"So, my background is cognitive science, or it isn't. You don't know."
Everyone who posts on/. builds up a profile of who they are. From the areas they post in you can work out their interests and areas of knowledge. From the source code on their web sites you can see the sort of tools they use and hence work out how computer literate they are, whether they prefer windoze or command line etc. User names are generally unique and Google is your friend. These are the things I worked out: Your background is IT, most likely a programmer/coder. I'd put money on you being pretty competant with anything command line and probably prefer vi as an editor. You play / used to play FRP's probably specifically D&D...and there is zero evidence you work in cognitive science, particularly from the neuroscience end. Most IT people dabble in AI sort of things somewhere in their career and it's covered in most degrees these days. So thats a fair bet generally and particularly on/. My relevant background is that I work as research scientist in cognitive science and I'm just finishing off my Masters in that field. Which as well as covering the usual AI stuff you come across in comp.sci. also included a pile of neuroscience from psychology. Of course what you dont know are my other degrees or how long I've used computers for although the latter you could get some idea of from/. postings and perhaps the web.:-)
However, getting back to the main point, my initial complaint was a simply BAD example about creativity. What was put up as a boundary in helping creativity was simply no such thing. Maybe the poster meant that supplying a context enables a difficult open task to become more constrained and hence simpler and if that was the case then fair enough. But that has jack all to do with creativity.
Most evidence points to creativity being due to 'not-normal' brain function. If 'normal' brains run according to "laws / rules" then creative individuals typically lie well outside the bell curve. The savant is at the far end of that scale. Empirical evidence is pointing toward a trade off between high intelligence/creativity and normal function. There is typically a price to pay and the increased placticity/flexibility in conciousness (and unconcious behaviour) is reflected in decreased ability in other areas such as social skills (which do have a lot of 'rules' )and communication. Most readers of/. would be acutely aware of this.:-) There are a small few who get the benefits without too much cost but we are talking a limited resource here (one brain inside one skull) and gains in one area are usually offset.
Although creativity is a difficult concept to quantify and measure a few things are apparent. Creativity involves ignoring normal links between related areas. It involves what we say as 'seeing things in a differnt light', the ability to adjust the context of an idea or memory and associate it with typically unrelated ideas. Or the ability to link two disparate concepts. Now this is at odds with our brains general "rule" of trying to match each idea, experience or thought to existing ones. Our brains have evolved to pattern match everything, it's one of the reasons we are so smart as a species. As soon as see/experience something our brain tries it's hardest to match it previous experiences and memories. That's what happenng when I refered to the cuing in the initial example. When people see/read those words they are instantly recognised and related to previously known events/memories. In particular somantic memories which are the memories of things. This triggers a cascade of activity in areas related to those words and hey presto, you can now make up a story by tying together things you already know. You see this in kids alot when they make up stories and there aren't the complex memories that form the normal relationships (as viewed by an adult experienced brain) between i
Neetth mindlessly blabbed.."Oh, dear. Another techy nerd who thinks they understand how humans 'think' but really doesn't." The original article was a techie and mentioned the no dates, fitting the category of 'techy nerd'. My posting on the other hand did not give away who I am or my background. As such your posting is pretty funny and typical of/., i.e. clueless. oh, and excellent effort in the use of cut paste to send back my original snipe, that's very witty. Have you considered a career in radio?
What do you mean "by boundaries"? What do mean by "wouldn't work"? What the hell are you talking about!? I was talking about the fact the original post seemed to think that cue based recall of semantic memory was the same as creativity. It's not. Ok, it's not first year psychology but you can get the hint.
If you are going to make comment about a subject, in this case cognitive science, a least have the courtesy to use the language of people who work in the area actually use , unless you want to look like the usual/. commenter, spruiking ignorant comment out of their field of expertise. Stick to your code cutting and magic swords.
"Okay. Try telling a story about a talking dog and a troll that live together in a cave. That's a little easier, isn't it? The more limitations that are given - boundaries or obstacles - the more the brain works to be creative."
Oh, dear. Another techy nerd who thinks they understand how humans 'think' but really doesn't.. Creativity is NOT the ability for your brain to pattern match a couple of ideas and recall related information , which is what the example above suggests. The reasons the above task seems easier is because providing cues ("talking dog", "cave", "troll") stimulates existing neural connections within the brain to activate, making memories appear to your conciousness. That is not creativity, although if you're not creative you can be forgiven for not knowing. Creativity is about new ideas and concepts that didn't exist before and actually making them happen. Like having a story about a talking cave and a dog that live inside a troll...or going out on a date with a real human.
