I have been wondering about the comparative costs of different energy sources. Does anyone know the dollar cost per BTU (or per some unit of energy) for the various types of sources of energy? That is at today's prices, how much money per BTU of Natural Gas, gasoline, electricity from the power company, etc?
If you like, give websites with this kind of information.
By the way, some way to rate individual moderator assessments could be set up in which the regular/. user does not know who they are evaluating, but the top level people can get reports of individual moderators. That would put a stop to junk like this.
The topic of this thread started out as "Space Elevator." Who ever moderated this post (#13593147) as anything other than -1 off topic is eggregiously irresponsible. What is worse, this moderator thinks the post is "Interesting."
Is there some way we can rate the moderators? This moderator should be moved on to responsibilities other than moderating.
Seems true 3D would appear muddy as you'd be seeing through translucent objects, unless they've come up with a way to make air opaque.
I can think of a few applications which I did not see not mentioned in the article.
In engineering it could be used as a quickie rapid prototype. You could not pick it up, but you could see it (and turn it around with your hand).
Another area (still engineering) would be visualization. Imagine taking your 3d model of the proposed bridge to the county commissioner meeting and displaying it on one of these things. (Maybe I am just easily impressed, but to me that is a big wow.)
Those are examples of showing the proposed "finished product" to the boss. But it could also have breakthrough applications in the drafting and engineering side. A draftsman could do all of his 3d design work using this as a screen.
The opacity problem you mention is not a problem if you tackle it from the software side. Let's say you have a 1 terabyte whole-body scan. The software would have the job of classifying tissues, so that if you only wanted to see bone, the software would render the bone tissue before generating the image for the projector to project. You want to add blood vessels to the view? Just tell the application to add the blood vessels. What, the view is too busy now to really get a good look? Use the software to zoon in and then clip the front of the image so that the radiologist can get a clear view of just the area of the suspected tumor.
In other words, there are ways to filter out things you don't want to see. View depths/clipping is one way. Turning off the display of different "materials" is another way.
Now that this thing is here (or on the verge of here, I hope) I think we are going to be seeing a lot of this thing (or things like it) in the next ten years or so. I remember the day in the early nineties when a laptop with a 12" b/w screen was impressive. Now even I can afford a 17" 96 dpi full color laptop. I am very hopeful about this new technology.
I don't know if they even would be removable or interchangeable, so really this is a question. Could they be desinged that way? If so, would anyone want it and why?
I don't think it is we who are the new interstellar species. It would be the microbes on Voyager. I mean the ones they did not exterminate before lift off.
So why would they flash red-red-green anyway then? If some percentage of pilots is only going to see flash-flash-flash, why go to the trouble of having red and green?
By that I mean, why just flash red-red-green. They could also indicate the best direction to turn to get out of the airspace as quickly as possible:
Red-red-green means turn right. Red-green means turn left. Red-red means stay straight. Green-green (for a few seconds) means you are now clear of the airspace.
I had heard the notion that the ark could have killed Uzzah because it was a charged capaictor and he grounded it when he touched it. But I never heard any speculation of what might have charged it. The experience these dudes had on myth busters is very instructive.
I do not get cable TV. Do you mind telling me if the myth busters explained how the Ark became charged when no electric fences existed during the days of the Old Testament?
Isn't that the million dollar question? Although I never read _I, Robot_, I bet that is one of the questions those stories ask. Certainly it is what Rodenberry and Berman were asking with the Data character in ST-TNG.
If I remove all of my preconceived ideas of computer limitations, there are a lot of things I would like to do. For example, I might ask my machine to survey and assimilate everything written by Nietze and everything written in direct response to him. Then I would have a conversation with it, asking me to explain Nietze's main points and underlying world view. In the course of the conversation I could ask my machine to pick out a few key passages to let me read for myself (on its screen, of course).
Smart is definitely trying to get us to think outside of the cliche. The things he was talking about there are things he envisions happening in the next ten to fifty years.
Yes, you got my meaning. (If you are a bot, I guess you simulated getting my meaning.)
I did not actually say personality is required. For conversation it is entailed. When we get to the point of emulating personality, that will possibly also be done internally with statistics and tables. Confirmation, by the way, is not an implementation method. Also, it is something personalities already do when they judge there is a need for it, wouldn't you say?
I see what you are saying, though. This leaves the question in my mind of what Smart was talking about when he said that the real challenge for LUI's is language processing and not speech recognition. If all I want to do is start an email to my professor by saying "email doctor rosenthall" to my computer, this is already available in some form. (What you call machine pidgin.) Clearly he was speaking of a conversation with a computer that is more freeform: "email doctor rosenthall and tell him that I had an emergency come up and have to miss class tomorrow."
Perhaps you did not get from Smart's lecture the same things I got. He just could not have been speaking of pidgin.
After thinking it over, I realize that perhaps you did not get my meaning. I am saying that if a computer is sophisticated to be able to understand and respond to a human at a level higher than pidgin (much higher), then it would be so sophisticated that it would inherently have personality as an emergent feature. And Smart did not make that link, which surprises me.
I was expecting Smart to make a connection between LUI'S and Personality Capture, but if he did I missed it. It has to do with the notion that Natural Language Processing (which he pointed out is such a challenge) is naturally done by personalities. Okay, perhaps it is not a link with the "capture" part of Personality Capture, but we capture things now with computers. The link is with the "personality" part.
Language processing is based on life experience. In order for a neural net to learn language it must have inputs such that it can understand a concept such as "select", "walk", or "win." For a computer to understand "select" might be pretty easy. The trainer could say "I select a file" while he uses a mouse to select a file. The neural net could interface with that. But more sophisticated interfaces will be required to provide the nn with "context" for less computer-like concepts. We could put the nn into a robot that walks (like recently discussed on/.), along with visual processing so that it can experience walking see other things walking. Then when it hears references to "walk" it can make the connection.
(Yes, people who are unable to walk from infancy can speak intelligently about walking. Blind people can speak of and understand seeing. But those objections miss the point of a lack of "context input." As I understand it, a totally blind person does not know what "red" really is. (If I am misspeaking on this point, I apologize, especially to blind people or their close friends.))
Now consider this sentence, which is spelled phonetically:
"wonwonwonandwonwontoo"
Pretend that you heard it spoken instead of saw it written. The proficienct English speaker would realize several things. First, she would parse that into individual words:
"won won won and won won too"
Then she would do a lot of fast computation work to try different parts of speech for each word such that the sentence fits semantically and grammatically into rules of English. She might then write the sentence on paper as:
"One won one and one won two."
And that is enough for her to understand that the sentence is a fragment of a larger text, a newpaper report on the dog show or something. This is because the sentence has a lot of ellipses in it with anaphoric references being elided. Since references must be present, there must be more text associated with the sentence. With the references put back into the sentence it would read
"One person won one prize and one person won two prizes."
or "one dog won one bone . .." or something.
The proficient English speaker would not even be thinking about "anaphoric elliptical references." She would "just know."
All of these levels of computation go on in our brains constantly when we participate in all forms of communication. And in order for a LUI to work properly, the machine will also have to be able to do the same thing. Yet without other faculties (such as visual processing, mobility, etc.) these things can not be learned either. Hence, Linguistic User Interfaces and Personality emulation are intrinsically linked (and pretty darn tough).
I sure hope Khan doesn't find out about this plan.
As I recall from the Star Trek episode about Khan, the Eugenics wars happened in the 1990's, and then he and his genetically superior pals went into suspended animation on that spaceship that looks a lot like a model submarine. So he is probably snoozing about now and would not be hearing about this project.
I too have a blind friend. I have seen JAWS in operation on his computer and I find it lacking. He and I spent a long time trying to get it to read Acrobat.pdf files either being read aloud or sent to his Braille display, but to no avail. Also, JAWS can't show him anything from the display of Winamp. The problem here was that he can't access the time index. I would record our classes on mp3 and record major topic headings in a text file with the time index. My indexing was useless to him without a sighted person there to help him find it visually.
Come on. A "stuck cruise control" happened on an episode of CHIP's back in the seventies. They probably got the idea for that episode from a real life experience. In other words, there is nothing new here.
Seems to me the most useful application would be in car glass for gas/electric hybrids. The power generated by the clear solar panels would go into the cars electric propulsion system when it is running and trickle-charge the batteries when sitting out in the parking lot.
Hey, who knows. Maybe one day drivers trying to park in parking decks will fight over top-level spaces to get their batteries charged.
I question your conclusion about the author's decision. A single word (such as 'to') is ambiguous in its meaning until the context of a sentence is provided. So having meaning does not define a word either, yet it Zipf's original work was based on words. So if his work is based on words, uncertain in their meaning as they are, then notes ought to be a legitimate parallel base unit in music.
Yes, that link was informative and interesting. But what would have been really informative is information on the radial sweep distinguishable by the average healthy human eye. This could then be correlated to how far the eye must be from a screen of a given dot pitch before it can not distinguish (or see) dots (such as the dot over an "i" in a small font). If anyone could post that info, it would be much appreciated, but only for the purpose of satisfying my curiosity.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been wondering about the comparative costs of different energy sources. Does anyone know the dollar cost per BTU (or per some unit of energy) for the various types of sources of energy? That is at today's prices, how much money per BTU of Natural Gas, gasoline, electricity from the power company, etc?
If you like, give websites with this kind of information.
- the Dunedan
The mods must be on crack.
/. user does not know who they are evaluating, but the top level people can get reports of individual moderators. That would put a stop to junk like this.
Now there is something you and I can agree on.
By the way, some way to rate individual moderator assessments could be set up in which the regular
- theDunedan
(Score: 5, Interesting)
The topic of this thread started out as "Space Elevator." Who ever moderated this post (#13593147) as anything other than -1 off topic is eggregiously irresponsible. What is worse, this moderator thinks the post is "Interesting."
Is there some way we can rate the moderators? This moderator should be moved on to responsibilities other than moderating.
theDunedan
In engineering it could be used as a quickie rapid prototype. You could not pick it up, but you could see it (and turn it around with your hand).
Another area (still engineering) would be visualization. Imagine taking your 3d model of the proposed bridge to the county commissioner meeting and displaying it on one of these things. (Maybe I am just easily impressed, but to me that is a big wow.)
Those are examples of showing the proposed "finished product" to the boss. But it could also have breakthrough applications in the drafting and engineering side. A draftsman could do all of his 3d design work using this as a screen.
The opacity problem you mention is not a problem if you tackle it from the software side. Let's say you have a 1 terabyte whole-body scan. The software would have the job of classifying tissues, so that if you only wanted to see bone, the software would render the bone tissue before generating the image for the projector to project. You want to add blood vessels to the view? Just tell the application to add the blood vessels. What, the view is too busy now to really get a good look? Use the software to zoon in and then clip the front of the image so that the radiologist can get a clear view of just the area of the suspected tumor.
In other words, there are ways to filter out things you don't want to see. View depths/clipping is one way. Turning off the display of different "materials" is another way.
Now that this thing is here (or on the verge of here, I hope) I think we are going to be seeing a lot of this thing (or things like it) in the next ten years or so. I remember the day in the early nineties when a laptop with a 12" b/w screen was impressive. Now even I can afford a 17" 96 dpi full color laptop. I am very hopeful about this new technology.
- the Dunester
I don't know if they even would be removable or interchangeable, so really this is a question. Could they be desinged that way? If so, would anyone want it and why?
I don't think it is we who are the new interstellar species. It would be the microbes on Voyager. I mean the ones they did not exterminate before lift off.
some people can't tell red from green
Wasn't thinking about that. Doh.
So why would they flash red-red-green anyway then? If some percentage of pilots is only going to see flash-flash-flash, why go to the trouble of having red and green?
Actually I mean "why not" encode data in the signal.
the Dunedan
By that I mean, why just flash red-red-green. They could also indicate the best direction to turn to get out of the airspace as quickly as possible:
Red-red-green means turn right. Red-green means turn left. Red-red means stay straight. Green-green (for a few seconds) means you are now clear of the airspace.
the Dunedan
Thanks for the info.
I had heard the notion that the ark could have killed Uzzah because it was a charged capaictor and he grounded it when he touched it. But I never heard any speculation of what might have charged it. The experience these dudes had on myth busters is very instructive.
I do not get cable TV. Do you mind telling me if the myth busters explained how the Ark became charged when no electric fences existed during the days of the Old Testament?
aside from entertainemt what use would it have?
Isn't that the million dollar question? Although I never read _I, Robot_, I bet that is one of the questions those stories ask. Certainly it is what Rodenberry and Berman were asking with the Data character in ST-TNG.
If I remove all of my preconceived ideas of computer limitations, there are a lot of things I would like to do. For example, I might ask my machine to survey and assimilate everything written by Nietze and everything written in direct response to him. Then I would have a conversation with it, asking me to explain Nietze's main points and underlying world view. In the course of the conversation I could ask my machine to pick out a few key passages to let me read for myself (on its screen, of course).
Smart is definitely trying to get us to think outside of the cliche. The things he was talking about there are things he envisions happening in the next ten to fifty years.
I read it as '111 and 112'. Does that mean that I fail the Turing Test?
:)
No, it means that my example is so good that there was a point of ambiguity in it that I missed.
Yes, you got my meaning. (If you are a bot, I guess you simulated getting my meaning.)
I did not actually say personality is required. For conversation it is entailed. When we get to the point of emulating personality, that will possibly also be done internally with statistics and tables. Confirmation, by the way, is not an implementation method. Also, it is something personalities already do when they judge there is a need for it, wouldn't you say?
I see what you are saying, though. This leaves the question in my mind of what Smart was talking about when he said that the real challenge for LUI's is language processing and not speech recognition. If all I want to do is start an email to my professor by saying "email doctor rosenthall" to my computer, this is already available in some form. (What you call machine pidgin.) Clearly he was speaking of a conversation with a computer that is more freeform: "email doctor rosenthall and tell him that I had an emergency come up and have to miss class tomorrow."
Perhaps you did not get from Smart's lecture the same things I got. He just could not have been speaking of pidgin.
