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Curse my clicky finger, I hit submit before previewing:

An amazing array of many of the apps listed above and lots more, all bundled up nicely in RPM format: Planet CCRMA

You can even use apt-get to pull them all down at once, like a distribution. It's pretty well maintained for updates and compatibility. If you're using Linux, I highly recommend this site. One of my personal favorite weirdo sound apps is Timemachine.

By the way, check out Rosegarden (mentioned above) but also take a good look at MUSE. I prefer it to Rosegarden, mostly because it tends to crash less, but they're both quite good.

Also, if using Linux and JACK (recommended), Qjackctl will save your sanity. Trust me on this one; JACK ain't worth suffering through on the command line.

Curse my clicky finger, I hit submit before previewing:

An amazing array of many of the apps listed above and lots more, all bundled up nicely in RPM format: Planet CCRMA

You can even use apt-get to pull them all down at once, like a distribution. It's pretty well maintained for updates and compatibility. If you're using Linux, I highly recommend this site. One of my personal favorite weirdo sound apps is Timemachine.

By the way, check out Rosegarden (mentioned above) but also take a good look at MUSE. I prefer it to Rosegarden, mostly because it tends to crash less, but they're both quite good.

Also, if using Linux and JACK (recommended), Qjackctl will save your sanity. Trust me on this one; JACK ain't worth suffering through on the command line.

Curse my clicky finger, I hit submit before previewing:

An amazing array of many of the apps listed above and lots more, all bundled up nicely in RPM format: Planet CCRMA

You can even use apt-get to pull them all down at once, like a distribution. It's pretty well maintained for updates and compatibility. If you're using Linux, I highly recommend this site. One of my personal favorite weirdo sound apps is Timemachine.

By the way, check out Rosegarden (mentioned above) but also take a good look at MUSE. I prefer it to Rosegarden, mostly because it tends to crash less, but they're both quite good.

Also, if using Linux and JACK (recommended), Qjackctl will save your sanity. Trust me on this one; JACK ain't worth suffering through on the command line.

Curse my clicky finger, I hit submit before previewing:

An amazing array of many of the apps listed above and lots more, all bundled up nicely in RPM format: Planet CCRMA

You can even use apt-get to pull them all down at once, like a distribution. It's pretty well maintained for updates and compatibility. If you're using Linux, I highly recommend this site. One of my personal favorite weirdo sound apps is Timemachine.

By the way, check out Rosegarden (mentioned above) but also take a good look at MUSE. I prefer it to Rosegarden, mostly because it tends to crash less, but they're both quite good.

Also, if using Linux and JACK (recommended), Qjackctl will save your sanity. Trust me on this one; JACK ain't worth suffering through on the command line.

Turing formulated the TM as a way to show that our formal axiomatic system for mathematics was undecidable (that is, there are statements whose truth values cannot be determined algorithmically).

Not quite. Kurt Godel demonstrated that mathematics (or any sufficiently powerful "formal system") was either complete (all valid statements are decidable) or inconsistent.

Turing demonstrated that -- assuming you want your system to be consistent -- there is no finite, deterministic method for determining whether a given statement in that system is decidable or not.

I.e., not only is mathematics "sullied" by these undecidable statements, but there is no way to neatly characterize them.

This was the last nail in the coffin of the Hilbert Program. (David Hilbert was a leading German mathematician of the early 20th century). Hilbert asserted that mathematics can be characterized as "an inventory of provable formulas", without possibility of inconsistency (i.e., it was not possible for 'A' and 'Not A' to be true at the same time). Godel proved that not all formulas are proveable. Turing destroyed any remaining hope by proving that there was no way cordone off the unprovable formulas.

The Turing Machine is arguably the theoretical foundation of computing.

So while you are correct that neither the idea of computers nor the first implementations of computers can be credited to Alan Turing, you might call him the father of the concept of programming.

Sorry, this is wrong in so many ways.

Turing wasn't Church's student for the very good and simple reason that

1. Church was in Princeton in the USA
2. Turing was in Cambridge, England.

They both came up with separate, original proofs that the entscheidungsproblem was not soluable at pretty much the same time; neither was aware of the other's work. Nor did they meet until after both papers had been published.

