Thats about the same thign I was thinking when I read the article. America is a highly capitalist society, business makes America work, and workers are what make business work. If the names dropped in the article ar really behind the design of a school system that creates good workers, perhaps we should look a little closer at the merits of that system before we go mucking around with it.
Would you really want to live in a society where everybody was as well educated and hard to control as, for example, computer engineers?
Actually, come to think of it, most computer engineers are very narrowly educated and sharply focused. Most probably took lots of classes, but for most of them only the technical classes stayed in the brain.
I guess my point is just that while mechanization is nice, and I love technical solutions, I don't think we have the sociological solutions to eliminate all those kinds of jobs (and thereby remove the need to have a school system that creates people that are ideal for filling those jobs). America, for now, must maintain a very low unemployment rate until we figure out how to create a social situation that is conducive to having a very small number of extraordinarily skilled workers driving the economy, allowing much of the population to remain unemployed.
Of course, if we have a system that can sustain very high unemployment (say, 65%) where those who are unemployed because the choose to be, not because they are so stupid/inept/unskilled that nobody can employ them, we'll probably see a huge explosion in the 'socialite' class, which is currently filled mostly by old-money kids.
Thats just what we need, most of the population engaged in seeing how precisely they can follow mostly arbitrary, unwritten rules of social engagement. A society where social class is what people work for, because they have no need to work for money. Great.
Those are not CCD artifacts, those are diffraction lines from the 'spider' in the telescope, the thin vertical pieces of material that hold the secondary mirror.
Typically there are four, resulting in the four (or 2 depending on how you count) perpendicular diffraction spikes. Many designs exist, some that spread the diffracted light so that it is not obvious to the eye.
I don't think diffraction spikes are useful, other than making bright stars look more 'starry'.
The 10MW version is only 200 tons, so about 0.034 hp/lb.
And you can probably expect the taxes used to pay for road maintainance to go up when we're all driving 200 ton single passenger vehicles to work.
Re:No boom, you will just scorch the paint
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 1
hey, I wonder if it will be eqipped with that anti-RPG armor we read about a few weeks ago. IIRC it consists of a couple of charged plates acting as a fairly high power capacitor. As the molten jet of copper from an RPG or other similar shaped charge weapon penetrates the armor, it shorts the plates together and the resulting current flow through the jet ruins its geometry and, therefore, its penetration power.
I think you mean two intersecting spheres, where the intersection is a circle (there will be an arc along this circle, near the surface of the earth, that are all valid solutions. The third intersecting sphere reduces the choice of locations to 2, one of which will not be sane (very distant from the surface of the earth and moving very quickly). The GPS receiver, under the assumption that it is operating on earth, can eliminate the unreasonable answer.
It might be entertaining to write a small script to find all the reoccuring three and four letter word combinations in a document and automatically search-n-replace them with an appropriate acronym, using the parenthetic notation for the first replacement.
This could have some entertainment value when used on long term papers.
If I understand correctly, the reason you cannot transmit information using the rate at which you measure the entangled bits (thereby fixing the state of the remote bits) is because the observer at the remote side cannot distinguish the entangled bits from the unentangled bits, and so therefore has no way of determining the rate at which they are becoming unentangled.
If I were to give two each researches two sets of atoms, one pair of which was entangled and one that was not, the researchers could perform in isolation any kind of test they wanted and they would not be able to tell which set of atoms was entangled. Only by compairing results could they make that determination.
Good thing you posted as an AC, because the coin need only be conductive to exibit the inductive braking effect caused by eddy currents induced in the coin by motion relative to the magnets.
Ferrous metals aren't neccessary to the demonstration of inductive braking. The relative motion of the coin to the magnets induces eddy currents in accordance with Lenz's Law. The eddy currents generate their own magnetic field opposed to that from the magnets, causing the inductive braking effect.
With strong magnets like those found in harddrives, the effect is quite pronounced with a simple coin.
Please refer to this article for more information and links.
Ok, here is the whole thing, code, schematic, a couple of the images I just posted, and a short write-up about the project.
Please feel free to bash my ugly code, I was working strictly for functionality without the slightest regard to design. I wouldn't know good C code if it came up and introduced itself anyway, so if you are inclined, feel free to enlighten me as to my mistakes.
I'm using the AT90S2313. Its my favorite AVR right now because its small, but has a reasonable amount of IO and a built in UART.
More fun, leave the magnets mounted in the little cage they come in, and drop a quarter or other suitably sized metal coin between them and amaze your friends with the magnetic breaking action.
