Autodesk does sell a 3D parametric solid model design package: Inventor. It's a low-mid level solution with a steadily growing range of functions and user base. Similar to Solidworks, though generally less well regarded, Inventor is extremely easy to learn, with a pretty intuitive interface and feature set.
All it Takes is a Little Inspiration
on
Saving U.S. Science
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Sure, our society de-values intellectual achievement vis-a-vis instant gratification and entertainment. However, as one who mentors secondary school students in engineering, I have seen first hand that those students who have even a slight inclination towards technology or science only take a little push to get them to pursue those interests.
My own daughter is a case in point. She has always been an artist and excelled in all her subjects, but until 8th grade had little interest in the physical world. That changed when she took a technology course with a very good instructor. He gives his classes challenges - mousetrap powered cars, egg drops, etc. and they go through what amounts to a full design cycle of problem definition, concept development, design, test and repeat, culmonating in a intra-class competition. He's pretty good at promoting these competitions and making it interesting for most students. Long story short, my daughter really got into her challenge: a CO2 powered crash sled with an egg cargo, and did pretty well in the competition. That, I think, was all it took to get her hooked.
When she got to high school, my daughter signed up for a robotics "club", kind of on a whim (but I'd bet her technology class experience helped her make the choice). Coincidentally (or maybe not), the club was led by the brother of the middle school teacher. The robotics club turned out to be a FIRST high school robotics team (Cybersonics, team 103, for those in the know), and consummed her life throughout her four years of high school.
She's now a sophomore in college, studying electrical and biomedical engineering. The biomedical part was another case of earlier inspiration - she took anatomy in high school and really liked it, too. She still paints for pleasure and gets A's in English, but knows her future is in biosensors, etc.
As I said, I mentor kids in engineering (through FIRST and team 103), and know that kids are not dumber now than when I was a kid - they just don't have things like the space race, displayed constantly and large in the media, to inspire them.
All it takes is a little push, and some of us are pushing instead of blaming foreigners and politicians.
2001: A commission led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the newly nominated defense secretary, recommended that the military should "ensure that the president will have the option to deploy weapons in space." [http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0518-02.h tm]
2002: Talking about planned militarization of space, Rumsfeld said "defending the U.S. requires prevention, self-defense and sometimes preemption." [http://www.space.com/news/rumsfeld_space_020204.h tml]
2003: Speaking about the status of the Space Commission recommendations at a Pentagon "town hall" meeting Rumsfeld suggested "...maybe we ought to think about taking a look at where we are -- and it's been a couple of years -- and give some thought to whether or not we've learned enough that we can make some more progress and finish the 20 percent, although it is a moving target." [http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/2 0030306-9.html]
2004: General Lance Lord, commander of U.S. Air Force Space Command, explained, "We must establish and maintain space superiority. Modern warfare demands it. Our nation expects it. Simply put, it's the American way of fighting." [http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_11/Krepon.asp #notes2]
2005: "We haven't reached the point of strafing and bombing from space," Pete Teets, who stepped down last month as the acting secretary of the Air Force, told a space warfare symposium last year. "Nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities." [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/business/18spac e.html?ex=1274068800&en=e2a17a59b511f204&ei=5088]
Proving once again that the Bush administration does stick to its convictions, even in the face of logic, reality or world opinion.
"The New Scientist says that software capable of recognising emotions just by looking at photographs could lead to PCs that adjust their response depending on the user's mood. "
Now why does Grovel, the obsequious robot of Danger Mouse fame come to mind?
I just can't wait for the day when my computer starts reading things into my appearance! This could be a real labor saver - taking the drudge work of misinterpreting my moods off my wife's shoulders.
I've bought four cameras from Beach Camera - one from their Green Brook store and the rest online. Their site is a good place to shop, but if you're a connoisseur of high-pressure sales technique, go to the brick & mortar store on Rt 22. It's the next best thing to NYC.
The "electrical equivalent for a gallon of gasoline" is actually closer to $1.50, using your figures.
Here in the Mid-Atlantic states gas is about twice that (USD 2.35 is the cheapest, but usually over 2.50) and this morning CNN was reporting that in Great Britain a liter of gas was going for GBP.90 which works out to over USD 6.00 per gallon.
For arguments sake, say you average 25 MPG in your non-SUV and travel 12,000 miles per year, spending USD 1,200 here and USD 2,880 in the GB. If electric costs USD 1.50/Gal (USD 720/yr), and you kept the car for four years, you'd only save USD 480 here and USD 2,160 in the GB.
Clearly, the savings of going electric here in the US aren't great enough for most people to sacrifice driving range, performance and convenience yet. So, while I would like to feel good about doing my part to reduce energy consumption, I don't see that out-weighing the pleasure of driving an S4.
