Your reply erks me so much that I couldn't help posting again.
I don't think we need to check your credentials. If you really had something to say about airships, you'd use a better argument than an appeal to authority.
By the way, you misspelled 'irks'. Need I say more?
I detest the doubling of letters simply to indicate long vowels.
"Mori" is the most proper spelling, if you have a Unicode capable browser (MSIE or Netscape 6.0).
The method the GLV to produce a patch of 'dark' is ingenious. A strip of alternating rasiedand depressed strips reflect no light because the light from the depressed strips is 180 out of phase with the light reflected from the raised strips.
This is how the pits in CDs work. They appear dark not because they present a less shiny surface, but because the light they reflect cancels out the light reflected by the adjacent 'lands'
Claims to 'reactionless' engines are a dime for a dozen. One of the stupidest experiments I've seen involves a 'drive' with a spinning weight, powered by a liquid fuel model aircraft engine. The machine was suspended from one arm of a balance. A counterweight was hung from the other arm.
After a few minutes, the machine ended up higher than the counterweight. The experimentors took this behaviour (it was repeatable, no less! to be evidence of their reactionless drive working. *giggle* No chocolate fish for these guys!
If they claimed it could deflect nuclear missiles, they might get more money to fund more rigorous experiments.
IR vision, cool! A few cones for X-ray, like Superman? Wow!!! Why not add radio wavelenghts and UHF so we can listen to radio and TV broadcasts without needing any gadgets? All 5 gazillion cable channels at the same time! Cool! Oh, oh... sensory overload! I can't think anymore... I've turned into an antenna...
You should see The Man With the X-Ray Eyes. He didn't enjoy it very much at all towards the end. He was most upset lying in bed at night, seeing through his closed eyelids, through the upper floors of the building the brilliant stars.
Snakes (though not all) are the obvious choice for IR vision with their heat pits under their eyes (commonly mistaken for nostrils). Deer can see in the UV spectrum above what humans can percieve...
An excellent BBC TV programme, Supersenses featured a goldfish. Goldfish can see IR, UV and the wavelengths in between, though I don't recall any mention of the number of kinds of photopigments goldfish eyes have. The implication that the goldfish was more suited to the role of security than the human security guard presented was a bit of a giggle.
The programme also featured creatures with many other kinds of vision systems. The weirdest one was an undersea critter equipped with a rotating polarising filter and a sweeping rainbow colour filter over each eye.
You could produce a practically unlimited number of colours even though the number of possible wavelengths is finite (though quite large). Consider each wavelength as a primary
colour and mix the rate of which photons of each wavelength are produced to varying degrees.
Cones in human eyes have a finite range of levels they can distinguish, something like 480. I suspect humans can see 110 million colours, nonlinearly spaced.
I've given up counting the mistakes in the article. Here are a few corrections and interesting facts:
Rods are sensitive but quite slow, compared to cones.
An individual cone is either short, medium or long wavelength detecting. They are commonly imprecisely called red, green and blue. Red cones peak at green wavelengths.
The bandwidth of the optice nerve is spectacularly low. John Carmack compared it to a 57.6kbps modem. He should know about these things. I tend to believe him.
Cones are not 'inefficient due to their complex nature'. They are designed to be used in daylight viewing conditions, having fewer buckets of photosensitive goo than rods. Their small size makes them quick to respond.
Most humans can reliably detect a flash of light dim enough that only one in a hundred rods will receive a photon.
The optic nerve thingy is obviously more than 2-3cm in length, considering that the visual cortex is at the back of the head.
Blurring is just what happens when a moving image is integrated over time. The viisual cortex doesn't have do anything special here.
It's hard to say what the maxinum frame rate a human eye can perceive directly is. It depends on the viewing conditions and the observer. In daylight, I can easily watch the progress of the video beam on a 50Hz TV as it makes its way from the top to the bottom in each field of each frame.
If 'frameless rendering' can be used (an option if real-time raytracing is feasible), then the natural smearing and removal of temporal aliasing in a quickly changing scene will lessen the need for a very high frame rate. Try searching for 'Frameless rendering'. I'm looking forward to Quake XXIV Bitchfight implementing it.
As horrid as the thought is (to me anyway), I believe that it is a matter of time before we discard these bodies of flesh for "shining new homes of metal and plastic"
I think any artificial body for which sex is not its primary function is doomed to be a marketing failure.
So, what could make gravity less? It would mean that 65 million years ago the Earth would have had significantly less mass than it does now.
Earth was spinning a bit faster then. The effect of gravity woudn't be felt as strongly by critters living near the equator as it would be felt by critters near the poles. Tidal evolution, which slows the Earth's rotation, encourages the Moon to keep the same side facing the Earth and causes the Moon to orbit the Earth in increasingly wider circles might have had a significant effect. The question is, how much faster could the Earth have been spinning? Enough to make 70,000lb bodybuilders feasible, even?
