I have made the stuff with much simpler apparatus. Get a thin tungsten sheet crucible in a bell jar with some gold in it, connected across a power supply. Evacuate the air and backfill with a couple of torr of argon. Pass current to melt the gold. Some gold evaporates, and then condenses as gold soot. You can collect the gold soot on some object held above the crucible. The laser will create a superheated gold plasma that will condense in the same way as soot, but it is a lot more expensive.
Most black materials will reflect a percent or so of the light falling on it. This reflects less than 0.1%. It is weird to look at: you get no clue to the shape of the object because no light comes back.
The bad news? Well, basically, it is soot, and it wipes off. It is probably too delicate for the insides of ordinary cameras, and bits might drop off if you sent it into space. It does not work with all materials, and gold gives the best black.
I have worked a bit in nuclear and pulse power industries. I had never heard of this guy, though I had actually known about the ramjet. I have always had deep scepticism about nuclear fusion. It is touted as a clean source of power, but I knew that the traditional D-T fusion gives off this 14.5 MeV neutron and a powerful gamma. This is highly penetrating radiation, which will tend to make your whole plant radioactive. It could be stopped by 15 cm of Al, but it could also be stopped by a few mm of depleted uranium, which would then give out more energy. If you could build a fusion reactor, it might then make economic sense to shroud it in what is effectively a fast breeder reactor. Now a fast breeder aren't as dangerous as their stupid name suggests, but they aren't exactly clean consience-free energy either. Okay, that's where I come from. Now here is what I thought of the video.
Within minutes, he had pointed out that his reaction did not produce neutrons. He clearly knew this is a key issue. He described the basic geometries of fusion reaction. He made a nice, clear description of the random walk nature of tokomak fields, and why that meant some of the contents would always head for the walls. His explanations involved nice, clear numbers, like how many times the ion should go through the dense region before it collided. This isn't a popular science gloss-over - I am pretty sure you are getting the real deal here. He argued the need for a 1/r-type field to contain the ions, and why this is best done using electrons guided by coils. I have some familiarity with saddle-field ion sources - not the same thing, but similar enough to recognize what he was talking about.
For those of you familiar with Hollywood Science, 11 years of research with a load of failed designs may not seem like an investment. Actually, it showed a lot of steady progress, with many orders of magnitude improvement. The only faintly Hollywood bit was the final experiment, and that rang very true to me. The lab is being shut doown; the apparatus is going into storage. We may get to use it again, we may not. Why not turn the current supply all the way up? You can do it safely enough if you stand behind the filing cabinet. Oops, it fried. Oh well, we got some numbers anyway. Yup, that's what a lot of science is like. It is much slower and less dramatic then you would believe.
The 'wiffle ball' effect is really cute. He is working with plasmas. You have charged stuff zipping about in magnetic and electrostatic fields. Unfortunately, that stuff is itself charged, and because it is moving, it has its own magnetic field. This usually means the plasma can work out within microseconds what it is not supposed to do, and start hosepiping, or wiggling, or whatever it was that it shouldn't. Just occasionally, you can use this self-will to your advantage. The microwave magnetron is an example (particularly cute that he used one inside his experiment to keep the ionization up). Well, I would see that you could concentrale positive ions using negative electrons, but wouldn't they hit each other and neutralize all the time? Well - no they don't, because the electrons will make fast lanes through the slower moving ions.
He had worked on space engines. He is one of the mad atom smashers from the fifties. Okay, let's see how his proposal stacks up in traditional Mad Scientist terms. Usually a good Mad experiment involves at least two of (a) space, (b) H-bombs, (c) superconductivity, and (d) a small country. A mad experiment needs a budget that is a mere 10% of the US annual defence budget/spending of fossil fuels. And, usually there is the requirement for government funding to pay for the bits that won't make a profit. Some biofuel proposals get well into the Mad bracket. This project has clear aims and costs. It is not huge. You can build it. Either it will work or it won't. If it works, then we can put it into ships and conventional power stations. Project Plowshare it ain't.
The only thing I might say against is that this may be just
I understand the dilemma. You are more likely to get struck by lightning on the way to the polls then you are to affect a national election. You don't like picking any card from such a heavily prepared deck. Nevertheless, by posing the question to yourself and others you have probably revealed yourself as someone who worries about the consequences of the collective effects of their actions. This is just the sort of voter the polls need.
But, you are right, it does stink. I wish all elections gave you the opportunity of voting for or against each candidate. Often there are several people who I could vote for in my local elections, but one or two that I definately don't want on any account.
A whole-disk encryption system will always need to apply some encryption or decryption algorithm to every byte going to and from the disk. If you are going to do this in software, then there is clearly going to be a performance hit. If you are not going to encrypt every byte, but just have a key for the whole disk then you are not going to be secure. I cannot see any way other than special hardware of achieving this.
It is unrealistic and unlikely to expect every disk manufacturer or computer manufacturer to include this extra hardware overnight. Howver, it should be possible to make something that can fit between the disk and the data bus that does the encryption or decryption. It would have to be pretty slim to fit into the average laptop, but this should be possible. When the computer boots up with the key in, then the key should get passed to the new gadget, and thereafter the encryption and decryption should be invisible to the user. When the computer is powered down, the key should be lost.
Ordinary USB drives make good physical keys. You can stick these on keyrings. If someone sticks their house keys and office keys on the keyring, then they are unlikely to leave them in the laptop. Once the drive is unlocked, they will stick them back in their pocket.