The only venue for a broad spectrum of music these days is non-corporate radio, otherwise usually known as "college radio". At least their revenue mostly comes from outside the RIAA business community.
I listen to WPRB (103.3, http://wprb.com/) from Princeton. Period.
[truth in posting disclaimer: WPRB "pays" me every day by playing a wide variety of music most people consider wierd, at best]
I'd say a curb weight of 2,400 kg is a pretty big "systemic problem"! Just trying to find VR-rated tires with that kind of load rating drove him to the 8-wheel design. That, and putting enough brakes on the car to stop it from high speed.
Though the reviewers noted its low center of gravity, there is another big problem in where some of the weight is located. One lovely feature of "in-wheel" motors is astronomical unsprung weight. All that inertia keeps a wheel from responding rapidly to change of direction (like going over a bump) which turns the tire sidewall into the main "suspension" element.
Just the same, maybe it will help generate interest (pun intended) in developing realistic electric performance vehicles. Oh, and maybe someone can look into how to efficiently recycle all those batteries so we aren't just moving our pollution from the air to the landfill.
"...and the people (in the US) can move on to higher paying, more creative, more value generating jobs"
Would that be value-generating jobs like these? (http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos249.htm) Instead of manufacturing old-fashioned material goods, we can manufacture a world safe for "democracy"!
Try High School Robotics
on
RoboCup 2003
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Okay, it can't compete with Aibos for cute (or irony), but there is a much more exciting way to go: FIRST high school robotics (http://www.usfirst.org/), an international competition for high school robotics teams.
These are 130 lb robots with between one and two horsepower, running both autonomously and with radio control, and playing a two against two timed game. The teams have six weeks in Jan. & Feb. to design, build, program, test and ship their robots. They start with a kit of parts (motors, robot controller, misc. hardware) and build their robots for a game which changes every year.
There are 800 teams in the US, Canada, the UK and Brazil and 23 regional competitions, plus the championship event which was held in the Reliant Stadium in Houston last month. We used the Astrodome for our pits!
As a mentor and parent of two team members (http://www.cybersonics.org/), I can tell you this is a blast! I encourage everyone to take a look at it and think about getting involved. Most teams are always looking for mentors and new teams are starting every year.
Yeah, my son had one about the same time (he graduated in 1997). But the time at Boy Scout camp when he launched a chicken carcass with his water balloon slingshot was much more amusing. Don't recall if he served potatos with it.
Unfortunately, about half of the story (see "long answer" above) is on the cutting room floor, if it was shot at all. I tried to see past the innumerable portrait interludes (Kelvin sleeping or his dead wife posing for endless minutes) to imagine what this film could have been. That exercise allowed me to stay interested enough that I didn't leave early from boredom (like the people in the seats behind us).
All of the things any real person would be doing in Kelvin's place were not presented. Like trying to figure out what was going on or what Solaris was made of. And what did happen to the rescue party which had been sent before Kelvin was called upon, but not heard from again?
My wife managed to stay awake - probably didn't want to miss one of Clooney's butt shots - but the consensus of the women I heard talking about it was that if this was supposed to be a chick flick, it missed that target by a wide margin, too.
My advice: wait for the video, and don't rent it.
Depends on memory and graphics hardware, right?
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 1
On my beige G3/466 with 640 MB, but just 6 MB video RAM, OS X.2 "feels" about the same as 9.1 at the Finder level, but iMovie playback is noticeably choppier. I'd blame that on the slow graphics on this machine. However, it runs alot better on this machine than I'd expect XP to run on a four year old PC!
Anyway, speed isn't everything - I still prefer to use my old Mac for most things than my 1.7 GHz Xeon with 1 GB and Win2000 (shame it won't run OS X). Maybe the Windows machine is 10 times faster, but I'm faster using MacOS than Windows. Then again, Autodesk Inventor is a blast on the Xeon!
So if it is evolving, this would be the discovery of a new species. If current environmental regulations are (supposedly) aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, then can we infer that this species is not only newly discovered, but endangered as well?
I can see the newspaper headline now: "Environmental groups demand resumption of CFC production".
Whether this is a novel technique or not, Hotlinks doesn't work very well!
I submitted an admittedly narrow query ("beige g3 rom") to it and to Google. I got 7,000+ hits from Google but no hits from Hotlinks' search engine.
I guess they haven't loaded many Mac user's bookmarks...
In WWII they called these things "barrage balloons" and used them to confound the other guys aircraft. I bet the various pilots assoc. would be real happy to see this technique adopted!
