If you let who people are decide whether you treat them with respect, you will quickly polarize the society into "those like us" and "those unlike us", and you'll be back to a tribal society, not a civilization. We're on the path there, I'm afraid.
Sadly, I doubt there is a society or a subset of society that ever existed which is civilized under your definition. Starting in kindergarden/gradeschool society, we are essentially taught that some people are worth treating with respect, and some are not (e.g., ones who follow rules are to be respected, ones that don't are shamed). Later on people who follow the rules are not respected, and the rule-breakers are admired. Then it's people who are good at sports, or math, or skateboard or use computers or have girlfriends or boyfriends or have a job, or have been on a cruise, or been to europe, or been to vietnam, or are married, or have kids or have grandkids or coloring your hair or just happen to be in the opposite set which are the complement of these things.
Societies are generally always structured into the conforming and the non-conforming outsiders. Generally the non-conforming outsiders usually get no respect or in many cases no rights at all (for example that will most certainly date me, on early usenet, some sites didn't allow newbies to post at all). The "in" crowd makes the rules, generally to differentiate them from the "outsiders" and create the exclusion set. More often than not, the rules also make provisions for transitioning members from the inclusion set to the exclusion set (e.g., excommunication, shunning, banning, blocking, voting-out, etc).
Although it's just a matter of degree, I doubt being 100% "civilized" by your definition would ever the goal of any actual society, lest they let the outsiders in and ruin it;^)
Entertainment Software Association (www.theesa.com) the ones to bring you the E3 conference, not European Space Agency (www.esa.int)
The ESA (the space agency one), of course also spends massive amounts of money too, but in their reports, they talk alot about new countries that want to join. Unfortunatly, in their reports, the ESA doesn't give a comprehensive understanding on what their lobbing groups do for their projects (other than convince european countries pay for the galileo navigation system)...
All the articles mention ethane being the product of methane "broken" by sunlight, it is actually methane CH4 having it's H knocked away by a sunlight reaction to make a methyl CH3 radical and joining with another CH3 to make ethane C2H6. I guess you can call that "broken" into ethane.
Given that the above reaction has a byproduct of H*, I guess there is an open question if it can somehow combine with the Nitrogen. For example, if you have some natural process of natural Nitrogen fixation (breaking the triple bond of N2 so it could be combined with H), it seems to me that there is at least some chance of life. Unfortunatly, at a very low temperature, this seems like it would be tough to do. But if you had a way to make ammonia (maybe lightning?), then it seems mightly likely that something could use this highly energetic molecule as a basis for life. Other than that, it seem like it's mostly a hydrocarbon stew...
Many folks think that simple, but highly energetic molecules like ammonia are needed for life. This is basically because it seems hard to evolve in an environment where free uncontrolled energy (like direct ultraviolet light which is what is making all that ethane from methane) is probably tearing down any molecules (like protiens or dna) which proto-life is carefully putting together, so you likely need a small molecule to transfer/store energy from where it is collected to somewhere more protected where you can use it to make more complicated molecules. Of course many folks could be wrong and something else might work just as well.
Seems to me this is just generic beamforming or synthetic aperature.
The idea is that a small object is sent down a micro-fluidic channel which passes over an array of sensors that take a repetitive sequence of "pictures" of it as it slowly moves down the channel (each of the M sensor takes say N pictures). All the "pictures" are later re-assembled as if they were taken at the same time with very small spatial displacement (instead of far apart in space and time). If you know the constant velocity V of the channel and the constant distance between the sensors this isn't too hard to do (just math). This is the basics of the synthetic aperature or beam-formed approach.
The slight twist they came up with is the arrangement of the sensors. Instead of just putting them in a straight line down the direction of motion of the channel, the sensors on the chip in a diagonal across the narrow width of the channel. If you just organized the array in the direction of motion, you only get improved resolution in the direction of motion. With this arrangment, you can get better spatial resolution in the direction orthogonal to the motion as well.
The microfluid channel seems like the technology limiter to me. I imagine for stuff like blood or water (which you can send down a microfluidic channel at an easy to measure constant velocity) it works pretty well, but if something is moving (so that different pictures in time are radically different, not related to the velocity of the fluid in the channel), it would be really, really blurry or have aliasing. Remember those panoramic class picture with the pin-hole aperature so you could shake your head during the shot and blur-out, or if you were fast enough, you could run from one side of the picture and be in two places at once. These are the same problems with any long-time aperature imaging technique.
In any case, if instead it was an imaging technique like one that was described in Michael Crichton's "Prey" book (not his best work, but interesting), now that would be something to write home about...
I call BS on your analysis of the uses of this technology.
Surprisingly a wonderfully innovative technology to accomplish all of your benefits already exists. They're called headphones. My guess is that they don't use them because of some other reason. I wonder what that is...
Maybe it's that a large number of the people that listen to their music at parties, concerts, and through car audio systems actually *want* others to hear their music. When played loudly, it's just basically, a childish/immature behavior to impose/force their taste in music upon others (neighbors, etc)...
That headphone technology won't work for you... Why not?
You don't have to rely on your teacher to learn something.
Although some people feel more comfortable learning from an instructor and from the book that the instructor recommends, for some of us, it's just as easy to buy a decent textbook (or a collection of a few well written journal papers) and learn a subject. The problem with learning w/o the instructor is that you don't get a piece of paper to wave in front of an HR person that determines your salary (when you are done learning it, or not learning it as the case may be)...
For better or worse, "credentialed" learning institutions (and the certificate papers they produce) is the way we've decided to handle the bulk of our societies work assignment roles (fortunatly, not all, but the bulk of them), so you either play that game, or start your own company (with your own money too, as most venture capitalists and investment bankers like those pretty certificate papers as well).
Credentialed learning institutions have instructors, instructors recommend books, and today most of those recommended books aren't e-books. Maybe this will change eventually, but given the parent post's preferences, when they do shift to e-books, there will be another group of people who will be unhappy (e.g., when the books are only available in e-book format and you can't buy a nice paper version, only a crappy A4-sized black/white leaflet on photocopier paper instead of a smaller format hard bound version on nice reading paper).
This is the problem with granting the "learning monopoly" to current credentialed learning institutions racket, you are at their mercy as to their chosen teaching techniques...
Yet another artifact of the french revolution (circa 1793) but it didn't catch on then...
Personally, I think that this would be great. Since in the Republican calendar scheme, each 30-day month got divided into 3 10-day weeks in this scheme, 40 hour/weeks would be a breeze... If you got paid monthly, the 5 (or 6) day "leap" month every year would be a pretty good bonus too.
Excitons are _not_ supposed to be faster switchers (it even says this in the article).
The value proposition is that they can switch at the same rate as electronic circuits, but where normal electronic circuits have slower interconnect, excitons based switching transistors can use faster interconnect.
Basically electrons traveling down wires travel only about 50-75% the speed of light (as I recall that's some phonon-limit). In addition, there with current MOSTFET transistor technology, the gates are voltage sensitive so you need to charge up the capacitance as well. If a exiton transitor emits a photons, the photon has the potential to travel faster (given the right interconnect medium up to near the speed of light) to the next switch resulting in overall faster computing.
In the short term, this could make some things easier transiting things from one chip to another chip (say a processor to a memory chip), between chips in a multi-chip module (using some inter-die optical interconnect layer), or even from one side of a chip to another (which takes longer than a clock cycle in todays advanced high-speed chips).
In the longer term, these types of breakthroughs may actually make computing faster. For example, if your computation involved no feedback, in principle, it would be limited by switching speed (and many circuit design techniques try to do this today by pipelining clocks with data in the same direction), but with feedback, you eventually become limited by circuit-to-circuit propagation delay (so-called wire-delay). This is probably what they are thinking about it helping, but that type of development is probably much further away.
Although there is a rumor going around about a settlement, apparently, at least something is still on-going....
The last entry in June 4, indicates a hearing and exihibits were being submitted so there's a probably a settlement conference on this, but maybe it hit some sort of last minute snag...
Google can encourage mental habits where people can talk about subjects that they do not understand.
Replace Google with "TV", "slashdot", "talk-radio", "alcohol", "beautiful women", "bs sessions", etc... This is not a new google phenomena of the 21st century.
Also, wasn't it Feynman who later had the suspicion that he was lead by the nose to the o-ring discovery by General Kuytna who knew, but couldn't bring it up for political reasons. He later mused that he may have really just been manipulated to release controlled information as much as he thought other members of the commission were manipulated by controlled information.
Also, wasn't it Vinge that was a big proponent of the technological singularity (where machine intelligence ala google-search inevitably becomes dominant and self re-inforcing learning machines that exponentially create a new superhuman intelligence).
Not saying I understand anything about what I just said, though, as this is/.;^)
Instead of calling them "autonomous fin-actuated underwater vehicles", perhaps they could call them "autonomous fin-inducted submarine hybrid" or just AFISH for short...
Sure transporting carbon nano-tubes and some expoxy and aluminum to the moon might not be to bad, but did anyone think of the "next" step?
They next applied additional layers of epoxy and spun the material at room temperature.
Getting a large enough volume at room temperature (assuming you need some air pressure too) on the moon to mix it with epoxy and spin it (also presumably at room temperature) might be pretty hard to do without some bulky equipment. Although vacuum coating the mirror blank might seem easier on the moon, as other commentors noted, how do you keep it dust free?
So to summarize...
1. Bring epoxy, carbon nanotubes, aluminum and big spinner to the moon 2. ??? 3. Coat resulting lunar dust blank with aluminum to make a mirror 4. Profit?!? (until it's covered with dust)
I'm guessing contact payment devices have the exact same issues with RFIDs as the new biometric passports. Perhaps we should just all switch to carrying aluminum foil wallets and purses around...
Why does everyone include the OLPC in their comparisons? Probably the same reason people compare 0-60 acceleration times on cars that you can't buy and aren't street legal, or how tall or beautiful a woman is compared to actresses and models that you will never meet in real life, or the GFLOPS to some supercomputer machine buried in some weather simulation laboratory, or information content compared to the library of congress...
Because it's easier to compare against something other people have heard about and have a positive association with (even if it's inaccessible in real life).
What applying the anti-biotics do is kill the ones that are more succeptible thus "selecting" the __survivors__ to breed and use resources in the follow-on generation.
The "experiment" you propose on the bacteria showing evolution hour-by-hour really probably doesn't do what you think it's doing. What's probably happening is that there is a spectrum of genotypes/phenotypes of bacteria that have varing resistance to the anti-biotics you are contemplating applying to them. What applying the anti-biotics do is kill the ones that are more succeptible thus "selecting" them to breed and use resources in the follow-on generation. The existing geno-types/pheno-types were existing in the population already in the span of hours. Over the course of days or week or months or years, you might develop mutations or horizontal gene transfer in bacteria that can be tested in a selecting environment to experience evolution, but in bacteria, anyhow, you get all sort of non-sexual evolutionary development of pheno-types which are not classically geno-types. These type of mutations that can be selected by evolutionary pressure (also known as natural selection) are unlikely to occur in the span of hours.