This ought to give reasonable security to the average Joe without changing their life too much. The weakest point is now the OS. A malicious rootkit could copy the key. To combat this you will probably need some reputable software organization to track the relentless progress of malware - it is beyond what dumb hardware can achieve. You might stick a bootable sector on the USB drive and have a physical switch to enable writing for when you want to change the key or update the software. I am surprised McAffee or Norton haven't made this sort of thing.
I can't tell from the information on the site, but the epicentre seems to be very shallow for an earthquake. If you can get more details, a nuke should have a sharp rising edge to the P-wave, and a very weak S-wave. It is hard to mistake the two. If you could disguise practrical nukes as earthquakes, then test ban treaties would not mean anything. If someone has the proper seismology data, they probably know one way or the other. I expect we will have a more informed opinion in a few hours.
If I patent something, I patent it in my own country. If I get the patent, I can then apply for a patent in other countries citing the unpublished patent in my own country. In the UK I cannot jump straight to applying for a US patent, even if all my market is in the US, and my UK/European patents are not needed. This is a sensible ruling - it means that the US patent office is not flooded by foreign patent applications, as the local application processes should weed out the unoriginal ideas, the unworkable ideas, and so forth.
However, suppose one country in the international patent community choses to unilaterally extend the concept of patents to include methods (swinging on a swing sideways), business practices (pouring the milk on your own cereal), software (editing colours in an image using a computer), or harvesting traditional plants (basmati rice). Their nationals will be able to file patents for heroic ideas such as these (hooray!), but people in other countries where such patents are not recognized will be unable to apply for them.
This argument could be taken either way. The TRIPs agreement requires that patents be available for "any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided they are new, involve an inventive step and are capable of industrial application". It could be argued that the European Patent Convention and all subsequent rulings against software patents and the like are not compatible with this section of the TRIPs areement by excluding a subset of the possible patents. However, it does seem against the spirit of reciprocality within TRIPs for one country to unilaterally extend patent law in this way.
Have a look at Zheng He's integrated map of the world on http://www.1421.tv/pages/maps/1418.htm. This shows a navigable route towards the North pole. The world was warmer then, and there were rich farming communities on Greenland, which later vanished.
Gavin Menzies' book "1421" makes a good argument that the Chinese treasure fleets did manage to sail along the north coast of Greenland, and explore Siberia, which argues that there were several major routes that could be navigated by the large junks of the day. The evidence that they actually sailed to the North pole is pretty thin - but then again it is hard to see what evidence they could have bought back that would convince anyone. And most of the other stuff they surveyed and plotted has turned out to be supported by other evidence, so why not?
Anyhow, while we are knocking holes in the article, polar bears are quite happy to swim 50 miles or more out to sea. That little crack won't worry them. We need to be worried about global warming, but the issue isn't helped by hype like that.
Film has a soft MTF, where most discrete detectors have a definite Nyquist limit. There is no hard figure for the number of equivalent pixels on a film image. you like film (and I do) it is easy to argue the figure up by a factor of two or so. If I had to guess, I would say IMAX still had the edge: better contrast, and maybe better resolution. nevertheless, if there is still a gap, it is closing fast.
I saw it at IBC last week. They had a camera on the top of the RAI showing live shots of Amasterdam as well as stuff from disc, all at 60 Hz. It looked pretty good. It wasn't like looking out of a window - though it might have done if the screen had been window-sized. The screen was big like an IMAX screen, and you could let your eye wander around it in the same way. I felt there was some sharpening and colour processing nonsense going on. I guess the total contrast was something like 2000:1, so you will need a high dynamic range version before the highlights and shadows look quite convincing. However, getting 2000:1 is pretty impressive - a lot of the scattered light in projectors comes from the pixel edges, and you must have a lot more of these. All in all, it was pretty sweeeet. They also had a 4K LCD display outside the theatre, and that looked good too.
I was told the downlink for the live camera was sending 52 Gbits/sec, which isn't quite the figures the others were coming up with. The data might have been 16 bits per channel. The camera was about a foot cube, which is pretty good as a blimped IMAX camera is the size of a small car.
I don't know where the figure of not being ready for 25 years comes from. The project never had a time to manufacture. I would imagine if there was demand, it could be ready a lot earlier.
Does it replace IMAX? I am not sure. I would like to see it show footage scanned from the original "North of Superior" footage. I have seen a strike from the original negative of that, and I remember the image being so impressive that you felt the tilt when the aeroplane cornered: you believed your eyes over your inner ear. It would be interesting to know if this rig could do the same.
There have been devices that have attempted to reproduce the entire spectrum before. Surface acoustic wave devices were used in the 80's and 90's to give switchable gratings. I remember working with a film recorder that used to use one of these. Unfortunately, it was not sufficiently saturated, and later versions used a filter wheel. Wyszecki and Stiles also cite an earlier gadget where white light was spread into a spectrum, and a template was used to select the spectra wanted: you could do the same thing with an LCD. There are also switchable liquid crystal colour filters which were used with black and white CRTs to give a colour display, though this technology could not manage continuously variable spectra unless you made the filter a lot deeper and more lossy.