I especially like the part where they include two fixed wing aircraft to deploy when the weather is too rough for the balloon. How thoughful.
Slashdot Mirror
Autodesk does sell a 3D parametric solid model design package: Inventor. It's a low-mid level solution with a steadily growing range of functions and user base. Similar to Solidworks, though generally less well regarded, Inventor is extremely easy to learn, with a pretty intuitive interface and feature set.
e s/2006/inventor2006.asp/here.
I've been using Inventor professionally for about four years and have taught it to high school students whom I mentor in the FIRST Robotics Competition. You can see some of their award-winning work http://www.cybersonics.org/cybersonics/awardentri
Sure, our society de-values intellectual achievement vis-a-vis instant gratification and entertainment. However, as one who mentors secondary school students in engineering, I have seen first hand that those students who have even a slight inclination towards technology or science only take a little push to get them to pursue those interests.
My own daughter is a case in point. She has always been an artist and excelled in all her subjects, but until 8th grade had little interest in the physical world. That changed when she took a technology course with a very good instructor. He gives his classes challenges - mousetrap powered cars, egg drops, etc. and they go through what amounts to a full design cycle of problem definition, concept development, design, test and repeat, culmonating in a intra-class competition. He's pretty good at promoting these competitions and making it interesting for most students. Long story short, my daughter really got into her challenge: a CO2 powered crash sled with an egg cargo, and did pretty well in the competition. That, I think, was all it took to get her hooked.
When she got to high school, my daughter signed up for a robotics "club", kind of on a whim (but I'd bet her technology class experience helped her make the choice). Coincidentally (or maybe not), the club was led by the brother of the middle school teacher. The robotics club turned out to be a FIRST high school robotics team (Cybersonics, team 103, for those in the know), and consummed her life throughout her four years of high school.
She's now a sophomore in college, studying electrical and biomedical engineering. The biomedical part was another case of earlier inspiration - she took anatomy in high school and really liked it, too. She still paints for pleasure and gets A's in English, but knows her future is in biosensors, etc.
As I said, I mentor kids in engineering (through FIRST and team 103), and know that kids are not dumber now than when I was a kid - they just don't have things like the space race, displayed constantly and large in the media, to inspire them.
All it takes is a little push, and some of us are pushing instead of blaming foreigners and politicians.
2001: A commission led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the newly nominated defense secretary, recommended that the military should "ensure that the president will have the option to deploy weapons in space." [http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0518-02.h tm]
h tml]
2 0030306-9.html]
p #notes2]
c e.html?ex=1274068800&en=e2a17a59b511f204&ei=5088]
2002: Talking about planned militarization of space, Rumsfeld said "defending the U.S. requires prevention, self-defense and sometimes preemption." [http://www.space.com/news/rumsfeld_space_020204.
2003: Speaking about the status of the Space Commission recommendations at a Pentagon "town hall" meeting Rumsfeld suggested "...maybe we ought to think about taking a look at where we are -- and it's been a couple of years -- and give some thought to whether or not we've learned enough that we can make some more progress and finish the 20 percent, although it is a moving target." [http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/
2004: General Lance Lord, commander of U.S. Air Force Space Command, explained, "We must establish and maintain space superiority. Modern warfare demands it. Our nation expects it. Simply put, it's the American way of fighting." [http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_11/Krepon.as
2005: "We haven't reached the point of strafing and bombing from space," Pete Teets, who stepped down last month as the acting secretary of the Air Force, told a space warfare symposium last year. "Nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities." [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/business/18spa
Proving once again that the Bush administration does stick to its convictions, even in the face of logic, reality or world opinion.
No word on how much compression was achieved by driving the Beetle over it? A rather inefficient method in any case.
"The New Scientist says that software capable of recognising emotions just by looking at photographs could lead to PCs that adjust their response depending on the user's mood. "
Now why does Grovel, the obsequious robot of Danger Mouse fame come to mind?
I just can't wait for the day when my computer starts reading things into my appearance! This could be a real labor saver - taking the drudge work of misinterpreting my moods off my wife's shoulders.
I've bought four cameras from Beach Camera - one from their Green Brook store and the rest online. Their site is a good place to shop, but if you're a connoisseur of high-pressure sales technique, go to the brick & mortar store on Rt 22. It's the next best thing to NYC.
For arguments sake, say you average 25 MPG in your non-SUV and travel 12,000 miles per year, spending USD 1,200 here and USD 2,880 in the GB. If electric costs USD 1.50/Gal (USD 720/yr), and you kept the car for four years, you'd only save USD 480 here and USD 2,160 in the GB.
Clearly, the savings of going electric here in the US aren't great enough for most people to sacrifice driving range, performance and convenience yet. So, while I would like to feel good about doing my part to reduce energy consumption, I don't see that out-weighing the pleasure of driving an S4.
