How much of the fight scene at the subway station was CGI? I thought a lot of that was wire work, multiple cameras, blue screen and polystyrene walls etc. I didn't think that much was comp generated. Computer cleaned up and tweeked I'm sure but not computer generated.
I do agree with your comments on the bill. It is totally crazy and unworkable, however....
Other examples of A/D : How the telephone company decodes the tones when you press a button into a number The ADC converts the telephone signal to digital. The tone decode is worked out further down the line using a signal processor (using quite a neat algorithm by the way)
How digital cell phones work The ADC in mobile phone does exactly the same job as the ADC in a normal exchange.
How fax machines work Hmm. Its only a one bit ADC but I guess thats true.
Digital medical equipment (measuring blood pressure, heartbeat, etc) Literally any digital sensor Apart from those that are digital in a different way such frequency counters.
Your themostat in your house New ones yes, but the majority you come across in use are still mechanical as they are so cheap to produce.
Sure there are dangers with microwaves, however as with all things, it comes down to dosage. Strong signals - bad. Weak signals - less bad OR no effect OR benificial. So what is it?
There is an awful lot of research into the effects of mobile phones (certainly here in Europe) as it is such a big issue and people are worried. However, so far no effects have been shown apart from usage of phones actually improving your short term memory by a small amount.
Still worried? Well here is a parallel example. Find yourself a large magnifying glass and stand underneath it in bright sunlight. You will be cooked. Does this mean that sunlight is dangerous? Well yes if its bright sunlight (sunburn / cancer etc). However at low levels it is good for you. Your body needs sunlight to produce vitamin D, without it you get rickets etc.
So will mobile phones kill you? The answer to that is a definite Yes. Many people have already died directly caused by mobile phones. How? Well by walking out in front of cars whilst talking, driving in walls whilst using them etc. Compared to this, this risk of getting cancer or other ill through mobile phone usage is tiny. Not nil, this can't be proved, but tiny.
This assumes that cellphones can give you braincancer of which there is NO peer reviewed evidance.
(they certainly can give you headaches;) not from the phone though speaking to the inlaws can cause this:-) There is some evidance that mobile phone use can improve your memory but that's about it. Mobile phones have not been proved to be safe but then this will never be possible. It has been proved that the dangers are far less than the dangers of using a mobile phone whilst driving which kills many many people every day.
This makes the antenna bigger. That means that the phone will send the braincancer waves to a bigger part of your brain, don't it? The size of the antenna does change its performance but a larger antenna can mean either a performance gain or a performance loss. A simple antenna wants to be 1/4 of the wavelength of the signal it is transmitting. Either bigger or smaller will reduce its performance. You are also missing a very important point. An improvement in the antenna means that the signal driving it can be reduced so as to save battery life. The signal strength generated by a mobile phone is adjusted to be as weak as possible so as to just make a reliable connection. Therefore the radiated output from the phone will be the same.
And it will be more difficult to shield the antenna because the outside of the phone will be a complete antenna. Mobile phone shields do not work. The phone simply increases the signal strength to compensate for any changes any so called shields provide. Transmission measurements in lab conditions have shown that shields make no difference at all.
Also a larger antenna doesn't neccesarely mean that it's better. Correct. However a larger antenna "could" be better.
I believe that for every wavelength there's an optimal size (if I remember correctly). The ideal length for a 1/4 wavelength antenna used on a mobile operating at 900MHz is 75mm. However, there are other options apart from 1/4 wavelength antennas.
I recall hearing that bird's eyes work at very high frequencies, does that mean our houses are blinking like Christmas trees to them? That's an interesting thought
I hadn't thought of this but you are quite probably right. Humans can see flashing up to about 30Hz. Birds (or any other animal) need only to be x4 better than this to see the flashing of our street lamps etc. Doesn't seem to bother them though. Maybe they just think they are in the disco...
I'd be amazed if they can blink on-off distinctly more than 100 times a second. Anything faster else would blur
Then be amazed. To your eyes its a blur but not to a photo transistor or similar. Both the LED and the receiver are easily capable of these frequencies and as mentioned in the article 10MHz is not a problem. A good example where this technique is used delibrately is on TV remotes. OK the data rate is low (10kb/s??) but the parts used are very low tech.
