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See Figure 3 in the linked paper below "Reinforcement Learning in Board Games". According to the author's estimate Go is practically off-the-scale in terms of game tree size and possible states when compared to Chess. https://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/Publ...

Secure multiparty computation algorithms provide fully visible algorithms that remain a black box.
A neat trick.

http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~nige...

Please provide a link that supports your claim: "because it wants to react with everything."

Uranium is a highly reactive metal and reacts with almost of all the nonmetallic elements and many of their compounds. It dissolves in acids, but it is insoluble in alkalis.
http://www.chemicool.com/eleme...
http://www.pnl.gov/main/public...
http://www.bris.ac.uk/cabot/me...

You're getting caught up trying to dig your way out of being 100% wrong. It's really OK. I'll put the guns away. The part you're missing is that Uranium readily oxidizes in even "cold" water, and from there, the chemical possibilities expand dramatically.

But thanx for the links about alpha decay etc. :D pffft.

I felt the links describing alpha decay and alpha particles were pertinent since your initial claim, 6 goal posts ago, was that a 1kg sample of Uranium would kill you if you slept on it.

Of course it took 30 seconds to google and find the actual study http://www.nature.com/npp/jour...

Here's one: http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/DeafStudiesTeaching/dissert/BPS%20Ethical%20Guidelines.htm

https://www.acrc.bris.ac.uk/

I suspect it was ran on phase 2. There is usually quite a bit of spare time on it.... except a week before some coursework deadlines when everyone uses it D:
At least, that was the case 2 years ago before I graduated.

Well, it's a coinage that's over a century old. (I found a 1908 paper that... ironically, debunks a long list of suspected cases of naturally-occurring luminous plants.) If you want something else to predict they'll get upset about, I highly recommend reading through here.

They put a reflective film on a LCD monitor and aimed a projector at it. If you're almost perpendicular to the display, you see the projected image; otherwise you see the LCD image. The setup is that the display sits flat on a table and the projector is overhead, pointing down. If you lean over the display, the image changes. The room lighting has to be dim for this to work.

It's cute, but the applications are limited.

If you really wanted many people to see different things on the same screen, the various tricks used for 3D (shutter glasses, polarization) would be more effective.

Over here in radio astronomy, there actually are quite a few people who still use Linux or the X11 in OSX to run old unix software. I mean stuff like Miriad, built on the original Xaw/Athena in the middle of the eighties.
I don't know their code in detail, so I can't say if it does bypass some of the X11 functions, but given that is was developed mostly the X window system reached version 11, I think it's pretty basic X.

There's also AIPS, which is even older. I don't think it knows about X, it uses a serial stream of bytes, where each byte is a pixel, to display images on "AIPSTV". This is a program that still thinks in input/output/program tapes and has no concept of a file system beyond "tape library".

What I learned when I ventured into radio astronomy, is that a lot of the software in use is still seventies and eighties FORTRAN code. Only recently, with the newer ALMA and LOFAR telescopes coming online, did more modern packages like CASA (1991) gain any traction.

Yes 2 decades old is considered "new" in radio astronomy.

http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/mark/AIPS.html

I ran across this paper on nano scale production of zinc oxide by a laser ablation method. If the ZnO is being used as a catalyst, nanostructures are useful for their increased surface area.

This might be useful for those amateur chemists wanting to build their own at home.

Yang, Li, Paul W May, Lei Yin, and Tom B Scott. 2007. “Growth of self-assembled ZnO nanoleaf from aqueous solution by pulsed laser ablation.” Nanotechnology 18(21):215602. Retrieved April 5, 2012. http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/pt/diamond/pdf/drm17-931.pdf

The problem is not just generating the power... it's delivering it and consuming it without breaking/melting. And that's what they're getting at here - getting more FLOPS per watt... not finding out how to push more watts into a system. A silly amount of the energy going into a supercomputer comes out as heat... and a silly amount of energy is then used to remove that heat. Hopefully, by significantly improving the energy efficiency of chips and systems, we can make them a lot more powerful without them needing a whole lot more power. And I haven't even mentioned the mobile/embedded side of the spectrum where its about battery life and comfortable operating temperatures... the same energy efficiency goals apply.

