Why would the US Treasury fund any power plants, anywhere? No wonder the US government and budget is in such a mess. WTF are these people doing?
You think they dish out foreign aid so we can all hold hands and sing kumbayah? Because Money = Influence, that's why. It allows us to influence how the votes go at the U.N., what communications passing through a nation's territory get tapped, what routes are available for U.S. military supply shipments, what policies on drugs or extradition get implemented in those countries.
If America can't look in the mirror to examine itself, we'll use a foreign example. With China's increasing wealth has come increasing expenditures on foreign aid, and that is buying them access to ports and listening outposts around the globe, and you can bet their influence will keep expanding as long as the money keeps flowing.
It's not being completely ignored. For example, Tom's Hardware made a stink about Radeon 2D performance a few years back, and managed to get AMD moving to fix some performance bugs:
To cold_fjord: Your quoted article doesn't touch on any of the background, but it touches on an example of how history -- if not actually repeating itself -- often rhymes.
A key component of Nixon's victory had to do with the schism in the Democratic party that formed in the late 1940's to 50's between the Northern Democrats (your "hermetic liberal provincialism", which sought to embrace the burgeoning Civil Right movement), and the Southern Dixiecrats (who portrayed themselves as primarily opposed to the expansion of Federal power, but also happened to be rather socially conservative). The Dixiecrats splintered off into their own faction -- the "States Right's Democratic Party"; at least portions of it saw themselves as separate from the the mainstream Democratic Party, even while attempting a Democratic party-platform takeover from within.
Not surprisingly, this conflict eventually would prove terribly destructive to the Democratic Party. Even though the Northern Democrats eventually won control of the platform, the climax of the conflict would come with passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, at which time President Lyndon Johnson was said to have prophetically stated that "We have delivered the South to the GOP for a generation" (note: variations in claimed wording of LBJ's quote, and he infamously has also been rumored to have remarked that "We'll have those N------ voting Democrat for the next two hundred years."). Nixon successfully courted the disaffected supporters of Southern ex-Democrats, winning him the presidency and successfully splitting the formerly Solid South -- the move that was the source Pauline Kael's bewilderment in your quoted article.
Of course, every reaction has it's equal and opposite reaction(s). The absorption of the Dixiecrats would also mark the beginning of the fall for Rockefeller Republicans. It also resulted the beginnings of an exodus for Black Republicans who had long supported the "Party of Lincoln", although the migration to the Democratic Party would take many years to complete.
I remember hearing about a submarine design where the batteries were deliberately distributed in the outer part of the vessel, underneath the skin. While that increased the risk of damage to the batteries themselves, the heavy batteries also served as a layer of armor, giving additional protection for the ship's interior. So depending on the design decisions made, it might actually increase safety in some situations.
I'm having trouble thinking of a Chinese retail brand name that a majority of people worldwide have heard of. Same thing for Russia. Even India (Bollywood doesn't count).
Volvo (purchased by Geely of China) is a good examples of a purchased brand name. As far as native brands go -- Tsingtsao, Haier, Huawei, Lenovo are good examples of native brands, although none of them have very strong reputations.
You know, reading Chinese state media is always funny to me. They're always so friendly when they talk about changing the way the monetary system works, and they do the same thing on other topics.
"Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock." --Will Rodgers
Why isn't that consistent? Suppose your own staff has been working to try to get a new project out the door, but failing. The upper managment decides to buy some company that has a working version.
Do you keep both groups around?
I apologize if my writing was ambiguous. What I was speculating on, is that if all the decent engineers from Renesas have already left (in the three-month interval since the previously announced shutdown), then Broadcom would be left buying IP plus an empty building. So either Renesas has managed to retain its engineers, or Broadcom has no clue and is going to have no engineering team to support their new product.
Prior to the Broadcom's announcement, it seems that, back in June, Renesas announced it was shutting down it's Renesas Mobile division (which appears to be the entity that Broadcom is purchasing). Given that several months have elapsed, one has to wonder how many engineers might have already jumped ship.
Then again, it is possible Broadcom might have made the purchase just to get the Renesas IP and LTE chipset (which supposedly is ready to go), but that doesn't seem consistent with firing their own internal engineering staff.
But a microscopic MEMS device? Too tiny to handle the current.
Thing about MEMs is, if they're made using semiconductor manufacturing techniques you can make huge numbers of them all at once (unless it's a one-off deviced carved with an electron beam or such). Solid-state power-handling devices can have arrays of millions of mass-produced micro-circuits on an IC, handling macro-sized load in parallel.
Humans will never be able to drive in the winter, because the windshield will be covered in snow so you can't see out. I'm not seeing how this problem is any harder for a machine, especially since you already rely on mechanical wipers to solve it for you.
It's not the snow on the car that is the biggest problem. It's the snow on the road that obscures lane markings, signs, and road edges. Buried curbs can be detected using snow-penetrating radar, but non-raised features like painted-on markings are a difficult problem.
Or more likely, they did some demand modeling and found some value that made the economic sense?
Electricity demand follows a predictable pattern, with the lowest demand between 10pm and 7am. If surplus power (to storage) were to transition from positive to negative in the early evening, then 6 hours of stored capacity might work out pretty well.
Do we have evidence that that correlation has remained constant throughout history (and into prehistory apparently) ? or are we assuming that that is how it has always been since that's how it is now? (assuming of course that that's how it is now.)
That a greater proportion of men have shorter index fingers than ring fingers than do women was noted in the scientific literature several times through the late 1800s, with the statistically significant sex difference in a sample of 201 men and 109 women established by 1930, after which time the sex difference appears to have been largely forgotten or ignored. In 1983 Dr Glenn Wilson of King's College, London published a study examining the correlation between assertiveness in women and their digit ratio. This was the first study to examine the correlation between digit ratio and a psychological trait within members of the same sex. Wilson proposed that skeletal structure and personality were simultaneously affected by sex hormone levels in utero. In 1998, John T. Manning and colleagues reported the sex difference in digit ratios was present in two-year-old children and further developed the idea that the index was a marker of prenatal sex hormones.
So we have some evidence the difference was present as early as the 1800's, although that doesn't demonstrate that the ratio has necessarily remained constant, certainly not all the way back to pre-historical times. Given that Digit Ratios are a marker of in-utero exposure to Testosterone levels, I suspect it may very well have shifted over time (due to the correlation between Smoking, Obesity and elevated Testosterone levels in women).
Looking down at my hands, I see that I am a male who happens to be an exception to the rule, with a Digital Ratio of almost exactly 1 (Note: fingers should be measured from the palmar side, from fingertip down to the last skin-crease at the base of the finger; not straight-across the tips of the fingers). Fortunately for me, there is no strong correlation between In-utero and adult Testosterone levels.
FYI: If you've ever doubted the ability of Japanese manga artists to make anything cute, take a look at Gokiburi Gijinka, which features the adventures of adorable little Gokicha-chan and her misunderstood struggle to make friends with humans -- who for some inexplicable reason she can't understand -- keep trying to squash her.
The only thing that will come into contact with the superhydrophobic coating is moisture, so I wouldn't expect the coating wearing off to be as much of a problem there as, say, on your smartphone, which you handle constantly.
For polymer coatings, you have to worry about things like hydrolysis and thermal degradation of your polymer. Since surface geometry is also a major contributor to the hydrophobic character, I imagine there could also be issues with dimensional stability at the microscopic level.
I think we'll all look back with pride when we tell our grandchildren how we served on the day our country called us.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots." -The Secret War of Lisa Simpson
That happens to be a single trait that emerged in the DAG of life something like forty times or so, isn't it? In other words, it probably isn't the best criterion to judge the evolutionary proximity of these plant species.
Right, but I didn't realize it at the time that it was not such a fundamental trait. I just pulled up what knowledge I had about those plants from what I already knew (hence the result of me making a polyphyletic grouping).
Tell that to a wedding photographer. The prints you get do not come with permission to copy them and send them to everyone you know, whether for money or not.
That's actually a good point. Before hiring a wedding photographer always make sure to clarify what rights each party has to the pictures taken -- in writing -- and don't hire anyone who isn't willing to make some compromises (even if you have to pay a little extra and search a little harder). You have plenty of negotiating leverage before the wedding occurs, but not afterwards.
One day, we were on the lawn, where a maple tree and a white pine tree grow. I asked the students which were more closely related: The maple and the pine tree, or the maple and the grass? I could not convince most of them that the 2 flowing plants were more closely related. Most insisted that being trees, they were closely related.
