Slashdot Mirror

fsh writes "José Gómez-Rodríguez and company from the Madrid Autonomous University have successfully imaged the phase change of a lead crystal from 45K to 135K. They built their very own variable temperature scanning-tunneling microscope, capable of continuously scanning an area 20nm square throughout a 100K temperature jump. This was a surface phase change, but their technique will hopefully pave the way for imaging other phase changes, like solid to liquid. Check out the movie."

fsh writes "José Gómez-Rodríguez and company from the Madrid Autonomous University have successfully imaged the phase change of a lead crystal from 45K to 135K. They built their very own variable temperature scanning-tunneling microscope, capable of continuously scanning an area 20nm square throughout a 100K temperature jump. This was a surface phase change, but their technique will hopefully pave the way for imaging other phase changes, like solid to liquid. Check out the movie."

karvind writes "Article in Physical Review Focus reveals the silence practiced by Physical Review during WWII to delay publishing results related to fission, the splitting of an atom's nucleus accompanied by a prodigious release of energy. From the article: Because of fears that Germany would use American research to pursue an atomic weapon, the Physical Review agreed to withhold reports of significant advances. It was not until several months after an atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki, Japan, that Phys. Rev. published the paper announcing the discovery of plutonium, the material used in that bomb. Physicist Abraham Pais later called the journal's silence on the subject 'the most important nonevent in the history of the Physical Review.'"

starannihilator writes "Helium 3, rare on the earth but abundant on the moon, may prove to be a feasible energy source with NASA's Moon-Mars initiative. Despite the American Physical Society's Report that the initiative harms science, the moon may actually benefit humans because it contains 10 times more energy than all the fossil fuels on earth. Long hailed as a potential source of energy, and outlined in detail by the Artemis Project, helium 3 may solve earth's energy crisis without any radioactive byproducts. The only problem: the reactor technology for converting helium 3 to energy is still in its infancy. Read more about the Artemis Project's information about fusion power from the moon here." Reader muditgarg points out that India has just hosted a global conference on Moon exploration and utilization, and adds a link to this related story on KeralaNext.

starannihilator writes "Helium 3, rare on the earth but abundant on the moon, may prove to be a feasible energy source with NASA's Moon-Mars initiative. Despite the American Physical Society's Report that the initiative harms science, the moon may actually benefit humans because it contains 10 times more energy than all the fossil fuels on earth. Long hailed as a potential source of energy, and outlined in detail by the Artemis Project, helium 3 may solve earth's energy crisis without any radioactive byproducts. The only problem: the reactor technology for converting helium 3 to energy is still in its infancy. Read more about the Artemis Project's information about fusion power from the moon here." Reader muditgarg points out that India has just hosted a global conference on Moon exploration and utilization, and adds a link to this related story on KeralaNext.

apsmith writes "Scaled Composites has just announced their first attempt at breaking 100 km, scheduled for June 21. This would make it the first commercial manned vehicle to officially enter space. This is not quite an Ansari X prize attempt since it will carry only one person without the extra mass corresponding to the 3-person prize requirement; they have to give at least 30 days' notice for that. Past flight history is available from their site; the Discovery Channel is producing a documentary on the whole project, 'Rutan's Race For Space.'" Roger_Explosion adds "If successful, the craft - named Space Ship One - will become the world's first commercial manned space vehicle. Space Ship One will temporarily leave the earth's atmosphere, and the pilot (yet to be announced) will experience about three minutes of weightlessness."

Oil -- and energy in general -- has long been a big topic among Slashdot readers. Predictions about The End of the Age of Oil (about which, claims the subtitle, this book provides "all you need to know") certainly are not new -- and if civilization lasts long enough, one day they'll prove true. It's nice to consider that automobiles aren't necessarily tied to petroleum, but mine certainly runs on 87 octane gasoline, and there aren't enough turkey guts or grease to power everything that we use petro-fuels for right now (though places like Iceland are trying hard to tap other sources). Current gas prices (in the U.S. at any rate) are higher than they have been in a decade or so, but in constant dollars, gasoline prices have certainly been worse. How much to panic, and when? Read on below for Arthur Smith (apsmith)'s brief review of David Goodstein's Out of Gas for a rather gloomy look at the future of oil-based energy. Out of Gas: All You Need to Know about the End of the Age of Oil author David Goodstein pages 128 publisher W.W. Norton & Company rating 9/10 reviewer Arthur Smith ISBN 0393058573 summary Why replacing oil is the world's most urgent and ignored problem. Americans have started to notice prices at the pump with an unfamiliar '2' on the sign. Meanwhile, crude oil prices are hitting 13-year records close to $40 per barrel. As the International Energy Agency reports, there is "no relief in sight". All this should come as no surprise to readers of David Goodstein's Out of Gas - the only question is, have we left it too late to survive the inevitable shocks that are coming?

