In the 1960s the foundation of VM/370 was created at Cambridge University (MA, USA, not UK) and called CP/67.
From what I can gather, it was not Cambridge University (of which I believe there is still only one, located in the UK, despite the similarily-named Cambridge College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but as the latter is an adult-educational center founded in 1971, the chances are that wasn't where CP/67 was developed), but rather IBM's Cambridge Scientific Center that used to be in the same building as MIT's Project MAC. Project MAC (becoming later the MIT Lab for Computer Science) being where much of the structure of modern OSes was invented.
Those were heady days for Tech Square. And, otherwise, the parent poster is right on.
In a similar vein, I was a self-taught programmer until I was 16 and went to college (a big-name technical school in New England). The big difference in our experience is that I had been inventing as I was going along, coming up against problems and finding solutions that, once I made it to a place where people thought about programming far more than me, and had been doing so for decades, I learned were standard fare. This was hugely enabling, for it validated my skills and thought processes, and I raged through my CS courses. Thinking back, it was a tremendous amount of fun, and I learned far, far more than I could have otherwise.
There's a big difference between inventing in isolation (as I was before college), learning from a pre-recorded lecture (next best), and learning from an inspirational teacher who can -- and this is this primary difference that at-your-own-time web-based learning cannot replicate -- answer questions in real time. I was so inspired by my professors that I remained in academia, and became an award-winning educator myself. Where are the next generation of professors going to come from if everyone is watching time-shifted lectures remotely without the possibility of asking questions?
Web-based training has its place, but basic, fundamental education is not it.
No one benefits from reCAPTCHA being broken. No one
You couldn't be more wrong. Sure, breaking reCAPTCHA would create a headache for website admins (including me, for example), but in order to break reCAPTCHA someone has to devise a better text recognition program. And that's great news! This is an example of a general side effect of the cat and mouse game that are captchas. Captcha's are a simple form of Turing Test, where website admins are trying to determine who is a computer and who is a real human being. Every time a captcha gets broken, we get a sophisticated new algorithm for doing something that previously only humans could do (or only humans could do well, at least).
No. No, no, no. Doing research into OCR and publishing the results is fantastic. It makes the world a better place.
Showing that you have written software to cheat a system that is in wide use to benefit society is morally wrong. It is bad.
Devising a better Turing test is good, coming up with a way of cheating the current one is bad.
Devising a better way to recognize counterfeit currency is good, coming up with a new way to counterfeit currency is bad.
Constructive behavior, good; destructive behavior, bad. Do I need to make it clearer?
Isaac Asimov wrote over 500 books. I don't know know haw many Terry Pratchett has written but the number is in the dozens. There's Clarke, Heinlein, Niven... and those are just a few science fiction writers (yes, Asimov also wrote nonfiction and Pratchett is known mainly for fantasy). Serious authors write more than one book each.
So your average is a little meaningless.
No, averages are very meaningful. Extremely meaningful. They are the AVERAGE (usually the mean), which means that some values will be above, and some values will be below. The idiocy comes in when people mistakenly jump to the conclusion that just because an average exists, it means that every value must be exactly the same as the average. Or, just because you can find extreme values far away from the average that again the average is not meaningful.
If the average states that 1 in 50 people have written a book, then, by gum, it will be easy to find plenty of people who have written zero books, somewhat fewer who have written exactly one (something below 1 in 50), much fewer who have written exactly two, even fewer who have written exactly three, etc. That does not mean that example authors with hundreds of books cannot exist, it only bounds how frequent they can be.
Of the myriad of ideas that the academic community has utterly failed in educating the general public about, it's the relationship between averages and distributions. One more time: just because an average exists, it does not mean that every datum has the same value as the average. As an example, just because the average male in the US is 5' 9", it does not mean that every single male is that tall, nor that you will not find ones that are shorter, taller, or even much shorter or much taller. The tallest man (according to my 20 seconds of research through Google) was 8' 11", and the shortest was 1' 10"... does that lessen the meaningfulness or utility of the average male height? Rather the contrary: it provides important information as to the extent of the distribution of heights.
Now, I suspect that the parent poster is trying to say that because -- by loosely founded speculation -- most authors are professional authors ("serious authors") and therefore will have more than one book to their name, the classification of people into authors and non-authors will be skewed against 1:50. I would not argue against that (in fact, I indirectly argued for it above). Nevertheless, using the utterly non-scientific sample of the books above my desk, most authors have only one book to their name, so the number isn't going to be much worse than 1:50, perhaps 1:55 or 1:60. That kind of pure, unadulterated speculation is exactly the sort I would love to see proved wrong with hard data.
