Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then though must be damned perpetually.
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease and midnight never come!
Fair nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day, or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite noctis equi!
From Scene 14, Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe.
[Odin’s] men rushed forwards without armour, were as mad as dogs or wolves, bit their shields, and were strong as bears or wild bulls, and killed people at a blow, but neither fire nor iron told upon themselves. These were called Berserker.
From the Ynglinga Saga.
Meantime the berserks thought that Grettir was a long time away and began to suspect some treachery. They rushed to the door and found it locked. They strained at the woodwork till every timber groaned. At last they tore down the wooden partition and so gained the passage where the privy was, and thence the steps. Then the berserks’ fury fell upon them and they howled like dogs. At that moment Grettir returned, and taking his halberd in both hands he thrust it right through Thorir’s body just as he was about to descend the steps. The blade was very long and broad. Ogmund the Bad was just behind pushing him on, so that the spear passed right up to the hook, came out at his back between the shoulderblades and entered the breast of Ogmund. They both fell dead, pierced by the spear. Then all the others dashed down as they reached the steps. Grettir tackled them each in turn, now thrusting with the spear, now hewing with the sword, while they defended themselves with logs lying on the ground or with anything else which they could get. It was a terrible trial of a man’s prowess to deal with men of their strength, even unarmed.
From the Saga of Grettir the Strong.
Erlang is a fleet of cars that all cooperate to get you where you want to go. It takes practice to be able to drive with one foot in each of several cars, but once you learn how you can drive over terrain that would be very hard to navigate any other way. In addition, because you’re using so many cars, it doesn’t matter if a few of them break down.
Haskell is an incredibly elegantly-designed and beautiful car, which is rumored to be able to drive over extremely strange terrain. The one time you tried to drive it, it didn’t actually drive along the road; instead, it made copies of itself and the road, with each successive copy of the road having the car a little further along. It’s supposed to be possible to drive it in a more conventional way, but you don’t know enough math to figure out how.
Ada is a tank. A butt-ugly tank that never breaks down. People laugh uncontrollably if you tell them you drive Ada, but really, do you want to be driving a sports car in a war zone?
From Mike Vanier’s page, which has others.
Professor Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen had been a refuge for German Jewish physicists since 1933. Max von Laue and James Franck had deposited their medals there to keep them from being confiscated by the German authorities. After the occupation of Denmark in April 1940, the medals were Bohr’s first concern. In Hitler’s Germany it was almost a capital offense to send gold out of the country. Since the names of the Laureates were engraved on the medals, their discovery by the invading forces would have had very serious consequences.
George de Hevesy explains, “I suggested that we should bury the medal, but Bohr did not like this idea as the medal might be unearthed. I decided to dissolve it. While the invading forces marched in the streets of Copenhagen, I was busy dissolving Laue’s and also James Franck’s medals. After the war, the gold was recovered and the Nobel Foundation generously presented Laue and Frank with new Nobel medals.”
de Hevesy wrote to von Laue after the war that the task of dissolving the medals had not been easy, as gold is “exceedingly unreactive and difficult to dissolve.” The Nazis occupied Bohr’s institute and searched it very carefully but they did not find anything. The medals quietly waited out the war in a solution of aqua regia.
From the Nobel Prize website, edited for clarity.
By Karena A. Karras.
Take mineral Cinnabar and prepare it in the following manner. Cook it with rain water in a stone vessel for three hours. Then purify it carefully, and dissolve it in Aqua Regis, which is composed of equal parts of vitriol, nitre, and sal ammoniac. Another formula is vitriol, saltpetre, alum, and common salt.
Distil this in an alembic. Pour it on again, and separate carefully the pure from the impure thus. Let it putrefy for a month in horse-dung; then separate the elements in the following manner. If it puts forth its sign, commence the distillation by means of an alembic with a fire of the first degree. The water and the air will ascend; the fire and the earth will remain at the bottom. Afterwards join them again, and gradually treat with the ashes. So the water and the air will again ascend first, and afterwards the element of fire, which expert artists recognise. The earth will remain in the bottom of the vessel. This collect there. It is what many seek after and few find …
From The Treasure of Treasures for Alchemists, on the Alchemy Web Site.
Octave is a high-level interactive language, primarily intended for numerical computations that is mostly compatible with Matlab.
Octave can do arithmetic for real, complex or integer-valued scalars and matrices, solve sets of nonlinear algebraic equations, integrate functions over finite and infinite intervals, and integrate systems of ordinary differential and differential-algebraic equations.
AgileEVM is an adaptation of the traditional project management practice of measuring actual value of integrated cost, schedule and scope against a baseline plan using Earned Value Management (EVM) metrics. The methods of measurement have been adapted to easily fit within the Scrum project management framework. AgileEVM can be used both in conjunction with traditional EVM metrics across the entire product life cycle to measure cost efficiencies. This is an important addition to an Agile program management structure - giving important early warnings of trends across the entire product life cycle.
By Tamara Sulaiman at InfoQ.
Your client or legacy application needs to communicate with disparate health information systems. Your applications don’t support HL7, or speak the necessary protocols needed to exchange information. You’re looking for a comprehensive integration solution that can handle all of the necessary work to transform and route HL7 messages, and you’d like it to be open source so that you can import existing interfaces to common data sources.
Enter Mirth, the “Swiss army knife” HL7 integration engine. Specifically designed for HL7 message integration, Mirth provides the necessary tools for developing, deploying, and monitoring interfaces.
From the Mirth Project.