Slashdot Mirror

The pic in the article reminds me of Traffic, that awesomely addicting old Palm game (based on a real-world sliding block puzzle). I wish there was a PocketPC version!

It was definitely harder for me to get in the door for that first job, though. I got lucky in many respects, whereas other folks from higher profile programs had an easier in. For the most part, though, I agree with the folks here saying your first job matters more than your degree. After my first job, experience and social networking were definitely more important than the degree itself.

On the other hand, I didn't want to finish with a B.S., I wanted to go back to grad school and eventually get into teaching at the college level. So after having been a part of the workforce for a few years, I applied to Ph.D. programs at several well known schools.

Despite my having very good grades and excellent references, most of them turned me down flat. I'm reasonable sure the primary reason was my undergraduate degree -- when you're competing with 9 other people for one slot in the program, it's easy to get tossed out for not having a degree from a well known university. My work supervisor at the time got his Ph.D. in CS from CMU, one of the programs to which I was applying. He wrote one of my recommendations. I got in. I think if he hadn't, they probably would have turned me away because of my undergraduate degree as well.

So I do think what program you're in does matter. It's also been my recent experience that the undergrads at the high profile program really do learn a lot more than I did in my undergraduate program. That doesn't mean it's true in all cases, but it certainly is true in my limited experience.

When I first applied to undergrad programs, I was accepted at several well-known programs, but I decided I wanted to go to smaller, more personal school instead. I liked the program I was in, but if I had a chance to do it over again, I would choose a different school.

Shorter summary: Granter of degree is not destiny, but is an important component of same.

Hope that helps!

Yes, however only until GPUs start taking advantage of the same technology and optimize it for graphics.

Check out Stanford's IMAGINE stream processor, and corresponding software implementation of OpenGL.

They took a massively parallel architecture and optimized the communication between the ALUs, resulting in performance which competes with older GPUs in terms of graphics performance, using a general purpose multiprocessor.

And this was two years ago, by a small crew of highly talented academics with limited resources.

Just think what big megacorps like Sony, and IBM could do....

Yes, however only until GPUs start taking advantage of the same technology and optimize it for graphics.

Check out Stanford's IMAGINE stream processor, and corresponding software implementation of OpenGL.

They took a massively parallel architecture and optimized the communication between the ALUs, resulting in performance which competes with older GPUs in terms of graphics performance, using a general purpose multiprocessor.

And this was two years ago, by a small crew of highly talented academics with limited resources.

Just think what big megacorps like Sony, and IBM could do....

Flaming space sharks! with lasers!

(and ninjas)

*claps*

PS. That pop culture reference referred to the, um, space combat, not the porn. One can't be too careful in 2004, you know...

George W. Bush have also recommended: James Buchanan, Ronald Reagan, Dad.

Why would someone who voted for Bush also want to also vote for our only gay president?

Now I'm really confused.

I agree, and suggest that they look at the IMAGINE and MERRIMAC streaming architectures at Stanford.

Unfortunately, this is being proposed by 1 guy at a tiny company. They'd need major multi-million dollar investments to even get this thing off the ground.

I agree, and suggest that they look at the IMAGINE and MERRIMAC streaming architectures at Stanford.

Unfortunately, this is being proposed by 1 guy at a tiny company. They'd need major multi-million dollar investments to even get this thing off the ground.

This should answer your questions.

Just for clarification. Quote: The newly-developed technology uses a water-based solution of sodium borohydride, made from sodium borate, to produce hydrogen gas.

That means they put the hydrogen "into" sodium borate, creating sodium borohydride. A catalytic reaction on board the vehicle then "produces" the hydrogen. Stanford has a nice PDF on using sodium borohydride for hydrogen storage.

I'd agree with the definition,

(a) A supposed sense which was held to be the common bond of all the others.

However, I'd like to point out that it's a "supposed" sense and often common sense is quite wrong. As in this case.

There is no harmful correlation between casual coping and sales, and in fact, when there is a correlation, it's a positive one. It's simply a myth that people who use a crack would actually pay. The truth is most would find less expensive more accessible alternatives. In fact the whole high prices thing is simply incompetent management.

Here, try reading, "A Plea For Casual Copying"
http://tinyurl.com/6t5ht

Secondly, overly high prices directly limit sales and therefore profits. Simple, basic economics.

Third, the software market is known for it's manipulative market practices and for its relentless attacks of both consumer rights and the public domain.

http://cse.stanford.edu/class/cs201/projects-99-00 /dvd-css/role.htm

However, you are right, it is a choice. Many choose not to purchase the game, one way or another. To bad those executives aren't smart enough to fiqure out a way to allow everyone who wanted to play, an easily affordable way to do so.

Oh, and by the way, I have found a constructive way to fight evil corporations. I simply don't buy thier products or use thier services.

Multiple GPUs will be good to have as there are lots of uses for GPUs additionally to pretty pictures.

The Folding@home (http://folding.stanford.edu/) is about to enter the GPU based Folding:
http://forum.folding-community.org/viewtopic.php?p =75287#75287

Interesting times ahead...

Kevin Christopher, a senior and resident computer consultant for Faisan, said that he has been using browsers other than Internet Explorer for a few years and distrusts Microsoft's products.

For those wondering just what "Faisan" is, and what it means to be a computer consultant who is both resident and senior, here's the scoop. Faisan is a dorm at Stanford (actually it's a section of a larger dorm, Florence Moore hall, where I spent freshman year about a decade ago). The quoted gentleman is a senior at Stanford, and a "Resident Computer Consultant" which basically means he's the go-to guy for IT questions at that particular dorm.

Apparently the author believed this particular dorm to be so well-known that no explanation was needed.

Since they have the hardware in place, I wonder what they do when they don't have films to make and/or work - i.e. would they consider contributing those idle CPU times to something like the Folding@HOME project ... the powder2glass team would love the work units! ;-)

-HJ

Of course, you'd be free to beat your kid

Absolutely not. Child abuse is a serious criminal matter that should be handled by the police (which is a proper government function).

The government of the people and by the people should have the people's interests at heart.

The problem with this is that your interests are not necessarily mine. The only moral way to deal with this is to speak in terms of negative rights (which tell us exactly how we will not interfere with each other).

If you haven't already, read John McCarthy's (best known as the creator of Lisp) Sustainability of Human Progress pages. He writes about a large number of environmental topics, and comes to what I consider very solid conclusions.

The differences between the Human Proteome Folding (HPF) project and Folding@home have already been mentioned. The differences between HPF and the recently completed Distributed Folding (DF) project should also be mentioned. HPF and DF attempt to predict the 3-dimensional, or folded, structure of protein sequence data. Both projects are well suited to parallelization. DF used an in-house algorithm to predict the structures of small proteins (which may or may not be in the human genome) with known structures and of proteins with previously-unknown structures in the CASP5 and CASP6 structure prediction contests. HPF uses the Rosetta software package, developed by The Baker Laboratory at the University of Washington, to predict protein structures for proteins which occur in the human genome.

DF is currently redesigning its folding algorithm using the results from its first project, and may begin another project in the future. See my summary of DF for a quick history of the project.

Would be nice if they could share. Stanford's project already has a pretty good head start. And they have clients for Windows, Linux x86, and MacOSX. I've been running folding@home for a quite a while, my team has submitted over 8000 work units now. See Team Champion.

Would be nice if they could share. Stanford's project already has a pretty good head start. And they have clients for Windows, Linux x86, and MacOSX. I've been running folding@home for a quite a while, my team has submitted over 8000 work units now. See Team Champion.

I haven't heard of any 1.22 GW vacuum tubes, but they certainly could be built. They'd be large.

Gigawatt Multibeam Klystron (GMBK)
A 2-GIGAWATT, 1-MICROSECOND, MICROWAVE SOURCE
15 feet long 15 inch diameter
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/kly/muri/murid.ht m

• I have to second that. My feeling on it is when they had a meeting with a blank piece of paper to design this chip they only invited hardware people. All the tough stuff has been moved into software.

1. Its too expensive,

Tell that to France. They have a GREAT nuclear program, AND lower energy costs. The generate over 75% of their electricity from nuclear power.

2. Smart engineers know Murphy always wins.

Smart engineers are able to solve problems. With that type of thinking, we wouldn't have cars, airplanes, semiconductor plants, etc. "Murphy always wins" is a cop-out for not actually looking at the REAL risks involved. "Smart engineers" actually do the work to look at the REAL risks instead of just spouting slogans...they leave that to management.

