It would be pretty cool to be able to go into your local bookstore - which would keep just one copy of every book - and therefore be much smaller - and have your book printed on the spot.
When you find the book you want, they'd print and bind it on the spot - with a handful of these machines at every store, they could have you outta there in a couple of minutes...giving you time to visit the in-store coffee shop.
Books that are rarely purchased would still be available - they'd never 'go out of print' - although you'd have to browse on a computer instead of picking up a physical book to look at.
Ideally, you'd be able to choose the page size, font size, paper and binding quality that you prefer and choose how you want it bound (spiral, etc)...costs being set appropriately.
Yeah - I know all of that. I used to own a small parrot - they are quite amazing creatures.
But when we were all kids we were taught that T.Rex meant 'King of the Terrible Lizards' and that it was pretty much the most lethal killing machine ever to walk the planet. We all had plastic T.Rex models on our bookshelves and in our toy boxes - they were essentially *real* live dragons - the nearest thing to mythology brought to life. We knew that if something so utterly impossible as a T.Rex could really have existed - then our imaginations could allow the possibility of anything existing for real.
Yet by steady stages, good, annoyingly rational, verifiable and solid science is turning our childhood icon into pathetic, helplessly overweight, flightless vultures covered with soft cuddly feathers.
I don't think kids will be having realistically cuddly T.Rex models in their toybox. What do we have to excite their interest? I bet *all* of the paleantologists who made this amazing discovery got into the business because of a childhood love of poor old T.Rex.
Oh the poor T.Rex...gone from being the most powerful and vicious creature imaginable - chasing down jeeps and eating lawyers and shaking the ground as it runs...then we hear that if it ran at more than 8 mph, it would fall over...then that if it ever did fall over, it couldn't get back up again...then they told us that it was merely a scavenger and not a hunter at all.
AND NOW IT LOOKS LIKE A GIANT, FLUFFY YELLOW CHICK?!?
Nooooo!
T.Rex's had laser eyes, breathed fire and had enormous leathery batlike wings that don't show up in the fossil record because they were shed every year to grow new ones. They could run at 80mph and ate several Diploducus for breakfast every morning before having violent terratorial disputes that took up the rest of their days. At night they tracked down and ate cavemen. Their advanced (but brutal and inhumane) society dominated the earth for 20 million years and was only brought down by alien civilisations hurling giant flaming meteors at them from the safe distance of the Kyper belt.
OK - maybe I lost a bit of scientific detachment there - but..*REALLY*.
Intelligence tests are DESIGNED to avoid these kinds of issues. So long as you have sufficient education to be able to read the verbal tests, the results don't correlate with the amount or nature of the education you've had.
However, all they really measure is ones ability to pass intelligence tests.
If those tests are calibrated by giving the test first to an 'average person', then to a genius and then to person who is evidently a 'slow thinker' - then lo and behold, when you test a population with the resulting test - you get back what you put in.
So if the test shows that there are 5.5 times as many male geniuses as female - then the very definition of what it means to be a genius has been defined according to the results of giving the IQ test to a predominantly male section of the population.
The only thing that gives IQ tests validity is how they correlate to other measures of human achievement. The fact that a high average IQ correlates to high average national income simply means that IQ is a measure of earnings potential. Well, we know that for one social reason or another, women's earnings potential is less than mens - which explains how the IQ test scores come out the way they do.
The deeper problem is that:
a) We don't like to think of men and women as being different...which is unfortunate because we are VERY different. There is more genetic similarity between a human and a chimpanzee of the same sex than there is between two humans of different sexes.
b) The word 'Intelligence' (and consequently the results of a test that measures this rather vague parameter) has become somehow correlated with one's life achievement or 'success' or something. Nobody regards it as a great scandal when someone says that men appear to be hairier than women...but somehow we attach so much to this incredibly vague and hard-to-measure parameter called 'Intelligence' - even though not one person can define it adequately.
The combination of these two purely social inhibitions serves to make it very difficult to study these things.
