...and this will further the trend by leading to lower prices and more available...
We won't ever see the lower prices in the form of cheaper fast food.
Here's a funny but true story... At the GM plant in Auburn Hills, MI, they use robots to stock supplies and take inventory around the plant. The robots are smallish, about the size of a garbage can and ideally they move around the plant carrying things and scanning things.
What really happens though, is that human workers hate the robots and often tip them upside down, lock them in closets, or lay an extension cord around them on the floor. The wheels are so small that the robots can't even get over an extension cord and just move around in circles until their batteries die. Even in a closet or upside down, they keep trying to move until their batteries die.
If robots do make it into the fast-food industry any time soon, they will take a lot of abuse from the remaining adolescent workforce.
In the meantime, it's nice to know that if the robots try to take over the world, we can just lay an extension cord on the floor for protection!
You can set up a nice differential equation to find the optimum # of nodes and $ per node.
Did you use any sort of optimization algorithms in designing this system? Not just for the number of nodes, but also for quality vs. price, or any other areas.
Actually... much of the research that goes on at LANL (and other national labs) is in low energy materials processing. That's one of the reasons that the dept. of energy is involved.
Face it, the cold war is over. Cheap ceramic cutting tools are better for the country then secret nuclear powered tanks-bombs.
I watched Crocodile Dundee; I know that an Aussie with a knife is dangerous.
Law enforcement officers in the USA are trained that someone with a knife at less then 10 meters can come at you faster then you can draw your firearm.
You are right, the UZI came about ~200 years after the constitution was written.
The constitution was written with the idea that people have the right to protect themselves from a corrupt government with technologically advanced weapons.
In the 200+ years since the constitution was drafted, nothing has changed that would make nullify this statement.
I read your other post. I own many firearms and I use NONE of them for self defence.
By the way, I hardly believe hunting, shooting game, or whatever you said, to be a less-then-astonishing reason to own a gun (according to your other post) for the following 2 reasons:
1. The Number of registered deer hunters in Michigan every year is larger then the number of members in the USA armed forces (all branches combined).
2. Do you really think that an individual can be told their reasoning is less-then-astonishing. I'm very glad that YOUR opinion about everyone else's reasoning should be made into law.
Some of my firearms, I don't hunt with. I own them for the sole purpose of collecting. This includes some types of foriegn assault rifles, which I purchased because I thought that they would become banned....but that is probably less-then-astonishing to you
I'm not sure about WalMart, but there is a interesting story about Meijer: (WalMart + IGA (in midwest) = Meijer) Someone bought a 22 cal. in Meijer and went out into the parking lot an committed suicide. The family members sued Meijer for selling a firearm to someone so 'distressed'. I'm not sure how the case ended, but as a result of this case, Meijer now only carries Blackpowder guns and Air (pellet & BB) guns. This is very unfortunate!
Perhaps the MP3 community (I was Napster banned for 1 remix of a Metallica song) should look to the firearms industry for knowledge. The firearms industry has been fighting stupid lawsuits for years.
Like MP3 companies, the firearms companies are being sued so that they accept the responsiblity of individuals who do stupid things with their products. I don't think trading MP3's is stupid, but I agree that an individual should be held responsible when using a product in an illegal manner.
If one conclusion can be made by looking at the firearm industry is that the MP3 companies are going to endure years of litigation until the recording industry can find someone else to blame or another way to make money.
A rigorous mathematical curriculum enhances many areas of child development. IMHO the best high school course is a geometry course.
In a standard high school geometry course, theorems and proofs are introduced well for a HS level. Childeren are taught to look at complicated problems/theorems and then break them up into small steps in order to prove it. One of the main concepts is to teach the students to solve a problem by breaking it into a linear series of steps all leading towards one goal. This is a major part of the abstract reasoning that you mention in the second bullet.
I have four years of tutoring experience at a college level and in every college class from basic algebra to differential equations, all problems can be solved/understood by breaking them into a linear series of smaller problems. (This is also true of the classes I took that were past Diff Eq.) Something that should have been developed in HS geometry.
