I don't think Lynch butchered Herbert's work, after all, Herbert was aware of the production and probably had some influence. I still think Lynch's work is pretty spectacular. I hear that he was considered for the role of director of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. I wonder how would those Ewoks have fared in a Lynch inspired filmscape?
Having read the original novel by Philip K Dick and seen the director's cut of Bladerunner I have to say that Scott's vision surpasses the original novel. This isn't to say that the novel wasn't good. It was good but different. But I would have to say that the movie not only displayed a great sense of visual beauty and a fabulous sound track but the plot formed a fine tapestry that explored what it is to be human.
The book Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner talks about how Philip K Dick was totally taken with Scott's and the screen writers interpretation of the novel. Also I recall that William Gibson was also totally blown away by the movie and he was also impressed that this movie had better visuals than what he was dreaming up for his novel Neuromancer (which hadn't been published yet).
There was a special issue of Scientific American that was published either this last summer or the previous summer and it was on life extension. One of the articles was about brain transplantation. Apparently there is one doctor who is willing to perform this kind of surgery but it apparently has to be under the right conditions in order for him to agree to perform it. It sounds like many people have already asked him to perform this sort of operation (mostly in Russia) but he isn't willing until the right conditions are available.
What are the right conditions? Well besides having a live patient and a recently dead donor body it sounds like he needs an operating room that is twice the size of a regular one so that they don't have to move from one room to another so that they can quickly move a few feet rather than a couple of yards.
So there is at least one doctor who is ready to do this kind of surgery on a real patient. I think he would only accept candidates that are currently quadriplegics and whose bodies are severely degenerating to the point where they need a new body or will die. I don't think that this doctor necessarily thinks that doing such a surgery will provide a person with the capability of getting up and walking but would provide nutrients to their brain and thus extend their life.
Ender's game was fabulous. One of the few other books that have gripped me was On the Wings of Eagles. Except that it isn't fiction. It's a real story about how Ross Perot got together a team to break his employees out of Iran during the hostage affair. Quite gripping...I had a terrible time trying to put it down. I mention it because it's one of the few books that really pulled me in and it is also involves a lot of strategy in a warlike setting.
After I read Ender's Game my friend told me not to bother with the sequel because it wasn't supposed to be good. Sounds like there are a lot of opinions here agreeing with that...though I've always thought that Children of the Mind is a fantastic title! Too bad it sounds like it's a so so novel.
Yes, definitely the first thing I thought about when I read this was flying insect like killer robots. I need to start building my army of defensive killer spider-robots.
Speaking about potentially lethal technology another not-talked-a-lot-about threat are electromagnetic pulse weapons. They are suspected to have been used already in Russia in bank robberies. I once saw a Primetime Live special about a guy who builds these from regular components expressly for the purpose to see how easy it is to build! He tests them near Groom lake/Area 51 and contracts for the Military. Diane Sawyer watched him aim one of the devices he built at a running car and shoot it - the engine died immediately.
I can sum the review up in one sentence: it suffers from the usual problem with critics, subjective myopia
That's exactly why I usually don't listen to critics. I generally read reviews only to get more information about what the movie is about or to see more clips of the movie before I actually decide to see it. Also while a reviewer saying a movie is crap may not influence me...a reviewer saying a movie is excellent will likely influence me more to see it.
I liked Mars Attacks! though it is a bit weak.
I really disliked the Matrix (thought it had no plot just a bunch of mindless action and one cool quote "free your mind") and didn't understand why everyone else thought it was brilliant?!? I really was surprised to hear people comparing the Matrix to Blade Runner which IMHO is the best sci-fi drama out there (2001: A Space Odyssey is a close 2nd).
1. The reason the Zeta function is useful in this case is because if all of it's zeroes lie in 1/2+nj (where n is a positive or negative real number and j is the square root of -1), the right side of the complex plane, then this means that the distribution of the primes does indeed follow 1/ln(x). The Zeta function is merely providing tolerance limits, but nevertheless it also implies that the primes are random.
2. So you know the Zeta function is useful for this but now the question is how to show that all these zeroes lie in that line? It seems that Alain Connes has developed a quantum chaotic model that has energy gaps that are equivalent in proportion to the gaps found between zeroes of the Zeta function in the complex plane. But now he has to verify that there are no additional energy levels that do not lie on that line. This is the part that he may have a lot of difficulty solving. Also the n-adic geometry that Connes is using basically means that he is doing cyclic arithmetic. In a 5-adic system, 5+3=3, 2+4=1, and so on. It's just like a clock...once you pass the number at the top of the dial you start again at the lower numbers. Even so, I don't understand why he is using this mathematical system to describe separate dimensions for each prime number!?!
