Slashdot Mirror

There is other information available.

For example, the date of the observation (7 November), and commentary in the article leads to the reasonable supposition that the observation was from a meteor in the Taurid stream http://comets.amsmeteors.org/meteors/showers/tauri ds.html. Since the Taurids are very well characterized, their orbital velocity is extremely well known, and thus the net impact velocity would be known with great precision, too. If it's one of the Taurids. Which is not so bad an assumption.

Even without the Taurid assumption, you can look at other data to put some bounds on the meteor velocities. For example, there are excellent "head echo" observations by some big radars:

Arecibo http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/acp/4/947/acp-4- 947.pdf

Jicamarca http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/acpd/3/6063/acpd -3-6063.pdf

and there have been several PhD dissertations in recent years exploring a variety of aspects of meteors, just from the plasma physics side (let alone the "meteor astronomy" side); check out Close and Dyrud from 2004 at BU, http://www.bu.edu/astronomy/alumni/phd.html.

The past decade has been a remarkably active time for meteor studies. There will be presentations about meteors at the URSI meeting in Boulder CO 4-7 Jan 2006, http://cires.colorado.edu/ursi/

Actually, NASA can simply license the ideas/patents from his estate and from his employer of several decades -- Boston University.

With that said, aspartame *can* break down into methanol, but usually only does so at extreme pH or temperature. Warm water alone very slowly hydrolyzes aspartame. I'm trying to find some good kinetics studies; this one indicates 90% hydrolysis after 53 days at 25 degrees C which is a good argument for only drinking refrigerated pop.

But the sheer amount you'd have to drink to produce blindness is astounding. I once calculated that with 100% hydrolysis, it would take 20 cans of pop per hour to build up and maintain harmful concentrations of methanol in the blood. EPA studies have indicated that 0.5g/kg/day doesn't result in observable health problems. There are (Google calculator r00lz) 0.014g of methanol per can of 100% hydrolyzed Coke. Hm, so that indicates that you probably don't want to drink more than 35 cans per day or you'll be above the no-observed-adverse effect level.

The official Materials Safety Data Sheet for methanol lists "Carcinogenicity: Methyl Alcohol - Not listed by ACGIH, IARC, NIOSH, NTP, or OSHA." That doesn't mean it's not carcinogenic, but it does mean that none of them has ever found any evidence for it being carcinogenic, as opposed to things like the nitrites in bacon, which have definite carcinogenic activity. The point being: we're eating things that are probably orders of magnitude more carcinogenic than the released methyl alcohol in aspartame; our bodies produce more methyl alcohol and its metabolites naturally than any but the most aggressive pop drinker will ever experience.

I'm not defending aspartame's use, but if you're going to attack what the FDA did when they certified it for use, attack it on other grounds, like your observed reaction to it, rather than because of methanol.

ID is falsifiable if someone can demonstrate a creature evolving through chance with no intervention from intelligent beings

Can you falsify the assertion that God causes the fall of every sparrow? Of course not - the influence of a divine being is not measurable - it just happens. It could be that the transition from one quantum state to another quantum state of every particle in the entire universe only happens because God is concentrating really hard, and makes it happen... but even if that's true there's no way to construct an experiment which could falsify that explanation.

There's no way you could construct an experiment in which a creature could evolve through chance with no intervention from intelligent beings, because there's no way you could stop a divine being (by definition "intelligent") from intervening. There's no "God Kryptonite." Or "God Lead."

Gradual evolution can be falsified if one can show a creature rapidly evolve.

No, it can't. Individuals express different traits, and they can do it in a way that doesn't contribute to their survival at all. And then there can be a large environmental shift that makes some of those traits beneficial compared to their absence, and you have what appears to be "rapid evolution" when they live and their cousins die.

evolution in action will be caught on tape, so to speak, at some point, and then the question resolved

Two things: fossil record, and genetic algorithms.

If you can demonstrate that random processes and death can create higher order signals

One thing: chaos theory

(It doesn't look at evolution, but it gets the first part of your question - higher-order signals from random processes. As for the "death" part, look back at genetic algorithms.)

Tom Clancy outlined this in "Sum of All Fears", reference: http://kh.bu.edu/qcl/pdf/hughes_r199518777668.pdf

Not like I'm a Tom Clancy fanboy or anything. Just sayin.

Offtopic, perhaps, but I wouldn't recommend drinking acetic acid at any reasonable concentration either. Vinegar is dilute, on the order of 5%, and even drinking that straight probably isn't doing your stomach any favors.