It does a disservice to evolutionary scientific theory when these type of explanations are circulated (however well articulated), because they just strengthen the argument that evolution is a flawed theory. The reason evolution appears to be successful in higher animals is specifically because of sexual reproduction slowing the rate of mutation adaptation allowing for better natural selection to occur. In bacteria and viruses, horizontal gene transfer complicates much of the case that proves natural selection and evolution in higher animals and probably just weakens the case for evolution to be believed rather than some weird soviet style biology inheritance (aka lamark or whatever his name was).
Despite the dogma filtered down to the masses, evolution is actually rather an interesting theory that at the same time is subtle and convincing. However presenting it as this over-arching organizational theory that is popular in the layman press really just dillutes the theory (for example, darwinian theory applied to business), which opens it up to crap like ID (who's to say that the guberment isn't designing the successful businesses instead of business being emergent from a natural competition). It may be a bit too subtle to see how generalizing a theory can make it weaker, but I hope this silly example can show you how overarching claims actually detracts from the "real" theory of evolution.
I remember a long time ago when people tried to dump old tires in the ocean with the thought that they could form the basis for an artificial reef. Apparently that didn't work out so well...
Just because it's unstable doesn't mean it's impossible to get working.
For instance most modern fighter aircraft are aerodynamically unstable, but they still fly. For example, the F16 was deliberatly designed to be unstable (to gain better manuverability). Of course the F16 has a computer control system to make it flyable by humans, but if the computer dies, well, unstable tumble modes ahead... I've also antecdodally heard that some modern bridges and tall-buildings are also not inherently stable (and are actively stabilized by computer control systems).
But to be honest, I think the engineering of a space elevator is pretty much beyond our forseeable technical ability (material science, control systems, assembly techniques, not to mention project management, risk/return estimation, and financing/underwriting).
If you think the problems are merely about waiting for technology, just think of the chunnel. It was imagined for a long time, but even after they got all the science and technology and assembly issues under control, the project management, risk/return estimation and financing/underwriting issues managed to kill a few companies before if finally got done.
Secondly, why did they have to change the word polarization to "wiggling"? As if lay people didn't know the word polarized from experience with their sunglasses.
Perhaps I'll concede that calling orbital angular momentum to "twisting" may be a reasonable twisting of the terminology, although in earlier papers they refer to "spiraling" or "cork-screw" which seems like a much better scientific-speak-transliteration to me...
I'm afraid you'll have to look those physics books back up.
Although QM computers do use basic entanglement for creating superpositions, understanding Shor's algorithm (the one everyone is concerned about since it's factoring in polynomial time) is mostly just understanding QM superposition. Entanglement gives generic QM computers great parallel processing power by superposition by explaining how QM probability wave combine under superposition, but Heisenberg limits the computing power of a QM computer in a non-trivial way as well because after you collapse the wave functions by measurement you give up the parallel processing enabled by Entanglement (e.g., if you peek inside the oven, it stops working, if some of the heat leaks out of the oven even with the door closed, it doesn't work as efficiently, the oven being the QM computer).
FWIW, Shor's algorithm essentially converts factoring into a sequence period finding exercise. You might imagine that that's something easy to do if you had a machine which given a bunch of superimposed waves with a certain modulo structure could tell you the period (hint the ones that don't modulo with a specific period with self interfere and measure as zero, where the one with that period with self-reinforce). With a QM computer you do this all in parallel with superimposed probability waves and when you measure it, the highest probability one you measure is the one that doesn't self-interfere (the ones that self-interfere has probability near zero). Basically this measurement is wave function collapse which doesn't actually depend on entanglement or heisenberg to understand (although it does require you to believe in QM wave functions and measurement operators).
Entanglement is really a strange artifact of QM that explains probability correlations that you see in QM experiments that can't be explained classically. It's really more of an artifact of the existance of probability amplitude waves (the QM wave function) rather than an effect that directly enables the QM computer. Of course if you didn't have QM wave functions you wouldn't have a QM computer so I guess that's a chicken and egg scenario. Entanglement is like the "carburator" function of the QM computer. The QM computer uses superposition of QM wave functions to work and when you have more than one QM wave function, they get entangled when you start superimposing wave functions and the way the waves entangle helps you compute in parallel so it's important to understand how these waves entangle.
Heisenberg's principle is a consequence of wave function collapse (measurement) which also limits the QM computer (this limiting effect is often called QM de-coherence). Heisenberg isn't required by a QM computer when it's computing, but you need to see the result somehow so when you measure the result, one of the side effects is the Heisenberg principle (although that's also a chicken-egg problem, since HP is a consequence of QM wave function collapse and w/o QM there's no superposition computing). The closest explanation I can think of is that Heisenberg's principle is the "heat" caused by friction of the QM computer. You need friction to stop the computer to read out the result, but at the same time you can't get rid of a little friction while it's running either (causing de-coherence). The side effect of this friction is heat.
You may have a personal opinion that superposition is a "nice way of doing statistics using discrete values for covering the not so discrete results of experiments", but there is experimental evidence that your personal opinions is at odds with physical reality. As QM computers that do QM computing (including IBM's NMR experiment which implemented shor's algorithm) have already been implemented it's hard to refute that something non-classical is going on.
It may be that in the end, QM is total malarky and there's some other weird unexpected thing going on, but there are mountains of evidence that whatever is going on, it isn't as simple as "hidden variables"
As someone who does alumni admissions activities for that school on the left coast (Caltech), I can tell you that most top ranked schools are pretty much need blind for admissions (at least for non-international student admissions). That's the official stance of most schools and even though I'm not an official representative of the admission office, I can say for most of the folks I've talked to this is pretty true (not just BS).
