You're not alone. For the last two years of unemployent and depression, three things have kept me afloat: Getting to see the rest of the Matrix Series Getting to see the rest of the LOTR series Getting to see the Cassini mission to Saturn.
After Cassini loses contact with Earth due to a high-gain antenna/metric conversion/O-ring malfunction in July 2004, I got nothin'.
I read about this method recently: it performs PCR of a drop of liquid in a mineral oil-filled capillary by moving the droplet through different static heating elements. Kinda like the old way of moving the tube from heat bath to heat bath, but without the tube. The drop is small, so you don't get a lot of product, but the heat transfer is really great, so it works very quickly. Alternatly, you could probably make a hot-air cycler, like the one that Idaho Technologies (?) sells, much easier and cheaper than making a peltier/heated lid cycler. Enjoy!
J. Chiou et al., "A closed-cycle capillary polymerase chain reaction machine," Analytical Chemistry, 73:2018-21, May 1, 2001.
"A capillary PCR machine has been built and demonstrated to perform 30-cycle PCR runs of a 500-bp target from genomic lambda-DNA with 78% efficiency in 23 minutes, which compares to coventional PCR machines that take 1 to 2 hours. The system moves a 1-microliter droplet between three heat zones in a 1-mm-i.d., oil-filled capillary and uses multielement scattered light detection with active feedback to detect the position of the fluid slug. This paper goes into detailed analysis of the potential optimal cycling times based upon device geometry and fundamental constraints of the biology."
Middle manager? No, I don't manage anybody. I'm just an employee who hopes that when I use a piece of equiptment, it will work as expected, and not crush/mangle/electrocute my ass! You don't document critical changes, oh, whenever you get around to it. You do it immediately after you make the changes, or in anticipation of the change, so the reactor doesn't spew acid through the missing gaskets, or the bus doesn't drive off with a missing brake line, or the multi-ton satellite doesn't fall on somebody. It IS the employee's responsibility to work according to protocol; if he doesn't, he's responsible for the consequences (and, as I said, if the supervisor allows shit like this to happen routinely, he should be fired as well). And yes, some protocols are unrealistic, but then he should tell his supervisor, and not just do whatever he wants.
If you don't like being ultimately responsible for the consequences of your actions, that's your business; but I sure as hell wouldn't want you working in the same company as me.
And rightfully so, if the technician was the one who failed to document the bolt removal properly! Now, if the supervisor allowed documentation failures like this one to occur routinely on his watch, then he should be shown the airlock, as well!
After reading previous posts on/. about media formats becoming obsolete (remember the BBC Domesday project?), I would do the following:
1) If you want to keep something for more than a year, make multiple copies (so if part of one copy goes bad, you're more likely to recover it from another copy). 2) Store at least one copy in a different physical location. But most importantly, 3) upgrade your media every few years!
If you had something important on floppies, they should have gone to tape or CD-R. If you have stuff on CD-R, make copies on DVD. In a year or two, when the "DVD format wars" have settled and a format (+? -? #?) has been decided, make new copies to that. In five years, when the carbon nanotube ultrahigh density static memory is available, make copies to that.
Remember, it doesn't matter if your Beta casettes full of "Buck Rogers" episodes are in perfect shape, if you can't find a machine to play them on!
And in the sun's frame, the mirror is receding and the reflected photons are doppler shifted
This point was raised in the previous./ article about solar sails, to explain why light striking a sail loses energy and increases the motion of the sail. My quesion is, isn't the redshift of the sail relative to the sun so small that any photons strinking the mirror would lose only a tiny fraction of their energies? This might mean that a sail would work in principle, but that the accelerations would be so small as to be impractical. (Yes, any acceleration is better than no acceleration, but most astronauts would like to get home in their lifetimes...)
Can any non-armchair physicists shed some red-shifted light on this?
