The article proves that you could better spend your time going to a cheaper grocery store, rather than hunting for the cheapest gas. However, it seems to me that complaints about gas prices are not regarding the relative prices between gas stations, but rather the inflation of gas prices as a whole. No matter how much time I spend looking for the cheapest grocery store and the best discounts, if gas prices go up then I spend more on gas than I did before. A rise in gas prices of 10% means I have (0.1 * money spent on gas) less to spend on other things.
So if you devote your time to finding the cheapest gas station and you complain that it takes you too great an effort to find a cheaper one, then yes, please stop doing that and go find a cheaper grocery store instead. But if you like to complain about gas prices being high _in general_, then that doesn't depend on which grocery store you go to.
Back in high school I did precisely such a study on red forest ants. We dubbed it the 'homing pigeon behavior' of ants. Our results showed that up to a distance of about 7 metres the ants were able to find their way back to home. Please note we took the ants from their nests and placed them at varying distances from the nest in varying directions. We did not make a distinction between ants with different functions in the nest.
It was interesting to see that the ants would sometimes interact with other ants and then might dribble off to other tasks withouth even returning to the nest completely.
To quote (from memory) the online commentator Mig Greengard: "If X3D Fritz lacks a clear target it plays like a braindamaged lemur"
As Fritz moved its pieces back and forth throughout the game, Kasparov could make several free moves. That isn't brilliant, that's just making use of the other guys mistakes. Kasparov dominated the whole game, while Fritz had no clue at all what to do. According to one of its makers, X3D Fritz reached a new record of reading deeply (19 ply if I'm not mistaken) since the number of possible moves was so small in the cramped space they were building up their positions. This, however, didn't help a bit and I had a few giggles over bishops and knights moving away and then back again to the very same place they were coming from.
Only at the very end did Fritz realize it was losing, throughout the whole game it couldn't see what was glaringly obvious to the audience.
I've been told that this was proper anti-computer chess. The cramped position makes it tremendously difficult for a computer program to play properly while a human can easily see what's to be done.
All in all, it wasn't brilliant, Fritz just didn't have a clue
What am I discussing all this chess for? Let me get back to KGS...
Mouse: "... So I understand that you've run through the agent training program. You know, I wrote that program." Apoc: "Here it comes." Mouse: "So what did you think of her?" Neo: "Of who?" Mouse: "The woman in the red dress? I designed her. She, um...well she doesn't talk very much, but...but if you'd like to meet her, I can arrange a much more personalized meeting." Switch: "Digital pimp, hard at work"
Re:Semi-realtime satellite image of fire status
on
Online Fire Tracking?
·
· Score: 1
What I have always wondered is this: What would it take to get close to realtime satellite coverage of high-risk areas? If you can detect new fires within hours/minutes/seconds, you could send a quick response team with their airplane full of water and extinguish the fire before all hell brakes loose.
What kind of technology is being applied nowadays to detect forest fires when they are still small, or do the first reports come in long after it went out of control? With the kind of media attention forest fires around the world get nowadays, one would think it is a big issue and is worth spending a few bucks on. Surely there is a plan (in the build) for such realtime coverage?
Asking why you should fund mathematics is asking why you should fund art. Who ever got cured by art?
I certainly know that a major motivation for my career in science is the beauty of it. It's like the sunset outside my window, it's like Dido's new single emerging from my speakers. Today I spent studying for my thermodynamics exam and even the simple mathematics used therein is beautiful. Wednesday is my Quantum Mechanics exam and if it weren't for the beauty of the mathematics of the Schrödinger equation it would be a whole lot less intruiging. I make that exam for the joy and beauty I find in the mathematics and physics, not because it makes your cd player work.
Beauty. That is why you should fund mathematics. The fact that it helps society is a secondary concern. But hey, that's just my opinion. And that of the Pythagoreans, to name a few.
Beauty can be found in more things than a painting or Natalie Portman. It's in logic, in mathematics, hell, it's even in code. It's in patterns, it's in reason, it's in deduction as much as it's in nature, an individual or a thought.
they want to put one transmission behind the other. So when the first transmission passes they have to move in the other one. Your method then only works if the transmissions from one source come in regular intervals and I'm not sure if this is the case. If not, then they have to know for every unique transmission when it has passed the point where they want to add the other transmission so they know when to let the other one on the main line.
