One of his earliest works??? Thanks for making me feel old, I can remember when it came out!! But I'm reassured to see that it came out in 1993, and so is (just) from the second half of his novel writing career (first was Sundiver in 1980). In fact, as much as I love the ol' Brinster, his earlier novels are the best so far, IMHO.
That's no definition of fascism I have ever encountered, it's more like socialism. Fascism is hard to pin down, but is more about opposing liberalism, Marxism and internationalism, the cult of youth vs the corrupt old elites, creating so-called national communities in order to bring about a national rebirth. It's not primarily about economics at all, although corporativism was attractive to many fascist ideologues.
Fair enough. I'm just saying it's a theory I have seen before that seems dubiously psychological (and oh how Hitler attracts dubious psychological theorising). I'm a history grad student, I'd like to see contemporary evidence is all.
Er, yes, but there were still a lot of good ones left - ever heard of Heisenberg? Weizsacker? Hahn? Von Laue? Gerlach? Planck? Jordan? Do you think Einstein would have written to Roosevelt pleading for the US to develop a bomb before Germany did if he had thought those physicists who stayed were a pack of second-raters?
But anyway, what has that got to do with the point you quoted? The "aryan physicists" failed to take over German physics (by which I mean the physics community as a whole, not just the nuclear research program) - they had failed to secure the support of the Nazi leaders (even Himmler, ever the pseudoscience buff, came down on Heisenberg's side over the "white Jew" affair) and after securing Sommerfeld's chair for one of their own in 1939 - the high tide mark for aryan physics - generally failed to win any more institutional or bureaucratic battles. And the reason is that, eg, aircraft design has more to do with aerodynamics than ideology. No good being racially sound if your fighters fall out of the sky. BUT, whether or not the best had already left Germany before then is irrelevent to the fact that the aryan physicists were in fact defeated by the modernists, whether second-rate or no.
I can't say much aboutFor a starting reference, see Alan Beyerchen, Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977).
We hit Dresden because the Germans hit Coventry. We carried out the raid because we knew the Germans were going to hit Covernty and couldn't act on that information without giving away the breaking of Enigma. We did it because we were angry.
Sources? Coventry was in 1941, Dresden in 1945. I can't see that the one had anything directly to do with the other - 4 years is a long time to be angry when there was so much other stuff going on, including much other bombing of German cities in the meantime.
I've never bought that argument, because it never stopped him from using gas on Jews, homosexuals, the disabled, and any other "undesirables". If there are any records of Hitler saying that it had to do with his personal experiences then I'd like to see them... eg maybe he had an opinion of the Italian use of gas during the Abyssinian war.
Personally, I have sometimes been guilty of google scholarship but I wrote an essay on the subject of "Aryan physics" a few years ago for a class so I do know a little about this... and yes, the GP was correct. Some scientists did share the goals of the Nazis, some were at best indifferent. It's a myth to suppose that scientists are somehow morally insulated from politics, just because nature is. (In particular, I'm sick of Heisenberg being whitewashed - he was a great physicist, but he couldn't see any moral difference between Nazi Germany and the western democracies, and his atomic weapons program failed because of his mistakes, not because he was trying to stop Hitler from getting the bomb.) On the other hand, by the early years of the war, the proponents of "aryan physics" had fairly decisively lost out in their battle to take over German physics, so even in Nazi Germany one could argue that objective physics won out.
supporting characters who learned to act somewhere in the middle of the second season, except for the redheaded telepath chick. She looked cheesy all the way through
Arrgh, yes, she was awful! She was in the original pilot movie but not in season 1. I had assumed it was because she couldn't act to save her life... but as she returned later on, I guess she must have had some dirt on JMS or something.
Yes, I think you're right, and I've run into this before. I find it difficult to pick up a history book unless it is throughly footnoted and referenced, but I admit that's not the kind of history most people will be read (or see on tv, more to the point) and be influenced by! But my point still remains: there are histories which are more or less as honest and as unbiased as possible, and it is those that should be used to judge the worth of history as a discipline. Then the question is, how to get those histories to a wider audience (as opposed to the populist rubbish), but I doubt that will ever happen on a large scale...
Well, that's your opinion - but I'm somebody working at the coalface of history, and I don't see it. (Intertwined? Sure, sometimes. Irrevocably? Not in the least.) You haven't demonstrated anything other than the most superficial knowledge of the way history is actually done, so I'm not moved by such bland assertions. (Feel free to prove me wrong on that point, BTW.)
I fail to see how more details can come to light.
Well, of course they can - but again, this just shows you don't understand anything about how history is done. Do you think the US government, for example, conducts all of its discussions in public? It's my impression that they do not. "Details" of those discussions will eventually come to light, and may prove illuminating. Or not.
From which biased historians will pick elements that fit their pre-conceived view of events, and print millions of copies of books, with aid from their national governments, dwarfing and ridiculing information produced by anyone of contrary oppinion. That is the way it works.
That statement alone tells me you have had no contact with academic history. Very, very, very few academic historians sell (or even print) millions of books. They are ecstatic if they ever sell thousands of books. The rest of your statement is just rubbish. Sorry, you're talking through your hat. But I guess there is a reason why you chose the nick IgnoramusMaximus - why let knowledge get in the way of a good argument, hey?
That is not the purpose of history. But just like the purpose of mathematics is not to improve your ability to count change, that is its practical effect.
That is ONE practical effect. I have encountered a few other practical effects of mathematics in my time (as I said, I used to be a physicist - Fourier transforms don't help you count change, but they are great for determining galaxy redshifts). Likewise, history has many uses, but how history is used or abused does not reflect upon the practice of history itself, and whether or not it is useful for your narrow purposes does not mean it has no value for other purposes. You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
History as an abstract collection of curious but useless data is certainly one approach. However most political movements will attempt to use history to justify their views, and thats where it falls apart.
But that's not where history falls apart. It's where politics falls apart. You didn't know that politics is inherently biased? Well, now you do.
Yes that was the idea. I was being funny.
But not making a valid point thereby, because as I said, historians don't work that way. It's not about merely amassing piles of evidence and going with the bigger pile, it's about evaluating the quality and consistency of the evidence.
So on "macroscopic" scale, they can tell that 9/11 happened and have some vague idea about the sequence of events. Any fine detail on the other hand is a lost cause even now. Fast forward 30 years and the data will get only fuzzier.
Yes, of course many, many details are lost to time - that's rather obvious. But who is going to be interested in minor details, such as whether a firewall collapsed at 9.37am or at 9.42am, or whatever? It's the bigger picture that historians will be more interested in, and that will become clearer in time, as more details previously unknown come to light, the full impact becomes clearer, and people can consider the events a bit more calmly and rationally. Surely that is more important to your stated desire to resolve nationalist agendas? Accounts of the broader implications of September 11 are awash with them now, and will be for many decades to come. Some people will never be able to disengage emotionally and consider it objectively - it's too scarring. But others will be able to, and historians will be among those people.
Some general, vague, macroscopic things are knowable just by the fact that should these major things be wrong a vast array of other things would be contradicted
Precisely - except that replace "some" with "many", "general, vague, macroscopic" with "specific". Even on small scales, where we have only one account of an event, we can do consistency checks with other types of evidence, and also see whether the account coheres with other accounts of similar events.
but again that is also possible if some regime managed to color facts early on and do so sucessfully and others worked their way from there until the thing is "common knowledge" accepted by everyone, historians included.
Sure, historians can be as blind to their assumptions as anyone else, but that's something that can be corrected by later generations of historians working from primary sources. The existence of those primary sources is the important thing.
But the main point remains: history is but useless when it counts: in deciding historical grievances of various nationalist/religious groups.
Oh! Sorry, I didn't realise that the main purpose of history was to reinforce (or negate) somebody's nationalist agenda. I had some bizarre notion of valuing knowledge for it's own sake - I guess I'll have to re-evaluate my approach to my own research. Thanks for pointing this out.
