Ethel the Blog
Observations (and occasional brash opining) on science, computers, books, music and other shiny things that catch my mind's eye. There's a home page with ostensibly more permanent stuff. This is intended to be more functional than decorative. I neither intend nor want to surf on the bleeding edge, keep it real, redefine journalism or attract nyphomaniacal groupies (well, maybe a wee bit of the latter). The occasional cheap laugh, raised eyebrow or provocation of interest are all I'll plead guilty to in the matter of intent. Bene qui latuit bene vixit.

The usual copyright stuff applies, but I probably won't get enraged until I find a clone site with absolutely no attribution (which, by the way, has happened twice with some of my other stuff). Finally, if anyone's offended by anything on this site then please do notify me immediately. I like to keep track of those times when I get something right.

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"When they say, 'Gee it's an information explosion!', no, it's not an explosion, it's a disgorgement of the bowels is what it is. Every idiotic thing that anybody could possibly write or say or think can get into the body politic now, where before things would have to have some merit to go through the publishing routine, now, ANYTHING." - Harlan Ellison JOLLY OLD PALS Other stuff of mild interest to some: unusual literature scientific software blog physical oceanography glossary computer-related tutorials and texts Friday, October 22, 1999 STRANGE LIT The Lionel Fanthorpe Appreciation Page is a must for connoisseurs of bad writing. Fanthorpe happened to specialize in science fiction but his literary style transcends genres. At his peak in the early 1950s he is known to have written 80 "novels" in three years - an average of one 158-page book every twelve days. His writing technique was to dictate into a tape recorder and hire a pool of typists to transcribe his silver-tongued verbiage. The many obvious transcription errors in his published work add to its delectably egregrious nature. He also wrote to a precise word count, leading to either dizzying and mystifying action in the last few pages to foreshorten a story, or long digressions and pointless internal dialogs to stretch one out. Most of all Fanthorpe had an indescribable way with words. Some fine examples are: "Yes," The monosyllable was terse, almost unnecessarily so. Trinkle did not possess a legal mind. He was a mental grasshopper, an intellectual kangaroo, a mind wallaby. Mentally, he was a swimmer towing cerebral rafts through waters of thought, heading for logical landing stages. Greyness was the dominant background shade; neither black nor white, but something midway between the two. It was a light rather than a dark grey, yet it could never had been so light that it might be mistaken for an off white. It was the smell of death, the aroma of decay, the odour of perishability, the effluvium of ephemerality. It was the emanation of doom, the smoke of mortification, the reek of putrefaction. It was the nidor of the lower regions. He obtained most of his story ideas from usually lurid cover paintings sent his way by Badger Books. He would first write a back-cover blurb and then suggest some titles. When an appropriate title was agree upon he would start writing the novel. Things sometimes got a bit confused during this process, like the time he decided on the title The Last Valkyrie and proceeded to write a abook about Daedelus, Icarus and King Minos in ancient Greece. Fanthorpe should be considered the literary equivalent of "Plan 9 from Outer Space" for the 1950s. posted by Steven Baum 10/22/1999 04:07:49 PM | link SCIENCE A commentary by Myles Allen in Nature (Vol. 491, 1999, pp. 642) proposes a massively distributed climate modeling effort similar to the SETI@home and various distributed.net projects. It's called Casino-21, and is an experiment in large-scale Monte Carlo simulation of the climate of the 20th and 21st centuries. The models used to predict the effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions on the global climate are complex beasties with more than a few parameters that need to be specified. The general procedure up to now has been to tweak those parameters in a manner that best reproduces the present climate, and then use those same parameters in simulations that predict future climates. A more optimal procedure would involve performing many simulations in which all of the parameters were varied within their ranges of uncertainty. This is known as an ensemble forecast. The general strategy is to first perform a full range of simulations of the last 50 years, starting each with the same initial conditions and seeing which parameter combinations do a good job of reproducing the known climate of the latter half of the 20th century. This would be done twice - once using the known increases in greenhouse gases (the perturbed case) and again using the gas concentrations that would have existed without the increases due to burning fossil fuels (the unperturbed case). The simulations inconsistent with the observed record (in the first case) or with the estimate of what the unperturbed climate would have been (in the second case) will be discarded. The remaining cases will be run for