I find the articles themselves to be almost worthless if you're not in the specific field.
I find that varies highly with the field. I'm not a molecular biologist, and so don't have the necessary background to understand most of those articles. But, then, they're not written for me in mind, so I've no place to complain. That's why the more important articles have summaries written for the out-of-field scientists. On the other hand, I'm not a geologist, but I can slog through some of the thermochronology articles. Same for the archeology articles. It varies.
The point is, however, to read the summaries and encapsulations which are normally quite excellent. The original papers really aren't intended for the general scientific reader.
Subscribe to Science and Nature. Both of them have encapsulations and summaries with implications on the hottest articles published in each week's issue. Both have on-line versions. Also, Scientific American can be good (once was great) for perspective articles by world experts.
I do hope some cosmologist answers this better than I will, but this conundrum was addressed in part by a then-radical idea proposed by MIT professor Alan Guth (he lectured my freshman physics class, in part) who suggested that for a brief period right after the Big Bang, the universe expanded at much faster than the speed of light. This theory is called The Inflationary Universe, and although no one seems to understand why it might be the case, it's one of the few theories that explains things like why the universe is so big, why it's so very nearly flat, and why it isn't all exactly the same temperature and density.
I wonder if this could lead to an electric car that is good for the masses where they can cross country and take only 5 to 10 minutes to recharge.
Unlikely at best. The problem is that the rate of energy transfer for chemical storage (that is, fuels, like gasoline) is really, really high. While you could in principle build a station which could recharge your batteries in the same amount of time it takes to gas up your car, it wouldn't be something you'd want to be near.
Why?
When you put gasoline in your car, you are moving power at a rate of about 5 MW. That's the entire output of a small power plant. Liquid fuels, gasoline in particular, are a very dense way to store and transport energy. Electrical wires aren't very good for that in comparison, even with superconductive cables. Think of it this way, even if we could transfer energy from a station to your car with 99.9% efficiency (which is well and far beyond anything we can do in the forseable future), that's 500 W of power that needs to be dissipated at the conversion site between the station and your car. That's going to be too hot to hold like a fueling nozzle for gasoline cars. If we use 48V to move 5MW (48V is gaining traction as a new standard for power transfer), that's 100,000 A of current. Even if we use an insane voltage level like 5 kV, prone to arcing and causing nasty things like fires and death, that's still 1,000 A of current. Not small. If this power is transferred by direct contact, you get immediate electromigration at the contacts, arcing problems when starting and stopping the current (ever wonder why power transmission towers are so tall?). If it's transferred by induction, then the EM fields will be enough to cause cancer (ok, I don't know that one for sure, but it's going to be as if 1000 microwave ovens are all operating right there at your car, something I don't want to be near).
Building an electrical system that can move megawatts of power is not something that will ever happen on the consumer level.
What about improving the efficiency of cars? We can make cars at best an order of magnitude more energy efficient. That isn't going to solve the problems alone.
Now, if, instead of recharging, you swap out batteries (that is, move mass that carries energy instead of moving energy aone), things get far more attractive. Except that people are currently a little leary of exchanging parts of their cars (can you imagine swapping tires every time you went to a filling station?). But that would allow a quick recharging.
The only solution that really makes sense for refueling by recharging is to do it while the vehicle is sitting idle when there is more time available, rather than being driven when there isn't. If you allow 20 hours for a recharge instead of 5 minutes, the power transfer rate drops to 20 kW which isn't so bad. Add in an order of magnitude higher efficiency vehicles and perhaps live with shorter distances between recharges, and you get down to the kilowatt range which is entirely doable (1.5kW can be supplied from a single, standard US household outlet).
Wanna enjoy it? Gotta earn it.
on
Just Let Me Play!
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
It is well-understood in behavioral psychology that a reward is enjoyed more when it is earned.
A better question would be "Are there cancer resistant humans and we don't know about it?"
