This is True®
by Randy Cassingham

Randy Cassingham's Honorary Unsubscribe Recognizes the Unknown, the Forgotten and the Obscure People who Had an Impact on Our Lives

Tung-Yen Lin

Born in Shanghai, Lin trained as an engineer. His passion was bridges, and to make them better he used prestressed concrete, which uses embedded high-tension steel cables to allow more economical and better-looking building techniques. During his career, he oversaw the constructions of thousands of bridges, including a thousand in China alone. His ideas spread when he turned to teaching: he was a professor at the University of California in Berkeley from 1946 to 1976 -- his alma mater (he got a graduate degree there in 1933). He also designed an elevated roadway into San Francisco International Airport. When President Ronald Reagan presented Lin the National Medal of Science in 1986, he shocked the President by presenting him with a design for an "Intercontinental Peace Bridge" across the Bering Strait, linking the U.S. with the USSR. "You spend money on bombs, and in 10 years they're out of date," he said later. "But you build bridges, they last forever." He died November 15 at home in El Cerrito, Calif. He was 91.

From This is True for 16 November 2003

Suggestions for further reading:

Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One
By: Deke McClellandDavid Futato
List Price: $49.99
Amazon Price: $31.49
Editorial Review:
Master the fundamentals of Adobe InDesign with One-on-One, Deke McClelland's unique and effective learning system. Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One includes step-by-step tutorials, more than four hours of DVD-video demonstrations, and hands-on projects to help you improve your knowledge and hone your skills. Once you read about a particular technique, you can see how it's done first-hand in the video. The combination is uniquely effective.

Whether you're new to InDesign or a creative professional interested in the groundbreaking features of CS4, Deke's conversational style and carefully structured lessons guide you easily through the program's fundamental and advanced concepts and techniques. More than 900 full-color photos, diagrams, and screen shots illustrate every key step. With this book, you will: Learn at your own speed with 12 self-paced tutorials Create professional-looking documents with InDesign's powerful text and graphic tools Discover how to create, import, and modify artwork Apply a sequence of style sheets to format an entire document in one operation Compose a fully interactive document with bookmarks, hyperlinks, buttons, sounds, and movies Test your knowledge with multiple-choice quizzes in each chapter

And more. Written and produced by a Photoshop expert with well over 20 years of experience, Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One simulates a classroom environment that provides one-on-one attention as you proceed from lesson to lesson. You'll learn to use InDesign faster, more creatively, and more efficiently than you thought possible.

With Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One, you'll quickly learn how to design professional layouts for print and digital publishing with this program. You get complete step-by-step instructions and hours of DVD-video demonstrations with Deke McClelland's unique and effective system. Learn techniques in the book, see how they're done in the video, and apply the knowledge to hands-on projects offered in every chapter.


Coauthor David Futato's Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One Top Ten New Features Roundup

David Futato is a full-time freelance designer and the design mastermind behind the One-on-One book series. Having worked in design and production in both publishing and advertising for the last fifteen years, he brings real-world experience to his projects?he's wrestled with nearly every kind of layout, file format, schedule, press issue, and client one can imagine. In addition to the One-on-One books, his credits include the interior book designs for the Animal and Digital Media series from O'Reilly Media. David holds a Bachelor of Science in writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

10) Spread-view rotation. If you have landscape pages in your document, this feature will save you a trip to the chiropractor. Just rotate the spread view from the Pages palette, and like magic, InDesign suddenly rights itself.

9) New Style option in dialogs. This may seem like something trivial, but the amount of time saved adds up quickly. In CS4, whenever you are asked to specify a style (say, for a nested style or an automatic number), you now have the option of creating a new style from within the dialog. No more backing out, creating the new style separately, then heading back to the original dialog box.

8) The Preflight palette. Quite possibly the biggest new feature in the bunch. The plethora of options tucked away inside the Preflight palette may well have designers pulling at their hair (or ignoring the palette entirely), but prepress folks and standards-sticklers will fall in love. Real-time preflighting as you work? Awesome. No more surprises when your files go to the vendor? Even better.

7) GREP nested styles. This is InDesign's most obtuse new feature, hands down. GREP? Regular expressions? Still, if your eyes haven't glazed over yet, they're probably popping. Users with an understanding of regular expressions will love the power and flexibility of this feature?automatically styling any URL, or phone number, or anything else that can be found with a regex search, regardless of where it appears in the paragraph.

6) Contact-sheet cascade placement. Sure to be the new best friend of catalog-makers, asset managers, heck, just about anyone with more than a handful of images to keep track of. Take a stack of images loaded on the Place cursor, and drag a box on the page. InDesign automatically sizes and distributes the images in contact sheet form in the box you just drew.

5) The tabbed-window interface. This is a controversial feature for sure, and a couple of OS X users are crying foul. Early on, I was one of them?I'm a Mac guy through and through, using Boot Camp to run Windows when necessary?but I became a tabbed-window convert. You now have the option of docking every document in a tabbed window. Click a tab to switch documents. Drag a tab to reassign priority. Just like I could never give up my tabbed web browsing, I'm hooked on the tabbed-window interface in CS4.

