I turn on my phone's GPS to use an on-line mapping tool only rarely, such as when I'm visiting an unfamiliar city. Otherwise, I check a mapping service beforehand, memorize any key specifics, and off we go!
The upside: I'm always looking at the road and can avoid the idiots who aren't.
Ah, no. A stable oscillator can be easily constructed that fully resists changes in input (power supply) voltage. Your $5 quartz watch has one. From that perspective I really only see a difference being one of scale: this is a first only because it has been done on an atomic level.
And now that I happened to use the word "atomic", that makes me question: what's the difference between this and the cesium oscillator in an atomic clock?
I read the linked article (which is a summary of the real report). It's not my field.
How is what they describe anything other than just a stable oscillator? It consumes energy, since to run it requires regular (although perhaps not periodic?) pulses of light.
How is this different from a macroscopic tuned circuit that also resists changes in driving force, and oscillates at a stable frequency? Because it's made with a handful of atoms instead of gazoober electrons streaming around a circuit? I'm (not intentionally) being snarky -- I'm curious because by the article the physicists are peeing all over themselves in excitement, so I'm guessing they think there's something to this that I don't see.
So the supposition is that kilns have been found with pots inside, we can demonstrate that the pots have been left undisturbed since the start of their last firing many thousands of years ago so you can judge the orientation of the earth's field at the time of cooling, and, moreover, we know the kilns haven't been moved either?
Color me skeptical.
Note that the article talks about intensity not orientation. Intensity, I understand. Orientation seems implausible with this method.
Multiple samples from independent sources and locations help mitigate those concerns, along with a slowly-varying time course of the field strength.
What manufacturing circumstances would change the strength of magnetization for ferrous inclusions in cooling pottery that would be present before, say, 0 AD to pick a convenient, arbitrary and approximately relevant threshold?
Hmm... How are you going to determine field orientation at time of cooling below the Curie temperature for pottery? Wouldn't that require knowing the physical orientation of the item when it was being cooled after firing? Am I missing something, like there's a universal point-to-the-east orientation that all pottery is placed in when cooling?
I can see making a good guess for geological structures, but pottery?
The subtitle of the article makes it pretty clear that the handheld market is not what is being targeted here:
It might be an ideal form of energy storage for solar and wind power.
It's intended for fixed-location installations where physical volume isn't such a concern, so energy density, while important, doesn't matter as much. The same niche is currently occupied by the nickel-iron battery that was recently mentioned in another/. article that I can't put my typing fingers on right at the moment. Same issues there: high reliability and lifetime, but (comparatively) poor energy density suggests power-smoothing for solar or wind would be an ideal application.
Here's the thing, quick and simple: Uber is not known for it's warm feelings toward its employees/contractors (depending on which side of the law you sit on). Driving a four-wheeled vehicle on the ground is simple enough that you can do it while seriously impaired without too much risk. Not so with something flying through the air. Pilots are not the same as the semi-employable edge of society that Uber is famous for employing/contracting (yes, I'm being intentionally inflammatory here).
Anyone, but anyone, can drive a car. Not everyone has the situational awareness to fly you through the air, and the vast majority of Uber drivers I've had would not pass even a low-bar flight test. How are they going to surmount the barrier that getting a pilot's license requires? Are they going to attempt to establish a new class of licence in the eyes of the FAA? Good luck with that. Engineering is one thing. Fighting government in 50 states plus the feds, now that's something entirely different. Finding talented people to pilot these things for bottom-of-the-bucket wages, well, that's crazy impossible.
Let's say it together: "Wireless Access Point." There, I knew you could do it. A router is not the same thing, although many wireless access points are also routers, not all are, and not all routers have wireless features!
The soft helmets are a cool idea. But when they're unzipped, as you can see in the many photos with the helmets at that pose, there's a lot of stress at the zipper. That's going to be a failure point, just like it is on your luggage. I'm surprised that there isn't a better solution for that.
That said, it took me all of 10 seconds to see that, and the folks at Boeing aren't idiots, so I hope they have tested the hinging of their zippers!
Emphatically YES! Smarts in one narrow field doesn't guarantee smarts in every field: John Podesta is a Smart Guy, but he was stupid enough to fall for a phishing attack.
Yeah, the lesson I took from that is pretty simple and clear: DO NOT READ EMAIL AT 4 AM WHEN YOU ARE NOWHERE NEAR IN CHARGE OF YOUR FULL FACULTIES. Not sure why Podesta hadn't already figured that one out.
Let's understand the REAL issue here; the PATENT prevented everyone else from implementing a safety.
(Hyperbolic emphasis removed.)
I presume you mean "safety feature." In that case, you need to also understand that the fellow was using Apple's products and functionality, so their electing to implement or not implement the feature and thus blocking anyone else from developing the same has no bearing. You might also want to look at other instances where one company has patented some feature or product and that did not block other companies from producing highly similar features or products based on alternate implementations. There are many, many instances and examples of such cases. At the same time, we don't know that Apple, electing to not implement the patent, had not been approached to license the IP by manufacturers who wanted to implement the feature on their hardware. The argument you are proposing is that having a patent irrevocably blocks any development along a given line of inquiry, and that assumption is not exactly correct. Rather not, in fact.
Apple is being sued in this case, we might readily presume, because they have deeper pockets than anyone else, certainly deeper than the driver who so unfortunately caused the accident by his negligence to the task at hand of keeping his attention to the road. I suspect the suit will not succeed, and hope that the family can be brought some solace by owning all future wages ever earned by the liable driver.
Whether the amount the company is charging is an accurate reflection of their costs, or whether they are able to make a profit at it are irrelevant considerations. Whether the business model is a potentially successful one is not a legal question. And the simple counter-argument is that many, many, many businesses offer below-cost services in order to seed growth, especially early on in their existence. Even mature businesses offer so-called loss-leader specials that are intended to attract customers, even if they are not strictly money-making in an of themselves.
Whether the $1 final cost to the customer is sustainable by VidAngel is irrelevant: they could change their prices tomorrow, and for all we know, already have a price increase path plotted for the future.
Agreed. The only instance I can think of where a major UI change was definitively for the better was when GIMP tossed that horrible multi-window idiocy for the unified window presentation. That was a clear win (and one that users were clamouring for extensively). Other than that, though, it's all been for-the-worse. The basic menu is a great structure, but what makes it super-duper is having a help system that allows you to search for functionality without having to resort to Google.
you need to measure all mammals or a decent cross section.
Did you read the scientific article? They measured a large number of species, but limited their study to primates and carnivores, as it says in the title of the study:
Postcopulatory sexual selection influences baculum evolution in primates and carnivores
within the scientific article they give the details as to how many:
A supertree phylogeny of 5020 extant mammals was used to reconstruct the ancestral states of baculum presence across the mammalian order.
That sounds like a decent cross-section. Five thousand species.
Secondly, I am not sure how they came to their monogamy theory.
Did you read the scientific article? It's pretty well explained there. They correlated the mating strategy of each species with baculum length. The homo erectus link was done by the Guardian article reporter, though.
Primates in polygamous mating systems were found to have significantly longer bacula than those in other mating systems (n = 65, p = 0.032).
and later
Two more phylogenetic t-tests showed that primates in polygamous mating systems and seasonally breeding primates had significantly longer bacula than primates in other mating systems and those without a seasonal breeding pattern, highlighting the importance of postcopulatory sexual selection as a driver of bacular evolution.
chimpanzees do have a baculum, so the correlation is simply not there between longer intercourse and existence of a baculum.
For an otherwise cogent and reasoned posting, you kind of lost it there. Correlation is not causation, or in this case, the correlation may not be perfect since you have identified an exception. Or, perhaps, the correlation is indeed graduated such that the larger the baculum, the longer the intromission (as just a wild-assed guess). Correlation does not need to be 100% in order to observe a valid link.
Indeed, if you read the article's abstract (despite the broken link in the summary), you'd find that the authors are EXACTLY correlating baculum length with intromission duration (emphasis added):
The extreme morphological variability of the baculum across mammals is thought to be the result of sexual selection (particularly, high levels of postcopulatory selection). However, the evolutionary trajectory of the mammalian baculum is little studied and evidence for the adaptive function of the baculum has so far been elusive. Here, we use Markov chain Monte Carlo methods implemented in a Bayesian phylogenetic framework to reconstruct baculum evolution across the mammalian class and investigate the rate of baculum length evolution within the primate order. We then test the effects of testes mass (postcopulatory sexual selection), polygamy, seasonal breeding and intromission duration on the baculum in primates and carnivores. The ancestral mammal did not have a baculum, but both ancestral primates and carnivores did. No relationship was found between testes mass and baculum length in either primates or carnivores. Intromission duration correlated with baculum presence over the course of primate evolution, and prolonged intromission predicts significantly longer bacula in extant primates and carnivores. Both polygamous and seasonal breeding systems predict significantly longer bacula in primates. These results suggest the baculum plays an important role in facilitating reproductive strategies in populations with high levels of postcopulatory sexual selection.
