Thanks for the info. I had a friend who told me about this one. He seemed to think it had been done. I'll have to talk to him... Also, couldn't you just leave all the switches on and wire the leads to each room through relays? That'd be a whole lot easier.
I'd also like to point out the really cool fact that I got 42nd comment on a story about MIT. : )
Sorry. I guess I was a little confused. I looked it up and discovered that this particular joke did not occur on April Fools Day. Also, the dome became a beenie, not the clocktower. It's still funny, though.
MIT students are notorious for this kind of thing. They're very good at April Fool's jokes especially. I can't wait to see what they do this year. A few years ago, they turned the clocktower into a giant beenie cap, complete with rotating propeller, overnight! That was probably the best one.
At another school (Please tell me if you know which one...), the students rigged the electrical lines on one dorm so they could play Tetris: using the room lights as blocks.
Sorry about that. Typo. It was supposed to say that he taught at Caltec. Oops.
As for being the only modern physicist to make the list, that was the exact termenology used on the list. (They obviously were not refering only to post-Newton.) Einstein was first, if you were wondering.
It seems that when NASA ran missions that cost hundreds of times as much, the media griped about the high cost and our tax dollars and so on. When NASA cut costs drastically, a few missions fail. Now, the press is griping about the money down the drain and your tax dollars and so on. No win situation... So many people love to point out the problems that no one saw the counterpoint until it was tried out.
I think NASA is basically saying that they are going back to the way things used to be. It was more expensive, but it was also more cost effective. I think NASA is less concerned with public opinion now, and more with science. It's for the better. I hope it lasts.
One of the more interesting tidbits about nanotechnology is who first presented the idea as a possibility. In fact, he was none other than the great Richard Feynman.
In case you don't know, Feynman was a leading physicists of the 20th century. He went to school at MIT and Princeton, worked at Los Alamos, investigated Challenger, and taught at Princeton. He was a very interesting guy. If you ever get a chance, read one of his books, such as "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" or "What do you care what other people think." Quite a character. Feynman was in the news recently as the only modern physicist to make the top 10 physicists of all time (He was number 7).
Somehow, I doubt AOL is going to clean up its act. In fact, I don't think AOL's going to care one bit. They don't care about the bad publicity. They get enough of that as it is. Who knows? It might even work for them. Any publicity is good publicity. Sooner or later, some misguided techno-phobic reporter is going to desperately attempt to convey this information the public, the public's going to see the word AOL, and AOL stock will go up.
And they obviously don't care about the fact that they have a problem. They've got enough of those in the inbox as it is. They never fix them. Instead, they add more "features" and make it more difficult to reach the areas that are buggy.
First of all, this is hardly new news. Engineers and other cool people (like the geeks at MIT : ) have been using Lego for years. Lego is by far the most versatile prototyping tool in existance. And here's why:
Easy and fast construction
Equally easy and fast reconstruction (stuff happens...)
Incredibly well designed modular components (Have you seen all the ways these parts can fit together?)
Durability and structural integrity (Hey, for plastic...)
Simplicity
Amazingly wide assortment of engineering components (There are differentials : )
Frequent updates (Remember the differentials? Lego has released three versions; each better than the last)
Relatively low cost
Customer friendly company
That, my friends, is why Lego is not just a toy.
Four years ago, well before Mindstorms, I bought the Control Lab. It has 8 input (4 Digital, 4 Analog) and 8 output ports. The only catch is that it has to be tethered via serial cable. The software is nice too, because you can even make a little GUI. It has a pretty impressive assortment of commands too; much more than Mindstorms. If you use Lego for prototyping or just fun with engineering, I highly recommend you try one of these.
I've built pretty much everything out of Lego. I've built automated fighting robots, a robot that could assemble Lego, and an automatic car test track (to name a few).
