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My school offers a grad-level Quantum Computing class (that of course can be taken by undergrads), Ph/CS 219, which ya may wanna check out. The page seems to have some pretty useful information, including lecture notes, homeworks, references, etc. Its prerequisites are Ph 129, a class on Mathematical Methods of Physics, which in turn has the prerequisites Ph 106 (Topics in Classical Physics), and ACM 95 (Introductory Methods of Applied Mathematics) or Ma 108 (Classical Analysis).

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This reminds me of an interesting article by Vernor Vinge (sci fi writer and Com Sci Prof?) about the possibility of creating superhuman intelligence.

Its a thought provoking article if you have the time to read it
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html

The problem with this statement is that you're claiming to have all-knowing knowledge of physics and chemistry which we don't. According to the "cold fusion" experiments, they amount of neutrons they detected was 10 times less than would be expected if nuclear fusion was occuring...so perhaps that is why they are still alive. If these effects are cold fusion then a theoretical explanation will have to be developed that explains it. Other weird effects such as the Mossbauer effect and high temperature superconductivity were also things which were not thought to be possible though they were more readily accepted. No doubt, the huge media blitz that surrounded the publicity on the initial cold fusion experiments killed any mainstream acceptance of this field.

Read this essay about cold fusion from a non-believer. He gives a very fair portrayal of cold fusion. It's pros and cons and does go on to say that he doesn't believe in it but he does believe that one of the people doing research in this field is doing ethical, careful research that seems to yield promising results. The author of this essay is a physicist and not an electrochemist.

http://www.caltech.edu/~goodstein/fusion.html

Also in the essay the author notes that cold fusion researchers consistently get positive results when they dope the palladium rods with enough deuterium that the ratio of deuterium to palladium is above 0.85.

I am also not a believer in cold fusion. I don't know if it's for real or not but I prefer to keep an open mind especially if they are doing careful experiments and getting positive encouraging results. It is better for them to actually try and see what is there then to ignore it and hope it goes away.

either Verner Vinge's Singularity or this stem cell research ... either way, it looks like i've got a decent shot at immortality. cool. this whole religion thing may become deprecated yet.

Don't leave Ricketts out of this- when they weren't blowing things up they had time for the tunnels too.

As a Caltech student, I can definitely affirm the accounts of the great steam tunnel tradition. The house most famous for this sort of thing is Blacker.

One fine day, we decieded we needed a faster intranet between the north and south houses for the trading of DivX, porn, and such [shared 10BaseT just does not cut it anymore]. So, the most obvious solution was to set up some routers (FreeBSD and Linux) and drop some gigabit cable. (we only had 100BaseT NICs, but we got a good deal on the cat 5e)

Of course, it was wonderful to have relatively easy access to the tunnels, enabling us to run the cable quickly, neatly, and safely.

Here's some wonderful pictures of the whole thing. The tunnels became quite constricted in some areas, so we had to protect our buddy from the elements (asbestos, spiders, god knows what) as he crawled in the dirt underneath the students houses.

Preparing...

Ready to go..

Anticipation

Success!!

As a Caltech student, I can definitely affirm the accounts of the great steam tunnel tradition. The house most famous for this sort of thing is Blacker.

One fine day, we decieded we needed a faster intranet between the north and south houses for the trading of DivX, porn, and such [shared 10BaseT just does not cut it anymore]. So, the most obvious solution was to set up some routers (FreeBSD and Linux) and drop some gigabit cable. (we only had 100BaseT NICs, but we got a good deal on the cat 5e)

Of course, it was wonderful to have relatively easy access to the tunnels, enabling us to run the cable quickly, neatly, and safely.

Here's some wonderful pictures of the whole thing. The tunnels became quite constricted in some areas, so we had to protect our buddy from the elements (asbestos, spiders, god knows what) as he crawled in the dirt underneath the students houses.

Preparing...

Ready to go..

Anticipation

Success!!

Here's the corresponding Caltech link:
http://www.caltech.edu/events/mitcit/citmit.html

-Chris

Caltech and MIT are joining forces to create a reliable and uniform voting system. I have far more confidence in their effort than in any matter in which Microsoft is involved.

