Slashdot Mirror

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.

I had my own go at realtime processing this summer when I was trying to write a data collection driver for my research group that would do signal processing in kernel space to achieve low latencies. That stumbled when I found out that you can't do floating point operations in kernel space (and last I checked, you couldn't in RTLinux either.) That KILLS most signal processing. Implementing the filters using integers wasn't fun, and it wound up slower than same filters in user space (though the latency is better.)

The various low-latency patches, on the other hand, just require a process to be setuid root, and to request realtime priority--other than that the implementation is the same as any other program. MUCH MUCH better for audio programming.

Unfortunately, since the task of creating workable and useful algorithms for quantum computers is still in its infancy, I very much doubt present day programmers will ever be able to sit in front on one and hack away at a piece of code. Quantum algorithms are very different from those we use in current computers.

See QUIC at CalTech or the Centre for Quantum Computation at Oxford for more information on quantum algorithms.

The Kill Your TV Website:

http://othello.localaccess.com/hardebeck/

No this is serious. He claims that Sesame Street may teach your kid to recognize letters and numbers, but it shortens their attention span.

It happens that, when I was a kid, I stopped watching television when my sister left for college. I had never really actively watched TV before, but would sit passively while she changed the channels. With my sister gone, I would at first just sit in silence in the empty house. But I started listening to music which, unlike TV, allows you to devote your attention to other things while you listen.

I read a lot, ground telescope mirrors, acted in the high school theater and eventually became the set director, started college at 16 while still attending high school, scored 890 out of a possible 900 on the SAT Math II achievement test and was accepted into CalTech, where I published in the astrophysical journal and did research on the 200" and 60" telescopes.

I still don't watch TV, and have a successful software consulting business.

Mike

Note - you can find refs to my papers in the "Publications" section of my resume. Abstracts are available online. I didn't say it in my original letter but the work that was published I did while employed as a research assistant the summer after my freshman year.

One

Two

Three

Four

But seriously, they already have mechanical 'noses' that can detect things like drugs in luggage, or the ones at UConn or CaltTech that can diagnose some ailments.

I was told CalTech and Wolfram had a disagreement over who owned the machine, and Caltech moved it to the most inaccessable place they owned to try to keep it. (I take no responsibility for the accuracy of this statement.)

Another cute feature was the reel to reel tape drive - an old but still used technology at the time. They had a particularly old drive, because all the new ones would auto-feed the tape for you using suction, and they wouldn't work at ~4200m altitude.

I hate to say it, but something like Microsoft's Terraserver would be real nice here. Given my current coordinates on Earth, the day I want to go star searching, the area of the sky I will look at, etc., and let me see what I will look at through my telescope. There is an interface that provides the ability to search in a fashion somewhat like this, but I still seem to know more that I do to use it.

The Byzantine Generals problem deals with exactly what McNett needs:

"There has to be a security model that is very easy, that doesn't allow a client machine to gain more insight than it should on the nature of a task and that can assure that no one client machine has enough grasp of the project that it can adversely affect the result."

A commercial "Distributed.com" would have a simpler problem, because they can reliably a) authenticate a computer's identity, so they know if two messages come from the same computer, and b) they can assume that the server isn't a traitor. This will severely reduce the level of redundancy necessary. Still, they must deal with truly malicious nodes, whereas Distributed.net has only had to deal with faulty ones.

As for granulating the data so that K traitorous nodes cannot glean something useful from the data, this should be interesting information theory. I would think that adding some garbage data to calculate from, along with the real stuff, might be a decent cost/security trade-off.

You're right; god dammit. I plead two mitigating circumstances. First, I'm British, and we just avoid all that sort of confusion by simply having 1760 yards in a mile. Second, I'm an anthropologist, and was just slavishly quoting the Nature article. However, the confusion seems to be in other places too, for instance in the web site of Yotta Yotta NetStorage at www.yottayotta.com (company motto: "Put a Lotta Yottayotta in Your Life," and there's also a company theme song). Also, somebody who uses the base 10 rather than base 2 definitions of these terms has placed calculations of how many bytes there are in different things are here... I was just thinking, that although 2*10 is quite close to 10*3 (2.4% off, right), 2*80 is quite a way off from 10*24 (about 21% I think). At some point, the two series must get completely out of step.

In particular, it has a link to this site, which tells all about solar sailing. It has an introduction section with "Solar Sailing 101". It should explain your questions.

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~bo yk/spectra/spectra.htm contains a scientific paper written by my dad, who teaches at Caltech, about this very topic. In fact, you can sense the loss of pitches well above 20KHz, which is where CDs reach their limit. That, for one thing, is why Lps sound better than CDs.

