Naked competition, all other equipment is provided and is standard.
FWIW, how long will it be until the special olympics where people can use prosthetics surpasses the regular ones? Hat tip to GitS: SAC (Official Site).
Basically I imagined a redoing things at the protocol level, with "payment" sent with the email, encrypted, and it would all require the digital signatures, etc, etc. Naturally, I had imagined this as a service that people would pay money for, but it would require a critical mass, etc.
It's just fun to come up with imaginative ideas, I guess.:)
Charge money to send emails. That idea has been discussed before, I know, but there is a twist to make it work - make it so that the recipient is the one who gets paid. After all, it's their time the spammers are wasting so they should be fairly compensated. This would cause serious problems for people who run listservs, so this would have to be combined with user customizable white-lists. In the ideal case, each recipient can even name their own price, have a white list, and retroactively forgive debt. For most users the charges will roughly balance out and/or they'll have the who send them the most email on their white list. The ISP and money shuffler makes money by charging the owners of the account a fixed fee for providing this premium spam-free service.
Then, of course, you get the problem of spammers trying to weasel their way into as many white-lists as possible, but it is easy to kick them off the white list and the spammers would be subject to criminal prosecution if they are hacking or otherwise resorting to dirty means to get themselves on white lists.
As another reply already noted, this is the interstellar medium, which should be a good deal dense than the space between galaxies and galaxy clusters.
Next, how does sound transmit? Well, sound is a density/pressure wave, right? All I need is for the free particles to be interacting somehow to set one up. Turns out, the interstellar medium isn't a gas like you're used to thinking of, it's a plasma. The important point here being that because the electrons are not bound to the atoms, the effective "size" of the atoms goes up (that is, the disntance over which they interact with neighboring atoms). Thus you should be able to get sound waves more easily than you would suspect from a regular gas that is that sparse.
In order to get to the point that we could make an entire solar system a boondoggle, we'll have to get out of ours first. That means tapping energy and resources available in the solar system, whether the process is pretty or not.
It's all getting destroyed by the sun in a few billion years, anyway.
According to TFA, and a comment above mine, they still reproduce at 3 years, which is the equivalent of 80 human years. This makes the most sense, to me, if the aging process is mainly driven by the breakdown of mitochondria as animals age. This also fits with the calorie restriction data available. What I would love to know is: what is the mitochondria count in their non-muscle cells, can the process be tweaked to produce different mitochondria levels so that we can test for senescence as a function of age and mitochondrial density, are there any other drawbacks beyond the obvious increase in food demand and reduction in sociability, and how well do these mice do on various calorie restriction diets (ie is the increase in life-span greater or lesser than for normal mice)?
Everybody says that "vinyl = analog => it has more data." This is not entirely true because, on top of the issues onemorehour raised, there's also a limit to the feature size that vinyl can have. Theoretically, a vinyl record will never have more resolution than 1 molecule of the vinyl. Realistically, the limit has to do with read/write head sharpness and/or the structure of the vinyl itself. Not to mention the mechanical wear and tear inherent in actually using it is greater than with CDs.
One thing that interests me is the possibility that sampling at a constant rate could introduce distortion to the sound which can make an audible difference in how the lower frequencies are percieved even if the higher frequency is inaudible. If this is possible, then the best solution without an insane amount of oversampling would be some kind of stochastic sampling where there is some jitter explicitly added to the sample rate that would make the higher frequency noise broadband, and thus more white, and thus less likely to effect any one sound.
Consider, for instance, Edwin Hubble: astronomer, lawyer, and quite the athlete. Highlights: "Usually he placed in Big Ten dual track meets, in both the shot put and the high jump. [...] At Oxford Hubble [...] competed in track and field events and swam on the water polo team. He later said he fought an exhibition boxing match against the French national champion, and did well enough that promoters wanted him to train to fight the world heavyweight champion." Also from photo credits: "The University of Chicago 1909 intercollegiate championship basketball team. Hubble is on the left."
