This work is really cool, and it's interesting to muse about what else might be imaged this way. But while 22 nanometer resolution may give insight into the structure of a virus, that would be awfully lousy resolution for a macromolecule (say, a protein) or even a macromolecular complex.
Maybe we need a better streaming video mechanism for popular live streams? I would imagine that if everyone's watching the same thing at the same time, it ideally shouldn't take up any more bandwidth than, say, one compressed standard definition cable channel. Signed, naive chemist.
Definitely informative. Slowly failing RTG's due to degradation of the thermocouples that convert heat into electricity is a likely cause of the eventual end of the Voyager missions. More info at http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html
From the article... "If you could take 10% off the weight of every car on the planet overnight, it would make so much more difference than all the new engine technologies and fuel technologies that people are talking about."
He said that taking 10% weight off of all the cars makes more difference than all the alternative technologies out there. That's because the alternative technologies out there have little market penetration so far, not because taking 10% weight off will make a car have hybrid-like efficiency.
Consider... a compact car might weigh around 1200 kg. 10% is two light passengers. If you get decent gas mileage carrying two friends around, do you suddenly get hybrid-like milage when you throw out the friends?
Academic journals most definitely are not obsolete. Turnaround time is very reasonable at the top chemistry journals. We're talking about times on the order of weeks for some rapid communication journals (from submission to peer review to edits to proofs to online publication), and a small number of months for full papers and reviews. Maybe some other fields suffer from slow publication, but that's not an inherent quality of academic journals.
In the electronic age, journals retain information in a searchable format that keeps up with the times. For some journals, even articles back in the 1800s are now online in PDF format. And the indexing services like Chemical Abstracts have gone online, too, moving tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) of abstracts to an online database. Don't publish within the paradigm, and your stuff doesn't get abstracted, and when your peers search for it, they don't find it.
Academic journals haven't become obsolete. They've evolved.
If I work in a chemistry lab, and I spend way more hours a day there than I do at home, then does that count as home chemistry? What about my coworker who for one summer decided to sleep in the lab (admittedly in the office area) nightly? Does that count?
What do I want in Office? How about consistency in the layout of a document, for starters? Every version (Mac or PC) seems to make slightly different approximations, resulting in differences in where page breaks or text/picture frames end up every once in a while. Used to be way worse, but it's still not perfect.
How about consistency in the use of special characters between Mac and PC? If I type pi (the lowercase Greek letter, using the Symbol font) in a Mac, I expect it to read as pi on a PC. And vice versa.
There's more than that. Apple computers now can run Windows natively or virtually at speed. Switching away from x86 chips now would be a major step back in that regard.
he's already doing deals to deliver some people's content faster Typical bit of marketing here - this shouldn't be allowed to stand. Deals aren't being done to deliver content "faster" - deals are being done to deliver other content slower. Bandwidth is a zero-sum equation. But bandwidth isn't a zero-sum equation. New bandwidth can be added. I have no clue what size deals we're talking about, but what if it actually is enough to financially justify the cost of additional bandwidth?
Evidently, psychologists prefer base 9.1. It's not that they are bad at math, but that the world at large doesn't understand base 9.1. As for why psychologists prefer base 9.1, I haven't the faintest clue. I'm not a psychologist. I'm one of those bad at math organic chemists.
Remember those commercials emphasizing how hot the Pentium chip is?
The new Apple commercial would say "We realize that over the years, people have really taken to hot chips. Our newest chip generates double the heat of our competitor's."
For a budget laptop, I think to the PowerBook Duo 230 that I bought used back in 1997. Running a 33 MHz Motorola 68030, it was "way underpowered" compared to my PowerMac 8600/250 desktop, but it ran the exact same version of MS Office, allowing me to have a cheap laptop on a student budget that complimented the desktop that my parents so generously bought me.
Low cost (paid $350 at the time), small size, light weight, great battery life, and running the exact same version of the programs I intended to run on it as what I ran on my desktop, with more than acceptable performance. Admittedly, it helped that the previous owner had stuffed 12 MB of RAM into the thing, back when many of my college classmates had 8 MB in their desktops. No, this wasn't my PageMaker and Photoshop machine. With a grayscale monitor, Photoshop would have been a waste of time, but that wasn't the reason I bought the machine.
Since it was networked to my desktop when at home, it didn't need any external drives (I installed MacOS 7.6.1 on it over an AppleTalk network), so to save money, I didn't buy the floppy drive or the dock, which the previous owner ended up selling separately.
