Ironically the only two locations in the US to host the Winter Olympics...
Three cities in the US have hosted winter olympics: Lake Placid, NY (twice), Squaw Valley, CA, and SLC, UT.
Though it seems it's easier to make money on the Winter Olympics than it is the summer Olympics as the last place to ever make money on the Summer Olympics was Los Angeles.
LA allegedly made a profit both times (1932, 1984), though documentation for the 1932 profit is sparse.
Knowing that a former Secretary of State operated their own email server in a manner that a fairly knowledgeable system administrator would recognize as vulnerable to the known capabilities of state-sponsored attempts to compromise it and extract the contents, it's almost disingenuous for the government to claim security is both essential and working at the highest levels, when they knew or should have known that a Cabinet officer was subverting that security. They just were. Reasonable people and those skilled in the art cannot avoid coming to that conclusion baaed on the publicly known evidence.
Our government isn't very good at protecting our rights, nor at its own operations. Good enough reason to limit our government to essential activities only.
And I pray Apple actually tries to break their own encryption and fails. Security shouldn't be reserved to the few. In a nominally free society we will not have perfect security, but we will have, hopefully, more freedom than not.
Don't overlook the Office of Personnel Management data breach, in which the OPM had such bad security that they effectively released to hackers the entire collection of background check information for all government personnel and contractors who need access to gov't facilities for everyone who filled out the forms from about 2000 to 2015. It wasn't just the form data (name, SSN, lists of associates to use for references, foreign travel history) - it was all the follow up data, too. Including responses from references, clearance interview details. It even included images of fingerprints if you went through the process since the PIV-II cards came into use. All of that information is now basically free on the internet. Forever. It's a phisher's (and foreign extortionist's) wet dream-- a complete set of collated, validated data, including associations and relationships, as well as potential dirt, on everyone who has worked for the US gov't (including many many contractors) for the past 15 years.
That is a 31% chance of death. These people must have been extremely fit (or just stupid I suppose).
That's a misinterpretation of the numbers. For every ~190 who summit, ~60 die would be a ~24% (60/250) chance of death if everybody who attempted to summit either summitted or died trying (and you count people who die on the way down as died and not summitted). Many more people attempt to climb the various 10,000 m peaks and turn around without either summitting or dying. You need to compare the number who die to the total number who try, not the numbers who succeed. You'll still probably see something in the 5% range, which isn't that much higher than launch vehicle failure rates.
Photoelectric Effect -> early evidence for quantum mechanics, the consequences of which he really didn't like Cosmological Constant -> he started out with it, decided it was a bad thing and took it out, and now it's back with evidence Gravity waves
I have had problems at work like that, and I function better at night, always have. It is definitely a "Diversity issue" but good luck getting people who badmouth people who have trouble with the morning schedule, to recognize this.
I'm like that, too. I generally can work a full day starting around 9-9:30, leave at a reasonable hour, and then have a sort of down period from 8 to 10 pm. Some time between 10 and 11 I usually have a second wind and work 4-5 more hours of pretty high productivity. Unless someone's been making me come in at 7:30 or 8 for meetings, which kills both my daytime and nighttime productivity. Fortunately, most of what I do has allowed the flexibility to work the hours that work for me.
I was about 10 when the Oakland County Child Killer started hitting in southeast Michigan (1976), starting with a girl from the town I lived in. Even with that, most kids still walked to/from school most of the time (you could get a ride if you got up late or it was super cold), but I think few walked alone. In elementary school the crossing guards were kids (safety patrol) from the "upper" grades and just wore a reflective orange strap for visibility.
The fight for ratings was the start of the lightspeed peer to peer. It wasn't quite direct, but it became basically one hop-- any local news that would scare people could get on the wire with video and then be spread to everyone in the country by 6 or 11pm.
More likely in play is that people who have invested in on level of technology rarely upgrade without a very compelling reason. The "quieter" reason is not a reason that impacts the person who is using the tool, he's already invested in ear protection. The "quieter" reason is a reason that impacts the person who's not using the tool.