This is a serious poblem with the plan. There's a lot of stuff out there to be scooped up; it would be a substantial drain on the already burdened legal system to have thousands of people waving a buck around and claiming they own [insert valuable old work].
But...if these people have similar tastes to you, then you're listening to the same kinds of music as before, right? They need a service that takes what kind of music you hear too much of, then forces you to listen to something completely different, to make you expand your horizons. Kind of like a TMBG / NWA* exchange program.
*insert current group that's popular with the urban kids today.
Yeah! And it's up to a team of researcher to get a sample of the original virus...or, maybe a MONKEY infected by the virus, so they can get antibodies...antibodies they can use to cure everybody!!!
I'm tired of movies where they find the cure for the deadly virus in the last reel, and it's over! If any viral disease could be cured that easily, we wouldn't have to worry about HIV, Ebola, SARS, Hepatitis, Herpes, Norwalk, Hantavirus, West Nile, or the Common Cold...
Most programmers cant write code to do one simple task without having some sort of bug or malady arise, whereas DNA is able to manipulate individual molecules and chemical reactions in order to create a system magnitudes above anything the most brilliant human could think to design.
As a molecular biologist/computer progammer, I think you are giving DNA too much credit. Just as a single error in a piece of code can cause it to crash, a single base mutation in an organism's DNA can either a)cause it to abort during development or b) give it any of a thousand different diseases, from the annoying (myopia) to the deadly (Cystic Fibrosis, Huntington's, Cancer, and so on). The genetic code is a hack; a hack developed over 4 billion years that works just well enough to keep making more copies of itself.
This doesn't mean that life isn't incredible. Biological systems may be kludges, built off the remnants of older versions of itself, out of countless imperfect parts (like DNA which accumulates mutations, or proteins which can be misfolded or poisoned), but it has produced organisms that live in every concievable niche, including one that's trying to figure out how it works!
Computer science is still in its infancy. Right now, we're just learning how to make redundant, parallel systems that don't have to work perfectly with a 100.0% uptime to do their job. My guess is that if we someday develop artificial intelligence, it will use many trillions of small programs, none of which will work perfectly, but which will work in tandem with each other to make amazing things happen.
Neutrinos, they are very small. They have no charge and have no mass And do not interact at all. The earth is just a silly ball To them, through which they simply pass, Like dustmaids down a drafty hall Or photons through a sheet of glass. They snub the most exquisite gas, Ignore the most substantial wall, Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass, Insult the stallion in his stall, And, scorning barriers of class, Infiltrate you and me! Like tall And painless guillotines, they fall Down through our heads into the grass. At night, they enter at Nepal And pierce the lover and his lass From underneath the bed - you call It wonderful; I call it crass.
This bothered me too, but I think I understand now.
The real reason the machines keep the humans alive and plugged in is: they are using some portion of every human's brain for their computational power. Sure, silicon computers are fast, but there's something in the wetware that the AI's require. IIRC, the machines only rose up after human/computer connectivity became widespread. So, maybe linking to our neurons gave the machines the abilities and will to take over, and they haven't found a good substitute for our grey matter.
Neo and crew believe the "battery" story because everyone has been deeply conditioned through the Matrix to not consider the other possibility. If they knew the machines were using brains to run their programs, it could be a weakness they could exploit in their war against the machines.
I know there are holes in this idea. For instance, why don't the 'home-grown' Zioners come to this same conclusion? Maybe the Agents' desire to wipe out Zion stems from a fear that they will figure this out, and use this info to destroy the AIs. Thoughts? Ideas?
You CANNOT fit a 100 foot dish to a satellite and orbit it around Mars or Jupiter, etc, to pick up signals from further out and relay them to earth. Its simply not possible.
Not necessarily. Check out a proposed Neptune Explorer mission here. It would use an inflatable lens of 25 meters or so to focus both light and microwaves, to provide energy and communications to the probe.
