That was definitely my best Christmas - being in a warm living room with the snow falling heavily outside and Vangelis playing from the radio in the kitchen.
The thrill of unwrapping that large box to see the Atari logo on a silver box. I did have the chance to play around with player-missile graphics - there were many tutorials in Personal Computer World, Atari User and Byte, and of course "De Re Atari".
The tricky part with Atari's implementation was that, while there was a simple interface to control the horizontal position and width of each sprite (which was in fact a vertical band of pixels which went all the way down the screen), there was no easy way of setting the position of the sprite - for each video refresh, the whole band might have to be updated. That had to be performed in assembler and implemented as a VBI. The best article i read actually showed how to implement a basic physics engine (gravity, velocity and reaction) all in the VBI. You had activation bits which controlled which players & missiles were active. Each player and missile had a position, velocity and gravity. Just set up the values, activate the VBI and all the BASIC program had to do was detect when collision events occurred and update scores/positions.
Chris Crawford did some excellent articles on 3D animation. PCW had a simple program which animated a wireframe Atari 800. A couple of XIO commands, and it was rendering solid triangles. Another magazine article demonstrated how to copy the planet landing sequence in Aliens (where the landing path is defined by a serious of rectangular boxes heading towards a rotating planet. Some use of palette cycling and that too could be done on the Atari.
Definitely fun times. I've still got my Atari (+ books/magazines) although nearly all the books seem to be online now anyway.
Still have fond memories for Christmas 1981, when I got an Atari 800 + tape drive, along with a couple of "fun-pack" cassettes with numerous demos collected by or even written by the staff at the local store. Later additions included a light-pen, a couple of floppy disk drives, graphics tablet, and a couple of home-made controllers which included a old telephone dial which connected to the joystick buttons and an ORP-12 light sensor which connected to the paddle inputs.
Even by 1986, when the IBM PC first came out, I was amazed that while the Atari 800 could do 256 colours, player-missile graphics, fine scrolling and display list interrupts, the IBM PC could only do 4 colours, and didn't even have any analog input.
I do that too - after going through a junction, look back and see which direction to take (two adjacent T-junctions with staircases are probably the hardest).
I've also noticed that when taking a new route for the first time, such as finding a room in a campus build never visited before, the outgoing path always seems twice as long as the return path.
In those areas where you have more than one vendor, you already have tiered level access. Telewest, BT and other last mile Internet access suppliers provide a range of download rates from 64 Kbits (ISDN), 512 Mbits (ADSL) to 6 Mbits (cable), with each having a different monthly rate (15 pounds to 40 pounds).
Some people just want to read their E-mail once a week, while others are playing online multiplayer games every minute they aren't at work. Forcing one set of users to subsidize another isn't fair, nor is charging someone to use services they never use.
The real issue is the fact that once you have already paid for a permanent broadband connection, the ISP is going to try and bill you a different rate based on the application layer content of TCP/IP packets.
If the ISP does this, then someone could easily spam your computer with junk packets containing the relevant application data headers, and hit you with an expensive bill.
If ISP's want to charge extra for certain services, then they should offer them as optional services using their servers.
The Sunday Mail have an article on this subject. Basically, the BBC is pushing for TV licenses to be paid on all electronic devices that can play streamed video (mobile phones, laptops, PC's with TV/satellite reception cards). If you go into a store, you will be asked to fill in a form giving your name and address. This isn't an extended warranty, it's to send to the TV Licensing Authority. Similarly anything ordered online will also forward your address to the TVLA. And with the right software, even a console game system would be eligible as well, even if you didn't have a TV in the house (if it had a web browser and could play RealPlayer/Quicktime clips). At present, a TV license costs around 180 pounds/year.
Why wouldn't a financial management/accounting system have similar rules enforced and monitored?
That's one issue I can't understand - there have been several stories reported recently where traders mixed up the number and price of the shares they were trading:
It does look damn suspicious for a guy to turn around 3-5 movies a day and honestly claim he's NOT pirating them and just shipping them back as soon as his DVD ripper is done grabbing the movie. I'm sure there's a small percentage of legitimate people out there that really do nothing else all day but watch movies from sun up to sun down and they don't have cable or satellite, but they're few and far between.
