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Blender, as far as I know, is just a design tool, it doesn't actually do any rendering, it just allows you to develop models in a range of formats that you can then throw at a renderer.

No, it has a scanline renderer built in and an optional ray tracer backend called yafray.

I think the most reasonable solution for global illumination is photon mapping. The algorithms are elegant, produce very good output, and (unlike radiosity) are not horribly resource intensive.

It also helps to use a dictionary written in the last 20 years. Here's a link for ya: first genetic evidence uncovered of how major changes in body shapes occured during early animal evolution. Of course, no matter how much evidence is collected, and no matter how much research is done, the creationists will never admit their fantasy is wrong. Even if we layed down a giant phenological map of how every creature on earth day was evolved from a single source, the creationists would point to the species that have since gone extinct as reason why the "theory" is incorrect.

How about drink more coffee, less likely to suffer from Parkinson's or sleep less, live longer? This is just a few cursory findings on the surface, I'm sure you could find more.

Nice try but if malloc(3) is not too buggy (if it is, you have other problems) it will only return NULL or a valid pointer. If it never supposed to return -1 (unless -1 is a valid pointer) or some value larger than MAX_MEMORY_ADDRESS (from where does this macro come anyway?).

I don't think Linux has a realistic shot at beating down Apple (Logic), Steinberg (Nuendo, Cubase), Cakewalk (Sonar), Digidesign (Protools) and MOTU (Digital Performer) without any kind of differentiation.

I dunno...right now, all of the good sequencers are pretty expensive, so there's definitely a market on the Mac/PC for a somewhat decent, free sequencer. For instance, I own Logic 5.1 for Windows, which I use for recording and stuff, but I have an OSX laptop that I use for performances, etc. However, I can't afford Logic 7 for OSX, so it would be nice to have a minimal sequencer that I could use when I'm on the road.

an open-standard "music computer" with a lightweight embedded OS that can be taken out live on stage, and used to run what are effectively server applications (MIDI or audio in, audio or MIDI out) in a stable manner.

One thing to look into would be the Planet CCRMA version of Fedora out of Stanford. You have to install Fedora first, but then you install their stuff with APT. It has a low-latency kernel, and a bunch of audio software:

http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

Also, a traditional sequencer isn't really the best for live performances...look into PD http://www-crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html or Supercollider http://www.audiosynth.com/ for live-performance stuff on Linux

Tom

I know some are pointing to the Cell project as the inspiration here, but Tera was hard at work on this long ago in the form of the MTA

The MTA was a commercial failure. Tera's inability to execute as a company was a major reason.

It is fun to watch Intel chase AMD.

• Berkeley (Bancroft Library)
• UCLA (Young Research Library Special Collections
• http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/duppol.html

I also think that a 3D UI would be awkward. A ZUI (Zooming User Interface), however, has proven to be a very efficient and friendly way to organize data on a computer. The infinite desktop model allows for spatial organization and quick navigation.

Jef Raskin always has interesting GUI ideas, as well as a ZUI Demo.

Here at UCSD, Jim Hollan and friends have produced a ZUI called Dynapad. The video on that site shows a bunch of photos on the desktop, but in general any file or process can be accessed and arranged in the same manner.

Zoom, zoom, zoom!

actully, deterioration is not quite the problem you have made it out to be

this Science article clearly states that "[Crystalline Si solar cells] have already proven their excellent stability
and reliability, operating under outdoor conditions without any deterioration in their performance over several decades."

of course organic/polymer solar cells are a differnt story.

Why bother with solar panels and propellers? A buoyancy glider powered from temperature gradients is far more efficient. And you can use it where the sun don't shine, even off-planet.

I may regret this later, but...
Argo Robotic Instrument Network Now Covers Most of the Globe (2.6MB, QuickTime) (my mirror)

Flossie? Excellent, I didn't know reknowned HIV researchers trolled slashdot like the rest of us geeks. Cool to see you around these parts.

Objection: assumption of facts not in evidence. What you say is only true if it is possible to do it significantly better than it is done, and yet you have offered no evidence to support this assumption.

Do you have any evidence that it isn't possile to do it significantly better? We can both play the lack-of-evidence game. It is a great game to play as far as I'm concerned because the answer to it would be: we both admit it isn't perfect. Where's the objection to sponsoring significant studies to determine how not perfect it is and how to improve it?

Those are coming; they did not get them in time for this election.

There is proposed legislation to do this federally. There isn't any passed legislation to assure it will be in place at federal, state, county, and city levels by next year. While the notable bills that would give us voter-verifiable audit trails don't seem to be poisoned & should be passed, they aren't exactly being fast-tracked either.

So what? We had less percentage of error in this election than in 2000, when we DID have an audit trail.

And exactly how much error was there in 2000 and how much in 2004? You're making this up. (And after accusing me of doing something similar?!?!

Provisional ballots are new for this election, and the handling of them is defined by federal law

Some states had provisional ballots prior to the election. Congress made them required in all states this year. It is the states who determine which provisional ballots will be counted. Some throw out the provisional ballots cast in the wrong polling place. Some don't. Some require a form to be completely and accurately filled out. Some don't. There aren't even state-wide standards, as a 2002 court case in Colorado highlighted: three counties had three different standards in a statewide election.

Bull. It is possible to accout for that the statistical errors
There are none, moron.

You'd agree that there are some if you knew what they are. Please provide a definition and say why counting votes is so perfect that there are none. If we can't find the systematic cause of all errors, explain why. If we can, please explain why we can't make a perfect count after we resolve all systematic errors.

If you don't want to go to the trouble of checking out either of the books I mentioned from the library, feel free to use the web.

Yes, you can say that. If you're an idiot. It's nonsensical.

Way to go calling everyone publishing scientific papers and even many engineers idiots! You can (and often should) apply error analysis to any measurement that you can make repetitively that has a different value each time you measure it. It isn't nonsensical at all. If the standard deviation is sufficiently low, you might have wasted time or money. But we can gather from many recounts that the deviation is higher than small spreads & so could be worthwhile.

Such thing can only make sense when you are doing sampling, which you are not doing.

Neither are scientists doing sampling when they measure the speed of light.

then you went back to talking about it anyway, because you're stupid. Statistical error ONLY applies to sampling.

You're stupid. Read the references provided & explain to me how making a fixed measurement (as done in examples in many of the references) is sampling. It isn't. Statistical error applies to any repeatable measurement that don't lead to identical results.

There is no such thing as experimental error in these matters. There's no experiment.

If you've ever wondered what human skin tastes like, here's a chance to grow a bunch and slap it on the grill. Or sell it on ebay or make your own leather furniture. The possibilities are endless!

what difference does it make? Nitin Gupta http://bioinf.ucsd.edu/~ngupta

Exactly.

And if you look at the maps of its movements the answer becomes pretty aparent.

Look here

> Admittedly, not too much open-source in that field.

You've got to be joking! I've been doing software synthesis for a least a decade with Csound, long before VST. VST plug-ins are a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the rich history of software synthesis. For more information about the field, I'd suggest The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads.

Look at Linux MIDI & Sound page and tell me there aren't "much" open source soft synths. Besides Csound, pd and jMax might be worth investigating.

Cool, now it's up there with the classical station WCPE!

Does anyone know of any other Ogg Vorbis streams? The only other one I know is a police scanner.

More like a regular book / magazine, I guess, but it seemed a little weird. I guess vertical scrolling is just too ingrained ...

Check out http://www.threedee.com/jcm/ for more history of the Terak computer and the p-System. A pure bitmap display with 320 x 240 mono graphics, pan/scroll, a software-driven speaker and sound, all designed as a desktop personal computer, wow! It's right there in the history books next to Xerox PARC machines and the PERQ.

In November 1981, an Terak 8510/a with a PDP-11/03 CPU, 56K of RAM and one floppy drive was $8,935. And extra floppy drive was $2,570. You could even upgrade to color graphics at 640 x 480 by eight colors for $10,550. A ten meg hard drive was $7,985.

One of my functional Teraks was invited to take part in the 1970s History exhibit at SIGGRAPH 98, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference, the annual gathering of the computer graphics industry.

The p-System was one of the operating system alternatives for the original IBM PC, apart from MS-DOS and CP/M-86. If you can find them, the disk images for that p-System will still run in a command window under Windows, if you preload ANSI.SYS.

Another reference to the reunion is http://www.alumni.ucsd.edu/magazine/vol1no3/featur es/pascal.htm .

This Terak page won the "Geek Site Of The Day" Award on October 16, 1996.

- John

What keeps some random person who owns a gun from taking one of these down, exactly?

Gravity.

It has been called an "unforgiving motherfucker" by the walker-bound elderly, but the fact is, only gravity can protect our prescious airships from the terrorists who seek to destroy our way of life.

Let's suppose you've got a nice powerful 50 cal that fires at 2000 feet per second.

physics tells us that it'll take 2000 feet per second / 32 feet per second per second = 62.5 seconds to reach it's max height.

Then we can figure out how high that is with this equation:

distance = initial speed * time - ( 1/2 ) * acceleration * time^2

2000 * 62.5 - 0.5 * 32 * 62.5^2
125000 - 62500
== 62500

So your bullet will turn around roughly a mile short of the target. :)

Do not speak ill of "fortran 77". It is a great tool when used for its intended purposes. For example, I am preparing to use zipper to help create graphics for my upcoming talk. Another tool is PLTMG. These are both written in Fortran. (Of course, Surface Evolver is also a great program.)

It does look like a novel approach

Novel? This stuff is old hat.

It does look like a novel approach

Novel? This stuff is old hat.

...and the Cray 2 made a good bartender turret.

.

Ramachandran's optical illusions

They do have good algorithms for that sort of thing. Too bad they're not more widely used.

-jim

They do have good algorithms for that sort of thing. Too bad they're not more widely used.

-jim

They do have good algorithms for that sort of thing. Too bad they're not more widely used.

-jim

FWIW, readers should always understand that when they read a news story they are getting a reporter's interpretation of an interview that itself attempts to simplify a larger story. Inevitably, this means that technical details don't survive the translation. To wit, on the second page of the proposal we write: While it is tempting to repurpose the epidemiological models of infectious disease in humans [29], Internet pathogens are in fact quite different--they are authored by intelligent adversaries. Consequently, traditional stochastic analyses are highly fragile tools for predicting the dynamics or limitations of future outbreaks. For those actually interested in what our center is planning to do, I've made the proposal and the summary available. It also gives some insight into what an NSF grant proposal looks like for those who are curious. - Stefan

FWIW, readers should always understand that when they read a news story they are getting a reporter's interpretation of an interview that itself attempts to simplify a larger story. Inevitably, this means that technical details don't survive the translation. To wit, on the second page of the proposal we write: While it is tempting to repurpose the epidemiological models of infectious disease in humans [29], Internet pathogens are in fact quite different--they are authored by intelligent adversaries. Consequently, traditional stochastic analyses are highly fragile tools for predicting the dynamics or limitations of future outbreaks. For those actually interested in what our center is planning to do, I've made the proposal and the summary available. It also gives some insight into what an NSF grant proposal looks like for those who are curious. - Stefan

Proponents of the idea that google + "I'm Feeling Lucky" button could be a good contender in the Turing Test have been dismissed with "What if you ask google where your local chip shop is?"

So it's scary and amazing that it could actually have an answer to that question.

I created a Game based off of Irrlicht for a school project.

Although it has good features and good documentation as far as open source engines go, it will not compete with the likes of doom or half-life. The reason for this is speed. It is NOT as fast.

Irrlicht uses a very outdated method of restricting which objects are going to be rendered and rasterized (a technique called culling) as opposed to the complex method used in doom and half-life. In Irrlicht, this is called an Octree where in better engines they use a BSP (I believe).

Carmack does not find this to be much of a threat, I guarantee.

If you want something in this style which actually delivers as good or better performance and is free, check out Pure Data with the Gem library. You can make your very own VDMX (written in the commercial version of PD called Max). Runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows.

http://www-crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html/

http://gem.iem.at/

If you're looking for a good example of the right way to teach religion, you should check out the UCSD MMW (Making of the Modern World) program. http://provost.ucsd.edu/roosevelt/mmw/

Undergraduate general education requirement for Roosevelt college at UCSD. We study fscking EVERYTHING under the sun, and being an engineering student I absolutely hated every minute of it. I value it now though. Perhaps it was more of a guilty pleasure. ...Okay, so I lied, I liked it. But it was a ton of work.

It's 28 units of anthropology, a complete history of the world crammed into two years of study. It's very aggressive, but it's also taught very well and could easily be repackaged for high school consumption. Professors come from all sorts of different departments - history, English, theology, philosophy, etc. Oh, and anthropology.

When I say everything, I mean everything. From pre-history to the modern day. IIRC the breakdown is:

MMW 1: pre-history to neolithic
MMW 2: neolithic to classical antiquity
MMW 3: classical antiquity to medieval era (or as Eddie Izzard calls it, the "stupid fucker" period)
MMW 4: medieval era to ~1600
MMW 5: 1600 to 1800
MMW 6: 1800 to modernity

A favorite theory of mine posited by my MMW 1 professor is that agriculture came out of the discovery of grain fermenting on river banks, in other words, proto beer ;)

Another interesting theory is that the "virgin" birth was a mistranslation into Greek - the Greeks didn't have a word for "young girl," the closest thing was "virgin," and that's what got used.

One element of our study of the bible was that of who wrote it - the author of the book "Who Wrote The Bible" is a professor here at UCSD. Very interesting. Turns out there were four authors or so over a period of time, and that the whole thing is very political. Go figure.

The idea here is that this is all crap I absolutely never would have known without taking MMW.

Every major religion throughout time is studied, including the oddball ones - we don't stop at Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. We read parts of the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, all sorts of stuff. We're taught the beliefs and values, and investigate how these have effected history and decision making, why people might be fundamentally at odds, that sort of thing. But there's never any suggestion that something is right or wrong - that much is left to the student, and essays are graded on the strength rather than the slant of one's argument. Professors aren't looking to make students think a certain way, but instead simply to make students think. Far more valuable if you ask me, and what the author of the book in the OP is fighting for.

What makes it even more interesting is that it isn't particularly Euro-centric, and actually, one of the main themes of MMW 4 is the question "why Europe?" After all, China had gunpowder first. We read all sorts of crazy stuff too - Xenophon, Confucius, the salt and iron debate, the code of Bushido, the tale of Maruf the cobbler, Ibn Batuta, Newton, Treitschke, Ike, Hitler, Bob Dylan, and on and on and on. Contemporary accounts of every event we study, as well as op-ed type stuff. Very interesting.

Just don't ask me to remember any of it ;)

I've suggested that the lectures be made available on DVD to alumni of the program...I really hope something comes out of that.

is the one the on your door. Virtually everyone I knew who had anything stolen from them freshman year in my dorm had left their doors unlocked or open - even for a second to go to the bathroom. If you have an incompetent roommate, then I'd hide your laptop whenever you leave the room - prefereably in your underwear drawer. Or better yet, take it with you and surf in class if you're lucky enough to have a 802.11b school (like mine).

Sorry. That area code is Often used by carriers to indicate that the area code information is unavailable for CNID, even though the rest of the number is present.

Basically what you want to do is some time compression. You can do that by means of granulation or a FFT. Most audio applications already have time compression/expansion plugins built in to them. Sound Forge, Pro Tools Free, Live and Cool Edit are some of the commercial programs that come to mind. You could also build a stand alone program fairly easily with Csound, Max/MSP or Pure Data. These are audio programming/scripting languages. Csound and Pure Data are free. You just need to know a little about digital audio to make a program with any of those languages.

I'll never understand why this pathetic lameness is still considered funny for so long after the Republicans started exaggerating what Gore actually said. Is it some sort of self-mocking humor by the people dumb enough to repeat it?

• Argentine Ants Invasion: Success Tied to Reduced Genetic Variation
• Supercolony of ants found (Europe; Mirrored articles: #1 and #2)
• Invading Ants Press United Front in California
• Argentine Ants Threaten Californian Horned Lizards
• It's the weather
• Giant mutant ant colony found in Australia (similar story.
• Might not be 'supercolony' after all: #1 and #2.

Actually I think the most impressive leaps have already been taken in a previous age.

check out this graph of the population of the world. the sudden explosion during the Industrial Revolution is staggering, dwarfing even the exponential increases in computer power.

graph 2
graph 3

Anyone find a non-pdf version. Here is the list of top 100 papers in text form, converted using pdftotext. Skip down a bit for the actual list of the top 100 papers.

ucsd link

Not only do rocks travel between Mars and the Earth, but some are even thought to have traveled there and back !

There's approximately half a ton of material from Mars that falls on the Earth every year. Even though it takes more momentum to leave the Earth and more chance to fall back on Mars than the opposite, that's way too much to neglect.

For example, I am currently a physics graduate student. I get paid a little less than $20K a year, but have no fees.

My brother is going to law school. He gets paid nothing and will have around $150K in loans to pay off when he's done.

The balance is that he'll get paid more after he gets out, right? What happens if he can't find a good job? Not all lawyers (or MBAs for that matter) make a lot of money. What happens if he can't find any job? Unemployment among physics PhDs is always very low, almost never higher than 4%. Can MBAs or lawyers say the same?

The numbers of $40K a year for a post-doc may be right for biologists and organic chemists, but many of those guys are being replaced by robots and combinatorial chemistry. That's led to some poor job markets for them. Here are some actual numbers (as opposed to vague generalizations). While you don't make six figures as a physicist, you're doing pretty well.

When it comes down to it, science is changing now in the same way everything else is. Computers are cheap, easy to use and more powerfull, allowing students to be replaced by a few good Labview programs. The revolution in nanoscale characterization allowed by AFM and STM has lead to new, better ways of doing chemistry and biology. Should science NOT use these tools because it means some people are now obsolete?

The article is right on when it takes Universities to task for not teaching the skills which will be needed. Grad student labor is cheap, and some of this equipment is expensive. It's not even that more money is needed. It just needs to be spent smarter. Buying used equipment, testing prototype technology and forming collaborations with other groups to pool resources are ways of providing your research group with cutting edge tools (all of which are used in the lab I work in). Of course, there's nothing wrong with building your own equipment either (what I am spending a Saturday doing, after posting here, of course). In any case, it's dishonest for a University to hand out PhDs to people who are not able to get jobs for lack of training.

QUALCOMM has been demonstrating this capability for years using 1xEV-DO.

In December 2000, QUALCOMM provided Wireless LAN access to the 49th IETF meeting in San Diego by doing this. You can read about it in this paper.

The UCSD CyberShuttle has been doing this for over two years. You can read about it in this article.

Here's another process talking about production rates of 1.6kg/0.8hr. So that several kg sphere could quite obviously exist =)

Everybody knows chatbots and the Turing-Test.

But what happens, when a chatbot talks to another chatbot? Take a look.

Implemented in a video card in real time? Wow. I'm impressed.

There are many other sorts of co-ops as well, including:

• housing co-ops (often for students)
  in which the people living in the house are part owners and their "rent" is actually going to pay off the mortgage
• food co-ops
  which in this day and age are usually buyer's co-ops, where the shoppers are "members" who pay an annual fee and in return get lower prices on food
• farm co-ops
  in which farmers pool their resources to purchase fertilizer, distribution, etc

and there are many other sorts of co-ops, usually fitting either the "buyer's co-op" model or the "workers' co-op" model (where the workers own the business) -- at my school there are 4 co-ops, all workers' co-ops; one is a book store, one is a food store, one is a convenience/school supplies store, and the last is a cafe and all-ages venue (The Che Cafe)