He was supposed to use the Walther PPK it. It was the standard MoD handgun. The AWE guards used to have them. I expect it still is. But he thought it was too bulky, and preferred a Beretta 418. I am not a big fan of the books, but I picked up 'Dr No' years ago, thinking I ought to see what a Bond book was like, and that bit stuck. The films get that wrong too.
I have always wondered why people build stone circles for astronomical measurements. You could do a lot better by picking some distant landmark - the pass in this case - and moving sideways until the sun or moon appears aligned. Better still, pick something that is above you, so you are looking slightly upwards - if you were trying to mark the position where the sun sets over the sea, there is a lot of atmosphere that may contain clouds and stop the reading, and a lot of distortion. This uses a valley, and a set of sticks in the ground: more accuracy for less effort than stone circles.
Remember when the Hubble telescope first went up, and could not focus? It had all been tested on the ground on an artificial star target. Unfortunately, the test rig had a plate that was about half-an-inch thick that should have been subtracted from the optical path. So they had a mirror that was accurate to about 1/100th of a wave but half an inch in the wrong place.
There was a rocket where the guidance for the two stages had been coded separately. One stage used a value of -9.8 m/s2 for 'g' because it measured heights upwards and the acceleration was downwards, while the other used a value of +9.8 m/s2 and flipped the sign in the equations. When the rocket took off, the first stage was fine but the second stage suddenly flipped over.
That's what I dread: thinking I have checked everything, and thought of everything, and then finding out publicly and expensively that my regression tests were worthless all along.
I remember people doing something like this back in about 1990 using very similar techniques - locating the nostrils, the eyes, the curve of the mouth to generate a real-time animation. Back then, this allowed people to transmit a cartoon over the existing phone network, allowing the deaf to lip-read. Back then, this was a clever idea.
I agree. Are VC's right for you? The alternative in your case might be to look at collaborating directly with people who make video editing products. They will have solved a lot of the dull stuff: getting the different formats of video in and out, making sure the machine hits rate, checking the video passes QA, and having a useable interface. A convincing before and after video ought to be enough.
We can look at the states before and after a quantum transition, but we cannot try and catch an energetic hydrogen atom that is half-way through emitting a photon. Well, we don't actually know that but a lot of people have tried because not being able to take some process apart really irritates physicists like nothing else, and in the last hundred years, quantum physics has not been cracked open at all. We can tell whether an electron is in a particular orbital, or whether a nucleus can spontaneously decay, but we cannot predict exactly how long it is going to stay in any state other than the ground state, because the ground state has no energy to go anywhere.
We cannot tell when a quantum state is going to change but can another quantum state see something we can't, even if it cannot communicate it? Can you get processes which ping back and forth, or go in circles in a regular fashion; or when a quantum state is reached, is all information lost, and the particle may have been in that state for a quadrillionth of a second or a billion years. My guess, and it is a pure guess with no information behind it, is that the information is lost, and you cannot get these cyclic quantum events. We shall see. Or not.
Ok, I'll have a stab at it. First of all, ignore the 'crystals of time' hoopla. This is not helpful.
Imagine a hydrogen atom with one electron and a fixed nucleus. The electron will be in a certain orbital. If you are thinking of the atom according to the Bohr model, the the electron is going around the nucleus like a planet around the sun. However, the position of the electron, or rather the probably of finding the electron in any particular position, is determined by a wave-function. This wave-function is a complex number that varies with space, and possibly with time too. You cannot measure this complex function directly, but if you can detect the particle somehow, you might learn something about the value the wave function had before the measurement started.
Actually, the stable hydrogen atom wave-function is simple and calculable, and just like the simple harmonic oscillator, it does not change with time. The electron is in a stable orbit, and will need to lose energy or gain energy to go to a different orbit. The same is true for many much more complex wave-functions. If you have a current running in a superconducting loop, then all the electrons in the superconducting band can be described by a single giant wave-function. You still have all the individual electrons, but they are all moving in a coherent manner, so they are not losing energy. Indeed, they probably got into that state by taking energy from the giant wave-state, until it reached some local stable minimum. And even though you may have billions of electrons in the wave-state, the wave-function does not change with time unless something disturbs it.
Okay, the idea of sucking out energy until a particle or a system reaches a stable state is pretty common, but it is not necessarily universal. You could have two hydrogen atoms, one with the electron in the ground state, and one with the electron in an excited state; and the second atom loses its energy to the first one, and after a while, the first atom gives it back to the second one again, and so it goes on. In real life, the atom would probably emit a photon that would not get caught by the other one, and that would be the end of it. But if you could somehow constrain the photon to just bounce between the two atoms, then you have two electron wave functions that are perpetually flipping between two states in such a way that energy is preserved. This cyclic flipping would mean that the whole system gets back to where it was a short while ago: it is something that happens at regular intervals in time, hence the 'crystals in time' bit. Ugh. Can we describe the whole system, including whatever it is that constrains it by a bigger wave-function that does not change with time, like our superconductors? It's a bit unlikely, because the jumping between states and emitting or absorbing a photon is a sudden transition, where the super-electron interactions were smooth and continuous. But there might be a way.
An error with an Excel spreadsheet looses Belgium, and the corresponding warp in the data space plays with the world economy? The only logical explanation is someone in Heaven has hired Douglas Adams to make reality 'more interesting'.
