Some time ago, Pitchfork did 100 Awesome Music Videos, with one of their criteria being that the videos be available on YouTube. Those videos occasionally get yanked, as I discovered when I started doing something similar every Friday. I wouldn't mind if YouTube could present those legally.
The safety concern was that, if the shuttle had its tiles damaged by foam (or ice from the external tank) so that it couldn't come back to Earth, the shuttle couldn't transfer its orbit to the ISS for safe docking. Instead, NASA would have to send a second shuttle up and try an on-orbit shuttle-to-shuttle dock. That's why the Hubble mission was deemed "more dangerous than any other" -- the "other" missions are to the ISS, which can act as a safe harbor.
I'm collating the reviews posted to the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.int-fiction at http://brasslantern.org/. I expect to have them up starting in a day or so.
The main difference is that, for me, GTray occasionally stops working silently, requiring me to realize that it isn't announcing and then go download a new version. With luck that won't be the case with Google's version.
This isn't all that new. One of Infocom's pieces of interactive fiction, A Mind Forever Voyaging, was explicitly political. Similarly, Infocom's Trinity took on the subject of atomic weapons. Both of those games were released in the mid-1980s.
All of the reviews I've seen, including my own, have been uniformly positive. You can see some of those reviews listed on the author's page about the books. It's an extremely accessible book, which isn't easy to do, and the highest praise I can give it is that I wish I'd written it.
What I think we should be developing, in addition to a shuttle replacement, is robotic repair vehicles that we could use in case of a backup, or in cases of hardware that we really don't want people risking their lives for.
We're working on technologies for that right now, through things like NASA's Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology mission and DARPA's Orbital Express program. Right now we don't have good sensors for bringing two crafts together under robotic or tele-robotic control. With luck, we'll have them working and working well in the very near future.
And yeah, I am a rocket scientist.
Re:Who is Cringley these days anyway?
on
Cringley on E-voting
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The PBS Cringely was the third InfoWorld Robert X. Cringely writer. There wasn't really anything to "sell out" about, as he wasn't the first (or last) Cringely, merely the one who kept using the pseudonym after he and InfoWorld parted ways.
There are changes to the various interactive fiction languages to address various problems and shortcomings in the field. The trouble is, most of the easy stuff has been done. What's left now is trying to figure out what hard stuff can be done, or is even worth doing.
For example, right now most of the languages accept sentences of the form [VERB] [DIRECT OBJECT] [PREPOSITION] [INDIRECT OBJECT]. Occasionally someone suggests, "Why not add adverbs?" The general concensus is that doing so suddenly requires the author(s) to consider a gigantic range of actions (what's the difference in result between "squeeze toothpaste tube slowly" and "squeeze toothpaste tube violently"?), and that, though such parsing can be done, it doesn't add to the world model.
Nevertheless, even in traditional interactive fiction there is language development going on to increase what can be done. The example I am most familiar with is TADS 3 (http://tads.org/t3dl.htm), which is adding a lot of deeper simulation aspects, such as varying light sources, a better concept of distance, easy ways of getting around the standard atomicity of the world being broken up into discrete rooms, and support for deeper interaction with non-player characters. The big leap here is in giving a ready-made and easy-to-use framework for such advances.
Hi, I'm the competition organizer this year. In case you're wondering, all but a handful of the submitted games can be run on a myriad of OSes and platforms. You need the interpreters to run them, as most of the games run in various virtual machines; links to interpreters are available on the competition page.
If you want to download games individually, I'd request you use one of the bigger-bandwidth mirrors, like iBiblio.
Finally, these are short, often experimental games. Their quality can vary from great to not so great. If this whets your appetite for other text adventures, take a look at Baf's Guide to the IF Archive and the Interactive Fiction Ratings Site for ideas of other good games to play.
Funny you should mention the cigarette industry, as I thought of them while reading the article.
Dr. Howard's conclusions are to be released today by the ETC Group, an opponent of rapid nanotechnology development that asked him to perform the research review.
For years the cigarette companies paid researchers to do research that -- surprise! -- showed no link between cigarettes and cancer.
Is this guy's research good, his data valid, his choice of literature well-made? I don't know. But I do know I become a little more suspicious when the science is done at the behest of a group that has an extremely vested interest in getting a certain answer.
