There is no need to preserve everything. A good random selection will tell us a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of what gets preserved is not random. The La Brea tar pits are so valuable because they probably captured a good cross section of the fauna at the time, big and small.
Here's another example. There are many relics of the American Civil war. There are lots of ceremonial pistols and uniforms covered in gold braid. I am told there are no surviving examples of a private's uniform from either side. Demobbed soldiers used them to do the gardening, then to lag pipes or as floor cloths. Fortunately we have pictures.
Take the Roman occupation of Britain. We knew perhaps the names of 50 people who were involved with this, and they were all generals and politicians. Often what they reported was cleaned up to be a part of an official history. Then someone came across a lost bag of Roman mail. Now we know the names of hundreds of people, and something about how they lived...
It is hard to know what the future would like us to preserve. Nevertheless, I think they would rather have a complete log of Slashdot with all the postings in context for a month then just the bare titles and articles for years.
I would also add that the Human Resources droid, or agency lackey that often writes the job advertisements does not necessarily understand what a house computing environment is like. They tend to focus on the languages and packages, and ask for experience in exactly that. The people who actually are going to employ you ought to be more flexible. If they ask for a language you have never used, then it would make sense to read up about it, but you can then say 'hey - I have only learned about this since I read your advert'. You can learn languages, but you never really know them until you have used them for a serious job, and trying to blag it would probably be fatal..
You might get unlucky. I was once given a 'C' grammar test as part of an interview. The company had had a lot of people who claimed godlike computing powers, and this was their way of sorting out the more obvious chaff. Again, you can be flexible in your answers. I remember my test having a long statement with no brackets and all kinds of precedence. I gave three replies...
(1) I know where to find the precedence rules (page 53 of Kernigan & Ritchie, the page that is all yellow on my copy) and I would look it up rather than trust to my memory (2) Nobody ought to be writing code like that anyway - brackets don't cost, and (3) my guess at a solution.
Good luck anyhow.
Lamere's experiments can't be called "scientific"
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Detecting Click Tracks
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Can't they? Why not? He starts out with the hypothesis that music recorded with a preset click track might give a flatter graph that one recorded without. He tests his theory with known examples. He tests his theory with unknown examples and notes that the graphs fall into two pretty distinct sets: ones with small deviations from a straight, flat line, and ones that wander about. There are some examples where a tune is flatlining, and then wanders off for a bit, then drops back again, suggesting that it is possible to use a click track but perhaps ignore it for a while.
This sounds pretty much like science as I have always known it. You don't have to sex it up with Greek symbols and arcane maths. You don't always end up with a neat E = mc^2 formula. You can't always fit all of your experimental data.
See... http://www.luft46.com/misc/sanger.html
Note the engine details. There is a jet engine fuelled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen, piped through the jet bell, so it gets cooled and the fuel gets vapourized.
Neat, eh? Clever guys, those Germans.
You can't swap silicon for carbon in DNA. Silicon doesn't have the same talent for directionally bonding to itself. You can get get multiple bonds if you stick an oxygen in between, but the oxygen always has electron pairs that make it open to attack. There is no equivalent of the stable and inert paraffin chain.
If you were to have silicon-based life, then it would probably not use chain molecules. Suppose you had a planar silicate structure that catalysed the formation of a similar layer on top of it. The layers might then separate or exfoliate and then catalyse other copies of themselves. Some formations would be more stable, or would come out of solution at lower concentrations, and thereby 'predating' on less successful conformations by lowering the conentration of valuable components, and causing the other to go back into solution.
This is pretty dull sort of life - it isn't really much more than crystallization. No antennae, no ray-guns, no 'greetings earthlings, we come in peace'. However, carbon-based life was probably a pretty dull affair before the cell wall. It would have relied on random variations in ambient chemistry and temperature to do anything, and a lot of time must have been spent waiting for the right conditions for the next move. The simpler viruses are more like big chemicals than small creatures.
I remember a Scientific American article from about 1983 where it was argued that some of the lamellar structures that you can get in pre-cambrian clays may have been just such a system. No easy way of telling now, of course, because carbon based life would probably have killed it off. If it could be said to have been alive in the first place.
It is nice to have some feedback from someone who has actually tried something of the sort, instead of the usual gut-driven reactions. How does just posting 'No' get moderated to 5? Kinda makes you distrust all trust-based networks.
I would have thought the original articles description ought to work. You don't slam someone from white to black because their posting has crossed some arbitrary line. You slowly crank up the delay. Just asking for a resend ought to filter out most of the dumber spambots. If subsequent posts seem OK, then they get their whiteness back. You don't chuck them in the tarpit unless you are really sure. Something has got to keep a tally of squillions of nano-grudges, but that's what computers do best. Sounds like your mail daemon was somewhat shit. Likewise, Executive A.
I do think publishing blacklists is a bad idea. It gives spammers and pranksters feedback. They will surely use that against you.
This would make it possible to purchase votes and have a receipt to check that the service was delivered. Or bully people for votes or whatever. It is generally considered an undesirable feature.
I disagree. The simple scheme is just to cover the 'uh-oh - I don't think it took my vote' case. The piece of paper with their number should not leave the polling station.
An ATM doesn't have the onerous requirements that a voting process does: it doesn't need to not give receipts and it doesn't need to be ignorant about who is using it. This makes auditing very much easier. It is also not a disaster if someone tries to use it, fails to and walks away thinking they have received cash when they have not. Moreover, it is legal to get direct assistance in using an ATM if for whatever reason you can't figure out how.
Do voters need a permanent receipt for their vote? Surely, this allows for the very vote selling and bullying you were arguing against? Quite apart from that, I don't think it helps. Once the voter is satisfied their vote has gone into some distributed robust database, it should be impossible to lose except by some sort of widespread fraud. It should be impossible to lose it by resetting the local voting machine or pulling the power on the polling station.
I remember reading about 'foolproof' paperless voting machines in the 1960's. In fifty years, nothing seems to have changed except for the technology. You don't have a full record of the votes. People vote for a day, and at the end of the day the total does not tally, but you don't know what went wrong.
If at the end of the day, the machines logged who voted, which way, and when, then everyone would be able to check that their vote was logged correctly. However, this might allow others to know or guess the way you voted, so the ballot would not be secret.
Suppose your voting paper had a unique random barcode generated at the time your ballot paper was printed. The machine takes the candidate number of your vote and adds it to the total. It also adds your candidate number to your barcode number, and puts that in a public database. The public database would contain a set of apparently random numbers. However, if you keep your ballot paper with the number, you or someone at the voting booth ought to be able to find the number that corresponded to your vote, and check that the machine correctly tallied it.
This is a crude proposal. There are probably much better ones out there. I bet ATM software doesn't put up with a 2% error rate.
It's a bit late to decide not to affect the planet. We already have done so. If we can get everyone to cut their carbon use, and all plant trees, then this is geoengineering. If we decide not to do that, and carry on emitting carbon dioxide and other stuff, then that will be geoengineering too - the bad sort.
