I've been trying to find some way to get exercise but nothing seemed to stick.... I'm fucking 24
If your wife is OK with that, then it sounds like you've already found the ideal exercise program.
Now, if I could just find a fun diet...
Take some advice from one of your elders, youngster. Take a look at the Hacker's Diet . It fits very well with a hackerish lifestyle, and is very effective.
Trust me. I know how good it feels to plan out the good things you're going to do. That way, you're not really procrastinating. No, no. You're preparing. The project is underway.
Nicely put. Physically getting started is the hardest part of exercis. Well, no, continuing your chosen form of exercise for a second day when your flabby body is sore after the first day is *really* the hardest part. Nike's tag line is annoying but correct... just do it. Stop planning out how you're *going* to do it, and just do it. Or, if you like, keep planning the ideal approach, but start doing something while you continue to plan (and plan and plan).
I'll toss in a plug for the Hacker's Diet , too. Good exercise plan, good diet. I've lost 18 pounds so far, and I've gone from being doughy and pudgy to more toned and muscular. YMMV, but the important thing is to actually get up off your ass and do someting.
The X-15-style rocket plane approach for getting to sub-orbit does make sense for several reasons. Going from 0 to 400 mph presents a different set of challenges than going from 400 to 2000 mph; ditto for going from ground to 40,000 feet vs. getting from 40,000 to sub-orbit and sub-orbit to orbit. Using a conventional carrier aircraft to get the rocket plane up to a good rocket launch speed/altitude solves a lot of problems in design and system complexity by making the systems separate.
The problem, though, is that rocket planes are a good way to get to sub-orbit position, but not to orbit, at least not in any designs that are out there currently. From a sub-orbital position, a secondary launch can insert a satellite or other payload into orbit, but the craft itself, with the crew, will stay sub-orbital. Eventually, I could see rocket planes which get achieve and stay in orbit for awhile, but they couldn't ever break orbit.
The reason for going with the ballistic missle-based spacecraft was that Von Braun and all of the NASA guys realized that getting to orbit was only the first step in the ultimate goal of going to the moon and other the planets. There was tremendous fear that the Russians would land on the moon and claim it as the property of the Soviet Union. (This was before the treaties which disbarred direct annexation of extra-terrestrial property.) Looking back on thirty years of manned space activity restricted exclusively to LEO, it might seem like they missed a good bet by ignoring the potential of a multiple component carrier/rocket plane system in favor of a single ship to go from the ground to orbit. Ultimately, rocket planes will get you up, but never out.
If rocket planes can ever get up to orbit, there might be a "best of both worlds" synergy to going to the moon and beyond. Use a rocket plane to ferry personnel up to orbit, where they assemble parts which were lifted ballistically. This assumes, of course, that the difficulties in assembling/testing complex interplanetery craft in orbit can be ameliorated.
Ahhh, back in the days when the Scavenger Hunt was a real challenge, and we slept out for classes. I'll never forget Sleepout 1989... 20 degrees F overnight, huddled under blankets on the frozen ground in front of Harper. All the people who were there for the fun and comraderie took their chattering teeth home with them by midnight. All of us who were there to get the classes we wanted toughed it out straight through till dawn. I don't think I saw a single person, even the ones who had been bragging about their North Face down jackets, who wasn't shivering badly, those deep, convulsive shivers that make your hands shake so badly you can't hold a cup of coffee or even sign your name to the registration form.
Those were the days when a Maroon was a Maroon. How badly do you want Bevington's Shakespeare class? How badly do you want Ruddat's Plant Physiology? How badly do you need that Chemical Thermodynamics class in Spring Quarter, not Fall, dammit, Spring!
They're all wimps now. Harold's is all prettied up, the C Shop is a Pizza Hut, and Morrie's is a Starbucks.
Lumix is open source, and if you're interested in getting a CD containing Lumix, just send them a request for it by e-mail What they can't do, he said, is visit your site and install or debug it for you.