You probably do not need a continuously variable spectrum for each pixel. A simple set of red, green, and blue primaries cannot reproduce the stimulus of all the spectral colours, yet they give a good enough representation of most scenes. This works because the eye-brain system transmits brightness, colour, motion detection, and other signals as firing rates in nerves. The nerves will typically have a significant background firing rate even for zero signal, so the system has to continuously try to calibrate itself, and work out what the zero and scale signals are. This is why we can look at printed images with a typical contrast ratio of 100:1 and a white point as set by the ambient light, and recognize a scene without worrying that the blacks look grey or the whites look coloured. Many illusions depend on fooling this feedback process. For example, if you look at a slowly moving object for some time and the look at a still scene, it may seem to rotate in the opposide direction because your motion sensors have adapted. Well, the same happens with your sense of colour contrast - that will adapt to compensate for the variations due to intensity. If you look at a dimmer version of an image, the colour difference signals are weaker but colours you see will look much the same (until you get down to mesopic light levels, and the adaption system begins to pack up altogether). If you are looking at an image in a darkened room, and the colours are 10% desaturated, you will probably not notice unless there is some other stimulus (such as a red power LED on your monitor) to act as an independent reference. It many seem that a three-component display can only get at about half the colour space within the spectral locus, but under typical viewing conditions, we are poor judges of colour contrast. If you want to make an image look more colourful, make it brighter. Get a slide projector and move it close to the screen so the image is small but really bright - you know the colours have stayed the same and only the intensity has changed, but you will probably find the colours a lot more satisfying.
There are other reasons for wanting to go for more primaries. You eye does not have uniform colour sensitivity: it will detect colours differently in the centre and in the periphery. The brain tries to remove this variation, as it is part of the eye not part of the image. You do not see this variation directly, but you can get to see it if you look at a large white patch on a screen where the left and right halves have different spectra. If you have an RGB projector with broad spectral primaries, this will give you a similar stimulus to a general reflection scene in the central and the peripheral vision, but you will not be able to get the saturated colors. If you have narrow band primaries, you will be able to get the deep reds, peacock blues, and violets you cannot get with the broad primaries, but you may have strange side-effects because your central and peripheral vision no longer match. make a projector with six primaries, and you could get the best of both.
But, is the extra effort really worth it? It is a bit like 3D - twice as much technology giving you a bit of extra stimulus that can startle, but can also detract from the nett visual experience. I would love one of these variable filters as a research tool, but I don't expect fully spectral displays any time soon.
It is a pity about the chlorofluorcarbons. There is a good alternative process that uses ammonia and water that has been around for some time. It is more efficient than the straight water cycle, and the system is closed so the water isn't going anywhere. See for example
http://www.geothermie.de/gte/gte46/geothermal_powe r_plant.htm
If you have an inverse square gravitational field, then a uniform shell will balance itself out exactly. If you are outside the shell, it will behave as though there was a point mass at the centre.
Roughly it goes like this. If you approach one side, then you have a small region that is very close to you on that side, and a much bigger region on the other side that isn't attracting you as strongly. The area goes as the square of the radius. The attraction per unit area goes as the inverse square. So they ought to be able to balance out, and in fact they do exactly.
Okay - it may not be perfect but it is better than the only alternative. What's the alternative? The traditional methods of measuring gravitational forces on earth involve measuring tiny motions of suspended weights towards each other. Suspending the weights ought to mean the degrees of freedom for the weights lie perpendicular to the ambient gravitational field. Well, that works, but the ambient gravitational field is many billions of times greater than the little attraction you are trying to measure. You have to isolate the experiment from external vibrations, movements of mass, electric and magnetic fields, tidal effects, ageing and grain growth in the support cables, yada, yada, yada.
Sticking the whole experiment up in space gets rid of most of these problems. No wire, no vibrations, no air currents (vacuum out there is very much better than lab vacuums). The gravity is now by far the biggest force. If you stick the whole experiment in a symmetric tin, then Gauss' theorem (old school gravitational theory, but still pretty accurate) says it the net gravitational field inside is zero. The tin could keep out the solar wind, though it might need a small ion motor to keep it motionless with respect to the experiment inside.
I am not sure of the need to go to the Lagrange point. That is a precious point in space and we don't want to go cluttering it with time-expired junk. Probably just getting into high orbit would get us much better results than on earth. Shoving the experiment out of earth's orbit altogether might be better still.
Anyhow, we ought to do it because it's cool. That's what Space stuff is for: to be cool. The space shuttle sort-of misses the point of Space these days.
Various other people have come up with arguments saying that Australia was not isolated. They well may be right. However, Australian aboriginies were the example I first thought about in connection with this.
We know, or we believe we know from genetical studies, that populations do migrate or diffuse out rapidly. Often this motion is along trade routes, or around shallow coasts; following animal migrations, rivers, or belts of arable land. As long as there are suitable links, then there will be patches of people with a common relation. In medieval times, Indian objects got to Scandinavia, and Roman glass fot to Japan. But we also know there are places like Australia which took a long time to be discovered by Europeans (they somehow managed to find Tasmania first, but miss Australia), and so are probably much more weakly connected with the rest of the world. There are also other cultural barriers that will attenuate if not prevent intercourse between races, countries, religions, tribes, and whatever. Genetic research has told us that these taboos have probably been breached throughout history, but nevertheless there will be resistance.
We do not know nearly enough about where people did and did not travel in early history to make such a model. A lot of the evidence from 5000BC has probably vanished with rising sea levels. My gut feeling is that this model makes the world too uniform, and does not have enough hard links to it, but I don't really know either.
To be impacted with the _worm_, users have to actively download the code.
Anyone click on the _worm_ link in the article? What did it do? It probably told you all about worms, which is a bit dull but safe. However, that's how it reproduces.
All the good tricks are basically conjuring tricks or confidence tricks. E-mail and webpages ought to be safe. You should have to actually click on something to get something nasty to happen. The art is to get the mail to look like something friendly; to make the attachment look like an image file; to stick a transparent border on the window so what looks like the X button on a pop-up is part of the window. I remember someone back in the seventies logging on to a terminal, only to have it give him a rude message and make off with his password: the terminal had been left with a running program that looked like the login. Easy when you see it done, surprising when you have never met it. I remember last year someone clicking on a.jpg file only to have it do something because the name had a lot of spaces followed by.exe in the name, and you didn't see it in the window. They are basically the same trick, thirty years apart. If you want to stop the tricks, you get in a scam expert, not a programmer. or maybe a scam expert and a programmer.
You can get a long way with an old school mail reader. You can peek at the headers if you know. You can look at the attachments and see whether the file names look okay. You can turn off the HTML. If you add all sorts of automatic checks and filters, then this just adds extra levels of complexity in which you can hide scams, exploit programming errors, hide stuff where it might get clicked on by accident.
We have McAffee filtering our computer. Somehow, one of the games manages to turn it off when the kids use it. This ought not to be possible. I am sure something is somehow suckering us into turning it off, or has somehow suckered us into giving something the priveleges to do this. Can we fix it? Nope. What do we do? We take the plug from the hub when we are not wanting an outside connection. Don't get me wrong - I am not saying we do not need security systems. I know some clown in China is trying to find a port on my computer every 30 seconds or so, day and night, rot him/her. However, to continue the automotive parallel of other posts, the faulty component is still the well-oiled nut behind the wheel nine times out of ten.
An oil painting can record sound. The canvas vibrates with the sound in the studio, creating ridges in the paint left by the artist's pallette knife or brush. I remember some research in the 1970's (?) that claimed to have reproduced some noises, though no intelligible words, from light-slice microscopy of some Dutch masters.
The Mona Lisa was painted on wood. Not much chance of "enough of the knock-knock jokes, you silly cow, this is supposed to be a serious portrait" spoken with a Tuscan accent.
I remember a very early style checking program called 'Andrew'. It higlighted sentences over 16 words, and prompted you to break up ones over 24 words. Pretty arbitrary limits, but they work well in almost all cases. It could graph your average sentence length over an article (I did not use this). It checked for passive voice, and a few other things. That did it for me. Once you get into the habit of dismantling big, complicated sentences into little, terse ones, then you start being able to do this without the checker. I still need a second pass or two to do this now, but I don't need the style checker for sentence length.
I am told Rudyard Kipling used to go through his prose, striking out all the adjectives and adverbs, and then putting back the ones that were absolutely necessary. This works for technical writing too: it is easy to put in qualifiers such as 'probable', 'fairly', 'somewhat' in your text to tone down unsafe statements, but most of them don't convey anything useful. Plus, it helps focus you on what you are really saying.
This is fine if you promise to wake it up again. But young children can get scared of going to sleep because they do not feel in control of when they wake up again. My ones never did, but I am told it happens.
Ever read the original 'Frankenstein'? In particular, the bit were the doctor meets the 'monster' on the glacier, and the 'monster' demands that Frankenstein - who he regards as someone who has taken of the role and therefore the responsibilities of a creating god - finishes the job properly and gives him the ability to reproduce. And the doctor's options as he sees them are to play for time, and hope he can whack it when it isn't looking.
Good point. We can't because flatworms all have the same neurons, and we know exactly when we have got anything wrong. But creating a neural net computer with a similar complexity and connectivity to the human brain - which I am told is quite feasable today, though it may not do anything useful - is a long way from creating a simulation of a particular human brain, and then asking it what it had for breakfast.
This particular experiment is not going to create a 2-year old. We have had robots and simulations of robots that have used neutral nets to see if motor skill can be optimised using learning-like techniques. We have had recognition programs that do the same things that our eye and brain system do. This is an intelligent combination of the two.
However, just suppose, and then suppose, and then suppose...
So far, we can build computers that can simulate brain cells. There is nothing stopping us making a computer that has a similar complexity to the brain. We will have to mimic the strange mix of part-design, part randomness that brains are. Or maybe we can just throw more computing power, and stuff the brain doesn't have, like the ability to back up and regress. Sooner or later - probably later is my guess, but who knows? - we are going to come up with something that shows intelligence, and probably has inteligence.
African grey parrots are kept as pets. These are said to be as intelligent as a two-year old. Some of them can understand sentances from a vocabulary of hundreds of words. They don't progress much beyond a two year old. And they are Not Like Us, so it's OK to keep them in cages. Apparently. Hmmm.
One day, someone is going to make something intelligent, and then turn it off, and there will be an outcry. Is anyone doing the thinking on the ethics of making it before making it?
I learned programming in the 1960's (Algol 1900) when you had to send away punched cards, and you got out printout. You looked at the header sheet where they put out your user initials in BIG letters made out of lots of little letters, and you thought "hey, I could do pictures and graphs that way!". It was hard, but you did.
Then came teletypes where you could only use a simple line editor, so the expeience was not that different from punchcards. Then came the permission to write interactive programs, where you could get keystrokes, and make something happen on the teletype (or screen, later) that wasn't just what you typed.
Then, for me came the lab's Commodore Pet with 512 bytes of RAM. You weren't spending your precious x units of processing and storage allocated by the administrators when you played with it. It was just sitting there if you weren't using it, so you used it (or more often you hung around while someone else used it). That was when the computer experience really caught fire. There nearest equivalent I can remember is getting broadband at home, but that was nothing like the rush. Okay, there was RACTER, and there was a bug squashing game, and there was a static StarTrek game on the mainframe which the admin kept trying to delete, and not a lot else. But it was glorious.
Then came machine code on the Spectrum or the BBC Acorn. You weren't living in the tidy little OS world; you were making the little bits in the thing do what you wanted personally. Man, you were baaaad!
Now, if a kid asks you to teach them programming because they wanna write a videogame, what do you tell them? It takes ages. It's lots of typing before you get to see the first thing move. And all you ever write will look incredibly sad compared to the other stuff on the computer. It's not the act of learning that daunts people, but the examples of what has already been done.
Maybe webpages are the way to go. The standards are not so high. Many good webpages are entirely static. Kids can use familiar tools to edit the bits of graphics. Then they see a bit of animation, so you show them how to look at the source, and to google and wiki for the bits they don't understand. If they then say they want to learn programming, they understand what they are asking for.
Well I got 7/8 which classified me as a 'tightrope walker', treading the line between safety and infection. I would have got full marks had they not lost my andswer to the first question, but that was because I had too many windows open in looking at the magnifications, and started the quiz twice. However, seeing how I got the others right, it's probably fair.
Q1
One site has an address that matches the website, and the other doesn't. Anyhow, screen savers still waste power. Unless you are doing a useful calculation, you don't need these. Neither is really safe.
Q2
One site says "No unwanted software". Well, you could say that even if you included stuff - doesn't say who wants it? But, at least it reaised the issue. The other is a tad too bland. But, smileys? If you get infected trying to download smileys, then it's just nature's way of telling you to get a Fisher-Price instead of a Dell, and serve you right.
Q3
Games? These are programs. They could do anything within your space. They are all potentially poxed. But we play games, so we download one at a time froma site we trust, and try it very carefully. How do we find a site we trust? Well - one of them has a forum. You could fake these, but it takes time and effort.
Q4
Again, go to the site with more features, if you have to.
Q5-Q8
I knew KaZaa was unsafe. I knew Emule is supposed to be safe. So I didn't trust the others. Which turned out to be right.
So, where does this get us? Nowhere. Every malicious site will now have its own forums where it removes unflattering letters, extra features that may not actually be implemented, a cluttered and 'less professional' look, so they look less like rip-off artists. And the harder it gets to tell which sites are safe, the more we have to depend on bought software. We get wiser. They get wiser. The world remains the same.
Even if you don't design the bioweapon, there are plenty of nasties in the earth or in the village pond that will do the job. Weren't the crusaders supposed to hae catapulted bodies of plague victims over castle walls? The WW2 solution was to use anthrax, a natural product, but they found how to get anthrax to hang in the air so it could be breathed in. I am not fool enough to repeat what it was on the web, but you can guess it was ingenious but not too complex. The main problem with these weapons is controlling where they go - no problem if you don't care.
It would be nice to segment bio-warfare research (bad, evil, icky) and anti-bio-warfare research (nice, good, clean), but life isn't that simple. If you are making armour-piercing weapons, then you get to know about armour, and if you work on armour you get to know about armour-piercing weapons. This latest round of research is going to generate volumes on biological weapons, most of it in open documents and electronically searchable. This may be the real mess our kids will have to live with.
Earlier computer graphics
on
The Story of Tron
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The article says Disney experimented with using comupters for animation in the seventies. I think the first thing they tried doing was to do in-betweening of hand-plotted vector graphics, animating the series of lines on a vector scope, then drawing the lines to cells using an XY plotter. This was done using an IBM Whirlwind vector terminal in 1959 or 1960.
Slashdot Mirror
Most black materials will reflect a percent or so of the light falling on it. This reflects less than 0.1%. It is weird to look at: you get no clue to the shape of the object because no light comes back.
The bad news? Well, basically, it is soot, and it wipes off. It is probably too delicate for the insides of ordinary cameras, and bits might drop off if you sent it into space. It does not work with all materials, and gold gives the best black.
Within minutes, he had pointed out that his reaction did not produce neutrons. He clearly knew this is a key issue. He described the basic geometries of fusion reaction. He made a nice, clear description of the random walk nature of tokomak fields, and why that meant some of the contents would always head for the walls. His explanations involved nice, clear numbers, like how many times the ion should go through the dense region before it collided. This isn't a popular science gloss-over - I am pretty sure you are getting the real deal here. He argued the need for a 1/r-type field to contain the ions, and why this is best done using electrons guided by coils. I have some familiarity with saddle-field ion sources - not the same thing, but similar enough to recognize what he was talking about.
For those of you familiar with Hollywood Science, 11 years of research with a load of failed designs may not seem like an investment. Actually, it showed a lot of steady progress, with many orders of magnitude improvement. The only faintly Hollywood bit was the final experiment, and that rang very true to me. The lab is being shut doown; the apparatus is going into storage. We may get to use it again, we may not. Why not turn the current supply all the way up? You can do it safely enough if you stand behind the filing cabinet. Oops, it fried. Oh well, we got some numbers anyway. Yup, that's what a lot of science is like. It is much slower and less dramatic then you would believe.
The 'wiffle ball' effect is really cute. He is working with plasmas. You have charged stuff zipping about in magnetic and electrostatic fields. Unfortunately, that stuff is itself charged, and because it is moving, it has its own magnetic field. This usually means the plasma can work out within microseconds what it is not supposed to do, and start hosepiping, or wiggling, or whatever it was that it shouldn't. Just occasionally, you can use this self-will to your advantage. The microwave magnetron is an example (particularly cute that he used one inside his experiment to keep the ionization up). Well, I would see that you could concentrale positive ions using negative electrons, but wouldn't they hit each other and neutralize all the time? Well - no they don't, because the electrons will make fast lanes through the slower moving ions.
