Slashdot Mirror

Speaking as a biologist, there is a grain of truth to the 747 out of a junkyard statement. A widely held theory (especially among biologists who study microRNAs and ribozymes) is that life forms with DNA-based genetic elements originated from organisms with RNA-based genetic elements. The (circumstantial) evidence is that RNA (or RNA-like molecules) are central in many biological processes. For instance, the catalytic function of the ribosomes (protein-RNA complexes that assemble proteins from amino acids) is performed bot by protein, but by RNA. Many protein enzymes rely on ATP and NADH as cofactors to perform their normal function. Many viruses have an RNA genome.

So, fine, DNA-based life forms slowly evolved from RNA-based life forms. That much is, at least, imaginable. RNAs that could copy themselves started to use proteins and DNA to do some of the work, and added things on piece by piece until one of them hit on the combination of roles for DNA, RNA, and proteins that we see today.

But what about the first RNA-based life form -- some RNA that can make a copy from an RNA template. In a gneral soupd of organic chemicals, with some energy input, you can get nucleotides to form by chance, and even chains of them. I can easily imagine that somewhere you just happened to have one RNA strand that, quite luckily, can copy other RNAs. The real hitch is that two of them have to 'just happen' in the same place, at the same time, so that one can copy the other. This is asking for a lot, even for a simple form of 'life,' a RNA-based RNA polymerase.

To solve this problem, RNA-life apologists often postulate a form of 'Pre-RNA Life," which is a litte bit unsatisfying. It's a little bit like turtles all the way down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_d own, which is a bit surprising for scientists.

I believe a quote from a lecture by Dave Bartel http://web.wi.mit.edu/bartel/pub/ sums it up best:

"Based on what we know of pre-biotic chemistry, you could make a pretty good, I would say airtight even, case that life as we know it should not exist. Unfortunately, it does."

People concerned about trying to discover the origins of life, wherever they may have occured (given our reliance on liquid water and solution chemistry, frozen comets seem a little farfetched to me), would be well-served to focus their efforts on studying the conditions that lead to the creation of simple, self-replicating, organic chemicals. Understanding those conditions would certainly place constraints on the possible locations for the origin of life on earth, and provide a palatable answer to the 747 argument.

Hear, hear. The DMCA (which I absolutely abhor) has the "Safe Harbor" provision, which says that if you remove the content once the copyright holders notify you, you're in the clear. It is not YouTube's responsibility to police the videos. Neither is it AT&T's responsibility to police their IP network. Should your ISP be responsible for the things you post on Usenet?

What happens if I upload a picture that someone else copyrighted to Flickr? Did Flickr commit copyright infringement? NO! I DID!

What Viacom is trying to do is utterly ridiculous. The law is not in their favor. I think they're really just mad that they have to pony up a bunch of money to police YouTube. It probably seems easier to sue them to make them create a filtering system (after which Viacom would drop the case) rather than police it themselves, ask nicely, or get the law changed. Unfortunately for them, Google has plenty of money to lawyer with too.

Not to mention, with the amount of highly skilled people at their company they could probably even come up with some applications for automatic generation of depositions, interviews, and even legal briefs and motions. Kinda like those kids from MIT created an automatic paper generator a few years ago and actually got a couple of conference acceptances. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ How can you lawyer a company into submission that has, for all intents and purposes, an infinite number of lawyers at their disposal for dollars a day? They could completely bog down the legal system if they wanted to.

This almost sounds like an MIT hack, like when they stole Caltech's cannon many years ago... http://hacks.mit.edu/

Feld and his colleagues have been able to image live, untreated cells by using an optical technique based on interferometry: a laser beam passed through a sample is compared with a reference beam of similar wavelength that is not passed through the cell. For example, it takes longer for light to travel through a cell than through, say, water. Researchers can measure that time delay, or phase shift, and then can map the cell and its motions on the scale of nanometers.

