The problem isn't the distance, it's the speed. We can very, very easily lift something 100 miles straight up. No problem whatsoever, and we can do it for far, far less money than we currently spend on rocket launches.
There's just one little problem: the damn thing would just fall straight back down again.
To be in orbit, you don't need to just be 100 miles up, you also need to be travelling something like 20,000 miles per hour. That acceleration is what takes 9 days.
One very common symptom of schizophrenia is hallucination, and I was a bit surprised (although I immediately realized that I shouldn't have been) when I read that hallucinations can involve any of the five senses, or combinations of them. Tactile hallucinations are quite common.
Actually, auditory hallucinations are by far the most common kind experienced by schizophrenics. The stereotypical "hearing voices" symptom is actually one of the defining characteristics of the disorder.
According to the DSM, "hallucinations consist[ing] of a voice keeping up a running commentary on the person's behavior or thoughts, or two or more voices conversing with each other" is by itself sufficient to diagnose a person with schizophrenia. Well, provided that drug use can be ruled out, it has been happening for a significant length of time, etc.
This isn't true. The energy that a particle contains has no upper bound, even if its velocity does. Its velocity is simply asymptotic to c.
True, but irrelevant. Within the Swartzchild radius, nothing can escape a black hole's gravity. Period. Doesn't matter if it is travelling at 99% the speed of light or 99.999999999999999999999999999% the speed of light relative to the black hole, it still can't escape.
The entire universe crammed into a small space would have one hell of a Swartzchild radius, and nothing within this radius could escape unless it were moving faster than the speed of light. Therefore, all Big Bang theories that I am familiar with introduce the notion that space itself was expanding, effectively allowing matter to move (relative to other matter) faster than the speed of light and therefore escape the gravitational pull at the center. Without (effective) faster-than-light travel, how could the universe ever have expanded with that sort of gravity present?
I admit that I am not a cosmologist, but I certainly thought that this was the reasoning behind the theory of inflation.
Otherwise you'll get a uniform distribution (unless you use java).
Huh? The 'simple' way of generating random numbers in Java, java.lang.Math.random(), is uniform. You have to use java.util.Random.nextGaussian() if you want a Gaussian distribution.
Much better to remove content from the equation, so the student can effectively learn how to present ideas in a useful and persuasive manner regardless of what the idea may be.
Are you suggesting that there exists a machine which can judge if an idea is presented in a "useful and persuasive manner"?
Funny, the machine on my desk has enough trouble just telling whether a comma is in the right place or not. I can't wait to see something that can judge how useful and persuasive English prose is.
There are quite a number of valid GR metrics which describe space which expands faster than the speed of light, and in fact, it's thought that it did expand faster than the speed of light during the inflationary period.
I would take this one step further and state that we know one of the following things is true:
A) Faster-than-light expansion of the distance between two objects is possible
-or-
B) The Big Bang theory is completely and utterly wrong
We know that one of those two facts is true, with 100% confidence. How can I be so sure?
Well, think about the starting condition for the big bang: all of the matter in the universe crammed into a small space. Now, think about how much gravity the ENTIRE UNIVERSE has. Even if every particle in the universe were flying away from the center at 99.9999999% the speed of light, the gravity would be so unbelievably strong that the universe would near-instantaneously re-collapse into the biggest black hole imaginable. Remember, light itself, the fastest thing in the universe, can't escape from a black hole weighing a measly 10 solar masses. Surely a mass of 10 billion trillion solar masses would somewhat more difficult to get away from.
Yet, here we are. So obviously either A) the matter somehow moved faster than the speed of light (which is the Inflationary Period -- technically, matter was still limited to the speed of light relative to space, but space itself was expanding at many times the speed of light), or B) the Big Bang theory is completely wrong.
The fact that Mythbusters couldn't do it, doesn't mean it can't happen. Within the last 30-days, on the local news here in Dallas, I saw a static discharge start a car fire while at the pump. The person failed to ground themselves prior to starting to pump fuel. Once the vapors were in the air, they touched *something* (I don't recall where the spark occurred, sorry). Swoosh! Suddenly, the car was on fire. The guy experienced minor burns up his arm, which was holding the pump.
