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Hopcroft, J.E. & Ullman, J.D. (1979). Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation. Addison-Wesley.
Hopcroft, J.E. & Ullman, J.D. (1974). The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms. Addison-Wesley.
Conway, J.H. (1971). Regular Algebra and Finite Machines. Chapman and Hall.
Sudkamp, T.A. (1988). Languages and Machines. Addison-Wesley.

Most of the computer "scientists" I've met can't really use any system well, can't program, haven't developed an algorithm, and are not scientists by definition.

If you go to this page you will get a new picture every time you hit the refresh button.

The process is a scanning one, like an AFM, but the probe exites the atoms underneath it to make light. The light they make has spectral lines, so you get more than just a picture. With a picture, you get the amplitude and the color of a spot. Here you also get that, but there is more information in the "color", so you can tell what type of molecule you are next to.

I work at the lab where these guys did this. They gave a fascinating lecture on it a few weeks ago, here's their website complete with pictures.

Huh? The primary engineers in the early days were Germans, including former Nazis, many of whom built rockets for V-2 missle program. After the war just as many went to Russia as came here. They went to any country that had the resources to pursue a space program.

And there is no way you are going to tell me the space program was anything but politically motivated. It was a platform for Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to show up the Russians. Johnson particularly used it to keep the nations mind off Vietnam.

If anything, the lackluster movement of our space program can be attributed to a LACK of political motivation.

Failure is part of the process. The success of Pioneer's 3-11 came as a result of the failures of pioneer 0-2. The ones where they didn't "get it right"

It's also not like those engineers in the good old days never killed anybody. We've had three major disasters exploring space in 67, 86, and 03. All about 15 years apart or so. Not bad considering this is easily the toughest and most dangerous job in the world.

Sorry, but the idea that the deccan traps were caused by a metorite impact are daft to say the least.

Firstly, there is the geochemical evidence:

Then there are the dates - this started 3.5 million years before the Mexico impact.

And then you have the minor fact that metorite impacts and flood basalt events do not correlate. This is another case of astronomers forgetting that this science called 'geology' exists...

Isaac Asimov, The Last Question

Well, lucky for us a sci-fi writer, in this case Asimov, already has an idea of how this will be solved. One of my favorite short stories: The Last Question ("for educational use") talks about entropy and the end of the universe as a whimper, with a great ending.

Jason

How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?

(With apologies to Asimov.)

Hey cool! You mean, like Robin Hood? Yeah man, I can see that. He like robbed from the rich to give to the poor!

Robin Hood was an outlaw as well, found guilty by the Evil Sherrif of committing terrible crimes and stealing for poor defenceless rich people.

Despite some evidence that suggests he had a taste for violence, and in fact helped rich people as well, of course everybody loves Robin, don't they.

Anyway, back to the point, Bill made a lot of money out of the markets precisely by so effectively removing that freedom. He should be punished like anybody else who attempts to play the markets, but he hasn't been. Giving away lots of money to charity doesn't make it OK by the way, if that were the case all drug dealers would have to do to get off the books would be to give away some of their personal fortune to good causes.

Considering he basically did steal that money and even got found guilty of it, I don't see why his charitable preferences should override mine. He gave $10 billion to India to fight aids yes? He also gave a lot more than that to fight Linux in the very same country, not a good cause I'd have chosen to donate to (and I do donate to charity by the way).

$24 Billion is more than most developed countries in the world will put into that sort of work in our lifetimes.

Since when? Governments give huge amounts of money away as part of aid initiatives and so on. Britain still pays out large sums of money to help prop up parts of Africa, as well as supporting many charities through grants. Other governments do similar things. Often it has strings attached of course - Bill can give away all his money and see it disappear down the drains through long term corruption and mismanagement but governments who represent the people need to be a bit more careful, which is why such organisations often require governmental reforms to go along with aid.

Oh and finally, don't forget that if him or his company had paid income tax, then a portion of that money would have gone towards such aid, and (at least in theory) the people would have chosen where the aid went or at least had some influence over it.

>In Dutch, "ent" means graft.

