At the time I was taking the class (1990) the formal title of Ch41 was "Chemistry of Covalent Compounds", though everyone called it Organic Chemistry informally. Nothing was a completely unofficial publication put together by Zach Berger and DA Kornreich. They just wrote stuff, photocopied it, and left the copies out where people could find them. Nothing seems to have died when their courseload started to increase; I don't remember it coming out at all by my senior year.
What is quintuply-bonded carbon? Is this one of those jokes like dihydrogen monoxide?
Nope. Carbon can only form 4 bonds at a time. During the course of a reaction, there may be short-lived meta-stable carbon species with only 3 bonds, or reactive intermediates (i.e. unstable things that are a transition state between two more stable forms) that have 3 bonds plus one bond that's half made and one bond that's half broken, but there aren't any forms with a full 5 bonds. Undergraduates taking their first Organic test, though, are apt to draw such quintuply bonded carbons and thus get answers wrong on their tests.
Prof. Grubbs always warns his students not to make that mistake before their first test, and even goes into a mini-rant on the topic much like the one in the article. I wouldn't be surprised if the "This reaction doesn't have a chance in hell of happening" were a direct quote. The rant is very memorable, and I'm sure that everyone who took Organic from him would remember it. Despite this, many students will go on to make exactly the mistake that he warned them against, which I assume is the reason that he's so vehement about it.
I took a class (Ch41, Chemistry of Covalent Compounds) from Professor Grubbs, and he is an excellent teacher as well as a great scientist. He can also take a joke. The following was published in Nothing, an unofficial humor paper published by a couple of bored Techers, and based by a standard lecture that Grubbs gave to every Organic Chemistry class before their first test.
Caltech Professor Lashes Out Against High Energy Reaction
In a remarkable demonstration of unbridled passion, Caltech professor Rober Brubbs yesterday lashed out against a high energy reaction--namely, one which includes the formation of a quintuply-bonded carbon. Provoked to a fever pitch by the prospect of dsp3 hybridization in a first period species, he opined: "This reaction doesn't have a chance in hell of happening." He proceeded to characterize quintuply-bonded carbons as "bad", "no good", "undesirable", and "a damned silly notion." After his oration Professor Gurbbs nonchalantly continued with the lecture.
Earlier this mornin, students and other various members of the Caltech and Pasadena communities picketed Grubbs' office to demand retraction of his libelous comments. At the protest, Jennifer O'Leary, spokeswoman for the Quintuply-Bonded Carbon Anti-Defamation League, characterized Grubbs's statement as "shocking" and vowed, "He hasn't heard the last of us. High-energy reaction have just as much a chance of happening as any other. Grubbs's evil exergonocentrist demagoguery demands retraction." Nothing has also received reports from reliable sources that Grubbs has received death threats from both the Brotherhood for Hybridization Freedom and the Carbonic Liberation Front, left-wing propentavalent reactionist groups.
In a response to the same event, the Coalition for Traditional Carbon Valence made public this statement: "We applaud Professor Grubbs for his courageous stand against the poison of quintuple bonds."
Professor Grubbs was unavailable for comment after the lecture as his office refused to return phone calls.
Caltech Security stated that in order to maintain a suitable atmosphere for study and research it would investigate the matter to the fullest extent of its capabilities.
(Information in this story gathered by reporters on fat expense account.)
I usually ignore the politics, but that caused trouble at one company.
Don't confuse avoiding politics and ignoring politics. It's a good idea to pay attention to politics- knowing the players and their games- if only so you can steer clear. If you ignore politics completely then you may very well find yourself involved in them without knowing. Forewarned is forearmed.
Franklin seemed to think that not only did you have to be a hard worker, but others needed to know you were a hard worker, to be successful.
He was right, too. There's nothing that employees like less than a boss demands more of them than he does of himself. If you want people to work hard for you, you have to show that you're willing to work hard for them.