This is at complete variance with Hardy's description of him. Hardy and Ramanujan were opposites: Hardy gloried in mathematical rigour, where Ramanujan seemed to work by instinct. Hardy described with awed fascination what it was like working with this wholly alien mind. Ramanujan sometimes seemed to guess the form of a solution instantly and without effort, and then work backwards from that to derive the proof that Hardy insisted upon. Freeman Dyson says much the same. There are many first-class mathematicians who have contributed more to mathematics than Ramanujan did, but he still has this unique reputation. So much so, indeed, that some people see his talent as proof of the Vedic deities that he said gave him the answers. I don't believe this myself, but if others of his temple started showing the same talents, I would be impressed. But no, he seems to be the only one of his kind.
He had a unique talent way beyond "reasonably bright". He had a placid personality, utterly free of "raging obsession". Otherwise OK.
Make the building with the CNC machine. Make the building the CNC machine itself. In which case your resources list becomes...
(a) ability to feed and sustain itself
(b) ability to grow.
Be very careful with (c) ability to resist parasites, or you may be in trouble.
There are open source machines for making earth bricks. You could compromise by allowing the building to request humans to extend it, so it does not do everything. Maybe it could be done...
30 or so years ago someone who had worked on a railgun described it to me as "a device that hurls its breech ten feet into the ground when anyone over the rank of Major is watching."
I used to work on patents for Canon at the time patents on software were beginning to be recognized in the US in the 90's. At the time Canon's patent filings were something 2nd or 3rd in the world after IBM, and split roughly 70% defensive patents, 30% patents suggested by inventors. I believe that figure was pretty representative for large patent portfolio companies at the time. So, there are both people with clever ideas, and land-grab speculators. I would class my patents as inventor patents, but many of them would ot have happened if I did not work for a company that was hungry for new patents.
Software patents were largely a US invention. The US represents a large slice of the technological market covered by a single patent written in English, so patent coverage in the US is particularly valuable. If you are outside the US, then you patent in your own county first (in my case, the UK), and then apply for the corresponding US patent. If US patent practice recognized software patents, and European practice does not, the a European could not patent software, and so could not patent software in the US. So, as the US started recognizing software patents - and this was not a sudden thing: it started with patenting a device controlled by an appropriately programmed computer, then the computer with the program stored on some hard drive, then the option of the program on some moveable drive - then the rest of the world followed. This was a massive land-grab, because many ideas that had been use since the earliest cays of computers had no well-documented prior art, and people tried patenting the file, the memory pointer, the set, and so on. By contrast, business practice patents - patenting selling cornflakes in a canteen but allowing people to help themselves to milk, for example, is a US phenomenon which hasn't really spread beyond the US.
Suppose the US patent bodies and WIPO together ruled that any complete computing machine, given sufficient time and memory, is capable of calculating anything that is calculable according to the Church-Turing thesis, and so constitutes prior art for any software patent. This would require no new drafting of laws, and could happen overnight.
Who would this hurt? In general, software innovation is buried in compiled code. A patent is an open announcement of what you are doing, allowing your rivals to do the same. Unless your patent is something to do with user-machine interactions, proving infringement can be very hard. This makes enforcing software patents something that is almost impossible for the individual, but favours very large companies with large patent portfolios and a large legal department. The private individual or small company is better defended by copyright law if a chunk of their code is ripped off directly, or unsubtly reverse-engineered. A good reverse engineering gob can be more effort than writing the job from scratch.
Who would it not hurt? You could still patent hardware that has been optimized for a particular purpose, such as graphics board design details. This means that physical devices which have long lead times and investment are still covered, but the program, which can be modified at will, is not.
I think the call to abandon all patents, is almost like calling to destroy all banks. There is a lot going on that we do not like, but the torches and pitchforks gang will end up destroying something that we needed along with the part we were glad to loose. However, software patents are a part of patent use that we could chop off cleanly. If innovation flourishes, then we could look at what else we could prune.
I am not one of these people who can make a new app out of several different apps in differet languages in a day. For the last 30 years I have mostly written in C, just using the C++ features when I need them. I prefer using simple tools in a smart way, rather than trying to use smart tools in a dumb way. My memory is not great, or at least it cannot be relied upon, so I think I can understand where you are coming from.
'C' is a small language. I still have the standard Kernigan & Ritchie book on my desk, and you might be able to read it and do the exercises in a weekend. If you want to use classes (and they are useful, but I have to look up the syntax every time) you can go straight from C to C++. However, C++ is huge, and the typical C++ book is at least 700 pages thick. And 'C' also leads into Java, and C# and lots of other languages. 'C' does not have graphics support, so you would probably go to using an OpenGL library, or skip to Java. Maybe the first step is to find some job that could be done on a command line.
The main thing is to find a task that interests you. I have never been able to learn an language permanently from examples in a book - you have to use it to do something for any of the stuff to stick.
How about a sudoku solver? Not a plain brute-force one, but one that tests guesses that look likely to yield results like a human does. This is a hot topic at the moment, with people using some measure of the minimum number of assumptions to measure of how hard a given sudoku is. You could look up how they do it, but by not looking you might come up with something new.