Broadband light from a superluminescent diode (superluminescent diode (SLD) (EG&G, Gaithersburg, MD), output power 3 mW, center wavelength 845 nm, full width half-maximal bandwidth 22 nm...

The second harmonic of the cw Nd:YAG laser (CrytaLaser, special custom-built module; wavelength 532nm, 500 mW) is used as an illumination source for a typical inverted microscope (Axiovert 100, Carl Zeiss).

And if the French hadn't helped during the American revolutionary war, you would still be an English colony, so fuck off.

The Carnival Booth Attack can turn any passenger screening system against itself making it do the exact opposite of what it is supposed to do. The one requirement for the Carnival Booth Attack is that the system remain unchanged between the time it is tested and the time it is exploited. By routinely changing the system (this is at least the third time in six years) they can throw a wrench into any prep work that has been carried out to circumvent the system.

Using a different technology (no direct chip-neural interface), a monkey controlled a robotic arm over the Internet about seven years ago. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2000/monkeys-1206.ht ml The technology for direct neural interfaces is developing very rapidly. Background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-computer_interf ace

Related links: * LDX@MIT
* Physics of magnetically confined fusion [pdf]
* The main principles of magnetic fusion
* Magnetic fusion experiments at LANL
* High density magnetic fusion
* Has a good bit on magnetic confinement
* Can a magnetic field be used to contain plasma?
* International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor
* What's happening in fusion?
* Design of magnetic fields for fusion experiments [pdf]
* Wikipedia article on the topic
* Magnetized target fusion bibliography
* Plasma physics bibliography
* Databases for plasma physics

* Plasma physics laboratories
* List of plasma physicists
* Plasma on the internet

There is no Hydrogen infrastructure!
How much energy does it cost to generate the hydrogen?
How much carbon will be dumped into the atmosphere to create that hydrogen.
Hydrogen is highly flammable and explosive - Hindenburg anyone!
The R&D being spent on hydrogen fueled cars is a complete waste of $$ and time.
I drive a BMW and like it very much. I am so disappointed in BMW. They really missed an opporunity to demonstrate some leadership and failed.
We need investment in solar energy conversion and storage.
References: http://web.mit.edu/chemistry/dgn/www/research/e_co nversion.html

As of 21 October 2004, LINEAR had detected 211,849 new objects of which at least 1622 were near earth asteroids and 142 were comets. All of LINEAR's discoveries were made using robotic telescopes.

The gold standard is terrible, leads to recessions, and in general unnecessarily constrains the economy. Here's a hint: if you think money is generally created by printing more currency, you obviously don't know what the hell you're talking about. Even if you understand how money is created, you still may not. For a thorough debunking of the gold standard, read this: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/goldbug.html

For an introduction on how money is created, try this: http://ingrimayne.com/econ/Banking/Commodity2.html

This is really more of the same arbitrary justice that make software patents a bad idea in the first place

How so? MS paid Fraunhoffer for the patents (as did the rest of the tech industry) which were co-developed by Fraunhoffer, Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T. If Fraunhoffer was not the right authority to license these patents, Alcatel should have sued them for falsely representing themselves as such. That makes sense, and that's the nutshell version of what the Judge ruled.

Their prowess in court only strengthens their position as lord and master.

Your hatred of MS is blinding your objectivity, and even your desire to seek the truth. MS adopted patents as a defensive strategy (see this 1991 memo from Bill Gates http://www.bralyn.net/etext/literature/bill.gates/ challenges-strategy.txt. Even back then he seemed to understand the ramifications of software patents better than anyone else. Also note his referencing of this memo calling out the dangers of software patents: http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/against-software-pat ents.html. The honesty of his stance and clarity of vision is something his critics here should take note of.

What you have to understand is that M$ itself is a patent troll.

What you have to understand is that MS did not (and still does not) have the lobbying power to change the retarded patent system. Don't blame them for playing by the rules and making the best of the hand they are dealt with. The OSS movement has more power because the entire industry is rallying behind it - but MS has an obligation to its shareholders to not become a part of that movement - linux on the desktop threatens to erode MS's core business. It's really that simple..