In this slim and subtly illustrated volume Dr. Goodstein, physics professor and vice provost at Caltech, explains in clear and simple terms why the fossil fuel age is coming to an end. A "massive, focused commitment" is needed to develop alternatives, and every year of delay in that commitment adds immeasurably to future human suffering.

In years, or at best a decade, we will reach the global "Hubbert's peak" for conventional oil, when production starts to decline even with rising demand. Such a peak was reached for US production in 1970. "Foreign oil" has sustained us until now, but Goodstein shows why it cannot for much longer.

A number of books on this subject have come out in recent years, some very pessimistic about the future (for example Heinberg's "The Party's Over", which warns of a greatly decreased world population). Goodstein offers some hope in alternatives, substantially based on the analysis of climate scientist and space solar power advocate Martin Hoffert.

Solar-based renewables and fusion are the only long-run energy solutions. According to Goodstein, natural gas and nuclear fission can help tide us over. All of these have problems, with the most scalable (solar power from space) still the least mature. Goodstein's longest chapter discusses thermodynamics and the physical laws that explain usable energy and its relation to entropy. As a physicist, I was pleased and surprised to learn something from Goodstein's clear explanation here.

Goodstein also discusses global climate problems with continued use of fossil energy, particularly an increasing dependence on coal. He concludes: "Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century unless we find a way to live without fossil fuels."

There were a few minor things to complain about. Transitions between the chapters are too abrupt, perhaps caused by the wide range of discussion in such a short book. A few technical things seemed wrong - for example, it is quite feasible to run transportation systems off grid electricity (electric trains, subways, etc. do this) - would it be so hard to do it for personal transport too?

But Goodstein's book is the clearest explanation yet of our need to get beyond fossil fuels. Is it enough to get the public, and our leaders, actually paying attention?

You can purchase the Out of Gas: All You Need to Know about the End of the Age of Oil from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

TMB writes "Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman, astrophysicists at Case Western Reserve University (and in LK's case, author of a number of books including Physics of Star Trek), just submitted this nice little paper to Phys. Rev. Letters. It claims that in an accelerating universe, the existence of a future event horizon puts a fundamental physical limit on the total amount of calculation that can be done, even in an infinite time. This limit is much smaller than the traditional Hawking-Beckenstein entropy. Among other things, this implies that and Moore's Law must have a finite lifetime, here calculated to be 600 years, and that consciousness must be finite."

md_seymour observes: "Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA has a description and image of light that can twist as well as spin, based on research from Miles Padgett and Johannes Courtial of the University of Glasgow. They and their colleagues have apparently been able to sort individual photons by their orbital angular momentum. Since this characteristic of the photon is able to take on an infinite number of values, it may be possible to pack much more information into a light beam."

apsmith writes "In the New York Times' Sunday Book Review Dennis Overbye reviews British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees' new book: Our Final Hour - A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In This Century--On Earth and Beyond. The book paints an exceedingly grim picture of our future - Reese gives humanity only a 50-50 chance of surviving the 21st century, with all the potential for calamity we have unleashed (and that nature may have in store for us too). But the book isn't just doom and gloom - we CAN do something, and the answer lies in space. But NASA has been doing it all wrong. Interestingly enough, this coming weekend is the International Space Development Conference in San Jose, where you can find out the latest ideas on how we really should be settling space."

apirkle writes "Why can't we use magnetic media as RAM? Flipping the north and south poles of the tiny magnets we call bits simply takes too long. A collaboration of researchers has recently demonstrated a much faster method for reversing magnetization, described in Physical Review Focus."

derubergeek writes "APS has a summary of a paper being published in the Dec. 30th Physics Review Letters on the possiblity of creating quantum entanglement of particles traveling at speeds less than the speed of light. They believe there may be practical applications in satellite synchronization, for example."

derubergeek writes "APS has a summary of a paper being published in the Dec. 30th Physics Review Letters on the possiblity of creating quantum entanglement of particles traveling at speeds less than the speed of light. They believe there may be practical applications in satellite synchronization, for example."