Plus, there some other folks working on the same sort of thing. They call them "Hyper-Redundant Robots". http://robby.caltech.edu/pictures.html

check http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~john/computer/hk/ for example patch for console mode

There are some photos of MEMS mirrors at CalTech and Bell Labs, and page 90 of the January Scientific American.

And here, have a link to various mission profiles complete with some graphics of return tragectories:

Free Return Trajectories for Mars Missions
Mars Exploration Strategies
Exploration of Mars

I don't post often on Slashdot, but I think that this article hits close enough to home that I really should. I hope that I can bring some perspective to those working with or who have "gifted" children. I have some recommendations based on my experience at the bottom of this post that you should read if you aren't interested in wading through this entire post.

I've been characterized as "gifted" youth for as long as I can remember. I was enrolled in an accelerated program here in the Seattle School District called APP. Although the coursework was a bit more challenging than in the regular programs, I was still quite bored. Because of this, I forged ahead, teaching myself Trig and BASIC at 11, Calculus and OOP with C++ at 12. This was really enjoyable, but there was always a big discontinuity between what was being taught in classes and what I was interested in learning.

A solution to this problem was discovered by my parents, who found out about a program run here in Seattle called the Early Entrance Program which takes kids under 15 and, after one year of very rigorous preparation at "Transition School," sends them into the UW as regular students. To get in, one has to take the SAT and school higher than 1300. I did that, and proceeded to enroll in this program.

The other kids were VERY talented, and it was strange to go from the top of the class to the middle (and sometimes the bottom!). And they were what you'd expect: geeks. I don't mean to say that as a derogatory comment, but basically they were very technical, very smart kids who didn't place a big emphasis on social skills and following mainstream trends. This wasn't true across the board, but it was the majority of the class. It was an interesting experience, and I made friends with quite a few, but I had more than the usual number of personality conflicts with others.

I left out a few details here and there, but for those of you that are interested in hearing more, take a look at this page by someone who enrolled in the program and dropped out. It's a few years old, but fairly accurate.

Anyway, college was interesting, though I felt kind of burned out (at 14!). My friends were still mostly kids from the program, and I didn't integrate well into the college environment. That started to change sophomore year, when I was able to convince my parents to let me move into the dorms. This was one of the most pivotal moments of my life, because I socialized with normal people and I got out of an environment that was extremely focused on academic success and got into one that was more about being happy (and by that I don't mean drinking all day either!). My experience in the dorms changed my perspective on EEP as well, because the closer I looked at the people that graduated from the program, the more flaws I saw in the entire process.

I found that a lot of people were graduating with 3.9+ GPAs but were unable to find jobs in the real world. I found that a lot of people were going directly into grad school without knowing why they were doing it. I found that a lot of people were sacrificing so much of their life and of their childhood without knowing what they wanted to do. These are 16 year olds living life from test to test without any long-term perspective. Quite frankly, a lot of these kids should have stayed in high school instead of coming to the UW so early. They simply weren't ready, and when they graduated, they weren't ready for the real world either.

When it really comes down to it, my advice boils down to two phrases: Be Practical, Be Well-Rounded.

My most important piece of advice: Human civilization consists of PEOPLE. As talented as this kid is, he NEEDS to be able to get along with other people. And it doesn't matter what field he's in, there's still plenty of networking and politics in research sciences! He needs to have the skills not only to do what he likes (technical stuff), but he also needs to be able to communicate what he's done. If he doesn't master those skills, he'll probably end up managed by people much less intelligent than him (maybe even the jocks that terrorize smart kids in grade school!).

Getting him involved in sports, getting him to experience normal things that a typical 9 year old would experience is a great idea. It's a good idea to encourage his abilities, but make sure that he gets that same level of encouragement in other activities that an intelligent adult might look on as "unnecessary."

As for me, I'm graduating at 19 (I'm 18 now) in Applied Math. I had to take a few quarters off here and there to "find myself" but it's been worth it. I don't need to graduate a full 4 years ahead anyway! I'm planning on going to a top business school after a few years, and I'm doing as much schmoozing as I can to make that dream a reality. Additionally, I'm starting a EEP Student Association with a few other students to make sure that this knowledge that I've gained through a few quarters of horrible grades gets spread to the younger EEP students. I think that they have a lot more to learn about the world than they think they do.

Thanks for reading.

Not in my lifetime. Nor anyone else's. This sounds like the same mistake that Bill Gates made.
--
Paul Gillingwater

Kinda reminds me of my first astronomy class. I hadn't even made it to my freshman year of high school and I had 4 credits of Astronomy from the local community college.

Many people have given good advice above. I'll mainly just second their comments. The order I'd proceed in is.

First item, a good beginners star atlas.

Second item, warm clothing.

Third item, many nights in the country just learning the stars and constelations.

After that go and get a good pair of binoculars or a good telescope.

Last, but not least. As your doughter is so young, you will need to be there as a source of infromation. You'll need to learn alot to help guide her in the early years.

Now for some Links. The first two have good beginners information. Some of the links below may be dead. I just quick cut and pasted them from the astronomy section of my Interesting Places page.

• Astronomy Mag. (www.astronomy.com/home.asp).
• Sky & Telescope Mag. (www.skypub.com).
• Minnesota Astronomical Society (MAS) (www.mnastro.org).
• The Telescope Shoppe (www.telescopeshop.com), 3402 Federal Dr., Eagan, MN, 651-688-7335. Yes this is a local Twin Cities telescope shop. They have a map on their site showing where they are. They are tucked in the lower level along the side of the strip mall they are in. The store is small and easy to miss. If your at the corner of Yankee Doodle RD and Federal Dr., park in the lot to the south east. They are a short stones throw from the intersection.
• Telescope making links
• • Many good links on making AltAz mounts (zebu.uoregon.edu/~mbartels/altaz/altaz.html).
  • ATM's resource List (www.freenet.tlh.fl.us/~blombard).
• Astronomy-Mall.com (www.astronomy-mall.com/Astronomy-Mall).
• Stellafane (www.stellafane.com).
• Terrestrial Planet Finder (tpf.jpl.nasa.gov).
• Many Images of the moon (www.seds.org/nineplanets/nineplanets/pxmoon.html) .
• Solar Views (www.solarviews.com).
• Planetary Image Atlas (www-pdsimage.JPL.NASA.GOV/PDS/public/Atlas).
• Hubble Space Telescope Archive (oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.html).
• Hummble Site (hubble.stsci.edu).
• StarStuff (www.starstuff.org).
• SpaceRef (www.spaceref.com), Your space refference.
• Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive (antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html).
• SkyView (skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov) virtual observatory.
• 2MASS (www.ipac.caltech.edu/2mass/) and (pegasus.astro.umass.edu/GradProg/2mass.html) Two Micron All Sky Survey.
• Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment (LASCO) (http://lasco-www.nrl.navy.mil/lasco.html).
• AAVSO Network to Search for Optical Counterparts of Gamma-Ray Bursts (www.aavso.org/grb.stm).
• High Altitude Observatory (www.hao.ucar.edu).
• Asteroid Comet Impact Hazards (impact.arc.nasa.gov).
• • Unusual Minor Planets (cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/Unusual.html).
  • Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/PHACloseApp.html).& nbsp; Of particular interest to me are LB16 and AN10 which will pass at a distance closer than the moon's orbit. LB16 currently only has one opposition charted so it's predicted orbit will likely change as new data comes in. It's expected to swing by in 2004. In 2027 AN10 will visit earth. It's orbit is calculated with three oppositions meaning it't much more likely to really showup ontime and in place. With further data LB16 could either get closer or farther away. When AN10's orbit was first predicted (only one opposition at the time) it's error envelope included earth. With further data it was found to just pass within the moon's orbit and miss the earth.
  • Forthcoming Close Approaches To The Earth (cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/CloseApp.html).&nbs p; This is the document to look at when you want to know who will visit next and how far away. It has all close approaches to 0.2 AU away from earth or within 20% of the distance of between the sun and earth. On Sep 19th, 2000 we will have a visiter at 0.0477 AU and on Oct 31st anotehr one will pass at 0.07386 AU. LB16 and AN10 are expected to pass at around 0.25% of the distance between the sun and earth.
• Mars Global Surveyor (mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/index.html).
• Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) (ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/mola.html). There are full data on the shape of Mars including 1 degree and .5 degree elevation data sets.
• Planetary photojournal by JPL (photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov).
• NASA's Origins Program (origins.jpl.nasa.gov).