..then considering joining one of the skeptic organisations and help promote scientific thought and education. Yes, the level of un-scientific comment is rising in the media. Yes, the scientific understanding in the community is falling. Yes, there is more and more of this crap and this this article shows that this sort of muddy thinking can directly everyone, even you nerdy kids. Scientific ignorance can and will kill you or otherwise wreck your life.
Please do something about it because less and less people seem to get involved in community issues and this sort of crap about WiFi is just the tip of the iceberg. The ability to understand technology is a good step in understanding science. If you have any spare time then helping people understand science and technology is one of the best uses of it. Without it another dark age is a real possibility becuase many media people will not let truth get in the way of good story.
For many people outside of the USA having an encrypted HD is a matter of good business sense or national security, depending on where you work. For those who work outisde the USA in the defence area, and work colaboratively with people in the USA, this is now a major hassle. When crossing the border the software needed for decent security is now effectively banned from leaving the country and your laptop will be confiscated. The fact the software came from another country in the first place and the person is actually working for a friendly government and helping the USA government is seemingly irrelevant. The solution to this problem which many are taking is quite simple, limit helping the USA with any classified or confidential work. And before people reply "the USA doesn't need anyone else", please think about why you have huge national debt... I thought that after 911 the government departments were meant to be 'beating to the same drum' for national security and yet here we are, 5 years later, with a case of the geniuses that run border security stuffing up other government departments.
As an engineer I am increasingly concerned about our loss of basic knowledge that is kept in non-electronic form. How many people could actually make a working windmill, water wheel or atmospheric engine to kick start any sort of failed society? How did we mine basic ores, make good charcoal and smelt them into metal? How did our first carts and harnesses work? How does one craft rock by hand? What about the basics of farming? Most people in the west now live in cities and have no clue about food production.
This is exactly what the dinosaurs said 65M years ago. "You just watch Cyril, we might only have been advanced for 300 thousand years but if by some fluke we kill ourselves off, the only trace will be the layer of iridium from our iridium reactors as they all melt down. Apart from that and a few lucky bones and they'll never know our advanced society even existed!"
If you need a group of people in a shared experience in a 3D VR room and you want them to communicate like normal humans, looking at each other as they speak, using body language cues etc. then goggles don't work. Of course if your a nerd playing Doom5 then social interaction isn't really important and goggles are fine.
"If I don't wear my seat belt, who am I going to hurt? " You hurt society, your family and friends you twit. By being crippled in such a pointless way and needing 24/7 support to feed you and wipe your arse you deprive the community of a person who can usefully contribute to society. The total cost to society is in the negative by removing yourself from it such a stupid way. Let alone all the emotional trauma and hurt you cause to everyone who knows you and then has to care for you if you are crippled and don't die. Go do some work at a rehab centre and see "who am I going to hurt?". Everyone who knows you *much* prefer you as a fully functioning human with a huge potential for great things rather than someone who threw away a life and everything it can offer. (Ok, last part is guess but there's a pretty good chance it's true)
OK, lets think about this. A rat in the real world (e.g. my shed) routinely goes out from where it lives to scavenge food. This creature has a home base and returns there. From an evolutionary point of view I imagine there would be strong selection pressures to be able to return to it's home and not get lost and end up with the neighbours cat. As such, when the rat gets to the food it's brain would want to be primed for the return trip, which is most likely in recent memory and not committed to long term memory. Going over something again in the *reverse* order would be a method for planning the return trip and ensuring it is not forgotten until needed. If it was simple reinforcement for standard learning the rat wouldn't be doing it in reverse, it would be doing it in the order it first occured. As it is more difficult to learn something (even temporalily) in reverse then the *reverse* aspect of the learning would seem to be the important bit if the brain is going to the extra effort to do it, not just the 'rat goes over what it has learnt' bit. Maybe not so useful for people unless you reverse learn where you parked your car in the lot to find it again??
"trapping alcohol molecules in cluster of water molecules"...WTF? To the best of any scientists knowledge water has never been seen to "clump". Water molecules are all the same, that's why they are "molecules". That would be year 8 science. Same concept applies to any talk of "imprinting" on water. This is the sort of science called 'psuedo-science' or pure BS.
