Slashdot Mirror

.. without escaping the HTML.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs101/syllabus.html

Put a different way, the privilege protects the "expression of the contents of an individual's mind."

I thought this was the most interesting quote from TFA because it raises the question of what exactly constitutes an individual's mind. I once read a philosophy paper promoting a school of thought called Active Externalism that says that the interaction between a user and an object or interface can constitute a kind of distributed cognitive system. From the open-access Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

[A]ctive externalism asserts that the environment can play an active role in constituting and driving cognitive processes. Hutchins (1995) argues that the successful completion of a typical commercial flight requires complex interaction between the pilots and the instruments in the cockpit. He claims that an adequate analysis of the task would need to treat the whole distributed system as a cognitive system with memories, representations, and cognitive processes that extend outside the pilots' heads. Clark and Chalmers (1998) is a widely-discussed defense of active externalism. In one argument, they introduce a thought experiment where someone with Alzheimer's disease has to rely on a notebook to retain information and find his way about. Clark and Chalmers argue that because the notebook plays an active role in the cognitive life of the patient, its contents actually constitute some of that person's non-occurrent beliefs, and so these belief contents are “not in the head”.

Given the extent to which we rely on our laptops - calendars to help us remember where to be, photos to help us remember the past, etc. - I wonder if a laptop wouldn meet this qualification. If so, maybe the contents of the laptop actually constitute the individual's mind in the first place!

(I'm not saying I really believe this is true or that there's any chance a court would ever buy it, just that it's an interesting thought experiment.)

The summary is a bit remiss in not mentioning Karl Deisseroth's group at Stanford, who have really made this technique practical. I'm at a different (also good) neuroscience lab, and his group's work looks like magic to me -- they've crossed a lot of t's and dotted a lot of i's. It's really, really elegant, and has a lot of therapeutic potential in humans.

They've made a great video showing optical control of a mouse's motor cortex, and the lab's main optogenetics page has some publications.

It is amazing how much the data varies seasonally to this day. Check out the chart here and the fascinating ones here It is also surprising how much weekends matter; more than anything else. I suppose few people or hospitals schedule a birth on the weekend, but I always thought of birth happening on its own schedule. According to the data, that is very much not true.

From year to year the weekends would shift around, but you still end up with uneven seasonal distribution as well as the weekends piling up on different days.

Sadly philosophy was largely absent from my education, I have been (very slowly) rectifying my ignorance for the past decade and have found the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy to be a very useful resource.

| I have no interest in wasting any of my precious time
| taking classes in English, Philosophy, History, Art
| and the like. While these fields are useful and
| perhaps enriching, they will not contribute
| to making me better at my job

this is a narrow view, an perhaps runs counter to the
well-rounded nature of what a *bachelor of science* may imply.

also, some people might differ with you though in regards to
the 'not contributing to making you better at your job'.

this whole address is really worth a read:

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
>
> Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I
> decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned
> about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space
> between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography
> great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that
> science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
>
> None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.
> But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh
> computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac.
> It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never
> dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never
> had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows
> just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have
> them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this
> calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful
> typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots
> looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear
> looking backwards ten years later.
>
> (Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement address, 2005)

--

Denmark alone has 4 GW. Scale that up to global land size, and you have 14 TW. And Denmark is by no means fully utilized - it has somewhat old, small turbines and lots of windy areas left, and, of course, quite a bit of off-shore potential. AFAIK, this report is the most comprehensive study yet, and it reports 72 GW as the global potential. Also, while you average only a third of nameplate capacity from wind, electricity is worth three times as much as thermal energy, so that evens out. (The 13.5 TW you claim is all primary energy, which means nuclear is counted three times the size of hydro, which generates just as much electricity. To replace those 13.5 TW primary energy, 4.5 TW average electrical generation should suffice.)

You can lose it at the power plant, or lose it in and internal combustion engine, same difference.

There is a big difference. Granted, that while this paper was written by Tesla Motors in 2006, it does give some pretty believable back of the envelope calculations demonstrating their Tesla Roadster to be twice as efficient as a Honda Prius.