A few other reviews, such as the CNet review, note the presence of a VGA port. In my view, this makes a perfect e-mail and PowerPoint machine. I imagine many professors who give PowerPoint lectures would love to have one. Carry a very light package to the classroom or on a seminar tour, but still have everything needed to give the lecture.
At least according to the specs on newegg.com this thing has VGA out. If one can squeeze PowerPoint onto the thing, it would make the ultimate PowerPoint presentation machine. A mere two pounds, ultra-small, and more than capable of giving PowerPoint presentations that aren't overly loaded with multimedia.
Can anyone verify the presence of a VGA port? eeepc.asus.com doesn't specify, though it may be because every other page on its website is down at the moment.
I don't need the very best computer, but if I needed/wanted the best, cost be damned...
That's hardly something that would fit under my desk. And there's no discussion of performance specs, just a bunch of hype. Besides, with serviceability taking a back seat, you won't be able to upgrade the thing readily, probably making it at the top of its game only for a few months.
Just stop publishing in those journals and create your own. The barriers to entry are pretty low to set up an on-line publication, and even dead tree publishing of scientific papers isn't that expensive.
Who is going to peer review the thing to help ensure the reader that it isn't a waste of time to read? How do we know where to look? Are we to scan everybody's website daily rather than look at a few centralized journal websites?
And even if you manage to get your paper noticed and to have people care about your self-published paper, who is going to ensure that the original, unedited paper is available for access in perpetuity, and indeed, that the paper is the real thing? The top journals I peruse on a daily basis have 100+ year histories, and I can readily access any paper ever published there. Even papers from the 1800s have been converted into PDF. (It's just scans of the printed version, but it will do.) I can also get supplemental information files that are many decades old by simply asking for them (and possibly paying a nominal fee). And if I download a PDF from the journal, I can be assured that what I am downloading is the real deal.
The undersigned, with the consent of all authors, hereby transfers, to the extent that there is copyright to be transferred, the exclusive copyright interest in
the above cited manuscript, including the published version in any format (subsequently called the "work"), to the American Chemical Society....
Journal of the American Chemical Society, the flagship journal of the ACS, also adheres to an embargo on previously disclosed communications (as opposed to full papers). My professor's communication once got disallowed because Chemistry and Engineering News (another ACS publication) accidentally wrote about the communication before it got to print (before the days of online journals). Of course, the two publications were highly apologetic and accepted the communications as full papers with some additional material added. Interestingly, there is some Corey total synthesis (don't remember which offhand) that was first disclosed as a full paper. I wonder if something similar happened there, if it was leaked for some reason and thus disallowed as a communication.
The difference is that aluminum was always around, but not readily converted into pure metal until recently (in the whole scheme of things). Gold has always been relatively easy to obtain as the pure metal, but it is simply rather scarce. Short of a bunch of nuclear synthesis of gold, that isn't going to change. Whether or not it will be desired is another issue, but its supply is constrained by supply, not by technology.
I don't understand why they can't design a cargo/supply ship that STAYS IN ORBIT. That could be interesting. After all, they could always be deorbited later if they're not of use. We probably shouldn't keep all of them around... that's way too much space junk near the station. But having a few around (probably the most recent few) might eventually prove useful.
Given the topic, I feel the need to add the following disclaimer. I am rehashing what I had previously wrote in various discussions at BikeForums.net and thus parts of this post may constitute self-plagiarism.
Individual problem-solving is characteristic of school and pretty much nowhere else. There is no business value in it. In introductory undergrad level science/math classes, the ultimate point of the problems solved in the class (both inside and outside the classroom) isn't to teach the student to solve those problems. Those problems are already solved for all time, and as some note, in the real world, you can look them up or hire someone to solve them. The point of studying these somewhat artificial problems is to build up an understanding in order to tackle real world problems. Unlike word problems, real world problems often are messy. They don't usually start out as neatly parsed equations with well-defined variables. They usually start out much more vague. Often, a quick order of magnitude assessment or a back of the envelope calculation is required to assess how one should proceed, but often, one doesn't have hard numbers to insert into these assessments. The careful study and mastery of the simple problems is in order to prepare students for solving problems of importance that have not already been solved and that may not fit neatly into any of the simple problems found in the classroom.
Some people are good with back of the envelope type estimations and calculations. I believe these skills can be developed, and they are developed by first building an absolutely solid foundation of problem solving with well-defined equations and variables, then moving on to trying to define problems when the problems are not as well defined, then moving on to being able to insert reasonable approximations and assumptions when such information is not readily available in any precise form. Consciously or subconsciously, such skills are used all the time. (Can you cross the street before the car on the cross street hits you? There is no time to measure the variables, but this is a relatively simple back of the envelope calculation.)
