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Maybe he hasn't "evolved" to the stage where he believes he needs to kill his problems yet. Give him some time :P

You've got a lot to learn. Killing your problems is only a human condition if you're a foolish liberal. Chimps are intensly territorial, and there have even been documented incidents of chimp communities going to war with one another, to the extent that the larger group will hunt down and kill every member of the smaller group. The behavior isn't confined to chimps. Some species of ants actually enslave others.

The queen of an established slavemaking colony will produce new queens who leave the colony to develop their own colony. The young slavemaking queen will wait outside of the colony she is leaving and follow a group of raiding slave makers into her new colony. As the worker slavemakers raid this colony for eggs, the queen takes advantage of the battle by using it to sneak into the colony. Once it finds the queen, it kills her and takes her place. The new queen mimics the old queen by consuming pheromones from her body and releasing them to the attending ants. This new queen having mated with a slavemaking male earlier begins to produce new slave makers. Other variations on these hostile takeovers include one South American species whose workers secrete a chemical on a host colony that causes the ants of the host colony to evacuate the nest. In their haste to leave, pupae will be left behind. These developing ants are then taken back to the slave maker nest. Another variation is in a European species that attacks ants that are significantly larger in size. The queen invades a nest by clinging on the rightful queen and slowly chokes her to death.

There are different ways of measuring, each of which have a different effect on the particle. When measuring an electron, you can orient your measuring device at any of three different perpendicular angles. The angle at which you measure affects the probability of the entangled particle registering at the (opposites of) that angle and the other two angles. See here.

An Explanation of Bell's Theorem

The nature-would-do-us-best thesis is a feelgood mythology for people ill suited for the present technological norms most humans practice.

It is only in 2007 that the world became more urban than rural, up until then "most" humans lived in a rural environment.

Look at actual population numbers and graphs, bonehead.

I'm not at all convinced giving middle-school students their own laptops does much good. Giving them to younger students seems less useful.

Look into the Maine Laptop Initiative, http://www.mainelearns.org/, for the sugar-coated version of how wonderful it has been.

A slightly irreverent flavor of our Governor's view of it is at http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2006/06/angus_king_a_brief_h.html.

Then again, some of the less-considered issues include student damage, as discussed at http://www.raymondmaine.org/jsms/Tech/Rules_Consequences.pdf, for example...

And for a fair list of issues that can cause such a program to fail or succeed less than hoped for, look at http://www.ncsu.edu/meridian/win2008/tenlessons/02.htm and read carefully. Much of this is actually common sense, which explains how it is overlooked so easily. Note also many of the recommendations here cost more money, so they easily get lost in the budget hearings, and outcomes suffer because of it.

You won't find much in the way of criticism of the MLTI. While I wanted to offer an alternative to using iBooks, this was never possible - the MLTI is a joint venture with Apple, the State of Maine, University of Maine, and even IBM (it leveraged the MSLN network). But serious criticism of the MLTI is discouraged, and is usually found in school system meeting minutes, the rare disagruntled blog, and private comments by teachers...

And I'm not sure that there is a lot of genuine data on success, though I am pointed to many sites that claim good to great results. Mostly by adminstrators so proude that they survived the NCLB testing and reporting.

I'm not convinced that laptops do that much for studnets, if you compare the effort and integration with making the same effort with more conventional tools, or even a part-time lab.

Of course, this all may be colored by my age, remembering school in the late 60s - early 70s, and my no longer being an Apple outlet. Hey, I'm human.

The introductory physics classes at Carnegie Mellon use VPython to run some simulations. It's pretty simple to use and intuitive. The textbook makes use of it too.

At my university, we had a student body president who, in order to draw attention to the farce that was our student government ran as "The Pirate Captain." So screw you ninja!

http://students.ncsu.edu/sgims/archive-85/p/the-pirate-captain-piavis-wjpiavis.html

In response to Card criticizing Rowling:
http://www.linearpublishing.com/RhinoStory.html

Card said in this article criticizing Rowling's originality:
"The difference between us is that I actually make enough money from Ender's Game to be content, without having to try to punish other people whose creativity might have been inspired by something I wrote."

Might I remind readers of Card's fundamental flaw in basic logic: the above cannot possibly be true, Card having written the essay with at least some form of castigation in mind for Rowling! This also reveals Card is not near the contentedness as he claims.

