Re: Calendar 2011 - The Best Sundials of Poland
Dear Darek, Thank you for this beautiful Christmas present! I'll hope to keep it longer than just one year. Best regards, Frans Maes On 8-12-2010 1:59, Darek Oczki wrote: Dear friends As the year 2011 is approaching I would like to present to all of you a special calendar showing the best of Polish sundials. I hope you gonna like it as much as the works of Polish masters of gnomonics. You may download the calendar from here: http://www.gnomonika.pl/files/calendar_2011.pdf (Note: the hi-res file is over 25MB) --- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
Re: Merry Christmas in all the languages
Great thought, Steve. Thanks. David Brown Somerton, Somerset UK Steve Confrere: Like most, sometimes I just sit and other times I sit and think. Perhaps with the holidays approaching and the turmoil in the world, I was thinking that the whole world should have a list like ours. You look at the names, people from all over the world and both genders. You read the emails, different ideas, different methods and all well received with respect and admiration. Everyone freely giving and responding to any quest for knowledge or help. Sometime just sharing an experience. All, as interesting to read as anything in a library. I could not in my worst nightmare think badly of anyone on the list, and so that is my Christmas gift to myself. Merry Christmas to all. Steve Yorktown, VA --- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial --- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
Re: stop the earth: TI 59 PPX; No No Nooooooo!
Good morning Roger and Bill, I'm not an engineer, just a field scientist (ecologist and geomorphologist) who now prefers the label eclectic naturalist. I tried HP and TI calculators way back when, and I went with TI. I found the RPN of the HP counter-intuitive and difficult to program. The TI was also about half the price of the equivalent HP. I used my programmable TI-59 for many years, and especially during a 15 months of field work in Antarctica, and it was pure magic. I was able to write all the programs for reducing a range of surveys, etc. I used the printer constantly, and I still have the printouts pasted in my field books. A few years ago I gave the entire set of TI-59, printer, programs, manuals and magnetic cards to a computer collector here in Sydney. The whole lot fitted beautifully in a suitcase designed (of all things) to carry lawn bowling balls. HP vs TI; PC vs Mac: it's all a bit ho-hum. My criterion has always been if I have a PC at work and I can get training, support and software free, then that's what I use. My son who is a successful pro photographer continually berates me for using PCs rather than Macs. As he rightly says, Macs are definitely the tool of choice for high-end and heavy graphic use. Like lots of people my superannuated age, I started with punch cards on a mainframe, but I decided that I would never learn Fortran etc. I was a field scientist: I could and did remove, overhaul and replace gearboxes in my Land Rover, but I couldn't program x + y = z. There were experts who could do that for me. My first PhD was on a small Australian-made PC called a Microbee. It had all of 128k of memory (yep, 128k!), and it used 8 floppies. By the time I got around to trying to transfer my punched cards to disk, there was only one working card reader extant in Australia, and I guess it's in a museum now. Now I'm thinking of putting a 1TB disk in my desktop. Cost: $AUD200. Almost unbelievable. But the biggest change has been the explosion of fabulous software. Back in the old days, if you wanted to do a regression analysis, you either wrote the program yourself in Fortran, or got someone to do it for you. Now you buy any one of a number of great software packages (e.g. Minitab) which come with excellent help files and after-market books. It's a bit like GPSs. My first field work was all with paper maps and using the Land Rover odometer to determine location. Now I have a GPS connected to a notebook loaded with maps or satellite images and I track my position in real time. Or I use a hand-held for the same thing when I'm doing field work on foot. And all in the comfort of a quiet air-conditioned Toyota Prado with 160L of fuel tanks as standard instead of the noisy, blazing hot Land Rover with 45L of fuel. Good old days?? You must be joking! But we had a lot of fun in the Land Rover even if I had to carry full sets of open-end, ring and socket spanners (wrenches for you benighted people who speak American instead of English) in BSW, SAE, BA and metric. For the Toyota, it's one set: metric. The job's the same, but as you say, the tools are infinitely better. The real negative change has been the blanket of OHS rules that are stifling. I could go away for a month-long trip, and never make contact with work. These days, carrying personal EPIRBs and call-backs every 24 h are mandatory, and it is almost a disciplinary offence to miss a call. Am I safer? Yes, but not because of this garbage which replaces common-sense and experience with reliance on electronics. One of my favourite movies is Master and Commander in which Russell Crowe is told to capture a French frigate, and he heads off half-way round the world on the pursuit. No contact with the Lords of the Admiralty except via rare despatches at some ports. These days, he would be deluged with micro-management emails from a bunch of oxygen thieves in head office who have nothing better to do that demand constant reports solely to justify their own jobs. But them's the rules, and if you take the pay, you accept the new rules. The nadir of this is if you want to do field work in water catchment areas controlled by Sydney Water. You have to call back EVERY time you change location, which may be five times in a day. Are they kidding? For this, give me the good old days when you told them where you were going, and called them when you got back. No fuss, no muss, no drama. Gee, I'm starting to sound like a grumpy old man. It must be the upcoming summer solstice. Love the Abbott and Costello routine! So I'll hit the Start button, and then Log-off. Gotta love them PCs. Cheers, John John Pickard Sunny and hot Sydney, Australia john.pick...@bigpond.com - Original Message - From: Roger Bailey rtbai...@telus.net To: Bill Gottesman billgottes...@comcast.net; sundial@uni-koeln.de Sent: Monday, December 13, 2010 3:37 PM Subject: Re: stop the earth: TI 59 PPX; No No
Re: stop the earth: TI 59 PPX; No No Nooooooo!
