Slashdot Mirror

I thought Slashdot had discussed this satellite, and the major points were that it would need an 8-inch telescope due to the distance, and existing weather satellites already give a better 24-hour view of weather patterns. Triana would have to be 1.6 million kilometers from Earth, rather than the 36,000 kilometers of a weather satellite's Clarke orbit. A 24-hour sunlit view could be created from the existing satellite images, as was mentioned in the link in the parent article.

This Guy is a professor on one of the most important brasilian universities and he seems to be radically against the use of computers or video-games by youngsters.

We're running a discussion on his ideas on userfriendly.org's forum about this, and is great to see a scientific report that refutes some of Seltzer's opinions.


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In case some of you young'uns didn't catch the reference, here's a link. Thiotimoline to the Stars!

Taco's corollary to Clarke's Law: any sufficiently convoluted Slashdot topic is indistinguishable from science fiction (or will at least provide good context for some hyperlinks).

This is in fact correct. Arthur C. Clarke has said as much in interviews. He did come up with the idea of putting a geosynchronous satalite in orbit and using it for communications. He himself points out that he could have pattented it, but Telstar (the first such satalite) was launched about the time the pattent would have expired, so he doesn't feel put out by it.
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I don't know if this is an urban legend or not, but I had heard that petroleum is actually more valuable as a lubricant than as a fuel, because we can't yet create synthetic lubricants which are as good as the real thing. The danger is that all of our machines may literally grind to a halt when we run out of oil, even if the machines themselves are solar/nuclear/etc powered.

True and false. There ARE in fact things we can put together out of carbon which are superior to any petroleum-based lubricant. Unfortunately, no one has done so commercially. This is mostly because it's expensive. You can see pictures of buckyballs here. CMU has a buckyball project. So does SUNY. You could make your own fullerenes. There are a number of fullerene-related patents.

That last page produces the real gem: this patent is for a "Magnetic recording medium comprising a solid lubrication layer of fullerene carbon having an alkyl or allyl chain". The abstract reads:

A magnetic disk has a magnetic medium or a protection film, and a solid lubrication film formed on the medium or the protection film and consisting of a fullerene C60, C 70 or C84 and an alkyl or allyl-chained fullerene. The lubrication film provides the disk with high mechanical durability and high linear recording density.

There are further supporting references. The Buckyball: An Excruciatingly Researched Report (which gives its references at the bottom) contains this quote:

A fully fluorinated buckyball would create the slickest molecular lubricant known to man, C60F60. The uses for a molecular lubricant are boundless, limited only by our imagination.

Of course, I don't know that anyone's actually assembled such a molecule. I located an article called Just Rolling Along which discusses tungsten disulfide, which is similar to buckyballs. It is, however, expensive to produce, and difficult to make in quantity; This is what we're waiting for. Incidentally, I did find one article that gave hope for this, under the heading "Cheap Buckyballs". Amusingly enough (to me) the anchor tag is named "cheapballs". I guess when you're hopped up on this much sugar all kinds of things are funny. If anyone has access to the text of "Journal of Organic Chemistry, March 8" perhaps they could help out here.

So in summary, there ARE better lubricants than those cracked from crude. They are not, however, currently on the market, as they are expensive and time-consuming to produce. However, science marches on, and we'll solve this problem, too.

I did a little search on Google to look for the system my university uses in its library, and found an interesting listing.

However, it seems to contain only commercial software (the one the guys here use, Aleph, is the first in the list), but you may find some interesting things if you browse the links (I didn't take the time for that).

I did a little search on Google to look for the system my university uses in its library, and found an interesting listing.

However, it seems to contain only commercial software (the one the guys here use, Aleph, is the first in the list), but you may find some interesting things if you browse the links (I didn't take the time for that).

but I haven't seen much UI innovation recently

That's because you didn't go look for it.

Morphic
Native Oberon
Bricks
Merlin
Photon

There's more...

I'll add two suggestions to those already given:

• Tunes is an attempt to build an advanced OS around proof of correctness and other such concepts. They have a nice review of other OSes and languages, so their site is worth visiting just for that.
• Merlin is my own project for a reflective, object-oriented systems (I now call it Self/R, but this web page is a bit outdated...).

-- Jecel