Having said that, the financial aid departement of most schools will also expect that parents make some contribution to your education (whether that's appropriate or not, I'm just saying that's the case).
I don't know your folks financial situation, but generally if your family is opaque with the financial aid office (and I can tell you that many "upper" middle class families are generally hesitant to part with that infomation since they expect to get nothing in exchange so your situation is not be unique), it's really hard to get financial aid (other than a few token scholarships).
Sadly to say, if your parents have no intention of cooperating with the financial aid office, you'll probably have to figure out the financial aid situation by yourself, but if they are willing to open up a bit, most high end institutions will work out a pretty good package with pretty minimal debt. In fact Caltech is probably one of the better schools in this respect (although MIT's latest 75K initiative is pretty good too).
On the other hand, there are many good schools out there and Caltech and MIT aren't for everyone. In fact it's fairly likely that on a strict financial investment point of view they may not be worth it. But if you are looking for a way to maximize you opportunities to explore science or develop good school contacts that you can use throughout your life or in your words "prefer a school that I'm not in the top 1% of math SAT scores", you might find Caltech or MIT a pretty good challenge.
However, having said that, I'm a bit worried that your are looking at MIT being some sort of computer programming utopia that you need to get into to validate destiny. C programming (or even Javascript) aren't the end all of programming languages. They are just the current "fad". By the time you graduate and get out into the world, the fad will probably fade and you'll be looking at the next big thing (probably some sort of parallel programming paradigm if I read my crystal ball correctly) and it'll be nothing that you learned in school. A high end university setting is a place to learn how to learn, not a C-programming vocational school (it'd be a very expensive vocational school). In fact if I were you, I'd actually look at the core curriculm of any school you are considering to see if they still hold your interest (e.g., may premeds bail out of caltech when they discover they need to take 2 years of physics courses to graduate with a degree in literature).
I applaude you in the fact that you seem to have discovered what you want as such a young age (when I when to college, I had no fucking clue what I wanted to do, other than a general interest in computers and a chemistry scholarship). However, without telling you what I studied or what job I have now, I can say I'm pretty much not doing much with any of the specific skills/facts I learned in univeristy, and I'll bet many folks you talk to will say the same. The thing that most people get out of school was the people they met and the exposure to new ideas that they got, not the technical facts that they learned.
I doubt there will be any real problems for the lighting industry...
You could make the same argument about low-flow showerheads or toilets or plumbing fixtures in general (how long to those last).
People still remodel, new houses are built, old houses are destroyed, people break them, someone will come up with a new lighting mechanism (maybe that aluminum foil micro plasma lighting will become popular), and people will go through another replacement cycle.
Try to prove to some hard-pseudo-scientific people that using just pure logic (no need to go into advanced rhetoric) that simultaneosly believing in the deconstructionist "standard-model" of quantum physics and the experimental theory of general relativity would have an internal contradiction. They're general response is to equivocate enough that you can hear all the general logical debate flaws (attacking the messenger, strawmen arguments, etc) all in a period of 1 to 2 minutes... Tell me that isn't something to behold...
I always tell people, nobody has the answers and the hard-pseudo-scientists that claim the scientific religion does have the answers and they shouldn't be questioned are pretty much origin-of-species-thumping folk that are essentially right next to the bible-thumping folks that are they have so much of an issue with.
Sure, I'll concede that 6000 years is wrong, but the only thing that science has going for it that religion doesn't have is that religion (at least most of them) are for better or worse tied to something that was written down a thousand or so years ago. Some of the tenants seem pretty good, some are wrong. If you looked at a so-called scientific textbook from just 100 years ago and tried to make the case that science is always right, well you'd be in the same boat as many of those religious folks are today defending a document or a status quo.
Which brings me to my real point. Science is about theory explaining observations and testability. It's not about true and false. So the people who argue Science is right and religion is wrong are just as wrong as the religious people. It's always nice to have people who agree with you, but really good science is about prediction not about being right. In science, a better theory that has better predictive power may come along, but that doesn't necessarily completly invalidate the previous work (think newtonian mechanics and special relativity). Science is not about immortalizing the current state of the art, it's a mechanism to gain greater predictive power for the future.
Evolution (in the sense of modern man evolving from a common ancestor as modern apes as opposed to generic evolution) is in the true scientific sense only vaguely scientific because, we aren't really actually actively testing this theory directly (mostly because the timescale makes it impractical), and we aren't observing or repeating it (it's an expost-facto observation of historical fossil records), although evolution in its generic form seems to somewhat good at explaining thing (timeframes are still tough to manage here except for things like bacterica). Of course generic evolution as well as Evolution seems to be a very, very good compelling theories for explaining where we come from, but there doesn't seem to be a good case to call it good hard core science (for instance compare this to the photo-electric effect, superconductors, or drug effectiveness evaluation on patients, or even rats running in a maze listening for sounds of their feet, if you recall one of the Richard Feynman's antecdotes on the subject).
In my opinion, having "good" scientists strap their wagons to Evolution as the prototypical science theory actually does a disservice as it's not exactly the best example of what a prototypical scientfic theory would be (have predictive power and be repeatable in our lifetime) if the goal were to actually educate or convince the public about the value of science. Of course most people that front Evolution as the prototypical science theory often have other agendas, so I guess they're free to do whatever they want, but in my book they aren't actually advancing science or the understanding of science at all.
Science often falls in to the same trap that lawmakers end up in. The more extreme the case you use as the example, the worse the law to apply to it becomes. Maybe it's hard to get people excited about the photo-electric effect as science but that's a much better thing to front that some over-arching theory about Evolution.
