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This guy built his own "Brazil" monitor

Sir, it's bad form for a scientist to tell people that they don't know what they're talking about. If I am incorrect, exercise the option of teaching rather than insulting.

Anyway, since I don't want you holding (or refusing to hold your breath), I did a little research. For those, who are still interested, below is a wonderful set of links to websites that discuss the rocket equation. The second is my favorite. Enjoy!

Teachin' Science
Rocket Equation Applet
Wolfram

Michael.

I don't know what MIT is using right now, but I know that a few years ago I noticed This Site at MIT as well as this security assesment. From my personal experience (not at MIT, but elsewhere) often in some situations you will be expected to leave your student ID at places such as the dorm front desk if you check out, say, a vaccum cleaner. (This of course gets really ironic since in my dorm we need the card to get from where the desk is back into the 'main dorm') I know from some playing with my card that our cards basically contain the following information. A question mark, our full name, social security numbre, followed by a sequencing number and then a semicolon. The system connects to the main campus server using a standard ip address (although it may have been moved to a VPN, I haven't played with it since freshman year) over tcpip. While I imagine network security is fairly lapse, I wouldn't worry too much, because beyond dorm access and meal plan I don't use my card that much. In all honesty, I'd be more afraid of somebody grabbing one of the many lists that different campus organizations are given (such as dining services) that have all of our personal information such as our social security number and are often sitting right next to the terminals at retail locations run by the campus or in drawers. There is a possibility of identity theft en masse if someone stole one of these. They are trying to improve the system however. When I first came to my university, everything was SSN based, but now they are moving to a 'net id' (based on your initials and a number) however some professors will still ask for your social, and the grade system as well as the card system are still based on the ssn, and I don't see them changing any time soon.

I don't know what MIT is using right now, but I know that a few years ago I noticed This Site at MIT as well as this security assesment. From my personal experience (not at MIT, but elsewhere) often in some situations you will be expected to leave your student ID at places such as the dorm front desk if you check out, say, a vaccum cleaner. (This of course gets really ironic since in my dorm we need the card to get from where the desk is back into the 'main dorm') I know from some playing with my card that our cards basically contain the following information. A question mark, our full name, social security numbre, followed by a sequencing number and then a semicolon. The system connects to the main campus server using a standard ip address (although it may have been moved to a VPN, I haven't played with it since freshman year) over tcpip. While I imagine network security is fairly lapse, I wouldn't worry too much, because beyond dorm access and meal plan I don't use my card that much. In all honesty, I'd be more afraid of somebody grabbing one of the many lists that different campus organizations are given (such as dining services) that have all of our personal information such as our social security number and are often sitting right next to the terminals at retail locations run by the campus or in drawers. There is a possibility of identity theft en masse if someone stole one of these. They are trying to improve the system however. When I first came to my university, everything was SSN based, but now they are moving to a 'net id' (based on your initials and a number) however some professors will still ask for your social, and the grade system as well as the card system are still based on the ssn, and I don't see them changing any time soon.

It was originally funded and built by the Sloan School of Business at MIT and has recently been adopted by the University of Heidelberg in Germany, the University of Bergen in Norway and parts of Cambdridge University in England.

This past weekend I attended the dotLRN Seminar in Copenhagen and over 70 people from over 20 institutions worldwide were present. dotLRN's future is very bright!

Also, you can rest assured that no learning institution will ever face silliness such as this.

talli

It was originally funded and built by the Sloan School of Business at MIT and has recently been adopted by the University of Heidelberg in Germany, the University of Bergen in Norway and parts of Cambdridge University in England.

This past weekend I attended the dotLRN Seminar in Copenhagen and over 70 people from over 20 institutions worldwide were present. dotLRN's future is very bright!

Also, you can rest assured that no learning institution will ever face silliness such as this.

talli

For those readers who haven't before encountered state machines:

Los Alamos National Lab has some good info (overview mostly)
Lecture notes from MIT
An interesting research project from The Beast
Some info on how FSMs are used for AI in computer games

The actual papers are available online.
Part I
Part II

Mirrored:
Part I
Part II

The actual papers are available online.
Part I
Part II

Mirrored:
Part I
Part II

Here's a Real Wearable. The upside is it's free. The downside is that everything is an add-on.

Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla have been locked up now for around a year(Over a year in Hamdi's case I think). Both have been refused access to a lawyer and neither have had charges filed against them. These are american citizens. This could happen to you. This could happen to somebody you know.

Our own government is locking people up without due process or just killing them to save the hassle. Something really has to be done. Write your congressmen, join the ACLU(I did yesterday), participate in protests even if it feels stupid at first. The only way we're going to keep our rights is to actively work to defend them, especially with facists like Bush, Ashcroft, and Rumsfield at the helm.