Yes; that's the more likely association/source for the word "ent" as used by Tolkien. There's a Middle English cognate, "imp" which means both a mischievous sprite and a graft. There's an otherworldly tree described as an "ympe" tree in the Middle English poem Sir Orfeo, which Tolkien knew very well since he translated and taught it.

The 'ettin" used in Beowulf is transformed to "etayn" in Middle English and refers to giants.

Religion is religion. Just because you don't like someone's beliefs doesn't give you the right to tell them that what they believe in isn't as valid as your imaginary friend (or lack thereof).

Sorry charlie, but there is such a thing as objective truth, you know--it just requires the scientific method to get at it.

Now morality OTOH, that's a whole different kettle of fish.

It is entirely possible that our eyes require very similar forms of calibration, but that we have not even theorized the existence(sp?) of such a problem b/c we don't spend nearly as much time watching lossily encoded images as we spend listening to lossily encoded sounds.

Interestingly, consider this (lifted from here but you can find it mentioned in many places via Google):

Another example of the brain coming up with better algorithms for doing things, thus showing that many basic brain functions are not hard-wired, involves the use of prism lenses. In an experiment, people are made to wear, for long periods of time, lenses that cause their field of vision to be turned upside down. After a while, the person reports that things have become right side up again. Then, taking off the glasses makes everything upside down. It seems that even this basic fact of how we perceive what is around us is not hard-wired into the brain. Maybe we see right side up because it simplifies the calculations that we need to make in order to perform everyday tasks. Seeing upside down is actually the default, in a certain sense, because the lenses in our eyes turn the received light into an upside down image on our retina. It is the brain that causes the perceived objects to be right side up. The evidence that even this is not hard-wired into the brain is rather interesting, as it indicates that everyone's brain independently and without our conscious knowledge comes to the decision that seeing right side up is the most efficient way to allow performance of daily tasks.

Fun eh? Makes you think. Possibly calibration of the ears works in a similar way. Presumably if the 'lossy' audio ever became a problem (this is assuming you don't speak to anyone, or make/hear any natural noise for most of the day, of course) then you'd just listen to 'normal' sounds. That's what calibration is, after all.

By the way, out of interest, here's another interesting write-up about the experiment being done in Japan. I'm curious to see it was done 'recently', as I remember this experiment being mentioned on TV about 15-20 years ago*.

Tim

* Johnny Ball's 'Think of a Number' for you UK geeks :)

Totally. The whole subnet is thrashed, its 10Mbit uplink is maxed out The whole package is 116MB, I'm thinking someone is going to get a pound^H^H^H^H^H talking to.

I just went down to the lab and I can't tell exactly from looking at it but I'm pretty sure that server is no better than a Pentium MMX.

Report that elderly people are 50% more likely to commit suicide when they own a gun. - this one from a suicide-prevention research project at a university. Not involved in the gun / anti gun debate.

Report showing a positive correlation between handgun ownership and prevalence of suicide, homicide, and injuries / deaths of children. This one by Harvard School of Public Health, Injury Control Research Center .

The list goes on... but the data is pretty clear:

1.You are more likely to die in an auto accident, statistically, if you have a little red Italian sports car parked in your garage.

2. You are more likely to die earlier, statistically, if you chain-smoke cigarettes.

3. You are more likely to die, kill someone else, or kill yourself, statistically, if you own a gun;

and most importantly,

4. I am probably subsidizing all that risky gun-owning, sports-car driving, chain smoking activity through higher taxes, higher insurance premiums, etc., to the tune of 35% of my gross income. And I'm not very happy about it.

Speech recognition is actually pretty good today. Similar words can be mixed up, but a good probabilistic language model can cull out most errors. The really hard probel is natural language understanding and generation. Pro-nouns and tenses are particularly confusing, and subtle turns of phrase are often missed. Right now, the best dialogue system is being developed at the University of Rochester Computer Science Department. Currently, TRIPS works only on some toy domains, but it's being ported to real world problem, and yes, I think by 2012, there will be real spoken interaction with computers.

As an aside, that is a _really_ cool story. Definitely read it.

