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It's the very high end scientific and medical stuff that really benefits from high-end computing, though at that point you also have issues relating to shipping the data involved about. And security too. (What fun!)

The plural of "virus" isn't "virii." There is no such word. The plural of "virus" is "viruses."

Here's a good explanation from cdknow.com, quoted here in its entirety because the people who most need to read this won't click on a link.

The correct English plural of virus is viruses. Please consult any good dictionary before making up words.

For the purists, in Latin, there is a rarely-used plural form:

virus, viri (neuter)

(Forms: almost always restricted to nominative and accusative singular; generally singular in Lucretius, ablative singular in Lucretius)

The point of this is that even in Latin the form "viri" is rarely used. The singular form is used in most every instance. (This is from the Oxford Latin Dictionary.)

So, when considering the Latin: "virii" is incorrect and "viri" was almost never used.

Despite the fact there was little use for the plural form, there is another reason why "viri" was rarely used. The most common Latin word for "man" is "vir" with "viri" being its plural in the form used as the subject of a sentence. Thus, since "men" as the subject of a sentence would be used far more often than "venoms" (virus means venom) the "viri" word was most commonly seen as the plural of "man."

Bottom line: Don't try to make up words using a false Latin plural form. Since the word virus in its English form is now used then the English plural (viruses) should be used.

More plural-of-virus resources:

perl.com, the canonical and exhaustive source
The alt.comp.virus FAQ
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard's Frequently Given Answer
Merriam-Webster's "Word for the Wise," January 20, 2000.

The article states that a single RNA strand is responsible for recruiting the other seven, which then work together to produce more virons. I'm curious as to whether it is that RNA strand which has to mutate in order for the virus to jump from species to species (such as from birds to humans). Perhaps this could lead to a new innoculation for birds that would prevent their viral infections from jumping ship to us.

The article states that a single RNA strand is responsible for recruiting the other seven, which then work together to produce more virons. I'm curious as to whether it is that RNA strand which has to mutate in order for the virus to jump from species to species (such as from birds to humans). Perhaps this could lead to a new innoculation for birds that would prevent their viral infections from jumping ship to us.

I sent this email to museumtour.com 2 days ago. Hopefully, this helps them out.

I have seen the ridiculous claims by SBC concerning your website and their patents. So, I thought i might attempt to be a little help in this situation and do a little online searching for previous art. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1995S ep/0034.html As you can see, that email is from September of 1995, almost a full YEAR before that patent was filed. It appears that the patent SBC filed was on the very reason for the invention of frames in the first place!

In particular I would like to refer to the following in that September 1995 email: NAME="window_name" The NAME attribute is used to assign a name to a frame so it can be targeted by links in other documents (These are usually from other frames in the same document.) The NAME attribute is optional; by default all windows are unnamed. Therefore, a frame could remain static while referencing other frames with each click in the original frame.

Also, you might check out this url: http://www.focazio.com/web95/images/cnn.gif

This is a screenshot of cnn.com in 1995. I'm sure you'll notice the navigation icons at the top.

Also, there is this link: http://www.ac603.dial.pipex.com/webinov.htm#Intro

As you see, it's from December 1995 and SPECIFICALLY talks about using frames for navigation.

Fred Sotherland of C|Net gave an overview of how the C|Net television network is using the web to integrate TV with the Internet. He also gave some rules which they apply to make sure that pages are usable.

* *No page with more than 20k graphics * *All pages have 256 colour graphics * *Making use of Netscape 2.0 frames to put content and navigation side by side. * *Your only limitation is your Imagination (an the available bandwidth)

Again, this link is from November 1995: http://www.i-m.com/November-1-7-1995/0018.html

If you read that, you see the following: - If you have an image (a button bar for example) that is 80 pixels high and 400 pixels wide, DON'T make a Frame 80 x 400. As with everything else, allow a buffer. The scroll bars (or the blank space that makes them up) runs 20-25 pixels. In addition to that Netscape does appear to add a little more in the gutter area. An 80 x 400 image should be in a 110-120 x 430 frame at the least. - More of a good thing, isn't better. Having a fixed portion of the interface for the navigation bar is a good thing. However, having 4 frames isn't.