Working well with others is a key part of this. In any large bureaucracy, there are two organizational charts. One is the formal chart that shows how the people at the top think that things work. The other is the informal chart that shows how people at the bottom actually get things done. Learn the second chart and become a key part of it. You want to be able to solve problems, so make sure that other's know you're part of the solution yourself. Give and return favors for other people who get things done. That way they'll owe you one when you need their help, or at least they'll know that you'll pay them back when they need your help.
If you often need help from somebody who doesn't need your help, see if you can be nice to them some other way. Always remember to thank people who have helped you out, even if helping you is officially part of their job. Show that you know and appreciate it when they go above and beyond to help you. The helpful people in big bureaucracies take pride in getting things done, and they can be just as appreciative for recognition of their work as they can for tangible rewards.
I think that driving around a big city (New York, London, Paris, etc...) is much harder than driving around the desert, orders of magnitude harder, IMO. Especially during rush hour.
I think that most people who actually have experience doing both would disagree with you. Those cities have been highly engineered to make driving in them as easy as possible, which is why millions of people do it every day. The desert is a very hostile environment that is capable of physically destroying a car if it isn't driven very carefully. IIRC, in last year's Grand Challenge there were sections where the organizers had actually included deliberately constructed obstacles. That's easy to understand, since the military minds that designed the Challenge expect that enemies will do their best to make life difficult for them.
What you're thinking of are their high end Pentium IV chips, which are quickly approaching the per-centimeter thermal dissapation rates of a nuclear powerplant.
It's not just dissipation, either; there's also a problem with power connections. Modern chips operate at low voltages but still consume huge amounts of power, which means that they draw very high currents. Since future chips would supposedly have even lower voltages and even higher powers, their current requirements would get truly outrageous. At some point, the chips would get to the point that they'd need to use their whole surface to conduct in all the current they need, and I've heard that they'd reach that point before they got to the point of being impossible to cool. Cutting power consumption obviously attacks both excessive current and excessive heat simulataneously, so it's the smartest solution.
Each person has their own core of knowledge that's essential to them in their lives, but much of that isn't shared. As a trivial example, I need to know the layout of streets in my neighborhood but not in yours, while you need to know your neighborhood but not mine. If I ever want to visit you, I can use a map (though you'd need to provide your address first). An auto mechanic needs to memorize different things from a surgeon. To a considerable extent, we wind up learning those kinds of things without necessarily trying. I find that I'll wind up memorizing things incidentally when I've looked them up enough times.
The things that everyone needs to know are essentially how to get along in society- the three Rs, the basic structure of society, and how to coexist with others without fighting. Add in the ability to learn new things as you discover that you need to know them, and you've come to the end of what everyone needs to know.
In addition, ebook readers don't feel like or smell like books.
Doesn't sound like much of a problem to me. It's would be nice for ebooks to be physically pleasant, but I see no reason to copy the look, feel, and smell of existing books. Those are things that aren't desirable in and of themselves; we just like them because they're characteristics of something that we like. After a few years of using electronic books, you'd find that there were different things about them that you latched onto as nice.
While I can't carry 40 or 50 books around in my briefcase at time (a big "feature" of ebooks), I don't generally finding a need to do so.
I think of plenty of reasons to want to carry more than that. How about students who need to carry all of their textbooks? And how about reference books? I may only read a few books at a time for pleasure, but I never know when I'm going to want to look something up in a reference book. Being able to keep all my reference books with me wherever I go would be incredibly useful.
Books take up too much space. I have lots of book cases in my apartment and more in my office at work, but I don't have enough space for all of them. Ebooks would take up enough less space that avid readers would benefit immensely.
Electronic books should be cheaper, once all's said and done. The cost to make an ebook (as opposed to an ebook reader) should be a small fraction of the price of a paper book, with the savings shared between the reader, author, and publisher.
Ebooks would never have to go out of print. The only cost of keeping any book, no matter how obscure, available would be the cost of the disk space for the master copy. At the same time, publishers would be able to deal with demand for a book that was unexpectedly popular.
Those seem like quite compelling practical reasons to like ebooks. We just need to work out the practical problems, like high quality readers and preventing illegal copying.
