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Have a look at the U of Washington Biostat StatCD which puts Xemacs, R, Ghostscript, a LaTeX implementation and a ton of other things, incl. Cygwin, onto two cds.

The professor is John Gottman from the department of psychology in the University of Washington, Seattle. He conducts most of his research at the Gottman institute.

However the most readable reference is his famous book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.

Actually, you're both sorta right -

NTSC has 525 total lines vertical lines (horizontal varies) but broadcast signals interleave (most sites say interlace, but this is technically incorrect - interlacing is skipping lines and drawing every other one, while interleaving is going every other line on one pass, then the other lines on the next pass) the signal which should amount to 263 lines per signal, but only 242 lines are sent in broadcast signals, so you lose 20 lines from the top and bottom (I think this is why we have TV and video modes on TVs). Because the 242 lines are interleaved and actually drawn at almost 60Hz (242 in one direction as the beam moves top to bottom and 242 as the beam moves bottom to top), you actually have 484 lines of information at ~30Hz.

here's a couple of interesting links (HDTV) link with more info on all formats and the same location on NTSC. Both articles are old - circa '95, but still interesting. Use google for more modern (but mostly less informative) info.

In consoles, the full 525 can be used, as well as 600+ horizontal.

The two biggest obstacles I see are
a) refresh rate fixed at roughly 30Hz
b) vertical resolution fixed at 525

HDTV is icky, so I don't want to talk about it, but it's much better than NTSC (better v-res, better Hz).

Actually, you're both sorta right -

NTSC has 525 total lines vertical lines (horizontal varies) but broadcast signals interleave (most sites say interlace, but this is technically incorrect - interlacing is skipping lines and drawing every other one, while interleaving is going every other line on one pass, then the other lines on the next pass) the signal which should amount to 263 lines per signal, but only 242 lines are sent in broadcast signals, so you lose 20 lines from the top and bottom (I think this is why we have TV and video modes on TVs). Because the 242 lines are interleaved and actually drawn at almost 60Hz (242 in one direction as the beam moves top to bottom and 242 as the beam moves bottom to top), you actually have 484 lines of information at ~30Hz.

here's a couple of interesting links (HDTV) link with more info on all formats and the same location on NTSC. Both articles are old - circa '95, but still interesting. Use google for more modern (but mostly less informative) info.

In consoles, the full 525 can be used, as well as 600+ horizontal.

The two biggest obstacles I see are
a) refresh rate fixed at roughly 30Hz
b) vertical resolution fixed at 525

HDTV is icky, so I don't want to talk about it, but it's much better than NTSC (better v-res, better Hz).

I bet you could really excercise your cat with that one, and do it over the internet, too!

Slashdot really sucks nowadays. There are better alternatives. Check out

The Quit Slashdot Movement for some better quality "new for nerds" sites.

I use the MyBus.org page for the intersection right next to where I work ( FAIRVIEW AV N & DENNY WY) practically every day. It's really nice because I clearly see when the next bus will arrive (and if it's going to be late) and I know to leave my cube about 5 minutes before it shows up. No more standing around in the Seattle rain waiting for the bus!

Paintball fields in Canada

'elliptic curve' encryption technology, (developed by Whitfield Diffie of Diffie-Hellman public key fame)

Elliptic curve cryptography was indepentantly
invented by Neal Koblitz, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington and Victor Miller who was then at IBM.
(Source)

Whitfield Diffie is Sun's chief security officer, and co-invented public-key cryptography.

It isn't "Open Source's" fault. Slashdot is to blame. They are just extremely biased toward open source.

Slashdot really sucks nowadays. There are better alternatives. Check out

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Slashdot really sucks nowadays. There are better alternatives. Check out

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Slashdot sucks nowadays. soooo.....

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I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on it, but the reviewer clearly didn't bother doing any fact checking. "The Morris-Thorne principle" is based on a paper by Michael Morris, Kip Thorne, and Ulvi Yurtsever which was published in the conservative and prestigious journal Physical Review Letters in 1988. For anyone interested in how this might relate to time travel, take a look at John Cramer's Alternate View column for June 1989.

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Here is another article from John G. Cramer's Alternate View Articles in Analog Sci-Fi Magazine.

Professor Cramer is the real deal. A physics professor at Washington University who is also a sci-fi fan and writer. He is also an excellent pop-science writer who can get his point across without dumbing things down. Enjoy.

Here is another article from John G. Cramer's Alternate View Articles in Analog Sci-Fi Magazine.

Professor Cramer is the real deal. A physics professor at Washington University who is also a sci-fi fan and writer. He is also an excellent pop-science writer who can get his point across without dumbing things down. Enjoy.

Here is another article from John G. Cramer's Alternate View Articles in Analog Sci-Fi Magazine.

Professor Cramer is the real deal. A physics professor at Washington University who is also a sci-fi fan and writer. He is also an excellent pop-science writer who can get his point across without dumbing things down. Enjoy.

If I have time I'll write a formal HOWTO and maybe submit it to /. In the meantime, here's a synopsis:

You need a Linux machine with a static IP address. If you can't have a static IP I suppose you can play games with dynamic IP addresses to access the server. Get a DNS entry to make it easier to access.

Set up fetchmail . Fetchmail is a simple program (written by ESR) which downloads mail via POP or IMAP. You configure it with your mail server, username, and password, and it downloads mail to the local machine. Actually, it re-delivers your mail locally. Your remote email might be chris2912@earthlink.net, and your username on your Linux server might be ces; fetchmail delivers the mail it downloads to ces@localhost.

At this point, you can use pine or mutt to read your mail. By default, they read mail from your local spool. Note that your "inbox" is /var/spool/mail/username, but other mail folders are usually under your home directory. Configure pine or mutt to put your mail folders in ~/mail.

Install procmail. Procmail allows you to set up filters for handling mail. It will let you move mail to a folder based on sender (something like various mail client's rules) and more importantly, it will let you run SpamAssassin (or junkfilter, but I recommend SpamAssassin). Set up procmail to run SpamAssassin on each email, and then either delete the spam or move it to a certain folder. The SpamAssassin documentation is pretty clear on how to do this. Make sure procmail is configured to use the folders in ~/mail.

Install an IMAP server. I use the standard UW server; there are others. The UW server runs via [x]inetd. I recommend setting up the SSL support (imaps).

What IMAP does is allow you to access your email remotely, without downloading it like POP. Mail is kept on the server, in folders. Through an IMAP client, you "subscribe" to a certain set of folders; these are the only folders IMAP clients will see. You want to configure your IMAP clients to use ~/mail as your root folder; otherwise you will see any other folders in your home directory (IMAP isn't limited to email).

When you set up an IMAP client (Outlook will work, though Outlook 2000 has an annoying bug, always reporting "server dropped connection", I use Mozilla mail) you provide the IP address of your server, and your username and password on that server.

IMAP is strange about deleting. Many IMAP clients by default want to move deleted messages into a folder. That's okay if you want to do that, I prefer to actually delete them. Even if you actually delete a message, it is only marked as deleted; it's still there until you purge it. Pine asks if you want to purge messages when you leave a folder; other clients do similar things.

Finally, install a web email package. IMP is the best, but it can be very hard to set up. I resorted to another package called squirrelmail before I finally got IMP set up. Squirrelmail is perfectly fine. Configure the package to use IMAP, using localhost as the server.

That's the basic points. Email me at ceswiedler@mindspring.com if you want any further help.

>To reproduce a signal whose dynamic range
>is 90 dB, the smallest excursions have to
>be roughly 1/30000 of the maximum amplitude.

That may well be the case, but the vinyl LP tops out at about 60db of dynamic range. And that's with an audiophile virgin vinyl pressing produced on the finest equipment. 40-50db of dynamic range is the best you'll get from most discs & equipment, and even then not at all frequencies. When it comes to consumer audio, only the digital formats - DAT, MiniDisc, CD & its offspring - can deliver 90db of dynamic range. Although I suppose VHS Hi-Fi and quality cassette decks with Dolby S can come pretty close.

>the width of the groove is roughly .01/667
>meters, which is 150 microns.

This page, which purports to be the text of an RIAA bulletin from 1963, lists all the standards for phonograph records. According to it, the grooves of a stereo record are at a minimum .001" wide, which I believe is 25 microns. Of course, they can be much wider than the minimum - and in fact, have to be, if you want to reproduce loud, low bass.

For comparison, CD "grooves" (tracks, really) are 1.6 microns wide, according to this page.

Each pit is approximately .5 micron wide. DVD tracks and pits are roughly half as wide as CD's (and the pits are much shorter). So clearly lasers wouldn't have any trouble seeing into the groove of a vinyl record, but I'm not sure how the laser turntables are picking out details smaller than about .1 micron. Perhaps the extraordinary cost of the laser turntable units - about $10,000/ea. and up - confirms it's not easy to read a record using light! Could they be using UV lasers or some other esoteric technical tricks?

Whatever they're doing, they got a great review.

I agree though that there's no way a home scanner could suck enough detail off a stereo record to reproduce much of anything. 1200dpi isn't even close to what you'd need.

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BNC stands for Berkeley Nucleonics Corporation, started in 1950 and still in business today. BNC connectors terminate 50-ohm coaxial cables, ideal for capturing high-frequency or low-duration events common to physics.

This is already happening in Artificial Intelligence. The Journal of AI Research (JAIR), and The Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) are peer-reviewed journals published on the web for free.

I'm not sure what the $20 million is for, since (at least in AI) peer-review is done for free anyway, as a service to the community. The big journals charge money while getting editing, review, and often even typsetting for free from their editorial boards or authors.

Since peer-review is the main service provided by the big journals, it was only a matter of time before the reviewers organized themselves. The tenure issue is a bit of a problem, since untenured faculty will want to publish in the best established journals. However, that should work itself out over time, as tenured researchers choose to publish in the new free journals. Eventually the new journals will be well enough established for young researchers to feel comfortable publishing in them.

remember kids, don't read slashdot.

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it demonstrates that light travels as waves, until you fire only 1 photon then you prove it travels as particles as well.

Actually, it proves that light travels as either a wave or particle.

It depends on the experiment. An experiment looking for particles will show particles, and waves, waves.

Check out The Copenhagen Interpretation

I love Quantum Theory so much I read the same book three times: In Search of Schrodinger's Cat. Might be out of date, but an easy read for us lay men.

Does this actually sound like a recommendation to anyone at all, or just faintly patronising and insulting?

The story just reads like the bastard offspring of "ph34r me, I don't understand codepages" megatokyo and "1337 h4x0r" jeffK. Since when do 10-year-olds write for wired? Oops, sorry, they always have...

or, in the words of the excellent "quit slashdot" page:

So, really, it's time to ask yourself: why should I read Slashdot? Because it targets my demographic? That's a silly reason.

My personal experience echoes what others have said - you'd think that Ed. Tech programs would be paragons of technical literacy themselves, but alas. (My alma mater UW is a case in point.)

For my masters' degree, I chose a long-running distance program at GWU; sort of putting my money where my mouth is, so to speak. I'm looking forward to starting next week, and hope the dialogs are up-to-date and up to my expectations. Other programs I considered were Pepperdine, MU, and Boise State

Another resource to check out of course is ISTE, and I'm sure there are others like it.

Why stop the censorship? We need more, so more people will choose to quit Slashdot!

This is a design by Robert Zubrin for a rocket that produces a continous atomic blast using water with a high concentration of Uranium or Plutonium salts.

Nuke Your Way to the Stars

For more on electric amor, check out
this page.

Chandra Interactive Analysis of Observations (CIAO) also looks like an interesting project

CIAO is indeed interesting. Thank you. FWIW, you may wish to know that I have made you my friend in order to make it easier for me to find your posts, which AFAIAC are always worth reading.

BTW: you are quite justified in applauding Mead, a Real Physicist's physicist. IYCTK, I think the point particle is in the same class as the spherical chicken: the best argument in its favor is that it allows considerable simplification. And, regarding the Transactional Interpretation I will only say that I am far less interested in the so-called physical meaning of a mathematical model than in the correctness of the model itself. But that's probably because, as Breitling (hi, Detlef) pointed out to me, I am not a Real Physicist. ;)

There actually already is a great deal of open hardware out there. It just depends on what you want to build, if you want to look at some neat circuit designs for various applications the University of Washington EE dept maintains a list of older circuit designs here (hey guess where I go to school). Pretty simple stuff like how to make Oscillators, pelter coolers, using serial ports, multi-vibrator circuit A-D converters, etc.

There are lots of other archives and examples, around the web. BUT, the catch is that this information is useless to most people. Unless you have a few hundred thousands of dollars to spend to make your own IC's the only option is microprocessors, FPGAs, CPLDs, etc. The design of custom IC's is not a consumer market and never will be untill someone comes out with a neat little Star Trek replicator. The closest thing to consumer IC's is MOSIS, which will make a few chips for you for around $10,000. The UW actually has two IC fabrication labs and only a few people can (and need to) make chips with them because the lithographic masks cost $30k each.

You can make your own processors if you really want, there are plenty of books that will teach you how to make your own Verilog MIPS processor. But, the software to take that design and turn it into a chip layout costs a couple hundred thousand dollars. But, if you want to build your own Pentium class processor, you're out of luck. Those designs are the property of whoever makes them, and with good reason. It costs millions of dollars to make and design these chips (don't forget just getting your chip to work is only 1/3 of the work, manufacturing it reliably is a far greater problem). There was a case several years ago against AMD (I believe) who suddenly came out with a memory design that was smaller than the industry standard. Funny thing was that another smaller company had come out with the design several months earlier... and guess what happened? They got a hold of the chips realized AMD had copied the design EXACTLY, except for a single reversed transistor (which didn't really change anything). Needless to say AMD lost a shit load of money and had to pay royalties. So, with respect to Stallman's rather silly statement the question is important and the answer is a resounding NO.

If you want to make your own circuits though, there are plenty of resources out there pcbexpress.com will take your PCB (printed circuit board) layouts and manufacture boards for under $100. And there's even free PCB design software out there (a lot of companies have their own for their services but everyone takes GERBER files - the industry standard for PCB layout). One popular free program is EAGLE which has Linux and Windows clients http://www.cadsoft.de/ , which has pretty good quality - hey its free. Plus there are lots of other PCB programs on Freshmeat. There are plenty of resources out there to make your own boards and lots of people do, but open hardware will never be as simple as downloading a design and hitting a button (even open source software isn't even that easy) because electronics isn't that simple. You can solder things together perfectly and have your design not work, because of some small detail or it could work perfectly, which is what makes it so fun!

At the UW, the honors program requires you to take any 3 year-long sequences to graduate (along with whatever major you're doing). These include:

• Western Civilization
• World Civilization
• Physics
• Math

• I choose the first three. Out of world civ, for example, I got to write a 50-page paper on pyramids, study west African feminist literature, and take a really interesting course from a femini-Nazi women's study professor.

  Now, while I'm coding OS thread tasks, I can also appreciate a bit of Herodotus (or whatever else tickles your fancy) while taking my breaks. So if you're interested in a well-rounded education, check out your school's honors program.

It doesn't matter how current your programming language is. If you're using a toy to demonstrate concepts when a full blown implementation is just as available, that's where things get ugly.

Programming languages are not much of an issue to me nowadays. All of the languages that have seriously caught on (apart from Basic) have their structure ripped from C/C++. You can look at PERL and find bits of Bash and awk, but still.

How long does it take to learn a new programming language, and its syntax? Not *incredibly* long. It takes longer to learn the syntax, and find out about all the specialized functions that each one has built into it.

Being a compsci student, programming languages should be fairly simple to pick up (after C++, give a few weeks to learn how to do things equivalently). I wish we'd get more time learning how to do things (Makefiles etc) than focus on 10 different ways to say "Hello world"

I'd much rather take two semesters of a class that does something real (like tweak with linux, or write a C compiler) than one semester of something that won't be useful in the real world (tweaking NACHOS, or a COOL compiler).

It's times like that I wonder what *really* goes into getting a diploma.

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I agree with most of your points: there's a lot of life left in the model making business. Sometimes models make more sense than 3d work, and since we don't have three dimensional screens, design reference models will be around for quite a while. Oh, and hell no theater won't replaced by CG (holograms?), no matter how good it becomes.

However, due to recent research papers, I do think that 3d-generated actors will be a reality, and without the need for references. There has been a lot of animation research into taking captured actions and changing them to fit the physical characteristics of generated models based on physics. As an example, I motion capture the skinny kid serving coffee on the set throwing a punch, and the motion is mapped to a 3d-generated (and non-aging) Ah-nold, with specialized algorithms adapting the motion to his bodytype, speed, size, etc. Its possible that eventually there will be whole libraries of motions that can be used with any 3d-generated 'actor' with the help of adaption alogorithms like these. For more information, you can check out the recent SIGGRAPH stuff, or perhaps look at this guy's work.

Speaking of cloth, yes there is also a lot more work to do here. Animating cloth by hand is a pain. Simulating cloth graphically is not hard, and can look quite good--until it collides with something. Fast cloth-on-cloth collision testing is still a ways away, but in a few years, I think animators will be able to specify the parameters of a model's clothes (for example) and then let the algorithms do the rest. For a good look at recent work in cloth simulation, check out this guy's work.

As long as the computing price/performance ratio keeps improving, the accessibility of computer-generated effects will continue to grow. And with computer graphics being such a hot research topic, both visual and procedural improvements will be coming fast and thick.

-s

> The problem is that global warming doesn't take into acount the previous warming and cooling cycles presented via geology.

Depends what you are looking for. If your interested in global warming on the scale of 10E6 years, it would be certainly be a quite small timeframe.

The point is, this global warming is on a much smaller time-scale, more up to 10E2. (Actually, being on such a small time-scale is the problem).

Same point applies to local weather. The knowledge of global climate does not help us to predict, wether it rains in four days in Seattle or not.

>Fact is we aren't going to have an accurate snapshot ...

It does make as much sense as saying life doesn't exists because we don't have statistical evidence. On a certain scale, it may be correct. But on the scale, which currently interests us, it is not.

BTW, there are a geological study, which took geological cycles into account, which actually make much less optimistic.
Here is an essay

PS: Hopefully, you don't involve some butterflies in the discussion.

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Oh, I forgot to mention - there are decent instructions on the site above telling you how to build your own - they're quite easy, if you want to experiment, although some commercial ones aren't all that expensive, either, but then you'd miss the fun of building your own...

The artificial muscle they are using are pretty interesting. Its called the Mckibben artificial muscle and the basic design has been around for a while. Here's a link that gives a basic overview and shows you how to make one:

Mckibben muscle page

And here's one where a guy actually integrated it into his lego mindstorms!
Lego air muscle

Actually, the basic technology here is not at all new. These are what is know as "McKibben Muscles", first developed for artificial arms in the 1950s. (The link is to a good overview of them from my robotics bookmarks list.)

They are cheap, strong, compact, and easy to build, but they require a lot of energy in the form of not-too-easily available compressed air or other gas. For this reason, they're not used too frequently for prosthetics since carrying enough gas becomes a problem.

These have been used to build a number of camplex life-mimicking robots, including many of the better legged walking robots. Check out the this page for an idea of how you can use them in place of real muscles to achieve very lifelike results.

If you've got a good source of compressed gas, these are an excellent design choice, and probably the only thing we have that can fairly approximate natural muscle at a reasonable cost. ("Muscle wires" like Nitinol require gobs of power and need way too much cooling time to contract to be useful in most applications.)

Actually, the basic technology here is not at all new. These are what is know as "McKibben Muscles", first developed for artificial arms in the 1950s. (The link is to a good overview of them from my robotics bookmarks list.)

They are cheap, strong, compact, and easy to build, but they require a lot of energy in the form of not-too-easily available compressed air or other gas. For this reason, they're not used too frequently for prosthetics since carrying enough gas becomes a problem.

These have been used to build a number of camplex life-mimicking robots, including many of the better legged walking robots. Check out the this page for an idea of how you can use them in place of real muscles to achieve very lifelike results.

If you've got a good source of compressed gas, these are an excellent design choice, and probably the only thing we have that can fairly approximate natural muscle at a reasonable cost. ("Muscle wires" like Nitinol require gobs of power and need way too much cooling time to contract to be useful in most applications.)

No, when I think "funky robot hand" - I always think of that extremely dextrous, three-fingered robot hand that was shown way back in the 1980's on such shows like "That's Incredible" and "Beyond 2000" - I can't find any pictures online of it, though I think it was one of the incarnations of the Utah/MIT Dextrous Hand Master system (I found plenty on the system, but they don't have the same hand I remember). One thing I remember that was most funky about the hand was that the fingers could flex inward and outward, to hold and manipulate large ring type pieces. Each finger had base abduction, and multiple flexing movement - it seemed to be driven by steppers with flexible cables. They had a demo (which seemed staged, and the hand without feedback sensors at the time) showing it handling and manipulating various items - very impressive, fluid, and beautiful to watch in action.

Does anyone here know of what I am talking about - and can anyone find images? I admit I didn't do a major exhaustive Google search - only delved a few pages in the results...

Most moderators are just pimply-faced 14-18 year old geeks without a girlfriend anyway. Who cares about them? Who cares about slashdot? Why not just Quit Slashdot now. You can do it. Good luck!

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I'm going to Quit Slashdot now.

later...

I did. I read about it a while ago here. Here is the article on the original warp drive which looks rather hard to build, because (as I recall) you need a large 'negative energy density' (or some such). And here is the article on the "Micro warp drive" that makes a spacial bubble around to you make you really small, so you don't need as large a negative energy density, and that you, apparently, can't see out of. :) Another interesting article there (of course, there all interesting), is about the Krasnikov Tube which lets you travel somewhere and back at relativistic speeds without having to worry about time dilation.

Of course, these aren't particularly detailed on how the math/physics works (warp drives for dummies :)), but they're entertaining to read and give you at least a general overview of how they work. Chef recommends.

I did. I read about it a while ago here. Here is the article on the original warp drive which looks rather hard to build, because (as I recall) you need a large 'negative energy density' (or some such). And here is the article on the "Micro warp drive" that makes a spacial bubble around to you make you really small, so you don't need as large a negative energy density, and that you, apparently, can't see out of. :) Another interesting article there (of course, there all interesting), is about the Krasnikov Tube which lets you travel somewhere and back at relativistic speeds without having to worry about time dilation.

Of course, these aren't particularly detailed on how the math/physics works (warp drives for dummies :)), but they're entertaining to read and give you at least a general overview of how they work. Chef recommends.

I did. I read about it a while ago here. Here is the article on the original warp drive which looks rather hard to build, because (as I recall) you need a large 'negative energy density' (or some such). And here is the article on the "Micro warp drive" that makes a spacial bubble around to you make you really small, so you don't need as large a negative energy density, and that you, apparently, can't see out of. :) Another interesting article there (of course, there all interesting), is about the Krasnikov Tube which lets you travel somewhere and back at relativistic speeds without having to worry about time dilation.

Of course, these aren't particularly detailed on how the math/physics works (warp drives for dummies :)), but they're entertaining to read and give you at least a general overview of how they work. Chef recommends.

I did. I read about it a while ago here. Here is the article on the original warp drive which looks rather hard to build, because (as I recall) you need a large 'negative energy density' (or some such). And here is the article on the "Micro warp drive" that makes a spacial bubble around to you make you really small, so you don't need as large a negative energy density, and that you, apparently, can't see out of. :) Another interesting article there (of course, there all interesting), is about the Krasnikov Tube which lets you travel somewhere and back at relativistic speeds without having to worry about time dilation.

Of course, these aren't particularly detailed on how the math/physics works (warp drives for dummies :)), but they're entertaining to read and give you at least a general overview of how they work. Chef recommends.

High-dimensional (or multivariate) visualization is nothing new in the world of statistics & exploratory data analysis. Check out the freely available XGobi software or the new GGobi package. For a 100% Java version, see Blue Orca.