Sure. But there isn't a single human genotype, phenotype, or culture that will let its members thrive at zero partial pressure of oxygen. No matter who you are, you can't hold your breath indefinitely. (At least not without external support.)
Now, I'm pretty sure that susceptibility to VR sickness isn't as predetermined and immutable as oxygen metabolism, or even color-vision defects. I have no idea where it falls on the spectrum, but I'm skeptical of anyone who says "you just need to practice and get over it."
As I understand it, one of the big problems with VR sickness is latency. If the display refresh and the tracking-camera frame rate are both 60 Hz, there's no way to get less than 33ms of lag as the display tracks your movement -- and that's assuming zero time to process tracking info and render the scene.
I'd hope that they're using at least 120 Hz refresh on the display, and something much faster for the tracking camera, but I don't know what the state of the art is like on the tracking end.
I seem to remember many years ago some research with non-progressive field rendering -- I don't remember if it dropped to low-res/faster-updates during fast motion, whether it blurred everything but central vision, or something else. In any event, I think it required highly non-standard display hardware. This was probably in the CRT days. I'd think it would work well to drop back to (say) 480p resolution during fast slews, increasing the frame rate 4x, but I don't know how accessible the necessary hardware/software would be.
Or perhaps it's like color-blindness, where no amount of "training" will let you reliably distinguish red and green if you weren't born with the appropriate retinal architecture.
Or like holding your breath, where you can improve to a degree with training, but if you try to push beyond a certain limit, you're just giving yourself irreversible brain damage.
I've always assumed that VR sickness is a handicap I'll just have to deal with. I suppose it's possible that I could overcome it with training, but training that repeatedly takes me up to or over the brink of nausea seems really, really unappealing.
[...] they could very precisely see how the men's gazes never quite reached the lingerie brand name in the ad's corner.
Not to mention how the gaze patterns were profoundly different for 5-10% of the men, who reliably tracked to male backsides instead of female backsides or breasts. We're getting closer to recognizing Nothing Wrong With That as a society, but there are still a lot of men who'd prefer not to be outed by their sidebar ads.
Eye-tracking is a big honking window into the subject's subconscious mind. I will be extremely reticent about releasing that data into an information system.
It's creepy enough seeing the amount Google knows about me already just from searches and cookies. I sure as hell don't want advertisers to get fine-grained feedback about which ads attract my attention, never mind cranking up the distracting peripheral-vision movement to force my gaze.
And don't even get me started on the evil tricks you can play by keeping things just outside the user's central vision, no matter how hard you try to look directly at them...
I think that's more commonly attributed to Ray Bradbury. I don't actually consider Bradbury a science-fiction writer, but mine is apparently a minority view.
I doubt that they're going full nonimaging optics in the carport, although I could well be wrong. But that's mainly to make tracking easier (or unnecessary); practically, there just isn't any way you're going to get more than one sunlight-square-meter of power out of a square meter of roof, period.
As car concepts go, this one's a bit sillier than most. But once photovoltaics get cheap and robust enough to be used as a car finish, why the hell not?
The amount of detail we humans can comfortably dissolve at that distance stops at somewhere around 200dpi and the difference between 110dpi and 200dpi isn't much any more.
Given these hard biological facts, going anywhere over 110dpi for screens you look on longer than a few seconds at the time is mostly luxury and posing.
You aren't considering hyperacuity. Remember, there's more to vision than a mosaic of photosensors. There's a monstrous amount of real-time image-processing going on in your eye and your brain. Some of that processing is able to extract data far below naively-calculated "physical limits" of resolution or signal/noise.
No, I'm faulting them for leading everyone to believe that the light was tied to camera activity with a hardware interlock that couldn't be defeated in software.
Speaking as someone who's been a Mac owner continuously since 1985, I have to say that you aren't casting the user community in a very flattering light.
I see nothing in the article to indicate that later models are any more secure. This particular software may not work with them, but I have no confidence that they can't be hacked the same way.
Hey, post links to some of the tutorials you've written and published. Then all the people who were inspired by them to go into a career in EE will post replies, and we'll all know who's really competent!
Or you can continue taking anonymous potshots. Your call.
I don't get the creationism/climate-change-denial perspectives, either. But I can't minimize his contributions as a popularizer of electronics. He doesn't have to be a Tesla or Maxwell on the forefront of research, and he doesn't have to have the media popularity of a Sagan or a DeGrasse Tyson. He's done a world of good as an educator.
