Slashdot Mirror

Science fail. The nearest star to our sun is a 'mere' 4 light years away. There are 25 on this list that are less than 11.7 Light years away. Still a hell of a trip, but once you're up to some appreciable % of C, it starts looking like you could fit in a trip within a human's lifespan. In fact, if you get up to a high % of C, time dilation kicks in and you could see most of the observable universe within a life-time (says Michio Kaku - YMMV)

Addictive Potential

Long-term marijuana abuse can lead to addiction; that is, compulsive drug seeking and abuse despite the known harmful effects upon functioning in the context of family, school, work, and recreational activities. Estimates from research suggest that about 9 percent of users become addicted to marijuana; this number increases among those who start young (to about 17 percent) and among daily users (25-50 percent).

Long-term marijuana abusers trying to quit report withdrawal symptoms including: irritability, sleeplessness, decreased appetite, anxiety, and drug craving, all of which can make it difficult to remain abstinent. These symptoms begin within about 1 day following abstinence, peak at 2-3 days, and subside within 1 or 2 weeks following drug cessation.3

Physical Dependence

Two decades ago, addiction medicine doctors and counselors believed that the difference between substance abuse and substance dependence was whether tolerance and withdrawal were present. Now it is known that, although tolerance or withdrawal may occur in individuals with addiction, the condition of addiction can exist without any sign of tolerance or withdrawal. Still, a common question of interest is, does marijuana produce physical dependence (that is, tolerance or withdrawal)?

By the twenty-first century, the answers to these questions are clear. Tolerance does develop to THC (the active chemical in marijuana). Moreover, withdrawal definitely occurs in some users. The effects of this withdrawal are generally the opposite of the effects of intoxication: anxiety and insomnia instead of relaxation; loss of appetite rather than hunger; excessive salivation instead of dry mouth; and also decreased pulse, irritability, and sometimes tremor. People who have used marijuana as a way to control underlying anger may also experience irritability, increased mood swings, and even an increase in aggressive behavior, as symptoms of withdrawal.

Long-Time Marijuana Use Linked to Psychosis in Young Adults

Respiratory Effects of Marijuana and Tobacco Use in a U.S. Sample

Emphysema linked to smoking marijuana

This must be the guy http://das.doit.wisc.edu/

I preferred to go to the source of the information rather than filtering it through a reporter -- especially when the source has perfectly accessible text that doesn't need a scientist to explain for us.

You should link directly to said text then. :)

If you want to see many news articles about it, Google News [slashdot.org] will find them quickly.

True, but you could say the same about the main Ice Cube project page.

That was my first try at a submission -- next time I'll put more in the summary.

It was fine, it just needed a direct link to something talking specifically about this news item.

The linked text was "Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory". The text linked to the official page of the observatory. The summary is about the observatory being complete. No indirection here.

Nothing implied that the link should be to an article. You assume that they "should" have linked to a news article, instead of the observatory itself. There is no such requirement of slashdot summaries, either implicit or explicit, and there is plenty of information about IceCube on the IceCube site. If the linked text implied that there was a news article behind it, you would have a point.

As for the content of slashdot summaries being bad or needing more informaton, I believe that is a perennial issue that transcends what submitters choose to link to.

How is the official home page of the observatory, which includes that story and more in the "News" column right smack-dab in the middle of the home page the "wrong link"?

Sure, maybe the summary could have included more information, or a link to a summarizing news story, but linking to the observatory's official presence on the internet is hardly the "wrong link".

Want to spend a winter in Antarctica as the BOFH for a scientific supercomputer watching for neutrinos in a 2-km^3 ice cube?

Recruitment for the 2011-2012 season will begin in early 2011

obviously someone who's never gotten his hands dirty in a physics lab

Yes, that basically sums him up by the looks:

http://das.doit.wisc.edu/

Take a look at this.

Another factor affecting the stability of a nucleus is whether the number of protons and neutrons is even or odd. Among the 354 known stable isotopes, 157 (almost half) have an even number of protons and an even number of neutrons. Only five have an odd number of both kinds of nucleons

The reason why this is so is that nuclei just like atoms in chemistry have shells (in chemistry it's electrons with nuclei it's protons and neutrons) filled shells are more stable which is why there is an island of stability. The island of stability is centered around the magic numbers 114 (the number of protons) and 184 (the number of neutrons) magic numbers of either protons or neutrons tend to create more stable nuclei. nuclei with odd numbers of either are less stable in the same way that Fluorine is less stable chemically compared to Neon. The nuclear shell is not full and is therefore less stable to various modes of decay.

Your point concerning alpha and fission modes of decay is more likely to increase the half life significantly excluding electron capture and beta decay modes.

elements 114-116 have isotopes with half lives that are significantly higher than nuclei in the 100-113 range as these lower nuclei tend to have half lives measured in fractions of a second. The island of stability is a misnomer. It'd be far more accurate to say that it is an island of relative not absolute stability. The odds of finding any nuclei beyond uranium with a comparable half life or even stable nuclei is remote.

There is no gap between stars. By the time you get close to exiting our solar system, you will already be closer to a neighboring star then you will be to Sol.

Are you SERIOUSLY this clueless about distances? The closest neighbor star is 4.2 light-years away http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/extra/nearest.html. The edge of the Sol system http://burro.astr.cwru.edu/stu/solarsystem_edge.html is approximately 17.6 billion miles (120 A.U.) away.

There are about 63115.2 AUs/lyr. That means the edge of the solar system is: 120AU/63115.2 = 0.001901 light years in distance. Oh - you bet that's closer, 0.001901 is "almost" the same as 4.2 light years.

Anyone know how long it will take the probe to get there?

Current plans are for a 5 year cruise phase with one Earth fly-by. This might change, especially if the mission has to slip for some reason.

Both Strang and Keisler are only free as in beer, not free as in speech, so they represent dead ends in terms of the free-information ecosystem.

Are you sure?

The Keisler site says the "work is licensed for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons License" and links to a BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

I don't see a license specifically for Strang but the MIT OCW page refers to the CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US license for OCW materials. (If you're interested in doing some work on Strang's Calculus, it wouldn't be too difficult to confirm the CC license applies to it specifically.)

They're limited to non-commercial use, but the BY-NC-SA license is hardly a dead-end.

Even if they were only free-as-in-beer, there are ethically and morally legitimate means to customize their use, if not their content. Teachers regularly write notes and supplementary materials for textbooks to adapt their use.

PostScript files may not render on certain devices, such as non-PostScript printers.

Any printer can be used as a PostScript printer if the PC connected to it is running an implementation of the PostScript language, which converts a PostScript file to a bitmap image. See GSview.

Doesn't even contain a link to the project in question.

Many a true word spoken in jest... I don't suppose you've ever seen NPRQuake have you?

Jeez, I cannot believe it's not been updated in 8 years!!!

Another opensource option: The pdfs can be converted to tiffs using ghostscript and ocr-ed using tesseract. The current version of tesseract does not have document layout analysis and page segmentation support.

It sounds like CWIS may be what you're seeking. It's a free web-based turnkey package, developed at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and funded in part by NSF under the National Science Digital Library initiative. CWIS is written in PHP/MySQL, includes a search engine, a recommender engine, and a raft of other features, and is currently in use in a wide array of contexts.

A link with a few more links for the UW method for doing this can be found here. It includes a hardware diagram at the bottom.

What you want is IPTV over multicast. A number of universities have done this - one is the University of Wisconsin at Madison, which has a pretty bare bones approach using IP multicast and Apple Quicktime. They are also pretty good about giving technical clue if you run into trouble and ask nicely. If you want to spend more money, there is the HaiVision Video Furnace, which is used by, e.g., Brown University.

I have no idea if your contract with Comcast will let you do this, but I believe that the Universities do it by restricting use to only people on campus, so you might be able to do the same.

"But people aren't random number generators."

Nope, but accounting trolls are, according to dilbert!

https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/lnmaurer/web/rng_stuff/Dilbert0001.jpg

1D cellular automata? Otherwise known as "Mathematician's Plaid".

http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/mcell/ca_gallery.html

Speaking of "Mathematician's Plaid" does anyone in the wonderful world of slashdot know where I could get fabric with a CA pattern?

"Telescope" is used by astronomers and physicists in this sense: an instrument to study the sky. So, COBE/WMAP/Planck were microwave telescopes, Auger is a cosmic ray telescope, and IceCube is a neutrino telescope. The word was borrowed from optical telescopes to radio/x-ray telescopes, and from there to everything else. IceCube researchers call it a neutrino telescope, it's not an error by the article.

In any case, the U. Wisc. team that is running the project calls it a telescope. So I'm going with that.

The IceCube website and U Wisc. says it's a telescope. So, case closed as far as I'm concerned.

An event reconstruction from the 79 string detector configuration https://blog.icecube.wisc.edu/?p=1355

Here's a handy link to the University of Wisconsin Fusion website dealing with the advantages/disadvantages of 3He as fuel
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/research/dhe3
A key feature -- even though it requires more energy, burning D+3He yields far less neutrons which would be an important advantage in a commercial reactor.
Fusion is still a dream but there is a lot of action with "alternative configurations" so we should keep our fingers crossed.
Me: if fusion can work, why stop at the moon? Betcha there is more 3He to be sucked out of the regolith on Mercury!

In such a high energy environment you will not find life. It was shocking when life was found in boiling water in Yellowstone. PS in the link some numbers appear to be in the hundreds of C, but these are actually with one decimal place. And in such a high energy environment none of the complex molecules characteristic of life would survive.

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~suman/pubs/citywide.pdf
ABSTRACT
We describe our experiences in building a city-wide infrastructure for wide-area wireless experimentation. Our infrastructure has two components — (i) a vehicular testbed consisting of wireless nodes, each equipped with both cellular (EV-DO) and WiFi interfaces, and mounted on city buses plying in Madison, Wisconsin, and (ii) a software platform to utilize these testbed nodes to continuously monitor and characterize performance of large scale wireless networks, such as city-wide mesh networks, unplanned deployments of WiFi hotspots, and cellular networks. Beyond our initial eorts in building and deploying this infrastructure, we have also utilized it to gain some initial understanding of the diversity of user experience in large-scale wireless networks, especially under various mobility scenarios. Since our vehicle-mounted testbed nodes have fairly deterministic mobility patterns, they provide us with much needed performance data on parameters such as RF coverage and available bandwidth, as well as quantify the impact of mobility on performance. We use our initial measurements from this testbed to showcase its ability to provide an ecient, low-cost, and robust method to monitor our target wireless networks. These initial measurements also highlight the challenges we face as we continue to expand this infrastructure. We discuss what these challenges are and how we intend to address them.

Open PDF-creating software is just finally getting started really it seems

Not sure what you mean here. I've been using Ghostscript for 14 years now. It has never had a problem generating PDF for me. You did say open, so I should note that the GPL version came out 7 years ago.

It may be because most programs for creating SVG graphics are using the .svg format instead of PDF

Hmm, I never thought about using SVG to replace PDF. I suppose you could. I'm not sure how well SVG implements paper-space.

They have different purposes. SVG was designed to produce vector graphics for the WWW. PDF was designed to produce a digital print job. PDF does make use of vector graphics. However, it was meant as an end-deliverable. That is why the ability to edit PDF is so limited.

It's still a complete mystery why HTML web standards stopped at "dynamic and moving text" instead of continuing onto "dynamic and moving verticies and lines"

That isn't much of a mystery. HTML stands for Hyper-TEXT markup language. The World Wide Web Consortium did create a web-standard to handle "dynamic and moving verticies and lines". They called it Scalable Vector Graphics

So you mean coupons you get off the Web are like--OMG!!!--Web cookies.

Come on people. There's nothing here that hasn't already been in Web cookies for more than a decade. If you don't want to be tracked, don't use 'em. Or, if you want o zap them, the cookies that is, see the instructions on the following Web page:

http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=3235

Steven

And here is another great view of the fireball from Madison.

If we do a histogram of that data we get:
Bin . . . Frequency
02.5 . . . 1
05.0 . . . 3
07.5 . . . 3
10.0 . . . 3
12.5 . . . 5
15.0 . . . 7
More . . . 4
If we have trouble finding "dimmer" stars, there could be a lot of them (Bunch of presumptions, including that the "more" category is small because we are having trouble finding dim stars!!!).

This chart http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/extra/nearest.html lists the closest objects to earth. The brown dwarf (being a failed brown dwarf and found recently...howzabout calling it FAIL) is about the 12th closest object to our solar system.

Some no cost resources that I don't think were mentioned:

A three part self-test/review of fundamental Calculus skills. The first 6 questions in the part on Trig, Logs and Limits are prerequisites to a first course in elementary calculus.

A collection of articles with intuitive explanations of math concepts many people find too abstract.

A textbook, "Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach", available under a creative commons by-nc-sa license. Covers Calculus I/II material.

A collection of texts covering a sequence in Real Analysis (covers calculus concepts from an analytical point of view) and Number Theory available under a free of charge license to students using it for self-study. Probably beyond your current interest in math.

Through random misfortune, you might be doing something that tickles a few bugs. 1,000 other people could be asked to make two slides and compare and none of them hit both bugs, few hitting one, and their conclusions would be totally different. It is just basic statistics.

Okay, let me reiterate, and I've added more evidence, that Impress screws up dead simple presentations. See here. Again, I'm not doing anything weird modifying the slide templates or masters or anything, and these bugs show up across mulitple installations of PowerPoint. The bugs that these tests illustrate I don't see how they wouldn't surface in almost every PPTX presentation out there.

I created six presentations that consist of a slightly-modified default, blank presentation; they vary along 2 axes:

• Titles: present or deleted
• Background: default (white), "manually set" (red), set using the "background styles" dropdown in the ribbon (tan)

I also put up the default presentation.

What did I (re-?)learn:

• You can have a slide which, in PPT, appears to be completely blank (as in you can try to lasso the entire slide and select no object) and Impress may still insert a text box. (In this case, that text box is present on the master slide. However, it does not show up in PowerPoint either in edit or presentation mode.)
• The above continues to hold if you leave the ephemeral "click to add title" and "click to add subtitle" text fields in place and fill them out. (Knowing that it's coming from the master slide means this makes some amount of sense.) The result is text overlayed with text.
• The above problems do seem to be confined to the titles slides: other slide layouts don't have this problem.
• The text formatting is wrong on my subtitle. It should be grey and centered; instead, it's black and left-justified.
• If you right click on a slide and choose "format background" and set it to a solid color, it works (that's the point of the ugly red background), but if you use the "background styles" dropdown in the "design" ribbon, then it doesn't; even if it looks like it's just setting it to a solid color. (This is the one place where I think that you're right about my original comparisons not being entirely fair.)
• While we're at it, look at how crappy the not-anti-aliased text looks. (Is there a way to get it to? Perhaps. I'm using a fresh, default installation. But if there is, why the heck isn't it on by default?) This seems to be a problem with Impress in general (and they seem to be working on it), not the import filter.

As far as I'm concerned, if you hand me a calculator and I try "1+1", "2*3", and "sqrt(9)" and it gets all of those wrong, I'm pretty comfortable proclaiming that calculator "barely alpha quality" even if it did every single other thing right, and even if it said "2.1", "6.5", and "4" or something for my tests.

And that is why when I find a repeatable bug, I spend a significant amount of time boiling it down, documenting it, and reporting it to qa.openoffice.org. Did you?

If I had to report everything about Impress that keeps me from using it, I'd be writing and testing for a couple days at least. I'm not that invested in the project. Until now, those screenshots were just something I threw together in 5 minutes when a new version of OpenOffice was released since I think it's good to check the status anyway, so I can see what I could assume if I need to distribute slides. Now that I've written more up and put together a page that acutally presents all the screenshots all nicely (before yesterday I'd just give a link to the directory listing and let people click on the individual files) I might see about what bugs exist.

At the same time, I feel that it's very unlikely that I'd be able to bring much new to the table; the stuff I'm doing is not exactly out there. You don't have to wade

Clearly you haven't tried to open a PPTX file in Impress; that import filter is barely alpha quality at best.

And if you want to see justification for this statement, I just put together a small page to annotate some screenshots I've been collecting over the last couple OpenOffice releases that compare what a couple slides should look like vs what they actually do look like in Impress.

A pair of studies was done, one of which directly measured causation (the first was correlational and had a self-reporting factor--not a strong argument).

Non-press release version: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/psp-784772.pdf

Participants were divided into two groups, playing either Wolf3D or Myst. Those playing Wolf3D later punished an opponent (gave a noise blast) for a longer period of time than the Myst players.

Another thing to note is the factors considered in how this happens:

. . . violent video games may have even stronger effects on children's aggression because (1) the games are highly engaging and interactive, (2) the games reward violent behavior, and because (3) children repeat these behaviors over and over as they play (Gentile & Anderson, 2003). Psychologists know that each of these help learning - active involvement improves learning, rewards increase learning, and repeating something over and over increases learning.

(Emphasis mine)

In other words, the factors that teach agression are also exactly the same factors being explored to make them useful as general educational tools. By having an incentive system and making it easy to restart, video games naturally push you learn while also supporting "overlearning" (related to the concept of muscle memory in martial arts or playing musical instruments). But you can't have one without the other.

Then you might appreciate this.

Ok, then. More rain and snow prove global warming. And drought proves global warming. So..... given that any changes in the weather prove global warming, what would disprove global warming?

I'd like to introduce you to a concept called "pool boiling". You can see "pool boiling" when you boil water in a pot on the stove. Pool boiling has three main regimes:

1) Convective boiling, where tiny bubbles are being formed on the bottom surface of the pot and immediately float to the surface. Increasing the burner temperature will lead to:

2) Nucleate boiling, where little spots on the bottom surface produce bubble after bubble after bubble that immediately float to the surface. Increasing the burner temperature will lead to:

3) Film boiling, where there is a constant layer of vapor next to the hot bottom.

Here is the funny thing: nucleate boiling can produce more vapor than film boiling. If you are in the film boiling region, lowering the stove temperature will lead to more boiling.

BTW here's a picture of pool boiling: http://wins.engr.wisc.edu/teaching/mpfBook/FIGURES/FIG5-1.html

So let's re-write your statement about global warming as a statement about pool boiling:

Ok, then. Higher stove temperature prove more boiling. And lower stove temperature proves more boiling. So..... given that any changes in the stove temperature prove more boiling, what would disprove more boiling?

My point is that natural phenomena do not have to be monotonic or uniform. The same rules on a local scale (microscopic forces) can lead to drastic differences on a larger scale. 10 inches of snow in Dallas can indeed result from higher average temperatures elsewhere.

Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass

Sounds a lot like my experience in an optics lab class, where I disproved almost every single principle of the field.

Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass

My favorite example of Jmol usage: The Virtual Museum of Minerals and Molecules. Yes, I got paid to put its most recent iteration together. Your point?

Fighting that application as an encroachment on the IP of the function of the other device would be a less frivolous lawsuit. I could make such an app for my Droid, too, or on a PC...oh, wait...they already exist...POS integrated with a handheld has been done. Even the Fujitsu app/device isn't unique.

Because one thing has the same name as another thing is not a good reason to do make lawsuits.

There are an awful lot of iPads out there other than the one from Apple. Fujitsu is considering trying to get something for nothing.

(http://www.google.com/search?q=ipad+-apple)

Just with "ipad" in the URL:

http://ipad.primate.wisc.edu/
http://www.ipad.com/
http://www.ipad.net.nz/
http://www.ipadowners.org/

I hope Fujitsu realizes how dumb it'd be to sue and proves to not be stoopid.

We are listening for Neutrinos.

IceCube Neutrino Observatory

We're already on our way (or will be in 2011, I hope). See http://juno.wisc.edu/

I believe he may be thinking of OS-9.

cf: Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass

Also, I have something of a Javascript benchmark, my email obfuscater. Seamonkey 1 required me to click continue on the 'slow javascript' popup something like three times. Seamonkey 2: zero times.

There's something to be said about doing what you love and saying "to hell with chasing the almighty dollar". But then you get paid $12,894 per academic year, and you wonder if a little dollar chasing might not be a bad thing. There are other things in life that are desireable (like a family), and they take money.

A science career means spending ~5-6 years working hard and being paid crap in grad school, and then another couple of years working hard and being paid a bit more as a postdoc, and then maybe you can get a decent paying job doing science, but there aren't all thay many science jobs (at least in physics), in academia or industry (bye bye bell labs -- moreover, just because you like science in academia donesn't mean you'll like science in industry), relative to the number of PhDs so there's a decent chance you'll end up in a non science job.

I'm just saying that it's not as simple as "people don't do science because all they care about is money."