Adventures with a Porcupine

Adventures with heterocycles.

Elucidation of mechanisms and discovery of novel reactions are interconnected, as four research chapters from the Munich laboratory demonstrate. 1) In a new opening of the furan ring, 2-methoxyfuran and tetra-acceptor-substituted ethylenes furnish methyl acrylates, which are cis-3-substituted by a cyclopropyl ring that bears the four acceptor groups. Experiments with trans- and cis-1,2-bis(trif...

Adventures with portability

In this paper we describe the issues we are facing, and some of the solutions we have developed, in porting a complex multi-component simulation model of pastoral dairy-farming scenarios for execution on a high-performance Linux cluster. This exercise is part of a wider goal to develop and implement global optimization procedures for this model which necessarily require very large numbers of si...

Adventures with membrane lipids.

It is a very great honour to have been awarded the Biochemical Society’s Morton Lectureship for 1994. T o be chosen by one’s peers for an award of this stature is indeed the ultimate reward for one’s life’s work, even more so when one considers the high level of achievement reached by Professor R.A. Morton himself and by the previous awardees. This award is particularly gratifying to me in reca...

Adventures with Rubik’s UFO

Chapter 3: Adventures with a Cosmoscope

To argue for scrutability theses, as I do in this chapter and the next, we first need a potential scrutability base. I will start with a reasonably generous base. Later (in chapters 6 and 7), I will consider whether it needs to be augmented and whether it can be narrowed down. In the Aufbau, Carnap’s main base was a phenomenal base, consisting just of logical expressions plus an expression for ...