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Yet another poster who says that "they dont care". Obviously you DO care; do you think that by saying this you


I'm not saying at all that I don't care about this thread. Obviously, as you point out, I do, or I wouldn't have done that simulation. What I meant (at the bottom of the website I posted and which you quote) is that I don't care to spend more time on the simulation, because I didn't believe it necessary.


Proving that something can be faked doesnt make the original a lie; what it proves is that you are skilled at forgery,


I was not attempting to prove that it was a forgery, and I do not in fact believe it was a forgery. I suspect it is, most likely, an actual telescopic photograph taken by the satellite in question.

What I was attempting to demonstrate was that there wasn't enough information in their original image to form a conclusion about the nature of the object.

That the original was a very low-resolution image. In specific, that the bright white object seen is only 3 pixels wide and in reality is just a 4-pixel upside down "T" shape. In only looks like the classic UFO shape because of the "enhancement" they applied. The shape it was before ehnancement could have been a picture of anything: a star, a planet, a comet, a spacecraft, or a speck of dust on the lens.

My argument is that, based on only a few pixels of color and no other information, one cannot generally make a conclusion as to the nature of the object.


havent got either the brains or skills to do the REAL WORK that is needed to comb through this evidence to find out whats really going on.


While normally I wouldn't even respond to such an obvious troll, in this case I'll make an exception. I would be the first one to cheer in the case of confirmed evidence of extraterrestrials. My real work is, in fact, in astrobiology - the search for life on other worlds. It involves a great deal of "combing through the evidence" -- many years worth, and a whole lot of hard work. I work now at the California Institute of Techonology in collaboration with researchers at JPL and USC.

I just can't abide people who don't understand the scientific method and critical thought, and who believe a tiny amount of nonspecific, unconfirmed data like a three-pixel-wide image can prove anything.

Give me *real* evidence, say a few 300-pixel-wide image showing spacecraft structures, or parallax and spectrographic shift data demonstrating that this object is in our solar system but moving contrary to gravity (i.e. under thrust or other sort of propulsion), and get that data confirmed by a couple of independent laboratories, and you'll make a believer out of me. I want it to be true as much as you do.

In the meantime, I'll remain wary of charlatans who would capitalize on your naievete and fanatical desire for UFOs to be real in order to sell you CDs of "enhanced" pictures of what are probably random space rocks.

I would have expected them to at least add shell-scripting to this

We intend to eventually allow submission of entries in other languages besides those mentioned above. If you prefer to write your algorithm in some other language or software, please contact the Turing group via email at ...

They SHOULD have said:

The Turing Tournament at Cal Tech wants to distribute $20,000 of the school's funds to their 'internet friends', Caltech friends, and other IVY league schoolers whom they would explain the contest to in human terms.

The contest strives to limit the accessibility of other people by not using human terms whenever possible, and by making the contest information as uninteresting and hard to follow and understand as possible to regular internet visitors to keep the pool as low as possible.

This decreases the chance high school kids or other 2 and 4 year college students would know about this since their professors would not read the dready explanations that they would then have to interpret and explain to students, when the rules and explanations should have been obviously simple to understand already.

Since the attempt is clearly to have a small amount of entries, this makes the competition mostly garbage."

Seriously, their page says it was made with LaTeX2HTML, but they only wrote that because they seriously knew they wouldn't have fooled anyone with telling us the directions were written by a human.

They are having an AI tournament, and their supported language list includes C, C++, Java, Perl, Mathematica, and something called the Gambit Command Language.


They're having an AI tournament on something that's more related to Game Theory and which is why GCL has been mentioned.

GCL is a HLL that's used for testing game theory related approaches. It supports a lot of important factors in game theory related operations, like vectorization and form representaion switching.

Read this Caltech site for more on GCL.

GCL may not be very well known outside the AI/GT areas, since its used more in a purely CS research oriented environment. I think it started out as a series of C++ libraries for GT related stuff.

you must have missed this node and possibly this one as well

you must have missed this node and possibly this one as well

Page sucks!

Oh, er, hmm. Sorry about that.

