Right. I would have made this comment if it hadn't already been here. I'd also like to mention the CHARA project, located at Mount Wilson Observatory. This *is* the equivalent of the VLA, but in the optical domain.
I'm no astronomer, but I saw it when I went up there for a tour, and it looks very cool. Really fascinating that, in spite of it's close proximity to the 'light pollution' of Los Angeles, Mount Wilson is still doing Real Astronomy.
They have. California, at least. If you take the 10 east from Los Angeles, you'll see literally thousands of windmills through some of the mountain passes. I think my electric bills usually indicate that one or two percent of my power is coming from wind power.
The problem with both wind and tidal is you can't just toss them up anywhere- you need somewhere with steady, fairly strong winds, or unusually large tides. I don't know much about tidal, but I doubt florida is going to have much luck with wind power- it's dead flat, and the best places for wind power tend to be mountain passes, which 'funnel' in the wind.
And what's gonna happen when you widen the roads? More people are going to move out further from the city, so more people are on the road. It's a self-defeating solution.
Then there are lots of places where there's simply nowhere to build another road. Example- I live in the Conejo Valley northwest of LA. The access from LA is via the 101 freeway. That's the *only* access- the only alternatives are winding two lane roads through the Santa Monica Mountains. There's simply nowhere else to put a road of any appreciable size through there. You say to widen the freeway? Where? There's development right up to the freeway on both sides.
With an attitude like that, I think it's your tenure that should be revoked. I had this guy for an intro geology class my freshman year; he's an incredibly smart and incredibly cool guy.
The sense I got from his interview on NPR was that this was just an 'interesting idea' he was throwing out, not something he was planning to try six months from now. Also, if having one far-fetched idea was grounds for revoking tenure, I suspect we'd have very few professors left.
Well, I looked at the animations. Neat idea, I think. But what happens if that timing belt goes? It looks to me like the thing would smash itself to pieces.
What would happen if a timing belt gave out on a 'normal' cylinder-based engine? I'm not too knowledgable about engines, but it doesn't seem like it would be quite as catastrophic.
ExpressPCB- Has an offer that will let you make 3 3.8"X2.5" 2-sided boards for about $60, as well as a more general off that's not too much more pricey. They have their own board design software you have to use, which is a bit primitive but adequate for hobbyist use, though it's a problem if you were to ever want someone else to make your boards.
Advanced Circuits- Has a deal to make 2-sided boards for $33/ea, min qty 3. These boards have a solder mask, which is required for dealing with fine-pitch SMT parts, and makes your board all pretty and professional-looking;-)
Sierra Proto Express- Has a similar deal to Advanced Circuits, but also has a good price to make four-layer boards.
Some general notes- I've used the first two, and it worked alright, but I haven't tried the third one. The latter two require Gerber and Excellon data- this is the standard format for PCB plotting and drilling information information. Essentially any board layout software should be able to generate them. However, it is not trivial to figure out what precisely to send the board manufacturer- you can't just blindly trust your layout software to do the Right Thing. I keep meaning to write a little tutorial on my hard-won knowledge about this, but I've never gotten around to it:-/
I found a terminal velocity calculator here. I don't feel like hunting up exact numbers, but it looks like a bowling ball isn't gonna manage much more than a few hundred miles an hour. Meteors start out going much faster than that.
This "experiment" has no bearing the behavior of meteors. Sounds like these guys should go review basic physics before they propose dangerous experiments.
See? Anytime someone lies, this program will tell you so!
Re:Artificial Intelligence
on
Tetris AI System
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The AI was limited and I think a more accurate project for AI would be to actually host an AI service that offered network-accessed primitives for supreme entropy to contribute to a work of data; such centralized AI system would allow gamers as well as scientific computing to benefit from a verry good entropy pool of numbers as well as improve the funfactor of gaming.
Y'know, I read through that several times, and I still don't know what it says. I'm pretty sure the poster didn't either.
They've been doing that for a while. Seismic exploration is a very common technique for oil drilling and the like. You induce vibrations using explosives or something like a pile driver, and listen to the echoes.
Also I think there have been studies done on the vibratory modes of the sun. Not quite the same thing, but related. Found a new word while googling about it- Helioseismology. Gonna have to remember that one:-)
Probably a lot of people. This is *chips*, not modules. A module has several chips on it- probably 8 or 16 (haven't looked at a DRAM module recently) 16*32MB=512MB, which is respectable.
