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from a link from an old slashdot story (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/ 07/129248&tid=187&tid=14)
(http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march05/ wakeupcall04.html)
Lai says there have been about 200 studies on the biological effects of cell-phone-related radiation. If you put all the ones that say there is a biological effect on one side and those that say there is no effect on the other, you'd have two piles roughly equal in size. The research splits about 50-50. "That, in and of itself, is alarming," Lai says. But it's not the whole story. If you divide up the same 200 studies by who sponsored the research, the numbers change. "When you look at the non-industry sponsored research, it's about three to one-three out of every four papers shows an effect," Lai says. "Then, if you look at the industry-funded research, it's almost opposite-only one out of every four papers shows an effect." Personally, I side with the conclusions of the guys who don't have a monetary stake in concluding cell phone radiation poses no danger to humans. It's damn inconvenient, but so are blindness and brain tumors.

Especially given that "When you look at the non-industry sponsored research, it's ... three out of every four papers shows [a biological] effect" from Cell Phone radiation.". The article is here:
http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march05/w akeupcall01.html

I suppose that the peer review which goes on in science means nothing. I also suppose that publishing so that people can reproduce your results also means nothing. Most scientists believe that is what makes the scientific process so valuable. But according to your arguments, it's irrelevant, and just results in fraud.

Either the scientific process and community are in gross error with how they do things, or there's something wrong with your hand waving calculations and arguments.

Personally, I'll place my bets on the scientific community. And it's clear that you're just trolling.

"Written examinations? Nobody has to type the Morse anymore? Anyone here who got his license recently care to shed some light on this one?"

If you consider five years ago 'recent,' that's when I upgraded to Extra class after 22 years of being a Tech class licensee. I would be happy to comment.

The Morse code requirements have been fading for some time. At one point, you needed to be able to send/receive at 13WPM to get a General or Advanced class license (the Advanced no longer exists), and 20WPM to get an Extra class.

The FCC eventually dropped the speed requirement to 5WPM (that originally required to get a Novice or Tech class license), so all those who had originally taken the 5WPM Morse Code element (I had, back in 1977, when I was first licensed) were eligible to upgrade simply by passing the higher-level written exam.

I had, as you might imagine, gained quite a bit of experience with electronics and radio after 22 years of being a hamateur, and fixing commercial 2-way radios, so taking the Extra-class exam was the next logical step for me. It's just that I never liked communicating via Morse, so I never practiced it beyond one on-air contact.

The written exams I keep referring to are multiple-choice 50 or 100-question exams which cover basic electronics and radio theory, operating practices, and FCC regs as they pertain to the amateur radio service. They get progressively more difficult as you go up the ladder of the various license levels, making greater knowledge and experience in the radio field a requirement as you try to advance through General to Extra.

Amateur radio is, I think, a fun hobby, despite the naysayers. It is especially useful during natural disasters, as I found out directly during the Bay Area's 'Quake of 89,' the East Bay Hills firestorm of 1991, and the Nisqually earthquake in Washington in 2001.

If you're interested, now that the Morse requirement is close to being eliminated, you should check in with whatever ham radio club(s) are local to you for license classes. You can find such clubs in your area by searching at this link.

You can find further information on amateur radio, and how to get your license, from this link (RealPlayer or similar required).

Keep the peace(es).

The written

Shameless plug for my employer and website:

http://www.uwtc.washington.edu/

Certificate classes seem to be all the rage now. "A writing department in the College of Engineering? GASP! Are engineers... ALLOWED to write?"

This right here is what the world needs more of. Transformer b-boys!

then ill be happy...
breakdancing transformers

and i want that song on the soundtrack too.

"I see, so how is one going to practice this? Guess keep the equipment and the antennas up and invest 1000s of dollars into a hobby on the off chance that maybe you'll be able to help one day...but until that day it just sits there unused..."