As part of a "branding" attempt after around WWII, California Institute of Technology refers to itself as "Caltech", not "Cal Tech".

See this Caltech Institute Archive.

The Turing tournament is a two sided tournament designed to find, on the one hand, the best computer programs to mimic human behavior, and on the other hand, the best computer programs to detect the difference between machine and human behavior. Two types of submissions will be accepted: an emulator, which mimics human behavior, or a detector, which detects the difference between human and machine behavior.

So, I suppose we could say by evaluating the success of response (as would be weeded out by whomever *actually* turns out an entry), we will have achieved our research, VOILA! It's a successful research incentive, the prize that is.

Whaddya think? no? heck of a fight though wasn't it? :P

The Turing tournament is a two sided tournament designed to find, on the one hand, the best computer programs to mimic human behavior, and on the other hand, the best computer programs to detect the difference between machine and human behavior. Two types of submissions will be accepted: an emulator, which mimics human behavior, or a detector, which detects the difference between human and machine behavior.

So, I suppose we could say by evaluating the success of response (as would be weeded out by whomever *actually* turns out an entry), we will have achieved our research, VOILA! It's a successful research incentive, the prize that is.

Whaddya think? no? heck of a fight though wasn't it? :P

The Turing tournament is a two sided tournament designed to find, on the one hand, the best computer programs to mimic human behavior, and on the other hand, the best computer programs to detect the difference between machine and human behavior. Two types of submissions will be accepted: an emulator, which mimics human behavior, or a detector, which detects the difference between human and machine behavior.

So, I suppose we could say by evaluating the success of response (as would be weeded out by whomever *actually* turns out an entry), we will have achieved our research, VOILA! It's a successful research incentive, the prize that is.

Whaddya think? no? heck of a fight though wasn't it? :P

Would someone please translate this to something than can be parsed by non-math types?

Why trade one gravity well for another?

It might be less romantic, but it's much more economical to build space habitats with artificial gravity (Babylon5/O'Neill-ish). Here, you don't have a gravity well to fight, there's constant sunlight, and there's no wasted mass beneath your feet which could be put better use.

Bio-Human colonization of outer space isn't even our ultimate destiny - "inner space" is. I hope I haven't shocked you with science "fiction" you're not ready to seriously contemplate. :-)

--

It's accomplished via huge (4 ft. diameter, 2.5 mi. length) tubes in an L-shape. A laser is then bounced along the length of the tube, and measures its distance very accurately: to within 10^-16 (!) cm, or about one hundred millionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom. Any change in the distance is a possible indication of a gravity wave passing through from some distant, powerful source. The fact that gravity decreases exponentially with distance means that even gravitational waves from extremely powerful sources, like binary neutron-star systems, are very weak when they get to Earth.

Of course, other vibrations can screw this up, so these observatories are really isolated (both geographically and mechanically) and data is compared from around the world. Lots of information is available at the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) website, where I got most of the specs listed here.

There is another very important point to recognize here. The HST Key project results (based upon Cepheid variable stars) is independent of the measurement/modeling of the ages of the oldest stars of Milky Way halo stars and clusters. Sure, both measurements each have significant systematic errors, but their uncertainties come from entirely different things! So the fact that they agree is quite reassuring. It also means that the measurements can be combined, at least to some degree.

With the newest generation of instruments and telescopes observing the Universe from radio waves to gamma rays, there will be new, independent methods of measuring the age and fate of the Universe. Already measurements from Type 1a supernovae are narrowing the uncertainties in some cosmological parameters. Other methods that currently yield very large error bars, but will be pivotal in the next few years are gravitational lensing (a detailed description here) and the Senyaev-Zeldovich effect (some details here).

When and if we get to the point where all methods yield the same result, we'll have our answer. In the meantime, if you just quote the formal results from just a single group, from a single type of argument/measurement, the systematic errors are going to be large, particularly when you're dealing with anything on cosmological scales!

