First of all, yes, I am an astronomer, and I have used the HST (only twice, but hey, I'm a radio astronomer...). A couple of misconceptions in your post:
The colour portion of the pic is a composite from two or more pictures. True, but this is always true: in order not to saturate detectors, and to remove the inevitable cosmic rays, it is typical to take lots of dithered exposures. For an example of just how serious this cosmic ray problem is, take a look at this before and after image pair.
The colours are so vibrant you have to assume they're retouched
True, they are assigned, but it is very typical to get images in multiple filters, each of which has a well defined "color" - so it is easy to produce a final representative color image. Not even stretching the truth that much.
the stars in the background were added
Well, they retained the stars from one image (so they were not added), and rendered that in greyscale. Artistic license, definitely.
many of the stars have lens flares... Photoshopped in afterward
Alas, flaring is typical: if you have bright stars in the field, the mirror obstructions (supports, secondary, etc) will produce flares. True at every optical telescope, from Palomar and Keck to the HST. Definitely not Photoshop!
The meat of your complaint seems to be this:
Do we have to win tax-payer support by drawing Star Trek scenes and releasing them to news outlets as "science"? And that's a very valid question, even if, as I pointed out above, nothing really fishy is being done here.
My point of view, should that interest you, is this: except for a couple of very rare exceptions, every target the HST looks at is chosen after a brutal (trust me, brutal) review process. The HST costs an enormous of money to run, and they have lived up to that in terms of published peer-reviewed output per observation. So now if they kick in a few thousand extra bucks to take the science images, combine them with a little (not much, mind) artistic license, and release it to the public (who are, after all, paying for it) -- more power to them! Astronomy is one of those rare disciplines where the the excitement of cutting edge science can still be brought to the casual reader - if nothing else, as "Ooh, look, a pretty picture!" I think that is well worth it, as long as they aren't being scientifically dishonest.
(And that last point is a whole other story: do press releases over-hype the discovery? Does Nature twist a simple research result into "Unprecedented discovery revolutionizes our understanding of the Universe"? Maybe, but that's not a problem with the pretty pictures.)
I don't know about "ten years of controversy" - these things have been around since 1992 and pretty widely accepted. Here's the original Nature abstract (1992) and here's Alex W's ADS entry - there's a pretty steady stream of PSR B1257+12 papers, and not much in the way of controversy.
So I'm seeing lots of funny stuff, but no serious comments. Okay, we knew about supernovae, and we knew that where there is star formation, sooner or later there will be star death and supernovae as well. No freaking big deal, right?
The surprise here is the rate of supernovae going off in that tiny volume. One cluster, one million stars, and a supernova every two years. In our galaxy, we're still waiting for one since the days of Galileo and Tycho, probably an average rate of one every century or so. And this is with Billions and Billions (TM) of stars in our galaxy!
So that is a pretty big surprise. And it is a VLBA result: very cool. (The standard analogy for the VLBA resolution is the ability to pick out Roosevelt's eye on a dime held up in LA while you are standing in New York...)
This technology promises to eliminate the bad influence from walls, floors and ceilings on the sound.
Yeah, I can't wait for the idiots who will shell out the megabucks to put this into their cars, along with the low rider suspension and the ground effect lighting. And when they pass me by in traffic, the loud obnoxious rap will still sound just as obnoxious. Only with less distortion. I mean, why do people even bother with the alphabet soup of technologies? SRS, XBS, ABC, PQT, does it make any difference when you listen to music that makes a point of distortion? Or does bubblegum pop sound magically better this way?
Sorry for the rant, but it seems like people make a point of blasting their poor taste out of their car windows. And this will make things distortion free? Color me unimpressed.
In case you read replies, I should warn you not to take them personally.
The vast majority of the people here read a great comment, nod or shake their heads, and carry on without replying. I was about to do the same, until I read some of the other replies you got... Don't take the
anonymous replies from a few cruel jerks with too much time on their hands as opinions representative of the rest of the people on the site. Your comment was a great one, and at least the moderators showed their appreciation.
In mozilla, at least, you can simply zero out the referer header: I got the original version of the articles (slowly), not the "light" version.
Under Linux, the file is called:
Since when do black holes occupy so much space (I thought they were points)? And how can something with a density only 1/100 of our Sun be called super-massive?
The "size" of the black hole refers to the size of its event horizon (a.k.a the Schwarzschild Radius), which is R = GM/2c^2. For a huge value of M ("supermassive"), the event horizon is very large: once you cross this, there's no coming back, and our physics stops at the edge. But since R is so large, the tidal forces are small at the event horizon - much smaller than the tidal forces at the event horizon of a smaller black hole. (Chew on it for a second and it makes sense).
The "actual" naked singularity is in fact a point, but we have no way of probing anything inside the event horizon. So calculating the density of a black hole is misleading...
It looks lame and silly to begin with, and you play a few rounds with a casual "Oh what's the harm" shrug - and before you know it, sunlight makes you blink, your girlfriend has dumped you, you have no friends, no job, no life, and you're gibbering in your sleep about invisible stalkers and the horror of Demogorgon.
When you have dreams in ascii (I speak from experience), with a solitary "@" surrounded by h and & and D and L and you're running low on your ! and / and ?, and you wake up in a cold sweat, you'll realize it's not worth it.
If it were simply the best strategy / role playing game there was, that would be one thing, but Nethack is an addiction.
As to the second point: personally, I miss the pictures you got with plates. Not the science, not the many hours of additional labor, etc, etc, just the pure artistic "feel" of those pictures.
I'm shocked - shocked - that I'd actually say this to a response on/., but I couldn't agree more with you on that. I know, as a practical matter, that once you have enough pixels, you can't distinguish between a digital image and an analog one. And sometimes I can't even tell the difference between some 1-hour prints and some prints from my graphic-designer GF's inkjet. But I agree that film "feels" different.
OTOH, that's what vinyl-lovers said about CDs too, and damned if they aren't a niche market now. I give film a good 30 years still, but I have seen the future, and it's all 1s and 0s... Sometimes, I regret that, myself.
You realise that film still, and will always have its advantages.
As an astronomer and an amateur photographer, I agree with everything you said, but disagree with your lead-in.
Astronomy used to be done with plates: glass plates with custom emulsions, which would be developed in labs and illuminated for research work. Nowadays, it is all, without exception, done with CCDs. No professional optical telescope uses anything besides CCDs, and it's not just because of advantages in post-processing. CCDs have higher sensitivity, higher dynamic range, and higher fidelity than plates ever did. And yes, they are robust and easy to import into workstations too.
Of course, with CCDs, it helps a great deal if price is (almost) no object, upto a few tens of Gs. For amateur (prosumer) cameras, cost is abig deal, but this is one case where I'd bet on rapid development. The 11MP cameras show that we're getting close: when we get, say, 15 MP cameras for under $1000 (at the level of the Canon A-2 or whatever it is these days), I'll bid a fond farewell to film.
But until then, I agree with you - I'm not excited by digital cameras yet.
Not that this matters, but the "high honor" referred to is the nomination for the Prize, not the Prize itself. Even a nomination is rare, and there are apparently several people who were otherwise deserving but never nominated...
Space-based telescopes, such as Hubble [...]
are the only means of searching for asteroids in the daytime sky.
Yeah, right! The author has no idea how carefully STScI checks the HST pointing to make sure you don't look anywhere near the Sun...
The only way to detect these suckers coming in from the Sun side is radar or spacecraft telescopes at the Lagrange points, not earth-orbiting scopes. Those are just a handful of objects, though: for the vast majority, I expect robotic camera surveys are quite sufficient, if someone coughs up the money.
Alas, if one of these hits the earth, then "the terrorists will already have won"(TM) - or rather, they won't need to win.
"Kempin said Microsoft should withhold technical information from Intel and "work underground" to promote its competitors in the computer chip industry"
Ah, and then AMD testified in favor of Microsoft out of the goodness of their hearts.
And this just speaks for itself: "I would further try to restrict source code deliveries where possible and be less gracious when interpreting agreements -- again without being obvious about it," Kempin wrote.
This paper appeared on astro-ph last week, as astro-ph/0204479. Here's the abstract:
The Cyclic Universe: An Informal Introduction
Authors: Paul J. Steinhardt, Neil Turok
The Cyclic Model is a radical, new cosmological scenario which proposes that the Universe undergoes an endless sequence of epochs which begin with a `big bang' and end in a `big crunch.' When the Universe bounces from contraction to re-expansion, the temperature and density remain finite. The model does not include a period of rapid inflation, yet it reproduces all of the successful predictions of standard big bang and inflationary cosmology. We point out numerous novel elements that have not been used previously which may open the door to further alternative cosmologies. Although the model is motivated by M-theory, branes and extra-dimensions, here we show that the scenario can be described almost entirely in terms of conventional 4d field theory and 4d cosmology.