On NPR this morning, they mentioned that Intel had said that a typical PC user wouldn't notice any change as a result of this new architecture. So one presumes this means no major instruction set revisions or anything.
The other question is what you consider as a unit of innovation?
If we said that the invention of a practical flying machine by the Wright Brothers constituted one 'unit' of innovation. (Let's give it a proper scientific unit 'the wright' - and an abbreviation 'wr')...then how many wrights was the discovery of pennicilin? It feels like about 1.5wr to me - but who knows?
Clearly something like the iPod/iTunes innovation has touched about the same number of lives as a typical 1.0wr innovation - but somehow it seems much more trivial to me. I'd rate it an 0.05wr at the most.
But isn't this all terribly subjective?
To come up with any kind of analysis on the basis of such a subjective 'feel' seems meaningless to me.
Who cares what the rate of innovation per unit of population is? That peculiar measure of progress would only matter if benefits of innovation somehow didn't scale with the population size. The world population is still increasing - so the absolute rate of innovation as seen by consumers of those innovations is surely far better than linear.
But even if you are concerned about rate per unit of population, averaging over the entire planet is a stupid idea. The population increases are in the underdeveloped countries - who (pretty much by definition) aren't innovating much.
If you counted the rate of innovation per unit of population in DEVELOPED countries (whose populations are actually DECREASING) - then you'd see that the rate of innovation amongst those who are actually doing the innovating is still on a steep curve.
It's really obvious that if he makes his own ice using a fridge that's in the same room that he's cooling then the machine won't get him net cooling.
But where did it say that?
Maybe he has a big old chest freezer in his garage - the garage gets unbearably hot - but he doesn't live in his garage.
Maybe there is a free ice-maker in his apartment complex.
Maybe he buys bags of ice from Kroger. ($1.40 buys 10lbs of ice - that'll get you a big bucket of ice-water).
Maybe he makes ice in his fridge all day when he's at work/school - then opens all of his doors and windows to let the hot air out and get the room back to ambient before turning on the home-made A/C unit to chill things down when he's at home.
There are LOTS of ways that this could actually work.
But since cheap A/C can be had for $100 and is pretty much guaranteed to be more efficient and less hassle - I don't think this is such a wonderful device.
Sure - the downsides are obvious - but think of the benefits for a nerd-slob...
* An application that'll scan one sock and automagically tell me where the other one is.
* Something that'll automatically tell me which of a pile of quasi-dirty tee shirts were least recently worn.
* Laundry that screams out to the automatic laundry-o-matic when it's been stuck down the back of the sofa for more than three months....the possibilities are endless.
It's pretty clear that Maya is the best tool out there - if you can't get a decent Mac version, the cost of a Linux PC to run it on will be totally dwarfed by the cost of Maya itself!
"...features what Intel calls "IDE redirection" which will
allow administrators to remotely enable, disable or format
or configure individual drives and reload operating systems
and software from remote locations, again independent of
operating systems."
Doesn't this sound just suicidally dangerous to every single slashdot reader? Have we learned NOTHING about network security over the history of the Internet?
Intel put this technology in at the hardware level and refuse to tell us how it works!
So are we to believe that 'security by obscurity' is all that's protecting us from random idiots reformatting our hard drives and loading entire new OS's onto our machines? IRRESPECTIVE of what OS I have loaded!?!?!
If the underlying security is good enough to make this even REMOTELY bearable then there is no reason not to tell us (in great detail) how it works.
If the security this uses is cracked within a year of the machines appearing on the market, we'll have several million computers on the Internet that are UTTERLY defenseless against hackers - and Intel aren't even prepared to risk an open 'Peer review' of the technology!!
Think about this - if this can happen IRRESPECTIVE of the OS on the machine - then there is no conceivable software defence against hackers using this mechanism.
This is quite the most irresponsible idea I've heard in a very long time!
Whilst I'm a big fan of all five series of Trek, it's not remotely what I'd call great science fiction.
Here is a case in point:
They find a Dyson sphere!!! Wow!!! SciFi addicts are drooling. Against all odds, they find an easy way inside!!! We're on the edges of our seats!