He had worked on space engines. He is one of the mad atom smashers from the fifties. Okay, let's see how his proposal stacks up in traditional Mad Scientist terms. Usually a good Mad experiment involves at least two of (a) space, (b) H-bombs, (c) superconductivity, and (d) a small country. A mad experiment needs a budget that is a mere 10% of the US annual defence budget/spending of fossil fuels. And, usually there is the requirement for government funding to pay for the bits that won't make a profit. Some biofuel proposals get well into the Mad bracket. This project has clear aims and costs. It is not huge. You can build it. Either it will work or it won't. If it works, then we can put it into ships and conventional power stations. Project Plowshare it ain't.
The only thing I might say against is that this may be just
But, you are right, it does stink. I wish all elections gave you the opportunity of voting for or against each candidate. Often there are several people who I could vote for in my local elections, but one or two that I definately don't want on any account.
It is unrealistic and unlikely to expect every disk manufacturer or computer manufacturer to include this extra hardware overnight. Howver, it should be possible to make something that can fit between the disk and the data bus that does the encryption or decryption. It would have to be pretty slim to fit into the average laptop, but this should be possible. When the computer boots up with the key in, then the key should get passed to the new gadget, and thereafter the encryption and decryption should be invisible to the user. When the computer is powered down, the key should be lost.
Ordinary USB drives make good physical keys. You can stick these on keyrings. If someone sticks their house keys and office keys on the keyring, then they are unlikely to leave them in the laptop. Once the drive is unlocked, they will stick them back in their pocket.
This ought to give reasonable security to the average Joe without changing their life too much. The weakest point is now the OS. A malicious rootkit could copy the key. To combat this you will probably need some reputable software organization to track the relentless progress of malware - it is beyond what dumb hardware can achieve. You might stick a bootable sector on the USB drive and have a physical switch to enable writing for when you want to change the key or update the software. I am surprised McAffee or Norton haven't made this sort of thing.
Ho-hum.
However, suppose one country in the international patent community choses to unilaterally extend the concept of patents to include methods (swinging on a swing sideways), business practices (pouring the milk on your own cereal), software (editing colours in an image using a computer), or harvesting traditional plants (basmati rice). Their nationals will be able to file patents for heroic ideas such as these (hooray!), but people in other countries where such patents are not recognized will be unable to apply for them.
This argument could be taken either way. The TRIPs agreement requires that patents be available for "any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided they are new, involve an inventive step and are capable of industrial application". It could be argued that the European Patent Convention and all subsequent rulings against software patents and the like are not compatible with this section of the TRIPs areement by excluding a subset of the possible patents. However, it does seem against the spirit of reciprocality within TRIPs for one country to unilaterally extend patent law in this way.
Oh, and by the way, it stinks too.
Gavin Menzies' book "1421" makes a good argument that the Chinese treasure fleets did manage to sail along the north coast of Greenland, and explore Siberia, which argues that there were several major routes that could be navigated by the large junks of the day. The evidence that they actually sailed to the North pole is pretty thin - but then again it is hard to see what evidence they could have bought back that would convince anyone. And most of the other stuff they surveyed and plotted has turned out to be supported by other evidence, so why not?
Anyhow, while we are knocking holes in the article, polar bears are quite happy to swim 50 miles or more out to sea. That little crack won't worry them. We need to be worried about global warming, but the issue isn't helped by hype like that.
Film has a soft MTF, where most discrete detectors have a definite Nyquist limit. There is no hard figure for the number of equivalent pixels on a film image. you like film (and I do) it is easy to argue the figure up by a factor of two or so. If I had to guess, I would say IMAX still had the edge: better contrast, and maybe better resolution. nevertheless, if there is still a gap, it is closing fast.
I was told the downlink for the live camera was sending 52 Gbits/sec, which isn't quite the figures the others were coming up with. The data might have been 16 bits per channel. The camera was about a foot cube, which is pretty good as a blimped IMAX camera is the size of a small car.
I don't know where the figure of not being ready for 25 years comes from. The project never had a time to manufacture. I would imagine if there was demand, it could be ready a lot earlier.
Does it replace IMAX? I am not sure. I would like to see it show footage scanned from the original "North of Superior" footage. I have seen a strike from the original negative of that, and I remember the image being so impressive that you felt the tilt when the aeroplane cornered: you believed your eyes over your inner ear. It would be interesting to know if this rig could do the same.
You probably do not need a continuously variable spectrum for each pixel. A simple set of red, green, and blue primaries cannot reproduce the stimulus of all the spectral colours, yet they give a good enough representation of most scenes. This works because the eye-brain system transmits brightness, colour, motion detection, and other signals as firing rates in nerves. The nerves will typically have a significant background firing rate even for zero signal, so the system has to continuously try to calibrate itself, and work out what the zero and scale signals are. This is why we can look at printed images with a typical contrast ratio of 100:1 and a white point as set by the ambient light, and recognize a scene without worrying that the blacks look grey or the whites look coloured. Many illusions depend on fooling this feedback process. For example, if you look at a slowly moving object for some time and the look at a still scene, it may seem to rotate in the opposide direction because your motion sensors have adapted. Well, the same happens with your sense of colour contrast - that will adapt to compensate for the variations due to intensity. If you look at a dimmer version of an image, the colour difference signals are weaker but colours you see will look much the same (until you get down to mesopic light levels, and the adaption system begins to pack up altogether). If you are looking at an image in a darkened room, and the colours are 10% desaturated, you will probably not notice unless there is some other stimulus (such as a red power LED on your monitor) to act as an independent reference. It many seem that a three-component display can only get at about half the colour space within the spectral locus, but under typical viewing conditions, we are poor judges of colour contrast. If you want to make an image look more colourful, make it brighter. Get a slide projector and move it close to the screen so the image is small but really bright - you know the colours have stayed the same and only the intensity has changed, but you will probably find the colours a lot more satisfying.
