Many metals (and a few non-metals like polyacetylene) superconduct (lose all electrical resistance) when cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero. The temperature where superconductivity starts is known as the critical temperature TC
Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer figured out how this works back in the 50s: see a quick intro here. They won the Nobel for BCS theory in 1971.
However, the highest temperature found (and predicted possible) for a conventional BCS superconductor was about 30K. In the mid-80s a group found ceramics that superconducted at 35K, there are now ones known that superconduct at 77K at room pressure. (Important since you can use cheap, easy to store liquid nitrogen to cool rather than very expensive liquid helium.) These materials became known as high-TC superconductors.
Nobody knows how these work, although there are a lot of people trying to find out. A workable theory that explained how this happens while ruling out the other competing theories would get you a Nobel in short order. Manage to come up with one that can predict the composition of a room temperature variety and you'll be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Not really. A lot of small science has been done, but there's lots left. (Note: I'm defining small as "Can be done with a single investigator, a few grad students and a modest NSF grant" as opposed to projects in high-energy physics where the author list is longer than the paper.)
Want an instant Nobel prize? Come up with an equivalent to BCS theory for high-TC superconductivity. My bet is that this is going to come out of a group of no more than 5.
Amateurs can still make significant discoveries in astronomy, paleotology or geology with equipment you can buy in Wal-Mart. Shoemaker-Levy-9 was an amateur find. A friend of mine in college stumbled across a fossil while looking at sediments in a local stream: the fossil was of a walrus that wasn't thought to exist anywhere in North America or anywhere near the time is was dated to: various scientists had to recheck their assumptions of what the climate was like at that time and place when he published.
As you point out, there is a *lot* of science in computational biology out there still: cheap Linux clusters bring the price of this kind of work way down. I could afford to do it at home if I had the time. Saying this is a new field is somewhat disengenuous: virtually all non-trivial new discoveries come in "new" fields. Major discoveries create those new fields in the first place.
Usenet failed to evolve along with the rest of the Internet.
I find this an odd comment. With a decent newreader (MT-Newswatcher for you Mac folks), USENET has features that web boards can only dream of: it's still years ahead of anything else on the web for discussion. Can you imagine how much nicer/. would be with the ability to create intelligent scorefiles with color-coding? Or no more waiting for a web page to load? No blinking ads covering half the page?
Through Google (nee Deja) I can get USENET postings back to the early 90s almost instantly. Web boards often don't archive, so everything there is lost after a few months
I can't get USENET at my current work (save through Google) so I spend time on/., K5 and FARK. Other than the Photoshop contests on FARK, I can't think of anything any of these boards does better than trn+a good news feed did back in 1990.
I know of one know-nothing "Exchange admin" (this is his only job, in a company of only 500 people or so) who makes $75k/year even now and spends half his day gaming.
Obviously not a very competent admin. He should be able to spend all of his time gaming.
Seriously, the sign of a really good IT person (Windows, Unix, etc) is that they can spend a good part of their time goofing off. Why? Because they designed the systems right in the first place and then fix any problems at the base rather than adding layers of ad-hoc patches. Thus, there are very few problem calls and a lot of UT2003.
I'm surprised. I've got a bunch of presets on my radio: an ad comes on and it's not more than a second before I'm punching buttons. I'll even bail out during NPR sponsorship announcements, and they're a 100x less irritating than most ads. (Hey, I send NPR money anyway.)
I'd think TV ads would have been more effective. I can come in the middle of a song and it's no big deal: switching in the middle of a program is a lot harder. I typically mute the ad and pick up a book, but I can often still see the ad.
Even with the load spike caused by the software problem, I could have hosted the system with no trouble from this box here in my dorm room.
Quite possibly not. I work at a small (~750 student) college and our PC-based system (Quad-Xeon with a gig of RAM) fell over during online reg. You might be surprised to learn how IO intensive these student information programs are. When the entire school gets up at 7:30 in a mad dash to register for the popular courses load spikes are kinda high. We're trying to work out a system to keep the spikes down, probably by having designated time slots for people to register.
This wasn't such a case. This was a professor that halfway through her course decided she didn't like the text she had selected and was too embarrassed to make the students pay for another one.
