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Atomism, any doctrine that explains complex phenomena in terms of aggregates of fixed particles or units. This philosophy has found its most successful application in natural science: according to the atomistic view, the material universe is composed of minute particles, which are considered to be relatively simple and immutable and too small to be visible. The multiplicity of visible forms in nature, then, is based upon differences in these particles and in their configurations; hence, any observable changes must be reduced to changes in these configurations.
The basic nature of atomism
Atomism is in essence an analytical doctrine. It regards observable forms in nature not as intrinsic wholes but as aggregates. In contrast to holistic theories, which explain the parts in terms of qualities displayed by the whole, atomism explains the observable properties of the whole by those of its components and of their configurations.
In order to understand the historical development of atomism and, especially, its relation to modern atomic theory, it is necessary to distinguish between atomism in the strict sense and other forms of atomism. Atomism in the strict sense is characterized by three points: the atoms are absolutely indivisible, qualitatively identical (i.e., distinct only in shape, size, and motion), and combinable with each other only by juxtaposition. Other forms of atomism are less strict on these points.
Atomism is usually associated with a "realistic" and mechanistic view of the world. It is realistic in that atoms are not considered as subjective constructs of the mind employed for the sake of getting a better grip upon the phenomena to be explained; instead, atoms exist in actual reality. By the same token, the mechanistic view of things, which holds that all observable changes can be reduced to changes of configuration, is not merely a matter of employing a useful explanatory model; the mechanistic thesis holds, instead, that all observable changes are caused by motions of the atoms. Finally, as an analytic doctrine, atomism is opposed to organismic doctrines, which teach that the nature of a whole cannot be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part by itself.
Various senses of atomism
The term atomism is derived from the Greek word atoma—"things that cannot be cut or divided."
Two basic types of atomism
The history of atomism can be divided into two more or less distinct periods, one philosophical and the other scientific, with a transition period between them (from the 17th to the 19th century). This historical fact justifies the distinction between philosophical and scientific atomism.
Philosophical atomism
In philosophical atomism, which is as old as Greek philosophy, attention was focused not on the detailed explanation of all kinds of concrete phenomena but on some basic general aspects of these phenomena and on the general lines according to which a rational explanation of these aspects was possible. These basic aspects were the existence in nature of a manifold of different forms and of continuous change. In what way could these features be explained? Philosophical atomism offered a general answer to that question. It did not, however, strictly confine itself to the general problem of explaining the possibility of change and multiplicity—not even in ancient Greek atomism, for in Greek thought philosophy and science still formed a unity. Consequently, atomists also tried to give more detailed explanations of concrete phenomena, such as evaporation, though these explanations were meant more to endorse the general doctrine of atomism than to establish a physical theory in the modern sense of the word. Such a theory was not yet possible, because a physical theory must be based upon indirect or direct information about the concrete properties of the atoms involved, and such information was not then available.
Modern atomic theory
With the development of a scientific atomic theory, the general philosophical problems gradually disappeared into the background. All attention is focused on the explanation of concrete phenomena. The properties of the atoms are determined in direct relationship with the phenomena to be explained. For this reason the chemical atomic theory of the 19th century supposed that each identified chemical element has its own specific atoms and that each chemical compound has its own molecules (fixed combinations of atoms). What particles act as unchanged and undivided units depends upon what kind of process is involved. Some phenomena, such as evaporation, are explained by a process in which the molecules remain unchanged and identical. In chemical reactions, however, the molecules lose their identity. Their structures are broken up, and the composing atoms, while retaining their own identity, are rearranged into new molecules. With nuclear reactions a new level is reached, on which the atoms themselves are no longer considered as indivisible: more elementary particles than the atoms appear in the explanations of nuclear reactions.
Extensions to other fields
Whereas classical atomism spoke mainly of material atoms (i.e., of particles of matter), the success of the atomic doctrine encouraged the extension of the general principles of atomism to other phenomena, more or less removed from the original field of application. Rather plausible, for example, was the extension of atomism to the phenomena of electricity. There were reasons to suppose the existence of an elementary charge of electricity associated with an elementary material particle, the electron (19th century). A second fruitful extension concerned energetic processes (20th century). Some experimental data suggested the hypothesis that energy can exist only in amounts that are whole multiples of an elementary quantity of energy. Extensions of the idea of an atomic structure to amounts of gravitation and even to time have been attempted but have not been sufficiently confirmed.
More removed from the original field of application of atomism is a theory known as logical atomism (developed by the eminent philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell and by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his early period), which supposes that a perfect isomorphism exists between an "atom" of language (i.e., an atomic proposition) and an atomic fact; i.e., for each atomic fact, there is a corresponding atomic proposition. An atomic proposition is one that asserts that a certain thing has a certain quality—e.g., "This is red." An atomic fact is the simplest kind of fact and consists in the possession of a quality by some individual thing.
Another application of atomism (albeit in a moot sense) lay in the monadology of the philosopher-scientist G.W. Leibniz. According to Leibniz, the atoms of Democritus, who provided the paradigm case of ancient Greek atomism, are not true unities; possessing size and shape, they still are divisible in principle. The ultimate constituents of things must, therefore, be points, said Leibniz, not mathematical but metaphysical points—i.e., points of real existence. They are indeed a kind of soul, which he came to call "monads."
In psychology, atomism is a doctrine about perception. It holds that what human beings perceive is a mosaic of atomic sensations, each independent and unconnected with any other sensation. According to the early modern empiricist David Hume and the pre-World War I father of experimental psychology Wilhelm Wundt, the fact that humans nevertheless experience an ordered whole formed from the unordered "atoms" of perception is caused by the mind's capacity to combine them by "association."
Diverse philosophical characterizations of atomism
The intrinsic nature of the atoms
In 1927 the Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître formulated the hypothesis that the present high degree of differentiation of matter in space and the complexity of forms displayed by the various astronomical objects must have resulted from a violent explosion and subsequent dispersal of an originally highly compressed homogeneous material, a kind of "primitive atom," containing all of the matter that exists. From the philosophical viewpoint this hypothesis is interesting. By its attempt to reduce the manifold to unity, it recalls the beginning of Greek philosophy, which was also inspired by a thesis of the unity of being, propounded by the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides. Even apart from their respective contexts, there is, of course, a great difference between Lemaître's and Parmenides' conceptions of the unity of being, for the latter combined the thesis of the unity of being with that of the immutability of being.
Although it would be wrong to classify Parmenides among the atomists, it is nonetheless appropriate that, in an introduction to the diverse forms of atomism, his conception of reality as just one being should be mentioned. Parmenides' thesis is not only historically but also logically the cornerstone of atomistic thought. Any atomic theory can be interpreted as an attempt to reconcile the thesis of the unity and immutability of being with the fact that the senses observe multiplicity and change. The different ways in which the unity and immutability are understood characterize the different forms of atomism.
Atoms as lumpish corpuscles
As corpuscles (minute particles), atoms can either be endowed with intrinsic qualities or be inherently qualityless.
The most striking basic differences in the material world, which lead to a first classification of substances in nature, are those between solids, liquids, gases, and fire. These differences are an observed datum that must be accounted for by every scientific theory of nature. It was, therefore, only natural that one of the first attempts to explain the phenomena of nature was based upon these differences and proclaimed that there are four qualitatively different primitive constituents of everything—namely, the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire (Empedocles, 5th century bce). This theory dominated physics and chemistry until the 17th century.
Although the theory of the four elements is not necessarily an atomistic theory, it obviously lends itself to interpretation in atomistic terms—namely, when the elements are conceived as smallest parts that are immutable. In this case, all observable changes are reduced to the separation and commingling of the primitive elementary substances. Thus, Parmenides' thesis that being is immutable is maintained, whereas the absolute unity of being is abandoned. Yet, the fact that the infinite variety of forms and changes in nature is reduced to just one type of process between only four elementary kinds of atoms shows its affinity with the thesis of the unity of all being.
Notwithstanding the great disparity between the theory of the four elements and modern chemistry, it is clear that modern chemistry falls into the same class of atomic theories as that of Empedocles. There are differences, of course, but these will be deferred for later discussion.
More removed from the original thesis of Parmenides was the theory of his contemporary Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, which assumed as many qualitatively different "atoms" as there are different qualitied substances in nature. Inasmuch as these atoms, which Anaxagoras called "seeds," are eternal and incorruptible, this theory still contains an idea borrowed from Parmenides. A special feature of Anaxagoras's theory is that every substance contains all possible kinds of seeds and is named after the kind of seed that predominates in it. Since the substance also contains other kinds of seeds, it can change into something else by the separation of its seeds.
Another interesting form of atomism with inherently qualitied atoms, also based on the doctrine of the four elements, was proposed by Plato. On mathematical grounds he determined the exact forms that the smallest parts of the elements must have. Fire has the form of a tetrahedron, air of an octahedron, water of an icosahedron, and earth of a cube. Inasmuch as he characterized the atoms of the four elements by different mathematical forms, Plato's conception can be considered as a transition between the qualitative and quantitative types of atomism.
The most significant system of atomism in ancient philosophy was that of Democritus (5th century bce). Democritus agreed with Parmenides on the impossibility of qualitative change but did not agree with him on that of quantitative change. This type of change, he maintained, is subject to mathematical reasoning and therefore possible. By the same token, Democritus also denied the qualitative multiplicity of visible forms but accepted a multiplicity based on purely quantitative differences. In order to reduce the observable qualitative differences to quantitative differences, Democritus postulated the existence of invisible atoms, characterized only by quantitative properties: size, shape, and motion. Observed qualitative changes are based upon changes in the combination of the atoms, which themselves remain intrinsically unchanged. Thus Democritus arrived at a position that was defined above as atomism in the strict sense. In order to make the motion of atoms possible, this atomism had to accept the existence of the void (empty space) as a real entity in which the atoms can move and rearrange themselves. By accepting the void and by admitting a plurality of beings, even an infinite number of them, Democritus seemed to abandon—even more than Empedocles did—the unity of being. Nevertheless, there are sound reasons to maintain that, in spite of this doctrine of the void, Democritus's theory remained close to Parmenides' thesis of the unity of being, for Democritus's atoms were conceived in such a way that almost no differences can be assigned to them. First of all, there are no qualitative differences; the atoms differ only in shape and size. Second, the latter difference is characterized by continuity; there are no privileged shapes and no privileged sizes. All shapes and sizes exist, but they could be placed in a row in such a manner that there would be no observable difference between successive shapes and sizes. Thus, not even the differences in shape and size seem to offer any ground explaining why atoms should be different. By accepting an infinite number of atoms, Democritus retained as much as possible the principle that being is one. With respect to the acceptance of the void, it must be stressed that the void in the eyes of Democritus is more nonbeing than being. Thus, even this acceptance does not seriously contradict the unity of being.
