If you can find it, get a copy of The Conquest of Space, pictures by Bonestell and text by Willy Ley - published in 1950 by Viking press. Has data on the solar system and describes the planets as they were known about 50 years ago. The art is amazing - in addition to the planets (which are mindblowing), there are some paintings of the Earth (e.g. NY, the Great Lakes, Europe) as they would be observed from 25-500 miles above the surface during suborbital "rocket" transportation in the future.
Project leaders at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission say they're not interested in the movements of individual drivers, and have gone to great lengths to protect privacy, including encrypting the serial number of each transponder as its location is transmitted. They promise to keep this data separate from the identities of FasTrak users and other information needed to make automatic monthly deductions from their bank or credit card accounts.
"We're not tracking or trying to follow any individual car, just the overall traffic flow," TravInfo project manager Michael Berman said. "We're really trying to bend over backward to make sure we don't know."
Of course the Tweeter Center is not without its problems, including roudy suburban folk.
By the time the night is over, drunk and high people will overwhelm the emergency rooms at Virtua-West Jersey Hospital, Cooper Hospital-University Medical Center, and Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center. Police will arrest or issue citations to 32 people on charges ranging from aggravated assault to urinating in public.
This may sound like a typical night in an impoverished city with a reputation for drugs and crime.
But it's not.
This night, rapper Eminem is playing the Tweeter Center - and it's his fans who are wreaking havoc.
This was also covered in the Philadelphia Inquirer. In the article, they go into a little more detail about measuring the Earth's diameter. Sounds like they are taking advantage of some sort of Doppler shift:
That doesn't change much - just a few millimeters - from year to year. Tiny as that sounds, satellite tracking allows scientists to make extremely precise measurements of the planet's shape.
Changes in the shape influence the strength of the Earth's gravitational pull from place to place, said Benjamin Chao of NASA-Goddard. Those gravitational changes in turn influence the positions of satellites.
And that's something they can measure to within centimeters. "We shoot laser beams to the satellites," he said. The time it takes for the laser light to bounce off reflective surfaces and back to the ground tells them precisely how far their satellites are, said Chao, who collaborated in the findings. He and Cox put the satellite positions into a computer, he said. That's how they got their surprise finding.
That's because each one of these round-the-world balloon trips, according to press reports, is estimated to have cost at least $300,000 a pop. Fossett representative Stuart Radnofsky told ABCNEWS, "We don't discuss costs."
...
Charities like the Red Cross, World Vision and UNICEF declined to comment on what they thought about Fossett's spending habits -- but $300,000 could certainly do plenty to help them.
For $300,000, UNICEF said it could immunize nearly 20,000 children for life against the top six childhood killer diseases, or provide 120,000 children with basic school supplies.
The World Vision Web site says $30 can send a child in Uganda to school for a year, or help a family in the Dominican Republic plant 10 fruit trees. So that's 10,000 Ugandan children or Dominican families who are going without for a balloon flight.
The Red Cross says $350 can cover the costs of providing food and shelter for 50 disaster victims for one day. So $300,000 could cover the cost of providing food and shelter for that same group for more than two years.
....
"You can find people who criticize people about anything," said Radnofsky -- but some Australians think they have a case for their vitriol toward Fossett, especially after the 1998 trip that nearly killed him.
That's because after Fossett went down, he was saved by Australian search-and-rescue teams at an estimated cost of nearly $300,000, according to AusSAR official Ben Mitchell (no relation to Jim Mitchell). And despite his considerable fortune, Fossett has never paid them back, Mitchell said.
Isn't the artist where art and reality meet? Maybe that's what Escher was getting at... after all - it's not just a blank spot, he put his signature there. If so, then filling in the "spot" may actually change the point of the drawing.
In the MSNBC article, they rescaled the brain images to be about the same size - going to the original article (subscription req'd), the brains overexpressing ß-catenin look to be about twice the size of the normal ones.
The researchers genetically altered the brain cells, but not bone growth - so I wonder whether the increased folding is a response to being crammed into a cranial cavity that is too small.
An estimate for "L", the lifetime of civilizations capable of communicating with civilizations on other planets, can be estimated if you consider individual civilizations on Earth as data points. Based on an average of 60 civilizations on Earth, e.g. the Roman Empire, Babylonia, etc., L was on average ~420 years out of ~25,000 years total - extremely short. This could be used to argue that a galaxy has on average less than 4 communicating civilizations in total at any given time.
An interesting aspect of the argument is that L decreases as societies become more technologically advanced (on Earth, at least). Whether this is the case after a certain "threshold" for technology is less clear, though, but it certainly seems plausible that at any given time there may be a species capable of communicating with no one else to talk to.
According to Science it took the group two years to synthesize the virus and the synthetic virus is 1000 - 10,000 times weaker than "natural" Polio virus.
Still, by biotech standards, this is the equivalent of doing science in the garage. At least the smallpox genome is ~25x bigger than polio.
If it's a.ps file or.pdf file, it will probably have the font embedded in it.
This is probably the key point... all of the sponsors of this font are scientific publishing houses that are already heavily into using Abobe.pdf files for online publishing. Having a standardized scientific font is one more step towards a uniform online publishing format. Whether this should have been based on.pdf files or not is another issue - it is certainly not my favorite format, but it looks like we're stuck with it.
eBay points to the market opportunities presented by the rest of PayPal's business, but post-acquisition, PayPal's non-eBay turnover may well fall. Its new owner intends to phase out business with gambling sites - 'regulatory uncertainty' is the rationale.
As bad as PayPal can be, it is probably better than having an account directly with an online casino.
Q17. I don't see you mentioning ogg files on your list of ideas. What about
supporting those?
A17. At the current time we belive this is not very likely (though
we are not completely closing out this possibility). The Micronas
chip (MAS3507) decoder in the archos does not natively support ogg
decoding and there is very little program space in the player to
implement it ourselves. The alternative would be to write a software
decoder as part of the RockBox firmware. However, as much as we love
our players, the computing power of the Archos (SH1 microcontroller) is
not fully sufficent for this need (Once again, this is not a definative
no. The world is full of brilliant people. We just aren't hunting
down all the ones not already involved with the project right this
instant).
It wouldn't be surprising if LUCass decides to redo the original trilogy.... again. It'd mean more green in his pockets. Consider: A New Hope (or just Star Wars as it was called back then), had a re-release in theaters just after it's original run. All three of the original films were re-released as 'special' editions in 1997, supposedly to hype the forthcoming prequel trilogy.
Exactly... I bought one set of tapes ("never to be released again"), only to have the version with Jabba the Hut added to "Episode IV" come out one month later. The only Star Wars item I'd even consider buying at this point is a bootleg of the Christmas Special.....
Still, remember how many galaxies there were in some of the Hubble Photos? Even if the number of inhabitable planets/galaxy is low, there are still a lot of galaxies out there.
Re:What Really Happened?
on
Mars 1, Japan 0
·
· Score: 3, Informative
From Space.com: Mars has been a major target of exploration since the beginning of the space age. It also has been an elusive target, as demonstrated once again by Mars Climate Orbiter's failure in September. Overall, about two in three missions to the red planet have failed.
...
Greeley notes that "the track record is pretty good" in exploring Venus, but disputes any notion that therefore Mars is an unusually difficult destination. Venus, he notes, is an extremely harsh environment, especially for landers. The higher failure rate of Mars missions, he thinks, is just the luck of the draw.
ABC News did a story on this last August - which provides a little more detail.
The breakthrough here is that PCR confirmed that there was very little damage to the ethanol preserved specimen. The next step is that they are planning on using PCR amplified DNA to "rebuild" the genome of the Tasmanian Tiger. To my knowledge, all other cloning involves injecting cell nuclei into oocytes (eggs). This has the advantage of preserving genes in the proper context. This is probably not possible with the preserved specimens.
Trying to re-build the entire Tasmanian Tiger genome, essentially from scratch, to produce artificial chromosomes is a huge undertaking - by the researcher's estimates, this could take 10-15 years.
The boy nodded his understanding. "Can I ask you something?" The Jedi Master nodded. "What are midi-chlorians?"
Wind whipped at Qui-Gon's long hair, blowing strands of it across his strong face. "Midi-chlorians are microscopic life-forms that reside within the cells of all living things and communicate with the Force."
"They live inside of me?" the boy asked.
"In your cells." Qui-Gon paused. "We are symbionts with the midi-chlorians."
"Symbi-what?"
"Symbionts. Life-forms living together for mutual advantage. Without the midi-chlorians, life could not exist, and we would have no knowledge of the Force. Our midi-chlorians continually speak to us, Annie, telling us the will of the Force."
"They do?"
Qui-Gon cocked one eyebrow. "When you learn to quiet your mind, you will hear them speaking to you."
