I'm no scientist, but I do know that silicon and high temperatures don't get along too well.
The problem is with mostly doped silicon; at high temperatures the dopants tend to migrate, which is bad for very small, very fast electronics. It isn't a mechanical problem.
This leads me to my problems with the nano-technologists we have nowadays. Where's the power? Anybody have a 1 cubic milimeter battery that'll last 1 hour yet? Show me a self powered nanobot. Hell, show me a nano-power source that works!
Sure, if you show me a car that drills its own oil and refines its own fuel from it. Where'd you get the "self powered" requirement? All they need to do for most applications is receive power (e.g. from high frequency sound waves) and convert it to mechanical energy. For the sound waves--which look like pressure waves at that scale--all you need is a piston.
Remember, volume decreases by the cube as you scale down.
False logic. The power requierments also scale down, sometimes by as much as the fifth power IIRC.
Sure a quintillion nano-bots could make me breakfast out of yesterday's trash, but what's going to power them?
How about yesterday's trash? 1) it's there, and 2) there's plenty of it, so 3) you aren't going to use all of it, and 4) part of what you don't use would burn, so 5) controlled, small scale oxydation (e.g., what microbes, fungi, etc. would do if they were converting the trash) should give you all the energy you need.
Heck, if you're building a diamondoid structure of some sort instead of just cooking breakfast for a skeptic, you'e have way more reduced hydrogen than you need, so just use that and dump the resulting water.
These lawsuits aren't the first time that PanIP principal Lawrence Lockwood has initiated legal proceedings against companies he felt were infringing his patents...He's obviously learned from his earlier 'mistake' and is only going for the smaller companies.
So, what we should do is keep our eyes out for companies that are violating his "patents" (e.g., get a phone book) and start notifying them that they appear to be in violation. Copy PanIP on the notice, and see what happens. If enough people (hundreds? thousands?) do this to enough companies, it should surely stir up some dust.
Foe good measure, 1) pick companies that look big enough to fight him (or obvious sympathy cases), 2) also copy the patent office on the message, and 3) send a copy to the journalists who have covered the story.
Smirk. One good way to kill things that live under rocks is to expose them to daylight.
...Home Office plans to use these chips in all goods...
That should be fun. Even assuming that "all goods" excludes things like food, there are still a wide range of products that I sure wouldn't want to track.
Quick and dirty, that I can tune as needed.
So to produce a frame, you have each "creature" draw themselves if they overlap the present view area. The detail of each creature's "look" is local to that creature, so you can tune/tweak it at need. Done.
Zoom capability on a grid
The "present view" data includes a view-center and a scale factor, which all the drawing primatives use to translate from world coordinates to screen coordinates. Clicking on a point on the grid may make that point the new screen center and increase/decrease the scale factor, depending on which "tool" (the magnifying glass, etc.) the user has sellected. Done.
Pop up menus on any one grid element to get information.
Trivial. When the mouse hovers, or they right click, or press control-yada-yada-cokebottle, or wahatever, pop up your menu. If you also want information about each creature, use a (perhap subtilly) different colour for each creature and check the colour of the creature under the mouse to determine what to pop up. Done.
Scrolling, resizing, the typical.
Done.
Be able to hook to a C/C++ program to get a creature's behavior
Done.
It shouldn't take much longer to write than it took to ask the question, or to answer it.
I know you're joking, but this is pretty close to what I have done. We had to have a one-of-a-kind ubberbox moved across town. The person handling things on our end brought the representative from the mover to me, asking what sort of assurances we needed from them. I told him there was an easy answer: his boss and I would ride in the back of the truck, and trust our people to have handled everything.
We did, they did, and I got to spend forty five minutes in the dark with someone I didn't know, swapping war stories and trying to guess which street we were on. The move went flawlessly.
The problem with this is that you're making the same mistaken assumptions about the solar system/galaxy/universe that most humans are making about the earth...
That there are infinite resources, and that they exist for the sole purpose of being consumed by humans. This is the kind of philosophy that has put us (and overpopulation) where we are...
First off, "enough for many centuries" does not equal "infinite". So you either didn't get my point, or you are intentionally misrepresenting it to make yours.