Atoms as sheer extension
Democritus declared quantitative differences to be intelligible because they are subject to mathematical reasoning. Precisely this relationship between quantitative differences and mathematics made it impossible for Descartes (17th century) to think along the atomistic lines of Democritus. If the only thing that is clearly understandable in matter is mathematical proportions, then matter and spatial extension are the same—a conclusion that Descartes did not hesitate to draw. Consequently, he rejected not only the idea of indivisible atoms but also that of the void. In his eyes the concept "void" is a contradiction in terms. Where there is space, there is by definition extension and, therefore, matter.
Yet, however strange it may seem in view of his identification of matter with extension, Descartes offered nonetheless a fully developed theory of smallest particles. To the questions that arise immediately as to how these particles are separated and distinct from each other, Descartes answered that a body or a piece of matter is all of that which moves together. In the beginning of the world all matter was divided into particles of equal size. These particles were in constant motion and filled all of space. As, however, there was no empty space for moving particles to move into, they could only move by taking the places vacated by other particles that, however, were themselves in motion. Thus the motion of a single particle involved the motion of an entire closed chain of particles, called a vortex. As a result of the original motion, some particles were gradually ground into a spherical form, and the resulting intermediary space became filled with the surplus splinters or "grindings." Ultimately, three main types of particles were formed: (1) the splinter materials, which form the finest matter and possess the greatest velocity; (2) the spherical particles, which are less fine and have a smaller velocity; and (3) the biggest particles, which originated from those original particles that were not subject to grinding and became united into larger parts.
Thus Descartes could construct an atomic theory without atoms in the classical sense. Although this theory as such has not been of great value for the scientific atomic theory of modern times, its general tendency has not been without importance. However arbitrarily and speculatively Descartes may have proceeded in the derivation of the different kinds of corpuscles, he finally arrived at corpuscles characterized by differences in mass, velocity, amount of motion, etc.—properties that can be treated mathematically.
Atoms as centres of force: dynamic particles
Most systems of atomism depict the action between atoms in terms of collision—i.e., as actual contact. In Newton's theory of gravitation, however, action between bodies is supposed to be action at a distance—which means that the body in question acts everywhere in space. As its action is the expression of its existence, it is difficult to confine its existence to the limited space that it is supposed to occupy according to its precise shape and size. There is, therefore, no reason for a sharp distinction between occupied and empty space. Consequently, the mind finds it natural to consider the atoms not as extended particles but as point-centres of force. This conception was worked out by the Dalmatian scientist R.G. Boscovich (1711–87), who attempted to account for all known physical effects in terms of action at a distance between point-particles, dynamic centres of force.
Atoms as psychophysical monads
The idea of applying the atomistic conceptions not only to material but also to psychical phenomena is as old as atomism itself. Democritus spoke of the atoms of the soul. According to the principles of his doctrine, these atoms can differ only quantitatively from those of the body: they are smoother, rounder, and finer. This makes it easy for them to move into all parts of the body. Basically, however, the atoms of the soul are no less material than other atoms.
In Leibniz's monadology the situation is quite different. Leibniz did not first conceive of material atoms and then only later interpret the soul in terms of these atoms; from the beginning, he conceived of his "atoms," the monads, in terms of an analogy with the soul. A monad is much more a spiritual than a material substance. Monads have no extension; they are centres of action but not, first of all, in the physical sense. Each of the monads is gifted with some degree of perception; each mirrors the universe in its own way. Monads differ from each other, however, in the degree of perception of which they are capable.
The immutability of atoms
By their nature all atomic theories accept a certain degree of immutability of the atoms, for without any fixed units no rational analysis of complex phenomena is possible. At least with respect to the stable factors in the analysis involved, the atoms have to be considered as immutable. According to atomism in the strict sense, this immutability has to be interpreted in an absolute way.
The same absolute interpretation appeared in classical chemistry, although its atomic theory deviated from atomism in the strict sense by assuming qualitatively different atoms and by assuming molecules (rather stable aggregates of atoms). The decisive point, however, is that molecules are formed by mere juxtaposition of atoms without any intrinsic change of the qualities of the atoms. Modern atomic theory, in contrast, gives a less rigid interpretation of the immutability of elementary particles: the particles that build up an atom do not retain their identity in an absolute way.
In some philosophical atomistic theories, the immutability of the atoms has been understood in a highly relative sense. This interpretation arose mainly in the circles of those Aristotelian philosophers who tried to combine atomistic principles with the principle of Aristotle that elements change their nature when entering a chemical compound. The combination of both principles led to the doctrine known as the minima naturalia theory, which holds that each kind of substance has its specific minima naturalia, or smallest entities in nature. Minima naturalia are not absolutely indivisible: they can be divided but then become minima naturalia of another substance; they change their nature. In a chemical reaction, the minima of the reagents change into the minima of the substances that result from the reaction.
Other differences
Atomisms also differ regarding the number of atoms, whether they occupy a void, and how they relate to one another.
Number of atoms
As has already been mentioned, Democritus introduced the hypothesis that the atoms are infinite in number. Although one may question whether the term infinite has to be taken in its strict sense, there is no doubt that by using this term Democritus wanted not merely to express the triviality that, on account of their smallness, there has to be an enormous quantity of atoms. Democritus also had a strong rational argument for postulating a strictly infinite quantity of atoms: only thus could he exclude the existence of atoms that specifically differ from each other.
When in modern science the problem of the number of atoms arises, the situation is quite different from that of the Greek atomists. There is now much more detailed information about the properties of the atoms and of the elementary particles, and there is also in astrophysical cosmology some information about the universe as a whole. Consequently, the attempt to calculate the total number of atoms that exist is not entirely impossible, although it remains a highly speculative matter. In a time (around 1930) when all chemical atoms were supposed to be composed of electrons and protons, the pioneering joint-relativity-quantum astrophysicist A.S. Eddington calculated the number of these elementary particles to be 2 × 136 × 2256, or approximately 1079, arguing that, since matter curves space, this is just the number of particles required barely to close the universe up into a hypersphere and to fill up all possible existence states.
The existence of the void
To Democritus the existence of the void was a necessary element in atomistic theory. Without the void the atoms could not be separated from each other and could not move. In the 17th century Descartes rejected the existence of the void, whereas Newton's conception of action at a distance was in perfect harmony with the acceptance of the void and the drawing of a sharp distinction between occupied and nonoccupied space. The success of the Newtonian law of gravitation was one of the reasons that atomic theories came to prevail in the 18th century. Even with respect to the phenomena of light, the corpuscular and hence atomic theory of Newton, which held that light is made of tiny particles, was adopted almost universally, in spite of Huygens's brilliant development of the wave hypothesis.
When, at the beginning of the 19th century, the corpuscular theory of light in its turn was abandoned in favour of the wave theory, the case for the existence of the void had to be reopened, for the proponents of the wave theory did not think in terms of action at a distance; the propagation of waves seemed to presuppose instead a medium not only with geometrical properties but with physical ones as well. At first the physical properties of the medium, the ether, were described in the language of mechanics; later they were described in that of the electromagnetic field theory of J.C. Maxwell. Yet, to a certain extent, the old dichotomy between occupied and nonoccupied space continued to exist. According to the ether theory, the atoms moved without difficulty in the ether, whereas the ether pervaded all physical bodies.
In contemporary science this dichotomy has lost its sharpness, owing to the fact that the distinction between material phenomena, which were supposed to be discontinuous, and the phenomena of light, which were supposed to be continuous, appears to be only a relative one. In conclusion, it can be claimed that, although modern theories still speak of space and even of "empty" space, this "emptiness" is not absolute: space has come to be regarded as the seat of the electromagnetic field, and it certainly is not the void in the sense in which the term was used by Democritus.
Atoms in external aggregation versus in internal relationship
In most forms of atomism it is a matter of principle that any combination of atoms into a greater unity can only be an aggregate of these atoms. The atoms remain intrinsically unchanged and retain their identity. The classical atomic theory of chemistry was based upon the same principle: the union of the atoms into the molecules of a compound was conceived as a simple juxtaposition. Each chemical formula (e.g., H2O, H2SO4, NaCl, etc.) reflects this principle through the tacit implication that each atom is still an H, O, or S, etc., even when in combination to form a molecule.
Chemistry had twofold reasons for adopting this principle. One reason was observational, the other philosophical. The fact that some of the properties of a chemical compound could, by simple juxtaposition, be derived from those of the elements (the molecular weight, for example, equals the simple sum of the respective atomic weights) was a strong factual argument in favour of the principle. Many properties of the components, however, could not be determined in this way. In fact, most chemical properties of compounds differed considerably from those of the composing elements. Consequently, the principle of juxtaposition could not be based on factual data alone. It was in need of a more general support. This support was offered by the philosophical idea that inspired all atomism—namely, that if complex phenomena cannot be explained in terms of aggregates of more elementary factors, they cannot be explained at all.
For the evaluation of this idea, the development of the scientific atomic theory is highly interesting, especially with respect to the interpretation of the concept of an aggregate. Is the only interpretation of this concept that of an assemblage in which the components preserve their individuality—like, for instance, a heap of stones? Modern atomic theory offers an answer to this question. This theory still adheres to the basic principle that a complex structure has to be explained in terms of aggregates of more elementary factors, but it interprets the term aggregate in such a way that it is not limited to a mere juxtaposition of the components. In modern theories atomic and molecular structures are characterized as associations of many interacting entities that lose their own identity. The resulting aggregate originates from the converging contributions of all of its components. Yet, it forms a new entity, which in its turn controls the behaviour of its components. Instead of mere juxtaposition of components, there is an internal relationship between them. Or, expressed in another way: in order to know the properties of the components, one has to study not only the isolated components but also the structures into which they enter. To a certain extent modern atomic theory has bridged the gap between atomistic and holistic thought.
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
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Pierre Gassendi: Skepticism and atomismIn 1641 the theologian and mathematician Marin Mersenne invited Gassendi and several other eminent thinkers to contribute comments on the manuscript of René Descartes's
Meditations(1641); Gassendi's comments, in which he argued that Descartes had failed to establish the reality and certainty of innate…
Judaism: The Karaites…Muʿtazilite
kalāmwholesale, including its atomism. The Muʿtazilite atomists held that everything that exists consists of minute, discrete parts. This applies not only to bodies but also to space, time, motion, and the "accidents"—that is, qualities, such as colour—which the Islamic and Jewish atomists regarded as being joined to the…
Islamic arts: General considerationsThe atomist theory, widely accepted in Islam since the 10th century, leaves no room for a "dramatic" movement; it teaches that God creates everything anew in every moment, and what is called a "law of nature" is nothing but God's custom, which he can interrupt whenever…
More About Atomism28 references found in Britannica articles
Assorted References
- Berzelius' nomenclature
- comparison to hylomorphism
- In hylomorphism
- denial of Not-Being
- place in atomic theory
aspect of
- Indian philosophy
- Pre-Socratic philosophy
influence on
- Cartesian mechanism
- Greek medicine


