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Imagine a beowulf cluster of...

By "geological map layer", I mean color-coded formations and other structures. Topography and marking features such as volcanoes is a start, but geologists usually map whole areas by the type of bedrock or surface sediments, the relative age, major faults, volcanoes, et cetera. Most countries have a geological survey of some kind whose job it is to map the geology of the country. In the U.S., it is the United States Geological Survey, in Canada, it is the Geological Survey of Canada, and there are often state or provincial efforts too. There is substantial economic interest via mining, agriculture, and water resources, so geology is important enough to document properly. We do live on the Earth, after all.

Most of the world has been mapped, though at highly variable levels of detail. For example, here's an interactive geological map of Kentucky. See all the pretty colors? Each is a rock formation of a particular age.

Fusing the detailed local compilations into one global map would be very challenging because of differences in terminology and conventions, but there are several generalized continent and global-scale compilations that have been published on paper.

None of this detracts from the fact that the current incarnation of Google Earth is *very* cool.

The result was that all the comic book publishers banded together and formed a voluntary rating system. In effect, they censored themselves. The new rules said that, since comic books were for kids, no comic books were allowed to include words like "teror," "horror," or "crime" in their titles; comics could not feature werewolves, vampires, or other elements of the supernatural; if any crime was depicted in a comic book, the criminals would have to come to justice for their crimes by the end of the story; and so on. The net effect was that an entire genre of horror and crime comic books went out of business. You know some of those comic books -- for example, Tales from the Crypt. There were many others, however. In its heyday, a comic book called Crime Does Not Pay outsold not just Tales from the Crypt but the entire output of that book's publisher (E.C. Comics) combined. It too went out of business, just months after Tales from the Crypt and the other E.C. horror comics, once the Comics Code took effect.

And so the world was safe. Kids stopped being juvenile delinquents, at least the ones who were able to stay away from that awful rock 'n roll music. It was a halcyon age, a veritable paradise, for the next 30 years or so.

But then in the 1980s, rap music came along, and heavy metal, and they were even worse than rock 'n roll. This aural poison proved to be all but irresistable to kids. So a brave group of moral citizens, led by the wife of future Democratic presidential hopeful Al Gore, banded together to slap labels on rap albums, warning parents about the horrors inside. Again we were safe.

But now the evil rears its ugly head again -- video games! We tried using a ratings system on them, but nobody went out of business (unlike the comic book publishers in the 50s). How long can we as citizens stand for this?? Clearly something must be done if this cycle of moral depravity is ever going to end!

Wrong skit. Steve is Dieter - but who will be the monkey?

I don't really see how it's possible for the submitter to be fake. Either he submitted the story or he didn't. Apparently, he submitted the story.

Now, he might think the joke is that he's posting 'news' from a news aggregation site to a news aggregation site, but meta news is the only kind of news slashdot gets anyway, and that's what we come here for.

All in all, if he's scamming slashdot, he can only be doing it if EurekAlert is a fake, which it certainly doesn't look like at first glance, though I notice that in an unusual move for a meta-news site, it doesn't have links to originating information. That is somewhat suspicious. Still, if true, it's an incredible effort he's putting in just to scam slashdot stories.

Further, it would have to be a long term scam plan, since the UKY story in particular is real:
http://news.uky.edu/news/display_article.php?artid =844

So at best he's trying to build credibility as an article submitter for a later scam.

This was my masters project. Ball and Plate system

I say we just keep on using legos in scientific projects and prove to them how valuable legos are.

I've never had an easier time prototyping a model, and the finished instrument table, make out of aluminum and stainless steel to a very high precision, shows the value of legos in the prototyping process.

It sounds like there aren't a lot of /.ers that have worked in big iron shops. The replies to this article seems to have more inaccuracies than most.

The 4100 seems to be part of the evolution for "big iron" laser printers starting with the 3800. These printers started out being centralized printers to reduce cost per page for large organizations AND for billing organizations.

After the 1980s, I don't think a lot were sold to IT ("IS" at the time) organizations because having a single printer and distributing its output to different locations throughout a building is slow, expensive and time consuming - all the things using them was supposed to eliminate.

Where the printers really made their niche was generating bills for various organizations. The advantage of a laser printer over traditional printers was that traditional printers used pre-printed forms which were more expensive and had to be precisely lined up for the billing information to show up in the appropriate locations. The advantage of a laser printer in this application is that it can print all the background information, logos, terms and conditions, etc. just as quickly as a traditional printer just put in the differing information but at a much lower cost.

