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I was taking a Unix/C/C++ certification class at SFSU five years ago, and until then, I was deciding whether I should stay in public education or seriously persue a system administrator job. After that, the decision had been made for me. Jobs dried up, and the ones that remained were filled by people who had actually been administering systems and not taking a class in administrering systems. Fortunately, I don't mind remaining a high school math teacher, because I love children.

On the Road with the Mobile Mesh

Military technology could help alleviate traffic problems.

Good. It needs to be done away with. If you're too stupid to put a little bit of your money aside each month for your future, you deserve to die in a gutter somewhere without medication, shelter or food.

You do remember that Social Security was created as a result of the Great Depression, right? Millions of people who put money away for retirement were among the jobless standing in breadlines. Now, if there is any one thing that can cause the downfall of capitalism, that one thing would be to have starving people dying in gutters. Many a revolution has come about due to that very reason.

My school uses this number for everything! The worst was when the residents on my floor were invited to a special dinner. If you wanted to go to the dinnner you had to sign up on a list posted in the hall with your full name and SSN. I guess they needed it to deduct a meal from your meal plan, but JEEZ! The worst part was how many students signed up without thinking.

LOL or cry in silence, it doesn't matter to me which you do. Executive Orders are not fluff or nonsense and are enforced even when they contravene the Constitution. You should read one or two before you pooh pooh them as impotent foolishness. And how do you expect anyone to take seriously your link to a crackpot website? Did you know what kind of "fluffy nonsense" that site contains, or did you find that particular page in Google and so accept it as gospel truth?

You just said in four paragraphs what I've been trying to say ever since I started college. I have heard, though, from my friends that go to private universities, that despite the heavy cost burden, private schools are better than state schools. Of course, our mileage may vary. But your experience sounds like my wasted two years at a state university.

One issue I've not read in the articles posted here is the one concerning the toxicity of nano materials, such as buckyballs.

Also, right now on wbur is a BBC documentary on nanotech.

You can remotely spy on someone's CRT dispay or LED display... not by means of trojans, but by some clever signal processing on either stray light from the display or radio emissions.

If you're going to get paranoid about such things, you should be getting paranoid about the fact that someone could be watching your computer from several rooms away :-)

This google search lead to this good page on the topic (skip down to 'how it works').

That is, inertia in big science funding?

In 1995, the GP-B was described as the "only experiment ever devised to test [the existence of frame-dragging]."

However, in 1997 NASA announced that it had successfully tested frame dragging. See also here.

However, in 1997 NASA announced that it had successfully tested frame dragging. See also here.

However, in 1997 NASA announced that it had successfully tested frame dragging. See also here.

In addition to the sensitivity problem, I wonder if this could be an experiment whose time has passed.

In 1995, the GP-B was described as the "only experiment ever devised to test [the existence of frame-dragging]."

However, in 1997 NASA announced that it had successfully tested frame dragging. See also here.

In addition to the sensitivity problem, I wonder if this could be an experiment whose time has passed.

In 1995, the GP-B was described as the "only experiment ever devised to test [the existence of frame-dragging]."

However, in 1997 NASA announced that it had successfully tested frame dragging. See also here.

I know this because none of the people I know from my parents generation ever lost a job. Most worked at the same company, practically at the same DESK for eons compared to today.

If they worked at a desk, that would make them white-collar, now wouldn't it? And I specifically mentioned that this phenomenon was new to white-collar workers. But companies, even in this mythic past you believe in, had no compunction about screwing over blue-collar workers. If they couldn't export the jobs -- and they did that prior to the '80s -- they'd import the workers, hire strikebreakers, crush nascent unions -- and those were companies that played nice.

Or are you going to tell me that the sort of folks who had Cesar Chavez and his followers beaten did so because they cared about the workers?

I don't know ANYBODY today who has been gainfully employed without a layoff for more than about 18 months,

Your friends and acquaintances aren't a representative sample.

This is completely offtopic, but ever since I learned how to use bring and take properly back in highschool (1988) its really annoying to see people use it inproperly.

