when learning to use a tool, the pattern of neuronal activity is somehow transferred from the hand to the tool, "as if the tool were the hand of the monkey and its tips were the monkey's fingers." As for how the same neurons could affect both the opening and the closing of the hand, the team speculates that they may be connected with other sets of neurons that more directly control these movements.
I expect that mapping to get connected inside the basal ganglia that interconnect motor and prefrontal cortices. It will be fascinating to watch (probably literally, with MRI) already learned hand use get quickly mapped to newly learned handtool use. The feedback loops for that learning, once mapped, will present an extremely valuable target for automation or synthetic enhancement, whether by chemical facilitators, electrochemical signals, or outright replacement with prostheses.
Our handheld tools should give a lot more feedback directly to our hands. We're starting to make our tools "smarter", or at least automated (power tools evolving to electric screwdrivers). But I don't know of any tools that give any feedback other than the coarsest momentum cues from the point where the tool contacts the target material back into the hand itself. At best we've got visual cues from bubble levels. If my nailgun vibrated my hand while I rotated it until it felt level, I'd be a lot more productive securing things straight. If my circular saw felt like it were diverging from the planned cut, my cuts would be a lot more accurate and faster (and my eyes would be safer out of the loop).
The front ends of our tools should be more sensitive, and the back ends should fit more like a glove, or an elbow.
good news for India & Brazil who need this drug to be cheap
It's also good news for the US which needs this drug to be cheap. AIDS patients aren't earning a lot of money while on this therapy, and their other medical care costs a lot of money. Either them directly, or their insurance corps which mark up the payout and charge the rest of us who haven't (yet) needed the drugs.
Again, my understanding of ballistics says that some velocities give parabolic trajectories that return to Earth, while some higher velocities escape Earth and its orbit, while that threshold between them stays in orbit. Hitting that orbital velocity at the right starting angle to the Earth's surface gives an orbit.
The other method I described just shoots chunks of spacecraft into a big orbiting net. At about 11.2Km:s, very close to the orbital velocity of the net (and the Space Station, and its astronauts). Then astronauts collect it, assemble it, and release it like a "buoy", probably changing the spacecraft's orbital velocity a little for a different orbit than the Space Station. The energy to operate that interception, collection, assembly and release, all of which changes the orbit the chunks are in, would be generated by solar. But not delivered directly as solar power to the spacecraft, just powering devices that manipulate the spacecraft. Though the craft could have a chunk that's a solar power plant, which powers orbital tweaks over the craft's lifetime.
I like the idea. I like the efficiency gain over rocket fuel, which has to lift the fuel, too. And I like the idea of dual purposing these expensive war projects to industry and science.
But since you mentioned a space elevator, I'll mention that a space elevator would be a great scaffold for a launching railgun...
Bush and his Republicans say that the FISA renewal is the most important weapon we have to protect ourselves against attack. But Bush says he'll veto it if it lets people sue telcos for helping Bush wiretap us, and his Republicans also have tried to stop the bill from being amended, or even debating amendments. And now these Republicans are even trying to stop FISA from being extended while the Congress debates what the renewed version contains.
So Bush and his Republicans say that telco amnesty, retroactive immunity, is worth going without FISA at all. Even though they say it's our most important defense. So telco immunity, even though telcos would be immune under current law if they can show evidence that Bush assured them they were immune, is more important than our security.
"Paranomocracy" is rule by criminals, as first used by Russian Ouspensky in a 1919 letter describing what he also called "kakourgocracy" the new Soviet rule by criminals.
multi billion dollar industries on the back of our content without paying for it
I don't see U2 sending checks to the many blues, folk and rock (and other) artists still alive from whom U2 "stole" so many lyrical, topical, sylistic, musical, production themes and techniques.
U2 wouldn't even have to send out "free money". It could just make an album of songs they cover that were written by other artists who influenced them, which would automatically pay those artists with songwriter royalties. Of course it's not really "automatic", but the royalty agencies have guilt multi billion dollar industries on the back of all that content without paying for it, and often without paying the artists they owe. And I don't see U2 complaining about that.
Of course, none of that is really U2's obligation. The way we make music, especially pop music, is to "steal" from previous artists. Picasso said "all artists borrow; great artists steal ". Without that "stealing", we wouldn't have any art except the "original" cave paintings. U2 wouldn't have had records to listen to from which to "steal" when they got their turn.
And since U2 is far from starving while others make their "billions" too, this complaint rings especially false. There goes their sainthood.
I'm not familiar with the requirement of a rocket to "circularize" an orbit. My understanding of ballistics is that the right trajectory and velocity insert objects into orbit, as a matter of parabolic paths.
