Re:Ha! Metric unit of mass is still a chunk of met
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Uncle Sam's Funhouse
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· Score: 2
Could you tell me of any practical mass measurement method (for solids) that does not rely on weight comparison ?
A company named K-Tron once made table scales which measured mass directly by measuring the change in resonant frequency of the entire platform/load cell assembly. This was highly nonlinear and each load sensing element was supplied with an EPROM describing the characteristics of its particular vibrating wire.
These babies were amusing when they broke, because they would display seriously counterintuitive and nonlinear responses as you added test weights to them.
And oh, this was quite an article. Working in the scale industry as I do, I quite appreciated it -- thanks,/. editors!
What would actually happen if we increased tidal drag would be that the moon would spiral out faster. For the last 3.5bY or so the Earth and Moon have been trading Earth's rotational energy for the Moon's revolutional energy; had the Moon been ejected in an orbit in the opposite direction, the reverse would be true and the Moon would have crashed back into the Earth very early in the pair's history.
Eventually the Earth will be tidally locked to the Moon as the Moon already is to Earth. At this point IIRC the Moon will be about 350,000 miles out (rather than the 250,000 it is now). Isaac Asimov ran all this out in an essay in A Choice of Catastrophes.
I have read in several semipublic sources that researchers have traced enough interareal pathways to create a "wiring diagram" of the white matter of the neocortex, but I've been unable to find this -- or any other detailed information about neocortical function -- on the net. OTOH I have found lots of advertisements for drugs and procedures whose usefulness might be better evaluated if the real information were also available.
Post or moderate? Ah, my first experience with the dilemma.
the only animals we have ever empathised with, as a species, are apes and monkeys
Methinks you have forgotten about DOGS which most folks in non war-torn areas of the world resist eating, find valuable as companions, and generally adopt as members of the family. Of course I suspect dog ownership is relatively low in geek circles, as many of us reserve our capacity for close interpersonal relationships for blazingly fast hardware and right hands.
Then there is a minority of humans (unfortunately not enough of a minority) who have a thoroughly masochistic attachment to CATS even though these miserable creatures treat them and everything else with disdain.
Oh, and my own non-right-hand companion has a wicked preference for BIRDS, especially her PARROT which is much more sophisticated about the words it says than non-parrot-owning people might generally suspect. I am quite certain that there are people, possibly including myself, whom DH would kill before allowing so much as a feather to be ruffled on Polly's head.
OTOH many of us regard whole vast segments of our own species whose skin pigmentation, religion, geographic location, language, accent, or choice in pets to be, er, dogmeat.
I think that there will be people who form "fellow-feeling" for aliens or AI with little difficult and rally for their inclusiveness, just as there will be those who think the guy next door is trash because he drives a pickup truck instead of a Mercedes. Our ideas of who "belongs" are very diverse and influenced more by our upbringing and culture than by any uniform idea of who is and isn't "human."
The bottom line with providing cable to anywhere is some guy has to go out there with the end of the cable and drag it to your house. Everyone else wants you to pay them, either coming or going, to do it.
The PUD's are planning to send the guy with the cable to your house anyway, though, because it's to their advantage to install the remote meter-reading network. They're willing to pay for him to drag a cable out there anyway. So it's gravy for them to give him fiber instead of copper. They don't have to charge you for the most expensive part of setting up the infrastructure because it's something they would have done themselves anyway to save money on meter readers.
You're right, though, after the wait for cable and painful measurements of house-to-CO distance for DSL, it is pretty ironic that the most rural folks of all may get even better connections than those of us "lucky" enough to be in broadband now.
