...I do my AI Masters Thesis for that guy (Peter) and some friends of mine have been working on Priscilla. He has an enormous talent for getting publicity on everything he does. The smaller robot, Elvis, has been on national TV and on posters on public transportation here in Gothenburg, among other things. Everytime he starts on a new project, he manages to make the press interested and write an article about it. Perhaps more scientists should look into PR?
I thought of those, but you should not include them in the calculation. The date is not fully related to the astronomical year. One thing that I should have included, however, is the skipped leap year every 400 years.
ALot of people especially people from slashdot say tax cuts are good, my question to these people, Do you all have bomb shelters? How will you survive a nuclear terrorist attack?
How would a bomb shelter have any effect on you surviving a terrorist nuclear attack? Do you plan to live there?
yet not a single bomb shelter, no way to stop a biological attack, no way to stop nuclear attacks, no way to stop terrorist attacks like 911.
Guess what? That's because there is no way to stop loonies like that. How will you ever defend against the possibility of two guys with a backpack nuclear bomb blowing up New York? Perhaps we should outlaw backpacks?
Here's the rub - the only way to protect the US population is to stop making enemies and to work against poverty and illiteracy all over the world. The guys who get drafted for fundamentalist causes are mainly poor and uneducated orphans from the streets. A standard brainwash takes place, where the organization offers food and shelter, thus getting total emotional control over the victim.
Imagine that there was a "duplication device" that could clone whatever you put into it - a watch, a TV, a car, whatever. Imagine it only cost $.20 per use. This device could literally destroy our society. [...] How would any manufaturer or store stay in business? Does this seem bad to anyone other than me?
It would not destroy anything. The manufacturers would not be able to stay in business, just like any other obsolete company in a market economy - good riddance. The net gain to society would obviously be enormous. See it as Free Hardware (as in Free Hardware Foundation), people would be getting stuff for free and there would always be some people prepared to make new inventions for the others. Companies wanting to get profit out of that industry would have to rely on giving support and "business solutions". Sound familiar?
...or did 3D-gaming get old several years ago. Granted - Doom was damn cool. Ultima Underworld was nice too. The zillionth FPS was just a yawn.
In the mid 90s, for some reason, something happened. Suddenly the mainstream opinion was that a game without 3D was somehow inferior to the 3D ones, so *everything* had to be 3D. Face it - 3D is just a gimmick like anything else. For most games, 3D is just wrong. It makes the interface bad and worsens gameplay. We humans are by nature not fully 3D-compliant (e.g see Rubik's Cube for proof). Imagine what a pain in the ass a 3D window manager would be (yeah I know some people research it, but that is their problem, isn't it?).
IMHO games are now in the childish state of "the more real it looks, the better". Now, I am certainly not opposed to the idea of beautiful games. I want stunning, great looking games. But where would art be today if it had stopped at the rather primitive notion that the painting that most resembles reality is the most beautiful?
I don't know about you, but when Heroes of Might & Magic III came out (New World Computing makes arguably the most beautiful 2D-graphics in the world), I was far more impressed by the beautiful details and the general mood that they managed to generate, than by the graphics of Quake III (or whatever FPS-clone was the current rave then).
Don't get me wrong, there are games that benefit from 3D (Tekken comes to mind), but not *all*. Is there even a non-3D game available for the xbox? Damn the lemming mentality of the game publishers... Will I ever see stunning artwork again?
I am quite certain that you are not allowed to sell for less than manufacturing costs in the EU.
A few weeks ago, I read an article about MS wanting to cut the prices on xbox, but that EU threatened to take them to court if they did. Now, just a few weeks later, they do it anyway and not a single word about that law is heard. I smell some heavy lobbying.
Everybody knows that... However g is not the same as G. G is the universal constant that governs all gravity and that is what we need to measure. There is nothing fundamental about g.
The gravitational constant is an elusive thing. When I studied quantum physics, the lecturer, who was one of the members of the Nobel Prize committee (I live in Sweden), told us that one of the "sure" ways (there are a few grand questions in physics which has this status, others probably include: finding the mass of neutrinos, evidence for the Higg's Boson, the decay time for protons, etc) to get a Nobel Prize is to measure G as exactly as the other physical constants are known (i.e roughly to the same number of significant digits).
...you did understand the joke, right?
I mean normally I wouldn't ask since it is so mind-numbingly obvious, but I see no hint of sarcasm in your post...
