Looking at pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime and Abebe Bikila (the Ethiopian marathon runner) tells me that muscle mass has nothing to do with running speed.
Arnold and Abebe are still around the same size. You need to take a look at something with a large volume. Building tall buildings is very similar. The taller you build it, the stronger each support needs to be. If you need your 10th story to support 50 above it, then your 10th story may need to become thicker. Add one more story on top, every story under it needs to become a little thicker.. all the way down to the bottom story which will need to have massive supports. What this means for an animal is that for every inch they go up, they go out a few inches.. and since volume compounds inch per inch, the weight they increase by gaining that much height is incredible.
Basically, the taller they got, the larger their bones had to be to support their weight, the larger their hearts had to be to send blood through their large body, which means they would need larger lungs to support the oxygen into their blood, which would mean their inner cavity would be incredibly massive.. which would mean simple massive bulk. Overall a large weight. While they could walk easily, do the math for how much weight that would be landing on one leg in full stride at 40 mph. (I can't do the math, I just know it's big *grin*)
Another example. Mechwarriors are most likely never going to happen, simply because a running robot is impossible with today's materials. We don't know of any material that could be lightweight enough to create a 60 foot robot that could run without it's own weight crushing its own legs.. and we know dinosaurs didn't have any magic materials in their legs.
To create self-propelled nanoscale robots, Vogel's team reversed nature's arrangement. By fixing kinesin molecules all over a surface, wormlike microtubules propel themselves randomly all over the surface. By attaching a fluorescent dye to the microtubules, the researchers can follow where they go - and where they don't.
While I understand the bull is a lot smaller, the actual light & movement from these new nanobots seems to be a much more utilitarian view of nanotechnology.
I've found that this site: http://www.nanotechplanet.com/ is a great reference to the business side of the nanotechnology field. If you're interested in learning more about the current research going on, or about what company to invest in, I think it's a pretty good starting point.
It wasn't until we changed from Warcraft's "unit equivalence" to StarCraft's "race equivalence" that we were able to correct the most egregious play imbalance issues.
I find this to be a very important statement he made in regards to the development of multiplayer and RTS games. After warcraft, the piles of RTS games that came out all had some thing in common. A few races (or civs, etc) that had different units that all did basically the same thing.. the "ranged unit" the "fast unit" the "strong unit that is really expensive", etc. Other than some small games that didn't really make it off the ground, Starcraft was the first mainstream game that said "this race can do this and this other race is completely different". I believe that Starcraft is replayed so often because there is an incredible amount of flexability with each race and when combined with fighting against another diverse race, it creates an incredible amount of possibilities.
What makes this a great money maker for games such as Diablo and Starcraft (if they'd get off their buttocks), is that they can reuse the same engine they already had written, code in another race (or couple classes as in Diablo II LoD), and have people scrambling to buy it, since it adds an exponential amount of excitement to the game. If Starcraft added one single race (sold at the price of $25 in stores), I would instantly buy it.. not only would I be able to learn all about the new "Dotslash" race, but I would be able to figure out piles of strategies about how to fight Dotslashes with Terrans, or Protoss.. Just as the message boards are filled with people asking how to fight Druids with Necromancers, etc etc.
The game industry needs to focus more on additions to their games, instead of starting from scratch every single time. Not only would the players be happier, but I imagine the pocketbooks of the game makers would be happy as well.
Dave
Re:The question we need to be asking ourselves is.
on
Collateral Damage
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· Score: 1
Why so many *pro* war movies since 9/11??? After years of anit-war movies, we are now being bludgeoned with propaganda peice after propaganda peice.
What about two of the biggest movies to come out in the last few years? The Patriot & Braveheart? I don't see positive war movies being an odd thing at all.. it seems to be pretty consistant, audiences enjoy seeing "their people" win against all odds. And since the majority of movie profits comes from the US, the US is going to be the main stars. If someday China becomes the leading movie watcher, I'm quite sure that many movies will come up with brave Chinese people doing all sorts of neat things.
Or they'll bite off more than they can chew, get really depressed, and never get around to contributing anything to anyone. They've got to get it in their heads to start simple, otherwise they'll never achieve great things.
Like many coders, I enjoy the process of designing and writing my own code simply for the sake of making something work. I started my own MMORPG a couple years ago and it's working out well so far. No, I'm not ready to go public, and yes, there's a good chance it will never go anywhere, but that's not necessarily the point is it?