Nehalem? Larrabee? Heck, I remember when "Pentium" came out and people laughed
Heck, I remember when "Itanium" came out and people laughed...
But before they laughed, I remember a bunch of companies folded up their project tents (sun, mips, the remains of dec/alpha). I'm not so sure companies will do the same this time around... Not saying this time Intel doesn't have their ducks in a row, but certainly, the past is no indication of the future...
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, I doubt there is a society or a subset of society that ever existed which is civilized under your definition. Starting in kindergarden/gradeschool society, we are essentially taught that some people are worth treating with respect, and some are not (e.g., ones who follow rules are to be respected, ones that don't are shamed). Later on people who follow the rules are not respected, and the rule-breakers are admired. Then it's people who are good at sports, or math, or skateboard or use computers or have girlfriends or boyfriends or have a job, or have been on a cruise, or been to europe, or been to vietnam, or are married, or have kids or have grandkids or coloring your hair or just happen to be in the opposite set which are the complement of these things.
Societies are generally always structured into the conforming and the non-conforming outsiders. Generally the non-conforming outsiders usually get no respect or in many cases no rights at all (for example that will most certainly date me, on early usenet, some sites didn't allow newbies to post at all). The "in" crowd makes the rules, generally to differentiate them from the "outsiders" and create the exclusion set. More often than not, the rules also make provisions for transitioning members from the inclusion set to the exclusion set (e.g., excommunication, shunning, banning, blocking, voting-out, etc).
Although it's just a matter of degree, I doubt being 100% "civilized" by your definition would ever the goal of any actual society, lest they let the outsiders in and ruin it ;^)
Of course that's the wrong ESA ;^)
Entertainment Software Association (www.theesa.com) the ones to bring you the E3 conference, not European Space Agency (www.esa.int)
The ESA (the space agency one), of course also spends massive amounts of money too, but in their reports, they talk alot about new countries that want to join. Unfortunatly, in their reports, the ESA doesn't give a comprehensive understanding on what their lobbing groups do for their projects (other than convince european countries pay for the galileo navigation system)...
All the articles mention ethane being the product of methane "broken" by sunlight, it is actually methane CH4 having it's H knocked away by a sunlight reaction to make a methyl CH3 radical and joining with another CH3 to make ethane C2H6. I guess you can call that "broken" into ethane.
Given that the above reaction has a byproduct of H*, I guess there is an open question if it can somehow combine with the Nitrogen. For example, if you have some natural process of natural Nitrogen fixation (breaking the triple bond of N2 so it could be combined with H), it seems to me that there is at least some chance of life. Unfortunatly, at a very low temperature, this seems like it would be tough to do. But if you had a way to make ammonia (maybe lightning?), then it seems mightly likely that something could use this highly energetic molecule as a basis for life. Other than that, it seem like it's mostly a hydrocarbon stew...
Many folks think that simple, but highly energetic molecules like ammonia are needed for life. This is basically because it seems hard to evolve in an environment where free uncontrolled energy (like direct ultraviolet light which is what is making all that ethane from methane) is probably tearing down any molecules (like protiens or dna) which proto-life is carefully putting together, so you likely need a small molecule to transfer/store energy from where it is collected to somewhere more protected where you can use it to make more complicated molecules. Of course many folks could be wrong and something else might work just as well.
Seems to me this is just generic beamforming or synthetic aperature.
The idea is that a small object is sent down a micro-fluidic channel which passes over an array of sensors that take a repetitive sequence of "pictures" of it as it slowly moves down the channel (each of the M sensor takes say N pictures). All the "pictures" are later re-assembled as if they were taken at the same time with very small spatial displacement (instead of far apart in space and time). If you know the constant velocity V of the channel and the constant distance between the sensors this isn't too hard to do (just math). This is the basics of the synthetic aperature or beam-formed approach.
The slight twist they came up with is the arrangement of the sensors. Instead of just putting them in a straight line down the direction of motion of the channel, the sensors on the chip in a diagonal across the narrow width of the channel. If you just organized the array in the direction of motion, you only get improved resolution in the direction of motion. With this arrangment, you can get better spatial resolution in the direction orthogonal to the motion as well.
The microfluid channel seems like the technology limiter to me. I imagine for stuff like blood or water (which you can send down a microfluidic channel at an easy to measure constant velocity) it works pretty well, but if something is moving (so that different pictures in time are radically different, not related to the velocity of the fluid in the channel), it would be really, really blurry or have aliasing. Remember those panoramic class picture with the pin-hole aperature so you could shake your head during the shot and blur-out, or if you were fast enough, you could run from one side of the picture and be in two places at once. These are the same problems with any long-time aperature imaging technique.
In any case, if instead it was an imaging technique like one that was described in Michael Crichton's "Prey" book (not his best work, but interesting), now that would be something to write home about...
But ./ is already taken over with yak. Seriously.
I call BS on your analysis of the uses of this technology.
Surprisingly a wonderfully innovative technology to accomplish all of your benefits already exists. They're called headphones. My guess is that they don't use them because of some other reason. I wonder what that is...
Maybe it's that a large number of the people that listen to their music at parties, concerts, and through car audio systems actually *want* others to hear their music. When played loudly, it's just basically, a childish/immature behavior to impose/force their taste in music upon others (neighbors, etc)...
That headphone technology won't work for you... Why not?
Although some people feel more comfortable learning from an instructor and from the book that the instructor recommends, for some of us, it's just as easy to buy a decent textbook (or a collection of a few well written journal papers) and learn a subject. The problem with learning w/o the instructor is that you don't get a piece of paper to wave in front of an HR person that determines your salary (when you are done learning it, or not learning it as the case may be)...
