Re: goldfish scales

[brian whatcott <inet@INTELLISYS.NET>]

At 11:35 4/15/99 -0400, you wrote:
> In my mis-spent youth, I recall an assigned problem in thin-film
> interference, in which the thicknesses and indices of refraction for several
> layers in a fish scale were given, and the question asked was "What color is
> the fish?"
>
> We'd like to work it through as an in-class exercise, but can't seem to
> locate the data.  Does anybody have the appropriate data, or a notion where
> we might find it?

> George Spagna

I'm sure George will be pleased to know that Tolstoy referred more
than once to fish-scales in "War & Peace".
(As a metaphor for dying bees ! and for dappled sunlight)

I might even set out to impress him by weaving such a reference
casually into a relevant response. Trouble is, I have nothing
more relevant on offer.

       So I need to answer his question with a question:
in this set of Corel CDRoms Norma bought from the library sale
yesterday, it seemed like a good idea to be able to search classic
books for keywords and phrases.

 And there was a disk with Shakespeare's works and one with a wide
 variety of classic literature:
 but what I need ( and now see great utility for) is a compendium of
science papers or texts or monographs. So I expected to be able to
 access new lists of Science CDRoms produced in the 3 or 4 years
 since these bargains were produced, from Corel's web presence.

    But I was disappointed:
  http://www.corel.com
had relegated all their former offerings of this kind ("CDHome")
to archives where tifs of former sales managers, and building facades
 were stored.

It seems that this sort of searchable library ROM was not a marketing
success, despite its obvious virtues for scholarship.

I expect though that educators, always tuned to the latest learning
resources may know of new Multimedia companies who have picked up the
torch? I hope so, at any rate. Nothing searches better than a computer!

Brian

brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>
Altus OK