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I agree with the government keeping tabs on what the people see...

However Check this out...

It's not like the majority of the population lives on top of the Himilayas. The most dense areas are obviously near the major metropolis's. Now whether or not those people can afford to own a computer or not, that's a different story. However 27 Million out of 1 Billion+ still does sound kind of low. (I guess the average rice farmer doesn't need E*trade to check his portfolio)

If you want a good small world to study, I'd go to Junkyard Wars on The Learning Channel (TLC). Most games are inherently top-down, identifying the high level structure of what you'll want to do and even often the tools you'll be using and leading you to just decide what order to press the buttons to make those tools achieve that goal. If you want strategy to be used, I suggest you being in a more bottom-up, Lego-like way giving some components with purposes that are not readily apparent but that invite experimentation, improvisation, and composition.

It bugged me a lot that in Pharoah, for example, that when I worked out a way to manage a small region of a town, I couldn't encapsulate that and start to build bigger patterns from smaller ones. There were no compositional tools. And eventually the game dies of its own weight because one gets tired of dealing with things at the micro level, and the time spent dealing with that distracts from the fun of building bigger patterns.

Computer scientists know that you can't build bigger and bigger things without creating aggregations (and aggregations of aggregations, and so on) or without creating abstractions and hiding detail; game designers need to come to grips with the fact that game players need these same tools to keep a game from wearing out. The issue of a commander having to give orders and have others implement them doesn't just add "realism", it adds tractability. It keeps the game "possible".

If you want a good small world to study, I'd go to Junkyard Wars on The Learning Channel (TLC). Most games are inherently top-down, identifying the high level structure of what you'll want to do and even often the tools you'll be using and leading you to just decide what order to press the buttons to make those tools achieve that goal. If you want strategy to be used, I suggest you being in a more bottom-up, Lego-like way giving some components with purposes that are not readily apparent but that invite experimentation, improvisation, and composition.

It bugged me a lot that in Pharoah, for example, that when I worked out a way to manage a small region of a town, I couldn't encapsulate that and start to build bigger patterns from smaller ones. There were no compositional tools. And eventually the game dies of its own weight because one gets tired of dealing with things at the micro level, and the time spent dealing with that distracts from the fun of building bigger patterns.

Computer scientists know that you can't build bigger and bigger things without creating aggregations (and aggregations of aggregations, and so on) or without creating abstractions and hiding detail; game designers need to come to grips with the fact that game players need these same tools to keep a game from wearing out. The issue of a commander having to give orders and have others implement them doesn't just add "realism", it adds tractability. It keeps the game "possible".

At least his mate Wes better be there.

*chuckle*

Now there is a distributed system that would help out this project. Granted, you need some hardware, but it shouldn't be that expensive. Those computerized Meade telescope like this one, aren't that expensive. Now if they could be centrally controlled and linked, very high resolution images could be rendered? I bet there are already some people set up with this. Any projects started? What are they tracking these days?

In a recent documentary about CCTV, Monty Python's John Cleese foiled a Visionics face-recognition system that had been set up in the London borough of Newham by wearing earrings and a beard.

I think they're actually talking about Cleese's four-episode series about faces, which did not concentrate on CCTV. There was a short segment in which Cleese tried to fool a surveillance camera by cross-dressing and then by covering most of his face with a tilted hat and large sunglasses. The camera recognized him the first time but not the second.

I just finished watching a very in depth documentary on the Discovery channel that was jointly done by NBC, CNBC, and the BBC. If they show it again, you should try and watch it. Some of it is on the web here.

Not even counting the most recent tragedy, the US government has mountains of evidence linking bin Laden to every major terrorist attack on the US for the last 10 YEARS!

The guy who bombed the WTC in 1993 confessed he was part of bin Laden's organization. The same with the guy who shot people outside CIA headquarters. Not to mention Somalia, Kenya, and Nairobi. This is part of the public record. There is no need to provide proof of this attack being linked to bin Laden, we already have more than enough evidence from all the other attacks he was involved in. Proof has been provided to the Taliban before in these cases, years ago. Just because you have no sense of the history of the last 10 years doesn't mean that the rest of us don't!!! The Taliban are just a bunch of thugs that don't believe anything we say no matter how much evidence we present.

