Back in the 80's there was some kind of DNA music program available for the Amiga. My aged memory cells do not provide me with the program name, but if no one here remembers (or believes), I'll try to track it down.
Okay, I should have read the NYT article first. It had to have been 1957 when I discovered FORTRAN. I had taken an assembly language course in March 1956, but it was too tedious to write in for my heat transfer and fluid flow work.
It was not machine efficiency that won me over; it was my own efficiency in getting results. I believe that this was the essential thing for most,if not all, engineering folks who started using FORTRAN.
We were able to solve some humongous problems with the programs that I and others wrote as the years rolled on.
It was pleasant to see that someone still understands that FORTRAN can be of value. I'll admit that I like C, but for solution of engineering problems, I would probably still switch back to FORTRAN, which I self-taught myself from the manual shortly after it was released in 1956. I probably wrote 15 to 20 thousand lines of FORTRAN code in my engineering days.
The reporter who wrote this was totally ignorant of matters nuclear. Radium is an alpha emitter, totally useless for a breeder experiment. He was grabbing for buzzwords.
I'm not sure that many pounds of thorium are needed for a thorium breeder, but it may well be in the hundred of pounds, perhaps in the tons range. The kid is supposed to have been able to refine some unidentified compound to obtain huge quantities of thorium?
The story should have triggered the bullshit alarms and never been posted to/.
I was surprised that no one mentioned ReplayTV who's lunch appears to have been eaten by TIVO.
Is anyone sufficiently knowledgable about ReplyTV to access whether the TIVE paten(s) might utilize ReplayTV's prior art. I don't own either, but was just wondering...
Zeinfeld may be right about the causes of the Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island accidents. Maybe the Russians had only 2D codes, but my memory is that the US had been using 3D codes for some time.
The Chernobyl accident, from what I have read, was due to managers trying a supremely stupid experiment with no engineers present in the control room; they turned off the reactor coolant flow! They supposedly thought they had a reason to try this, but the result was a major disaster which any nuclear engineer could have told them would happen.
As I thought I recalled in the Three-Mile Island accident, there was a recently identified interaction beween pumps, valves, and gauges which could lead to an operator to misinterpret a reading. Unfortunately, as the tale went, the bulletin (or whatever is was called) which detailed the interaction had not been read and understood by the Three-mile Island crew before they experienced this interaction.
I anticipate that Feinman will correct me if I'm wrong about his simplistic (IMHO) summary.
I was stunned by reading the article refered to. Was there a 35-year hibernation period?
In the 1963-65 period I worked on thermal and gas flow analysis for a closed cycle merchant ship application of reactor technology developed during the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Project (canceled in 1961; on which I had also worked). It was to use helium coolant.
There were politcal and technological factors, of which I only had a marginal awareness, which resulted in the design never being built.
To find the concept revived, even with a somewhat different reactor design, is startling. Was the previous work forgotten? What motivated bringing the concept back to life after 35 years?
We were well aware of the German work on the Pebble Bed Reactor. We spoke of it as the gumball machine reactor. Was there a similar 35 year hiatus for the concept, or has it been on the back burner for the Germans all these years?
Stunned, inquiring mind would really like to know.
This is an honest question. I've been seeing a lot of badmouthing of Columbus.
In this posting, it is claimed that he was a rapist and a murderer. Is there any actual documentation that he personally committed rapes or murders?
He was the captain of a fleet of ships and a man of his times. There seems to be no doubt that crew members acted as criminals, but did Columbus act in that way or is he merely being tarred as a figurehead?
I believe the chambers are what are called pegmatites. I read of them years ago in a geology book and was utterly fascinated by the descriptions of gigantic crystals to be found in such chambers.
Although I can't remember the name of the book, I seem to recall that 80-foot crystals were mentioned. Makes me wonder if these selenite crystals are really the world's largest.
Forget the one billion years from now! As someone has already noted, if we can set up a grazing path asteroid by then, we probably won't even be living on Earth.
However, we won't be living anywhere if a non-grazing non-trivially-sized asteroid impacts earth. So far as I have heard, only meager funds are devoted to the search for such bodies and there are no funds devoted to readying hardware which might deflect such a potential impacting body.
