Why would any inter-computer handshaking process require a scale of minutes? Someone is not thinking here.
Processors are running HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF OPS PER SECOND... how can a simple handshake take more than a few milliseconds?
(I've yet to understand why Wifi connections, as another example, aren't almost instantaneous; communication between two computers, even with really generous timeouts should not take on the scale of seconds.)
The trick being, of course, that they are all 100% worthless for predicting future trends.
Actually, they're pretty good at predicting broad trends. It's just that they're not good at predicting specific outcomes. In the same way that understanding the odds of roulette doesn't let you predict what number will come up on a specific spin. The only way to really use the odds is to bet across the entire table to take advantage of the trend - that's what the house does.
I have two friends who work in finance (I'm sure I'm not alone in this here), one as a trader and one as a quant. The trader does very, very well. The quant, who is using some very sophisticated mathematics (say, "power law" to him, and he'll retort, "most examples aren't actually power laws, just things that look like power laws that people don't bother checking; a severely skewed distribution does not a power law make") does not do quite as well, but still has a positive return.
Not everyone in finance is like these two. But they are solid examples of professionals watching and taking advantage of trends.
MIT?? This is kid's stuff. The only difference between your broomstick controller and a $20 DIY backyard sun-tracking sundial is that the broom balancer is 2-axis, and has to be faster. Big deal.
Um, no. Clearly you have not studied this problem which is a (perhaps *the*) classic PID exercise. A simple P term (proportional) will fail very, very quickly. Add the D term (differential) and you get stability, but drift. Finally, add the I term (integral) and you eliminate the drift and turn the meta-stable system into a stable one. If you want stability to external perturbation, or generalization to a broad range of loads, then you need more analysis and more terms.
Designing one of those from scratch, based only on the mathematical modeling, and building it from individual components, while worthy of no more than an undergraduate exercise at MIT, is non-trivial. Designing a full Segway-like system is a generalization of this problem and also non-trivial.
If you think it's so easy, then please build one yourself -- demonstrating all of the calculations -- and post the video.
Digital controllers -emulate- analog behavior (at least many of them do). There's a pantload of research and science behind analog control.
At MIT, if you take 18.03 (differential equations), you see an example of a PID controller to balance a broomstick (inverted pendulum) --- in analog -- which, with not too much generalization, becomes a Segway. It doesn't surprise me in the least that this guy is at MIT.
I've often wondered about what seems like a huge gap in the security technology: umbrella shafts, like the Penguin would use. It's a thin circular shaft of metal. On the X-ray, it's going to show up as thin circular shaft of metal. Seems like an obvious place to put a sword blade...
If you were to precisely match the dimensions of a sword blade to the enclosing shaft such that together there were no gaps, then the x-ray would not see the sword. Were there any gaps, they would make the sword visible.
It's all about changes in material density (composition) or thickness. That's the only thing that can be seen, because it is the only effect that drives variation in x-ray absorption.
Why are journalists a special protected class in your opinion? Would they release information without filtering it? What if they were pressured to not release it by a government? Or what if it exposes the wrongdoing of the corporation that owns the journalists?
The ideal journalist will disseminate the information to everyone anyway, why add the extra step?
Two simple factors (I'm actually quite surprised that a thinking person wouldn't already realise this): first, not everyone can write, so not all of the material you would want disseminated would be easy to read. Second, journalists do more than just copy, they gather potentially disparate facts, distill them, drop irrelevant cruft, and give the readers the good parts.
Seriously, have you read all of the thousands of recently leaked cables? Do you have any desire to whatsoever? Personally, I'd rather pay a professional reporter to do that for me, and filter out what is important and what is not. I'll especially pay him if he can write well.
It depends greatly what you are building or fixing.
For basic electronics stuff, soldering irons, those boxes of little drawers (filled with components), good chairs, a magnifying lamp, lots and lots of storage for this-and-that, heat gun, lots of shrink tube, wire in a handful of gauges and insulation colors (all teflon, if your budget allows) in solid and stranded. A variac. An oscilloscope (I have found that there are exactly two good places for a 'scope: on a cart, or in a 19-inch rack). Hand tools, and save some budget for extra hand tools as they have a high vapor pressure. Good hand tools, at that. Basic metal / wood working tools (files, hand saws, drills). Drill bits: buy good ones and you'll thank me later, buy cheap ones and you'll end up buying good ones anyway. A small drill press (one of THE most valuable bits of kit around). One of those massively heavy vises that gets bolted to the work surface (and do, indeed, bolt it in place). I've found an end-sander is really useful too. Epoxy, lots of epoxy. A set of precision screwdrivers (keep them under lock and key). A cordless drill (minimum a DeWalt). Fluke hand-held meters. A very high quality 6 or 8-inch L-square, and a decent quality 12-24 inch one. Good lighting. Lots of electrical outlets. A handful of ethernet drops.
Try reading the article again. The 30 minutes is not how long they expect it to take for the house to burn down. 30 minutes is how long they expect it to take before the fire is hot enough to break down toxins before they can escape the house in the plume of smoke.
As for the detonation issue, a lot of explosives will merely burn quickly unless they are very hot and are triggered by a shock wave (such as from a blasting cap) to detonate. It's quite reasonable for them to expect to be able to burn a lot of the explosives without detonation occurring, and even if a lot of the stuff does detonate, they've calculated that debris would only be sent flying 60-70 feet.
Assuming things like (1) an accurate and complete inventory of the materials in the house has been made (highly doubtful given that the article claims a robot cannot navigate the piles of junk), (2) no booby traps are going to be accidentally triggered by the fire, (3) no explosive devices are going to be accidentally triggered by the fire -- not the chemicals, but a mechanical triggering due to heat deformation of the triggering mechanism, (4) no unanticipated chemical reactions are going to take place that might release *really* nasty stuff into the atmosphere, (5) the models are correct, etc.
This guy was sufficiently unhinged that he decided to store materiel at home and make a mini bomb factory. With that as a starting point, burning the house would not seem the prudent choice.
One, this happened over a period of years, not weeks.
Second, if the tenants destroy your property creating a meth lab, the government would not reimburse you. For all intents and purposes these tenants destroyed the property. I as a tax payer should not compensate the landlord for his loss.
No, the government is destroying this house. The tenants only stored unusual materials that the government has deemed dangerous.
I understand it's a rental property and the owner is not to be compensated, because it was declared a "public nuisance". DOH! Should've kept up with those annual inspections!
We clearly don't have all of the information on that decision. Nevertheless, in reading the article, not compensating the owners struck me as just being mean. The property should be taken by eminent domain (to protect the public welfare), owners compensated fair market value, the structure buried under a heap of dirt to protect the neighbours and the contents extracted by robot, slowly, with the explosive bits being neutralized a small bit at a time, in a controlled way.
Burning the entire house, when the authorities do not know what nastiness might be hiding in unlabelled bottles, is not a controlled disposal. I, for one, do not believe that explosives will burn for 30 minutes, and that no toxicity will be released. The house may burn for 30 minutes, but the explosives are going to incinerate a whole lot faster, assuming none of them achieve detonation conditions. Am I the only one who is given pause by the implicit assurance of a so-called controlled burn that none of these explosives are going to detonate?
They wound their solenoids by hand? Isn’t that a little like writing an application in assembly language? on a CPU you built from relays and piano wire?
Yes, *exactly*. Now that I've been told they are in fact MIT graduates, it makes sense. The MIT EECS curriculum (which I had the tremendous fortune of being able to teach all four of the core courses) emphasizes precisely that: build your own from scratch so that you understand every single aspect. In the Intro to Digital Design course (6.004) students, do, in fact, build CPUs from relays and piano wire, as it were. Then they code in machine language for a while, followed by writing an assembler so they can use assembly language.
I *loved* this project, even if it isn't brand-spanking new, and even if they got the xylo- / metallo- / whatever terminology not quite right. They got the physics right, even going back to original reports. Moreover, they didn't intone "4th degree differential equations" all-wide-eyed, but, instead with confidence that it's knowable and understandable. They not only machined their own bars, but wound their own solenoids on custom-machined forms! Holy western union, Batman! That's beyond nerdy: That's Thomas Edison / Alexander Graham Bell levels of intensity. Reminds me of MIT undergrads.
And, beyond all that nerdfest of wonderfulness, they managed to make a very watchable and instructive video. To all of you who are bashing this impressive effort, I say: go do better, and then come back and sling your darts and arrows.
