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Sci-fi authors have a very hard time trying to predict how life is going to be in the future. If the singularity occurs, we have no idea at all of what life is going to be like. The singularity may occur within a couple of years. Even now, science is moving too fast to make accurate predictions. Therefore almost all sci-fi written today may be out of date very soon.

More on the singularity: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html

Here is one of the pages I had read before on the matter.

You just have to tack into the solar wind. *grynn*

I agree with the OP. At this point, it's better to devote resources to the other Great Observatories.

We're already seeing wonderful results from Spitzer, and Chandra has been producing valuable data for years. Their biggest deficiency has been a lack of comparable PR campaign to Hubble's. (That and XRay data doesn't make such beautiful pictures.)

Our next visible-light instrument needs to resolve objects two to four times fainter than Hubble, with finer resolution to answer the next round of big astrophysical questions. VLBA instruments, composed of multiple collectors in solar orbit are the right answer. Diverting scarce NASA funding to keeping a relic -- even one as significant and loved as Hubble -- working is not the right answer.

I agree, so why haven't we found life out there? Ok, let's keep this simple. According to NASA, "The Solar System has been measured to be about 28,000 light years from the center of the galaxy, and about 20 light years above the galaxy's equatorial plane." Ok, even simpler, we are Here . That means we are an oasis in the middle of a vast desert in the galaxy (well away from the center, 20 light years ABOVE the galactic plane), so looking around and seeing nothing near us doesn't mean that there's no life out there somewhere. (Unless of course, they've ALL banned nightclubs and parties!) };-)

Dude! They already have these. What about LIGO? Unfortunately, as far as I know, gravity wave astronomy will NOT help us find extra-terrestrial life or Earth-like planets. We're still stuck with only being able to look for gas giant type planets with our current technology. I thought that there was also supposed to be a satellite in the planning phase to detect gravity waves, but the mission got postponed because good old George W. Bush thinks it would be better to spend our money to go to Mars and look for the little green men who keep sabotaging our unmanned Mars probes. Besides, what's wrong with radio waves? You really need to define what you mean by "local." Radio astronomers routinely study natural radio signals from objects that are light years away. That hardly seems local to me!

I think that famous Pi woman and Senior VP of Northface Univ. Eve Andersson does ...

http://wwws.sun.com/software/linux/compatibility/l xrun/

Run Linux Applications unmodified on Solaris

As a result of collaboration between Sun Microsystems and the lxrun open development effort, Linux applications run without modification on the Solaris Operating Environment on Intel platforms.
Solaris and lxrun provide a robust environment allowing a range of applications to be executed. These applications can range from browsers and office productivity tools to graphic-intensive applications and games. For example, these included Applix, GIMP, GNOME, Netscape Communicator, Myth II and WordPerfect.

http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/lxrun/

Lxrun is an emulator for executing Intel Linux a.out and ELF binaries on other types of UNIX® running on Intel x86. It was developed originally on and for SCO OpenServer and SCO UnixWare.

[ SCO was handing out free UNIXWARE at a Linux show five or so years ago, I don't remember which one in SF Bay area. Sales rep. was making point that Linux binaries work on their product. I haven't tried installing yet..]

Lxrun does system call remapping "on the fly." There isn't a significant difference between the execution environment required by Linux and SCO binaries. The primary difference is the way in which system calls are handled.

In Linux, an int $0x80 instruction is used, which jumps to the system-call-handling portion of the Linux kernel. On SCO systems, int $0x80 causes a SIGSEGV signal. Lxrun intercepts these signals and calls the SCO equivalent of the system call that the Linux program attempted.

There is also some mapping of ioctls, various flags, return values, and error codes. The result is that the Linux binary runs--with the help of lxrun--on the host platform with a small (usually negligible) performance penalty.

Because lxrun is effectively a system call emulator, it requires copies of the Linux dynamic loader (ld-linux.so.1) and whatever Linux shared libraries are required by the program being run.

Most programs that do not rely on Linux-specific idiosyncracies or deal directly with hardware should work under lxrun.

The official lxrun web page is http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~steven/lxrun/

One problem I can think of is that L1 isn't stable; any spacecraft parked there will go off station over a timescale of around 20 days, unless it receives corrections to its orbit around the sun. Having to put an orbital control system on each piece of hardware you park there would make the cost unattractive.

Besides, the L1 is already used for scientific purposes -- amongst others, SOHO and ACE are in halo orbits around the Lagrange point, and I'm sure the scientists who rely on them (including some of my work colleagues) wouldn't welcome L1 becoming a junk yard.

In a truly free society, they would be able to send you those messages and you would be able to ignore them. Either by clicking "OK" or using the various guides available online.

Freedom is a double edged sword, friend.

How about getting a definition of consciousness first -- and then trying to find what neurons are responsible for them.