How old were these children? You asked quite a difficult question that requires some fairly advanced formal logical and systematization skills. From a developmental perspective, a textbook answer would say these skills begin appearing around age 11 -- but practically these skills aren't really mature and generalize-able until around age 13~17.
Even being a Biology major, I still got the answer to your question wrong (I mentally blanked out the provided solution and tried to figure it out independently without references). I ended up clumping the Pine and Maple into a polyphyletic grouping as C3-photosynthesizing plants, with the grasses as C4-photosynthesizers. Granted, I made the mistake because my training veered towards the molecular-bio side of things, and I've been out of school long enough to forget much of my Linnaean cladistics.
My first thought upon reading the summary was, "Which Tsinghua University"? In this case it's the one in Mainland China, but there's a fascinating backstory behind my initial confusion regarding the history of Tsinghua University.
Following the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion (1899 - 1901), the China was made to pay an enormous sum in reparations to the great powers -- Russia, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, and the US. While the American share of the reparations was relatively minor (about 7% of the total) it still represented an excessive amount. American Secretary of State John Hay -- serving in the administration of Teddy Roosevelt -- arranged for about a third of the funds to be used for to set up scholarships, as well as a new school in Beijing which served to prepare students for overseas study in the US. It was this institution that eventually became Tsinghua University, one of the most prestigious learning institutions in China.
There's more to the history however. Following the Chinese Civil War, the defeated Nationalists retreated to Taiwan. A large portion of the Tsinghua staff fled with them and founded a new Tsinghua University in Taiwan (or perhaps they merely re-located the original to Taiwan, depending on your point of view). This other Tsinghua went on to become one of the top Universities in Taiwan as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Mine just says "Formosa." Isn't that a cheese?
It's a historical term from the Portuguese name Ilha Formosa, meaning "Beautiful Island".
Why would the US Treasury fund any power plants, anywhere? No wonder the US government and budget is in such a mess. WTF are these people doing?
You think they dish out foreign aid so we can all hold hands and sing kumbayah? Because Money = Influence, that's why. It allows us to influence how the votes go at the U.N., what communications passing through a nation's territory get tapped, what routes are available for U.S. military supply shipments, what policies on drugs or extradition get implemented in those countries.
If America can't look in the mirror to examine itself, we'll use a foreign example. With China's increasing wealth has come increasing expenditures on foreign aid, and that is buying them access to ports and listening outposts around the globe, and you can bet their influence will keep expanding as long as the money keeps flowing.
It's not being completely ignored. For example, Tom's Hardware made a stink about Radeon 2D performance a few years back, and managed to get AMD moving to fix some performance bugs:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ati-2d-performance-radeon-hd-5000,2635.html
I'm quite sure that, some day, these things will be labeling us as food...
How very right you are, considering these things are bacteria (see: Decomposition).
Well, if you only had one of them, you would only have a very tiny bit of Turing himself.
Well, his mommy had only that much at one point. Fortunately, it was capable of self replication :P
To cold_fjord: Your quoted article doesn't touch on any of the background, but it touches on an example of how history -- if not actually repeating itself -- often rhymes.
A key component of Nixon's victory had to do with the schism in the Democratic party that formed in the late 1940's to 50's between the Northern Democrats (your "hermetic liberal provincialism", which sought to embrace the burgeoning Civil Right movement), and the Southern Dixiecrats (who portrayed themselves as primarily opposed to the expansion of Federal power, but also happened to be rather socially conservative). The Dixiecrats splintered off into their own faction -- the "States Right's Democratic Party"; at least portions of it saw themselves as separate from the the mainstream Democratic Party, even while attempting a Democratic party-platform takeover from within.
Not surprisingly, this conflict eventually would prove terribly destructive to the Democratic Party. Even though the Northern Democrats eventually won control of the platform, the climax of the conflict would come with passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, at which time President Lyndon Johnson was said to have prophetically stated that "We have delivered the South to the GOP for a generation" (note: variations in claimed wording of LBJ's quote, and he infamously has also been rumored to have remarked that "We'll have those N------ voting Democrat for the next two hundred years."). Nixon successfully courted the disaffected supporters of Southern ex-Democrats, winning him the presidency and successfully splitting the formerly Solid South -- the move that was the source Pauline Kael's bewilderment in your quoted article.