My first job after high school was a minimum wage job pumping gas at a full service Shell gas station and car wash.

Average employee turnover was about a week. I stayed for six weeks, so it didn't take long to get seniority.

My manager said "Anybody gives you any trouble, you send them to me." so that's what I did.

And what would he do? He shook his fist at them and told them to get the fuck off his gas station or he'd pummel them.

Took care of irate customers pretty quick. We were grossing $20,000 per day, so losing a $10/day customer wasn't a big deal compared to losing a trained - and, more important - competent employee who'd already lasted longer than a week.

Now that's morale boosting!

And I didn't quit because of the low pay or working conditions or anything. I told the manager I had to leave to study astronomy at CalTech. He suggested he put me back on swing shift and I could bring my telescope to the gas lot (which was in the middle of the city!)

I explained this wasn't really how one did professional astronomy these days... at CalTech I ended up getting to observe with the 60" and 200" telescopes at Palomar Mountain.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

• I like Liet/Kynes in the miniseries more than in the Lynch film: he feels like much more of a wildcard politically, and much more the quintessential geek/nerd that would be a career ecologist in the first place.
• Interesting they're using an Egyptian/Byzantine motif for Arrakis scenery & sets instead of the Arabic feel the Lynch film did (inspired because Herbert wrote the novel Dune based on the life of Mohammed and the historical origin of Islam).
  
• The Atreides look leans towards British/Austrian military uniforms and is interesting (although the huge epaulets they put on Paul's outfits are just stupid). Loved Princess Irulan's butterfly geisha court dress (and speaking of Irulan, did they just send for Uma Thurman's little sister or what?) The Sardaukar outfits look pretty good, even with the oversized floppy black berets. Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen gets the "worst-dressed" award for that stupid little paper triangle - what is he supposed to be, a Japanese lantern? I like the stillsuits as a significant improvement over the rubber fetish outfits of Lynch's film, though. I want the Baron Harkonnen's metal fan for Christmas, too (accessorize, accessorize...). And I like the loose braid & metal tipped hair of the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother in the first scene - her "hat" loosely reminds me of a cardinal's headgear in Catholicism.
  
• The hand weaponry was wrong for shield work: should have been straight like a dirk, not wavy like a kukri crossed with a bowie blade. Epees and misericordes, that's what you'd need with kinetic energy shields.
  
• Also why were the Fremen's eyes glowing brilliant blue, like firefly bright? It looked like they had blue glowsticks under their eyelids. If they'd cut the brilliance value down a bit it'd look a bit more realistic. Graeme Revell's score is pleasant, and appropriate.
  
• It goes without saying I was slightly disappointed the overdecorated Chapman Stick used as a baliset in the Lynch film was replaced by a mere ordinary lute in this miniseries, but I'm biased because I play a Stick, ok?
  
• The actor playing Paul Atreides was annoying at first, and settled into the character nicely. He's not Kyle McLachlan, but he's pretty good. I wasn't sure about William Hurt, who can be hit or miss sometimes, but he did well. I thought actress portraying the Shadout Mapes was ok, but Linda Hunt's portrayal in the Lynch film was definitive for me (Hunt is one of my favorite character actors). Duncan Idaho was well-portrayed. Thufir Hawat was better done in the Lynch film. The Guild ship was nicely done, and accurate to the book.
  
• I liked the ducted-fan look of the ornithopters, I liked the sandworms (maybe not more than I did the sandworms in the Lynch film, but the Lynch sandworms were fantastic - these are quite satisfactory).
• The mentats lacked the stained lips they should have had, and the sort-of-uniform they wore didn't adequately present them for me (also, it'd be nice for at least some hint somewhere of what is a mentat and why every nobleman has one around - I'm not asking for a full explanation of the Butlerian Jihad).
  
• Anyone else notice the Shakespearean touches and echoes, especially the habit of Baron Harkonnen's closing lines rhyming? Shakespeare does that to close at least every act, if not every scene of every act.
  