Although there may well be more we don't know about, there are cancer resistant humans we do know about: People with Down Syndrome have about half the rate of non-leukemia cancer compared to the general population. They have a higher rate of childhood leukemia, though (and maybe one other cancer that I can't seem to recall right now). Down Syndrome is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21. I attended a presentation at MIT a couple of years ago where there was some very exciting work being done on anti-angiogenic drugs, and the researcher presented compelling data on the effectiveness of one such compound that he was researching. What's the link? This compound occurs normally in the human body where it mediates vascular generation, and many cancers interfere with it so as to trigger vascular proliferation to feed their explosive growth (cancers need blood flow, and lots of it). Guess where it's sequence lies? Chromosome 21. It turns out that people with Down Syndrome have about double the level of this anti-angiogenic compound in their blood.
There are only two ways to move that kind of energy that quickly and not need serious protection from something that might melt or even explode in your hands from losses, (a) mass transfer of either a chemical compound like gasoline or a battery swap, (b) superconductive cables, 'cause 6 MW at even 0.1% loss (an insane level of efficiency) would be 6kW in your hand and that's gonna get hot.
This is the most effective argument against electrical power and one that cannot be overcome without a serious change to the public's expectations during the refueling process. As long as we expect to re-energize our vehicles in a few minutes, there is no currently known solution that will not be at best dangerous. Even with superconductive cabling and a transfer system that is close to lossless, if we move power via DC, the contacts aren't going to last long due to electromigration; if we move power via AC, the fields are going to be really, really strong, and everyone's credit cards will get erased (actually much worse things are likely to happen, but you get the idea). Pushing megawatts of power through E&M fields is hard.
Now, if we can recharge a different way, say over 10 hours instead of 10 minutes, the story is entirely different, 'cause moving kilowatts of power isn't that big a deal. Or if we re-energize the vehicle by swapping batteries for ones that the filling station recharges at their leisure, it's much less of an issue. But both of those require a substantial shift in public perception and expectation.
IIANSDBS (I Am A Neuroscientist Studying Deep Brain Stimulation), and I attended one of the recent workshops that Medtronic had on this very subject where they brought together all of the physicians working on their pre-clinical trial of these devices. It was incredibly cool. Despite my having worked in the field for 6 years now, deep brain stimulation continues to astound me. The meeting covered exactly what you would think it would cover (and no, I'm not going to reveal any trade secrets or violate any NDAs): patient case studies, general results where such conclusions could be drawn, trends and statistics where available.
First off, deep brain stimulation is not for the feint of heart. They permanently implant an electrode deep in the middle of your head. Actually, two of them. One on each side. This *is* brain surgery. Screwing up is a Big Deal, and, generally, brain surgery has a risk of complication measured at the 5-10 percent level. Then, in addition to these electrodes in your skull, there are wires which come out under your skin and route down to your chest to a permanently implanted stimulator. Actually, two of them. One on each side. This level of surgery is not something to be taken lightly. The target patient population is not people who feel a little down all the time; these are clinically depressed patients who spend the entire day sitting around doing nothing. Their lives are seriously impacted, just as seriously as someone who had a debillitating major physical ailment such as emphysima, heart disease, or a degenerative bone disease.
Which brings me to the point of this posting, to comment on item 3 of the parent: many seriously believe "fixing" this, particularly the down or depressed side will decrease or neutralize the creative side of those who are exceptionally creative. The patients that this treatment is intended for are so depressed that they have no creative side. They are paralyzed by their depression. They do not function in society. They are barely able to nourish themselves, and, in some cases, require hospitalization or other form of daily care. The parent poster's assertion about this particular treatment is bunk. Brain surgery is not for people who feel down but are able to live halfway decent lives; Brain surgery is for people who are seriously broken. At this meeting, I saw videotapes of patients in the pre-clinical trials, and these are people who are before treatment so fogged by depression that they communicate in single word responses; they often miss appointments with their doctors because they cannot bring themselves to leave the house; they are deeply affected by their condition.