We've been screwing around with this guy for years. There was a plan in 1998 to go in and get bin Laden, but Clinton didn't have the balls to do it. We're done screwing around with bin Laden!

One other poinant thing this program pointed out. bin Laden may say he follows Islam, but he does NOT! What does Mohammed say about jihad? You shall not kill women. You shall not kill children. You shall not destroy the enemy's buildings. You shall not kill an unarmed opponent. You shall not kill old people. bin Laden needs to READ the Koran sometime. True Islam abhors violence!

an high resolution view of defrosting dunes in the southern polar region of Mars used in this study is available on discovery.com here

an high resolution view of defrosting dunes in the southern polar region of Mars used in this study is available on discovery.com here

Junkyard Wars had featured a pumpkin-hurling contest between two teams, on operating an air powered cannon and the other a trebuchet.
A veteran of the show has a site which is *Dedicated to the art of hurling *

Sounds a lot like that episode of Junkyard Wars where they laid siege to the castles with turnips. It was interesting to see how they had to fiddle with the weight and fulcrum adjustments. Makes one wonder how it was all done before Calculus or calculators.

I have a video from TLC on this showing the guys with the rockets that I got 5 or 6 years ago. I also got one on Tornados and one on Huricanes. Very cool stuff. You should be able to buy them from their web site.

What will they eat when their teeth fall out in the low gravity?

Lately TLC (The Learning Channel) has been playing a miniseries called "The Human Face" hosted by John Cleese (yippee!). I was watching it last night through the face recognition part, in which they showed people who couldn't recognize faces or associate emotions with them. During this section, Cleese also demonstrated the face recognition software that police are using..

John put on a wig and put on a different facial expression after the software recognized him and captured his image.. It recognized him with the wig & new expression, so they had him dressed up as a woman (eugh! - John Cleese is not a sexy woman) with a new wig and breasts, a dress, etc. The software still recognized 'im. Finally he wore large, very dark sunglasses and a cap very low over his eyes. This was the only time it failed to recognize him but he looked obviously suspicious enough that any person would think "mebbe we'd better watch this guy".

For more info on the show check out TLC's Human Face site.

And yours is also wrong. Didn't you check it, either? That's what [Preview] is for. It works a lot better if you make it into a hyperlink.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20010827/mars teeth.html

I'm now hit with that 'compression filter' problem.... how to get the info out there seems to be the question.... Ah. good. this ramble fixed it.

It looks like the story link doesn't work. At least it didn't work for me. Here is the one that worked for me.

> This is probably exactly what the guy's entire problem was. He was standing there, under attack, and thinking "Gee, I wish I had something that was suitable for use as a weapon, but all I have is this copper axe."

IIRC, he was found with partially finished bow and arrows. Looks like "they" found him before he was ready for them.

Ah! Check this out.

Other pages disagree on whether or not he was a meat eater; some say that the (purported) fact that he wasn't a meat eater means that his bow and arrows were for fighting rather than for hunting.

Also of interest, his bow apparently qualifies as a "longbow". See the entries for "iceman bow" and "longbo" at this site.

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Really, this isn't special knowledge. If you've taken an anthropology course you've seen nekkid dark-skinned pre-teens.

Not to jump to conclusions, but his name is Thomas H. Maugh II. Maybe he's got family money? Most people that are 'II' content themselves with 'Junior.'

This link tells us that he is a Ph.D. It also appears here that he's been writing for a while. See

Maugh, T. H., II. "LSD and the Drug Culture: New Evidence of Hazard." Science, 23 March 1973, p. 1221.

Here in Holland it is on the Discovery Channel

I'm not sure what you are eluding to, but TLC is a Discovery Network channel. As a matter of fact, the TLC site is under Discovery.com.

Oops... should have previewed. And the problem with that limited range is... ?what again?



This has been another useless post from....

And the problem with that limited range is...



This has been another useless post from....

If you think they are overacting, then you haven't been subjected to Robotica yet. Ahmet Zappa is probably the worst host I have ever seen. He is purely a distraction from any kind of educational value the show might otherwise have.

It would also be rather nice if they had real robots instead of glorified R/C cars (IMHO).

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... Alright, now what can we do with it?

While I'm sure this question has been aimed at the more creative of you by your phb's, it has an insidious quality about it in this discussion. Namely that someone is getting close to creating a really efficient highly energetic system. Great, then what do we do with it?

While I'm sure this'll risk being labeled redundant, I noticed that several posts raise the question of getting energy out of this system.

The answer, at least since Cestesibus's chronicler Hero recorded it, has been to let the system transfer energy into an expanding liquid, and use that liquid (air, steam, etc) to drive a mechanical system.

An interesting paper (warning, pdf) supporting an alternative fusion concept describes obliquely how magnetohydrodynamics may provide an inductive transfer of current from the plasma mass to the surrounding apparatus with an efficiency ranging from 70 to 95% depending on the fuel used to form the plasma mass.


Nietzsche on Diku:
sn; at god ba g
:Backstab >KILLS< god.

P.S. to Taco: he's also an anime fan (or used to be), he provided the videos for the SF Con in Waterloo.

"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"

These guys are serious, they even advertise on various Discovery stations. Here, on this site, you can buy not only an antenna to enhance the signal your cel phome produces, but also a wave scrabmler to reduce your cel phone's signal (cel phone radiation that hurts you only comes out through the earpiece, after all)

Only in America.

The Italians are facing the same problem, as Venezia (Venice to us Anglos) is sinking. The water level is so high that moderate springtime rain will cause Piazza San Marco to flood.

As millennia pass, I hope that humankind buys in to the notion that a coastal area just isn't a good place to build--great place to visit, though....

I see a great future for a new TV program in the spirit of Junkyard Wars. The contestants are given ten hours to scrounge parts from a heap of trashed servers to construct useful items. In the first episode, the teams must build a set of rock-and-roll instruments from a room full of PDP-11s. Hosted by Steve Wozniak and Heidi Wall.

I remember watching a documentary program a few months back on discovery or something (might have been discovery today) about the big question of what to do with the ever increasing stockpile of this stuff. It turns out they are burying some if it in some old salt mines that are slowly collapsing from the weight of the rock above which will effectivly seal it all under half a kilometer of rock. The were descussing what to do about warning furture generations to its presence, such as giant monoliths with engravings in every known language saying "keep away", or markings such as radioactive symbols, but they fealt that in the future, considering we are talking of 30k year half lifes and stuff that our known languages and symbols may have no meaning. They then considered "emotions" and had one idea of what kind of looked like a thorn bush, but in stone. Eventualy the settled on the idea that best thing to do was not mark the site at all as we all know that curiosity was allways the cats downfall :-)

The BBC also had an article on it a few days ago here.
The Washington Post has this little piece on the creature.
The NYTimes didn't seem to have anything. Discover as linked in the story has the best coverage, but the font the story is in is really small.

I guess the DNA study is a recent development. P revious researchers think they may have been related to the Celts. The Weegas (God knows how many English spelling variations ther are) probably have some ancestry from these peoples. Some of them have blue eyes, which can be seen in other shows about Western China. They do share some cultural characteristics with the mummies. Over time the caucasoid gene pool was replaced by the mongoloid gene pool.

Check out PBS 1998 Nova's Mysterious Mummies of China and for 1999 the Discovery Channel's Riddle of the Desert Mummies

Why oh why is it that all the cool stuff about the history of mankind... er ah humanity is in countries that aren't friendly to America? China, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, etc.

If you think the international politics are bad. Just check out our very own domestic Graves Act. It allowed aboriginal Americans to claim the 9,000 year old bones of the Kennewick Man as their direct ancestor. Nova also covered this issue with Mystery of the First Americans. His genes show that he's most closely related to the Ainu.

The peopling of the Earth is a contentious issue and probably will be until all our genes are thoroughly mixed and we become a uniform gray with no outward sexual differentiation.

It's surprising how many people don't realize that. On the final episode of Junkyard Wars, season 4 (on the cable channel TLC) the two teams built rockets to see who could launch an ostrich egg higher. They both used an accelerometer to trigger their parachute deployment, and both teams, aided by model rocketry experts concluded that when the acceleration drops to zero that the charge should go off because that would happen at the apogee of the flight.

Wrong! The parachutes were deployed as soon as the rocket motors burned out, preventing the rockets from attaining their highest potential altitude given their upward momentum.

