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I figured I'd chime in here as a Western Engineering Student, who had Prof. Kopp last year, let you know what he was up to in the Fall. Kopp only taught the second half of my course because the first half of the year (during Hurricane season) he went to New Orleans to study the devistation.

This project isn't meant to make a perfectly hurricane resistant house (though, you could try based on the results). As far as I know, the aim is to find what little things can be done to the average house to improve the chances of survival for the house, or at least the people in it. In the example of nailing trusses to the walls of the house, anyone who's actually been there to see or nailed a truss can attest to how weak that connection can be, and one possible change is to mandate exactly how the trusses need to be nailed, and perhaps develop a new nailing plate to ensure that the placement of the nail is exact each time (if there is a steel plate on each truss with only one hole, you know where the nail is going).

Also, for anyone wondering "why Western Ontario?", UWO is home to a very well respected wintunnel lab, which has tested many very well known buildings (Athens Olympic Stadium, CN Tower, numerous tall buildings in China to name a few). You can take a look here: http://www.blwtl.uwo.ca/Public/Home.aspx

Here you go:

http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~wiegert/3753/3753.html

I'm keeping Cruithne itself for my own Uber-secret plan for world domination, but the article lists several others - Happy Bwaaahhh-hah-hah-hah'ing!

Back before the previous Canadian government was defeated and Bill C-60 (Canada's DMCA) was pending, I wrote a fairly in-depth article along this line (i.e., the likes of the DMCA being mostly useful for anti-competitive behavior) and sent it to the various cabinet ministers and MPs. A lot of the responses I got back seemed to be hung up on the need for academic access to copyrighted works. I'm guessing that was because I identified myself as coming from a University in the cover letter, and that was about as far as several of the MPs bothered to read.

In any event, it will all be coming around again. Bill-C60 has gone down the tubes with previous government, but the industry is still lobbying, and the WPPT and WCT treaties require the Canadian government to do something. On a positive note, from what I've heard, it sounds like Bev Oda (the new Canadian Heritage Minister) has connections on both sides of the plate and could very well be interested in trying to strike a balance. She certainly wrote me back an informed response to my article. Here's hoping there will at least be a clause requiring actual copyright infringement to award damages.

For the interested, the paper and another on the CRIA can be found here. At the time, I tried a couple of times to get it posted to Slashdot, but the powers that be must have not felt it to be sufficiently interesting/relevant.

You are thinking of the XB-35/XB-49 flying wing.

My understanding was that they were not hard to control, but that the CEP was too high for bombing.

Swept forward wings where first used on a Luftwaffe JU-287 back in the 40's.

ref here

More about this angle from Japan Today, and another story suggesting beer has the same health benefits as red wine.

My God Oh, that's completely ack basswards! ;-)

You all need to read `on holy wars and a plea for peace': http://www.csd.uwo.ca/staff/magi/personal/humour/S haggy_Dog/On%20Holy%20Wars%20and%20a%20Plea%20for% 20Peace.html .1+ TMG 95:05:20 61-01-5002 dnuora detsoP
(wakarimasu ka ^_^).

And btw, my way of doing things (which of course is "D-YYYY-hh ss:MM:mm") is the only right way :P

Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability.(pdf)

link

I personally hate the idea. It assaults the foundation of my liberalism, that everyone is born equal. But I don't think that ignoring the facts for political correctness makes sense. This is part of Harvard Pres Lawrence H. Summers 'controversial" speech.

"It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they're all over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation-and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways-you get five to one, at the high end. Now, it's pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability to do that. And that's absolutely right. But I don't think that resolves the issue at all. Because if my reading of the data is right-it's something people can argue about-that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well. So my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true-is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem."

Now, this seems pretty firmly grounded in the questioning openmindedness we expect from our universities. If you disagree, and Summers has pointed out some weak spots for you to start with, I'm sure he's open to disscuss it.

Of course, the resulting PC backlash had Harvard promising $50,000,000 for anti discrimination measures in two weeks. Something is very wrong here.

There is a correlation between childhood nutrition and IQ, but it's minor compared to the genetic component, and only kicks in in cases of malnutrition.

Zork

nuff said

Er, what?