In both the US and Canada, I've met bus drivers (mainly in their 50's) who would work long hours all week, and then rent a stackload of videos so they could spend the entire weekend indoor watching films from dawn to dusk without going outside - driving in traffic for five days was enough of the outside world for them.
The following web site has a major time line of human population:
Ice Age Circa 700AD: Plagues halve European population.
763AD-764AD: From about 400 A.D. to around 900, the climate became much colder. The winters of 763-764 and 859-860 were extraordinarily cold, with the ice so thick in the Adriatic near Venice that it could hold up heavily-loaded wagons. There was ice even on the Nile. (From a website reviewing book on climate change by H. H. Lamb, Climate History and the Modern World.)...
850AD: (12). Four hundred years later, the agricultural base of the Tiwanaku civilization of the central Andes collapsed as a result of a prolonged drought documented in ice and in lake sediment cores (13). In Mesoamerica, lake sediment cores show that the Classic Maya collapse of the 9th century A.D. coincided with the most severe and prolonged drought of that millennium (14). In North America, Anasazi agriculture could not sustain three decades of exceptional drought and reduced temperatures in the 13th century A.D., resulting in forced regional abandonment (15). See Harvey Weiss and Raymond S. Bradley, 'What Drives Societal Collapse?', Science, Jan. 26, 2001.
I tried doing a search for volcanic eruptions in the 700AD - 850AD era.
The following web site has an article about a massive volcanic eruptions at the headwaters of the White River 1250 years ago (750AD)
Below this black soil lies a thin layer of white ash from a massive volcanic eruption that occurred near the headwaters of the White River 1,250 years ago. This event was one of the largest volcanic explosions the world has seen over the past 10,000 years. Most of central and southern Yukon was covered by the ash, and traces can be found even in the Northwest Territories. With deposits more than one metre thick near the source, the White River eruption was an ecological disaster that killed many plants and animals and probably forced people to move away from the area near the eruption for many generations, until plants and animals began to return. At Annie Lake, howhttp://www.planetforlife.com/gwarm/globclimate. htmlever, the ash is thin--only several centimetres, and it is possible the impact of the eruption was not so severe here as in other places in the Yukon. Perhaps the main result of the White River eruption was that new people moved into the Annie Lake area from regions hard hit by the ash.
White spruce (Picea glauca) in this region is preserved as relict trees that are dead but not decayed due to low temperatures. Subfossil trees are preserved in permafrost, glacial sediment deposits and in the White River Ash (pictured above). This last deposition resulted from a major volcanic eruption in the Wrangell Mountains around 800AD
The Laki eruption lasted eight months during which time about 14 cubic km of basaltic lava and some tephra were erupted. Haze from the eruption was reported from Iceland to Syria. In Iceland, the haze lead to the loss of most of the island's livestock (by eating fluorine contaminated grass), crop failure (by acid rain), and the death of one-quarter of the human residents (by famine). Ben Franklin noted the atmospheric effects of the eruption (Wood, 1992).
It is estimated that 80 Mt of sulfuric acid aerosol was released by the eruption (4 times more than El Chichon and 80 times more than Mount St. Helens).
The volcanic eruption in 1783 caused the winter average temperatu
I still remember that day back in mid 1990's - seeing the SGI GL programming examples that originally ran on the RealityEngine running on the PC using OpenGL (the flysim with the paper aeroplanes, the underwater caustics demo and the animated reflected pool of water). And suddenly, the low-end SGI's lost their coolness factor.
Even now, the source code to the old Stonehenge demo is buried within the Microsoft.NET library guide disks.
But honestly, is this the way for people to get their money nowadays? Claim "prior art" on any patent which seems convenient and then hold any company which uses the format to cut a hole in their wallet?
This is an example of submarine patents. You have an idea, quietly patent it, but noisily advertise the technology. Then you wait for the patents to be granted and for industry to incorporate your technology into their products. Once the market has matured, you fire off multiple patent violations in every direction. By then, the cost of removing your technology from their products will cost far more than it would to pay the license fee. (For digital file formats, this is especially true, since both software and hardware codecs will already have been distributed, and third party customers will have distributed their data into this format.