Unfortunately, it is not always easy to distinguish between good and bad proposals. The solutions originally proposed for acid rain back in the 1970's - reducing exhaust gas temperatures and using scrubbers - would have resulted in us consuming more coal for the same energy production, and would probably have made things worse. In fact, the sulphur compounds are probably helping the cloud cover, so we might be in other trouble if we got rid of them too quickly. Making methanol biofuel from waste sugar cane seemed good back in the 1970's too.
Well, anyone can make mistakes. The scary thing about geoengineering is that we only get one stab at it. We can't even do a proper experiment with a control. Any changes we make will be hard to measure because there are natural random events, such as sunspots, weather patterns, volcanoes, and so forth. So we want a proposal that should be effective, have some measureable effect before going global-scale, and should be capable of being turned of smartly if we find it is not working.
Top of the proposals in may view, are the ships that spray seawater into the air. This could create cloud cover and rain, and absorb heat at sea level, and re-emit it at the top of the atmosphere where it may radiate into space. If it is not doing the right thing, then we can turn off the sprays, and everything is back where we started.
Number two would be adding iron salts to the sea. Iron is scarce in seawater, and the lack of iron throttles algae growth. A small amount of iron will produce a lot of algae, fixing carbon, and providing food for other sea creatures. This is all measurable. If we find we are doing the wrong thing, then we can't get the iron back out of the sea again, so we have to start small scale and work upwards.
Most of the other solutions in the article are a bit scary for me. There are many other smaller-scale proposals not mentioned that will not provide a global solution by themselves, but should give a cost effective contribution. Examples are capping old coal mines to store methane emissions, or generating fuels from bacteria to fix carbon. For completeness' sake, I add the virtuous proposal of getting people to use less energy, but that isn't happening nearly fast enough.
Yes, geoengineering is a bit scary. But, right now, it is a lot less scary than the geoengeneering we are doing right now by carrying on as we have always done.
Could this be a coincidence or was there some 2008/2009 rollover issue going on here?
set the system time back a few mins before the crash occured and see if your server crashes again... otherwise it's idle speculation
I suspect changing the clock will prove nothing. It is likely that a computer in isolation will happily count onwards, leap-second or no. I would have said all standalone software these days ought to be written well enough to take care of this, but there was the Zune...
The problem probably comes when you have several computers connected together, and only some of them are putting in the leap second. Initially the computers may check their clocks, as small errors are likely, but thereafter they may be synchronized. Then, all of a sudden, some of them are giving out time stamps that seem to be a whole second ahead of the others. It might be quite reasonable to reject packets of data with impossible timestamps, as their data might be corrupt, or it may be some hacker injecting fake packets, and they haven't got the clocks quite right. So you would have to reset the clocks on lots of computers - perhaps all the computers on the internet - to run a proper test, and even then there might be a freak combination of circumstances that stops it happening a second time.
Really, the only sensible thing to do is to do what the original poster did - write to Slashdot and find out whether there were other cases. He seems to have got a lot of replies saying "well duh! there are millions of computers so one is bound to crash close to the New Year, don't'cha understand probability?" which is rather unfair as you won't know you are the only one unless you ask. He hasn't got the fifty or so replies saying they saw the same thing that might have meant a systematic problem, so it was probably random.
Nice sounding idea. There's lots of energy down there. If we take it away, then everything down there ought to cool down, and become safe. Easy, no?
Well, not really. What we have here is something like a giant steam engine boiler twenty miles across with the safety valve stuck down. In the days of steam locomotives, if you thought there might be a crack in a boiler, then you filled the whole system with water and pressurized it. That way, if the boiler gave a little, the water would escape and the pressure would rapidly drop. Water is not elastic, so you have little stored energy, and you don't get an explosion. Gas is much more springy so you would get much more bang and flying bits with pressurized gas. Superheated steam is like a really compressed gas with liquid densities, so that is even worse still.
If you have an old-fashioned boiler with rivets, then as the pressure builds up, it will creak and the rivets will give a bit, and the steam will leak, a bit, but the whole system does not fail explosively. However, suppose you went around patching all the tiny leaks, and made the boiler rigid - it then has no way of failing other than by splitting in half. I have a nasty feeling that taking heat energy out of the weak places in the Yellowstone dome - if we could extract heat on that scale - would make it stiffer and more rigid, while the reduction in temperature may cause the gases to come out of solution, which would make the big explosion more likely.
For safety reasons, what we need a series of local eruptions that release pressure and gas like a safety valve or a weeping rivet, but that won't do the environment much good ( though if we recover some of the energy and use it to replace coal-fired power stations, it might not be that bad either ). However, you aren't going to get me to climb onto a 20-mile long steam boiler with a stuck safety valve and drill little holes to relieve the pressure.
We could build geothermal power stations, but the energy they are likely to be able to extract will be so tiny when compared to what's down there that they won't make any difference, unless you are talking of planet-scale engineering. On the plus side, I don't think we risk making things significantly worse either. Right now, and such power stations are in the wrong place for the US power grid.
Nice idea, though. I hope someone, somewhere is seriously looking at ideas like this. However, in the particular case of Yellowstone, we don't know of other volcanoes like this, so we can only look at the past history of this one. Most of the supervolcano theory is pretty young, and I don't think we really know enough about the materials at the pressures and temperatures to be able to dick with it with confidence. We know it doesn't blow up often, so we would be very unlucky if it blew up tomorrow. Right now, the best plan is probably to measure it very carefully, and learn all we can about how volcanoes work in depth. These little earthquakes tend to come in bursts, but we don't really know why.
Thank you for reading. We now return to our regular Internet schedule AAAGH! THIS IS IT OMFG WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE! And the angel sounded the trumpet a forth time and one third of the world's Zune players fell silent... Nostradamus has written: it's gonna be the Y2K bug all over again. Buy guns! Buy ammo!! THESE ARE THE END DAYS! (etc)...
This argument has probably fizzled out, which is a shame as I weuld have liked to reply to this. I am not a supporter of these laws, but I can see why they might be being drafted, and as such, I was trying to answer a question posed in an earlier post.
Nevertheless, the proof of guilt is precisely the point. A bad law, like the UK's recent racial hare speech laws, is so vague as to either make everyone guilty or no-one guilty. Such laws bring the institutions that draft them and the institutions that uphold them into disrepute. Some laws, such as the German Holocaust denial law are a messy compromise to try and restrain an ingenious and sinister faction with little regard for historical truth, but in effect is saying there is an official history, and if you don't believe that you go to prison. Such are the times, we may have to reach for compromises like these. I don't like it at all, but I cannot suggest a sensible compromise.
However, here we are dealing with digital images which are felt likely to be pictures of a real illegal event. The defence will argue that all digital evidence of this kind is capable of being faked or copied without limit, so it cannot be presented as evidence in a court. If holding such images is made illegal, then we have a simple rule that can be applied with a fair chance of dividing the innocent from the guilty, rather than dividing those who can afford good lawyers from those who can't.
You are all right to quote the principle "innocent until proven guilty" if you feel it is being threatened. Even if I feel you are not right in this particular case, I think you should do so. However, the drafting of real laws is often a bitter compromise. It would be nice to just have one law: "Don't do bad stuff", but to use the law you have to codify things so that what is considered "good" or "bad" is put into unequivocal terms. In this case, I think a balance of a kind is being struck.
The suggestion, as I read it, is that the BBC should increase the quality and resolution of its output at the expense of the UK TV licence payer, so it takes more bandwidth. This will mean it will not download at a reasonable rate unless ISP suppliers worldwide sell the viewers an expanded service for which it can charge.
None of your ten dollars to your ISP gets back to the BBC. I do not see it as the duty of the BBC to provide future revenue for your ISP. People want internet access because there is something worthwhile to look at. It is not a good business plan to punish the BBC and other providers of content that people want to download, or to artificially inflate the volume of internet traffic so the ISPs can provide a new tier of service.
The BBC needs an income that is independent of the UK government. The current TV licence scheme is bizarre and increasingly unenforceable with USB TV decoders and such. I don't see how they can raise revenue from the Internet, which has always been the land of "do-as-you-please". There ought to be some payback for somewhere for providing worthwhile content. But this..? This may have been posted think in all good faith, but from the UK it reads like a troll. Really.
Supposing they found someone with a set of convincing looking child photos on their hard drive. They look realistic but the owner says they had been created within PhotoShop ( or Gimp or whatever ), and no children were harmed. They may have created the image, or they may have filtered the image in PhotoShop to remove any digital signatures from the camera that took the image. Okay, Solomon, how do we settle this one?
Well, there is a legal precedent. Hans Van Meegren, a Dutchman, was accused of selling Old Master paintings to the Nazi occupiers. He argued that the paintings he supplied were fakes. To prove this, he had to produce a convincing painting in court that would have passed for a Vermeer. And he did. Actually, his fakes were not technically accurate - he used things like zinc white instead of the lead white that Vermeer would have used, so the court could have decided on forensic evidence. However, as his recreation of the techniques of Old Masters was better than most other of his age - Tom Keating could have taught him a thing or two - the court required the proof of his talent.
Of course, if you bought some of these images, then we cannot know whether you thought they were real or no. We assume the Nazis thought the Vermeers were real. It seems reasonable to assume any collector of such images thought they were real if they look convincing enough, in the lack of other evidence.
I don't think the aim is to criminalize cartoons which clearly have no human originals, though doubtless there will be factions that will want to apply them that way. If you draw anime images of under-age sex or collect Star Trek homoerotica then people such as I might not want to shake your hand, but we will fight for your rights to do so.
If creatures have evolved enough intelligence to use tools and anticipate the future, then why aren't all animals intelligent? As some of them have been around for longer than us, why aren't they smarter than us? Some adaptions, such as flight, or vision, or a poisonous bite might seem to have to happen all at once, but intelligence can come by degrees - adding a few more brain cells here and here until you have the right balance, until you reach some natural limit where the head becomes too heavy or uses too much energy.
There has to be a payback for having intelligence. If the animal has something that can grasp objects, then it can use tools and do things that it would not normally be able to do. If you are a shellfish then there is not much you can do with your deep thoughts, so a smarter shellfish is less likely to survive.
This is guesswork, but maybe extra weight in our head makes us clumsier and vulnerable to neck injuries. That, and the energy requirements of the larger brain. But it's not really that much larger, is it? Birds have very compact brains - if this was an issue, then our brains would be smaller too. No - I think there has to be something else, but I can't see what it is.
Yup. In 1934, Wheatstone demonstrated stereo using hand drawn figures. He then got onto his friend Fox Talbot, and they made stereo pictures. Perhaps there was only six months between the arrival of practical photography in Britain and experiments with 3D. It was sxhibited in 1838,
In Europe, Duboscq developed viewers that showed transparency stereo pairs. These became popular ince Queen Victoria had been presented with a model at the Crystal Palace exhibition.
The Holmes stereoscope was a simpler instrument without optics, and it used reflection images. These gave less intense images, but the stereoscopes and the images could be mass produced. You still find them in US junk shops. Holmes didn't invent stereography any more than Eastman invented photography or Ford invented the car. But he did make them popular in the US.
I have been all the way though this discussion, and if someone else has said this then I can't find it, so here goes...
The project manager ought to know what's going on. Indeed - if they were good, they ought to suggest it themselves. If people want to sign their work then they feel good about it and good about themselves. There is a list of names that come up when you log into PhotoShop. The engineers got to sign their names on the inside of the case mould in the first Apple computers. Other such easter eggs include pop-up portraits of the team when some unlikely combination of keys is pressed. I know it is silly, but code often seems like a sterile sequence of ones and zeros, and having your name or your face in it somehow does make a difference.
There is a greyer area of an easter egg that does something significant, and so might be a bug or a backdoor for an attack. If it is fun and its obscure, then the project manager will have to make a call. If you wrote it, you are bound to think it is cool. Hell, all my code is wicked cool, and I don't need anyone's opinion, so I should know. But I would still tell the manager.
On the other hand, if you are stuffing your own secret code into a commercial product without telling anyone, then you are on your own, mate. And if you were doing that on a project of mine, I would be deeply worried.
. without something
As long as it does not bloat the code significantly, and it does not open any backdoors, but it can make a lot of people feel good about what they do.
or anything, but
people how worked on each PhotoShop release comes uwant them to somewhow sign their names to their artwork
My advice would be to: (a) do a course with some physical sciences and mathematics; and hence (b) put off making a decision for or against specializing in mathematics; and finally (c) probably end up doing some go physical science subject, where you can use your secret math superpowers to overtake the others.
Cambridge (not that Cambridge, the UK one) offers a degree in Natural Sciences. I was able to study Physics, Maths, Chemistry, & Materials Sciences. I was good at maths, and was offered the chance at the end of my second year to transfer to doing maths. There are probably similar options in the US. I chose to give up maths. Though it was probably my best subject, I got to met people that were a lot better than me. I also liked doing stuff with my hands. There are plenty of applied maths subjects. Don't get put off by people who spend 40 years in an attic proving the Riemann hypothesis - both my parents were mathematicians, but they did practical things in aircraft design. For me, doing an experiment with something real seemed important to me then, and still does now. Also, if you are armed with a bit more than your fair helping of maths skills, then you get to see farther than the others in many fields that are less mathematical.
Plenty of posters have said variants on "Let her do what she wants". At that age, I had no idea what I wanted - I just wanted to be - well - effective at something. Lots of people want to be something in particular, but some of us don't have specific ambitions. Back then (the early seventies) astronomy was doing huge things, and I would have loved to be part of that, but it was all happening as I was getting my degree, and I was too early. I wanted to bring maths to materials science, but I was too early for that by about 30 years (good now, though).