(1) Everyone has a rough idea of what is meant by being conscious. For now, it is better to avoid a precise definition of consciousness because of the dangers of premature definition. Until the problem is understood much better, any attempt at a formal definition is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or both. If this seems evasive, try defining the word "gene." So much is now known about genes that any simple definition is likely to be inadequate. How much more difficult, then, to define a biological term when rather little is known about it.

I read some articles about using standard GPUs for matrix and mathematical operations. Does anyone know if this is being coupled with clustering? Seems that this would give you some of the power of vector processors, but thats just my $0.02.

Punch card balloting is an extremely accurate and economical way to tally votes.

It would help when making such statements if you were prepared to back them up. How about research from the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project that did some comparisions. According to their 2001 Report on Reliability of Existing Voting Equipment (executive summary),

We find the performance of punch cards alarming: punch cards are an established technology and the residual vote rate [spoiled or unmarked ballots] of this technology is nearly double that of alternatives.

Hardly what one would call "extreemly accuate", though I won't quibble with "economical".

Punch card balloting is an extremely accurate and economical way to tally votes.

It would help when making such statements if you were prepared to back them up. How about research from the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project that did some comparisions. According to their 2001 Report on Reliability of Existing Voting Equipment (executive summary),

We find the performance of punch cards alarming: punch cards are an established technology and the residual vote rate [spoiled or unmarked ballots] of this technology is nearly double that of alternatives.

Hardly what one would call "extreemly accuate", though I won't quibble with "economical".

Punch card balloting is an extremely accurate and economical way to tally votes.

It would help when making such statements if you were prepared to back them up. How about research from the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project that did some comparisions. According to their 2001 Report on Reliability of Existing Voting Equipment (executive summary),

We find the performance of punch cards alarming: punch cards are an established technology and the residual vote rate [spoiled or unmarked ballots] of this technology is nearly double that of alternatives.

Hardly what one would call "extreemly accuate", though I won't quibble with "economical".

The following link may be helpful for those of us who are a little fuzzy on quantum computing: http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~westside/quantum-intro. html

This is nonsense, perpetuated by people who don't understand quantum mechanics. E.g., Michael Crichton in Timeline. It's really very simple; take a a week off watching Jeopardy to read Preskill's lecture notes: here .

If you don't have the time for that.. Quantum computing allows a square root speedup and no more in unstructured search. (Searching a key space is generally unstructured. Algebraic problems like factorization have structure.) So say your key is 128 bits. It takes ~2^128 time to search over all the keys classically, and ~2^64 time quantumly. So ~doubling key lengths basically restores security.

We just aren't getting the same type of benefits from NASA that we once did, it's stagnant and dull.
What crack are you smoking and can I have some?

One of the LIGO sites is located in Hanford, Washington, near the nuclear waste site. However, they are in no way affiliated.

Tom van Flandern is a well-known crank. He has done some good science in other areas, but his conclusions regarding the speed of gravity are just plain wrong. For corrections of van Flandern's mistakes, see this paper, and also this discussion.

The speed of gravity has been indirectly measured to be equal to the speed of light within about 1% accuracy, by observing a binary pulsar system (whose rate of inspiral due to loss of energy from gravitational radiation depends on the speed of that radiation); the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Taylor and Hulse for this work. Direct measurements will become possible once LIGO or one of its peer or successor experiments detect gravitational waves.

You know, being Kip Thorne isn't so bad on its own. He's not exactly riding Hawking's coattails here.

That said, looking at the LIGO facility , it seems like somewhat of a harsh scar on the Louisiana forest. Could they not have been a little 'greener' in their construction of the site? One of their daily secondary missions, after all, is educating students.

LIGO Hanfod is a very cool facility. I got to go on a tour of it several years ago while they were in the calibration phase. At the time they were working on mapping the background vibration in the area. Trucks hitting a bump on a highway over 10 miles away left a consistent detectable spike. It was impressive the work that went into identifying every vibration they felt and then setting up monitoring and periodic average noise maps in order to help filter out the background noise to focus on the vibrations from space. LIGO is the king of siesmographs.

Its interesting that LIGO Livingston seems to be the more PR focused one. Go figure the one in a worse location for this work, but not on a nuclear site gets the PR :P, got to love America's fear of nuclear power.

If I remember right, there are 5 other international LIGOs, all collaborating on this. It's amazing the expense getting put into verifying this prediction by Einstein. It's never been clear to me why peopel care enough to go to such great lengths to verify this prediction. Anyone have insite in this? Please no philosophical boiler-plate answers...real impact-on-physics answers are what I am looking for.

yes Iraq WAS (past tense ;-) a 'disgrace' for having violated numerous UN Security council resolutions, each of which authorized "serious consequences" (diplo-speak for war) ... UN Security Council Resolutions on Iraq

yes Iraq WAS (past tense ;-) a 'disgrace' for having violated human rights (coalition abuse != Saddam-era torture)... UN Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the situation of human rights in Iraq and also view the Iraq torture video clip

Vinge is an auther of the technological singularity concept. Technological singularity is a situation then pace of technological change increasing to such a degree that our ability to predict its consequences will diminish virtually to zero and a person who doesn't keep pace with it will rapidly find civilization to have become completely incomprehensible. For example transfer to usage of languadge instead of basic system of signal could be considered as a technological singularity for proto-human, though drawn in time.

JPL is part of NASA, it's just run by the folks from UC

Actually, JPL is run by Caltech for NASA. Funding for JPL comes from NASA.

Human ears listen up to about 16kHz.

Oohashi and his colleagues recorded gamelan to a bandwidth of 60 kHz, and played back the recording to listeners through a speaker system with an extra tweeter for the range above 26 kHz. This tweeter was driven by its own amplifier, and the 26 kHz electronic crossover before the amplifier used steep filters. The experimenters found that the listeners' EEGs and their subjective ratings of the sound quality were affected by whether this "ultra-tweeter" was on or off, even though the listeners explicitly denied that the reproduced sound was affected by the ultra-tweeter, and also denied, when presented with the ultrasonics alone, that any sound at all was being played.

I don't know if those are gravitational waves you are seeing (They are building big machines to observe those, if you're the first to see one you got yourself a Nobel prize). The lines running oblique trough the image are obviously the rings of Saturn. The waves you are probably referring to run exactly horizontal. I therefore suspect it is an image artifact, caused by something in the CCD or because the image was recorded line for line. This might be a raw image, which still has to go through image processing to get the 'waves' out with some previous calibration. If it were something to do with the rings themselves than i would expect it to be either parallel or perpendicular to the rings, and not exactly parallel to the frame.

1. Vernor Vinge's singularity.
2. "Memorable quote": The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Isn't that a highly irrational comment?

Yes, but this one is transcendental!

The economy is bad for everyone except foreign contractors:

"The scale of the task facing the United States and the international community in Iraq has been highlighted by the first detailed figures since the conflict ended on the state of the Arab country's economy.

Iraq's economy will shrink 22% this year, having fallen 21% in 2002 and 12% in 2001, the United Nations and the World Bank have estimated.

The figures, which have been published ahead of a major meeting of donor nations, suggest that reconstruction work in Iraq will be slower to take effect than originally hoped.

Average income in Iraq fell from $3,600 per person in 1980 to between $770 and $1,020 by 2001 and will be just $450-610 by the end of 2003, the UN and World Bank said.

Even by the end of 2004, the two organisations estimate that average income could be lower than in 2001."

Iraq's economy declines by half

Science really is just curve fitting. That is why the undergrads at Caltech use a program called "CurveFit". http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~vsanni/ph3/ (CurveFit is near the bottom of the page.) Science doesn't require absolute truth, only successive approximations basedon empirical knowledge (or 'experience' in plain English). The idea that you can know absolute truth - and the need to prove yourself right when you don't know what you are talking about - are carry-overs from classical philosophers, such as Aristotle who got the rules of gravity wrong because he rested his case on only one experiment (the feather and the rock experiment).

...the author of this work Mathieu Desbrun recently organised a seminar class at Caltech (along with Peter Schroeder, also mentioned in the article) on Discrete Differential Geometry:Theory and Applications. Movies of all the lectures are on the class website in wmv format, with accompanying slides.

A good open source Applied Math text.

First, in principle you can prepare a superposition of all possible inputs to your program. Run the program once. You've now got a superposition of all possible outputs that can be generated from your inputs.

Second, within the program itself, performing an operation some number of times N can lead to superpositions containing ~ exp(N) terms. That is, with a linear number of operations you can generate an exponentially large number of states.

You can read more about quantum computation here or here .

How about listening to the best? Caltech's Streaming Theater.

I wonder if the US's best puzzler, Wei-Hwa Huang, will compete in the online tournament. He won the world championships a couple of years ago and finished second last year. I went to college with this guys and he was a dweeb even by Techer standards. All freshmen go to an orientation camp on Catalina Island and every year's there's a "talent show." Wei-Hwa entered the talent show and showed how he could solve a Rubik's Cube after only glancing at it once. He would quickly look at the cube, then walk around the room trying to be funny while he solved it without looking at it again. Each joke was followed by what can only be described as a very uncomfortable silence... I think Wei-Hwa works for Google now, an interesting coincidence?

Sedna's not a planet.

For that matter, a lot of people don't think of Pluto as a planet either.

Nope. Remember Sedna?

Not that Sedna's that big a deal. A lot of astronomers don't consider Pluto to be a true planet either...

My personal favourite (a few clicks away from the above link): "Teapotahedron".

