Further, Tour and his group have synthesized molecular transistors (he calls them "Moleisters") about a year and a half ago.
"Moleisters"?? What awful nomenclature, sounds scandalous. How about switching it around, call them "Transeculars." Hmm, that's not much better... But hey, it's all good, whatever helps them sustain an electron.
At the top of my wish list, is a cell phone with the following features:
1) MP3 player functionality, with 256MB flash memory and USB interface, mountable as a hard drive.
2) Infrared/802.11/Bluetooth modem support, plug & play with any laptop computer, log on from anywhere. (No need to cram a web browser onto the cell display itself.)
3) Ability to make calls over cell network, cordless landline, or internet, at will.
4) GPS/navigational functionality.
5) Last but not least, optional laser engraving for a paltry additional $49, of course. (Do-it-yourself paperclip engraving is just so five-seconds-ago.;-)
Maybe Apple's next Digital Device will be something like this. I have a Powerbook G4, and it's surprisingly difficult to find a workable log-on-from-anywhere solution.
...we could have a manned mission to Mars and it will be done in time to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence (2016).
Um, the 250th anniversary is in 2026, not 2016. On the other hand, 2026 is a hell of a lot more realistic timeframe... So, your point is still well taken, and it's a very worthy goal to shoot for.
...Why on earth does the book needs to be 1200-odd pages? Was it just me, or did the first chapter simply restate the same basic idea over and over and over again? If it practiced what it preaches, this book could have been a single-page essay, from which all the contained ideas would be trivial corollaries.
I do agree that it's kind of neat that simple cellular automata can engender apparent complexity and simulate Turing machines, but wasn't this shown of the game of Life a long time ago? And although the rules per cell are very simple, the actual computation must be massively parallel to achieve any reasonable speed, making it a dubious prospect for useful implementation on modern hardware, unless we were to switch to FPGA's or something.
I suppose I should continue skimming the book, but I haven't seen anything mind-blowing in the first few chapters... Anyone know what I'm missing? (besides my 45 bucks?)
The article seems to indicate that strangelets passing through the earth would be barely slowed down at all, so they would exit the other side and continue on their way. What size mass would a planet/star have to be in order to capture a strangelet in its gravitational field, and what would be the consequences?
Obviously, if scientists were to create and contain a strangelet in a lab, it would be bound by Earth's gravitational field. What if one got loose, and fell through the planet, without the energy to exit out the other side? Do these things decay, or would it continue gobbling up material? Scary stuff...
...two instances where two earthquakes hapened within a few seconds of each other on nearly-opposite sides of the world.
There must be more to it than this. Strangelets (if they exist) are equally likely to hit the Earth at any angle, so the entry and exit points need not be antipodal. They could enter at Los Angeles and exit at Seattle, for instance.
The how-fast-are-they discussion reminds me of those "rail-guns" in the movie Eraser, where the bullets are said to travel at 1/3 c, yet visibly take several frames to move from the gun to the target. 26 seconds to cross the Earth is not an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, by any stretch.
Also, the jump to label these events as caused by "stranglets" brings back memories of a college physics lab, where the professor was describing particles scattering off gold nuclei. He said, "Does anyone know what these particles are called?" Some guy in the back shouted, "Call them 'Scatterons!'" As in Scooby Doo, eventually we'll see what these strangelets REALLY are...
The above comparison of Chess to Go is a very deep observation. As an avid computer programmer and Go player, I am repeatedly struck by how much more difficult it is to analyze Go than it is to analyze chess from a computational perspective. I think a significant part of the difficulty is that the "object" in Go is not nearly as binary as Chess, where a single particularly good or bad move can quickly end the game. Go play is much more analog and fluid, and imho is far better suited to the quality of intellect that makes us uniquely human.
It's also fascinating to observe the parallels between Go playing and life; many of the same patterns and relationships tend to emerge in play. Personalities are brought out very clearly in the way people play Go. (The same can be said of Chess to some extent, but I believe in Go even more strongly.) If I had the free time, I'd love to set myself the challenge of writing a Go program that could beat me, and do it within a year. (I'm around 10 kyu.)
An anecdote (not sure of the truth of this)... Henk Rogers brought the game Tetris over from Russia, and went to the CEO of Nintendo to try to sell the idea. The CEO (4-dan) challenged him to a game of Go. Henk Rogers (who happened to be 5-dan) prevailed, and thus Tetris was brought to the Nintendo platform. (Can anyone back up this story, or provide more details?)
Another aside: Go programs are often criticized for playing in a very "non-human" style; skipping randomly around the board, playing very disjointed and disconnected moves. I have a very different opinion about this: I believe that "God's Algorithm" for Go will look very different from either human or computer play. Current human play has developed a style which limits the complexity of any given situation to a level that is graspable by the human mind. An infinitely powerful mind would be more likely to develop even more complexity in a game, far beyond what humans are capable of analyzing. (In Chess, on the other hand, I believe current grandmaster play comes quite close to the complexity limit.)
Back to chess, personally, I don't believe the human race has anything to worry about from a pride standpoint, if (when!) Fritz eventually triumphs over Kramnik. But when the world's top Go players are finally defeated, that will be a different story indeed...
I had the opportunity to ride the Segway at the TED conference in Monterey a few months ago, and was quite impressed. It feels a bit like water skiing; takes a minute to get your "sea legs," then it's completely intuitive. Right now, there are no "gears"; you just lean forward or backward and it goes. This seemed to be a bit of a problem getting on and off the thing; I'd like to see a "Neutral" gear, where it tries to stay as motionless as possible, balancing upright. In fact, in this mode, a person could probably do a handstand on the handlebars and it would continue to balance itself!! (Cirque du Soleil, anyone?)
Also, perhaps separate "Drive" and "Reverse" modes might be called for, where it goes only forwards or only backwards (unless needed for balancing). And currently, a hard rotational twist at high speed will flip the thing. There must be some way to detect radial acceleration and ease up when it gets to a dangerous point... I understand the need for linear response, like a car steering wheel has, but note that a car is more likely to skid (not flip) if you turn the wheel a little too hard. (I don't think the Segway has enough juice to skid, anyway... and its center of gravity is way too high.) Some sort of governor that kicks in at high radial acceleration and avoids flipping would be a welcome improvement.
Just my two cents... I still want one! (well, perhaps when it comes down to $1000...;-)
De Viron's team found that earthlings can expect the length of an average day to increase by 11 millionths of a second per decade, corresponding to an overall increase of about one ten-thousandth of a second by the close of the century.
See, here's the thing.
Long ago, in the age of dinosaurs, the earth was spinning much faster, so everything on the surface (especially near the equator) had less apparent weight. That's how come the dinosaurs got so big. But as the earth spun slower, they all got too heavy to support themselves, so they all died and went extinct. Now, with the earth's rotation slowing further, we are all getting heavier and heavier, as evidenced by the alarming rise in obesity around the world, until eventually we die out too. See, global warming really causes obesity! It's all so obvious.
And once you find the average color, you can make an Anti-Web page, that you can let your browser sit on a few hours a day, to reverse your monitor burn-in....
Sucessful families with 1.2 children (below the replacement level, their genes are effectively selected against). Poverty level people having 3.6 children (geneticaly sucessfull).
One counterexample to this might be seen in professional sports, though it clearly emphasizes physical development over intelligence... How many women did Wilt Chamberlain claim to have slept with, 20,000? Perhaps the future will be full of 7-foot basketball players...
If it doesn't then the wave will have energy equivalent to nuclear weapons when it reaches the endpoints and the waves transmit themselves into the supporting structure....
On the bottom end, the atmosphere should absorb quite a bit of this energy before the shock wave hits the ground station. And on the top end, since the cable gets thicker as you go up, there should be less of a whiplike effect, I would imagine. In any case, the nuclear-weapons-equivalent energy is distributed over such a tremendous area (or distance), it probably wouldn't be too catastrophic at any one spot. Or am I missing something?
why not create a platform 50-80,000 feet up for planes to land on. This would save very large amounts of cable from being created
Um, 50-80,000 feet is utterly insignificant compared to the the total length of the cable, like one part in a thousand. You wouldn't be saving much of anything doing it this way. And the beauty of carbon nanotubes is that they are SO strong, the cable could get away with being quite thin, probably thin enough that most parts would burn up in the atmosphere on reentry. (Especially if the tether were composed of bundles of separate nanotube fibers, surrounded by a coating of ordinary material to hold them together. If the coating burns off in the atmosphere, the fibers fly apart and disintegrate almost instantly.)
They never answer the basic question of why did the aluminum have to be transparent? Why not regular aluminum or any other such material? Do the whales need a view of the Klingon starship? Do they have no cameras or sensors to let them see the whales?
I wondered about this too, until I realized that the transparent aluminum recipe was simply payment for the normal plexiglass walls they needed for the whales; a sort of barter transaction. The film didn't make this entirely clear on first viewing, but I think this is the logic of the plot.
That begs the question; why did the whales need transparent plexiglass? Perhaps 24th century science has discovered that whales are claustrophobic?
(If the above post is not off-topic, then neither is this one.)
Slashdot Mirror
Further, Tour and his group have synthesized molecular transistors (he calls them "Moleisters") about a year and a half ago.
"Moleisters"?? What awful nomenclature, sounds scandalous. How about switching it around, call them "Transeculars." Hmm, that's not much better... But hey, it's all good, whatever helps them sustain an electron.
It'll be forever before we have such a lovely thing in the US, with our collective allergy to mass transit...
The irony is, if we had mass transit like this, we wouldn't have the allergy anymore.
42. The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
One byte can contain it, and Douglas Adams made millions off it. (One has to wonder, of course, how much the actual question would be worth...?)
At the top of my wish list, is a cell phone with the following features:
;-)
1) MP3 player functionality, with 256MB flash memory and USB interface, mountable as a hard drive.
2) Infrared/802.11/Bluetooth modem support, plug & play with any laptop computer, log on from anywhere. (No need to cram a web browser onto the cell display itself.)
3) Ability to make calls over cell network, cordless landline, or internet, at will.
4) GPS/navigational functionality.
5) Last but not least, optional laser engraving for a paltry additional $49, of course. (Do-it-yourself paperclip engraving is just so five-seconds-ago.
Maybe Apple's next Digital Device will be something like this. I have a Powerbook G4, and it's surprisingly difficult to find a workable log-on-from-anywhere solution.
...we could have a manned mission to Mars and it will be done in time to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence (2016).
Um, the 250th anniversary is in 2026, not 2016. On the other hand, 2026 is a hell of a lot more realistic timeframe... So, your point is still well taken, and it's a very worthy goal to shoot for.
...Why on earth does the book needs to be 1200-odd pages? Was it just me, or did the first chapter simply restate the same basic idea over and over and over again? If it practiced what it preaches, this book could have been a single-page essay, from which all the contained ideas would be trivial corollaries.
I do agree that it's kind of neat that simple cellular automata can engender apparent complexity and simulate Turing machines, but wasn't this shown of the game of Life a long time ago? And although the rules per cell are very simple, the actual computation must be massively parallel to achieve any reasonable speed, making it a dubious prospect for useful implementation on modern hardware, unless we were to switch to FPGA's or something.
I suppose I should continue skimming the book, but I haven't seen anything mind-blowing in the first few chapters... Anyone know what I'm missing? (besides my 45 bucks?)
The article seems to indicate that strangelets passing through the earth would be barely slowed down at all, so they would exit the other side and continue on their way. What size mass would a planet/star have to be in order to capture a strangelet in its gravitational field, and what would be the consequences?
Obviously, if scientists were to create and contain a strangelet in a lab, it would be bound by Earth's gravitational field. What if one got loose, and fell through the planet, without the energy to exit out the other side? Do these things decay, or would it continue gobbling up material? Scary stuff...
