If a Pharma company invented any of them today there is no way they'd even be allowed for use with a prescription, let alone stocked in 500-count bottles
Here in Netherlands, they are not allowed to be sold in greater quantities than 20 pills, just to reduce the perception that they are harmless. The strange thing with paracetamol toxicity is that it would be trivial to add a harmless antidote against overdosing to the pills, but this isn't done despite the fact that paracetamol poisoning is the most common type overdose of pharmaceutical products.
"300 Mev photons are high-power gamma rays, not x-rays."
No, an accelerator of 300 MeV per meter over 3 mm gives you 1 MeV, or less if the actual field is over less than the chip size. Tuning down from there will easily get you into the x ray domain.
Another poster posted a link to a youtube clip of these contact lenses. They come with built-in fake irises, so only the pupil appears dark. Regarding the definition of near infrared: the standard range of visible light is assumed to be up to 740 nm, but I have worked with 800 nm near-IR lasers for many years and they are still visible, although a 1 watt beam appears to be comparable to that of a 1 mW laser pointer at 675 nm. See for yourself here for the sensitivity curve: http://cvrl.ioo.ucl.ac.uk/cvrlfunctions.htm (under fundamental spectra or luminous efficiency).
You seem to be stating that if I accidentally took 3 paracetamol pills,
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol_toxicity . Short version: maximum recommended intake is 3 grams per 24 hours; a single dose of 10 g can be fatal, as are a few days in a row at 10 g per day spread out over multiple smaller doses.
if you put one layer on top of the other, even transparently, I am not sure.
Ink on paper works like this: the paper acts as a diffuse reflector; the ink absorbs light for certain wavelengths, but the light that is not absorbed passes through without changing direction. Putting two layers of ink with different absorption wavelengths on top of each other will result in only the wavelengths that are *not* absorbed by either being reflected by the paper. This is the whole point of the CMY(K) printing process.
Maybe you are thinking of paint, which typically includes its own reflective particles. But paint needs to be applied in a much thicker layer (0.1 mm or 4/1000 inch) to do its job, so it would be rather noticeable; the deck of cards would be 5 mm (1/4 inch) thicker and you would be able to feel the paint with your fingertips.
But if you collecting acoustic data over a period of time, transient sounds (noise) average out, and the loud peak (gunshot)
Well yeah, if you want to pinpoint the source of a massive transient or the source of an annoying continuous whistling sound or a never-ending repeated playback of some secret message, this sensor could work. But it would not be very useful for recording private conversations.
But look at it from this side: a normal microphone measures pressure as a function of time, i.e. p(t). If their is only one source of sound, you can reconstruct the sound wave at the source. If there are two sources, it becomes impossible to distinguish. This transducer will generate three signals: vx(t), vy(t), and vz(t). If you have three sources of sound, then you could, with proper tuning and calibration, disentangle the signal and reconstruct the output of each of the sources individually. As soon as there are more than three sources, say in a pub with 20 conversations going on at the same time, you cannot do this anymore simply because there are more bits of data being transmitted than being transduced; you would need to solve a system of three equations with twenty unknowns.
... a well chosen filter can indeed make two light bundles look different that look exactly the same without the filter.
Yes, that's what makes the skin look weird under cheap white LED lights and older fluorescent tubes. This effect is called metamerism.
But unless you print the entire back sides of the playing cards with a pattern of two different inks that look the same under the casino lights but look different through your filter, you cannot use this to label cards after the fact. Ink absorbs light, so when applied to white paper, the surface will look darker than before, no matter what.
...IR detector card has a strip of chemicals on it that glow pink when a remote control is aimed at it.
That is not frequency doubling, but a special form of phosphorence. Visible/blue light is used to generate long-lived excitations in the molecules. Infrared then excites them further to a slightly higher level with a short excitation lifetime; as that excitation decays, it emits visible light. It shares the disadvantages of common phosphorence: it is not directional.
Near-infrared ink (as posted by an AC) sounds like the most plausible approach. In the range 700-750 nm, the sensitivity for light is less than 1% of the peak sensitivity. You would need (1) a proper long-wavelength-pass filter, (2) ink that absorbs only in this wavelength range, and (3) an illumination source that is heavy in this wavelength area (e.g. halogen/incandescent lights).
