Not the worst, but pretty mind-numbing...
A student job at some Big Ivy U keeping the library card catalog up to date, before there were computer databases.
Monday: "We got 3000 new books this month; please insert these cards."
Wednesday: "These 1000 books are no longer in the library; please remove their cards."
In a million book stack, with 1000 cards per tray and 1000 trays.
And of course, the requests are not sorted yet.
Sometime in the 1960s Americans lost their enthusiasm for science and futuristic things.
But the Chinese retain their enthusiasm and are doing things like going into space, building th world's tallest building, and superfast trains. If you wander around Chinese streets or schools you'll see this enthusiasm in posters and books etc.
Americans got jaded by the liberal pablum of 'Silent Spring' and 'Limits to Growth' in the 1960s.
Science became pollutors, war mongers, and could do no right. Though pockets of "true believers" remain in groups like Slashdot, it is sad to live in such an apathetic country.
A step up from rfid are smart chips, essentially very small computers. Europe has been using car-based versions for years for everything. I heard Sun micro once gave employees the option of smartchip rings with the functionality of employee pass cards. 24/7 jewelry like watches, glasses, rings, etc. are good places to put these.
Almost all measures of time compare one periodic cycle to another, such as the rotation or revolution of the earth, the vibration of quartz or cesium. The astronomical cycles are earth-biased. A Planck second is based on a combination of fundamental constants- the speed of light, the quantum of action, and gravitation constant. It is 1.351E-44 of a standard second. You would metricize it to 1.351 seconds for use in human activities.
Depending on the geographic situation, there can be seconds to minutes for the most descruction seismic waves to hit you (surface waves travel about 3 miles a second). That might give you enough time to shut down computers, natural gas feeds, subways, etc. A conference last month reviewed progress in this area.
Mexico probably has the best situation because its west coast quakes take about six minutes to reach Mexico City which has been mostly constructed on "mud". Southern California is less lucky, because it can be right over the quake. Japan and Taiwan are inbetween with cities about a minute from major faults. The Mexican system even puts text warn on TV like tornado reports, according to the abstract.
The traditional alarm methods listen to several stations in order to block out non-earthquake events and triangulate the location. But this takes 2-5 minutes waiting for enough information. Some research is going towards single-station, first couple second analysis, which may be useful for Los Angeles.
Meterologists have found that people dont pay attention to tornado or hurricane predictions unless they are better than 30% accurate over a city-size area and couple hour time window (one day for hurricane). Too many false alarms are ignored.
An earthquake prediction is considered successful in the scientific sense if it beats background chance. (Backround chance is computed by counting space-time windows through seismic catalogs). Earthquakes are so rare, e.g. large ones in tens of thousnds of days in California, that large space-time window can beat chance. However, no one has published a reproducable methods for general earthquake prediction (ecuding aftershocks, maximum force, etc) that has eat chance.
The most important prediction method is to antipicate the maximum horizontal force resulting from an earth quake. A force execeeding 10% the amout of earth's surface gravity, called a "g", at one Hertz can collapse a poorly designed building or overpass. 200% g is observed in the largest quakes. A guide to destruction in terms of "g" is here .
The United States Geological Survey has spent a lot of effort predicting maximum forces. this is based on the location of previous large earthquakes and local soil conditions among other factors. This has resulting in relatively low death rates of quakes of similar size. For example last month's central California quake and Iranian quakes were about the same size with death tolls of 3 and 30,000. Ditto 1994 Northridge and 1995 Kobe Japan with tolls of 55 and 6,000.
This Russian group first got attention in the US seismology community when it "predicted" the Loma Prieta (Silicon Valley) quake of 1989. The technique performs spatial-temporal statistical analysis of weaker earthquakes that proceed large quakes. The first President Bush even asked the US Geological Survey to look into this.
The method may work, but it has not yet passed the scientifically required of repoducibility by scientists outside the Russian research group. Several leading US seismologists have tried reproducing this analysis method without success. Either the method is devilishly difficult to reporduce, important details have [perhaps intentionally] not been published, or it really doesn't work. Furthemore, you dont see the US results in press, because people generally dont publish negative results.
Hopefully the reproducibility issues will be resolved and there will be a successful prediction method.