But how do you know?

What if there was a planned, calculated conspiracy by another country or very powerful corporation?

Here's an example of a slightly different project. Imagine if the goals were a little different.

It's not worth taking a chance over.

It seems you can make a wirelss antenna out of a pringles can.

Pringles can? Kidding...(but it would be cool). Just get it as close to the outside wall as you can, by a window is even better.

1. Ok. And if that bothers you that much (even though in my book it's comaring Apple iPods to oranges since it's not really a peripheral in its primary use), then it must not be for you. No problems. As for me, and many others, I'd never buy a PC that cheap. iPods are definitely targeted at people with good computers (heck, many "$300" computers don't have USB2.0 or FireWire built in). People with bottom-of-the-line bargain basement PC's probably want the various $50 32MB flash MP3 players because clearly they've made a decision to save money instead of buying top-quality technology products. They also tend to have dial-up which lessens the likelyhood that they have many GB of MP3's.

2. I didn't mean to say it's unbreakable. But it's not fragile. I've dropped mine several times. I did have a minor problem early on with mine (this was also before I'd really dropped it at all) and Apple took it and fixed it and overnighted it back all in less than a week. and it's been fine since. It's got a warranty, and when that runs out, put it on your homeowner's insurance or the excellent Safeware policy.

> what college [do] you go to where you see so many kids walking around with $300 MP3 players?

I go to San Francisco State University, an urban public university that describes itself as having undergraduate fees that "are still the lowest in the nation when compared with similar public higher education institutions." In other words, like most of the second-tier California State University system, SFSU is a school with a large majority of students from California working-class and low-income families. Having spent about 1.5 years here, I can confidently say that the "obscenely rich" make up a tiny, tiny portion of the students on this campus.

> Do these kids drive $20,000 cars to school as well?
Actually, many do. Now I have absolutely no idea how they afford those. And we have lots of these Asian guys with these little Hondas with all the extensive racing mods and those huge spoilers. They must work, a lot.

Anyway, though, my point was that $300 isn't that much money. Really, it's not. My roommate spent that much on a video card and 3D games in the last year. The iPod is no different--it's the best player, so if you like music, you make sacrifices and get one. For me, it was bought on my American Express card and ultimately paid for with Financial Aid money. I don't even have a job. I also don't have a car, which saves me thousands every year.

Lots of college students own things that cost more than $300. Car payments/insurance, insane video cards and gaming consoles/software, and designer clothes are a much bigger expense for most students than an iPod would be.

Oh, and while we're talking college, iPods start at $269 at the Apple Store for Education (telesales and Web), and at the Apple campus resellers located on most college campuses. So that's the price that should be compared when you're talking about the college MP3-player market.

> Again, the iPod is merely an item for those who can afford to drop $300 on a MP3 player...

And again, without any offense intended toward anyone, all these cheap imitations are merely items for those who can't. Neither of these statements are very informational, and the cost issue doesn't have any bearing on whether you should buy an iPod. If you can't afford one, you can't buy one. If you can afford one, then in my opinion is it's worth your money.

1. Ok. And if that bothers you that much (even though in my book it's comaring Apple iPods to oranges since it's not really a peripheral in its primary use), then it must not be for you. No problems. As for me, and many others, I'd never buy a PC that cheap. iPods are definitely targeted at people with good computers (heck, many "$300" computers don't have USB2.0 or FireWire built in). People with bottom-of-the-line bargain basement PC's probably want the various $50 32MB flash MP3 players because clearly they've made a decision to save money instead of buying top-quality technology products. They also tend to have dial-up which lessens the likelyhood that they have many GB of MP3's.

2. I didn't mean to say it's unbreakable. But it's not fragile. I've dropped mine several times. I did have a minor problem early on with mine (this was also before I'd really dropped it at all) and Apple took it and fixed it and overnighted it back all in less than a week. and it's been fine since. It's got a warranty, and when that runs out, put it on your homeowner's insurance or the excellent Safeware policy.

> what college [do] you go to where you see so many kids walking around with $300 MP3 players?

