Slashdot Mirror

The new SDK will allow developers to control accessories attached to the dock adapter. I'm really hopeful someone will make a card reader

Or, at least, an IBM parallel channel adapter, so you can hook up one of these card readers. Unfortunately, the iPhone SDK's terms of service would probably disallow a port of Hercules, so you'd need to jailbreak in order to get that classic mainframe experience on the iPhone....

Here is a database of observed climate change impacts. Your facts are fundementally correct but your conclusion is not, nobody is arguing climate change was the sole cause and it is disingenous to accuse the GP of doing so.

As for the observed temprature change being too small to affect large scale environmental change this is a silly argument that is easily debunked by observing Artic sea ice, it's like saying a teaspoon of sugar in your tank can't possibly do any harm to your engine. The amount of energy required to lift the global temprature even one degree is staggering yet the main cause of that increase is an increase in CO2 mesured in parts per million. That trapped energy must go somewhere and it does so mainly in the form of kinetic energy (below a 5km ceiling).

The government may or may not be incompetent but you are ignoring the facts in my summary and you are also ignoring the fact that most of the state has already been (naturally) burnt in recent years, particulaly in the summer of 2006-2007.

http://www.columbia.edu/~rr91/1052_2000/images/dancing.jpg

From TFA:

"The probability of our discovering the Higgs is very good - 90% if it is in the high mass range.
"And the chances are even higher - 96% - if its mass is around 170GeV (giga-electron volts)."

That's a BBC-friendly soundbite, but there is some deep where-are-we analysis behind it:

... which may, if improvements in their analysis work out, give them a two-thirds chance of seeing the Higgs at 2 sigma level over the entire expected mass range, or a 50/50 chance of seeing it at 3 sigma level over a large range, including a small range just above the 114Gev LEP limit.

Not Even Wrong blog, Peter Woit
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=1612/

In other words, they've sat down and worked through the what-ifs, and depending on how heavy the particle turns out to be, how likely they are to see it.

This reminds me of the DEC Rainbow (8086 and Z80) or Commodore 128 (8502 + Z80) or even the Acorn BBC with ARM-addon.
 
So who still thinks the Anonymous Coward is a n00b?

... besides, it wouldn't even be that important if it slowed down:

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/gs/

Interesting. Since I even learned that myth(?) in school, i will remain sceptical.

Maybe the Gulf Stream is slowing down already

No it's not. Stop spreading refuted myths.

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/politics/story.html?id=18a82eea-b683-44db-a46c-47ad6c3ae6c1

... besides, it wouldn't even be that important if it slowed down:

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/gs/

Yes, choice, variety, and competition are horrible things aren't they?

They have real disadvantages. http://www.columbia.edu/~ss957/whenchoice.html

If you are going to donate a brain, there are recommended packing instructions.
And don't risk using UPS, since Sterling Courier Systems is the pathologist's preferred shipper.

A similar class has been offered by Columbia's CS/EE departments for many years as well. Here is a link to last spring's version of the class:

http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards/classes/2008/4840/index.html

Git GPG signing, and KeyNote.

http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~angelos/keynote.html

read the article: in it, you will see links to the fact that Git already has GPG signing on tags.

also, you will see references to KeyNote, aka RFC 2704. for convenience, i'm cut/pasting the top bit, here:

"Trust management, introduced in the PolicyMaker system [BFL96], is a unified approach to specifying and interpreting security policies, credentials, and relationships; it allows direct authorization of security-critical actions. A trust-management system provides standard, general-purpose mechanisms for specifying application security policies and credentials. Trust-management credentials describe a specific delegation of trust and subsume the role of public key certificates; unlike traditional certificates, which bind keys to names, credentials can bind keys directly to the authorization to perform specific tasks."

For what it's worth, one is an Ivy League university in New York City, the other is not. TFS is wrong but TFA is right; the editor and/or submitter must be having trouble with copy and paste.

Let's get some facts straight. CFC 114 is not "used for enrichment," it is used as a coolant like any other CFC. There is no technical reason that another, less ozone toxic chemical or method could not be used.

Irrelavent. CFC114 is used in the process, whether it is used to cool the beers of the technicians or comes in direct contact with the element. The FACT is CFC114 is used.

Furthermore, the primary reason coolant usage is ... producing U-235 through such an outdated method.