For the naked eye, the ink would appear as a very pale cyan color. With a proper filter, everything would look very dark due to the filter removing 99% of the visible light, but the ink would show up with much more contrast. Effective long-pass filters do exist, e.g. Schott RG695 or RG715 for a 695 or 715 nm cut-off, respectively. There are plenty of suitable dyes. Probably you would want to have this filter only on one eye, otherwise the world around you might appear very dark.
The other theories that have been posted here make no sense.
Frequency-doubling needs extremely high intensities (like a high-power or focused low-power laser beam), which would render you blind. Moreeover, frequency-doubling requires proper phase matching, which boils down to the requirement of an exact combination of angle and wavelength.
Polarizers: it is not possible to turn unpolarized light into polarized light without throwing away half of the light. Once the light is polarized, the polarization direction can be manipulated with optically active materials, though.
A high-refractive index coating would not only change at the Brewster angle, it would make the cards much more glossy as seen from any angle. It is not possible to make the refractive index change dramatically within a short wavelength range without changing the absorption as well, so the glossiness would appear in visible light as well.
A phosphor coating would not work for several reasons: phosphors do not emit the phosphorence in the same direction as the absorbed radiation; they always convert from short wavelengths to long wavelengths, and the phosphorence light would be completely out of focus.
This article actually starts as a question, but there are only a few posts addressing practical ways to deal with it. I for one use Smart Wifi Toggler on Android. It decides when to switch on Wifi based on cell tower locations. I use it mainly because it saves some battery.
Average power is low now, but there is a clear path to at least kilowatt average powers (see the LBNL NGLS) and 10s of KW are pretty straightforward.
A clear path to kilowatt powers, that's sounds a bit like the stories about the EUV sources years ago. Reality turned out to be quite a bit harder...
There has been quite a bit of work on EUV / Xray optics, but again the parts are really expensive (an X-ray mirror runs $1M. )
Are those normal incidence or grazing incidence mirrors? For proper imaging, you need to image one area onto another area with low aberrations, not one focal point onto another focal point. This is far easier to do with mirrors designed for normal incidence than for grazing incidence. Even then, it turns out that you need about 10 reflections from the EUV source to the silicon wafers; it's because with every reflection you lose about 1/3 of the power that we would like to have a kilowatt to start with. If the reflection losses are a bit larger due to a larger number of mirrors or a higher per-mirror loss, then you need to start with even more power.
ASML aren't a "light source maker", they don't "make" anything actually.
With the acquisition of Cymer, ASML is actually a light source maker.
integrate stuff from different suppliers, and have contractors bolt it together.
It is true that ASML outsources the manufacturing of most components as far as it involves materials processing (machining, coating, soldering) and off-the-shelf components (pumps, filters, sensors, computers, bolts, cables, etc.). But the actual assembly and tuning of these thousands of components is done by ASML's own employees in ASML's own cleanrooms. As I am typing this, this is happening about 15 meters below my office.
Given the wide variety in technologies used in these scanners, and given how fast the technology changes, it wouldn't make much sense to do all the materials processing in-house. For me as a design engineer it is quite cool that I generally only need to worry whether the design of a component is manufacturable by some supplier in the world, rather than that I have to keep in mind what our own tools, which have to be used because they are not yet written off. That would slow down development tremendously -- it is already hard enough to keep up with Moore's law without such a restriction.
"a bunch of 193nm immersion tools (for triple patterning) the EUV may never make economic sense for fabs."
A problem with dual/triple patterning is that it is mostly suitable for making parallel lines, not complex patterns. It happens that this works very well for NAND memory, but for CPUs, not so much.
Another problem is that you need 2x or 3x the number of process steps, which puts the higher price for EUV machines into perspective.
I expect that the primary target at the moment is to develop the technology. Once we're there, more attention can go to reducing costs.
Disclosure: I work at ASML on the EUV source. But this are my own views; I don't officially represent the company.
mortality rate of 1000 for men and 600 for women, per 100,000... In London alone the expected death rate on that day alonw was 219 people...
It's a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. Every living person will die at some point. Comparing a single cause of death against all causes of death combined will result in a small number for most causes of death. In this case, you're comparing death rates for people who mostly had a long and healthy life behind them to a death cause that hit mostly people between 20 and 50 years old, and moreover that also involved 700 injuries. (I'd like to know how many of those 700 are actually people who were rendered severy crippled for the rest of their lives.)