And in case the terminology used here seems odd, "predicts" in this context means they have fitted a model (that's the Markov chain, Bayesian framework stuff) that uses various parameters to understand underlying structure in the noisy data, and that if you vary a given parameter, like baculum length, the model will predict a values for another parameter, say intromission duration, with good correspondence to the actual data, suggesting the model has captured a link of some sort. The key to understanding this is that the data will of necessity be noisy (all biological data are noisy), and the model, if it's a good one, will reject that noise and capture the underlying structure, thus there will likely be deviations from perfection.
For me, educated as an engineer and trained as a biologist, it was a shock to discover that a model in biology was considered to be very good fit when it was only 30% off the mark, whereas in engineering a model was called good when it was only 1% off the mark. Engineering is a far more refined discipline than biology.
A wise person to whom I'm distantly related argued for in front of a small european parliment for that government to put its effort into efficiency thus: energy conservation provides temporary relief that disappears once economic conditions improve, whereas advances in energy efficiency have indefinite payoff.
Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like they just stacked two LCDs and bumped the brightness of the light source. Mind you, that's a very good idea. The new underneath layer probably only needs single R/G/B group resolution in order to achieve the claimed specs, making it somewhat easier to manufacture, although alignment is still going to be important to get right, as will appropriately close bonding of the two planes to control leakage from one luminance cell (for want of a better word) to the neighboring RGB cells in the color layer.
A highly-motivated enthusiast might be able to get close to the same results by merging two existing IPS monitors and bumping the light source brightness.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. If your parents were Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty, then the correct orthography would be:
I love my parents Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.
But because you added the comma, it becomes a list of four people:
I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.
Personally, I prefer the Oxford comma, as it helps further disambiguate such instances.
That was beautiful: subtle and witty.
Ed is the standard. Edlin is, of course, based on ed.
https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/...
"Ed is for those who can remember what they are working on." - patl.
I turn on my phone's GPS to use an on-line mapping tool only rarely, such as when I'm visiting an unfamiliar city. Otherwise, I check a mapping service beforehand, memorize any key specifics, and off we go!
The upside: I'm always looking at the road and can avoid the idiots who aren't.
Ah, no. A stable oscillator can be easily constructed that fully resists changes in input (power supply) voltage. Your $5 quartz watch has one. From that perspective I really only see a difference being one of scale: this is a first only because it has been done on an atomic level.
And now that I happened to use the word "atomic", that makes me question: what's the difference between this and the cesium oscillator in an atomic clock?
I read the linked article (which is a summary of the real report). It's not my field.
How is what they describe anything other than just a stable oscillator? It consumes energy, since to run it requires regular (although perhaps not periodic?) pulses of light.
How is this different from a macroscopic tuned circuit that also resists changes in driving force, and oscillates at a stable frequency? Because it's made with a handful of atoms instead of gazoober electrons streaming around a circuit? I'm (not intentionally) being snarky -- I'm curious because by the article the physicists are peeing all over themselves in excitement, so I'm guessing they think there's something to this that I don't see.
So the supposition is that kilns have been found with pots inside, we can demonstrate that the pots have been left undisturbed since the start of their last firing many thousands of years ago so you can judge the orientation of the earth's field at the time of cooling, and, moreover, we know the kilns haven't been moved either?
Color me skeptical.
Note that the article talks about intensity not orientation. Intensity, I understand. Orientation seems implausible with this method.
And you know that the pottery wasn't moved from its original orientation during cooling because .... ?
Multiple samples from independent sources and locations help mitigate those concerns, along with a slowly-varying time course of the field strength.
What manufacturing circumstances would change the strength of magnetization for ferrous inclusions in cooling pottery that would be present before, say, 0 AD to pick a convenient, arbitrary and approximately relevant threshold?
Hmm ... How are you going to determine field orientation at time of cooling below the Curie temperature for pottery? Wouldn't that require knowing the physical orientation of the item when it was being cooled after firing? Am I missing something, like there's a universal point-to-the-east orientation that all pottery is placed in when cooling?
I can see making a good guess for geological structures, but pottery?
