Vatican Chooses Open FITS Image Format 223
@10u8 writes "The Vatican Library plans to digtize 80,000 manuscripts and store them in the open data format FITS, originally developed for astronomy and maintained under the IAU. The result is expected to be 40 million pages and 45 petabytes. FITS was chosen because it 'has been used for more than 40 years for the conservation of data concerning spatial missions and, in the past decade, in astrophysics and nuclear medicine. It permits the conservation of images with neither technical nor financial problems in the future, since it is systematically updated by the international scientific community.'"
Petabytes (Score:2, Funny)
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This will all be porn to the filters, since the artwork often has no clothes {/joke}
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If you have to tell us it's an asshole-ish statement, it's not...oh wait, it was. Nevermind.
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More like... Pedobytes!
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Does the Vatican intend to store their Pedo files in such a way that future generations will keep discovering their fantastic secrets?
Re:Petabytes (Score:5, Funny)
Happy now?
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And why does Chrome think petabytes is a misspelling and want me to change it to gigabytes? Hello Google! You probably deal with more petabytes than anyone, how does your browser not recognize that word?
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You read "petabytes", and think "pedophile"? Seems someone has a problem...
And why does Chrome think petabytes is a misspelling and want me to change it to gigabytes?
You spelled pedophile wrong.
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You read "petabytes", and think "pedophile"?
No, they read "Catholic Church" and think "pedophile", for the same reason one would read, "Christian Conservative" and think "cruising for gay hookers."
It's just the way the human brain works: things that are found together with relatively high frequency, like Catholic priests and child abuse, or Christian "Conservatives" and unseemly acts in public restrooms, tend to conjure each other up.
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You're right it's about the way the brain works, but it's not because these things are found together with so high frequency.
It's that they feel so salient when they are.
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Christian "Conservatives" and unseemly acts in public restrooms, tend to conjure each other up.
You got your quoted words mixed up. I think you meant: "Christian" Conservatives.
Being [politically] "Conservative" does not necessitate morality. Being "Christian" presumably has some connotation of morality.
I find it interesting that you are ok with calling unseemly acts in public restrooms a Christian, but seem to hesitate to really refer to them as Conservative.
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Ah, but he wasn't talking about railing against gays; he was talking about being gay and acting lewdly in a public restroom...
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> So, in my experience, railing against gay people is a Conservative thing not a Christian one.
If you're a Christian that believes in Biblical literalism (or at least Biblical infallibility) then that position doesn't make very much sense. Leviticus specifically states that gays, or at least gay men, "must be put to death".
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=468306 [google.com]
If you're a Christian who does _not_ believe the Bible is divinely inspired... well, I'd be interested to hear how you manage tha
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Leviticus specifically states that gays, or at least gay men, "must be put to death".
Obligatory question: Why can't I own a Canadian? [humanistsofutah.org].
Anyone that believes that homosexuality is wrong because their religious text says so, and then takes their family out for a nice ham dinner after Church on Sunday, is a full-fledged hypocrite.
Exactly, just like you and religious bigotry (Score:2)
It's just the way the human brain works: things that are found together with relatively high frequency...
Like many slashdot readers and uninformed bigotry against religion.
But then it's easy to hate and fear what you do not understand, because it would take work to understand someone else, and bigotry is born of laziness.
Not at all religious myself, I've just had a lot of friends that were and met many priests that were nothing like the monsters you seem to expect by default.
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Amen brother! Sing it to the mountains! [youtube.com]
40 Years? (Score:2, Interesting)
The Wikipedia page states FITS was created in '81. How does that translate to more than 40 years of use?
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They used their own definition of year, the same one which makes them say that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.
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The Wikipedia page states FITS was created in '81. How does that translate to more than 40 years of use?
In some years they REALLY used it.
Re:40 Years? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) data format was developed in the late 1970s to interchange astronomical image data. The final negotiations on its design occurred in March 1979. By 1981, the year that the specifications were published in an astronomical journal, FITS had become the de facto standard data interchange format of astronomy. This fact was recognized by the IAU, which adopted FITS as its standard data interchange and archiving format by a resolution at the Patras (1982) General Assembly.
