This seems reasonable to me, though I still feel that the question of a gene just happening to appear in a mouse that just happens to make that mouse sensitive to the odor of its likely predators pushes the envelope of statistical credibility.
The word "feel" is incompatible with "statistical credibility". Statistics are notoriously counter-intuitive.
Think through the statistics -- tens (hundreds?) of millions of generations of tens (hundreds?) of millions of mice. Mutations happen all the time -- retroviruses, chemical or radiation damage, transcription errors -- but most confer either nothing or a negative advantage, and aren't seen again (unless they spontaneously arise again -- although changes due to retrovirus activity are more likely to recur). It only takes one "good" mutation in one breeding mouse to propagate. Even a slight edge gets multiplied over successive generations.
Well, and I meant it was fairly common to see it in discussions on BIX (and some other places) after Pournelle introduced it. Haven't seen it that much recently, I'll grant you.
Kelly's Heroes, one of the all time great war movies. When Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland face off against the Tiger tank, you can almost hear "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" theme in the background.
It seems the only way evolution could explain this is by saying that the vast-majority of mice without this gene were promptly eliminated by cats and taken out of the gene pool.
Not at all.
Consider a population of pre-mice, without the gene, that are reasonably adept at avoiding predators for other reasons -- camouflage, fast, good hearing, whatever. Then some sub-population of these critters acquires this gene. Said sub-population becomes much more adept at avoiding predators, and tend to out-survive (and hence, out-reproduce) those without it. Perhaps later, since that gene is so effective, the biological cost of the other avoidance factors (camouflage, hearing, speed etc) outweighs the advantage they confer, and they fade from the population, or perhaps not. Probably in the pre-smell avoidance gene days, cats and other predators were on average slower, and the predator population slowly gets faster as the quick ones outcompete the slow ones.
Likewise for the smell of other predators. But that would imply that there was initially an enumerated list of odors
Not at all.
This assumes that not only do all predators smell different, but that the odor-causing chemical in each species is completely unrelated to all others. This is highly improbable. More likely the odorant chemical is identical or very nearly so in mouse-predator species, probably some byproduct of digesting and metabolizing mouse (and other rodent) proteins. (Consider also that there are only a few different families of mammalian rodent predators - felis, canis, mustelidae - and this smell aversion probably doesn't work for snakes or owls.)
Pournelle was using that on BIX (rapidly picked up by other Bixen) back before The Gripping Hand (working title "The Moat Around Murcheson's Eye", if I remember right) came off the presses, i.e. circa 15 years ago.
Hey, he died in the original movie, was that counted? And I recall an episode where he'd been in the sarcophagous many times but come to think of he didn't die before each time, that was just maintenance.
I'll have go back through my collection, 13 sounds not far off, counting times he ascended/returned and times he was revived in a sarcophagous.
How about a car that drives itself? We're almost there (see the recent DARPA Urban Challenge).
Wonder when we'll see the Teamsters' Union either requiring a union dues tax to be levied on the purchase price or lobbying to keep them off public highways.
Why invest in developing robotic fruit or vegetable pickers if no farmer's going to buy them when migrant labor is cheaper? Why invest in developing housekeeper robots when no e.g. hotel is going to buy them? Etc, etc.
If the market supply of minimum-wage (or below) labor dried up, we'd see a short term rise in wages paid (for those jobs that can't be offshored), followed by increasing replacement of expensive human labor with cheaper robotic labor as the latter became available.
The R2 and similar non-anthropomorphic droids were the ones that actually got the work done. As Owen Lars said of C-3PO, "I have no need for a protocol droid". Did 3PO ever do anything useful aside from translate for R2-D2? (And what's up with that? Even in 1976 we had machines that could speak.)
Humanoid isn't a bad shape for a general purpose bot that has to interact with a human environment and made-for-humans tools, but there's still room for improvement, and in general purpose-built bots are likely more cost-effective.
It is, bar none, the best phone UI on the market today.
Sorry, but it ain't. That honor still falls to the full size touchtone pad developed by AT&T (the original one) back in the 1960s. (Couple that with a good wireless headset and you've reached telephone nirvana.)