As you can see from that, not only does it mention a navigation bar, but it also mentions a BUTTON BAR..like what you have on your webpage. That is from the year BEFORE SBC's patent.

If there is any doubt to that, check this link: http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.1/guide.html The pictures are from Spring 1996 when the patent was filed, but they're using the features from Netscape 2.0.

http://semanticstudios.com/publications/web_archit ect/frames.html This is a PERFECT PERFECT PERFECT example of prior art. It is published 2 months before the patent application and describes websites with the EXACT features the patent was filed on.

One more, from netscape itself discussing netscape 2.0: http://wp.netscape.com/navigator/v2.0/frames.html

Netscape 2.0 was released in February of 1996, as you can see from this link: http://scout.wisc.edu/addserv/NH/96-02/96-02-05/00 31.html

That is all I have time for right now, I hope you fight this and don't give in. There is clearly prior art and it seems SBC just filed a patent on something that was already in heavy use at the time of the filing. Now, they want to harass small companies almost 7 years later. They don't go after the big companies because they know their claims are fraudulent. But, I think if you can show them YOU know beyond the shadow of a doubt that their claims are ridiculous, they might look elsewhere for a sitting duck.

Hare Krishna!

The IBM paper is interesting, but beyond doing these straightforward kinds of measurements, I can think of a lot of better approaches to improving kernel and core application performance, based on research I've seen... When I was doing profiling work on supercomputer stuff a few years back I surveyed the tools and found some systems that use really novel approaches which could definitely be adapted to this purpose. I suppose word doesn't really get out about some of this stuff; anyway, take a look and see for yourself:

S-Check

S-Check starts with your original source code and points suspected of being bottlenecks. It adds artificial delays at the specific points throughout the parallel code. These delays can be switched ON or OFF. The switched delays generate numerous new versions of the program, with the delays simulating adjustments in code efficiency. S-Check methodically executes the many variants, recording delay settings and corresponding run times. S-Check analyzes the recorded entries against a linear response model using techniques from statistics. The results are a sensitivity analysis from which program problem areas can be identified. This provides a portable, scalable, and generic basis for assaying parallel and network based programs.

Paradyn
(overview)

"...a heuristic, goal-seeking algorithm was coupled with a dynamic instrumentation package to drive an automated, systematic inquiry into the performance of a parallel application."

The upshot is tools which can instrument a running system on the fly, and use statistical techniques that identify "hot spots" by looking for the amount of "collateral damage" when adding artificial delays to a particular location. You can even go farther, mapping out relationships, etc.

These are approaches that came out of parallel supercomputing, because in that field traditional approaches to benchmarking and profiling are often useless and/or impractical, and the systems (and programming problems) have become so complex that effective hand tuning becomes nearly impossible as well. Of course the kernel isn't so simple either, and these days you have parallelism to boot... I would love to see these techniques solving a wider range of problems.

The IBM paper is interesting, but beyond doing these straightforward kinds of measurements, I can think of a lot of better approaches to improving kernel and core application performance, based on research I've seen... When I was doing profiling work on supercomputer stuff a few years back I surveyed the tools and found some systems that use really novel approaches which could definitely be adapted to this purpose. I suppose word doesn't really get out about some of this stuff; anyway, take a look and see for yourself:

S-Check

S-Check starts with your original source code and points suspected of being bottlenecks. It adds artificial delays at the specific points throughout the parallel code. These delays can be switched ON or OFF. The switched delays generate numerous new versions of the program, with the delays simulating adjustments in code efficiency. S-Check methodically executes the many variants, recording delay settings and corresponding run times. S-Check analyzes the recorded entries against a linear response model using techniques from statistics. The results are a sensitivity analysis from which program problem areas can be identified. This provides a portable, scalable, and generic basis for assaying parallel and network based programs.

Paradyn
(overview)

"...a heuristic, goal-seeking algorithm was coupled with a dynamic instrumentation package to drive an automated, systematic inquiry into the performance of a parallel application."

The upshot is tools which can instrument a running system on the fly, and use statistical techniques that identify "hot spots" by looking for the amount of "collateral damage" when adding artificial delays to a particular location. You can even go farther, mapping out relationships, etc.

These are approaches that came out of parallel supercomputing, because in that field traditional approaches to benchmarking and profiling are often useless and/or impractical, and the systems (and programming problems) have become so complex that effective hand tuning becomes nearly impossible as well. Of course the kernel isn't so simple either, and these days you have parallelism to boot... I would love to see these techniques solving a wider range of problems.

The cool thing is the process seems to be green-house nuetral.

Safari's been around since at least 1995 - see here

SCNR...

First of all I would reccomend that you not do any home experiments unless:
a.) you are fully aware of the hazards/risks involved and know how to minimize them.
or
b.) the experiments you perform are not hazardous.

Check up on your laboratory safety at The Laboratory Safety Institute or take an Online Safety Course or visit OSHA's site. Final note on safety---> It's always fun until someone gets hurt!!!

I assume that you still want to do chemistry experiments. Choose choice b. There are many experiments that you can do that are not hazardous to humans. e. g. mix Baking Soda an Vinegar to produce carbon dioxide.

Keeping a laboratory book is essential in science laboratory and highly reccommended for amature experementation. This typically includes information such as Introduction/Purpose(what do you expect to occur)...Experimental Method(how you will do the experiment, EXACTLY)....Experimental Results...Disscussion of Experimental Results/Conclusion...Reference information.

Basically as far as the laboratory manual is concerned, your experiments should be repeatable by someone else. An excellent book on the subject is : H. M. Kanare, Writing the Laboratory Notebook, American Chemical Society, Washington, D. C., 1985; ASIN: 0841209065.

As far as studying general chemistry goes; I would recommend you get a handle on fundamental chemical laws, basic naming of chemical compounds, understand the polyatomic ions, stoichiometry (e.g. 2 moles of hydrogen react with one mole of oxygen to produce 1 mole of water), Acid-Base Reactions, Oxidation-Reduction Reactions, gas laws and thermochemistry.

These are the things that you should master in the first course of general inorganic chemistry.

As far as amateur science is concerned the Society for Amature Scientists is excellent.

I think chemistry as an amature science is greatly underrepresented. As far as chemistry sets are concerned they are generally geared toward children and therefore may not be much fun for an adult. If you study chemistry seriously, and are interested, you can develop you own experiments. As far as chemicals and glassware are concened; it's probably better to get them at a yard sale or auction site. This is because they are cheaper. If you don't know exactly what chemical you need it is not recommended that you buy any though. Some chemicals available on ebay are extremely hazardous.

For further information I would recommend the very excellent Jounal of Chemical Education.

Think-Learn-Think-Experiment-Think-Learn have fun and be careful!!!

Agreed. If you've never seen the Anarchist's Cookbook, it's rather like a long "Overrated" Slashdot post printed on paper with pictures and a handsome black cover. The guy doesn't really understand most of the things he discusses and is on the firmest ground when he sticks with safe topics (guns and knives). It was written during the Vietnam era by a pissed-off draft age guy. Now he's turned to Jesus and says he wishes he hadn't written the book at all. Another mind lost to religion.

