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Dude, seriously what the hell is wrong with you? Yes some sites have seriously retartded concatenations bt homestarruner is NOT one of them. Here's a dime, dumbass, go buy yourself a new new goddamn brain.

To the moderators, please don't feel to0 bad about modding this one down.(I'm waiting..tap tap tap).I've got the karma to burn and frankly I'd rather waste a little here and there than put up with the occacasional retarded slashdotter. Oh yeah, the Anonymous Coward checkox? Nah. Fuck it.

. . . is to give the voting system a much-needed tweak. I think most people would agree that if Nader hadn't run, Gore would be president. There was a similar problematic election in France recently. The problem arises from the system of plurality voting, which can easily lead to the paradoxical result of a lesser desired candidate winning. While there are no perfect voting systems, there are much less imperfect ones, such as the Borda count, that would allow a candidate like Jobs to run without voters having to fear that their votes for him would have no chance of counting, or would only skew the election results insofar as they had any effect. Voting can be much more democratic than it currently is.

Here's a quote from an article I came across not too long ago on voting theory:

In some elections, any candidate can win, depending on which voting system is used, says Donald Saari of the University of California, Irvine. Consider 15 people deciding what beverage to serve at a party. Six prefer milk first, wine second, and beer third; five prefer beer first, wine second, and milk third; and four prefer wine first, beer second, and milk third. In a plurality vote, milk is the clear winner. But if the group decides instead to hold a runoff election between the two top contenders--milk and beer--then beer wins, since nine people prefer it over milk. And if the group awards two points to a drink each time a voter ranks it first and one point each time a voter ranks it second, suddenly wine is the winner. Although this is a concocted example, it's not an anomaly, Saari insists.

You can get the whole article, which gives a fair overview of various voting systems, at Science News, or if you prefer: http://www.sciencenews.org/20021102/bob8.asp

Vote as an individual; lemmings end up falling off cliffs. Camaraderie is no substitute for common sense, and being your own man will make you sleep better.
--Pierre S. du Pont

I go into a booth with a curtain all around it

You forgot one part: you go into a public booth with a curtain all around it.

Let's say all this identification verification stuff gets worked out, and people can vote from home. Are you more or less likely to have your vote coercerced in or out of public view?

Beyond that, there are much bigger problems, which have nothing to do with technology. More than anything, we need to revise our voting procedures.

The article mentions flying at 20 feet above the ocean to exploit the effect which makes me wonder how they'll handle the odd rogue wave.

Too bad Northwest isn't going to have it for my DTW -> NRT -> KUL -> PER for CALU.

Yeah, and don't forget, like, your OAD that is attached to your BDT sticking out of your ROR pointing to your BRD for LITH.

but what could possibly be more important is noncoding RNA, or microRNA. I read a good article about it at Science News.
Another useful link is the project site for the program RNAGENiE.

Just thought many people would find that interesting.

but what could possibly be more important is noncoding RNA, or microRNA. I read a good article about it at Science News.
Another useful link is the project site for the program RNAGENiE.

Just thought many people would find that interesting.

Here's a fairly non-technical article if you want to learn more about this bug: ScienceNews

A new analysis reveals that the production of a single 2-gram microchip requires nearly 2 kilograms of chemicals and fossil fuels.

I suppose that it might just be a "special form of ridicule" to simply propose a good ridiculing, but yes, let's hear the argument for the ridiculing.

Regarding your sig, and because so few people even know what IRV is, I wanted you to take a look at this, which recently dampened my spirits about promoting IRV. Of course, it's still better than plurality voting, but, well....you'll see. If you're short on time, at least skip to the bottom and study the illustrated example.

There is an old article in Science News that demstrates things being sent faster than light. The interesting bits of the article talk about one experiment where a beam of light was shot into a cloud of gas, and it exited the cloud before it entered it. Another has them sending Mozart 40th symphony at 4.7 times the speed of light.