They wound their own solenoids by hand! I can't get over that. My father, when he was working as an engineer, built a machine to wind coils because doing them by hand was so onerous. Doing it by hand, and showing how on a video, that's beyond showing off, that's showing *how*.
The problem with that method is that it requires that you be 100% confident in the placement of your mirrors because there is no feedback on their location until it becomes critical.
So did the old method, until people got used to it.
Um, no. Because you see the edge of your car in the traditional aiming method, you know exactly where the mirror is pointing. If you don't see the edge of your car, there is no a-priori information about where the side-view mirror is aimed until a car is passing you, at which point, it is too late. But worse, if the mirrors in the new method are pointed incorrectly, there is no feedback to indicate correction is required and you have an *unconstrained* blind spot (possibly two per side). The total risk is higher.
The new mirror surface with minimum distortion and wide view is a superior solution.
The problem with that method is that it requires that you be 100% confident in the placement of your mirrors because there is no feedback on their location until it becomes critical.
In contrast, when the mirrors are showing you part of your car, it provides an automatic reference point to judge the location of the images that does not depend on the precise mirror position. Furthermore, if your car does not show in your side-view mirrors, then it indicates that their alignment is off.
Since the standard interface with rear and side view mirrors includes easy adjustments, I'd rather not depend on the placement being accurate.
It replaces MOST phosphorus atoms with arsenic, but not all.
After listening to the conference, it appears they don't know if it actively replaces phosphorous with arsenic, or it's happily living that way already. The experiment (based on listening to the lead author talk about it, which should be good enough, and if it isn't, I blame the author) was that they took a dollop of Mono Lake mud and put it in a laboratory environment that was rich in everything except (a) it wholly lacked phosphorus (how did they eliminate the phosphorus from the mud?) and (b) it had a "double helping" (her words) of arsenic. Then, they waited to see what would grow. The bacterium subsequently isolated had arsenic in place of phosphorus in isolated parts of its DNA and perhaps other important molecules, but that is after application of arsenic stress, not before.
Because the Clinton candidacy was strong when he chose Palin, and McCain assumed (with good reason) that if Clinton got the Democratic nomination that the election would end up being about opening up a new era of equality in politics with regards to female candidates.
And Condi Rice turned him down. (Actually, I don't know if that's true or not, but Dr. Rice would have made a far better choice to counter what Clinton and Obama were bringing to bear... and might have been a good choice for the country as well.)
It probably has to do with the recent discovery of oxygen on saturn's moon Rhea.
Doubtful, for two reasons: (a) that has already been announced, and (b) the oxygen there has a plausible nonbiological origin (energetic particles in Saturn's magnetic field interacting with water ice on the surface).
The smart money says this press announcement will be disappointing to most people. Not unlike like the whole Apple/Beatles thing.
Extra doubtful that it's about Rhea because Carolyn Porco, the head of the Cassini project, isn't on the list of participants.
Doing a few minutes' worth of work in Google comes to the following information about the listed participants in the press conference:
Mary Voytek -- director, NASA Astrobiology program Felisa Wolfe-Simon -- evolutionary biology including metallic enzymes, specifically the potential role of arsenic in DNA Pamela Conrad -- biogeochemistry and organic chemical signatures of extremophiles Steven Benner -- geobiology of RNA, including detection of DNA and RNA James Elser -- the influence of nitrogen and phosphorus in biological processes including ecosystems, speciation and RNA
Since the announcement of the press conference says that the finding will impact the "search for evidence of extraterrestrial life," chances are they've found some potential signature of a metabolic process. Notwithstanding what I said above about Carolyn Porco, Cassini flew within 100 km of Rhea earlier this year (March) to "determine what is coming off Rhea" according to NASA's site on the flyby. The timing (March to December) fits well with the amount of time it takes to do data analysis, write a paper, and have it accepted for publication for something that gets fast-tracked. Science is published on Fridays. Nature is published on Thursdays. It would seem like the paper is going to appear in Nature no matter what the exact announcement is.
It's not new that our immune system has to be trained to work well. And only some kind of idiot doesn't make the link that keeping the kids away from every source of infection must result in an inferior immune system. Where's the news here?
Two of my relatives by marriage do not understand this, and would be classified as "some kind of idiot," despite being rational, intelligent, reasonable people. That is, they are apparently normal people except when it comes to dirt, in which case they become germ nazis. These sorts of reports continue to be news to them, news that they both passively and actively resist.
