Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Periodicity, Vacuum, Strength
Bratty kids get to sit near the volatile elements. Theodore Gray writes: "About a month ago there was a slashdot lively discussion about my wooden Periodic Table Table. A bunch of slashdot readers sent me elements for it: Thank you slashdot! Two people actually sent me free Ag and Pd, contrary to the jokes in the discussion. I decided the world could stand another periodic table website. Since all the eight dozen other periodic tables on the web have better reference information than mine, I used some Mathematica programs to generate links to many of them for each element. But my site is more beautiful. I'm going for science as art. Mine also has by far the best quality sample photos: High resolution, high quality macro shots of 89 samples so far."
Starts with a crank, too. ripaway writes "With all the recent stories about vaccuum tubes, I find it ironic that I stumbled on this today. Sterephile reports about the Panasonic CQ-TX5500D(link to Japanese site) car stereo that uses a vaccuum tube, with analog vu-meters. It also plays mp3 files 8-) Naturally, this is for the Japan market only."
Sounds like material for a Burning Man tent ... nm1m writes "A superstrong composite developed by Brigham Young University scientists and students has received financing for its first practical application -- mammoth wind turbine towers able to more than triple the electrical output of existing steel models. Read the story here."
We mentioned this interesting lattice-looking material a few weeks ago.
Sucking requires a context to be good or bad. Sun Tzu writes "After the recent discussion on bad software, how about a different reason for why software sucks? Maybe we programmers and users don't have it quite so bad after all."
That dadburn whippersnapper, why when I was a boy ... Junks Jerzey writes "I remember reading about Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers five years ago in Wired News. Pretty cool stuff, with an introduction by some guy called John Romero. It was available for a long time as a commercial product that used HTML for formatting, but it's now completely online, as reported by the author."
The official name of the church is "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints". [1] As you can expect, that's quite a mouthful so a nickname is necessary. "Latter-Day Saint (LDS) Church" is acceptable, and the church Presidency supports it. Likewise, it's appropriate to call members of the LDS church "Latter-Day Saints".
"Mormon" [2] is a nickname that was given to the church and its members by others, who knew that we considered the Book of Mormon to be scripture [3] (but didn't know much else about us). This is not a nickname sanctioned by the church Presidency, but most of the church members tolerate it. The problem is that using the name "Mormon" for the church and its members makes it sound like we worship Mormon, or that the church was perhaps founded by Mormon; neither is the case.
What's worse, there are several groups that claim to be "Mormons" - most notably the "Reformed LDS Church" and the polygamists [4] in southern Utah (who I think call themselves "Fundamentalist Mormons", or something like that) - who have little to do with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. For the most part these other "Mormon" churches are splinter groups formed by people who left the church (or were kicked out) because they felt that they should be leading the flock instead of the current Presidency. The legitimate leaders are understandably anxious to make a clear distinction between the real LDS church and the others that call themselves "Mormons".
I personally respond to either and don't make a big deal about it in most cases as long as I'm sure that there's no confusion about what people mean by it.
[1] The "Latter Days" referred to are the present times. The members of Christ's church in His day were called saints, and members of His church today are called "Latter-Day Saints to distinguish the "former" church from the "latter".
[2] Mormon was a real person, a prophet-historian who compiled the Book of Mormon. It's his book, so it's named after him.
[3] We recognize the Bible as scripture, too. There are also a couple of other books of scripture that we use: the Doctrine and Covenants records revelations given to Joseph Smith, the first prophet of the latter days; and the Pearl of Great Price, which records revelations recived by Moses and Abraham, found and translated by Joseph Smith.
[4] Polygamy used to be practiced by the LDS church, but was discontinued about 150 years ago. Anyone church member who practices it modernly is promptly excommunicated. So Tom Green, on trial for various sex crimes against one of his underage wives has nothing whatever to do with the LDS church, regardless of how much he may protest that he is a "Mormon".
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
don't buy IBuyPower computers. my disk died today and I had to use a Windoze box just to get my work done. AAAAAAAAAAAHHH!