And btw, 6.6 microseconds aint bad. I never read below, but I can imagine the massive amount of (bad) Beowulf jokes. I doubt their latency is any better. Assuming only 1 packet is sent at a time, thats ~150,000 packets per second (theorectical peak of course). Seeing as how I havent sent that many in the last 9 hours this isnt too bad of a problem. You are right that this isnt entirely whats needed for this purpose, but you cant learn if you dont try.

candidate with the most votes wins.

While the article criticises the "plurality" vote taken from the popular vote, they fail to mention the overwhelming influence of "Single Member Districts" (SMD) and the "Electoral College" (EC). SMD consistently over-represents the top candidate's electors, and this is repeated in the EC as the electors' votes are aggregated at the state level, converting all of a state's electoral weight to favor the candidate that mustered a simple majority in a simple majority of electoral districts.

What you're inclined to assume when reading articles like Election Selection is that the goal of "voting" and "elections" is to accurately represent the aggregate "will of the people." Actually, the goal of the Presidential Election in the USA is to select the candidate without giving the choice over to a few voters in a close race. It's designed to make one candidate pull far ahead of the others early in the count at the expense of accurate representation.

The worst-case scenario is that a miniscule number of votes (even smaller number of eligible voters if turnout is poor) will decide against a clear popular majority. If you get votes from 51% of the people who turned out for the 2000 Presidential Election in the 11 top electoral states (plus Wyoming) you will win the election with 272 Electoral votes and only 40,278,397 popular votes. That popular vote is roughly 14% of the voting-age US population. If you assumed perfect turnout, that's still 30% of the population represented as an absolute majority in the electoral college.

The bottom line is there's lots of parameters in the voting system function, so you have to do more math than they mentioned in the article to make any conclusions. The problem is, Poli-Sci departments are often poorly funded, so who's going to do the research? Lobbyists! Be very wary of this whole voting reform stuff.

b.) It isn't genius. It's the most simplistic music theory. Clever, maybe, but not even close to genius.

there is a glass window pane, it has slowly melted
into a warbled surface, so the light passing through
it and coming into my room is no longer uniform.

Glass doesn't flow. Old glass is crap because it was crap when they made it. Their manufacturing techniques weren't as good as ours.

Here a link.

I won't ask for people to check what they're writing for relevance... after all, I enjoy many of the comments I read here, but it is considered bad style to criticize the work of others without enough commonalities between the work and the critical remarks.

...LAVARAND?

Lets face it: current computers and humans are both as bad as each other at randomness. The fact that computers have to "calculate" randomness is a bad sign in itself, and the humans that program these computers are almost utterly incapable of perceiving true randomness anyway. I'm waiting for the day when the national lottery comes up 1,2,3,4,5 with a bonus ball of 6. Society will crumble, public enquiries will be called for and conspiracy theorists will have something to bang on about for years. I think that barring the sudden development of Quantum x86 chips (at which point randomness becomes "real" and encryption becomes pretty much unbreakable), the only real solution for decent randomness must surely be TCP/IP seeding based on Lava Lamps

A Month ago I was reading an article in a newspaper talking about a research from Harvard University stating that waking-up late in the morning favorise learning of new elements and that taking a nap after six hours of study boosts the amount of knowledge you can acquire... This study can easily been applied to the context of producing work. It was pinpointing the fact that the brain activity is better functioning when the sleep cycle is completely ended, instead of breaking it - waking-up early. And that this brain activity progressively slow down after 6 hours of strait work. Taking a nap was helping people to return to a normal state and continue to stimulate brain activity. I know my english isn't good today... I've been working 24 hours in the past 2 days... Really, in my own opinion... working more than 10 hours a day slow my performance... going over that limit more than 2 days in a row and your work output will be less in a week (I mean good work output) than if you have made a regular 10 hours a day 5 days a week. And Btw, working on weekends destroy people moral.... ! Here are some references : "Power Nap" Prevents Burnout; Morning Sleep Perfects a Skill, Snooze Power: Midday nap may awaken learning potential... anyway I have to sleep... good reading !!! peace... and continue to tell you boss that more resources make better software and that later or sooner he will face problems in the code that will cost him much more than spending a little bit more earlier !!!

Hm, there's the dark force that accelerates the universe's expansion, and now there's the "mysterious force" that deccelerates a space probe? What's next: the Irresponsible Force, which is what causes events to take place (interstellar eruptions, interplanetary collisions, graduate students' completion of their dissertations) at the last possible moment before they become impossible?

But nobody is going to go to the trouble of synthesyzing an Ebola virus because it's too much trouble and there's a better way to turn it into a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD). Ebola has just seven genes and only one of these produces the substance that causes the 90% fatality rate - Ebola glycoprotein. The gene for this protein has already been isolated and put in a common cold virus!!!

"...Nabel's team worked with intact blood vessels taken from people and animals. The researchers infected those cells with a cold virus they had engineered to carry the Ebola glycoprotein gene. Within 48 hours, massive numbers of endothelial cells began to die and the blood vessels became leaky. Such effects could lead to the internal and external bleeding caused by Ebola...."

Kinda makes you wonder where ol' Nabel's virus is now, huh? Hope it's safely in the bottom of his lab freezer. But inserting the Ebola glycoprotein in a bacterium (as opposed to a virus) is basically a science fair project these days, so ANYBODY can get in on the fun. Who knows, the next Jack in the Box E Coli scare may very well be a version with an Ebola gene in it. The basic data you need for such a project is onlione at the SWISS-PROT database in Switzerland; just enter ebola in their search engine and see for yourself. The specific data for Ebola glycoprotein is here, and in case that gets slashdotted, the relevant sequence data info is as follows:

MGVTGILQLP RDRFKRTSFF LWVIILFQRT FSIPLGVIHN STLQVSDVDK LVCRDKLSST NQLRSVGLNL EGNGVATDVP SATKRWGFRS GVPPKVVNYE AGEWAENCYN LEIKKPDGSE CLPAAPDGIR GFPRCRYVHK VSGTGPCAGD FAFHKEGAFF LYDRLASTVI YRGTTFAEGV VAFLILPQAK KDFFSSHPLR EPVNATEDPS SGYYSTTIRY QATGFGTNET EYLFEVDNLT YVQLESRFTP QFLLQLNETI YTSGKRSNTT GKLIWKVNPE IDTTIGEWAF WETKKTSLEK FAVKSCLSQL YQTEPKTSVV RVRRELLPTQ GPTQQLKTTK SMASENSSAM VQVHSQGREA AVSHLTTLAT ISTSPQSLTT KPGPDNSTHN TPVYKLDISE ATQVEQHHRR TDNDSTASDT PSATTAAGPP KAENTNTSKS TDFLDPATTT SPQNHSETAG NNNTHHQDTG EESASSGKLG LITNTIAGVA GLITGGRRTR REAIVNAQPK CNPNLHYWTT QDEGAAIGLA WIPYFGPAAE GIYIEGLMHN QDGLICGLRQ LANETTQALQ LFLRATTELR TFSILNRKAI DFLLQRWGGT CHILGPDCCI EPHDWTKNIT DKIDQIIHDF VDKTLPDQGD NDNWWTGWRQ WIPAGIGVTG VIIAVIALFC ICKFVF

Any genetic engineer worth her salt should be able to take this data and create a Ebola / E Coli hybrid plasmid with the help of this data and a friendly mail order supplier of synthetic DNA...

That's pretty much how it works. However, many species of bacteria can exchange DNA with other species of bacteria. This means that many strains of bacteria get their first resistant variant without having to go through all the trouble of random mutation by swapping with other kinds of bacteria and then surviving while their peers die.

• A nice article on antibotics, drug resistance, and how both work.
• A nice article on gene swapping and how it's confounding evolutionary biology.

Both are slightly technical, but can be skimmed over without missing too much detail.