...two instances where two earthquakes hapened within a few seconds of each other on nearly-opposite sides of the world.
There must be more to it than this. Strangelets (if they exist) are equally likely to hit the Earth at any angle, so the entry and exit points need not be antipodal. They could enter at Los Angeles and exit at Seattle, for instance.
The how-fast-are-they discussion reminds me of those "rail-guns" in the movie Eraser, where the bullets are said to travel at 1/3 c, yet visibly take several frames to move from the gun to the target. 26 seconds to cross the Earth is not an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, by any stretch.
Also, the jump to label these events as caused by "stranglets" brings back memories of a college physics lab, where the professor was describing particles scattering off gold nuclei. He said, "Does anyone know what these particles are called?" Some guy in the back shouted, "Call them 'Scatterons!'" As in Scooby Doo, eventually we'll see what these strangelets REALLY are...
The above comparison of Chess to Go is a very deep observation. As an avid computer programmer and Go player, I am repeatedly struck by how much more difficult it is to analyze Go than it is to analyze chess from a computational perspective. I think a significant part of the difficulty is that the "object" in Go is not nearly as binary as Chess, where a single particularly good or bad move can quickly end the game. Go play is much more analog and fluid, and imho is far better suited to the quality of intellect that makes us uniquely human.
It's also fascinating to observe the parallels between Go playing and life; many of the same patterns and relationships tend to emerge in play. Personalities are brought out very clearly in the way people play Go. (The same can be said of Chess to some extent, but I believe in Go even more strongly.) If I had the free time, I'd love to set myself the challenge of writing a Go program that could beat me, and do it within a year. (I'm around 10 kyu.)
An anecdote (not sure of the truth of this)... Henk Rogers brought the game Tetris over from Russia, and went to the CEO of Nintendo to try to sell the idea. The CEO (4-dan) challenged him to a game of Go. Henk Rogers (who happened to be 5-dan) prevailed, and thus Tetris was brought to the Nintendo platform. (Can anyone back up this story, or provide more details?)
Another aside: Go programs are often criticized for playing in a very "non-human" style; skipping randomly around the board, playing very disjointed and disconnected moves. I have a very different opinion about this: I believe that "God's Algorithm" for Go will look very different from either human or computer play. Current human play has developed a style which limits the complexity of any given situation to a level that is graspable by the human mind. An infinitely powerful mind would be more likely to develop even more complexity in a game, far beyond what humans are capable of analyzing. (In Chess, on the other hand, I believe current grandmaster play comes quite close to the complexity limit.)
Back to chess, personally, I don't believe the human race has anything to worry about from a pride standpoint, if (when!) Fritz eventually triumphs over Kramnik. But when the world's top Go players are finally defeated, that will be a different story indeed...
I had the opportunity to ride the Segway at the TED conference in Monterey a few months ago, and was quite impressed. It feels a bit like water skiing; takes a minute to get your "sea legs," then it's completely intuitive. Right now, there are no "gears"; you just lean forward or backward and it goes. This seemed to be a bit of a problem getting on and off the thing; I'd like to see a "Neutral" gear, where it tries to stay as motionless as possible, balancing upright. In fact, in this mode, a person could probably do a handstand on the handlebars and it would continue to balance itself!! (Cirque du Soleil, anyone?)
;-)
Also, perhaps separate "Drive" and "Reverse" modes might be called for, where it goes only forwards or only backwards (unless needed for balancing). And currently, a hard rotational twist at high speed will flip the thing. There must be some way to detect radial acceleration and ease up when it gets to a dangerous point... I understand the need for linear response, like a car steering wheel has, but note that a car is more likely to skid (not flip) if you turn the wheel a little too hard. (I don't think the Segway has enough juice to skid, anyway... and its center of gravity is way too high.) Some sort of governor that kicks in at high radial acceleration and avoids flipping would be a welcome improvement.
