I am somewhat disappointed about the available tasks. They have tasks up like: "Remove old icons from gnome-desktop" and "Design logo" over at Apache. Are you taking young programmers seriously? I know, I know, these tasks must be done, but how's this supposed to attract the younger, yet still just as serious, programmers? There are many young guys out there that are making MMORPGs, networking libraries, improving obscure microprocessor architectures, and tons of other fun stuff. Some of us (ahem) have spent many hours behind the debugger working out kinks in algorithms, in games, or logged hours late into the night just for the hell of it. I was really hoping that this would be an opportunity to encourage serious open source development from the younger programmers out there, but really it looks more practical to join some of the open source mailing lists and going rogue. Google could have just named these guys with their label and make the whole (true) experience more than worthwhile, rather than dishing out these insults. But it's a start, I am eager to see how this plays out.
The late André Bensoussan worked with me on the Multics operating system at Honeywell in Cambridge. We were working on a major change to the file system, which required a subsystem, the VTOC manager, to manage file description information. It had to transport the file information between disk and memory, manage a shared memory buffer pool, and manage space on disk for the information. In other words, it was a small virtual memory manager.
André took on the job of design, implementation, and test of the VTOC manager. He started by sitting at his desk and drawing a lot of diagrams. I was the project coordinator, so I used to drop in on him and ask how things were going. "Still designing," he'd say. He wanted the diagrams to look beautiful and symmetrical as well as capturing all the state information. I was getting nervous about the schedule, so I was glad when he finally began writing code. He wrote in pencil, at his desk, instead of using a terminal. He declined offers of typing help, and just kept writing away in pencil. He rewrote parts, copied things over, erased and rewrote.
Finally André took his neat final pencil copy to a terminal and typed the whole program in. His first compilation attempt failed; he corrected three typos, tried again, and the code compiled. We bound it into the system and tried it out, and it worked the first time.
In fact, the VTOC manager worked perfectly from then on. Only one bug was ever found in it, and that was my fault: André had asked me the calling sequence for an error procedure, and I'd guessed instead of looking it up, so it crashed the first time it hit an error. Beyond that the program was perfect.
In invasive BCIs, a big problem is getting information out of the head, so many researchers have been using wireless transmission of power and data either by RF (popular) and less commonly IR. The reason they do this is because of infections- and you do not want a brain infection. So how does this heat conduit really work? A direct link from inside the skull to outside the skull is not a good idea, and if there's any skin in between the heat sink and the conduit then that skin is going to die. Maybe it's causing more problems than it solves. If it does what it says it does, then we could easily throw in some more BCIs and not have to worry about too much heat dissipation, which has this nasty tendency to kill brain cells. I maintain a small page on neurotech.
Here's my notes on silicon semiconductor manufacturing, but this 'polymer sandwhich' method is entirely new to me. From what I can recall, manufacturing tactics usually include chemical etching with masks to make marks into the wafer or sometimes with specialized lasers. From the summary of the article, it looks like this latest process lets us do periodic lines via adding mechanical energy so that we fracture the plates. Ironic, since we usually try to avoid fracturing our wafers.;)
We present a pedagogical review of neutrino physics. In the first lecture we describe the theoretical motivation for neutrino masses, and explain how neutrino flavor oscillation experiments can probe neutrino masses. In the second lecture we review the experimental data, and show that it is best explained if neutrinos are massive. In the third lecture we explain what are the theoretical implications of the data, in particular, what are the challenges they impose on models of physics beyond the SM. We give examples of theoretical models that cop e with some of these challenges.
In the present lectures the following topics are considered: general properties of neutrinos, neutrino mass phenomenology (Dirac and Majorana masses), neutrino masses in the simplest extensions of the standard model (including the seesaw mechanism), neutrino oscillations in vacuum, neutrino oscillations in matter (the MSW effect) in 2- and 3-flavour schemes, implications of CP, T and CPT symmetries for neutrino oscillations, double beta decay, solar neutrino oscillations and the solar neutrino problem, and atmospheric neutrinos. We also give a short overview of the results of the accelerator and reactor neutrino experiments and of future projects. Finally, we discuss how the available experimental data on neutrino masses and lepton mixing can be summarized in the phenomenologically allowed forms of the neutrino mass matrix.
BTW, particle physics has an awesome WWW presence.
The researchers explained that the transplantation method is simple in concept, though complicated to execute. First, the proteins were stripped from the M. mycoides LC cells, resulting in naked DNA that can be passed between cells. Then this intact DNA was incubated briefly with M. capricolum cells, soaking in a solution that caused the M. capricolum cells to fuse together. As two of these recipient cells fused, they sometimes encapsulated a donor DNA chromosome.
And then the citation:
Lartigue, Carole, Glass, John I., Alperovich, Nina, Pieper, Rembert, Parmar, Prashanth P., Hutchison III, Clyde A., Smith, Hamilton O., and Venter, J. Craig. Genome Transplantation in Bacteria: Changing One Species to Another. 3 August 2007, Vo. 317, Science.
Abstract:
Originally published in Science Express on 28 June 2007
Science 3 August 2007:
Vol. 317. no. 5838, pp. 632 - 638
DOI: 10.1126/science.1144622
Genome Transplantation in Bacteria: Changing One Species to Another
Carole Lartigue, John I. Glass,* Nina Alperovich, Rembert Pieper, Prashanth P. Parmar, Clyde A. Hutchison, III, Hamilton O. Smith, J. Craig Venter
As a step toward propagation of synthetic genomes, we completely replaced the genome of a bacterial cell with one from another species by transplanting a whole genome as naked DNA. Intact genomic DNA from Mycoplasma mycoides large colony (LC), virtually free of protein, was transplanted into Mycoplasma capricolum cells by polyethylene glycol-mediated transformation. Cells selected for tetracycline resistance, carried by the M. mycoides LC chromosome, contain the complete donor genome and are free of detectable recipient genomic sequences. These cells that result from genome transplantation are phenotypically identical to the M. mycoides LC donor strain as judged by several criteria.
The J. Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, MD 20850, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jglass@jcvi.org
But would it be too painful to actually add in relevant information from the published article? Not all of us know where to go get "Science", nor do we have magical access. Slashdot editors, if you would be so kind- stop accepting articles about papers behind paywalls. Some of us want to actually discuss the contents of these articles, the research methods, to look into what's actually going on... not this hype that tells us nothing and wastes our time. ("You must be new!")
Anyway, genome transplantation means that maybe we can get the genome of our stem cells transplanted into bacteria. Just store lots of stem cell DNA, and then one day start the procedure to make the bacteria uptake the DNA and--- well, the current problem with this is that the human genome is much different from bacterial genomes, and so there will undoubtedly be way too many problems with the host bacteria, i.e. trying to make some of the proteins and biomolecules that actually causes self-destruction, but the concept/hope is still there.
SuperMemo is an interesting software package that helps with memorization and even "reading thousands of web pages at once." Seriously. To my memory, the story goes something like this: Piotr Wozniak was studying molecular biology in Poland and realized that the amount of information he had to consume was way above the limits of what he was going to achieve with the methods he was using to study. Mainly concerned about his uptake of tens of thousands of English words, he began tracking his own memory, recall, experiences, etc. and devised his own spaced repetition algorithm which is now encoded into the freely available software on the site (well, not all of it is free).
Me, well. I prefer to "read 'thousands' of web pages at once" via Opera but the literal bookmarking, highlighting and the ability to fork pages into the equivalent of flash cards is quite interesting.
Haha- so this is the sort of article that I miss when I sleep? Anyway, I have collected some links that somebody might find useful to go start some more research. Maybe setup a basement lab or something.
There are obstacles, though: One of the key components needed for silicon PICs is the very high-speed silicon optical modulator, which is used to encode data on optical beam.
Catalyzing development. (hopefully):)
- Does anybody have links or papers re: manufacturing of fiber optics or very small optical beams? Would be great to have.
And if anybody has links on nanomechanical synthesis, that'd be much appreciated. IIRC, nanolithography is one of the main areas of development, along with nonlinear optics to get the required precision manufacturing.
How would we build an internet infrastructure? What processes can we use to build fiber optics? Or what sort of PCBs and connectors would we need to make the "last mile" work? This looks like a project just waiting for some interested individuals to get some big plans together.
Let the user become the crawler- and do not eliminate the search giants (just don't rely on them completely). Already I sort of operate like a (slow) crawler with my queues of links to read, bookmarks (be weary- big load) and indexing those very interesting or important pages, sharing related tidbits, etc. Just feels like the natural extension, though I am sure that many people will want to stick with traditional GUIs and "back/forward" habits. There is also some interesting discussion in ATLAS-L re: future search infrastructures. So, in the spirit of promoting development in this area, linkage:
Somehow, this is like an extension of surfraw. I imagine that soon enough we will start up an open source crawler-browsing hybrid software package, though have been surprised that nothing like it has popped up yet- it's (usually) the way of the programmer to make sure that he has the ability to do what the giants are doing. Maybe we have all been collectively blinded by graphical web browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, etc.) and "click-click-click" thinkware?
Practically any time I hear a large software system discussed I hear "X is a #%@!in mess," or "Y is unmanageable and really should be rewritten." Some of this I know is just fresh programmers seeing their first big hunk o' code and having the natural reaction.
If only mess you see when reading code, then programmer you are not-- a programmer must have the most serious mind, the deepest commitment. See more than mess, he must.
Also, this post will push down the presence of my post on artificial meats on the profile page, and I think it somewhat important to keep the link available.
Nowadays we live in a world in which neurologists and psychologists have demonstrated that this is fundamentally flawed, that much of our decision making is unconscious, and that in reality there is rarely such a thing as a free choice.
Haha, but really: we can never really know if we have free will, so the practical solution to the question is to behave as if you are Free so that you may attempt to maximize your actions and behavior just in case. If not, you could have done no differently. If so, well, you could have lost. Some readers may recognize this as a modified (reduced) Pascal's wager (in that the religious requirements are pulled from it).
To have really free choice you would have to have an unbounded set from which choices could be selected, but that's going down another path of discussion entirely- finite universes imply finite choices and even then you have hard enough time catching up with the number of options available.
Roger, I went definition hunting to double check my own understanding (q='define:electric field' @ Google). The problem arises here:
The electric field, by definition, is the force felt per unit charge. If I put a charge in an electric field then can physically observe the force and hence infer that there is a field. Virtual particles are the mechanism that creates the field but the field IS is physical entity.
Virtual particles are virtual and not physical; so if they are what causes the field, then how can you say that the field physically exists? The field is virtual. These 'fields' are merely regions of space in which the force or interaction occurs. (Left to the reader as an exercise: must all existent systems and processes exhibit particle-like nature?)
The standard model is described mathematically in terms of what is called a "gauge field theory". After all, quantum theory says particles can't be localized to a single point in space, so it is natural to deal with them as something that is "smeared out" rather than a discrete object.
This post seems to describe what I am getting at. And now for some other links:
* Teller on QFT review by the good 'ol/~crshalizi/ guy appears in my search results way too often.
-- plus some other notes I was collecting in response, though think they are not as useful as they once were:
More hunting turned up this page re: what force really is and it seems to support my understanding:
So, what is the quantum view of the nature of force? In the Standard Model, quantum physicists view forces as exchanges of virtual particles. Huh? Well, there are certain types of particles, called bosons, that "mediate" forces. Each force has its own boson. For instance, the boson that mediates the electromagnetic force is the photon. In order for two electrons to exert electromagnetic forces on each other, they exchange virtual photons. How does this work? An analogy - though not a very accurate one - is this: imagine standing with a friend on smooth, frictionless ice holding basketballs. As you and your friend throw the basketballs back and forth the basketball exerts an impulse on you each time you throw it and each time you catch it. This causes you and your friend to accelerate away from each other. There is no force that causes you to be repelled by your friend - the acceleration is caused by the exchange of particles (basketballs).
Wait a minute! How can the gravitational force be "an exchange of virtual particles" when Einstein explained it geometrically - as a curvature of spacetime? How do these two ideas fit together? Well, there's the rub, you see - they don't. The two modern views of force are contradictory and mutually exclusive. At least one of them must be wrong, although there is considerable experimental evidence that they both are correct!
The search for the ultimate nature of force is an extremely active area of research - both theoretical and experimental. What's a force? Nobody really knows.
Why is Newtonian gravity real? It explains the gravitational
interactions between objects in frames where the objects
aren't moving quickly with respect to c and in which the
gravitational fields are small. But, surely, it too is just
mathematics and the concept of something instantaneosly
affecting the motion of another object some distance away
is used by the mathematics but not explained by it.
I'm unsure as to what the modern library will be like, or even if it will have a physical public location - though I hope they maintain that part. My ideal library would have a number of advanced technologies incorporated - from Tagging and print on demand books to Virtual Reality education and highend computer modelling/simulation software.
My ideal library would be more social and more like an open-access university. Most information is useless unless you can attach some names and people. Many people hide behind their written works as "authors" that are largely inaccessible. In the background, I found an idea for community libraries or more aptly put: selections from the library catered towards the immediate community.
There are many ideas that can be generated to revamp libraries in all sorts of fun/interesting/sometimes/boring ways. The most important of which would be to blur the line between information producers and consumers. Consumers produce information via the selections they make, what they look at, what they comment on, and producers naturally are adding content. There are already web services out there that take this into account, slightly: Trexy and Prefound. So, let the users of the library make their own formulations of the content and let them add, comment, tag, or create their own data structures just like in wikis or Ted Nelson's Xanadu.
That introduces the concept of the ultimate library, the computer. So far, at least, librarians know the computer largely as a replacement for the card catalog, but the computer as a library in itself sits in the future like the Sphinx demanding the answer to its riddle. And if you don't give the right response it will bite your head off--or at least sit there blocking the way to all the information it contains.
Also, Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine fame has previously written on civilizations as creatures where the libraries are the self-replicating centrality or nucleus. From video game interfaces, perhaps information scientists and librarians will get some clues and help make fast-paced content retrieval, just as quickly as we can run our virtual spaceships over virtual terrains. I have made some scripts and extensions in the past to illustrate, and I am terribly sorry for the following WMV formatted video. The joltiness in the following video is in fact Firefox and not CamStudio: video clicky.
Slashdot Mirror
I am somewhat disappointed about the available tasks. They have tasks up like: "Remove old icons from gnome-desktop" and "Design logo" over at Apache. Are you taking young programmers seriously? I know, I know, these tasks must be done, but how's this supposed to attract the younger, yet still just as serious, programmers? There are many young guys out there that are making MMORPGs, networking libraries, improving obscure microprocessor architectures, and tons of other fun stuff. Some of us (ahem) have spent many hours behind the debugger working out kinks in algorithms, in games, or logged hours late into the night just for the hell of it. I was really hoping that this would be an opportunity to encourage serious open source development from the younger programmers out there, but really it looks more practical to join some of the open source mailing lists and going rogue. Google could have just named these guys with their label and make the whole (true) experience more than worthwhile, rather than dishing out these insults. But it's a start, I am eager to see how this plays out.
So, here's to studying mathematics:
* My bookmarks on mathematics [~600?]
* Wikipedia mathematics portal-- recursively read through these, do a depth-five and you should be good to go.
* Synopsis of elementary results in pure and applied mathematics (G. S. Carr)-- lists 1200 theorems in mathematics, re: Ramanujan. Highly recommended.
And some math discussion forums:
* Mathematics help
* Another one
* More
* Even more
Also use irc.freenode.net #math and #not-math, as well as efnet.
In invasive BCIs, a big problem is getting information out of the head, so many researchers have been using wireless transmission of power and data either by RF (popular) and less commonly IR. The reason they do this is because of infections- and you do not want a brain infection. So how does this heat conduit really work? A direct link from inside the skull to outside the skull is not a good idea, and if there's any skin in between the heat sink and the conduit then that skin is going to die. Maybe it's causing more problems than it solves. If it does what it says it does, then we could easily throw in some more BCIs and not have to worry about too much heat dissipation, which has this nasty tendency to kill brain cells. I maintain a small page on neurotech.
Here's my notes on silicon semiconductor manufacturing, but this 'polymer sandwhich' method is entirely new to me. From what I can recall, manufacturing tactics usually include chemical etching with masks to make marks into the wafer or sometimes with specialized lasers. From the summary of the article, it looks like this latest process lets us do periodic lines via adding mechanical energy so that we fracture the plates. Ironic, since we usually try to avoid fracturing our wafers. ;)
Neutrino physics [Evgeny Khakimovich Akhmedov] [PDF]:
BTW, particle physics has an awesome WWW presence.
* Neutrino :)
* History of the neutrinos [from our perspective, mind you]
* The Ultimate Neutrino Page
etc. I should go call up my particle physicist body to post up some comments.
And then the citation:
Abstract: But would it be too painful to actually add in relevant information from the published article? Not all of us know where to go get "Science", nor do we have magical access. Slashdot editors, if you would be so kind- stop accepting articles about papers behind paywalls. Some of us want to actually discuss the contents of these articles, the research methods, to look into what's actually going on
Anyway, genome transplantation means that maybe we can get the genome of our stem cells transplanted into bacteria. Just store lots of stem cell DNA, and then one day start the procedure to make the bacteria uptake the DNA and--- well, the current problem with this is that the human genome is much different from bacterial genomes, and so there will undoubtedly be way too many problems with the host bacteria, i.e. trying to make some of the proteins and biomolecules that actually causes self-destruction, but the concept/hope is still there.
BTW, the group that this article is about has been taking up way too much of our collective attention:
* Team claims synthetic life feat
* Venter Institute claims patent on synthetic life
* and now this.
And I should probably link over to this site.
Related links: * LDX@MIT
* Physics of magnetically confined fusion [pdf]
* The main principles of magnetic fusion
* Magnetic fusion experiments at LANL
* High density magnetic fusion
* Has a good bit on magnetic confinement
* Can a magnetic field be used to contain plasma?
* International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor
* What's happening in fusion?
* Design of magnetic fields for fusion experiments [pdf]
* Wikipedia article on the topic
* Magnetized target fusion bibliography
* Plasma physics bibliography
* Databases for plasma physics
* Plasma physics laboratories
* List of plasma physicists
* Plasma on the internet
SuperMemo is an interesting software package that helps with memorization and even "reading thousands of web pages at once." Seriously. To my memory, the story goes something like this: Piotr Wozniak was studying molecular biology in Poland and realized that the amount of information he had to consume was way above the limits of what he was going to achieve with the methods he was using to study. Mainly concerned about his uptake of tens of thousands of English words, he began tracking his own memory, recall, experiences, etc. and devised his own spaced repetition algorithm which is now encoded into the freely available software on the site (well, not all of it is free).
Me, well. I prefer to "read 'thousands' of web pages at once" via Opera but the literal bookmarking, highlighting and the ability to fork pages into the equivalent of flash cards is quite interesting.
* Memorizing vocabulary
* Another post
* One here and here re: learning a language in the digital age.
Haha- so this is the sort of article that I miss when I sleep? Anyway, I have collected some links that somebody might find useful to go start some more research. Maybe setup a basement lab or something.
... ... with Prozac?
-- General
* Irazoqui's neurotransceiver [pdf] [2003] The problem with Irazoqui's device is that it is maybe 1% power efficient, so maybe some electronicists can come around and make some suggestions to improve the coil design and so on. He did his testing on rats, not humans.
* Direct brain interface bibliography from the University of Michigan
* Gleamed from an article below: wireless visual cortex implant publications
-- EEG
* Controlling computers with EEG signals
* EEG via soundcard from OpenEEG
* Wireless EEG
-- Slashdot goodness
* Scientists couple nerve tissue with semiconductors
* Post re: neurosilicon junction with PDF
* Thinkware
* Good post w/ links on neurocomputation
* Brain slice experiments
* Neuroscientists at MIT doing direct neural interfaces- but this post sets things into perpsective as well as this one
* Single neuron recordings w/ ref
* Sorry to dash your hopes, but
* Autonomously adjusting electrodes? and more
* Artificial hippocampus and stimulating neuron growth / neurogenesis
* Implant a chip inside your head- though it does not discuss the specific surgery skills you would need
* Working nerve chip of silicon and snail neurons
* Re: Kevin Warwick- interview- the so-called "Captain Cyborg" since '98 or something
* BrainPort
* Fusing neurons with computers
-- More
* Artificial vision
* The vision quest
*
* Sam's Laser FAQ
Catalyzing development. (hopefully)
- Does anybody have links or papers re: manufacturing of fiber optics or very small optical beams? Would be great to have.
From my collection:
* Nanotechnology information [archived] [2002]
* Bibliography of nanotechnology and nanoscience [pdf] [2004]
* Brad Hein's nanotechnology website
* Ned Seeman's DNA nanotech bibliography
* MEMS/nanotech reading list
* Even more publications in nanotechnology
* sci.nano archives
* The open micro/nano-manufacturing project
* Nanotech in scifi
And if anybody has links on nanomechanical synthesis, that'd be much appreciated. IIRC, nanolithography is one of the main areas of development, along with nonlinear optics to get the required precision manufacturing.
* Electric Power Research Institute re: a distributed network.
* Electric power transmission
* Hydrogen power wiki (questionable) * [pdf] Present limits of high-voltage transmission
* Power station diagram (and more)
* Energy development as well as * "The SuperGrid for Electricity & Hydrogen"- but no designs are included.
And with DIY wind turbine and the DIY UPS system, maybe we can cook something up?
Need more information.
How would we build an internet infrastructure? What processes can we use to build fiber optics? Or what sort of PCBs and connectors would we need to make the "last mile" work? This looks like a project just waiting for some interested individuals to get some big plans together.
Let the user become the crawler- and do not eliminate the search giants (just don't rely on them completely). Already I sort of operate like a (slow) crawler with my queues of links to read, bookmarks (be weary- big load) and indexing those very interesting or important pages, sharing related tidbits, etc. Just feels like the natural extension, though I am sure that many people will want to stick with traditional GUIs and "back/forward" habits. There is also some interesting discussion in ATLAS-L re: future search infrastructures. So, in the spirit of promoting development in this area, linkage:
* Grub article (now defunct)- was distributed peer-to-peer crawler. (see also)
* Boitho, another distributed crawler
* YaCy- another peer-to-peer crawler
* How to build a web spider
* C++ web crawler lib
* LibWWW (perl)
* W3C's WebBot
* The Internet Archive's Heritrix crawler
* WebSPHINX- customizable crawler
Somehow, this is like an extension of surfraw. I imagine that soon enough we will start up an open source crawler-browsing hybrid software package, though have been surprised that nothing like it has popped up yet- it's (usually) the way of the programmer to make sure that he has the ability to do what the giants are doing. Maybe we have all been collectively blinded by graphical web browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, etc.) and "click-click-click" thinkware?
Making it worse?! How could it be worse?! Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!
* Astronomy Knowledge Base
* Astronomy resources on the web
Also, this post will push down the presence of my post on artificial meats on the profile page, and I think it somewhat important to keep the link available.
My posted content re: gettting off of this third rock, and do not neglect the one reply to the post either. Also, for the experimentalists out there I have some collected bookmarks re: aerospace, DIY jet engines, etc..
To have really free choice you would have to have an unbounded set from which choices could be selected, but that's going down another path of discussion entirely- finite universes imply finite choices and even then you have hard enough time catching up with the number of options available.
* Teller on QFT review by the good 'ol
-- plus some other notes I was collecting in response, though think they are not as useful as they once were:
More hunting turned up this page re: what force really is and it seems to support my understanding: Re: gravity: This page on the quantum view of forces is also helpful.
[PDF] Functional neurotransceiver.
There are many ideas that can be generated to revamp libraries in all sorts of fun/interesting/sometimes/boring ways. The most important of which would be to blur the line between information producers and consumers. Consumers produce information via the selections they make, what they look at, what they comment on, and producers naturally are adding content. There are already web services out there that take this into account, slightly: Trexy and Prefound. So, let the users of the library make their own formulations of the content and let them add, comment, tag, or create their own data structures just like in wikis or Ted Nelson's Xanadu.