3. Nuclear proliferation.

Pretty much a non-issue, I'm not a nuclear scientist but this particular point was debunked very well during the last story /. posted related to nuclear power.

4. Compared to alternative energy (solar, wind, geothermal, wave, etc.), it's less commercially viable with far more risks.

This really falls under #1. Just like #1 you're not really backing up these claims. For example, solar power is definately NOT cheaper than nuclear power on any meaningful scale.

5. Large monolithic power plants take years to build, the investment makes no sense without government subsidies

That's a policy issue not a technical one. Let the gov't build the plants then. It's not as if the gov't doesn't already subsidize utilities.

Nuclear power: old complex clunky mainframe, prone to bugs.

Pure FUD. Modern nuclear power plants are very safe. You percieve the risk to be greater than it actually is.

Solar power: wireless handheld with worldwide networking


Solar power is NOT PRACTICAL. Solar panels simply do not put out enough power per square meter to be able to meet out energy needs, period.
"To even come close to supplying our energy needs we would need about 500 plants which would require (figuring maintenance roads and access) 25,000 square miles of ground which is equal to the surface area of Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and New Jersey combined."

Hydrogen is the lightest of the elements with an atomic weight of 1.0. Liquid hydrogen has a density of 0.07 grams per cubic centimeter, whereas water has a density of 1.0 g/cc and gasoline about 0.75 g/cc. These facts give hydrogen both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that it stores approximately 2.6 times the energy per unit mass as gasoline, and the disadvantage is that it needs about 4 times the volume for a given amount of energy. A 15 gallon automobile gasoline tank contains 90 pounds of gasoline. The corresponding hydrogen tank would be 60 gallons, but the hydrogen would weigh only 34 pounds.

Note that these tests only uses the computing power of the main processor, while the GPU is sitting idly by doing nothing. With a little effort, and perhaps the use of some tools that harness the computing power of the gpu, these clusters would get a lot faster. It may not help in tasks like the distributed kernel compile, but things like parallel raytracing which can use the massively parallel floating point capabilities of the xbox graphics card could really benefit here.

In the future, the playstation 3 will really provide an opportunity for some enterprising cluster builders for couple of reasons. First, the initial release of most console hardware is where the manufacturer sells them for the biggest loss. Sony actually makes money on PS2s now even if you don't buy any games, but when they release the PS3, they'll be selling at a loss and your performance-to-cost ratio is going to be huge. Secondly, if the architecture decisions behind the PS3 make it anything like the PS2, it will be much easier to harness the vector engines for general purpose calculations (compared to other graphics cards). Most of the horsepower in the PS2 (and potentially in the PS3) is in it's parallel vector engines. While the general purpose processor is reasonably fast (300 mhz mips), the vector units can dispatch a ton of parallel floating point operations which enable it to run games that would crush a 300 mhz pentium with a comparable circa-2000 graphics card.

Meese went on a crusade to eliminate pr0n from the American landscape (didn't work, of course), among other issues he pursued. In general, I would count Meese as equally, if not a shade more, conservative than Ashcroft.

Here's a pic of the dirty old bastard.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -Donald E. Knuth

Check out Mor Naaman at Stanford who is working on adding GPS metadata to photographs. Once he has the GPS coordinates he uses that to get information such at time of day, lighting, weather, elevation, temperature, etc... This allows you to create metadata searches for "All early morning images in clear weather in Las Vegas, etc..."

YOu can try the system out here with a collection of almost 4k images.

> I wonder how the Fold@Home total CPU power compare to this in terms of percentage?

Not to worry the Folding@home has more power in terms of TFLOPS than the Blue Gene/L (195 TFLOPS vs. 70 TFLOPS):
http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=o sstats

But there is no competition, the Pande Group and Blue Gene/L teams are cooperating:
http://forum.folding-community.org/viewtopic.php?p =67420#67420

"That's just U-235. U-235 accounts for only 0.7% of the uranium available. The other 99.3% is U-238. U-238 can't be used as fuel in our current reactors, but can be used in breeder reactors. What's more, spent fuel from current reactors can also be fed into a breeder reactor. With breeder reactors that 100 years turns into about 100,000. And we haven't even touched on non-uranium fueled reactors yet."