apsmith writes "When somebody says "world space power", how many of you think of Ukraine? Kosmotras has done it again though, with a third $1000/pound launch December 20, 2002 to low Earth orbit of six spacecraft on the Dnepr (formerly SS-18 ICBM) launch vehicle. Among the six were a variety of small European, South American, and one Saudi satellite, and a 'dummy' of the commercial TrailBlazer craft headed to the Moon next year. The Rubin2 craft launched yesterday is also of interest, as it will be the first Internet-controlled spacecraft to operate 24 hours a day without having to use ground stations."

fist_187 writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has a story on the smallest PC since the Mini-PC: The MicroPC. It's a Pentium 4/2400 MHz machine, but you'd probably mistake it for a cable modem. I'm sure this trend will continue on to the Nano-PC, Pico-PC, and the Dick Tracy Watch."

During the cavalcade of April Fool's spoofs here on /., one submission stuck in my mind as fascinating and enjoyable -- and a complete scam. It was about an alleged anti-gravity disc, made from a 12" superconducting ring that looked not unlike a brake pad. As luck would have it, I was reading the book Voodoo Science at the time and thought once the April Fools hoopla had died down that I'd do a review of it for Slashdot, so read on if you care to. Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud author Robert Park pages 230 publisher Oxford University Press rating 4/5 reviewer chrisd ISBN 0195147103 summary Robert Park exposes how bad science propogates. Perhaps I should have posted the story, but in the end that sort of pseudo-scientific chicanery doesn't even deserve the attention that /. would bring it on April Fool's day.

The short review of Voodoo Science is that this is not a book that would make a good birthday gift for Alex Chiu or for that matter Deepak Chopra.

Voodoo Science is a happy little bon-bon of a book for the scientifically inclined. Robert Park is the head of the Washington office of the American Physical Society, and has worked inside the beltway helping the U.S. government and others understand the basics of science so they can make appropriate policy decisions. It is depressingly clear how badly they need it.

While there is a certain level of joy to be found in reading about Mr. Park's exploits debunking cranks and frauds, there is a sad realization that prominent legislators have no clue as to the physical laws that are the underpinnings of science. No, I wasn't surprised, but it was depressing nonetheless to see Trent Lott's name on a resolution designed to push through a patent on a "free energy" device, or Tom Harkin using his power to force the NIH to embrace alternative medicine as anything other than a placebo.

While fun, this isn't a perfect book. It is organized a little strangely, with subheadings throwing off the flow of reading, and at a little over 200 pages it seems too short.Park's mission with this book was not to dissect the great scientific frauds of all time, but I thought he could have spent more time on the issues he did bring up and less on trying to understand the Alex Chius of the world. Mr. Park is probably just trying to be polite, but in my reading of Voodoo Science he comes off as being too soft on the very targets of the book.

The case of cold fusion is a perfect example. His recounting of the famous events was right on, but it just fell flat when it came to to point the finger at Pons, Fleischman and the University of Utah for their complicity in fraud before the Utah state legislature. It is akin to writing a book about Enron and saying about Ken Lay: "It is likely he knew what he was doing was possibly improper."

I'd recommend Voodoo Science as a good gift to a younger reader, as it describes foundations of science in an accessible way. As you've probably gathered, an appropriate name for this book might be "The Laws of Thermodynamics and those that thought it didn't apply to them." As such, the book serves as a decent introduction to critical thinking about the physical world around us.

You can purchase Voodoo Science from bn.com. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Slashback arrives tonight with updates on the lukewarm path to cold fusion, one more update on what Microsoft claims is "the way out" (really, this time), a hopeful look at Mandrake's Club, and more -- read on below for the details.

"Congratulations! You may already own goats.cx!" King Mongo writes: "Well, well. First Verisign sent mail to trick domain owners into switching registrars ( as described earlier on Slashdot ); today I received a similar letter from Verisign asking me to renew cruel-intention.com with them. The problem is, I never bought cruel-intention.com and I've never used Verisign as a registrar. But what's this? Whois says I've owned it since September 2001? And the Technical Contact is Verisign? And it's registered for 10 years? You can bet I'll be contacting my state AG, as well as the USPS Inspectors' office; what if the domain name was offensive, or actionable (it may even be a DMCA violation)? Verisign has taken it upon themselves to hijack my identity and expose me to litigation! At least they let me know!"

Port softly, and carry a big Club. joestar writes: "Just seen in Mandrake Linux news... It seems that the recent call for Mandrake Club subscriptions had a double effect: it was a financial success for MandrakeSoft ($390,000 since the Club was first created on November 28th, 2001), and at the same time it generated lots of questions about this new approach of doing business with Free-Software. In a really interesting message, MandrakeSoft's CEO Jacques Le Marois gives all details about the Club results and why and how they are currently inventing a new business model dedicated to Free-Software oriented companies, since the traditional business models fail for these companies. Actually I'm impressed."

