Slashdot Mirror

I'm not sure about the 2 first questions.
http://www.sr.bham.ac.uk/~tjp/... seems to suggest that apparent magnitude is based on flux (=total amount of light), and not on intensity (=light density).
It means that the light density of Betelgeuse supernova would be much higher than the light density of the quarter moon. The total amount would be approximately the same. If I'm not mistaken, since the sun (32.7 arcminutes) is much bigger than Betelgeuse (0.056 arcseconds), Betelgeuse supernova would also have a much higer intensity than the Sun.

For the last one :
https://what-if.xkcd.com/129/
http://home.earthlink.net/~kit...
During a quarter moon, you only get sunlight reflected at weird angles off the moon.

I call BS on that. The Pirate Bay alone has 46 million peers active. Nobody short of the NSA, and maybe not even them, can monitor that much traffic.

You don't need to "monitor traffic" or collect contents. You need only collect signals of peers announcing what they have.

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~tpc/...

Cosmic rays (they are actually particles, not electromagnetic radiation) cover a whole range of stuff, with individual particles varying extremely widely in energy content. Primary cosmic rays originate outside Earth's atmosphere. When they collide with the atmosphere, secondary cosmic rays are generated. Primary cosmic rays are mostly (99%) nuclei of various atoms. The remaining 1% are mostly free electrons (beta particles). In turn, 90% of the nuclei are free protons (hydrogen nuclei), just because most of the matter in space is hydrogen. 9% are alpha particles (helium nuclei), and 1% are the nuclei of other (heavier) elements. There is also a very small fraction of more exotic stuff, like antimatter.

While the mean energy content of a cosmic ray particle is in the range of only about 10^-11 to 10^-10 J, extremely rare single particles with energy content up to 50 J exist. This energy is truly astounding, as it means a single submicroscopic particle has the same kinetic energy as a slowly pitched or fairly briskly thrown baseball!

Cosmic rays are some of the most penetrating radiative phenoma known. Just compare their mean atmospheric penetrative power to that of other radiative phenomena. The following represent rough mean values of what are actually widely distributed ranges; in other words, some fraction of cosmic rays penetrate hugely in excess of the figure quoted below, just as some fraction falls far short.

cosmic "rays" - 10,000 m (about the same for both primary and secondary)
gamma rays - 1000 m
x-rays - 100 m
alpha particles - 0.1 m

It should also be noted that significant sources of radiative phenomena are generally point sources, or at least localized sources. They are attenuated in concentration, not total amount,by distance, even in a perfect vacuum. This arises due to spreading out according to the inverse square law. For example, if you want to escape the radiation from a nuclear explosion, even in outer space, you can just move away from it. Cosmic rays are completely different in that they are diffuse. They are not "radiating" from a single point at all. They are distributed in concentration and direction everywhere. There is no attenuation due purely to distance. The attenuation of cosmic rays by the atmosphere is a result of collisions of cosmic ray particles with the atoms in the atrmosphere.

Cosmic rays, or better stated, cosmic ray products (neutrinos) have been detected in deep mineshafts after penetrating kilometers of rock. Clearly the beta particles are not penetrating very much at all, and even the nuclei have limited penetration, but some of the subnucleic particles ain't stoppin' for nobody.

For some commentary with a bit more substance than 'gizmag', see:

http://pathogenomics.bham.ac.uk/blog/2012/02/oxford-nanopore-megaton-announcement-why-do-you-need-a-machine-exclusive-interview-for-this-blog/

e.g:

'Why a USB stick? "The form factor is determined by the requirements" - as there are no fluidics you don't need a big machine. There are no fluidics. "Your fluidics is a Gilson [pipette]", said [Oxford Nanopore CTO] Brown. The prototype version has an ugly battery pack attached to it but it will eventually use USB power. The USB stick is disposable. "Why do you need an instrument?" he says. We wander into the realms of sci-fi at this point. DNA molecules pass through the nanopore and nucleotide sequence is detected by the electronics. Bases are streamed - live - to your laptop as FASTQ (bases with qualities). This is where the "run until" makes sense, if you are interested in a particular gene just wait until the sequence comes out and shut it down to preserve the circuitry."

tl;dr?:

- This technology has enormous potential and looks like it could fundamentally change the way sequencing is used. Features like the long read length and lack of infrastructure required are hugely attractive.

- It isn't going to make genomes dramatically cheaper initially, promising only to be 'competitive' with existing technology (which is already down to the $3000-$5000 range per genome, and quite possibly $1000 by next year).

With whole exome sequencing like this, you pay the fee once, and have all* the data medical science will ever need about you...* Not counting repetitive elements, promoter regions, UTRs, spacer DNA, or the epigenome

Not just exome, but whole genome in about a year (they claim), so everything except the epigenome. Some interesting discussion here:

http://pathogenomics.bham.ac.uk/blog/2012/01/ion-torrent-proton-the-chip-is-not-the-machine/

http://seqanswers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16709

As an aside, BGI is not just any centre, it is the centre. Much like biochemists send their crystals to a synchrotron for X-ray crystallography, biologists send their sequences to BGI to get them sequenced. They own something like 180 high-throughput sequencing instruments, which is about 5-10% of the installed base, give or take.

R

There is nothing that beats it on any platform. Some links:

http://www.sr.bham.ac.uk/~ajrs/R/r-gallery.html
http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/index.php
http://opencpu.org/
https://r-forge.r-project.org/
http://hlplab.wordpress.com/
http://rseek.org/
http://www.r-bloggers.com/

The world's most expensive iPod dock and it doesn't even come with speakers :-)

How are you finding it? Looks useful for smaller -scale (subgenomic or bug) projects where the capacity of a bigger machine would be wasted. And the concept of a 'massively parallel pH meter' is certainly cool.

For human whole-genome stuff there are already relatively cheap options. Illumina now offers a genome service for $4000 per sample in quantity:

http://www.bio-itworld.com/news/05/09/2011/Illumina-announces-five-thousand-dollar-genome.html

So the '$1000 genome' can't be far off, and may well be available as a commercial service before Ion Torrent can offer a competing solution for their machine. They already have a bit of a reputation for hype:

http://pathogenomics.bham.ac.uk/blog/2010/12/ion-torrent-hype-cycle-status-disappointment/

Note that the original article is misleading about the competing technologies, implying that the (existing) Ion Torrent costs $49000 because it uses 'optical based' technology. In fact the Ion Torrent (unlike the Illumina system, which does use an optical system) has always been semiconductor-based:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_semiconductor_sequencing

The key issue, of course, is the cost and sequencing capacity of the (disposable) chips it uses, not the one-time cost of the machine. Right now, the comsumable costs are pretty high per sequenced base when compared to Illumina's. The Ion Torrent chip technology needs to be scaled up substantially if they want to offer a viable genome solution.

" THIS article from just the other day"

What the hell.
this is complete bullshit.
utter utter bullshit.

"Our total storage capacity is the same as an adult human's DNA. And there are several billion humans on the planet. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome:
3 billion DNA base pairs

even storing it in plain text without compression that's only 3 gigabytes.
my external hard drive could store that 1000 times over.

"the 6.4*10^18 instructions per second that human kind can carry out "

6.4*10^18=
6400000000000000000 instructions per second

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jxb/INC/l2.pdf

"The human brain is extremely energy efficient, using approximately 10-16 joules
per operation per second, whereas the best computers today use around 10-6 joules
per operation per second."

6400000000000000000/(10^16)

640 joules per second.

1 food calorie = 4.2 kilojoules

1 Cal every 6.5625 seconds.

Seconds in a day:86400

86400/6.5625=13165 calories per day just to keep your brain running.

actual figure:400 and 500 calories per day

For what it's worth, many of the positions which you think may be undecidable are in fact solvable. Check out this paper (warning, PDF) from the guy who proved that it was NP-complete; it has a bunch of examples of non-trivial setups that appear to be unsolvable without guessing, but actually are. You don't necessarily encounter these in every game, but you might be surprised if you do some analysis before you make a guess.

Regardless, the paper is a good read.

But but but this guide tells me exactly how women should act!

(Yes, I know that the article was probably a hoax.)

Not according to this. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/117/
But I could be wrong since it has been a long time since I took Chem.

Except real encryption doesn't work this way. Almost all encryption contains a feedback loop in it where the results of the previous block of encryption is fed into the the next block of encryption--specifically to thwart statistical analysis of its contents. This is how you can encrypt something with a lot of repeating bits (like, say, a bitmap with large blocks of color) and still get something that looks like random noise out.

Personally, I'd say that, almost by definition, any completely opaque encrypted blob is unsearchable by definition, though I won't discount the idea that someone smarter than I am could make it work. The scenarios for using that sort of tech don't seem all that compelling to me, though.

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mdr/teaching/modules/security/lectures/symmetric-key.html - see the block cipher modes section for info on that.

Actually I had read your comments; and it wasn't a direct reply to you, more of a reply to the notion of it not being the point.

And I wouldn't consider copyright infringement being completely off topic when the majority of the posts here are regarding breaking copy protection systems and more specifically the TPM in order to gain access to the protected content; particularly when the original post is "TPM will 'absolutely stop piracy of gameplay'"

The main concept behind T/C is so that those offering a service can be given some assurance that their content will be used in accordance of their license. Like I said before, I don't particularly agree with it but it's not something that is going to go away.

If it is used in the correct context for the right reasons TPM is a solid platform for temporary licensing to view/listen copyrighted media.
Of course there are infinetly more reasons that can be considered as an abuse of the system and as pointed out in this video http://pyg.keonox.com/tests/flash_flv_player/TrustedComputing.flv (or embedded in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mdr/teaching/modules/security/video/trustedComputing.html) if they don't trust us why should we trust them?

You must mean this map of the interweb. To me it looks more like a birthday cake sparkler. It's surprisingly non-web like with only a several paths between any 2 points. Down to a trunk and back up to the destination leaf.

What would a map of wikipedia rendered in this way look like? Probably closer to fishnet stuffed into a mayonnaise jar.

Care of Jonathan Cummins, Patrick Diskin, Samuel Lau and Robert Parlett of the School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham.

unremovability being one of their key points.

(DISCLAIMER: I have no idea on any of these things, google just happens to exist)

Perhaps I was not clear. When I said "save a single person from a pandemic type flu virus" - I was referring to mortality. Your references provide no evidence that Tamiflu reduces mortality with current Flu strains, let along a pandemic strain. If found a 2005 meta review that was also unable to find any such evidence of mortality reduction: http://www.arif.bham.ac.uk/Requests/o/oseltamivir-tamiflu-pandemic.htm.

From the conclusions of your first link "There are no clinical data available for the use of oseltamivir [Tamiflu] in a pandemic." So I was correct, no such evidence exists.

"There's tons more out there and anyone willing to get off their butt and do the research can find it. Now granted, there haven't been any large scale trials with H5N1 in people because not that many people have had H5N1. That said, combination therapies in mice with H5N1 have proven quite effective. There's no guarantee it will work in people, but all the evidence suggests that H5N1 is susceptible to neuraminidase inhibitors like Tamiflu will be effective against H5N1. It won't be 100%, but based on the existing data, I suspect it will have a pretty significant impact."

I don't really care about studies with H5N1 - it's obviously not a pandemic strain (witness the current lack of a pandemic). There is absolutely no evidence that vaccines, or any of the currently approved drugs will have any effect on some future pandemic strain.

I not been able to find any evidence that Tamiflu or it's cousins have had any impact on influenza/pneumonia death rates in any country, and that's ultimately what I care about. People shouldn't be taking expensive drugs to avoid a day of aches and pains. See the following meta-review: http://www.arif.bham.ac.uk/Requests/o/oseltamivir-tamiflu-pandemic.htm

It seems that influenza deaths are so rare it's very difficult to conduct a large enough study to determine if these drugs have any impact on mortality.

The ideal solution is to use an ad blocker so you don't have to see the ads, then have an Electric Monk on-hand to watch the ads for you later....

Further back, "In 1992 ... so called prion knock-out mice [were created]. ... Strangely enough, mice lacking the prion gene are apparently healthy".

While other studies have found, "abnormalities in circadian rhythms and sleep" and ataxia late in life.

Proportionally, such symptoms may occur in 13 year old cattle (see halfbakery link).

So, to follow the new year's theme of predictions, I fully expect to be able to buy prion free beef by 2025.

I can rarely be bothered to enter into these debates anymore- you tell someone nuclear power is safe, they reply "You would say that, you're a nuclear physicist".

I don't know how much credence I'd give that paper. It's over 30 years old, and my vegetarianism doesn't seem to have stopped my brain from developing.

If you read the second paragraph there in the primate baseline, the diet they ascribe to early primates is strikingly similar to the diet that is promoted to cure America's dietary ills: fruits, veggies, lots of vitamins, low sodium, low fat, low cholesterol.

I think the position in the paper reflects the poor understanding of nutrition in the 70s. People used to think you had to eat a 'complete protein' to have enough protein, which is just silly. The body synthesizes the protein from the component amino acids in the diet just fine - or else how in world would a cow grow so much beef from eating grass?

Furthermore I don't think the end of the paper is correct: "While human cranial capacity tripled over the 2.5 million years after H. habilis first appeared, this trend has recently reversed. Since peaking among Cro Magnons and other humans living during the Late Paleolithic, cranial capacity has fallen off about 11%." They blame this on a decrease in meat eating. This just isn't relevant. Cranial capacity is the volume in your skull. But that's not all brains - that would also include the large protuding jaws we used to have and don't have anymore. There was a recent study: http://www.buzz.bham.ac.uk/Buzz_69.pdf/ (warning pdf) that measured skulls over a 600 year period and found that we have less prominent facial features and a larger cranial vault, the part that actually matters. What matters is the complexity of the structure in the pre-frontal lobe, which is reinforced by social and other educational interactions, not the volume of your head or how much meat you eat.

I did a google search on Denver Airport baggage system and found this: classic case of bad software design.

Yep. And the reason that they don't get brain damaged is because their neurons aren't dying. And their neurons aren't dying because they're not metabolizing, and thus needing oxygen. The brain is in hibernation, just like the rest of the body.

So is there a temperature limit for metabolizing?

Cell death is of two kinds - apoptosis or necrosis. Apoptosis is programmed cell death (when the lysosomes break), whereas necrosis is due to cell damage - and in this case, lack of oxygen. Cells that die due to necrosis show a lower level of ATP - so it makes sense that the cell was trying to metabolize the remaining oxygen and ran out.

From here, you can see that the increase in Ca2+ ions leads to chain of events that eventually leads to necrosis. Ca2+ ions over a certain threshold inhibits the energy and respiratory processes. I guess the question is, what is stopping the neuron from trying to metabolize?

What I'm assuming is that it takes longer for the blood in the body to cool down, during which time the neurons can continue metabolizing. But when the temperature is suddenly lowered to 7C, metabolysis stops? But we couldn't just quickly lower the temperature of the body to 7C because it would take > 5 min for the blood to cool.

This looks like a quite good idea.

The target audience it is aimed at has no need for the more advanced features, and so the manufacturer has ditched them in favour of focusing more on the user interface.

No offense intended to those who have earnt their years, but i have found through my tech supporting that after a certain point, as age increases technical ability decreases.

From an HCI view point having dedicated buttons for specific tasks is a great idea. It helps increase predictability, which is often a recommended key point in most style guides;
such as apple's
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExper ience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/chapter _1_section_1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000894

Added to that it looks reasonably pretty, which helps users come away from it with a positive experience. There was a study where two usability equivalent ATM machines were tested by users. they came back and said that the prettier one was easier to use - even though they were designed in the exact same way, bar aesthetics. I can't remember the exact link but it can be found off one of the links here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~rxb/Teaching/HCI/resourc es-active.php

provided they've actually pulled this off well, then i see it as a very good thing.

- Alan

Minesweeper is NP-Complete, which is basically a haughty way of saying "it's probably very difficult, but if you can prove whether it is or not, there's a million bucks in it for you"

[another interesting link on the subject]

Quite improbable.

In case you've never taken a hard disk apart, the heads aren't moved by a motor. They're moved by a voice coil, which is basically a coil of wire that interacts with a permanent magnet attached to the drive. They don't touch each other. Here's a picture

Now, I suppose that the bearings could wear out, but compiling software isn't very likely to make a lot of difference. Especially since it's not such a disk intensive operation anyway.

Yeah, I used to do all my programming in life but I recently switched to minesweeper. It's a huge timesaver as long you stay focused and don't start playing it. Might give this railroad thing a try though.

To celebrate Darwin Day (12th February) two academics have performed extracts from The Origin of Species in dub (hybrid form of reggae) as the Genomic Dub Collective. The BBC has an informative piece about the inspiration for doing this.

The aim is to create a new musical genre, Genomic Dub, that celebrates recent successes in the field of genomics and evolutionary biology. They also aim to highlight common threads that link current scientific, artistic and social issues with the past (e.g. the Darwins' involvement in the anti-slavery movement), and to explore the potential for encoding macromolecular (protein and DNA) sequence data into dub music.

Samples of the Origin of Species in Dub can be downloaded from the Genomic Dub Collectives web site, or a CD can be ordered by sending an e-mail to m.pallen@bham.ac.uk

To celebrate Darwin Day (12th February) two academics have performed extracts from The Origin of Species in dub (hybrid form of reggae) as the Genomic Dub Collective. The BBC has an informative piece about the inspiration for doing this.

The aim is to create a new musical genre, Genomic Dub, that celebrates recent successes in the field of genomics and evolutionary biology. They also aim to highlight common threads that link current scientific, artistic and social issues with the past (e.g. the Darwins' involvement in the anti-slavery movement), and to explore the potential for encoding macromolecular (protein and DNA) sequence data into dub music.

Samples of the Origin of Species in Dub can be downloaded from the Genomic Dub Collectives web site, or a CD can be ordered by sending an e-mail to m.pallen@bham.ac.uk

To celebrate Darwin Day (12th February) two academics have performed extracts from The Origin of Species in dub (hybrid form of reggae) as the Genomic Dub Collective. The BBC has an informative piece about the inspiration for doing this.

The aim is to create a new musical genre, Genomic Dub, that celebrates recent successes in the field of genomics and evolutionary biology. They also aim to highlight common threads that link current scientific, artistic and social issues with the past (e.g. the Darwins' involvement in the anti-slavery movement), and to explore the potential for encoding macromolecular (protein and DNA) sequence data into dub music.

Samples of the Origin of Species in Dub can be downloaded from the Genomic Dub Collectives web site, or a CD can be ordered by sending an e-mail to m.pallen@bham.ac.uk

To celebrate Darwin Day (12th February) two academics have performed extracts from The Origin of Species in dub (hybrid form of reggae) as the Genomic Dub Collective. The BBC has an informative piece about the inspiration for doing this.

The aim is to create a new musical genre, Genomic Dub, that celebrates recent successes in the field of genomics and evolutionary biology. They also aim to highlight common threads that link current scientific, artistic and social issues with the past (e.g. the Darwins' involvement in the anti-slavery movement), and to explore the potential for encoding macromolecular (protein and DNA) sequence data into dub music.

Samples of the Origin of Species in Dub can be downloaded from the Genomic Dub Collectives web site, or a CD can be ordered by sending an e-mail to m.pallen@bham.ac.uk

An Electric Critic? Mmmm. It'd go nicely with your VCR and Electric Monk.

...that their logo is similar to The Birmingham University Guild of Students logo, heh, whodathunkit.

You know that Jesus was a Black dude, right?

We don't need volunteers. Why not just study from our dear president G W Bush?

From the article:

It poured out more energy in three hours than the sun does in 100 years

Given that the sun produces about 3.8e+26 Watt, and that a year contains about 3.15e+7 seconds, the explosion comes down to a total energy release of about 1.1e+36 Joules.

Still, this is puny compared with a gamma-ray burst: in 60 seconds, that yields about 10e+45 Joules.

it seems to me that where the burden lies is not so clear. If I found a 4+ century old manuscript in an unknown language, I would assume it to be real, unless proven otherwise.

Here is what is known about the manuscript

It is not a moden hoax, as old letters have been found after its rediscovery that refer to it.

It has 234 pages (plenty long enough for statistical analysis) and appears to have been copied by a professional. It also has a number of images of various sorts, with "labels" and the words used in the labels also appear in the text near the images.

(BTW, I do not see how you get that in a "grill" system hoax.)

There are, however, no apparent images of the usual alchemical signs, occult signs, etc. - the sort of stuff that might impress an occult minded royal buyer.

It appears to have been written in (at least) two langauges or dialects or jargons, based on word use, with each page being in only one "language"

Here is a plot showing the correlation of word usage between pages in the manuscript - color coded with red meaning more words in common, black meaning the fewest, with page one in the upper left hand corner.

I would expect a grill method to produce a random version of this image - which is clearly not random.

The text follows roughly the 1st. and 2nd. Zipf's laws of word frequencies.

The word length distribution is very different from Latin, German, English, French or Italian, and, in fact, is similar to various Asian languages like Chinese - words are uniformly short.

Again, I don't see why a grill method would do this.

The 2nd. order entropy is too low for an European language using a simple substitution cipher, and the third and fourth are too high. (Also, download this pdf.)

What does this mean ? It means that the second character of a word in the manuscript is more predictable than in a typical European language, and that the third and fourth characters are _less_ predictable.

It is very hard for me to see how this could come from the grill method.

So, regardless of where the burden of proof lies, I, for one, am not convinced.

it seems to me that where the burden lies is not so clear. If I found a 4+ century old manuscript in an unknown language, I would assume it to be real, unless proven otherwise.

Here is what is known about the manuscript

It is not a moden hoax, as old letters have been found after its rediscovery that refer to it.

It has 234 pages (plenty long enough for statistical analysis) and appears to have been copied by a professional. It also has a number of images of various sorts, with "labels" and the words used in the labels also appear in the text near the images.

(BTW, I do not see how you get that in a "grill" system hoax.)

There are, however, no apparent images of the usual alchemical signs, occult signs, etc. - the sort of stuff that might impress an occult minded royal buyer.

It appears to have been written in (at least) two langauges or dialects or jargons, based on word use, with each page being in only one "language"

Here is a plot showing the correlation of word usage between pages in the manuscript - color coded with red meaning more words in common, black meaning the fewest, with page one in the upper left hand corner.

I would expect a grill method to produce a random version of this image - which is clearly not random.

The text follows roughly the 1st. and 2nd. Zipf's laws of word frequencies.

The word length distribution is very different from Latin, German, English, French or Italian, and, in fact, is similar to various Asian languages like Chinese - words are uniformly short.

Again, I don't see why a grill method would do this.

The 2nd. order entropy is too low for an European language using a simple substitution cipher, and the third and fourth are too high. (Also, download this pdf.)

What does this mean ? It means that the second character of a word in the manuscript is more predictable than in a typical European language, and that the third and fourth characters are _less_ predictable.

It is very hard for me to see how this could come from the grill method.

So, regardless of where the burden of proof lies, I, for one, am not convinced.

I've studied the Voynich manuscript before, and the possibility of a hoax seems just as unlikely as many of the theories that have been floating about. Yes, the language of the Voynich manuscript could be an elaborate hoax, but Rugg's analysis only proves what is already widely known.

The problem of creating such an elaborate hoax is that even Rugg's theory doesn't explain all the features of the Voynich manuscript. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that a sixteenth-century forger would go to the trouble of creating something that would have all the qualities of a real language and would include techniques that would deliberately resemble an actual document when viewed with analytical techniques that wouldn't be developed later. Occam's Razor makes it seem more likely that there some kind of language operating in the manuscript than a random system of patterns. Then again, there's no real way of knowing.

There are some images of the text of the Voynich Manuscript available here. Analysis of the text and the illustrations support the theory that the manuscript has defined sections on astrology, herbal medicine, and other subjects. There have been some serious and some rediculous theories about the manuscript from the intriguing notion that the Voynich text is mathematically similar to East Asian languages like Chinese or Vietnamese, or that the Voynich manuscript is written in an ancient form of Ukrainian. (I've read the supposed translation of it from the Ukrainian, and it hardly makes sense given that the manuscript's illustations don't match the text of the supposed translation.)

In the meantime, this site offers more information on modern translation efforts including a font for the Voynich script. (Which would make a lovely way of annoying co-workers by switching their default system font to Voynich text...)

You can go from knowing nothing about Java to programming J2EE systems by following this plan (I'm serious):

1. Read Beginning Java Objects. I agree with just about everything the reviewer says about this book. It's very well-written for people who've never programmed using OO before (but not for people who've never programmed in procedural), and in fact isn't even really a Java-specific book until the last third of the book. It's a great way to learn the concepts and terminology, which are all-important in the OO world.
2. Read Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel. BJO is a great book to get the basic ideas down, and TIJ is a little too advanced for the complete newb -- but TIJ will teach you the rest of the language, the things that BJO leaves out. Also, the latest edition of TIJ does go into test-driven development.
3. Learn how to use the Ant build tool. Whether you do this from a book (Java Development with Ant is excellent) or from online tutorials, Ant will spare you much agony and will keep you from becoming overly addicted to a particular IDE's build conveniences.
4. Read Core Servlets , which will teach you the basics of servlets and JSP (the web layer of J2EE development). It will help if you already have a strong concept of the HTTP protocol from previous experience in PHP, ASP, Perl, etc.
5. Join a J2EE-focused mailing list (such as struts-user, j2eerocks, etc), and read the posts. Whoever said you don't learn via osmosis never subscribed to a mailing list -- even if only subconsciously, you will start to pick up terms and concepts such as design patterns or unit testing. Eventually you will find yourself answering the most-frequently-asked questions (usually with a link to the archives).
6. Learn how to use Struts and JSTL, using either online tutorials or a book (any will do). This will help you unlearn the bad habits of using scriptlets as they are taught in Core Servlets (see above). It's good to know what they are and how to use them, but stick with an MVC framework and JSTL for real development.
7. Now you need to fine-tune your Java knowledge. Read Sun Java Certification by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, which practically guarantees you'll score above 90% on the SCJP. At least you'll master all the nuances of the language that were left out of BJO and TIJ. This book should not be ignored.
8. Read Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans by Ed Roman et al. This is the final stage of your J2EE training, where you learn how to write and use EJBs. Then realize that for most applications, EJBs are overkill and go back to using DAO with JDBC or some other persistence framework. But you should still know this stuff.
9. Finally, start refining all of this knowledge by reading some patterns books like Agile Software Development: Patterns, Principles, and Practices, or Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Fowler's Refactoring is pretty good too.

Of course, you should be actively engaging with these materials and coding as you go along, or none of this will stick. It took me about ten months, following this lesson plan, to consider myself a J2EE programmer -- and I started at the beginning, knowing nothing but PHP and Perl. I'm now an employed J2EE programmer (becoming a rarity in this country).

When we begin to model gene expression accurately, with all of its epigenetic feedback loops, then the effects of genetic modification will be simulated inside a computer. There'll be no need to create living degenerate forms.

Instead we'll design the way Nature designs: run our own evolutionary algorithm through thousands of generations to arrive at a stable, functional form. Then you're only limited by your ability to define the right fitness test. In the end, if you like what you see, you "print to hardcopy".

When are we going to realize that we don't need to invent some magical nanotech assembler? We have been carrying it with us all along, inside each and every cell. DNA is nanotechnology.

Again we'll learn from Nature, this time how to do fabrication. Just as evolutionary computation is an abstraction of evolutionary biology, we'll create an abstraction of DNA's enzymatic assembler that serves our purposes. XNA anyone?

The article about the micro engine was frustrating. "300 times more eneergy". Bah! 300 times more energy than a watch battery or a car battery? Obviously, they mean power but how much power? 300 times x? What's x?

Also, since this thing consumes fuel, it might be helpful to compare power-to-weight ratios with the smallest gas engines widely available (e.g., model airplane engines).

Thanks a lot, U Birmingham, for dumbing the article so far down that all it conveys is "oooohhh look, neat new thing".

"These micro-engines have over 300 times more energy than an ordinary battery" is meaningless. If they mean total energy delivery over whatever time period you like, then microengines can beat batteries by a factor of a million trillion zillion, as long as you hook them up to a big enough fuel tank. In actual power capacity, though, microengines aren't anything special at all, yet.

The aim is little turbines the size of a sugar cube that run from butane or propane or whatever, and have several watts of output power; prototypes of such things have been spinning for a while now. The microengines shown in the U of B release, though, are minuscule piston units which have power output in the microwatts, if that. Heck, the ones shown in the release don't even have generators attached to them, so their electrical output at the moment is zero!

For your amusement: A reader also pointed this out to me; it's a reprint of a piece on the subject from the British "Sun" tabloid, and it reads as if they took the U of B press release and put it through a Markov chain program, or something.

It's good to know that alcoholism in the press is alive and well.

I'm tired of saying 'these data' when everybody else says 'this data'.

Common usage becomes standard usage, as in
Data, singular or plural?, where they compare the pluralization of data in some technical and popular journals. The verdict: nobody says datum, so it's ok to use singular data.

Now if we can acknowledge the fact that 'they' may be incorrect, but is a much better replacement for the indefinite 'him or her', I'd be satisfied and wouldn't ask for any more usage changes.

Used mostly for teaching AI, it has a lot of weird features. It also let programmers to manipulate the stack. The VM, called "poplog", supports multilanguage (.net invented 20 years ago) with ML + Prolog + Pop-11 + Lisp implementations off the box, and allows incremental compilation (very similar to CMUCL).

Here you will find an online primer. Another good site.

Used mostly for teaching AI, it has a lot of weird features. It also let programmers to manipulate the stack. The VM, called "poplog", supports multilanguage (.net invented 20 years ago) with ML + Prolog + Pop-11 + Lisp implementations off the box, and allows incremental compilation (very similar to CMUCL).

Here you will find an online primer. Another good site.

The court that dealt with this is Copenhagen's Fogedret. A fogedret can roughly be compared to a bailiff that deals out injunctions. Newsbooster (the company that deep linked) has already said that they'll appeal the verdict to the Danish High Court. This case isn't over yet.

Computer science is about Linux and operating system hacking. As a computer science student who took an Operating Systems course this year in a department that has several hundred Linux machines, I can tell you this for a fact!

Nerds 'R' Us:

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~cogs/forum/

Troll 'em boys.