It would be more fair to compare the numbers against deaths from accidents (e.g. traffic or work-related). For comparison, traffic deaths in Greater London were 204 in the year 2009; compared to that, the 52 deaths on 7/7 is not that small of a number.
According to the wiki, as early as 1604, smoking was considered unhealthy, which is pretty soon given that tobacco became known after the discovery of America. Only the tobacco industry was actively trying to play down the risks of smoking.
They're checking for TATP or something similar, even though no sane person would carry it in liquid form.
You have it backwards. TATP is a solid explosive compound that can be produced from liquid acetone, liquid hydrogen peroxide, and an acid. If TSA is afraid of TATP, then it makes sense to check that people aren't carrying hydrogen peroxide.
My practice with hotels is to find the cheapest one available, and then only sleep there.... What do you do with hotels that requires you to actually study up on reviews beforehand?
I followed this strategy plenty of times and my experience is that I will end up with a smelly room (body odor and/or smoke absorbed into the carpet and curtains), excessive street noise, a half-broken water knob(*) in the shower, noisy/drunk neighbors who also went for the cheapest option, and/or a really greasy breakfast.
I would actually prefer to stay in a hostel, but alas my SO doesn't like the idea of bunk beds and shared bathrooms.
(*) Why does each and every hotel bathroom have a different system for adjusting the water flow and temperature of the shower that involves unlabeled knobs and that requires two minutes of fiddling to figure out?
The problem with Android permissions is that a lot of apps request internet and sdcard access and there is no way to know what kind of data is going to be exchanged. Benign usage would be downloading ads and dynamic content, for the apps that are just a wrapper for a website. But for all I know, an app could be scanning the sd card for interesting data and feeding it to big brother.
"... if they took the 22,000 wire tap orders and an estimated 22 million phones and came up with that figure. That may not be accurate."
The letter states that there were 25k wire-tap orders over 2012 and that this is explicitly not the number of suspects, since some suspects use "very many" phone numbers. The letter doesn't mention 1 in 1000; that's the media spin on it.
Why does slashdot post an artocle about Netherlands at midnight local time?
I just returned from holiday in Ireland and apparently temperatures were exceptionally high. One day, my shoe soles were essentially paved (they looked like road surface) because the roads I had walked on were molten. I wonder whether this droplet has anything to do with the weather conditions.
By the way: exceptional weather means a week of sunny weather with 24-28 degrees C temperatures. Irish asphalt is probably optimized for cooler and rainier weather.:-)
word processor that you're using that does all those things BETTER than MS Word
The main difference with some of my coworkers is that I note the problems myself, curse, and fix them before asking someone else to read my work. Over time I found a work flow that tends not to generate too many issues (print to PDF via cutePDF, avoid copy/paste of text with references as much as possible, don't deal with the equation editor, don't convert back and forth between.doc and.docx).
And if I write something with lots of equations and I'm sure that coworkers will not need to revise future versions (i.e. a write-once document), I do it in LaTeX. That has its own set of disadvantages, but I find myself cursing a lot less if I use it.
... anti-ms trolls are always careful not to include a SINGLE fact...
The documents that we deal with here contain company-secret information, so I am not going to share any problematic documents just to convince you. However, I can tell you that they are usually rather old (Office 2003) macro-enabled templates that are now being used with Office 2010. I'm sure the "error reference not found" result from bad copy/paste actions by the user, but I consider it an design error of MS Word that I never see any warning about broken references.
By the way, libreoffice (my version is about 2 years old) invariably chokes on our company Office templates (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) as well.
Also, Word works reasonably well. For example, right now I have a nearly 80,000 word document that it handles well enough
Strange; where I am sitting, I hear of and see endless numbers of problems with Word with my colleagues: Word crashing on or garbling documents with too many floating figures, equations that suddenly turn into un-editable bitmapped images, documents full of "Error reference not found" (try remembering exactly what you wanted to refer to a month ago...), "save as PDF" generating pages with a gray toner-wasting background.
Anti-reflection coatings by themselves are nothing new. AR coatings that are scratch-resistant might be more tricky. But I would be really impressed if they can make it anti-reflective even when covered with fingerprints.