And that is exactly what was said on Mythbusters -- the danger is in static electricity. They showed a number of such fires being started.
The idea that a cell phone would start a fire borders on ludicrous, though. To start a fire, it would have to generate intense heat. The only reasonable way for a tiny electrical device with no heating elements to generate such heat is by creating a spark. But a spark represents a tremendous waste of energy -- why are you bothering to use your battery power to ionize the air, raise it to extreme temperatures, and generate the resultant light and sound? Cell phones didn't get to the kind of battery life they have now by wasting their energy producing sparks.
Either A) something was seriously wrong with the guy's phone, or B) the fire started via a spark of static electricity, which is a well-documented occurrence.
I don't have full-blown face blindness, but I'm not terribly far away.
If two people look vaguely similar, I have tremendous difficulty telling them apart. I don't mean "they could be twins" similar either -- even "they could be second cousins" can seriously throw me off. I can meet a person, spend twenty minutes talking to that person, walk away and come back, and be completely unable to pick that person out of a small crowd. Depending upon how "average" the person's face was, I might not even experience any sense of familiarity at all when looking at them.
You learn other tricks for recognizing people after a while. I usually note what people are wearing, so that if I run into them again the same day I have a good shot at recognizing them. Hair color and style help a lot, and tend to remain constant for a substantial time. I'm also very good at identifying voices, so I often wait to hear a person speak before I feel confident that I have correctly identified them. I also rely on my wife to help me remember people a lot -- fortunately she's healthy in this regard, and very understanding of the difficulty I have.
To give you an idea of how bad things are, a long time ago I was away on business for two months. My girlfriend (now my wife) and I had been together for two years at that point, but I hadn't seen her during those two months.
She had changed her hairstyle while I was away, so when I got off the plane I didn't recognize her. I noticed this girl smiling at me, and I thought she looked sort of like my girlfriend, but it wasn't until I was within five feet of her that I was sure it was her.
Can you imagine dating a girl for two years, and then having trouble recognizing her after a mere two-month absence? And I don't have face blindness. I just have moderate difficulty identifying people, compared to the full-blown disorder.
So, yes, call it a "culture of euphamism" all you like, but I certainly believe that this is a real disability that affects real people.
Re:a real use for this kind of technology
on
The Face Detector
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· Score: 1
Ok, I'll bite. I don't get it. Seriously.
The implication is that the robbers are wearing masks of Ronald Reagan. Watch the movie Point Break, it will make more sense.
The face looks horribly, dramatically fake to me. Maybe it's because I'm married to a professional portrait photographer and used to studying photographs of models, but the lighting and skin are very obviously fake.
Faith is a belief that lacks evidence to support it. To this extent, atheism is a faith just as much as Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Nonsense. Do you believe in fairies? The Easter Bunny? Is there an invisible, bloodthirsty unicorn hiding behind you right now, waiting to pounce?
I certainly hope the answer to those three questions is "no". It does not require "faith" to believe that there is no Easter Bunny. It is simply that there is no evidence to suggest that the Easter Bunny actually exists, therefore it is more logical to believe that there is no Easter Bunny.
Non-belief in God is a matter of logic and Occam's Razor, not faith.
In order to do color reproduction without a backlight, you need overlapping colored pixels, and that is an order of magnitude harder than just putting colored pixels next to each other, as on a TFT or CRT screen. If you want to create white and put red, green, and blue reflecting pixels next to each other, the result will be reflecting roughly 1/3 of the light in the best case, which is grey. It's comparable to a colored mobile-phone display with the backlight switched off.
Wrong on several counts.
1) The colors do not need to overlap. Why would they? As you noted, monitors use side-by-side colors rather than overlapping colors, and e-paper would be no different in this regard.
2) As this is a reflective display rather than an emissive display, the primary colors would be cyan, magenta, and yellow (possibly with black), not RGB.
3) I have no idea where you get the "1/3 of the light" figure from. This technology is quite different than LCDs -- LCDs have fundamental limitations on their ability to transmit light due to the use of polarizing filters. e-paper does not use polarizing filters, just plain ol' reflection, and this means that (theoretically) there is nothing stopping e-paper from having brightness comparable to good paper. It's just a matter of refining the technology.