The best explosive recipe in the book is one that the author discounts in passing- nitrogen triiodide, or NI3. (Actually, the structure is NI3-NH3, where the NH3 is bound to the NI3 electrostatically by what resemble hydrogen bonds.) According to the Cookbook a fly landing on it will set it off (which is probably true, although I never succeeded in getting a fly to cooperate). It claims it's too useless for any serious consideration when planning your anarchy. It might not be good for that, but it's great for pranks. I've had so much fun with that stuff. The secret to NI3 is DO NOT MAKE TOO MUCH OF IT. That way you can keep your fingers. A gram is way too much. Just take a few iodine crystals and put them under ammonia, and presto, it turns into this black powder. If you keep it under the ammonia, it's actually quite stable. When not under ammonia (even when under pure water) it might go off at any moment. Pick it up from the ammonia with a plastic eyedropper, and deposit the black sludge on some surface. Once dry it rapidly loses its NH3 adduct and becomes extremely sensitive to shock, decomposing explosively producing N2 and I2. Don't get traces of it on your clothes or skin, or you'll be treated to a continuous snap-crackle-pop of microscopic explosions (quite annoying).

Finding references on it is difficult- it's almost like people don't want to do research on it. It's probably unstable because the iodine atoms are huge compared to the nitrogen. Congestion around the central N forces the molecule into a planar shape, with repulsive interactions among the three iodines, so it's unhappy for steric reasons. One thing I did find out was that the stuff turns bright orange if you leave it under the ammonia for a long time (like a month). This is probably because it picks up additional NH3 adducts.

I agree. Building your own chemistry set would be more fun, and you would learn more.

The best way to learn is to teach. Collecting a bunch of good chemistry experiments, and the sources for the materials, would make a great project.

And you aren't the only one who benefits...

Some places to start:
Delights of Chemistry
Demonstration Lab
Lecture Demonstrations
Chemistry Resources

Some Sources of chemicals:
CHEM Scientific
Fisher
Sagent Welch
Carolina

I am certain you will get lots more from other Slashdaughters...

The two most prominent links to IEC-based fusion technology seem to be Arianespace's FusionStar FS-NG1 Neutron Generator and the Advanced Fuels Project at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

These pretty much place fusion by IEC techniques on solid ground. Now we "just" need to focus on issues of scaling up to positive-power systems. :-)

This from Bill Sethares:
"I upgraded my RCA Cosmac computer to 512 bytes. I programmed a version of Conway's game of life and watched it for hours on a black and white TV."

It doesn't work because Adam Parker didn't win a second place prize (Engineering category) in the Intel Science and Engineering Foundation contest for building one.

And these guys at U Wisconsin are frauds too.

I don't think claiming that it doesn't work is a very logical position. See some of the lists of peer reviewed publications on the subject which have obviously been fairly widely replicated (see for example this link. Clearly, the fact that these systems produce neutrons in substantial quantities seems unassailable - whether the exact results or numbers Hirsch and Meeks reported or claims (billions of neutrons per second or whatever) has been replicated doesn't affect the basic premise.

And of couse, patents be damned - trying to figure fuckall out from any patent is generally a futile exercise as anybody who's tried to do it will tell you.

Also, I remember the result you refer to from my Freshman year E&M class ... that you can't produce a "particle trap" using an electric field alone. I remember similarly to you, that had to do with the fact that a potential well -> non-zero divergence and thus a source of charge... But I certainly don't remember in enough detail to imply that this device (whose existance is clearly admitted to by many real physicists) in any way contradicts Gauss' law. I sincerely doubt if you actually work through solving Poisson's equation in radial coordinates that you will find anything magically contradictory about the existence of this device, since nobody has gone around thumping their chests that Gauss was wrong because IEC is possible.

Now the question of whether these devices will lead to breakeven or better sustained fusion reactions - that's another question entirely, and I'll be damned if any of us know the answer to that one yet.

Here's some background on diamond films:
In July of this year, scientists in the United States reported that isotopically pure diamond films (containing 99.9% carbon-12 and not the 1% carbon-13 that is present in natural diamonds) had been grown. The pure films not only conducted hear 50% better than the best natural diamonds but also withstood damage by laser radiation ten times more effectively than natural diamond.

One could have the concept of combining functions: Glass that serves as a semiconductor, etc. Interesting.

I don't know if manufactured diamonds theaten the jewelry industry, but I doubt it. Although hundreds of almost-slaves labor in mines so deep it's scary, and the industry is full of creepy deals, people buy them, and the industry churns them out just the same.

mug

Hi there. Nice work on USITE Crerar, then. I've been in there a number of times since the lab was installed. Impressive Seti numbers, too.

Since you ask, I work for Dr. Foster under the rubrick of the Computation Institute on campus. Where on campus that is currently is in a state of flux between Ryerson and the RI.

I think that the USITE computers will continue running Seti for the time being, as we are not suffering from a lack of heterogenous resources, but a lack of software to pull it all together. We've currently got I think twelve grid sites lined up to accept Sloan cluster finding work, not counting the WorldGrid, which we should (hopefully) be able to tie into as well before long. iVDGL might be of interest to you on that front. My group, the Grid Physics Network, is less concerned with these management issues, than with taking the existing tools and wrapping them around real physics problems.

On the other hand, I do know people who wouldn't mind if those lab computers got set up with some Condor daemons, which would be a lot more useful than some single-purpose cluster finding code, anyway, and more in keeping with the grid computing style of doing things. I don't know how much demand there is for WinNT pools, though.

Ex. "This relation between temperature and resistivity can be shown to be exponential in certain temperature regimes by waving your hands and chanting "to first order".

See also rule #5 at this page, or this link.

I love it when people correct the grammar of others, when they themselves are wrong. Morons.

The University of Wisconsin is doing some pretty major research on this topic, and I believe it to be leading research in the field right now. The central location for public information on the topic at the UW is here.

• Condor - seems to be the best free as in beer scheduler, but it's not free as in speech.
  
• OpenPBS - This one is sort of Free, but it is being developed by a company that doesn't seem so sure it likes it that way. The code goes BSD after a couple of years, and they've been doing that for several years, yet they don't make the old (now BSD) versions available, and they make you register just to download.
• Sun GridEngine - Free, and it looks pretty sweet. I couldn't get it to work on Debian, but people on the mailing list said they were using it with Debian.
• Globus Toolkit - Not so sure about this one.
• Maui - Scheduler system for supercomputers
• OSCAR - Sweet project from IBM to put together all the best Free tools for clustering! They are using the Maui scheduler in their system.

What I would really like to see is a HOWTO that gives a good overview of scheduling and clustering. Everything I have found so far is not so good.

"We can't 'eat' air and dirt and use it (and it alone) to grow and reproduce. Nanites could, in theory, do just that, by using raw materials in the air and the earth to reproduce. "

NO, neither could "Nanites"; simply being super tiny dosen't confer upon you the ability to circumvent the laws of thermodynamics! The amount of negative entropy available in any such reaction from eating air and dirt would be so miniscule as to prevent the Nanite from reproducing uncontrollably. Just like THESE bacteria that acually DO subsist on air nd dirt alone(nearly).

The parent post's point still stands, as I see it.

The article about CD-Audio watermarking (which is a very good read) is in GhostScript format.

Just in case you don't have the ability to read it, you can get the viewer program by following the instructions here and here.

This might be redundant, but I didn't have it on my Windows machine, and the article was really worth the trouble to find it. Figured I'd save others the headache...unless I'm the only one here who didn't have it.

The article about CD-Audio watermarking (which is a very good read) is in GhostScript format.

Just in case you don't have the ability to read it, you can get the viewer program by following the instructions here and here.

This might be redundant, but I didn't have it on my Windows machine, and the article was really worth the trouble to find it. Figured I'd save others the headache...unless I'm the only one here who didn't have it.

Short story - someone purposely pulled a control out of a shutdown reactor too far, causing the reactor to become supercritial, emit a lot of steam, and impale him on the ceiling. The Army - since they didn't have Adm. Rickover (say what you want about him, he did make a very safe, very successful nuclear power program in the Navy) - should not be messing with nuclear power.