I don't about you guys but I personally do not want my cellular number to be made available so easily.
I'm curious to know if you read the article. I doubt most of the respondants here will, either, so I quote for you:
The centralized database of wireless numbers would be off limits to telemarketers, and consumers would be able to choose whether to have their numbers listed or unlisted, according to people familiar with the process.
Regardless of whether or not you believe the telemarketers won't get access to it, you can apparently choose not you have your number included. Now, what it doesn't say is if being listed will cost money, as unlisted land-line numbers do now.
Fair enough. What do you think the performance improvement of hydrogen cars will be over gasoline-powered ones? Me, I have trouble figuring what any will be beyond the potential environmental ones -- and I don't think those will be a strong selling point for a while yet. The car's big improvements over the horse and buggy were speed, endurance, and distance. I don't see hydrogen cars improving any of those.
Sure it's happened before, but note that, in your example of horses vs. cars, the replacement technology was an improvement in terms of performance. What is being proposed here is not a better car in terms of consumer performance -- they're talking about spending years and a lot of R&D to equal current car performance, not better it.
Regardless, I think my original point still stands: looking at the acceptance of the Prius and extrapolating that to say, "People are ready for hydrogen cars!" is too far of a leap.
When reading the article, one part in particular jumped out at me:
A mandatory portion should be set aside for marketing. Detroit will face a tremendous hurdle of consumer acceptance, and it should take full advantage of Madison Avenue's skills to convince the public that fuel cell cars aren't just viable, but desirable. This isn't a fantasy. Toyota's Prius, the first mass-produced gasoline/electric hybrid car, has sold more than 100,000 units since its 1997 debut, proving that the public will embrace a radically different automobile.
Is the Prius really a radically different automobile from the view of the consumer? It has the same sort of range as a traditional car, and you still have to fuel it up like other cars. The only radical differences I can see are its gas mileage (which is not always what it's cracked up to be) and the higher cost of repairs. I'm hesitant to extrapolate from its acceptance to the acceptance of a car that runs on entirely different fuel, and requires a now-nonexistent fuel infrastructure.
Rotational intertia (or, as I've always heard it called, the moment of inertia) is indeed a property of the object, just like mass is a property of an object. Its value depends on how the mass is arranged, though -- a solid disk and a hoop which both have the same mass and radius don't have the same moment of inertia.
You're right that angular momentum depends on rotational speed (omega), but it also depends on the moment of inertia. That's the I in your formula.
Nevertheless, as another poster pointed out, the mylar disc is small (moment of inertia goes up as you put more mass further away from the rotational center) and lightweight, so angular momentum effects will undoubtedly be tiny.
I'm guessing so. TADS is indeed the language he developed. It's still being developed, in fact, though these days it's available for free.
The original C source for TADS used 8-character variable and subroutine names, in order to compile on an old and restrictive C compiler. (Watcom, perhaps?) So maybe Mike learned more from Chuck's Power Koding than you mentioned.
This list is great if for no other reason than it gives me a chance to say "Superkamiokande!" in a superhero-like voice.
Say it with me. It'll make you feel better. "Superkamiokande!"
Of course, having research I worked on mentioned in passing ("Researchers also reported on the unusual expansion characteristics in an ultra-cold Fermi gas this month") was cool too.
Fermions can't do that unless they pair up. Fermions have half-integer spin, whereas bosons have integer spin. So if you pair two fermions up, you can get what is in effect a composite boson. This is where superconductivity comes from, since electrons are fermions: two of them form what's called a Cooper pair and start acting kinda like a boson, and can then all drop into the ground state like in BECs. A superfluid of fermionic gas is a big deal just like one of bosonic gas is.
Even without that, you still get wacky non-ideal-gas properties. The fermions have an outer pressure thanks to the Pauli exclusion property. It's what keeps neutron stars from completely collapsing -- the Fermi pressure counters the gravitational force. And that seems awful neat to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Some time ago, Pitchfork did 100 Awesome Music Videos, with one of their criteria being that the videos be available on YouTube. Those videos occasionally get yanked, as I discovered when I started doing something similar every Friday. I wouldn't mind if YouTube could present those legally.
