John Baez has posted a list of recommended free math and physics books available on the web. This is very helpful: There are a lot of free texts out there, but taken as a whole they only demonstrate Sturgeon’s revelation. You need some educated guidance to find the good stuff in a finite time.
See today’s Onion
Irish Class, March 17, 2008
The first event was an exercise in sentence structure. We were given several Irish sentences and were asked to pick out key grammatical elements
without actually translating them. We were looking for verbs, subjects,
objects, prepositional phrases, dependent clauses, and
genitives.
| admhaigh | admit |
| admhaím | I admit |
| rómhaith | very good |
| dream | group (of people) |
| measa | worse. Comp. of olc— bad, evil |
| casadh | twist, turn, reproach |
| riamh | ever, never |
| taobh | side, flank |
| dúchas | heritage, patrimony, native place |
| faoi láthair | at present |
| grinn | perceptive, accurate |
| arb | was (past of copula before a vowel |
| páirteach | participating, sharing, sympathetic |
| sraith | swath, course, layer, series, row, rate |
| ráchairt | run f2 |
| saighdiúir | soldier |
| cogadh domhanda | world war |
| troid | fight, quarrel f3 |
| arm | army. Also weapon, arm |
| sraidbhaile | village |
| bocht | poor person m1 |
| lár | middle, center. Also floor, ground |
Next came question and answer. Nick asked various general knowledge questions in Irish and we answered. This to see how well we could follow spoken Irish.
Poul Anderson’s classic Uncleftish Beholding is on the web!
Via John Baez.
St. Patrick is the Patron Saint of Engineers because Continue reading
Vanguard 1 was launched into space on March 17, 1958. It is still up there.
Via Bad Astronomy.
Spacewalkers resort to banging, pry bar
What an old friend calls “Engineering method #1: Brute force.”
mia_mcdavid is in Michigan for the weekend and the first couple days of next week. Her aunt died after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s. She has posted about it, most recently here.
I cleaned off my workbench this morning, and am trying to make some progress on at least some of my unfinished projects. Quite a list
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 