The statistical distribution of repeated subsequences in natural language follows a power law. Encrption and decryption seeks to distrupt or detect such. DNA seems to follow that pattern too. The non-protein coding parts of DNA- about 98% that of human- seems to indicate it is conveying information, but people haven't quite figured it out. It might be modifying nearby coding DNA or generating short-live RNA (2005 Nobel chemistry and medicine prizes0 or doing something else.
I read an analysis in Technology Review(?) about a decade ago the proper way to balance security, privacy, and abuse is to put all video accessible online to everyone. Then the "watchers are watched" by the public. In the 1990s this was technically impossible. In the 2000s were see piecemeal versions of this with UTube-like services and ubiquitous personal and public cameras. In the 2010s this could be a reality.
The idea of robots has been around far longer than computers. Artifical humans go back to the myths of Vulcan's manufactured helpers and Hebrew golems. The term robot was invented in the 1930s. Artifical brains go back to Cabbage in the 1850s and the computer machine in the 1940s (borrowed from human 'computers' who did laborous calculations by hand or adders).
Isaac Asimov wrote about both- though many more about robots. Notable computer stories are "the last question" where computer pondering about about God becomes God. And another one (I forget the title) where executives become so dependent on their handheld devices they can no longer think for themselves.
In reality robotic technology hasnt evolved as far as computers. I foresee "computers that move and do things" to be a future step. Machines incorporate more computing and the converse. As Bill said, engineers underestimated the amount of computing necessary for machines to sense the world and make good movements. But that computing power is now here.
Volcanic erruptions may not create a lot seismic noise to be detected by worldwide seismographs or submarine hydrophones. There may not be an explosion. There is a volcanic noise called "harmonic earthquake" which kind of a long gurgle of moving lava. Fault earthquakes have sharp onsets, many frequencies, and strong energy while harmonic quakes dont have sharp onsets and are relatively monochromatic. Quake observation software is not tuned for these kind of quakes.
Other I remember include:
"S" from Bell Labs for statistic analysis package.
"W" at Stanford for UNIX bitmap graphics window software circa 1985.
"X" at Stanford for client-server graphics "extended" software from same Stanford research group.
"X" and "W" were combined into XWindows and managed at MIT for many years.
All three of these were plays on UNIX's "B" and "C" language naming.
Thata the great thing about a dynamically programmable robot out there.
Some patches I remember:
- March 2004 to fix flash memory driver: Somehow the free-list wasnt programmed properly in this fairly "new" device, so the rover ran out of image memory. Then it tried to reboot several dozen times in a row. A patch fixed this.
- Software for automated detection of whirlwinds: There were strong hints of lots of whirlwinds out there, from tracks and mysterously cleaned solar panels. However the rovers only have the capacity of recording and transmitting a couple hundred frames a day. So the solution was to difference repeated shots even 20 seconds apart and save a series if there were changes between. They've photgraphed dozens of whirlwind animations now.
- Software to reduce getting stuck in sand:
I think Spirit has been stuck once in sand drifts and Opportunity at least twice- one lasting about 40 days. Opportunity was planned to go about 100 meters at time. But one trek it spent most of this time just digging its wheels deeper into into about a foot of sand. It took several weeks of patience rocking back and forth to escape.
A software upgrade now tries to visually detect getting stuck in sand and stop moving if it thinks it has. Its like the whirlwind software. Pictures are compared after every turn of a wheel or so. If the images havent moved by an expected amount, then the rover halts and notifies earth. This is much more efficient than human masters checking the rovers advance every hour or so.
You'd be surprised how products in modern culture use bovine byproducts- many kinds of foods, cosmetics, leather clothing, medicine... I saw a list of several hundred once. To avoid such you basically have to back to the pre-20th century where people made most of their own stuff.
The aide was pretty young. Prossibly saw a loty cheating in school and just carried it into work life. In the real world you get caught more of the time.
I define Christian science fiction as using current scientific explanations for Biblical events and prophecies. The "Left Behind" series is the premier example of this genre. C.S. Lewis wrote a fair amount of this too. I'd say the Narnia series is not quite there, though the lion has a resurrection. All these convolution explanations of Biblical miracles you read around Christmas and Easter time are borderline too.
At current use rates there are two to four centuries of coal in US, China, and Russia. There are plans to build carbon-capture coal electricity plants. However, because they cost more, only a couple of the 150 plants on the drawing boards will be of the carbon-clean type.
Buy Arctic beachfront property for future resorts when the weather becomes nicer. The only problem is predicting where the shoreline will be with rising water levels:-(
The peak energy of quakes decreases in frequency (dispersion) as it goes off into the distance. Buildings and mud layers have resonant frequencies which can effective triple the force of the wave as it passes by. The Loma Prieta "sweet spot" was not close-in in Silicon Valley mudflats, but about twice that distance in Oakland and San Francisco Marina.
One serious problem with tsunami-size quakes, M7.5 and larger, is to accurately measure the magnitude of the large quake. Regular seismographs saturate at high magnitudes- that means that an 8 looks just like an 8.5 looks just like a 9 for conventional single-station magnitude calculations. There is a more accurate calculation called moment-magnitude, but that requires collecting data from at least a hemisphere of stations, preferrably a full global. That requires an hour, half an hour for the wave to to reach enough stations, and recording it for several tens of minutes to obtain essential low-frequency information. This assumes instantaneous telemetry to a central location and a good automatic computing program. An offshore quake can send water waves to the nearest shore in a quarter of that time. The 2004 Sumatra Boxer Day tsunami was a slow motion horror film. The first magnitude reports were around 8, but kept on growing for all morning as more precise computations were performed. It didnt help that computer programs were finicky at the time requiring human data editing and the humans in North America were sleeping off their Christmas parties away from the office. (The pacific tsunami center has a seismologist on 15 minutes paging duty, but didnt have the best computer programs at the time.)
So there is a fair amount of research on quick-large-magnitude determination. Seismologist are hoping for a characteristic signature in the first 30 seconds of a seismogram. A hopeful method compares a new large quake to a previous large quake from the same area of the world. Plus you want seismographs at minutes of wave propagation distance from every offshore fault capable of a great quake. Such stations were supposedly in place for a 2006 Java great quake, but didnt work properly. The governement notification system didnt work at all. Fortunately there wasnt a tsunami.
Tsunami notification doesn't rely solely on seismic data. Special buoys measure the wave as it passes by. But they buoys are too far away for the nearest shorelines, so a quick seismic method is still desired.
The USGS started Radon measurements right after the Chinese and Russians claimed some encouraging results in the early 1970s. The results have been inconclusive. There have been a dozen sizeable quakes in the San Andreas area where the USGS has its sensors- all inconclusive.
Besides radon is a slow signal. In the few promising results, the radon starts increasing weeks before an event, but with no clear signal pointing to the day or hour.
You hear about the rich software wizards who make a fortune and then fade off into the sunset, e.g Netscape, Yahoo, etc. But Steve Jobs has had four mega-hits over three decades Apple-2, Mac, Pixar and iPod. So it take several dogs between megahits. Very few people get a second chance, much less four, and hes not done yet.
There a number of examples in history where a single genius invents a lot of amazing stuff in a short period of time. New discovered universal gravition, calculas, and optics. Galileo discovered lows of motion and telescope. Imhotep pretty invented the pyramids. You can see his intermediate projects from mastaba to step pyramids to true stone ones. Archimedes and so on...
There are probably many such geniuses unrecorded in history. Writing systems appear fair ly suddenly in dyanastic Egpyt and the alphabet in Urgait. Other historians suggest long transitional phases, with some evidence. But I can equally envison some light-bulb guy doing this in a single career.
Perhaps the clock machinist was one of these geniuses.
Baby boomers remember "Made in Japan" to mean two different things. When they were growing up it meant cheap junk than broke easily. Then when they were leaving college it meant stuff better than made in America.
The rest of Asia is having a similar learning curve. Not the best quality when starting out, but improving.
I write data proccesing and graphical interpretation software for oil exploration. With this the average worker can find drilling sites about a hundred times faster than before 1990- its more like they look at 20 times more data with one fifth of the people. There have been similar gains on the "smart" drilling side where rigs accomplish in week what it took a season to do. The consequence was the US oil industry cut its workers 75% in the past 20 years, a cut that puts the auto industry to shame.
Much of this gain is erased by that the "easy" deposits have long ago been discovered and produced. So its been kind of treadmill for overall producing costs over that period of time.
The runnup in pretroleum prices in the past three years is due to other factors.
The number one reason is that it is considered more valuable to the culture to be working and contributing money to the family than spending time in school. Especially when some of the schools in immigrant neighborhoods are crappy and dead end.
Hispanics are the fastest growing group in most school districts.
This must be frustrating the test-based reformers. As these are taking effect, the immigration factor is negating it.
Not all immigrants devalue education. Some poor Asian immigrant groups value it extremely. And in the last century it was east Europeans.
The core Anglo culture is not that must better. As any geek know there anti-intellectualism in that culture, directing talent toward the money careers rather than the knowledge careers.
Slashdot Mirror
The statistical distribution of repeated subsequences in natural language follows a power law. Encrption and decryption seeks to distrupt or detect such. DNA seems to follow that pattern too. The non-protein coding parts of DNA- about 98% that of human- seems to indicate it is conveying information, but people haven't quite figured it out. It might be modifying nearby coding DNA or generating short-live RNA (2005 Nobel chemistry and medicine prizes0 or doing something else.