The subtitle of the article makes it pretty clear that the handheld market is not what is being targeted here:
It might be an ideal form of energy storage for solar and wind power.
It's intended for fixed-location installations where physical volume isn't such a concern, so energy density, while important, doesn't matter as much. The same niche is currently occupied by the nickel-iron battery that was recently mentioned in another /. article that I can't put my typing fingers on right at the moment. Same issues there: high reliability and lifetime, but (comparatively) poor energy density suggests power-smoothing for solar or wind would be an ideal application.
Here's the thing, quick and simple: Uber is not known for it's warm feelings toward its employees/contractors (depending on which side of the law you sit on). Driving a four-wheeled vehicle on the ground is simple enough that you can do it while seriously impaired without too much risk. Not so with something flying through the air. Pilots are not the same as the semi-employable edge of society that Uber is famous for employing/contracting (yes, I'm being intentionally inflammatory here).
Anyone, but anyone, can drive a car. Not everyone has the situational awareness to fly you through the air, and the vast majority of Uber drivers I've had would not pass even a low-bar flight test. How are they going to surmount the barrier that getting a pilot's license requires? Are they going to attempt to establish a new class of licence in the eyes of the FAA? Good luck with that. Engineering is one thing. Fighting government in 50 states plus the feds, now that's something entirely different. Finding talented people to pilot these things for bottom-of-the-bucket wages, well, that's crazy impossible.
Let's say it together: "Wireless Access Point." There, I knew you could do it. A router is not the same thing, although many wireless access points are also routers, not all are, and not all routers have wireless features!
Yeah, and the damage potentially happens far faster than your hundred-millisecond scale reaction time.
We've been creating mice with human immune systems for probably decades now. Heck, you can even order them from commercial suppliers:
https://www.jax.org/jax-mice-a...
The soft helmets are a cool idea. But when they're unzipped, as you can see in the many photos with the helmets at that pose, there's a lot of stress at the zipper. That's going to be a failure point, just like it is on your luggage. I'm surprised that there isn't a better solution for that.
That said, it took me all of 10 seconds to see that, and the folks at Boeing aren't idiots, so I hope they have tested the hinging of their zippers!
Who spells it with an N?
Emphatically YES! Smarts in one narrow field doesn't guarantee smarts in every field: John Podesta is a Smart Guy, but he was stupid enough to fall for a phishing attack.
Yeah, the lesson I took from that is pretty simple and clear: DO NOT READ EMAIL AT 4 AM WHEN YOU ARE NOWHERE NEAR IN CHARGE OF YOUR FULL FACULTIES. Not sure why Podesta hadn't already figured that one out.
Let's understand the REAL issue here; the PATENT prevented everyone else from implementing a safety.
(Hyperbolic emphasis removed.)
I presume you mean "safety feature." In that case, you need to also understand that the fellow was using Apple's products and functionality, so their electing to implement or not implement the feature and thus blocking anyone else from developing the same has no bearing. You might also want to look at other instances where one company has patented some feature or product and that did not block other companies from producing highly similar features or products based on alternate implementations. There are many, many instances and examples of such cases. At the same time, we don't know that Apple, electing to not implement the patent, had not been approached to license the IP by manufacturers who wanted to implement the feature on their hardware. The argument you are proposing is that having a patent irrevocably blocks any development along a given line of inquiry, and that assumption is not exactly correct. Rather not, in fact.
Apple is being sued in this case, we might readily presume, because they have deeper pockets than anyone else, certainly deeper than the driver who so unfortunately caused the accident by his negligence to the task at hand of keeping his attention to the road. I suspect the suit will not succeed, and hope that the family can be brought some solace by owning all future wages ever earned by the liable driver.
Whether the amount the company is charging is an accurate reflection of their costs, or whether they are able to make a profit at it are irrelevant considerations. Whether the business model is a potentially successful one is not a legal question. And the simple counter-argument is that many, many, many businesses offer below-cost services in order to seed growth, especially early on in their existence. Even mature businesses offer so-called loss-leader specials that are intended to attract customers, even if they are not strictly money-making in an of themselves.
Whether the $1 final cost to the customer is sustainable by VidAngel is irrelevant: they could change their prices tomorrow, and for all we know, already have a price increase path plotted for the future.
