Anybody know if that old dream of powering a vehicle into orbit using ground-based lasers is still alive? And if so, how powerful a laser would be required?
That might be a worthwhile spinoff of this R&D..
Honestly, this is the type of corruption and incompetence I've simply come to expect from this administration. The counter examples, where they *do* act in the public interest are hard to come up with. Maybe somebody could list them, and prove me wrong.
While I understand that Google's just a business, this seems to mark a
fall from grace. It's kind of a pity. I respected them for their moral
positions, not just for their products & services.
It also calls into question their motivations for resisting the Bush
administrations requests. (reminds me of the old joke: Man asks a woman
to have sex with him, she says forget it. He says "how about for a
hundred thousand dollars". She consents, so he says "how about for ten
dollars". She says "what kind of a girl do you think I am?". He replies
"We've already established that, now we're just negotiating about
price".
I've been listening to courses from the Teaching Company. They're
college lectures on various subjects (Great Minds of the Western
Intellectual Tradition is one of the better ones).
The lecturers are top academics, and they cover a semesters worth of
material, more or less.
I listen to them while I work out. Learning about the history
of ancient Egypt, for example, makes 30 minutes of cardio
bearable.
Here's the url:
http://www.teach12.com/teach12.asp
Basically, there are colors that the eye can perceive, but that a
monitor just can't display. Really intense flourescent green, or deep, dark, saturated violets for
example.
Every display device can only show some subset of the range of visible colors. CRT Monitors can show some colors that LCD monitors can't,
so you can describe the gamut (basically the achievable range) of
colors of the CRT monitor as being larger than that of an LCD monitor.
The thing to keep in mind with 32bit color, is that even if it was
structured to encompass the entire range of perceptable color (which I
understand it's not, but that's outside my expertise), you still have
to show the color on a monitor eventually.
As an aside, I've read that some women have tetrachromatic vision. In
addition to having red, green and blue cones like normal people, they
have another receptor equadistant from red and green (yellow?). It
doesn't give them the ability to see colors that others can't, but it
does give them much finer discrimination along that color range...The
kicker is that the mutation is correlated with the genes that cause
red-green colorblindness in men, so it's as if the women swipe a cone
from their male relations;-)
It was an interesting Siggraph for display technology.
That high-dynamic range monitor was far and away the coolest innovation
(it's contrast range is like, 300 times higher than ordinary monitors.
When they set it to maximum brightness it actually takes your eyes a
moment or two to adapt when you go from a bright part of an image to a
dark part).
And modern graphics cards actually have the precision to make a huge
gamut like that useful. Hopefully they'll take off and we'll see
games start to use it. It really made all of the other monitors look
dim and washed out.
There were a bunch of different naked eye 3D displays. Nothing
fantastic, but still pretty cool, although headache inducing if
over-indulged in. I'm guessing that they'll be used for trade shows...
Another group was showing a projection system with 6 primary colors. large
color gamut display
They ganged up two sets of projectors. One with straight up RGB, and
another with CMY (I think!), and by overlaying the two they were able
to get a much wider color
gamut than traditional RGB monitors. It was very hip, but I have
trouble imagining it ever leaving a research lab.
There was also some cool stuff done by registering lots of projectors
together to get very large, very high resolution displays, without any
visible seams. It would make for a cool game room
(assuming that you had a machine that could drive a 4000 X 12000 pixel
display!).
Still the high dynamic range monitor is the one that I'm lusting
after...
Yeah, hominid fossils are pretty thin on the ground.
Partly that's because Africa is a difficult and dangerous place to
conduct archeological digs. We have a much better sense for the history
of the European Neanderthals, for example just because Europe is an
easy place to work.
Homo Erectus is fairly well represented, but as you get deeper in time,
the fossil record gets spottier. We've only found a handful of
Australopithecus, for example.
But we know that they were there. At Laetoli in Tanzania, there's that
famous set of footprints captured in volcanic ash: Laetoli
Footprints
And that was about 3.6 Million years ago. Pretty deep history.
But I'm curious what you're getting at? Do you support the
multi-regional hypothesis? Humans evolved independently from scattered
Homo Erectus populations in locations other than Africa?
Or that we evolved in East Africa, not South Africa (which is, I
understand a point of contention)
Or are you simply arguing for divine creation in the relatively recent
past?
And you've just got to see the incredible exoskeletal arms that the
lead
scientist uses to control the experiment!
I'm sure that he's taken ample precautions to keep them from taking him
over....
The Earths Magnetic field keeps all kind of nasty radiation from
hitting the surface.