-Cruz

I personally have this set to my background at work. Gets you weird looks from passerby :)

I'm sure the fine folks at SensAble are disappointed that the article doesn't mention them or indicate that PHANTOM is an abbreviation (though I can't find the expansion at the moment). I seem to remember it being pHANTOM back in '97.

Back in my college days, I got to play with a PHANTOM at URCS. It's an arm that can exert translational forces at the tip. They're available with a thimble or a stylus on the end. We had the thimble style, which had a weird harness joint that always kept the finger tip at the "end" of the arm regardless of rotation. You strapped in the tip of your finger in not entirely unlike strapping a foot into a bike pedal.

From a programming standpoint, you could query it for position and velocity, then send back a force vector. Multiplying the velocity vector by a value between 0 and -1 gave the impression of moving through peanut butter or motor oil or water. I tried using a positive multiplier, but that got dangerous very quickly. You were supposed to be careful about hitting the edges of the range of motion.

You could simulate surfaces by monitoring the position for crossing the surface and returning a force vector orthogonal to the surface. At the time, really hard surfaces didn't work. You could get many gradations of sponginess, but past a certain point, it wouldn't get any more solid. Surface texture (bumpy vs. smooth) and shape were easy to feel, though.

One of the really, really slick things my advisor commissioned was to put two PHANTOMS facing each other so you could put your thumb in one and index finger in the other. Then you strapped on a VR headset with a magnetic head tracker. You could see a sphere each for the thumb and finger tips. There were boxes floating around that you could grab, throw, and bounce off of each other and the "walls". Although it was a zero-gravity environment, the "weight" of the blocks between the fingers was very convincing, as were the collisions. You could bounch a block basketball style, and it felt about right. The head tracking contributed greatly to overcoming the proprioception disconnect.

I'm sure the fine folks at SensAble are disappointed that the article doesn't mention them or indicate that PHANTOM is an abbreviation (though I can't find the expansion at the moment). I seem to remember it being pHANTOM back in '97.

Back in my college days, I got to play with a PHANTOM at URCS. It's an arm that can exert translational forces at the tip. They're available with a thimble or a stylus on the end. We had the thimble style, which had a weird harness joint that always kept the finger tip at the "end" of the arm regardless of rotation. You strapped in the tip of your finger in not entirely unlike strapping a foot into a bike pedal.

From a programming standpoint, you could query it for position and velocity, then send back a force vector. Multiplying the velocity vector by a value between 0 and -1 gave the impression of moving through peanut butter or motor oil or water. I tried using a positive multiplier, but that got dangerous very quickly. You were supposed to be careful about hitting the edges of the range of motion.

You could simulate surfaces by monitoring the position for crossing the surface and returning a force vector orthogonal to the surface. At the time, really hard surfaces didn't work. You could get many gradations of sponginess, but past a certain point, it wouldn't get any more solid. Surface texture (bumpy vs. smooth) and shape were easy to feel, though.

One of the really, really slick things my advisor commissioned was to put two PHANTOMS facing each other so you could put your thumb in one and index finger in the other. Then you strapped on a VR headset with a magnetic head tracker. You could see a sphere each for the thumb and finger tips. There were boxes floating around that you could grab, throw, and bounce off of each other and the "walls". Although it was a zero-gravity environment, the "weight" of the blocks between the fingers was very convincing, as were the collisions. You could bounch a block basketball style, and it felt about right. The head tracking contributed greatly to overcoming the proprioception disconnect.

Here's a direct link to the professor's (A. Murat Tekalp) page of published papers at the U. of Rochester. Paper 6 is by the same four authors as the current paper (which he hasn't posted on his site yet).

1. They have to actually enforce it.

2. They have to attach scary penalties to it.

I don't disobey very many laws, if any (far be it from me to admit to illegal activities in a public forum). However, when I do, it is because they are laws that any thinking person knows are either nonsense or evil.

We used to have some really wonderful laws in this country like The Fugitive Slave Act or the Executive order which required the Internment of Japanese Americans. These laws were evil. People who didn't help enforce them and actively disobeyed them were brave and noble.