1. Compared to a Lagrange point, getting to low Earth orbit (LEO) is a piece of cake. LEO is still very deep inside Earth's gravity well. The amount of energy you need to put in to each kilogram of cargo to get it to a Langrange point is much greater.

2. Friction doesn't cause (appreciable) damage. Atmospheric drag does cause orbital decay. If you don't give your LEO space station a kick in the pants periodically, it will spiral down and crash. If you're at the point where atmospheric drag is doing real damage to your LEO object, it's too late--it's gonna crash.

3. It's true that you're somewhat less likely to get smacked by something truly dangerous at the Lagrange points. In LEO, you've got a big gravity source (Earth) sucking space crud down on you; an object at rest relative to the Earth a goodly distance away will pick up about 10 kilometers per second of velocity by the time it hits you. LEO is also full of detritus and debris that have been left behind by human space exploration. This is not to say that there aren't free bodies travelling at high speeds in 'free' space at the Langrange points. The stable Lagrange points have accumulated a signficant amount of stuff over the years, since those points are gravitationally stable. While most of it will have a low velocity relative to a space station at a Langrange point, some of those chunks are pretty hefty, and I wouldn't want to have even a low-speed collision with them.

Bonus: Pretty movies and a description of Earth Lagrange asteroids (Earth Trojan asteroids).

The real reason for the trip to Phobos is to photograph the Leather Goddesses

"The era of plausible deniability of genetically based group differences in intelligence is about to end. Fasten your seat belts."

I think not. The social consequences are huge, and this paper is nothing compared to others.

Much safer to ignore it.

I first read Cochran's paper on gnxp.com, where it's been kicking around for a while before publication. If anyone is interested in a (much) deeper and smarter look at these topics, go there.

Dejas only went back to 1995 though didn't they? Google's innovation was to extend the archive back to 1982. Granted Henry Spencer's tapes were used, but no one else has put them online complete back to 1982 as far as I know.

See for example David Wiseman's history of the recovery or the Salon.com overview article.

In summary, Google only really started encouraging the tape restore project about six months before groups.google.com kicked off. The idea of restoring Henry's tapes had been widely thought of in the 1990s, and Wiseman had picked them up to start the project, but it took some years to accomplish, along with help from various people and some equipment from Brewster Kahle.

And I'm leaving out a bunch of stuff. I won't try and credit everyone involved in the process here, but it was lots of people. Good on all of them.

Leather goddesses of phobos.

Your main point remains, though, everyone is unique, regardless of genetic endowment.

I'll wait for the paperback. (Or the Infocom game.)

So, am I the only one old enough to remember DNA's game Bureaucracy? Apparently, it was inspired by a very similar experience...

Make sure every key works the way it's expected. Start with this as an inputrc file:
http://meta.csd.uwo.ca/~wade/Courses/cs307/Html/Tu torials/G09/inputrc.html

And here's a script I made that will make a kickass prompt:
http://meta.csd.uwo.ca/~wade/Courses/cs307/Html/Tu torials/G09/prompt.html

Tell the user about those environment variables. I had a lot of fun just checking what they all say and changing a few of them.

Make sure every key works the way it's expected. Start with this as an inputrc file:
http://meta.csd.uwo.ca/~wade/Courses/cs307/Html/Tu torials/G09/inputrc.html

And here's a script I made that will make a kickass prompt:
http://meta.csd.uwo.ca/~wade/Courses/cs307/Html/Tu torials/G09/prompt.html

Tell the user about those environment variables. I had a lot of fun just checking what they all say and changing a few of them.

I guess you don't like Arthur or Journey then..?

Or is it only the adding of illustrations that you object to?

IIRC, Infocom always used to say that they didn't include graphics in their game not because graphics are inherently bad, but because decent graphics didn't exist yet. They also said that they'd rather spend their very limited space per floppy on decent text, rather than cruddy graphics.

Obviously, times have changed in that respect.

I guess you don't like Arthur or Journey then..?

Or is it only the adding of illustrations that you object to?

IIRC, Infocom always used to say that they didn't include graphics in their game not because graphics are inherently bad, but because decent graphics didn't exist yet. They also said that they'd rather spend their very limited space per floppy on decent text, rather than cruddy graphics.

Obviously, times have changed in that respect.

In fact these devices would be cheap enough to set up a whole classroom with VNC based terminals.

Mount a solarpanel on the back to recharge the display batteries and you would help save the planet! Down with rooms full to 300-400Watt power sucking PCs!

I was thinking that they could finally make a live-action movie of the original Mighty Hercules, without cheesy CGI or claymation for Newton and Toot.

"To me is seems that this project will only work if it is managed as a coherent whole, like BSD or Squeak, and that means being open source with a strong leader. And now that I've gotten completely off-topic of your question I'll end my post :)"

A Coherent Interface has been available for quite some time. Unfortunately Good Enough won instead of it's nearest Competitor.

1. Console access. These include Speakup ftp://ftp.braille.uwo.ca/pub/speakup/, Screader http://www.euronet.nl/~acj/eng-screader.html, YASR http://yasr.sourceforge.net/, and many folks' favorite BrlTTY http://dave.mielke.cc/brltty/

2. Specialized environment. The most obvious option here is emacspeak http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ but there are others.

3. GUI Access. The only real option today is the Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html that is part of the GNOME desktop http://www.gnome.org/start via the GNOME Accessibility Project http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/ (though other options are being explored). Note: my day job is as Sun's Accessibility Architect, working on the GNOME Accessibility Project and helping with the development of things like Gnopernicus, and another amazing product for people with physical impairments - GOK http://www.gok.ca/.

A pretty complete list of F/OSS accessibility projects can be found at the Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS) http://lars.atrc.utoronto.ca/current.html. I maintain a blog on this stuff as well, which has lots more information: http://blogs.sun.com/korn.

http://www.gazette.uwo.ca/2000/February/3/photos/s queegee.gif

"Since I don't mind high taxes, the welfare state aspect doesn't bug me much"

All the 'welfare' state is is an insurance type policy but the government is the insurance company and the payments are paid via taxes.

As well we can afford our 'welfare' state because we're the only G8 country whose government is running a surplus. One shouldn't confuse welfare state with fiscal imprudence.

Reminds me of an excellent game for the Apple IIe, A Mind Forever Voyaging. You played a character in a city simulation to determine long-term ramifications for political decisions. Very thought provoking for an 8th-grade student.

The Air Force has messing with this stuff for quite some time.

In 1959, they launched a missile nicknamed "King Lofus IV" from a B-58 as an early test of satellite intercept using Explorer V as a target...the test was a miserable failure.

They were more successful in 1985, with a successful intercept and kinetic kill of a satellite with an F-15 launched ASAT prototype. The program was terminated in 1988.

As much as I liked HHGTG as a kid, and as much as I loved the infocom games (Planetfall and Stationfall are probably my favorites), the HHGTG infocom game was probably about the worst one they made. One misstep and the game was over, it was completely linear and frustrating.

Check out this little quote on the fate of the "Restaurant" sequel that was never released.

Apparantly DNA just didn't "get" the idea of interactive fiction.

Anyhow, is there any way to hear the original radio series, or obtain the original TV series for free (legally, of course)?

I believe Daikatana was used for a while as a blood pressure monitor, but it had disastrous results.

Daikatana? Bah, try playing a game that actually has a blood pressure monitor built in: Infocom's Bureaucracy, by Douglas Adams.

Sure.. I grabbed them from recent news published after a Kerry's remarks about closing the border. Unfortunately, they're now "for pay" articles at Globe and Mail (around $5) (Try Google news)

This link shows the garbage collection fee and "average" recycling costs. The $135 per ton (after recovery) is an average of the paper and metals (which is about $85 per ton) through to the recent introduction of organics (composting) at around $200 per ton.

You best bet is to call or email someone from Jane Pitfields office and ask them about the expenses involved. They'll be able to give you all of the gory details.

Seriously, this was probably the most annoying Infocom game ever published

Oh, I don't know about that. I think Douglas Adams's other Infocom game deserves at least an honorable mention. Just consider the name he gave it: Bureaucracy...

The very first thing the game has you do is fill out a form with your name, address, previous address, etc. The insertion point jumps randomly from field to field, so you have to pay very close attention not to just start randomly typing, but actually read closely to see where the input is now. Not that it matters though, because even then the game will toss out what you typed and use random data in the dialogue that follows.

>look
Front Room

This is the living room of your new house, a pretty nice room, actually. At least, it will
be when all your stuff has arrived as the removals company said they would have done
yesterday and now say they will do while you're on vacation. At the moment, however, it's
a bit dull. Plain white, no carpets, no curtains, no furniture. A room to go bughouse in,
really. Another room is visible to the west, and a closed front door leads outside.

>score
[Your blood pressure is 124/82, in 2 moves. Your status is Stable. Your score is 0 out of
a possible 21, making you a Victim.]

>walk west
Back Room

You're in the back room of your new house, another nice room, at present suitable for
lining with latex padding and bouncing off the walls, but likely to be pretty impressive
and upwardly mobile once the removals men have sorted out their little problem. The exit
leads east to the living room.

You see a combination telephone/answering machine and a table here. On the table you see
a hacksaw, an address book, a small case, your Boysenberry computer, a letter and your
passport.

The doorbell is ringing.

>answer door
Front Room
You open the front door.

"Hi," says the annoyingly bright young man in the doorway. "Chowmail Overnite. Are you Mr
Devers, of 42 Main St?" He holds up a large burlap bag. "Here's your order of Llamex(R)
brand High-Fibre Llama Treats!"

>slam door
You slam the front door in the delivery man's face. You can hear him muttering a
traditional llama-food delivery man's curse upon you, your family and your llamas as he
walks away.

>score
[Your blood pressure is 122/81, in 6 moves. Your status is Stable. Your score is 0 out of
a possible 21, making you a Victim.]

>

The link is to the freely available downloads if you didn't get that from the last post.

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/ltoi.html

The distant past called.... ...from a galaxy far, far away...

InfoCom Corporation, current holder of the .IQ TLD, has gotten into big trouble for aiding terrorists. Note that this isn't the same Infocom that made Zork and all of the other adventure games. They no longer exist, but there are several Infocom fan sites available.

http://www.4law.co.il/L1.htm for more information about the arrests of Infocom owners for aiding terrorists.

A.K. Dewdney describes in "The Tinkertoy Computer and Other Machinations" not only the famous Tinkertoy computer, but also how a computer can be constructed entitely from ropes and pulleys. Furthermore, in "The Planiverse" he describes how a computer can be built in a two-dimensional world (quite a feat, I can tell you).

I am a McGill alumnus, so I am biased...

There is a strong American presence at the undergraduate level (nearly 20% of the international student population) so by virtue of that, McGill is *somewhat* well-known in the northeastern U.S., at least among college-bound kids and their parents.

See this article on McGill University for an idea. Many of the alumni are household names in the U.S.

Consider this also: public reputation is not the same as academic reputation.

The McGill name may not be well-known to the U.S. public, but in academic circles it sparks recognition.

Also, I am not sure if it really is much harder to get a job with a foreign degree than a U.S. one, because when I browse faculty pages at most U.S. schools, a good number of professors seem to have foreign graduate degrees (granted, these profs were not American to begin with, but....). Anecdotally, I know of many Canadian profs who teach at U.S. schools.

Having said that, graduate funding at McGill is not as good as it ought to be, despite being a first tier research institution. McGill professors are the richest in the country yet only a limited portion of their funds are used to fund grad students (I wonder why).

So let me point the submitter to some Canadian schools that will *guarantee* graduate funding to anyone who can get into some of their programs (doesn't matter if you're Canadian or not). As far as I can tell, the University of Toronto funds every student accepted.... Info here. University of Alberta, University of Western Ontario, McMaster University funds all students accepted to selected programs.

In my experience, U.S. schools often don't like to fund Masters students because M.S. programs are too short for them to extract any useful research out of the students (projects funded by research grants usually take years). They prefer to fund Ph.D. students.

But in Canada, M.S. students have an almost equal chance of getting funding.

Anyway, as some other poster said, there will be insular schools and outward-looking schools. The United States is a big and diverse country - one cannot really generalize.

(P.S. but sometimes it is tempting... for instance, I was watching Letterman last night, and David Letterman was talking to a lady from Texas (this was on Stupid Pet Tricks). He asked her, "So if you drive west from Texas, you hit New Mexico, right?". She said yes. "What state is west of New Mexico?"... and she said "I don't know". And she's from Texas! I'm not American and even I know Arizona is west of New Mexico. But as I said, the U.S. is a big country... and there are all kinds out there.)