Why would anyone want to do this? It's like attacking the UN peace keeping troops or the Red Cross. reCAPTCHA is doing good work, digitizing scanned printed books so that the the text can be made available for online searching. Breaking reCAPTCHA is like defecating in the village well, ensuring that everyone suffers. No one benefits from reCAPTCHA being broken. No one.
Hmm... I apparently mis-remembered the incident. The photographer was arrested for child pornography and assault, but ultimately convicted only of disorderly conduct and malicious destruction of property, not child abuse. Please read material at the link for more details
If some school kids visited the courthouse and the pictures were saved, remember that child pornography laws are so strict that it's nearly guilty until proven innocent. I'd hate to be an operator of one of those machines if there is even a single image of a minor. Even just one.
Except the images wouldn't be considered pornographic, ergo can't be child porn.
In Massachusetts, a local photographer was convicted with child *abuse* because of photos she took of her own 4-year-old child and because someone at the processing lab considered the photos pornographic. Child nudity was taken to be the same as child pornography that was taken to be the same as child abuse. The photos were apparently as innocent as can be.
It depends on the font. If it is monospaced (such as on a typewriter) it should be two spaces. If you are using a proportional font, use one space.
If you are using a proportional font, the word processor you are using should be making spacing decisions for you, so it does not matter if you use one or two spaces after a period. At least some systems (like TeX) do a far better job than can be done in a reasonable time by hand.
Get some enterprising hacker to release those 30k pics. If some schoolkids visited the courthouse, we'll see which is stronger: "think of the children!" or "think of the terrists!"
If some school kids visited the courthouse and the pictures were saved, remember that child pornography laws are so strict that it's nearly guilty until proven innocent. I'd hate to be an operator of one of those machines if there is even a single image of a minor. Even just one.
Come to think of it, that would be a good way for the ACLU to dismantle the entire program.
If you are thinking of entering the academic / scientific programming field, which has somewhat lower pay scale but much better benefits and job stability than nearly anywhere else programmers can get hired, then you must include MATLAB as one of your languages. MATLAB looks very much like any other programming langauge (C-ish, Perl-ish, PHP-ish, ALGOL-ish, PASCAL-ish, whatever) except that the types are different and the way one thinks about writing code is different, since fundamentally the basic type is a matrix of doubles, rather than a 32/64-bit integer.
A good MATLAB coder knows the GUI and profiler and can speed up even library MATLAB code by a factor of 2. A great MATLAB coder knows how to use the GPU / IO / realtime extensions.
For a few years now, we've been able to control the porosity of membranes in vivo, not just in a laboratory dish, by exposing them to light. The work started at Caltech, where, a little over ten years ago, someone demonstrated the first cellular membrane channel that could be turned on and off by light -- it was a potassium channel (that is, a pore specially designed so that it only passed potassium ions) if I recall correctly. More recently, and more famously, a fellow at the MIT Media Lab was able to engineer rhodopsin (one of the pigments of the photo-sensitive cells in the retina) into similar ion channels resulting in much more efficiently controlled ion-specific porosity.
Again, this is work that has been done in whole living animals, not inanimate substance, a far more impressive feat. I've seen presentations where a mouse's behavior was controlled through turning on or off light going into an optical fiber implanted in its brain. The light controled the porosity of the cell membranes of neurons in a particular part of the brain: turn the light on, channels / pores are opened exiting the cells; turn the light off, channels are closed, quieting the cells down. (For those familiar with this work, I admit that this is a gross simplification for the purposes of the present argument.)
While the work at U. Rochester sounds interesting, the researchers there are certainly not the first to control membrane porosity through light. That, and the past tense of "to shine" is "shone".
Any material ablated from the surface of an object that's larger than really tiny is going to be ejected in mostly one hemisphere, therefore will impart momentum to the object in the opposite direction. If the object is so small that a laser shot can completely ablate it so the hemispherical assumption is no longer valid, then problem solved!
I wouldn't expect a single shot to be enough to de-orbit non-trivial objects. My understanding -- which is admittedly limited -- is that the best bet for cleaning up space junk is not to deorbit, since that's quite difficult, but to merely lower the orbit sufficiently that atmospheric drag takes over. So multiple ground or water-based laser shots to impart momentum through ablation should be workable.
You can release a non-trivial amount of chemical energy through non-uniform heating such as from a remote laser trained on one part of an object. If beam-created local heating causes vaporization, the force applied to the object can be larger than from the energy of the beam alone.