Can this discussion be a bit more friggin intellectual? What we want to know is if we cloned them a)could we hunt and shoot them and b)what did they taste like?
Although everyone here is commenting on how great this all is, unless there is a (good)log of who's looking at what, can't people see the *cough* *cough* security issues with such information? Line of sights, rooftop views, access to bridge service roads, insides of military bases (!), general layout of the land. This stuff is a military goldmine! Once my secret base is finished inside the volcano the world will be mine Mwaahaha haaaaaaa. No seriously... WTF?
That's why I've quit using the term "Artificial Intelligence" and now use "Synthetic Cognition". "Intelligence" is too much associated with humans and who says that's the best or only starting point for something that reasons, learns and thinks? "Artificial" also has the connotation it's not real or in some way sub-standard. Synthetic Cognition will be exactly what it sounds like, something created that thinks and is self-aware, in all it's richness. I don't care if it's not "human" enough, I'll measure it's success by what it can do, not how it does it or what it looks like.
Puts on tin foil hat and spins propeller. "Intelsat already has plans to launch the IA-8 satellite, currently scheduled to occur on 17 December 2004." Gee, that was handy..
LPA=Linear Particle Accelerator. It was for a science project. Knocked up 200kV using a Tesla coil and put it through a 1m tube which was meant to be hard vacuum. Aim was to hit a lithium target and measure the particles coming off.Problem was getting a hard enough vacuum with affordable pumps. If it's not very good, and ours wasn't, the high energy electrons hit the air mixture and you get a truckload of radiation you don't want rather than ions of stuff you do. Ours blackened "sealed" photographic paper 10' away after about a minute... The thing glowed a rather spiffy ultraviolet when it ran and insulating it was a nightmare with 6" sparks all over the place, including to nearby humans.(But very low current).You could see them track down the glass legs the thing sitting on. Way cool..
You could these days. Size needs to be no more than about a 5mm cube. But you still have to get power, which at least is only 2 wires. But bear in mind you need a minimum of 5 per hand if just measuring finger tips, or 14 if measuring total finger touch. Per hand. But at least polling update would only need to be about every 10 mili-seconds so bandwidth would not be a issue. The smallest wireless transmitters I have seen used are about 15x10x3 mm though. And using a matrix skin without local processing is still dumb, in animals the milions of "touch sensor" signals don't go back to the brain in a raw form, for good reason. We should understand why this is good and/or bad.
I started a Masters degree on this issue in the 1980's and it's sad to see the same *wrong* approach to touch still being applied if the end use is a robotic hand/finger. At the time MIT was doing work on this, as were a few other places, all with the wrong approach. Here's the problem: It's not the sensors or the density or how long they last or their accuracy or anything like that, even though these are real problems. The big killer problem is wiring. You get all these signals and at some point you need to get the wiring over joints that have to bend a real lot. And the more sensors you have the wires your typically going to have. Eventually you end up with bundles of wires and the simple fact is bundles of wires do not like being bent repeatedly, apart from which fingers need to be skinny to be useful and this is at odds with fat bundles of wires.
One solution however is physically simple and was presented at a National robotics conference in Australia in 1990. In summary I proposed and had made a working 2D slice of finger that used only 4 sensors. A 3D finger tip would require about 9 sensors, and by finger tip I mean measuring the major contact, magnitude and direction anywhere beyond the joint. The method was based on normal engineering and had the 4 sensors buried into a compliant skin. An external force caused a reading on all 4 strain gauges. From this small amount of data a PC worked out the magnitude, position and direction of the applied force using data collected from earlier testing. As a 2D finger slice it could successfully follow an edge when attached to a robot arm. I can scan and email the paper (this was pre net days) if any researchers want to extend this work and come up with practical robotic fingers. Email me. Another solution is to put the smarts into the skin so only a "summary" signal needs to go back through the various joints. This couldn't be done in the 80's but could be now?
As sure as the sun comes up, this concept will be adopted and the robots will have more and more sensors and require more and more power. Although it currently uses chitin I'm sure a version could be made to eat fats and proteins. And now we know why humans taste like chicken.. the iRobot dudes could use this idea for their battlefield mules. Brings a whole new meaning to the Monty Python plague sketch with "I'm not dead yet!"
