Slashdot Mirror

Here's a link to the actual research paper (and abstract) describing the work:

Rizzuto, DS, Mamelak, AN, Sutherling, WW, Fineman, I and Andersen, RA (2005) Spatial selectivity in human ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. In press at Nature Neuroscience.

The functional organization of lateral prefrontal cortex is not well understood, and there is debate as to whether the dorsal and ventral aspects mediate distinct spatial and non-spatial functions, respectively. We show for the first time that recordings from human ventrolateral prefrontal cortex show spatial selectivity, supporting the idea that ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in spatial processing. Our results also indicate that prefrontal cortex may be a source of control signals for neuroprosthetic applications.

For an overview of the neural prosthetics work in Richard Andersen's lab at Caltech, this presentation is handy.

I'm sure they're subject-shopping, but it's interesting that there are so many weird things going on out there.

It does feel like there are a few things about to tease themselves apart in cosmology...

Gravity seems to be behaving oddly, with things like the Pioneer acceleration and the anomalous in-track acceleration of the LAGEOS satellites.

The limited age of the universe is being stretched to strange proportions of late with observations of the early universe looking more developed than expected. Observations by the Spitzer may throw even more confusion on the fire.

Add to the pile interesting oddities like Quantized Redshift, originally proposed by Tifft and still observed, that would see to put us at the center of the universe (we shouldn't see the equivalent of even "shells" from our point of view). The Fingers of God is an interesting graphic interpretation.

Association of high-redshift quasars with low-redshift galaxies rounds off the plate.

Actually, a number of these controversies have been around since the mid-80's, but the power and spectrum spread of our telescopes has been getting better. It's been hard to get time to observe the controversial objects - the allocation committees tend to turn such proposals down - but there are plenty of controversies left in the skies, even when we don't go looking for them :)

Personally, I'm excited by the possibilities. It feels like there's something just around the corner, if only we can get some research time in on it.

Okay... but here's my point: Every single example that shows how elegant Haskell and OCaml are uses lists. The 4-line Quicksort example for Haskell uses lists. All of the code that demonstrates easy reuse of functions and functions taken as arguments uses lists (like how easy it is to implement quite complicated algorithms using only map and filter, for example).

Or perhaps more correctly, "every single example that you've seen". For a real quick one, look at Jason Hickey's Intro to OCaml (pdf) and have a quick peek at his Red/Black tree implementation. Or even cooler (if you're into that sort of thing) is the ever famous One Day Compilers talk.

But what you're saying in #1 above is that in "production," speed-sensitive code, no one is using lists... this would mean that no one is using map, filter, or any other pieces of reusable primitive code. So, they are instead all using mutable data structures... I.e., they are programming with side-effects and loops (random access instead of recursion, even when ever element of an array/list needs to be accessed/processed).

No. What he's saying in that you should use the best data structure for the job. Your best bet would have been to use the Hashtbl module from the standard library, or if you wanted to stay in the purely applicative, the Map module (also in the standard library) would have been loads faster...

You are aware that there are more purely functional data structures (pdf) (OCaml implementations) than the list, don't you?

So... maybe you can re-write higher-order memoization code using more efficient data structures? I would love to see that code, and I'm sure the OCaml community would benefit from having that in their toolbox.

Here's a pretty neat example that uses arrays in a naive way, but you could certainly use, say, a map instead... And I'm pretty sure the OCaml community (by which I mean the people who would have helped you improve your code had you asked them) know about things like this.

I don't think I spread any falsehoods. I mean, my experiment was real, and the results are real, and the code is there for people to inspect and try on their own. I also talked in my /. post about OCaml code that is isomorphic to C being fast, but functional code perhaps not being fast.

Yes. And we inspected it, found it to be poorly written, and told you so. The "falsehood" here is that you claim that code written in a functional style is slow, when you really should have said "my code written in a naively functional style is slow". If I fill my gas tank with water, my car sure is slower than walking, therefore all cars are slower than walking... right?

Trust me... I am *dying* to use OCaml or Haskell for real-world programming. I have spent the past month or so exploring these languages and trying to apply them to real programming problems. Especially when shootout results showed that OCaml was sometimes faster than C, and when I discovered that OCaml was much faster than Hasell, I was really starting to think that OCaml was a possibility.

I put a link to tho OCaml mailing lists above. Use it. Ask questions of the list (you may want to start with the beginner's list). They can help you learn the language faster and better than google will.

However, the ONLY reason why I would want to use OCaml is to take advantage of the expressiveness of pure functional programmin

This thing is the SportsMobile from Team Caltech: just imagine the advances in science if Snoop Dogg had entered the DARPA Grand Challenge! Pimpin' hard but somebody's gotta do it I guess...

...but in terms of its mission statement it will largely replace what Hubble is doing now.

Here is NASAs budget. Try reading it sometime.

From the budget:

• 5.5 Billion is dedicated to Science including the James Webb Telescope, Keck Interferometer, Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer, , Terrestrial Planet Finder, Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), SWIFT, Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer, Gravity Probe-B, RXTE, FUSE, Chandra, XMM, HETE-2, WMAP, INTEGRAL, CHIPS, GALEX, Spitzer, Astro-E2, LISA, Constellation-X, STEREO, SOLAR-B and many more but I am getting bored looking this stuff up for you.
• 2.7 Billion for Exploration Systems including CEV and Prometheus
• 906 Million for traditional aeronautics
• The remaining 6.7 Billion is to support the ISS, Shuttle and infrastructure.

• <sarcasm>But yeah, you are right... Bush threw everything at Pie-in-the sky stuff...</sarcasm>

We do have spitzer now. Though I'm not sure of the dis/adv. of infrared compared to visual. http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/

Well, just googling for quantum computer gave me as very first hit http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~westside/quantum-intro. html, which looks quite good to me.

Also under the first links is http://www.qubit.org/library/intros/comp/comp.html , which also looks quite good to me. (the whole www.qubit.org is interesting, BTW).

If you want to go a bit more in depth, I think http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~schmuel/comp/comp. html looks good.

And if you can't wait to program a QC, then you might be interested in QCL, the quantum computation language. Yes, you can download a compiler there (which of course only simulates a QC, since current computers don't yet come with quantum processors :-)).

You don't feel the electric field of the electron, for instance, but it does produce EM waves which carry energy away.

What pisses me off is they aren't budgeting for their own computer resources, they are leeching off the donation-net.

Which takes away from other projects that really have no budget , and/or really are more important, and/or more likely to have a positive outcome.

In a way it's fraudulent to set up experiment on that basis; without the computations, you don't have an experiment, yet you ASSUME people will give you computer time, BUT that computer time is being drawn from a finite pool of well-wishing volunteers, and thus causing a loss to those other projects who really have to budget.

Pseudoscientific "sixth-sense" garbage aside, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a very fascinating brain area. I find the area interesting because it's the location of spindle neurons, which seem to be unique to humans and great apes. The concentration of spindle neurons is greatest in humans and decreases with evolutionary distance, indicating that these neurons may play a crucial role in what distinguishes human behavior from other animals. However, we still really have no idea about what their functional role is.

Wikipedia link

Here are some quotes from a page on them:

http://www.allmanlab.caltech.edu/research/spindlec ells.htm

Recently, we have identified a class of neurons that are unique to humans and our closest relatives, the great apes. These are large spindle-shaped cells located in anterior cingulate cortex. Anterior cingulate cortex is reduced in both size and metabolic activity in autistic patients versus control subjects . The activity of the area is also reduced in patients with attention deficit disorder and depression. The activity in this area is increased in patients with obsessive-compulsive, phobic, post-traumatic stress, and anxiety disorders.

Area 24 appears to be an interface between emotion and cognition. The bottom part of area 24 controls autonomic functions such as heart rate and blood pressure, and is involved in the production and recognition of facial expressions. The experience of virtually any intense emotion whether it be anger, love, fear, or happiness is associated with the activation of the bottom part of area 24. By contrast, the top part of area 24 is activated whenever the subject is engaged in a cognitively demanding task. In EEG studies, a signal arises from this area when the subject is engaged in problem solving and the amplitude of this signal increases with task difficulty. When the subject makes an error there is a deflection of this signal, which is termed "error-related negativity". The anterior cingulate cortex monitors negative outcomes and initiates corrective behavior so as to achieve more optimal results. The spindle cells are a phylogenetically recent specialization in hominoids that relay information from area 24 to other parts of the brain during focused problem solving.