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The tourism council of Bhutan will issue the Bhutan visa to Traveler's only when you wire transfer 100% tour cost in advance. Tourism council of Bhutan will hold the tour payment and then they will release the tour cost to our account deducting the Royalty and taxes only when you have left Bhutan.
The ways of paying the tour Cost:
1. Please deposit the 100% tour payment to our USD Bank accounts by wire transfer after you confirm the tour package.
2. Please email or fax us the Bank telegraphic transfer receipt copy.
To wire transfer the Tour payment to Bhutan National Bank, from any Place outside Bhutan, Please request your Bank to remit money through Bhutan National Bank Ltd. We will provide you the bank details once you conform your tour.
Ultimate Beneficiary details :
Account Holder's Name: World Tour Plan
Account No: 0000069080011
Account Holder's CID: 10211004645
Address : World Tour Plan, Post Box No. 2032, Thimphu, Bhutan.

subset: commoncrawl


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Local Pancake Fundraiser Pays Out. Kiwanis Club Presents Checks This Week To 13 Organizations
If you know of someone who is in a civic organization it's time to say thanks.
The oldest and largest Kiwanis Club in Sioux Falls, (Kiwanis Club of Sioux Falls) has raised over $500,000 over the years to support local organizations that work with children. We raise funds through our Kiwanis Pancake House at the Empire Fair and by sponsors that support the work we do for local children in need.
This year, the Kiwanis Club of Sioux Falls, will be handing out $21,500 to 13 organizations on May 7th at our regular scheduled meeting, which starts at noon and ends at 1pm.
The meeting is held at the Royal Fork, just south of Macy's at the Empire Mall.


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Grant's retreat: Board departure a mystery
Gary Grant is no stranger to the hot seat. In fact, he's been on it pretty consistently since he was elected to the at-large seat on the Albemarle County School Board in 1999.
Grant ran for office as the information candidate, and, true to his word, he published a clear and detailed account of every school board meeting. His At-Large District Constituents' Report managed to irk fellow board members and resulted in public rebukes when he annually reported which teachers didn't make the cut to have their contracts renewed by the county.
But his insistence on making public records public earned him as many admirers too– including the esteemed Virginia Coalition for Open Government.
What caused him to throw down his pen at the March 27 school board meeting and publicly acknowledge in a 1:42am email sent to the 300 recipients of his Constituents' Report that not only did he not want to be at that particular meeting, but that he wasn't running for reëlection?
Was it weariness with a contentious school board? Was it an upcoming election against well-organized opponent Brian Wheeler?
He won't say. But he denies he's having a midlife crisis.
Grant's only other forays into politics came at his Iowa high school where he served as freshman and junior class president. "No one else wanted the job," he says, because it involved running a magazine sale and organizing the prom.
Before joining the school board, Grant was best known for his journalistic stints at the Observer and WINA.
His radio career began at age 12. "My father owned a radio station, and he needed Saturdays off so he could go to Iowa State football games," recalls Grant.
He admits that reporting got in his blood, but says, "I don't miss the money."
These days, Grant is a house dad by choice. He referees soccer games and works part time at the post office in Ruckersville. He estimates that school board business takes an average 15 to 20 hours a week, and he marvels at how people who hold full-time jobs manage to serve.
He clears up one misperception. "Some people think I'm a social conservative as well as a fiscal conservative. I'm not," says Grant, citing his support for a woman's right to choose and his opposition to the death penalty.
And where does the soon-to-be ex-school board member see himself in five years? "I'd still like to be refereeing soccer," he says. And while he doesn't exclude taking up politics again in the future, for right now, "I'm not actively thinking about it."
Meanwhile, Grant remains mum about why he's not running again, but perhaps the real story will come out if he ever manages to live his Walter Mitty fantasy.
Age: 54
What brought you here? A job at WCHV in 1984 after vacationing here in 1982
What's worst about living here? Land prices
Favorite hangout? Kitchen table
Most overrated virtue? Compromise
What would people be surprised to know about you? I used to open bodies for autopsies at a Seattle morgue in 1971.
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? Shyness in social settings
What accomplishment are you proudest of? Having taught school for six years
What do people find most annoying about you? I don't know, but I'd like to.
Whom do you admire? Del. Rob Bell, Larry Sabato, Dick Mountjoy, Rosa Parks, skilled workers (carpenters, plumbers, masons, etc.)
Favorite book? How Schools Really Work (Saul Cooperman) and Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)
What subject causes you to rant? Public officials who keep public information from the public
What thrills you about life in the 21st century?
"Millennials" (the generation born since 1982)
What creeps you out about life in the 21st century?
The misery of children in Third World countries
What do you drive? 1998 Toyota 4-Runner
What's in your car CD player right now?
Never anything. I prefer listening to news.
What's your next journey? I'd like to save some money to take our adopted daughter to Russia to meet her two sisters, whom she hasn't seen for 10 years.
What's the most trouble you've ever gotten in? Jailed in Kampala, Uganda, in 1972 under suspicion of spying while in the Peace Corps.
What do you regret? October 31, 1993 [On that date, Grant's, 21-month-old daughter died in her crib of natural but unknown causes.]
Favorite comfort food? Popcorn
What's always in your refrigerator? Unused soy sauce, hot mustard, and duck sauce packets from Chinese restaurants
Must-see TV? USA Men's National Soccer Team games
Favorite cartoon? Sally Forth
Describe a perfect day. Breakfast of waffles and decaf coffee on a sunny porch, browsing antique stores with my spouse, watching my children's soccer games, and finishing the day with a spicy Chinese buffet.
Walter Mitty fantasy? Writing a best-selling novel based on characters from the Albemarle School Board
Who'd play you in the movie? Cary Grant– we have the same birthday.
Most embarrassing moment? Dropping a friend's birthday cake on her doorstep
Best advice you ever got? No good deed goes unpunished Favorite bumper sticker? Ignore your rights and they'll go away.