I read an analysis in Technology Review(?) about a decade ago the proper way to balance security, privacy, and abuse is to put all video accessible online to everyone. Then the "watchers are watched" by the public. In the 1990s this was technically impossible. In the 2000s were see piecemeal versions of this with UTube-like services and ubiquitous personal and public cameras. In the 2010s this could be a reality.
The idea of robots has been around far longer than computers. Artifical humans go back to the myths of Vulcan's manufactured helpers and Hebrew golems. The term robot was invented in the 1930s. Artifical brains go back to Cabbage in the 1850s and the computer machine in the 1940s (borrowed from human 'computers' who did laborous calculations by hand or adders).
Isaac Asimov wrote about both- though many more about robots. Notable computer stories are "the last question" where computer pondering about about God becomes God. And another one (I forget the title) where executives become so dependent on their handheld devices they can no longer think for themselves.
In reality robotic technology hasnt evolved as far as computers. I foresee "computers that move and do things" to be a future step. Machines incorporate more computing and the converse. As Bill said, engineers underestimated the amount of computing necessary for machines to sense the world and make good movements. But that computing power is now here.
Volcanic erruptions may not create a lot seismic noise to be detected by worldwide seismographs or submarine hydrophones. There may not be an explosion. There is a volcanic noise called "harmonic earthquake" which kind of a long gurgle of moving lava. Fault earthquakes have sharp onsets, many frequencies, and strong energy while harmonic quakes dont have sharp onsets and are relatively monochromatic. Quake observation software is not tuned for these kind of quakes.
Other I remember include:
"S" from Bell Labs for statistic analysis package.
"W" at Stanford for UNIX bitmap graphics window software circa 1985.
"X" at Stanford for client-server graphics "extended" software from same Stanford research group.
"X" and "W" were combined into XWindows and managed at MIT for many years.
All three of these were plays on UNIX's "B" and "C" language naming.
Thata the great thing about a dynamically programmable robot out there. Some patches I remember:
- March 2004 to fix flash memory driver: Somehow the free-list wasnt programmed properly in this fairly "new" device, so the rover ran out of image memory. Then it tried to reboot several dozen times in a row. A patch fixed this.
- Software for automated detection of whirlwinds: There were strong hints of lots of whirlwinds out there, from tracks and mysterously cleaned solar panels. However the rovers only have the capacity of recording and transmitting a couple hundred frames a day. So the solution was to difference repeated shots even 20 seconds apart and save a series if there were changes between. They've photgraphed dozens of whirlwind animations now.
- Software to reduce getting stuck in sand: I think Spirit has been stuck once in sand drifts and Opportunity at least twice- one lasting about 40 days. Opportunity was planned to go about 100 meters at time. But one trek it spent most of this time just digging its wheels deeper into into about a foot of sand. It took several weeks of patience rocking back and forth to escape.
A software upgrade now tries to visually detect getting stuck in sand and stop moving if it thinks it has. Its like the whirlwind software. Pictures are compared after every turn of a wheel or so. If the images havent moved by an expected amount, then the rover halts and notifies earth. This is much more efficient than human masters checking the rovers advance every hour or so.
You'd be surprised how products in modern culture use bovine byproducts- many kinds of foods, cosmetics, leather clothing, medicine... I saw a list of several hundred once. To avoid such you basically have to back to the pre-20th century where people made most of their own stuff.
The aide was pretty young. Prossibly saw a loty cheating in school and just carried it into work life. In the real world you get caught more of the time.
For those Geeks who dont take showers or change their clothes daily.
I define Christian science fiction as using current scientific explanations for Biblical events and prophecies. The "Left Behind" series is the premier example of this genre. C.S. Lewis wrote a fair amount of this too. I'd say the Narnia series is not quite there, though the lion has a resurrection. All these convolution explanations of Biblical miracles you read around Christmas and Easter time are borderline too.
At current use rates there are two to four centuries of coal in US, China, and Russia. There are plans to build carbon-capture coal electricity plants. However, because they cost more, only a couple of the 150 plants on the drawing boards will be of the carbon-clean type.
Buy Arctic beachfront property for future resorts when the weather becomes nicer. The only problem is predicting where the shoreline will be with rising water levels :-(
So the rescue works can go in the right direction. Cant depend on media to all be working then.
The southern california early alert system (for organizations only) tries to compute and notify location ASAP.
You can shutdown the subways, shut off refinery valves, park computer disk arms, and walk to a safer location.
The peak energy of quakes decreases in frequency (dispersion) as it goes off into the distance. Buildings and mud layers have resonant frequencies which can effective triple the force of the wave as it passes by. The Loma Prieta "sweet spot" was not close-in in Silicon Valley mudflats, but about twice that distance in Oakland and San Francisco Marina.