Obviously the two proofs were logically equivalent but they could not have been more different and it was Turing, not Church who produced the blueprint for the first computer: the universal machine which can compute everything which can be computed. Even today we say of processors and languages that they either are or are not 'Turing equivalent' meaning that they either are or are not equivalent to the machine 'U'.

Furthermore, Turing did not show that you could run the Lambda Calculus on U (although it was implicit, because U could run anything which could be computed, and Lambda Calculus can be computed, therefore U could run Lambda Calculus). It was John McCarthy who did that.

Sorry, this is wrong in so many ways.

Turing wasn't Church's student for the very good and simple reason that

1. Church was in Princeton in the USA
2. Turing was in Cambridge, England.

They both came up with separate, original proofs that the entscheidungsproblem was not soluable at pretty much the same time; neither was aware of the other's work. Nor did they meet until after both papers had been published.

Obviously the two proofs were logically equivalent but they could not have been more different and it was Turing, not Church who produced the blueprint for the first computer: the universal machine which can compute everything which can be computed. Even today we say of processors and languages that they either are or are not 'Turing equivalent' meaning that they either are or are not equivalent to the machine 'U'.

Furthermore, Turing did not show that you could run the Lambda Calculus on U (although it was implicit, because U could run anything which could be computed, and Lambda Calculus can be computed, therefore U could run Lambda Calculus). It was John McCarthy who did that.

But it's enough of an atmosphere to have weather, so I too would say that Mars is not "essentially airless".

• Monte Davidoff - co-author (along with Gates and Allen) of Microsoft/Altair BASIC
  
  
• Richard Stallman - Pioneer of open software movement/GNU
  
  
• Niklaus Wirth - PARC researcher responsible for Algol, Pascal, Modula-2, Laser Printers, and more
  
  
• Marvin Minsky - Built the first neural net AI in 1951
  
  
• Seymour Papert - Developer of LOGO and another AI pioneer
  
  
• Tommy Flowers - Built one of the earliest electronic computers, with the practical application of codebreaking during WWII
  
  
• Donald Knuth - Regarded by many as the "Father of Computer Science".
  
  
• Edsger Wybe Dijkstra - The guy leading the way to abolish the GOTO statement is surely a hall-of-famer!
  
  
• Konrad Zuse - Another early computer pioneer that due to politics and circumstances beyond his control was never able to be fully-recognized.
  
  
• Jeff Raskin - Creator of the Macintosh and pioneer in computer-human interfaces.
  

...and they run all the same software that you've become accustomed to under linux.

No they don't - CCRMA

Some of us would like to do more than server stuff with Linux.

As alluded in the "Note to Slashdot Editors" (thought they would prune that), I first want to emphasize I have NO relationships with the folks running this content - I just think it is hilarious, although it will certainly provide some insights into how Google works, and we'll see all sorts of whacky things from the SEO pro's - again, I am not one of 'em.

Second, I hadn't thought about Slashdot ranking 1st for the contest as some have suggested - now that would be a crackup! Unfortunately, Slashdot won't allow you to place in IMG tag in a post (a requirement of the contest is a small image on the page), plus I'm not a member of the SearchGuild, so I'm not elgible ... maybe Cmdr Taco or Timothy need an iPod and/or 17" LCD - go for it! ;-)

Third, you know the folk at Google have gotten wind of this contest, and if I were them, I'd put a link on the main page to their own nigritude ultramarine page. I.e. Google should NOT tinker with their algorithms, but with a link from their PR10 main page, that certainly should shoot 'em up in the rankings. I gotta wonder if the pre-IPO Google would do this - we'll see with the "new" Google ;-)

Fourth, I appreciate some of the comments from folks about my Christmas Lights and the Christmas Webcam with webcontrol (yes, you can turn the lights ON and OFF via the web) which actually been on Slashdot before - in fact, you can read my Slashdot Effect Analysis from last year. I assure you it should be MUCH more interesting this year, as due to some multi-threaded optimizations, I think I'll be able to reduce the throttle from minimum 5-second updates to 1-second updates. I'm going to have to be REALLY NICE to my neighbors, 'cause it will be quite the flickering light show in December/2004 ... although I usually fire it up for a test-run in October as part of my Halloween Decorations and Lights.

alek

P.S. One thing slight off-topic is the Google Compute project which I thought I mention to those Slashdotters with idle CPU time that want to help the Stanford Folding@Home project - this really is a good cause.

It's a good idea if your datasets take a long enough time to process. You could run 6 or so cards (maybe 1 AGP super fast, 5 PCI slowish (eg FX5200)) in your machine and send a dataset to each GPU and the main CPU, then get the results back. The trick is to keep them working without blowing all your bandwidth or PSU. Also depends on the resolution required, because the GPU is only 32 bits FP, compared to 80 bits for the CPU.

All I can suggest is download the Brook libraries and try it out. See if it helps, and see if the results are accurate enough. And yes, Fortran can be used if you can bind it - Intel's compiler suite worked for me.

BrookGPU
from the BrookGPU website...
As the programmability and performance of modern GPUs continues to increase, many researchers are looking to graphics hardware to solve problems previously performed on general purpose CPUs. In many cases, performing general purpose computation on graphics hardware can provide a significant advantage over implementations on traditional CPUs. However, if GPUs are to become a powerful processing resource, it is important to establish the correct abstraction of the hardware; this will encourage efficient application design as well as an optimizable interface for hardware designers.

From what I understand this project it aimed at making an abstraction layer for GUP hardware so writing code to run on it is easier and standardsied.

> How could one hope to extract a certain few bits from a recording when
> the CPU's instruction throughput is many times that?

The few bits you're trying to extract may have an observable influence on global statistics, especially when you can affect the value of some other bits. See for example Boneh and Brumley's timing attack on OpenSSL.

Intercepting the OpenGL calls from non-modified OpenGL applications and rendering them to walls and CAVEs is a nice trick.

If this interests you at all, you also need to check out the open source Chromium project, which can do that, and much, much more. While it doesn't have the event tracking that VRiser appears to have, it has the ability to render to tiled displays, stereo displays, CAVES, do distributed sort-last compositing, OpenGL stream modification on the fly, parallel OpenGL submission, and a heck of a lot more. It supports high-speed cluster interconnects such as Myrinet, Quadrics, and Infiniband. It's also pretty easy to add your own OpenGL modification if you want to do something special.

As an example, check out this project that uses Chromium to split up live Quake games into an external isometric view.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the Chromium developers, and my Lab helps pay the external developers to write this open source tool.)

Even error-correcting memory may suffer an uncorrected failure in the multi-year lifespan of a disk. I don't know if RAM would be more reliable byte-for-byte than platters. In fact, I think either one has an MTBF on the order of a few years for typical sizes, and disks are a lot larger.

Disks are so much cheaper than you can simply have mirrors and backups. Buy ten disks, and put them in mirrorred pairs. Use something like rdiff-backup to make backups and you can likely keep every version of your filesystem for the last year.

You need to protect against user error and software failure, not just hardware failure. Accidental deletion is far more common than drive failure, and only some kind of backup or snapshot system will protect you against that.

Subsurface scattering is quite old - I learned about it in my graphics classes, and I've been out of school since 1996... here's a 1993 paper on it.

He points out on his web page "Photon mapping is quite good at simulating subsurface scattering, but it becomes costly for highly scattering materials such as milk and skin. For these materials it is better to use a diffusion approximation. The diffusion approximation is much faster than tracing individual photons, and it is simple enough that a BSSRDF can be formulated."

Here's a BSSRDF from a google search.

Subsurface scattering is quite old - I learned about it in my graphics classes, and I've been out of school since 1996... here's a 1993 paper on it.

He points out on his web page "Photon mapping is quite good at simulating subsurface scattering, but it becomes costly for highly scattering materials such as milk and skin. For these materials it is better to use a diffusion approximation. The diffusion approximation is much faster than tracing individual photons, and it is simple enough that a BSSRDF can be formulated."

Here's a BSSRDF from a google search.

Actually, this technique uses sub-surface scattering to accurately model the light transport characteristics of human skin.

Henrik has been a pioneer in developing efficient techniques for representing BSSRDF (bidirectional sub-surface scattering distribution functions).