But oh - wait - we spent too much time on the interpersonal stuff between Scotty and LeForge - so now all we can do is to invent some reason why they have to immediately escape from the sphere and leave all of the interesting stuff to someone else.
Bah! I wanted to know how the Sphere designers solved the problem of needing day/night cycles - how the poles are structurally abilised - about how the land area inside is so vastly huge that many civilisations must be spread across it's internal structure. How the population of the sphere probably exceeds that of the enture galaxy outside.
Now go read RingWorld to see how a Science Fiction plot line *should* be done.
Now, I have to say, I enjoyed that episode - but it just didn't have very much to do with SciFi.
Most Trek episodes do something like this - they usually end with the ships' deflector dish being redesigned with three keystrokes to emit wibble-rays which remodulate the theta band babbleometer and thereby save the day in the last 2 minutes. This only works because it's not being treated as a SciFi program.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing - and it certainly made the series popular amongst people who wouldn't know a SciFi plotline if it bit them in the leg.
The amount by which the lens of your eye has to distort to make a sharp image on the retina. That requires muscular effort in your eyes - which is physically tiring to them. (Like long periods of reading with the book three inches from your eyes and no way to look off into the distance for a while to relax them every few pages).
Worse still is the fact that using the lenses in your eyes to focus on something that appears to be very close whilst pointing your two eyes such as to fuse the two images as if the object was far away is an extremely unnatural thing - it never happens in day to day life.
When you force your visual system to do things like that, it can give you blinding headaches and make you feel very sick.
Collimated optics are the way to go - but they aren't cheap.
> If you were really a time traveler, why would you want to show up > at a known place on a known date? The government would be waiting > with an awesome arsenal of firepower, waiting to forcefully take > your tools from you.
I don't think so...and there is an easy way to see if I'm right.
Do *you* really think there will be an awesome arsenal of firepower at the party next week? Just on the offchance that some time travellers actually show up? I kinda doubt it....and bear in mind that these guys from the future will know (by reading their history books) whether it turned out to be safe or not.
For us here in the past, the only way to have a hope of catching an alert time traveller would be to do it in some way that would be completely undetectable in the future - it would have to be very carefully hushed up!
A well publicised event like this one is the safest possible place for a time traveller because that's the kind of place where he'll have plenty of archival data.
The problem is - Einsteins theories don't permit a 'special' frame of reference. So you don't have any place to measure the 'absolute' motion of the earth *from*. Do you only consider the earth's motion in orbit around the sun - or do you also consider the suns' rotation around the galactic core? How about the motion of our galaxy relative to the other nearby galaxies? What about the expansion of the universe?
There is no absolute coordinate to dial into...it's a meaningless concept.
This is a severe problem for any kind of *discontinuous* time travel.
For time travel into the past to function, it more or less has to work like time travel to the future does (the kind we're engaging in right now as we head to the future at a rate of one second of experienced time for every second of elapsed time).
As you travel back continuously, your feet would still be resting on the surface of the earth - and still get dragged around by it. If you travelled backwards by simply experiencing time in reverse, there needn't be any physical problems.
In 'The Time Machine' by H.G.Wells, that's exactly what happens. The time traveller sees things happening in the world around him - but rapidly and in reverse.
Alternatively, if time travel were via wormhole/blackhole types of things - then the motion of the wormhole or black hole would be the only constraint. Once you can do that, finding the Earth again would simply be a matter of knowing how the earth and the wormhole had been positioned back in the time you went back to.
Either way, it's not a problem.
The ikky problems only come about with the kind in which: **ZAP** you disappear - then after 20 seconds of cheap special effects - **UNZAP** you reappear 100 years in the past - now, you have no frame of reference to go by and you could (presumably) pop out a long way from anywhere interesting.
Whilst your eyes *can* do what you say - they don't like it. It definitely causes eye strain. I talked to one of the Shuttle astronauts who went on the Hubble repair mission. They did a LOT of hours in VR simulation using helmets that didn't employ collimated optics - and they got blinding headaches and other weird visual problems because of it.