Is this not hypocrisy at it's most blatant and clear?

*****a great article on Card's breed of dogma is:"My favorite author, my worst interview" :
http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/03/card/index.html

Is being hate-filled a sure sign of low intelligence?
Does Card have a history of being hate-filled person? Here are some indicators. (How can his new jealousy of Rowling be any sort of surprise?):
http://atheism.about.com/b/2004/01/03/orson-scott-card-criminalize-homosexual-behavior.htm
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2005-05-15-1.html
http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html

Literary criticism of Card by respected and award-winning author John Kessel:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Demonizing.html
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

Card as could-be Hitler-apologist in 'Ender's Game':
Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman (20 Years Later) - Elaine Radford's analysis of the Ender and Hitler connection:
http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html

possibility that Card's Ender's Game itself was stolen from the 1984 film the Last Starfighter :
from digg.com, comment by Dysarthria on 06/16/2007:
http://digg.com/gaming_news/Orson_Scott_Card_Reveals_Plans_for_Video_Games_based_on_Ender_s_Game
"A few points:

1) The movie of Ender's Game (published in 1985) has already been done, it's called the Last Starfighter (1984). While not identical, both are about boys who save the planet by playing a video game. When I read this novel about 20 years ago, I felt like it was it was kind of a rip-off. Great story, just not that original.

2) I think the most boring game in the world would be an adaptation of a novel about a video game. Guys, come on. Enders game was a nice little unoriginal story published 20 years ago."

Also, remember this man criticizes Darwinismin.
The following link to another of Card's essays is from digg.com's insomniacal on 06/16/2007 :
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-01-08-1.html

In response to Card criticizing Rowling:
http://www.linearpublishing.com/RhinoStory.html

Card said in this article criticizing Rowling's originality:
"The difference between us is that I actually make enough money from Ender's Game to be content, without having to try to punish other people whose creativity might have been inspired by something I wrote."

Might I remind readers of Card's fundamental flaw in basic logic: the above cannot possibly be true, Card having written the essay with at least some form of castigation in mind for Rowling! This also reveals Card is not near the contentedness as he claims.

Is this not hypocrisy at it's most blatant and clear?

*****a great article on Card's breed of dogma is:"My favorite author, my worst interview" :
http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/03/card/index.html

Is being hate-filled a sure sign of low intelligence?
Does Card have a history of being hate-filled person? Here are some indicators. (How can his new jealousy of Rowling be any sort of surprise?):
http://atheism.about.com/b/2004/01/03/orson-scott-card-criminalize-homosexual-behavior.htm
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2005-05-15-1.html
http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html

Literary criticism of Card by respected and award-winning author John Kessel:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Demonizing.html
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

Card as could-be Hitler-apologist in 'Ender's Game':
Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman (20 Years Later) - Elaine Radford's analysis of the Ender and Hitler connection:
http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html

possibility that Card's Ender's Game itself was stolen from the 1984 film the Last Starfighter :
from digg.com, comment by Dysarthria on 06/16/2007:
http://digg.com/gaming_news/Orson_Scott_Card_Reveals_Plans_for_Video_Games_based_on_Ender_s_Game
"A few points:

1) The movie of Ender's Game (published in 1985) has already been done, it's called the Last Starfighter (1984). While not identical, both are about boys who save the planet by playing a video game. When I read this novel about 20 years ago, I felt like it was it was kind of a rip-off. Great story, just not that original.

2) I think the most boring game in the world would be an adaptation of a novel about a video game. Guys, come on. Enders game was a nice little unoriginal story published 20 years ago."

Also, remember this man criticizes Darwinismin.
The following link to another of Card's essays is from digg.com's insomniacal on 06/16/2007 :
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-01-08-1.html

the publishers get about 65% of the money, the store about 20% and the author about 10%

http://www.fis.ncsu.edu/ncsubookstores/images/textbook_dollar.gif

In my school, North Carolina State University, you can be kicked out for preparing abstracts/transcripts of lectures (sounds like notes to me, and since i'm not the judge they can pick what it means) to sell to other students.

http://www.ncsu.edu/stud_affairs/osc/AIpage/cheatingpolicy.html

What is "As many as 20 percent of the proteins are found in saliva are also found in blood[...]" supposed to mean?

