That is not true whatsoever... broadly ignorant statements about all scientists and research grants
Actually, my statements are not made based on a layman's ignorance, or even based on a generalized theoretical concept of how grant funding works. It's based on my professional experiences as a scientist reviewing grant proposals and making recommendations on which proposals to fund, as well as my experiences writing and submitting research grants.
As part of the review process, the panel of scientists responsible for evaluating the proposal takes into consideration the significance of the problem being investigated. How is significance defined? Typically, it's based on the professional judgement of the scientists on the review panel as to what constitutes an important problem. However, it is also based on mandates and directives from the funding agency. If someone highly placed (funding agency director, congressman, etc.) has been swayed by alarmist press surrounding the Iceball Earth phenomenon, and has, as a result, decided that we need to know more about it, then there will be a pot of money set aside just for that topic. These earmarked research funds ensure that this topic will get at least a certain non-zero level of funds, a guarantee that other topics don't have.
Political pressure is one of the forces which drives research money in one direction or another. That's just a fact of science. The more urgent and important your research is percieved to be, the greater liklihood it will be funded. The more trivial and irrelevant your research is percieved to be, the less likely it will be funded.
The alarmists aren't happy unless they're running around screaming "the sky is falling!"
Hint: grant money allocation is correlated with the significance of the problem. Putting out some alarmist press for an obscure question in paleogeology is like wearing a WonderBra and a nose ring to the mall... it's just a way to get some attention.
We're deeply offtopic here, but if you take a look at the title of that day's webcomic, it reads "Episode 476: Red Mage in the Cradle", obviously a reference to the book "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut. This novel, written in 1963, is where Ice-9 is orignally introduced as a theoretical form of water which solidifies at room temperature, and is thermodynamically preferred over normal ice. Since contact with it would cause all water everywhere to solidify instantly, Ice-9 has the potential to freeze the world solid, therby killing just about everything on Earth in the blink of an eye.
The book revolves around the pursuit of a small vial which may or may not contain a small piece of this incredibly powerful, incredibly dangerous substance, created by a very clever rogue scientist who didn't bother to consider the consequences of his actions. Written at the height of the Cold War, Ice-9, of course, is a stand-in for nuclear weapons... a technology which everyone wants to have, everyone wants the other side to *not* have, but one which, from a tactical standpoint, has no pratical application, since it can't be used without terrible consequences for all sides.
Good lord, a literary reference on/.? Without being worked into a goatse, "in Soviet Russia" or "4. Profit!" gag?
I salute you, sir/madam!
the poll is screwed up, too
on
Xbox 360 for $300
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Another sign of/. wierdness... today's Poll ("favorite tool of destruction") was created as an archive, so no comments can be posted.
Personally, I think that Hemos, CmdrTaco and all the other/. bigwigs have gone up to their cabins in the U.P. for August, and have left the running of/. to some interns. This is why you should never, never, never give interns Administrator privledges, even temporarily.
On their products page they give a few items, but they are all listed as "System Available for Beta-Testing Only". Not exactly designed to inspire confidence.
1. Get a product into beta. 2. Distribute it as a beta, with no warranty. 3. ******** 4. Profit!
Just becasue it works for Google doesn't mean it will work with anything.
All they did was take an LCD screen, designed to be used with overhead projectors, and put it onto an overhead projector. The only "DIY" was the case they built out of "partial board" and covered with black felt.
My department bought one of those transparent LCD screens in 1997, back when overhead projectors were still to be found in every lecture hall, laptops were $3000 and LCD projectors were $5000 and as big as a suitcase. The idea was to use this to go from the computer screen to the wall screen on the cheap. It was used every once in awhile, but if you weren't using a laptop, it was a pain to use, since you had to wheel in a cart with a desktop PC.
Once laptops got cheap enough so that they were commonplace, LCD projectors had gotten cheap enough that the department bought one and consigned the transparent LCD screen, with its terrible picture quality, to the back closet of the copier room. There, it collected dust, along with all of the other obsolete junk that no one wanted to use anymore, but had cost too much to just throw away.
The transparent LCD screen was an ugly kludge, a bridge technology to mate the old with the new. Let it die.
Spend the $10 and get a 4' USB extension cable. Leave it plugged into the difficult-to-access slot, thereby giving you an easy-to-access USB port next to your machine.