I started by learning Microsoft's DirectShow technology and utilizing the OpenCV library according to the tutorial by R. Laganiere to access the pixels being sent by my web cam. If you try to use the tutorial, you'll have to use the new library paths for DirectX 9 because the ones in the tutorial are a little outdated.

Microsoft, the choice of terrorists everywhere. Born, raised and trained (if you call DirectX familiarization a training) right here in the USA.

Last summer was ... last month and M$ has already changed enough for you to need new libraries. Ugh.

Sheesh. It's not that toxic, unless you drink it. It's not "readily absorbed through the skin"; the MSDS for it says it is only a skin irritant, which is the case with any alcohol. It can be absorbed through the skin, or course, but only with prolonged contact. It does not seem to be significantly more dangerous than most household chemicals. Considering that it will be in a sealed cartridge, I don't see the big deal.

Absorption of Earth's atmosphere. Note it's the lines under the 255K curve that determine if heat gets from the ground to space (so look at c, b is for the 5780 curve and solar heating). The principal CO2 line is well away from saturation; the H20 lines are pegged.

Everything is predictable scientifically. It's just that there's too many variables to do it practically.

What is this, 1792?

I think this isn't true anymore

Some of you may be interested in dependent types. This is where simple types (what Java, C etc.) are extended so that types can be dependent on values. For example, your list type can include the size of the list as part of the type. So, the empty list would be type List(0), the list containing 3 things would be List(3). This allows you to do very powerful and useful analysis of the code at compile time. For instance, if you call removeLastItem on a list of type List(1), you know it will return List(0) (and not just List type in most languages). If you then add the constraint that removeLastItem can only be called with List(n), where n is greater than 0, to your code, you can catch out of bounds array accesses at compile time. This not only makes you code more robust, but you can also optimise out range checking code so it is efficient too. See this paper for examples: http://www.cs.bu.edu/~hwxi/academic/papers/pldi98. pdf

That depends on your interpretation of quantum mechanics. As Bayesians consider probability to be assigning likelihoods to logical propositions, some people think you can (maybe) relax the requirement that probabilities be real, and form so-called exotic probability systems based on C or H (quaternions) instead, from which quantum mechanics just drops out as a consequence. Within an exotic probability system, it is meaningful to speak of a probability with a value like 0.1+0.2i

If this bugs you, it helps to imagine a probability system where 1 means "it's definitely true" and infinity means "it'll never happen", instead of 0 and 1. Now, if you can see that the choice of the 0..1 interval is thus in fact arbitrary, why not allow other intervals and spaces of likelihood? It was then shown (see link below) that the only spaces that make sense for exotic probability theories are isomorphic to R,C or H.

That "why not?" tends to lead to an flamage from frequentists, but bayesians tend to go "uh. maybe. But now my head really hurts, you git.", and QM people go "look, the equations work already, you're not adding anything useful, just another way of interpreting QM"

See http://physics.bu.edu/~youssef/quantum/quantum_ref s.html

the authoritative list, by hardcore gaming fans of board games shows that the FASTEST (under 12 minutes per round) and most fun game is Lost Cities.

the current database list is at :
http://scv.bu.edu/~aarondf/Top100/list.txt

Lost cities is usually in the top 35 of all known popular games on the planet in the list (there is a longer list at that site)

But the best part is that a FREE, no-advertisement Java-in-a-browser SAFE implementation of Lost Cities is at :
www.Flexgames.com

There are actually three different multiplayer games at www.Flexgames.com, but the Lost Cities section is the most active.

The site has chess club player rankings, and makes the game better than the card came even if playing office coworkers (it tallies scores, sorts your hand, and displays the remaining card count in the deck)

All of those electronic additions makes the game more fun on a computer.

Please try it out. Its addictive and very fun. many players on that site have played THOUSANDS of games according to the statistics logs. (There are many types of reports available).

in-web-browser Java multiplayer online games are safe too (such games run in unpriviledged sandbox)

The only problem is that the first time you run a java web multiplayer game, it needs to cache the files, and that takes a minute on dialup, but is very fast on broadband, and once in the cache it is not too bad.

So try Lost Cities.... the highest rated short duration two player game in history.... and now its free and online and leaves plenty of time to eat during luch or WHILE you play. You can eat and play at the same time, no need to chat during the game.

try it, there is no ads, you can use a fake email address (if paranoid), and its free and quite well designed : flexgames.com

plus.... i need more opponents now that the winter crowds have thinned out. (Why do so many people only play card games in the cold months?)