Either way, that paper is a good read and shows why burning hydrocarbons at the power station and sending electricity back to vehicles is the way to go. You can then start to supplement the power station hydrocarbon burning with alternative fuels, or more nuclear power.

Dude, read on: http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/

Read this paper (or at least skim it) - these are called plenoptic cameras.

It doesn't do any particular voodoo. I suppose you could distill it down to the point where the camera is (in function) a compound eye.

... demonstated to be a working principle.

The paper includes graphics and formulas... a fuck load more detail than the story link given to us...

The website about the camera doesn't have enough details, either, but this paper does give a reasonable idea of what's going on.

Here is my contribution (working with some Stanford and UCLA computer science faculty) to wearable sensors: http://www.pivotmylife.com/ Prof Ron Fedkiw is also teaching a seminar next year on this topic, entitled "Cellphones, Sensors, and You". Check out his website for a description http://physbam.stanford.edu/~fedkiw

Look, solar irradiance averages about 1366 W/m^2 and a has a variation of about 1 W/m^2 (using a one-year moving average). That's 0.073%.

You are referring to the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI). But it is not total: the satellites used to measure it have a spectral window from 2000 nm down to 200nm. That leaves out the EUV and X-Ray region. There, the variation is huge. See for example this factor-of-three variation over the solar cycle in the 26-34 nm band.

In the X-ray region variations can be orders of magnitude. Looking at any EUV of X-ray image, it is obvious that the short wavelength intensity from the corona much exceeds the black body radiation coming off the surface. So the conventional view that the EUV and X-Ray region is just an irrelevant tail of the black-body curve is wrong:the flux there is much more intense.

Then there are serious doubts about whether the TSI time series as published are actually all that constant. There have been per-instrument aging calibrations that have removed slopes in the raw data. The question though is whether this slope was really due to aging or due to a systematic trend in the solar irradiance. Also, the long-term TSI curve spans a number of instruments (satellites) with some gap in between. There is a lot of discussion about whether this gap has been bridged without skewing the data towards less variance than there really is.

There. A tiny bit more research shows that the sun can have a rather greater effect on Earth's temperature than it is given credit for.

And no, climate scientists are not familiar with this. The importance of the EUV and X-Ray region has been overlooked in the past and only recently has started to gain attention.

" wind, " If you put a windmil in avery viable location in the US, you still wont' gt 1/10th are power needs."

You are an idiot or a shill. Or both.

The total amount of economically extractable power available from the wind is considerably more than present human power use from all sources. [11] The most comprehensive study as of 2005[12] found the potential of wind power on land and near-shore to be 72 TW, equivalent to 54,000 MToE (million tons of oil equivalent) per year, or over five times the world's current energy use in all forms. The potential takes into account only locations with mean annual wind speeds 6.9 m/s at 80 m. The study assumes six 1.5 megawatt, 77 m diameter turbines per square kilometer on roughly 13% of the total global land area (though that land would also be available for other compatible uses such as farming). The authors acknowledge that many practical barriers would need to be overcome to reach this theoretical capacity.

Also:

On February 11, 2010, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory released the first comprehensive update of the wind energy potential by state since 1993, showing that the contiguous United States had potential to install 10,459 GW of onshore wind power. The capacity could generate 37 petawatt-hours (PWh) annually, an amount nine times larger than current total U.S. electricity consumption. The U.S. also has large wind resources in Alaska, and Hawaii.

And of course, most wind generator will only get back what it took to build for most of it's life time.

Wow. You really are fucking dumb.

I stopped reading there.

The summary is misleading, and it seems that there is much confusion and emotion regarding this issue.

Let's look at the facts, shall we?

54,79% of Italians voted. Of those, 94,05% voted against nuclear energy.

I can't undertand why, but some slashdotters, despite overwhelming evidence, seem to believe that nuclear power is the only way to solve global warming, that it actually provides a considerable amount of relatively safe and clean energy, and that's it's the future. All of these propositions are wrong, based on the scientific data available.

Nuclear power provides about 6% of the world's energy, whereas about 19% of global final energy consumption comes from renewables.

A study published in July 2010 by John O. Blackburn and Sam Cunningham from Duke University details how electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants.

