Geminids and Other Things

Posted Sat Dec 12, 2009 in

GeminidsThe Geminids are coming to town. They should be visible in clear skies next week and should also put on a great show — if you can stand the cold.

I’ll have to go out and look, at least once. I’ll check the star chart (on my iPhone) to determine when and where to look. The article says best times are just after midnight local time. If the weather cooperates, it will be a good time.

I notice I didn’t post much this week. I have been writing, just off-line in my paper journal. Sometimes I need the act of physically writing to make it work for me. I work through things by writing about them. That is something I never thought I would do, but there it is.

I hope this show is better than the Leonids. They weren’t very impressive this year.

  1. I hope you finish the writing of your paper successfully.
    I have a question: dose a referencing style such as Harvard Referencing System change or not?

    — Bahareh    12 December 2009, 14:01    #

  2. Established schemes for references don’t change very often. I prefer the Chicago format for most of my work (most of the journals use the Chicago style or something close to it).

    It depends on what you want to achieve.

    — ruminator    12 December 2009, 17:03    #

  3. Thank you for your answer. Our faculty asks the students to write their theses in this format.

    — Bahareh    12 December 2009, 23:19    #

  4. If the school or faculty has a standard they prefer, then that’s the approach you should use.

    If you’ve been around me long enough, you realize that I use LaTeX for most of my writing. I actually persuaded a few of my graduate students and some of my colleagues to use that system as well. It’s open source, freely available, and there is much support for using the system.

    Bibliographic information is handled using bibtex, which takes a database approach to bibliographies. I use a Mac, so the tool of choice is BibDesk. BibDesk handles the database part of the process. When bibtex processes the source file, it extracts the bibliographic entries from the database. Then LaTeX formats them using the requested standard (in my chase Chicago).

    I wrote a number of documents using word processors and handling bibliographic information was one of the challenges. The system I currently use makes that a lot easier (still have to keep up with the database, though).

    — ruminator    13 December 2009, 06:30    #

  5. Yes, handling bibliographic information with MS word is a serious challenge.
    Thank you for your valuable guides.

    — Bahareh    13 December 2009, 12:55    #