That's the one - there was another "large" version. It was relatively large at the time (600x800x24 bits or something similar; around 30 megabytes). Far too much for a server with a 40 MByte hard disk drive and 9.6K modem to handle.
SGI's heyday was when most people thought of them as The Purple Computer Company; the Jurassic Park Era.
The advert they had in various magazines and on their website in the early 1990's was perhaps too successful. This was the picture with several levels of scaffolding around a large Tyrannosaurus Rex, silhouettes of people standing around on the floor and the caption at the bottom: "SGI - helping build a better dinosaur". This was available in both low-resolution and high-resolution image formats (there's probably a copy on our server somewhere). Their competitors took advantage of this and kept telling customers "If you want to animate dinosaurs, go buy an SGI, but if you want to do anything serious, buy out stuff).
SGI were still popular in the mid 1990's, but it was Microsoft who announced that "UNIX is legacy, Windows NT is the future" that made the UNIX workstation vendors like DEC, HP and SGI panic. When DEC and HP buckled to the Windows NT bandwagon, SGI were forced to follow.
SGI had some success with selling development tools for the Ultra-64, but they began to slip when consoles and PC graphics cards (3dfx voodoo) could do texture mapping, while workstations like the Indy couldn't. The old SGI logo (as used by slashdot) is still immediately recognisable, but if they tried to make entry-level desktop systems based on high-performance GPU boards from Nvidia/ATI/3dlabs/.. and Linux, they would be competing directly with the high-end game rigs from Alienware and Dell.
If you have an office to yourself, how much would they have to pay you to make you willingly give it up? If you don't have an office, how much of a pay cut would you be prepared to take to get one?"
If I had my own office, I wouldn't give it up for anything. Being able to work somewhere with the benefit of natural daylight and without distraction is something I would not give up. Having the ability to open the window and get natural air is an added bonus.
My reasoning is this: By being able to work without distraction I can focus on producing quality work in a short amount of time, and increase my value to the employer, which would increase my chances of getting better pay rises. Having natural air also helps achieve this goal (as opposed to having a desk right next to an industrial laser printer which as in constant use).
There was also a previous discussion where Microsoft observed that every 5 minute distraction caused their developers spend 25 minutes in order to get the flow going again).
Is it my imagination, or does everything on the Discovery channels in the UK seem to be related to either World War II, hurricanes, tornados, crime, accidents? I haven't been able to find anything related to the latest science news. There used to be Discovery 2000, but maybe that was some time ago. There just doesn't seem to be any sort of weekly science update like a video version of New Scientist.
Wasn't that some sort of early warning system that used ground-imaging satellites to estimate the average weight of a human population through the shadows they made while walking outside. The system would send out a warning to the healthd department when a particular threshold level was exceeded.
Is that not the very definition of "overpopulated" right there?
They would have the ability to provide food for all their population if it weren't for all the tribal wars over territory. If farmers and their families spend all their time trying to keep out of warzones and having their crops raided by guerilla armies, they don't have the produce or time to set up food-markets. Consequently, the country ends up with famines.
Read up on the "urban heat sink effect" of large cities. For every 1 mile radius of city, the core temperature rises up by 1 degree centigrade. So the core temperature for a large city can actually be 10 degrees higher than in the suburbs. And urban development causes rainwater to run off 10 times faster than if it were being soaked up by natural vegetation. This has the effect of disrupting local weather patterns to the extent that a city can actually created a rainfall shadow; an area downwind of the central core which has an artificially higher rainfall (which might not be too bad unless it's acid rain). NASA have more details.
The effect of solar panels is negligible compared to what we have already done.
Dermatobia hominis, or Torsalo, or Human Botfly is a type of moth whose larvae live inside human flesh. The female doesn't lay her eggs directly on a human host by herself. Instead, she "captures" a female mosquito, places some eggs on the mosquito and then releases her. As soon as the mosquito reaches a mammal and starts feeding, the heat from the host activates the eggs which hatch and then burrow into the wound that the mosquito just created. Since the larvae needs to breath, it will maintain a small airhole leading to the surface of the skin.