Ages ago - sometime in the eighties I guess - I wrote a shell script called 'tree' that did an ASCII-art rendition of file structures. This was on my path, so I could just type 'tree ' and it drew out the structure with one directory or file per line.
Many years and two jobs later, when wanting to plot out a file structure, my fingers returned to their old habits: I typed 'tree ' and whaddya know, it worked! I have never found who did this to thank them. I don't know if I inspired this version but layout is exactly the same, so I like to think so.
I also had an ASCII-art image viewer. We had one terminal that could slowly view colour images, and this was always in use, so I wrote something that could scroll, zoom, view separations, histogram equalize, and view and eidt pixel values. If you have to grok image pixels, it was handy. That never made it into UNIX. Shame.
Stupid UNIX tricks? Well, ASCII art was good for all sorts of things - I remember it being used for floor plans, so 'finger' could tell people where your desk was.
Saying 'a schedule isn't creative' doesn't clarify things at all. How did you decide this? (NB: this is a reply not just to the author of this post but to all who submitted similar comments, so don't get paranoid). Is it 'obvious?'.
The concept of 'obviousness' may seem plain to us, but it is not plain enough to be admitted to law. If it was, then we would only need one law: "Don't Do Bad Things", and assume we all understood.
The common solution is to refer to a prior case if there is one. In this case, there are several. There was a copyright argument over a century ago in the US about the copyright of telephone directory data. People made large telephone directories by collating freely available data on phone numbers and addresses. While the re-formatting and putting into alphabetical order was a laborious process, it was argued that it was a mechanical process, and so no additional creative input was needed. Denied: the data elements were individually too small to be considered copyright, and so a compilation of them did not breach copyright. This happened in the US and not Australia - however, if no similar Australian case can be found, then I would imagine a US copyright argument could still be produced to illustrate the case.
There are limits on how much of a work you can copy. If this were not the case, then you would be able to copy an encyclopaedia, one article at a time. So the breakpoint for copyright in a collation must lie somewhere between a phone directory entry and a short encyclopaedia entry. A straight TV schedule would be the size of a phonebook entry, so no contest, eh?
I hope the case gets thrown out. I also hope that in the spirit of "Don't Do Bad Things" that Nine gets landed with punitive damages for hiring legal hit men to do over a smaller rival using frivolous legal arguments. But that's probably too much to hope for. Heigh-ho...
Neutrons can have a similar ageing effect. The original work on this was Californian. Someone put bottles of Spanish brandiy going into a high neutron flux reactor at a facility I worked at once to see if they can reproduce the effect. I am told it went in dark brown and tasted rough, and it came out light coloured and tasted smooth. This is not really a commercial process because you could not easily market Three Mile Island Brandy. I don't expect miracles, but you might be able to produce bsome of the mellowing effect that you do get with wine in smaller timescales.
Microwaves also have funny effects on chemistry. They might be worth a try.
This gadget, though? If it really worked, then would they be selling it? Or would they be being paid by the wine industry not to sell it? Deeply suspicious.
Most babies have a startle reflex where their arms go out to the sides, and their mouth goes open. I have still got this at 52. I startle easily, I admit it. By this test, I ought to be Hitler. However, I don't recognize any part of the description of these people. I don't think I am more fearful of my immediate neighbors because I jump in a silly way when things go bang. I just live with it. I certainly would not want or trust any organization with the death penalty, or control of speech, even if it would mean people were polite like they used to be and kept their gardens tidy.
I think there are at least two sorts of jumpiness here, and they need to be separated. Are there many others out there like me?
If you are not familiar with superconducting magnets, then some of these terms may seem a bit mysterious. So, here goes...
A superconducting magnet is essentially a big coil of superconductor. Initially, you put current into the superconductor to build up the magnetic field. You then 'join the ends' of the superconducting loop, so the current circulates endlessly, and the middle has a constant magnetic field.
There is a lot of energy in the magnetic field. An 11-tesla magnetic field has about the same energy per unit volume as TNT. Worse than TNT, there is no rest mass to the 'explosive' so all the magnetic field energy would be dumped straight to the surround. The surround is already under a lot of tension due to the magnetic field, so the magnet would blow apart spectacularly, if it wasn't properly designed.
The magnet has a link in the superconductor which is heated to drive it 'normal': this is used when the magnetic field is being built up. This link usually has a great big conventional shunt resistor in parallel with it with great big heat sinks, and this arrangement is usually on the top of the magnet. If the helium level gets low or something else funny happens, the hope is that the coil superconductivity will go at this point rather than anywhere else. The magnetic energy, instead of getting dumped into the magnet's structure, gets dumped into this shunt resistor. It may glow yellow, and boil off lots of helium, but the magnetic field can collapse over a few seconds rather than instantly, and won't release an electromegnetic pulsed that might set off a chain reaction with the magnets next door.
What has happened here is that the safety system has gone off in one of the magnets just as it ought to. I expect they will inspect the shunt assembly to check nothing has scorched when all the energy got dumped, and also to try and find out why it did. However, with luck they can get it all going again without interrupting the vacuum.
We were trying a lot of different approaches at Canon Research Europe in the nineties. We tried using an ordinary camera with built in flash. It works, but with the provisos other people have pointed out - subject should be still, opaque and matte, yada yada. I think there was already prior patent art even then.
It's still neat, though.
What is NASA for? And what is it worth?
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NASA Turns 50
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I am not convinced that the ultimate end of all NASA's work (investment?) has got to be a commercial sector development. Most of space is pretty hostile - too cold, too empty, too expensive, too far go go back if something goes wrong. There are spin-offs but they are pretty tiny when compared to the actual cost. Perhaps what NASA does is worth doing, just because it is fun, and makes us feel good about ourselves?
We have already had the obligatory rants on how (a) the money could be better spent on the starving or (b) how much smaller the NASA budget
is than the military. Perhaps we could equate what NASA does to entertainment. I believe the costs of the Apollo program were the equivalent to a cinema ticket for every US adult and child per year. Or, the other way around, when the film "2010" was produced, people considered shooting the spacewalk sequences in space itself: it was more expensive, but not by a silly ratio.
The Apollo program has been likened to a modern building of the pyramids. This is probably a fair analogy: Egypt had a seasonal surplus of labor. The costs did not seem to have harmed them at the time. The Easter Islanders, on the other hand, destroyed their economy and ruined their island putting up those stupid heads. The Great Wall of China was a huge investment, but provided no real protection.