Please draw your own conclusions about the effectiveness of the treatment by inference from Medtronic's pushing this forward to clinical testing. I, for one, am glad to see it advance.
I was fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to have attended both MIT and Caltech, and spent sufficiently many years at both to have understood the hacker culture and the relative prowess of the campus constabulatory.
Bottom line: Caltech's security guards are rent-a-cops; MIT's are policemen. I cannot recall a single incident in my six years at Caltech where security responded to a call fast enough to see perpetrators. I personally committed a number of, ah, acts at leisurely pace because there was no reason to hurry. I've been to the rooftops in the middle of the day countless times. It's no big deal. You cannot do the same thing at MIT with such cavalier ease because the campus has been hardened against hacking, and the MIT Campus Police are reasonably quick to respond, and reasonably quick-witted.
Kudos to the MIT group for pulling off an impressive feat!
[Comparing images] we should also be able to tell when new craters hit.
Technically, craters are the result of an imapact, not the impactor itself. But more importantly, we already know about about substantial meteorite impacts because of their signature on the global seismological / nuclear explosion sensing network.
What's the big deal here? The paint is conductive. The conductivity cannot be switched on and off, but by reading between the lines of TFA, they have an antenna inside the faraday cage which can selectively provide connectivity to the outside world. You can do the same thing with copper mesh (and I have, to make ultra-quiet recordings of microvolt biological signals) to create an entire room that is a faraday cage.
The only thing newsworthy is that this paint contains nanotechnology. Sure, that's nice. But the summary and title are misleading: The paint blocks, always. The additional antenna blocks on demand, and there's nothing special there.
Many of the bathrooms in the Mediterranean countries are like this. Often, they lack a well-defined shower area, have no shower curtain, sporting just a wall mounted hand-held telephone style shower head, and a central drain. (It's up to the user to make sure they don't spray the toilet paper and render it less than optimally useful!) But everything dries quite nicely, thank you. It all depends on the local humidity and temperature.
I really don't recommend you try it yourself, but it won't kill you.
You are lucky you didn't breathe in during the fireball. The hot gasses which caused the sunburn-like effects on your outer skin would have done the same to your lungs. This could easily have landed you in a hospital emergency room or intensive care unit, and could well have resulted in death over the next few days in a rather unpleasant process akin to slow suffocation. Burning your lungs is really, really bad. Don't do this. It can kill you.
But why don't you make it EASIER to report errors? There isn't, as far as I can tell, even a difficult way listed somewhere on the site (and daddypants@slashdot just isn't memorable). Or adopt more of the Wiki model where there are a larger number of (unpaid) junior editors who have write access to the posts?
I've lost track of the number of egregious errors I've seen that anything more than a half-hearted scanning would catch. I'd have been happy to make corrections; perhaps modpoints should come with an ability to click on a "fix the posting" box?
Max brightness: 250 cd/m^2 at 100, but dropped 1 cd/m^2 EVERY SECOND I left it at that setting(and oddly enough, when I brought the setting back to 0, luminance climbed slightly over 5-10 seconds, then dropped back to 178-179). 0 is anywhere from 178.2-180.
Not so odd, you're seeing temperature effects, where hotter bulbs produce lower output. When you set it to the highest level, it takes a while to stabilize at the new, higher, temperature. When you brought it back to 0, it took a while to stabilize again.
The question of, "what looks best on the web," surely should be rephrased as, "what looks good at intermediate display resolution," with the clear caveat that as technology progresses, this will become less of an issue as our screen resolutions increase. The common 12 inch laptop screen with 1024x768 pixels has about 100 dpi; if that were to increase to 300 dpi we wouldn't care nearly as much; at 600 dpi, this would be a vastly different discussion.
