I'm an occasional storm chaser, definitely not a meteorologist. I've been chasing a couple times, and I've only seen one traffic jam, which was mildly stupid, not terribly dangerous, and composed of about two thirds recreational chasers, one third more science-y looking types. For the most part, when people are out there, they seem to have good attitudes, but in both the chaser and science communities there are some big, terrible egos that really have little tolerance for people who aren't doing the exact same thing the exact same way they are. But that's just whining, that's not the real problem. The real problem is common sense, which is ever slightly less uncommon with the science crowd than with the recreation crowd. Both are capable of blocking roads, impeding traffic, and being a general nuisance. Again, the recreation crowd is slightly worse at this because there are slightly more people proportionally in that crowd that lack appreciation for their surroundings due to overexcited-ness and some of them just being silly kids and/or hillbillies out looking for fun. That said, some people who think they are big shots because they're "scientists", and the world should get out of their way, and the same problems emerge. So, to the scientist community, I say, complaining about chasers is NOT the answer to your difficulties. Cooperation and education ARE answers (though imperfect as there will always be some yahoos out there being stupid). Sure, the science community has the best tools out there for doing legitimate research, but they're usually slow groups and many participants don't have the skill or experience to get to areas of interest like many of the best chasers do. If chasers were utilized as a scouting tool by Vortex and other search entities, given proper chasing protocols, and for those who show they're responsible enough, some actual data acquisition tools, Vortex could have a lot more success and everyone could be happier and have a good time too. Many chasers are really just a lot better at getting to storms (safely), than the researchers, it's just a fact (of course, it's also a fact that a lot of inexperienced chasers suck, but whatever, hopefully they can at least have positive examples on how to conduct themselves safely and respectfully). I mean, he may be a complete spaz that rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but Reed Timmer and crew have a LOT more success getting to tornadoes than any researchers. There are a lot of other chasers out there who are also very good and if treated with respect would be quite happy to aid in a research project.
In other words, CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?! (it's better than whining behind each other's backs, we don't want this to start being like that awful Twister movie).
As someone who's worked with data from some very expensive scanners and interpolation techniques, I can say that nothing I've seen yet (other than physically point armature scanning, which still requires significant cleanup) produces a directly usable result on a surface a like a car. Scans can be used as reference for talented 3D modelers to create more useful wireframes off of however. And to the point of the ruling, since there are so many things that can be called "wireframes" (original CAD data, something someone modeled at home from photos or their imagination, point clouds or other capture attempts) that should/could have very different positions in the copywrite world, I expect this area of law to get more even more confusing in the years to come. I just know, if I leak any of the secret CAD data I have access to on a daily basis, that all hell would break loose.
...is when my friends and I went to see Mission to Mars, a film by Brian DePalma. We laughed SOOooooo hard at the absolutely ridiculous 3rd act of this film (and a bit at the simply stupid 1st and 2nd acts too), that others in the theater, who HAD to be less cynical and obnoxious than a bunch of early 20s art students, were also laughing heartily at this cinematic piece of crap by the end. Had we not been there and got the ball rolling, I wouldn't be surprised if people simply would have sat quietly, being annoyed by the stream of cliche, contrivances and cheesiness.
This just in, people, when given access to public communication often say stupid things out of ignorance or personal/collaborative agendas! Even more shocking is that people occasionally believe the things that others say in such a format! Obviously the format is to blame, so therefore we need to look critically at the regulations involving sharpie markers, cheap paint, and posterboard. Oh, this is about Youtube, er, uh, yes, computer...security...validity...media...something-or-other...meh, nevermind...
It seems to me that with either a hierarchical approach (either within the contents of one article, or in separate articles addressing terms and specific issues in more detail), one could construct articles where it's easy for a layman to read the outline and the basics of the information as well as for the obsessive nerds to delve into the depths of all the detailed terms and eccentricities related to a given subject. I've been reading a lot about meteorology lately on wikipedia, and it seems that lots of the articles about things people might hear mentioned on television weather are written with at least introductions in simple terms. However, I can dig deeper and find out about the dynamics of convective vs. orographic precipitation if I want to. Anyway, it seems to be that in such instances we should always be striving for an organized and cohesive presentation of all available information, and that having things presented in a way in which the reader encounters as much detail and complexity as they chose. And furthermore it seems that hierarchically branched structure using links and sub articles and so on and so forth, which is so much easier in Wiki format than it was in print, really allows us much greater possibilities for organizing our information for the best possible experience for the reader. So choosing detail or easy to read average joe type articles exclusively seems incredibly lame.
