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Yeah, I haven't had the heart to go back since the new one opened. I think I actually cried when they closed it. The promotions made it look awful. While construction was ongoing, they had a pretty decent display of other things (chickens hatching, air pollution, mass transit) in a temporary annex in the parking lot, but that's probably down now too.

Great memories of that place. All I remember of the main building was a bunch of kinda oldish-looking exhibits, though I think either upstairs or downstairs was a model train room, and one time they had one of the robots from Short Circuit chatting about. The hall to the side had all the good stuff... the math and probability room, the robots-building-bicycles display that would CAD you a custom bike drawing, touchscreen displays (this was 1987), fun with magnets and electricity and so on... I'd beg my parents to take me there on weekends; we probably went a few times a year (it helped that my dad's a museum addict). I think I may have even ended up in some promotional video that I never saw, as they were filming when a friend and I were playing a maze game against a computer AI. It was hardly fair... the joystick was broken and wouldn't move left.

Found a link to a retrospective of the museum... guess the Mathematica section had been around a while... http://www.concentric.net/~Whmsicl/CMSI.html -- someone on the message boards claims it lives in New York now.

I about screamed when I read someone on the internets recently comparing something to a moebius strip because you can't get to both sides of it, instantly knowing they were full of BS as I remembered seeing the little arrow on a track at the museum.

The typical Slashdotter only thinks they're knowledgeable and intelligent.

Looking at the list of "MacGyverisms",
he was often just as misguided.

I often wished some of his trickery would backfire uproariously. A self-spoof once in awhile can be fun. With the added excitement that there's no foregone conclusion that the trick will work.

Did you remember to do a "warm-up" phase for java to enable all JIT-compilation to take place before doing the real test? (See here for more tips on this).

For what it's worth, I wasn't just pulling the above out of my hindside... Look at the formula for "intervals" at the bottom of that previous link:

If we think of an event as a flash bulb popping off at some place and time, this event can be described by four such numbers, x1, y1, z1, and ict1. If there is another flash bulb popping off in another place and time, x2, y2, z2, and ict2; we can define the "interval" between these two events by simple Pythagorean law. The interval is the square root of the sum of the squares of the "distances": x2 - x1, y2 - y1, z2 - z1, and ic (t2 - t1). Note that the "distance" ic (t2 - t1) is "imaginary" but is in units of distance. The product of a unit of velocity, such as the speed of light, c, and a unit of time, is a unit of distance. As an imaginary distance, however, its square will be a negative real number. Therefore, the interval between events in space-time is the square root of the sum of four terms, three of which are always positive, and one of which is always negative.

Last year my Yamaha DX7 music keyboard battery died. I didn't know it at the time but when the battery dies, all programmed sound patches and modes are erased, even the factory presets. No problem, I had made a backup years ago with DX Android on the Atari ST so I could just restore from those backups. I got the battery replaced but when I got the Atari ST out of the closet it would not boot. I guess I could have searched ebay for a replacement but instead I got the Atari ST emulator, STeem from http://www.atari.st/ and was able to restore the patches from the backups using it.

I have emulators for most of the computers I had previously owned. I still have the software, just would not have a way to play them anymore if it wasn't for emulators. Some of the ones I use besides the Atari ST that I had previously mentioned are:
Amiga http://www.winuae.net/
Atari 800 http://www.concentric.net/~Twist/atari800win/
DOS Games http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/
Another Atari ST Emulator http://sourceforge.net/projects/winston/

What I read of this is that the BBC is going to put these up on the net, and hope people will pay for them anyways... somehow, I'm not perfectly certain it's going to work the way we want it to...

Yeah, because the RIAA and MPAA both say it isn't true, and they'd never lie, right?

It's amusing to note that of the people who have tried have found that it does indeed increase sales.

I guess you don't realize that the RIAA not only gives their stuff away to people who don't pay for it, but actually pays people to give it away for them.

Error in your logic: often you actually do need permission to legally record your cover version (see eg. example or just use google - rules may vary according to your jurisdiction).

Also see: NIKOLA TESLA 1856 - 1943 FORGOTTEN AMERICAN SCIENTIST

"ERASED AT THE SMITHSONIAN

OMITTED IN SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS

OMITTED IN TECHNICAL JOURNALS

UNKNOWN, EVEN TO SOME ENGINEERS"

The above page is in co-operation with Yale Scientific Magazine, who has this story: To the Smithsonian or Bust: The Scientific Legacy of Nikola Tesla

You could link and at least credit the source...

Takes up less space as well :)

Here is a page that has something. Look for "The evil urn", with a pic of the bottle and a description. The show was "Hakusshon Dai Maou". Sorry no pic of the Genie.

I'll keep looking.

I'm really starting to have problems powering everything, right now it's all on a power strip with a bunch of 3-way adapters, but still not everything fits, and I'm probably asking to burn the house down. :/

There's also an obligatory Enterprise model. ;)

And no, I'm not summoning elemental forces in there, that's what I get from trying to squeeze a 25th photo onto the roll of 24.

Uh, no other company would be stupid enough to try to use the name "TiVO" without paying for it,

Maybe the cases of companies ripping off intellectual propery rights are very few and far between, indeed, but that is not to say that it doesn't happen.One case that comes to mind is that of a band called The Squirrel Nut Zippers in which Wrigley's Gum used their song in a television commercial without paying the band or acknowleging their rights to the band's own music. To add insult to injury, Wrigley didn't even bother recreating the song with a sound alike band...they just lifted the track directly from the album . Of course the band sued, as I understand it, and the company settled out of court.

I don't think this sort of monumental stupidity is what you would call commonplace. But it does occasionally happen.

The original lyrics are also copyrighted and can't be reproduced for wide distribution (even as a vocal transformation) without consent.

Not exactly. A cover song can be publically performed with a simple ASCAP (or BMI or whatever) compulsary license. To be on the safe side, they should definately have an ASCAP license, that's not all that expensive. They still could run into problems because of the fact that they are allowing the songs to be downloaded. Technically, they should probably be paying Harry Fox (or someone similar) "7.1 cents per CD sold if the song is 5 minutes or under. Songs over 5 minutes cost slightly more, based on a rate of 1.35 cents per minute."

Actually,

The source for atari800win is freely availiable. You could use
kaillera for the netcode and voila instant atari netplay goodness. I've been wanting to play ballblazer 2p across the net for a while now :)

Maybe you should make it a senior project for your students to get it done :P

I think you're thinking of "Circus on Ice", a short in front of episode 421, "Monster a Go Go." Some more quotes from the bots can be found here.

• XZip. for X-Windows
• WinFrotz for Windows
• MaxZip for Macintosh
• Frotz for DOS, WinCE, Amiga, OS/2, and Psion
• Pilot-Frotz for Palm OS

Specs:

P3-850MHz, 128mb RAM plus one empty SODIMM (mine easily upgraded to 384mb), 20gb IDE drive, 16mb Geforce2Go AGP video, DVD/CD-RW combo drive (4x CD-R/CD-RW write, 24x read), integrated ethernet (Intel EtherExpressPro 10/100), two USB ports, one Firewire port (OHCI), parallel, external VGA, composite video, built-in subwoofer (excellent sound for a laptop!), can play audio CDs while computer off, headphone jack with volume control dial on side of computer.

--

OpenGL performance is pretty much as expected from an NVIDIA chipset. Not quite full Geforce2 performance, but beats the crap out of the SGI O2s that I often use. If you need to run your high-end 3D apps on a laptop, this will handle them. Haven't yet tried Quake3 or Unreal Tournament yet, but graphics demos and screensavers (i.e. GizmoZone screensaver) run very nicely.

As LCD display resolution is fixed, it's often the case that lower resolutions tend to look pretty crappy on LCD displays. There is an optional feature to use the Geforce2Go to rescale lower resolutions (or full-screen DOS console) to full screen. The scaling utilizes bilinear filtering so it smooths out the image and happens in real-time. A nice feature I'd love to see is to be able to scale down from higher resolutions. For instance, 1280x1024 would look really slick scaled down to 1024x768 LCD resolution.

One of the coolest features of the Geforce2go chipset is Twinview. This allows you to plug in an external display (either VGA or composite video) for dual monitor display. In Win2000, you can split your dual displays using a top/bottom or left/right orientation, or you can have one display show a zoomed up section of another. The chipsets capability of smoothly zooming on a section of the screen is pretty slick, and you have a lot of freedom to choose which display shows what.

Another EXTREMELY cool feature is the ability to automatically show 'overlay' video full size on an external display. For instance, start playing an AVI file with mplayer2 (or a DVD for that matter) in a window, and it will show full screen on your secondary monitor or TV output. Drag the mplayer2 window to the side of your primary display and the video still plays. This is definitely the laptop to buy for doing presentations.

One thing that really stands out is the sound. I didn't really buy this laptop with audio in mind but was gladly surprised to find that the Yamaha DS-754 chipset sounds almost as good as my $180 Yamaha SW60XG MIDI card. I've been running the (admittedly crappy) XG Enlightenment Central page for about four or five years. XG is easily the best sounding MIDI standard around, supporting very powerful on-board channelized DSP effects (32 channels of filter/reverb/chorus, solid-state/marshall/tube amp distortion, pitch change, WAH-WAH, EQ, many more!) Not to plug my site (I don't have any ads, so I don't make money off hits), but I have collected a few hundreds MIDI files on my site mostly done by in-house Yamaha composers. The DS-754's DSP is supposedly software-programmable, which has some some hack value if the SDK ever is released.

On the bad side, I don't care much for the little eraserhead-type mouse thingy. I've gotten a little bit more used to it, but I still would have preferred a touchpad. The DVD/CD-RW combo drive sometimes take about 30 seconds to recognize some CD-R discs. The display is 1024x768, which is fine for some people but I would have easily paid a few hundred more for higher resolution. You can now buy a DELL with Geforce2Go (both 16mb and 32mb) with a higher display resolution, and pretty much all the specs of the Toshiba, but it probably ends up costing quite a bit more. I paid $2500, but the price has dropped to about $2000-$2200 for a similar model with a P3-900.

BTW, I have yet to install Linux on this thing but I've heard it runs quite well except for the Toshiba (Lucent?) AMR WinModem.

STratoHAKster

well, i was going to moderate, but i couldn't resist.

this (mirror) is "leaptrek". it's an erotic fanfic st:tng/quantum leap crossover, where sam beckett leaps into the body of jean-luc picard. his mission? to fuck beverly crusher.
---

One story goes that Edison put a good deal of money into developing the electric chair as a AC-based device (as opposed to DC) to give people the impression that AC was dangerous. Apparently it took a good deal of work (hint: defibrilation paddles are AC based). From what I can tell, it would have been much easier with DC, but Edison would have nothing to do with a DC electric chair.

Once it became clear that AC was a far better solution to most electricity problems, Edison pretended that it was his idea all along, and has tried (mostly effectively) to wipe Tesla out of the history books as a serious inventor.

Given that Tesla was pretty much the god of AC, and radio depends on AC, I wouldn't be surprised to find that Tesla had a hand in early radio work.

I think that http://www.concentric.net/~jwwagner/is the site that tells a lot about this story.
--

If nothing else, it's fun to speculate about such things. As I said, take it with a huge grain of salt.

"legalize drugs"? Which drugs? May I hypothetically prognosticate?

Legalize penicillin (yes, penicillin is a controlled substance, just try walking into a pharmacy and asking for a bottle of it with no prescription) and relative to a control group, you'll soon see a small increase in penicillin-resistant pathogens. That, at least, is the rationale put forth by the U.S.A.'s profit-oriented medical profession, why ordinary folks like you and I should not be able to buy antibiotics over-the-counter without first writing a big old check to an M.D. somewhere first in return for his scribbled sig on a scrip pad. I suspect that that for-profit aspect might have something to do with it too, but maybe I am just a cynic, feel free to disregard me.

Legalize marijuana, and, socially speaking, well, nothing happens. No one dies of marijuana overdoses, no one at all, not now and not "then," never. It could be argued that marijuana use would go up, but that assumption presumes that our idiotic War on Drugs actually does something today to inhibit marijuana use. This presumption seems to be contradicted by facts such as the one about marijuana being California's number-one cash crop. Evidently, legal or not, millions of people smoke marijuana anyway. The only public effect, then, would be that the jails would have more room for armed robbers, rapists, and that ugly ilk, and those taxes spent on enforcement of marijuana laws could be either spent on something more socially productive or rebated to the taxpayers, and the tens of billions of dollars which go into the illegal marijuana market would stop disappearing underground. Oh yeah, and when you'd go the the bookstore and buy new books they'd be printed on cheap, high-quality, acid-free paper that lasts just about forever.

Legalize heroin and other opiates, and among other effects you'll see a diminution in the number of overdose deaths. I've got a specific mechanism in mind. #1: junkies can only afford one or two doses at a time. #2: our junkie especially values that intense rush he gets when he shoots up, that rush is something he doesn't want to miss. #3: the concentration of street dope varies wildly from day to day. #4: overdoses suck; they don't feel extra-good, on the contrary, they feel real bad, plus of course OD'ing squanders a whole bunch of perfectly good dope. But in order not to miss out on that rush (junkies are not noted for caution), the junkie shoots up all he's got anyway. Unfortunately, sometimes the dealer is trying to do his customer a favor by supplying especially good, that is, high-purity dope. Alas, the poor junkie. All his old friends miss him.

But imagine that one could buy opiates in shrink wrap right over the counter at your local pharmacy and/or liquor store. (It isn't that fantastic, after all - keep in mind that a hundred years ago, right here in the U.S.A, you could buy all the morphine you wanted, with no legal restrictions.) Well, in that case, our junkie would probably not overdose, because, having bought a commercial product with a known concentration, he wouldn't want to take too much, and he'd know exactly what quantity he's taking. By the way, counting overdose fatalities, I exclude suicides. If opiates were readily available, they'd probably the means of choice for deliberate self-extinction. As Schopenhauer put it, "...there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person." This might be a specific advantage of legalization, for victims of painful, terminal diseases. The obvious down side of opiate legalization, of course, would be that while you would see fewer overdose deaths, you would also most likely see a whole lot more people who become physically addicted to these opiates for one reason or another, If for any reason their supply were cut off for seventy-two hours, they would be reduced to agonized withdrawal victims. Maybe not good, huh? At least something to worry about.

Legalize cocaine. Imagine an ultra-libertarian world where even cocaine were available without restriction (again, this was the situation one century ago, when among other luminaries Freud and Conan Doyle dabbled in it). Now, first of all, too much cocaine kills, that's a simple medical fact. And second, for some people at least, cocaine is the perfect and complete binge drug. Particularly when you strip off that pesky HCl with a little NaHCO3 + H2O, heat the resulting solid precipitate to vaporization in a pipe, and inhale the gaseous product... Take these two facts together, you can see the danger here. More and more leads to more and more and more. So I am told. Individuals differ, of course. For example, someone I knew well a long time ago had that very same problem with mere common alcohol. One drink, one single little drink, and absolutely surely from that moment he'd stop eating and start drinking non-stop, for days and weeks until he had to be ambulanced to an emergency room in epileptiform delirium tremens. Anyway. My guess is, you make essentially limitless quantities of coke available o.t.c. and one result would be that every big city's Sanitation Department would have to take on a new, disgusting duty: patrolling the alleys every morning before dawn, carting off the corpses of the freshly OD'd dead. Gee, I don't like cocaine.

Well, all this is highly hypothetical, and who knows? maybe even incorrect in point of fact, but there's four of them. Only four of the countlessly many currently proscribed drugs, each wildly different from the others. That's the point I'm trying to make here: "drugs" are all different. Talking about globally legalizing "drugs" is like talking about legalizing, I don't know, green things. Cabbages, iguanas, bottles of absinthe, hand grenades, treat 'em all identically, they're all green. I could maybe accept this attitude from an ideologically pure radical Libertarian or anarchist. At least he is consistent: possession of any thing should be legal. Conversely there's the equally consistent but dystopian 1984/police-state model where everything is illegal. It's not over the issue of self-contradiction that we reject the Khmer Rouge theory of government! Anybody else, however, who jabbers about drug laws without explicitly distinguishing between the various drugs in question, I have to accuse him of shallow, or sloppy, or downright dishonest thinking.

So which drugs, exactly, did you want to legalize?

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

When I saw the headline I also thought we were going to hear about kinetic sculpture -- then as I read the article I thought of sculpture using phones.

Sort of, it's actually something that SGI started calling an Accumulation Buffer many years before 3DFX ever existed. How does it work? Simple, enable alpha blending, don't clear screen buffer memory on each frame, and render all your polys with alpha set to whatever level you want (depending on the effect you want..).

Here's a simple (!) demo that I wrote for a 3DFX-sponsored demo competition, got 5th place, and did motion blur years before 3DFX hyped T-buffering. Included is all 200-lines of source code.. d:^)

http://www.concentric.net/~Psteffen/savers3DFX/

Any 3D chipset that supports alpha channels can do motion blur without any significant hit to framerate or CPU overhead. In fact, the Atari and Amiga demo scenes were doing this using bitplane tricks.

STratoHAKster

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 14,...
Reading about his house and habits reminds me of my childhood-favorite biography of Thomas Edison.