The deeper question becomes, then, what can font designers do to ensure that their fonts are properly optimized for a range of display resolutions, not just size? The interactions between font size (measured in points) and readability have been well studied in the print world (eg, for the same family, a 6 pt face will be squatter and have relatively looser kerning than the 12 pt face), but as far as I know, less work has been put into resolution. Resolution and size, while often related, are fundamentally orthogonal.
I've often heard the arguments that we should go away from the current generation of mechanical voting machines because (a) they're old and breaking down and no one understands how to repair them, and (b) they're old and breaking down and spare parts aren't available. These arguments are quickly followed by statements of how much better electronic voting would be.
I don't believe it for a second. I'm not sure who is trying to pull a fast one (perhaps Diebold is the answer in the US), but someone is planting FUD in no uncertain way.
Please, seriously, someone make a cogent argument that for the millions of dollars that a contract to make electronic voting machines would cost, spare parts could not be designed and manufactured de novo for these mechanical ones. Someone tell me that we couldn't make it worthwhile to train people on how to fix them with those same millions of dollars. Just because a machine no longer has someone to tend it does not mean it becomes an untrustworthy impenetrable black box -- it means we have an opportunity to educate someone, perhaps many people, to a vital and important skill. Aftermarket spare parts are still being made for air-cooled VW Beetles, often to better specs than the originals. And we can't remanufacture our current mechanical voting machines which have worked for decades? Are voting machines somehow so much more complex than car engines? Someone's trying to trick us.
By the way, I have yet to print a picture, ever.:)
That's exactly where you really see the difference. Monitor screens, except for the really, really good ones (eg, the 9M pixel T221 behemoths with 200 screen dpi that IBM designed for places like Sandia Labs) don't come close to 300 DPI of a standard printer, forget a good printer. The detail from a properly exposed, properly printed photo from a 350D using L glass is impressive.
Yes, the better image quality is nice too, but it's not _that_ huge a difference anymore.
Have you looked at properly exposed and printed shots from a decent dSLR (eg, a Canon Rebel XT) and a decent point and shoot (eg, a Canon SD450)? I'm not talking about viewing images on a computer screen, but looking at properly printed enlargements. With a dSLR you can get incredible, incredible detail and contrast that is just flat not possible from the lenses on point-and-shoot cameras. There still is a huge difference. Even the difference between entry level SLR optics and pro-quality optics (eg, Canon's L series lenses) produces a big step in image quality.
This is not to say that short back-focus optics have not become very good, but they're not quite up to the development that's been put into the 35mm format. Not yet, at least.
Algae based biodiesel solves this problem but is significantly more expensive to produce than convientional biodiesel last time I checked. Honestly though, I haven't heard about any new research in that field since the DOE Algae program was put to an end back on Clinton's watch.
I have friends working on this exact problem. Their company is called GreenFuel and they have a winning idea: take the waste heat and CO2 from the exhaust stream of conventionally fired power plants (eg, coal, natural gas) and use it to grow algae tuned to produce a high fraction of lipids. The algal output is readily converted to biodiesel. Even if it isn't super inexpensive (which by their projections it will be), it has the significant advantages of (a) using carbon twice rather than just once to produce energy in the overall cycle, therefore reducing the total CO2 load, (b) increasing the efficiencies of the plants where it's installed because it takes advantage of the waste stream, and (c) providing CO2 credits to the power companies which can be traded for cash, (d) scrubbing the exhaust gasses, thereby reducing emissions at the plant. The only drawback right now is that it requires reasonably high levels of sunlight to be effective, but they're working on that.
Two weeks is nothing
on
Space Lichens
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Terrestrial bacteria were found to have survived for three years of lunar exposure. Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad who retrieved the camera from which these bacteria were cultured thinks this discovery is the, "most significant thing that we ever found," in the entire Apollo program.
Slashdot Mirror
I find the articles themselves to be almost worthless if you're not in the specific field.