I've also suggested in this thread that the railgun exit at the top of an Andean mountain, which gets the payload closer to space to start, and past the thickest atmosphere. From inside an evacuated barrel. Friction and drag would be much less.
As for the orbital collection, if it's necessary, that sounds like a good job for the Space Station (and tugs docking to it). Shooting payloads at a big net that's already travelling orbital speeds should be a good job for live astronauts. And extra energy for tweaking the payload into orbit could be generated by the Station from solar, rather than packing it (and its management/expenditure sustems) along with the payload as mass. I could see firing little payloads at low energies, already within reach of the current railgun plans, that Station astronauts collect and assemble into full spacecraft. That method also allows packing more fragile components to withstand acceleration, then reassembling them once they're safely in space. And it all would justify humans working fulltime in orbit on more than just Station maintenance itself. Which in turn creates surplus value justifying putting pure scientists up there with them. And presto: commercial launches of unmanned gear justify humans colonizing space.
Oh, good. Because your reasons are even worse ones for modding it down.
I didn't know about the NASA project. So I insightfully thought of it myself (though of course there's lots of fictional precedent, starting with _From Earth to the Moon_). And I then included specific information about escape velocity and how this gun's specific development roadmap that could attain it.
So NASA cancelled their project. You don't know why, or whether this Navy project could restart it (which makes you neither insightful nor informative). But it means that the principle was validated by NASA going further than my 5-minute Slashdot post into actually investigating such a project. A project that still seems very feasible. NASA cancels all kinds of worthwhile projects, especially in the hyperpolitical Bush administration that has its own twisted path favoring Star Wars weapons above any other military or NASA project.
So here we are actually arguing about the project I suggested. Which, if my post were modded into oblivion, no one could do. Thanks for nothing.
I have the right to do whatever I want with my copy of the music. But that right not protected by the government, which compromises to add privileges to the author of the music. But that compromise is not their right, it is an exception to my rights.
My rights still include lending a copy to a friend, or playing a copy for a friend, even at a party, even if I don't stay in the room. Because stopping that is too much a compromise of my rights to their privilege to make money by stopping me.
And that way of protecting their commerce has worked for centuries. Even when copying the music was even easier than it is now, just singing back a song someone had heard. Today, there are so many ways to make money off the free distribution of music by people with copies (like selling concert tickets, merchandise, and licensing for advertising jingles or sampling/soundtracks) that the compromise should serve the privilege even less, and revert to protecting our rights even more.
Their privilege to make money doesn't mean a right to make all of the money, especially when I'm doing more of the work for them.
A circular track could accelerate the payload gradually around a lot of cycles, rather than stress it with high-G acceleration.
What if the payload were also spiraled around its axis that's parallel to the circle, as it's accelerated along that axis. Wouldn't that neutralize the centripetal effect on the payload, so the total acceleration wouldn't damage the contents of the payload?
Of course a little turbulence in the barrel could really wreck things, and humans would get scrambled. But an evacuated barrel at the top of an Andean mountain and magnetic buffers could eliminate friction, both to minimize turbulence and drag in general, popping out at an altitude already much thinner than sealevel and something like 50 miles further from the Earth's center than at Cape Kennedy.
There are lots of useful satellites and probes that don't have to weigh very much.
And I don't see why it can't shoot a larger craft into space in chunks that assemble each other once up. Shoot the right machines to the Moon, and they can join together to make a factory producing other probes.
If I were in charge of China's space program, I'd be buying one of these right now.
You want to mod my post down because of a simple formula error that can be made up with just (4x) more energy than I specified coming in the future? Just correcting the mistake and talking about it some more isn't enough for you?
A launcher railgun will need distance to accelerate to escape velocity. I wonder about building it up the side of an Andean mountain, which starts a little further out at the Equatorial bulge, and ends out in thinner air. If the gun's barrel is evacuated, it can shoot faster, and avoid the thick atmosphere drag at the bottom.
I'm too lazy to do the math to see how long such a barrel would have to be to accelerate the payload. But I think a circular track towards the peak could do much of the acceleration in loops before releasing along the final track. Also, wouldn't spinning the payload on its axis that's parallel to the circular track neutralize the centripetal effect of the loop on the payload? Make it cycle enough loops to accelerate slowly but steadily, and it seems the overall G-force on the payload could be minimized.
Still a lot of TrollMods who can't stand even mentioning that the Pentagon's business is shooting things down, or that doing something else instead could be good.
Mach 8 is about 9800KPH. Escape velocity from the Earth's surface is 40,320KPH. This gun is already firing at over 24% of escape velocity. A 64Mj gun would be almost 50%; a 132Mj gun would shoot projectiles right into orbit.
I wonder whether coming generations of this gun could shoot unmanned exploration vehicles or satellites out into space. The Pentagon will probably try to use it just to shoot down spacecraft, but instead we could use their budgets to increase space industry and exploration.
Leaving people we care about (whether friends, family, neighbors, or fellow citizens) out of the fighting, replaced by robots, lets us ignore the need for war to be more ethical in how it's fought and what it's fought for. It dehumanizes the enemy even more than do the reasons for war and the following propaganda. People will claim the rewards of "bravery" for pushing a button, without having to pull a trigger in the face of return fire.
Robots will make war more likely. Which is unethical.
You have a natural tendency To squeeze off a shot You're good fun at parties You wear the right masks You're old but you still Like a laugh in the locker room You can't abide change You're at home on the range You opened your suitcase Behind the old workings To show off the magnum You deafened the canyon A comfort a friend Only upstaged in the end By the Uzi machine gun Does the recoil remind you Remind you of sex Old man what the hell you gonna kill next Old timer who you gonna kill next I looked over Jordan and what did I see Saw a U.S. Marine in a pile of debris I swam in your pools And lay under your palm trees I looked in the eyes of the Indian Who lay on the Federal Building steps And through the range finder over the hill I saw the front line boys popping their pills Sick of the mess they find On their desert stage And the bravery of being out of range Yeah the question is vexed Old man what the hell you gonna kill next Old timer who you gonna kill next Hey bartender over here Two more shots And two more beers Sir turn up the TV sound The war has started on the ground Just love those laser guided bombs They're really great For righting wrongs You hit the target And win the game From bars 3,000 miles away 3,000 miles away We play the game With the bravery of being out of range We zap and maim With the bravery of being out of range We strafe the train With the bravery of being out of range We gain terrain With the bravery of being out of range With the bravery of being out of range We play the game With the bravery of being out of range
Ah, but that extra 2%+1 makes all the difference. Symbian will clearly have to react to this, which certainly makes Nokia less dependent on Symbian's UIKON GUI layer. The probable reaction is for Symbian to adopt Qt to replace UIKON on at least some models. Or drop UIKON entirely, as they've evolved UIKON in several different generations for very specific rendering tasks that Nokia's Qt will be perfected for, and have lately apparently completely factored UIKON into an independent presentation tier inside Symbian OS.
Android's GUI is forked from Qt. I wonder whether this means a huge convergence to a common Qt GUI for mobiles, which also looks/works the same on desktops. If things move that way, then probably UIKON is doomed.
Too bad I use GNOME as my Desktop. Maybe someone will finally release a "KDE for GNOME" theme, or maybe there already is one...
How will Symbian react? Will they switch to using GNOME so they have parity? I'd doubt they'd adopt Qt with one of their customers controlling its license back to them. Does this move mean Symbian will always use its own proprietary GUI SW?
Slashdot Mirror
In Imperial measures, that's how many Libraries of Congress?
I expect that mapping to get connected inside the basal ganglia that interconnect motor and prefrontal cortices. It will be fascinating to watch (probably literally, with MRI) already learned hand use get quickly mapped to newly learned handtool use. The feedback loops for that learning, once mapped, will present an extremely valuable target for automation or synthetic enhancement, whether by chemical facilitators, electrochemical signals, or outright replacement with prostheses.
Our handheld tools should give a lot more feedback directly to our hands. We're starting to make our tools "smarter", or at least automated (power tools evolving to electric screwdrivers). But I don't know of any tools that give any feedback other than the coarsest momentum cues from the point where the tool contacts the target material back into the hand itself. At best we've got visual cues from bubble levels. If my nailgun vibrated my hand while I rotated it until it felt level, I'd be a lot more productive securing things straight. If my circular saw felt like it were diverging from the planned cut, my cuts would be a lot more accurate and faster (and my eyes would be safer out of the loop).
The front ends of our tools should be more sensitive, and the back ends should fit more like a glove, or an elbow.
It's also good news for the US which needs this drug to be cheap. AIDS patients aren't earning a lot of money while on this therapy, and their other medical care costs a lot of money. Either them directly, or their insurance corps which mark up the payout and charge the rest of us who haven't (yet) needed the drugs.
Again, my understanding of ballistics says that some velocities give parabolic trajectories that return to Earth, while some higher velocities escape Earth and its orbit, while that threshold between them stays in orbit. Hitting that orbital velocity at the right starting angle to the Earth's surface gives an orbit.
The other method I described just shoots chunks of spacecraft into a big orbiting net. At about 11.2Km:s, very close to the orbital velocity of the net (and the Space Station, and its astronauts). Then astronauts collect it, assemble it, and release it like a "buoy", probably changing the spacecraft's orbital velocity a little for a different orbit than the Space Station. The energy to operate that interception, collection, assembly and release, all of which changes the orbit the chunks are in, would be generated by solar. But not delivered directly as solar power to the spacecraft, just powering devices that manipulate the spacecraft. Though the craft could have a chunk that's a solar power plant, which powers orbital tweaks over the craft's lifetime.
I like the idea. I like the efficiency gain over rocket fuel, which has to lift the fuel, too. And I like the idea of dual purposing these expensive war projects to industry and science.
But since you mentioned a space elevator, I'll mention that a space elevator would be a great scaffold for a launching railgun...
Bellybutton. Do I get a peek?
Bush and his Republicans say that the FISA renewal is the most important weapon we have to protect ourselves against attack. But Bush says he'll veto it if it lets people sue telcos for helping Bush wiretap us, and his Republicans also have tried to stop the bill from being amended, or even debating amendments. And now these Republicans are even trying to stop FISA from being extended while the Congress debates what the renewed version contains.
So Bush and his Republicans say that telco amnesty, retroactive immunity, is worth going without FISA at all. Even though they say it's our most important defense. So telco immunity, even though telcos would be immune under current law if they can show evidence that Bush assured them they were immune, is more important than our security.
If you're a Republican, it is.
"Paranomocracy" is rule by criminals, as first used by Russian Ouspensky in a 1919 letter describing what he also called "kakourgocracy" the new Soviet rule by criminals.
I don't see U2 sending checks to the many blues, folk and rock (and other) artists still alive from whom U2 "stole" so many lyrical, topical, sylistic, musical, production themes and techniques.
U2 wouldn't even have to send out "free money". It could just make an album of songs they cover that were written by other artists who influenced them, which would automatically pay those artists with songwriter royalties. Of course it's not really "automatic", but the royalty agencies have guilt multi billion dollar industries on the back of all that content without paying for it, and often without paying the artists they owe. And I don't see U2 complaining about that.
Of course, none of that is really U2's obligation. The way we make music, especially pop music, is to "steal" from previous artists. Picasso said "all artists borrow; great artists steal ". Without that "stealing", we wouldn't have any art except the "original" cave paintings. U2 wouldn't have had records to listen to from which to "steal" when they got their turn.
And since U2 is far from starving while others make their "billions" too, this complaint rings especially false. There goes their sainthood.
How can I get the 3D data generated from my uploaded 2D image into KML format, so I can upload that into Google Earth? Some VRML to KML converter?
I'm not familiar with the requirement of a rocket to "circularize" an orbit. My understanding of ballistics is that the right trajectory and velocity insert objects into orbit, as a matter of parabolic paths.
I've also suggested in this thread that the railgun exit at the top of an Andean mountain, which gets the payload closer to space to start, and past the thickest atmosphere. From inside an evacuated barrel. Friction and drag would be much less.
As for the orbital collection, if it's necessary, that sounds like a good job for the Space Station (and tugs docking to it). Shooting payloads at a big net that's already travelling orbital speeds should be a good job for live astronauts. And extra energy for tweaking the payload into orbit could be generated by the Station from solar, rather than packing it (and its management/expenditure sustems) along with the payload as mass. I could see firing little payloads at low energies, already within reach of the current railgun plans, that Station astronauts collect and assemble into full spacecraft. That method also allows packing more fragile components to withstand acceleration, then reassembling them once they're safely in space. And it all would justify humans working fulltime in orbit on more than just Station maintenance itself. Which in turn creates surplus value justifying putting pure scientists up there with them. And presto: commercial launches of unmanned gear justify humans colonizing space.
Oh, good. Because your reasons are even worse ones for modding it down.
I didn't know about the NASA project. So I insightfully thought of it myself (though of course there's lots of fictional precedent, starting with _From Earth to the Moon_). And I then included specific information about escape velocity and how this gun's specific development roadmap that could attain it.
So NASA cancelled their project. You don't know why, or whether this Navy project could restart it (which makes you neither insightful nor informative). But it means that the principle was validated by NASA going further than my 5-minute Slashdot post into actually investigating such a project. A project that still seems very feasible. NASA cancels all kinds of worthwhile projects, especially in the hyperpolitical Bush administration that has its own twisted path favoring Star Wars weapons above any other military or NASA project.
So here we are actually arguing about the project I suggested. Which, if my post were modded into oblivion, no one could do. Thanks for nothing.
I have the right to do whatever I want with my copy of the music. But that right not protected by the government, which compromises to add privileges to the author of the music. But that compromise is not their right, it is an exception to my rights.
My rights still include lending a copy to a friend, or playing a copy for a friend, even at a party, even if I don't stay in the room. Because stopping that is too much a compromise of my rights to their privilege to make money by stopping me.
And that way of protecting their commerce has worked for centuries. Even when copying the music was even easier than it is now, just singing back a song someone had heard. Today, there are so many ways to make money off the free distribution of music by people with copies (like selling concert tickets, merchandise, and licensing for advertising jingles or sampling/soundtracks) that the compromise should serve the privilege even less, and revert to protecting our rights even more.
Their privilege to make money doesn't mean a right to make all of the money, especially when I'm doing more of the work for them.
I already replied to comments making all your redundant points.
Add your flamebait and you're well on your way to +5.
A circular track could accelerate the payload gradually around a lot of cycles, rather than stress it with high-G acceleration.
What if the payload were also spiraled around its axis that's parallel to the circle, as it's accelerated along that axis. Wouldn't that neutralize the centripetal effect on the payload, so the total acceleration wouldn't damage the contents of the payload?
Of course a little turbulence in the barrel could really wreck things, and humans would get scrambled. But an evacuated barrel at the top of an Andean mountain and magnetic buffers could eliminate friction, both to minimize turbulence and drag in general, popping out at an altitude already much thinner than sealevel and something like 50 miles further from the Earth's center than at Cape Kennedy.
There are lots of useful satellites and probes that don't have to weigh very much.
And I don't see why it can't shoot a larger craft into space in chunks that assemble each other once up. Shoot the right machines to the Moon, and they can join together to make a factory producing other probes.
If I were in charge of China's space program, I'd be buying one of these right now.
Thank you very much. Tip your bartenders, try the veal...
You want to mod my post down because of a simple formula error that can be made up with just (4x) more energy than I specified coming in the future? Just correcting the mistake and talking about it some more isn't enough for you?
A launcher railgun will need distance to accelerate to escape velocity. I wonder about building it up the side of an Andean mountain, which starts a little further out at the Equatorial bulge, and ends out in thinner air. If the gun's barrel is evacuated, it can shoot faster, and avoid the thick atmosphere drag at the bottom.
I'm too lazy to do the math to see how long such a barrel would have to be to accelerate the payload. But I think a circular track towards the peak could do much of the acceleration in loops before releasing along the final track. Also, wouldn't spinning the payload on its axis that's parallel to the circular track neutralize the centripetal effect of the loop on the payload? Make it cycle enough loops to accelerate slowly but steadily, and it seems the overall G-force on the payload could be minimized.
Moderation +3
40% Interesting
20% Troll
20% Insightful
Still a lot of TrollMods who can't stand even mentioning that the Pentagon's business is shooting things down, or that doing something else instead could be good.
Mach 8 is about 9800KPH. Escape velocity from the Earth's surface is 40,320KPH. This gun is already firing at over 24% of escape velocity. A 64Mj gun would be almost 50%; a 132Mj gun would shoot projectiles right into orbit.
I wonder whether coming generations of this gun could shoot unmanned exploration vehicles or satellites out into space. The Pentagon will probably try to use it just to shoot down spacecraft, but instead we could use their budgets to increase space industry and exploration.
Robots will make war more likely. Which is unethical.
"The Bravery of Being Out of Range" by Roger Waters
I hope you're right.
Ah, but that extra 2%+1 makes all the difference. Symbian will clearly have to react to this, which certainly makes Nokia less dependent on Symbian's UIKON GUI layer. The probable reaction is for Symbian to adopt Qt to replace UIKON on at least some models. Or drop UIKON entirely, as they've evolved UIKON in several different generations for very specific rendering tasks that Nokia's Qt will be perfected for, and have lately apparently completely factored UIKON into an independent presentation tier inside Symbian OS.
Android's GUI is forked from Qt. I wonder whether this means a huge convergence to a common Qt GUI for mobiles, which also looks/works the same on desktops. If things move that way, then probably UIKON is doomed.
Too bad I use GNOME as my Desktop. Maybe someone will finally release a "KDE for GNOME" theme, or maybe there already is one...
How will Symbian react? Will they switch to using GNOME so they have parity? I'd doubt they'd adopt Qt with one of their customers controlling its license back to them. Does this move mean Symbian will always use its own proprietary GUI SW?