Now, if you're talking about UIs for all the other electronic gadgets that aren't a phone that are also rolled into the iPhone, you might have a point. But for making calls (especially all those conference calls where you have to input 8- or 10-digit ID numbers after connecting) give me a full size standard layout touch pad.
Just tried this on Linux; "mv" (or "cp") just complains and refuses to do anything with/beta/baz. KDE/Konqueror detects the conflict and asks if you want to cancel, rename baz, or overwrite baz. If you overwrite, you end up with what you show above for Windows, with "one" being the one from beta/baz, the old alpha/baz/one is toast (unless there was another link elsewhere to the same inode).
I've sometimes wondered how far back in history you'd have to go before the technology was incapable of making a reliable relay and a battery. [...] Perhaps two hundred years ago, maybe more.
Joseph Henry invented the relay in 1835, ten years after William Sturgeon invented the electromagnet (in turn five years after Oersted discovered electromagnetism in 1820). So the relay was invented a couple of years before Babbage started describing his analytical engine (1837 - the simpler difference engine he described in 1822). Had the knowledge of eg Boolean logic been there, a digital computer could certainly have been built before 1850. (In fact it took until 1937, when Claude Shannon proved in his master's thesis that Boolean algebra could be implemented with relays.)
Assuming one already knew how to do it -- as with a time traveller -- all you'd need is a supply of wire (and some means to insulate it) and iron to make the relays. Chemical batteries are rather easy to make if you've got a couple of dissimilar metals, but if you can make relays you can probably also make generators. A modern day "Connecticut Yankee" could have given Arthur an electromechanical digital computer. Smelting of iron began in the BC era, and use of meteoritic iron goes way back. The ancient Egyptians certain knew how to make wire (for jewellery), so who knows how far back you could go. It's not so much a hard line as a level of increasing difficulty.
With a UID of 12292, and he's talking about "Open Linux", he probably hasn't touched the stuff in years. Open Linux was the name of Caldera's (remember them? they became The SCO Group, dropped their Linux business, and are now in bankruptcy) distro back around the turn of the millenium.
One thing you COULDN'T do with this PC is buy anything from Walmarts own website
There's a huge difference between "anything" and "video download service". The article you link to complains about Walmart's video download service not working with anything but IE. The rest of Walmart's website works just fine with Firefox on Linux.
as the vehicle touches the ground, you get a pivotal point and the rocket just tends to top over.
Yeah, I see the problem. The video you linked to shows that the engine is still firing when the first landing leg touches the ground, and the thing just bounces a bit before settling.
They could steal a trick from the Apollo Lunar Module, and attach contact probes to the landing legs. In the LM these extended a few feet down from each footpad, and as soon as any of them made contact with the lunar surface, that would kill the descent engine. The vehicle then just drops the remaining distance. Just make the probes a few inches for Earth gravity, and the thing would be less prone to jittery bouncing when it nears the ground. (I can also see where it might have guidance problems at that point -- one leg touches the ground, bounces a bit, and the guidance system sees that as an attitude change it needs to compensate for with the engine. It really needs an "okay, I'm close enough to the ground to just stop" sensor.)
2) They may not have made it over the finish line, but they are the only ones who entered the race among ten or so teams. Many of the teams said they were "close" last year, yet still couldn't make it work a year later.
There's a local (Colorado) team that has a vehicle and they felt it ready to enter, but (per the newspaper report) couldn't get the requisite FAA flight approval. (Sorry, don't recall whether it was Paragon or Micro-Space).
I would have thought that some kind of contest like this would have a blanket FAA waiver to cover the sight for the time involved. Apparently each vehicle also needs some kind of FAA documentation. Anyone know the details? Were any of the other teams that didn't enter in the same boat?
Yeah, getting rocket ignition right is hard. (Even with those little Estes rockets;-)
You've got to get the fuel/oxidizer mix lit -- controllably -- before too much of either builds up in the combustion chamber (which can result in an explosion when it does light), but your ignition system is so much dead weight the rest of the time.
That's one reason the Apollo spacecraft went with a hypergolic propellant combination -- just open the valves and the two components ignite as soon as they come in contact with each other (same with the Shuttle maneuvering system, for that matter). But nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine are nasty chemicals to work with. LOX and kerosene (or alcohol or whatever fuel Armadillo is using) are much easier and safer to handle -- but then you need an ignition system. This is even tougher when you're designing the engines to be in-flight restartable ("in-flight" here includes "after landing somewhere other than the launch pad"), otherwise you can build some of the ignition system into the launch pad, or at least prep it manually prior to launch.
I didn't know the ISS had such a big despun platform.
It doesn't. ISS is not spin-stabilized. Mostly it's gravity-gradient stabilized with gyros and thrusters to make up the difference. The rotating joints are to keep the solar panels pointed towards the sun while the station is at some other angle. In theory they probably don't need to do more than one rotation per orbit, although I'm sure they can rotate much faster than that.
But nothing like the several RPMs of a spin-stabilized satellite.
In the original scheme of things -- i.e. back in the late 1970s when the Shuttle was being built -- the plan was that while the Shuttle would carry the vast majority of "medium size" payloads, they'd keep Delta around for small payloads (Delta has been upgraded quite a bit since then) and Saturn V around for the large payloads.
Needless to say, that plan was scrapped early on. Probably just before they overhauled the VAB and Pad 39 to make them Shuttle-compatible but Saturn V-incompatible.
Cards based on the Radeon 9200/9250 (R200) are still available and have a good 3D OSS driver. ATI released the specs for that just before they clammed up.
With the recent opening up by AMD/ATI of the specs for R600 etc, we should start to see good OSS 3D drivers for newer cards.
Heck, I've still got old Pentium I's (well, they never used that designation - 166MHz Pentiums) running just fine. Primarily as (runlevel 3) firewalls, mail and proxy servers, but they'll do the other stuff in a pinch.
My younger kids have P-IIs that run recent distros just fine, once the memory is beefed up a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
bringing the resulting system up to better than 80 percent efficiency when considering all energy inputs and outputs. (emphasis added)
So like, dudes, where does that other 20% of the energy go? The Phantom Zone? No, wait, that'd be an energy output too.
Maybe the system just gets heavier.
This seems reasonable to me, though I still feel that the question of a gene just happening to appear in a mouse that just happens to make that mouse sensitive to the odor of its likely predators pushes the envelope of statistical credibility.
The word "feel" is incompatible with "statistical credibility". Statistics are notoriously counter-intuitive.
Think through the statistics -- tens (hundreds?) of millions of generations of tens (hundreds?) of millions of mice. Mutations happen all the time -- retroviruses, chemical or radiation damage, transcription errors -- but most confer either nothing or a negative advantage, and aren't seen again (unless they spontaneously arise again -- although changes due to retrovirus activity are more likely to recur). It only takes one "good" mutation in one breeding mouse to propagate. Even a slight edge gets multiplied over successive generations.
Well, and I meant it was fairly common to see it in discussions on BIX (and some other places) after Pournelle introduced it. Haven't seen it that much recently, I'll grant you.
"Woof, woof!"
Kelly's Heroes, one of the all time great war movies. When Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland face off against the Tiger tank, you can almost hear "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" theme in the background.
The ability to "blind" a tank assumes a level of tech that's not currently available.
Hey, a few paintballs or some spraypaint on the viewports will do wonders.
It seems the only way evolution could explain this is by saying that the vast-majority of mice without this gene were promptly eliminated by cats and taken out of the gene pool.
Not at all.
Consider a population of pre-mice, without the gene, that are reasonably adept at avoiding predators for other reasons -- camouflage, fast, good hearing, whatever. Then some sub-population of these critters acquires this gene. Said sub-population becomes much more adept at avoiding predators, and tend to out-survive (and hence, out-reproduce) those without it. Perhaps later, since that gene is so effective, the biological cost of the other avoidance factors (camouflage, hearing, speed etc) outweighs the advantage they confer, and they fade from the population, or perhaps not. Probably in the pre-smell avoidance gene days, cats and other predators were on average slower, and the predator population slowly gets faster as the quick ones outcompete the slow ones.
Likewise for the smell of other predators. But that would imply that there was initially an enumerated list of odors
Not at all.
This assumes that not only do all predators smell different, but that the odor-causing chemical in each species is completely unrelated to all others. This is highly improbable. More likely the odorant chemical is identical or very nearly so in mouse-predator species, probably some byproduct of digesting and metabolizing mouse (and other rodent) proteins. (Consider also that there are only a few different families of mammalian rodent predators - felis, canis, mustelidae - and this smell aversion probably doesn't work for snakes or owls.)