Even if you make a couple of thousand a year, that's still 6k of debt. And depending on where you get the loan, the interest could mean you're paying it off for decades. How many parents can afford 8k per year? I know that slashdot is generally full of rich kids, but in the real world, many families are lucky to have 1k a year spare after living costs.

A commonly-bandied figure is that the average lifetime income increase from a college education is a million bucks or so. Paying back $8,000 over ten years at an average of 5% a year interest leads to a total of about $13,000, or $1,300 a year. The median income differential between having and not having a bachelor's degree is more than ten times that.

Unless one is a goddamned idjit, one will also take advantage of the subsidized Stafford loans offered by the feds, which currently have an interest rate of 3.37%, which isn't exactly extortionate.

I'm afraid I don't know about this community college thing. If it's as good as a normal university then why not stay the whole time at the community college? How much does it cost in comparison?

Learn. Community colleges only provide the first two years of education; they don't do all four years. And, indeed, many low-income students attend community college for the two years that they can. Community colleges are somewhat like extended high schools.

In comparison, community college costs about (random sample here) $100 a credit. Which is $300 a course, I would reckon, or about $1500 a semester. On the other hand, it looks like those particular guys waive tuition for in-state students.

Then why does anyone bother going to the private ones?

Beats me. I got a tuition waiver to state school---my state has a free-ride program for anyone graduating in the top five percent of their class with above a 1400 SAT score or something like that, so I just paid for fees, room and board. They also have programs where they'll pay half tuition for high school graduates in the top ten percent with scores above 1200 and so forth.

I suppose that's not particularly helpful for the other ninety percent of high school graduates, however.

But no, I can't give you a damned reason why anyone would choose to go to, say, Boston University ($29k/year not including room and board) instead of UMass Boston ($4k/year; I don't think they have dorms).

--grendel drago

Gotta be that fuzzy "new math" used in the Million Man March a few years ago.

I wonder if we could organize a "Million Fox March" on Netscape's headquarters. There seem to be about 57,530,179 of us. ^_^

The fluoride ion readily penetrates the skin causing destruction of deep tissue layers and even bone.

I would not have used HF acid, ever. This is especially true for some stupid lab. Safer acids should always be used like HCl, or even better, H2SO4 since you can smell that one :)

If you spill it on yourself, flush the are with A LOT of water. Water works best to dissolve virtually any common acids.

All fluorides are nasty. Yes, this includes Teflon (CF2-CF2) which kills hundreds of pet birds each year. Also, if it kills birds, it probably has some nasty effects on us http://tuberose.com/Teflon.html

Who's to say that neurons operate in the same way as a computer's multiple-add operations?

The structure of the neuron is well known and has been proven by microscopic and chemical analysis. Details can be found here and here

you'll need additional programming to tell the computer how to emulate the communication and interaction between neurons.

From studies of the human brain, two new computational paradigms have been identified this technical report.

The article gives little detail of the technology, and it's not like the general ideas Hawkins describes haven't been explored by people during the many decades of AI/neural networks research. The Numenta website gives the following:

That sounds like a number of neural network approaches, including Stephen Grossberg's work at BU. Although Hawkins seems to be a very bright guy, this field is littered with very bright researchers who made bold claims, and none of those efforts have yielded revolutionary businesses. Anyone remember (Stanford AI researcher) Edward Feigenbaum's Fifth Generation book in the 1980s? Doug Lenat's Cyc project?

Remember the huge difference between one neuron's firing rate and the clock speed for processors. The brain operates in a way that's fundamentally different from how we program and how computers operate: massive parallelism with slow components versus (mostly) serial computation. So when a company says they'll market a software solution to something which scientists haven't figured out yet, I am indeed skeptical. This is really more research effort than commercial venture, and Numenta admits this: "It may well take several years before products based on HTM systems are commercially available."

I hope there's something here. I'd love to see an outsider come in with fresh ideas and create a software platform to explore neuro-inspired programs. But let's be realistic and remember the history of AI. A red flag is the lack of any scientific papers available from the Numenta web site. If they are far enough along to make a software development kit, they should have been publishing results in peer-reviewed journals (with appropriate patent filings if necessary). So far, the only literature published is a trade book: On Intelligence.

See here. To save you the time, here's a list of stuff I found from that story, games that sounded interesting or worth checking out.

First, I decided I should really get into Go. Some links from that Slashdot story: here, The Second Book of Go here, here, here, here, and here.