One proposal I've heard for the origins of insect wings is as heat collectors. What with all that surface area and the network of veins going through them, insect wings would make good solar collectors. That is, up until the wings got too big, and the heat dissipated before it could get back to the insect's body. But a study showed that just about the time they got too big to work as solar collectors, they'd be big enough to help with gliding.
It's an interesting theory, but I doubt a similar course could apply to birds. Their wings are covered with feathers, which are mostly just dead skin, and probably wouldn't absorb heat well. Plus birds are warm-blooded, and would have less need for sunning themselves.
Depends on the vitamin. IIRC, there are two general categories of vitamins- Water-soluble, and fat-soluble. Water-soluble vitamins, which include vitamin C, are easily flushed out of the body, so excesses of those vitamins are generally not too harmful. Fat-soluble vitamins, such as Vitamin A, on the other hand, accumulate in fatty tissue, and *can* build up to dangerous concentrations.
Found some info on Vitamin A overdose here; there's also info on vitamin C there as well, but only to state that there are no known symptoms of Vitamin C overdose.
Theorem: All finite, abelian groups are isomorphic to a group of the form Z_n1 X Z_n2 X... X Z_ni for some n1,n2,... ni. Apologies for lousy formatting, as I don't think slashdot lets you do subscripts. X == direct product, Z_n == cyclic group of order n. Also apologies if I didn't get that quite right, as I don't have an Abstract Algebra text in front of me.
And if you don't know what what I just said means, then you shouldn't be commenting on the existence of 'important' theorems, should you?
My maternal grandfather was one Mr. Smith. My mother married Mr. Jones, so I'm a Jones. But my uncle had kids, and they are still Smiths. So I decended from a Smith, I'm a Jones, but there are still Smiths around.
This is an exact analogy for what you're complaining about. Starting from some ancestral ape, some of its decendants evolved into humans, while others remained apes.
The park service (or whoever it is that's in charge, I dunno) seems intent on supressing any little forest fire that comes along. Oh, we can't have fires, it'll hurt the trees, or it'll destroy homes, or something. Problem is, sooner or later you'll have a dry year, and a fire that gets out of control, and there's all the dead wood left over from the fires that didn't happen.
So instead of lots of little fires that aren't likely to kill trees or do too much damage, you end up with a few really big ones that *do* cause damage, and a lot of it.
There are lots of other examples of similar effects- trying to control beach erosion with breakwaters, and controlling flooding with levees are two examples that come to mind.
Anyway, point is, *maybe* I'd think it was okay to try to redirect tornadoes and destructive storms and the like, but just deciding 'this is a vacation hotspot, it should never rain here' (or even something less drastic), is almost certainly not okay.
Re:so if two objects are traveling toward the same
on
E ~ mc^2
·
· Score: 4, Informative
point at c/2 from opposite directions they both gain infinite mass!? Nope. Drop all your newtonian physics assumptions out the window. Speed is relative as well, and doesn't add in such a straightforward fashion. An observer on one object will actually measure the velocity of the other as something less than c. (pardon me if I don't go look up the exact equations right now). That's where relativistic time dialation comes from- time has to slow down to make up for the non-additive properties of velocity.
By that same argument if I am traveling at c toward Earth, Earth gains infinite mass and the gravitational pull drags me toward it even faster! Wrong again. You can't travel at c toward earth, so the question is meaningless. It takes infinite energy for a massive to reach that velocity, so it's impossible.
No offense, but this makes no sense. Either none of us understand it, or the emporor has no theory. Quite a bit of offense taken, actually. You missed the third possibility, that *you personally* don't understand it, and that physicists do. Do you really think that points as obvious as yours would have been missed in all the years that Relativity has been under close scrutiny?
Oh, well. People who argue "I don't get it, therefore it's wrong" annoy me.
You're probably right. No statistics on hand, but a large majority of known fossils are of marine organisms. I suppose because the right conditions for fossilization are more likely to occur on the relatively calm and undisturbed bottom of the ocean than somewhere on land.
Looked at it with IE. Right clicked, and sure enough, it blocked it. Hm, how'd it do that? Look at source. Close that, and right clicked again. That time it let me save the image. How clever.
The sheer amount of stupidity in the world astounds me sometimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. I would have made this comment if it hadn't already been here. I'd also like to mention the CHARA project, located at Mount Wilson Observatory. This *is* the equivalent of the VLA, but in the optical domain.
I'm no astronomer, but I saw it when I went up there for a tour, and it looks very cool. Really fascinating that, in spite of it's close proximity to the 'light pollution' of Los Angeles, Mount Wilson is still doing Real Astronomy.
