I agree with your take on viruses, but also think that us humans special place leads to a greater impact. Namely our medical treatments, lifespans, ease of travel, high density populations, monosourced food, etc.
BTW, the OED only gives 'viruses' for the plural of 'virus'. this article has far too much information on the subject.:-)
Going totally off topic, it was funny finding that link on perl.com, knowing Larry Wall's liguistic background. I'll save my opinion on perl for another forum.
Dude. You got a bunch of responses that disagree with you. I don't get it.
As other posts pointed out, yes there are such things as 'flying fish'. The problem is they don't fly. They glide. This is why you don't see them flitting from tree to tree. Your post pointed out that this would very caloricly expensive for a cold blooded creature.
Giant squid live in the ocean. They have for a very long time. I'm assuming the show postulated an earth devoid of land fauna, that the squid would be all into exploiting. I don't think so. There would be many reef/shoreline type animals that would be better placed than a creature that evolved to live in the deep ocean.
Sharks have been what they are for a long time. I don't see any pressure on them to dress up.
I assume the show was refering to larger derivatives of the squid, which they face the same problem the insects do, namely getting bigger than a baseball.
From what I understand, an exoskeleton puts an upper limit on size. On the other hand, I don't want to short change calamari's future.
Yeah. My dog is going to continue writing code after I leave for Alpha Centuri:-).
Seriously, human 'technology' has existed for one thousandth of the time spans being mentioned, and for 99% of that, the tech consisted of rocks.
Given that by that time there will be new mountain ranges and seas, I don't think laser eye surgery and linux will be a hot topic for cockroaches or squids.
A long time ago, I worked in a bookstore, and a customer special ordered an art book entitled 'Zooipedia' or 'Beastapiedia' or some such.
It was a series of full color plates like you would find in a Victorian biology book decepting an alien flora and fauna. I only had a short look at it, but was impressed, and would like to know the title and author. Anyone know what I'm talking about??
It's nice to see something on/. that's not so U.S.-centric. I enjoy listening to 'Quirks and Quarks' on CBC (Canadian public radio) on occasion, but I havn't seen a science TV show of any note ever. I mean, The Learning Channel can be interesting, but they hate to go into detail about anything.
I would venture to say (and I used to work for CBC-TV) that TV is a medium that can't afford to go into detail at all, and therefore will never produce great science programming.
I'm continually suprised by the number of/. readers who don't seem to 'get' the segway. I was blown away when I saw it. I believe this will revolutionize transport. I believe cities will be built around it (or something like it). It seems so obvious to me I can't even explain why.
Of course, I also believe all that 'The network is the computer' stuff also.
Seriously, you're right, but have you ever tried to admin an XP machine through a CLI?? Heck, I can't even figure out what's wrong with the damn things when I'm sitting in front of them.
You're correct, but the article is not about linux on the desktop.
I personally wish the whole 'Linux on the Desktop' argument would go away for a few years. I run linux on many machines. I'd never run anything else on them. But give me OS X or WinXP to do my 'user like' computer stuff, please.
Huh?? OK that's a joke, then. For anyone who's wondering, the Linux kernel is almost all C. If not all C. The rest of linux (the apps, tools, etc) are 80% C and most of the rest being C++, plus a little Obj-C and the like.
IANAP, but here goes;
Everthing you can see or interact with, from snowflakes to magnetic fields, exists in a 3d universe. Such things as electrons, quarks, superstrings etc might not, but I've never seen one.
The snowflake exibits a fractal dimension over a wide range of scales. If you took a microscope you could magnify it many times over and keep finding the same level of detail being revealed. So we say it has a fractal dimension. Without knowing the fractalness of a paticular snowflake, the dimensions of the snowflake wouldn't be enough to tell you how much water was in it with much accuracy.
A coastline has the same property on a human scale. As the size of your measuring stick decreses, the length of the coastline increases.
But if you happen to work with radioactive materials, this could be helpful if something is leaking or otherwise out of the ordinary. It could mean the difference between cancer or not.
Tenebrae says on the homepage that "These are essentially the same algorithms as used by the new Doom game".
They are refering to stencil shadows and per pixel lights, which DoomIII wil have. But DIII also has lots of other goodies also. Uber-high polycount lighting on lowpoly models and the physics engine, for example. So a card capable of playing Tenebrae might choke on DIII.
Tenebrae sure looks good. It's funny how the shadows, etc, make the low poly models stand out though.
How refreshing.
on
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· Score: 4, Informative
This is a cool project. It reminded me of this project (from this/. posting. A guy building logic gates with water flow.
There was another link I can't find anymore to a lab moving microscopic drops of water around on a sillicon substrate really fast. The target apps are in biochemistry, but iirc the design used the liquid to do some logic, also.
I totally agree with you, and also think that most energy research should be concentrated on this and other clean energy sources.
I still want fusion though, badly. The promises and possibilities are too great to ignore. Fusion would give us power to burn, and could make ideas that are impractical now a reality.