40 years is a bit of a stretch, but if you go from the time FITS was first thought of it is ~ 35 years old. Not bad for ANYTHING related to computing. Imagine if filesystems has 30+ year lifetimes ;p
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Imagine if filesystems has 30+ year lifetimes ;p
FAT32 and NTFS are getting there...
UFS has been around for over 30 years (Score:2, Informative)
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One guy's been using it since it was invented. Someone else found out about it eleven years ago and has been using it since them.
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In astronomy, time dilation even affects the data formats.
DjVu? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Maybe they're just trying to make amends with astronomy after persecuting it so many years ago. "Hey, we have something in common now!"
Re:DjVu? (Score:5, Interesting)
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They did that a while ago; they have an observatory and host astronomy conferences. Obviously it's an attempt to live down what their predecessors did to Galileo, but I welcome it.
Back in the day, the idea of the church actively supporting astronomy is kind of like the christian fundamentalists of today actively supporting evolutionary biology.
Strangers things have happened...
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Back in the day, the idea of the church actively supporting astronomy is kind of like the christian fundamentalists of today actively supporting evolutionary biology.
Why is it exactly that those fundamentalists think God is a moron? They assert that he can't design a system that's self-running. So, either he's not omniscient, not omnipotent, or just not as smart as the fundamentalists (given the first two they must agree that he doesn't want to make a self-running system, so they know better).
Why do funda
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Why is it exactly that those fundamentalists think God is a moron....They assert that he can't design a system that's self-runnin
Well, There are many who do believe in evolution, but the opposite implication can be made for those who insist that God could NOT have possibly designed things without evolution-- it denies his sovereignty. The "God is a watchmaker" idea is more properly attributed to theists than to christians.
I do like the sweeping generalizations however, they make for nice strawmen.
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They wanted to be absolutely sure... and "back in the day" was around 1758 or 1822, depending on your POV :-)
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They did that a while ago; they have an observatory [space.com] and host astronomy conferences [bbc.co.uk]. Obviously it's an attempt to live down what their predecessors did to Galileo, but I welcome it.
"The Vatican Observatory is one of the oldest astronomical institutes in the world and the only research group directly supported by the Holy See". It's just the VATT (Vatican Telescope) that's relatively new.
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Re:DjVu? (Score:5, Informative)
DjVu is a format intended specifically for document distribution which uses lossy compression to obtain small files. It's not nearly as flexible as FITS, so you can't use it to represent hyperspectral images, metadata, etc.
Since the Vatican wants a format for data archival, they probably want to preserve as much information as possible for a wide variety of documents, so they can keep the originals in a vault and not touch them for the next 100 years.
Re:DjVu? (Score:4, Interesting)
It might not be around as long as FITS, but isn't DjVu [wikipedia.org] more suited for the digitization of manuscripts?
The Vatican isn't choosing FITS because it's more suited towards digitization of manuscripts. The church intends to be around literally forever and they're choosing FITS because it too, should be around as long as there is SCIENCE! From the FITS wikipedia article: 'FITS was designed with an eye towards long-term archival storage, and the maxim once FITS, always FITS represents the requirement that developments to the format must not render invalid existing files using older versions.'
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I don't know DjVu, but I'm an astronomer and I've worked with FITS a lot. It's actually a very simple data format. There's a header with all the document metadata, followed by the binary data. The metadata has a few standard [required] keywords, but as long as it's formatted correctly, you can add any header fields you like. The data is stored as uncompressed binary vector (unsigned char, short, int,
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No, not really. The most important consideration for the ancient Vatican documents is an exact and accurate replication of document image. If you have an document fragment from the third century, a proper reading of the document may hinge on how a particular letter fragment is reconstructed. To do this work properly, you need as exact a replication of the original as possible. It seems that FITS is designed to do just that. DjVu is not. DjVu works with modern documents and is focused on creating high
Word (Score:2)
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DjVu is a good distribution format, but they want an archival format. something that can store everything down to the grain of the paper and the pen strokes used to write them. And not neccesarily just in the wavelengths of "red" "green" and "blue", they may want bands that preserve the previous works on palimpsests. FITS allows storage of much more data than just what is required to look at the page and have it look like it would to a human holding it at arms length. They want something suitable for scien
What about the Monks? (Score:3, Funny)
Does this mean in the monasteries we are going to have monks transcribing these manuscripts bit by bit? I mean, if you just scan the stuff in what else will they have to do all day. Pray for the boredom to be over...