Cox Communications hasn't gotten around to installing the equipment for my town, which is a pretty well-to-do suburb of New Orleans (Mandeville). BellSouth did an end-run and put DSL here before starting in on the city. They provide excellent service, nearly everyone who isn't rurual (the fastest growing and wealthiest demographic here) is within range of the CO, and they regularly deliver the promised 1.5MBPs down / 200KBPS up I was promised. I especially see those limits when using Napster:-)
OTOH my friends on the south shore who have Cox @Home have constant service headaches, outages, hacker attacks (you can have your fixed IP address, I *like* PPPoE), have found customer service to be ignorant, unresponsive, and rude, and while they get more bandwidth than I do they don't seem to get what they were promised.
OTOH I've heard of people with similar DSL headaches elsewhere. It all depends on who your provider is and how serious they are.
Oddly, my regular phone service went out last month due to a bad line from house to pole, but the DSL continued to work. I have been using BellSouth FastAccess for about 4 months now and have never had even a 5 minute outage. Go figure.
Louisiana's state Constitution sets the age of majority at 18. It's right there in black and white; at 18, you have all the "rights and privileges" of adulthood. This language was inserted for good reason when the Constitution was revamped in IIRC 1974. Vietnam had a lot to do with it.
So guess what the drinking age is here? Yep. The Feds blackmailed us by threatening to withhold highway funds (YOO-HOO, where do you think those funds COME FROM, eh? Blackmailed with OUR OWN MONEY!!!) At first the Legislature wouldn't pass the law. It was, after all, patently unconstitutional. Then, as the deadline neared, they caved. Went to the state Supreme Court. The Supremes said, guess what d00ds, this is unconstitutional. The deadline got closer, the Lege passed it again, and this time the Supremes did a backflip and coughed and said that our Constitution does not in fact say what it very obviously says.
The period in which we refused to pass on this crap was one of the few times I've been proud of our state's elected officials. I suppose I can't blame them for finally caving in to a superior force but it was a sad day for freedom in a venue which, compared to some other things, isn't even really that important.
The treaty has supporters, of course. The Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry of America Association, and the Business Software Alliance all favor the treaty's requirement that certain copyright infringements be handled under criminal law.
Boy, this has to take some kind of award for existentialist flame-bait. I know Luna is the name of the Earth's only natural satellite the same way I know Mars is the name of the next planet out, Charon is the name of Pluto's only moon, and Sol is the place-name of the particular somewhat dim and average star that happens to be at the center of this particular solar system. That's what it's called.
Have you ever heard anyone look up at the sky and say "Hey, there's Moon?" Of course not, because "moon" isn't a name, even when it's capitalized. It's a description. Yeah, we use it, just like we use the contraction "America" to refer to what is really the United States of America, not the American continent.
True, in normal talk we know which particular moon the Moon is, but this was a customs declaration form. Think like a bureaucrat, man! You're supposed to get details like this right or there isn't any point.
He had published the idea before it occured to anyone it was patentable, thus invalidating any attempt to patent it.
Exactly -- he had the opportunity to publish it as a patent rather than as a science-fiction short story. Despite your other point...
had he patented it when he published the idea (around 1948 I think) the patent would have expired I think 17 years latter (1965) before it was a major business
...I think he would have made rather more money from the patent than from the short story. I'm also not sure your timing is right; I seem to recall the story being from the 50's. In any case while I'm not familiar with the details this is an oft-cited example of the Patent That Might Have Been.
Oh, and for the other poster: The idea most certainly was patentable, even if it was in 1948. There is nothing "abstract" about it at all, it can be perfectly described within the confines of a patent application. Get a copy of Patent It Yourself and learn how these things really work.
...could have patented the geosynchronous satellite, but apparently didn't think it worth bothering. He wasn't exactly impoverished by this oversight, but he would have made Bill Gates look like the poor boy from across the tracks by comparison if he'd done it.
Incidentally, Clarke introduced the modern communication satellite to his readers by postulating a Soviet plan to put one above Middle America and bombard us with an endless and unjammable stream of propaganda and morals-degenerating quasi-porn... kinda like what the American broadcast companies actually did:-)
"Moon" is no more the place name of Earth's Moon than "Continent" is the place name of Australia. The specific Moon which Armstrong et al visited has a specific place name: Luna. That is what should have been written on the form.