The 3800 and subsequent printers were/are the industry standard for these applications - very little of their output actually comes into the office except in the form of invoices from other companies.

When IBM spun off its printer division (known as "LexMark"), they did not sell of the big iron printers. They make a ton of money for IBM and also drive other purchases for IBM hardware.

It's probably more difficult now to see these monsters in action, but if you get the chance you should take a look - they are amazing. The old 3800s could print an entire 10" high box of 8.5 by 11 fanfold paper in just a few minutes and while cutting the paper appropriately. The "high end" models mentioned probably have letter stuffing hardware so the final output is a nice neat stack of bills all ready for shipment to the post office.

myke

Here's a periodic table that kids might be interested in.

Actually, you'll find that you're reading "6000" as "GOOD." I used to think the same thing (I'm from Ohio) when I was young and just starting to read (I'm not insulting your intelligence--it's just that I've been around a lot more Kentuckians than you, so I realized the mistake earlier in my life). Sorta like reading 1337 5p33k before it was cool. There is no "Good County"; the 6000 refers to the weight the vehicle is allowed to tow (including the weight of the vehicle, IIRC). You'll notice that it is generally on trucks...in fact, they may have done away with that type of license plate marking in recent years, with the coming of vanity and more graphical plates.

(Note, Beowulf is not "English" literature any more than Ibsen is.)

Here's handy script to parse out Xeni Jardin's content on boingboing. Now if only I had one to parse out Doctorow's fucking Disney fetish, I'd be all set.

The use of multispectral imaging (MSI) to view ancient papyri has been going on for some years now, with the following being some of the most interesting projects:

- recovering text from a manuscript containing 10th century copies of some of Archimedes works which had been erased and over-written in the 12th century. http://www.thewalters.org/archimedes/frame.html

- similar to the project above, this is the recovery of carbonised Roman papyri found in Herculaneum (which was covered in 100 feet of lava during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-14522 44_1,00.html

There are also lots of other artefact imaging projects, such as that being carried out by the Digital Hammurabi Project (http://www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/), who want to digitise (make high-res 3D computer models of) ancient cuneiform tablets or the work at the University of Kentucky which may allow text to be 'read' without the artefact being touched at all - using a CT scan which can be decoded on a computer http://www.research.uky.edu/odyssey/fall04/seales. html

Awesome stuff...

Have you ever tried to build GNOME?! Just take a look at the build scripts for the two in Slackware. KDE has a unified build script. GNOME is a dependency nightmare.

• http://entomology.unl.edu/images/blowflies/blowfly mags1.jpg
• http://www.uky.edu/Agriculture/PAT/recs/crop/scrnm gt.jpg
• http://www.sids.org.uk/fsid/maggot.jpg
• https://id294.securedata.net/ultimateamerican/Merc hant2/graphics/tshirts/maggot_big.jpg
• http://www.yamagiku.co.jp/pathology/image/201/5.jp g

I was just the lab helpdesk, I had a 50 workstation lab on the graveyard shift, somedays, thinks would reclone fine, other days, no apps would come up. It was hit or miss, but considering the contract UK had with Novell, it should have worked and cooked us an omlet every morning.

This site says the House still needs 26 states to elect a President. Does that mean if the House votes 20, 10, 10, they have to keep voting until 6 switch to the 20 for a majority?

"huge amounts of energy"?? We're not talking about giant 1000-watt spotlights to pump water into your swimming pool. I imagine they'd hope to use this effect with mW ultraviolet LEDs or some equivalently small, low-power light source.

"why"? Because at this scale, it becomes fairly difficult to precisely, reproducibly move droplets of water around. Pumps and water hoses (as someone else wondered about) don't really work too well. Channels in microfluidic devices are tens to hundreds of micrometers across - this is to move microliter droplets, not buckets.

One problem with this is that it would apparently limit devices to one layer of channels (or at least, limit the complexity of the devices); the "damaging" electric fields can give pretty precise flow control in devices with several layers, etc. There's also the alternative of using "centrifugal force" for power on rotating disc devices - Bachas' group at Kentucky built nifty parallel microfluidic devices on CDs that work like that. This new light-based approach works for moving individual drops around, but there are microfluidic things that it doesn't do (at least yet).

