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http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

Women tend to gather around the average. Men tend to polarize between the genius and the retard.

It's the only always-verifiable universal truth when you compare the genders.

Maybe that's why she can hire better female programmers easier - because if you pick someone at random, you'll get more retarded males - and at the same time, the more brilliant males are ignored, since anyone about average can write easy-to-follow code pretty well.

2 possibilities:

1. Ingres has incompetent interviewers - the quality of their pick is low, and the result can be easier seen from their female hires vs their male hires (remember, if you pick randomly and only require average skills, the female candidates will be better in general)

2. Ingres does not provide challenging enough jobs for their developers. As a result, the males polarized at the brilliant side don't manifest.

"The other oft-quoted statistic, the average number of years between moves, can be calculated by dividing life expectancy (which was 74 years in 1982) by the number of lifetime moves (10.5). The answer, 7.0, suggests that the average American moves once every seven years" link.

The stat I have always heard is 7 years on average and this was the first Google quote I could find backing it with actual data =)

This visualised pretty well here

(Java required)

Here goes some useful links to electronics resources in the web:

Mag Lab Education - Electricity and Magnetism: A to Z

Make Magazine - all about hobbyst stuff - try searching here for "multimeter", or "soldering", or "PCB"...

Microelectronics Videos - very good videos about microelectronics and fiber optics

UVA Virtual Lab - Amazing multimedia resources covering many aspects of electricity and magnetism

ePanorama - practical projects, texts, tutorials, and many more...

MIT OpenCourseWare - if you want to go really deep in theory...

anyone wants to complete this list???

Here is Roy Baumeister's invited talk at the American Psychology Association, definitely worth a read if you're wondering what good men are: http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

I saw this linked on /. before. Here it is again. A good time to wheel it out ...

Is there Anything Good About Men?

Replying to undo incorrect mod. So I'll just say it, wavelength does have to do with resolution. That is why electron microscopes have higher resolution than light microscopes. See a demo for visible light. Parent is incorrect. At least it wasn't modded informative.

You're inferring cause and effect. The same as a lot of people here are doing with Tasers, for that matter. Helps to get the facts behind the situation, which does involve firearms but not in the way that you probably think. We have plenty of good research on the subject of firearms. So far as I know, we have nothing comparable when it comes to the use of Tasers.

There are many reasons why a given society (or even a particular region within a given country) has a high crime rate. Most of those are economic: people with something to lose generally don't go around shooting up other people for fun and profit. People with nothing to lose, on the other hand ...

When you look at the numbers, the defensive uses of firearms (which includes all the millions of times a weapon's mere presence ameliorates or prevents a violent confrontation) on the part of both law enforcement and private citizenry far outweigh the negative impact. Doesn't matter if you gun-control advocates think otherwise: facts speak for themselves and need no interpretation. Contrary to popular belief, the prime function of firearms in civilized cultures is not the launching of projectiles at people: it is the projection of fear.

I don't own a gun (well, I have a BB pistol) but I accept that America would be much worse off if the government truly tried to completely remove them from the population. In some places that has happened, and the result was rarely what the local leaders expected, although it was predictable. The sheep does not, after all is said and done, hold its own well against the wolf.

Everything we know about the psychological effects of firearms might be true with Tasers, I don't know. Probably not: if you're a physically healthy criminal capable of handling a Taser charge (particularly if you've already had the experience) you aren't going to be anywhere near as afraid of a good Tasering as you would be of a bullet. As a deterrent to violent crime a Taser is, by its very nature, less potent than a gun.

I'm not really sure where gun control advocates draw the line. Some of them just don't want "We the People" to have guns, others seem to want guns removed from everyone's hands (as if that were possible.) If it were up the the latter crowd, the next logical step in the program would be to remove guns from the police, replacing them with Tasers or other "non-lethal" technologies: I suspect that will result in a lot more dead cops.

Any way you slice this, treating a Taser like a watered-down police special is insufficient. Cops need to know when to use them, when not to use them, and when to just pull their guns. That all requires expensive training, and perhaps the powers-that-be have decided that a few dead citizens is a reasonable tradeoff for saving the bucks.

Note: I don't think orbital power's going to be a solution any time soon, but I had to respond.

You want to show me where the prototype exists to convert a very-high-powered laser beam to an electricity source

First, most proposals I've seen merely reflected and concentrated the sun.
Second, the 'prototypes' would most likely be solar thermal plants, merely adjusted for receiving more energy.