Removal of the larvae is performed in several ways: (1) Just let it grow until it falls out, (2) surgical removal, or (3) suffocate it out - By using camphor or superglue, it is possible to block the airhole, which will drive the larvae to the surface. Then with the appropriate application of pressure, the larvae can be forced out of the host (usually shooting 6-10 feet in the process).
Neighbours several houses down on the next street once bought a cheap baby intercom that ran on FM radio. It was rather suprising to be cycling through the channels fo find a new but rather gritty family sit-com, only to realize that events were actually synchronised to the events happening in their backyard.
You can get a web enabled washing machine. It automatically downloads clothing care programs. However, the 1st generation machine needs to be connected to a PC in order to download files, but the 2nd generation machine will have a built-in modem.
The machine is the result of a three-year development project that involved 30 engineers and cost roughly $3.5 million, according to the company.
There was also a web-enabled refrigerator that would allow you to download music, E-mail, take photographs and do teleconferencing. Photograph of the machine. Original article
Slashdot Mirror
That was definitely my best Christmas - being in a warm living room with the snow falling heavily outside and Vangelis playing from the radio in the kitchen.
The thrill of unwrapping that large box to see the Atari logo on a silver box.
I did have the chance to play around with player-missile graphics - there were many tutorials in Personal Computer World, Atari User and Byte, and of course "De Re Atari".
The tricky part with Atari's implementation was that, while there was a simple interface to control the horizontal position and width of each sprite (which was in fact a vertical band of pixels which went all the way down the screen), there was no easy way of setting the position of the sprite - for each video refresh, the whole band might have to be updated. That had to be performed in assembler and implemented as a VBI. The best article i read actually showed how to implement a basic physics engine (gravity, velocity and reaction) all in the VBI. You had activation bits which controlled which players & missiles were active. Each player and missile had a position, velocity and gravity. Just set up the values, activate the VBI and all the BASIC program had to do was detect when collision events occurred and update scores/positions.
Chris Crawford did some excellent articles on 3D animation. PCW had a simple program which animated a wireframe Atari 800. A couple of XIO commands, and it was rendering solid triangles. Another magazine article demonstrated how to copy the planet landing sequence in Aliens (where the landing path is defined by a serious of rectangular boxes heading towards a rotating planet. Some use of palette cycling and that too could be done on the Atari.
Definitely fun times. I've still got my Atari (+ books/magazines) although nearly all the books seem to be online now anyway.
Still have fond memories for Christmas 1981, when I got an Atari 800 + tape drive, along with a couple of "fun-pack" cassettes with numerous demos collected by or even written by the staff at the local store. Later additions included a light-pen, a couple of floppy disk drives, graphics tablet, and a couple of home-made controllers which included a old telephone dial which connected to the joystick buttons and an ORP-12 light sensor which connected to the paddle inputs.
Even by 1986, when the IBM PC first came out, I was amazed that while the Atari 800 could do 256 colours, player-missile graphics, fine scrolling and display list interrupts, the IBM PC could only do 4 colours, and didn't even have any analog input.
I do that too - after going through a junction, look back and see which direction to take (two adjacent T-junctions with staircases are probably the hardest).
I've also noticed that when taking a new route for the first time, such as finding a room in a campus build never visited before, the outgoing path always seems twice as long as the return path.
There was an article about how London taxi drivers had larger hippocampi regions>/a> when compared to non-taxi drivers.
In those areas where you have more than one vendor, you already have tiered level access. Telewest, BT and other last mile Internet access suppliers provide a range of download rates from 64 Kbits (ISDN), 512 Mbits (ADSL) to 6 Mbits (cable), with each having a different monthly rate (15 pounds to 40 pounds).
Some people just want to read their E-mail once a week, while others are playing online multiplayer games every minute they aren't at work. Forcing one set of users to subsidize another isn't fair, nor is charging someone to use services they never use.
The real issue is the fact that once you have already paid for a permanent broadband connection, the ISP is going to try and bill you a different rate based on the application layer content of TCP/IP packets.
If the ISP does this, then someone could easily spam your computer with junk packets containing the relevant application data headers, and hit you with an expensive bill.
If ISP's want to charge extra for certain services, then they should offer them as optional services using their servers.
At least in the UK, there are additional taxes charged on cigarettes, tobacco, beer, wine and hot food, not forgetting petrol.
But people earning less than 6000 pounds/year are exempt from paying income tax, while the government takes 40% of what you earn over 40K pounds/year.
The Sunday Mail have an article on this subject. Basically, the BBC is pushing for TV licenses to be paid on all electronic devices that can play streamed video (mobile phones, laptops, PC's with TV/satellite reception cards). If you go into a store, you will be asked to fill in a form giving your name and address. This isn't an extended warranty, it's to send to the TV Licensing Authority. Similarly anything ordered online will also forward your address to the TVLA. And with the right software, even a console game system would be eligible as well, even if you didn't have a TV in the house (if it had a web browser and could play RealPlayer/Quicktime clips). At present, a TV license costs around 180 pounds/year.
More details can be found here: Have you got a license for that mobile sir?
There's a basic explanation of the known forces (Strong, Electronmagnetic, Weak and Gravity
n t Field,
There are quite a few ideas kicking about:
scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG)
Modified Newtonian Dynamics
General Relativity,
Quantum Gravity,
The http://www.halexandria.org/dward155.htm">Zero-poi
Superstring Theory,
M-theory,
Inflation/Cosmology,
Yilmaz gravitation, and
Membrane Gravity
Law of Universal Gravitation,
And there's also Intelligent Gravity
Unfortunately, there is no one simple experiment to prove any of these either true or false.
Why wouldn't a financial management/accounting system have similar rules enforced and monitored?
That's one issue I can't understand - there have been several stories reported recently where traders mixed up the number and price of the shares they were trading:
Traders typing error costs Japanese brokerage firm millions
You would think it would be possible for the system to check the selling price against the current going price.
It does look damn suspicious for a guy to turn around 3-5 movies a day and honestly claim he's NOT pirating them and just shipping them back as soon as his DVD ripper is done grabbing the movie. I'm sure there's a small percentage of legitimate people out there that really do nothing else all day but watch movies from sun up to sun down and they don't have cable or satellite, but they're few and far between.
In both the US and Canada, I've met bus drivers (mainly in their 50's) who would work long hours all week, and then rent a stackload of videos so they could spend the entire weekend indoor watching films from dawn to dusk without going outside - driving in traffic for five days was enough of the outside world for them.
The following web site has a major time line of human population:
...
Ice Age
Circa 700AD: Plagues halve European population.
763AD-764AD: From about 400 A.D. to around 900, the climate became much colder. The winters of 763-764 and 859-860 were extraordinarily cold, with the ice so thick in the Adriatic near Venice that it could hold up heavily-loaded wagons. There was ice even on the Nile.
(From a website reviewing book on climate change by H. H. Lamb, Climate History and the Modern World.)
850AD: (12). Four hundred years later, the agricultural base of the Tiwanaku civilization of the central Andes collapsed as a result of a prolonged drought documented in ice and in lake sediment cores (13). In Mesoamerica, lake sediment cores show that the Classic Maya collapse of the 9th century A.D. coincided with the most severe and prolonged drought of that millennium (14). In North America, Anasazi agriculture could not sustain three decades of exceptional drought and reduced temperatures in the 13th century A.D., resulting in forced regional abandonment (15).
See Harvey Weiss and Raymond S. Bradley, 'What Drives Societal Collapse?', Science, Jan. 26, 2001.
I tried doing a search for volcanic eruptions in the 700AD - 850AD era.
The following web site has an article about a massive volcanic eruptions at the headwaters of the White River 1250 years ago (750AD)
White river volcanic eruption
Below this black soil lies a thin layer of white ash from a massive volcanic eruption that occurred near the headwaters of the White River 1,250 years ago. This event was one of the largest volcanic explosions the world has seen over the past 10,000 years. Most of central and southern Yukon was covered by the ash, and traces can be found even in the Northwest Territories. With deposits more than one metre thick near the source, the White River eruption was an ecological disaster that killed many plants and animals and probably forced people to move away from the area near the eruption for many generations, until plants and animals began to return. At Annie Lake, howhttp://www.planetforlife.com/gwarm/globclimate. htmlever, the ash is thin--only several centimetres, and it is possible the impact of the eruption was not so severe here as in other places in the Yukon. Perhaps the main result of the White River eruption was that new people moved into the Annie Lake area from regions hard hit by the ash.