I've rode in a couple modern European diesel powered cars and seen many more, and even some of the new ones in America that use proper piezoelectric direct injection, I can say that not all diesels spew forth filth (the filth you're seeing is soot and particulate matter). Reducing the sulfur content of diesel fuel and using new injection technology (the techniques for fuel delivery and timing are constantly being improved with these), the emissions of diesel engines can be quite good. If big rig trucks were more modern in design (mostly the fuel system), combined with the new, much cleaner fuel that we now have here in America, giant trucks wouldn't need to spew forth much of any visible emissions when operating under heavy load like most of them do now. Of course, this doesn't solve the Nitrogen Oxide problem (solutions coming such as Urea injection catalysts, and a nifty little nitrogen process catalyst from Honda). Also, get ready for all internal combustion engines to operate much like diesel engines, regardless of fuel. Many car companies are looking into compression ignition for Octane engines because it will allow a nice jump in thermal efficiency under many driving conditions. Mercedes offers one now in Europe as a 3.5 liter V6, and though it's early for the technique, it already has more power and better mileage in the same car as the traditional spark only ignition version of the engine. And as techniques for NOx control and engine mapping improve the performance and efficiency will only improve more (and better integrate with spark ignition more). Still, it won't make an Octane type fuel engine match the Torque and efficiency of a real proper Cetane (diesel) engine.
The idea of replacing the batteries in electric and hybrid electric cars is not a new one. BMW was at one point determined to use ultracapacitors in it's hybrids, rather than batteries, because without chemical reactions taking place, the storage of electricity is much more efficient than batteries. BMW has apparently abandoned that in their alliance with DCX and GM on their hybrid system, but since BMW hasn't announced any of their own hybrids, we can't exactly tell yet. I believe also that it would allow greater maximum output from a car, if one were so inclined to let a couple/few hundred kilowatts go to the electric motors. The problem is that the ultra capacitors haven't been quite ultra enough yet. I'm no expert on capacities of capacitors, but you're limited by size/surface area in the capacitor and 'they' seemed to 500 miles is quite a claim, and unless they have a specific car, it's not a usefully specific claim. And if they do have a vehicle, it's best to make sure it's not a lightweight go kart like an Elise (or the new Tesla car, which is an Elise), as those cars tend to not please typical automotive tastes. There is still potential out there to make much more effective capacitors. I believe MIT students/professors/people of some sort came up with a Carbon Nano-fiber fuzzy capacitor that multiplied many times the surface area inside a capacitor on which the charge is built up by making the charge holding surface out gagillions of those little fibers. That sounded like a hilariously expensive proposition to me, but perhaps it's not as expensive as my imagination makes it out to be, or it could even inspire others to find similar and less expensive ways to make significant advances in the field of ultracapacitors. At the very least, companies who make outrageous claims like this one bring awareness to different technologies and methodologies such as capacitors vs. batteries. I'll be interested to see if/when someone brings a capacitor driven car to market, be it these guys, or BMW, or whoever.
I just downloaded that ringtone, and even on my laptops crappy speakers at low volume I found it to be piercingly loud and annoying at the ripe old age of 26. I guess I'm not surpised I can hear it, since when I visit my parents large house I can tell if they have the TV on by the time I get to the front door (tv is at the back of the slightly large house). As a kid I was always suprised other's, even many young people, didn't notice that noise. I'm not sure why kids would want that as a ringtone, since it's not like having a secret ringtone makes it any easier to secretly talk on the phone I guess a more discreet alarm for incoming text messages may be more "practical", but a discerning teacher would be able to notice kids texting by, you know, looking and noticing.
Anyway, back to the Mosquito device, I'm sure if it can be found, it can be simply sabotaged. I'm sure the little speaker wouldn't work too well if it had, say, superglue or something caked onto it, and unless it's sophisticated enough to notice that it's been tampered with and flash an error code or something, since the old fart using it can't here it, he'd be none the wiser.
This stability control system, if this review is to be trusted, is actually calibrated well for spirited driving. That would make it different from most stability control systems in a fairly relivant manner.
Jaguar has had such systems before, but, possibly due to the less than optimal dynamics of x types, s types and xjs, the systems have had more to do, or just weren't tuned well.
If some of these reviews are to be trusted, Jag actually made a darn fine car for once...maybe...
While building a car like that is an amazing achievement for any young people, the hype in this article about the car, or that is critical of the auto industry, is just plain silly. As others have pointed out, a big reason that car goes fast is likely that it is very low weight, and if those kids and their shop teacher can find better ways to cut weight without making it too expensive or sacrificing safety better than...say...Lotus engineering...well, then I'd be damned impressed. More importantly, the soybean oil thing. It's not like car companies don't know about good deisel engines, since they sell millions of them in europe that go in passenger cars every year. And, it's not like they don't know about biodiesel either (same for the fuel industry). I do believe that biodiesel is being mixed into regular diesel products around the US right now, because from some sources it's quite cheap, and it helps emmissions. And, ignoring the problem of the minor-moderate conversion it takes to make a car biodiesel ready, there's one much bigger problem, and that's the cold weather of much of the united states. Biodiesel gels a good bit sooner than petrol diesel, making even significant mixes of it useless to large populations for a number of months out of the year. I'm very pro-biodiesel (as long as it doesn't restrict food supply, I think fighting hunger is much more important), but it's just not going to solve many problems on it's own.
Also of note, are cars like the Opel/Vauxhall EcoSpeedster. This car was built by good ol' GM (though much of it is based on Lotus parts) a couple years ago in Europe, and it wasn't quite as fast as these kid's car (0-60 in about 5.6 if I remember correctly). The car also got about 90 miles per gallon if driven gently, and was still in the mid 30s in an endurance test of the car at 150 miles per hour (if I remember correctly, I'm too lazy to look this stuff up). That level of efficiency is MUCH better than what these kids are getting, and that shows what happens when a big company lets some of it's engineers go to town on a concept for lightweight, efficient diesel, and good aerodynamics (.22 drag coefficient! that's why it was so efficient at speed!).
Hype aside, hopefully project like what these kids made will promote ideas like biodiesel, and diesel in general, to increase awareness of these things so they can be intelligently integrated into infrastructures like the US.
I wonder what happens when one runs Beer through this machine.
And I don't mean Budwieser and the like, I mean Imperal IPAs, Imperial Stouts, Belgian's of all kinds, English strong ales, etc, the kinds of beer that I have aging in my "beer cellar" right now. I've had some suprising success aging beers (my oldest is probably 10 months) removing mild skunk and metallic flavours, mellowing, bring out some subtle dark fruitiness, and it would be nice to be able to do that faster!
I don't think most american microbreweries who make such products would be "above" using such devices either, as long as they actually work. Of course, you won't get the character of wood aging (vanillin!) with such a device.
I am so sick of this ID argument (so sick that I will apparently join in? how's that for logic!)
The first time ID was explained to me, it was by an advocate of it, who's name was Hugh Ross, and he was talking at my parent's church, and he's a cosmologist or something of the sort, fancypants professor/researcher. He explained it as science and christian ideals aren't really neccissarily contradictory, since if there was a God, He created a world/universe in which the rules of science are pretty much in control, in a manner as such that it would create life and planets such as this.
The one argument with scientific theory was that Dr. Ross thought that it was possible that the creation of humans was done by God himself because we are different/special enough. This is an easy view to take or leave, and is obviously a religious belief.
Where this ID stuff has gone in the past few years since I heard Mr. Ross talking about it mystifies me....well, not it doesn't, it just annoys me. Some advocates of it have apparently thought to exploit what was once an idea to quiet the discord between scientists and those with religious faith, and turn it into a vehicle to bring God into the science classroom. I don't support this, as a christian, and I can certainly understand why many evolutionists would have an adverse reaction to this. I can also understand why many religious people are upset at how theories of evolution and such are somewhat sloppily portrayed as fact in education (this was the case in my education, we were told human embryos have gills, therefore, evolution. it's my understanding now [which could of course be false, given the spazness of the issue] that the while gill thing is silly and was made up by some scientist guy, who was refuted by his scientist colleagues, and somehow his drawings got into the wrong hands, and because "accepted facts").
I just see people continuing to be afraid of each other's beliefs, scientific or religious, because they might possibly conflict with the way they approach their own beliefs. It all seems like a terrible waste of energy to me...
OH WELL!!!
Speaking of wastes of energy, I just posted in a thread on an internet commentary forum!
Anyway, good job on the bee research, that part of the story seams neato.
I've never had that one yet! But I would like to. The closest I've come is Rochefort Trappist 10, which is possibly the one beer I like better than Devil Dancer Triple IPA. Crazy Belgians!
Also, to the other poster who replied to my first post, there's no rotten corn in the beer I drink. It's all barley, if not wheat. I've never had/heard of corn beer, and I don't drink rice beer. And, it's still cheaper than wine!
I already have a beer with "enhanced levels of these compounds". It's called Devil Dancer Tripel IPA, it's brewed in michigan, and it's delicious! There are a number of other beers like it, the style usually being called Imperial IPA, or double IPA.
The only problem, it's a bit...mmmm...strong, at 13.something percent alcohol, it's a bit more than the health types recommend you drink a day to get the wine like antioxidant effects from beer. My solution is to share my strong beers with friends, as I have no intention of giving myself a buzz every night.
Oh, one more problem, it's $12 a 4 pack...hmmm...
Maybe 'the government' can subsidize extra hoppy (especially dry hopped) ales? You know...for health?
I too, am glad someone is finally pointing out that a velociraptor is a tiny little thing compared to the 7 foot tall creatures displayed in the movies.
And besides the overall size, the head shape is definitely Deinonychus, taller vs. the long, thin head of velociraptors.
As someone who was a big Dienonychus fan from about the age of 10 when I read about them in National Geographic, this offended me, er, mildly.
It's actually quite fun, and quite a promising technology. You have a convinient little "volume" control attached to the system so you can choose how strong you want it to be, and if you turn it all the way up, it's very hard to walk straight, and if you don't fight it, you can almost fall over.
After they would make people look silly in a public demonstration with the remote control, they show different applications by hooking it up to a racing game and a music demo. Being a Gran Turismo fan, being able to feel the cornering force somewhat was quite nice.
There was one significant problem with the system however. They need a better method for delivering the electrical current than was used in the siggraph demo in which you had to wipe behind your ears with a wet towel. After the moisture evaporated it would start to burn, and my headset was somewhat painful by the end. I'm sure that's not too large a hurdle to overcome, especially for home users vs. a public demonstration to hundreds of conference attendies.