Here are some more supplies for clocks, and the back of this one (forgive the libral use of hot glue, its just a prototype:)).
I thought about selling the design, but the idea is really almost trivial, the software design (done in AVRGCC, maybe 200 LOC at most) took an evening and only that long because I'm pretty clueless when it comes to C coding. I kept K&R's _The C Programming Language_ handy and spent quite a bit of time screwing up the switch statement.
The hardware was time consuming because I was using perfboard and wiring up all those damned headers. I won't make that mistake again. Next time I'll just have the PCB made professionally and save myself hours of frustration soldering hookup wire.
You are right though, it would be nice to be able to refrence it in a resume. Perhaps I'll reduce it to a single board design (one PCB behind the platter with SMT LEDs) and have a few boards made. Would be fun anyway.
I just stripped out all the parts, built the circuit on perf board, milled some holes into the back of bottom of the case behind the platter and mounted blue LEDs in the holes. I drilled holes in the platter (very carefully so I could keep the very flat mirror surface that makes the platters look so neat in the first place) and mounted some little plastic rods with frosted ends in the holes to diffuse the light from the leds.
In an improvement over the Think Geek clock, I have the LEDs set up to fade on and off over a quarter second, instead of the abrupt blink on and off in the TG clocks.
The bottom register is seconds, right is minutes, and top is hours. Its easier to read than the TG clocks, but doesn't generate the cool patterns.
I cut down one of those clear CD blanks that you find on top of a spindal of CDR's so that it fit neatly over the electronics, then frosted it with some sandpaper so it has a nice diagonal grain. This fits over electronics so they are less obvious, but can still be seen if you care to look.
Heres a picture of the clock. The lighting isn't great, so its hard to see how clearly the bits of each register light up. The frosted end of each rod lights up brightly, while the sides are water-clear, so it ends up looking like a bright blue disk 'floating' above the mirrored surface. Really looks pretty good.
I don't understand why people rest their hand on a mouse at all. I rest the base of my hand on the pad/desk, grip the sides of the mouse with thumb and ring and pinky fingers, and place the remaining to fingers on the buttons or scroll wheel. Mousing consists of moving only the fingers with no forearm movement and no deliberate wrist movement (there is maybe a 5 degree or so deflection from moving the fingers around). The last thing I want is for the body of the mouse to touch my palm, as it interferes with movement of the mouse. Its kind of like writing with a pencil, the fingers do the moving, because thats where the dexterity is.
Course, mice with those 4th and 5th buttons on the side suck for me, because i'm constantly pushing them on accident while moving the mouse.
Well, you can put digital data on DAT tapes and 'Audio' CDR's, and thats legal because those kinds of media are taxed too.
I'm not sure if putting music on 'data' cd's is illegal. If its for personal use I'd expect not, there might be an issue with making dups on the untaxed media if you are giving them away to friends.
"All heavier-than-air craft stay in the air by accellerating air downwards."
wrong wrong wrong.
to learn how airfoils REALLY work along with a description of the Bernoulli effect that allows them to work, check out this website.
I disagree. I think that NASA's Glenn Research Center has a more complete analysis than the resource you posted. The articles better demonstrate why the Bernoulli effect is not the right theory of lift, although it does contribute.
These pages describe briefly why the popular discriptions of lift theory are wrong or incomplete:
This page describes the various factors that contribute to the generation of lift.
The key concept is that all the factors in some way contribute to the turning of the airstream. This turning, or acceleration of the airstream is the reaction force that allows the aircraft to change direction, or, in the case of lift, _not_ change direction by countering the acceleration of gravity.
Helicopters stay in the air by blowing air down, but airplanes don't, and ballons certainly do not.
While you are correct about ballons, you are somewhat off the mark with airplanes. All heavier-than-air craft stay in the air by accellerating air downwards. How precisely this downward accelleration is accomplished doesn't matter much, as long as it happens.
Consider the similarity between helicopter rotor blades and airplane wings. Both are airfoils and work in the same manner, which is, ultimately, to push air downward.
The Antarctica strike occurred during an ice age, so even tidal waves would have been weakened to mere ripples by the calming effect of icebergs on the ocean.
My understanding is that tidal waves are seismic events that travel along the seafloor. They raise the water level only a few feet, and are essentially invisible until they hit shore and start climbing.
I suspect by 'tidal wave' they mean 'tsunami'. Seismic events can cause tsunami by quickly raising or lowering a section of seafloor, causing a ridge or trough in layer of water above. This large water wave travels at the surface and is generally quite wide and low. As it approaches shallow areas the leading edge slows causing the wave to build upwards in the same manner as typical surf.
