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I don't understand why they need the computing power either.

here's work on active stabilization. See "Active-Feedback Control of the Magnetic Boundary for Magnetohydrodynamic Stabilization of a Fusion Plasma" [aip.org]. That's a 2006 paper on a scheme involving 192 active feedback coils to stabilize a plasma. There's other work like that, and hope that one of the designs that's almost stable might be nudged into stability with active control.

Yes but that work was done on the reverse field pinch device called RFX-mod ( http://www.igi.cnr.it/rfxmod2009/ ). It's a tokamak-like magnetic confinement device so it probably has shot times measured in the multi-second range. Plenty of time for active stabilization but way different from this new MTF approach.

There are and will be quite a bit more "telescopes" out there, where I've used the term as loosely as the original poster, i.e. including imaging by other means than actual focussing. Some examples include the Japanese Suzaku mission; ESA's Integral or the small gamma-ray observatory AGILE. Further interesting developments in infrared astronomy are the soon-to-be-launched Herschel mission - the largest mirror before the launch of JWST - and the Japanese-led SPICA observatory.

Something similar, the Libra nose has been developed in Italy, at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata". The article is slim on the transducer CalTech is using...

That said, I am sure that someday in the distant furure, such concerns would be warrented. I can forsee a day when the power needs of the earth and the technology is such that we would be tapping heat more directly from the mantle or core in amounts that we might be able to affect the magnetosphere by cooling the mantle/core significantly. This is not a problem for these projected plans. I would be doubtful of our ability to cool even a localized area enough that we could accomplish something like "eliminate the possibility of the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting." We have to keep in mind the scale of our activities compared to the size of the earth. Our ability to communicate only makes the earth seem to be small....

Finally, on the subject of heating the earth: all electricty generation and consumption creates heat. We take fossil fuels from deep inside the earth and burn them, generate electricity and consume it, converting it back to heat as we do. This is all heat that would not have otherwise ever been found on the surface of the earth. Or we can take heat that is rising to the surface of the earth anyways, fast track it to the surface, generate electricity and do the consumption/conversion thing. Yes, we bring heat to the surface, but since it was on its way to the surface anyways, it seems a no brainer to me.

I confess to being baffled as to why people continue to indulge themselves with the delusion that such a proposition as yours will ever be possible. Considering these two graphs how could the prospect of "weaning ourselves off of high energy consumption" ever be seen as anything but irrational hope? No, the exponential growth of energy consumption by human civilization and the inextricably associated increases in life expectancy and living standards are undeniable. The energy consumption of the world will continue to increase exponentially and unabated for the forseeable future. The trick then, is to find a source of energy which can simultaneously provide the staggeringly huge needs of the future while also being environmentally benign. Controlled nuclear fusion, among a few other potential energy sources, fits this need nicely.

I'm not much of a physicist but a while back in the mid 90s someone came up with a way to get
MeV electrons by hitting a very thin metal foil with a laser.

"High-energy electron beam production by femtosecond laser interactions
with exploding-foil plasmas"

http://xray.ipcf.cnr.it/archivio/PRE_RC_01.pdf

They were already back then ten years ago jawing about cheap radiation equipment for example for
radiation therapy etc. Nothing came of it, I wonder why Siemens or Varian or all the rest of the equipment
manufacturers aren't delighted that there now is a cheap alternative?

Btw, you don't need to wear that lead apron while burning DVDs :-)

I haven't gotten the chance to read this thoroughly, but I think this is the research paper the article was referring to:
http://ecagents.istc.cnr.it/imgs/blu_paper.pdf

I'm curious, how long would it take for the in orbit debrii that is presumably from other satellites and space missions and things, to eventually get caught by earth's gravity and burn up in the atmosphere?

I would imagine that eventually the debris will lose enough energy to re-enter, but how long that would take is beyond me. The atmosphere doesn't just stop. It gradually becomes less and less dense with altitude and there is always some other matter about to hit. Someone, somewhere, probably has a table of the relative concentrations of matter and loss of momentum due to friction for various levels of orbit, but I'm too lazy to Google for it :-)

Here's something I did Google up, though.