The real reason you haven't seen a color version yet, and aren't likely to anytime soon, is that e-paper is currently a strictly on/off display. It does not do grayscales at all. Suppose you figured out how to triple the resolution of this device and switch from B&W to CMY. You now have a display capable of showing exactly eight colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, red, green, blue, black, and white. That's it. You need intermediate steps (say, 50% cyan and 25% yellow) to display any other colors.
Either somebody needs to figure out how to make e-paper do grayscales, or the resolution needs to be way higher so that many subpixels of each color can be devoted to each pixel.
Progressive displays simply turn on or off a pixel and set a color to it. Non-progressive displays, like your CRT, constantly refreshes the information in a sweep across the entire screen. Thus it has a refresh rate.
That is not what progressive means. Progressive is the opposite of interlaced -- an interlaced display alternates updating the even and odd scan lines, while a progressive display updates all of the scan lines in one pass. Whether it requires constant refreshing (CRTs) or not (LCDs and Plasmas) is immaterial.
Even when it's something more sophisticated than a text file, it can still be faked pretty easily.
So wouldn't a log like this be completely inadmissable in any court anyway?
Any evidence can be faked. When the police find a suspect's fingerprints, do you think they hand the jury the prints so that they can compare them against the suspect's fingers? Nope, they put a fingerprint expert on the stand and let him testify. Hell, even if they did hand them to the jury to examine, how could you be sure that the prints were actually lifted from where they said they were?
Likewise, they don't hand the jury a sample of blood and have them do DNA analysis. A forensic scientist takes the stand and testifies that there is only a 1 in X chance that it could be anybody but the defendent. He doesn't collect the sample at all -- somebody else did -- and even assuming he's telling the truth about the results, the jury has to take his word for it.
Any yet, many convictions are based on exactly this. Somebody takes the stand, claims to be an expert, and tells the jury something. Hopefully they are really an expert, hopefully they are telling the truth, and hopefully if they aren't the defendent's attorneys are sharp enough to prove it, but if you are concerned about how easy it is to fake something, the train left a long time ago.
And, I should probably point out, lots of the "science" behind certain kinds of forensic analysis is highly suspect. There was just recently an article about bullet lead analysis in Science News which strongly implies that people put behind bars on the strength of bullet lead analysis may have been wrongly imprisoned -- and that "expert witnesses" on bullet lead analysis have for years been giving testimony that amounts to little more than lies.
What's my point? Well, yes, chat logs can be faked easily. But they are no easier to fake than any other kind of evidence you care to present in court.
A friend of mine who's done use tax stuff for banks says that putting a "0" on that line is better than leaving it blank. If you put a "0", you have made a declaration that you don't owe any use tax, which might very well be true. If you put nothing, you haven't filled the form out properly, which is a Bad Thing.
Then your friend has no idea what he is talking about. Non-applicable lines on tax return forms are usually left blank instead of being filled with zeroes. My frickin' tax software leaves such lines blank, so I fail to believe that it's a big audit trigger.
I remember green hair, but I haven't kept up with the series past the original.
In the original NES game, she had green hair when you were playing as her without the suit, but brown hair when you saw her during the endings.
Metroid 2 was black and white.
In every single other Metroid game she has been featured with blonde hair. Given that the NES was so primitive that the Metroid designers were unable to even keep her hair color consistent throughout the game, I think we can safely discount the NES Metroid game -- Samus is definitely blonde.
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That's a long trip- 9 days to go 100 miles or so.
The problem isn't the distance, it's the speed. We can very, very easily lift something 100 miles straight up. No problem whatsoever, and we can do it for far, far less money than we currently spend on rocket launches.
There's just one little problem: the damn thing would just fall straight back down again.
To be in orbit, you don't need to just be 100 miles up, you also need to be travelling something like 20,000 miles per hour. That acceleration is what takes 9 days.
"Drug store"? Is there an Americanized version of HHGTTG? My copy says "chemist", not "drug store".