I go to San Francisco State University, an urban public university that describes itself as having undergraduate fees that "are still the lowest in the nation when compared with similar public higher education institutions." In other words, like most of the second-tier California State University system, SFSU is a school with a large majority of students from California working-class and low-income families. Having spent about 1.5 years here, I can confidently say that the "obscenely rich" make up a tiny, tiny portion of the students on this campus.

> Do these kids drive $20,000 cars to school as well?
Actually, many do. Now I have absolutely no idea how they afford those. And we have lots of these Asian guys with these little Hondas with all the extensive racing mods and those huge spoilers. They must work, a lot.

Anyway, though, my point was that $300 isn't that much money. Really, it's not. My roommate spent that much on a video card and 3D games in the last year. The iPod is no different--it's the best player, so if you like music, you make sacrifices and get one. For me, it was bought on my American Express card and ultimately paid for with Financial Aid money. I don't even have a job. I also don't have a car, which saves me thousands every year.

Lots of college students own things that cost more than $300. Car payments/insurance, insane video cards and gaming consoles/software, and designer clothes are a much bigger expense for most students than an iPod would be.

Oh, and while we're talking college, iPods start at $269 at the Apple Store for Education (telesales and Web), and at the Apple campus resellers located on most college campuses. So that's the price that should be compared when you're talking about the college MP3-player market.

> Again, the iPod is merely an item for those who can afford to drop $300 on a MP3 player...

And again, without any offense intended toward anyone, all these cheap imitations are merely items for those who can't. Neither of these statements are very informational, and the cost issue doesn't have any bearing on whether you should buy an iPod. If you can't afford one, you can't buy one. If you can afford one, then in my opinion is it's worth your money.

What utter crap. Mozilla has been my default browser for a couple of years now. i use it on both my dual boot Windows 2000 and RedHat 9.0 (Xinerama enabled) with no issues whatsoever, including sharing the email folders, bookmarks, cookies, blocked cookies/images and more.

I also use MozillaFirebird (when i am in the mood) on the same machine with no lockups. See for yourself

On the other hand Opera 7.11 - 7.20 used to crash on my Xinerama setup. See these threads on the My.Opera forums.

Cheers,

The PDP-8 was first a Minicomputer based on small scale TTL gates and Core memory, but it was later implemented as a single chip microprocessor. In fact it was produced by Intersil, and the part number was IM6100. Harris also produced a version of the 6100 processor. It's a 12 bit data buss chip that runs the full PDP-8 instruction set. There were popular personal computers made up using them, one was called the Intercept.

I've got a whole bunch of Harris 6100 chips new in the tubes from the vendor and am working on a project to kit them up and sell them to hobbyists. It's a cool chip for a hand-rolled project, it has an easy clock (unlike the Intel-based chips which need a 1/3 duty cycle clock signal) and can be casually 'breadboarded.'

No, never.

Here's an archive of the story: http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kennerly/game_design/fun_ is_fine.html

This isn't just something the government can do--this is something that a dedicated amateur can do with a little time and money. In addition to some expertise, you will need the following equipment:

• A good commercial wide band radio receiver preferably designed for surveillance (requires a little modification) with spectrum display. Sensitivity and selectivity are paramount. Not all receivers will do the job adequately
• Horizontal and vertical sync generator. Commercially available and will require some modification.
• Multi-Scan Video Monitor with Shielded cables
• Active Directional Antenna (phased antenna array) with shielded cables. Think radio telescope.
• Video tape recording equipment.

interaccess in Toronto is an amazing gallery.
The Seemen and SRL in San Francisco will blow your ass up.
xraylab in Seattle/Chicago/New York does some great interactive work.
Norm White has been kicking art/tech ass for since before you were born.
David Rokeby's work is totally amazing too.

Beige Programming Ensemble in Chicago/St. Louis/New York can make your Atari/C64 do backflips.

and for some amazing reading... Stephen Wilsons information arts book has no comparison.
rhizome.org is a pretty good site for all things art/tech (esp. web art)

And for validation by the mainstream art world check out the whitney's artport.

interaccess in Toronto is an amazing gallery.

The Seemen and SRL in San Francisco will blow your ass up.

xraylab in Seattle/Chicago/New York does some great interactive work.

Norm White has been kicking art/tech ass for since before you were born.

David Rokeby's work is totally amazing too.

Beige Programming Ensemble in Chicago/St. Louis/New York can make your Atari/C64 do backflips.

And for some amazing reading... Stephen Wilsons information arts book has no comparison.

rhizome.org is a pretty good site for all things art/tech (esp. web art)

And for validation by the mainstream art world check out the whitney's artport.

Newsgroups + email + wiki = 10 times what WebCT is.

An old standby is COW. COW is an excellent quick-n-dirty solution. It has very low system requirements and is very easily modified.

Incidentally, there are also illnesses that are actually being proven to exist, like fibromyalgia, where the complex list of ailments is also real... again, NOT to be taken as evidence that every ailment with such a laundry list of symptoms is genuine yet unproven, in fact this is the exception, rather than the rule. This list of ailments comes up with almost any new toxin. It came up with"Electricity Allergy," where the patient claims to have an allery to Electromagnetic fields which can even break the devices that bear the fields. Again, cases where the patient does the describing and the diagnosis. *shaking head* Doesn't anybody believe in double blind studies any more??

i hope this fellow gets better. I hope that people stop referring to empirical- science based medicine as 'allopathic,' which is a label that only self-stylised 'holistic' pseudomedics seem to use. I just wanted to point out the exception or two where the symptoms are diagnosable, distinct, testable, and can be demonstrated not to be psychosomatic. I didn't read anything that leads me to believe that he's had all the tests to rule such things out. Medicine is NO PLACE for shoddy science!!!!

Sure restriction enzymes are costly, but at least they're legal enough to give to 2nd year biochem students like me. Also you can buy a gene printer (known as an oglio synthesiser) from Bioron or ABI for about $12,000.00 used. That can print up arbitary DNA sequences for you without much fuss, and then you can DNA ligase them together into whatever you want.

All this is legal, and getting cheaper (Moore's law... blah... Blah...).

Whether the rich or the poor or both get the benefits and/or curses of the technology depends on the laws and the cultural aspects, not the science.

Unlike plutonium which is a relatively rare and dangerous element, the the chemicals that this technology uses exist in every cell of your body. You didn't think that your cells went and sliced and diced DNA without the benefit of restriction enzymes did you?

Furthermore, are your gender politics assuming that all the rich people who go for this technology are male? I find your logic there rickety at best.

Pringles Can Antennas !!

or maybe these much nicer looking clones from DLink.

ELiTeUI Out.

Ive been wanting to make one of these for awhile now. You can find some absolutely splendiferous pictures here: http://verma.sfsu.edu/users/wireless/pringles.php

you will want to read these results

This is kind of offtopic, but I just read a book called Bold Science: Seven Scientists Who Are Changing Our World. It talks about Venter's interesting background. Other scientists mentioned:

Susan Greenfield,

Geoffrey Marcy,

Polly Matzinger,

Saul Perlmutter,

Gretchen Daily, and

Carl Woese.

In this experiment, tiny drops of oil are suspended in mid-air between two charged plates by the interaction of a discrete electric charge on the oil drop.

You use a microscope to measure the speed of the drop with no charge on the plates, then adjust the charge on the plates to hold the drop in place. In other words, the force of gravity is cancelled by the electrostatic force.

If the drops are small enough, you can notice discrete steps in the data when you plot the variables. The beauty is in its simplicity: Using some oil, two pieces of metal and microscope, you can determing the charge of a single electron.

It doesn't get much prettier than that.

Muerte

It's not that big of a deal anyways, companies like SONY and Mitsubishi toss plenty of money at the US and vice versa.

International competition is great for the world economy, but you have to be careful that things don't turn out like the Japan Bashing that still sometimes happens because of the auto industry.

Just get one of these babies and you'll no longer have a problem with laptop theft.

