Re:Five facts from a professional photographer
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Beyond Megapixels
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As a semi-pro who for a number of years made extra cash selling fine-art photos, I agree with everything you said.
At this point, I lament the number of thousands of dollars spent on high-quality film and processing which could have gone to a high-end digital camera and lens. The yearly running costs for a digital camera are very nearly zero: the early running costs for a film camera can swamp the cost of the equipment. And I *don't* earn my keep that way!
My understanding is that current photojournalists all use digital as well, in part because of the decreased time-to-publication possible by skipping the processing step. Also makes it easier (in some cases possible) to file shots from the field.
Laparoscopic surgery is done with instruments, but they are not usually "remote controlled."
Yes, but there's still a long distance between the surgeon's hands and the ends of the instruments (compared to normal instruments which, as you know, are much shorter), and the instruments all pass through a trochar which alters their maneuverability substantially (compared to normal instruments in an open case), but the biggest difference is that you no longer have direct visual feedback -- you rely upon the weird perspective of the video camera which also includes a certain amount of delay (perhaps as little as 30 ms, but there nevertheless). This is all reminiscent of playing a video game -- that, I think, was the point of the parent poster's "remote control" terminology.
And, I think, this also leads to the larger issue: there is something fundamentally different between flying by wire and having direct visual feedback. Many people -- surgeons included -- currently have little experience with fine control of an object when some part of the feedback loop, either the manipulation or observation of the object, is not direct. People who play video games are much more familiar with this idea, and it seems reasonable that there be a correlation (not necessarily causation) between video game playing and laparoscopic skill. Don't you think?
And not just ancient Egypt, either. As a child, I recall being able to purchase unglazed water jugs in Greece which, when filled, would slowly weep, and take advantage of evaporative cooling to keep the rest of the water chilled. Then, doing some investigation, it appeared that many of the ancient Greek pots about the same size-and-shape as the modern ones were also unglazed (while others weren't). So, there's at least 2500 years' use as well.
When the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost due to a mixup between NASA and Lockheed Martin concerning imperial vs. metric units, I recall Dan Goldin, the then-head of NASA, being asked by a reporter if heads would roll. He replied something like, "sure we could do that, but then we'd have to replace those engineers. Now we already hired the best ones we could find in the world, so where are we to get better ones?"
The Shuttle is one of the (if not *the*) most complex bits of engineering we, as a world-wide society, have achieved. I would never expect any shuttle to be manufactured/assembled/flown/controlled/maintained perfectly without flaw. I would, however, expect it to be designed to work well in the face of such problems, as does seem to be the case here. Discovery had 30 successful flights despite a part on a major control surface being installed backwards? Everyone landed safely? Tons of good science, too? Doesn't mean the problem shouldn't be fixed, but kudos to NASA for what sounds to me like a job well done.
That, reducto ad absurdum, argument is not what I was asserting. I was merely pointing out that the statement on THC consumption being self-limiting is false because of the availability of concentrated forms. (And, although I didn't emphasise this point earlier, the *ready* availability of concentrated forms.)
Your argument about nicotine is not as powerful as you might like because of the relative lack of availability of concentrated injectable nicotine. It is possible to physically ingest large quantities of tobacco (chewing style, specifically) which may be sufficient to induce death before they are expelled, but that is not what you were arguing.
So, while there are many reasons why we, as a society, might want to ban cigarettes, your asserting is not one widely considered among them.
... well before you're able to consume enough THC...
You're assuming consumption is by inhalation; by ingestion, especially in concentrated form (hashish or THC tablets), it is surely possible.
Just as it is difficult to achieve alcohol poisoning when drinking normally because of the same self-limiting effects (although it is possible), it is also possible to chug a litre of pure ethanol and likely induce death.
Note I'm not saying it is *impossible*, just improbable. With a big enough impact, ejecta could have enough energy to escape the solar system, but an impact with that amount of energy is very, very improbable. Given that it takes a fair amount of energy for ejecta to escape Earth, one would expect to see more terrestrial material on Venus than on Mars, but it does not make the ratio 1:0. There's a big difference between improbably and impossible, and, regrettably, many people don't understand that.
What if some bacteria escaped earth's atmosphere -- maybe a meteor kicked it up, or it was randomly carried by wind up and out of the reach of earth -- and settled on Europa, Mars, Venus, or some other planets?
Basic celestial mechanics would suggest that if anything were ejected from Earth, it would be very unlikely to have enough energy to escape much beyond Earth's orbit, and would, more likely, decay toward the Sun instead. That's the hypothesized mechanism for the few (terrestrial) meteorites which have been identified as having Martian origin. Therefore, based only on the sequence of planets from the Sun, we'd expect Earth ejecta on Venus and Mercury, but probably not Mars, and probably not on any of the outer planets' moons. Additionally shrinking the probability of hitting an outer planet's moons is the large gravitational well from the outer planet itself. Add then, to that, the difficulty of getting through the asteroid belt without being deflected, and it becomes not impossible, but overwhelmingly improbable that anything from (geologically modern, life-bearing) Earth has made it to Europa.
Indeed. Remember that electricity moves at the speed of light. (pause) Yes, the speed of light. (pause) Yes. Not the speed of light in a vacuum, the speed of light in the transmission medium in question. When this is wires on a PC board or traces on a chip, the capacitance and inductance of the wires -- which form the transmission medium -- slow down the photons which mediate the field propagation (at least that's one way of looking at it). For example, the speed of light in a coax cable is slower than the speed of light in a vacuum (although it's usually a fair fraction of it, typically well over 90%).
That said, and understanding that signals on chips are already propagating at fractional-light speeds, you can tell that the original statement is bunk. Why? Because we're already at the physical limitations. It is already true that it takes an appreciable fraction of a clock cycle for signals to propagate from one side of a chip to another. Remember, light -- in vacuum -- travels about 11 inches per nanosecond. Slow that down to 0.3c and suddenly your 3 GHz processor clock means you can get about 1 cm between clock cycles, or, from one edge to another of the big, modern chips.
So, the important question is: how fast do infrared photons travel in doped silicon? Anyone know?
Whenever I hear about the latest and greatest electronic voting scheme, it gives me pause to wonder who is behind this.
Mechanical voting machines have proved effective and relatively reliable for many, many years. I've heard the claim that the company that once manufactured them has gone out of business and that spare parts are no longer available. I say, BUNK. Given the amount of money that will undoubtedly be spent on engineering incredibly vulnerable systems which will be obsolete in a few years as compared to the previous systems which worked fine for a few decades, it would be a trivial task to have new parts designed and produced for the older machines.
Whose boondogle is the whole idea of electronic voting?
... see Vitruvius' book on architecture. There's an older tech manual for you.
Or any of a handful of ancient Greek authors; they'd have predated Chaucer by, oh, nearly two millenia.
More specifically (clickety-click, all-praise-unto-Google) how about the Antikythra instrument, a well-known Ancient Greek calculating engine, complete with inscribed instructions? Estimated to be made in 80 BC or so, 1400 years or so before Caucer. A friggen' computer with a manual fer chrissakes.
How do the prions get across the blood-brain barrier?
There's evidence that the blood-brain barrier is not quite as absolute as originally thought and that, for example, leukocytes (part of the immune system) can traverse the barrier, going from blood to brain. This mechanism is suspected to be critical for progression of diseases like AIDS-related dementia and spongiform encepalopathies among others. However, I don't recall seeing a definitive answer to your question (but that in and of itself isn't definitive 'cause there's a lot of work I've not read about!).
I've been doing a bit of reading on the Mad Cow disease lately.
Apparently, not enough reading. CJD and vCJD are different, although related, diseases with different symptoms, different susceptible populations, and different progressions. vCJD, for example, affects a much younger population and has a very short incubation time (for want of a better word), whereas CJD is, more-or-less as you describe it, a disease that primarily affects older people or those who took human growth hormone injections before the synthetic version was commercially available. Once more: CJD and vCJD are not the same disease.