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John Carmack Interview: GPU Race, Intel Graphics, Ray Tracing, Voxels and more!
Carmack Speaks
Last week we were in Dallas, Texas covering Quakecon 2011 as well as hosting our very own PC Perspective Hardware Workshop. While we had over 1100 attendees at the event and had a blast judging the case mod contest, one of the highlights of the event is always getting to sit down with John Carmack and pick his brain about topics of interest. We got about 30 minutes of John's time over the weekend and pestered him with questions about the GPU hardware race, how Intel's intergrated graphics (and AMD Fusion) fit in the future of PCs, the continuing debate about ray tracing, rasterization, voxels and infinite detail engines, key technologies for PC gamers like multi-display engines and a lot more!
One of our most read articles of all time was our previous interview with Carmack that focused a lot more on the ray tracing and rasterization debate. If you never read that, much of it is still very relevant today and is worth reading over.
This year though John has come full circle on several things including ray tracing, GPGPU workloads and even the advantages that console hardware has over PC gaming hardware.
Continue reading to see the full video interview and our highlights from it!!
Note: Due to popular demand, we
are going to have a transcript ready (likely tomorrow) as the third and 4th page of this article.
First up on our list of topics was the importance of mathematics in the world of game and game engine design. Carmack stated that though his math background was a bit overstated in some cases he was able to build the engines we all know and love with a basic, applicable knowledge of high school topics such as geometry and calculus. The key is knowing how to apply these things to a problem that you haven't seen before as opposed to being able to answer a question on a test. Of course, as engines have developed into more and more complicated pieces of software the need for higher level mathematics are required for physical simulations though you can still solve much of the world's problems (at least in a software sense) by time-slicing and iterating.
The topic of the GPU hardware race came up early in our talk and the response Carmack gave us was pretty interesting. Stating "I don't worry about the GPU hardware at all, I worry about the drivers" seemed to be a reiterated point. This became very apparent to id Software while developing RAGE where even though the PC had truly an order of magnitude more horsepower than the consoles, it struggled to keep up with the "minimum latency", get feedback here, update data there, etc and do it all to maintain a 60 Hertz frame rate. DirectX 11 and multi-threaded drivers might have helped things but he still claims that they are far from the solution he envisions: direct surfacing of the memory system. The process of updating a textures on the PC is on the order of "tens of thousands of times slower" than on the Xbox 360 and PS3. AMD did implement a "multi-texture" update specifically for id Tech 5 which should help, but from the interview you can tell that Carmack really does want more done on this topic.
One interesting side effect of this talk – Intel's integrated graphics actually has impressed Carmack quite a bit and the shared memory address space could potentially fix much of this issue. AMD's Fusion architecture, seen in the Llano APU and upcoming Trinity design, would also fit into the same mold here. He calls it "almost a forgone conclusion" that eventually this type of architecture is going to be the dominant force. You might remember our discussion of this topic with Josh's analysis of AMD's Fusion System Architecture – it would appear that AMD has a potential ally on its side if they are paying attention.
Carmack still thinks the Intel integrated graphics is on feature parity with other integrated options and that people are going to be surprised in the not-too-distant future when the "free" graphics you get with your Intel CPU is good enough to play pretty much any game you want. He admits of course that the software and driver implementations from Intel need a lot of work and he has "high hopes" that with the shared memory potential there Intel will push forward with this "closer to the metal" mentality. There is also the outlet for console developers to more directly develop for integrated graphics than for discrete graphics (as it would be more similar to the console architectures) and games might run faster on integrated than low cost discrete solutions.
Larrabee was discussed as well – and though a couple of years ago it was thought this might be the "sweep" architecture across all the coming generation of consoles, it clearly didn't meet the performance requirements to be successful yet. Instead, it seems obvious that there are again going to be multiple architectures on the pending console designs and there could be "strong contenders" based around the ARM architecture. But any next-generation console NEEDS to be a 64-bit architecture and with ARM just now integrating 64-bit designs for the first time, it leads us to believe we are a couple of steps away from seeing ARM in your next gaming console.
Carmack does hope that Sony avoids the Cell architecture all together due to the difficulty in development.
Video News
I like the summary but, Will there be a written transcript of the interview?
I can read faster than watch and I can read the articles during sanity breaks at work.
Its rare that I make time for an internet video, but I will try to for this one.
We might try to do that but we hadn't planned on it. The whole idea of video (and then the written summary) was to NOT do a complete and direct transcription.
I think the subject matter is technical enough that you can assume the interested readers are not illiterate :) And yeah, i don't have time to watch a talking head for 32 minutes when i could read the transcript in 10.
And yet you have time to come on here and post 2x about it, when instead you could have watched the interview with the great illustrative video samples of games and graphic techniques.
On a (crappy) mobile here, please make a transcript!
Also, making a transcript of anything Carmack says just makes sense :)
We get enough requests and we'll probably do it. :)
+1 for a transcript.
We are currently working on it!
Another +1 for a transcript. Pleeeease?
Thanks, Dr Smokey.
We'll have sometime tomorrow early afternoon, promise.
Here it is: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editorial/John-Carmack-Interview-GPU-Race-I...
It's rare that I leap to Sony's defence, but I feel I should so here. The reason the PS3 doesn't use full 64 bit addresses is simply because it doesn't need to. John seems to find the decision strange that they don't have a >4GiB address space, but given that there's only 512MiB of memory (plus some extra devices etc), having 8byte pointers would just be a waste of space that could be better used for other stuff.
The first few versions of the PS3 SDK were truly 64bit, but enough developers complained about the waste of space using long pointers that didn't need to be long that Sony saw sense and fixed it. The 360 similarly has a 64bit processor, but only bothers with a 32bit address space, simply because it's enough.
Another vote for the transcript. Besides being faster to read than view, a transcript would allow so much more. A transcript leads to indexing, which leads to searching, which leads to traffic from search engines, and ultimately more traffic on your site as a whole. This provides a much higher value for everyone far beyond the enjoyment and edification of just watching a John Carmack interview.
But anyways, thanks again for the interview. Always great to hear what John has been up to and the state of game development.
Transcript please!
We do have an editor working on it now. We'll add it as third page on this review today or tomorrow.
Thanks for reading!
Indeed, Tim is that lucky man.
Ask and you shall receive (sometimes), the interview transcript:
Thanks for the transcript, Tim!
(Great summary though, thanks for that!)
I for one am blown away by the clarity of the questions and Carmack's clear replies. You don't get a proper appreciation for how great an extemporaneous speaker Carmack is in a transcript, although the data density is certainly high enough to make a transcript useful. But I think it is worth the time to just listen to two smart people going at a complex subject.
Well done!
Thanks Paul!
1 TB is not that much anymore.
My PC is busy so I will cut this short ;) :)
It sure would be a lot to DOWNLOAD though, right?
I love how this interview guy pretends like he knows what Carmack is saying. Dude, I'm about to get a PhD in Neuroscience and I've been watching Carmack talk for 10 years, and I barely can follow what he says even with my failed CS degree. I would never be like "OK..sure..cool..right...OK..yeah..Cool..OK...yeah" when talking with the pioneers of my field. And then read some pre-made questions to ask him. OMG dude! Have you even played DOOM? Romero would make you his bitch.
PhD in Neuroscience? That's cool and all but you know, he isn't talking about neuroscience. If you managed to fail CS degree, it's not surprising that you can't follow Carmack. I could follow most of the stuff he was talking about and who knows what kind of background the interviewer has. He at least had good questions on the subject.
Exactly. There was very little stuff I didn't understand. After working in the graphics field for 11 years now, I have a pretty good grasp. Could I compete with Carmack in SAYING all of that? Nope. Could I understand most of it? Yup.
Great interview - though I dont think Ryan knows what he's talking about most of the time- check out the nervous nods in slightly the wrong places to simulate understanding.
Remember though, John is supposed to be doing the talking, not Ryan, and it succeeds in that aim.
Oh - previous poster, said same thing. Dont be hard on ryan: its all geeky techy stuff; not understanding is more a function of John's extreme geekiness than Ryans lack of intelligence. Low level programming knowledge does not equate to god-like wisdom. It's the guys job & passion, after all.
From what I've seen of Rage so far, it looks just like another boring shooter. Totally unexciting. Pioneer or no pioneer back in the day, I'm not that interested in their games.
I thought the interviewer saying "OK" "OK" "Right" "Right" constantly was really annoying.
OK Right
Mm hmm...
Thanks heaps for the transcript! I really appreciate your effort.
Ryan, not intending to mean or insulting, but so I might not feel any more of an idiot that I already am, did you really instantaneously get what he was saying? If you did, you are incredibly knowledgeable in this area of expertise. Wish I got half of it. I will listen again, but doubt that will improve my comprehension. Certainly doesn't take much to get John talking, and I guess in consideration of time constraints, you were regularly saying "OK" and "right" to move him along and get to the next question. Personally, though I really liked the range of questions, I would have been fine listening to him answer one question in the time allowed. Anyway, good job.
You are correct - part of the reason I was saying those things was attempting to find a break point to interject and get some more questions in. Obviously I failed.
Also, as for how much of it I understood, I think I got about 75% as we went - I don't think I am near the level of many other technical writers out there but having dealt with this for 11 years I picked up quite a bit.
lol, now you know how I feel trying to get a word in edgewise with Katy! :P
I really, REALLY want Carmack's q2 shirt.
Transcript = awesomeness.
Thanks guys :)
Good interview and good diverse (and interesting) questions!
Listening to Carmack is always interesting. Thanks for doing this!
This interview is the exact opposite of an interview with say Robert Dinero. With him you could bearly get him to say anything other than yes and no to your questions so the time was filled with the interviewer trying to fill the space by talking. Carmack is an interviewers dream. You ask one question and sit back for 20 minutes a let him go. That being said, he is obviously brilliant. Notice for instance he rarely says "um".... or "right"... or any other things that allow you time to think stuff out, it just flowes out perfectly.
Yeah, he is a talker, that's for sure! He always has a lot of interesting things to say.
Not to belittle Mr. Carmack in anyway, but most of his interview answers were really at a high-level / project manager style. This is nothing a smooth talking software salesman couldn't pull off. And for the lack of "um..." or "right...", all that suggests is that he has confidence and has talked on these topics many times before (probably everyday at id). In fact, give a listen to some very brilliant people like Dr. Robert Shiller (Yale) or Dr. Summers (former president of Harvard) and you'll find many "um..." and pauses, which appear to be signs of measured speaking and reflection. Mr. Carmack definitely has been a very successful software engineer which is in part due to proper timing (right code for the right market time).
More importantly, we should all be discussing the content of what he said, not the style or the judgement of the man. I found the hybrid ray-tracer (ray casting for only specular reflections in the context of a rasterized pipeline) quite interesting but superficial in presentation. However, the unnecessary ratio analysis of developer time / rasterized based shaders versus developer time / x86 cores (pertaining to the offline raytracing done for textures) not to be completely necessary - at least in the way he presented it (again nothing more than a stock analyst could pull off).
Have anyone seen the CentiLeo GPU ray tracer? They show virtual memory access working very well on consumer GPU, it was presented on Siggraph very impressively. Here are some first news about them http://gpgpu.org/2011/08/04/centileo-out-of-core-ray-tracer
well, it's about as i figured: as these games get more and more complex, it gets harder and harder for the modding community. with quake 3, even i could make a map. now, you'll need a very talented team to do that. it's a real shame, and a good reason why i'll bet this game disappears 1.5 years after release.
i'm still waiting for a true successor to quake 3...i wonder if those days are over?
I am pretty sure the transcript should read "[...] people start looking at Navier-Stokes equations [...]" instead of "[...] people start to look for your Stokes equations [...]" in Carmacks first answer. Those equations are actually used to simulate (turbulent) fluid flow, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations
'doing a render "man-like thing" going down to micro-polygon levels'
should actually be
'doing a RenderMan-like thing going down to micro-polygon levels'
Listened for a second time and was able to understand a lot more than I did the first time. With this listening, was able to recognize when John was going off on a tangent. Ryan did his best to reel him in. Great job and great interview. Thanks.
Thanks, appreciate the comment!
"well we've got a Bézier spline, or a nerve, or something like that,"
should probably be
"well we've got a Bézier spline, or a NURB, or something like that,"
NURB is short for Non-Uniform Rational B-spline. Makes a bit more sense in context.
Great guest and great Interview Ryan. Thank You, and thanks for 166 great hardware podcasts you've given us.
You guys could talk for 350 minutes and I'd not stop listening! Enjoyed watching two smart people didcussing intelligently about interesting topics, but you said Ok, OK too many times. Although certainly not your intention, it came accross as if the guest was boring and you needed to terminate each thread. Also, now that you've got this guy, why sit him in front of the elevators and in such a noisy environment with crew members pushing carts around in the background? Heck, with a guest like that, I would've rented a presidential suite room, sat on the couch and had a relaxed long conversation.
I`ve played DOOM-I with great excitement, because it was the first game with such technology.
But have to say that their games need to become "inspired content", take for example SW KOTOR-II; Witcher-2; etc.
I mean that the game should make you feel, take decisions and witness the consequence, not just point & shoot everything, because it`s boring to kill thousands of opponents (at least for me).
It`s boring also to search labyrinths without any clue where to go....