To answer your other point about Multiplication tables and long division... I believe students should memorize them merely to teach them that some things they have to sit down and rigorously go over until they know it. What other area in education forces students to rigorously memorize anything? In schools around Okemos (MI), they have discontinued multiplication tables from the curriculum, and I fear that the students are never going to learn that sometimes they need to sit down and go over something until they know it. There's no easy way to learn multiplication tables and that is it's strength.
One last interesting point is that I have tutored a wide range of math classes at college, and the biggest difference between the math-challenged people in College Algebra 101 and the engineering students taking differential equations is self confidence. My observations show that Mathematical self confidence almost always correlates to personal self confidence. In the Diff Eq room, you help a student by guiding them, and they would trudge through the details, making mistakes, but ultimately solving the problem. In the Algebra 101 help room, many of the students need you to solve the problem while they watch, they seem afraid to perform basic steps by themselves.
One of my most rewarding experiences in the math help room was with a girl that would come in 2-3 times a week. In the beginning of the semester, she was constantly frustated because she didn't understand things, and I wouldn't just sit down and solve it for her. I would tell her how to do it but make her do the thinking. One day in the middle of the semester, she stopped me in the middle of a problem that I was helping her with. She said that she wanted to figure the rest of it out herself. I was happy for about 3 days because of that, and she probably never even realized it.
I created my own Parking Gate card with barcode font, so I can park in any gated lot on campus. The folded up sheet of paper with barcodes on it opens the gates for me.
And now for the on-topic part... I hope that they put a lot of thought into the standard. I'm sure that in the future, they would be read from a distance, or read with microscopic sensors (in our finger tips). It would be VERY cool to wave your fingers over a topic on a page and have your HUD instantly show you more information about that topic!
#20 is not a cop-out. It should have been #1 or been mentioned as a basis for ALL of the other achievements. Here's how/why:
1. Electrification -- Thanks to low resistivity copper alloys for wire, glass insulators, and alloy filaments for heaters/lights we can all enjoy many benefits of electric devices in our homes
2. Automobile -- Ease of manufacturability of many metals through stamping, molding, etc. helped bring prices down to what the common person can afford. You may say "Assembly Line" did it, but first you need materials that can be easily formed on an assembly line.
3. Airplane -- Aluminum, Carbon Fiber, Beryllium. Second only to good design, materials science is what makes airplanes lighter, faster, and better.
4. Water Supply and Distribution -- This is a tough one, but I know that they have developed special clays for irrigation canals in the southwest that soak up to 11 times their weight in water.
5. Electronics -- Can anyone say semiconductors? Photolithography? Huge single crystal silicon wafers? They're all high-performance materials and materials manufacturing.
6. Radio and Television -- There's a lot of overlap here, but again, materials science helped bring the costs down to put one in every homes' living room.
7. Agricultural Mechanization -- High strength steels, efficient combustion engines, all resulting from better materials
8. Computers -- semiconductors, semiconductors, semiconducts, and of yeah, LCD displays! (you guessed it, high performance materials)
9. Telephone -- Low resistivity copper wire as well as eventual fiber optic cables (all high performance materials) can connect me to my mom in Tokyo almost instantly.
10. Air Conditioning and Refrigeration -- Freon, and new thermo-electric materials
11. Highways -- Concrete is the most used material in the world. Cheap, high-tech concrete makes many roads possible.
12. Spacecraft -- See airplanes.
13. Internet -- fiber-optics are the backbone of the internet. Materials science developed the glass and manufacturing techniques for it.
14. Imaging -- Optical - glass lenses, MRI - high power magnetic materials, SEM - e- emitting Tungsten tips, many more.
15. Household Appliances -- resulting from cheaper plastics, refrigeration materials, and manufacturing techniques of metals.
16. Health Technologies -- Shape memory alloys, Inert metals, ceramics.
17. Petroleum and Petrochemical Technologies -- I'm assuming that this includes plastics.
18. Laser and Fiber Optics -- The basis of a laser is a single material that emits it's own wavelength of light. Mr. Borosilicate fiber optic cable is high tech all by himself.
19. Nuclear Technologies -- I don't want to limit this to Bombs, but the required spherical shell of pure Beryllium is a materials' feat in itself.