12,000 years ago the earth drastically warmed due to the end of a periodic ice age advance (we are due for more ice age episodes). There were some extinctions, perhaps aided by early human hunters. But the not the scale predicted by these scientiic Cassandras.
China has a focused and reliable space program. The US manned program has been meandering with creaky shuttles and bloated space station.
China can afford a space program more the the US. China's economy has been growing at 8% a year for 20 years, twice the US economy's rate. It has the second largest GDP, though per-capita is diluted by its huge population. It has a foereign trade surplus of $300 billion, while the US has an annual trade deficit of $500 billion. The 30% devaluation of the dollar with respect to the Euro is just the beginning of paying for this.
The base station of the US pathefinder was photographed by the high resolution orbiter.
It only filled a few pixels, so you had to stretch
your imagination to believe the black and white pixels matche the orientation of the airbags and base respectively.
I think there was a weak attempt to locate the failed 1999 lander's parachute photographically. The high resolution camera can only see miniscule parts of the surface.
A believable price has to charge for the price of the building and labor required to build and maintain it. A real price would be easily double this quote.
So thats one way to deal with the lack of women in India. Sons have always been strongly favored. With new medical technology- mainly ultrascan abortions- this dream has been realized. The male:female ratio in some villages is approaching 3:2.
On the oher hand, if anyone one is going to get a women, its going to be a smart, rich guy in Bangalore.
At $400 million a planetery robot, you could launch 200 for a $80 billion space station. You could have them crawling over every major body in the solar system.
If I cant find it on the first page of Google results, I dont look at the second page, but try to narrow the google search. I dont see how squeezing 100 or results graphically into a single screen is going to give a better search.
Slashdot Mirror
Not the worst, but pretty mind-numbing...
A student job at some Big Ivy U keeping the library card catalog up to date, before there were computer databases.
Monday: "We got 3000 new books this month; please insert these cards."
Wednesday: "These 1000 books are no longer in the library; please remove their cards."
In a million book stack, with 1000 cards per tray and 1000 trays. And of course, the requests are not sorted yet.
$699 was the limited-time "amesty" price.
You use the windows then to simulate any size house you want. I recall an Isaac Asimov novel about this premise.
Imagine seeing unsolicited advertised around you house all the time!
4f6e 6520 6269 6720 7374 6570 2066 6f72
:-)
2061 2072 6f76 6572 2c0a 6f6e 6520 6769
616e 7420 6c65 6170 2066 6f72 2072 6f62
6f74 2d6b 696e 6421 0a
(Its ascii-English, but you wouldn't
expect a robot to speak English, would you?
Sometime in the 1960s Americans lost their enthusiasm for science and futuristic things. But the Chinese retain their enthusiasm and are doing things like going into space, building th world's tallest building, and superfast trains. If you wander around Chinese streets or schools you'll see this enthusiasm in posters and books etc.
Americans got jaded by the liberal pablum of 'Silent Spring' and 'Limits to Growth' in the 1960s. Science became pollutors, war mongers, and could do no right. Though pockets of "true believers" remain in groups like Slashdot, it is sad to live in such an apathetic country.
A step up from rfid are smart chips, essentially very small computers. Europe has been using car-based versions for years for everything. I heard Sun micro once gave employees the option of smartchip rings with the functionality of employee pass cards. 24/7 jewelry like watches, glasses, rings, etc. are good places to put these.
Environmentalists are suing power companies because a windmill kills a bird every other year. here Imagine their flaming at a bit of nuclear power.
Almost all measures of time compare one periodic cycle to another, such as the rotation or revolution of the earth, the vibration of quartz or cesium. The astronomical cycles are earth-biased. A Planck second is based on a combination of fundamental constants- the speed of light, the quantum of action, and gravitation constant. It is 1.351E-44 of a standard second. You would metricize it to 1.351 seconds for use in human activities.
At eight amps, that should keep any room warm.
Depending on the geographic situation, there can be seconds to minutes for the most descruction seismic waves to hit you (surface waves travel about 3 miles a second). That might give you enough time to shut down computers, natural gas feeds, subways, etc. A conference last month reviewed progress in this area. Mexico probably has the best situation because its west coast quakes take about six minutes to reach Mexico City which has been mostly constructed on "mud". Southern California is less lucky, because it can be right over the quake. Japan and Taiwan are inbetween with cities about a minute from major faults. The Mexican system even puts text warn on TV like tornado reports, according to the abstract.