It’s all about the deformability of the loop. In a perfectly circular loop, the intersection with the ground is tangential. If the loop deforms, it strikes the ground rather than intersecting tangentially, and the faster it spins, the harder it hits the ground. The harder it hits, the more it deforms.
Alternately, as I see it, if it is accelerating due to its friction with the ground (i.e. if you spin it up first and then let it go) it should be able to temporarily keep itself supported under its own momentum, but as soon as that friction drops to zero it will begin to collapse due to its own weight and then the above will apply. As long as the frictional force vector is zero or points backward, the band should deform. Naturally I’ll be needing a few hundred thousand dollars to be testing my theory.
Just watch a little top fuel drag racing to see tire (a/k/a elastic loop) deformation under load.
Why the hate on the AP program? You dont have to be "affluent" to be in it, you just have to do well in school. The fees for the tests can be waived or reduced if your family is low income. Does your hate maybe stem from not liking the type of people that are in the program? That's understandable, some are pricks, I know b/c I was in many AP classes in HS. However, dont label everyone in the program as such, it makes you look like a douche. AP classes are a great way to get college credit before college, so don't knock the program itself.
Don't forget Garfield High School in Los Angeles and the amazing mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante who, through dint of sheer will and incredible teaching ability, demonstrated that students from East LA could do very, very well in calculus, many even passing the harder BC version of the AP test. These students were not affluent in the least, just inspired to excellence by an incredible individual.
I actually had an anesthesiologist ask me for tech support on his XP install while he was sedating my wife as she was delivering my second child. I asked him if I would get free anesthesiology if I gave him free tech support, and he got the hint.
A more professional approach (and one that I have used many times) would be, "here's my business card; why don't you call to set up an appointment?" Or, far more germane to your story (I'm not sure why you allowed this anesthesiologist to continue working on your wife if he had the poor judgement to ask about anything -- ANYTHING -- not medically-related while he was providing acute health care), "right now we're busy taking care of something else, why don't we discuss it at a more appropriate time?"
Either one gets the important message across: I have hired you as a professional, please act accordingly and do your job to the expected standards.
Plus, there's a legitimate question of jurisdiction. If I commit a crime at point A against someone at point B that is thousands of miles away, who gets to decide what the punishment is? The legal system at point A, where the crime was actually being committed, or the legal system at point B, where the target or victim of the crime is located?
I am not a lawyer (otherwise I probably would already know the answer to this): if, in the United States, a person in State A, standing very close to the border with State B, fires a gun, the bullet from which kills someone standing across the border in State B, who has jurisdiction?
It seems like that sort of question would have been already answered, even if questions of crimes committed remotely through the Internet have not been fully thrashed out.
Agreed. The laptop manufacturing world is slowly understanding something that has been well understood in the fine art world for decades.
1. glossy surfaces are horrible because of reflections, but allow the finest details to be visible of the item behind
2. matte surfaces diffuse the reflections and so eliminate that annoyance, but at the price of ultimate available resolution
3. optical anti-reflective coatings on glossy surfaces fix both problems, but are heinously expensive
If you have the funds, you take option 3; otherwise you try and find a good option 2, and if resolution is hyper important and you can't afford the good glass, then you take option 1 and control the lighting.
With laptops, controlling the lighting is not possible for the general case (or is undesirable, because, frankly, who wants to always sit facing the brightest light source in the room?) so option 1 is a poor choice, and thus mostly option 2 has been used up until recently. I'm wating for option 3 -- glossy screens with multi-coated surfaces. I'd gladly pay extra (I do so on my prescription glasses, even sunglasses). If the laptop maufacturers follow the footsteps of so many fields before them (including the fine art world alluded to above), we should see coated screens in a few years, initially with a premium pricetag.
Nearly so. A standard corporation's primary goal is to continue to exist. There are exceptions to this such as corporations that are organized to spend down or distribute a fund to termination, but, mostly, corporations want first to continue being. The next goal might well be to maximize profit, but, again, there are exceptions where factors other than just profit are considered, such as the do-good policies of Ben and Jerry's before they were bought by Unilever, or legal prohibition of actions that maximize profit at the expense of customer well-being. Futhermore, maximizing profit needs to be broken down into short-term and long-term, as there are many strategies to long-term profitability that are simply dreadful in terms of short-term results: startup companies are often good examples of the distinction.
They actually have a responsibility to their shareholders to make money.