3. So what if he verifies that there are no additional energy gaps that violate the 1/2+nj line? Then it sounds like he needs to verify this model experimentally with some real system.
4. If all this comes to pass then I guess the primes are proved to follow the distribution more or less.
An interesting side note. It should be obvious that this looks sort-of like a problem in control theory.
In control theory, you try to analyze a system for stability based on its transfer function. If the transfer function has a denominator that can be set to zero then the values that create that condition are labeled "poles."
It seems like in this case we could treat the Zeta function as the transfer function.
If the poles of a system lie on the right side of the axis of the imaginary plane then the system is considered unstable and the time response is supposed to increase exponentially with time or increase exponentially as a sinusoid with time.
I'm not saying that these are necessarily the same problem but it is interesting to consider the analogy. So is the tolerance of the logarithmic distribution of primes equivalent to the exponential time response of an unstable control system??? I guess that's what makes the distribution random - eh?
In an interview on 60 minutes, the daughter of Frank Sinatra admitted that her father acted as a go between JFK's father and one of the major mob bosses. Basically through a gentleman's agreement the mob boss agreed to give JFK all of their union votes likely in exchange for a lenient Federal government. Unfortunately for the mob, JFK's administration via RFK double crossed the mob and investigated and prosecuted them to the hilt. As a result of this double cross Frank Sinatra agreed to do a week's worth of shows for free at the mob bosses club.
Gore is winning the popular vote by 174,000 votes!
I wonder how will they handle this if Gore wins the popular vote but not the electoral votes? I still think there is a very excellent chance that Gore will win Florida. There is also news that there was a faux-pas in that many Floridians accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan when they meant to vote for Al Gore. There was something wrong with the voting booth mechanism lever that caused that snafu. Since we know they were going to vote for Al this could really tilt it in his favor if they "fix" those miscast votes.
Actually the vote difference in Florida is about 500 votes and there are about 13,000 outstanding ballots yet to be counted from soldiers that are abroad.
What we need is the Borda count. See this article in Discover magazine. It seems to provide the best way to select the winner from multiple candidates. It lets you rank the candidates so that you don't have to "waste" your vote. It is apparently used by some scientists because of its accuracy.
Re:Surprising amount of scientific ignorance here.
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but not unexpected. He may be the greatest chess player of all time but I don't think he could maintain that level of playing forever. People seem to become less able to perform intellectual feats as they get older. Kasparov beat Karpov when Karpov was 34. Kasparov is about 37 now. He's getting close to that age where one is no longer so sharp. Here's a good article on aging from Feed.
Capt. Joseph Kittinger jumped from 102,800 feet in 1960. Another skydiver Piantanida jumped from 123,500 feet in 1966 but his altitude record was not recognized I think because they were not sure he actually made that altitude (his altimeter may have stopped working).
A simulation of the Kittinger dive is on the NOVA website. Plus they also show the famous picture of him jumping out of the gondola.
Also there is a really great book written by Craig Ryan called The Pre-Astronauts. The Pre-Astronauts is all about the history of high altitude skydiving. A cool quote by Alan Shepard from the book when asked if he would have done the Kittinger jump: "Hell no. Absolutely not."
Another cool fact is that Capt. Kittinger's boss during those high skyjumps was no other than John Paul Stapp the guy who is always in those famous pictures and movies of the rocket sled. Remember those pictures of a man's face being progressively made more distorted by g-forces? That's John Paul Stapp!
Re:Open source.. assisted? (well, gpl perhaps..)
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Microsoft Cracked
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Of course, but Linda Tripp was also going to be prosecuted after the whole Lewinsky fiasco because she broke the law by taping Lewinsky in the first place without her consent.
So yeah, while the evidence might be admissible to a court the person who collected it is certainly going to be in hot water.
I don't know about Asimov having any serious intellectual limitations, I assume people here are not aware that he was a professor of biochemistry at Boston University??
He wrote an amazing number of books. He wrote popularizations of science (astronomy, etc), books on religion, obviously science fiction, etc etc. He was no dummy. He was pretty sharp.
I own a World Book Encyclopedia yearbook from 1962 that has an article by him about science (the picture has him surrounded by chemistry lab equipment).