AR coatings are based on thin layers with thicknesses tuned and accurate to 20 nm or less and well defined refractive indices, matched to the refractive index of the air on one side and the glass on the other side. It's hard if not impossible to make a coating that keeps working even with an undefined number of micrometers of skin grease on top.
My glasses (eyewear) have a very nice AR coating, but fingerprints turn it into a colorful reflector.
"I ALWAYS turn my phone and any other devices COMPLETELY OFF at important events"
I used to have a Nokia N82 that would wake up from the "completely off" state to sound an alarm. Only removing the battery would do the job.
Fortunately I didn't discover this while attending a concert (or worse: while being one of the performers in a choir).
I'm actually not sure whether Android doesn't do this. Nowadays I always check that there is no alarm set at an inconvenient time before going to silent mode.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in Netherlands, they are not allowed to be sold in greater quantities than 20 pills, just to reduce the perception that they are harmless. The strange thing with paracetamol toxicity is that it would be trivial to add a harmless antidote against overdosing to the pills, but this isn't done despite the fact that paracetamol poisoning is the most common type overdose of pharmaceutical products.
"300 Mev photons are high-power gamma rays, not x-rays."
No, an accelerator of 300 MeV per meter over 3 mm gives you 1 MeV, or less if the actual field is over less than the chip size. Tuning down from there will easily get you into the x ray domain.
Another poster posted a link to a youtube clip of these contact lenses. They come with built-in fake irises, so only the pupil appears dark. Regarding the definition of near infrared: the standard range of visible light is assumed to be up to 740 nm, but I have worked with 800 nm near-IR lasers for many years and they are still visible, although a 1 watt beam appears to be comparable to that of a 1 mW laser pointer at 675 nm. See for yourself here for the sensitivity curve: http://cvrl.ioo.ucl.ac.uk/cvrlfunctions.htm (under fundamental spectra or luminous efficiency).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol_toxicity . Short version: maximum recommended intake is 3 grams per 24 hours; a single dose of 10 g can be fatal, as are a few days in a row at 10 g per day spread out over multiple smaller doses.
Ink on paper works like this: the paper acts as a diffuse reflector; the ink absorbs light for certain wavelengths, but the light that is not absorbed passes through without changing direction. Putting two layers of ink with different absorption wavelengths on top of each other will result in only the wavelengths that are *not* absorbed by either being reflected by the paper. This is the whole point of the CMY(K) printing process.
Maybe you are thinking of paint, which typically includes its own reflective particles. But paint needs to be applied in a much thicker layer (0.1 mm or 4/1000 inch) to do its job, so it would be rather noticeable; the deck of cards would be 5 mm (1/4 inch) thicker and you would be able to feel the paint with your fingertips.
Well yeah, if you want to pinpoint the source of a massive transient or the source of an annoying continuous whistling sound or a never-ending repeated playback of some secret message, this sensor could work. But it would not be very useful for recording private conversations.
But look at it from this side: a normal microphone measures pressure as a function of time, i.e. p(t). If their is only one source of sound, you can reconstruct the sound wave at the source. If there are two sources, it becomes impossible to distinguish. This transducer will generate three signals: vx(t), vy(t), and vz(t). If you have three sources of sound, then you could, with proper tuning and calibration, disentangle the signal and reconstruct the output of each of the sources individually. As soon as there are more than three sources, say in a pub with 20 conversations going on at the same time, you cannot do this anymore simply because there are more bits of data being transmitted than being transduced; you would need to solve a system of three equations with twenty unknowns.
Yes, that's what makes the skin look weird under cheap white LED lights and older fluorescent tubes. This effect is called metamerism.
But unless you print the entire back sides of the playing cards with a pattern of two different inks that look the same under the casino lights but look different through your filter, you cannot use this to label cards after the fact. Ink absorbs light, so when applied to white paper, the surface will look darker than before, no matter what.
That is not frequency doubling, but a special form of phosphorence. Visible/blue light is used to generate long-lived excitations in the molecules. Infrared then excites them further to a slightly higher level with a short excitation lifetime; as that excitation decays, it emits visible light. It shares the disadvantages of common phosphorence: it is not directional.
