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Slashback: Periodicity, Vacuum, Strength
Bratty kids get to sit near the volatile elements. Theodore Gray writes: "About a month ago there was a slashdot lively discussion about my wooden Periodic Table Table. A bunch of slashdot readers sent me elements for it: Thank you slashdot! Two people actually sent me free Ag and Pd, contrary to the jokes in the discussion. I decided the world could stand another periodic table website. Since all the eight dozen other periodic tables on the web have better reference information than mine, I used some Mathematica programs to generate links to many of them for each element. But my site is more beautiful. I'm going for science as art. Mine also has by far the best quality sample photos: High resolution, high quality macro shots of 89 samples so far."
Starts with a crank, too. ripaway writes "With all the recent stories about vaccuum tubes, I find it ironic that I stumbled on this today. Sterephile reports about the Panasonic CQ-TX5500D(link to Japanese site) car stereo that uses a vaccuum tube, with analog vu-meters. It also plays mp3 files 8-) Naturally, this is for the Japan market only."
Sounds like material for a Burning Man tent ... nm1m writes "A superstrong composite developed by Brigham Young University scientists and students has received financing for its first practical application -- mammoth wind turbine towers able to more than triple the electrical output of existing steel models. Read the story here."
We mentioned this interesting lattice-looking material a few weeks ago.
Sucking requires a context to be good or bad. Sun Tzu writes "After the recent discussion on bad software, how about a different reason for why software sucks? Maybe we programmers and users don't have it quite so bad after all."
That dadburn whippersnapper, why when I was a boy ... Junks Jerzey writes "I remember reading about Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers five years ago in Wired News. Pretty cool stuff, with an introduction by some guy called John Romero. It was available for a long time as a commercial product that used HTML for formatting, but it's now completely online, as reported by the author."
Score one for us Latter-day Saints. Now if only the comments would last five minutes without obligatory mentions of polygamy, jello, large families, missionaries or cults, we'd have it made.
Got Rhinos?
Sounds like material for a Burning Man tent ... nm1m writes "A superstrong composite developed by Brigham Young University scientists and students has received financing for its first practical application -- mammoth wind turbine towers able to more than triple the electrical output of existing steel models. Read the story here."
Wow. Brigham Young and burning man mentioned in the same sentence?
Having attended one of the above, I can guarantee you this will not be a frequent event.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Has this been done before? Any comments on ruggedization?
I guess you meant Au, tsk tsk, and we trust you to build perodic tables. :)
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
There is also a motehrboard using vacuum tubes for onboard audio, here is a link to google's cache of the page.
or its first practical application -- mammoth wind turbine towers
The first impractical application was for shoes that could have doors slammed on them and not injure the wearer.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
.. and safe to have around, so long as you don't eat them (these ones are alpha emitters; alpha particles can't penetrate a sheet of paper). They're also unregulated (in retail quantities) so you don't have to get NRC approval to have them.
Polonium: You can buy photographic negative brushes that contain polonium, from good camera shops. The polonium gives off alpha particles that help to discharge static from the negatives as you brush them. $10-$20.
Americium: Smoke detectors contain Americium-241. A tiny speck of it is in the detector head -- the roughly cylindrical gizmo that looks like a stamped-metal flying saucer. $9
Uranium: pitchblende is comparatively easy to find, and of course the infamous 1970s Fiesta Ware is still to be found (though getting more difficult).
I've found a novel new place to find the little buggers. Take a trip 20-30 minutes out of any major metropolis and you'll find that the rural outskirts are often littered (sadly) with old appliances. Often very old appliances. I found a basket full of buggers out of a few old TV sets on a friend's property last week. They tend to weather the elements pretty well. The load I found were probably dumped at least 10 years ago and were all in perfect condition.
Then, if you're a real man/woman, clean up the old trash.
