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Bacteria evolve at a furious rate and we can expect new varieties to appear for any environment provided. They live where it is cold, where it is hot, and even in space! This article http://www.sciam.com/explorations/072196exploratio ns.html features an interesting experiment where bacteria were observed to evolve several times in four years.

This article http://www.sciam.com/1096issue/1096onstott.html#1 covers research of bacteria found in oil deposits and other unlikely places. Bacteria found in oil can be 300 million years old, and have certianly gotten out before. They get away with and without man's help, and you deal with it every day.

Now get back to work, everybody! No more strikes and millsmashing, execpt you poor loosers at dot coms. Dot com-ers can just go home.

Deep Thought/Blue is not 'limited to the "brute force" approach', while it does check moves as fast as it can (which any player, human or computer would want to do)
what makes Deep Blue so good is a concept called Singular Extension. What signular extension does is to identify potentialy important moves
and spend time searching in that portion of the game tree, as opposed to 'simply searching as big an area of the tree as possible' as you state.
There is a very good SCIAM article on how DT/B operates.

Singular extension can be increadibly powerful in practice. I had the good fortune to witness a game that DT played in the North
American ACM Computer Chess Championships betwee Deep Thought and Hitech (the other CMU chess computer).
Both team set up their monitors in the same conference room so the spectators could watch the 'thinking' of two programs.
In the end game their came a point where Hitch thought it was up a pawn, but Deep Thought saw mate in 12 moves!
Hitech went on for I think 6 more moves before it decided to resign.

This concept can obviously be applied to the original topic of this discussion, a computer driving a car.
The computer could realize that the car ahead which is begining to spin is a much more important concern
than whether or not the car behind can pass on the next turn if the turn will be blocked by the spinning car

Not quite. They could just change audio formats to DVD and let all the CD players in the world rot away. DVD players would have to have RIAA, DMCPA sanctioned controlers that would refuse to play music without a watermark. Your new Sound Blaster would also have to conform

By the way, in 5 years or so your PC will look hopelessly archaic next to everyone else's pocket jukebox. Who needs physical media when we can all consume great music for just pennies a second?

And why would anyone non RIAA want to record or publish? Don't you know anyone with any talent signs up? As last month's Scientific American put it, you should watch out for "a small number of computer scientists to create software that subverts the efforts of government" because speech without accountability is dangerous and can even get people killed. Better be a good boy and buy the toys that Scientific American has to sell this month November 2000 issue. Publish? Don't even think about it!

Not quite. They could just change audio formats to DVD and let all the CD players in the world rot away. DVD players would have to have RIAA, DMCPA sanctioned controlers that would refuse to play music without a watermark. Your new Sound Blaster would also have to conform

By the way, in 5 years or so your PC will look hopelessly archaic next to everyone else's pocket jukebox. Who needs physical media when we can all consume great music for just pennies a second?

And why would anyone non RIAA want to record or publish? Don't you know anyone with any talent signs up? As last month's Scientific American put it, you should watch out for "a small number of computer scientists to create software that subverts the efforts of government" because speech without accountability is dangerous and can even get people killed. Better be a good boy and buy the toys that Scientific American has to sell this month November 2000 issue. Publish? Don't even think about it!

The July 2000 issue also has an interesting article on the Large Hadron Collider that CERN is building. This article does not appear to be on www.sciam.com.

The July 2000 issue also has an interesting article on the Large Hadron Collider that CERN is building. This article does not appear to be on www.sciam.com.

No, but they have proved that there is metallic hydrogen there, which I think is much cooler anyways. You can find the article over at Scientific American. I'm not sure when the result was published, but it is within a year and a half. Very neat quantum effects start happening with hydrogen when you get hydrogen under a couple of kilo-atmospheres.

and the article from Scientific American stating NASA's position against sex in space caused me to have this very ugly vision of a possible starting media for that culture.

Not too long ago, Scientific American ran a couple of items like this one citing Xerox, and specifically Mark Stefik on digital rights enforcement. So where's Xerox and their tech in all this?

At the Xerox site I found some references to XRML or DPRL (Digital Property Rights Language) and ContentGuard

More XRML at Oasis-Open like this item by Robin Cover.