text:
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Judge Michael I. Levanas declined a motion for a court order preventing Donald Sterling and his attorneys from "directly or indirectly threatening, harassing and/or intimidating any trial witness" leading up to a July 7 hearing that could determine ownership of the Clippers on Thursday. The motion had been accompanied by signed declarations from Dr. Meril Platzer and Dr. James Spar saying they felt intimidated by calls and letters they allegedly received from Donald Sterling and his attorney.
The doctors declared Sterling "mentally incapacitated" last month.
For the Dr. Meril Platzer audio, go here: http://bit.ly/1lOjdMa
For the Dr. James Spar audio, go here: http://bit.ly/1qxgCOx


text:
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Live Music @ Glen Eagle Restaurant
March 2, 2018 @ 6:30 pm - 10:00 pm
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An event every week that begins at 6:30pm on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, repeating until December 29, 2018
Live Music Wednesday-Saturday starting at 6:30-10ish.
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text:
Is Earning A Livelihood An Obligation
Q. And lastly, more and more Muslim brothers are marrying and cannot afford to support a wife. Their families either become a ward of the government or they experience a life of meagre subsistence. In fact we know of one sister whose husband was injured on his job. he was awarded a small sum of money on monthly basis by the government. The money is not enough to maintain his family. Yet! although he is not disabled to the point where he cannot work he refuses to look for a job to bring in additional income to support this family. He claims he is doing Allah's work since he is out to invite every person he meets to embrace Islam and will not withdraw from Allah's work for the Dunya. Whose duty is it, then, to support his family? Or can the sister request a divorce based on her husband's inability to support this family.


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Last week, I wrote about Leroy Jauman after we visited the home on Eighth Street where he was born, the abode with those two tall, slender palm trees in front of it. His dad, Andy, planted those trees in honor of his son Leroy's birth back in 1924, and that they still sway in the ocean breeze is a marvelous thing: a symbol of everlasting parental love.
But the day we met there, Leroy tantalizingly shared some information about another piece of local history that goes back to his youth: a movie that was made by a teacher at what today is Dwyer Middle School (and back then was known as Central Elementary School).
Mrs. Elinor Greer was the teacher, and in 1937, when Leroy was 13, she decided to shoot a film as part of a master's degree she was in the process of working toward. It ran 40 minutes and was titled "The Air Mail Saves the Day." She cast Leroy, whom she considered her teacher's pet, to star as "Leroy Brown," a bit of a hellraiser who must find a way to help his family find money to pay the mortgage, lest they lose their house
It's a storyline that could have easily been ripped from today's stale-economy headlines, and in the film, Leroy decides to enter an essay contest that promises a big payout.
As Jauman described to me, the film was shot all over Huntington Beach and captured rare footage of the oil wells, Pacific Electric Red Cars, Main Street and more. But when he said he had a copy of the vintage film and was willing to share, it almost seemed too good to be true.
However, when I met him and his former classmates from Huntington Beach High School, class of '42, recently for lunch, there was the VHS tape, brought by his friend and classmate Rosemary Robinson. When I arrived back home and popped it in the player, I was genuinely taken aback by what I saw, and thoroughly impressed with the efforts of Mrs. Greer.
The film is silent, and title cards are interwoven throughout, helping to advance the narrative as we see a teenaged Jauman and his classmates chewing the scenery for almost 40 minutes — an epic for the time. The title cards appears to be typewritten pieces of paper simply filmed by the camera operator, as there were obviously no optic effects available for the class.
The scene is set with this opening card: "In the windy city of Pacific Beach is the home of the Brown family." Then we see some establishing shots of oil wells, the ocean, and a house that bears a striking resemblance to the house Jauman was born in — and there is a small palm tree right in front. Did they shoot there? Jauman could not quite pinpoint all of the locales around the city, but he thinks that may be his house of birth.
Another card: "The mortgage is due in 15 days. Father cannot get work. Everything looks hopeless." So the young Jauman gets to work when he hears about an essay contest in New York.
The film reminded me of something producer Hal Roach might have created in his Our Gang days, a bunch of ragtag kids running around town, trying to stave off the evil "villain" who can't wait to evict the family.
Throughout the film, the viewer is treated to some remarkable footage of Huntington Beach. We see Jauman march up to a mailbox on Main Street near Pacific Coast Highway and mail his entry. We the post office on Main Street, the same one that is there today, as the letter gets sorted. Then we see the mailman place the mail sack on a Pacific Electric Red Car bound for Los Angeles, where it will be put on a plane to New York. The footage of the train car pulling away from the Main Street station, oil derricks as far as the eye can see, is a "money shot" if there ever was one.
Mrs. Greer even includes footage of a plane taking off that, presumably, was shot at one of several locals airstrips that existed before Meadowlark Airport.
Long story short, the essay wins, but Leroy also learns an important lesson on paying attention in class about how to send a letter. See, he forgot to include his return address, as he hears on the radio, which jeopardizes his winning entry. Nevertheless, things are sorted out, the money is sent, good triumphs over evil and the family home is saved.
My friend Maria Hall-Brown, with whom I co-host the "Forgotten OC" series on the PBS SoCal program "Real Orange," was kind enough to digitize the movie footage and edit a condensed, nine-minute version of "The Air Mail Saves the Day." And Jauman has been generous enough to allow us to share it with you.
To experience this cinematic trip back in time to Huntington Beach, 1937, simply look alongside this article on the Independent's website.
And make sure you watch the end to see the elaborate credits, to get a real sense of how sophisticated this production was and how many students Mrs. Greer involved in the making of it. Jauman told me as much and it seems obvious, but she must have been just a marvelous teacher to go to these lengths. I only wish she could have known how many more people will now get to enjoy her work.
CHRIS EPTING is the author of 19 books, including the new "Baseball in Orange County" from Arcadia Publishing. You can chat with him on Twitter @chrisepting or follow his column at http://www.facebook.com/hbindependent.