You see that big white thing hanging from the ceiling that wonderfully lights up the room? Is that a steady light or pulsed? The 50Hz (or 60Hz for you yanks) supply causes filament bulbs to pulse at 100Hz (120Hz) and is very obvious if you have the right sensor to pick it up. (Your eyes are not the right sensor.) Florescent lights are even better and are completely dark for quite a proportion of their on time.
The best bit is at the end of the pdf. A slight modification to somebodies keyboard will cause the scroll lock led to output details of every last keypress you make. Encription does not matter if you have access to the plain text...
There are 536 tonnes of air in both the Biomes
volume inside HT Biome; 330,110m3
volume inside WT Biome; 85,620m3
Density of air = 1.225 Kg/m3 (at 15 deg C) - though this gives a mass of 509 tonnes.
Either way the air does not quite weigh as much as the steel but its close.
The Millennium Dome is a suspension type construction which is generally very light so I would guess that the air inside it weighs a lot less than the structure.
I live about 30mins from the Eden Project so I can truely say that is has been a very impressive project in both its construction and its finished state. The biomes are gigantic, the pictures really don't give you a feeling of exactly how big they are. The technology is great as well. The glass is in fact a couple of layers of plastic blown up with gas. On UK TV, they recently balanced a car on one of the cells to show its strength even though the plastic itself is rather thin. Its claimed that the structure weighs less then the air it contains though I do find this hard to believe.
However, the comparison with biosphere 2 is rather strange as the two projects are very different. The Eden Project is basically a big green house. It has never been sealed and has never had that intention. It has value as an educational tool and there are some science studies going on but this is minor. Beyond its construction (which is bleeding edge), I found the biosphere 2 project far more interesting.
With the biosphere 2 project, the entire environment had be controlled. As they found, this is very difficult to achieve and needs to be sorted before any attempts for Moon or Mars bases can start. It should be interesting to see what the next attempt at a sealed environment achieves.
A few links from the BBC and from Google for the Eden Project.
and then of course, the guy that thinks of the spuds and soot printing technique applies and gets a patent on the process. If he's clever, it will worded so that it then covers all future printing processes such a proper ink and proper type.
This would be fine if he continues to innovate but if he does not, nobody else will think the costs are worth it as they will just get sued.
The other side of course, is that if there were no patents then nobody would innovate as they would not be able to recoup their investment. I personally think that although this is true, there tide has flowed far to far towards the patent holders. I would love to see the strength of patents weakened but I feel the opposite is happening.
I mean, they have those traces-printed-on-plastic ribbon cables connecting things like keyboards and calculator screens to components. And printer heads in inkjets.
Flex's are made using a similar process to that used to make printed circuit board. A layer of copper is stuck to a sheet of plastic and then photo etched. This is cheap but not as cheap as a normal printing process.
Plus, we have alloys which can be deposited on substrates a micron-layer at a time.
This can be done (crisp packets for example (sorry - chip packets for you yanks)) but most processes require high temperatures which don't do much good to a layer of plastic.
How tough is it to dope conducting inks with Gallium-Arsenide? (Or whatever).
Physics Today have an article about the University of Cambridge printing transistors using ink jet printers. Conducting inks are not unusual - indeed most mass produced PCBs are put together with screen printed solder paste. Its a bit of a step to call this an ink but it gives you an idea of what's possible.
Why the heck hasn't this technology been around for a decade or more? It doesn't seem so much like an advance as it does a, "They finally got off their asses and assembled the stupid thing."
The devel is in the detail. Sure I can demonstrate printing to you using some chimney soot and half a potato. Its quite a bit harder to produce a 100,000 copies of a newspaper (including those AOL CD's) for just a few pence. Development always takes many times longer than you think and far more money.
When you purchase a DVD then you can do anything you want with it - except distribute copies of it.
