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There is an interesting experimental keyboard-less input program called Dasher. The current program is oriented towards ordinary text, for written language input (e.g. to allow the disabled to send emails). What would be interesting would be to customise this for program editing, possibly inside an IDE. E.g. to build in the main language constructs, and to replace the English language dictionary by the table of symbols valid at the point you are editing. Another approach to predictive editing.

Koreans don't seem to like Unicode either. Most e-mails I receive are encoded as "euc-kr"...

related MLP:
- broad overview (Netscape FAQ)
- better introduction (*nix Unicode FAQ)
- Unicode homepage

Unfortunately, Unix Unicode implementations appear to use UTF-8 (see here) which is rather inefficient for non-ASCII encodings...

This problem appears to be bigger than the internet; it is deeply rooted in the C library itself...

Koreans don't seem to like Unicode either. Most e-mails I receive are encoded as "euc-kr"...

related MLP:
- broad overview (Netscape FAQ)
- better introduction (*nix Unicode FAQ)
- Unicode homepage

Unfortunately, Unix Unicode implementations appear to use UTF-8 (see here) which is rather inefficient for non-ASCII encodings...

This problem appears to be bigger than the internet; it is deeply rooted in the C library itself...

Only occasionally does a computer prove a theorem previously unsolved by humans, such as Robbins algebras are Boolean, but these tend to be problems (like this one) involving simple algebraic manipulations. Something like Fermat's Last Theorem, forget it; Wiles' proof has not even been verified by computer, much less automatically proved. The correctness of Wiles proof is at this point based on a consensus of human mathematicians, who may or may not (hopefully not) have overlooked some subtle flaw in its incredibly deep proof.

BTW don't confuse theorem provers with symbolic algebra systems such as Mathematica, Maple, or the GPL'ed Maxima. While indispensable for complicated calculus problems etc. beyond what a human can practically do, AFAIK they cannot prove even a simple abstract result such as the irrationality of the square root of 2.

I remember seeing this incredibly cool alternate-input system for text on PDAs called Dasher on slashdot awhile back. here's the link. It has to take over the screen to function on a PDA, but, then, that's okay becuase so does the flp-up keyboard. (And on a tablet PC, it would rock.) It interested me because it was minimalist, yet used the device to the extent of its potential and looked at an old problem in a new way. Anyway, the project's awesome, i was wondering when if ever we might see that picked up as something widely embraced. There's windows and linux versions of a demo available, but i dont' think it will get very far unless the cambrige people creating it embrace open source. At the least, i can't run the demo because they only make binaries available, and my Linux install is not x86..

Just curious as to whether anyone else thinks Dasher + Matchbox in a little pda thingy would rock. Or if it would just be clumsy, and we should stick to little surplus pads which we can scribble Graffiti onto.

(Ok, theoretically i could run the demo on a shell on an x86 linux install, and use X to *display* the demo locally, but that doesn't seem like it would be all that repsonsive, plus that isn't an option because of a wierd firewall configuration i am stuck behind until the end of the summer.. no public IP == no DISPLAY=hostname:0.0..)

Edinburgh doesn't teach computer science any more. It teaches Word Processing with How To Throw Together A Few Lines Of Code. That's brought the number of UK universities which actually teach proper computer science down from four to a rather paltry three. It's a great shame, really; without a pretty decent knowledge of computing as a science, any kind of software engineering is pretty tricky.

Wasn't there a recent story here about developing a multiple-mirrored telescope to allow high resoultion images of deep space? Some of the discussion even mentioned the notion of placing individual mirror elements in different places around the world to help improve resolution. Such a scope is harder to use than a single curved mirror (despite the cost savings) due to image distortion. I would think this kind of technology would be perfect for something like that...

Not really, unfortunately. You're thinking of interferometry or aperture synthesis, which can also be done with light.