another 50 years in predictive mode. These results will produce a range of possible climate scenarios, and will allow a statistical estimate of the probability of climate warming (and to what degree) to be made. The unperturbed cases will also allow an estimate to be made of the probability that an unperturbed climate would exhibit the amount of warming we've measured in the last 50 years, i.e. the probability that the warming is merely a natural climate variation rather than caused by man. The problem is that it takes a huge amount of computer time to perform ensemble forecasts. For instance, if only two parameters are varied 10 times apiece 100 simulations are required to fully explore the full range of the parameters (usually called the "parameter space"). Another parameter would bring that to 1000 simulations. You get the picture. According to my sources, Myles has been swamped with volunteers for the project. Sign up today. posted by Steven Baum 10/22/1999 10:45:03 AM | link SCIENCE Improved hurricane prediction is about as obviously good a scientific goal as one can find. The last decade has seen tremendous improvement in predicting the path of hurricanes since the so-called 'steering flow' is a function of the flow in the surrounding atmosphere, the prediction of which improves directly with improvements in numerical weather prediction. Predicting the maximum intensity of the winds in a hurricane has proved to be a bit trickier, although Kerry Emanuel and others have made great progress in recent years. A series of increasingly complex models have been developed that model hurricanes as idealized heat engines running between warm and cold reservoirs - the former being the ocean surface at around 27 deg. C and the latter the tropical troposphere at around -73 deg. C. A hurricane's maximum intensity is proportional to this difference in temperature, i.e. the fairly intuitive notion that large temperature differences can cause very strong winds. A problem with this model has been that hurricanes are almost always weaker than predicted. This problem is largely solved in a recent Nature paper by Emanuel ("Thermodynamic control of hurricane intensity," Vol. 491, 1999, pp. 665-669). The key notion is that the temperature of the warm ocean reservoir doesn't remain constant during the hurricane. The tremendous winds serve to churn the upper ocean sufficiently to mix cold water from lower depths into the the very warm and relatively thin surface layer. This decreases the difference in temperature between the reservoirs and consequently the intensity of the winds. There are still problems with the model as illustrated by some of the failed hindcasts in the paper, but those are due to other simplifications made to make the problem tractable. One should keep in mind the old modeler's adage that "all models are wrong, but some are more useful than others." posted by Steven Baum 10/22/1999 09:18:23 AM | link Thursday, October 21, 1999 posted by Steven Baum 10/21/1999 03:17:34 PM | link SCIENCE Philip Morrison was the book reviewer for Scientific American from 1966 until relatively recently. He is probably better known for his PBS series (and accompanying book) The Ring of Truth: An Inquiry Into How We Know What We Know, but his book-reviewing tenure has provided me with many more and varied pleasures. The best way to become acquainted with his book reviews (other than the not unrewarding task of obtaining 30 years of Scientific American back issues) is to obtain a copy of Philip Morrison's Long Look at the Literature: His Reviews of a Hundred Memorable Science Books (yet another out-of-print title to search for at ABE). His preface to that book contains passages that cause me as much envy as anything I can recall (or even imagine). Speaking of his years as a reviewer, he says, "We live with a kind of free bookshop in the house. One big room is lined with shelves that bear a thousand or twelve hundred new books at any time, all in transit. In they flood by mail and special parcel service, perhaps two hundred books a month on average, delectable and daunting, on topics from Akkadian to zymotechnology. On many days a whole canvas sack of two dozen books will appear in the front hall. Books are sent by one or another among some four hundred publishers." He goes on for several more paragraphs about how he deals with the "problem" of all those books. Every time I read this (I'm a real masochist that way) I end up in tears over one of the most moving passages I've ever read. Morrison's reviewing style leads me to think of him as a sort of John Updike for scientific literature. Both evoke a "Geez, has this guy really read everything ever written in his and most related fields?" sense of awe. Both also make you want to read books that obtain their stamp of approval. Fortunately, given the prolific habits of both, I'll not soon run out of new and recommended things to read. posted by Steven Baum 10/21/1999 03:10:04 PM | link YAMMERING/STRANGE LIT The first time I saw the (in)famous "dogs playing poker" motif was in a barbershop back in Ashville, Ohio many, many years ago. A recent Social Studies column in the Toronto Globe and Mail offers some details on the history of this bit of classic iconography. The motif had its origins in a series of