Having a superposition of states is really the exciting thing about quantum computing but as a concept there is really nothing new for any cs-majors.

Abstractions of this concept can be pretty well cooked up by nondeterministic programming and lazy evaluation but should one actually be able to run these on a quantum computer the speed-ups could be enormous.

The point being that with the above two concepts you can create even more general problem solving strategies than quantum computers would allow for, however in the same spirit, and use them with current computers. Having a language does not mean that you can really run it with any quantum computers. That's more of a job for a compiler.

Having a superposition of states is really the exciting thing about quantum computing but as a concept there is really nothing new for any cs-majors.

Abstractions of this concept can be pretty well cooked up by nondeterministic programming and lazy evaluation but should one actually be able to run these on a quantum computer the speed-ups could be enormous.

The point being that with the above two concepts you can create even more general problem solving strategies than quantum computers would allow for, however in the same spirit, and use them with current computers. Having a language does not mean that you can really run it with any quantum computers. That's more of a job for a compiler.

the post itself is a reference to a Monty Python skit about the Spanish Inquisition.

Sergey Brin is one of the heads of Google. (he developed it, and is the moral compass for google)

You can read a (fairly close) script of the Spanish Inquisition bit here

--

Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.

This Florida company seems to be referenced repeatedly, so why is it such a big deal to actually cite the name of it? Black helicopters are probably unlikely to appear overhead your house ... wait no, I bet it's Disneyworld ? Dammit ... and the whole Disneyworld Buys MIT wasn't actually a hoax. It all makes so much sense now.

Great, I'll tell Hamlet. :-)

While not directly related to April Fool's Day, one cannot forget MIT Hacks. Some of the best pranks I've seen in awhile.

Notable is the Campus cop car on the Great Dome...though they're all great.

While not directly related to April Fool's Day, one cannot forget MIT Hacks. Some of the best pranks I've seen in awhile.

Notable is the Campus cop car on the Great Dome...though they're all great.

This may be closer to real than you think.

Among other silly concepts at this site, we have the internet microwave oven
or
Another internet-controlled microwave and health monitoring toilet.
or
The "other" Echelon, who are into "Internet Control of Restaurant Management"

I'd just like to review the 'jokes' so far... call it Flamebait, if you want to, but it just annoys me and I have to say it...

1. RFC 3514
   This one was nice. Obvious, but nice... as usual, the RFC people are doing a good job. Too bad Slashdot ruined it with the first April Fools dupe...
2. Gentoo on RPM
   Well, good idea of the Gentoo people, but waaay too obvious... imho a good AF joke is one you believe to be true for at least a couple of minutes until you've looked at it very closely. But OK, this was only number 2, so it was still nice... now AF story bloat yet.
3. Whitespace programming language
   Hm. As has been pointed out, it's not new... and even more obvious than the previous one (and pretty much boring too). I think then CPAN people know how to really make a good AF joke...
4. Microsoft + Security
   Hey... better at least. Nicely combining a true story with a joke story... though the joke was not very believable either. Also, it's number four already, and we're only half-way through the day...
5. The Register's story
   OK. By itself, not all that bad... but not too overwhelming either. And, on Slashdot, we're now at Number 5 and counting.
6. The dupe.
   OK, increasingly stupid... but then again, maybe the best joke today on Slashdot :)
7. Enlightenment 1.0
   Aawwww, come on. Enough. It hurts. And again, blunt joke. Latency between reading and noting the joke: .01 ms. Including the dupe, we're at seven now... and the day is still not over. I think I'll stop reloading the web site until I'm sure April 1 is over in all time zones...

For some quality 4-1 jokes, see here (German), the above-mentioned cpan.org, or even the Freshmeat one which isn't so bad. This ain't so bad either. Kuro5hin points to this interesting link.

Can you /. editors pleease try to come up with a single good hoax and dump the rest? That would be nice.

Might be relevant with the things going on these days:

Detection of the B-2 Stealth Bomber And a Brief History on "Stealth"

Please, somebody mark the parent as "funny" instead of "interesting"! It's utter BS (if you want to learn something about synesthesia, try this site), but admittedly, it's quite hilarious.

Milling is the process of cutting by movign a quickly rotating cuting head in relation to the item being cut down. Most machine shop milling machines have a stationary head, and move the item around, while some cnc machines have a head that moves.

Of course, questions like this are where search engines come in handy -- http://www-me.mit.edu/Lectures/MachineTools/mill/i ntro.html

Pictures and video of Gene Ray, the discoverer of the Timecube, giving lecutre at MIT.

