Slashdot Mirror

> At least right now what type of applications would this be good for? Do we really need that
> much storage?

Yes, we really need that much storage. I am currently working on a data mining/analysis project. We currently are looking at multi-terabyte datasets from astro and climate simulations.

Three dimensional super nova explosion simulations take around 50 terabytes at the current resolution. This is small compared to the petabytes of data needed for biological simulations.

Look at http://sdm.lbl.gov/sdmcenter/tasks.htm for some discussion of why we need huge storage capacities (and some of the other problems involved).

Also there was a story about 2 weeks ago, mentioning solar energy breakthrough using full-spectrum layering. Does anyone know anymore about this.

Have a look here. It even comes with references to papers (not that I've read them, but y'know).

This is not nearly the complete list of particles. The complete list of known and predicted particles is organized by the Particle Data Group at LBL. You can see the listings in PDF or PS formats. You can also order a FREE (as in both speech and beer) hard copy of the listings, just published this summer. It is about the size of 2 phone books, but they also have a free pocket version.

This is not nearly the complete list of particles. The complete list of known and predicted particles is organized by the Particle Data Group at LBL. You can see the listings in PDF or PS formats. You can also order a FREE (as in both speech and beer) hard copy of the listings, just published this summer. It is about the size of 2 phone books, but they also have a free pocket version.

This is not nearly the complete list of particles. The complete list of known and predicted particles is organized by the Particle Data Group at LBL. You can see the listings in PDF or PS formats. You can also order a FREE (as in both speech and beer) hard copy of the listings, just published this summer. It is about the size of 2 phone books, but they also have a free pocket version.

but what could possibly be more important is noncoding RNA, or microRNA. I read a good article about it at Science News.
Another useful link is the project site for the program RNAGENiE.

Just thought many people would find that interesting.

Einstein's greatest mistake, the Cosmological constant, is currently under debate again after observations of NASA's deep space probes and for example supernovae.

• Throw away your alarm clocks and wrist watch, the glowing hands give you 0.6 mrem/year.
• Or try giving up bananas, most people recieve about 40 mrems/year per year in Potassium-40 radiation
• But the absolute worst source of radiation, cigarettes- 1.5 packs per day = 8000 mrem/year
• And move away from coal fired plants; Uranium occurs naturally in coal, which when burned exposes you to 1-4 mrems/year

With a bit more work we could turn the disks into nanotube interfaces to a frozen light held inside the platter. The article on that wouldn't say how many paperbacks it can hold, more like "If you could convert your body into pure data, you could store N million skinny people (or M million fat people)." Sure it would have to be kept cold, but big deal. And that's not even new technology, what's so great about a lousy 90 GB?

Radiance is best for realistic lighting simulation. Even better than POV-Ray, available for all good OSes, even Mac OS X. But it is only a rendering package. No modelling.

Or for repairing a broken duck.

Personally, I prefer using DUCT tape for most applications, including removing warts. Doesn't work all that well for taping ducts, though.

I should have left the Nagasaki bomb out of the post, but cyclotrons were used for the uranium processing on the Hiroshima bomb. Gaseous diffusion was also used and soon became the preferred method but if you read up on "Calutron"s (modified cyclotrons) you will find their role in the early uranium processing.

this article has a pretty good description, including reasons why the Calutrons feel from favor.

xmove could do some of what you want, moving clients between X servers. I haven't used it in 3 or 4 years, so I don't know if it still works.

From the man pages:

xmove starts a pseudoserver which allows X11 clients to be relocated from one display to another. Upon startup it will create a listening port from which it accepts new client connections. When xmove is invoked it chooses a default server, and all clients will be displayed on that server until moved elsewhere. Several clients may connect through a single xmove, thus requiring only one xmove process per machine.

Actually we do have a lot of 2D tools available, if not exactly pre-press tools. Many of them were originally developed under Unix and Xlib rather than using the Gtk or Qt toolkits, so aren't part of either of the "standard" Linux desktops (although are certainly usable with same). Some of them are under oddball licenses (eg 'tgif' has free-as-in-beer and QPL type licenses).

