HOMEWORK HELP!!

[Amelia-Mary]

Re: Help?

Thanks guys x

[Gwen]

Re: HOMEWORK HELP!!

Not sure how helpful it is, Amelia-Mary, but many of my Christian classmates take a "s**t happens" view: God either doesn't want to or can't intercede all the time. The most common iteration involves God suspending omnipotence so that we can exercise free will, and then weeping with us when we make decisions that hurt one another.

Pihlaja, do you need to have a question formulated at the outset, or can you just start doing the research on the general topic of religious minorities as presented by Finnish media, and hone your topic as you go? If you pick a topic sentence now are you bound to it or can you adjust based on what you find? And do you have the research time and publication space to explore all religious minorities equally or might it be better for you to focus on one or two prominent ones?

Thal, if you're interested I can get the name of a good book on Lurianic Kabbalah (1600s). It's really interesting stuff, and many European ceremonial magickal ideas bear striking similarities. Eliot Wolfson, Gershom Scholem, Arthur Greene, and Moshe Idel are some of the major scholars on Jewish Kabbalistic history.

[cesara]

Re: HOMEWORK HELP!!

[quote author=thalassa link=topic=273.msg2679#msg2679 date=1287085825]
I'll be honest...I started this thread because I need help.

I need to do a book review for my History of Early Modern Europe class. It has to be a book based that takes place between 1400 and 1850 or covers a topic or individual during that time period. Optionally, we can do a movie review. Either way, it has to be factually based, though it can be a popular work, and doesn't need to be academic or a period text.

I'm trying to go with topics that I find somewhat interesting, even though this isn't my fave time period. So far, I have the following for a short list:

Galileo's Daughter A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel
Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother by James A. Cooper
Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution by Lisa Jardine

My first pick was Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker...but then I noticed that it won't be published until next spring...

Anyhoo...has anyone read any of these, or anything by the authors, or just have any preference of what might not put me to sleep?


ETA: This looks interesting too... Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore
[/quote]

So, what did you end up choosing? They all sound really interesting! I can't believe I missed this thread back in October. I would have suggested a documentary I saw on the De Medici's in Florence. Financially powerful, coming from modest beginnings, they ended up with 2 Popes in the vatican plus a Queen in France (who saw Nostrodamus regularly, and raised Mary Queen of the Scots for a time) -- not to mention they essentially raised Da Vinci in their home, were critical to the rise of the Italian Rennaissance and were supporters of Gallileo. SUPER interesting family!

[thalassa]

Re: HOMEWORK HELP!!

lol, I ended up doing none of them (though I still want to read all of them), and reading a book called The Little Ice Age.

[Bluedragoncoop]

Re: HOMEWORK HELP!!

I'



Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother by James A. Cooper

I know I didn't write a book yet. The author is James A Connor not Cooper

I did write a paper on science and spirituality which may be of some help to you. It's called The Complexity of Energetic Fields

I wrote it for my Writing 122 Class which for whatever reason is a core requirement for a BA at Southern Oregon University

[lorraine02]

Re: Help?

nice book , looking forward to it .

[Ouranos Ouroboros]

Re: Help?

It's not for a class or anything, but I need to figure out how two stars in a binary system interact with each other and how that affects a planet around one of them. Does anyone know where I could find free software to model this type of thing. It isn't hard sf, and it doesn't have to be totally detailed - but I don't want to overlook some law of physics or fact about stellar astronomy that makes one of the books' landscapes seem totally unrealistic.

Much thanks in advance if you can help.

[Heka]

Re: HOMEWORK HELP!!

That sounds totally awesome, and it's not something I've thought of before, when you figure it out, I'd love to hear about it!

[MoonRaven]

Re: Help?

It's not for a class or anything, but I need to figure out how two stars in a binary system interact with each other and how that affects a planet around one of them. Does anyone know where I could find free software to model this type of thing. It isn't hard sf, and it doesn't have to be totally detailed - but I don't want to overlook some law of physics or fact about stellar astronomy that makes one of the books' landscapes seem totally unrealistic.

Much thanks in advance if you can help.

I'm not going to say that such software does not exist, but I am not aware of it. Also I would remain sceptic to any software who announced that it did include the programming for such a simulation since there is as yet little data available as to how planets who orbit one or both suns in a binary system behaves or would be affected. This is due to the fact that until only last year it was thought that binary systems could not have planets, then someone discovered a binary solar system that actually had a planet and everything had to be revised. Since then another planet in a binary system have been discovered but we are still woefully lacking in information.

