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Yes, a wonderful tape- I use it frequently at work for our "Sounds of Science" shows (part of the university physics department's community outreach program). The narrator was Phillip Tonken. I think he was with WOR-AM back in the 1950s and 60s, and did narration for radio shows like "Dantro, The Planet Man" and "Murder by Experts."

Sounds like an old joke we shared around the IT dept about 20 years ago related to 'anticipatory paging', why not anticipatory programming. Hmm. Useful

This could save some of the effort of heavy lifting of that axe or driving that nail.

"after the nth time the process failed I gave the computer such a look that the software uninstalled itself, the harddrive crashed and the O/s committed suicide."

The idea was that you could take a standard resolution video that panned across a scene, and by merging the frames over time create amazingly high resolution images.

But wait ... there's more ... so much more! I give you DOOFAAS (Dumb Or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronym Site). Examples such as CASA-BLANCA (Chicago Air Shower Array - Broad LAteral Non-imaging Cerenkov Array) abound, but for mine you can't go past HIS/HERS (High Intensity Spectrograph / High Energy Range Spectrometer).

Additionally, it mentions that "infection is usually spread from infected to non-infected susceptible animals during the milking process" -- not at all surprising, since most animals are milked by machine, and sanitary conditions in farming aren't exactly what I'd want to think my food's been around.

I don't know how often mastitis occurs in untreated cows either (the Guardian article you linked mentioned a rate of >30% in England, but didn't say whether that included rbST-treated cattle), but it doesn't surprise me that the increase in milk production was only nominal -- if you're increasing gross milk production but losing a lot of what you produce due to infection, the net isn't going to change much. That said, however, the root cause of the problem is still physical, not chemical, in nature -- the way the cows' udders are handled promotes inflammation, cracking, &c., which promotes infection (especially in unsanitary conditions), and so on.

Is there a good way, a safe way, to extract large amounts of milk from cows? Hell if I know; I'm a bioinformaticist, not a farmer. Find that, though and we'll have found a solution to the problems you've cited.

-abh, who actually remembered to format this time. and is also lactose intolerant. go figure.

Sometime over winter break, my university (University of Maryland at College Park), decided to effectively block all bittorrent traffic. It's exceptionally frustrating that they refuse to respond to inquiries about the decision. Their action, IMHO, also contradicts the Acceptable Use Policy which clearly states that "The University does not limit access to information due to its content when it meets the standard of legality." Sadly, this trend is only going to get worse at my school, in view of the recent news coverage.

Sometime over winter break, my university (University of Maryland at College Park), decided to effectively block all bittorrent traffic. It's exceptionally frustrating that they refuse to respond to inquiries about the decision. Their action, IMHO, also contradicts the Acceptable Use Policy which clearly states that "The University does not limit access to information due to its content when it meets the standard of legality." Sadly, this trend is only going to get worse at my school, in view of the recent news coverage.

I read something very interesting on gravity in deep space. A scientist who revised the rules of gravity so that the model worked without all this invisible stuff around. The amazing thing is that while this guy does exactly the same as dark matter believers - filling in blank spots until the model fits reality - he's not taken seriously at all.

MOND theories are taken seriously, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The problem is that these theories are only descriptive and do not lead to a universal principle. Of course that doesn't mean that there is no such principle. For example, the spectral lines of the hydrogen atom could already be calculated precisely in the 19th century. But Niels Bohr was the first to actually give an explanation for that.

Another task is to explain that some galaxies contain less dark matter than expected.

Or, an acronym, actually.

MOND = Modified Newtonian Dynamics

It's one of those theories that sounds totally crackpot when you first hear it (and, admittedly, has some problems), but many would argue that it's no weirder than a bunch of dark stuff that we know nothing about. The destain with which astronomers and physicists view MOND is quite surprising, since they are asking us to be believe that (something like) 95% of the matter in the universe is composed of some sort of weird, non-Baryonic particle (most people favor WIMPs over MaCHOs now-a-days).

Anyway, just food for thought.

...and the researcher was able to explain most effects that are otherwise explained by dark matter, by slightly changing the theory of gravity.


You are probably thinking of MOND.