I wonder if this is one of those things that changed with WWII? Perhaps the 60s? Or maybe Hubble was an exception, and the problem is older.
I had made the mistaken assumption that/. was repeating itself and that Lerner was just Bussard's replacement at the head of his project.
Lerner doesn't go into as great a detail about the DOE denying funding as Bussard, but he does definitely accuse them of only being interested in few huge projects.
So, basically, the same criticism applies to Bussard and Lerner with the same punch-line: I really hope they're right, but I really doubt it.
For the technical problems, look no further than BlueParrot's comment a little ways down thread.
For the crackpot-esque funding claims, just look for his claims about the DOE "defending their rice bowl." If you had any idea how the funding process works you'd know that the decisions of who to give a grant to aren't directed primarily by a bunch of territorial bureaucrats, it's made by scientists, his fellow peers who would actually be able to measure the merits of what he is proposing better than anyone. Frankly, I would believe that some fraction of the scientific community was capable of the behavior he accuses them of (saying, "Screw humanity, I want to defend my income"), but not enough that he wouldn't be able to get any funding from the DOE, NSF, or some other agency if he really tried. I guarantee that there would be enough scientists who would tend to put the interests of humanity first to get the level of funding he's talking about, if he could convince enough of them that his idea had merit.
The navy, on the other hand, has different funding priorities. Because their budget is vastly bigger and their priority is to get an edge/prevent enemies from getting an edge, they'll be more willing to take a "see what sticks" kind of approach. I mean, just Google for "navy cold fusion" to get some idea of how they're willing to fund an idea even if it's reputation is "radioactive" in academia. You can tell, also, that he's used to pitching this idea to national security types - he mentions several times in the video how the "Chinese will develop it." That's exactly the sort of argument you use if you want o pry funding out of military hands, not academic ones.
So, although I would love nothing more than to be wrong on this one, I think that the guy is just plain wrong and he went into crackpot territory with his obsession with his idea.
He said it was crackpot. I didn't try to get him to go into details, but he basically mentioned the same stuff you did - stellarators, etc. What's more, there is the crack-pottery in the clip about how all the people in the field are in a conspiracy to deny his idea funding. I know these people - you might find some or even a majority who would be so unscrupulous, but nowhere near enough to maintain such a conspiracy. So, I would tend to think that you're right.
Basically, this guy is probably guilty of exactly what he accuses the rest of the fusion community of - he's fixated on his idea. He apparently won funding from the navy, so there's a chance his group could prove me wrong, and I hope that they do, but I doubt it.
Before there were patents there were guilds and these guilds have trade secrets that they jealously guarded out of fear of losing their exclusive meal ticket. Patents, because the schematics are public records, discourage this behavior. This is a good thing because it means that the knowledge is less likely to be lost and will enter the public domain "soon." At least, that's the ideal.
Now, is the patent system as presently constituted anywhere close to an ideal solution to this problem? Not on your life. The obviousness threshold for granting patents needs to be raised significantly and there are lots of things being patented that shouldn't be (eg genes).
Fixing those things, though, could we make it even better? That's the million dollar question.
Are they going to have the roaches ingest or inhale any radioisotopes? My understanding is that that is a significant part of the problem after a nuclear war.
Because the fitness landscape for any individual organism must include the effects of the other members of his species more interesting things can occur. The worst part is that either effect can occur - the main population can either deepen the well or make it more shallow. In the former case you have a strong tendency towards monoculture even on non-optimum points - think Windows. In the latter case the organism will tend to "fill up" the local minimum and eventually, population constraints being favorable, spill over into any nearby lower areas. Thus, either creating a new species that splits off or out-competes its parent species. The nice part about this model is that it offers another way for apparently discontinuous jumps to appear in the fossil record even when there is no evidence for similarly discontinuous changes in the environment.
It's expensive to run an election, so politicians who want to look fiscally responsible will make sure to keep elections consolidated. After all, they wouldn't want to cut any of those expensive boondoggles, would they?