In spite of the "informal" claim, the paper is fairly dense - IAAPA (I am a professional astronomer) and I found it heavy going. But the link above has PDF versions if you're interested.
And of course, the problem with doing that experiment was the even for Millikan's it was only
selectively filtered data points that got published.
Such a good story - it's a pity it is not true! Here's a link to David Goodstein's homepage - he's the vice-provost of CalTech - the second link on his homepage is a PDF file which should show you that the accusation is simply wrong.
Take a look - it's not long, and it's well worth it - before slandering a beautiful experiment.
Okay, but what happens, for god knows what reason, you find yourself on the inside of the glass next to an approaching train / monorail? Seems unlikely but an interesting question.
Oh come, come: a good design would always allow the glass doors to be opened manually from inside, for maintenance if nothing else. Rather like fire exits always open without a key to let you out of the building, but not back in.
Imagine a little red handle - "In case of emergency, use lever".
Now, if you're too drunk to read and figure out how to use the lever, well, the gene pool needed some chlorine anyways...
Why they charged so much is beyond me, but that is the reason why IBM didn't make money off
Linux.
Not meant to be flamebait, just anecdotal evidence from my attempts to order a Dell and an IBM machine with RedHat pre-loaded:
Microsoft charges OEMs for a license for each PC shipped - not each PC with Windows, but each and every one they ship. This keeps piracy down, according to MS, by removing the incentive to ship "naked PCs".
Now, to install and test RedHat on a machine, and to offer some support for it (sound card, monitor, etc) costs extra money.
Add 1+2 and you see why it costs more for a PC with Linux on it. For our Dell server, the grant ate the extra 50 bucks, and I ordered with RedHat (6.1, in those days?) just to make a statement that we wanted it. For my Thinkpad, it wasn't worth it. In both cases, MS got their money.
Of course, this is only my understanding, I could be wrong...
SF has a long history of interacting with science (and not just physics!). Off the top of my head, here's a selection:
First the obvious: "Cyberspace" was first made popular in William Gibson's Neuromancer, the first of the cyberpunk novels.
Biotechnology, and the possibility of reviving extinct species with trans-species surrogate mothers or eggs is almost a commonplace concept now, but when Jurassic Park (Michael Crichton's book, not the movie) came out, it was path-breaking.
Books to watch in future are Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age for nanotech and "replicators," and Snow Crash, for the
future evolution of virtual worlds as well as pizza delivery...:-)
The obscure: the concept of vacuum energy was actually propounded in a Physical Review Letters article by Robert L. Forward before Asimov borrowed it to power his spaceships (the starship "Forward") - I forget the book, but it might have been Friday.
And the obvious once again: geosynchronous sattelites were predicted (but not patented) by Arthur Clarke - that's why they are called Clarke orbits. And watch for the Beanstalk to be built some day, on Mars if not Earth.
Speaking of Mars: Robert Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars, pitches a serious plan for the manned exploration of Mars that has at least forced some re-thinking at NASA. The ideas were borrowed, reworked and expanded somewhat in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars: look for a future manned Mars mission to use many of those ideas.
Of course, the Three Laws of Robotics have influenced AI researchers, if not AI research...
That's a smattering - I'm sure there are many many more that others will list.
I'm seeing all these SF authors being tossed around, but come on, people - will they be read 50 years from now? By a small and committed minority, perhaps, but by a large number of people? I doubt it very much...
On the other hand, historical accounts will survive, I'm sure of that. So, for example, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes will still be read, much like William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is still a must-read. The Atomic Bomb is a fantastic book, a towering and comprehensive work - I recommend it most strongly.
Then, for example, there are biographies: I doubt that James Gleick's Chaos will still be read - there will be other, better expositions of the Feigenbaum Constant - but his biography of Feynman, Genius, will still be read by anyone interested in the mystique of Feynman. (And trust me, with nanotech's rise, his mystique will only grow!)
And of course, I agree with everyone who nominated Dr. Seuss. That, and Alice, and Tolkien, will survive and still be relevant. Harry Potter - it's too early to say, though they are great fun to read...
FWIW, I actually use OpenWindows as my desktop (oh, the horror, the horror!) and along with olvwm, it does its job and stays out of the way. All my real work is done with xterms, gcc/cc, emacs (so go on, flame me) and custom astronomy software. If you ever had the misfortune to use AIPS, you'd be into B&D too.
With Linux (and gnome) on my laptop and on our newer production machines, I just don't know: it looks (and feels) clunky. What 5 year old drew those ugly icons? Even with the "tiny icons" on my laptop Gnome toolbar, the only icon I actually like is the simple red star of Mozilla. And my work is all at the command line, I don't use icons! But I still can't convince Gnome, even with repeated "Save settings," that I'd rather not have an icons for/dev/fd0 and/dev/hda cluttering my desktop. Non-intuitive, hard to learn (this from an OpenWindows user!!) and ugly: is there any reason for Sun to switch to Gnome besides saving development costs?
So, maybe I am giving too much credit to the checks and balances system, but won't these new laws still have to be upheld by a court?
US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor says
she foresees unprecedented restrictions on democratic rights in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. She declared flatly, "We're likely to experience more restrictions on our personal freedom than has ever been the case in our country." Read the article here, or find it on yahoo etc - it was widely reported.
Do you see a check or balance anywhere in sight? I see a big blank check being handed to Congress by one of the justices on the Supreme Court, but besides that...
Slashdot Mirror
- The colour portion of the pic is a composite from two or more pictures.
- The colours are so vibrant you have to assume they're retouched
- the stars in the background were added
- many of the stars have lens flares
... Photoshopped in afterward
The meat of your complaint seems to be this: Do we have to win tax-payer support by drawing Star Trek scenes and releasing them to news outlets as "science"? And that's a very valid question, even if, as I pointed out above, nothing really fishy is being done here.True, but this is always true: in order not to saturate detectors, and to remove the inevitable cosmic rays, it is typical to take lots of dithered exposures. For an example of just how serious this cosmic ray problem is, take a look at this before and after image pair.
True, they are assigned, but it is very typical to get images in multiple filters, each of which has a well defined "color" - so it is easy to produce a final representative color image. Not even stretching the truth that much.
Well, they retained the stars from one image (so they were not added), and rendered that in greyscale. Artistic license, definitely.
Alas, flaring is typical: if you have bright stars in the field, the mirror obstructions (supports, secondary, etc) will produce flares. True at every optical telescope, from Palomar and Keck to the HST. Definitely not Photoshop!
My point of view, should that interest you, is this: except for a couple of very rare exceptions, every target the HST looks at is chosen after a brutal (trust me, brutal) review process. The HST costs an enormous of money to run, and they have lived up to that in terms of published peer-reviewed output per observation. So now if they kick in a few thousand extra bucks to take the science images, combine them with a little (not much, mind) artistic license, and release it to the public (who are, after all, paying for it) -- more power to them! Astronomy is one of those rare disciplines where the the excitement of cutting edge science can still be brought to the casual reader - if nothing else, as "Ooh, look, a pretty picture!" I think that is well worth it, as long as they aren't being scientifically dishonest.
(And that last point is a whole other story: do press releases over-hype the discovery? Does Nature twist a simple research result into "Unprecedented discovery revolutionizes our understanding of the Universe"? Maybe, but that's not a problem with the pretty pictures.)
Also, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band - another set of songs conceived as an album, almost perfect.
But yes, it is extraordinarily neat!
The surprise here is the rate of supernovae going off in that tiny volume. One cluster, one million stars, and a supernova every two years. In our galaxy, we're still waiting for one since the days of Galileo and Tycho, probably an average rate of one every century or so. And this is with Billions and Billions (TM) of stars in our galaxy!
So that is a pretty big surprise. And it is a VLBA result: very cool. (The standard analogy for the VLBA resolution is the ability to pick out Roosevelt's eye on a dime held up in LA while you are standing in New York...)
Yeah, I can't wait for the idiots who will shell out the megabucks to put this into their cars, along with the low rider suspension and the ground effect lighting. And when they pass me by in traffic, the loud obnoxious rap will still sound just as obnoxious. Only with less distortion. I mean, why do people even bother with the alphabet soup of technologies? SRS, XBS, ABC, PQT, does it make any difference when you listen to music that makes a point of distortion? Or does bubblegum pop sound magically better this way?
Sorry for the rant, but it seems like people make a point of blasting their poor taste out of their car windows. And this will make things distortion free? Color me unimpressed.
In case you read replies, I should warn you not to take them personally.
The vast majority of the people here read a great comment, nod or shake their heads, and carry on without replying. I was about to do the same, until I read some of the other replies you got... Don't take the anonymous replies from a few cruel jerks with too much time on their hands as opinions representative of the rest of the people on the site. Your comment was a great one, and at least the moderators showed their appreciation.
There you go: no referer.