Bringing this up without mentioning M.O.N.D. is irresponsible journalism. MOND (Modification of Newtonian Dymanics) is a theory that simply says that gravity 'decays' at a slightly different rate than expected over astronomical distances. The effects predicted by this theory are spot on to the observed effects that dark energy and matter try to explain.

I googled about found this link, but I first read about it in New Scientist about a year ago.

I used PhotoMesa before they wanted money for it, but you can still download a free trial. It's written in Java "but" it is well-written and feels very fast.

There's an article on Sun's Java website about PhotoMesa.

I used PhotoMesa before they wanted money for it, but you can still download a free trial. It's written in Java "but" it is well-written and feels very fast.

There's an article on Sun's Java website about PhotoMesa.

At my school U of MD at College Park, computer engineering is usually considered the hardest major in the school, followed by EE, and then CS. The irony is that you'll ask a CS major if he could hack EE, and he'd almost certainly say "HELL NO!", and if you asked the EE whether he could do CS, he'd respond the same way.

Neither engineering nor CS have any sort of GPA requirements. If you can keep your head above water, they'll keep you. Naturally, GPAs are lower because the classes are harder.

The reason CE is considered so hard is that they hit you with the hardest CS courses (Operating Systems comes to mind) and you get more than a bit of EE (which, of course, is not trivial either). CS and EE afford you the luxury of only having to know EE or CS, not both (well, except for a bit of cross-training, not enough to impress anyone).

However, don't confuse this with "CEs can program better than CS majors at UMCP". They can't. Their knowledge of more esoteric languages like Lisp and Prolog ends up suffering in the process, and they're missing out on quite a bit of algorithm theory.

I'm a CS/Econ double major, and it's like accounting and economics. Yes, I've taken a massive amount of statistics and finance courses, but that doesn't mean I'd be the better accountant of a guy with a business degree in finance. Ditto for CE and CS - he's got harder courses, but it doesn't make him a better programmer, because I've got more of them where it counts.

In other words, the two majors aren't at all the same, and the idea of using CEs as the "better" cheap labor for coding isn't thought-out very well. (No, this isn't in response to the parent, but it's something I needed to say). I have no interest in being some kind of lowly code slave, which is why I got the Econ degree, too.

-Erwos

• mint
• mono
• monodis
• monograph
• monosn
• pedump
• mcs

Sometimes they do. Here's an article about NASA's handover of SAMPEX ops to the University of Maryland's Aerospace Engineering department.

http://www.capc.umd.edu/rpts/MD_EVoteEval.pdf

You wouldn't be thanking him if he stopped you staring at a blue screen like this!!

---

This is where you can
submit your name for the Deep Impact Mission

After you give them your name the site even generates a a really cool, serial numbered certificate you can print out and hang up on the wall.

The parent wasn't being a troll by saying it only accepts the english character set:

http://deepimpact.umd.edu/sendyourname/namehelp. ht ml
"At the present however, our database is unable to accept foreign characters, so please use the English alphabet/character set when adding your name. Also, please avoid using special characters such as quotation marks, ampersands, brackets, underscores, mathematical symbols, etc. These characters may cause unexpected errors, and you may not be able to retrieve your certificate from the database. Numbers, apostrophes, dashes, and letters with accents or other embellishments (such as "e" or "n") are acceptable."

I think its pretty cool I can have my name sent to a comet. The mission wont be launched until 2005 or so but I can wait. The last time NASA did something like this I missed out.

This is where you can
submit your name for the Deep Impact Mission

After you give them your name the site even generates a a really cool, serial numbered certificate you can print out and hang up on the wall.

The parent wasn't being a troll by saying it only accepts the english character set:

http://deepimpact.umd.edu/sendyourname/namehelp. ht ml
"At the present however, our database is unable to accept foreign characters, so please use the English alphabet/character set when adding your name. Also, please avoid using special characters such as quotation marks, ampersands, brackets, underscores, mathematical symbols, etc. These characters may cause unexpected errors, and you may not be able to retrieve your certificate from the database. Numbers, apostrophes, dashes, and letters with accents or other embellishments (such as "e" or "n") are acceptable."

I think its pretty cool I can have my name sent to a comet. The mission wont be launched until 2005 or so but I can wait. The last time NASA did something like this I missed out.

Also it's NOT a screenshot of SkyOS with goatse loaded in a browser on it. In fact it doesn't even show a web browser in the screenshot.

Mirror of the image

The benchmarks are poorly designed microbenchmarks. Why do people pay attention to such things? See Cliff Click's talk on "How NOT To Write A Microbenchmark".

We've done some of our own cross-language benchmarking. The NASA Advanced Supercomputing Parallel Benchmarks are problem statements for serious computation science problems, and solutions can be written in any programming language. We implemented the sparse Conjugate Gradient benchmark, and compared Java against fastest Fortran/MPI implementation on a cluster of 32 linux workstations. Java performed at essentially the same speed as Fortran/MPI (actually a little faster on 16 nodes). Although Fortran was slightly faster at the sparse matrix-vector product, Java communications using Java nio was faster than using the LAM implementation of MPI (the MPICH implementation was much worse than the LAM implementation).

You can read the whole study here: http://www.cs.umd.edu/local-cgi-bin/hcil/sr.pl?num ber=HCIL-2003-36

Abstract follows:

There have been several studies that compare sequential search results versus clustered search results, and graphical presentations versus textual presentations. These studies have resulted in confirmed efficiency and preference of clustering over sequential lists. The studies between graphical and textual presentations have usually shown to be task dependant. This study shows a systematic evaluation of zoomable versus textual clustered search results. A controlled experiment with repeated measures design and within-subjects differences was performed with fifteen subjects, comparing Groxis, Inc.'s Grokker - their clustering product - a zoomable user interface, their textual clustering product and Vivisimo's textual clustering product. No significant differences were found for objective measures. However, there were significant differences for subjective measures. The textual clustering interfaces was preferred and elicited major satisfaction among the users. Results are summarized in both a quantitative and qualitative format.

Being European and leaning slightly to the left I'd like to see that page drawn up. And please don't be coy with details, I know my German history. Make sure to mark the counterparts of the Holocaust and the Gleichschaltung in bold so I won't miss them.

Jews to Belsen, Muslims to Guantanamo Bay... The Nazi concentration camps weren't death camps to begin with. It took several years between the start of the policy of vilification of Muslims - sorry, I meant Jews - and the start of the policy of extermination. But it's a process, and one which the United States has clearly begun. Like the Jews at Belsen, the Muslims at Guantanamo Bay have been made Untermensch, outside the protection of normal law.

Muslim citizens in the United States are already subject to arbitrary arrest and detention without charge. They're subject to invasive searches and monitoring when they travel. They're already subject to threats and abuse from their neighbours. This is just what the Jews in Germany were experiencing in the late twenties and early thirties. And the first concentration camp has now been operating for over a year.

Remember:

In Germany first they came for the communists and I did not speak out- because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out- because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out- because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics and I did not speak out- because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me- and there was no one left to speak out for me.

They're coming for the muslims now. What are you going to do?

Some doctors have considered prescribing nicotine as a cure for a variety of ailments, including schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, attention deficit disorder and colitis.

I'm thinking about it!

FYI. There is a game company called 2015

Anyway, try to sing this to the tune of Zager & Evans In the Year 2525 :

In the year 2015 If programming is still alive
if coding can survive
They may find ....

In the year 2025
Ain't gonna need to reboot
no retries
Everything you think do and say is in the chip you implanted today.

feel free to add your own stupid verses too. for 2035, 2045, etc.

• 12 Partridges in 12 Pear Trees
  
• 22 Turtle Doves
  
• 30 French Hens
  
• 36 Calling Birds
  
• 40 Gold Rings
  
• 42 Geese-a-Laying
  
• 40 Swans-a-Swimming
  
• 36 Ladies Dancing
  
• 30 Lords-a-Leaping
  
• 22 Pipers Piping
  
• 12 Drummers Drumming

This is basically a high-powered cyclone dryer. Cyclone dryers have been around for decades, but they're not usually run at power levels high enough to get grinding effects.

"Just think it, believe it, dream about it and it's real man."

St. Anselm said the same thing about God.

Unfotunately for him, the logic didn't work out. Heinlein, on the other hand, was probably pretty much right.

Fine. I'll spend all of 5 mintues with Google News since you're incapable of doing so yourself:

Reuters AlertNet
United Press International
The Chicago Maroon.
The Cornell Daily Sun
The Diamondback
The Massachusettes Daily Collegian

The last 4 are university newspapers who had people there.
"Oh, no! That must mean they're biased since they're filthy protesters!"

Face it. People like you have blinders on. If someone says something that disagrees with your worldview, you'll loudly trump about how they're a liar and biased. In that way, you're exactly like the Iraqi Information Minister, going on and on about how there are no infidels in Baghdad's airport and how they're being killed in streets even as coallition forces roll over the countryside. Think, research, and stop making kneejerk, assinine posts accusing someone else of lying when you can't be bothered to verify the information yourself.

Nope, that wasn't subtle. And for the record, neither was this. But when you have devotion like this, you have to know you're doing something right.

Actually A biplane made out of kite material and used bycycle parts by two bycycle repairmen is an invention.

It is thematically and philosophically the strongest of the entire trilogy, and accomplishes as much more subtly than its predecessors. Viewers were confronted with great ethical dilemmas and metaphysical conundrums in the form of 'in-your-face' one liners and headache-inducing dialogues in the first two Matrix films, but Revolutions takes a different approach. Its depth and philosophical richness comes in the strength of its visual metaphors and an intriguing storyline pulling on everything from the Bible to The Wizard of Oz, grounding the story in cultural identification and modern mythmaking.

Sounds good to me. I don't like professional critics, anyway.

==========

Although I haven't had a chance to see it yet, I have seen a bit of praise

s

One picture like that made him fired? What about this picture?!

Will this satellite photo piss off Microsoft so much that they send their ninjas off to assasinate me?

Robert Park's a University of Maryland Physics professor (emeritus? on leave?), Director of Public Information, Washington Office of the American Physical Society and writer of the American Physical Society's weekly What's New column, and is the author of "Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud." You can download his CV here , and it will basically tell you he's a scientific somebody.

Ben Shneiderman has, in my opinion, voiced the best why there's only limited future to speech based UI:
We can't talk and think at the same time.

In other words, the act of forming and uttering words is mobilizing some of our brain's planning and reasoning resources, which are thus not available for making sense of the data that's presented to us or for planning the next steps in a complex task.

So, voice may be fine for some basic tasks, but not for what a computer is most interesting for: augmenting our thought process. See a more elaborated discussion on the topic.

Another argument against speech-based input is that the speech signal is intrinsically ambiguous. Making sense of "put that there" requires more than the best speech recognition software we'll ever be able to built !

More on the ambiguous chapter: In french, there are more than a thousand syntactically valid interpretations of a very simple sentence like: "J'ai mal au pied", and 2 fully ambiguous semantic interpretations: "j'ai mal au pied" and "j'ai mal aux pieds" ("my foot hurts" or "my feet hurt"). Some examples of those curious but perfectly acceptable interpretations: "Geai male, au pied!" (male bird, at my feet!), "J'aima l'haut pied" (I loved the high foot), "J'ai mal, Oh, pie et..." (It hurts, oh, bird, and...) and so forth.

I'm sure native english can come up with similar strings of possible interpreations of a simple basic sentence...

45 years ago, when we were starting NASA, China was well, kind of busy. They've had a rough century; you really ought to give them a bit of slack while they take the time to catch up with everyone else.

...marshmallows.

Maybe we can combine the methods, add graham crackers, and create C-smores!

they don't even include (at least not on casual glance) how one can calculate the speed of light using a microwave and a plate of marshmellows. that's one i'd really like to attempt some time when i'm bored enough.

my worst microwave moment: I have a couple lizards (leopard geckos to be precise). in their cage, i had a piece of a bark they were using as a hiding spot. i was washing the bark one day and wanted to dry it in the microwave (not the brightest idea, but whatever). Apparently a cricket had hidden itself somewhere inside one of the porous spaces. Long story short, when I nuked it, about 10 s into the run, i hear a brief high pitched whine, increasing frequency and then a splat noise. apparently i boiled the cricket from the inside out, and like a pressure cooker with a not so well attached lid, it exploded.

I used BW Garbage Collection on an Information Visualization system here available under the GPL.
It works, but with some problems, mainly due to the fact that it doesn't knows enough of the OS, in particular large pages allocated by libraries that it has to scan for pointers. There is nothing that cannot be fixed in theory, but systems are not designed for it right now.
On my visualization application, it spends seconds scanning some memory mapped zone opened by NVidia OpenGL implementation (this is a guess from looking at the stack trace in gdb).

For the performance talk, there are interesting figures in the book Garbage Collection
and at Boem's site showing that reference counting costs more than garbage collection.
However, reference counting is predictable and does not interrupt interactive applications at random moments.
In particular for multithreaded applications, reference counts should be guarded by a mutex that is very expensive and can be avoided using a GC.

One possible alternative to C++ with BW is using gcj, the Gnu Java Compiler. It uses the same back-end than G++ for producing optimized code but is closely tied to the BW garbage collection, providing information about how objects are organized in memory, improving the marking-time of the GC.
gcj produces code that can be linked with C and C++ without having to resort to JNI.

To me, the Connection Machine range of supercomputers were the ultimate in blinkenlighten computing.

The Connection Machine CM-2 cube. Another picture.

Presently, there's the Connection Machine CM-5. Another image.

Try looking here for starters, or just Google :-)

My company took over Atari's building on North First Street in San Jose. There was a whiteboard that still had a project status for porting various well-known arcade games to Apple, C64, etc. Very melancholy.

The next day he was showing Ben Schneiderman some of this stuff at the open house. A bunch of us looked on as they chatted, planned visits, golf outings and talked about how it all worked.

Depending on the queries he gave it, this one program would chew through data from usenet. and give back all kinds of stats and then draw relationships It even did graphical representaitons of users' actvity. Density of posts in a single thread versus starting new threads, frequency of posts, replies vs. new messages etc would be denoted by distance from the main timeline, darkness and width of the circel and so forth. You would look at a wide but faint circle and say (and I may be off in how the key worked, but ...) "This guy sticks to the topic over a long period of time" or you could denote the flame warrior or the vagrant by their graphical representation and so forth. The way the data was processed was really cool and how quickly you could start to decipher the keys was really interesting.

The Big brother implications ... well that's a whole 'nother thing there too isn't it?

The next day he was showing Ben Schneiderman some of this stuff at the open house. A bunch of us looked on as they chatted, planned visits, golf outings and talked about how it all worked.

Depending on the queries he gave it, this one program would chew through data from usenet. and give back all kinds of stats and then draw relationships It even did graphical representaitons of users' actvity. Density of posts in a single thread versus starting new threads, frequency of posts, replies vs. new messages etc would be denoted by distance from the main timeline, darkness and width of the circel and so forth. You would look at a wide but faint circle and say (and I may be off in how the key worked, but ...) "This guy sticks to the topic over a long period of time" or you could denote the flame warrior or the vagrant by their graphical representation and so forth. The way the data was processed was really cool and how quickly you could start to decipher the keys was really interesting.

The Big brother implications ... well that's a whole 'nother thing there too isn't it?

It is possible that the donut in the sky is a Pulse-Jet Engine, which is completely different from the Detonation Engine. Then again, this site supports your theory.

Nope, I wasn't smoking anything at the time.

I originally wrote that paper for an Honors Seminar at the University of Maryland. It was called Science and Pseudoscience: An Investigative Approach. Pretty nifty class that helped you to look at things differently. I'm not sure what the conspiracy angle is that you're talking about aside from it discussing aircraft technologies that are still under wraps. As you can see from the bibliography section of the report I wrote, Popular Science and other news organizations have known about the existence of this technology for a while. More than a decade in fact.

Space craft take off using a continuous propulsion system in the form of gasses leaving the rocket. The force exerted by a pulse-detonation engine is more powerful than a continuous propulsion system when it comes to force exerted over a smaller amount of time. Also by having a series of detonations instead of a continuous burn, the craft doesn't have as many problem when it comes to ignitions back-tracking up the fuel supply lines to the main fuel storage area.

That's what I was thinking. Here is a nice article, with a pretty picture of that contrail.

Not to support a right wing looney, but the Great Leap Forward in China did kill from 30 to 60 million Chinese. Thats got to be the largest death toll for a purely economic policy.

However, this was the result of a command economy/ state capitalism, where the state acts a giant corporation, not a Communist one. The only vaguely large scale implementation of a Communist economy was in Spain during the Civil War. Didn't do too badly, till they lost. Its hard to tell how stable that would be long term.