Most people around here who use them have no hearing protection and at most a simple bandanna over their face for "dust" protection. They're typically illegal immigrants or maybe legal but don't have enough education or english skill to get any other job. Both cleaner and quieter would help protect them, but people don't want to do their lawns themselves and don't want to pay much to have their lawns done, and are either deaf or at work when their gardeners come. In LA there are huge amount of people who work at home in the entertainment industry (writers, editors, sound design) and are disrupted by their neighbors' gardeners.
But some use these blowers for an actual full days use of work, not an occasional use for a driveway. Battery powered units are not mobile enough for a landscaper to use.
And the two-stroke blowers can't 'blow the paint off a car', unless there is other major damage to it already.
If they're being used on hardscape it's not the air that will blow the paint off, but the high speed abrasive dust. Around here the dust has a lot of decomposed granite in it, which will do a nice job on your paint at high speed.
And you can't rake flowers...which leaves you with only one option. Using a leaf blower!
It sounds like maybe you should get out in the yard yourself and try some of this stuff out, so that you see how it actually works...or perhaps you live in a >1-floor home with no yard to care for, in which case you shouldn't be putting forth your uninformed opinion on these things in the first place?
I have a good sized yard with all sorts of things planted and have never had a need for a leaf blower. If you have actual delicate flowers, the blower is going to damage them, and unless you're an industrial gardner supplying florists, you could probably just reach in and pull leaves out with your hands. Or leave them as mulch-- much of my raking amounts to collecting the leaves from under the oak trees to use as mulch around the fruit trees.
That's actually the real problem behind all the leaf blower noise -- Americans in the suburbs often have giant pieces of property with unnecessary huge lawns and unreasonable expectations that they be kept up continuously as if they were part of a golf course. Maybe we should attack the underlying problem -- like avoiding giant unneeded lawns or getting rid of this notion that any leaves on the ground are bad or "untidy" (they can actually be good fertilizer if they aren't excessive).
It's not just huge lawns. In SoCal even the postage stamp of a lawn gets blown using a backpack blower at least once a week by the "gardeners". Leaf blowers became popular during one of the droughts (the 70s?) because of prohibitions on hosing off your sidewalk. People don't even use them for leaves much of the time, in a lot of cases it's just to get the dust off the hardscape and much of it ends up stuck to the side of the house (or in your lungs).
Like my neighbour, who takes a good 20 minutes to clear leaves off an area he could sweep in 5 at max (I know this because I have a larger area of paving that's how long it takes me to edge it, sweep it and rip the weeds out of the gaps in the concrete).
I see the same thing with clearing the roof. My neighbors have theirs blown twice a week for something like 20 minutes each time. I can do mine (same size) with a broom in about 10, and I do it a whole lot less often because I do it myself. It's not necessary to do it all that often-- once every couple weeks in fire season and in the winter if there's rain in the forecast.
Before leaf blowers there were no city ordinances to take care of the leaves, because there were no storm sewers either. Storm sewers become clogged and streets flood with the slightest rainfall if leaves are not tended to.
The smaller storm sewers in my area are 5' diameter tubes you can walk through. The large ones are 10+ feet wide and deep trenches. The really big ones (far downstream from me) are used to film car chases for TV (all those chases in the 70's cop shows). No amount of leaves will clog them or their inlets (which are also huge - during a heavy rainfall there's pretty good stream in the center channel on the end of my street. I used to jump it until I realized that I could easily end up a few miles downstream in a debris basin. The debris basins can handle hundreds of tons of trees and rocks coming in from the mountains.
As someone who used to care for a large lawn next to woods, a two stroke engine powering a lawn mower sized leaf blower/vacuum is the best for blowing leaves into the woods. Turns a four man job with rakes into a one man job. Even electric leaf blowers are noisy. Do they plan on increasing the fan size?
I live on the edge of a national forest. There are trees and leaves and wild animals. I'm always amazed when people are trying to hold back the tide and make it look like a lawn at disneyland and get rid of the wild animals. All those things are the reasons to live here and if you can't accept them it's better to go live in Irvine or someplace else with a mediated experience.
Put a wall up to keep the noise out like everyone else does. Why am I or anyone else not free on my property because you don't like something on yours?
Noise ordinances are written the other way around. You can make as much noise as you want on your property as long as it doesn't exceed 50 dB or ambient+3dB (or something like that) at the property line. If you want to make noise, the wall is your responsibility.
Is it really too much to ask that i keep my freedom even if it somehow bothers you one or two days of the year? I mean the alternative isn't going to be as rosy as you think when your freedom annoys someone else at some point in time. Hell, just look at drones or the state of children walking to school.
You clearly don't live in Southern California. A substantial fraction of people have "gardeners" (even if they live in cheap rentals) who show up once a week and mow/blow/go, often with a couple of backpack leafblowers going at once. They can spew so much unburned gas that you smell more gas from your neighbor's yard than when pumping gas (we have emission controls on gas pumps). If you live anyplace with suburban or denser single family housing you pretty much hear them constantly from about 8 am to 3:30 pm, year round (live oak trees, among others, drop leaves year round, though acorns are seasonal and not even every year) . Many people have their gardeners twice a week-- and they blow the whole lawn even if there are so few leaves it would be faster to just walk around and pick them up by hand.
And in the United States in the early 1970s I did similar things. Crime was WAY worse then than now. But nobody thought anything of it.
We have become insane.
Yes. I walked to school with a couple other 6 year olds in 1st grade in the 70's. It's lightspeed peer to peer communication that's made us insane. Every bad thing that happens anywhere to anyone gets bumped up to national news so it seems like it's all in your backyard and around every corner.
Also durability. An app will only run as long as the device and OS that it was made for remains current. If you're generating content that will remain useful for more than a few years the content and markup should be independent of the platform. I have PDFs and HTML that were generated in the late 90's that are still readable on any current device. If they were apps they'd be lost forever when the devices and OS's are gone. Think about dead tree books-- I can (and have) gone back to look at 100 year old technical papers that were in dead tree format and they're still readable. Apps are very ephemeral. Epub will be readable as long as you can keep copying the bits (it's ultimately a text based format, with features that allow images). PDF is close, but has a lot of limitations and is also a little too closed for a lot of applications.
If you do an Epub 3 you only have to do it once and don't have to do the whole app development, and it will also be less of a storage hog and requires development across multiple devices and OS's and requires more work from the developer to allow all the things that ereaders provide. There ends up being a lot of app overhead that you don't need if you just supply content instead of an app. Ebooks that are now Epub 2.0 used to be provided as apps, too, just to give someone a text experience. I don't want to put together an app for every new piece of content when there's essentially a markup scheme (HTML5/EPUB3) that will do the same thing with less effort.
What you described is not an ebook, and there is no good reason to overload "ebook" with all of what you intend.
There's every good reason to "overload" an ebook with the features that the OP asked for. Many people (probably more than ever) are reading their ebooks on tablets that are perfectly capable of rendering all the features identified, and more. It's quite reasonable to want to put all of that into a neatly packaged file that a person can dl to their tablet and use offline. It's so reasonable that the group that defines the EPUB format has updated the format to support HTML5 in EPUB 3.0, which would be how those features all get implemented. The people who make readers haven't kept up with that-- most readers are still limited to EPUB 2, and many distributors are still using outdated versions of EPUBcheck to validate files, so they reject perfectly valid EPUB 2 files because they're too lazy to update their validator (which is free and open source).
As a reader of scientific material, I would like to see many of the features that the OP requested-- I read quite a few electronically published papers and books, and unfortunately the most common format remains flat PDF, which kind of sucks for reading technical content on a small tablet. An html based format (like EPUB) that encapsulates the whole paper or book, including scalable images and graphs, copyable equations, and video where appropriate, would be a much preferable format. And don't say "just read it off the web". I do read it off the web, but I also download papers to archive, and if the publisher disappears (it happens) or I stop having access to that publisher (e.g. my employer's library drops the subscription), I'd still like to be able to read the article in its entirety, along with all the multimedia supplements.
Calibre is nice for converting among formats but doesn't support detailed editing of the source files. If you just stick an OO formatted file in and have it convert, it will do it, but you're likely to need a lot of hand tweaking to get it to look like you want and pass the validators.