Pitch detection is a simple FFT (Fast Fourier Transform). You can use Matlab or rip the code from Numerical Recipies. Note that you'll most likely want to do the STFT (Short Time Fourier Transform) if you want to detect "notes".

Tempo detection is a little trickier but still not that bad. You can take a local autocorrelation of the signal. From this, you should see some periodic hills and valleys. (as well as some noise... good time for a low pass filter?) To figure out the periodicity of the autocorrelation, we use our old friend the FFT again!

These are the sorts of tricks that Winamp plugins and dancing robots use.

Spoofing to NATted boxes into talking UDP is much easier than TCP 'cause of the lack of sequence numbers and other byproducts of guaranteed delivery. There' a great page about it at http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/ ~da nk/peer-nat.html.
--

I attended the Virtual Observatories of the Future conference this past summer and would like to note that:

• Jim Gray has been collabortaing with the astronomical data community for some time.
• The spacial-indexing schemes Jim helped develop for Terraserver will be key to performant queries for a Virtual Observatory
• Jim Gray was well-known in the database community as the guru of pe rforman ce metrics, long before joining Microsoft

The take-home lesson from the Virtual Observatories conference was that the amount of data required to do science with a "virtual observatory" leads to interesting problems in computer science, problems which are only tractable when analyzed by collaborations between statisticians, computer science people, and the astronomers themselves.

Finally, note that this year's historic increase in the National Science Foundation budget is largely due to the new Information Technology Research Initiative. The need for new methods of data managment in the sciences is real.

But apart from Microsoft's involvement (and the idea has been batted around the astro community for years, it's nothing new), assembling the whole lot in one place *is* a big step up from all those disparate collections which currently exist. It's like the move from BBS's to the Internet - the "barriers to entry" are so much lower that it becomes easy to use (and so will be used) rather than tedious (and so is used only by the cognoscenti).

Check out the National Virtual Observatory (really should be International VO) . This is not a M$ project; it's a new effort among astronomical data centers to do a lot of what you're asking about.
-- tdk

Having discussed extensively design possibilities with the big walker operator and worked a bit on a Walking robot repairs with him while with SRL (www.srl.org), I can attest that the Honda robot is definately an impressive achievement. Stable walking is difficult enough on tripedal and quadropedal robots, and the hacking done at SRL only succeeded in 2 and 3 legged robots, with not much hill-climbing ability, and only moderate speeds. The feedback circuitry and balancing techniques needed for a biped like the Honda robot is, sadly, not yet within reach of even the sophisticated hackers without a ton of money.

The Honda robot qualifies as an "impressive start"... its 2.0km/h speed of the Honda robot is not impressive for a lightweight tri or quad walker, but it is for a bipedal robot of human size.
The fact that it can climb stairs is especially cool, given the extensive rebalancing done every moment in a step, and the feedback sensors needed to read these motions properly.

Certainly there are lifting robots which can hoist many tons, so the 5.0kg/hand weight limit seems skimpy - but not when considering that this machine can allegedly walk and perform complex arm manipulations while holding this weight. Sadly, its continuous runtime before recharge is only 30 minutes, but I suspect later versions will take advantage of increasing innovation in charge/weight ratios in batteries, and perhaps solar panels for space use (an obvious application of these robots would be EVAs for the ISS or other craft).

Cool, in terms of integration with other systems, is the use of wireless ethernet as the comm standard, rather than some proprietary system. This means this robot could be controlled by base-station systems of arbitrary complexity - including a Beowulf cluster running a complex AI system like Webmind. This means that while technology is not quite there yet to put any advanced computational intelligence inside a biped robot, it can be controlled by advanced systems running at fixed-position stations through LAN technology - a good compromise in terms of merging the state-of-the-art in Robotics with AI to try to build towards a better convergence.

Regarding the robustness, it appears that the 25 minutes of runtime is the primary limitation in terms of continuous operation - there is no data I was able to find on failure rates or the fault tolerance of the sensors or computational systems on-board.

As for hacks vs. new general purpose algorithsm... They obviously do not reveal tremendous amounts of details, but suffice it to say that the engineering done to build 3 successive models of bipedal robots that can walk and climb (stairs, hills) represents fundamental work in robot dynamics engineering which, while parameter tweaked for this robot's operations, is certainly applicable (with some tweaks or modifications, as with all engineering techniques) to other bipedal robot applications.