paintings created by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1844-1934) for the Bigelow calendar company from 1906 to 1934. He painted at least 16 variations on the motif, with all of the originals now residing in private collections (undoubtedly because those tasteless cads at MoMA refuse to display them). The most well-known of them - called "A Friend in Need" - shows one dog slipping another the ace of clubs and ranks seventh in popularity on the U.S. Poster and Print Index. Even more interesting *gasp* than the paintings themselves is Coolidge. He was born well-off and founded both a bank and a newspaper, after which he got bored and moved to New York to try a more bohemian lifestyle. (Hardly a choice that would be deemed appropriate in the present climate in which success, money and happiness are the holy and conflated trinity.) And, in addition to his painting, he dabbled in the musical arts, with his accomplishments in that realm including a comic opera about a New Jersey mosquito epidemic. An entire chapter devoted to an appreciation of Coolidge can be found in the Big Damn Book of Sheer Manliness. In addition to appearing on posters, this timeless canine motif can also be found on tin signs, calendars (where it all started), ties, playing cards and t-shirts. I note also that ESPN has been showing a series of NFL commercials featuring poker-playing dogs for the last couple of years, with one of the bowsers speaking with the ever-annoying voice of Gilbert Gottfried. posted by Steven Baum 10/21/1999 01:55:01 PM | link SOFTWARE I created a Linux Metapage a few months ago when I couldn't find anything else to satisfy my need for a single screen's worth of links to (almost) anything and everything Linux. Okay, it's no longer a single screen (at least on my 17" monitor) since I got all hoity-toity and added some Linux-friendly or -specific search engines. posted by Steven Baum 10/21/1999 10:24:13 AM | link STRANGE LIT I've always enjoyed discovering literary meta-sources, i.e. books that contain pointers to other books and whose authors taste coincides with mine to a reasonable degree. My favorite - and a book that rekindled my interest in things literary 15 years ago - is Anthony Burgess's 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (out-of-print so try ABE). Burgess led me to many authors I probably wouldn't have discovered as quickly otherwise, and his taste for the unusual and the obscure meshes nicely with mine. A book obviously patterned after the Burgess volume (the author says as much in his preface) is David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. Although I'd read many more of Pringle's selections than Burgess's, Pringle still led me to appreciate some authors I'd ignored and even discover one or two. While looking up this volume on Amazon, I discovered two others I've not heard of but will probably obtain: Horror: The 100 Best Books by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman and Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books by H. R. F. Keating and Patricia Highsmith. In Writer's Choice: A Library of Rediscoveries by Linda Sternberg Katz and Bill Katz, a thousand books considered to be unjustly neglected, overlooked or forgotten according to a poll of over 400 writers are presented. Each of the listings is accompanied by a paragraph or two of commentary, and the book is divided in the categories of fiction, biography, literature, poetry, arts, philosophy, religion, social sciences, sports, history, war, economics, travel, psychology, food and cooking, and science. The fiction section occupies about two-thirds of the book. The maddening part about these books (and also many of my recommendations elsewhere) is how often they're out-of-print. This should probably lead to a lengthy rant on my part about our bestseller culture and its harmful effects on our literary tradition, but I'm feeling a bit too conciliatory today so I'll save it for some other time. posted by Steven Baum 10/21/1999 09:41:06 AM | link Wednesday, October 20, 1999 SOFTWARE IBM has re-released their Visualization Data Explorer as the Open Source Data Explorer or OpenDX. As you might guess from the name, it is now available under Open Source licensing terms. OpenDX is based on the last commercial release of Data Explorer (version 3.1.4B), with the license manager removed and the code reworked to reflect an Open Source development framework. OpenDX is a visualization framework for applying advanced visualization and data analysis techniques to data. It provides a full set of tools for manipulating, transforming, processing, realizing, rendering and animating data using methods based on points, lines, areas, volumes, images or combinations of geometric primitives. The interfaces include Motif widgets, visual programming, script language programming, and an API. An extended data-flow-driven client-server execution model is used wherein the client process is the GUI and resides on a single workstation. The server process does all the number crunching and can reside on the same workstation, another one, or on some combination of a cluster of machines with or without SMP. The available realization techniques for generating renderable geometry from data include color and opacity mapping, contours and isosurfaces, histograms, 2- and 3-D plotting and surface deformation for scalar data, as well as arrow plots, streamlines and streaklines for vector data. Also supported are data probling, arbitrary surface and volume sampling, and arbitrary cutting and mapping of planes. A myriad of non-graphical operations are also supported including arbitrary mathematical expressions, univariate statistics, image processing functions, and field and vector operations. The available data manipulation tools include those for point removal, subsetting by positions, sub- and super-sampling, grid construction, mapping, interpolation, regridding, sorting, etc. This is one of the best tools I've found for exploring the field of scientific visualization, which strives to find ways to make huge, multi-dimensional data sets reveal their patterns and other secrets. Having spent more than few hours trying to understand 2- and 3-D output fields from atmospheric and oceanic circulation models, I'll have to agree with those who say data visualization is as much an art as a science. Many online tutorials and courses are available including: Graphical Data Analysis by Jeff Banfield Advanced Topics in Computer Graphics Color in Scientific Visualization Proceedings of the 1996 IBM Visualization Data Explorer Symposium posted by Steven Baum 10/20/1999 07:33:01 PM | link SCIENCE As an oceanographer one hears many apocryphal tales of the size and power of waves. Jean Guichard's Lighthouses in the Storm animation is the most stunningly visceral example of this I think I've ever seen. One has to admire the fortitude of that lighthouse keeper. posted by Steven Baum 10/20/1999 03:12:02 PM | link STRANGE LIT Henry Stommel is one of the gods of the physical oceanography field. His technical accomplishments in oceanography will be chronicled more than once in this forum (after all, I named this machine after him), but he also wrote interesting books for the non-specialist. One of those books is Lost Islands: The Story of Islands That Have Vanished from the Nautical Charts, which you'll find (when you follow the link) is out-of-print so try ABE. In this book Stommel chronicles how, until surprisingly recently, nonexistent islands were still listed on various official charts and maps. The reasons for the listing of these non-islands range from poor navigation (i.e., almost all navigation until accurate timepieces were invented as is marvelously chronicled in Dava Sobel's Longitude), misprints, falsification (by mapmakers to protect themselves from plagiarism or by failed explorers trying to gain immortality), optical illusion, lonely and boozed-up sailors, and even a few islands which have really vanished due to volcanic/tectonic phenomenon. posted by Steven Baum 10/20/1999 11:11:52 AM | link Tuesday, October 19, 1999 STRANGE LIT Simply the best SF collection I've read in well over a decade is The Avram Davidson Treasury. Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis edit this volume containing 38 of Davidson's best short stories written between 1945 and his death in 1993. Each of the stories includes a preface by an author who admired Davidson, who has been called one of the great short story writers of the century, science fiction or otherwise. I've got the hardback edition which is beautifully produced as well as written (although a paperback edition is now available as well). posted by Steven Baum 10/19/1999 04:12:15 PM | link STRANGE LIT The NESFA Press is the "publishing pseudopod of the New England Science Fiction Association." At last count they had around 45 titles available, the most interesting of which for me are: The Silence of the Langford by David Landford - It's been said that nobody likes a wiseass except other wiseasses. Books like this remind me why I agree with that sentiment. His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth - This member of the fabled Futurians died of a heart attack at age 35, but still managed to turn out over a hundred stories, many among the best of the genre. This contains the 56 short stories he wrote alone and with collaborators. His best known work remains his novel-length collaborations with Frederick Pohl (The Space Merchants and Gladiator-at-Law). The Compleat Boucher - While Anthony Boucher was probably best known as a mystery author and editor, he also made many contributions to SF. This collects all of his known SF and fantasy stories in a single volume. Although I find these the most interesting, many of the remaining volumes are also worthy efforts. posted by Steven Baum 10/19/1999 03:52:07 PM | link SOFTWARE Steganography is the study of methods for hiding information in other information. The canonical example seems to be that of hiding a message in the least significant bits of an image file. That is, some or all of the least significant bits of the numbers that represent an image are replaced with a message that may or may not in itself be encrypted. The idea is that the resulting image - while not being a perfect copy of the original - will be close enough not to cause suspicion - especially if the original is not available for comparison. Thus a message can be sent and those for whom it is not intended will not even know that it exists. While this is a fairly well known concept, I offer