As the designer, we tried to take people like you into account. If you're willing to solder your own boards and deal with heat sinking on your own, you can buy bare boards and use the Digikey BOM we made available on the documentation page to make your own for perhaps $100-$200 not including whatever you value your time at.
There's also a 5% discount using the coupon code hobb123.
Feel free to join the development lists if you want to get more ideas about how to do a less expensive system. I certainly want one too... but most of the cheap RGB fixtures out there are, in my opinion, unhackable garbage. RGB strips are cool though, if you just want mood lighting.
w/r/t the comment below about 800 lumens being as bright as a standard 60W light bulb, I should point out why, although true, that's not actually a sane comparison.
First, the lights here is colored to start with. Take a 60W incandescent and filter out everything but red, and you have a very dim light.
Second, it is 800 lumens because we used royal blue (extremely pretty color) instead of standard blue. The difference in perceptible brightness, in my opinion and the opinion of everyone who has seen a side by side comparison, is that there is no difference. However, the conversion from lumens to watts declares that it is 200 lumens dimmer. I think that there is a serious flaw in the way we calculate bright-adjusted conversion factors.
Third, the light is focused into a tight cone, meaning we lose almost no light due to light going "up" into the fixture. In a standard 60W, you're spending about half your light illuminating the ceiling. We don't do that, so the lux (lumens per square meter) is much higher. Try looking directly into one of these lights for more than a second, and you'll understand the difference.
There is a difference between 60W from a white incandescent and a 800 lumen LED fixture. Yes, technically the number of lumens thrown out are the same, and it would be dumb to use the LED light to produce white light, but for colored light it is at least an order of magnitude brighter.
As the person who designed the device and the case, I have to question your ability to do a valid cost analysis, but if you'd be interested in helping out with bringing the cost down we'd love to have you. You can join our hardware mailing list at http://saikoled.com/mailinglists/ Wramsdel is completely correct, I have to pay the initial software developers who spent hundreds of hours developing the base system so that it was in a usable state, and I think it's not terribly fair to argue that the thousand plus hours I put into design, prototyping, assembly, and programming is not valuable. This is a one-man shop, and it's taken me three years to get from my original light fixture covered on slashdot in 2008 (http://led-artwork.com) to this one, and I can assure you that the time investment is well worth it in quality. These things are good enough to compete with CK light fixtures (although I still need to finish my DMX -> OSC converter, I'm kind of totally out of money at the moment though).
Most of the cost issue is that in small quantities *any* machining is expensive. Just having the 8 holes drilled and tapped into the aluminum piping was $17, for instance. If I was casting 1000 cases, and hiring FoxConn employees to assemble them, and not paying the software or hardware developers anything for their time, sure maybe the price could get down to $300, but $150 is crazy. The raw parts for the wifi module are $60 alone, not including any case whatsoever, nor the included arduino, nor the power supply, and so on.
Also, Wramsdel is completely correct that I have to license patents from CK/Philips to sell these, and although the agreement is confidential, the amount is not trivial (and took lawyer time and my time to make happen). Additionally, I am trying to sell these to clubs as well so that I can offer cheaper versions to hobbyists (see below for how to get them cheaper). They are comparable to CK fixtures of similar price and brightness, are easier to install and use, and have free software to make them actually do things, as opposed to spending another $3k on control hardware and software.
In any case, my goal with this is to get the price down to the point where I would happily buy lots of them. Since I'm poor, the only way I can do that is to get orders for enough of them that I can drop the price. Suggesting, however, that the price should be the cost of the components alone is unreasonable for any sane business. I want to be able to do this for a living and as a community service, not as a community service alone.
In any case, since I want to get this off the ground so I can drop the price, I will point out a few things that you can do to drop the price.
Buy the kit and build it yourself. My time is valuable (believe it or not), and I happily designed the product offering to be such that you could buy *everything* that you need to build your own, minus a screwdriver, for $680. I have a (hard) day job, and I'll pay top dollar for your time in doing it yourself.
Use our hacker coupon code - hobb123. 5% discount. More than that I can't really support right now, since I need to get about $30k in order to build a full run of 100 lights.
If you're really strapped for cash, buy the bare boards, and use the bills of materials which I *made fully downloadable from the site*, upload those to digikey, and source your own parts. Use the instructions I wrote for how to lay down the solder paste, place the components, and trivially reflow solder them on a hot plate. You won't have a case, but it sounds like you can surely manufacture your own, buy a power supply, and buy an arduino or whatever control board you like for $50. Go for it. If you just want raw component costs, excluding arduino and power supply and case, you can probably do it for $200 ($33 each special) or maybe even under $150 if you build a lot of them. Even better, you can put on your own colors of LEDs! I used red, green, and royal blue... you cou
Olin seems to doing fairly well. I've found everyone I met from there to be a solid engineer so far, and they were founded my freshman year. They were close by my actual school, so I got to interact with them from time to time.
If you really believe that the people around you are not smart, then I think (as someone who has a PhD from one of the big name Ivy League schools =P) that you have perhaps an inflated opinion of your own skills... a common problem at said schools.
I got accepted to both, and in both cases their offer for financial aid resulted in lower total costs than Purdue or Rose-Hulman in Indiana. My impression has been that since I was a freshman (2001), they have both gotten even more generous with financial aid for low income students.
OTOH, you're screwed if you have rich parents. They assume your parents will pay for your college, and that is simply not always the case. One of my friends has $120k+ of student loans because his dad was rich, but refused to help in paying his tuition. My friend would have been better off financially if he could have legally been separated from his parents, but like that's going to happen. Lame. Because of that, I was saddled with small enough debt to go on to grad school and generally be more adventurous after graduation with entrepreneurship while he had to get a job right away. Not very fair.
This is total nonsense. I saw the overall budget at MIT, and a breakdown. Undergraduate is a *LOSS* financially for them. When asked why they continue doing it, they say it's so that they can keep a good reputation, and as community service.
Also agree. I had a serious accident (no burns, luckily, but shattered everything) that resulted in me being unable to use my hand for about 6 months (and after that, with only extremely limited range of motion). By the end, I was able to type and generally do things with a single hand alone that previously took two hands (like typing). It will take some practice, but like any motor skill, practice will change the brain pathways to make it feel natural eventually.
With these sorts of things, my opinion is that attitude is everything. You *can* do the things you want to do (albeit not as quickly), and you *are* going to be able to master those new motor skills. It will be difficult, but you can do it.
A recent game like that is called Globulation 2 (Linux, not sure about other platforms). Instead of telling unit X to do task Y, you say "I want task Y done, with as close to N units working on it as possible." and the AI for your team does its best to fulfill your requests. If you ask for impossible things (say, building 20 buildings, each with 10 units, while you only have 100 units), it instead prioritizes as well as it can based on available resources and location of units. You can also script your own AI if you like, they have a large group of people that work hard on making the AI as strong as possible by trying to script their own winning strategies. It's sort of a modern extension of the ancient game "Simant" where you could put down smells and the ants would respond accordingly without individual control. You paint areas you want scouted (or not), and the scouts go and check it out. You paint areas where you want defenders, and your defenders are allocated as well as possible.
My primary complaint was the lack of diversity in the game. Only three unit types, which could be upgraded along only a single path, and maybe a half dozen or a dozen building types. It was really entertaining until I solved the game to my satisfaction, and I haven't really played since. A fork with more types of units might be a serious contender for best game on Linux.
Ah yes... I seem to remember this particular method resulting in second degree burns on two of my friends when the fire flashed back to the bottle of lighter fluid and exploded.
Not recommended. Steady streams of flammable liquid connecting flame to a fuel bottle is a stupid idea.
Because in his proposed solution you require one IT person per five staff scientists. =) Extra!
I worked at MIT, which has amazing tech support from what I experienced, and even there I was still *setting up* the databases myself, even if they did set up SQL for me. If I hadn't known how to use PHP (sigh) to make websites, I still wouldn't have had much of a frontend... all in all, quite a bit of work for me, and I didn't bother in the end.
Other universities do not have *nearly* the level of IT support that I saw there. Want a SQL server? Better buy a computer to run it on then, and hire a postdoc that knows linux.
As someone who just finished their PhD in materials science, and is now doing a PostDoc, I found myself basically doing the same thing you are doing. I found a few flaws with my original directory structure, but the one I've adopted for my PostDoc is rather designed to avoid those issues.
As someone else mentioned (so I won't bother), while I'm fine at programming, and have built SQL databses, as someone who's job is *not* programming, it seems like a horrible waste of time to set up such complex tools when there aren't even any frontends that would display all of the data in a single application. For instance, my XRD data is in.xml files that have to be translated to a graphic to be interesting, my TEM images are graphics, my GC data is in pdfs and openoffice spreadsheets, and so on. Similarly, although as someone who was originally a physicist and am somewhat of a magician at matlab, I found that it took me less time to make publication quality graphics in *OpenOffice* than in either Matlab, Mathematica, or Microsoft Office. How messed up is that, right? I found that with every tool I used (and I did try briefly some other more exotic/expensive ones recommended by colleagues), I had to do so much postprocessing to get sane default settings for the graphics; i.e. size 36 fonts, line widths of at least 4 points, colors that colorblind people can distinguish as the first two options (wtf gnuplot), a graphic that takes up the *entire* bounding box so I can make the sides, tops and bottoms of graphics align, and the ability to easily combine graphics using OO draw into larger graphics to save space by sharing legends and such, not to mention the ability to export as perfect pdf files for including in my latex source... but I digress.