Not many people seem to believe this. I don't really see why not as this has already been done long ago by Ad Lagendijk and others (please note, the original research was done at Amsterdam, not the University of Twente).
Furtermore, Bigelow e.a published their paper in the Physical Review Letters on March the 21st, not on the first of April. They submitted their paper on 31 October 2002.
From what I could make up of it, Ad Lagendijk did this in the early nineties by having the light reflect off of particles and thus slowing it down effectively (it doesn't emerge on the other side of the container at t=x/c where t is the time, x is the width of the container and c is the speed of light). Bigelow, Lepeshkin and Boyd really just created a ruby crystal with an enormously high refractive index, effectively slowing down the light. Nothing really odd.
Concerning the application of this research in telecommunications the article mentions the following:
Boyd anticipates that the slow light device will find a role in the telecommunications industry. When two signals from fiber optic lines merge, the two signals may reach the merging router at the exact same moment and need to be separated slightly in time so they can be laid down one after another. Like two cars merging on a highway where one may need to slow down to let another car into the lane, a light-slowing device could help ease congestion on fiber optic lines and simplify the process of merging signals on busy networks.
This I know nothing about, however, this does seem a bit odd to me as I don't know how they intend to figure out where the light is in order to know how much to slow it down.
So the costume design for Two Towers was really worse than for the Fellowship? Or were the other movies so impressive that LOTR-TTT didn't get nominated in this category? Odd.
You can visit the CERN in Geneva. You have to schedule it in advance, but I guess that it will be great (I plan on going there somewhere next year). And Geneva is a beautiful city, so it's great anyway.
You can get a tour of the facility which must prove interesting for every nerd with an interest in elementary particles.
Can anyone please explain how you miss something like that growing?
Do these spiders do this in one night, or did the caretaker (and everyone else using the playing field) suddenly realize that grass really shouldn't be white?
...I think it's good entertainment. My first (and for quite some time, only) Star Trek experience has been the TNG and VOY episodes. And I like them a lot. There's repitition, but I think it's good entertainment; I like watching it. However, I don't like TOS, nor do I like the Kirk-movies. I'm not one for old-day sci-fi (except StarWars, but hey). I did like Insurrection though. Again, good entertainment; some action, pretty special effects, acting wasn't too bad at all, some heroism (but not corny) and a lot of sci-fi. Yeah, that's good entertainment to me. Now if you don't like it, don't go and see Nemesis. I for one will be among the first to get tickets (hoping they won't wait with releasing it here in the Netherlands for a month or 6).
Good entertainment, that's what it is too me. I can go and get some popcorn and a soda and enjoy 90+ minutes of good entertainment. Throw in a little heriosm, some good catchy lines (Data: "Lock and load", it just all depends on _who_ says it) and some nice shots and I've got good entertainment.
I would have thought that they computed the series of moves but that didn't really become clear to me from previous statements... thnx for the info and yes, I was aware of the fact that I computed rather impossible positions, but I just wanted to prove that my calculation would always be less than their figure... thnx for the info
10^120? How is that? I would think that the absolute maximum (ignoring all chess rules) would be: there's 2*6 different kind of pieces (black&white) that makes 2*6+1(empty) different possible values for one square so that's 13^64~0.2*10^72 probably flawed somewhere, but this figure is much smaller than 10^120???
I'm getting the silly feeling that the average slashdotter seems to be more worried about the fact that oil reserves might not run out than the fact that what the Icelanders intend to do is very applaudable because they are showing some initiative and are willing to develop different energy sources. And so what if there is enough oil for a long time, that doesn't mean that this isn't a good initiative that could be beneficial for others too. Personally I really like "green" electricity, I think it makes my computer run much better (no, just kidding) I think it is a good initiative and could never be less good than the energy we are using nowadays. Maybe the effect of burning fossil fuels is not as bad as some would like us to believe, but it most likely has some negative effects which can be eliminated using green fuels.
So, kudos to Iceland!