Of course, every reaction has it's equal and opposite reaction(s). The absorption of the Dixiecrats would also mark the beginning of the fall for Rockefeller Republicans. It also resulted the beginnings of an exodus for Black Republicans who had long supported the "Party of Lincoln", although the migration to the Democratic Party would take many years to complete.
I remember hearing about a submarine design where the batteries were deliberately distributed in the outer part of the vessel, underneath the skin. While that increased the risk of damage to the batteries themselves, the heavy batteries also served as a layer of armor, giving additional protection for the ship's interior. So depending on the design decisions made, it might actually increase safety in some situations.
I'm having trouble thinking of a Chinese retail brand name that a majority of people worldwide have heard of. Same thing for Russia. Even India (Bollywood doesn't count).
Volvo (purchased by Geely of China) is a good examples of a purchased brand name. As far as native brands go -- Tsingtsao, Haier, Huawei, Lenovo are good examples of native brands, although none of them have very strong reputations.
You know, reading Chinese state media is always funny to me. They're always so friendly when they talk about changing the way the monetary system works, and they do the same thing on other topics.
"Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock." --Will Rodgers
Why isn't that consistent? Suppose your own staff has been working to try to get a new project out the door, but failing. The upper managment decides to buy some company that has a working version.
Do you keep both groups around?
I apologize if my writing was ambiguous. What I was speculating on, is that if all the decent engineers from Renesas have already left (in the three-month interval since the previously announced shutdown), then Broadcom would be left buying IP plus an empty building. So either Renesas has managed to retain its engineers, or Broadcom has no clue and is going to have no engineering team to support their new product.
Prior to the Broadcom's announcement, it seems that, back in June, Renesas announced it was shutting down it's Renesas Mobile division (which appears to be the entity that Broadcom is purchasing). Given that several months have elapsed, one has to wonder how many engineers might have already jumped ship.
Then again, it is possible Broadcom might have made the purchase just to get the Renesas IP and LTE chipset (which supposedly is ready to go), but that doesn't seem consistent with firing their own internal engineering staff.
Jesus does my lawn. He does great work. I found him outside Home Depot looking for work.
He any good at carpentry?
But a microscopic MEMS device? Too tiny to handle the current.
Thing about MEMs is, if they're made using semiconductor manufacturing techniques you can make huge numbers of them all at once (unless it's a one-off deviced carved with an electron beam or such). Solid-state power-handling devices can have arrays of millions of mass-produced micro-circuits on an IC, handling macro-sized load in parallel.
Humans will never be able to drive in the winter, because the windshield will be covered in snow so you can't see out. I'm not seeing how this problem is any harder for a machine, especially since you already rely on mechanical wipers to solve it for you.
It's not the snow on the car that is the biggest problem. It's the snow on the road that obscures lane markings, signs, and road edges. Buried curbs can be detected using snow-penetrating radar, but non-raised features like painted-on markings are a difficult problem.
Nighttime lasts longer than that.
Or more likely, they did some demand modeling and found some value that made the economic sense?
Electricity demand follows a predictable pattern, with the lowest demand between 10pm and 7am. If surplus power (to storage) were to transition from positive to negative in the early evening, then 6 hours of stored capacity might work out pretty well.
Do we have evidence that that correlation has remained constant throughout history (and into prehistory apparently) ? or are we assuming that that is how it has always been since that's how it is now? (assuming of course that that's how it is now.)
From Wikipedia's article on Digit Ratios:
That a greater proportion of men have shorter index fingers than ring fingers than do women was noted in the scientific literature several times through the late 1800s, with the statistically significant sex difference in a sample of 201 men and 109 women established by 1930, after which time the sex difference appears to have been largely forgotten or ignored. In 1983 Dr Glenn Wilson of King's College, London published a study examining the correlation between assertiveness in women and their digit ratio. This was the first study to examine the correlation between digit ratio and a psychological trait within members of the same sex. Wilson proposed that skeletal structure and personality were simultaneously affected by sex hormone levels in utero. In 1998, John T. Manning and colleagues reported the sex difference in digit ratios was present in two-year-old children and further developed the idea that the index was a marker of prenatal sex hormones.
So we have some evidence the difference was present as early as the 1800's, although that doesn't demonstrate that the ratio has necessarily remained constant, certainly not all the way back to pre-historical times. Given that Digit Ratios are a marker of in-utero exposure to Testosterone levels, I suspect it may very well have shifted over time (due to the correlation between Smoking, Obesity and elevated Testosterone levels in women).