Finally, this is just a preliminary report that something pretty cool is actually possible - they don't describe even a simple device based on this, they're not announcing commercial availability of a complete home lab that uses this. If you don't get "why" ... well, wait a few years and a nifty application of it will be all the answer necessary.

the Nintendo GameCube has a Class I laser housed inside a Class I case and if the mechanism is bypassed that prevents operation of the laser while the lid is open, then potential eye damage is probable. They didn't want to give anyone the idea to take apart a GameCube and damage their vision.

No individual, regardless of exposure conditions to the eyes or skin, would be expected to be injured by a Class I laser. No safety requirements are needed to use Class I laser devices.

The Elements is a brilliantly organized treatment of the science of geometry as a whole. While reading it, ask yourself what the subject of each book is (there are 13 books). Ask why they're in the order they're in. Ask why the propositions within each book are done in this order. When he gives a definition (like the definition of a circle) ask yourself whether that's the best definition, and why. Read each of the propositions (proofs) carefully, and try to re-present them in writing without looking at the book.

I know the OP is suggesting algebra, and I'm suggesting geometry, but high-school algebra is really no different than geometry represented symbolically. Book II of the Elements is devoted to geometrical representations of the same truths that high schools teach algebraically.

Even Abe Lincoln read Euclid every night before he fell asleep because it helped him to think logically and even philosophically.

The worst travesty done to ancient mathematical thought has been to try to introduce it to children in modern math textbooks.

Belloc

These could be pebbles (i.e. sedimentary) or they could be lapilli (volcanic structures formed by the sticking-together of ash particles). They could also be zones of cementation that developed long after deposition (e.g., concretions), in which case they do not say much about conditions at time of deposition. The latter two are more likely, because the "balls" are so spherical (most pebbles are not so perfectly equidimensional).

I've been excited about the spheres, too. Unfortunately, there seem to be so many (and as you noticed, so perfect) that I can't imagine them ever being tumbled about in a Martian spring.

I imagine they're the result of volcanic or impact processes throwing molten material up into the air. With a gravity one-third of Earth's, large, hot particles would have more time to coalesce into a sphere before they hit the ground.

Bad news for the search for life, though. But part of me roots for the "dead planet" theory. We can put all the strip miners in a refurbished Saturn V, point it at Mars, and let them fight out mineral rights on the trip!

I'm black, but I don't agree. "Whitey" didn't go to the moon. We all did--it was done with all the money of the USA's citizens. Just because James Brown didn't set foot on the moon first with a "Good God!" and a wail doesn't make the achievement any less important.

There are always problems that could use more attention. But don't mistake attention for money that you think should be flowing elsewhere. Our government didn't just meld billions of dollars into hardware to get us to the moon. That money was the cost to PAY for labor (jobs) to make the things and create the services that got us there.

In other words, space exploration, robots or no, create jobs. They just may not be the jobs you (and I speak generally) never pushed yourself to attain. That's another problem that's not the government's fault, but a self-attainment, supply-demand, and achievement thing.

At the same time, we can't all be rocket scientists. So, it would be nice to get our corporate sector in on the New Frontier to start the seed by sponsoring flights for new, future jobs. If the new Mars rover or the next flight to the moon is named the Verizon-Pepsi Moon Shuttle, and adds a few millon of non-tax dollars to get the ship there, then so be it.

If we can get Hilton Hotels, for instance, to put down some long-term funds to invest in a recreational/retirement resort on the moon, great. It would be the ultimate vacation, or even theraputic resort or hospise. Old folks with bad backs or arthritis will LOVE playing in 1/6th gravity, and also the funny sensation of going to Heaven before they die.

We will ALWAYS focus on matters on Earth. But exploration fosters new opportunities and jobs. I wish I could say that jobs are instantly created, but that is rarely true for any business. It takes time, but if individuals or governments or businesses aren't given reasons to consider investing, then jobs will never manifest. If we refused to move to space in the 1960s, imagine how tech-poor we all would be now because the space race wasn't around to create the technology we take for granted now, such as the computer I type on, the Internet (created from funding for our missile systems so no one nuke would stop our nukes from being set off during the Cold War) or the cell phone you speak on, or even the 911 system.

Remember that migration in the 17th Century that brought English settlers here to North America and launched a new economy, among other achievements that reciprocated around the world? Imagine how we can do that elsewhere, and what it can do to help make humanity that much more rich in resources that COULD attend to the usual needs of food, clothing and shelter that much more.

