Does it have to be symmetric in order to be useable by lefties? I'm right handed, but I just tried my MX700 with my left hand and it actually felt quite comfortable. The thumb buttons are now pinky buttons, but otherwise I think I could easily use this mouse southpaw.
Focusing laser light doesn't affect its coherence. In fact, they almost certainly focus the light, to make sure that they only get a strong signal back from where they expect the surface to be. So even if you held the mouse up right to your eye, your retina is far enough away that the laser would be unlikely to cause damage (aside from the fact that they use an IR laser, so most of the light wouldn't get absorbed by your retina anyway).
Also, the original poster was right about the damage from lasers. The reason they're dangerous is that when the light is collimated, the intensity doesn't drop off with distance the way it does with ordinary light. If a laser beam were to get into your eye, it wouldn't matter how wide your pupils were since the beam is narrowly confined to begin with. It also wouldn't matter whether your eye tried to focus on it or not, since a ray passing through a lens still comes out as a ray.
Oh, and LEDs are also coherent. They just have a much shorter (less than 50 micrometer) coherence length.
Actually, there's no direct evidence that the stereocilia of hair cells (they're not true cilia, by the way) are motile in mammals, although there's currently a strong and sometimes bitter debate in the cochlear mechanics field about this. Most current cochlear models take into account the somatic motility (that is, the whole cell can change length in response to electrical stimulation) which has been well documented in isolated outer hair cells and isolated cochlea preparations, and, indirectly, in vivo. Lower vertebrates (reptiles, amphibians and birds) have motile hair bundles, but don't have somatic motility. Most of the debate centers around whether mammals have retained this ability, and if so, what purpose it serves (since the somatic motility seems to be the key component of sound amplification).
The issue of spontaneous vibrations is also up to debate. It's been argued that spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (sounds coming out of your ear spontaneously, which many people have) occur when the somatic-motility-based amplifiers go unstable. However, a recent paper (Shera, 2000) showed that such emissions can occur even if the amplifiers remain stable, so no spontaneous oscillations are needed.
As for the ringing in your ears (tinnitus), it can occur in the absence of damage, but if you've been exposed to loud sounds and you hear ringing afterward, that's a good sign that you've suffered at least some temporary (but not necessarily permanent) hearing loss. Best to avoid being in such situations on a regular basis.
Active cooling of an entire Linus, though, would require large quantities of beer, which would completely offset the productivity gains you would otherwise get.
On the other hand, it would make him look more like Tux.
I don't see why the CS/AI Lab and the Linguistics Departments need this much security anyway.
It's quite simple, really. First of all, the building is only locked up during evenings and weekends, when people aren't expected to be around (of course, this being MIT, people are around anyway, but at least the staff get to go home on weekends). Second, and most important, if you look at the way the building is designed, it's a very open architecture. Rooms blend into other rooms, hell, even floors blend into other floors, and most of the space is in common areas. Unlike the rest of the campus, which has closed offices and labs connected by common hallways, the Stata Center has open lab and office space. This was done to promote collaboration, which is important when you're doing research, but has the downside of requiring security when people aren't around. So, to keep random people from walking off with valuable equipment, the building is locked down when no one is around. Sure, it's not an ideal solution, but posting guards at every possible exit isn't feasible, and putting RFID tags on the equipment won't prevent vandalism, or stop people from stealing the CPUs and memory out of all of the computers.
Has the average temperature on Earth been going up recently? Yes. Is it due to human activity? Maybe. Can we do anything to stop it? Perhaps. Is the planet likely to go to hell within any of our lifetimes? Probably not.
But I don't care about that. I'm in favor of efforts to reduce noxious emissions for an entirely different reason - my health. Sure, the EPA has some restrictions on what kind of crap you can spew into the air, but the air in and around most US cities is nasty! It's easy not to notice if you spend all of your time in the city, but whenever I go for a long bike ride, where I need to get a lot of oxygen into my lungs, I can really tell that the air near big cities is harder to breathe. And believe me, it's no fun to be finishing a hard bike ride, taking in deep lungs-full of air, and finding yourself stuck behind a bus spewing out black soot.
I've seen plenty of posts already arguing that we shouldn't bear the burden of reducing emisisons for a dubious long-term gain. But I don't think anyone would disagree that doing so would clean up the air around us in the short-term, and that alone, to me, is worth the cost.
Does anyone know where I could find some sort of evidence that there is a danger to begin with?
Step 1: Go here. Step 2: Bake on high heat for four years. Step 3: Calculate the odds of crashing to six significant digits.