That demonstrates nicely that (absent significant aerodynamic drag) a rocket is "weightless" from the moment the engines quit until it either hits the ground or is retarded by a parachute.

I agree,

But These are where to look:

Discovery Channel MUAV page
Aerovironment's Black Widow
Black Widow development (pdf)

The first televised version of this was "Robot Wars" in the U.K. Their website mentions that "Robot Wars" is coming to the U.S. soon, but provides no further information. BTW, if you want to argue the merits of U.K. vs. U.S. robots, go to the message board at their site, the debate has been raging for months.
Battlebots is the first U.S. version, seen on Comedy Central in the U.S., The Comedy Channel in Canada, and BB2 in the U.K. Some of the robots from the British series appeared in Battlebots and did rather well. The rules and weight classes differ between the two shows. Battlebots info is here.
Finally, TLC, one of the Discovery channel networks has a series called "Robotica" which starts airing tonight at 9:00 PM E.S.T. It seems to be a hybrid of RobotWars and BattleBots, but there's not much information on the website.
Information about the robots can be found on the Robotwars and Battlebots websites, and many of the robots (or their builders) have their own sites, with more technical info than you can easy digest in one sitting. Take a look at the Suicidal Tendencies site and look at how they machined the individual tractor treads out of aluminium blocks. These people are fanatical!
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The host is Ahmet Zappa, on of Frank's many kids. I don't think this is the Robot Wars show, It's my understanding that in robot wars a "Home built" robot competes against the shows' own robots... like a mechanised American Gladiator. Robotica features home builts competeing against each other in 4 different arenas;Combat, a maze, a race, & something called "gauntlet". The TLC website for the show is here.

TLC's own robot fighting show, "Robitica" is airing tonight (i.e. April 4th). I've been seeing commercials for it every week when I watch Junkyard Wars (one of my favorite things on TV) and it certainly does look interesting... we'll see later tonight though ;p
The show's page can be found here: http://tlc.discovery.com/fansites/robotica/robotic a.html
I love the Discovery Channel. So much cool crap on it all the time.

these may be a joke but the concept is a sound one...double amputees who are very active use similarly designed prosthetics

FlexFoot
Aimee Mullins
Jami Goldman

That must have been an incredible sight at the time it was built.

See also the article at Discovery Channel News.

See also the article at Discovery Channel News.

Dude, calm down. Isn't it much more likely that this reflects no policy, only random bureaucratic confusion? Chances are some relatively minor functionary brough up the customs question, nobody had any idea what the answer was, and some other functionary decided to have the form filled out just to cover their ass.

Besides, I'm sure the official U.S. position on "moon ownership" is already sufficiently well documented elsewhere.

This all started out with a real-time minicomputer game called Space War, popular back in the early 70s. (Here's an ancient Rolling Stone piece.) Atari's first project was an embedded version of Space War for pinball arcades and bars. The official Atari story was that Pong was invented later because users (especially bar patrons) found Space War too complicated to learn. Actually, Pong was released first, in order to test some of the circuitry developed for Space War. The first prototype appeared in a bar in Sunnyvale. The next day, Atari got a phone call complaining that the prototype was broken. Nothing was actually broekn, but the coin mechanism had turned itself off when its receptacle filled up with quarters. The rest, as they say, is history.

__________________

When are they going to make an episode of Junk Yard Wars using this concept as a base? Ideally it would culminate in something like that other geek robot game show, but there are certainly other venues that could be followed, like autonomous retrieval of items. Perhaps a bit difficult without some sort of headstart though.

[ http://maur.litestep.com/ ][ maur@technologist.com ]

For those of you arguing about microgravity: A tidbit from the video (I'm listening to /watching it, as I type this) Gravity on Eros appears to be 1/1000th of earth Gravity. You might as well have some real stats.
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http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20010205/gall ery/crystals_zoom.jpg
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20010205/gall ery/crystals2_zoom.jpg

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20010205/gall ery/crystals_zoom.jpg
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20010205/gall ery/crystals2_zoom.jpg

Haha ! very funny !
Anyway, seriously, there is plenty of nice information on steganograpy at Fravia
and you may also want to check Stegosaurus :)
*still laughing*