Firstly, the scene needs to be set for those born in the last 25 years or so. In the late 1970's hand-held calculators eventually became programmable. This is days of the Apple II, Space War game consoles etc. There were 2 big companies who made them, TI and HP and they competed in the top end of the calculator business. Now these calulators were incredibly expensive (Say AUD $500, so over AUD$2000 in todays dollars, or about USD $3.25..:-) ). Anyway, now for the story.Two friends were drinking at the Adelaide University bar, which happens to be 3 stories up with a lovely balcony overlooking the cloisters, which are covered with brick paving. The discussion aided by much beer drifted towards who had the best calculator, and one had a TI (TI58?, first one with card reader) and one had a HP kitted out. TI's were rated as crap, everyone knew this, whilst HP's were pieces of engineering elegance and divinely inspired.(ok, I'm biased too, proud owner of a HP41C that still works and is on it's 3 set of batteries in 23 years). Anyway as the beer flowed and the argument became more heated it was decided the only way to solve the dispute was a drop test.. from the balcony and onto the brickwork far below. So the deed was done and both calculators were soon demonstrating a 1g acceleration on a free body. Well everything was fine until the last few inches when plastic and copper interacted with oven cured clay. The result was spectacular with the TI basically smashing open with many a destroyed components but the HP only suffered a crack through the LCD screen, which still worked , along with the rest of the calulator.Total height was close to 50' as the ground floor has a cafeteria with double height ceiling. HP really knew how to build equipment..
"Could this be real?Possibly" http://www.metalstorm.com/04_the_technology.html (sheesh, ever heard of a search engine??) Yes it is real.(USA does not invent everything in the world, surprising as that may be..). Although it has a high rate of fire it's not like a machine gun. The projectiles are loaded into the barrel in series. Once gone the entire barrel needs reloading. The main advantage is many bullets close to each other means you can target things things like grenades and artillery in flight. Normally the physical distance between each bullet/shell is so large the target can move far enough between each shot (say 1/10th second=30m of target movement)so that the rounds miss. If the rounds are only 1/100,000th of a second apart they are physically closer together and as long as you can aim the first shot accurately the rest of barrel load will be very close behind.Of course if you miss, the target will probably hit you before you reload the barrel. (Which is why the device typically has multiple barrels) You can also electronically control the rate of fire to exactly what you need. e.g. 1 rounds/min to it's maximum.
"Is Microsoft Software actually certified for safety critical systems?"
If you read the EULA it specifically says that the product is *not* to used for critical systems..and there's a big list of them. IMHO, this is why PLC's or at least real time industrial computers running secure software should be used for anything mission critical. And the same applies to SCADA, don't ever use vanilla windows unless having manual control and observation of your control system is *not* important. As soon as all those IT bozo's tried moving into engineering and control systems whilst pushing Windows based PC's, I gave that career away as far too dangerous. IMHO, people with only an IT or CompSci degree should be kept well away from things than really need an engineer to consider everything about what your controlling, including failure modes.There is *so* much more to complex control systems than just the software..
Installed it last night, went to bed, woke up, PC is buggered. First warning was finding new hardware, motherboard, etc!! Then it tried doing something with the registery which failed. Now when it tries starting windows it's in an endless loop of trying to fix registery and rebooting. Fricken thanks Microsoft and someone playing with something they didn't understand. Lesson learnt, don't do stuff late at night without trawling the web for everyone else's feedback/problems first. The funny thing was , this machine *was* the stablest WIN98 machine I had ever come across. Oh well, guess I have a reason to upgrade to 2000 now if it can't be untangled.
Fall off building and land on your head?? Totally wrong! Here's why.When you fall and hit the ground the damage isn't the impact of your skull and the ground, it's your brain and the inside of your skull. Plus the stretching/twisting applied to the spinal cord. Even though your skull may be cusioned, your actual brain isn't, so *it* slams into your skull, hey presto, haemorage and death from internal bleeding and/or swelling. That's why playgrounds are meant to have deep padding and why cars are meant to crumple, it prolongs the deceleration in an accident so the g force on your gooey brain isn't so high.
Slashdot Mirror
"So, my background is cognitive science, or it isn't. You don't know."
