I own and use a ModEEG kit from the OpenEEG project. You can buy the pre-built circuit boards, assembly is mostly a matter of mounting them in shielded boxes and connecting cables and a battery. It's really a fairly trivial build, if you plan what you need to do while you wait for the boards to arrive by mail you can easily assemble everything in an evening.
Sign on to the OpenEEG email list though, it shouldn't be hard to find someone who would be willing to build out a kit for you.
Most computer PSU's actually are just DC-DC converters. They take the incoming AC, rectify it and use it to charge a capacitor (typically to around 170VDC, but they will usually run happily at lower voltage, check the specs for the PSU for the rating).
This isn't much help if you don't have a source of fairly high voltage DC available, but if you feel like putting some 12v cells in series you can directly power a computer PSU with it.
my company is one of the largest fast food chains in America, so depending on how you look at it, Dell is directly responsible for high priced fast food. Revolt!
I didn't like the BCD display either, so I made my own. Mind you, this was months before ThinkGeek had a clock with blue leds. And the LEDs in mine fade on and off instead of just blinking. It's much more serene.
Video of the clock, schematic and C code (I am *not* a C programmer, and the code reflects that fact) are available in the zip file.
Not everyone views all killing as unethical. For those who do, I often wonder how they rationalize animals in the wild. Are tigers "evil" for hunting and killing other animals? If not, are tigers somehow inferior to humans in a way that makes what is fine for them, unethical for us?
The usual difference is that most animals do not have the mental capacity to make a moral judgment about how their actions affect other animals. This is sometimes called 'moral patiency' (google will turn up more details).
The act of a tiger killing its prey is an amoral action because tigers don't seem to have the capacity to judge the morality of their actions.
(Of course, one must wonder then if Ted Bundy's actions were also amoral, given that he was a clinical psycopath and so also lacking moral patiency in the same way as the tiger.)
The act of a rational human killing a tiger for reasons other than survival or 'greater good' (opinions vary) is immoral because the human has the capacity to consider the tiger's viewpoint and to understand how his actions affect the tiger, and the capacity to choose a course of action that results in less suffering or more efficent use of resources.
This isn't necessarily the ethical system I use, just how I understand it after living and discussing the subject with a couple of vegans and philosophy majors. I personally don't have a problem with killing animals for food as long as they are not abused and suffering is kept to a minimum I'm much more interested in the ideas of conservation and sustainability and how hunting and livestock affect the environment.
I saw a TV program where some guys put a theory like this to the test, MythBusters-style. As accomplished long-distance runners, they decided to go out to the American West and give running down some deer-like animals a try (I don't recall what kind of animal they were chasing, something that grazes on the plains, doesn't hide in holes, and that would be small enough for someone to kill after running it down, i.e., not American Bison).
They spent the day jogging after a herd of the animals, trying to keep to a pace they could sustain pretty much indefinately. The animals would run off when they got close, but were so much faster than the human runners that they had ample time to graze while the runners caught up.
In that particular test they decided that they didn't have a chance in hell of running down the animals.
Personally, looking at the strategies that wildlife has developed for capturing those animals that are fleet of foot, I don't see any 'just keep running' methods. It seems its much more practical to sneak up close and then sprint, possibly using teamwork and environmental factors to improve odds.
It might be interesting to try the experiment with a couple of ATV's.
Sorry I don't have a link, its been quite a few years since I saw the program.
You should add to the list researching of methods to adapt animal biology to space. For example, improved radiation hardening and radiation repair mechanisms, skin modifications to allow short-term unprotected exposure to hard vacuum, extended ability to operate without breathable oxygen (say, 15 minutes in vacuum without a critical reduction in physical capability), modifications to eliminate zero-gee related infirmities (bone density reduction, fluid redistribution, etc).
Advanced topics might include research into waste regeneration (converting blood waste products back into useful compounds through the use of an embedded electrical or nuclear powered chemical device), modification of human form to increase dexterity of lower limbs.
Overall I'd say your list ignores the fact that most of the population doesn't care about those things, and that the Earth is a fantastic cache of natural resources that we are biologically bound to. Moving away from it is possible, but to be practical will require a fairly radical reinvention of the biological nature of man. This is possible (and desirable, IMO), but will probably require many hundreds more years of research. In the meantime we've got to maintain the resources we have in the most sustainable way.
In short, the goal to get the planetary society to act as a springboard for the development of a true space-going branch of civilization is a good one, but its not going to happen as a concerted effort by a nation. Open human societies simply don't have the capacity to maintain a focus like that (although a socially engineered society might), and if they did, they could solve the environmental problems that might make such a move to space seem like a necessary thing.
Eh, unless you have kids you can assign the task too, don't depend too much on a roomba for cleaning if you have cats or dogs. For the time you'll spend picking up stuff that the roomba will get tangled up in, turning on virtual walls, and cleaning cat fur out of the stupid roller brush, you might as well have just spent 5 minutes with a real vacuum.
Seriously, I have a roomba and a couple cats, and most of the time its easier to just snag the full-size and run it around. I still use the roomba, but I'd rather have something sized somewhere between the two.
A (simple) technological solution for a social problem. It won't work. It will save the very few people who would actually do it a few hundred watts, but the problem is the cumulative usage.
The problem is that most people simply don't care enough to go to the trouble, and you can't make them care. You have to lobby to the people who make the laws that manufacturers follow to reduce stand-by power for everything.
Frankly, while this is a lot of power, I think you'd do better to lobby against incandescent light bulbs and nighttime lighting. Cut the big wasters before you go for the little ones.
I almost feel like they are going to have to raise the ages and take out both fights. The Bonzo one especially. Ender will have to have another sort of killer instinct test...
I disagree, I think the Bonzo fight would work very well, particularly if they can thrown in some other fights between kids that are of the more typical nature, just scuffles for dominance. It would be easy to show that the Ender-Bonzo fight is 'for real', and that it is Ender's nature to fight to win. They'd want to build up the tension prior to the fight, but make the actual fight scene very short.
Here's hoping that they don't do to it what they did with 'I, Robot'.
No other animal I know of keeps pets simply because we enjoy the company of other non-human specie
Meet Koko's kitten. In case you've been living in a cave the last couple decades, Koko is a female gorilla who asked for and was given a pet cat, which she named ('All Ball', because it had no tail) and cared for until it was killed in a auto accident.
It's not that animals aren't capable of many of the capacities that we humans exibit, its just that they have different social situations that cause them to exibit different behaviors. Much of what we think of as fundamentally human activities are not features of the human genetic code, they are features of our social context, something that has been built up over tens of thousands of years. Raising other primates with that social context tends to bring out those behaviors in them as well, to some extent. If human children were raised in a gorilla society they would likely have the same behaviors and values as the gorillas. From Wikipedia:
[...] Feral children lack the basic social skills which are normally learned in the process of enculturation. For example, they may eat with their hands at a great rate, be unable to learn to use a toilet, have trouble learning to walk upright and display a complete lack of interest in the human activity around them. They often seem mentally impaired and have almost insurmountable trouble learning a human language. It is essentially impossible to convert a child who became isolated at a very young age into a relatively normal member of society.
Culture is a major factor in what makes humanity what it is, not necessarily just our potential for intelligence, compassion, imagination and empathy.
Chimps that have been taught sign language have been known to reject non-signing peers, refering to them as "dumb monkeys" because of their inability to communicate. They teach sign language to their children, and might be expected to form more complex societies if there were enough of them interacting.
It would be a facinating experiment to create a nature preserve of tens of signing chimps and keep presenting them with challenges that require them to hone their communication and cooperation skills.
Hah, thats a myth. Everybody knows that you have to suspend the flies with a wire glued to their backs. See, they won't flap their wings if their legs are on the ground. If you pull the ground away from their legs though, they'll just keep flapping.
Sorry, I should have used the phrase 'rational entity' in there somewhere.
Microsoft makes a lot of stupid decisions, probably because of organizational inefficencies/rot. Google probably will eventually too, but they haven't had time to grow into that phase of business yet. Maybe they are different enough to avoid it, but that is the fate of most very large companies.
Rotating the motor might make it harder to build the motor. If you are producing the motor and weight assembly using lithography it would probably be easier to build the motor so that the output shaft is vertical with a weight that it can swing around in a circle.
I wish the article had gone into some more detail about the construction techniques so we could more easily see the problems that this solves.
I think its a clever bit of technology, although I'm curious about the linkage between the front and rear axels. It seems that linkage could be difficult to build (unless its just a series of flat gears?).
This is news, but it's not particularly unusual. When you are vulnerable to an attack, you take steps to remove the vulnerability using resources under your control.
You and I wear the same size, and encounter the same problem. The answer is to look for shirts that say 'Fitted', and to take new shirts to a local tailor (bridal shops always have tailors, and they do shirts too) and have them altered. It only costs a few bucks, and the clothing looks, fits and feels better. If you happen to have a sewing machine around the house and are inclined to develop your skills, doing those sorts of alterations yourself really isn't too difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
I own and use a ModEEG kit from the OpenEEG project. You can buy the pre-built circuit boards, assembly is mostly a matter of mounting them in shielded boxes and connecting cables and a battery. It's really a fairly trivial build, if you plan what you need to do while you wait for the boards to arrive by mail you can easily assemble everything in an evening.
Sign on to the OpenEEG email list though, it shouldn't be hard to find someone who would be willing to build out a kit for you.
Methinks you posted the wrong file:
File: Bangbus - Episode 53 - Ritta.mpg
Whats really sad is that I recognize that one by name.
Most computer PSU's actually are just DC-DC converters. They take the incoming AC, rectify it and use it to charge a capacitor (typically to around 170VDC, but they will usually run happily at lower voltage, check the specs for the PSU for the rating).
This isn't much help if you don't have a source of fairly high voltage DC available, but if you feel like putting some 12v cells in series you can directly power a computer PSU with it.
If we do nothing, space will look a lot more like Antarctica than Alaska.
And how is this a bad thing ?
Well, for one thing, all that snow will block the view of the stars.
my company is one of the largest fast food chains in America, so depending on how you look at it, Dell is directly responsible for high priced fast food. Revolt!
Taco Bell must run linux.
3.Do the right thing and depend on the sense of justice of a jury to vindicate your actions.
Doing the right thing isn't always painless.
I didn't like the BCD display either, so I made my own. Mind you, this was months before ThinkGeek had a clock with blue leds. And the LEDs in mine fade on and off instead of just blinking. It's much more serene.
Video of the clock, schematic and C code (I am *not* a C programmer, and the code reflects that fact) are available in the zip file.
Not everyone views all killing as unethical. For those who do, I often wonder how they rationalize animals in the wild. Are tigers "evil" for hunting and killing other animals? If not, are tigers somehow inferior to humans in a way that makes what is fine for them, unethical for us?
The usual difference is that most animals do not have the mental capacity to make a moral judgment about how their actions affect other animals. This is sometimes called 'moral patiency' (google will turn up more details).
The act of a tiger killing its prey is an amoral action because tigers don't seem to have the capacity to judge the morality of their actions.
(Of course, one must wonder then if Ted Bundy's actions were also amoral, given that he was a clinical psycopath and so also lacking moral patiency in the same way as the tiger.)
The act of a rational human killing a tiger for reasons other than survival or 'greater good' (opinions vary) is immoral because the human has the capacity to consider the tiger's viewpoint and to understand how his actions affect the tiger, and the capacity to choose a course of action that results in less suffering or more efficent use of resources.
This isn't necessarily the ethical system I use, just how I understand it after living and discussing the subject with a couple of vegans and philosophy majors. I personally don't have a problem with killing animals for food as long as they are not abused and suffering is kept to a minimum I'm much more interested in the ideas of conservation and sustainability and how hunting and livestock affect the environment.
I saw a TV program where some guys put a theory like this to the test, MythBusters-style. As accomplished long-distance runners, they decided to go out to the American West and give running down some deer-like animals a try (I don't recall what kind of animal they were chasing, something that grazes on the plains, doesn't hide in holes, and that would be small enough for someone to kill after running it down, i.e., not American Bison).
They spent the day jogging after a herd of the animals, trying to keep to a pace they could sustain pretty much indefinately. The animals would run off when they got close, but were so much faster than the human runners that they had ample time to graze while the runners caught up.
In that particular test they decided that they didn't have a chance in hell of running down the animals.
Personally, looking at the strategies that wildlife has developed for capturing those animals that are fleet of foot, I don't see any 'just keep running' methods. It seems its much more practical to sneak up close and then sprint, possibly using teamwork and environmental factors to improve odds.
It might be interesting to try the experiment with a couple of ATV's.
Sorry I don't have a link, its been quite a few years since I saw the program.
You should add to the list researching of methods to adapt animal biology to space. For example, improved radiation hardening and radiation repair mechanisms, skin modifications to allow short-term unprotected exposure to hard vacuum, extended ability to operate without breathable oxygen (say, 15 minutes in vacuum without a critical reduction in physical capability), modifications to eliminate zero-gee related infirmities (bone density reduction, fluid redistribution, etc).
Advanced topics might include research into waste regeneration (converting blood waste products back into useful compounds through the use of an embedded electrical or nuclear powered chemical device), modification of human form to increase dexterity of lower limbs.
Overall I'd say your list ignores the fact that most of the population doesn't care about those things, and that the Earth is a fantastic cache of natural resources that we are biologically bound to. Moving away from it is possible, but to be practical will require a fairly radical reinvention of the biological nature of man. This is possible (and desirable, IMO), but will probably require many hundreds more years of research. In the meantime we've got to maintain the resources we have in the most sustainable way.
In short, the goal to get the planetary society to act as a springboard for the development of a true space-going branch of civilization is a good one, but its not going to happen as a concerted effort by a nation. Open human societies simply don't have the capacity to maintain a focus like that (although a socially engineered society might), and if they did, they could solve the environmental problems that might make such a move to space seem like a necessary thing.
Eh, unless you have kids you can assign the task too, don't depend too much on a roomba for cleaning if you have cats or dogs. For the time you'll spend picking up stuff that the roomba will get tangled up in, turning on virtual walls, and cleaning cat fur out of the stupid roller brush, you might as well have just spent 5 minutes with a real vacuum.
Seriously, I have a roomba and a couple cats, and most of the time its easier to just snag the full-size and run it around. I still use the roomba, but I'd rather have something sized somewhere between the two.
A (simple) technological solution for a social problem. It won't work. It will save the very few people who would actually do it a few hundred watts, but the problem is the cumulative usage.
The problem is that most people simply don't care enough to go to the trouble, and you can't make them care. You have to lobby to the people who make the laws that manufacturers follow to reduce stand-by power for everything.
Frankly, while this is a lot of power, I think you'd do better to lobby against incandescent light bulbs and nighttime lighting. Cut the big wasters before you go for the little ones.
We live on front porches and swing life away,
We get by just fine here on minimum wage
If love is a labor I'll slave till the end,
I won't cross these streets until you hold my hand
I almost feel like they are going to have to raise the ages and take out both fights. The Bonzo one especially. Ender will have to have another sort of killer instinct test...
I disagree, I think the Bonzo fight would work very well, particularly if they can thrown in some other fights between kids that are of the more typical nature, just scuffles for dominance. It would be easy to show that the Ender-Bonzo fight is 'for real', and that it is Ender's nature to fight to win. They'd want to build up the tension prior to the fight, but make the actual fight scene very short.
Here's hoping that they don't do to it what they did with 'I, Robot'.
Meet Koko's kitten. In case you've been living in a cave the last couple decades, Koko is a female gorilla who asked for and was given a pet cat, which she named ('All Ball', because it had no tail) and cared for until it was killed in a auto accident.
It's not that animals aren't capable of many of the capacities that we humans exibit, its just that they have different social situations that cause them to exibit different behaviors. Much of what we think of as fundamentally human activities are not features of the human genetic code, they are features of our social context, something that has been built up over tens of thousands of years. Raising other primates with that social context tends to bring out those behaviors in them as well, to some extent. If human children were raised in a gorilla society they would likely have the same behaviors and values as the gorillas. From Wikipedia:
Culture is a major factor in what makes humanity what it is, not necessarily just our potential for intelligence, compassion, imagination and empathy.
Chimps that have been taught sign language have been known to reject non-signing peers, refering to them as "dumb monkeys" because of their inability to communicate. They teach sign language to their children, and might be expected to form more complex societies if there were enough of them interacting.
It would be a facinating experiment to create a nature preserve of tens of signing chimps and keep presenting them with challenges that require them to hone their communication and cooperation skills.
Hah, thats a myth. Everybody knows that you have to suspend the flies with a wire glued to their backs. See, they won't flap their wings if their legs are on the ground. If you pull the ground away from their legs though, they'll just keep flapping.
"The virus hides users from"...
WTF? Does it hide users from grammar too?
Sorry, I should have used the phrase 'rational entity' in there somewhere.
Microsoft makes a lot of stupid decisions, probably because of organizational inefficencies/rot. Google probably will eventually too, but they haven't had time to grow into that phase of business yet. Maybe they are different enough to avoid it, but that is the fate of most very large companies.
This is more cheaply addressed by building the proper overhang over windows. Low winter sun shines in, high summer sun does not.
Might make sense for walls, roofing and pavement though, dark pigment for the winter and light for the summer.
Rotating the motor might make it harder to build the motor. If you are producing the motor and weight assembly using lithography it would probably be easier to build the motor so that the output shaft is vertical with a weight that it can swing around in a circle.
I wish the article had gone into some more detail about the construction techniques so we could more easily see the problems that this solves.
I think its a clever bit of technology, although I'm curious about the linkage between the front and rear axels. It seems that linkage could be difficult to build (unless its just a series of flat gears?).
In other news, a large company covers its ass.
This is news, but it's not particularly unusual. When you are vulnerable to an attack, you take steps to remove the vulnerability using resources under your control.
Nothing to see here folks, move along.
On the other hand, a dye that can harmlessly stain the whites of the eyes spice-blue might be an interesting product.
By the sound of it he's around 195cm tall and weighs maybe 80kg (presuming he's not a beefcake with an hourglass figure).
You and I wear the same size, and encounter the same problem. The answer is to look for shirts that say 'Fitted', and to take new shirts to a local tailor (bridal shops always have tailors, and they do shirts too) and have them altered. It only costs a few bucks, and the clothing looks, fits and feels better. If you happen to have a sewing machine around the house and are inclined to develop your skills, doing those sorts of alterations yourself really isn't too difficult.
Combining a shirt from the 'Inductor' line and pants from the 'Capacitor' line is an ensemble that will keep you bouncing all day long.