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• While most of those who hold that the whole heaven is finite say that the earth lies at the center, the philosophers of Italy, the so-called Pythagoreans, assert the contrary.
  They say that in the middle there is fire, and that the earth is one of the stars, and by its circular motion round the center produces night and day....
• But Aristarchus of Samos brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, in which the premises lead to the conclusion that the universe is many times greater than that now so called.
  His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain motionless, that the earth revolves about the sun in the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same center as the sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the center of the sphere bears to its surface....
• Rubik's cube can be easily pulled apart and put back together again.
  First, >position one side at a diagonal to the others so that you can use a small coin >to prise a corner out....
• Nevertheless, in the system of Copernicus there are found many and great inconvenience
  for both the loading of the earth with a triple motion is very incommodious, and the separation of the sun from the company of the planets, with which it has so many passions in common, is likewise a difficulty, and the introduction of so much immobility in nature, by representing the sun and stars as immoveable, especially being of all bodies the highest and most radiant, and making the moon revolve about the earth in an epicycle, and some other assumptions of his, are the speculations of one who cares not what fictions he introduces into nature, provided his calculations answer....
• aga n. [WPI] A cuspy but bogus raving story about N random broken people.
  Here is a classic example of the saga form, as told by Guy L....
• The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on.
  Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms....
• Quote #580 Even a committee of two gets in the way of redesign.
  This happens particularly in the interfaces between pieces of software written by two different people....
• bug n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp.
  one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature....
• logical adj. [from the technical term `logical device', wherein a physical device is referred to by an arbitrary `logical' name] Having the role of.
  If a person (say, Les Earnest at SAIL) who had long held a certain post left and were replaced, the replacement would for a while be known as the `logical' Les Earnest....