Where've you been?
Pournelle was using that on BIX (rapidly picked up by other Bixen) back before The Gripping Hand (working title "The Moat Around Murcheson's Eye", if I remember right) came off the presses, i.e. circa 15 years ago.
I've seen it a number of other places, too.
Or, was that a whooshing sound I just heard?
Hey, he died in the original movie, was that counted? And I recall an episode where he'd been in the sarcophagous many times but come to think of he didn't die before each time, that was just maintenance.
I'll have go back through my collection, 13 sounds not far off, counting times he ascended/returned and times he was revived in a sarcophagous.
but I would really like a robot chauffeur.
How about a car that drives itself? We're almost there (see the recent DARPA Urban Challenge).
Wonder when we'll see the Teamsters' Union either requiring a union dues tax to be levied on the purchase price or lobbying to keep them off public highways.
Cheap (undocumented/illegal) immigrant labor.
Why invest in developing robotic fruit or vegetable pickers if no farmer's going to buy them when migrant labor is cheaper? Why invest in developing housekeeper robots when no e.g. hotel is going to buy them? Etc, etc.
If the market supply of minimum-wage (or below) labor dried up, we'd see a short term rise in wages paid (for those jobs that can't be offshored), followed by increasing replacement of expensive human labor with cheaper robotic labor as the latter became available.
The R2 and similar non-anthropomorphic droids were the ones that actually got the work done. As Owen Lars said of C-3PO, "I have no need for a protocol droid". Did 3PO ever do anything useful aside from translate for R2-D2? (And what's up with that? Even in 1976 we had machines that could speak.)
Humanoid isn't a bad shape for a general purpose bot that has to interact with a human environment and made-for-humans tools, but there's still room for improvement, and in general purpose-built bots are likely more cost-effective.
The best method available (without special equipment) is the ratio of waist size to height.
There's my problem, I'm too short!
It is, bar none, the best phone UI on the market today.
Sorry, but it ain't. That honor still falls to the full size touchtone pad developed by AT&T (the original one) back in the 1960s. (Couple that with a good wireless headset and you've reached telephone nirvana.)
Now, if you're talking about UIs for all the other electronic gadgets that aren't a phone that are also rolled into the iPhone, you might have a point. But for making calls (especially all those conference calls where you have to input 8- or 10-digit ID numbers after connecting) give me a full size standard layout touch pad.
Let's say I copy directory /beta/baz to /alpha/
/alpha/baz/(one,two,three,four,five)
/beta/baz. KDE/Konqueror detects the conflict and asks if you want to cancel, rename baz, or overwrite baz. If you overwrite, you end up with what you show above for Windows, with "one" being the one from beta/baz, the old alpha/baz/one is toast (unless there was another link elsewhere to the same inode).
Windows:
Just tried this on Linux; "mv" (or "cp") just complains and refuses to do anything with
I've sometimes wondered how far back in history you'd have to go before the technology was incapable of making a reliable relay and a battery. [...] Perhaps two hundred years ago, maybe more.
Joseph Henry invented the relay in 1835, ten years after William Sturgeon invented the electromagnet (in turn five years after Oersted discovered electromagnetism in 1820). So the relay was invented a couple of years before Babbage started describing his analytical engine (1837 - the simpler difference engine he described in 1822). Had the knowledge of eg Boolean logic been there, a digital computer could certainly have been built before 1850. (In fact it took until 1937, when Claude Shannon proved in his master's thesis that Boolean algebra could be implemented with relays.)
Assuming one already knew how to do it -- as with a time traveller -- all you'd need is a supply of wire (and some means to insulate it) and iron to make the relays. Chemical batteries are rather easy to make if you've got a couple of dissimilar metals, but if you can make relays you can probably also make generators. A modern day "Connecticut Yankee" could have given Arthur an electromechanical digital computer. Smelting of iron began in the BC era, and use of meteoritic iron goes way back. The ancient Egyptians certain knew how to make wire (for jewellery), so who knows how far back you could go. It's not so much a hard line as a level of increasing difficulty.
Well, technically second data point was Angel, with third data point Firefly.
