I saw an interesting Google sponsorship of PBS NOVA Tuesday. In their 15-second infomercial a word typed into the Google screen about some natural phenomena and switched to a video clip of that phenomena. (I dont think Google does that right now, but will any month.)
Botht the Cerf and PBS thing shows Google is moving away from being just a startup and more of a community player.
The space shuttle and international space station are effectively dead. It will just take a few years for NASA and the US government to admit to the fact. Without the shuttle the space station infrastucture and orbit decays. Without the space station the shuttle has little purpose.
I see the highly successful robotic space exploration continuing. It is essentially completely outsourced already with manufacturing and operation by private companies and universities. It could be transfered to NASA's successor or the National Science Foundation with little disruption.
In Plato's Pharmacy, Socrates claims the use of writing will weaken one's intellect. Writing will weaken one's ability to memorize. Written records may preserve falsehoods.
There was extreme looting and rioting in Baghdad the first week after the US takeover despites tens of thousands of coalition troops in each major city. It might be human nature to panic or abuse in such considitions. There were no operational utilities, terrible weather and shortages of all kinds too. We kid ourselves thinking the US is "special" and above this all. It might just be human nature.
NASA has been using a version of realtime UNIX called VxWorks from Wind River in many of its space probes and robots. It has been evolving for decades along with various NASA probes. Its not perfect, having brought down the rovers for a couple weeks with a thread blocking problem. But it has been field tested for a long time.
Despite the NASAs great results with their three successful Mars rovers, the two Russian Lunokhods still hold the distance records covering about 30 miles together, or an order of magnitude more than the Martian rovers. The Moon is near enough to allow interactive control of surface robots, unlike Mars.
Of course many of us would like to see dozens of rovers crawling all over the planets and moons.
The cost of the International Space Station would have funded over 200 rovers.
Silicon Valley did OK in the 1989 M6.9 Loma Prieta Earthquake. There were power outages and work holidays the first couple of days. However the InterNet and computers were mostly up the day after. I was sending emails and get earthquake data across the InterNet the following day. The graphical world wide web was not yet operational in the 1980s, so mostly was ftps, usenet and email.
The 1989 was considered a medium-large quake. The Maximum quake could be as much as 1.3 magnitudes high and about fifty times more energetic.
A hurricane is different. Its harder for electrical networks to stay operation during large scale flooding. Likewise, the storm that hit New Orleans is by no means the largest possible.
Mag tape is always cheaper than disk per byte, despite both dropping greatly in recent decades. I can see you barcoding extremely cheap items like a stick of gum or individual cigarettes, but not RFID'ing them.
Just before before internet browsers became popular, MicroSoft was trying to beat AOL and the InterNet with its own protocol. However, the world wide web took off so fast that these plans never took off.
Since then MicroSoft continues to try to co-opt parts of the Internet with proprietary IP-extensions, a free browswer, and proprietary parts of XML.
The speculation of differential rotation was due to an expensive computer simulation by Harvard physicist Glatzmier in the mid-1990s. People hadnt done this calculation before because it was incredibly expensive: two months of a supercomputer time in the mid-1990s. First the cost comes from calculating fluid flow and electrodynamics simultaneously. Second, because the magnetic field is somewhat chaotic (unstable), yu have to have lots of tiny grid cells and time steps in a three dimensional sphere. One result of his calculation is the magnetic field in the liquid outer core has enough energy to push it differentially with respect to the earth's rotation. A second result is he predicted magnetic pole reversals in manner observed in the rock records- periods of great stability, punctuated by "flickering". Some of these flickers turn into complete reversals. Incidentally, the earth is in a "flickering phase" right now.
People have known this since the mid-1990s.
I wonder why the journal even bother publishing this old result. Actually it is new data confirming an old result.
Except for a few brief periods when techies were respected as way of getting fabolously rich (dot-com etc) technology and science havent been widely respected in the USA. In contrast, techies are highly respected in Asia. The current and previous Chinese leaders have been engineers. Only one of ten US presidents- Hoover and Carter- since 1900 have had technical backgrounds.
Gort is very good. He just zaps those burglars and urchins with those lasers in his eyes. Great for those obnoxiuos dog-walkers always poo-ing on my lawn.
"Come into my house and meet Gort".
"Hey Gort, why are you lifting your visor? This is a friend."
"Gort, why are turing your head at me?"
"Close it!" "Turn off that lase beam!" "Klatu barada nictu!"
(muffled screams, the smell of burnt flesh...)
The first books were scrolls like Torah and the Alexandrian Library. Torah scrolls are quaint, but a pain to move to another section. Around the first century AD people started making codexes. I think it was because as trade with papyrus source areas such as Egypt and Mesopotamia decline, scolars started using animal skins (vellum) as substitute.
Its easier to cut these into squares rather than sew them into scrolls. Note that codexes appeared in northern India about the same time- block printing of Buddhist texts. The next big advance was to use capitalization and punctuation to make words, sentences and paragraphs easier to distinguish. People used to run all the words and sentences together written in capital letters (see a Torah or ancient Roman inscriptions). Printing made books cheaper- from a couple years' average wages of an average worker to months, but first imitated the bulky form-factor of vellum books. The bulk was moviated by the expense of parchement and cloth-based paper.
Finally in the 1800s printers started printing hand-sized pocket books for the masses. Cheap wood-based paper facilitated this. Plus public education exploded literacy and demand. books finally became convenient and relatively cheap (a few days wages or less).
So my point is that physcial books had a long learning curve. The computer replacement of books will have some learning curve too, but I am bit surprised it is taking so long. Cheap readers with good ergonomics (high contrast, 300 dpi tablets, $100) are at hand. Publishes are relucant to distribute their source in digital form cheaply. When eBooks copy iTunes and drop to few bucks or an unlimited monthly subscription, then these may take off.
In our local library the entire front area is filled with DVD/videos, InterNet terminals, sofas and reference librarians. If you make it to the back or basement you eventually find a bookshelf.
Ditto the local Barnes & Noble. They also have a coffeehouse and periodicals in front.
Slashdot Mirror
It only holds 500 hours of video. If I watched every minute from waking to sleeping, I use that up in a month :-(
Thanks. I should have googled for it.
It doesnt show up in "more>>" yet but in Google Labs.
I saw an interesting Google sponsorship of PBS NOVA Tuesday. In their 15-second infomercial a word typed into the Google screen about some natural phenomena and switched to a video clip of that phenomena. (I dont think Google does that right now, but will any month.)
Botht the Cerf and PBS thing shows Google is moving away from being just a startup and more of a community player.
The space shuttle and international space station are effectively dead. It will just take a few years for NASA and the US government to admit to the fact. Without the shuttle the space station infrastucture and orbit decays. Without the space station the shuttle has little purpose.
I see the highly successful robotic space exploration continuing. It is essentially completely outsourced already with manufacturing and operation by private companies and universities. It could be transfered to NASA's successor or the National Science Foundation with little disruption.
Very few high tech companies have such these days. You are supposed to save 401K and stock options and crosss your fingers for the big IPO.
In Plato's Pharmacy, Socrates claims the use of writing will weaken one's intellect. Writing will weaken one's ability to memorize. Written records may preserve falsehoods.
I was comparing $90G for ISS versus $0.4G for each MER rover. If rovers are "mass-produced" then their price would decline.
There was extreme looting and rioting in Baghdad the first week after the US takeover despites tens of thousands of coalition troops in each major city. It might be human nature to panic or abuse in such considitions. There were no operational utilities, terrible weather and shortages of all kinds too. We kid ourselves thinking the US is "special" and above this all. It might just be human nature.
NASA has been using a version of realtime UNIX called VxWorks from Wind River in many of its space probes and robots. It has been evolving for decades along with various NASA probes. Its not perfect, having brought down the rovers for a couple weeks with a thread blocking problem. But it has been field tested for a long time.
Despite the NASAs great results with their three successful Mars rovers, the two Russian Lunokhods still hold the distance records covering about 30 miles together, or an order of magnitude more than the Martian rovers. The Moon is near enough to allow interactive control of surface robots, unlike Mars.
Of course many of us would like to see dozens of rovers crawling all over the planets and moons. The cost of the International Space Station would have funded over 200 rovers.
Lets call these an auto-mobile, a vehicle that drives itself :-)
These results were oriinally published in 2004.
People have been doing this for a long time. There are cluster launches of mini-satellites and specifications for engineering them.
Silicon Valley did OK in the 1989 M6.9 Loma Prieta Earthquake. There were power outages and work holidays the first couple of days. However the InterNet and computers were mostly up the day after. I was sending emails and get earthquake data across the InterNet the following day. The graphical world wide web was not yet operational in the 1980s, so mostly was ftps, usenet and email.