Btw, I personally dislike Brin's short stories but I love his novels. The BEST of Brin IMHO:
1. The Practice Effect,
2. Glory Season,
3. Earth,
4. The Postman.
If you get any of his books get the Practice Effect not only is the novel FUN but it plays a really cool game with one of the laws of thermodynamics! Also the only flame I see might be in Glory Season as the novel is a sort of response to a pastoral society ruled by women.
This really isn't farfetched at all. All you'd have to do is take out a brain and rewire it to provide artificially created inputs that simulate vision, touch, smell, etc. The technology to do this however won't be around for a very long time.
There are robots in the Foundation Series. First off the Foundation Series is tied to the Liege Bailey detective Robot Novels.
So there are two series that merge together and the second main character in the Liege Bailey novels is the robot R. Daneel Olivaw (a human-appearing robot). This robot turns out to live thousands of years and sees the spread of humanity throughout the galaxy. Remember that the Empire has existed for several tens of thousands of years and that Daneel Olivaw has existed since before the Empire and afterwards too!
At any rate, it turns out that R. Daneel Olivaw has actually been the man (or robot) behind the power of the Empire. He was like an assistant prime minister.
I don't think there were any other robots that existed in the Foundation Series per se besides Olivaw.
about time! How long does a guy have to wait these days? He invented the darned thing back in the late 50's. It's been at least 40 years. Were they going to wait until he died? I guess they did for Robert Noyce (one of the founders of Intel) who was the other co-inventor of the microchip except that Noyce figured out how to wire the IC whereas Kilby figured out how to create lumped-parameter components out of silicon by connecting them with tiny tiny wires made of gold.
Link to Fermat's Proof...
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Nobel Prizes
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PBS's NOVA showed a really great interview of Andrew Wiles and his colleagues called "The Proof."
Nobel Prize Research Refuted?
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There is one given to Medawar & Burnet in 1960 in Physiology or Medicine back in the 50's on the mechanism of the immune system and it apparently is being refuted by work done by Polly Matzinger at the NIH. Also another guy, Stanley Prusiner, won the Nobel in 1997 for the discovery that prions can cause disease; This award is being criticized on the grounds that there is no real proof that unusual proteins cause disease. So at least two Nobels could be invalidated because of new research or having awarded the prize too quickly.
Field's Medal==Nobel Prizes for Mathematics
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Nobel Prizes
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Yeah, I've heard the same thing, but I think I've also heard that the Abel thing is unlikely. It kinda does make sense for it to be an award for inventions to help humanity since Nobel did invent dynamite which in some ways is useful.
Besides, there is the Fields Medal in mathematics which is the equivalent of the Nobel except that there is an age limit associated with the Fields Medal. You have to be under 40 by the time you make your breakthrough else you don't get a medal! This is why Andrew Wiles, who cracked Fermat's Last Theorem did not get one. He was a little bit over 40 when his proof was published etc etc. So they gave him a special Field's Medal. Btw, Field's medal is not named after the idea of fields in mathematics but is actually the name of the guy who endowed the trust that funds the medals.
Scientific American has a blurb on what the Higgs Boson is all about.
The July 2000 issue also has an interesting article on the Large Hadron Collider that CERN is building. This article does not appear to be on www.sciam.com.
Slashdot Mirror
you can get books in text format for free from Project Gutenberg. Atlas Shrugged doesn't seem to be one of them though. http://www.gutenberg.net/
I don't think Lynch butchered Herbert's work, after all, Herbert was aware of the production and probably had some influence. I still think Lynch's work is pretty spectacular. I hear that he was considered for the role of director of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. I wonder how would those Ewoks have fared in a Lynch inspired filmscape?
The book Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner talks about how Philip K Dick was totally taken with Scott's and the screen writers interpretation of the novel. Also I recall that William Gibson was also totally blown away by the movie and he was also impressed that this movie had better visuals than what he was dreaming up for his novel Neuromancer (which hadn't been published yet).
What are the right conditions? Well besides having a live patient and a recently dead donor body it sounds like he needs an operating room that is twice the size of a regular one so that they don't have to move from one room to another so that they can quickly move a few feet rather than a couple of yards.
So there is at least one doctor who is ready to do this kind of surgery on a real patient. I think he would only accept candidates that are currently quadriplegics and whose bodies are severely degenerating to the point where they need a new body or will die. I don't think that this doctor necessarily thinks that doing such a surgery will provide a person with the capability of getting up and walking but would provide nutrients to their brain and thus extend their life.