As far as I am concerned, it's why it makes sense to teach so many people organic chemistry someday when most of them will never use the subject in the real world anyway. Organic chemistry is a great case study in problem solving for most of them. They enter a world that they can't see, but nonetheless have to learn to describe. It has rules, but they're not rigid. There are explanations, but they may or may not have any bearing on reality. (In many cases, standard rules of thumb are based on explanations that are provably untrue, but these rules of thumb are nonetheless useful predictive tools.) They must solve problems that ask them to predict as well as problems that ask them to create. They must grapple with qualitative and quantitative problems alike. They must balance tactical and strategic considerations. This is real world problem solving, stripped to its essense, studied in one comprehensive example.
Group study is a great thing when done properly. But the way I see it, taking the easy route because that's what one would do in the real world is missing the point of education.
Slashdot Mirror
...if no one else touches the item!
This work is really cool, and it's interesting to muse about what else might be imaged this way. But while 22 nanometer resolution may give insight into the structure of a virus, that would be awfully lousy resolution for a macromolecule (say, a protein) or even a macromolecular complex.
Maybe we need a better streaming video mechanism for popular live streams? I would imagine that if everyone's watching the same thing at the same time, it ideally shouldn't take up any more bandwidth than, say, one compressed standard definition cable channel. Signed, naive chemist.
Definitely informative. Slowly failing RTG's due to degradation of the thermocouples that convert heat into electricity is a likely cause of the eventual end of the Voyager missions. More info at http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html
From the article... "If you could take 10% off the weight of every car on the planet overnight, it would make so much more difference than all the new engine technologies and fuel technologies that people are talking about." He said that taking 10% weight off of all the cars makes more difference than all the alternative technologies out there. That's because the alternative technologies out there have little market penetration so far, not because taking 10% weight off will make a car have hybrid-like efficiency. Consider... a compact car might weigh around 1200 kg. 10% is two light passengers. If you get decent gas mileage carrying two friends around, do you suddenly get hybrid-like milage when you throw out the friends?
Academic journals most definitely are not obsolete. Turnaround time is very reasonable at the top chemistry journals. We're talking about times on the order of weeks for some rapid communication journals (from submission to peer review to edits to proofs to online publication), and a small number of months for full papers and reviews. Maybe some other fields suffer from slow publication, but that's not an inherent quality of academic journals.
In the electronic age, journals retain information in a searchable format that keeps up with the times. For some journals, even articles back in the 1800s are now online in PDF format. And the indexing services like Chemical Abstracts have gone online, too, moving tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) of abstracts to an online database. Don't publish within the paradigm, and your stuff doesn't get abstracted, and when your peers search for it, they don't find it.
Academic journals haven't become obsolete. They've evolved.
If I work in a chemistry lab, and I spend way more hours a day there than I do at home, then does that count as home chemistry? What about my coworker who for one summer decided to sleep in the lab (admittedly in the office area) nightly? Does that count?
What do I want in Office? How about consistency in the layout of a document, for starters? Every version (Mac or PC) seems to make slightly different approximations, resulting in differences in where page breaks or text/picture frames end up every once in a while. Used to be way worse, but it's still not perfect. How about consistency in the use of special characters between Mac and PC? If I type pi (the lowercase Greek letter, using the Symbol font) in a Mac, I expect it to read as pi on a PC. And vice versa.
There's more than that. Apple computers now can run Windows natively or virtually at speed. Switching away from x86 chips now would be a major step back in that regard.
To clarify, at about $200 for a 1 TB drive, that's $0.20 (20 cents) per gigabyte, or 0.02 cents (1/50 cent, or 1/5000 dollar) per megabyte.
Evidently, psychologists prefer base 9.1. It's not that they are bad at math, but that the world at large doesn't understand base 9.1. As for why psychologists prefer base 9.1, I haven't the faintest clue. I'm not a psychologist. I'm one of those bad at math organic chemists.
99 (base 9.1) + 10 (base 9.1) = [(9 * 9.1^1) + (9 * 9.1^0)] + [1 * 9.1^1] (base 10) = 100 (base 10)
Remember those commercials emphasizing how hot the Pentium chip is?
The new Apple commercial would say "We realize that over the years, people have really taken to hot chips. Our newest chip generates double the heat of our competitor's."
Should sell like hotcakes
For a budget laptop, I think to the PowerBook Duo 230 that I bought used back in 1997. Running a 33 MHz Motorola 68030, it was "way underpowered" compared to my PowerMac 8600/250 desktop, but it ran the exact same version of MS Office, allowing me to have a cheap laptop on a student budget that complimented the desktop that my parents so generously bought me.