The wireless lan comm technology, improved user interface (over the previous version), and sensor systems are all also certainly reusable in similar robots (indeed, likely also in multi-legged robots).

However, as it is a commercial product AND I do not read Japanese, I was not able to find any papers on specific algorithms to give a more detailed analysis...

Here are some useful resources I did find:

The official site in English

An article about the robot's walking functions

Images of the robot at UIUC

Biped Robots in General

Robodex Robotics Conference

I would just like to note there are a number of cluster surveys going on out there. Including one, called the REFLEX survey, that uses the same data, the ROSAT All Sky Survey, as the MACS survey as a starting point.

What makes cluster surveys interesting is not just the scientific output but the various means of finding clusters people are trying. For example, the MACS survey mentioned above uses a Voronoi tesselation of the original X-ray data to detect and find sources. Other surveys use wavelet techniques, such as the SHARC survey (to pick one out of the air) or adaptive kernel smoothing, such as the Northern Sky Optical Cluster Survey.

Is it a bit odd to see what I do for a living on /.

... about accelerating technology. Much better than Joy's whining self-praise.

It's not just shooting up mice and Mad Cow Disease- all those biotech people are clamoring for more computing power. But now that they've sequenced the whole human genome, does our pal J. Craig at Celera really know what to do with more computing power? I'd give dollars to donuts that he'd waste it on a UT server, while people like Stephen Mayo and his research group at CalTech are drooling over power like this.

Hot biotech now isn't about sequencing the genome, it's trying to decide what to do with the sequence now that there is a blueprint to work from. Thus companies like Incyte Genomics and Sangamo Biosciences are making money selling tools to build on or manipulate the structure we already have.

A machine running code that will reliably predict the actual folded tertiary structure of the unique protein that derives from any known sequence of DNA is the holy grail of biotech today. Maybe this IBM box (or should I call it a house?) is a step in that direction.

A while ago, I got interested in various ways of calculating Pi and saw some of the discoveries made by simon plouffe (this guy memorized the first 5000 places of pi), especially the one he found that allows him to calculate the n-th hexadecimal place of pi without having to get the n-1 places first : this is called digit extraction ,and was kind of unexpected before it was discovered !
There is also a nice little formula from Ramanujan that is an exact sum from 0 to +infinity of Pi
At rank 0, it's got 6 places correct, and it adds 8 correct places each time you increment it (cool eh !)
A couple of Pi links :
Plouffe algorithm
Ramanujan's formula

Remember the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth? They're composed of energetic charged particles (protons and electrons), excited to high energies by the magnetosphere, and are held in their spiraling paths by the terrestrial magnetic field. Before they were discovered (in the late 50's, by James Van Allen), people like Werner Von Braun had planned to put manned satellites in a two-hour orbit -- about 1075 miles up. This turned out to be in the lower Van Allen belt, and the radiation hazard was far too great for safety, so manned spaceflight now is generally in orbits below 250 or 300 miles.

But it's Jupiter we're talking about, and the jovian magnetic field is much stronger than Earth's; the jovian equivalent of the Van Allen belts are millions of times more energetic than the terrestrial belts. Just to give you an idea of what this means to people, compare the exposure at Jupiter (say, in the neighborhood of Io) to that around Earth.

When the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, they had to penetrate the Van Allen belts twice, going out and coming back; in doing so, they received about 2 rem radiation dose. This isn't too much: the U.S. limits radiation workers to about 25 times this, each year, based on the cancer risk. When you talk acute doses -- say, you do a pass by Io, which is in the middle of the jovian belts -- the whole-body exposure which is 50% fatal within 30 days (when untreated) is around 250-300 rad (under these circumstances, 1 rad ~ 1 rem).

Jupiter's radiation belts are millions of times stronger than Earth's, so if an astronaut spent the same time in them (about 3 hours total on a lunar mission -- but Jupiter's much larger, and so your speed would have to be hugely greater to make the transit in that time) they'd get an exposure of millions of rem. In other words, they'd be dead almost immediately -- an exposure of mere seconds would probably be lethal.