In the article "chronology" it is mentioned that lightweight trash and foam are among the items expected to survive. They quickly lose their momentum because they don't have much mass and flutter down like snow.
the common availability of liquid Hydrogen would allow some really cool do-it-yourself experiments and engineering projects
...but only if you overcame some pretty elaborate interlocks, I'd bet. The safety regulations surrounding hydrogen are rather draconian.
Trucks which carry liquid hydrogen are not allowed to have safety valves. I am not kidding. They are not allowed to vent into the atmosphere at all. They carry portable refrigeration equipment to extend their range but each trailer has a finite range in hours, which is stamped on its side, depending on its insulation characteristics and the efficiency of its portable reefer unit.
A plant operator told me that one truck went off a cliff in North Carolina. It was lifted onto a flatbed trailer and carried at high speed to its final destination, where it was offloaded, instead of having its load transferred into an unwrecked trailer.
Another hydrogen truck was involved in a messy accident on I-10 in the town of Slidell, near New Orleans, not long ago. Particularly charming was the fact that a car was crushed beneath the trailer and burned there. This trailer was offloaded in the field, but they evacuated a 1/2 mile perimeter around the site and shut down the Interstate for half a day.
It is worth noting that it takes significant BTU's just to cool the hydrogen down if you intend to store it in cryogenic form. This becomes an important part of its production cost. And while it may be relatively safe, the authorities here certainly don't think so.
Honda's car uses a fuel cell to generate electricity, for what is essentially an electric car. BMW's car uses an internal combustion engine and can also run on gasoline. Similar ultimate goal, different technology.
Commercial hydrogen fuel does NOT come from water
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Hydrogen Powered Cars
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· Score: 5
My company services one of the plants which provide hydrogen fuel for Space Shuttle launches. 100% of the hydrogen used by the STS comes from petroleum. While you could electrolyze water to get hydrogen fuel what is currently practical is to crack petroleum in the same way you crack it to get gasoline. Naturally this does not have a very good yield compared to gasoline production, since it leaves the entire carbon content of the original petroleum as byproduct. (Guess where this carbon generally ends up.)
Hydrogen fuel advocates are assuming, perhaps correctly, that once economies of scale are applied to hydrogen that more long-term and large-scale production methods will become practical and economical. But it hasn't happened yet.
Most of the thoughtful and intelligent posters from/. have moved on to K5
You mean like the intelligent and thoughtful poster who got this blatant piece of corporate propaganda on K5's front page recently? At least Slashdot's occasional failings are usually funny.
Oh well, I did sign up over there, maybe it was just a fluke that it was twice as lame as any/. frontpage I've ever seen. Well, at least they fronted the story about/. and the scientologists. I guess I'll check them again later.
Seems to me (and I Am Not A Browser Design Expert) that since Java code is sent as source and clearly marked (so it can be run) that it should be possible to design some kind of plug-in or filter that would massage it before giving it to the browser.
I write code for an embedded device that requires source in the EPROMs after a download -- you can extract the program. No problemo, I wrote a filter that removes all comments and whitespace, uppercases everything, and while leaving known language keywords intact replaces all the variable, subroutine, and function names with random 4-digit hexadecimal numbers in the range A000-FFFF.
Seems like it would be child's play (for one who knows the right hooks) to insert such a beast into any Java to turn ONCLOSE into ONHELLFREEZESOVER.
I really don't know why. I read the story mutliple times, and it haunted me for days afterward. I'm not sure exactly what it was, though. There, you see, I still get the shivers thinking about it. Amazing.
For this effect approximately squared try The Persistence of Vision, from an anthology of the same name.
Actually the reason chip testers cost millions is that they must be carefully designed to work fast and be very complete. The factory can't afford to leave it running for a week running some program that does nothing but exercise the cache and FPU in every possible way.