On the other hand, a close colleague of mine did field work in PNG looking at asthma rates in the undeveloped and developed sections of that country. The homes with dirt floors where the family pigs roamed in and out freely had the lowest instances of asthma. Mention this scientific study to my aforementioned relatives and they refuse to accept it, despite it having been done by someone that not only has been affiliated with some of the top research universities in the US, but someone with whom I've published.
Seeing how light travels much faster than sound, my initial reaction is that this is a terrible idea.
Didn't bother viewing the linked video, eh?
The idea works pretty well because things with mass tend to move slowly, so despite the latencies involved and differential speed of sound and light, the described mixed digital / analog device works quite well to capture a mid-pop baloon or breaking wine glass. But then there are all of those classic Doc Edgerton photos that were taken with just analog circuitry, and they worked fine, too. Indeed, Prof. Edgerton made quite a career for himself at MIT using just this idea. So, despite the perhaps 10 seconds of thought you put into the problem before composing your negative reply, the idea has merit.
And when grandma wants to play a flash game on her Ipad I suppose you'll have another argument about how being "easy to use" means not having to play the games she wants to play? When Apple says "Easy to use" Apple is talking about you.
No, they are not. I'm in a tiny, insignificant little minority (so are you, if you didn't realize) who knows up from down when it comes to computers. Apple does not really care about us because they aim to sell not tens of thousands of units but millions upon millions. We don't matter. Grandma does. If all of the Slashdot readers stopped buying Apple products, I'd be surprised if it made a difference in the smallest significant digit used in Apple's annual report.
Remember, Apple has 65 billion dollars of annual sales, according to their 10-K filing from September 2010. That's many millions of shipped units. Again, you and I don't matter. Grandma does.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would any inter-computer handshaking process require a scale of minutes? Someone is not thinking here.
Processors are running HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF OPS PER SECOND ... how can a simple handshake take more than a few milliseconds?
(I've yet to understand why Wifi connections, as another example, aren't almost instantaneous; communication between two computers, even with really generous timeouts should not take on the scale of seconds.)
The trick being, of course, that they are all 100% worthless for predicting future trends.
Actually, they're pretty good at predicting broad trends. It's just that they're not good at predicting specific outcomes. In the same way that understanding the odds of roulette doesn't let you predict what number will come up on a specific spin. The only way to really use the odds is to bet across the entire table to take advantage of the trend - that's what the house does.
I have two friends who work in finance (I'm sure I'm not alone in this here), one as a trader and one as a quant. The trader does very, very well. The quant, who is using some very sophisticated mathematics (say, "power law" to him, and he'll retort, "most examples aren't actually power laws, just things that look like power laws that people don't bother checking; a severely skewed distribution does not a power law make") does not do quite as well, but still has a positive return.
Not everyone in finance is like these two. But they are solid examples of professionals watching and taking advantage of trends.
MIT?? This is kid's stuff. The only difference between your broomstick controller and a $20 DIY backyard sun-tracking sundial is that the broom balancer is 2-axis, and has to be faster. Big deal.
Um, no. Clearly you have not studied this problem which is a (perhaps *the*) classic PID exercise. A simple P term (proportional) will fail very, very quickly. Add the D term (differential) and you get stability, but drift. Finally, add the I term (integral) and you eliminate the drift and turn the meta-stable system into a stable one. If you want stability to external perturbation, or generalization to a broad range of loads, then you need more analysis and more terms.
Designing one of those from scratch, based only on the mathematical modeling, and building it from individual components, while worthy of no more than an undergraduate exercise at MIT, is non-trivial. Designing a full Segway-like system is a generalization of this problem and also non-trivial.
If you think it's so easy, then please build one yourself -- demonstrating all of the calculations -- and post the video.
Digital controllers -emulate- analog behavior (at least many of them do). There's a pantload of research and science behind analog control.
At MIT, if you take 18.03 (differential equations), you see an example of a PID controller to balance a broomstick (inverted pendulum) --- in analog -- which, with not too much generalization, becomes a Segway. It doesn't surprise me in the least that this guy is at MIT.
I've often wondered about what seems like a huge gap in the security technology: umbrella shafts, like the Penguin would use. It's a thin circular shaft of metal. On the X-ray, it's going to show up as thin circular shaft of metal. Seems like an obvious place to put a sword blade...
