Or, the slightly different scenario from Rainbows End:
We can take off what's left of your arm and fit you with a prosthesis. You can have a completely natural appearance, good strength, good weight/balance, or good sensation -- just not all from the same unit, at least not yet.
Or, we can stabilize and numb what's left, and wait for progress on regeneration. We can already do quite a bit, but it'll be a year or two before we can really heal you; until then, you'll be lugging around a large, inconvenient dead weight. But if we take off what's left, you'll have to wait a lot longer, and the process itself will be a lot more expensive.
Sunlight is hot -- that is, if you're directly exposed to the Sun, you'll pick up a lot of heat. But reflective parasols are dead easy to make and deploy, and don't even have to mass much (think aluminized mylar).
And once you're in the shade, you're radiating against a 4K background (unless you're in low orbit around something warmer, against which you can also shade yourself). Cold, cold, cold.
Yes, conduction and convection in standard Earthbound conditions carries heat more quickly. But if you're trying to maintain a temperature below local ambient, this just serves to dump heat in more quickly. In space, you can almost always radiate into a background that's colder than your working temperature.
Isn't it funny how, while manufacturers outrace Moore's Law in their efforts to deliver the most impressive "gaming experience", Jackson continues to produce engaging and entertaining titles running on pre-1980 hardware?
Instead of even more tediously refuting a long post point by point, let me just ask this: what does a thousand cubic kilometers of salt water in the middle of the Pacific have to do with a California desert neighborhood full of people who want to water their lawns, golf on natural greens, and wash their cars weekly?
Engineers have been considering approaches like this for ages. It's good to see it being put into practice.
As best I can tell, one of the biggest hurdles is local waste-handling laws. When we had a local drought a few years ago, we were saving wash water to put on our outdoor plants -- but that was a violation of local policy, because cooties from your dirty clothes might get into The Environment, contaminating all the bird and squirrel and cat and dog waste that's already there.
I'm sure Google's treatment policies have satisfied the local authorities, and if they're proceeding with the project, I'm sure they've found a way that's cost-effective.
Yes, there are still plenty of companies outsourcing to RentACoder/Elance/etc. Not every company has yet figured out why this is a bad idea; some, given their management structure, never will. (Burn rates are visible throughout the hierarchy, but the reasons that projects are falling behind never are.)
On the other hand, at least in our area (Raleigh/Durham, NC, USA), demand for Java and C# developers still outstrips supply, and there are plenty of opportunities at $40+/hr. If you've got 12 years of experience doing actual development, and if there are at least a few people you've impressed or bamboozled enough to use as references, you can do much better than that. If you've spent 12 years doing Visual Basic, or if you've spent half that time unemployed, I can imagine that things would be tougher.
I'm not sure I want them to invent that. I can certainly see what would appear to be the utility of it, but most of the more insidious aspects of the dementiae come from degeneration in other areas (esp prefrontal, nigrostriatal, or broader (nonhippocampal) temporal areas). The loss of memory, while upsetting, really only serves as the harbinger (for some like Alzheimer's and frontotemporal dementia, anyway; for others like Parkinson's it comes after some of the other effects have already set in).
I can't help feeling, though, that the interface between short- and long-term memory is really where I happen. If that can be tapped, it can be preserved, restored, and eventually augmented.
Once you consider that, you have to start wondering whether the ability to surgically (or even intravenously, once nanobots advance a bit further) inject memories into others might have more risks than benefits...
There's plenty of opportunity for intentional or unintentional evildoing. But you really don't need an invasive (in the surgical sense) interface for that.
Why, then, it might mean that the user isn't willing to put in the time, thought and preparation necessary for an inherently complex task.
Or it might mean that the user is trying to do something simple (registration? hello?), and the implementation is brittle, obfuscated, and/or inefficient.
If your user has to read instructions in order to register for an event, YOU fail, not your user.
