I'd guess the real step forward is workflow. The array can view twelve targets at once, with no dependencies (except they all have to be visible from the site). It can presumably shift from target to target pretty quickly, so I guess they'd sample many objects per telescope per night -- after all, transits happen with a timescale on the order of hours (possibly minutes in extreme cases), not seconds.
The big deal, though, seems like the relatively high-resolution brightness measurements (one part per thousand is pretty darn good), and long-term logging and correlation.
I hope someone more informed than me will chime in...
Yeah, I'd love to try this -- I'd be happy to spring for a Note 4 and the mount. But I'm one of the poor unfortunates who's highly susceptible to VR sickness. Not full-blown cookie-tossing, but twenty minutes in a CAVE or other immersive environment is enough to leave me feeling crappy for the rest of the day.
I'm hoping super-low latency, high frame rates and short persistence will produce something I can use without getting sick, but I don't think it's right around the corner. A shame, too; I've been wanting VR for decades.
Yeah, cancer sucks. I just lost a very good friend to it, way too young.
But facing cancer after 120+ years of healthy, happy life, instead of dying from heart disease or arthritis-enforced inactivity or dementia at 85 or 90? I'd sign up for that in the blink of an eye.
Actually, I'm surprised that the algorithm doesn't outperform spouses as well.
Do any of your friends tirelessly catalog, index, analyze and correlate every chuckle or offhand comment you make within their earshot? Do you continue to talk freely in front of them, knowing they're doing it? If so, they can probably outperform this algorithm.
The real fun will come from correlating the physiological signals coming in from fitness bands, eye-trackers, and eventually EEG pickups. Your soul will be laid barer than lunar regolith.
I'm with you on the printing press. Kosher food rules are too close to halal food rules, though. If I'd been writing it, the lone loser would've landed in a (pork) barbecue pit, or sprawled under the spilled contents of an overturned hot-dog cart.
Yeah. I'm less concerned (although still quite concerned) about them getting a "false impression". I'm much more concerned about them getting a true impression of things that are logically, ethically, or legally none of their business, and then taking actions based on those illogically, unethically or illegally-drawn conclusions.
I'm betting that with all the crap they're cramming onto the TV side of the bill we'll still come out well ahead. And that's without considering the "make me an offer to keep me from going over to [cough] DSL" negotiations.
Not that DSL is a serious competitor around here -- it seems to give about 1/5 the bandwidth for about 80% of the price -- but I don't have to let them know that I care about that.
The last straw for us was the $2.75 sports surcharge. The only sports broadcasts we've ever tuned in are on the local channels, and those only because they ran late and delayed what we were intending to watch, and we were waiting for them to end. Between that, $2.75 a month for broadcast TV (what?), various taxes and so forth -- we're just really tired of paying for stuff we don't use.
We'll see how the negotiations go. Maybe TW Business Class will start to make more sense. Or maybe it'll be bad enough to justify dropping back to 3Mbps DSL.
Do you do anything on the Internet besides stare slack-jawed at videos? If so, you'll still need to pay for Internet access, even if you're getting cable or dish TV. So saying "then $50/mo for some form of internet" seems a bit disingenuous.
As for me and my family, we'd be happy to pay $20/mo to a couple of places that provide programming we actually care to watch, rather than paying $100+/mo to TWC for an array of several hundred channels, of which we watch perhaps five, for an hour or two a day on average. In fact, we're getting ready to do exactly that. GOODBYE, bundled-and-unwanted garbage.
"The article [which was printed] was written by the evangelical author Eric Metaxas, and in it, he argued that scientists have determined that life is so improbable it must have been created."
"Krauss concluded [in a letter which was not printed] by writing that '[r]eligious arguments for the existence of God thinly veiled as scientific arguments do a disservice to both science and religion, and by allowing a Christian apologist to masquerade as a scientist [Wall Street Journal] did a disservice to its readers.'"