I find that varies highly with the field. I'm not a molecular biologist, and so don't have the necessary background to understand most of those articles. But, then, they're not written for me in mind, so I've no place to complain. That's why the more important articles have summaries written for the out-of-field scientists. On the other hand, I'm not a geologist, but I can slog through some of the thermochronology articles. Same for the archeology articles. It varies.
The point is, however, to read the summaries and encapsulations which are normally quite excellent. The original papers really aren't intended for the general scientific reader.
Subscribe to Science and Nature. Both of them have encapsulations and summaries with implications on the hottest articles published in each week's issue. Both have on-line versions. Also, Scientific American can be good (once was great) for perspective articles by world experts.
I do hope some cosmologist answers this better than I will, but this conundrum was addressed in part by a then-radical idea proposed by MIT professor Alan Guth (he lectured my freshman physics class, in part) who suggested that for a brief period right after the Big Bang, the universe expanded at much faster than the speed of light. This theory is called The Inflationary Universe, and although no one seems to understand why it might be the case, it's one of the few theories that explains things like why the universe is so big, why it's so very nearly flat, and why it isn't all exactly the same temperature and density.
/ inflation.html .
For more information see http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/cosmology
I've found http://wwww.projectorcentral.com/ to be a very useful resource when wondering about projectors.
Oh, and http://www.google.com/ as well. Amazing what information is out there.
I wonder if this could lead to an electric car that is good for the masses where they can cross country and take only 5 to 10 minutes to recharge.
Unlikely at best. The problem is that the rate of energy transfer for chemical storage (that is, fuels, like gasoline) is really, really high. While you could in principle build a station which could recharge your batteries in the same amount of time it takes to gas up your car, it wouldn't be something you'd want to be near.
Why?
When you put gasoline in your car, you are moving power at a rate of about 5 MW. That's the entire output of a small power plant. Liquid fuels, gasoline in particular, are a very dense way to store and transport energy. Electrical wires aren't very good for that in comparison, even with superconductive cables. Think of it this way, even if we could transfer energy from a station to your car with 99.9% efficiency (which is well and far beyond anything we can do in the forseable future), that's 500 W of power that needs to be dissipated at the conversion site between the station and your car. That's going to be too hot to hold like a fueling nozzle for gasoline cars. If we use 48V to move 5MW (48V is gaining traction as a new standard for power transfer), that's 100,000 A of current. Even if we use an insane voltage level like 5 kV, prone to arcing and causing nasty things like fires and death, that's still 1,000 A of current. Not small. If this power is transferred by direct contact, you get immediate electromigration at the contacts, arcing problems when starting and stopping the current (ever wonder why power transmission towers are so tall?). If it's transferred by induction, then the EM fields will be enough to cause cancer (ok, I don't know that one for sure, but it's going to be as if 1000 microwave ovens are all operating right there at your car, something I don't want to be near).
Building an electrical system that can move megawatts of power is not something that will ever happen on the consumer level.
What about improving the efficiency of cars? We can make cars at best an order of magnitude more energy efficient. That isn't going to solve the problems alone.
Now, if, instead of recharging, you swap out batteries (that is, move mass that carries energy instead of moving energy aone), things get far more attractive. Except that people are currently a little leary of exchanging parts of their cars (can you imagine swapping tires every time you went to a filling station?). But that would allow a quick recharging.
The only solution that really makes sense for refueling by recharging is to do it while the vehicle is sitting idle when there is more time available, rather than being driven when there isn't. If you allow 20 hours for a recharge instead of 5 minutes, the power transfer rate drops to 20 kW which isn't so bad. Add in an order of magnitude higher efficiency vehicles and perhaps live with shorter distances between recharges, and you get down to the kilowatt range which is entirely doable (1.5kW can be supplied from a single, standard US household outlet).
It is well-understood in behavioral psychology that a reward is enjoyed more when it is earned.
A better question would be "Are there cancer resistant humans and we don't know about it?"
