Let them do something like, oh, dispense only one-tenth as much for each prescription, then make the patient dilute it prior to use, like the US insurers that force people to get double-dose pills and split them.
Oh, that's right -- since diluting homeopathic remedies makes them stronger, they'd be putting everyone at risk of overdose. Never mind, then.
You actually can see very faintly in IR. If you wear visible-spectrum opaque, but IR-transparent glasses, you can maneuver through the environment just by its heat output. It's dark, but doable.
No, you can't.
You can see near-IR, the kind produced by TV remotes, very faintly -- although, if your source is bright enough to be easily perceptible, it can damage your eyes, just like staring into the sun.
Thermal IR is almost an order of magnitude longer in wavelength. It can't affect your retina's sensory cells, except by cooking them. Even if it could, your lens can't focus it. At all. And even if it could, you'd be focusing the IR into a medium that's already radiating at the same frequencies. It would be like trying to project an image onto the surface of a light bulb that's already turned on.
It is possible to make (or evolve) thermal IR imagers that operate at ambient temperatures, but they're nothing like the human eye. Ask your local pit viper.
But the only "heat output" that your eyes can see is incandescence -- from light bulb filaments, or red-hot heating elements, or glowing coals. If you can maneuver through your environment by seeing its heat output, you'll want to exit that environment as quickly as possible, being very careful not to touch anything while you do so.
This provides a way to perform a computation of infinite length within a finite interval (from your point of view). Of course, you have to count on the (external) universe sticking around and powering your machine forever, which doesn't fit with our current theories. You also have to launch yourself into a black hole to take advantage of this. Most users aren't ready to make that much of a commitment to one platform.
I was a gung-ho CS student when this article came out, and we spent a LOT of time hashing it over. He specifically did not say that he had done this, and while I don't remember him making an outright denial, we concluded that he hadn't. After all, the C compilers of that day were still small enough to be understood by a single human, and comparing C code to the assembly code generated from it (or comparing that assembly code to generated machine instructions) was not very challenging.
Maybe the Jargon File entry is right, and he did implement it as a proof-of-concept, but it wasn't widely distributed. It was easy enough for an interested (and bored) undergrad to check out over a weekend, but hard enough that compiler distributions weren't routinely examined.
With today's optimizing compilers and layers upon layers of abstraction, though, it seems like there's more than enough room for plenty such exploits. Pham Nuwen can still have his backdoor into the localizers.
Silicon dioxide's bulk density is 2200 kg/m^3. Let's assume the density of this coating is comparable.
One square meter of silica, one meter deep, masses 2200 kg.
One millimeter deep, 2.2 kg.
One micron deep, 2.2 g.
One nanometer deep, 2.2 mg.
If you dispersed a square meter of this coating uniformly into the air, you'd need to dilute it into a column 22 meters deep to meet the OSHA limit. But how are you going to disperse that much all at once? A crack or a scratch would likely disperse much less than a square millimeter worth of the stuff, and that wouldn't be enough to pollute half a shot glass full of air. (1 m^3 = 1000 L; 22000 L / 1000000 = 22 ml)
More to the point, that volume is about 1/20 of a typical breath. In other words, you'd need to scrape the hell out of the surface in order to get one lungful of air above the OSHA limit -- and that limit is for chronic exposure (8 hours/day), not a one-shot acute exposure.
A disco ball. Shine a light on a disco ball, and project those cool reflections onto a surface more than a few light-seconds away. You'll see that the spots move much faster than light.
Still no FTL movement or information transfer. Still no violation of GR or causality. Just another nice, attention-grabbing headline.
Implement a dictionary class. You'll be given a file containing the set of words in the dictionary. You must implement one method 'boolean isWord(String word)'.
Good solution: reads the dictionary, stores the words in a HashSet/TreeSet or ArrayList, checks to see if word is present in isWord (must use binary search for ArrayList).
So if someone codes up a trie, instead of assuming a HashSet is "good enough" for your purposes, do you score them higher or lower?
If you would be so kind as to go soak your head in a large reservoir of liquid nitrogen for a few hours, you'll have your opportunity. Your head will be radiating light/heat at a blackbody temperature around 77K, which is (a) invisible and (b) cold. For the "dry water" part, well, frozen tissue at 77K really isn't very "wet" at all, except in the chemical sense.
I want to be able to consume as many extra calories as I like, and then radiate the excess as visible light, with radiant area, spectrum and direction under my conscious control.
Or, at least, I'd like to be able to metabolize my food and store excess energy as electric charge, easily transferred to whatever devices are handy.
Webcams, consumer cams and the like can detect near-IR, in the 700-800nm range. Thermal IR is in the 2500-10000nm range, and consumer cams are totally blind to it.
The only way a cheap webcam can see thermal IR is if the object they're looking at is just below red-hot.
The linked item is not an imager, it's a glorified thermometer. I wish you could get a thermal imager for cheap -- last I checked, they still started in the $3-4K range.