It has been axiomatic since the earliest days of computing that the best way to test a configuration is to run it for an extended period of time. The factory doesn't do this because it can't afford to. The overclockers are doing exactly what companies like IBM and Data General used to do to prove their designs. Go back and read Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine and tell me an overclocker can't do a better job than those engineers did of getting reliability out of their systems.
It seems like once they have perfected this tech, a natural extension would be to repeatedly overprint with layers of conductive, nonconductive, and semiconductor ink to create a 3-D circuit. This could go a long way toward offsetting the registration size and natural slowness of the junctions, since you could stack them into a cube. If the layer size is comparable to the junction size, you could end up with breathtaking densities. With good massively parallel architecture such blocks -- they wouldn't be flexible and would probably be more like regular IC's once manufabbed -- might dwarf the performance of single-layer silicon.
...we used CPU's like the 1802 and 8080A with ~2000 transistors, or processors like the HP2100A mini which ran at 150KHz and we were glad to have them. You'd be surprised what you can do with a machine of that scale when you approach it from a sense of the possible rather than a sense of loss. At one time the whole world was run by computers which could probably be implemented right now with this technology, except they cost thousands or millions of dollars instead of pennies.
Don't underestimate the importance of this.
I predict one of the earliest practical application will be a real credit-card calculator -- one the same size and thickness as your credit cards. Feature size will probably go down at about the same rate it has for silicon. Remember, back in the 70's feature size on silicon wasn't much better than what these guys are aiming for. And neither was the speed -- remember 4000 series CMOS? Yet these chips were the backbone of all technology when they were expensive.
This was a good article, well balanced and without a lot of the usual hype about how the tech will result in self-assembling skyscrapers. These people have modest, achievable goals. It will be interesting to see what they do.
Slashdot Mirror
A company named K-Tron once made table scales which measured mass directly by measuring the change in resonant frequency of the entire platform/load cell assembly. This was highly nonlinear and each load sensing element was supplied with an EPROM describing the characteristics of its particular vibrating wire.
These babies were amusing when they broke, because they would display seriously counterintuitive and nonlinear responses as you added test weights to them.
And oh, this was quite an article. Working in the scale industry as I do, I quite appreciated it -- thanks, /. editors!
Eventually the Earth will be tidally locked to the Moon as the Moon already is to Earth. At this point IIRC the Moon will be about 350,000 miles out (rather than the 250,000 it is now). Isaac Asimov ran all this out in an essay in A Choice of Catastrophes.
My favorite TR quote -- "More people died in Total Recall than in all of Philip K. Dick's books and stories put together."
The post I was considering moderating was not the one to which I replied. But once you moderate in a thread you can't post, and vice-versa.
I have read in several semipublic sources that researchers have traced enough interareal pathways to create a "wiring diagram" of the white matter of the neocortex, but I've been unable to find this -- or any other detailed information about neocortical function -- on the net. OTOH I have found lots of advertisements for drugs and procedures whose usefulness might be better evaluated if the real information were also available.
the only animals we have ever empathised with, as a species, are apes and monkeys
Methinks you have forgotten about DOGS which most folks in non war-torn areas of the world resist eating, find valuable as companions, and generally adopt as members of the family. Of course I suspect dog ownership is relatively low in geek circles, as many of us reserve our capacity for close interpersonal relationships for blazingly fast hardware and right hands.
Then there is a minority of humans (unfortunately not enough of a minority) who have a thoroughly masochistic attachment to CATS even though these miserable creatures treat them and everything else with disdain.
Oh, and my own non-right-hand companion has a wicked preference for BIRDS, especially her PARROT which is much more sophisticated about the words it says than non-parrot-owning people might generally suspect. I am quite certain that there are people, possibly including myself, whom DH would kill before allowing so much as a feather to be ruffled on Polly's head.
OTOH many of us regard whole vast segments of our own species whose skin pigmentation, religion, geographic location, language, accent, or choice in pets to be, er, dogmeat.