Mad cow disease is originally believed to have been caused as a result of feeding beef/other meat products to cows.
Uhm, no. Mad cow disease is primarily spread by that mechanism, it did not originate by that way. It is currently hypothesized that spongiform encepalopathies (ie, BSE in cows, scrapie in sheep, CJD in humans, I-forget-what in chicken) happen spontaneously at a low but detectable background rate in any given population. Now, what happens when you take a sick animal and feed its remains to a large number of other animals? The same thing that happened to those unfortunate short youngsters who were given real human growth hormone in the last century: disease transmission.
The disease is an interesting one. Here's a quick primer: there are small proteins called prions which are ubiquitous in the central nervous system. Their function is not yet well understood, but they're everywhere. They come in two conformations (3d structures), a normal one and a disease-causing one. Healthy individuals likely have zero disease-causing conformations -- why? Here's the cool bit: the diseasing causing conformation catalizes the switching of normal versions to disease-causing versions! So just one bad molecule starts to change all of the others. Normal cooking heat unfortunately does not destroy these prions, either. It is hypothesized that some vanishingly small number of prions in the aggregate set from a population of individuals spontaneously convert to the disease-causing conformation (my favorite reason is cosmic-ray strike). However, ingesting even one bad prion may be enough to cause disease, eventually.
Scientific American published a small handful of articles (3?) on the subject a few years ago.
One thing it taught us was to add insurance coverage to all our shipping.
Although this might sound like a wise-ass comment, it is meant seriously. Is it easier to get money out of an insurance company by filing a claim than it is to get money out of a shipping company by suing them? Even when the so-called insurance is being sold by the same shipping company who is handling your package (and therefore you'd be making an insurance claim against the same company you'd previously had just sued for breach of contract)? Have you had a chance to test the theory?
We once had three high-end PCs (marked for signature delivery) "stolen" from a customer's doorstep. Then, when the customer decided he didn't want us to ship replacements and hit us with the chargeback, we were out nearly $10,000. I still believe the customer saw an opening and stole those PCs, but I'll never know for sure.
This was an excellent and informative post. But I'm curious about this particular bit -- wasn't the carrier liable since you specified signature delivery and, presumably, no signature was obtained?
Geothermal: Nonscalable (very few areas have harvestable geothermal resources)
Not quite true. The Earth is approximately 50F just about everywhere, once you get below the top few meters of dirt (the depth varies from location to location as does the exact temperature). This means a nearly inexhaustible supply of cooling during the summer and heating during the winter is available if you're willing to go straight down (and the bedrock doesn't prevent you). This isn't a high-quality energy source, but were we to switch private residences to geothermal heat pumps, the energy savings would be tremendous.
Now, if you're talking about high-quality (read: high temperature), high-capacity (MW) energy sources, then, yes, geothermal isn't ubiquitous... unless you're willing to drill even deeper. The investment costs do get pretty high though.
As the ice age cycle is (currently) about 100,000 years, with evidence of 400,000 and 1,000,000 year periodic variations, I'd suggest that 200 years of accurate surface data is not going to help as much as one might hope.
The base clock speed of the aforementioned P4 is 3.0 GHz, whereas the fastest DDR SDRAM runs at around 400MHz.
Yes, except that the fraction of transistors switching in the two at any given moment is vastly different: in the P4 it will be reasonably high, in memory chips, it will be vanishingly low. Thus your analysis is inaccurate at best and potentially misleading at worst.
Think of the following empirical observations: a modern processor cannot run without a heatsink without going into thermal failure. The specifications for power dissipation run between 50 and 100 W. Normal die temperature is closing in on 100 C. Now, how about for a modern memory chip? Dissipations are in the hundreds of milliwatts. Sure, you might have 10 or 20 of them, but that's it, creating an order of magnitude difference between processor power dissipation and memory chip power dissipation in normal use. Think about it: if this weren't the case, then memory banks would *require* fans for normal (not overclocked) operation just as processors do.
Multiple times while reviewing the Efficion architecture the article's author suggests that the tradeoff of additional storage required for Transmeta's code-morphing approach will easily balance out the power savings from making a simpler CPU. This belies a deep misunderstanding of power consumption in digital systems, as readily evidences by the fact that modern non-Transmeta processers dissipate multiple tens of Watts of power (often nearly 100W) and a full complement of memory (4G, in modern machines) dissipates a few Watts at most.
Also in the article, the author suggests that processors spend most of their time wating on loads, and then argues that since the code-morphing approach means more instruction fetches, the Efficion processor will be spending disproportionatly more time on loads. Then, after this assertion, he admits that he does not know *where* the translated Efficion code is held. Might it be in one-cycle-accessible L1 cache? That point is conveniently sidestepped. He does not understand under what circumstances the profiling takes place, although he regurgitates the sales pitch nicely. He argues that transistors hold the translated code (trying to argue against the transistors-for-software tradeoff) but then does not realize that transistors in memory do not equate transistors in logic (neither in power, as they are not cycled as frequently, nor in speed characteristics).
In all, I find the author's treatment of the Transmeta architecture sophomoric, and, after finding that section lacking, I left the rest of the article unread. Your mileage may vary.
Yes, exactly. This is the only follow-on poster which figured that out: while most might think the series of questions I described to be an invasion of privacy, the fact of the matter was the interrogators couldn't care less (well, nearly so) about my answers, it was the way in which I answered, the way I responded to their questions that mattered. No notes were taken, no recording was made (to my knowledge). I'm sure that they forgot all about my unremarkable-to-them interview during the next one. And that's just fine by me. Much better than filling out some form which becomes part of a permanent paper or electronic record.
Agreed. The best security I've ever seen is at the Tel Aviv airport. Before passengers can check in, they are subject to an intensive interrogation by two security guards (think military intelligence officers rather than rent-a-cops) who are trained in asking rapid-fire, pointed questions. I was in Jerusalem attending a scientific conference, and had a letter of introduction with me from the organizers (remember this is *leaving* Israel). The set of questions went something like this (my answers are left as an exercise to the reader) --
Why were you in Israel? Where was the conference? Did you present at the conference? Do you have the conference program? Please give it to me. What did you present? Is your name in the program? Please give us your presentation. Yes, now. (I spoke for perhaps 2 minutes and was then interrupted.) Were you invited to the conference? Why would they invite you? Are you some kind of expert in this field? Where did you stay? How did you know where to stay? Who arranged your hotel for you? Where did you get your taxi this morning? How did you know you could find one there?... and so forth. It was the third degree.
They are smart enough to have about as many interrogation stands as there are check-in counters, so there's plenty of bandwidth. Once you pass through security, you walk 10 meters to the counter and talk to an airline employee to check in, rather than the other way around, and the path from interrogation to check-in is controlled. The idea behind the interrogation is to make sure you are legitimate, and have a solid, believable story (I do not for a moment think they cared about my research into an arcane corner of neurobiology). They are checking the person rather than his belongings (although they do this as well). That's security.
American airports don't have security, they have inconveniences to placate the general population into thinking they are secure. I'd much rather the Americans implemented a system like the Israelis have.
Let me make something a little clearer -- if you take two cars with equal off-the-line performance, one with electric motors and one with an internal combustion engine, the traditionally-engined car will likely have a higher top speed. Thus my speculative assertion that an electric motored vehicle will have an apparently low top speed because we expect a certain kind of performance based on our experience with internal combustion engines, and extrapolate from the anomalously good low-end performance of electric motors.
Electric motors, unlike internal combustion engines, can generate maximum torque at zero RPM. This translates directly into excellent off-line acceleration, impressive 0-60 times, and all-round high performance. Around-town driving in an electric car should give the impression that there's a much bigger engine due to our preconceptions based on internal combusion (thus, the comment "only 200 hp"). Top speed, however, will seem stunted in comparison to that available from an internal combustion engine because they generally produce increasing torque with increasing RPM (especially below 2000 RPM).