Other games:
Apples to Apples - got this for my cousin, they liked it.
Settlers of Catan - got this for myself, very nice game, try a local hobby shop or here or try Amazon.com

Others: Puerto Rico (Similar to Settlers of Catan), Lord of the Rings board game was mentioned, Kill Dr. Lucky, Deadwood, Give me the Brain, Lightspeed Games, Fluxx is fun, very random and quirky.

There's more! Mind Trap
Munchkin , Heroscape, Ticket to Ride, Mystery of the Abbey, Memoir '44, Queen's Necklace at Days of Wonder, Bang!, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Articulate
Killer Bunnies (and Quest for the Magic Carrot), Illuminati , Acquire .

Some other reviews/top game lists here:
here
here
here

Happy gaming!

It's not really a molecule. Molecules are "bonded" due to Chemistry(covalent bonds, sharing electrons and all that jazz). Clusters on the other hand are formed due to a need to minimise energy.

To my understanding, it's something like soap molecules in water which most of us would have learnt about at some stage. They have a spherical head part which loves water and a long tail which hates water. So, bunches of molecules form spherical "clusters" where all the tails are on the inside of the sphere, guarded from water by the heads on the outside. Many substances form clusters (usually at low temperatures). Recently, Prof. Eugene Stanley and associates discovered that even Water forms these clusters at sufficiently low temperature.

and any interest at all in biochem, you could cover your bets pretty well by going after one of the Bioinformatics programs [those are two programs I know of...quite expensive as they are presumed by the schools to be in demand and it is expected your employer is helping pay the tuition] It does not outfit you for commercial web app development or for some mainstream IT jobs but within a few narrow areas such as search and rapid access to terabyte databases, these guys are at the limits of computing. You will get a job if you survive.

I studied with Prof. Jim Collins at the BU Center for Biodynamics.

One of his most recent studies is into the study of introducing 'noise' to the feet of those with balance issues. He uses a random vibrating insoles to generate noise in the shoe, which (as his studies proved) is successful in helping the elderly maintain balance and control.

A very interesting and very current look into biodynamics and engineered enhancers.

I studied with Prof. Jim Collins at the BU Center for Biodynamics.

One of his most recent studies is into the study of introducing 'noise' to the feet of those with balance issues. He uses a random vibrating insoles to generate noise in the shoe, which (as his studies proved) is successful in helping the elderly maintain balance and control.

A very interesting and very current look into biodynamics and engineered enhancers.

I studied with Prof. Jim Collins at the BU Center for Biodynamics.

One of his most recent studies is into the study of introducing 'noise' to the feet of those with balance issues. He uses a random vibrating insoles to generate noise in the shoe, which (as his studies proved) is successful in helping the elderly maintain balance and control.

A very interesting and very current look into biodynamics and engineered enhancers.

My friend came to me back in the summer, asking me to sign up under him at freeipods.com. At this point there wasn't much information about Gratis' operation on the Internet, so I did some back of the envelope calculations to figure out how the hell these guys could make money by giving away iPods.

I ended up posting my results here. Quick summary: It's economically viable. I wish I had thought of this first.

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

"The Black Death (also bubonic plague, and more recently The Black Plague) was a devastating epidemic in Europe in the mid-14th century (1347-1350), and is estimated to have killed about a third of Europe's population. Historical records attribute Black Death to an outbreak of bubonic plague, an epidemic of the bacterium Yersinia pestis spread by fleas with the help of animals like the black rat (Rattus rattus). However, today's experts debate both the microbiological culprit and mode of transmission."

"Information about the death toll varies widely from source to source, but it is estimated that about a third of the population of Europe died from the outbreak in the mid-1300s. Approximately 25 million deaths occurred in Europe alone, with many others occurring in Africa and Asia."

In Europe alone, 25 million people dead in 3 years. Wow.

"Humans are the so-called dominant species."

-Joe

http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Afri/AfriLouw.htm
---
Why not use the word "adapted" in the place of the word "evolved" when possible?

That's some pretty impressive edge detection, thanks for pointing it out. A related problem is to identify areas in an image that are the same thing. The best algorithm I know of for segmenting images is Leo Grady's brand new iso parametric graph partitioning method. His work is at http://cns.bu.edu/~lgrady/. His PhD thesis is probably the best place to start.

I fear if successful, then we will see this a lot more. It could be a big win for the companies, the more people to try to get ipod, the less leads that they are to go around, meaning many people won't fill their quota, meaning less ipod the adverising company has to give out (but they still get the same amount or more leads, with the less cost!).