This is the sort of thing we over the pond are very interested in too. Like for example *cough* the Microelectronics Research Group that I'm a part of.

Edward A. G. Schuur, a University of Florida researcher who has done extensive field work in Alaska, is worried by the changes he already sees, including the discovery that carbon buried since before the dawn of civilization is now escaping. “To me, it’s a spine-tingling feeling, if it’s really old carbon that hasn’t been in the air for a long time, and now it’s entering the air,” Dr. Schuur said. “That’s the fingerprint of a major disruption, and we aren’t going to be able to turn it off someday.”

I suspect the "spine-tingling" part might have to do with the Permian-Triassic extinction (90%+ of all species wiped): A rise of a few degrees in temperature led to massive release of methane which brought a total 6-degree rise, which led to total mayhem for life on Earth, and which best current explanation is:

The cause of the burp was probably global warming triggered by huge releases of CO2 from the Siberian Traps. Methane is a greenhouse gas too, so a big burp raises global temperatures even further. Normally, long-term global processes act to bring greenhouse gas levels down. This kind of negative feedback keeps the Earth in equilibrium. But what happens if the release of methane is so huge and fast that normal feedback processes are overwhelmed? Then you have a "runaway greenhouse". This is a positive feedback system: excess carbon in the atmosphere causes warming, the warming triggers the release of more methane from gas hydrates, this in turn causes yet more warming, which leads to the release of more methane and so on. As temperatures rise, species start to go extinct. Plants and plankton die off and oxygen levels plummet. This is what seems to have happened 251 million years ago.

That sure seems an extreme scenario, easy to swipe aside because of its extreme nature. Problem is, we can't, in all intellectual honesty, really dispel it. Replacing the "Siberian Traps" with the "burning of fossil fuels" means we are currently on a path toward a future in which that scenario has a higher likelihood, whatever it is. Unfortunately, the laws of nature don't care about the personal worldview and state of mind of each of us, and no amount of sarcasm has ever been able to counteract the natural laws, the (relatively short in geological time) human historical record is clear on that.

1. Can you offer any insights into what happens with these meltdowns? If that actually HFT related and what goes wrong? Is it amateurs in action of is there a more fundamental issue with market structure? Eg http://www.zerohedge.com/article/how-hft-quote-stuffing-caused-market-crash-may-6-and-threatens-destroy-entire-market-any-mom

2. Can you offer any suggestions as to how a retail investor might deal with the presence of HFTs and not get taken to the cleaners? Eg in the light of things like this "Evaluation of the 'Adaptive-Aggressive' Trading-Agent Strategy Against Human Traders in CDA: AA Wins" at http://lscits.cs.bris.ac.uk/docs/AAMAS_CAMERA_READY.pdf

Scientists have been doing it to identify and count penguins for some time now and those don't even have stripes to speak of.

http://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/news/leverhulme_grant.html

Speaking of 3D rendering, most of them output HDR which would be awesome to see without being tone mapped!. (LuxRender has built-in Reinhard tone mapping) And since we are on the topic of HDR.. this is what it is NOT http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~reinhard/tm_comp/flickr_hdr/The%20Problem.html (Reinhard discusses the blown out tone mapping heavily prominent on flickr)

Just grab through the air from overhead power lines.

http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2004/360

Read 'em, I have.

Sanctafuckingmonious dickweed.

Did you think that because you didn't link to the articles that no one could find them?
I just read the first one and neither the word "addiction" nor any of its variants appears even once in the text.
The word "dependence" is used ONCE in this dismissive sentence, "Combination of effects for over-use of cannabis with those for dependence makes it difficult to compare with our findings."

Utter fucking failure on your part.

http://www.bris.ac.uk/psychiatry/staff/zammit/documents/paper.pdf

There were no corporations when America was "growing up"? What kind of retarded Sociality historical revisionism is that? Here's a paper published at Harvard that should educate you: http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/davisjoe/corps

"Page's law" is simply a restatement of May's law:

"Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore's Law".

David May is a British Computer scientist who was the lead architect for the Transputer. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)
and page 20 of:
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/iee.pdf

I'm one of those weirdassed extra-colours seers [g] To me, a peacock's tail plumage looks more like the righthand example than the left: http://www.bio.bris.ac.uk/research/vision/4d.htm -- not quite that blue, but with the sparklies in the black "eye" clearly visible.