Luis and Mike, however, are offering additional assistance for those who require it. They can be reached at the LumixTech Web site.
Ouch. You gotta feel sorry for their mailserver and webserver now that this has been brought to the attention of/.
"The Howard County Public Library burned to the ground today when several computers burst into flames, touching off the conflagration."....
Getting rid of the biggest noisemakers obviously has the biggest absolute impact. That's the cheapest and most effective first step. However, once you've removed the fans and made a regular PC quiet, going from quiet to *very* quiet gets trickier, and more expensive. The costs start to rise exponentially, and the 90/10 rule comes into play... getting rid of the last 10% of the noise costs as much as the first 90% did.
Is it worth all that extra money to go from a 91% quiet machine to a 96% quiet machine? In a newly quiet room, that soft little whine of the disk drive (which was masked by the loud case/CPU fans) is suddenly an issue; you certainly notice its absence when you switch to a Barracuda. The *percieved* improvement in the noise environment is subjective.
Re:Fun with Numbers
on
Death by Coffee?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The half life of caffeine in pretty variable. Nicotine helps you to process caffeine more quickly, but sugar delays the breakdown. Women generally process caffeine more quickly than men, unless they happen to be pregnant, in which case the caffeine buzz hangs around a lot longer. If you knocked back all 100 cups right in a row, the caffeine toxicity might or might not kill you, depending on what your tolerance is to begin with; taken over the course of a day, you'll probably just get sick and severly dehydrated.
A good book to refer to is "The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug" by Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K. Bealer. Fun reading. There's a case discussed in there about somewone who did almost exactly this... drank some insane amount, enough to make the blood caffeine levels go WAY over the toxicity limit, yet survived with no lasting aftereffects. LD50s are, clearly, just a guideline... YMMV, or rather, YTMV.
I'll second this. The Palm (mine's an m515) and the folded keyboard easily fit in your pockets. This is particularly convenient on airplanes, as you don't have to get the laptop down from the overhead, or have it take up the space under the seat in front of you.
Start up time through the power/PalmOS/keyboard/fileXXX.doc sequence(time to actually start typing, not just boot up) is a few seconds, a fraction of the power/BIOS/Win/Desktop/Word/fileXXX.doc startup cycle on a laptop, so it is much more convenient to add just a few sentences or a few key ideas to a draft document.
The keyboard is comparable in size and functionality to a laptop. Admittedly, formatting of the text (attributes, fonts, indents, etc.) is not very smooth, but the ability to get words down on the screen is very, very quick. I type drafts with this setup, then clean up the formatting on my desktop when I get back to my office.
I was a miserable outcast, alone in a crowd for most of my childhood and adolesence. Family and school were impossibly frustrating because nothing anyone did seemed to make any sense to me. I thought people were pretending to be slow, stupid and dense just to irritate and tease me; I was always able to come up with a better way to do everything, but no one understood me. So, I avoided everyone as much as I could, and stuck to books, films and numbers.
I found interacting with humans to be much easier and more comfortable once I began to think of myself as having been raised by wolves. Instead of resigning myself to being awkward, confused and unable to function socially, I set about learning how humans spoke to each other, interacted, related, formed alliances and/or antagonisms. The proper-use-of-knife-and-fork thing was easy... I learned that from Fred Astaire movies. Cary Grant taught me how to talk to girls, Ronald Reagan taught me how to be speak in public, James Cagney taught me how to stop getting beaten up (hit first and hit hard, as many times as you can before they either pull you off or pummel you to the ground, rinse, lather, repeat), Richard Feynman taught me how to excel at school (nobody cares if your methods are superior, you're going to be graded on being able to use *their* methods), etc. I can pass for human almost flawlessly these days.
I still haven't really gotten the hang of talking about football, though.