My x86 laptop (hp zt3000 a year old already) does a good 3.5 hours on a battery, and some other x86 laptops last a lot longer than mine, and lots of those big 17 inch widescreen laptops last a good 2-3 minutes (ok, that's an exhaggeration).
Anyway, since many of intel's biggest advances lately have been in the mobile computing, I wouldn't worry about the future of apple laptops.
It all depends on how you cook. I do a lot of high heat cooking, and to get the pan that hot before I put food or oil in it, I'd get it to the temperature where teflon gets too hot and starts releasing gas into the air. For instance, when I cook a burger on the stove, the pan is probably at least 500 degrees F, which is too hot for teflon. But most teflon coated pans are thin and don't retain heat well enough for proper browning anyway, so that's where the good ol cast iron skillet comes in. Nerd friendly food personality Alton Brown has confronted the teflon fumes on his television program Good Eats in a "mythbusters" style episode. That 'myth' was verified, though I forget how thorough his reasoning was.
But I don't know who's getting their pants that hot!!! (which probably is besides the point, but it sounds funny, so I said it)
You can sort the list by Alphabetical, Actor, and Date. No sorting by Director? No thank you. Directors are the central artists of films (at least most that should be on lists like that), and to not let the list be sorted by director, but by the onscreen talent, indicates to be a lack of familiarity with the art of filmmaking to me.
Though, to contradict my subject, I do really think it is a decent list, though I don't agree with some selections.
I've done similar testing in my Protege 5, though I didn't drive THAT aggressive, just a little bit, and in both sides of the test I was driving on a very fast highway everyday, and who am I to question the speed of traffic on 696?
Anyway, driving like my normal self, having fun with the revs and the right pedal, I got about 30.6MPG. Driving like, oh, maybe Flanders, I got about 33.2MPG. It does make a difference most of the time. That's also why my friend in his mazda 6 gets HORRIBLE mileage, cause he floors it all the time.
There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding of the term "intelligent design" here.
It is not a fundamentalist belief that the earth was literally created in 6 days about 14,000 year ago or whatever.
Intelligent design, from my understanding, is the belief that the natural laws of physics and chemistry and biology, that we understand through the ideas of science, such as the theory of evolution were the forces that God used to shape our universe to the way it is so that humans would exist (not excluding other life forms elsewhere, that is merely an unknown). An advocate of intelligent design spoke at my church a few years ago, and my parents encouraged me to attend his talk with them. I went expecting some spaz proclaiming the usual battle of God vs. scientific thinking and was pleased to find someone speaking of them as ideas that are in no way mutually exclusive (since we can't forseeably scientifically prove or disprove the existance of God). His name was Dr. Hugh Ross, and he's an astrophysicist or cosmologist at Berkley or something like that. He and his buddies have a website, http://www.reasons.org/ or something like that, if you want to hear them rant about the latest science and how they see it relating to issues of faith.
Anyway, the one thing that both scientists and religious people need is a nice dose of humility. Evolution, to us, was taught as fact, not theory, and that's BS, at least partially. Likewise, religious people should be satisfied with science taught with humility, and should butt out so long as teachers are doing a good job of teaching kids about scientific ideas and theories in an honest way. Creationism discussion can occur in classes about religions, not science classes.
Now, I'm no physicist, but wouldn't a human body reach terminal velocity, like a sky diver, and isn't that somewhere around 300 miles per hour or something? Of course in the upper, thinner atmosphere would allow a higher terminal velocity.
But anyway, what I'm getting at, is it possible for a human falling purely by the acceleration of gravity in our atmosphere with ambient temperature not exceeding, lets say, 80 degrees at the surface... Is it possible for that falling human to heat up much at all?
Sure seems to me like the convection of all that cold air up there would completely overpower atmospheric friction at purely gravity attainable velocities.
Sure, texturemaps are useful, but there are plenty of other things that take up memory. Let alone that with color maps, spec maps, normal maps, perhaps even displacement maps, it's not hard to exceed 512 megs for us non-realtime artists. Heck, when rendering at large resolutions for print, some of our maps are bigger than 512 megs. Geometry for instance is one. And if you start raytracing it, then you might have an acceleration grid to fit into memory somewhere (yes, I know raytracing in significant quantities isn't part of todays games, but we're already playing those at decent framerates).
Oh, and shadowmaps, or if Pixar lets us all use them, deep shadow maps. And lightmaps. Who knows who could find ways for fast lookups of irradiance information, stuff like that, maybe even photons.
And, like others have said, there's more to the life of graphics cards than games. There's scientific visualization, there's production rendering software that use graphics cards to varying degrees, and as the capabilities of the cards increase, so will their utilization, and then we'll be wanting even more RAM on board.
I could go on for hours and be boring like that, but, anyway, yeah, I think not being able to see a use for 512 megs of RAM on a graphics card shows significant lack of vision.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm an occasional storm chaser, definitely not a meteorologist. I've been chasing a couple times, and I've only seen one traffic jam, which was mildly stupid, not terribly dangerous, and composed of about two thirds recreational chasers, one third more science-y looking types.
For the most part, when people are out there, they seem to have good attitudes, but in both the chaser and science communities there are some big, terrible egos that really have little tolerance for people who aren't doing the exact same thing the exact same way they are. But that's just whining, that's not the real problem.
The real problem is common sense, which is ever slightly less uncommon with the science crowd than with the recreation crowd. Both are capable of blocking roads, impeding traffic, and being a general nuisance. Again, the recreation crowd is slightly worse at this because there are slightly more people proportionally in that crowd that lack appreciation for their surroundings due to overexcited-ness and some of them just being silly kids and/or hillbillies out looking for fun. That said, some people who think they are big shots because they're "scientists", and the world should get out of their way, and the same problems emerge.
So, to the scientist community, I say, complaining about chasers is NOT the answer to your difficulties. Cooperation and education ARE answers (though imperfect as there will always be some yahoos out there being stupid). Sure, the science community has the best tools out there for doing legitimate research, but they're usually slow groups and many participants don't have the skill or experience to get to areas of interest like many of the best chasers do. If chasers were utilized as a scouting tool by Vortex and other search entities, given proper chasing protocols, and for those who show they're responsible enough, some actual data acquisition tools, Vortex could have a lot more success and everyone could be happier and have a good time too. Many chasers are really just a lot better at getting to storms (safely), than the researchers, it's just a fact (of course, it's also a fact that a lot of inexperienced chasers suck, but whatever, hopefully they can at least have positive examples on how to conduct themselves safely and respectfully). I mean, he may be a complete spaz that rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but Reed Timmer and crew have a LOT more success getting to tornadoes than any researchers. There are a lot of other chasers out there who are also very good and if treated with respect would be quite happy to aid in a research project.
In other words, CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?! (it's better than whining behind each other's backs, we don't want this to start being like that awful Twister movie).
As someone who's worked with data from some very expensive scanners and interpolation techniques, I can say that nothing I've seen yet (other than physically point armature scanning, which still requires significant cleanup) produces a directly usable result on a surface a like a car. Scans can be used as reference for talented 3D modelers to create more useful wireframes off of however.
And to the point of the ruling, since there are so many things that can be called "wireframes" (original CAD data, something someone modeled at home from photos or their imagination, point clouds or other capture attempts) that should/could have very different positions in the copywrite world, I expect this area of law to get more even more confusing in the years to come. I just know, if I leak any of the secret CAD data I have access to on a daily basis, that all hell would break loose.
...is when my friends and I went to see Mission to Mars, a film by Brian DePalma. We laughed SOOooooo hard at the absolutely ridiculous 3rd act of this film (and a bit at the simply stupid 1st and 2nd acts too), that others in the theater, who HAD to be less cynical and obnoxious than a bunch of early 20s art students, were also laughing heartily at this cinematic piece of crap by the end. Had we not been there and got the ball rolling, I wouldn't be surprised if people simply would have sat quietly, being annoyed by the stream of cliche, contrivances and cheesiness.
This just in, people, when given access to public communication often say stupid things out of ignorance or personal/collaborative agendas! Even more shocking is that people occasionally believe the things that others say in such a format!
Obviously the format is to blame, so therefore we need to look critically at the regulations involving sharpie markers, cheap paint, and posterboard. Oh, this is about Youtube, er, uh, yes, computer...security...validity...media...something-or-other...meh, nevermind...
It seems to me that with either a hierarchical approach (either within the contents of one article, or in separate articles addressing terms and specific issues in more detail), one could construct articles where it's easy for a layman to read the outline and the basics of the information as well as for the obsessive nerds to delve into the depths of all the detailed terms and eccentricities related to a given subject.
I've been reading a lot about meteorology lately on wikipedia, and it seems that lots of the articles about things people might hear mentioned on television weather are written with at least introductions in simple terms. However, I can dig deeper and find out about the dynamics of convective vs. orographic precipitation if I want to.
Anyway, it seems to be that in such instances we should always be striving for an organized and cohesive presentation of all available information, and that having things presented in a way in which the reader encounters as much detail and complexity as they chose. And furthermore it seems that hierarchically branched structure using links and sub articles and so on and so forth, which is so much easier in Wiki format than it was in print, really allows us much greater possibilities for organizing our information for the best possible experience for the reader.
So choosing detail or easy to read average joe type articles exclusively seems incredibly lame.
I've rode in a couple modern European diesel powered cars and seen many more, and even some of the new ones in America that use proper piezoelectric direct injection, I can say that not all diesels spew forth filth (the filth you're seeing is soot and particulate matter). Reducing the sulfur content of diesel fuel and using new injection technology (the techniques for fuel delivery and timing are constantly being improved with these), the emissions of diesel engines can be quite good. If big rig trucks were more modern in design (mostly the fuel system), combined with the new, much cleaner fuel that we now have here in America, giant trucks wouldn't need to spew forth much of any visible emissions when operating under heavy load like most of them do now.
Of course, this doesn't solve the Nitrogen Oxide problem (solutions coming such as Urea injection catalysts, and a nifty little nitrogen process catalyst from Honda).