My current project is by far the most impressive. I even managed to turn it into a winning Science Fair project. It's a Digital Mechanical Computer built entirely out of Lego pieces. I'm working on a nice site to explain the mechanisms and such. The entire device is modular and the ALU is expandable (I currently have it at two 2-bit inputs in parallel). The ALU returns the OR,AND, XOR, Sum, and Carry of the inputs. It has registers and everything. Very cool. Right now, the device contains about 400 gears (including 31 differentials) in very tight quarters.
If you're looking for a good book, try Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It was written 20 years ago by Douglas Hofstadter, the man who's organizing this. The book covers everything from math to psychiatry and everything in between. Plus, it's just been released in a 20th anniversary edition, so it's possible to find again. This man truly knows what he's talking about. Simply a must read for any geek.
There was an IBM ad not long ago where a technician comes to a house to fix a refrigerator. But the family is convinced the refrigerator isn't broken. They tell the man that they don't need a repairman because it isn't broken. He responds that he knows it isn't broken - yet. The caption then reads something to the effect of, "Appliances that call for their own help. Who'd have thought?"
However, when you think about it, this wouldn't be as great as it sounds. First of all, who wants to have a stranger come to their door unexpected? A con-man could tell you that your refrigerator called him, and you'd be none the wiser. But, even if the appliance tells you it called for help (It didn't in the ad.), who knows who else got that message. Maybe it wasn't just your doctor...
Another Lego site to check out
on
Lego CAD
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· Score: 4
If you want more information on CAD programs for Lego, go to lugnet They have all sorts of stuff for Lego freaks (like me). You'll probably find the CAD section informative.
Lego isn't just a children's toy anymore. With some of the Technic parts available (I'm not just talking about the electronics.), pretty much anything can be built using Legos. The prototyping capabilities are enormous. I've built automated robotic soldiers and a robot that could assemble Legos (yes, I know the plural is really Lego), to name a few. My most recent project got complicated enough to enter (and win) in the Science Fair. Suffice it to say that the final device contains almost 500 gears (that's a lot) and is fully modular so it can be expanded easily. The engineering aspect of this thing is incredible. I'm working on a nice webpage with all my notes and drawings and (hopefully) building instructions. No, I won't tell you what it is. You'll find out soon enough. Just leave it to say, you can do pretty much anything with Legos. If you don't believe me, check out MIT's page. They use Legos too : )
LegoCAD, a joint venture with AutoDesk by the way, only features parts from the simple machines set. This set, used for teaching engineering principles, has a very limited number of components. Also, it doesn't do animations. (Well, if you want to keep moving the parts and rendering over and over...) Instead, I use LeoCAD or, the even better, MLCAD. Both are based on LDraw, but provide a graphical interface instead of a text based one. More parts than you'll ever need, including old versions of parts.
Things have changed. Back in the Nintendo days, you could keep people enthused with games inferior to the ones on my calculator. Now the people want internet...
How many companies have made a fortune with no more than good advertising on the basis of "Easy Internet Access?" Let's see. There's AOL, which offers pretty much nothing at high cost. Yet AOL is rolling in cash and the stock soars. Then there was Web-TV (What a dumb idea that probably made some money for a while...) Much better are companies like E-Machine, that provide cheap computers for little more than internet access. It's supply and demand at its finest...
Problem: Some of us don't want a cheap little computer. But it's becoming more and more difficult to find an ad for a good computer these days.
It seems virtually anything can be advertised on the basis of internet access. Sega tried it with the Dreamcast. But their network still isn't up and is only for multiplayer gaming anyway.
The X Box and this new thing both promise internet access. The well known company advertises the power of their machine. (It makes my PC look kind of sorry. I need a new one...) This new guy focuses on the fact that it provides internet access. They'll make a fortune, no doubt. However, it seems that anyone who advertises heavily on the internet is using it as a facade to cover up a cheap product.
These guys may change the trend. The fact that this thing is going to run Linux suggests that they are trying to cater to the geeks, not the masses who are impressed by internet access alone. The interesting thing about this product is that they list pretty good specs, but only seem to espouse the internet. I'm curious to see how this thing operates, let alone how it does in stores.
