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With information growning exponentialy, one must wonder if we're on the edge of the Singularity as anticipated by Vernor Vinge.

The HAV act (help amerca vote), created a land rush by mandating a minumum number of touchscreen voting machines by 2004. The stalking horse provision in the bill is that blind people cant use most voting systems without assistance, and people in wheel chairs have difficulties as well. Noble motivation yes, but the cure is worse than the problem.

This land rush was led by diebold with a first-to-market system. they acheived this by using off the shelf components and OS and DB. THe system has not proven reliable or safe. I wont regurgitaete the accusationsof fraud, except to mention that any time elections differ by 6 sigma from poll results someting reeks. Unfortunatley other companies ESS and Sequoia tried to keep pace. the ESS systems at least have the benefit of actually failing to boot so often that florida has abandoned them! THe Sequoia system is the best of the lot but still has its own flaw. At least the sequoia people, when pushed, seem to be trying to respond to the demand for voter verified balloting.

The good news is that After pressure by california's santa clara county (19 million dollar
contract), Sequoia voting system has agrees to implement (at no cost) a
voter verified, recountable, paper ballot in addition to the touch
screen systems.
(see here )

Already the House of representatives has a bill pending ( The Voter
Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003) that will require
all touch screen voting systems to be voter verifiable.
(see here )

Indeed the entire country of brazil, which has 400,000 electronic
voting machines has decide to replace them with voter verifiable
systems.
(see here )

A 95 page caltech and MIT study surveying many years of voting reports
that among all voting methods, the method with the single largest
average error rate is electronic voting, which is senate and
gubenatorial elections has almost TWICE the error rate of optical scan voting. This means that by enfranchising blind people we disenfranchise far more people. a bad trade.
(see here page 21 )

Indeed reality is much worse since that's just an average, since
electronic voting errors tend to be both non-random and clustered in
catastrophic events.

For example, Bernalio county in Albuquerque reported 48,000 voters went to the polls
but only 36,000 votes were registered on Sequoia voting systems.
(see here )

Similarly, many votes were lost in the latest election in florida
counties using Sequoia voting systems. Janet reno is investigating
cases where heavily democratic counties registered ZERO votes for any
democrat. Sequoia systems has presented Los Alamos FALSE information
of Seqouia systems. For example, they claimed it did not run on
windows OS. In fact WinEDS their database collection system is based
upon microsoft OS, and uses a Microsoft-based SQL DB, and the password for
this system is "password" (really!).
(see here )

You can in fact obtain this very minute on CD rom a program which will
break into any diebolds MS ACCESS based database and change results then erase all log
entries of the intrusion. It's easy to imagine that SQL can nbe attacted too either by security hoiles or user admin mistakes in the table grants.

Sequoia's Glowing reviews in florida, santa
clara and Lousianna counties are somewhat marred by the fact that the
Luosianna county agent who reviews them highly is now under indictment
for a payoff from seqouia, like wise the santa clara and florida
registrar have both been (publicly) paid off by the

See also here. I don't quite know why that guy is offering a prize. It's well understood as coming from the properties of the j-function.

Very briefly: you may have sketched the function y^2=P(x) in your life where P(x) is a cubic. If you allow x and y to be complex numbers you get a 2D surface. That 2D surface is basically a twisted up torus (minus a point at or two corresponding to when x and y go to infinity) and the j function gives a way of specifying exactly what torus. It also plays an important role in string theory. But the full explanation of why you get all these near integers is quite long and involved.

This is not the first controlled-not gate for a quantum computing system but rather the first in this solid state system.

Other implementations of a controlled-not gate (or its close relative, a controlled-phase gate) include:

Caltech Quantum Optics implemented a controlled-phase gate between photons using a strongly coupled atom in a cavity.

Serge Haroche's group implemented a controlled-phase between an atom and a photon using microwave cavities and atomic Rydberg states.

NIST Ion Storage Group: implemented a two qubit gate (which could be turned into a controlled-not) and a four qubit gate using trapped ions.

NMR quantum computing has been implemented by various groups including the biggest quantum computation to date, factoring 15, done by Isaac Chuang's group (IBM and now MIT.)

A proof of principle implementation of a controlled-not in the linear optics quantum computing scheme has been implemented at the University of Queensland.

I'm leaving out quite a few other cool experiments: but the above links should give you a good idea of the what early steps have been taken in quantum computing.