So it's always been a bit of a puzzle why there's no correllation
between magnetic reversals (where the magnetic field weakens, fades,
then reappears with swapped poles) and mass extinctions.
After all, one would think that floods of radiation washing across the
Earths surface would be unhealthy, no?
But now it appears that when the magnetic field weakens, the solar wind
induces a magnetic field in the ionosphere that's pretty much as
effective at stopping high energy particles and cosmic rays as is the
original field.
Here's an article about it in New Scientist from a few months ago. New
Scientist
Wow! Only 780 thousand years ago?
At that point our hominid ancestors were strolling around southern
Africa. By then we had stone tools and the occasional use of fire.
That's really recent in a hominid lineage that goes back, what 6
million years? They lived through a 3-7 kilometer asteroid
impact! Can you imagine?
Good thing it didn't land a few thousand miles to the north...
Yes, but I've read that undirected panspermia (ie, just rocks diffusing
out of the solar system into the galaxy at large) would take, well, forever. On the order of trillions
of years.
So, it's possible that we've kicked it off already, but at this rate
it's going to be a while before the galaxy's green.
Supposedly debris ejected from Earth in an asteroid impact could
eventually whack into Mars and Venus.
Much more debris makes it from Mars to Earth (on the order of tons per
year, mostly dust and small grains).
It seems possible, (although someone with a better grasp of orbital
dynamics than I could say with certainty) that bacteria-laden rocks
could make it all the way out to Titan.
If this is the case, then the whole solar system (more or less) would
have long ago been exposed to terrestrial life. So even if we do find
bacterial life (in some Martian hotspring or in the Venusian clouds,
or radically less likely given the available energy, Titan) then it's
quite likely that it will turn out to be based on the same old DNA as
us.
So from this perspective, Finding life on Titan (or Mars, or Venus)
wouldn't necessarily tell us anything about the likelyhood of finding
life elsewhere in the galaxy.
I've read that we hit a Hubbert's peak for plutonium in about 30-40
years, so depressingly enough, even nuclear (fission) power isn't a
long term solution.
I noticed this comment in the mission blog:
http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/statustextonly.html
"About 24 MB of data is being played back from Odyssey.
It will take about 12 minutes to get all the information, officials
report.
This will contain engineering data on the rover's systems and possibly
some pictures."
Which makes it sound as if the bandwidth is more like 2MB per second...
Odd.
I'm not a programmer, but I am a professional user of 3D tools.
I've noticed that the huge advances in 3D modeling & animation packages
that we saw in the late '90's, with the release of Maya, Max 1-3, Lightwave,
Soft and the like seem to have come to a stop.
The most recent releases of all of these seem to be converging on the same
feature sets. They're all making dull, incremental progress. At the moment,
I'm wondering whether it's even worth the hassle to upgrade from Max 4 to
Max 5. The only thing it really seems to offer is built in global illumination
rendering, which has been available as a plugin for a while.
I'm wondering what the next revolution in 3D authoring tools is going to
be. I can't imagine that we'll be going down this path of diminishing returns
forever.
One possibility seems to be true WYSIWYG realtime rendering using the coming
generation of floating point accurate 3D cards. Another seems to be automation
of character animation (embedding simple AI into the skeletons)...
I'd question if it's worth the bother to simply replicate the existing functionality
of mature, static programs. If it's a new project, you could rethink what
a 3D package is supposed to do and make a real leap.
What do you all think it would take to refresh the 3D tools world.
It's possible to synthesize a very, very wide dynamic range with a digital camera.
You tripod mount it and shoot multiple exposures at a range of apertures.
This gives you a wide sampling of the light in the scene (from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights).
Then you bring the images into a program like Paul Debevec's HDRShop http://www.debevec.org/HDRShop/ and
composite them together. You wind up with a High Dynamic Range image that represents luminosity far beyond what
your monitor can display.
I'm looking forward to cameras that have this as an automatic feature; you click the shutter button and it rapidly takes
a dozen images from f2.2 to f18 or so and saves them into a floating point format.
You would take the image home and decide how you wanted to expose it that evening, as you sat at your computer
If the everett/wheeler interpretation is true (ie, quantum states never "collapse", the universe branches into as many variants as are necessary to express every outcome) then time travel (into the past) is just a special case of ordinary time travel (into the future, at 1 second per second).
By travelling into the past you'd be hopping over into a new universe (one where you showed up), not the universe you left (where you clearly never did show up).
An excellent description of this notion can be found in David Deutsch's book, "the fabric of reality"
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody know if that old dream of powering a vehicle into orbit using ground-based lasers is still alive? And if so, how powerful a laser would be required? That might be a worthwhile spinoff of this R&D..