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Image size? (Score:4, Interesting)
High quality images eat storage quickly (Score:3, Insightful)
(45 petabytes) / (40 million pages) ~= 1.2 gigabytes / page. Is it just me, or does that seem a little big?
Storage is cheap. The manual process of scanning each of these documents is the costly part. It is thus better to scan at the maximum resolution and quality possible so that they never have to do it again. They may even be scanning multiple passes with different methods (visible, IR, etc.). 1.2GB per page is not unreasonable, even if it uses a lossless compression scheme.
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Storage is cheap. The manual process of scanning each of these documents is the costly part. It is thus better to scan at the maximum resolution and quality possible so that they never have to do it again.
You are correct about the cost. Hell, I've been holding off archiving my audio CDs until I have enough disk space to store them all in a lossless format just so I won't feel the need to do it over again.
There is also another VERY important reason why they don't want to repeat this if at all possible.
You
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How many CD's do you own!!! A 1TB drive which are dirt cheap these days will hold around 2000 average CD's with lossless compression. There are also 2TB drives on the market as well.
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Yes :) FITS files are HUGE!
As a sysadmin for an astronomy observatory I find this laughable. FITS was designed to store every last detail about an image (and frequencies for radio astronomy) and it seems WAY overkill to burn that many bits digitizing manuscripts.
But hey, who am I to question the word of the church? :)
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> Is it just me, or does that seem a little big?
They might want to scan at such a high resolution that someone can study the makeup of the manuscript paper and things like brush and pen strokes...
If you assume 1200DPI non-lossy and uncompressed at 32bpp, an 8.5x11 piece of paper might be 500MB or so (depending on how they encode it), and old manuscripts aren't necessarily going to be as small as regular paper. They're probably also scanning things like maps.
c.
Re:Image size? (Score:5, Informative)
DaVinci Code aside, parchment used to be expensive. People reused it. Probably they want a high enough resolution to read any palimpsets [wikipedia.org] they may have.
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Don't worry, it's Wikipedia - you probably won't.
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But all those extra details can be extrapolated in software anyways, didn't you ever watch CSI?
Computers is black majick! Use Monk scribes!! (Score:2)
Monk labor is a time-tested and proven method of copying information from one paper/parchment to another. I see no reason to stop now.
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Do you know if that actually is something that monks still do?
I would assume that the process of manually copying manuscripts started to taper off when the printing press went into operation, let alone now with digital copying processes.
I like FITS (Score:2)
I like FITS. It shows its age: the file headers are all arranged in decks of 80 column cards. But who cares? It is robust, easy to parse (if you want to read simple data formats) flexible and stable. One can write a basic image reader and writer in a day, and you will be able to read images from about 30 years old to ones created right now.
There are some slight pecularities, like applying a fixed additive offset to every data element. These are rarely encountered except in specific circumstances: fits does
Re:Did they ask Pope? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not really. Nowhere in TFA does it mention these records being available to the general public, let alone free to download over the net. Just because they are digitizing the archives for some safety/redundancy does NOT mean that the church is suddenly backtracking and opening the archives up to everyone.
We must have read different articles, the second link to the British Library is confusing if what you say is true:
I am particularly interested in the business model that the Vatican Library will adopt in making these manuscripts digitally accessible. In particular, I am thinking of the manuscripts that are held across institutions and the potential for aggregating them (or even 'virtually re-uniting' them) in Virtual Research Environments.
While not free it sounds like they want to make them more available and make a little cash on the side too to me. Nevertheless they will use the internet to not only spread these articles but also make money. Still a bit two faced, wouldn't you say? Although it's not the utmost in transparency it's still more so than locked underneath the Vatican where only the most holy scholars on site can
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I am naturally very excited about the news. This is a very ambitious project on one of the world's most important manuscript collections. I will keep my eyes peeled for any further details and developments. I am particularly interested in the business model that the Vatican Library will adopt in making these manuscripts digitally accessible. In particular, I am thinking of the manuscripts that are held across institutions and the potential for aggregating them (or even 'virtually re-uniting' them) in Virtual Research Environments.