Not sure if you're being serious or not but I'll bite. Put the dangly bit in the cup of advanced tea substitute. Oh, and don't ever spill or drop the fake tea, cuz the nutrimat won't give you another and you'll have to restart from before you dropped it.

In fact, it's probably easiest if I just add a link to the online walkthru.

This isn't all that new. One of Infocom's pieces of interactive fiction, A Mind Forever Voyaging, was explicitly political. Similarly, Infocom's Trinity took on the subject of atomic weapons. Both of those games were released in the mid-1980s.

This isn't all that new. One of Infocom's pieces of interactive fiction, A Mind Forever Voyaging, was explicitly political. Similarly, Infocom's Trinity took on the subject of atomic weapons. Both of those games were released in the mid-1980s.

The original Zork had barely anything to do with plot, but I did forget about A Mind Forever Voyaging.

Rob

The author of a text adventure has to be schizophrenic in a way that the author of a novel does not. The novel-reader does not suffer as the player of a game does: she needs only to keep turning the pages, and can be trusted to do this by herself. The novelist may worry that the reader is getting bored and discouraged, but not that she will suddenly find pages 63 to the end have been glued together just as the plot is getting interesting.

Thus, the game author has continually to worry about how the player is getting along, whether she is lost, confused, fed up, finding it too tedious to keep an accurate map: or, on the other hand, whether she is yawning through a sequence of easy puzzles without much exploration. Too difficult, too easy? Too much choice, too little? So this book will keep going back to the player's eye view.

On the other hand, there is also a novel to be written: the player may get the chapters all out of order, the plot may go awry, but somehow the author has to rescue the situation and bind up the strings neatly. Our player should walk away thinking it was a well-thought out story: in fact, a novel, and not a child's puzzle-book.

Exactly; totally agree. Of course, it goes for any other subject as well.

I think the biggest advantage that parents have over teachers is that they are there in the less formal moments when something sparks their child's interest, and can enlarge on it right then and there, in a much more interesting way. I think it is absolutely vital to make use of these opportunities if you're going to get kids to build on their own inate interest in things, and ultimately foster their ability to teach themselves about things they find interesting (and to keep finding things interesting).

No matter how good your kid's school is, they will eventually get an uninspiring teacher who can easily crush their spirit unless they have already become independently inquisitive and driven (I'm thinking of Mr. Cantwell on The Wonder Years, who could turn the most violent and interesting science into a droll monotone). And when this does happen, then provide backup and encouragement.

Here are some examples:

• In kindergarten, my daughter's teacher asked them to name the largest number they knew, and my daughter answered a googol. The teacher said no, there was no such number. She came home disappointed. We talked about it at dinner and sent a nice note back to the teacher, referring her to a dictionary and pointing out that it was, in fact, a child who had come up with the name. Lessons learned: my daughter could have confidence in things she knew, even in the face of an unauthoritative authority, and something could be done about it. Everyone learned something.
• One good source of inspiration is paradoxes. These get at the heart of a lot of math and science, yet they are inherently interesting. One of the best for me, a good example of making use of the moment, was when my daughter was watching me play Zork Zero. In one of the puzzles, an executioner will hang you if he can grant your last request, otherwise he will behead you. Getting past the cartoon violence, my daughter caught the paradox and solution, and kept a copy of the narrative on her wall for years.
• Another good source of ideas is in several of Feynman's popular books in which he discusses his father's influence on him. Once again, many of these were by making the best use of the moment.

It might be better described as a "companion" of Earth, or in a co-orbit. This is actually the third such object discovered. To explain what the heck is going on, here are pages about the first two:

3753 Cruithne
2002 AA29

It might be better described as a "companion" of Earth, or in a co-orbit. This is actually the third such object discovered. To explain what the heck is going on, here are pages about the first two:

3753 Cruithne
2002 AA29

This is the third asteroid we've found which has an orbit tied loosely to that of the Earth. The others are 3753 Cruithne and 2002 AA29. You can see pictures and applets and read about these other bodies at Paul Wiegert's web site:

http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~wiegert/