4) Place-gun constrained frames. Even though it may sound dangerous, in actuality it's the best new image placement feature. With an image loaded onto the place cursor, click and drag?InDesign automatically constrains the frame to the proportions of the image. What's more, it displays the scale percentage of the image on the fly while you drag.

3) The Links palette. Rebuilt, retooled, and revamped in CS4, the Links palette is no longer just a place to check for red question marks or yellow triangles. Split into two panes, the first is the traditional list you know and love (though now it's customizable), and the second gives you more information than you can imagine about the selected image. Best feature? You can see the effective PPI directly from within InDesign?something I'm thrilled to finally see.

2) Smart Guides. The Smart Guides are an amazing collection of... well, it's hard to say exactly what they are. How they work, on the other hand, is straightforward and yet magical?InDesign compares the object you're working on to those around it on the page, and snaps into place. The Smart Guides work for aligning, scaling, cropping, distributing?you name it, they've got it covered. And the Smart Measure cursor puts the most relevant dimensions right at the same point as your mouse, so no more looking back and forth between what you're doing and what the control palette dimensions say.

1) Cross-references. Sure, it's not flashy (or visually stunning) like Photoshop CS4's OpenGL navigation, or even InDesign's Smart Guides. And some people may never use the feature?rarely do you need cross-references in print ads or other single page documents. But as an author, a book designer, a layout artist?whatever hat I'm wearing at the moment?my bread and butter are books, and a book without cross-references is little more than a doorstop. I've been waiting, no clamoring, for this feature for years. No more entering five-hundred-plus figure references by hand! The cross-reference formats are fully customizable and work beautifully across book documents. Best of all, they automatically translate to links when exported to PDF.


 
Bridges: Amazing Structures to Design, Build & Test (Kaleidoscope Kids)
By: Carol A. JohmannElizabeth Rieth
List Price: $12.95
Amazon Price: $10.36
Editorial Review:
Build bridges of your design -- from the 'workhorse' truss-beam bridge to the dazzling suspension bridge. Use bridge-building basics, and, along the way, discover how science and creativity come together in the creation of those weight-bearing wonders -- bridges. Choose the best bridge design for different sites. Make decisions about cost, safety, materials, and the environment. Build and innovate using available materials. Test your construction for function and load.
 
Dynamic Learning Flash CS3
By: Fred GerantabeeAGI Creative Team
List Price: $44.99
Amazon Price: $29.69
Editorial Review:
Dynamic Learning: Flash CS3 Professional is like having access to a top-notch team of your very own instructors. Written by product experts and trainers who have produced many of Adobe's training titles, the book takes you step-by-step through the process of learning to use Flash CS3 like a pro.

This full-color book is organized into lessons, with easy-to-follow instructions, tips, examples, and review questions at the end of every lesson. Each lesson is self-contained, so you can go through the entire book sequentially or just focus on individual lessons.

Topics covered include: What's new in Flash CS3 Professional Flash CS3 jumpstart Drawing tools Modifying and transforming graphics Working with symbols and the library ActionScript Working with video and audio The DVD that is included with the book includes video tutorials and all of the files you'll need to complete the lessons, from the starting images and elements to the final, completed Flash animations. A free Instructor's Guide is available online.
 
Brooklyn Bridge
By: Lynn Curlee
List Price: $18.99
Amazon Price: $14.81
Editorial Review:

"It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, but a bridge."

So wrote one architectural critic of the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the grandest and most eloquent monuments to the American spirit that our country has produced. Its magnificent site, breathtaking span, cutting-edge technology, and sheer beauty have made it the subject of poems, paintings, photographs, novels, plays, and movies.

Beneath the Brooklyn Bridge's triumphant arches lie astonishing tales of death, deception, genius, and daring. Over the fourteen-year course of its construction, there were many deaths, including that of John A. Roebling, designer and chief engineer; an underwater fire; and even fraud.

Finally, though, the bridge was finished, and as part of the opening day festivities, the president, and two mayors crossed it.

In this stunning visual history, Lynn Curlee tells the fascinating story of the history and construction of the "Eighth Wonder of the World."


 
Design of Highway Bridges: An LRFD Approach
By: Richard M. BarkerJay A. Puckett
List Price: $175.00
Amazon Price: $133.00
Editorial Review:
The up-to-date guide to applying theory and specifications to real-world highway bridge design


Design of Highway Bridges, Second Edition offers detailed coverage of engineering basics for the design of short- and medium-span bridges. Based on the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) LRFD Bridge Design Specifications, it is an excellent engineering resource. This updated edition features:
* Expanded coverage of structural analysis, including axle and lane loads, along with new numerical analytic methods and approaches
* Dozens of worked problems, primarily in Customary U.S. units, that allow techniques to be applied to real-world problems and design specifications
* Revised AASHTO steel bridge design guidelines that reflect the simplified approach for plate girder bridges
* The latest information on concrete bridges, including new minimum reinforcement requirements, and unbonded tendon stress at ultimate and losses for prestressed concrete girders
* Information on key bridge types, selection principles, and aesthetic issues
* Problems and selected references for further study
* And more

From gaining quick familiarity with the AASHTO LRFD specifications to seeking broader guidance on highway bridge design--this is the one-stop, ready reference that puts information at your fingertips.
 
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