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Standing up to the salt air may be an issue.

The Dutch have had them for a couple of years, so there's at least some precedent and any issues they encounter are likely to give a 4 - 5 year heads up to this initiative.

Actually, try getting a ham license and you will find plenty of equipment and help experimenting with microwaves. I regularly see TWTs, brick oscillators, http://home.swbell.net/k5oe/K-Band/K-Band.htm">K-band (24 GHz) and X-band (10 GHz) equipment in the under $100 price range. Even the old Gunn Diode Oscillators can provide some fun. Hams even launch their own satellites and send their own microwave and VHF/UHF signals to the moon and back.

Here is another page I have been going thru: http://home.wxs.nl/~gkorthof/index.htm

From the about page:

"The goal of this site is to assess the current scientific status of evolutionary theory by a careful and fair evaluation of the problems and the arguments for and against evolution."

God bless you and keep you.

And that's the more important thing, perhaps. Not what the particular standard of evidence is for you to change your beliefs, but that there is one. I mean, I'd be a much happier person if I were religious, and no longer had to fear my own mortality. But I'm just psychologically incapable of making such a commitment of belief without objective proof.

Excuse me!? What exactly do you call a "shack"? What country are you thinking about (Albania?)?

I'm asking because I'm cannot think of any place in western Europe where people live in shacks.

But I'll check carefully, next time I'm in Europe. [gazes out of the window, which offers a pretty good view of a small city] No. No shacks. I can see a couple of churches, a school, a bank, a train station, a bloody big hospital, a wind mill, and more houses than I care to count, but no shacks. Wait, that's wrong - there is a bike shack right below the building. Didn't spot anyone living there when I put my bike there this morning, though.

Just for the record, I really can see all the items linked to from behind my desk ;-)

for those who where not around here's some links to the AGC, DSKY and more:
*Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC)

*slash article with source code listing

*Simulation of Apollo Guidance Computer

*DSKY

Ah, thanks for the correction. I'm not really involved in Esperantujo these days, and my language is iom fus'a. :)

The other advocate was Derk Ederveen, incidentally.

s'OK. A little googling brings up a good reference.

I think it is important to try and take as broad a view as possible about what life might actually be. I mean, what the heck IS life, anyway? I find Stuart Kauffman's thinking very interesting.

Lets take a look at a VIN. First you can only use capital letters and numbers, except for the letters I, O and Q. If you can't tell if its a letter or a number then its a number. WVW EE83A2 SE219476 The first three characters are the WMI, world manufacturer identifier. With the above VIN its pretty obvious who made this car (volkswagen). I can't speak for other manufacturers, but with volkswagen the first character is the country of manufacture. This Passat was built in Germany. The next six characters are the VDS, vehicle descriptor section. Manufacturers use this to describe the vehicle traits, and if you google for "volkswagen vin decoder" (or whatever manufacturer you're looking for) you can probably find out what the codes represent. The last digit in this section is a check digit. The final 8 characters are the VIS, vehicle identifier section. At least, the last 5 digits must be numbers and it is the production number of the car (serial number). The first character in this section is the year of manufacture. With VW, the second character in this section is representative of the plant that built the car. The remaining digits are the production number. If you look at the year of manufacture it rolls over every 30 years anyways. With a little common sense it shouldn't matter if two cars have the same VIN... there would be an age difference of 30 years.

This annoying page which resizes your browser unnecessarily will help you understand why that is not accurate. So will ISO 3779, but you have to pay to get standards apparently...

Sheesh! Have you guys forgotten BrainFuck?
http://home.wxs.nl/~faase009/Ha_BF.html Now we're talking superior!

What the hell is the plasma for?

Plasma? Maybe it's an atmospheric pressure plasma for decontamination of biohazards. But then again maybe not.

Maybe it's a microwave plasma fireball for shooting bad guys.

Nah. Its probably just one of these dumb things from Spencer's Gifts.

For 12 marbles, as the parent says n=3 is sufficient, and there are many weighing schemes which work, including:

Label the marbles A, C, D, E, F, I, K, L, N, M, O, and T

weigh MA DO versus LIKE
weigh ME TO versus FIND
weigh FAKE versus COIN

The grandparent poster incorrectly answered the question,and then blamed his mistake on the interviewer for not asking a simpler question which would have been trivial to solve ... not a good sign in a potential employee.

I'm guessing a response like, "There are 24 possibilities to distinguish between, as one of the twelve is either heavy or light. There are 3 possible outcomes to each weighing, so I can theoretically see 27 possible outcomes from three weighings. Therefore, there should exist a solution in three weighings." would be acceptable- I doubt the interviewer would require you to actually figure one of the solutions out on the spot as this is not trivial, though the ability to do so rapidly would be either exceptional or because you'd seen it before.

This is a very good version of mario brothers I found earlier on today while looking for graphics for my website. Full source is included and there's an intresting story there about how someone took one of the beta's and modified the exe and attached some documents and made it shareware.

I'm the proud (?) owner of an SQL Iris 4M. I can't get it to boot. It also needs a 20 Amp shop-style plugin. I've been debating turning it into a bar fridge or maybe a really oversized PC case. If anyone objects to this senseless butchering of a historical artifact, let me know and I might be willing to sell (shipping NOT included! And you can come pick it up, I put my back out last time I moved it).

I've used some generator to create a simple poll, hoping that would end the replies asking for a poll. (I know, wishfull thinking) it's here: http://home01.wxs.nl/~toth0002/poll.html

Bin Laden humer

First and foremost, I don't think the theorem is actually called the Klehr-Bliss theorem. AFAIK it's the van Lamoen theorem, since he was the first to furnish a full proof. Lou Talman had a quicker (and simpler) proof that was purely geometric, but I believe it was found to be flawed. I was working on a brute-force algebraic manipulation, but Floor van Lamoen carried essentially the same technique to its completion before I was able to. You can read about his proof here.

Josh's conjecture was pretty accurately summarized in the article. The point E mentioned is actually the circumcenter, the center of the only circle passing through the three vertices of the triangle. Also, it is not exactly correct to say that the lines through A, B, and C intersect in "a point" inside the triangle. The three lines are concurrent (they all pass through a common point, a rare thing for three lines to do), but Josh's slope-reciprocal construction is really just a reflection about the line y=x in the coordinate plane, and changing the orientation of the coordinate axes relative to the triangle makes the point of concurrence wander around inside the triangle. The kicker that I noticed is that as it wanders, it stays on the nine-point circle, or Feuerbach circle of the triangle. I've actually found that there's a lot more to be said along these lines, and to my knowledge none of it has been published.

For the public/private thread... I think that Josh was and is attending a private school (Paideia, an excellent school by the way) though I attended a public one (Collins Hill... not too bad as public schools go).

Not only does the theorem have little to no practical value, it also is of little interest to mathematicians. I've always thought of it as simply a little ditty in triangle geometry. I haven't yet read van Lamoen's article in the AMM, but I believe he mentions it only in passing.

And yes, it is vitally important to have an encouraging mentor. Steve Sigur, Josh's teacher, is a great guy and an excellent math teacher. I don't mean this to trivialize Josh's accomplishment--it's also vitally important to have a creative mind and be willing to explore--but Mr. Sigur deserves the real praise here.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to shamelessly plug The Geometer's Sketchpad. It's a great piece of software that dynamically creates geometric constructions. It's excellent for visualization. I used it to see the generalizations I was after, and I think Josh was using it when he first made his conjecture. If you've any interest in geometry--or are willing to have some anew--you should check this out. You can download a free sample version.

Anyway, I just wanted to post and settle a few things... If anyone has any questions, you can post them here or email me (I'm abliss at freeshell.org). Thanks for your attenton!

http://home.wxs.nl/~lamoen/wiskunde/concur.html

The extremely vague statements in the article look similar to what is presented there...

It seems that a fair few people on sadsloth/dashlots have some acquaintance with Stuart Kauffman's At Home In the Universe - complexity theory and autocatalytic sets:
"It is not necessary that a specific set of 2000 enzymes be assembled... Whenever a collection of chemicals contains enough different kinds of molecules, a metabolism will crystallize from the broth."

Concrete evidence for spontaneous complexity:

Gunter von Kiedrowski, then at U. Freiburg in Germany, several years ago published work on a collectively autocatalytic set of two DNA hexamers that mutually ligated the two pairs of DNA trimers composing the two hexamers. Meanwhile, Reza Ghadiri at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California has made an autocatalytic peptide, Nature August 2 years ago and nearly collectively autocatalytic sets more recently.

Unexpected evidence comes from Lou Allamandola. "The most amazing thing is that we start with something really simple. And then suddenly we're making this enormous range of complex molecules. When I see this kind of complexity forming under these exceedingly extreme conditions, I begin to really believe that life is a cosmic imperative." and from Biliang Zhang and Tom Cech, who isolated RNAs that could efficiently link specific amino acids together. These pseudo-ribosomes were selected from a random pool of 10^15 synthetic RNAs.

So, there is enough evidence to invalidate the claim that complexity theory is 'fact-free science'. Recently Yao et al described a four-component peptide system that is capable of auto- and cross-catalysis and which supports the suggestion that self-replicating peptides may have played a role in the origin of life.

If you find this project interesting, you may want to also see THIS link which has details/schemas on many other Mech.Scanned clocks. None as neat and clean as Blick's - but nice nonetheless. Has a few projects with pretty large units - different formats/methods ect.. have a look.

Ive been putting off building a mechanically scanned clock like this for some time! I saw this page some time ago, Bob Blick's project is very neat and clean. I stumbled across it while researching about BEAM robotics. Meant to comment on the last story here on /. about the Home Robot. I dug up this link which is decidedly more hardcore an offering compared to the Pocket-Bot (scroll to very bottom of page) offered by Divent (though _Not_ the bot featured in the /. article - it is the other kit Divent apparently markets).



Hey Americans: Big Biz has bought your Democracy, are using your gov' and military to enslave you. Wake up. Free yourselves. Do the world a favour; Tell your friends/relatives/neighbours to:

Dave Barrett's Clock

The Original - Bob Blick's Clock

Luberth Dijkman's Clock

Andrew Jardine's Clock

Ken Staton's Clock

Victor Tihonov's Clock

Don Zehnder's Clock

Come one, build a clock, join the club!
---------------------------------------

Dave Barrett's Clock

The Original - Bob Blick's Clock

Luberth Dijkman's Clock

Andrew Jardine's Clock

Ken Staton's Clock

Victor Tihonov's Clock

Don Zehnder's Clock

Come one, build a clock, join the club!
---------------------------------------

Since the site is slashdotted, here's another propeller-clock sites to look at in the meantime:

http://home.wxs.nl/~luberth/propklok.htm

This is at least two years old. It's been around for a long while.

PICs are great little microcontrollers. Get one from DigiKey for around $6. A good programmer for them you can build is called the NOPPP. It's easy and cheap to build.

This guy built a better version of the propeller clock.

Hope this helps.

A few months ago, a games company approached me and asked me if i could do a linux port of their upcoming game. I agreed, not knowing which trouble I got myself into :). Lucky for me, the game release date is November 1999 (for both the win32 and the Linux version). So I created a project which defines a standard linux base (both hardware and software) for games in Linux, in the hope some distributions someday will comply to this.

The Linux Standard Game Base Project tries to develop and promote a standard that will increase compatibility among Linux systems and enable multimedia applications (eg. games) to run on all compliant systems.

Have a look at this page:

It tries to define a standard base for linux games, and has support of some major (and minor) game companies (author told me).