OK, perhaps we only have the way sideways. gh0ul writes "news.com is featuring an article regarding Microsoft and Unisys' joint venture to steer companies/individuals away from Unix and branch in to the corporate servers based on Windows2000. With all the negative impact towards 'wehavethewayout.com', im supprised they kept it going.. guess that $28 million matters.."

We've patented that way to think, sorry. An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Symantec marketing droids are on the rampage again. After patenting their definition update technology, this time they patented heuristic virus scanning. When will this insanity end? :P"

I'll believe it when it's powering my air-car. abburdlen writes: "A month ago an article in the Journal Science appeared hyping the possibility of tabletop fusion. Quick summary: Sonoluminescence in heavy acetone ... temperature of collapsing bubbles reaching temperature hotter than the Sun ... evidence of fusion. There was some excitement. There were also many initial skeptics. Looks like the doubtful win again. From the APS, 'The possibility of a major discovery has been obscured by substandard experimental techniques.' Ouch."

One day we'll all have decent bandwidth, right? Pathway writes "I know this has been looked at by slashdot before, but here's a good update comparing the Zipp Fiber to the Terabyte Triangle in Spokane at thelocalplanet.com. In the article, they compare how one prodject is so successful, while the other is foundering. It's a good read."

apsmith writes: "Bruce Sterling's latest Viridian piece is a written version of a talk on why we're in such a mess with crypto, why the computer industry is going nowhere for the next few years, and what Lawrence Lessig, the NSA, Echelon, Oliver North and Abdullah Catli have in common. Thought-provoking stuff, even if you might not agree with quite everything ("Why don't you geeks just sit down with your cheap, crappy plastic boxes, and shut up? Here in the TV biz, our boxes look nicer anyway!")." This is a lunch-time talk, and it's meant to be entertaining, and it is. :)

Johnny Vector writes: "Scientists at Cornell have taken X-rays of fruit flies, with enough detail to see the hairs on their wings. The AIP has more photos. They did it with an "X-Pinch" machine: vaporize a wire, the resulting plasma implodes, producing a tiny (1/1000 inch), fast (nanosecond) pulse of X-rays. I want one of those machines."

Jens Lönn writes: "The Kapitza-Dirac effect is the diffraction of a beam of particles, electrons in particular, by a standing wave of light. One can interpret it as waves of matter diffracted from "crystals" made of light, it's like matter and light swap roles. It was predicted in 1933 by a pair of future Nobel Prize winners, Russian Peter Kapitza (1894-1984) and Englishman P.A.M. Dirac (1902-84), but the technology needed to demonstrate it didn't exist at the time. It wasn't until April 11, 2001, when it was observed for the first time in Herman Batelaan's lab in the Behlen Laboratory for Physics at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. This is the first time _ever_ that scientists have shown that light can bend matter, not just the opposite."

apsmith writes: "Some of the companies that were preparing for a race to commercialize space and return to the moon (like Idealab's "Blastoff.com") have vanished with the stock market meltdown. But TransOrbital, a privately held company, is still plugging away, and claims to be on schedule for launch in the 4th quarter of 2001. The funding model seems to be generating lots of pretty pictures and selling them. Though for just $2500 you can also send your business card to the Moon!" Sounds like they've pushed their schedule a little bit since last mention, but considering the scope of the project, nearly any launch date would still be respectable.

Reader apsmith contributed this review of Gerard O'Neill's The High Frontier, a book now nearly a quarter century old. The author's dream of an upwardly mobile Earth population remains largely unrealized, though if O'Neill were alive today, he might be gladdened that there is at least one long-term orbiting home in place.

The High Frontier author Gerard K. O'Neill pages 326 publisher (1989 edition) Space Studies Institute Press rating 10 reviewer apsmith ISBN 0962237906 summary O'Neill outlines how to colonize near space with little more than boring 1970s materials and engineering know-how, with boot-strap colonies of thousands of peopleprocessing moon and asteroid dust in high-earth orbit. The Big Idea Continued growth in material well-being and freedom for humanity is only possible through colonization of space; O'Neill outlines how to do it with little more than boring 1970's materials and engineering know-how, via boot-strap colonies of thousands of people processing moon and asteroid dust in high-earth orbit. The only problem is the seed capital to get started; his initial $100 billion was clearly an over-estimate - a later estimate brought the startup costs closer to $7 billion. Even more important we really should now have the resources and motivation (global warming!) to make it happen. There is a new 2000 edition with additional material from other authors.