Here is the layout I have used very successfully to organize similarly many thousands of experiments worth of data, graphics, papers, presentations, and my own writing. It's a little odd in that I organize in one direction for some types of documents and the exact opposite for others, but I find it to be extremely natural as this order is the way I naturally think about the data.
I. Project Folder (each project gets its own folder - I find I'm usually doing 3-5)
1. Data Folder
i. Data Type Folder (TEM image, AFM image, XRD scan, FTIR, GC, etc)
a. Experiment Number Folder (I use at least three digits for numbers so they show up in order, i.e. BN001-BN999 followed by a short description for my memory -- but really that's what my lab notebook is for anyway.)
b. Composite Folder (for graphics made from multiple experiments, assuming there are only a handful of these in comparison).
2. Proposals/Presentations Folder (my initial proposals for funding)
3. Graphics Folder (Publication quality graphs I will likely want to reuse many times, which incorporate data from many sources) II. Paper Collection Folder
1. Project Folder containing related papers (if you have related topics, don't bother).
i. Each paper with the filename written as "author name - title.pdf" so that you can find papers in your bibliography later on easily as well as use standard filesystem search tools to find papers that have titles with a keyword when you know you have it, but can't remember the author or full title. III. Publications Folder
1. Project folder containing source materials for each publication you're writing.
i. Main Figures Folder (I just copy and have duplicates of the graphics from the project graphics folders, but I suppose you could also make a symbolic link in linux, or whatever the equivalent is in windows).
ii. Supplementary Figures Folder (ditto. This also helps me find specific graphics that are in papers in case someone asks for a high resolution version).
I did a reasonably extensive amount of research into how to do this, and I'm pretty confident I know the answer.
1. Get OruxMaps - it allows you to use maps without an active internet connection. 2. While connected to wifi, download the tiles from google terrain (or one of the other map sources available). If you know exactly where you're hiking, you can get zoomed in maps for say a 20 mile square around the center of your hike with amazing resolution. 3. Put your phone in a plastic bag, and only take it out if you actually don't know where you are (I find that I almost always do).
In terms of battery life, I was using my android phone as a camera too, and checking GPS every few hours to verify I was in the right place, and it lasted for three days taking down the battery by 40%. Make sure to turn off the cell tower seeking and such or else you will drain the battery really fast. Airplane mode probably won't allow you to receive GPS, unfortunately, but you can at least turn off wireless, data connections, etc.
If you aren't going to be gone very long, and you want a cool log of your trip, you can have OruxMaps poll the GPS in "power saving" mode, which as far as I can determine seems to mean connecting, and then dropping to low power (non-receiving) mode for 10-20 seconds before polling the satellites again. Then you can tell it to make a "track", and it will record your hike -- average speed, immediate speed at each point, speed distribution, altitude map, total distance, and other cute information.
Hopefully someone will mod this up high enough that the submitter can see it... this is the part of ask slashdot that always confuses me. Hopefully a few hundred other people came up with the same solution, so at least one of us is actually noticed =)
What makes the pendantic side of me even more pissed is that they use pounds to measure the force on the sail, and then attempt to use pounds to indicate the mass of the spacecraft. I actually looked at this first and said to myself (just for a second)... 0.0002 pounds isn't nearly enough force to counteract 700 pounds... and in what direction?
I think this makes lots of sense at a federal level. States are the ones that have the "no stabbing people" laws anyway; states rights and all. Depending on the state, crimes will have dramatically different sentences.
So don't worry about this sort of provision causing state laws to go off the books; the point is that federal government should be comparitively limited, and only pass important laws.
Besides, I'm fairly sure that this won't exponentially become more difficult -- it should reach a steady state where they are able to pass exactly as many laws as expire.
Exactly, this is well known, and is the difference between homogeneous nucleation caused by the massive undercooling providing the energy to nucleate ice spontaneously versus heterogeneous nucleation which requires much less free energy and occurs dependent on surfaces.
It is not scientifically interesting that they warmed it to get it to freeze, that's just a comparison of freezing points... it's interesting that the charge of the surface modified the freezing/nucleation point. Frankly, I am amazed that this was published in Science; it seems like worthwhile research, but for a journal more like, say... applied physics letters or a more specific interest journal. Kudos to the researchers for managing to spin it as a general-interest paper when it is in fact a fairly simple observation of an obscure phenomena.
I think a large part of it is physical exercise. It's massively undervalued as a way to deal with anxiety. I never had anxiety or depression issues as a kid, and I was always running around.
I am now irregularly taking anti-anxiety medication (and have good reasons for the anxiety, which I find I legally can't escape from), and I find that when I am actively teaching karate (my hobby) or attending classes where I get to get some physical exercise, I have immensely less difficulty sleeping, working, or otherwise functioning.
I wonder if the correlation could be more related to "kids don't exercise as much, and kids are also more anxious" than any particular immaturity in dealing with stress. The human body was definitely not intended to be lethargic, and I wonder how much of these problems are a result of our biology not being tuned to an environment with no exercise. It's also not designed to have such poor nutrition -- obviously my sample size is small, but I notice very clear differences in my state of mind depending on my diet and exercise that day (or for a day or two prior).
Definitely true. I'm sitting in my office right now wearing my hoodie that has my karate organization's logo clearly printed on the back. A definite sign of aggression.
Every time that kids (i.e. age 16-30) get in trouble for setting off fireworks, building a potato cannon, trying to make flash powder, having LEDs on a shirt, or otherwise trying to be creative* and explore something that they think is awesome, we are dumbing down the country and gradually smothering the spark of excitement at making something that will impress other people --- i.e. the engineering spirit.
And no, I don't think that there is some "TPOB" that is actively trying to do this, I think it's a natural extension of a litigious society that favors "in loco parentis" by the school, the university, and the government. In an attempt to make the world safe, we make it too dangerous to explore.
* - These are just examples, I actually don't much care for pyrotechnics, being more impressed by colorful things myself. However, I can think of lots of people who's interest in chemistry, engineering, physics, etc was sparked by things that go "boom".
Hmm, although this sounds like a nice theory, I'm afraid I disagree with your analysis. While it is true that energy is conserved in the system, the "effective temperature" if you will is not.
Let me illustrate a thought experiment based on your argument and take it to the logical conclusion. Assume it is the case that taking wind energy out of the environment in one area is used to produce useful work and heat elsewhere (which is all eventually turned into heat). Now, assume that all of the energy released as heat can be converted back into wind. Voila, perpetual motion machine.
The difficulty here, which I spent the last day milling over a bit, is that the heat released at the point of use is not as high grade as the "heat" contained in the wind. Don't take this to mean the actual temperature of the wind, I'm talking about the thermodynamic potential of the wind to do mechanical work, so "heat" doesn't really apply. I'm just trying to make an analogy to a heat engine.
So, it is definitely the case that energy is removed from the wind, and transformed into heat, and that while some small fraction of the heat may be used to produce more wind, the substantialy majority of the heat is not going to be of high enough grade to produce a pressure gradient that will actually allow conversion back into wind.
Does that make sense to you? I'm not trying to be imprecise here, but trying to talk about the conversion efficiency of heat to wind in a system like the earth's atmosphere I'm afraid is rather difficult and I'm not even sure strictly how one would discuss it. However, I am certain that if the heat were actually converted back into wind causing no change in the energy contained in the atmosphere in the form of weather, you would be able to build a perpetual motion machine.
I'm honestly totally neutral to the idea since I'm a scientist, and I don't really have any personal stake in the answer. However, I have done a lot of reading about many things like this.
People have seen a measurable local temperature increase near the ground due to lower winds -- similar to a city heat island. We are talking about a degree or two C locally, right where the windmill is, not an extended area effect.
Furthermore, the greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere are theoretically increasing the amount of energy in the atmospheric system (increased hurricanes, etc). It seems rather unlikely on the face of it that removing energy from the atmosphere will cause a problem that more than offsets the problems from greenhouse gases, although it's certainly a valid thing to look into.
In any event, here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation for you. The solar insolation is 1366 W/m^2 at the top of the atmosphere, with ~500-1000 W/m^2 absorbed before it gets to the ground. The cross section of the earth is 127,400,000 km^2, giving a total power absorbed by the atmosphere in excess of 63700 TW. So, producing the total energy consumption of humans on earth (16TW) by energy removed from the atmosphere this way is talking about a 0.025% decrease in the atmospheric energy...
It's not impossible that this would cause problems, but this seems like a situation far less likely to lead to the extinction of mankind (or at least lots of animals that can't adapt fast enough) than global warming, and powering ourselves from wind removes a huge amount of political friction from the world, making a situation that is far less likely to lead to a nuclear holocaust... I think it's a matter of risk analysis... and unless someone did some pretty compelling modeling to demonstrate otherwise, I think I'll take my chances with too many calm summer days.
Although to be fair, this seems to be describing Tunneling Magnetoresistance (actually the next incremental step in hard drive read heads), not the Colossal Magnetoresistive Effect, which only works in very special situations.
This is not new, nor truly preliminary technology; I researched this back in 2004 and there was already a huge amount in the literature. It's just an incremental improvement and uses by and large existing thin film technologies pushed to their limit.