Since starting I have learned piles of things about Java, threads, networking, different ways to cache things, etc etc.. it's a great learning experience. Just as many people first learned to program from writing basic games on their old apple IIe's, I think it's a great learning experience.
Actually I would say that it's a better thing to practice programming than any other type of "game" that you could play around with. Online games of this sort tend to involve incredible flexability in the types of things they cover. Security for hackers trying to break your game, connection speed and threads for the hundreds of people you're planning on having connecting, memory usage for the hundreds of objects and rooms you'll have, speed since you'll want your game to not crawl, data storage since you'll have all sorts of data to store about people, areas, etc etc etc.
I'd view this almost the same way parents view their children reading. Every coder should try to write a MMORPG at some point in time.. you could learn a lot while having fun.
Another one of the main reasons that the third world is poor in general is because it is the cheap unskilled labor ghetto of the global capitalist economy. Sure certain places are pretty inhospitable to live in...nevertheless people have been living there quite peacably in harmony with their environment until the last century or so, which saw imperial colonization, and vast (mostly forced) changes in lifestyle. I bet you also subscribe to some absolutist view of "progress".
As much as I would love to believe that the Africans used to lead this wonderful lifestyle that was in harmony with nature, I think it's bull. Life before technology was "nasty, brutal and short". Average lifespans around 25 years. I personally think it's progress to have a longer life, I am enjoying it so far.
Yes, temporarily technology does exploit resources, and does harm the environment, but if we can hurry up and get past the "dirty" hurdle of destroying the planet, we can get on to saving it. The advanced countries of the world are already dropping down legislation to try to improve the environment, cut down on greenhouse gases, etc etc etc. This will only help the planet if everyone gets involved, which includes the Africans. If we ignore their problems, they will continue to sit there and slowly destroy the wildlife that is left.. if we help them, there's a chance we can save some of it.
Since females usuallymate only once, if they are mated by a sterile male they will notproduce any offspring.
And further in the paper: "If females mate with a non-sterile male who has been hit with radiation, the female will most likely produce baby flies which live forever, cannot be killed except by playing loud jazz music, and feed only on human blood."
Patents should be restricted so that they are used only to recuperate money spent on R&D of the idea/concept/technology. This way researchers could, in theory, fund their own research, once they got the ball rolling. Under these restricted patents, your patent last for a very small amount of time, maybe a few years, and it can be cut short if you make enough money off of the patent so as to recover your R&D costs.
This would never work. The whole reason there is large amounts of money being spent in the research fields is that there is a large amount of money to be had with an idea that actually works. For every working idea there are 99 failures. Therefore the only way you can encourage people to spend so much money is the chance that if you have a brilliant idea, you may make a massive profit.
How could you claim it goes unreported? I watch the news in the US, and I've seen quite a few horrible things done to the Palestinians.. I don't quite know why people keep claiming that we're completely biased against the Palestinians. No one is innocent here, but no one is completely guilty either.
The Pentagon controls the flow of information in a war zone - they say what footage gets cut, because reporters cannot get anywhere near the action without military assistance.
How can people truly believe that the government controls all of our media? Of course they try to put a good face on things, but if the government is actually controlling our media, they're doing a piss poor job of it.
Watch the news stations.. plenty of people saying that they hope we don't attack another country. "I hope we don't screw things up like the golf war". "Look at these pictures from when we blew up a school".
Our media is about as open as you can get in showing the US citizens the problems in their own government. Listen to people from a country that Doesn't have the freedom of the press.. people insisting that the US hates all other countries.. insisting that the US attacks them all the time, that the US has never helped anyone but themselves. Those are the foolish statements of people who don't have access to free press.
I've read British newspapers, Chinese newspapers, Russian newspapers.. there is no "fake" footage, or "cut" footage, unless you're claiming that every single media outlet in the world is controlled by the US military.. which would be extremely impressive.
How could you say the US doesn't care about other countries? The US's monetary donations to charities/developing countries far surpasses any other country in the world. While I would not say the US's foreign policy is perfect, I would also not dream of saying that the US government is in the habit of ignoring people outside of their own country.
And I certainly don't think causing the largest terrorist attack in history is going to cause anything but more pain for the innocents of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime and Abebe Bikila (the Ethiopian marathon runner) tells me that muscle mass has nothing to do with running speed.