The Scenario: In 1969 Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill organized a weekly seminar for the advanced students in his freshman physics class. It was Apollo's heyday, but also a time of deepening skepticism in the benefits and relevance of science and technology. Both the Cold War with the Soviets and the hot war in Vietnam were at their height; pollution seemed to be worsening everywhere; serious people were arguing that humankind was already overstepping Earth's carrying capacity, and it was time to retrench. In this climate O'Neill asked his students:

"Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding technological civilization?"

And despite what Isaac Asimov called our "planetary chauvinism", O'Neill and his little group came up with strong arguments and designs for artificial colonies in high orbit or free space, well away from planetary surfaces. O'Neill was so taken with their enthusiasm for this that he committed a good deal of his spare time over the next several years to developing the ideas and trying to get them published. Along the way he enlisted a young MIT student named Eric Drexler, and colleague Freeman Dyson, among a small group of supporters. Worldwide publicity finally arrived in May 1974, when the NY Times sent a reporter to the small conference O'Neill had organized on this new topic of "space colonization".

Three years later came "The High Frontier", O'Neill's main publication for a popular audience on the subject. In his 1993 obituary Freeman Dyson said, "The High Frontier... established O'Neill as a spokesman for the people in many countries who believe that the settlement of space can bring tremendous benefits to humanity ...."

Repeated throughout the book is O'Neill's goal: "the humanization of space", by which he means in part the capacity to move the bulk of humanity off this planet and into colonies with resources vastly greater than what the Earth can provide. These colonies would be more than self-supporting; their first great contribution would be in construction of solar power satellites from lunar materials, allowing the nations of Earth to vastly expand their energy resources in the most environmentally sound fashion possible. Earth's surface captures only a tiny fraction of the solar energy available; something like 30 times what Earth receives comes through even the relatively narrow confines of geosynchronous orbit; another factor of 100 times as much energy is available inside the Moon's orbit where the "L5" or "high" orbits for the colonies are suggested.

O'Neill goes through in some detail what it would take, using the capacity of NASA's then-planned space shuttle, to first set up an initial mining station on the moon, which would then launch hundreds or thousands of times more mass to high orbit. The one new technology O'Neill relied on was his "mass driver", an electromagnetic acceleration system used both on the lunar surface to dump raw materials into space, and as a propulsion system somewhat similar to the electromagnetic "ion drive" NASA is now using on its Deep Space 1 mission, and of course related to the electromagnetic particle accelerators O'Neill worked with at his real job. O'Neill and colleagues even put together several "mass drivers" out of spare parts to test what accelerations were feasible -- even the first model achieved over 30 g's.

The centerpiece of the book is the design of the colonies themselves, constructed for the most part out of lunar material. These are the hollow spheres or cylinders, which O'Neill refers to as "Islands", rotated so as to provide a land area with artificial gravity. There's no fancy technology needed, despite what you might expect reading Clarke's Rama novels, or Greg Bear's Eon, or countless others. The magnitude of Island One, a colony designed for some 10,000 people, is well within the scale of many artifical structures we have built here on earth; O'Neill compares it to shipbuilding in particular. O'Neill's materials are aluminum alloys or even steel; no need for carbon fiber composites here (and the Moon is a little low on carbon anyway). The colonies provide comforts similar to home, with terraced apartments, rooftop gardens, forests and rivers and recreational areas. Lighting is provided through a somewhat complex system of mirrors, baffles, and ordinary glass windows - no need for a central "plasma tube"! Radiation shielding is the usual six feet of slag or lunar dirt.

The book is chock-full of great ideas that seem to make the whole scheme obviously practical. Did you know the space shuttle cargo bay has roughly the same capacity as a DC-9 airliner? In principle our current space shuttles could be used to ferry over a hundred passengers into space at a time; O'Neill estimates that even a limited shuttle fleet could get close to a hundred thousand people into low earth orbit every year (of course that was back when NASA thought it would be doing 60 shuttle missions a year). O'Neill was sure that other better ways of getting into low earth orbit would come along; the next few years should be very interesting in this regard with new launch systems from Kistler Aerospace, Rotary Rocket, etc. supposedly in the works. With O'Neill's reasonably optimistic scenario, we would have hundreds of millions of people in these colonies in 35-50 years. Sounds outrageous? A hundred years ago most people thought it was impossible to fly something heavier than air, but now airlines routinely handle hundreds of millions of passengers every year.