The approach mentioned of disecting a mouse brain neuron by neuron and modeling it is very interesting. I don't think anyone has ever approched it from such a reductionist angle before. Even doing this for a small section of brain (say the visual cortex) would probably provide some interesting information.
It seems that this could be capable of showing if there's more than just the neurons involved.
Huh. Good point. I would like to add a slightly offtopic A.C.Clark quote;
'The skyhook(meaning space elevator type thingy) will be built 50 years after people stop laughing about it'
A.C.C didn't invent a thing, but he sure saw a long way....
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I'm a Canadian. Any time I cross the border I'm struck by how much bigger everybodys car is. And how much bigger every body is.
BTW, the OED only gives 'viruses' for the plural of 'virus'. this article has far too much information on the subject. :-)
Going totally off topic, it was funny finding that link on perl.com, knowing Larry Wall's liguistic background. I'll save my opinion on perl for another forum.
That's probably it, it looks much like some of the illustrations I remember. Thanks.
As other posts pointed out, yes there are such things as 'flying fish'. The problem is they don't fly. They glide. This is why you don't see them flitting from tree to tree. Your post pointed out that this would very caloricly expensive for a cold blooded creature.
Giant squid live in the ocean. They have for a very long time. I'm assuming the show postulated an earth devoid of land fauna, that the squid would be all into exploiting. I don't think so. There would be many reef/shoreline type animals that would be better placed than a creature that evolved to live in the deep ocean.
Sharks have been what they are for a long time. I don't see any pressure on them to dress up.
I'm not going to comment on the chrome spider.
From what I understand, an exoskeleton puts an upper limit on size. On the other hand, I don't want to short change calamari's future.
Seriously, human 'technology' has existed for one thousandth of the time spans being mentioned, and for 99% of that, the tech consisted of rocks.
Given that by that time there will be new mountain ranges and seas, I don't think laser eye surgery and linux will be a hot topic for cockroaches or squids.
It was a series of full color plates like you would find in a Victorian biology book decepting an alien flora and fauna. I only had a short look at it, but was impressed, and would like to know the title and author. Anyone know what I'm talking about??
If there is a God, He will mod the parent up.
Great!! Meet me for coffee at the cafe!!
It's nice to see something on /. that's not so U.S.-centric. I enjoy listening to 'Quirks and Quarks' on CBC (Canadian public radio) on occasion, but I havn't seen a science TV show of any note ever. I mean, The Learning Channel can be interesting, but they hate to go into detail about anything.
I would venture to say (and I used to work for CBC-TV) that TV is a medium that can't afford to go into detail at all, and therefore will never produce great science programming.
Of course, I also believe all that 'The network is the computer' stuff also.
That was a very polite 'fuck you', and it's a pity you got modded 'flamebait'. Oh, and this is off-topic, so go ahead.
Seriously, you're right, but have you ever tried to admin an XP machine through a CLI?? Heck, I can't even figure out what's wrong with the damn things when I'm sitting in front of them.
I personally wish the whole 'Linux on the Desktop' argument would go away for a few years. I run linux on many machines. I'd never run anything else on them. But give me OS X or WinXP to do my 'user like' computer stuff, please.
Seriously, I would rather see every line commented in pseudocode than no comments at all. Literate programming is a nice model to work with.
Huh?? OK that's a joke, then. For anyone who's wondering, the Linux kernel is almost all C. If not all C. The rest of linux (the apps, tools, etc) are 80% C and most of the rest being C++, plus a little Obj-C and the like.
Everthing you can see or interact with, from snowflakes to magnetic fields, exists in a 3d universe. Such things as electrons, quarks, superstrings etc might not, but I've never seen one.
The snowflake exibits a fractal dimension over a wide range of scales. If you took a microscope you could magnify it many times over and keep finding the same level of detail being revealed. So we say it has a fractal dimension. Without knowing the fractalness of a paticular snowflake, the dimensions of the snowflake wouldn't be enough to tell you how much water was in it with much accuracy.
A coastline has the same property on a human scale. As the size of your measuring stick decreses, the length of the coastline increases.
But if you happen to work with radioactive materials, this could be helpful if something is leaking or otherwise out of the ordinary. It could mean the difference between cancer or not.
They are refering to stencil shadows and per pixel lights, which DoomIII wil have. But DIII also has lots of other goodies also. Uber-high polycount lighting on lowpoly models and the physics engine, for example. So a card capable of playing Tenebrae might choke on DIII.
Tenebrae sure looks good. It's funny how the shadows, etc, make the low poly models stand out though.
There was another link I can't find anymore to a lab moving microscopic drops of water around on a sillicon substrate really fast. The target apps are in biochemistry, but iirc the design used the liquid to do some logic, also.
I still want fusion though, badly. The promises and possibilities are too great to ignore. Fusion would give us power to burn, and could make ideas that are impractical now a reality.
That depends on the energy levels of said neutrons.
It seems that this could be capable of showing if there's more than just the neurons involved.
'The skyhook(meaning space elevator type thingy) will be built 50 years after people stop laughing about it'
A.C.C didn't invent a thing, but he sure saw a long way....