The next idea would need some graphics: make a general solitaire player. Define some syntax that describes how the cards are laid out; what a legal move is; and how you win, preferably in some human-readable format. The app would lay out the cards for you, and forbid illegal moves, or suggest legal ones. With a bit of tweaking, it could make obvious moves for you if you define what an obvious move was; could test whether a solution exists, or try random legal moves, or allow you to rewind. I know a good game called 'eights' that I have never seen in a solitaire package, and I have always meant to code it up. I started one once, with an ASCII interface ages ago, but never finished it.
If those ideas don't grab you, then you can probably find something else that does. That's the big step for me, anyhow. Then you can find a language that suits. It might be something completely different from any of our suggestions. All the best with it.
PS: Don't take some of the slashdot space cadets too seriously - you don't necessary want to code Call of Duty WWIII in your Visual Haskell browser shell on an iPhone. I swear they just want to see the rest of your brain go pop.
The other thing about the Concorde was that it was effectively a prototype. It was a small racing-car of a plane with few seats, which was OK because the exclusivity of going faster than sound meant that you could charge a huge premium. The plan was to follow it up with a Concorde2 with a much larger body, and more practical costs, but the world changed and it never happened. I can find very little mention of Concorde 2 on the web, which is strage as you can normally find anything; but the design work lead to HOTOL and eventually to Skylon, and probably to other things such as giant, hollow, atmosphere-skipping delta wings that may not get built either.
A weird fact about Concorde - it flew higher than normal aircraft. The air is thinner, which means the meteoric duct that rains continuously down on us, and abrades aircraft paint, falls faster up high, so Concorde hit much less of it. Many of the Concordes were never repainted in 20 years.
The church used to excommunicate them, and send them to hell. Now, Hell isn't scary enough. They have motorbikes in Hell if you believe in Meatloaf. So they threaten sinners with the US. The first circle of virtuous pagans go to Washington. The patricides and regicides go to... Detroit.
I have always found the trolley model to be absurd. If we were being realistic, then there would be other solutions. The same dilemma was re-written for river tribesmen, and I much prefer this version. As far as I can remember, it goes like this...
You fish on the great river. There are five people in your boat: four people who row, and a fat guy who sits in the back and baits the hooks. Your grandfather has stories of a great and fierce crocodile that lives in the river, and kills entire boat crews, but your generation have never seen it...
(1)
The crocodile appears and comes for the boat. He swims much faster than you can row, but you start to row anyway. The fat guy was standing up at the back, and he falls in. Suddenly the boat is going faster: you might get to shore, but then the fat guy is lost. Do you turn around and try to pick him up? Most people would keep going, but feel that they ought to turn back.
(2)
The crocodile appears and comes for the boat. He swims much faster than you can row, but you start to row anyway. The fat guy was standing up at the back, but does not fall in. You know if he falls in, the boat will go faster, and he may distract the crocodile too. Do you push him in? Most people would not push, but would think that the four for one exchange is reasonable.
(3)
You are the fat guy. The crocodile appears and comes for the boat. If you jump off the boat, the others might make it to shore. Most people would think that the four for one exchange is reasonable: they hope they would be noble enough to jump, but suspect the wouldn't actually do it.
I have done Paralyne coating back in the 1980's. It is a vapour deposited plastic. If you are putting down Paralyne 'C' (the chlorinated version - there was no fluorinated version back then as far as I knew) then it could give a tough plastic coating that could be 100 nm deep. This forms a thin coating over all surfaces including under electronic components on boards. I have even seen it creep between stacks of microscope slides that aren't quite flat. This coating was transparent. If you put down a thinker coating you could get interference colours, and if you kept going it would look milky - particularly with Paralyne 'N' (the unchlorinated version)..
Paralyne was a standard 'tropicalization' process for electronics to be used in harsh environments. You tended to 'tropicalize' circuit boards with masking over the board edge connectors. As Paralyne was good at penetrating, you probably could not coat anything with a 2-way switch, or plugs. But things like earphones and displays would probably be fine.
Yellowing? I never saw it go yellow. It would have to go amazingly yellow because the coat is so thin.
A lot of people have argued that Kodak laked the foresight to go digital. I do not believe this is true. I remember when I worked in printing reading a Kodak paper about 1990 which predicted the rise of the digital camera, and how it would replace the snapshot first, as those users would compromise quality for getting to see their pictures quicker (us older folks rember taking a year or so to use a 36-exposure reel of film). The top end where people used traditional equipment, and wanted high resolution and a long exposure range with latitude for over- and under-exposure would hold out longest, but the end of film would come sometime in 2010-2015. It was not clear how the motion picture market would go because there were no digital projectors back then, but the early TI research was beginning to show the way.
Kodak knew what was coming. They tried to move to digital. They made the first digital cameras. They make the first 1k by 1k area detectors. However, in the end, they were a film company, and despite having plenty of money and clever people back then (and probably now, too), you can't just become an innovator in a new field because your manager tells you to. Plus, there must be a certain squeamishness about gouging your own market while film is actually filling your pay-packet. Heigh-ho - it was never really likely to end any other way...
And what if she had seen those glories fade,
Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;
Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid
When her long life hath reached its final day:
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great is passed away.
(Wordsworth)
C.T.R.Wilson built the first working cloud chamber in 1911 as part of a lengthy investigation into the mechanisms behind atmospheric cloud formation. He noticed that the nucleations sometimes formed tracks, and established the link between the tracks and the particles that generated them. The connection between cloud seeding and energetic radiation is 100 years old this year.
I remember seeing the tracks of particles from a radioactive source in a cloud chamber when at school. It's a lovely thing. For more info and a video, have a look at...
Gels have been used to capture very fine metallurgical detail. However, the normal route was to take a print of the surface, coat the gel in gold, and then view it in an electron microscope. This was handy when you had a large sample in some sort of fatigue test apparatus, and you wanted to monitor the growth of a crack in nanometers. This GelSight process will not be able to rival electron microscopy, but you might be able to measure sub-micron features with microscope optics.
This seems to be just the range of scales for looking at human-made objects. If you find a bit of bone or a bit of pottery, this can give you detailed information on how smooth the surface was, how it was broken, and stuff like that. You could capture the accurate shape of coins, and work out which ones probably came from the same die. The portable version could be used on a dig, or in a museum. There would be little risk of contaminating the object if it was solid enough to be picked up with gloves. This could show up all sorts of things. Neat.
NB: fingerprints are usually pictured using similar optics, but using a rigid piece of glass rather than a prism. Light will reflect internally off the glass surface, but the reflection is interrupted where the finger touches the glass, giving you a good high-contrast image. I have worked a bit on these.
SETI is unlikely to pick up the waste radio energies beamed out by an alien civilization, any more than an alien civilization is likely to pick up our wasted signals. TV signals may have been traveling from earth for the last 60 years, but they have been spreading out in inverse square fashion, so they will be amazingly weak. Gliese 876 is not going to be sitting down to this weeks 'I Love Lucy'.
SETI might be able to pick up a transmission that is directly beamed at us. We can see planets of Jupiter size orbiting nearby stars. Suppose Gliese 876 is able to see earth-sized planets and smaller from their orbiting 1 Km optical telescopes. They notice that the third rock out has some emission lines in the sodium and mercury lines, and guesses that we have street lighting, and so some level of technology. They have a large transmitter, and they pick a wavelength that we may recognize, and they try sending us a signal. If we look in the right direction, and we have sensitive enough detectors, then we might hear something.
How much looking should we do? We can look at more neighbouring star systems. We can listen at more wavelengths. If we have a much more sensitive telescope, then we can go back and listen again. After a while, we have done all the listening that is sensible with the technology we have. Gliese 876 may be sending us messages coded in organic molecules: these do not spread out like radio waves so they could be a much more efficient way of transmitting data. Perhaps we are listening in completely the wrong way. SETI hopes that another civilization transmits a signal for us to receive. They will probably guess we will not make a superconducting antenna 1000 Km in diameter just to pick up a weak radio signal. If we cannot pick up a signal on a reasonable antenna, then the signal it is probably not there.
Just my 2p's worth, but my vote goes for the James Webb telescope rather than SETI.
Do you remember the first computers? You could spend 20 minutes loading a simple game from audio tape on a Commadore PET, only to have it fail the checksum. The audio was 'beep'. The displays were black and green, or awful CGA black, magenta, cyan and white, or black, red, green and yellow. The printers used thermal paper and had a tiny resolution. It was grim, but it was fun too for some of us who could see this as the first glimmers of a new universe of possibilities from a machine made not for particular purpose, but to be capable of doing an unknown nearly infinite set of things. Meanwhile the press said 'you can store recipies on these things', and 'they can remind you of diary appointments', and the average user wondered what the fuss was about.
The RepRap is like an X-Y plotter with a glue gun. It will produce arbitrary but rather wonky shapes with glue gun drool. It is pretty limited in materials. If you say "Faberge Egg" and hold out your hands, you will be disappointed. But it is affordable in the way the early computers were if you were a dedicated hobbyist, such as you may find in the the Slashdot target demographic. There are machines that can manage more materials and higher resolutions, but they cost much more. We got nice looking color pictures on our computers in the end. In time we shall get nice, smooth, hard (or soft) objects from our 3D printers. The press says 'you can make tea with these', and the average user wonders why on earth they should get excited about one. But those who understand what they are now, and also what they will become are excited.
Not interested? Well, the Internet is big these days, and I am sure you will find the lolcats, tubgirl, furry porn or whatever it is you are looking for. But the Internet was small once, and we had a lot of fun watching it grow. These are going to be interesting times for 3D printing, and we are going to have ourselves some fun all over again, and the Grinch himself cannot stop us...
While the rest of the group is going ZOMG, ZOMG, we're all gonna diie!!...
Wikipedia has a nice summary of cancer clusters. Sometimes you just happen to have a group of people in a particular occupation that have more cancers than you could expect at random. The sensible thing to do is to gather statistics from everyone else in the profession. While you are doing that, the sensible other thing to do is to get everyone in the occupation to wear radiation badges, because maybe they are getting a higher dose of radiation then they should. What happens most of the time is the cluster is not significant when viewed against more data. Of the 15% or so remaining cases, some may show some statistical correlation, but you can't work figure out a sensible cause and effect. Very rarely, if there is a particular rare cancer that shows up a lot, like scrotal cancer in Central London chimney-sweeps, then you get a good case that this causes that. In this case, the right things seem to be being done, there does not seem to be an exotic form of cancer, the correlation isn't very strong, and odds are this will all come to nothing conclusive.
We now return you to your scheduled programme. ZOMG, ZOMG, we're all gonna diiie!!