We believe that the spindle cells may be co-ordinating the activity of other brain areas during intense mental activity. Based on our examination of the ontogenetic series of human brains at the National Museum of Health and Science, the spindle cells are not discernable at birth, but rather appear to migrate into anterior cingulate cortex beginning about 4 months after birth. The emergence of the spindle cells in four month old human infants coincides with the infant's capacity to hold its head steady, track a object visually and reach for that object. The late development of the spindle cells could be important since there is evidence that other populations of post-natally generated neurons are heavily influenced by environmental factors. For example, the post-natally generated neurons in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus are very vulnerable to many stress-related events and their survival can be enhanced by enriched environments, physical activity and serotonin. If the survival of the spindle cells were similarly influenced by environmental conditions during infancy, it is conceivable that the resulting changes in circuitry could either enhance or degrade mental functioning as exemplified in problem-solving ability or vulnerability to psychiatric or learning disorders.

Gravitational Radiation being much weaker, thus harder to detect, does not interact with matter like the electromagnetic radiation does. As a result, gravitational waves produced by spiraling binary star systems, coalescing stars, supermassive black holes etc will be unaltered when detected giving us a completely new perspective in how we look to the universe. It will be like the transition from optical telescopes to x-ray ones.

An excellent, popular book about the topic is Black Holes and Time Wraps by Kip S. Thorne, one of the participants in the LIGO project at Caltech and a well known theorist.

In the case of imaging invisible celestial objects , consider that, for example, Black Holes are by definition invisible, they do not emit electromagnetic radiation ( short of, if we forget the Hawking Radiation ) so astronomers predict that a Black Hole exists by observing the effects ot its existence to the surrounding stars. With gravitational radiation detectors a more direct method will be available. Plus, there exists the dark matter issue ( and others ), an extra tool would be nice to have.

PS. Gravitational waves from the inflationary phase of the universe ( if there is such ) will be too weak to detect.

PS2. From a more theoretical point of view there are some alternative theories ( quite serious ) like the Brans - Dicke theory, they include also a scalar field that propagates in the form of a wave as well. If i recall correctly, in this case the polarisation is different so i think ( but i am not 100% sure ) that if such fields exist a detector like LIGO will able to tell.

Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory from Caltech is working on same subject. LIGO will search for gravitational waves created in supernova collapses of stellar cores (which form neutron stars and black holes), collisions and coalescences of neutron stars or black holes, rotations of neutron stars with deformed crusts and the remnants of gravitational radiation created by the birth of the universe. LIGO is a joint project between scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

First off, it's the University of Pittsburgh, not Pittsburgh University.

The actual web site for Schwartz's lab:
http://motorlab.neurobio.pitt.edu/

The above link has neat videos of the monkey moving the arm around.

Researchers like Schwartz who record from motor areas of the brain do cool stuff, but I'm personally more interested in folks like the Andersen Lab who do recording from more goal-oriented areas. Basically, it's a difference between a command to "move my elbow this much" versus "I want to grab this object."

Here's a PDF link to a paper published by Schwartz and others in 2002. Here's the abstract:

Direct Cortical Control of 3D Neuroprosthetic Devices

Dawn M. Taylor, Stephen I. Helms Tillery, Andrew B. Schwartz

Three-dimensional (3D) movement of neuroprosthetic devices can be controlled by the activity of cortical neurons when appropriate algorithms are used to decode intended movement in real time. Previous studies assumed that neurons maintain fixed tuning properties, and the studies used subjects who were unaware of the movements predicted by their recorded units. In this study, subjects had real-time visual feedback of their brain-controlled trajectories. Cell tuning properties changed when used for brain-controlled movements. By using control algorithms that track these changes, subjects made long sequences of 3D movements using far fewer cortical units than expected. Daily practice improved movement accuracy and the directional tuning of these units.