I have no idea as to exactly how they work, with the "being in two states at once" deal; but allegedly, instead of a computation requiring, say, exponential (like 2^n) time on a conventional machine, it takes only polynomial (or smaller?) time, which is a HUGE win (much more so than even consistently linearly increasing numbers of flops). Essentially, ALL of the key possibilities can be done "simultaneously" and the correct result is the one that gets reported.

If I'm wrong about the exponential->polynomial thing, someone please correct me...

Read this.

Jenghis Khan was a man who cared nothing for Buddhism's spirit of loving compassion; he was interested only in conquest. He was a man who believed that the greatest happiness is "to crush your enemies, to see them fall at your feet--to take their horses and goods and hear the lamentation of their women." [Harold Lamb, Genghis Khan: The Emperor of All Men, Robert McBride & Co., 1927 pp. 106-107]

What the hell is pop? I think you mean soda, or maybe coke, but certainly not pop.

Obligatory link: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~almccon/pop_soda/

Another oft neglected Caltech stunt was the "improvement" of the Hollywood sign. There is actually an "official day" for pranks called "Ditch Day."

The only measly prank I was involved in was a disappearing parking space.

Another oft neglected Caltech stunt was the "improvement" of the Hollywood sign. There is actually an "official day" for pranks called "Ditch Day."

The only measly prank I was involved in was a disappearing parking space.

"The Chi is strong in this one..." ...NEXT!

They are supposedly able to sense changes in the slope of the earth around them (hills, etc.) and balance themselves out.

They also can sense the emotions and ambitions of the humans around them, slowly feeding off of their pain and misery, and always plotting against us.

Something different:

They can sense the coming of the Singularity by using their advanced meditation techniques. Slowly watching us they are, gathing information, to make the elimination of the humans that much more quick. ..NEXT!

Tai Chi Tamagochi Robots! If you feed them they'll grow into Tai Chi Masters, able to masterfully perform even the most difficult moves of Tai Chi.

COLLECT ALL 6 TODAY!!

(Only at Participating McHughs Restaraunts. While Supplies Last.) .NEXT!

It'd be cooler if they were powered by Chi.

NEXT!

"Li added that this type of robot would be able to take over some dangerous jobs from humans."

--As soon as I get my gun, I guess they'll have robotic telemarketers*. Now I need an EMP.

END!

New Movies Titles:
"Kung Fu Tai Chi Fighting Robots from Outer Space!"

"Tai Chi Robots from HELL!"

* I do not condone the shooting of telemarketers in this economy. But as soon as things improve and a better job opens up, say, anything, it'll be ok again.

As funny as that statement is, I'd rather it be modded as insightful, rather than funny.

Imagine, if you will, that CmdrTaco's little icon joke about the Borg is indeed correct. OK, now, imagine that we manage to insert a little bit of autonomy (by college education, for example) into one of the drones. Remember Hugh? Seems OSS has hurt Microsoft in ways that can't be measured quite yet on the balance sheet.

I've always thought that the best way to dismantle a machine is from the inside. Here's more credence to that thought, IMHO. Actually, my first thought when I read the article was "Merry Christmas, Soko - there really is a Windows user with a clue."

Soko

...maybe we could just lock in the coordinates on our freight transporter and teleport it directly into the sun. You're thinking 1000 years, not 100. Think of what we have accomplished in the past 100 years and stop being ridiculously optimistic.

The most interesting article I could find about cold fusion.

Actually I'm citing the work of Kip Thorne, recognized by many groups and one of the most genius minds in astrophysics. Thorne's hypothesis is that in order for the ball to go through time and interact with itself, it MUST follow one of the infinite number of scenarios in which the effect leads to the cause, as is the case here. This infinite number of scenarios is one of the major problems many have with the hypothesis.

As far as your accusation of freshmen interpreting freshmen, I suggest you look into Thorne's credentials a little more before dismissing him as an unreliable source of information.

One is already found - more than 1.5 billion kilometres beyond Pluto. Quaoar, as it has been dubbed, is about 1,280 kilometres across and circles the Sun every 288 years.

Here's a nice FAQ about it.

The sine qua non of geekery is el cheapo AI textbook AI4U: Mind-1.1 Programmer's Manual.

This brand-new November-2002 open-source artificial intelligence resource book needs to be reviewed here on SlashDot.

The Robot AI Mind is freeware, not shareware, and is listed in the Free Software Donation Directory as an open source AI project not crying for gimme-gimme money-money but rather as quasi-shareware where you get something in return: potentially the rare Gutenberg Bible of public domain AI leading to the Technological Singularity.

Accordingly, the extra request is made here that AI geeks obtain two copies of AI4U : one for themselves, and one that they register with BookCrossing.com and then leave surreptitiously in locations where other AI-prone geeks and wannabe's will find the AI-secrets AI4U textbook. Merry Xmas.

On the other hand, it turns out that the general phenomenon of exponential growth in computation goes back at least a hundred years, and one can make a plausible case that it extends through the entire history of life on Earth. This "generalized Moore's Law" is much more robust than the transistor version.

Don't give up hope on that 1THz laptop just yet.

For more data about the whole project go to Virtual Planetary Laboratory Homepage.

I ran this same story on my site today. More details are offered at the VPL website. They say that their models will be the first to combine the radiative fluxes, climate, chemistry, geology and biology of a terrestrial planet, to generate a wide range of plausible atmospheres for extrasolar planets, and for the atmospheres of early Earth.

1 it would be impossible to get those kinds of intense magnetic fields without using superconductors. Conventional conductors would melt with the kind of electrical current you would need.

2 unfortunately buckyballs don't seem to lubricate. but see that post on FLIR made with nanotechnology for more commercial nanotech products.

3 You want great 3d uses of holograms? Try imaging This technique could generalise for anything else you want to look at under a microscope in 3D. Cells. Fuel rods in a nuke reactor. the hologram captures all that data at the quantum level.

the application is commercial because there are hologram companies that sell equipment to other companies. If you want to get into it yourself for next to nothing look at this link and search for hologram

C'mon, thought experiments are the stuff that philosophy is made of. You give me a scientific, measurable definition of conciousness and I'll lay off the thought experiments.

When it comes to building circuits that act like neurons, I'm not a neuromorphic engineer. But even today people are building circuits that can interface with neurons (look at the guys at Cal Tech, for example). There was that guy in Britian (can't remember his name, references somebody?) who was doing experiments with re-routing electrical signals from his arm to his computer and back to his arm to see if the computer could reproduce the signal adequately to control the muscle (this was the same guy who walked around with implants that tracked where he was around the school).

If it makes you feel better you can skip the step about "synthetic" neurons and go right to the step where you've got a little computer that simulates the neurons and can interface with them.

As for simulating the brain exactly: first of all, there isn't much evidence that there is any quantum effects in the behavior of a neuron (people don't seem to take Roger Penrose too seriously in this area). Second of all, even if there are quantum effects and there was some randomness to the simulation, so what? Just because there are quantum effects, doesn't mean you can't simulate them. You aren't trying to *predict* what someone else's brain is going to do, you just want a simulation that follows the same laws. You just have to add some randomness to your experiment.

What makes a neuron a neuron is that it is, well, a neuron.

Can't argue with you there. :)

I went to grade school across the street from Cal Tech, and it was said that Einstein was often seen bicycling around on his 3-speed. Something about that lack of pretense has always charmed me, and I would think he is already one of the most human famous scientists. He spent much of the last 20 years of his life concerned with averting nuclear war.

Einstein on a bicycle. And he didn't wear a helmet.

The sloan is a major part of the VO as will be the 2-Mass allsky Near Infrared survey and many other surveys to come. This is not something that will be limited to a particular mission or archive, but infrastructure to allow interaction between these data and service sources.

The first priority of the Virtual Observatory (VO) is making it easier for professional astronomers to combine data from different sources, but we're also committed to involving the amateur astronomy and general public - that will involve special portals and eventually special software tools. I would caution that the whole project is at a very early stage, but I'm optimistic that a few years from now you'll see some nifty tools to let you explore the universe from your web browser (I don't know about support for lynx as one person asked about, personally I prefer wget...). Note that most astronomy analysis software is open source, and most is *only* available for Unix/Linux, so many /. readers will have a leg up on the world if they really want to do stuff with our data. But you don't need fancy software to play with the pretty pictures we make.