Not that that changes your conclusion.
With a UID of 12292, and he's talking about "Open Linux", he probably hasn't touched the stuff in years. Open Linux was the name of Caldera's (remember them? they became The SCO Group, dropped their Linux business, and are now in bankruptcy) distro back around the turn of the millenium.
One thing you COULDN'T do with this PC is buy anything from Walmarts own website
There's a huge difference between "anything" and "video download service". The article you link to complains about Walmart's video download service not working with anything but IE. The rest of Walmart's website works just fine with Firefox on Linux.
Irony works better when it's factual.
as the vehicle touches the ground, you get a pivotal point and the rocket just tends to top over.
Yeah, I see the problem. The video you linked to shows that the engine is still firing when the first landing leg touches the ground, and the thing just bounces a bit before settling.
They could steal a trick from the Apollo Lunar Module, and attach contact probes to the landing legs. In the LM these extended a few feet down from each footpad, and as soon as any of them made contact with the lunar surface, that would kill the descent engine. The vehicle then just drops the remaining distance. Just make the probes a few inches for Earth gravity, and the thing would be less prone to jittery bouncing when it nears the ground. (I can also see where it might have guidance problems at that point -- one leg touches the ground, bounces a bit, and the guidance system sees that as an attitude change it needs to compensate for with the engine. It really needs an "okay, I'm close enough to the ground to just stop" sensor.)
2) They may not have made it over the finish line, but they are the only ones who entered the race among ten or so teams. Many of the teams said they were "close" last year, yet still couldn't make it work a year later.
There's a local (Colorado) team that has a vehicle and they felt it ready to enter, but (per the newspaper report) couldn't get the requisite FAA flight approval. (Sorry, don't recall whether it was Paragon or Micro-Space).
I would have thought that some kind of contest like this would have a blanket FAA waiver to cover the sight for the time involved. Apparently each vehicle also needs some kind of FAA documentation. Anyone know the details? Were any of the other teams that didn't enter in the same boat?
Yeah, getting rocket ignition right is hard. (Even with those little Estes rockets ;-)
You've got to get the fuel/oxidizer mix lit -- controllably -- before too much of either builds up in the combustion chamber (which can result in an explosion when it does light), but your ignition system is so much dead weight the rest of the time.
That's one reason the Apollo spacecraft went with a hypergolic propellant combination -- just open the valves and the two components ignite as soon as they come in contact with each other (same with the Shuttle maneuvering system, for that matter). But nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine are nasty chemicals to work with. LOX and kerosene (or alcohol or whatever fuel Armadillo is using) are much easier and safer to handle -- but then you need an ignition system. This is even tougher when you're designing the engines to be in-flight restartable ("in-flight" here includes "after landing somewhere other than the launch pad"), otherwise you can build some of the ignition system into the launch pad, or at least prep it manually prior to launch.
I didn't know the ISS had such a big despun platform.
It doesn't. ISS is not spin-stabilized. Mostly it's gravity-gradient stabilized with gyros and thrusters to make up the difference. The rotating joints are to keep the solar panels pointed towards the sun while the station is at some other angle. In theory they probably don't need to do more than one rotation per orbit, although I'm sure they can rotate much faster than that.
But nothing like the several RPMs of a spin-stabilized satellite.
In the original scheme of things -- i.e. back in the late 1970s when the Shuttle was being built -- the plan was that while the Shuttle would carry the vast majority of "medium size" payloads, they'd keep Delta around for small payloads (Delta has been upgraded quite a bit since then) and Saturn V around for the large payloads.
Needless to say, that plan was scrapped early on. Probably just before they overhauled the VAB and Pad 39 to make them Shuttle-compatible but Saturn V-incompatible.
Cards based on the Radeon 9200/9250 (R200) are still available and have a good 3D OSS driver. ATI released the specs for that just before they clammed up.
With the recent opening up by AMD/ATI of the specs for R600 etc, we should start to see good OSS 3D drivers for newer cards.
Heck, I've still got old Pentium I's (well, they never used that designation - 166MHz Pentiums) running just fine. Primarily as (runlevel 3) firewalls, mail and proxy servers, but they'll do the other stuff in a pinch.
My younger kids have P-IIs that run recent distros just fine, once the memory is beefed up a bit.