FTFA: "His idea is to stand billions of ultrafine wire loops around the edge of a silicon chip -- hence the name racetrack -- and use electric current to slide infinitesimally small magnets up and down along each of the wires to be read and written as digital ones and zeros.
His research group is able to slide the tiny magnets along notched nanowires at speeds greater than 100 meters a second. Since the tiny magnetic domains have to travel only submolecular distances, it is possible to read and write magnetic regions with different polarization as quickly as a single nanosecond -- far faster than existing storage technologies."
What is really really old is new again, eh?
I can see it now - to erase your iPod, turn it on its side and shake - just like an Etch-a-Sketch!
"They don't even really understand how gravity works, and that's the most important force which affects us humans in our daily lives." Well, not entirely true. I'd say that E&M is actually far more important to our daily experience than gravity, especially in the number of phenomena rooted in it.
"There's now some evidence that there might be other dimensions besides the 4 we're familiar with," What evidence? Point to some experiment or observation, please, not theoretical work.
"various particles have been detected (like neutrinos) which previously were only hypothesized." This is entirely false. Neutrinos have been detected for several decades now, and they've even been used as tools in experiments - just look up some papers on deep inelastic neutrino scattering to see what I mean. No, what's new is that we're pretty sure that they have some mass, though we still only have an upper bound on it. In fact the last new fundamental particle to be discovered was the top quark in the 90s, and that was a couple of decades or so after the last new particle. It's now just down to the Higgs hunt as far as the standard model goes, and every particle physicist is praying that when we do find it there's something about it that doesn't fit in the standard model because otherwise particle physics is likely to die from it's too successful theory.
"150 years ago people thought it was impossible to fly in a machine that was heavier than air." And those people would have been laymen who didn't know what was going on anyway. All you'd need to do is look at Newton's second law to see that if you could somehow push down on the air with enough force you'd be able to make anything fly. Even Leonardo da Vinci, a couple hundred years earlier than your estimate, knew that.
"There's no telling what other facets about our universe exist which we are unable currently to observe and understand, just like we had no idea how to split or fuse atoms and create enormous amounts of energy 100 years ago." Actually, we do have a pretty good idea. Just like it turned out that Einstein's relativity was only a small modification of Newton's physics in the known regime, it's a pretty good bet that any new physics will have to reduce to the current theories, approximately, in the areas we have already explored experimentally.
I've repeatedly heard it said that you would have to run for an insane amount of time to burn off the extra calories from just one cookie, so it isn't in that fashion that exercise helps with weight problems. The only alternative explanation I've heard involves endorphins and whatnot. I've suspected that it may be due to the fact that repairing the damage done to one's body during exercise is metabolically more expensive than just doing the motions, but had no idea whether this was true or not. This possibility, however, is far more interesting and direct - exercise puts stresses on the bones that may stimulate the production of a hormone that aids in the proper regulation of energy metabolism.
Kind of like how certain immune functions cease working in the absence of a gravitational field.
Granted, the root of the problem is energy intake exceeding energy expended, but until one understands better the reasons why a person would eat more than they need it is futile to tell people to just stop.
I've also wondered if part of the problem isn't that the modern, refined, carbohydrates are so concentrated. I mean, I would imagine that the human digestive system is capable of absorbing nutrients down to a certain concentration in the digestive fluids. If the calories are more concentrated, eg the food lacks fiber to give it indigestible bulk, then the body will absorb a larger fraction of the calories. So, another question I have is if it is significant to not just consider calories ingested, but calories ingested minus calories expelled.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, how long will it be until the special olympics where people can use prosthetics surpasses the regular ones? Hat tip to GitS: SAC (Official Site).
Basically I imagined a redoing things at the protocol level, with "payment" sent with the email, encrypted, and it would all require the digital signatures, etc, etc. Naturally, I had imagined this as a service that people would pay money for, but it would require a critical mass, etc.