This is a relatively recent supposition, but there is actually little behind it other than convention. Corporations are accountable to act legally and, in many cases, competently (that is, to avoid egregious errors), but there is no responsibility to make money. If you buy shares in XYZ Widgets, Inc., and despite demonstrable competence (or, more accurately, lack of demonstrable incompetence) they lose money for the year, they have no obligation toward you, the shareholder, and you have no recourse against them. As firms have started to put in their standard investment disclaimers, "there is the possibility of loss of value."
The problem I see with this is the fact that certain wavelengths have certain interfering effects with other wavelengths. For example, 660-670nm radiation coupled with 720-740nm IR radiation causes some odd effects, which plants happen to utilize in photosynthesis, but I don't think we've ever tested such effects against the communication of data.
What planet are you living on? Non-linear interaction between frequencies of EM communication has been studied for not just years, but decades. It's well understood. The subject is covered in any decent first-year Electrical Engineering course, and covered in much more detail in any decent course on Signals and Systems. Given linear media, supperposition applies, and there's no interaction. Given non-linear media, you get frequency mixing; with accurate knowledge of the non-linear characteristics, you have exact knowledge of the mixing. This isn't new Physics, it's Science that's so well understood it's become Engineering.
The parent post is a clear example of the need for -1, Naive.
Although much of the focus of pollution from automobiles centers on carbon emissions...
What, did we forget the decades of governmental (EPA) regulation on NOx, SOx, HC and particulate emissions that have utterly ignored CO2 emissions, at least until very recently? The CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards? The reasons that we have, oh, EGR valves, catalytic converters, lambda sensors, lead-free gasoline, and a gazillion other emission control bits on our automobiles? Exactly where is said focus?
[I] have not even read a complete [research paper]
Then that is where you should start. Seriously, writing papers is all about communicating your ideas to others. Doing so in a simplistic, naive sort of way will get your submission rejected. You've clearly taken impressive steps toward educating yourself in the field, so now take the next step and educate yourself as to how people in the field professionally communicate with each other.
Writing the central part of a paper -- describing the main idea -- is the easiest, and fastest part. Writing the introduction, background, and discussion sections where your work is compared with the literature, problems are discussed, and potential future solutions laid out, is by far the hardest part, take by far the longest time, and is what distinguishes a high-school book report from a scholarly paper.
How do you go about this? Use Google Scholar to search for papers related to your field. Read them. You might need to pay for some (the horror!); some might be available through your public library or state university. Find the papers that those papers reference, get them, read them. Repeat until you've found no more new ones. Intellectually digest the contents. Find one that reads particularly well and use it as a template, and then write a basic manuscript. Use whatever tools you like at this point.
You will then need to select a journal. Each journal has its own Guide for Authors (or similar document) that details the specific format that they require for submissions. Do not treat this document cavalierly. Much of the time, the journal will provide a template of some sort. Cram your original document into this format and obey every rule.
Then, make your submission. And wait. And expect to be rejected without review.
Then, select the next journal down your list of preferred publications, and try again. Re-writing for their particular guidelines. Submit, and expect a rejection.
Repeat until you get the golden accept. Note that most journals will not allow you to submit to more than one at the same time, and if you do, and are found out, at best you will be given a black mark, at worst, you will not be able to publish ever again. Since there are only so many reviewers, and they generally know each other professionally, the chances of being caught are quite high.
If your algorithm is a big step forward and could have a big impact, I would not discount Science as a potential journal. But, bear in mind that the best journals (Science, Nature, Cell, etc.) publish only a tiny fraction of submissions. You could, as an alternate, consider PLoS (Public Library of Science).
Having an official academic affiliation usually helps -- or, better put, having no academic affiliation hurts. If you can make friends with a professor at your local state university and get a visiting scientist appointment (free to both parties) that could go a long way to helping you publish.
and stay there because that's about what it's worth. The only reason it's up above 10,000 is because it's being propped up with funny money. Just a year ago it was at 6800...these are the same companies. Does anyone really believe that all of the companies listed are collectively worth 1.5 times more?
So you're saying that the DJIA being over 10,000 prior to the global recession was also due to funny money? Which source, exactly?
Making stock comparisons to valuations of one year ago is highly suspect as the prices one year ago were not real: they were during a highly anomalous global market condition. The tacit assumption that the origin of the comparison was a normal condition is not valid, therefore any irregular results (like 1500% growth in one year) should not be taken at face value.
That said, if you were smart enough to have gone all in a year ago, you'd be sitting pretty right now.
Slashdot Mirror
In the 1960s the foundation of VM/370 was created at Cambridge University (MA, USA, not UK) and called CP/67.