That was actually a link to some manners site I had in my clipboard. Sorry. The correct link

Much more relavant, don't you think?

First of all, this sound is based on observations of the microwave background radiation, which didn't come into existence until 300,000 years after the big bang. You will note that the article states "when it [the universe] was just 18 million light years across" Imagine beating a drum that big, and you'll see why the pitch is so low. So the big bang may or may not have been a "bang" but 300,000 years later, the sound made was a hum.

Really, the relevant signal to listen to is the background signal of gravitational waves. These actually correspond rather directly to (faint) sound waves, since they induce mechanical disturbances as they pass through matter. By now, of course, most of these will have stretched to the dimensions of the universe, and be more or less undetectable, even in principle. Some theories predict the existence of higher frequency waves going back to the first moments of the big bang. We can look forward to detecting some higher frequency waves in the next five to ten years, from the various interferometers coming online. This is serious science, and could provide insights into not only the origins of the universe, but also supernovae, and the dynamics of black holes and neutron stars. Not to mention curiosities that may occur unheralded. Something akin to the advent of radio astronomy may be in store for us.

There's also (presumably) a neutrino background, from about one second after the big bang. This will be very hard to detect, until we build a big sister to AMANDA covering icy orb, perhaps ganymede :) Some folks seem to be trying to detect it indirectly via the microwave background.

Physicists are entitled to a little fun now and then, anyway. It also helps to bring cosmology a little closer to the general public. It certainly isn't as if this researcher had to get a peer reviewed grant of many thousands of dollars to produce such "trivial" results: he simply did some starightforward processing on data that was already available, quite possibly in his spare time on his own computer. Oh, and I would definitely classify this as more useful/pertinent then that (admittedly a bit silly) "color of the universe stuff"!

It is not the case that "any" sound can be created, or that there is no relationship to the original, when scaling by 100,000. Many (most) relationships are preserved in this sort of operation. Indeed, a familiar example would be to speed up or slow down normal speech; it remains understandable.

Science starts with the presumption of ignorance, and then proceeds to discover what the universe can tell us about itself. Many slashdotters could take a lesson from this.

The two most abundant things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
Harlan Ellison

See this piece at Caltech for an example of how things change with time.

It was the journalist who changed things. When Bush did his little Top Gun stunt, he simply did not say "the end of combat operations."

And what he did say was on a live fucking network broadcast! Joe Stalin himself would have a pretty hard time revising all the tapes that were made of it. Reporters of course don't need to revise records to change history -- they just need to ignore the records in their reporting, and presto-chango, it's done!

If this was some crazy government conspiracy and they were trying to hide the information, why would they put it on their website? Could be any number of reasons they have done this perhaps they were getting loads of hits from google about iraq related things but if anyone really wants the information surely they can just visit it.

Actually, the motivation around this could be to prevent caching of the documents, so that it's not so easy to compare differently dated versions of the same document. See this piece at Caltech for an example of how things change with time.

Yes, I think I've seen this before somewhere. I tell you, even in the future Slashdot reports outdated events!

I took Caltech freshman physics only a year or two after The Mechanical Universe was filmed, and the first quarter, still taught by Goodstein, followed the series fairly closely, though with a much faster pace. The room was also obviously the same. Many of the "students" in the series were actors, though.

CERN, whose laboratories straddle the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, said it had sent 1.1 Terabytes of data at 5.44 gigabits a second (Gbps) to a lab at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, on October 1.

Basically they showed that conventional TCP is not very good at scaling to large flows like the ones in the article. He described a typical broadband Internet connection as being able to utilize only about 27 percent of the available bandwidth, while their modified FAST TCP connection reached 95 percent efficiency. He had some nice test results showing how the protocols reacted to having to share bandwidth with other flows, and pointed out how when other flows finished and more bandwidth opened up, conventional TCP was very slow to take advantage of the increased bandwidth.

There's an older Economist article describing the protocol in more detail for those who are interested.

Basically they showed that conventional TCP is not very good at scaling to large flows like the ones in the article. He described a typical broadband Internet connection as being able to utilize only about 27 percent of the available bandwidth, while their modified FAST TCP connection reached 95 percent efficiency. He had some nice test results showing how the protocols reacted to having to share bandwidth with other flows, and pointed out how when other flows finished and more bandwidth opened up, conventional TCP was very slow to take advantage of the increased bandwidth.

There's an older Economist article describing the protocol in more detail for those who are interested.

