If you have some romantic notion about astronomers sitting at telescope eyepieces in freezing temperatures, allow me to disabuse you of it now. We don't (well, most of us don't). We often take data at an observatory, without ever operating the telescope (too many chances we astronomers would break the instrument, so they hire people to do that), load the data onto magnetic tape, bring it to our home institution, load it into the computer, and then analyse it. The punch line is that we spend a lot of time in front of computers.
I've become rather taken with computers, in part because they do exactly what one tells them to do (one should note the vivid contrast between computers and humans...). Thus, I (try to) keep track of various computer related things. Here's some stuff on the Web related to computers which I find interesting:
PGPLOT is a wonderful graphics package put together at Caltech, largely by T. J. Pearson. The documentation is online.
Although I've learned C and am working on C++ (and Lisp and Perl...), Fortran remains my language of choice. The Fortran market contains pointers to the wide variety of Fortran products available. (Fortran now refers to the language once known as Fortran 90, and includes support for array manipulation and parallelization.)
Linux is a Unix-like operating system for IBM PCs and clones developed by Linus Torvalds and an international network of hackers. If you are currently afflicted with M$-DOG and Windoze, I highly recommend you take a look at a real operating system.
The HyperText Markup Language is the series of markup tags used to make information available over the Web. HTML gets its own separate section because it is so neat.
HTML describes what a document contains. Note how revolutionary that is. The typical method (particularly in desktop publishing) is to describe how a document looks (this part is bold, this part is in italics, etc.). In contrast, HTML says, this thing is a paragraph, this thing is a header, this text should be emphasized.
Consider the difference. If all I say is that this text should be emphasized, I'm leaving it to you (well, really your browser) to figure out what that means. Should emphasized text be written in italics? big letters? different colors? spoken in a different style of voice? (That's right, blind folks can surf the Web with a voice synthesizer. Maybe someday soon, even seeing folks will have HTML documents read to them by computers!)
Of course, one thing about HTML is that I, the author, lose a lot of control. Many folks don't like that and have tried to delude themselves (often with the help of companies like Netscape and Microsoft) that authors can control the presentation of an HTML document. I figure I have better things to do with my time than try to figure out how to tell your machine how to behave. I argued this position for some time in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html. As a result of my participation in that newsgroup, I've taken to calling myself Lt. Lazio of the html.police.
Many folks have described the potentials of the Web better than I. I particularly like Micheal Kelsey's essay What is HTML? and Abigail's dream. I've learned a lot from
and many others in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html.
Some folks appear to have a misguided notion about the Web. A particularly egregious example is contained in David Seigel's essay, Severe Tire Damage. I've written a brief rebuttal.
I learned HTML itself from The Beginner's Guide to HTML, though this is now a bit dated. If you have any HTML questions, I recommend the authoritative source on the Web, W3C and their exhaustive set of documentation.
Oh, and of course, this document has been validated! (See below.) If you're a Web author, too, you've been a good net.citizen and validated your documents, haven't you?
jlazio@patriot.net 