From what I can gather, it was not Cambridge University (of which I believe there is still only one, located in the UK, despite the similarily-named Cambridge College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but as the latter is an adult-educational center founded in 1971, the chances are that wasn't where CP/67 was developed), but rather IBM's Cambridge Scientific Center that used to be in the same building as MIT's Project MAC. Project MAC (becoming later the MIT Lab for Computer Science) being where much of the structure of modern OSes was invented.
Those were heady days for Tech Square. And, otherwise, the parent poster is right on.
In a similar vein, I was a self-taught programmer until I was 16 and went to college (a big-name technical school in New England). The big difference in our experience is that I had been inventing as I was going along, coming up against problems and finding solutions that, once I made it to a place where people thought about programming far more than me, and had been doing so for decades, I learned were standard fare. This was hugely enabling, for it validated my skills and thought processes, and I raged through my CS courses. Thinking back, it was a tremendous amount of fun, and I learned far, far more than I could have otherwise.
There's a big difference between inventing in isolation (as I was before college), learning from a pre-recorded lecture (next best), and learning from an inspirational teacher who can -- and this is this primary difference that at-your-own-time web-based learning cannot replicate -- answer questions in real time. I was so inspired by my professors that I remained in academia, and became an award-winning educator myself. Where are the next generation of professors going to come from if everyone is watching time-shifted lectures remotely without the possibility of asking questions?
Web-based training has its place, but basic, fundamental education is not it.
No one benefits from reCAPTCHA being broken. No one
You couldn't be more wrong. Sure, breaking reCAPTCHA would create a headache for website admins (including me, for example), but in order to break reCAPTCHA someone has to devise a better text recognition program. And that's great news! This is an example of a general side effect of the cat and mouse game that are captchas. Captcha's are a simple form of Turing Test, where website admins are trying to determine who is a computer and who is a real human being. Every time a captcha gets broken, we get a sophisticated new algorithm for doing something that previously only humans could do (or only humans could do well, at least).
No. No, no, no. Doing research into OCR and publishing the results is fantastic. It makes the world a better place.
Showing that you have written software to cheat a system that is in wide use to benefit society is morally wrong. It is bad.
Devising a better Turing test is good, coming up with a way of cheating the current one is bad.
Devising a better way to recognize counterfeit currency is good, coming up with a new way to counterfeit currency is bad.
Constructive behavior, good; destructive behavior, bad. Do I need to make it clearer?
Breaking reCAPTCHA is bad.
Isaac Asimov wrote over 500 books. I don't know know haw many Terry Pratchett has written but the number is in the dozens. There's Clarke, Heinlein, Niven... and those are just a few science fiction writers (yes, Asimov also wrote nonfiction and Pratchett is known mainly for fantasy). Serious authors write more than one book each.
So your average is a little meaningless.
No, averages are very meaningful. Extremely meaningful. They are the AVERAGE (usually the mean), which means that some values will be above, and some values will be below. The idiocy comes in when people mistakenly jump to the conclusion that just because an average exists, it means that every value must be exactly the same as the average. Or, just because you can find extreme values far away from the average that again the average is not meaningful.
If the average states that 1 in 50 people have written a book, then, by gum, it will be easy to find plenty of people who have written zero books, somewhat fewer who have written exactly one (something below 1 in 50), much fewer who have written exactly two, even fewer who have written exactly three, etc. That does not mean that example authors with hundreds of books cannot exist, it only bounds how frequent they can be.
Of the myriad of ideas that the academic community has utterly failed in educating the general public about, it's the relationship between averages and distributions. One more time: just because an average exists, it does not mean that every datum has the same value as the average. As an example, just because the average male in the US is 5' 9", it does not mean that every single male is that tall, nor that you will not find ones that are shorter, taller, or even much shorter or much taller. The tallest man (according to my 20 seconds of research through Google) was 8' 11", and the shortest was 1' 10" ... does that lessen the meaningfulness or utility of the average male height? Rather the contrary: it provides important information as to the extent of the distribution of heights.
Now, I suspect that the parent poster is trying to say that because -- by loosely founded speculation -- most authors are professional authors ("serious authors") and therefore will have more than one book to their name, the classification of people into authors and non-authors will be skewed against 1:50. I would not argue against that (in fact, I indirectly argued for it above). Nevertheless, using the utterly non-scientific sample of the books above my desk, most authors have only one book to their name, so the number isn't going to be much worse than 1:50, perhaps 1:55 or 1:60. That kind of pure, unadulterated speculation is exactly the sort I would love to see proved wrong with hard data.