The traditional alarm methods listen to several stations in order to block out non-earthquake events and triangulate the location. But this takes 2-5 minutes waiting for enough information. Some research is going towards single-station, first couple second analysis, which may be useful for Los Angeles.
Meterologists have found that people dont pay attention to tornado or hurricane predictions unless they are better than 30% accurate over a city-size area and couple hour time window (one day for hurricane). Too many false alarms are ignored.
An earthquake prediction is considered successful in the scientific sense if it beats background chance. (Backround chance is computed by counting space-time windows through seismic catalogs). Earthquakes are so rare, e.g. large ones in tens of thousnds of days in California, that large space-time window can beat chance. However, no one has published a reproducable methods for general earthquake prediction (ecuding aftershocks, maximum force, etc) that has eat chance.
The most important prediction method is to antipicate the maximum horizontal force resulting from an earth quake. A force execeeding 10% the amout of earth's surface gravity, called a "g", at one Hertz can collapse a poorly designed building or overpass. 200% g is observed in the largest quakes. A guide to destruction in terms of "g" is here .
The United States Geological Survey has spent a lot of effort predicting maximum forces. this is based on the location of previous large earthquakes and local soil conditions among other factors. This has resulting in relatively low death rates of quakes of similar size. For example last month's central California quake and Iranian quakes were about the same size with death tolls of 3 and 30,000. Ditto 1994 Northridge and 1995 Kobe Japan with tolls of 55 and 6,000.
This Russian group first got attention in the US seismology community when it "predicted" the Loma Prieta (Silicon Valley) quake of 1989. The technique performs spatial-temporal statistical analysis of weaker earthquakes that proceed large quakes. The first President Bush even asked the US Geological Survey to look into this.
The method may work, but it has not yet passed the scientifically required of repoducibility by scientists outside the Russian research group. Several leading US seismologists have tried reproducing this analysis method without success. Either the method is devilishly difficult to reporduce, important details have [perhaps intentionally] not been published, or it really doesn't work. Furthemore, you dont see the US results in press, because people generally dont publish negative results. Hopefully the reproducibility issues will be resolved and there will be a successful prediction method.
(Read my lips: cold fusion)
Get a life.
Enough said.
The fault rate 134 out of 91K is comparable to paper ballots. Hopefully e-ballots will get this down to 0.1% for closely contested elections.
12,000 years ago the earth drastically warmed due to the end of a periodic ice age advance (we are due for more ice age episodes). There were some extinctions, perhaps aided by early human hunters. But the not the scale predicted by these scientiic Cassandras.
China has a focused and reliable space program. The US manned program has been meandering with creaky shuttles and bloated space station.
China can afford a space program more the the US. China's economy has been growing at 8% a year for 20 years, twice the US economy's rate. It has the second largest GDP, though per-capita is diluted by its huge population. It has a foereign trade surplus of $300 billion, while the US has an annual trade deficit of $500 billion. The 30% devaluation of the dollar with respect to the Euro is just the beginning of paying for this.
The base station of the US pathefinder was photographed by the high resolution orbiter. It only filled a few pixels, so you had to stretch your imagination to believe the black and white pixels matche the orientation of the airbags and base respectively.
I think there was a weak attempt to locate the failed 1999 lander's parachute photographically. The high resolution camera can only see miniscule parts of the surface.
A believable price has to charge for the price of the building and labor required to build and maintain it. A real price would be easily double this quote.
Should we call this 'The Orchard'?
So thats one way to deal with the lack of women in India. Sons have always been strongly favored. With new medical technology- mainly ultrascan abortions- this dream has been realized. The male:female ratio in some villages is approaching 3:2.
On the oher hand, if anyone one is going to get a women, its going to be a smart, rich guy in Bangalore.
At $400 million a planetery robot, you could launch 200 for a $80 billion space station. You could have them crawling over every major body in the solar system.
If I cant find it on the first page of Google results, I dont look at the second page, but try to narrow the google search. I dont see how squeezing 100 or results graphically into a single screen is going to give a better search.
If foreign programmers were so great, they would have invented the World Wide Web!
Don tell me - you mean they did? A recently knighted Brit invented it in Switzerland?