The only venue for a broad spectrum of music these days is non-corporate radio, otherwise usually known as "college radio". At least their revenue mostly comes from outside the RIAA business community.
I listen to WPRB (103.3, http://wprb.com/) from Princeton. Period.
[truth in posting disclaimer: WPRB "pays" me every day by playing a wide variety of music most people consider wierd, at best]
I'd say a curb weight of 2,400 kg is a pretty big "systemic problem"! Just trying to find VR-rated tires with that kind of load rating drove him to the 8-wheel design. That, and putting enough brakes on the car to stop it from high speed.
Though the reviewers noted its low center of gravity, there is another big problem in where some of the weight is located. One lovely feature of "in-wheel" motors is astronomical unsprung weight. All that inertia keeps a wheel from responding rapidly to change of direction (like going over a bump) which turns the tire sidewall into the main "suspension" element.
Just the same, maybe it will help generate interest (pun intended) in developing realistic electric performance vehicles. Oh, and maybe someone can look into how to efficiently recycle all those batteries so we aren't just moving our pollution from the air to the landfill.
"...and the people (in the US) can move on to higher paying, more creative, more value generating jobs"
Would that be value-generating jobs like these? (http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos249.htm) Instead of manufacturing old-fashioned material goods, we can manufacture a world safe for "democracy"!
Okay, it can't compete with Aibos for cute (or irony), but there is a much more exciting way to go: FIRST high school robotics (http://www.usfirst.org/), an international competition for high school robotics teams.
These are 130 lb robots with between one and two horsepower, running both autonomously and with radio control, and playing a two against two timed game. The teams have six weeks in Jan. & Feb. to design, build, program, test and ship their robots. They start with a kit of parts (motors, robot controller, misc. hardware) and build their robots for a game which changes every year.
There are 800 teams in the US, Canada, the UK and Brazil and 23 regional competitions, plus the championship event which was held in the Reliant Stadium in Houston last month. We used the Astrodome for our pits!
As a mentor and parent of two team members (http://www.cybersonics.org/), I can tell you this is a blast! I encourage everyone to take a look at it and think about getting involved. Most teams are always looking for mentors and new teams are starting every year.
Yeah, my son had one about the same time (he graduated in 1997). But the time at Boy Scout camp when he launched a chicken carcass with his water balloon slingshot was much more amusing. Don't recall if he served potatos with it.
Unfortunately, about half of the story (see "long answer" above) is on the cutting room floor, if it was shot at all. I tried to see past the innumerable portrait interludes (Kelvin sleeping or his dead wife posing for endless minutes) to imagine what this film could have been. That exercise allowed me to stay interested enough that I didn't leave early from boredom (like the people in the seats behind us).
All of the things any real person would be doing in Kelvin's place were not presented. Like trying to figure out what was going on or what Solaris was made of. And what did happen to the rescue party which had been sent before Kelvin was called upon, but not heard from again?
My wife managed to stay awake - probably didn't want to miss one of Clooney's butt shots - but the consensus of the women I heard talking about it was that if this was supposed to be a chick flick, it missed that target by a wide margin, too.
My advice: wait for the video, and don't rent it.
On my beige G3/466 with 640 MB, but just 6 MB video RAM, OS X.2 "feels" about the same as 9.1 at the Finder level, but iMovie playback is noticeably choppier. I'd blame that on the slow graphics on this machine. However, it runs alot better on this machine than I'd expect XP to run on a four year old PC!
Anyway, speed isn't everything - I still prefer to use my old Mac for most things than my 1.7 GHz Xeon with 1 GB and Win2000 (shame it won't run OS X). Maybe the Windows machine is 10 times faster, but I'm faster using MacOS than Windows. Then again, Autodesk Inventor is a blast on the Xeon!
So if it is evolving, this would be the discovery of a new species. If current environmental regulations are (supposedly) aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, then can we infer that this species is not only newly discovered, but endangered as well?
I can see the newspaper headline now: "Environmental groups demand resumption of CFC production".
Boot the RIP server, of course!
Whether this is a novel technique or not, Hotlinks doesn't work very well! I submitted an admittedly narrow query ("beige g3 rom") to it and to Google. I got 7,000+ hits from Google but no hits from Hotlinks' search engine. I guess they haven't loaded many Mac user's bookmarks...
In WWII they called these things "barrage balloons" and used them to confound the other guys aircraft. I bet the various pilots assoc. would be real happy to see this technique adopted! I especially like the part where they include two fixed wing aircraft to deploy when the weather is too rough for the balloon. How thoughful.