For the naked eye, the ink would appear as a very pale cyan color. With a proper filter, everything would look very dark due to the filter removing 99% of the visible light, but the ink would show up with much more contrast. Effective long-pass filters do exist, e.g. Schott RG695 or RG715 for a 695 or 715 nm cut-off, respectively. There are plenty of suitable dyes. Probably you would want to have this filter only on one eye, otherwise the world around you might appear very dark.
The other theories that have been posted here make no sense.
Frequency-doubling needs extremely high intensities (like a high-power or focused low-power laser beam), which would render you blind. Moreeover, frequency-doubling requires proper phase matching, which boils down to the requirement of an exact combination of angle and wavelength.
Polarizers: it is not possible to turn unpolarized light into polarized light without throwing away half of the light. Once the light is polarized, the polarization direction can be manipulated with optically active materials, though.
A high-refractive index coating would not only change at the Brewster angle, it would make the cards much more glossy as seen from any angle. It is not possible to make the refractive index change dramatically within a short wavelength range without changing the absorption as well, so the glossiness would appear in visible light as well.
A phosphor coating would not work for several reasons: phosphors do not emit the phosphorence in the same direction as the absorbed radiation; they always convert from short wavelengths to long wavelengths, and the phosphorence light would be completely out of focus.
This article actually starts as a question, but there are only a few posts addressing practical ways to deal with it. I for one use Smart Wifi Toggler on Android. It decides when to switch on Wifi based on cell tower locations. I use it mainly because it saves some battery.
A clear path to kilowatt powers, that's sounds a bit like the stories about the EUV sources years ago. Reality turned out to be quite a bit harder...
Are those normal incidence or grazing incidence mirrors? For proper imaging, you need to image one area onto another area with low aberrations, not one focal point onto another focal point. This is far easier to do with mirrors designed for normal incidence than for grazing incidence. Even then, it turns out that you need about 10 reflections from the EUV source to the silicon wafers; it's because with every reflection you lose about 1/3 of the power that we would like to have a kilowatt to start with. If the reflection losses are a bit larger due to a larger number of mirrors or a higher per-mirror loss, then you need to start with even more power.
With the acquisition of Cymer, ASML is actually a light source maker.
It is true that ASML outsources the manufacturing of most components as far as it involves materials processing (machining, coating, soldering) and off-the-shelf components (pumps, filters, sensors, computers, bolts, cables, etc.). But the actual assembly and tuning of these thousands of components is done by ASML's own employees in ASML's own cleanrooms. As I am typing this, this is happening about 15 meters below my office.
Given the wide variety in technologies used in these scanners, and given how fast the technology changes, it wouldn't make much sense to do all the materials processing in-house. For me as a design engineer it is quite cool that I generally only need to worry whether the design of a component is manufacturable by some supplier in the world, rather than that I have to keep in mind what our own tools, which have to be used because they are not yet written off. That would slow down development tremendously -- it is already hard enough to keep up with Moore's law without such a restriction.
(The above are my own views/opinions yadda yadda)
"a bunch of 193nm immersion tools (for triple patterning) the EUV may never make economic sense for fabs."
A problem with dual/triple patterning is that it is mostly suitable for making parallel lines, not complex patterns. It happens that this works very well for NAND memory, but for CPUs, not so much.
Another problem is that you need 2x or 3x the number of process steps, which puts the higher price for EUV machines into perspective.
I expect that the primary target at the moment is to develop the technology. Once we're there, more attention can go to reducing costs.
Disclosure: I work at ASML on the EUV source. But this are my own views; I don't officially represent the company.
It's a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. Every living person will die at some point. Comparing a single cause of death against all causes of death combined will result in a small number for most causes of death. In this case, you're comparing death rates for people who mostly had a long and healthy life behind them to a death cause that hit mostly people between 20 and 50 years old, and moreover that also involved 700 injuries. (I'd like to know how many of those 700 are actually people who were rendered severy crippled for the rest of their lives.)
It would be more fair to compare the numbers against deaths from accidents (e.g. traffic or work-related). For comparison, traffic deaths in Greater London were 204 in the year 2009; compared to that, the 52 deaths on 7/7 is not that small of a number.
The concept of a flat earth was never "innate", at least in Western cultures over the past 2200 years.
According to the wiki, as early as 1604, smoking was considered unhealthy, which is pretty soon given that tobacco became known after the discovery of America. Only the tobacco industry was actively trying to play down the risks of smoking.
You have it backwards. TATP is a solid explosive compound that can be produced from liquid acetone, liquid hydrogen peroxide, and an acid. If TSA is afraid of TATP, then it makes sense to check that people aren't carrying hydrogen peroxide.
I followed this strategy plenty of times and my experience is that I will end up with a smelly room (body odor and/or smoke absorbed into the carpet and curtains), excessive street noise, a half-broken water knob(*) in the shower, noisy/drunk neighbors who also went for the cheapest option, and/or a really greasy breakfast.
I would actually prefer to stay in a hostel, but alas my SO doesn't like the idea of bunk beds and shared bathrooms.
(*) Why does each and every hotel bathroom have a different system for adjusting the water flow and temperature of the shower that involves unlabeled knobs and that requires two minutes of fiddling to figure out?
The problem with Android permissions is that a lot of apps request internet and sdcard access and there is no way to know what kind of data is going to be exchanged. Benign usage would be downloading ads and dynamic content, for the apps that are just a wrapper for a website. But for all I know, an app could be scanning the sd card for interesting data and feeding it to big brother.
"... if they took the 22,000 wire tap orders and an estimated 22 million phones and came up with that figure. That may not be accurate."
The letter states that there were 25k wire-tap orders over 2012 and that this is explicitly not the number of suspects, since some suspects use "very many" phone numbers. The letter doesn't mention 1 in 1000; that's the media spin on it.
Why does slashdot post an artocle about Netherlands at midnight local time?
I just returned from holiday in Ireland and apparently temperatures were exceptionally high. One day, my shoe soles were essentially paved (they looked like road surface) because the roads I had walked on were molten. I wonder whether this droplet has anything to do with the weather conditions.
By the way: exceptional weather means a week of sunny weather with 24-28 degrees C temperatures. Irish asphalt is probably optimized for cooler and rainier weather. :-)
The main difference with some of my coworkers is that I note the problems myself, curse, and fix them before asking someone else to read my work. Over time I found a work flow that tends not to generate too many issues (print to PDF via cutePDF, avoid copy/paste of text with references as much as possible, don't deal with the equation editor, don't convert back and forth between .doc and .docx).
And if I write something with lots of equations and I'm sure that coworkers will not need to revise future versions (i.e. a write-once document), I do it in LaTeX. That has its own set of disadvantages, but I find myself cursing a lot less if I use it.
The documents that we deal with here contain company-secret information, so I am not going to share any problematic documents just to convince you. However, I can tell you that they are usually rather old (Office 2003) macro-enabled templates that are now being used with Office 2010. I'm sure the "error reference not found" result from bad copy/paste actions by the user, but I consider it an design error of MS Word that I never see any warning about broken references.
By the way, libreoffice (my version is about 2 years old) invariably chokes on our company Office templates (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) as well.
Strange; where I am sitting, I hear of and see endless numbers of problems with Word with my colleagues: Word crashing on or garbling documents with too many floating figures, equations that suddenly turn into un-editable bitmapped images, documents full of "Error reference not found" (try remembering exactly what you wanted to refer to a month ago...), "save as PDF" generating pages with a gray toner-wasting background.
Anti-reflection coatings by themselves are nothing new. AR coatings that are scratch-resistant might be more tricky. But I would be really impressed if they can make it anti-reflective even when covered with fingerprints.
AR coatings are based on thin layers with thicknesses tuned and accurate to 20 nm or less and well defined refractive indices, matched to the refractive index of the air on one side and the glass on the other side. It's hard if not impossible to make a coating that keeps working even with an undefined number of micrometers of skin grease on top.
My glasses (eyewear) have a very nice AR coating, but fingerprints turn it into a colorful reflector.
"I ALWAYS turn my phone and any other devices COMPLETELY OFF at important events"
I used to have a Nokia N82 that would wake up from the "completely off" state to sound an alarm. Only removing the battery would do the job.
Fortunately I didn't discover this while attending a concert (or worse: while being one of the performers in a choir).
I'm actually not sure whether Android doesn't do this. Nowadays I always check that there is no alarm set at an inconvenient time before going to silent mode.