BTW:

Disabled US vets 10 yrs after Viet Nam: 10%
12 yrs after Gulf War: 89%
Stop uranium inhalation poisoning!

What exactly is your source on this? According to an anti-military news source quoting the DoVA:

Of the 504,047 eligible for VA benefits, 149,094 (29%) are now considered disabled by the VA eleven years since the start of the Gulf War; and...

29% is a big number, but 29% != 89% last time I checked. Also, there are many other explanations other than uranium dust, like chemical weapons in theatre. But I don't think facts probably matter very much to you.

This reminds me of the "Progranisms" project I saw over on the Gentoo Linux forums:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-255505-highli ght-progranism.html
http://www.progranism.com/

Basically some guy put together an executable which makes a few (mutated) copies of itself when it runs, then executes those copies after a short delay. The idea is that executables might evolve which show interesting behaviors.

You can download his source code here:

http://www.progranism.com/junk/progranism-2.3.1.c

Because I like doing strange things, I made a variant of the program which mutates the source code and recompiles it (mutating until it gets something compilable), rather than mutating the executable directly:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/progr anism-neilh.c
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/progr anism-neilh-condensed.c
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/ (some cleanup and maintenance scripts)

Unfortunately, it's stuck in a pretty steep local minima -- it makes some trivial mutations, but nothing major. One interesting possibility would be to have it search your hard drive for other executables and source files, and try to "mate" with those.

Another scary possibility would be to have viruses/worms with non-trivial evolution capabilities. That'd be a pretty nasty outbreak to try to control.

Finally, a rather neat-looking project is AI.Planet, which is trying to create an 3D evolving ecosystem/world of intelligent "organisms." Framsticks, a 3D life simulation project, is also pretty cool.

This reminds me of the "Progranisms" project I saw over on the Gentoo Linux forums:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-255505-highli ght-progranism.html
http://www.progranism.com/

Basically some guy put together an executable which makes a few (mutated) copies of itself when it runs, then executes those copies after a short delay. The idea is that executables might evolve which show interesting behaviors.

You can download his source code here:

http://www.progranism.com/junk/progranism-2.3.1.c

Because I like doing strange things, I made a variant of the program which mutates the source code and recompiles it (mutating until it gets something compilable), rather than mutating the executable directly:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/progr anism-neilh.c
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/progr anism-neilh-condensed.c
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/ (some cleanup and maintenance scripts)

Unfortunately, it's stuck in a pretty steep local minima -- it makes some trivial mutations, but nothing major. One interesting possibility would be to have it search your hard drive for other executables and source files, and try to "mate" with those.

Another scary possibility would be to have viruses/worms with non-trivial evolution capabilities. That'd be a pretty nasty outbreak to try to control.

Finally, a rather neat-looking project is AI.Planet, which is trying to create an 3D evolving ecosystem/world of intelligent "organisms." Framsticks, a 3D life simulation project, is also pretty cool.

This reminds me of the "Progranisms" project I saw over on the Gentoo Linux forums:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-255505-highli ght-progranism.html
http://www.progranism.com/

Basically some guy put together an executable which makes a few (mutated) copies of itself when it runs, then executes those copies after a short delay. The idea is that executables might evolve which show interesting behaviors.

You can download his source code here:

http://www.progranism.com/junk/progranism-2.3.1.c

Because I like doing strange things, I made a variant of the program which mutates the source code and recompiles it (mutating until it gets something compilable), rather than mutating the executable directly:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/progr anism-neilh.c
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/progr anism-neilh-condensed.c
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/progranism/ (some cleanup and maintenance scripts)

Unfortunately, it's stuck in a pretty steep local minima -- it makes some trivial mutations, but nothing major. One interesting possibility would be to have it search your hard drive for other executables and source files, and try to "mate" with those.

Another scary possibility would be to have viruses/worms with non-trivial evolution capabilities. That'd be a pretty nasty outbreak to try to control.

Finally, a rather neat-looking project is AI.Planet, which is trying to create an 3D evolving ecosystem/world of intelligent "organisms." Framsticks, a 3D life simulation project, is also pretty cool.

Please explain how a quantum computers "breaks" AES. Please

Caveat: I'm not an expert, and this is just my understanding.