Summary: yes there are free PDF tools, but not for Windows.

In my limited experience, GS does a better PS->PDF conversion than Distiller. Conversely, Acrobat Reader on Linux seems to do a better job at PDF->PS.

There really aren't many native PDF tools per se, but it is true that many 'nix tools produce postscript, which can be easily converted to PDF. The only free tool I'm aware of that produces PDF natively is pdftex, which is available on Windows as part of the MiKTeX TeX distribution.

Nobody has asked for or posted real technical details. I'm somewhat disappointed in /. tonight--there's more to being a nerd than running LINUX!

Here is a page describing the research.

Here is a PDF file with real details, including construction, etc.

Nobody has asked for or posted real technical details. I'm somewhat disappointed in /. tonight--there's more to being a nerd than running LINUX!

Here is a page describing the research.

Here is a PDF file with real details, including construction, etc.

I am a network engineer for a (somewhat) small ISP. We track bandwidth utilization by protocol using cisco netflow data. I generate reports that analyze the percentage of our backbone traffic that gets utilized by different protocols and basically 50% of our traffic is HTTP, 30% is Peer to Peer (Kazaa, Morpheus, Gnutella, Etc). If I thought this were an issue I would not start filtering the content, as that can lead to all kinds of issues with common carrier status. However, that is not to say an ISP is helpless to cut down on the amount of P2P traffic that passes through your network, calling the top 25 bandwidth eaters and reminding them of our AUP has been pretty effective in controlling growth of P2P traffic.

Other options than plain filtering would include rate limiting. If you just rate limited p2p type traffic at your network egress you could easily control P2P traffic to an overall acceptable percentage of your aggregate network bandwidth.

We closely monitor the amount of bandwidth used for these types of applications, and may be forced to take action at some point in the future... But consumers who want full T1 service without the T1 pricetag can move to a competitor because they cost us money. There are reasons why Business class service is more expensive, and if a residential customer wants to use their connectivity like a business then they should be paying the business rate or move to a provider who isnt in business to at least break even from their customers.

Those of you interested should check out Flowscan @wisc.edu

Also called "Magic Sand", it appears to be mainly sold to elementary school science teachers who want to give their kids a hands-on activity. Here are some Quicktime movies of magic sand being poured onto water, etc, like the parent-post says.

Why use 3d when you can use 5 dimensions?

There is another way. Open Source.

By installing some GNU software (Ghostscript), a printer re-director (RedMon), and a few configurations, you'll be cranking out PDFs from your favorite program just by printing!

I performed this install on Windows XP, so your experience may vary.

1. Install AFPL Ghostscript. In my case, gs704w32.exe.

2. Install RedMon. In my case, redmon17.zip.

3. Go to your Add a New Printer wizard for Windows. a) Make it a local printer and don't automatically detect b) Choose create a new port and select Redirected Port from the dropdown menu. c) Unless you have good reason to do otherwise, just accept the default port name, which should be RPT1 d) Select a printer that has all the features you've always dreamed of your printer having! I chose Apple Color LaserWriter 12/1600 e) Fill out the next few dialog boxes as you see fit. Don't bother to print a test page. f) Now look at your printer's properties, select your new port, and choose to configure it.

4. Adjust your port. At this point, you should have a dialog box for port configuration displayed. Depending on where you installed Ghostscript, your values may vary below. Also, make sure you use the 16bit name for the path. Notice my "Program Files" has been represented as "PROGRA~1". Under Windows XP, you can get these names by using "dir /X" from a command line.

Field Label: Redirect this port to the program:

Value: C:PROGRA~1gsgs7.04bingswin32c.exe

Field Label: Arguments for this program are:

Value: @C:PROGRA~1gspdfwrite.rsp -sOutputFile="%1" -c save pop -f -

Dropdown Label: Output

Value: Prompt for filename

5. If you didn't notice, the Field Value for Arguments for this program contains a reference to a file pdfwrite.rsp. This is a plain text file and should contain something similar to the following. (Adjust at your own adventure and risk!)