Basically they showed that conventional TCP is not very good at scaling to large flows like the ones in the article. He described a typical broadband Internet connection as being able to utilize only about 27 percent of the available bandwidth, while their modified FAST TCP connection reached 95 percent efficiency. He had some nice test results showing how the protocols reacted to having to share bandwidth with other flows, and pointed out how when other flows finished and more bandwidth opened up, conventional TCP was very slow to take advantage of the increased bandwidth.

There's an older Economist article describing the protocol in more detail for those who are interested.

Camp 1: Support the work of William Tifft in '70s, and subsequent work of Napier and Guthrie in '97 showing quantized redshifts, used as proof of geocentric or galactocentric universe, with concentric shells of galaxies around us or our galaxy. Tifft's early work utilized results of pencil-beam surveys, largely discredited because a foamy universe produces the same results. Napier and Guthrie find quantization in larger sample of galaxies in the Virgo cluster, statistically significant only when assuming the local cluster is falling towards Virgo. Many members of this camp are Christians who think that Earth is special because of Divine Interest in the human race.

Camp 2: Arp and friends. They think that redshift has two components, one associated with velocity and one an intrinsic (inherent) property of the object that increases with time. While they deny the geocentric shell model and the quantization of "total" redshift, they do think the intrinsic redshifts are quantized. Start with galaxies in the middle of a pair of quasars. One must assume the quasars have the same intrinsic redshift (and that they had a common origin in the 'parent' galaxy), and then the intrinsic redshift of both can be found by an average of the total redshifts of the two quasars. Quantization of the intrinsic redshift is implied to mean that something about the quasars changes as they age- in discrete steps. This is where they decide to throw out much of modern physics on its ear. They conclude that quasars are new matter being born in an infinitely-old, flat universe (somehow being spit out of the hearts of more mature galaxies). New matter starts out with zero mass and gains mass as it ages, either as the square of the elapsed time or in discrete quantum steps, depending on which website one reads. ref.

Camp 3. 'Mainstream' scientists - Think that redshift is due to the peculiar velocity of the emitting object and the stretching of the space through which the photons must travel on their way here. Quasars are very far away, not near foreground galaxies. Problems: 90% of the expected matter is invisible. A 'dark energy' is necessary to explain the perceived expansion. ref

So I got confused when you started the thread by saying something that sounded like you were in camp 1, but then posting links to camp 2. Some mainstream astronomers think there may be something interesting lurking in reports of quantization., so don't knock us for asking about it. Even worse would be if we ignored it entirely.

Just curious.

How come that's not working for me? I copy/pasted, and Google brings up an actual search with the first listing being the following, called CHAPTER 2

What gives?

"Usage Note: The words ironic, irony, and ironically are sometimes used of events and circumstances that might better be described as simply "coincidental" or "improbable," in that they suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly. Thus 78 percent of the Usage Panel rejects the use of ironically in the sentence In 1969 Susie moved from Ithaca to California where she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came from upstate New York. Some Panelists noted that this particular usage might be acceptable if Susie had in fact moved to California in order to find a husband, in which case the story could be taken as exemplifying the folly of supposing that we can know what fate has in store for us. By contrast, 73 percent accepted the sentence Ironically, even as the government was fulminating against American policy, American jeans and videocassettes were the hottest items in the stalls of the market, where the incongruity can be seen as an example of human inconsistency.

I was browsing the Internet for a substitute for my Lexmark e210 printer toner and I found something very interesting. The Samsung 1210 laser toners are the almost exact same as the Lexmark e210 toners. While Lexmark prohibits refills of their toner cartridges, Samsung does not. It turned out that a clip inside the Lexmark laser printer has to be removed inorder for the Samsung toner to fit. Checkout this site here http://mmrc.caltech.edu/colin/other/misc/20030315/ and it will show the modification to the Lexmark laser. Bottom line, you 'can' use Samsung laser toners inside Lexmark lasers using and also using refill kits. This will save a Lexmark owner countless dollars on toners.

Well, I guess it must be the eleventh planet then, for we already found a tenth. Wasn't it called Quauar? Or was it the other way round? I mean Niburu being the eleventh.
Come to think about it, that blob out there was probably called Quaoar
Never mind, err.. WHOOSH..WHOOSH.. Is this thing on?

