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Along the way, the beach-ball-shaped device, roughly two meters (six feet) in diameter, used the global Iridium satellite network to send information about its position, the surrounding air temperature, pressure, humidity and light intensity to a JPL ground station.

Note that the wind-propelled rover used an existing overbuilt satellite constellation to communicate its data back to the engineers. The implication there is that the rover couldn't use the sort of non-androsynchronous communications satellite that is currently available on Mars. So unreliable communications is one notable problem.

Also, look at the data that were being recorded... position, air temperature, pressure, humidity, and light intensity. Position is likely hard to determine without a Martian GPS system. Even so, the rest of those parameters can be deduced from current orbiters, especially "humidity". I can tell you that now -- it's somewhere close to 0%. It's a dry heat^w cold.

The nature of the object means that those are pretty much all the sensor readings you're going to get, too... add pretty pictures to the mix, of course. But this isn't something that can bore holes in rocks or take detailed spectra of interesting spots, because there's no way to anchor the ball to the ground.

If it can be done "fast and cheap", go for it. It might give some good close-up photos of places to send a more capable lander. But I'd suggest launching another Beagle (with airbags) first, if we're wanting best bang for the buck.

From here:
"Payloads [...] Speech Synthesiser"

What good will that do a satellite in orbit?

Would someone actually sue over a project codename?

Unixware has never achieved a substantial market share

X/Open introduces the UNIX 95 branding programme. Novell sells UnixWare business to SCO

1992 - Purchases rights to AT&T UNIX
1995 - Sells Unixware to Santa Cruz Operation

The GR also has a direct relationship with biological systems, especially relating to growth.

Apart from the breeding of Fibonacci's Rabbits there are nice examples of Phyllotaxis and Sunflower Seed Patterns which exhibit the Golden Ratio.

There is a really great page that explains the relation between the Golden ratio and the Fibonacci numbers here
The fibonacci number is the series 1,1,2,3,5,8... where every number is the sum of the two numbers before it. What does this have to do with the golden ratio? Everything! Just check it out, you'll be amazed.

It is logical. I even thought it was funny!

Real world fibonacci

I use something similar to what the grandparent post speaks of: the Smith Chart

Inside the circle of the Smith Chart exists every possible transmission line termination, from the open circuit (Z= infinity), to the short circuit (Z=0) and everything in between. "1," or a perfect match, is located at the center of the chart.

Some of you may already know that there exists an ISO standard for brewing the ideal cup of tea. It is ISO 3103 (which is also a British Standard -- BS 6008), and is available for download here.

Also, one of my pet ideas is that it people here in the U.S. prefer coffee over tea simply because of a boycott that started when the Boston tea party happened. Sadly, it looks as if there has been an anti-tea sentiment here ever since.

Sounds like you're talking about mobile ad-hoc networking. With some judicious configuration of routing (TORA/AODV/ODMRP/etc) protocols and a good firewall you can do all this today over 802.11x links.

A good portion of the software currently runs on Linux as that is what the research/development folks are using to build prototype systems.

NRL

Assorted Papers

Mac OS 8.5 even had themes (aka the Appearance Manager) and Apple developed serveral themes in-house but never shipped them. My favorite was Drawing Board that made all the widgets look kinda like a blueprint.

here's some random links i googled up: some guy's FAQ, a paper on hybrid engines with a lot of formulas and math (not a whole lot about cleanliness, though), a page with some firing pics which also claims clean burning.

here's some random links i googled up: some guy's FAQ, a paper on hybrid engines with a lot of formulas and math (not a whole lot about cleanliness, though), a page with some firing pics which also claims clean burning.

They say "gas clouds" like there are known clouds of gas following the earth. I am certainly a neophyte when it comes to astronomy, but I would have thought SOMEONE would have mentioned this to me at SOME point.

It's an implied commitment. If you don't like commercials, fine, don't watch them. But then you are going to bitch when they cancel all the shows you like because advert dollars don't work. Or they'll make you enter in a special code that gets displayed through the adverts and you will bitch about that.

Your logic is still flawed. There is absolutely no "implied commitment" by the viewer to watch commercials, as there is equally no "implied commitment" by the advertiser to provide you anything of value. It's a case of "take it or leave it"...on both sides of the tube. You clearly aren't a lawyer.

But then you are going to bitch when they cancel all the shows you like because advert dollars don't work.

I've watched MOST of the shows I've liked get cancelled prematurely *regardless of how many commercials I watched*. I can't begin to name them all...NBC's original Star Trek, NBC News Overnight, ABC's Police Squad!, Fox's Action...the list goes on and on. The cancellation of most of the shows I liked had nothing to do with skipping commercials and everything to do with the fact that THERE WEREN'T ENOUGH GULLIBLE CONSUMERS WATCHING THEM TO SATISFY THE ADVERTISER'S MARKETING OBJECTIVES. Does that mean that if I want to watch these shows I have an "implied commitment" to lobotomize myself to meet the target demographic? I think not.

Not thinking you are screwing over the networks by deliberately circumventing all adverts with PVRs is like trying to say smoking is healthy.

This is TRULY IRONIC. *I'm old enough to remember advertisements that said that smoking WAS healthy.* Your argument is just as perverse as those advertisements were, advertisements that marketed cigarettes to young people--advertisements that you imply we all had an obligation to watch.

You are try to excuse your own bad behavior.

Now you're just name calling...an ad hominem attack. This is even MORE ironic because I don't even own a PVR! Just because I've refuted the logic of your argument against those who do use PVRs you now think you have the right to recklessly accuse me of bad behavior. That's pretty weak. Believe it or not, I use my 7 year old videocassette recorder almost exclusively to view videotapes I rent; I only own one blank videotape and have only used the VCR TWICE to record a TV program. This underlines how desperate you are to make your ill-conceived point.

You will lose.

Yeah, right. Resistance is futile! :^)

Maybe it's not the old school definition of thievery, but that's the ironic thing about the "Give Me Everything I want for Free" geeks.

Don't you find it the least bit ironic that you have just admitted to changing the definition of thievery...just as the big media have attempted to do? How much more of your freedom do you wish to give away simply by allowing others to redefine your "old school" rights for you? You seem desperate to justify all this by vaguely equating it to blatant copyright infringement, a comparison that simply isn't valid.

They use new technology, and when someone says it's wrong with old words, they say, "Nope, because it's digital it can't be theft!"

No, what they are doing was always perfectly legal using the old technology (editing out or skipping over commercials), so doing it with newer, more efficient technology isn't any less legal, no matter how much the advertisers yammer about it. You seem to think that improvements in technology that collide with certain business perogatives ought to be illegal and that laws ought to be reinterpreted to give advertisers rights they never had to begin with. You're entitled to your personal beliefs, but regardless of how strongly you feel them they aren't equivalent to law.

Average amount of cable required per remote rural subscriber in Australia is about 30 km. That's the average. Many people in the Outback have their nearest neighbour over 100 miles away. 97% of the population lives in 13% of the area (source). So we're talking about 600,000 people - at most 200,000 subscribers - in an area equivalent to the USA, less Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.
Existing LEOSats, such as Iridium and Globalstar can't even do 56kbps. But the Ka-band - if it works - may be enough to do 2 Gbps. That's what the experimental communications payload is for, amongst other things, to see how well or how badly Ka-band works over rural Australia (and also in built-up areas for other applications)

NTSC (digital) is spec'd 720*577 (including vertical blanking) for a full frame (2 fields).

I was under the distinct impression that NTSC and PAL/M were specified as 525 lines per frame, not 577. PAL video is 625 lines. You may be thinking of PAL's visible area.

laserdisc, quite sure of it...

You're right. I checked this out, and came across something called Compact Disc Video (CD-V; not Video-CD, V-CD or VCD); essentially, this is just Laserdisc and Laserdisc/CD hybrids under a different name.
This page gives a 1987 date for CD-V, and this page dates the official adoption of Video CD (i.e. MPEG-1) to 1993. There's more here and here about CD-V.

The CD-audio 5" disks are actually hybrid CD-DA/Laserdiscs (digital and analog) which is what threw me. (I was wrong earlier- it's the 8" discs that hold 20 minutes of video; the 5" discs hold a whole 6 minutes worth! Wow.)

I don't remember the phrase `Laserdisc' being used to describe any of these discs (5", 8" or 12"); but then, Laserdisc had pretty much bombed in the UK, so it wouldn't surprise me if they marketed all 3 sizes as CD-V.

This still leaves the issue of when VCD (MPEG-1) was launched. The 1987 date given in the URL above seems very early- I think the author of the webpage meant CD-V/Laserdisc (which I saw marketed in '89), or confused it with VCD... I could be wrong though.

What a pointless "technology".
"Pointless" would be to argue with you about the meaning of higher education.

Let's think what the article actually says: IBM has employed a technique which lets them estimate the original distribution of data by adding a certain amount of random data with know distribution. That surely should be useful in other areas as well?!
A Google seachr on Random Perturbation gives quite a long list with applications in wheather simulation, computer graphics, chaotic dynamical systems, etc.
Still pointless? What about a search in the then NEC Research Index? Wowwww... Pointless, eh...?

The wide-screen iMac specs page gives the native
resolution of the 17" iMac as 1440x900. This is a 16:10 display ratio, which is about as
close as any monitor I know of gets to the
Golden Ratio, (1 + sqrt(5)/2), or approximately 1.618.

Clearly Apple is trying to channel Pyramid Power
to sell more computers.

I wanted to point out to /.s out there that there is quite a bit of software available to explore artificial societies on your own. I also wanted to say that I have had the rare privledge of working w/ these folks for many years and all of the positive comments (and none of the negative ones :-)) in this thread are right on. Anyway, Ascape, a software framework for agent-based modelling that I developed is available for download at the Brookings Website. Many other interesting models are also described there.. Its all in Java, and the source code for versions of many models is available. (For the person who was complaining that the results aren't reproducable, this will prove you completely wrong. In fact, Epstein and Axtell and others in the field have spent a lot of time thinking about how models can be independently understood and verified.) Someone has allready mentiond JASSS; there is an article in that journal on Ascape. The Ascape build on the Brookings website is now quite old. I joined the Bios Group some time ago and we've been improving and enhancing Ascape as part of our work in using complexity science in "real world" applications. So there should be a new public release RSN, but the version on the website now is relativly robust and has a lot of features. Note that the mailing list at the Brookings website appears to be down at the moment.

The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS). It is on-line. It is free. It is great.

Take a look at this cool online journal
The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulations

Crikey, you figured that out after two semesters. I guess I wasted 4 years of my life doing a degree in it all then... I must never have cottoned on to how well expert systems such as Mycin and Dendral actually perform.

You think programming is just the "intelligence of the programmer"? Guess again -- many people have AI systems running which program themselves, coming out with emergent behaviour which the programmer never expected.

Do you really think that a person can simplify circuit boards to their simplest form by themselves? I thought not. I know that Julian Miller can't, but that using his Cartesian Genetic Programming he's managed to wirte programs that do just that. Thus proved that a computer program can ultimetaly be more than the sum of its external inputs.

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

The LZW patent is set to expire at the end of this year

Not according to this it's not. The patent was granted in 1985. 1985+20=2005. Or you could read at Unisys itself.

~

It wasn't a solution or a proposal.

I know, bad wording. Sorry ,man.

~

MPEG-4 will be exactly the same algorithm in a decade as it is now.

You are 100% correct, but my point is no one will care. We will have GREATLY moved on by then, and the guts of MP4 will be very little more than an eye-brow raiser.

Space Rangers?

Some guy who wrote his PhD thesis on the things...

Some guy who wrote his PhD thesis on the things...

Some guy who wrote his PhD thesis on the things...

http://www.globalideasbank.org/BOV/BV-393.HTML

The biggest problem about getting science fiction applied in what is laughingly called 'the real world' is the old Catch-22. It is best exemplified by Arthur C. Clarke's explanation of why he is not rather better off than he actually is. When he first had the idea of the communications satellite, he tried to get it patented. 'Come, come, Mr Clarke,' said the people at the Patent Office. 'We're a serious outfit, we haven't got time to waste on fantastic ideas like this.' Years later, when the first satellite (with which Arthur was actively involved) actually went up, and the nations were queuing to get their own satellites up, Arthur went back to the Patent Office. 'But, Mr Clarke,' they said, 'the satellite already exists. You should have come to us earlier.'

Typical Bureaucratic bungling.

and there is more:

The very first paper describing the very first constellation, consisting of three satellites in geostationary orbit. Allegedly the only accurate science-fiction prediction ever. Authored by the famous Arthur C. Clarke, before the space race, before Sputnik 1, and before Arthur C. Clarke became a famous author. (There's a mirror of the paper. And now we call it the Clarke orbit, and you can simulate the original proposal.

This Page also discusses the legal issues because at the time Clarke wrote his paper, there was no way to get a satellite into orbit to begin with.

Well, there's hope of it, anyhow --
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/05/229204 .

It would be a shame for all that infrastructure to go to waste -- 128Kbps, flat rate, is really all I need for the most part. Sure, I like cable modems, DSL, and faster things when I have them to use, but on a day-t'-day basis, 128 wireless and flat-rate would be not bad. However, this stuff is so far still too localized for me to buy a Honda Goldwing and roam the country with an always-connected laptop. Low-Earth-Orbit Satellites are what I'm looking for.

Cheers,

timothy

Elite used Fibonacci Numbers with a eight 6-byte seeds, plus a few dozen bytes of look-up tables, to achive this. The principle was very similar to MojoWorld's use of fractals, but Fibonacci series are considerably quicker to process, particularly on an early 80's home computer.

[All links pulled from google's first page for each letter - sick, ain't it?]

Perhaps my point was obscured by my vitriol. Let me try again without the ad hominem.

The upshot of the article at ldolphin.org is that 1 Kings 7:23 predicts a value of 333/106 for pi. The author arrives at this value by extracting the numbers 3, 106, 111, and combining them as 3*111/106. Surely you can see how this might seem contrived to a skeptic. Since these numbers are relatively small, it should not be difficult to find them in a given text. A numerologist of superior skill could produce the ratio 355/113 from the same text.

Now, 333/106 is a pretty good approximation to pi, but it is not remarkable. The reason that it is close to pi is that it is a so-called "continued fraction convergent" to pi. (See this page for an introduction to continued fractions.) The first few convergents to pi are 3, 22/7, 333/106, 355/113, and 103993/33102. Every irrational number can be represented by a continued fraction, and the convergents are used to find rational approximations. (The approximation 355/113 was known to the Chinese in the 5th century AD)

By the way, I think it is silly to call 1 Kings 7:23 a biblical contradiction. The Bible is not an engineering manual, and surely the measurements given are accurate enough for their purpose. On the other hand, I see no difference between numerology and Alex Chiu. (oops, that just slipped out)

I submitted this story too. More information from Yahoo(via Reuters). They mention how it works, something with dislocations, loop-flaws in the silicon. The press release from U-Surrey is here. Google also claims to have indexed their paper here but accesss is forbidden.

I submitted this story too. More information from Yahoo(via Reuters). They mention how it works, something with dislocations, loop-flaws in the silicon. The press release from U-Surrey is here. Google also claims to have indexed their paper here but accesss is forbidden.

You wouldn't believe it, but there is life outside the US, too! ;-)

Well ... an how about the rest of the world? Sometimes I really hate all those america-centric ppl.

http://www.surrey.ac.uk/ (notice the .uk?)

But as this advances further than the Silicon counterpart, it paves the way for some huge research, specifically in Quantum Evolution.

I do quite a bit of study in Quantum Cryptography (I ain't no prof. though!) , and wonder how this all fits in.

"...plus a set of powerful text manipulation utilities like sed, grep, awk, lex, and yacc, whose functions should be obvious from their names."

Paul Stevenson

Case #1

Dancin Santa

imagine 6 lines crossing the poles at 60 degree intervals

Make that (idealized) 30 degree intervals. There are 6 planes, cutting mother earth into 12 pieces of cake...

http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/ has a nice picture for the imagination impaired.

Distributing this across a dozen or so processes wouldn't be that hard.

For themes and schemes resembling Apple's designs, take a look at http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/kaleido scope/schemetotheme.

http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/

http://www.skypub.com/

Candidates who started their programmes after August 1998 may use only Casio FX115W or FX115S calculators in examinations. Other candidates must obey School's regulations.

For someone who spent their school days using the same TI method to use a calculator Casio's DAL (or whatever it's called) rubbish is a right pain. Maybe I can use that to excuse the fail mark? ;)

wrighty.

This won't markedly increase the "stuff going into space" anytime soon. For that you need a market, and right now, that market is pretty stable. From 1990 to present, there have been around 150 satellites a year launched on an average of about 70 rockets. Even the big build-up of satellite constellations in the late 90s (along with the entry of new spacefaring nations like Brazil and India) didn't change this much, although for a time, it resulted in much rocketry investment and several startups in the cheap-access-to-space field.

But make no mistake: with Iridium failing to sell at a penny on the dollar (that's right, 1% of the investment so far, and the buyer walked away), its strongest competitor Globalstar perilously close to bankruptcy, ICO just emerging from Chapter 11, Orbcomm losing money despite orders, and so on, the LEO constellation market is pretty much over and done with.

[See Lloyd's Satellite Constellations for more info.]

With the end of speculation in the LEO constellation business [as well as a tanking tech stock sector], Rotary Rocket failed to get further investment despite an operational vehicle. This pretty much put the kibosh on anyone like Kistler or Beal or energizing the Cheap Access to Space market by dramatically reducing launch costs, at least anytime soon.

It may seem counterintuitive, but there actually are only a limited number of things you can do in space. Communications satellites in GEO are one; scientific satellites in LEO are another. And there are already plenty of commercial devices selling the data they collect.

What the launch limitations did was two things. First, they were political cover for an administration burned by Loral malfeasance in assisting China with a launch. Second, they were a simple protectionist measure aimed at giving homegrown companies (Rotary, Beal, Kistler) a window in which to develop vehicles and compete for business against the established American leaders, Boeing and Lockmart.

The irony is that most post-Soviet space vendors (Khrunichev, Energiya, Ukraine's Sea Launch) have partnered with one or more of the leading American vendors, who are now able to steer customers to a "preferred" international partner, in effect recapturing lost business. There has been no new American vendor to reach maturity. Whether these quasi-monopolies constitute improved American competition for the global satellite business, which pretty much remains a zero-sum game, is an exercise for the reader.
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