But I don't see anything off-hand on doing the MP3 kind of thing. That would involve an extension to autonomous devices. Could be done if the devices had decent hard-to-tamper clocks.

There are other people in the same business such as NetActive

It's still not free, of course. But I'm not yet convinced that copyright is dead. I'm willing to pay for rights, but I need the real rights that I used to get, not some constrained version like SDMI.

--
Henry Troup

Not too long ago, Scientific American ran a couple of items like this one citing Xerox, and specifically Mark Stefik on digital rights enforcement. So where's Xerox and their tech in all this?

At the Xerox site I found some references to XRML or DPRL (Digital Property Rights Language) and ContentGuard

More XRML at Oasis-Open like this item by Robin Cover.

But I don't see anything off-hand on doing the MP3 kind of thing. That would involve an extension to autonomous devices. Could be done if the devices had decent hard-to-tamper clocks.

There are other people in the same business such as NetActive

It's still not free, of course. But I'm not yet convinced that copyright is dead. I'm willing to pay for rights, but I need the real rights that I used to get, not some constrained version like SDMI.

--
Henry Troup

Here is the link:

SciAm Space Exploration Issue

And, no it isn't a goat sex link.

The present is unimaginably bad by standards of just five years ago. How can it be that I'm stuck with crapy peer to peer networking with propriatary MS formats only when HTML is so much easier? Who would have imagined that vastly improved hardware could be made less reliable and slower than a 386? Who would belive that decoding media or linking could be illegal?

Your freedoms are being erroded. Check out this attack on a system called Publius, Speach without Accountibility from an old killer of trees, Scientific American. Anonymous publishing will not be tollerated in the new media, and "piracy" will be used as the hammer that squashes free publishing in general. Anonymous publishing is the foundation of a free press and the meat space equivalent will never die.

Cool, I finished this letter before BSoD. Sorry if it is less than pollished.

GE has not forcast costs. These things need to be looked at once a year, and need "major components" once every five years. Design life is 15 years. In fifteen years, your payments may look small but your fuel will still cost money. If everyone buys one of these, the cost of fuel will go up, just like gasoline prices have jumped with SUV purchases. GE will swing the price of maintenance with demand too, we can be sure.

In a free market, the price of a necessity will always hover just below above the cost of the less convenient alternative. How much GE can charge for this is going to depend on how far deregulation is actually carried and how far people will go to avoid getting raped by it. Don't count on corn to save you eat, don't play with your food . Windmills and solar power are still much more expensive than comercially available power.

The whole point of regulation was to provide this neccessity at a reasonable cost while giving investors a reasonable return on their investment. If this has failed, we should be looking at why and fix it. If these fuel cells are really superior, why not set them up under the normal utilites? It would be much esier to do this through large organizations with fixed profits than it would to do it like car sales for example. Somehow though, it seems like it's more expensive to distribute natural gas than electricity (pipe and pump vrs. wire and transformer) and this would fall down if all economic issues were considered rationaly.

Einstein has not left the building

I believe that link discusses the subject to which you are referring. This guy and his friend performed an experiment in which the group velocity exceeds the speed of light. As I understand it, group velocity is an idealization: it is the notion of the velocity of a pulse, not a photon. As the article explains, in some sense they've gotten the pulse to traverse a medium faster than c. But, "no object or information has been made to travel superluminally."

So, surprisingly enough, nearly seventy years' worth of physics has not been suddenly and summarily disproven.


If you're not wasted, the day is.

It is remarkable that consciousness of the importance of MPEG-4 has leaked out into the wider, technical (though not necessarily hacker) community. There was an interesting column in Scientific American last month with history and some analysis that complements this article.

I'm reaaly surprised I don't see more links to sciam, they're usually more informed than most internet sites (for example they had a very good rundown of the whole cesium-gas-faster-than-light story.)

As an alum I'd love to see this get more widespread exposure --wish it existed back in my day!

--

The Scientific American article (which, by the way, was from a previous issue. If you are not subscribed, you are really missing out) mentions a rough classification of alien civilizations (see sidebar to the main article). Type I civiliations (like ours) have the resources of their home planet to use in sending out EM signals. Type II civs have the resources of the entire system (the solar system, in our case) for signals, and Type III have the entire galaxy to use to send out EM signals. If Type III civs were out there and sending our radio beams, we would know by now. Nearly the same for Type II, so now we are looking for Type I's, who are doing pretty much the same thing we are - sending out narrowly focused beams, sweeping the sky, or just leaking out signal (radio, TV, whatever).