In 21st century America, "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" is a synonym for an unclimbable mountain of words, like "War and Peace" or "Being and Nothingness". Don't let the size of the mountain scare you off... there are so many passages that are just absolutely delightful, that it really is a great read.
For example, the scene from Henry V, in the tents of the French commanders, just before the battle (end of Act 3?), where the Dauphin is boasting of his military prowess, and everyone else is basically trash-talking him for being a coward and an idiot weakling is just priceless. Shakespeare is full of great stuff.
You don't stop with the great books, you start there.
I'll second this as an important point that many people miss. Once you've read every book in the Great Books canon, whichever list or lists you're working from, that can only be an introduction. Mortimer Adler's essay, "Why Read Great Books?" (URL:http://radicalacademy.com/adlergreatbooks1.ht m>) contains a great nugget: "Exclusive preference for either the past or the present is a foolish and wasteful form of snobbishness and provinciality. We must seek what is most worthy in the works of both the past and the present."
"I don't waste my time on dead white males when there are so many important new thinkers." is just as narrow-minded and limiting as "If you read the great thinkers of the past, you have read everything worth reading."
I got my Van Dorens mixed up. Easy enough to do... both Charles' father Mark Van Doren and his uncle Carl Van Doren were Pulitzer-prize winning author, and respected thinkers in their time. Charles, Mark and Carl were all graduates of, and later professors at, Columbia University.
Agreed, the Great Books approach has long suffered from the DWM slant (Dead White Male), and the canonical Harvard Classics list, developed in the early 20th century, as badly as any. With this in mind, it's important to recognize that any list of books to read can never be any more than a good place to start, as I said in the parent post.
More current lists recognize and draw more heavily from Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, and other cultures. For example:
The New Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major (4th ed., 1997)
Part One
1. Anonymous, ca. 2000 BCE. The Epic of Gilgamesh.
2. Homer, ca. 800 BCE. The Iliad.
3. Homer, ca. 800 BCE. The Odyssey.
4. Confucius, 551-479 BCE. The Analects.
5. Aeschylus, 525-456/5 BCE. The Oresteia.
6. Sophocles, 496-406 BCE. Oedipus Rex; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone
7. Euripides, 484-406 BCE. Alcestis; Medea; Hippolytus; Trojan Women; Electra; Bacchae.
8. Herodotus, ca. 484-425 BCE. The Histories.
9. Thucydides, 470/460-ca.400 BCE. The History of the Peloponnesian War.
10. Sun-tzu, ca. 450-380 BCE. The Art of War.
11. Aristophanes, 448-388 BCE. Lysistrata; The Clouds; The Birds.
12. Plato, 428-348 BCE. Selected Works.
13. Aristotle, 384-322 BCE. Ethics; Politics; Poetics.
14. Mencius, ca. 400-320 BCE. The Book of Mencius.
15. Valmiki, ca. 300 BCE. The Book of Ramayana.
16. Vyasa, ca. 200 BCE. The Mahabharata.
17. Anonymous, ca. 200 BCE. The Bhagavad Gita.
18. Ssu-ma Ch'ien, 145-86 BCE. Records of the Grand Historian.
19. Lucretius, ca. 100-ca. 50 BCE. Of the Nature of Things.
20. Virgil, 70-19 BCE. The Aeneid.
21. Marcus Aurelius, 121-180. Meditations.
Part Two
22. Saint Augustine, 354-430. The Confessions.
23. Kalidasa, ca. 400. The Cloud Messenger; Sakuntala.
24. Revealed to Muhammad, ca. 650. The Koran.
25. Hui-neng, 638-713. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch.
26. Firdausi, ca. 940-1020. Shah Nameh.
27. Sei Shonagon, ca. 965-1035. The Pillow Book.
28. Lady Murasaki, ca. 976-1015. Tale of Genji.
29. Omar Khayyam, 1048-? The Rubaiyat.
30. Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. The Divine Comedy.
31. Luo Kuan-chung, ca. 1330-1400. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
32. Geoffrey Chaucer, 1342-1400. The Canterbury Tales.
33. Anonymous, ca. 1500. The Thousand and One Nights.
34. Niccolò Macchiavelli, 1469-1527. The Prince.
35. François Rabelais, 1483-1553. Gargantua and Pantagruel.
36. Wu Cheng-en, 1500-1582. Journey to the West.
37. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533-1592. Selected Essays.
38. Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra, 1547-1616. Don Quixote.
Part Three
39. William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. Complete Works.
40. John Donne, 1573-1631. Selected Works.
41. Anonymous, 1618. The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P'ing Mei)
42. Galileo Galilei, 1574-1642. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
43. Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679. Leviathan.
44. René Descartes, 1596-1650. Discourse on Method.
45. John Milton, 1608-1674. Paradise Lost; Lycidas; On the Morning of Christ's Nativity; Sonnets; Areopagitica.
46. Molière, 1622-1673. Selected Plays.
47. Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662. Thoughts (Pensées).
48. John Bunyan, 1628-1688. Pilgrim's Progress.
49. John Locke, 1632-1688. Second Treatise of Government.
50. Matsuo Basho, 1644-1694. The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
51. Daniel Defoe, 1660-1731. Robinson Crusoe.
52. Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745. Gulliver's Travels.
53. Voltaire, 1694-1778. Candide and Other Works.
54. David Hume, 1711-1776. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
55. Henry Fielding, 1707-1754. Tom Jones.
56. Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in, 1715-1763. The Dream of the Red Chamber (also called The Story of the Stone).
57. Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778. Confession
I have a set of the Harvard Classics on my bookshelf, the "five-foot-shelf" that is a very good collection of Great Books. (http://www.bartleby.com/hc/). Biography, history, drama, literature, fiction, philosophy, science, politics, religion... it's all there. I've been working my way through it for almost twenty years. Well worth having around, as it means you will never lack for high-quality reading material.
My alma mater, the University of Chicago (http://www.uchicago.edu/), is very much a Great Books kind of place. Here's a good list to start with (from "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, 1972):
1. Homer (9th Century B.C.?)
Iliad
Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus (c.525-456 B.C.)
Tragedies
4. Sophocles (c.495-406 B.C.)
Tragedies
5. Herodotus (c.484-425 B.C.)
History
6. Euripides (c.485-406 B.C.)
Tragedies
(esp. Medea, Hippolytus, The Bacchae)
7. Thucydides (c.460-400 B.C.)
History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates (c.460-377? B.C.)
Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes (c.448-380 B.C.)
Comedies
(esp. The Clouds, The Birds, The Frogs)
10. Plato (c.427-347 B.C.)
Dialogues
(esp. The Republic, Symposium, Phaedo, Meno, Apology, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Sophist, Theaetetus)
11. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Works
(esp. Organon, Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, The Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics)
12. Epicurus (c.341-270 B.C.)
Letter to Herodotus
Letter to Menoeceus
13. Euclid (fl.c. 300 B.C.)
Elements
14. Archimedes (c.287-212 B.C.)
Works
(esp. On the Equilibrium of Planes, On Floating Bodies, The Sand-Reckoner)
15. Apollonius of Perga (fl.c.240 B.C.)
Conic Sections
16. Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
Works
(esp. Orations, On Friendship, On Old Age)
17. Lucretius (c.95-55 B.C.)
On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil (70-19 B.C.)
Works
19. Horace (65-8 B.C.)
Works
(esp. Odes and Epodes, The Art of Poetry)
20. Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17)
History of Rome
21. Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17)
Works
(esp. Metamorphoses)
22. Plutarch (c.45-120)
Parallel Lives
Moralia
23. Tacitus (c.55-117)
Histories
Annals
Agricola
Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa (fl.c. 100 A.D.)
Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus (c.60-120)
Discourses
Encheiridion (Handbook)
26. Ptolemy (c.100-170; fl. 127-151)
Almagest
27. Lucian (c.120-c.190)
Works
(esp. The True Way to Write History, The True History, The Sale of Creeds)
28. Marcus Aurelius (121-180)
Meditations
29. Galen (c. 130-200)
On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus (205-270)
The Enneads
32. St. Augustine (354-430)
Works
(esp. On the Teacher, Confessions, City of God, On Christian Doctrine)
33. The Song of Roland (12th century?)
34. The Nibelungenlied (13th century?)
(Völsunga Saga is the Scandinavian version of the same legend)
35. The Saga of Burnt Njal
36. St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274)
Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
Works
(esp. The New Life, On Monarchy, The Divine Comedy)
38. Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400)
Works
(esp. Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales)
39. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)
The Prince
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus (c.1
IAAS and I serve as a peer-reviewer for a number of journals. Among the criteria we are asked to judge are the significance and originality of the work. If the work isn't "interesting", i.e. if it is not very significant/important or it's not very original (confirmatory results, for example), then it gets scored lower. The journal's space is limited, and the editors would rather devote it to new, important information rather than results which don't advance the field.
If the bulk of the readership is going to skip the article because it presents no new information or because it deals with a topic that no one cares about, then the editors are right to reject it.
In every journal, the "Instructions to Authors" section spells out what kind of manuscript will be considered for publication... the topics appropirate for this journal, the kinds of research, etc. If your paper isn't right for this journal, publish it somewhere else.
This supports a wind erosion theory for the bluberries. I'd heard people say that the atmosphere is too thin to really erode them much; clearly, if it's strong enough to suspend dust in densitites like this, it's got enough force to erode/polish the pebbles to roundness.
I have nothing to contribute to this discussion of RoR, but I have to complement you on your sig. Seeing "i.e." and "e.g." used interchangeably is almost as irritating as hearing people use "literally" as a meaningless intensifier, e.g. "She was so mad, she was literally on fire!"
However, it doesn't have to be an "all or nothing" approach. If the one robot you sent off in the terraforming probe to Planet X can gather raw materials and assemble a copy of itself, fully functional except that it lacks the CPU, then send along a bag of 10,000 CPUs with it. Final populations size will max out at 10,000, but that's still a better way to get 10,000 robots on the ground than sending them all pre-assembled.
Also, once a certain critical mass of robots is in place, they might then be able to build a chip fab facility.
"5 years later I checked back in with that bankruptcy attorney and his office was still using the app!"... and THAT is why the federal government likes WordPerfect. The latest version is 12.0, but documents that were created using 11,10,9,8,7,6 or even the legendary 5.1 for DOS are still openable, readable and, for the most part, still formatted correctly. Try opening a MSWord 6.0 for Win 3.1, or a MSWord95 document with Word2002 or WordXP... it's a very different experience. If it opens at all, it will be scrambled.
Once a single user (the Boss) goes from Word2002 to WordXP (because it came on this year's new computer), then everybody has to switch, beacuse the formatting gets all screwed up. Then, all of your legacy documents are screwed up, and it's easier just to redo them than to try to fix all the formatting crap.
Law firms, courts, federal agencies are built around absolutely unbelievably huge mountains of documents that have to be live and usable for years and years. It might take 5, 6, 7 years for a case to work its way up through appeals, or for project to be authorized, funded and executed; you just can't stop and rewrite/reformat everything because the office went from one version of Word to another. The trouble for WordPerfect is that if a 5-year-old version of your software will open documents created with the newest version, there's no cattle prod forcing the legacy user to upgrade, so that's a lost sale.
I've been using WordPerfect since 4.0 for DOS, when I switched from WordStar 9.0. I prefer it to Word, hands down. After the decree came down from on high, I've tried to use Word several times over the years, but the lack of continuity with legacy documents is just a killer.
Actually, the cells within a leaf are arranged in densely packed columns on the dorsal (top) side (the palisade parenchyma), with the long axis parallel to the incident angle of the sunlight, serving to allow for reflective capture much as the article describes with the nanotubes. Leaves have more open, dispersed cells on the ventral (bottom) side (the spongy mesophyll) to allow for gas exchange.
"Star Trek has inspired us, and particularly Enterprise, with its superb theme song that tells so much about our struggle to move space travel forward and closer to the public"
The show is finally statring to get good, but the theme song? Superb? Give me a break! This thing has got to be a hoax.
I've been waiting for four years to see how the Federation was formed. Now that the stupid Temporal Cold War or Lack of Original Plot Ideas War or whatever it was is finally over, the show is finally getting good.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not true whatsoever... broadly ignorant statements about all scientists and research grants
Actually, my statements are not made based on a layman's ignorance, or even based on a generalized theoretical concept of how grant funding works. It's based on my professional experiences as a scientist reviewing grant proposals and making recommendations on which proposals to fund, as well as my experiences writing and submitting research grants.