Arnold and Abebe are still around the same size. You need to take a look at something with a large volume. Building tall buildings is very similar. The taller you build it, the stronger each support needs to be. If you need your 10th story to support 50 above it, then your 10th story may need to become thicker. Add one more story on top, every story under it needs to become a little thicker.. all the way down to the bottom story which will need to have massive supports. What this means for an animal is that for every inch they go up, they go out a few inches.. and since volume compounds inch per inch, the weight they increase by gaining that much height is incredible.
Basically, the taller they got, the larger their bones had to be to support their weight, the larger their hearts had to be to send blood through their large body, which means they would need larger lungs to support the oxygen into their blood, which would mean their inner cavity would be incredibly massive.. which would mean simple massive bulk. Overall a large weight. While they could walk easily, do the math for how much weight that would be landing on one leg in full stride at 40 mph. (I can't do the math, I just know it's big *grin*)
Another example. Mechwarriors are most likely never going to happen, simply because a running robot is impossible with today's materials. We don't know of any material that could be lightweight enough to create a 60 foot robot that could run without it's own weight crushing its own legs.. and we know dinosaurs didn't have any magic materials in their legs.
I suppose they need to update Austin Powers now.. "Mini-me! Stop humping the polychromatic LASER"
To create self-propelled nanoscale robots, Vogel's team reversed nature's arrangement. By fixing kinesin molecules all over a surface, wormlike microtubules propel themselves randomly all over the surface. By attaching a fluorescent dye to the microtubules, the researchers can follow where they go - and where they don't.
h tml.
Anyone else notice the slight jump in nanotechnology? Just a few months ago scientists were excited because someone had made a very small bull: http://www.nanotechnews.com/nano/997993091/index_
While I understand the bull is a lot smaller, the actual light & movement from these new nanobots seems to be a much more utilitarian view of nanotechnology.
I've found that this site: http://www.nanotechplanet.com/ is a great reference to the business side of the nanotechnology field. If you're interested in learning more about the current research going on, or about what company to invest in, I think it's a pretty good starting point.
It wasn't until we changed from Warcraft's "unit equivalence" to StarCraft's "race equivalence" that we were able to correct the most egregious play imbalance issues.
I find this to be a very important statement he made in regards to the development of multiplayer and RTS games. After warcraft, the piles of RTS games that came out all had some thing in common. A few races (or civs, etc) that had different units that all did basically the same thing.. the "ranged unit" the "fast unit" the "strong unit that is really expensive", etc. Other than some small games that didn't really make it off the ground, Starcraft was the first mainstream game that said "this race can do this and this other race is completely different". I believe that Starcraft is replayed so often because there is an incredible amount of flexability with each race and when combined with fighting against another diverse race, it creates an incredible amount of possibilities.
What makes this a great money maker for games such as Diablo and Starcraft (if they'd get off their buttocks), is that they can reuse the same engine they already had written, code in another race (or couple classes as in Diablo II LoD), and have people scrambling to buy it, since it adds an exponential amount of excitement to the game. If Starcraft added one single race (sold at the price of $25 in stores), I would instantly buy it.. not only would I be able to learn all about the new "Dotslash" race, but I would be able to figure out piles of strategies about how to fight Dotslashes with Terrans, or Protoss.. Just as the message boards are filled with people asking how to fight Druids with Necromancers, etc etc.
The game industry needs to focus more on additions to their games, instead of starting from scratch every single time. Not only would the players be happier, but I imagine the pocketbooks of the game makers would be happy as well.
Dave
Why so many *pro* war movies since 9/11??? After years of anit-war movies, we are now being bludgeoned with propaganda peice after propaganda peice.
What about two of the biggest movies to come out in the last few years? The Patriot & Braveheart? I don't see positive war movies being an odd thing at all.. it seems to be pretty consistant, audiences enjoy seeing "their people" win against all odds. And since the majority of movie profits comes from the US, the US is going to be the main stars. If someday China becomes the leading movie watcher, I'm quite sure that many movies will come up with brave Chinese people doing all sorts of neat things.
Or they'll bite off more than they can chew, get really depressed, and never get around to contributing anything to anyone. They've got to get it in their heads to start simple, otherwise they'll never achieve great things.
Like many coders, I enjoy the process of designing and writing my own code simply for the sake of making something work. I started my own MMORPG a couple years ago and it's working out well so far. No, I'm not ready to go public, and yes, there's a good chance it will never go anywhere, but that's not necessarily the point is it?
Since starting I have learned piles of things about Java, threads, networking, different ways to cache things, etc etc.. it's a great learning experience. Just as many people first learned to program from writing basic games on their old apple IIe's, I think it's a great learning experience.
Actually I would say that it's a better thing to practice programming than any other type of "game" that you could play around with. Online games of this sort tend to involve incredible flexability in the types of things they cover. Security for hackers trying to break your game, connection speed and threads for the hundreds of people you're planning on having connecting, memory usage for the hundreds of objects and rooms you'll have, speed since you'll want your game to not crawl, data storage since you'll have all sorts of data to store about people, areas, etc etc etc.
I'd view this almost the same way parents view their children reading. Every coder should try to write a MMORPG at some point in time.. you could learn a lot while having fun.
Another one of the main reasons that the third world is poor in general is because it is the cheap unskilled labor ghetto of the global capitalist economy. Sure certain places are pretty inhospitable to live in...nevertheless people have been living there quite peacably in harmony with their environment until the last century or so, which saw imperial colonization, and vast (mostly forced) changes in lifestyle. I bet you also subscribe to some absolutist view of "progress".
As much as I would love to believe that the Africans used to lead this wonderful lifestyle that was in harmony with nature, I think it's bull. Life before technology was "nasty, brutal and short". Average lifespans around 25 years. I personally think it's progress to have a longer life, I am enjoying it so far.
Yes, temporarily technology does exploit resources, and does harm the environment, but if we can hurry up and get past the "dirty" hurdle of destroying the planet, we can get on to saving it. The advanced countries of the world are already dropping down legislation to try to improve the environment, cut down on greenhouse gases, etc etc etc. This will only help the planet if everyone gets involved, which includes the Africans. If we ignore their problems, they will continue to sit there and slowly destroy the wildlife that is left.. if we help them, there's a chance we can save some of it.
Since females usuallymate only once, if they are mated by a sterile male they will notproduce any offspring.
And further in the paper: "If females mate with a non-sterile male who has been hit with radiation, the female will most likely produce baby flies which live forever, cannot be killed except by playing loud jazz music, and feed only on human blood."
We're doomed.
Patents should be restricted so that they are used only to recuperate money spent on R&D of the idea/concept/technology. This way researchers could, in theory, fund their own research, once they got the ball rolling. Under these restricted patents, your patent last for a very small amount of time, maybe a few years, and it can be cut short if you make enough money off of the patent so as to recover your R&D costs. This would never work. The whole reason there is large amounts of money being spent in the research fields is that there is a large amount of money to be had with an idea that actually works. For every working idea there are 99 failures. Therefore the only way you can encourage people to spend so much money is the chance that if you have a brilliant idea, you may make a massive profit.
How could you claim it goes unreported? I watch the news in the US, and I've seen quite a few horrible things done to the Palestinians.. I don't quite know why people keep claiming that we're completely biased against the Palestinians. No one is innocent here, but no one is completely guilty either.
http://bb12.betterbox.net/~fusion/patriotic.html
The Pentagon controls the flow of information in a war zone - they say what footage gets cut, because reporters cannot get anywhere near the action without military assistance.
How can people truly believe that the government controls all of our media? Of course they try to put a good face on things, but if the government is actually controlling our media, they're doing a piss poor job of it.
Watch the news stations.. plenty of people saying that they hope we don't attack another country. "I hope we don't screw things up like the golf war". "Look at these pictures from when we blew up a school".
Our media is about as open as you can get in showing the US citizens the problems in their own government. Listen to people from a country that Doesn't have the freedom of the press.. people insisting that the US hates all other countries.. insisting that the US attacks them all the time, that the US has never helped anyone but themselves. Those are the foolish statements of people who don't have access to free press.
I've read British newspapers, Chinese newspapers, Russian newspapers.. there is no "fake" footage, or "cut" footage, unless you're claiming that every single media outlet in the world is controlled by the US military.. which would be extremely impressive.
http://bb12.betterbox.net/~fusion/patriotic.html
How could you say the US doesn't care about other countries? The US's monetary donations to charities/developing countries far surpasses any other country in the world. While I would not say the US's foreign policy is perfect, I would also not dream of saying that the US government is in the habit of ignoring people outside of their own country.
And I certainly don't think causing the largest terrorist attack in history is going to cause anything but more pain for the innocents of the world.
http://bb12.betterbox.net/~fusion/patriotic.html