I have enjoyed the debate, but just wanted to add my two cents worth. I wrote the book Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology which partially stimulated Jon Katz' first posting

- The book Information Arts attempts to survey a great variety of artistic experimentation and theoretical speculation. It doesn't claim artist interest in science/technology is new or does it take one position on the science/art split. In fact, since no other comprehensive survey was available, I was trying to bring into one place examples of artists and theorists working at that boundary coming from a wide spectrum of perspectives. I hoped the 1000 pages of examples would be a tool for thinking more about the issues.

- I know that CP Snow and his "two cultures" theory has been beaten around over the years. At one point his theory was taken very seriously and universities ran to add integrated art/science programs. Then it was decided the split wasn't such a problem. Now its seen as a problem again. John Brockman wrote a book called the "The Third Culture" that proposed that current communications and media foment provided another "culture" outside the old two where there was the possibility of much cross fertilization.

- This is the activity that I think many postings were referring to. Electronic media pervade the culture. People from many fields experiment with it and are interested. People are interested in new developments. Wired and Slashdot itself are signs of that expanding interest. Popular culture seems open to influence from all kinds of disciplines. These are hopeful indicators of the beginnings of dissolving of boundaries.

-Still, my book suggests that it is not as much of a non-issue as some postings suggest. The enlightenment really did reward specialization and concentration within disciplines. Sure there were instances of cross influences all along but the arts and sciences were seen as very separate. It still continues. By and large the mainstream art world of museums, curators, art historians, collectors do not accept the active world of scientific research and technological innovation as central concerns for the art world. Most art histories see examples such as Leonardo, the abstracitionists interest in alternative geometries, the Bauhaus, and the 60's EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology) as minor footnotes to the main flow. The museums just recently accepted photography and video as perhaps art. If an innovation results in something that ends up looking like media (eg digital imaging) then the museums might now show interest. Some are trying to figure out how to use the web. Ask them, however, how interested they are in art based on more speculative research areas such as genetic engineering, medical imaging, ecological reclammation, space science, materials science, nanotechnology, telepresence, particle physics, artificial intelligence, body sensing and the like and you are likely to get blank stares.

- The world of professional science is similar. Many scientists love classic art and music but the definition does not extend into the art experiments of the last decades. Some of the younger ones are into electronic culture. The "uncredentialed" art experimentation, however, certainly is not seen as contributing anything to serious research in their fields; often research by other scientists in outside fields is not even seen as useful.

- Also technology research and science often get lumped together. Just because someone is playing with a new technological gizmo doesn't mean they are actively engaging the process of research and innovation that will invent the next possibilities. The expansion of digital art or electronic music does not necessarily mean the gap between art and science/research has been bridged. There is alot of participation in the consumption of research - much less in framing of agendas and the production of research. Still, the widening hunger for the innovations might ultimately stimulate the consumers to become producers.

- Is the art experimentation good science or good art? Probably not yet. The current era of art experimentation is still pretty new. There are lots of questions: How much training, background knowledge etc do the artists need to seriously enagage an area? Can their experiments work both as art and research? How will this work be evaluated? What will happen to the old canons of visual power, emotional engagement, etc? How should the new art be shown? Still, what is going on is pretty interesting and somewhat different from previous art incursions into science/technology.

-Just to give one example: An Austraiian arts group called "Tissue Culture and Art" (TCA) is working to create stem cell sculptures. They think medical sciences' growing understanding and manipulation of stem cells is an important cultural event worthy of artistic attention. They have taken it on themselves to learn the technical procedures and background knowledge in order to work with stem cells. They have immersed themselves in the ethical, scientific and cultural questions of this area of inquiry. They are willing to take on research questions not ordained by the scientific disciplines. They are struggling to find ways to present the research process as art. It is ready to hang on the walls next to Picasso? Probably not yet. Is it going to produce breakthroughs in working with stem cells? Who knows? However, this kind of engagement with frontier areas of research does seem like a very interesting first step and appropriate place for the arts explore as we move forward.