This technique is older than it sounds
on
The Sound of Cells
·
· Score: 1
For what it's worth, the idea that came to him in 2001 is called Atomic Force Sensing, and is actually about five years older than that. The only difference is that Gimzewski is looking at spontaneous oscillations rather than driven oscillations - and that's where the difficulty lies, because it's very, very hard to show that those oscillations are due to activity of the cells and not, say, vibrations caused by a truck driving by outside. I'm skeptical that these oscillations are coming from the cells (as you can tell from my other posts in response to this article), but if they are, it suggests a very, very interesting mechanism that we know nothing about.
Re:Conformal change vibration and resonance analys
on
The Sound of Cells
·
· Score: 1
Keep in mind, though, that the measurement method he used is going to average the conformational changes of all of the proteins within a cell - averaging a large number of independent random variables gives you an approximately Gaussian distribution, i.e., noise.
That being said, there are cells that use conformational changes to cause motion at audio frequencies. Outer hair cells (OHCs) in your cochlea exhibit length changes in response to changes in transmembrane voltage, with a gain of about 20 nm/mV. They do this using a protein called Prestin - there's still some debate about how it works in detail, but the protein completely covers the lateral walls of the cell membranes. Transfecting other cells with this protein caused them to be motile, and knocking out this protein killed the motility of OHCs.
Without some kind of specialization like that, I find it hard to believe that an entire cell can exhibit a spontaneous oscillation like what's been reported here. I smell the presence of an experimental artefact.
That's certainly one important control, but it's not enough. The vibration could be due to motion of the microscope stage which is coupled well to the probe tip by the cell, but not by the fluid. The mechanical load of the cell on the probe tip might also reduce the passive resonant frequency of the tip. I'm not sure exactly which tips he's using, but some of the more compliant V-shaped AFM tips unloaded resonant frequencies as low as 20 kHz; loading them with the mass of a cell could easily drop the resonant frequency down to 1 kHz. Unless he's done some careful work to show that these vibrations he's seeing aren't due to thermal noise, I would have serious doubts that they tell you anything about the cells.
How about the company that sells the e-voting systems? A voting system isn't just open-source software - you need hardware and training as well, and such things don't come free as in beer. I see absolutely no reason why some company couldn't make money selling open-source, verifiable e-voting systems.
I've been walking past this building every morning since before they tore down building 20, and I think it's pretty amazing. At first I thought "damn, what an ugly mess," but then I realized that I kept staring at it every time I walked by. If nothing else, it's not a building you can ignore.
As others have said, the inside is really amazing, too. The parking garage, which opened last year, is as close to acoustically dead as I've ever seen outside an anechoic chamber. I saw a car drive by three rows away, and couldn't hear it at all! Compare that to just about any other parking garage, where all you hear is reverberation and squeal - there's an amazing amount of human-factors engineering in this building. That being said, though, I'm pissed that the bastards took away the view out my window.
The best thing about this idea is that it plays right into the strength of bittorrent - namely, having a large number of people trying to get the same content at the same time. Since everyone will get the RSS feed at roughly the same time, there will be a large number of peers to share the load for bittorrent.
The funny thing is, I ran into Andrew the other day, and he was just gushing about this new idea he had! I had no idea what he was talking about at the time. Guess I missed my chance to post a story on slashdot.
Despite what the article says, the song does not identify "psycho-acoustical" properties of the music files, because that's impossible. Psychoacoustics is what happens inside your head when you hear something - if they had software that could figure out what you were thinking, I'm sure they'd have better uses for it than developing anti-p2p technology. Nope, they're looking at plain old acoustical properties.
You might want to check out the boards put out by Interface, a Japanese company. Specifically, their PAZ-3161 board supports up to 40 MHz sampling rate (one channel; 20 MHz if you sample both channels). Not only does this company make excellent boards (my lab has several), they provide both Windows and Linux drivers for the boards.
I've done some preliminary work on writing signal-analyzer software for their PCI-3525 board, which I would be happy to share (it's not close to being fully-functional yet, but we've got a student who may be using these boards, so that might change soon). I'm also happy to try to adapt this code to more general use. With these boards and existing code, your task might be much easier than you originally thought. Also, their sales engineers are very willing to help solve problems. I don't know the prices on their boards (ours were donated), but they are excellent devices.
When I was doing tech support, I was told that whenever a customer swore at me, I was to reply, "Sir (or Ma'am), please call back when you can control your language," and hang up. Boy, angry people get REALLY mad when you call them "Sir (or Ma'am)"!
Slashdot Mirror
Does it have to be symmetric in order to be useable by lefties? I'm right handed, but I just tried my MX700 with my left hand and it actually felt quite comfortable. The thumb buttons are now pinky buttons, but otherwise I think I could easily use this mouse southpaw.
Nice explanation! Too bad it's mostly wrong.
Focusing laser light doesn't affect its coherence. In fact, they almost certainly focus the light, to make sure that they only get a strong signal back from where they expect the surface to be. So even if you held the mouse up right to your eye, your retina is far enough away that the laser would be unlikely to cause damage (aside from the fact that they use an IR laser, so most of the light wouldn't get absorbed by your retina anyway).