Re:Inflammatory summary
on
Microsoft Sues EU
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I actually don't see that as very likely. The bigger issue is that Microsoft *depends* on secrecy and lock-in to hold onto their market in the face of less expensive competition. So yes, opening up the protocols will cause them irreparable harm.
That isn't irreprable harm, though; that's just having to face the market. Being forced to compete in an actual market is supposed to be the whole point of anti-trust law. It would be ridiculous to find that Microsoft was engaged in anticompetitive behavior but not actually force them to compete as part of the judgment.
It's a nice story, but it isn't actually true. Both the USA and USSR initially used pencils in their space programs. The company that developed the space pen did so on their own hook without any funding from NASA, and the pen they developed worked well enough that both the USA and USSR programs eventually used it. For more details see the writeup at Snopes.
Do you actually have some evidence to back that claim up? I thought not. The people who come up with ideas like military lasers are actually smart enough to have thought of things like mirrored surfaces on enemy missiles. They wouldn't have put all that time, effort, and money into the project if it could be stopped by such a simple countermeasure.
Common mirrors are not 100% efficient; they absorb some fraction of the light rather than reflecting it. The actual reflecting layer is also quite thin. The small amount of absorbance is enough that a high energy laser will destroy an ordinary mirror very quickly, at which point the remaining energy is absorbed efficiently. The kind of extremely efficient mirrors needed for ultra-high power lasers are fantastically expensive and fragile enough that it's hopelessly impractical to try putting one on military gear.
That would depend on the angle at which the laser is fired. If it's really intended for anti-missile use, it's likely to be pointed upward, which means that a miss will tend to go away from the Earth, not toward it.
you name it, my system has it... and much of it is intermixed, which is why I've been refactoring my code in my free time.
If your problem is that you've intermingled the parts of your system, you have an architecture problem, not a language problem. As the saying goes, you can write spagetti code in any language.
Either you know enough about what's wrong with your code to rewrite a better version in another language or you don't. If you do know enough, you also know enough to refactor your existing code, and that will probably be faster and generate fewer bugs than trying a rewrite. If you don't know enough, you'll just wind up with the same problems (or a different, but no less intractable set of problems) in your new version. Either way, you're probably better off investing your time in improving what you have than starting over from scratch.
I've got a good hunch that if you started all over again, still using Perl, and chose your toolset wisely, your app would be more stable, scalable, functional, and modular.
Even better, don't actually rewrite the app, just refactor it. Break spagetti code up into proper subroutines. Move commonly used functions into separate modules. Take the time to comment your code while you're working on it. In less time that you think, you'll have a functional system that can actually be maintained and improved without having to worry about breaking everything.
Don't laugh. Darl McBride actually mentioned this animation in his Long Live Unix letter. He was making fun of the "First you have to config it, then write some shell scripts, update your RPMs, partition your drives, patch your kernel, compile your binaries and check your version dependencies..." part, but he raised this obviously humorous animation as a serious criticism of Linux.
Chemistry isn't my expertise, but is there any reason why the noble gasses couldn't have been put at the left of the table instead of the right?
Yes. The elements on a single row are all filling the same electron shell, with the noble gasses being noble because they have full shells. Moving the noble gasses to the left of the table would disrupt that arrangement. It would probably make more sense to put the noble gasses into the table twice, with ones to the left of the alkali metals shaded some way to make it clear that they're duplicates and just there to show that the table wraps around.
The new one isn't only pretty, it's totally logical in an absolutely obvious way.
The new one may be pretty and logical, but it's not terribly useful. A periodic table for a working scientist must not only show the elements' relationships with each other but also provide a huge amount of extra information about them. A good periodic table can fit onto a single piece of letter/A4 sized paper and includes all the elements, their names and symbols, their atomic weights, electron configurations, valences, whether or not they're metals, and usually some extra information like their electronegativity, melting and boiling points, density, crystaline structures, or the acid/base properties of their oxides. This new version wastes way to much space on its pretty background picture that could instead be used to convey that kind of information.
Significantly, having that information embedded into the table itself rather than on a separate chart makes a big difference in understanding it. With the information on the element squares, it's easy to see periodic trends in the behavior of the elements that aren't obvious when the same data is shown in tabular form.