There are already a lot of good tools around - someone mentioned Tom McGlynn's Skyview, and he's part of the VO team (perhaps a better word would be Collective, since we are trying to assimilate everyone...) and the VO will provide middleware to make it easier for those public tools to interoperate and get their hands on more data. So it'll be a real help to people writing those kinds of service (Skyview, NED, Aladin, etc.), more directly I think than to most end users at least in the short term.

To address your specific question of format, the current idea seems to be XML descriptive wrappers paired with FITS binary data for most applications. But there are usually GIF/JPEG type preview images around, and the image viewer SAO DS9 for FITS data has been ported to PCs and Macs and is pretty easy to use. In the meantime, you may want to check out NED Level 5 for an excellent overview site on extragalactic astronomy.

- Jonathan

From what the article reads, it seems to be a very ambitious and interesting project. Very rarely do you see people trying to get together to spread information out to the web in such a fashion. The major problem in my (and I can imagine in their) mind is of format? How can you accomodate the mythical layman's and his or her inherent lack of skill, and still have it be available for advanced researchers to make use of.

It seems that there is simply going to be a huge amount of data-cross referenced and collated. From the second page of the article, it seems to include pictoral data. I also hear talk of XML being thrown around, which is a good start, but there's a lot that goes into that transition. Are they looking to set the layman bar at "your novice astronomer", "the third grade science report", or "grad student". Where is this information really being targeted at the sub-obscure level.

While I don't want to trivialize their massive IT effort, it seems that a lot of this is going to come down to the end user of the data. Their sample study using this information isn't trivial stuff, and does seem to set the aforementioned bar at somewhere in the undergrad-graduate level. Perhaps that is the nature of the data (I'm not that familiar with it). There's an XML schema, some request examples, and other framework stuff already in place to view by potential client writers.

I'm glad to see XML being done the right way (by collaboration with its end users), and those pictures /numbers being available for public research. Maybe someone will throw together an inverse Terraserver or something with Whiz-bang true-layman appeal. Until then, the geeks bow at the effort, because man, space is BIG.

Anyone closer to the project know of any simplification efforts?

--jaybonci

Just a second... to save the race from the Singularity? The Singularity is a good thing. If you read Vinge's essay, or any of the other essays on the subject, you'll find that people look forward to this event and are actively trying to move the date forward. One fellow says that the definition of morally good is that which makes the Singularity happen sooner.

(There's a lot of interesting things at the Singularity Institute by the way.)

So either the poster is on crack, or ve represents a new and radically different perspective on the Singularity than I have ever seen in print. Which is it?

I'm not with Xcor any more.

There's a list of 'delta-v's here.

Her breasts weren't *that* large, I think that bizarre suit they whipped up for her was responsible for half of it. As a sex symbol (an icy one) she was OK, but I intensely disliked the ridiculous high heels they had her wear. (Look like I'm not the only grump about this point. One fan insists the heels are "irony" :)

I just read Koenig/Chekov's book "Warped Factors" from the library. It's fairly entertaining and talks some about Roddenberry's influence/ One comment, there or elsewhere, was that his relationships with women tended to be physical rather than intellectual. However, I get the sense from Majel Barett that she is not an airhead. I also sensed that Rick Berman was a strong influence in later years, and perhaps a bit of an asshole.

Yes, I agree Sisko was a somewhat uneven character (as was Picard, at his worst in any number of season 1-3 episodes, and at his best in "The Inner Light" wherein via a probe's intervention he lives a lifetime as a member of a dying civilization -- I can't imagine ever being the ame after such a wrenching experience). FWIW Avery Brooks appeared ambivalent about playing the role. My wife loved the deep space "Hawk" -- not a person to fsck around with.

..electrolytic capacitors have a fixed lifetime and are by nature unreliable.

You guys are all full of crap.

On Star Trek they use flux capacitors which I presume are far more reliable than your Fancy Pants, Big City tantalum or electrolyte capacitors.

It is only mentioned briefly in the article, but I'll try to elaborate.

Basically gravity waves will stretch space in one direction (say x) and contract space in a perpendicular direction (y). Given this, the "easiest" way to detect gravity waves is to build a very large interferometer. LIGO is the current ongoing gravity wave interferometer, which splits one laser beam into two lasers beams, sending each perpendicularly down a vacuum "hallway" four kilometers long. At the end, the beams are reflected by mirrors. The two lasers meet again after another 4km.

The two beams are recombined afterwards. If the distances the two travel are exactly equal, then the two beams will interfere constructively. But if the lengths which the two beams are stretched/contracted by a passing gravity wave, the beams will interfere since one will be "shifted" (it had to travel a longer/shorter distance. By measuring the interference pattern between theses two beams, and hopefully physicists will be able to detect a gravity wave.

The amount that a gravity wave will shrink/extent one of the beam lines is amazingly small. Each 4km beam line will have it's distance changed by 10^-18 meters, or on the scale of attometers! Because of this, any vibration or local variation will affect the beam length. So the physics who are part of the LIGO collaboration built two such laser devices, one in Livingston, Louisiana and the other in Hanford, Washington. When a gravity wave (from outer space) travels through the earth, hopefully both sites will measure the same small variation, which will correspond to a passing gravity wave.

You can get more information about LIGO at:
LIGO's Home Page

LIGO collaboration page.

Slashdot recently had a science story about LIGO.

Oh, by the way it was the New Kind of Science book, not the Mathematica book that I read ;)

At any rate, I found some cool analysis tools that people should check out as alternatives to Mathematica for analysis and visualization of everything from battlebots to cellular automata. Without further ado:

1. PDL
2. R
3. PGPlot
4. GRASS

PDL is the most directly analagous to Mathematica or Matlab. R is, of course, like S/S+. PGPlot is for visualization. Grass is mostly for geostatistics/GIS. But it's cool enough to throw in the mix.

Anyhow, hope this helps someone out. Go forth and make a battlebot.

Hey, that's what I did my PhD thesis work in! :-)

Aluminum is the largest component of the most easily formed
"quasicrystals", and this analysis seems to be yet another indication that the seemingly normal metal face-centered-cubic structure of alumnium is actually not very far removed from some quite strange states of matter. Further evidence is right there on the periodic table - gallium, just below Al, has one of the strangest ground-state structures of any metal, and melts at a balmy 35 degrees Celsius!

For those who have access, I actually wrote a paper on this over 10 years ago... ah the memories...

This is obviously a richly researched topic with lots of published papers. Some of them talk about new algorithms for tackling the complex dynamics you're talking about. And of course there's always Moore's Law; the computers used for Apollo missions were about as powerful as (or maybe much less than?) Palm Pilots.

It's probably quite feasible to give the L1 station a radio link to an orbital mechanics cluster on the ground, which can be as big as is needed, and could run equations of motion for a couple dozen nearby orbits in faster-than-real-time.

Here at Caltech the CS department is into this kind of thing.

They've even built a nearly complete MIPS 3000 compatible processor using async logic.

Seems pretty cool, but I'm waiting for some company to expend the resources to implement a more current processor (such as the PowerPC 970 perhaps) in this fashion.

Here at Caltech the CS department is into this kind of thing.

They've even built a nearly complete MIPS 3000 compatible processor using async logic.

Seems pretty cool, but I'm waiting for some company to expend the resources to implement a more current processor (such as the PowerPC 970 perhaps) in this fashion.

The largest ascynchronous project (to my knowledge)is the MiniMips that was developed at Caltech 1997 and has 1.5 M transistors. It was modelled after the R3000 mips architecture.
The best selling larg scale asynchronous circuit seems to be a micro controler that Philips developed and used in a pager series.

There's even a cool Escher print based on it.

Annual Robowar tournament champs

I believe the Japanese guy that received the prize worked at the Super-Kamiokande detector that damaged half of its photo-multiplyer tubes in a big implosion.

Famous quote at the time of the incident: Thank goodness we got our Nobel already cooking