If you were to precisely match the dimensions of a sword blade to the enclosing shaft such that together there were no gaps, then the x-ray would not see the sword. Were there any gaps, they would make the sword visible.
It's all about changes in material density (composition) or thickness. That's the only thing that can be seen, because it is the only effect that drives variation in x-ray absorption.
Some ideas that might help:
1. can you pop off the tops of the keys that you think are not useful or that are somehow distracting?
2. can you acquire the reduced-footprint keyboards that don't have the keypad extension?
Why are journalists a special protected class in your opinion? Would they release information without filtering it? What if they were pressured to not release it by a government? Or what if it exposes the wrongdoing of the corporation that owns the journalists?
The ideal journalist will disseminate the information to everyone anyway, why add the extra step?
Two simple factors (I'm actually quite surprised that a thinking person wouldn't already realise this): first, not everyone can write, so not all of the material you would want disseminated would be easy to read. Second, journalists do more than just copy, they gather potentially disparate facts, distill them, drop irrelevant cruft, and give the readers the good parts.
Seriously, have you read all of the thousands of recently leaked cables? Do you have any desire to whatsoever? Personally, I'd rather pay a professional reporter to do that for me, and filter out what is important and what is not. I'll especially pay him if he can write well.
It depends greatly what you are building or fixing.
For basic electronics stuff, soldering irons, those boxes of little drawers (filled with components), good chairs, a magnifying lamp, lots and lots of storage for this-and-that, heat gun, lots of shrink tube, wire in a handful of gauges and insulation colors (all teflon, if your budget allows) in solid and stranded. A variac. An oscilloscope (I have found that there are exactly two good places for a 'scope: on a cart, or in a 19-inch rack). Hand tools, and save some budget for extra hand tools as they have a high vapor pressure. Good hand tools, at that. Basic metal / wood working tools (files, hand saws, drills). Drill bits: buy good ones and you'll thank me later, buy cheap ones and you'll end up buying good ones anyway. A small drill press (one of THE most valuable bits of kit around). One of those massively heavy vises that gets bolted to the work surface (and do, indeed, bolt it in place). I've found an end-sander is really useful too. Epoxy, lots of epoxy. A set of precision screwdrivers (keep them under lock and key). A cordless drill (minimum a DeWalt). Fluke hand-held meters. A very high quality 6 or 8-inch L-square, and a decent quality 12-24 inch one. Good lighting. Lots of electrical outlets. A handful of ethernet drops.
Now I'm gonna have to crush like 20 yellow Fiestaware pitchers to test my homemade GM tubes. Thanks for nothing Amazon.
I'm pretty sure you want to be smashing the orange-red ones.
I just refuse to believe that people can be that dumb...
"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." -- Henry Menken
Try reading the article again. The 30 minutes is not how long they expect it to take for the house to burn down. 30 minutes is how long they expect it to take before the fire is hot enough to break down toxins before they can escape the house in the plume of smoke.
As for the detonation issue, a lot of explosives will merely burn quickly unless they are very hot and are triggered by a shock wave (such as from a blasting cap) to detonate. It's quite reasonable for them to expect to be able to burn a lot of the explosives without detonation occurring, and even if a lot of the stuff does detonate, they've calculated that debris would only be sent flying 60-70 feet.
Assuming things like (1) an accurate and complete inventory of the materials in the house has been made (highly doubtful given that the article claims a robot cannot navigate the piles of junk), (2) no booby traps are going to be accidentally triggered by the fire, (3) no explosive devices are going to be accidentally triggered by the fire -- not the chemicals, but a mechanical triggering due to heat deformation of the triggering mechanism, (4) no unanticipated chemical reactions are going to take place that might release *really* nasty stuff into the atmosphere, (5) the models are correct, etc.
This guy was sufficiently unhinged that he decided to store materiel at home and make a mini bomb factory. With that as a starting point, burning the house would not seem the prudent choice.
One, this happened over a period of years, not weeks.
Second, if the tenants destroy your property creating a meth lab, the government would not reimburse you. For all intents and purposes these tenants destroyed the property. I as a tax payer should not compensate the landlord for his loss.
No, the government is destroying this house. The tenants only stored unusual materials that the government has deemed dangerous.
I understand it's a rental property and the owner is not to be compensated, because it was declared a "public nuisance". DOH! Should've kept up with those annual inspections!