For better or worse, "credentialed" learning institutions (and the certificate papers they produce) is the way we've decided to handle the bulk of our societies work assignment roles (fortunatly, not all, but the bulk of them), so you either play that game, or start your own company (with your own money too, as most venture capitalists and investment bankers like those pretty certificate papers as well).
Credentialed learning institutions have instructors, instructors recommend books, and today most of those recommended books aren't e-books. Maybe this will change eventually, but given the parent post's preferences, when they do shift to e-books, there will be another group of people who will be unhappy (e.g., when the books are only available in e-book format and you can't buy a nice paper version, only a crappy A4-sized black/white leaflet on photocopier paper instead of a smaller format hard bound version on nice reading paper).
This is the problem with granting the "learning monopoly" to current credentialed learning institutions racket, you are at their mercy as to their chosen teaching techniques...
Yet another artifact of the french revolution (circa 1793) but it didn't catch on then...
Personally, I think that this would be great. Since in the Republican calendar scheme, each 30-day month got divided into 3 10-day weeks in this scheme, 40 hour/weeks would be a breeze... If you got paid monthly, the 5 (or 6) day "leap" month every year would be a pretty good bonus too.
Excitons are _not_ supposed to be faster switchers (it even says this in the article).
The value proposition is that they can switch at the same rate as electronic circuits, but where normal electronic circuits have slower interconnect, excitons based switching transistors can use faster interconnect.
Basically electrons traveling down wires travel only about 50-75% the speed of light (as I recall that's some phonon-limit). In addition, there with current MOSTFET transistor technology, the gates are voltage sensitive so you need to charge up the capacitance as well. If a exiton transitor emits a photons, the photon has the potential to travel faster (given the right interconnect medium up to near the speed of light) to the next switch resulting in overall faster computing.
In the short term, this could make some things easier transiting things from one chip to another chip (say a processor to a memory chip), between chips in a multi-chip module (using some inter-die optical interconnect layer), or even from one side of a chip to another (which takes longer than a clock cycle in todays advanced high-speed chips).
In the longer term, these types of breakthroughs may actually make computing faster. For example, if your computation involved no feedback, in principle, it would be limited by switching speed (and many circuit design techniques try to do this today by pipelining clocks with data in the same direction), but with feedback, you eventually become limited by circuit-to-circuit propagation delay (so-called wire-delay). This is probably what they are thinking about it helping, but that type of development is probably much further away.
Although there is a rumor going around about a settlement, apparently, at least something is still on-going....
The last entry in June 4, indicates a hearing and exihibits were being submitted so there's a probably a settlement conference on this, but maybe it hit some sort of last minute snag...
Also, wasn't it Feynman who later had the suspicion that he was lead by the nose to the o-ring discovery by General Kuytna who knew, but couldn't bring it up for political reasons. He later mused that he may have really just been manipulated to release controlled information as much as he thought other members of the commission were manipulated by controlled information.
Also, wasn't it Vinge that was a big proponent of the technological singularity (where machine intelligence ala google-search inevitably becomes dominant and self re-inforcing learning machines that exponentially create a new superhuman intelligence).
Not saying I understand anything about what I just said, though, as this is /. ;^)
Instead of calling them "autonomous fin-actuated underwater vehicles", perhaps they could call them "autonomous fin-inducted submarine hybrid" or just AFISH for short...
Getting a large enough volume at room temperature (assuming you need some air pressure too) on the moon to mix it with epoxy and spin it (also presumably at room temperature) might be pretty hard to do without some bulky equipment. Although vacuum coating the mirror blank might seem easier on the moon, as other commentors noted, how do you keep it dust free?
So to summarize...
1. Bring epoxy, carbon nanotubes, aluminum and big spinner to the moon
2. ???
3. Coat resulting lunar dust blank with aluminum to make a mirror
4. Profit?!? (until it's covered with dust)
I'm guessing contact payment devices have the exact same issues with RFIDs as the new biometric passports.
Perhaps we should just all switch to carrying aluminum foil wallets and purses around...
Why does everyone include the OLPC in their comparisons? Probably the same reason people compare 0-60 acceleration times on cars that you can't buy and aren't street legal, or how tall or beautiful a woman is compared to actresses and models that you will never meet in real life, or the GFLOPS to some supercomputer machine buried in some weather simulation laboratory, or information content compared to the library of congress...
Because it's easier to compare against something other people have heard about and have a positive association with (even if it's inaccessible in real life).
... of course I meant
What applying the anti-biotics do is kill the ones that are more succeptible thus "selecting" the __survivors__ to breed and use resources in the follow-on generation.
Let's be a bit more clear here.
The "experiment" you propose on the bacteria showing evolution hour-by-hour really probably doesn't do what you think it's doing. What's probably happening is that there is a spectrum of genotypes/phenotypes of bacteria that have varing resistance to the anti-biotics you are contemplating applying to them. What applying the anti-biotics do is kill the ones that are more succeptible thus "selecting" them to breed and use resources in the follow-on generation. The existing geno-types/pheno-types were existing in the population already in the span of hours. Over the course of days or week or months or years, you might develop mutations or horizontal gene transfer in bacteria that can be tested in a selecting environment to experience evolution, but in bacteria, anyhow, you get all sort of non-sexual evolutionary development of pheno-types which are not classically geno-types. These type of mutations that can be selected by evolutionary pressure (also known as natural selection) are unlikely to occur in the span of hours.
It does a disservice to evolutionary scientific theory when these type of explanations are circulated (however well articulated), because they just strengthen the argument that evolution is a flawed theory. The reason evolution appears to be successful in higher animals is specifically because of sexual reproduction slowing the rate of mutation adaptation allowing for better natural selection to occur. In bacteria and viruses, horizontal gene transfer complicates much of the case that proves natural selection and evolution in higher animals and probably just weakens the case for evolution to be believed rather than some weird soviet style biology inheritance (aka lamark or whatever his name was).
Despite the dogma filtered down to the masses, evolution is actually rather an interesting theory that at the same time is subtle and convincing. However presenting it as this over-arching organizational theory that is popular in the layman press really just dillutes the theory (for example, darwinian theory applied to business), which opens it up to crap like ID (who's to say that the guberment isn't designing the successful businesses instead of business being emergent from a natural competition). It may be a bit too subtle to see how generalizing a theory can make it weaker, but I hope this silly example can show you how overarching claims actually detracts from the "real" theory of evolution.
Maybe it'll work out better this time...
Just because it's unstable doesn't mean it's impossible to get working.
For instance most modern fighter aircraft are aerodynamically unstable, but they still fly. For example, the F16 was deliberatly designed to be unstable (to gain better manuverability). Of course the F16 has a computer control system to make it flyable by humans, but if the computer dies, well, unstable tumble modes ahead... I've also antecdodally heard that some modern bridges and tall-buildings are also not inherently stable (and are actively stabilized by computer control systems).
But to be honest, I think the engineering of a space elevator is pretty much beyond our forseeable technical ability (material science, control systems, assembly techniques, not to mention project management, risk/return estimation, and financing/underwriting).
If you think the problems are merely about waiting for technology, just think of the chunnel. It was imagined for a long time, but even after they got all the science and technology and assembly issues under control, the project management, risk/return estimation and financing/underwriting issues managed to kill a few companies before if finally got done.
First off, isn't this rehashed news from 2005?
Secondly, why did they have to change the word polarization to "wiggling"? As if lay people didn't know the word polarized from experience with their sunglasses.
Perhaps I'll concede that calling orbital angular momentum to "twisting" may be a reasonable twisting of the terminology, although in earlier papers they refer to "spiraling" or "cork-screw" which seems like a much better scientific-speak-transliteration to me...
I'm afraid you'll have to look those physics books back up.
Although QM computers do use basic entanglement for creating superpositions, understanding Shor's algorithm (the one everyone is concerned about since it's factoring in polynomial time) is mostly just understanding QM superposition. Entanglement gives generic QM computers great parallel processing power by superposition by explaining how QM probability wave combine under superposition, but Heisenberg limits the computing power of a QM computer in a non-trivial way as well because after you collapse the wave functions by measurement you give up the parallel processing enabled by Entanglement (e.g., if you peek inside the oven, it stops working, if some of the heat leaks out of the oven even with the door closed, it doesn't work as efficiently, the oven being the QM computer).
FWIW, Shor's algorithm essentially converts factoring into a sequence period finding exercise. You might imagine that that's something easy to do if you had a machine which given a bunch of superimposed waves with a certain modulo structure could tell you the period (hint the ones that don't modulo with a specific period with self interfere and measure as zero, where the one with that period with self-reinforce). With a QM computer you do this all in parallel with superimposed probability waves and when you measure it, the highest probability one you measure is the one that doesn't self-interfere (the ones that self-interfere has probability near zero). Basically this measurement is wave function collapse which doesn't actually depend on entanglement or heisenberg to understand (although it does require you to believe in QM wave functions and measurement operators).
Entanglement is really a strange artifact of QM that explains probability correlations that you see in QM experiments that can't be explained classically. It's really more of an artifact of the existance of probability amplitude waves (the QM wave function) rather than an effect that directly enables the QM computer. Of course if you didn't have QM wave functions you wouldn't have a QM computer so I guess that's a chicken and egg scenario. Entanglement is like the "carburator" function of the QM computer. The QM computer uses superposition of QM wave functions to work and when you have more than one QM wave function, they get entangled when you start superimposing wave functions and the way the waves entangle helps you compute in parallel so it's important to understand how these waves entangle.
Heisenberg's principle is a consequence of wave function collapse (measurement) which also limits the QM computer (this limiting effect is often called QM de-coherence). Heisenberg isn't required by a QM computer when it's computing, but you need to see the result somehow so when you measure the result, one of the side effects is the Heisenberg principle (although that's also a chicken-egg problem, since HP is a consequence of QM wave function collapse and w/o QM there's no superposition computing). The closest explanation I can think of is that Heisenberg's principle is the "heat" caused by friction of the QM computer. You need friction to stop the computer to read out the result, but at the same time you can't get rid of a little friction while it's running either (causing de-coherence). The side effect of this friction is heat.
You may have a personal opinion that superposition is a "nice way of doing statistics using discrete values for covering the not so discrete results of experiments", but there is experimental evidence that your personal opinions is at odds with physical reality. As QM computers that do QM computing (including IBM's NMR experiment which implemented shor's algorithm) have already been implemented it's hard to refute that something non-classical is going on.
It may be that in the end, QM is total malarky and there's some other weird unexpected thing going on, but there are mountains of evidence that whatever is going on, it isn't as simple as "hidden variables"
As someone who does alumni admissions activities for that school on the left coast (Caltech), I can tell you that most top ranked schools are pretty much need blind for admissions (at least for non-international student admissions). That's the official stance of most schools and even though I'm not an official representative of the admission office, I can say for most of the folks I've talked to this is pretty true (not just BS).
Having said that, the financial aid departement of most schools will also expect that parents make some contribution to your education (whether that's appropriate or not, I'm just saying that's the case).
I don't know your folks financial situation, but generally if your family is opaque with the financial aid office (and I can tell you that many "upper" middle class families are generally hesitant to part with that infomation since they expect to get nothing in exchange so your situation is not be unique), it's really hard to get financial aid (other than a few token scholarships).
Sadly to say, if your parents have no intention of cooperating with the financial aid office, you'll probably have to figure out the financial aid situation by yourself, but if they are willing to open up a bit, most high end institutions will work out a pretty good package with pretty minimal debt. In fact Caltech is probably one of the better schools in this respect (although MIT's latest 75K initiative is pretty good too).
On the other hand, there are many good schools out there and Caltech and MIT aren't for everyone. In fact it's fairly likely that on a strict financial investment point of view they may not be worth it. But if you are looking for a way to maximize you opportunities to explore science or develop good school contacts that you can use throughout your life or in your words "prefer a school that I'm not in the top 1% of math SAT scores", you might find Caltech or MIT a pretty good challenge.
However, having said that, I'm a bit worried that your are looking at MIT being some sort of computer programming utopia that you need to get into to validate destiny. C programming (or even Javascript) aren't the end all of programming languages. They are just the current "fad". By the time you graduate and get out into the world, the fad will probably fade and you'll be looking at the next big thing (probably some sort of parallel programming paradigm if I read my crystal ball correctly) and it'll be nothing that you learned in school. A high end university setting is a place to learn how to learn, not a C-programming vocational school (it'd be a very expensive vocational school). In fact if I were you, I'd actually look at the core curriculm of any school you are considering to see if they still hold your interest (e.g., may premeds bail out of caltech when they discover they need to take 2 years of physics courses to graduate with a degree in literature).
I applaude you in the fact that you seem to have discovered what you want as such a young age (when I when to college, I had no fucking clue what I wanted to do, other than a general interest in computers and a chemistry scholarship). However, without telling you what I studied or what job I have now, I can say I'm pretty much not doing much with any of the specific skills/facts I learned in univeristy, and I'll bet many folks you talk to will say the same. The thing that most people get out of school was the people they met and the exposure to new ideas that they got, not the technical facts that they learned.
You could make the same argument about low-flow showerheads or toilets or plumbing fixtures in general (how long to those last).
People still remodel, new houses are built, old houses are destroyed, people break them, someone will come up with a new lighting mechanism (maybe that aluminum foil micro plasma lighting will become popular), and people will go through another replacement cycle.
Try to prove to some hard-pseudo-scientific people that using just pure logic (no need to go into advanced rhetoric) that simultaneosly believing in the deconstructionist "standard-model" of quantum physics and the experimental theory of general relativity would have an internal contradiction. They're general response is to equivocate enough that you can hear all the general logical debate flaws (attacking the messenger, strawmen arguments, etc) all in a period of 1 to 2 minutes... Tell me that isn't something to behold...
I always tell people, nobody has the answers and the hard-pseudo-scientists that claim the scientific religion does have the answers and they shouldn't be questioned are pretty much origin-of-species-thumping folk that are essentially right next to the bible-thumping folks that are they have so much of an issue with.
Sure, I'll concede that 6000 years is wrong, but the only thing that science has going for it that religion doesn't have is that religion (at least most of them) are for better or worse tied to something that was written down a thousand or so years ago. Some of the tenants seem pretty good, some are wrong. If you looked at a so-called scientific textbook from just 100 years ago and tried to make the case that science is always right, well you'd be in the same boat as many of those religious folks are today defending a document or a status quo.
Which brings me to my real point. Science is about theory explaining observations and testability. It's not about true and false. So the people who argue Science is right and religion is wrong are just as wrong as the religious people. It's always nice to have people who agree with you, but really good science is about prediction not about being right. In science, a better theory that has better predictive power may come along, but that doesn't necessarily completly invalidate the previous work (think newtonian mechanics and special relativity). Science is not about immortalizing the current state of the art, it's a mechanism to gain greater predictive power for the future.
Evolution (in the sense of modern man evolving from a common ancestor as modern apes as opposed to generic evolution) is in the true scientific sense only vaguely scientific because, we aren't really actually actively testing this theory directly (mostly because the timescale makes it impractical), and we aren't observing or repeating it (it's an expost-facto observation of historical fossil records), although evolution in its generic form seems to somewhat good at explaining thing (timeframes are still tough to manage here except for things like bacterica). Of course generic evolution as well as Evolution seems to be a very, very good compelling theories for explaining where we come from, but there doesn't seem to be a good case to call it good hard core science (for instance compare this to the photo-electric effect, superconductors, or drug effectiveness evaluation on patients, or even rats running in a maze listening for sounds of their feet, if you recall one of the Richard Feynman's antecdotes on the subject).
In my opinion, having "good" scientists strap their wagons to Evolution as the prototypical science theory actually does a disservice as it's not exactly the best example of what a prototypical scientfic theory would be (have predictive power and be repeatable in our lifetime) if the goal were to actually educate or convince the public about the value of science. Of course most people that front Evolution as the prototypical science theory often have other agendas, so I guess they're free to do whatever they want, but in my book they aren't actually advancing science or the understanding of science at all.
Science often falls in to the same trap that lawmakers end up in. The more extreme the case you use as the example, the worse the law to apply to it becomes. Maybe it's hard to get people excited about the photo-electric effect as science but that's a much better thing to front that some over-arching theory about Evolution.
Heck, I remember when "Itanium" came out and people laughed...
But before they laughed, I remember a bunch of companies folded up their project tents (sun, mips, the remains of dec/alpha). I'm not so sure companies will do the same this time around... Not saying this time Intel doesn't have their ducks in a row, but certainly, the past is no indication of the future...