Low cost (paid $350 at the time), small size, light weight, great battery life, and running the exact same version of the programs I intended to run on it as what I ran on my desktop, with more than acceptable performance. Admittedly, it helped that the previous owner had stuffed 12 MB of RAM into the thing, back when many of my college classmates had 8 MB in their desktops. No, this wasn't my PageMaker and Photoshop machine. With a grayscale monitor, Photoshop would have been a waste of time, but that wasn't the reason I bought the machine.
Since it was networked to my desktop when at home, it didn't need any external drives (I installed MacOS 7.6.1 on it over an AppleTalk network), so to save money, I didn't buy the floppy drive or the dock, which the previous owner ended up selling separately.
A few other reviews, such as the CNet review, note the presence of a VGA port. In my view, this makes a perfect e-mail and PowerPoint machine. I imagine many professors who give PowerPoint lectures would love to have one. Carry a very light package to the classroom or on a seminar tour, but still have everything needed to give the lecture.
At least according to the specs on newegg.com this thing has VGA out. If one can squeeze PowerPoint onto the thing, it would make the ultimate PowerPoint presentation machine. A mere two pounds, ultra-small, and more than capable of giving PowerPoint presentations that aren't overly loaded with multimedia.
Can anyone verify the presence of a VGA port? eeepc.asus.com doesn't specify, though it may be because every other page on its website is down at the moment.
I don't need the very best computer, but if I needed/wanted the best, cost be damned...
That's hardly something that would fit under my desk. And there's no discussion of performance specs, just a bunch of hype. Besides, with serviceability taking a back seat, you won't be able to upgrade the thing readily, probably making it at the top of its game only for a few months.
Who is going to peer review the thing to help ensure the reader that it isn't a waste of time to read? How do we know where to look? Are we to scan everybody's website daily rather than look at a few centralized journal websites?
And even if you manage to get your paper noticed and to have people care about your self-published paper, who is going to ensure that the original, unedited paper is available for access in perpetuity, and indeed, that the paper is the real thing? The top journals I peruse on a daily basis have 100+ year histories, and I can readily access any paper ever published there. Even papers from the 1800s have been converted into PDF. (It's just scans of the printed version, but it will do.) I can also get supplemental information files that are many decades old by simply asking for them (and possibly paying a nominal fee). And if I download a PDF from the journal, I can be assured that what I am downloading is the real deal.
For chemistry:
Journal of the American Chemical Society, the flagship journal of the ACS, also adheres to an embargo on previously disclosed communications (as opposed to full papers). My professor's communication once got disallowed because Chemistry and Engineering News (another ACS publication) accidentally wrote about the communication before it got to print (before the days of online journals). Of course, the two publications were highly apologetic and accepted the communications as full papers with some additional material added. Interestingly, there is some Corey total synthesis (don't remember which offhand) that was first disclosed as a full paper. I wonder if something similar happened there, if it was leaked for some reason and thus disallowed as a communication.Interesting stuff. I think I would have enjoyed Sim Mars.
The difference is that aluminum was always around, but not readily converted into pure metal until recently (in the whole scheme of things). Gold has always been relatively easy to obtain as the pure metal, but it is simply rather scarce. Short of a bunch of nuclear synthesis of gold, that isn't going to change. Whether or not it will be desired is another issue, but its supply is constrained by supply, not by technology.
Some people are good with back of the envelope type estimations and calculations. I believe these skills can be developed, and they are developed by first building an absolutely solid foundation of problem solving with well-defined equations and variables, then moving on to trying to define problems when the problems are not as well defined, then moving on to being able to insert reasonable approximations and assumptions when such information is not readily available in any precise form. Consciously or subconsciously, such skills are used all the time. (Can you cross the street before the car on the cross street hits you? There is no time to measure the variables, but this is a relatively simple back of the envelope calculation.)
As far as I am concerned, it's why it makes sense to teach so many people organic chemistry someday when most of them will never use the subject in the real world anyway. Organic chemistry is a great case study in problem solving for most of them. They enter a world that they can't see, but nonetheless have to learn to describe. It has rules, but they're not rigid. There are explanations, but they may or may not have any bearing on reality. (In many cases, standard rules of thumb are based on explanations that are provably untrue, but these rules of thumb are nonetheless useful predictive tools.) They must solve problems that ask them to predict as well as problems that ask them to create. They must grapple with qualitative and quantitative problems alike. They must balance tactical and strategic considerations. This is real world problem solving, stripped to its essense, studied in one comprehensive example.
Group study is a great thing when done properly. But the way I see it, taking the easy route because that's what one would do in the real world is missing the point of education.