Glancing at the headline, I read it at "City of herpes", which I'm hoping doesn't say anything in particular about me.
Honestly, this is the type of corruption and incompetence I've simply come to expect from this administration.
The counter examples, where they *do* act in the public interest are hard to come up with. Maybe somebody could list them, and prove me wrong.
O.
While I understand that Google's just a business, this seems to mark a fall from grace. It's kind of a pity. I respected them for their moral positions, not just for their products & services.
It also calls into question their motivations for resisting the Bush administrations requests. (reminds me of the old joke: Man asks a woman to have sex with him, she says forget it. He says "how about for a hundred thousand dollars". She consents, so he says "how about for ten dollars". She says "what kind of a girl do you think I am?". He replies "We've already established that, now we're just negotiating about price".
O.
I've been listening to courses from the Teaching Company. They're college lectures on various subjects (Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition is one of the better ones).
The lecturers are top academics, and they cover a semesters worth of material, more or less.
I listen to them while I work out. Learning about the history of ancient Egypt, for example, makes 30 minutes of cardio bearable.
Here's the url:
http://www.teach12.com/teach12.asp
Basically, there are colors that the eye can perceive, but that a monitor just can't display. Really intense flourescent green, or deep, dark, saturated violets for example.
;-)
Every display device can only show some subset of the range of visible colors. CRT Monitors can show some colors that LCD monitors can't, so you can describe the gamut (basically the achievable range) of colors of the CRT monitor as being larger than that of an LCD monitor.
The thing to keep in mind with 32bit color, is that even if it was structured to encompass the entire range of perceptable color (which I understand it's not, but that's outside my expertise), you still have to show the color on a monitor eventually.
As an aside, I've read that some women have tetrachromatic vision. In addition to having red, green and blue cones like normal people, they have another receptor equadistant from red and green (yellow?). It doesn't give them the ability to see colors that others can't, but it does give them much finer discrimination along that color range...The kicker is that the mutation is correlated with the genes that cause red-green colorblindness in men, so it's as if the women swipe a cone from their male relations
It was an interesting Siggraph for display technology.
That high-dynamic range monitor was far and away the coolest innovation (it's contrast range is like, 300 times higher than ordinary monitors. When they set it to maximum brightness it actually takes your eyes a moment or two to adapt when you go from a bright part of an image to a dark part).
And modern graphics cards actually have the precision to make a huge gamut like that useful. Hopefully they'll take off and we'll see games start to use it. It really made all of the other monitors look dim and washed out.
There were a bunch of different naked eye 3D displays. Nothing fantastic, but still pretty cool, although headache inducing if over-indulged in. I'm guessing that they'll be used for trade shows...
Another group was showing a projection system with 6 primary colors.
large color gamut display
They ganged up two sets of projectors. One with straight up RGB, and another with CMY (I think!), and by overlaying the two they were able to get a much wider color gamut than traditional RGB monitors. It was very hip, but I have trouble imagining it ever leaving a research lab.
There was also some cool stuff done by registering lots of projectors together to get very large, very high resolution displays, without any visible seams. It would make for a cool game room (assuming that you had a machine that could drive a 4000 X 12000 pixel display!).
Still the high dynamic range monitor is the one that I'm lusting after...
Yeah, hominid fossils are pretty thin on the ground.
Partly that's because Africa is a difficult and dangerous place to conduct archeological digs. We have a much better sense for the history of the European Neanderthals, for example just because Europe is an easy place to work.
Homo Erectus is fairly well represented, but as you get deeper in time, the fossil record gets spottier. We've only found a handful of Australopithecus, for example.
But we know that they were there. At Laetoli in Tanzania, there's that famous set of footprints captured in volcanic ash:
Laetoli Footprints
And that was about 3.6 Million years ago. Pretty deep history.
But I'm curious what you're getting at? Do you support the multi-regional hypothesis? Humans evolved independently from scattered Homo Erectus populations in locations other than Africa?
Or that we evolved in East Africa, not South Africa (which is, I understand a point of contention)
Or are you simply arguing for divine creation in the relatively recent past?
And you've just got to see the incredible exoskeletal arms that the lead scientist uses to control the experiment!
I'm sure that he's taken ample precautions to keep them from taking him over....
The Earths Magnetic field keeps all kind of nasty radiation from hitting the surface.
So it's always been a bit of a puzzle why there's no correllation between magnetic reversals (where the magnetic field weakens, fades, then reappears with swapped poles) and mass extinctions.