The problem is whilst it's up there, for however long, that's a slot in space you can't put to good use because it's full of uncontrolled junk whizzing hither and yon. On its way back down, if it isn't done in a controlled fashion, it also has the opportunity to cause havoc with other satellites and even space missions. I believe, somewhere, there is a small object tracking center that keeps an eye on the larger bits of junk. This is the sort of thing I'm talking about. You'll notice they talk about the smaller particles losing momentum fairly rapidly, which would suggest that it is contact with other matter and resultant conversion of kinetic energy to heat that causes decay of orbit.

So, after waffling on, no, it won't stay up there forever. As for robotic trash collectors, forget it. We can't even keep down here clean, let alone up there. Can you imagine what would happen if the thing dropped the can lid? "UFO Spotted by By Roland Piquepaille! Posted by Timothy on April 1st 2006 23:59 from the little-green-men-and-link-whores department" ;-)

Sorry, got a bit bitchy towards the end there, didn't I? Time for a coffee...

The closer you get to the planet, the more crap there is. Some of it is really interesting crap, but it's still deadly crap.

Well, no wonder he has trouble finding food.. They took the list of pizza places in Canberra off of the Samba documention page. Furthemore, the Samba FAQ no longer seems to list ways of sending pizza to the Samba developers.

See here for an old copy.

If you google for the word "geothermal" the top four pages all reference heat pumps as geothermal energy. (The fifth is very brief and does not mention heat pumps either as geothermal or not.) You must have searched pretty hard to find the two references you sited.

Geothermal Education Office
"Today, with geothermal heat pumps (GHP's), we take advantage of this stable earth temperature - about 45 - 58 degrees F just a few feet below the surface"

Geothermal Resources Council
"Learn the basics about geothermal energy and the three technology categories, geothermal heat pumps, direct-use applications, and power plants"

U.S. Dept of Energy
"Ground-source heat pumps use the earth or groundwater as a heat source in winter and a heat sink in summer."

International Geothermal Association
"The most common non-electric use world-wide (in terms of installed capacity) is heat pumps (34.80%)"

Yup, you're still wrong.

P.S. citing the IRS as a technical resource is pathetic. They are the ones that upheld ketchup as a "fresh and perishable fruit" for purposes of bankrupcy.

Cutler Cleveland (Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University) appears to be one of the leading energy analysts these days, his work is quite broad. In "Net Energy from the extraction of oil and gas in the united states", Int. Journal of Energy 30 (2005), he shows that US Oil production has a EROI of 11 for energy in/thermal energy out. And gasoline is 30-50% of this value (ie 3.3-4.5 EROI). Now that doesn't include conversion efficiency in a car or power turbine, nor does it include the embodied energy of the extraction equipment or ICE/power plant to burn it.

If you make calculations just for conversion efficiency (33% ave) of US oil converted to electricity/mechanical power has EROI of 3.6, and gasoline in a car is less than 1 (meaning that the energy to do mechanical work in a car is being subsidized by by electricity (coal) to run the extraction equipment). And still we haven't considered the embodied energy in the extraction equipment or the ICE. (now of course middle eastern oil is 3 times better than this) That is very poor EROI! And coal isn't looking much better. Both of these resources EROIs have dropped by at least a order of magnitude over the last 100 years as extraction becomes more difficult. The future of fossil fuels by EROI analysis looks bad.

