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Consider the basic argument that resource production/depletion tends to follow a bell-shaped curve. See this page (in particular and the whole site in general). Now that data is 5 years and a relevant war out of date, but the general concept is still valid.

Scientific American has a followup that is only 2 years out of date and it puts the peak between 2004 and 2008. I haven't seen any huge discoveries of new oil fields in the last two years so ...

Think of it this way. If an alien landed today, and shook hands with the locals, would you believe the media? If not, you are severely biased the other way.

That this hasn't already happened is probably the reason most people are skeptical. Check out Ian Crawford's "Where Are They?", he makes some interesting points regarding the Fermi Paradox, Drake Equation, etc...

excerp: ...the first technological civilization with the ability and the inclination to colonize the galaxy could have done so before any competitors even had a chance to evolve. In principle, this could have happened billions of years ago, when Earth was inhabited solely by microorganisms and was wide open to interference from outside. Yet no physical artifact, no chemical traces, no obvious biological influence indicates that it has ever been intruded upon.

Scientific American had an interesting article (the begining of which is reproduced here. Basically, two charged plates are on either side of an elastic material. Provide a current, and it compresses... compress it and it provides current! Apparently the US Army is interested in turning the tech into portable generators for their 'soldiers of the future'.

Pizeoelectric devices would work the same way; deform them and they generate electricity.

Solid-state approaches also would make production easier... none of it has to be waterproof. You could probably even convert a good pair of running shoes no problem.

This example is a bit stupid - what stops a computer program from filtering out everything of the wavy background by just eliminating everything non-black? There seems to be so much contrast in the image that it would be a really trivial job.

Am I the only one having troubles deciphering the second word on the second picture?

Aaron Mahler's MAME setup was featured as The Infinite Arcade Machine: Building the world's largest video arcade--in your family room (page 2) in the October 2003 issue of Scientific American. Printer-friendly version.

Aaron Mahler's MAME setup was featured as The Infinite Arcade Machine: Building the world's largest video arcade--in your family room (page 2) in the October 2003 issue of Scientific American. Printer-friendly version.

Aaron Mahler's MAME setup was featured as The Infinite Arcade Machine: Building the world's largest video arcade--in your family room (page 2) in the October 2003 issue of Scientific American. Printer-friendly version.

Here is an article from about a month ago on it.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0005B4B 6-1CEC-1F5D-905980A84189EEDF&catID=2 They covered it quite extensively in the latest issue.

As this article states, the cheaters are way ahead of the drug testers. Notice that they have a quote from the anonymous Olympic Committeeman. "If this were a basketball game, we'd be behind about 98 to 2." I have even read that it is widely believed that rich countries do better in the Olympics primarily because they can afford better masking technologies.

I thought that space was infinite... What gives?

Erik Demaine is also a recipient. He is the one who showed Tetris is an NP-complete problem.

Here's a link to a Sci. Am. article on super-absorbing stuff. At the bottom is a picture of water molecules associating with the polymer chain.

It'll help to remember that the water/polymer association is just that: an association. This isn't a 1:1 bonding situation, so the carboxyl groups can attract more than one water molecule.

Here's a link. You could have used Scientific American's search feature to find it. Or how about the abstract here. Perhaps the original poster assumed too much by assuming that you could remember back a whole year and a half to when the study was published.

This SciAm article describes three categories of ferromagnetic materials. The first two are ferromagnetic alloys (which are what make up MRAMs and other current ferromagnetic tech), and ferromagnetic semiconductors. This team has discovered the first room-temperature (or higher) ferromagnetic semiconducting material, hence opening the way for spin switching and computing.

This article (from feb 2003) mentions that one of the major obstacles is making it work at room temperature which now has been achieved. Apparently this is a huge breakthrough.

For example, it doesn't have a keyboard or mouse, and doesn't need you to know what one is.

If you had read the article from Scientific American at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000454A E-7675-1D7E-90FB809EC5880000 you'd of found all this out.

Ewan

Global warming is a FACT you nimrod. The degree to which it will affect our future is what is uncertain.

Evidence:
1
2

and so on.

that reminded me of this

The phrases in the "interview" on newsforge are eerily similar to, in fact exactly copied from earlier story dated 1999 in Sci Am.

This is courtesy the Scientific American website. There is more information out there.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F1ED D-B48A-1E90-8EA5809EC5880000

Now all we have to do is find a way into the 2 dimensional universe!

Speaking of which Scientific American has an article about how reality may be comprised of two spatial dimentions. And you thought you were just being funny.

Searching ScAm's Ask the Expert section, I found the following:

"Dragline silk [a kind of silk all spiders make] is a composite material comprised of two different proteins, each containing three types of regions with distinct properties. One of these forms an amorphous (noncrystalline) matrix that is stretchable, giving the silk elasticity. When an insect strikes the web, the stretching of the matrix enables the web to absorb the kinetic energy of the insects flight. Embedded in the amorphous portions of both proteins are two kinds of crystalline regions that toughen the silk. Although both kinds of crystalline regions are tightly pleated and resist stretching, one of them is rigid. It is thought that the pleats of the less rigid crystalline regions not only fit into the pleats in the rigid crystals but that they also interact with the amorphous areas in the proteins, thus anchoring the rigid crystals to the matrix. The resulting composite is strong, tough, and yet elastic."

Well, I've read the article. I've read Scientific American's version. I've read a few other ones google referenced. And I still haven't a fucking clue why silk is so strong.

Am I getting dumber, or are these science article getting more opaque?

"becuase of proteins with various properties" me arse.

It's fair use. Letting other people borrow your copy of a copyrighted item. As long as you aren't making multiple copies, you can give that copy that you bought to other people. What is scary is this: No public access to online journals

See the Scientific American article "Speaking in Tones". It seems speakers of Asian tonal languages have close-to-perfect pitch.

Spamming is a scale free phenomena- that is, a small fraction, 20 to 200, account for most of the sucessful spam. You'd just need the legal incentive to go after the big ones.

The other point once made (although I can't find a link) was Moore's Law could arguably be perpetuating itself. Instead of looking at it as what is orginally was, an observation, many see Moores Law as a guide and judge the growth of the Industry--making it a goal companies strive to attain.

Just my 2 cents...

The other point once made (although I can't find a link) was Moore's Law could arguably be perpetuating itself. Instead of looking at it as what is orginally was, an observation, many see Moores Law as a guide and judge the growth of the Industry--making it a goal companies strive to attain.

Just my 2 cents...

The other point once made (although I can't find a link) was Moore's Law could arguably be perpetuating itself. Instead of looking at it as what is orginally was, an observation, many see Moores Law as a guide and judge the growth of the Industry--making it a goal companies strive to attain.

Just my 2 cents...

The other point once made (although I can't find a link) was Moore's Law could arguably be perpetuating itself. Instead of looking at it as what is orginally was, an observation, many see Moores Law as a guide and judge the growth of the Industry--making it a goal companies strive to attain.

Just my 2 cents...

No one is blaming these stupid worms for all their woes. Well, maybe a few airlines can gripe because their ticketing system is completely disabled. The worms are, however, exasperating the blackout's impact, and some have even implicated it as the blackout's root cause. Statements in the New York Times about non fuctioning alarm display sceens being the root cause of the blackout give those rumors weight. In any case, you are missing the point.

lots of people are (hopefully) going to be scrabbling for WindowsUpdate for patches which will also add to the bandwidth being consumed.

The God damn worm is consuming bandwith in just that manner. Thanks to Microsoft's brain dead distribution system, that bandwith consumption is nationwide. You can contrast that to free software distribution systems where it's easy to set up a local mirror and theyby reduce the amount of traffic needed by orders of magnitude. I've only got six machines or so, but my bandwith usage is down dramatically thanks to a local mirror. The same benifits can be had, but to a much larger extent, in an organization with hundreds or thousands of machines. Train wreck, yeah, that's about right. One track, all blocked up by broken shit. Hopefully, people are going to be scrambling to replace that M$ junk. How many times do you have to be burnt to learn?

Statements about lower TCO for M$ junk are equally flawed and embarassing when you factor in the costs of worms like this and weeks of lost business.

... in this case, the scientist could estabilish the roots of chain letters (like the nigerian) using technics from genetics phylogeny (evolutionary history) http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0003D47 6-1852-1EB7-BDC0809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=1&catI D=2 I think this could be used as well as in computer programs.

Sorry, I spelled it incorrectly.
"Synesthesia".

Here is the article on it from

I only have a touch of it...when I was 5 I'd write my name Kirk as Ki4k, (I think because the 4 has an "R" sound) and I would read the promo for "The Fifth Elment", "It Mu5t Be Found" and ask "it muft be found? what the hell is that?"

"pa1mOne" doesn't trigger quite as much, but it's still really stupid.

Reactor design article by Scientific American
Read that article in print before & it talked about using spheres to contain the nuclear fuel, like a giant gumball machine spitting out spent fuel balls. Discover or SciAm also had an article in the past year regarding cleanup of exisiting sites: apparently, the rules as they are now, or proposed, suggest people may actually want less radiation there than NATURALLY occurs! I also grew up watching "Silkwood" & reading about Chernobyl, so you're going to have the nuclear genie in people's heads for a long time. Also consider if we're producing enough nuclear engineers or not to keep the existing plants running, let alone expand nuclear use. I live not far from Kennedy Space Center, and there were people in this county opposing a new gas plant being built out by the swamplands; mix that with the blurbs about the proposed wind field in Martha's Vineyard: for ANY plant, there will be a "Not In My Backyard" issue.

> You said, "Already Mosquitos and flies started
> showing up in various places where they were
> never seen before."

> Really. I'd like to know what place that is.

What I've seen about it talks about how they are moving to higher elevations on mountain ranges than they have been previously.
Here you go.

The other thing I've recently been reading about (not directly related to a warming climate) is that species of mosquitoes have been migrating due to global trade, riding in containers or whatever.

> It's always seemed odd to me that we are "up here" while apes and chimps are "down there" and other mammals kind of dribble down from that. Why nothing in-between?

Right now is sort of an anomaly in the family tree. For most of "human" history there were multiple species of "humans" living concurrently, and there were formerly many more species of ape alive at the same time too.

Also, the lack of in-between-ness is exaggerated by the nonlinearity of what has been going on in our species. If you compare the material culture of modern humans to that of chimps it looks like an unbridgeable gulf, but if you instead compare our material culture of 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and 1,000,000 years ago to the current material culture of chimps, the gap really closes up.

It appears that a small difference in cognitive ability can make a huge difference when its results are allowed to accumulate over the millenia.

> It would be cool if there was some other species that slightly filled that gap bewteen us and the animals.

True, but arguably there already is. Take away the chimps and observe how wonderfully they fill the gap between ourselves and gorillas. Take away gorillas and observe how well they fill the gap between us+chimps and the other apes.

Our corner of the family tree is an interestingly dense bush as it is, and would be even more interesting if not for the extinctions over the past few million years.

Recommended readings:

"The Culture of Chimpanzees" (PDF) Overview of culture among chimpanzees.

"Planet of the Apes" (Just a tease; see the full article in your neighborhood library.) Breadth of the ape family tree in the Miocene.

"Hominid Species" What we currently know about our sub-branch of the family tree.

What you see, way too often, is a horse that looks pretty, but is completely screwed up in the head. And that's with traditional breeding (and I'm including the straw o'semen in the "traditional" category). I can only imagine the neurotic, unpredictable horses that will come from cloning the "best" show horses. They'll be useless for any actual work, probably won't be able to reproduce without assistance (already a problem today), and will be a danger to their rider and anyone nearby.