At the very least, they're going to have some trouble marketing this thing. The masses are going to complain about having to learn Linux (boo-hoo) whereas an ad campaign aimed toward geeks probably wouldn't be cost effective.
It's going to be interesting. But with all that competition, we can at least expect a wide variety of high quality consoles and games. Even if it fails, it will have done some good...
I agree. I'm not even going to try to argue with you. However, I don't think even connecting cities with something like this is going to come into widespread use anytime soon. There's too much other technology that has to come into existance before this can become practical for even the largest network. For now, I think we have to stick to what we've been using.
Of course something like this will be great in the future. I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that. But right now, I think this technology requires too much more before it can become useful. The technology is in it's infancy and a little ahead of its time. Nothing came of DaVinci's flying machine.
And I wasn't trying to suggest that I would be using something like this on my PC. It was simply an example of how incredibly large 3.28 Terabits is.
In short, my point was not that this is a useless technology. My point was that this technology is a bit impractical with today's resources.
I'm just as excited about this as everyone else is, but when you stop to think about it, what's the point? Let's do the math:
3.28 Tbps =.41 TBps = 410 GBps
410 Gigabytes per second. My present hard drive only holds 12.1 Gigabytes. So this thing could transmit the contents of my computer 33.88 times. And that's only if the harddrive could be read that fast (which it obviously can't).
So my question is what on Earth are we going to be sending at speeds like 3.28 Terabits per second? Even if we were to split up this little bundle and give each computer in a building one of those strands (for one wavelength), 40 Gbps is still huge. I don't think there's a practical medium for data storage of vast amounts of data that can be read at speeds even close to that.
So, we probably can't read the data that fast, but let's suppose we could. In theory, we could send this data at 3.28 Tbps. Now what are we going to do with it at the receiving end? Can anyone's processor even deal with data at speeds like that? (Especially while running an OS and who knows what else.) And how are we going to store it? Again, we need incredibly fast data storage to make this work.
In short, with present technology, this system could not truly run at 3.28 Tbps anyway. Processing and data storage speeds would slow it down. The 3.28 Tbps seems more symbolic than anything else...
Wow, I hate being the realistic geek...
Fun with number theory
on
Happy Pi Day!
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· Score: 1
While we're celebrating pi day, we need to remember that today is also Albert Einstein's birthday. Happy birthday Al!
My favorite formula for pi:
lim (as n approaches infinity) sin(180/n)*cos(180/n)*n
This is the easiest to derive. The area of a regular polygon with n sides and radius R is:
sin(180/n)*cos(180/n)*n*R^2
And since the area of a regular polygon with infinite sides is pi*R^2 (we can prove that it is directly proportional to R^2), we obtain that pi is equal to the above limit.
Of course, this formula is useless if the algorithm you use for sin and cos uses pi. But there are plenty that don't.
We can't forget digit extraction for pi:
Sigma (as n goes from 0 to infinity) (4/(8n+1) - 2/(8n+4) - 1/(8n+4) - 1/(8n+6)) * (1/16)^n
You can find that formula in a legible form at http://www.mathsoft.com/asolve/plouffe/plouffe.htm l
And let's not forget our good buddy Ramanajun (sp). The man was an absolute genius. He came up with five or 6 expressions for (are you ready for this?) 1/pi. I'd type them here, but they'd be mulilated in standard text (much like the digit extraction theorem was).
Finally:
pi^2/6 = sigma (as x goes from 1 to infinity) 1/(x^2)
On another fun note, I'll now list off a few other fun tricks with transidential numbers and other fun stuff:
The nth Fibonacci number is (phi^n-psi^n)/sqrt(n)
e^(pi*i) = -1
i^i = e^(-pi*i/2)
tau(tau(15!)) = 42
My favorite is the last one : )
On a final note, you can't appreciate pi until you read The Joy of Pi. You can enjoy some of the fun at www.joyofpi.com The book has all sorts of fun things. Among them are the first 1,000,000 digits of pi printed in the background on every page. (You can find 10,000 at the webpage.) Better still, important digits are marked. Ever wonder what the 3rd digit of pi is? What about the 31st? 314th? 3141st? 31415th?