After I read Ender's Game my friend told me not to bother with the sequel because it wasn't supposed to be good. Sounds like there are a lot of opinions here agreeing with that...though I've always thought that Children of the Mind is a fantastic title! Too bad it sounds like it's a so so novel.
Speaking about potentially lethal technology another not-talked-a-lot-about threat are electromagnetic pulse weapons. They are suspected to have been used already in Russia in bank robberies. I once saw a Primetime Live special about a guy who builds these from regular components expressly for the purpose to see how easy it is to build! He tests them near Groom lake/Area 51 and contracts for the Military. Diane Sawyer watched him aim one of the devices he built at a running car and shoot it - the engine died immediately.
Yes, they made a movie adaptation of Asimov's Nightfall in 1988 or 1989. It was god awful! It is on my list as the worst movie ever made.
Meredith Baxter-Birney's (Family Ties) husband starred in it. Plus the local newspaper gave it something like 1 of out 5 stars.
That's exactly why I usually don't listen to critics. I generally read reviews only to get more information about what the movie is about or to see more clips of the movie before I actually decide to see it. Also while a reviewer saying a movie is crap may not influence me...a reviewer saying a movie is excellent will likely influence me more to see it.
I liked Mars Attacks! though it is a bit weak.
I really disliked the Matrix (thought it had no plot just a bunch of mindless action and one cool quote "free your mind") and didn't understand why everyone else thought it was brilliant?!? I really was surprised to hear people comparing the Matrix to Blade Runner which IMHO is the best sci-fi drama out there (2001: A Space Odyssey is a close 2nd).
I haven't seen Red Planet but intend to since I like the way it looks and hey Roger Ebert gave it 3 out of 4 stars.
2. So you know the Zeta function is useful for this but now the question is how to show that all these zeroes lie in that line? It seems that Alain Connes has developed a quantum chaotic model that has energy gaps that are equivalent in proportion to the gaps found between zeroes of the Zeta function in the complex plane. But now he has to verify that there are no additional energy levels that do not lie on that line. This is the part that he may have a lot of difficulty solving. Also the n-adic geometry that Connes is using basically means that he is doing cyclic arithmetic. In a 5-adic system, 5+3=3, 2+4=1, and so on. It's just like a clock...once you pass the number at the top of the dial you start again at the lower numbers. Even so, I don't understand why he is using this mathematical system to describe separate dimensions for each prime number!?!
3. So what if he verifies that there are no additional energy gaps that violate the 1/2+nj line? Then it sounds like he needs to verify this model experimentally with some real system.
4. If all this comes to pass then I guess the primes are proved to follow the distribution more or less.
An interesting side note. It should be obvious that this looks sort-of like a problem in control theory.
In control theory, you try to analyze a system for stability based on its transfer function. If the transfer function has a denominator that can be set to zero then the values that create that condition are labeled "poles."
It seems like in this case we could treat the Zeta function as the transfer function.
If the poles of a system lie on the right side of the axis of the imaginary plane then the system is considered unstable and the time response is supposed to increase exponentially with time or increase exponentially as a sinusoid with time.
I'm not saying that these are necessarily the same problem but it is interesting to consider the analogy. So is the tolerance of the logarithmic distribution of primes equivalent to the exponential time response of an unstable control system??? I guess that's what makes the distribution random - eh?
In an interview on 60 minutes, the daughter of Frank Sinatra admitted that her father acted as a go between JFK's father and one of the major mob bosses. Basically through a gentleman's agreement the mob boss agreed to give JFK all of their union votes likely in exchange for a lenient Federal government. Unfortunately for the mob, JFK's administration via RFK double crossed the mob and investigated and prosecuted them to the hilt. As a result of this double cross Frank Sinatra agreed to do a week's worth of shows for free at the mob bosses club.
I wonder how will they handle this if Gore wins the popular vote but not the electoral votes? I still think there is a very excellent chance that Gore will win Florida. There is also news that there was a faux-pas in that many Floridians accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan when they meant to vote for Al Gore. There was something wrong with the voting booth mechanism lever that caused that snafu. Since we know they were going to vote for Al this could really tilt it in his favor if they "fix" those miscast votes.
Actually the vote difference in Florida is about 500 votes and there are about 13,000 outstanding ballots yet to be counted from soldiers that are abroad.