Summer solstice! You lucky dog. -Bill On 12/13/2010 5:35 PM, John Pickard wrote: Gee, I'm starting to sound like a grumpy old man. It must be the upcoming summer solstice. --- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
Re: stop the earth: TI 59 PPX; No No Nooooooo!
Hi Bill, What? You didn't get invited to join the Oprah Winfrey juggernaut that is currently taking over Sydney? Eat ya heart out! Cheers, John John Pickard john.pick...@bigpond.com - Original Message - From: Bill Gottesman billgottes...@comcast.net To: sundial@uni-koeln.de Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 9:52 AM Subject: Re: stop the earth: TI 59 PPX; No No Nooo! Summer solstice! You lucky dog. -Bill On 12/13/2010 5:35 PM, John Pickard wrote: Gee, I'm starting to sound like a grumpy old man. It must be the upcoming summer solstice. --- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial --- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
R: Books of interest from Internet Archive
Dear John, I read the sundials books in the Archive.org since from 2005. Here I found the first only free digital version of Gatty, Alice Morse Earle, Newton Mayall and more other. On the 2008 Archive.org added in his web site also good part of the free digital books published from Google Books. As, most of the old sundial books you see in the Archive.og, instead, are coming from Google Books (the digital scansions are egual).The best wishes, Nicola Messaggio originale Da: john.pick...@bigpond.com Data: 14/12/2010 3.00 A: Sundial Listsundial@uni-koeln.de Ogg: Books of interest from Internet Archive -- Good morning, Members may be interested in the following classic books available as free downloads from Internet Archive (www.archive.org): Holtzapffel, C. (1852) Turning and mechanical manipulation. Intended as a work of general reference and practical instruction, on the lathe, and the various mechanical pursuits followed by amateurs. Volume 1: Materials; their differences, choice, and preparation; various modes of working them generally without cutting tools. Holtzapffel amp; Co., London. http://www.archive.org/details/turningmechanica01holtuoft (44MB) Holtzapffel, C. (1856) Turning and mechanical manipulation. Intended as a work of general reference and practical instruction on the lathe, and the various mechanical pursuits followed by amateurs. Volume II: The principles of construction, action, and application, of cutting tools used by hand; and also of machines derived from the hand tools. Holtzapffel amp; Co., London. http://www.archive.org/details/turningmechanica02holtuoft (53MB) Holtzapffel, C. (1850) Turning and mechanical manipulation. Intended as a work of general reference and practical instruction on the lathe, and the various mechanical pursuits followed by amateurs. Volume III: Abrasive and miscellaneous processes, which cannot be accomplished with cutting tools. Holtzapffel amp; Co., London. http://www.archive.org/details/turningmechanica03holtuoft (61MB) http://ia700304.us.archive.org/22/items/turningandmecha00holtgoog/turningandmecha00holtgoog.pdf (13 MB) For the second version, downloading is a bit opaque. In the left-hand box where the different formats are shown, click on All Files HTTP and then chose the pdf. If you just click on the PDF (Google.com) it takes you to Google and this is a waste of time Holtzapffel, C. (1881) Turning and mechanical manipulation. Intended as a work of general reference and practical instruction on the lathe, and the various mechanical pursuits followed by amateurs. Volume IV: The principles and practice of hand or simple turning. Holtzapffel amp; Co., London. http://www.archive.org/details/turningmechanica04holtuoft (71MB) As far as I could find, Volume V is not available on Internet Archive. Pity. All volumes have been reprinted by The Early American Industries Association, but I don't know if they are still in print. I guess a check on Amazon would show that. Also available is: Holtzapffel, C. (1847) Turning and mechanical manipulation. Holtzapffel amp; Co., London. 2nd edition This seems to be an early version of Volume I above. http://ia331420.us.archive.org/1/items/turningandmecha01holtgoog/turningandmecha01holtgoog.pdf (17MB) See above re downloading Google scanned versions Ibbetson, J. H. (1833) A brief account of Ibbetson's geometric chuck, manufactured by Holtzapffel amp; Co. with a selection of specimens illustrative of some of its powers. John Holt Ibbetson, London. http://www.archive.org/details/briefaccountofib00ibbeiala Have fun! Now if I could finish looking at these things, and writing papers, I could actually get to my lathe and turn good metal into swarf. BTW: Googling sundial in domain archive.org gave 2970 hits with many titles of interest. Looking at just those on Internet Archive with Sundials as subject gave 29 hits (http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Sundials%22). I don't have time at the moment to go through these. Perhaps someone on the list could do so, and tell us all of the goodies that can be found here??? Familiar authors are Biot (multiple volumes), Henslow, Gatty, and even NASA. Searching Internet Archive for Sundial gave 115 hits, with a lot of extraneous titles. I don't have time at the moment to go through these. Perhaps someone on the list could do so, and tell us all of the goodies that can be found here??? Cheers, John John Pickard john.pick...@bigpond.com --- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