Basically, to crack AES using a brute force method, you have to try every potential key in the keyspace in a linear fashion-- ie, you start at the beginning and pile down the list. ("Not this one. Not this one either. Not this one.." etc.) Of course you can distribute the effort across many computers and each does a portion, but every possible solution must be independently tested.

Quantum computing, again as best as I understand it-- and I know someone will correct me if I'm wrong here-- works totally differently than a normal computer. Rather than stepping through an instruction serially, many potential outcomes can be evaluated simultaneously, in parallel. How is this possible? Well, a "bit" in regular computing may hold the result of one attempt to find an answer (0 or 1), but a "qubit" in quantum computing can hold many, many potential solutions all at once.

The result is what was a linear process is turned on its side and every solution is processed with a single quantum operation. With a quantum calculation, the "right" answer is arrived at quickly. What would take thousands or millions of years to run through serially can be done in a fraction of the time, as in minutes, as trillions of potential solutions are checked in one fell swoop.

How this is done sounds like magic to me. It has something to do with reading the "superposition" state of a qubit and then using probability to narrow through the possible solutions until you arrive at the correct one. I've heard it described as a simultaneous evaluation of multiple universes where each universe has a different, known solution, and then figuring out which universe we happen to be in.

The overall point is that any encryption algorythm which can be cracked by doing the same operation over and over until the key is found (but relies on the practical impossibility of doing that) is succeptable to quantum computers' massively parallel computations.

I don't know if this made any sense (I haven't read about quantum computing stuff for a few years so it's getting a little hazy), but this page is a good introduction to these concepts.

W

Similar work has been carried out by Cornell and Caltech under Saul Teukolsky and Kip Thorne. Cornell's Black Hole Numerical Group Homepage has more details about simulating collision of black holes and other relevent information.

Check out the software and The paper. These were the basis for the Discover article the other respondent to you mentioned (in case you haven't been able to find it)

Virgin Galactic's web site has a new computer-generated
video available, which shows the full flight profile of the Virgin
Galactic craft. It's available for streaming at the bottom of this
page:

http://www.virgingalactic.com/news.asp

I took the liberty of capturing just about all the key frames from the
video, and posting them on the web:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/

The most interesting images are seen right after the question "What
Next?" flashes on the screen. These are images of what appear to be a
Virgin Galactic space station, with a SpaceShipOne-style craft docked.
Of course, they're probably complete vapourware for now, but they
certainly look interesting:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002175.png
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002215.png
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002260.png

I've been told that these some of these images also appeared on the Discovery Channel's Black Sky: The Race for Space DVD, with descriptions from Burt Rutan.

Virgin Galactic's web site has a new computer-generated
video available, which shows the full flight profile of the Virgin
Galactic craft. It's available for streaming at the bottom of this
page:

http://www.virgingalactic.com/news.asp

I took the liberty of capturing just about all the key frames from the
video, and posting them on the web:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/

The most interesting images are seen right after the question "What
Next?" flashes on the screen. These are images of what appear to be a
Virgin Galactic space station, with a SpaceShipOne-style craft docked.
Of course, they're probably complete vapourware for now, but they
certainly look interesting:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002175.png
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002215.png
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002260.png

I've been told that these some of these images also appeared on the Discovery Channel's Black Sky: The Race for Space DVD, with descriptions from Burt Rutan.

Virgin Galactic's web site has a new computer-generated
video available, which shows the full flight profile of the Virgin
Galactic craft. It's available for streaming at the bottom of this
page:

http://www.virgingalactic.com/news.asp

I took the liberty of capturing just about all the key frames from the
video, and posting them on the web:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/

The most interesting images are seen right after the question "What
Next?" flashes on the screen. These are images of what appear to be a
Virgin Galactic space station, with a SpaceShipOne-style craft docked.
Of course, they're probably complete vapourware for now, but they
certainly look interesting:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002175.png
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002215.png
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002260.png

I've been told that these some of these images also appeared on the Discovery Channel's Black Sky: The Race for Space DVD, with descriptions from Burt Rutan.

Virgin Galactic's web site has a new computer-generated
video available, which shows the full flight profile of the Virgin
Galactic craft. It's available for streaming at the bottom of this
page:

http://www.virgingalactic.com/news.asp

I took the liberty of capturing just about all the key frames from the
video, and posting them on the web:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/

The most interesting images are seen right after the question "What
Next?" flashes on the screen. These are images of what appear to be a
Virgin Galactic space station, with a SpaceShipOne-style craft docked.
Of course, they're probably complete vapourware for now, but they
certainly look interesting:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002175.png
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002215.png
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/0 0002260.png

I've been told that these some of these images also appeared on the Discovery Channel's Black Sky: The Race for Space DVD, with descriptions from Burt Rutan.

What about it? Look at the wavelengths observed by each of NASA's first generation of orbital "great observatories," and you'll realize that James Webb isn't comparable to Hubble at all - it's much more a successor to Spitzer.

(iv) The Carnegie Foundation, established by the Scotsman Andrew Carnegie, funds many philanthropic endeavours, including public libraries. It provided the money for the famous 200-inch telescope on Mount Palomar, which saw first light in 1950.

Some images of the gates and whatnot are here and here and here and here.

Some images of the gates and whatnot are here and here and here and here.

Some images of the gates and whatnot are here and here and here and here.

Some images of the gates and whatnot are here and here and here and here.

My brother, who is a PhD student at Caltech, told me about this article and indicated that his group has been partnering with HP for quite some time on this project. He personally is working with these latches on a daily basis and the group is currently investigating ways to produce them reliably on a mass scale. However, apparently, HP is claiming most of the glory in the press releases.

A magic link:

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/cbsss/pdf/SniderG/NanoAr chI.ppt

It's got a space, but you can just click it and it works.

so as Caltech. BTW htmlgoodies.com has good html href help too.

it's called tacking

As I understand it, the solar wind consists of charged particles moving outwards from the sun. (a) Do these have a net charge?

The simulations suggest that over the next hundred years we could see average rises of average temperatures of up to 11K, more than twice what was previously thought.

So we previously thought we'd be 5,500 degrees hooter than we are currently? (That's half of eleven kay.)

The surface of the sun is about 5,600 degrees.

I know, lame joke, but teh degree symbol is a standard HTML object (&#176;).

Posted anonymously to prevent karma-whoring:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/TOQCv1_0.pdf

You're right.

In fact, John Preskill won that famous bet against Hawking.

Even leaving that aside, though, people are changing too. In my opinion, people growing up in first-world countries today (in the last 20 years, really) will be less susceptible to that particular symptom of aging than their ancestors because they're used to things changing all the time. The rate of change will continue to increase if you believe Vernor Vinge, but "things are changing faster than they did when I was young" is a different kettle of fish than "things were about the same when I was 15 and when I was 5, so why can't they stay that way forever?"

You can choose to greet change by cowering in fear and retreating into a hole or meeting it head-on and treating it as an opportunity. I believe today's kids are more likely to do the latter than previous generations were.

And even leaving that aside, you can bet that the perspective of a 70-year-old who hasn't even reached the average age of the population yet will be a bit different than one who's reaching the tail end of the actuarial tables.

The Nobel Prize for economics a couple of years ago went to Daniel Kahneman, who demonstrated that

Kahneman also demonstrated that the Heritage foundation's intuition is poorly suited to understanding the economics and statistics of the real world.

Kahneman showed that people often prefer to choose a pair of gambles that equate to

• 25% odds of winning $240 and
• 75% odds of losing $760

• 25% odds of winning $250 and
• 75% odds of losing $750

Kahneman's colleague Colin Camerer also demonstrated that taxi drivers work longer hours on nights when they make less money per hour and knock off early when they make more money per hour. In other words, the supply of cab drivers increases when the demand decreases and vice-versa!

Camerer's results violate the Heritage Foundation's intuition and suggests that increasing taxes might well lead people to work harder because people often work until they earn a target, after which they decide to knock off early and enjoy their leisure.

In the real world, people's choices frequently violate in a fundamental manner the postulates of economic rationality and thus refute trite intuitive assumptions that people act to maximize their income, wealth, or other measures of utility.