This requires knowledge of the phase of the light rather than just its amplitude or power, which is all you get from normal video cameras. Also, interferometry increases your resolution but not your field of view, i.e. it's closest to the part of the article about zooming in, not panning around. To use the technique in the article you'd have to build bigger telescopes to get the improved resolution, which is what astronomers try to do anyway.

If you're talking about combining lots of images from the same vantage point in order to improve your field of view, astronomers do this mosaicing all the time. For some of my work on the Galactic Centre I was using an instrument with a small field of view (a thirtieth of a degree), and I had to pan the telescope as well as stitch multiple observations together to get the full map which was still only a few degrees across (the size of a few full moons).

Wasn't there a recent story here about developing a multiple-mirrored telescope to allow high resoultion images of deep space? Some of the discussion even mentioned the notion of placing individual mirror elements in different places around the world to help improve resolution. Such a scope is harder to use than a single curved mirror (despite the cost savings) due to image distortion. I would think this kind of technology would be perfect for something like that...

Not really, unfortunately. You're thinking of interferometry or aperture synthesis, which can also be done with light.

This requires knowledge of the phase of the light rather than just its amplitude or power, which is all you get from normal video cameras. Also, interferometry increases your resolution but not your field of view, i.e. it's closest to the part of the article about zooming in, not panning around. To use the technique in the article you'd have to build bigger telescopes to get the improved resolution, which is what astronomers try to do anyway.

If you're talking about combining lots of images from the same vantage point in order to improve your field of view, astronomers do this mosaicing all the time. For some of my work on the Galactic Centre I was using an instrument with a small field of view (a thirtieth of a degree), and I had to pan the telescope as well as stitch multiple observations together to get the full map which was still only a few degrees across (the size of a few full moons).

I wrote an article a few months ago arguing that it was in society's interests as well as ours for engineers to get more involved in politics, and putting forward a few ides about why we are so ineffective. I had enough difficulty publishing it.

Anti Aliasing isn't the end-all be-all of fonts. What matters is to have good fonts to begin with. If you go get the Microsoft ttf fonts and install them, you'll be much better off in programs that don't support anti-aliasing (easily) like Mozilla. Moz. is infinitely usable and looks just like Moz. Win32 if you use the same fonts.

I mention that because he complains about anti-aliasing, especially in Mozilla, both on the 10 things needing fixing page, and on the Top N Things That Have Been Solved page.

Microsoft core TTFs are available here: MS TTFs

Install guides and scripts are available several places: http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~jw35/docs/ms-fonts .html, http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/mini/TT-Debian -7.html, http://linux.org.mt/article/ttfonts.

The best script to auto-install to RedHat that I've found is here, he has lots of other goodies to boot: http://www.linuxquebec.com/~nomis80/

I dont think the boy bands are the problem, they're just a symtom. The earth might be dieing.

Frankly I'd rather see industry moves toward reliable solid state mass storage. Mechanical means just don't cut it any more as far as I'm concerned, just take a look at my journal to see the reason for my stance on that matter.

But where would we be without a few conspiracy theories?...

• Hard drive manufacturers operate an underground "quality cartel" on desktop grade drives, making people buy more and more, averaging out losses from customers switching brands, pumping up profit.
  
• HD makers are secretly on the take from the R.I.A.A. and M.P.A.A. to make crap drives, meaning all those evil mp3 pirates cannot hoard and share their booty for too long.
  
• The Men In Dark Suits Who Do Not Exist secretly sift through dumpsites in the dead of night looking for hard drives from which to recover details and evidence of MP3/DVD pirates, terrorists and other criminal activity. And pr0n.

Ali

I can understand how it works but I fail to find any logic in it. Why you cannot change AM/PM and overflow the clock numbers at the same time? Oh yeah, it's because your clock notation is a relic from time when number zero wasn't yet invented. How about using ISO 8601?

Optical aperture synthesis is working quite well from the ground at specialist observatories. COAST gets fringes from 5 telescopes and synthesises a baseline of 67m, while CHARA has achieved fringes from 2 telescopes separtaed by 400m. It has 6 telescopes in all. The combination of beams is, however, not done in software because we don't have instruments capable of recording the detailed phases of a beam of light, as can be done in the radio. All these optical interferometers use light pipes and mirrors on trollies to match path lengths and to directly combine the beams of light coming from the sub-telescopes.

The key with these projects though is that they all use small sub-telescopes, so can only observe fairly bright objects. Still, it can give you images of the surface of a star like Betelgeuse.
Getting to fainter objects means going to larger apertures for the sub-telescopes, and that brings problems. With the small telescopes the wavefront across them is affected in the same way by the atmosphere, so things are coherent when they're combined. With a large aperture (like the VLT primaries at 8m) the wavefront is not the same across the mirror, so this needs to be corrected before the individual telescopes can be combined. This is a major sticking point that has taken a long time to sort out. The corrections needed still limit these systems to quite bright obejcts, though.

Optical aperture synthesis is working quite well from the ground at specialist observatories. COAST gets fringes from 5 telescopes and synthesises a baseline of 67m, while CHARA has achieved fringes from 2 telescopes separtaed by 400m. It has 6 telescopes in all. The combination of beams is, however, not done in software because we don't have instruments capable of recording the detailed phases of a beam of light, as can be done in the radio. All these optical interferometers use light pipes and mirrors on trollies to match path lengths and to directly combine the beams of light coming from the sub-telescopes.

The key with these projects though is that they all use small sub-telescopes, so can only observe fairly bright objects. Still, it can give you images of the surface of a star like Betelgeuse.
Getting to fainter objects means going to larger apertures for the sub-telescopes, and that brings problems. With the small telescopes the wavefront across them is affected in the same way by the atmosphere, so things are coherent when they're combined. With a large aperture (like the VLT primaries at 8m) the wavefront is not the same across the mirror, so this needs to be corrected before the individual telescopes can be combined. This is a major sticking point that has taken a long time to sort out. The corrections needed still limit these systems to quite bright obejcts, though.

Has everyone already forgotten about the Trojan Room?

in terms of online coffee

this was one of the first places I went when I was online thanks to john levine

history of the cambridge coffee pot

Trojan Room
coffee pot

regards

john jones

in terms of online coffee

this was one of the first places I went when I was online thanks to john levine

history of the cambridge coffee pot

Trojan Room
coffee pot

regards

john jones

Yes. It is a naturally-occuring process. However the ozone hole is as large as it is with the help of humans. http://www.atm.ch.cam.ac.uk/tour/part1.html

Exactly. And as long as the truth gets out, there should really be nothing to worry about.

There are still two possible problems.

• Patents. Nothing new here, just the usual problem of software patents being inherently evil.
• Legislation. As long as the so-called "content industry" has nitwits like Sen. Hollings in their pocket, general purpose computing faces the threat of being outlawed.

As long as you can continue to use your general purpose computer without going to jail, the free market will dispose of ill-concieved notions like Palladium quite nicely.

C'mon, Judge Kollar-Kotelly, make me proud. :)

Do-it-yourself speech recognition-based reading instruction

CMU Sphinx

comp.speech.research

Cambridge Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (speech data not included)

Best wishes,
James

"biggest to smallest" is the ISO standard. Read all about it here. This has always made most sense to me too, and is completely unambiguous. I've been using it in my programs for years now (and since y2k, whenever I write dates by hand, checks, etc) and it looks like now many XML applications use it too.

If you've ever had to write a program to parse non-ISO dates from some other program's output, you'll wish the rest of the world used it too...

I really don't see any need for any other time system, especially one that's based on something OTHER than planetary movements. Yeesh....

Yup it's ISO 8601.

(and don't forget that YOU decide who is trusted and who is not)

most people will stick with the "insecure" content they are used to now

Palladium is a good idea, but not for desktop use. End-users are treated like criminals or people operating under secrecy.

Palladium is more about (1) hardware enforced signing and (2) code verification.

I'm all for signing and code verification. I check my package signatures with GPG before I install them and I MD5 all my .isos before I burn them. I use HTTPS (where the certificates get handed down via Verisign or some other root server).