Actually, it turns into 100 million+. You can get uranium from seawater. And since the uranium in seawater is constantly being fed by the earth's crust, (and there are 10^18 tons of the stuff in the crust - the limit seems to be a saturation point of water) we could expand our lifestyle to the rest of the world until the sun expands into a giant.

Furthermore, these plants could be absolutely safe, based on passive technology, like Edward Teller suggested. 10GW passive reactors, no less. It'd be a beautiful thing, but we so happen to live in a world where people are even scared of the word atom.

The estimates are that we'd have a ~100 year supply of Uranium if all power was switched to nuclear power today. This figure does not take reprocessing and non-uranium fission into account.

That's without going to lower yield Uranium ores or breeder reactor usage. Either of those will extend it by a factor of ten or more, more than a factor of 100 if you do both, and if you include oceanic Uranium then the total lifetime goes out towards a billion years.

See for example:

John McCarthy's Sustainability page on nuclear power resources.

> The estimates are that we'd have a ~100 year supply of Uranium if all power was switched to nuclear power today. This figure does not take reprocessing and non-uranium fission into account.

But if you DO take into account reprocessing, you can arrive at an estimate of a 1,000,000,000 year supply of fission fuel on Earth. See this FAQ on some of the issues involved in nuclear power. It's an excellent FUD-buster.

The major premise of that faq and its related site is that human progress depends on, and will benefit tremendously from, MORE energy, not less. Conservation is a false "alternative" for energy problems. Fuel efficient vehicles that still burn petroleum products only postpone the inevitable.

I wish people would better understand how amazingly safe nuclear energy is, and can continue to be, and especially how in the big picture is is much much MORE safe than coal, or natural gas, or oil. Thousands of people die EACH YEAR in accidents related to those industries, whereas a TOTAL of about a thousand have ever died from nuclear accidents, EVER.

Everyone just thinks of "nuclear" as scary.

Even the waste issue is easily solved: bake the stuff into glass or ceramics, which makes it chemically stable. Then store it away somewhere. It doesn't matter if that somewhere has an earthquake, because the waste won't "leak" even if shattered.

But as this election cycle has shown more clearly than ever, Americans cannot have a rational discussion about pretty much anything, because rational discussions don't fit into soundbites.

- Peter

"(d) We don't even know how the hell to deal with the solid waste we're producing from nuclear plants now, let alone if we ramped it up."

Dealing with radwaste is simple. Just take a big hole in the ground, cover and seal it thoroughly, and start filling it with radwaste. THEN add a low-temperature-difference power generation system, like OTEC. Remember all those thousands of years they claim you have to keep radwaste sequestered? It's actually lots less; after about 600 years, the radiation diminishes to the normal background level. Anyway, such a waste pile would give us MORE POWER for all those years, AND because people will need to maintain the power plant, people will always be there to warn others of the danger.

Here is the original paper.

(it might be gone soon, though - it's an arXiv mirror)

Lemma 8 is on Page 35 -


Lemma 8 Let r(v) and (v) of class C1(v0,), 0 r(v) v0 = 1/2 N0; and let (v) in C0(v ,) be such that

*defines an integral limit for K as a function of (T) for certain values of T, and gives the boundary and limit conditions*



Although this made sense, the proof is kinda over my head, though. :-)

Btw - which dept were you at GT?

Paper can be found here. Quite a good read.

here's the fixed link

1968 was an important year in world history, no doubt about it. In 1998, there was a wave of documentaries, books and essays about that year. The authors focused on yippies trashing democratic convention in Chicago, Warsaw Pact invading Czechoslovakia, student uprising in Paris, Mexico massacre, flower-power, maoism, Vietnam war, Beatles recording white album or Che Guevara in Bolivia.

Almost nobody noticed that 1968 was also the year when Noyce an Moore founded Intel, Douglas Engelbart demoed for the fist time GUI, mouse and word processing, UCLA and Stanford started to build their networking connection. Even today, scholars seem not to notice the relevance of these facts.

That's a good question. I'm on the HardOCP team and am #45 of many thousand (I'm not sure what it's up to now). HardOCP appears to have gotten started sooner though (team number 33 as compared to 11326). I wish more people would contribute. This is a much more useful use of CPU cycles that distributed.net IMHO.