There was a study of rats that were raised in anaseptically clean environments, and lo and behold, their immune systems bairly developed. Perhaps it would be wise to let your children overcome an infection or two on their own, rather than attempt to fix it via antibiotics every time.

here for more info

Sure these technologies seem fine individually, but add 'em up and they spell disaster with a capital 'D'. Even worse, what if such a robot uses its unstoppable power to take over an automobile or vacuum cleaner factory and convert it to some sort of killbot factory? I think the Luddites were on to something! We'd better go out with baseball bats (or cricket bats for those of you near the Living Robot facility) and rough up some robotics researchers! Who's with me?
(Ugh, those lousy robots have even infiltrated my .sig! Is there no stopping them?)

"...maybe we could convince the 1.2 billion Chinese, that you can dump your junk on their soil, if they can dump their junk on your soil.
Come to think of it, the US might still be better off: It is still the world's largest poluter per capita and *not willing to do anything about it*."

China is polluting the USA soil. Actually, a lot of the pollution is their soil. Fortunately, they have a large population to reduce the pollution per capita.

Ah! Here's the original article: Code Breakers. It's definitely worth a read.

Ah! Here's the original article: Code Breakers. It's definitely worth a read.

The above may have been an urban legend, however I do remember a legit Science News article about toilets and pathogenic materials, so I looked it up (link provided below). Bottom line: toilets may be disgusting, but they don't harbor pathogens. The dishrags and sponges you have in your kitchen are probably worse.

See http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arch/9_14_96/bob2.ht m.

Sure. Look at Alan Preece's research here, summarized here.

Is this really news, or hasn't this been done...

before?

or before?

-D

This discusses the possibility of tiny black holes created by high-energy collisions (discussed in a previous Slashdot), which the researches hypothesize happens regularly in our upper atmosphere (bit of a stretch). It also discusses a novel theory as to why gravity is so significantly weaker than other local forces -- That unlike other forces, gravity acts through all the 'extra' dimensions hypothesized in super-string theory.

One of the more interesting things about the article is that it shows that with recent developments (the new Large Hadron Collider, etc.) scientists are beginning to reach a point where they can start to prove or disprove parts of super-string theory... Interesting stuff indeed!

This discusses the possibility of tiny black holes created by high-energy collisions (discussed in a previous Slashdot), which the researches hypothesize happens regularly in our upper atmosphere (bit of a stretch). It also discusses a novel theory as to why gravity is so significantly weaker than other local forces -- That unlike other forces, gravity acts through all the 'extra' dimensions hypothesized in super-string theory.

One of the more interesting things about the article is that it shows that with recent developments (the new Large Hadron Collider, etc.) scientists are beginning to reach a point where they can start to prove or disprove parts of super-string theory... Interesting stuff indeed!

Very pricey to produce but has 4-5 times the efficiency of copper at 1/5th the weight of aluminum.

Copper is a better conductor of heat than aluminium. 'nuff said.

Amazing device turns grass into meat!!!

This article points out that some stars in the cluster could have been as close as 130 light-years away around 2 million years ago. The local bubble itself is only 150 light-years across, so the earth would have been within the necessary range for damage to occur.

There's also a theory floating around that a star in the cluster actually made the local bubble.

I think there were a great many more people who discoverd the 'Americas' before the Vikings, Chinese, and Europeans.

Old world origins of first Americans revealed in analysis of skulls
Early Brazilians Unveil African Look
First Arrivals

Actually that was a university experiment (MIT maybe?) on actual random number generation. The images from the lava lamp were used as the random number seed, since apparently the lamp is the easiest way to observe "true" randomness.

Silicon Graphics took this farther and made a sellable package of this called lavarand. Check out this article for more.

If anybody remembers the article and wants to let me know what issue it was, I can try looking it up. A search on their website produced no results, so I'm guessing that its pre-96.

http://www.sciencenews.org/20001007/mathtrek.asp

There's also a good page quickly discussing Villain-to-Victim computing. The point is to use correctly configured machines to do things they were not intended to.

What gives you the idea that spider silk is non-stretching? Au contraire, spider silk is very stretchy. University of Wyoming researchers found the gene for capture silk which, while also very sticky, can stretch up to 3 times its original length. That's a bit too far, and it would be REALLY tough to handle (how would you let go?).