Also, the original poster was right about the damage from lasers. The reason they're dangerous is that when the light is collimated, the intensity doesn't drop off with distance the way it does with ordinary light. If a laser beam were to get into your eye, it wouldn't matter how wide your pupils were since the beam is narrowly confined to begin with. It also wouldn't matter whether your eye tried to focus on it or not, since a ray passing through a lens still comes out as a ray.
Oh, and LEDs are also coherent. They just have a much shorter (less than 50 micrometer) coherence length.
Actually, there's no direct evidence that the stereocilia of hair cells (they're not true cilia, by the way) are motile in mammals, although there's currently a strong and sometimes bitter debate in the cochlear mechanics field about this. Most current cochlear models take into account the somatic motility (that is, the whole cell can change length in response to electrical stimulation) which has been well documented in isolated outer hair cells and isolated cochlea preparations, and, indirectly, in vivo. Lower vertebrates (reptiles, amphibians and birds) have motile hair bundles, but don't have somatic motility. Most of the debate centers around whether mammals have retained this ability, and if so, what purpose it serves (since the somatic motility seems to be the key component of sound amplification).
The issue of spontaneous vibrations is also up to debate. It's been argued that spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (sounds coming out of your ear spontaneously, which many people have) occur when the somatic-motility-based amplifiers go unstable. However, a recent paper (Shera, 2000) showed that such emissions can occur even if the amplifiers remain stable, so no spontaneous oscillations are needed.
As for the ringing in your ears (tinnitus), it can occur in the absence of damage, but if you've been exposed to loud sounds and you hear ringing afterward, that's a good sign that you've suffered at least some temporary (but not necessarily permanent) hearing loss. Best to avoid being in such situations on a regular basis.
The discovery will be confirmed within the next seven days.
Until it actually happens, shouldn't we say "confirmed or refuted"? After all, if we knew the outcome, we wouldn't have to do the experiment.
In that case, maybe it's a good thing that Darl carries a gun.
Active cooling of an entire Linus, though, would require large quantities of beer, which would completely offset the productivity gains you would otherwise get.
On the other hand, it would make him look more like Tux.
I don't see why the CS/AI Lab and the Linguistics Departments need this much security anyway.
It's quite simple, really. First of all, the building is only locked up during evenings and weekends, when people aren't expected to be around (of course, this being MIT, people are around anyway, but at least the staff get to go home on weekends). Second, and most important, if you look at the way the building is designed, it's a very open architecture. Rooms blend into other rooms, hell, even floors blend into other floors, and most of the space is in common areas. Unlike the rest of the campus, which has closed offices and labs connected by common hallways, the Stata Center has open lab and office space. This was done to promote collaboration, which is important when you're doing research, but has the downside of requiring security when people aren't around. So, to keep random people from walking off with valuable equipment, the building is locked down when no one is around. Sure, it's not an ideal solution, but posting guards at every possible exit isn't feasible, and putting RFID tags on the equipment won't prevent vandalism, or stop people from stealing the CPUs and memory out of all of the computers.
But how do we know that the whole tale of Noah's Ark wasn't just a story some guy made up to explain why there was a big boat halfway up a mountain?
Has the average temperature on Earth been going up recently? Yes. Is it due to human activity? Maybe. Can we do anything to stop it? Perhaps. Is the planet likely to go to hell within any of our lifetimes? Probably not.
But I don't care about that. I'm in favor of efforts to reduce noxious emissions for an entirely different reason - my health. Sure, the EPA has some restrictions on what kind of crap you can spew into the air, but the air in and around most US cities is nasty! It's easy not to notice if you spend all of your time in the city, but whenever I go for a long bike ride, where I need to get a lot of oxygen into my lungs, I can really tell that the air near big cities is harder to breathe. And believe me, it's no fun to be finishing a hard bike ride, taking in deep lungs-full of air, and finding yourself stuck behind a bus spewing out black soot.
I've seen plenty of posts already arguing that we shouldn't bear the burden of reducing emisisons for a dubious long-term gain. But I don't think anyone would disagree that doing so would clean up the air around us in the short-term, and that alone, to me, is worth the cost.
And the nerd would never say, "Sure, I can help you with that computer problem. Let's log you in, first. What's your password?"
> It'll be just like Livejournal!
Ie, the cream will rise to the top.
And so will the scum!
Does anyone know where I could find some sort of evidence that there is a danger to begin with?
Step 1: Go here.
Step 2: Bake on high heat for four years.
Step 3: Calculate the odds of crashing to six significant digits.
