I've been listening to and occasionally watching all the space walks streaming live on NASA TV while at work. Thats one video site they havent banned yet. I'm listening to the fifth space-walk now. The view is straight down at earth behind the shuttle.
Every once in a while I hear them count off. I think they are counting seconds they apply a tool, but I haven't been paying close attention.
The discoverer of the structure of DNA was the 3rd person fully sequenced. 20 of his genes appear in the bad gene database (@5000 entries). None of these have been expressed yet at his ripe old age of 80+.
Sergey Brin is worries about finding a Parkison's gene in his genome. But he doesnt need to be overly worried.
They fixed everything they supposed to during the first four space walks except for part of an instrument that was to far gone. They fixed some things that werent even deisgned to be serviced.
Servers farms supply the commodity information for commerce and recreation in the early 21st century. Depending on what source you accept, they, along with client computers and video screens of all sizes, consume 3% to 10% of the US's energy.
I shamelessly stole this idea from Peter Huber of the Manhattan Institutes recent book The Bottomless Well. The trend of human commerce over the past couple centuries was to use more energy in more refined ways: wood, coals, whale-oil, petroleum, electricity, solar, computing, optical...
I say early 21st century, because maybe some new discovery in computing technology or energy will drastically cut the energy consumption of yottaflops of computing before the century is over.
There are several companies and industry conventions devoted to efficiently building massive server farms. I went to an oil industry convention session on these last year (The energy industry is 6th largest sector of supercomputing for seismic exploration, oilfield simulation and credit transactions.) Server farms consume vast amounts of power in the CPUs and air conditioning.
Modular expansion is fad. Server companies now recycle shipping containers as a row of racks with built in service, power distribution, and air conditioning. You have a certain rating of petabytes and kilowatts per shipping container. You start filling up a warehouse with these on a "as-needed" basis. Google is reputed to be at the top of this game.
It is hypothesized that many cancers start in tissues with lots of stem cells and perhaps from the stem cells themselves, e.g. colon lining, skin, bone marrow. So one wants to be very careful using therapies based on re-programmed stem cells. Do the research and clinical testing carefully beforehand.
I mean the whole chain of identify, downloading and buying a book the way Amazon+Kindle does it.
If they are too specific with a patent, then competitors could change a small piece when copying it (I DID NOT MENTION THE OTHER SEATTLE COMPANY KNOWN FOR IMITATION!!!!). If their claim is too broad, it probably steps on some existing electronic-book-distribution patent.
I've never really studied the subject, but just have read what of the researchers Lee Smolin has said about it. Space, time, matter, energy, and force may be ultimately discete (atomic, local, quantized) at an extremely small scale. Smolin writes interesting pop science and philosophy books too.
If you read his claim in a "New Kind of Physics" that cellular automata would completely change and improve physics. The volume was an exhaustive exploration of all possible rules for the basic 8-neighbor, rectangular planar automata. Some interesting, but not revolutionary results.
Not because its so recent, but because its been contaminated by nukes.
On the other hand,t he 2nd half of the 20th century will have a very distinctive stratigraphic signature in the far future from the atmospheric nuke tests.
They are a little younger than MicroSoft and Apple.
Sun did a lot of interesting things in its first decade like pioneer networking, build one of the earliest usable graphics computers, and the best flavor of UNIX. They stumbled in the 1990s before briefly recovering with JAVA, then downhill again.
My siblings buy my parents high tech gifts thinking its trendy or will make life easier. But just about all of the gifts go right into the closet and collect dust. Most of the stuff is not easy to use and complicates life.
I attended some of early debates at scientific conferences between the Alvarezes (father and son discoverer of the meteor data) and the their early detractors. The Alvarezes were a chemist and sedimentary geologists neither familiar with paleontology details. There main detractors at the beginning were paleontologists. Other detractors were volcanologists who thought they had a better alternative theory.
In the intervening decades the meteor extinction theory has risen to the level "predominant working hypothesis", that is the thing scientists test new observations against. Generally many more observations support the meteor hypothesis, but who knows how much of that is pre-directed research. Many things in geology have some degree of uncertainty and a true scientist keeps an open mind and ranking of alternative theories.
I was talking to a comp sci proof who uses plagarism software to detect copied source programs. Claims it detects common ruses like transposition, reformatting, and variable renaming. The school suspends for rest of year if claim is verified.
Some professors now encourage group programming projects because that is how it works in the real world.
Some people see a like between low solar magnetic storm activity and cooler weather. An extended solar minimum in the 17th century was correlated a "Little Ice Age". Solar radiance does not decrease enough to explain this effect, so there may be some other physics going on or merely a coincidence.
There would have been a six-month gap between the ending of the print edition and startup of the web site. Plus the name and managment of the new site was different from the previous newspaper website. Other newspapers that have turned web-only had a seamless transition. For unclear reasons the news chain that owned the rocky didnt allow this.
And Facebook is it right now. MySpace and Friendster are top-dog in their own lesser spheres. The whole point of networking is have all the people you are interested in connected to the same system.
The space station operation seems to working fairly well, even though I think it is too expensive for its results. For a while, the US had to subsidize the Russian space program during Russia's hard times last decade. Now Russia has to subsidize the US with the only manned launch vehicle. The ESA provides an annual unmanned supply ship, with its first success last year. Japan and Canada have built ISS modules.
The largest missing player is China. They have their own slow, but successful space program.
Slashdot Mirror
Animals further apart than human and chimps DNA-wise can produce offspring: Ligers and mules.
Neandertal was probably more like a strong racial difference.
I've been listening to and occasionally watching all the space walks streaming live on NASA TV while at work. Thats one video site they havent banned yet. I'm listening to the fifth space-walk now. The view is straight down at earth behind the shuttle.
Every once in a while I hear them count off. I think they are counting seconds they apply a tool, but I haven't been paying close attention.
The discoverer of the structure of DNA was the 3rd person fully sequenced. 20 of his genes appear in the bad gene database (@5000 entries). None of these have been expressed yet at his ripe old age of 80+.
Sergey Brin is worries about finding a Parkison's gene in his genome. But he doesnt need to be overly worried.
They fixed everything they supposed to during the first four space walks except for part of an instrument that was to far gone. They fixed some things that werent even deisgned to be serviced.
Soem discussions of global warming sound like creationism in this regard.
Servers farms supply the commodity information for commerce and recreation in the early 21st century. Depending on what source you accept, they, along with client computers and video screens of all sizes, consume 3% to 10% of the US's energy.
...
I shamelessly stole this idea from Peter Huber of the Manhattan Institutes recent book The Bottomless Well. The trend of human commerce over the past couple centuries was to use more energy in more refined ways: wood, coals, whale-oil, petroleum, electricity, solar, computing, optical
I say early 21st century, because maybe some new discovery in computing technology or energy will drastically cut the energy consumption of yottaflops of computing before the century is over.
There are several companies and industry conventions devoted to efficiently building massive server farms. I went to an oil industry convention session on these last year (The energy industry is 6th largest sector of supercomputing for seismic exploration, oilfield simulation and credit transactions.) Server farms consume vast amounts of power in the CPUs and air conditioning.
Modular expansion is fad. Server companies now recycle shipping containers as a row of racks with built in service, power distribution, and air conditioning. You have a certain rating of petabytes and kilowatts per shipping container. You start filling up a warehouse with these on a "as-needed" basis. Google is reputed to be at the top of this game.
If you believe the rumors.
It is hypothesized that many cancers start in tissues with lots of stem cells and perhaps from the stem cells themselves, e.g. colon lining, skin, bone marrow. So one wants to be very careful using therapies based on re-programmed stem cells. Do the research and clinical testing carefully beforehand.
I mean the whole chain of identify, downloading and buying a book the way Amazon+Kindle does it. If they are too specific with a patent, then competitors could change a small piece when copying it (I DID NOT MENTION THE OTHER SEATTLE COMPANY KNOWN FOR IMITATION!!!!). If their claim is too broad, it probably steps on some existing electronic-book-distribution patent.
I've never really studied the subject, but just have read what of the researchers Lee Smolin has said about it. Space, time, matter, energy, and force may be ultimately discete (atomic, local, quantized) at an extremely small scale. Smolin writes interesting pop science and philosophy books too.
If you read his claim in a "New Kind of Physics" that cellular automata would completely change and improve physics. The volume was an exhaustive exploration of all possible rules for the basic 8-neighbor, rectangular planar automata. Some interesting, but not revolutionary results.
Not because its so recent, but because its been contaminated by nukes. On the other hand,t he 2nd half of the 20th century will have a very distinctive stratigraphic signature in the far future from the atmospheric nuke tests.
72 usable chars out of 80-char records.
(At least it seems that way with how poorly all the new slashdot web enhancements bog down.)
They are a little younger than MicroSoft and Apple.
Sun did a lot of interesting things in its first decade like pioneer networking, build one of the earliest usable graphics computers, and the best flavor of UNIX. They stumbled in the 1990s before briefly recovering with JAVA, then downhill again.
My siblings buy my parents high tech gifts thinking its trendy or will make life easier. But just about all of the gifts go right into the closet and collect dust. Most of the stuff is not easy to use and complicates life.
I attended some of early debates at scientific conferences between the Alvarezes (father and son discoverer of the meteor data) and the their early detractors. The Alvarezes were a chemist and sedimentary geologists neither familiar with paleontology details. There main detractors at the beginning were paleontologists. Other detractors were volcanologists who thought they had a better alternative theory.
In the intervening decades the meteor extinction theory has risen to the level "predominant working hypothesis", that is the thing scientists test new observations against. Generally many more observations support the meteor hypothesis, but who knows how much of that is pre-directed research. Many things in geology have some degree of uncertainty and a true scientist keeps an open mind and ranking of alternative theories.
The sooner I can download what ever text I want, the better. I hope the governement doesnt stand in the way.
Less powerful than these cards.
I was talking to a comp sci proof who uses plagarism software to detect copied source programs. Claims it detects common ruses like transposition, reformatting, and variable renaming. The school suspends for rest of year if claim is verified.
Some professors now encourage group programming projects because that is how it works in the real world.
Volunteers are pretty common in online discussion groups. However you need a mechanism for culling those who become dictatorial.
Some people see a like between low solar magnetic storm activity and cooler weather. An extended solar minimum in the 17th century was correlated a "Little Ice Age". Solar radiance does not decrease enough to explain this effect, so there may be some other physics going on or merely a coincidence.
There would have been a six-month gap between the ending of the print edition and startup of the web site. Plus the name and managment of the new site was different from the previous newspaper website. Other newspapers that have turned web-only had a seamless transition. For unclear reasons the news chain that owned the rocky didnt allow this.
And Facebook is it right now. MySpace and Friendster are top-dog in their own lesser spheres. The whole point of networking is have all the people you are interested in connected to the same system.
The space station operation seems to working fairly well, even though I think it is too expensive for its results. For a while, the US had to subsidize the Russian space program during Russia's hard times last decade. Now Russia has to subsidize the US with the only manned launch vehicle. The ESA provides an annual unmanned supply ship, with its first success last year. Japan and Canada have built ISS modules.
The largest missing player is China. They have their own slow, but successful space program.