(BTW, the Dutch (all, besides me) really like their ancient windmills which make our flat landscapes look oh so nice, but when you want to build a beautiful, modern energy providing windmill they (again all, besides me) say they're polluting the horizon! and that from a country that is as flat as a mirror and that wants to have 15% green fuels in just a few years)
What a wonderful trailer. It gives little away about the movie regarding the story line and the action scenes but it does tell you a lot about the experience and it certainly gets me excited about it.
If you compare this to the Star Wars trailers for example. Of course we all know the story line, but we don't know about all the action scences and the conversations. After seeing the trailers though, several scenes are pretty much given away for free to the public which, in my eyes somewhat takes away from the experience.
I'm not sure if this source is accurate, but if the e-coli bacterium has more than 4 million base pairs... damn, isn't that a lot of combinations? a lot of possibilities for mutatiions? How can you simulate such mutations if each mutation occurs within the next day (maybe even hours) or so??? I don't know where my logic failed, but this seems to me as an awful lot of computation and experimenting if you want to look at the development over a period of 40 years... i reccon that must amount to at least 40*365.25=15 thousand reproductions, multiply this with 4*3 million if you want to change (not cut one out, add one or anything) just 1 base pair per reproduction and it starts to become a mind boggling big project. And sure, there are a lot of paths that won't result in viable bacteria, but still..
can someone tell me how they do this and where my calculations go wrong?
else it is a very interesting idea, researching all possibililities... i wonder when we will be able to do this with human genes... just to find out what kind of creatures may evolve from our genome in due time.
(I'm Dutch) Hmmm, maths? Physics I do mostly in English since my first encounter with physics was in english (and nowadays it is still in english (university)). I don't know actually, next time I'm computing some divisions or differentials I'll pay attention to my thinking. And yeah, it's hard to pronounce 888 in "civilized" Dutch (Dutch spoken in "Holland", the western part of the Netherlands), but I don't really see how you can find spies with that. Not everyone pronounces it the same and in the southern part of NL it's a "soft" g/ch instead of the hard/rough pronounciation in the north.
Slashdot Mirror
The article proves that you could better spend your time going to a cheaper grocery store, rather than hunting for the cheapest gas.
However, it seems to me that complaints about gas prices are not regarding the relative prices between gas stations, but rather the inflation of gas prices as a whole. No matter how much time I spend looking for the cheapest grocery store and the best discounts, if gas prices go up then I spend more on gas than I did before. A rise in gas prices of 10% means I have (0.1 * money spent on gas) less to spend on other things.
So if you devote your time to finding the cheapest gas station and you complain that it takes you too great an effort to find a cheaper one, then yes, please stop doing that and go find a cheaper grocery store instead. But if you like to complain about gas prices being high _in general_, then that doesn't depend on which grocery store you go to.
But it's a nice article anyway.
Back in high school I did precisely such a study on red forest ants. We dubbed it the 'homing pigeon behavior' of ants.
Our results showed that up to a distance of about 7 metres the ants were able to find their way back to home. Please note we took the ants from their nests and placed them at varying distances from the nest in varying directions. We did not make a distinction between ants with different functions in the nest.
It was interesting to see that the ants would sometimes interact with other ants and then might dribble off to other tasks withouth even returning to the nest completely.
To quote (from memory) the online commentator Mig Greengard:
"If X3D Fritz lacks a clear target it plays like a braindamaged lemur"
As Fritz moved its pieces back and forth throughout the game, Kasparov could make several free moves. That isn't brilliant, that's just making use of the other guys mistakes. Kasparov dominated the whole game, while Fritz had no clue at all what to do. According to one of its makers, X3D Fritz reached a new record of reading deeply (19 ply if I'm not mistaken) since the number of possible moves was so small in the cramped space they were building up their positions. This, however, didn't help a bit and I had a few giggles over bishops and knights moving away and then back again to the very same place they were coming from.
Only at the very end did Fritz realize it was losing, throughout the whole game it couldn't see what was glaringly obvious to the audience.
I've been told that this was proper anti-computer chess. The cramped position makes it tremendously difficult for a computer program to play properly while a human can easily see what's to be done.
All in all, it wasn't brilliant, Fritz just didn't have a clue
What am I discussing all this chess for? Let me get back to KGS...
... obviously wins
Mouse: "... So I understand that you've run through the agent training program. You know, I wrote that program."
Apoc: "Here it comes."
Mouse: "So what did you think of her?"
Neo: "Of who?"
Mouse: "The woman in the red dress? I designed her. She, um...well she doesn't talk very much, but...but if you'd like to meet her, I can arrange a much more personalized meeting."
Switch: "Digital pimp, hard at work"
What I have always wondered is this:
What would it take to get close to realtime satellite coverage of high-risk areas? If you can detect new fires within hours/minutes/seconds, you could send a quick response team with their airplane full of water and extinguish the fire before all hell brakes loose.
What kind of technology is being applied nowadays to detect forest fires when they are still small, or do the first reports come in long after it went out of control?
With the kind of media attention forest fires around the world get nowadays, one would think it is a big issue and is worth spending a few bucks on. Surely there is a plan (in the build) for such realtime coverage?
For the sheer beauty of it.
Asking why you should fund mathematics is asking why you should fund art. Who ever got cured by art?
I certainly know that a major motivation for my career in science is the beauty of it.
It's like the sunset outside my window, it's like Dido's new single emerging from my speakers. Today I spent studying for my thermodynamics exam and even the simple mathematics used therein is beautiful. Wednesday is my Quantum Mechanics exam and if it weren't for the beauty of the mathematics of the Schrödinger equation it would be a whole lot less intruiging. I make that exam for the joy and beauty I find in the mathematics and physics, not because it makes your cd player work.
Beauty. That is why you should fund mathematics. The fact that it helps society is a secondary concern. But hey, that's just my opinion. And that of the Pythagoreans, to name a few.
Beauty can be found in more things than a painting or Natalie Portman. It's in logic, in mathematics, hell, it's even in code. It's in patterns, it's in reason, it's in deduction as much as it's in nature, an individual or a thought.
Peter Molyneux's Lionhead has been busy with something similar for some time now:
The Movies
Correct me if I'm wrong but:
they want to put one transmission behind the other. So when the first transmission passes they have to move in the other one. Your method then only works if the transmissions from one source come in regular intervals and I'm not sure if this is the case. If not, then they have to know for every unique transmission when it has passed the point where they want to add the other transmission so they know when to let the other one on the main line.
Right?
Furtermore, Bigelow e.a published their paper in the Physical Review Letters on March the 21st, not on the first of April. They submitted their paper on 31 October 2002.
From what I could make up of it, Ad Lagendijk did this in the early nineties by having the light reflect off of particles and thus slowing it down effectively (it doesn't emerge on the other side of the container at t=x/c where t is the time, x is the width of the container and c is the speed of light).
Bigelow, Lepeshkin and Boyd really just created a ruby crystal with an enormously high refractive index, effectively slowing down the light. Nothing really odd.
Concerning the application of this research in telecommunications the article mentions the following:
This I know nothing about, however, this does seem a bit odd to me as I don't know how they intend to figure out where the light is in order to know how much to slow it down.
So the costume design for Two Towers was really worse than for the Fellowship? Or were the other movies so impressive that LOTR-TTT didn't get nominated in this category? Odd.
WCDMA - Wideband Code Division Multiple Access
UMTS - Universal Mobile Telecommunications System
according to www.acronymfinder.com and others
You can visit the CERN in Geneva. You have to schedule it in advance, but I guess that it will be great (I plan on going there somewhere next year). And Geneva is a beautiful city, so it's great anyway.
You can get a tour of the facility which must prove interesting for every nerd with an interest in elementary particles.
Can anyone please explain how you miss something like that growing?
Do these spiders do this in one night, or did the caretaker (and everyone else using the playing field) suddenly realize that grass really shouldn't be white?
of people hard at work to get my email back online! Thank you very much!
/.-effect-building-on-fire joke here]
Pictures
[Insert own
And I for one think the ENT cliffhanger is pretty decent...
And there's always the temporal police... they must be the coolest guys in the galaxy, right after Q, Q, and all the other Q
...I think it's good entertainment.
My first (and for quite some time, only) Star Trek experience has been the TNG and VOY episodes. And I like them a lot. There's repitition, but I think it's good entertainment; I like watching it. However, I don't like TOS, nor do I like the Kirk-movies. I'm not one for old-day sci-fi (except StarWars, but hey). I did like Insurrection though. Again, good entertainment; some action, pretty special effects, acting wasn't too bad at all, some heroism (but not corny) and a lot of sci-fi. Yeah, that's good entertainment to me. Now if you don't like it, don't go and see Nemesis. I for one will be among the first to get tickets (hoping they won't wait with releasing it here in the Netherlands for a month or 6).
Good entertainment, that's what it is too me. I can go and get some popcorn and a soda and enjoy 90+ minutes of good entertainment. Throw in a little heriosm, some good catchy lines (Data: "Lock and load", it just all depends on _who_ says it) and some nice shots and I've got good entertainment.
I hadn't thought of that, thnx for the info
I would have thought that they computed the series of moves but that didn't really become clear to me from previous statements... thnx for the info and yes, I was aware of the fact that I computed rather impossible positions, but I just wanted to prove that my calculation would always be less than their figure... thnx for the info
10^120?
How is that? I would think that the absolute maximum (ignoring all chess rules) would be:
there's 2*6 different kind of pieces (black&white)
that makes 2*6+1(empty) different possible values for one square
so that's 13^64~0.2*10^72
probably flawed somewhere, but this figure is much smaller than 10^120???
I'm getting the silly feeling that the average slashdotter seems to be more worried about the fact that oil reserves might not run out than the fact that what the Icelanders intend to do is very applaudable because they are showing some initiative and are willing to develop different energy sources. And so what if there is enough oil for a long time, that doesn't mean that this isn't a good initiative that could be beneficial for others too.
Personally I really like "green" electricity, I think it makes my computer run much better (no, just kidding) I think it is a good initiative and could never be less good than the energy we are using nowadays. Maybe the effect of burning fossil fuels is not as bad as some would like us to believe, but it most likely has some negative effects which can be eliminated using green fuels.
So, kudos to Iceland!
(BTW, the Dutch (all, besides me) really like their ancient windmills which make our flat landscapes look oh so nice, but when you want to build a beautiful, modern energy providing windmill they (again all, besides me) say they're polluting the horizon! and that from a country that is as flat as a mirror and that wants to have 15% green fuels in just a few years)
What a wonderful trailer. It gives little away about the movie regarding the story line and the action scenes but it does tell you a lot about the experience and it certainly gets me excited about it.
If you compare this to the Star Wars trailers for example. Of course we all know the story line, but we don't know about all the action scences and the conversations. After seeing the trailers though, several scenes are pretty much given away for free to the public which, in my eyes somewhat takes away from the experience.
Well Captain, it looks like a distortion in subspace!
I'm not sure if this source is accurate, but if the e-coli bacterium has more than 4 million base pairs... damn, isn't that a lot of combinations? a lot of possibilities for mutatiions? How can you simulate such mutations if each mutation occurs within the next day (maybe even hours) or so??? I don't know where my logic failed, but this seems to me as an awful lot of computation and experimenting if you want to look at the development over a period of 40 years...
i reccon that must amount to at least 40*365.25=15 thousand reproductions, multiply this with 4*3 million if you want to change (not cut one out, add one or anything) just 1 base pair per reproduction and it starts to become a mind boggling big project.
And sure, there are a lot of paths that won't result in viable bacteria, but still..
can someone tell me how they do this and where my calculations go wrong?
else it is a very interesting idea, researching all possibililities... i wonder when we will be able to do this with human genes... just to find out what kind of creatures may evolve from our genome in due time.
Well, actually, we talk in cubic metres since "metre" or "meter" is pretty much an SI-unit...
(I'm Dutch) Hmmm, maths? Physics I do mostly in English since my first encounter with physics was in english (and nowadays it is still in english (university)). I don't know actually, next time I'm computing some divisions or differentials I'll pay attention to my thinking.
And yeah, it's hard to pronounce 888 in "civilized" Dutch (Dutch spoken in "Holland", the western part of the Netherlands), but I don't really see how you can find spies with that. Not everyone pronounces it the same and in the southern part of NL it's a "soft" g/ch instead of the hard/rough pronounciation in the north.