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As a semi-pro who for a number of years made extra cash selling fine-art photos, I agree with everything you said.
At this point, I lament the number of thousands of dollars spent on high-quality film and processing which could have gone to a high-end digital camera and lens. The yearly running costs for a digital camera are very nearly zero: the early running costs for a film camera can swamp the cost of the equipment. And I *don't* earn my keep that way!
My understanding is that current photojournalists all use digital as well, in part because of the decreased time-to-publication possible by skipping the processing step. Also makes it easier (in some cases possible) to file shots from the field.
Laparoscopic surgery is done with instruments, but they are not usually "remote controlled."
Yes, but there's still a long distance between the surgeon's hands and the ends of the instruments (compared to normal instruments which, as you know, are much shorter), and the instruments all pass through a trochar which alters their maneuverability substantially (compared to normal instruments in an open case), but the biggest difference is that you no longer have direct visual feedback -- you rely upon the weird perspective of the video camera which also includes a certain amount of delay (perhaps as little as 30 ms, but there nevertheless). This is all reminiscent of playing a video game -- that, I think, was the point of the parent poster's "remote control" terminology.
And, I think, this also leads to the larger issue: there is something fundamentally different between flying by wire and having direct visual feedback. Many people -- surgeons included -- currently have little experience with fine control of an object when some part of the feedback loop, either the manipulation or observation of the object, is not direct. People who play video games are much more familiar with this idea, and it seems reasonable that there be a correlation (not necessarily causation) between video game playing and laparoscopic skill. Don't you think?
And not just ancient Egypt, either. As a child, I recall being able to purchase unglazed water jugs in Greece which, when filled, would slowly weep, and take advantage of evaporative cooling to keep the rest of the water chilled. Then, doing some investigation, it appeared that many of the ancient Greek pots about the same size-and-shape as the modern ones were also unglazed (while others weren't). So, there's at least 2500 years' use as well.
When the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost due to a mixup between NASA and Lockheed Martin concerning imperial vs. metric units, I recall Dan Goldin, the then-head of NASA, being asked by a reporter if heads would roll. He replied something like, "sure we could do that, but then we'd have to replace those engineers. Now we already hired the best ones we could find in the world, so where are we to get better ones?"
d perfectly without flaw. I would, however, expect it to be designed to work well in the face of such problems, as does seem to be the case here. Discovery had 30 successful flights despite a part on a major control surface being installed backwards? Everyone landed safely? Tons of good science, too? Doesn't mean the problem shouldn't be fixed, but kudos to NASA for what sounds to me like a job well done.
The Shuttle is one of the (if not *the*) most complex bits of engineering we, as a world-wide society, have achieved. I would never expect any shuttle to be manufactured/assembled/flown/controlled/maintaine
That, reducto ad absurdum, argument is not what I was asserting. I was merely pointing out that the statement on THC consumption being self-limiting is false because of the availability of concentrated forms. (And, although I didn't emphasise this point earlier, the *ready* availability of concentrated forms.)
Your argument about nicotine is not as powerful as you might like because of the relative lack of availability of concentrated injectable nicotine. It is possible to physically ingest large quantities of tobacco (chewing style, specifically) which may be sufficient to induce death before they are expelled, but that is not what you were arguing.
So, while there are many reasons why we, as a society, might want to ban cigarettes, your asserting is not one widely considered among them.
... well before you're able to consume enough THC ...
You're assuming consumption is by inhalation; by ingestion, especially in concentrated form (hashish or THC tablets), it is surely possible.
Just as it is difficult to achieve alcohol poisoning when drinking normally because of the same self-limiting effects (although it is possible), it is also possible to chug a litre of pure ethanol and likely induce death.
We're one step closer now.
Note I'm not saying it is *impossible*, just improbable. With a big enough impact, ejecta could have enough energy to escape the solar system, but an impact with that amount of energy is very, very improbable. Given that it takes a fair amount of energy for ejecta to escape Earth, one would expect to see more terrestrial material on Venus than on Mars, but it does not make the ratio 1:0. There's a big difference between improbably and impossible, and, regrettably, many people don't understand that.