Yes, yes, the inflatant will gradually escape, but once you have your space elevator and nuclear powered engines, you'll be able to call "Culligan's Volatiles Service (We Deliver)" and have your tanks topped off periodically.
Think of the possibilities! Stephen Hawkings reads "Lord of The Rings"! Stephen Hawkings reads "The Deep End of the Ocean"! Stephen Hawkings reads "A Brief History of Time"!
But as I continued, this article kind of answered my questioning for having a clock that acurate, besides the "No, it really is 12:43.35PM coolness factor"
If a doomsday asteroid is heading for earth, there's nothing we can do about it, and if you think there is you've watched too many Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay movies.
That's why you should see the movie "Last Night". In it, the world is going to end at midnight, everybody has known it for a few months, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. The movie never says why the world is going to end, and it doesn't really matter. The point is how the characters spend their last hours of life, and what, of all the things we do in our lives, really matters?
The movie does mention the chaos that happened when people first learned the world would end, and there are people still acting out their violent urges up to the end. Some of the characters are religious people, but instead of 'going insane', they spend their time with family and friends, praying and contemplating their lives, and what will happen next.
I agree that the laws and mores that rule our civilizations would collapse if we learned the end was nigh. But the end of the world would be our last chance to live with greatness and compassion and dignity, in full knowledge of how precious all life is. Losing that chance would be a terrible waste.
by Vernor Vinge. Two of the best SF books I've ever read. The technology of 'bobbles' (impenetrable, indestructable stasis fields if you haven't read the book) opens up some great possibilities. The first book is an exciting David v. Goliath fight that would work great on the big screen, and the second has the Singularity, the exploration of the galaxy, and a murder mystery to beat Columbo hands down. But who do we get to play Della Lu...?
Slashdot Mirror
You're not alone. For the last two years of unemployent and depression, three things have kept me afloat:
Getting to see the rest of the Matrix Series
Getting to see the rest of the LOTR series
Getting to see the Cassini mission to Saturn.
After Cassini loses contact with Earth due to a high-gain antenna/metric conversion/O-ring malfunction in July 2004, I got nothin'.
I read about this method recently: it performs PCR of a drop of liquid in a mineral oil-filled capillary by moving the droplet through different static heating elements. Kinda like the old way of moving the tube from heat bath to heat bath, but without the tube. The drop is small, so you don't get a lot of product, but the heat transfer is really great, so it works very quickly. Alternatly, you could probably make a hot-air cycler, like the one that Idaho Technologies (?) sells, much easier and cheaper than making a peltier/heated lid cycler. Enjoy!
J. Chiou et al., "A closed-cycle capillary polymerase chain reaction machine," Analytical Chemistry, 73:2018-21, May 1, 2001.
"A capillary PCR machine has been built and demonstrated to perform 30-cycle PCR runs of a 500-bp target from genomic lambda-DNA with 78% efficiency in 23 minutes, which compares to coventional PCR machines that take 1 to 2 hours. The system moves a 1-microliter droplet between three heat zones in a 1-mm-i.d., oil-filled capillary and uses multielement scattered light detection with active feedback to detect the position of the fluid slug. This paper goes into detailed analysis of the potential optimal cycling times based upon device geometry and fundamental constraints of the biology."
I found this, which says that meteorites lose much of their heat through ablation, so they shouldn't be hot.
But even if it isn't hot, Don't touch it!
Middle manager? No, I don't manage anybody. I'm just an employee who hopes that when I use a piece of equiptment, it will work as expected, and not crush/mangle/electrocute my ass! You don't document critical changes, oh, whenever you get around to it. You do it immediately after you make the changes, or in anticipation of the change, so the reactor doesn't spew acid through the missing gaskets, or the bus doesn't drive off with a missing brake line, or the multi-ton satellite doesn't fall on somebody. It IS the employee's responsibility to work according to protocol; if he doesn't, he's responsible for the consequences (and, as I said, if the supervisor allows shit like this to happen routinely, he should be fired as well). And yes, some protocols are unrealistic, but then he should tell his supervisor, and not just do whatever he wants.