Meet Fake Tom Cruise
tcd004
Software development is driven by clueless pointy-hairs, overreaching sales guys who make baseless promises and people who've never had a single software development class or written a single line of code
I realized this at my last company -- I was in a high enough staff position to see the whole tragedy unfold. Features were driven by what the sales team promised, deadlines by what was written into contracts without development's input, and product managers would bypass the release process and give customers internal test versions of the software. The developers were simply issued marching orders and then ignored.
I believe this is the way most crappy software comes about, regardless of how obvious this process is.
Of course, leave it to the geeks and you'll get Mozilla (good, solid, standards-compliant and really, really late). There's a balance between shipping decent software and shipping a product in time to stay alive as a company. id Software has this balance, ION Storm certainly did not.
Rant over. Please go about your business.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Just don't try to make yourself a breeder reactor! :-)
This post is strictly my own opinion and not necessarily that of my employer.
What's the difference between "mormon" and "latter day saint"? Is it simply a usage issue (aka, followers of Islam are Muslims, not Islams)? Is it an honorific type of deal? Is it simply a preference? What would John Smith or Brigham Young have referred to themselves as?
Anyhow, serious curiosity. Reply appreciated.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
This is indeed an excellent read and well worth the time - if you want some other online books which discuss the earlier days of computing and hacker culture try these
Free As In Freedom - Sam Williams - A biography of Richard Stallman and an excellent read for those who would like to understand the man a bit more or even understand how GNU and Open Source actually happen. I reccomend this to even people who dislike RMS (as i did) as you will understand the man from a new perspective
The Cathedral and the Bazzar- Eric Raymond - This book has been condemmed and praised by many and provides an intersting look at open source and the different models of software - worth a read
Underground : Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier - Sulette Dreyfuss - A great look inside the world of the cracker and very intersting and compelling to read
There are heaps more out there - post them as you find them - BTW if you have a bit of cash to spend i reccomend Hackers by Steven Levy and Fire in the Valley by freiburger and swain for 2 more great books on computer and PC history
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
These guys are pretty good for buying small uranium ore samples to test geiger counters with. They also stock uranium doped glass marbles that really light up under black light. Pretty cool radioactive toys.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
--I'm not LDS, but we follow their credo of being prepared, even better. We have two years+ of stored food here, ability to grow all we need essentially, yada, yada, yada. I also like how they help people over the planet without much fanfare or notice. I've seen the warehouses full of goods that gets shipped to poor or disaster areas, every penny donated. Kudos to you folks!
I mean, sure there's a market for a high end tube amp in cars. The car, that rather noisy accoustical nightmare that, no matter how you try, you will never ever be able to fit good speakers in. Oh well... but why does the thing have to look so damn.... tacky? Come on. Analog VU meters and the tube exposed, combined with what looks to be a gold finish. Almost as ugly as a Marantz set.
Not that I think modern car stereos look good... give me those they made about 5-10 years ago: decent button layout, single color displays, and no frigging light-shows. *sighs*
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
"People are understandably reluctant to add real engineering discipline to software development..."
... well.. ameteurish. But when they make a model that they have lots of reference of, like the starship Enterprise for example, then they look top notch. Even presented with such a startling comparison, they still refuse to do the design work. Why? Because it adds overhead to their project.
I found this 'alternative reason to why software sucks...' to be true with 3D Animation as well.
As a hobby, I assist people entering into the world of 3D art. My goal is to teach them professional methods to achieve their goals. What I've found interesting, though, is that a lot of them are reluctant to actually design what it is they are building or animating.
With new recruits, I can almost never get them to actually sit down with some paper and design the robot they want to build, for example. What they try to do is just sit down and build it. I'll hear stuff like "Oh I can't draw...", or "It's faster if I just sit down and build it. I know what I want it to look like."
The results? Well, the models they invent are
I really think what happens is that they have in inaccurate impression of what being a 3D artist really entails. This is similar to what Ray said in his post about why software sucks. The sad thing is that until they start taking approaches like designing your model, they'll always look like a 3D newb.
