Alright, so everyone's probably been right so far that stringing a few strands of hair across a grid of thumbtacks probably won't light a CFL. Here's what probably happened: the kid made a device and showed that it can collect sunlight. Using a few rudimentary calculations, he scaled up his results to show that a working model with about a pound of hair would give something on the order of 18 watts of power (in full sunlight). The Daily Mail pounced on it because they don't know any better. And voila! Sensationalized story. That doesn't mean it can't be done. I'd say we should feel cautiously optimistic about this story and look at the science behind it as opposed to focusing on what the news agency said about it. As we all know, news agencies are notoriously bad scientists.
Also, if melanin is the key to hair having semiconductive properties, doesn't this mean...ah nevermind, how about just 'Insert blond joke here.'
Do software companies also get a cut of the CPCC money? After all, there has to be some sort of way to compensate the developers for the hours and the sweat and the blood and the tears and the extreme, extreme expense that goes into writing code. Now if I back up a program on a disc, who gets compensated for that? I have a hard time feeling sorry for Canadian musicians after they gave the world Celine Dion and Bryan Adams.
Yeah but I was referring to carrying out the test with the handsome men/pretty women present. The article seems to imply that this isn't the case. But maybe there's too much going on in that type of experiment to garner any meaningful results (although that seems to be the status quo in modern psychology...ba-zing!).
Why not give the memory test during the chatting session to see what happens to cognitive function then? I'd be interested to see if men make the same number of mistakes if the test somehow ties into the whole 'impressing women' deal. Then again, I'd be interested to see how the women do in the same situation. I know a lot of women who dumb themselves down in the presence of a man they're interested in because they believe that men are intimidated by smart women.
Now consider the life of someone who was born in the 1880s and died in the 1960sâ"my grandmother, for instance. She witnessed the introduction of electric light and telephones, of autoÂmobiles and airplanes, the atomic bomb and nuclear power, vacuum electronics and semiÂconductor electronics, plastics and the computer, most vaccines and all antiÂbiotics. All of those things mattered greatly in human terms, as can be seen in a single statistic: child mortality in industrialized countries dropped by 80 percent in those years.
First off, don't child labor laws probably have something to do with that? Also, the author fails to mention that a much higher number of countries (and parts of countries) are industrialized now than they were in the mid-20th century. The important lesson to draw from this is that both of these events were politically, not scientifically, driven, and that we rely on a certain political atmosphere for technological progress to be implemented.
Aside from that, it seems that the author is conflating revolutions in theoretical science with adoption of technology stemming from those revolutions. Maxwell's E&M came out in the mid-19th century, but a lot of the practical innovations lagged his discovery by 20 or more years. Telephones were invented in 1876, but didn't come into the mainstream until the early 20th century. The first automobile patent by Karl Benz was in 1880, but as the author notes, his grandmother was one of the first in her neighborhood to own a car in 1924. International airplane travel may have been common in the 1910's for the elite few in Europe, but the first transatlantic flights weren't until 1919, 15 years (and one World War) after the invention of the airplane. Basic quantum mechanics was essentially developed by 1930, but lasers didn't come into common use until the 70's or 80's. And how long did we have to wait for Einstein's relativity (1915) to be practical? Until satellite and GPS technology became accurate enough for relativistic calculations to be important. With regard to recent theoretical revolutions, the Human Genome Project was provisionally completed in 2003, and the fullerenes were discovered in 1985, so if history is any indication, biotech and nanotech may have to wait a bit before they see their ideas come to fruition in the general populace.
All that being said, I don't necessarily agree with Kurzweil's assessment of the future of humanity (he discounts the possibility that the average person might not want to abandon their corporeal form), but this article is just a poorly reasoned 'good-old-days' piece of garbage.
The point of the research is that nothing so far has come close to creating images of molecules this detailed before. We've seen poorly-resolved images of polymers and macromolecules like C60, and we've seen images of individual atoms on surfaces; hell, we've even seen standing electron waves on metal surfaces, but we've never been able to image a molecule quite like this before. This is one of those science pictures I see every once in a while that just takes my breath away. Amazing work.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why Telkom now offers a new service: two pigeons. For a modest fee.
Alright, so everyone's probably been right so far that stringing a few strands of hair across a grid of thumbtacks probably won't light a CFL. Here's what probably happened: the kid made a device and showed that it can collect sunlight. Using a few rudimentary calculations, he scaled up his results to show that a working model with about a pound of hair would give something on the order of 18 watts of power (in full sunlight). The Daily Mail pounced on it because they don't know any better. And voila! Sensationalized story. That doesn't mean it can't be done. I'd say we should feel cautiously optimistic about this story and look at the science behind it as opposed to focusing on what the news agency said about it. As we all know, news agencies are notoriously bad scientists.
Also, if melanin is the key to hair having semiconductive properties, doesn't this mean...ah nevermind, how about just 'Insert blond joke here.'
Do software companies also get a cut of the CPCC money? After all, there has to be some sort of way to compensate the developers for the hours and the sweat and the blood and the tears and the extreme, extreme expense that goes into writing code. Now if I back up a program on a disc, who gets compensated for that? I have a hard time feeling sorry for Canadian musicians after they gave the world Celine Dion and Bryan Adams.
I guess I won't be reading this on a Kindle anytime soon...
Yeah but I was referring to carrying out the test with the handsome men/pretty women present. The article seems to imply that this isn't the case. But maybe there's too much going on in that type of experiment to garner any meaningful results (although that seems to be the status quo in modern psychology...ba-zing!).
Why not give the memory test during the chatting session to see what happens to cognitive function then? I'd be interested to see if men make the same number of mistakes if the test somehow ties into the whole 'impressing women' deal. Then again, I'd be interested to see how the women do in the same situation. I know a lot of women who dumb themselves down in the presence of a man they're interested in because they believe that men are intimidated by smart women.
Now consider the life of someone who was born in the 1880s and died in the 1960sâ"my grandmother, for instance. She witnessed the introduction of electric light and telephones, of autoÂmobiles and airplanes, the atomic bomb and nuclear power, vacuum electronics and semiÂconductor electronics, plastics and the computer, most vaccines and all antiÂbiotics. All of those things mattered greatly in human terms, as can be seen in a single statistic: child mortality in industrialized countries dropped by 80 percent in those years.
First off, don't child labor laws probably have something to do with that? Also, the author fails to mention that a much higher number of countries (and parts of countries) are industrialized now than they were in the mid-20th century. The important lesson to draw from this is that both of these events were politically, not scientifically, driven, and that we rely on a certain political atmosphere for technological progress to be implemented.
Aside from that, it seems that the author is conflating revolutions in theoretical science with adoption of technology stemming from those revolutions. Maxwell's E&M came out in the mid-19th century, but a lot of the practical innovations lagged his discovery by 20 or more years. Telephones were invented in 1876, but didn't come into the mainstream until the early 20th century. The first automobile patent by Karl Benz was in 1880, but as the author notes, his grandmother was one of the first in her neighborhood to own a car in 1924. International airplane travel may have been common in the 1910's for the elite few in Europe, but the first transatlantic flights weren't until 1919, 15 years (and one World War) after the invention of the airplane. Basic quantum mechanics was essentially developed by 1930, but lasers didn't come into common use until the 70's or 80's. And how long did we have to wait for Einstein's relativity (1915) to be practical? Until satellite and GPS technology became accurate enough for relativistic calculations to be important. With regard to recent theoretical revolutions, the Human Genome Project was provisionally completed in 2003, and the fullerenes were discovered in 1985, so if history is any indication, biotech and nanotech may have to wait a bit before they see their ideas come to fruition in the general populace.
All that being said, I don't necessarily agree with Kurzweil's assessment of the future of humanity (he discounts the possibility that the average person might not want to abandon their corporeal form), but this article is just a poorly reasoned 'good-old-days' piece of garbage.
The point of the research is that nothing so far has come close to creating images of molecules this detailed before. We've seen poorly-resolved images of polymers and macromolecules like C60, and we've seen images of individual atoms on surfaces; hell, we've even seen standing electron waves on metal surfaces, but we've never been able to image a molecule quite like this before. This is one of those science pictures I see every once in a while that just takes my breath away. Amazing work.