Almost all of their software has come from predatory acquisitions but the market has dried up because people are no longer willing to risk their money in the business where M$ can crush them. You must have noticed that all of the innovative companies, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook and others are all using gnu/linux and avoiding the desktop in order to make money. M$ has built themselves a patent war-chest to assail those businesses, and has been instrumental in setting up business method and other stupid patents. Others have taken advantage of the situation, but that does not make M$ any less culpable.

You conveniently left Apple of the list of 'innovators'. Apple is extremely innovative, they do not avoid the desktop and they have a patent war-chest. Naturally it was inconvenient for you to mention them. Google has its share of patents as well. It's really rich of you to think that Google will ever donate any of its search-related patents to OSS. They will donate any patents that help erode MS's core business. They will hold on to any patents that help them maintain their core business (search). Are we to hate them for that? Absolutely not -- it's good strategy. But hating MS for the same behavior makes you a hypocrite.

No additional certainty has been added to the market that can benefit anyone. The case is far from settled but it has already cost both companies boatloads of money. Only the largest companies could weather that kind of storm and this will keep investors and small companies out of the business.

Finally some sense. And while this is true, think about a world without patents -- how will any small company prevent an MS/Apple/Google/IBM from using/reverse-engineering/copying/whatever thier work and eroding thier business? I'm not a fan of the current patent system but I don't think getting rid of software patents is the answer. The very purpose of patents is to protect the incentive to innovate. Whether the solution lies in better screening so that fewer 'obvious' things become

This reminds me... For anyone wanting to know how Kerberos works, there is a nice dialog covering this...
http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/dialogue.html

No doubt. And you can see this on NYTimes.com; I emailed them. How long do you think they will take to correct this?

Why would they correct something that they didn't get wrong? Just because a few slashdotters don't feel that the number cited is correct, you're going to tell them that they're wrong? How about doing three minutes of research to find out for yourself first? Let's hear it for "Citizen Journalism", where truthiness is more important than facts.

And for those of you playing at home, the relevent passage from the MIT study (press release here) (actual study here) [PDF warning] is this:
Based on growing markets in the United States for clean, base-load capacity, the panel thinks that with a combined public/private investment of about $800 million to $1 billion over a 15-year period, EGS technology could be deployed commercially on a timescale that would produce more than 100,000 MWe or 100 GWe of new capacity by 2050. This amount is approximately equivalent to the total R&D investment made in the past 30 years to EGS internationally, which is still less than the cost of a single, new-generation, clean-coal power plant.

But why do they make those life choices? When you walk into a room and you're the only girl and the rest are hormonal boys making stupid jokes, are you going to go back? I did, but that's because I've been a geek all my life but I have plenty of friends that did not. And if you notice, this book is targeting middle school girls. That the time where girls choose, in a real sense, whether to care about math. So, she wrote the book in a style for middle school girls and if they make it out of puberty with a little more math knowledge, they might make different choices. A great example of a more nuanced look at this (for older girls in computer science) is MIT's report on women enrolled in the EECS department from over 10 years ago: http://www.eecs.mit.edu/AY94-95/announcements/13.h tml The sad part is that a lot of the material in here is still true.

"Drinking from a firehose" was coined long before UHF.

MIT President ['71-'80] Jerome Weisner coined the phrase "getting an Education from MIT is like taking a drink from a Fire Hose."

binspam tag to this shameless self-promotion?

(disclaimer: just joking, I enjoy drinking from the Firehose Fountain.)