If you would like to know more about the book, Information Arts, please visit http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~swilson/book/infoartsbook .html

If you would like more information about TCA or other artist experiments, please visit my categorized set of web links
http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~infoarts/links/wilson.art links2.html

I have enjoyed the debate, but just wanted to add my two cents worth. I wrote the book Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology which partially stimulated Jon Katz' first posting

- The book Information Arts attempts to survey a great variety of artistic experimentation and theoretical speculation. It doesn't claim artist interest in science/technology is new or does it take one position on the science/art split. In fact, since no other comprehensive survey was available, I was trying to bring into one place examples of artists and theorists working at that boundary coming from a wide spectrum of perspectives. I hoped the 1000 pages of examples would be a tool for thinking more about the issues.

- I know that CP Snow and his "two cultures" theory has been beaten around over the years. At one point his theory was taken very seriously and universities ran to add integrated art/science programs. Then it was decided the split wasn't such a problem. Now its seen as a problem again. John Brockman wrote a book called the "The Third Culture" that proposed that current communications and media foment provided another "culture" outside the old two where there was the possibility of much cross fertilization.

- This is the activity that I think many postings were referring to. Electronic media pervade the culture. People from many fields experiment with it and are interested. People are interested in new developments. Wired and Slashdot itself are signs of that expanding interest. Popular culture seems open to influence from all kinds of disciplines. These are hopeful indicators of the beginnings of dissolving of boundaries.

-Still, my book suggests that it is not as much of a non-issue as some postings suggest. The enlightenment really did reward specialization and concentration within disciplines. Sure there were instances of cross influences all along but the arts and sciences were seen as very separate. It still continues. By and large the mainstream art world of museums, curators, art historians, collectors do not accept the active world of scientific research and technological innovation as central concerns for the art world. Most art histories see examples such as Leonardo, the abstracitionists interest in alternative geometries, the Bauhaus, and the 60's EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology) as minor footnotes to the main flow. The museums just recently accepted photography and video as perhaps art. If an innovation results in something that ends up looking like media (eg digital imaging) then the museums might now show interest. Some are trying to figure out how to use the web. Ask them, however, how interested they are in art based on more speculative research areas such as genetic engineering, medical imaging, ecological reclammation, space science, materials science, nanotechnology, telepresence, particle physics, artificial intelligence, body sensing and the like and you are likely to get blank stares.

- The world of professional science is similar. Many scientists love classic art and music but the definition does not extend into the art experiments of the last decades. Some of the younger ones are into electronic culture. The "uncredentialed" art experimentation, however, certainly is not seen as contributing anything to serious research in their fields; often research by other scientists in outside fields is not even seen as useful.

- Also technology research and science often get lumped together. Just because someone is playing with a new technological gizmo doesn't mean they are actively engaging the process of research and innovation that will invent the next possibilities. The expansion of digital art or electronic music does not necessarily mean the gap between art and science/research has been bridged. There is alot of participation in the consumption of research - much less in framing of agendas and the production of research. Still, the widening hunger for the innovations might ultimately stimulate the consumers to become producers.

- Is the art experimentation good science or good art? Probably not yet. The current era of art experimentation is still pretty new. There are lots of questions: How much training, background knowledge etc do the artists need to seriously enagage an area? Can their experiments work both as art and research? How will this work be evaluated? What will happen to the old canons of visual power, emotional engagement, etc? How should the new art be shown? Still, what is going on is pretty interesting and somewhat different from previous art incursions into science/technology.

-Just to give one example: An Austraiian arts group called "Tissue Culture and Art" (TCA) is working to create stem cell sculptures. They think medical sciences' growing understanding and manipulation of stem cells is an important cultural event worthy of artistic attention. They have taken it on themselves to learn the technical procedures and background knowledge in order to work with stem cells. They have immersed themselves in the ethical, scientific and cultural questions of this area of inquiry. They are willing to take on research questions not ordained by the scientific disciplines. They are struggling to find ways to present the research process as art. It is ready to hang on the walls next to Picasso? Probably not yet. Is it going to produce breakthroughs in working with stem cells? Who knows? However, this kind of engagement with frontier areas of research does seem like a very interesting first step and appropriate place for the arts explore as we move forward.