Examples: tgif, xfig, pstoedit, gnuplot, xgraph, fig2java, xv, and so on. I find tgif useful for laying out EPS and PS files (you can draw and edit too), xfig is a nice general vector draw tool.

It was the Thinkpad 701 - here's a fan page.
Google has more, of course.

1. Yes, we do need another <insert software-type here>.
2. No, it doesn't matter what the software is. You think every window manager should be like TWM?
3. People will develop what they want to develop, regardless of whether or not YOU think it is prudent or a good use of "resources" (ie. people besides you).
4. Start at the beginning, and work your way up. RMS stated that the GNU system would encompass everything from a shell to a spreadsheet. Linus just wanted a kernel. Which one has been useful the longest? Don't bite off more than you can chew.
5. Professional != Better (necessarily).

You suck at trolling.

Anyway, for anyone who wants the history of aerogels, click here.

Aerogel

Aerogel

So what's your point? This is the usual JPL "we tweaked an old technology and are releasing a big PR campaign announcing a new JPL invention" their big-budget PR office uses.

(Imagine computing devices that communicate seamlessly across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.)

Okay, I'm imagining it. But that's not what this is, right (even though it's a cool project)? Radio's just a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This presumably isn't going to be transmitting in visible light, let alone hard X-rays and gamma rays.

I just noticed that I misunderstood your question a little bit. The microscope mentioned above is an electron microscope - as such it has no mechanical moving parts. You can see pictures taken with that microscope in this paper (2MB). You were probably thinking of scanning tunneling microscopes that have a tip scanning over the surface of a sample. These microscopes would indeed need mechanical positioning at the mentioned level to measure such small distances.

See title...

What is wrong with arpwatch?

"apt-get install arpwatch" and the ARP table is monitored for new stations, station changes, etc. You stay up-to-date by email.

All the concrete in the airports have been doing this for years. Ever hear of urban heat islands?

Some rough figures:

Some other fiures:

Industrial sheet metal shear: 3000 watts
Hydraulic press: 6000 watts
Industrial arc welder: 8000 watts
Commercial HVAC compressor (10 ton): 14,000 watts

A small, light industrial machine shop will have multiple of each of these. There are hundreds of these shops in almost every city in the US. Residential electricity usage doesn't even begin to come close to commercial usage. Computer usage doesn't even come close to the electricity used by these big tools. The last study that was done estimated that computers are using about 2% of the power consumed nation wide. That figure included networking equipment for backbones, and other office equipment like copy machines, too!

Hardly. With the power management set up (including such things as monitor blanking and hard-drive spin down) and wake-on-LAN enabled, it doesn't really take a lot when not in use.

Yeah and to use Wake-On-LAN you need just another running computer... Very good energy saving indeed...

To quote http://wattwatchers.utep.edu/pages/PowerManagement .htm:
According to EPA Estimates, the average powered workstation costs $37/yr.: a computer with full Power Management configuration can cost only $16.40/yr. 75% of a workstation energy usage comes from the monitor.

Alright, this is more than I thought, but I don't think it justifies letting a computer run over night for 10 hours, just to save one minute boot time! That's you brushing your teeth in between and the computer again almost in screen saver state.

Now you're being foolish. Sharpen up the debating skills a bit - 'examples' like that are too easy to knock down

Well, your opinion seems to be, that if cars had power managment and such, just to say, they don't use so much energy (and money) any more, you wouldn't care.

Maybe you also take a look at:
http://standby.lbl.gov/

Or read http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/energyefficiency/appl iances/standby/

Recent research has revealed that standby power consumption accounts for 11.6% of Australia's household electricity usage, costing Australian households more than $500million and generating more than 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum. This is equivalent to the greenhouse impact of more than 1 million cars.

And believe me, Australia is nothing in comparison to the US.

The element 118 and 116 Berkeley claim was retracted about a year ago: http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/118-re traction.html

1. MIT has an interest in ensuring that people do not fear technology. Worst case scenario: a technophobic generation starts shunning the MITs of the world for agricultural colleges.
   
   
2. Appending the MIT brand to someone's opinion doesn't necessarily mean the author is any more knowledgeable than the clerk at your local 7-eleven.