If not, perhaps you should check out the
requirements again. Also, check out his other poetry site. The error message is actually quite cool.
...it will probably be even better when AMD Hammer gets out. The best way to squeeze some performance out of it will be to compile for that specific architecture (of course, the real gains can only come when people start programming specifically with 64-bit in mind, but that is a while off).
I understand how a hammer works. 1. For destructive purposes you basically bang the flat end into the object that you want to destroy. 2. For naildriving purposes you position the pointy side of the nail towards where you want it to sink in. Then you hit it with the flat end of the hammer in much the same way as if you were trying to destroy the nails head [see 1].
The closest thing that has been discovered is the two gas giants around 47 Ursa Majoris. This is the planetary system that so far looks most like our own. The two giants have less extreme (more circular) orbits than most of the ca 70 planets found, which also contributes to make it look a lot like ours. Gas giants can be an important contributor for life to appear on a smaller planet, since they act like magnets for asteroids and other debris, sheltering the smaller planets and giving life a chance to evolve.
As a Gentoo-user since, hmmm, early november I think (when rc6 was just released anyway), I can testify that it *ROCKS*. Thinking back to the time when I had to bother with the dirty RPM's of Mandrake, I don't think I could ever go back. In this way, all I have to do to keep my system updated with the latest versions and the latest security patches is type 'emerge update' or if I'm not gonna touch the computer for a while, 'emerge update --world'. The entire dependency nightmare from using RPM's is also gone. If you emerge something that needs a lib or whatever, the program neatly emerges all dependencies first. Also, the guys behind the distribution definitely seems to know what their doing. In conclusion, if you are not afraid of compiling your own kernel and you can live with having to edit a few of the files in/etc for customisation, you should definitely give this distro a try. Mmmm.... I can feel myself growing into a zealot;)
Different scientists claim to have created the "wavelike substance" in a lab, called Bose-Einstein condensates.
"Claim" is hardly the correct word, since it is not disputed (to my knowledge). Last years Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to the first experimenters who created this sixth (depending on how you count) state of matter. The existence of Bose-Einstein condensate is not in itself any challenge to black holes.
The article states: Calculations show that a black hole would contain astoundingly more "entropy" than the matter that fell into it
If the article was less sensationalist, they would have mentioned that there are also calculations based on Hawking radiation that show the entropy of a black hole to work out perfectly. Some say the entropy is wrong, others don't. Also, referring to singularities as "paradoxes" seems strange. One would rather not deal with them, of course, but paradoxial? Nah. Since they are always hidden and cannot be reached in finite time, the philosophical question is whether they even can be said to exist in the same way as other things exist.
The article also does not increase in credibility, when it refers to the uncertainty principle as "eerie" and to black holes as "spooky" and "scary".
What about gravastars then, are they for real? Dunno... Most theories are at the fringe for a good reason, though.
Hmmm... Yesterday there was speculation on kuro5hin whether the google-censorship was due to xenu.net using "google-bombing". There seems to be little doubt that xenu.net has been google-bombing. The only question is whether this contributed to google's decision of having them bumped. If so, good riddance. People who try to exploit search engines by phoney meta data and other practices are scum. (Yes, I know the Scientologists did the same thing, but that does not justify anyting. You don't see me going around brainwashing people just because the Scientologists do...)
I admit that it was a few years since I studied the theory of relativity, but I belive it is you who don't know your physics.
From this page, for example:
The following chart shows the perceived travel time for the particle moving at 0.9999999999999999999999951c from different locations in the universe:
Alpha Centauri 0.43 milliseconds
Galactic nucleus 3.2 seconds
Andromeda galaxy 3.5 minutes
Virgo cluster 1.15 hours
Quasar 3C273 3 days
Edge of universe 19 days
For a better understanding, consider the following. If you set out on a ship from earth moving at the velocity of the above proton, and travelled to the edge of the universe and back, you would perceive being gone for 38 days (19 days out and 19 in). However, when you arrive back on earth, 34 BILLION YEARS would have elapsed! The earth probably won't even be here by then. That time is twice as old as many speculate the universe is.
The world is stranger than you think. Next week perhaps I'll tell you about quantum mechanics;)
First of all, a person making ad hominem attacks against the proponents of an idea ("no capability in scientific reasoning" and "Pretty childish") without actually making any real arguments, is perhaps the one most suited by such epithets.