There are other reasons for wanting to go for more primaries. You eye does not have uniform colour sensitivity: it will detect colours differently in the centre and in the periphery. The brain tries to remove this variation, as it is part of the eye not part of the image. You do not see this variation directly, but you can get to see it if you look at a large white patch on a screen where the left and right halves have different spectra. If you have an RGB projector with broad spectral primaries, this will give you a similar stimulus to a general reflection scene in the central and the peripheral vision, but you will not be able to get the saturated colors. If you have narrow band primaries, you will be able to get the deep reds, peacock blues, and violets you cannot get with the broad primaries, but you may have strange side-effects because your central and peripheral vision no longer match. make a projector with six primaries, and you could get the best of both.
But, is the extra effort really worth it? It is a bit like 3D - twice as much technology giving you a bit of extra stimulus that can startle, but can also detract from the nett visual experience. I would love one of these variable filters as a research tool, but I don't expect fully spectral displays any time soon.
It is a pity about the chlorofluorcarbons. There is a good alternative process that uses ammonia and water that has been around for some time. It is more efficient than the straight water cycle, and the system is closed so the water isn't going anywhere. See for example http://www.geothermie.de/gte/gte46/geothermal_powe r_plant.htm
Roughly it goes like this. If you approach one side, then you have a small region that is very close to you on that side, and a much bigger region on the other side that isn't attracting you as strongly. The area goes as the square of the radius. The attraction per unit area goes as the inverse square. So they ought to be able to balance out, and in fact they do exactly.
Sticking the whole experiment up in space gets rid of most of these problems. No wire, no vibrations, no air currents (vacuum out there is very much better than lab vacuums). The gravity is now by far the biggest force. If you stick the whole experiment in a symmetric tin, then Gauss' theorem (old school gravitational theory, but still pretty accurate) says it the net gravitational field inside is zero. The tin could keep out the solar wind, though it might need a small ion motor to keep it motionless with respect to the experiment inside.
I am not sure of the need to go to the Lagrange point. That is a precious point in space and we don't want to go cluttering it with time-expired junk. Probably just getting into high orbit would get us much better results than on earth. Shoving the experiment out of earth's orbit altogether might be better still.
Anyhow, we ought to do it because it's cool. That's what Space stuff is for: to be cool. The space shuttle sort-of misses the point of Space these days.
We know, or we believe we know from genetical studies, that populations do migrate or diffuse out rapidly. Often this motion is along trade routes, or around shallow coasts; following animal migrations, rivers, or belts of arable land. As long as there are suitable links, then there will be patches of people with a common relation. In medieval times, Indian objects got to Scandinavia, and Roman glass fot to Japan. But we also know there are places like Australia which took a long time to be discovered by Europeans (they somehow managed to find Tasmania first, but miss Australia), and so are probably much more weakly connected with the rest of the world. There are also other cultural barriers that will attenuate if not prevent intercourse between races, countries, religions, tribes, and whatever. Genetic research has told us that these taboos have probably been breached throughout history, but nevertheless there will be resistance.
We do not know nearly enough about where people did and did not travel in early history to make such a model. A lot of the evidence from 5000BC has probably vanished with rising sea levels. My gut feeling is that this model makes the world too uniform, and does not have enough hard links to it, but I don't really know either.
To be impacted with the _worm_, users have to actively download the code.
Anyone click on the _worm_ link in the article? What did it do? It probably told you all about worms, which is a bit dull but safe. However, that's how it reproduces.
All the good tricks are basically conjuring tricks or confidence tricks. E-mail and webpages ought to be safe. You should have to actually click on something to get something nasty to happen. The art is to get the mail to look like something friendly; to make the attachment look like an image file; to stick a transparent border on the window so what looks like the X button on a pop-up is part of the window. I remember someone back in the seventies logging on to a terminal, only to have it give him a rude message and make off with his password: the terminal had been left with a running program that looked like the login. Easy when you see it done, surprising when you have never met it. I remember last year someone clicking on a .jpg file only to have it do something because the name had a lot of spaces followed by .exe in the name, and you didn't see it in the window. They are basically the same trick, thirty years apart. If you want to stop the tricks, you get in a scam expert, not a programmer. or maybe a scam expert and a programmer.
You can get a long way with an old school mail reader. You can peek at the headers if you know. You can look at the attachments and see whether the file names look okay. You can turn off the HTML. If you add all sorts of automatic checks and filters, then this just adds extra levels of complexity in which you can hide scams, exploit programming errors, hide stuff where it might get clicked on by accident.
We have McAffee filtering our computer. Somehow, one of the games manages to turn it off when the kids use it. This ought not to be possible. I am sure something is somehow suckering us into turning it off, or has somehow suckered us into giving something the priveleges to do this. Can we fix it? Nope. What do we do? We take the plug from the hub when we are not wanting an outside connection. Don't get me wrong - I am not saying we do not need security systems. I know some clown in China is trying to find a port on my computer every 30 seconds or so, day and night, rot him/her. However, to continue the automotive parallel of other posts, the faulty component is still the well-oiled nut behind the wheel nine times out of ten.