- "presbyopia" is far-sightedness, and if age related, is usually corrected by over the counter "readers" or "reading glasses"
Not exactly. Far-sightedness is hyperopia. Presbyopia refers specifically to the loss of "focal accommodation" with age; if you have otherwise normal vision, this usually manifests itself as loss of the ability to focus on close objects.
I've been strongly myopic from childhood. Now, in my early 50s, presbyopia means that without glasses I can only focus on things about six to ten inches away from my eyes, instead of things from two to ten inches away. With glasses, I can still see normally to infinity, but I need bifocals to cover both far and near ranges -- unless I hold the target up close and peer under my glasses.
If you start out with hyperopia (far-sightedness), and presbyopia sets in, you may not be able to focus at any distance -- your nearest focus distance may be beyond infinity.
There's at least one constellation "The Triangle*" which is smaller, or if you allow two-star constellations, "those two faint dots over there" is even smaller.
(*Yes, I stole that The Triangle from Terry Pratchett; it's the name of a Discworld constellation.)
It boggles my mind that astronomers picked this particular set of three stars, and no other, to call "The Triangle". There are plenty of sets of three not-particularly-colinear stars that deserve the title, from very large scales (the Summer Triangle) to much smaller scales (Orion's head).
Then again, the figures people see in the sky are mostly baffling to me. Give humans a random sensory stimulus, and we can't help but invent meaningful patterns in it.
...but, in terms of widely recognized asterism shape, Delphinus and Sagitta are both smaller. Sure, as the sky is officially divvied up and assigned to constellations, Crux gets the smallest area -- but those divisions seem about as respectable as gerrymandered congressional districts in the US.
Thunderbolt is more like USB to the user - it's a thing you use to connect untrusted devices to your system.
Thunderbolt is more like PCIe to the system -- it's a thing you use to connect trusted devices to your system. In fact, it is PCIe, along with DisplayPort.
The one mitigating factor is that, while there are Thunderbolt devices out there, users are less likely to find one lying in the company parking lot and decide "durr, let me plug this into my work computer and see what's on it". That seems to be a pretty effective delivery method for hostile USB devices.
I agree with the reply to a previous post -- this nit isn't worth picking. They didn't say "300 to 500 millivolts of power", which would have been unambiguously wrong. The summary said "boost 300 to 500 millivolts power to 3 to 5 volts", which is poor grammar, but not necessarily wrong -- if they'd said "300 to 500 millivolt power", it would have correctly described "power delivered at a voltage of 300 to 500 millivolts", which gets converted to "power delivered at a voltage of 3 to 5 volts" (and about one-tenth the current, minus any conversion loss).
I don't think this is nearly as bad as watts vs watt-hours, which does seem to engender harmful confusion.
Remember Shannon: a channel being used at its optimum capacity is statistically equivalent to a channel full of noise.
Why should this principle be limited to what we currently think of as "communication channels"? Maybe the optimal way to pervade the Universe is in a form that's indistinguishable from its substrate -- unless you know the key to correlate it.
If you're colonizing the Universe in a way that the natives can detect, you're wasting resources. Grown-up minds know better.
I can throw a rock through someone's window, climb into their house, get a bunch of their personal info, and publicize it. SUPERPOWER!
I can put a tap on their phone line at the demarc box, record everything from their landline until they notice the intrusion, and publish it all. SUPERPOWER!
I can dig through their garbage for carelessly-discarded confidential papers. Heck, I can just count their beer and wine bottles, and publicize that. SUPERPOWER!
Maybe not the lamest claim ever, but it'll do for today.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd guess the real step forward is workflow. The array can view twelve targets at once, with no dependencies (except they all have to be visible from the site). It can presumably shift from target to target pretty quickly, so I guess they'd sample many objects per telescope per night -- after all, transits happen with a timescale on the order of hours (possibly minutes in extreme cases), not seconds.
The big deal, though, seems like the relatively high-resolution brightness measurements (one part per thousand is pretty darn good), and long-term logging and correlation.