Fortunately, we now have collimated optics which completely solve that problem.
> Basically, with a visor, you're staring at a screen a few inches > from your nose for a protacted period of time. Focusing on that is > not fun;
I work in flight simulation - we have VERY good VR helmets. The light fed into your eyes is 'collimated' - meaning that the light rays from the video display are stuffed through some optics so that they emerge as PARALLEL rays of light rather than rays eminating radially outwards from each point on the screen.
Collimating the light is the key to avoiding the problem you describe - and it works perfectly. We also employ big curved display screens that wrap all around your face - so it's not like looking at two tiny squares in front of your face - you can swivel your eyeballs and look to either side, up and down.
You can see our VR helmet at http://www.link.com/ - you can even buy one if you can afford the price of a pretty decent Ferrari.
The only problem with collimated displays it that when something *IS* close to you in the virtual world, it seems that it's too far away - however, because we project a slightly different image into each eye, your brain does a pretty good job of recognising when things are close by noting how much your eyes have to cross to fuse the two images into one.
There was one very small remaining problem - you couldn't see your own nose! You'd be amazed at just how weird that is (unless of course you happen to have lost your nose in some kind of tragic accident!). A small piece of plastic built into the display at a strategic point fixed that nicely.
The display is crisp and bright and each display can be driven by either one PC or an entire render farm to get realtime realism that can be almost arbitarily good.
The helmet can easily incorporate one of any number of head tracker technologies depending on whether or not a magnetically neutral or acoustically reasonable environment is available to allow different kinds of tracker to work accurately.
So - the helmet problem is completely, 100% solved...except for the price.
VR is alive and kicking - it's just that the people who build it and the people who use it don't *call* it "virtual reality".
Flight simulation (complete with helmet-mounted display, head trackers, hand trackers, fancy graphics, etc) *is* virtual reality. The company I work for (L3 Simulation) sells full up systems to the US government by the truckload (literally: http://www.link.com./ Other companies make simulators for a variety of other vehicles using similar techniques.
Where VR has failed is for people who are just walking around in the virtual world - mostly because of the extreme difficulty of coming up with treadmills or whatever that adequately allow you to walk around. (although there have been some brave efforts). So - VR is currently restricted to simulating people flying planes, driving cars or whatever.
The BBC Television version of H2G2 *is* funny - and retains the long rambling asides - a few of which are essential to the story (eg the Deep Thought stuff). The asides were largely retained as animated excerpts from the Guide and it totally worked.
However, the TV series ran for a total of 190 minutes - a bit long for a movie - although the Harry Potter movies stretched close to that.
That said, the movie wasted a lot of time on material that wasn't funny and didn't advance the plot. The scene in the heart of gold's kitchen for example - I'd have swapped that for keeping the description of how Arthur found the bypass plans in the basement - which is ESSENTIAL for the story since it's a nice counterpoint to the Vogon's claim that humanity didn't try to find the plans for the hyperspatial bypass.
It's a pretty short movie - and hour and fortyfive minutes. In this day and age, movies for teens and adults frequently run over two hours.
A 'long rambling aside' needs maybe two minutes. Adding 20 minutes to the movie would have allowed ten of those to be inserted.
With some cutting of the slower less funny scenes - and the restoration of some of the more important dialog - and more long rambling asides, this could have been a great movie.
They ripped out too many great scenes - put in a few new ones that were a waste of time - and a lot more that were great. They cut words from formerly hilarious dialog and thereby removed the humor from them.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be pretty cool to be able to go into your local bookstore - which would keep just one copy of every book - and therefore be much smaller - and have your book printed on the spot.
When you find the book you want, they'd print and bind it on the spot - with a handful of these machines at every store, they could have you outta there in a couple of minutes...giving you time to visit the in-store coffee shop.
Books that are rarely purchased would still be available - they'd never 'go out of print' - although you'd have to browse on a computer instead of picking up a physical book to look at.