I should have expected that from 'timothy'. Try reading more history and you'll find that Edison's biographies are often inflated ego trips for the man, and mysteriously choose to avoid talking about Nikolai Tesla. Check out this, this, and this to understand why. If it were up to Edison we'd have *no* electricity because he wanted us to use a DC system simply because it was his idea. 'NIH' (Not Invented Here) syndrome is a bad thing.

Nice rant! Thanks for writing. Say, how do you feel about VP candidate Lieberman, that Social Security bandito^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprivatizer, and his claim that we atheists (and for that matter, followers of non-theistic religions like Buddhism) can't possibly be good Merkins on account of us failing to believe in "God"? And, ha ha, the very next day after I read that crap in the newspaper, I get a solicitation in my mailbox from the Democratic National Committee asking me to dig into my wallet and give till it hurts! Bite me, DNC, and rack up another vote for Righteous Ralph instead!

...because after all, I can always leave the oppressed and join the oppressors...

cf. our crabby old friend Mencken on this very issue.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Jesus H. Kee-rist, that's just the thing you need here in the year-2000 United States of Amerika, our new police state. Absolutely perfect to get your ass shot.

Someday I should tell you about the day a lady copy pulled a gun on me because she saw I had a ninety-glass in a case hanging from my belt.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Most of Infocom's games, including LGOP, were in their .z5 format, playable on a wide range of machines. If you have the game files (you can probably find the Infocom masterpieces collection, 33 games on one CD) all you need is an interpreter.

Download the Zork 1-3 .z5 files (they might possibly be renamed to .dat) at http://www.concentric.net/~Twist/WinFrotz/download .shtml . These are freely redistributable.

Download interpreters for your platform at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive /interpreters-infocom-zcode/

See where you can buy the games at http://underworld.fortunecity.com/trac k/946/

From the article: Other scientists also came to the same conclusion at about the same time.

There have been so many instances of a scientist not receiving due credit for his developments. I'm glad to see this isn't the case with Mr. Davies. (However, it would be neat to see who else worked on the same concept at the time.)

--
"Give him head?" ... "Be a beacon?"

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft Ad

Next thing: Murder as art...

Raymond Chandler considered murder to be art, his art. This is a cool little book.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Besides, no moon, then no spoon in June...

Everyone knows that the Moon influences, some say entirely controls, the romantic life of human beings. No moon, no love, no more children, extinction, death, doom, dust.

Then again that might not be such a bad thing after all.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

I used to watch Starblazers and Force Five every day after school. I think Force Five aired primarily in New England. Anyone else watch it? And if you did, who thought Starvengers was the best of the 5?

The original show's target audience was in the 12-14 year old male demographic. FUNimation's rape...er, English dub I mean, is what dumbs the show down to 8-year-old level.

It's well worth it to invest in some fansub tapes to see the show in its original form. A few advantages of the fansubbed episodes:

• Freezer is not an 80-year-old woman with emphysema
• Kuririn is actually a cool character!
• Muten Roshi actually is a dirty old man, and cops a feel whenever he can on any of the female characters
• none of that "the next dimension!" crap; people actually die in the original version
• Episode 125 (although this will be dubbed soon, Funi will probably screw it up) Chichi forces Son Gokuu and Piccolo to take driving lessons--hysterically funny!
• Well-written and well-placed background music, none of that idiotic meandering synth music that they put in the dub!

Obviously only a partial list, but if you want to see what you're missing in the dub, check out Chris Psaros' DBZ Uncensored!

Anyway, if you don't feel like waiting for some college kid in Nebraska to get around to mailing you some tapes, you can download episodes at Da Black Goku or at DALnet #dbzleech.

> It's a naked couple engaged in sexual activity. Of course it's pornographic!

The deep problem is, as you know, that decent persons who share your wholesome heartfelt thorough revulsion to the horrible act of fornication, for technical reasons I'm sure we'd rather not elaborate in detail out here in public, end up childless. Whereas conversely, moral-less sensualists, career fornicators, by a perversity of the Universe, often end up parents even without intending to in the first place.

That such is the case in our contigent and accidental world is dreadful enough; the further fact that it is a veritable law of nature that such a state of affairs must necessarily be, is sad and awful proof that the Manichaeans were right, and that ours is indeed the worst of all possible worlds.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

> They're going to put me in the same category as rapists and murderers?