This paper that he published in collaboration with other notable people at Stanford was among the first to describe methods of calculating the effects of sub-surface scattering.

Actually, this technique uses sub-surface scattering to accurately model the light transport characteristics of human skin.

Henrik has been a pioneer in developing efficient techniques for representing BSSRDF (bidirectional sub-surface scattering distribution functions).

This paper that he published in collaboration with other notable people at Stanford was among the first to describe methods of calculating the effects of sub-surface scattering.

The problem with this reasoning is that these are "invented facts" as opposed to "discovered facts."

Except that most of the information on the AP CS exams aren't invented facts. They are basing the questions off parts of a standardised language, which they most certainly didn't create. I suppose the exact, verbatim text of the questions might be copyrighted, but that wouldn't apply to the fact that they asked you a question about a certain fact (does anyone even remember the verbatim text of test questions? I know I almost always just remember what a question covered, not the exact wording used).

You might be able to make a case for the Case Study code, since it's not part of the standard, but that's it. And even that's tenuous, what with the Case Study being released to the public and used in CS curriculums all over the US. It's available for download from the College Board site, and I know for a fact that the code came with one of the editions of CodeWarrior.

The only thing the College Board could sue you for regarding the case study would be for republishing verbatim code without their consent, but that wouldn't bar one from talking about the Case Study, only from copying the exact code used. And even there, fair use guidelines apply. I could be wrong about the exact number, but IIRC, fair use allows for up to 10% of the original material to be copied and requires that the work be used for certain purposes (i.e. comment, criticism, and parody--comment certainly applies here).

The problem with this reasoning is that these are "invented facts" as opposed to "discovered facts."

Except that most of the information on the AP CS exams aren't invented facts. They are basing the questions off parts of a standardised language, which they most certainly didn't create. I suppose the exact, verbatim text of the questions might be copyrighted, but that wouldn't apply to the fact that they asked you a question about a certain fact (does anyone even remember the verbatim text of test questions? I know I almost always just remember what a question covered, not the exact wording used).

You might be able to make a case for the Case Study code, since it's not part of the standard, but that's it. And even that's tenuous, what with the Case Study being released to the public and used in CS curriculums all over the US. It's available for download from the College Board site, and I know for a fact that the code came with one of the editions of CodeWarrior.

The only thing the College Board could sue you for regarding the case study would be for republishing verbatim code without their consent, but that wouldn't bar one from talking about the Case Study, only from copying the exact code used. And even there, fair use guidelines apply. I could be wrong about the exact number, but IIRC, fair use allows for up to 10% of the original material to be copied and requires that the work be used for certain purposes (i.e. comment, criticism, and parody--comment certainly applies here).

• The Art of Computer Programming

For aspiring CS students, check out Concrete Mathematics by Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik.

It's based on a sort of "essential math for CS majors" course Knuth designed at Stanford when he realized people weren't getting any discrete mathematics preparation in high school.

Given the nature of CS, discrete mathematics are probably the key, though I think a grounding in algebra, the Calculus, and topology is essential too.

As a final plug, I'm fond of Feynman's Lectures on Computation both because I'm a Feynman fan and because I think it's useful to understand the physical basis of what you're doing. Most of his particular examples are dated (at one point he talks about this "revolutionary new technology called CMOS") but the principles and techniques he goes over are evergreen.

This was the topic of Jeffrey Ullman's Knuth prize lecture [stanford.edu]. Well worth reading.

Beats me, but there's a paper if you're interested.

Note: raytracers can be slow, but doubling the complexity of the scene does not double the rendering time, as with scanline renderers, assuming the raytracer uses a reasonable bounding volume system.

-jim

This is what you get when the staff's doing it the Stanford way, thanks to Orkut. Orkut started the whole "invite and hype" model with the service of same name, and continues this policy today under Gmail. If anything, it'd do good to come clean before people who have enough clout to force it to happen, no matter what your euphemism or excuse is, given your common denominator. Obviously, they need to read up on true security, versus putting the backbone of things on close circles that are easily broken when people start bragging about them. Refer to Operation Fastlink, something that would definitely clean house out of Orkut, and Google if applied to them. If you are going to run a private service, dont advertise.

While we're on the topic of real-life PacMan,

A Cross-Dressing Stanford Ms. Pacman

Berkeley students can never resist the temptation of poking fun at the 'other school'...

However, fair use standards CLEARLY state that consumers are allowed to view copyrighted work however they please, as long as they have paid for it. There is no law or statute that allows copyright holders to force consumers to view their work only on certain devices.

Where do they say this so clearly? I'm afraid you are only familiar with fair use rhetoric and not the actual law. Please consult EFF's Fair Use faq or better still Stanford's Fair Use resource page.

To whit, all fair use legally defines thus far is the ability to briefly use snippets of creative work for one of 6 categories.

The only legal extension that has occurred is under the VHS-Sony-Betamax court case the court argued that time shifting VHS material was a fair use.

Outside of that there is no other fair use legalese language. It's all an "implied" sort of thing based on copyright law that has not been tested substantially in court.

Broadcasting is "we broadcast it and you listen", and there's no automatic right to tape records off the radio.

There IS.

It's part of the 'fair use' concept:

"Personal use also permits music fans to make "mix tapes" or compilations of their favorite songs from their own personal music collection or the radio for their own personal enjoyment in a more convenient format. [...] They do not have the right, however, to make their music collections available to others by uploading them onto the Internet for public downloading."

So as long as you're not sharing your recordings that you make off of public broadcasts, you are legal.

More info: http://fairuse.stanford.edu

The Hulkster

If you're going to run any of these kinds of distributed clients, then you should run Folding@Home instead. The fruits of this work might just help save yours or a loved one's life someday.

Please show me a computer programmer that can apply Grice's maxims of conversational implicature. See http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist230a/grice.p df for examples, such as:

Archie: Do you have your bike with you?
Betty: I walked in today.

Archie: I'm gonna flunk this course.
Betty: Sure, just like you flunk every course you take.

Archie: Boys will be boys.

Just a little nag.. the correct mereological problem is "Theseus's Ship," not "Ulysses's Ship".

/philosophy dork

To see the implications of this, consider that people on a team--no matter how assembled--tend to regard their teammates as smarter than those not on the team. In light of the social roles of computers, a reasonable question might then be: Would individuals "teamed" with a computer think that the computer is smarter than would computer users not on a team?

In an experiment, individuals were told that they were being teamed with a computer to solve a task. (How do you foster team identity when the team consists of a human and a computer? You declare the pair "The Blue Team," give the human a blue wristband, decorate the computer with a blue border, and place a "Blue Team" label on top. I'm not making this up.) The human member of each team then worked with the computer to solve the problem. Other individuals received the same responses from the computer in solving the task, but were not told they were on a team. Those teamed with the computer rated the computer as more helpful and insightful than those who were not.

Through numerous other experiments, Nass and his colleagues have shown that computer "personality" and other factors can be manipulated to elicit positive responses to computers by their users. (One experiment demonstrated that humans seem to be suckers for computer-generated flattery.) For AI researchers, Nass made the point that users can be encouraged to perceive computers as intelligent through social strategies that have little to do with intelligence.

Those interested in learning more might read The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places in which Nass and Byron Reeves describe 35 experiments.

For those who haven't read - there is an article written by Brin and Page - maybe a little outdated, but still interesting: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Agreed. I'm hoping the group which put this thing together releases the plans they came up with. It'd be really interesting to see how they reasoned it out. Anyone know if they've published anything?

Funny this comes up after seeing yesterday's steampunk link on /.

The distributed backup system you just described is also followed by the Lockss library/publishing model.

You have to conduct a case by case analysis every single time.

That's true. The particular considerations are your purpose, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount used, and the effect on the market. More info here.

Seems like Stanford has those things just lying around eh?

SLAC - At night the ice weasels come... (And some guys are hang around outside checkin' out their BMW motorcycle.)

Peter has lots of ghostly photos from outside and inside SLAC

Seems like Stanford has those things just lying around eh?

SLAC - At night the ice weasels come... (And some guys are hang around outside checkin' out their BMW motorcycle.)

Peter has lots of ghostly photos from outside and inside SLAC

I mean, the guy was describing the sound of a pipe organ for two pages.

Don't ever read Donald Knuth's homepage.

Maybe I'm too much of an English major

A scarce resource around Slashdot.

There are a lot of reasons that I like Stephenson's writing, but here's a simple good one. I can read about technology from Stephenson without feeling that my intelligence is being insulted. Most writers (and that includes science fiction writers) just plain don't understant computers very well, and make very silly assumptions that techies have to drag themselves through, rolling their eyes as they go. It breaks the illusion. Stephenson doesn't do that.

From the article A Near-Perfect Gyroscope provided by another poster:

"Mechanically, the 1.5-inch diameter rotors are within 40 atomic layers (0.3 millionths of an inch) of a perfect sphere, rounder than anything within many light-years distance from us....Only neutron stars are rounder."

Now I know that here on slashdot such things as neutron stars are always only a synapse or two away from our collective consciousness, but I have to say that reading those words sent a shiver up my spine. A sentence that would feel right at home in an Iain M. Banks novel is being used to describe something happening right now.

Cool.

If they do detect a signal, I suspect it will be more of a testament to the power of experimental precision rather than a test of GR, which practically every serious physicist believes to be correct.

That's the whole point - if they prove the effect, then we no longer have to 'believe' it to be correct :)

I know, I know - it'll still only be a theory, but it'll have yet more experimental evidence confirming it, which is a good thing(TM).

It's also worth noting that if nothing is seen, it's more likely than not due to the difficulty of detecting such a small signal.

True, but they do believe they can do it. I had a read of their 'so what's it all about' document (PDF) and it's a fascinating experiment. If you scaled the 1.5" spheres up to the size of the earth, the largest imperfections would be 8 feet high!

I wish them all the best...

Mark

without the exclusivity period, you'll have a very hard time getting Principal Investigators to spend years of their lives dedicated to designing and building an instrument and flying it. (And that same exclusivity period applies to virtually all scientific endeavors, regardless of how funded BTW.)

I do not have an argument against the exclusivity period per se. Just that in certain instances it may serve the greater public good not to have it.

So much as finding Principal Investigators who will spend their lives dedicated to designing and building an instrument and flying it goes, science follows fundamental economic principles as much as anything else. It is a question of supply and demand, and economic motivation. Saying that science is outside of the sphere of "economic influence" is naive.

In other words, it is the golden rule. Whoever has the gold makes the rules. You have heard it before.

Believe what you will, reality remains the same regardless. It's not a simple as making a single gyro reading and comparing it to the theory

Or in other words, the public is not as good at "statistical massaging" that scientists may be. I would have to agree on that point.

You are right, they have an *idea*. What they don't have is solid data. They don't know precisely how the gravitational effects of the Sun and Moon will effect the readings. The don't know how galactic rotation will effect the readings. They don't know the precise effects of the precession of the orbit... It will take thousands of measurements across a span of months and years to get enough data to make the statistical analysis and to determine what are residual effects, what are dynamic effects, and what is an actual measurement of frame dragging.

Please, don't try to surround the experiment in a "scientific fog" to justify hiding the gyro data from the public. Frame dragging is predicted to be 42 milliarc-seconds/year.

I am quite sure that the scientists in charge of this project have the capability to know instantaneously how the actual gyro spin compares to this predicted value. And they should start to see a trend develope by three months.

The experiment will not take "years". The duration for this mission is sixteen months. The gyros are not going to be wildly thrown about by all the things you suggest, or they would not send the experiment up in the first place.

Sorry, I saw you plam that card and attempt to shift the claim from your original 'their are critics of Einstein's theories' to simply being a critique of frame dragging. Your arguement is based on false pretenses.

Plam?? oh, you meant "palm". The whole entire point of this thread and my parent post is that Einstein is placed on such a high pedestal that he has been placed beyond the reach of any scientific criticism, regardless as to its veracity and origin.

There is not one shred of evidence that Einstein wasn't right, and none of his critics have been able to supply a theory that both explains the measured and detected results.....

And in some instances there is not a shred evidence that he was right either. From this website;

Einstein forever altered our thinking about space, time and the Universe, but some of his most basic ideas remain untested and bafflingly at odds with the rest of modern physics.