-IC:PROGRA~1gsgs7.04lib;C:PROGRA~1gsfonts

-sDEVICE=pdfwrite

-r300

-dNOPAUSE

-dSAFER

-sPAPERSIZE=letter

Fire up your word processor or spreadsheet program and give it a try!

> What happens if the matter/antimatter mix is not correct?

Matter/antimatter mix? Watching to much Star Trek and not enough physics lectures? Whichever there was more of will have leftovers. Hopefully, this is the ship, and not the fuel :) You are correct that putting enough antimatter to do something useful is dangerous. It is even more dangerous when the ship's sail is made of U235, since then you have radioactive material to get scattered around. Given what they said about fission being important to making this work, they probably need a lot less antimatter than they would otherwise.

The nature of an antimatter explosion would be different from a hydrogen or uranium/plutonium explosion. In a fusion or fission reaction, there are fast moving massive particles, including atomic nuclei and neutrons. In an antimatter annihilation, there is _no_ matter left over, only energy. You get two gamma rays for each annihilation event. (There are always two, not one, because the total momentum of the system is constant.) The gamma rays would heat up surrounding matter, but I'm not sure it would make any of it radioactive (it would have to knock particles out of atomic nuclei to do that). The penetration depth of gamma rays in air is around 400m. This means that the energy of the reaction is distributed over a very large area, unlike in a fusion or fission reaction. This large distribution of enegy would not make for explosive expansion unless there was a very large amount of energy released. You might end up with some plasma close the the explosion. Of course, ionizing radiation is bad for living creatures, so anyone too close to the reaction could end up dead or with radiation poisoning. There wouldn't be any lingering radiation, though, because all the antimatter would react right away and produce only photons.

If the same thing happened near something that absorbed gamma rays pretty well, like the ground, or a building, that matter would be heated very hot in a much smaller area. It would expand explosively. Of course, there wouldn't be fallout. There would be lots of dust thrown into the air, which could create a nuclear winter effect, setting back global warming by several decades :)

Please use a mirror, yeah, har har. Thanks, buddy. As of now, of course, none of the mirrors have updated, possibly because people post links right to the master.

Australia (Canberra, .au only) http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/OpenBSD/songs/song 32.ogg
Australia (Melbourne) http://www.openbsd.aba.net.au/ftp/songs/song32.ogg
Australia (Sydney) http://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/OpenBSD/songs/song 32.ogg
Australia (Sydney) http://the.wiretapped.net/OpenBSD/songs/song32.ogg
Austria (Vienna) http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/OpenBSD/songs/song32. ogg
Belgium (Ghent) http://openbsd.rug.ac.be/ftp/pub/OpenBSD/songs/son g32.ogg
Canada (Edmonton) http://sunsite.ualberta.ca/pub/OpenBSD/songs/song3 2.ogg
Canada (Sherbrooke) http://gulus.usherb.ca/ftp/OpenBSD/songs/song32.og g
Finland http://ftp.fi.debian.org/OpenBSD/songs/song32.ogg
Finland (Jyvskyl) http://ftp.jyu.fi/ftp/pub/OpenBSD/songs/song32.ogg
Germany (Esslingen) http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/OpenBSD/songs /song32.ogg
Germany (Frankfurt) http://pandemonium.tiscali.de/pub/OpenBSD/songs/so ng32.ogg
Germany (Stuttgart) http://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/OpenBSD/songs/song 32.ogg
Italy (Napoli) http://ftp.openbsd.it/OpenBSD/songs/song32.ogg
Sweden (Uppsala) http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/OpenBSD/songs/song32.ogg
Sweden (Uppsala) http://mirror.pudas.net/OpenBSD/songs/song32.ogg
Taiwan http://openbsd.nsysu.edu.tw/pub/OpenBSD/songs/song 32.ogg
TamSui, Taiwan http://ftp.tku.edu.tw/pub/OpenBSD/songs/song32.ogg
USA (Batesville, AR) http://gandalf.neark.org/pub/distributions/OpenBSD /songs/song32.ogg
USA (Sunnyvale, CA) http://east.dl.sourceforge.net/mirrors/OpenBSD/son gs/song32.ogg
USA (Tallahassee, FL) http://mirror.csit.fsu.edu/pub/OpenBSD/songs/song3 2.ogg
USA (Lake in the Hills, IL) http://rt.fm/pub/OpenBSD/songs/song32.ogg
USA (Indianapolis, IN) http://archive.progeny.com/OpenBSD/songs/song32.og g
USA (West Lafayette, IN) http://ftp7.usa.openbsd.org/pub/os/OpenBSD/songs/s ong32.ogg
USA (Cambridge, MA) http://openbsd.mirrors.netnumina.com/songs/song32. ogg
USA (State College, PA) http://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/OpenBSD/songs/song3 2.ogg
USA (Fairfax, VA) http://mirrors.rcn.net/pub/OpenBSD/songs/song32.og g
USA (Fairfax, VA) http://openbsd.secsup.org/songs/song32.ogg
USA (Springfield, VA) http://www.tux.org/pub/bsd/openbsd/songs/song32.og g
USA (Madison, WI) http://mirror6.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/OpenBSD/son gs/song32.ogg