Again, irrelevant. Whatever the reasons, Paducah is still in operation enriching uranium leaking CFC114.

By the way, if modern nuclear power plants could get approval to be built, there would be less need for enrichment in the first place.

All modern pre-approved reactor designs are once through cycle, for example the Westinghouse AP-1000. Politically conditions are extremely favourable for Nuclear reactors to be built. Regulatory framework has been discarded (in the guise of the 2005 Energy act).

However, modern designs only require an initial source of enriched material and then can be fed U-238. They accomplish this through extensive reprocessing of nuclear waste and breeding new fissionable material. The end result is an extremely efficient system (uses 99.5% of the energy in uranium as opposed to a LWR which uses 1%) that produces very little waste.

Uses U-238 !?!?!? Are you sure you don't mean Pu-239? Because I think you are talking about a IFR - which needs significant advances in material technology to be viable. Send a link if you really mean a viable commercial reactor that can use U-238.

Industrial emissions amount to a small percent of the total amount of CFCs released per year. the reason for the CFC emissions being so high for industrial use is that the USEC plant is very old ...In other words, stop trying to make it sounds like nuclear fuel enrichment is single-handedly causing the destruction of the ozone layer which is going to kill us all.

Compared to what, domestic emissions? old fridges on rubbish tips? More irrelevance, the plant is in operation - no other enrichment facilities are available. CFC114, a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02 is leaking from Paducah at 1 million pounds, thats 453,592.27 kilgrams PER YEAR since the bans began. That is 8 618 255.03 kilograms *since* CFC114 was banned. That's the equivalent of 172,365,100,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the enrichment process alone and does not include the 1 Gigawatt of coal fired power used to run Paducah. What part of 'Paducah is still in operation' do you not understand?

It's always, always the same thing. Nuclear advocates can't take responsibility for the externalities of the nuclear industry, instead 'it's those greenies fault for not letting us build something else'. Build a geologically stable waste dump first and then maybe we can move on from there.

As for the bit about the algae, there is not a lot of evidence to support your assertion.

Well a quick google seach produced this straight away

Overall, the production of oxygen in the oceans is at least equal to the production on land if not a bit more

and

Field studies indicate that photosynthesis is impaired first, followed by decreases in protein concentration and changes in pigment composition. As a result, a dramatic decrease in photosynthetic oxygen production can be measured after exposure to solar radiation

Or of course you could just go straight to the official UN monitoring of CFC114 after Montreal Environme

Yeah, because no-one did payroll before clusters of P4s. Those IBM and UNISYS mainframe timetracking apps must have been figments of my imagination. I confess I don't know how many MIPS the mainframes had, but the keyboard I used looked like this.

I worked in a data center with an IBM 370 and it had 32K or RAM...lol, have no idea if it had even 1 MIP. Based on this blog post it probably had 1 MIP or less. The quote in the blog that I saw was

The years was 1979...And with the older IBM 370/158 rated as a 1.0 âoeold styleâ MIPS machine (based on IBMâ(TM)s figures of a cycle time of 115 nanoseconds, which is about 8.7 MHz.), this new one, the 4331 mainframe, rated at about .3 MIP, and its big brother, the 4341, at a shade under 1 MIP â" an incredible price/performance achievement at the time.

In the early 80s I worked with the IBM 4341, 61 and 81s. Back closer to 79 it was an IBM 360, so my guess is we had 1 MIP or less on that 32MB of RAM box.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane...

Yeah, because no-one did payroll before clusters of P4s. Those IBM and UNISYS mainframe timetracking apps must have been figments of my imagination. I confess I don't know how many MIPS the mainframes had, but the keyboard I used looked like this.

Oh do you mean this terrifying Rashid Khalidi who is a professor at this well know terrorist training camp called Columbia University?

First, this isn't a new idea. Artificial air capture of CO2 has been proposed for some time; a noted proponent of this idea is Klaus Lackner. I don't think this new group has made a huge breakthrough in the technology. The basic problem is that it's (a) expensive, and (b) you have to put the carbon somewhere.

As for (a), it's currently cheaper to just capture the CO2 at large point sources like coal plants. On the other hand, that only gets some of the emissions. While coal plants are the most serious source of CO2 right now, adding capture to power plants doesn't capture emissions from cars and other small sources. Still, right now it's easier to just make more fuel efficient cars than try to capture the CO2 they emit.