Good point. If an incandescent lasts one year, but a CFL lasts 20, an incandescent user does generate less mercury emissions by sitting in the dark for those remaining 19 years.
(For the sarcasm-impaired, the power plant is still yielding only a quarter of the mercury, because you're using 20 times as many incandescent bulbs to get the same duration of light.)
...TFA, that is. I can't believe I just wasted five minutes of my life looking for something of value in it.
As far as I can tell, TFA thinks that Google should only spend money on things that have a guaranteed short-term return. Because, I suppose, we don't have nearly enough companies already doing exactly that.
If a company is willing to step up and fund this kind of blue-sky research, I'm more than happy to use their products, let them suck on my personal information, and even go long on their stock. In fact, the moment I see announcements from Google saying "yeah, blue-sky research is a bad idea" will be the moment I sell it all.
If the CFL is burning a quarter of the power, emissions drop by 75%. You still come out ahead using CFLs, even if you smash every one of them open when you're done with it.
Night light deficient in short wavelengths preserves your circadian rhythm better than cooler, bluer light.
Of course, as many others have posted, it's easy enough to get a warm LED now. I'm hoping someone will come out with a dimmable LED that shifts toward a warmer color balance at lower levels -- that particular incandescent "feature" is a good match for my usage patterns, where I use dimmer light when it's later and I don't want to wake myself up. The difference, of course, is that the LED wouldn't have to drop to sub-1% efficiency at low levels.
You've got to protect all your exposed skin. Conductive fabric or foil should do quite nicely. (Has to be reflective, though; if it's just resistive/dissipative, then you're wrapped in flaming fabric.
If you want us to believe that this thing is "acting as a heat pump" (actually the opposite), start by defining the heat source and heat sink.
If it's the moral equivalent of black-body radiation, say so, even though that makes it boring.
As it stands, TFA seems to imply that the thing cools itself below the temperature of its environment by ejecting energy as light, which I'm pretty sure violates at least one law of thermodynamics. (Yes, I know Brin proposed the same idea in Sundiver, and says that a couple of Nobel laureates couldn't find anything wrong with it, but I didn't buy it then, and I'm still not buying it now.)
To me, it looks like another classic pathological-science result -- only discernible at levels close to various noise thresholds, and not backed by a reasonable theory. But I'm a layman, so what do I know?
"I really hate these new 1200-baud modems. 300 baud is just the right speed for me to follow along, read, and think about what I'm reading. At 1200, I'm always having to control-S to pause the stream, and when there are a few short lines, I can lose my place in the text."
Eventually, e-ink displays will be just as dynamic as today's tablets, maybe more so. Heck, eventually, paper will be that dynamic.
If there's a mismatch between the content being displayed and our cognitive needs, fix the content. "Translating it down through a lower-Zone protocol" shouldn't be necessary.
IANAL, so I have no idea how likely this is, but -- is it possible that he's seen sealed testimony or other privileged information that could be damaging to Google, and would otherwise not be directly accessible to Microsoft?
Then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates suspended the bomber development in 2009, citing out-of-control cost and technical ambition.
Soon thereafter, current Secretary Leon Panetta gave the relevant committee members a few good, hard slaps, and they all woke up, shuddered, and went back to shoveling money into the bottomless maw.
Granted, the drop in supply was more abrupt than the restoration of supply, so one would expect prices to follow the same curve.
It may be too much to hope that this leads to more geographic diversity in manufacturing, but I hope it's at least produced some lasting acceleration toward solid-state storage.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, the slightly different scenario from Rainbows End:
We can take off what's left of your arm and fit you with a prosthesis. You can have a completely natural appearance, good strength, good weight/balance, or good sensation -- just not all from the same unit, at least not yet.
Or, we can stabilize and numb what's left, and wait for progress on regeneration. We can already do quite a bit, but it'll be a year or two before we can really heal you; until then, you'll be lugging around a large, inconvenient dead weight. But if we take off what's left, you'll have to wait a lot longer, and the process itself will be a lot more expensive.
