Eyewitness to Jesus: amazing new manuscript evidence about the origin of the Gospels

Reviewed Book: Thiede, Carsten Peter. Eyewitness to Jesus: amazing new manuscript evidence about the origin of the Gospels. New York: Doubleday, 1996

Detecting Technibaryon Dark Matter

The technibaryon constitutes a possible dark matter candidate. Such a particle with electroweak quantum numbers is already nearly ruled out as the dominant component of the galactic dark matter by nuclear recoil experiments. Here, the scattering of singlet technibaryons, without electroweak quantum numbers, is considered. For scalar technibaryons the most important interaction is the charge radius. The scattering rates are typically of order $10^{-4}$ (kg keV day)$^{-1}$ for a technicolor scale of 1 TeV. For fermionic technibaryons the most important interaction is the magnetic dipole moment. The scattering rates in this case are considerably larger, typically between $10^{-1}$ and 1 (kg keV day)$^{-1}$, depending on the detector material. Rates this large may be detectable in the next generation of nuclear recoil experiments. Such experiments will also be sensitive to quite small technibaryon electric dipole moments.Comment: 11 pages, Tex file, requires phyzzx, Santa Cruz preprint SCIPP 93/3

James McGready: Son of Thunder, Father of the Great Revival

This dissertation is a biography of James McGready (c.1760-1817), a Presbyterian revivalist minister who lived and worked primarily in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Indiana. He is best known as the Father of the Great Revival, an evangelical revival that spread throughout the southeastern United States between 1800 and 1805, and the creator of the camp meeting, which soon became an institutional part of American revivalism. Historians have generally described McGready as an innovator in matters of doctrine and revivalist methodology. This study argues that McGready is better understood as a traditionalist. This interpretation follows several recent works that have outlined a Scottish and Scotch-Irish Presbyterian revivalist tradition dating from the 1620s.;The study traces McGready\u27s educational background, outlines a variety of his theological positions, describes his intense homiletical style, and details his professional career. Research revealed that McGready was educated in several small Presbyterian-run schools that had direct links to the Presbyterian revivalism mentioned above. In doctrine, an examination of such varied topics as the process of conversion, limited atonement and predestination, and millennialism, showed McGready to be a firm Presbyterian Calvinist at every turn. In his homiletical style McGready followed a one hundred and fifty year old pattern of preaching known as the plain style and avoided the unstructured, extemporaneous preaching increasingly favored by revivalists in the nineteenth century. During his professional career, and especially during the Cumberland controversy of 1805-1809, McGready sided with the mainline church and eschewed those with schismatic inclinations.;The reinterpretation of McGready as a traditionalist casts doubt on much of the historiography of American revivalism. Historians have generally argued that revivalism arose in America and especially on the frontier. Understanding McGready, one of the foremost revivalists of the period, as a traditionalist tends to undermine that position. Additionally, this work re-emphasizes the transference of European forms to the New World, even past the American Revolution. Finally, McGready\u27s professional struggles point up the remarkable fluidity in American religion during the early national period

Nuclear quantum effects in liquid water from path-integral simulations using an ab initio force matching approach

We have applied path integral simulations, in combination with new ab initio based water potentials, to investigate nuclear quantum effects in liquid water. Because direct ab initio path integral simulations are computationally expensive, a flexible water model is parameterized by force-matching to density functional theory-based molecular dynamics simulations. The resulting effective potentials provide an inexpensive replacement for direct ab inito molecular dynamics simulations and allow efficient simulation of nuclear quantum effects. Static and dynamic properties of liquid water at ambient conditions are presented and the role of nuclear quantum effects, exchange-correlation functionals and dispersion corrections are discussed in regards to reproducing the experimental properties of liquid water.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, 2 table

Software for Managing Inventory of Flight Hardware

The Flight Hardware Support Request System (FHSRS) is a computer program that relieves engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) of most of the non-engineering administrative burden of managing an inventory of flight hardware. The FHSRS can also be adapted to perform similar functions for other organizations. The FHSRS affords a combination of capabilities, including those formerly provided by three separate programs in purchasing, inventorying, and inspecting hardware. The FHSRS provides a Web-based interface with a server computer that supports a relational database of inventory; electronic routing of requests and approvals; and electronic documentation from initial request through implementation of quality criteria, acquisition, receipt, inspection, storage, and final issue of flight materials and components. The database lists both hardware acquired for current projects and residual hardware from previous projects. The increased visibility of residual flight components provided by the FHSRS has dramatically improved the re-utilization of materials in lieu of new procurements, resulting in a cost savings of over $1.7 million. The FHSRS includes subprograms for manipulating the data in the database, informing of the status of a request or an item of hardware, and searching the database on any physical or other technical characteristic of a component or material. The software structure forces normalization of the data to facilitate inquiries and searches for which users have entered mixed or inconsistent values