It should be noted that research has been done into the whole bee/bug flying thing, and they have a pretty clear picture of how bugs fly. The bee one was poor science when it was done, using fixed-wing calculations on a moving-wing object. No less amazing, though, is all the stuff that has to be done to copy it, and the fact that it's controlled by something no bigger than, well, fly shit.

Here is an article about it. See how /. readers don't do that, a synopsis: Flies keep their wings at the edge of stall, which gives a boost to total lift; they rotate them at the end of the stroke, giving spin lift; and they do the upstroke through their own wake, recovering energy from the downstroke. Then they use a whole bunch of sensors to correct for turbulence, blah blah blah, meaning that a fruit fly has to do more thinking than the typical cubicle rat.

I remember, you don't, NT not at fault

Your topic doesn't make sense, since I can't "not remember" an article that I might not have read.

Besides, maybe you didn't read this thread:

http://lists.insecure.org/lists/politech/2000/Aug/ 0027.html

Which actually partially references the article you mentioned, even though you cited a link that doesn't even work. (http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198techbus2. html (nope, doesn't work even without the spaces))

I find it cute that NT crashes to its knees because a userland app made a division-by-zero (or buffer overflow) error. Which makes it at fault.

Scientific American sums it up better than I ever could:

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense - A great article, written by the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, that goes point-by-point through creationist beliefs. My mother (who is religous) actually sent me the article because she thought cleared up so many muddy issues.

I thought part of the patent law process was that you had to have a working model, in order to be awarded a patent?

Please mod this parent down. Vivato claims to do wireless switching but this is simply a marketing term. They do interesting work on antennas, (from what I understand, similar to what is described in July's SciAm), but ~11Mbs on a single channel is an immutable law. What is more interesting as a solution for this WLAN problem is to set a Minimum Association Rate as described in this whitepaper.

I found a site on the "hole in the wall" computers. Enjoy the site while it lasts, it doesn't look too promising.

I found a site on the "hole in the wall" computers. Enjoy the site while it lasts, it doesn't look too promising.

There are "for Dummies" books that cover many of the topics you've listed. I was never fond of them, but you may want to take a look at them.

The biggest problem when you're undertaking a self-study endeavour is that most books that are available are either
- Very specialized topics (What does pi mean?)
- Refresher-course books (Lots of problems, few explanations)

The specialized topics books - commonly reviewed in magazines such as Scientific American - are fun to read, but I'm not sure if they serve the purpose of what you're seeking.

How much of algebra do you know? If you can look through the table of contents of a textbook for Algebra I and II and are confident in all the topics, then I'd move on to geometry/trigonometry before calculus.

Also, keep in mind that conceptual physics texts are divided between algebra-based and calculus-based reasoning. Take whichever you're more comfortable with.

Some 'refresher-course' books that will come in handy with the conceptual books that others may suggest:
Schaum's Outlines
Research & Education Association's Problem Solvers series
CliffsNotes and SparkNotes

This was actually on Slashdot last fall.

The two links within were pretty informative too.

For much of the past decade, policy leaders and social scientists have grown increasingly concerned about a societal split between those with and those without access to computers and the Internet. The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration popularized a term for this situation in the mid-1990s: the "digital divide." The phrase soon became used in an international context as well, to describe the status of information technology from country to country. Underlying disparities are real, both within and among countries. The Benton Foundation, which promotes the public-interest use of communications technology, reports that by late 2001, 80 percent of American families with annual household income greater than $75,000 were online, compared with 25 percent of the poorest U.S. families. Total home Internet access was 55 percent for whites, 31 percent for African-Americans and 32 percent for Hispanics. Looking at the international picture, in most African countries less than 1 percent of the population is online. Not surprisingly, such disparity correlates highly with other measures of social and economic inequality....continued at Scientific American Digital