Anakin thought about it for a moment, then frowned. "I don't understand."
Qui-Gon smiled, and his eyes were warm and secretive. "With time and training, Annie, you will."
In the Science article(subscription req'd), they mention that the nucleotides surrounding the triplet codon recognition sequence are also semi-conserved - so the tRNA sequence recognizing the mRNA might be more like CUCUAA binding in a non-standard way instead of a simple triplet interacting with a codon. This could provide a higher level of specificity for incorporating these "specialized" amino acids like pyrrolysine or selenocysteine.
Also, the UGA stop codon is a good choice, since the ribosome will pause there longer than the typical amino acid coding sequence and it also has a higher readthrough probability than other more efficient stop codons - both of which are helpful for more involved tRNA-mRNA interactions.
The key is not to make blastocyst production illegal - since this has the potential to provide stem cells for therapeutic purposes. Instead, make implanting them into a uterus illegal. If this isn't done, the blastocyst has no chance to develop into a fully functional human.
Aside from side stepping some of the ethical issues - this also addresses the fact that most cloned animals don't do too well. Cloning a healthy human is way too technically challenging at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, one good place for used books is abebooks.
If you can find it, get a copy of The Conquest of Space, pictures by Bonestell and text by Willy Ley - published in 1950 by Viking press. Has data on the solar system and describes the planets as they were known about 50 years ago. The art is amazing - in addition to the planets (which are mindblowing), there are some paintings of the Earth (e.g. NY, the Great Lakes, Europe) as they would be observed from 25-500 miles above the surface during suborbital "rocket" transportation in the future.
have been collecting music using Windows Media Player to copy from CDs.
That was the first mistake...
There's also a version of Cthulhu for nursery schoolers.
Project leaders at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission say they're not interested in the movements of individual drivers, and have gone to great lengths to protect privacy, including encrypting the serial number of each transponder as its location is transmitted. They promise to keep this data separate from the identities of FasTrak users and other information needed to make automatic monthly deductions from their bank or credit card accounts.
"We're not tracking or trying to follow any individual car, just the overall traffic flow," TravInfo project manager Michael Berman said. "We're really trying to bend over backward to make sure we don't know."
But it feels like they are spying on me...
By the time the night is over, drunk and high people will overwhelm the emergency rooms at Virtua-West Jersey Hospital, Cooper Hospital-University Medical Center, and Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center. Police will arrest or issue citations to 32 people on charges ranging from aggravated assault to urinating in public.
This may sound like a typical night in an impoverished city with a reputation for drugs and crime.
But it's not.
This night, rapper Eminem is playing the Tweeter Center - and it's his fans who are wreaking havoc.
For that matter, any explanations for what happened to Kirk's hair?
That doesn't change much - just a few millimeters - from year to year. Tiny as that sounds, satellite tracking allows scientists to make extremely precise measurements of the planet's shape.
Changes in the shape influence the strength of the Earth's gravitational pull from place to place, said Benjamin Chao of NASA-Goddard. Those gravitational changes in turn influence the positions of satellites.
And that's something they can measure to within centimeters. "We shoot laser beams to the satellites," he said. The time it takes for the laser light to bounce off reflective surfaces and back to the ground tells them precisely how far their satellites are, said Chao, who collaborated in the findings. He and Cox put the satellite positions into a computer, he said. That's how they got their surprise finding.
That wouldn't happen to be Christmas Island, would it?
That's because each one of these round-the-world balloon trips, according to press reports, is estimated to have cost at least $300,000 a pop. Fossett representative Stuart Radnofsky told ABCNEWS, "We don't discuss costs."
Charities like the Red Cross, World Vision and UNICEF declined to comment on what they thought about Fossett's spending habits -- but $300,000 could certainly do plenty to help them.
For $300,000, UNICEF said it could immunize nearly 20,000 children for life against the top six childhood killer diseases, or provide 120,000 children with basic school supplies.
The World Vision Web site says $30 can send a child in Uganda to school for a year, or help a family in the Dominican Republic plant 10 fruit trees. So that's 10,000 Ugandan children or Dominican families who are going without for a balloon flight.
The Red Cross says $350 can cover the costs of providing food and shelter for 50 disaster victims for one day. So $300,000 could cover the cost of providing food and shelter for that same group for more than two years.
"You can find people who criticize people about anything," said Radnofsky -- but some Australians think they have a case for their vitriol toward Fossett, especially after the 1998 trip that nearly killed him.