Just my two cents... I still want one! (well, perhaps when it comes down to $1000...
This is just a marketing ploy so they can sell storage Clusters shaped like Castles, Pirate Ships and the Millenium Falcon!
No, I think they should sell Clusters shaped like Beowulf.
Yes, I plan to install one of these puppies in my basement immediately... then I can just float around the house all day :-)
Good god. It doesn't work that way.
;-)
Oops, I suppose there's something I forgot to add:
There, much better.
De Viron's team found that earthlings can expect the length of an average day to increase by 11 millionths of a second per decade, corresponding to an overall increase of about one ten-thousandth of a second by the close of the century.
See, here's the thing.
Long ago, in the age of dinosaurs, the earth was spinning much faster, so everything on the surface (especially near the equator) had less apparent weight. That's how come the dinosaurs got so big. But as the earth spun slower, they all got too heavy to support themselves, so they all died and went extinct. Now, with the earth's rotation slowing further, we are all getting heavier and heavier, as evidenced by the alarming rise in obesity around the world, until eventually we die out too. See, global warming really causes obesity! It's all so obvious.
Well, if CowboyNeal ever decided to propose this way, at least he wouldn't have this problem...
Of course, once you win the contest and the result is posted everywhere, the search won't be valid anymore...
Good idea!..
And once you find the average color, you can make an Anti-Web page, that you can let your browser sit on a few hours a day, to reverse your monitor burn-in....
Sucessful families with 1.2 children (below the replacement level, their genes are effectively selected against). Poverty level people having 3.6 children (geneticaly sucessfull).
One counterexample to this might be seen in professional sports, though it clearly emphasizes physical development over intelligence... How many women did Wilt Chamberlain claim to have slept with, 20,000? Perhaps the future will be full of 7-foot basketball players...
We're too late... For Pete's sake, lowly television sets and computer screens already control the bulk of many peoples' lives.
What about the degenerative effect on the brain? Cranial Tunnelvision Syndrome...
If it doesn't then the wave will have energy equivalent to nuclear weapons when it reaches the endpoints and the waves transmit themselves into the supporting structure....
On the bottom end, the atmosphere should absorb quite a bit of this energy before the shock wave hits the ground station. And on the top end, since the cable gets thicker as you go up, there should be less of a whiplike effect, I would imagine. In any case, the nuclear-weapons-equivalent energy is distributed over such a tremendous area (or distance), it probably wouldn't be too catastrophic at any one spot. Or am I missing something?
why not create a platform 50-80,000 feet up for planes to land on. This would save very large amounts of cable from being created
Um, 50-80,000 feet is utterly insignificant compared to the the total length of the cable, like one part in a thousand. You wouldn't be saving much of anything doing it this way. And the beauty of carbon nanotubes is that they are SO strong, the cable could get away with being quite thin, probably thin enough that most parts would burn up in the atmosphere on reentry. (Especially if the tether were composed of bundles of separate nanotube fibers, surrounded by a coating of ordinary material to hold them together. If the coating burns off in the atmosphere, the fibers fly apart and disintegrate almost instantly.)
They never answer the basic question of why did the aluminum have to be transparent? Why not regular aluminum or any other such material? Do the whales need a view of the Klingon starship? Do they have no cameras or sensors to let them see the whales?
I wondered about this too, until I realized that the transparent aluminum recipe was simply payment for the normal plexiglass walls they needed for the whales; a sort of barter transaction. The film didn't make this entirely clear on first viewing, but I think this is the logic of the plot.
That begs the question; why did the whales need transparent plexiglass? Perhaps 24th century science has discovered that whales are claustrophobic?
(If the above post is not off-topic, then neither is this one.)
1. Pick a location.
2. Build a small enclosure around yourself.
3. Define yourself to be on the outside.
One other thing, I wonder if there is a such thing as a gravatic black hole. Something so powerfully repulsive that gravitons cannot escape...
Jar Jar qualifies for this, I suppose. No wonder he wasn't in the latest Episode II trailer.