And, of course, the most important digit: THE 42nd DIGIT OF PI : ) I looked it up once. I think it's a 9.
Why didn't anyone celebrate e day? What about phi day? Why not celebrate the 42nd day of the year?
This concludes yet another edition of "Grant Babbles meaninglessly."
I was thinking the same thing. There was no Samuel in WarGames that I know of. It would have been quite a stretch for Cyrix to name a processor after the WOPR anyway. It would probably take about 10 minutes to ask if you'd like to play a game. And the really fast Tic-Tac-Toe...
It could be worse, I suppose... The AMD K6II could have been named after a supercomputer...
Software used to perform some complicated task that an average person won't ever want to do doesn't need to be simple. If only geeks will need the program anyway, does it really matter? Howver, if the program is something that will be commonly used, it does need to be simple. (Obviously) Programs like OS's and ISP's fall in this category.
Take AOL for example. (We all hate it right?) One of its biggest downfalls (from a geek's perspective) is that the UI is TOO "easy" to use. As a result, the program is absolutely huge! Besides that, they made complex things more difficult. i.e. about 10 clicks through AOL servers (You know, the slow ones...) just to log into an FTP server. All that space and it's just an inconvenience. BUT, the average person off the street loves it. It's lousy software that makes it easy to do stupid things that aren't that hard to begin with. But that makes this particular brand of user happy.
In short, most of the open-source software was never meant for the typical person off the street anyway. So why worry?
OK. You've all had fun mocking the fact that there is no HAL and no mission to Jupiter (movie) or Saturn (book). Did you ever stop to think about some of the things Clarke came up with that actually happened? The communication satellite was Clarke's idea. 2010 and 2061 discuss Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Clarke suggests that Europa is a large ocean covered by a layer of ice. He also suggests that on the ocean bottom are hot vents on which life could form. These predictions were made well before the launch of the Galileo probe. Today, we have reason to believe that all of these could be true. Not bad for an author in the 80's. Godspeed Mr.Clarke and godspeed HAL!
Actually, the original theory was that HAL was named to be one step ahead of IBM. IBM was a major contributer to 2001 (the movie) and was angered greatly when such rumors began to surface. Arther C. Clarke even tried to end the debate in 2010 (the line doesn't appear in the movie version). Someone starts joking with HAL's creator (I believe his name was Dr. Chandra) that HAL was named to be one step ahead of IBM. He becomes enraged and begins to scream about how HAL stands for Heuristic Algorithm. Clarke explains in the beginning of the book that this line was added simply to put an end to the rumors. Obviously, that didn't work...
Someone may have already said this- there are a lot of comments here- but I didn't see Newton mentioned. Newton pioneered physics. Without him, most of the other people mentioned wouldn't have gotten anywhere. My picks (in no particular order) would have to include:
Newton - Physics
Einstein, Bohr - Quantum Mechanics (among others)
Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler - Astronomy
Edison, Watt, Volta, Marconi - Inventors
I tried to limit this list to people who laid the groundwork for many of the important discoveries you've all been mentioning.
Quite frankly, Y2K panic was the media's fault. We had predictions of doom from people who had no idea what they were talking about. We had NBC's nice little movie in which objects that don't rely on the year still malfunctioned ("His pulse rate isn't 240...It must be Y2K"). Then when it was all over, the media decided that the blame for the panic had to be redirected quickly. (And they seemed pretty disappointed that nothing happened.) I think there could have been problems and we did need to prepare, but scaring the public is not preparation. Most of the predicted problems could have just as easily been caused by the panic itself. A food or gas shortage could be caused by stockpiling. Loss of telephone service could be caused by everyone checking for a dial tone at midnight. You get the idea. If you want a case study, look at Italy. They started preparing about four months ago, and got mocked for being so late. BUT NOTHING HAPPENED! And I still say the big party is 2048 (100000000000 in binary).