Second, what put us where we are is not some phylosophy about resources. What has "put us where we are" has been the development of better and better health care, agriculture, etc., coupled with the belief that the results should be shared with as many people as possible. I would rather go to space to continue this trend than say, "No, sorry, gotta stop. Food and health care are only for the nobel/rich again, and we're going to drop the quality for them until enough people die off that we can sustain everybody on just what we have here."
If you want to kill yourself to make room for someone else, I support your right to do so. But if you intend to bump of someone else, I will fight you. But rather than either, I'd invite you to consider how easy it would be for us to raise the world standard of living to something above the present US average, while at the same time reducing the load on the earth. Not a permanent solution, no, but neither is throwing someone a life vest. That isn't a reason not to do it.
... just what this planet needs to help out with the overpopulation problems.
Nuts. We already know of the location of enough energy, raw materials, space, etc. to suport the current population growth trends and indefinite longevity for many centuries, while at the same time cleaning up the environment and working on the solutions we will need beyond that.
All we have to do is grow up, go up, leave the nest, and get on with it.
Obscurity is the only paradigm. The only difference is degree. If I have a machine on the street corner that despenses money to anyone that asks, I'll likely go broke if the command sequence is "give me money". I can save myself for a while by making the command something like JJ6554, but eventually the word will get out. This is a base example of security through obscurity; I'm counting on the fact that there are a lot of commands I could be using and it will take the bad guys a while to guess which ones I'm actually using.
I could buy more time by making the numeric portion of command sequence different for each user, and tying it to some even more obscure pattern of magnetic bits on a little card for each user, etc., but all I am doing is increasing the obscurity and thus gaining additional temporary security.
The problem isn't with "security through obscurity" as the/part of the/all of the security model. The real question is, can you quantify the obscurity (and thus the risk). In a closed security model, there's no way to measure the obscurity/security without breaking it. In an open model, the system is divided into two parts; a specification or standard of some sort which is visible and from which you can compute the size of the second, obscure portion (e.g. C^N where C is the number of characters in the password character set and N is the length of the password). That way at least you can estimate how long you have before the bad guys get in.
Something as simple as a piece of paper and a light source showed that classical mechanics was not enough to explain our universe and that quantum mechanics had to be invented.
First, you might want to throw a prism on your list, or a laser, since it only works with monochromatic light. Secondly, this shows the wave nature of light, but it doesn't show the particle nature, so it doesn't really challenge classical physics when taken in issolation. You need something like the photoelectric effect, or an in-depth look at spectroscopy vs. black body radiation in addition to make trouble for classical physics.
it says "serious" math. It depends on your definition of seriousness. For me Quicksort only uses trivial math. Nothing worth being called "serious" at all.
I have yet to encounter any "trivial math"; as far as I've seen, it's all serious if you look at it hard enough. For example, arithmetic may seem trivial, but in the hands of Whitehead & Russell it turns out to be serious. All they were trying to do was put simple arithmetic on a sound logical footing, yet they (with Godel, etc.) wound up challenging notions like "proof" and "truth"--fairly serious consequences for such a trivial topic.
Take a group. If you're sorting, there must be some ordering, so we can say that for any pair A and B, either A comes before B, B comes before A, or it doesn't matter which you put first.
Pick a random element P from your set. Some belong before it, some after it, and some are equal. So that's three smaller sets. Apply the same process to the smaller sets, so they're sorted. Then put 'em together, and it's all sorted.
So, right off the top I see predicate calculus ("P implies Q" and "for any X such that..."), set theory, trichotomy (either A, B, or not (A or B)), partial ordering, random/stochastic variables...I thought the point was to do it without using math?
Why don't you make something from scratch? With everything from transistors to single board "stamp" systems available, pick a level you find entertaining and roll your own. Can you make a working adder from transistors? How about a distrubuted cluster of little embedables. Or if you're really brave, try something analogue.
If you need a focus, think robotics. Or wearability. Or rocketry. If you don't mind starting over a lot, try to make something that can swim.
Don't you think it is flashed only at the surface? So that there _IS_ a gradient.
That would be true for the nested tubes (which, as I understand it, don't blow up).
But for the single layer the "surface" is all there is. They are, after all, only one atom thick. And since atoms are the bottom as far as heat is concerned (or at least, they are about as far down as you can go with the classical concept of heat) their isn't really a difference between the "surface" and the "inside".
You can't have a carbon atom that's hot on one side and cold on the other, and more than you can have an integer that's even on one side and odd on the other.
If you heat an issolated something uniformly it doesn't matter how well it conducts heat; heat only flows if there's a gradient (in this case, that implies someplace else (that wasn't flashed) to dump the heat).
Isn't this supposed to be unecessary? Isn't GNU/Linux supposed to be upgradable just where needed? What am I faling to understand here.
Given that I am reading this thread specifically because I'm interested in upgrading a few existing boxes, I may be able to explain.
I suspect I'm lazy.
Can't get more "Occam's razor" than that. There's one box in pariticular that I'd like to have KDE3 on, but to do that I'd also need to update Qt to 3.something, and lib-this.so and dev-that.so.what and I don't really feel like it. I don't need KDE3 on the box, and, as I concluded the other night when I started to think about upgrading, I'm lazy. Or to put a (slightly) more charitable face on it, I'd rather code, and play with my kid, and web-surf, and read, and doodle arround on the piano. Not all at the same time of course.
The point of OSS (to me at least) isn't that I always do things myself, but that I have that option, and at varrious levels of granularity. I eat out most meals, but I'd be annoyed if I didn't have a stove in the house, or some unpaved dirt in the back where I could plant things. But I'm still willing to let the folks at RedHat, etc. cook for me if they want to.
Scientists should stop realeasing info like that to the stupid press before their results are confirmed.
...or we all should stop listening to the press when they publish half-baked science stories. Think about the motivations and potential to learn; any particular scientist who makes themeselves a laughing stock will learn, but they are more or less out of the game by that point. But a newspaper, etc. that suffers a decline in readership directly attributable to publishing half baked claims without a huge disclaimer (or a system, such as slashdot has, allowing readers to attach their own disclaimers) will still be in the game and they do learn. In fact, part of the reason the press sucks as much as it does is that they have been learning from us, the general public, what to print and what not to print. So when you see something like this, speak up!
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I think I've cancled three subscriptions to Scientific American on this principle so far. They don't seem to have learned yet, but I've enjoyed writing the letters.
NewsFactor reports that Quark's QuarkXPress is not quite up-to-snuff under Mac OS X." Sources in the article claim Mac OS X still isn't quite there in regard to printing, or predictability. That is, I suppose, you don't mind crashes as long as you know when they are going to happen and what is going to cause them.
I'm having trouble parsing that last sentence. The only interpretation I can think of that (roughly) fits with the grammer and my understanding of the world is that Quark users will be disapointed under Mac OS X, since they are used to having their systems crash and knowing that Quark caused it, and now when their system crashes they won't know for sure if Quark caused it.
If that's the case, I can fix the problem easily. Just print out this post and patse the following line somewhere where you can refer to it often:
Firstly, I'll repeat IANAL, and you may well be right. Secondly, we're in full agreement that if the DCMA would/does prohibit the discussion of circumvention that would be/is unconsititutional. And thirdly, I only left out words because I was being lazy (and couldn't figure out how to copy/paste from the pdf); I assumed that the words I omited did not significantly affect the interpretation.
You seem to agree that the omitted words only restrict the paragraphs in question to cases where there is no circumvention of technological measures of copy protection.
So the only point in question is: does copying DVDs involve the circumvention of technological measures? I have always assumed that it did (and I belive that that is the position that the content "industry" would take), but I can see how you could argue that, for example, an identical copy (including the copy protection) was not circumventing the technological measures. I can also see how the courts might beg to differ.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. My base belief that the DMCA prohibits discussion of means of circumvention comes, not from reading the law itself, but from a variety of published sources, e.g. the book "Digital Copyright."
Right. What's your point? The government doesn't prohibit you from talking about how to copy DVDs.
See HR-2281 (the "DMCA") page 8, Ch 12-f-3. It says "information [...] may be made available to others [...] provided [...it is used...] solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability [...and...] to the extent that doing so does not constitute an infringement under this title".
IANAL, but this pretty clearly states that we are prohibited from talking about how to copy a DVD since actually copying one could be an infringement of the DMCA.
The artical was short, and missing one major detail...What is it?
The said it was "a pentamethylcyclopentadienyl cation" which tells you exactly what they made if you have the right secret decoder ring.
penta- means five
-methyl- refers to a methane group; a methane group is a carbon with all it's free bonds capped with hydrogen.
pentamethyl- means it has five methyl- groups dangling off of it; they don't tell us where, but we'll shortly see why they didn't bother.