So that is the whole point of doing the experiment in the first place. My contention is not the quality of any particular Einstein critic, but that to criticize Einstein is not acceptable by any member of the current scientific establishment.

Because of this I believe that there is distinct possibility for experimental bias affecting the results of this experiment in a manner that would promote Einstein theories rather than provide an objective analysis of the experimental evidence. Hence my suggestion that the data be published in realtime to promote scientifi

It's a pretty fascinating experiment, although it seems like a lot of money to spend just for testing his theory. I think that recent missions to mars were a bit more interesting.

Stanford has a great overview of the mission. It's in pdf format.

The most facinating tidbit from the NASA article is the absoutely beyond perfect Niobium-coated Quartz spheres at the heart of the ultra-precise gyroscopes.

A quick Google found this link with more cool details, including:

* The 1.5-inch diameter rotors are within 40 atomic layers (0.3 millionths of an inch) of a perfect sphere.

* "Electrical sphericity" must be held to parts in ten million.

* Each rotor spins inside a quartz housing with clearances to the rotor of barely one thousandth of an inch.

* To lift the rotor on earth takes 1,000V. In space, only a fraction of a volt is needed.

* In 1,000 years the gyroscope should barely lose 1% of its starting speed.

* To isolate the gyroscope from the Earth's magnetic field, it will be shrouded in four layers of lead balloons, plus an outer shield of iron.

Plus these cool facts (and a ton more), there are steampunk-styled drawings of the manufacturing process.

Seems like NASA could make some money selling the rejects (you know there are plenty) as the ultimate shooters!

What are you doing up so early in the morning besides posting to slashdot? Or haven't you gone to bed yet?

1) The scientific community is largely based on recognition of accomplishment. You may feel that the taxpayers should get the data, but you'd be acting in haste. You're paying the scientists salaries so that *they* can make important discoveries, not *you*.

I don't see how publishing the data realtime for this important experiment would hurt anybody except for maybe a few scientists who want to climb the scientific career totem pole. I'm sure that if there was enough concern about this, scientists could be found who were less "territorial," and wouldn't mind publishing a paper even though the data was made available realtime.

Considering that $700 million dollars of the public's money was spent on this thing, maybe a compromise could be made. Maybe they could find somebody like the late Carl Sagan to show up in six months and tell us whether the probe is finding frame dragging or not. They should be able to spot a trend by then.

It's easy to plot out mean values of raw data and compare them to theory. In that case, you're right. There are many, many people out there that would love to determine for themselves if they understand the mathematics of this experiment enough to analyze the data. However, The real experiment is determining to what extent their data can be 'trusted'. In order to do this, they must factor in the sensitivity of *every* piece of equipment used to collect any portion of the data, as well as all of the natural statistical errors that coincide with an experiment of this nature.

Yes and no. First, this satellite has been designed at great expense a thousand different ways of left and right to prevent noise. The builders have have even advertised that the space inside the gyros is going to be the quietest place anywhere, acoustically and electrically. It has been advertised as equivalent to being able to measure the width of a human hair at ten miles and frame dragging to an accuracy of 1%. That's their words, not mine.

If the probe is going to be that accurate, then it should be pretty obvious what forces are acting on the gyros (if there are any).

I would imagine that most of the data collected in experiments of this nature would look like noise to any scientist who did not also have (possibly classified) knowledge of the nature of the instruments being used to collect the data

This is my point. If the data from the probe looks like noise, and given the fact that it should easily detect frame dragging, what is there to be afraid of? Do they need to "statistically massage" the data to get the desired result? What are they protecting? Does the public need protecting from the natural phenonema of the universe? Are they using alien technology from area 51? Or maybe Einstein is right no matter what.

Maybe they spent that 700 million on keggers every saturday for fourty years and all they are sending up is some neat looking nickel plated ping pong balls. After all, it was a bunch of naked guys at the pool who invented it.

Admittedly I'm being difficult. And every scientist on the planet is going to be watching this thing anyway. It will be an understatement to say that it will be interesting to see what will happen.

Anyway, I never said mine was the majority opinion. You obviously have faith in the scientific profession as it currently stands. In many instances it works and it produces important and useful results.

But occasionally the method and the results leave something to be desired.