Also, get ready for all internal combustion engines to operate much like diesel engines, regardless of fuel. Many car companies are looking into compression ignition for Octane engines because it will allow a nice jump in thermal efficiency under many driving conditions. Mercedes offers one now in Europe as a 3.5 liter V6, and though it's early for the technique, it already has more power and better mileage in the same car as the traditional spark only ignition version of the engine. And as techniques for NOx control and engine mapping improve the performance and efficiency will only improve more (and better integrate with spark ignition more). Still, it won't make an Octane type fuel engine match the Torque and efficiency of a real proper Cetane (diesel) engine.
The idea of replacing the batteries in electric and hybrid electric cars is not a new one. BMW was at one point determined to use ultracapacitors in it's hybrids, rather than batteries, because without chemical reactions taking place, the storage of electricity is much more efficient than batteries. BMW has apparently abandoned that in their alliance with DCX and GM on their hybrid system, but since BMW hasn't announced any of their own hybrids, we can't exactly tell yet. I believe also that it would allow greater maximum output from a car, if one were so inclined to let a couple/few hundred kilowatts go to the electric motors.
The problem is that the ultra capacitors haven't been quite ultra enough yet. I'm no expert on capacities of capacitors, but you're limited by size/surface area in the capacitor and 'they' seemed to 500 miles is quite a claim, and unless they have a specific car, it's not a usefully specific claim. And if they do have a vehicle, it's best to make sure it's not a lightweight go kart like an Elise (or the new Tesla car, which is an Elise), as those cars tend to not please typical automotive tastes.
There is still potential out there to make much more effective capacitors. I believe MIT students/professors/people of some sort came up with a Carbon Nano-fiber fuzzy capacitor that multiplied many times the surface area inside a capacitor on which the charge is built up by making the charge holding surface out gagillions of those little fibers. That sounded like a hilariously expensive proposition to me, but perhaps it's not as expensive as my imagination makes it out to be, or it could even inspire others to find similar and less expensive ways to make significant advances in the field of ultracapacitors.
At the very least, companies who make outrageous claims like this one bring awareness to different technologies and methodologies such as capacitors vs. batteries. I'll be interested to see if/when someone brings a capacitor driven car to market, be it these guys, or BMW, or whoever.
I just downloaded that ringtone, and even on my laptops crappy speakers at low volume I found it to be piercingly loud and annoying at the ripe old age of 26. I guess I'm not surpised I can hear it, since when I visit my parents large house I can tell if they have the TV on by the time I get to the front door (tv is at the back of the slightly large house). As a kid I was always suprised other's, even many young people, didn't notice that noise.
I'm not sure why kids would want that as a ringtone, since it's not like having a secret ringtone makes it any easier to secretly talk on the phone I guess a more discreet alarm for incoming text messages may be more "practical", but a discerning teacher would be able to notice kids texting by, you know, looking and noticing.
Anyway, back to the Mosquito device, I'm sure if it can be found, it can be simply sabotaged. I'm sure the little speaker wouldn't work too well if it had, say, superglue or something caked onto it, and unless it's sophisticated enough to notice that it's been tampered with and flash an error code or something, since the old fart using it can't here it, he'd be none the wiser.
This stability control system, if this review is to be trusted, is actually calibrated well for spirited driving. That would make it different from most stability control systems in a fairly relivant manner.
Jaguar has had such systems before, but, possibly due to the less than optimal dynamics of x types, s types and xjs, the systems have had more to do, or just weren't tuned well.
If some of these reviews are to be trusted, Jag actually made a darn fine car for once...maybe...
While building a car like that is an amazing achievement for any young people, the hype in this article about the car, or that is critical of the auto industry, is just plain silly.
As others have pointed out, a big reason that car goes fast is likely that it is very low weight, and if those kids and their shop teacher can find better ways to cut weight without making it too expensive or sacrificing safety better than...say...Lotus engineering...well, then I'd be damned impressed.
More importantly, the soybean oil thing. It's not like car companies don't know about good deisel engines, since they sell millions of them in europe that go in passenger cars every year. And, it's not like they don't know about biodiesel either (same for the fuel industry). I do believe that biodiesel is being mixed into regular diesel products around the US right now, because from some sources it's quite cheap, and it helps emmissions. And, ignoring the problem of the minor-moderate conversion it takes to make a car biodiesel ready, there's one much bigger problem, and that's the cold weather of much of the united states. Biodiesel gels a good bit sooner than petrol diesel, making even significant mixes of it useless to large populations for a number of months out of the year.
I'm very pro-biodiesel (as long as it doesn't restrict food supply, I think fighting hunger is much more important), but it's just not going to solve many problems on it's own.