We just don't have the launch capacity, keeping the mirror focused on the right spot would require the satellite to perform gymnastics that would tear one big enough to be useful to shreds. Coordinating multiple satellites is still too complicated, and our orbitals are too dirty, as they'd be too large to dodge like the ISS and shuttle currently do.

The split magnet mentioned in this story is a purely resistive magnet. This means that it will operate at room temperature and uses copper alloy coils (pretty sure its a copper-silver allow) along with a tremendous amount of current to generate a magnetic field. The resistive magnets at the NHMFL operate at up to 60,000A and at up to 500V which equates to about 30MW. This amount of power is difficult to dissipate and makes these some of the worlds most powerful hot water heaters. The coil technoloy used is known as Florida-Bitter. The tricky part about a split magnet is that you have to take the most efficient portion of the magnet, which are the coils close to the center and effectively move them to the farthest region of the magnet. For comparison, the most powerful resistive magnet at the NHMFL with comperable parameters generates 35T. The most powerful persistant magnets however are the hybrids which have superconducting coils in the low field regions and resistive coils in the high field regions. The most powerful is 45T A lot more information can be found at: http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/

His post is ripped off from the introduction to this. Which is long but actually very interesting.

Yeah, I read that blog post too. It was interesting, but it has some problems.
Basically, he is arguing that X chromosomes tend to influence towards tight distribution of behavior, and Y towards broad distribution. That's fine and all, but if a guy only has daughters, how's his Y chromosome going to pass on the characteristics about him that make him so aggressive and alpha-male?
This is almost Lamarckian reasoning, and while there *are*, as we've found, ways in which parental characteristics and even grandparental characteristics influence children non-genomically, he's specifically claiming genomic inheritance transfers characteristics, but there isn't a reliable way of doing that (that I know of.)

Much of his reasoning can be equally well explained by social conditioning, especially the networking issues. I like what he's saying, I just think he's far overstating his case, and proposing unlikely mechanisms for how it happens, when it seems possible that it's just due to how people are raised and what expectations they absorb from society. If women musicians don't have any reasonable expectation of becoming famous through their compositions -- or indeed becoming famous at all -- why would they expend much effort composing? Johann Bach's wife composed a lot of wonderful music, and it wasn't until 200 years later that anyone even realised they were her compositions, rather than her husband's.

Is There Anything Good About Men? by Roy F. Baumeister is the original author whose ideas I tried to paraphrase. Forgive my errors.

This is a fearsomely difficult and touchy topic... for what it's worth, here's what I believe.

There is meaningful bias against females in parts of tech culture. There is also meaningful bias against geeks in parts of female culture, as gurps_npc notes. Doesn't excuse either bias. Gets into philosophical hierarchy/expectation/etc issues I suppose.

Some of the worst cases of anti-female bias I've seen have been driven by other females. I'm not sure what that means.

Men and women are socialized significantly differently.

Men and women are biologically different. There is meaningful evidence that men are simply drawn more strongly to technology (I'll phrase it in terms of interest, rather than aptitude, but that's another variable we should consider). Since men and women *are* different, we shouldn't necessarily expect males and females to be present in equal numbers in technology fields. But we shouldn't use sex differences as an excuse for anti-female biases.

We'd all benefit if participation in tech fields (as well as the rest of society) was wholly meritocratic. It's definitely not right now. I believe females do tend to get unfairly marginalized by some parts of tech culture.

I thought this was an interesting take on sex differences, which could perhaps be applied to explore differences of participation in technology fields.

Perhaps someone should let them know.

While the mitochondria is in a pure symbiotic relationship with the cell, it is still just a degraded bacteria (just millions of years ago). In particular, the Mitoconhondria CAN exist outside of the cell (with a little bit of help), while as you point out the cell WILL die without our little powerhouse. But the telling issue is that Mito's have the same DNA as that from bacteria (anucleas as well as the same structure as ALL prokayotes; in a centerfuge, they spin to the EXACT location of all prokayotes), whereas we eurkayotes have DNA inside of a nucleas and a different structure. The DNA from mito's have as much in common with nuclear DNA as the E. Coli in you does.

It has been 25 years since I was in the virology section of CDC, but I tend to recall the majority of study. In particular with a quick google:
The mitochondrion is different from most other organelles because it has its own circular DNA (similar to the DNA of prokaryotes) and reproduces independently of the cell in which it is found; an apparent case of endosymbiosis. Scientists hypothesize that millions of years ago small, free-living prokaryotes were engulfed, but not consumed, by larger prokaryotes, perhaps because they were able to resist the digestive enzymes of the host organism. The two organisms developed a symbiotic relationship over time, the larger organism providing the smaller with ample nutrients and the smaller organism providing ATP molecules to the larger one. Eventually, according to this view, the larger organism developed into the eukaryotic cell and the smaller organism into the mitochondrion.