Personally, I use my radios every day. When I'm in my home area, I use them to chat with other hams during my commute. When I'm in an unfamiliar area, especially Canada, having amateur radio handy has saved my arse more than once, especially when it comes to getting driving directions and traffic advisories from the locals.

I'm proud to say I've been active in ham radio since 1977, and I've learned an awful lot from it, electronics-wise. In fact, I would not be in my current job had it not been for the experience I gained from the hobby.

When the Nisqually Earthquake hit in Feb. 2001, here in the Puget Sound region, the entire cellphone network was overloaded within minutes after the shaking stopped, and landlines were quick to follow.

What kept on working? That's right. Ham radio VHF and UHF repeaters. Emergency-response nets went active in record time, insuring that areas without any other type of communication at that moment suddenly had a way to contact the rest of the area, and to ask for help if it was needed.

When the East Bay Area hills in California suffered a crippling firestorm in 1991, guess what kept on working when cell sites and landlines were overloaded? Right again. Amateur radio.

And let's not forget the now-famous Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989. Once again, amateur radio equipment kept right on working while cellular and landlines were overcrowded or knocked out entirely.

Want to know something else? I'm a survivor of all three of those disasters. In each and every case, my radio gear and my fellow hams held the only reliable means I had to keep informed on what was happening, and to keep in touch with my family.

I can also tell, by your comments, that you've never taken a serious look at ham radio. You don't need "1000s of dollars" to get started. You can get a simple handheld transceiver for less than $100, and many ham radio clubs offer license classes for free.

Now, is it POSSIBLE to invest thousands into the hobby? Of course it is. I've done it, but I also provide technical services to other hams as part of my side business.

Spending thousands is possible with ANY hobby (just ask a coin or stamp collector). Like any other hobby, you can choose to put as little or as much as you want to into it.

Also, like any other hobby, it gives back exactly what you choose to put into it.

So, before you go assuming that a typical ham's radio gear and antennas just "sits there unused" most of the time, I suggest you go talk to an active hamateur, or perhaps attend a local radio club meeting. You can find listings for clubs at the ARRL's site. You can also find info on how to get started in the hobby if you so choose.

And yes, BPL is most definitely "evil." You'd understand why if you had your ham license.

Happy hunting.

Build yourself a couple of Thermal Cubes ($3.50 - $5.00 each), and connect them to a box running Nagios (which you should be running anyway). Hey presto, temperature monitoring. And you get to play with soldering irons at work, which can be great fun if you act secretive and mutter about overclocking.

Use OpenBSD as a Bridging Firewall. The firewall has no IP number, you put in two etherenet cards "bridge" into the middle of an ethernet cable. No network routing configuration necessary, you can remove the firewall be merely moving one cable. This means console access only, network transparent and super secure. We've been using this setup for our network (hundreds of client site traffic) for years and have had zero problems with the firewall.

I use this for my solar observation needs.

We computer geeks like to think that we are enlightened, that there is no systematic bias against women in computer science. We are wrong. What's worse is that we cannot admit that we are wrong. Suddenly, we become unscientific in our analysis of the situation, using in our personal anecdotal evidence to serve as proof against the claim. We think "I never did anything to prevent a women from pursuing a career in computer science." My brothers, we are wrong. Here is a summary of the evidence for this claim: http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrest ricted/colloq/details.cgi?id=312

Computer science isn't advancing as well as it could due to the fact that intelligent women who would otherwise contribute are being repelled due to male influence. It's humbling to admit that we aren't as enlightened as we think we are, but we need to. Only then can we learn with an open mind what we need to do--suppressing our pride and other misplaced feelings of righteousness and instead focusing on the data--to rectify the situation.

I'm not really holding out for Solar Sails as a viable propulsion mechanisms, but it is a crying shame to have perfectly good hardware getting lost. Even if the propulsion didn't pan out as anything useful, it might still return a tremendous amount of useful data on space operations. Data that could be useful for other projects such as solar energy collectors or M2P2 propulsion.

Speaking of M2P2, anyone know of any research updates? The website is just as useless as ever for updates. Are they just sitting on the tech?

Wow.
You reinvented the Drake Equation.

Most of you are part of a vast empire of drones whose consumption of mass media is rotting your brain -- not unlike the damage caused by using methamphetamine every day for 10 years. Aside from eating, sleeping working, and going to school, you spend your supposed free time consuming junk food for your brain. So in the interests of slowly weening you off this mass media cult(ure), I present some workable alternatives. Sure, your friends and family will hate you when you can no longer mimick the latest Adam Sandler baby talk, but rest assured, they're just a bunch of junkies who only liked you because you were their monkey boy in the first place.

1. Go outside. It's sunny. Unless you live in Seattle.
2. Turn on PBS. Sure, it's boring, but you can fantasize about the large breasted woman pleading with you to help save WSTD.
3. Use the intarweb. You know, they have it for computers now.
4. Play with your kids. They hate you, but you did father them. If you don't have kids, make some.
5. Refer to last part of previous point -- even if you already have kids.
6. Get a girlfriend. They're all squishy and stuff. I highly recommend it. Make sure the wife doesn't find out.
7. Produce your own movie. If Kevin Costner can get paid to pretend that he can pretend, then I doubt you can do much worse.
8. Play sports. Well, that might be a stretch seeing as you have developed into a plump little couch potato during your addiction phase, but rest assured there's a position for you on the baseball diamond... like designated backstop.

IAAP (I am a physicist), and here's the deal:

There are suggestions out there that one way to test for the existence of extra "compactified" spatial dimensions (the kind of stuff needed in string theories) is to look for deviations from Newton's 1/r^2 gravity at small distance scales. See, for example, here.

The problem is, it's very hard to measure just the gravitational interaction between two objects separated at micron scales. Gravity is incredibly weak compared to common forces like electrostatics and magnetic interactions, and even more exotic things like Casimir forces (related to the van der Waals interaction).

The Purdue team has shown that the measured Casimir force in their experiment acts just as expected, setting a new limit on how screwy gravity can be at these distance scales.

For what it's worth, there are two other big efforts in this area. The one at Stanford is led by Aharon Kapitulnik, and is so sensitive that their apparatus can detect the different forces on Au and Si in the earth's magnetic field due to diamagnetism (!). The one at Washington is reportedly even more sensitive, and there are rumors circulating that they may have seen something exciting.

The really cool thing here is how table-top solid state experiments may have something profound to say about high energy physics, without any big accelerators.

You can't believe that brain size has anything to do with intelligence. Einstein was a pretty smart guy (200 IQ) and had a smaller than average brain (http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/ein.html).

Perhaps you meant: MS Outlook is broken for millions of users? It's easy to not click on things that are executable when your e-mail client doesn't run things upon double-click. If you have a sane e-mail client, you also wouldn't have to worry about similar problems... Obligatory Pine Plug: I use pine. I don't get viruses : )

The reason that the simulation results coming from the original UWashington research on the subject - http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/smt/ - looked far better was their use of unreasonably large caches in their simulations, and that they completely ignored the OS overhead of enabling SMT - which is non-negligeable - and is a thing that has been pointed out often on the Linux Kernel mailing list as well.

I didn't read most of the princeton paper... but you're arguing that caches need to be big to get any gains, and that Intel's HT chips show SMT doesn't offer anything. The Intel chips have ridiculously small L1 caches - only 8KB. A quick sampling of washington papers shows they simulate machines with 64-128KB L1 caches, which are entirely reasonable - all AMD processors since the Athlon have had 64KB L1 caches. Both companies are increasing L2 sizes, and 1-2MB is not unreasonable either.

I don't know anything about OS overhead, but section 2.3 of the princeton paper argues SMP kernels (which SMT requires) are slower, and thus you pay for extra overhead when using SMT vs a non-multithreaded single processor. However, they themselves don't make the same claim for multiprocessors (because you have to pay the OS overhead anyway), and with the introduction of dual core processors at the consumer level, everybody will soon be using the SMP kernels anyway. This point is [rapidly becoming, if not already] moot.

Their analysis in section 3.3 implied that the memory subsystem becomes the bottleneck in multiprocessor systems with SMT enabled, but before you take that and agrue SMT offers nothing, I again point out problems with the Intel implementation: their memory bus is shared among all CPUs, so the per-CPU bandwidth drops with an increase in CPUs, and per-thread bandwidth is half again. AMD's Opterons don't suffer from this same problem due to their NUMA configuration, so a 2-CPU 2-thread SMT with an Opteron-like memory system would get the same per-thread memory bandwidth as a 2-CPU non-SMT Xeon system, while supporting twice as many threads.

• Fortran+MPI
• Sisal
• SAC
• Cilk
• ZPL
• Occam
• other

I'm a researcher working on high performance computing and have used various configurations of Simultaneous Multithreading (aka Hyperthreading aka CMT) (Intel Xeon, IBM POWER5). The result is always the same - at the end, memory latencies and OS overheads kill most of the gains of instruction level parallelism coming from SMT. Look at it this way - the typical latencies of operations on most modern processors are of the order of 1 nanosecond, whereas DRAM latencies are of the order of 200ns. As long as you can't do anything about this latency, there's no point in cutting down on processing times. There's a very nice paper in this year's ACM SIGMETRICS that gives real experimental data to illustrate this fact - http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~yruan/XeonSMT/smt.pdf The paper shows that the speedups obtained using SMT in practice are meagre. The reason that the simulation results coming from the original UWashington research on the subject - http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/smt/ - looked far better was their use of unreasonably large caches in their simulations, and that they completely ignored the OS overhead of enabling SMT - which is non-negligeable - and is a thing that has been pointed out often on the Linux Kernel mailing list as well.

I'm not interested in building new dams, or raising the ones we've got. I'm interested in the capital investment that increases efficiency of the generators - note that Grand Coulee is up to 1.1 gigawatts, and *most* of the dams in WA haven't gotten anything like the new generators it has. So, no, you're very much incorrect about full exploitation. Some of the dams in WA can get twice as much power as they are now out of the same amount of water. On urban planning, I suggest you have a look at "A Pattern Language", by Christopher Alexander et al. I *do* actually take into account weather and climate, age distribution, and suburbanization - suburbs will disappear as the car becomes less used due to oil prices. People only "like" what they're told to like. The more trains you put on a line, the more people will use them - look at all the successful urban subway systems and train networks. Check out the Japanese or European city cores - they're sure not decaying. And no, they weren't heavy, slow or expensive. They were cost-effective, had better acceleration, and were becoming affordable before big oil finds. Here's an example from Seattle: http://content.lib.washington.edu/imlsmohai/image/ 1998.jpg Remember, the Ford automobile was first sold to the upper class as a replacement for a horse drawn coach. :) Neither that nor this had the same range and speed.

There is no species which deliberately handicaps itself

It's not about the creature which is most likely to survive but the one who is most likely to reproduce (technically which is most likely to pass on a given gene). If some trait will cause a creature to have a 5% larger chance of dying but attracts females at a 10% greater rate then it will survive. I need to note that any disadvantages caused need to be small enough as to not affect the species as a whole (a handicap but one the species can absorb in essence).
-Gerald S. Wilkinson and Paul Reillo showed such evolution for the stalk-eyed fly (Cyrtodiopsis dalmanni)
-Giant antlers, potentially evolved because the directly indicate a healthy individual.
-Passerina amoena: bird species has two subpopulations, one bright and aggressive while the other dull and passive. It seems females select for the best of either population, so in other words the selection seems to not be due to some survival probabilities.

There is no way for a species to spiral out of control. Eventually the species will either become the main course for others, or hit the limits of its food supply.

Please learn to read next time, spiral out of control was not used for population size and I never indicated so. I was talking in terms of a feature getting more and more pronounced, ie: spiraling out of control. And yes it would either stop once it became too disadvantageous or once it caused the species to go extinct.

What most such pseudo-science theories seem to mis-represent as such are other factors which the species needed, and which are _not_ there as handicaps.

If you wish to debate this issue you can contact the people who came up with the following:

- Zahavi's handicap principle (http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/ha ndicap_principle.html)
- Grafen's model (http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/ty pes_of_handicap.html)
-Runaway selection (proposed by Ronald Fisher)

E.g., human breasts, since you mention them are there _not_ either as handicap, nor as the "sex signal of having a butt on the chest" idiocy. They're there because that's convenient for a primate to hold its baby, and they're that size in humans because a human baby needs a _lot_ of food. The brains alone needs ridiculous quantities of proteins to even keep working. (See why the evoloution of human brain size kept step with the availability of food sources: e.g., fire allowing us to eat plants.)

Fire allowed us to eat meat I believe but that another point. And as someone mentioned breast size has jack shit to do with milk production as all that extra mass is fat not mammary glands. There is a reason tiny asian woman who are flat as airport runways can successfully have kids. By your logic everyone would have decently sized breasts however that is not true. As I said, other primates do not have such large breasts and they also carry their children.

Humans were very good at surviving so small handicaps could be accumulated without endangering their survival.

E.g., other signals (such as colours) in various species are _not_ there as a handicap, but to solve problems like finding each other. See, being well hidden from predators doesn't help that much if you also don't find a partner to mate with. Or like the kid being able to follow the mother.

And yet some of those colors are quite flamboyant aren't they? Your logic only works u to a point, especially since coloring varies greatly among birds and many are decently well hidden.

There is no species which deliberately handicaps itself

It's not about the creature which is most likely to survive but the one who is most likely to reproduce (technically which is most likely to pass on a given gene). If some trait will cause a creature to have a 5% larger chance of dying but attracts females at a 10% greater rate then it will survive. I need to note that any disadvantages caused need to be small enough as to not affect the species as a whole (a handicap but one the species can absorb in essence).
-Gerald S. Wilkinson and Paul Reillo showed such evolution for the stalk-eyed fly (Cyrtodiopsis dalmanni)
-Giant antlers, potentially evolved because the directly indicate a healthy individual.
-Passerina amoena: bird species has two subpopulations, one bright and aggressive while the other dull and passive. It seems females select for the best of either population, so in other words the selection seems to not be due to some survival probabilities.

There is no way for a species to spiral out of control. Eventually the species will either become the main course for others, or hit the limits of its food supply.

Please learn to read next time, spiral out of control was not used for population size and I never indicated so. I was talking in terms of a feature getting more and more pronounced, ie: spiraling out of control. And yes it would either stop once it became too disadvantageous or once it caused the species to go extinct.

What most such pseudo-science theories seem to mis-represent as such are other factors which the species needed, and which are _not_ there as handicaps.

If you wish to debate this issue you can contact the people who came up with the following:

- Zahavi's handicap principle (http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/ha ndicap_principle.html)
- Grafen's model (http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/ty pes_of_handicap.html)
-Runaway selection (proposed by Ronald Fisher)

E.g., human breasts, since you mention them are there _not_ either as handicap, nor as the "sex signal of having a butt on the chest" idiocy. They're there because that's convenient for a primate to hold its baby, and they're that size in humans because a human baby needs a _lot_ of food. The brains alone needs ridiculous quantities of proteins to even keep working. (See why the evoloution of human brain size kept step with the availability of food sources: e.g., fire allowing us to eat plants.)

Fire allowed us to eat meat I believe but that another point. And as someone mentioned breast size has jack shit to do with milk production as all that extra mass is fat not mammary glands. There is a reason tiny asian woman who are flat as airport runways can successfully have kids. By your logic everyone would have decently sized breasts however that is not true. As I said, other primates do not have such large breasts and they also carry their children.

Humans were very good at surviving so small handicaps could be accumulated without endangering their survival.

E.g., other signals (such as colours) in various species are _not_ there as a handicap, but to solve problems like finding each other. See, being well hidden from predators doesn't help that much if you also don't find a partner to mate with. Or like the kid being able to follow the mother.

And yet some of those colors are quite flamboyant aren't they? Your logic only works u to a point, especially since coloring varies greatly among birds and many are decently well hidden.

Sorry, posted the wrong link. Here's a live one that includes the oceans.

Hate to say it, but this sounds like a pipedream. They want to 'take the proteins and tweak them' an dthen have a computer program spit out the DNA required to make that protein.

Well whoop-de-do. I'd like to make a computer that can generate wormholes. Doesn't mean it's going to happen.

Can't promise much in the way of wormholes, but Homme Hellinga and David Baker's groups already make software for protein design.

Synthetic biology's been around for a while (see also e.g. Adam Arkin). This is just Drew's startup getting column inches in Forbes, and then getting eagerly lapped up by Zonk, as far as I can see.

Botnets used to be found mostly on infected redhat and solaris boxes infected by trinoo

...is of the Paul G. Allen Computer Science building at the University of Washington.

At least part of this article is particularly disreputable. It says:

But surely we can do better than a February study in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review that concluded that it's easier to identify someone close to you than someone more than a football-field-length away. At 450 feet, the scientist concludes, "the human visual system starts to lose small details."

The phrase quoted by the writer ("the human visual system starts to lose small details") never appears anywhere in the journal article. (Why is it easier to identify someone close than far away? by Geoffrey Loftus, University of Washington, and Erin M. Harley, University of California). In fact, the first sentence of the article, not the conclusion, is "It is a matter of common sense that a person is easier to recognize when close than when far away."

The researchers were concerned with assessing the ability of an eyewitness to a crime to identify a suspect seen at a distance. The research shows why at certain distances it is impossible and it is not simply because the face is very small.

Check out the epiglottis on her!

http://videosrv14.cs.washington.edu/info/audio/mp3 /colloq/ESchmidt_050526.mp3

Probably more relevant to techies than TFA. Interestingly, ge stopped his prepared statement about halfway into his alloted 50 minutes to take questions.

(PS- Not having posted in awhile, I find the "type this text to confirm you're not a script" thing kind of ironic in this context. I'm not a script, but how will you know I'm not a downloaded consciousness running on a Beowulf cluster of PS3's? However, it probably is a good way of keeping dyslexic people from posting.)

I think ARToolkit could be used for input.

It uses a webcam to calculate position of
a physical marker. It could be used for
some cool method of controlling a game..

http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/

There is a project called ARToolkit at the University of Washington HITLab which uses a camera to track six degrees of freedom on not just a triangle but almost any 2d shape.

http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/

"For my own "I told you so" points, I wrote about this happening in May of 2003"

How about 1997? I didn't actually write it down, but I told this to quite a few people. I cannot produce a document of course :( But the point is, I came to this conclusion after reading a book written in 1973, which itself refered to a theory from the 1920's. Google "Kondratieff" or check this link.
http://faculty.washington.edu/modelski/IPEKWAVE.ht ml
This theory not only helped me explain global economic problems, but it also helped me predicting that there would be wars coming at that time. So I wasn't really shocked when 9/11 happened. I immediately called my friend whom I discussed these theories and told him that he was right about the coming wars. Expect more wars to come, and don't blame Bush for them.

Listen to the low-karma slashdot troll Sheepdot. Sure, he says a lot of obviously wrong things and gets called out on it, and whenever he does he refuses to justify himself and just insults the people who catch him. This is a sure sign of a truly powerful security and voting systems expert.

I mean, what does Bruce Schneier know? The world comes to slashdot trolls for its opinions, after all.

How can anyone fail to sense your hidden genius in your appreciation for half-baked security tools that have a history of failure traceable as far back as Phrack articles from 1993.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, only on slashdot can a whiny, obnoxious, ignorant baby like Sheepdot treat experts like assholes and still get a free education in return:

--
"More recently, other implementations of LKMs for hiding processes,
files, and directories have come about that can get around the above
described methods of defeating standard root kits, as well as
cryptographic checksumming programs like "tripwire" that must trust the
operating system to present them with valid bits from disc and memory.

The Hacker's Choice (THC) from Germany has write-ups on loadable
kernel modules for Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris, which describe this
methods of hiding out on a rooted box:

http://www.thehackerschoice.com/papers/LKM_HACKING .html
http://www.thehackerschoice.com/papers/bsdkern.htm l
http://www.thehackerschoice.com/papers/slkm-1.0.ht ml

TESO has another Linux LKM ("adore") along these same lines:

http://www.team-teso.net/releases.php

Using methods such as these, integrity checking programs like "tripwire"
and NIPC's "find_ddos" programs can be subverted, as the kernel could
not even be trusted to give correct results when searching process
tables, network structures, or file systems.

You might think that simply disabling LKM support in the kernel -- which
is still a good idea to improve security on a server whose configuration
will be stable -- is the final answer. Not exactly.

Another method of inserting code into running kernels -- even if LKM
support is not present -- is described by Silvio Cesare:

http://www.big.net.au/~silvio/runtime-kernel-kmem- patching.txt"
--

Too bad you can't run tripwire to protect your brain, Sheep. LOL.

http://dub.washington.edu/denim/

"DENIM is a system that helps web site designers in the early stages of design. DENIM supports sketching input, allows design at different refinement levels, and unifies the levels through zooming."

"But I still don't see any reason to tell a kid that his parents are wrong because they believe in creationism."

Nor do I, but when was that suggested in the conversation? This whole thing is about Religion impinging on Science's territory, not Science "disproving" Religion. As far as I'm concerned people can believe the universe was sneezed out of the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure, as long as they keep it to themselves and don't start fucking with the education of a generation to further their (illogical, unproveable, minority) beliefs.

"Personally, I think that belief in religion is beyond a true/false mentality. There's just no point in attempting to prove it either way, since religion serves a purpose besides explaination of the universe to me."

Indeed. I consider myself a relatively spiritual person (just not of any particular denomination), and always try to respect beliefs I don't share (assuming they don't turn out to be completely insane). However, I also respect that Religion has a very definite "turf", and it should stick to it. Ethics, morality and the human condition? No problem. Advancing theories to explain how the real, physical universe works? No Fucking Way.

"Anyways. The description that I read myself of the double slit experiment is that in fact actually the photon is (as we will all agree) both a particle and a wave. This particle is such like a "wave packet". A grouping of waves that are restricted more or less together into a single particle group.
"

Indeed - photons are both particle and waves, so they do exhibit properties of each. However, you seem to be working under a misaprehension - a quantum of light (a photon) is indivisible. That's basically the definition of a photon - an indivisible amount of light. This is why it exhibits particle-like qualities at all, because it's effectively a classical indivisible body, and why the double-slit experiment reinforces quantum mechanics - the photon is indivisible, so (classically) it should be impossible for it to pass through both slits at the same time (recall that the slits are separated by a gap many times the wavelength of the photon).

Also, if you read my post you'd see I specifically mention that it also works with single particles of matter (eg electrons), which are (supposedly) matter, not a wave.

The only way to explain this (or rather, the only way science currently can) is that the electron must also exhibit wave-like properties, and the only way it can do this is if it's in a quantum superposition of states. When it's superposed, the electron can be thought of as a wave, with a bell-curve-shaped hump in the middle. The height of the wave at any point represents the probability that the electron will be at that point when the state of superposition collapses.

It's important to notice that (as with a bell-curve) the wave's ends are asymptotic to zero, so it technically stretches the width of the universe. This means that when the wave collapses to a point, the electron could in fact be anywhere along that line. Although in practice the chances of this are so vanishingly small (the height of the wave is vanishingly close to zero for all but a tiny area) that it rarely "moves" far from where you expect it to be, it does allow for quantum tunneling, where the electron appears to tunnel through solid objects.

"Again, I believe quite similarly to Einstein. God doesn't play dice to the universe. The notion that the order and regularity that we experience can be built upon pure instability is ludacrous to me."

Ah, so you don't believe in quantum mechanics? Why? I'll admit it's counter-intuitive, but then so is the idea that the earth revolves around the sun. Read up on it, understand it, and it

You can type fast enough, but who taught you how to use colons? Seriously, though, a tablet-based system has legitimate uses for those who can see beyond coding. One great use would be as a web designer using something like Denim.

I'm glad everyone has done his or her part. I know I wrote a letter to Sys-Con; I sent it to half of the departments as well as Mr. Kircaali through their online contact pages. How many others did something similar?

http://blackbox02.cs.washington.edu:11223/cgi-bin/ narnia.mov.torrent

http://blackbox02.cs.washington.edu:11223/cgi-bin/ firefox-1.0+.en-US.mac.dmg.torrent

http://blackbox02.cs.washington.edu:11223/Berkeley .zip.torrent

http://blackbox02.cs.washington.edu:11223/Berkeley .zip.torrent

Maybe they should work on something a little more durable, like Mini-Magnetosphere Plasma Propulsion.

I attended a lecture back in '96 or '97 given by Ms. Yu at Ga Tech. She demonstrated a LISP program that did a very nice job...

Following is from http://computing.breinestorm.net/design+retrieval+ image+designers+edu/

"Diagram Query and Image Retrieval in Design
Gross, M. and E. Do Proceedings, 2nd International Conference on Image Processing, Crystal City, Virginia, IEEEComputer Society Press, 1995 design machine group University of Washington Seattle WA USA 98195-5720 http://depts.washington.edu/dmachine
DIAGRAM QUERY & IMAGE RETRIEVAL IN DESIGN Mark D Gross (1) and Ellen Yi-Luen Do (2) (1) College of Architecture and Planning, University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309-0314 mdg@cs.colorado.edu (2) College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta GA 30332-0155 ellendo@cc.gatech.edu ABSTRACT Architectural designers are voracious consumers of visual images, which play a crucial role especially in conceptual and creative design. Consequently architectural education revolves around visual references. Yet key word, texture and color retrieval schemes do not suit designers needs. Designers need shape based retrieval that is driven by free hand drawing, and ways to integrate retrieved images into their design environment. The paper describes Drawing Analogies, an image retrieval scheme for design based on the need for image retrieval that can be integrated with the act of free hand drawing."

Just not on regular roads. Retrofitting the existing road network with the required level of instrumentation is actually more expensive than building a new one.

http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/PRT/

http://www.atsltd.co.uk/
http://www.skywebexpress.com/

http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/prtquick .htm

etc.

The only thing that held VR back was the 3d Head Mounted Display units. At the time, they would only offer 320x240 resolution and it cost about $1,000. Most of them didnt offer tracking systems, and it was pretty far from giving you a full immersion effect. It was basically an fancy movie viewer.

Then came Retina Displays, the ability to beam video signal via lasers directly into your retina. Many military and medical applications, but its still far from being a consumer product. Its the only technology that has the best chance at offering something close to full immersion.

The University of Washington is one school thats paving the way for commercial VRD development.

http://www.hitl.washington.edu/publications/r-98-2 1/r-98-21.pdf

Once this technology is perfected, it should be no different than a SVGA Monitor, just plug it into your VGA port and launch whatever game you want.

You're right. Okay, here's one I found after some googling.

Sun's not the only one working on a language to better support HPC (i.e. massively parallel) programming. IBM's working on a language called X10, and Cray is working on one called Chapel. All three companies are being funded by the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems project.

Will any of these replace the dreaded MPI+(C/Fortran)? Only time will tell...