As part of my research, I did happen upon someone who had explained the math of it pretty well here. (Please note, this isn't me, and I'm not affiliated with that site at all).

But, to comment on some of your other thoughts:

...when playing online games people are asking others to help them get ipods.

You're absolutely correct that this is an abuse of the original concept of viral marketing, and moreso, part of the effect of "annonimity" on the internet. I believe the original intent of viral marketing was to get people to ask their friends and family, really people that they know, to try offers. It would be that bond that makes the sale. However, people have taken the megaphone-internet and started shouting their message to anyone/everyone that they can reach... and with the internet, that's a whole mess of people.

This is the same thing that ticks people off about SPAM. I mean, if it was just one jerk sending email, it'd be easy enough to ignore him. But once thousands and thousands start doing it, it becomes more than just a frustrating endevour; it becomes a real hinderance to the use and enjoyment of the network.

So... what's the solution to this (these) problems? I think at this stage people are still upset over having to deal with anything (basically, the whole "why should it be MY problem when it shouldn't be a problem at all?!?" view). So, they tend to just get angry about it. Once we're past that, what can we do about it? Education? Regulation?

Assuming the collective attitude is that regulation is "taking away freedom," we must turn to education. So the question then becomes: what are you doing to help educate those around you without falling into the same "spam-trap" that gets one irritated in the first place?

This was already documented, but it's a good story.

When Nathan Cohen first submitted a paper documenting his fractal antenna research to a scholarly journal, the editors thought it was a practical joke.

Essentially, he had discovered that bending conventional antennas into repeating geometric or "deterministic fractal" shapes helped save space and did not adversely affect reception. It's a very simple idea -- and that simplicity, coupled with the fact that Cohen is a radio astronomer by training, not a fractal mathematician, made the antenna an easy target for expressions of skepticism.

"It seems particularly ironic if you think about what I was really asking people to do: bend a 30-cent piece of wire," he says. "It's not like this is a hard experiment to reproduce."

Indeed, Cohen first conducted it on his own ham radio, which he was trying to operate in an apartment complex with a no-antenna rule. He, too, was something of a skeptic at the time, but that didn't prevent him from giving the fractal a chance.

In addition to making him an entrepreneur, Cohen says, the fractal antenna has made him a student once again. Understanding the subtleties of his discovery has required him to get better acquainted with electromagnetics, a discipline that is not his specialty.

Full Article:
http://www.bu.edu/bridge/archive/1998/12-11/featur es3.html

More photos of fractal antennas:
http://classes.yale.edu/Fractals/Panorama/ManuFrac tals/FractalAntennas/FractalAntennas.html

"The USA may be shit, but the rest of the worl is shittier"

Look, we simulate populations of neurons all the time. Sometimes they are extremely realistic on an individual scale. A colleague of mine at a has funding to build a Beowulf cluster, simulating IIRC around 40,000 neurons, bigger than this collection of rat neurons. See Chris Eliasmith's work here.

Do you shed elephant tears for the numbers floating around in our computers? Or do you think there is something magic about cells?

• Babson College Wellesley
• Bentley College Waltham
• Berklee College of Music Boston
• Boston Architectural Center Boston
• Boston College Newton
• Boston Conservatory, The Boston
• Boston University Boston
• Brandeis University Waltham
• Bunker Hill Community College Boston
• Cambridge College Cambridge
• Emerson College Boston
• Emmanuel College Boston
• Fisher College Boston
• Harvard University Cambridge
• Hellenic College Brookline
• Lesley College Cambridge
• MIT Cambridge
• Massachusetts College of Art Boston
• Massachusetts College of Pharmacy
  and Allied Health Sciences Boston
• Mount Ida College Newton
• New England Conservatory of Music Boston
• New England School of Law Boston
• Northeastern University Boston
• Pine Manor College Chestnut Hill
• Radcliffe College Cambridge
• Simmons College Boston
• Suffolk University Boston
• Tufts University Medford
• Wellesley College Wellesley
• Wentworth Institute of Technology Boston
• Wheelock College Boston

It's amazing how many hostile responses there have been to my post.

My point is: There is absolutely NO evidence that genetic differences that may have been discovered have any effect whatsoever on what a man is able to do. In normal human interaction, men are just as able to perceive and understand color as women.