Although there may well be more we don't know about, there are cancer resistant humans we do know about: People with Down Syndrome have about half the rate of non-leukemia cancer compared to the general population. They have a higher rate of childhood leukemia, though (and maybe one other cancer that I can't seem to recall right now). Down Syndrome is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21. I attended a presentation at MIT a couple of years ago where there was some very exciting work being done on anti-angiogenic drugs, and the researcher presented compelling data on the effectiveness of one such compound that he was researching. What's the link? This compound occurs normally in the human body where it mediates vascular generation, and many cancers interfere with it so as to trigger vascular proliferation to feed their explosive growth (cancers need blood flow, and lots of it). Guess where it's sequence lies? Chromosome 21. It turns out that people with Down Syndrome have about double the level of this anti-angiogenic compound in their blood.
There are only two ways to move that kind of energy that quickly and not need serious protection from something that might melt or even explode in your hands from losses, (a) mass transfer of either a chemical compound like gasoline or a battery swap, (b) superconductive cables, 'cause 6 MW at even 0.1% loss (an insane level of efficiency) would be 6kW in your hand and that's gonna get hot.
This is the most effective argument against electrical power and one that cannot be overcome without a serious change to the public's expectations during the refueling process. As long as we expect to re-energize our vehicles in a few minutes, there is no currently known solution that will not be at best dangerous. Even with superconductive cabling and a transfer system that is close to lossless, if we move power via DC, the contacts aren't going to last long due to electromigration; if we move power via AC, the fields are going to be really, really strong, and everyone's credit cards will get erased (actually much worse things are likely to happen, but you get the idea). Pushing megawatts of power through E&M fields is hard.
Now, if we can recharge a different way, say over 10 hours instead of 10 minutes, the story is entirely different, 'cause moving kilowatts of power isn't that big a deal. Or if we re-energize the vehicle by swapping batteries for ones that the filling station recharges at their leisure, it's much less of an issue. But both of those require a substantial shift in public perception and expectation.
The orgasmatron is one step closer to reality!
This is a running joke amongst my colleagues. It's a lot easier than you might think.
IIANSDBS (I Am A Neuroscientist Studying Deep Brain Stimulation), and I attended one of the recent workshops that Medtronic had on this very subject where they brought together all of the physicians working on their pre-clinical trial of these devices. It was incredibly cool. Despite my having worked in the field for 6 years now, deep brain stimulation continues to astound me. The meeting covered exactly what you would think it would cover (and no, I'm not going to reveal any trade secrets or violate any NDAs): patient case studies, general results where such conclusions could be drawn, trends and statistics where available.
First off, deep brain stimulation is not for the feint of heart. They permanently implant an electrode deep in the middle of your head. Actually, two of them. One on each side. This *is* brain surgery. Screwing up is a Big Deal, and, generally, brain surgery has a risk of complication measured at the 5-10 percent level. Then, in addition to these electrodes in your skull, there are wires which come out under your skin and route down to your chest to a permanently implanted stimulator. Actually, two of them. One on each side. This level of surgery is not something to be taken lightly. The target patient population is not people who feel a little down all the time; these are clinically depressed patients who spend the entire day sitting around doing nothing. Their lives are seriously impacted, just as seriously as someone who had a debillitating major physical ailment such as emphysima, heart disease, or a degenerative bone disease.
Which brings me to the point of this posting, to comment on item 3 of the parent: many seriously believe "fixing" this, particularly the down or depressed side will decrease or neutralize the creative side of those who are exceptionally creative. The patients that this treatment is intended for are so depressed that they have no creative side. They are paralyzed by their depression. They do not function in society. They are barely able to nourish themselves, and, in some cases, require hospitalization or other form of daily care. The parent poster's assertion about this particular treatment is bunk. Brain surgery is not for people who feel down but are able to live halfway decent lives; Brain surgery is for people who are seriously broken. At this meeting, I saw videotapes of patients in the pre-clinical trials, and these are people who are before treatment so fogged by depression that they communicate in single word responses; they often miss appointments with their doctors because they cannot bring themselves to leave the house; they are deeply affected by their condition.