If you want equations to come out reasonably, you have to use EPUB 3 or iBooks Author (which isn't open source). The problem you're going to find with EPUB 3 is that most readers don't support it yet, and you might have to distribute it yourself. I have a small publishing company and we recently did a book full of equations and ended up publishing it only on iTunes/iBooks and our own site. It has the equations done in MathML so you can copy and paste them into other things. Most of your other features are things we haven't tried to implement, but I suspect will cause the old EPUB 2.x validators to barf (even if it's valid EPUB 2, many distributors are using old validators).
As far as tools, we tend to export things from Indesign (because a lot of our books are in dead tree format, too) and then fix them up with BBEdit, TextMate, or Sigil. Sigil is nice because it will render the book for you. BBEdit will open a properly zipped up epub file package and let you hand edit things inside, but it doesn't do any of the cross-file updating that Sigil does (e.g. if you change a file name it will get updated where appropriate in Sigil, but you have to do it by hand in BBEdit). TextMate doesn't open epub packages directly, but it's useful as an editor (and any other text editor with regex support will serve you about the same). BBEdit and TextMate both have good regex support (more so than Sigil). I'm partial to BBEdit, while our other editor is partial to TextMate. We have a little "tech tips" section on our main site that describes how we export a word file and make an epub from it (it should be about the same with OO), as well as how we do references. Unfortunately there aren't any good epub editors available yet that support references in a reasonable way. Assuming you can figure out the EPUB 3 implementation of the features you want, you should be able to do most of what you need with a good text editor that has good regex support.
You can run your final product through Epubcheck 3 (or whatever version you want) and verify that it's valid. Most distributors use some flavor of epubcheck 2.x and will reject it if your file throws any errors. They may or may not accurately tell you the errors, and like any compiler, you can sometimes fix 30 pages of errors by putting in the correct bit of punctuation just before where the first error is thrown.
Slashdot Mirror
for $100 that's not easy. less than $200 and it starts to be reasonable. Logicsupply.com has some compact boards that are inexpensive and capable.
Ironically the only two locations in the US to host the Winter Olympics...
Three cities in the US have hosted winter olympics: Lake Placid, NY (twice), Squaw Valley, CA, and SLC, UT.
Though it seems it's easier to make money on the Winter Olympics than it is the summer Olympics as the last place to ever make money on the Summer Olympics was Los Angeles.
LA allegedly made a profit both times (1932, 1984), though documentation for the 1932 profit is sparse.
Knowing that a former Secretary of State operated their own email server in a manner that a fairly knowledgeable system administrator would recognize as vulnerable to the known capabilities of state-sponsored attempts to compromise it and extract the contents, it's almost disingenuous for the government to claim security is both essential and working at the highest levels, when they knew or should have known that a Cabinet officer was subverting that security. They just were. Reasonable people and those skilled in the art cannot avoid coming to that conclusion baaed on the publicly known evidence.
Our government isn't very good at protecting our rights, nor at its own operations. Good enough reason to limit our government to essential activities only.
And I pray Apple actually tries to break their own encryption and fails. Security shouldn't be reserved to the few. In a nominally free society we will not have perfect security, but we will have, hopefully, more freedom than not.
Don't overlook the Office of Personnel Management data breach, in which the OPM had such bad security that they effectively released to hackers the entire collection of background check information for all government personnel and contractors who need access to gov't facilities for everyone who filled out the forms from about 2000 to 2015. It wasn't just the form data (name, SSN, lists of associates to use for references, foreign travel history) - it was all the follow up data, too. Including responses from references, clearance interview details. It even included images of fingerprints if you went through the process since the PIV-II cards came into use. All of that information is now basically free on the internet. Forever. It's a phisher's (and foreign extortionist's) wet dream-- a complete set of collated, validated data, including associations and relationships, as well as potential dirt, on everyone who has worked for the US gov't (including many many contractors) for the past 15 years.
That is a 31% chance of death. These people must have been extremely fit (or just stupid I suppose).
That's a misinterpretation of the numbers. For every ~190 who summit, ~60 die would be a ~24% (60/250) chance of death if everybody who attempted to summit either summitted or died trying (and you count people who die on the way down as died and not summitted). Many more people attempt to climb the various 10,000 m peaks and turn around without either summitting or dying. You need to compare the number who die to the total number who try, not the numbers who succeed. You'll still probably see something in the 5% range, which isn't that much higher than launch vehicle failure rates.
He seemed to not like a lot of his own work:
Photoelectric Effect -> early evidence for quantum mechanics, the consequences of which he really didn't like
Cosmological Constant -> he started out with it, decided it was a bad thing and took it out, and now it's back with evidence
Gravity waves
I have had problems at work like that, and I function better at night, always have. It is definitely a "Diversity issue" but good luck getting people who badmouth people who have trouble with the morning schedule, to recognize this.
I'm like that, too. I generally can work a full day starting around 9-9:30, leave at a reasonable hour, and then have a sort of down period from 8 to 10 pm. Some time between 10 and 11 I usually have a second wind and work 4-5 more hours of pretty high productivity. Unless someone's been making me come in at 7:30 or 8 for meetings, which kills both my daytime and nighttime productivity. Fortunately, most of what I do has allowed the flexibility to work the hours that work for me.
I was about 10 when the Oakland County Child Killer started hitting in southeast Michigan (1976), starting with a girl from the town I lived in. Even with that, most kids still walked to/from school most of the time (you could get a ride if you got up late or it was super cold), but I think few walked alone. In elementary school the crossing guards were kids (safety patrol) from the "upper" grades and just wore a reflective orange strap for visibility.
The fight for ratings was the start of the lightspeed peer to peer. It wasn't quite direct, but it became basically one hop-- any local news that would scare people could get on the wire with video and then be spread to everyone in the country by 6 or 11pm.
More likely in play is that people who have invested in on level of technology rarely upgrade without a very compelling reason. The "quieter" reason is not a reason that impacts the person who is using the tool, he's already invested in ear protection. The "quieter" reason is a reason that impacts the person who's not using the tool.
Most people around here who use them have no hearing protection and at most a simple bandanna over their face for "dust" protection. They're typically illegal immigrants or maybe legal but don't have enough education or english skill to get any other job. Both cleaner and quieter would help protect them, but people don't want to do their lawns themselves and don't want to pay much to have their lawns done, and are either deaf or at work when their gardeners come. In LA there are huge amount of people who work at home in the entertainment industry (writers, editors, sound design) and are disrupted by their neighbors' gardeners.
But some use these blowers for an actual full days use of work, not an occasional use for a driveway. Battery powered units are not mobile enough for a landscaper to use.
And the two-stroke blowers can't 'blow the paint off a car', unless there is other major damage to it already.
If they're being used on hardscape it's not the air that will blow the paint off, but the high speed abrasive dust. Around here the dust has a lot of decomposed granite in it, which will do a nice job on your paint at high speed.
And you can't rake flowers...which leaves you with only one option. Using a leaf blower!
It sounds like maybe you should get out in the yard yourself and try some of this stuff out, so that you see how it actually works...or perhaps you live in a >1-floor home with no yard to care for, in which case you shouldn't be putting forth your uninformed opinion on these things in the first place?
I have a good sized yard with all sorts of things planted and have never had a need for a leaf blower. If you have actual delicate flowers, the blower is going to damage them, and unless you're an industrial gardner supplying florists, you could probably just reach in and pull leaves out with your hands. Or leave them as mulch-- much of my raking amounts to collecting the leaves from under the oak trees to use as mulch around the fruit trees.
That's actually the real problem behind all the leaf blower noise -- Americans in the suburbs often have giant pieces of property with unnecessary huge lawns and unreasonable expectations that they be kept up continuously as if they were part of a golf course. Maybe we should attack the underlying problem -- like avoiding giant unneeded lawns or getting rid of this notion that any leaves on the ground are bad or "untidy" (they can actually be good fertilizer if they aren't excessive).
It's not just huge lawns. In SoCal even the postage stamp of a lawn gets blown using a backpack blower at least once a week by the "gardeners". Leaf blowers became popular during one of the droughts (the 70s?) because of prohibitions on hosing off your sidewalk. People don't even use them for leaves much of the time, in a lot of cases it's just to get the dust off the hardscape and much of it ends up stuck to the side of the house (or in your lungs).