I don't think that there's necessarily a clean distinction between the two positions. Instead there is a feedback loop. American culture is more tolerant of violence than of sex, so we allow greater presentation of violence than sex in our media. That acculturates people to accept more violence than sex in the media, reinforcing their preexisting tolerance.
That's not to say that the existing beliefs of the majority will naturally and inevitably be reinforced. It's possible for a minority, sometimes a small one, to push the boundaries of the acceptable one way or the other. Pornographers, for instance, have been trying (with some success) to push the boundaries of what is acceptable within the bounds of pornography. Things that would have been designated obscene (and thus could leagally be blocked) a few decades ago are considered acceptable today. Hollywood studios seem to be very willing to push the limits of acceptable violence, and people are more tolerant of violent content today than they used to be. On the other side of the battle, minority religious groups have recently had some success in pushing sexual content off the air.
There are two problems with your analogy. One is that you're slanting the argument by presenting levels of sex and violence that are far different from what actually triggers complaints. TV shows are free to show violence much worse than a slap. Plenty of fictional shows involve on-screen murder, and sports TV is allowed to show boxing matches in which people are actually trying to beat each other into a pulp. OTOH, people go ballistic about a woman's breast being shown on TV, which is far less sex than you're mentioning. I'd guess that a 10 year old is likely to be far less traumatized by walking in and seeing his or her parents naked than he or shee would be by walking in on them trying to beat each other to a pulp.
The other problem is that what a kid is likely to find traumatic depends heavily on aculturation. If a 10 year old finds violence to be less disturbing than sex, that may be because he or she has been exposed to violence more than to sex. If TV routinely showed nudity but not violence, then kids would be more shocked by the later than by the former.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Grubbs still do his "no pentavalent carbon" talk before the midterm?
At the time I was taking the class (1990) the formal title of Ch41 was "Chemistry of Covalent Compounds", though everyone called it Organic Chemistry informally. Nothing was a completely unofficial publication put together by Zach Berger and DA Kornreich. They just wrote stuff, photocopied it, and left the copies out where people could find them. Nothing seems to have died when their courseload started to increase; I don't remember it coming out at all by my senior year.
Nope. Carbon can only form 4 bonds at a time. During the course of a reaction, there may be short-lived meta-stable carbon species with only 3 bonds, or reactive intermediates (i.e. unstable things that are a transition state between two more stable forms) that have 3 bonds plus one bond that's half made and one bond that's half broken, but there aren't any forms with a full 5 bonds. Undergraduates taking their first Organic test, though, are apt to draw such quintuply bonded carbons and thus get answers wrong on their tests.
Prof. Grubbs always warns his students not to make that mistake before their first test, and even goes into a mini-rant on the topic much like the one in the article. I wouldn't be surprised if the "This reaction doesn't have a chance in hell of happening" were a direct quote. The rant is very memorable, and I'm sure that everyone who took Organic from him would remember it. Despite this, many students will go on to make exactly the mistake that he warned them against, which I assume is the reason that he's so vehement about it.
I took a class (Ch41, Chemistry of Covalent Compounds) from Professor Grubbs, and he is an excellent teacher as well as a great scientist. He can also take a joke. The following was published in Nothing, an unofficial humor paper published by a couple of bored Techers, and based by a standard lecture that Grubbs gave to every Organic Chemistry class before their first test.
Don't confuse avoiding politics and ignoring politics. It's a good idea to pay attention to politics- knowing the players and their games- if only so you can steer clear. If you ignore politics completely then you may very well find yourself involved in them without knowing. Forewarned is forearmed.
He was right, too. There's nothing that employees like less than a boss demands more of them than he does of himself. If you want people to work hard for you, you have to show that you're willing to work hard for them.
Working well with others is a key part of this. In any large bureaucracy, there are two organizational charts. One is the formal chart that shows how the people at the top think that things work. The other is the informal chart that shows how people at the bottom actually get things done. Learn the second chart and become a key part of it. You want to be able to solve problems, so make sure that other's know you're part of the solution yourself. Give and return favors for other people who get things done. That way they'll owe you one when you need their help, or at least they'll know that you'll pay them back when they need your help.