Personally though I would say that the two main factors are heat and radiation from the suns, particularly if your planet only orbits one of the stars since at some point in its travels it will get between the two stars and get heat and radiation from both. Unless they are very weak stars and/or they are very far apart the surface of the planet would not so much be Tatooine like hot as it would be unable to support life in any form that would be recognisable to us.

If you want to pick my brain on the subject feel free to PM me or write your questions here and I shall try to answer, though I am an interested amateur and not an expert on the matter.

[Unlogisch]

Re: Help?

I'm not going to say that such software does not exist, but I am not aware of it. Also I would remain sceptic to any software who announced that it did include the programming for such a simulation since there is as yet little data available as to how planets who orbit one or both suns in a binary system behaves or would be affected. This is due to the fact that until only last year it was thought that binary systems could not have planets, then someone discovered a binary solar system that actually had a planet and everything had to be revised. Since then another planet in a binary system have been discovered but we are still woefully lacking in information.

Personally though I would say that the two main factors are heat and radiation from the suns, particularly if your planet only orbits one of the stars since at some point in its travels it will get between the two stars and get heat and radiation from both. Unless they are very weak stars and/or they are very far apart the surface of the planet would not so much be Tatooine like hot as it would be unable to support life in any form that would be recognisable to us.

If you want to pick my brain on the subject feel free to PM me or write your questions here and I shall try to answer, though I am an interested amateur and not an expert on the matter.

It's a special case of the classical n-body problem. For n=2 or n=3 it's relatively simple (ish) but things start getting pretty hairy, computationally speaking, for larger n since the problem is that you have to solve a second order system of partial differential equations in 6n variables to get the functions describing the full system. For a binary system with a single planet, what you have is actually a 3-body problem but you can basically get away with ignoring the variables for the planet since the mass of most planets, relative to their stars, is basically negligible for most purposes.

[Ouranos Ouroboros]

Re: HOMEWORK HELP!!

I'm not going to say that such software does not exist, but I am not aware of it. Also I would remain sceptic to any software who announced that it did include the programming for such a simulation since there is as yet little data available as to how planets who orbit one or both suns in a binary system behaves or would be affected. This is due to the fact that until only last year it was thought that binary systems could not have planets, then someone discovered a binary solar system that actually had a planet and everything had to be revised. Since then another planet in a binary system have been discovered but we are still woefully lacking in information.

Personally though I would say that the two main factors are heat and radiation from the suns, particularly if your planet only orbits one of the stars since at some point in its travels it will get between the two stars and get heat and radiation from both. Unless they are very weak stars and/or they are very far apart the surface of the planet would not so much be Tatooine like hot as it would be unable to support life in any form that would be recognisable to us.


If you want to pick my brain on the subject feel free to PM me or write your questions here and I shall try to answer, though I am an interested amateur and not an expert on the matter.

It's a special case of the classical n-body problem. For n=2 or n=3 it's relatively simple (ish) but things start getting pretty hairy, computationally speaking, for larger n since the problem is that you have to solve a second order system of partial differential equations in 6n variables to get the functions describing the full system. For a binary system with a single planet, what you have is actually a 3-body problem but you can basically get away with ignoring the variables for the planet since the mass of most planets, relative to their stars, is basically negligible for most purposes.

I knew we were finding more and more exoplanets all the time (although I guess a lot are Hot Jupiters and others not very Earth-like); I guess I thought we knew more about how planets would behave around binaries.


Although my personal goal is to learn as much as I possibly can (and, to that end, thanks a ton for the link you sent, Unlogisch), my goal for the novels is to describe a world that won't cause anyone to say, "No - that's totally impossible, you moron." It's not hard sf and doesn't have to be technical. Basically, I just want to know if it's plausible - for the sake of a story - to believe that a very watery Earth-like world could be orbiting around a very, very Sun-like G2 star that is, itself, orbiting a massive but not-very-energetic red star. I think I can work out how the suns would look from any given time of year, and I've tried to account for things like biology (gardeners on the planet talk about whether it's mostly a red or orange year in terms of cycles of plant-life or plant predators, for instance, and some animals hibernate not until the next year but until the next yellow year or orange year) and culture (there are stories about how the red sun god eats his yellow sun god brother and then spits him out, for instance) and landscape (I have to remember that, because they don't rise and set at the same times throughout the year, the night is sometimes red-hued). I really just need to know if it's not impossible that this might happen - according, at least, to the science we currently have.

[Unlogisch]

Re: HOMEWORK HELP!!

You're welcome, Ouranos!