There's also the little matter of having a backup in case Earth gets hit by a large rock from space--it's happened before in all likelihood, and don't think that humanity is smart enough to survive it en masse. We need to all think like a Windows NT system admin--always have a backup plan.

Your basement or a spare bedroom is hardly the ideal location to record live audio in.

It worked okay for Berry Gordy though.

Meanwhile, just use one of the plenty of distributed computing programs that already exist for scientific research, if ever you got bored by SETI@home...
Analytical Spectroscopy Research Group
evolution@home
eOn
Climate Prediction
Distributed Particle Accelerator Design
LifeMapper
etc...

Professor Feynman's addendum to the Challenger disaster report.

And d'fim, if I had points, I would have given you a good mod for that post.. but lacking those, I'll just do a little busywork.

Thank you for making this point.

My alma mater is bound and determined to set enrollment records every year, but the morons don't realize that the tuition paid is chump change compared to grants, fellowships, patents, and gov't contracts that come from cranking out a well educated student body, as opposed to ever larger (and dumber) classes.

I'm all for switching to a European style system where getting accepted to a college or university is merit based with very high performance requirements for entry. If you blow your SAT out of the water, we'll take care of funding your education, if drop a sub 1000 SAT, good luck getting in anywhere but the local community college

Ask yourself if you're griping about the EC because it's a poor system, or because of your political preferences.

The comic book periodic table!

The University of Kentucky's KLAT2 project used a FNN to get insane bandwidth without worrying about gigabit cards and switches. I'd suggest you take a look at it.

Really, I learned a lot more in undergraduate genetics, microbiology, botany and orgainic chemistry courses on how to be a terrorist than I did by launching model rockets.

Got Botulism? It might take a while to isolate and identify the proper strain, but terrorists don't have the marketing department breathing down their necks to meet a shipping date. They're patient if they have to be. Once identified, it's just a matter of culturing and refining the toxin.

Got Ricin? Yes, the lovely castor bean plant (ricinus communis) produces a rather nice toxin. Readily available through many plant stores. A bit of applied organic chemistry lab work, and you too can get the desired organic compound.

Got GB Nerve gas? Malathion (an readily available and highly used insecticide) and the first component of the binary nerve gas GB are very similar. Any organic chemist worth his money would be able to do some work to make it exactly similar. The other component is isopropol alcohol. You can find that in any drugstore.

Got FAE? Why bother with ANFO (ammonium-nitrate fuel-oil, the fertilizer bomb that has been used in many, many places) truck bombs? A little bit of applied mechanical engineering and you to can have explosives on par with low-yield nuclear weapons. Sure, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide may be a bit hard to source, but you can use others to get a similar result.

Or, as was demonstrated by one nutcase in South Korea, all it takes is a determined individual with gasoline to kill many people on a subway.

Model rockets? Give me a break. Next on the list: slingshots.

What college do you go to where primary registration doesn't occur during the preceeding semester. At UK, we registered in November for spring classes, April for summer and fall session. If you need an exemption, go check in with your INS officer, most of these people had slipped under the radar.

This exact question was addressed at length by Richard Feynman, during the investigation of the Challenger explosion. See here for example. I chose this URL because I figure UKY can take the slashdotting. Please google for "rogers commission feynman appendix" if you want to be nice. The upshot according to Feynman is that, at the time, estimates of fatal failure probability ran from 1 in 100 (Engineers) to 1 in 100,000 (NASA "suits"). Feynman's Appendix to the Rogers Commission report is must reading. If the probability of a fatal incident is indeed 1 in 100 or so, I think it would surprise many people who believe the image of Shuttle flight being so safe that we can send up civilians for public relations purposes.

Guys, instead of trying to do something whose only purpose is to allow people to rip off games, why not do something noble that will help humanity. Here are some suggestions:

1.) Seti@Home
2.) Cure Cancer
3.) Evolution@Home
4.) Entropia
5.) eOn
6.) Climate Prediction
7.) Particle Accelerator Design
8.) Analytical Spectroscopy Research Group

See a complete list here: http://www.aspenleaf.com/distributed/distrib-proje cts.html

And no, I don't consider cracking encryption "noble". Especially when people don't seem to get the point that if it takes tens of thousands of computers months and months to crack some encryption, it is GOOD ENCRYPTION.

