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The "two-photon" refers to the type of optical spectrosopy - not manipulating individual photons.

see:
http://belfield.cos.ucf.edu/storage.html
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_absorption

The energy of 2 photons are abosorbed by the dyes to reach the appropriate molecular energy state. This type of optical spectroscopy has been known for a very long time. Aren't there are physical chemists in teh slashdot audience?

One of the other links gives better detail.

It looks like they are relying on using two photons of half the required excitation energy (twice the wavelength) rather than one photon of the exact excitation energy. The probability of two photons arriving close enough in time is far less than the probability of one, and as a result it appears the excitation response is a very nonlinear function of light intensity.

See http://belfield.cos.ucf.edu/one%20vs%20two-photon% 20excitation.html - It appears that the big difference in this "two photon" excitation method is that excitation only occurs at the very focal point of the beam where the intensity is at a maximum, as opposed to basically any point in the beam.

I would agree with you, were it not for a conference publication that's on the website.

Agreed, it's not a peer-reviewed journal publication, but the publication suggests that this idea is probably not vapourware.

We recently finished prototyping a head-worn display. Enjoy.

For our undergrad senior design project, we build one of these guys.

It uses an RFID card to store personal musical preferences, and then as you "buzz in" (walk by the reader), it averages your tastes with the others in the area and picks appropriate music from an on-board Flash device to play. The goal is to match the music playing to the general tastes of a crowd.

Here's the project. And thanks for the ad spot, Slashdot ;).

Actually, you are incorrect about most of this;

1. Yes, it is easy if the boiling apparatus is designed correctly. I've done it. And you can distill water without actually boiling it, though it is a slower process. And it is under active development; http://www.solarconference.net/abstract_selection. php http://www.ecozen.com/steam1.htm http://www.epsea.org/stills.html http://www.solaqua.com/solwatdis1.html http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/pubs/EnergyNotes/en-3.htm
2. The volatiles that come out at water boiling temperature are usually relatively benign, and as I said, a coconut hull carbon stage removes them.
3. My home distillation device wastes only about 1% of the water you put into it. It uses air to cool and condense the steam, so no flow of cool water is required at all.
4. Distilled water is not acidic at all. I just tested mine. Totally neutral, pH 7. That is by definition, as distilled water is what is used to calibrate the middle of the scale. And the lack of minerals is not a deficit to the healthiness of the water at all. You would have to drink many gallons of water every day to get even 1% of any of the important minerals. In other words, you get these from your food, and the contribution of the water is insignificant. Add to that the fact that minerals can include things like Arsenic, Lead, Mercury, Uranium, and other things that are bad for you even in trace amounts.

Finally, some people say that distilled water tastes funny. But the taste of water is governed by the amount of oxygen in the water, and fresh distilled water very much lacks oxygen. This can be remedied by filling a container half full of water and shaking vigorously.

OP makes a joke but it's not funny. You'd be hard pressed to find a teacher in the engineering dept at UCF who speaks clear english. Even harder than that is finding a teacher who can teach. Most of them dribble off powerpoints provided by the publisher of the textbook. My college has been largely worthless in providing me an education in the field of IT. I picked up most of my skills from books and interns.

This site http://netmoc.cpe.ucf.edu/Projects/OpenDocument/Te stSuite.html has Sample ODF documents intended as references. From the site:

We are working towards developing a comprehensive set of sample documents for the OpenDocument specifications developed by the Oasis consortium.

Every document has associated rendering samples created with:

* OpenOffice v2.0.1 on Windows XP SP2

* KOffice v1.5beta on Gentoo Linux

The set of sample documents was developed at the Networking and Mobile Computing Laboratory at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Central Florida.

Developed by: Yi Luo and Majid A. Khan under the supervision of Dr. Lotzi Boloni.

The development was sponsored by Intel corporation and released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

" Solar energy cannot be used directly because photovoltaics are inefficient and most of our machines aren't photosynthetic."