This site mentions a later eruption at 800AD:
Extending the Alaska Tree-Ring Record
White spruce (Picea glauca) in this region is preserved as relict trees that are dead but not decayed due to low temperatures. Subfossil trees are preserved in permafrost, glacial sediment deposits and in the White River Ash (pictured above). This last deposition resulted from a major volcanic eruption in the Wrangell Mountains around 800AD
Volcanic eruption of 1783
The Laki eruption lasted eight months during which time about 14 cubic km of basaltic lava and some tephra were erupted. Haze from the eruption was reported from Iceland to Syria. In Iceland, the haze lead to the loss of most of the island's livestock (by eating fluorine contaminated grass), crop failure (by acid rain), and the death of one-quarter of the human residents (by famine). Ben Franklin noted the atmospheric effects of the eruption (Wood, 1992).
It is estimated that 80 Mt of sulfuric acid aerosol was released by the eruption (4 times more than El Chichon and 80 times more than Mount St. Helens).
The volcanic eruption in 1783 caused the winter average temperatu
I still remember that day back in mid 1990's - seeing the SGI GL programming examples that originally ran on the RealityEngine running on the PC using OpenGL (the flysim with the paper aeroplanes, the underwater caustics demo and the animated reflected pool of water). And suddenly, the low-end SGI's lost their coolness factor.
.NET library guide disks.
Even now, the source code to the old Stonehenge demo is buried within the Microsoft
But honestly, is this the way for people to get their money nowadays? Claim "prior art" on any patent which seems convenient and then hold any company which uses the format to cut a hole in their wallet?
This is an example of submarine patents. You have an idea, quietly patent it, but noisily advertise the technology. Then you wait for the patents to be granted and for industry to incorporate your technology into their products. Once the market has matured, you fire off multiple patent violations in every direction. By then, the cost of removing your technology from their products will cost far more than it would to pay the license fee.
(For digital file formats, this is especially true, since both software and hardware codecs will already have been distributed, and third party customers will have distributed their data into this format.
That's the one - there was another "large" version. It was relatively large at the time (600x800x24 bits or something similar; around 30 megabytes). Far too much for a server with a 40 MByte hard disk drive and 9.6K modem to handle.
SGI's heyday was when most people thought of them as The Purple Computer Company; the Jurassic Park Era.
The advert they had in various magazines and on their website in the early 1990's was perhaps too successful. This was the picture with several levels of scaffolding around a large Tyrannosaurus Rex, silhouettes of people standing around on the floor and the caption at the bottom: "SGI - helping build a better dinosaur". This was available in both low-resolution and high-resolution image formats (there's probably a copy on our server somewhere). Their competitors took advantage of this and kept telling customers "If you want to animate dinosaurs, go buy an SGI, but if you want to do anything serious, buy out stuff).
SGI were still popular in the mid 1990's, but it was Microsoft who announced that "UNIX is legacy, Windows NT is the future" that made the UNIX workstation vendors like DEC, HP and SGI panic. When DEC and HP buckled to the Windows NT bandwagon, SGI were forced to follow.
SGI had some success with selling development tools for the Ultra-64, but they began to slip when consoles and PC graphics cards (3dfx voodoo) could do texture mapping, while workstations like the Indy couldn't. The old SGI logo (as used by slashdot) is still immediately recognisable, but if they tried to make entry-level desktop systems based on high-performance GPU boards from Nvidia/ATI/3dlabs/.. and Linux, they would be competing directly with the high-end game rigs from Alienware and Dell.
If you have an office to yourself, how much would they have to pay you to make you willingly give it up? If you don't have an office, how much of a pay cut would you be prepared to take to get one?"
If I had my own office, I wouldn't give it up for anything. Being able to work somewhere with the benefit of natural daylight and without distraction is something I would not give up. Having the ability to open the window and get natural air is an added bonus.