Please draw your own conclusions about the effectiveness of the treatment by inference from Medtronic's pushing this forward to clinical testing. I, for one, am glad to see it advance.
The motto at MIT is "Mens et Manus" (roughly, "mind and hand," or, as I prefer it, "science and technology"). Everyone at The 'Tute knows the motto.
I was fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to have attended both MIT and Caltech, and spent sufficiently many years at both to have understood the hacker culture and the relative prowess of the campus constabulatory.
Bottom line: Caltech's security guards are rent-a-cops; MIT's are policemen. I cannot recall a single incident in my six years at Caltech where security responded to a call fast enough to see perpetrators. I personally committed a number of, ah, acts at leisurely pace because there was no reason to hurry. I've been to the rooftops in the middle of the day countless times. It's no big deal. You cannot do the same thing at MIT with such cavalier ease because the campus has been hardened against hacking, and the MIT Campus Police are reasonably quick to respond, and reasonably quick-witted.
Kudos to the MIT group for pulling off an impressive feat!
What computer lasts 50 years? Steel plate, sure, but silicon and plastic?
[Comparing images] we should also be able to tell when new craters hit.
Technically, craters are the result of an imapact, not the impactor itself. But more importantly, we already know about about substantial meteorite impacts because of their signature on the global seismological / nuclear explosion sensing network.
What's the big deal here? The paint is conductive. The conductivity cannot be switched on and off, but by reading between the lines of TFA, they have an antenna inside the faraday cage which can selectively provide connectivity to the outside world. You can do the same thing with copper mesh (and I have, to make ultra-quiet recordings of microvolt biological signals) to create an entire room that is a faraday cage.
The only thing newsworthy is that this paint contains nanotechnology. Sure, that's nice. But the summary and title are misleading: The paint blocks, always. The additional antenna blocks on demand, and there's nothing special there.
Many of the bathrooms in the Mediterranean countries are like this. Often, they lack a well-defined shower area, have no shower curtain, sporting just a wall mounted hand-held telephone style shower head, and a central drain. (It's up to the user to make sure they don't spray the toilet paper and render it less than optimally useful!) But everything dries quite nicely, thank you. It all depends on the local humidity and temperature.
I really don't recommend you try it yourself, but it won't kill you.
You are lucky you didn't breathe in during the fireball. The hot gasses which caused the sunburn-like effects on your outer skin would have done the same to your lungs. This could easily have landed you in a hospital emergency room or intensive care unit, and could well have resulted in death over the next few days in a rather unpleasant process akin to slow suffocation. Burning your lungs is really, really bad. Don't do this. It can kill you.
I'm heartened to hear this.
But why don't you make it EASIER to report errors? There isn't, as far as I can tell, even a difficult way listed somewhere on the site (and daddypants@slashdot just isn't memorable). Or adopt more of the Wiki model where there are a larger number of (unpaid) junior editors who have write access to the posts?
I've lost track of the number of egregious errors I've seen that anything more than a half-hearted scanning would catch. I'd have been happy to make corrections; perhaps modpoints should come with an ability to click on a "fix the posting" box?
Max brightness: 250 cd/m^2 at 100, but dropped 1 cd/m^2 EVERY SECOND I left it at that setting(and oddly enough, when I brought the setting back to 0, luminance climbed slightly over 5-10 seconds, then dropped back to 178-179). 0 is anywhere from 178.2-180.
Not so odd, you're seeing temperature effects, where hotter bulbs produce lower output. When you set it to the highest level, it takes a while to stabilize at the new, higher, temperature. When you brought it back to 0, it took a while to stabilize again.
The question of, "what looks best on the web," surely should be rephrased as, "what looks good at intermediate display resolution," with the clear caveat that as technology progresses, this will become less of an issue as our screen resolutions increase. The common 12 inch laptop screen with 1024x768 pixels has about 100 dpi; if that were to increase to 300 dpi we wouldn't care nearly as much; at 600 dpi, this would be a vastly different discussion.