Like my neighbour, who takes a good 20 minutes to clear leaves off an area he could sweep in 5 at max (I know this because I have a larger area of paving that's how long it takes me to edge it, sweep it and rip the weeds out of the gaps in the concrete).
I see the same thing with clearing the roof. My neighbors have theirs blown twice a week for something like 20 minutes each time. I can do mine (same size) with a broom in about 10, and I do it a whole lot less often because I do it myself. It's not necessary to do it all that often-- once every couple weeks in fire season and in the winter if there's rain in the forecast.
Before leaf blowers there were no city ordinances to take care of the leaves, because there were no storm sewers either. Storm sewers become clogged and streets flood with the slightest rainfall if leaves are not tended to.
The smaller storm sewers in my area are 5' diameter tubes you can walk through. The large ones are 10+ feet wide and deep trenches. The really big ones (far downstream from me) are used to film car chases for TV (all those chases in the 70's cop shows). No amount of leaves will clog them or their inlets (which are also huge - during a heavy rainfall there's pretty good stream in the center channel on the end of my street. I used to jump it until I realized that I could easily end up a few miles downstream in a debris basin. The debris basins can handle hundreds of tons of trees and rocks coming in from the mountains.
If I hadn't already commented in the thread I'd mod you up.
As someone who used to care for a large lawn next to woods, a two stroke engine powering a lawn mower sized leaf blower/vacuum is the best for blowing leaves into the woods. Turns a four man job with rakes into a one man job. Even electric leaf blowers are noisy. Do they plan on increasing the fan size?
I live on the edge of a national forest. There are trees and leaves and wild animals. I'm always amazed when people are trying to hold back the tide and make it look like a lawn at disneyland and get rid of the wild animals. All those things are the reasons to live here and if you can't accept them it's better to go live in Irvine or someplace else with a mediated experience.
Put a wall up to keep the noise out like everyone else does. Why am I or anyone else not free on my property because you don't like something on yours?
Noise ordinances are written the other way around. You can make as much noise as you want on your property as long as it doesn't exceed 50 dB or ambient+3dB (or something like that) at the property line. If you want to make noise, the wall is your responsibility.
Is it really too much to ask that i keep my freedom even if it somehow bothers you one or two days of the year? I mean the alternative isn't going to be as rosy as you think when your freedom annoys someone else at some point in time. Hell, just look at drones or the state of children walking to school.
You clearly don't live in Southern California. A substantial fraction of people have "gardeners" (even if they live in cheap rentals) who show up once a week and mow/blow/go, often with a couple of backpack leafblowers going at once. They can spew so much unburned gas that you smell more gas from your neighbor's yard than when pumping gas (we have emission controls on gas pumps). If you live anyplace with suburban or denser single family housing you pretty much hear them constantly from about 8 am to 3:30 pm, year round (live oak trees, among others, drop leaves year round, though acorns are seasonal and not even every year) . Many people have their gardeners twice a week-- and they blow the whole lawn even if there are so few leaves it would be faster to just walk around and pick them up by hand.
And in the United States in the early 1970s I did similar things. Crime was WAY worse then than now. But nobody thought anything of it.
We have become insane.
Yes. I walked to school with a couple other 6 year olds in 1st grade in the 70's. It's lightspeed peer to peer communication that's made us insane. Every bad thing that happens anywhere to anyone gets bumped up to national news so it seems like it's all in your backyard and around every corner.
Also durability. An app will only run as long as the device and OS that it was made for remains current. If you're generating content that will remain useful for more than a few years the content and markup should be independent of the platform. I have PDFs and HTML that were generated in the late 90's that are still readable on any current device. If they were apps they'd be lost forever when the devices and OS's are gone. Think about dead tree books-- I can (and have) gone back to look at 100 year old technical papers that were in dead tree format and they're still readable. Apps are very ephemeral. Epub will be readable as long as you can keep copying the bits (it's ultimately a text based format, with features that allow images). PDF is close, but has a lot of limitations and is also a little too closed for a lot of applications.