Everyone knows that good programming can only be taught using Scheme. Surely, kids can see the benefits of learning the statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the mother of all computer languages.

Additionally, Twirlip might have implied owning patents- I can't recall exactly. There was also another post which gave a good clue, but I can't find it either. (And slashdot doesn't even have an approximation of a good search engine!)

Ron has been known to use the nickname "Twirlip of the Mists"

Other people could've read that book...

But it is very understandable that such a celebrity might want to anonymize himself on a forum like Slashdot, so as to focus responses on what he says, not who he is.

Not damning, but interesting evidence nonetheless.

Since Rivest is all about information security, it would be amusing if a "traffic analysis" attack could strip him of an assumed identity. Twirlip has a high posting frequency- an automatically collected log of his userpage would reveal his daily schedule. Rivest lives in Massachusetts (a known time-zone), and often teaches an undergraduate class, so part of his schedule is public knowledge.

So, a quick test would be to list times Rivest was known to be lecturing in the past few years, and then look for any post from Twirlip inside that envelope.

(Of course, an individual could confound this style of analysis by pre-scheduling a forum post at a later time...)

Why do you think Twirlip of the Mists is Ron Rivest?

Twirlip doesn't seems to post on crypto subjects (although it's hard to tell, because the 24 message buffer doesn't last him a day). Maybe he's trying to avoid the topics of his day job?

I couldn't find the site you refer to, although one of the other posters to this thread has given us another mirror.

A bit more searching though, and it appears that the IPIX trouble may not be the cause of the current outage - see this.

The FSF has never taken a position against software patents, and has actually been rather restrained in its critism of them. For example, when the W3C tried to deal with the problem of incorporating patented technology into their standards, the FSF's only objection was that the patent license was too narrow.

Now, the League for Programming Freedom has a completely different take on the topic. Since it can be hard to tell its core members from those of the FSF, you're excused from the mistake this time :-)

The Chicago undergraduate mathematics bibliography is a pretty good collection of mathematics texts on moderately advanced topics with some commentary.

Oh, like this?

MIT Intellectual Commons (collection of related e-learning initiatives including dotlrn): http://web.mit.edu/cet/strategy/commons.html

What is .LRN? (from www.dotlrn.org ):

-A fully open source eLearning platform.

-A portal framework and integrated application suite to support course management and online communities.

-A scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready eLearning platform that can be deployed readily by small and large organizations.

-A modular architecture to permit flexibility and to drive innovation.

-A set of best practices in online learning shared in the form of source code.

The dotlrn project page has documentation, news, forums... It is hosted on the www.openacs.org site, which is the parent web framework upon which dotlrn is based. Besides the above, the framework has a rich architecture for managing permissions, users, groups, content management, course management, forums, email, and more.

What do you mean what about it? It's still going on. I book marked it when slashdot had the original article about it. It's right here.

Jason
ProfQuotes

I just checked out the OpenCourseware site , and it seems to me that the professors at MIT are dragging their feet. Just look at this electrical engineering course, where lecture notes for the first 13 lectures are Missing In Action.

Moreover, the schedule seems awfully slow: all course materials available FOUR YEARS from now! Wow, don't hurry up or anything. How hard can it be to throw your lecture handouts up onto the board? If it's not good enough for Open CourseWare, then why was it ever good enough for MIT students paying tuition?

I just checked out the OpenCourseware site , and it seems to me that the professors at MIT are dragging their feet. Just look at this electrical engineering course, where lecture notes for the first 13 lectures are Missing In Action.

Moreover, the schedule seems awfully slow: all course materials available FOUR YEARS from now! Wow, don't hurry up or anything. How hard can it be to throw your lecture handouts up onto the board? If it's not good enough for Open CourseWare, then why was it ever good enough for MIT students paying tuition?

I just checked out the OpenCourseware site , and it seems to me that the professors at MIT are dragging their feet. Just look at this electrical engineering course, where lecture notes for the first 13 lectures are Missing In Action.

Moreover, the schedule seems awfully slow: all course materials available FOUR YEARS from now! Wow, don't hurry up or anything. How hard can it be to throw your lecture handouts up onto the board? If it's not good enough for Open CourseWare, then why was it ever good enough for MIT students paying tuition?

MIT's OKI Project, Open Knowledge Initiative

Stanford's CourseWork

University of Michigan's CHEF Project

As far as I can tell, all that exists is an advanced discussion tool, with a content sharing tool coming soon. Universities need a much richer courseware system, one that handles a variety of tools (discussion, quizes, content management, tools that promote good pedigogical practices, etc.), and performs a variety of administrative functions (like authentication / authorization, grouping, reports & statistics, unified UI across tools, grading, etc.). MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative is another project in the courseware space, and there are other institutions which have developed their own homegrown courseware system. What we need in this space are standards for courseware - metadata standards, tool interoperability standards, etc. The internet2 middleware initiative addresses some of this in terms of authorization (see Shibboleth), but more collaboration around standards needs to take place.

So again, it's totally obvious, at least in the everyday sense of the word, to a practicing electrical engineer. Search through the postings on this story for "frequency counter" and you'll find a number of other posts that agree. I would therefore suggest you take at least one undergraduate computer architecture class, or at least do a bit of reading, before you make any assertions as to the novelty of the invention in question.

And since this patent was ostensibly granted based on the USPTO's interpretation of "novel" (which, as you correctly point out, is the relevant standard here), the fundamental problem is with the USPTO -- which was my original (if inadequately argued) point.

--FP

Well, as long as the MITOpenCourseWare is unaffected I'm fairly happy. This is a use of the internet that I applaud loudly.

"Could someone translate that to English for us?"

You mean *from* English poetry into American prose, right? ;)

Like The Skinhead Hamlet or Ebonics Hamlet?

Not Macbeth, true, but still Shakespeare.

How come Space War is the only game to impliment gravity in relation to shots fired? It was a great game. Have to get around to building my MAME console one day.

Coincidentally yesterday NASA came out with this article about the October event. HETE satellite catched a gamma-ray burst "[it] spotted the burst, nailed down a location, and notified observers worldwide within a few seconds, while the gamma rays were still pouring in". It turns out that there is a "Gamma-ray burst Coordinates Network", and an Automated Telescope in Japan that started observing just 193 after the burst was detected. cool story.

Shouldn't be too hard. Let's see...

1. Characterizing supporters of this war as "wanting to kill Iraqis" is slanderous. Admittedly, there's a handful of Iraqis, all of them with the surname "Hussein", whom we'd like to see dead. But no one wants to see innocent Iraqi civillians dead. Too bad Saddam would rather put some of them through a paper shredder himself. No, few are "passionate" about this war. Many supporters of it feel a certain ambivalence. It's something we have to do, but few are happy that we have to do it. There are a few exceptions. Iraqi expatriates living in the US are very glad indeed that this war is happening. Why don't you find one and ask why they came here? Hint: it usually wasn't for the cheese.
2. Blaming Bush for the economy is senseless. Anyone who was paying attention could see that the economy was beginning to tank in 1Q 2000, while Clinton was still in office. It's fitting, really, that an economy puffed up by lies and foolish business models occurred during the administration of the biggest liar we've had for a President since LBJ. Bush arguably hasn't done a whole lot about it. There's arguably not a lot he can do about it. No one's savings or retirement funds are going away any time soon just because the stock market is no longer inflated beyond all reason.

   By the way, Gore lost the election. Deal with it.

3. "The whole world" with more than a few minor exceptions like the UK, Spain, Australia, etc. Minor, yeah. The UN resolution that might have authorized war had a majority of the Security Council supporting it. It was withdrawn under the threat of a unilateral veto by France. Only in the mind of an unusually arrogant Frenchman does France constitute the "whole world".
4. The Pope? My, we have come a long way since JFK was elected over the objections of those who feared, unreasonably, that he'd be a papal puppet. (Ironically, this was another very close election with the candidates separated by .2% of the popular vote. A single switched vote per precinct would have sent the election the other way. Did Kennedy steal the election?) Now the President is supposed to obey the Pope! That's funny. When you're done laughing, read and understand the following: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...." You should recognize it; it's part of the same Constitutional Amendment that also allows you the right to post a lying, hate-filled tirade like this one without fear of government reprisal. As for "the poor" being shipped to Vietnam, it's a lie.
5. I remind the writer that we no longer have the draft. Anyone now in the military has volunteered of his or her own free will. The possibility of being sent to war is a risk they knowingly took upon themselves when they joined up. This second attempt at drawing a Vietnam parallel is even more pathetic than the first.
6. Ah, yes. The French. Oh, please. Could they perhaps be supporting Iraq because of the nuclear reactors they're selling there? Or the French oil company operating there, the biggest in Iraq? Could the French possibly have their own business interests in mind when they oppose this war? Ya think?

And of course, following another paragraph full of hate and ad hominem, he closes with the old saw that this is just an oil grab. News flash: we don't need Iraqi oil, and even if we did we could get it just by lifting the sanctions Saddam earned by invading his weakest neighbor. It's a nonsensical accusation on its face. It's high time to drop it.

Buzzword Bingo: MIT's way of having fun when the 'most technologically savvy politician' visited the Institute for Commencement.

Business management is supposed to be an analytical profession, not an artistic one. It's got much more in common with engineering disciplines than it does with the humanities.

In many Universities, it's a seperate college from liberal arts and engineering, although I suspect that may be to keep the b-school donations and donars from worrying about the English department squandering their donations.

The same would would be true for a highly technology oriented school in the U.S.

I'm sure that these folks would vehemently disagree with that analysis, and I believe their technolgy orientation and credentials are beyond question...

GPL-style educational material has problems similar to GPL-style software: textbook committees like some kind of authority to be responsible for authenticating the material's quality. Someone they can point to and sue if necessary. I'm not saying this is right, but it's the way it is right now.

The funny thing is, many students already take The Internet to be the ultimate authority on matters. When they do reports or projects or homeworks, they'll search their textbook for The Right Answer and if it's not there, they'll go to Google. So it may be that if we can make the OpenWikipediaCourseware site, then they will come whether or not it becomes the official text.

Context: I teach university math. I despise most textbooks but don't have something better to replace them. YET.

- Eric

http://www.orgnet.com/

http://www.anacubis.com/index.html

http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

http://www.smartmobs.com/index.html

http://smg.media.mit.edu/projects/SocialNetworkFra gments/

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_4/krebs/

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_camero n030703.asp

Did you ever think that some of us actually still believe in God?

Some of us have a newfound belief in a supreme being. Note that I greatly disapprove of "organized religion" because they came into existence as a way to control "the populace" -- being spiritual and being religious are to me two very different things.

Below is something I wrote recently which attempts to explain how I view "God". I attempt to use science and extrapolate known facts to explain a larger unknown. It's very primitive and can be improved upon but I think it'll click with a number of you.

Believing in a being more powerful than us, composed of us, is not "primitive." It is, in my mind at least, enlightened.

Think of us as cells. There are 10-100 trillion cells in the human body. Each cell, if it had consciousness, could be thinking, "I'm an individual. There is no Thing 1!"

And it wouldn't matter to me whether my cells believed in me or not, as long as they were acting to further my interests. As soon as one or more turn cancerous (and I notice), they're outta there.

I believe that humans are the "cells" of God. God is a quantum structure, created by quantum effects which our collective brains produce. One example follows, which is how I learned to believe in the possibility of telepathy a few years ago.

There were two articles I read, separated by about 2 weeks. The first said we had isolated a quantum effect in the laboratory, that of entanglement, and we had proven that information could be transmitted at a distance of up to 10 km (perhaps more, that's the greatest distance they tested) using entangled particles.

The second article said that the human brain works not only on chemical, biological, and electrical principles, but also on the quantum level.

So if the human brain can use quantum effects, and one quantum effect is transmission of information at a distance, and evolution tends to take advantage of existing phenomena -- then I believe that telepathy is possible.

There is also the anecdotal evidence; we hear about a mother knowing her child's in danger, or twins knowing what's happening to the other -- but we never hear about a father knowing. This is because during the 9 months of gestation, through exchange of molecules between the mother and embryo, entanglement is taking place. I would bet that the link between twins is stronger than the link between a child and mother, because the twins are in closer proximity during gestation.

Coming back to the issue, if our brains work on the quantum level, this is just one example. We have no idea what the limits are to quantum effects. We have created a simple 7 qubit quantum computer which can factor 15 into 3 and 5. Who's to say (speculation, I know) that there aren't greater effects that can be produced by billions of brains working in concert to create something greater than ourselves?

I think the rotation of the planet has a lot to do with the creation of God as well. We have night, which reduces the effectiveness of our vision, so we go into a dormant mode. We're rather vulnerable in this mode, however; if we all concentrate during sleep on "powering" God, then God will act to protect its cells while they are dormant. Perhaps God is strongest when we're asleep (but since half the world is sleeping while the other half is awake, God is powered full-time).

There are hundreds of religions, but the ones in which there is a single God are most dominant. This makes sense because resources are limited -- human brains can more easily power a single God than multiple, and that one God will be more powerful than the multiple Gods. Evolution of religion (sorry Kansas).

I know I lack direct evidence that there really is a God, but don't confuse a higher power with the actions of religious nuts. Or as my friend's bumper sticker reads, "God please save me from your Followers."

It will take forever for the 3d holograms to load over a broadband cable connection. Also, the psychic popup ads will be a real pain....

There is no doubt that holographic televisions is in our near future. But, with holographic video and autosterescopic lenticular screens, I think that the next major step is going to be something like a VR-Grid Browser, which runs in the 3D Window Manager.

As far as the psychic popup ads... I don't know anything about that....