It will be invented and used and abused by everyone, including "historians" because such history will be "studied" by people who are severely biased and quickly a point will develop whereby the amount of confusion and obfuscation will exceed the capability to decipher the facts. This is true of most of our recent history.
Which is why historians, by and large, don't write about "recent" history. My personal rule of thumb is that anything that happened in my lifetime isn't history, it's too contemporary and the distance needed to develop objectivity isn't there.
I advise you to venture into some of these history nuts' forums and you will soon be crushed by a vast pile of "data" online (not to mention the hard copy stuff that they will point you to) up to the point that no sane analysis is possible.
I'm not really interested in what such people have to say. Anyone obsessive enough can amass a lot of data about a subject, but that doesn't mean they have the critical faculties or broad perspective to be able to interpret it sensibly. And as for being crushed by the data, if it's in my particular field of study, I say bring it on - what do you think real historians actually do??
Why yes, they can determine for example that: 1123 sources mention July 1st, 967 July 2nd, 625 June 1st, 425 July 31st, and 1341 a date in winter. From which they will quickly deduce that the event occured in Spring because if it did not, it would conflict with other previously "corraborated" eye-witness accounts. Thats history for you. If you think I am joking,
Perhaps not joking, but either misinformed or severely exaggerating. Because I can't think of any historiographical example like your bogus example. But if a straw man is easier for you... !
you should read some of the eye-witness accounts of the events of September 11th and you would find out that vast majority of what we "know" about this very recent happening is conjecture and wild guesses combined with totally contradictory accounts and only being saved by some pieces of technology which create a modicum of sanity in this mess.
Like I said, this is too recent to be considered "history". Come back to me in 30 years.
So in conclusion, no I do not reject history totally but simply consider it far to unreliable to be useful when it counts.
Well, that is progress from history being "authoritative lies", I guess. But I really don't get any sense that you are aware of what actual historians write about or how they conduct their research. I'd guess too much time on the internet, or perhaps reading trashy pop history...
Because unless the entire world media + internet were somehow overpowered by some global conspiracy, one does not need a historian to see what went on with one's own eyes. That is what makes the difference.
And that is exactly why we can know things about the past. There would have to have been a massive global conspiracy to fabricate history, because we have massive amounts of data about the past. It can't all be made up.
That is not a question of "difficult". It is a case of "impossible". Unlike physics for example, one cannot easilly verify the information expermentally and thus the only measure of reliability is the number of independent sources.
Interesting you picked that example; I have a postgraduate education in both physics and history... But you are wrong; it's not simply the number of independent sources. Historians can, and do, evaluate them for bias, closeness to the events in question in time and space, and suchlike. There's no need for a counsel of despair.
And so goes on the unqestioning belief in the USA that it is America who won WWII while at the same time every Russian will tell you it was USSR. Both will recite vast amounts of historical "evidence" to validate their claim.
Are you talking about historians? Or the average person on the street? Because if the former, it's simply not true that such beliefs are unquestioned, and if the latter, it's simply not true that they can cite vast amounts of historical evidence about anything.
But let's turn the question "who won world war 2" on its head. Do you think any of these answers are more, or less, likely than the others? (a) USA; (b) USSR; (c) Nazi Germany; (d) Canada; (e) Napoleonic France; (f) Palestine; (g) Margaret Thatcher? If you don't think any of these answers are obviously wrong, then you are truly a relativist, and so there's not really a lot of point talking to you. But if you can see that, for example, Napoleonic France disappeared over a century before WW2 started and so couldn't possibly have won WW2 (that's physics for you), then you accept that we can know something of the past and I'm satisfied - the rest is merely haggling over the details. Even if it were not possible to say whether the US or USSR won the war - why can't it be both? - there are still statements one can make about the subject which are more true than others.
And you know, I lied: regardless of the so-called history, I will go with the side that does not make children drink their own piss and then burns them and rips them to shreads with explosives.