Slashdot Mirror
He was supposed to use the Walther PPK it. It was the standard MoD handgun. The AWE guards used to have them. I expect it still is. But he thought it was too bulky, and preferred a Beretta 418. I am not a big fan of the books, but I picked up 'Dr No' years ago, thinking I ought to see what a Bond book was like, and that bit stuck. The films get that wrong too.
I have always wondered why people build stone circles for astronomical measurements. You could do a lot better by picking some distant landmark - the pass in this case - and moving sideways until the sun or moon appears aligned. Better still, pick something that is above you, so you are looking slightly upwards - if you were trying to mark the position where the sun sets over the sea, there is a lot of atmosphere that may contain clouds and stop the reading, and a lot of distortion. This uses a valley, and a set of sticks in the ground: more accuracy for less effort than stone circles.
Simple way to achieve this with conventional media. Destroy mankind!
Remember when the Hubble telescope first went up, and could not focus? It had all been tested on the ground on an artificial star target. Unfortunately, the test rig had a plate that was about half-an-inch thick that should have been subtracted from the optical path. So they had a mirror that was accurate to about 1/100th of a wave but half an inch in the wrong place.
There was a rocket where the guidance for the two stages had been coded separately. One stage used a value of -9.8 m/s2 for 'g' because it measured heights upwards and the acceleration was downwards, while the other used a value of +9.8 m/s2 and flipped the sign in the equations. When the rocket took off, the first stage was fine but the second stage suddenly flipped over.
That's what I dread: thinking I have checked everything, and thought of everything, and then finding out publicly and expensively that my regression tests were worthless all along.
When I looked at the video, YouTube also offered a trailer for 'Pacific Rim'. Oh, how we laughed.
I remember people doing something like this back in about 1990 using very similar techniques - locating the nostrils, the eyes, the curve of the mouth to generate a real-time animation. Back then, this allowed people to transmit a cartoon over the existing phone network, allowing the deaf to lip-read. Back then, this was a clever idea.
I agree. Are VC's right for you? The alternative in your case might be to look at collaborating directly with people who make video editing products. They will have solved a lot of the dull stuff: getting the different formats of video in and out, making sure the machine hits rate, checking the video passes QA, and having a useable interface. A convincing before and after video ought to be enough.
We can look at the states before and after a quantum transition, but we cannot try and catch an energetic hydrogen atom that is half-way through emitting a photon. Well, we don't actually know that but a lot of people have tried because not being able to take some process apart really irritates physicists like nothing else, and in the last hundred years, quantum physics has not been cracked open at all. We can tell whether an electron is in a particular orbital, or whether a nucleus can spontaneously decay, but we cannot predict exactly how long it is going to stay in any state other than the ground state, because the ground state has no energy to go anywhere.
We cannot tell when a quantum state is going to change but can another quantum state see something we can't, even if it cannot communicate it? Can you get processes which ping back and forth, or go in circles in a regular fashion; or when a quantum state is reached, is all information lost, and the particle may have been in that state for a quadrillionth of a second or a billion years. My guess, and it is a pure guess with no information behind it, is that the information is lost, and you cannot get these cyclic quantum events. We shall see. Or not.
Not sure about the piezoelectric bit, though.
Ok, I'll have a stab at it. First of all, ignore the 'crystals of time' hoopla. This is not helpful.
Imagine a hydrogen atom with one electron and a fixed nucleus. The electron will be in a certain orbital. If you are thinking of the atom according to the Bohr model, the the electron is going around the nucleus like a planet around the sun. However, the position of the electron, or rather the probably of finding the electron in any particular position, is determined by a wave-function. This wave-function is a complex number that varies with space, and possibly with time too. You cannot measure this complex function directly, but if you can detect the particle somehow, you might learn something about the value the wave function had before the measurement started.
Actually, the stable hydrogen atom wave-function is simple and calculable, and just like the simple harmonic oscillator, it does not change with time. The electron is in a stable orbit, and will need to lose energy or gain energy to go to a different orbit. The same is true for many much more complex wave-functions. If you have a current running in a superconducting loop, then all the electrons in the superconducting band can be described by a single giant wave-function. You still have all the individual electrons, but they are all moving in a coherent manner, so they are not losing energy. Indeed, they probably got into that state by taking energy from the giant wave-state, until it reached some local stable minimum. And even though you may have billions of electrons in the wave-state, the wave-function does not change with time unless something disturbs it.
Okay, the idea of sucking out energy until a particle or a system reaches a stable state is pretty common, but it is not necessarily universal. You could have two hydrogen atoms, one with the electron in the ground state, and one with the electron in an excited state; and the second atom loses its energy to the first one, and after a while, the first atom gives it back to the second one again, and so it goes on. In real life, the atom would probably emit a photon that would not get caught by the other one, and that would be the end of it. But if you could somehow constrain the photon to just bounce between the two atoms, then you have two electron wave functions that are perpetually flipping between two states in such a way that energy is preserved. This cyclic flipping would mean that the whole system gets back to where it was a short while ago: it is something that happens at regular intervals in time, hence the 'crystals in time' bit. Ugh. Can we describe the whole system, including whatever it is that constrains it by a bigger wave-function that does not change with time, like our superconductors? It's a bit unlikely, because the jumping between states and emitting or absorbing a photon is a sudden transition, where the super-electron interactions were smooth and continuous. But there might be a way.
An error with an Excel spreadsheet looses Belgium, and the corresponding warp in the data space plays with the world economy? The only logical explanation is someone in Heaven has hired Douglas Adams to make reality 'more interesting'.
This is at complete variance with Hardy's description of him. Hardy and Ramanujan were opposites: Hardy gloried in mathematical rigour, where Ramanujan seemed to work by instinct. Hardy described with awed fascination what it was like working with this wholly alien mind. Ramanujan sometimes seemed to guess the form of a solution instantly and without effort, and then work backwards from that to derive the proof that Hardy insisted upon. Freeman Dyson says much the same. There are many first-class mathematicians who have contributed more to mathematics than Ramanujan did, but he still has this unique reputation. So much so, indeed, that some people see his talent as proof of the Vedic deities that he said gave him the answers. I don't believe this myself, but if others of his temple started showing the same talents, I would be impressed. But no, he seems to be the only one of his kind. He had a unique talent way beyond "reasonably bright". He had a placid personality, utterly free of "raging obsession". Otherwise OK.
Make the building with the CNC machine. Make the building the CNC machine itself. In which case your resources list becomes...
(a) ability to feed and sustain itself
(b) ability to grow.
Be very careful with (c) ability to resist parasites, or you may be in trouble.
There are open source machines for making earth bricks. You could compromise by allowing the building to request humans to extend it, so it does not do everything. Maybe it could be done...
30 or so years ago someone who had worked on a railgun described it to me as "a device that hurls its breech ten feet into the ground when anyone over the rank of Major is watching."
I used to work on patents for Canon at the time patents on software were beginning to be recognized in the US in the 90's. At the time Canon's patent filings were something 2nd or 3rd in the world after IBM, and split roughly 70% defensive patents, 30% patents suggested by inventors. I believe that figure was pretty representative for large patent portfolio companies at the time. So, there are both people with clever ideas, and land-grab speculators. I would class my patents as inventor patents, but many of them would ot have happened if I did not work for a company that was hungry for new patents.
Software patents were largely a US invention. The US represents a large slice of the technological market covered by a single patent written in English, so patent coverage in the US is particularly valuable. If you are outside the US, then you patent in your own county first (in my case, the UK), and then apply for the corresponding US patent. If US patent practice recognized software patents, and European practice does not, the a European could not patent software, and so could not patent software in the US. So, as the US started recognizing software patents - and this was not a sudden thing: it started with patenting a device controlled by an appropriately programmed computer, then the computer with the program stored on some hard drive, then the option of the program on some moveable drive - then the rest of the world followed. This was a massive land-grab, because many ideas that had been use since the earliest cays of computers had no well-documented prior art, and people tried patenting the file, the memory pointer, the set, and so on. By contrast, business practice patents - patenting selling cornflakes in a canteen but allowing people to help themselves to milk, for example, is a US phenomenon which hasn't really spread beyond the US.
Suppose the US patent bodies and WIPO together ruled that any complete computing machine, given sufficient time and memory, is capable of calculating anything that is calculable according to the Church-Turing thesis, and so constitutes prior art for any software patent. This would require no new drafting of laws, and could happen overnight.
Who would this hurt? In general, software innovation is buried in compiled code. A patent is an open announcement of what you are doing, allowing your rivals to do the same. Unless your patent is something to do with user-machine interactions, proving infringement can be very hard. This makes enforcing software patents something that is almost impossible for the individual, but favours very large companies with large patent portfolios and a large legal department. The private individual or small company is better defended by copyright law if a chunk of their code is ripped off directly, or unsubtly reverse-engineered. A good reverse engineering gob can be more effort than writing the job from scratch.
Who would it not hurt? You could still patent hardware that has been optimized for a particular purpose, such as graphics board design details. This means that physical devices which have long lead times and investment are still covered, but the program, which can be modified at will, is not.
I think the call to abandon all patents, is almost like calling to destroy all banks. There is a lot going on that we do not like, but the torches and pitchforks gang will end up destroying something that we needed along with the part we were glad to loose. However, software patents are a part of patent use that we could chop off cleanly. If innovation flourishes, then we could look at what else we could prune.
This seems the best advice so far.
I am not one of these people who can make a new app out of several different apps in differet languages in a day. For the last 30 years I have mostly written in C, just using the C++ features when I need them. I prefer using simple tools in a smart way, rather than trying to use smart tools in a dumb way. My memory is not great, or at least it cannot be relied upon, so I think I can understand where you are coming from.
'C' is a small language. I still have the standard Kernigan & Ritchie book on my desk, and you might be able to read it and do the exercises in a weekend. If you want to use classes (and they are useful, but I have to look up the syntax every time) you can go straight from C to C++. However, C++ is huge, and the typical C++ book is at least 700 pages thick. And 'C' also leads into Java, and C# and lots of other languages. 'C' does not have graphics support, so you would probably go to using an OpenGL library, or skip to Java. Maybe the first step is to find some job that could be done on a command line.
The main thing is to find a task that interests you. I have never been able to learn an language permanently from examples in a book - you have to use it to do something for any of the stuff to stick.
How about a sudoku solver? Not a plain brute-force one, but one that tests guesses that look likely to yield results like a human does. This is a hot topic at the moment, with people using some measure of the minimum number of assumptions to measure of how hard a given sudoku is. You could look up how they do it, but by not looking you might come up with something new.