The assumption that some of the signal would leak out or be intentionally aimed at us has guided most SETI projects. However, is this really the case? In the last century, we may have had unfocused EM signals spraying all over the place, but for how long? It appears that our communication channels are starting to become more focused and efficent through the use of cables and focused, line-of-site EM. Even cellular phones, which still use EM propagation in the air, are short-range devices. How many of the products sold today would, in normal operation, produce signals detectable from Pluto, much less from light-years away? With commuinication devices heading for higher-bandwidth applications, I don't see this trend abating. I can imagine, by this time next century, the whole planet is using cabled or focused communication, so that the aliens would have to wander between the Moon and Earth to discover a narrowly focused communication channel. They may notice runway lights first.

This reasoning may eliminate any hope of discovering everyday communication signals from alien civilizations. But we should still search, in the hope that other civilizations are as interested in making contact as us. We have to assume that their scientists are thinking the same way we are, and are searching in "logical" bandwidths for good carrier signals, as well as transmitting powerful signals on these channels. Although we may be looking in the wrong place now, eventually we will have the funding and technology for powerful, broadband searches across the spectrum. At the same time, we may just be lucky and find ET tommorrow.

Something I've never seen is any information about how powerful the extraterrestrial signals have to be for us to hear them

You people got it all wrong.. The problem of humanity isn't about wether or not we can colonize every part of the universe or not. See: http://www.sciam.com/2000/ 0700issue/0700crawfordbox3.html

If this is true, then humans are just like they said in Matrix: A virus, up to no good other than abusing its environment for its own selfish goals.

Compare this to a computer program: What good is it to produce huge quantities of programs with the same quality and complexity? Sheer quantity is not a human solution. Do you feel happy in huge cities?

- Steeltoe

Scientific American has a fairly balanced article on the subject, Exploiting Zero-Point Energy. By balanced, I mean it's probably excessively generous in allowing that there might be something in some of the crackpot theories of zero-point energy.

The suggestion given about using zero-point energy to affect gravity makes no sense to me. If it was taken from that book, I would suggest that you consider the book highly suspect, or at least speculative to the point of fantasy.

Most supposed exploitations of zero-point energy ignore what we really do know about it, namely that Heisenberg's principle means that by definition, it manifests in really, really small quantities. The only known and peer-verified effect that's commonly attributed to zero-point energy is the Casimir effect, which as described in the Scientific American article, is capable of generating mere nanonewtons of force - the weight of a blood cell in the Earth's gravitational field.

Zero-point energy proponents make all sorts of assumptions about things that we can't possibly test, nor do we have any reason to believe that they're true. For example, the idea that there's an infinite reservoir of energy orthorgonal to the dimensions we live in, that might somehow be tapped. The zero-point energy of real physics implies nothing of the kind, and there is no evidence of this. This idea comes from a naive conception of energy and its creation - "there are very small amounts of energy everywhere in the universe at all times, therefore it must be coming from an infinitely huge reservoir."

In fact, the best quantum theory interpretations imply that zero-point energy is actually created and destroyed in the vacuum, i.e. the energy does not lead a separate existence (as in a reservoir) outside of the particle-antiparticle generation and annihilation that occurs continually at the levels which Heisenberg's principle predicts. Further, these interactions are theoretically limited in size, since if they exceeded Heisenberg's limits they would violate what we know about conservation of energy. So what we really know about zero-point energy is that you would have to "farm" unimaginably huge volumes of space to obtain useful amounts of energy, and that there are any number of more practical energy sources around us.

But let's assume I'm completely wrong and you could somehow extract large amounts of energy from an arbitrary point in space. It still wouldn't create the gravity warping machine described. Once fully present in our universe, this large amount of energy would radiate like any other large energy source - you'd effectively have created a small star in your vicinity, although one which burns without the need for pesky raw materials. Yes, this virtual star would affect spacetime (and therefore gravity) around it, but I suspect your elation at the levitation effect thus achieved would be rather diminished by your imminent demise as you and everything around you is fried to a crisp.