As for (b), the sequestration problem is shared by any carbon capture technology (air capture or not). The main solutions are to pump it into geological formations in land or under the sea, or to convert it to solid form. The latter is relatively expensive and energy intensive. Storing it in the deep ocean is difficult to do on a large scale. On land there are serious limitations on how fast you can pump CO2 into a formation without pressure fractures and leaks, and even then there is a wide variety of formations whose ability to store CO2 varies dramatically. It requires careful siting, monitoring, etc. and you still have to worry about leaks, not to mention all the legal problems with people worrying about the CO2 acidifying the groundwater and leeching out heavy metals.

That being said, I think this technology definitely needs a lot of R&D aimed at it, because though expensive and difficult, it's a fallback position to reduce CO2 levels if energy efficiency and alternative energy measures don't do enough of a job.

I should have posted a link the first time. Sorry.

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/hollerith.html

Hollerith's contributions to modern computing are... "incalculable" :-) He did not stop at his original 1890 tabulating machine and sorter, but produced many other innovative new models. He also invented the first automatic card-feed mechanism, the first key punch, and took what was perhaps the first step towards programming by introducing a wiring panel in his 1906 Type I Tabulator, allowing it to do different jobs without having to be rebuilt! (The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate only on 1890 Census cards.) These inventions were the foundation of the modern information processing industry.

Funny, I had the same thought, and it turns out someone is pursuing it:

http://www.eee.columbia.edu/research-projects/sustainable_energy/Hydrates/index.html

What's particularly appealing is:
a) even if you capture and burn the stuff that's bubbling up, you're still reducing the overall GHG load, but even better, if you
b) capture the effluent CO2, it may be possible to push it into the sediments in replacement for the methane clathrates.

The latter seems pretty far off, but if these reports of "chimneys" of rapid release are right, they could be a decent candidate for capture. You'd have to have some kind of mobile apparatus for capture, and I have no idea how hard that is. Maybe you could use it to power a small data center in a floating enclosure?

The thing about climate models is that they get more complex and higher resolution as soon as the computers get faster. We will always take about 3 months to run a simulation. You can run it faster? Make it more detailed. It takes longer? Wait a few months to a year and it'll only take 3 months. Why 3 months? Not sure. Partly because that is about the length of a funding cycle of design experiment, run it, analyze, and write it up.

If you want to run 100 years per day, you can do so with an older model. The EdGCM project has wrapped a NASA global climate model (GCM) in a GUI (OS X and Win). You can add CO2 or turn the sun down by a few percent all with a checkbox and a slider. Supercomputers and advanced FORTRAN programmers are no longer necessary to run your own GCM.

Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.

If they're not curling their toes and mimicking a seizure, you're doing it wrong, or she's got some issues.

http://www.goaskalice.columbia.edu/2524.html

Steve Bellovin (granddaddy of IP firewalling) gives his (strongly negative) opinion here. He points out that it would be in seeming contradiction to the UN Charter.

Taking up again the tradition of the Friesian School, this is a non-peer-reviewed electronic journal

non-peer reviewed journal. yeah right! Read some peer reviewed (or at least more mainstream) stuff here:
http://wcar.alrc.net/mainfile2.php/For+the+negative/14/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/living/caste.shtml

Today, caste barriers have largely broken down in the large cities. "Untouchability" has been abolished by law.
However, loyalty to a caste is much harder to eliminate and it still provides a sense of community and belonging, particularly in country areas.

Plus, India has an extensive system of affirmative actions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India

That's been in place for a while now, which is why they've had a disadvantaged for a president:

And caste system exists among non-Hindus as well in India

(Muslims:
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/ambedkar_partition/410.html

  Christians:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/115071/Christian-caste
http://www.webindia123.com/goa/people/caste.htm

) so religion has little to do with it (although it does have a peripheral influence)

In other words, pretty much the same as post desegregation USA deep south.

Is there anything similar to your project that works completely on Linux, or are there plans to migrate away from a proprietary database to one that will work truly cross-platform?

I was interested until that bit:
Although the GCM itself can be run on Linux as well as on most other Unix variants, the EdGCM interface cannot. The reason is that the 4th Dimension database underlying EdGCM is available for MacOS and Windows, but not Linux. Should 4D, Inc. ever introduce a Linux version of 4th Dimension, we would be happy to provide EdGCM for that platform as well.

Might I suggest SQLite, or MySQL/Postgresql if you need a DBMS. These should run under MacOS as well.

(from the FAQ.)

If you'd like to replicate this experiment in a NASA climate simulation yourself, the EdGCM project has wrapped a NASA global climate model (GCM) in a GUI (OS X and Win). You can add CO2 or turn the sun down by a few percent all with a checkbox and a slider. Supercomputers and advanced FORTRAN programmers are no longer necessary to run your own GCM.

Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.

By the way, with an estimated population of 13.1 persons per square km under that satellite with a random reentry time, you'd get about 0.3 person inside that "hazard area". That's pretty small, but it's not zero and it doesn't look like the government's goal of less than 1/10,000. It's been said here already, but by the time it reaches Bush's desk it's boiled down to: 1) Could we make it worse? (NO) 2) Could we make it better? (MAYBE) Probabilities don't comfort victims or leaders.

(The numbers quoted above are accurate and come from a variety of sources, not all free.)

It's unnecesary to use a TinyURL in this instance (I don't have any idea why the submitter would), but you can hop on TinyURL and have a cookie set to preview all TinyURL links (or get Greasemonkey scripts to change all tinyurl.com requests to preview.tinyurl.com, which isn't as easily wiped like a cookie).

That link goes to http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/publications /pdfs/Bitouk_SIGGRAPH08.pdf

Maybe slashcode could be modified to have an option to resolve all TinyURLs to original links and to edit the submission accordingly automatically. I'm sure slashdot's servers wouldn't care if they found out that a TinyURL redirected to goatse...but it would help the readers.

Why the hell is there a tiny url (http://www.tinyurl.com/6ehog5) in this story? Where does it point? Goatse? Tubgirl? Some random PDF? This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen slip by the editors. It's not like this is Twittr, where you're limited to 140 bytes.

Maybe Slashcode needs something to automatically follow links in articles and replace them with their target if they redirect.

This must have been a historic encounter...

Ed Sullivan meets Johnny Cash (pictured right) they somehow morphed into Elvis and Nixon (left)!

Not 10 years (with current technology). Try 1 to 2 years energy payback time.

See the graph on page 4: http://www.clca.columbia.edu/papers/Photovoltaic_Energy_Payback_Times.pdf

it illustrates the issue nicely.

Well, maybe not.

From the article, the real issue appears to be that they make the assumption that the markers are independent of each other without having done the research.

In fact, they should know better than that. From DNA as a forensic instrument:

THE ISSUES SURROUNDING genetic information in trials may soon become more complicated. The next likely controversy will concern the science of population genetics. Even if a combination of markers is rare among all people, it might appear at higher rates in some ethnic subgroups, says Conrad Gilliam, professor of genetics and development at Columbia. He testified in the 1990 case Castro v. New York State, the first in which a prosecution's attempted use of DNA data was thrown out by the court.

Suppose a murder is committed in Chinatown, Gilliam conjectures, and the police find blood samples. Certain polymorphic variants that occur frequently in Chinese people are rare in Caucasians. If these markers show up in the sample, and the police produce a Chinese suspect, a prosecutor could try to use the DNA as further evidence against him. "However," Gilliam says, "a defense attorney could argue that there could be so many local suspects with the same profile that the evidence has no bearing on the case."

If the markers were truly independent, the polymorphic variants mentioned would be random as well.

So if the above is true, the markers aren't independent and they know it.

So that's why I keep my DECwriter III around! [image]

I had always given Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. That they weren't really all that bad, just unusually incompetent and maybe a bit greedy with a touch of power-hungry. Now I'm fully convinced that there is some kind of rotten fucking evil permeating that organization.

I went through this transition, now comes the powerlessness associated with knowing there is little you can do stop them, none of your friends will even understand this - of course, where you can you try to fight the man, the man will eventually bludgeon you into submission.

The sad reality is that the market will slowly be corralled into accepting Vista and all the requisite DRM baggage that it carries. The key here is that the frog is heated very slowly in the pot and the market will accept, like sheep, what is fed to them. Of course the ardent Microsoft supporters will say Vista ain't so bad, and sure their products are nice to work with, but they are also a nightmare of interoperability when you try and work with anything else.

I don't want to encourage purchase of their products because when you dig deeper into the behavior of Microsoft the 'evil' conclusion is consistently reinforced. A corporation has the same legal rights as an individual in society it begs the question "What sort of individual is Microsoft", I found this and made the comparison.

HOW TO SPOT A PSYCHOPATH - 5 WAYS TO AVOID HIRING PSYCHOPATHS COPYRIGHT 2008 MICHAEL MERCER, PH.D.

1. Pre-Employment Tests - especially certain test scores

From my research on pre-employment tests, there are specific test scores that may indicate a job applicant is a psychopath. Specifically, psychopaths may get low or high scores on certain measures/scales in pre-employment tests:

* low scores on two measures - (a) Truthfulness and (b) Following Rules

Check , Check

* high scores on two measures - (a) Aggressiveness and (b) Power Motivation

Check, Check

Lesson: Be cautious with job applicants who get such scores on pre-employment tests.

2. Job Interviews

If you suspect a job applicant may be a psychopath, then you can ask questions to elicit answers revealing if the applicant threatens or intimidates people. Reason: Psychopaths get a huge thrill from intimidating through (a) real or implied threats, (b) verbal hostility, and (c) manipulation.

threats, hostility, manipulation, manipulation, manipulation.

3. Reference Checks

Call the job applicant's ex-bosses at home, and ask for a "personal reference." Obtain specific examples of how the applicant "handled difficulties and friction with other employees." Listen for warning signs of threats, intimidation, anger, or ridicule.

intimidation, anger,

people don't infringe copyrights by remembering what happened in a story (even reading the story in a bookstore).

Citation needed. The "My Sweet Lord" case, Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976), established that people can infringe U.S. copyrights by remembering and accidentally copying melodies, a holding that has been upheld on appeal in the Second and Ninth Circuits. See ABKCO Music v. Harrisongs Music, 722 F.2d 988, 221 U.S.P.Q. 490, and Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton, 212 F.3d 477 (9th Cir. 2000). This has made some people wonder whether it is even possible to write an original song anymore.

people don't infringe copyrights by remembering what happened in a story (even reading the story in a bookstore).

Citation needed. The "My Sweet Lord" case, Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976), established that people can infringe U.S. copyrights by remembering and accidentally copying melodies, a holding that has been upheld on appeal in the Second and Ninth Circuits. See ABKCO Music v. Harrisongs Music, 722 F.2d 988, 221 U.S.P.Q. 490, and Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton, 212 F.3d 477 (9th Cir. 2000). This has made some people wonder whether it is even possible to write an original song anymore.

Assuming the previous comment about women still hitting menopause around their 40s would not be true, then how long they remain fertile is a function of how many eggs they are going to produce. Which, as you may recall from high school biology or health class, is fixed at birth. A reply on Go Ask Alice! suggests only about 400 eggs will be be able to mature and be released, so a woman would probably only remain fertile until her mid 40s or 50s at best, regardless of when the hormonal changes associated with menopause started.

Here's some links to the IBM mechanical business machines:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/tabulator.html

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/407.html

With successive stages of punched-card processing, fairly complex calculations could be made. One could roughly think of each stage as an SQL clause: SELECT (filter columns), then WHERE (filter cards, or "rows"), then maybe a GROUP BY, then a SORT BY, and then perhaps feed those back to another set of SELECT and WHERE cycles again if needed. Still, a human operator usually had to store, load, and monitor the various card stacks over each stage.
       

Here's some links to the IBM mechanical business machines:

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/tabulator.html

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/407.html

With successive stages of punched-card processing, fairly complex calculations could be made. One could roughly think of each stage as an SQL clause: SELECT (filter columns), then WHERE (filter cards, or "rows"), then maybe a GROUP BY, then a SORT BY, and then perhaps feed those back to another set of SELECT and WHERE cycles again if needed. Still, a human operator usually had to store, load, and monitor the various card stacks over each stage.
       

The Japanese definition of "rural" is nowhere near the definition of rural here in the US. this is because they have an ungodly amount of people for the land they inhabit.

Basically, what I am saying is the Japanese idea of rural is, at best, like a marginally populated suburban neighborhood in the US.

Here are some raw numbers to better illustrate my point (from this study, year 2000 numbers):

Japan total rural area (sq km): 273,646
Japan total rural population: 13,498,527
Japan rural population density (people/sq km): 49.32

US total rural area (sq km): 8,423,867
US total rural population: 54,936,968
US rural population density (people/sq km): 6.52

SEE THE DIFFERENCE? It's almost an order of magnitude! And the urban numebrs show a 3x difference between the US and Japan; closer, but still nowhere near each other.

Of course we have infrastructure problesm here in then US, and they largely don't; it just comes with the territory.

SCREEN for persistent terminal connections,
XMOVE for X programs (although xmove is a bit of a bear to use, and is suffering a slight case of bitrot) ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/pub/xmove/
VNC is probably a better choice for "generic" use.
VNC can be tunneled through SSH, which is better than opening a port for it (by itself, VNC isn't secure).

Hope this helps.

since you're too much of a neophobe to learn screen, these require no new software learning at all, and they're completely intuitive. and totally retro style, d00d, almost steampunk, I hear that's all the rage with the kids these days...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASR33

or

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/la36.html

If you'd like to simulate this yourself, the EdGCM project has wrapped a NASA global climate model (GCM) in a GUI (OS X and Win). You can add CO2 or turn the sun down by a few percent all with a checkbox and a slider. Supercomputers and advanced FORTRAN programmers are no longer necessary to run your own GCM.

Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.

It's really not that difficult to write the software. I managed to follow this paper and get it working in a few evenings....

http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~ravir/cvpr07.pdf

I only had a go after seeing that a guy on CG talk managed to do it (and he's an artist - not a programmer).... http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=109&t=636851

Both pie charts have the same date, November 2007.

The list is compiled every six months. It takes a while for the results to be tabulated and validated. New results for May 2008 will be available soon.

The upper pie is based on the share of systems by operating system family. That giant pac-man shape represents the 85% share tux had in November. The Windows sliver represents 1.2% or roughly six or seven systems in the top 500 most powerful computers publicly known, for all versions of Windows.

The bottom pie is different because it represents the operating system family's share of processing power. Here you'll note the Windows systems have disappeared entirely. Usually this represents that the scarce Windows systems were in the bottom end of the range or older systems that are not maintaining a proportional share of processing power.

Since you're making the observation that the data is seven months old, are you anticipating some upswell in adoption of Windows among the HPC crowd, who are presumed to know what they're doing and be unswayed by political or marketing concerns? That would be remarkable. If the petaflop Cell processor supercomputer IBM just built called RoadRunner runs Windows I'll eat an original IBM punch card.

What's also remarkable is that Microsoft with its billions can't build and keep a few in-house systems high in this list just to build their HPC credibility and assist their marketing in this area - which they would dearly like to have.

Brookhaven received a donation $13 million so that the 2006 RHIC run could go for 20 weeks, vs 12. (The summary to the contrary, I would say that BNL is a particle physics lab.)

http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=06-X2
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=328

This year though, the budget process is such that there may not be a RHIC run at all!

The movies they attach are not very good.

I have some Python source code for doing similar things with the case of European nations on http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/06/animated_mds_co.html (there is an animated GIF there).

A bit more discussion about my methodology is at http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/06/nations_of_euro.html

The movies they attach are not very good.

I have some Python source code for doing similar things with the case of European nations on http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/06/animated_mds_co.html (there is an animated GIF there).

A bit more discussion about my methodology is at http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/06/nations_of_euro.html

I'm reading Slashdot on an LA36, you insensitive clod!

Off-topic, but I actually used one of these things (or something in the same family; it was 1984-85 and I don't remember the exact model) my first year in college. Freshman CS majors had to write Pascal programs using these on a CDC mainframe. There were 3 video terminals (I don't remember the type, now - they were large, clunky things, not made by DEC or Tektronix or any other company I recognized at the time) in one of the terminal rooms. They were greatly preferred, but since everyone wanted to use them, I was usually stuck at a print terminal. I got access to the manual for the terminals through a friend, and found that you could set a password. I'm sorry to say that I did that on all three terminals, and only gave it to two of my friends, so we could always use them. That's probably the most anti-social thing I've ever done...

It looks as though we are going to need sequestration from the atmosphere based on what is becoming understood about the sensitivity of the climate to grenhouse gasses http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080317.pdf

In my opinion, a solid is much more compatible with storing carbon in the Earth than a gas, but even if we are to store a gas, it does not make a whole lot of sense to use up what capacity there may be on burning coal. Coal is already nicely sequestered.