Slashdot Mirror
Dead link
Thanks for the info. I had a friend who told me about this one. He seemed to think it had been done. I'll have to talk to him... Also, couldn't you just leave all the switches on and wire the leads to each room through relays? That'd be a whole lot easier.
I'd also like to point out the really cool fact that I got 42nd comment on a story about MIT. : )
Sorry. I guess I was a little confused. I looked it up and discovered that this particular joke did not occur on April Fools Day. Also, the dome became a beenie, not the clocktower. It's still funny, though.
MIT students are notorious for this kind of thing. They're very good at April Fool's jokes especially. I can't wait to see what they do this year. A few years ago, they turned the clocktower into a giant beenie cap, complete with rotating propeller, overnight! That was probably the best one.
At another school (Please tell me if you know which one...), the students rigged the electrical lines on one dorm so they could play Tetris: using the room lights as blocks.
Sorry about that. Typo. It was supposed to say that he taught at Caltec. Oops.
As for being the only modern physicist to make the list, that was the exact termenology used on the list. (They obviously were not refering only to post-Newton.) Einstein was first, if you were wondering.
It seems that when NASA ran missions that cost hundreds of times as much, the media griped about the high cost and our tax dollars and so on. When NASA cut costs drastically, a few missions fail. Now, the press is griping about the money down the drain and your tax dollars and so on. No win situation... So many people love to point out the problems that no one saw the counterpoint until it was tried out.
I think NASA is basically saying that they are going back to the way things used to be. It was more expensive, but it was also more cost effective. I think NASA is less concerned with public opinion now, and more with science. It's for the better. I hope it lasts.
One of the more interesting tidbits about nanotechnology is who first presented the idea as a possibility. In fact, he was none other than the great Richard Feynman.
In case you don't know, Feynman was a leading physicists of the 20th century. He went to school at MIT and Princeton, worked at Los Alamos, investigated Challenger, and taught at Princeton. He was a very interesting guy. If you ever get a chance, read one of his books, such as "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" or "What do you care what other people think." Quite a character. Feynman was in the news recently as the only modern physicist to make the top 10 physicists of all time (He was number 7).
Somehow, I doubt AOL is going to clean up its act. In fact, I don't think AOL's going to care one bit. They don't care about the bad publicity. They get enough of that as it is. Who knows? It might even work for them. Any publicity is good publicity. Sooner or later, some misguided techno-phobic reporter is going to desperately attempt to convey this information the public, the public's going to see the word AOL, and AOL stock will go up.
And they obviously don't care about the fact that they have a problem. They've got enough of those in the inbox as it is. They never fix them. Instead, they add more "features" and make it more difficult to reach the areas that are buggy.
Easy and fast construction
Equally easy and fast reconstruction (stuff happens...)
Incredibly well designed modular components (Have you seen all the ways these parts can fit together?)
Durability and structural integrity (Hey, for plastic...)
Simplicity
Amazingly wide assortment of engineering components (There are differentials : )
Frequent updates (Remember the differentials? Lego has released three versions; each better than the last)
Relatively low cost
Customer friendly company
That, my friends, is why Lego is not just a toy.
Four years ago, well before Mindstorms, I bought the Control Lab. It has 8 input (4 Digital, 4 Analog) and 8 output ports. The only catch is that it has to be tethered via serial cable. The software is nice too, because you can even make a little GUI. It has a pretty impressive assortment of commands too; much more than Mindstorms. If you use Lego for prototyping or just fun with engineering, I highly recommend you try one of these.
I've built pretty much everything out of Lego. I've built automated fighting robots, a robot that could assemble Lego, and an automatic car test track (to name a few).
My current project is by far the most impressive. I even managed to turn it into a winning Science Fair project. It's a Digital Mechanical Computer built entirely out of Lego pieces. I'm working on a nice site to explain the mechanisms and such. The entire device is modular and the ALU is expandable (I currently have it at two 2-bit inputs in parallel). The ALU returns the OR,AND, XOR, Sum, and Carry of the inputs. It has registers and everything. Very cool. Right now, the device contains about 400 gears (including 31 differentials) in very tight quarters.
For more information about the Lego, visit Lugnet
If you're looking for a good book, try Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It was written 20 years ago by Douglas Hofstadter, the man who's organizing this. The book covers everything from math to psychiatry and everything in between. Plus, it's just been released in a 20th anniversary edition, so it's possible to find again. This man truly knows what he's talking about. Simply a must read for any geek.
There was an IBM ad not long ago where a technician comes to a house to fix a refrigerator. But the family is convinced the refrigerator isn't broken. They tell the man that they don't need a repairman because it isn't broken. He responds that he knows it isn't broken - yet. The caption then reads something to the effect of, "Appliances that call for their own help. Who'd have thought?"
However, when you think about it, this wouldn't be as great as it sounds. First of all, who wants to have a stranger come to their door unexpected? A con-man could tell you that your refrigerator called him, and you'd be none the wiser. But, even if the appliance tells you it called for help (It didn't in the ad.), who knows who else got that message. Maybe it wasn't just your doctor...
If you want more information on CAD programs for Lego, go to lugnet They have all sorts of stuff for Lego freaks (like me). You'll probably find the CAD section informative.
Lego isn't just a children's toy anymore. With some of the Technic parts available (I'm not just talking about the electronics.), pretty much anything can be built using Legos. The prototyping capabilities are enormous. I've built automated robotic soldiers and a robot that could assemble Legos (yes, I know the plural is really Lego), to name a few. My most recent project got complicated enough to enter (and win) in the Science Fair. Suffice it to say that the final device contains almost 500 gears (that's a lot) and is fully modular so it can be expanded easily. The engineering aspect of this thing is incredible. I'm working on a nice webpage with all my notes and drawings and (hopefully) building instructions. No, I won't tell you what it is. You'll find out soon enough. Just leave it to say, you can do pretty much anything with Legos. If you don't believe me, check out MIT's page. They use Legos too : )
LegoCAD, a joint venture with AutoDesk by the way, only features parts from the simple machines set. This set, used for teaching engineering principles, has a very limited number of components. Also, it doesn't do animations. (Well, if you want to keep moving the parts and rendering over and over...) Instead, I use LeoCAD or, the even better, MLCAD. Both are based on LDraw, but provide a graphical interface instead of a text based one. More parts than you'll ever need, including old versions of parts.
Things have changed. Back in the Nintendo days, you could keep people enthused with games inferior to the ones on my calculator. Now the people want internet...
How many companies have made a fortune with no more than good advertising on the basis of "Easy Internet Access?" Let's see. There's AOL, which offers pretty much nothing at high cost. Yet AOL is rolling in cash and the stock soars. Then there was Web-TV (What a dumb idea that probably made some money for a while...) Much better are companies like E-Machine, that provide cheap computers for little more than internet access. It's supply and demand at its finest...
Problem: Some of us don't want a cheap little computer. But it's becoming more and more difficult to find an ad for a good computer these days.
It seems virtually anything can be advertised on the basis of internet access. Sega tried it with the Dreamcast. But their network still isn't up and is only for multiplayer gaming anyway.
The X Box and this new thing both promise internet access. The well known company advertises the power of their machine. (It makes my PC look kind of sorry. I need a new one...) This new guy focuses on the fact that it provides internet access. They'll make a fortune, no doubt. However, it seems that anyone who advertises heavily on the internet is using it as a facade to cover up a cheap product.
These guys may change the trend. The fact that this thing is going to run Linux suggests that they are trying to cater to the geeks, not the masses who are impressed by internet access alone. The interesting thing about this product is that they list pretty good specs, but only seem to espouse the internet. I'm curious to see how this thing operates, let alone how it does in stores.