The Nobel Prize for economics a couple of years ago went to Daniel Kahneman, who demonstrated that

Kahneman also demonstrated that the Heritage foundation's intuition is poorly suited to understanding the economics and statistics of the real world.

Kahneman showed that people often prefer to choose a pair of gambles that equate to

• 25% odds of winning $240 and
• 75% odds of losing $760

• 25% odds of winning $250 and
• 75% odds of losing $750

Kahneman's colleague Colin Camerer also demonstrated that taxi drivers work longer hours on nights when they make less money per hour and knock off early when they make more money per hour. In other words, the supply of cab drivers increases when the demand decreases and vice-versa!

Camerer's results violate the Heritage Foundation's intuition and suggests that increasing taxes might well lead people to work harder because people often work until they earn a target, after which they decide to knock off early and enjoy their leisure.

In the real world, people's choices frequently violate in a fundamental manner the postulates of economic rationality and thus refute trite intuitive assumptions that people act to maximize their income, wealth, or other measures of utility.

I'm already linked to on this page, but I've taken the liberty of cropping out and separating the individual
camera views, which should make them more suitable for creating composites and panoramas:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/huygens/huygens_ image_triplets_separated.zip (13 meg file)

Besides panoramas and animations, it might also be interesting to try to subtract out image artifacts and dust.

f you feel that we came about by a brute force algorithm, they love you. It's silly that hackers will accept an idea as illogical that something as complicated as cells just came about by chance. I don't use a brute force algorithm to program, I design it.

>>So, people who would benefit from a 24/96 ogg are extremely small in number.

Have a read: "There's Life Above 20kHz!"
http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.h tm

Feel free to jump to section X & XI (results).

I haven't been able to find too much more, newer work done on the subject, so I don't think there is a great deal of scientific interest in it. Interesting read though.

Using the numbers here , I calculated each of the F1 engines as being class U on the model rocket scale, but that's probably wrong since I'm not a real rocket scientist. Anway, here's my figuring:
(304.8 pound-seconds/lb of fuel) *4.44 = 1353 Ns/lb fuel
4492 lbs of fuel for the entire first stage / 5 engines = 898lb/engine
1353 Ns/lb * 898 lb/engine = 1,215,000 Ns/engine

The differance is that MultiCore is going mainstream. Intel, ADM, IBM, Sun all have chips we can buy in the next year. Not as powerfully as Trea, but a lot cheaper.

My point would be that - regardless of why its happening - there is a major change it hardware happening, Like the change from Intel 16 bit to 32 bit, which took several years, but much more difficult. (we are also going 64 bit is servers and desktops to address all that chaep ram, but that is also most a non-story.)

The industry has been talking about Parallelism for a long, long, time. Looks like we a now starting down that path. Its going to be hard, but it is rewarding. Which is part of Herb Sutter's and Tim Bray's message. The OS's, tools, and applications that do this right are going have a big advantage in the server and desk/laptop market with all that highly scablible hardware.

I was not talking about the consumer market here (yes, I understand that the original poster wanted a 10 GHz processor under his desk, but I did not had that in mind). What consumers really want is a nice thin client in there, hmm, cellphone with a laser projected image directly on there retina and lots of bandwidth and computational power upstream.

People who provide THAT power and bandwidth CAN afford whatever cooling is needed if they can get more bang per buck. My favorite SCE project was to allow telcos to replace 5 racks of routers with one rack, half of that densily packed SCE, half cooler compressor and electronics, same number of lines, all running at 60 GHz rather than 10...

And yes, you need LHe cooling for this stuff, but you would be surprized at how advanced modern pulse-tube coolers are. Without disclosing anything that I am not supposed to disclose ;-), check out this NASA presentation about space-qualified coolers: here,
if this would become any kind of a mass market a cooler like this would cost a couple thousand $$, maybe a bit too costly for your home, but definitely affordable for telco/service provider market.

Paul B.

I've used apache with webdav over https on several occasions for remote file sharing. Works great on 2000 & XP through webfolders without additional software. Users can just browse using windows explorer as if working with local files. OSX needs a special app (goliath). tuning apache to user webdav with XP is the hardest part (but there's an manual here and here.