One serious problem with tsunami-size quakes, M7.5 and larger, is to accurately measure the magnitude of the large quake. Regular seismographs saturate at high magnitudes- that means that an 8 looks just like an 8.5 looks just like a 9 for conventional single-station magnitude calculations. There is a more accurate calculation called moment-magnitude, but that requires collecting data from at least a hemisphere of stations, preferrably a full global. That requires an hour, half an hour for the wave to to reach enough stations, and recording it for several tens of minutes to obtain essential low-frequency information. This assumes instantaneous telemetry to a central location and a good automatic computing program. An offshore quake can send water waves to the nearest shore in a quarter of that time. The 2004 Sumatra Boxer Day tsunami was a slow motion horror film. The first magnitude reports were around 8, but kept on growing for all morning as more precise computations were performed. It didnt help that computer programs were finicky at the time requiring human data editing and the humans in North America were sleeping off their Christmas parties away from the office. (The pacific tsunami center has a seismologist on 15 minutes paging duty, but didnt have the best computer programs at the time.) So there is a fair amount of research on quick-large-magnitude determination. Seismologist are hoping for a characteristic signature in the first 30 seconds of a seismogram. A hopeful method compares a new large quake to a previous large quake from the same area of the world. Plus you want seismographs at minutes of wave propagation distance from every offshore fault capable of a great quake. Such stations were supposedly in place for a 2006 Java great quake, but didnt work properly. The governement notification system didnt work at all. Fortunately there wasnt a tsunami.
Tsunami notification doesn't rely solely on seismic data. Special buoys measure the wave as it passes by. But they buoys are too far away for the nearest shorelines, so a quick seismic method is still desired.
The USGS started Radon measurements right after the Chinese and Russians claimed some encouraging results in the early 1970s. The results have been inconclusive. There have been a dozen sizeable quakes in the San Andreas area where the USGS has its sensors- all inconclusive.
Besides radon is a slow signal. In the few promising results, the radon starts increasing weeks before an event, but with no clear signal pointing to the day or hour.
File writes are unlikely to exceed flash's 100K lifetime, but virtual memory might. You may get away with eliminating with a couple gigs of core.
Royalties to Parker Brothers $50,000
Lawyer to defend against PB IP suit $50,000
Damages on top of royalties ??????
Just joking.
You hear about the rich software wizards who make a fortune and then fade off into the sunset, e.g Netscape, Yahoo, etc. But Steve Jobs has had four mega-hits over three decades Apple-2, Mac, Pixar and iPod. So it take several dogs between megahits. Very few people get a second chance, much less four, and hes not done yet.
There a number of examples in history where a single genius invents a lot of amazing stuff in a short period of time. New discovered universal gravition, calculas, and optics. Galileo discovered lows of motion and telescope. Imhotep pretty invented the pyramids. You can see his intermediate projects from mastaba to step pyramids to true stone ones. Archimedes and so on ...
There are probably many such geniuses unrecorded in history. Writing systems appear fair ly suddenly in dyanastic Egpyt and the alphabet in Urgait. Other historians suggest long transitional phases, with some evidence. But I can equally envison some light-bulb guy doing this in a single career.
Perhaps the clock machinist was one of these geniuses.
The Wired article says the 10-15% of printed tags cant be read by scanners or become too smudged or torn for humans. RFID read errors are 3-5%.
Baby boomers remember "Made in Japan" to mean two different things. When they were growing up it meant cheap junk than broke easily. Then when they were leaving college it meant stuff better than made in America.
The rest of Asia is having a similar learning curve. Not the best quality when starting out, but improving.
I write data proccesing and graphical interpretation software for oil exploration. With this the average worker can find drilling sites about a hundred times faster than before 1990- its more like they look at 20 times more data with one fifth of the people. There have been similar gains on the "smart" drilling side where rigs accomplish in week what it took a season to do. The consequence was the US oil industry cut its workers 75% in the past 20 years, a cut that puts the auto industry to shame.
Much of this gain is erased by that the "easy" deposits have long ago been discovered and produced. So its been kind of treadmill for overall producing costs over that period of time.
The runnup in pretroleum prices in the past three years is due to other factors.
The number one reason is that it is considered more valuable to the culture to be working and contributing money to the family than spending time in school. Especially when some of the schools in immigrant neighborhoods are crappy and dead end.
Hispanics are the fastest growing group in most school districts.
This must be frustrating the test-based reformers. As these are taking effect, the immigration factor is negating it.
Not all immigrants devalue education. Some poor Asian immigrant groups value it extremely. And in the last century it was east Europeans.
The core Anglo culture is not that must better. As any geek know there anti-intellectualism in that culture, directing talent toward the money careers rather than the knowledge careers.