I think "How long would it take you to learn Portuguese?" was a good question. If you go to Brazil with an English->Portuguese phrase book, you'll be able to ask for a bathroom or a taxi after a short period of time. But don't think you can show up with zero Portuguese and be writing a dissertation next week.

Unless you happen to be Feynman

The American space program is alive and well. Ok, it could be better, but to say that it is shut down is just plain wrong.

Why couldn't we put this lab in orbit?

The main reason is that the effect is so weak. A mission concept called LISA is being studied by ESA and NASA. The idea is to have 6 spacecraft orbiting the Sun, which together form a interferometer several million kilometers in size. The catch: Because the waves are so weak, the distances between these spacecraft would need to be controlled to within about a nanometer (!) to have any hope of detecting a signal. Needless to say a VERY challenging mission.

A lot of other interesting missions would be enabled by good formation flight technology. Look at NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder mission, or the ESA's similar Darwin mission.

Allright, IAAP (I Am A Psysicist), and I think it's good two debunk a common misconception here:

Gravity waves are not the same as gravitational waves

Gravity waves are matter density waves in fluidi (fluids or gases) caused by the interaction of two forces: bouyancy and gravity. Here, bouyancy is the upward-driving force, and gravity is the downward-driving force. The essence is that these waves require a medium to propagate (e.g. air).

Gravity waves can be found in the atmosphere, e.g. clouds which form in regular bands of cloud and clear sky, where the gravity waves carry momentum and energy from the troposphere to the middle and upper atmosphere Gravity waves can also be found on the surface of fuilds: think of the waves behind a boat. A good primer on gravity waves can be found here

Gravitational waves are a whole different ballgame! These waves have got nothing to do with matter densities as they don't require a medium to progagate: it is not matter that moves, and in that respect gravitational waves are like light (which, contrary to beliefs held at the beginnning of the century, don't require a medium such as "ether"). Gravitational waves are wacves in the spacetime-metric.

So what the hell does that mean? Well, in gravity waves, there is a wave in space (and time) in which the thing that changes over space and time is the density of matter. In gravitational waves, there also is a wave in space and time, but the thing that "wiggles" is not the density of matter (or the strength of electric and magnetic fields, like in light or EM radiation in general), but the properties of the fabric of space and time itself. You can think of it as if the coordinate system itself wiggles, so to speak. This "wiggling" results in the length of the arms of e.g. the LIGO interferometer to change ever so slightly, causing a phase shift between light beams send through both arms, which can (hopefully) be detected.

In more mathematical terms, the exact properties of space and time are called the metric. In a portion of space without any matter, the metric is flat (called the Minkovski metric), which means that the usual laws of geometry apply. In any circumstances with matter (and thus gravity) present, these laws to do hold up!

What?!, I hear you think. Yes sir, you've been lied to in geometry class! However, you've been lied to only very, very slightly. Example: if you measure the radius of a sphere (say: R), you expect to find a surface area of exactly 4/3 * pi * R^3. If the earth would be a perfect sphere (which it isn't), and you would be able to measure its radius and surface very accurately, you would find that the surface area is ever so slightly smaller than expected. Or, in other words, the radius seems to be a bit too large (in the order of 3 cm or 30 cm IIRC). Read more about space time curvature here/

A primer on gravitational waves can be found here. A more detailed description here.

slightly off topic but... when i was a young geek of about 10 years old, i played a computer game based on reverse polish notation -- robowar (lousy web page, but the few good ones disappeared long ago)

you programmed a robot and then unleashed it against other people's programmed robots in a visual arena. when programming a robot, one had to keep the stack well in mind (stack overflows -- when there are more than 99 instructions on the stack -- and underflows -- when an instruction tries to do something with the stack but nothing's on it -- were common with noob robots). because part of the game involves selecting the maximum number of instructions per unit of time that your robot can execute (you can trade away some computing power for armour) programming strategies developed that involved loading up huge amounts of numbers and commands on the stack when things are quiet, then burning through them when needed.

it really was a fun game (provided one wasn't bored by programming). when i got to high school and they gave us TI-85s i was pissed that my refined RPN skeels couldn't be put to use

Any one who loses the election will request a recount... of all the paper ballots.

What if N paper ballots/receipts go missing, with N > than the winning margin? A lot seem to go missing currently. There is some consensus that there does not need to be a paper audit trail at the voter level. I agree; there are too many voters and our 18th c paper system is already badly creaking under the weight.