20. High-performance Materials -- this is what I've been bragging about!
Wait, before you flame me, I'm not saying that materials science was solely involved for each of these, but it played at least a major role.
What about another sim game where you act as a software developer with others around the world trying to create a new web browser. To keep things realistic, this network based game forces you to communicate with other players via newsgroups and emails.
To keep things interesting, how about giving it a dinosaur theme and naming it something that rhymes with Godzilla!
I don't think so...because then we would know what the question is, and we all know what happens to the earth 5 minutes before the question is figured out. The accurate mass of the Earth would be useless after the Vogons demolish the planet.
unstructured, unmoderated, and impromptu forum on the web.
I believe that very rich information structures can be developed from many people/processes/automata following simple trends. For example: There a was an experiment where a bunch of robots were designed to 1. move at random 2. pick up a block if they weren't already carrying one and they buimped into one 3. set down a block it they were carrying one and they bumped into another one This sounds relatively random, but when many of these robots were released into an arena with random blocks everywhere, the robots eventually put all of the blocks into one big pile.
I think that these students are trying to find a pattern within the links.
It's the same thing that makes well written massively parallel computing algorithms so effective...and interesting!
Actually, I'm more interested in knowing what window manager they are using in the screenshots for that Cycas 2.0 program. Those windows look really cool and I don't remember seeing that one at themes.org.
I've decided that the best distro is the first one that I can get USB ethernet working on. I've already run into some problems with Mandrake, so now I will try it on Redhat for a while.
Oh yeah... Mandrake has the advantage of Xemacs included on the cd, but they both have wonderful installation programs, and installed flawlessly for me.
It's nice to hear that it will be released supporting all of the major OSes. Let's hope that this isn't just a marketing ploy, and, that most new hardware will follow this plan.
Things seem to be swinging back to the way that it was in the '80s with many different OS's. This time, however, we have standardized hardware (mostly).
Making Linux into an adequate gaming platform also depends upon immediate support when hardware is released. I think the ATI Radeon is a step in the right direction.
Not to mention Donna Shirley's management of the other Mars exploration mission. Remember? The one that was a huge success.
Donna Shirley and her team produced that little robot that lasted longer then it was designed for, and the whole project ended up UNDER BUDGET.
Shirley also wrote a book (online version) called Managing Creativity full of...you guessed it... strategies for managing groups of creative researchers and developers. Although I haven't read the book, based upon a NPR interview, I believe to be quite interesting.
If NASA continues to tap into resources such as Donna Shirley, then I believe that they will many successful projects ahead.
Portable GPS jamming is one less reason to buy an I-opener, as if the store you bought it from giving away your credit card number wasn't a good enough reason.
Amazon still holds patents for jpeg, png, and www until 2006!
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Re:why?: think geek for $19 VS. amazon for $16.80
on
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I loved Gleick's other book Chaos.
Here's one of my favorite quotes from Gleick's Chaos:
...twentieth-century science will be remembered for three things: relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos. Chaos, they contend, has become the century's third great revolution in the physical sciences.
Go Chaos Theory!!
One things that creeps me out in this book is how he refers to a lot of people in past tense, as though they were dead. I know some of these people, and it seems like he is refering to them as being dead! They aren't dead yet.
You should have read the article instead of posting as fast as you could. He states that AI is already here in different forms.
The little Microsoft Office2000 Cat that answers all my questions is a form of AI (1st category according to article).
Microsoft might eventually have a NT-assistant... You can select from a paper-clip, office shredder, or cartoon 2-year-tech-degree System-Administrator to answer all of your questions. With a little more work, this NT-Assistant might replace the real thing! For a little realism, the NT-assistant could get frustrated when you showed it a CD that you stuck in the microwave and said that the CD-burner wasn't working. ;-)
Hey, I can't wait until all my computationally expensive projects can be done on someone elses computer.
Having to upload/download images can be annoying, though, even if you have a fast connection. Has anyone developed a secure way that a webserver could mount a local directory? What about an insecure way?
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a funny but true story...