Perhaps the key is to have 30 or 40 000 amputees with a health-care plan that isn't dedicated to maximizing profits.
/ducks and runs
Space is cold.
Sunlight is hot -- that is, if you're directly exposed to the Sun, you'll pick up a lot of heat. But reflective parasols are dead easy to make and deploy, and don't even have to mass much (think aluminized mylar).
And once you're in the shade, you're radiating against a 4K background (unless you're in low orbit around something warmer, against which you can also shade yourself). Cold, cold, cold.
Yes, conduction and convection in standard Earthbound conditions carries heat more quickly. But if you're trying to maintain a temperature below local ambient, this just serves to dump heat in more quickly. In space, you can almost always radiate into a background that's colder than your working temperature.
Isn't it funny how, while manufacturers outrace Moore's Law in their efforts to deliver the most impressive "gaming experience", Jackson continues to produce engaging and entertaining titles running on pre-1980 hardware?
Instead of even more tediously refuting a long post point by point, let me just ask this: what does a thousand cubic kilometers of salt water in the middle of the Pacific have to do with a California desert neighborhood full of people who want to water their lawns, golf on natural greens, and wash their cars weekly?
Engineers have been considering approaches like this for ages. It's good to see it being put into practice.
As best I can tell, one of the biggest hurdles is local waste-handling laws. When we had a local drought a few years ago, we were saving wash water to put on our outdoor plants -- but that was a violation of local policy, because cooties from your dirty clothes might get into The Environment, contaminating all the bird and squirrel and cat and dog waste that's already there.
I'm sure Google's treatment policies have satisfied the local authorities, and if they're proceeding with the project, I'm sure they've found a way that's cost-effective.
Yes, there are still plenty of companies outsourcing to RentACoder/Elance/etc. Not every company has yet figured out why this is a bad idea; some, given their management structure, never will. (Burn rates are visible throughout the hierarchy, but the reasons that projects are falling behind never are.)
On the other hand, at least in our area (Raleigh/Durham, NC, USA), demand for Java and C# developers still outstrips supply, and there are plenty of opportunities at $40+/hr. If you've got 12 years of experience doing actual development, and if there are at least a few people you've impressed or bamboozled enough to use as references, you can do much better than that. If you've spent 12 years doing Visual Basic, or if you've spent half that time unemployed, I can imagine that things would be tougher.
I'm not sure I want them to invent that. I can certainly see what would appear to be the utility of it, but most of the more insidious aspects of the dementiae come from degeneration in other areas (esp prefrontal, nigrostriatal, or broader (nonhippocampal) temporal areas). The loss of memory, while upsetting, really only serves as the harbinger (for some like Alzheimer's and frontotemporal dementia, anyway; for others like Parkinson's it comes after some of the other effects have already set in).
I can't help feeling, though, that the interface between short- and long-term memory is really where I happen. If that can be tapped, it can be preserved, restored, and eventually augmented.
Once you consider that, you have to start wondering whether the ability to surgically (or even intravenously, once nanobots advance a bit further) inject memories into others might have more risks than benefits...
There's plenty of opportunity for intentional or unintentional evildoing. But you really don't need an invasive (in the surgical sense) interface for that.
...but I'm waiting for the real memory prosthetic, the one that integrates with my hippocampus.
I've probably got another thirty or forty years before it becomes a serious issue, but I'd like to think I'll have that option when I need it.
Why, then, it might mean that the user isn't willing to put in the time, thought and preparation necessary for an inherently complex task.
Or it might mean that the user is trying to do something simple (registration? hello?), and the implementation is brittle, obfuscated, and/or inefficient.
If your user has to read instructions in order to register for an event, YOU fail, not your user.
Oh, goody! A neutronium handset!
Good news: it's smaller than your iPhone.
Bad news: it weighs 50000 tons.
...pick any zero.
The data rate is 100mb/sec -- that's 100 millibits per second.
The transmitter is a large particle accelerator.
The receiver is a cave full of money.
Good point. If an incandescent lasts one year, but a CFL lasts 20, an incandescent user does generate less mercury emissions by sitting in the dark for those remaining 19 years.
(For the sarcasm-impaired, the power plant is still yielding only a quarter of the mercury, because you're using 20 times as many incandescent bulbs to get the same duration of light.)
...TFA, that is. I can't believe I just wasted five minutes of my life looking for something of value in it.
As far as I can tell, TFA thinks that Google should only spend money on things that have a guaranteed short-term return. Because, I suppose, we don't have nearly enough companies already doing exactly that.
If a company is willing to step up and fund this kind of blue-sky research, I'm more than happy to use their products, let them suck on my personal information, and even go long on their stock. In fact, the moment I see announcements from Google saying "yeah, blue-sky research is a bad idea" will be the moment I sell it all.
...into line with the rest of the EU. Just restrict their citizens' ability to find information.
If the CFL is burning a quarter of the power, emissions drop by 75%. You still come out ahead using CFLs, even if you smash every one of them open when you're done with it.
LED, of course, is still better.
Night light deficient in short wavelengths preserves your circadian rhythm better than cooler, bluer light.
Of course, as many others have posted, it's easy enough to get a warm LED now. I'm hoping someone will come out with a dimmable LED that shifts toward a warmer color balance at lower levels -- that particular incandescent "feature" is a good match for my usage patterns, where I use dimmer light when it's later and I don't want to wake myself up. The difference, of course, is that the LED wouldn't have to drop to sub-1% efficiency at low levels.
You've got to protect all your exposed skin. Conductive fabric or foil should do quite nicely. (Has to be reflective, though; if it's just resistive/dissipative, then you're wrapped in flaming fabric.
Everybody knows that you can't get that perfect warmth without tubes.
If you want us to believe that this thing is "acting as a heat pump" (actually the opposite), start by defining the heat source and heat sink.
If it's the moral equivalent of black-body radiation, say so, even though that makes it boring.
As it stands, TFA seems to imply that the thing cools itself below the temperature of its environment by ejecting energy as light, which I'm pretty sure violates at least one law of thermodynamics. (Yes, I know Brin proposed the same idea in Sundiver, and says that a couple of Nobel laureates couldn't find anything wrong with it, but I didn't buy it then, and I'm still not buying it now.)
To me, it looks like another classic pathological-science result -- only discernible at levels close to various noise thresholds, and not backed by a reasonable theory. But I'm a layman, so what do I know?
...only it went like this:
"I really hate these new 1200-baud modems. 300 baud is just the right speed for me to follow along, read, and think about what I'm reading. At 1200, I'm always having to control-S to pause the stream, and when there are a few short lines, I can lose my place in the text."
Eventually, e-ink displays will be just as dynamic as today's tablets, maybe more so. Heck, eventually, paper will be that dynamic.
If there's a mismatch between the content being displayed and our cognitive needs, fix the content. "Translating it down through a lower-Zone protocol" shouldn't be necessary.
IANAL, so I have no idea how likely this is, but -- is it possible that he's seen sealed testimony or other privileged information that could be damaging to Google, and would otherwise not be directly accessible to Microsoft?
FTFA:
Then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates suspended the bomber development in 2009, citing out-of-control cost and technical ambition.
Soon thereafter, current Secretary Leon Panetta gave the relevant committee members a few good, hard slaps, and they all woke up, shuddered, and went back to shoveling money into the bottomless maw.
Granted, the drop in supply was more abrupt than the restoration of supply, so one would expect prices to follow the same curve.
It may be too much to hope that this leads to more geographic diversity in manufacturing, but I hope it's at least produced some lasting acceleration toward solid-state storage.
"We're ready to have another kid, and we've almost finished the mixtape."