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Weapons are the bearers of bad news;
all people should detest them.

The wise man values the left side,
and in time of war he values the right.
Weapons are meant for destruction,
and thus are avoided by the wise.
Only as a last resort
will a wise person use a deadly weapon.
If peace is her true objective
how can she rejoice in the victory of war?
Those who rejoice in victory
delight in the slaughter of humanity.
Those who resort to violence
will never bring peace to the world.
The left side is a place of honor on happy occasions.
The right side is reserved for mourning at a funeral.
When the lieutenants take the left side to prepare for war,
the general should be on the right side,
because he knows the outcome will be death.
The death of many should be greeted with great sorrow,
and the victory celebration should honor those who have died.

I love to Google, so I'll be happy to lend a hand.

"nutmeg poisoning, severe toxic symptoms produced by ingestion of powdered nutmeg, characterized by narcosis with periods of delirium and excitability."

Dorland's Medical Dictionary

"Nutmeg is poisonous and should be used in moderation, a pinch or two is safe."

Encyclopedia of Spices

"Nutmeg is safe in very small amounts, but eating 1 to 6 tablespoons at on sitting can make you ill.

"Symptoms: Eating nutmeg causes headache, dizziness, nausea and aching muscles."

Everyday Poisons

"An hallucinogen and toxic."

Toxic Plants and Household Poisons

"888/ Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously."

Weird Science Fact File

"C. Nutmeg (Myristica spp.): Old World tropical hallucinogenic flowering plant, the source of nutmeg and mace. Probably pre-historical use. Taken orally or as a narcotic snuff. Extremely variable in effect, usually causes distortion of time and space perception."

Psychoactive Plants

Eh, close enough...

Hydro power is cleaner, but at the expense of wildlife, and at the cost of destroying natural flood patterns and waterside ecosystems.

Everything has an impact. Some impacts are lesser, or more tolerable than others. But it is hard to explain to the Salmon why they are getting turned into paste by turbines because California needs more air conditioning.

We need more projects like CAESAR and Integral Fast Reactors to solve our energy problems...

Ditto the University of Southampton. I've been working on a SW-related project, AKT, for the last four years; as part of this work, I was a member of the W3C working group (along with Jeff Heflin) that wrote the OWL Web Ontology Language.

Other places to look at are Jim Hendler's MIND group in Maryland, which has been doing some sterling work over the last few years (as an aside, Jeff used to be Jim's PhD student).

If one is interested in a global viewer with additional scientific value, the Global Land Cover Facility has the Earth Science Data Interface that allows one to browse Earth's surface from the perspective of many different satellites. It has imagery from the Landsats, Terra, Aqua and the Space Shuttle. For a true-color global satellite imagery set, check out the GeoCover NaturalVue at Earth Satellite Corproation.

MOND

Well, it's what some physicists may be thinking, anyway. I suspect that the Guardian article is meaning to hint at this, as well. For those who don't know, MOND is a modification of standard Newtonian Dynamics that has to do with very small accelerations. I'd actually really, really like to see a MONDian calcuation of what the forces should be on those probes and see if it matches their current paths.

Wow. I think this is the second time I've advocated MOND (a theory which I just barely consider reasonable, and no where near verified) on /.

We have been using the Anoto paper with a few of the digital pens (each with varying ease of use), and have created some useful systems in the process. Most notably:

• François Guimbretière's home page, which has links to all of the Paper Augmented Digital Documents (PADD) papers.
• ProofRite - A combination of a distributed PADD infrstructure and an extension to AbiWord. It allows for annotations to be incorporated into AbiWord documents, so that Tablet PC users may mark up their document on the screen. Further, users may print an AbiWord document, annotate it on Anoto paper, and have their strokes incorporated into the document.

The gap between paper and computers has existed for too long. With this research and the amazing new hardware, I personally believe we'll be seeing the gap close quickly.

-Dave

We have been using the Anoto paper with a few of the digital pens (each with varying ease of use), and have created some useful systems in the process. Most notably:

• François Guimbretière's home page, which has links to all of the Paper Augmented Digital Documents (PADD) papers.
• ProofRite - A combination of a distributed PADD infrstructure and an extension to AbiWord. It allows for annotations to be incorporated into AbiWord documents, so that Tablet PC users may mark up their document on the screen. Further, users may print an AbiWord document, annotate it on Anoto paper, and have their strokes incorporated into the document.

The gap between paper and computers has existed for too long. With this research and the amazing new hardware, I personally believe we'll be seeing the gap close quickly.

-Dave

We have been using the Anoto paper with a few of the digital pens (each with varying ease of use), and have created some useful systems in the process. Most notably:

• François Guimbretière's home page, which has links to all of the Paper Augmented Digital Documents (PADD) papers.
• ProofRite - A combination of a distributed PADD infrstructure and an extension to AbiWord. It allows for annotations to be incorporated into AbiWord documents, so that Tablet PC users may mark up their document on the screen. Further, users may print an AbiWord document, annotate it on Anoto paper, and have their strokes incorporated into the document.

The gap between paper and computers has existed for too long. With this research and the amazing new hardware, I personally believe we'll be seeing the gap close quickly.

-Dave

We have been using the Anoto paper with a few of the digital pens (each with varying ease of use), and have created some useful systems in the process. Most notably:

• François Guimbretière's home page, which has links to all of the Paper Augmented Digital Documents (PADD) papers.
• ProofRite - A combination of a distributed PADD infrstructure and an extension to AbiWord. It allows for annotations to be incorporated into AbiWord documents, so that Tablet PC users may mark up their document on the screen. Further, users may print an AbiWord document, annotate it on Anoto paper, and have their strokes incorporated into the document.

The gap between paper and computers has existed for too long. With this research and the amazing new hardware, I personally believe we'll be seeing the gap close quickly.

-Dave

Do you REALLY want me to bring up how 'good' the Linux kernel was in it'x 1.x days?

Do you REALLY want me to bring up how 'good' Windows was in it's 1.x days?

It's a "corner reflector" - put three mirrors, mutually perpendicular, two on the wall and one on the floor in the corner of a room. Any light shone one one will also reflect off the other two and go straight back the direction it came. The ones put on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts are, IIRC, are a (grossly approximate) one-foot-square array of one-inch corner reflectors.

Google finds some relevant links:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog? sc=1971-008C&ex=9

http://www.physics.umd.edu/lecdem/services/demos/d emosl2/l2-44.htm

way to steal from the onion for karma.

Obligitory Onion Reference

MONK GLOATS OVER YOGA CHAMPIONSHIP
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~chande/humor/yoga.html

Too bad you have to pay to access the Onion's archives.

For those missing a Linux version, PhotoMesa is a nice image browser, though while it doesn't have the meta-data stuff Picasa likely does, it is a very nice way of browsing images. And coming from one of the best HCI labs around, it's pretty useful..

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/photomesa/

Google for Tomasulo's algorithm.

1. pacemaker recall.
2. F-15 Radar. Google for B. Nordall's port in Aviation Week and Space Technology
3. Patriot Missile II (Anoplate, Suspected tin whisker related problems, Fall 2000)
4. Nuclear Utilities Tin plated contact support arms on relays grew tin whiskers causing a resistive shunt path.
5. Rocket motor starting

And likewise there should be no further possibility he could even be a professor in mathematics from either University of Maryland, College Park , Johns Hopkins University , or many of the other nearby colleges/universities I'm too lazy to link (George Washington University, Towson University, Loyola, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, etc etc).

Yes and it just gets worse as chip densities increases. That's why IBM invented Chipkill (which is essentially RAID-5 for ECC RAM banks). The error rate for 1GB ECC memory-equipped server is 9 outages per 100 servers over 3 years IBM whitepaper, pdf. Non-ECC ram is probably rediculously high!

...and USB and SCSI and gigabit Ethernet and commodity SMP and IPv6 and...

Parent^2 was probably a troll, or maybe just ignorant, but in case anybody agrees, consider this:

If you ever take a look at the various visualization projects that show the breakdown of the Linux kernel, like this one, what you'll find is that a huge amount of code is dedicated to things that didn't even exist in 1983, and probably not in 1993 either. Most of them are hardware drivers and filesystems and networking standards that get built as modules, so you wouldn't necessarily care that there's IRDA or HFS or MIPS support, but it's there.

Bei ze vay: Ze airplane was neither invented by American nor Russians, but also by us. To be precise, by Otto Lilienthal

Link here.

Web page for University of Maryland, College Park, venus transit

"Witness the first Transit of Venus in 122 years
Join the Department of Astronomy
Tuesday, June 8
from 5:30 - 7:30 AM
5th Floor Balcony, Plant Sciences Building
Park (free) on Level 3 in the Regent's Drive Parking Garage (entrance on Stadium Dr.).
Walk across the bridge (near section 3-4) in the southwestern corner of the garage.
Enter the building and take the elevator (you will be on the 2nd floor) to the 5th floor.
Walk out onto the balcony.
In case of cloudy weather, join us in the Computer and Space Science Building (on Stadium Drive), in the Computer Lab, Room 1220. We will view the transit using the computers."

Your best (free) bet is probably TIGER data in either its original form or in shapefile form, updated and corrected locally.

TIGER is made from USGS DLG or DRG files, combined with some updating done by the US Census Bureau. Since the census is only done periodically, the TIGER data gets out of date.

Some organizations take TIGER data and update it and resell it in various forms. One of these is NAVTEQ, who has people out on the road constantly driving around and updating their maps. As a result, this information tends to be rather expensive, but pretty high quality. Other companies in the same business are DeLorme and UnderTow (formerly Chicago Mapping, I believe). I think UnderTow's Precision Mapping product has pretty decent licensing terms, last I looked at it (several years ago). Much better than DeLorme.

If you want to get your own imagery and work from that, there are several good free sources:

University of Maryland's GLCF site serves up 30m color imagery and 15m monochrome imagery for most of the world. To make the color imagery useful, you'll want to take a look at Scott Cherba's Tutorial using Photoshop or Terrainmap's tutorial using PaintShop Pro. One of the software companies I've founded makes an inexpensive utility called PixelSense (Windows, $49) to do this process automatically.

The United States Department of Agriculture Lighthouse Server serves up a variety of data including free 1m monochrome mosaics of virtually every county in the US. These are large files, and come in MrSID format, for which you'll need to download a Viewer (time-limited trial version) that can save out the portions you want. The nice thing about this is that they are mosaiced and brightness-balanced, whereas if you just go buy/download a bunch of DOQQs elsewhere, they may not match well at the edges of each file.

Finally, in urban areas, you may be able to take advantage of the USGS Urban Areas High-Resolution Orthoimagery available for some cities from the USGS Seamless Server. This data is fantastic, 1ft resolution color airphotos. You can see cars and individual people. It's very recent, having been aquired after 2001 for national disaster planning and response purposes.

Good luck. I'd be happy to answer questions you might have privately, as a lot of my customers do cartography.

Here's a Pic...:

Pic

Wow. This makes MOND sound like a mainstream theory! :-)

My room-mate has Linux installed on his IPaq and carries that around, with a small portable keyboard.

Here's a how-to on installing Linux on an IPaq and here's the keyboard for it.

I hear that there are also IR versions of these things that've come out, but I've not seen one yet.

I'm not sure cultural factors are primary here. Yes, there is a long heritage of collective responsibility, deference to elders and clan leaders, the paternalist state, etc. But do recall that the current regime has engaged in widespread, politically-motivated murder and torture.

The Party regards a form of collective spiritual and physical exercise as a political threat and have imprisoned and tortured its followers. It is within the living memory of most Chinese that the universities were emptied and intellectuals, professors and students forced to undergo *political re-education* on collective farms and forced-labor camps. Millions of Chinese have died for their political views (even the mere potential for dissenting views) in the last sixty years.

Which is why the current appropriation of the slogan *Let a thousand flowers bloom* sticks in my craw so. Besides being a mis-translation, this slogan of the early days of the cultural revolution was not an invitation to voice new ideas or question established norms, but bait to lure dissenting elements into the open. It is like saying *arbeit macht frei.* It may or may not be so, but to use the phrase in any but a historical context would be deeply offensive to many, even today. That such a reaction is not invited by the Chinese phrase is a testament to Western cultural astigmatism.

The site for the Ranger robot is here.

And sometimes, D&D gives back:

~wavylines~

"A balrog!" Gandalf rasped. "I might have known!"

Pippin hauled out his well-worn copy of the Monstrous Manual, while Merry peeked over his shoulder. "I don't see 'Balrog' listed in the index anywhere."

"Of course not, foolish Took," the high-level mage chided him. "The copyright to the 'Balrog' name is owned by the Tolkien estate. Gygax had to call it 'Balor' or a 'Type VI demon' when he put the MM together."

Merry quickly thumbed to the Demon section, only to recall that in 2nd Edition, "Demons" and "Devils" had been renamed Baatezu and Tanar'ri, although he never could remember which was which. He cursed the Fundamentalist Christian parents' groups who had threatened to boycott TSR for creating a "demonic" game, and which had forced that particularly stupid name-change upon them. Finally, though, he located "Balor" in the Tanar'ri section, grateful that they weren't among the discontinued demon listings like Orcus and Demogorgon.

"They're only 13 hit dice," Merry dutifully reported, "But they can cast dispel magic every round at 20th level, so watch yourself, Gandalf!"

"That also do 4d8 damage if they make a to-hit roll with their whip and drag you close to their bodies," Gimli noted. "I'm outta here!" He turned and ran at his full movement rate of 9 (12 if he wasn't wearing armor).

"Leave him to me," the mage intoned. "They're worth 46,000 experience points apiece, and if I kill him by myself, I get *all* of those points!" He strode toward the Balr-- er, Balor, and blocked the 10-foot-wide corridor leading out of the room. "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!!!"

LOTR as written by others - as a D&D novel.

I would, and have looked into it and written some code that way. However I am using Piccolo for my graphics, and while there is an SWT port, it just doesn't work as well. But, since Piccolo has a .NET version I would like to make a GTK# version that uses Cairo and stuff.

a similar site. For kicks, try sending a 1000 km rock asteroid into Mars at 20 km/sec and see what Marvin thinks of it. Then if you're not intimidated, try again with a 5000 km one.

Try this simulator referenced earlier in the thread:

http://janus.astro.umd.edu/astro/impact.html

If you enter a speed lower than 11.2 km/s, you will get this error message:

As an object falls toward a planet, it is accelerated by the planet's gravity. The slowest possible impact speed for interplanetary material is the planet's escape velocity. Impact speeds for Earth range from 11.2 km/s to 72.8 km/s. Try again with a faster speed!

Those results are hardly user-friendly. If you're not a physics genius, there's a better simulator here.
In addition to the scientific number-spam, it briefly explains the results and even presents a picture of a real crater that is thought to have been caused by a meteor similar to the one you specified.
It doesn't seem to have the same degree of flexibility as the one in the article, however, but at least it's fun! :)

http://janus.astro.umd.edu/astro/impact.html

Not only do you get interesting graphics of similar impact craters, but if the impact is big enough you get the Martian from Bugs Bunny making pithy comments while he looks through his telescope at Earth. Cool stuff!

By drinking coffee you actually dehydrate your body, because the coffee has a higher electrolyte concentration

No. Coffee will dehydrate you because caffeine reduces absorption of water in the Loops of Henle (in the glomerular capsules of the nephrons in your kidney and hence is s diuretic. The fact that it reduces the absorption by affecting the electrolyte balance has nothing to do with the electrolyte concentration in the coffee itself: taking a caffeine-containing pill like Pro-Plus will have the same effect.

Newsmap is based on Treemaps, which is both a conceptual GUI idiom as well as a commercial product. This is the work that Ben Schneiderman is most well-known for, and he's been working on different forms of interactive information visualization for decades.

The parent was asking about projects like KDE and Gnome picking up cool concepts like this. The HCI world is full of 'hey neat' ideas that on the surface really seem like they should be brought into the fold, but aren't for a variety of reasons. One company in particular that I worked for (and won't name) has a really cool project that I feel could become a standard UI idiom like radio buttons and scrollpanes, but the product is doomed to failure because the company is horribly mismanaged and (having been the sole coder--as an intern, even) I also know the code to be completely inflexibly designed. Furthermore, they want to make all sorts of money on the thing, which means they're charging customers an arm and a leg to use it.

The Linux desktop environment projects have issues equally as inibitive as the one described above, but rather than being financially oriented, their problems are more about ego and (with the exception of some of the KDE guys) a complete misunderstanding of what HCI is all about. I really wish KDE/Gnome would use these experimental UI metaphors, but alas, I think their structures prohibit this sort of thing.

Not intending to do self promotion, I'll point first to a competitor's product rather than my own:
Hivegroup's Honey Comb relies on the treemap technique from University of Maryland. This is far cooler idea than those lame heatmaps.

If you want a free try on your own data, you may also try my own version of the same stuff: ILOG Discovery.

I think the exciting thing here is the excellent (not just neat, but surprisingly useful/usable) implementation of a treemap pulling from publicly available data.

Also, while treemaps aren't new (see Smart Money's Market Map, MSR Netscan), they are qualitatively different visualizations than the heatmaps you mention.

(Also, the Flash loads much more transparently and the overall design is much slicker and well designed than most of the Java versions out there)

See the original homepage for this type of visualization (called a treemap) here.

Is it anything like Pad++? These ideas aren't exactly new.

A quick google search reveals evidence of only one paper (but not the paper itself, unfortunately) entitled, "Performance, Beliefs, and the Illusion of Control", see, e.g., here:

Kottemann, J.E., Davis, F.D., & Remus, W.R. (1994). Computer-assisted decision making: Performance, beliefs, and the illusion of control. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 57, 26-37.

Note that this paper was published in 1994; it's not a "1980s paper" as cited in the article. Careless errors like this make one wonder what else in the author's train of thought is similarly researched. Perhaps he's just incorporating incertainty into his references, too--or, maybe he considers 1994 to be statistically similar to the 1980s?

The Novikov conjecture (or here) is worth mentioning.

This is not recorded anywhere in any historical document. This is a legend that has been passed on over the years.

If it is a legend then I don't know what to make of this:

From Order by the Commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi, January 15, 1865:

"The three parties named will subdivide the land, under the supervision of the Inspector, among themselves and such others as may choose to settle near them, so that each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground, and when it borders on some water channel, with not more than 800 feet water front, in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection, until such time as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title."

Nothing about mules, but still...

This looks like a job for Space Systems Lab! In fact, RTSX had already been under consideration for the Sept 2004 Hubble servicing mission. I think this would be a great opportunity to give Ranger a spin. With the increased interest in astronaut safety, there's a very real opportunity here for the space telerobotics community. After all, why do a dangerous all-hands spacewalk outside the ISS, as they did recently, when they could send a robot out to do the dirty work, instead?

This looks like a job for Space Systems Lab! In fact, RTSX had already been under consideration for the Sept 2004 Hubble servicing mission. I think this would be a great opportunity to give Ranger a spin. With the increased interest in astronaut safety, there's a very real opportunity here for the space telerobotics community. After all, why do a dangerous all-hands spacewalk outside the ISS, as they did recently, when they could send a robot out to do the dirty work, instead?

Plug in some numbers and find out :)

copper

For a slightly doom-spelling (unforunately Ross tends to be right far too often) check Cambridge University professor Ross Anderson's Trusted Computing FAQ. There is also his Cryptography and Competition Policy - Issues with `Trusted Computing' paper as well.

You can also look at documents at Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, and I recommend reading The TCPA; What's wrong; What's right and what to do about by William A. Arbaugh

For a slightly doom-spelling (unforunately Ross tends to be right far too often) check Cambridge University professor Ross Anderson's Trusted Computing FAQ. There is also his Cryptography and Competition Policy - Issues with `Trusted Computing' paper as well.

You can also look at documents at Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, and I recommend reading The TCPA; What's wrong; What's right and what to do about by William A. Arbaugh