Galileo is radiation-hardened, since it was intended to survive in this environment; however, it's been there for almost three times its design limit, and it must be getting pretty fried by now. As a matter of fact, last year when it made its first really close flyby of Io, there was concern that the radiation would corrupt the computer memory and cause it to go into safe mode, or blind the camera's CCD. When that didn't happen, everyone was relieved -- and they promptly did it again!

The radiation environment is severe enough that they actually expect the spacecraft to be physically destroyed in a few hundred million years, if they left it in Jupiter orbit.

---

Here's a way to make it even more effective: make some small changes to the letter to make it into a petition. (You can see my version (in plain text) here.) Print it out and take it to work/school with you. (Assumedly, many of you spend great quantities of your time in geek-saturated areas. Leave it on the bulletin board, with a short note asking people to sign it. Come back in a few days, put it in an envelope and mail it. Tada! Instant activism.

abszero

(also, on a side note, the treaty, if broadly interpreted, threatens to render large sections of theoretical number theory illegal.)

Royalties are based on the number of books sold, no? If there is a boycott of the book, fewer copies will be sold, no? So you will get fewer royalties, no? So, encouraging a boycott of your own book/publisher hurts you financially, no?

I could explain it again if you want....

Relating to open-source textbooks, there's a very good, anti-copyrighted text on applied mathematics here. It was written over the author's many years of TAing the required applied math course at Caltech.

There is more information on the LIGO site: http://www.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/news /00 10han.

• Do you use a micro controller or is the device connected to the PC while running ?

• How do you supply power/control to the rotating parts (the LEDs)?

• How do you read out the instantaneous angle of the LEDs ?

• Is the software available?

The ROPOD (ROtating POlar Display) is a similar device, only the screen is a spinning disc rather than a rotating cylinder, making this one of the few displays to use a polar coordinate system. It's also capable of quite a bit more than telling time; the resolution is much higher, and the author has software that can decode a compressed animation format for video display. Follow the link for photos etc..

The coolest thing about the ROPOD is that it's this huge, whirling, rickety contraption that makes bystanders fear for their lives...

Far from true. The mikes used in this paper, "There's life above 20 KHz!", certainly were capable of this.

Secondly, most speakers won't crank out those high frequencies without a severe falloff in response: the high-end Genelec 1038A triamped monitor gets you 33-20k Hz (-3dB). (http://www.genelec.com/products/1038a/1038a.htm)

Also not true. Unless there is a low-pass filter to prevent sending higher-frequency signal to the tweeters, most amplifiers, speaker wire, and drivers will gladly play sounds upwards of 100KHz. Whether it is necessarily FLAT is another story, as most people don't optimize (or even measure) flatness above 20k.

The best reason for Super CD (or DVD or whatever) is higher bit depth, NOT higher sampling rate; going from 16/44.1 (CD quality) to 24/44.1 takes just 50% more space, for nontrivially better quality, while going from 16/44.1 to 16/88.2 brings minimal benefit at a 100% space penalty.

This is probably true, except that "minimal" may be too harsh a term. Have YOU ever done a careful comparison between a 16/44.1 recording and a 16/88.2 recording? (I have!) On a somewhat-related note, it is remarkably interesting what effect a more accurate clock signal has on the quality of a 44.1KHz recording. The human ear can distinguish playback when the timing of these samples being played back varies by as little as 10^-10 seconds!

The reality is that the human ear's ability to differentiate is remarkably more subtle and complex than the market (and marketeers) would have you believe.

The Gale secure messaging service is in version 0.99a. FAQ. The name is a takeoff on MIT Zephyr. Goals include scalability as well as security. The Gale documentation has a page comparing Other secure instant messaging systems.

Extropians: Randists, only
more so.

Singularity: Explained here.

Read all of that and digest. It's fun.

I've had excellent service from Speakeasy as well. They quoted me 13 days from order to working DSL, and delivered, despite a change in what I requested as far as IP addresses during mid-order. I have 608/128 ADSL. There was apparently one glitch in the installation, the Covad installer placed a phone call and cleared it up in about four minutes, too fast for me to actually know what the issue was. During the 13 days their status page gave me complete visibility into what was happening behind the scenes. A nice touch.

I've also only called customer service once (for a service change, not for a problem) and someone actually answered the phone promptly.