Also of note, are cars like the Opel/Vauxhall EcoSpeedster. This car was built by good ol' GM (though much of it is based on Lotus parts) a couple years ago in Europe, and it wasn't quite as fast as these kid's car (0-60 in about 5.6 if I remember correctly). The car also got about 90 miles per gallon if driven gently, and was still in the mid 30s in an endurance test of the car at 150 miles per hour (if I remember correctly, I'm too lazy to look this stuff up). That level of efficiency is MUCH better than what these kids are getting, and that shows what happens when a big company lets some of it's engineers go to town on a concept for lightweight, efficient diesel, and good aerodynamics (.22 drag coefficient! that's why it was so efficient at speed!).
Hype aside, hopefully project like what these kids made will promote ideas like biodiesel, and diesel in general, to increase awareness of these things so they can be intelligently integrated into infrastructures like the US.
I wonder what happens when one runs Beer through this machine.
And I don't mean Budwieser and the like, I mean Imperal IPAs, Imperial Stouts, Belgian's of all kinds, English strong ales, etc, the kinds of beer that I have aging in my "beer cellar" right now.
I've had some suprising success aging beers (my oldest is probably 10 months) removing mild skunk and metallic flavours, mellowing, bring out some subtle dark fruitiness, and it would be nice to be able to do that faster!
I don't think most american microbreweries who make such products would be "above" using such devices either, as long as they actually work. Of course, you won't get the character of wood aging (vanillin!) with such a device.
I am so sick of this ID argument (so sick that I will apparently join in? how's that for logic!)
The first time ID was explained to me, it was by an advocate of it, who's name was Hugh Ross, and he was talking at my parent's church, and he's a cosmologist or something of the sort, fancypants professor/researcher. He explained it as science and christian ideals aren't really neccissarily contradictory, since if there was a God, He created a world/universe in which the rules of science are pretty much in control, in a manner as such that it would create life and planets such as this.
The one argument with scientific theory was that Dr. Ross thought that it was possible that the creation of humans was done by God himself because we are different/special enough. This is an easy view to take or leave, and is obviously a religious belief.
Where this ID stuff has gone in the past few years since I heard Mr. Ross talking about it mystifies me....well, not it doesn't, it just annoys me. Some advocates of it have apparently thought to exploit what was once an idea to quiet the discord between scientists and those with religious faith, and turn it into a vehicle to bring God into the science classroom. I don't support this, as a christian, and I can certainly understand why many evolutionists would have an adverse reaction to this. I can also understand why many religious people are upset at how theories of evolution and such are somewhat sloppily portrayed as fact in education (this was the case in my education, we were told human embryos have gills, therefore, evolution. it's my understanding now [which could of course be false, given the spazness of the issue] that the while gill thing is silly and was made up by some scientist guy, who was refuted by his scientist colleagues, and somehow his drawings got into the wrong hands, and because "accepted facts").
I just see people continuing to be afraid of each other's beliefs, scientific or religious, because they might possibly conflict with the way they approach their own beliefs. It all seems like a terrible waste of energy to me...
OH WELL!!!
Speaking of wastes of energy, I just posted in a thread on an internet commentary forum!
Anyway, good job on the bee research, that part of the story seams neato.
I think that one useful part of the site got slashdotted! Oh well...
I've never had that one yet! But I would like to. The closest I've come is Rochefort Trappist 10, which is possibly the one beer I like better than Devil Dancer Triple IPA. Crazy Belgians!
Also, to the other poster who replied to my first post, there's no rotten corn in the beer I drink. It's all barley, if not wheat. I've never had/heard of corn beer, and I don't drink rice beer.
And, it's still cheaper than wine!
I already have a beer with "enhanced levels of these compounds". It's called Devil Dancer Tripel IPA, it's brewed in michigan, and it's delicious! There are a number of other beers like it, the style usually being called Imperial IPA, or double IPA.
The only problem, it's a bit...mmmm...strong, at 13.something percent alcohol, it's a bit more than the health types recommend you drink a day to get the wine like antioxidant effects from beer. My solution is to share my strong beers with friends, as I have no intention of giving myself a buzz every night.
Oh, one more problem, it's $12 a 4 pack...hmmm...
Maybe 'the government' can subsidize extra hoppy (especially dry hopped) ales? You know...for health?
I too, am glad someone is finally pointing out that a velociraptor is a tiny little thing compared to the 7 foot tall creatures displayed in the movies.
And besides the overall size, the head shape is definitely Deinonychus, taller vs. the long, thin head of velociraptors.
As someone who was a big Dienonychus fan from about the age of 10 when I read about them in National Geographic, this offended me, er, mildly.
It's actually quite fun, and quite a promising technology.
You have a convinient little "volume" control attached to the system so you can choose how strong you want it to be, and if you turn it all the way up, it's very hard to walk straight, and if you don't fight it, you can almost fall over.
After they would make people look silly in a public demonstration with the remote control, they show different applications by hooking it up to a racing game and a music demo. Being a Gran Turismo fan, being able to feel the cornering force somewhat was quite nice.
There was one significant problem with the system however. They need a better method for delivering the electrical current than was used in the siggraph demo in which you had to wipe behind your ears with a wet towel. After the moisture evaporated it would start to burn, and my headset was somewhat painful by the end.
I'm sure that's not too large a hurdle to overcome, especially for home users vs. a public demonstration to hundreds of conference attendies.
