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Dear Biomch-L readers,
Following my posting of 16 May 91, I have made contact with the Russian
postmasters on the uucp list mentioned at the time (correction: there were
125 nodes, about 40 of which seem to be on-line), and I posted a further
announcement to the networkers@hq.demos.su list in Moscow. To my delight,
a number of replies have been received, one of which came from as far away
from Western Europe as Novosibirsk at the river Ob in Western Siberia.
Furthermore, I am happy to announce that we have obtained our first Russion
subscriber - Welcome!
This development brings up some consequences, though. For most subscribers
(especially those on EARN/BITNET), email is essentially free of charge --
the only expenses being made are typically at the discretion of local system
policies (log-on time, disc usage, number of paper pages printed, etc.).
This is *not* necessarily the case for our Eastern colleagues. One communi-
cation from the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy near Moscow stated:
"(...)if somebody in the Biological Institute, for example, would ask
news groups from you, he could die under the flow of articles. And, +
to this, every MB of letters, received from FUUG.FI [the Finnish EUnet/
EurOpen backbone through with the .su domain is connect to the Western
world -- HJW], costs for us (and for users) about 600 roubles (for com-
parison - usually, engineers have about 200 - 500 roubles / month)."
While EARN/BITNET is expected to extend into the USSR later this year, the
above suggests that we should constrain our communications onto this list,
and I may have to begin by doing so myself! Fortunately, Biomch-L is a
rather quiet list, with approximatly 50 - 100 kB per month (as seen from the
archives for 1991); thus, our self discipline may have to be rather modest
in terms of roubles, for the time being.
I might add to this posting that I am particularly happy with the arrival of
our Russian friends in view of my contribution to the 1984 book "Human Motor
Actions - Bernstein Reassessed" edited by John Whiting, formerly at the Free
University in Amsterdam, and now at the University of York's Department of
Psychology in the U.K. As many of you will know, Bernstein was one of the
founding fathers of our field. Bernstein received the USSR's 1947 state
price for his work, and a selection from his work was published in 1967 as
"The co-ordination and Regulation of Movements" by Pergamon (who also publish
the Journal of Biomechanics, and who recently merged with Elsevier in Amster-
dam/NL). Since the book was sold out some years ago, it was republished,
with contemporary commentaries, by North Holland/Elsevier in 1984.
Herman J. Woltring, Eindhoven/NL
Following my posting of 16 May 91, I have made contact with the Russian
postmasters on the uucp list mentioned at the time (correction: there were
125 nodes, about 40 of which seem to be on-line), and I posted a further
announcement to the networkers@hq.demos.su list in Moscow. To my delight,
a number of replies have been received, one of which came from as far away
from Western Europe as Novosibirsk at the river Ob in Western Siberia.
Furthermore, I am happy to announce that we have obtained our first Russion
subscriber - Welcome!
This development brings up some consequences, though. For most subscribers
(especially those on EARN/BITNET), email is essentially free of charge --
the only expenses being made are typically at the discretion of local system
policies (log-on time, disc usage, number of paper pages printed, etc.).
This is *not* necessarily the case for our Eastern colleagues. One communi-
cation from the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy near Moscow stated:
"(...)if somebody in the Biological Institute, for example, would ask
news groups from you, he could die under the flow of articles. And, +
to this, every MB of letters, received from FUUG.FI [the Finnish EUnet/
EurOpen backbone through with the .su domain is connect to the Western
world -- HJW], costs for us (and for users) about 600 roubles (for com-
parison - usually, engineers have about 200 - 500 roubles / month)."
While EARN/BITNET is expected to extend into the USSR later this year, the
above suggests that we should constrain our communications onto this list,
and I may have to begin by doing so myself! Fortunately, Biomch-L is a
rather quiet list, with approximatly 50 - 100 kB per month (as seen from the
archives for 1991); thus, our self discipline may have to be rather modest
in terms of roubles, for the time being.
I might add to this posting that I am particularly happy with the arrival of
our Russian friends in view of my contribution to the 1984 book "Human Motor
Actions - Bernstein Reassessed" edited by John Whiting, formerly at the Free
University in Amsterdam, and now at the University of York's Department of
Psychology in the U.K. As many of you will know, Bernstein was one of the
founding fathers of our field. Bernstein received the USSR's 1947 state
price for his work, and a selection from his work was published in 1967 as
"The co-ordination and Regulation of Movements" by Pergamon (who also publish
the Journal of Biomechanics, and who recently merged with Elsevier in Amster-
dam/NL). Since the book was sold out some years ago, it was republished,
with contemporary commentaries, by North Holland/Elsevier in 1984.
Herman J. Woltring, Eindhoven/NL