As for Alsema, he does review the added embodied energy of infrastructural components in section 4.5 of the paper. For complete balance of systems analysis (inc. frames, structures, concrete, maintenance, etc) the best technologies (thin films and ribbon Si) have EPBP of 1.2-2 (15-25 EROI @ 30y, 25-41 EROI @ 50y). scSi is around 3.3 years (9 EROI @ 30y, 15 EROI @ 50y). Analysis shows that PV energy is manufacture side heavy, with little continuing energy inputs as would be expected from a solid state, fixed, and essentially maintenance free device (how often do you maintain your current roof shingles?). However, even his latest numbers are out of date as he notes getting information from manufacturers is difficult because EROI calcs involve knowing trade and financial secretes so it takes a long time to get agreements in place. Also his calcs don't use the best efficiency panels on the market, which underestimates EROI, if that was the criteria on which we made purchases. Also multijunction concentrators, should be significantly better since 1) they use less material per peak watt and 2) they have a higher efficiency. References: Here,Here, Here, Here

What's the end result? EROI calculations beyond first or second order become quite tricky and controversial. But we can show that solar in a detailed "second order" or more EROI estimate looks very favorable compared to even a "first order" estimate of oil, NG, or coal.

Yeah, well the original requirements were to create a non-corporate, non-business oriented clone of UNIX for use by hobbiests.

Linux has, in the meantime, grown out of the lazy hobbiest requirements into a full blown industrial strength high performance yet immensely flexible kernel and toolset slash political movement. It has outgrown the fat penguin metaphor. I like the image of the sleek, powerful, art deco Peng, I think it fits. It conveys reliability. Tux conveys a powerful warning about drinking and Down's Syndrome.

And have you ever SEEN a phallus? Mine does not look like that. It's mostly cylindrical with a mushroomy bit at the top. Peng, on the other hand, is distinctly triangular. In fact, the only thing in nature as sleek as Peng that I can think of is, well, a penguin racing through the water.

Gee, he must have a heck of an intestinal disorder for it to be detectable with a telescope! Actually, it's called a spectrometer. You can use it to find out what any object that emits (or reflects) light is made of.

It's Pizzaware!
(see point 1.8 for details)

WebGraph is a framework to study the web graph. It provides simple ways to manage very large graphs, exploiting modern compression techniques. More precisely, it is currently made of:

1. A set of flat codes, called codes, which are particularly suitable for storing web graphs (or, in general, integers with power-law distribution in a certain exponent range). The fact that these codes work well can be easily tested empirically, but we also try to provide a detailed mathematical analysis.
2. Algorithms for compressing web graphs that exploit referentiation ( la LINK), intervalisation and codes to provide a high compression ratio: for instance, the WebBase graph (2001 crawl) is compressed at 3.08 bits per link, and a snapshot of about 18,500,000 pages of the .uk domain gathered by UbiCrawler is compressed at 2.22 bits per link (the corresponding figures for the transposed graphs are 2.89 bits per link and 1.98 bits per link). The algorithms are controlled by several parameters, which provide different tradeoffs between access speed and compression ratio.
3. Algorithms for accessing a compressed graph without actually decompressing it, using lazy techniques that delay the decompression until it is actually necessary.
4. A complete, documented implementation of the algorithms above in Java, contained in the package it.unimi.dsi.webgraph. Besides a clearly defined API, the package contains several classes that allow to modify (e.g., transpose) or recompress a graph, so to experiment with various settings. The package relies on fastutil for a type-specific, high-performance collections framework, on MG4J for bit-level I/O, on the COLT distribution for ready-to-use, efficient algorithms and on GNU getopt for line-command parsing.
5. Data sets for very large graph (e.g., a billion of links). These are either gathered from public sources (such as WebBase), or produced by UbiCrawler.

In the end, with WebGraph you can access and analyse a very large web graph, even on a PC with as little as 256 Mbytes of RAM. Using WebGraph is as easy as installing a few jar files and downloading a data set. This makes studying phenomena such as PageRank, distribution of graph properties of the web graph, etc. very easy.

You are welcome to use and improve WebGraph! Installation

You just have to install the .jar file coming with the distribution, and download the jars WebGraph depends upon (i.e., fastutil, MG4J, COLT and GNU getopt). You may find useful to refer to the JPackage Project if you own an RPM-based distribution. In the same vein of the packages above, WebGraph is also distributed as a Jpackage-like RPM.