Dragline silk, though (which is what I imagine we'd want for climbing) is what Nexia is producing. It's only 1/5th as stretchy as capture silk (see first link, above), which means it'll stretch to 1.4 times its original length -- plenty of "shock absorption" to keep you from getting cut in two.

And although Nexia doesn't say anything about abrasion resistance, they do say they're hoping to create fibers with specific properties for specific applications. I do agree that the fibers may need to be sheathed in something else (maybe even dragline silk would be too sticky -- who knows?), but I still think it'd be a vast improvement over what we carry today.

I'm sure that if we were around during the beginning of an ice age, we would've freaked out then too. Probably would've been told by our global governments to go start fires etc... to try to warm things up

Actually, I believe that there are some climatologists who feel that we are in the beginning of a minor ice age, but that the global warming of our past greenhouse emissions has been able to stave it off. I can't remember where I read this, but it was in a reputable science news source - it may have been Science News (the print edition of it).

If I am not mistaken, they have already taken the brain of a sea lamprey and connected it to a motor on wheels (and it actually moved around on it's own, until the brain die), so this is sorta old news then, huh?

The full arcticle is here

The link to sprouts mentioned in the original query seems to have an error in attribution.

"Sprouts is an interesting paper and pencil game for two players. It was invented in Cambridge in the 1970's."

There's a bunch more info on game play, theory, and mathematical background on the game at that link, as well as this link: http://www.forum.swarthmore.edu/news.archives/geom etry.research/article399.html to a strategy by John Conway on a strategy for game play.

As an aside, I knew a guy at RPI who in 1981 or so wrote a program to play the game and graphically display the results... if you wanted it to, it would show all the possibilities as it tried different moves, too! Pretty amazing feat considering the capabilities of the computers we had available at the time.

A pilot plant for extracting hydrogen by electrolysis, driven by solar cells was built in Riverside, California in the early 1990s. Overall efficiency was 4.7%, which isn't too good.

There are occasional lab reports of better schemes for separating hydrogen, but so far none of them work in production. The U.S. Department of Energy funds work in this area, but no breakthroughs yet.

This isn't a new idea. It's an old one with lousy performance.

But I'm betting on the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, and the return of Zarquon.

Here's a link to the original [sciencenews.org] publishing of the article.

-Berj

They turned out to be far more problematic than anticipated, like most new technologies. Gears stick together, levers bend, everything wears out. It turns out that microsurfaces are different enough from macrosurfaces that the basic mechanisms that work on the macroscale fail on the microscale.

Unfortunately, it's not online except for subscribers, but the always interesting Science News did an article on the problem last year:

Unexpectedly strong friction and other surface forces are hindering development of some microscopic machines, such as these microgears with teeth 9 micrometers long. Researchers are turning to a new frontier of surface science for answers about sticking and wear.

There are micromachines that work, as other posters have noted, but the idea that larger-scale mechanical engineering could be easily projected into the microworld has now been discredited. Nanotechnology will present even greater challenges.

Tim Maroney

They turned out to be far more problematic than anticipated, like most new technologies. Gears stick together, levers bend, everything wears out. It turns out that microsurfaces are different enough from macrosurfaces that the basic mechanisms that work on the macroscale fail on the microscale.

Unfortunately, it's not online except for subscribers, but the always interesting Science News did an article on the problem last year:

Unexpectedly strong friction and other surface forces are hindering development of some microscopic machines, such as these microgears with teeth 9 micrometers long. Researchers are turning to a new frontier of surface science for answers about sticking and wear.

There are micromachines that work, as other posters have noted, but the idea that larger-scale mechanical engineering could be easily projected into the microworld has now been discredited. Nanotechnology will present even greater challenges.

Tim Maroney

Myth # 1 Sperm Mitochondria are passed on. FACT: the Egg executes any Mitochondria found in the sperm. Mom's Sperm Executes Dad's MITOCHONDRIA!