research, and your interest in phosphorus
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Hi.
I noticed in the first two Baroque cycle books that you're enchanted by the distillation of phosphorus from urine.
As a matter of fact, it is described in both books with a level of detail that suggests, shall we say, first hand knowlege of the process.
How much alchemical (and mathematical) tinkering do you do when researching your books? How do you go about researching such things... solo binges of ravenously devouring of source materials, or do you seek out experts early on the process to point you in the right direction?
It makes the correct (i.e. by the book) second move, but it can't followup. It also falls for the other triangular traps:
Top right, lower left, lower right, middle right.
and
Middle, bottom right, bottom left, bottom center.
So it's a real politician: Simple ideas about how to things work (based on a cursory examination of what the experts have to say), but no deep understanding... which leads to the floundering failure of the incompetent.
Esquire and Cook's Illustrated are indeed fantastic.
Esquire: David Sedaris... some great articles on politics (a scathing look at Karl Rove's power)... a recent tech-savvy article about astronauts... it goes on and on, and is only about $10/year to subscribe to.
Cook's Ilustrated is, of course, the paper version of America's Test Kitchen, the geeked up cooking show.
I'm a graduate student in Materials Science, and I'm a big fan of Mathematica.
It takes people a while to figure out that Mathematica uses a "functional" language, and not a "procedural" language, but once you invest sufficient time, you can write the most elegant, easy to understand, easy to debug, easy to modify code that you've ever seen. You can take three hard-to-parse C++ pages of code, and reduce it to ten lines of beautiful code in Mathematica.
Plus the Help browser is the most useful thing I've ever seen in any program, ever.
The drawback, of course, is that it's slow, as with all interpreted languages, and thus can't compete with, e.g., FORTRAN.
My bottle has a big skull and crossbones on
it, right next to a little picture of a flame.
The text says: Contact with water liberates
highly flammable gasses. Toxic if swallowed.
Causes burns.
Sodium borohydride is a strong reducing agent!
It turns just about any metal cation (e.g. Fe+2,
Cu+2, etc.) into the metal!
According to the Merck, it also reduces:
aldehydes, ketones, acids, esters, acid chlorides,
disulfides, and nitriles. Ouch! Not exactly
inert or friendly. A mouthful of gasoline isn't
gonna kill you, but this stuff'll really do you in.
Personally, I can remember being absolutely terrified by little ascii text lower case "d". That dragon put the fear of God in me. On the other hand, I haven't seen a graphic of a dragon in a game that terrified me. The first thing I do is to evaluate the thing artistically, and think, "okay, it's a dragon." But I'm not terrified!
On the other hand, I do think that sub-woofers have added alot of excitement to games. As has background music. I had to turn the sound down on Legend of Zelda in order to get throught the dungeons. Yowza!
A method for extending a mousepad by creating a virtual extension. Solves the problem often encountered when a computer mouse has been moved all the way to the top (left/right/bottom) of the mousepad, yet the cursor is still in the center of the computer screen. Method involves manually levitating the mouse and moving the mousepad such that the mouse is now on the opposite side of the mousepad, thereby reproducing the effect of a mousepad extension, yet without the neccessity of an actual mousepad extension. Note: the method is entirely reversible, and thus the original mousepad may be recovered by reversing steps. Medhod is infinitely extendable, thus creating a "virtually endless" mousepad.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi.
I noticed in the first two Baroque cycle books that you're enchanted by the distillation of phosphorus from urine.
As a matter of fact, it is described in both books with a level of detail that suggests, shall we say, first hand knowlege of the process.
How much alchemical (and mathematical) tinkering do you do when researching your books? How do you go about researching such things...
solo binges of ravenously devouring of source materials, or do you seek out experts early on the process to point you in the right direction?
-Sgt.P.
It makes the correct (i.e. by the book) second move, but it can't followup. It also falls for the other triangular traps:
Top right, lower left, lower right, middle right.
and
Middle, bottom right, bottom left, bottom center.
So it's a real politician: Simple ideas about how to things work (based on a cursory examination of what the experts have to say), but no deep understanding... which leads to the floundering failure of the incompetent.
Esquire and Cook's Illustrated are indeed fantastic.
Esquire: David Sedaris... some great articles on politics (a scathing look at Karl Rove's power)... a recent tech-savvy article about astronauts... it goes on and on, and is only about $10/year to subscribe to.
Cook's Ilustrated is, of course, the paper version of America's Test Kitchen, the geeked up cooking show.
I'm a graduate student in Materials Science, and I'm a big fan of Mathematica.
It takes people a while to figure out that Mathematica uses a "functional" language, and not a "procedural" language,
but once you invest sufficient time, you can write the most elegant, easy to understand, easy to debug,
easy to modify code that you've ever seen. You can take three hard-to-parse C++ pages of code,
and reduce it to ten lines of beautiful code in Mathematica.
Plus the Help browser is the most useful thing I've ever seen in any program, ever.
The drawback, of course, is that it's slow, as with all interpreted languages, and thus can't compete with, e.g., FORTRAN.
My bottle has a big skull and crossbones on
it, right next to a little picture of a flame.
The text says: Contact with water liberates
highly flammable gasses. Toxic if swallowed.
Causes burns.
Sodium borohydride is a strong reducing agent!
It turns just about any metal cation (e.g. Fe+2,
Cu+2, etc.) into the metal!
According to the Merck, it also reduces:
aldehydes, ketones, acids, esters, acid chlorides,
disulfides, and nitriles. Ouch! Not exactly
inert or friendly. A mouthful of gasoline isn't
gonna kill you, but this stuff'll really do you in.
Personally, I can remember being absolutely terrified by little ascii text lower case "d". That dragon put the fear of God in me. On the other hand, I haven't seen a graphic of a dragon in a game that terrified me. The first thing I do is to evaluate the thing artistically, and think, "okay, it's a dragon." But I'm not terrified!
On the other hand, I do think that sub-woofers have added alot of excitement to games. As has background music. I had to turn the sound down on Legend of Zelda in order to get throught the dungeons. Yowza!
Virtual Mousepad Extension
A method for extending a mousepad by creating a virtual extension. Solves the problem often encountered when a computer mouse has been moved all the way to the top (left/right/bottom) of the mousepad, yet the cursor is still in the center of the computer screen. Method involves manually levitating the mouse and moving the mousepad such that the mouse is now on the opposite side of the mousepad, thereby reproducing the effect of a mousepad extension, yet without the neccessity of an actual mousepad extension. Note: the method is entirely reversible, and thus the original mousepad may be recovered by reversing steps. Medhod is infinitely extendable, thus creating a "virtually endless" mousepad.