The safety concern was that, if the shuttle had its tiles damaged by foam (or ice from the external tank) so that it couldn't come back to Earth, the shuttle couldn't transfer its orbit to the ISS for safe docking. Instead, NASA would have to send a second shuttle up and try an on-orbit shuttle-to-shuttle dock. That's why the Hubble mission was deemed "more dangerous than any other" -- the "other" missions are to the ISS, which can act as a safe harbor.
No, though there was one last year. Instead, you can grab the games from the various IF Archive mirrors:
i on2004/ s Xcompetition2004.html c ompetition2004/ m esXcompetition2004.html s /competition2004/
ftp://ftp.ifarchive.com/if-archive/games/competit
http://ifarchive.jmac.org/indexes/if-archiveXgame
http://ifarchive.flavorplex.com/if-archive/games/
http://ifarchive.giga.or.at/indexes/if-archiveXga
ftp://ftp.guetech.org/pub/guetech/if-archive/game
-Your friendly neighborhood competition organizer
I'm collating the reviews posted to the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.int-fiction at http://brasslantern.org/. I expect to have them up starting in a day or so.
The main difference is that, for me, GTray occasionally stops working silently, requiring me to realize that it isn't announcing and then go download a new version. With luck that won't be the case with Google's version.
This isn't all that new. One of Infocom's pieces of interactive fiction, A Mind Forever Voyaging, was explicitly political. Similarly, Infocom's Trinity took on the subject of atomic weapons. Both of those games were released in the mid-1980s.
Interestingly enough, there's "nuntalyli'u", a version of Colossal Cave translated to Lojban.
Throughout the book, spoilers are listed as such and set off from the text in such a way that it's not too hard to skip them.
All of the reviews I've seen, including my own, have been uniformly positive. You can see some of those reviews listed on the author's page about the books. It's an extremely accessible book, which isn't easy to do, and the highest praise I can give it is that I wish I'd written it.
What I think we should be developing, in addition to a shuttle replacement, is robotic repair vehicles that we could use in case of a backup, or in cases of hardware that we really don't want people risking their lives for.
We're working on technologies for that right now, through things like NASA's Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology mission and DARPA's Orbital Express program. Right now we don't have good sensors for bringing two crafts together under robotic or tele-robotic control. With luck, we'll have them working and working well in the very near future.
And yeah, I am a rocket scientist.
The PBS Cringely was the third InfoWorld Robert X. Cringely writer. There wasn't really anything to "sell out" about, as he wasn't the first (or last) Cringely, merely the one who kept using the pseudonym after he and InfoWorld parted ways.
There are changes to the various interactive fiction languages to address various problems and shortcomings in the field. The trouble is, most of the easy stuff has been done. What's left now is trying to figure out what hard stuff can be done, or is even worth doing.
For example, right now most of the languages accept sentences of the form [VERB] [DIRECT OBJECT] [PREPOSITION] [INDIRECT OBJECT]. Occasionally someone suggests, "Why not add adverbs?" The general concensus is that doing so suddenly requires the author(s) to consider a gigantic range of actions (what's the difference in result between "squeeze toothpaste tube slowly" and "squeeze toothpaste tube violently"?), and that, though such parsing can be done, it doesn't add to the world model.
Nevertheless, even in traditional interactive fiction there is language development going on to increase what can be done. The example I am most familiar with is TADS 3 (http://tads.org/t3dl.htm), which is adding a lot of deeper simulation aspects, such as varying light sources, a better concept of distance, easy ways of getting around the standard atomicity of the world being broken up into discrete rooms, and support for deeper interaction with non-player characters. The big leap here is in giving a ready-made and easy-to-use framework for such advances.
Hi, I'm the competition organizer this year. In case you're wondering, all but a handful of the submitted games can be run on a myriad of OSes and platforms. You need the interpreters to run them, as most of the games run in various virtual machines; links to interpreters are available on the competition page.
Let me reiterate the request to use BitTorrent to ease our bandwith requirements. BitTorrent links are available for all of the games in a zip file, all of the games in a Windows installer, and all of the required interpreters for Windows in an installer.
If you want to download games individually, I'd request you use one of the bigger-bandwidth mirrors, like iBiblio.
Finally, these are short, often experimental games. Their quality can vary from great to not so great. If this whets your appetite for other text adventures, take a look at Baf's Guide to the IF Archive and the Interactive Fiction Ratings Site for ideas of other good games to play.