They have. California, at least. If you take the 10 east from Los Angeles, you'll see literally thousands of windmills through some of the mountain passes. I think my electric bills usually indicate that one or two percent of my power is coming from wind power.
The problem with both wind and tidal is you can't just toss them up anywhere- you need somewhere with steady, fairly strong winds, or unusually large tides. I don't know much about tidal, but I doubt florida is going to have much luck with wind power- it's dead flat, and the best places for wind power tend to be mountain passes, which 'funnel' in the wind.
And what's gonna happen when you widen the roads? More people are going to move out further from the city, so more people are on the road. It's a self-defeating solution.
Then there are lots of places where there's simply nowhere to build another road. Example- I live in the Conejo Valley northwest of LA. The access from LA is via the 101 freeway. That's the *only* access- the only alternatives are winding two lane roads through the Santa Monica Mountains. There's simply nowhere else to put a road of any appreciable size through there. You say to widen the freeway? Where? There's development right up to the freeway on both sides.
With an attitude like that, I think it's your tenure that should be revoked. I had this guy for an intro geology class my freshman year; he's an incredibly smart and incredibly cool guy.
The sense I got from his interview on NPR was that this was just an 'interesting idea' he was throwing out, not something he was planning to try six months from now. Also, if having one far-fetched idea was grounds for revoking tenure, I suspect we'd have very few professors left.
Well, I looked at the animations. Neat idea, I think. But what happens if that timing belt goes? It looks to me like the thing would smash itself to pieces.
What would happen if a timing belt gave out on a 'normal' cylinder-based engine? I'm not too knowledgable about engines, but it doesn't seem like it would be quite as catastrophic.
ExpressPCB- Has an offer that will let you make 3 3.8"X2.5" 2-sided boards for about $60, as well as a more general off that's not too much more pricey. They have their own board design software you have to use, which is a bit primitive but adequate for hobbyist use, though it's a problem if you were to ever want someone else to make your boards.
Advanced Circuits- Has a deal to make 2-sided boards for $33/ea, min qty 3. These boards have a solder mask, which is required for dealing with fine-pitch SMT parts, and makes your board all pretty and professional-looking ;-)
Sierra Proto Express- Has a similar deal to Advanced Circuits, but also has a good price to make four-layer boards.
Some general notes- I've used the first two, and it worked alright, but I haven't tried the third one. The latter two require Gerber and Excellon data- this is the standard format for PCB plotting and drilling information information. Essentially any board layout software should be able to generate them. However, it is not trivial to figure out what precisely to send the board manufacturer- you can't just blindly trust your layout software to do the Right Thing. I keep meaning to write a little tutorial on my hard-won knowledge about this, but I've never gotten around to it :-/
I found a terminal velocity calculator here. I don't feel like hunting up exact numbers, but it looks like a bowling ball isn't gonna manage much more than a few hundred miles an hour. Meteors start out going much faster than that.
This "experiment" has no bearing the behavior of meteors. Sounds like these guys should go review basic physics before they propose dangerous experiments.
Maybe, but I think NASA presently has enough trouble with things blowing up. They don't need George W. Bush helping out.
One problem (among many others) is that frequently by the time you know you have a disease, you've already passed it on.
#include
void main()
{
printf("You're lying!\n");
return;
}
See? Anytime someone lies, this program will tell you so!
The AI was limited and I think a more accurate project for AI would be to actually host an AI service that offered network-accessed primitives for supreme entropy to contribute to a work of data; such centralized AI system would allow gamers as well as scientific computing to benefit from a verry good entropy pool of numbers as well as improve the funfactor of gaming.
Y'know, I read through that several times, and I still don't know what it says. I'm pretty sure the poster didn't either.
They've been doing that for a while. Seismic exploration is a very common technique for oil drilling and the like. You induce vibrations using explosives or something like a pile driver, and listen to the echoes.
:-)
Also I think there have been studies done on the vibratory modes of the sun. Not quite the same thing, but related. Found a new word while googling about it- Helioseismology. Gonna have to remember that one
Probably a lot of people. This is *chips*, not modules. A module has several chips on it- probably 8 or 16 (haven't looked at a DRAM module recently) 16*32MB=512MB, which is respectable.
One proposal I've heard for the origins of insect wings is as heat collectors. What with all that surface area and the network of veins going through them, insect wings would make good solar collectors. That is, up until the wings got too big, and the heat dissipated before it could get back to the insect's body. But a study showed that just about the time they got too big to work as solar collectors, they'd be big enough to help with gliding.