Why would anyone want to do this? It's like attacking the UN peace keeping troops or the Red Cross. reCAPTCHA is doing good work, digitizing scanned printed books so that the the text can be made available for online searching. Breaking reCAPTCHA is like defecating in the village well, ensuring that everyone suffers. No one benefits from reCAPTCHA being broken. No one.
Hmm ... I apparently mis-remembered the incident. The photographer was arrested for child pornography and assault, but ultimately convicted only of disorderly conduct and malicious destruction of property, not child abuse. Please read material at the link for more details
http://users.rcn.com/kyp/angindex.html
If some school kids visited the courthouse and the pictures were saved, remember that child pornography laws are so strict that it's nearly guilty until proven innocent. I'd hate to be an operator of one of those machines if there is even a single image of a minor. Even just one.
Except the images wouldn't be considered pornographic, ergo can't be child porn.
In Massachusetts, a local photographer was convicted with child *abuse* because of photos she took of her own 4-year-old child and because someone at the processing lab considered the photos pornographic. Child nudity was taken to be the same as child pornography that was taken to be the same as child abuse. The photos were apparently as innocent as can be.
It depends on the font. If it is monospaced (such as on a typewriter) it should be two spaces. If you are using a proportional font, use one space.
If you are using a proportional font, the word processor you are using should be making spacing decisions for you, so it does not matter if you use one or two spaces after a period. At least some systems (like TeX) do a far better job than can be done in a reasonable time by hand.
Get some enterprising hacker to release those 30k pics. If some schoolkids visited the courthouse, we'll see which is stronger: "think of the children!" or "think of the terrists!"
If some school kids visited the courthouse and the pictures were saved, remember that child pornography laws are so strict that it's nearly guilty until proven innocent. I'd hate to be an operator of one of those machines if there is even a single image of a minor. Even just one.
Come to think of it, that would be a good way for the ACLU to dismantle the entire program.
If you are thinking of entering the academic / scientific programming field, which has somewhat lower pay scale but much better benefits and job stability than nearly anywhere else programmers can get hired, then you must include MATLAB as one of your languages. MATLAB looks very much like any other programming langauge (C-ish, Perl-ish, PHP-ish, ALGOL-ish, PASCAL-ish, whatever) except that the types are different and the way one thinks about writing code is different, since fundamentally the basic type is a matrix of doubles, rather than a 32/64-bit integer.
A good MATLAB coder knows the GUI and profiler and can speed up even library MATLAB code by a factor of 2. A great MATLAB coder knows how to use the GPU / IO / realtime extensions.
For a few years now, we've been able to control the porosity of membranes in vivo, not just in a laboratory dish, by exposing them to light. The work started at Caltech, where, a little over ten years ago, someone demonstrated the first cellular membrane channel that could be turned on and off by light -- it was a potassium channel (that is, a pore specially designed so that it only passed potassium ions) if I recall correctly. More recently, and more famously, a fellow at the MIT Media Lab was able to engineer rhodopsin (one of the pigments of the photo-sensitive cells in the retina) into similar ion channels resulting in much more efficiently controlled ion-specific porosity.
Again, this is work that has been done in whole living animals, not inanimate substance, a far more impressive feat. I've seen presentations where a mouse's behavior was controlled through turning on or off light going into an optical fiber implanted in its brain. The light controled the porosity of the cell membranes of neurons in a particular part of the brain: turn the light on, channels / pores are opened exiting the cells; turn the light off, channels are closed, quieting the cells down. (For those familiar with this work, I admit that this is a gross simplification for the purposes of the present argument.)
While the work at U. Rochester sounds interesting, the researchers there are certainly not the first to control membrane porosity through light. That, and the past tense of "to shine" is "shone".
Any material ablated from the surface of an object that's larger than really tiny is going to be ejected in mostly one hemisphere, therefore will impart momentum to the object in the opposite direction. If the object is so small that a laser shot can completely ablate it so the hemispherical assumption is no longer valid, then problem solved!
I wouldn't expect a single shot to be enough to de-orbit non-trivial objects. My understanding -- which is admittedly limited -- is that the best bet for cleaning up space junk is not to deorbit, since that's quite difficult, but to merely lower the orbit sufficiently that atmospheric drag takes over. So multiple ground or water-based laser shots to impart momentum through ablation should be workable.
You can release a non-trivial amount of chemical energy through non-uniform heating such as from a remote laser trained on one part of an object. If beam-created local heating causes vaporization, the force applied to the object can be larger than from the energy of the beam alone.
Or so I've heard.
It’s all about the deformability of the loop. In a perfectly circular loop, the intersection with the ground is tangential. If the loop deforms, it strikes the ground rather than intersecting tangentially, and the faster it spins, the harder it hits the ground. The harder it hits, the more it deforms.