There are thousands of "scientific" articles like this that vastly overstate the scientist's actual findings. The article is written the way it is only because that way it will be read by more than a few people, who are looking for justification for the hostility toward men that has become standard in the U.S. culture. Normally the underlying findings would be read by only 50 or 100 geneticists, at most, who have an interest in a genetic difference that makes no perceptible difference in human behavior.

This is VERY important: A man can learn to be just as good in sensing color as a woman, in any human endeavor that matters.

Most of the great painters have been men, of course. Have you known women who complain that great male painters have made bad color choices?

The article sells a lie that is too subtle for most people. Most people are completely fooled, as the comments show.

This is extremely important because of the prevalence of misunderstanding. Men in the U.S. live in a very adversarial environment. Few realize this. They learn to accept the hostility and even invite it, and even treat themselves in a hostile manner. For example, the Slashdot logo says "nerd", an extremely derogatory label.

Again, men have been taught to accept adversarial behavior. Look at the responses to my comment that assume that I am trying to get some social advantage. Some people can only have that perception, and cannot benefit from what I said.

You don't need to live in the cultural prison that others made for you.

It means that it's both on some Activision collection CDs (look for the Lost Treasures of Infocom; there have been a few different releases at least one of which includes HHGTTG) which are at the moment out of print (but still findable here and there and which get rereleased every so often) and available through the web. I seem to recall that Douglas Adams' official site made the release in around the time of his death, and I think it still may be available there. If not, do a Google search for hhgttg.z5, HHGTTG.z5, hhgtg.z5, and other related variations. You'll need Z-machine software to run it, but that's readily (and freely) available for virtually all platforms. Check here for a quick list of links of Z-machine apps by platform. Of course, all this is assuming it's really legal to do so; again I reiterate that I really do believe it was so released... Douglas Adams' official site seems to be suffering from the /. effect right now so it's hard to get the final word.

Anyway, is there a way to reverse the crowd drawing algorthm to estimate individuals in a crowd?

The interesting cases are not ones like computer science, which have always been dominated (numerically) by men. The interesting cases are ones like medicine, where in certain specialties -- gynecology and pediatrics -- the tide has shifted from majority male to majority female or a 50/50 split. What causes this change? Not evolution! In other words, nothing inherently biological.

Idiot posters aside, I think most people can agree that there are a combination of biological and environmental factors that contribute to the low percentage of female CSers. Fine. So what are the environmental factors, and how can we control them? That's the real (and interesting) question.

Preferrably the formalism should allow me to give an exact description of the following probabilities: Given four random nodes, what is the probability that they form a cycle? Given a cycle of length 4 what is the probability that all 4 nodes are connected? Given four connected nodes, what is the probability that one of the nodes has 4 neighbors whereas the others have 7 neighbors?

I have only heard few talks on random networks, but I was very disappointed because the talks were rather sparse. Most of the talkers showed that the swedish sex network was scalefree, but they never considered joint probabilities for more than two nodes. Is there a theory for this or is everything still in the works?

Thanks in advance

I'm in the process of buying an old house (built in 1905!), so I've done quite a bit of research recently on Asbestos (and lead paint).

The epa has a pretty good section devoted to it. I also found The Asbestos Tragedy to be enlightening and more than a bit disturbing.

Asbestos, the state rock of California, is a mineral fiber. It's a rock that can be woven into fabric. It's very strong, chemically resistant, and fireproof. Being a natural substance, it's around us all the time and is part of the environment - as the rocks erode, the dust containing asbestos fibers are picked up by wind. (When an asbestos containing product is releasing fibers, it's termed friable).

It was used in a wide variety of household materials for decades. Things like heating system insulaton, vinyl/asphalt/rubber tiles, vinyl floor backing and adhesives, joint compounds, texturized paint, stove-top pads, oven mits, etc.. It was even used as stage curtains in theaters because of it's resistance to flame.

If it's in good condition (non-friable), meaning not cracking, crumbling, on an impact surface or otherwise releasing dust, then it's usually harmless if left alone. If it's friable though there are two methods for taking care of it - encapsulation (which is a temporary solution and must be maintained) and removal. Most states specify that only a licensed contractor or homeowner (friends and relatives can help, but cannot be paid, and all regulations must be followed) can deal with it.

When exposed to asbestos it will usually be caught by the mucus in the lining of your nose, mouth, and throat. This eventually gets swallowed (or hacked up I suppose). What's swallowed passes through you and winds up passing through and out of your digestive tract.