My x86 laptop (hp zt3000 a year old already) does a good 3.5 hours on a battery, and some other x86 laptops last a lot longer than mine, and lots of those big 17 inch widescreen laptops last a good 2-3 minutes (ok, that's an exhaggeration).
Anyway, since many of intel's biggest advances lately have been in the mobile computing, I wouldn't worry about the future of apple laptops.
It all depends on how you cook. I do a lot of high heat cooking, and to get the pan that hot before I put food or oil in it, I'd get it to the temperature where teflon gets too hot and starts releasing gas into the air.
For instance, when I cook a burger on the stove, the pan is probably at least 500 degrees F, which is too hot for teflon. But most teflon coated pans are thin and don't retain heat well enough for proper browning anyway, so that's where the good ol cast iron skillet comes in.
Nerd friendly food personality Alton Brown has confronted the teflon fumes on his television program Good Eats in a "mythbusters" style episode. That 'myth' was verified, though I forget how thorough his reasoning was.
But I don't know who's getting their pants that hot!!! (which probably is besides the point, but it sounds funny, so I said it)
...Next year I'll have more choices for modestly expensive but well designed lightweight laptops and we ventilated workstations.
Another silly question, if OSX will run on Intel, why not AMD as well?
You can sort the list by Alphabetical, Actor, and Date.
No sorting by Director? No thank you. Directors are the central artists of films (at least most that should be on lists like that), and to not let the list be sorted by director, but by the onscreen talent, indicates to be a lack of familiarity with the art of filmmaking to me.
Though, to contradict my subject, I do really think it is a decent list, though I don't agree with some selections.
I've done similar testing in my Protege 5, though I didn't drive THAT aggressive, just a little bit, and in both sides of the test I was driving on a very fast highway everyday, and who am I to question the speed of traffic on 696?
Anyway, driving like my normal self, having fun with the revs and the right pedal, I got about 30.6MPG. Driving like, oh, maybe Flanders, I got about 33.2MPG.
It does make a difference most of the time.
That's also why my friend in his mazda 6 gets HORRIBLE mileage, cause he floors it all the time.
There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding of the term "intelligent design" here.
It is not a fundamentalist belief that the earth was literally created in 6 days about 14,000 year ago or whatever.
Intelligent design, from my understanding, is the belief that the natural laws of physics and chemistry and biology, that we understand through the ideas of science, such as the theory of evolution were the forces that God used to shape our universe to the way it is so that humans would exist (not excluding other life forms elsewhere, that is merely an unknown).
An advocate of intelligent design spoke at my church a few years ago, and my parents encouraged me to attend his talk with them. I went expecting some spaz proclaiming the usual battle of God vs. scientific thinking and was pleased to find someone speaking of them as ideas that are in no way mutually exclusive (since we can't forseeably scientifically prove or disprove the existance of God). His name was Dr. Hugh Ross, and he's an astrophysicist or cosmologist at Berkley or something like that.
He and his buddies have a website, http://www.reasons.org/ or something like that, if you want to hear them rant about the latest science and how they see it relating to issues of faith.
Anyway, the one thing that both scientists and religious people need is a nice dose of humility. Evolution, to us, was taught as fact, not theory, and that's BS, at least partially. Likewise, religious people should be satisfied with science taught with humility, and should butt out so long as teachers are doing a good job of teaching kids about scientific ideas and theories in an honest way. Creationism discussion can occur in classes about religions, not science classes.
Or at least that's how I see it.
Now, I'm no physicist, but wouldn't a human body reach terminal velocity, like a sky diver, and isn't that somewhere around 300 miles per hour or something?
Of course in the upper, thinner atmosphere would allow a higher terminal velocity.
But anyway, what I'm getting at, is it possible for a human falling purely by the acceleration of gravity in our atmosphere with ambient temperature not exceeding, lets say, 80 degrees at the surface... Is it possible for that falling human to heat up much at all?
Sure seems to me like the convection of all that cold air up there would completely overpower atmospheric friction at purely gravity attainable velocities.
Sure, texturemaps are useful, but there are plenty of other things that take up memory. Let alone that with color maps, spec maps, normal maps, perhaps even displacement maps, it's not hard to exceed 512 megs for us non-realtime artists. Heck, when rendering at large resolutions for print, some of our maps are bigger than 512 megs.
Geometry for instance is one. And if you start raytracing it, then you might have an acceleration grid to fit into memory somewhere (yes, I know raytracing in significant quantities isn't part of todays games, but we're already playing those at decent framerates).
Oh, and shadowmaps, or if Pixar lets us all use them, deep shadow maps. And lightmaps. Who knows who could find ways for fast lookups of irradiance information, stuff like that, maybe even photons.
And, like others have said, there's more to the life of graphics cards than games. There's scientific visualization, there's production rendering software that use graphics cards to varying degrees, and as the capabilities of the cards increase, so will their utilization, and then we'll be wanting even more RAM on board.
I could go on for hours and be boring like that, but, anyway, yeah, I think not being able to see a use for 512 megs of RAM on a graphics card shows significant lack of vision.