Alternately, as I see it, if it is accelerating due to its friction with the ground (i.e. if you spin it up first and then let it go) it should be able to temporarily keep itself supported under its own momentum, but as soon as that friction drops to zero it will begin to collapse due to its own weight and then the above will apply. As long as the frictional force vector is zero or points backward, the band should deform. Naturally I’ll be needing a few hundred thousand dollars to be testing my theory.
Just watch a little top fuel drag racing to see tire (a/k/a elastic loop) deformation under load.
Why the hate on the AP program? You dont have to be "affluent" to be in it, you just have to do well in school. The fees for the tests can be waived or reduced if your family is low income. Does your hate maybe stem from not liking the type of people that are in the program? That's understandable, some are pricks, I know b/c I was in many AP classes in HS. However, dont label everyone in the program as such, it makes you look like a douche. AP classes are a great way to get college credit before college, so don't knock the program itself.
Don't forget Garfield High School in Los Angeles and the amazing mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante who, through dint of sheer will and incredible teaching ability, demonstrated that students from East LA could do very, very well in calculus, many even passing the harder BC version of the AP test. These students were not affluent in the least, just inspired to excellence by an incredible individual.
I actually had an anesthesiologist ask me for tech support on his XP install while he was sedating my wife as she was delivering my second child. I asked him if I would get free anesthesiology if I gave him free tech support, and he got the hint.
A more professional approach (and one that I have used many times) would be, "here's my business card; why don't you call to set up an appointment?" Or, far more germane to your story (I'm not sure why you allowed this anesthesiologist to continue working on your wife if he had the poor judgement to ask about anything -- ANYTHING -- not medically-related while he was providing acute health care), "right now we're busy taking care of something else, why don't we discuss it at a more appropriate time?"
Either one gets the important message across: I have hired you as a professional, please act accordingly and do your job to the expected standards.
You could at least mention that Rob Pike had a large part in designing ... UTF-8 ...
You're saying it like that's something he should be proud of.
Plus, there's a legitimate question of jurisdiction. If I commit a crime at point A against someone at point B that is thousands of miles away, who gets to decide what the punishment is? The legal system at point A, where the crime was actually being committed, or the legal system at point B, where the target or victim of the crime is located?
I am not a lawyer (otherwise I probably would already know the answer to this): if, in the United States, a person in State A, standing very close to the border with State B, fires a gun, the bullet from which kills someone standing across the border in State B, who has jurisdiction?
It seems like that sort of question would have been already answered, even if questions of crimes committed remotely through the Internet have not been fully thrashed out.
It's what I did in my office, and now I never get screen glare, as the sun rises and sets to the right of me.
You rotate your desk 180 degrees over the course of the day?
No, he sits facing East in the Northern Hemisphere.
This is true. I do not have a good glossy screen.
Because they don't make such a thing.
Agreed. The laptop manufacturing world is slowly understanding something that has been well understood in the fine art world for decades.
1. glossy surfaces are horrible because of reflections, but allow the finest details to be visible of the item behind
2. matte surfaces diffuse the reflections and so eliminate that annoyance, but at the price of ultimate available resolution
3. optical anti-reflective coatings on glossy surfaces fix both problems, but are heinously expensive
If you have the funds, you take option 3; otherwise you try and find a good option 2, and if resolution is hyper important and you can't afford the good glass, then you take option 1 and control the lighting.
With laptops, controlling the lighting is not possible for the general case (or is undesirable, because, frankly, who wants to always sit facing the brightest light source in the room?) so option 1 is a poor choice, and thus mostly option 2 has been used up until recently. I'm wating for option 3 -- glossy screens with multi-coated surfaces. I'd gladly pay extra (I do so on my prescription glasses, even sunglasses). If the laptop maufacturers follow the footsteps of so many fields before them (including the fine art world alluded to above), we should see coated screens in a few years, initially with a premium pricetag.
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit.
Nearly so. A standard corporation's primary goal is to continue to exist. There are exceptions to this such as corporations that are organized to spend down or distribute a fund to termination, but, mostly, corporations want first to continue being. The next goal might well be to maximize profit, but, again, there are exceptions where factors other than just profit are considered, such as the do-good policies of Ben and Jerry's before they were bought by Unilever, or legal prohibition of actions that maximize profit at the expense of customer well-being. Futhermore, maximizing profit needs to be broken down into short-term and long-term, as there are many strategies to long-term profitability that are simply dreadful in terms of short-term results: startup companies are often good examples of the distinction.