The Mona Lisa was painted on wood. Not much chance of "enough of the knock-knock jokes, you silly cow, this is supposed to be a serious portrait" spoken with a Tuscan accent.
I am told Rudyard Kipling used to go through his prose, striking out all the adjectives and adverbs, and then putting back the ones that were absolutely necessary. This works for technical writing too: it is easy to put in qualifiers such as 'probable', 'fairly', 'somewhat' in your text to tone down unsafe statements, but most of them don't convey anything useful. Plus, it helps focus you on what you are really saying.
Simple us usually safe.
Ever read the original 'Frankenstein'? In particular, the bit were the doctor meets the 'monster' on the glacier, and the 'monster' demands that Frankenstein - who he regards as someone who has taken of the role and therefore the responsibilities of a creating god - finishes the job properly and gives him the ability to reproduce. And the doctor's options as he sees them are to play for time, and hope he can whack it when it isn't looking.
Good point. We can't because flatworms all have the same neurons, and we know exactly when we have got anything wrong. But creating a neural net computer with a similar complexity and connectivity to the human brain - which I am told is quite feasable today, though it may not do anything useful - is a long way from creating a simulation of a particular human brain, and then asking it what it had for breakfast.
However, just suppose, and then suppose, and then suppose...
So far, we can build computers that can simulate brain cells. There is nothing stopping us making a computer that has a similar complexity to the brain. We will have to mimic the strange mix of part-design, part randomness that brains are. Or maybe we can just throw more computing power, and stuff the brain doesn't have, like the ability to back up and regress. Sooner or later - probably later is my guess, but who knows? - we are going to come up with something that shows intelligence, and probably has inteligence.
African grey parrots are kept as pets. These are said to be as intelligent as a two-year old. Some of them can understand sentances from a vocabulary of hundreds of words. They don't progress much beyond a two year old. And they are Not Like Us, so it's OK to keep them in cages. Apparently. Hmmm.
One day, someone is going to make something intelligent, and then turn it off, and there will be an outcry. Is anyone doing the thinking on the ethics of making it before making it?
Then came teletypes where you could only use a simple line editor, so the expeience was not that different from punchcards. Then came the permission to write interactive programs, where you could get keystrokes, and make something happen on the teletype (or screen, later) that wasn't just what you typed.
Then, for me came the lab's Commodore Pet with 512 bytes of RAM. You weren't spending your precious x units of processing and storage allocated by the administrators when you played with it. It was just sitting there if you weren't using it, so you used it (or more often you hung around while someone else used it). That was when the computer experience really caught fire. There nearest equivalent I can remember is getting broadband at home, but that was nothing like the rush. Okay, there was RACTER, and there was a bug squashing game, and there was a static StarTrek game on the mainframe which the admin kept trying to delete, and not a lot else. But it was glorious.
Then came machine code on the Spectrum or the BBC Acorn. You weren't living in the tidy little OS world; you were making the little bits in the thing do what you wanted personally. Man, you were baaaad!
Now, if a kid asks you to teach them programming because they wanna write a videogame, what do you tell them? It takes ages. It's lots of typing before you get to see the first thing move. And all you ever write will look incredibly sad compared to the other stuff on the computer. It's not the act of learning that daunts people, but the examples of what has already been done.
Maybe webpages are the way to go. The standards are not so high. Many good webpages are entirely static. Kids can use familiar tools to edit the bits of graphics. Then they see a bit of animation, so you show them how to look at the source, and to google and wiki for the bits they don't understand. If they then say they want to learn programming, they understand what they are asking for.
Q1
One site has an address that matches the website, and the other doesn't. Anyhow, screen savers still waste power. Unless you are doing a useful calculation, you don't need these. Neither is really safe.
Q2
One site says "No unwanted software". Well, you could say that even if you included stuff - doesn't say who wants it? But, at least it reaised the issue. The other is a tad too bland. But, smileys? If you get infected trying to download smileys, then it's just nature's way of telling you to get a Fisher-Price instead of a Dell, and serve you right.
Q3
Games? These are programs. They could do anything within your space. They are all potentially poxed. But we play games, so we download one at a time froma site we trust, and try it very carefully. How do we find a site we trust? Well - one of them has a forum. You could fake these, but it takes time and effort.
Q4
Again, go to the site with more features, if you have to.
Q5-Q8
I knew KaZaa was unsafe. I knew Emule is supposed to be safe. So I didn't trust the others. Which turned out to be right.
So, where does this get us? Nowhere. Every malicious site will now have its own forums where it removes unflattering letters, extra features that may not actually be implemented, a cluttered and 'less professional' look, so they look less like rip-off artists. And the harder it gets to tell which sites are safe, the more we have to depend on bought software. We get wiser. They get wiser. The world remains the same.
It would be nice to segment bio-warfare research (bad, evil, icky) and anti-bio-warfare research (nice, good, clean), but life isn't that simple. If you are making armour-piercing weapons, then you get to know about armour, and if you work on armour you get to know about armour-piercing weapons. This latest round of research is going to generate volumes on biological weapons, most of it in open documents and electronically searchable. This may be the real mess our kids will have to live with.
The article says Disney experimented with using comupters for animation in the seventies. I think the first thing they tried doing was to do in-betweening of hand-plotted vector graphics, animating the series of lines on a vector scope, then drawing the lines to cells using an XY plotter. This was done using an IBM Whirlwind vector terminal in 1959 or 1960.