Most people didn't even notice the transition from regular magnetorestrictive heads to giant magnetoresistive heads, they were just incorporated naturally so that hard drive densities could further increase. This technology is the obvious and natural extension from giant magnetoresistive heads, and the increased signal to noise ratio will allow for denser drives with no doubt -- although we're already at the point where a "bit" is only made up of a few dozen magnetic domains. But in any case, this type of technology is a prerequisite for using more highly nanocrystalline magnetic materials with smaller domains...
Slashdot Mirror
As the designer, we tried to take people like you into account. If you're willing to solder your own boards and deal with heat sinking on your own, you can buy bare boards and use the Digikey BOM we made available on the documentation page to make your own for perhaps $100-$200 not including whatever you value your time at.
There's also a 5% discount using the coupon code hobb123.
Feel free to join the development lists if you want to get more ideas about how to do a less expensive system. I certainly want one too... but most of the cheap RGB fixtures out there are, in my opinion, unhackable garbage. RGB strips are cool though, if you just want mood lighting.
w/r/t the comment below about 800 lumens being as bright as a standard 60W light bulb, I should point out why, although true, that's not actually a sane comparison.
First, the lights here is colored to start with. Take a 60W incandescent and filter out everything but red, and you have a very dim light.
Second, it is 800 lumens because we used royal blue (extremely pretty color) instead of standard blue. The difference in perceptible brightness, in my opinion and the opinion of everyone who has seen a side by side comparison, is that there is no difference. However, the conversion from lumens to watts declares that it is 200 lumens dimmer. I think that there is a serious flaw in the way we calculate bright-adjusted conversion factors.
Third, the light is focused into a tight cone, meaning we lose almost no light due to light going "up" into the fixture. In a standard 60W, you're spending about half your light illuminating the ceiling. We don't do that, so the lux (lumens per square meter) is much higher. Try looking directly into one of these lights for more than a second, and you'll understand the difference.
There is a difference between 60W from a white incandescent and a 800 lumen LED fixture. Yes, technically the number of lumens thrown out are the same, and it would be dumb to use the LED light to produce white light, but for colored light it is at least an order of magnitude brighter.
Dear Speare,
As the person who designed the device and the case, I have to question your ability to do a valid cost analysis, but if you'd be interested in helping out with bringing the cost down we'd love to have you. You can join our hardware mailing list at http://saikoled.com/mailinglists/ Wramsdel is completely correct, I have to pay the initial software developers who spent hundreds of hours developing the base system so that it was in a usable state, and I think it's not terribly fair to argue that the thousand plus hours I put into design, prototyping, assembly, and programming is not valuable. This is a one-man shop, and it's taken me three years to get from my original light fixture covered on slashdot in 2008 (http://led-artwork.com) to this one, and I can assure you that the time investment is well worth it in quality. These things are good enough to compete with CK light fixtures (although I still need to finish my DMX -> OSC converter, I'm kind of totally out of money at the moment though).
Most of the cost issue is that in small quantities *any* machining is expensive. Just having the 8 holes drilled and tapped into the aluminum piping was $17, for instance. If I was casting 1000 cases, and hiring FoxConn employees to assemble them, and not paying the software or hardware developers anything for their time, sure maybe the price could get down to $300, but $150 is crazy. The raw parts for the wifi module are $60 alone, not including any case whatsoever, nor the included arduino, nor the power supply, and so on.
Also, Wramsdel is completely correct that I have to license patents from CK/Philips to sell these, and although the agreement is confidential, the amount is not trivial (and took lawyer time and my time to make happen). Additionally, I am trying to sell these to clubs as well so that I can offer cheaper versions to hobbyists (see below for how to get them cheaper). They are comparable to CK fixtures of similar price and brightness, are easier to install and use, and have free software to make them actually do things, as opposed to spending another $3k on control hardware and software.
In any case, my goal with this is to get the price down to the point where I would happily buy lots of them. Since I'm poor, the only way I can do that is to get orders for enough of them that I can drop the price. Suggesting, however, that the price should be the cost of the components alone is unreasonable for any sane business. I want to be able to do this for a living and as a community service, not as a community service alone.
In any case, since I want to get this off the ground so I can drop the price, I will point out a few things that you can do to drop the price.
Olin seems to doing fairly well. I've found everyone I met from there to be a solid engineer so far, and they were founded my freshman year. They were close by my actual school, so I got to interact with them from time to time.
If you really believe that the people around you are not smart, then I think (as someone who has a PhD from one of the big name Ivy League schools =P) that you have perhaps an inflated opinion of your own skills... a common problem at said schools.
This is true for MIT and Caltech as well.
I got accepted to both, and in both cases their offer for financial aid resulted in lower total costs than Purdue or Rose-Hulman in Indiana. My impression has been that since I was a freshman (2001), they have both gotten even more generous with financial aid for low income students.
OTOH, you're screwed if you have rich parents. They assume your parents will pay for your college, and that is simply not always the case. One of my friends has $120k+ of student loans because his dad was rich, but refused to help in paying his tuition. My friend would have been better off financially if he could have legally been separated from his parents, but like that's going to happen. Lame. Because of that, I was saddled with small enough debt to go on to grad school and generally be more adventurous after graduation with entrepreneurship while he had to get a job right away. Not very fair.
This is total nonsense. I saw the overall budget at MIT, and a breakdown. Undergraduate is a *LOSS* financially for them. When asked why they continue doing it, they say it's so that they can keep a good reputation, and as community service.
Also agree. I had a serious accident (no burns, luckily, but shattered everything) that resulted in me being unable to use my hand for about 6 months (and after that, with only extremely limited range of motion). By the end, I was able to type and generally do things with a single hand alone that previously took two hands (like typing). It will take some practice, but like any motor skill, practice will change the brain pathways to make it feel natural eventually.
With these sorts of things, my opinion is that attitude is everything. You *can* do the things you want to do (albeit not as quickly), and you *are* going to be able to master those new motor skills. It will be difficult, but you can do it.
A recent game like that is called Globulation 2 (Linux, not sure about other platforms). Instead of telling unit X to do task Y, you say "I want task Y done, with as close to N units working on it as possible." and the AI for your team does its best to fulfill your requests. If you ask for impossible things (say, building 20 buildings, each with 10 units, while you only have 100 units), it instead prioritizes as well as it can based on available resources and location of units. You can also script your own AI if you like, they have a large group of people that work hard on making the AI as strong as possible by trying to script their own winning strategies. It's sort of a modern extension of the ancient game "Simant" where you could put down smells and the ants would respond accordingly without individual control. You paint areas you want scouted (or not), and the scouts go and check it out. You paint areas where you want defenders, and your defenders are allocated as well as possible.
My primary complaint was the lack of diversity in the game. Only three unit types, which could be upgraded along only a single path, and maybe a half dozen or a dozen building types. It was really entertaining until I solved the game to my satisfaction, and I haven't really played since. A fork with more types of units might be a serious contender for best game on Linux.
Ah yes... I seem to remember this particular method resulting in second degree burns on two of my friends when the fire flashed back to the bottle of lighter fluid and exploded.
Not recommended. Steady streams of flammable liquid connecting flame to a fuel bottle is a stupid idea.
Because in his proposed solution you require one IT person per five staff scientists. =) Extra!
I worked at MIT, which has amazing tech support from what I experienced, and even there I was still *setting up* the databases myself, even if they did set up SQL for me. If I hadn't known how to use PHP (sigh) to make websites, I still wouldn't have had much of a frontend... all in all, quite a bit of work for me, and I didn't bother in the end.
Other universities do not have *nearly* the level of IT support that I saw there. Want a SQL server? Better buy a computer to run it on then, and hire a postdoc that knows linux.
As someone who just finished their PhD in materials science, and is now doing a PostDoc, I found myself basically doing the same thing you are doing. I found a few flaws with my original directory structure, but the one I've adopted for my PostDoc is rather designed to avoid those issues.
As someone else mentioned (so I won't bother), while I'm fine at programming, and have built SQL databses, as someone who's job is *not* programming, it seems like a horrible waste of time to set up such complex tools when there aren't even any frontends that would display all of the data in a single application. For instance, my XRD data is in .xml files that have to be translated to a graphic to be interesting, my TEM images are graphics, my GC data is in pdfs and openoffice spreadsheets, and so on. Similarly, although as someone who was originally a physicist and am somewhat of a magician at matlab, I found that it took me less time to make publication quality graphics in *OpenOffice* than in either Matlab, Mathematica, or Microsoft Office. How messed up is that, right? I found that with every tool I used (and I did try briefly some other more exotic/expensive ones recommended by colleagues), I had to do so much postprocessing to get sane default settings for the graphics; i.e. size 36 fonts, line widths of at least 4 points, colors that colorblind people can distinguish as the first two options (wtf gnuplot), a graphic that takes up the *entire* bounding box so I can make the sides, tops and bottoms of graphics align, and the ability to easily combine graphics using OO draw into larger graphics to save space by sharing legends and such, not to mention the ability to export as perfect pdf files for including in my latex source... but I digress.
Here is the layout I have used very successfully to organize similarly many thousands of experiments worth of data, graphics, papers, presentations, and my own writing. It's a little odd in that I organize in one direction for some types of documents and the exact opposite for others, but I find it to be extremely natural as this order is the way I naturally think about the data.
I. Project Folder (each project gets its own folder - I find I'm usually doing 3-5)
1. Data Folder
i. Data Type Folder (TEM image, AFM image, XRD scan, FTIR, GC, etc)
a. Experiment Number Folder (I use at least three digits for numbers so they show up in order, i.e. BN001-BN999 followed by a short description for my memory -- but really that's what my lab notebook is for anyway.)
b. Composite Folder (for graphics made from multiple experiments, assuming there are only a handful of these in comparison).
2. Proposals/Presentations Folder (my initial proposals for funding)
3. Graphics Folder (Publication quality graphs I will likely want to reuse many times, which incorporate data from many sources)
II. Paper Collection Folder
1. Project Folder containing related papers (if you have related topics, don't bother).
i. Each paper with the filename written as "author name - title.pdf" so that you can find papers in your bibliography later on easily as well as use standard filesystem search tools to find papers that have titles with a keyword when you know you have it, but can't remember the author or full title.
III. Publications Folder
1. Project folder containing source materials for each publication you're writing.
i. Main Figures Folder (I just copy and have duplicates of the graphics from the project graphics folders, but I suppose you could also make a symbolic link in linux, or whatever the equivalent is in windows).
ii. Supplementary Figures Folder (ditto. This also helps me find specific graphics that are in papers in case someone asks for a high resolution version).
I did a reasonably extensive amount of research into how to do this, and I'm pretty confident I know the answer.
1. Get OruxMaps - it allows you to use maps without an active internet connection.
2. While connected to wifi, download the tiles from google terrain (or one of the other map sources available). If you know exactly where you're hiking, you can get zoomed in maps for say a 20 mile square around the center of your hike with amazing resolution.
3. Put your phone in a plastic bag, and only take it out if you actually don't know where you are (I find that I almost always do).
In terms of battery life, I was using my android phone as a camera too, and checking GPS every few hours to verify I was in the right place, and it lasted for three days taking down the battery by 40%. Make sure to turn off the cell tower seeking and such or else you will drain the battery really fast. Airplane mode probably won't allow you to receive GPS, unfortunately, but you can at least turn off wireless, data connections, etc.
If you aren't going to be gone very long, and you want a cool log of your trip, you can have OruxMaps poll the GPS in "power saving" mode, which as far as I can determine seems to mean connecting, and then dropping to low power (non-receiving) mode for 10-20 seconds before polling the satellites again. Then you can tell it to make a "track", and it will record your hike -- average speed, immediate speed at each point, speed distribution, altitude map, total distance, and other cute information.
Hopefully someone will mod this up high enough that the submitter can see it... this is the part of ask slashdot that always confuses me. Hopefully a few hundred other people came up with the same solution, so at least one of us is actually noticed =)
What makes the pendantic side of me even more pissed is that they use pounds to measure the force on the sail, and then attempt to use pounds to indicate the mass of the spacecraft. I actually looked at this first and said to myself (just for a second)... 0.0002 pounds isn't nearly enough force to counteract 700 pounds... and in what direction?
I think this makes lots of sense at a federal level. States are the ones that have the "no stabbing people" laws anyway; states rights and all. Depending on the state, crimes will have dramatically different sentences.
So don't worry about this sort of provision causing state laws to go off the books; the point is that federal government should be comparitively limited, and only pass important laws.
Besides, I'm fairly sure that this won't exponentially become more difficult -- it should reach a steady state where they are able to pass exactly as many laws as expire.
Obviously he's developed a doomsday device, which he will use to hold the world for ransom (and presumably use to make sure ACTA doesn't get through).
What makes you think they weren't stoned...?
Speaking as a scientist, I think that's an untested hypothesis.
Exactly, this is well known, and is the difference between homogeneous nucleation caused by the massive undercooling providing the energy to nucleate ice spontaneously versus heterogeneous nucleation which requires much less free energy and occurs dependent on surfaces.
It is not scientifically interesting that they warmed it to get it to freeze, that's just a comparison of freezing points... it's interesting that the charge of the surface modified the freezing/nucleation point. Frankly, I am amazed that this was published in Science; it seems like worthwhile research, but for a journal more like, say... applied physics letters or a more specific interest journal. Kudos to the researchers for managing to spin it as a general-interest paper when it is in fact a fairly simple observation of an obscure phenomena.
I think a large part of it is physical exercise. It's massively undervalued as a way to deal with anxiety. I never had anxiety or depression issues as a kid, and I was always running around.
I am now irregularly taking anti-anxiety medication (and have good reasons for the anxiety, which I find I legally can't escape from), and I find that when I am actively teaching karate (my hobby) or attending classes where I get to get some physical exercise, I have immensely less difficulty sleeping, working, or otherwise functioning.
I wonder if the correlation could be more related to "kids don't exercise as much, and kids are also more anxious" than any particular immaturity in dealing with stress. The human body was definitely not intended to be lethargic, and I wonder how much of these problems are a result of our biology not being tuned to an environment with no exercise. It's also not designed to have such poor nutrition -- obviously my sample size is small, but I notice very clear differences in my state of mind depending on my diet and exercise that day (or for a day or two prior).