They actually have a responsibility to their shareholders to make money.
This is a relatively recent supposition, but there is actually little behind it other than convention. Corporations are accountable to act legally and, in many cases, competently (that is, to avoid egregious errors), but there is no responsibility to make money. If you buy shares in XYZ Widgets, Inc., and despite demonstrable competence (or, more accurately, lack of demonstrable incompetence) they lose money for the year, they have no obligation toward you, the shareholder, and you have no recourse against them. As firms have started to put in their standard investment disclaimers, "there is the possibility of loss of value."
The problem I see with this is the fact that certain wavelengths have certain interfering effects with other wavelengths. For example, 660-670nm radiation coupled with 720-740nm IR radiation causes some odd effects, which plants happen to utilize in photosynthesis, but I don't think we've ever tested such effects against the communication of data.
What planet are you living on? Non-linear interaction between frequencies of EM communication has been studied for not just years, but decades. It's well understood. The subject is covered in any decent first-year Electrical Engineering course, and covered in much more detail in any decent course on Signals and Systems. Given linear media, supperposition applies, and there's no interaction. Given non-linear media, you get frequency mixing; with accurate knowledge of the non-linear characteristics, you have exact knowledge of the mixing. This isn't new Physics, it's Science that's so well understood it's become Engineering.
The parent post is a clear example of the need for -1, Naive.
Although much of the focus of pollution from automobiles centers on carbon emissions ...
What, did we forget the decades of governmental (EPA) regulation on NOx, SOx, HC and particulate emissions that have utterly ignored CO2 emissions, at least until very recently? The CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards? The reasons that we have, oh, EGR valves, catalytic converters, lambda sensors, lead-free gasoline, and a gazillion other emission control bits on our automobiles? Exactly where is said focus?
[I] have not even read a complete [research paper]
Then that is where you should start. Seriously, writing papers is all about communicating your ideas to others. Doing so in a simplistic, naive sort of way will get your submission rejected. You've clearly taken impressive steps toward educating yourself in the field, so now take the next step and educate yourself as to how people in the field professionally communicate with each other.
Writing the central part of a paper -- describing the main idea -- is the easiest, and fastest part. Writing the introduction, background, and discussion sections where your work is compared with the literature, problems are discussed, and potential future solutions laid out, is by far the hardest part, take by far the longest time, and is what distinguishes a high-school book report from a scholarly paper.
How do you go about this? Use Google Scholar to search for papers related to your field. Read them. You might need to pay for some (the horror!); some might be available through your public library or state university. Find the papers that those papers reference, get them, read them. Repeat until you've found no more new ones. Intellectually digest the contents. Find one that reads particularly well and use it as a template, and then write a basic manuscript. Use whatever tools you like at this point.
You will then need to select a journal. Each journal has its own Guide for Authors (or similar document) that details the specific format that they require for submissions. Do not treat this document cavalierly. Much of the time, the journal will provide a template of some sort. Cram your original document into this format and obey every rule.
Then, make your submission. And wait. And expect to be rejected without review.
Then, select the next journal down your list of preferred publications, and try again. Re-writing for their particular guidelines. Submit, and expect a rejection.
Repeat until you get the golden accept. Note that most journals will not allow you to submit to more than one at the same time, and if you do, and are found out, at best you will be given a black mark, at worst, you will not be able to publish ever again. Since there are only so many reviewers, and they generally know each other professionally, the chances of being caught are quite high.
If your algorithm is a big step forward and could have a big impact, I would not discount Science as a potential journal. But, bear in mind that the best journals (Science, Nature, Cell, etc.) publish only a tiny fraction of submissions. You could, as an alternate, consider PLoS (Public Library of Science).
Having an official academic affiliation usually helps -- or, better put, having no academic affiliation hurts. If you can make friends with a professor at your local state university and get a visiting scientist appointment (free to both parties) that could go a long way to helping you publish.
Good luck.
and stay there because that's about what it's worth. The only reason it's up above 10,000 is because it's being propped up with funny money. Just a year ago it was at 6800...these are the same companies. Does anyone really believe that all of the companies listed are collectively worth 1.5 times more?
So you're saying that the DJIA being over 10,000 prior to the global recession was also due to funny money? Which source, exactly?
Making stock comparisons to valuations of one year ago is highly suspect as the prices one year ago were not real: they were during a highly anomalous global market condition. The tacit assumption that the origin of the comparison was a normal condition is not valid, therefore any irregular results (like 1500% growth in one year) should not be taken at face value.
That said, if you were smart enough to have gone all in a year ago, you'd be sitting pretty right now.