Rapists, maybe, not murderers. Don't you read the news? Didn't you hear? You don't go to jail for murder any more.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Oh, and all my friends call me for tech support too... ^_^

partial agreement. the one-sided political brainwashing of children is certainly unfair; i questioned and disliked my teachers who tried it. (incidentally, that it will probably happen from parents if not outside sources is also a given. we shouldn't be so quick to point out schools and tvs as the sole culprits, but recognize many parents' lack of attention to this, as well.)

back to the point--i think you are confusing issues.

the tesla activism is hardly a political campaign on level with blinded letter-writing like the 'save the rainforest' one you mentioned. the tesla issue is not an existing multimillion $ campaign but rather one started at the classroom level. taken ad nauseam, one might argue that pen pal programs are despicable because they force children into writing letters without properly explaining the potential grief of unanswered letters, false joy in respondents, and broken friendships. clearly there is a distinction between extremes and, in my opinion, the tesla campaign falls within reason.

why? getting back to your point regarding failing to present both sides of the issue--i'm curious. what makes you certain that this teacher hasn't? after reading his pages, he seems to have followed a reasonable path over at least 10 years. furthermore, it seems this level of dispute with the smithsonian is a more recent development. his students (hopefully still not the same 3rd grade class as 1989, hehe) were probably not subjected to a fierce pro-tesla campaign from the start, but rather started with a class lesson on tesla and grew with the teacher through a logical course of events. i *am* concerned the younger students will miss out on the progression that led up to this point, seeing only the one side now presented. but i think that the persistence, the respect for history, and the desire to see fair recognition for a man's accomplishments (quite obviously not being done) are all very worthy causes for this campaign.

and, even if i am wrong, the intelligent students in the class will, like you and i did with our teachers, take more away from this than the teacher put in.

and, finally, a bit of sarcasm (because it wouldn't be a post without it)...

keep in mind that a possible reason for keeping tesla out, besides "lacking in theory", is because there are no giant electric, sponsorship-offering, companies bearing his name. given /.'s typical fare, i am surprised you did not mention this.

after all, wagner does point out that the smithsonian did refuse to credit the wright brothers until after both of their deaths. why? allegedly because the head of the smithsonian had failed in his own attempt to build a flying contraption.

maybe *gasp* the faculties of yale, princeton, mit and harvard might know more than a couple of biased secretaries at the smithsonian?

• The picture of Tesla sitting in a room full of big sparks is a fake; the sparks and Tesla were photographed separately.
• His own claims for his wireless power transmission scheme were achievable, but not useful. He claimed he could light one 40W bulb per house in a small town with a big receiving antenna in each attic and a megawatt-sized transmitting station. That's possible, but incredibly inefficient. Plus it causes giant RFI problems. The U.S. Navy's big submarine communication ELF station in upper Michigan has power levels like that, and they have to ground fences and other large metal objects for miles around.
• Tesla's giant Wardencliffe tower would never have worked. His scheme was to use big UV lamps to ionize a path upward to the ionosphere, so that RF power could be conducted by the ionosphere. RF propagation doesn't work that way; the ionosphere isn't a conductive surface.
• The original "vibrating building" story (which is probably bogus) involved attaching a vibrator to the steel skeleton of a building under construction. A steel building skeleton doesn't have much damping until the walls and floors are installed, because steel has a high coefficient of restitution (>99%). If the structure has a single resonant frequency (something modern designs avoid for earthquake and wind-stiffening reasons), you might be able to pump it up with a vibrator. You can't pump it up indefinitely; when the loss per cycle equals the energy input per cycle, that's as far as you can go. Irrelevant note: whatever happened to the group putting math typesetting into HTML? I'd put some equations here if I could. For systems with more damping, you can't get very far trying to pump energy into a resonance, which is why the explosives/earthquake idea was a dud.

Tesla was indeed a great inventor, but he's been adopted as a cult hero by the UFO/Area 51/free energy crowd, which hypes him to the point of silliness. Remember him for AC power, and forget the junk science of his later life.

The curator continues to describe how electricity (presumably from Edison) brought numerous consumer items to market...citing the vacuum cleaner and fans. He carefully neglects to mention that vacuum cleaners and fans use Tesla's AC motors.

I agree. I can only wonder what parents must think when their kids come home wearing this shirt. This seems akin to getting kids to write letters to your congressmen because you are upset about an issue. It's misleading and probably unethical.

Edison could spend his time inventing new things because his life was paid for by the things he'd invented previously. If he didn't know that he would achieve a financial pay off from his efforts, I doubt he would have done what he did.
Edison did not invent. Edison stole. How did he steal? Patent laws. Do a little research. Here is a primer. I do not mean this as a flame, I am only trying to keep you from spreading ignorance and to dispel your own. Edison was the Bill Gates of the first half of this century. Don't make him out to be a hero.

On Cloning:
Science is an evolutionary thing. Every step has to be proceeded by the step before. Consider this oversimplified example: In order to put your computer on your desk, two major lines of scientific research had to be done. First, we had to really understand how electricity worked(not just discover its existence)Thank you Nicola Tesla. Second, we had to discover how to actually make a computer, which we can thank many people, but the one that comes to mind right now is Madam Currie. THEN we had to figure out how to make the two sciences compatible.
My point is these are all baby steps getting the scientists closer to the end goal, actual cloning.

On Media:
The media is very much like a snake with its head cut off. It lashes out at anything it senses, and has no concept of what it is doing.
Take for instance the story ran just yesterday about DeCSS and its "piracy" software, versus the "Good Guys," the DVD industry. CNN makes me wretch. By the way, the hearing is tomorrow(today, my time.) Big turnout, please! Nothing would make me happier than Open Source supporters standing in the streets because the entire courthouse was chock full. Anyone who can, go support the cause.

This is how the Smithsonian feels about the most influential man of the twentieth century(and my personal hero).

http://www.concentric.net/~Jwwagner/

> A more significant beef about PG is that it is
> centralized and dominated by one person, who does
> not share the philosophy of Open Source production
> that most of us do. Instead of forcing individuals to
> contribute to this project, why not help them set up their
> own web sites to publish their own works, or other
> works they have scanned?

Read the PG copyright notice, which is at the top of most PG text files. Michael Hart does not force anybody who contributes to Project Gutenberg to post his work on only his one site. PG's copyright terms are actually more liberal than the GPL. I have beta copies (not completely proofread yet) of my Project Gutenberg transcriptions on my own site:

http://www.con centric.net/~Wkiernan/text/Gutenberg_at_Frownland. html

Contributors (and anyone else, too) are allowed, by the terms of the PG copyright, to redistribute PG works on one of two conditions: either they strip off the PG copyright header, in which case they can reprint the work with no further restrictions; or otherwise, if they leave the PG copyright header on, they must contribute 20% of the profits to Project Gutenberg. Certainly that's not requiring too much of a redistributor, to ask him to strip off the PG copyright header from the top of the text file, before he uses it anyway he pleases.

And for those HTML fans who criticize PG's least-common-denominator ASCII format, many of the works in the PG library are available in both ASCII and HTML format. While I myself prefer plain text, after I finish transcribing my next two books, I'm going to fall back and make HTML versions of all the books I've done thus far. (It's going be a while; the next two books amount to a little over 3000 pages. At a hundred pages per weekend, I'm "booked" until about next June.)

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

The XG standard adds much greater control for subtlety to the MIDI format and with a bit of tweaking, can create incredibly realistic-sounding performances.

Yamaha's in-house composers are simply insane when it comes to recreating subleties of instruments and if you have an XG-compatible MIDI card or the software-based MidiPlug, check out their free XG MIDI files section.

My favorite example is this tune which does an excellent job of recreating flamenco guitar including noise from the frets and picking, though there are other MIDI files that do a decent job of recreating Jimi Hendrix and Steve Ray Vaughan as well.

I also have an XG page for techies but I haven't touch it in years and the links are probably dead, so don't go there. d:^)

- Regards!

• E(star)Trouble by Sam Varshavchik
• E*scam by myself

Actually, for those of us who will eventually get their shares, E*Trade may actually be doing us a favor: RHAT has risen to $52 1/16 ;-)

Oh, cut it out. There have been some legitimate questions raised regarding inconsistent and bizarre handling of this IPO by E*Trade. E*Trade should be forced to come up with an answer regarding a number of perfectly valid and reasonable questions regarding their suspicious handling of this IPO.

I had compiled a whole bunch of inconsistent statements that were coming out of E*Trade over the course of about 72 hours. It has to be a pretty wild stretch of imagination for all of them to be true. See http://www.concentric.net/~mrsam/etroubl e/ (shameless plug).
--

Here is a picture of my favorite Penguin Pet.

Dear Santa, For Christmas please bring me ...

1. Plain text in an email message 2. URL where the resume is posted online