This type of scanning electron microscopy is fairly new (~10-15 yrs), but it's not a Danish invention... a lot of places make and sell these microscopes. Traditional SEM requires sputter coating your subject with gold or osmium, something really electron dense to get a good conduction and bounceback. You "shine" electrons at your subject, they bounce back, you detect them. All well and good, but the coating process meant some artifacts were introduced, and you killed your subject. The detection had be done under high vacuum, and it had to be dry, so water and air wouldn't scatter the electrons and ruin your imaging.
Environmental SEM (or "variable pressure" SEM) puts the subject in a chamber that's isolated from the electron emitter/detector by a thin membrane. The separation allows for different pressures and atmospheres around the detector and the subject. From an informative website(http://www.itg.uiuc.edu/ms/equipment/micro scopes/esem/): "When the electron beam (primary electrons) ejects secondary electrons from the surface of the sample, the secondary electrons collide with water molecules, which in turn function as a cascade amplifier, delivering the secondary electron signal to the positively biased gaseous secondary electron detector (GSED). Because they've lost electrons in this exchange, the water molecules are positively ionized, and thus they are forced/attracted toward the specimen (which may be nonconductive and uncoated), serving to neutralize the negative charge produced by the primary electron beam."
You can take live action shots of wee beasties or watch crystals grow, live, rather than having to take snapshots of stopped processes.
I'll second the comment about caffeine and sleep. During a peiod of serious caffeine over-use (first year of grad school), I found that I just could hardly keep my eyes open in the afternoons. "How could this be?", I thought, "It's only 2:00, and I've had 14 cups of coffee today!" I was exhausted by the end of every day.
What kills you with heavy caffeine use is the fact that all of the residual caffeine in your body makes it almost impossible to get good, restful sleep. You wake up drag-assing, and the first four or five cups of joe only serve to get you functional, not bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the way they should. Taking in more caffeine makes the problem worse in the long run. I'd advise cutting back, and really limiting caffeine in the afternoons, to the point of "no caffeine after lunch". You'll sleep better, function better in the afternoons, and those morning coffees will be much more stimulating.
As far as taste, I'd skip instant coffee. I won't go so far as to say that they all taste like shit, but for a quick cup of good java, get a french press. You can steep some grounds in scalding hot water for a couple of minutes, then press out a cup of actual coffee that will taste better than almost any instant coffee, in almost the same amount of preparation time. Brew with whatever roast/grind/blend/flavor coffee you like, for a better selection than instants. Also, it's portable, so you're not tied to an outlet as with a percolater/drip/espresso machine.
Here's a tip, though... if you want stronger coffee, use more grounds with the same steeping time, rather than a fixed amount that you let steep longer. More flavor, less bitterness.
Good lord, man, it was a *darning* needle, not a knitting needle! No matter how careful you are, if you try to do Isaac's trick with a knitting neelde, it'll be fresh eye-kabob all around, and Johnny-come-back-for-seconds!
Radioisotope thermoelectric power units need to be hot enough to allow for electricity to be generated by thermocouples placed between the unit and the heat sink (space). A quick Google search gives 200-500 watts of power generated from multiple interleaved stacks of plutonium-238 or strontium-90, average radioactive source strength of around 50,000 curies, depending on design.
Radioisotope heaters use much less material, as they only need enough heat to keep the warm electronics box above -40F or so. From the Environmental Impact Statement in the Federal Register ([wais.access.gpo.gov][DOCID:fr10de02-54]):
"Each rover would employ two [calibration] instruments that use small quantities of cobalt-57 (not exceeding 350 millicuries) and curium-244 (not exceeding 50 millicuries) as instrument sources. Each rover would have up to 11 RHUs that use plutonium dioxide to provide heat to the electronics and batteries on board the rover. The radioisotope inventory of 11 RHUs would total approximately 365 curies of plutonium."
Nothing you'd like to swallow, but still, much smaller than a radioisotope power unit.
Down at the bottom of TFA is a quote from Bradley about what exactly led to the PC hardware revolution, i.e. cheap, interoperable, expandable hardware. First was IBM's decision to outsource development of the OS (Microsoft) and CPU (Intel) [giving them expertise which they later used to markey directly to clone vendors]. Bradley: "Second, we made it an open system. We published a user manual that made it easy for other people to develop software."