3. The author is not an MIT professor of economics, political science, sociology, literature, comp-sci or any other subject that would qualify him as an authority on the subjects covered by 1984. He teaches astrogeophysics at Berkeley. He currently teaches a course called "Physics for future Presidents" ["my goal is to cover the physics that future world leaders need to know (and maybe present world leaders too....)."] and is the author of a historical novel called "The Sins of Jesus."

   The assumption that presidents need to understand physics (rather than employ well-informed experts as advisors on the subject) and the profession that Jesus used "magic and deception" to pose as the son of God (based on "historical facts and biblical references") makes me wary of his preaching.

1. MIT has an interest in ensuring that people do not fear technology. Worst case scenario: a technophobic generation starts shunning the MITs of the world for agricultural colleges.
   
   
2. Appending the MIT brand to someone's opinion doesn't necessarily mean the author is any more knowledgeable than the clerk at your local 7-eleven.

3. The author is not an MIT professor of economics, political science, sociology, literature, comp-sci or any other subject that would qualify him as an authority on the subjects covered by 1984. He teaches astrogeophysics at Berkeley. He currently teaches a course called "Physics for future Presidents" ["my goal is to cover the physics that future world leaders need to know (and maybe present world leaders too....)."] and is the author of a historical novel called "The Sins of Jesus."

   The assumption that presidents need to understand physics (rather than employ well-informed experts as advisors on the subject) and the profession that Jesus used "magic and deception" to pose as the son of God (based on "historical facts and biblical references") makes me wary of his preaching.

Which article did you read? There are two articles linked in the Slashdot blurb. The first article links to the original announcement of the discovery dated June 7, 1999. In that article, there's a link to the retraction, dated July 27, 2001. Today, July 15, 2002, there's an article reporting that the original discovery wasn't a discovery at all. It was fabricated data and the announcement was intentionally done based on fake information. That is fraud. That's a trust issue.

Had the original announcement was a discovery that they believed was based on real, bona fide data, that would be different -- just part of the normal scientific discovery process.

Which article did you read? There are two articles linked in the Slashdot blurb. The first article links to the original announcement of the discovery dated June 7, 1999. In that article, there's a link to the retraction, dated July 27, 2001. Today, July 15, 2002, there's an article reporting that the original discovery wasn't a discovery at all. It was fabricated data and the announcement was intentionally done based on fake information. That is fraud. That's a trust issue.

Had the original announcement was a discovery that they believed was based on real, bona fide data, that would be different -- just part of the normal scientific discovery process.

This is not new news at all, in fact Berkeley scientists retracted their paper back in 2001. Here is a link: http://enews.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/118- retraction.html.

From the looks of it, an aerogel solution sounds promising for a few reasons:

1. Aerogel is incredibly light (99.8% air), which should make it fairly cheap to include in a shuttle payload;

2. It has fairly high insulating properties, which would help with heat issues;

3. It's already being used as a means of collecting very small objects.

4. Variations on aerogel can incorporate magnetic metallic oxides.

Here's an idea:

1. Create aerogel 'Nerf balls' of different sizes (golf ball, basketball, beach ball, for example) that are treated with a small amount of magnetic material, and put them into a dispersion container (think of a scaled-up version of a multibarrel Nerf gun);

2. Launch a shuttle;

3. At the proper orbit, launch the aerogels into the orbital path you want to clear. Yes it will probably take lots and lots of launches, but if you can release one batch with every ISS maintenance launch, it would be a start.

4. Let gravity and a little magnetism do the grunt work: as the aerogels orbit, they should pick up some of the smaller pieces of debris (paint flakes, nuts and bolts, etc.: the harder pieces to track are the ones that are probably the most dangerous anyway).

5. As the aerogels orbit and pick up debris, they'll slow down, and possibly come into contact with other orbiting aerogels. At close enough distances, their magnetic properties will attract them to each other, making easier-to-harvest 'clumps' that shuttle operators or the ISS can scoop up safely. In the case of a heavy-enough clump, it would start to de-orbit by itself, where atmospheric moisture would break it down , exposing its contents to friction.

But then again, I am not a rocket scientist: all that might do is make the planet look like it has an orbiting ring of Nerf balls around it...

Other info: State Energy Data Report for 1999 from the DOE. (The 2000 report isn't due out until Dec. 2002.)

One suggestion thats been around for a while is the energy saving that could be made by painting all the roofs white. There's a study here. This info has been around for a few years. Has anything been done about this? Living in the UK I'm certainly glad that the US has found another way to burn up the remaining supplies of oil.

This summer I'm working at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and some of the people near where I work have gotten a few grams of lunar material (Apollo 15, IIRC) from NASA for an experiment aiming to figure out the material's age of formation. Now they only need to look at a particular tiny part of the sample and NASA expects to get the rest back.

Now none of that is unreasonable, but what is unreasonable is the insurance policy they have to take out on the material against theft, accidental lost or destruction. Now insurers naturally want to know the value of what they are insuring. NASA's official and much repeated line is that all lunar material is priceless. This poses a serious problem for insurers, so the next question was what is the cost to replace the sample. No joke, they figured the cost of the policy, and hence the premiums, based on the cost of building a rocket, flying to the moon, collecting a new sample, and bringing it back. Not only that, but two members of the Berkeley physics department are officially down on paper as having volunteered to make the trip should it become neccesary.

I don't know what they are paying exactly, and being in a secured area of a restricted access research lab probably helps keep down the cost, but still it's not cheap holding on to lunar material that NASA expects to get back.

The politics that follow this 'sale' ought to be rather interesting. NCAR bought a Japanese supercomputer some time back and nearly got wiped out by funding deletion by the US Congress.

What happens next ought to be VERY interesting.

On the other hand, the Cray employees I've talked to - needling them for giving into the dark side and selling a SX-6 - have said that anything that is good for vector computing is good for Cray: they can always sell a follow-ob with their SV-2 and SV-2e.

I saw a post that I skimmed above that stated something to the effect that "you'll never touch [a supercomputer]. We, at NERSC, are still looking for a few good sysadmins. Keep in mind we're pretty brutal about who we let in, but if you think you have the right stuff to be a sysadmin on some of the world's most powerful machines...;)

This is kind of offtopic, but I just read a book called Bold Science: Seven Scientists Who Are Changing Our World. It talks about Venter's interesting background. Other scientists mentioned:

Susan Greenfield,

Geoffrey Marcy,

Polly Matzinger,

Saul Perlmutter,

Gretchen Daily, and

Carl Woese.

Uh, there's a LOT more to it than that!

A couple of comments above, somebody cited the poop on the different Plutonium isotopes. I hadn't the slightest fscking idea that there are over thirty! Half-lives cover the spectrum, from 0.6 nS to eighty million years. Of these, only the ones with spontaneous fission decay modes: 236(2.9Y), 238(88Y), 239(24e3Y), 240(6500Y), 241(14Y), 242(3.7e5Y), and 244(8e7Y) would be of interest to nuclear engineers. My understanding has always been that the main useful isotope was 239. All give off charged particles (alphas, electrons) but it's the neutrons from the spontaneous fission that can feed nuclear chain reactions, even though these are a miniscule fraction of the total radiation.

Plutonium _oxide_ (the active compound in reactor fuel rods) isn't too hard to handle, but the pure (metallic) Plutonium is more dangerous. The chief hazard is that it's easily burned, making smoke which spreads well through the atmosphere and returns to earth as dust. This dust is deadly. Breathing it loads your lungs with plutonium, the long-term radiation from which damages the tissues of your body. Damage to cellular DNA causes cancer. A (nuclear) munitions plant in Colorado had a fire in 1957, the (Plutonium) smoke from which was not fully contained. The neighboring town remains a cancer colony, though other contaminants, in addition to Plutonium, can be pointed at. The most dramatic story was of a little girl who was perfectly healthy until she fell down in the playground and scraped her knee. She must have picked up a plutonium dust particle or two, because six months later she lost the knee to cancer and by the end of a year she was dead.

The big story was of the filming of "The Conqueror" in 1954, about a hundred miles, and upwind, even, from a bomb test site in NV. As of 1980 John Wayne, Susan Hayward, director Cecil B DeMille, and half the crew who filmed it (kicking up plenty of dust in the process, no doubt, and breathing it as well) were dead - mostly of lung cancer, though no causal relation was proven in court.

Really, that doesn't sound too much like anything "harmless". But in comparison, there are other isotopes so intensely radioactive that only brief exposure to them amounts to a death sentence. There are elements which are much more aggressively absorbed by biochemistry, making their radioactive isotopes far more dangerous.

I don't want any of these things in my environment. Bury 'em, DEEP, so deep that nobody will ever get at them accidently!

But what about Mother Nature? It's pretty well known that the Earth's crust isn't a static thing. It moves, fluids (water, oil, etc) wash around inside it, and over the geologic span of time that this stuff (some of it, at least) lasts, who knows what will happen in Nevada's basement?

Wrong, the longest lived isotope of plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years.

No, YOU are wrong. The longest-lived isotope of plutonium is Pu-244 with a half-life of 80 million years.

This page on the Lawrence Berkely Natn'l Lab site claims efficiencies of 150lumens/watt for the RF lighting - and that's for daylightish white light. In contrast, according to The New Environmentalist, the best you're going to get for ghastly fluorescent is like 100lumens/watt, and about 60lumnes/watt for a cool white fluorescent. Combine this with the fact that bulbs last essentially forever (11.4 years if run continuously, with no loss of light output), and you've for a pretty good bulb for large-scale lighting.

And before you attemp making your case of aerogel, please read How Do You Work With Silica Aerogel Without Breaking It?.

I wasn't able to figure out whether it would build up static electricity, and, not being an engineer or even knowing/remembering what Young's modulus, among other things in the physical specs is, I am of course only guessing, but I think it might be a better sound insulator (like a lining inside the case) than structural load-bearer (like a PC case).

If you want to waste some time on it, why don't you read through the info and brainstorm some more uses for it? I'd love to hear what you come up with. Interesting stuff.

I wasn't able to figure out whether it would build up static electricity, and, not being an engineer or even knowing/remembering what Young's modulus, among other things in the physical specs is, I am of course only guessing, but I think it might be a better sound insulator (like a lining inside the case) than structural load-bearer (like a PC case).

If you want to waste some time on it, why don't you read through the info and brainstorm some more uses for it? I'd love to hear what you come up with. Interesting stuff.

I wasn't able to figure out whether it would build up static electricity, and, not being an engineer or even knowing/remembering what Young's modulus, among other things in the physical specs is, I am of course only guessing, but I think it might be a better sound insulator (like a lining inside the case) than structural load-bearer (like a PC case).

If you want to waste some time on it, why don't you read through the info and brainstorm some more uses for it? I'd love to hear what you come up with. Interesting stuff.

I wasn't able to figure out whether it would build up static electricity, and, not being an engineer or even knowing/remembering what Young's modulus, among other things in the physical specs is, I am of course only guessing, but I think it might be a better sound insulator (like a lining inside the case) than structural load-bearer (like a PC case).

If you want to waste some time on it, why don't you read through the info and brainstorm some more uses for it? I'd love to hear what you come up with. Interesting stuff.

Unlike traditional broadcasting, the cost of operation jumps for each listener tuned in. Each listener requires an ongoing dialog with the server and a big chunk of bandwidth

Not with IP Multicast. You can broadcast UDP packets to entire networks across the globe from you. Of course, this assumes that all routers between you and them support multicast, and that's why MBONE is so important.

An interesting next step might be to have a "Science Grid@home" program that people can run as a screen saver on their PCs, or something. Not for all projects, but a little extra programming might be justified for all those unused CPU cycles.

These new LEDs are pretty cool. Another new technology on the horizon is the sulfur lamp

I'm not looking forward to climbing on my roof in the middle of the night to shovel it off so I can get my heat and lights.

What ever happened to the Neutron Bomb??

It can be made very small, it produces neutrons that penetrate heavy armor/ bunkers. It doesn't produce long lingering radiation so it only kills the targets. And it doesn't make the drop zone uninhabitable.

Imagine if we'd have used the neutron bomb in Afghanistan; same horribly dead victims, but the country wouldn't look so much like a blasted Martian landscape. Also, no depleted uranium shells littering the land, damaging people, babies, and crops for generations.

Really, why aren't they developing this trusty old tech? Sure seems like the lesser evil.