I read recently, somewhere, I can't find it, that in the UK this is not true. A law has been passed that denies you the right to make a backup copies even if you have not, and have made no attempts to distribute it. (I believe this was with reference to CD's but I'm not sure)
This worried me a lot. Does anyone else know if this is true or not?
I'm surprised that people in the US get so much spam...the most I got in one day was four.
Consider yourself very lucky. I must delete 30 to 50 spams a day (and I'm from the UK). The main problem is that I have to have a valid email address on my companies website and that has meant the auto collection bots have grabbed it. Its easy to spot some of the emails as the bot made a mistake in getting the email address and corrupted it. Unfortunately, this only accounts for about 20%.
I don't personally go after spammers though I wish I had the time and very much thank those that do.
Sure the game developer may have found that changing the physics model made the game more fun to play but one possibility is that (s)he had forgotten to model downforce. An F1 car produces a downforce higher than its own weight (cue comment about F1 cars being able to drive on the ceiling). Without downforce, a car would flip going around a corner at F1 speeds.
A very simple (*) way to model downforce is to drop the centre of gravity of the model so that it is below the ground. Other variables such as tire grip also have to be changed as well but these are generally constants.
(*) Downforce changes with vehicle speed so this is a very simple model.
I've not seen the colour display but I have been able to take a close look at their banner blue and white display. It had letters about 100mm high and must have been about a 1m long. It ran from a PP3 battery and was controlled via a serial port. The update rate was about once every 2 secs but I believe this was more to enable people to read the messages more than anything else. The clarity was fantastic and it really did look like it had been printed. I was impressed anyway
It did suffer from some image ghosting which meant that every 4 images are so it had to go to all blue and then all white to get rid of this problem. This took about 1 sec which made me believe that the max update was about 2Hz. Not really suitable for connecting to your laptop but then this was over a year ago and they may have been able to improve on this since then.
The E-ink site is at www.eink.com but I guess you guessed that.
As you say LS TTL is rather slow and rather out of the arc technology. Not quite sure why your using it as an example.
Lets take the current commonly available state of the art. Intels P4 1.5GHz has a clock period of 666ps (pico seconds) and it does something useful within this time. This implies that there gate delay will be a maximum of 30% to 50% of this, say 200 to 300ps. (It could be considerably less) Now 200ps is only 60mm (or 2.3" for you Yanks)
Its beginning to make the 5ns time look rather slow don't you think.
and not just us "one shot, one kill" young adults that like blood, guts, a little additude, and a lot of inside mature humor. Instead they will have to produce some of the real gems that we learned to love as youngsters: Mario, Metroid, PacMan, DigDug, SpaceInvaders, Asteriods..
Mario - Jump on animals to squish
Metroid - ???
PacMan - Eat the monsters
DigDug - Squash the monsters
SpaceInvaders - Shoot the aliens
Asteriods - Shoot the rocks(OK I guess) and the aliens
Non violent - I think not. The realism of modern games has improved and the gore content has gone up but I believe this is more a result of better technology than anything else. The violence has always been there.
The ISO format makes sense as it can easily be sorted into time/date order but why do the US insist on using MM-DD-YY? The UK (like the rest of the world?) uses DD-MM-YY which seems far more sensible.
Also, why use Eastern Standard Time (what ever that is). Why not use Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)?
OK. I guess I should stop whinging.
My guess for what its worth 2001-03-18 18:10:00 just in time to be shown on your news cast.
I agree with the other comments that the moons are more sensible places to look for life. But wouldn't it be possible for squishy life forms to survive in a liquid environment under high gravity? As long as the life form is approximately the same density as its environment then moving about should not be too much of a problem.
Here is another link to show that bacteria from earth has survived in space before.
The relevant bit is as follows:
In November, 1969, the Surveyor 3 spacecraft's microorganisms were recovered from inside its camera that was brought back to Earth under sterile conditions by the Apollo 12 crew. The 50-100 organisms survived launch, space vacuum, 3 years of radiation exposure, deep-freeze at an average temperature of only 20 degrees above absolute zero, and no nutrient, water or energy source
Here is a referenc e of jellyfish and leukaemia virus genes being inserted into a monkey.
