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...which is an 8-fold improvement, using existing technology. I can't see why nobody has done it. It's cheap enough that even Australia could do it.

We can already do that for less using not-much-beyond V2 technology and without the $17G flagfall.

True, the nice elevator will drop costs well below Mr Walker's $1300/kg and will loft up to 22t in one chunk (instead of 2t), but we should be trying both methods in parallel, walk before we run as it were.

For $0.5G/a (ie cost of about one shuttle flight per annum) we can loft over 700t each year using existing technology. It's hard to see why we don't.

...or by placing a source of nuclear radiation in your basement and measuring its decay, as this link shows. Quoting from the page: "Rummaging around in the well-endowed Fourmilab junk box turned up a 60 microcurie Jordan Nuclear Krypton-85 (85Kr) source capsule, model BB-0005.". Whoa. Here's the projects main page.

...or by placing a source of nuclear radiation in your basement and measuring its decay, as this link shows. Quoting from the page: "Rummaging around in the well-endowed Fourmilab junk box turned up a 60 microcurie Jordan Nuclear Krypton-85 (85Kr) source capsule, model BB-0005.". Whoa. Here's the projects main page.

Punch cards!

I think Speak Freely may be what you are looking for. I haven't tried it, but I did look into it. It seemed like a lot of trouble to get working, but if you're already using ALSA sound drivers, you're probably halfway there. I don't think the OSS drivers are able to do full duplex (playing and recording at the same time), so you probably won't be able to use the program very well with OSS drivers.

Here's the funniest part, smart quotes endumbened but all typos left intact.

"Endumbened". I'll have to remember that one. The correct term, I believe, is "demoronised - but I like yours too.

Just look upon his works, ye mighty, and despair:

Heh. There's definitely something pompous about using a first initial and middle name. Particularly if the first initial is J. Odd.

I wonder if J in this case is short for Jabba the.

The demoroniser is your friend.

I used this:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/base64/

Who said that a picture has to use light? Anyway, we have taken pictures of individual atoms using optical photography.

Writing With Atoms

Imaging Atoms at Sub-Angstrom Resolution with a Corrected Electron Microscope

Bell Labs researchers invent technique for imaging single impurity atoms within silicon

Imaging Bose-Einstein Condensates

Trapped Atoms Photo

Single Atoms in a MOT

That reminds me of a great book called "Cosmicomics" from Italo Calvino, one of my favourite writers (in fact he's my favourite non-brazilian writer). In the first story it tells about the epoch when the Moon was closer to the Earth, so close that on perigee you could sail under the Moon and jump there! :)

In line with protecting the environment, I choose to use environmentally friendly products in my cpu, such as compost and renewable timber.

Nifty! I don't suppose you've been trying to build Babbage's Analytical Engine, would you? The concept of building one out of wood sounds interesting... is compost the power source? (I'd suppose you'd still need a combustion chamber... of what are you constructing that?)

Anyhow, good luck in getting it running! (I wonder how many years per frame you'd get playing Quake?)

Hmm. So MS finally came up with a De-moronizer of their own. Go fig.

Annoyance filter has many tuning and reporting options. It can plot a histogram of junk words. In addition to scanning the message header and body, Annoyance Filter can pull text out of Flash, PDF, and other attachments.

It includes a 180-page PDF manual, mostly the source code presented in literate programming style. The TEX typesetting is beautiful, so turn to page 17 to see Paul Graham's LISP function presented in readable mathematics notation.

* Walker's Hacker's Diet has been discussed on Slashdot here, here, and here.

Annoyance filter has many tuning and reporting options. It can plot a histogram of junk words. In addition to scanning the message header and body, Annoyance Filter can pull text out of Flash, PDF, and other attachments.

It includes a 180-page PDF manual, mostly the source code presented in literate programming style. The TEX typesetting is beautiful, so turn to page 17 to see Paul Graham's LISP function presented in readable mathematics notation.

* Walker's Hacker's Diet has been discussed on Slashdot here, here, and here.

Interesting that we are doing with computers what God's has appearantly done with us. Or the Angels, or Set, or whoever seems to be toying around with us from time to time...