And don't even get me started on "Disclosure"...
(Evil Amazon link
)
The "size" of the black hole refers to the size of its event horizon (a.k.a the Schwarzschild Radius), which is R = GM/2c^2. For a huge value of M ("supermassive"), the event horizon is very large: once you cross this, there's no coming back, and our physics stops at the edge. But since R is so large, the tidal forces are small at the event horizon - much smaller than the tidal forces at the event horizon of a smaller black hole. (Chew on it for a second and it makes sense).
The "actual" naked singularity is in fact a point, but we have no way of probing anything inside the event horizon. So calculating the density of a black hole is misleading...
It looks lame and silly to begin with, and you play a few rounds with a casual "Oh what's the harm" shrug - and before you know it, sunlight makes you blink, your girlfriend has dumped you, you have no friends, no job, no life, and you're gibbering in your sleep about invisible stalkers and the horror of Demogorgon.
When you have dreams in ascii (I speak from experience), with a solitary "@" surrounded by h and & and D and L and you're running low on your ! and / and ?, and you wake up in a cold sweat, you'll realize it's not worth it. If it were simply the best strategy / role playing game there was, that would be one thing, but Nethack is an addiction.
I'm shocked - shocked - that I'd actually say this to a response on /., but I couldn't agree more with you on that. I know, as a practical matter, that once you have enough pixels, you can't distinguish between a digital image and an analog one. And sometimes I can't even tell the difference between some 1-hour prints and some prints from my graphic-designer GF's inkjet. But I agree that film "feels" different.
OTOH, that's what vinyl-lovers said about CDs too, and damned if they aren't a niche market now. I give film a good 30 years still, but I have seen the future, and it's all 1s and 0s... Sometimes, I regret that, myself.
As an astronomer and an amateur photographer, I agree with everything you said, but disagree with your lead-in.
Astronomy used to be done with plates: glass plates with custom emulsions, which would be developed in labs and illuminated for research work. Nowadays, it is all, without exception, done with CCDs. No professional optical telescope uses anything besides CCDs, and it's not just because of advantages in post-processing. CCDs have higher sensitivity, higher dynamic range, and higher fidelity than plates ever did. And yes, they are robust and easy to import into workstations too.
Of course, with CCDs, it helps a great deal if price is (almost) no object, upto a few tens of Gs. For amateur (prosumer) cameras, cost is abig deal, but this is one case where I'd bet on rapid development. The 11MP cameras show that we're getting close: when we get, say, 15 MP cameras for under $1000 (at the level of the Canon A-2 or whatever it is these days), I'll bid a fond farewell to film.
But until then, I agree with you - I'm not excited by digital cameras yet.
Yeah, right! The author has no idea how carefully STScI checks the HST pointing to make sure you don't look anywhere near the Sun...
The only way to detect these suckers coming in from the Sun side is radar or spacecraft telescopes at the Lagrange points, not earth-orbiting scopes. Those are just a handful of objects, though: for the vast majority, I expect robotic camera surveys are quite sufficient, if someone coughs up the money.
Alas, if one of these hits the earth, then "the terrorists will already have won"(TM) - or rather, they won't need to win.
Ah, and then AMD testified in favor of Microsoft out of the goodness of their hearts.
And this just speaks for itself: "I would further try to restrict source code deliveries where possible and be less gracious when interpreting agreements -- again without being obvious about it," Kempin wrote.
The Cyclic Universe: An Informal Introduction
Authors: Paul J. Steinhardt, Neil Turok
The Cyclic Model is a radical, new cosmological scenario which proposes that the Universe undergoes an endless sequence of epochs which begin with a `big bang' and end in a `big crunch.' When the Universe bounces from contraction to re-expansion, the temperature and density remain finite. The model does not include a period of rapid inflation, yet it reproduces all of the successful predictions of standard big bang and inflationary cosmology. We point out numerous novel elements that have not been used previously which may open the door to further alternative cosmologies. Although the model is motivated by M-theory, branes and extra-dimensions, here we show that the scenario can be described almost entirely in terms of conventional 4d field theory and 4d cosmology.
In spite of the "informal" claim, the paper is fairly dense - IAAPA (I am a professional astronomer) and I found it heavy going. But the link above has PDF versions if you're interested.
Such a good story - it's a pity it is not true! Here's a link to David Goodstein's homepage - he's the vice-provost of CalTech - the second link on his homepage is a PDF file which should show you that the accusation is simply wrong.
Take a look - it's not long, and it's well worth it - before slandering a beautiful experiment.