Right, and given your own arguments about history being lies, you believe that those things happened because... ? Unless you were there, you can't know - according to you, anyway.
Just because determining the truth can be difficult does not make it impossible, nor is it any the less necessary to try.
Quite right, and the bizarre thing is that although psychologists recognise that Freud mostly wasn't right, not many other people have. For example, you can make a career in history by writing Freudian interpretations of this event or that person - last year I took a graduate seminar which largely used Freud's particular definition of trauma and applied it to memorialisation of the Holocaust. Fortunately my essay for the subject did NOT have talk about trauma. But I nearly screamed when we spent a day discussing Freud's absurd theory that Moses was actually Akhenaten and so on, and the lecturer indicated that she wasn't concerned with whether or not it was true or even remotely plausible, but wanted to use to explore "historical trauma".
There are some, but I think they are for niche markets, eg BibDesk which integrates with LaTeX. (Good for me as I'm considering writing a PhD thesis in LaTeX!) It does seem like there is an opportunity for an open source project to take on Endnote, it is the de facto standard but as you say, it doesn't integrate well with anything but Word.
Tell me about it! I mean, it's funny enough the first ten thousand times you hear it, but after that it gets a tad tedious... of course, I perpetrated this myself often enough as a teenager, so perhaps it's karma.
I swear to God I was literally dreaming about this new iMac last night! Although the one in my dream was butt-ugly (not that the real one is much prettier). It's not like I have been hanging out for this - I don't even want one! - but I guess I'm officially a Mac fanboy now. Oh, the shame...
I have wondered that myself, but I think it is just a coincidence - Sergey was born in Moscow, and his family emigrated to the US in 1979 according to this. David was born in the US in 1950. Still could be distantish relations, but if you google (what else?) on "david brin" and "sergey brin" then you only find 4 pages of hits with both names, all of which seem to be coincidental. So if there is a relation, they are keeping it well hidden!
There is a reason people pay for taking classes. They must want to learn. Otherwise they would not pay thier hard earned dollars.
I think what many of the responses to this story have shown is that many people do not want to learn, they want to pass. They want to get their diploma or degree and get a great job, earn lots of money to pay back their student loans and buy a new car, etc. They don't think that they should have to actually demonstrate that they have learned anything to get those degrees. They're wrong.
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One of his earliest works??? Thanks for making me feel old, I can remember when it came out!! But I'm reassured to see that it came out in 1993, and so is (just) from the second half of his novel writing career (first was Sundiver in 1980). In fact, as much as I love the ol' Brinster, his earlier novels are the best so far, IMHO.
That's no definition of fascism I have ever encountered, it's more like socialism. Fascism is hard to pin down, but is more about opposing liberalism, Marxism and internationalism, the cult of youth vs the corrupt old elites, creating so-called national communities in order to bring about a national rebirth. It's not primarily about economics at all, although corporativism was attractive to many fascist ideologues.
Fair enough. I'm just saying it's a theory I have seen before that seems dubiously psychological (and oh how Hitler attracts dubious psychological theorising). I'm a history grad student, I'd like to see contemporary evidence is all.
But anyway, what has that got to do with the point you quoted? The "aryan physicists" failed to take over German physics (by which I mean the physics community as a whole, not just the nuclear research program) - they had failed to secure the support of the Nazi leaders (even Himmler, ever the pseudoscience buff, came down on Heisenberg's side over the "white Jew" affair) and after securing Sommerfeld's chair for one of their own in 1939 - the high tide mark for aryan physics - generally failed to win any more institutional or bureaucratic battles. And the reason is that, eg, aircraft design has more to do with aerodynamics than ideology. No good being racially sound if your fighters fall out of the sky. BUT, whether or not the best had already left Germany before then is irrelevent to the fact that the aryan physicists were in fact defeated by the modernists, whether second-rate or no.
I can't say much aboutFor a starting reference, see Alan Beyerchen, Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977).