One very common symptom of schizophrenia is hallucination, and I was a bit surprised (although I immediately realized that I shouldn't have been) when I read that hallucinations can involve any of the five senses, or combinations of them. Tactile hallucinations are quite common.
Actually, auditory hallucinations are by far the most common kind experienced by schizophrenics. The stereotypical "hearing voices" symptom is actually one of the defining characteristics of the disorder.
According to the DSM, "hallucinations consist[ing] of a voice keeping up a running commentary on the person's behavior or thoughts, or two or more voices conversing with each other" is by itself sufficient to diagnose a person with schizophrenia. Well, provided that drug use can be ruled out, it has been happening for a significant length of time, etc.
This isn't true. The energy that a particle contains has no upper bound, even if its velocity does. Its velocity is simply asymptotic to c.
True, but irrelevant. Within the Swartzchild radius, nothing can escape a black hole's gravity. Period. Doesn't matter if it is travelling at 99% the speed of light or 99.999999999999999999999999999% the speed of light relative to the black hole, it still can't escape.
The entire universe crammed into a small space would have one hell of a Swartzchild radius, and nothing within this radius could escape unless it were moving faster than the speed of light. Therefore, all Big Bang theories that I am familiar with introduce the notion that space itself was expanding, effectively allowing matter to move (relative to other matter) faster than the speed of light and therefore escape the gravitational pull at the center. Without (effective) faster-than-light travel, how could the universe ever have expanded with that sort of gravity present?
I admit that I am not a cosmologist, but I certainly thought that this was the reasoning behind the theory of inflation.
Otherwise you'll get a uniform distribution (unless you use java).
Huh? The 'simple' way of generating random numbers in Java, java.lang.Math.random(), is uniform. You have to use java.util.Random.nextGaussian() if you want a Gaussian distribution.
Much better to remove content from the equation, so the student can effectively learn how to present ideas in a useful and persuasive manner regardless of what the idea may be.
Are you suggesting that there exists a machine which can judge if an idea is presented in a "useful and persuasive manner"?
Funny, the machine on my desk has enough trouble just telling whether a comma is in the right place or not. I can't wait to see something that can judge how useful and persuasive English prose is.
There are quite a number of valid GR metrics which describe space which expands faster than the speed of light, and in fact, it's thought that it did expand faster than the speed of light during the inflationary period.
I would take this one step further and state that we know one of the following things is true:
A) Faster-than-light expansion of the distance between two objects is possible
-or-
B) The Big Bang theory is completely and utterly wrong
We know that one of those two facts is true, with 100% confidence. How can I be so sure?
Well, think about the starting condition for the big bang: all of the matter in the universe crammed into a small space. Now, think about how much gravity the ENTIRE UNIVERSE has. Even if every particle in the universe were flying away from the center at 99.9999999% the speed of light, the gravity would be so unbelievably strong that the universe would near-instantaneously re-collapse into the biggest black hole imaginable. Remember, light itself, the fastest thing in the universe, can't escape from a black hole weighing a measly 10 solar masses. Surely a mass of 10 billion trillion solar masses would somewhat more difficult to get away from.
Yet, here we are. So obviously either A) the matter somehow moved faster than the speed of light (which is the Inflationary Period -- technically, matter was still limited to the speed of light relative to space, but space itself was expanding at many times the speed of light), or B) the Big Bang theory is completely wrong.
The fact that Mythbusters couldn't do it, doesn't mean it can't happen. Within the last 30-days, on the local news here in Dallas, I saw a static discharge start a car fire while at the pump. The person failed to ground themselves prior to starting to pump fuel. Once the vapors were in the air, they touched *something* (I don't recall where the spark occurred, sorry). Swoosh! Suddenly, the car was on fire. The guy experienced minor burns up his arm, which was holding the pump.
And that is exactly what was said on Mythbusters -- the danger is in static electricity. They showed a number of such fires being started.
The idea that a cell phone would start a fire borders on ludicrous, though. To start a fire, it would have to generate intense heat. The only reasonable way for a tiny electrical device with no heating elements to generate such heat is by creating a spark. But a spark represents a tremendous waste of energy -- why are you bothering to use your battery power to ionize the air, raise it to extreme temperatures, and generate the resultant light and sound? Cell phones didn't get to the kind of battery life they have now by wasting their energy producing sparks.