it as a preface to a description of a software package called StegFS that implements a steganographic file system for Linux. StegFS not only encrypts data in a filesystem but also hides it so it cannot be proved that it is even there. It does this by placing hidden files into unused blocks of a partition that also contains normal files managed by the regular filesystem. A separate block allocation table is used that contains an entire 128-bit encrypted entry for each block, and which is present whether or not the steganographic system is being actively used. The only information that can be inferred from the presence of the table is that StegFS has been installed and not that it is being used. After installation StegFS acts exactly like the standard Ext2fs filesystem on Linux, except that it randomly overwrites deleted file blocks such that they are indistinguishable from other such blocks that may or may not be hiding something. A chosen number of security levels are created, with each requiring a separate passphrase for entry therein. A command requiring both a level number and a passphrase is used to open a given level, which makes accessible all files at that level and any lower levels. No information about possible higher levels is revealed. Thus you not only have plausible deniability about whether any hidden levels exist, but also about how many there might be. And even if one level is revealed, each lower level is still passphrase protected and the existence of higher levels remains hidden. Nifty idea, that. posted by Steven Baum 10/19/1999 01:51:46 PM | link SITINGS Not so long ago interfacing with the Web meant using either FTP or Telnet, and the content was in ASCII rather than HTML format. Do you remember all those *.txt files you used to hoarde and peruse after long FTP sessions? So where are they now? A site called The Textfile Directory has gathered together thousands of them in a wide range of categories, e.g. anarchy, ASCII art, drugs, food, humor, ezines, conspiracies, hacking, the occult, programming and, of course, sex. All the things that made the Web great then and still make it great now (albeit with more pictures, moving and otherwise). posted by Steven Baum 10/19/1999 11:28:35 AM | link SITINGS/YAMMERING According to the Death Test (found via memepool), I'll die on April 6, 2039 at the age of 79 (as opposed to the average final age of 67 for all participants thus far). My "high score" is mainly due to a relative lack of vices (other than beer and being cranky) as well the physical condition I've reached in the last seven months. The combination of looking 40 years of age in the eye and wanting to once again play ultimate frisbee reasonably well led me to go on a fitness tear starting in early April. The upshot (to now) is that I managed to bench press 305 pounds on the day before my birthday (July 12) and can now play ultimate for two hours without being immobile for the next five days. I'm not sure my knees will make it to 79 (or even 49) but I'll probably not much feel like using them by then anyway. Having reached the 300 lb. goal, I've cut way down on the weights and increased the aerobic portion of my workout to gradually reduce the load on the knees (who don't really care about whether the 215 pounds they're dragging around is fat or muscle). Even though I haven't played ultimate in over a decade, the only difference that jumped out at me was people referring to a specific type of throw that I used to call a tomato as a hammer. It took me exactly one game after 10+ years to remember how addictive the game is and how much I truly love to play it. It took another five months to get the legs into adequate condition, i.e. to where the pain only lasted for a day or two after each game. The throws are slowly coming along. I've regained the distance and accuracy of my backhand, about 75% of both for the forehand, and am just about back to par with all of the hammer throw variations (except of course for that incredibly difficult "Trondheim hammer dance" variation what with the shameful lack of fjords hereabouts). posted by Steven Baum 10/19/1999 10:20:17 AM | link STRANGE LIT During my over 20 years of poring through used book stores, I've found and bought more than a few oddities. I'll chronicle some of these finds in this irregular feature. The first oddity I'll report is a book entitled Loxfinger, a very Jewish parody of the James Bond genre by Sol Weinstein. It features an agent named Israel Bond, a supervillain named Lazarus Loxfinger, and a climactic battle between Bond and the villain's chief thug over a game of marbles. A search on ABE shows that he's written at least two other such parodies: Matzohball and On the Service of His Majesty, the Queen. He appears to enjoy the parody genre as the two other titles I find by him are Jonathan Segal Chicken and Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Sex. The Bond parody genre has been mined mostly heavily by other films including (arguably) many of the Roger Moore "official" Bond flicks, the overdone Casino Royale (currently out of print), the James Coburn Flint pictures Our Man Flint and In Like Flint, and the hugely awful Dean Martin Matt Helm series. I should also mention another spoof done by Coburn at around the same time as the Flint