After thinking it over, I realize that perhaps you did not get my meaning. I am saying that if a computer is sophisticated to be able to understand and respond to a human at a level higher than pidgin (much higher), then it would be so sophisticated that it would inherently have personality as an emergent feature. And Smart did not make that link, which surprises me.
I was expecting Smart to make a connection between LUI'S and Personality Capture, but if he did I missed it. It has to do with the notion that Natural Language Processing (which he pointed out is such a challenge) is naturally done by personalities. Okay, perhaps it is not a link with the "capture" part of Personality Capture, but we capture things now with computers. The link is with the "personality" part.
/.), along with visual processing so that it can experience walking see other things walking. Then when it hears references to "walk" it can make the connection.
." or something.
Language processing is based on life experience. In order for a neural net to learn language it must have inputs such that it can understand a concept such as "select", "walk", or "win." For a computer to understand "select" might be pretty easy. The trainer could say "I select a file" while he uses a mouse to select a file. The neural net could interface with that. But more sophisticated interfaces will be required to provide the nn with "context" for less computer-like concepts. We could put the nn into a robot that walks (like recently discussed on
(Yes, people who are unable to walk from infancy can speak intelligently about walking. Blind people can speak of and understand seeing. But those objections miss the point of a lack of "context input." As I understand it, a totally blind person does not know what "red" really is. (If I am misspeaking on this point, I apologize, especially to blind people or their close friends.))
Now consider this sentence, which is spelled phonetically:
"wonwonwonandwonwontoo"
Pretend that you heard it spoken instead of saw it written. The proficienct English speaker would realize several things. First, she would parse that into individual words:
"won won won and won won too"
Then she would do a lot of fast computation work to try different parts of speech for each word such that the sentence fits semantically and grammatically into rules of English. She might then write the sentence on paper as:
"One won one and one won two."
And that is enough for her to understand that the sentence is a fragment of a larger text, a newpaper report on the dog show or something. This is because the sentence has a lot of ellipses in it with anaphoric references being elided. Since references must be present, there must be more text associated with the sentence. With the references put back into the sentence it would read
"One person won one prize and one person won two prizes."
or "one dog won one bone . .
The proficient English speaker would not even be thinking about "anaphoric elliptical references." She would "just know."
All of these levels of computation go on in our brains constantly when we participate in all forms of communication. And in order for a LUI to work properly, the machine will also have to be able to do the same thing. Yet without other faculties (such as visual processing, mobility, etc.) these things can not be learned either. Hence, Linguistic User Interfaces and Personality emulation are intrinsically linked (and pretty darn tough).
the Dunedan
If only such could be true for the antecedent reference.
- theDunedan
As I recall from the Star Trek episode about Khan, the Eugenics wars happened in the 1990's, and then he and his genetically superior pals went into suspended animation on that spaceship that looks a lot like a model submarine. So he is probably snoozing about now and would not be hearing about this project.
But if he could have been reached for comment, how would anyone else know it was really him?
Man, has this been a flamebait (read 'useless') article/thread.
I too have a blind friend. I have seen JAWS in operation on his computer and I find it lacking. He and I spent a long time trying to get it to read Acrobat .pdf files either being read aloud or sent to his Braille display, but to no avail. Also, JAWS can't show him anything from the display of Winamp. The problem here was that he can't access the time index. I would record our classes on mp3 and record major topic headings in a text file with the time index. My indexing was useless to him without a sighted person there to help him find it visually.
FWIW,
theDunedan
shooting a laser onto my retina is not my idea of a smart thing to do?
Come on. A "stuck cruise control" happened on an episode of CHIP's back in the seventies. They probably got the idea for that episode from a real life experience. In other words, there is nothing new here.
- the Dunester
Seems to me the most useful application would be in car glass for gas/electric hybrids. The power generated by the clear solar panels would go into the cars electric propulsion system when it is running and trickle-charge the batteries when sitting out in the parking lot.
Hey, who knows. Maybe one day drivers trying to park in parking decks will fight over top-level spaces to get their batteries charged.
theDunedan
I question your conclusion about the author's decision. A single word (such as 'to') is ambiguous in its meaning until the context of a sentence is provided. So having meaning does not define a word either, yet it Zipf's original work was based on words. So if his work is based on words, uncertain in their meaning as they are, then notes ought to be a legitimate parallel base unit in music.
Yes, that link was informative and interesting. But what would have been really informative is information on the radial sweep distinguishable by the average healthy human eye. This could then be correlated to how far the eye must be from a screen of a given dot pitch before it can not distinguish (or see) dots (such as the dot over an "i" in a small font). If anyone could post that info, it would be much appreciated, but only for the purpose of satisfying my curiosity.
- Paul
The price for the 19 Dbi dish at www.stelladoradus.com (mentioned above) is $41. For me, the extra $37 is worthwhile.