This is the way to do it!

Cesium in air and water

Open with Acrobat Reader, File->Document Properties->Summary... reveals:

Title: Microsoft Word - 3DB823B-1ABD-0AA6.doc

Furthermore, the PDF file was created by http://createpdf.adobe.com - which allows one to upload files and have the processed into PDF - 15 for free, more for $$$.

Seems like they didn't find out that ghostview allows you to generate pdf files as well as view them...

Music has mathmatical patters, that does not mean math makes good music. People have been trying to discover algorithims which can generate music for years, and this guy has not advanced the science any.

True enough. The only good overlap I've seen between mathematics and music has been the use of math to analyze music written by humans. For an example of such analysis, please refer to the landmark work by Meloon and Sprott.

Yet another /.'ing. Mirrors up at Earlham College and at UW-Madison.

Be warned that I am planning on taking down the UW-Madison server for repairs and upgrades later tonight, so Earlham is probably your best bet.

Since the site appears to be getting kind of slow, and also seems to be a personally-hosted site, I have set up mirrors here (courtesy of Earlham College) and here (courtesy of UW-Madison).

Since the site appears to be getting kind of slow, and also seems to be a personally-hosted site, I have set up mirrors here (courtesy of Earlham College) and here (courtesy of UW-Madison).

GSView (requires Ghostscript) works pretty well on Windows. It's also free beer/speech, depending on which version you get (old versions get relicensed as GPL when a new version is released). As for editing, I don't know of anything besides acrobat that edits PDF directly.

Click on this link, download the program called TF32, open any WAV file, click with the left mouse to first place left cursor than right cursor, click to down arrow to zoom in, and work the scroller control to scroll the spectrogram. Try this on a CRT and then on an LCD, and then contact cspeech@chorus.net if you think I don't know what I am talking about.

Look here Scrool down to "Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 or XP" and download the gs704w32.exe and gsv43w32.exe files.

..or you can get ghostscript with gsview. Did you know that 63503 is isomorph in gsview? ;-)

Iodine clock reactions are the bomb. Especially if you pour your mixture back and forth between beakers so a stream of it is cascading at the time the color changes.

• Make Nitrogen triiodide crystals and detonate them (the purple crystals explode when jarred)
• Electric pickle - make a pickle glow!
• Oobleck! Corn starch and water combine to make a substance you've got to handle to believe.

I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned the glycerine/potassium permanganate trick yet. See it here

This is *not* a hands-on demonstration. keep the kids well back and wear goggles.

Potassium Permanganate?
It's dark purple, and is rather impressive when mixed with glycerin...