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The Australian Rugby Union (ARU) plays a crucial role in this shared experience. It's been connecting fans with the game since 1949, when it became the governing body for rugby in Australia.
The Australian Rugby Union (ARU) plays a crucial role in this shared experience. It's been connecting fans with the game since 1949, when it became the governing body for rugby in Australia.
In 2012, the ARU committed to enhancing the experience of fans and growing the game further. To achieve this, it partnered with Accenture and began taking advantage of cutting-edge digital, technology and consulting services including data analytics, wearables, mobile apps, digital strategy, cloud-based CRM and more—all the ingredients for a transformative journey, underpinned by a well-targeted digital strategy.
Accenture is proud to partner with the Australian Rugby Union, the Qantas Wallabies and the Australian Rugby Sevens teams.
Managing Director for Accenture Digital, Australia and New Zealand
Rugby is more than just a game—it's a rich culture that brings people together in the shared experience of something that's quintessentially Australian.
Through our industry-leading digital and technological solutions and more, we help establish the foundations for the ARU's operations, helping players participate in local games and bringing fans closer to the match action.
What matters most in rugby is the excitement of the game. The ARU's transformation on and off the pitch means it can now help fans connect with the game they love in more ways than ever before.
The ARU's cross-platform solution includes apps, a mobile enabled website and a new ticket-vending platform that emphasises social content and data storytelling. The digital engagement platform will even offer exclusive content across all devices, allowing fans to have a truly immersive experience as well as create new revenue streams.
Accenture has also introduced wearable technology innovations that will provide ARU executives with real-time campaign feedback.
All of this will make rugby more accessible and exciting for its fans.
CEO, Australian Rugby Union
A fast live streaming solution
Live matches for troops abroad and fans at home
Instant information with wearable devices
Real-time feedback on campaign performance and sales—all delivered straight to the wrists of those administrating the game
A solution for the ARU Executives to receive real-time ticket sales data and Google chat messages straight to their Samsung Galaxy Gear device, enabling faster decisions for their respective areas of the business.
As wearables become more common with consumers, the possibilities for engaging fans in new ways are limitless.
A new website for fans at home and abroad
Organise matches for your local club and find out what the Wallabies are up to.
Enabling digital engagement between all facets of the game and its fans across all devices; from desktop to mobile to tablet.
A platform to create new, dynamic and personalised content for fans.
Driving match data insights straight into the palms of game supporters through third party data integration.
A whole of game strategy
Australian Rugby Strategic Plan for 2016-2020 is underpinned by a vision "to inspire all Australians to enjoy our great global game."
Key initiatives that will significantly drive the game forward in:
Fan engagement and creating a new digital experience.
Participation to create new game formats for new audiences.
High performance analytics and pathways.
Structural changes to improve the governance of the game.
A cloud-based CRM solution
From local matches to international showdowns, the ARU's CRM system captures all relevant customer information, providing valuable insights into the needs of fans and participants.
Single view of all ARU customers.
Greater customer insight and marketing initiatives via analytics platform.
Improved gross revenue through targeted campaign management and marketing.


text:
WASHINGTON—The National Archives is reducing its public operating hours due to automatic federal budget cuts taking effect.
In the past, the National Archives offered extended hours between March 15 and Labor Day to accommodate crowds viewing the U.S. Constitution during Washington's tourism season. Exhibits were kept open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week.
Now officials say those extended hours will be eliminated. Exhibits will be open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. year round.
Archives research rooms in Washington and in College Park, Md., also will have reduced hours beginning Friday. They used to offer evening hours three nights a week, staying open until 9 p.m. Now they will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday.


text:
Express. Home of the Daily and Sunday Express.
Tykes set to meet with Butcher
Barnsley are hoping the lure of a return to English football will help convince Inverness boss Terry Butcher to turn his back on what could be a glorious season north of the border and accept the vacant manager's job at Oakwell.
The South Yorkshire club, currently bottom of the npower Championship, are looking to appoint their sixth manager in seven and a half years following the sacking last month of Keith Hill.
They received permission from Inverness to approach former England skipper Butcher, 54, on Monday and hope to meet with him this week to thrash out a deal that would see him swap the top two of the Scottish Premier League for a relegation scrap in English football's second tier.
Sean O'Driscoll, sacked by Nottingham Forest just hours after their Boxing Day win over Leeds, has turned down the chance of a speedy return to management at Oakwell after being offered the job following talks last week.
Barnsley director Don Rowing told Press Association Sport: "We've sought permission to speak with Terry Butcher and Inverness have agreed, so we expect to meet with him within the next 48 hours about the first-team manager's vacancy."
Butcher, in charge of Inverness since replacing Craig Brewster in January 2009, has guided them up to second place behind Celtic in the SPL table, while the club play Hearts in the semi-finals of the Scottish League Cup later this month.
Inverness have only lost against Motherwell and Celtic this season, are still in the William Hill Scottish Cup and are top scorers in the SPL so far with 44 goals.
The fact the former Coventry and Motherwell boss - Butcher also had brief stints as manager at Sunderland, Sydney FC and Brentford - has achieved this with a playing budget of £800,000 at the Tulloch Caledonian Stadium has not been lost on Barnsley, who operate on one of the tightest budgets in the Championship.
Inverness chairman Kenny Cameron said in a statement: "We have given Barnsley FC permission to speak to Terry. Given our current position in the SPL and the fact we have a cup semi-final on the horizon, it is inevitable that if any managerial positions come up our management team will no doubt be on the radar.
"We will be doing everything possible to ensure that Terry remains with the club and finishes what has been an incredible journey to date for us all."


text:
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The logo of Chanel is a C with an upturned C through it and is derived from founder Coco Chanel. It is performed in a modern, sleek typeface without too much frills, just like Chanel herself was. Only after the opening of the first pair of Chanel stores the logo was deposited by Chanel. Besides beautiful bags, clothing and various other products are also as Chanel sunglasses very exclusive. Besides the regular Chanel sunglasses Chanel always produces special Chanel sunglasses for Christmas collection. You can, of course, every year in our purchase in the store. All Chanel sunglasses come with a matching Chanel sunglasses etui.Op this case is a Chanel logo belonging to the delivered Chanel Chanel glasses or sunglasses. Arnold Booden Unique Eyefashion is an exclusive Chanel eyeglasses and sunglasses retailer.


text:
TakeThisCity needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 123 designs submitted by 21 freelance designers.
Take This City
TakeThisCity.com is a web based, social networking community that connects individuals with opportunities to serve their local community. The database we are launching will assimilate needs and service opportunities of all variations around any city and filter the opportunities into a personalized live feed of opportunities sorted by the passions, skills and location of any individual. We intend to mobilize millions of individuals across the US to meet the needs of their local community by making information more accessible and convenient.
We have 2 target markets:
1. Individuals - we want to engage individuals of all types and ages. We anticipate our most involved age groups will be 18-30 and 55-70.
2. Nonprofit Organizations - before we can invite individuals to serve, we must find opportunities or needs in the community. Instead of finding these ourselves, our model is to engage existing Nonprofit Organizations by providing a web based database that they can use to recruit volunteers by posting their service opportunities and needs. This allows individuals to find the organizations in their local community that work in causes related to the individual's passions or skills. Thus, we must attract organizations, as well as individuals.
We are looking for a logo and avatar that will invite and motivate individuals in to a city focused service movement.
We need an edgy new brand that makes people want to take action.
We are looking for a clean design that communicates purpose and adventure.
A City theme of some sort is welcomed, but not mandatory.
2 requirements:
1. We need this logo to work with and without ".com" at the end. We need 2 copies of the logo, one with ".com" and one without.
2. We need an Avatar that can be used as the icon for an iphone app etc.
Join us in changing the face of service in our cities.
I have attached three simple concepts that we like, but need to be improved and developed further. Feel free to run with these concepts.
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.


text: London - Geoffrey Boycott has criticised England's batsmen after their first-Test defeat to South Africa, saying they forgot about defence in the pursuit of their ambition to score runs. To save the match, England needed to bat out the final day at The Oval on Monday to force a draw. However the visitors' bowling attack, led by Dale Steyn's five for 56, steamrolled them to win by an innings and 12 runs. "When defence is paramount and not giving your wicket away crucial, then surely top players have to rein in their stroke-playing," the former England opening batsman turned commentator wrote in his column for The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday. "If they can't, or won't, then they are playing for themselves and not the team. "Batting in these situations you have to look forward to the challenge: to enjoy the chance to bat all day, relish it like eating a good dinner or savouring a gorgeous glass of wine." Boycott, who scored 22 centuries in 193 Test-match innings, particularly cricitcised top-order batsman Kevin Pietersen, who got 42 runs in the first innings and 16 runs in the second. "Kevin Pietersen got sucked into a bouncer contest with Morné Morkel," he wrote. "His hubris got the better of him. He was too busy trying to score runs and get on top of the bowler and he forgot about his defence and missed a straight one." Ian Bell and Matt Prior were the only two to provide some resistance to the Proteas' bowlers during the second innings, with Bell taking four hours to reach his half-century and eventually bowing out on 55 from 220 balls. The right-hander said things would be set straight at the Headingley Test starting on August 2. "We came out and gave it everything we had but South Africa were better than us in this Test match," Bell told Sky Sports. "We know we can make improvements and put things right at Headingley."