Sources? Coventry was in 1941, Dresden in 1945. I can't see that the one had anything directly to do with the other - 4 years is a long time to be angry when there was so much other stuff going on, including much other bombing of German cities in the meantime.
I've never bought that argument, because it never stopped him from using gas on Jews, homosexuals, the disabled, and any other "undesirables". If there are any records of Hitler saying that it had to do with his personal experiences then I'd like to see them ... eg maybe he had an opinion of the Italian use of gas during the Abyssinian war.
Personally, I have sometimes been guilty of google scholarship but I wrote an essay on the subject of "Aryan physics" a few years ago for a class so I do know a little about this ... and yes, the GP was correct. Some scientists did share the goals of the Nazis, some were at best indifferent. It's a myth to suppose that scientists are somehow morally insulated from politics, just because nature is. (In particular, I'm sick of Heisenberg being whitewashed - he was a great physicist, but he couldn't see any moral difference between Nazi Germany and the western democracies, and his atomic weapons program failed because of his mistakes, not because he was trying to stop Hitler from getting the bomb.) On the other hand, by the early years of the war, the proponents of "aryan physics" had fairly decisively lost out in their battle to take over German physics, so even in Nazi Germany one could argue that objective physics won out.
Yep, and it didn't exactly "crater" either, considering that data collected on its voyages helped Darwin come up with natural selection ...
Arrgh, yes, she was awful! She was in the original pilot movie but not in season 1. I had assumed it was because she couldn't act to save her life ... but as she returned later on, I guess she must have had some dirt on JMS or something.
Ta muchly for the spoiler - the final episode of Voyager hasn't aired yet in Australia (not on free-to-air, anyway).
Yes, I think you're right, and I've run into this before. I find it difficult to pick up a history book unless it is throughly footnoted and referenced, but I admit that's not the kind of history most people will be read (or see on tv, more to the point) and be influenced by! But my point still remains: there are histories which are more or less as honest and as unbiased as possible, and it is those that should be used to judge the worth of history as a discipline. Then the question is, how to get those histories to a wider audience (as opposed to the populist rubbish), but I doubt that will ever happen on a large scale ...
Well, that's your opinion - but I'm somebody working at the coalface of history, and I don't see it. (Intertwined? Sure, sometimes. Irrevocably? Not in the least.) You haven't demonstrated anything other than the most superficial knowledge of the way history is actually done, so I'm not moved by such bland assertions. (Feel free to prove me wrong on that point, BTW.)
I fail to see how more details can come to light.
Well, of course they can - but again, this just shows you don't understand anything about how history is done. Do you think the US government, for example, conducts all of its discussions in public? It's my impression that they do not. "Details" of those discussions will eventually come to light, and may prove illuminating. Or not.
From which biased historians will pick elements that fit their pre-conceived view of events, and print millions of copies of books, with aid from their national governments, dwarfing and ridiculing information produced by anyone of contrary oppinion. That is the way it works.
That statement alone tells me you have had no contact with academic history. Very, very, very few academic historians sell (or even print) millions of books. They are ecstatic if they ever sell thousands of books. The rest of your statement is just rubbish. Sorry, you're talking through your hat. But I guess there is a reason why you chose the nick IgnoramusMaximus - why let knowledge get in the way of a good argument, hey?
That is ONE practical effect. I have encountered a few other practical effects of mathematics in my time (as I said, I used to be a physicist - Fourier transforms don't help you count change, but they are great for determining galaxy redshifts). Likewise, history has many uses, but how history is used or abused does not reflect upon the practice of history itself, and whether or not it is useful for your narrow purposes does not mean it has no value for other purposes. You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
History as an abstract collection of curious but useless data is certainly one approach. However most political movements will attempt to use history to justify their views, and thats where it falls apart.
But that's not where history falls apart. It's where politics falls apart. You didn't know that politics is inherently biased? Well, now you do.
Yes that was the idea. I was being funny.