Oh come, come: a good design would always allow the glass doors to be opened manually from inside, for maintenance if nothing else. Rather like fire exits always open without a key to let you out of the building, but not back in. Imagine a little red handle - "In case of emergency, use lever".
Now, if you're too drunk to read and figure out how to use the lever, well, the gene pool needed some chlorine anyways...
Not meant to be flamebait, just anecdotal evidence from my attempts to order a Dell and an IBM machine with RedHat pre-loaded:
- Microsoft charges OEMs for a license for each PC shipped - not each PC with Windows, but each and every one they ship. This keeps piracy down, according to MS, by removing the incentive to ship "naked PCs".
- Now, to install and test RedHat on a machine, and to offer some support for it (sound card, monitor, etc) costs extra money.
Add 1+2 and you see why it costs more for a PC with Linux on it. For our Dell server, the grant ate the extra 50 bucks, and I ordered with RedHat (6.1, in those days?) just to make a statement that we wanted it. For my Thinkpad, it wasn't worth it. In both cases, MS got their money.Of course, this is only my understanding, I could be wrong...
Bwahahahahaha...
Ugh, my bad. Monday, Monday...
- First the obvious: "Cyberspace" was first made popular in William Gibson's Neuromancer, the first of the cyberpunk novels.
- Biotechnology, and the possibility of reviving extinct species with trans-species surrogate mothers or eggs is almost a commonplace concept now, but when Jurassic Park (Michael Crichton's book, not the movie) came out, it was path-breaking.
- Books to watch in future are Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age for nanotech and "replicators," and Snow Crash, for the
future evolution of virtual worlds as well as pizza delivery...
:-)
- The obscure: the concept of vacuum energy was actually propounded in a Physical Review Letters article by Robert L. Forward before Asimov borrowed it to power his spaceships (the starship "Forward") - I forget the book, but it might have been Friday.
- And the obvious once again: geosynchronous sattelites were predicted (but not patented) by Arthur Clarke - that's why they are called Clarke orbits. And watch for the Beanstalk to be built some day, on Mars if not Earth.
- Speaking of Mars: Robert Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars, pitches a serious plan for the manned exploration of Mars that has at least forced some re-thinking at NASA. The ideas were borrowed, reworked and expanded somewhat in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars: look for a future manned Mars mission to use many of those ideas.
- Of course, the Three Laws of Robotics have influenced AI researchers, if not AI research...
That's a smattering - I'm sure there are many many more that others will list.On the other hand, historical accounts will survive, I'm sure of that. So, for example, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes will still be read, much like William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is still a must-read. The Atomic Bomb is a fantastic book, a towering and comprehensive work - I recommend it most strongly.
Then, for example, there are biographies: I doubt that James Gleick's Chaos will still be read - there will be other, better expositions of the Feigenbaum Constant - but his biography of Feynman, Genius, will still be read by anyone interested in the mystique of Feynman. (And trust me, with nanotech's rise, his mystique will only grow!)
And of course, I agree with everyone who nominated Dr. Seuss. That, and Alice, and Tolkien, will survive and still be relevant. Harry Potter - it's too early to say, though they are great fun to read...
Anyway, that's my $0.02.
FWIW, I actually use OpenWindows as my desktop (oh, the horror, the horror!) and along with olvwm, it does its job and stays out of the way. All my real work is done with xterms, gcc/cc, emacs (so go on, flame me) and custom astronomy software. If you ever had the misfortune to use AIPS, you'd be into B&D too.
With Linux (and gnome) on my laptop and on our newer production machines, I just don't know: it looks (and feels) clunky. What 5 year old drew those ugly icons? Even with the "tiny icons" on my laptop Gnome toolbar, the only icon I actually like is the simple red star of Mozilla. And my work is all at the command line, I don't use icons! But I still can't convince Gnome, even with repeated "Save settings," that I'd rather not have an icons for /dev/fd0 and /dev/hda cluttering my desktop. Non-intuitive, hard to learn (this from an OpenWindows user!!) and ugly: is there any reason for Sun to switch to Gnome besides saving development costs?
I, for one, am not impressed.
US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor says she foresees unprecedented restrictions on democratic rights in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. She declared flatly, "We're likely to experience more restrictions on our personal freedom than has ever been the case in our country." Read the article here, or find it on yahoo etc - it was widely reported.
Do you see a check or balance anywhere in sight? I see a big blank check being handed to Congress by one of the justices on the Supreme Court, but besides that...