An analysis published in Energy Policy by researchers from Stanford University and the University of California-Davis and authored by Mark Z. Jacobson and UC-Davis researcher Mark A. Delucchi states: "There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources", and to power 100 percent of the world for all purposes from wind, water and solar resources, the footprint needed is about 0.4 percent of the world's land (mostly solar footprint) and the spacing between installations is another 0.6 percent of the world's land (mostly wind-turbine spacing). And we can do it before 2050, Jacobson said.

Another analysis shows how solar will become the cheapest source of energy of all, even chapter than coal, in justa a few years, while nuclear costs will keep rising.

From TFA:

Notice in the first chart how steadily manufacturing costs have come down, from $60 a watt in the mid-1970’s to $1.50 today. People often point to a “Moore’s Law” in solar – meaning that for every cumulative doubling of manufacturing capacity, costs fall 20%. In solar PV manufacturing, costs have fallen about 18% for every doubling of production. “It holds up very closely,” says Solaria’s Shugar.

The “Moore’s Law” analogy doesn’t necessarily work on the installation side, as you have all kinds of variables in permitting, financing and hardware costs. But with incredible advances in web-based tools to make sales and permitting easier; new sophisticated racking, wiring and inverter technologies to make installation faster and cheaper; and all kinds of innovative businesses providing point-of-sale financing (think auto sales), costs on the installation side have fallen steadily as well. The Rocky Mountain Institute projects that these costs will fall by 50% in the next five years.

And here's the paper from The Rocky Mountain Institute.

So, if you are still blinded by your emotional attachment to nuclear and can't seem to reason straight, think about this:

That 17 GW installed in 2010 is the equivalent of 17 nuclear power plants – manufactured, shipped and installed in one year. It can take decades just to install a nuclear plant. Think about that. I heard Bill Gates recently call solar “cute.” Well, that’s 17 GW of “cute” ad

However, solar variation in radiation is not the cause (this is what is taken into account in climate models) but the magnetic fields and the solar wind appear to play a much larger role.

I would not be so sure about that since there is a bit of a blind spot in the theories, models and observations: EUV and X-Ray radiation. Take, for example, this time graph of the 26-34 nm EUV band. A factor of three or so variation in flux over the course of the solar cycle.

Look at any EUV or X-Ray image of the sun, and it is obvious that we are talking about radiation that much exceeds that what would be expected from the short wavelength tail of the solar black body curve (the surface, which is the source of that tail, appears relatively "dark" at those short wavelengths). Indeed, the spatial distribution of the source of the short wavelength emissions looks determined by magnetic field loops and surface bundles as can be seen in this three-color composite EIT synoptic image in 171 Å (blue), 195 Å (green), and 284 Å (red) . So yes, there is a correlation with magnetic fields and the solar wind, but it is likely still direct EUV and X-Ray radiation (absorbed in the very upper layer of the atmosphere) that affects the climate on earth.

You mean, aside from the fact that the last forty or fifty years we were in a grand maximum of solar activity, the highest seen on earth since the very beginning of the Holocene? And that, given the unknowns and the egregious speculation that has occurred in lieu of actual research concerning the feedback, this is a confounding factor that has been more or less completely ignored by the AGW zealots?

Completely ignored? So responses like the three explanations listed here, as well as all of the discussion in the comment section, is "completely ignoring" the issue? Or how about this article, featuring Stanford University "completely ignoring" the impact of solar activity. New Scientist also "completely ignored" solar activity in this article as well.

For something that the "AGW zealots" have "completely ignored", Google seems to find a hell of a lot of sources discussing how solar activity has some effect on global warming, but is not the primary cause.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/october19/jacobson-energy-study-102009.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_power_source#European_super_grid
"with 70% total energy from wind at the same sort of costs or lower than at present"

There already some intriguing early results in optical networking with living brains...

This is so much more tasteful than the old cat with a Cannon plug on its head.

There already some intriguing early results in optical networking with living brains...

"Why is medicine so Stone Age still?"