Gummi noses to match the Gummi fingers for faking out fingerprint scanners, anyone?

http://web.mit.edu/6.857/OldStuff/Fall03/ref/gummy -slides.pdf

This sort of thing could make quite a fun party trick, to go with the recently reported cast of Napoleon's lover's breasts:

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article280262 8.ece

Old Days: MIT Guide to Lockpicking New Times: Learn to Sculpt Faces

Just two sites with alternatives.

http://www.utoronto.ca/atrc/reference/tech/altmous e.html

http://web.mit.edu/atic/www/tools/mice.html

I hope the word "teledildonics" gets added to the SCIGEN database. I know I just added it to my system's dictionary.

One approach is to externally verify what you've voted for without being able to prove it. That should be enough, because when enough people raise their voice about being improperly counted, something is bound to happen. One of the approaches is called three ballot voting (pdf). It's a bit convoluted, but it seems to work.

"Negative vibes" from towers?

There's a growing number of people who do believe something like that. Probably the average /.er (if anyone's still reading these comments) will laugh very hard, and consider this to be even 'better' than the tinfoil hats, but anyway:

'Orgonite' is a mixture of resin and metal shavings - basically like fibreglass but with metal instead of glass - and often with quartz and other crystals added. It absorbs the negative form of the basic 'life force' energy which the Chinese call 'qi', Indians call 'prana', and Wilhelm Reich who researched it in the 1950s called 'orgone'; and converts it to the positive form, with a resulting improvement in the surrounding environment.

The most common orgonite device is a simple piece of this substance with a quartz crystal, moulded in a muffin pan, and it's known as a 'tower buster' because the most common use for them is converting the negative orgone energy produced by cell phone (and some other) towers - which produce a lot of it, and people who make and distribute orgonite 'gifts' (as they're often called) generally believe that it's this energy (also produced in large quantities by nuclear reactors and radioactive substances, among other things) that is the real problem. Of course, 'tower busters' can be used for other things; burying one of them next to the two apple trees in my garden made them produce a large yield of edible apples for the first time!

A more exotic orgonite device is the 'cloudbuster', which can do things like this.

It's the craziest thing ever, but for anyone with an open mind, orgonite is cheap and simple to make and experiment with. (several people also sell it pre-made; see the vendors list on Etheric Warriors)

More information: Orgonite Info Orgonise Africa Etheric Warriors Warrior Matrix

obGrammerNazi: http://web.mit.edu/writing/temp2/flaunt.htm

You mean those tinfoil hats that just happen to amplify certain frequencies in bands reserved for government use?

The iSmell so deserved to die the horrible death that it did. Like the ink jet printer profit model, they planned on selling the smell imaging device for cheap, and then totally gouging you on the scent cartridges.

iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer:

The iSmell or iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer was a computer peripheral device developed by DigiScents. The prototype connects to a personal computer via USB or serial port, and is designed to emit a smell when a user visits a certain web site or opens an email. The device contains a cartridge with 128 "primary odors," which can be mixed to replicate natural and manmade odors. DigiScents has indexed thousands of common odors, which can then be coded, digitized, and embedded into web pages or email.

Symbolic Olfactory Display:

3.8.2 Computer-controlled systems
3.8.1.1 Digiscents

Digiscents deserve much of the credit for bringing ideas about computer-controlled scent systems to the foreground, for which at least some of the credit goes to an enthusiastic article in Wired Magazine (Platt 1999). The reporter was presented and evidently impressed with a sequence of smell enhanced movie clips ('Scentracks TM'), ranging from the Wizard of Oz and a cedar forest or the smell of wood fire as the Wicked Witch cooks up a potion, to a banana-scented Donkey Kong and incensed Orient - a sequence designed and presented by thesis reader Marc Canter, who was working with Digiscents at the time.

The article gives extensive background into Digiscents' founders' backgrounds, and their business plan: to license their 'ScentRegistry TM', an index of smells, rather than to build hardware devices (such as their prototype iSmell TM) themselves. However, the article raises some questions.

