Michael Crichton, the million-selling author of such historic and prehistoric science thrillers as “Jurassic Park,” “Timeline” and “The Andromeda Strain,” has died of cancer, his family said.

He died Tuesday in Los Angeles at age 66 after a long battle with the illness.

The subject of this volume is the Yorktown class, the near-legendary American aircraft carriers that kept the Japanese at bay in the dark days between Pearl Harbor and the decisive battle of Midway, where Yorktown hereself was lost. Hornet launched the famous Doolittle Raid on Japan before being sunk at Santa Cruz in October 1942, but Enterprise surived the fierce fighting of the early war years to become the US Navy’s most decorated ship. With its unparalleled level of visual information-paint schemes, models, line drawings and photographs-it is simply the best references for any modelmaker setting out to build one of these famous carriers.

I am thinking about doing a “Why She Matters Today” book on a WW2 aircraft carrier, either Yorktown or Enterprise.

The second volume in a new series providing ship modellers with all they need to know about a famous class of warship and associated model kits.
The five battleships of the King George V Class were the most modern to serve the Royal Navy in World War II; all rendered invaluable service in the war effort, and, indeed, the first two could be credited with influencing the very course of the conflict. Instrumental in the sinking of the battleship Bismarck, they bought about a fundamental shift in German naval policy, the emphasis moving away from heavy surface ships and towards the U-boat arm. With its unparalleled level of visual information- colour schemes, models, line drawings and photographs-it is simply the best reference for any model-maker setting out to build one these great battleships.

If you’re going to apply that logic, then you should also credit PRINCE OF WALES with changing the course of the war in the Pacific, sealing the loss of Singapore, and ending the British Empire.

That being said, I’d love to have a copy of this book!

“Slides” is preferred. Idiomatically “Powerpoints” may be allowed, as in “Powerpoint Rangers.”

Re: Vugraph? Viewgraph?

Re: Vugraph? Viewgraph?

Subject: Re: Vugraph? Viewgraph?
From: Thom Randolph To: “Halter, Meg”
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 23:51:29 -0800

Meg:

If you mean the clear plastic sheets on which text and
images are printed, and which text and images are
projected onto a semi-reflective viewing screen by means
of light transmitted through the plastic sheet while the
sheet is positioned on a (usually) horizontal glass
or plastic panel….

The machine is properly referred to as an “overhead
projector”, and the sheets used to carry the text and
images are called “transparencies”. One is called a
“transparency”. The transparent plastic is available
in rolls for properly equipped projectors, or in sheets
with or without cardboard frames.

The term “viewgraph” is sometimes used to mean such a
transparency. I try to avoid using it, since when someone
goes out to purchase blank transparency film, they will
not find it under viewgraph. Dictionary.com does have
a definition for the word, from WordNet, but none of
the unabridged dictionaries I have include it.

I’ve also seen the sheets referred to as “viewgraphs”,
“Vue-graphs”, “Vu-graphs”, “overheads”, and “foils”.

I have always found the term viewgraph to be confusing,
especially when I’ve had to train non-English students.
Of course they’re supposed to “view” it, but there’s not
always a “graph” on it, strictly speaking. On the other
hand, many more people are likely understand what a
projector is, and can by extension understand what an
overhead projector is. Thus, the clear sheets used with
one are easily understood as “overhead projector transparency
sheets”, or just “transparencies” for short.

I hope that helps.

Regards,

Thom Randolph

Review of: D.A by Willis, Connie

My only complaint is that when the character learns the meaning of the term “D.A.”, she should learn something of its history.

A bracing Brin-like approach to competition and education.

An original text; the earliest version. Also attrib. or as adj.
1932 Times Lit. Suppl. 14 July 511/3 In these volumes..we have the nearest thing possible in Chopin’s case to an Urtext. 1959 Cambr. Rev. 6 June 598/2 Authoritative editions allegedly based on urtexts. 1963 S. WEINTRAUB Private Shaw & Public Shaw iv. 119 The earlier version still retains advocates, because of its more complete, ur-text quality, and the comfortable feeling that no Procrustean games were played with its vocabulary and sentence structure. 1974 Early Music Oct. 259/1 The edition is urtext, with prefatory staves, showing the original clefs and signatures. 1982 Times 2 Apr. 14/2 An urtext edition of the 21 Schubert piano sonatas. 1983 London Rev. Bks 7-20 July 21/4 Elaborate versions often point back to the gospel of Mark as a kind of cryptic Urtext.

I prefer Ur text, like Baltimore clamp (but unlike the Rosetta Stone). Ur is a place name. I veto OED’s single word version, urtext. Hyphenated is wrong, as the examples Baltimore-clamp or baltimore-clamp make clear.

Today, I would like to briefly share the philosophies behind Google ranking:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

And they really mean #3!

No discussion of Google’s ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! - question: “Does Google manually edit its results?” Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well … subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.

It would be nice if a breath of candor were introduced here.

• Humans aren’t scalable.
• Humans aren’t subject to Moore’s law.
• Humans aren’t deniable.
• Humans Not Allowed is as much about $ as about search quality.
  

As Amit Singhal undoubtedly knows, many IR studies have found that a combination of humans with algorithms works better than either alone. Not that that’s a universal truth, but it has been a common pattern.

The good news is that as long as humans are out of the loop in Google, there will be an opportunity for human experts to add value using such old-fashioned technologies as the book.