pictures called The President's Analyst, which holds up better than the Flint parodies today. It wasn't exactly a superspy spoof, but Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? sent up just about everything and predated MST3K by a quarter century. Allen took a bad Japanese spy film and dubbed new dialog onto it about a plot to steal a top-secret recipe for egg salad. On a historical note, the Allen film was primarily intended as a parody of the Peter Sellers vehicle What's Up Pussycat?, now primarly remembered for the title song as rendered by Tom Jones. posted by Steven Baum 10/19/1999 09:31:55 AM | link Monday, October 18, 1999 STRANGE LIT In my recent perambulations through the local Half Price Books I've found a couple of Ralph Steadman illustrated volumes among the publisher's overstocks. These additions to my library were Animal Farm (with the text by George Orwell, of course) and Still Life with Bottle: Whisky According to Ralph Steadman. I've been a big fan of Steadman since I first read about him in the Hunter S. Thompson collection The Great Shark Hunt (in a piece in which Thompson took Steadman to the Kentucky Derby and eventually had to save him from being lynched for creating wholly unflattering caricatures of various people), although he's a bit of an acquired taste. Steadman's style is a perfect fit for the Orwell volume, with the pigs and their toadies drawn such that they're every bit as ugly externally as they are internally. (I should also mention the recently televised TNT version of Animal Farm since I suspect those involved were more than slightly familiar with the Steadman-illustrated volume.) The second volume is a look at the history of and folklore behind the making of single malt Scotch whisky, with Steadman's quirky sense of humor providing sufficient irreverence to keep the book grounded. While looking up these titles at Amazon, a couple of other volumes jumped out at me. It seems that Steadman has also illustrated an edition of The Poor Mouth by Flann O'Brien, the satirical Irish author of many names. (O'Brien's funniest work can be found in The Best of Myles, a collection of columns written for the Irish Times under the name Myles na gCopaleen.) Another Steadman volume is a sort of follow-up to the whisky book entitled The Grapes of Ralph: Wine According to Ralph Steadman, where he apparently does wine the same favor as he did whisky in the earlier volume. posted by Steven Baum 10/18/1999 02:43:48 PM | link SCIENCE A medium- to long-range project is to make important and out-of-print physical oceanography books available via the Web. I find it disconcerting how many of the seminal works of my field are extremely difficult to obtain other than in large libraries. I've spent a lot of time and money obtaining many of them, but it's not going to get easier or cheaper for future students. I've made significant progress in getting an unpublished manuscript from the 1950s by Bob Reid entitled Dynamical Oceanography online, with it lacking mostly the figures at this point. There are 10-20 classics of the field that need to be somehow brought back into availability, with one, entitled Evolution of Physical Oceanography, having been first published in 1981 by the MIT Press and out-of-print in the early 1990s, being the most current technically advanced overview of the field published in a single volume. The list of texts goes back at least 100 years and encompasses those volumes that chronicled the important advances in the field - from significant expeditions to overviews of observational evidence to advances in the dynamical understanding of waves and currents. Ideally all of these will eventually be online in hypertext format as well as in some printable format such as PDF/PostScript. Also, they'll all be cross-referenced with each other as well as with my Glossary of Oceanography to enable key concepts and well as basic facts to be both well understood and traceable to their origins. posted by Steven Baum 10/18/1999 10:58:26 AM | link SITINGS The Advanced Book Exchange has nearly robbed me of one of the few reasons I like to travel, i.e. to peruse the shelves at used book stores. The clever person who started ABE had the bright idea to get used book stores from around the world to offer their wares online at a centralized, searchable database. At present ABE offers the wares of over 5000 such stores totaling over 15 million books. You can search by author, title, keywords and publisher. You can also narrow your search by specifying specific book stores, binding types, first editions, signed books and price range. I've failed to find a book I wanted on ABE only three times over the last couple of years, and have located such gems as Scream for Jeeves by Peter Cannon, a pastiche combining elements of both P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster series and the horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft. The only things I haven't been able to find are some rare, out-of-print physical oceanography textbooks I desire due to my interest in the history of my profession. I should also mention Powell's Books as another used book resource I've found valuable. posted by Steven Baum 10/18/1999 10:37:12 AM | link

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