Definitely true. I'm sitting in my office right now wearing my hoodie that has my karate organization's logo clearly printed on the back. A definite sign of aggression.
Science!
Who cares if it's specific to America?
Every time that kids (i.e. age 16-30) get in trouble for setting off fireworks, building a potato cannon, trying to make flash powder, having LEDs on a shirt, or otherwise trying to be creative* and explore something that they think is awesome, we are dumbing down the country and gradually smothering the spark of excitement at making something that will impress other people --- i.e. the engineering spirit.
And no, I don't think that there is some "TPOB" that is actively trying to do this, I think it's a natural extension of a litigious society that favors "in loco parentis" by the school, the university, and the government. In an attempt to make the world safe, we make it too dangerous to explore.
* - These are just examples, I actually don't much care for pyrotechnics, being more impressed by colorful things myself. However, I can think of lots of people who's interest in chemistry, engineering, physics, etc was sparked by things that go "boom".
If you put a load on the propellers, it should act in the same way as a windmill and extract kinetic energy from the water by increasing drag...
Just requires *extremely* well planned stops!
Hmm, although this sounds like a nice theory, I'm afraid I disagree with your analysis. While it is true that energy is conserved in the system, the "effective temperature" if you will is not.
Let me illustrate a thought experiment based on your argument and take it to the logical conclusion. Assume it is the case that taking wind energy out of the environment in one area is used to produce useful work and heat elsewhere (which is all eventually turned into heat). Now, assume that all of the energy released as heat can be converted back into wind. Voila, perpetual motion machine.
The difficulty here, which I spent the last day milling over a bit, is that the heat released at the point of use is not as high grade as the "heat" contained in the wind. Don't take this to mean the actual temperature of the wind, I'm talking about the thermodynamic potential of the wind to do mechanical work, so "heat" doesn't really apply. I'm just trying to make an analogy to a heat engine.
So, it is definitely the case that energy is removed from the wind, and transformed into heat, and that while some small fraction of the heat may be used to produce more wind, the substantialy majority of the heat is not going to be of high enough grade to produce a pressure gradient that will actually allow conversion back into wind.
Does that make sense to you? I'm not trying to be imprecise here, but trying to talk about the conversion efficiency of heat to wind in a system like the earth's atmosphere I'm afraid is rather difficult and I'm not even sure strictly how one would discuss it. However, I am certain that if the heat were actually converted back into wind causing no change in the energy contained in the atmosphere in the form of weather, you would be able to build a perpetual motion machine.
I'm honestly totally neutral to the idea since I'm a scientist, and I don't really have any personal stake in the answer. However, I have done a lot of reading about many things like this.
People have seen a measurable local temperature increase near the ground due to lower winds -- similar to a city heat island. We are talking about a degree or two C locally, right where the windmill is, not an extended area effect.
Furthermore, the greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere are theoretically increasing the amount of energy in the atmospheric system (increased hurricanes, etc). It seems rather unlikely on the face of it that removing energy from the atmosphere will cause a problem that more than offsets the problems from greenhouse gases, although it's certainly a valid thing to look into.
In any event, here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation for you. The solar insolation is 1366 W/m^2 at the top of the atmosphere, with ~500-1000 W/m^2 absorbed before it gets to the ground. The cross section of the earth is 127,400,000 km^2, giving a total power absorbed by the atmosphere in excess of 63700 TW. So, producing the total energy consumption of humans on earth (16TW) by energy removed from the atmosphere this way is talking about a 0.025% decrease in the atmospheric energy...
It's not impossible that this would cause problems, but this seems like a situation far less likely to lead to the extinction of mankind (or at least lots of animals that can't adapt fast enough) than global warming, and powering ourselves from wind removes a huge amount of political friction from the world, making a situation that is far less likely to lead to a nuclear holocaust... I think it's a matter of risk analysis... and unless someone did some pretty compelling modeling to demonstrate otherwise, I think I'll take my chances with too many calm summer days.
Although to be fair, this seems to be describing Tunneling Magnetoresistance (actually the next incremental step in hard drive read heads), not the Colossal Magnetoresistive Effect, which only works in very special situations.
This is not new, nor truly preliminary technology; I researched this back in 2004 and there was already a huge amount in the literature. It's just an incremental improvement and uses by and large existing thin film technologies pushed to their limit.
Most people didn't even notice the transition from regular magnetorestrictive heads to giant magnetoresistive heads, they were just incorporated naturally so that hard drive densities could further increase. This technology is the obvious and natural extension from giant magnetoresistive heads, and the increased signal to noise ratio will allow for denser drives with no doubt -- although we're already at the point where a "bit" is only made up of a few dozen magnetic domains. But in any case, this type of technology is a prerequisite for using more highly nanocrystalline magnetic materials with smaller domains...