As to phrasing, I simply pointed out that the mito is a poor choice to study, but it is quick, fast, cheap, and doable.

Amort Calculator

22% interest on 14K over 72 monthly payments (I'm assuming 12 payments per year)

$351.77 / month car payment

After 6 years, that's $11326.75 in interst paid!

Let's put it this way: If you can afford to put aside $351.77 / month, and you can get a savings account that offers 4% interest, then after 1 year, you'll have $4,313.83 saved up.

If you need the car NOW, then heck, if you can afford $351.77 / month, you probably have a not too shabby salary. Get a line of credit from the bank. They're usually in the neighbourhood of 6%. You can buy a 14k outright, and then payback the loan. At $351.77 / month, you'll have it paid back in 44 months (as opposed to 72), and you'll have paid only $1631.32 in interest (as opposed to $11k!). Plus a line of credit is more flixible. If you can afford to pay more than $351 in a month, you can, without penalties.

Actually, it's their knowledge of guns that gives me some comfort. The people you see commenting about firearms here on Slashdot are the very last sort of people you're going to see committing a massacre, are the ones most likely to successfully use a firearm in a defensive situation, and least likely to shoot someone by accident. I'd rather have one of them holding a gun on me than you. At least, if I get shot it'll be because they had a good reason to shoot me, not because they pulled the trigger by accident.

You, on the other hand, are someone who by his own admission, knows nothing of what he is talking about, knows nothing of what is being discussed, and has expressed fear and loathing of what is, after all ... only a machine. A gun is not an object worthy of such an emotional response, any more than your car or your refrigerator. Keep in mind that our nation was founded by people who saw the value of such machines, and in fact our freedoms were secured because they used those weapons well.

Now, I don't own a gun, either ... but I acknowledge that guns are power, and as such may ultimately be the only form of power We the People have when the political process fails us completely (that is unavoidable, we all know it, the Founders knew it: it is only a matter of when.) In the meantime, I'm glad there are people out there who aren't cops, professional soldiers, or crooks, who own firearms and know how to use them. As I said, guns are power and I see no reason why one side should have all of it. Neither would you, if you were to look at the situation a little more dispassionately.

As an initiation into the world of firearms and defensive gun usage, I would recommend that you to check out the writings of one Gary Kleck. Here's another article. I'm sure you can Google for more (those are just the top few links I found by typing his name.)

It's eye-opening stuff, and he has the math and the numbers to back it up. I guarantee it will thoroughly upset your worldview, but sometimes the truth hurts.

Given that heat -> power is a fairly mature technology, wouldn't that be more efficient than solar cells?

What about Molten Salt

...forms of nanoscale artwork is the art etched into microchips. It's more fun than most nanoscale art, because if you start pulling apart ICs and putting them under a powerful enough microscope, you can spot all kinds of artwork.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, I highly recommend the Molecular Expressions Silicon Zoo gallery of chip art:

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/

So in order to definitely maximize profits, another patent application goes out a few years after FDA approval for a major improvement. It just happens to be that that improvement was old news in the company. This is bad for patients but reflects reasonable actions by the company. I'm not sure how to fix this. Maybe drug patents should only be granted and the clock start ticking once the drug is approved by the FDA.

Starting the clock when a drug is FDA approved may help but I've got what I think may be a better course of action. Let the National Institutes of Health, NIH, do more R&D, Research and Development. Then the NIH can license the drugs created out to manufacturers. The NIH already develops some drugs. For instance the NCI, National Cancer Institute, spent $183,000,000 the develop Taxol, a drug used in chemotherapy for some cancers. Unfortunately however the NCI "sold" the rights to all of the data the NCI generated for FDA approval to Bristol-Myers Squibb for only $43,000,000. With such a low price BMS spent, they made almost $1,000,0000,000 in 2000 alone. Imagine the R&D the NCI, NIH, could do with that type of money.

Two seconds of Googling reveals that Florida State University offers a Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering online. Geez, you're lazy.

Don't forget about the government funded R&D that big pharmaceutical companies often get exclusive rights to.