Ideally, you'd be able to choose the page size, font size, paper and binding quality that you prefer and choose how you want it bound (spiral, etc)...costs being set appropriately.
That would be *cool*.
Yeah - I know all of that. I used to own a small parrot - they are quite amazing creatures.
But when we were all kids we were taught that T.Rex meant 'King of the Terrible Lizards' and that it was pretty much the most lethal killing machine ever to walk the planet. We all had plastic T.Rex models on our bookshelves and in our toy boxes - they were essentially *real* live dragons - the nearest thing to mythology brought to life. We knew that if something so utterly impossible as a T.Rex could really have existed - then our imaginations could allow the possibility of anything existing for real.
Yet by steady stages, good, annoyingly rational, verifiable and solid science is turning our childhood icon into pathetic, helplessly overweight, flightless vultures covered with soft cuddly feathers.
I don't think kids will be having realistically cuddly T.Rex models in their toybox. What do we have to excite their interest? I bet *all* of the paleantologists who made this amazing discovery got into the business because of a childhood love of poor old T.Rex.
Reality sucks.
Oh the poor T.Rex...gone from being the most powerful and vicious creature imaginable - chasing down jeeps and eating lawyers and shaking the ground as it runs...then we hear that if it ran at more than 8 mph, it would fall over...then that if it ever did fall over, it couldn't get back up again...then they told us that it was merely a scavenger and not a hunter at all.
AND NOW IT LOOKS LIKE A GIANT, FLUFFY YELLOW CHICK?!?
Nooooo!
T.Rex's had laser eyes, breathed fire and had enormous leathery batlike wings that don't show up in the fossil record because they were shed every year to grow new ones. They could run at 80mph and ate several Diploducus for breakfast every morning before having violent terratorial disputes that took up the rest of their days. At night they tracked down and ate cavemen. Their advanced (but brutal and inhumane) society dominated the earth for 20 million years and was only brought down by alien civilisations hurling giant flaming meteors at them from the safe distance of the Kyper belt.
OK - maybe I lost a bit of scientific detachment there - but..*REALLY*.
And in the remaining places:
...or Poisonous spiders ...or Poisonous scorpions
G) or anyplace with Poisonous snakes
H)
I)
Intelligence tests are DESIGNED to avoid these kinds of issues. So long as you have sufficient education to be able to read the verbal tests, the results don't correlate with the amount or nature of the education you've had.
However, all they really measure is ones ability to pass intelligence tests.
If those tests are calibrated by giving the test first to an 'average person', then to a genius and then to person who is evidently a 'slow thinker' - then lo and behold, when you test a population with the resulting test - you get back what you put in.
So if the test shows that there are 5.5 times as many male geniuses as female - then the very definition of what it means to be a genius has been defined according to the results of giving the IQ test to a predominantly male section of the population.
The only thing that gives IQ tests validity is how they correlate to other measures of human achievement. The fact that a high average IQ correlates to high average national income simply means that IQ is a measure of earnings potential. Well, we know that for one social reason or another, women's earnings potential is less than mens - which explains how the IQ test scores come out the way they do.
The deeper problem is that:
a) We don't like to think of men and women as being different...which is unfortunate because we are VERY different. There is more genetic similarity between a human and a chimpanzee of the same sex than there is between two humans of different sexes.
b) The word 'Intelligence' (and consequently the results of a test that measures this rather vague parameter) has become somehow correlated with one's life achievement or 'success' or something. Nobody regards it as a great scandal when someone says that men appear to be hairier than women...but somehow we attach so much to this incredibly vague and hard-to-measure parameter called 'Intelligence' - even though not one person can define it adequately.
The combination of these two purely social inhibitions serves to make it very difficult to study these things.
On NPR this morning, they mentioned that Intel had said that a typical PC user wouldn't notice any change as a result of this new architecture. So one presumes this means no major instruction set revisions or anything.
The other question is what you consider as a unit of innovation?