Extinguish!

I don't care how little tetraethyl lead is in it. It sounds like a horrible idea. tetraethyl lead is a known carcinigen and is most definetly a poison that accumulates in the body overtime. http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/leadtet/leadj.htm

Here are apperently some links:
http://www1.gly.bris.ac.uk/~george/noises/text.html

Doesn't sound like rocks grinding to me...

Banks is indeed a socialist and one of his best friends is Ken McCleod who's Fall Quadruple is a fantastic vision of a near future (in my opinion, and I'm a classic east coast libertarian). I finished The Execution Channel last night which is left wing propoganda at it's worst but a great read and quite amusing in that it shows how people assume malevolence when it's sometimes incompetence. My first Bank's book was Excession which I read stuck on an island off the US coast on 12th->14th September 2001 when I wasn't going anywhere for obvious reasons. A struggle at first, it's a fantastic mix of cyberpunk and space opera in my opinion and a great introduction to the Culturverse, and with a "WOW" ending and that really puts their power into perspective. The Algebraist was similar - though not a Culture novel, once the initial shock is over it's a great, great Space Opera. The concept of rHuman and aHuman is played out well across a cruel universe. Some notes on the Culture by Iain M Banks

As several people have pointed out this is not a new discovery, its been well understood for a long time and doesn't take much thought to understand the processes. A really quick google search found the following references: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/newstraffic.shtml http://www.enm.bris.ac.uk/publicity/traffic.html These don't go back too far, but I remember watching a TV program about this and the scheme proposed for the M25 (UK) and that was many years ago. As usual the title is overly sensational. The actual NewScientist article does point out this is simply a physical demonstration of a theory that goes back 15 years and has been modeled in computer simulations many times before! I would think observing many of the worlds busy motorways is just as beneficial! The one thing that worries me is the suggestion that this can now be used to help understand how to reduce traffic jams. Using the computer models this has long been understood, its just not so easy to get motorists to abide by the requirements!

The same mechanisms that are said to cause globabl warming today; CO2 levels for earth peaked in the triassic period at about 3000ppm (currently at 381ppm, under 300ppm pre-industrial revolution). The higher CO2 levels led to higher levels of water vapor, and the two together made earth a big greenhouse.

Reference

On a bit of a tangent, I saw an interesting documentary about four years ago where a group of scientists tried to deduce of all the things needed for life on earth, what would run out first. They came to the conclusion that CO2 levels would continue to fall, till Earth became incapable of supporting plant life, and as a result any higher life form.

The bomb skipped across the water until it HIT the dam.

The bomb then bounced back, and started to fall. During the fall the backspin made it move forward again, right up to the dam face.

The bomb fell approximately half-way down the dam - further than illustrated!

The above points are critical - Wallis found that explosive needed to be placed RIGHT AGAINST the dam wall to work effectively. It is probable that the several bombs used on the Mohne which did not break it initially were not centrally placed and failed to stick to the dam face.

A much better illustration is here: http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/webprojects2001/moorcraf t/The%20Bouncing%20Bomb.htm

The author, Iain Banks, thought about this some time ago and has written some truly excellent sci-fi with these questions in the background: The Player of Games, Excession, and The State of the Art.

Derby DB in the Browser

They knew about it further west long ago; it was the molecule of the month at Bristol University back in October 2005, where they mention its contribution to the smell of the sea. And of truffles. And of farts. Mmm, versatile!

>we've been building bridges for thousands of years

And despite that, they still fall down.

Read Henry Petrowski's book, "To Engineer Is Human" some time. The point of the book is: an engineer, whether bridge or software, is building a compromise between deadlines, money, user requirements, and laws of nature. As time marches on, that compromise will *always* tilt towards deadlines and money, and eventually it will break, at which point we've learned something for next time.

From outer space, we could tell that the Earth has a lot of metabolic activity in it, because the sky is mostly highly reactive oxygen that is a result of plant respiration.

Actually, the "sky" or atmosphere (as scientists call it) is mostly Nitrogen. Only around 20% is oxygen. Link.

Ocean water is practically alive itself, there is so much life in it. On land, the places with the greatest biomass and biodiversity are the rainforests, where they have near 100% humidity.