-cyclo- means the base structure is a ring.
-penta- is five again
-dienyl- means alternating single and double bonds like so...--C==C--C==C--C==...
-cyclopentadienyl- means that it's a ring of five carbons with every other other bond double. But wait, you say, what does "every other mean" in a five element ring? Thus we get to...
-cation means it's got a positive charge, so the whole bonding picture may be off, with the double bonds playing resonance leap-frog around the ring.
So (in English) it's a positively charged ring of five carbon atoms, with a CH3 hanging off each carbon, and an average of 1.4 bonds between each pair of carbons in the ring.
As for what it's good for, that depends. It could be good for a thesis, or for tenure, or for funding, or...it all depends on where you are in the food chain.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no scientist, but I do know that silicon and high temperatures don't get along too well.
The problem is with mostly doped silicon; at high temperatures the dopants tend to migrate, which is bad for very small, very fast electronics. It isn't a mechanical problem.
This leads me to my problems with the nano-technologists we have nowadays. Where's the power? Anybody have a 1 cubic milimeter battery that'll last 1 hour yet? Show me a self powered nanobot. Hell, show me a nano-power source that works!
Sure, if you show me a car that drills its own oil and refines its own fuel from it. Where'd you get the "self powered" requirement? All they need to do for most applications is receive power (e.g. from high frequency sound waves) and convert it to mechanical energy. For the sound waves--which look like pressure waves at that scale--all you need is a piston.
Remember, volume decreases by the cube as you scale down.
False logic. The power requierments also scale down, sometimes by as much as the fifth power IIRC.
Sure a quintillion nano-bots could make me breakfast out of yesterday's trash, but what's going to power them?
How about yesterday's trash? 1) it's there, and 2) there's plenty of it, so 3) you aren't going to use all of it, and 4) part of what you don't use would burn, so 5) controlled, small scale oxydation (e.g., what microbes, fungi, etc. would do if they were converting the trash) should give you all the energy you need.
Heck, if you're building a diamondoid structure of some sort instead of just cooking breakfast for a skeptic, you'e have way more reduced hydrogen than you need, so just use that and dump the resulting water.
-- MarkusQ
So, what we should do is keep our eyes out for companies that are violating his "patents" (e.g., get a phone book) and start notifying them that they appear to be in violation. Copy PanIP on the notice, and see what happens. If enough people (hundreds? thousands?) do this to enough companies, it should surely stir up some dust.
Foe good measure, 1) pick companies that look big enough to fight him (or obvious sympathy cases), 2) also copy the patent office on the message, and 3) send a copy to the journalists who have covered the story.
Smirk. One good way to kill things that live under rocks is to expose them to daylight.
-- MarkusQ
That should be fun. Even assuming that "all goods" excludes things like food, there are still a wide range of products that I sure wouldn't want to track.
--- MarkusQ
Q: What would you use to build such an animation?
A: A programming language. Say, C or C++?
Seriously. Consider your criteria:
Quick and dirty, that I can tune as needed.
So to produce a frame, you have each "creature" draw themselves if they overlap the present view area. The detail of each creature's "look" is local to that creature, so you can tune/tweak it at need. Done.
Zoom capability on a grid
The "present view" data includes a view-center and a scale factor, which all the drawing primatives use to translate from world coordinates to screen coordinates. Clicking on a point on the grid may make that point the new screen center and increase/decrease the scale factor, depending on which "tool" (the magnifying glass, etc.) the user has sellected. Done.
Pop up menus on any one grid element to get information.
Trivial. When the mouse hovers, or they right click, or press control-yada-yada-cokebottle, or wahatever, pop up your menu. If you also want information about each creature, use a (perhap subtilly) different colour for each creature and check the colour of the creature under the mouse to determine what to pop up. Done.
Scrolling, resizing, the typical.
Done.
Be able to hook to a C/C++ program to get a creature's behavior
Done.
It shouldn't take much longer to write than it took to ask the question, or to answer it.
-- MarkusQ
Have them ride in the back of the truck...
I know you're joking, but this is pretty close to what I have done. We had to have a one-of-a-kind ubberbox moved across town. The person handling things on our end brought the representative from the mover to me, asking what sort of assurances we needed from them. I told him there was an easy answer: his boss and I would ride in the back of the truck, and trust our people to have handled everything.
We did, they did, and I got to spend forty five minutes in the dark with someone I didn't know, swapping war stories and trying to guess which street we were on. The move went flawlessly.
-- MarkusQ
The problem with this is that you're making the same mistaken assumptions about the solar system/galaxy/universe that most humans are making about the earth
First off, "enough for many centuries" does not equal "infinite". So you either didn't get my point, or you are intentionally misrepresenting it to make yours.
Second, what put us where we are is not some phylosophy about resources. What has "put us where we are" has been the development of better and better health care, agriculture, etc., coupled with the belief that the results should be shared with as many people as possible. I would rather go to space to continue this trend than say, "No, sorry, gotta stop. Food and health care are only for the nobel/rich again, and we're going to drop the quality for them until enough people die off that we can sustain everybody on just what we have here."
If you want to kill yourself to make room for someone else, I support your right to do so. But if you intend to bump of someone else, I will fight you. But rather than either, I'd invite you to consider how easy it would be for us to raise the world standard of living to something above the present US average, while at the same time reducing the load on the earth. Not a permanent solution, no, but neither is throwing someone a life vest. That isn't a reason not to do it.
-- MarkusQ
... just what this planet needs to help out with the overpopulation problems.
Nuts. We already know of the location of enough energy, raw materials, space, etc. to suport the current population growth trends and indefinite longevity for many centuries, while at the same time cleaning up the environment and working on the solutions we will need beyond that.
All we have to do is grow up, go up, leave the nest, and get on with it.
-- MarkusQ
or you could always take steps to keep people under 40 from reproducing
Isn't that the whole point of the high tech industry? At least, it worked on me.
-- MarkusQ
but obscurity is an accepted security paradigm
Obscurity is the only paradigm. The only difference is degree. If I have a machine on the street corner that despenses money to anyone that asks, I'll likely go broke if the command sequence is "give me money". I can save myself for a while by making the command something like JJ6554, but eventually the word will get out. This is a base example of security through obscurity; I'm counting on the fact that there are a lot of commands I could be using and it will take the bad guys a while to guess which ones I'm actually using.
I could buy more time by making the numeric portion of command sequence different for each user, and tying it to some even more obscure pattern of magnetic bits on a little card for each user, etc., but all I am doing is increasing the obscurity and thus gaining additional temporary security.
The problem isn't with "security through obscurity" as the/part of the/all of the security model. The real question is, can you quantify the obscurity (and thus the risk). In a closed security model, there's no way to measure the obscurity/security without breaking it. In an open model, the system is divided into two parts; a specification or standard of some sort which is visible and from which you can compute the size of the second, obscure portion (e.g. C^N where C is the number of characters in the password character set and N is the length of the password). That way at least you can estimate how long you have before the bad guys get in.
-- MarkusQ
Last I heard, Bruce Perens was up that way.
Of course, I stopped putting radio tracking devices on people back in high school, so I have no real idea where he is at the moment.
-- MarkusQ
Something as simple as a piece of paper and a light source showed that classical mechanics was not enough to explain our universe and that quantum mechanics had to be invented.
First, you might want to throw a prism on your list, or a laser, since it only works with monochromatic light. Secondly, this shows the wave nature of light, but it doesn't show the particle nature, so it doesn't really challenge classical physics when taken in issolation. You need something like the photoelectric effect, or an in-depth look at spectroscopy vs. black body radiation in addition to make trouble for classical physics.
-- MarkusQ
it says "serious" math. It depends on your definition of seriousness. For me Quicksort only uses trivial math. Nothing worth being called "serious" at all.
I have yet to encounter any "trivial math"; as far as I've seen, it's all serious if you look at it hard enough. For example, arithmetic may seem trivial, but in the hands of Whitehead & Russell it turns out to be serious. All they were trying to do was put simple arithmetic on a sound logical footing, yet they (with Godel, etc.) wound up challenging notions like "proof" and "truth"--fairly serious consequences for such a trivial topic.
-- MarkusQ
So, right off the top I see predicate calculus ("P implies Q" and "for any X such that..."), set theory, trichotomy (either A, B, or not (A or B)), partial ordering, random/stochastic variables...I thought the point was to do it without using math?
-- MarkusQ
Sometimes it seems that Microsoft's main product is abuse, not software.