Yes, I saw this at a CHI conference. I think it would've been '92 or '93. SF was there first, again; Spider Robinson had someone "dancing the drums" in Night of Power, 1985.
I don't know whether to be happy or angry that Clarke set the precedent by not trying to claim ownership of the notion of geosync communication satellites. Ideas want to be free, but I'd love to see Vinge take Microsoft out behind the woodshed for this.
Um, I'm already practically there. I can get a KWh out of the wall for 5p (10c), charge up an iPhone from dead to full for a quarter (5KWh battery capacity there) and can get as many cheap chargers as I like.
Um, I think you're off by at least three orders of magnitude there.
On my list of concerns right now, body-heat chargers are pretty far down.
Well, as long as you spend your whole life no more than a few hours away from a power outlet, that makes sense.
I'm still not buying the body-heat solution, though. Let's get something that runs off blood sugar instead.
My local kitchen store sells a digital scale with 1-gram resolution and 5kg (!) capacity for US$30, and several places will sell you a digital scale with 0.01g resolution and 200g capacity for around the same price. (I was very surprised and pleased to find this out.)
Holy cats! Those chemical kits ("Core Chemicals Bundle" and "Supplemental Chemicals Kit") are incredible. You'd spend many, many times more trying to order them piecemeal from one of the few dealers who'll still sell to individuals. And a lot of the other prices make me feel like I'm looking at a science catalog from my adolescence, back when science kit was at least borderline affordable.
Yes, this. Our lab is pushing the limits of conventional MRI (as opposed to the nanoscale "MRI" that's been in the news lately), maximizing resolution in a volume just large enough to hold a rodent brain. We can get down to 20 microns routinely, and 10 microns with heroic efforts; there's a pretty hard limit at 5 microns. There are good reasons to believe that we'll never be able to generate an MRI volume that resolves individual synapses and axons. For that, you need optical histology.
CT can in principle provide very high spatial resolution, especially if you start with a beam from a synchrotron. But the contrast in soft tissue is just about worthless -- you can get spectacular images of bone microstructure, but brains are pretty much uniform gray blobs.
So, yes, it's quite necessary. But if it makes you squeamish, we won't make you watch.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think any contemporary pharmaceuticals are "based on" dilution to the point of nonexistence.
Let them do something like, oh, dispense only one-tenth as much for each prescription, then make the patient dilute it prior to use, like the US insurers that force people to get double-dose pills and split them.
Oh, that's right -- since diluting homeopathic remedies makes them stronger, they'd be putting everyone at risk of overdose. Never mind, then.
Thirdhand is the best I can find:
Summary with offline citations
I was surprised, too.
You actually can see very faintly in IR. If you wear visible-spectrum opaque, but IR-transparent glasses, you can maneuver through the environment just by its heat output. It's dark, but doable.
No, you can't.
You can see near-IR, the kind produced by TV remotes, very faintly -- although, if your source is bright enough to be easily perceptible, it can damage your eyes, just like staring into the sun.
Thermal IR is almost an order of magnitude longer in wavelength. It can't affect your retina's sensory cells, except by cooking them. Even if it could, your lens can't focus it. At all. And even if it could, you'd be focusing the IR into a medium that's already radiating at the same frequencies. It would be like trying to project an image onto the surface of a light bulb that's already turned on.
It is possible to make (or evolve) thermal IR imagers that operate at ambient temperatures, but they're nothing like the human eye. Ask your local pit viper.
But the only "heat output" that your eyes can see is incandescence -- from light bulb filaments, or red-hot heating elements, or glowing coals. If you can maneuver through your environment by seeing its heat output, you'll want to exit that environment as quickly as possible, being very careful not to touch anything while you do so.
This provides a way to perform a computation of infinite length within a finite interval (from your point of view). Of course, you have to count on the (external) universe sticking around and powering your machine forever, which doesn't fit with our current theories. You also have to launch yourself into a black hole to take advantage of this. Most users aren't ready to make that much of a commitment to one platform.
I was a gung-ho CS student when this article came out, and we spent a LOT of time hashing it over. He specifically did not say that he had done this, and while I don't remember him making an outright denial, we concluded that he hadn't. After all, the C compilers of that day were still small enough to be understood by a single human, and comparing C code to the assembly code generated from it (or comparing that assembly code to generated machine instructions) was not very challenging.
Maybe the Jargon File entry is right, and he did implement it as a proof-of-concept, but it wasn't widely distributed. It was easy enough for an interested (and bored) undergrad to check out over a weekend, but hard enough that compiler distributions weren't routinely examined.
With today's optimizing compilers and layers upon layers of abstraction, though, it seems like there's more than enough room for plenty such exploits. Pham Nuwen can still have his backdoor into the localizers.
Silicon dioxide's bulk density is 2200 kg/m^3. Let's assume the density of this coating is comparable.
One square meter of silica, one meter deep, masses 2200 kg.
One millimeter deep, 2.2 kg.
One micron deep, 2.2 g.