The 1989 was considered a medium-large quake. The Maximum quake could be as much as 1.3 magnitudes high and about fifty times more energetic.
A hurricane is different. Its harder for electrical networks to stay operation during large scale flooding. Likewise, the storm that hit New Orleans is by no means the largest possible.
Mag tape is always cheaper than disk per byte, despite both dropping greatly in recent decades. I can see you barcoding extremely cheap items like a stick of gum or individual cigarettes, but not RFID'ing them.
Even water can be bad. A few extreme event deaths such as marathons have been attributed to drinking too much water and depleting electrolytes.
Now I can replace my car's internal combustion engine. And I'd thought I'd forking out lots of gas money this year.
Just before before internet browsers became popular, MicroSoft was trying to beat AOL and the InterNet with its own protocol. However, the world wide web took off so fast that these plans never took off.
Since then MicroSoft continues to try to co-opt parts of the Internet with proprietary IP-extensions, a free browswer, and proprietary parts of XML.
Could be the "Cancun" of 2020 at the rate things are changing!
The speculation of differential rotation was due to an expensive computer simulation by Harvard physicist Glatzmier in the mid-1990s. People hadnt done this calculation before because it was incredibly expensive: two months of a supercomputer time in the mid-1990s. First the cost comes from calculating fluid flow and electrodynamics simultaneously. Second, because the magnetic field is somewhat chaotic (unstable), yu have to have lots of tiny grid cells and time steps in a three dimensional sphere. One result of his calculation is the magnetic field in the liquid outer core has enough energy to push it differentially with respect to the earth's rotation. A second result is he predicted magnetic pole reversals in manner observed in the rock records- periods of great stability, punctuated by "flickering". Some of these flickers turn into complete reversals. Incidentally, the earth is in a "flickering phase" right now.
People have known this since the mid-1990s. I wonder why the journal even bother publishing this old result. Actually it is new data confirming an old result.
Except for a few brief periods when techies were respected as way of getting fabolously rich (dot-com etc) technology and science havent been widely respected in the USA. In contrast, techies are highly respected in Asia. The current and previous Chinese leaders have been engineers. Only one of ten US presidents- Hoover and Carter- since 1900 have had technical backgrounds.
Gort is very good. He just zaps those burglars and urchins with those lasers in his eyes.
...)
Great for those obnoxiuos dog-walkers always poo-ing on my lawn.
"Come into my house and meet Gort".
"Hey Gort, why are you lifting your visor? This is a friend."
"Gort, why are turing your head at me?"
"Close it!" "Turn off that lase beam!" "Klatu barada nictu!"
(muffled screams, the smell of burnt flesh
The first books were scrolls like Torah and the Alexandrian Library. Torah scrolls are quaint, but a pain to move to another section. Around the first century AD people started making codexes. I think it was because as trade with papyrus source areas such as Egypt and Mesopotamia decline, scolars started using animal skins (vellum) as substitute. Its easier to cut these into squares rather than sew them into scrolls. Note that codexes appeared in northern India about the same time- block printing of Buddhist texts.
The next big advance was to use capitalization and punctuation to make words, sentences and paragraphs easier to distinguish. People used to run all the words and sentences together written in capital letters (see a Torah or ancient Roman inscriptions). Printing made books cheaper- from a couple years' average wages of an average worker to months, but first imitated the bulky form-factor of vellum books. The bulk was moviated by the expense of parchement and cloth-based paper.
Finally in the 1800s printers started printing hand-sized pocket books for the masses. Cheap wood-based paper facilitated this. Plus public education exploded literacy and demand. books finally became convenient and relatively cheap (a few days wages or less).
So my point is that physcial books had a long learning curve. The computer replacement of books will have some learning curve too, but I am bit surprised it is taking so long. Cheap readers with good ergonomics (high contrast, 300 dpi tablets, $100) are at hand. Publishes are relucant to distribute their source in digital form cheaply. When eBooks copy iTunes and drop to few bucks or an unlimited monthly subscription, then these may take off.
In our local library the entire front area is filled with DVD/videos, InterNet terminals, sofas and reference librarians. If you make it to the back or basement you eventually find a bookshelf.
Ditto the local Barnes & Noble. They also have a coffeehouse and periodicals in front.