No, Microsoft's main product isn't abuse or software. It's stock.
Microsoft is a pyramid scheme. It only looks like a mountain because it's grown so darned large.
-- Markus
If you need a focus, think robotics. Or wearability. Or rocketry. If you don't mind starting over a lot, try to make something that can swim.
You get the idea.
-- MarkusQ
Don't you think it is flashed only at the surface? So that there _IS_ a gradient.
That would be true for the nested tubes (which, as I understand it, don't blow up).
But for the single layer the "surface" is all there is. They are, after all, only one atom thick. And since atoms are the bottom as far as heat is concerned (or at least, they are about as far down as you can go with the classical concept of heat) their isn't really a difference between the "surface" and the "inside".
You can't have a carbon atom that's hot on one side and cold on the other, and more than you can have an integer that's even on one side and odd on the other.
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
Given that I am reading this thread specifically because I'm interested in upgrading a few existing boxes, I may be able to explain.
I suspect I'm lazy.
Can't get more "Occam's razor" than that. There's one box in pariticular that I'd like to have KDE3 on, but to do that I'd also need to update Qt to 3.something, and lib-this.so and dev-that.so.what and I don't really feel like it. I don't need KDE3 on the box, and, as I concluded the other night when I started to think about upgrading, I'm lazy. Or to put a (slightly) more charitable face on it, I'd rather code, and play with my kid, and web-surf, and read, and doodle arround on the piano. Not all at the same time of course.
The point of OSS (to me at least) isn't that I always do things myself, but that I have that option, and at varrious levels of granularity. I eat out most meals, but I'd be annoyed if I didn't have a stove in the house, or some unpaved dirt in the back where I could plant things. But I'm still willing to let the folks at RedHat, etc. cook for me if they want to.
-- MarkusQ
Well done man, getting modded as insightful for admitting that you have been asleep for 6 years
Hey, I nodded off a lot. Can I have a point too?
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I'm shooting for Funny but I'll take Insightfull if that's all you've got.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I think I've cancled three subscriptions to Scientific American on this principle so far. They don't seem to have learned yet, but I've enjoyed writing the letters.
You sound like someone who's used Quark too much.
Yes, and far, far too late into the night trying to make a deadline on caffine and grim determination.
What do you think of InDesign? The reviews make me think it's a lot nicer to work with.
I haven't tried it, but you may well be right.
Maybe your press house should consider supporting it.
I was further upstream (downstream?) than that; I was stuck using Quark because that's what our printer accepted.
-- MarkusQ
I'm having trouble parsing that last sentence. The only interpretation I can think of that (roughly) fits with the grammer and my understanding of the world is that Quark users will be disapointed under Mac OS X, since they are used to having their systems crash and knowing that Quark caused it, and now when their system crashes they won't know for sure if Quark caused it.
If that's the case, I can fix the problem easily. Just print out this post and patse the following line somewhere where you can refer to it often:
You're welcome.
-- MarkusQ
You seem to agree that the omitted words only restrict the paragraphs in question to cases where there is no circumvention of technological measures of copy protection.
So the only point in question is: does copying DVDs involve the circumvention of technological measures? I have always assumed that it did (and I belive that that is the position that the content "industry" would take), but I can see how you could argue that, for example, an identical copy (including the copy protection) was not circumventing the technological measures. I can also see how the courts might beg to differ.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. My base belief that the DMCA prohibits discussion of means of circumvention comes, not from reading the law itself, but from a variety of published sources, e.g. the book "Digital Copyright."
See HR-2281 (the "DMCA") page 8, Ch 12-f-3. It says "information [...] may be made available to others [...] provided [...it is used...] solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability [...and...] to the extent that doing so does not constitute an infringement under this title".
IANAL, but this pretty clearly states that we are prohibited from talking about how to copy a DVD since actually copying one could be an infringement of the DMCA.
-- MarkusQ
The said it was "a pentamethylcyclopentadienyl cation" which tells you exactly what they made if you have the right secret decoder ring.
So (in English) it's a positively charged ring of five carbon atoms, with a CH3 hanging off each carbon, and an average of 1.4 bonds between each pair of carbons in the ring.As for what it's good for, that depends. It could be good for a thesis, or for tenure, or for funding, or...it all depends on where you are in the food chain.
-- MarkusQ