You seem to have substituted a sense of right and wrong for blind State-worship.

Is this guy supposed to be telling us something we don't already know?

We all know damn well that no company in any industry is concerned about their consumers/users and the public good first. Companies are only concerned with the bottom line; those that aren't go out of business. A companies first goal is to make money, and the public good, consumers, users, the environment, anything, is only secondary and considered in regard to how it affects the bottom line.

This isn't something companies should necessarily be chastized for. Their first obligation by the law is to maximize profit for their shareholders while obeying the law. But some companies use illegal, immoral, or unethical means.

What this means is that you can't trust anything a company tells you. A company's position on social issues is never consistent and will always vary, depending on what will benefit that company the most. In "The Future of Ideas," Lessig noted that AT&T's position on whether or not cable lines should be open changed when from "open access" to "no way" when it became a large owner of them.

That said, some industries have engaged in reprehensable behavior (biotech, software, etc), while others have no (referring here to non-technological industries, such as clothes industry).

In particular, the biotech industry has:

(1) Biopirated (stolen) treatments and cures for diseases from indigenous peoples around the world, patented those ideas, then turned around and charged indigenous peoples for the cures they themselves created.

(2) (In conjunction with the software industry) extended patent rights and duration beyond all reasonable grounds. Companies can patent things for which they do not even know what they do. They can also receive patents on very basic and primitive things which are no-where near leading to a drug, but which will be needed to be used in the research necessary to product a drug (upstream patents). Upstream patents should be retroactively eliminated (retroactive elimination is OK in this case because the gov't had no right to create them in the first place). Only downstream patents on a specific drug should be allowed; minor modifications to the drug should not result in a new patent. The standard for obtaining a patent needs to be dramatically raised. Every minor and trivial adaptation of an existing drug does not deserve a patent. Furthermore, patents on downstream drug products should not apply to basic research. Universities, governments, and companies should be able to obtain the drug in question for research purposes at the cost of production, without licensing hindrances.

(3) Denied people much-needed cures/treatments to further their bottom line. Companies have prevented patients from being treated so that they can get royalties on drugs. Lets save some scorn for the Universities too, which are recently becoming nothing more than corporations who also teach and train. My own University of Rochester was granted a patent to cox-2 inhibitors, which are used in Celebrex's anti-arthritis drug. The University received a patent recently (after Celebrex created the drug) and then filed lawsuite against Celebrex, potentially stopping those suffering from arthritis from getting the drug. While my respect is due to those at the UOR who researched cox-2, that research was done using public grants (which come out of the taxpayers pocket) and using the tuitions of students. It should be put in the public domain.

(4) Denying people in third world countries cures. Rather than allowing companies in third-world countries to make generic drugs and sell them cheaply (saving millions of people's lives), drug companies have tried to prevent such. Blinded by their greed, they have failed to realize that you can't squeeze water from a rock. Perhaps drug companies would be happy if people in the third world started selling them their body parts in exchange for drugs.

(5) Used propaganda to create the illusion that certain illnesses exist which in fact don't, boosting the sales of marginally useful drugs.

(6) Spent far far more money on lawyers, public relations, lobbying, and paying greedy executives than on actually doing research to find cures (not that any company is researching cures anyways).

I could go on and on.

The point is this patent non-sense has to stop. Its a problem everywhere, but most importantly in the biotech industry where its a problem that get people killed by preventing people from being treated, or preventing cures from being researched. As harmful as copyrights are given the fact that their scope is overly broad and their duration overly long, patents are an even bigger problem for the same excesses.

Initial innovation needs to be followed by subsequent innovation, sequential innovation; patents, in their current state, prevent this. I have a simple solution for this:

(1) Reduce the duration of patents. 10 years instead of 20.

(2) Force patent-owners to license patented drugs to those who wish to incorporate them into a product to be sold. A forced license of 50% of the profit from the venture going to the licenser is fine.

(3) Force patent-owners to license patent drugs to anyone for research purposes under a minimally restrictive license. The drug should be provided (for research purposes) at the cost of production, and the only limitation to the license to use it is that the drug itself cannot be sold.