At the GM plant in Auburn Hills, MI, they use robots to stock supplies and take inventory around the plant. The robots are smallish, about the size of a garbage can and ideally they move around the plant carrying things and scanning things.
What really happens though, is that human workers hate the robots and often tip them upside down, lock them in closets, or lay an extension cord around them on the floor. The wheels are so small that the robots can't even get over an extension cord and just move around in circles until their batteries die. Even in a closet or upside down, they keep trying to move until their batteries die.
If robots do make it into the fast-food industry any time soon, they will take a lot of abuse from the remaining adolescent workforce.
In the meantime, it's nice to know that if the robots try to take over the world, we can just lay an extension cord on the floor for protection!
--
You can set up a nice differential equation to find the optimum # of nodes and $ per node.
Did you use any sort of optimization algorithms in designing this system? Not just for the number of nodes, but also for quality vs. price, or any other areas.
--
Actually...
much of the research that goes on at LANL (and other national labs) is in low energy materials processing. That's one of the reasons that the dept. of energy is involved.
Face it, the cold war is over. Cheap ceramic cutting tools are better for the country then secret nuclear powered tanks-bombs.
--
I watched Crocodile Dundee; I know that an Aussie with a knife is dangerous.
Law enforcement officers in the USA are trained that someone with a knife at less then 10 meters can come at you faster then you can draw your firearm.
--
You are right, the UZI came about ~200 years after the constitution was written.
The constitution was written with the idea that people have the right to protect themselves from a corrupt government with technologically advanced weapons.
In the 200+ years since the constitution was drafted, nothing has changed that would make nullify this statement.
--
I read your other post. I own many firearms and I use NONE of them for self defence.
...but that is probably less-then-astonishing to you
By the way, I hardly believe hunting, shooting game, or whatever you said, to be a less-then-astonishing reason to own a gun (according to your other post) for the following 2 reasons:
1. The Number of registered deer hunters in Michigan every year is larger then the number of members in the USA armed forces (all branches combined).
2. Do you really think that an individual can be told their reasoning is less-then-astonishing. I'm very glad that YOUR opinion about everyone else's reasoning should be made into law.
Some of my firearms, I don't hunt with. I own them for the sole purpose of collecting. This includes some types of foriegn assault rifles, which I purchased because I thought that they would become banned.
I'm not sure about WalMart, but there is a interesting story about Meijer:
(WalMart + IGA (in midwest) = Meijer)
Someone bought a 22 cal. in Meijer and went out into the parking lot an committed suicide. The family members sued Meijer for selling a firearm to someone so 'distressed'. I'm not sure how the case ended, but as a result of this case, Meijer now only carries Blackpowder guns and Air (pellet & BB) guns. This is very unfortunate!
Perhaps the MP3 community (I was Napster banned for 1 remix of a Metallica song) should look to the firearms industry for knowledge. The firearms industry has been fighting stupid lawsuits for years.
Like MP3 companies, the firearms companies are being sued so that they accept the responsiblity of individuals who do stupid things with their products. I don't think trading MP3's is stupid, but I agree that an individual should be held responsible when using a product in an illegal manner.
If one conclusion can be made by looking at the firearm industry is that the MP3 companies are going to endure years of litigation until the recording industry can find someone else to blame or another way to make money.
--
A rigorous mathematical curriculum enhances many areas of child development. IMHO the best high school course is a geometry course.
In a standard high school geometry course, theorems and proofs are introduced well for a HS level. Childeren are taught to look at complicated problems/theorems and then break them up into small steps in order to prove it. One of the main concepts is to teach the students to solve a problem by breaking it into a linear series of steps all leading towards one goal. This is a major part of the abstract reasoning that you mention in the second bullet.
I have four years of tutoring experience at a college level and in every college class from basic algebra to differential equations, all problems can be solved/understood by breaking them into a linear series of smaller problems. (This is also true of the classes I took that were past Diff Eq.) Something that should have been developed in HS geometry.
To answer your other point about Multiplication tables and long division...