We clearly don't have all of the information on that decision. Nevertheless, in reading the article, not compensating the owners struck me as just being mean. The property should be taken by eminent domain (to protect the public welfare), owners compensated fair market value, the structure buried under a heap of dirt to protect the neighbours and the contents extracted by robot, slowly, with the explosive bits being neutralized a small bit at a time, in a controlled way.
Burning the entire house, when the authorities do not know what nastiness might be hiding in unlabelled bottles, is not a controlled disposal. I, for one, do not believe that explosives will burn for 30 minutes, and that no toxicity will be released. The house may burn for 30 minutes, but the explosives are going to incinerate a whole lot faster, assuming none of them achieve detonation conditions. Am I the only one who is given pause by the implicit assurance of a so-called controlled burn that none of these explosives are going to detonate?
They wound their solenoids by hand? Isn’t that a little like writing an application in assembly language? on a CPU you built from relays and piano wire?
Yes, *exactly*. Now that I've been told they are in fact MIT graduates, it makes sense. The MIT EECS curriculum (which I had the tremendous fortune of being able to teach all four of the core courses) emphasizes precisely that: build your own from scratch so that you understand every single aspect. In the Intro to Digital Design course (6.004) students, do, in fact, build CPUs from relays and piano wire, as it were. Then they code in machine language for a while, followed by writing an assembler so they can use assembly language.
I *loved* this project, even if it isn't brand-spanking new, and even if they got the xylo- / metallo- / whatever terminology not quite right. They got the physics right, even going back to original reports. Moreover, they didn't intone "4th degree differential equations" all-wide-eyed, but, instead with confidence that it's knowable and understandable. They not only machined their own bars, but wound their own solenoids on custom-machined forms! Holy western union, Batman! That's beyond nerdy: That's Thomas Edison / Alexander Graham Bell levels of intensity. Reminds me of MIT undergrads.
And, beyond all that nerdfest of wonderfulness, they managed to make a very watchable and instructive video. To all of you who are bashing this impressive effort, I say: go do better, and then come back and sling your darts and arrows.
They wound their own solenoids by hand! I can't get over that. My father, when he was working as an engineer, built a machine to wind coils because doing them by hand was so onerous. Doing it by hand, and showing how on a video, that's beyond showing off, that's showing *how*.
My hat is off to these folks: well done!
The problem with that method is that it requires that you be 100% confident in the placement of your mirrors because there is no feedback on their location until it becomes critical.
So did the old method, until people got used to it.
Um, no. Because you see the edge of your car in the traditional aiming method, you know exactly where the mirror is pointing. If you don't see the edge of your car, there is no a-priori information about where the side-view mirror is aimed until a car is passing you, at which point, it is too late. But worse, if the mirrors in the new method are pointed incorrectly, there is no feedback to indicate correction is required and you have an *unconstrained* blind spot (possibly two per side). The total risk is higher.
The new mirror surface with minimum distortion and wide view is a superior solution.
There's no need for any fancy mirrors. Using this method, you can adjust your mirrors so there is no blind spot. I've been using it for years.
http://www.cartalk.com/content/features/mirrors/
The problem with that method is that it requires that you be 100% confident in the placement of your mirrors because there is no feedback on their location until it becomes critical.
In contrast, when the mirrors are showing you part of your car, it provides an automatic reference point to judge the location of the images that does not depend on the precise mirror position. Furthermore, if your car does not show in your side-view mirrors, then it indicates that their alignment is off.
Since the standard interface with rear and side view mirrors includes easy adjustments, I'd rather not depend on the placement being accurate.
Yes this mirror is illegal in the us:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=drivers-med-rearview-mirror-sans-bl-2009-01-19
Man, I want a couple of those for my cars. Any idea if the inventor has marketed them?
It replaces MOST phosphorus atoms with arsenic, but not all.
After listening to the conference, it appears they don't know if it actively replaces phosphorous with arsenic, or it's happily living that way already. The experiment (based on listening to the lead author talk about it, which should be good enough, and if it isn't, I blame the author) was that they took a dollop of Mono Lake mud and put it in a laboratory environment that was rich in everything except (a) it wholly lacked phosphorus (how did they eliminate the phosphorus from the mud?) and (b) it had a "double helping" (her words) of arsenic. Then, they waited to see what would grow. The bacterium subsequently isolated had arsenic in place of phosphorus in isolated parts of its DNA and perhaps other important molecules, but that is after application of arsenic stress, not before.