On a serious note, it is good to know he was thinking of these issues for some time.
Funny you should mention the cigarette industry, as I thought of them while reading the article.
For years the cigarette companies paid researchers to do research that -- surprise! -- showed no link between cigarettes and cancer.
Is this guy's research good, his data valid, his choice of literature well-made? I don't know. But I do know I become a little more suspicious when the science is done at the behest of a group that has an extremely vested interest in getting a certain answer.
Sigh. I meant to say that you might have to pay to have your cell-phone number unlisted, not listed.
I don't about you guys but I personally do not want my cellular number to be made available so easily.
I'm curious to know if you read the article. I doubt most of the respondants here will, either, so I quote for you:
The centralized database of wireless numbers would be off limits to telemarketers, and consumers would be able to choose whether to have their numbers listed or unlisted, according to people familiar with the process.
Regardless of whether or not you believe the telemarketers won't get access to it, you can apparently choose not you have your number included. Now, what it doesn't say is if being listed will cost money, as unlisted land-line numbers do now.
Fair enough. What do you think the performance improvement of hydrogen cars will be over gasoline-powered ones? Me, I have trouble figuring what any will be beyond the potential environmental ones -- and I don't think those will be a strong selling point for a while yet. The car's big improvements over the horse and buggy were speed, endurance, and distance. I don't see hydrogen cars improving any of those.
Sure it's happened before, but note that, in your example of horses vs. cars, the replacement technology was an improvement in terms of performance. What is being proposed here is not a better car in terms of consumer performance -- they're talking about spending years and a lot of R&D to equal current car performance, not better it.
Regardless, I think my original point still stands: looking at the acceptance of the Prius and extrapolating that to say, "People are ready for hydrogen cars!" is too far of a leap.
When reading the article, one part in particular jumped out at me:
Is the Prius really a radically different automobile from the view of the consumer? It has the same sort of range as a traditional car, and you still have to fuel it up like other cars. The only radical differences I can see are its gas mileage (which is not always what it's cracked up to be) and the higher cost of repairs. I'm hesitant to extrapolate from its acceptance to the acceptance of a car that runs on entirely different fuel, and requires a now-nonexistent fuel infrastructure.
Rotational intertia (or, as I've always heard it called, the moment of inertia) is indeed a property of the object, just like mass is a property of an object. Its value depends on how the mass is arranged, though -- a solid disk and a hoop which both have the same mass and radius don't have the same moment of inertia.
You're right that angular momentum depends on rotational speed (omega), but it also depends on the moment of inertia. That's the I in your formula.
Nevertheless, as another poster pointed out, the mylar disc is small (moment of inertia goes up as you put more mass further away from the rotational center) and lightweight, so angular momentum effects will undoubtedly be tiny.
I'm guessing so. TADS is indeed the language he developed. It's still being developed, in fact, though these days it's available for free.
The original C source for TADS used 8-character variable and subroutine names, in order to compile on an old and restrictive C compiler. (Watcom, perhaps?) So maybe Mike learned more from Chuck's Power Koding than you mentioned.
This list is great if for no other reason than it gives me a chance to say "Superkamiokande!" in a superhero-like voice.
Say it with me. It'll make you feel better. "Superkamiokande!"
Of course, having research I worked on mentioned in passing ("Researchers also reported on the unusual expansion characteristics in an ultra-cold Fermi gas this month") was cool too.
Fermions can't do that unless they pair up. Fermions have half-integer spin, whereas bosons have integer spin. So if you pair two fermions up, you can get what is in effect a composite boson. This is where superconductivity comes from, since electrons are fermions: two of them form what's called a Cooper pair and start acting kinda like a boson, and can then all drop into the ground state like in BECs. A superfluid of fermionic gas is a big deal just like one of bosonic gas is.
Even without that, you still get wacky non-ideal-gas properties. The fermions have an outer pressure thanks to the Pauli exclusion property. It's what keeps neutron stars from completely collapsing -- the Fermi pressure counters the gravitational force. And that seems awful neat to me.
What? That's a terrible accusation to make! It's not as if I posted something similar last year or anything.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go count my four extra karma and cackle with glee at how well my plan to take over Slashdot is working.