All it takes however is a single asbestos fiber to get past that defense system and get trapped in your lungs to potentially cause cancer. But like most cancers it's hit or miss who will be affected.

Oh, remember that part about it being a naturally occuring substance? It is quite possible that you could be exposed just by breathing fresh clean air.

The worst part is that it takes 20-40 years for any signs to show up, there's no way to test for it besides using x-rays to see if there's visibly damaged lung tissue, and there's no treatment. Our house inspector has had 3 friends die in the past 5 years or so due to asbestos.

Which brings me back to the house I'm buying - we found obvious asbestos insulation on the old radiator heating system under the house. The seller is going to have professionally removed (licensed asbestos contractor).

But there may still be asbestos lurking in other places. The texturized ceilings in a few rooms will have to have tested (the current owners have had the place ~10 years, and don't know exactly when it was painted) for both asbestos and lead before we do anything with them. Testing runs about $25-50 per sample.

Lead paint is much much easier to deal with. Blood levels can be monitored, encapsulation products are easy to apply (special paint,kinda pricey but much cheaper than abatement), and for wood surfaces the newer soy gel paint strippers make it much safer for do-it-yourselfers.

Basically we're going to have to be very careful and meticulus about any work we decide to do or have done to make sure our home is safe.

Have a look at the wonderful world of bioinformatics, where (hopefully) you should be able to find an array of academic institutions publishing their data for peer review.

To pick just the one place I'm vaguely familiar with, try Boston University's BMERC lab, which publishes both raw genomes and MySQL databases. BMERC's main genome.sql.gz file is 119,294,059 bytes (113 mb, compressed), which should be well into the "large dataset" category you're asking for :-)

There are surely many other schools publishing similar data if you poke around a bit.

Of course, at that point, you start to be bound by the problem domain. Sure, you have lots of data and that's all well & good, but what does it mean? What sorts of analysis can you usefully do on it? Without a biology background, maybe not much, but it's an interesting field and you should be able to give yourself enough of a crash course to make something useful out of it...

Have fun!

Have a look at the wonderful world of bioinformatics, where (hopefully) you should be able to find an array of academic institutions publishing their data for peer review.

To pick just the one place I'm vaguely familiar with, try Boston University's BMERC lab, which publishes both raw genomes and MySQL databases. BMERC's main genome.sql.gz file is 119,294,059 bytes (113 mb, compressed), which should be well into the "large dataset" category you're asking for :-)

There are surely many other schools publishing similar data if you poke around a bit.

Of course, at that point, you start to be bound by the problem domain. Sure, you have lots of data and that's all well & good, but what does it mean? What sorts of analysis can you usefully do on it? Without a biology background, maybe not much, but it's an interesting field and you should be able to give yourself enough of a crash course to make something useful out of it...

Have fun!

Have a look at the wonderful world of bioinformatics, where (hopefully) you should be able to find an array of academic institutions publishing their data for peer review.

To pick just the one place I'm vaguely familiar with, try Boston University's BMERC lab, which publishes both raw genomes and MySQL databases. BMERC's main genome.sql.gz file is 119,294,059 bytes (113 mb, compressed), which should be well into the "large dataset" category you're asking for :-)

There are surely many other schools publishing similar data if you poke around a bit.

Of course, at that point, you start to be bound by the problem domain. Sure, you have lots of data and that's all well & good, but what does it mean? What sorts of analysis can you usefully do on it? Without a biology background, maybe not much, but it's an interesting field and you should be able to give yourself enough of a crash course to make something useful out of it...

Have fun!

I made a simulated prototype of a fast/simple algorithm, which was 100x (IIRC) faster than random wandering in my tests. A bit of information is here.

It requires that the robot know its position rather accurately, but if it's a hobby you could use differential GPS (which would add too much to the cost of a low-end commercial robot). You might look into localisation via wifi.

The red green and blue of projectors or monitors or whatever are not a single frequency of light. LEDs don't give you pure frequencies either. Lasers are the only thing that give you light at a pure, single frequency I think. On the other hand, this page seems to indicate that DLP light consists of sharper spectral peaks than either LCD or CRT (3rd paragraph).

But still I suspect that their filters probably filter out some of the visible light coming out of the projectors, making this black screen not quite as bright as a comparable white reflective screen. After all it has to be easier to make a material with close to 100% diffuse reflectance across the whole spectrum than to create something that's near 0% everywhere except for three narrow notches which are near 100%. But I'm no expert on light

So I'm thinking it's highly unlikely that the the filters come anywhere near 100% black in the non-reflected parts of the spectrum. No doubt this is the blackest projection screen you've ever seen, but I really doubt it will be the blackest thing you've ever seen. Especially if you've seen Undercover Brother

Still it's a pretty neat trick. Anyone know how they make passive filters with such sharp tuning to specific frequencies. Is it some kind of diffraction thing?