I don't think we can come up with a conventional financial justification for going into space. There is no need for a 'space race' any longer: we don't need to develop heavy missile weapons, and who gets there first is not an issue. Space will be there, much the same in ten years or a hundred. If we are going to do something in space, then let it be purely for the fun of finding out. Budget the thing at about a cinema ticket per adult per year.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no need to preserve everything. A good random selection will tell us a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of what gets preserved is not random. The La Brea tar pits are so valuable because they probably captured a good cross section of the fauna at the time, big and small.
Here's another example. There are many relics of the American Civil war. There are lots of ceremonial pistols and uniforms covered in gold braid. I am told there are no surviving examples of a private's uniform from either side. Demobbed soldiers used them to do the gardening, then to lag pipes or as floor cloths. Fortunately we have pictures.
Take the Roman occupation of Britain. We knew perhaps the names of 50 people who were involved with this, and they were all generals and politicians. Often what they reported was cleaned up to be a part of an official history. Then someone came across a lost bag of Roman mail. Now we know the names of hundreds of people, and something about how they lived...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-508044/They-came-saw--asked-new-underpants.html
It is hard to know what the future would like us to preserve. Nevertheless, I think they would rather have a complete log of Slashdot with all the postings in context for a month then just the bare titles and articles for years.
I agree.
I would also add that the Human Resources droid, or agency lackey that often writes the job advertisements does not necessarily understand what a house computing environment is like. They tend to focus on the languages and packages, and ask for experience in exactly that. The people who actually are going to employ you ought to be more flexible. If they ask for a language you have never used, then it would make sense to read up about it, but you can then say 'hey - I have only learned about this since I read your advert'. You can learn languages, but you never really know them until you have used them for a serious job, and trying to blag it would probably be fatal..
You might get unlucky. I was once given a 'C' grammar test as part of an interview. The company had had a lot of people who claimed godlike computing powers, and this was their way of sorting out the more obvious chaff. Again, you can be flexible in your answers. I remember my test having a long statement with no brackets and all kinds of precedence. I gave three replies... (1) I know where to find the precedence rules (page 53 of Kernigan & Ritchie, the page that is all yellow on my copy) and I would look it up rather than trust to my memory (2) Nobody ought to be writing code like that anyway - brackets don't cost, and (3) my guess at a solution.
Good luck anyhow.
Can't they? Why not? He starts out with the hypothesis that music recorded with a preset click track might give a flatter graph that one recorded without. He tests his theory with known examples. He tests his theory with unknown examples and notes that the graphs fall into two pretty distinct sets: ones with small deviations from a straight, flat line, and ones that wander about. There are some examples where a tune is flatlining, and then wanders off for a bit, then drops back again, suggesting that it is possible to use a click track but perhaps ignore it for a while.
This sounds pretty much like science as I have always known it. You don't have to sex it up with Greek symbols and arcane maths. You don't always end up with a neat E = mc^2 formula. You can't always fit all of your experimental data.
He could wear a white coat. Would that help?
See... http://www.luft46.com/misc/sanger.html Note the engine details. There is a jet engine fuelled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen, piped through the jet bell, so it gets cooled and the fuel gets vapourized. Neat, eh? Clever guys, those Germans.
You can't swap silicon for carbon in DNA. Silicon doesn't have the same talent for directionally bonding to itself. You can get get multiple bonds if you stick an oxygen in between, but the oxygen always has electron pairs that make it open to attack. There is no equivalent of the stable and inert paraffin chain.
If you were to have silicon-based life, then it would probably not use chain molecules. Suppose you had a planar silicate structure that catalysed the formation of a similar layer on top of it. The layers might then separate or exfoliate and then catalyse other copies of themselves. Some formations would be more stable, or would come out of solution at lower concentrations, and thereby 'predating' on less successful conformations by lowering the conentration of valuable components, and causing the other to go back into solution.
This is pretty dull sort of life - it isn't really much more than crystallization. No antennae, no ray-guns, no 'greetings earthlings, we come in peace'. However, carbon-based life was probably a pretty dull affair before the cell wall. It would have relied on random variations in ambient chemistry and temperature to do anything, and a lot of time must have been spent waiting for the right conditions for the next move. The simpler viruses are more like big chemicals than small creatures.
I remember a Scientific American article from about 1983 where it was argued that some of the lamellar structures that you can get in pre-cambrian clays may have been just such a system. No easy way of telling now, of course, because carbon based life would probably have killed it off. If it could be said to have been alive in the first place.
It is nice to have some feedback from someone who has actually tried something of the sort, instead of the usual gut-driven reactions. How does just posting 'No' get moderated to 5? Kinda makes you distrust all trust-based networks.
I would have thought the original articles description ought to work. You don't slam someone from white to black because their posting has crossed some arbitrary line. You slowly crank up the delay. Just asking for a resend ought to filter out most of the dumber spambots. If subsequent posts seem OK, then they get their whiteness back. You don't chuck them in the tarpit unless you are really sure. Something has got to keep a tally of squillions of nano-grudges, but that's what computers do best. Sounds like your mail daemon was somewhat shit. Likewise, Executive A.
I do think publishing blacklists is a bad idea. It gives spammers and pranksters feedback. They will surely use that against you.
This would make it possible to purchase votes and have a receipt to check that the service was delivered. Or bully people for votes or whatever. It is generally considered an undesirable feature.
I disagree. The simple scheme is just to cover the 'uh-oh - I don't think it took my vote' case. The piece of paper with their number should not leave the polling station.
An ATM doesn't have the onerous requirements that a voting process does: it doesn't need to not give receipts and it doesn't need to be ignorant about who is using it. This makes auditing very much easier. It is also not a disaster if someone tries to use it, fails to and walks away thinking they have received cash when they have not. Moreover, it is legal to get direct assistance in using an ATM if for whatever reason you can't figure out how.
Do voters need a permanent receipt for their vote? Surely, this allows for the very vote selling and bullying you were arguing against? Quite apart from that, I don't think it helps. Once the voter is satisfied their vote has gone into some distributed robust database, it should be impossible to lose except by some sort of widespread fraud. It should be impossible to lose it by resetting the local voting machine or pulling the power on the polling station.
I remember reading about 'foolproof' paperless voting machines in the 1960's. In fifty years, nothing seems to have changed except for the technology. You don't have a full record of the votes. People vote for a day, and at the end of the day the total does not tally, but you don't know what went wrong.
If at the end of the day, the machines logged who voted, which way, and when, then everyone would be able to check that their vote was logged correctly. However, this might allow others to know or guess the way you voted, so the ballot would not be secret.
Suppose your voting paper had a unique random barcode generated at the time your ballot paper was printed. The machine takes the candidate number of your vote and adds it to the total. It also adds your candidate number to your barcode number, and puts that in a public database. The public database would contain a set of apparently random numbers. However, if you keep your ballot paper with the number, you or someone at the voting booth ought to be able to find the number that corresponded to your vote, and check that the machine correctly tallied it.
This is a crude proposal. There are probably much better ones out there. I bet ATM software doesn't put up with a 2% error rate.
It's a bit late to decide not to affect the planet. We already have done so. If we can get everyone to cut their carbon use, and all plant trees, then this is geoengineering. If we decide not to do that, and carry on emitting carbon dioxide and other stuff, then that will be geoengineering too - the bad sort.
Unfortunately, it is not always easy to distinguish between good and bad proposals. The solutions originally proposed for acid rain back in the 1970's - reducing exhaust gas temperatures and using scrubbers - would have resulted in us consuming more coal for the same energy production, and would probably have made things worse. In fact, the sulphur compounds are probably helping the cloud cover, so we might be in other trouble if we got rid of them too quickly. Making methanol biofuel from waste sugar cane seemed good back in the 1970's too.
Well, anyone can make mistakes. The scary thing about geoengineering is that we only get one stab at it. We can't even do a proper experiment with a control. Any changes we make will be hard to measure because there are natural random events, such as sunspots, weather patterns, volcanoes, and so forth. So we want a proposal that should be effective, have some measureable effect before going global-scale, and should be capable of being turned of smartly if we find it is not working.
Top of the proposals in may view, are the ships that spray seawater into the air. This could create cloud cover and rain, and absorb heat at sea level, and re-emit it at the top of the atmosphere where it may radiate into space. If it is not doing the right thing, then we can turn off the sprays, and everything is back where we started.
Number two would be adding iron salts to the sea. Iron is scarce in seawater, and the lack of iron throttles algae growth. A small amount of iron will produce a lot of algae, fixing carbon, and providing food for other sea creatures. This is all measurable. If we find we are doing the wrong thing, then we can't get the iron back out of the sea again, so we have to start small scale and work upwards.
Most of the other solutions in the article are a bit scary for me. There are many other smaller-scale proposals not mentioned that will not provide a global solution by themselves, but should give a cost effective contribution. Examples are capping old coal mines to store methane emissions, or generating fuels from bacteria to fix carbon. For completeness' sake, I add the virtuous proposal of getting people to use less energy, but that isn't happening nearly fast enough.
Yes, geoengineering is a bit scary. But, right now, it is a lot less scary than the geoengeneering we are doing right now by carrying on as we have always done.
set the system time back a few mins before the crash occured and see if your server crashes again... otherwise it's idle speculation
I suspect changing the clock will prove nothing. It is likely that a computer in isolation will happily count onwards, leap-second or no. I would have said all standalone software these days ought to be written well enough to take care of this, but there was the Zune...
The problem probably comes when you have several computers connected together, and only some of them are putting in the leap second. Initially the computers may check their clocks, as small errors are likely, but thereafter they may be synchronized. Then, all of a sudden, some of them are giving out time stamps that seem to be a whole second ahead of the others. It might be quite reasonable to reject packets of data with impossible timestamps, as their data might be corrupt, or it may be some hacker injecting fake packets, and they haven't got the clocks quite right. So you would have to reset the clocks on lots of computers - perhaps all the computers on the internet - to run a proper test, and even then there might be a freak combination of circumstances that stops it happening a second time.
Really, the only sensible thing to do is to do what the original poster did - write to Slashdot and find out whether there were other cases. He seems to have got a lot of replies saying "well duh! there are millions of computers so one is bound to crash close to the New Year, don't'cha understand probability?" which is rather unfair as you won't know you are the only one unless you ask. He hasn't got the fifty or so replies saying they saw the same thing that might have meant a systematic problem, so it was probably random.
Nice sounding idea. There's lots of energy down there. If we take it away, then everything down there ought to cool down, and become safe. Easy, no?
Well, not really. What we have here is something like a giant steam engine boiler twenty miles across with the safety valve stuck down. In the days of steam locomotives, if you thought there might be a crack in a boiler, then you filled the whole system with water and pressurized it. That way, if the boiler gave a little, the water would escape and the pressure would rapidly drop. Water is not elastic, so you have little stored energy, and you don't get an explosion. Gas is much more springy so you would get much more bang and flying bits with pressurized gas. Superheated steam is like a really compressed gas with liquid densities, so that is even worse still.
If you have an old-fashioned boiler with rivets, then as the pressure builds up, it will creak and the rivets will give a bit, and the steam will leak, a bit, but the whole system does not fail explosively. However, suppose you went around patching all the tiny leaks, and made the boiler rigid - it then has no way of failing other than by splitting in half. I have a nasty feeling that taking heat energy out of the weak places in the Yellowstone dome - if we could extract heat on that scale - would make it stiffer and more rigid, while the reduction in temperature may cause the gases to come out of solution, which would make the big explosion more likely.
For safety reasons, what we need a series of local eruptions that release pressure and gas like a safety valve or a weeping rivet, but that won't do the environment much good ( though if we recover some of the energy and use it to replace coal-fired power stations, it might not be that bad either ). However, you aren't going to get me to climb onto a 20-mile long steam boiler with a stuck safety valve and drill little holes to relieve the pressure.
We could build geothermal power stations, but the energy they are likely to be able to extract will be so tiny when compared to what's down there that they won't make any difference, unless you are talking of planet-scale engineering. On the plus side, I don't think we risk making things significantly worse either. Right now, and such power stations are in the wrong place for the US power grid.
Nice idea, though. I hope someone, somewhere is seriously looking at ideas like this. However, in the particular case of Yellowstone, we don't know of other volcanoes like this, so we can only look at the past history of this one. Most of the supervolcano theory is pretty young, and I don't think we really know enough about the materials at the pressures and temperatures to be able to dick with it with confidence. We know it doesn't blow up often, so we would be very unlucky if it blew up tomorrow. Right now, the best plan is probably to measure it very carefully, and learn all we can about how volcanoes work in depth. These little earthquakes tend to come in bursts, but we don't really know why.
Thank you for reading. We now return to our regular Internet schedule AAAGH! THIS IS IT OMFG WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE! And the angel sounded the trumpet a forth time and one third of the world's Zune players fell silent... Nostradamus has written: it's gonna be the Y2K bug all over again. Buy guns! Buy ammo!! THESE ARE THE END DAYS! (etc)...
Uh, innocent until proven guilty?
This argument has probably fizzled out, which is a shame as I weuld have liked to reply to this. I am not a supporter of these laws, but I can see why they might be being drafted, and as such, I was trying to answer a question posed in an earlier post.
Nevertheless, the proof of guilt is precisely the point. A bad law, like the UK's recent racial hare speech laws, is so vague as to either make everyone guilty or no-one guilty. Such laws bring the institutions that draft them and the institutions that uphold them into disrepute. Some laws, such as the German Holocaust denial law are a messy compromise to try and restrain an ingenious and sinister faction with little regard for historical truth, but in effect is saying there is an official history, and if you don't believe that you go to prison. Such are the times, we may have to reach for compromises like these. I don't like it at all, but I cannot suggest a sensible compromise.