Ocean water is not "practically alive" in any sense whatsoever. There are vast areas where there is virtually no significant life. That is not to say those areas are sterile, but just that they do not have sufficient resources to sustain a large amount of diverse lifeforms. Such things as boundaries between ocean currents and upwellings of cold water bringing nutrients closer to the surface create conditions where life flourishes. This is why there are mass migrations of many species every year - to go where the food is. They wouldn't have to do that if the oceans were "practically alive". As for the rainforests, they have the greatest biomass due mainly to the fact that they are forests ! Forests full of massive plants called trees. Yes they do have massive bio-diversity, but that is mainly due to having the most available niches for life to succeed. From the forest floor to the canopy presents a large area in which to find suitable conditions. The Sahara desert is not entirely lifeless, but appears that way because it only provides 1 environment - the sand. Dig a little beneath the surface of the sand and you will find mammals, reptiles, insects and arachnids. Your argument is too simplistic.

My guess is that those 'extremophiles' are descendants of creatures who lived in more hospital environments and became adapted to increasingly extreme environments. I don't think that life originated in rocks or in ocean vents.

Well your guess would be pretty much wrong then. Link. What you "think" has no real bearing on the reality that science has discovered. And I don't think they had hospitals 4 billion years ago !

Look, when posting blogodreck about something somebody wrote, link to the actual article. This is supposedly about an article written by Prof. Nigel Smart at the University of Bristol. And it doesn't have a link to the article, or any useful reference to it. It doesn't even link to Prof. Smart's home page.

Here's Prof. Smart's home page.. He's a cryptographer, and one of the people behind elliptic curve cryptography, one of the alternatives to prime-number based systems. But I can't find any reference to risks of social networking on his pages.

So all we really have is some unknown blogger saying the obvious.

Also, I'd guess that environmental gene expression stars in the womb - that the fetus gets clues to the external environment from the nutrients and chemicals coming from the mother and adjusts itself accordingly. You could test that by somehow getting ahold of some in-vitro twins and implanting them at different times, I guess? But there probably still would be too many variables.

Is a highly effective painkiller that works by blocking sodium channels. Not all pain killers work on the principle of endorphin release, and not all pain killers are addictive.

Uh, no, because if it was a tooth, for example, *alot* can be determined from that "one bone". Same for many other individual bones, though most are not as diagnostic as teeth.

Then there's the fact that this specimen consists of a pretty complete skeleton with preservation of soft tissues, so your question kind of misses the point. This isn't "one bone".

"When mainstream scientists can't even explain exactly how these bones lasted as long as they think they did?"

Check out the general references on Wikipedia's taphonomy page. The book that is most relevant is the one on vertebrate taphonomy. You might also want to look up the term lagerstatten (damn, how do you make an aumlaut in here? It doesn't take the usual HTML codes. There should be an umlaut over the second "a"). The Karatau locality in Kyrgyzstan is pretty special because of the soft tissue impressions (i.e. a conservat-Lagerstatten). While there are plenty of questions, preservation isn't as problematic as you imply.

> While the Writely and Google Spreadsheets combo are not "killer apps" in terms of features

Actually, Writely and Google Spreadsheet are Labs toys right now. However fast forward one year, with Firefox sporting an embedded database, and Writely and Spreadsheets will look far less toy-like. Add support for rich controls from the WHAT-WG and in a couple of ears you have an office suite you can download on demand and run inside your browser. And you can work with it offline.

And if you think Microsoft hasn't read the writing on the wall, you haven't been looking at XAML and IE7 very closely.

For example, the bridge (the name of which I can't remember) from the early part of the 20th century that bent and twisted under high wind until it finally just fell apart. Loss of life? I don't believe so, but it was a spectacular destruction.

That's foolish. There are bugs in every project of every size. Including bridges. And skyscrapers. Remember the Tacoma Narrows Bridge?

Normally, those bugs have low Severity or Frequency (or both). Sometimes they have catastrophic severity.

Did you know that the twin towers were built to withstand a direct impact from a 707?

Bugs are a fact of life. They follow from the mantra 'nothing is perfect.'

If people with scientific and engineering mindsets just "left things alone", you'd be sitting in a cave wondering why rocks weren't edible.

Most likely, as the natural product needs to be modified before being an effective pharmaceutical, the compounds of interest will be identified. Then either the necessary gene sequence will be cloned into a workhorse organism, such as yeast or E. coli, or retrosynthetic techniques will be used to make the compound and derivatives thereof under abiotic conditions.

Translation: no company expecting to sell billions of dollars worth of product would rely on such a low-yield source such as mining coral reefs for drugs. Even Taxol( (R) Bristols-Meyer-Squibb) http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/MOTM/taxol/t axol.htm/, which could be grown on vast yew ranches, is preferrentially synthesized via standard organic chemistry techniques. Our methods of finding new molecules may be from the Dark Ages, but our methods of synthesizing them are not.

Re: showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago

Not so. Arthropods (millipedes and centipedes etc) first conquered the land around 500 million years ago and were walking around long before this newly-discovered beastie. Their fossilised footprints have been found. "The oldest body fossil of a land animal is a 430-million-year-old millipede."

"Our own ancestors, fish-like amphibians, first lumbered ashore a mere 370 million years ago. There they found a world teeming with plants and giant creepy crawlies."

there are *no* studies showing a correlation between living near pylons and cancer or other diseases

http://www.electric-fields.bris.ac.uk/PowerlinesAn dHealth.htm

http://www.revolt.co.uk/trentham/

I "personaly" believe in faries.

Time to trot out a link to a page I truly love: Molecules with Silly or Unusual Names.

Arsole! Megaphone! Spermine!

Have fun.

You may want to read about researcher Karen Wetterhahn, who died after spilling a drop or so of dimethylmercury, on top of the latex gloves she was wearing. Her story gives me the willies.

A real-life Player of games (no, it's not an affiliate link...). Of course we're missing some of the Culture yet...

I recommend the book, btw, but then most of the 'M' banks (the sci-fi stuff) is pretty damn good...

Simon

Recorded climatic history goes back a very long way. Ice cores show a huge amount about climate and give information over thousands of years

Ice cores contain an abundance of climate information --more so than any other natural recorder of climate such as tree rings or sediment layers. Although their record is short (in geologic terms), it can be highly detailed. An ice core from the right site can contain an uninterrupted, detailed climate record extending back hundreds of thousands of years[my emphasis].

Similarly, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Early Carboniferous Period were approximately 1500 ppm (parts per million), but by the Middle Carboniferous had declined to about 350 ppm -- comparable to average CO2 concentrations today! Earth's atmosphere today contains about 370 ppm CO2 (0.037%). Compared to former geologic times, our present atmosphere, like the Late Carboniferous atmosphere, is CO2- impoverished! In the last 600 million years of Earth's history only the Carboniferous Period and our present age, the Quaternary Period, have witnessed CO2 levels less than 400 ppm.[my emphasis]

Malaria causes more deaths

And that baffles me, since it's so readily cured with cheap tree bark or even a few hundred gin and tonics.

Why are we, and the kind Mr. Gates worried about a disease that's easily and cheaply cured (and even prevented?) And why are people still dying from malaria?

Great scientific pseudoachievements / pseudoadvances:

Phlogiston (a THEORY!! WOOO!)
http://www.jimloy.com/physics/phlogstn.htm

Montgolfier gas
http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/webprojects2003/hetherin gton/final/montgolfier_bros.html

LSD as a mind control drug
http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/lsd-mc-cia.htm
(to be differentiated from drug addiction, which is certainly controlling)

Frontal lobotomies
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=6379496&dopt=Abstract

Perpetual motion
http://burtleburtle.net/bob/physics/whythere.html

the 4^H5^H3 kingdom classification of organisms
http://encarta.msn.com/media_461530646/Classificat ion_of_Organisms.html

For coatings, you want CVD diamond. Here's a little overview.

There's some in this 4Mb Powerpoint presentation: http://www.bris.ac.uk/education/research/networks/ gern/gdc05.ppt

A few more in my lickle blog of examples: http://silversprite.blogspot.com/

The "games in education" research sector has generally moved on from the question of "Can games be of use in curriculum-based learning?" (answer: yes - look at the examples), and is looking more at "Which games?", "How?", and "What support do educators need to make the best use of them?". The EA / FutureLab linkup will be looking at these three.