Like Taxol. The National Institute of Cancer (NCI) spent $183 million developing Taxol for chemotherapy for cancer only to sale exclusive rights to the data the NCI generated to Bristol-Myers Squibb, BMS for $43 million. In 2000 BMS made almost $1 billion in sales of Taxol. Taxol costs less than $1 per dose to make yet treatment cost several thousand dollars.

Mod parent up -- very cool link

Another good link is "Powers of Ten"
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopt icsu/powersof10/

I don't know if it is open but if it is not it should be.

Not all public research data is open or publicly available. For instance the NCI, National Cancer Institute, spent $183,000,000 developing Taxol, a drug used in the treatment of cancer. What did the NCI do with the research data it came up with? It sold the data to BMS, Bristol-Myers Squibb, for $43,000,000. Not only did BMS pay less than 1/4 the cost of developing Taxol but it also got exclusive rights to the research. It was estimated that in 2000 BMS was to make $1,000,000,000, one billion dollars, in sales of Taxol, and another billion per year thereafter.

You wrote: "Bottom Line: We dump billions of tons of C02 (heat trapping gas) into the atmosphere annually and it is accumulating. How could this not be having an effect? Wishful thinking?"

Just FYI the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is 0.035% on average (less the one percent).

http://www.met.fsu.edu/explores/atmcomp.html

You are right, it is. This is something else with the same name....

Well if you really want to feel insignificant, view this little ditty on size:

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopt icsu/powersof10/

$ for i in *JPG ; do mv $i ${i/JPG/jpg} ; done

This isn't the first time I've seen this, but it will result in a file MYJPG.JPG being called MYjpg.JPG, ${i//JPG/jpg} would be better as at least the it would end up with the .jpg at the end, but ${i%.JPG}.jpg would be best.

Again, there's lots of ways to do it. To use the trivial JPG -> jpg, example, yes, you're correct in that using the shortest match at the end would be a better approach (excluding other issues). I just wanted to illustrate the redundant (and typically overused) use of basename with a simple example, and remind the folks that using parameter expansion is preferrable both in interactive form, and in scripts.

Me, I've always relied on Larry Wall's script exclusively to rename files interactively. Scripts, on the hand, are often best written with /bin/sh in mind, and should as a rule be as simple, clean and efficient as possible.

These numbers are all from the CDC.

http://webapp.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_sy.h tml

My queries are for the years 1999-2002 (all they have), the entire U.S., all races, both sexes, all ages. (four year totals)

Unintentional death by falling : 57,760
Unintentional Pedestrian deaths: 24,079
Unintentional Drowning : 13,739
Unintentional death by burning : 13,642
Unintentional Firearms deaths : 3,164
Unintentional Bicyclist deaths : 3,099

You can also break it down by age range. If we're worried about the teen years, we can look at ages 12-18. (four year totals)

Unintentional Pedestrian deaths: 1,561
Unintentional Drowning : 1,495
Unintentional Firearms deaths : 494
Unintentional Bicyclist deaths : 453
Unintentional death by burning : 423
Unintentional death by falling : 306

Younger still, ages 1-11: (four year totals)

Unintentional Pedestrian deaths: 2,118
Unintentional Drowning : 2,870
Unintentional death by burning : 1,920
Unintentional Bicyclist deaths : 371
Unintentional death by falling : 292
Unintentional Firearms deaths : 164

Accident-wise, young kids have a lot more to worry about than guns. And teenagers are almost as likely to die on their bicycles. God forbid they're bicycling to the swimming pool... or even worse, *walking* to the swimming pool ... but yes, there are gun accidents.

Non-accidental deaths:

It's interesting to note that more than half of violent deaths attributed to firearms are suicide. Whenever you read an article in the media that mentions the number of gun deaths it's a good bet that they're including suicides.

• Violent deaths by firearm: 113,160 (includes suicides)

• Suicide by firearm: 67,162

Now I, personally, don't mind if people kill themselves. More power to them. I do agree that that there is a lower barrier to entry when using a gun and understand that depressed people might not be the best people to own guns, but gun control isn't really the solution to depression.

So, anyway, taking out suicides leaves us with:

• "legal intervention": 1,192 (cops killing criminals?)

• Homicide by firearm: 44,806 (11.2K per year)

As compared to

• Non-firearm homicides: 26,794 (6.7K per year)

So, more people are definitely intentionally killed by guns than by any other single cause, roughly 11K people per year.

But...