What we need is the Borda count. See this article in Discover magazine. It seems to provide the best way to select the winner from multiple candidates. It lets you rank the candidates so that you don't have to "waste" your vote. It is apparently used by some scientists because of its accuracy.
The guy with the homemade rocket is at www.rocketguy.com.
but not unexpected. He may be the greatest chess player of all time but I don't think he could maintain that level of playing forever. People seem to become less able to perform intellectual feats as they get older. Kasparov beat Karpov when Karpov was 34. Kasparov is about 37 now. He's getting close to that age where one is no longer so sharp. Here's a good article on aging from Feed.
A simulation of the Kittinger dive is on the NOVA website. Plus they also show the famous picture of him jumping out of the gondola.
Also there is a really great book written by Craig Ryan called The Pre-Astronauts. The Pre-Astronauts is all about the history of high altitude skydiving. A cool quote by Alan Shepard from the book when asked if he would have done the Kittinger jump: "Hell no. Absolutely not."
Another cool fact is that Capt. Kittinger's boss during those high skyjumps was no other than John Paul Stapp the guy who is always in those famous pictures and movies of the rocket sled. Remember those pictures of a man's face being progressively made more distorted by g-forces? That's John Paul Stapp!
So yeah, while the evidence might be admissible to a court the person who collected it is certainly going to be in hot water.
Asimov's short biography
He wrote an amazing number of books. He wrote popularizations of science (astronomy, etc), books on religion, obviously science fiction, etc etc. He was no dummy. He was pretty sharp.
I own a World Book Encyclopedia yearbook from 1962 that has an article by him about science (the picture has him surrounded by chemistry lab equipment).
Btw, I personally dislike Brin's short stories but I love his novels. The BEST of Brin IMHO:
1. The Practice Effect,
2. Glory Season,
3. Earth,
4. The Postman.
If you get any of his books get the Practice Effect not only is the novel FUN but it plays a really cool game with one of the laws of thermodynamics! Also the only flame I see might be in Glory Season as the novel is a sort of response to a pastoral society ruled by women.
This really isn't farfetched at all. All you'd have to do is take out a brain and rewire it to provide artificially created inputs that simulate vision, touch, smell, etc. The technology to do this however won't be around for a very long time.
So there are two series that merge together and the second main character in the Liege Bailey novels is the robot R. Daneel Olivaw (a human-appearing robot). This robot turns out to live thousands of years and sees the spread of humanity throughout the galaxy. Remember that the Empire has existed for several tens of thousands of years and that Daneel Olivaw has existed since before the Empire and afterwards too!
At any rate, it turns out that R. Daneel Olivaw has actually been the man (or robot) behind the power of the Empire. He was like an assistant prime minister.
I don't think there were any other robots that existed in the Foundation Series per se besides Olivaw.
about time! How long does a guy have to wait these days? He invented the darned thing back in the late 50's. It's been at least 40 years. Were they going to wait until he died? I guess they did for Robert Noyce (one of the founders of Intel) who was the other co-inventor of the microchip except that Noyce figured out how to wire the IC whereas Kilby figured out how to create lumped-parameter components out of silicon by connecting them with tiny tiny wires made of gold.
There is a link to the complete transcript of the show.
I highly recommend Singh's book (he helped produce the NOVA show). It gave enough of the history and the essential parts of the mathematics.
Also a key reason that the Field's medal is restricted to under 40 is that it was considered that a mathematician does his best work under 40. An interesting article about aging and science is on www.feedmag.com.
There is one given to Medawar & Burnet in 1960 in Physiology or Medicine back in the 50's on the mechanism of the immune system and it apparently is being refuted by work done by Polly Matzinger at the NIH. Also another guy, Stanley Prusiner, won the Nobel in 1997 for the discovery that prions can cause disease; This award is being criticized on the grounds that there is no real proof that unusual proteins cause disease. So at least two Nobels could be invalidated because of new research or having awarded the prize too quickly.
Besides, there is the Fields Medal in mathematics which is the equivalent of the Nobel except that there is an age limit associated with the Fields Medal. You have to be under 40 by the time you make your breakthrough else you don't get a medal! This is why Andrew Wiles, who cracked Fermat's Last Theorem did not get one. He was a little bit over 40 when his proof was published etc etc. So they gave him a special Field's Medal. Btw, Field's medal is not named after the idea of fields in mathematics but is actually the name of the guy who endowed the trust that funds the medals.
The July 2000 issue also has an interesting article on the Large Hadron Collider that CERN is building. This article does not appear to be on www.sciam.com.