I am pretty convinced that global warming is happening, as it did frequently in the geologic past. However, I am not convinced that it is going to be universally harmful. Climate will change, getting worse in some places and better in others. I have half a mind to invest in arctic ocean beachfront property in Nunavik Canada:-) Ships will be passing by soon. And it may become a great fishing and swimming spot. The vast Canadian plains to the south will become rich farmland as the western US becomes desert.
Writing is a skill that becomes rusty if you dont practice it often enough. People may have done alright in school, but lose capabilities if they dont write essays or papers a few times a year. I I know myself there have been some years where I havent written a several-page document nor made a powerpoint presentation. I start forgeting some word spellings and clear sentence and paragraph structure.
Cultures where the parents expect high results from their kids is the most important factor. Dirt poor immigrants like China, Vietnam, eastern European Jews had very smart kids because they parents expected it and took interest. Other countries like Cambodia nd Mexico have low performing kids because they do not value it.
Last week it was MicroSoft and Sun as lovey-dovey partners. This week it is Apple and IBM. Breakups and marriages all the time. You'd think we were on daytime TV or high school:-)
Marketers find that more than five generations in series can make your product seem stale (especially if it is really getting stale). So there is often a name/numbering change.
I considered the original Pentium to be like a x576, the PII a x686, PIV a x886, then lost count.
The old system was terse with single line message descriptions. This was the philosophy of the google home page and many news-readers. Now they throw a couple of pages of message contents at you. I find that cluttered and harder to navigate.
Some of us with memories back to the mid-1980s actually remember the creation of the InterNet. At that time the federal government approved funds (via Gore's bill) for transcontinental, high capacity computer data lines. This would complement and connect several existing academic and military lines. And businesses would be allowed to connect too. Tapping into these lines meant you had to standardize a few basic protocols not everyone was using at the time.
Earth and Mars exchange meteors far faster than life evolves. Scientists have found 30 Martian meteors so far on earth. And that doesnt count the majority that fall into the ocean or get buried.
I'd go even further and claim that Earth life originated on Mars. Mars probably geologically stablized earlier than earth. Mars had water and more air earlier in its history. Then Martian meteors could have "infected" earth.
There were some interesting papers at the 2004 Los Angeles SIGGRAPH on using planar arrays of cameras. Lots of people have tried stereo vision- because we have two eyes- but why stop at two? Cameras, projectors, and PCs have been inexpensive enough that you can experiment with redundant arrays of these, much like RAID revolutionized disk storage a decade ago.
Now what can you do with a planar array of cameras? You are seeing one viewpoint, or two, but *all* viewpoints, coarsely sampled. In some respects this is like a realtime hologram.
Marc Levoy's group at Stanford constructed an image "cube" of a scence- all depths of view and
points of view. You can pluck out individual
objects in a congested space like cocktail party
or animals in a cornfield by computer synthesizing the appropriate focus. It almost seems like you can see through objects or arround corners.
Two other groups performed wide-angle realtime 3D TV (without eyeglasses). You have all the viewpoints all the time. Another group used an insect-eye approach using a special lense array
and camera on each arrays. Then realtime computing would rearrange the pixels to present a 3D image.
Theres many other ideas to explore out there, if you liberate your thinking from the point of a view of a one or two eye creature.
Many biologists have noted the coincident occurence of multi-cellular bodies, sex and death about 700 million years ago. Single cells that reproduce by fission can potentially live forever. They usually perish from harsh environmental conditions, starvation, or being eaten. Though single cells can renew their DNA by conjunctive mixing with each other, they dont use the two-sex methods of most multicellular creatures. Sex probably allowed life to evolve faster. Death may be somehow related to se and multicellular bodies too, beyond evolving simultaneously. An ecological niche that lacked genetic death would eventually die from running out of resources.
Some science fiction writers speculate that immortality may somehow be linked to the ending of sexual relations. For example, Ann Rice's vampyres. I dont see why this is necessary, but it is an interesting speculation.
Something like 50-75% of ones cell regnerations/divisions happen *before* puberty. Some people speculate that you'd have to apply the immortality process in childhood. Perhaps even prevent puberty altogether, except for a limited caste that would bring new people into the world and die early.
I recall the Martian society in Stranger in a Strange Land where the immortal elders way outnumbered the mortal youngsters. Societal copnventions were frozen for millions of years.
cat FIV vaccine invented in one year
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In the early 80s cats were dying off from an immune system destroying virus too. Yetr medicine was lucky enough discover a vaccine quickly. Its a routine pet service now. This encouraged early predictions of a quick vaccine for the human version. But no such luck.