Tidal waves (a misnomer, as they have nothing to do with tides) or tsunami do not travel at the sea floor, and could easily be damped by large amounts of ice cover.
I know where you can get a perfect solution to the problem. Unfortunately, the computer for it takes up a rather large bit of real estate, and it runs in realtime.
The only real solution to prevent the possiblity of hijakings is to not have any vehicles that transport large numbers of people at all.
I dunno about that, can you image the mess it would make if someone hijacked an oil tanker and rammed it at full speed into a busy port? There is that one port in California that handles some rediculious amount of traffic everyday. I'm sure a full tanker at 30 knots could do some serious damage, plus lay an enormous oil slick that would have to be cleaned up before business could resume in full.
Its a broken economic system! Just like open source.
I presume you are joking, but just in case.
Communism fails because its people don't directly benefit from their efforts.
Open source works because the developers (usually) directly benefit from their own work (either by getting paid to do it, getting to use the resulting software, or simply because they enjoy the labor), and because they can share the product without reducing the benefit to themselves.
Re:2d treadmills, motion sickness and Redirection
on
Walking In A VR Future
·
· Score: 1
I was thinking something more like this, allowing gross positioning of many objects (about 75 objects per second to 3cm). An on-player computer system would use an accelerometer system for head positioning and tracking between updates from the gross positioning system.
The article describes a 3 floor, 10,000 square foot office building that required about 750 sensors to cover. While that is probably expensive, its also a very large area. A mostly empty warehouse enviroment could probably be covered effectively (perhaps with lower resolution) for much less. For that matter, it might make more sense to put ultrasonic receivers on the few people and use a few transmitters located around the area to chirp signals that the computer system could use to triangulate its location.
I like the idea of VR gaming in an arena because it largely removes the problems of motion feedback (realistic acceleration, ground textures, etc), but still allows you to use the space to simulate a larger enviroment. I think the technology has progressed to a point where someone could set up a successful commercial arena VR game.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats about the same thign I was thinking when I read the article. America is a highly capitalist society, business makes America work, and workers are what make business work. If the names dropped in the article ar really behind the design of a school system that creates good workers, perhaps we should look a little closer at the merits of that system before we go mucking around with it.
Would you really want to live in a society where everybody was as well educated and hard to control as, for example, computer engineers?
Actually, come to think of it, most computer engineers are very narrowly educated and sharply focused. Most probably took lots of classes, but for most of them only the technical classes stayed in the brain.
I guess my point is just that while mechanization is nice, and I love technical solutions, I don't think we have the sociological solutions to eliminate all those kinds of jobs (and thereby remove the need to have a school system that creates people that are ideal for filling those jobs). America, for now, must maintain a very low unemployment rate until we figure out how to create a social situation that is conducive to having a very small number of extraordinarily skilled workers driving the economy, allowing much of the population to remain unemployed.
Of course, if we have a system that can sustain very high unemployment (say, 65%) where those who are unemployed because the choose to be, not because they are so stupid/inept/unskilled that nobody can employ them, we'll probably see a huge
explosion in the 'socialite' class, which is currently filled mostly by old-money kids.
Thats just what we need, most of the population engaged in seeing how precisely they can follow mostly arbitrary, unwritten rules of social engagement. A society where social class is what people work for, because they have no need to work for money. Great.
Those are not CCD artifacts, those are diffraction lines from the 'spider' in the telescope, the thin vertical pieces of material that hold the secondary mirror.
Typically there are four, resulting in the four (or 2 depending on how you count) perpendicular diffraction spikes. Many designs exist, some that spread the diffracted light so that it is not obvious to the eye.
I don't think diffraction spikes are useful, other than making bright stars look more 'starry'.
The 10MW version is only 200 tons, so about 0.034 hp/lb.
And you can probably expect the taxes used to pay for road maintainance to go up when we're all driving 200 ton single passenger vehicles to work.
hey, I wonder if it will be eqipped with that anti-RPG armor we read about a few weeks ago. IIRC it consists of a couple of charged plates acting as a fairly high power capacitor. As the molten jet of copper from an RPG or other similar shaped charge weapon penetrates the armor, it shorts the plates together and the resulting current flow through the jet ruins its geometry and, therefore, its penetration power.
France produces so much electricity that they have to sell it to neighbors at below cost just to get rid of it.
Um.. can't they just turn down the production a bit? Or are they locked into some kind of nuclear fuel purchasing agreement?