WebGraph is a framework to study the web graph. It provides simple ways to manage very large graphs, exploiting modern compression techniques. More precisely, it is currently made of:

1. A set of flat codes, called codes, which are particularly suitable for storing web graphs (or, in general, integers with power-law distribution in a certain exponent range). The fact that these codes work well can be easily tested empirically, but we also try to provide a detailed mathematical analysis.
2. Algorithms for compressing web graphs that exploit referentiation ( la LINK), intervalisation and codes to provide a high compression ratio: for instance, the WebBase graph (2001 crawl) is compressed at 3.08 bits per link, and a snapshot of about 18,500,000 pages of the .uk domain gathered by UbiCrawler is compressed at 2.22 bits per link (the corresponding figures for the transposed graphs are 2.89 bits per link and 1.98 bits per link). The algorithms are controlled by several parameters, which provide different tradeoffs between access speed and compression ratio.
3. Algorithms for accessing a compressed graph without actually decompressing it, using lazy techniques that delay the decompression until it is actually necessary.
4. A complete, documented implementation of the algorithms above in Java, contained in the package it.unimi.dsi.webgraph. Besides a clearly defined API, the package contains several classes that allow to modify (e.g., transpose) or recompress a graph, so to experiment with various settings. The package relies on fastutil for a type-specific, high-performance collections framework, on MG4J for bit-level I/O, on the COLT distribution for ready-to-use, efficient algorithms and on GNU getopt for line-command parsing.
5. Data sets for very large graph (e.g., a billion of links). These are either gathered from public sources (such as WebBase), or produced by UbiCrawler.

In the end, with WebGraph you can access and analyse a very large web graph, even on a PC with as little as 256 Mbytes of RAM. Using WebGraph is as easy as installing a few jar files and downloading a data set. This makes studying phenomena such as PageRank, distribution of graph properties of the web graph, etc. very easy.

You are welcome to use and improve WebGraph! Installation

You just have to install the .jar file coming with the distribution, and download the jars WebGraph depends upon (i.e., fastutil, MG4J, COLT and GNU getopt). You may find useful to refer to the JPackage Project if you own an RPM-based distribution. In the same vein of the packages above, WebGraph is also distributed as a Jpackage-like RPM.

Cigarette smoke produces alpha particles. Tests of aplha detectors were nearly of the scales when put to a cigarette. Here is another link to a site about radioactive cigarettes.

I dont know if this has allready been stated, but Alpha particles are just helium nuclei with the electrons stripped off. They travel in particle form and get stopped by most objects. I think tissue paper was even mentioned in this post. Its beta particles (free electrons) that are the risk. They travel in wave form and penetrate through the object leaving damage. If you do get some alpha's on you, they can easily be washed away, thusly averting the damage.

Thats perfectly possible, assuming you are in a powered craft. Its only not possible if you are in a free-fall (non-powered) orbit.

Hold on. Do me a favour. Take a look at this site.

Then can you tell me if you think using your 23rd Century space drive to hover over the south pole meets this definition of "orbit"?

Or you can use this definition . or this one , or this one , or this one , or this one .

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

And here is a screenshot of the HUD.

It's amazing what they can do these days... :-)

I have been hearing more about Europe in the last 2 years than ever before. When it come to comp news that is. For instance there is a Swedish Usergroup promoting Linux which is for the moment only in Swedish unfortunatly. And storyies that Italy, in an effort to help the future generations compete in a global market, has tried to do a serious gearup in the IT and high tech industries. One good example of this can be found in the CNUCE Institute, and the good news is, this one's in english. A vastly more diverse example can be found at Search Europe, in their computers and internet section. Even a link to a list of companies in the Irish Internet Industry can be found there. All in all pretty encouraging stuff from the European front.

May I turn your attention to the fact some areas of our planet are becomming unfit to life because of complete ozone layer depletion? It's actually the case in Terra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. By getting outside unprotected you get third-degree burn in less than seven minutes. Organic life isn't possible without the ozone layer.[sic]

Try this instead.

http://apegaia.iro e.f i.cnr.it/news/press_releases/chicago.htm


Not as dramatic as your "planet's becoming unfit for human life", but a little more realistic.

(yawn)