About 20% of the time, people do NOT secrete blood group antigens into their saliva or other body fluids. Before DNA analysis it was common to look for blood type in crime scene investigations. 80% of people are "secretors", the other 20% are harder to catch.

see http://www.ncsu.edu/kenanfellows/2002/pligon/forensics/notes/BloodNotes.html

Here is a bunch of links about Computer Ethics from when I was researching about it. The google video link (last one on this list) is particularly interesting. Computer ethics is actually a university research topic! http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/cei_hp.htm http://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/ http://www.southernct.edu/organizations/rccs/resources/teaching/teaching_mono/moor/moor_definition.html http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-computer/ http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/ProfessionalEthics.html http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hackers.html http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=4279094 http://cyberethics.cbi.msstate.edu/ http://www.oekonux.org/texts/copykillsmusic.html http://www.progilibre.com/Open-Source-Alternative-ou-fausse-route-_a350.html http://www.osalt.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License http://creativecommons.org/ http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html http://www.itc.virginia.edu/policy/ethics.html http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/overview/Ten_Commanments_of_Computer_Ethics.htm http://www.acm.org/serving/se/code.htm http://www.ieee.org/portal/site http://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=-3088012854941915784&q=computer+ethics

Here is the old theoretical paperOne path to acoustic cloaking, New Journal of Physics, v. 9, 45, 2007. [pdf reprint] The Science Daily article is just a reprint of the Duke press release. Steven A. Cummer seems to provide PDF "reprints" of all his papers but the new one isn't in that list. Nor can it be found on David Smith' page, David Schurig's old Duke page, or his new NC State page, Sir John Pendry's page, or Anthony Starr's page.

Yes, it can run linux.

A professor at my university has has setup a cluster of PS3 last year. It runs Fedora Core 5 Linux ppc64.
http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/

In the NCSU bookstore all profits go to scholarships.

scroll to the way bottom of this page:
http://www.fis.ncsu.edu/ncsubookstores/textbooks.html#FAQ4
also note that 4.5% is on the pie chart for college store income, which here supposedly goes to the scholarship fund.

If you can put a supercomputer in your hand, it's not a supercomputer. A week ago, we had an article here on a guy who'd wired several PS3s together and called it a supercomputer.

Folks didn't agree with the supercomputer designation

even though he was getting flops that would clearly have been supercomputer speed just five or six years ago.

Hmmm.... The Scientific Method may be more accurately summarized as follows:

1. Observe
2. Develop Hypothesis
3. Make predictions based on hypothesis
4. Test predictions by experimentation

Remember: a Hypothesis is not the same as Theory

Not really. The PULSTAR is a whopping 1MW reactor. Although, it is kinda freaky that it sits right smack in the middle of campus and that must students don't even know it's there!

If you'd like to know more about State's NE program here is a link, http://www.ne.ncsu.edu/

Are you sure about that?

Either you're worryingly ignorant or are trolling, in which case I just bit.

http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/

8+1 nodes, 2 TFLOPS ...

CC.

Hmmm....

NCSU Computer Science Dept. has PS3 cluster topping out at 218Gflops using 8 PS3s. PS3's are not $500 each, so that quite a bit better in terms of bang fot the buck. It's even better than the reduced price PC from Newegg.

http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/

http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/coe. html

Hmmm....

NCSU Computer Science Dept. has PS3 cluster topping out at 218Gflops using 8 PS3s. PS3's are not $500 each, so that quite a bit better in terms of bang fot the buck. It's even better than the reduced price PC from Newegg.

http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/

http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/coe. html

There's also Underground housing,SIPS,AAC,Rastra,Engineered Wood,ICF,Steel framing,Rammed Earth,Solar Housing (active and passive)

The editors are asleep again. The summary says the discovery was made at University of North Carolina, which really surprised me because all of the good engineering is happening at North Carolina State University.

It might seem like a trivial slip but to those around here there is a pretty huge difference.

Oh yeah, and DUKE SUCKS.

From direct observation of the remains of dinosours science can demonstrate the youngest known remains predate the oldest know human remains by tens of millions of years.

Like dinosaur bones still containing soft tissue? It seems to me, if this had been the bone of a still living species, it would have been dated at no more than a few tens of thousands of years. So now we are doing dating by preconcieved ideas about species rather than observable evidence.