Firstly, the article, as with much Digiscents' marketing material, talks of combining 100 to 200 "smell primaries" -- which, as the previous discussion on smell classification schemes, Lawless's analyses (1989) and Amoore's specific anosmia work question, may or may not exist. "Digiscents plans to begin taking beta-user orders by Christmas, and aims to make the gadgets generally available by Spring," states the article; as of April 2001, hardware devices were not available even to developers, despite extensive exhibiting by Digiscents of their device at trade fairs, the release of a software development kit, and a projected "developer's suite" at Digiscents head offices in Oakland, where developers could test their programs. (www.digiscents.com 2001)

Digiscents declared bankruptcy in April 2001; it is currently unclear what, if anything, will come of their work to date. However, some fundamental flaws in their strategy seem clear, in hindsight, at least.

Their fundamental problem, as with so many companies in the 'dot.com boom', was the absence of a product. Setting up a standard was all very well, but in the absence of any products to use it is was worth nothing. It was incumbent upon them to ensure that the first thousand or ten thousand or fifty thousand aromatrons were built, and they failed to do so. (Canter 2001)

They had what I believe are the right ideas about eventually giving users the opportunity to create their own smelltracks to existing DVDs and CDs, encouraging them to share their creations, and furthermore creating utilities so users could blend their own scents. (Canter 2001) Despite their marketing and other mistakes, Digiscents deserves credit for bringing the concept of computer-controlled scent output to the attention of the world.

-Don

Mode-S a very nifty datalink system that uniquely identified aircraft and can beam all sorts of useful traffic and navigation information. It was designed *WAY BACK* in 1975, only to be ignored by the FAA (the airlines the FAA works for didn't want pay for it). So they ignored it until a mid-air collision in 1986 woke up Congress, who mandated it in 1993. ADS-B (the Popular Mechanics article seems to be describing) AFAIK uses Mode-S to broadcast your aircraft's position using Mode-S, but the FAA have started shutting down Mode S transmitters 'because the safety benefits are not worth the cost'. Nice idea, but I hope it doesn't take another costly "wake up call".

http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/mode-s/today .html http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/air_traffic/tis.html http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/newsitems/2005/051020 mode.html http://www.avionicswest.com/myviewpoint/modestrans ponder.htm

Lots of technogibberish here: Hey, Wiley! When are you writing "Air Traffic Control for Dummies"?

It has finally happened! The time has come to plug this old graphic:

http://donkeykong.mit.edu/wiki/images/0/09/Ipwned. png (NSFW for poorly drawn penis)

(Parent AC here)

First, let me qualify my original stance with a few, maybe important, details about me. I'm 22, I just graduated from MIT with a BS in EECS and I'm continuing at MIT next year and will have my Master's in EECS by next June.

So there are a few things I agree with and a few things I disagree with in your arguments. For the most part, it is true that a lot of children freeze up if they can't just "Google the answer". Furthermore, state mandated cirriculums are horrible because they really do just support "memorizing the answers". My sister barely graduated high school and from an academic point of view, she shouldn't have. According to the guidelines for graduation from my HS, she should have repeated her senior year but they pushed her along. I agree, it's wrong, but it's politics. Letting children hang around for extra years costs extra resources (time, money and most importantly space). If schools just kept everyone around that they were supposed to, then they would just be too overcrowded. Is it wrong? Yes. Did I get straight A's through high school? Of course. Did I have to try hard to get it? I don't think so. But that was high school. College is a different beast.

However, I feel that those fortunate ones to go off to accredited institutions do better themselves. The ones who just scrape by, like my sister, usually don't go to college and they just accept meager jobs requiring little to no technical work (she ended up in real estate). So I believe that your statements, though largely true, are only most applicable to high school students.

