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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: DEWAR (Spelled correctly!), Chill out
Date: 1998/01/22
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Date: 1998-01-22T00:00:00+00:00
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Michael Stark said

<<Dewar, chill out is a good thread title for those of us who remember
the posting a few years back about a satellite's (COBE, to be specific)
dewar running out of liquid helium. A dewar is essentially a thermos
bottle, and COBE's main experiment was looking at the cosmic background
radiation at 3 degrees K -- hence the need to cool the instrument to
that temperature.  Thus "chill out" is particularly appropriate, but
I hesitate to assign any deeper meaning to this ;)
>>


Dewar was the chemist who invented the thermos bottle. People often ask
me if I am related (since they know that my father was a world famous
chemist, and actually my degrees are also in chemistry), but that 
particular Dewar is not a relative.

He annoyed people not by sending internet messages :-) but by being
very secretive about his methods. The following is a rhyme of the
time:

  Professor Dewar 
  Is Clev'rer than you are
  None of you asses
  Can liquify gasses

:-)

I am also not related to the Dewar of Dewar Benzene, but the Michael
Dewar of Molecular Orbital fame was my father ...

People often find it interesting to read my father's autobiography (it
is in the ACS autobiography series). You will recognize some things
there, particularly the notion that strenuous argument (in which people
should not get emotionally involved please) is a good path to understanding
issues. I always find it interesting that, at least in the Oxford tradition
of English in which I was brought up, argument is a positive term, not
at all related to the word quarrel, whereas in the US, it seems a very
negative word, not far from quarrel :-)

Oh well a less related-to-GNAT thread is hard to imagine, but presumably
this is a thread that the dwinding few on CLA who are still interested
in technical Ada issues only have already killed (although the change
in subject means you have to kill it again!)