The next idea would need some graphics: make a general solitaire player. Define some syntax that describes how the cards are laid out; what a legal move is; and how you win, preferably in some human-readable format. The app would lay out the cards for you, and forbid illegal moves, or suggest legal ones. With a bit of tweaking, it could make obvious moves for you if you define what an obvious move was; could test whether a solution exists, or try random legal moves, or allow you to rewind. I know a good game called 'eights' that I have never seen in a solitaire package, and I have always meant to code it up. I started one once, with an ASCII interface ages ago, but never finished it.
If those ideas don't grab you, then you can probably find something else that does. That's the big step for me, anyhow. Then you can find a language that suits. It might be something completely different from any of our suggestions. All the best with it.
PS: Don't take some of the slashdot space cadets too seriously - you don't necessary want to code Call of Duty WWIII in your Visual Haskell browser shell on an iPhone. I swear they just want to see the rest of your brain go pop.
The other thing about the Concorde was that it was effectively a prototype. It was a small racing-car of a plane with few seats, which was OK because the exclusivity of going faster than sound meant that you could charge a huge premium. The plan was to follow it up with a Concorde2 with a much larger body, and more practical costs, but the world changed and it never happened. I can find very little mention of Concorde 2 on the web, which is strage as you can normally find anything; but the design work lead to HOTOL and eventually to Skylon, and probably to other things such as giant, hollow, atmosphere-skipping delta wings that may not get built either.
A weird fact about Concorde - it flew higher than normal aircraft. The air is thinner, which means the meteoric duct that rains continuously down on us, and abrades aircraft paint, falls faster up high, so Concorde hit much less of it. Many of the Concordes were never repainted in 20 years.
The church used to excommunicate them, and send them to hell. Now, Hell isn't scary enough. They have motorbikes in Hell if you believe in Meatloaf. So they threaten sinners with the US. The first circle of virtuous pagans go to Washington. The patricides and regicides go to... Detroit.
I have always found the trolley model to be absurd. If we were being realistic, then there would be other solutions. The same dilemma was re-written for river tribesmen, and I much prefer this version. As far as I can remember, it goes like this...
You fish on the great river. There are five people in your boat: four people who row, and a fat guy who sits in the back and baits the hooks. Your grandfather has stories of a great and fierce crocodile that lives in the river, and kills entire boat crews, but your generation have never seen it...
(1)
The crocodile appears and comes for the boat. He swims much faster than you can row, but you start to row anyway. The fat guy was standing up at the back, and he falls in. Suddenly the boat is going faster: you might get to shore, but then the fat guy is lost. Do you turn around and try to pick him up? Most people would keep going, but feel that they ought to turn back.
(2)
The crocodile appears and comes for the boat. He swims much faster than you can row, but you start to row anyway. The fat guy was standing up at the back, but does not fall in. You know if he falls in, the boat will go faster, and he may distract the crocodile too. Do you push him in? Most people would not push, but would think that the four for one exchange is reasonable.
(3)
You are the fat guy. The crocodile appears and comes for the boat. If you jump off the boat, the others might make it to shore. Most people would think that the four for one exchange is reasonable: they hope they would be noble enough to jump, but suspect the wouldn't actually do it.
I have done Paralyne coating back in the 1980's. It is a vapour deposited plastic. If you are putting down Paralyne 'C' (the chlorinated version - there was no fluorinated version back then as far as I knew) then it could give a tough plastic coating that could be 100 nm deep. This forms a thin coating over all surfaces including under electronic components on boards. I have even seen it creep between stacks of microscope slides that aren't quite flat. This coating was transparent. If you put down a thinker coating you could get interference colours, and if you kept going it would look milky - particularly with Paralyne 'N' (the unchlorinated version)..
Paralyne was a standard 'tropicalization' process for electronics to be used in harsh environments. You tended to 'tropicalize' circuit boards with masking over the board edge connectors. As Paralyne was good at penetrating, you probably could not coat anything with a 2-way switch, or plugs. But things like earphones and displays would probably be fine.
Yellowing? I never saw it go yellow. It would have to go amazingly yellow because the coat is so thin.
A lot of people have argued that Kodak laked the foresight to go digital. I do not believe this is true. I remember when I worked in printing reading a Kodak paper about 1990 which predicted the rise of the digital camera, and how it would replace the snapshot first, as those users would compromise quality for getting to see their pictures quicker (us older folks rember taking a year or so to use a 36-exposure reel of film). The top end where people used traditional equipment, and wanted high resolution and a long exposure range with latitude for over- and under-exposure would hold out longest, but the end of film would come sometime in 2010-2015. It was not clear how the motion picture market would go because there were no digital projectors back then, but the early TI research was beginning to show the way.
Kodak knew what was coming. They tried to move to digital. They made the first digital cameras. They make the first 1k by 1k area detectors. However, in the end, they were a film company, and despite having plenty of money and clever people back then (and probably now, too), you can't just become an innovator in a new field because your manager tells you to. Plus, there must be a certain squeamishness about gouging your own market while film is actually filling your pay-packet. Heigh-ho - it was never really likely to end any other way...
And what if she had seen those glories fade, Those titles vanish, and that strength decay; Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid When her long life hath reached its final day: Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade Of that which once was great is passed away. (Wordsworth)
C.T.R.Wilson built the first working cloud chamber in 1911 as part of a lengthy investigation into the mechanisms behind atmospheric cloud formation. He noticed that the nucleations sometimes formed tracks, and established the link between the tracks and the particles that generated them. The connection between cloud seeding and energetic radiation is 100 years old this year.
