Slashdot Mirror

See http://www.bris.ac.uk/researchreview/2003/11138152 75 for more info.

I imagine your chest could destructively compress? It's possible to breath oxygen rich liquids, so this might work around that problem. http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/webprojects2002/shorrock /3-%20%20Liquid_breathing.htm

32 threads in hardware on one chip is the same as 32 slow CPUs.


A human brain consists of around 100 billion neurons each running at a maximum speed of 500 Hz (a single neuron can depolarize and recharge within 0.002 seconds).

If that were the case, wouldn't we be better off having a few huge brain cells, rather than billions of small ones?

Source: How neurons work

Nice time to use one of those Unix fire extinguishers :).

http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~henkm/extinguisher.html

Its highly probable that life is based on carbon, but other forms of life have been suggested such as silicon based and ammonia based ...
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/A/altern ative_forms_of_life.html
Even here on earth we have sulphur based ecosystems. These still have carbon-based lifeforms I think, but the energy is derived from sulphur rather than from the sun.
http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/webprojects1997/ClaireO/ Welcome.htm

I should probably mention that I've never tried Memorex discs. I currently use Fuji 48x blanks.

People don't seem to have mentioned the importance of taking care of your backup CD-Rs. Perhaps it's obvious, but CD-Rs should be protected from heat, humidity and light--the chemicals used in CD-Rs are somewhat light sensitive even after the disc burn is finished. Sunlight is especially bad.

Oh, and microwaving your CD-R backups is not recommended either.

Perhaps the easiest way to envisage an Orbital is to compare it to the idea that inspired it (this sounds better than saying; Here's where I stole it from). If you know what a Ringworld is - invented by Larry Niven; a segment of a Dyson Sphere - then just discard the shadow-squares, shrink the whole thing till it's about three million kilometres across, and place in orbit around a suitable star, tilted just off the ecliptic; spin it to produce one gravity and that gives you an automatic 24-hour day-night cycle (roughly; the Culture's day is actually a bit longer). An elliptical orbit provides seasons.

"Halo" isn't a Ringworld, but an Orbital. The following magazine excerpt bears this out:

"Wait a minute," you might be thinking. Doesn't the premise of this game bear a striking resemblance to a certain series of books by sci-fi author Larry Niven? Designer and Bungie co-founder Jason Jones is uncomfortable with the notion that Halo might be some sort of Niven knockoff. "Ringworld's a great book, but the point is that we don't want people to think this is the game of Niven's Ringworld, simply because it takes place on a ring-shaped artificial world... you'd be surprised how often people assume this." Jones explains. "In Niven's books, the Ringworld completely encircles a star, and is thus hundreds of millions of miles in diameter, whereas Halo is just a satellite orbiting a gas giant and is considerably smaller. In fact, structurally it's more similar to the "orbitals" in Iain M. Banks' Culture novels."

You can find more information here.

Well you shouldn't lose the repository, but you can:

http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~henkm/svn.html

But your backup suggestion is well taken - repositories should always be backed up. However, these sort of issues, are probably why so many folks are still using, and will continue to use, CVS. It simply works. I understand needing to go to backup if the hard drive crashes, but the database failing? I think, until SVN, or others, have major improvements over CVS, then we can switch. But this is sort of a point upgrade. Renaming files, directories - nice. Better merging would be great though. Monotone seems interesting, especially with the interest from Linus as a BitKeeper replacement.

Monolithic svn databases are vulnerable to irrecoverable corruption

http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/rdf/resources /*

Annotated RDF Links page.*

http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Librarie s/Library_and_Information_Science/Technical_Servic es/Cataloguing/Metadata/RDF/Applications/RSS/

RSS at the Google Directory.

Blue is higher frequency, which means *shorter* wavelength.

This illustrates it nicely.

Would any cryptographers here care to comment?

Subversion is a version control system. Like CVS. It is designed as a successor to CVS, improving the functionality, speed, without losing the elegance and simplicity of CVS. Subversion has indeed the features that CVS is lacking, you can move files, and you can easily tag releases. It is also blindingly fast, and it has used the sample approach that CVS uses. So far so good.

The reason I am no longer touching it with a bargepole is the implementation. svn has been implemented using Berkeley databases. Presumably because they are fast and efficient. All releases o all files are stored in a single database. This is fine, efficient, and everything else, until your database gets corrupted. At that stage you are up to your chin in shit.

The database is easily corrupted.

Er, the parent post is so ignorant I don't even know where to begin.

Let's see...

1. Relevance to 'modern' global warming: none. This is a hypothesis to explain one of the biggest extinctions in the history of the planet. Whatever caused it, afterwards the planet was almost a complete desert.

2. The siberian volcano wasn't merely 'big'. It was the size of Europe! One of the biggest volcanoes to happen since life evolved on Earth. And it lasted a very long time: erupting pretty much constantly for a million years. Krakatoa wasn't even a damp fart in comparison, and it changed the climate for years. It's called a flood basalt eruption, and they are really rare.

3. We know something happened to the oxygen levels at that time. They've never recovered: before the extinction, oxygen levels were nearly double what we have now. Afterwards, oxygen levels were as low as they are now at the top of high mountains. Modern animals, including us, would have serious problems in that environment. Imagine what problems animals used to even more oxygen would have. Yep, they'd die.

4. The dinosaurs. Yes. Well. Guess which event preceded the dinosaurs? You don't suppose, perchance, that the reason the world was warmer when the dinosaurs were about was because of this? I mean, saying the dinosaurs were happy in a hotter climate, so it doesn't matter if it's hot is just dumb. The hot climate that the dinos lived in was what killed the creatures that came before. That made space for dinosaurs to appear.

Or to put it another way. Polar bears are perfectly happy when the temperature is -20 or lower. So naturally, everything else would be happy if the entire world was at this temperature. Yeah, right. (And of course, polar bears would be just fine living at the equator. The dinosaurs had it hotter! SHEEEESH)

5. The main cause of the fall in oxygen levels was supposedly a massive drop in sea levels. The most likely cause of this is supposedly global cooling caused by the volcanoes ash (there are very large carbon deposits under the sea, which would have become liberated when the sea levels dropped enough). This is what caused the global warming.

Finally, this is not sensationalistic. This huge extinction HAPPENED. The siberian volcano also happened, at the same time. The reduction in oxygen levels happened, too. A lot of other stuff happened at this time. There's very good evidence for all of this. The question the paper is trying to answer is what caused the extinction. This has bugger-all to do with global warming in a modern context, cows or even vogons.

This link describes the vulcanism in Siberia a bit better than the rather lame Yahoo article linked by the blurb.

Here's a preprint of their publication in Applied Nonlinear Mathematics. Yes, it includes crochet instructions. :)

Once again, the physorg honeypot grabs slashdot eyeballs. Physorg takes press releases and puts them up, with bad formatting, on ugly web pages... with no links to the original source.

So here's some missing links: the press release at Bristol, the diamond group at bristol and the home page of Advance Nanotech.

As you can see, that's a chemical vapor deposition group, so there's no need to grind up diamond dust from real diamonds. :) It's also, um, not exactly what I'd call "nanotech"... unless you consider any product involving structures at the molecular scale (like, oh, wood, or portland cement) to be "nanotech".

Looks like they are using Diamond Like Carbon quite often... so its a quasi-zinc-blend structure apparently.

With field emission they are generating electrons so somehow the electrons get enough energy to reach the vacuum level. I wonder how efficient this is since diamond's bandgap is something like 5.5 eV.

-Gabe

"The Best Way to Skip a Stone" isn't silly. In fact, skipping stones was the basis of the concept of Dambuster bombs back in WW2.

One rather bizarre note appears here . "If the bomb breaches the dam, code word is Nigger but if it does not breach, code word is Gonner."

In any case, skipping objects off water is hardly a new area of research and does not belong on a list of things "new and innovative" as it is neither. But it is not at all silly.

Mal-2

You're all discussing the mis-spelling (yeah, yeah, comment away - I'm sure this is wrong too) of a funny line, and missing the point of this!

Spider silk is so cool! It's got a tensile strength even higher than Kevlar and is seen as a natural replacement for that material, espeically once we can mass produce it. It's lightweight, extremely strong, and if you coat it with Starlite, you've got battle armor that could withstand a nuclear hit! How much cooler can you get?

--LWM

Blogs were the first[,] and are the most deployed[,] apps to use CMS.

A blog is definitely not a CMS. A true CMS has certain features, such as content "versioning" and support for workflow.

I'm aware of very few apps meant to make a web developer's life easier by allowing online editing as if it were an online Dreamweaver or what not.

To the contrary, many CMS's are evolving in precisely this direction. Increasingly, they are improving their user interfaces (UI) so that the CMS UI becomes, in effect, a WYSIWYG word processor. As an example, I cite the excellent UI in OpenCMS, which somewhat resembles MS Word. Adding content to OpenCMS can be just like editing in MS Word except that the OpenCMS UI still does not have quite as many features or the same ease-of-use -- yet. See also Bitflux and Xopus, which are WYSIWYG editors meant to be used with any CMS, not a particular CMS.

If you want KISS & need to add a lot of content, what is lacking in wikis?

Wikis can be be easy to install, administer, and use. But they lack a great deal.

It was first found in Cummington, USA.

For more funny minerals/molecules names (Arsole, Nonanone, Spamol), there's this silly page. Has a picture of Cummingtonite as well.

this

...and paleontologists aren't really sure what caused it, far less sure than they were about what caused the K-T extinction that killed off the dinosaurs. The asteroid collision theory is floated as well for the Permian-Triassic extinction, but the theory that seems to receive the greatest currency among scientists was a massive volcanic eruption in what is today Siberia, if I recall correctly.

...and paleontologists aren't really sure what caused it, far less sure than they were about what caused the K-T extinction that killed off the dinosaurs. The asteroid collision theory is floated as well for the Permian-Triassic extinction, but the theory that seems to receive the greatest currency among scientists was a massive volcanic eruption in what is today Siberia, if I recall correctly.

Because, ultimately, the safety systems at Three Mile Island were able to keep the plant from blowing up, where other nations have not done so well when they had accidents. Nuclear power systems are safest made by advanced technological nations... even leaving aside the number of agressive loons who want nuclear bombs to lob at their obnoxious neighbors. True, even the current guys get it wrong... but the US has 60 years of experience in screwing up, and tends to not make the same engineering mistakes twice. (Political mistakes are another story.) If the developing world gets to use advanced safety designs, even if only by borrowing them rather than having to build them themselves, it's probably safer than them trying to reverse engineer the product and botching it.

You want to stop nuclear proliferation? How about starting with the United States, Israel, England, France, India...

Ummm... because stopping proliferation means keeping those who don't have nuclear weapons from getting them, which is incidentally easier than it is to get the ones who have them to give them up?

Not that I'm predicting this will happen here, but it's usually best not to heat deep water like that.

I have been thinking for a while now that mobiles are becoming more and more like the ubiqitous terminals people carry round with them in Iain (M) Bank's Culture. In the Culture, Terminals are a lifeline which no-one leave home without, albeit perhaps for safety reasons rather than the other uses of the devices (screens, recorders, light-source, etc, etc.). Anyone else had similar thoughts?

The fundamental difference being bridges cost more to alter than software does.

Which is directly correlated to the degree to which people care when one or the other comes crashing down.If a state, federal, or international root-cause investigating committee with subpoena powers was impanelled every time a piece of software crashed (like they often do for a bridge crashing down), Red Hat would be out of business in three weeks, Apple in two weeks, Sun in under a week, and Microsoft inside thirty-eight minutes.

Dan Bricklin is proposing a class of software with a substantially different attitude. IE, software that the company maintaining it says: "As long as you pay this fixed-cost support contract, we will guaranty to support this exact software package for up to 200 years, will let you shift between and use your licenses on any and all hardware/OS combination no matter how different they may be from what you have now, will make sure it remains completely usuable by any C-average high school graduate after six hours training, will be liable in a civil suit if it should ever crash, and will help you migrate your data to any product from any comptetor you may decide to use instead... although we suggest you get matching terms." (Try asking your favorite software vendor for that and see how long it takes them to stop laughing.)

With software requirements like that, the cost of making changes to the software becomes very comparable to changing the bridge. In fact, the bridge is probably a lot cheaper.

[T]he capabilities of hardware allows more freedom in software, to which there is no correlation in bridges.

Sure there is! Oh, wait, you care about whether your bridge won't come crashing down under use. Oops. Well, then....

I see lots of negative comments, and I really don't think this program deserves it since it's just at the first version and maybe it shouldn't even have been posted yet until it actually does something more visually appealing. What can be seen so far is just the potential. And for me this is really interesting. Only failing is that it's Flash not SVG but that's just my taste.

I notice for example that the author is also a poet who knows Neruda and uses a bit of surrealism. Vector based art is probably the best way of recreating what was pioneered by a similar artistic genre - Futurism - which used early 19th century typography to produce incredible works of art in written text, echoing the onomatopeia of battles and love of violence and war (ok nobody's perfect). So loads of text all over the place, and perhaps moving about - this is perfect media to showcase a program like this. There are lots of examples (try googling for futurist typography or go here http://www.colophon.com/gallery/futurism/14.html for a look at some of it).

So I think the author should merge some of his skills and a very good bit of software/art could result.

The other is an area less touched: improvisational scores - the rules by which experimental artists can improvise. No longer do people have to be bound by what can be printed, and there are now some examples of software based improvisation scores (wish I could find more examples of the more experimental of these, but am submerged by crap sw when I search). I made one in svg for example. So this program, if it's to merge vector graphics with AI, could go in this direction, maybe supplying some kind of interaction and participation in a live multimedia event or performance?

So I see lots of room for improvement but loads of potential here!

When I had a disc that was failing under warranty, I used a bootable hard disk wiping utility as the final step before sending the drive back.

Autoclave is the one I used. It is quite nice, fits on a bootable floppy. I felt better sending my drive in for warranty replacement after using this program.

Also see:
UBCSwipe
Darik's Boot and Nuke

Jim

A nice thing to have: a computer program that knows many important theorems I1, I2, I3, ... so that the user can specify "apply I12" followed by an application of I19 and then I6 and so on. The program doesn't have to understand the theorems, just use them in a sequence of deductions, as directed by a mathematician.

Yeah, it's amazing nobody ever thought of that.

A nice thing to have: a computer program that knows many important theorems I1, I2, I3, ... so that the user can specify "apply I12" followed by an application of I19 and then I6 and so on. The program doesn't have to understand the theorems, just use them in a sequence of deductions, as directed by a mathematician.

Yeah, it's amazing nobody ever thought of that.

How 'bout this?

Reference 1 volcano = 10 years human activity
More info
Table of H2SO4 release from several eruptions

Yes, but Iain Banks admitted that his Orbitals are a rip off of Ringworld :)

If you don't believe me - read this : Notes on the Culture

Look no further thjanhere to see why differential equations are quite important.

if you breathe 100% oxygen, you'd still have to have about 1/5th of an atmosphere of gas in your lungs to function properly (since the human body is designed for ~20% oxygen @ 1atm) you may be able to go a little lower than that but that's still an awful lot of pressure to contain, unless you start breathing liquids, which AFAIK has only been tested at high pressures, but might equally provide advantages at near vacuum .

The other problem would be evaporation. Your sweat would boil off in a vacuum, which would leave you extremely cold and with very dry skin.

And if you're in space, prepare yourself for the ultimate in sunburn.

Needless to say, I won't be volunteering for tests.

The android isn't named after "I Love Lucy," it's named after Lucy, a 40% complete hominid skeleton a bit older than 3 million years found by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in Ethiopia in 1974.

Lucy, as the above link mentions, was named becuase the paleontologists were listening to the Beatles "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" over and over again and eventually someone called skeleton Lucy.

"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" apparently was named after the title of a painting by Julian Lennon, the then-4-year-old son of John Lennon, not LSD.

If you don't believe John Lennon's explanations, then the most popular position was that it was named after the hallucinogenic drug LSD. LSD is the abbreviation for Lyserg-saure-diathylamid, or to us English speakers lysergic acid N,N-diethylamide. First synthesized by Albert Hofmann in 1938, the "interesting" properties were discovered by the same in 1943.

It isn't. TNT just reacts with itself. The chemical equation is

C7H5N3O6 -> 3.5 CO + 3.5 C + 2.5 H2O + 1.5 N2

This allows a stick of dynamite to blow up anywhere a spark or current is introduced to it, such as underwater or even outerspace.

See here for more detail

chlorophyll (a simple sugar

Chlorophyll is not a sugar. It is a porphyrin derivative called a chlorin. Here is the structure.

While you wait for the order, read a bit about Tetrodotoxin, which was the Molecule of the Month in November 1999.

While you wait for the order, read a bit about Tetrodotoxin, which was the Molecule of the Month in November 1999.

the magic ingredient in the disc is, such as "phenylalanine" (I think)

Phenylalanine? They're putting artificial sweeteners in CD-Rs now?!

Now you're giving Berkeley too much credit. LSD was synthesized by Albert Hoffman of the Sandoz Chemical Corporation of Basel, Switzerland in 1938.

They might've used a lot of LSD in Berkeley during the 60's, but it wasn't discovered there.

You mean bridges don't collaspe?

What about the Tacoma Narrow Bridge?

Part of your comparision falls completely flat, we have been building bridges for thousands of years, while software engineering is at best 50 years old.

(He has a bottomless bag of "Euler's theorem (due to Bernoulli)", "the inequality named after Schwarz (and therefore not due to Schwarz)..." with which to crack up audiences.)

Shame really, 'cos otherwise I might pay that price for a near-silent PC. Just my damn NetWinder to shut up then...
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/dooby/

Yep, HTMLArea definitely rocks, but be warned that you'll have to dig a beta of it out of CVS, and then it will only run on Mozilla 1.4+ and IE6 (at least in my experience).

Of course, the fact that it's cross platform/browser at all is quite an accomplishment. Also, here is a whole list of other online WYSIWYG html editors.

Ah...the Culture.... I only wish it was already here....