Because not enough people donate computing time to Folding@home ( http://folding.stanford.edu/ ) instead of leaving those other 1/37 cores run idle.
They also have version that runs on that expensive gaming graphics card you've got.
It's not much, but it helps me sleep better.

Which is why Secure Remote Password was invented. It's pretty secure for a password-based authentication protocol--much more so that HTTP Basic or Digest.

Not to mention the tidal forces make the Earth's surface flex about 1ft (as evidenced by my GPS) per day.

I find that very hard to believe. If there is any flexing of the Earth's surface, I don't believe it to be more than a fraction of a millimeter (unless shown convincing evidence to the contrary).

This presentation do for you?

"Earth tides" have been perfectly familiar to surveyors and geologists for a long, long time. Their detection was barely new news when I first started studying geology in the mid-70s.

For little live code practice problems in python and java there's http://codingbat.com/

There's Google's complete free python class at http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/

For a huge library of cs assignments, try the nifty assignments archive at http://nifty.stanford.edu/

Most fish farms aren't nearly as ecological as you might think. The problem is the food for carnivorous fish is made out of fish. That fish is caught by dragging big nets through the oceans. Or gill netting. Or is imported from places that have even worse fishing practices.

The only species for which fish farming makes sense is the vegetarian species. Tilapia and Chinese Carp are vegetarian. But unfortunately most farms supplement their vegetarian diet with fish meal.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/september7/woods-fishfarm-study-090709.html

http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab/Caldeira_research/Archer_Eby.html

I guess nothing has changed since the days of Gallileo.

Italian government remains corrupt top-to-bottom, its judiciary remains primitive banging-rocks-together screwheads. This isn't just one knuckle-dragging "judge"; this so-called "investigation" has been going on for over a year. Hundreds of people have had an opportunity to say "Questo è stupido, e si ferma subito." None have. Any scientists left in that pit of willful ignorance should get out, and get out now, because the tort lawyers are coming. High-tech companies should abandon Italy before they too are targeted my the government extortion machine and--

Oh wait. Too late. Skilled Italian scientists and engineers, the rest of the world will happily take you in. I'm sure there are many of you, and we need you. Your own country doesn't want you, though. The rest of us? We should stay the hell out of Italy lest we be similarly targeted.

Your plan sounds very similar to the classic SHRDLU system. Published 1971.

That summary is wrong, check http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/10/europe-haeurope-smacks-indiscriminate-copyright-levies-on-blank-cds-dvdslts-indiscriminate-copyright-levies-on-blank-cds-dvds.ars or http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6550.

That case was brought in by companies, that don't have right to make and were forced to pay regardless. Copyright levy for broad variety of goods bought for personal use is in place in almost all EU and this judgement will hardly change it.

If you're referring to the summary, it's a bit convoluted, but it's certainly valid English. Give it a try on the Stanford parser, for instance, and see for yourself.

I won't pretend my memory is perfect but I do seem to recall that Netscape was free for students but not for business. I want to say it's retail price for business was $49.99. This seems to support my memory as well as this one from 1998, 3 years after Internet Explorer 1.0.

http://einstein.stanford.edu/Media/Rel_gyro_expt-anima-flash.html gives a much better description of what they are measuring. Clicking on the media gallery link gives a choice of several other animations.

http://einstein.stanford.edu/Media/Simple_Expt_Anima-Flash.html has a simple animation explaining the gravity probe B experiment.

But does that matter? As long as as a society everyone is getting better does it matter that some are getting better faster than others?

Good point, but I doubt that everyone is getting better. If you define "getting better" in terms of the availability of cell phones and color TVs as another poster did, then, perhaps, the answer is yes. But check out these facts:

20 Facts about Social Inequality

Notice that the average real income of a worker has basically not increased although worker's productivity has increased. There are reasonable doubts about whether living quality has increased at all during the past 50 years, although definitely many things have have improved (e.g. there is more gender equality and much less racism nowadays). In summary, it looks pretty bad. For example, check out the poverty statistics.

What's your source for there not being enough land for windmills? Other people disagree.

Read some Karl Popper, then add in a dash of Thomas Kuhn and a soupcon of Stephen Toulmin for good measure. The post-modernist take on all of this starts with Lakatos and Musgrave.