Please read up on solar water heating. This can be used to heat water for washing and also for even heating homes via low temperature under floor heating. In the middle of winter you might need additional heating but the solar water heating means that less energy is needed to raise the temperature of the water up to the required level. (Here's the first link that google found: http://www.solarroofs.com/, and here is the second http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/solar/apps/sdhw/sdhw.htm)

If a house is used to accept or reject solar gain at the appropriate season and time of day the sun
can be used to warm the house when required, or provide cooling to replace or augment air conditioning.
If the house is well insulated, uses awnings to reject solar gain at the hottest part of the day, and
uses appropriate window coatings it can tend towards being a replacement. Even augmenting existing
air conditioning will reduce the load on other systems and mean less power usage.

" Retaining capacity to cope with peaks while reducing supply means either a) living with downtime while the system adjusts to the higher load or b) responding relatively quickly to relatively small fluctuations in demand."

Fluctuations can be predicted to a some degree, although with the advent of the Tivo and more TV channels the old ability to predict that there would be a big jump in usage during the ad break of M*A*S*H when everyone rushes to make a cup of coffee is no longer the case. Technologies exist to deal with fluctuations in demand (see: Dinorwic) over the timescale of a few minutes. Fluctuations on the level of a few seconds would be a problem, but in general these won't be so much of a problem as it is unlikely that the wind will stop and the sun stop shining over an entire city for 3 seconds and then suddenly start again. It is still a challenge, of course, but then humankind has risen to other
challenges, such as sending people to the moon. Solutions to these problems could result in valuable
technologies which the company developing could sell worldwide as a pinch on traditional energy
supplies becomes more apparent.

There would be a requirement for some base production which would possibly go unused to cope with some fluctuations, but this is where storage strategies such as Dinorwic can be used as they can be used to soak up the excess. Ultimately the goal is not to replace centralised power production but simply to augment it allowing the centralised power production to be a little smaller and for the total system (taking into account all the production of the equipment and maintenance required and so on) to produce less emissions. None of these strategies are magic bullets, of course.

The first line of attack should still be energy efficiency rather than micro production as the return on investment tends to be better and if a house, office, etc is energy efficient micro production of heat or energy becomes more viable.

" Ripping out a *real* network (the electric grid) with another one will takes orders of magnitude larger levels of capital investment."

There would be no need to rip out the existing network. It represents an additional layer of grid that could allow small-scale local trading of energy. It is best done as part of new builds, though. Retrofitting it into existing communities would be messy and costly.

http://main.uab.edu/show.asp?durki=69261
http://www.graduate.ucf.edu/CurrentGradCatalog/con tent/degrees/ACAD_PROG_71.cfm

These were just on the first two pages of a google search for "computer forensics graduate school". You couldn't have possibly looked that hard.

I'm not so sure about that. I have a Data Structures professor from Hungary whose name is... Lotzi Boloni.

Don't believe me? Here's his web page: http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~lboloni/ (Look at the titlebar of your browser when you go there.)

Is "True" AI , I have a degree in AI and I've never hear the term "True" AI. This is purely a name that has been pulled out of a hat. Having rtfa , and reading the description this sounds like nothing more than a fairly sophisticated expert system with some connectionist ideas thrown in.

Generally speaking there are two types of AI (GOFAI) "Good Old Fashioned AI" - That which deals with logic based reasoning, semantics and symbolic processing - Think ELIZA and ALICE or simple Chess programs all fit into this category.

The other school of AI - The Connectionist model deals with parallel processing models, neural networks, fuzzy logic and so forth.

It seems to me that GTX have basically used a blend of both these ideas to achieve this. Perhaps using expert system models to encapsulate the knowledge of a salesperson or customer service person. But using connectionist ideas to process speech and other fuzzy input data.

So while their product is quite an interesting one it is nothing new. I think that the term they may have been looking for is "Strong" AI whose aim is to produce machines with an intellectual ability indistinguishable from a human being. A laudable goal no doubt - We have the Turing test for these kinds of things. Question being -Do GTX have the confidence in their product to give it a try? As of today not a single machine has passed the Turing test.

Interesting links

http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Ref erence%20Articles/what_is_AI/What%20is%20AI02.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Test

http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~lboloni/Programming/GofaiWe b/

Nick ...

http://graphics.cs.ucf.edu/MAR-Sumant/index.php
mixed reality is something that allows people to actually interact with an environment in the real and virtual world. they use it for a lot of military simulators as well as a wide variety of other applications. plus it doesnt require the ball from American Gladiators.

There are actually many satellite projects for stuff this small. The space industry in Florida holds an annual competition for college students to design picosats called Funsat that uses the Cubesat format.

...I live in Orlando and I had no idea the pilot program was going on. You'd think they'd advertise it somewhere - maybe even at the local university. In fact, I don't know anyone that knew such a project was in place.

The University of Central Florida has won 2nd, 4th, and 7th at the International competition in past years. They claim that their record is unmatched- whether this is true or not is debatable, but the fact remains that U.S. teams have definitely placed highly in past years. Also, they placed 2nd at the Southeast Regional this year to Georgia Tech's 1st, not Florida, which is the University of Florida.

Surprised no one is mentioning building your own cables. Much higher quality than Monster and much cheaper (not including the cost of tools). As an added bonus it scores you Geek points. Here's a link dealing with the construction of Canare cables: http://www.bus.ucf.edu/cwhite/theater/diycable.htm

Just about every every college or university with a decent Computer Science program has people studying NLP (Natural Language Processing). Government agencies are probably the biggest source of grants for research, so DARPA funding this is nothing new. Additionally, NLP is just a sub-field in AI. AI has somewhat turned into a bunch of sub-fields that all relate to computers doing something "intelligent". Other areas of AI include computer vision, expert system development, machine learning...etc. There's a more "open" version of something like CYC(an Ontology) called WordNethttp://wordnet.princeton.edu/, lead by George Miller of Princeton's Psychology Department. You may be familiar with it. It is like a dictionary, but the important part isn't the definitions, it is the subconcept/superconcept(hyponym/hypernym) relationships among senses of words.

Applications for NLP are all over the place. Search engines, for example, use a limited amount. There is a professor at UCF http://www.cs.ucf.edu/ who has developed a system to look up answers to questions in an encyclopedia and respond (in sentences). It also crosses over with data mining, and uses machine learning very often. Here is a link to one of the biggest annual conferences on NLP: http://www.aclweb.org/

A pair of professors at my university are also working on a very similar book. When I first saw this one on slashdot I thought someone may have tried to rip them off. Some of you may want to check out this one too. It looks as though it may be a bit more formal (with both notation and language tone).

All this as I sit in class on break here http://www.cs.ucf.edu/csdept/info/gccf/ Oh the humanity of it all! Leave it to /. to take my focus away from class.

Actually, this is not really media contrived or a matter of opportunity knocking. I am part of the University of central Florida Amateur Radio Club (The Moderator can verify this if desired, I do not feel like giving out my email address to thousands).

Dr. Harpole (K4VUD) was actually part of what they called a DXpedition. Where he had gone , there had never in history been an officially sanctioned amateur radio station before. It was mere coincidence that he had been there 2 weeks prior that special permission had been granted for the radio operators to operate there. The ARRL has more on the DXpedition gone into emergency mode

Also, It should be noted that Dr. Harpole was not the only radio operator there. We have been keeping a series of links on this, however, which are available on the UCF Amateur Radio Club's wiki.


I would like to point out that I do not typically reply to Slashdot posts, however, this is actually something of which I am somewhat a part, and figure I should set things straight. (despite the fact people will still continute to put up off the wall posts on the subject anyway)

Actually, this is not really media contrived or a matter of opportunity knocking. I am part of the University of central Florida Amateur Radio Club (The Moderator can verify this if desired, I do not feel like giving out my email address to thousands).

Dr. Harpole (K4VUD) was actually part of what they called a DXpedition. Where he had gone , there had never in history been an officially sanctioned amateur radio station before. It was mere coincidence that he had been there 2 weeks prior that special permission had been granted for the radio operators to operate there. The ARRL has more on the DXpedition gone into emergency mode

Also, It should be noted that Dr. Harpole was not the only radio operator there. We have been keeping a series of links on this, however, which are available on the UCF Amateur Radio Club's wiki.


I would like to point out that I do not typically reply to Slashdot posts, however, this is actually something of which I am somewhat a part, and figure I should set things straight. (despite the fact people will still continute to put up off the wall posts on the subject anyway)

Ok, do you see why I "fall back to defending nuclear"?

As a consumer I want clean & cheap power. I've looked up how much it's costing the australians to build their solar plant, I've looked up how much it's costing to build the PBMR. I've spent some time trying to sort between the political, research (it is a first), and some allegations of corruption. I see China planing to build something like a hundred of them.

Yes, nuclear plants are run at full power all the time. But because of the nature of the fuel, smart companies will turn down other plants more than nuclear ones. For example, gas plants are very cheap to build, but the fuel costs you. So you shut down the gas plants first...

Solar thermal air-conditioning looks like it will be used soon in large installions which will cut the power consumption. Why use solar generated power to run heating elements to expand the gas on a hot day when you can use solar on the hot side of the cycle?

Well, for one your standard electric air conditioner doesn't use heating elements
Solar thermal air-conditioning looks like neat technology! Why hasn't there been a slashdot article on this? Sure, it's expensive, can't cool very well compared to traditional AC, but it can help. It maybe doesn't help that it's being touted by a gas comany, which mostly touts it for use when electricity is expensive, when you're making steam anyways, or to flatten your usage during 'peak' hours (when electric companies nail big users with bigger rates). However, by combining it with solar, you don't have to use gas. I guess it comes down to the guys with calculators and charts for considering when it's worth it to install it. There's plenty of charts in the pdf file. At a cost three times that of a good quality electric AC system, electricity needs to be pretty expensive, no?
Solar AC: $9,000/ton
Traditional AC: $7,000/3 tons.(SEER 19.2, just about the best available).

Definitely, but I think the "one true power" ethos from anyone is silly.
Like I said, I'd like to see the green powers used where economical. It's just that they aren't economical enough to beat nuclear all the time.

'Humanity is mind and the soul, not body and form.' - John Ringo, There Will Be Dragons (Free as in beer) This book seems to sum up my feelings on the subject rather well; and having met the author, he does his research. And having read the book, he writes a fun story :) Enjoy and be enlightened (and try not to melt the servers!)

'Humanity is mind and the soul, not body and form.' - John Ringo, There Will Be Dragons (Free as in beer)

This book seems to sum up my feelings on the subject rather well; and having met the author, he does his research. And having read the book, he writes a fun story :) Enjoy and be enlightened (and try not to melt the servers!)

For those who posted in response to my original post about NiMH cells having no memory effect, I believe you're mistaken. Here are a few links to back that up:

• NiMH Batteries and Memory
• Matt's Battery Site
• CellPower
• The user's manual of my Sony digital camera

It is true that the term 'memory effect' now has a much looser meaning than before, and that even NiCd batteries only suffer true memory effect under stringent lab conditions. However, today the term is used to refer to any drop in battery performance as a result of charging the battery before a (almost) complete discharge.

Wrong. Solar gain from radiation is a significant factor in design. See for instance this, or this, or this, or this.

Convection/Conduction are certainly at issue when there isn't sun (say, Seattle or Syracuse), but when there is, the radiation transmission is a major factor. This new technology sounds very promising. And yes, deciduous trees planted in good spots are a good low-tech approach.

-dB

The red green and blue of projectors or monitors or whatever are not a single frequency of light. LEDs don't give you pure frequencies either. Lasers are the only thing that give you light at a pure, single frequency I think. On the other hand, this page seems to indicate that DLP light consists of sharper spectral peaks than either LCD or CRT (3rd paragraph).

But still I suspect that their filters probably filter out some of the visible light coming out of the projectors, making this black screen not quite as bright as a comparable white reflective screen. After all it has to be easier to make a material with close to 100% diffuse reflectance across the whole spectrum than to create something that's near 0% everywhere except for three narrow notches which are near 100%. But I'm no expert on light

So I'm thinking it's highly unlikely that the the filters come anywhere near 100% black in the non-reflected parts of the spectrum. No doubt this is the blackest projection screen you've ever seen, but I really doubt it will be the blackest thing you've ever seen. Especially if you've seen Undercover Brother

Still it's a pretty neat trick. Anyone know how they make passive filters with such sharp tuning to specific frequencies. Is it some kind of diffraction thing?

These crystals can be ground up and painted onto a screen or even the side of a building. Then all you need is an infrared laser to scan the the sreen and you have an extremely bright and cheap full color display.

I haven't heard much lately about their progress so I assume they are having some technical or financial delays.

I must confess that I've done a bit of cryogenic piping design (cold boxes) in my time and I have no clue about helium. Offtopic, but related: interesting (but poorly-presented) PDF on LH2.

This course started a couple years ago.. It's a 1000 level course which is freshman level. I've met a few people that took it although most of them are film types. Most engineering majors and physics majors at UCF don't bother because it's virtually useless for our degree requirements.

Here's an article from our student newspaper from the fall 2002 semester.

Strangely, the course number listed in the article is for physical science. I don't know off hand what the real number is. Here's the O-P page from the latest online course catalog.

Well, finals ended for me yesterday (with my orbital mechanics final) so I'm going to die for 2 weeks until summer semester starts.

Daniel Davis

Aerospace Engineering major

University of Central Florida - Orlando

...University of California at Los Angeles, one of the nation's largest universities with 37,500 students...

erm, my school, University of Central Florida has 42,000ish and we're only the second largest in the state, right under the University of Florida.

>Wrongo -- The cost of electricity makes the $30 LInksys cheaper than a Linux/BSD firewall running on a desktop computer. Unless you have some special needs, get the little firewall box.

Yes and no.

Assuming the Linksys uses 1 Amp @ 12 Volts (depends on the model), it uses 12 watts. An old crap computer uses 50 watts in sleep mode (if you have it set up right, the only spinning items will be the fans). At 38 watts, the cost difference per year is:

Lowest (AFAIK... this is what I paid in Ontario, Canada until the liberals screwed it up):

4.3 cents per kWh * 38 * 24 * 365 / 100000 = $14.31 yearly ($CDN), or $10.79 ($US)

If you were to simply turn off the hard drive in the computer (not necessary for a router), you could shave about another 12 watts from that. Underclock it, maybe save another 5 watts.

Basically, in four years (taxes, remember) you can save enough to buy the linksys. And, if you're unlucky enough to live somewhere with disposal fees for old computers, count on this number hovering around 10 years.

Insert your own numbers for your local area. I hear if you are unlucky enough to live in California, you could pay over 15 cents per kWh, which would mean the Linksys could pay off in as little as 1 - 2 years.

This site includes a number of ideas for reducing that energy bill, including zoned heating/cooling. There are several interesting real-time graphs of current energy use.

I found the site while searching for information on heat pump water heaters. One example graph they give shows the heat pump water heater using less than half the energy as resistive heating.

If installed properly, a heat pump water heater will also help air-condition your house. A good place to put ducts is in the kitchen, where the waste heat from cooking can be removed and used to heat water. Ideally, the returned cooled air can be directed at your refrigerator's condenser coils for increased efficiency.

I got my undergrad from UCF in Digital Media, just down the street from FullSail - heard some questionable things as well about the place. They do have kickin' facilities, though.

I'm a grad student now at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The program has people going into many industries, but the majority are into video games. We have graduates at Rockstar, EA, Maxis, Angel Studios, and a number of other companies. One guy was back from his co-op at Maxis and had to excuse himself from a party because Will Wright had called him on his cell. We took a trip to EA (among other companies like Pixar, Disney, etc) last month, where the Vice President and CTO each gave presentations to our group of 30 or so.

Unlike many vocational programs, we don't actually have any courses on video game programming directly, though we do offer official courses in Maya, Building Virtual Worlds, and Game Design. The game design course mainly focuses on board, dice, and card games.

Retro gaming is a popular side hobby, with one student teaching a course in Game Development for the 8-bit NES and the X-Arcade company at residence in our building. (We've got two MAME Arcade setups in the hall)

It's not uncommon to see students parked in front of the gaming setups we have on each floor (with all the major consoles) doing "research", only to go back and discuss what they learned for a few hours with their project team.

The program is pretty demanding and tough to get in, but it's a fun place. Gaming is not an easy industry, there's a lot of late hours, especially in "crunch" mode before a game ships, but it's pretty rewarding.

Would it Kill ya? Clicable link

They are certainly working on it. Eg.:
H-ION Solar Inc.
Solar Hydrogen Research at the University of Central Florida

I'm curious about availability at major universities. Here at the University of Central Florida we have free access in most of the newer buildings and several outdoor areas. The coverage is growing and notable currently covered areas include the bookstore (which is run by Barnes and Noble and has the obligatory Starbucks), the Math and Physics building, the Student Union (along with areas surrouding it) and Engineering. Do other schools have widespread access for students and faculty?

Daniel
Aerospace Engineering major

I'm curious about availability at major universities. Here at the University of Central Florida we have free access in most of the newer buildings and several outdoor areas. The coverage is growing and notable currently covered areas include the bookstore (which is run by Barnes and Noble and has the obligatory Starbucks), the Math and Physics building, the Student Union (along with areas surrouding it) and Engineering. Do other schools have widespread access for students and faculty?

Daniel
Aerospace Engineering major

I'm curious about availability at major universities. Here at the University of Central Florida we have free access in most of the newer buildings and several outdoor areas. The coverage is growing and notable currently covered areas include the bookstore (which is run by Barnes and Noble and has the obligatory Starbucks), the Math and Physics building, the Student Union (along with areas surrouding it) and Engineering. Do other schools have widespread access for students and faculty?

Daniel
Aerospace Engineering major

This is a common problem for many libraries. Even if they're not forbidden, there's a great stigma for it. Libraries wind up with outdated collections because patrons (or more likely, parents of school students) can't stand the idea of getting rid of books. I've heard stories of librarians who have a stack of books in the back, and each day each staff member takes home a book to be thrown away at the librarian's home, so that patrons don't see the books being removed.

Here are some links about collection weeding. The SUNLINK Weed Of The Month is an especially interesting resource. The best part of the site is the Some Things We've Dug Up While Weeding page, with gems like:

Here's a "beaut" I unearthed from the shelves at one of the high schools in my county: "An American Dilemma; the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy" by Gunnar Myrdal. 1944.

I was weeding the vertical file several years ago and found a recipe for cheap and easy-to-make "play dough" - using asbestos!

While weeding a collection for the first time a few weeks ago, I came across a fiction book titled First on the Moon. The subject heading in the tracings at the bottom of the shelf-list card was Science Fiction.

When I first began as a Media Specialist about six years ago I found lots of interesting books! One of my favorites was: Junior: A Colored Boy Of Charleston. By Eleanor Frances Lattimore, Copyright 1938. Junior lives in Charleston and would like to be a shoeshine boy when he grows up!!

This is a common problem for many libraries. Even if they're not forbidden, there's a great stigma for it. Libraries wind up with outdated collections because patrons (or more likely, parents of school students) can't stand the idea of getting rid of books. I've heard stories of librarians who have a stack of books in the back, and each day each staff member takes home a book to be thrown away at the librarian's home, so that patrons don't see the books being removed.

Here are some links about collection weeding. The SUNLINK Weed Of The Month is an especially interesting resource. The best part of the site is the Some Things We've Dug Up While Weeding page, with gems like:

Here's a "beaut" I unearthed from the shelves at one of the high schools in my county: "An American Dilemma; the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy" by Gunnar Myrdal. 1944.

I was weeding the vertical file several years ago and found a recipe for cheap and easy-to-make "play dough" - using asbestos!

While weeding a collection for the first time a few weeks ago, I came across a fiction book titled First on the Moon. The subject heading in the tracings at the bottom of the shelf-list card was Science Fiction.

When I first began as a Media Specialist about six years ago I found lots of interesting books! One of my favorites was: Junior: A Colored Boy Of Charleston. By Eleanor Frances Lattimore, Copyright 1938. Junior lives in Charleston and would like to be a shoeshine boy when he grows up!!

A few weeks back I submitted an article about some mini-clusters we made at the Institute for Simulation and Training at the University of Central Florida. Here's a link: http://helios.engr.ucf.edu/beowulf/miniature.phtml "

Modern (common) homebuilding is nothing to be proud of.

We should be building Insulated Concrete Form homes. Instead we're still building them out of toothpicks. ICF homes are very much more energy efficient, and cost only slightly more to make. They also greatly reduce fire risk and wind damage risk.

So offtopic as it is, this quote is invalid.

We're working on using video see-through head mounted displays to overlay real time CG, something we call "mixed reality". It's like traditional VR, but we add a view of the real world, special effects like smoke, compressed air and interactive lighting, spatialized surround sound, etc. Take traditional VR and add in a whole bunch of technologies and techniques from theme parks and you get what we do.

One of our current research projects is for the Army to simulate urban combat training. We were also showing an entertainment version of the system on Display at SIGGRAPH in San Diego this past week.

The graphics engine for our system runs on Linux, using OpenGL and GLUT, written in C++. Control systems for special effects and point source sound are written in Java, which run on Linux, OSX, and WinXP (whatever platform supports harware interface drivers). We couldn't do what we do without OSS, and hope to release some components to the open source community once they get a little more mature.

See Our Website for more info.

here is the info on another solar race from Dell headquarters in Round Rock Texas to the Florida Solar Energy Center in Cocoa FL which just ended (after 9 days of racing) today.

Good job teams!

Lang's website for the course I was in is here. These notes are in PowerPoint format and require the symbol font just like Guha's did. You can just copy the Windows symbol font to Linux, and they're pretty readable, but still funny. I just used windows to read them.

::Blatant Plug Alert:::

Prepping our booth now for SIGGRAPH in San Diego later this month. We will be presenting a pair of two player mixed reality games on the show floor. We're using Canon video see through HMD's to put the player in a Sci-Fi Time Portal shoot 'em up game as well as a mixed reality aquarium game where you play ball with dolphins.

The idea is to get away from the "text in space" phenomenon that is present with most augmented or mixed reality systems to try and blend the real and the virtual seamlessly - meaning you can put some virtual character in the center of the room and interact, all the while seeing the real objects in the room as well as your buddies waiting on the sidelines. Interactive sets, lighting, and spatial audio wrap it off. Our placeholder website is available at http://www.mcl.ucf.edu/

Should be fun for anyone coming to San Diego!

Well, highschool chemestry classes will show you that all you need to perform electrolysis (separating Hydrogen and Oxygen in water) is electricity.

Here's an explanation.

So, all we need is electricity. Solar cells are one of our technologies that is particularly good at generating electricity without having to do much more than set them in the sun.

On a more interesting note, I was recently talking to a chemist-friend at Northwestern University who was telling me that one of the other research groups there was working on catalysts for solar photocatalytic hydrogen production. Basically the idea is to introduce a catalyst into water that will cause hydrogen to be released when the mixture is bombarded with photons (light). Apparently hydrogen is being separated this way (in research labs), but the process isn't efficient enough yet to make it worthwhile for production purposes.

I just found a page from the Florida Solar Energy Center listing many forms of solar hydrogen production research projects at the center.

Close up of hand of God reaching out to Adam from Michelangelo's Sistene Chapel.

black and white picture of The Creation of Adam from the Web Museums page on Michelangelo.

color photo of The Creation of Adam.

Look at the eye contact remember George Clooney's glance in that scene.

Notice the unborn behind God. Isn't that a nice bit of paradox?

My first reaction was to dismiss the hand of God reference as pretentious, but it does add a lot of depth to the movie, and it was finely executed by Clooney and Soderberg.