Ah, but don't you see? God is a programmer. We're just following his footsteps. Now for the clincher... what if there are bugs in the system?

God: What, bugs? No way, I'm perfect! Just let me fix this tiny little thing... (BUM!) Ooops, sorry Bill!

I have a feeling that Microsoft "XML" will use Microsoft "Unicode." That is, any character in the range of 0x82 to 0x95, which Unicode reserves for extra control characters, will be littered with "smart" quotes, emdashes, and other proprietary extensions to Unicode that ensure that nothing works with it. I ran into this problem when I tried converting FrontPage generated HTML into XHTML so I could do conversions with XSLT. Needless to say, it took a lot of effort, even with HTML Tidy, to get Microsoft's generated HTML to get converted into XHTML! HTML Tidy constantly complained about the HTML, and looking at what FrontPage generates, it's not hard to see why it complained.

I ran across the demoroniser, which fixes Microsoft Unicode problems, but it still doesn't fix the invalid HTML that FrontPage generates.

Microsoft XML? Hah! I'll believe it when I see it.

More relativistic flight sims and visualizations:

Visual distortions around black holes

Visual effects of special and general relativity.

And finally, an oh-my-God particle - a proton with the mass of a bacterium, the kinetic energy of a brick dropped on your toe, and which, if it were a spaceship, could make it to the edge of the universe in a week and a half (ship-time, that is!).

The universe offered to us by science isn't just stranger than we do imagine. It's stranger than we can imagine. The universe of the mystics and new-age hucksters is positively boring in comparison.

Yes, life seems to be quite common.
Let me count the potential candidates i heard of so far:

- Earth
- Mars
- Venus
- Europa (no, not the continent you US-centric /.ers)
- and now even Pluto...i def counted this one out.

My guess was always that life must be a rather common thing. If you look at all the impossible places where life found its way on Planet Earth...

• Home Planet, a space exploration tool for Windows
• AmphetaDesk, an open-source cross-platform news aggregrator

Enjoy

You can*t stream the mail.

And you can't demoronise your posts. (:

Anyway, Charles Dickens used to stream his novels over snail mail. So did all of his contemporaries. It's called serial publication, and there's no reason you can't do it with media today.

I thought they would render fine in IE....

Since Microsoft uses their own character set, whenever I read an email sent from Outlook, often I get block characters where -- should be. Here you can find some other problem characters.

I was just assuming he wrote this with Word or something and I was seeing ? instead of -- and the like, since I'm on Linux and using a standard character set.

Go figure?

Well, it's some swiss guy's, anyway.

The Demoroniser!

enjoy!

't be cool to have a board with a bit of radioactive alpha source and a counter to make genuine random numbers. Like this, or, ha, here's one (3rd from the top) that proposes using disk drive air turbulance to generate random numbers!

If this is a problem for you, you should check out The Hacker Diet - How to lose weight through stress and poor nutrition.

Hacker's Diet

That link's actually without spaces

In order for addition of a digits-reversed number to yield a palindrome, there must be no carries in the addition and hence each pair of digits must sum to 9 or less.

This is an assertion from John Walker's Three Years Of Computing . Several other sites reference this statement and it appears to be over generalized. Certainly for any addition of this form the sum is a palindrome but not all digit-reversed sums that are palindromes are of this form. For example conside
74 + 47 = 121
or
7744 + 4477 =12221
These are only a few counter examples. There may be some general rule on how to generate all such numbers.

I hope this statement isn't fundemental in any greater works.

I bought a pair of cheap dumbbells from Walmart and have been very pleased with the results. ExRx is a good source for exercise ideas. They index exercises by muscle group, describe how they are performed, and show how with a short video clip. I exercise wrist, upper arm and deltoids on day one; back and shoulders on day two; with day three as a rest day. I saw pleasing results soon with only light weight (5-10 lbs). I also try to walk for 30 to 60 minutes a few times a week.

For weight control, I'm trying the Hacker's Diet.

I've used just the diet portion and the eatwatch program and I lost almost 20 lbs by doing nothing more than watching what i eat.

