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If you RTFA...

All quantities are given at the Earth’s surface as defined through the SRTM (Shuttle Radar
421 Topography Mission) topography. Users wishing to use geoid heights instead of quasigeoid
422 heights can do so by applying standard conversion as described, e.g., Rapp [1997].

If you want a more generic explanation of gravity anomalies? Perhaps this will help... http://www.cage.curtin.edu.au/~will/grav_anoms.htm

If you RTFA...

All quantities are given at the Earth’s surface as defined through the SRTM (Shuttle Radar
421 Topography Mission) topography. Users wishing to use geoid heights instead of quasigeoid
422 heights can do so by applying standard conversion as described, e.g., Rapp [1997].

If you want a more generic explanation of gravity anomalies? Perhaps this will help... http://www.cage.curtin.edu.au/~will/grav_anoms.htm

it's great and all that they posted a pretty picture but they forgot to add a key or a legend of some kind. a color gradient scale with some kind of metric is the least they could do, even the weather channel knows that!

i'm sure the people who made this are the same damn kids that keep walking on my! </rant>

Here is a direct link to the map if you are wondering where you'll be the lightest :)

Where is the lowest spot?
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22613/lowest-gravity-on-earths-surface

Here is a direct link to the map if you are wondering where you'll be the lightest :)

http://kernow.curtin.edu.au/www/Agrirobot1/frutrob .htm

This is coming much faster than most expect. Which (to stand up on a political soapbox) there really is no need for a permanent underclass of immigrant laborers to supposedly do jobs locals are unwilling to take. Because machines will take over those jobs very soon anyway.

Built by the University of Western Australia and also used by Curtin University, there are completely automagic systems in use.

From Curtin's site:
A lecturer walks into their next lecture, turns the microphone on and delivers a lecture. An hour or so later, without any human intervention, an appropriately titled link automatically appears on the web page of that unit adding the just finished lecture to the list of all the lecture recordings for that unit.

Links
http://www.lectopia-service.uwa.edu.au/about
http://www.lectopia.uwa.edu.au/history.lasso
http://ilectures.curtin.edu.au/information/

We automatically record around 70 lectures per week using the Lectopia System http://lectopia.uwa.edu.au/ and haven't noticed any major drops in attendance in any of those lectures. One of our departments, the School of Computing, did a study of the use of Lectopia across a number of units and found there was no discernable drop in attendance at all compared to the control classes that hadn't used the system.

What we find is that although any recording is only second-best to a good-quality live interactive lecture, it is great for reviewing lectures before exams, for English-as-a-second-language students, those with disabilities and distance and part-time students, as well as regular students who have time-table clashes or who just slept in. We also notice some students putting down their pens and instead listening and participating in class and then later at home or in a computer lab with headphones on and the web browser in the background, writing notes on the lecture in Word as they pause and rewind the recording.

For some lecturers this system is the easiest and simplest way for them to get their lecture content "webified" and it's also great to be able to enable last year's version of a lecture when the lecturer is sick or the lecture has to be cancelled for some reason.

We use the Lectopia system (originally called iLectures) which is an enterprise-class system that enables lecturers to book their lectures at the start of semester and then on the day of each lecture just walk in, turn on the microphone (which triggers the recording) and deliver their lecture as they would normally. 15 minutes or so after they finish their lecture, streaming and podcast versions of the lecture appear on the web in their unit web pages all without any human intervention.

The system automatically captures whatever gets shown on the data projector as a high resolution, high quality XGA stream synchronised to the audio from the lecture theatre sound system so students can see the mouse moving around as the lecturer talks. It also means that no matter whether the lecturer is browsing the web, running a program or just showing powerpoint slides, it all gets recorded at a high enough quality for the users to read the small text better than if they were actually in the lecture theatre.

The system automatically compresses multiple versions for different bandwidths from 14k up to 1Mbps or more in Windows Media, Quicktime, MPEG-4, MP3, iPod audio book and 3GP formats for mobile phones etc in streaming as well as multiple downloadable formats. It also automatically publishes podcast versions to iTunes U.

Duke University in Durham NC uses Lectopia http://www.duke.edu/ddi/projects/capture.html to automatically record their lectures to fill all those iPods they give out to their students. A third of the universities here in Australia and New Zealand also use the system. The University of Western Australia (the original developer of Lectopia) records over 400 lectures per week across over 40 lecture theatres while at least one other university in Australia is planning to install automated Lectopia digitisers in 150 classrooms across their campuses.

We see podcasting/streaming lectures as a very valuable enhancement of existing lectures, something which turns them into a resource available 24/7/365 anywhere in the world. Not a silver bullet to replace lectures, but rather something to expand their usage and capture their value making something that used to last for one hour once a year in one room on campus into something available anytime, anywhere.

-Mart

Martin Hill, Digital Media Specialist
Information Management Services, Curtin University of Technology
Western Australia
web: http://ilectures.curtin.edu.au/

Of course, no story even marginally associated with silly walks could avoid this page.

I can't believe how many webpages are dedicated to this episode.

Not really.

Plutonium was being produced in the Oklo natural nuclear reactor that was running in Gabon 2 billion years ago. It had decayed away by the time we showed up on the scene. See this, for example.

We learned of it by making it, but nature had done it long before us.

in order to generate a self-sustaining level of radioactivity that would not have otherwise occured.

While I can agree with you on substance, Sometimes high levles of self-sustaining radioactivity do occur. Granted, not with the frequency of artificial creation, but Fission isn't a creation of Man.

With thanks to escaflo:

Moox Firefox 1.0 M1 (MMX) Torrent

Moox Firefox 1.0 M2 (SSE) Torrent

Moox Firefox 1.0 M3 (SSE2) Torrent

Use the torrents and save his bandwidth.

With thanks to escaflo:

Moox Firefox 1.0 M1 (MMX) Torrent

Moox Firefox 1.0 M2 (SSE) Torrent

Moox Firefox 1.0 M3 (SSE2) Torrent

Use the torrents and save his bandwidth.

With thanks to escaflo:

Moox Firefox 1.0 M1 (MMX) Torrent

Moox Firefox 1.0 M2 (SSE) Torrent

Moox Firefox 1.0 M3 (SSE2) Torrent

Use the torrents and save his bandwidth.

Location: Natural fossil reactors have (so far) only been found in the country of GABON in equatorial Africa. All but one of the reactors are located at a place known as the OKLO uranium deposit located in the south eastern corner of the country. Another fossil reactor has also been discovered in Gabon at another U deposit at Bangombe, some 35 km south east of the OKLO mine. For more information about Gabon;

Hey, if Mama nature can do it, we should be able to pull it off.

It's to deal with all the injuries resulting from research gone awry funded through the Ministry of Silly Walks.

The thing you seem to be thinking of is the unseen antichthon or counter-Earth; this dates from classical Greece where it was an element of Pythagorean cosmology. It was however not on the other side of the Sun but permanently hidden by the "central fire" which the Pythagoreans also believed in. To my knowledge it has never been taken seriously by scientists since that time - certainly not by a majority of them, anyway.

And finally, there was no universal law of gravitation to fit the Earth's orbit into prior to Kepler, or even for a few decades after his death. That had to await Isaac Newton. Sounds like you are thinking of Kepler's famous attempt to fit the planetary orbits into a nested series of perfect solids (pyramid, cube, etc).

The term "sabotage" relates to disgruntled French workers who, in revolt, cut the sabots holding the railway lines in 1912. A popular misunderstanding is Luddites threw their wooden shoes into the machines to brake them up. However likely this may be it is not the origin of sabotage

It's mostly been considered just a novelty, but maybe digital cinema could usher in an era where more movies in shot and shown in glorious 3D; some theatres could have LCD shutter glasses wired to every seat.

Well! There are hundreds. Here's one explaining that the Sun's energy isn't the result of continual bombardment of meteorites. Lamarck's theory of evolution predicted that siblings would share the phenotype of their parents, and they could change that phenotype during their lifetime. This was fairly easily debunked.

Literally, there are hundreds. That's how science advances, through the creation and disproval of scientific theories.

Oklo ?

Amazing thing

Here[Oklo]

If you like 3D screens, you will like 3D stereoscopic cameras - stereoscopy.com and curtin.edu.au. Pretty cool stuff.

I have a question. Where did the nuclear fuel come from? Can't we just put the nuclear waste back where the nuclear fuel came from? Like, maybe IN THE GROUND?!

Geologists go around claiming that the Earth's core is molten because of all the radioactive materials heating Earth. That stuff was there all this time. In fact, there are places on Earth where natural events have created natural nuclear reactors, which burned for thousands of years.

"If a canister holding either a whole fuel assembly or solidified waste should disintegrate, even soon after its emplacement in a repository, there is good reason to believe that the fission products and TRU nuclides would not diffuse far into the environment. Strong support for this contention is furnished by what has become known as the _Oklo phenomenon_. Oklo is the name of a uranium mine in the African nation of Gabon, where France obtains much of the uranium for her nuclear program. When uranium from this mine was introduced into a French gaseous diffusion plant, it was discovered that the feed uranium was already depleted below the 0.711 w% of ordinary natural uranium. It was as if the uranium had already been used to fuel some unknown reactor."

http://nova.nuc.umr.edu/~ans/oklo.html

Earth is naturally radioactive! You people are acting as if the world never saw radioactivity before science magically produced it. Do you think it would be healthy growing up in a pitchblend pit?

Oklo naturual reactors.

this this gent

So many possibilities...

handheld with projection system. It has the standard touch sensitive lcd (or LEP or whatever), but it uses a single chip reflective projector to put a *huge* picture up on any viewable surface. It's not very steady, so integrate some motion sensors in the device and some hardware to steady the projection (IR for distance to surface (image size), accelerometer for lateral stabalization).

When the projection is running, the touch screen on the device is still the input method.

But really, why not go all the way. I wear glasses, so give me a covert HMD. Something that can't be seen by the rest of the world, but that gives me unrestricted hands free access to my "handheld".

Then steal an idea from MIT and put a ring on each index finger. Radio connected, position sensing, and presure sensitive. Touch the left one with your thumb and the on-disply pointer tracks with movements of the right. Tap the right one, and it clicks, rotate the right one (around your finger) and it's like that little roller on your mouse.

Think all this is fantasy? I read too much science fiction? I think not.

single chip projectors
accelerometers for displacement
covert HMDs
The One Ring (fictional, I think)

The waste from nuclear reactors and reprocessing is in no way comparable to what is present in nature.

You might want to have a look at the Oklo Fossil Nuclear Reactor, the product of a natural nuclear reactor in Gabon. It's thought that, about 2000 million years ago, a water moderated chain reaction started in uranium rich soil and ran for about 1 million years. (How do they know, well there's all these fission products lying about the place.)

It is very chemically toxic ...

Agreed, but it is less chemically toxic than many other natural toxins. Botulism toxin is, I believe, top of the league table here. (And people inject this stuff into their foreheads!)

...but it will still be worrisome to deal with for something like 100,000 years.

This 100,000 years number seems to pop up with wild abandon. IIRC, this figure appears to be the half-life of one of the daughter products of the decay chain. But with a longer half-life comes less activity. How close is this to background radiation? And does it make more difference to radiation exposure than, for example, living at 700m above sea-level does?

None of the above is an argument for not treating nuclear waste carefully. But requiring massively different standards of risk control when the nuclear word is used doesn't help anyone. And it may be actively harmful: Opposition to nuclear power has led to more coal being used for base-line power production, leading to massive amounts of chemical and radioactive pollutants being spewed into the atmosphere. Not something I feel particularly comfortable about.

Why don't you do a Google search for "Perth" and "Technology". Quite a few startups and ISP's are based out of or operate offices in Perth. Not to mention the Curtin University of Technology in Perth.

Hell yeah - those were the days... at least on the Amiga they were...

Silents, Razor 1911, Complex, Cryptoburners, Melon Dezign, Fairlight, Crusaders, Skid Row, Kefrens, Andromeda... those cats flexed furious audiovisual skills on the Amiga's dedicated coprocessors. Most of them are working at game and 3D companies now, I imagine.

If anyone's interested, there's a very cool research paper called "The Hacker Demo Scene and it's Cultural Artifacts" at http://www.curti n.edu.au/conference/cybermind/papers/borzysko.html ...

Do you blame the guys who invented atomic fission for this?

Curtin Uni is literally across the road from Canning College (location of the Perth installfest), so I'm sure that for the lack of trouble it would put them through the student body would benefit.

What are the potential barriers towards adopting such a technology - better connection with kinesthetics, the intuitive match between spatial awareness and body motion - between physics models like MathsEngine to express - some killerapp vertically integrated applications to reach selected markets (like telesurgery which requires precise placement) to help bring the price-point down - software/content that supports 2-3D with the marginal effort of adding 3D smaller than marginal increase in sales

Apart from the gee-whiz factor, a realistic look at what services would benefit most from such displays needs to be addressed, especially their willingness to cough up the money. Remember that hardware is only 10% of the total costs, ad another 20% for peripherals/support, 30% for software/operational consumables, and 40% for training. It's starting to looking expensive.

3D will have a role but I suspect widespread star wars type holographic displays are still a way off unless a miracle occurs.

LL