Looking down at my hands, I see that I am a male who happens to be an exception to the rule, with a Digital Ratio of almost exactly 1 (Note: fingers should be measured from the palmar side, from fingertip down to the last skin-crease at the base of the finger; not straight-across the tips of the fingers). Fortunately for me, there is no strong correlation between In-utero and adult Testosterone levels.
FYI: If you've ever doubted the ability of Japanese manga artists to make anything cute, take a look at Gokiburi Gijinka, which features the adventures of adorable little Gokicha-chan and her misunderstood struggle to make friends with humans -- who for some inexplicable reason she can't understand -- keep trying to squash her.
The only thing that will come into contact with the superhydrophobic coating is moisture, so I wouldn't expect the coating wearing off to be as much of a problem there as, say, on your smartphone, which you handle constantly.
For polymer coatings, you have to worry about things like hydrolysis and thermal degradation of your polymer. Since surface geometry is also a major contributor to the hydrophobic character, I imagine there could also be issues with dimensional stability at the microscopic level.
I think we'll all look back with pride when we tell our grandchildren how we served on the day our country called us.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots." -The Secret War of Lisa Simpson
That happens to be a single trait that emerged in the DAG of life something like forty times or so, isn't it? In other words, it probably isn't the best criterion to judge the evolutionary proximity of these plant species.
Right, but I didn't realize it at the time that it was not such a fundamental trait. I just pulled up what knowledge I had about those plants from what I already knew (hence the result of me making a polyphyletic grouping).
Tell that to a wedding photographer. The prints you get do not come with permission to copy them and send them to everyone you know, whether for money or not.
That's actually a good point. Before hiring a wedding photographer always make sure to clarify what rights each party has to the pictures taken -- in writing -- and don't hire anyone who isn't willing to make some compromises (even if you have to pay a little extra and search a little harder). You have plenty of negotiating leverage before the wedding occurs, but not afterwards.
One day, we were on the lawn, where a maple tree and a white pine tree grow. I asked the students which were more closely related: The maple and the pine tree, or the maple and the grass? I could not convince most of them that the 2 flowing plants were more closely related. Most insisted that being trees, they were closely related.
How old were these children? You asked quite a difficult question that requires some fairly advanced formal logical and systematization skills. From a developmental perspective, a textbook answer would say these skills begin appearing around age 11 -- but practically these skills aren't really mature and generalize-able until around age 13~17.
Even being a Biology major, I still got the answer to your question wrong (I mentally blanked out the provided solution and tried to figure it out independently without references). I ended up clumping the Pine and Maple into a polyphyletic grouping as C3-photosynthesizing plants, with the grasses as C4-photosynthesizers. Granted, I made the mistake because my training veered towards the molecular-bio side of things, and I've been out of school long enough to forget much of my Linnaean cladistics.
The Tsinghua researchers...
My first thought upon reading the summary was, "Which Tsinghua University"? In this case it's the one in Mainland China, but there's a fascinating backstory behind my initial confusion regarding the history of Tsinghua University.
Following the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion (1899 - 1901), the China was made to pay an enormous sum in reparations to the great powers -- Russia, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, and the US. While the American share of the reparations was relatively minor (about 7% of the total) it still represented an excessive amount. American Secretary of State John Hay -- serving in the administration of Teddy Roosevelt -- arranged for about a third of the funds to be used for to set up scholarships, as well as a new school in Beijing which served to prepare students for overseas study in the US. It was this institution that eventually became Tsinghua University, one of the most prestigious learning institutions in China.
There's more to the history however. Following the Chinese Civil War, the defeated Nationalists retreated to Taiwan. A large portion of the Tsinghua staff fled with them and founded a new Tsinghua University in Taiwan (or perhaps they merely re-located the original to Taiwan, depending on your point of view). This other Tsinghua went on to become one of the top Universities in Taiwan as well.
I don't think the analogy holds too well.
That's cause you're holding it wrong. Here, you're supposed to hold that one like a joke:
*Ahem*
Q: "What kind of meat did the Priest have on Fridays?"
* Absurd questions demand surreal answers, and the surreal answer to every question is "a fish".
So it has come to this.