(4) Prevent drug companies from strategic licensing. A company sitting on a patent while research is done based off of that patent and mentioning nothing, then when a product is made, suing for royalties, should be prohibited. (I'm referring here to the same thing happening in the drug industry [i.e., with cox-2] that happened with MP3's).

(5) Retain a much stricter patent-granting scheme. Patents should not be granted for things which aren't really innovative. Currently, patents are granted on every minor modification of an existing drug.

(6) Hold a strong stance on patent nullification of patents ill-gotten. Patents should not be granted for drugs obtained via the results of biopiracy. Those which are discovered to have been obtained from that should in invalidated. Similarly, patents should not be granted on things which were previously invented by others. Should such happen, the patent should be invalidated.

(7) Punish companies for inappropriate patent behavior. If a compoany inappropriately attempts to use its patents to halt, or obtain patents by biopiracy, etc, it should lose all of its patent rights.

(8) Prevent universities for filing for patents, or if they do, require them license the patents under a "patent-left" license. Universities obtain their money for research from the public -- from government grants, funded by the taxpayers, or from students tuitions (also basically the public). Thus, their discoveries and/or inventions should either be in the public domain or patent lefted; i.e., a license corresponding to that of the GPL -- any discoveries/inventions using this patent must either be put in the public domain or licensed under this license, which allows unabridged access.

It is ever-important that we put these kind of restrictions on drug companies (and any technology companies). They will not govern themselves and act morally; indeed, it would be double standard to expect them to do so, since our laws require that they use any and all legal means to maximize profit for their shareholders. Thus, we need to make laws which prevent this kind of nonsense.

If the crystals were not formed by bacteria, the most likely cause is natural geological or chemical processes. Those should be similar here and on Mars (although with different ratios of chemicals and differing gravity). Look at Chapter 3 of "Paleomagnetism: Magnetic Domains to Geologic Terranes" for details on formation of geologic magnetic materials.

Slightly offtopic, but some research I've heard about is on the packing of the different color sensitive cone cells. A synopsis of it is here. Basically, they've imaged the cells (using adaptive optics, which is cool) and determined which corresponds to which color. What they've found is that the packing and relative number of cone cells vary greatly from human to human (and primate to primate) but this variation doesn't seem to greatly effect their color perception. It's very interesting work.

"We'll be phasing out our AS/400 line in favor of the mother of all Big Iron," quoted one researcher.

IBM expects the greatest benefit will come to those using Codeweaver and, surprisingly, certain gamers.

Earth is more like the Roll-Up Security Patch.

As far as the Universe being the largest computer, the great master, Issac Asimov, explored the concept first in The Last Question

Much easier for them than in many places in the world. They allready manage to heat almost of their homes with the abundance of the islands' geothermal power. And they are working vigorously to increase the amount of the elictricity they produce from it as well.

Don't get me wrong, it's very cool that they are making the most of their situation, but not many places in the world have it quite as easy as they do.

From the old, district-court, CDA decision:

Perversely, commercial pornographers would remain relatively unaffected by the Act, since we learned that most of them already use credit card or adult verification anyway. Commercial pornographers normally provide a few free pictures to entice a user into proceeding further into the Web site. To proceed beyond these teasers, users must provide a credit card number or adult verification number. The CDA will force these businesses to remove the teasers (or cover the most salacious content with cgi scripts), but the core, commercial product of these businesses will remain in place.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Yeah, yeah... offtopic... I know...

Yes, electrons can exist in multiple places at once, but that is limited to very short distances - the planck length. Using a beam splitter you can show that the same photon exists in two positions miles apart from each other simultaneously. This is actually done in the Laser Interferometer Gravity Wave Ovservatory. Let's see you do that with electrons, and I'll concede that they are particles in the same sense.

Well again. The use of the term "particle" to describe photons is well entrenched among physicists in order to describe how light interacts with other particles. Saying that a photon is a particle (and that electrons are particles) is a useful abstraction for some kinds of calculations.