There is another solution, albeit a non-technical one (perish the thought): devolve critical election or representatives to referenda (with some exceptions; not everything can be put to popular referenda).

The Internet was meant for this.

Incidentally, I think this is the first time we've been slashdotted. Some of the other grad students and I have been reading and enjoying the comments. We'll get straight to work on the sharks to go with the frickin lasers, um, as soon as we stop reading Slashdot. I'll see if I can get the authors of the paper to post a comment later about the workings of the experiment.

He should have Googled before giving up

I don't read science fiction for exactly this reason. What meaning could science fiction possibly have when science is constantly going beyond our imaginations already?

One of the problems we face today in writing 'real' Science Fiction is our understanding of science itself. In the golden age of SF you could write about rockets to Mars built in their back yards and piloted by guys with slide rules and you weren't far off from what was known to be possible. Nowdays we have the capability to actually do it and we know you can't build it in your backyard. In fact we know that the cost is far more than a jaded populace is willing to support right now.

Sure fantasy stories dressed up in science fiction clothing still hold peoples attention, but they aren't really the Science Fiction. But they are what die-hard hard-SF fans like myself derisivly refer to 'Sci Fi' (or 'skiffy' in the SF fan parlence). Moreover what was once Science Fiction in every sense of the phrase is now 'Sci Fi'.

The kind of stories that once filled us with wonder (partly because we could imagine ourselves in them) are now out of reach in reality; whether due to cost or due to the actual science being wrong. Once again, relying on SF Fannish phrasing, the sensawunda is no longer there, so we end up with stories based on implausible or impossible technology where plot points are based around plasma fires in the transporter. No sensawunda, but the special effects are cool.

The other problem with modern SF was first articulated by Vernor Vinge in his paper The Singularity: "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

Whether Vinge's Singularity comes to pass as envisioned or not, the core point is certainly valid; at the very least the future, even the near future, is probably going to be unimaginable by anyone living today. Why? Because sometime soon, perhaps not within thirty years but certainly within a century, we are going to have the ability to create intelligences orders of magnitude smarter than we are. It doesn't matter if we enhance human intelligence or create machine intelligence, either way the result is the same. Either way something that is to us as we are to mice is going to be calling the shots.

This scenario is pretty damming to SF; after all most of the familiar tropes of SF go out the window. Rocket ships? Well, they might exist, but we have no idea what they would look like or who would be on them. Alien contact? Hell, the aliens would be right here. Humans colonizing other star systems? Even if humanity survives into this post-human future it will change so as to be unrecognizable to us now anyway. How can you write stories about beings who don't share your basic motivations? (Not that this is impossible, but it certainly demands more from the reader, therefore making the book harder to sell.)

As of now no-one has successfully answered Vinge's question, other than several attempts to dismiss it out of hand. Vinge himself, because he wanted to write space operas, ended up thrusting the problem of ultra-intelligence aside by creating a magic 'slow zone' in the galaxy that limits intelligence to a maximum inside the zone.

However a few writers have tried to honestly deal with the problem of the Singularity by writing a new kind of fiction I refer to as 'Transhuman' SF. Cyberpunk was the progenitor of this SF form with stories set right on the edge of the Singularity. Writers like Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Kathleen Goonan, John Varley, Ian M. Bainks, Ken MacCleod, Greg Egan, Cory Doctorow and others have written SF set either just over that edge, or millions of years past it. Although the level to which they are honest in their presentation of transhumanism varies greatly, probably because the more you extrapolate the harder it is to make the story coherent and interesting.

Transhuman SF does require much from the reader. Unless the writer constantly stops the action for 'As you know Bob.' sequences to explicate things the reader must have a wide ranging knowledge of genetics,

This was always my favorite re-telling of the story... From David Goodstein at Caltech...

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/fusion_art.html

For those of you who took 'physics' this should be old hat.

There are many different wavelengths of light. Visible light is a very narrow band of the whole light spectrum. Other radiation (X, gamma, UV, IR) work in different parts of the spectrum, but is still light. Everyone likes the Hubble because it can give us pretty pictures, and truly they are amazing & has made many ground breaking discoveries, but IR can show us much much more.

Why? Because you make a better door than window Einstein. Interstellar space has tons and tons of dirt, which the Hubble can't see through with visible light. IR on the other hand is radiated through it. Just look how different the universe is when observed from a different point of view. Orion is amazingly different when looked at with IR compared with the visible spectrum. The composition, it's purpose and function is vastly different in IR to 'shed some more light' on things we 'already know'.