The problem lies with the fact that interoperability between Palladium and other systems is only guaranteed if you get a signature from a Microsoft-sponsored system. Guess which source is going to be trusted, no matter what? You're kidding yourself if Microsoft will allow you to "distrust" binaries or media coming from www.microsoft.com.

This is the exact argument for DeCSS. You may be perfectly happy to own DVDs that can only be played on the "Enhanced Windows" system that Microsoft offers, but cannot be decrypted, EVER, on any other OS. Including Macs. (Depending on how much money they pay Microsoft for the right to play your media.

They are going to release the source, which is odd in itself. It leads me to believe in general that MS may being a rather okay-ish thing.

Releasing the source is not a sign of goodwill here. Since Microsoft already has the patent (look at point #7) on the core idea of Palladium it would mean diddly squat to the GPL community.

My conclusion: Look at smart cards. They offer the same feature set. The only difference is that I'm gladly willing to give up the right to run software on the processor on the card in order to make things like bank transactions possible. The question is, are you willing to give up the right to run any software on your computer not expressly signed by MS, just so you can watch your favourite DVD on your PC?

Here

Another "Linux will take over the desktop in the future" piece. How redundant.

Believe me, companies desire to control their workers through computer access will trump any supposed benefits of "open" Linux and standards. With all the legacy applications and documents in MS and other proprietary formats most businesses will not risk switching over. Maybe in a few years an open source Office app will read MS formats, but the way IP law and copyrights are going (as well as looking at history) I'm not counting on it.

If you think home users will flock to Linux while business sticks with Windows TCPA, I think you'l be in for a rude shock. Most people's home computer uses what they use at work, for a variety of reasons. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Finally, you might be interested in reading Ross Anderson's piece about how TCPA will render GPL moot. Essentially, TCPA vendors will balkanize the computyer environment even further. That balkanization is inevitable unless business users don't use TCPA.

You can't separate business and home users. Where business goes, the home user will inevitably go.

15. So can't TCPA be broken?

The early versions will be vulnerable to anyone with the tools and patience to crack the hardware (e.g., get clear data on the bus between the CPU and the Fritz chip). However, from phase 2, the Fritz chip will disappear inside the main processor - let's call it the `Hexium' - and things will get a lot harder. Really serious, well funded opponents will still be able to crack it. However, it's likely to go on getting more difficult and expensive.

IF MS approves it, it would have to be compiled with a proprietary compiler, which understands the Palladium calls.

The TCPA/Palladium FAQ mentions that Intel has typically made their standards open to avoid anti-trust suits. It would make sense if they kept this up.

I also recall reading that the hardware interfaces would be open, but I couldn't find a link to it offhand. Anyone have a link or a rebuke?

TCPA / Palladium Frequently Asked Questions

Version 0.1 26 June 2002
Ross Anderson

1. What are TCPA and Palladium?

TCPA stands for the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), an initiative led by Intel. Their website is here. Their stated goal is `a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform.' Palladium appears to be a Microsoft version which will be rolled out in future versions of Windows, will build on TCPA hardware, and will add some extra features. The Palladium announcement appears to have been provoked by a paper I presented on the security issues relating to open source and free software at a conference on Open Source Software Economics in Toulouse on the 20th June. This paper criticised TCPA as anticompetitive. This has been amply confirmed by new revelations over the past few days.

For the rest:

TCPA/Palladium FAQ

The way computers play chess is almost completely unrelated to real world tasks.

Moves are generated by representing the chess board as a set of 64-bit integers, where each bit of the integer represents a yes/no property of one of the 64 squares (i.e. is this square occupied by a white pawn?). By using boolean algebra on these integers (called bitboards) you can perform most of the operations required very efficiently. For example, to see which white pawns could advance you might take the white pawn bitboard and left shift it by 8 (moving each pawn up one row) then AND that bitboard with the logical NOT of a bitboard with the OR of all the pieces on the board. Does this sound like any day-to-day applications you know of (zero floating-point)? Didn't think so.