However, it is the oldest written version we still have.

See also the work at the University of Kentucky in the digitization and restoration of the manuscript.

Yes, a translation is copyright. Any issues of rights of the original edition are separate (and obviously in this case the original edition is a few centuries out of copyright).

However, particular modern scholarly editions are copyright by the editors who prepare them. This is because for many works, particularly those published from manuscript, the textual editing required to prepare a usable edition generates a copyrightable text. (Take a look at a scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament sometime, you'll be shocked at how many different readings there are of each part of the text.) For scholarly purposes, a translator usually makes use of more than one edition to prepare his translation so that (s)he can consider all the possible readings; this also helps to protect the translator from a test as to how far the copyright of a scholarly edition extends. (When I worked for a journal that published this stuff, we had many cases of publishers trying to push the outside of the envelope in this way, and we tended to cave.)

I understand that the MS of Beowulf is unique, and is quite a mess, requiring a great deal of scholarly intervention.

Tolkien also translated the Middle English Pearl MS texts.

IANAL

Even then, I could barely make out the cryptic scribbles. Sure didn't look like English to me.

There's a good reason for that: the Domesday Book wasn't written in English. It was written by Norman monks as the article mentions. They wrote it in Latin. That was the language of government, the arts, and bureaucracy in those days. Old French was a strong second. And Old English, as the language of a subjugated populace, came in a distant, distant third.

æ And even if it had been written in English, you still wouldn't have been able to read it without special training. Here is an example of Old English (from memory, so if there are any mistakes, they're mine!):

Sume dæge hit gelamp æt an nunnan of æm ilcan mynstre geforon in on hire wyrt-tun. Ond ær heo gesawon an leahtric, and hit gelyste æs.

It so happened that a nun of that same monastery went into their garden. And there she saw a particular lettuce, and she wanted it.

Lastly, the project is not a copy of the original Domesday Book: it was an effort to create a resource of similar utility for future historians by gathering interesting stuff from around the country and storing it in digital form. Videos, maps, and so on, as the article said. There have been some electronic editions of medieval texts, notably the sole remaining manuscript of the poem Beowulf, which was written down in the early 1100s. Alas, it is proprietary, and you have to pay a rather large sum to the British Library if you want a copy. Some of it is web accessible.

Next question!

It's nice to see schools offering a more in-depth computer course to non-CS/CompE/EE types. Students in many of the programs at "America's Next Great University" are required to take CS 101, which is mostly a mind-numbingly simple introduction to Micro$oft Office. The first lab assignment in that class consisted of finding the power button and learning how to operate it.

The simple fact is that computers and computer-related issues are playing a larger role in the day-to-day life of the average American citizen. I'd rather have someone who's been through this course writing the next DMCA than some octogenarian senator from the deep south who has never been within 10 feet of a computer.

I don't know, if someone has a spare tape silo and robot it could probably be done, now I have to wait for my alma mater to get done with it.

I don't know, if someone has a spare tape silo and robot it could probably be done, now I have to wait for my alma mater to get done with it.

What do you mean delusions? There is no way that that could be a natural formation. I mean really!

Read the article. The point is to drill more efficiently utilizing technology resulting in fewer, more productive wells.

As for 'enviremental rape'(sic), ever see a strip coal mining operation in western Pennsylvania or West Virginia? How about an example in Kentucky Oil fields of 100 years ago can't even come close to this nonsense.

Now, go jump in your Ford Excursion (MPG not available), drive 10 miles to your favorite natural foods store - alone of course - and pick up a quart of soy milk to toast to your stupidity.

Well, Cliff,

There's plenty of good stuff out there, but you'll have to do some editing. As somebody who grew up around teachers and has worked in textbook publishing I can assure you that teachers all have to do it too. Their stuff sucks far worse than anything referenced here.

While Project Gutenberg is great, you should also check out on-line encyclopedias like NuPedia, and Everything2 which are all open source, as is The Open Directory Project . A great source of fiction, which can be a wonderful learning tool, is Baen Books who have put hundreds of book online and are eager to have them downloaded and spread around.

For science materials, there are lots of great sites for kids done by educators pursuing whever they're into. All of which you'll want to use to spice up access to sites like Science Daily that are handy but a bit too serious some days for young minds.

Which brings me to Make Stuff which should fill in quite nicely for the "arts and crafts" part of most school curricula.

