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You lefties are pro science, right?

From the PDF:

According to radiation safety experts, radiation exposures of 5 - 10 rem (5,000 - 10,000 mrem or 50 - 100 mSv) usually result in no harmful health effects, because radiation below these levels is a minor contributor to our overall cancer risk.

Safety recommendations are designed to keep your dose as low as possible.

It takes a large dose of radiation - more than 75 rem (75,000 mrem or 750 mSv) - in a short amount of time (usually minutes to hours) to cause immediate health effects, such as acute radiation sickness.

What does a physics lab have to say on the topic?

http://sbhepnt.physics.sunysb.edu/~rijssenbeek/RadiationSafety.html

The first detectable effect is a minor change in the blood count. As the cumulative dose increases in magnitude, the effects become more observable. Examples of expected effects versus radiation dose include:

25 Rad: Onset of minor observable blood changes

100 Rad: May observe radiation sickness symptoms (nausea, diarrhea)

250 Rad: Possible hair loss

450 Rad: Established lethal dose LD50/30 - (Without medical aid: 50% mortality within 30 days)

tl; dr version:

ZOMG! The EPA is saying there is no reason to panic over radiation doses less than half the dose that causes effects in your body that medical science is able to detect!

Here's what would happen if they found one on an actual collision course, administration be damned. This is a very good story, but if you're in a hurry, find: "brusquely". I doubt that Bruce Willis could actually do that much.

The premise is different obviously, but the human panic and destruction would be similar. Nature would provide much more fireworks than humans though. Maybe those SHTF bunkers might be useful after all!

Oh, and if you're in the dark already and can't read: here.

Read this http://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/sur...
A nice bit of research on the origins of the naming of 'America'. Even the Hungarians get a say on this as well as the Welsh. :)

Its probably possible to create a compiler mode that will compile bounds checking code into existing C programs.

It's somewhat possible, but not possible to do for general C programs. The CCured project has done something like this, but like I said it isn't fully general even for programs that are technically legal C. Many programs aren't and rely on specific implementations of certain undefined behaviors -- e.g. the Linux kernel needs to disable GCC's optimizations based on the strict aliasing rule, and that would almost certainly break a lot of approaches along the line of CCured.

C is a very poorly behaved language from a formal verification standpoint.

Keep track isn't hard. Telco's already have optimisation for tcp re-delivery from the mobile gateway so that the distant sender doesn't have to re-send the missing packet, the telco can do that.

This service improves tcp performance over a mobile network and is important for customer retention.

Maybe not all telco's do it but I doubt it.

http://www.iith.ac.in/~tbr/teaching/docs/transport_protocols.pdf
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~jgao/CSE370-spring06/lecture17.pdf

There's good tutorial about DSLs in Prolog here:

http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~warren/xsbbook/node10.html

this one http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/TALKS/Australis/wmap.jpg ?

I really don't want to be an asshole about anything. but you should clearly see that this particular 2198xsmth image from wmap is actually not that detailed. It has more pixels, but the information contained is less than the one in the Planck picture. at least, that's the way I see them, and the human eye is usually good to tell this kind of things.

"Evolution of Communication in Perfect and Imperfect Worlds "
http://sunysb.edu/philosophy//faculty/pgrim/pgrim_publications.html
http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/pgrim/evolution.htm
"We extend previous work on cooperation to some related questions regarding the evolution of simple forms of communication. The evolution of cooperation within the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma has been shown to follow different patterns, with significantly different outcomes, depending on whether the features of the model are classically perfect or stochastically imperfect (Axelrod 1980a, 1980b, 1984, 1985; Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981; Nowak and Sigmund, 1990, 1992; Sigmund 1993). Our results here show that the same holds for communication. Within a simple model, the evolution of communication seems to require a stochastically imperfect world. "

"Evolution of Communication in Perfect and Imperfect Worlds "
http://sunysb.edu/philosophy//faculty/pgrim/pgrim_publications.html
http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/pgrim/evolution.htm
"We extend previous work on cooperation to some related questions regarding the evolution of simple forms of communication. The evolution of cooperation within the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma has been shown to follow different patterns, with significantly different outcomes, depending on whether the features of the model are classically perfect or stochastically imperfect (Axelrod 1980a, 1980b, 1984, 1985; Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981; Nowak and Sigmund, 1990, 1992; Sigmund 1993). Our results here show that the same holds for communication. Within a simple model, the evolution of communication seems to require a stochastically imperfect world. "

Have you looked at Wikipedia?