And for you cynics, much of this data will be given straight to the community at large, making it truly a public endeavor.

For those of you who took 'physics' this should be old hat.

There are many different wavelengths of light. Visible light is a very narrow band of the whole light spectrum. Other radiation (X, gamma, UV, IR) work in different parts of the spectrum, but is still light. Everyone likes the Hubble because it can give us pretty pictures, and truly they are amazing & has made many ground breaking discoveries, but IR can show us much much more.

Why? Because you make a better door than window Einstein. Interstellar space has tons and tons of dirt, which the Hubble can't see through with visible light. IR on the other hand is radiated through it. Just look how different the universe is when observed from a different point of view. Orion is amazingly different when looked at with IR compared with the visible spectrum. The composition, it's purpose and function is vastly different in IR to 'shed some more light' on things we 'already know'.

And for you cynics, much of this data will be given straight to the community at large, making it truly a public endeavor.

For those of you who took 'physics' this should be old hat.

There are many different wavelengths of light. Visible light is a very narrow band of the whole light spectrum. Other radiation (X, gamma, UV, IR) work in different parts of the spectrum, but is still light. Everyone likes the Hubble because it can give us pretty pictures, and truly they are amazing & has made many ground breaking discoveries, but IR can show us much much more.

Why? Because you make a better door than window Einstein. Interstellar space has tons and tons of dirt, which the Hubble can't see through with visible light. IR on the other hand is radiated through it. Just look how different the universe is when observed from a different point of view. Orion is amazingly different when looked at with IR compared with the visible spectrum. The composition, it's purpose and function is vastly different in IR to 'shed some more light' on things we 'already know'.

And for you cynics, much of this data will be given straight to the community at large, making it truly a public endeavor.

Anyone care to enlighten a novice astromomer in the benefits of using infrared in telescopic technology?

There quite a decent summary contained within the sirtf site: Why IR?

I'm excited to see the value and quality of images such a thing can produce.

A picture of what they're aiming for and a video of what they've got I think we're perfectly safe for a while from these things. Of Course Aussies can handle a fly swat or rolled newspaper with ease, so they're not safe from us, or our blue heelers.

DIY AI (Do-It-Yourself Artificial Intelligence) is now available to provide AI Minds for these "Executive Secretaries" in a growing list of programming languages:
APL;
JAVA (see code-link #001 :-)
Labview;
Lisp;
Perl;
Python;
Visual Basic (see link #001 :-)

The Technological Singularity of Vernor Vinge is happening right here and now -- all around you.

Please mod up this message as high as it deserves. If you doubt the AI Mind meme, please see
ACM SIGPLAN Notices: Mind.Forth AI paper by Dr. Paul Frenger;
Concept-Fiber Theory of Mind review by Ben Goertzel, Ph.D.

Every Slashdot-reading programmer ought seriously to consider dropping all other activities and joining the AI Revolution adumbrated in this SlashDot article on Executive Secretaries with AI.

It is worth noting that the SIRTF SWIRE survey may be able to detect solar system sized supercomputers, aka Matrioshka Brains. For discussion see the thread starting here and navigate using the icons in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

Optical (visible?), ultraviolet and infrared are distinct parts of the electronmagnetic spectrum. the optical and ultraviolet regions do not lie in the infrared region.

For more info see http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroo m/ir_tutorial/what_is_ir.html

The thing that blows my mind is how they managed to make it so much larger than the Earth.

Caltech with its 939 undergraduates never has a chance at getting on the list.

The SIRTF Science Center had a contest to name SIRTF. They'll be announcing the name in a few months.

Optically scanned paper is one of the best ways to vote at least according to MIT and CalTech.

My last quarters project was to design an electronic voting system, the cornerstone, it printed an optical ballot backup that the voter could hold and verify and then drop in a secured box.

In order to get to the moon in the first place, you need to have almost completely escaped the Earth's gravity, so it doesn't help for launch of things that are originally from Earth. Best approach for that is to launch them to as _low_ an orbit as you can (so as to minimize delta-v required of high thrust, low-Isp drives), and to spiral the rest of the way out over a period of months using a low thrust, high-Isp drive.

Correct. But it does help for things that are going to Earth. That is, a base on the Moon would be ideal as a place for docking spacecraft that shuttle back and forth between places (like mining the asteroids, for instance). The advantage is that you don't want to bother lifting the 'craft up Earth's gravity well when you don't need to, and of course, if you're transferring things TO Earth FROM the Moon, that's virtually free.