My reasoning is this: By being able to work without distraction I can focus on producing quality work in a short amount of time, and increase my value to the employer, which would increase my
chances of getting better pay rises. Having natural air also helps achieve this goal (as opposed to having a desk right next to an industrial laser printer which as in constant use).
There was also a previous discussion where Microsoft observed that every 5 minute distraction caused their developers spend 25 minutes in order to get the flow going again).
The 'Snake on a Pike' is perhaps better known as the 'The Staff of Asclepius'
The 'Two Twirly Snakes on a Pole' is probably better known as the 'Caduceus of Mercury' or 'Karykeion of Hermes'.
Personally, I think the latter names sound much better for a D&D game.
More details can be found here.
Is it my imagination, or does everything on the Discovery channels in the UK seem to be related to either World War II, hurricanes, tornados, crime, accidents? I haven't been able to find anything related to the latest science news. There used to be Discovery 2000, but maybe that was some time ago. There just doesn't seem to be any sort of weekly science update like a video version of New Scientist.
Wasn't that some sort of early warning system that used ground-imaging satellites to estimate the average weight of a human population through the shadows they made while walking outside. The system would send out a warning to the healthd department when a particular threshold level was exceeded.
Is that not the very definition of "overpopulated" right there?
They would have the ability to provide food for all their population if it weren't for all the tribal wars over territory. If farmers and their families spend all their time trying to keep out of warzones and having their crops raided by guerilla armies, they don't have the produce or time to set up food-markets. Consequently, the country ends up with famines.
And there is a lot of knowledge required to keep a farm producing food at an optimum level (crop rotation. Look what happened to the farms in Zimbabwe when experienced farmers were displaced by unskilled labourers.
Read up on the "urban heat sink effect" of large cities. For every 1 mile radius of city, the core temperature rises up by 1 degree centigrade. So the core temperature for a large city can actually be 10 degrees higher than in the suburbs. And urban development causes rainwater to run off 10 times faster than if it were being soaked up by natural vegetation. This has the effect of disrupting local weather patterns to the extent that a city can actually created a rainfall shadow; an area downwind of the central core which has an artificially higher rainfall (which might not be too bad unless it's acid rain). NASA have more details.
The effect of solar panels is negligible compared to what we have already done.
Here's some more ....
Dermatobia hominis, or Torsalo, or Human Botfly is a type of moth whose larvae live inside human flesh. The female doesn't lay her eggs directly on a human host by herself. Instead, she "captures" a female mosquito, places some eggs on the mosquito and then releases her. As soon as the mosquito reaches a mammal and starts feeding, the heat from the host activates the eggs which hatch and then burrow into the wound that the mosquito just created. Since the larvae needs to breath, it will maintain a small airhole leading to the surface of the skin.
Removal of the larvae is performed in several ways: (1) Just let it grow until it falls out, (2) surgical removal, or (3) suffocate it out - By using camphor or superglue, it is possible to block the airhole, which will drive the larvae to the surface. Then with the appropriate application of pressure, the larvae can be forced out of the host (usually shooting 6-10 feet in the process).
Neighbours several houses down on the next street once bought a cheap baby intercom that ran on FM radio. It was rather suprising to be cycling through the channels fo find a new but rather gritty family sit-com, only to realize that events were actually synchronised to the events happening in their backyard.
You can get a web enabled washing machine. It automatically downloads clothing care programs. However, the 1st generation machine needs to be connected to a PC in order to download files, but the 2nd generation machine will have a built-in modem.
The machine is the result of a three-year development project that involved 30 engineers and cost roughly $3.5 million, according to the company.
There was also a web-enabled refrigerator that would allow you to download music, E-mail, take photographs and do teleconferencing. Photograph of the machine. Original article
And there's also a microwave with a built in LCD display which doubles as a TV screen and CCTV system so you can see what is cooking inside.
Add a personality chip and a speech synthesizer, and your refrigerator could become your personal dietician. As Dave Lister would say Smeg.
Back in 1994, I ordered some books from an E-mail based company (Walnut Creek or somewhere similar).
The books arrived packaged in a box, with packaging made from horizonyally shredded listings of Oracle customer response center telephone numbers.
That's OK - we'll just get our newspapers to misspell their headlines