I remember seeing the tracks of particles from a radioactive source in a cloud chamber when at school. It's a lovely thing. For more info and a video, have a look at...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_chamber
Gels have been used to capture very fine metallurgical detail. However, the normal route was to take a print of the surface, coat the gel in gold, and then view it in an electron microscope. This was handy when you had a large sample in some sort of fatigue test apparatus, and you wanted to monitor the growth of a crack in nanometers. This GelSight process will not be able to rival electron microscopy, but you might be able to measure sub-micron features with microscope optics.
This seems to be just the range of scales for looking at human-made objects. If you find a bit of bone or a bit of pottery, this can give you detailed information on how smooth the surface was, how it was broken, and stuff like that. You could capture the accurate shape of coins, and work out which ones probably came from the same die. The portable version could be used on a dig, or in a museum. There would be little risk of contaminating the object if it was solid enough to be picked up with gloves. This could show up all sorts of things. Neat.
NB: fingerprints are usually pictured using similar optics, but using a rigid piece of glass rather than a prism. Light will reflect internally off the glass surface, but the reflection is interrupted where the finger touches the glass, giving you a good high-contrast image. I have worked a bit on these.
SETI is unlikely to pick up the waste radio energies beamed out by an alien civilization, any more than an alien civilization is likely to pick up our wasted signals. TV signals may have been traveling from earth for the last 60 years, but they have been spreading out in inverse square fashion, so they will be amazingly weak. Gliese 876 is not going to be sitting down to this weeks 'I Love Lucy'.
SETI might be able to pick up a transmission that is directly beamed at us. We can see planets of Jupiter size orbiting nearby stars. Suppose Gliese 876 is able to see earth-sized planets and smaller from their orbiting 1 Km optical telescopes. They notice that the third rock out has some emission lines in the sodium and mercury lines, and guesses that we have street lighting, and so some level of technology. They have a large transmitter, and they pick a wavelength that we may recognize, and they try sending us a signal. If we look in the right direction, and we have sensitive enough detectors, then we might hear something.
How much looking should we do? We can look at more neighbouring star systems. We can listen at more wavelengths. If we have a much more sensitive telescope, then we can go back and listen again. After a while, we have done all the listening that is sensible with the technology we have. Gliese 876 may be sending us messages coded in organic molecules: these do not spread out like radio waves so they could be a much more efficient way of transmitting data. Perhaps we are listening in completely the wrong way. SETI hopes that another civilization transmits a signal for us to receive. They will probably guess we will not make a superconducting antenna 1000 Km in diameter just to pick up a weak radio signal. If we cannot pick up a signal on a reasonable antenna, then the signal it is probably not there.
Just my 2p's worth, but my vote goes for the James Webb telescope rather than SETI.
Do you remember the first computers? You could spend 20 minutes loading a simple game from audio tape on a Commadore PET, only to have it fail the checksum. The audio was 'beep'. The displays were black and green, or awful CGA black, magenta, cyan and white, or black, red, green and yellow. The printers used thermal paper and had a tiny resolution. It was grim, but it was fun too for some of us who could see this as the first glimmers of a new universe of possibilities from a machine made not for particular purpose, but to be capable of doing an unknown nearly infinite set of things. Meanwhile the press said 'you can store recipies on these things', and 'they can remind you of diary appointments', and the average user wondered what the fuss was about.
The RepRap is like an X-Y plotter with a glue gun. It will produce arbitrary but rather wonky shapes with glue gun drool. It is pretty limited in materials. If you say "Faberge Egg" and hold out your hands, you will be disappointed. But it is affordable in the way the early computers were if you were a dedicated hobbyist, such as you may find in the the Slashdot target demographic. There are machines that can manage more materials and higher resolutions, but they cost much more. We got nice looking color pictures on our computers in the end. In time we shall get nice, smooth, hard (or soft) objects from our 3D printers. The press says 'you can make tea with these', and the average user wonders why on earth they should get excited about one. But those who understand what they are now, and also what they will become are excited.
Not interested? Well, the Internet is big these days, and I am sure you will find the lolcats, tubgirl, furry porn or whatever it is you are looking for. But the Internet was small once, and we had a lot of fun watching it grow. These are going to be interesting times for 3D printing, and we are going to have ourselves some fun all over again, and the Grinch himself cannot stop us...
While the rest of the group is going ZOMG, ZOMG, we're all gonna diie!!...
Wikipedia has a nice summary of cancer clusters. Sometimes you just happen to have a group of people in a particular occupation that have more cancers than you could expect at random. The sensible thing to do is to gather statistics from everyone else in the profession. While you are doing that, the sensible other thing to do is to get everyone in the occupation to wear radiation badges, because maybe they are getting a higher dose of radiation then they should. What happens most of the time is the cluster is not significant when viewed against more data. Of the 15% or so remaining cases, some may show some statistical correlation, but you can't work figure out a sensible cause and effect. Very rarely, if there is a particular rare cancer that shows up a lot, like scrotal cancer in Central London chimney-sweeps, then you get a good case that this causes that. In this case, the right things seem to be being done, there does not seem to be an exotic form of cancer, the correlation isn't very strong, and odds are this will all come to nothing conclusive.
We now return you to your scheduled programme. ZOMG, ZOMG, we're all gonna diiie!!