If you would like to know more about the book, Information Arts, please visit http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~swilson/book/infoartsbook .html

If you would like more information about TCA or other artist experiments, please visit my categorized set of web links
http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~infoarts/links/wilson.art links2.html

Here's the author's page, with links to Amazon, and some other reviews of the book...

Once upon a time, Radio Shack tried to replace the Model 100/102/200 line with a dedicated word processor called the WP-2. In theory, it had all the necessary ingredients to be a successful replacement for the M10x line. In practice, it never sold well and was discontinued after about a year and a half of lackluster sales.

It had a full-size typewriter style keyboard that was actually better than the M10x line had, featuring comfortable sculpted keycaps. It had an 80-column by 8 line display. It had excellent runtime on AA batteries. It had a parallel printer port (something the M10x family never had), it had a real serial port that could go faster than 19,200 bps. It just never sold well.

Why? Well, I think the problem was the display. The 80-column width made the characters too small to see easily. If the machine had a higher-contrast display, the battery life would have suffered, but I think the display was too hard to read and that doomed the machine.

Anything that's going to successfully carry on the Model 100's legacy needs to have a readable display above all else.

Oh, by the way. For people who'd rather just click on a link than copy'n'paste URLs, here are the websites mentioned in the post to which I'm replying:

www.alphasmart.com
www.quickpad.com
www.perfectsolutions.com
www.dreamwriter.com
www.calcuscribe.com
Alphasmart review
Quickpad review

Show me a PIM that lets me enter notes quickly and I'll beat a path to your door. Until then, it doesn't matter whether the PIM is running PalmOS, DIPOS, or VMS - it's just another geek toy, suitable for impressing fellow geeks and inducing glazed eyes in everyone else.

The remarkable thing about a dancing bear is not how well it dances, but that it dances at all.

You have overlinked this article. Just because you know the URL of Linux doesn't mean you need to use it.

1. it was close to a close binary star
   
2. it was dimmer than the stars
   
3. some claimed to see a "filament" joining the object to the binary
   

Anyway, back to TMR-1C. I remember talking to other astronomers at the summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society in 1997, in San Diego, and most of them agreed with me that this was just a chance superposition of a background star with the binary. We thought that the discoverers should have waited for some additional evidence:

1. did the "planet" share a common motion in space with the binary star (we call this "proper motion"); it would take a few years to confirm this, since one has to wait for the stars to move a perceptable amount
   
2. did the "planet" have the proper colors? A planet in this system would have a particular ratio of visible to near-infrared to far-infrared radiation, whereas a background star would have very different ratios. Again, this would take time to confirm, since one would need to apply for telescope time at observatories with the proper equipment.
   

But a scientist is supposed to do this ...

Oh, and the poster who claims that astronomers have not detected ANY extra-solar planets is dead wrong. The radial velocity measurements he interprets as "changes in stellar shape" are really due to the motions of stars in orbits around their center of mass with bona-fide planets. Check out

http://cannon.sfsu.ed u/~gmarcy/planetsearch/planetsearch.html

and

http://www.obspm.fr/encycl/encycl.html

No, Geoff Marcy and his group had been searching for (and perhaps discovering planets) long before this was announced. What made this "discovery" significant was that it was the first time anyone had directly detected a planet optically (or at least thought they did).

All the extrasolar planets discovered to date have been spectroscopic, meaning that the astronomers used the Doppler effect to measure changes in the velocity of the parent star and detect the presence of an unseen body (a planet), by it's influence on the velocity of the star.

San Francisco State University's Physics and Astronomy department is doing a lot of the work on finding extrasolar planets. The lead investigator is Geoff Marcy, who has a page of extrasolar planet news notes and a page of links to other extrasolar planet sites.

San Francisco State University's Physics and Astronomy department is doing a lot of the work on finding extrasolar planets. The lead investigator is Geoff Marcy, who has a page of extrasolar planet news notes and a page of links to other extrasolar planet sites.