Which in turn reminded me of a web page that *still* makes me laugh out loud every time I read it, from The Garden of Eden, the geeky and yet very attractive Eve Anderson's original home page:

The Polyorchid Religious Society

This is one of the first sites I ever came across when I first got on the web those many years ago, and I *still* visit it.

Thank you, Eve!

People have also turned gravitational wave simulations into sound files. Gravitational radiation can be a hard concept to explain to people, but make it into a sound file and it helps people (non-physicists) grasp the idea. Here's a page with a set of audio files for inspiral into Kerr Black holes.

A few years ago I made an audio file out of the gravitational wave background in our galaxy (from white-dwarf binary stars). It sounded rather like listening to the ocean... I wish I had kept a copy.

No joke, there actually is such a thing. Asynchronous design is much harder to verify than ordinary clock-driven designs, but there is some evidence that that approach may help with current problems with clock distribution (obviously) and power dissipation.

Each new tech advance is more powerful and more accessible than the last, but the minds that wield it are relatively stagnant and still saddled with millions of years of selfish evolutionary baggage which we won't be able to fix for quite a while yet.

Humankind is within ~30 years of reaching the vingean Singularity, and the only question is the odds on making it without sabotaging ourselves first. IMO, the odds are very low, but unlike Bill Joy, I don't think there's any point in attempting to STOP or even slow this progress -- all we can do is try to safely guide the tech and hope for the best.

--

As I understand it, GenBank is just a catalogue of gene sequences, which is to say, the end results of data analysis. This is equivalent in the astronomy world to a catalogue of galaxies or stars or whatnot (which virtual observatories will also include). Of course you can get new science from such a database, but it's a very different kettle of fish to making available all the raw data that the geneticists used to derive the gene sequences in the first place, which could be even more useful (well, I imagine so, but perhaps it wouldn't be useful at all to other geneticists). So a virtual observatory is not mere hyperbole, IMHO, because it can be used to make what are effectively "new" observations of astronomical objects, as well as datamine previously compiled catalogues (a la GenBank, or in astronomy, NED or SIMBAD).

Erm, well, I'm rambling a bit so I'll shut up now.

At the time when I was involved with preliminary design of HTMT petaflops supercomputer (yes, it is petaflops, as in million gigaflops, see, for example, here), anyway, one of the problems which would require a supercomputer with this this kind of performance was real-time optimization of car traffic in a city the size of Manhattan, NY.

Paul B.

More in-depth is the original Press release from CalTech.

The baby planet is not the big discovery. The scientists find organic chemistry more interesting (they would).

Am I alone in wanting a completely computer-generated movie that looks real instead of cartoony and actually has a good plot?

I think you can safely say that, as a union, SAG (Screen Actor's Guild) is less than thrilled about the prospect. In the not too distant future, there may not be a need for human actors. Believable human animation may be to live acting, what sound was to silent movies. It's not the crowd scenes that are the problem. Weta proved that. Being able to model actors closeup will be the milestone. At that point, who do you give the Academy Award for Best Actor to when Shrek is brought to life by a cast of ... geeks?

Does Shrek have a voice coach? Stunt double? Agent? Someone to teach him to mix concrete and sign complicated insurance forms?

Because we have devices like blenders and DVD players that require more energy than, say, a mortar and pestle.

we know the sun's rays can be converted into heat to turn a turbine

Horribly inefficiently. I know of no full-scale power plant that does this.

we know that the sun's radiation can be converted directly into electrical energy.

A few problems here. First, the energy density of sunlight isn't that high, and even that's only available in generally arid conditions. Also, single-crystal-based Si solar cells require quite a bit of energy to fabricate, so they have a rather long energy break-even point.

There are attempts to change this, namely with Graetzel cell technology that runs on poly-crystalline Si that is cheaper, but research is ongoing for these.

From that alone, we have enough to power ourselves for quite a while..

And no efficient way to harness it. To supply the country with solar energy, we'd have to cover something like half of Arizona with solar cells. This is not currently viable.

Question is, when will everyone be convenced there is a problem, and when they are convenced, how willing will they be to give up their SUV's?

I sympathize with you here - Wy wife and I drive a sensible, 4-cylinder, gas-efficient sedan. We carpool. I hate SUVs for everything they represent, namely careless, pointless consumption to convince their middle-aged owners they really aren't driving minvans/station-wagons. That said, screaming solar/wind/biomass isn't going to get it done, because these technologies won't meet the world's needs now, let alone when the rest of the unindustrialized world decides to get online.

Much as I love and respect Ray Bradbury's writing, and much as I wish your claim were true, it simply isn't: most of those references to "butterfly effects" you cite actually relate to Chaos Theory, and apparently are attributable to none other than Lorenz (of Attractor fame) in the title of a 1972 talk entitled "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?"