QED, as we shall call it, is generally considered to be synonymous with the interaction of electrons and "photons", and the names most commonly associated with the theory are Paul Dirac and Richard Feynman (see the first two references below) who treated both entities, quite unambiguously, as elementary particles. QED achieved its most notable success in the period 1947-49, when the Dirac equation was modified to include the interaction of electrons with the vacuum electromagnetic field, thereby explaining, with enormous accuracy, some small effects in the spectrum of atomic hydrogen (Lamb shift) and in the electron's magnetic moment. This was first achieved by Julian Schwinger, who, building on Victor Weisskopf's ideas developed in the 1930s, described the electronic current by means of another field, so that the electron was no longer a point, but an extended object with a diameter of the order of a few picometers (the Compton wavelength). Schwinger's achievement was largely hidden from public view, though, jointly with Feynman and Tomonaga, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for it. Feynman's contribution was to show that Schwinger's very formidable calculations could be "simplified" by reverting to a pointlike description of both electrons and photons.... http://www.keyinnov.demon.co.uk/qed.htm

However, electrons and photons are both waves in the same sense with the primary difference that electron waves are about the size of an atom while photon waves can be many miles in length. In fact, the principle that electrons are also waves is central to the operation of both electron microscopes and our current explanations of molecular structure. (For example, it explains why graphite is planar while diamond is tetrahedral.) In fact, even protons and alpha particles have wave properties which is central to the operation of nuclear power plants.

But I'll even one-up you one. Not only can electrons exist muiltiple places simultaneously, but multiple larger particles can occupy the same space in a Bose-Einstein condensate. But here is a pdf article reporting the quantum superposition of an electron at a distance comparible to that of microcomputer transistor (0.4 micrometres). Also the NIST acheived superposition of atoms simultaneously in two locations at a scale of around 10 atomic diamters. As a result, particle/waves of light and particle/waves of matter don't look so different after all.

Maybe it's not as passive as disc golf, but lots of geeks still play Ultimate Frisbee. Most people have never played it until they get to college, and, as such, it's a very beginner-oriented sport. If you ever see people playing in a park, they're usually more than happy for you to join in, even if you've never played before.

It does involve some running, but it's non-contact and fun as hell. In fact the most important rule in the game is for it to be well-spirited (and fun). Also, many tournaments involve some wicked partying =)

If you're interested in learning more, try:
What is Ultimate?
The Ultimate Handbook
or find a team near you.

... In fact, the modern, very high performance routers here at the University [of Rochester] are extremely highly optimized for routing, and do it very well and very quickly. They are not, however, optimized for packet filtering. Estimates vary, and will depend on exact network use, but the first filter on a network port reduces the available bandwidth by 10-30 percent. The problem is that the packets are no longer able to pass through the high speed hardware routing path, but are instead shunted into slower, more cpu-intensive software filters. That big performance hit is only for the first filter, subsequent ones add in the range .5-1 percent reduction per filter, enough to be noticeable on high-bandwidth transactions.

Many network users aren't using their router interfaces to their full capacity anyway, and can take the 30 percent reduction without convenience. Unfortunately, there are two flaws in that reasoning. First, the hit isn't just to that interface, but to the whole router. One interface filter won't noticeably affect overall router performance, but if there were filters on every interface, the router would be significantly degraded. Second, the trend in networking is to increase bandwidth use, and in fact UTD is currently working on multiplying the backbone capacity by a factor of over ten times. So when the network users eventually need more bandwidth, the filters will become noticeable. And simply going to faster networks won't help, because the filtering speed of the routers isn't increasing as fast as the networks themselves are. (emphasis added)

Ha, I knew I'd find a link to it somewhere.
to quote:

The United States should maintain the threat of nuclear retaliation with an "irrational and vindictive" streak to intimidate would-be attackers such as Iraq, according to an internal military study made public Sunday.

'Nuff said.

All these scientists that signed the 2nd paper discounted what the
1st guys said and they did it with an overwhelming number of people

Research grants: Medical research grants, DOE Big friggin' laser grants, etc.

And of course, students are federally supported, and all that money (indirectly) goes to the Univ.

I saw some info about modafinil (or Provigil) on 20/20 or one of the network mag shows recently and was quite impressed. Side affects appear minimal. I don't know if I'd care to use it over extended periods, but I'm interested.

Some dubious links are here and here. More reliable stuff is here and here.

This was pretty big news last year when the University of Rochester filed the largest patent lawsuit in US history against Pfizer and Searle for infringement of their Cox-2 inhibitor (Celebrex, super-aspirin) patent.

of course not to this scale perhaps but HP _had_ a patent infringement problem with univ of rochester. click here for the link.

in general however the size of a company like hp [and its associated hpLabs research] the number of patents churned out is ENORMOUS . i interned in hpL palo alto last summer and the patent figures overall for the previous year was many hundreds..... dont have exact figures sorry. i guess this is due to a) the scale of operations involved b) it pays to patent things *just in case* / *making sure* you have the cat in the bag if you know what i mean.

vv

IIRC, Xerox originally came up with the concepts of the personal computer, the graphical user interface, the mouse, and several other substantial breakthroughs in computer science.

According to this page, the personal computer was invented in 1949. Xerox was a chemical company called Haloid at the time, and was just getting into the photocopy business.

This very good primer describes how various pieces of the GUI were invented throughout the 50s and 60s by people such as Ivan Sutherland and Alan Kay.

The mouse was invented by Douglas Englebart in the mid-1960s.

Xerox did invent at PARC in the 1970s and beyond: several other substantial breakthroughs in computer science, such as Ethernet and Object-oriented programming.

Ugh, if you ask me Canadians are even more nauseatingly patriotic than us Americans. We've been doing nuclear astrophysics experiments for decades already and with cooler looking instruments too! ha! take that Canada!

This is very cool, on many levels: space-saving, open architecture, and so forth.
And sure, there's a lot of collaboration going on behind it as the press release says, but what's the likelihood that Blades will actually be a force in server hardware? A lot of companies are worried enough about financial situations without replacing large amounts of their assets.
Just seems like a helluva risk to take, with this New Cool thing. When it DOES gain popularity, though, it'll be nice to hear success stories about physically cooler server rooms(I'd imagine) with more space for NERF combat or Ultimate Frisbee.

Unfortunately,( RSFQ (Rapid Single Flux Quantum) circuitry is beyond the scope of SPICE simulations, but this appears to me to be a natural fit to the trinary logic paradigm.

Some circuits have already been physically built and tested - and at least one person feels that they lend themselves to tristate logic gates .

The basic principles are already in the category of proven technology - ever heard of a SQUID sensor?

Josephson junctions work equally well for either positive or negative currents - and so do magnetic flux quanta. (But this circuitry has to be the ultimate in low-power computing - you can't get much lower discrete amounts of energy than a single quantum of magnetic flux.)

Here's a good "plain english" explanation of what happened.

Karma whore disclaimer: This link was stolen from the other article about this experiment.

A quick search of the Fermilab site found some more specifics than in the Washington Post article: a press release, the paper itself: A Precise Determination of Electroweak Parameters in Neutrino-Nucleon Scattering, and some slides [PDF] from a Fermilab seminar.

the first hit on "Cesium" in Google is: Songs of Cesium

on this page is a mention of Cesium Chloride... which (correct me if I'm wrong, I never did chemistry) I think is salt...

maybe we should take this article with a pinch of it...

the only software called Cesium that I could find is: clock and timing software for the Palm

As we understand the universe better and better, I believe we will begin to see nature using/demonstrating "advanced" scientific principal as we begin to understand them.
This can be shown with bees

The school I'm going to (University of Rochester) is very light on specific required courses. You have to take one writing course freshman year, under the logic that no matter what you do with your life you should be able to write. Besides, that, you have your major and minor (or double major or double minor), and then you must satisfy a "cluster" (which is sort of like a mini-minor) in the area(s) that your major/minor are not in. If you major in something that is a liberal art, you must have a more technical cluster. You still get to choose which one though. It allows you to diversify and such, but not have your entire schedule dictated to you (unless you're one of those silly premeds).

From a link in timeline in the main story. It explains about the various levels of DEFCON and what they mean.