/. builds up a profile of who they are. From the areas they post in you can work out their interests and areas of knowledge. ..and there is zero evidence you work in cognitive science, particularly from the neuroscience end. Most IT people dabble in AI sort of things somewhere in their career and it's covered in most degrees these days. So thats a fair bet generally and particularly on /. /. postings and perhaps the web. :-)
/. would be acutely aware of this. :-) There are a small few who get the benefits without too much cost but we are talking a limited resource here (one brain inside one skull) and gains in one area are usually offset.
Everyone who posts on
From the source code on their web sites you can see the sort of tools they use and hence work out how computer literate they are, whether they prefer windoze or command line etc. User names are generally unique and Google is your friend.
These are the things I worked out: Your background is IT, most likely a programmer/coder. I'd put money on you being pretty competant with anything command line and probably prefer vi as an editor. You play / used to play FRP's probably specifically D&D.
My relevant background is that I work as research scientist in cognitive science and I'm just finishing off my Masters in that field. Which as well as covering the usual AI stuff you come across in comp.sci. also included a pile of neuroscience from psychology. Of course what you dont know are my other degrees or how long I've used computers for although the latter you could get some idea of from
However, getting back to the main point, my initial complaint was a simply BAD example about creativity. What was put up as a boundary in helping creativity was simply no such thing. Maybe the poster meant that supplying a context enables a difficult open task to become more constrained and hence simpler and if that was the case then fair enough. But that has jack all to do with creativity.
Most evidence points to creativity being due to 'not-normal' brain function. If 'normal' brains run according to "laws / rules" then creative individuals typically lie well outside the bell curve. The savant is at the far end of that scale. Empirical evidence is pointing toward a trade off between high intelligence/creativity and normal function. There is typically a price to pay and the increased placticity/flexibility in conciousness (and unconcious behaviour) is reflected in decreased ability in other areas such as social skills (which do have a lot of 'rules' )and communication. Most readers of
Although creativity is a difficult concept to quantify and measure a few things are apparent. Creativity involves ignoring normal links between related areas. It involves what we say as 'seeing things in a differnt light', the ability to adjust the context of an idea or memory and associate it with typically unrelated ideas. Or the ability to link two disparate concepts. Now this is at odds with our brains general "rule" of trying to match each idea, experience or thought to existing ones. Our brains have evolved to pattern match everything, it's one of the reasons we are so smart as a species. As soon as see/experience something our brain tries it's hardest to match it previous experiences and memories. That's what happenng when I refered to the cuing in the initial example. When people see/read those words they are instantly recognised and related to previously known events/memories. In particular somantic memories which are the memories of things. This triggers a cascade of activity in areas related to those words and hey presto, you can now make up a story by tying together things you already know. You see this in kids alot when they make up stories and there aren't the complex memories that form the normal relationships (as viewed by an adult experienced brain) between i
Neetth mindlessly blabbed.."Oh, dear. Another techy nerd who thinks they understand how humans 'think' but really doesn't." /., i.e. clueless.
/. commenter, spruiking ignorant comment out of their field of expertise. Stick to your code cutting and magic swords.
The original article was a techie and mentioned the no dates, fitting the category of 'techy nerd'.
My posting on the other hand did not give away who I am or my background.
As such your posting is pretty funny and typical of
oh, and excellent effort in the use of cut paste to send back my original snipe, that's very witty. Have you considered a career in radio?
What do you mean "by boundaries"? What do mean by "wouldn't work"? What the hell are you talking about!?
I was talking about the fact the original post seemed to think that cue based recall of semantic memory was the same as creativity.
It's not. Ok, it's not first year psychology but you can get the hint.
If you are going to make comment about a subject, in this case cognitive science, a least have the courtesy to use the language of people who work in the area actually use , unless you want to look like the usual
"Okay. Try telling a story about a talking dog and a troll that live together in a cave.
That's a little easier, isn't it?
The more limitations that are given - boundaries or obstacles - the more the brain works to be creative."
Oh, dear. Another techy nerd who thinks they understand how humans 'think' but really doesn't..
Creativity is NOT the ability for your brain to pattern match a couple of ideas and recall related information , which is what the example above suggests.
The reasons the above task seems easier is because providing cues ("talking dog", "cave", "troll") stimulates existing neural connections within the brain to activate, making memories appear to your conciousness. That is not creativity, although if you're not creative you can be forgiven for not knowing.