I went to a talk at EDUCAUSE last month by the head of the MIT project. Copyright is one of their toughest problems: how do you make publically available the reams of material that professors want to use in their courses? [1]
Her example was an architecture course that isn't listed on OpenCourseware. IIRC, it has something like 800 images on the private MIT website for the class. Every single one of those images has to be cleared before putting the site up for the public: she said they've done about 680 so far. Many of the images can't be published: the owner simply won't allow it, so you have to find some other source or simply drop it from the site.
"The system doesn't scale" was the basic conclusion. They have a small group of people doing nothing else. I can't imagine they are paying them enough.
[1] Most of this material is, to be blunt, pirated. (I'm speaking as an instructional tech guy here: I have to deal with these issues.) Faculty will happy scan entire books worth of art, digitize huge tracts of books and in one notable case last year, actually *making multiple photocopies of an entire textbook.* We deal with it by sticking our heads in the sand and blocking anyone outside of our school from seeing it, as do most schools, but I pity MIT: they actually have to sort through the mess.
Because some people often have an awful lot of tabs open at the same time. I more often than not have 20 or more at a time. Try fitting all that in the taskbar when you've got other applications running, along with the Start button and a fair few systray applets.
While I love tabbed browsing in general, this really isn't a problem if you know how to work around it. I've got my taskbar on the right side of my 1600x1200 monitor: I can fit something like 45-50 tabs as well as the start button, five rows of systray applets and five rows of one click buttons. (And I can still read the text on every tab since they are all constant width.)
I run out of memory long before I run out of space on the task bar, but then again running Mozilla, IE, Photoshop, Emacs, Access and Flash all at the same time tends to run you out of memory in a mere 6 tabs.
If you would read the actual Apple HIG, they say that apps which are meant to replace a real-world item/function (such as Calculator, iCal, iTunes) should be built with the brushed metal look.
They break this numerous places: in fact, virtually everywhere.
By the definition above, *everything* should be brushed metal. Word processor replaces pencil/typewriter. Spreadsheet replaces graph paper. Sherlock replaces phonebook/dictionary. Photoshop replaces sissors/paste/darkroom.
If you try and tighten it down to obvious objects like iTunes replacing a radio, then why is iChat brushed metal? Why is iMovie brushed metal and Final Cut Pro Aqua? They do exactly the same thing!
This is one area where Apple is just out to lunch. The HI folks had nothing to do with brushed metal: it's clearly a Steve "That's cool: go with it" decision.
Got a call from one of the help desk people yesterday: he was confused about a Disk First Aid message on a Mac here.
Yep, you guessed it... B-tree was basically spaghetti: reformat and reinstall time. I've seen it happen a few times before: the most spectacular being a crash during a defrag. Basically, nothing pointed to the right file: all the icons were there, but the info in them was basically noise.
Re:Blame college tuitions, not the dot-coms....
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 2
I agree. College tuition has been growing like the stock market should. It's a sin, really; do college administrators fail to care or understand the burden they place on students?
They understand. Believe me, they understand.
Do you understand why they are increasing? No, it's not because of the huge pay hikes of college professors. Our raise this year was virtually nothing: my previous employer (Virginia Tech, a large state school) is under a salary freeze and probably will be for another few years. Finding PhDs who will work for less than $50k/year isn't all that easy when they can make twice that in the private sector.
Bloated faculty+staff? Well, my previous employer is busy with layoffs right now: Luckily I beat the door out before my position was eliminated. My current employer (small liberal-arts college) is currently attriting through retirement in the hopes of avoiding layoffs, but it's probably not going to work.
Huge budgets? Don't make me laugh: we operate on resources that the private sector spends on free sodas. We cut those 5% across the board this year: next year will be worse.
Huge building projects? That would be why we've basically put on hold the renovations to all buildings on this campus? Tech at least got the new chemistry building: the one I was in was ~80 years old and had not been effectively renovated in all that time.
So why is it costing more? Huge state budget cuts for the state supported folks. Tech lost ~$25 million in state funding last year and they will lose about that much again next year. For many smaller schools, we rely on endowment income to help fund the school. Notice the stock market lately? Our endowment is down about 35%, and we're doing a lot better than most places. Run a deficit until the market comes back? We already do.
And for all schools, we've been expected to do more and more over the years. Yes, it was cheaper in the 1950s when we didn't have to pay for IT, the library kept only books, classrooms only had a chalkboard, there was no health center or psychological services or childcare, the chemistry department didn't have NMRs and biology never needed anything more than a few pickled frogs.