For a couple decades now NOAA has been on the conservative's hit list for abolition. One reason is because much of its research is into the environement. Another reason is that some small governement people believe that the government should outsource most, if not all research to universities, think tanks and companies.
I live near the the Boulder UCAR/NCAR/NOAA centers. Every year in recent years their proposed fudning gets whacked 25-50%, only to be restored last minute. But the restoration may not continue much longer.
Besides the obvious like credit card accounts and mortgages, credit scores are used in many other places.
These include insurance products of all kinds (though some states prohibit this), signing up for utilities, rent applications, some job applications. Even some rental car agencies have experimented with using your scores.
There is a scary practice called "universal default". One bad glitch in one credit account can be used to restrict credit in many other accounts, even though you didnt abuse those accounts.
I doomed now that I turned in my library books late last week !!!
When are we going to see something truely new from MicroSoft? After all they have one of the world's largest R&D labs which is well-respected at academic conferences. Yet commercially all we hear is one copycat prodcut after another, back to the beginning years of MS.
It seems like most of my classmates I've kept in touch with are software engineers, yet none of us majored in computer science. We have a philosopher, linguist, biologist and geologist among us. The dot.com boom, bust, and outsourcing fad seemed to pass us by.
I took some "trendy" courses in the business school (Course XV) and core theory courses (Course VI-1). The former long became obsolete, while the latter are still useful.
The deeper into space, the better. Too bad the stuff in movie 2001 did not materialize on that schedule. I was also charmed by the adventure in Have Space Suit, Will Travel by Heinlein.
Thats more of an interesting threat than RFIDs on passports. You could confirm a persons ID and location. You could even turn it on without the owner knowing and spy on their conversations. Many more people carry cellphones around that passports. However the Great Poodle (Blair' UK) and other countries are considering RFID ID personal cards.
Slashdot Mirror
I get phone calls and emails all the time asking me for money because I went there some years back. Not all that different form the other spams.
I am pretty convinced that global warming is happening, as it did frequently in the geologic past. However, I am not convinced that it is going to be universally harmful. Climate will change, getting worse in some places and better in others. I have half a mind to invest in arctic ocean beachfront property in Nunavik Canada :-) Ships will be passing by soon. And it may become a great fishing and swimming spot. The vast Canadian plains to the south will become rich farmland as the western US becomes desert.
Writing is a skill that becomes rusty if you dont practice it often enough. People may have done alright in school, but lose capabilities if they dont write essays or papers a few times a year. I I know myself there have been some years where I havent written a several-page document nor made a powerpoint presentation. I start forgeting some word spellings and clear sentence and paragraph structure.
Cultures where the parents expect high results from their kids is the most important factor. Dirt poor immigrants like China, Vietnam, eastern European Jews had very smart kids because they parents expected it and took interest. Other countries like Cambodia nd Mexico have low performing kids because they do not value it.
Last week it was MicroSoft and Sun as lovey-dovey partners. This week it is Apple and IBM. Breakups and marriages all the time. You'd think we were on daytime TV or high school :-)
Marketers find that more than five generations in series can make your product seem stale (especially if it is really getting stale). So there is often a name/numbering change.
I considered the original Pentium to be like a x576, the PII a x686, PIV a x886, then lost count.
I hear MIT people and other college students do this almot every year. The Learning Channel had a documentary about another MIT group that did this.
If I wear a MIT logo to a 21 table, will I be quickly expelled?
The old system was terse with single line message descriptions. This was the philosophy of the google home page and many news-readers. Now they throw a couple of pages of message contents at you. I find that cluttered and harder to navigate.
Some of us with memories back to the mid-1980s actually remember the creation of the InterNet. At that time the federal government approved funds (via Gore's bill) for transcontinental, high capacity computer data lines. This would complement and connect several existing academic and military lines. And businesses would be allowed to connect too. Tapping into these lines meant you had to standardize a few basic protocols not everyone was using at the time.
Earth and Mars exchange meteors far faster than life evolves. Scientists have found 30 Martian meteors so far on earth. And that doesnt count the majority that fall into the ocean or get buried.
I'd go even further and claim that Earth life originated on Mars. Mars probably geologically stablized earlier than earth. Mars had water and more air earlier in its history. Then Martian meteors could have "infected" earth.