In another post you make the argument that
"Just like the fusion research and colliders (aka Big Science) are siphoning funding from real science with no real promise of delivering anything useful anytime within the next few decades." You are not a big fan of mathematicians or theoretical physicists, are you? Mathematics is a good example of a field that is doing fundamental research. Just because you are not researching something that is immediately transferable into a product, does that mean that it is wasted? For example, the important fields of complex analysis and hyperbolic geometry was developed way before anyone could think of a use for them. Since when is the foundations of physics and fundamental research not important? The theory of relativity was basically completely useless and unverifiable for a long time. Does this mean that it should not have been published? What possible use did you have for Murray Gell-Mann's quarks and the invention of QED? How do you propose that we search for the Higgs boson without particle accelerators? Do you have any alternative way of testing the GUT's without particle accelerators?
Also, your claim that solar sails and space elevators are irrelevant dreaming, does not impress me much. True, they are not feasible with todays technology. That is why you develop new technology. Grand ideas of what to do with it is an incentive. I don't care if you feel that whatever it is that you do is an underfunded area - research into solar sails is hardly a big strain on the science budget. Leave it to companies to research products with commercial potential on the horizon (they won't mind). State funded research have through all ages been mostly about knowledge for knowledges sake. Don't you have any curiosity left? Don't you wonder, even just a little, about the implications of these ideas?
If you can accelerate your vessel to something within the same order of magnitude as the speed of light, time dilation would start to have an effect. I.e, to the landlubbers back on earth the voyage would seem to take longer than for the actual passengers.
If we, like Einstein, imagine riding on a sunbeam the trip to _anywhere_ takes no time at all. Of course, travelling at the speed of light takes infinite energy (and the g-force of the prior acceleration could be lethal), so we'd have to settle for a bit less. Still...
I checked out both links and it seems like you know your stuff;). Thus I have a question for you.
I have drifted more and more towards functional programming. In fact, even my C++ is starting to look more and more functional, with lots of small functions and the occasional recursion. The logical step for me is to try out some functional languages and see if I find anything I like. I did this and ML was the one I liked best (mainly for 2 things: efficient compilers and possibility for an imperative style when that is the best solution).
The questions: What are the differences between ocaml and SML/NJ? Are there other mature ML-dialects (preferably with compiler, debugger, profiler and perhaps a plugin for glade, etc)? I have tested ocaml on some smaller programs and is quite pleased with it. Is there any reason why I should consider SML instead?
Slashdot Mirror
...I do my AI Masters Thesis for that guy (Peter) and some friends of mine have been working on Priscilla. He has an enormous talent for getting publicity on everything he does. The smaller robot, Elvis, has been on national TV and on posters on public transportation here in Gothenburg, among other things. Everytime he starts on a new project, he manages to make the press interested and write an article about it. Perhaps more scientists should look into PR?
I thought of those, but you should not include them in the calculation. The date is not fully related to the astronomical year. One thing that I should have included, however, is the skipped leap year every 400 years.
1/365.25, as a matter of fact. Leap years, you know...
How would a bomb shelter have any effect on you surviving a terrorist nuclear attack? Do you plan to live there?
yet not a single bomb shelter, no way to stop a biological attack, no way to stop nuclear attacks, no way to stop terrorist attacks like 911.
Guess what? That's because there is no way to stop loonies like that. How will you ever defend against the possibility of two guys with a backpack nuclear bomb blowing up New York? Perhaps we should outlaw backpacks?
Here's the rub - the only way to protect the US population is to stop making enemies and to work against poverty and illiteracy all over the world. The guys who get drafted for fundamentalist causes are mainly poor and uneducated orphans from the streets. A standard brainwash takes place, where the organization offers food and shelter, thus getting total emotional control over the victim.
It would not destroy anything. The manufacturers would not be able to stay in business, just like any other obsolete company in a market economy - good riddance. The net gain to society would obviously be enormous. See it as Free Hardware (as in Free Hardware Foundation), people would be getting stuff for free and there would always be some people prepared to make new inventions for the others. Companies wanting to get profit out of that industry would have to rely on giving support and "business solutions". Sound familiar?
...or did 3D-gaming get old several years ago. Granted - Doom was damn cool. Ultima Underworld was nice too. The zillionth FPS was just a yawn.