It has much to say on the human condition

What, exactly? That you are specially gifted, and better than anyone else. Your mistreatment is the evidence of your gifts. You are morally superior. Your turn will come, and then you may severely punish others, yet remain blameless. You are the hero?

PS3 Linux runs inside a hypervisor, and it is deliberately denied direct access to the GPU. Graphics are done via virtual framebuffer, with no 3D acceleration.

http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/doc/ LinuxKernelOverview.html
has a copy of the Sony docs spelling it out.

This makes the PS3 far less interesting as a Linux device, obviously.

The PS3 is not a PC. You might want to read this:

http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/doc/ LinuxKernelOverview.html

graphics call access to RSX is blocked by a hypervisor which has control over the kernel. I'm asking if Sony plans to create a hypervisor interface to RSX, as well as kernel patches and optimized GL support.

I thought so too, but no.

http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/doc/ LinuxKernelOverview.html

USB

PS3 equips industry standard USB EHCI host controller and its companion OHCI host controllers. Although most USB host controllers are PCI devices, PS3 USB host controller exists in the companion chip. The PCI probe routines of Linux are modified so that PS3 USB host controller can imitate PCI device. After initialization, all operational registers of USB host controllers are directly accessed by PPE, so no modification to original Linux USB host controller driver is needed. PS3 has internal high speed USB hub. The USB ports of PS3 front panel is connected to the hub, not to USB host controller directly. This PCI probe modification would be change later to get better device driver maintainer acceptance.

Most of it shouldn't even need to be converted. It should be in MARC Bibliographic format, which is generally fairly easy to transfer between databases.

This is true, as far as the bibliographic information goes. There are lots of open-source packages for working with MARC records, like pymarc (Python) or File_MARC (PHP). But the rest of the system is proprietary: holdings records, (which copies do you hold, in which locations, and where is that copy currently - loaned out, lost, on reserve, etc), circulation records, user records, acquisitions records. Sure, it's all just a database schema mapping exercise, if your vendor's license allows you to touch that data directly. Sadly, the past generation of libraries seems to have accepted vendor lock-in as a matter of course; a mistake that we're paying for now and which led directly to the development of Evergreen.

But really, let's be realistic. The major OPAC package is Voyager, which runs on top of Oracle, so runs on anything that runs Oracle. Libraries that don't have Voyager are pretty much all just wishing they could afford it (and the Oracle licenses).

Basically programmers gave up Lisp not because of syntax, but because they aren't eager to learn new ways of programming.

Don't discount the syntax issue. When your average programmer has been ingrained with years of Algol-like syntax, coming to Lisp is not easy. And yes, the overload of parenthesis can make the language harder to read, because there are fewer cues to pick up on. Consider that humans work by visually scanning and picking out noticable features: Preattentive Processing

Don't just take my word for it, as an admitted non-Lisper. Read what an industry insider thinks, and why he coded his own "if" macro: http://www.franz.com/~jkf/coding_standards.html

It has been noted that a program is written only once yet read many times. Thus program readability has to be a primary concern of the programmer. It's likely that the person reading your code will have far less knowledge of how you've solved the problem at hand than you have at the time you wrote the code. Thus you must strive to make your code readable by someone with little knowledge of the code.

I've found that the key to readability in Lisp functions is an obvious structure or framework to the code. With a glance you should be able to see where objects are bound, iteration is done and most importantly where conditional branching is done. The conditionals are the most important since this is where the program is deciding what to do next. Bugs often occur when the conditional can't handle all possible cases. If you're planning on extending the function you need a clear idea of the possible inputs it's willing to accept and what you can assert to be true for each branch of the conditional.

The Smithsonian Magazine has sort of a followup on Mary Schweitzer (more about her and her history than the actual fossils) from May 2006. It's probably not exactly what you're looking for, but it's a start. According to her university's information page, she hasn't published anything this year, yet. Or that page just isn't up to date.

A better link describing how they are used can be found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4468076. stm, and some photos can be seen at http://www4.ncsu.edu/~frey/apcespph.html>.

Very large equipment sizes are required to be effective on a power plant scale.

Or I can get one of these

I used to work in a fairly dangerous facility. I was only a computer programmer there, but had to attend the monthly safety meetings anyway. Everyone from janitors to the machine operators to the secrataries and the bosses knew that you don't simply turn off these machines to do maintence.