How many times are guns used defensively? Since defensive gun use isn't something that is reported (like an offensive gun use is), numbers are harder to find. Here is the page I have bookmarked with the only numbers I've ever seen. (refers to Gary Kleck's survey and a DOJ-sponsored study, and has a table of the results of 13 other surveys). (Gary Kleck is a criminologist at FSU - and, no, he's not an NRA member. http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/p/faculty-gary-klec k.php)

• http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

Summary: Kleck thinks defensive gun use happens 2.5M times per year, other surveys listed range between 770K and 3.6M. The DOJ study thinks it's 1.5M times per year.

Let's aim low and go with 1M defensive uses per year. The question posed at the book club was "when does the ratio become w

I work in NMR, and the largest routine fields we work with are 21.1 Tesla (1H:900MHz),and the Florida State U National High Field lab has a working 45 Tesla NMR, which to my knowledge has the highest field.

According to this article, the peak fields for this magnet are 3.9T; Is this the world's largest magnetic field, or just the largest magnet physically?

What people need to know about divorce...

The industry that has evolved from people wanting divorces is a huge cash cow machine for states' social services and often shabby lawyers who really care more about having a job and lining their pockets than the welfare of our citizens or our children. The biggest lie in divorces involving custody is that the court tries to make decisions "in the child's best interest". This is of course an entirely subjective definition which while in theory sounds like what we all want, in practice it runs completely afoul of the United States Constitution in violating multiple constitutional rights, particularly: the right to protection from unreasonable seizure, the right to due process, the right to equal protection under the law. Remember that our laws are not meant to be - nor should they be - the highest of moral standards but rather minimal standards in order to best protect everyone while still keeping people as free as possible.

No doubt many people will just simply not believe me when I tell you that men are routinely and commonly and unjustly denied their constitutional rights in divorce proceedings. Ignorance is bliss after all but then complacency is no virtue either. Meanwhile others will cry about how abused women are while others will say but women are just naturally better parents. If you don't believe me read what the other people say:

In a 66 page legal article in Volume 25, No. 4 (Summer 1998) Florida State University Law Review at http://www.law.fsu.edu/Journals/lawreview/download s/254/mcneely.pdf, Cynthia A. McNeely very clearly lays out the unconstitutionality of current divorce practices from its historical basis to its societal impact.

In a 32 page article published in Volume 1, Number 2 (1999) pp 123-150 University of Utah School of Law, Journal of Law & Family Studies at http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/hubin1/Researc h/PRDP.PDF, Donald Hubin rights about Parental Rights and Due Process that specifically describes the failure of the courts to recognize that the standard of "child's best interest" fails to meet our right to due process that should require the courts to recognize that sole custody to one parent means taking away the other parent's custodial rights and that this should not be allowed to be done without proof beyond reasonable doubt that the parent is unfit to share in that right. Imagine if the same standard of "child's best interest" were applied to your family where no divorce was going on and your children were taken from you because in the judge's opinion your faith (or anything else) wasn't in your child's best interest. That's an aweful lot of latitude for subjectively taking your kids away unless we demand nothing less than our due process right. In the context of divorce and custody that means nothing less than a presumption of continued shared custody unless a parent can be shown unfit to the same standards as is done in showing guilt in criminal cases.

In an ongoing battle to protect the virtues of justice and equality are folks like Glenn Sacks who runs a great website on many of the abuses suffered at the hands of the courts in regards to divorce which folks should also check out at http://www.glennsacks.com/. And the list of references can easily go on.

If you get through at least these three references, you'll hopefully be at least dispelled of any blissful ignorances you too may have once had.

No, tomorrow its Snakes on a Chip!

Market forces should reward success in the face of risk, if that's what's beneficial to the public. How much does it cost to find and prove safe a new drug, versus what percentage of new drugs turn out to be the cure for cancer or something? What payoff is required to take that gamble? Huge probably.

The regulations for drug approval are stacked to the advantage of large pharmaceutical companies. It cost millions, even hundreds of millions to get a drug to approval which means small companies or individuals can't afford to bring a drug to market. However not all drugs are created by businesses, government comes up with some. An excellent example is Taxol. The NCI, National Cancer Institute, spent $183 Million to develop Taxol from the bark of the Pacific Yew tree. They then "sold" the rights to all of the research and testing to Bristol-Myers Squibb, BMS, for $35 Million. It waa estimated BMS made $1 Billion on sales of Taxol in 2000 and sales are only expanding. From that page:

"On September 19, 2000, BMS quoted $6.09 per milligram as the RedBook average wholesale price for Taxol ($182.63 for 30 mg, or $1,826.25 for 300 milligram vials). In August 2000, a generic producer reported that his costs of making Taxol were $.07 per milligram, so the profit margins are very high."