I believe students should memorize them merely to teach them that some things they have to sit down and rigorously go over until they know it. What other area in education forces students to rigorously memorize anything? In schools around Okemos (MI), they have discontinued multiplication tables from the curriculum, and I fear that the students are never going to learn that sometimes they need to sit down and go over something until they know it. There's no easy way to learn multiplication tables and that is it's strength.
One last interesting point is that I have tutored a wide range of math classes at college, and the biggest difference between the math-challenged people in College Algebra 101 and the engineering students taking differential equations is self confidence. My observations show that Mathematical self confidence almost always correlates to personal self confidence. In the Diff Eq room, you help a student by guiding them, and they would trudge through the details, making mistakes, but ultimately solving the problem. In the Algebra 101 help room, many of the students need you to solve the problem while they watch, they seem afraid to perform basic steps by themselves.
One of my most rewarding experiences in the math help room was with a girl that would come in 2-3 times a week. In the beginning of the semester, she was constantly frustated because she didn't understand things, and I wouldn't just sit down and solve it for her. I would tell her how to do it but make her do the thinking. One day in the middle of the semester, she stopped me in the middle of a problem that I was helping her with. She said that she wanted to figure the rest of it out herself. I was happy for about 3 days because of that, and she probably never even realized it.
--
I created my own Parking Gate card with barcode font, so I can park in any gated lot on campus. The folded up sheet of paper with barcodes on it opens the gates for me.
And now for the on-topic part...
I hope that they put a lot of thought into the standard. I'm sure that in the future, they would be read from a distance, or read with microscopic sensors (in our finger tips). It would be VERY cool to wave your fingers over a topic on a page and have your HUD instantly show you more information about that topic!
--
1. Electrification -- Thanks to low resistivity copper alloys for wire, glass insulators, and alloy filaments for heaters/lights we can all enjoy many benefits of electric devices in our homes
2. Automobile -- Ease of manufacturability of many metals through stamping, molding, etc. helped bring prices down to what the common person can afford. You may say "Assembly Line" did it, but first you need materials that can be easily formed on an assembly line.
3. Airplane -- Aluminum, Carbon Fiber, Beryllium. Second only to good design, materials science is what makes airplanes lighter, faster, and better.
4. Water Supply and Distribution -- This is a tough one, but I know that they have developed special clays for irrigation canals in the southwest that soak up to 11 times their weight in water.
5. Electronics -- Can anyone say semiconductors? Photolithography? Huge single crystal silicon wafers? They're all high-performance materials and materials manufacturing.
6. Radio and Television -- There's a lot of overlap here, but again, materials science helped bring the costs down to put one in every homes' living room.
7. Agricultural Mechanization -- High strength steels, efficient combustion engines, all resulting from better materials
8. Computers -- semiconductors, semiconductors, semiconducts, and of yeah, LCD displays! (you guessed it, high performance materials)
9. Telephone -- Low resistivity copper wire as well as eventual fiber optic cables (all high performance materials) can connect me to my mom in Tokyo almost instantly.
10. Air Conditioning and Refrigeration -- Freon, and new thermo-electric materials
11. Highways -- Concrete is the most used material in the world. Cheap, high-tech concrete makes many roads possible.
12. Spacecraft -- See airplanes.
13. Internet -- fiber-optics are the backbone of the internet. Materials science developed the glass and manufacturing techniques for it.
14. Imaging -- Optical - glass lenses, MRI - high power magnetic materials, SEM - e- emitting Tungsten tips, many more.
15. Household Appliances -- resulting from cheaper plastics, refrigeration materials, and manufacturing techniques of metals.
16. Health Technologies -- Shape memory alloys, Inert metals, ceramics.
17. Petroleum and Petrochemical Technologies -- I'm assuming that this includes plastics.
18. Laser and Fiber Optics -- The basis of a laser is a single material that emits it's own wavelength of light. Mr. Borosilicate fiber optic cable is high tech all by himself.
19. Nuclear Technologies -- I don't want to limit this to Bombs, but the required spherical shell of pure Beryllium is a materials' feat in itself.
20. High-performance Materials -- this is what I've been bragging about!
Wait, before you flame me, I'm not saying that materials science was solely involved for each of these, but it played at least a major role.