If we said that the invention of a practical flying machine by the Wright Brothers constituted one 'unit' of innovation. (Let's give it a proper scientific unit 'the wright' - and an abbreviation 'wr')...then how many wrights was the discovery of pennicilin? It feels like about 1.5wr to me - but who knows?
Clearly something like the iPod/iTunes innovation has touched about the same number of lives as a typical 1.0wr innovation - but somehow it seems much more
trivial to me. I'd rate it an 0.05wr at the most.
But isn't this all terribly subjective?
To come up with any kind of analysis on the basis of such a subjective 'feel' seems meaningless to me.
Who cares what the rate of innovation per unit of population is? That peculiar measure of progress would only matter if benefits of innovation somehow didn't scale with the population size. The world population is still increasing - so the absolute rate of innovation as seen by consumers of those innovations is surely far better than linear.
But even if you are concerned about rate per unit of population, averaging over the entire planet is a stupid idea. The population increases are in the underdeveloped countries - who (pretty much by definition) aren't innovating much.
If you counted the rate of innovation per unit of population in DEVELOPED countries (whose populations are actually DECREASING) - then you'd see that the rate of innovation amongst those who are actually doing the innovating is still on a steep curve.
It's really obvious that if he makes his own ice using a fridge that's in the same room that he's cooling then the machine won't get him net cooling.
But where did it say that?
Maybe he has a big old chest freezer in his garage - the garage gets unbearably hot - but he doesn't live in his garage.
Maybe there is a free ice-maker in his apartment complex.
Maybe he buys bags of ice from Kroger. ($1.40 buys 10lbs of ice - that'll get you a big bucket of ice-water).
Maybe he makes ice in his fridge all day when he's at work/school - then opens all of his doors and windows to let the hot air out and get the room back to ambient before turning on the home-made A/C unit to chill things down when he's at home.
There are LOTS of ways that this could actually work.
But since cheap A/C can be had for $100 and is pretty much guaranteed to be more efficient and less hassle - I don't think this is such a wonderful device.
Sure - the downsides are obvious - but think of the benefits for a nerd-slob...
...the possibilities are endless.
* An application that'll scan one sock and automagically tell me where the other one is.
* Something that'll automatically tell me which of a pile of quasi-dirty tee shirts were least recently worn.
* Laundry that screams out to the automatic laundry-o-matic when it's been stuck down the back of the sofa for more than three months.
It's pretty clear that Maya is the best tool out there - if you can't get a decent Mac version, the cost of a Linux PC to run it on will be totally dwarfed by the cost of Maya itself!
So the Digit Online article says:
"...features what Intel calls "IDE redirection" which will
allow administrators to remotely enable, disable or format
or configure individual drives and reload operating systems
and software from remote locations, again independent of
operating systems."
Doesn't this sound just suicidally dangerous to every single
slashdot reader? Have we learned NOTHING about network
security over the history of the Internet?
Intel put this technology in at the hardware level and refuse
to tell us how it works!
So are we to believe that 'security by obscurity' is all that's
protecting us from random idiots reformatting our hard drives
and loading entire new OS's onto our machines? IRRESPECTIVE of
what OS I have loaded!?!?!
If the underlying security is good enough to make this even
REMOTELY bearable then there is no reason not to tell us (in
great detail) how it works.
If the security this uses is cracked within a year of the machines
appearing on the market, we'll have several million computers on
the Internet that are UTTERLY defenseless against hackers - and Intel
aren't even prepared to risk an open 'Peer review' of the technology!!
Think about this - if this can happen IRRESPECTIVE of the OS on
the machine - then there is no conceivable software defence against
hackers using this mechanism.
This is quite the most irresponsible idea I've heard in a very
long time!
Nonsense! You can verb any word in the English language.
So the plan is to take nice human-readable strings (like 'slashdot.org') and replace them with utterly incomprehensible 10 to 14 digit numbers?
Mmmm'K.
How about using a URL to dial phones? Wouldn't that make more sense?
'phone.sjbaker.org' and 'fax.sjbaker.org' as well as 'www.sjbaker.org' ?