Biological (neural) systems have properties sometimes desirable electronically, such as robustness and insensitivity to noisy data. Indeed, Caltech's Carver Mead (if he's still there) went a long way to popularize biologically-inspired engineering, or "neuromorphic engineering." His book Analog VLSI and Neural Systems is the usual text, mixing VLSI design and mimicry of, say, the retina.

The original Nature article should be readable to those clued in on MOS circuitry and a bit of neuroscience. I think it's wonderful that Nature is willing to post their material for free online, esp. in PDF...

For those of you itching to learn more about the brain & neuromorphic engineering, I set up a page of links to related books.

All best,

Gregg Favalora, CTO, Actuality Systems, Inc.

Developing autostereoscopic volumetric 3-D displays.

His device broke a single laser beam into 20 sub-beams and recombined them into a spot about an inch across that could move anywhere across an 8 inch circle. It was steered using piezoelectric mirrors (each on separate mounts - the whole thing looked like a frankenstein project compared to current technology). The focusing was entirely done by shifting the phase of each sub-beam.

There was feedback in the system that used varying frequencies to slightly modulate each beam and then combine the phases to get the best focus on a target. The whole thing could work automatically to track a small white target on the end of a stick.

The researcher inadvertently discovered that if he walked through the beam it would lock onto and track his shiny belt buckle. I saw this demonstrated in an 8mm movie he shot. Considering that this was being developed for tracking nuclear missiles he said he found this a little disturbing.

Also of note is his early use of color animated computer graphics. He printed out beam fluxes across the region during various simulations as integer digits on line printer paper. Then he assigned his young son to color in all the digits a certain way, so 0 went uncolored while 9 was yellow. Then he used a cable-release on his 8mm camera to animate the calculated simulations of beam tracking.

They've come a long ways, I see. His crude device probably cost $100,000 or more and I expect took about a year to build.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

• Industrial processes
• Environmental toxins and pollutants
• Space station air quality
• Medicine / body functions
• Food processing
• Military enviromnent
• Toxicology

• Quotidiano: Researchers developing an electronic nose
• JSOnline: Electronic nose takes on a higher profile
• Electronic Nose Club
• Electronic Nose Inspects Cheese, Hints At Human Sense of Smell Caltech Microelectronic Research Group
• Warwick-Southampton Electronic Nose Group
• Isoen2000 Olfactory and Electronic Nose 2000
• Press Releases: Electronic Nose Sniffs Out Fresh Fruit
• Electronic Nose Workshop
• Food Explorer Electronic Nose
• Electronic Nose User Forum
• An Electronic Nose For Business, NSF, NASA, and Others
• Wired: Electronic Nose

• Industrial processes
• Environmental toxins and pollutants
• Space station air quality
• Medicine / body functions
• Food processing
• Military enviromnent
• Toxicology

• Quotidiano: Researchers developing an electronic nose
• JSOnline: Electronic nose takes on a higher profile
• Electronic Nose Club
• Electronic Nose Inspects Cheese, Hints At Human Sense of Smell Caltech Microelectronic Research Group
• Warwick-Southampton Electronic Nose Group
• Isoen2000 Olfactory and Electronic Nose 2000
• Press Releases: Electronic Nose Sniffs Out Fresh Fruit
• Electronic Nose Workshop
• Food Explorer Electronic Nose
• Electronic Nose User Forum
• An Electronic Nose For Business, NSF, NASA, and Others
• Wired: Electronic Nose

Yeh, I think I sent him some similar mods. I also sent him a patch that added a better command line widget with history and some other improvements to the basic text item widget (for instance as it currently ships, typing a CTRL-A actually puts an invisible CTRL-A character in the text buffer!)

Does anyone know if he is still supporting/working on it, or if he is still around?

I think I heard that he is out of grad school now and working somewhere. So I suspect it is no longer actively being developed. I was toying with the idea of asking Paul to release it to community control. Right now it is not under GPL or anything -- just says that he owns exclusive copyright.

GLUI is very nice for small projects. I've used it for a number of little apps, but I would definitely not recommend it for anything major. First, the design, while written in C++, is not very object oriented, mainly because it doesn't stray too far from the GLUT ideology, which itself is not very object oriented. Second, as another poster points out, the window management is rather lacking. It doesn't seem to have been designed with the idea of opening and closing different windows over the life of the app. Extensibility is also a problem. The 'GLUI' class in the API has a separate API for instantiating and adding every different kind of widget to the UI. For instance rather than creating a button and calling something like glui->addWidget(button), you call glui->add_button(...list of button parameters...). That means that if you want to build your own widgets you can't put them on equal footing with the native ones. You would need to modify or subclass the 'glui' object for that.

On top those drawbacks, unless the poster is developing a 3D opengl app (which he didn't say), I would stay away from toolkits like GLUI which were designed as a cross-platform solution specifically for GL apps.