--
What about another sim game where you act as a software developer with others around the world trying to create a new web browser. To keep things realistic, this network based game forces you to communicate with other players via newsgroups and emails.
To keep things interesting, how about giving it a dinosaur theme and naming it something that rhymes with Godzilla!
--
...42 by any chance? ;-)
I don't think so...because then we would know what the question is, and we all know what happens to the earth 5 minutes before the question is figured out. The accurate mass of the Earth would be useless after the Vogons demolish the planet.
--
wow.
we weigh ~6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons, we gain ~200 metric tons per year.
That's really significant!
\end{sarcasm}
Where does the earth ever hide away these lbs?
Give up? Rosie O'Donnel
--
There a was an experiment where a bunch of robots were designed to
1. move at random
2. pick up a block if they weren't already carrying one and they buimped into one
3. set down a block it they were carrying one and they bumped into another one
This sounds relatively random, but when many of these robots were released into an arena with random blocks everywhere, the robots eventually put all of the blocks into one big pile.
I think that these students are trying to find a pattern within the links.
It's the same thing that makes well written massively parallel computing algorithms so effective...and interesting!
--
It happened when I chose www.perl.org too. I think it has more to do with using Active Server Pages without proper tweaking.
Oh well,
it was a neat idea, anyway.
-
I was refering to the screenshots on this page, not the ones on the first page.
--
Actually,
I'm more interested in knowing what window manager they are using in the screenshots for that Cycas 2.0 program. Those windows look really cool and I don't remember seeing that one at themes.org.
Can anyone tell me?
--
I have two I-openers.
...and Redhat 6.2 installed on the other.
I have Mandrake 7.0 installed on one...
I've decided that the best distro is the first one that I can get USB ethernet working on. I've already run into some problems with Mandrake, so now I will try it on Redhat for a while.
Oh yeah... Mandrake has the advantage of Xemacs included on the cd, but they both have wonderful installation programs, and installed flawlessly for me.
--
It's nice to hear that it will be released supporting all of the major OSes. Let's hope that this isn't just a marketing ploy, and, that most new hardware will follow this plan.
Things seem to be swinging back to the way that it was in the '80s with many different OS's. This time, however, we have standardized hardware (mostly).
Making Linux into an adequate gaming platform also depends upon immediate support when hardware is released. I think the ATI Radeon is a step in the right direction.
--
Not to mention Donna Shirley's management of the other Mars exploration mission. Remember? The one that was a huge success.
...you guessed it... strategies for managing groups of creative researchers and developers. Although I haven't read the book, based upon a NPR interview, I believe to be quite interesting.
Donna Shirley and her team produced that little robot that lasted longer then it was designed for, and the whole project ended up UNDER BUDGET.
Shirley also wrote a book (online version) called Managing Creativity full of
If NASA continues to tap into resources such as Donna Shirley, then I believe that they will many successful projects ahead.
--
Portable GPS jamming is one less reason to buy an I-opener, as if the store you bought it from giving away your credit card number wasn't a good enough reason.
-
Amazon still holds patents for jpeg, png, and www until 2006!
-
Here's one of my favorite quotes from Gleick's Chaos:
Go Chaos Theory!!
One things that creeps me out in this book is how he refers to a lot of people in past tense, as though they were dead. I know some of these people, and it seems like he is refering to them as being dead! They aren't dead yet.
-
You should have read the article instead of posting as fast as you could. He states that AI is already here in different forms.
;-)
The little Microsoft Office2000 Cat that answers all my questions is a form of AI (1st category according to article).
Microsoft might eventually have a NT-assistant...
You can select from a paper-clip, office shredder, or cartoon 2-year-tech-degree System-Administrator to answer all of your questions. With a little more work, this NT-Assistant might replace the real thing! For a little realism, the NT-assistant could get frustrated when you showed it a CD that you stuck in the microwave and said that the CD-burner wasn't working.
-
Hey, I can't wait until all my computationally expensive projects can be done on someone elses computer.
Having to upload/download images can be annoying, though, even if you have a fast connection. Has anyone developed a secure way that a webserver could mount a local directory? What about an insecure way?
-