But not making a valid point thereby, because as I said, historians don't work that way. It's not about merely amassing piles of evidence and going with the bigger pile, it's about evaluating the quality and consistency of the evidence.
So on "macroscopic" scale, they can tell that 9/11 happened and have some vague idea about the sequence of events. Any fine detail on the other hand is a lost cause even now. Fast forward 30 years and the data will get only fuzzier.
Yes, of course many, many details are lost to time - that's rather obvious. But who is going to be interested in minor details, such as whether a firewall collapsed at 9.37am or at 9.42am, or whatever? It's the bigger picture that historians will be more interested in, and that will become clearer in time, as more details previously unknown come to light, the full impact becomes clearer, and people can consider the events a bit more calmly and rationally. Surely that is more important to your stated desire to resolve nationalist agendas? Accounts of the broader implications of September 11 are awash with them now, and will be for many decades to come. Some people will never be able to disengage emotionally and consider it objectively - it's too scarring. But others will be able to, and historians will be among those people.
Precisely - except that replace "some" with "many", "general, vague, macroscopic" with "specific". Even on small scales, where we have only one account of an event, we can do consistency checks with other types of evidence, and also see whether the account coheres with other accounts of similar events.
but again that is also possible if some regime managed to color facts early on and do so sucessfully and others worked their way from there until the thing is "common knowledge" accepted by everyone, historians included.
Sure, historians can be as blind to their assumptions as anyone else, but that's something that can be corrected by later generations of historians working from primary sources. The existence of those primary sources is the important thing.
But the main point remains: history is but useless when it counts: in deciding historical grievances of various nationalist/religious groups.
Oh! Sorry, I didn't realise that the main purpose of history was to reinforce (or negate) somebody's nationalist agenda. I had some bizarre notion of valuing knowledge for it's own sake - I guess I'll have to re-evaluate my approach to my own research. Thanks for pointing this out.
It will be invented and used and abused by everyone, including "historians" because such history will be "studied" by people who are severely biased and quickly a point will develop whereby the amount of confusion and obfuscation will exceed the capability to decipher the facts. This is true of most of our recent history.
Which is why historians, by and large, don't write about "recent" history. My personal rule of thumb is that anything that happened in my lifetime isn't history, it's too contemporary and the distance needed to develop objectivity isn't there.
I advise you to venture into some of these history nuts' forums and you will soon be crushed by a vast pile of "data" online (not to mention the hard copy stuff that they will point you to) up to the point that no sane analysis is possible.
I'm not really interested in what such people have to say. Anyone obsessive enough can amass a lot of data about a subject, but that doesn't mean they have the critical faculties or broad perspective to be able to interpret it sensibly. And as for being crushed by the data, if it's in my particular field of study, I say bring it on - what do you think real historians actually do??
Why yes, they can determine for example that: 1123 sources mention July 1st, 967 July 2nd, 625 June 1st, 425 July 31st, and 1341 a date in winter. From which they will quickly deduce that the event occured in Spring because if it did not, it would conflict with other previously "corraborated" eye-witness accounts. Thats history for you. If you think I am joking,
Perhaps not joking, but either misinformed or severely exaggerating. Because I can't think of any historiographical example like your bogus example. But if a straw man is easier for you ... !
you should read some of the eye-witness accounts of the events of September 11th and you would find out that vast majority of what we "know" about this very recent happening is conjecture and wild guesses combined with totally contradictory accounts and only being saved by some pieces of technology which create a modicum of sanity in this mess.
Like I said, this is too recent to be considered "history". Come back to me in 30 years.
So in conclusion, no I do not reject history totally but simply consider it far to unreliable to be useful when it counts.
Well, that is progress from history being "authoritative lies", I guess. But I really don't get any sense that you are aware of what actual historians write about or how they conduct their research. I'd guess too much time on the internet, or perhaps reading trashy pop history ...