If you often need help from somebody who doesn't need your help, see if you can be nice to them some other way. Always remember to thank people who have helped you out, even if helping you is officially part of their job. Show that you know and appreciate it when they go above and beyond to help you. The helpful people in big bureaucracies take pride in getting things done, and they can be just as appreciative for recognition of their work as they can for tangible rewards.
I think that most people who actually have experience doing both would disagree with you. Those cities have been highly engineered to make driving in them as easy as possible, which is why millions of people do it every day. The desert is a very hostile environment that is capable of physically destroying a car if it isn't driven very carefully. IIRC, in last year's Grand Challenge there were sections where the organizers had actually included deliberately constructed obstacles. That's easy to understand, since the military minds that designed the Challenge expect that enemies will do their best to make life difficult for them.
It's not just dissipation, either; there's also a problem with power connections. Modern chips operate at low voltages but still consume huge amounts of power, which means that they draw very high currents. Since future chips would supposedly have even lower voltages and even higher powers, their current requirements would get truly outrageous. At some point, the chips would get to the point that they'd need to use their whole surface to conduct in all the current they need, and I've heard that they'd reach that point before they got to the point of being impossible to cool. Cutting power consumption obviously attacks both excessive current and excessive heat simulataneously, so it's the smartest solution.
Each person has their own core of knowledge that's essential to them in their lives, but much of that isn't shared. As a trivial example, I need to know the layout of streets in my neighborhood but not in yours, while you need to know your neighborhood but not mine. If I ever want to visit you, I can use a map (though you'd need to provide your address first). An auto mechanic needs to memorize different things from a surgeon. To a considerable extent, we wind up learning those kinds of things without necessarily trying. I find that I'll wind up memorizing things incidentally when I've looked them up enough times.
The things that everyone needs to know are essentially how to get along in society- the three Rs, the basic structure of society, and how to coexist with others without fighting. Add in the ability to learn new things as you discover that you need to know them, and you've come to the end of what everyone needs to know.
Doesn't sound like much of a problem to me. It's would be nice for ebooks to be physically pleasant, but I see no reason to copy the look, feel, and smell of existing books. Those are things that aren't desirable in and of themselves; we just like them because they're characteristics of something that we like. After a few years of using electronic books, you'd find that there were different things about them that you latched onto as nice.
I think of plenty of reasons to want to carry more than that. How about students who need to carry all of their textbooks? And how about reference books? I may only read a few books at a time for pleasure, but I never know when I'm going to want to look something up in a reference book. Being able to keep all my reference books with me wherever I go would be incredibly useful.
Several reasons:
Those seem like quite compelling practical reasons to like ebooks. We just need to work out the practical problems, like high quality readers and preventing illegal copying.
That isn't irreprable harm, though; that's just having to face the market. Being forced to compete in an actual market is supposed to be the whole point of anti-trust law. It would be ridiculous to find that Microsoft was engaged in anticompetitive behavior but not actually force them to compete as part of the judgment.
But extremely vulnerable to drought.
No it doesn't. Montreal most certainly is part of Canada. Whether it should be part of Canada depends on your political persuasion.
It's a nice story, but it isn't actually true. Both the USA and USSR initially used pencils in their space programs. The company that developed the space pen did so on their own hook without any funding from NASA, and the pen they developed worked well enough that both the USA and USSR programs eventually used it. For more details see the writeup at Snopes.
Do you actually have some evidence to back that claim up? I thought not. The people who come up with ideas like military lasers are actually smart enough to have thought of things like mirrored surfaces on enemy missiles. They wouldn't have put all that time, effort, and money into the project if it could be stopped by such a simple countermeasure.
Common mirrors are not 100% efficient; they absorb some fraction of the light rather than reflecting it. The actual reflecting layer is also quite thin. The small amount of absorbance is enough that a high energy laser will destroy an ordinary mirror very quickly, at which point the remaining energy is absorbed efficiently. The kind of extremely efficient mirrors needed for ultra-high power lasers are fantastically expensive and fragile enough that it's hopelessly impractical to try putting one on military gear.