What if some bacteria escaped earth's atmosphere -- maybe a meteor kicked it up, or it was randomly carried by wind up and out of the reach of earth -- and settled on Europa, Mars, Venus, or some other planets?
Basic celestial mechanics would suggest that if anything were ejected from Earth, it would be very unlikely to have enough energy to escape much beyond Earth's orbit, and would, more likely, decay toward the Sun instead. That's the hypothesized mechanism for the few (terrestrial) meteorites which have been identified as having Martian origin. Therefore, based only on the sequence of planets from the Sun, we'd expect Earth ejecta on Venus and Mercury, but probably not Mars, and probably not on any of the outer planets' moons. Additionally shrinking the probability of hitting an outer planet's moons is the large gravitational well from the outer planet itself. Add then, to that, the difficulty of getting through the asteroid belt without being deflected, and it becomes not impossible, but overwhelmingly improbable that anything from (geologically modern, life-bearing) Earth has made it to Europa.
Indeed. Remember that electricity moves at the speed of light. (pause) Yes, the speed of light. (pause) Yes. Not the speed of light in a vacuum, the speed of light in the transmission medium in question. When this is wires on a PC board or traces on a chip, the capacitance and inductance of the wires -- which form the transmission medium -- slow down the photons which mediate the field propagation (at least that's one way of looking at it). For example, the speed of light in a coax cable is slower than the speed of light in a vacuum (although it's usually a fair fraction of it, typically well over 90%).
That said, and understanding that signals on chips are already propagating at fractional-light speeds, you can tell that the original statement is bunk. Why? Because we're already at the physical limitations. It is already true that it takes an appreciable fraction of a clock cycle for signals to propagate from one side of a chip to another. Remember, light -- in vacuum -- travels about 11 inches per nanosecond. Slow that down to 0.3c and suddenly your 3 GHz processor clock means you can get about 1 cm between clock cycles, or, from one edge to another of the big, modern chips.
So, the important question is: how fast do infrared photons travel in doped silicon? Anyone know?
I was, specifically, thinking of the lever-pull systems.
Whenever I hear about the latest and greatest electronic voting scheme, it gives me pause to wonder who is behind this.
Mechanical voting machines have proved effective and relatively reliable for many, many years. I've heard the claim that the company that once manufactured them has gone out of business and that spare parts are no longer available. I say, BUNK. Given the amount of money that will undoubtedly be spent on engineering incredibly vulnerable systems which will be obsolete in a few years as compared to the previous systems which worked fine for a few decades, it would be a trivial task to have new parts designed and produced for the older machines.
Whose boondogle is the whole idea of electronic voting?
... see Vitruvius' book on architecture. There's an older tech manual for you.
Or any of a handful of ancient Greek authors; they'd have predated Chaucer by, oh, nearly two millenia.
More specifically (clickety-click, all-praise-unto-Google) how about the Antikythra instrument, a well-known Ancient Greek calculating engine, complete with inscribed instructions? Estimated to be made in 80 BC or so, 1400 years or so before Caucer. A friggen' computer with a manual fer chrissakes.
How do the prions get across the blood-brain barrier?
There's evidence that the blood-brain barrier is not quite as absolute as originally thought and that, for example, leukocytes (part of the immune system) can traverse the barrier, going from blood to brain. This mechanism is suspected to be critical for progression of diseases like AIDS-related dementia and spongiform encepalopathies among others. However, I don't recall seeing a definitive answer to your question (but that in and of itself isn't definitive 'cause there's a lot of work I've not read about!).
I've been doing a bit of reading on the Mad Cow disease lately.
Apparently, not enough reading. CJD and vCJD are different, although related, diseases with different symptoms, different susceptible populations, and different progressions. vCJD, for example, affects a much younger population and has a very short incubation time (for want of a better word), whereas CJD is, more-or-less as you describe it, a disease that primarily affects older people or those who took human growth hormone injections before the synthetic version was commercially available. Once more: CJD and vCJD are not the same disease.
Mad cow disease is originally believed to have been caused as a result of feeding beef/other meat products to cows.
Uhm, no. Mad cow disease is primarily spread by that mechanism, it did not originate by that way. It is currently hypothesized that spongiform encepalopathies (ie, BSE in cows, scrapie in sheep, CJD in humans, I-forget-what in chicken) happen spontaneously at a low but detectable background rate in any given population. Now, what happens when you take a sick animal and feed its remains to a large number of other animals? The same thing that happened to those unfortunate short youngsters who were given real human growth hormone in the last century: disease transmission.
The disease is an interesting one. Here's a quick primer: there are small proteins called prions which are ubiquitous in the central nervous system. Their function is not yet well understood, but they're everywhere. They come in two conformations (3d structures), a normal one and a disease-causing one. Healthy individuals likely have zero disease-causing conformations -- why? Here's the cool bit: the diseasing causing conformation catalizes the switching of normal versions to disease-causing versions! So just one bad molecule starts to change all of the others. Normal cooking heat unfortunately does not destroy these prions, either. It is hypothesized that some vanishingly small number of prions in the aggregate set from a population of individuals spontaneously convert to the disease-causing conformation (my favorite reason is cosmic-ray strike). However, ingesting even one bad prion may be enough to cause disease, eventually.
Scientific American published a small handful of articles (3?) on the subject a few years ago.
One thing it taught us was to add insurance coverage to all our shipping.
Although this might sound like a wise-ass comment, it is meant seriously. Is it easier to get money out of an insurance company by filing a claim than it is to get money out of a shipping company by suing them? Even when the so-called insurance is being sold by the same shipping company who is handling your package (and therefore you'd be making an insurance claim against the same company you'd previously had just sued for breach of contract)? Have you had a chance to test the theory?
We once had three high-end PCs (marked for signature delivery) "stolen" from a customer's doorstep. Then, when the customer decided he didn't want us to ship replacements and hit us with the chargeback, we were out nearly $10,000. I still believe the customer saw an opening and stole those PCs, but I'll never know for sure.
This was an excellent and informative post. But I'm curious about this particular bit -- wasn't the carrier liable since you specified signature delivery and, presumably, no signature was obtained?
Geothermal: Nonscalable (very few areas have harvestable geothermal resources)
... unless you're willing to drill even deeper. The investment costs do get pretty high though.
Not quite true. The Earth is approximately 50F just about everywhere, once you get below the top few meters of dirt (the depth varies from location to location as does the exact temperature). This means a nearly inexhaustible supply of cooling during the summer and heating during the winter is available if you're willing to go straight down (and the bedrock doesn't prevent you). This isn't a high-quality energy source, but were we to switch private residences to geothermal heat pumps, the energy savings would be tremendous.
Now, if you're talking about high-quality (read: high temperature), high-capacity (MW) energy sources, then, yes, geothermal isn't ubiquitous
As the ice age cycle is (currently) about 100,000 years, with evidence of 400,000 and 1,000,000 year periodic variations, I'd suggest that 200 years of accurate surface data is not going to help as much as one might hope.
The base clock speed of the aforementioned P4 is 3.0 GHz, whereas the fastest DDR SDRAM runs at around 400MHz.
Yes, except that the fraction of transistors switching in the two at any given moment is vastly different: in the P4 it will be reasonably high, in memory chips, it will be vanishingly low. Thus your analysis is inaccurate at best and potentially misleading at worst.
Think of the following empirical observations: a modern processor cannot run without a heatsink without going into thermal failure. The specifications for power dissipation run between 50 and 100 W. Normal die temperature is closing in on 100 C. Now, how about for a modern memory chip? Dissipations are in the hundreds of milliwatts. Sure, you might have 10 or 20 of them, but that's it, creating an order of magnitude difference between processor power dissipation and memory chip power dissipation in normal use. Think about it: if this weren't the case, then memory banks would *require* fans for normal (not overclocked) operation just as processors do.