If you are interested specifically in GL windowing toolkits, I recommend you check out the GLOW toolkit by Daniel Azuma. I've tried it on linux and WinNT 4.0. He's put a lot of work into making it a fully functional gui toolkit. The look and feel is kind of like motif on a bad day, but the underlying library looks solid. So who is interested in making GLOW skinnable?

Of course, you can continue to disagree if you like, but if you'd like to see some data and application take a virtual visit back to our alma mater's experimental econ lab or maybe look around at the competition in arizona.

Neat stuff. The Caltech lab eventually got seriously involved in influencing policy about auctioning the airwaves, in electricity trading for California, and in pollution markets with SCAQMD. A lot happened since we were undergrads.

Now, I will grant you that the lab has revealed that individual choice is fubared, as is quite a bit of game theory. But markets work pretty much like the textbooks suggested they did.

Paul J. Brewer
Caltech b.s.89 fizz-sucks/ph.d 95 ec0n

Disclaimer: I was a language designer for JJ.
Joseph R. Kiniry
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~kiniry/
California Institute of Technology

Take a look at Call Center, Bug Tracking and Project Management Tools for Linux, which has a bunch of these.

Gnu Bug Tracking System (Gnat) has a billion (or so) user interfaces you can use with it - Tk, web, command-line, etc.

Even the high-end call-tracking systems like remedy can be (and often are) configured to email you when you get a new case assigned to you, but these are hugely expensive and it doesn't sound like you wanted to spend a lot of money.

And anyone who's too lazy to do it himself can find plenty of mp3s available.

I had been using LILO, but I recently switched to GRUB. It doesn't have the 1024 cylinder problem
and more importantly


o Once it is set up you don't have to tell
it about new kernels if you don't want to
because it can
o Read ext2/msdos/minix/... filesystems
natively which means you can boot any
file. This also means you can
o cat /etc/fstab from the boot prompt
and it will search you partitions for
the file and cat it and
o Most importantly it has file/disk/partition
completion from the boot prompt.
o It can even do a nice menu (that you can
always escape to a prompt from).
o As it is a GRand Unified Boot loader, you
can also boot 95/98/NT/*BSD... and
o Use the same command line from inside
your OS to try it out and set things up.

I liked it so much, I made an rpm so I could easily put it on all of my computers. Beware, it is still in alpha/beta.

LILO, no more...

Not so, so-called "virtual observatories" are becoming a hot topic in astronomy. See, for example this "vision statement" for the Virtual Observatories of the Future conference being held at Caltech in June (which I may be going to, if I can get my ass into gear). See also the Digital Sky Project, which has links to the major efforts underway. (Note that the surveys don't even need to be digital: the single most useful project in astronomical history is probably the Palomar Sky Survey, orignally undertaken in the 1950s.)

A quote from the vision statement: For the first time in the history of astronomy, we will have data sets whose full information content greatly exceeds the original purposes for which the data were obtained. This opens the new field of data-mining of digital sky surveys, using the data for newly conceived projects and exploring the vast data parameter spaces. It is inevitable that the previously poorly explored parts of the observable parameter space will contain new discoveries and surprises.

And again: We will be able to tackle some major problems with an unprecedented accuracy, e.g., mapping of the large-scale structure of the universe, the structure of our Galaxy, etc. The unprecedented size of the data sets will enable searches for extremely rare types of astronomical objects (e.g., high-redshift quasars, brown dwarfs, etc.) and may well lead to surprising new discoveries of previously unknown types of objects or new astrophysical phenomena. Combining surveys done at different wavelengths, from radio and infrared, through visible light, ultraviolet, and x-rays, both from the ground-based telescopes and from space observatories, would provide a new, panchromatic picture of our universe, and lead to a better understanding of the objects in it. These are the types of scientific investigations which were not feasible with the more limited data sets of the past.

Not so, so-called "virtual observatories" are becoming a hot topic in astronomy. See, for example this "vision statement" for the Virtual Observatories of the Future conference being held at Caltech in June (which I may be going to, if I can get my ass into gear). See also the Digital Sky Project, which has links to the major efforts underway. (Note that the surveys don't even need to be digital: the single most useful project in astronomical history is probably the Palomar Sky Survey, orignally undertaken in the 1950s.)

A quote from the vision statement: For the first time in the history of astronomy, we will have data sets whose full information content greatly exceeds the original purposes for which the data were obtained. This opens the new field of data-mining of digital sky surveys, using the data for newly conceived projects and exploring the vast data parameter spaces. It is inevitable that the previously poorly explored parts of the observable parameter space will contain new discoveries and surprises.

And again: We will be able to tackle some major problems with an unprecedented accuracy, e.g., mapping of the large-scale structure of the universe, the structure of our Galaxy, etc. The unprecedented size of the data sets will enable searches for extremely rare types of astronomical objects (e.g., high-redshift quasars, brown dwarfs, etc.) and may well lead to surprising new discoveries of previously unknown types of objects or new astrophysical phenomena. Combining surveys done at different wavelengths, from radio and infrared, through visible light, ultraviolet, and x-rays, both from the ground-based telescopes and from space observatories, would provide a new, panchromatic picture of our universe, and lead to a better understanding of the objects in it. These are the types of scientific investigations which were not feasible with the more limited data sets of the past.

To go to a good colledge (really good one) will cost you around $30,000 a year.

If only! I see that the cost now to attend Harvard is $35000 + travel expenses. MIT weighs in at about the same. Stanford is $1k cheaper (Bargain!), and you pay a meager $30,000+ for a year at CalTech.

No wonder going off to college feels like an Expedition - they cos t about the same! Makes me thankful for the "paltry" $10K/yr I paid a decade ago (compare at $20,000 for Stanford).

Of course, $20,000 to $35,000 in 10 years is only 6% per year, or twice the rate of inflation. If the stock market keeps growing at 15% like it has for the last decade, the $125,000/year our kids will feel like $5500 today. That's only a little bit more than my freshman tuition was. Go, bull, go! ;-)

It depends greatly on where you are. In the US, most states have public mental health services which are free or low-cost with a sliding scale. The service isn't all that great but you can see a psychiatrist and get medication and such things as lithium level blood tests for free.

I did this for years through the Santa Cruz County Mental Health Department, but there were two big problems - only one 20-minute session a month with a doctor (so if I was having trouble there wasn't a lot I could do), and the antidepressant they wanted me to take caused a immediate and severe anxiety attack (I was warned this might happen). The one I ended up taking as an alternative, ludiomil, worked great for me but the state wouldn't pay for it because the cheaper one that caused the bad anxiety was available.

(I understand the Alliance for the Mentally Ill had to sue the state of New York to cover the $9000/year it costs to treat a schizophrenic with clozapine - many cheaper drugs are available but clozapine works for many people where no other drug will and has had miraculous effects on about 30% of those who take it. But it's an expensive drug and even more expensive because it has a rare but fatal side effect and weekly blood tests are required by the FDA for everyone who takes it).

If you are a college student, you may be able to see a doctor for free through your campus. I did at UC Santa Cruz and CalTech. There may be a limit on the number of sessions and the medication won't be covered.

If you live in an enlightened country like Canada, psychiatric sessions are completely free, although finding a doctor and getting an appointment may be hard. (Only M.D.'s are paid for, not psychologist or non-M.D. "talk therapists"). Also medication is not covered. Lithium's pretty cheap and so are most antidepressants but some things are real expensive, my risperdal runs me well over $100 a month and I only take a tiny dose.

If you live in a place with publicly funded medicine where there is no prescription drug coverage, you would do well to apply immediately for supplemental insurance that does. A friend in Canada gets blue cross for CDN $30 per month - and besides covering her psychiatric medicine at a couple hundred per month it also paid for a $700 two-week ulcer antibiotic treatment (to kill H. Pylori bacteria).

I'm afraid in the vast majority of the world there is little public support for psychiatry, if you can find a doctor at all. But in many of those countries, you can buy medication without a prescription - pretty dangerous yes and I wouldn't suggest it without actually seeing a doctor but at least you wouldn't have to keep seeing one to get refills.

michael@geometricvisions.com

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Michael D. Crawford

Being a geek has a lot to do with mental illness. There's more to me than being manic depressive; I was always a social outcast growing up and quite long before I came down with manic depression I had plenty of problems with traditional psychological disorders, of the sort that are effectively treated with "talk therapy" (as was done with me as an adult).

In my case as a child my illnesses, both physical and emotional, drove me into the extremes of intellectual inquiry that leads to such scientific and technical achievements as attending CalTech as first an astronomy major, then a physics major, then (while manic) switching to literature.

I did research on the 200" and 60" telescopes at Palomar Observatory. For my senior thesis at UC Santa Cruz I did some numerical analysis and particle detector shift work at CERN in Geneva.

And I taught myself programming because I was too sick to continue school and eventually started my own software consulting company

You could say I was just one mentally ill person who happened to be smart, but I know I'm definitely not alone. I remember from CalTech that there were a number of people that I consider now to likely have been manic depressive (why did we have a full-time staff psychiatrist for such a small school?) at least one person who was schizophrenic, and a substantial portion of the campus sufferred from major depression.

I know one guy who attempted suicide while I was there and eventually succeeded after leaving school, and I once hitched a ride from a pasadena paramedic who commented on the large number of particularly bizarre suicide attempts that he responded to at the school. I heard about the case of an astronomy professor who wrecked his sports car driving to palomar observatory. So he bought another the next day - cash. It was in that car that he killed himself on the way to the observatory. He held a speed record for the drive from campus to the observatory.

Of course this is all just anecdotal evidence. More substantial arguments are given in the book Touched with Fire by Kaye Redfield Jamison, a psychologist who specializes in manic depression. The book gives case studies of many, many creative people who are known or thought to be manic depressive, people who committed suicide or exhibited manic behaviour during their lives, as well as statistical studies such as the attendees at a professional writers workshop many of whom killed themselves later.

Jamison's own study quoted in the book involved some british academics who had been awarded some high academic honor, and also who had sought psychiatric help far out of proportion to the general population.

(Jamison also coauthored the standard medical textbook on manic depressive illness and mostly kept her own illness quiet through her training as a psychologist and most of her career until she wrote a biography that emphasizes her and her father's manic depression, An Unquiet Mind

Something else I want to point out is, I've been around in the mental health game for a long time, been in lots of therapy groups, mental hospitals and such, and I've met people with many disorders. Everyone who wasn't manic depressive could be considered an average person; while I have known a couple unusually intelligent schizophrenics they weren't the usual case. On the other hand, I have yet to meet a manic depressive who wasn't extremely intelligent. This is not to say they are successful; often we are misdirected or we live in poverty because of our illness, but I don't know of a single manic depressive person who isn't really bright.

But what I was really trying to get at though in my letter Programming and Madness is not that programming makes one crazy; it is precisely programming that made me sane. A huge part of my healing process involved finding a place for myself in the world where I could still live happily as a geek. Sadly I've never been able to do that in physics, my first love. But learning to program turned me from a world of sickness and desperation to a life of joy and prosperity.

I still encounter mentally ill people in my work. I've worked in silicon valley companies where I met other manic depressives on the same hall. So in volunteering for the Metro article and posting this on Slashdot I'm trying to make life a little better for others who suffer as I do (and I still do, although not as bad - manic depression is treatable but not curable).

One more factoid. Some study a few years ago found that manic depression was not as common in the scientific community as it was among the artistic and humanities communities. But that is not my experience; the study was done on career members of the communities (college professors in the case of the scientists). It did not include students. My experience of students is that mental illness is just as prevalent as it is among artists and writers. I think one doesn't find so many mentally ill scientists either because they are rejected by the community or because they are successful in hiding their illnesses. I think that is a shame and I'd like to do something to change it.

Michael D. Crawford

Being a geek has a lot to do with mental illness. There's more to me than being manic depressive; I was always a social outcast growing up and quite long before I came down with manic depression I had plenty of problems with traditional psychological disorders, of the sort that are effectively treated with "talk therapy" (as was done with me as an adult).

In my case as a child my illnesses, both physical and emotional, drove me into the extremes of intellectual inquiry that leads to such scientific and technical achievements as attending CalTech as first an astronomy major, then a physics major, then (while manic) switching to literature.

I did research on the 200" and 60" telescopes at Palomar Observatory. For my senior thesis at UC Santa Cruz I did some numerical analysis and particle detector shift work at CERN in Geneva.

And I taught myself programming because I was too sick to continue school and eventually started my own software consulting company

You could say I was just one mentally ill person who happened to be smart, but I know I'm definitely not alone. I remember from CalTech that there were a number of people that I consider now to likely have been manic depressive (why did we have a full-time staff psychiatrist for such a small school?) at least one person who was schizophrenic, and a substantial portion of the campus sufferred from major depression.

I know one guy who attempted suicide while I was there and eventually succeeded after leaving school, and I once hitched a ride from a pasadena paramedic who commented on the large number of particularly bizarre suicide attempts that he responded to at the school. I heard about the case of an astronomy professor who wrecked his sports car driving to palomar observatory. So he bought another the next day - cash. It was in that car that he killed himself on the way to the observatory. He held a speed record for the drive from campus to the observatory.

Of course this is all just anecdotal evidence. More substantial arguments are given in the book Touched with Fire by Kaye Redfield Jamison, a psychologist who specializes in manic depression. The book gives case studies of many, many creative people who are known or thought to be manic depressive, people who committed suicide or exhibited manic behaviour during their lives, as well as statistical studies such as the attendees at a professional writers workshop many of whom killed themselves later.

Jamison's own study quoted in the book involved some british academics who had been awarded some high academic honor, and also who had sought psychiatric help far out of proportion to the general population.

(Jamison also coauthored the standard medical textbook on manic depressive illness and mostly kept her own illness quiet through her training as a psychologist and most of her career until she wrote a biography that emphasizes her and her father's manic depression, An Unquiet Mind

Something else I want to point out is, I've been around in the mental health game for a long time, been in lots of therapy groups, mental hospitals and such, and I've met people with many disorders. Everyone who wasn't manic depressive could be considered an average person; while I have known a couple unusually intelligent schizophrenics they weren't the usual case. On the other hand, I have yet to meet a manic depressive who wasn't extremely intelligent. This is not to say they are successful; often we are misdirected or we live in poverty because of our illness, but I don't know of a single manic depressive person who isn't really bright.

But what I was really trying to get at though in my letter Programming and Madness is not that programming makes one crazy; it is precisely programming that made me sane. A huge part of my healing process involved finding a place for myself in the world where I could still live happily as a geek. Sadly I've never been able to do that in physics, my first love. But learning to program turned me from a world of sickness and desperation to a life of joy and prosperity.

I still encounter mentally ill people in my work. I've worked in silicon valley companies where I met other manic depressives on the same hall. So in volunteering for the Metro article and posting this on Slashdot I'm trying to make life a little better for others who suffer as I do (and I still do, although not as bad - manic depression is treatable but not curable).

One more factoid. Some study a few years ago found that manic depression was not as common in the scientific community as it was among the artistic and humanities communities. But that is not my experience; the study was done on career members of the communities (college professors in the case of the scientists). It did not include students. My experience of students is that mental illness is just as prevalent as it is among artists and writers. I think one doesn't find so many mentally ill scientists either because they are rejected by the community or because they are successful in hiding their illnesses. I think that is a shame and I'd like to do something to change it.

Michael D. Crawford

The canonical books on MIT hacks are The Institute for Hacks, Tomfoolery & Pranks and "Is This The Way To Baker House?" A Compendium of MIT Hacking Lore, which are both available from the MIT Press Bookstore.

--bal

In a nutshell, neuromorphic engineering involves modelling neural systems in analog hardware, starting with the neurons and moving up, hopefully to whole neurvous systems in the coming decades. The focus is one realism--this is modelling, after all--and replicating the physical properties of neurons as accurately as is possible in silicon VLSI. It is also home to a great deal of work on analog, and mixed analog-digital devices, as well as pure research on neural computation. (In a broad sense a 'computation'.)

Most relevent to this discussion is that we now have an AI proto-field that is completely different in its approach to the problem (so much so that I don't expect it to turn its attention toward AI, in the proper sense, for several years), far moreso than connectionism. As a happy coincidenece, it also overcomes many of the limitations of classical AI, both technical and ideological, by attacking the problem at the biophysical, instead of psychological, level and doing so in physical, instead of algorithmic, terms.

the HGP uses 4 BAC libraries with some P1s and pacs thrown in, for a total of 6
caltech libraries b,c and d
pieter DeJongs libraries RPCI-11 and RPCI-1
and the dupont p1 library(I forget the link, it's handled by a private company now)

Each library was constructed from a different persons tissue

jor-el

If you want to learn more about Pi or maybe about someone who just about worships pi check out Eve Astrid Andersson's page at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~eveander/

This issue has been explored since, like forever, in science fiction. There is now even a name for it: "The Singularity", coined by writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge. My gist of what it means is the point at which any and all "normal" humans will be unable to grasp, predict, or participate in, the further advancement of technology.

That is just one view, of course. To read Vinge's original paper on this idea, go here. Also, I think the comment in the original story is pretty lame. It implies that if we smart people get together and discuss these problems, we'll figure out a way to prevent them from occurring. That's ridiculous. The only thing that happens when technocrats get together is that we get new rules and new ways of controlling the future. No way, I say. Let the future happen in its unpredictable fashion, and we'll all be better off for it.

BBB

Didn't Al Gore invent the Beawulf cluster and the 1.ghz computer?

At the CalTech Center for Advanced Computing Research they are using HP Exemplars in a similar fashion. Though they claim "The HP Exemplar X-Class server installed at CACR, at 256 CPUs and 64GB memory, is the largest cache-coherent shared-memory computer in the world" and I don't _think_ that is true anymore, it is still an impressive piece o' hardware and the work looks mighty cool.
From what I have read on it, they are simulating and databasing the results of particle collider experiments which are planned in a few years. Personally, I like the idea of researchers having the ability to do that kind of stuff on a _simulated_ basis and get most of the bugs worked out ahead of time. If they can do that with success for nuclear testing we may see the end of the need for "test detonations". I'm not some peace love and tofu GreenPeace activist, but I'd rather not irradiate a good portion of the only planet we have in the name or science. Call me wacky.

Hmmm... think they'd let me use it as a Quake3 server?

Didn't Al Gore invent the Beawulf cluster and the 1.ghz computer?