Whilst I'm a big fan of all five series of Trek, it's not remotely what I'd call great science fiction.
Here is a case in point:
They find a Dyson sphere!!! Wow!!! SciFi addicts are drooling. Against all odds, they find an easy way inside!!! We're on the edges of our seats!
But oh - wait - we spent too much time on the interpersonal stuff between Scotty and LeForge - so now all we can do is to invent some reason why they have to immediately escape from the sphere and leave all of the interesting stuff to someone else.
Bah! I wanted to know how the Sphere designers solved the problem of needing day/night cycles - how the poles are structurally abilised - about how the land area inside is so vastly huge that many civilisations must be spread across it's internal structure. How the population of the sphere probably exceeds that of the enture galaxy outside.
Now go read RingWorld to see how a Science Fiction plot line *should* be done.
Now, I have to say, I enjoyed that episode - but it just didn't have very much to do with SciFi.
Most Trek episodes do something like this - they usually end with the ships' deflector dish being redesigned with three keystrokes to emit wibble-rays which remodulate the theta band babbleometer and thereby save the day in the last 2 minutes. This only works because it's not being treated as a SciFi program.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing - and it certainly made the series popular amongst people who wouldn't know a SciFi plotline if it bit them in the leg.
Not the incidence angle of a single ray.
The amount by which the lens of your eye has to distort to make a sharp image on the retina. That requires muscular effort in your eyes - which is physically tiring to them. (Like long periods of reading with the book three inches from your eyes and no way to look off into the distance for a while to relax them every few pages).
Worse still is the fact that using the lenses in your eyes to focus on something that appears to be very close whilst pointing your two eyes such as to fuse the two images as if the object was far away is an extremely unnatural thing - it never happens in day to day life.
When you force your visual system to do things like that, it can give you blinding headaches and make you feel very sick.
Collimated optics are the way to go - but they aren't cheap.
> If you were really a time traveler, why would you want to show up
...and bear in mind that these guys from the future will know (by reading
> at a known place on a known date? The government would be waiting
> with an awesome arsenal of firepower, waiting to forcefully take
> your tools from you.
I don't think so...and there is an easy way to see if I'm right.
Do *you* really think there will be an awesome arsenal of firepower at the
party next week? Just on the offchance that some time travellers actually
show up? I kinda doubt it.
their history books) whether it turned out to be safe or not.
For us here in the past, the only way to have a hope of catching an
alert time traveller would be to do it in some way that would be
completely undetectable in the future - it would have to be very
carefully hushed up!
A well publicised event like this one is the safest possible place
for a time traveller because that's the kind of place where he'll
have plenty of archival data.
The problem is - Einsteins theories don't permit a 'special' frame of reference. So you don't have any place to measure the 'absolute' motion of the earth *from*. Do you only consider the earth's motion in orbit around the sun - or do you also consider the suns' rotation around the galactic core? How about the motion of our galaxy relative to the other nearby galaxies? What about the expansion of the universe?
There is no absolute coordinate to dial into...it's a meaningless concept.
This is a severe problem for any kind of *discontinuous* time travel.
For time travel into the past to function, it more or less has to work like time travel to the future does (the kind we're engaging in right now as we head to the future at a rate of one second of experienced time for every second of elapsed time).
As you travel back continuously, your feet would still be resting on the surface of the earth - and still get dragged around by it. If you travelled backwards by simply experiencing time in reverse, there needn't be any physical problems.
In 'The Time Machine' by H.G.Wells, that's exactly what happens. The time traveller sees things happening in the world around him - but rapidly and in reverse.
Alternatively, if time travel were via wormhole/blackhole types of things - then the motion of the wormhole or black hole would be the only constraint. Once you can do that, finding the Earth again would simply be a matter of knowing how the earth and the wormhole had been positioned back in the time you went back to.
Either way, it's not a problem.
The ikky problems only come about with the kind in which: **ZAP** you disappear - then after 20 seconds of cheap special effects - **UNZAP** you reappear 100 years in the past - now, you have no frame of reference to go by and you could (presumably) pop out a long way from anywhere interesting.