There are specific lock out/tag out procedures. The machine should have been off, verified it was off, locked from being turned back on and labled as not to be turned back on before he went anywhere near the danger zone.

Granted even after all of this safety training we usually had about a half dozen fatalities a year. That doesn't change the fact that it was operator error, not machine malfunction that did it.

But here is a interesting related story anyway: Killer Robot

Hey Eric,

Thanks for your informative reply. FWIW, there are bacteria wich excrete amonia, at least to my fumbling memory. And so google, et voilà (pardon my french) http://www.water.ncsu.edu/watershedss/info/nh3.htm l

Scrolling down to sources one can see this solution might just be a good way to get rid of a lot of sewage. Mind you i'm not taking into account the huge energy required to separated the ammonia from the sewage.

Regards,

J.

Spooky action at a distance.

In lit studies - only research, publication and education. This is reason 2 for my departure to Rhetoric & Digital Media [Ph.D. program site]. The program was actually created with help from grants from a bunch of Research Triangle Park companies (as well as SAS, not in RTP). There's more at the site, but our options are MUCH greater than "English majors." We're encouraged to take Computer Science courses, Design courses, etc.

We're talking about how to know where a sound's from, and the natural world is full of good solutions to crib from in localizing noise.

Owls are particularly well-adapted to enhance hearing. Among the tricks they use are their concave "facial disks" of feathers. They also have ears that are markedly asymmetrical -- one opening will be higher than the other, in addition to their having different shapes, so they can judge the direction a sound's coming in top-to-bottom even better.

And speaking of links between hearing and sight, Barn owls have been shown to interpret sounds spatially in much the same way our brains interpret sight. (For a few different reasons Barn owls' hearing has been studied more than basically any other non-human species. Probably other owls perceive sounds in a similar way.)

If I was trying to make a hearing aid I'd be working to imitate the way owls do things, not designing directional mikes around something as clunky as existing glasses, personally. Anyone who's ever seen a barn owl or a Harrier quartering above a field can tell how intense their perception really is...

Mentifex was the original author of Mind.Forth, Mind.html and the AI4U ISBN 0595654371 textbook of artificial intelligence.

Mind.Forth was a primitive artificial mind written in Win32Forth for robots and based on a Theory of Cognitivity for artificial intelligence. AI functionality was developed by Mentifex first in Mind.Forth and ported subsequently into the Mind.html Seed AI for propagation throughout the installed user base.

Mind.html was an artificial intelligence coded by Mentifex initially in JavaScript for Web migration and in Forth for robots, evolving towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and towards superintelligence beyond any human IQ.

The AI4U textbook was reviewed falsely and viciously but found its way into libraries at such prestigious universities as the University of Hong Kong, North Carolina State University and Texas A&M University.

Technological Singularity was launched almost single-handedly by Mentifex against all odds and in the face of desperate opposition from the FAQ-writing AI Establishment and the Singularity wannabes whose revenue stream was threatened by the free Open-Source AI software released into the Web Wilds by Mentifex.

funny i remember much smaller areas beating the crap out of that stat http://www.ncsu.edu/news/dailyclips/1002/103102.ht m - Just search for laptop

"These people kill themselves for a reason."

Well, if you ask the people who survive jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in the US, you'll find that most of them realize that their problems are entirely solvable about half way down. Then they hit the water at 80 MPH and cost their families tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills.

"It really disturbs me that, at the same time our population keeps rising on an exponential curve, we still cling to archaic notions of the "sacredness" of every life."

Our population isn't rising on an exponential curve. It's more like a logistic equation. Right now, we're at or just past 1/2 earth's carrying capacity, so population growth will decrease until it levels off around 10 billion.

... unfortunately it looks ugly.

It has however, have a standard spec: http://www.pc104.org/technology/PDF/PC104%20Spec%2 0v2_5.pdf
and has been around for quite some time (1992 by the looks of that document)

Random pictures for the uninitiated:

• http://www.ncsu.edu/stud_orgs/ar/images/pc104.jpg
• http://symmetry.com.au/symres/index_files/image012 .jpg
• http://eri.ca.sandia.gov/eri/pics/stack3.jpg

You should read this.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034

And this.

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

You should read this.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034

And this.

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

"Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality" by John Kessel
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm