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Royal Institute Christmas Lectures
category9 writes "One of the best xmas tv highlights for us chaps in the UK is the RI Christmas Letures. Once broadcast by the BBC, Channel4 now have the helm. Past lecturers include the world renowed cybernetics engineer, Prof. Kevin Warwick. This year Sir John Sulston, of Human Genome Project fame, will be talking about genetics and the building blocks of life over 5 lectures. This is a must see for anyone interested in artificial intelligence. The lectures are presented in a format which allows technical detail, but in a way very accessible to those outside the particilar scientific fields. The website has transcripts for anyone not able to receive Channel4, perhaps with streams coming at a later date (lobby Channel4 if you must)."
You clearly don't read The Register. Warwick is a joke in the Artificial Intelligence community, regarded by most as little more than a publicity hound. He used to go around saying that we would all be human slaves in a robot nation by the year 2000. At the time he came to my university to debate some of the professors in our Artificial Intelligence department, and they mopped the floor with him.
Having milked the world of Artificial Intelligence for all the publicity it was worth, he then installed one of those chips they use for tracking dogs in his arm and started claiming that he was the first Cyborg...
Do a search for "Captain Cyborg" at The Register to learn more about this guy, he gives science a bad name.
On a related note, at a recent C. elegans seminar I attended, the speaker made mention of Sir John, saying (to paraphrase) "Only Sulston is interested in these long boring projects, like serial EM reconstructions and the human genome project". Said in jest, of course :)
NO CARRIER
RI is a quaint, somewhat ruritanian institution. Most of the membership are rather stuffy and insist on wearing formal evening dress to the discourses, and there is a tradition that no questions are taken from the floor (you have to buttonhole the speaker afterwards). The staff and the Director, on the other hand. are very unfussy and very helpful. The Director is Susan Greenfield, who is known as a broadcaster on neurology. They do have a lovely old building in Albemarle Street, however, with an absolutely excellent Faraday museum. Research into inorganic chemistry is still carried out in the basement where Faraday had his original labs.
I was looking at the TV license website and they claim they have vans that can pick up the signals of a specific TV component.
Their wording made it seem like they require some sort of locator beacon to be built into every British TV. Is this the case or do their vans just pick up escaped EM radiation from the TV? If there is a beacon, do any of you ever open up your TVs and disable it? Or how about putting your TV inside a Faraday Cage?
Good luck actually getting a picture of anything other than snow if you ever *do* put your TV inside a Faraday cage.
Basically, it works like this:
1. Your television receiver has a superheterodyning circuit in it. It basically generates a specific frequency, mixes this with the input signal, separates out the beats caused by interference, and amplifies them.
2. Your television is a big glass tube wrapped in metal coils. These coils tweak at a rate of 15kHz (horizontal coil) and 50Hz (vertical coil) [note: these figures for PAL only].
3. Both of these (1 and 2) emit electromagnetic radiation with detectable and verifiable signatures. Using (1) you can even determine what station someone is tuned to. Using (2) confirms that the person has a monitor or TV that is operating.
Think of it as something like TEMPEST.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra