My uncle retired as a US Navy Captain. For many years he had two photographs displayed in his house, which he ascribed to Admiral "Bull" Halsey's "second" typhoon, in June 1945. At that time my uncle was an ensign, assigned to a destroyer, and on his first sea voyage.
The two photographs were of a sister destroyer. In the first photograph, all one sees is a giant wave, with the bow of the destroyer sticking out of one side, and the stern sticking out of the other. The middle of the ship, including the masts and superstructure, is submerged and not visible.
In the second photo, taken a few seconds later, the middle of the ship is now visible, but both the bow and stern are now submerged in the wave train. And as a kid, the part that fascinated me the most: You could see an air gap below the middle of the ship, between the ship's keel and the wave trough below.
If they did, they were awfully slow at it. The first ratifiable Safety Of Life At Sea (SOLAS) treaty wasn't signed until 1929 -- seventeen years after the Titanic disaster -- and the US didn't ratify that treaty until 1936, seven years after that.
. . . but consider just one, the SS Flying Enterprise, that sank in 1952 in the North Atlantic. While a freighter, it carried ten passengers, and spent 13 days listing from 45 to 60 degrees to port -- a list that would surely have prevented any lifeboats from being launched -- before finally going down.
There are many other examples -- the Yorktown comes to mind, although naval vessels should probably be a separate discussion -- but the point is that it doesn't take much of a list to render lifeboats unlaunchable: Fifteen degrees will do.
One of the under-appreciated technologies to result from the Titanic disaster was the development of the auto alarm: An automatic receiver that continuously monitored the calling frequency (500 kHz) for a specific alarm signal to be sent by ships in distress.
Prior to this time, an operator trained in Morse code reception was required to be on duty or, failing that, a "wireless watcher," a deck officer trained to listen for the distinctive three-dits-three-dahs-three-dits of the SOS call. However, the wireless watcher system had obvious flaws (e.g., other duties of the deck officer taking him away from the receiver), and so an automatic system was desired. The trick was doing it with 1920s technology.
It was decided early on in the development of the auto alarm that having a detector able to correctly decode "SOS" with sufficient sensitivity and selectivity (i.e., without false detections during a night of reception of multiple simultaneous and possibly interfering signals, lightning crashes, etc.), and at different rates and fidelity (recall that the SOS signal would be sent by hand, by a person likely to be under high stress) was beyond the technology of the day. Instead, a second, simpler, signal was invented -- a signal specifically for detection by the auto alarm. This signal was defined to be a series of four or more dashes, each four seconds long, with a space of one second between them. (Clocks provided in the radio rooms were required to have a sweep second hand, and a pattern of 4 on, 1 off dashes was printed around the circumference of the clock to aid the timing of the operator.) Alarm bells were placed over the bunks of both the Radio Officer and the ship's Master.
When the radio officer went off watch, he turned the auto alarm on. Should an auto alarm signal be received, the bells would go off (not unlike a fire bell and, a foot over your head, very impressive at 2 AM, I can assure you), and the operator would then climb off of the ceiling, go to the radio room, turn off the auto alarm, and monitor 500 kHz to see what's going on.
In an actual emergency, the radio officer on the ship in distress actually sends the auto alarm signal first, then sends the SOS signal. (The SOS signal, by the way, is sent as a single character, with no spaces between the letters -- di-di-dit-dah-dah-dah-di-di-dit, not di-di-dit-space-dah-dah-dah-space-di-di-dit.) This mp3 file, of an actual disaster (the fire on the MS Prinsendam, PJTA, in 1980), has this clearly audible: The recording starts with a long series of auto alarm tones, followed by the SOS call at about the 2:30 mark.
Those of us with a logical bent would find the design of these auto alarms to be a study in stone-knives-and-bear-skins analog computing. This document gives one some idea of the requirements. It would be a good task for an engineering student project.
Part of the rules for the calling frequency (500 KHz) was that everybody would stop talking for a few minutes every half-hour, so people could hear if there was a station in distress that was far away, or running out of power, and being swamped out by local traffic. Not an issue for the Titanic, but still a good idea.
To be sure, but Silent Periods (15 to 18 minutes, and 45 to 48 minutes, past the hour, every hour) were installed as a result of the Titanic disaster, not before, as part of the Safety Of Life At Sea (SOLAS) treaty series. One of the conclusions drawn from Titanic was that there was no universally agreed-upon prioritization of wireless traffic, and the SOLAS treaties established one.
There was a SOLAS treaty of 1914, but World War I kept it from being ratified in most (if not all) countries and, though many countries implemented parts of the agreement piecemeal, the first ratifiable treaty wasn't signed until 1929. (Even then, the US did not ratify the treaty until 1936 -- with the Titanic disaster now ancient history, the depression gave a certain political party the opportunity to complain about onerous, burdensome government regulation taking jobs from otherwise employed sailors, and that treaty supporters were dupes of foreign powers trying to take the jobs of hard-working Americans by modifying the "free market" in their favor. Reading the political arguments of the time, and the reports of the congressional hearings, in the old newspaper microfilms is quite depressing -- and cynicism-inducing.)
. . . though it leaves out mention of the graduate student that Watson and Crick acquired to help them through the hydrogen bonding, the name of whom escapes me at the moment. (Anyone remember?) I always felt he deserved more credit than he got. --
Perhaps you're thinking of Jerry Donohue, the post-doc physical chemist?
60 is a wonderful number. It is both a unitary perfect number and a Harshad number. It's the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two odd primes in 6 ways. It has many nice geometric representations resulting from its highly composite nature.
In my career, I've had good male managers and good female managers. The difference is that, while I've had several male managers that were priggish martinets, I've not had a female manager with similar qualities.
Anecdotal experience is not law, of course, and I could have been the beneficiary of just not having a large enough sample size of female managers, but that's been my experience.
I was just being flip in my earlier comment, but let me attempt a serious reply:
Just because you and I currently have an agreed on [sic] notion of property. . .
When did we establish that we currently have an agreed-upon notion of property? My notion of property is that everything you have is mine, including the pocket the wallet is in. Did you agree to this? How do you know that I agreed? Did you take my word?
The autocratic nation in which we both reside just nationalized "our" wallets -- without our knowledge or consent -- and an official has taken our wallets by force. Neither of us had an agreement with this official, nor negotiated with him, but he certainly has our wallets. He claims they are now his, and may even have the support of the populace (to which the contents of our wallets are promised, of course), which agrees with the official's notion of property.
My point is, it's not only the concept of property that's arbitrary, it's the concept of negotiation and agreement; and I would argue that the latter is much more arbitrary than the former. Neither, of course, are "laws of nature" (whatever those are).
A lot of points that make good PR are also helpful when faced with a job interview or otherwise advancing your career. Consider yourself as "the product" in the quote below:
Helping technical people step out of their own skin and get people sitting across the table to want, really want, the product -- hardware/software/solution -- is what PR is really all about.
It's not lying. It's interpreting what you're going to do for them... and listening to them so you can shape what the product really does in terms that meet their wants, needs...
A lot of the art of job interviewing is understanding the wants and needs of the interviewer, and presenting yourself as the solution, in terms that the interviewer understands. Once you get hired, establishing and maintaining your reputation involves many of the same PR skills.
I mean, there's a reason we speak of a "Ford Lincoln Mercury Sable", and not a "personal conveyance named after its inventor, an assassinated ruler, a character from Greco-Roman myth and a small furry mammal." Both are true, but. . . .
Like many semi-tropical regions, Florida is full of skiers that don't like snow. (I was 12 when I first heard of snow skiing. Before then, "skiing" meant what I now know to be "water skiing.")
If you're going to spread that old baloney about radar and cancer, at least have it based on something actually happening in the Real World. Most automotive radar systems use the 76-77 GHz band.
To be sure. Derek's rockets are classified by US Federal Aviation Administration regulations as "Advanced, High-Power Rockets", not Model Rockets. See CFR Part 14, 101.22.
The United States has a two-man rule in place, and while only the President can order the release of nuclear weapons, the order must be confirmed by the Secretary of Defense (there is a hierarchy of succession in the event that the President has been killed in an attack). Once all the codes have been verified, the military would issue attack orders to the proper units. These orders are given and then re-verified for authenticity.
[H]ow does patenting this crap which any of the skilled engineer's [sic] on slashdot [sic] could implement in our sleep, manage to advance the useful arts or sciences by getting approved?
Simple: Since the engineers cannot duplicate this method of annotation because of the patent, they're forced to sit down and think of something new. Creating new methods, rather than copying someone else's existing method, is known as advancing the state of the art. Or inventing.
. . . which covers 'receiving an annotation of the digital work, storing the annotation, and providing the annotation to a user.'
No, it does not. It covers A PARTICULAR METHOD of 'receiving an annotation of the digital work, storing the annotation, and providing the annotation to a user.' Specifically,
A computer-implemented method for providing an annotation of a digital work, comprising: --under control of instructions that are executed by one or more computing devices:
--receiving multiple annotations from different authors for particular content in a digital work;
--storing the annotations in association with the digital work;
--providing a list of abbreviated versions of the annotations to a user desiring to access one or more of the annotations, wherein the list presents the annotations in an order determined by reference to a criterion;
--receiving an authorization credential from a user desiring to access one or more of the annotations; and if the authorization credential is valid,
--providing a full version of one or more of the annotations of the digital work to the user in context with regard to the digital work.
The patent covers a method that includes all five of the listed elements (receiving, storing, providing, etc.). Your favorite method must include all five of these elements, and be published before the filing date (19 January 2005) to be classified as disqualifying prior art. Not include one (or more) of these elements? Then it's not disqualifying prior art. (I'm speaking in generalities here, and ignoring other independent claims, apparatus claims, and lots of special cases. See your attorney if it matters to you.)
The Okular annotation method, while no doubt earlier and better in every way, seems not to include many of these elements, and so would not be disqualifying prior art.
Can we become better educated on patents -- maybe just a little -- so that we can not panic every time somebody patents something? By that I mean, can we start quoting Claim 1 in the summary, instead of the abstract?
I note in passing that the Patent Examiner reviewed (approximately; I counted by hand) 184 US patents and patent applications, 6 foreign patent documents, and 80 other references, looking for art, and that the examination process took more than seven years to complete. Whatever else one may say about this patent, it wasn't rubber-stamped.
Regardless of his interests, your nephew has passed the programmer's first test: His program prints "sorry to low" and "sorry to high". Only a true programmer would get the computer language correct, but the human language incorrect.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . right after they identify the meaning of "intelligence."
My uncle retired as a US Navy Captain. For many years he had two photographs displayed in his house, which he ascribed to Admiral "Bull" Halsey's "second" typhoon, in June 1945. At that time my uncle was an ensign, assigned to a destroyer, and on his first sea voyage.
The two photographs were of a sister destroyer. In the first photograph, all one sees is a giant wave, with the bow of the destroyer sticking out of one side, and the stern sticking out of the other. The middle of the ship, including the masts and superstructure, is submerged and not visible.
In the second photo, taken a few seconds later, the middle of the ship is now visible, but both the bow and stern are now submerged in the wave train. And as a kid, the part that fascinated me the most: You could see an air gap below the middle of the ship, between the ship's keel and the wave trough below.
But even for those few of us who claim to be complete skeptics, belief quietly sneaks in.
Nope. Not a bit of it. In my experience, only believers believe that everyone else must secretly be a believer. The rest of us live a fact-based life.
If they did, they were awfully slow at it. The first ratifiable Safety Of Life At Sea (SOLAS) treaty wasn't signed until 1929 -- seventeen years after the Titanic disaster -- and the US didn't ratify that treaty until 1936, seven years after that.
. . . but consider just one, the SS Flying Enterprise, that sank in 1952 in the North Atlantic. While a freighter, it carried ten passengers, and spent 13 days listing from 45 to 60 degrees to port -- a list that would surely have prevented any lifeboats from being launched -- before finally going down.
There are many other examples -- the Yorktown comes to mind, although naval vessels should probably be a separate discussion -- but the point is that it doesn't take much of a list to render lifeboats unlaunchable: Fifteen degrees will do.
One of the under-appreciated technologies to result from the Titanic disaster was the development of the auto alarm: An automatic receiver that continuously monitored the calling frequency (500 kHz) for a specific alarm signal to be sent by ships in distress.
Prior to this time, an operator trained in Morse code reception was required to be on duty or, failing that, a "wireless watcher," a deck officer trained to listen for the distinctive three-dits-three-dahs-three-dits of the SOS call. However, the wireless watcher system had obvious flaws (e.g., other duties of the deck officer taking him away from the receiver), and so an automatic system was desired. The trick was doing it with 1920s technology.
It was decided early on in the development of the auto alarm that having a detector able to correctly decode "SOS" with sufficient sensitivity and selectivity (i.e., without false detections during a night of reception of multiple simultaneous and possibly interfering signals, lightning crashes, etc.), and at different rates and fidelity (recall that the SOS signal would be sent by hand, by a person likely to be under high stress) was beyond the technology of the day. Instead, a second, simpler, signal was invented -- a signal specifically for detection by the auto alarm. This signal was defined to be a series of four or more dashes, each four seconds long, with a space of one second between them. (Clocks provided in the radio rooms were required to have a sweep second hand, and a pattern of 4 on, 1 off dashes was printed around the circumference of the clock to aid the timing of the operator.) Alarm bells were placed over the bunks of both the Radio Officer and the ship's Master.
When the radio officer went off watch, he turned the auto alarm on. Should an auto alarm signal be received, the bells would go off (not unlike a fire bell and, a foot over your head, very impressive at 2 AM, I can assure you), and the operator would then climb off of the ceiling, go to the radio room, turn off the auto alarm, and monitor 500 kHz to see what's going on.
In an actual emergency, the radio officer on the ship in distress actually sends the auto alarm signal first, then sends the SOS signal. (The SOS signal, by the way, is sent as a single character, with no spaces between the letters -- di-di-dit-dah-dah-dah-di-di-dit, not di-di-dit-space-dah-dah-dah-space-di-di-dit.) This mp3 file, of an actual disaster (the fire on the MS Prinsendam, PJTA, in 1980), has this clearly audible: The recording starts with a long series of auto alarm tones, followed by the SOS call at about the 2:30 mark.
Those of us with a logical bent would find the design of these auto alarms to be a study in stone-knives-and-bear-skins analog computing. This document gives one some idea of the requirements. It would be a good task for an engineering student project.
Part of the rules for the calling frequency (500 KHz) was that everybody would stop talking for a few minutes every half-hour, so people could hear if there was a station in distress that was far away, or running out of power, and being swamped out by local traffic. Not an issue for the Titanic, but still a good idea.
To be sure, but Silent Periods (15 to 18 minutes, and 45 to 48 minutes, past the hour, every hour) were installed as a result of the Titanic disaster, not before, as part of the Safety Of Life At Sea (SOLAS) treaty series. One of the conclusions drawn from Titanic was that there was no universally agreed-upon prioritization of wireless traffic, and the SOLAS treaties established one.
There was a SOLAS treaty of 1914, but World War I kept it from being ratified in most (if not all) countries and, though many countries implemented parts of the agreement piecemeal, the first ratifiable treaty wasn't signed until 1929. (Even then, the US did not ratify the treaty until 1936 -- with the Titanic disaster now ancient history, the depression gave a certain political party the opportunity to complain about onerous, burdensome government regulation taking jobs from otherwise employed sailors, and that treaty supporters were dupes of foreign powers trying to take the jobs of hard-working Americans by modifying the "free market" in their favor. Reading the political arguments of the time, and the reports of the congressional hearings, in the old newspaper microfilms is quite depressing -- and cynicism-inducing.)
the man with a pistol on his hip is not the one you need to worry about.
...spoken by a man with a pistol on his hip.
. . . though it leaves out mention of the graduate student that Watson and Crick acquired to help them through the hydrogen bonding, the name of whom escapes me at the moment. (Anyone remember?) I always felt he deserved more credit than he got.
--
Perhaps you're thinking of Jerry Donohue, the post-doc physical chemist?
60 is a wonderful number. It is both a unitary perfect number and a Harshad number. It's the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two odd primes in 6 ways. It has many nice geometric representations resulting from its highly composite nature.
Of course this is all redundant, because there is no such thing as an uninteresting natural number.
In my career, I've had good male managers and good female managers. The difference is that, while I've had several male managers that were priggish martinets, I've not had a female manager with similar qualities.
Anecdotal experience is not law, of course, and I could have been the beneficiary of just not having a large enough sample size of female managers, but that's been my experience.
I was just being flip in my earlier comment, but let me attempt a serious reply:
Just because you and I currently have an agreed on [sic] notion of property. . .
When did we establish that we currently have an agreed-upon notion of property? My notion of property is that everything you have is mine, including the pocket the wallet is in. Did you agree to this? How do you know that I agreed? Did you take my word?
The autocratic nation in which we both reside just nationalized "our" wallets -- without our knowledge or consent -- and an official has taken our wallets by force. Neither of us had an agreement with this official, nor negotiated with him, but he certainly has our wallets. He claims they are now his, and may even have the support of the populace (to which the contents of our wallets are promised, of course), which agrees with the official's notion of property.
My point is, it's not only the concept of property that's arbitrary, it's the concept of negotiation and agreement; and I would argue that the latter is much more arbitrary than the former. Neither, of course, are "laws of nature" (whatever those are).
This is why all notions of property are arbitrary.
Could you give me my wallet, there in your pocket?
. . . now expanded to include the English language.
A lot of points that make good PR are also helpful when faced with a job interview or otherwise advancing your career. Consider yourself as "the product" in the quote below:
Helping technical people step out of their own skin and get people sitting across the table to want, really want, the product -- hardware/software/solution -- is what PR is really all about.
It's not lying. It's interpreting what you're going to do for them... and listening to them so you can shape what the product really does in terms that meet their wants, needs...
A lot of the art of job interviewing is understanding the wants and needs of the interviewer, and presenting yourself as the solution, in terms that the interviewer understands. Once you get hired, establishing and maintaining your reputation involves many of the same PR skills.
I mean, there's a reason we speak of a "Ford Lincoln Mercury Sable", and not a "personal conveyance named after its inventor, an assassinated ruler, a character from Greco-Roman myth and a small furry mammal." Both are true, but. . . .
It is like a skier that doesn't like snow.
Like many semi-tropical regions, Florida is full of skiers that don't like snow. (I was 12 when I first heard of snow skiing. Before then, "skiing" meant what I now know to be "water skiing.")
Once that is solved, there are many new opportunities. Optimum guidance; optimum traffic patterning,
optimum lawsuit structure. . .
If you're going to spread that old baloney about radar and cancer, at least have it based on something actually happening in the Real World. Most automotive radar systems use the 76-77 GHz band.
Derek's rockets are on a whole different level.
To be sure. Derek's rockets are classified by US Federal Aviation Administration regulations as "Advanced, High-Power Rockets", not Model Rockets. See CFR Part 14, 101.22.
See the nuclear football:
The United States has a two-man rule in place, and while only the President can order the release of nuclear weapons, the order must be confirmed by the Secretary of Defense (there is a hierarchy of succession in the event that the President has been killed in an attack). Once all the codes have been verified, the military would issue attack orders to the proper units. These orders are given and then re-verified for authenticity.
[H]ow does patenting this crap which any of the skilled engineer's [sic] on slashdot [sic] could implement in our sleep, manage to advance the useful arts or sciences by getting approved?
Simple: Since the engineers cannot duplicate this method of annotation because of the patent, they're forced to sit down and think of something new. Creating new methods, rather than copying someone else's existing method, is known as advancing the state of the art. Or inventing.
. . . which covers 'receiving an annotation of the digital work, storing the annotation, and providing the annotation to a user.'
No, it does not. It covers A PARTICULAR METHOD of 'receiving an annotation of the digital work, storing the annotation, and providing the annotation to a user.' Specifically,
A computer-implemented method for providing an annotation of a digital work, comprising:
--under control of instructions that are executed by one or more computing devices:
--receiving multiple annotations from different authors for particular content in a digital work;
--storing the annotations in association with the digital work;
--providing a list of abbreviated versions of the annotations to a user desiring to access one or more of the annotations, wherein the list presents the annotations in an order determined by reference to a criterion;
--receiving an authorization credential from a user desiring to access one or more of the annotations; and if the authorization credential is valid,
--providing a full version of one or more of the annotations of the digital work to the user in context with regard to the digital work.
The patent covers a method that includes all five of the listed elements (receiving, storing, providing, etc.). Your favorite method must include all five of these elements, and be published before the filing date (19 January 2005) to be classified as disqualifying prior art. Not include one (or more) of these elements? Then it's not disqualifying prior art. (I'm speaking in generalities here, and ignoring other independent claims, apparatus claims, and lots of special cases. See your attorney if it matters to you.)
The Okular annotation method, while no doubt earlier and better in every way, seems not to include many of these elements, and so would not be disqualifying prior art.
Can we become better educated on patents -- maybe just a little -- so that we can not panic every time somebody patents something? By that I mean, can we start quoting Claim 1 in the summary, instead of the abstract?
I note in passing that the Patent Examiner reviewed (approximately; I counted by hand) 184 US patents and patent applications, 6 foreign patent documents, and 80 other references, looking for art, and that the examination process took more than seven years to complete. Whatever else one may say about this patent, it wasn't rubber-stamped.
As someone else above has noted, in the US John Wyndham is rarely mentioned, but The Day of the Triffids is great reading.
Compiled as Ingathering: The Complete People Stories. Just . . . excellent.
Regardless of his interests, your nephew has passed the programmer's first test: His program prints "sorry to low" and "sorry to high". Only a true programmer would get the computer language correct, but the human language incorrect.
I predict a bright future.