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African Debt since Debt Relief: How Clean is the Slate?
This blog post was co-authored with Dino Merotto, Tihomir Stucka, and Tau Huang.
The benefits of debt relief have persisted, although some countries may now be borrowing too quickly.
Remember Jubilee 2000 and the HIPC Initiative? Remember the "Drop the Debt" and "One" movements in 2005? Live 8? Bono on the White House Lawn? Those white "make poverty history" wristbands?
Seven years on, debt is now making headlines in the rich countries. In Europe and the US the news is of sovereign debt downgrades amid speculation about capacity to rollover debts, and countries' long-term fiscal capacity to repay.


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We are on a World Tour!
Starting from November 2015 Bat Detective is on a World Tour! We'll be regularly uploading new data from places across the globe, from Europe to Africa, North America and Asia, each with its own selection of bat species. Read more about where we're visiting and the science behind Bat Detective here.
Start your search
Jump right in and begin classifying calls. Take your ears on a drive through our database - and tell us what you see and hear. Listen out for bats, insects and other sounds.
Discuss the findings
Have you found a particularly interesting bat call? Having trouble distinguishing bat calls from insect noise? Have a question about bats, or a crazy theory about how bats use sound? Head over to the Bat Detective Forum to discuss your findings with others including the Bat Detective team.
Why bats?
Bats are mammals (like us) that have modified their hands and fingers to create wings for powered flight. Despite their description in many languages meaning blind or flying mice (murciélago, Fledermaus), they are neither blind nor mice. Bats are more closely related to cats and dogs than to rodents. Although most bats are around 20g (the weight of a squash ball), bats range in size from the tiny bumblebee bat at under 2g to the flying fox at a whopping 1.5Kg. Out of the 1,200 or so species, one in every five species is threatened with extinction in the next 50 years. Some bat species in North America have undergone dramatic declines in the last few years owing to a new disease (White-nose syndrome) that is threatening populations to extinction.
Why are we recording bat calls?
Many people believe that monitoring the status of bat populations can help tell us about the health of a natural environment as a whole; the bats serve as an early warning, like a canary in a coal mine. This is because bat species are distributed all over the world, and provide lots of services to humans through controlling pests by eating vast quantities of insects and pollinating and dispersing commercially important crops (for example bananas, tequila). Bat biology also makes them sensitive to human impacts, for example they typically only have one offspring a year and so bat populations take a long time to recover after disturbance. Many species are also very sensitive to climate and migrate or hibernate in different seasons, making them particularly vulnerable to climate change.
Although it is really important to monitor bat populations, it is difficult to do with traditional visual surveys as bats are mostly small, nocturnal and very hard to catch. More recently, a growing number of bat surveys are been done acoustically because bats 'leak' information about themselves into the environment. This is because they use sound to find their way around, hunt for food and to socialise. Over 1000 species of bats use sound in this way, with the rest of the species (Old World fruit bats or flying foxes) relying more on their eyes and noses to find food.
When bats are using sound to find their way around or to hunt, they emit a call and listen and interpret echoes as the call bounces off objects in the environment (echolocation). As a bat gets closer to its prey, the bat needs more information and calls get closer together ending in a 'feeding buzz'. Bats tend to use ultrasonic frequencies for their calls (above 20 kHz) because shorter wavelengths are more likely to hit and bounce off smaller objects, and so give the bat more detail about its environment. However, higher frequency sounds tend to not travel as far as sounds of lower frequency, so there is a trade-off between hearing in fine detail and hearing long distances. Calls that bats use for socialising are not used for echolocation but communication, and these calls tend to be lower in frequency and have a more complex structure. Only under a third of all the echolocation calls of bats worldwide are known and even less is understood about social calls. Perhaps only 5% of all species social calls have been recorded.
What kind of data are we looking at?
There are lots of different methods to detect bat calls but they all involve using a special ultrasonic microphone to pick up bat calls (a bat detector) and to transform these into something we can hear or see. More sophisticated methods transform the ultrasonic call into a 'sonogram' so that you can see the call or sequence of calls clearly. Sonograms show calls visually and display the frequency of the call going up along the side of the image and time going along the bottom, and the loudness of the call is shown by how intense the colour of the call is. We can extract details about different calls from spectrograms and develop methods to tell us exactly what species they belong to – enabling us to track populations of these species by making recordings along set surveys every year.
Typically many hours of recordings are made at night by researchers using bat detectors and the most difficult part of the process is finding bat calls in these recordings! For example, for a 1 hour recording it will take 6 hours to go through the files to find all the calls and detail them. There are existing automatic computer programmes that find calls in recordings, but these aren't very good at finding calls in poor recordings where a bat call is mixed up with other sounds like insects or a lot of background noise. Existing programmes also can't tell the difference between the different types of bat calls (search and feeding echolocation calls and social calls). Additionally, bat echolocation calls are emitted in a continuous stream as the bat tries to figure out where it is and where its food is and existing programmes can't pick out which calls come from the which sequence.
How do Citizen Scientists help?
This is where you come in! Humans are absolutely fantastic at hearing and seeing the difference between a bat and a non-bat call, the different types of calls and what sequence a call belongs in. We need your help going through our recordings to pick out the different calls. The ultimate goal is to use your classifications to make a new automatic programme that researchers all over the world can use to extract information out of their recordings, making it really easy to track populations of bats. This will make understanding how bat populations are being effected by global change much easier.
Each region of the world has different bats, the areas with the most bats or 'bat hotspots' are places like northern South America with over 200 species in an area! Bat Detective aims to develop these new automatic programmes for bats all over the world but we are starting our journey in Europe, where we know a lot about the bats already. Over the course of the project we will release data from more areas from around the world. In Europe, there are over 40 species of bats, they all use echolocation to eat insects. Most species hibernate to escape the food shortage in insects during the winter. Some other bat species migrate to other parts of Europe during winter, but we know very little about which species do this. In the summer, most species split into separate female and male roosts (in buildings, tree cavities, under bridges, caves), where the males just chill out whilst the females busily gather insects to raise their baby. During the autumn the males and females come back together again to mate and then don't emerge again until the next spring. Check out the Bats page to see some examples of European bats whose calls you might see and hear in our recordings!
Some examples of the European bats whose calls you might see and hear in our recordings.
Common pipistrellePipistrellus pipistrellus
The common pipistrelle is thought to be one of the most common European bats, weighing around 5 grams. It has a rapid, agile flight and forages along edges of treelines, hedgerows and water edges. A single pipistrelle can eat 3,000 tiny insects in just one night!
Soprano pipistrellePipistrellus pygmaeus
The soprano pipistrelle looks so similar to a common pipistrelle that it was only discovered as a separately species a few years ago. It turns out that the common and soprano pipistrelle are as different as lions and tigers are to each other. The soprano pipistrelle uses a higher echolocation frequency than the common pipstrelle (hence its name).
Nathusius' pipistrellePipistrellus nathusii
The Nathusius' pipistrelle is thought to be migratory in Europe but this is not well understood. For example, in the UK we only discovered that it was a resident species in 1997, previous to that we thought it was a migrant from continental Europe. It has a slower, less manoeuvrable flight than other pipistrelles and has a lower frequency call.
Daubenton's batMyotis daubentonii
The Daubenton's bat (or water bat) is found throughout Europe and feeds by skimming insects from the water's surface with their large hairy feet or tail. This species has a broadband call (goes through a large range of frequencies) to gather a lot of information while it forages close up to the water.
NoctuleNyctalus noctula
The noctule has long narrow wings and flies in a straight line, very high and fast. It has an extremely loud, very low frequency echolocation call (one of the loudest sounds in nature) that travels a long distance.
Greater horseshoe batRhinolophus ferrumequinum
Horseshoe bats possess a distinctive horseshoe-shaped nose-leaf. These bats forage in dense canopy in woodland have very high constant frequency calls that let them distinguish very fine details of their environment.
The sonograms on the site are from thousands of hours of ultrasonic recordings made on bat surveys by volunteers all over the world. Many of the surveys were made through the Indicator Bats Program (iBats) which monitors bat populations globally by listening to the sounds bats use to navigate and find food. iBats is a partnership project between national conservation groups in many different countries and the Zoological Society of London and The Bat Conservation Trust, and is funded by The Darwin Initiative and The Leverhulme Trust.
The recordings on Bat Detective were mostly made by iBats volunteers using special ultrasonic detectors. These detectors listen to sounds for 340ms snapshots at a time and then slows down the sound by ten times and plays back the sound through the detector. The detector then listens again for 340ms and so on until the survey is finished. Bats use sound at high frequencies, so slowing down the sound means that the frequency is lowered and it can be recorded. Volunteers can record the sounds on recording devices like a minidisk or a Zoom. The volunteers record sounds for 90 minutes about 30 minutes after sunset, and typically use a GPS to also record the route they have taken. Volunteers can walk or cycle their route but many typically drive the route with a car at speeds of 25km/hour, so that they can survey more of their area. More recently, we have developed an iBats app for the Android and iPhone which when attached to the bat detector with a special cable, records the sound and the GPS route at the same time and uploads to the iBats website automatically.