If you don't like being ultimately responsible for the consequences of your actions, that's your business; but I sure as hell wouldn't want you working in the same company as me.
And rightfully so, if the technician was the one who failed to document the bolt removal properly! Now, if the supervisor allowed documentation failures like this one to occur routinely on his watch, then he should be shown the airlock, as well!
ISP Guy: In that case, let me E-mail it to you.
Exactly 733 Rupees.
Ha ha ha ha ha! 2
After reading previous posts on /. about media formats becoming obsolete (remember the BBC Domesday project?), I would do the following:
1) If you want to keep something for more than a year, make multiple copies (so if part of one copy goes bad, you're more likely to recover it from another copy).
2) Store at least one copy in a different physical location. But most importantly,
3) upgrade your media every few years!
If you had something important on floppies, they should have gone to tape or CD-R. If you have stuff on CD-R, make copies on DVD. In a year or two, when the "DVD format wars" have settled and a format (+? -? #?) has been decided, make new copies to that. In five years, when the carbon nanotube ultrahigh density static memory is available, make copies to that.
Remember, it doesn't matter if your Beta casettes full of "Buck Rogers" episodes are in perfect shape, if you can't find a machine to play them on!
Oh, so he was an object oriented programmer?
And in the sun's frame, the mirror is receding and the reflected photons are doppler shifted
./ article about solar sails, to explain why light striking a sail loses energy and increases the motion of the sail. My quesion is, isn't the redshift of the sail relative to the sun so small that any photons strinking the mirror would lose only a tiny fraction of their energies? This might mean that a sail would work in principle, but that the accelerations would be so small as to be impractical. (Yes, any acceleration is better than no acceleration, but most astronauts would like to get home in their lifetimes...)
This point was raised in the previous
Can any non-armchair physicists shed some red-shifted light on this?
Thanks,
Dexter
This is a serious poblem with the plan. There's a lot of stuff out there to be scooped up; it would be a substantial drain on the already burdened legal system to have thousands of people waving a buck around and claiming they own [insert valuable old work].
But...if these people have similar tastes to you, then you're listening to the same kinds of music as before, right? They need a service that takes what kind of music you hear too much of, then forces you to listen to something completely different, to make you expand your horizons. Kind of like a TMBG / NWA* exchange program.
*insert current group that's popular with the urban kids today.
Yeah! And it's up to a team of researcher to get a sample of the original virus...or, maybe a MONKEY infected by the virus, so they can get antibodies...antibodies they can use to cure everybody!!!
I'm tired of movies where they find the cure for the deadly virus in the last reel, and it's over! If any viral disease could be cured that easily, we wouldn't have to worry about HIV, Ebola, SARS, Hepatitis, Herpes, Norwalk, Hantavirus, West Nile, or the Common Cold...
Most programmers cant write code to do one simple task without having some sort of bug or malady arise, whereas DNA is able to manipulate individual molecules and chemical reactions in order to create a system magnitudes above anything the most brilliant human could think to design.
As a molecular biologist/computer progammer, I think you are giving DNA too much credit. Just as a single error in a piece of code can cause it to crash, a single base mutation in an organism's DNA can either a)cause it to abort during development or b) give it any of a thousand different diseases, from the annoying (myopia) to the deadly (Cystic Fibrosis, Huntington's, Cancer, and so on). The genetic code is a hack; a hack developed over 4 billion years that works just well enough to keep making more copies of itself.
This doesn't mean that life isn't incredible. Biological systems may be kludges, built off the remnants of older versions of itself, out of countless imperfect parts (like DNA which accumulates mutations, or proteins which can be misfolded or poisoned), but it has produced organisms that live in every concievable niche, including one that's trying to figure out how it works!
