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You think the ancient Greeks didn't know about snow melting to water, water vapor from boiling or dew from moist air? The four elements are their first attempt at the periodic table, they did not confuse elements and states. Though I suppose fire was way off the mark.

Rights from God and not man. But of course these thoughts come from principles of the bible. Which many Americans have long forgotten about. Only few remain.

Over three quarters of the US population claims to be some form of Christian. Get off your martyrdom kick, you are the majority.\
http://b27.cc.trincoll.edu/weblogs/AmericanReligionSurvey-ARIS/reports/ARIS_Report_2008.pdf

Also, please tell me how I may logically distinguish between the rights the True God imparted to us, and the rights that humans merely claim to be divinely derived. If you have a method based on logic and not faith, I think many people would find that very useful.

Your theory sounds nice, but that's all it is, and you most certainly can't prove the slightest bit of it. For example, you mention the highly secular population in Europe and use that as evidence, but fail to explain why the USA has not followed the same model. In fact religiosity has remained largely constant, and you can't hope to show that all americans are highly ignorant.

Actually, no, religion in the US is decreasing as well.

I'm not sure why it's taking longer in the US, but it's still happening.

Nor does your model fit when eastern countries unaffected by events in the west that took a much different In some, atheism was the rule, rather than the exception, long before people had answers to to the questions of their daily existence. In other countries, the dominant beliefs were religious, yet did not offer the answers you refer to. by all means, try to explain these holes in your theory, without assuming they are insignificant and irrelevant.

That's rather too vague. Be more specific please.

Of course the correct way to do it would be to multiply the information of the LoC with k*T ln 2 where k = Boltzmann constant, T = temperature of the Library, ln 2 to change from base 2 logarithm (information entropy) to natural logarithm (thermodynamic entropy).

Let's take the 20 million volumes * 200 pages from your calculation, and assume 250 words per page, 4.5 letters per word and 1.4 bits per letter (see directly above table 1, the value for longer text; I've taken the middle, rounded up). With this data, we get a total information content of the LoC of 6.3*10^12 bits. Let's further assume the temperature of LoC is about 290K, then we get the energy equivalent of the LoC as about 0.11 TeV.

Therefore 3.5 TeV is about 32 LoC.

An explanation of our search results.

If you recently used Google to search for the word "Jew," you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We'd like to explain why you're seeing these results when you conduct this search.

A site's ranking in Google's search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for "Jew" brings up one such unexpected result.

If you use Google to search for "Judaism," "Jewish" or "Jewish people," the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for "Jew" different? One reason is that the word "Jew" is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word "Jewish" when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically, as noted on websites devoted to Jewish topics such as these:

http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol01/vol01.17 4
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah081500. asp
Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like "Judaism," "Jewish people," or "Jews" than the single word "Jew." In fact, prior to this incident, the word "Jew" only appeared about once in every 10 million search queries. Now it's likely that the great majority of searches on Google for "Jew" are by people who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves.

The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the page.

We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.

Sincerely,
The Google Team

p.s. You may be interested in some additional information the Anti-Defamation League has posted about this issue at http://www.adl.org/rumors/google_search_rumors.asp . In addition, we call your attention to Google's search results on this topic.

Perhaps even something like an x-prize for robotics...

Well, there are a few such competitions, but more for serious stuff like search and rescue, and firefighting than for simple household chores. After all, there are already cheap, mass production robots and automated machines for vacuuming, mowing lawns, making coffee, doing dishes, etc.

The vigenere cipher is a far better alternative for short messages, and it is fairly quick to encrypt with it if you use a table. All you ever wanted to know about the vigenere cipher: http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/cpsc/cryptography/vi genere.html

I'm a high school student too, and I disagree. At my school (a public school) we have about 30 or so students participating in the trinity robotics competition.

And finally, when we reach the new testament, there is no commandment to individuals to do violence against anyone. In fact, the command is to not even resist evil men with violence.

That's completely true, which is why it's so sadly hilarious to see George W Bush claim Jesus as his favorite political philosopher. (Of course, he's acting just like any of the millions of Christians who focus on the concept that love for Jesus protects sinners, freeing them to sin and ignore Jesus's fundamental directions for life)

President Bush claims to be a Christian and named Jesus as his favorite political philosopher at the December 13 Republican debate in Des Moines. Without going too far into, "What part of "Thou shalt not kill, didn't you understand?" My question to G.W. is, "If tomorrow, St. Peter asked you wht you invaded Iraq. How would you answer? You realize that political double-speak and half truths in this forum will land you in a very warm place for the rest of eternity".

Also: Karen Lee Joachimmi, 20 who was arrested after robbing a Howard Johnson hotel. Her arrest was not difficult, as her weapon of choice, an electric chainsaw, was not plugged in.

Some problems are very hard to reproduce in a computer...
Artificial Intelligence is the same.

You missed the key point there. You don't need to puzzle out intellegence at all to do a brute force emulation! You simply scan/duplicate all of the neurons and synapes of a living intelligent brain and do a raw low level emulation.

Sound like sci-fi? We've already emulated a mouse hippocampus!

"Our current chip has 18 dynamic neuron synapses, and it behaves just like a network of real biological neurons in the hippocampus," Granacki said. "When the chip receives real electrical signals as inputs, it processes them and sends out exactly the same signals that a real neuron would send."
Berger's ultimate goal is to make a computer chip that can be connected to human brain tissue and take over a cognitive function that has been destroyed
Refference Link

We just tossed the hard AI problem out the window! We are left with the "easy" tasks of scanning a brain and supplying the raw RAM and gigaflops to do a dumb-emulation. ("Easy" in the sense of non-baffling basic engineering over a few decades.)

If you can replace brain tissue with a silicon chip to repair destroyed function, then there's no reason you can't accellerate that chip.

Things like that will be possible faster than it seems. Saying it may be possible in a hundred years sounds reasonable, right? But it's natural to think in terms of today's rate of change. The rate of change is itself accellerating and not running out any time soon. Given today's rate of change, all of the 1900's produced about 25 or 30 years worth of progress. We will actually produce a 100 years worth of todays rate of change in the next 25 or 30 years.

Of course I don't expect to get "downloaded" as soon as the crude capability exists. That's the sort of thing you want to go through rather extensive refinment and testing before you even try it on a human subject, much less make it available for "common consumer availability".

Advanced nanotech is coming in a similar timescale.

Given a little health luck and/or a modest improvements in longevity, I think I have a shot at seeing one or both of these techs mature. Stick around a while and there will definitly be additional increases in longevity. Anything beyond that turns into fast forward sci-fi right off the scale. The exponential growth can clearly continue a few decades, and any sort of mind-machine interface easily runs that exponential into some sort of singularity.

An interesting point to note is that Moore's law was first applied to integrated circuits in 1965, but computation speed per dollar has been actually been supra-exponential back through 1900. Through electromechanical devices, relays, vaccum tubes, transistors, and now integrated circuits. Graph here. Each horizontal line is multiplier of 100.

Oh, and as for the less 'lucky' portion of the human race, that in no way holds back progress in the more advanced areas. Actually globalization will merely increase the rate of change even more. Huge swaths of the earths population, such as in India and China, are taking short cuts and catching up using known tech. They are increasingly making their own contributions to total progress. Plus a brilliant person in the poorest part of the world can access almost the sum total of human knowledge and make contributions if the village has internet access. A child in Kenya can read scientific papers published the day before.

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A simple substitution cipher (or "Caesar cipher") is generally the first thing presented in an introduction to encryption. It may be weak encryption, but it's encryption none the less.

The ASCII code is, well, a code, rather than a cipher, which is to say it's an arbitrary mapping that must be well-known to all parties sharing the information. If you conceal the code book, you can use a code for security. Or you can publish the code book for the sake of standarization. Compare with, say, the standard tables of Huffman codes that define bit patterns in a fax transmission.

For the HS crowd, there's Botball, which had it's DC area competition this weekend at UMCP, sponsored by the K.I.S.S. Institute for Practical Robotics. KIPR also puts together neat kits if you're looking for something to play with (a word of advice, Interactive-C blows and it's type checking system is flakey at best).

There's also Trinity Colleges's Autonomous Robotics Firefighting Contest which has a league for just about anybody. Qualifying alone is an impressive feat.

Also, if you're interested in the simulation league, you may be interested in checking out this paper which was written by one of the profs in my department.

</karmawhoring>

You're thinking of the Trinity College Fire Fighting Home Robot Contest. Our Robot Team at UT Austin competed in it for a few years, but it got too expensive to fly up there and have Fedex destroy our equipment.

...now I'll say it a (++cur_aleph)th time: People, this is why we need patents!

Do you know why "this technology has been lost for about 200 years"? Because it was a trade secret, that's why.

The ancient Islamic warriors couldn't rely on patent law to protect them, so they kept the method a trade secret.

Result? It dies with them.

Imagine if ancient Islamic Generals had discovered RSA encryption, but, because they couldn't threaten their enemies with lawsuits if they refused not to use it themselves, they had to keep it a secret.

Result? It's never publicly published, and for hundreds of years we end up having to rely on ROT-x. (--and even that wasn't invented until Caesar's time). Ratio today of ROT-13 aware browsers/newsreaders to PGP/GPG aware browsers/newsreaders? 10:1. That's what happens when you don't publish. That's what happens when you keep it a secret. The world needs to rediscover RSA all over again -- even if it takes millennia.

So the next time you curse the cease-and-desist letter you get from EvilCo about your opensource program PROG_TO_KILL, module MODULE_TO_KILL, lines 1324-6 and 2357-3, because, well, those mathematical operations done in that order are covered under their patents number BIGNUM and BIGNUM + SMALLNUM, which won't expire until LATER and STILL_LATER, just say to yourself:

"It's okay. I should be happy there are patents. If there weren't, the computer would still be proprietary, a closely guarded trade secret. And where does that leave my prissy "open-source! free the information! it wants to be free! it has a right to be free!" ass now, huh? No-where, that's where."

Come on, people, how hard is it? I'm really appalled by the ignorance I see here sometimes.

I'm not a lawyer, but I like acting really pissed off and even appalled at the ignorance I see here sometimes, at all these crackpot morons who haven't even studied eight credit's worth of IP law. Yeesh. The ignorance!

...just like all the TV shows, they're not robots, they're all remotely controlled. If you want to see a real robotics competition, go see the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Home Robot Contest in Hartford, CT in a couple weeks. There's also a few throughout the country sponsored by local clubs such as Seattle Robotics.

Don't get me wrong, FIRST is great. I wish it was available when I was in high school! And Dean Kamen is my hero...

A short description of how the machine worked.

An Enigma simulation and some good links.

Some cool stuff!

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Josh

the firefighting robot competition at Trinity College in Hartford CT. The rules for the 2001 competition will be posted on September 1. From the official web page: "This is the largest, public, true Robotics competition held in the U.S. that is open to entrants of any age, ability or experience from anywhere in the world... The goal of the 2001 contest is the same - to build a Robot that can find and extinguish a fire in a house. The challenge for the entrants is to build a computerized (not radio-controlled) Robotic device that can move through a model of a single floor of a house, detect fire (a lit candle) and then put it out. Robots that consistantly accomplish this task in the shortest time win."

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If you really want to know how to build autonomous robots, there are several competitions with the same level of excitement as Battlebots et al, but with the added benefit that you can imagine it might eventually be a good thing to turn the resulting machines loose in the real world.

For instance, Robot Sumo is quite popular in Japan and the US. You can find the rules and links to competitions at Sine Robotics. Another big competition is the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Home Robot Contest, wherein robots navigate a known maze (a model house floorplan) to put out a fire (simulated by a lit candle).

Another nice thing about these competitions is they can be cheaper to get into than Battlebots (less heavy iron and welding). And there are lots of good people and organizations who can help you climb the learning curve. Just a few of my favorites are the Seattle Robotics Society, The Robotics Club of Yahoo, Raleigh Triangle Amateur Robotics Group, Portland Area Robotics Society, Robotics Society of Southern CA, and the San Francisco Robotics Society of America.

Finally, here's a few places you can find parts, books, plans, kits, and lots of links: Mondo-Tronics, Acroname, and Robot Books.com.

Does anyone else think that the new Cube looks just like a breadmaker machine?

Or possibly a Brita water filter pitcher?

I'll bet this new Cube makes an even better fish tank than the old 128K's.

Does anybody else think the new G4 Cube looks like a breadmaker machine?

Or a Brita water filter pitcher?

I bet this model will make a great fish tank!

Heh heh.

Trinity college sponsors a large robotics competition up in CT. I've never been there, but am entering the Senior Division (they have 4 classes: Junior, High School, Senior, and Expert) for my senior project for school... Judging from videos of past events everyone seems to have a good time participating... I know Mississippi is a long way from connecticut, but it might be worth a look, even if you just do something similar at your own school rather than entering the actual contest...

Trinity college sponsors a large robotics competition up in CT. I've never been there, but am entering the Senior Division (they have 4 classes: Junior, High School, Senior, and Expert) for my senior project for school... Judging from videos of past events everyone seems to have a good time participating... I know Mississippi is a long way from connecticut, but it might be worth a look, even if you just do something similar at your own school rather than entering the actual contest...

This looks like a Vigenere Cipher...

I know they are very weak ciphers but it still looks familiar...

Here... link away

http://www.achiever.com/freehm pg/cryptology/vig.html

http://www.cs.arizona.edu/h ttp/html/people/muth/Cipher/

http://cw.oaktree.co.uk/crypt/vigen ere_doc.html

http://sh akti.trincoll.edu/~rmorelli/FYSM122/Cryptograms/Cr yptogram8.html


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Bun-Bun Rules!
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