In fact the instruction set of most CPUs aren't well suited for some of the more difficult parts of move generation (like bishop, rook, and queen moves), so Deep Blue used specially made "chess chips" from IBM. They probably did more than just move generation, but the details are a little thin.

Beyond move generation, these programs use a very sophisticated set of heuristics to decide which moves should be analyzed first and which lines of play are not worth exploring too deeply. It's these algorithms that make the big difference between one program and another, not hardware.

So, these results will say something about which chipset is better, but it's in a very narrow area that doesn't matter too much.

According to the Jargon Files, this was a CPU instruction that would cause a hardware error. The example given was rapidly toggling some bus lines so as to cause them to catch fire :-]

• If you find Dasher "scary", or "it is writing things I don't want to write", please read the tips for novices and the three page explanation. It's like learning to drive a car. Don't speed; Don't drive forward until you know where you want to go; Go slowly for a minute or two and you'll soon get better.
• According to his assistant, Stephen Hawking can write at 6-9 words per minute with his present system, on a good day. With Dasher, we can write at 20 or 35 words per minute, depending on whether we use eyetracker or mouse.
• If anyone wants a job in Cambridge working on Dasher, we are looking to recruit a good programmer to clean up the rough edges.

• If you find Dasher "scary", or "it is writing things I don't want to write", please read the tips for novices and the three page explanation. It's like learning to drive a car. Don't speed; Don't drive forward until you know where you want to go; Go slowly for a minute or two and you'll soon get better.
• According to his assistant, Stephen Hawking can write at 6-9 words per minute with his present system, on a good day. With Dasher, we can write at 20 or 35 words per minute, depending on whether we use eyetracker or mouse.
• If anyone wants a job in Cambridge working on Dasher, we are looking to recruit a good programmer to clean up the rough edges.

• If you find Dasher "scary", or "it is writing things I don't want to write", please read the tips for novices and the three page explanation. It's like learning to drive a car. Don't speed; Don't drive forward until you know where you want to go; Go slowly for a minute or two and you'll soon get better.
• According to his assistant, Stephen Hawking can write at 6-9 words per minute with his present system, on a good day. With Dasher, we can write at 20 or 35 words per minute, depending on whether we use eyetracker or mouse.
• If anyone wants a job in Cambridge working on Dasher, we are looking to recruit a good programmer to clean up the rough edges.

It's not intended as a competitor to a keyboard, though. On the web page I read that "Dasher is a competitive text-entry system wherever a full-size keyboard cannot be used".

Download it and check it out on your desktop (Windows, Linux). Pretty cool. It works really well for common words, and conveniently sets up common endings for you (-tion, -ing, etc.) But, uncommon words are really tough, and punctuation is seriously lacking. Sometimes it's even hard to find the space for the end of a word. I don't really see how you could use it to edit text either, it's painful just editing the current stream as it is. It is pretty damn cool....

Z

Rotary processors by Simon Moore is the sort of thing. My flatmate is looking at it now but more for performance reasons than power.

I agree. I can't really imagine a universe where life didn't exist anywhere besides Earth.

After seeing Hubble Deep Field pictures (like this) and seeing the mindbogglingly huge numbers of galaxy and stars that are supposed to exist, I now believe (without proof, but still) that life (any life, not just sentient) does indeed exist elsewhere in the universe.

Even if a quadtrillionth (wild-ass-guess) of a percent of the stars out there had planets around them where life existed, that's still a lot of life.

Is he a CS major or MS major? (Martketing Science)

British universities don't have majors as such, but Ross Anderson is a well-published and widely-respected computer scientist, specialising in security. In fact he heads the Security Team at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. Examination of the publications on his home page will give some clue as to where he normally stands on the politics of computer security issues.

This paper argues that open and closed systems are broadly similar in the fall-off of defect rates, and then identifies some secondary issues (such as transaction cost, vendor behaviour, test focus, and defender behaviour) that can break this symmetry.

A large part of the paper is concerned with identifying negative consequences that digital rights management technology (such as the TCPA) can have on the future of open systems. In particular, he envisions a future where software vendors can readily lock their file formats, and block not only substitute products, but also selected complement products.

He gives some interesting examples: Apparently vendors are already using cryptography to detect third party batteries and memory cards in order to make them appear of lower quality; also he claims the US government encourages secrecy concerning security flaws so that law enforcement has a window of opportunity to exploit them.

With NDA [sic] and limited information that Microsoft is required to release. [sic] LINUX will be hurt by not having access to information for compatibility. LINUX is a competing operating system that Microsoft can not [sic] buy or sue into non-existence. Companies, like RedHat, make money is [sic] selling services or easy to install copies of the OS, without having to pay a licensing fee. But LINUX licensee [sic] places a burden on a developer that
code made available via under it [sic] licensee [sic] is free of other licensing restricting and the full source is available at no extra
charge. In this way the next developer can improve the code and again pass it on. [sic]Allows for thousands of people to give a little of themselves for the greater good.

Signing a [sic] NDA or paying for trips to meetings, [sic] places a unfair burden in [sic] small "guys" [sic] like myself to compete, or share what I have learned. Even to share code, since licensing restrictions may get in the
way. Instances [sic], I am "un-clean" to work on open source projects. I may use some else [sic]IP by accident.

In the end, the agreement should be blocked and [sic] better settlement be reached. IF [sic] the agreement is kept, then change it so the following happens:

1) All API's [sic]are published, documented, and examples made available 6 months prior to first general release containing the API's [sic]. Release of API's [sic] is made by any method of Microsoft's choice as long it is also placed on [sic] microsoft.com website, [sic]easily found (example: Search: "API WinXP") and [sic]
limited to HTML version 3 display standards. Further [sic] not having to register
with [sic] or agree to a [sic]NDA with Microsoft or any other company to gain access
to this information. Further to state... an API is not Intellectual Property[sic], but ways to "talk" to a
program that is[sic].
2) A Beta version is released and in the hands of all whom [sic] asks [sic] for it, no
later than 3 months prior the general release or an [sic] product. Any changes to
that Beta must [sic] in the hands of all who received the original shipping, to [sic] later
than 2 weeks after the change [sic] were made or 2 weeks prior to general release, which ever [sic] is earlier. An exception is a [sic]emergency release because a [sic] virus [sic]exploit.

3) Remove any clause that defines who Microsoft has to talk to. Instead place "Any person who wishes [sic] know".
Change 1, insures [sic] that if I wish to create a product that interacts with a Microsoft product, that I have full and complete information. AND [sic] will not be blocked or restricted by Microsoft. Change 2, [sic] Allows [sic] me to make compatibility tests and modification to my code prior to Microsoft releasing their product. This way my customers are protected from changes that may break code they are running. Change 3,[sic] Allows [sic]anyone who wishes to go a
technology meeting will [sic] be allowed [sic] IT IS NOT LONGER A "PRIVATE CLUB".

If in way I can help, please let me know.

Jack Beglinger

8900 Keeler Ave

Skokie, IL

847-677-2427


If the parent's author really said that... then he's a fool. Now go and read about Anderson

for a large, complex system to have a mean time before failure (MTBF) of (say) 100,000 hours, it must be subject to at least that many hours of testing

This seems to assume that you are testing the quality into the system, rather than getting quality by design + inspection. We all know how important design is, whether or not we do it correctly... And it's been very well demonstrated that code inspections find more bugs than testing. Since open-source invites the whole world to inspect your code, did Anderson just miss it's biggest advantage? And still come out with security(open source) == security(by obscurity)?

I've only read the first two pages of that 13 page pdf so far, so this opinion is subject to revision.

Linking several together gives you a theoretical mirror many hundereds of miles wide.

Whilst you can do this at radio wavelengths, and have baselines (the separation between individual telescopes) the size of continents as with the VLBA, it is more difficult at optical wavelengths. This is essentially because the much shorter wavelengths make for much tighter tolerances in combining the signals. As far as I know, the current state of the art gives separations of only about 100 metres, rather than miles. See for example COAST and Optical Long Baseline Interferometry News.

Maybe I'm being trolled :-), but this isn't the same thing as SETI@home , just because the VLA is a radio telescope.

Radio astronomy lets us study objects like supernova remnants and the interstellar medium (and hence star-birth and star-death), or active galaxies such as quasars, and the big cosmological questions about the origin of the universe.

The VLA is no more 'looking for aliens with radios' than optical telescopes are 'looking for aliens with flashlights'.

The VLA is an interferometer, which means that the 27 individual dishes are linked to simulate one huge telescope as big as the largest distance between them (up to 36km). This process of 'aperture synthesis' was pioneered at MRAO in Cambridge, UK (where I used to study, hence the plug :-).

Very roughly speaking, you 'fill in' the gaps in your notional huge telescope by having multiple dishes, sometimes by moving them, and also by allowing the Earth to rotate (thus effectively moving the dishes around for you over the course of a day). The larger the separation between the most distant dishes, the finer the resolution. However, you don't have the collecting area of an actual 36-km telescope, which can limit the sensitivity to faint objects.

So, strictly speaking, where the NYT article says:

Even though there is plenty of room here for more antennas, astronomers want to place the new ones some 60 and 150 miles away in southwestern New Mexico. With the wider dispersion, affording deeper views of the heavens, the Very Large Array will be, in effect, a single telescope the size not of a desert plain, but a quarter of a state.

they aren't quite accurate. "Deeper" is usually taken to mean "able to see fainter objects", whereas the longer baselines ("wider dispersion") will actually be allowing the VLA to see finer details instead.

The VLA is an interferometer, which means that the 27 individual dishes are linked to simulate one huge telescope as big as the largest distance between them (up to 36km). This process of 'aperture synthesis' was pioneered at MRAO in Cambridge, UK (where I used to study, hence the plug :-).

Very roughly speaking, you 'fill in' the gaps in your notional huge telescope by having multiple dishes, sometimes by moving them, and also by allowing the Earth to rotate (thus effectively moving the dishes around for you over the course of a day). The larger the separation between the most distant dishes, the finer the resolution. However, you don't have the collecting area of an actual 36-km telescope, which can limit the sensitivity to faint objects.

So, strictly speaking, where the NYT article says:

Even though there is plenty of room here for more antennas, astronomers want to place the new ones some 60 and 150 miles away in southwestern New Mexico. With the wider dispersion, affording deeper views of the heavens, the Very Large Array will be, in effect, a single telescope the size not of a desert plain, but a quarter of a state.

they aren't quite accurate. "Deeper" is usually taken to mean "able to see fainter objects", whereas the longer baselines ("wider dispersion") will actually be allowing the VLA to see finer details instead.

What was allegedly the first Egyptology site on the web(!) looks like a good starting point for Egyptology resources. They also have some comments on "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns" :-)

What was allegedly the first Egyptology site on the web(!) looks like a good starting point for Egyptology resources. They also have some comments on "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns" :-)

Well, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people already know this, but as far as the quality of patents go, they simply stink.

While I don't remember what date the special was aired (sometime in 2001), NBC (in the United States) aired a special on the USPTO and how patent examiners are given performance pay. The third paragraph in this article supports this fact. While the quality of a patent is not measurable, the quantity of patents approved by examiners is.

Since the USPTO does provide performance pay due to a lack of examiners, they have basically created their own problem. Since everything under the sun is patentable (including restaurants attached to hotels and bra size measurements), the examiners have basically build themselves a self-reinforcing problem that continually encourages them to rubberstamps patents, regardless of what the patent application is for.

I'm not at all surprised at what gets through the USPTO these days. Simply put, the excessive number of patents only serves the examiners and the legal system.