As I hope all realize, exploding such an incoming object will just yield smaller bodies over a larger impact area. There would still be almost as much kinetic energy to be dissipated on impact except for fragments which might miss the Earth and added burnoff from increased surface area.
I'm an old fart who remembers exactly where I was when I heard that Kennedy had been shot and when I heard that the Challenger shuttle had exploded. I was deeply saddened by both.
It seemed immediately obvious that the Challenger cabin would fall to the ocean surface intact and it would be at that point that the crew would die, in full knowledge of the fact that they were going to die.
That awareness contributed to my feeling of deep sadness and I was actually surprised when this obvious fact was subsequently announced as news. I guess that knowledge is not particularly conducive to happiness.
The Challenger disaster is a sad monument to the general fact that management decisions are a widespread cause of sadness and disaster. It's a shame that there's no way to stamp out management decisions.
It also a shame that too many shallow individuals find it appropriate to make light or contemptuous remarks about an event that comemmorates the death of some good people.
Books which can give the public some comprehension of factual matters about various branches of science are a valuable counterforce to the dumbing down of the US population which goes on continuously.
Just listen to the TV weather readers talking foolishly about "normal" temperatures and rainfall rather than "average". They pick up an attitudinal "should be" mental state and make stupid comments that wouldn't occur if "average" was the term used.
Few people will have the opportunity to acquire the mathematical tools to work with or even truly understand physics. Some may be incapble of such learning, although I am not convinced that this has been proven.
In any event, don't denigrate the "fairy tale" books which treat of science. They are of great value to the general public and, if read when one is young enough, might even result in significant career choices in later life.
I did take appropriate math and quantum mechanics courses a half century ago. Never made my living that way, but I can read books on science at various levels with some critical facility and appreciation.
Reminds me of the last IBM OS commercials on TV
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
You probably remember them. A group of people, supposedly looking at a monitor whose face is not visible, oohing and aahing about what they were supposedly seeing. I'm as impressed by IT as I was by those stupid IBM commercials.
IT is vapor until its function and nature are revealed, no matter who supposedly oohs and aahs over it.
Cactus Critter
no sig; it's better that way
Castigating de Jaeger (sp?) shows ignorance beyond belief. He wasn't by any means the first Y2K doomsayer, as I'm sure many/. readers are aware.
I remember discussing the two-digit year problem with fellow members of the Cincinnati-Dayton (Ohio USA) Chapter of the ACM in the 1964-65 period. It was absolutely stunning to learn in the latter half of the 90's that no one had quit doing this stupid thing even when disk space and RAM got cheap, nor had anyone committed any resources to fix systems that were obviously going to break.
My one-time coworker, Bob Bemer, made the most determined run at developing concern about the upcoming problem. I read that he actually had an audience with President Nixon (71-72?) on the topic. Nixon supposedly sloughed it off and asked Bob about repairing cars.
Bob also wrote a detailed article on the upcoming Y2K problem in a 1978 issue of "Info World". He was really casting pearls of foresight before capitalistic swine, IMHO.
I think that he made his own bundle on Y2K consulting. I think that he deserved to.
Anyone who thinks that a catastrophe avoided was a hoax because it didn't actually happen is taking on the trappings of an idiot.
It is tiresome to hear folks suggesting that artists and other creative folks should prove that they really do love what they to do by not deriving any income from their favored activity.
Perhaps these are facetious suggestions, but they are, nonetheless, quite tiresome.
It is, in fact, a great delight to be able to make a living by doing something you love to do. Everyone has to earn a living unless they are born to wealth.
I recall with longing the period of my life when my wife would tell me, "They are paying you to play." I was an engineer-programmer at the time.
So, quit sounding like idiots by claiming that if someone loves to do something, they should not be reimbursed for their efforts.
IIRC, Galileo sat in storage for a couple of years during the launch moratorium which followed the Challenger disaster. When it was time for prepare for the long-delayed launch, no one thought to see if mechanical stuff still worked, like unfurling the main antenna. It was reported that it was thought that the lubrication seized up, preventing deployment of the main antenna.
I believe that they even spun the Galileo trying to deploy the main antenna. As someone has already observed, it was a magnificent accomplishment to jury rig things with the small, omnidirectional antenna so many millions of miles away.