Finally, they did a POP migration on me a while back, which did require an IP addr. change. In their defense, they gave me lots of warning and a choice of transition times, and the transition was smooth and problem-free.

Contrast this with my experiences getting ISDN installed by PacBell.

--j

So shut up.

From my sources, this was done a long time ago. There's a Caltech press release entitled "The DNA Double Helix Conducts Current as a Molecular Wire" that was released 11/11/1993. You can go to Caltech's site and search for 'DNA conduct' and you'll see it's there.

Further, there's an research brief at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (who knew we had such an institute?) from 1997 talking about the same thing.

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

From my sources, this was done a long time ago. There's a Caltech press release entitled "The DNA Double Helix Conducts Current as a Molecular Wire" that was released 11/11/1993. You can go to Caltech's site and search for 'DNA conduct' and you'll see it's there.

Further, there's an research brief at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (who knew we had such an institute?) from 1997 talking about the same thing.

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

The Code is Speeh Corporation is an organization that is totally dedicated to ensuring that code is treated as speechand that software regarded as such remain totally free.

I briefly worked as a tech for Carver Mead, the man behind Foveon

One of Carver's best known works are his books on VLSI (published in the early days before some of us were even born.) and analog VLSI and neural systems.

His research group did some really interesting technology including silicon retina which simulated the eye's tendency to detect motions and edges.

Foveon products probably won't show up in your handheld cameras anytime soon. But for professional environments, it takes beautiful images that minimize image artifcats that are typically associated with digital imagers.

I briefly worked as a tech for Carver Mead, the man behind Foveon

One of Carver's best known works are his books on VLSI (published in the early days before some of us were even born.) and analog VLSI and neural systems.

His research group did some really interesting technology including silicon retina which simulated the eye's tendency to detect motions and edges.

Foveon products probably won't show up in your handheld cameras anytime soon. But for professional environments, it takes beautiful images that minimize image artifcats that are typically associated with digital imagers.

I briefly worked as a tech for Carver Mead, the man behind Foveon

One of Carver's best known works are his books on VLSI (published in the early days before some of us were even born.) and analog VLSI and neural systems.

His research group did some really interesting technology including silicon retina which simulated the eye's tendency to detect motions and edges.

Foveon products probably won't show up in your handheld cameras anytime soon. But for professional environments, it takes beautiful images that minimize image artifcats that are typically associated with digital imagers.

I briefly worked as a tech for Carver Mead, the man behind Foveon

One of Carver's best known works are his books on VLSI (published in the early days before some of us were even born.) and analog VLSI and neural systems.

His research group did some really interesting technology including silicon retina which simulated the eye's tendency to detect motions and edges.

Foveon products probably won't show up in your handheld cameras anytime soon. But for professional environments, it takes beautiful images that minimize image artifcats that are typically associated with digital imagers.

1) Lack of multithreading/multiprocessing capability.

2) Memory allocation is very non-intuitive.

3) Exception handling is almost non-existant.

4) The blasted turtle never does what you want.

I would suggest (and I think my views are shared by a large percentage of the computer industry) that a better programming language for large-scale, team based software design must combine the data abstration of COBOL with the versatility of INTERCAL.

I don't know, maybe we should ask Bill Gates?

From http://www.vi s.caltech.edu/~pz/letters-from-the-front/bill-gate s.html:

"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." (Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, Viking Penguin (1995), p. 265.)

--

They were expected to have the programs run on the lab computers where the class was taught (IBM PC/XT's - this was in the early 80's) but if the student wanted to run their code on a Vax and transfer it over somehow we weren't stopping them.

This worked in part because what we were teaching was the algorithms - first and second order approximations, the Runge-Kutta method and so on. The student was expected to know and demonstrate the algorithm, not a particular language.

BTW, the class was not a programming course, but the students were not expected to know how to program when they started the class. There were texts on programming languages made available, and they were just expected to pick up the language as they went along. Learning a language in this course was a required skill but not the objective taught in the class, much like learning how to use the editors on the lab machines.

BTW - looking at the web page now it looks like the class has advanced considerably since I taught it (they use Maple and Mathematica) but it looks like you don't get a choice of programming language anymore.