In the mid 90s, for some reason, something happened. Suddenly the mainstream opinion was that a game without 3D was somehow inferior to the 3D ones, so *everything* had to be 3D. Face it - 3D is just a gimmick like anything else. For most games, 3D is just wrong. It makes the interface bad and worsens gameplay. We humans are by nature not fully 3D-compliant (e.g see Rubik's Cube for proof). Imagine what a pain in the ass a 3D window manager would be (yeah I know some people research it, but that is their problem, isn't it?).
IMHO games are now in the childish state of "the more real it looks, the better". Now, I am certainly not opposed to the idea of beautiful games. I want stunning, great looking games. But where would art be today if it had stopped at the rather primitive notion that the painting that most resembles reality is the most beautiful?
I don't know about you, but when Heroes of Might & Magic III came out (New World Computing makes arguably the most beautiful 2D-graphics in the world), I was far more impressed by the beautiful details and the general mood that they managed to generate, than by the graphics of Quake III (or whatever FPS-clone was the current rave then).
Don't get me wrong, there are games that benefit from 3D (Tekken comes to mind), but not *all*. Is there even a non-3D game available for the xbox?
Damn the lemming mentality of the game publishers... Will I ever see stunning artwork again?
I am quite certain that you are not allowed to sell for less than manufacturing costs in the EU.
A few weeks ago, I read an article about MS wanting to cut the prices on xbox, but that EU threatened to take them to court if they did. Now, just a few weeks later, they do it anyway and not a single word about that law is heard. I smell some heavy lobbying.
Everybody knows that... However g is not the same as G. G is the universal constant that governs all gravity and that is what we need to measure. There is nothing fundamental about g.
The gravitational constant is an elusive thing. When I studied quantum physics, the lecturer, who was one of the members of the Nobel Prize committee (I live in Sweden), told us that one of the "sure" ways (there are a few grand questions in physics which has this status, others probably include: finding the mass of neutrinos, evidence for the Higg's Boson, the decay time for protons, etc) to get a Nobel Prize is to measure G as exactly as the other physical constants are known (i.e roughly to the same number of significant digits).
If not, perhaps you should check out the requirements again. Also, check out his other poetry site. The error message is actually quite cool.
...that onion-dude sure knows his marketing.
...it will probably be even better when AMD Hammer gets out. The best way to squeeze some performance out of it will be to compile for that specific architecture (of course, the real gains can only come when people start programming specifically with 64-bit in mind, but that is a while off).
I understand how a hammer works.
1. For destructive purposes you basically bang the flat end into the object that you want to destroy.
2. For naildriving purposes you position the pointy side of the nail towards where you want it to sink in. Then you hit it with the flat end of the hammer in much the same way as if you were trying to destroy the nails head [see 1].
The closest thing that has been discovered is the two gas giants around 47 Ursa Majoris. This is the planetary system that so far looks most like our own. The two giants have less extreme (more circular) orbits than most of the ca 70 planets found, which also contributes to make it look a lot like ours. Gas giants can be an important contributor for life to appear on a smaller planet, since they act like magnets for asteroids and other debris, sheltering the smaller planets and giving life a chance to evolve.
As a Gentoo-user since, hmmm, early november I think (when rc6 was just released anyway), I can testify that it *ROCKS*. Thinking back to the time when I had to bother with the dirty RPM's of Mandrake, I don't think I could ever go back. In this way, all I have to do to keep my system updated with the latest versions and the latest security patches is type 'emerge update' or if I'm not gonna touch the computer for a while, 'emerge update --world'. The entire dependency nightmare from using RPM's is also gone. If you emerge something that needs a lib or whatever, the program neatly emerges all dependencies first. /etc for customisation, you should definitely give this distro a try. ;)
Also, the guys behind the distribution definitely seems to know what their doing. In conclusion, if you are not afraid of compiling your own kernel and you can live with having to edit a few of the files in
Mmmm.... I can feel myself growing into a zealot
Superconducting is usually counted as a separate state.
"Claim" is hardly the correct word, since it is not disputed (to my knowledge). Last years Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to the first experimenters who created this sixth (depending on how you count) state of matter. The existence of Bose-Einstein condensate is not in itself any challenge to black holes.
The article states: Calculations show that a black hole would contain astoundingly more "entropy" than the matter that fell into it
If the article was less sensationalist, they would have mentioned that there are also calculations based on Hawking radiation that show the entropy of a black hole to work out perfectly. Some say the entropy is wrong, others don't. Also, referring to singularities as "paradoxes" seems strange. One would rather not deal with them, of course, but paradoxial? Nah. Since they are always hidden and cannot be reached in finite time, the philosophical question is whether they even can be said to exist in the same way as other things exist.