At the very least, they're going to have some trouble marketing this thing. The masses are going to complain about having to learn Linux (boo-hoo) whereas an ad campaign aimed toward geeks probably wouldn't be cost effective.
It's going to be interesting. But with all that competition, we can at least expect a wide variety of high quality consoles and games. Even if it fails, it will have done some good...
I agree. I'm not even going to try to argue with you. However, I don't think even connecting cities with something like this is going to come into widespread use anytime soon. There's too much other technology that has to come into existance before this can become practical for even the largest network. For now, I think we have to stick to what we've been using.
Of course something like this will be great in the future. I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that. But right now, I think this technology requires too much more before it can become useful. The technology is in it's infancy and a little ahead of its time. Nothing came of DaVinci's flying machine.
And I wasn't trying to suggest that I would be using something like this on my PC. It was simply an example of how incredibly large 3.28 Terabits is.
In short, my point was not that this is a useless technology. My point was that this technology is a bit impractical with today's resources.
I'm just as excited about this as everyone else is, but when you stop to think about it, what's the point? Let's do the math:
.41 TBps = 410 GBps
3.28 Tbps =
410 Gigabytes per second. My present hard drive only holds 12.1 Gigabytes. So this thing could transmit the contents of my computer 33.88 times. And that's only if the harddrive could be read that fast (which it obviously can't).
So my question is what on Earth are we going to be sending at speeds like 3.28 Terabits per second? Even if we were to split up this little bundle and give each computer in a building one of those strands (for one wavelength), 40 Gbps is still huge. I don't think there's a practical medium for data storage of vast amounts of data that can be read at speeds even close to that.
So, we probably can't read the data that fast, but let's suppose we could. In theory, we could send this data at 3.28 Tbps. Now what are we going to do with it at the receiving end? Can anyone's processor even deal with data at speeds like that? (Especially while running an OS and who knows what else.) And how are we going to store it? Again, we need incredibly fast data storage to make this work.
In short, with present technology, this system could not truly run at 3.28 Tbps anyway. Processing and data storage speeds would slow it down. The 3.28 Tbps seems more symbolic than anything else...
Wow, I hate being the realistic geek...
While we're celebrating pi day, we need to remember that today is also Albert Einstein's birthday. Happy birthday Al!
m l
My favorite formula for pi:
lim (as n approaches infinity) sin(180/n)*cos(180/n)*n
This is the easiest to derive. The area of a regular polygon with n sides and radius R is:
sin(180/n)*cos(180/n)*n*R^2
And since the area of a regular polygon with infinite sides is pi*R^2 (we can prove that it is directly proportional to R^2), we obtain that pi is equal to the above limit.
Of course, this formula is useless if the algorithm you use for sin and cos uses pi. But there are plenty that don't.
We can't forget digit extraction for pi:
Sigma (as n goes from 0 to infinity) (4/(8n+1) - 2/(8n+4) - 1/(8n+4) - 1/(8n+6)) * (1/16)^n
You can find that formula in a legible form at http://www.mathsoft.com/asolve/plouffe/plouffe.ht
And let's not forget our good buddy Ramanajun (sp). The man was an absolute genius. He came up with five or 6 expressions for (are you ready for this?) 1/pi. I'd type them here, but they'd be mulilated in standard text (much like the digit extraction theorem was).
Finally:
pi^2/6 = sigma (as x goes from 1 to infinity) 1/(x^2)
On another fun note, I'll now list off a few other fun tricks with transidential numbers and other fun stuff:
The nth Fibonacci number is (phi^n-psi^n)/sqrt(n)
e^(pi*i) = -1
i^i = e^(-pi*i/2)
tau(tau(15!)) = 42
My favorite is the last one : )
On a final note, you can't appreciate pi until you read The Joy of Pi. You can enjoy some of the fun at www.joyofpi.com The book has all sorts of fun things. Among them are the first 1,000,000 digits of pi printed in the background on every page. (You can find 10,000 at the webpage.) Better still, important digits are marked. Ever wonder what the 3rd digit of pi is? What about the 31st? 314th? 3141st? 31415th?