The way I read the article that paragraph is just the blogger's opinion. He says he will "keep his eyes peeled for any further details," and that he's interested in the "business model that the Vatican Library will adopt in making these manuscripts digitally accessible." Nowhere does he say that this will ACTUALLY happen, though.
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Nothing two-faced about the Catholic Church wanting to make money. It's what they've always been about.
Re:The Pope Has Spoken, It Is Done! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Does what they say actually matter, in light of the recent news of what's been done by them?
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"Does it matter?" I don't know, man, that depends on what sort of a moral world-view you're subscribing to, and what you mean by "matter". Personally, I don't have a world-view where it's all fine and dandy for me to twist peoples' words and laugh at them for being hypocrites in one matter just because they've done something wrong in another matter, in any case at all. I consider this, first, as a responsibility towards myself. Slashdot-types, who might be thought to ostensibly value Science, ought to be th
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Sadly, that PBS story didn't include any links to the original text. So we don't know what the Pope actually said, only what Margaret Warner claimed he said, based on an on the fly translation.
BTW, why do you expect the Torah and the New Testament to be any more consistent than US law (about, say, races) in 1800 vs. 2000?
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Wonder if they may accidentally include manuscripts that conspiracy nuts think the Vatican has that the Vatican denies having?
I have no idea which manuscripts those would be.
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The Vatican Secret Archives, is not really that secret anymore. But at one time, the Archivist (currently Cardinal Raffaele Farina) was one of two Cardinals, that could leave and return to the Papal Conclave (pope election). The new rules, allow for sickness.
Re:The Pope Has Spoken, It Is Done! (Score:4, Informative)
Its actually quite funny, the website [vatican.va] actually has the title "secret archives", and offers to sell you scanned copies on CD.
Re:The Pope Has Spoken, It Is Done! (Score:5, Interesting)
As a Catholic myself, I can assure you that the Church bureaucracy makes every other organization seem small. It's not even the left and right hands working in opposite directions, it's the three left hands disagreeing with the two right hands and the foot. The head has very little idea what's going on, and several sections outright ignore it, or at least filter out whatever they disagree with.
Re:The Pope Has Spoken, It Is Done! (Score:4, Insightful)
But everyone looks the other way from what the dick is doing.
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it's the three left hands disagreeing with the two right hands and the foot.
I guess this fell bureaucratic beast is called Christphod Biblecrux.
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Every religion ever created by man has splintered, and will continue to do so.
There is no reality for them to agree on.
SB
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Just imagine how silly he's going to feel when he realizes that the church is choosing to use technology which was produced by the same scientific community the church had previously persecuted [wikipedia.org].
Re:The Pope Has Spoken, It Is Done! (Score:5, Informative)
The Institute of Physics's magazine /Physics World/ did an article on his trial last year (IIRC, it may have been earlier). He was tried for heresy, but the reason he was tried was not for heliocentric theory, but rather for insulting the Pope (who had been interested in his theories) about an unrelated (somewhat political) matter instead of answering his questions. IOW, he was killed not for arguing against the church but for publicly insulting the man with the power to have him killed, which is generally regarded as a bad idea.
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There are a -lot- of things you can condemn the Catholic church about, namely the power abuse historically, the sale of indulgences and the failure to adapt to the 21st century. The entire format of the Catholic church is born out of an illiterate population filled with 'visions'. But the entire church failed to change for an enli
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That would be nice if it were true. It's not. Abuse rates are much higher in public schools. [cbsnews.com]
The church is held (as it should be) to a higher standard. I blame the celibacy rule for the priesthood which creates a cadre of leadership that is totally insensitive to the needs of families to protect their children and which creates an inviting environment for pedophiles giving them access and cover.
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When I was in high school there was a teacher/coach who kept getting shuffled around from school to school because he had a habit of sleeping with female students. It was pretty common knowledge among us (students) which girls he'd had.
I know of 4 schools (including mine) where he'd worked within a span of 6 years, because the administrators just wanted him to move along without making an public issue.
Re:inb4 (Score:4, Informative)
Wow... how do you feel about US public schools then? I've read that there are much higher rates of abuse there - just less publicity.