Also, here is a referenc e to fire fly genes being inserted into a plant. Sure, they are not being used to grow more fire flys but there is no non GM method of getting the genes into the plant which was the original point.
Slashdot Mirror
How much of the fight scene at the subway station was CGI? I thought a lot of that was wire work, multiple cameras, blue screen and polystyrene walls etc. I didn't think that much was comp generated. Computer cleaned up and tweeked I'm sure but not computer generated.
What info have you got on this scene?
I do agree with your comments on the bill. It is totally crazy and unworkable, however....
Other examples of A/D :
How the telephone company decodes the tones when you press a button into a number
The ADC converts the telephone signal to digital. The tone decode is worked out further down the line using a signal processor (using quite a neat algorithm by the way)
How digital cell phones work
The ADC in mobile phone does exactly the same job as the ADC in a normal exchange.
How fax machines work
Hmm. Its only a one bit ADC but I guess thats true.
Digital medical equipment (measuring blood pressure, heartbeat, etc)
Literally any digital sensor
Apart from those that are digital in a different way such frequency counters.
Your themostat in your house
New ones yes, but the majority you come across in use are still mechanical as they are so cheap to produce.
Sure there are dangers with microwaves, however as with all things, it comes down to dosage. Strong signals - bad. Weak signals - less bad OR no effect OR benificial. So what is it?
There is an awful lot of research into the effects of mobile phones (certainly here in Europe) as it is such a big issue and people are worried. However, so far no effects have been shown apart from usage of phones actually improving your short term memory by a small amount.
Still worried? Well here is a parallel example. Find yourself a large magnifying glass and stand underneath it in bright sunlight. You will be cooked. Does this mean that sunlight is dangerous? Well yes if its bright sunlight (sunburn / cancer etc). However at low levels it is good for you. Your body needs sunlight to produce vitamin D, without it you get rickets etc.
So will mobile phones kill you? The answer to that is a definite Yes. Many people have already died directly caused by mobile phones. How? Well by walking out in front of cars whilst talking, driving in walls whilst using them etc. Compared to this, this risk of getting cancer or other ill through mobile phone usage is tiny. Not nil, this can't be proved, but tiny.
The gyros are made from silicon and by these people.
I used to work in the next department on laser gyros. Interesting stuff.
This assumes that cellphones can give you braincancer of which there is NO peer reviewed evidance.
:-) There is some evidance that mobile phone use can improve your memory but that's about it. Mobile phones have not been proved to be safe but then this will never be possible. It has been proved that the dangers are far less than the dangers of using a mobile phone whilst driving which kills many many people every day.
(they certainly can give you headaches;) not from the phone though speaking to the inlaws can cause this
This makes the antenna bigger. That means that the phone will send the braincancer waves to a bigger part of your brain, don't it? The size of the antenna does change its performance but a larger antenna can mean either a performance gain or a performance loss. A simple antenna wants to be 1/4 of the wavelength of the signal it is transmitting. Either bigger or smaller will reduce its performance. You are also missing a very important point. An improvement in the antenna means that the signal driving it can be reduced so as to save battery life. The signal strength generated by a mobile phone is adjusted to be as weak as possible so as to just make a reliable connection. Therefore the radiated output from the phone will be the same.
And it will be more difficult to shield the antenna because the outside of the phone will be a complete antenna. Mobile phone shields do not work. The phone simply increases the signal strength to compensate for any changes any so called shields provide. Transmission measurements in lab conditions have shown that shields make no difference at all.
Also a larger antenna doesn't neccesarely mean that it's better. Correct. However a larger antenna "could" be better.
I believe that for every wavelength there's an optimal size (if I remember correctly). The ideal length for a 1/4 wavelength antenna used on a mobile operating at 900MHz is 75mm. However, there are other options apart from 1/4 wavelength antennas.