Is there a solution? Well, I have an idea as to how to help both the 3D Artists and the Programmers out there: Make it clear that there is more to their job than just poking keys. I had no idea what all a Software Engineer (I used to call them Programmers...) did until I got a job at a software company. I had the impression in my mind that all they did was write code. The thought of them doing things like 'designing the UI' was alien to me.
Heck, before I got a job doing 3D, I thought all I had to do was build a model as fast as I possibly could. I expected they'd give me 3 days to do what would normally take me a week. I had no idea that they'd actually give me time to design and understand my model before building it. I spent over a year trying to be faster in LW, only to find that faster isn't what they wanted.
In short, I think it's very important to alter the perception out there about what a job really entails. If somebody aspiring to be a programmer knows that they need to pay attention to design and UI, then they'll be far more observant about those aspects during their education. If I had known how much learning to draw would help me with my 3D work, I would have done a lot more drawing exercises in high school.
"Derp de derp."
"That kid is on the Europium again!"
Since it is three times taller than the usual turbines, that means it'll be visible three times farther away, so it will be an eyesore to nine times as many people. Wouldn't you get just as much power by building three of the normal size turbines instead?
Well, Mormons do not particularly mind being called Mormons. At least that is what the missionaries who stand outside a nearby McDonald's say.
Don't forget tobacco. The tobacco plant likes to collect elements which tend to be radioactive (polonium in particular). Smoking a pack exposes you to more radiation than a chest x-ray.
Lighting up under black light is neat, but unless I'm much mistaken that is due to fluorescence and not radioactivity.
Yes. Plenty.
The car radio was not invented with the transistor. Motorola, who was originally founded to make "Motor Victrolas", ie. car audio, branched into semiconductors almost as soon as it was seen that they had practical aspects in car radios.
In the beginning, car radios had tubes. Tubes require filament power as well as the power and B+ power. The parallel would be a transistor radio which needs a 9V battery (main power) to power the radio and a whole bunch of 1.5V D cells (filament power) to keep the transistors warm enough to work.
The filaments of appropriate tubes will run happily off 12V, but they still need something from about 90V to 250V for main power (known as B+ or plate supply). Back then, cars ran off 6V or 12V electrical systems, and this had to provide sufficient voltage for the radio. Before transistors and switching power supplies, there was only one way: the vibrator.
Sexual references aside, a vibrator is basically a relay wired to break its circuit when it's turned on. The raspy buzz chopped a circuit on and off, which made DC from the car's electrical system into a pulsetrain which drove a small transformer. The transformer stepped up the voltage and it was rectified in the usual way for the era: a small recifier tube. Of course, this was highly inefficient and noisy.
Never mind that the car radio would take several amps while it was on, and these were in the days before alternators. Less efficient generators and battery technology meant that leaving the radio on for too long while in traffic would run down the battery to the point where the ignition system stopped - and so did you.
Durability was another issue. Tubes are held in their sockets by friction, and would have a tendency to vibrate out of their sockets, making the radio fail. The "loctal" base was invented to deal with this. It was a base design where the tube's keyway was notched and would hold the tube with a spring on the base. They're a pain in the ass since they always corrode in the locked position and you often break the tube trying to get it out of the socket.
Tubes are basically light bulbs with a whole bunch of closely-spaced wires, grids and sheetmetal electrodes. If they move relative to each other, the electrical characteristics of the tube change - and therefore so does the behavior of the radio. This effect is called "microphonics". Not to mention vibration fatigue causing shorts, cracked glass and vacuum loss, etc. Tubes don't like vibrations. If don't believe me, hit your monitor a few times.
While I love tubes, a car stereo is about the last place they belong.
On this site you can see what a 1930s car radio looked like. Note that the radio was too large to fit in the dashboard and often ended up in the passenger's footwell. A "control head" was a set of remote volume and tuning knobs on the dashboard; they were usually connected by a cable arrangement similar to speedometer or bicycle brake cables.