Well then, looks like 1953 is the most recent year for which I've managed to read all the Hugo best novel nominees ... *sigh*
And that is exactly why we can know things about the past. There would have to have been a massive global conspiracy to fabricate history, because we have massive amounts of data about the past. It can't all be made up.
That is not a question of "difficult". It is a case of "impossible". Unlike physics for example, one cannot easilly verify the information expermentally and thus the only measure of reliability is the number of independent sources.
Interesting you picked that example; I have a postgraduate education in both physics and history ... But you are wrong; it's not simply the number of independent sources. Historians can, and do, evaluate them for bias, closeness to the events in question in time and space, and suchlike. There's no need for a counsel of despair.
And so goes on the unqestioning belief in the USA that it is America who won WWII while at the same time every Russian will tell you it was USSR. Both will recite vast amounts of historical "evidence" to validate their claim.
Are you talking about historians? Or the average person on the street? Because if the former, it's simply not true that such beliefs are unquestioned, and if the latter, it's simply not true that they can cite vast amounts of historical evidence about anything.
But let's turn the question "who won world war 2" on its head. Do you think any of these answers are more, or less, likely than the others? (a) USA; (b) USSR; (c) Nazi Germany; (d) Canada; (e) Napoleonic France; (f) Palestine; (g) Margaret Thatcher? If you don't think any of these answers are obviously wrong, then you are truly a relativist, and so there's not really a lot of point talking to you. But if you can see that, for example, Napoleonic France disappeared over a century before WW2 started and so couldn't possibly have won WW2 (that's physics for you), then you accept that we can know something of the past and I'm satisfied - the rest is merely haggling over the details. Even if it were not possible to say whether the US or USSR won the war - why can't it be both? - there are still statements one can make about the subject which are more true than others.
Right, and given your own arguments about history being lies, you believe that those things happened because ... ? Unless you were there, you can't know - according to you, anyway.
Just because determining the truth can be difficult does not make it impossible, nor is it any the less necessary to try.
Quite right, and the bizarre thing is that although psychologists recognise that Freud mostly wasn't right, not many other people have. For example, you can make a career in history by writing Freudian interpretations of this event or that person - last year I took a graduate seminar which largely used Freud's particular definition of trauma and applied it to memorialisation of the Holocaust. Fortunately my essay for the subject did NOT have talk about trauma. But I nearly screamed when we spent a day discussing Freud's absurd theory that Moses was actually Akhenaten and so on, and the lecturer indicated that she wasn't concerned with whether or not it was true or even remotely plausible, but wanted to use to explore "historical trauma".
There are some, but I think they are for niche markets, eg BibDesk which integrates with LaTeX. (Good for me as I'm considering writing a PhD thesis in LaTeX!) It does seem like there is an opportunity for an open source project to take on Endnote, it is the de facto standard but as you say, it doesn't integrate well with anything but Word.
Pity I've already posted, you deserve to be modded up! +1, Insightful and DNAish.
Tell me about it! I mean, it's funny enough the first ten thousand times you hear it, but after that it gets a tad tedious ... of course, I perpetrated this myself often enough as a teenager, so perhaps it's karma.
Yeah, right, tell that to the orthodox Christians, among others ...
I swear to God I was literally dreaming about this new iMac last night! Although the one in my dream was butt-ugly (not that the real one is much prettier). It's not like I have been hanging out for this - I don't even want one! - but I guess I'm officially a Mac fanboy now. Oh, the shame ...
I have wondered that myself, but I think it is just a coincidence - Sergey was born in Moscow, and his family emigrated to the US in 1979 according to this. David was born in the US in 1950. Still could be distantish relations, but if you google (what else?) on "david brin" and "sergey brin" then you only find 4 pages of hits with both names, all of which seem to be coincidental. So if there is a relation, they are keeping it well hidden!
I think what many of the responses to this story have shown is that many people do not want to learn, they want to pass. They want to get their diploma or degree and get a great job, earn lots of money to pay back their student loans and buy a new car, etc. They don't think that they should have to actually demonstrate that they have learned anything to get those degrees. They're wrong.