One nanometer deep, 2.2 mg.
If you dispersed a square meter of this coating uniformly into the air, you'd need to dilute it into a column 22 meters deep to meet the OSHA limit. But how are you going to disperse that much all at once? A crack or a scratch would likely disperse much less than a square millimeter worth of the stuff, and that wouldn't be enough to pollute half a shot glass full of air. (1 m^3 = 1000 L; 22000 L / 1000000 = 22 ml)
More to the point, that volume is about 1/20 of a typical breath. In other words, you'd need to scrape the hell out of the surface in order to get one lungful of air above the OSHA limit -- and that limit is for chronic exposure (8 hours/day), not a one-shot acute exposure.
It's just a darn shame that the end couldn't have been thirty or forty years further out.
</Garrett_Morris>
A disco ball. Shine a light on a disco ball, and project those cool reflections onto a surface more than a few light-seconds away. You'll see that the spots move much faster than light.
Still no FTL movement or information transfer. Still no violation of GR or causality. Just another nice, attention-grabbing headline.
Implement a dictionary class. You'll be given a file containing the set of words in the dictionary. You must implement one method 'boolean isWord(String word)'.
Good solution: reads the dictionary, stores the words in a HashSet/TreeSet or ArrayList, checks to see if word is present in isWord (must use binary search for ArrayList).
So if someone codes up a trie, instead of assuming a HashSet is "good enough" for your purposes, do you score them higher or lower?
Well played. In fact, once you've got the charge in the battery, I'd argue that it is "easily transferred to whatever devices are handy".
It would be nice to have a more direct metabolic conversion, though, preferably one that doesn't generate quite so much sweat, fatigue, and boredom.
If you would be so kind as to go soak your head in a large reservoir of liquid nitrogen for a few hours, you'll have your opportunity. Your head will be radiating light/heat at a blackbody temperature around 77K, which is (a) invisible and (b) cold. For the "dry water" part, well, frozen tissue at 77K really isn't very "wet" at all, except in the chemical sense.
I want to be able to consume as many extra calories as I like, and then radiate the excess as visible light, with radiant area, spectrum and direction under my conscious control.
Or, at least, I'd like to be able to metabolize my food and store excess energy as electric charge, easily transferred to whatever devices are handy.
Webcams, consumer cams and the like can detect near-IR, in the 700-800nm range. Thermal IR is in the 2500-10000nm range, and consumer cams are totally blind to it.
The only way a cheap webcam can see thermal IR is if the object they're looking at is just below red-hot.
The linked item is not an imager, it's a glorified thermometer. I wish you could get a thermal imager for cheap -- last I checked, they still started in the $3-4K range.
Yes, I saw this at a CHI conference. I think it would've been '92 or '93. SF was there first, again; Spider Robinson had someone "dancing the drums" in Night of Power, 1985.
...from Rainbows End, circa 2006.
I don't know whether to be happy or angry that Clarke set the precedent by not trying to claim ownership of the notion of geosync communication satellites. Ideas want to be free, but I'd love to see Vinge take Microsoft out behind the woodshed for this.
...that spoiled their tree-of-life crop, apparently.
Um, I'm already practically there. I can get a KWh out of the wall for 5p (10c), charge up an iPhone from dead to full for a quarter (5KWh battery capacity there) and can get as many cheap chargers as I like.
Um, I think you're off by at least three orders of magnitude there.
On my list of concerns right now, body-heat chargers are pretty far down.
Well, as long as you spend your whole life no more than a few hours away from a power outlet, that makes sense.
I'm still not buying the body-heat solution, though. Let's get something that runs off blood sugar instead.
My local kitchen store sells a digital scale with 1-gram resolution and 5kg (!) capacity for US$30, and several places will sell you a digital scale with 0.01g resolution and 200g capacity for around the same price. (I was very surprised and pleased to find this out.)
Holy cats! Those chemical kits ("Core Chemicals Bundle" and "Supplemental Chemicals Kit") are incredible. You'd spend many, many times more trying to order them piecemeal from one of the few dealers who'll still sell to individuals. And a lot of the other prices make me feel like I'm looking at a science catalog from my adolescence, back when science kit was at least borderline affordable.
Thanks for the link!
"...that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.".
Yes, this. Our lab is pushing the limits of conventional MRI (as opposed to the nanoscale "MRI" that's been in the news lately), maximizing resolution in a volume just large enough to hold a rodent brain. We can get down to 20 microns routinely, and 10 microns with heroic efforts; there's a pretty hard limit at 5 microns. There are good reasons to believe that we'll never be able to generate an MRI volume that resolves individual synapses and axons. For that, you need optical histology.
CT can in principle provide very high spatial resolution, especially if you start with a beam from a synchrotron. But the contrast in soft tissue is just about worthless -- you can get spectacular images of bone microstructure, but brains are pretty much uniform gray blobs.
So, yes, it's quite necessary. But if it makes you squeamish, we won't make you watch.
...or perhaps a megacore?