Here is a pdf copy if anyone's interested. The Expert Mind One of the researchers cited in the article, K. Anders Ericsson, is a faculty member at Florida State University. The stuff mentioned in the Scientific American article barely scratches the surface of his work. It's amazing how flexible the human mind can be.

I was actaully going from memory from my chemistry days at uni - back before I made the switch from chem eng to comp sci. But a google gives:

http://chemed.chem.purdue.edu/genchem/topicreview/ bp/ch22/activate.html#rate
http://www.chem.brown.edu/chem12/catalyst/catalyst .html

and of course at some that don't state the speed must be increased:
http://wine1.sb.fsu.edu/chm1046/notes/Kinetics/Cat alyst/Catalyst.htm
http://www.purchon.com/chemistry/catalyst.htm

So yes I guess people do call inhibitors catalysts - learn something new every day I guess...

As for TEL being a catalyst, I'd still argue it isn't because it isn't the TEL that does anything, it's the products of its decomposition which would be classified as catalysts assuming the link you have is correct (I don't know the details - chem eng was about the cat cracking side of petroleum, not the burn it an engine part :)

...from the lower left corner what with filing Chapter 11 and all. Such a pity...

Here are papers and more videos from the lab's web page: http://www.eng.fsu.edu/ciscor/research_highlights. htm

Lab's web page: http://www.eng.fsu.edu/ciscor/

The robot hardware platforms are a customized ATRV (four wheels) by RWI (now iRobot) and a Pioneer DX (two wheels) by ActivMedia (now MobileRobots Inc.). This hardware would not be used in the field (Since RWI no longer exists and the DX is about 2 feet tall), but the navigation principles they developed might be (along with many others).

Here are papers and more videos from the lab's web page: http://www.eng.fsu.edu/ciscor/research_highlights. htm

Lab's web page: http://www.eng.fsu.edu/ciscor/

The robot hardware platforms are a customized ATRV (four wheels) by RWI (now iRobot) and a Pioneer DX (two wheels) by ActivMedia (now MobileRobots Inc.). This hardware would not be used in the field (Since RWI no longer exists and the DX is about 2 feet tall), but the navigation principles they developed might be (along with many others).

As if proximity to the eyes isn't enough (the optic nerve is really part of the brain), brains need cooling. It would be difficult to adequately cool the brain if it was in the chest surrounded by a large mass of heat producing muscles and organs.

Some reason that cooling advantages of bipedelism permited the rapid growth in brain size of early humsans.

http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/human. html
http://www.anthro.fsu.edu/people/faculty/falk/radp apweb.htm

(These probably aren't the best referencs available but they came up in a quick google)

Will the future of geek culture be like this? Instead of bored microelectrical engineers making silicon art, will DNA nano-engineers be making DNA art? :)

Florida State University beats Indiana State by a year...

From: http://president.fsu.edu/pages/state_of_uni_04.htm l

"As part of the admission contract, next year's freshman class will be required to bring a computer to campus. In the fall of 2006, entering freshman will be required to bring a laptop to campus with an approved academic software package."

I know that this is the trend in my state's public universities.

Here at FSU, I think the enforced policy goes into effect this fall, and I think something similar is happening at UF.

http://www.fsu.edu/~trustees/meeting/minutes/09-24 -04.html
http://www.circa.ufl.edu/computers/

At least UF makes some mention of consideration for this in financial aid.

I suspect the schools think they can save money buy not having to create/maintain the labs, even if more financial aid has to go out. And I'm sure they'll get some nice kickbacks for pushing something like Dell on the students.

photograph here

It was actually directly translated word for word into Russian, with disregard for grammar, word order and the like. As it stands it doesn't make much sense at all in Russian.

What would've been cool, if they got someone who actually new Russion to translate it.

Actually it is something like "When you wish good steal real the best" - VAX designers never cared to learn Russian :)

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/images/russi ans.jpg

And as far as I remember, Soviet Union was never much interested in VAXen.

There is a lot of this type of chip art... Here's a link: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russia ns.html Don't feel bad, I couldn't remember it exactly as well, had to look it up!

how do we know whether it has moving parts in it or not?

RTFA:

Remember how a laser light diffract when passing through a pinhole? Infos here and here (in french). FYI, the latter university is named after the 19h century french scientist who gave his name to the Fourier transform we all know.

I guess by superimposing many diffraction patterns they are able to generate the picture. This should imply Fourier-like transforms of the source image.