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Oh, it burns colorless, does it?

The Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) http://www.galex.caltech.edu/ is cranking out great science (and spectacular pictures of galaxies...)

Yes, IAAA.

You can't compare TV, which is just reproducing images taken from real life, with games, which have to generate everything themselves.

If you're waiting for a VR world with the complexity of the real world including artificial human actors, I doubt you'll see that in 20 years. My guess is 50-200 if ever. And whenever it comes, we will have achieved the Singularity, and AI will start making all the advancements for our civilization.

If you just want multiplayer games where all the actors can be human, then you only need wait until we can simulate every hair on your body, the blood in your veins, the dust particles floating through the air, and a million other things just to reproduce what you see on your TV. Heck I can sit down and draw from real life and beat a computer game for realism, who cares? Games are not TV.

The little speck in the lower-left hand corner?

We assume that it is a giant killer crab robot that the ancient orionids left in orbit to defend their treasure trove of super science.

Of course, without the Improved Space Scanner we can't be sure.

The amazing thing is how well Moore's law has stood up against repeated Malthusian forecasts of its demise. One still presumes that the fences of quantum uncertainty, relativistic delay, and heat production will prevent Moore's law from continuing number of device doubling indefinitely, without major paradigm shift (async to beat the clock?reversible to beat heat & entropy? optical? quantum?), but mere technological advances may continue far beyond my Malthusian imagination.

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Cole's Law -- Finely Sliced Cabbage with dressing.

They also have a nice map with the Internet2 traffic:

http://boson.cacr.caltech.edu:8080/

Objection: assumption of facts not in evidence. What you say is only true if it is possible to do it significantly better than it is done, and yet you have offered no evidence to support this assumption.

Do you have any evidence that it isn't possile to do it significantly better? We can both play the lack-of-evidence game. It is a great game to play as far as I'm concerned because the answer to it would be: we both admit it isn't perfect. Where's the objection to sponsoring significant studies to determine how not perfect it is and how to improve it?

Those are coming; they did not get them in time for this election.

There is proposed legislation to do this federally. There isn't any passed legislation to assure it will be in place at federal, state, county, and city levels by next year. While the notable bills that would give us voter-verifiable audit trails don't seem to be poisoned & should be passed, they aren't exactly being fast-tracked either.

So what? We had less percentage of error in this election than in 2000, when we DID have an audit trail.

And exactly how much error was there in 2000 and how much in 2004? You're making this up. (And after accusing me of doing something similar?!?!

Provisional ballots are new for this election, and the handling of them is defined by federal law

Some states had provisional ballots prior to the election. Congress made them required in all states this year. It is the states who determine which provisional ballots will be counted. Some throw out the provisional ballots cast in the wrong polling place. Some don't. Some require a form to be completely and accurately filled out. Some don't. There aren't even state-wide standards, as a 2002 court case in Colorado highlighted: three counties had three different standards in a statewide election.

Bull. It is possible to accout for that the statistical errors
There are none, moron.

You'd agree that there are some if you knew what they are. Please provide a definition and say why counting votes is so perfect that there are none. If we can't find the systematic cause of all errors, explain why. If we can, please explain why we can't make a perfect count after we resolve all systematic errors.

If you don't want to go to the trouble of checking out either of the books I mentioned from the library, feel free to use the web.

Yes, you can say that. If you're an idiot. It's nonsensical.

Way to go calling everyone publishing scientific papers and even many engineers idiots! You can (and often should) apply error analysis to any measurement that you can make repetitively that has a different value each time you measure it. It isn't nonsensical at all. If the standard deviation is sufficiently low, you might have wasted time or money. But we can gather from many recounts that the deviation is higher than small spreads & so could be worthwhile.

Such thing can only make sense when you are doing sampling, which you are not doing.

Neither are scientists doing sampling when they measure the speed of light.

then you went back to talking about it anyway, because you're stupid. Statistical error ONLY applies to sampling.

You're stupid. Read the references provided & explain to me how making a fixed measurement (as done in examples in many of the references) is sampling. It isn't. Statistical error applies to any repeatable measurement that don't lead to identical results.

There is no such thing as experimental error in these matters. There's no experiment.

It's a modification of the scaling/congestion alogorithms in TCP/IP:
http://netlab.caltech.edu/FAST/index.html

You can download it and try it yourself.

Enjoy

They are talking about "Fast" TCP, which AFAIK just consists of a better routing algorithm and using multiple TCP streams at once.

In 1959 Feynman described what it would take to build arbitrarily anything at the atomic level: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~feynman/plenty.html

midcom-p2p.sf.net has an implementation called natcheck which might be handy. Note that you can even connect via TCP sometimes; Bryan Ford is writing a paper about that. See also draft-ford-midcom-p2p-03.txt, RFC3489 (STUN), and my site, alumnus.caltech.edu/~dank/peer-nat.html.

It's unfortunately not little enough, but the lab I'm currently in has a large drosophila robotic model sitting in a two-ton vat of mineral oil which flaps its wings around and such. It's dubbed, "Bride of Robofly."

Actually, the first full-blown asynchronous microprocessor was developed at Caltech. See http://www.async.caltech.edu/ for more details. The company Fulcrum Microsystems spun out of this group (and my living room) to commercialize related technology.

Reliability of Existing Voting Equipment

Using an average of "residual votes" weighted by the prevalence of the voting equipment type, they found that about 2.1 percent of all ballots resulted in an uncounted vote.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that at least one state (and quite possibly enough electoral votes to swing the election either way) will be "decided" with a margin of victory lower than 2.1%.

--kirby

Not sure why you would expect The Second Best Science & Technology School to be The Most Connected. I wasn't surprised that The Best Science & Technology School wasn't at the top of this list -- just look at some of the criteria. Online classes (good schools have small classes with lots of student/teacher interatction)? Online registration (students at good schools have advisors who talk to them about what classes they are going to take) ? Require students to own a computer? These aren't the kind of things that I would expect out of a Top Two school.

Whoo, another singularity skeptic. At least the killer for me is that Vinge makes sweeping claims about how changes in technology will have radical and unpredictable effects on society, but fails to hit any of the relevant works about the intimate symbiotic relationship between technology, culture and economics.

I'd like to suggest that a certified open source voting system - completely minimal, based on some kind of well secured version of the OS, vetted by independent auditors, distributed as a CD with a known checksum, might be a useful thing to have done after the last election, but I don't know of any such project.

I think you're talking largely about the MIT/Caltech Voting Project.

As I understand it they're developing standards and a reference implementation. Many implementations is the goal. Yours is a good idea - a LiveCD could be run on the computers in the schools' computer labs where voting is most often held.

Now, it'll probably take some work to get the Federal Elections Commission to mandate the use of the developed XML standards. Fortunately labels like "MIT" and "Caltech" might help. Probably depends on how good Diebold's lawyers are.

Yes, there are things that Hubble can do that no other satellites can do, but not for the reasons you listed.

Hubble is one of multiple telescopes in NASA's Great Observatories project.

There are currently three space-bound observatories for astronomy.
For instance, Spitzer meets the qualifications you gave, the difference being that it operates in the IR range, while Chandra looks at x-rays.

Hubble works in the visible range. But that's not to say that it's the only space-based visible spectrum satellite, as there's also SOHO, which points at the sun, and isn't used to point anywhere but the sun.

[I'm not an astronomer, but I work on the STEREO and VSO projects]

(I forgot to log in last time so I'm reposting this under my account this time... D'oh!)

You forgot Spitzer (Link), which is up there today. There have already been more than a few collaborative projects between this space telescope and Hubble.

And on the subject of space telescopes that can see places Earth-based telescopes will never be able to see because of the blocking effects of the atmosphere: Chandra (Link), which can see X-ray sources. This one is my favorite Chandra picture.

You forgot Spitzer (Link), which is up there today. There have already been more than a few collaborative projects between this space telescope and Hubble.

And on the subject of space telescopes that can see places Earth-based telescopes will never be able to see because of the blocking effects of the atmosphere: Chandra (Link), which can see X-ray sources. This one is my favorite Chandra picture.

There was another show that I used to catch years ago (infrequently, as it seemed to get scheduled at odd times) on one of the local PBS stations. I think it was called 'Physical Universe' or something like that. It had a real clean cut lecturer speaking in an auditorium complete with lab table in front of a bunch of students. There were some simple but, IMHO, effective computer graphics showing some of the physical principles being talked about. Pretty low budget, I'd guess, but interesting. Anyone know if it's still being aired?

I think you are refering to The Mechanical Universe . It was a 26 part series coproduced by Cal Tech which was essentially a telecourse of your basic first semester physics class. Hosted by Caltech Professor David Goodstein, there is a "sequel" of a sort consisting of an additional 26 episodes dealing with electricity and magnetism as well as other topics you'd find in a second semester physics class.

I was too young to really appreciate the contents of each half hour show when the local PBS station aired them years ago. But I remember thinking the CG was really cool and feeling this, as opposed to afternoon cartoons, was my sort of "thing".

So, we're what 10 - 20 years away from a QC that both gives you your answer and blue screens at the same time?

Atleast.

I would say maybe 50. It's not enough if you can get a system to do something - you need to make it reliable and scaleable.

We're still tackling the very basic problems in QC, and have a very very long way to go. Error correction is still a very big problem.

Some people, such as Alexei Kitaev, have done some pioneering work but it's still in its infancy. A long long way to go.

Florida's Department of Transportation is switching from its "color coded" U.S. highway signs to the standard black-and-white signs, under pressure from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The Florida DOT argued that drivers could simply follow the color of the sign to their destination, but the FHWA said it would be forced to "withhold certain monetary funding if the state of Florida continued to use their color coded markers."

What are your thoughts on Veror Vinge's Singularity prediction. Is it inevitable? Will humans become a part of it or be left behind by this new "species"?

The press release at the CBI website is much more informative.

The big news is that they've measured the polarized power spectrum, and it agrees extremely well with the theoretical predictions. Which means that not only do the density fluctuations match what's expected, but the matter is moving in the gravitational field of those density fluctuations exactly as expected.

[TMB]

This is cool: http://thebigone.caltech.edu/quake/publications/sc ienceoct02.pdf.

Interferometry of this kind is (with current technology, but even in principle) only conceivable with radio astronomy, not with optical astronomy.

Perhaps I'm reading this wrong-- or misinterpreting what you mean by "this kind". The WM Keck telescopes in Hawaii-- visible light scopes-- already use interferometry.

The principle is exactly as you describe, with timestamped data being combined on a separate processor.

Interestingly, other arrays (planned or already existing) that are designed to search for other types of signals-- such as LIGO-- use the same principles. In this case the quarry is gravity waves (predicted by theory but not yet detected), but it works by interfering the results of two linear beam detectors. When a gravity wave moves through (in theory), it disturbs the beam in one arm of the L-shaped detector more than the other. Since the wavelength is calibrated to normally exactly cancel, knocking it just slightly off-kilter will result in the sudden detection of a signal. Multiple installations are scattered across the world, partly so that each can verify the results of the others, partly so that, in the event that a wave is detected, the timestamps on the interferometers can be used to triangulate the source-- much the same way that seismologists triangulate the epicenter of an earthquake.

Sorry about these amazingly long run-on sentences!

The effect they are using is a non linearity in the restoring force of a doubly clamped beam. It is well known that if you have a nonlinear restoring force F = kx + k_3 x^3, for sufficiently large driving power, the amplitude close to resonance becomes bistable. (This system is called a Duffing oscillator).

switching from one stable state to another is accomplished by driving the system at sufficiently high or low power, such that the bistability vanishes and the system is force into the high or low state. A simple hysteresis problem ...

For an example of a Duffing oscillator in a related system, look at figure 3 in this publication http://www.its.caltech.edu/~postma/pdf/APL83_1240. pdfAppl. Phys. Lett 83, 1240 (2003) (pdf file) ... yes, this is a shameless plug ;-)

"If you evaluate your voting power by dividing the number of votes assigned to your state by its population, you're doing it wrong. Voting power indices are not calculated this way. Read about Banzhaf index."

It has been suggested that voting power indices such as the Banzhaf index do not reliably reflect voting power. In particular, the Banzhaf index relies on the random voting model, in which all votes are equally likely, but it is not obvious that this assumption yields correct results. Your larger point is correct, however. Dividing electoral votes by population is not the right way to calculate voting power.

http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~jeff/lwimages/ozonehole .gif

Are there web resources that clearly explain the technical details of how to arrive at this conclusion? While I suspect you are correct, it would be nice to have a URL that I could point people toward.

Also, what are your thoughts on the assertion that combining presidentialism and multipartism leads to political instability? E.g.:

Party Fragmentation and Presidential Elections in Post-Communist Democracies

(The topic of the paper is somewhat tangential, but it's the best web reference I have found.)

"That said, more recent statistical analysis (which I can't find right now, but there are some papers on the web) that takes into account the current structure of political power in the United States shows that, in fact, the net effect of the electoral college is pretty close to zero."

A working paper by Katz, Gelman, and King comes to mind. (Also, another analysis of voting power under the Electoral College system by Gelman and Katz, as well as a critique of the applicability of the Banzhaf index in this case.)

"That said, more recent statistical analysis (which I can't find right now, but there are some papers on the web) that takes into account the current structure of political power in the United States shows that, in fact, the net effect of the electoral college is pretty close to zero."

A working paper by Katz, Gelman, and King comes to mind. (Also, another analysis of voting power under the Electoral College system by Gelman and Katz, as well as a critique of the applicability of the Banzhaf index in this case.)

"That said, more recent statistical analysis (which I can't find right now, but there are some papers on the web) that takes into account the current structure of political power in the United States shows that, in fact, the net effect of the electoral college is pretty close to zero."

A working paper by Katz, Gelman, and King comes to mind. (Also, another analysis of voting power under the Electoral College system by Gelman and Katz, as well as a critique of the applicability of the Banzhaf index in this case.)

One day I discovered that the workmen who lived further out and wanted to come in were too lazy to go around through the gate, and so they had cut themselves a hole in the fence. So I went out the gate, went over to the hole and came in, went out again, and so on, until the sergeant at the gate begins to wonder what's happening. How come this guy is always going out and never coming in? And, of course, his natural reaction was to call the lieutenant and try to put me in jail for doing this. I explained that there was a hole.

You see, I was always trying to straighten people out. And so I made a bet with somebody that I could tell about the hole in the fence in a letter, and mail it out. And sure enough, I did. And the way I did it was I said, "You should see the way they administer this place (that's what we were allowed to say). There's a hole in the fence 71 feet away from such and such a place, that's this size and that size, that you can walk through."

Now, what can they do? They can't say to me that there is no such hole? I mean, what are they going to do? It's their own hard luck that there's such a hole. They should fix the hole. So I got that one through.

Pick up a copy of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

It's a good quick ready and talks about his lock picking and safe cracking while working on the Manhattan projcet at Los Alamos.

Or read about it here

Does gravity travel faster than light?

If I send an object in one direction at 0.75*c (3/4 the speed of light), and another object in the opposite direction, also at 0.75*c, aren't they traveling apart from each other at 1.5*c?

If I had a steel rod that was 4,000 miles long, and I pushed on one end of it, would a spectator at the other end see their end of the rod move simultaneously, or would something about relatively cause a delay?

I'd go for a definition similar to Mike Brown's (that Sedna bloke's) suggested definition of a planet - a moon is any body, in orbit around a planet, whose mass is greater than the total of all other masses in similar orbits around the same planet. Of course, this prompts a definition of "similar".

I'd say many of us know the reason, but the reason is about two centuries out of date. The fairest way to have your vote count (and if the state is solid red or blue, it won't) is to have national instant run-off voting.

If you're going to change the voting system, why replace a broken system with a semi-broken system? IRV is better than plurality but has plenty of problems of its own. Condorcet voting is a much better choice.

Right now we have tyranny of small states.

This is a understandable, and common, error, but it's still wrong. The EC has two conflicting effects. The most obvious is that it gives residents of low-population states a slightly larger fraction of an electoral vote than residents of populous states. The other arises from the fact that most states deliver their votes in a bloc. This means that large states are much more likely than small states to swing an election. We saw evidence of this in 2000; even though Florida wasn't the only close state, it was the only one that mattered because Florida has a large population and lots of electoral votes.

Several mathematicians over the last few decades have performed a rigorous analysis of the relative effects of these facets of the EC, based on a simple measurement of the power of a single vote: What is the probability that a given vote will swing the entire election? The result is that a voter in a larger state has more power to decide the presidential election than a voter in a small state, because the advantage of a big bloc of electoral votes outweighs the advantage of fewer voters per electoral vote.

It's also worth noting that a more detailed analysis which takes into account the current political structure of the nation was done recently, and it found that, currently, the EC doesn't favor either party and that the EC will currently only return a result different from a popular vote when the electorate is very evenly divided. In those cases, a single new story, or even just some bad weather, might change the outcome in any case. In other words, the EC might "change" the outcome when the difference in the popular vote is statistical noise anyway.

If science or scientific methodology is not part of the story then why should it be eligible for this award? What happened to the heritage of Asimov, Lem, Dick, Heinlein, Clarke, and others?

I guess we're approaching the singularity and are finally becoming aware that it exists, and therefore no longer assume the future will look like the present, only with higher tech, and so put much higher believability requirements on pure sci-fi.

The article is a good look at the whole CF phenomenon as of 1993.

Caching the four or five gigabytes of a DVD in RAM isn't that far out there. 512 MB of RAM sells for about a hundred Canadian dollars right now. It wasn't that long ago that the same money bought you one lousy meg. I won't be surprised if my next upgrade takes me to a full GB, or if I have four or eight GB of RAM in a few years' time. Power users can have several gigabytes on their desk now, if they feel like it.

Further, although 1 GB per second is awfully fast to write to a hard drive or storage system, 100 MB per second isn't--and that still represents an entire DVD in less than a minute. You can push that much over gigabit ethernet, too. I'm confused as to why the parent considers Jack to be lying in this instance--Caltech does have the FAST project, and one of its stated goals is to develop 100 gigabit per second (and faster) wide area networking technology.

FAST is true. Though you're right in so far as today's average PC can't quite handle that.

From a press release: The protocol is called FAST, standing for Fast Active queue management Scalable Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The researchers have achieved a speed of 8,609 megabits per second (Mbps) by using 10 simultaneous flows of data over routed paths, the largest aggregate throughput ever accomplished in such a configuration. More importantly, the FAST protocol sustained this speed using standard packet size, stably over an extended period on shared networks in the presence of background traffic, making it adaptable for deployment on the world's high-speed production networks.

OK enough trekkies speaking about Scotty and telling horribly stupid jokes.

The article is about Quantum Computing. Qubits behave differently than bits regarding that they're both in 1 and 0 at the same time, and with entanglement, we can know the state of a qubit by analizing the other one. Even when they're not in the same physical space. But they're ENTANGLED - that means they share some properties.

When this is applied to computing, and we get the first quantum computers to work, it will mean that we'll be able to perform computing faster than we've ever imagine, because of the implicit parallel processing in qubits.

This means we could break traditional cryptography in just a matter of seconds. (And this means we'll have to use quantum computers to devise a new kind of cryptography: Quantum cryptography).

Here's an introductory article to quantum computing for those who really want to know.

It's actually fairly simple. In QC, you can perform any quantum operations on the qubits, but you cannot look at the bits without losing some information. Therefore, what you do is use error correcting codes, by superimposing the quantum states onto a set of photons whose states you observe, but do not use. What they have done here is basically taken the unknown quantum state of a photon onto a superposition set of three photons, and you can find the state of any one photon by observing the other two photons.

This was predicted a while ago by Alexei Kitaev, and Anton Zeilinger had a preliminary demonstration of a basic q.t. system a while ago. I would imagine that this is just an extension of their works.

We would put the odds at roughly 50/50, or maybe 10-to-1. It all depends on whether Mother Nature is kind.

The LIGO weekly reports give a good taste of the real-world science and engineering involved, which is completely awesome. It's humanity's first big quantum system engineering project--very challenging!

Also, LIGO's resident sociologist, Harry Collins, has a new book coming out on LIGO called "Gravity's Shadow". The perfect Christmas 2004 stocking-stuffer for your Slashdot significant other!

The answer to 2 is no.

Actually, it's yes: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~diedrich/solarsails/i ntro/tacking.html

In space, there is no "water" for a rudder to work in

Actually, there kindof is : because all motion around the Sun is necessarily rotational (especially if you launch from Earth!), your tangential velocity is essentially your "water" - to fall inward, you angle the sail so that it slows you down, rotationally.

You could always cut the sail and let the Sun's gravity slow you...

Things going around the Sun are in orbit. There's no possible way that a solar sail could fully oppose gravity unless it were gigantic. Actually, that's not such a bad undergrad physics problem... anyway. The Sun's gravity wouldn't slow you down - it keeps you in orbit. You actually use the sail to slow you down, and then your slower orbital speed lets you fall in.

There are no breaks, but you CAN use it to manuver in any direction that is not 'up wind'.

No.

http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~diedrich/solarsails/i ntro/tacking.html

Solar sails can tack, because slowing your orbital velocity moves you closer to the Sun. If you put the sail at an angle such that majority of the light pressure opposes your direction of motion, you will move inward.

So to slow down, you just alter the angle of the sail. Easy enough.

In general terms a singularity is the point where a function goes to infinity. It cannot happen in the real world with physical resource constraints, instead of a singularity we have a step function with exponential growth which we're seeing at the moment, then the limits will kick in and it'll level off to a steady state plateau.

If you actually read Vinge's discussion of the singularity you will find that he does not suggest that any physical parameter literally goes to infinity. Nor is a soft landing on a plateau the only possible outcome. What Vinge is suggesting is more akin to a phase change.

A gentle but fairly thorough taste can be found in Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines". Also check out http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?m=1
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Singularity/

I am sure interested entities can google more.