After all, one would think that floods of radiation washing across the Earths surface would be unhealthy, no?
But now it appears that when the magnetic field weakens, the solar wind induces a magnetic field in the ionosphere that's pretty much as effective at stopping high energy particles and cosmic rays as is the original field.
Here's an article about it in New Scientist from a few months ago.
New Scientist
Heh!
Well, it's worth pointing out that technology that can divert an asteroid one way could also divert it another.
"No, Mr. Kim Jong-il , we are just shocked, shocked! to discover that a 500 meter asteroid is about to smack into pyongyang. Our deepest condolences."
Wow! Only 780 thousand years ago?
At that point our hominid ancestors were strolling around southern Africa. By then we had stone tools and the occasional use of fire. That's really recent in a hominid lineage that goes back, what 6 million years? They lived through a 3-7 kilometer asteroid impact! Can you imagine?
Good thing it didn't land a few thousand miles to the north...
Yes, but I've read that undirected panspermia (ie, just rocks diffusing out of the solar system into the galaxy at large) would take, well, forever. On the order of trillions of years.
So, it's possible that we've kicked it off already, but at this rate it's going to be a while before the galaxy's green.
Supposedly debris ejected from Earth in an asteroid impact could eventually whack into Mars and Venus.
Much more debris makes it from Mars to Earth (on the order of tons per year, mostly dust and small grains).
It seems possible, (although someone with a better grasp of orbital dynamics than I could say with certainty) that bacteria-laden rocks could make it all the way out to Titan.
If this is the case, then the whole solar system (more or less) would have long ago been exposed to terrestrial life. So even if we do find bacterial life (in some Martian hotspring or in the Venusian clouds, or radically less likely given the available energy, Titan) then it's quite likely that it will turn out to be based on the same old DNA as us.
So from this perspective, Finding life on Titan (or Mars, or Venus) wouldn't necessarily tell us anything about the likelyhood of finding life elsewhere in the galaxy.
I've read that we hit a Hubbert's peak for plutonium in about 30-40 years, so depressingly enough, even nuclear (fission) power isn't a long term solution.
Whoops, I meant 2mb per minute. Doh.
I noticed this comment in the mission blog:y .html
http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/statustextonl
"About 24 MB of data is being played back from Odyssey.
It will take about 12 minutes to get all the information, officials report.
This will contain engineering data on the rover's systems and possibly some pictures."
Which makes it sound as if the bandwidth is more like 2MB per second... Odd.
O.
I'm not a programmer, but I am a professional user of 3D tools.
I've noticed that the huge advances in 3D modeling & animation packages that we saw in the late '90's, with the release of Maya, Max 1-3, Lightwave, Soft and the like seem to have come to a stop.
The most recent releases of all of these seem to be converging on the same feature sets. They're all making dull, incremental progress. At the moment, I'm wondering whether it's even worth the hassle to upgrade from Max 4 to Max 5. The only thing it really seems to offer is built in global illumination rendering, which has been available as a plugin for a while.
I'm wondering what the next revolution in 3D authoring tools is going to be. I can't imagine that we'll be going down this path of diminishing returns forever.
One possibility seems to be true WYSIWYG realtime rendering using the coming generation of floating point accurate 3D cards. Another seems to be automation of character animation (embedding simple AI into the skeletons)...
I'd question if it's worth the bother to simply replicate the existing functionality of mature, static programs. If it's a new project, you could rethink what a 3D package is supposed to do and make a real leap.
What do you all think it would take to refresh the 3D tools world.
It's possible to synthesize a very, very wide dynamic range with a digital camera. You tripod mount it and shoot multiple exposures at a range of apertures. This gives you a wide sampling of the light in the scene (from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights). Then you bring the images into a program like Paul Debevec's HDRShop http://www.debevec.org/HDRShop/ and composite them together. You wind up with a High Dynamic Range image that represents luminosity far beyond what your monitor can display. I'm looking forward to cameras that have this as an automatic feature; you click the shutter button and it rapidly takes a dozen images from f2.2 to f18 or so and saves them into a floating point format. You would take the image home and decide how you wanted to expose it that evening, as you sat at your computer
If the everett/wheeler interpretation is true (ie, quantum states never "collapse", the universe branches into as many variants as are necessary to express every outcome) then time travel (into the past) is just a special case of ordinary time travel (into the future, at 1 second per second). By travelling into the past you'd be hopping over into a new universe (one where you showed up), not the universe you left (where you clearly never did show up). An excellent description of this notion can be found in David Deutsch's book, "the fabric of reality"