There were some interesting papers at the 2004 Los Angeles SIGGRAPH on using planar arrays of cameras. Lots of people have tried stereo vision- because we have two eyes- but why stop at two? Cameras, projectors, and PCs have been inexpensive enough that you can experiment with redundant arrays of these, much like RAID revolutionized disk storage a decade ago.
Now what can you do with a planar array of cameras? You are seeing one viewpoint, or two, but *all* viewpoints, coarsely sampled. In some respects this is like a realtime hologram.
Marc Levoy's group at Stanford constructed an image "cube" of a scence- all depths of view and points of view. You can pluck out individual objects in a congested space like cocktail party or animals in a cornfield by computer synthesizing the appropriate focus. It almost seems like you can see through objects or arround corners.
Two other groups performed wide-angle realtime 3D TV (without eyeglasses). You have all the viewpoints all the time. Another group used an insect-eye approach using a special lense array and camera on each arrays. Then realtime computing would rearrange the pixels to present a 3D image.
Theres many other ideas to explore out there, if you liberate your thinking from the point of a view of a one or two eye creature.
Many biologists have noted the coincident occurence of multi-cellular bodies, sex and death about 700 million years ago. Single cells that reproduce by fission can potentially live forever. They usually perish from harsh environmental conditions, starvation, or being eaten. Though single cells can renew their DNA by conjunctive mixing with each other, they dont use the two-sex methods of most multicellular creatures. Sex probably allowed life to evolve faster. Death may be somehow related to se and multicellular bodies too, beyond evolving simultaneously. An ecological niche that lacked genetic death would eventually die from running out of resources.
Some science fiction writers speculate that immortality may somehow be linked to the ending of sexual relations. For example, Ann Rice's vampyres. I dont see why this is necessary, but it is an interesting speculation.
Something like 50-75% of ones cell regnerations/divisions happen *before* puberty. Some people speculate that you'd have to apply the immortality process in childhood. Perhaps even prevent puberty altogether, except for a limited caste that would bring new people into the world and die early.
I recall the Martian society in Stranger in a Strange Land where the immortal elders way outnumbered the mortal youngsters. Societal copnventions were frozen for millions of years.
In the early 80s cats were dying off from an immune system destroying virus too. Yetr medicine was lucky enough discover a vaccine quickly. Its a routine pet service now. This encouraged early predictions of a quick vaccine for the human version. But no such luck.
These systems have been around 20 years. I havent seen whether it is worthwhile to deploy them. Perhaps in dense urban centers with high crime.
For a couple decades now NOAA has been on the conservative's hit list for abolition. One reason is because much of its research is into the environement. Another reason is that some small governement people believe that the government should outsource most, if not all research to universities, think tanks and companies.
I live near the the Boulder UCAR/NCAR/NOAA centers. Every year in recent years their proposed fudning gets whacked 25-50%, only to be restored last minute. But the restoration may not continue much longer.
Notice the oldster on park benches feeding and talking to the park critters. Cheaper than buy a robot.
Besides the obvious like credit card accounts and mortgages, credit scores are used in many other places. These include insurance products of all kinds (though some states prohibit this), signing up for utilities, rent applications, some job applications. Even some rental car agencies have experimented with using your scores.
There is a scary practice called "universal default". One bad glitch in one credit account can be used to restrict credit in many other accounts, even though you didnt abuse those accounts.
I doomed now that I turned in my library books late last week !!!
When are we going to see something truely new from MicroSoft? After all they have one of the world's largest R&D labs which is well-respected at academic conferences. Yet commercially all we hear is one copycat prodcut after another, back to the beginning years of MS.
It seems like most of my classmates I've kept in touch with are software engineers, yet none of us majored in computer science. We have a philosopher, linguist, biologist and geologist among us. The dot.com boom, bust, and outsourcing fad seemed to pass us by.
I took some "trendy" courses in the business school (Course XV) and core theory courses (Course VI-1). The former long became obsolete, while the latter are still useful.
The deeper into space, the better. Too bad the stuff in movie 2001 did not materialize on that schedule. I was also charmed by the adventure in Have Space Suit, Will Travel by Heinlein.
Well maybe when I was a kid. I've settled on a PhD and some patents since then.
People can be [self] trained to practice deception easily all the time. Then it wouldnt take more efforts. Spies are trained in this technique.
Thats more of an interesting threat than RFIDs on passports. You could confirm a persons ID and location. You could even turn it on without the owner knowing and spy on their conversations. Many more people carry cellphones around that passports. However the Great Poodle (Blair' UK) and other countries are considering RFID ID personal cards.