And just why is it so important for BSD to have a VDR? The idea just seems dumb to me.

Binocular disparity only works out to a few metres distance. Beyond that you use different cues. Consider some papers by my supervisor, for example: A laminar cortical model of monocular and binocular interactions in depth perception, Neural Dynamics Of 3-D Surface Perception: Figure-Ground Separation And Lightness Perception

There are plenty of people out there designing and writing games who are both creative artists and decent engineers and programmers.

Sure. But there are plenty of un-creative, overly technically obsessed, keeping-up-with-the-chipset-joneses-driven game 'designers' out there as well, pumping out boring dreck with their warezed 3DSMax installs, re-used Half Life engines, and 'games == war' mindset.

It wouldn't hurt to have a little more Shakespeare or Chancer in this Modern Literary Front ... Just because you may not understand some of the real concepts behind what this author is proposing ... and yeah, frankly, the Two Cultures problem just still has not been addressed properly in the game industry.

Think otherwise? Give an example?

Huh? Where's the news? Dr Henrik Jensen discovers years of research on BRDFs?

I'd add Newton books to the list of formats that the e-book reader should read. There are still tons of them around out there available for free (many which aren't available in other formats), plus the software to create them is freely available and the file format specifications for them are widely available.

See this project for some further information on working with Newton books.

Is this Dark Matter the same thing as or related to anti-matter or something whole different?

Obviously, you've never read things like the Didache, I Clement, or the like from the 1st century, nor the others in the second century. There are lots of rules in those. Of course, as Christianity spread from Palestine all the way to Rome, it also spread as far as India, and those churches still exist, and they all have many rules, very similar doctrines, and so on (with the exception of Roman Catholicism which is the most different of the bunch), including lots of rules.

Another mistake is that the Roman Empire fell in two phases, realistically, one in 476 and the other in 1422. In 476, the Goths only took Rome, but the capital, primary emperor, and central administration had long since been moved to Constantinople, and neither order nor the old mores of civilization were disrupted there, and it most certainly was part of the "known world," as were the places further east, and the Western Europeans knew about all the rest, because they talked about it frequently and passed through it to wage the Crusades.

The myth that your post presupposes that Rome and all civilization Christianity knew fell in the fifth was created by the Germanic, not to be confused with German, peoples occupying Rome to discredit the "Byzantine Empire." In so doing, they set up their own "true" empire, the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither "holy" nor "Roman." In fact, the Roman Empire remained quite stable during this period.

So, if I take what you say seriously, then somehow the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire in the fifth century (and you must mean this fall, because the Latin and Greek churches had long since split by the time the Roman Empire ultimately fell) caused Christianity to form the same rules and regulations everywhere it had reached, including places that had long since been separated by distance. Fortunately, I don't have to believe it anymore than I have to believe that the world was made 6k years ago.

For your reading pleasure, I googled for a bit and found the following for you: Assyrian Church, Coptic Church, Coptic Church, Syriac (and Indian) churches, and so many other "churches," but I've googled for enough. As for "Byzantine" Empire, about's site and another site.

There's always more information if someone wants to google. Your statement on Roman Catholicism spring from Reformation religious feuds and hubris. The belief in this great primordial change when the "known world" descended into chaos was propigated by the Reformers to rationalize their actions. After all, they waged incessant wars with Catholicism and each other for religious supremacy, altering the contents of their Bible by excising whole books and adding or subtracting words in their translations to suit their doctrines, and declaring "antichrist" anything that disagreed with them (Martin Luther was especially bad about this). They are hardly a good place to get history from, but that is where the Roman Catholic fall and restoration, ultimately comes from. The other catholic churches, to my knowledge, do not hold that view despite an equal animosity between them and the RC.

It still more depends on the concept of the "known world" falling into chaos. This was created by Germanic, not German, politics and the same bigoted racism Western Europe later exported to other civilizations even as they exterminated so many of them. Unfortuanately, they exported their racist history everywhere they went, so that their interpretation is the dominant one. Fortunately, it only takes a cursory examination of the facts to see through it.

Before you pat yourself on the back about how you can have an intelligent discussion about religion, without screaming and shouting, sit back and a