It's an interesting theory, but I doubt a similar course could apply to birds. Their wings are covered with feathers, which are mostly just dead skin, and probably wouldn't absorb heat well. Plus birds are warm-blooded, and would have less need for sunning themselves.
Depends on the vitamin. IIRC, there are two general categories of vitamins- Water-soluble, and fat-soluble. Water-soluble vitamins, which include vitamin C, are easily flushed out of the body, so excesses of those vitamins are generally not too harmful. Fat-soluble vitamins, such as Vitamin A, on the other hand, accumulate in fatty tissue, and *can* build up to dangerous concentrations.
Found some info on Vitamin A overdose here; there's also info on vitamin C there as well, but only to state that there are no known symptoms of Vitamin C overdose.
Theorem: All finite, abelian groups are isomorphic to a group of the form Z_n1 X Z_n2 X ... X Z_ni for some n1,n2,... ni. Apologies for lousy formatting, as I don't think slashdot lets you do subscripts. X == direct product, Z_n == cyclic group of order n. Also apologies if I didn't get that quite right, as I don't have an Abstract Algebra text in front of me.
And if you don't know what what I just said means, then you shouldn't be commenting on the existence of 'important' theorems, should you?
Okay, stupid.
My maternal grandfather was one Mr. Smith. My mother married Mr. Jones, so I'm a Jones. But my uncle had kids, and they are still Smiths. So I decended from a Smith, I'm a Jones, but there are still Smiths around.
This is an exact analogy for what you're complaining about. Starting from some ancestral ape, some of its decendants evolved into humans, while others remained apes.
Now go away, stupid.
Of forest fires.
The park service (or whoever it is that's in charge, I dunno) seems intent on supressing any little forest fire that comes along. Oh, we can't have fires, it'll hurt the trees, or it'll destroy homes, or something. Problem is, sooner or later you'll have a dry year, and a fire that gets out of control, and there's all the dead wood left over from the fires that didn't happen.
So instead of lots of little fires that aren't likely to kill trees or do too much damage, you end up with a few really big ones that *do* cause damage, and a lot of it.
There are lots of other examples of similar effects- trying to control beach erosion with breakwaters, and controlling flooding with levees are two examples that come to mind.
Anyway, point is, *maybe* I'd think it was okay to try to redirect tornadoes and destructive storms and the like, but just deciding 'this is a vacation hotspot, it should never rain here' (or even something less drastic), is almost certainly not okay.
point at c/2 from opposite directions they both gain infinite mass!?
Nope. Drop all your newtonian physics assumptions out the window. Speed is relative as well, and doesn't add in such a straightforward fashion. An observer on one object will actually measure the velocity of the other as something less than c. (pardon me if I don't go look up the exact equations right now). That's where relativistic time dialation comes from- time has to slow down to make up for the non-additive properties of velocity.
By that same argument if I am traveling at c toward Earth, Earth gains infinite mass and the gravitational pull drags me toward it even faster!
Wrong again. You can't travel at c toward earth, so the question is meaningless. It takes infinite energy for a massive to reach that velocity, so it's impossible.
No offense, but this makes no sense. Either none of us understand it, or the emporor has no theory.
Quite a bit of offense taken, actually. You missed the third possibility, that *you personally* don't understand it, and that physicists do. Do you really think that points as obvious as yours would have been missed in all the years that Relativity has been under close scrutiny?
Oh, well. People who argue "I don't get it, therefore it's wrong" annoy me.
You're probably right. No statistics on hand, but a large majority of known fossils are of marine organisms. I suppose because the right conditions for fossilization are more likely to occur on the relatively calm and undisturbed bottom of the ocean than somewhere on land.
No it hasn't. The earth is very close to thermal equillibrium, meaning it radiates about as much energy as it absorbs.
Go read up on some basic thermodynamics, troll. And while you're at it get a new nick, because you ain't.
you can still microwave DRM enabled CDs.
Far more entertainment value than any music that may be on them.
Sears, for one. All their in-store servers run OS/2. Don't have a link to prove it, but a family member is working on the project.
:-/
But (surprise, surprise!) they're working on migrating to something else
Mathematics is often about doing "useless" things. Mathematicians often do things not because they are useful, but because they are "interesting".
:-p
Number theory used to be a "useless" field.
Then someone discovered you could do cryptography with it.
That said, I *still* can't think of a good reason to calculate that many digits of pi
Hahaha!
Looked at it with IE. Right clicked, and sure enough, it blocked it. Hm, how'd it do that? Look at source. Close that, and right clicked again. That time it let me save the image. How clever.
The sheer amount of stupidity in the world astounds me sometimes.