[UPS] Re-naming UPS

[Michael L. Nelson]

On Wed, 3 Nov 1999, Eric F. Van de Velde wrote:

> This leaves only two choices among those already
> proposed:
> 
> Kepler
> Opcit or OpCit
> 
> I do not know the motivation for Kepler. Will
> the proposer please explain?

I proposed Kepler for these reasons:

- not an acronym.  as Eric points out, acronyms are fraught with peril
  regarding shifting mean, use by others, and endless debate about 
  the semantics of parts of the acronym ("archiving", "e/pre-prints", 
  etc.)

- easy to pronounce.  can't stress that one enough.

- a famous historical scientist

- and (this is the good part)....  Kepler was a great theoretician, but
  struggled to get data from his sponsoring colleague, Tycho Brahe, the
  great observationalist. Tycho finally gave Keppler access to all his
  data when he (Tycho) was on his deathbed.  Avoiding this kind of 
  situation is in the spirit of the Santa Fe/UPS meeting...

regards,

Michael
 

> The domain name www.kepler.edu SEEMS to be
> available.
> 
> Opcit comes from the library abbreviation
> for opere citato, meaning "in the cited work".
> This has a nice ring to it, is to the point.
> The domain name www.opcit.net is available.
> The domain name www.opcit.edu SEEMS to be
> available.
> 

---
Michael L. Nelson             
NASA Langley Research Center  m.l.nelson@larc.nasa.gov
MS 158, Hampton VA 23681      http://home.larc.nasa.gov/~mln/
+1 757 864 8511               +1 757 864 8342(fax)