The deeper question becomes, then, what can font designers do to ensure that their fonts are properly optimized for a range of display resolutions, not just size? The interactions between font size (measured in points) and readability have been well studied in the print world (eg, for the same family, a 6 pt face will be squatter and have relatively looser kerning than the 12 pt face), but as far as I know, less work has been put into resolution. Resolution and size, while often related, are fundamentally orthogonal.
I've often heard the arguments that we should go away from the current generation of mechanical voting machines because (a) they're old and breaking down and no one understands how to repair them, and (b) they're old and breaking down and spare parts aren't available. These arguments are quickly followed by statements of how much better electronic voting would be.
I don't believe it for a second. I'm not sure who is trying to pull a fast one (perhaps Diebold is the answer in the US), but someone is planting FUD in no uncertain way.
Please, seriously, someone make a cogent argument that for the millions of dollars that a contract to make electronic voting machines would cost, spare parts could not be designed and manufactured de novo for these mechanical ones. Someone tell me that we couldn't make it worthwhile to train people on how to fix them with those same millions of dollars. Just because a machine no longer has someone to tend it does not mean it becomes an untrustworthy impenetrable black box -- it means we have an opportunity to educate someone, perhaps many people, to a vital and important skill. Aftermarket spare parts are still being made for air-cooled VW Beetles, often to better specs than the originals. And we can't remanufacture our current mechanical voting machines which have worked for decades? Are voting machines somehow so much more complex than car engines? Someone's trying to trick us.
By the way, I have yet to print a picture, ever. :)
That's exactly where you really see the difference. Monitor screens, except for the really, really good ones (eg, the 9M pixel T221 behemoths with 200 screen dpi that IBM designed for places like Sandia Labs) don't come close to 300 DPI of a standard printer, forget a good printer. The detail from a properly exposed, properly printed photo from a 350D using L glass is impressive.
Yes, the better image quality is nice too, but it's not _that_ huge a difference anymore.
Have you looked at properly exposed and printed shots from a decent dSLR (eg, a Canon Rebel XT) and a decent point and shoot (eg, a Canon SD450)? I'm not talking about viewing images on a computer screen, but looking at properly printed enlargements. With a dSLR you can get incredible, incredible detail and contrast that is just flat not possible from the lenses on point-and-shoot cameras. There still is a huge difference. Even the difference between entry level SLR optics and pro-quality optics (eg, Canon's L series lenses) produces a big step in image quality.
This is not to say that short back-focus optics have not become very good, but they're not quite up to the development that's been put into the 35mm format. Not yet, at least.
Algae based biodiesel solves this problem but is significantly more expensive to produce than convientional biodiesel last time I checked. Honestly though, I haven't heard about any new research in that field since the DOE Algae program was put to an end back on Clinton's watch.
I have friends working on this exact problem. Their company is called GreenFuel and they have a winning idea: take the waste heat and CO2 from the exhaust stream of conventionally fired power plants (eg, coal, natural gas) and use it to grow algae tuned to produce a high fraction of lipids. The algal output is readily converted to biodiesel. Even if it isn't super inexpensive (which by their projections it will be), it has the significant advantages of (a) using carbon twice rather than just once to produce energy in the overall cycle, therefore reducing the total CO2 load, (b) increasing the efficiencies of the plants where it's installed because it takes advantage of the waste stream, and (c) providing CO2 credits to the power companies which can be traded for cash, (d) scrubbing the exhaust gasses, thereby reducing emissions at the plant. The only drawback right now is that it requires reasonably high levels of sunlight to be effective, but they're working on that.
Terrestrial bacteria were found to have survived for three years of lunar exposure. Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad who retrieved the camera from which these bacteria were cultured thinks this discovery is the, "most significant thing that we ever found," in the entire Apollo program.
p 98_1.htm
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast01se