What's Good? Just about everything -- I'd heard about this book probably since I was in grade school, but never got around to reading it until now. It's the clear foundation for any logical expansion of humanity into space; all we need to do is get with the program! O'Neill founded the Space Studies Institute to gather private donations to spur further research into the whole scheme, which it has done very extensively. What's Bad? Why hasn't it all happened yet? The 1989 edition contains a newer appendix by O'Neill with the following quote that sums up at least part of the problem: "In 1973 the U.S. space program had been fifteen years ahead of all others. By 1988 that lead had been thrown away." But O'Neill's prophesying was somehow also at fault. With such huge untapped resources, why hasn't Exxon or Mobil, or General Electric, been leaping at the chance to invest some of their spare capital to make a killing? Maybe they're just too clueless about the possibilities here? Or maybe they've made a rational judgment to be second or third, not first on something as apparently risky as this? Somebody has to do it first, and O'Neill in his 1989 comments at least seems to have lost faith in NASA and its over-cautious contractors to get the thing started. So who will it be? What's in it for me? There seems a good chance space development will be "the next big thing" after the Internet has run its course through our lives. After all, we still need material resources to do the things we want to do. Earth's population is still increasing, and its resources really are limited. The threat of global warming traces almost entirely to our burning of fossil fuels for energy. If we don't get started on a long-term solution now, when will we? This book is still the clearest rational outline of why, and how, space development makes sense. Plus, who wouldn't want an apartment on one of those "islands in the sky"?"

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Sara Chan writes "The Internet remains connected on a global scale even if a randomly chosen 99% of its connection points break down. It is, however, in danger if its most highly connected points are selectively knocked out. Recent computer simulations have shown that the Internet is fairly resilient because it is scale free. The latest work, published in Physical Review Letters strengthens this conclusion. Two independent groups of researchers applied percolation theory. Percolation theory deals with systems containing points ("sites") and connections between them, and it analyzes the behavior of the system when some of the sites or connections are removed (it was developed by geophysicists for estimating how much oil could be extracted from reservoirs in a porous medium). Abstracts of the papers are available here and here."

Sara Chan writes "The Internet remains connected on a global scale even if a randomly chosen 99% of its connection points break down. It is, however, in danger if its most highly connected points are selectively knocked out. Recent computer simulations have shown that the Internet is fairly resilient because it is scale free. The latest work, published in Physical Review Letters strengthens this conclusion. Two independent groups of researchers applied percolation theory. Percolation theory deals with systems containing points ("sites") and connections between them, and it analyzes the behavior of the system when some of the sites or connections are removed (it was developed by geophysicists for estimating how much oil could be extracted from reservoirs in a porous medium). Abstracts of the papers are available here and here."

apsmith wrote in wondering what software makers (like Microsoft) will be doing with their software versioning now that we've passed the year 2000 milestone. It's a humorous look at software versioning and it poses some interesting questions. What do you do when you cease using a sensible versioning system in favor of marketing hype (ala "Windows 2000")? Click below for the full text.

apsmith asks: "As I just heard that Microsoft is naming the next version of its database SQL Server 2000 it got me wondering - what happens to all these software products with big "version numbers" in a couple of years when 2000 seems like ancient history? Will we see more factor-of-20 leaps to Office 65535, Windows 1048575, etc? Merely modifying the fourth digit of the version number seems too insignificant to make upgrading seem worth the hassle - does Windows 2008 catch your eye any differently than Windows 2005?

It's not just Microsoft products that seem to have written themselves into a corner with high version numbers, though they are probably the worst. But even Emacs is up to version 20. Sun pushed Solaris from 2.6 to 7. RedHat at 6.1 is somehow way beyond the Linux kernel. At the other extreme is the model that Donald Knuth took for TeX, with the version numbers slowly approaching Pi (the latest teTeX distribution has TeX version 3.14159) but TeX hasn't changed much in the last 10 years either, so a lot of extra pieces have evolved around it to keep it functional.

In the real non-hyped world it seems any version number over 5 or 6 implies it's about time to switch to a new product or start over from scratch. There are countless examples - from recent history think of libc6 -> glibc2 (a bit of a mess there), HTML 5 -> XHTML, or perhaps even Netscape 5 -> Mozilla. Or is that just a geek's view of the universe? How should we be numbering our products these days? And what is Microsoft going to do after 2000? "