I hope someone more informed than me will chime in...
Yeah, I'd love to try this -- I'd be happy to spring for a Note 4 and the mount. But I'm one of the poor unfortunates who's highly susceptible to VR sickness. Not full-blown cookie-tossing, but twenty minutes in a CAVE or other immersive environment is enough to leave me feeling crappy for the rest of the day.
I'm hoping super-low latency, high frame rates and short persistence will produce something I can use without getting sick, but I don't think it's right around the corner. A shame, too; I've been wanting VR for decades.
Yeah, cancer sucks. I just lost a very good friend to it, way too young.
But facing cancer after 120+ years of healthy, happy life, instead of dying from heart disease or arthritis-enforced inactivity or dementia at 85 or 90? I'd sign up for that in the blink of an eye.
Actually, I'm surprised that the algorithm doesn't outperform spouses as well.
Do any of your friends tirelessly catalog, index, analyze and correlate every chuckle or offhand comment you make within their earshot? Do you continue to talk freely in front of them, knowing they're doing it? If so, they can probably outperform this algorithm.
The real fun will come from correlating the physiological signals coming in from fitness bands, eye-trackers, and eventually EEG pickups. Your soul will be laid barer than lunar regolith.
The anaerobes have written a letter about that new-fangled "photosynthesis" mutation.
What are you complaining about? For your laptop battery to last 200 miles, you only have to be averaging 50 mph.
I'm with you on the printing press. Kosher food rules are too close to halal food rules, though. If I'd been writing it, the lone loser would've landed in a (pork) barbecue pit, or sprawled under the spilled contents of an overturned hot-dog cart.
Yeah. I'm less concerned (although still quite concerned) about them getting a "false impression". I'm much more concerned about them getting a true impression of things that are logically, ethically, or legally none of their business, and then taking actions based on those illogically, unethically or illegally-drawn conclusions.
I'm betting that with all the crap they're cramming onto the TV side of the bill we'll still come out well ahead. And that's without considering the "make me an offer to keep me from going over to [cough] DSL" negotiations.
Not that DSL is a serious competitor around here -- it seems to give about 1/5 the bandwidth for about 80% of the price -- but I don't have to let them know that I care about that.
The last straw for us was the $2.75 sports surcharge. The only sports broadcasts we've ever tuned in are on the local channels, and those only because they ran late and delayed what we were intending to watch, and we were waiting for them to end. Between that, $2.75 a month for broadcast TV (what?), various taxes and so forth -- we're just really tired of paying for stuff we don't use.
We'll see how the negotiations go. Maybe TW Business Class will start to make more sense. Or maybe it'll be bad enough to justify dropping back to 3Mbps DSL.
Do you do anything on the Internet besides stare slack-jawed at videos? If so, you'll still need to pay for Internet access, even if you're getting cable or dish TV. So saying "then $50/mo for some form of internet" seems a bit disingenuous.
As for me and my family, we'd be happy to pay $20/mo to a couple of places that provide programming we actually care to watch, rather than paying $100+/mo to TWC for an array of several hundred channels, of which we watch perhaps five, for an hour or two a day on average. In fact, we're getting ready to do exactly that. GOODBYE, bundled-and-unwanted garbage.
"The article [which was printed] was written by the evangelical author Eric Metaxas, and in it, he argued that scientists have determined that life is so improbable it must have been created."
"Krauss concluded [in a letter which was not printed] by writing that '[r]eligious arguments for the existence of God thinly veiled as scientific arguments do a disservice to both science and religion, and by allowing a Christian apologist to masquerade as a scientist [Wall Street Journal] did a disservice to its readers.'"
Perhaps the problem is that too many people in this thread are trying to anthropomorphize Edsger Dijkstra.
- "presbyopia" is far-sightedness, and if age related, is usually corrected by over the counter "readers" or "reading glasses"
Not exactly. Far-sightedness is hyperopia. Presbyopia refers specifically to the loss of "focal accommodation" with age; if you have otherwise normal vision, this usually manifests itself as loss of the ability to focus on close objects.