Kinda late, I know, but I've been having beaucoup computer problems. Just hadda say it.
Don't forget the rest of the world; there have always been a lot of folks out there to whom equally bad or worse things have happened. "Two centuries, when (as was true until fairly recently, in fact) orphans and the sick and old routinely starved to death?" I am a seventh generation Kentuckian (although I now live in Arizona) and never have regarded KY as an enlightened state. Nonetheless, when doing family genealogical research, I was startled by the number of court records which dealt with caring for the sick and old. This included several examples of citizens directed to determine if specific individuals were so penurious that they should become wards of the county. There were other examples. My take is that there is a tendency to underestimate the degree of social responsibility which existed 200 years ago. JMHO, of course.
I recall that several people have died as a result of faulty software. Regrettably, I can only recall one in any detail. A variable intensity X-ray machine had control software which went bonkers when the operator typed too fast for the software. Result, the patient received a fatal irradition, rather than a therapeutic dose. There was (maybe still is) a moderated newsgroup that dealt with hazards arising from software usage where I read of these things.
The phenomenon of traffic deaths being necessary before safety measures are installed are, IMHO, a clear demonstration of the necessary role of human sacrifice in modern society. Other examples come readily to mind. I never did get around to writing that essay on the role of human sacrifice in modern society that I considered 20 or more years ago.
Am I just being naive in thinking that MS could prevent these macro viruses (or whatever the proper term is) by invoking Word Viewer instead of Word itself? My understanding is that the Viewer utilities will not expand macros. Of course, that means MS would have to distribute the Viewer utilities, but that would be trivial. If MS realy wanted to get thorough, they could add features to the Viewers which might offer a raw display of the macro attachments and let users decide whether to pass them on to Word (or whatever). Hey! Wouldn't that be a good place to perform macro virus checking. Oh well, the key thing is that there seems to be a way to prevent the macro viruses from wreaking their havoc... if as I noted above, I'm not simply naive.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the 80's there was some kind of DNA music program available for the Amiga. My aged memory cells do not provide me with the program name, but if no one here remembers (or believes), I'll try to track it down.
Okay, I should have read the NYT article first. It had to have been 1957 when I discovered FORTRAN. I had taken an assembly language course in March 1956, but it was too tedious to write in for my heat transfer and fluid flow work.
It was not machine efficiency that won me over; it was my own efficiency in getting results. I believe that this was the essential thing for most,if not all, engineering folks who started using FORTRAN.
We were able to solve some humongous problems with the programs that I and others wrote as the years rolled on.
It was pleasant to see that someone still understands that FORTRAN can be of value. I'll admit that I like C, but for solution of engineering problems, I would probably still switch back to FORTRAN, which I self-taught myself from the manual shortly after it was released in 1956. I probably wrote 15 to 20 thousand lines of FORTRAN code in my engineering days.
Ah! The nostalgia of it all!
The reporter who wrote this was totally ignorant of matters nuclear. Radium is an alpha emitter, totally useless for a breeder experiment. He was grabbing for buzzwords.
I'm not sure that many pounds of thorium are needed for a thorium breeder, but it may well be in the hundred of pounds, perhaps in the tons range. The kid is supposed to have been able to refine some unidentified compound to obtain huge quantities of thorium?
The story should have triggered the bullshit alarms and never been posted to /.
I was surprised that no one mentioned ReplayTV who's lunch appears to have been eaten by TIVO.
Is anyone sufficiently knowledgable about ReplyTV to access whether the TIVE paten(s) might utilize ReplayTV's prior art. I don't own either, but was just wondering ...
Zeinfeld may be right about the causes of the Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island accidents. Maybe the Russians had only 2D codes, but my memory is that the US had been using 3D codes for some time.
The Chernobyl accident, from what I have read, was due to managers trying a supremely stupid experiment with no engineers present in the control room; they turned off the reactor coolant flow! They supposedly thought they had a reason to try this, but the result was a major disaster which any nuclear engineer could have told them would happen.
As I thought I recalled in the Three-Mile Island accident, there was a recently identified interaction beween pumps, valves, and gauges which could lead to an operator to misinterpret a reading. Unfortunately, as the tale went, the bulletin (or whatever is was called) which detailed the interaction had not been read and understood by the Three-mile Island crew before they experienced this interaction.
I anticipate that Feinman will correct me if I'm wrong about his simplistic (IMHO) summary.
I was stunned by reading the article refered to. Was there a 35-year hibernation period?
In the 1963-65 period I worked on thermal and gas flow analysis for a closed cycle merchant ship application of reactor technology developed during the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Project (canceled in 1961; on which I had also worked). It was to use helium coolant.
There were politcal and technological factors, of which I only had a marginal awareness, which resulted in the design never being built.
To find the concept revived, even with a somewhat different reactor design, is startling. Was the previous work forgotten? What motivated bringing the concept back to life after 35 years?
We were well aware of the German work on the Pebble Bed Reactor. We spoke of it as the gumball machine reactor. Was there a similar 35 year hiatus for the concept, or has it been on the back burner for the Germans all these years?
Stunned, inquiring mind would really like to know.
This is an honest question. I've been seeing a lot of badmouthing of Columbus.
In this posting, it is claimed that he was a rapist and a murderer. Is there any actual documentation that he personally committed rapes or murders?
He was the captain of a fleet of ships and a man of his times. There seems to be no doubt that crew members acted as criminals, but did Columbus act in that way or is he merely being tarred as a figurehead?
Inquiring mind wants to know.
I appreciate the correction. The discussion reaccessed my ancient neural memory banks. I had quite forgotten the slowly cooling magma context.
Just another demo of the vast knowledge store which the /. attendees bring to the discussions.
A fabulous group of folks, despite the leavening of trolls!
I believe the chambers are what are called pegmatites. I read of them years ago in a geology book and was utterly fascinated by the descriptions of gigantic crystals to be found in such chambers.
Although I can't remember the name of the book, I seem to recall that 80-foot crystals were mentioned. Makes me wonder if these selenite crystals are really the world's largest.
Forget the one billion years from now! As someone has already noted, if we can set up a grazing path asteroid by then, we probably won't even be living on Earth.
However, we won't be living anywhere if a non-grazing non-trivially-sized asteroid impacts earth. So far as I have heard, only meager funds are devoted to the search for such bodies and there are no funds devoted to readying hardware which might deflect such a potential impacting body.
As I hope all realize, exploding such an incoming object will just yield smaller bodies over a larger impact area. There would still be almost as much kinetic energy to be dissipated on impact except for fragments which might miss the Earth and added burnoff from increased surface area.
I'm an old fart who remembers exactly where I was when I heard that Kennedy had been shot and when I heard that the Challenger shuttle had exploded. I was deeply saddened by both.
It seemed immediately obvious that the Challenger cabin would fall to the ocean surface intact and it would be at that point that the crew would die, in full knowledge of the fact that they were going to die.
That awareness contributed to my feeling of deep sadness and I was actually surprised when this obvious fact was subsequently announced as news. I guess that knowledge is not particularly conducive to happiness.
The Challenger disaster is a sad monument to the general fact that management decisions are a widespread cause of sadness and disaster. It's a shame that there's no way to stamp out management decisions.
It also a shame that too many shallow individuals find it appropriate to make light or contemptuous remarks about an event that comemmorates the death of some good people.
Books which can give the public some comprehension of factual matters about various branches of science are a valuable counterforce to the dumbing down of the US population which goes on continuously.
Just listen to the TV weather readers talking foolishly about "normal" temperatures and rainfall rather than "average". They pick up an attitudinal "should be" mental state and make stupid comments that wouldn't occur if "average" was the term used.
Few people will have the opportunity to acquire the mathematical tools to work with or even truly understand physics. Some may be incapble of such learning, although I am not convinced that this has been proven.
In any event, don't denigrate the "fairy tale" books which treat of science. They are of great value to the general public and, if read when one is young enough, might even result in significant career choices in later life.
I did take appropriate math and quantum mechanics courses a half century ago. Never made my living that way, but I can read books on science at various levels with some critical facility and appreciation.
You probably remember them. A group of people, supposedly looking at a monitor whose face is not visible, oohing and aahing about what they were supposedly seeing. I'm as impressed by IT as I was by those stupid IBM commercials. IT is vapor until its function and nature are revealed, no matter who supposedly oohs and aahs over it. Cactus Critter no sig; it's better that way
Castigating de Jaeger (sp?) shows ignorance beyond belief. He wasn't by any means the first Y2K doomsayer, as I'm sure many /. readers are aware.
I remember discussing the two-digit year problem with fellow members of the Cincinnati-Dayton (Ohio USA) Chapter of the ACM in the 1964-65 period. It was absolutely stunning to learn in the latter half of the 90's that no one had quit doing this stupid thing even when disk space and RAM got cheap, nor had anyone committed any resources to fix systems that were obviously going to break.
My one-time coworker, Bob Bemer, made the most determined run at developing concern about the upcoming problem. I read that he actually had an audience with President Nixon (71-72?) on the topic. Nixon supposedly sloughed it off and asked Bob about repairing cars.
Bob also wrote a detailed article on the upcoming Y2K problem in a 1978 issue of "Info World". He was really casting pearls of foresight before capitalistic swine, IMHO.
I think that he made his own bundle on Y2K consulting. I think that he deserved to.
Anyone who thinks that a catastrophe avoided was a hoax because it didn't actually happen is taking on the trappings of an idiot.
It is tiresome to hear folks suggesting that artists and other creative folks should prove that they really do love what they to do by not deriving any income from their favored activity. Perhaps these are facetious suggestions, but they are, nonetheless, quite tiresome. It is, in fact, a great delight to be able to make a living by doing something you love to do. Everyone has to earn a living unless they are born to wealth. I recall with longing the period of my life when my wife would tell me, "They are paying you to play." I was an engineer-programmer at the time. So, quit sounding like idiots by claiming that if someone loves to do something, they should not be reimbursed for their efforts.
IIRC, Galileo sat in storage for a couple of years during the launch moratorium which followed the Challenger disaster. When it was time for prepare for the long-delayed launch, no one thought to see if mechanical stuff still worked, like unfurling the main antenna. It was reported that it was thought that the lubrication seized up, preventing deployment of the main antenna. I believe that they even spun the Galileo trying to deploy the main antenna. As someone has already observed, it was a magnificent accomplishment to jury rig things with the small, omnidirectional antenna so many millions of miles away. Kinda late, I know, but I've been having beaucoup computer problems. Just hadda say it.
Don't forget the rest of the world; there have always been a lot of folks out there to whom equally bad or worse things have happened. "Two centuries, when (as was true until fairly recently, in fact) orphans and the sick and old routinely starved to death?" I am a seventh generation Kentuckian (although I now live in Arizona) and never have regarded KY as an enlightened state. Nonetheless, when doing family genealogical research, I was startled by the number of court records which dealt with caring for the sick and old. This included several examples of citizens directed to determine if specific individuals were so penurious that they should become wards of the county. There were other examples. My take is that there is a tendency to underestimate the degree of social responsibility which existed 200 years ago. JMHO, of course.
I recall that several people have died as a result of faulty software. Regrettably, I can only recall one in any detail. A variable intensity X-ray machine had control software which went bonkers when the operator typed too fast for the software. Result, the patient received a fatal irradition, rather than a therapeutic dose. There was (maybe still is) a moderated newsgroup that dealt with hazards arising from software usage where I read of these things.
The phenomenon of traffic deaths being necessary before safety measures are installed are, IMHO, a clear demonstration of the necessary role of human sacrifice in modern society. Other examples come readily to mind. I never did get around to writing that essay on the role of human sacrifice in modern society that I considered 20 or more years ago.
Am I just being naive in thinking that MS could prevent these macro viruses (or whatever the proper term is) by invoking Word Viewer instead of Word itself? My understanding is that the Viewer utilities will not expand macros. Of course, that means MS would have to distribute the Viewer utilities, but that would be trivial. If MS realy wanted to get thorough, they could add features to the Viewers which might offer a raw display of the macro attachments and let users decide whether to pass them on to Word (or whatever). Hey! Wouldn't that be a good place to perform macro virus checking. Oh well, the key thing is that there seems to be a way to prevent the macro viruses from wreaking their havoc ... if as I noted above, I'm not simply naive.