The inventor David E. H. Jones, better known as Daedalus, described a very similar underwater glider in one of his columns. From memory, his version exploited a liquid that changed volume with temperature, rather than a wax (and the temperature-volume relationship was in the opposite direction).
The column is included in the compilation "The Further Inventions of Daedalus" published in 1999. I think an early prototype of the wax-based mechanism (apparently an independent, though later, invention) had already appeared at the time of publication.
It's astounding how many of Daedalus' crackpot schemes later emerged as real inventions -- occurrences Jones documents with enthusiasm in the two compilations. One great example is the similarity between Daedalus' "Unisphere" and the much later Segway.
I'm sorely disappointed that my friendly local BT tracker isn't awash with ripped and remixed movies.
We have the means! I want this to happen
Hell, the distribution doesn't even need to involve copyright violation -- remixers could share their edit lists (FCP, whatever) and the recipients could apply them to their *ahem* personal DVD copies of the source material... (moral rights of the copyright holder put aside for the moment).
Is there a movie remix underground I've simply failed to break in on?
The first two years after I graduated from
University, I worked between twenty and thirty
hours a week as a programmer and sysadmin for
an ISP. The main thing to watch out for is that you don't
yield to the temptation to work late, otherwise
you find yourself in the office forty hours a week
after all. At the time I had grand plans of
reading a lot of books, looking into places to
go to grad school, get involved in politics, etc. but as it was I just slacked off.
However, I had a great time, and don't regret it
one bit.
The key to all this is of course having a sane boss. I was working for a friend, and someone who
I deeply respect, so it was never a problem (and he never doubted my commitment to turning in a professional showing). This was in Australia, BTW,
so it may be harder in countries more deeply effected by work-ethic, career and income neuroses.
I think there are good reasons to believe that a reasonable description of protein dynamics is possible without quantum calculations.
Proteins are built up out of twenty standard amino acids, and it turns out that if you can make a model which describes the behaviour of individual amino acids well (with reference to quantum calculations, or experimental data), then you can describe their collective behaviour in proteins quite well too.
The Amber, CHARMM, and GROMOS parameter sets for doing this are quite refined, and simulations using these parameters appear to agree pretty well with reality.
The big problem is that, as the project pages mention, computer simulations of proteins have only recently hit the 1 microsecond range. What they don't tell you is that many common-or-garden proteins fold on a millisecond, second, or longer timescale. That's a factor of a million you have to brute-force your way through. A simulation also deals with one protein molecule at a time, while nature tends to fold a couple of billion of them at once, so it doesn't matter if a few don't quite make it to the correct fold in a reasonable time.
I've been using GNU R for all my scientific plotting and data analysis work the last year or two. While there is supposedly some kind of GUI interface in the works, I do it all from the command line. That way you can automate, script, make things consistent, etc. New, fancy plots are a Simple Matter of Programming.
R is a clone of the statistics programming language/environment S-plus, which was invented at Bell Labs a number of years ago. It's a very nice, interpreted language with elegant support for vectors, functional programming, and even some basic object-orientation.
Back in the mid-80s, Apple made a big deal about spending a bundle having Frog Design (responsible for the Sony Walkman) do the case for the Apple//c. The expense of the mouldings for the original Macintosh was bandied about as well.
Apple started off as a "home" computer company, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Entrepeneurial law firms in Germany seem to have perfected this business model over several years. More background here from the good people at Heise: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fct-tv%2Fartikel%2FHintergrund-Abmahnen-statt-verkaufen-901244.html&sl=de&tl=en
The inventor David E. H. Jones, better known as Daedalus, described a very similar underwater glider in one of his columns. From memory, his version exploited a liquid that changed volume with temperature, rather than a wax (and the temperature-volume relationship was in the opposite direction).
The column is included in the compilation "The Further Inventions of Daedalus" published in 1999. I think an early prototype of the wax-based mechanism (apparently an independent, though later, invention) had already appeared at the time of publication.
It's astounding how many of Daedalus' crackpot schemes later emerged as real inventions -- occurrences Jones documents with enthusiasm in the two compilations. One great example is the similarity between Daedalus' "Unisphere" and the much later Segway.
We have the means! I want this to happen
Hell, the distribution doesn't even need to involve copyright violation -- remixers could share their edit lists (FCP, whatever) and the recipients could apply them to their *ahem* personal DVD copies of the source material... (moral rights of the copyright holder put aside for the moment).
Is there a movie remix underground I've simply failed to break in on?
The key to all this is of course having a sane boss. I was working for a friend, and someone who I deeply respect, so it was never a problem (and he never doubted my commitment to turning in a professional showing). This was in Australia, BTW, so it may be harder in countries more deeply effected by work-ethic, career and income neuroses.
Proteins are built up out of twenty standard amino acids, and it turns out that if you can make a model which describes the behaviour of individual amino acids well (with reference to quantum calculations, or experimental data), then you can describe their collective behaviour in proteins quite well too.
The Amber, CHARMM, and GROMOS parameter sets for doing this are quite refined, and simulations using these parameters appear to agree pretty well with reality.
The big problem is that, as the project pages mention, computer simulations of proteins have only recently hit the 1 microsecond range. What they don't tell you is that many common-or-garden proteins fold on a millisecond, second, or longer timescale. That's a factor of a million you have to brute-force your way through. A simulation also deals with one protein molecule at a time, while nature tends to fold a couple of billion of them at once, so it doesn't matter if a few don't quite make it to the correct fold in a reasonable time.
R is a clone of the statistics programming language/environment S-plus, which was invented at Bell Labs a number of years ago. It's a very nice, interpreted language with elegant support for vectors, functional programming, and even some basic object-orientation.
Grab the source from your nearest CRAN mirror or the Debian package.
I read it more than ten years ago, so I can't remember much about it, but I definitely enjoyed it.
Apple started off as a "home" computer company, right?