Hacker's Diet

-- Tim

Terry Ritter offers us "Random Number Machines: A Literature Survey" which discusses random numbers from noise and other sources. Well worth a look.

Ritter expounds on Geiger counters:

Nisley, E. 1990. BASIC Radioactive Randoms. Circuit Cellar Ink. April/May. 58-68.

"While pseudo-random (pronounced "fake random") numbers may be OK for computer science types, Real Engineers get Real Random Numbers by timing nuclear disintegrations with a Geiger-Muller detector." "A few months ago I saw the RM-60 Micro Roentgen Radiation Monitor from Aware Electronics. It is a Geiger-Muller tube that connects to a PC's parallel or serial port, with the circuitry drawing power from a single interface pin."

Now they also offer canned software - a random number generator based on radioactive decay.

See here for details. It tells you how to build your own hardware to capture random numbers from a radiation source, and also has a server that can give you random bits from his source.

The rest of this site is unspeakably cool - it's the home pages and collected wisdom of John Walker, founder of Autodesk - you have heard of AutoCad, right?

There's measuring beta particles of decaying Krypton: Fourmilab Hotbits

Then, there's LAVALAMP randomness: LavaRND

Oh, and you could connect a radio to a sparcstation, and use broadcast noise at: Random.org

Hell, you could use a webcam pointing at a staticy TV.

Lots of possibilities. Amazing what you can find with ... google.

HotBits. I doubt you could implement it at home, though.

A friend of mine had some success with it. I don't have much dieting experience so I wonder what others here think of this book.

<AOL>Me too.</AOL>

To the guy talking about losing 20 pounds in a week on Atkins - dude, you went into ketosis and dehydrated yourself. Nothing to do with the diet. Good think you knew to drink plenty of water, though.

To the guy who started this thread, talking about losing a pound a week on Atkins - dude, you can do that on any calorie-restricted diet!

A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. Losing a pound a week means a calorie deficit of 500 calories a day.

Suggested reading #1: The Hacker's Diet (Former CEO of Autodesk describes an approach to dieting in language that will appeal to engineers. He starts with the "3500 calories in a pound of fat", applies the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and derives the rest from there.)

If you normally burn 2000 calories per day to keep yourself alive (i.e. to maintain a body temperature of 98.6F in ambient air of 70F, and to sit erect at a computer terminal), and you want to lose a pound a week, you need to cut 500 calories a day. A moderate-to-heavy soda drinker (say, 4 cans a day) can accomplish this simply by switching from regular (at ~130 cal per can) to diet (zero).

The exercise suggestion part of Atkins is good (but it's a good idea with or without diet), but IMNSHO, the nutritional advice is questionable at best - and dangerous quackery at worst.

Suggested Reading #2: As Quackwatch appears to be down at the moment, I recommend anyone considering a low-carb diet read Google's cached copy of Stephen Barrett's analysis of Atkins and the other low-carb approaches.

I agree with Barrett's conclusion - that most of the "success stories" of Atkins dieters are merely the logical end result result of caloric restriction, and not anything "magical" about the approach -- other than that it's a lot easier and more pleasant to eat 1500 calories of "what you want" (guzzle coffee, water, and diet sodas all day long at the office and finish off - at 400 calories per 4-oz serving - with a juicy well-marbled 16-oz New York Strip for dinner! Every night!) than to live on 1500 calories a day of tofu.

Obligitory Hackers Diet reference.

Still the king, baby. Common sense, and a lot less trendy crap, and a whole lot more suck it up and deal mentality.

Barring a genetic or hormonal issue, when you eat, you're taking in calories. Your body burns off some doing its normal metabolic processes, some goes out when you piss and crap, and the rest takes up residence in your fat ass.

The trick is, then, to only consume what you need. Or, less than you need, and your body will eventually relent and burn off some of that fat, and you'll lose weight.

Ladies and gentlemen, time to run up John Walker's(1) bandwidth bill some more, get his name in the papers again, and introduce some more people to The Hacker's Diet.

Available in both North American and European mirrors, The Hacker's Diet takes a practical, pragmatic, engineer's approach to losing weight, and more importantly, maintaining that new weight, both stably and comfortably.

In fact, it even has a section on basic excercise to get you somewhat fit. Not to get you starring in a Bally's Total Fitness commercial. Just able to run up a flight of stairs without passing out. Fit, as in, healthy, instead of fat, as in unhealthy. Gosh, what a concept.

Now we'll do the webblog plug, too. Mark Pilgrim(2) wrote a great writeup of The Hacker's Diet twice, last August and an extended, much more blunt version last October. Here's the October version. Go read it.

Then get off your ass, sit outside, and read the book. Download the PalmOS apps to your Visor, your Clio, or your Zaurus with POSE. And do something about that Mr. Fatty-Fat-Fat nickname.

(1) John Walker, founder of AutoDesk. (2) Mark Pilgrim, that guy who got fired because of his weblog, and who wrote Dive into Python. (3) And why does Slashcode strip out superscript and underscores? Weak.

There will be biased random number generators in the peer nodes. This is unavoidable unless you equip each node with a geiger counter (HotBits). However, since there will be true randomness in the overall structure of the network (i.e. various types of systems will be randomly distributed across the net). This random network structure will compensate for the peudorandom number generators running in the peer nodes.

So, what raw materials would be found on the moon that wouldn't have to take off from earth in a more primitive form? You'll also have to transport enough supplies to sustain the builders while they assemble the parts on the lunar surface and the tools used to do the assembly. Then you'd have to transport the extra fuel to achieve escape velocity from the moon when you could have had the whole job done with one launch.

There's a lot of structural mass involved in a platform that can sustain the thrust required to get off of our ball of dirt that then becomes superfluous for the entire rest of the trip, and is a maneuvering liability (extra inertia == more reaction mass required for a given vector change). If we had some sort of propulsion method that didn't involve reaction mass this wouldn't matter so much, but as yet that hasn't happened.

Look at it this way: if you were going to build a wooden boat, would you build it at the logging camp 500 miles from the ocean, incorporate wheels and a car engine, and drive it to the ocean?

Ole

Backward compatibility is an unfortunate fact of life. If it weren't we could have gone to flat address spaces 20 years ago, we wouldn't have these noisy and power-wasting AT-compatible cases, and it wouldn't be so hard to break away from Microsoft platforms and applications.

In point of fact, Intel didn't simply ignore backward compatibility with the Itanium. They just thought that they could build a processor powerful enough to maintain it through emulation.

True nanotechnology as envisioned by Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, and other pioneers in the field deals by definition with a bottom-up approach. There is nothing new or revolutionary about miniturization; we continue to build smaller and smaller gears, valves, and motors, lithography is becoming more and more refined, but none of these advancements merit the term "nanotechnology", even if they do approach nanometer sizes. The true revolution is, as I said, a bottom-up approach.

Technology is trying to use smaller and smaller materials, and we are only now approaching manipulation on a molecular scale. How, then, can you define nanotechnology as the bottom-up design of molecules by manipulating individual atoms?

What are you talking about? We have been manipulating things on a molecular scale at least since 1985, and we have come a long way since then.

download plus description

download plus description

Wolfram's first CA book (the collection of his papers) is out of print but available for download at http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/books/c a-reprint/

Well, you are correct, Uranus is not actually hitting their face at that time. You can calculate the actual planetary positions, at here,

The above is from John Walker's excellent website. He conducted the Cavendish experiment in his basement.

- Monica

The above is from John Walker's excellent website. He conducted the Cavendish experiment in his basement.

- Monica

(Damn, the window title is so pathethic.. "JPG Compression - The Bandwidth Saver". I demand a public apology from Hemos)

That's the title? My browser shows "JPG Compression * The Bandwidth Saver". I guess either my browser doesn't know what character #150 is, or someone forgot to run demoronizer.

What browser do you use, anyway? I use links.

It's available here. It's command line only but it supports all the protocols and encryption of the Windows version. Enclosed in the package are two Tcl/Tk frontends. Additionally, there's this GTK front end for it.