Creativity is about new ideas and concepts that didn't exist before and actually making them happen.
Like having a story about a talking cave and a dog that live inside a troll...or going out on a date with a real human.
..then considering joining one of the skeptic organisations and help promote scientific thought and education.
Yes, the level of un-scientific comment is rising in the media.
Yes, the scientific understanding in the community is falling.
Yes, there is more and more of this crap and this this article shows that this sort of muddy thinking can directly everyone, even you nerdy kids.
Scientific ignorance can and will kill you or otherwise wreck your life.
Please do something about it because less and less people seem to get involved in community issues and this sort of crap about WiFi is just the tip of the iceberg. The ability to understand technology is a good step in understanding science.
If you have any spare time then helping people understand science and technology is one of the best uses of it.
Without it another dark age is a real possibility becuase many media people will not let truth get in the way of good story.
For many people outside of the USA having an encrypted HD is a matter of good business sense or national security, depending on where you work. For those who work outisde the USA in the defence area, and work colaboratively with people in the USA, this is now a major hassle. When crossing the border the software needed for decent security is now effectively banned from leaving the country and your laptop will be confiscated. The fact the software came from another country in the first place and the person is actually working for a friendly government and helping the USA government is seemingly irrelevant. The solution to this problem which many are taking is quite simple, limit helping the USA with any classified or confidential work. And before people reply "the USA doesn't need anyone else", please think about why you have huge national debt ...
I thought that after 911 the government departments were meant to be 'beating to the same drum' for national security and yet here we are, 5 years later, with a case of the geniuses that run border security stuffing up other government departments.
As an engineer I am increasingly concerned about our loss of basic knowledge that is kept in non-electronic form.
How many people could actually make a working windmill, water wheel or atmospheric engine to kick start any sort of failed society?
How did we mine basic ores, make good charcoal and smelt them into metal?
How did our first carts and harnesses work?
How does one craft rock by hand?
What about the basics of farming? Most people in the west now live in cities and have no clue about food production.
This information needs recording permanently.
This is exactly what the dinosaurs said 65M years ago.
"You just watch Cyril, we might only have been advanced for 300 thousand years but if by some fluke we kill ourselves off, the only trace will be the layer of iridium from our iridium reactors as they all melt down. Apart from that and a few lucky bones and they'll never know our advanced society even existed!"
If you need a group of people in a shared experience in a 3D VR room and you want them to communicate like normal humans, looking at each other as they speak, using body language cues etc. then goggles don't work.
Of course if your a nerd playing Doom5 then social interaction isn't really important and goggles are fine.
"If I don't wear my seat belt, who am I going to hurt? "
You hurt society, your family and friends you twit. By being crippled in such a pointless way and needing 24/7 support to feed you and wipe your arse you deprive the community of a person who can usefully contribute to society.
The total cost to society is in the negative by removing yourself from it such a stupid way.
Let alone all the emotional trauma and hurt you cause to everyone who knows you and then has to care for you if you are crippled and don't die. Go do some work at a rehab centre and see "who am I going to hurt?".
Everyone who knows you *much* prefer you as a fully functioning human with a huge potential for great things rather than someone who threw away a life and everything it can offer. (Ok, last part is guess but there's a pretty good chance it's true)
OK, lets think about this.
A rat in the real world (e.g. my shed) routinely goes out from where it lives to scavenge food. This creature has a home base and returns there. From an evolutionary point of view I imagine there would be strong selection pressures to be able to return to it's home and not get lost and end up with the neighbours cat. As such, when the rat gets to the food it's brain would want to be primed for the return trip, which is most likely in recent memory and not committed to long term memory. Going over something again in the *reverse* order would be a method for planning the return trip and ensuring it is not forgotten until needed. If it was simple reinforcement for standard learning the rat wouldn't be doing it in reverse, it would be doing it in the order it first occured. As it is more difficult to learn something (even temporalily) in reverse then the *reverse* aspect of the learning would seem to be the important bit if the brain is going to the extra effort to do it, not just the 'rat goes over what it has learnt' bit.
Maybe not so useful for people unless you reverse learn where you parked your car in the lot to find it again??
"trapping alcohol molecules in cluster of water molecules" ...WTF?
To the best of any scientists knowledge water has never been seen to "clump".
Water molecules are all the same, that's why they are "molecules".