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[CITATION NEEDED]
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As fair as I'm aware, they've never, as yet, conducted any Inquisitions, Crusades, or any amount of other heinous, greedy, megalomaniacal skulduggery. And they're certainly not in the business of keeping the masses poor and ignorant to further concentrate their power over them.
The child abuse is one of the Church's lesser crimes, to be honest. It's just current.
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Has the US public school system officially implemented a strategy to not only cover up those abuses but also protect those who perpetrated the abuses and maintain them in a position where they can abuse children with impunity?
Re:inb4 (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't the Vatican one of the more reasonable major religions when it comes to science and technology? Obviously, you can't expect any religious group to completely dismiss any role for God to play (if they did they wouldn't be a religion), but they've gone on record saying that Evolution is correct.
It's the folks that read a few Bible verses and then take them as the 100% literal History Of The World that really oppose all things science (as opposed to being a book that man needs to interpret).
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It's protestants that believe in creationism
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Not even just protestants, but a very narrow, crazed faction of protestants. Lutherans, for example, are fairly rational.
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The church has not "endorsed" evolution though - they just remain fairly silent on it and grudgingly admit the argument may have merit. But I'm with you, I have some appreciation for the institution that attempts
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Earth is at center of the universe, imprisoning Galileo, etc, etc will teach nearly any institution a lesson or two in flexibility. And it only took 1500 years or so...
Actually, heliocentrism began with Copernicus, a priest.
Galileo affair (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't the Vatican one of the more reasonable major religions when it comes to science and technology?.
Yes, and it was only in 1992 that they admitted that they had made a mistake in forcing Galileo to recant that the Earth went around the sun. Yes, Galileo was an ass about how he said it, but it doesn't change the fact that the church opposed the science with real physical and political force. Since this is how a "more reasonable major religion" behaves I think this is an EXCELLENT argument against "moderate" religion.
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Yes, and it was only in 1992 that they admitted that they had made a mistake in forcing Galileo to recant that the Earth went around the sun.
I'm not defending the church's stance on Galileo in the 1630s, but I do find it interesting that you judge an organization by an action committed almost 400 years ago. While the church took longer to officially admit their wrong-doing, they had already taken Galileo's book off the banned list by the 1750s. They allowed access to scholars who wanted to study the affair beginning in the 19th century, and it was those scholars who actually wrote the history books that portrayed Galileo as the hero of the sci
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Isn't the Vatican one of the more reasonable major religions when it comes to science and technology? Obviously, you can't expect any religious group to completely dismiss any role for God to play (if they did they wouldn't be a religion), but they've gone on record saying that Evolution is correct.
The Catholic church is largely an European institution and europe has become (thankfully) a very secular society. The folks who happen to reach the Catholic church's higher ranks tend to be born and raised in a very secular society, which is very pro-science, very pro-technology and although they also accept religion they don't take kindly to fundamentalist crackpots. If you have an organization who is led by people who grew up in that environment then those values tend to rub down on your entire organiza
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You are of course aware that here in England we burned orders of magnitudes more Catholics at the stake, than the inquisition ever had people done away with but that never comes up on the radar. Even to this day we have an annual celebratory burning of a Catholic effergy complete with fireworks and everything.
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Yes. I've heard of a lot more non-priest scientists though.
(Even when factoring in the greater number of non-priests.)
Catholic church does real scientific work ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really, but I find very funny that the Vatican is using “science and technology" to store its manuscripts, when at the same time they spit so much on this same science and technology.
The currently accepted theory regarding the origin of the universe, the "big bang" theory, was developed by a catholic priest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema [wikipedia.org]ître
The vatican operates a world class astronomical observatory.
http://vaticanobservatory.org/VOF/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=1 [vaticanobservatory.org]
When I was an undergraduate at a california state university the dean of the chemistry department was also the parish priest at a small local church.
Some religious individ
Corrected link (Score:2)
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître"
Anyone know how to avoid such problems in a posted URL?
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I doubt they're hiding much in the library... thousands of academics are there every year. No, having Joe Public in the stacks is not conducive with preservation - you are welcome to obtain copies.
You can't check out the Declaration of Independence from the National Archives, either!
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The VL measurement is uncompressed images of parchment.