Background? I collect and restore antique TV sets and 1960s/1970s musclecars. Lots of my friends are into 1930s and 1940s cars, and often get me to fix their vintage tube car radios so that the full experience of driving a car of that era can be preserved.
Sterephile reports about the Panasonic CQ-TX5500D(link to Japanese site) car stereo that uses a vaccuum tube, with analog vu-meters. It also plays mp3 files 8-) Naturally, this is for the Japan market only."Even with a modern DC-DC converter powering the B+ circuit, what a profoundly stupid idea.
While I really like the fact that it plays MP3s, this is just more stuff for homiez with gold chains, small cars, and smaller penises.
Can't wait until "Da Bass" people get their hands on this. A car stereo which can bounce quarters on the roof of the car will be more than sufficient to make the tube microphonic. Feedback between the subs and the tube will result in blown subs, toasted amplifiers, and no more din of license plates rattling on every rusting 1984 Prelude at every traffic light.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
What are those, they use em in Hoover Windtunnels right?
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
The official name of the church is "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints". [1] As you can expect, that's quite a mouthful so a nickname is necessary. "Latter-Day Saint (LDS) Church" is acceptable, and the church Presidency supports it. Likewise, it's appropriate to call members of the LDS church "Latter-Day Saints".
"Mormon" [2] is a nickname that was given to the church and its members by others, who knew that we considered the Book of Mormon to be scripture [3] (but didn't know much else about us). This is not a nickname sanctioned by the church Presidency, but most of the church members tolerate it. The problem is that using the name "Mormon" for the church and its members makes it sound like we worship Mormon, or that the church was perhaps founded by Mormon; neither is the case.
What's worse, there are several groups that claim to be "Mormons" - most notably the "Reformed LDS Church" and the polygamists [4] in southern Utah (who I think call themselves "Fundamentalist Mormons", or something like that) - who have little to do with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. For the most part these other "Mormon" churches are splinter groups formed by people who left the church (or were kicked out) because they felt that they should be leading the flock instead of the current Presidency. The legitimate leaders are understandably anxious to make a clear distinction between the real LDS church and the others that call themselves "Mormons".
I personally respond to either and don't make a big deal about it in most cases as long as I'm sure that there's no confusion about what people mean by it.
[1] The "Latter Days" referred to are the present times. The members of Christ's church in His day were called saints, and members of His church today are called "Latter-Day Saints to distinguish the "former" church from the "latter".
[2] Mormon was a real person, a prophet-historian who compiled the Book of Mormon. It's his book, so it's named after him.
[3] We recognize the Bible as scripture, too. There are also a couple of other books of scripture that we use: the Doctrine and Covenants records revelations given to Joseph Smith, the first prophet of the latter days; and the Pearl of Great Price, which records revelations recived by Moses and Abraham, found and translated by Joseph Smith.
[4] Polygamy used to be practiced by the LDS church, but was discontinued about 150 years ago. Anyone church member who practices it modernly is promptly excommunicated. So Tom Green, on trial for various sex crimes against one of his underage wives has nothing whatever to do with the LDS church, regardless of how much he may protest that he is a "Mormon".
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Now hold on just a minute. Since when are these isotopes only alpha emitters? It is true that the alpha particles emitted will not penetrate past the already-dead part of your skin, but I do happen to know offhand that Americium-241 and the Uranium isotopes emit gamma radiation as well. And if you don't believe me, test these samples with a Geiger counter.
To see how well the radiation penetrates through human flesh, you can try wrapping your hand around the Geiger tube and bringing them close to the material. You don't have to be too careful with the Fiesta Ware of course... the lead in the glaze is probably worse for you than the radiation. But please bear in mind that these isotopes often emit more than just an alpha particle! If you look at a table of isotopes you will see that they often alpha decay to an excited state, which then releases a photon to go to the ground state. (aka an isomeric transition)
To some of us, the best way to model an algorithm is to write the C code for it.
The second big problem is weak interprocess communication. UNIX is partly responsible for this. Interprocess communication was retrofitted to UNIX in several different ways, most of them bad. The basic problem is that what you usually want is a subroutine call, but what the OS gives you is an I/O operation. If you build a subroutine call on top of an I/O operation, (think Sun RPC, or CORBA) it's slow. This leads to big, monolithic programs that crash all at once, instead of little, intercommunicating ones that contain the damage caused by a bug. It doesn't have to be this way. Take a look at QNX to see this done right.
The third big problem is DMA. The idea that the peripherals see raw address space and can read and write to it dates from the early days of minicomputers, when it required fewer transistors to do it that way. Mainframes had "channels", which connected peripherals to memory in a controlled, secure way. You could take full control of a peripheral on an IBM mainframe, run a driver as a user program, and still not be able to crash the system. With channelized I/O, drivers aren't as privileged. They can only mess up their own peripheral, not the whole system. This improves system stability considerably. IBM tried to put channelized hardware in PCs, but at the same time, they tried to increase their profit margins on peripherals. This killed the IBM PS/2.
Fourth, Microsoft likes a complicated OS. Ballmer has said so publicly. If PCs came with channelized hardware and a microkernel in ROM, the OS would have far less to do, and would be more of a commodity. There'd be alternatives, like KDE and Gnome on Linux, all of which ran the same applications. Standardized interprogram communication, enforced by the kernel and hardware, would make components more pluggable. All this would dent the Microsoft monopoly severely.
Down at the bottom, at the foundations of personal computers, those are the problems. And that's why software sucks.
His polygamy and marriage to young girls I could tolerate. What he really should go to jail for is welfare fraud -- didn't he have several of his "wives" claiming to be unwed mothers and receiving assistance from the state?
Polonium was also used on spark plugs for a while during the "atomic age". Neat idea, ionizing radiation lets you set the electrodes further apart. Found a picture of them here.
Sounds plausible, but I'm not sure how well they'd work, nor am I sure how much polonium would end up reacting chemically during combustion and leaving the tailpipe as a dangerous radioactive compound, but I've seen them before and thought they were amusing.
Better watch out or every homey with a V-Tec sticker on his Honda Civic will be trying to screw 1940s spark plugs into his head so he can have a "nuclear-powered" 4-cylinder wanna-be racecar.
Heheh.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Always wanted to play with Mathematica, never could afford it. Now I hear from a guy who uses it as an HTML editor! I think I'll have him killed.
What is going to stop him from putting a "nuclear powered" sticker on his car in the first place?
I mean, if the beaterz.com website taught us anything, it is stickers with cool names can compensate for lack of actual performance any day.
In case anyone is wondering, "Fiestaware" is any ceramic dishes painted with a very Brady Bunchish orange paint. It turns out the paint contains a lot of uranium oxide, and is shows up quite well when a Geiger counter is put next to it.
e ar / ucbuy.html#c2
Here is a site describing FiestaWare with pictures of the Geigercounter resting on top of it.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucl
I have no pants and I must scream
Did we say pitchblende? Only $750 USD and you can have a nice size chunk for yourself. Hmm. Wonder if you can make a good misquito lamp out of it...
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
don't buy IBuyPower computers. my disk died today and I had to use a Windoze box just to get my work done. AAAAAAAAAAAHHH!
1 pack >= pa+lat chest??
can someone give a reference on this?
I agree with you, and in general you can sum up your argument as follows: Software sucks because we use inappropriate abstraction mechanisms.
So it's basically a money thing, then?
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Can someone explain to me how these things work? Are they similar to solar chimneys or what?
Dyolf Knip
As 007, I guess he would have access to things like Thallium.
ya gotta hand it 2 those wacky mormons: they sure know how 2 impress w/architecture...but isn't that the purpose of all steeples;-)
here in Our Nation's Capital(tm dave barry;-) they bought some land near where the beltway was going 2 b built (and ya gotta admire their long-term planning;-) so now travelers on the outer loop(counterclockwise, west-bound) cresting the rise @ the georgia ave. exit are treated to the angel moroni rising atop the main spire, appearing on the western horizon like a vision (as i'm sure he did 4 ol joe smith;-) and dominating the view for the entire 1 mile downhill stretch, until it disappears behind the CSX rr bridge over the beltway, where u can still make out the over-painted graffiti: "surrender dorothy"
hey, anybody up 4 slipping some green gels over the temple's floodlites?;-);-);-)
no,no, after the plates were translated by joe, with the aid of the urim & thummim (xref: seeing stones/indian gold;-) the angel moroni conveniently reappeared & took them back...what? u expected hard evidence? religions don't need no steeking evidence;-)
yup, u rilly can't appreciate a modern car til u've experienced the thrill of mechanical brakes...i made sure my daughter drove my dad's '35 ford phaeton...she now appreciates power steering, as well;-)
sound phenomenal, again, and use almost no power at sound levels high enough to shake your mirror off the windshield
Yep -- though there's new, non-radioactive fiestaware (apparently it's still a viable brand!) available in a department store near you. I forget which chain I saw it in -- maybe Macy's...
I would waste you so fast, it would be almost a waste of my time. Not only could I beat you in the 1/4 mile, I could beat you in the turns, and in endurance. Just because you have a bigger engine, doesnt mean you are better in any way.
So, while you are still driving your pentacle of inefficiency, I will be near the finish line, WINNING!
I drive WAY too fast to worry about cholesterol!
Seriously, the anon-coward's right. For a die-hard atheist you know more about the history of Christian religions in general and Mormons specifically than the white-shirts. What gives? (I'm suspecting a disgruntled Utah native, perhaps the bishops' son or daughter?).
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I live in Utah and you seem to be giving the mo-mo's (yet another euphemism for a Mormon) an unfair shake. Most of the ones I've met are pretty good people. For every one that's so wrapped up in their jammies they seem to have lost all reason (if not oxygen) there are 20 who are nice, mostly normal and intelligent (as you can see by the BYU story, the Mecca of college bound Mormons).
And I'm agnostic if you were tempted to brand me as a Mormon apologist...
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Um, not sure that I read ANYWHERE in his diatribe that he was saying they were bad people, just clarifying the history.
This page seems to be mostly factual and will give you some numbers on this.
Of course there is some question about which parts of the body are more or less sensitive to radiation, and in my opinion 1,300 mrem/year is not as much of a risk as the chemical effects of the cigarette smoke. Still, 1,300 mrem/year is considerably greater than what the DOE allows nuclear sites to expose the general public to.
In terms of life expectancy the effect of smoking has been well estimated for a while. This is what life insurance companies are good at. It is interesting to see that radiation could be part of how smoking effects people. But as I said, I personally suspect the radiation is not significant enough to be a large factor.
Now, I know it's a cool software package and all, but doesn't that fall into the category of functional bloat? When did it go from a math package to a web page authoring tool? Am I missing something obvious here?
I don't expect it is too hard to get it to do whatever you want it to do.
Theo has been a key member of the Mathematica development team since day one.
Early on he was looking at defining its graphical user interface using Mathematica itself, and it isn't all that far from GUI to Web site and book design.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
but we have evidence, we have witness, all those who watched the plates befores taken back by moroni, and which names apear in every book of mormon in the earth, but wait many of them left the church, but why?, they saw the evidence, why a person who watch so much evidence from joseph smith will leave his church, maybe because its scam????
I would never say that Mormons are fundamentally bad people. Too much firsthand experience to the contrary.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Power goes up approximately linearly with area, but tripling the blade length will only triple the area of the blade, since the blade is approximately a rectangle, not the circle described by the blade's motion.