However, here we are dealing with digital images which are felt likely to be pictures of a real illegal event. The defence will argue that all digital evidence of this kind is capable of being faked or copied without limit, so it cannot be presented as evidence in a court. If holding such images is made illegal, then we have a simple rule that can be applied with a fair chance of dividing the innocent from the guilty, rather than dividing those who can afford good lawyers from those who can't.
You are all right to quote the principle "innocent until proven guilty" if you feel it is being threatened. Even if I feel you are not right in this particular case, I think you should do so. However, the drafting of real laws is often a bitter compromise. It would be nice to just have one law: "Don't do bad stuff", but to use the law you have to codify things so that what is considered "good" or "bad" is put into unequivocal terms. In this case, I think a balance of a kind is being struck.
I cannot see how this was modded as 'insightful'.
The suggestion, as I read it, is that the BBC should increase the quality and resolution of its output at the expense of the UK TV licence payer, so it takes more bandwidth. This will mean it will not download at a reasonable rate unless ISP suppliers worldwide sell the viewers an expanded service for which it can charge.
None of your ten dollars to your ISP gets back to the BBC. I do not see it as the duty of the BBC to provide future revenue for your ISP. People want internet access because there is something worthwhile to look at. It is not a good business plan to punish the BBC and other providers of content that people want to download, or to artificially inflate the volume of internet traffic so the ISPs can provide a new tier of service.
The BBC needs an income that is independent of the UK government. The current TV licence scheme is bizarre and increasingly unenforceable with USB TV decoders and such. I don't see how they can raise revenue from the Internet, which has always been the land of "do-as-you-please". There ought to be some payback for somewhere for providing worthwhile content. But this..? This may have been posted think in all good faith, but from the UK it reads like a troll. Really.
Supposing they found someone with a set of convincing looking child photos on their hard drive. They look realistic but the owner says they had been created within PhotoShop ( or Gimp or whatever ), and no children were harmed. They may have created the image, or they may have filtered the image in PhotoShop to remove any digital signatures from the camera that took the image. Okay, Solomon, how do we settle this one?
Well, there is a legal precedent. Hans Van Meegren, a Dutchman, was accused of selling Old Master paintings to the Nazi occupiers. He argued that the paintings he supplied were fakes. To prove this, he had to produce a convincing painting in court that would have passed for a Vermeer. And he did. Actually, his fakes were not technically accurate - he used things like zinc white instead of the lead white that Vermeer would have used, so the court could have decided on forensic evidence. However, as his recreation of the techniques of Old Masters was better than most other of his age - Tom Keating could have taught him a thing or two - the court required the proof of his talent.
Of course, if you bought some of these images, then we cannot know whether you thought they were real or no. We assume the Nazis thought the Vermeers were real. It seems reasonable to assume any collector of such images thought they were real if they look convincing enough, in the lack of other evidence.
I don't think the aim is to criminalize cartoons which clearly have no human originals, though doubtless there will be factions that will want to apply them that way. If you draw anime images of under-age sex or collect Star Trek homoerotica then people such as I might not want to shake your hand, but we will fight for your rights to do so.
If creatures have evolved enough intelligence to use tools and anticipate the future, then why aren't all animals intelligent? As some of them have been around for longer than us, why aren't they smarter than us? Some adaptions, such as flight, or vision, or a poisonous bite might seem to have to happen all at once, but intelligence can come by degrees - adding a few more brain cells here and here until you have the right balance, until you reach some natural limit where the head becomes too heavy or uses too much energy.
There has to be a payback for having intelligence. If the animal has something that can grasp objects, then it can use tools and do things that it would not normally be able to do. If you are a shellfish then there is not much you can do with your deep thoughts, so a smarter shellfish is less likely to survive.
This is guesswork, but maybe extra weight in our head makes us clumsier and vulnerable to neck injuries. That, and the energy requirements of the larger brain. But it's not really that much larger, is it? Birds have very compact brains - if this was an issue, then our brains would be smaller too. No - I think there has to be something else, but I can't see what it is.
Any ideas?
Yup. In 1934, Wheatstone demonstrated stereo using hand drawn figures. He then got onto his friend Fox Talbot, and they made stereo pictures. Perhaps there was only six months between the arrival of practical photography in Britain and experiments with 3D. It was sxhibited in 1838,
In Europe, Duboscq developed viewers that showed transparency stereo pairs. These became popular ince Queen Victoria had been presented with a model at the Crystal Palace exhibition.
The Holmes stereoscope was a simpler instrument without optics, and it used reflection images. These gave less intense images, but the stereoscopes and the images could be mass produced. You still find them in US junk shops. Holmes didn't invent stereography any more than Eastman invented photography or Ford invented the car. But he did make them popular in the US.
I have been all the way though this discussion, and if someone else has said this then I can't find it, so here goes...
The project manager ought to know what's going on. Indeed - if they were good, they ought to suggest it themselves. If people want to sign their work then they feel good about it and good about themselves. There is a list of names that come up when you log into PhotoShop. The engineers got to sign their names on the inside of the case mould in the first Apple computers. Other such easter eggs include pop-up portraits of the team when some unlikely combination of keys is pressed. I know it is silly, but code often seems like a sterile sequence of ones and zeros, and having your name or your face in it somehow does make a difference.
There is a greyer area of an easter egg that does something significant, and so might be a bug or a backdoor for an attack. If it is fun and its obscure, then the project manager will have to make a call. If you wrote it, you are bound to think it is cool. Hell, all my code is wicked cool, and I don't need anyone's opinion, so I should know. But I would still tell the manager.
On the other hand, if you are stuffing your own secret code into a commercial product without telling anyone, then you are on your own, mate. And if you were doing that on a project of mine, I would be deeply worried. . without something As long as it does not bloat the code significantly, and it does not open any backdoors, but it can make a lot of people feel good about what they do. or anything, but people how worked on each PhotoShop release comes uwant them to somewhow sign their names to their artwork
My advice would be to: (a) do a course with some physical sciences and mathematics; and hence (b) put off making a decision for or against specializing in mathematics; and finally (c) probably end up doing some go physical science subject, where you can use your secret math superpowers to overtake the others.
Cambridge (not that Cambridge, the UK one) offers a degree in Natural Sciences. I was able to study Physics, Maths, Chemistry, & Materials Sciences. I was good at maths, and was offered the chance at the end of my second year to transfer to doing maths. There are probably similar options in the US. I chose to give up maths. Though it was probably my best subject, I got to met people that were a lot better than me. I also liked doing stuff with my hands. There are plenty of applied maths subjects. Don't get put off by people who spend 40 years in an attic proving the Riemann hypothesis - both my parents were mathematicians, but they did practical things in aircraft design. For me, doing an experiment with something real seemed important to me then, and still does now. Also, if you are armed with a bit more than your fair helping of maths skills, then you get to see farther than the others in many fields that are less mathematical.