At the CalTech Center for Advanced Computing Research they are using HP Exemplars in a similar fashion. Though they claim "The HP Exemplar X-Class server installed at CACR, at 256 CPUs and 64GB memory, is the largest cache-coherent shared-memory computer in the world" and I don't _think_ that is true anymore, it is still an impressive piece o' hardware and the work looks mighty cool.
From what I have read on it, they are simulating and databasing the results of particle collider experiments which are planned in a few years. Personally, I like the idea of researchers having the ability to do that kind of stuff on a _simulated_ basis and get most of the bugs worked out ahead of time. If they can do that with success for nuclear testing we may see the end of the need for "test detonations". I'm not some peace love and tofu GreenPeace activist, but I'd rather not irradiate a good portion of the only planet we have in the name or science. Call me wacky.

Hmmm... think they'd let me use it as a Quake3 server?

"Can you drag a range of text from an emacs window and drop-insert it into a vi window? Or can you drop a JPEG file from the desktop into your text? Or when you get some new application, do you have to learn all new command-keys and shortcuts, or recalibrate your muscle memory for the way the menus work and so forth?

That's what a standard GUI API is for..."

Except... that's not what a standard API is for--

There actually is a (somewhat) standard drag'n'drop protocol....

Note that I say "protocol", rather than "API", and note that protocol is rather independant of API.
As noted at the XDND web-site, there are several APIs supporting the same protocol.

As for whether I can do drag'n'drop between applications written with different APIs: yes, I can--examples include doing drag'n'drop between Motif-based Netscape and GTK+-based GMC.
I believe that there are also versions of VI and Emacs that support drag'n'drop of text and images (GNU Emacs, under X, is not such a beast, but this does not stem from the mere fact that it uses a different API).

As for key-bindings....
Key-bindings have even less to do with the API than drag'n'drop does.

Well, let's just wait for good implementations of valarray and slice... Is not it what you want?

So, if you're interested, here's some (although odl at this point) links to things that are going/have gone on in the pasadena neck-o-the-woods:

• http://broccoli.caltech.ed u/~pinelab/mike.html#neurochip
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~pine lab/pinelab.html
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~p inelab/PotterGroup.htm
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~p inelab/netinadish.html
• and much related stuff at: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~fraslab/

-rob

So, if you're interested, here's some (although odl at this point) links to things that are going/have gone on in the pasadena neck-o-the-woods:

• http://broccoli.caltech.ed u/~pinelab/mike.html#neurochip
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~pine lab/pinelab.html
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~p inelab/PotterGroup.htm
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~p inelab/netinadish.html
• and much related stuff at: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~fraslab/

-rob

So, if you're interested, here's some (although odl at this point) links to things that are going/have gone on in the pasadena neck-o-the-woods:

• http://broccoli.caltech.ed u/~pinelab/mike.html#neurochip
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~pine lab/pinelab.html
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~p inelab/PotterGroup.htm
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~p inelab/netinadish.html
• and much related stuff at: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~fraslab/

-rob

So, if you're interested, here's some (although odl at this point) links to things that are going/have gone on in the pasadena neck-o-the-woods:

• http://broccoli.caltech.ed u/~pinelab/mike.html#neurochip
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~pine lab/pinelab.html
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~p inelab/PotterGroup.htm
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~p inelab/netinadish.html
• and much related stuff at: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~fraslab/

-rob

So, if you're interested, here's some (although odl at this point) links to things that are going/have gone on in the pasadena neck-o-the-woods:

• http://broccoli.caltech.ed u/~pinelab/mike.html#neurochip
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~pine lab/pinelab.html
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~p inelab/PotterGroup.htm
• http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~p inelab/netinadish.html
• and much related stuff at: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~fraslab/

-rob

In that they talk mainly of using this join for easier voltage selected membrane penetration (and i would assume, recording), this is shy of direct control of cell processes. Sure -- indirectly one can do alot here, but don't look to mechanisms like this to slow down any process (ie: cancer) except outside of small cell populations ... Some of the difficulties in engineering can be found here (a similar project). FWIW though, greater control for small populations is helpful in research. If people could obviate some issues (ie: the membrane) in cancer research, research could speed up :)

Sorry for the lame 2c ... I'll poke about and post some more links for those interested.

-rob

Mayall is usually referred to as "Four Meter" which is approximately 157 inch. Whereas Hale is usually referred to as "200 Inch" which is approximately five meter. I wonder what actual diameters are, to a millimeter?
--

But, back to Tierra. Tom Ray was the motivating force, if you want a contact point. The networked version hasn't been released, as far as I know; the other version is released under an open source license, copied below from the original location:

1) License Agreement

Tierra Simulator V5.0: Copyright (c) 1990 - 1998 Thomas S. Ray

Tom Ray, ray@udel.edu ray@santafe.edu ray@hip.atr.co.jp (the bulk of the code)
Joseph F. Hart, jhart@hip.atr.co.jp (general programming, Amiga support)
Matt Jones, mjones@condor.psych.ucsb.edu (Mac support)
Agnes Charrel, charrel@int-evry.fr, (tping code for network version)
Tsukasa Kimezawa, kim@hip.atr.co.jp (socket code for network version)
Kurt Thearling, kurt@think.com (CM5 adaptation, parallel creatures)
Dan Pirone, cocteau@life.slhs.udel.edu (frontend, crossover)
Tom Uffner, tom@genie.slhs.udel.edu (rework of genebanker & assembler)

If you purchased this program on disk, thank you for your support. If you obtained the source code through the net or friends, we invite you to contribute an amount that represents the program's worth to you. You may make a check in US dollars payable to Virtual Life, and mail the check to one of the two addresses listed below.

This is license agreement:

The source code, documentation, and executables can be freely distributed

The source code and documentation is copyrighted, all rights reserved. The source code, documentation, and the executable files may be freely copied and distributed without fees (contributions welcome), subject to the following restrictions:

This notice may not be removed or altered.

You may not try to make money by distributing the package or by using the process that the code creates.

You may not prevent others from copying it freely.

You may not distribute modified versions without clearly documenting your changes and notifying the principal author.

The origin of this software must not be misrepresented, either by explicit claim or by omission. Since few users ever read sources, credits must appear in the documentation.

Altered versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software. Since few users ever read sources, credits must appear in the documentation.

The following provisions also apply:

Virtual Life and the authors are not responsible for the consequences of use of this software, no matter how awful, even if they arise from flaws in it.

Neither the name of Virtual Life, nor the authors of the code may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

The provision of support and software updates is at our discretion.

Please contact Tom Ray (full address below) if you have questions or would like an exception to any of the above restrictions.

If you make changes to the code, or have suggestions for changes, let us know! If we use your suggestion, you will receive full credit of course.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Projector technology right now sucks for the high end. The CAVE uses CRT projectors (much like the ones in the old big screen TV's) instead of a brighter technology such as LCD, DLP, or Digital Light Valve. Unfortunately, the manufacturers of these brighter products have not pushed the refresh rate limit. In order to use the StereoGraphics shutter glasses, you need at least 100 Hz refresh rate out of your projectors. Currently, the only types of projectors that can handle 100 Hz are CRT's.

These CAVE's are not really multiuser. There are some real problems with perspective in these environments. Only one person can have a corrected view frustrum, and everyone else has to put up with a warping and shearing scene. Of course, this is assuming you are trying to visualize something floating in front of you. This is very hard to describe, but if you think about it, imagine projecting an object floating in front of you, while trying to give your user the ability to walk all around it. Anyhow, this is impossible in any multiuser mode.

CAVE are small. 10'^3 may seem like a lot of space, (as most people's dorm rooms are 12'^3), but oftimes people are limited in movement. This also limits the number of people who can share this experience.

The Electronic Visualization Lab at University of Illinois, Argonne National Labs Futures Lab, and NCSA all have major research going on in CAVE technology.

-Stryemer
We are the music makers,
and we are the dreamers of the dream.

That's what we do here. Granted, our web pages haven't been updated in some time and therefore don't contain a whole lot of robot stuff.

While much of our funding is fron DARPA, we have not investigated the prosects of attaching toy guns yet.

This is _semi_ related. For more information on Robots in the news, check some of the below links:
CNN - Second robot to work on recovery of EgyptAir 'black boxes' - November 8,
Biped robot research in the world
Enjoy.

Ben Brewer
brewer@nullified.org

I will not only second the vote on Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, but I will give some good reasons for reading it. Vinge is not one of the most prolific authors in science fiction, but he is one of the most thought provoking. He creates alien cultures that are believable and compeling, with real characters who are every bit as important to the story as the humans. In A Fire Upon the Deep, he creates several races at varying levels of detail. The Tines, we read a great deal about. We get to see more than one subculture among them. We find dear friends and menacing enemies.

Vinge also asks big questions. One of the running themes through his fiction is, "What will we become?" He is asking what humanity will develop itself into. And he only shows us indirectly in his references to singularity. There is a web page here giving some of his thoughts on the concept. He doesn't try to give a complete answer.

A Fire Upon the Deep is a very worthwhile read as are the compilation Across Realtime and the prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep which I am reading right now, A Deepness In the Sky. Calling it a prequel is perhaps a bit strong. It contains a character who appears in Fire and takes place in a setting that he described in that book, briefly.

If I had a single bookshelf labelled Books That Made Me Think every one of Vernor Vinge's books that I have read would be on it.

Here's a link to research on that front:
http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~p inelab/PotterGroup.htm

The Potter Group is attempting to get microprocessors communicating with slices of mammalian (in this case rats) neural cultures, which would be a significant step towards synthetic brain implants that would augment memory, processing, senses (i.e. full 360 degree EM spectrum awareness, telepathy; that is, if the brain can adapt to new senses...), etc.