For what it's worth, the idea that came to him in 2001 is called Atomic Force Sensing, and is actually about five years older than that. The only difference is that Gimzewski is looking at spontaneous oscillations rather than driven oscillations - and that's where the difficulty lies, because it's very, very hard to show that those oscillations are due to activity of the cells and not, say, vibrations caused by a truck driving by outside. I'm skeptical that these oscillations are coming from the cells (as you can tell from my other posts in response to this article), but if they are, it suggests a very, very interesting mechanism that we know nothing about.
Keep in mind, though, that the measurement method he used is going to average the conformational changes of all of the proteins within a cell - averaging a large number of independent random variables gives you an approximately Gaussian distribution, i.e., noise.
That being said, there are cells that use conformational changes to cause motion at audio frequencies. Outer hair cells (OHCs) in your cochlea exhibit length changes in response to changes in transmembrane voltage, with a gain of about 20 nm/mV. They do this using a protein called Prestin - there's still some debate about how it works in detail, but the protein completely covers the lateral walls of the cell membranes. Transfecting other cells with this protein caused them to be motile, and knocking out this protein killed the motility of OHCs.
Without some kind of specialization like that, I find it hard to believe that an entire cell can exhibit a spontaneous oscillation like what's been reported here. I smell the presence of an experimental artefact.
That's certainly one important control, but it's not enough. The vibration could be due to motion of the microscope stage which is coupled well to the probe tip by the cell, but not by the fluid. The mechanical load of the cell on the probe tip might also reduce the passive resonant frequency of the tip. I'm not sure exactly which tips he's using, but some of the more compliant V-shaped AFM tips unloaded resonant frequencies as low as 20 kHz; loading them with the mass of a cell could easily drop the resonant frequency down to 1 kHz. Unless he's done some careful work to show that these vibrations he's seeing aren't due to thermal noise, I would have serious doubts that they tell you anything about the cells.
Imagine the US postal cycling team support car having stats in real time on all of the cyclist during the tour de france.
No need to imagine - Team USPS has been using heart rate monitors for years, not to mention being in constant radio contact with their director. All of the other teams do this, too.
"Who is accountable?"
How about the company that sells the e-voting systems? A voting system isn't just open-source software - you need hardware and training as well, and such things don't come free as in beer. I see absolutely no reason why some company couldn't make money selling open-source, verifiable e-voting systems.
I've been walking past this building every morning since before they tore down building 20, and I think it's pretty amazing. At first I thought "damn, what an ugly mess," but then I realized that I kept staring at it every time I walked by. If nothing else, it's not a building you can ignore.
As others have said, the inside is really amazing, too. The parking garage, which opened last year, is as close to acoustically dead as I've ever seen outside an anechoic chamber. I saw a car drive by three rows away, and couldn't hear it at all! Compare that to just about any other parking garage, where all you hear is reverberation and squeal - there's an amazing amount of human-factors engineering in this building. That being said, though, I'm pissed that the bastards took away the view out my window.
The best thing about this idea is that it plays right into the strength of bittorrent - namely, having a large number of people trying to get the same content at the same time. Since everyone will get the RSS feed at roughly the same time, there will be a large number of peers to share the load for bittorrent.
The funny thing is, I ran into Andrew the other day, and he was just gushing about this new idea he had! I had no idea what he was talking about at the time. Guess I missed my chance to post a story on slashdot.
Maybe they got the license in exchange for these seven figures. That would be more of a fair exchange, I think.
Despite what the article says, the song does not identify "psycho-acoustical" properties of the music files, because that's impossible. Psychoacoustics is what happens inside your head when you hear something - if they had software that could figure out what you were thinking, I'm sure they'd have better uses for it than developing anti-p2p technology. Nope, they're looking at plain old acoustical properties.
Yeah, but then you can just stick a Linux boot floppy into it and fix it yourself (try it, it really works)!
You might want to check out the boards put out by Interface, a Japanese company. Specifically, their PAZ-3161 board supports up to 40 MHz sampling rate (one channel; 20 MHz if you sample both channels). Not only does this company make excellent boards (my lab has several), they provide both Windows and Linux drivers for the boards.
I've done some preliminary work on writing signal-analyzer software for their PCI-3525 board, which I would be happy to share (it's not close to being fully-functional yet, but we've got a student who may be using these boards, so that might change soon). I'm also happy to try to adapt this code to more general use. With these boards and existing code, your task might be much easier than you originally thought. Also, their sales engineers are very willing to help solve problems. I don't know the prices on their boards (ours were donated), but they are excellent devices.
When I was doing tech support, I was told that whenever a customer swore at me, I was to reply, "Sir (or Ma'am), please call back when you can control your language," and hang up. Boy, angry people get REALLY mad when you call them "Sir (or Ma'am)"!
Well, I haven't read the entire Time Cube web site either, but I read enough to form a solid opinion.