Agreed. The only instance I can think of where a major UI change was definitively for the better was when GIMP tossed that horrible multi-window idiocy for the unified window presentation. That was a clear win (and one that users were clamouring for extensively). Other than that, though, it's all been for-the-worse. The basic menu is a great structure, but what makes it super-duper is having a help system that allows you to search for functionality without having to resort to Google.
you need to measure all mammals or a decent cross section.
Did you read the scientific article? They measured a large number of species, but limited their study to primates and carnivores, as it says in the title of the study:
Postcopulatory sexual selection influences baculum evolution in primates and carnivores
within the scientific article they give the details as to how many:
A supertree phylogeny of 5020 extant mammals was used to reconstruct the ancestral states of baculum presence across the mammalian order.
That sounds like a decent cross-section. Five thousand species.
Secondly, I am not sure how they came to their monogamy theory.
Did you read the scientific article? It's pretty well explained there. They correlated the mating strategy of each species with baculum length. The homo erectus link was done by the Guardian article reporter, though.
Primates in polygamous mating systems were found to have significantly longer bacula than those in other mating systems (n = 65, p = 0.032).
and later
Two more phylogenetic t-tests showed that primates in polygamous mating systems and seasonally breeding primates had significantly longer bacula than primates in other mating systems and those without a seasonal breeding pattern, highlighting the importance of postcopulatory sexual selection as a driver of bacular evolution.
chimpanzees do have a baculum, so the correlation is simply not there between longer intercourse and existence of a baculum.
For an otherwise cogent and reasoned posting, you kind of lost it there. Correlation is not causation, or in this case, the correlation may not be perfect since you have identified an exception. Or, perhaps, the correlation is indeed graduated such that the larger the baculum, the longer the intromission (as just a wild-assed guess). Correlation does not need to be 100% in order to observe a valid link.
Indeed, if you read the article's abstract (despite the broken link in the summary), you'd find that the authors are EXACTLY correlating baculum length with intromission duration (emphasis added):
The extreme morphological variability of the baculum across mammals is thought to be the result of sexual selection (particularly, high levels of postcopulatory selection). However, the evolutionary trajectory of the mammalian baculum is little studied and evidence for the adaptive function of the baculum has so far been elusive. Here, we use Markov chain Monte Carlo methods implemented in a Bayesian phylogenetic framework to reconstruct baculum evolution across the mammalian class and investigate the rate of baculum length evolution within the primate order. We then test the effects of testes mass (postcopulatory sexual selection), polygamy, seasonal breeding and intromission duration on the baculum in primates and carnivores. The ancestral mammal did not have a baculum, but both ancestral primates and carnivores did. No relationship was found between testes mass and baculum length in either primates or carnivores. Intromission duration correlated with baculum presence over the course of primate evolution, and prolonged intromission predicts significantly longer bacula in extant primates and carnivores. Both polygamous and seasonal breeding systems predict significantly longer bacula in primates. These results suggest the baculum plays an important role in facilitating reproductive strategies in populations with high levels of postcopulatory sexual selection.
And in case the terminology used here seems odd, "predicts" in this context means they have fitted a model (that's the Markov chain, Bayesian framework stuff) that uses various parameters to understand underlying structure in the noisy data, and that if you vary a given parameter, like baculum length, the model will predict a values for another parameter, say intromission duration, with good correspondence to the actual data, suggesting the model has captured a link of some sort. The key to understanding this is that the data will of necessity be noisy (all biological data are noisy), and the model, if it's a good one, will reject that noise and capture the underlying structure, thus there will likely be deviations from perfection.
For me, educated as an engineer and trained as a biologist, it was a shock to discover that a model in biology was considered to be very good fit when it was only 30% off the mark, whereas in engineering a model was called good when it was only 1% off the mark. Engineering is a far more refined discipline than biology.
... use resources more efficiently ...
A wise person to whom I'm distantly related argued for in front of a small european parliment for that government to put its effort into efficiency thus: energy conservation provides temporary relief that disappears once economic conditions improve, whereas advances in energy efficiency have indefinite payoff.
Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like they just stacked two LCDs and bumped the brightness of the light source. Mind you, that's a very good idea. The new underneath layer probably only needs single R/G/B group resolution in order to achieve the claimed specs, making it somewhat easier to manufacture, although alignment is still going to be important to get right, as will appropriately close bonding of the two planes to control leakage from one luminance cell (for want of a better word) to the neighboring RGB cells in the color layer.
A highly-motivated enthusiast might be able to get close to the same results by merging two existing IPS monitors and bumping the light source brightness.