The effective temperature of the Sun's surface is 5770 K (Ostlie & Carroll page 77). There's no reason the usual principle of "if somebody objects, provide a source" can't apply. Source obvious statements that are obvious to everyone should be easy. If it's not, maybe they're not so obvious and need to be sourced. Cheers, WilyD On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 12:33 PM, <WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 12:33 PM, <WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote: I mean neither, in practice - or, more accurately, I think the oral tradition in question contains statements more obvious than "the Sun is hot," but does not include matters of opinion. It would, I think, include statements like "Joyce is one of the most significant authors of the 20th century," a statement that is, I think factually true and that is true on a level that goes beyond any given guy who says "Joyce is one of the most significant authors of the 20th century." It's a statement that has to do not with Joyce's aesthetic merits but with his importance and notability. There's probably, for this, plenty of people who have incidentally commented on Joyce's importance in an introduction, but this is a profoundly sloppy way to do it - yes, we can find people who incidentally note Joyce's importance, but for the most part the importance of Joyce to literary studies is not something that is thoroughly documented in written literature. (I am, notably, not a Joyce scholar, and this may not be true of Joyce as such - perhaps there is an article on "How Joyce became significant" that traces this fact thoroughly. But you can replace Joyce with a hundred other authors, and I am sure not all of them have thorough overviews of their sociological importance to literary studies from good sources.) And the amount of stuff that exists largely in the oral tradition of what is assumed within the humanities extends well beyond things like that. We are still an oral culture in many ways. -Phil