The parallels with the prospects for a PC software revolution are obvious.
Another quote (by Grove): "It's hard 20 years later to realize how drastic a departure this was from the computer industry's standard practices. Computer companies at that time tended to base everything on differentiation. My software will run only on my platform. The thinking was, 'If I don't differentiate, I'm just in a commodity business.'... if IBM senior management had fully understood what it was unleashing in 1981, I don't think it would have done this.""
I think Microsoft realizes exactly what happened with IBM... they lost control of the PC hardware business, but the open platform they originated blossomed in a hundred creative directions. MS has no intention of losing control of the PC OS business.
I've been using a Logitech cordless keyboard and mouse (the Cordless Freedom Pro Combo, since discontinued) for a couple of years, at work and at home. I can easily recommend them to anyone. Battery life at work is around 6 months, at home closer to 9... not a perceptible burden. This mouse uses a trackball, so the battery life on it is probably better than it would be for an optical cordless mouse.
The PC at home is in the office/den, and my three kids have only lost the mouse once (gone missing for a couple of hours until we cleaned the den), much better than their record with the TV remote. With no cords to tangle or pull, it's actually a lot easier to put the KB & mouse up on a shelf, where the kids can't play with them.
I'm a complete convert to wireless KB/mouse. I love not having to drag a cord around. I put yet another set onto a computer in my lab (for the PC that runs my spectrophotometer), and it's great being able to put the KB and mouse where it's convenient, not where the cord will reach. I put the small form-factor PC up on a lab shelf, and it's out of my way, preserving precious lab bench space.
At my office desk, I've found the little shortcut buttons to be habit-forming, as well, although I don't use them much at home (it's too easy for the kids to accidentally dial into our ISP with the push of a button). It's like having a speed-dial for frequently used programs.
This is a VERY TOUCHING STORY that shows GODS plan for EVERYONE!!!!!!! It was sent to me by a US Senator who is not afraid to Speak OUT for JESUS!! Forward this story to EVERYONE you know!!!!! (Bill Gates will donate $1000 for every 100 e.mails!) JESUS DIED FOR YOUR SINS!!!!!!!!!
GOD Bless America!!!!! We Remember 9/11!!!!!!! ETC!!!!! ETC!!!!!!!
As I recall, Giskard and Daneel were discussing the matter, and, in the end, Giskard just couldn't make himself really accept it. Daneel finally stated it as a formal law, and Giskard used it to justify his actions when he let the Earth go radioactive (to force humanity out into the universe), but the effort of reconciling the Zeroth Law with the other three killed him. The scenes of them thinking about this radical idea, and repeatedly backing away from the logical conclusions to their speculation are really interesting. It reminded me of theologians coming to the conclusion that the orthodox beliefs their world was founded on were incomplete. Tough stuff.
As a side note, they also agreed that walking was one of the hardest things that either of them had to do on a day-to-day basis, purely from the amount of computation required to balance, move and stay upright. This is a problem that Sony seems to have, if not solved, then at least addressed pretty effectively.
0. No robot may harm humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
All the of the others should be amended to reflect this law (called Zeroth because it should have come before the First). The idea is that a robot could, in seeking to prevent harm to a human, prevent that human from performing some self-sacrificing action for the good of humanity (say, rushing into a deadly radiation area to shut down a failing nuclear reactor before it goes critical and destroys the city), thereby causing more harm than good. The Three Laws were invented by humans for robots, but the Zeroth Law was invented by a robot, R. Daneel Olivaw.
Michael, we've all just about had it with you and your thing for little blond boys. With all of your plastic surgery, YOU are the one who looks like a robot.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been trying to find some way to get exercise but nothing seemed to stick.... I'm fucking 24
If your wife is OK with that, then it sounds like you've already found the ideal exercise program.
Now, if I could just find a fun diet...
Take some advice from one of your elders, youngster. Take a look at the Hacker's Diet . It fits very well with a hackerish lifestyle, and is very effective.
Trust me. I know how good it feels to plan out the good things you're going to do. That way, you're not really procrastinating. No, no. You're preparing. The project is underway.
Nicely put. Physically getting started is the hardest part of exercis. Well, no, continuing your chosen form of exercise for a second day when your flabby body is sore after the first day is *really* the hardest part. Nike's tag line is annoying but correct... just do it. Stop planning out how you're *going* to do it, and just do it. Or, if you like, keep planning the ideal approach, but start doing something while you continue to plan (and plan and plan).
I'll toss in a plug for the Hacker's Diet , too. Good exercise plan, good diet. I've lost 18 pounds so far, and I've gone from being doughy and pudgy to more toned and muscular. YMMV, but the important thing is to actually get up off your ass and do someting.
The X-15-style rocket plane approach for getting to sub-orbit does make sense for several reasons. Going from 0 to 400 mph presents a different set of challenges than going from 400 to 2000 mph; ditto for going from ground to 40,000 feet vs. getting from 40,000 to sub-orbit and sub-orbit to orbit. Using a conventional carrier aircraft to get the rocket plane up to a good rocket launch speed/altitude solves a lot of problems in design and system complexity by making the systems separate.
The problem, though, is that rocket planes are a good way to get to sub-orbit position, but not to orbit, at least not in any designs that are out there currently. From a sub-orbital position, a secondary launch can insert a satellite or other payload into orbit, but the craft itself, with the crew, will stay sub-orbital. Eventually, I could see rocket planes which get achieve and stay in orbit for awhile, but they couldn't ever break orbit.
The reason for going with the ballistic missle-based spacecraft was that Von Braun and all of the NASA guys realized that getting to orbit was only the first step in the ultimate goal of going to the moon and other the planets. There was tremendous fear that the Russians would land on the moon and claim it as the property of the Soviet Union. (This was before the treaties which disbarred direct annexation of extra-terrestrial property.) Looking back on thirty years of manned space activity restricted exclusively to LEO, it might seem like they missed a good bet by ignoring the potential of a multiple component carrier/rocket plane system in favor of a single ship to go from the ground to orbit. Ultimately, rocket planes will get you up, but never out.
If rocket planes can ever get up to orbit, there might be a "best of both worlds" synergy to going to the moon and beyond. Use a rocket plane to ferry personnel up to orbit, where they assemble parts which were lifted ballistically. This assumes, of course, that the difficulties in assembling/testing complex interplanetery craft in orbit can be ameliorated.
Ahhh, back in the days when the Scavenger Hunt was a real challenge, and we slept out for classes. I'll never forget Sleepout 1989... 20 degrees F overnight, huddled under blankets on the frozen ground in front of Harper. All the people who were there for the fun and comraderie took their chattering teeth home with them by midnight. All of us who were there to get the classes we wanted toughed it out straight through till dawn. I don't think I saw a single person, even the ones who had been bragging about their North Face down jackets, who wasn't shivering badly, those deep, convulsive shivers that make your hands shake so badly you can't hold a cup of coffee or even sign your name to the registration form.
Those were the days when a Maroon was a Maroon. How badly do you want Bevington's Shakespeare class? How badly do you want Ruddat's Plant Physiology? How badly do you need that Chemical Thermodynamics class in Spring Quarter, not Fall, dammit, Spring!
They're all wimps now. Harold's is all prettied up, the C Shop is a Pizza Hut, and Morrie's is a Starbucks.
Pity. It built character.
Luis and Mike, however, are offering additional assistance for those who require it. They can be reached at the LumixTech Web site.
Ouch. You gotta feel sorry for their mailserver and webserver now that this has been brought to the attention of"The Howard County Public Library burned to the ground today when several computers burst into flames, touching off the conflagration."....
Getting rid of the biggest noisemakers obviously has the biggest absolute impact. That's the cheapest and most effective first step. However, once you've removed the fans and made a regular PC quiet, going from quiet to *very* quiet gets trickier, and more expensive. The costs start to rise exponentially, and the 90/10 rule comes into play... getting rid of the last 10% of the noise costs as much as the first 90% did.
Is it worth all that extra money to go from a 91% quiet machine to a 96% quiet machine? In a newly quiet room, that soft little whine of the disk drive (which was masked by the loud case/CPU fans) is suddenly an issue; you certainly notice its absence when you switch to a Barracuda. The *percieved* improvement in the noise environment is subjective.
The half life of caffeine in pretty variable. Nicotine helps you to process caffeine more quickly, but sugar delays the breakdown. Women generally process caffeine more quickly than men, unless they happen to be pregnant, in which case the caffeine buzz hangs around a lot longer. If you knocked back all 100 cups right in a row, the caffeine toxicity might or might not kill you, depending on what your tolerance is to begin with; taken over the course of a day, you'll probably just get sick and severly dehydrated.
A good book to refer to is "The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug" by Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K. Bealer. Fun reading. There's a case discussed in there about somewone who did almost exactly this... drank some insane amount, enough to make the blood caffeine levels go WAY over the toxicity limit, yet survived with no lasting aftereffects. LD50s are, clearly, just a guideline... YMMV, or rather, YTMV.
I'll second this. The Palm (mine's an m515) and the folded keyboard easily fit in your pockets. This is particularly convenient on airplanes, as you don't have to get the laptop down from the overhead, or have it take up the space under the seat in front of you.
Start up time through the power/PalmOS/keyboard/fileXXX.doc sequence(time to actually start typing, not just boot up) is a few seconds, a fraction of the power/BIOS/Win/Desktop/Word/fileXXX.doc startup cycle on a laptop, so it is much more convenient to add just a few sentences or a few key ideas to a draft document.
The keyboard is comparable in size and functionality to a laptop. Admittedly, formatting of the text (attributes, fonts, indents, etc.) is not very smooth, but the ability to get words down on the screen is very, very quick. I type drafts with this setup, then clean up the formatting on my desktop when I get back to my office.
I was a miserable outcast, alone in a crowd for most of my childhood and adolesence. Family and school were impossibly frustrating because nothing anyone did seemed to make any sense to me. I thought people were pretending to be slow, stupid and dense just to irritate and tease me; I was always able to come up with a better way to do everything, but no one understood me. So, I avoided everyone as much as I could, and stuck to books, films and numbers.
I found interacting with humans to be much easier and more comfortable once I began to think of myself as having been raised by wolves. Instead of resigning myself to being awkward, confused and unable to function socially, I set about learning how humans spoke to each other, interacted, related, formed alliances and/or antagonisms. The proper-use-of-knife-and-fork thing was easy... I learned that from Fred Astaire movies. Cary Grant taught me how to talk to girls, Ronald Reagan taught me how to be speak in public, James Cagney taught me how to stop getting beaten up (hit first and hit hard, as many times as you can before they either pull you off or pummel you to the ground, rinse, lather, repeat), Richard Feynman taught me how to excel at school (nobody cares if your methods are superior, you're going to be graded on being able to use *their* methods), etc. I can pass for human almost flawlessly these days.
I still haven't really gotten the hang of talking about football, though.
I always thought the old "exploding pen" trick was a lame joke left over from Get Smart.
Plus ca change...
"Ninety percent of science fiction is crap. Of course, ninety percent of *everything* is crap."
The FAQ says it costs about $4000 to retrofit it onto your guitar. This is not for your average guy who plucks a bit on the weekends.