Does anyone care to write a wee Java applet to simulate T.E.? I expect the tidal bulges sloshing around Pangea might need to be simulated too.
Footnote: Tidal evolution slows a planet's rotation down by having a moon pull slightly sideways on the nearest tidal bulge as the planet tries to spin the bulge out from under the moon.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think we need to check your credentials. If you really had something to say about airships, you'd use a better argument than an appeal to authority.
By the way, you misspelled 'irks'. Need I say more?
I detest the doubling of letters simply to indicate long vowels. "Mori" is the most proper spelling, if you have a Unicode capable browser (MSIE or Netscape 6.0).
Earlier versions of Netscape can be fixed with:
placed in the header section of the page HTML. If your browser's working properly, the following table will make sense.
Macron,Unicode,Chr,HTML
A U+100 Ā
E U+112 Ē#
I U+12A Ī
O U+14C Ō
U U+16A Ū
a U+101 ā
e U+113 ē
i U+12B ī
o U+14D ō
u U+16B ū
I think the Proton Polymer battery is just what you need.
The method the GLV to produce a patch of 'dark' is ingenious. A strip of alternating rasiedand depressed strips reflect no light because the light from the depressed strips is 180 out of phase with the light reflected from the raised strips.
This is how the pits in CDs work. They appear dark not because they present a less shiny surface, but because the light they reflect cancels out the light reflected by the adjacent 'lands'
Claims to 'reactionless' engines are a dime for a dozen. One of the stupidest experiments I've seen involves a 'drive' with a spinning weight, powered by a liquid fuel model aircraft engine. The machine was suspended from one arm of a balance. A counterweight was hung from the other arm.
After a few minutes, the machine ended up higher than the counterweight. The experimentors took this behaviour (it was repeatable, no less! to be evidence of their reactionless drive working. *giggle* No chocolate fish for these guys!
If they claimed it could deflect nuclear missiles, they might get more money to fund more rigorous experiments.
White is hardly safe when monitors come preset with 6500K, 9300K or even 5500K as the colour temperature used to define 'white'.
You should see The Man With the X-Ray Eyes. He didn't enjoy it very much at all towards the end. He was most upset lying in bed at night, seeing through his closed eyelids, through the upper floors of the building the brilliant stars.
An excellent BBC TV programme, Supersenses featured a goldfish. Goldfish can see IR, UV and the wavelengths in between, though I don't recall any mention of the number of kinds of photopigments goldfish eyes have. The implication that the goldfish was more suited to the role of security than the human security guard presented was a bit of a giggle.
The programme also featured creatures with many other kinds of vision systems. The weirdest one was an undersea critter equipped with a rotating polarising filter and a sweeping rainbow colour filter over each eye.
You could produce a practically unlimited number of colours even though the number of possible wavelengths is finite (though quite large). Consider each wavelength as a primary colour and mix the rate of which photons of each wavelength are produced to varying degrees.
Cones in human eyes have a finite range of levels they can distinguish, something like 480. I suspect humans can see 110 million colours, nonlinearly spaced.
It's hard to say what the maxinum frame rate a human eye can perceive directly is. It depends on the viewing conditions and the observer. In daylight, I can easily watch the progress of the video beam on a 50Hz TV as it makes its way from the top to the bottom in each field of each frame.
If 'frameless rendering' can be used (an option if real-time raytracing is feasible), then the natural smearing and removal of temporal aliasing in a quickly changing scene will lessen the need for a very high frame rate. Try searching for 'Frameless rendering'. I'm looking forward to Quake XXIV Bitchfight implementing it.
For pretty pictures and interesting reading, seehttp://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
- I mean to win the wimbledon!
I think any artificial body for which sex is not its primary function is doomed to be a marketing failure.
Earth was spinning a bit faster then. The effect of gravity woudn't be felt as strongly by critters living near the equator as it would be felt by critters near the poles. Tidal evolution, which slows the Earth's rotation, encourages the Moon to keep the same side facing the Earth and causes the Moon to orbit the Earth in increasingly wider circles might have had a significant effect. The question is, how much faster could the Earth have been spinning? Enough to make 70,000lb bodybuilders feasible, even?
Does anyone care to write a wee Java applet to simulate T.E.? I expect the tidal bulges sloshing around Pangea might need to be simulated too.
Footnote: Tidal evolution slows a planet's rotation down by having a moon pull slightly sideways on the nearest tidal bulge as the planet tries to spin the bulge out from under the moon.
- Blancmange