evought

Here's a link to an article online along with a slide show of pictures. In the slide show, there is a link for viewing a large image of the new table. Personally, I do not see the point. Mendelev's original table (or the 90-degree rotated version we all learned in school) is clear, concise, and makes the relationships between the elements apparent. It does not waste space or color. Stewart's version has a lot more graphics, but conveys less information and is unclear. I do not understand how a background of stars tells students how elements behave.

Er... Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto-Charon Sedna Unless I am particularly dimwitted tonight (entirely possible ;-) ), I count 10, 8 if Pluto-Charon and Sedna are not counted as 'planets'. I tend to ascribe to the 8 planet crowd as it gets a little ridiculous if every pebble is counted as a planet. Pluto and Charon are close enough in mass that it really is just a pair of planetoids circling a shared point rather than a true orbit, which is why some scientists refer to it as "Pluto-Charon". If you start counting random rocks, when do large asteroids in the asteroid belt get planetary status? Or, for that matter, when do you start talking about Earth's separate "moon" (yes, we have one). That being said, I agree with the original poster that an eleventh "planet-like-thing" will probably be found. For that matter, an eighteenth will probably be found someday.

For those of you, like me who have taken iTunes and mp3 libraries to their logical conclusion and started digitizing their DVD collection or downloading some of the very good amateur flicks out there (e.g. Star Wreck: In the Pirkenning), you may have run into this:The official DivX codec has some serious problems on OS X Tiger (10.4.x) and Quicktime 7. Problems can include very choppy display, no sound, no display, etc. I experienced a LOT of frustration on upgrading to 10.4 when much of my video library stopped working (and it is such a hassle to have to dig through boxes for an actual DVD ...). Fortunately the fix is easy: use VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/). VLC is a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac, etc) video player which has built in support for XVid, DivX, etc, and plays these files correctly. In some ways, it is much better than the free Quicktime player which comes with Mac OS X, anyway. In particular, it allows you to select with device to send video to and allows me, for instance to play fullscreen video on my TV without tying up my monitor.

Actually, as I recently discovered, you do not *need* a DVD drive to install as long as you have an external firewire drive (or iPod) of some sort and a Mac with a DVD drive somewhere to prepare the image. You can boot and install off of the firewire drive on the less capable Mac. You can even use a DVD-capable iBook or Powerbook in target mode to install a non-DVD system.

I use gmail myself and agree with the reviewer. Depending on what you use the system for, however, there are some things you might want to be aware of. Specifically, Google (mechanically) scans your mail messages.GMail's advertising system provides ads which are tailored to you. This allows them to not waste your time reading irrelevent ads and increases the response rate for their advertisers. They do this by filtering your mail and displaying ads which correspond to things you discuss in your messages. If you spend several messages talking about your upcoming trip to the Outer Banks, you may get more ads all of a sudden for, say, cheap air fares or suntan lotion.This concerns some people for several reasons:1) It is trivial for google to add automatic filters for purposes other than advertising (political reasons, law enforcement, etc.)2) The compiled personal information can be sold.3) It is not clear who in the company might have access to your email data (outside the typical system administration staff)The bottom line is that if you use your gmail account for any sort of confidential or business correspondence, be aware of the filtering capabilities. Your email is exposed with any provider (or in transit between providers) and any provider can set up to gather statistics on message contents or selectively read messages, but in gmail's case, we already know they do it. That being said, this message is not meant to alarm and I thing gmail's advertising setup is both ethical and innovative--- as long as you know it is there.If you feel the need to protect certain emails from filtering and possible disclosure, look at PGP or GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) style email encryption (https://www.gnupg.org/). In combination with gmail's POP feature, you can readily produce and read encrypted messages on your own system and use the online access only for your run of the mill correspondence. Personal encryption is not a bad idea in any case, email has always been the equivalent of writing your message on a postcard; anyone who handles it can read it at any stage of processing. Many of these privacy protection tools are free (as in beer).