You can try some ideas from books already available in print as well as in electronic versions.
SICP
Stony Brook Algorithm Repository

Here's a simplified Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment
http://tonic.physics.sunysb.edu/~dteaney/F07_modern/lectures/mlab1_michelson.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson-Morley_experiment
http://www.wikinfo.org/index.php/Michelson-Morley_experiment

How about building your own Radio Telescope
http://www.radiotelescopebuilder.com/

For that matter you could get them to build their own Dobsonian although the physics there isn't too hard (basic optics), especially if you don't hand figure the mirror. There's also a large metalwork or woodwork component that might not be considered relevant.

Here are some really good astronomy tutorials (though the prac work is done with simulated software). You might be able to modify them to something more practical
http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~marschal/clea/CLEAhome.html

Some of the topics covered by the above
Radio Astronomy of Pulsars
Astrometry of Asteroids
The Revolution of the Moons of Jupiter
The Rotation of Mercury by The Doppler Effect
Photoelectric Photometry of the Pleiades
Spectral Classification of Stars
The Hubble RedShift-Distance Relation
The Flow of Energy Out of the Sun
The Quest for Object X
Jupiter's Moons and the Speed of Light: The Classic Roemer Experiment

There are books and web pages out there....many tend to be geared to highschool, then there are some that would require you to up your insurance...so you'll have to sift through them

http://physics.about.com/od/physicsexperiments/tp/experimentbooks.htm
http://www.educypedia.be/education/physicsexperiments.htm

If you do it properly will will get a nice set of multidimensional objects and fact/attribute tables which are orthogonal and lean. Easy to understand, search, join, build, compose, decompose, signal and track.

I'm led to believe it's not that easy, but I'd love to be shown wrong.

Also, SQL is a nightmare

I agree, and I think one of the interesting questions is why we don't have something better, or even just something else. There are probably millions of man-hours put into ORM or QBE layers, some with their own hacked-up query languages... that are eventually re-written as an SQL query. But as far as I know, despite the fact that we have open source databases, despite the fact that storage engines aren't married to queries... we don't have any other query languages directly supported by the database (unless, I don't know, is QUEL still supported by Postgres?).

Where's D? Why not have Prolog (or a tabled prolog if you're worried about unbounded queries)? Given the fecundity of the field with regards to all kinds of different programming languages, I don't understand why there seems to have to be One Query Language(TM).

And there are tons more use cases than that! My research group has a complete plugin system already implemented for GCC, and I've written a few plugins for it.

I've got plugins that put hooks in for all sorts of variable access, function call and lock events so I can put in custom debugging code. My current project involves collecting statistics and detailed logs for these events in the Linux kernel.

Because the compiler knows so much data-flow and type information, we also think that these plugins could be perfect for sophisticated static analyses.

Also, it's funny that another poster suggested trippy visualizations, since one of the projects in the group just so happens to be a visualization! It's not the trippy kind though. Actually, it shows you control flow graphs after compilation and lets you drill down into the compiled representation (a 3-address code known as GIMPLE). It's designed as a tool to aid in debugging new plugins, but it may also be useful for people who want to learn about compilers or people trying to figure out how to write code that optimizes better.

Check out the paper:
http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/docs/gccplugins-gccsummit2007/index.html

What, do they come with LaTeX files or something?

Actually, the CalTech prof who's most prominently featured in the article makes his book available in PDF and MS Word format. He has the link to the Word file labeled "Source Code," so he obviously groks the open-source concept and is trying to do something similar. Of course Word is a proprietary format, but it's a proprietary format with pretty darn good OSS support.

Quite a few free textbooks do come with latex source code. Examples: [1], [2], [3], [4].

For the Windows boxes I use at home, I have the A/V software set to scan only on write or modify, and exclude certain files that get written to a lot but are very unlikely to carry an infection (e.g., log files). Using this setup, files are generally only scanned a few times (depending on how the download and install system uses temporary space), but the system is still just as protected.

Well, some paranoids would argue that by doing so, you're still vulnerable to any threat between the last write to a file and the latest signature file update. An on-open scan which compares the date of the last "on-write-scan" with the date of the signature update would plug the hole.

another interesting approach is AvFS which tries to integrate virus scanning inside a file system layer and to scan the data on the fly as it is loaded (thus not blocking the execution for a long time while a huge file is accessed but scanning data as it is streamed from the underlying file system - should fix all the "drawing an installer's icon freezes the desktop" situations).

This wouldn't work if you don't really have control over the system, and someone evil came in and turned off the A/V and then loaded a virus. Just in case, though, I have scheduled full drive scans run weekly during low use hours.

Well, a physical access is a guaranteed way to compromise a system anyway. Though I don't know if you can trust the scanner once the system is compromised : several viruses are well known for hiding themselves from scan (and some do even intercept updater's access to the web and prevent downloading a signature definition of that virus - the antivirus always report a clean system but that's only because its signature file is corrupted). I think scanning from a bootable media (CD-R, usb key) would probably be more reliable.

I have never read a reputable article that shows organic to be any healthier for the consumer or the environment

Organics' not any healthier than conventional food? Face Off: Organic vs. Conventional. "Since 2001 more than 40 studies comparing the nutrient content of organic and conventional foods have been published. From those and some earlier studies, the Organic Center identified 236 scientifically-valid head-to-head match ups between an organic food and a conventional one. The nutrients included antioxidants (total phenolics, total antioxidant capacity, quercetin and kaempferol), three precursors of key vitamins (Vitamins A, C, and E), two minerals (potassium and phosphorous) and total protein."

Next, environment. So you haven't heard about estrogen mimics that mess with the reproduction of fish, alligators, and other wildlife?

I do not know if it's a new data structure or not, but while I was searching the definition of "sparse voxel octrees" in order to understand what is the article about, I hit this article from 1993 that speaks about how octrees are one of the best ways to represent spatial data for 3d rendering applications:

Volume Graphics

I have the impression that sparse voxel octrees is not a new data structure at all, but it has been neglected by the industry because of technological limitations. Now that these issues are resolved, perhaps the next step in 3d graphics are sparse voxel octrees.

Yes, this is known as the Anthropic Principle.

Actually (and this is drifting even FURTHER off topic, heh), America wasn't named after Amerigo Vespucci. For a long time it's thought it was that way, but unless someone is a royal or a leader then a place they discover is named after their LAST name (so it would have been named Vespuccia if it was named after he) - take a look at other examples... Cook Straits, Magellan Straits etc.

The man they think America was actually named after was Richard Amerike, a merchant from Bristol in the UK who traded and shipped supplies to people in Newfoundland.

More info here

Here is a bunch of links about Computer Ethics from when I was researching about it. The google video link (last one on this list) is particularly interesting. Computer ethics is actually a university research topic! http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/cei_hp.htm http://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/ http://www.southernct.edu/organizations/rccs/resources/teaching/teaching_mono/moor/moor_definition.html http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-computer/ http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/ProfessionalEthics.html http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hackers.html http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=4279094 http://cyberethics.cbi.msstate.edu/ http://www.oekonux.org/texts/copykillsmusic.html http://www.progilibre.com/Open-Source-Alternative-ou-fausse-route-_a350.html http://www.osalt.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License http://creativecommons.org/ http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html http://www.itc.virginia.edu/policy/ethics.html http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/overview/Ten_Commanments_of_Computer_Ethics.htm http://www.acm.org/serving/se/code.htm http://www.ieee.org/portal/site http://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=-3088012854941915784&q=computer+ethics

First, create a uniquely named empty directory on each drive. Next, set up a Linux
file server running Samba to be used as a proxy to access the distributed storage
on the Windows machines. Finally create a union of all the empty directories using UnionFS :

http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-unionfs.html/

Problem solved.

jdb2

jimicus wrote:
> Seeing as ClamAV doesn't have a daemon mode

The stackable filesystem team (the ones who wrote Unionfs) put together a filesystem that uses ClamAV to perform on-access virus scanning in the kernel.

jimicus wrote:
> Seeing as ClamAV doesn't have a daemon mode

The stackable filesystem team (the ones who wrote Unionfs) put together a filesystem that uses ClamAV to perform on-access virus scanning in the kernel.

I don't agree with that. Especially with the more advanced kits which have more unique parts.

When I got LEGO sets, I usually spent time building the models from the included instructions... which not only was awesome because the models were great, but it also helped me understand how any new parts worked.

For example, one of the most advanced sets I ever got was a moderately large rescue helicopter model (alternate was a hovercraft/swamp boat thing... not quite as cool). New parts for me in this set included (as I fondly remember) a ball joint, universal joints, and flexible cables with ball and socket joints.

Here's a pic I found of it... http://www.chem.sunysb.edu/msl/LEGO/8856a.jpg

The joystick in the cockpit actually tilted the main rotor while it spun, the winch on the side worked, and the landing gear retracted. It was awesome.

The point is, this kind of model easily demonstrated how these various parts are used, and building them provides a lot of useful practice for when you inevitably disassemble them and make something of your own imagination. Just about the only parts from that model I never really used anywhere else were the seats.
=Smidge=

You still haven't produced the code for COSA, its been more than a month. Do you have it?

You still haven't stopped kissing ass?

That wasn't the answer to the question, where is the code to COSA, or is more BS?

Oh, the physics god, eh? Sorry, I don't worship time-travel-believing crackpots. ahahaha...

The I assume you will be showing some experimental evidence that refutes SR? Also see answer to questions #1,5,7,10,11,12,17, and probably some others. Just like the code to COSA? see answer to question #8 (especially regarding artificial intelligence and the bible.)

Are you a quack?

It's better to be a quack than an ass kisser, any day. ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha...

Whose ass am I kissing? I have nothing to gain here except the pleasure in debunking a quack. Also see answer to #26

So to sum things up: You have no verifiable evidence to backup your "Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics". And you don't have any code to backup your COSA vaporware. If you want to put me in my place all you have to do is come up with an answer these 2 little items. Simple?

You still haven't produced the code for COSA, its been more than a month. Do you have it?

A time dimension is crackpottery.

I suggest you read Relativity by Albert Einstein. He explains Special Relativity in simple mathematics that even somebody who has taken Algebra in US public school system can understand.

Read Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics and get the facts.

I will refer you to the following questionnaire: Are you a quack?

I was also disappointed to not have the package/link to the software mentioned. I'm pretty sure that this article, posted Aug 3,2007, can provide a bit more detail - there they use MediCAD:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/07073 0173404.htm
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~vislab/papers/Xin_ISMRM. pdf - paper from Thomas Jefferson University and Stony Brook University

Other posters here note the concept is not unique; but perhaps using it for surgical procedures regularly, rather than pure research, might be a 'first.' Thanks for the other link, I'll pass that along to our imaging folk as well. Still looking to see if either place has a page up for it.

I read the paper by Walborn et al. http://grad.physics.sunysb.edu/~amarch/Walborn.pdf and can only conclude that it is possible to transmit data between two obervers by carrying out the described "double-slit quantum eraser experiment" but nowhere I could find at what speed this communication would be.

Read the article and just think of this:

It is clear that the observer behind the double-slit window with quarter wave plates (observer #1) will detect an interference pattern (wave-like behaviour) as long as the entangled photon detected by observer #2 gets polarised and can therefore not give any information about which path the photon took through the double-slit window (by comparing polarization of both received signals).

In case the entangled photon detected by observer #2 remains UNpolarised the information could be used to derive which path the photon took through the double-slit window. Because of this the wave function will collapse and observer #1 will NOT see the interference pattern (which is particle-like behaviour).

By letting observer #1 switch the polariser in front of the detector "on" and "off" the interference pattern measured by observer #2 should then in turn respectively "appear" and "disappear" DISREGARDING the distance between observer #1 and #2.

BUT... does this indicate a faster than light communication between the two observers by means of just switching on/off a polariser on one side and measuring an interference pattern on the other?
It seems to me that the "communication" between the two entangled photons is instantaneous as if there was no physical distance between them. But to be able to construct a graph with the interference pattern (or lack thereof) you will need information from BOTH observers. The only way to get information from observer #1 and #2 to construct the interference graph is by using a normal/classical communication channel which is still limited by the speed of light.

Please correct me if I'm wrong!

Disclaimer: I am a physicist working in a quantum information group, and have taken a graduate level physics course on quantum information.

This won't work. The article doesn't give details, but by googling the scientist, I found this proposal, and immediately recognized the flaw in the experiment. He's trying to use a quantum eraser (wiki of quantum eraser, and link to good article on them) to change the image of the downconverted photons on a camera, but that simply cannot be done. The image on a screen can be changed using a nonlocal eraser, but only when you look at conincidences of the two photons. This is a common proposal for FTL communication, I just can't believe no one ever told this guy why it wouldn't work.

The quantum eraser (linked above) can be pretty tough to get your head around. It combines interference, entanglement, and nonlocality, all tough nonclassical phenomena. Feel free to ask if you read the article and don't understand something.

After understanding this quantum erasure experiment, it seems that if path p (in this experiment) was lengthened enough you can tell, by looking at the double slit results of path s, if the polarizer is in place on path p before the p photon even reaches the polarizer. What if path p was lengthened to a distant location? Could someone there apply or remove the polarizer to path p letting you, by looking at the nearby double slit interference/non-interference results of path s, receive the signal of whether the polarizer is on path p or not before the p photon reaches the distant polarizer? If so, you have FTL communication in one direction.

I had trouble with this too, but here's the explanation that finally helped me have an "Aha!" moment and finally get it: http://grad.physics.sunysb.edu/~amarch/

Or even a quantum erasure method where the emitter is at one end...

After understanding this quantum erasure experiment, it seems that if path p (in this experiment) was lengthened enough you can tell, by looking at the double slit results of path s, if the polarizer is in place on path p before the p photon even reaches the polarizer. What if path p was lengthened to a distant location? Could someone there apply or remove the polarizer to path p letting you, by looking at the nearby double slit interference/non-interference results of path s, receive the signal of whether the polarizer is on path p or not before the p photon reaches the distant polarizer? If so, you have FTL communication in one direction.

After reading this article on a quantum erasure experiment, it seems that if path p (in this experiment) was lengthened enough you can tell, by looking at the double slit results of path s, if the polarizer is in place on path p before the p photon even reaches the polarizer. What if path p was lengthened to a distant location? Could someone there apply or remove the polarizer to path p letting you, by looking at the nearby double slit interference/non-interference results of path s, receive the signal of whether the polarizer is on path p or not before the p photon reaches the distant polarizer? If so, you have FTL communication in one direction.

It's this that alters it, not the actual act of looking.

Funny you should ask.

for that link. It led me eventually to a wonderful web site.

That site, in turn, got me to Are You a Quack?.

Years ago, my being a Physics major qualified me as a crank magnet. I guess the Physics professors were too busy so I was dealing with the overflow.

I agree with you, but want to point out that it is not necessary for anti-virus apps to read the entire file on open. Instead, they can keep state on what they have checked in the file so far (and what parts of what signatures have been matched), and check for viruses on read/write operations. I don't know of any real-world apps that do this, but I know of one research project.

It shows that there is still some actual talent at MS,

Why do you automatically assume this was developed at M$?

The earliest direct reference I can find on the net is PaX but there are many variations on the general technique of address space layout randomization both before (on networks) and after.

'The Algorithm Design Manual' by Steven Skiena at Stony Brook is a very pragamatic book for intermediate data structures and algorithms. This is a definitely aimed at the practitioner who must get something up and running, without having to worry about big-Oh notation etc. There's an online version of the book but it's just so good, I'd recommend that anyone who needs this information, snap up a copy. Skiena also maintains The Stony Brook Algorithm Repository It's a treasure, as it includes implementations of some of these algorithms in a variety of programming languages. The web page does look somewhat dated, but as a good first step into intermediate data structures and algorithms.

Just to pimp somebody else's work...

A neat paper was presented in the Software track at USENIX Security just a week or so ago about a technique that can be used to prevent all SQL injection attacks. It's a source code transformation that tracks one or two bits of "taint" information for every byte address in a program's address space.

The sysadmin or security admin can then define a policy with augmented regular expressions that have three Kleene-style operators that let you say e.g. (expr)^T, which matches the expression 'expr', iff every byte in expr is tainted, or (expr)^t which matches 'expr' iff at least one byte of expr is tainted. The last operator is ^u which means "iff none of these characters are tainted".

They prevent SQL injections by making a policy that says that whenever the function that actually executes the SQL query is called, its arguments are examined, and any string that matches.. (looks it up).. "(StrIdNum|Delim)*(SqlMetachar)^T(any)*", causes the system to either cause the call to fail with a given error, or causes the program to halt.

That's pretty neat, but it's already been done with pre-built binaries. The problem with those systems is that they use library preload hacks and have to run each instruction inside a lightweight VM to track the taint information (because they lack the semantics that come with having the source), giving performance hits of a factor of around 100. Since this solution transforms the source, GCC can optimize the transformed code a fair deal and they end up with around a 17% performance hit, which is an excellent tradeoff for security.

Since it's a C source transformation, they transformed apache, PHP, bash, and even glibc. Their technique can be used (and was demonstrated in the paper) to prevent a number of classes of attacks, not just specific attacks.

Look it up: "Taint-Enhanced Policy Enforcement: A Practical Approach to Defeat a Wide Range of Attacks", Wei Xu, Sandeep Bhatkar, R. Sekar, Stony Brook University.

End pimp.

I tend to take the opposite view to life on Mars (and other planets/moons).
I assume there will be "life" in most places.
Just look around this great varied Earth of ours. In the furthest reaches, in the darkest depths and the most impossible places we find that it flourishes.

We have barely begun to look around on Mars and we certainly haven't dug far below the surface, give it time and I think we will find it.

Why is it so difficult to believe we are alone?

I'm not sure where I fall with the stress/temperature curves -- the Loose Change video references several steel buildings that burned for days without falling. That doesn't meant that it couldn't have fallen due to fire, but it's far from clear-cut.

What I really want to know is, where are the planes reconstructed from the debris? Here is an image of a section of fuselage in the WTC descrution. Where is the fuselage now? Where are all the parts they pulled from the pentagon? By contrast, here is an image of the reconstruction of flight 800. Why don't we have such reconstructions of the 9/11 planes?

How do you program without using discrete math(Or an algorithm for that matter)? It's very hard to program without conditional statements.

I have the latest version (i guess) 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519 (why is it so long?) and i confirmed the flaw in this version. earlier posts denied this. I dont know how that is possible. Here is a screenshot http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~gsugabra/ie-spoof.jpg

Relativity is not intuitive. Your questions demonstrate that much for sure.

The space traveler's DO NOT notice any change in the pace of time. Nobody will ever notice any change in the pace of their own clocks, chemical processes or entropy rates. The traveler will look back at earth and see that all its distances are foreshortened in the direction of travel. The earthlings will look at the space ship and think its clock is running too slow. The paradox is resolved by noting that one underwent acceleration and the other did not.

The question "two photons, L and R, head out from a lightbulb going in opposite directions, what is their relative speed?" is the classic question for separating the clued from the clueless. When you ask the question, you are acutally implying the fixed cartesian grid throughout space that you just said you knew to be a mistake. You're imaginging yourself in some priveleged observational frame seeing two photons but what question are you really asking? You are asking "what relative speed does photon L measure in trying to measure the speed of photon R?" The answer is always and only C no matter who takes the measurement. It was that observation, difficult though it was for others to accept it, that got Einstein thinking in the first place, it was like the proverbial apple that hit Newton on the head.
Try to think "space is squishy because of the time dimension"...not easy but it helps some people to visualize the physical world as relativistic observations reveal it to be.
Martin Gardener probably wrote some of the most accessible books on relativity for non physicists though he seems to leave some readers confused about GR...but then most people always will be. But if you are a really fast learner, you could try these lectures Space and Time in Special Relativity looks good but I have not read it...there are dozens of these. I got started with an introductory book by Bertrand Russell that is long out of print. Gamow was also a good popularizer.

The Security Lab (http://www.seclab.cs.sunysb.edu/) at SUNY Stony Brook actually has this for their network security course. I don't know if it is available or not though.

And the math department's decent, surprisingly. Good in geometry; for instance, Stony Brook is responsible for FIST (Fast Industrial Strength Triangulation), which was commissioned by Sun for the standard Java library. (Triangulation is basically separating a polygon into a set of triangles.)

In case you were wondering, here's Dr. Sullivan's website: http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~dennis/

Something like this?

Speaking of cool Roomba hacks, there is research where I go to school that should qualify. There's big bucks for wireless research now, so a wireless testbed is in development for simulations. The plan is to attach wireless devices to Roombas so that they can move themselves around to configure themselves for different experiments and to recharge themselves during experiments.

Check it out here.