I think that there will be people who form "fellow-feeling" for aliens or AI with little difficult and rally for their inclusiveness, just as there will be those who think the guy next door is trash because he drives a pickup truck instead of a Mercedes. Our ideas of who "belongs" are very diverse and influenced more by our upbringing and culture than by any uniform idea of who is and isn't "human."
The PUD's are planning to send the guy with the cable to your house anyway, though, because it's to their advantage to install the remote meter-reading network. They're willing to pay for him to drag a cable out there anyway. So it's gravy for them to give him fiber instead of copper. They don't have to charge you for the most expensive part of setting up the infrastructure because it's something they would have done themselves anyway to save money on meter readers.
You're right, though, after the wait for cable and painful measurements of house-to-CO distance for DSL, it is pretty ironic that the most rural folks of all may get even better connections than those of us "lucky" enough to be in broadband now.
OTOH my friends on the south shore who have Cox @Home have constant service headaches, outages, hacker attacks (you can have your fixed IP address, I *like* PPPoE), have found customer service to be ignorant, unresponsive, and rude, and while they get more bandwidth than I do they don't seem to get what they were promised.
OTOH I've heard of people with similar DSL headaches elsewhere. It all depends on who your provider is and how serious they are.
Oddly, my regular phone service went out last month due to a bad line from house to pole, but the DSL continued to work. I have been using BellSouth FastAccess for about 4 months now and have never had even a 5 minute outage. Go figure.
So guess what the drinking age is here? Yep. The Feds blackmailed us by threatening to withhold highway funds (YOO-HOO, where do you think those funds COME FROM, eh? Blackmailed with OUR OWN MONEY!!!) At first the Legislature wouldn't pass the law. It was, after all, patently unconstitutional. Then, as the deadline neared, they caved. Went to the state Supreme Court. The Supremes said, guess what d00ds, this is unconstitutional. The deadline got closer, the Lege passed it again, and this time the Supremes did a backflip and coughed and said that our Constitution does not in fact say what it very obviously says.
The period in which we refused to pass on this crap was one of the few times I've been proud of our state's elected officials. I suppose I can't blame them for finally caving in to a superior force but it was a sad day for freedom in a venue which, compared to some other things, isn't even really that important.
????
You've gotta stop doing those 'ludes and drinking at the same time, man. One day those bugs crawling on the walls will get you.
The treaty has supporters, of course. The Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry of America Association, and the Business Software Alliance all favor the treaty's requirement that certain copyright infringements be handled under criminal law.
What a surprise.
Boy, this has to take some kind of award for existentialist flame-bait. I know Luna is the name of the Earth's only natural satellite the same way I know Mars is the name of the next planet out, Charon is the name of Pluto's only moon, and Sol is the place-name of the particular somewhat dim and average star that happens to be at the center of this particular solar system. That's what it's called.
Have you ever heard anyone look up at the sky and say "Hey, there's Moon?" Of course not, because "moon" isn't a name, even when it's capitalized. It's a description. Yeah, we use it, just like we use the contraction "America" to refer to what is really the United States of America, not the American continent.
True, in normal talk we know which particular moon the Moon is, but this was a customs declaration form. Think like a bureaucrat, man! You're supposed to get details like this right or there isn't any point.
Exactly -- he had the opportunity to publish it as a patent rather than as a science-fiction short story. Despite your other point...
had he patented it when he published the idea (around 1948 I think) the patent would have expired I think 17 years latter (1965) before it was a major business
Oh, and for the other poster: The idea most certainly was patentable, even if it was in 1948. There is nothing "abstract" about it at all, it can be perfectly described within the confines of a patent application. Get a copy of Patent It Yourself and learn how these things really work.
Incidentally, Clarke introduced the modern communication satellite to his readers by postulating a Soviet plan to put one above Middle America and bombard us with an endless and unjammable stream of propaganda and morals-degenerating quasi-porn ... kinda like what the American broadcast companies actually did :-)
"Moon" is no more the place name of Earth's Moon than "Continent" is the place name of Australia. The specific Moon which Armstrong et al visited has a specific place name: Luna. That is what should have been written on the form.