That's because after Fossett went down, he was saved by Australian search-and-rescue teams at an estimated cost of nearly $300,000, according to AusSAR official Ben Mitchell (no relation to Jim Mitchell). And despite his considerable fortune, Fossett has never paid them back, Mitchell said.
Isn't the artist where art and reality meet? Maybe that's what Escher was getting at ... after all - it's not just a blank spot, he put his signature there. If so, then filling in the "spot" may actually change the point of the drawing.
I always thought open source cooking involved canned soup.
The researchers genetically altered the brain cells, but not bone growth - so I wonder whether the increased folding is a response to being crammed into a cranial cavity that is too small.
An interesting aspect of the argument is that L decreases as societies become more technologically advanced (on Earth, at least). Whether this is the case after a certain "threshold" for technology is less clear, though, but it certainly seems plausible that at any given time there may be a species capable of communicating with no one else to talk to.
Still, by biotech standards, this is the equivalent of doing science in the garage. At least the smallpox genome is ~25x bigger than polio.
This is probably the key point ... all of the sponsors of this font are scientific publishing houses that are already heavily into using Abobe .pdf files for online publishing. Having a standardized scientific font is one more step towards a uniform online publishing format. Whether this should have been based on .pdf files or not is another issue - it is certainly not my favorite format, but it looks like we're stuck with it.
As bad as PayPal can be, it is probably better than having an account directly with an online casino.
Q17. I don't see you mentioning ogg files on your list of ideas. What about supporting those?
A17. At the current time we belive this is not very likely (though we are not completely closing out this possibility). The Micronas chip (MAS3507) decoder in the archos does not natively support ogg decoding and there is very little program space in the player to implement it ourselves. The alternative would be to write a software decoder as part of the RockBox firmware. However, as much as we love our players, the computing power of the Archos (SH1 microcontroller) is not fully sufficent for this need (Once again, this is not a definative no. The world is full of brilliant people. We just aren't hunting down all the ones not already involved with the project right this instant).
Exactly ... I bought one set of tapes ("never to be released again"), only to have the version with Jabba the Hut added to "Episode IV" come out one month later. The only Star Wars item I'd even consider buying at this point is a bootleg of the Christmas Special .....
Still, remember how many galaxies there were in some of the Hubble Photos? Even if the number of inhabitable planets/galaxy is low, there are still a lot of galaxies out there.
...
Greeley notes that "the track record is pretty good" in exploring Venus, but disputes any notion that therefore Mars is an unusually difficult destination. Venus, he notes, is an extremely harsh environment, especially for landers. The higher failure rate of Mars missions, he thinks, is just the luck of the draw.
or maybe it was Marvin.
The breakthrough here is that PCR confirmed that there was very little damage to the ethanol preserved specimen. The next step is that they are planning on using PCR amplified DNA to "rebuild" the genome of the Tasmanian Tiger. To my knowledge, all other cloning involves injecting cell nuclei into oocytes (eggs). This has the advantage of preserving genes in the proper context. This is probably not possible with the preserved specimens.
Trying to re-build the entire Tasmanian Tiger genome, essentially from scratch, to produce artificial chromosomes is a huge undertaking - by the researcher's estimates, this could take 10-15 years.
Wind whipped at Qui-Gon's long hair, blowing strands of it across his strong face. "Midi-chlorians are microscopic life-forms that reside within the cells of all living things and communicate with the Force."
"They live inside of me?" the boy asked. "In your cells." Qui-Gon paused. "We are symbionts with the midi-chlorians."
"Symbi-what?"
"Symbionts. Life-forms living together for mutual advantage. Without the midi-chlorians, life could not exist, and we would have no knowledge of the Force. Our midi-chlorians continually speak to us, Annie, telling us the will of the Force."
"They do?" Qui-Gon cocked one eyebrow. "When you learn to quiet your mind, you will hear them speaking to you."
Anakin thought about it for a moment, then frowned. "I don't understand."
Qui-Gon smiled, and his eyes were warm and secretive. "With time and training, Annie, you will."
Also, the UGA stop codon is a good choice, since the ribosome will pause there longer than the typical amino acid coding sequence and it also has a higher readthrough probability than other more efficient stop codons - both of which are helpful for more involved tRNA-mRNA interactions.
Aside from side stepping some of the ethical issues - this also addresses the fact that most cloned animals don't do too well. Cloning a healthy human is way too technically challenging at this point.