This type of scanning electron microscopy is fairly new (~10-15 yrs), but it's not a Danish invention... a lot of places make and sell these microscopes. Traditional SEM requires sputter coating your subject with gold or osmium, something really electron dense to get a good conduction and bounceback. You "shine" electrons at your subject, they bounce back, you detect them. All well and good, but the coating process meant some artifacts were introduced, and you killed your subject. The detection had be done under high vacuum, and it had to be dry, so water and air wouldn't scatter the electrons and ruin your imaging.
o scopes/esem/): "When the electron beam (primary electrons) ejects secondary electrons from the surface of the sample, the secondary electrons collide with water molecules, which in turn function as a cascade amplifier, delivering the secondary electron signal to the positively biased gaseous secondary electron detector (GSED). Because they've lost electrons in this exchange, the water molecules are positively ionized, and thus they are forced/attracted toward the specimen (which may be nonconductive and uncoated), serving to neutralize the negative charge produced by the primary electron beam."
Environmental SEM (or "variable pressure" SEM) puts the subject in a chamber that's isolated from the electron emitter/detector by a thin membrane. The separation allows for different pressures and atmospheres around the detector and the subject. From an informative website(http://www.itg.uiuc.edu/ms/equipment/micr
You can take live action shots of wee beasties or watch crystals grow, live, rather than having to take snapshots of stopped processes.
Very cool.
Is there any Ontario town that *isn't* northern?
I'll second the comment about caffeine and sleep. During a peiod of serious caffeine over-use (first year of grad school), I found that I just could hardly keep my eyes open in the afternoons. "How could this be?", I thought, "It's only 2:00, and I've had 14 cups of coffee today!" I was exhausted by the end of every day.
What kills you with heavy caffeine use is the fact that all of the residual caffeine in your body makes it almost impossible to get good, restful sleep. You wake up drag-assing, and the first four or five cups of joe only serve to get you functional, not bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the way they should. Taking in more caffeine makes the problem worse in the long run. I'd advise cutting back, and really limiting caffeine in the afternoons, to the point of "no caffeine after lunch". You'll sleep better, function better in the afternoons, and those morning coffees will be much more stimulating.
As far as taste, I'd skip instant coffee. I won't go so far as to say that they all taste like shit, but for a quick cup of good java, get a french press. You can steep some grounds in scalding hot water for a couple of minutes, then press out a cup of actual coffee that will taste better than almost any instant coffee, in almost the same amount of preparation time. Brew with whatever roast/grind/blend/flavor coffee you like, for a better selection than instants. Also, it's portable, so you're not tied to an outlet as with a percolater/drip/espresso machine.
Here's a tip, though... if you want stronger coffee, use more grounds with the same steeping time, rather than a fixed amount that you let steep longer. More flavor, less bitterness.
Good lord, man, it was a *darning* needle, not a knitting needle! No matter how careful you are, if you try to do Isaac's trick with a knitting neelde, it'll be fresh eye-kabob all around, and Johnny-come-back-for-seconds!
Radioisotope thermoelectric power units need to be hot enough to allow for electricity to be generated by thermocouples placed between the unit and the heat sink (space). A quick Google search gives 200-500 watts of power generated from multiple interleaved stacks of plutonium-238 or strontium-90, average radioactive source strength of around 50,000 curies, depending on design.
Radioisotope heaters use much less material, as they only need enough heat to keep the warm electronics box above -40F or so. From the Environmental Impact Statement in the Federal Register ([wais.access.gpo.gov][DOCID:fr10de02-54]):
"Each rover would employ two [calibration] instruments that use small quantities of cobalt-57 (not exceeding 350 millicuries) and curium-244 (not exceeding 50 millicuries) as instrument sources. Each rover would have up to 11 RHUs that use plutonium dioxide to provide heat to the electronics and batteries on board the rover. The radioisotope inventory of 11 RHUs would total approximately 365 curies of plutonium."
Nothing you'd like to swallow, but still, much smaller than a radioisotope power unit.
Down at the bottom of TFA is a quote from Bradley about what exactly led to the PC hardware revolution, i.e. cheap, interoperable, expandable hardware. First was IBM's decision to outsource development of the OS (Microsoft) and CPU (Intel) [giving them expertise which they later used to markey directly to clone vendors].