Three words: Beware of Bugs.
Ouch!
There are VR helmets that can do 2kx2k resolution...non-problem.
You are very wrong.
Whilst your eyes *can* do what you say - they don't like it. It definitely causes eye strain. I talked to one of the Shuttle astronauts who went on the Hubble repair mission. They did a LOT of hours in VR simulation using helmets that didn't employ collimated optics - and they got blinding headaches and other weird visual problems because of it.
Fortunately, we now have collimated optics which completely solve that problem.
> Basically, with a visor, you're staring at a screen a few inches
> from your nose for a protacted period of time. Focusing on that is
> not fun;
I work in flight simulation - we have VERY good VR helmets. The light fed into your eyes is 'collimated' - meaning that the light rays from the video display are stuffed through some optics so that they emerge as PARALLEL rays of light rather than rays eminating radially outwards from each point on the screen.
Collimating the light is the key to avoiding the problem you describe - and it works perfectly. We also employ big curved display screens that wrap all around your face - so it's not like looking at two tiny squares in front of your face - you can swivel your eyeballs and look to either side, up and down.
You can see our VR helmet at http://www.link.com/ - you can even buy one if you can afford the price of a pretty decent Ferrari.
The only problem with collimated displays it that when something *IS* close to you in the virtual world, it seems that it's too far away - however, because we project a slightly different image into each eye, your brain does a pretty good job of recognising when things are close by noting how much your eyes have to cross to fuse the two images into one.
There was one very small remaining problem - you couldn't see your own nose! You'd be amazed at just how weird that is (unless of course you happen to have lost your nose in some kind of tragic accident!). A small piece of plastic built into the display at a strategic point fixed that nicely.
The display is crisp and bright and each display can be driven by either one PC or an entire render farm to get realtime realism that can be almost arbitarily good.
The helmet can easily incorporate one of any number of head tracker technologies depending on whether or not a magnetically neutral or acoustically reasonable environment is available to allow different kinds of tracker to work accurately.
So - the helmet problem is completely, 100% solved...except for the price.
VR is alive and kicking - it's just that the people who build it and the people who use it don't *call* it "virtual reality".
Flight simulation (complete with helmet-mounted display, head trackers, hand trackers, fancy graphics, etc) *is* virtual reality. The company I work for (L3 Simulation) sells full up systems to the US government by the truckload (literally: http://www.link.com./ Other companies make simulators for a variety of other vehicles using similar techniques.
Where VR has failed is for people who are just walking around in the virtual world - mostly because of the extreme difficulty of coming up with treadmills or whatever that adequately allow you to walk around. (although there have been some brave efforts). So - VR is currently restricted to simulating people flying planes, driving cars or whatever.
I strongly disagree.
The BBC Television version of H2G2 *is* funny - and retains the long rambling asides - a few of which are essential to the story (eg the Deep Thought stuff). The asides were largely retained as animated excerpts from the Guide and it totally worked.
However, the TV series ran for a total of 190 minutes - a bit long for a movie - although the Harry Potter movies stretched close to that.
That said, the movie wasted a lot of time on material that wasn't funny and didn't advance the plot. The scene in the heart of gold's kitchen for example - I'd have swapped that for keeping the description of how Arthur found the bypass plans in the basement - which is ESSENTIAL for the story since it's a nice counterpoint to the Vogon's claim that humanity didn't try to find the plans for the hyperspatial bypass.
It's a pretty short movie - and hour and fortyfive minutes. In this day and age, movies for teens and adults frequently run over two hours.
A 'long rambling aside' needs maybe two minutes. Adding 20 minutes to the movie would have allowed ten of those to be inserted.
With some cutting of the slower less funny scenes - and the restoration of some of the more important dialog - and more long rambling asides, this could have been a great movie.
They ripped out too many great scenes - put in a few new ones that were a waste of time - and a lot more that were great. They cut words from formerly hilarious dialog and thereby removed the humor from them.
Fortunately, I was laughing too hard to notice.