San Francisco State University's Physics and Astronomy department is doing a lot of the work on finding extrasolar planets. The lead investigator is Geoff Marcy, who has a page of extrasolar planet news notes and a page of links to other extrasolar planet sites.

San Francisco State University's Physics and Astronomy department is doing a lot of the work on finding extrasolar planets. The lead investigator is Geoff Marcy, who has a page of extrasolar planet news notes and a page of links to other extrasolar planet sites.

Any professional asttronomers or planet finders out there care to comment?

I'm not a professional in the field (I've used my physics degree to bootstrap myself into engineering consulting), but my field of interest was astrophysics, so I'll take a swing at it. Lotsa questions, though...

Remember, all these observations are INDIRECT. They are estimating the size of the planet by the solar wobble caused by the tug of gravity by these planets on their suns. Now, whose to say that this tug is caused by 1 super-jovian sized planet or 5-11 terran sized planets?

That information comes from the Doppler data: compare the present discovery with a system which has multiple planets. In the first case, you'll see a simple periodic variation in the Doppler shift -- a distorted sine curve, if you will, but one which has a single periodic structure which corresponds to the period of the planet. In the second case, there are three periods -- one for each of the three planets -- so they stack up on top of each other, to form a complex periodic structure. The second plot on that page shows the second and third planets' Doppler curve, with the very short-period inner planet removed; you see a long-period sinusoidal curve (the outer planet's), with a shorter-period curve (the second planet's) making about 5 "ripples" in the long-period curve (meaning that the second planet orbits about 5 times for each orbit of the outer one -- 241 days to 1309 days, in fact).

I won't go into the details -- there's plenty of that on the second link -- but it's just a matter of analysis of the data, fitting a model to it, and making a few wise choices if you find that the simplest models won't do. And BTW, it would take a lot more than a handful of terrestrial planets to equal the mass of a super-jovian -- although Jupiter is about 11 Earth diameters wide, it is much more massive (around 80 terrestrial masses, IIRC -- but don't quote me on that, I don't have a text or a link handy).

Whose to say these Saturn like and jovian like planets don't have moons in orbit that are in a "habitable zone?".

That may very well be the case, but we won't find that out with the present equipment. More reason to keep searching, and to get better instruments!

I wonder if we could detect anything but Jupiter from our ouwn sun's wobble? How big a planet does old Sol's wobble say is in orbit around it - 2 Jupiters or 1 jupiter and 8 to 9 others? How does an Oort cloud or Kuiper belt of material affect these calculations?

Right now, we'd might be able to detect Jupiter and possibly Saturn -- but both of those planets are in more-distant orbits than what we've found so far, so detection would be more difficult. The Doppler method would completely miss everything else in the Solar system. (Again, the mass of the rest of the system, after Jupiter and a bit from Saturn, is trivial...)

The Oort cloud and Kuiper belt don't have much effect at all -- orbits of stuff out there are quite long (hundreds of years and way up), compared to the few days to a few years for all the extrasolar planets detected so far. And as far as we know, the masses of bodies in both aren't very large -- in fact, they don't even detectably perturb the orbits of the planets in the Solar system, and we've been looking for that for a long time. Even if something quite large was out there, it would take hundreds to thousands of years of watching to detect it -- either here or in the extrasolar planetary systems.

Until we have a spaced based interferometer array (which I beleive NASA is trying to get funding for)which can do DIRECT imaging of these planets, we will not know of any reall numbers and sizes.

Actually, we do know one planet's mass and size, because it passed between us and the disk of its star; that allows us to remove the uncertainty in mass (from Doppler data, we only know a lower limit on the planet's mass) because we now know the plane of the orbit, and from the measured dimming of the star's light, we know the size of the planet.

But that's a rare case, and I won't argue that we don't need a space-based interferometer array.

Good questions, all of them -- and I hope I've answered them, at least partially.

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There's a picture in Hal Layer's collection, or check out Deep Space Tech if you want to buy one.

And of course, we have to have the obligatory Linux on NeXT link.