I recall hearing that bird's eyes work at very high frequencies, does that mean our houses are blinking like Christmas trees to them? That's an interesting thought
I hadn't thought of this but you are quite probably right. Humans can see flashing up to about 30Hz. Birds (or any other animal) need only to be x4 better than this to see the flashing of our street lamps etc. Doesn't seem to bother them though. Maybe they just think they are in the disco...
Then be amazed. To your eyes its a blur but not to a photo transistor or similar. Both the LED and the receiver are easily capable of these frequencies and as mentioned in the article 10MHz is not a problem. A good example where this technique is used delibrately is on TV remotes. OK the data rate is low (10kb/s??) but the parts used are very low tech.
You see that big white thing hanging from the ceiling that wonderfully lights up the room? Is that a steady light or pulsed? The 50Hz (or 60Hz for you yanks) supply causes filament bulbs to pulse at 100Hz (120Hz) and is very obvious if you have the right sensor to pick it up. (Your eyes are not the right sensor.) Florescent lights are even better and are completely dark for quite a proportion of their on time.
The best bit is at the end of the pdf. A slight modification to somebodies keyboard will cause the scroll lock led to output details of every last keypress you make. Encription does not matter if you have access to the plain text...
Time to get our paranoid hats on....
0.08% variation between one human and the next.
Therefore 57MB required per human.
1TB = 1048576MB
Therefore 18000+ genomes could be fitted into 1TB. I guess compression would allow this to be increased somewhat.
There are 536 tonnes of air in both the Biomes
volume inside HT Biome; 330,110m3
volume inside WT Biome; 85,620m3
Density of air = 1.225 Kg/m3 (at 15 deg C) - though this gives a mass of 509 tonnes.
Either way the air does not quite weigh as much as the steel but its close.
The Millennium Dome is a suspension type construction which is generally very light so I would guess that the air inside it weighs a lot less than the structure.
However, the comparison with biosphere 2 is rather strange as the two projects are very different. The Eden Project is basically a big green house. It has never been sealed and has never had that intention. It has value as an educational tool and there are some science studies going on but this is minor. Beyond its construction (which is bleeding edge), I found the biosphere 2 project far more interesting.
With the biosphere 2 project, the entire environment had be controlled. As they found, this is very difficult to achieve and needs to be sorted before any attempts for Moon or Mars bases can start. It should be interesting to see what the next attempt at a sealed environment achieves.
A few links from the BBC and from Google for the Eden Project.
and then of course, the guy that thinks of the spuds and soot printing technique applies and gets a patent on the process. If he's clever, it will worded so that it then covers all future printing processes such a proper ink and proper type.
This would be fine if he continues to innovate but if he does not, nobody else will think the costs are worth it as they will just get sued.
The other side of course, is that if there were no patents then nobody would innovate as they would not be able to recoup their investment. I personally think that although this is true, there tide has flowed far to far towards the patent holders. I would love to see the strength of patents weakened but I feel the opposite is happening.
I mean, they have those traces-printed-on-plastic ribbon cables connecting things like keyboards and calculator screens to components. And printer heads in inkjets.
Flex's are made using a similar process to that used to make printed circuit board. A layer of copper is stuck to a sheet of plastic and then photo etched. This is cheap but not as cheap as a normal printing process.
Plus, we have alloys which can be deposited on substrates a micron-layer at a time.
This can be done (crisp packets for example (sorry - chip packets for you yanks)) but most processes require high temperatures which don't do much good to a layer of plastic.
How tough is it to dope conducting inks with Gallium-Arsenide? (Or whatever).
Physics Today have an article about the University of Cambridge printing transistors using ink jet printers. Conducting inks are not unusual - indeed most mass produced PCBs are put together with screen printed solder paste. Its a bit of a step to call this an ink but it gives you an idea of what's possible.
Why the heck hasn't this technology been around for a decade or more? It doesn't seem so much like an advance as it does a, "They finally got off their asses and assembled the stupid thing."
The devel is in the detail. Sure I can demonstrate printing to you using some chimney soot and half a potato. Its quite a bit harder to produce a 100,000 copies of a newspaper (including those AOL CD's) for just a few pence. Development always takes many times longer than you think and far more money.
I read recently, somewhere, I can't find it, that in the UK this is not true. A law has been passed that denies you the right to make a backup copies even if you have not, and have made no attempts to distribute it. (I believe this was with reference to CD's but I'm not sure)
This worried me a lot. Does anyone else know if this is true or not?
Consider yourself very lucky. I must delete 30 to 50 spams a day (and I'm from the UK). The main problem is that I have to have a valid email address on my companies website and that has meant the auto collection bots have grabbed it. Its easy to spot some of the emails as the bot made a mistake in getting the email address and corrupted it. Unfortunately, this only accounts for about 20%.
I don't personally go after spammers though I wish I had the time and very much thank those that do.
Using Pounds is a way for NASA to save money...
;-)
As Pounds is a measure of weight rather than mass, the cost goes down as the weight reduces as the payload goes into orbit.
If you used Kilograms then you would be measuring mass which stays fixed, hence no cost savings
(Top Tip - Always buy a 2.2 Pounds of moon rock, never 1 Kilogram - You will get about 6 times as much rock due to the lower gravity on the moon)
A very simple (*) way to model downforce is to drop the centre of gravity of the model so that it is below the ground. Other variables such as tire grip also have to be changed as well but these are generally constants.
(*) Downforce changes with vehicle speed so this is a very simple model.
It did suffer from some image ghosting which meant that every 4 images are so it had to go to all blue and then all white to get rid of this problem. This took about 1 sec which made me believe that the max update was about 2Hz. Not really suitable for connecting to your laptop but then this was over a year ago and they may have been able to improve on this since then.
The E-ink site is at www.eink.com but I guess you guessed that.
As you say LS TTL is rather slow and rather out of the arc technology. Not quite sure why your using it as an example.
Lets take the current commonly available state of the art. Intels P4 1.5GHz has a clock period of 666ps (pico seconds) and it does something useful within this time. This implies that there gate delay will be a maximum of 30% to 50% of this, say 200 to 300ps. (It could be considerably less) Now 200ps is only 60mm (or 2.3" for you Yanks)
Its beginning to make the 5ns time look rather slow don't you think.
Mario - Jump on animals to squish
Metroid - ???
PacMan - Eat the monsters
DigDug - Squash the monsters
SpaceInvaders - Shoot the aliens
Asteriods - Shoot the rocks(OK I guess) and the aliens
Non violent - I think not. The realism of modern games has improved and the gore content has gone up but I believe this is more a result of better technology than anything else. The violence has always been there.
The ISO format makes sense as it can easily be sorted into time/date order but why do the US insist on using MM-DD-YY? The UK (like the rest of the world?) uses DD-MM-YY which seems far more sensible.
Also, why use Eastern Standard Time (what ever that is). Why not use Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)?
OK. I guess I should stop whinging.
My guess for what its worth 2001-03-18 18:10:00 just in time to be shown on your news cast.
I agree with the other comments that the moons are more sensible places to look for life. But wouldn't it be possible for squishy life forms to survive in a liquid environment under high gravity? As long as the life form is approximately the same density as its environment then moving about should not be too much of a problem.
Unless I've missed something, you are wrong here.
If the plane of orbit is a right angle to us then the sun would wobble in a circular motion.
If we are edge on to the plane of orbit then the sun would wobble side to side only.
Other angles would cause an elliptical motion on the sun.
I believe, that you get enough information that you can calculate the mass directly and also find out the plane in which it is rotating.
(I could be wrong though)
Try 145444 m/s Still fast though....
The relevant bit is as follows:
In November, 1969, the Surveyor 3 spacecraft's microorganisms were recovered from inside its camera that was brought back to Earth under sterile conditions by the Apollo 12 crew. The 50-100 organisms survived launch, space vacuum, 3 years of radiation exposure, deep-freeze at an average temperature of only 20 degrees above absolute zero, and no nutrient, water or energy source
Also, here is a referenc e to fire fly genes being inserted into a plant. Sure, they are not being used to grow more fire flys but there is no non GM method of getting the genes into the plant which was the original point.