As part of the review process, the panel of scientists responsible for evaluating the proposal takes into consideration the significance of the problem being investigated. How is significance defined? Typically, it's based on the professional judgement of the scientists on the review panel as to what constitutes an important problem. However, it is also based on mandates and directives from the funding agency. If someone highly placed (funding agency director, congressman, etc.) has been swayed by alarmist press surrounding the Iceball Earth phenomenon, and has, as a result, decided that we need to know more about it, then there will be a pot of money set aside just for that topic. These earmarked research funds ensure that this topic will get at least a certain non-zero level of funds, a guarantee that other topics don't have.
Political pressure is one of the forces which drives research money in one direction or another. That's just a fact of science. The more urgent and important your research is percieved to be, the greater liklihood it will be funded. The more trivial and irrelevant your research is percieved to be, the less likely it will be funded.
The alarmists aren't happy unless they're running around screaming "the sky is falling!"
Hint: grant money allocation is correlated with the significance of the problem. Putting out some alarmist press for an obscure question in paleogeology is like wearing a WonderBra and a nose ring to the mall... it's just a way to get some attention.
We're deeply offtopic here, but if you take a look at the title of that day's webcomic, it reads "Episode 476: Red Mage in the Cradle", obviously a reference to the book "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut. This novel, written in 1963, is where Ice-9 is orignally introduced as a theoretical form of water which solidifies at room temperature, and is thermodynamically preferred over normal ice. Since contact with it would cause all water everywhere to solidify instantly, Ice-9 has the potential to freeze the world solid, therby killing just about everything on Earth in the blink of an eye.
The book revolves around the pursuit of a small vial which may or may not contain a small piece of this incredibly powerful, incredibly dangerous substance, created by a very clever rogue scientist who didn't bother to consider the consequences of his actions. Written at the height of the Cold War, Ice-9, of course, is a stand-in for nuclear weapons... a technology which everyone wants to have, everyone wants the other side to *not* have, but one which, from a tactical standpoint, has no pratical application, since it can't be used without terrible consequences for all sides.
Ice-Nine
/.? Without being worked into a goatse, "in Soviet Russia" or "4. Profit!" gag?
Good lord, a literary reference on
I salute you, sir/madam!
Another sign of /. wierdness... today's Poll ("favorite tool of destruction") was created as an archive, so no comments can be posted.
/. bigwigs have gone up to their cabins in the U.P. for August, and have left the running of /. to some interns. This is why you should never, never, never give interns Administrator privledges, even temporarily.
Personally, I think that Hemos, CmdrTaco and all the other
On their products page they give a few items, but they are all listed as "System Available for Beta-Testing Only". Not exactly designed to inspire confidence.
1. Get a product into beta.
2. Distribute it as a beta, with no warranty.
3. ********
4. Profit!
Just becasue it works for Google doesn't mean it will work with anything.
All they did was take an LCD screen, designed to be used with overhead projectors, and put it onto an overhead projector. The only "DIY" was the case they built out of "partial board" and covered with black felt.
My department bought one of those transparent LCD screens in 1997, back when overhead projectors were still to be found in every lecture hall, laptops were $3000 and LCD projectors were $5000 and as big as a suitcase. The idea was to use this to go from the computer screen to the wall screen on the cheap. It was used every once in awhile, but if you weren't using a laptop, it was a pain to use, since you had to wheel in a cart with a desktop PC.
Once laptops got cheap enough so that they were commonplace, LCD projectors had gotten cheap enough that the department bought one and consigned the transparent LCD screen, with its terrible picture quality, to the back closet of the copier room. There, it collected dust, along with all of the other obsolete junk that no one wanted to use anymore, but had cost too much to just throw away.
The transparent LCD screen was an ugly kludge, a bridge technology to mate the old with the new. Let it die.
Spend the $10 and get a 4' USB extension cable. Leave it plugged into the difficult-to-access slot, thereby giving you an easy-to-access USB port next to your machine.
In 21st century America, "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" is a synonym for an unclimbable mountain of words, like "War and Peace" or "Being and Nothingness". Don't let the size of the mountain scare you off... there are so many passages that are just absolutely delightful, that it really is a great read.
For example, the scene from Henry V, in the tents of the French commanders, just before the battle (end of Act 3?), where the Dauphin is boasting of his military prowess, and everyone else is basically trash-talking him for being a coward and an idiot weakling is just priceless. Shakespeare is full of great stuff.