Well, as a socially isolated nerd in the 1970s, I never got much help from local people even when I shopped at Radio Shack. Those Mims project books, though, bootstrapped me to a point where I could get into Don Lancaster's books. It was enough to let me design and build a high-res video display system for my TRS-80, fifty-odd packages of SS and MS TTL.
I still have all the Mims project books, though, and I'm hanging on to them.
I was quite some time behind you, but the libraries I was borrowing from were even further behind. I learned about the nobles from one of Asimov's excellent non-fiction popular chemistry books, and from a 1950s edition of Britannica. I was thrilled when I found out that compounds actually existed.
Anything will combine with anything -- it just won't stay combined. You can rip as many electrons off (say) neon as you like, throw it in with another species, and watch them stick together long enough for neon to nab the electrons it wants -- but you won't get a compound that persists. Similarly, you can force xenon and anything together, but only a few pairings will produce compounds stable at even cryogenic temperatures.
Noble gas compounds are, indeed, old news. No need to change names or categorizations, though. After all, we still refer to human members of "the nobility", no matter how ignobly they may behave.
You are confused. You can buy xenoncompounds off the shelf, but certainly not argon compounds. Nobody has yet made argon difluoride, and I'm not sure current theory supports its existence.
The first synthesis of an argon compound was reported in 2000, so the first part of the headline is misleading -- this discovery itself doesn't "demote" argon. But it's still interesting news.
Well, if you're going to beat swords into plowshares, it would be great to do it before the swords are wielded in anger -- and even more efficient to do it before you spend all the time to forge, temper and sharpen them.
The technologies BD developed to make these robots work certainly have non-military uses. I'm not sure how they apply to data-gathering and marketing, though. Maybe some parts of Google really are interested in advancing technology for its own sake...?
There's room for argument over how expensive it would be to buy more backhaul capacity or reduce subscription fees, but there's little doubt that buying utility commissions and legislators is a lot cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. But there isn't a single human genotype, phenotype, or culture that will let its members thrive at zero partial pressure of oxygen. No matter who you are, you can't hold your breath indefinitely. (At least not without external support.)
Now, I'm pretty sure that susceptibility to VR sickness isn't as predetermined and immutable as oxygen metabolism, or even color-vision defects. I have no idea where it falls on the spectrum, but I'm skeptical of anyone who says "you just need to practice and get over it."
I think that means we agree...?
As I understand it, one of the big problems with VR sickness is latency. If the display refresh and the tracking-camera frame rate are both 60 Hz, there's no way to get less than 33ms of lag as the display tracks your movement -- and that's assuming zero time to process tracking info and render the scene.
I'd hope that they're using at least 120 Hz refresh on the display, and something much faster for the tracking camera, but I don't know what the state of the art is like on the tracking end.
I seem to remember many years ago some research with non-progressive field rendering -- I don't remember if it dropped to low-res/faster-updates during fast motion, whether it blurred everything but central vision, or something else. In any event, I think it required highly non-standard display hardware. This was probably in the CRT days. I'd think it would work well to drop back to (say) 480p resolution during fast slews, increasing the frame rate 4x, but I don't know how accessible the necessary hardware/software would be.
Or perhaps it's like color-blindness, where no amount of "training" will let you reliably distinguish red and green if you weren't born with the appropriate retinal architecture.
Or like holding your breath, where you can improve to a degree with training, but if you try to push beyond a certain limit, you're just giving yourself irreversible brain damage.
I've always assumed that VR sickness is a handicap I'll just have to deal with. I suppose it's possible that I could overcome it with training, but training that repeatedly takes me up to or over the brink of nausea seems really, really unappealing.
[...] they could very precisely see how the men's gazes never quite reached the lingerie brand name in the ad's corner.
Not to mention how the gaze patterns were profoundly different for 5-10% of the men, who reliably tracked to male backsides instead of female backsides or breasts. We're getting closer to recognizing Nothing Wrong With That as a society, but there are still a lot of men who'd prefer not to be outed by their sidebar ads.
Eye-tracking is a big honking window into the subject's subconscious mind. I will be extremely reticent about releasing that data into an information system.
It's creepy enough seeing the amount Google knows about me already just from searches and cookies. I sure as hell don't want advertisers to get fine-grained feedback about which ads attract my attention, never mind cranking up the distracting peripheral-vision movement to force my gaze.
And don't even get me started on the evil tricks you can play by keeping things just outside the user's central vision, no matter how hard you try to look directly at them...
Nah, it'll be drouds. Why filter your pleasure through the limited bandwidth and range of your physical senses?