That would be year 8 science.
Same concept applies to any talk of "imprinting" on water.
This is the sort of science called 'psuedo-science' or pure BS.
Can this discussion be a bit more friggin intellectual?
What we want to know is if we cloned them a)could we hunt and shoot them and b)what did they taste like?
Although everyone here is commenting on how great this all is, unless there is a (good)log of who's looking at what, can't people see the *cough* *cough* security issues with such information?
Line of sights, rooftop views, access to bridge service roads, insides of military bases (!), general layout of the land. This stuff is a military goldmine! Once my secret base is finished inside the volcano the world will be mine Mwaahaha haaaaaaa.
No seriously... WTF?
That's why I've quit using the term "Artificial Intelligence" and now use "Synthetic Cognition". "Intelligence" is too much associated with humans and who says that's the best or only starting point for something that reasons, learns and thinks? "Artificial" also has the connotation it's not real or in some way sub-standard. Synthetic Cognition will be exactly what it sounds like, something created that thinks and is self-aware, in all it's richness. I don't care if it's not "human" enough, I'll measure it's success by what it can do, not how it does it or what it looks like.
Puts on tin foil hat and spins propeller.
"Intelsat already has plans to launch the IA-8 satellite, currently scheduled to occur on 17 December 2004."
Gee, that was handy..
LPA=Linear Particle Accelerator.
It was for a science project. Knocked up 200kV using a Tesla coil and put it through a 1m tube which was meant to be hard vacuum. Aim was to hit a lithium target and measure the particles coming off.Problem was getting a hard enough vacuum with affordable pumps. If it's not very good, and ours wasn't, the high energy electrons hit the air mixture and you get a truckload of radiation you don't want rather than ions of stuff you do. Ours blackened "sealed" photographic paper 10' away after about a minute... The thing glowed a rather spiffy ultraviolet when it ran and insulating it was a nightmare with 6" sparks all over the place, including to nearby humans.(But very low current).You could see them track down the glass legs the thing sitting on. Way cool..
Here is one..d click NEXT. :-O
http://www.gigdig.com/~ted/page10.html
an
You could these days. Size needs to be no more than about a 5mm cube. But you still have to get power, which at least is only 2 wires. But bear in mind you need a minimum of 5 per hand if just measuring finger tips, or 14 if measuring total finger touch. Per hand. But at least polling update would only need to be about every 10 mili-seconds so bandwidth would not be a issue. The smallest wireless transmitters I have seen used are about 15x10x3 mm though.
And using a matrix skin without local processing is still dumb, in animals the milions of "touch sensor" signals don't go back to the brain in a raw form, for good reason. We should understand why this is good and/or bad.
I started a Masters degree on this issue in the 1980's and it's sad to see the same *wrong* approach to touch still being applied if the end use is a robotic hand/finger. At the time MIT was doing work on this, as were a few other places, all with the wrong approach. Here's the problem:
It's not the sensors or the density or how long they last or their accuracy or anything like that, even though these are real problems. The big killer problem is wiring. You get all these signals and at some point you need to get the wiring over joints that have to bend a real lot. And the more sensors you have the wires your typically going to have. Eventually you end up with bundles of wires and the simple fact is bundles of wires do not like being bent repeatedly, apart from which fingers need to be skinny to be useful and this is at odds with fat bundles of wires.
One solution however is physically simple and was presented at a National robotics conference in Australia in 1990. In summary I proposed and had made a working 2D slice of finger that used only 4 sensors. A 3D finger tip would require about 9 sensors, and by finger tip I mean measuring the major contact, magnitude and direction anywhere beyond the joint. The method was based on normal engineering and had the 4 sensors buried into a compliant skin. An external force caused a reading on all 4 strain gauges. From this small amount of data a PC worked out the magnitude, position and direction of the applied force using data collected from earlier testing. As a 2D finger slice it could successfully follow an edge when attached to a robot arm. I can scan and email the paper (this was pre net days) if any researchers want to extend this work and come up with practical robotic fingers. Email me.
Another solution is to put the smarts into the skin so only a "summary" signal needs to go back through the various joints. This couldn't be done in the 80's but could be now?
As sure as the sun comes up, this concept will be adopted and the robots will have more and more sensors and require more and more power. Although it currently uses chitin I'm sure a version could be made to eat fats and proteins. And now we know why humans taste like chicken.. the iRobot dudes could use this idea for their battlefield mules. Brings a whole new meaning to the Monty Python plague sketch with "I'm not dead yet!"
Firstly, the scene needs to be set for those born in the last 25 years or so. In the late 1970's hand-held calculators eventually became programmable. This is days of the Apple II, Space War game consoles etc. There were 2 big companies who made them, TI and HP and they competed in the top end of the calculator business. Now these calulators were incredibly expensive (Say AUD $500, so over AUD$2000 in todays dollars, or about USD $3.25.. :-) ). Anyway, now for the story.Two friends were drinking at the Adelaide University bar, which happens to be 3 stories up with a lovely balcony overlooking the cloisters, which are covered with brick paving. The discussion aided by much beer drifted towards who had the best calculator, and one had a TI (TI58?, first one with card reader) and one had a HP kitted out. TI's were rated as crap, everyone knew this, whilst HP's were pieces of engineering elegance and divinely inspired.(ok, I'm biased too, proud owner of a HP41C that still works and is on it's 3 set of batteries in 23 years). Anyway as the beer flowed and the argument became more heated it was decided the only way to solve the dispute was a drop test.. from the balcony and onto the brickwork far below. So the deed was done and both calculators were soon demonstrating a 1g acceleration on a free body. Well everything was fine until the last few inches when plastic and copper interacted with oven cured clay. The result was spectacular with the TI basically smashing open with many a destroyed components but the HP only suffered a crack through the LCD screen, which still worked , along with the rest of the calulator.Total height was close to 50' as the ground floor has a cafeteria with double height ceiling. HP really knew how to build equipment..
"Could this be real?Possibly" http://www.metalstorm.com/04_the_technology.html
(sheesh, ever heard of a search engine??)
Yes it is real.(USA does not invent everything in the world, surprising as that may be..). Although it has a high rate of fire it's not like a machine gun. The projectiles are loaded into the barrel in series. Once gone the entire barrel needs reloading. The main advantage is many bullets close to each other means you can target things things like grenades and artillery in flight. Normally the physical distance between each bullet/shell is so large the target can move far enough between each shot (say 1/10th second=30m of target movement)so that the rounds miss. If the rounds are only 1/100,000th of a second apart they are physically closer together and as long as you can aim the first shot accurately the rest of barrel load will be very close behind.Of course if you miss, the target will probably hit you before you reload the barrel. (Which is why the device typically has multiple barrels)
You can also electronically control the rate of fire to exactly what you need. e.g. 1 rounds/min to it's maximum.
"Is Microsoft Software actually certified for safety critical systems?"
If you read the EULA it specifically says that the product is *not* to used for critical systems..and there's a big list of them. IMHO, this is why PLC's or at least real time industrial computers running secure software should be used for anything mission critical. And the same applies to SCADA, don't ever use vanilla windows unless having manual control and observation of your control system is *not* important. As soon as all those IT bozo's tried moving into engineering and control systems whilst pushing Windows based PC's, I gave that career away as far too dangerous. IMHO, people with only an IT or CompSci degree should be kept well away from things than really need an engineer to consider everything about what your controlling, including failure modes.There is *so* much more to complex control systems than just the software..
Installed it last night, went to bed, woke up, PC is buggered.
First warning was finding new hardware, motherboard, etc!! Then it tried doing something with the registery which failed. Now when it tries starting windows it's in an endless loop of trying to fix registery and rebooting. Fricken thanks Microsoft and someone playing with something they didn't understand. Lesson learnt, don't do stuff late at night without trawling the web for everyone else's feedback/problems first.
The funny thing was , this machine *was* the stablest WIN98 machine I had ever come across.
Oh well, guess I have a reason to upgrade to 2000 now if it can't be untangled.
Fall off building and land on your head?? Totally wrong!
Here's why.When you fall and hit the ground the damage isn't the impact of your skull and the ground, it's your brain and the inside of your skull. Plus the stretching/twisting applied to the spinal cord. Even though your skull may be cusioned, your actual brain isn't, so *it* slams into your skull, hey presto, haemorage and death from internal bleeding and/or swelling.
That's why playgrounds are meant to have deep padding and why cars are meant to crumple, it prolongs the deceleration in an accident so the g force on your gooey brain isn't so high.