Of course, regardless of its impracticality as a gravitational generator, being able to extract large amounts of energy from nothing seems like it might be useful. But, even if this were possible (and all evidence and current knowledge indicates otherwise), you'd still face the same problems that are faced by builders of fusion reactors - how to contain and tap that energy. After all, "hot" fusion is already capable of providing huge amounts of energy using minimal raw materials, without the dangerous waste produced by nuclear fission; but unfortunately, no-one has yet been able to come up with a way to actually implement a practical fusion reactor.

Check some articles about this in Wired and Scientific American. They are about Tour and Reed. It talks about their plan on developing molecular computers. Sounds like they are very close to coming up with transistors but have quite a ways to go to come up with wiring!

Scientific American had an excellent piece about extraterrestrials and where they could be/why we can't find them in the July issue. The accompaning article about SETI and searching for ETs is here.

Scientific American had an excellent piece about extraterrestrials and where they could be/why we can't find them in the July issue. The accompaning article about SETI and searching for ETs is here.

Because it's not really based on english - it's based on machine code, logic, and math. Don't be too certain that mathematics isn't influenced by cultural factors in turn. You may find link interesting, to say the least.

Well, I think eveyone has got it all bass-ackwards on this. Looking for fossilized bacteria and water on Mars? Hoping for water on the Moon? Drilling through 10km of ice to see what might live in the ocean underneath Europa's crust? If you're looking for new life and exciting, harsh environments, I'd say we look down instead of up.

Don't get me wrong - I think the space program is entirely cool. But for billions of dollars less, we could effectively conquer the ocean floor instead of trying to escape gravity and get to space.

Just think - our planet is 70% covered with water, and yet it's mostly unexplored. We still haven't explored a lot of it, and there's lots to discover. How about looking at life forms that life in 400F toxic water plumes on the ocean floor instead of looking for fosselized bacteria? How about catalogueing all the various life that we haven't yet even seen in the depths instead of searching for water on the moon?

Space is cool - it's unlimited, which gives us room for our imaginations. The oceans are at a disadvantage due to that - they're finite. But I have a feeling it would be money better spent (and less of it, at that) exploring the depths of our oceans instead of the heights of our imaginations.

Aside from the diversion of research in the public interest to research for corporate profits, findings that are harmful to the underwriter's interest are quickly patented and buried. Anyone who doesn't find this alarming is either a moron or a whore.

Scientific American just had an article much like this, which you can read here without a subscription. They did mention Buckytubes, but didn't focus on them specifically.

A good source for concise, challenging programming problems is the archives of past ACM programming contests. Take a look at The Annual Berkeley Programming Contest. While during the contests, the only metric that matters is whether your program generates the correct output for the given (unknown) input, many of the problems raise issues that can be debated in more depth: what is the easiest solution to code? what is the most elegant approach? what is the most efficient? What are the strengths and weaknesses of using C, C++, or Java as the implementation language? etc.

When I was learning to program, my favorite source sof programming inspiration were popular math books, eg The Mathematical Tourist by Ivars Peterson, and the Amateur Scientist and Mathematical Recreations columns of Scientific American. I'd implement simulations of percolation; Conway's game of life in one, two, three dimensions; plot the Mandelbrot and Julia sets; iterated function systems fractals; simulating preditor-prey models; simulating the spread of a disease or forest-fire. Of course, all of that was on DOS using Turbo Pascal. Now that access to networked unix machines is so widely available, there are many new opportunities (eg, for network-related stuff) available.

Good reading material is a very important source of challenges, problems, and insight into computer science as a science. I'm thinking particularly of the famous Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, the textbook used in freshman computer science cources at MIT and University of California, Berkeley. The book demonstrates clearly that there are multiple approaches to problem solving, each with its advantages and disadvantages; SICP also convinces the student of the beauty and power of high-level abstraction.

Are you sure it was not this article

Ada and the First Computer
Eugene Eric Kim and Betty Alexandra Toole Augusta

Ada King was countess of Lovelace and daughter to the poet Lord Byron. More important, as a mathematician, she extended Charles Babbage¼s work on his proposed Analytical Engine and published the rst in-depth paper on programming a computer.

From The May 99 issue as a snippet to this story? I think it was in the margin as a complimentary piece to an expose one of the world's first female programmers.

See this. at Scientific American.

1) For those of you in New Zealand that seek a free ISP that is Linux (or any other OS) friendly, i4free is very excellent. I have now been using them since they pretty much started and am very happy with their service. The fact that they are working on WAP and other advanced services makes them even more desirable. I know of no other free service provider in New Zealand doing what they're doing.

2) I don't know if anyone else has ever thought of this, but I was reading some information from the July feature article of Scientific American and thought to myself, "What if we are the most developed, most advanced civilisation in existance?". Think about it. What if we, mere humans of planet Earth, are the most technologically and socially advanced living creature in the universe? Our broadcasts and attempts to reach other life may not be failing because there's nothing out there, but more so because maybe no one else has the ability to broadcast using light, sound or radio let alone receive the broadcasts. This is the complete inverse to what we've always assumed. So far we've assumed that life out there is at a similar or more advanced technological level to ourselves, but maybe we're the more advanced.

Nothing outstandingly mind numbing, but it is a possibility and something to think about on those long boring nights trying to get a program finished or server back online.

any hard drive experts out there that know the physical limits?

Here is an article from Scientific American (May 2000) that discusses the theoretical storage limits on hard drive technology. (Think this page was also a /. story).

http://sciam.com/2000/0500issue/0500toi g.html

Even better, grab random samples from public places, and amplify them via kitchen-sink polymerase chain reaction. Randomly vary the proportions and carry a vial of the stuff with you to paint on your shoes, dooknobs, bus seats, etc.

That will slow down the bastards!

Even at 100% efficiency, according to my calculations, you would need 62.5 million joules of energy per kilogram to reach Space from Earth. That's equivalent, per pound, to taking something that weighs a million pounds and lifting it twenty feet! And it's clear that perfect efficiency can never be reached, in fact, due to entropy, we won't even get close.

But perhaps a society of (probably necessarily genetically engineerd) people could exist in space permanently - always in space stations, and on (or in) asteroids and small moons. If fusion and He-3 ever become a reality, then such a society could live of the minerals in space debree, with the energy from fusion.

For those that are interested, Scientific American had a set of articles concerning new/alternative methods of space propulsion, also mentioning light sails.

While I'm at it, you might want to check out a fantastic (recreational) sf novel - The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton - any sf fan must read this (I think...:-) )!

Quotes are for those that don't know what to say... ;-)

--EMN

Even at 100% efficiency, according to my calculations, you would need 62.5 million joules of energy per kilogram to reach Space from Earth. That's equivalent, per pound, to taking something that weighs a million pounds and lifting it twenty feet! And it's clear that perfect efficiency can never be reached, in fact, due to entropy, we won't even get close.

But perhaps a society of (probably necessarily genetically engineerd) people could exist in space permanently - always in space stations, and on (or in) asteroids and small moons. If fusion and He-3 ever become a reality, then such a society could live of the minerals in space debree, with the energy from fusion.

For those that are interested, Scientific American had a set of articles concerning new/alternative methods of space propulsion, also mentioning light sails.

While I'm at it, you might want to check out a fantastic (recreational) sf novel - The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton - any sf fan must read this (I think...:-) )!

Quotes are for those that don't know what to say... ;-)

--EMN

Even at 100% efficiency, according to my calculations, you would need 62.5 million joules of energy per kilogram to reach Space from Earth. That's equivalent, per pound, to taking something that weighs a million pounds and lifting it twenty feet! And it's clear that perfect efficiency can never be reached, in fact, due to entropy, we won't even get close.

But perhaps a society of (probably necessarily genetically engineerd) people could exist in space permanently - always in space stations, and on (or in) asteroids and small moons. If fusion and He-3 ever become a reality, then such a society could live of the minerals in space debree, with the energy from fusion.

For those that are interested, Scientific American had a set of articles concerning new/alternative methods of space propulsion, also mentioning light sails.

While I'm at it, you might want to check out a fantastic (recreational) sf novel - The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton - any sf fan must read this (I think...:-) )!