Multiple times while reviewing the Efficion architecture the article's author suggests that the tradeoff of additional storage required for Transmeta's code-morphing approach will easily balance out the power savings from making a simpler CPU. This belies a deep misunderstanding of power consumption in digital systems, as readily evidences by the fact that modern non-Transmeta processers dissipate multiple tens of Watts of power (often nearly 100W) and a full complement of memory (4G, in modern machines) dissipates a few Watts at most.
Also in the article, the author suggests that processors spend most of their time wating on loads, and then argues that since the code-morphing approach means more instruction fetches, the Efficion processor will be spending disproportionatly more time on loads. Then, after this assertion, he admits that he does not know *where* the translated Efficion code is held. Might it be in one-cycle-accessible L1 cache? That point is conveniently sidestepped. He does not understand under what circumstances the profiling takes place, although he regurgitates the sales pitch nicely. He argues that transistors hold the translated code (trying to argue against the transistors-for-software tradeoff) but then does not realize that transistors in memory do not equate transistors in logic (neither in power, as they are not cycled as frequently, nor in speed characteristics).
In all, I find the author's treatment of the Transmeta architecture sophomoric, and, after finding that section lacking, I left the rest of the article unread. Your mileage may vary.
Yes, exactly. This is the only follow-on poster which figured that out: while most might think the series of questions I described to be an invasion of privacy, the fact of the matter was the interrogators couldn't care less (well, nearly so) about my answers, it was the way in which I answered, the way I responded to their questions that mattered. No notes were taken, no recording was made (to my knowledge). I'm sure that they forgot all about my unremarkable-to-them interview during the next one. And that's just fine by me. Much better than filling out some form which becomes part of a permanent paper or electronic record.
Agreed. The best security I've ever seen is at the Tel Aviv airport. Before passengers can check in, they are subject to an intensive interrogation by two security guards (think military intelligence officers rather than rent-a-cops) who are trained in asking rapid-fire, pointed questions. I was in Jerusalem attending a scientific conference, and had a letter of introduction with me from the organizers (remember this is *leaving* Israel). The set of questions went something like this (my answers are left as an exercise to the reader) --
... and so forth. It was the third degree.
Why were you in Israel?
Where was the conference?
Did you present at the conference?
Do you have the conference program?
Please give it to me.
What did you present?
Is your name in the program?
Please give us your presentation.
Yes, now.
(I spoke for perhaps 2 minutes and was then interrupted.)
Were you invited to the conference?
Why would they invite you?
Are you some kind of expert in this field?
Where did you stay?
How did you know where to stay?
Who arranged your hotel for you?
Where did you get your taxi this morning?
How did you know you could find one there?
They are smart enough to have about as many interrogation stands as there are check-in counters, so there's plenty of bandwidth. Once you pass through security, you walk 10 meters to the counter and talk to an airline employee to check in, rather than the other way around, and the path from interrogation to check-in is controlled. The idea behind the interrogation is to make sure you are legitimate, and have a solid, believable story (I do not for a moment think they cared about my research into an arcane corner of neurobiology). They are checking the person rather than his belongings (although they do this as well). That's security.
American airports don't have security, they have inconveniences to placate the general population into thinking they are secure. I'd much rather the Americans implemented a system like the Israelis have.
Let me make something a little clearer -- if you take two cars with equal off-the-line performance, one with electric motors and one with an internal combustion engine, the traditionally-engined car will likely have a higher top speed. Thus my speculative assertion that an electric motored vehicle will have an apparently low top speed because we expect a certain kind of performance based on our experience with internal combustion engines, and extrapolate from the anomalously good low-end performance of electric motors.
Electric motors, unlike internal combustion engines, can generate maximum torque at zero RPM. This translates directly into excellent off-line acceleration, impressive 0-60 times, and all-round high performance. Around-town driving in an electric car should give the impression that there's a much bigger engine due to our preconceptions based on internal combusion (thus, the comment "only 200 hp"). Top speed, however, will seem stunted in comparison to that available from an internal combustion engine because they generally produce increasing torque with increasing RPM (especially below 2000 RPM).