There is a research program within the USDA that is all about biofuels and development of improved efficiency of conversion: Crop Conversion Science and Engineering Research Unit . It has projects titled:
Aqueous Enzymatic Extraction of Corn Oil and Value-Added Products from Corn Germ Produced in New Generation Dry-Grind Ethanol Processes
Economic Competitiveness of Renewable Fuels Derived from Grains and Related Biomass
Enzyme-Based Technologies for Milling Grains and Producing Biobased Products and Fuels
Valuable Polysaccharide-Based Products from Sugar Beet Pulp and Citrus Peel
Engineering Scale-Up, Process and Economics Research Support Group
You don't stop with the great books, you start there.
t m>) contains a great nugget: "Exclusive preference for either the past or the present is a foolish and wasteful form of snobbishness and provinciality. We must seek what is most worthy in the works of both the past and the present."
I'll second this as an important point that many people miss. Once you've read every book in the Great Books canon, whichever list or lists you're working from, that can only be an introduction. Mortimer Adler's essay, "Why Read Great Books?" (URL:http://radicalacademy.com/adlergreatbooks1.h
"I don't waste my time on dead white males when there are so many important new thinkers." is just as narrow-minded and limiting as "If you read the great thinkers of the past, you have read everything worth reading."
I got my Van Dorens mixed up. Easy enough to do... both Charles' father Mark Van Doren and his uncle Carl Van Doren were Pulitzer-prize winning author, and respected thinkers in their time. Charles, Mark and Carl were all graduates of, and later professors at, Columbia University.
No smokes here, officer.
No, this is Prof. Mark Van Doren, of Columbia, Charles' father.
Agreed, the Great Books approach has long suffered from the DWM slant (Dead White Male), and the canonical Harvard Classics list, developed in the early 20th century, as badly as any. With this in mind, it's important to recognize that any list of books to read can never be any more than a good place to start, as I said in the parent post.
More current lists recognize and draw more heavily from Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, and other cultures. For example:
The New Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major (4th ed., 1997)
Part One
1. Anonymous, ca. 2000 BCE. The Epic of Gilgamesh.
2. Homer, ca. 800 BCE. The Iliad.
3. Homer, ca. 800 BCE. The Odyssey.
4. Confucius, 551-479 BCE. The Analects.
5. Aeschylus, 525-456/5 BCE. The Oresteia.
6. Sophocles, 496-406 BCE. Oedipus Rex; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone
7. Euripides, 484-406 BCE. Alcestis; Medea; Hippolytus; Trojan Women; Electra; Bacchae.
8. Herodotus, ca. 484-425 BCE. The Histories.
9. Thucydides, 470/460-ca.400 BCE. The History of the Peloponnesian War.
10. Sun-tzu, ca. 450-380 BCE. The Art of War.
11. Aristophanes, 448-388 BCE. Lysistrata; The Clouds; The Birds.
12. Plato, 428-348 BCE. Selected Works.
13. Aristotle, 384-322 BCE. Ethics; Politics; Poetics.
14. Mencius, ca. 400-320 BCE. The Book of Mencius.
15. Valmiki, ca. 300 BCE. The Book of Ramayana.
16. Vyasa, ca. 200 BCE. The Mahabharata.
17. Anonymous, ca. 200 BCE. The Bhagavad Gita.
18. Ssu-ma Ch'ien, 145-86 BCE. Records of the Grand Historian.
19. Lucretius, ca. 100-ca. 50 BCE. Of the Nature of Things.
20. Virgil, 70-19 BCE. The Aeneid.
21. Marcus Aurelius, 121-180. Meditations.
Part Two
22. Saint Augustine, 354-430. The Confessions.
23. Kalidasa, ca. 400. The Cloud Messenger; Sakuntala.
24. Revealed to Muhammad, ca. 650. The Koran.
25. Hui-neng, 638-713. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch.
26. Firdausi, ca. 940-1020. Shah Nameh.
27. Sei Shonagon, ca. 965-1035. The Pillow Book.
28. Lady Murasaki, ca. 976-1015. Tale of Genji.
29. Omar Khayyam, 1048-? The Rubaiyat.
30. Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. The Divine Comedy.
31. Luo Kuan-chung, ca. 1330-1400. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
32. Geoffrey Chaucer, 1342-1400. The Canterbury Tales.
33. Anonymous, ca. 1500. The Thousand and One Nights.
34. Niccolò Macchiavelli, 1469-1527. The Prince.
35. François Rabelais, 1483-1553. Gargantua and Pantagruel.
36. Wu Cheng-en, 1500-1582. Journey to the West.
37. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533-1592. Selected Essays.
38. Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra, 1547-1616. Don Quixote.
Part Three
39. William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. Complete Works.
40. John Donne, 1573-1631. Selected Works.
41. Anonymous, 1618. The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P'ing Mei)
42. Galileo Galilei, 1574-1642. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
43. Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679. Leviathan.
44. René Descartes, 1596-1650. Discourse on Method.
45. John Milton, 1608-1674. Paradise Lost; Lycidas; On the Morning of Christ's Nativity; Sonnets; Areopagitica.
46. Molière, 1622-1673. Selected Plays.
47. Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662. Thoughts (Pensées).
48. John Bunyan, 1628-1688. Pilgrim's Progress.
49. John Locke, 1632-1688. Second Treatise of Government.
50. Matsuo Basho, 1644-1694. The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
51. Daniel Defoe, 1660-1731. Robinson Crusoe.
52. Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745. Gulliver's Travels.
53. Voltaire, 1694-1778. Candide and Other Works.
54. David Hume, 1711-1776. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
55. Henry Fielding, 1707-1754. Tom Jones.
56. Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in, 1715-1763. The Dream of the Red Chamber (also called The Story of the Stone).
57. Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778. Confession
I have a set of the Harvard Classics on my bookshelf, the "five-foot-shelf" that is a very good collection of Great Books. (http://www.bartleby.com/hc/). Biography, history, drama, literature, fiction, philosophy, science, politics, religion... it's all there. I've been working my way through it for almost twenty years. Well worth having around, as it means you will never lack for high-quality reading material.
My alma mater, the University of Chicago (http://www.uchicago.edu/), is very much a Great Books kind of place. Here's a good list to start with (from "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, 1972):
1. Homer (9th Century B.C.?)
Iliad
Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus (c.525-456 B.C.)
Tragedies
4. Sophocles (c.495-406 B.C.)
Tragedies
5. Herodotus (c.484-425 B.C.)
History
6. Euripides (c.485-406 B.C.)
Tragedies
(esp. Medea, Hippolytus, The Bacchae)
7. Thucydides (c.460-400 B.C.)
History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates (c.460-377? B.C.)
Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes (c.448-380 B.C.)
Comedies
(esp. The Clouds, The Birds, The Frogs)
10. Plato (c.427-347 B.C.)
Dialogues
(esp. The Republic, Symposium, Phaedo, Meno, Apology, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Sophist, Theaetetus)
11. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Works
(esp. Organon, Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, The Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics)
12. Epicurus (c.341-270 B.C.)
Letter to Herodotus
Letter to Menoeceus
13. Euclid (fl.c. 300 B.C.)
Elements
14. Archimedes (c.287-212 B.C.)
Works
(esp. On the Equilibrium of Planes, On Floating Bodies, The Sand-Reckoner)
15. Apollonius of Perga (fl.c.240 B.C.)
Conic Sections
16. Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
Works
(esp. Orations, On Friendship, On Old Age)
17. Lucretius (c.95-55 B.C.)
On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil (70-19 B.C.)
Works
19. Horace (65-8 B.C.)
Works
(esp. Odes and Epodes, The Art of Poetry)
20. Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17)
History of Rome
21. Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17)
Works
(esp. Metamorphoses)
22. Plutarch (c.45-120)
Parallel Lives
Moralia
23. Tacitus (c.55-117)
Histories
Annals
Agricola
Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa (fl.c. 100 A.D.)
Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus (c.60-120)
Discourses
Encheiridion (Handbook)
26. Ptolemy (c.100-170; fl. 127-151)
Almagest
27. Lucian (c.120-c.190)
Works
(esp. The True Way to Write History, The True History, The Sale of Creeds)
28. Marcus Aurelius (121-180)
Meditations
29. Galen (c. 130-200)
On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus (205-270)
The Enneads
32. St. Augustine (354-430)
Works
(esp. On the Teacher, Confessions, City of God, On Christian Doctrine)
33. The Song of Roland (12th century?)
34. The Nibelungenlied (13th century?)
(Völsunga Saga is the Scandinavian version of the same legend)
35. The Saga of Burnt Njal
36. St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274)
Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
Works
(esp. The New Life, On Monarchy, The Divine Comedy)
38. Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400)
Works
(esp. Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales)
39. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)
The Prince
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus (c.1
IAAS and I serve as a peer-reviewer for a number of journals. Among the criteria we are asked to judge are the significance and originality of the work. If the work isn't "interesting", i.e. if it is not very significant/important or it's not very original (confirmatory results, for example), then it gets scored lower. The journal's space is limited, and the editors would rather devote it to new, important information rather than results which don't advance the field.