Computer science is still in its infancy. Right now, we're just learning how to make redundant, parallel systems that don't have to work perfectly with a 100.0% uptime to do their job. My guess is that if we someday develop artificial intelligence, it will use many trillions of small programs, none of which will work perfectly, but which will work in tandem with each other to make amazing things happen.
Cosmic Gall
by John Updike (1963)
Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed - you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.
This bothered me too, but I think I understand now.
The real reason the machines keep the humans alive and plugged in is: they are using some portion of every human's brain for their computational power. Sure, silicon computers are fast, but there's something in the wetware that the AI's require. IIRC, the machines only rose up after human/computer connectivity became widespread. So, maybe linking to our neurons gave the machines the abilities and will to take over, and they haven't found a good substitute for our grey matter.
Neo and crew believe the "battery" story because everyone has been deeply conditioned through the Matrix to not consider the other possibility. If they knew the machines were using brains to run their programs, it could be a weakness they could exploit in their war against the machines.
I know there are holes in this idea. For instance, why don't the 'home-grown' Zioners come to this same conclusion? Maybe the Agents' desire to wipe out Zion stems from a fear that they will figure this out, and use this info to destroy the AIs. Thoughts? Ideas?
So few posts about a killer bug sweeping the globe? This could mean only one thing...
I am the LAST SLASHDOT READER ALIVE ON EARTH!!!
Last Post!!!
...damn, I'm lonely.
Would an InSync ballad to Centipede be what you are looking for?
Well, N'Sync DID sample Pac-Man (and gave it credit) for their song "The Game is Over". But personally, I think Buckner and Garcia did it better.
wokka wokka wokka wokka wokka
You CANNOT fit a 100 foot dish to a satellite and orbit it around Mars or Jupiter, etc, to pick up signals from further out and relay them to earth. Its simply not possible.
Not necessarily. Check out a proposed Neptune Explorer mission here. It would use an inflatable lens of 25 meters or so to focus both light and microwaves, to provide energy and communications to the probe.
Yes, yes, the inflatant will gradually escape, but once you have your space elevator and nuclear powered engines, you'll be able to call "Culligan's Volatiles Service (We Deliver)" and have your tanks topped off periodically.
Think of the possibilities! Stephen Hawkings reads "Lord of The Rings"! Stephen Hawkings reads "The Deep End of the Ocean"! Stephen Hawkings reads "A Brief History of Time"!
No, wait, they already did that one.
No, Orange Alert is the best time to send up a weather balloon.
P.S. If I hear that George W. has hired a mute midget butler, I'm moving to Canada.
But as I continued, this article kind of answered my questioning for having a clock that acurate, besides the "No, it really is 12:43.35PM coolness factor"
Yeah, but 12:34:56.78 PM is cooler.
If a doomsday asteroid is heading for earth, there's nothing we can do about it, and if you think there is you've watched too many Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay movies.
That's why you should see the movie "Last Night". In it, the world is going to end at midnight, everybody has known it for a few months, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. The movie never says why the world is going to end, and it doesn't really matter. The point is how the characters spend their last hours of life, and what, of all the things we do in our lives, really matters?
The movie does mention the chaos that happened when people first learned the world would end, and there are people still acting out their violent urges up to the end. Some of the characters are religious people, but instead of 'going insane', they spend their time with family and friends, praying and contemplating their lives, and what will happen next.
I agree that the laws and mores that rule our civilizations would collapse if we learned the end was nigh. But the end of the world would be our last chance to live with greatness and compassion and dignity, in full knowledge of how precious all life is. Losing that chance would be a terrible waste.
by Vernor Vinge. Two of the best SF books I've ever read. The technology of 'bobbles' (impenetrable, indestructable stasis fields if you haven't read the book) opens up some great possibilities. The first book is an exciting David v. Goliath fight that would work great on the big screen, and the second has the Singularity, the exploration of the galaxy, and a murder mystery to beat Columbo hands down. But who do we get to play Della Lu...?