Quotes are for those that don't know what to say... ;-)

--EMN

"...Parrots are doing no more than repeating what they've learned to do via positive re-inforcement. It doesn't take too many tries to find out that if you are told 'blue metal' and you pick up the metal key (being that the only item on the table that is blue is also the only item that is metal) -- you get a treat. This seems like nothing more than conditioning to me."

Not so. http://www.mecca.org/~rporter/PA RROTS/grey_al.html:

"The sets of objects need not be familiar, nor need they be placed in any particular pattern, such as a square or triangle. Furthermore, if presented with a heterogeneous collection -- of X's and Y's -- he can respond appropriately to questions of either 'How many X?' or 'How many Y?' (62.5%, all trials; 70.0%, first trials).27 Our work with heterogeneous collections has suggested even more advanced skills. Alex can be shown a 'confounded number set' (collections of four groups of items that vary in two colors and two object categories -- e.g., blue and red keys and cars) and be asked to label the number of items uniquely defined by the combination of one color and one object category (e.g., 'How many blue key?').39 His accuracy (83.3%) replicates that of humans in a comparable study performed by Trick and Pylyshyn.38 Although we cannot claim that the mechanisms that Alex uses are identical to those of humans, the data suggest that a non-human, nonprimate, nonmammalian subject has a level of competence that, in a chimpanzee, would be taken to indicate a human level of intelligence.2,27"

2. Pepperberg, I.M.: An investigation into the cognitive capacities of an African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus). In Advances in the Study of Behavior. Edited by P.J.B. Slater, J.R. Rosenblatt, and C. Beer. New York, Academic Press, 1990.

27. Pepperberg, I.M.: Evidence for conceptual quantitative abilities in the African Grey parrot: Labeling of cardinal sets. Ethology 75:37-61, 1987.

38. Trick, L., & Pylyshyn, Z. Subitizing and the FNST spatial index model. University of Ontario, COGMEM#44 (Based on a paper presented at the 30th Psychonomic Society Mtg, Atlanta, GA, November, 1989).

39. Pepperberg, I.M. Numerical competence in an African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus). J. Comp. Psych., 108:36-44, 1994.

Irene Pepperberg's work has been published not just in popular press like Scientific American but in peer-reviewed journals such as those in the footnotes above, so I have to assume it has met their standards for scientific work. She and her team have clearly addressed the concerns you raise, and others besides.

Jamie McCarthy

Actually, according to this sciam article, they already located one gamma ray burst....

Also possibly of interest is yesterdays astronomy picture of the day.

And what would you do with it? Chop down trees?

Oh wait, I know, go to Indonesia and hunt for real dragons! Hmmm, I wonder if I can take a broadsword carry-on...

"Free your mind and your ass will follow"

As for your 2nd question, it might as well, but that also has to do with the exact specs of the protocol, which I don't know.

You know, I got NetworkWorld mag at work today and I thought the artical on the Oxygen Project was much cooler and made me think a lot more about Our Networked Future(tm).(or visit Scientific American

Seer

The slashgods repeatedly rejected a submission about a scientific american article that talk about upper limits on magnetic storage and puts forth a marvelous discussion of holography (http://www.sciam.com/2000/0500iss ue/0500toig.html). My question is, why this article and not the other? I personally preferred the Scientific American article.

I'll try to read it in the next day or two and give my opinion on what I see.

...see "Building a Brainier Mouse" from April's Scientific American. It has a super-cute graphic of a mouse reading Scientific American inside a maze.

...see "Building a Brainier Mouse" from April's Scientific American. It has a super-cute graphic of a mouse reading Scientific American inside a maze.

Scientific American had a great article on magnetic storage, its limitations, and what technologies are on the horizon to supplement or replace it.

Just thought some of you might like a more in-depth look at neutron stars. I've been doing some reading on neutron stars in the last few days, so I hunted around in my browser's history and found the two articles I had been reading.

The first one, by New Scientist, is a neat article on stars and their hunger for the planets around them.

The second one, by Scientific American, is a bit technical, but it describes how the X-ray emissions from neutron stars are being used to estimate their size.

--

• Scientific American: Space Tethers
• The Terminator Tether
• ProSEDS

Scientific American had a serries of articles on this here