I think that's more commonly attributed to Ray Bradbury. I don't actually consider Bradbury a science-fiction writer, but mine is apparently a minority view.
I doubt that they're going full nonimaging optics in the carport, although I could well be wrong. But that's mainly to make tracking easier (or unnecessary); practically, there just isn't any way you're going to get more than one sunlight-square-meter of power out of a square meter of roof, period.
As car concepts go, this one's a bit sillier than most. But once photovoltaics get cheap and robust enough to be used as a car finish, why the hell not?
I can see the headlines now:
Twelve Dead, Dozens Missing After Disgruntled Customer Tips Vending Machine
...as described in a summary so concise it lacks sense.
The amount of detail we humans can comfortably dissolve at that distance stops at somewhere around 200dpi and the difference between 110dpi and 200dpi isn't much any more.
Given these hard biological facts, going anywhere over 110dpi for screens you look on longer than a few seconds at the time is mostly luxury and posing.
You aren't considering hyperacuity. Remember, there's more to vision than a mosaic of photosensors. There's a monstrous amount of real-time image-processing going on in your eye and your brain. Some of that processing is able to extract data far below naively-calculated "physical limits" of resolution or signal/noise.
No, I'm faulting them for leading everyone to believe that the light was tied to camera activity with a hardware interlock that couldn't be defeated in software.
Speaking as someone who's been a Mac owner continuously since 1985, I have to say that you aren't casting the user community in a very flattering light.
I see nothing in the article to indicate that later models are any more secure. This particular software may not work with them, but I have no confidence that they can't be hacked the same way.
I was pretty convinced that I didn't have to put a post-it over my MacBook camera. Guess I'll go ahead and do it after all.
Yep. Looks like he's gotten out of all his exams. Win!
Well, it was one of the few you hadn't already gotten around to using.
Hey, post links to some of the tutorials you've written and published. Then all the people who were inspired by them to go into a career in EE will post replies, and we'll all know who's really competent!
Or you can continue taking anonymous potshots. Your call.
I don't get the creationism/climate-change-denial perspectives, either. But I can't minimize his contributions as a popularizer of electronics. He doesn't have to be a Tesla or Maxwell on the forefront of research, and he doesn't have to have the media popularity of a Sagan or a DeGrasse Tyson. He's done a world of good as an educator.
...if only for that first link. Really, REALLY cool stuff!
Well, as a socially isolated nerd in the 1970s, I never got much help from local people even when I shopped at Radio Shack. Those Mims project books, though, bootstrapped me to a point where I could get into Don Lancaster's books. It was enough to let me design and build a high-res video display system for my TRS-80, fifty-odd packages of SS and MS TTL.
I still have all the Mims project books, though, and I'm hanging on to them.
I was quite some time behind you, but the libraries I was borrowing from were even further behind. I learned about the nobles from one of Asimov's excellent non-fiction popular chemistry books, and from a 1950s edition of Britannica. I was thrilled when I found out that compounds actually existed.
Anything will combine with anything -- it just won't stay combined. You can rip as many electrons off (say) neon as you like, throw it in with another species, and watch them stick together long enough for neon to nab the electrons it wants -- but you won't get a compound that persists. Similarly, you can force xenon and anything together, but only a few pairings will produce compounds stable at even cryogenic temperatures.
Noble gas compounds are, indeed, old news. No need to change names or categorizations, though. After all, we still refer to human members of "the nobility", no matter how ignobly they may behave.
You are confused. You can buy xenoncompounds off the shelf, but certainly not argon compounds. Nobody has yet made argon difluoride, and I'm not sure current theory supports its existence.
The first synthesis of an argon compound was reported in 2000, so the first part of the headline is misleading -- this discovery itself doesn't "demote" argon. But it's still interesting news.
Well, if you're going to beat swords into plowshares, it would be great to do it before the swords are wielded in anger -- and even more efficient to do it before you spend all the time to forge, temper and sharpen them.
The technologies BD developed to make these robots work certainly have non-military uses. I'm not sure how they apply to data-gathering and marketing, though. Maybe some parts of Google really are interested in advancing technology for its own sake...?
Meanwhile, I'm hoping Google Fiber, FIOS, and other fast optical options scare more ISPs into action along both price and speed axes.
Why would they move along an axis that significantly reduces profits or increases costs, when they can continue to throw legal caltrops under the wheels of progress?
There's room for argument over how expensive it would be to buy more backhaul capacity or reduce subscription fees, but there's little doubt that buying utility commissions and legislators is a lot cheaper.