I think you mean two intersecting spheres, where the intersection is a circle (there will be an arc along this circle, near the surface of the earth, that are all valid solutions. The third intersecting sphere reduces the choice of locations to 2, one of which will not be sane (very distant from the surface of the earth and moving very quickly). The GPS receiver, under the assumption that it is operating on earth, can eliminate the unreasonable answer.
It might be entertaining to write a small script to find all the reoccuring three and four letter word combinations in a document and automatically search-n-replace them with an appropriate acronym, using the parenthetic notation for the first replacement.
This could have some entertainment value when used on long term papers.
If I understand correctly, the reason you cannot transmit information using the rate at which you measure the entangled bits (thereby fixing the state of the remote bits) is because the observer at the remote side cannot distinguish the entangled bits from the unentangled bits, and so therefore has no way of determining the rate at which they are becoming unentangled.
If I were to give two each researches two sets of atoms, one pair of which was entangled and one that was not, the researchers could perform in isolation any kind of test they wanted and they would not be able to tell which set of atoms was entangled. Only by compairing results could they make that determination.
At first I wasn't sure if that was a power joke or a Florida election joke.
Good thing you posted as an AC, because the coin need only be conductive to exibit the inductive braking effect caused by eddy currents induced in the coin by motion relative to the magnets.
Ferrous metals aren't neccessary to the demonstration of inductive braking. The relative motion of the coin to the magnets induces eddy currents in accordance with Lenz's Law. The eddy currents generate their own magnetic field opposed to that from the magnets, causing the inductive braking effect.
With strong magnets like those found in harddrives, the effect is quite pronounced with a simple coin.
Please refer to this article for more information and links.
Ok, here is the whole thing, code, schematic, a couple of the images I just posted, and a short write-up about the project.
Please feel free to bash my ugly code, I was working strictly for functionality without the slightest regard to design. I wouldn't know good C code if it came up and introduced itself anyway, so if you are inclined, feel free to enlighten me as to my mistakes.
I'm using the AT90S2313. Its my favorite AVR right now because its small, but has a reasonable amount of IO and a built in UART.
More fun, leave the magnets mounted in the little cage they come in, and drop a quarter or other suitably sized metal coin between them and amaze your friends with the magnetic breaking action.
Thanks. Yup, its really mine. :)
:)).
Here are some more supplies for clocks, and the back of this one (forgive the libral use of hot glue, its just a prototype
I thought about selling the design, but the idea is really almost trivial, the software design (done in AVRGCC, maybe 200 LOC at most) took an evening and only that long because I'm pretty clueless when it comes to C coding. I kept K&R's _The C Programming Language_ handy and spent quite a bit of time screwing up the switch statement.
The hardware was time consuming because I was using perfboard and wiring up all those damned headers. I won't make that mistake again. Next time I'll just have the PCB made professionally and save myself hours of frustration soldering hookup wire.
You are right though, it would be nice to be able to refrence it in a resume. Perhaps I'll reduce it to a single board design (one PCB behind the platter with SMT LEDs) and have a few boards made. Would be fun anyway.
I turned an old harddrive into a binary clock.
I just stripped out all the parts, built the circuit on perf board, milled some holes into the back of bottom of the case behind the platter and mounted blue LEDs in the holes. I drilled holes in the platter (very carefully so I could keep the very flat mirror surface that makes the platters look so neat in the first place) and mounted some little plastic rods with frosted ends in the holes to diffuse the light from the leds.
In an improvement over the Think Geek clock, I have the LEDs set up to fade on and off over a quarter second, instead of the abrupt blink on and off in the TG clocks.
The bottom register is seconds, right is minutes, and top is hours. Its easier to read than the TG clocks, but doesn't generate the cool patterns.
I cut down one of those clear CD blanks that you find on top of a spindal of CDR's so that it fit neatly over the electronics, then frosted it with some sandpaper so it has a nice diagonal grain. This fits over electronics so they are less obvious, but can still be seen if you care to look.
Heres a picture of the clock. The lighting isn't great, so its hard to see how clearly the bits of each register light up. The frosted end of each rod lights up brightly, while the sides are water-clear, so it ends up looking like a bright blue disk 'floating' above the mirrored surface. Really looks pretty good.
Here is a photo of the clock
I don't understand why people rest their hand on a mouse at all. I rest the base of my hand on the pad/desk, grip the sides of the mouse with thumb and ring and pinky fingers, and place the remaining to fingers on the buttons or scroll wheel. Mousing consists of moving only the fingers with no forearm movement and no deliberate wrist movement (there is maybe a 5 degree or so deflection from moving the fingers around). The last thing I want is for the body of the mouse to touch my palm, as it interferes with movement of the mouse. Its kind of like writing with a pencil, the fingers do the moving, because thats where the dexterity is.
Course, mice with those 4th and 5th buttons on the side suck for me, because i'm constantly pushing them on accident while moving the mouse.
Analog = legal, digital = illegal.
Well, you can put digital data on DAT tapes and 'Audio' CDR's, and thats legal because those kinds of media are taxed too.
I'm not sure if putting music on 'data' cd's is illegal. If its for personal use I'd expect not, there might be an issue with making dups on the untaxed media if you are giving them away to friends.
"All heavier-than-air craft stay in the air by accellerating air downwards."
wrong wrong wrong.
to learn how airfoils REALLY work along with a description of the Bernoulli effect that allows them to work, check out this website.
I disagree. I think that NASA's Glenn Research Center has a more complete analysis than the resource you posted. The articles better demonstrate why the Bernoulli effect is not the right theory of lift, although it does contribute.
These pages describe briefly why the popular discriptions of lift theory are wrong or incomplete:
Longer Path or Equal Transit Theory
Skipping Stone or deflection theory
Venturi or Bernoulli theory
This page describes the various factors that contribute to the generation of lift.
The key concept is that all the factors in some way contribute to the turning of the airstream. This turning, or acceleration of the airstream is the reaction force that allows the aircraft to change direction, or, in the case of lift, _not_ change direction by countering the acceleration of gravity.
Helicopters stay in the air by blowing air down, but airplanes don't, and ballons certainly do not.
While you are correct about ballons, you are somewhat off the mark with airplanes. All heavier-than-air craft stay in the air by accellerating air downwards. How precisely this downward accelleration is accomplished doesn't matter much, as long as it happens.
Consider the similarity between helicopter rotor blades and airplane wings. Both are airfoils and work in the same manner, which is, ultimately, to push air downward.
Flying cars capable of carrying 500Kg of explosives [Assume a flying car designed to carry 2 USsians]
Damn dude, I know we're fatter than average, but the auto industry has not yet upped the individual passenger weight estimate to 550lbs (250kg).
My understanding is that tidal waves are seismic events that travel along the seafloor. They raise the water level only a few feet, and are essentially invisible until they hit shore and start climbing.
I suspect by 'tidal wave' they mean 'tsunami'. Seismic events can cause tsunami by quickly raising or lowering a section of seafloor, causing a ridge or trough in layer of water above. This large water wave travels at the surface and is generally quite wide and low. As it approaches shallow areas the leading edge slows causing the wave to build upwards in the same manner as typical surf.
Tidal waves (a misnomer, as they have nothing to do with tides) or tsunami do not travel at the sea floor, and could easily be damped by large amounts of ice cover.
I know where you can get a perfect solution to the problem. Unfortunately, the computer for it takes up a rather large bit of real estate, and it runs in realtime.
The only real solution to prevent the possiblity of hijakings is to not have any vehicles that transport large numbers of people at all.
I dunno about that, can you image the mess it would make if someone hijacked an oil tanker and rammed it at full speed into a busy port? There is that one port in California that handles some rediculious amount of traffic everyday. I'm sure a full tanker at 30 knots could do some serious damage, plus lay an enormous oil slick that would have to be cleaned up before business could resume in full.
Its a broken economic system!
Just like open source.
I presume you are joking, but just in case.
Communism fails because its people don't directly benefit from their efforts.
Open source works because the developers (usually) directly benefit from their own work (either by getting paid to do it, getting to use the resulting software, or simply because they enjoy the labor), and because they can share the product without reducing the benefit to themselves.
I was thinking something more like this, allowing gross positioning of many objects (about 75 objects per second to 3cm). An on-player computer system would use an accelerometer system for head positioning and tracking between updates from the gross positioning system.
The article describes a 3 floor, 10,000 square foot office building that required about 750 sensors to cover. While that is probably expensive, its also a very large area. A mostly empty warehouse enviroment could probably be covered effectively (perhaps with lower resolution) for much less. For that matter, it might make more sense to put ultrasonic receivers on the few people and use a few transmitters located around the area to chirp signals that the computer system could use to triangulate its location.
I like the idea of VR gaming in an arena because it largely removes the problems of motion feedback (realistic acceleration, ground textures, etc), but still allows you to use the space to simulate a larger enviroment. I think the technology has progressed to a point where someone could set up a successful commercial arena VR game.
Thanks for the links.