"Well, just cut some of that", you say. Great: as soon as we do good faculty stop working here and good students go elsewhere.
A modern education costs money. It costs a lot of money. Feel free to start your own college if you think you can do better.
You do realize that this sort of thing took hours and hours on a $100,000 Avid previously. And now you're doing it on (approx.) $5k worth of Apple hardware with no special boards or drives.
Of course I do. I'm amazed I can do it at all. I'm just responding to the claim that the current G4s are fast enough to do everything one might want. They aren't even close.
And when the 8-way 1THz G9s finally make FCP totally realtime no matter how many effects you do, I'll go back to my old life as a quantum chemist. I don't care what processor you care to name, it's not fast enough for Spartan, and it's never going to be fast enough.
G4 chips have more than enough "under the hood" to comfortable kick the likes of Photoshop and Illustrator around, not to mention the iApps, and everybody's favorite Final Cut Pro.
You have *got* to be kidding. Enough power for FCP? Dude, I routinely run 30+ minute renders for a 3 minute chunk of video on a 933MHz G4, and I'm not even doing all that much. A few filters, some text generation, a mask or two and it's walk away from the machine time.
Apple could be shipping 8-way 2GHz G4s and it still wouldn't be enough.
There is no reason anyone here can't work out 45mins a day.
Don't have an infant in the house, do you?:^)
My son was ~6 months before I was able to exercise regularly, and that was mostly because my neighbor convinced me to get up before the sun to go run once he was sleeping through the night. It's virtually impossible to get up and exercise when you've been awake at 1 and 4AM, you don't have time at work and you deal with the baby in the evening since your wife is exhausted.
I can get in 30 minutes 3x a week right now, but I really need to add another session or two for strength work.
Re:Save yourself 15K...
on
Skydriving
·
· Score: 2
You might be surprised. I just got rid of my '89 Dodge Colt, although it only had 113K on it. (Traded it in towards a '96 Accord.) It wasn't in that great of shape: it ran and the AC worked, but the rest of it had seen better days.
The dealer sold it the next day: he barely had time to clean it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer figured out how this works back in the 50s: see a quick intro here. They won the Nobel for BCS theory in 1971.
However, the highest temperature found (and predicted possible) for a conventional BCS superconductor was about 30K. In the mid-80s a group found ceramics that superconducted at 35K, there are now ones known that superconduct at 77K at room pressure. (Important since you can use cheap, easy to store liquid nitrogen to cool rather than very expensive liquid helium.) These materials became known as high-TC superconductors.
Nobody knows how these work, although there are a lot of people trying to find out. A workable theory that explained how this happens while ruling out the other competing theories would get you a Nobel in short order. Manage to come up with one that can predict the composition of a room temperature variety and you'll be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
the small science has been done.
Not really. A lot of small science has been done, but there's lots left. (Note: I'm defining small as "Can be done with a single investigator, a few grad students and a modest NSF grant" as opposed to projects in high-energy physics where the author list is longer than the paper.)
Want an instant Nobel prize? Come up with an equivalent to BCS theory for high-TC superconductivity. My bet is that this is going to come out of a group of no more than 5.
Amateurs can still make significant discoveries in astronomy, paleotology or geology with equipment you can buy in Wal-Mart. Shoemaker-Levy-9 was an amateur find. A friend of mine in college stumbled across a fossil while looking at sediments in a local stream: the fossil was of a walrus that wasn't thought to exist anywhere in North America or anywhere near the time is was dated to: various scientists had to recheck their assumptions of what the climate was like at that time and place when he published.
As you point out, there is a *lot* of science in computational biology out there still: cheap Linux clusters bring the price of this kind of work way down. I could afford to do it at home if I had the time. Saying this is a new field is somewhat disengenuous: virtually all non-trivial new discoveries come in "new" fields. Major discoveries create those new fields in the first place.
Usenet failed to evolve along with the rest of the Internet.
I find this an odd comment. With a decent newreader (MT-Newswatcher for you Mac folks), USENET has features that web boards can only dream of: it's still years ahead of anything else on the web for discussion. Can you imagine how much nicer /. would be with the ability to create intelligent scorefiles with color-coding? Or no more waiting for a web page to load? No blinking ads covering half the page?
Through Google (nee Deja) I can get USENET postings back to the early 90s almost instantly. Web boards often don't archive, so everything there is lost after a few months
I can't get USENET at my current work (save through Google) so I spend time on /., K5 and FARK. Other than the Photoshop contests on FARK, I can't think of anything any of these boards does better than trn+a good news feed did back in 1990.