I also played very competitive ice hockey for 14 years so I don't even want to address the whole sports argument. I don't know which age group you're referring to so I can't comment. You could be talking about little kids, high school students or college aged. If it's little children, then of course they should give everyone a chance to play. There's no harm in it. The kid gets to run around, work up a sweat and have a little social and physical activity. The real concern there is the parents. Parents all seem to prematurely think their kid is going to be the next sports star. Don't blame the kids, blame the parents there. If it's high school students, then the argument is that you're keeping them busy and off the streets causing trouble and doing drugs. Once again, it's a parental affair. The kid probably doesn't think they'll make the NBA or MLB but they're doing it for fun (at least I hope they are). If it's college aged, then you must be talking about IM sports. In that case, the person is playing against their friends in other dorms and there is absolutely no problem in that. The benefit there is to get an escape from constant workloads that you have to undertake. It's a nice social time where you can exercise your body (instead of your mind). Once again, this is coming from someone who played really competitvely.

And about professors, yea a lot of the really accomplished ones suck badly. I will most certainly agree that a smart man doesn't necessarily make a good teacher (and in a lot of cases they're arrogant too). But I do believe that universities give students the opportunity to challenge themselves and think outside of the box. It's up to the student to take the initiative. In January I had the opportunity to experience what it was like to write parallelized code for the Cell processor in PS3s. The course was open ended and we proposed the projects. My team's project (the winning one ironically) can be seen here. Back in January, the PS3 was still extremely new, and selling for $1200 on ebay so the work we all did was hardly cookie-cutter and the skills we learned are ones that even top folks in industry still fail to understand (as the technology is still new). Can every college students claim to have engaged themselves this way? Of course not. Can every MIT student even claim this? Definitely

(Parent AC here)

First, let me qualify my original stance with a few, maybe important, details about me. I'm 22, I just graduated from MIT with a BS in EECS and I'm continuing at MIT next year and will have my Master's in EECS by next June.

So there are a few things I agree with and a few things I disagree with in your arguments. For the most part, it is true that a lot of children freeze up if they can't just "Google the answer". Furthermore, state mandated cirriculums are horrible because they really do just support "memorizing the answers". My sister barely graduated high school and from an academic point of view, she shouldn't have. According to the guidelines for graduation from my HS, she should have repeated her senior year but they pushed her along. I agree, it's wrong, but it's politics. Letting children hang around for extra years costs extra resources (time, money and most importantly space). If schools just kept everyone around that they were supposed to, then they would just be too overcrowded. Is it wrong? Yes. Did I get straight A's through high school? Of course. Did I have to try hard to get it? I don't think so. But that was high school. College is a different beast.

However, I feel that those fortunate ones to go off to accredited institutions do better themselves. The ones who just scrape by, like my sister, usually don't go to college and they just accept meager jobs requiring little to no technical work (she ended up in real estate). So I believe that your statements, though largely true, are only most applicable to high school students.

I also played very competitive ice hockey for 14 years so I don't even want to address the whole sports argument. I don't know which age group you're referring to so I can't comment. You could be talking about little kids, high school students or college aged. If it's little children, then of course they should give everyone a chance to play. There's no harm in it. The kid gets to run around, work up a sweat and have a little social and physical activity. The real concern there is the parents. Parents all seem to prematurely think their kid is going to be the next sports star. Don't blame the kids, blame the parents there. If it's high school students, then the argument is that you're keeping them busy and off the streets causing trouble and doing drugs. Once again, it's a parental affair. The kid probably doesn't think they'll make the NBA or MLB but they're doing it for fun (at least I hope they are). If it's college aged, then you must be talking about IM sports. In that case, the person is playing against their friends in other dorms and there is absolutely no problem in that. The benefit there is to get an escape from constant workloads that you have to undertake. It's a nice social time where you can exercise your body (instead of your mind). Once again, this is coming from someone who played really competitvely.