If the bulk of the readership is going to skip the article because it presents no new information or because it deals with a topic that no one cares about, then the editors are right to reject it.
In every journal, the "Instructions to Authors" section spells out what kind of manuscript will be considered for publication... the topics appropirate for this journal, the kinds of research, etc. If your paper isn't right for this journal, publish it somewhere else.
How can you possibly expect to get useful fusion reactions using a monolithium crystal?
This supports a wind erosion theory for the bluberries. I'd heard people say that the atmosphere is too thin to really erode them much; clearly, if it's strong enough to suspend dust in densitites like this, it's got enough force to erode/polish the pebbles to roundness.
I have nothing to contribute to this discussion of RoR, but I have to complement you on your sig. Seeing "i.e." and "e.g." used interchangeably is almost as irritating as hearing people use "literally" as a meaningless intensifier, e.g. "She was so mad, she was literally on fire!"
However, it doesn't have to be an "all or nothing" approach. If the one robot you sent off in the terraforming probe to Planet X can gather raw materials and assemble a copy of itself, fully functional except that it lacks the CPU, then send along a bag of 10,000 CPUs with it. Final populations size will max out at 10,000, but that's still a better way to get 10,000 robots on the ground than sending them all pre-assembled.
Also, once a certain critical mass of robots is in place, they might then be able to build a chip fab facility.
"... it is not thought to pose a threat"
I can't tell you how much better that makes me feel.
Next you're going to tell me the possibility of a resonance cascade is extremely remote and that you're seeing predictable phase arrays.
"5 years later I checked back in with that bankruptcy attorney and his office was still using the app!" ... and THAT is why the federal government likes WordPerfect. The latest version is 12.0, but documents that were created using 11,10,9,8,7,6 or even the legendary 5.1 for DOS are still openable, readable and, for the most part, still formatted correctly. Try opening a MSWord 6.0 for Win 3.1, or a MSWord95 document with Word2002 or WordXP... it's a very different experience. If it opens at all, it will be scrambled.
Once a single user (the Boss) goes from Word2002 to WordXP (because it came on this year's new computer), then everybody has to switch, beacuse the formatting gets all screwed up. Then, all of your legacy documents are screwed up, and it's easier just to redo them than to try to fix all the formatting crap.
Law firms, courts, federal agencies are built around absolutely unbelievably huge mountains of documents that have to be live and usable for years and years. It might take 5, 6, 7 years for a case to work its way up through appeals, or for project to be authorized, funded and executed; you just can't stop and rewrite/reformat everything because the office went from one version of Word to another. The trouble for WordPerfect is that if a 5-year-old version of your software will open documents created with the newest version, there's no cattle prod forcing the legacy user to upgrade, so that's a lost sale.
I've been using WordPerfect since 4.0 for DOS, when I switched from WordStar 9.0. I prefer it to Word, hands down. After the decree came down from on high, I've tried to use Word several times over the years, but the lack of continuity with legacy documents is just a killer.
Actually, the cells within a leaf are arranged in densely packed columns on the dorsal (top) side (the palisade parenchyma), with the long axis parallel to the incident angle of the sunlight, serving to allow for reflective capture much as the article describes with the nanotubes. Leaves have more open, dispersed cells on the ventral (bottom) side (the spongy mesophyll) to allow for gas exchange.
"Star Trek has inspired us, and particularly Enterprise, with its superb theme song that tells so much about our struggle to move space travel forward and closer to the public"
The show is finally statring to get good, but the theme song? Superb? Give me a break! This thing has got to be a hoax.
I've been waiting for four years to see how the Federation was formed. Now that the stupid Temporal Cold War or Lack of Original Plot Ideas War or whatever it was is finally over, the show is finally getting good.