... if IBM senior management had fully understood what it was unleashing in 1981, I don't think it would have done this.""
Bradley: "Second, we made it an open system. We published a user manual that made it easy for other people to develop software."
The parallels with the prospects for a PC software revolution are obvious.
Another quote (by Grove): "It's hard 20 years later to realize how drastic a departure this was from the computer industry's standard practices. Computer companies at that time tended to base everything on differentiation. My software will run only on my platform. The thinking was, 'If I don't differentiate, I'm just in a commodity business.'
I think Microsoft realizes exactly what happened with IBM... they lost control of the PC hardware business, but the open platform they originated blossomed in a hundred creative directions. MS has no intention of losing control of the PC OS business.
I've been using a Logitech cordless keyboard and mouse (the Cordless Freedom Pro Combo, since discontinued) for a couple of years, at work and at home. I can easily recommend them to anyone. Battery life at work is around 6 months, at home closer to 9... not a perceptible burden. This mouse uses a trackball, so the battery life on it is probably better than it would be for an optical cordless mouse.
The PC at home is in the office/den, and my three kids have only lost the mouse once (gone missing for a couple of hours until we cleaned the den), much better than their record with the TV remote. With no cords to tangle or pull, it's actually a lot easier to put the KB & mouse up on a shelf, where the kids can't play with them.
I'm a complete convert to wireless KB/mouse. I love not having to drag a cord around. I put yet another set onto a computer in my lab (for the PC that runs my spectrophotometer), and it's great being able to put the KB and mouse where it's convenient, not where the cord will reach. I put the small form-factor PC up on a lab shelf, and it's out of my way, preserving precious lab bench space.
At my office desk, I've found the little shortcut buttons to be habit-forming, as well, although I don't use them much at home (it's too easy for the kids to accidentally dial into our ISP with the push of a button). It's like having a speed-dial for frequently used programs.
This is a VERY TOUCHING STORY that shows GODS plan for EVERYONE!!!!!!! It was sent to me by a US Senator who is not afraid to Speak OUT for JESUS!! Forward this story to EVERYONE you know!!!!! (Bill Gates will donate $1000 for every 100 e.mails!) JESUS DIED FOR YOUR SINS!!!!!!!!!
GOD Bless America!!!!! We Remember 9/11!!!!!!!
ETC!!!!! ETC!!!!!!!
"fat, overweight geek with 17 gadgets in his pockets"
Mod -1, Redundant (is there any other kind of geek?)
1. They ignore you.
2. They laugh at you.
3. They fight you.
4. You win.
5. Profit!
As I recall, Giskard and Daneel were discussing the matter, and, in the end, Giskard just couldn't make himself really accept it. Daneel finally stated it as a formal law, and Giskard used it to justify his actions when he let the Earth go radioactive (to force humanity out into the universe), but the effort of reconciling the Zeroth Law with the other three killed him. The scenes of them thinking about this radical idea, and repeatedly backing away from the logical conclusions to their speculation are really interesting. It reminded me of theologians coming to the conclusion that the orthodox beliefs their world was founded on were incomplete. Tough stuff.
As a side note, they also agreed that walking was one of the hardest things that either of them had to do on a day-to-day basis, purely from the amount of computation required to balance, move and stay upright. This is a problem that Sony seems to have, if not solved, then at least addressed pretty effectively.
You forgot the Zeroth Law:
0. No robot may harm humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
All the of the others should be amended to reflect this law (called Zeroth because it should have come before the First). The idea is that a robot could, in seeking to prevent harm to a human, prevent that human from performing some self-sacrificing action for the good of humanity (say, rushing into a deadly radiation area to shut down a failing nuclear reactor before it goes critical and destroys the city), thereby causing more harm than good. The Three Laws were invented by humans for robots, but the Zeroth Law was invented by a robot, R. Daneel Olivaw.
Michael, we've all just about had it with you and your thing for little blond boys. With all of your plastic surgery, YOU are the one who looks like a robot.