I know of one know-nothing "Exchange admin" (this is his only job, in a company of only 500 people or so) who makes $75k/year even now and spends half his day gaming.
Obviously not a very competent admin. He should be able to spend all of his time gaming.
Seriously, the sign of a really good IT person (Windows, Unix, etc) is that they can spend a good part of their time goofing off. Why? Because they designed the systems right in the first place and then fix any problems at the base rather than adding layers of ad-hoc patches. Thus, there are very few problem calls and a lot of UT2003.
Not everyone has a high-speed link.
I'd think TV ads would have been more effective. I can come in the middle of a song and it's no big deal: switching in the middle of a program is a lot harder. I typically mute the ad and pick up a book, but I can often still see the ad.
http://nek.kids.R.us
Too bad there's no backwards R...
Even with the load spike caused by the software problem, I could have hosted the system with no trouble from this box here in my dorm room.
Quite possibly not. I work at a small (~750 student) college and our PC-based system (Quad-Xeon with a gig of RAM) fell over during online reg. You might be surprised to learn how IO intensive these student information programs are. When the entire school gets up at 7:30 in a mad dash to register for the popular courses load spikes are kinda high. We're trying to work out a system to keep the spikes down, probably by having designated time slots for people to register.
Doubles as a birth control device! Wear one of these puppies and watch the women cross the street to avoid you!
For senator, I had a choice between a Republican and two members of the tinfoil hat brigade. The Dems were scared to run anybody
For representative, I had a choice between an Republican and, well, nobody. Even the tinfoil hat brigades didn't bother to run anyone.
Democracy in action.
For senator, I had a choice between Warner(R) and two independants who I never heard of.
For representative, I had a choice between Goodlatte(R) and nobody. Even the tinfoil brigade stayed home.
We had two consitutional amendments, both so bland that the aforementioned tinfoil hatwearers were the only opposition.
Ok, I did get to vote on two bond measures, one of which was actually important.
Whoohoo! Democracy in action.
This wasn't such a case. This was a professor that halfway through her course decided she didn't like the text she had selected and was too embarrassed to make the students pay for another one.
I went to a talk at EDUCAUSE last month by the head of the MIT project. Copyright is one of their toughest problems: how do you make publically available the reams of material that professors want to use in their courses? [1]
Her example was an architecture course that isn't listed on OpenCourseware. IIRC, it has something like 800 images on the private MIT website for the class. Every single one of those images has to be cleared before putting the site up for the public: she said they've done about 680 so far. Many of the images can't be published: the owner simply won't allow it, so you have to find some other source or simply drop it from the site.
"The system doesn't scale" was the basic conclusion. They have a small group of people doing nothing else. I can't imagine they are paying them enough.
[1] Most of this material is, to be blunt, pirated. (I'm speaking as an instructional tech guy here: I have to deal with these issues.) Faculty will happy scan entire books worth of art, digitize huge tracts of books and in one notable case last year, actually *making multiple photocopies of an entire textbook.* We deal with it by sticking our heads in the sand and blocking anyone outside of our school from seeing it, as do most schools, but I pity MIT: they actually have to sort through the mess.
Because some people often have an awful lot of tabs open at the same time. I more often than not have 20 or more at a time. Try fitting all that in the taskbar when you've got other applications running, along with the Start button and a fair few systray applets.
While I love tabbed browsing in general, this really isn't a problem if you know how to work around it. I've got my taskbar on the right side of my 1600x1200 monitor: I can fit something like 45-50 tabs as well as the start button, five rows of systray applets and five rows of one click buttons. (And I can still read the text on every tab since they are all constant width.)
I run out of memory long before I run out of space on the task bar, but then again running Mozilla, IE, Photoshop, Emacs, Access and Flash all at the same time tends to run you out of memory in a mere 6 tabs.
It's not the number, it's the size, baby.
(And in seriousness, there's a fair number of theories that think life would not have come about without the large tides raised by the moon.)
I was buying Gyromice back in 1996. Half the campus here has them. Why on earth does this get a story?
Umm, perhaps there's a good reason why you might not want a lot of radio communication between land and a ship that's supposed to be hiding???
If you would read the actual Apple HIG, they say that apps which are meant to replace a real-world item/function (such as Calculator, iCal, iTunes) should be built with the brushed metal look.