Then go read some Feyerabend...

'We're the guys who don't accept the mantra from up high.'

Yeah we do:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/316.html

'We're the guys who don't accept the mantra from up high.'

Yeah we do:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/316.html

I'll say. Try 1968. December 9, to be precise:

I believe the "scholarly" term they're looking for is captology, the study of persuasive technology.

This is all just recruiting the lower parts of the brain that B.F. Skinner studied. Pull-lever-get-food-pellet type of stuff. No play involved, really.

Wind turbines at their best are uneven suppliers of electricity. They are are also eye sores.

Maybe compared to Glacier National Park they are eyesores, but compared to coal and nuclear power plants, they are scenic beauty!

Also, what you said about wind power being inherently uneven is a lie.

It just requires a modicum of intelligence.

In philosophy, researchers at the top of their field (disproportionately young, but not only) are invited to submit articles to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. And yes, philosophers do put this on their CV and are proud to have an article there. When one of the top philosophers of mind, David Chalmers discovered that his Wiki page blatantly misrepresented one of his central views, he got an account as "David Chalmers" and fixed it, only to be overruled by some undergrad in a state school who thought he owned that page and flamed Chalmers for impersonating someone famous. That would discourage me as well.

[...]doesn't change the fact that I'm allowed to have an opinion about sticking reproductive organs into germ-infested digestive tracts for little reason besides pleasure[...]

While you are at it, you could also stop (tongue-)kissing your wife, since you know, mouth is full of germs and was never intended to be kissed (for little reason besides pleasure).

I think you should read Carl Schmitt Don't get dizzy.

Everyone trots on Mao, Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin as extreme examples of "atheists" who demonstrated the cruelty of "atheism". The problem, of course, is that none of them were actually atheist....

I believe in one thing only, the power of the human will. -Joseph Stalin

League of The Militant Godless -- Operating in the Soviet Union during Stalin's rule (with official permission and support)

The Black Book of Communism - Crimes, Terror, Repression --100 million deaths

Totally. I'm sick of atheists and their "logic" and "rationality". They're clearly worse than people blowing themselves up in the name of religion.

You mean the likes of the secular Marxist Tamil TIgers?

Tamil Tigers: Suicide Bombing Innovators

Prof. PAPE: No. Actually, the Tamil Tigers are a purely secular suicide terrorist group. They're not a group that most of the listeners will have heard too much about because even though they're actually the world leader in suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2003, carrying out more suicide attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad, they're not attacking us and they're not attacking our allies.

And so, even though they've done really quite tremendously spectacular suicide attacks - for instance, in 1993, it's the Tamil Tigers who assassinated - with the suicide assassination a sitting president, Premadasa, a president of Sri Lanka. That's the only time that a suicide attack has actually assassinated a sitting president.

And then just a few years before that, Rajiv Gandhi, when he was running for prime minister in 1991, a Tamil suicide attacker, this time a woman by the name of Dhanu assassinated him. And so, despite the fact there have been these spectacular attacks, they have been occurring not against us or against our allies, and so many folks won't really have been as familiar with them.

But they are not religious. They're not Islamic. They're a Hindu group. They're a Marxist group. They're actually anti-religious. They are building the concept of martyrdom around a secular idea of individuals essentially altruistically sacrificing for the good of the local community.

The militantly atheist communists were, and are, one of the most dangerous threats to humanity.

The Black Book of Communism

Too bad not as far as with our perception of value / pleasure / money involved...

In fact, the most important is the amount of green stuff.

By the way: anybody who is the least bit interested in the subject of terrorism, and what is actually behind it, should read this study of the matter by Max Abrahms, which you can download from Stanford University: What Terrorists Really Want

Almost without exception, terrorists do not want what they say they want. They do not want to achieve political goals; if they did, once their goals were achieved they would disband, yes? But they don't. They find some other cause to terrorize over. They do not want to win a war (same reasoning). What do they really want? Peer recognition. Just like any street gang. That's all. Which makes them even worse.

It's a good read. Very educational. And it shows why these government measures to stop terrorism will not accomplish what the government says it intends.