Anyone know for certain?
Because the Clinton candidacy was strong when he chose Palin, and McCain assumed (with good reason) that if Clinton got the Democratic nomination that the election would end up being about opening up a new era of equality in politics with regards to female candidates.
And Condi Rice turned him down. (Actually, I don't know if that's true or not, but Dr. Rice would have made a far better choice to counter what Clinton and Obama were bringing to bear ... and might have been a good choice for the country as well.)
Excellent speculation.
It probably has to do with the recent discovery of oxygen on saturn's moon Rhea.
Doubtful, for two reasons: (a) that has already been announced, and (b) the oxygen there has a plausible nonbiological origin (energetic particles in Saturn's magnetic field interacting with water ice on the surface).
The smart money says this press announcement will be disappointing to most people. Not unlike like the whole Apple/Beatles thing.
Extra doubtful that it's about Rhea because Carolyn Porco, the head of the Cassini project, isn't on the list of participants.
Doing a few minutes' worth of work in Google comes to the following information about the listed participants in the press conference:
Mary Voytek -- director, NASA Astrobiology program
Felisa Wolfe-Simon -- evolutionary biology including metallic enzymes, specifically the potential role of arsenic in DNA
Pamela Conrad -- biogeochemistry and organic chemical signatures of extremophiles
Steven Benner -- geobiology of RNA, including detection of DNA and RNA
James Elser -- the influence of nitrogen and phosphorus in biological processes including ecosystems, speciation and RNA
Since the announcement of the press conference says that the finding will impact the "search for evidence of extraterrestrial life," chances are they've found some potential signature of a metabolic process. Notwithstanding what I said above about Carolyn Porco, Cassini flew within 100 km of Rhea earlier this year (March) to "determine what is coming off Rhea" according to NASA's site on the flyby. The timing (March to December) fits well with the amount of time it takes to do data analysis, write a paper, and have it accepted for publication for something that gets fast-tracked. Science is published on Fridays. Nature is published on Thursdays. It would seem like the paper is going to appear in Nature no matter what the exact announcement is.
It's not new that our immune system has to be trained to work well. And only some kind of idiot doesn't make the link that keeping the kids away from every source of infection must result in an inferior immune system. Where's the news here?
Two of my relatives by marriage do not understand this, and would be classified as "some kind of idiot," despite being rational, intelligent, reasonable people. That is, they are apparently normal people except when it comes to dirt, in which case they become germ nazis. These sorts of reports continue to be news to them, news that they both passively and actively resist.
On the other hand, a close colleague of mine did field work in PNG looking at asthma rates in the undeveloped and developed sections of that country. The homes with dirt floors where the family pigs roamed in and out freely had the lowest instances of asthma. Mention this scientific study to my aforementioned relatives and they refuse to accept it, despite it having been done by someone that not only has been affiliated with some of the top research universities in the US, but someone with whom I've published.
Seeing how light travels much faster than sound, my initial reaction is that this is a terrible idea.
Didn't bother viewing the linked video, eh?
The idea works pretty well because things with mass tend to move slowly, so despite the latencies involved and differential speed of sound and light, the described mixed digital / analog device works quite well to capture a mid-pop baloon or breaking wine glass. But then there are all of those classic Doc Edgerton photos that were taken with just analog circuitry, and they worked fine, too. Indeed, Prof. Edgerton made quite a career for himself at MIT using just this idea. So, despite the perhaps 10 seconds of thought you put into the problem before composing your negative reply, the idea has merit.
And when grandma wants to play a flash game on her Ipad I suppose you'll have another argument about how being "easy to use" means not having to play the games she wants to play? When Apple says "Easy to use" Apple is talking about you.
No, they are not. I'm in a tiny, insignificant little minority (so are you, if you didn't realize) who knows up from down when it comes to computers. Apple does not really care about us because they aim to sell not tens of thousands of units but millions upon millions. We don't matter. Grandma does. If all of the Slashdot readers stopped buying Apple products, I'd be surprised if it made a difference in the smallest significant digit used in Apple's annual report.
Remember, Apple has 65 billion dollars of annual sales, according to their 10-K filing from September 2010. That's many millions of shipped units. Again, you and I don't matter. Grandma does.