In the article "chronology" it is mentioned that lightweight trash and foam are among the items expected to survive. They quickly lose their momentum because they don't have much mass and flutter down like snow.
Trucks which carry liquid hydrogen are not allowed to have safety valves. I am not kidding. They are not allowed to vent into the atmosphere at all. They carry portable refrigeration equipment to extend their range but each trailer has a finite range in hours, which is stamped on its side, depending on its insulation characteristics and the efficiency of its portable reefer unit.
A plant operator told me that one truck went off a cliff in North Carolina. It was lifted onto a flatbed trailer and carried at high speed to its final destination, where it was offloaded, instead of having its load transferred into an unwrecked trailer.
Another hydrogen truck was involved in a messy accident on I-10 in the town of Slidell, near New Orleans, not long ago. Particularly charming was the fact that a car was crushed beneath the trailer and burned there. This trailer was offloaded in the field, but they evacuated a 1/2 mile perimeter around the site and shut down the Interstate for half a day.
It is worth noting that it takes significant BTU's just to cool the hydrogen down if you intend to store it in cryogenic form. This becomes an important part of its production cost. And while it may be relatively safe, the authorities here certainly don't think so.
Honda's car uses a fuel cell to generate electricity, for what is essentially an electric car. BMW's car uses an internal combustion engine and can also run on gasoline. Similar ultimate goal, different technology.
Hydrogen fuel advocates are assuming, perhaps correctly, that once economies of scale are applied to hydrogen that more long-term and large-scale production methods will become practical and economical. But it hasn't happened yet.
You mean like the intelligent and thoughtful poster who got this blatant piece of corporate propaganda on K5's front page recently? At least Slashdot's occasional failings are usually funny.
Oh well, I did sign up over there, maybe it was just a fluke that it was twice as lame as any /. frontpage I've ever seen. Well, at least they fronted the story about /. and the scientologists. I guess I'll check them again later.
I write code for an embedded device that requires source in the EPROMs after a download -- you can extract the program. No problemo, I wrote a filter that removes all comments and whitespace, uppercases everything, and while leaving known language keywords intact replaces all the variable, subroutine, and function names with random 4-digit hexadecimal numbers in the range A000-FFFF.
Seems like it would be child's play (for one who knows the right hooks) to insert such a beast into any Java to turn ONCLOSE into ONHELLFREEZESOVER.
For this effect approximately squared try The Persistence of Vision, from an anthology of the same name.
It has been axiomatic since the earliest days of computing that the best way to test a configuration is to run it for an extended period of time. The factory doesn't do this because it can't afford to. The overclockers are doing exactly what companies like IBM and Data General used to do to prove their designs. Go back and read Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine and tell me an overclocker can't do a better job than those engineers did of getting reliability out of their systems.
It seems like once they have perfected this tech, a natural extension would be to repeatedly overprint with layers of conductive, nonconductive, and semiconductor ink to create a 3-D circuit. This could go a long way toward offsetting the registration size and natural slowness of the junctions, since you could stack them into a cube. If the layer size is comparable to the junction size, you could end up with breathtaking densities. With good massively parallel architecture such blocks -- they wouldn't be flexible and would probably be more like regular IC's once manufabbed -- might dwarf the performance of single-layer silicon.
Don't underestimate the importance of this.
I predict one of the earliest practical application will be a real credit-card calculator -- one the same size and thickness as your credit cards. Feature size will probably go down at about the same rate it has for silicon. Remember, back in the 70's feature size on silicon wasn't much better than what these guys are aiming for. And neither was the speed -- remember 4000 series CMOS? Yet these chips were the backbone of all technology when they were expensive.
This was a good article, well balanced and without a lot of the usual hype about how the tech will result in self-assembling skyscrapers. These people have modest, achievable goals. It will be interesting to see what they do.