That would depend on the angle at which the laser is fired. If it's really intended for anti-missile use, it's likely to be pointed upward, which means that a miss will tend to go away from the Earth, not toward it.
If your problem is that you've intermingled the parts of your system, you have an architecture problem, not a language problem. As the saying goes, you can write spagetti code in any language.
Either you know enough about what's wrong with your code to rewrite a better version in another language or you don't. If you do know enough, you also know enough to refactor your existing code, and that will probably be faster and generate fewer bugs than trying a rewrite. If you don't know enough, you'll just wind up with the same problems (or a different, but no less intractable set of problems) in your new version. Either way, you're probably better off investing your time in improving what you have than starting over from scratch.
Even better, don't actually rewrite the app, just refactor it. Break spagetti code up into proper subroutines. Move commonly used functions into separate modules. Take the time to comment your code while you're working on it. In less time that you think, you'll have a functional system that can actually be maintained and improved without having to worry about breaking everything.
Don't laugh. Darl McBride actually mentioned this animation in his Long Live Unix letter. He was making fun of the "First you have to config it, then write some shell scripts, update your RPMs, partition your drives, patch your kernel, compile your binaries and check your version dependencies..." part, but he raised this obviously humorous animation as a serious criticism of Linux.
Yes. The elements on a single row are all filling the same electron shell, with the noble gasses being noble because they have full shells. Moving the noble gasses to the left of the table would disrupt that arrangement. It would probably make more sense to put the noble gasses into the table twice, with ones to the left of the alkali metals shaded some way to make it clear that they're duplicates and just there to show that the table wraps around.
The new one may be pretty and logical, but it's not terribly useful. A periodic table for a working scientist must not only show the elements' relationships with each other but also provide a huge amount of extra information about them. A good periodic table can fit onto a single piece of letter/A4 sized paper and includes all the elements, their names and symbols, their atomic weights, electron configurations, valences, whether or not they're metals, and usually some extra information like their electronegativity, melting and boiling points, density, crystaline structures, or the acid/base properties of their oxides. This new version wastes way to much space on its pretty background picture that could instead be used to convey that kind of information.
Significantly, having that information embedded into the table itself rather than on a separate chart makes a big difference in understanding it. With the information on the element squares, it's easy to see periodic trends in the behavior of the elements that aren't obvious when the same data is shown in tabular form.
I don't think that there's necessarily a clean distinction between the two positions. Instead there is a feedback loop. American culture is more tolerant of violence than of sex, so we allow greater presentation of violence than sex in our media. That acculturates people to accept more violence than sex in the media, reinforcing their preexisting tolerance.
That's not to say that the existing beliefs of the majority will naturally and inevitably be reinforced. It's possible for a minority, sometimes a small one, to push the boundaries of the acceptable one way or the other. Pornographers, for instance, have been trying (with some success) to push the boundaries of what is acceptable within the bounds of pornography. Things that would have been designated obscene (and thus could leagally be blocked) a few decades ago are considered acceptable today. Hollywood studios seem to be very willing to push the limits of acceptable violence, and people are more tolerant of violent content today than they used to be. On the other side of the battle, minority religious groups have recently had some success in pushing sexual content off the air.
There are two problems with your analogy. One is that you're slanting the argument by presenting levels of sex and violence that are far different from what actually triggers complaints. TV shows are free to show violence much worse than a slap. Plenty of fictional shows involve on-screen murder, and sports TV is allowed to show boxing matches in which people are actually trying to beat each other into a pulp. OTOH, people go ballistic about a woman's breast being shown on TV, which is far less sex than you're mentioning. I'd guess that a 10 year old is likely to be far less traumatized by walking in and seeing his or her parents naked than he or shee would be by walking in on them trying to beat each other to a pulp.
The other problem is that what a kid is likely to find traumatic depends heavily on aculturation. If a 10 year old finds violence to be less disturbing than sex, that may be because he or she has been exposed to violence more than to sex. If TV routinely showed nudity but not violence, then kids would be more shocked by the later than by the former.