This only applies if the craft MUST dock, because even the Moon has a gravity well. If it can just jettison things, then hell, very clever orbital mechanics wins over the Moon any day.

But, it COULD be useful. It would also be more useful as a manufacturing plant for Earth satellites - launch cost of 2.3 km/s to GEO, rather than 13.8 km/s.

This turns out not to be the case, as you need a lot of delta-v to travel from Mars's orbit to Earth's (the sun's gravity well is deep).

Huh? Mars's orbital velocity is ~24 km/s, Earth's is 30 km/s. That's 5 km/s difference, and escape velocity from Earth is 11 km/s, and Mars's escape velocity is 5 km/s. As far as I can tell, if you escape from Mars's orbit, you'll basically fall back to Earth's orbit, free. I'm just doing back-of-the-envelope calculations, but it seems smaller to me (yah yah, I'm ignoring tons of orbital dynamics, but the points are ~roughly valid). I think the parent poster is correct.

Actually, a brief search online finds that I'm right, as shown here. The DV from Mars C3=0 orbit to Earth C3=0 orbit is 0.9 km/s - virtually nothing! delta-V from Earth's surface to lunar surface is 9.7+2.5+0.7+0.7+1.6 = 15.2 km/s. Delta-V from Mars surface to Lunar surface is 4.1+0.9+0.3+0.2+0.9+0.7+1.6=8.7, which is almost a factor of 2. I think more clever methods could probably be derived to lower that to less (using Phobos or Deimos for a gravity handle, if they're rotating in the proper way... I can't think off hand).

The Sun's gravity well is deep, but 1/r^2 wins every time.

I'm reminded of Iain Banks's novel Complicity, in which the protagonist spends rather too much time playing fancy computer games. Banks, who obviously has the same problem, invented some extremely cool games for him to play, including one which sounds like Civilization, only much more imaginative and creative. People are always asking Banks where they can buy these games. Sadly, they don't exist outside his head.

Seems to be some reference to a Beastie Boys tune. But I'm far too old (by two or three years) to understand such music.

The last games to be conquered by machines will be physical like soccer, or involve recognition of speech or visual information. Humans use their brains to their fullest in those activities; it's what they're best at compared to machines. When AI gets that far, if you believe in the Singularity, we'll be at it.

It seems extremely conservative to me that Russia would take 30 years to get to Mars, especially considering their stated plan is to build a reactor - they'll get to Mars faster if the reactor is in fact what gets them to Mars in the first place.

The U.S. has had a working nuclear rocket engine for forty years, according to a PDF on the ROVER/Nerva project off this page. These are relatively simple engines which shoot hydrogen out the back.

Of course the reference to "already built" is bizarre, who cares if it is already built if they are going to take 30 years to do it? No reason to mention that unless maybe they are talking about tested submarine reactors.

Of course the U.S. has a deal according to this March 2003 article to get Russian nuclear rocket fuels for the nuclear rocket program of Project Prometheus through 2009.

This pdf says that using the NERVA rockets of the 1970s we could get to the moon in a day, or to Mars in 4 months. The article by a Los Alamos researcher is interesting as it talks about the social problems versus technical problems. In all it seems that the nuclear rocket costs half as much, is twice as powerful, and is safe (at least from this paper it seems that reactor core products stay in the reactor). Also from about page 21 there is an interesting section on radiation and human exploration.

It talks about using a gas core nuclear rocket (GCNR) in which we are talking about how to shield crew from radiation in flight, not on the ground, but that this will mean we can get to and from Mars in much less than NASA's planned (1998) mission of 3 years. With a specific impulse of over 3000 seconds, a GCNR ship can have a 3 month transit to Mars, 2 months on the planet, and 4 months back - thus reducing psychological stress factors by keeping the mission to 6-7 months' duration.

There is also the physical deterioration from a long flight.. Apparently the current U.S.-Russia program is aiming for even better, perhaps 2 months each way using small reactors for an unlimited fuel supply and three times better propulsion.

More info:
link
link
link
pro-nuclear space space group with more information

The lead character in Memento does have amnesia. He has precisely the symptoms of what neuropsychologists call classical amnesia.

Check the section called: `The Potential and Power of Quantum Computing' from the page: About quatum computing