And about professors, yea a lot of the really accomplished ones suck badly. I will most certainly agree that a smart man doesn't necessarily make a good teacher (and in a lot of cases they're arrogant too). But I do believe that universities give students the opportunity to challenge themselves and think outside of the box. It's up to the student to take the initiative. In January I had the opportunity to experience what it was like to write parallelized code for the Cell processor in PS3s. The course was open ended and we proposed the projects. My team's project (the winning one ironically) can be seen here. Back in January, the PS3 was still extremely new, and selling for $1200 on ebay so the work we all did was hardly cookie-cutter and the skills we learned are ones that even top folks in industry still fail to understand (as the technology is still new). Can every college students claim to have engaged themselves this way? Of course not. Can every MIT student even claim this? Definitely

Keep that laptop off your lap. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,118884-page,1/ar ticle.html Laptops may be the perfect gift for those id10t users who should have a little chlorine thrown in their gene pool. However until they fix the Darwin Award Winner generation issue, I think the popularity of laptops will be... muted. The other issue is the ergonomic nightmare that is the modern laptop. http://web.mit.edu/atic/www/disabilities/rsi/lapto pergo.html Add-on devices for ergonomics defeat the portability purpose of laptops, so with increased laptop use there will be increased RSI and soon the laptop surge will lead to the "Coming Dominance of the Desktop PC" articles. That's my take on this article.

In other words, you have no problem jumping to unwarranted conclusions just because it's an artificial sweetener.

No, no need for 'other words'. The words I used worked just fine. I do not have to explain my beliefs, especially when I put a disclaimer in the very sentence you quoted. I did not state that 'sucralose is bad for you because it's an artificial sweetner', which is what you said. I said that, in my belief, which is not yet backed up by data, it is probably bad for you.

Your belief is the conclusion. It's unsupported by data, so unless you have compelling reasons for it (other than 'it's artificial') it's unwarranted. I was just putting "your words" in perspective: you believe something that may or may not be true, and you're willing to declare it in a public forum. The question is, who gives a fuck?

Do you have citable statistical data for every single belief you hold?

Of course not, but then I'm not the one declaring "xyz is bad for you" You made a statement of fact which is probably not true based on the evidence. You might as well jump up on a soapbox and yell "I believe xyz (but I may be lying)!"

Oh my God you just gave me the best laugh I've had in years. Like there's no objective evidence that it isn't the best idea in the world to coat your lungs in radioactive tar. Like there's no objective evidence that drinking to excess is a bad idea. Oh, but no one does either of those things, because they know they're unhealthy, right? You really are a funny one.

Okay, you got me on that one. Glad you got a laugh out of it. Yes, people do dangerous things because they enjoy them, or because they're addicted. They also freak out at the slightest suggestion that there's something dangerous in their food. How many people stopped cooking with aluminum pans when researchers discovered a tentative link between aluminum and Alzheimer's? The problem is, they're just as likely to freak out from baseless scaremongering as from actual study results.

Really? What studies found aspartame to be safe? The ones conducted by the manufacturers of aspartame or the one presided over by the head of the FDA who later went to work for the manufacturers of aspartame? The ones where humans were given aspartame in slow-dissolving caplets?

I don't know if it's the one with caplets, but this MIT study looks like a good independent one. I don't trust the FDA, they are definitely in the pocket of industry, but even with flawed studies on the 'pro' side, nobody has come up with anything substantial on the 'con' side. The closest is the cancer-link study mentioned here. Anyway it's far more likely that actual dangers of Aspartame will be revealed by more research than by ranting netloons. Maybe Aspartame is bad for you. You are not everybody.

Yes, because medical researchers didn't tell us saccharine was safe. They didn't tell us fenphen was safe. They didn't tell us that the IUD was safe. They didn't tell us that trichloroethylene was safe. They didn't tell us that thalidomide was safe. Oh, wait...

And when people reported problems with these products, who found the cause? That's right, medical researchers. You see, science is like a sieve. It won't catch everything the first time through, but the more times you apply it, the more refined the knowledge you get out of it. If you think Aspartame or HFCS are unhealthy, that's perfectly okay. Let's see the evidence, please.