They break this numerous places: in fact, virtually everywhere.
By the definition above, *everything* should be brushed metal. Word processor replaces pencil/typewriter. Spreadsheet replaces graph paper. Sherlock replaces phonebook/dictionary. Photoshop replaces sissors/paste/darkroom.
If you try and tighten it down to obvious objects like iTunes replacing a radio, then why is iChat brushed metal? Why is iMovie brushed metal and Final Cut Pro Aqua? They do exactly the same thing!
This is one area where Apple is just out to lunch. The HI folks had nothing to do with brushed metal: it's clearly a Steve "That's cool: go with it" decision.
Yep, you guessed it... B-tree was basically spaghetti: reformat and reinstall time. I've seen it happen a few times before: the most spectacular being a crash during a defrag. Basically, nothing pointed to the right file: all the icons were there, but the info in them was basically noise.
I agree. College tuition has been growing like the stock market should. It's a sin, really; do college administrators fail to care or understand the burden they place on students?
They understand. Believe me, they understand.
Do you understand why they are increasing? No, it's not because of the huge pay hikes of college professors. Our raise this year was virtually nothing: my previous employer (Virginia Tech, a large state school) is under a salary freeze and probably will be for another few years. Finding PhDs who will work for less than $50k/year isn't all that easy when they can make twice that in the private sector.
Bloated faculty+staff? Well, my previous employer is busy with layoffs right now: Luckily I beat the door out before my position was eliminated. My current employer (small liberal-arts college) is currently attriting through retirement in the hopes of avoiding layoffs, but it's probably not going to work.
Huge budgets? Don't make me laugh: we operate on resources that the private sector spends on free sodas. We cut those 5% across the board this year: next year will be worse.
Huge building projects? That would be why we've basically put on hold the renovations to all buildings on this campus? Tech at least got the new chemistry building: the one I was in was ~80 years old and had not been effectively renovated in all that time.
So why is it costing more? Huge state budget cuts for the state supported folks. Tech lost ~$25 million in state funding last year and they will lose about that much again next year. For many smaller schools, we rely on endowment income to help fund the school. Notice the stock market lately? Our endowment is down about 35%, and we're doing a lot better than most places. Run a deficit until the market comes back? We already do.
And for all schools, we've been expected to do more and more over the years. Yes, it was cheaper in the 1950s when we didn't have to pay for IT, the library kept only books, classrooms only had a chalkboard, there was no health center or psychological services or childcare, the chemistry department didn't have NMRs and biology never needed anything more than a few pickled frogs.
"Well, just cut some of that", you say. Great: as soon as we do good faculty stop working here and good students go elsewhere.
A modern education costs money. It costs a lot of money. Feel free to start your own college if you think you can do better.
How much memory am I supposed to add?
You do realize that this sort of thing took hours and hours on a $100,000 Avid previously. And now you're doing it on (approx.) $5k worth of Apple hardware with no special boards or drives.
Of course I do. I'm amazed I can do it at all. I'm just responding to the claim that the current G4s are fast enough to do everything one might want. They aren't even close.
And when the 8-way 1THz G9s finally make FCP totally realtime no matter how many effects you do, I'll go back to my old life as a quantum chemist. I don't care what processor you care to name, it's not fast enough for Spartan, and it's never going to be fast enough.
G4 chips have more than enough "under the hood" to comfortable kick the likes of Photoshop and Illustrator around, not to mention the iApps, and everybody's favorite Final Cut Pro.
You have *got* to be kidding. Enough power for FCP? Dude, I routinely run 30+ minute renders for a 3 minute chunk of video on a 933MHz G4, and I'm not even doing all that much. A few filters, some text generation, a mask or two and it's walk away from the machine time.
Apple could be shipping 8-way 2GHz G4s and it still wouldn't be enough.
There is no reason anyone here can't work out 45mins a day.
Don't have an infant in the house, do you? :^)
My son was ~6 months before I was able to exercise regularly, and that was mostly because my neighbor convinced me to get up before the sun to go run once he was sleeping through the night. It's virtually impossible to get up and exercise when you've been awake at 1 and 4AM, you don't have time at work and you deal with the baby in the evening since your wife is exhausted.
I can get in 30 minutes 3x a week right now, but I really need to add another session or two for strength work.
The dealer sold it the next day: he barely had time to clean it out.