:)
It's just fun to come up with imaginative ideas, I guess.
Maybe I wasn't clear on this - the white list is a list of people who don't have to pay. Naturally, it would require some kind of authentication.
Then his mail won't reach the recipient, simple is that. This is a pre-pay scheme, not post pay.
Charge money to send emails. That idea has been discussed before, I know, but there is a twist to make it work - make it so that the recipient is the one who gets paid. After all, it's their time the spammers are wasting so they should be fairly compensated. This would cause serious problems for people who run listservs, so this would have to be combined with user customizable white-lists. In the ideal case, each recipient can even name their own price, have a white list, and retroactively forgive debt. For most users the charges will roughly balance out and/or they'll have the who send them the most email on their white list. The ISP and money shuffler makes money by charging the owners of the account a fixed fee for providing this premium spam-free service.
Then, of course, you get the problem of spammers trying to weasel their way into as many white-lists as possible, but it is easy to kick them off the white list and the spammers would be subject to criminal prosecution if they are hacking or otherwise resorting to dirty means to get themselves on white lists.
As another reply already noted, this is the interstellar medium, which should be a good deal dense than the space between galaxies and galaxy clusters.
Next, how does sound transmit? Well, sound is a density/pressure wave, right? All I need is for the free particles to be interacting somehow to set one up. Turns out, the interstellar medium isn't a gas like you're used to thinking of, it's a plasma. The important point here being that because the electrons are not bound to the atoms, the effective "size" of the atoms goes up (that is, the disntance over which they interact with neighboring atoms). Thus you should be able to get sound waves more easily than you would suspect from a regular gas that is that sparse.
I did find that passage harder to read than standard text. Just because my brain can handle the load doesn't mean the load is the same.
What's more, it wreaks havoc on someone who is dyslexic anyway.
In order to get to the point that we could make an entire solar system a boondoggle, we'll have to get out of ours first. That means tapping energy and resources available in the solar system, whether the process is pretty or not.
It's all getting destroyed by the sun in a few billion years, anyway.
According to TFA, and a comment above mine, they still reproduce at 3 years, which is the equivalent of 80 human years. This makes the most sense, to me, if the aging process is mainly driven by the breakdown of mitochondria as animals age. This also fits with the calorie restriction data available. What I would love to know is: what is the mitochondria count in their non-muscle cells, can the process be tweaked to produce different mitochondria levels so that we can test for senescence as a function of age and mitochondrial density, are there any other drawbacks beyond the obvious increase in food demand and reduction in sociability, and how well do these mice do on various calorie restriction diets (ie is the increase in life-span greater or lesser than for normal mice)?
Everybody says that "vinyl = analog => it has more data." This is not entirely true because, on top of the issues onemorehour raised, there's also a limit to the feature size that vinyl can have. Theoretically, a vinyl record will never have more resolution than 1 molecule of the vinyl. Realistically, the limit has to do with read/write head sharpness and/or the structure of the vinyl itself. Not to mention the mechanical wear and tear inherent in actually using it is greater than with CDs.
One thing that interests me is the possibility that sampling at a constant rate could introduce distortion to the sound which can make an audible difference in how the lower frequencies are percieved even if the higher frequency is inaudible. If this is possible, then the best solution without an insane amount of oversampling would be some kind of stochastic sampling where there is some jitter explicitly added to the sample rate that would make the higher frequency noise broadband, and thus more white, and thus less likely to effect any one sound.
Consider, for instance, Edwin Hubble: astronomer, lawyer, and quite the athlete. Highlights: "Usually he placed in Big Ten dual track meets, in both the shot put and the high jump. [...] At Oxford Hubble [...] competed in track and field events and swam on the water polo team. He later said he fought an exhibition boxing match against the French national champion, and did well enough that promoters wanted him to train to fight the world heavyweight champion." Also from photo credits: "The University of Chicago 1909 intercollegiate championship basketball team. Hubble is on the left."
I wonder if this is one of those things that changed with WWII? Perhaps the 60s? Or maybe Hubble was an exception, and the problem is older.
I had made the mistaken assumption that /. was repeating itself and that Lerner was just Bussard's replacement at the head of his project.
Lerner doesn't go into as great a detail about the DOE denying funding as Bussard, but he does definitely accuse them of only being interested in few huge projects.
So, basically, the same criticism applies to Bussard and Lerner with the same punch-line: I really hope they're right, but I really doubt it.
For the technical problems, look no further than BlueParrot's comment a little ways down thread.
For the crackpot-esque funding claims, just look for his claims about the DOE "defending their rice bowl." If you had any idea how the funding process works you'd know that the decisions of who to give a grant to aren't directed primarily by a bunch of territorial bureaucrats, it's made by scientists, his fellow peers who would actually be able to measure the merits of what he is proposing better than anyone. Frankly, I would believe that some fraction of the scientific community was capable of the behavior he accuses them of (saying, "Screw humanity, I want to defend my income"), but not enough that he wouldn't be able to get any funding from the DOE, NSF, or some other agency if he really tried. I guarantee that there would be enough scientists who would tend to put the interests of humanity first to get the level of funding he's talking about, if he could convince enough of them that his idea had merit.
The navy, on the other hand, has different funding priorities. Because their budget is vastly bigger and their priority is to get an edge/prevent enemies from getting an edge, they'll be more willing to take a "see what sticks" kind of approach. I mean, just Google for "navy cold fusion" to get some idea of how they're willing to fund an idea even if it's reputation is "radioactive" in academia. You can tell, also, that he's used to pitching this idea to national security types - he mentions several times in the video how the "Chinese will develop it." That's exactly the sort of argument you use if you want o pry funding out of military hands, not academic ones.
So, although I would love nothing more than to be wrong on this one, I think that the guy is just plain wrong and he went into crackpot territory with his obsession with his idea.
He said it was crackpot. I didn't try to get him to go into details, but he basically mentioned the same stuff you did - stellarators, etc. What's more, there is the crack-pottery in the clip about how all the people in the field are in a conspiracy to deny his idea funding. I know these people - you might find some or even a majority who would be so unscrupulous, but nowhere near enough to maintain such a conspiracy. So, I would tend to think that you're right.
Basically, this guy is probably guilty of exactly what he accuses the rest of the fusion community of - he's fixated on his idea. He apparently won funding from the navy, so there's a chance his group could prove me wrong, and I hope that they do, but I doubt it.
Though bicycling is preferable, even if it does get you sweaty.
Before there were patents there were guilds and these guilds have trade secrets that they jealously guarded out of fear of losing their exclusive meal ticket. Patents, because the schematics are public records, discourage this behavior. This is a good thing because it means that the knowledge is less likely to be lost and will enter the public domain "soon." At least, that's the ideal.
Now, is the patent system as presently constituted anywhere close to an ideal solution to this problem? Not on your life. The obviousness threshold for granting patents needs to be raised significantly and there are lots of things being patented that shouldn't be (eg genes).
Fixing those things, though, could we make it even better? That's the million dollar question.
Are they going to have the roaches ingest or inhale any radioisotopes? My understanding is that that is a significant part of the problem after a nuclear war.
Because the fitness landscape for any individual organism must include the effects of the other members of his species more interesting things can occur. The worst part is that either effect can occur - the main population can either deepen the well or make it more shallow. In the former case you have a strong tendency towards monoculture even on non-optimum points - think Windows. In the latter case the organism will tend to "fill up" the local minimum and eventually, population constraints being favorable, spill over into any nearby lower areas. Thus, either creating a new species that splits off or out-competes its parent species. The nice part about this model is that it offers another way for apparently discontinuous jumps to appear in the fossil record even when there is no evidence for similarly discontinuous changes in the environment.