If you do an Epub 3 you only have to do it once and don't have to do the whole app development, and it will also be less of a storage hog and requires development across multiple devices and OS's and requires more work from the developer to allow all the things that ereaders provide. There ends up being a lot of app overhead that you don't need if you just supply content instead of an app. Ebooks that are now Epub 2.0 used to be provided as apps, too, just to give someone a text experience. I don't want to put together an app for every new piece of content when there's essentially a markup scheme (HTML5/EPUB3) that will do the same thing with less effort.
What you described is not an ebook, and there is no good reason to overload "ebook" with all of what you intend.
There's every good reason to "overload" an ebook with the features that the OP asked for. Many people (probably more than ever) are reading their ebooks on tablets that are perfectly capable of rendering all the features identified, and more. It's quite reasonable to want to put all of that into a neatly packaged file that a person can dl to their tablet and use offline. It's so reasonable that the group that defines the EPUB format has updated the format to support HTML5 in EPUB 3.0, which would be how those features all get implemented. The people who make readers haven't kept up with that-- most readers are still limited to EPUB 2, and many distributors are still using outdated versions of EPUBcheck to validate files, so they reject perfectly valid EPUB 2 files because they're too lazy to update their validator (which is free and open source).
As a reader of scientific material, I would like to see many of the features that the OP requested-- I read quite a few electronically published papers and books, and unfortunately the most common format remains flat PDF, which kind of sucks for reading technical content on a small tablet. An html based format (like EPUB) that encapsulates the whole paper or book, including scalable images and graphs, copyable equations, and video where appropriate, would be a much preferable format. And don't say "just read it off the web". I do read it off the web, but I also download papers to archive, and if the publisher disappears (it happens) or I stop having access to that publisher (e.g. my employer's library drops the subscription), I'd still like to be able to read the article in its entirety, along with all the multimedia supplements.
Calibre is nice for converting among formats but doesn't support detailed editing of the source files. If you just stick an OO formatted file in and have it convert, it will do it, but you're likely to need a lot of hand tweaking to get it to look like you want and pass the validators.
If you want equations to come out reasonably, you have to use EPUB 3 or iBooks Author (which isn't open source). The problem you're going to find with EPUB 3 is that most readers don't support it yet, and you might have to distribute it yourself. I have a small publishing company and we recently did a book full of equations and ended up publishing it only on iTunes/iBooks and our own site. It has the equations done in MathML so you can copy and paste them into other things. Most of your other features are things we haven't tried to implement, but I suspect will cause the old EPUB 2.x validators to barf (even if it's valid EPUB 2, many distributors are using old validators).
As far as tools, we tend to export things from Indesign (because a lot of our books are in dead tree format, too) and then fix them up with BBEdit, TextMate, or Sigil. Sigil is nice because it will render the book for you. BBEdit will open a properly zipped up epub file package and let you hand edit things inside, but it doesn't do any of the cross-file updating that Sigil does (e.g. if you change a file name it will get updated where appropriate in Sigil, but you have to do it by hand in BBEdit). TextMate doesn't open epub packages directly, but it's useful as an editor (and any other text editor with regex support will serve you about the same). BBEdit and TextMate both have good regex support (more so than Sigil). I'm partial to BBEdit, while our other editor is partial to TextMate. We have a little "tech tips" section on our main site that describes how we export a word file and make an epub from it (it should be about the same with OO), as well as how we do references. Unfortunately there aren't any good epub editors available yet that support references in a reasonable way. Assuming you can figure out the EPUB 3 implementation of the features you want, you should be able to do most of what you need with a good text editor that has good regex support.
You can run your final product through Epubcheck 3 (or whatever version you want) and verify that it's valid. Most distributors use some flavor of epubcheck 2.x and will reject it if your file throws any errors. They may or may not accurately tell you the errors, and like any compiler, you can sometimes fix 30 pages of errors by putting in the correct bit of punctuation just before where the first error is thrown.
The Machinery handbook, the CRC Handbook, and the Radio Amateur's Handbook are the three classics.
plus Roark's Formulas for Stress and Strain, and Grover's tables of inductance calculations, and Gradshteyn and Ryzhik's tables of integrals
Fiber isn't that useful on a boat in the middle of the ocean.