The difference is that I don't actually care if you believe me... I don't hold my beliefs because I want others to blindly follow them

Yet you have no problem stating them as fact. You said,

I've seen this "Jesus Christ Lizard" (Google's first hit) on TV. It seems like it runs on water for only a short distance before dropping to swim, and it's using its big webbed feet to stay up rather than surface tension. It runs on the water to escape being eaten by critters on land, so it's betting the water is safer than the land.

I'm waiting for a R/C robostrider.

It's not revisionist. The term "hacker" has a history going back more than 50 years at MIT. Although its use has changed over the years, it definitely carried a connotation of using skill, imagination, and wits.

...can be found here:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/trauma-0715.htm l

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/biosuit2-enlarg ed.jpg

Yes, you can see the shape of her butt. I predict this will get near-unanimous approval.

http://web.mit.edu/aeroastro/www/people/dnewman/bi o.html
What more could a nerd ask for. I mean really, she designs
space suits.

Exclusive pictures.

Turns out, it only works if you wear it in a robotic cat.

It is 2D only because the robot cannot move from side to side. It can only move forwards and backwards across a terrain that has varying heights. This type of thing is typical when researching locomotion. You either have the robot mounted on a treadmill, or on a central pivot so that it cannot fall over sideways.

I don't know whether we've got it dialled in quite right, or whether we ever will. But it's way better than random, and that's good enough to take you anywhere, given sufficient time. Crudely speaking, geek paternalism is responsible for this.

Fair enough. I really hadn't meant to push so hard on the "we're doing it wrong" thing as to say "a bit of criticism won't hurt us". I just felt like there were a lot of overly defensive voices in the messages on this thread I'd sampled, and I wanted to nudge the discussion back toward the middle. I welcome ideas in any form, whether critical or not, as long as one can learn from them. And I'm always fascinated by people who have any theory at all of what computers can be other than what they are.

For what it's worth, my main personal pet peave about where we've gone is static type checking. It's certainly interesting, but the notion that all of CS seems to have focused so intensely on it, sometimes starving dynamic languages of attention seems to me an artifact of the order in which history occurred. It seems to me it could just as well have gone another way. Is one definitely better than another? Arguably not. But I think it's perceived that way sometimes by people who take headcounts on who uses what. Another accident of present reality that bugs me a lot is the passion for "int" types rather than "integer" and the strange choice of "float" over "rational" or "bcd". And the lack of the "symbol" type as a builtin in most major languages, forcing people to express ideas in terms of numbers that are not numbers--and not even "good" numbers at that, but fake numbers like ints and floats. I think these serve CS folks pretty well, but they are all serious barriers to ordinary people using computers because they are not "natural concepts" and so a barrier to wider audiences. They make people have to think like computers to gain entry, instead of forcing computers to be our servants and think like people. For what that's worth. Most of these are not about forgetting math, and in fact the int/float thing is about restoring proper math in place of fake math. And yes, I know there are good computational reasons for all of these things. But I've heard that for generations of computers now. At what point will computers be fast enough that we can have some fun with them and not have to always let O(1) issues dictate expressional policy...?

When Rod Brooks came along with his Subsumption Architecture, the establishment thought he was a crackpot. But his ideas were novel and exciting, and they took us to new ground. Last I heard, he was director of the MIT AI Lab.

Rod just stepped own as head of the lab in the last few days, actually. He's indeed a pioneer ... plus I enjoy seeing him show up on TV from time to time. :)

It's also important to take into consideration how the capacitors behave in differing operating conditions. Assuming the capacitor will be used in a car, will it work at -20 degrees? What aobut 130 degrees? Can it handle road vibrations? Will it still work after 10 years of abuse?

It's also important to take into consideration how the capacitors behave in differing operating conditions. Assuming the capacitor will be used in a car, will it work at -20 degrees? What aobut 130 degrees? Can it handle road vibrations? Will it still work after 10 years of abuse?

Unless you want to take the course at some unknown school like MIT which provides all the course material on the internet for free.

You should get rid of it anyway. http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/