BTW, I was yanking their crank. It never fails, someone else dis's the editor and they get +5000 Funny. I do it and get -USNationalDebt Troll. I guess I just need more practice.

-- I preferred trackballs and tablets to the mouse, and I had experimental evidence favoring those devices-- people have taken that to mean I didn't want to have a graphic input device, which I considered absolutely essential. But I also thought it was smart not to force people to use the graphic input device unnecessarily. Bill Atkinson had a different dream, which was to do everything graphically, and never touch the keyboard, which is, unfortunately, impossible. In my scheme you'd use the graphic input device when you need graphics, and otherwise you'd use the keyboard, which is how I was designing it. After I left that was largely thrown out, and it became this thing-- I call it a "hand to mouse existence"-- where you move back and forth [demonstrates] much too much.

I was not really pleased with the way the Mac came out in terms of ease of use. I was certainly pleased with the attractive appearance of the interface, but in terms of usability it was far inferior-- though one can only guess-- to what would have come out had I been left in charge of the project. Would it have sold as well, or better? We'll never know. I can't answer that question. But it certainly would have been easier to use. But as such, even with what I considered some downgrading of the quality of the interface, it was still far better than anything else out there at the time. I figure that even if I had done no more than orient Apple and the Macintosh project to being user interface-oriented, rather than hardware oriented, that would have been a significant achievement. That some of the actual widgets and things that I designed also got through is nice, too.

Interview with Jef Raskin

Raskin's design choices lost out to Atkinson's. Atkinson's quirky interface, and the consequent emphasis on the mouse, remains present in MacOSX. Raskin's own contribution is "dated and irrelevant", as he puts it.

even in cernobyl, there was 'only' chemical explosion (spreading radioactive material)

seriously though, does anyone know of a "computer" above this number, active allready, and one above 360TFLop/greater performance other than the following(which isn't complete yet?): http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-966312.html ? actually though the whole point of this post is just to point out that the grandparent is incorrect, whereas the parent is not.

In case anyone is skeptical about the parent post. In fact now that I think about it, seriously, guys; the linux number isn't very high. you linux users out there should contribute. join project wool clock

Fair enough. But the problem in the human-centric tasks such as writing a letter (besides being harder to time with a person in the loop) is code bloat, IMHO. One cannot blame modern languages or cpus on code bloat. Surely if you took the "same code" that was behind MS Word 1.0, compiled it on a modern compiler, and ran it on a modern computer it would run noticeably faster, even if it were running on a modern OS. (Granted, the modern OS might negatively impact the speed of MS Word 1.0.)

An excellent book, that addresses similar problems in a much more general manner is Why Things Bite Back by Edward Tenner. To (over) summarize, things "bite back" because humans have certain thresholds (such as safety thresholds) and will usually push new technology to ride those thresholds, explaing various things such as why air bags don't save as many lives as they could (if it weren't for human nature), etc. That doesn't mean air bags are bad, just that our nature mitigates some of their usefulness. Of course, I'm quickly digressing.

What is the evil force behind all wrongdoing in the universe?

It never had a name. Until now. Until we identified it and studied it while making ready to destroy it.

Its name is VladeKua5y !

VladeKua5y (pronounced "Vladequacy") is the root of the problem. VladeKua5y is the root of all problems. VladeKua5y is the enemy. VladeKua5y is what must be destroyed.

Kuro5hin + Vladinator + Adequacy = VladeKua5y !!

Who is the enemy? VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y !

What must be destroyed? VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y !

Who is the enemy of all trollers evarywhere? VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y !

Here is some information on VladeKua5y . Expect more people like Rusty Foster to be added soon.

NAME: Burdge, Jonathan E-MAIL: jlb@io.com, jlbatdarc@w-link.net, elby@adequacy.org, darc@w-link.net ALIASES: lb, jlb, Elby

NAME: Casillas, Luis E-MAIL: casillas@stanford.edu, em@adequacy.org ALIASES: em, Estanislao Martinez, Sylvain Tremblay

NAME: Corrigan, Barry E-MAIL: barry@bjcorrigan.fsnet.co.uk, bc@adequacy.org ALIASES: bc, ktb (Kiss the Blade), Lover's Arrival, Euroderf, Erbert Paget-Paget, Anya

NAME: Dickson, Craig E-MAIL: crd@inversenet.com, mendaxveritas@yahoo.com, mendaxveritas@pacbell.net ALIASES: mv, Mendax Veritas

NAME: Flickinger, Dan E-MAIL: flikx@geekizoid.com, flikee@xmission.com ALIASES: flikx

NAME: Haberberger, George E-MAIL: ghaberbe@frontiernet.net, George.Haberberger@usa.xerox.com ALIASES: GeorgeHa, Hairy_Potter

NAME: Huston, Bill E-MAIL: bozoman@vlad.geekizoid.com, ALIASES: bozoman

NAME: Johnson, Peter E-MAIL: peter.johnson@voicestream.com, shoeboy@adequacy.org ALIASES: Shoeboy, Peter Johnson

NAME: Lockwood, Scott E-MAIL: wsl3@attbi.com, vlad@geekizoid.com ALIASES: Vladinator, Lonesome Cowboy Burt, Quick Star, Pinkerton Floyd, etc.

NAME: Linwood, Rob E-MAIL: rcl@cs.csoft.net, rcl211@is9.nyu.edu ALIASES: AuntFloyd, Con Troll

NAME: Mann, Warren E-MAIL: broken@warmann.com ALIASES: osm, OpenSourceMan

NAME: McPherson, Craig E-MAIL: craig@laceyonline.com ALIASES: craig, naked&petrified guy

NAME: Nelson, Brian E-MAIL: elenchos@adequacy.org ALIASES: Elenchos

NAME: Osborne, Michaell E-MAIL: osborm@yahoo.com, dmg@adequacy.org,

The statistical properties of languages are utilized in most (successful) approaches for natural language processing, from part-of-speech tagging, information extraction, syntactic parsing, machine translation to question answering; you could almost say that NLP=S(tatistical)NLP nowadays.

--
Try Nuggets , our mobile search engine. We answer your questions via SMS, across the UK.

Black Law Students Association???

Holy fuck, they're studying the Law of the Jungle! At Stanford! Stop this world, I'm getting off.

A StanfordWho search for that id turns up this:

Name: Irene O Joe
Email: joeio@stanford.edu
Organization: University
Relationship: Student
Position: Graduate, Law
Department: Law School
I'm guessing some law student got her password cracked, and the school took down the file when they found out what happened.

Andy Grove probably realised that the tech boom was not forever, and given his increasing age probably wanted to just let the company hold its own with his name not attached to it as it once was. See if it'll manage and grow old like IBM (they came from the Hollerith era of computing.)

Jack Welch probably realised the same about GE. A CEO can only hold the company for so long. Company life cycle theory is quite interesting, and I'd like to see how Intel favors under it.

Put it another way. It's all about how well the company can do when the CEO jumps ship. Some CEO replacements were up to the task, like IBM's and GE's, whereas others might just sink. Does Intel need to be in every market it's in? Probably not.

How long they go on is a good question. Are they going to be like the 171-year-old Shell in Royal Dutch/Shell. Will they be swallowed up somewhere along the way like Seagate buying up Conner? Or will they just disappear...for a while (like Napster) or forever (like a dotcommer). Just think, only one of the original DJIA-30 is still on the DJIA-30 (if you exclude the years-ago hiatus). It's GE. Go figure.

--sean

Here is a paper written by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page the basic composition of google's search engine. You can find the article here. Makes for an interesting read and gives a little insight on what makes google tick.

I'm not sure how it's news, as it should generally be anticipated to occur naturally in gas giants, as mentioned in the article. There is a scant possibility that the phenomenon has not been observed before, or perhaps only observed in a very specific subset of conditions, which would lead to questions as to whether our understanding of the nature of gas giants is really valid.
The whole thing should really only be of interest to academics interested in this specific detail of thermodynamics. I don't see any practical reason why a lay person should care. Anyway, for a little more info on this, you can read http://www-sccm.stanford.edu/Students/witting/kh.h tml and if you find anything new and exciting, there's a very small wikipedia stub that could use expanding.

A nice article on retro-causation:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-backwa rds/

I have to agree that heat is a complicated subject and talking about a "heat particle" is a little silly but the phonon is a bad counter example. A phonon is "a quantized mode of vibration occurring in a rigid crystal lattice" - not a fundamental particle. The lattice itself is governed by electromagnetic interactions. The force carrier for electromagnetic interactions is the photon.