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Most scientists publish in English. This is because when they use their native languages, people laugh at their provincial accents.

posted at: 17:43 | path: /aletheia | permanent link to this entry

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Yahoo's term extraction API doesn't seem to know about entities like ä.

posted at: 22:06 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

Denn ist Einmal der Kopf voran, so folget der Schweif auch

is a line from Die Vortrefflichen (The Virtuosi) by Hölderlin, which is in hexameters. All five of that set of poems (Guter Rat, Advocatus Diaboli, Die Vortrefflichen, Die beschreibende Poesie and Falsche Popularität) are.

So can you place the caesura in that line? I can't, unless I make Kopf voran a dactyl, and it is nothing of the sort, so the caesura ends up in the middle of voran. He must be using the form to reinforce his point.

posted at: 21:49 | path: /D/bread_and_wine | permanent link to this entry

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There's only been a small amount of press coverage of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill (hereafter Leg and Reg), I think partly because there's no soap opera element. The press has comprehensive coverage of Tessa Jowell's connections to a foreign executive which is similarly cavalier with the rule of law, but then there's a house and a mortgage involved.

There are some safeguards built into Leg and Reg, but, as far as I can tell, none to prevent the executive using it, if passed, to modify it to remove those safeguards.

This is a Bill to introduce unfettered executive power, and the press is nearly silent. Is anyone willing to, I don't know, sleep with Jim Murphy, pay off his mortgage, buy Lord Falconer some new wallpaper, anything to get it some coverage?

posted at: 11:29 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry

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There's little risk of finding the sort of research I did by mistake by cursory Googling. If you go searching for terms like "hyperpolarizability" and "wavepacket revival" then you deserve what you get.

It's bad enough that life science papers contain pileups of everyday nouns like

horseradish peroxidase-conjugated donkey antirabbit IgG secondary antibody

but what's worse is that the Google Scholar project and open access pollute completely ordinary searches.

Just now I remembered RGL's Charles Rosen Schlegel quote about a fragment being like a miniature artwork, perfect in itself, wie ein Igel, like a hedgehog. Swa swa Sebastian. So 'fragment hedgehog Schlegel' is a perfectly sensible thing to type when looking for the English translation.

I hadn't counted on Sonic hedgehog. Out of the first ten hits, I get PMID: 12235001 and DOI: 10.1089/107632701753213174. I go home in the evenings to get away from that sort of thing.

posted at: 21:47 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry