I received a pair of these the other day. They are incredibly effective at blocking computer noise and also provide an effective method of silencing your boss/wife/gf without encasing them in a wooden box.
Upon first glance at that story one could point out a handful of blatantly false statements that the 'journalist' had embellished upon the presumed press release. To start with, the caption on the bizzare first image ignored atomic carbon (carbon black), nanotubes and the veritable zoo of non-C60 fullerenes.
Secondly the x-rays were not used to form the substance, but to analyse its structure. Hardness is not measured by an ability to crack, it's an ability to scratch. I could crack a diamond with a metal hammer, it doesn't make it harder.
The experimenter neatly summarises the novelty with "This experiment is the first to determine quantitatively how the bonding in graphite changes under high-pressure conditions.". But the article completely ignores what this new bonding is. These are not difficult diagrams. Diamond and graphite are simple to draw, where's the new one?
The summaries in the other stories crowding this one on the page are equally laughable. Anyone can see in the diagram of C60 that it doesn't have 60 sides. In fact if anyone can understand any of the images on the page then you're doing pretty well.
Finally, you've got to love this gem at the bottom: "AD SPACE FOR SALE THIS POSITION $4,000/YEAR FOR 200x60 PIXEL BANNER More Ad Rates".
The point is, they are not the first to do a GPS/GSM competition in a drink can. Budweiser did it (see earlier posts, there are pictures).
I haven't heard anything about GSM positioning, that was my speculation. You would only need the network provider to give you the locations of all their base stations (they already have lat/longs in a database anyway). The device could then report (by SMS) the nearest base stations and their relative strengths which could be used for rough positioning. Note also that the triangulation calculation doesn't even need to be calculated by the can. It can just report raw satellite/GSM data by SMS and you work it out at the other end. This is in contrast to an actual GPS device which needs to display the lat/long.
Well, it's not that advanced. They can certainly fit in a can. A Pentium4 could.
2. High gain antenna to beam back to satellites
You're right, there's no way a small device like a can (or a mobile phone) would want to talk to a satellite. They would both want a nearby antenna for low-power comms. Maybe Pepsi will blanket the whole country with a system of base-stations similar to the GSM network. Or.... they could just use GSM, which is what they do.
3. GPS reception indoors. 4. Battery life.
Both good points. The power source problem is solved, as you guessed, by only being in stand-by until the can is opened. At that point it powers up and tries to acquire a GPS location. It then sends an SMS over GSM reporting its position. If no GPS is possible, I'm guessing pepsi doesn't really care and you just don't win the prize. They'll wait for the next one to go off. However it may be possible to locate the winner anyway. The GSM network can give you a triangulation of sorts to the nearby base-stations. Also, when they arrive in the area with their Hum-V prize or whatever it may be possible to locate the winner with specialised scanning gear even if you are inside.
Many interesting legal repurcussions. What if you're in bed with your girlfriend and/or her husband about to embark on some kinky pepsi sex game?!
I doubt the paper would flicker at the refresh rate like a CRT does though. Cheap LCD like on a mobile phone have a slow refresh rate that's usually insufficient for video. However they don't flicker and don't hurt your eyes.
For example, a normal piece of paper has a refresh rate of 0, but doesn't hurt your eyes the way you're talking about.
This type of post is starting to get about as interesting as "First Post!!" and "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!"...
Every single new technology article covered gets someone saying "that's all well and good but they've been saying this for years. speak to me when i can buy one.".
Take the article for what it's worth. It's not a sales brochure or an investment prospectus, it's a science/tech piece.
Not to mention the Futurama episode when Farnsworth has been waiting to log on to AOL with the VR suits for years and it finally goes through. They get bombarded with 3D ads.:)
Cause a lot of appliances (like light bulbs, kettles, etc) can run just fine off AC. The cost of transformers is pretty much defined by how much iron you need (iron=weight) which in turn is defined by how much power you need to transform. So you wouldn't save much money by amalgamating them. I'm sure there are other reasons.
Fine, give him first place in the national economics fair. If McDonalds needed a neutron source in each of their outlets he would get the McThrifty award for cutting costs in the fast food business, but what has that got to do with science?
While the space elevator visionaries gathered in Santa Fe I feel it falls to me to point out a glaring hypocricy in the way that that conference was organised.
Despite the cost saving benifits of the elevator approach to accessing space, they are still advocating the ongoing use of shuttles as can be seen at the bottom of their about page.
I don't think you could be more wrong...unless you left out the bit about it being done in only one family.
Firstly, just because siblings sometimes share a problem doesn't prove that it's genetic. Siblings often share a bicycle, but that doesn't mean there's a gene for that. To really prove this sort of thing you need to look at twins who preferably have grown up apart. Researches are starting to realise that even this is not always enough. Changes in gene activation can be inherited without having anything to do with the genetic code. For example, lung size in tibetans takes several generations to return to normal after moving to lower altitude. It's thought that this is something to do with methelation of the chromosomes.
Secondly, finding a gene that causes a disease (even if there are others that remain undiscovered) does a LOT to combat the disease because you can start to target the cause. It's very little to do with proving that it's genetic rather than environmental.
There are 27 possible unary operators in ternary logic. As you say, many of them will not be useful, eg: 0->0 1->0 2->0
There are 19683 possible binary operators and 7.6 trillion possible ternary operators. In boolean logic the numbers of possible operators are 2, 16 and 256 respectively.
The real question that no one here seems to be asking is: what is a simple set of base operators from which all other operators can be constructed? Can such a base set be implemented in hardware? In boolean, a set of base operators is NOT and AND. For example: x OR y = NOT( NOT(x) AND NOT(y) ) x XOR y = ( x AND NOT(y) ) OR ( y AND NOT(x) )
= NOT( NOT(x AND NOT(y) ) AND NOT( NOT(x) AND y ) )
Well that's not very tolerant of you. But I don't claim to be either.
I find Gibson's thinly veiled agenda offensive (cite both Signs and his new movie The Passion). He shouldn't be using his vaulted position as a movie star/producer to preach his beliefs to the world. It's exactly the same argument behind the principal of separation of church and state.
I agree with everything you say here, especially about Star Wars, except to say that I always thought Aliens was one of the best sci-fi films around. Of course the biology of the alien itself is highly dubious from a scientific point of view. But the gist of the article is that you can forgive one or two leaps of fantasy if they are portrayed against a background of good science, and Aliens certainly is. The details like the dropships, terraforming, robotics, heavy-lifting exoskeleton, industrialisation of space, etc are all perfectly good sci-fi in my opinion.
On the other hand, movies like The Core, Independence Day and Armaggedon start with a ridiculous idea and proceed to fill in the details with jokey slapstick "fun-science" rubbish that makes it impossible to suspend disbelief and enjoy the movie. At least for me, someone who has studied physics and has been brought up on the complete works of Asimov and Arthur C Clarke...hmm.
But if you can identify one or more genes that are actually defective (or inferior to the gene present in the majority of the population) then you can look at it as a qualitative defect, not simply an unfortunate position on an IQ continuum.
Take for example the famous sickle-cell anemia gene. It is generally defective, however the sickle shaped blood cells offer protection against malaria, so this "defect" has been marginally successful in certain populations. That doesn't mean it should not be seen as defective. In the modern world having healthy cells is more important than the extra protection against malaria. Perhaps there are similar issues effecting intelligence, we just don't know yet.
I agree that correcting a number of these potential defective genes would still leave us with a bell-shaped IQ curve. However it would be narrower (smaller standard deviation) and have a higher average. People would be born with a more equal chance in life. Is that a bad thing?
Among the two major viral classes, they are either rod-shaped or have a quasi-spherical shape termed an icosahedron. Similar to a miniature soccer ball, the icosahedron is composed of 5-sided and 6-sided faces (pentamers and hexamers).
This is a truncated icosahedron. The one formed with pentagons and hexagons is special because it's the roundest polyhedron possible with this number of faces or vertices, which probably has something to do with the success of this shape in virii.
An icosahedron is formed of 20 triangles and 12 vertices.
Some even hope the system might someday lift people to space.
Wow, those crazy optimistic people. Given the existance of a working commercial cargo elevator, those hopeless romantic optimists will go even further and begin dreaming anew of "someday" using it to lift a real live person. Kooky guys indeed.
Sadly, the fact that gasses (identically to liquids) can create drag on any body within them is far from new, startling or amazing.
Even more sadly, this has nothing to do with the article. Your observation was raised and refuted about 10 times earlier in previous posts. The fact that mountain drag, windmills, airplane propellers and solar heating are some of the mechanisms of momentum exchange is irrelevant. The point is that momentum is concerved so observing the length-of-day tells you things about the atmosphere.
# Off-axis volcanic eruptions will also alter the Earth's spin, by some miniscule amount, by acting as a simple rocket.
Lol. Volcanos may slow the Earth by lifting mass further from the axis of rotation, thus increasing the moment of inertia, but this will be reversed when land mass sinks. For example the Tibetan Plateau is sinking under its own weight. There's definitely no rocket effect.
# The tides alter the centre of mass and centre of gravity, so ergo must continuously vary the Earth's rotation.
Wrong again. The centre of mass is the centre of gravity and the tides don't alter them significantly. The ocean swells on the moon-facing side and the opposite side at the same time. The lunar tide is slowing the Earth's rotation, but it's to do with the oceans lagging behind the Moon's rotation and exerting a gravitational effect.
# In winter, the mean radius is lower than that in summer (because of the loss of a lot of vegetation). Because angular momentum is preserved, winter days must really be shorter than summer days (where the mean radius is greater).
Wrong again. Winter increases the moment of inertia of one of the solid hemispheres through deposition of snow and ice. Over 90% of the seasonal length-of-day variation is from the change of wind velocity and the rest is from change in atmospheric pressure and oceanic exciation.
Good comment. Just a couple of notes. The length of the day was exactly 60*60*24 seconds around 1820, and leap seconds are currently added about once every 400 days (but only on specific dates), not once every three years. As you say they will need to be added more and more frequently. Right now the length of the day is about 86400.002 seconds. In 1000 years it'll be about 86400.016 and leap seconds will need to be added once every 2 months. In just a short 71 millenia will will need to be adding one every day.
Slashdot Mirror
I received a pair of these the other day. They are incredibly effective at blocking computer noise and also provide an effective method of silencing your boss/wife/gf without encasing them in a wooden box.
Cool, thanks for the info.
I know all this. Like I said, the caption was wrong. Yours would make a better caption, yes.
Upon first glance at that story one could point out a handful of blatantly false statements that the 'journalist' had embellished upon the presumed press release. To start with, the caption on the bizzare first image ignored atomic carbon (carbon black), nanotubes and the veritable zoo of non-C60 fullerenes.
Secondly the x-rays were not used to form the substance, but to analyse its structure. Hardness is not measured by an ability to crack, it's an ability to scratch. I could crack a diamond with a metal hammer, it doesn't make it harder.
The experimenter neatly summarises the novelty with "This experiment is the first to determine quantitatively how the bonding in graphite changes under high-pressure conditions.". But the article completely ignores what this new bonding is. These are not difficult diagrams. Diamond and graphite are simple to draw, where's the new one?
The summaries in the other stories crowding this one on the page are equally laughable. Anyone can see in the diagram of C60 that it doesn't have 60 sides. In fact if anyone can understand any of the images on the page then you're doing pretty well.
Finally, you've got to love this gem at the bottom:
"AD SPACE FOR SALE
THIS POSITION $4,000/YEAR
FOR 200x60 PIXEL BANNER
More Ad Rates".
Walk, don't run kids!
The point is, they are not the first to do a GPS/GSM competition in a drink can. Budweiser did it (see earlier posts, there are pictures).
I haven't heard anything about GSM positioning, that was my speculation. You would only need the network provider to give you the locations of all their base stations (they already have lat/longs in a database anyway). The device could then report (by SMS) the nearest base stations and their relative strengths which could be used for rough positioning. Note also that the triangulation calculation doesn't even need to be calculated by the can. It can just report raw satellite/GSM data by SMS and you work it out at the other end. This is in contrast to an actual GPS device which needs to display the lat/long.
You're answering your own questions.
1. Advanced electronics
Well, it's not that advanced. They can certainly fit in a can. A Pentium4 could.
2. High gain antenna to beam back to satellites
You're right, there's no way a small device like a can (or a mobile phone) would want to talk to a satellite. They would both want a nearby antenna for low-power comms. Maybe Pepsi will blanket the whole country with a system of base-stations similar to the GSM network. Or.... they could just use GSM, which is what they do.
3. GPS reception indoors.
4. Battery life.
Both good points. The power source problem is solved, as you guessed, by only being in stand-by until the can is opened. At that point it powers up and tries to acquire a GPS location. It then sends an SMS over GSM reporting its position. If no GPS is possible, I'm guessing pepsi doesn't really care and you just don't win the prize. They'll wait for the next one to go off. However it may be possible to locate the winner anyway. The GSM network can give you a triangulation of sorts to the nearby base-stations. Also, when they arrive in the area with their Hum-V prize or whatever it may be possible to locate the winner with specialised scanning gear even if you are inside.
Many interesting legal repurcussions. What if you're in bed with your girlfriend and/or her husband about to embark on some kinky pepsi sex game?!
Whereas... government organisations like, oh I don't know, NASA, are immune to cost-cutting, safety breaches and the risk of catastrophic failure...
I doubt the paper would flicker at the refresh rate like a CRT does though. Cheap LCD like on a mobile phone have a slow refresh rate that's usually insufficient for video. However they don't flicker and don't hurt your eyes.
For example, a normal piece of paper has a refresh rate of 0, but doesn't hurt your eyes the way you're talking about.
This type of post is starting to get about as interesting as "First Post!!" and "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!"...
Every single new technology article covered gets someone saying "that's all well and good but they've been saying this for years. speak to me when i can buy one.".
Take the article for what it's worth. It's not a sales brochure or an investment prospectus, it's a science/tech piece.
Not to mention the Futurama episode when Farnsworth has been waiting to log on to AOL with the VR suits for years and it finally goes through. They get bombarded with 3D ads. :)
Cause a lot of appliances (like light bulbs, kettles, etc) can run just fine off AC. The cost of transformers is pretty much defined by how much iron you need (iron=weight) which in turn is defined by how much power you need to transform. So you wouldn't save much money by amalgamating them. I'm sure there are other reasons.
Fine, give him first place in the national economics fair. If McDonalds needed a neutron source in each of their outlets he would get the McThrifty award for cutting costs in the fast food business, but what has that got to do with science?
essentially, i'd like a laptop that could do 24 hours w/o ac power.
:)
I agree. The bulky transformer boxes on the power cable that convert from ac to dc are a pain and add a lot of weight to your bag.
While the space elevator visionaries gathered in Santa Fe I feel it falls to me to point out a glaring hypocricy in the way that that conference was organised.
Despite the cost saving benifits of the elevator approach to accessing space, they are still advocating the ongoing use of shuttles as can be seen at the bottom of their about page.
Maybe it's more recognizable because less of the letters are missing?! Just a theory... :)
I don't think you could be more wrong...unless you left out the bit about it being done in only one family.
Firstly, just because siblings sometimes share a problem doesn't prove that it's genetic. Siblings often share a bicycle, but that doesn't mean there's a gene for that. To really prove this sort of thing you need to look at twins who preferably have grown up apart. Researches are starting to realise that even this is not always enough. Changes in gene activation can be inherited without having anything to do with the genetic code. For example, lung size in tibetans takes several generations to return to normal after moving to lower altitude. It's thought that this is something to do with methelation of the chromosomes.
Secondly, finding a gene that causes a disease (even if there are others that remain undiscovered) does a LOT to combat the disease because you can start to target the cause. It's very little to do with proving that it's genetic rather than environmental.
There are 27 possible unary operators in ternary logic. As you say, many of them will not be useful, eg: 0->0 1->0 2->0
There are 19683 possible binary operators and 7.6 trillion possible ternary operators. In boolean logic the numbers of possible operators are 2, 16 and 256 respectively.
The real question that no one here seems to be asking is: what is a simple set of base operators from which all other operators can be constructed? Can such a base set be implemented in hardware? In boolean, a set of base operators is NOT and AND. For example:
x OR y = NOT( NOT(x) AND NOT(y) )
x XOR y = ( x AND NOT(y) ) OR ( y AND NOT(x) )
= NOT( NOT(x AND NOT(y) ) AND NOT( NOT(x) AND y ) )
Well that's not very tolerant of you. But I don't claim to be either.
I find Gibson's thinly veiled agenda offensive (cite both Signs and his new movie The Passion). He shouldn't be using his vaulted position as a movie star/producer to preach his beliefs to the world. It's exactly the same argument behind the principal of separation of church and state.
I agree with everything you say here, especially about Star Wars, except to say that I always thought Aliens was one of the best sci-fi films around. Of course the biology of the alien itself is highly dubious from a scientific point of view. But the gist of the article is that you can forgive one or two leaps of fantasy if they are portrayed against a background of good science, and Aliens certainly is. The details like the dropships, terraforming, robotics, heavy-lifting exoskeleton, industrialisation of space, etc are all perfectly good sci-fi in my opinion.
On the other hand, movies like The Core, Independence Day and Armaggedon start with a ridiculous idea and proceed to fill in the details with jokey slapstick "fun-science" rubbish that makes it impossible to suspend disbelief and enjoy the movie. At least for me, someone who has studied physics and has been brought up on the complete works of Asimov and Arthur C Clarke...hmm.
...depend on placing the sample in a strong vacuum. That's fine for observing reactions between solids and gases...
Um, strong vacuum != gases. Heh.
But if you can identify one or more genes that are actually defective (or inferior to the gene present in the majority of the population) then you can look at it as a qualitative defect, not simply an unfortunate position on an IQ continuum.
Take for example the famous sickle-cell anemia gene. It is generally defective, however the sickle shaped blood cells offer protection against malaria, so this "defect" has been marginally successful in certain populations. That doesn't mean it should not be seen as defective. In the modern world having healthy cells is more important than the extra protection against malaria. Perhaps there are similar issues effecting intelligence, we just don't know yet.
I agree that correcting a number of these potential defective genes would still leave us with a bell-shaped IQ curve. However it would be narrower (smaller standard deviation) and have a higher average. People would be born with a more equal chance in life. Is that a bad thing?
Among the two major viral classes, they are either rod-shaped or have a quasi-spherical shape termed an icosahedron. Similar to a miniature soccer ball, the icosahedron is composed of 5-sided and 6-sided faces (pentamers and hexamers).
This is a truncated icosahedron. The one formed with pentagons and hexagons is special because it's the roundest polyhedron possible with this number of faces or vertices, which probably has something to do with the success of this shape in virii.
An icosahedron is formed of 20 triangles and 12 vertices.
Some even hope the system might someday lift people to space.
Wow, those crazy optimistic people. Given the existance of a working commercial cargo elevator, those hopeless romantic optimists will go even further and begin dreaming anew of "someday" using it to lift a real live person. Kooky guys indeed.
Sadly, the fact that gasses (identically to liquids) can create drag on any body within them is far from new, startling or amazing.
Even more sadly, this has nothing to do with the article. Your observation was raised and refuted about 10 times earlier in previous posts. The fact that mountain drag, windmills, airplane propellers and solar heating are some of the mechanisms of momentum exchange is irrelevant. The point is that momentum is concerved so observing the length-of-day tells you things about the atmosphere.
# Off-axis volcanic eruptions will also alter the Earth's spin, by some miniscule amount, by acting as a simple rocket.
Lol. Volcanos may slow the Earth by lifting mass further from the axis of rotation, thus increasing the moment of inertia, but this will be reversed when land mass sinks. For example the Tibetan Plateau is sinking under its own weight. There's definitely no rocket effect.
# The tides alter the centre of mass and centre of gravity, so ergo must continuously vary the Earth's rotation.
Wrong again. The centre of mass is the centre of gravity and the tides don't alter them significantly. The ocean swells on the moon-facing side and the opposite side at the same time. The lunar tide is slowing the Earth's rotation, but it's to do with the oceans lagging behind the Moon's rotation and exerting a gravitational effect.
# In winter, the mean radius is lower than that in summer (because of the loss of a lot of vegetation). Because angular momentum is preserved, winter days must really be shorter than summer days (where the mean radius is greater).
Wrong again. Winter increases the moment of inertia of one of the solid hemispheres through deposition of snow and ice. Over 90% of the seasonal length-of-day variation is from the change of wind velocity and the rest is from change in atmospheric pressure and oceanic exciation.
Good comment. Just a couple of notes. The length of the day was exactly 60*60*24 seconds around 1820, and leap seconds are currently added about once every 400 days (but only on specific dates), not once every three years. As you say they will need to be added more and more frequently. Right now the length of the day is about 86400.002 seconds. In 1000 years it'll be about 86400.016 and leap seconds will need to be added once every 2 months. In just a short 71 millenia will will need to be adding one every day.