Either A) something was seriously wrong with the guy's phone, or B) the fire started via a spark of static electricity, which is a well-documented occurrence.
This would keep people from installing rouge wireless networks.
I presume that beige wireless networks are okay?
Except that the 802.11b vendors seem to have some hardening against microwave ovens built into the drivers and firmware.
That's amazing, considering that I have never once been able to use a wireless device within twenty feet of an operating microwave.
I assume you've ruled out nearsightedness?
I am very nearsighted, actually, but I wear glasses. My vision is corrected to 20/20.
I don't have full-blown face blindness, but I'm not terribly far away.
If two people look vaguely similar, I have tremendous difficulty telling them apart. I don't mean "they could be twins" similar either -- even "they could be second cousins" can seriously throw me off. I can meet a person, spend twenty minutes talking to that person, walk away and come back, and be completely unable to pick that person out of a small crowd. Depending upon how "average" the person's face was, I might not even experience any sense of familiarity at all when looking at them.
You learn other tricks for recognizing people after a while. I usually note what people are wearing, so that if I run into them again the same day I have a good shot at recognizing them. Hair color and style help a lot, and tend to remain constant for a substantial time. I'm also very good at identifying voices, so I often wait to hear a person speak before I feel confident that I have correctly identified them. I also rely on my wife to help me remember people a lot -- fortunately she's healthy in this regard, and very understanding of the difficulty I have.
To give you an idea of how bad things are, a long time ago I was away on business for two months. My girlfriend (now my wife) and I had been together for two years at that point, but I hadn't seen her during those two months.
She had changed her hairstyle while I was away, so when I got off the plane I didn't recognize her. I noticed this girl smiling at me, and I thought she looked sort of like my girlfriend, but it wasn't until I was within five feet of her that I was sure it was her.
Can you imagine dating a girl for two years, and then having trouble recognizing her after a mere two-month absence? And I don't have face blindness. I just have moderate difficulty identifying people, compared to the full-blown disorder.
So, yes, call it a "culture of euphamism" all you like, but I certainly believe that this is a real disability that affects real people.
Ok, I'll bite. I don't get it. Seriously.
The implication is that the robbers are wearing masks of Ronald Reagan. Watch the movie Point Break, it will make more sense.
I don't download illegal music -- but I sure as hell do rip CDs that don't belong to me.
So you don't download music illegally from the internet -- you just copy it illegally from a physical CD.
And you seem to be implying that it's somehow different...
The face looks horribly, dramatically fake to me. Maybe it's because I'm married to a professional portrait photographer and used to studying photographs of models, but the lighting and skin are very obviously fake.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. About the only nightmares I ever have involve my teeth breaking or falling out.
God, I used to love Forth. Incredibly elegant for its time.
Ummm ... because I like to be able to see my screen when the lights are on?
I'd like to think that people are stupid about this, but I have to be honest, it's exactly the strategy I'd employ.
And you would therefore be falling into the trap of the Gambler's Fallacy, just like most of the idiots that think they can beat the house at Vegas.
Faith is a belief that lacks evidence to support it. To this extent, atheism is a faith just as much as Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Nonsense. Do you believe in fairies? The Easter Bunny? Is there an invisible, bloodthirsty unicorn hiding behind you right now, waiting to pounce?
I certainly hope the answer to those three questions is "no". It does not require "faith" to believe that there is no Easter Bunny. It is simply that there is no evidence to suggest that the Easter Bunny actually exists, therefore it is more logical to believe that there is no Easter Bunny.
Non-belief in God is a matter of logic and Occam's Razor, not faith.
In order to do color reproduction without a backlight, you need overlapping colored pixels, and that is an order of magnitude harder than just putting colored pixels next to each other, as on a TFT or CRT screen. If you want to create white and put red, green, and blue reflecting pixels next to each other, the result will be reflecting roughly 1/3 of the light in the best case, which is grey. It's comparable to a colored mobile-phone display with the backlight switched off.