For biography I'ld check out American National Biography and for history a good start can be made with pages like Anyday which can be amazing or useless, all based on where *you* go from the starting point that they provide. Places like Colonial America are designed just for this but again, check out more than one.

For reference material you should check out Theodora which, while not meant to be open source, is very handy, Geographic.Org, which is open source and student-oriented, should do the rest. I've found that the CIA sourcebook is terrible, as folk should have long since figured out. Biased, misinformed, and sometimes just wierd; leave it behind. However if you hunt you'll find that within various.gov sites there's tons of great stuff, from manuals on camping to stuff on solar panels.

The space science community is very kid friendly, from NASA down to the local Mars Society chapter, having plenty of materials on quite a range of topics that you're free to reproduce and spread around. If you can handle it, the neopagan community is reliably eager to provide information and links on ancient indo-european history, from the government of Sumeria, to Celtic ironwork. (You might be surprised at how many neopagans have advanced degrees in history and/or literature.)

Speaking of limits, you'll always have to be careful that your kids aren't ending up places they shouldn't be but again, every teacher and librarian faces that one.

Lastly, the reason that I've got all this ready to hand is that I took it from my source database, more of which can be found on my web site, which is primarily oriented towards adults and older kids but does have plenty of other links like the ones here.

Best of luck to you and be sure to post back to slashdot in a few years about how it's going.

Rustin H. Wright - Information Geek
"It's all about the information, Marty. Little ones and zeros!"

• Gain insight into the minds of the ancients (Plato would not let anyone into his school who hadn't mastered the geometry of the Elements),
• Improve your reasoning skills (Abraham Lincoln read Euclid when he decided to supplement his education later in life), and
• Be exposed to some of the most beautiful things that mathematics - or any academic pursuit - has to offer ("Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare." --Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Better place to look for Peano axioms is here. It should give the Axiom of Induction in a more sensible manner.

I am sorry to downplay you but apparently you do not have a strong background in math and maybe some knowledge in algorithm theory? In short: Gödel's theorem applies to all axiomatic systems containing Peano axioms. The system that number theoreticians study contains the Peano axioms (obviously as it is a theory of numbers). Therefore the Gödel theorem applies as considering the Riemann hypothesis.

You'll find the Peano axioms here. The most important thing about the Peano axioms is that they state the existence of natural numbers {1,2,3,...} (note the axioms give out an infinite number of such objects). So no Peano axioms => no theory of numbers...

By adulthood, Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements is firmly planted in a typical mind either as a tool for study or proof of mystical forces at work in nature. There are alternative structures: some clever and others using alternate media, extensions to the table providing nuclear structure, fermi surfaces, and line spectra.

Still others are extraordinarily cross-thematic, merging chemistry with comic books, poetry or haiku. But only the grouping-nature of the columns is retained in rejected elements, condiments and beer. Eventually the elements and the periodic qualities have been lost entirely, reducing the periodic table to a design template for topical lists of funk and rock music, comedy and TV shows, famous mathematicians and presidents, even SGI products. Soon a complete breakdown of the scientific aspect yields no similarity to the original, becoming a glorified table, a marketing tool, or hype itself. There is mounting evidence of a conspiracy.

What about thulium

All it says there is GLUG! sorry no comics yet for this element..

I wonder if I should rush out and make a thulium comic and take my place in history. Hm.

Probably not.

If you have the cash, take care of the lab assistants/consultants that are hard workers. Pay at UK wasn't particularly great and therefore, some of the consultants were sub par or simply sleepers. As pay rose, the better techs came out of the woodwork looking for jobs.

The broadcasts persisted, and some might say that they had an important role in the fall of communism.

We must ensure that we do not build up walls of our own that blind us from what is going on outside.

But don't take my word for it. Read up on this topic and figure it out for yourself.

University of Kentucky has rolled out 802.11b acess across most of the campus as well.

Beowulf has been studied a lot. Check out the names and ancestries of the characters. The epic Beowulf is not English literature, but literature in English, very old English. The action takes place in southern Scandinavia with the southern tip of what is now Sweden actually being Danish at the time.

If you're looking for a more general dead-tree version of Beowulf, then Howell D. Chickering, Jr. 's Beowulf, Anchor Books, Doubleday, New York, 1977 was a good one with both the transcribed Old English version and the modern English version side by side.