And, of course, the most important digit: THE 42nd DIGIT OF PI : ) I looked it up once. I think it's a 9.
Why didn't anyone celebrate e day? What about phi day? Why not celebrate the 42nd day of the year?
This concludes yet another edition of "Grant Babbles meaninglessly."
I was thinking the same thing. There was no Samuel in WarGames that I know of. It would have been quite a stretch for Cyrix to name a processor after the WOPR anyway. It would probably take about 10 minutes to ask if you'd like to play a game. And the really fast Tic-Tac-Toe...
It could be worse, I suppose... The AMD K6II could have been named after a supercomputer...
Software used to perform some complicated task that an average person won't ever want to do doesn't need to be simple. If only geeks will need the program anyway, does it really matter? Howver, if the program is something that will be commonly used, it does need to be simple. (Obviously) Programs like OS's and ISP's fall in this category.
Take AOL for example. (We all hate it right?) One of its biggest downfalls (from a geek's perspective) is that the UI is TOO "easy" to use. As a result, the program is absolutely huge! Besides that, they made complex things more difficult. i.e. about 10 clicks through AOL servers (You know, the slow ones...) just to log into an FTP server. All that space and it's just an inconvenience. BUT, the average person off the street loves it. It's lousy software that makes it easy to do stupid things that aren't that hard to begin with. But that makes this particular brand of user happy.In short, most of the open-source software was never meant for the typical person off the street anyway. So why worry?
OK. You've all had fun mocking the fact that there is no HAL and no mission to Jupiter (movie) or Saturn (book). Did you ever stop to think about some of the things Clarke came up with that actually happened? The communication satellite was Clarke's idea. 2010 and 2061 discuss Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Clarke suggests that Europa is a large ocean covered by a layer of ice. He also suggests that on the ocean bottom are hot vents on which life could form. These predictions were made well before the launch of the Galileo probe. Today, we have reason to believe that all of these could be true. Not bad for an author in the 80's. Godspeed Mr.Clarke and godspeed HAL!
Actually, the original theory was that HAL was named to be one step ahead of IBM. IBM was a major contributer to 2001 (the movie) and was angered greatly when such rumors began to surface. Arther C. Clarke even tried to end the debate in 2010 (the line doesn't appear in the movie version). Someone starts joking with HAL's creator (I believe his name was Dr. Chandra) that HAL was named to be one step ahead of IBM. He becomes enraged and begins to scream about how HAL stands for Heuristic Algorithm. Clarke explains in the beginning of the book that this line was added simply to put an end to the rumors. Obviously, that didn't work...
Sorry. I forgot to mention that Newton also pioneered Calculus.
Someone may have already said this- there are a lot of comments here- but I didn't see Newton mentioned. Newton pioneered physics. Without him, most of the other people mentioned wouldn't have gotten anywhere. My picks (in no particular order) would have to include:
Newton - Physics
Einstein, Bohr - Quantum Mechanics (among others)
Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler - Astronomy
Edison, Watt, Volta, Marconi - Inventors
I tried to limit this list to people who laid the groundwork for many of the important discoveries you've all been mentioning.
Quite frankly, Y2K panic was the media's fault. We had predictions of doom from people who had no idea what they were talking about. We had NBC's nice little movie in which objects that don't rely on the year still malfunctioned ("His pulse rate isn't 240...It must be Y2K"). Then when it was all over, the media decided that the blame for the panic had to be redirected quickly. (And they seemed pretty disappointed that nothing happened.) I think there could have been problems and we did need to prepare, but scaring the public is not preparation. Most of the predicted problems could have just as easily been caused by the panic itself. A food or gas shortage could be caused by stockpiling. Loss of telephone service could be caused by everyone checking for a dial tone at midnight. You get the idea. If you want a case study, look at Italy. They started preparing about four months ago, and got mocked for being so late. BUT NOTHING HAPPENED! And I still say the big party is 2048 (100000000000 in binary).