Plenty of posters have said variants on "Let her do what she wants". At that age, I had no idea what I wanted - I just wanted to be - well - effective at something. Lots of people want to be something in particular, but some of us don't have specific ambitions. Back then (the early seventies) astronomy was doing huge things, and I would have loved to be part of that, but it was all happening as I was getting my degree, and I was too early. I wanted to bring maths to materials science, but I was too early for that by about 30 years (good now, though).
Good luck!
Ages ago - sometime in the eighties I guess - I wrote a shell script called 'tree' that did an ASCII-art rendition of file structures. This was on my path, so I could just type 'tree ' and it drew out the structure with one directory or file per line.
Many years and two jobs later, when wanting to plot out a file structure, my fingers returned to their old habits: I typed 'tree ' and whaddya know, it worked! I have never found who did this to thank them. I don't know if I inspired this version but layout is exactly the same, so I like to think so.
I also had an ASCII-art image viewer. We had one terminal that could slowly view colour images, and this was always in use, so I wrote something that could scroll, zoom, view separations, histogram equalize, and view and eidt pixel values. If you have to grok image pixels, it was handy. That never made it into UNIX. Shame.
Stupid UNIX tricks? Well, ASCII art was good for all sorts of things - I remember it being used for floor plans, so 'finger' could tell people where your desk was.
'finger'? Whoa... It's all coming back...
Saying 'a schedule isn't creative' doesn't clarify things at all. How did you decide this? (NB: this is a reply not just to the author of this post but to all who submitted similar comments, so don't get paranoid). Is it 'obvious?'.
The concept of 'obviousness' may seem plain to us, but it is not plain enough to be admitted to law. If it was, then we would only need one law: "Don't Do Bad Things", and assume we all understood.
The common solution is to refer to a prior case if there is one. In this case, there are several. There was a copyright argument over a century ago in the US about the copyright of telephone directory data. People made large telephone directories by collating freely available data on phone numbers and addresses. While the re-formatting and putting into alphabetical order was a laborious process, it was argued that it was a mechanical process, and so no additional creative input was needed. Denied: the data elements were individually too small to be considered copyright, and so a compilation of them did not breach copyright. This happened in the US and not Australia - however, if no similar Australian case can be found, then I would imagine a US copyright argument could still be produced to illustrate the case.
There are limits on how much of a work you can copy. If this were not the case, then you would be able to copy an encyclopaedia, one article at a time. So the breakpoint for copyright in a collation must lie somewhere between a phone directory entry and a short encyclopaedia entry. A straight TV schedule would be the size of a phonebook entry, so no contest, eh?
I hope the case gets thrown out. I also hope that in the spirit of "Don't Do Bad Things" that Nine gets landed with punitive damages for hiring legal hit men to do over a smaller rival using frivolous legal arguments. But that's probably too much to hope for. Heigh-ho...
Neutrons can have a similar ageing effect. The original work on this was Californian. Someone put bottles of Spanish brandiy going into a high neutron flux reactor at a facility I worked at once to see if they can reproduce the effect. I am told it went in dark brown and tasted rough, and it came out light coloured and tasted smooth. This is not really a commercial process because you could not easily market Three Mile Island Brandy. I don't expect miracles, but you might be able to produce bsome of the mellowing effect that you do get with wine in smaller timescales.
Microwaves also have funny effects on chemistry. They might be worth a try.
This gadget, though? If it really worked, then would they be selling it? Or would they be being paid by the wine industry not to sell it? Deeply suspicious.
Most babies have a startle reflex where their arms go out to the sides, and their mouth goes open. I have still got this at 52. I startle easily, I admit it. By this test, I ought to be Hitler. However, I don't recognize any part of the description of these people. I don't think I am more fearful of my immediate neighbors because I jump in a silly way when things go bang. I just live with it. I certainly would not want or trust any organization with the death penalty, or control of speech, even if it would mean people were polite like they used to be and kept their gardens tidy.
I think there are at least two sorts of jumpiness here, and they need to be separated. Are there many others out there like me?
If you are not familiar with superconducting magnets, then some of these terms may seem a bit mysterious. So, here goes...
A superconducting magnet is essentially a big coil of superconductor. Initially, you put current into the superconductor to build up the magnetic field. You then 'join the ends' of the superconducting loop, so the current circulates endlessly, and the middle has a constant magnetic field.
There is a lot of energy in the magnetic field. An 11-tesla magnetic field has about the same energy per unit volume as TNT. Worse than TNT, there is no rest mass to the 'explosive' so all the magnetic field energy would be dumped straight to the surround. The surround is already under a lot of tension due to the magnetic field, so the magnet would blow apart spectacularly, if it wasn't properly designed.
The magnet has a link in the superconductor which is heated to drive it 'normal': this is used when the magnetic field is being built up. This link usually has a great big conventional shunt resistor in parallel with it with great big heat sinks, and this arrangement is usually on the top of the magnet. If the helium level gets low or something else funny happens, the hope is that the coil superconductivity will go at this point rather than anywhere else. The magnetic energy, instead of getting dumped into the magnet's structure, gets dumped into this shunt resistor. It may glow yellow, and boil off lots of helium, but the magnetic field can collapse over a few seconds rather than instantly, and won't release an electromegnetic pulsed that might set off a chain reaction with the magnets next door.
What has happened here is that the safety system has gone off in one of the magnets just as it ought to. I expect they will inspect the shunt assembly to check nothing has scorched when all the energy got dumped, and also to try and find out why it did. However, with luck they can get it all going again without interrupting the vacuum.
It's still neat, though.
I am not convinced that the ultimate end of all NASA's work (investment?) has got to be a commercial sector development. Most of space is pretty hostile - too cold, too empty, too expensive, too far go go back if something goes wrong. There are spin-offs but they are pretty tiny when compared to the actual cost. Perhaps what NASA does is worth doing, just because it is fun, and makes us feel good about ourselves?
We have already had the obligatory rants on how (a) the money could be better spent on the starving or (b) how much smaller the NASA budget is than the military. Perhaps we could equate what NASA does to entertainment. I believe the costs of the Apollo program were the equivalent to a cinema ticket for every US adult and child per year. Or, the other way around, when the film "2010" was produced, people considered shooting the spacewalk sequences in space itself: it was more expensive, but not by a silly ratio.
The Apollo program has been likened to a modern building of the pyramids. This is probably a fair analogy: Egypt had a seasonal surplus of labor. The costs did not seem to have harmed them at the time. The Easter Islanders, on the other hand, destroyed their economy and ruined their island putting up those stupid heads. The Great Wall of China was a huge investment, but provided no real protection.
I don't think we can come up with a conventional financial justification for going into space. There is no need for a 'space race' any longer: we don't need to develop heavy missile weapons, and who gets there first is not an issue. Space will be there, much the same in ten years or a hundred. If we are going to do something in space, then let it be purely for the fun of finding out. Budget the thing at about a cinema ticket per adult per year.
Bread and circuses. That's what the people want.