Many people want to get involved in detecting bats in their local area. The best way to start listening to bats is to contact your nearest wildlife conservation group and see if anyone is doing any bat detecting that you can come along on. If you are really keen, there are some cheap and simple detectors that you can buy if you want to start listening to bats on your own (e.g., heterodyne detectors). However, if you want to investigate the sounds in more detail and be more confident about identifying the calls to species, you will need more expensive sophisticated detectors (e.g., frequency division detectors). Although the recordings of bats made with frequency division detectors are sufficient for many purposes, this type of bat detector doesn't capture all of the variation in the call and can be less reliable to identify species. The recordings made by the iBats volunteers are made with time expansion or real-time detectors. Using these types of detectors, all of the variation in the calls is captured, making identifications easier. As these detectors are expensive, iBats volunteers tend to be part of a group that raises funds to buy some equipment and they monitor an area together as a community. Please contact the Bat Detective team if you are interested in setting up an iBats community group in your area.
For the initial launch of Bat Detective, we are using the recordings made by a number of different iBats community groups and other organisations in Europe. These include iBats Romania (Romanian Bat Protection Association), iBats Bulgaria (Green Balkans), iBats Hungary, iBats Ukraine, iBats Russia (Presevet), iBats UK (Bat Conservation Trust). Recordings have also been donated by partners in BatLife Europe.
Bat Detective is a partnership project between University College London, Zoological Society of London, The Bat Conservation Trust, BatLife Europe, University of Auckland, and the Citizen Science Alliance. The sonograms on the site are provided by thousands of volunteers and conservation organisations around the world recording bats as part of the Indicator Bats Program (iBats) and other conservation monitoring programmes.
University College London (UCL) is London's leading multidisciplinary university with over 8,000 staff and 25,000 students. UCL was founded in 1826 as a radically different university, opening up English higher education for the first time to people of all beliefs and social backgrounds. Bat Detective is supported by the Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment (GEE), the Centre for Mathematics and Physics in the Life Sciences and Experimental Biology (CoMPLEX) and the Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML).
The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) was founded in 1826 by Sir Stamford Raffles and is a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats. Bat Detective is supported by The Institute of Zoology (IoZ), the research division of ZSL specialising in the conservation, monitoring and health of animal species and their habitats.
The Bat Conservation Trust (BCT) works to secure the future of bats in our changing world. Together with volunteers, experts and the public, BCT discover more about bats, take action to conserve bats and habitats and inspire thousands of people to do their bit for bats.
BatLife Europe http://www.batlife-europe.info is a newly formed international NGO. It is built from a partnership of national bat conservation organisations that are committed to promoting the conservation of all bat species and their habitats throughout Europe.
The University of Auckland is New Zealand's largest and most highly ranked university. Founded in 1883 in an disused courthouse an jail, the University now stretches across 5 campuses, hosting more than 40,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students across eight faculties. The main University campus is located in the heart of the City of Auckland, which in 2011 was ranked as having the third highest quality of living worldwide.
The Zooniverse is home to the internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. The Zooniverse and the suite of projects it contains is produced, maintained and developed by the Citizen Science Alliance. The member institutions of the CSA work with many academic and other partners around the world to produce projects that use the efforts and ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers.
Kate Jones, University College London and Zoological Society of London is the Chair of Ecology and Biodiversity in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London and Zoological Society of London. Kate is also the Director of the iBats Program and the current Chair of The Bat Conservation Trust. Her research looks at global biodiversity patterns and predicts the effects of future global change on wild nature. Kate can be relied upon at parties to make the cocktails.
Charlotte Walters, Zoological Society of London is a PhD student at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London. Charlotte is figuring out how we can estimate and monitor bat distributions in Europe, and how environmental change is affecting bats. Other interests include chocolate brownies, margaritas and Tottenham Hotspurs.
Robin Freeman, University College London is a 2020 Science research fellow at CoMPLEX at University College London and Microsoft Research Cambridge. He's interested in animal behaviour, movement and computational approaches to ecology. He's working on methods to help identify bat species from recorded calls. Robin is also prone to working with animals with particularly sharp ends.
Mark Girolami, University College London is the Chair of Statistics in the Department of Statistical Science and is the Director of the Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning at University College London. Mark is excited to apply new statistical methods to create ways of automatically detect bat calls from the data gathered by Bat Detective. Mark is cultivating a handlebar moustache and side burns and loves cycling.
Jon Russ, Ridgeway Ecology, is a terrestrial and behavioural ecologist with a specialist interest in bats. He has worked for a number of years for the Bat Conservation Trust coordinating the iBats project in the UK and Eastern Europe.
Kate Barlow, The Bat Conservation Trust is the head of Monitoring at the Bat Conservation Trust. When she is not working on monitoring the UK's bat populations and trying to think of the best ways to count bats, she can usually be found out in the countryside somewhere with Laika, her German short-haired pointer.
Stuart Parsons, University of Auckland is an Associate Professor of Zoology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Stuart travels the world studying bat behaviour and ecology with a particular interest in their echolocation. Because New Zealand only has two species of bat much of the research in his lab focuses on insect and bird vocal communication and hearing. When not chasing bats, Stuart can be found drinking gin and eating wasabi peas (while he watches bats).
Oisin Mac Aodha, University College London is a research associate in the Department of Computer Science at University College London. For the Bat Detective project he is interested in creating machine learning algorithms that can automatically detect bats from audio recordings.
Rory Gibb, University College London is a PhD student who looks after the day-to-day running of the Bat Detective project. He's interested in the ways that animals (especially bats) use sound to navigate the world, computational approaches to ecology and evolution, and how people can use new technologies like acoustic sensors and movement tags to help to understand our global impacts on wildlife and ecosystems. When not working on science-related projects, he can normally be found writing, talking and thinking about electronic and experimental music.
Kelly Borden is an archaeologist by training but an educator by passion. While working at the Museum of Science and Industry and the Adler Planetarium she became an enthusiastic science educator eager to bring science to the masses. When not pondering the wonders of science, Kelly can often be found baking or spending time with her herd of cats – Murray, Ada, & Kepler.
Brian Carstensen is a web developer working on the Zooniverse family of projects at the Adler Planearium. Brian has a degree in graphic design from Columbia College in Chicago, and worked in that field for a number of years before finding a niche in web development.
Chris Lintott leads the Zooniverse team, and in his copious spare time is a researcher at the University of Oxford specialising in galaxy formation and evolution. A keen popularizer of science, he is best known as co-presenter of the BBC's long running Sky at Night program. He's currently drinking a lot of sherry.
As a visual communicator, David Miller is passionate about tellings stories through clear, clean, and effective design. Before joining the Zooniverse team as Visual Designer, David worked for The Raindance Film Festival, the News 21 Initiative's Apart From War, Syracuse Magazine, and as a freelance designer for his small business, Miller Visual. David is a graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, where he studied Visual & Interactive Communications.
Michael Parrish has a degree in Computer Science and has been working with The Zooniverse for the past three years as a Software Developer. Aside from web development; new technologies, science, AI, reptiles, and coffee tend to occupy his attention.
As an undergraduate, Arfon Smith studied Chemistry at the University of Sheffield before completing his Ph.D. in Astrochemistry at The University of Nottingham in 2006. He worked as a senior developer at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (Human Genome Project) in Cambridge before joining the Galaxy Zoo team in Oxford. Over the past 3 years he has been responsible for leading the development of a platform for citizen science called Zooniverse. In August of 2011 he took up the position of Director of Citizen Science at the Adler Planetarium where he continues to lead the software and infrastructure development for the Zooniverse.


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From left: Diego Capeletti, Eva Deemer and Alex Pastor of American Water Recycling.
University of Texas at El Paso student team Diego Capeletti, Eva Deemer and Alex Pastor were awarded $100,000 in seed funding for their company American Water Recycling (AWR) during the UT System Horizon Fund Student Investment Competition on May 2.
Eva Deemer speaks at the podium.
American Water Recycling will enable industries to discharge safe, clean re-useable water using an innovative process that is economically and environmentally sustainable.
Diego Capeletti (surrounded by supportive UT El Paso students and keynote speaker Bob Metcalfe) holds a check for $100,000 for American Water Recycling.
Sixteen student teams from 10 UT institutions competed in the competition.The teams presented their business plan and idea to a high-profile group of venture capitalists, investors and industry experts who judged the entries and announced the winning team during an award reception at the end of the day.