Wrong on several counts.
1) The colors do not need to overlap. Why would they? As you noted, monitors use side-by-side colors rather than overlapping colors, and e-paper would be no different in this regard.
2) As this is a reflective display rather than an emissive display, the primary colors would be cyan, magenta, and yellow (possibly with black), not RGB.
3) I have no idea where you get the "1/3 of the light" figure from. This technology is quite different than LCDs -- LCDs have fundamental limitations on their ability to transmit light due to the use of polarizing filters. e-paper does not use polarizing filters, just plain ol' reflection, and this means that (theoretically) there is nothing stopping e-paper from having brightness comparable to good paper. It's just a matter of refining the technology.
The real reason you haven't seen a color version yet, and aren't likely to anytime soon, is that e-paper is currently a strictly on/off display. It does not do grayscales at all. Suppose you figured out how to triple the resolution of this device and switch from B&W to CMY. You now have a display capable of showing exactly eight colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, red, green, blue, black, and white. That's it. You need intermediate steps (say, 50% cyan and 25% yellow) to display any other colors.
Either somebody needs to figure out how to make e-paper do grayscales, or the resolution needs to be way higher so that many subpixels of each color can be devoted to each pixel.
Progressive displays simply turn on or off a pixel and set a color to it. Non-progressive displays, like your CRT, constantly refreshes the information in a sweep across the entire screen. Thus it has a refresh rate.
That is not what progressive means. Progressive is the opposite of interlaced -- an interlaced display alternates updating the even and odd scan lines, while a progressive display updates all of the scan lines in one pass. Whether it requires constant refreshing (CRTs) or not (LCDs and Plasmas) is immaterial.
Even when it's something more sophisticated than a text file, it can still be faked pretty easily.
So wouldn't a log like this be completely inadmissable in any court anyway?
Any evidence can be faked. When the police find a suspect's fingerprints, do you think they hand the jury the prints so that they can compare them against the suspect's fingers? Nope, they put a fingerprint expert on the stand and let him testify. Hell, even if they did hand them to the jury to examine, how could you be sure that the prints were actually lifted from where they said they were?
Likewise, they don't hand the jury a sample of blood and have them do DNA analysis. A forensic scientist takes the stand and testifies that there is only a 1 in X chance that it could be anybody but the defendent. He doesn't collect the sample at all -- somebody else did -- and even assuming he's telling the truth about the results, the jury has to take his word for it.
Any yet, many convictions are based on exactly this. Somebody takes the stand, claims to be an expert, and tells the jury something. Hopefully they are really an expert, hopefully they are telling the truth, and hopefully if they aren't the defendent's attorneys are sharp enough to prove it, but if you are concerned about how easy it is to fake something, the train left a long time ago.
And, I should probably point out, lots of the "science" behind certain kinds of forensic analysis is highly suspect. There was just recently an article about bullet lead analysis in Science News which strongly implies that people put behind bars on the strength of bullet lead analysis may have been wrongly imprisoned -- and that "expert witnesses" on bullet lead analysis have for years been giving testimony that amounts to little more than lies.
What's my point? Well, yes, chat logs can be faked easily. But they are no easier to fake than any other kind of evidence you care to present in court.
A friend of mine who's done use tax stuff for banks says that putting a "0" on that line is better than leaving it blank. If you put a "0", you have made a declaration that you don't owe any use tax, which might very well be true. If you put nothing, you haven't filled the form out properly, which is a Bad Thing.
Then your friend has no idea what he is talking about. Non-applicable lines on tax return forms are usually left blank instead of being filled with zeroes. My frickin' tax software leaves such lines blank, so I fail to believe that it's a big audit trigger.
I remember green hair, but I haven't kept up with the series past the original.
In the original NES game, she had green hair when you were playing as her without the suit, but brown hair when you saw her during the endings.
Metroid 2 was black and white.
In every single other Metroid game she has been featured with blonde hair. Given that the NES was so primitive that the Metroid designers were unable to even keep her hair color consistent throughout the game, I think we can safely discount the NES Metroid game -- Samus is definitely blonde.