It's expensive to run an election, so politicians who want to look fiscally responsible will make sure to keep elections consolidated. After all, they wouldn't want to cut any of those expensive boondoggles, would they?
They have finally perfected the abacus!
FTFA:
"His idea is to stand billions of ultrafine wire loops around the edge of a silicon chip -- hence the name racetrack -- and use electric current to slide infinitesimally small magnets up and down along each of the wires to be read and written as digital ones and zeros.
His research group is able to slide the tiny magnets along notched nanowires at speeds greater than 100 meters a second. Since the tiny magnetic domains have to travel only submolecular distances, it is possible to read and write magnetic regions with different polarization as quickly as a single nanosecond -- far faster than existing storage technologies."
What is really really old is new again, eh?
I can see it now - to erase your iPod, turn it on its side and shake - just like an Etch-a-Sketch!
if they would just give me DWIM functionality in hardware. It's just so slow running that in software, you know.
We need to stop the hole pollution that's building up in space or someday our entire galaxy could fall in....
If we look down, anyway.
"They don't even really understand how gravity works, and that's the most important force which affects us humans in our daily lives."
Well, not entirely true. I'd say that E&M is actually far more important to our daily experience than gravity, especially in the number of phenomena rooted in it.
"There's now some evidence that there might be other dimensions besides the 4 we're familiar with,"
What evidence? Point to some experiment or observation, please, not theoretical work.
"various particles have been detected (like neutrinos) which previously were only hypothesized."
This is entirely false. Neutrinos have been detected for several decades now, and they've even been used as tools in experiments - just look up some papers on deep inelastic neutrino scattering to see what I mean. No, what's new is that we're pretty sure that they have some mass, though we still only have an upper bound on it. In fact the last new fundamental particle to be discovered was the top quark in the 90s, and that was a couple of decades or so after the last new particle. It's now just down to the Higgs hunt as far as the standard model goes, and every particle physicist is praying that when we do find it there's something about it that doesn't fit in the standard model because otherwise particle physics is likely to die from it's too successful theory.
"150 years ago people thought it was impossible to fly in a machine that was heavier than air."
And those people would have been laymen who didn't know what was going on anyway. All you'd need to do is look at Newton's second law to see that if you could somehow push down on the air with enough force you'd be able to make anything fly. Even Leonardo da Vinci, a couple hundred years earlier than your estimate, knew that.
"There's no telling what other facets about our universe exist which we are unable currently to observe and understand, just like we had no idea how to split or fuse atoms and create enormous amounts of energy 100 years ago."
Actually, we do have a pretty good idea. Just like it turned out that Einstein's relativity was only a small modification of Newton's physics in the known regime, it's a pretty good bet that any new physics will have to reduce to the current theories, approximately, in the areas we have already explored experimentally.
I've repeatedly heard it said that you would have to run for an insane amount of time to burn off the extra calories from just one cookie, so it isn't in that fashion that exercise helps with weight problems. The only alternative explanation I've heard involves endorphins and whatnot. I've suspected that it may be due to the fact that repairing the damage done to one's body during exercise is metabolically more expensive than just doing the motions, but had no idea whether this was true or not. This possibility, however, is far more interesting and direct - exercise puts stresses on the bones that may stimulate the production of a hormone that aids in the proper regulation of energy metabolism.
Kind of like how certain immune functions cease working in the absence of a gravitational field.
Granted, the root of the problem is energy intake exceeding energy expended, but until one understands better the reasons why a person would eat more than they need it is futile to tell people to just stop.
I've also wondered if part of the problem isn't that the modern, refined, carbohydrates are so concentrated. I mean, I would imagine that the human digestive system is capable of absorbing nutrients down to a certain concentration in the digestive fluids. If the calories are more concentrated, eg the food lacks fiber to give it indigestible bulk, then the body will absorb a larger fraction of the calories. So, another question I have is if it is significant to not just consider calories ingested, but calories ingested minus calories expelled.
The man in the moon is not only farting in our general direction, he's flashing us at the same time, too!