I've been strongly myopic from childhood. Now, in my early 50s, presbyopia means that without glasses I can only focus on things about six to ten inches away from my eyes, instead of things from two to ten inches away. With glasses, I can still see normally to infinity, but I need bifocals to cover both far and near ranges -- unless I hold the target up close and peer under my glasses.
If you start out with hyperopia (far-sightedness), and presbyopia sets in, you may not be able to focus at any distance -- your nearest focus distance may be beyond infinity.
...so annoying that not even He can be bothered to try to get to the article hidden behind it?
There's at least one constellation "The Triangle*" which is smaller, or if you allow two-star constellations, "those two faint dots over there" is even smaller.
(*Yes, I stole that The Triangle from Terry Pratchett; it's the name of a Discworld constellation.)
You may have stolen it from Pratchett, but it already exists in astronomical canon.
It boggles my mind that astronomers picked this particular set of three stars, and no other, to call "The Triangle". There are plenty of sets of three not-particularly-colinear stars that deserve the title, from very large scales (the Summer Triangle) to much smaller scales (Orion's head).
Then again, the figures people see in the sky are mostly baffling to me. Give humans a random sensory stimulus, and we can't help but invent meaningful patterns in it.
...but, in terms of widely recognized asterism shape, Delphinus and Sagitta are both smaller. Sure, as the sky is officially divvied up and assigned to constellations, Crux gets the smallest area -- but those divisions seem about as respectable as gerrymandered congressional districts in the US.
The F-35 is already a resounding success at its primary mission. I refer, of course, to pork distribution.
You just need a thiotimoline target in your detector.
You're old enough to recognize Kodak's long-term dominance, but you don't recognize a reference to the "Kodak moment" marketing tagline?
Thunderbolt is more like USB to the user - it's a thing you use to connect untrusted devices to your system.
Thunderbolt is more like PCIe to the system -- it's a thing you use to connect trusted devices to your system. In fact, it is PCIe, along with DisplayPort.
The one mitigating factor is that, while there are Thunderbolt devices out there, users are less likely to find one lying in the company parking lot and decide "durr, let me plug this into my work computer and see what's on it". That seems to be a pretty effective delivery method for hostile USB devices.
This is the first I'd heard of this potential risk from melatonin supplementation. I'd like to see this information more widely discussed.
I agree with the reply to a previous post -- this nit isn't worth picking. They didn't say "300 to 500 millivolts of power", which would have been unambiguously wrong. The summary said "boost 300 to 500 millivolts power to 3 to 5 volts", which is poor grammar, but not necessarily wrong -- if they'd said "300 to 500 millivolt power", it would have correctly described "power delivered at a voltage of 300 to 500 millivolts", which gets converted to "power delivered at a voltage of 3 to 5 volts" (and about one-tenth the current, minus any conversion loss).
I don't think this is nearly as bad as watts vs watt-hours, which does seem to engender harmful confusion.
Remember Shannon: a channel being used at its optimum capacity is statistically equivalent to a channel full of noise.
Why should this principle be limited to what we currently think of as "communication channels"? Maybe the optimal way to pervade the Universe is in a form that's indistinguishable from its substrate -- unless you know the key to correlate it.
If you're colonizing the Universe in a way that the natives can detect, you're wasting resources. Grown-up minds know better.
I can throw a rock through someone's window, climb into their house, get a bunch of their personal info, and publicize it. SUPERPOWER!
I can put a tap on their phone line at the demarc box, record everything from their landline until they notice the intrusion, and publish it all. SUPERPOWER!
I can dig through their garbage for carelessly-discarded confidential papers. Heck, I can just count their beer and wine bottles, and publicize that. SUPERPOWER!
Maybe not the lamest claim ever, but it'll do for today.
What do you suppose they use for shipping sulfuric acid?