The article also does not increase in credibility, when it refers to the uncertainty principle as "eerie" and to black holes as "spooky" and "scary".
What about gravastars then, are they for real? Dunno... Most theories are at the fringe for a good reason, though.
Hmmm... Yesterday there was speculation on kuro5hin whether the google-censorship was due to xenu.net using "google-bombing". There seems to be little doubt that xenu.net has been google-bombing. The only question is whether this contributed to google's decision of having them bumped. If so, good riddance. People who try to exploit search engines by phoney meta data and other practices are scum. (Yes, I know the Scientologists did the same thing, but that does not justify anyting. You don't see me going around brainwashing people just because the Scientologists do...)
I am fairly sure that no famous vikings were ever named "Lief"... ;).
The guys name was "Leif Eriksson" (or "Leffe" to his friends
From this page, for example: The following chart shows the perceived travel time for the particle moving at 0.9999999999999999999999951c from different locations in the universe: Alpha Centauri 0.43 milliseconds
Galactic nucleus 3.2 seconds
Andromeda galaxy 3.5 minutes
Virgo cluster 1.15 hours
Quasar 3C273 3 days
Edge of universe 19 days
For a better understanding, consider the following. If you set out on a ship from earth moving at the velocity of the above proton, and travelled to the edge of the universe and back, you would perceive being gone for 38 days (19 days out and 19 in). However, when you arrive back on earth, 34 BILLION YEARS would have elapsed! The earth probably won't even be here by then. That time is twice as old as many speculate the universe is.
The world is stranger than you think. Next week perhaps I'll tell you about quantum mechanics ;)
In another post you make the argument that "Just like the fusion research and colliders (aka Big Science) are siphoning funding from real science with no real promise of delivering anything useful anytime within the next few decades." You are not a big fan of mathematicians or theoretical physicists, are you? Mathematics is a good example of a field that is doing fundamental research. Just because you are not researching something that is immediately transferable into a product, does that mean that it is wasted? For example, the important fields of complex analysis and hyperbolic geometry was developed way before anyone could think of a use for them. Since when is the foundations of physics and fundamental research not important? The theory of relativity was basically completely useless and unverifiable for a long time. Does this mean that it should not have been published? What possible use did you have for Murray Gell-Mann's quarks and the invention of QED? How do you propose that we search for the Higgs boson without particle accelerators? Do you have any alternative way of testing the GUT's without particle accelerators?
Also, your claim that solar sails and space elevators are irrelevant dreaming, does not impress me much. True, they are not feasible with todays technology. That is why you develop new technology. Grand ideas of what to do with it is an incentive. I don't care if you feel that whatever it is that you do is an underfunded area - research into solar sails is hardly a big strain on the science budget. Leave it to companies to research products with commercial potential on the horizon (they won't mind). State funded research have through all ages been mostly about knowledge for knowledges sake. Don't you have any curiosity left? Don't you wonder, even just a little, about the implications of these ideas?
If you can accelerate your vessel to something within the same order of magnitude as the speed of light, time dilation would start to have an effect. I.e, to the landlubbers back on earth the voyage would seem to take longer than for the actual passengers.
If we, like Einstein, imagine riding on a sunbeam the trip to _anywhere_ takes no time at all. Of course, travelling at the speed of light takes infinite energy (and the g-force of the prior acceleration could be lethal), so we'd have to settle for a bit less. Still...
This is just soooo cute...
Best of luck to you both, from Sweden.
I'll produce my own Futurama-show... With black jack... And hookers!
:(
In fact, forget the show.
And the black jack.
Aehhh... screw the whole thing!
I checked out both links and it seems like you know your stuff ;). Thus I have a question for you.
I have drifted more and more towards functional programming. In fact, even my C++ is starting to look more and more functional, with lots of small functions and the occasional recursion. The logical step for me is to try out some functional languages and see if I find anything I like. I did this and ML was the one I liked best (mainly for 2 things: efficient compilers and possibility for an imperative style when that is the best solution).
The questions: What are the differences between ocaml and SML/NJ? Are there other mature ML-dialects (preferably with compiler, debugger, profiler and perhaps a plugin for glade, etc)? I have tested ocaml on some smaller programs and is quite pleased with it. Is there any reason why I should consider SML instead?