After seeing it in Brazil, the mayor of Los Angeles helped implement a system of express busses using dedicated lanes and timed lights.
Ottawa, Canada has done something similar with their Transitway. Ottawa is a rather low-density city, spreading out quite a distance east and west along the Ottawa River, and expanding into new suburbs to the south. Consequently, it can't really afford to support a subway/elevated rail system. Instead, they run regular buses on special lanes of existing roads and highways. Outside the crowded downtown, the city has built separate roads and bridges for much of the Transitway. These separate routes mean that the Transitway buses don't even have to interact with regular traffic much of the time.
The net result is a relatively inexpensive mass transit backbone, to which it is extremely easy and inexpensive to add capacity--and which is relatively resistant to regular roadway traffic. (I lived in Ottawa about three years ago. It was faster for me to take the Transitway to work out at the airport than it would have been to drive. If one counts the time saved not looking for parking, most trips downtown were also shorter--and I never had to worry about finding a designated driver.) In addition, if the city ever feels the need to upgrade to a rail-based system, it already has rights-of-way on the surface for many of the routes.
Aside: Ottawa recently added a light rail line across the southern part of the city, to take advantage of an otherwise unused stretch of track. The new light rail system is called the O-Train. Please try to hold on to your jokes.
True, without question. I don't know whether you mean it as an offhand remark, but what you say is true as a matter of doctrine (official or otherwise) for many fighting forces. A dead enemy soldier is a one less soldier shooting at you. A maimed soldier is two fewer soldiers shooting at you--because somebody has to carry the wounded guy. Additionally, there are major costs in terms of manpower and materiel--not to mention morale--associated with treating a badly injured soldier.
Why do you think there are so many small landmines? They're cheaper to make, sure, but they also are just enough explosive to take off a foot.
Einstien's handwriting is very interesting. Notice how he dots his i's and how small his writing is. This means that he has an exceptional eye for detail, and he has an unreal imgination.
Hm. Look at his small handwriting and dotted i's, I conclude that he had better than average eyesight, and a primary school teacher who rapped his knuckles with a ruler every time he forgot to dot an i or cross a t.
I conclude that he had an eye for detail and a healthy imagination based on what's in his writing, not how the letters are formed.
Re:Two funny (sad) arithmetic stories
on
Making Change
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· Score: 1
>How old are you, anyway?
22. And a flight instructor.
I should know better than to ask questions like that on Slashdot. I should realize that at 23, I'm older than a lot of posters...;)
I didn't realize that circular slide rules were still used in aviation, but it makes perfect sense. I'm also glad you mentioned it; it's a neat bit of trivia. (If anyone reading this is interested, here is a link to pretty pictures of dozens of slide rule watch faces.) In retrospect, the physics department display I mentioned in a previous post--the one containing a circular slide rule--also did say that it had been used aboard a WWII bomber.
Give me a problem (within reason) and I can give you an estimate, usually within 5% of the correct answer...in a few seconds.
Yep. I can do that too--although I usually state a 10% margin for error, just because I like a little more breathing room. It's really scary (and a little bit sad) how many people are dumbfounded by that sort of ability. Interesting that you should mention chemistry--I just finished my B.Sc. in a chemistry program, and nothing teaches the value of sanity checks like a spectroscopy course.
Cheers.
Re:Two funny (sad) arithmetic stories
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
Actually, another frightening thing is how few people can use a circular slide rule.
Erm. How old are you, anyway?;)
I just finished a B.Sc. in a physics-related discipline, and I've never been called upon to use a slide rule. For novelty's sake, I'm familiar with the principles of their operation, and I can usually get the right answer out of one--but to be frightened that few people can use one is a little much.
Also--circular? Those were pretty rare, even back in 'the day'. I use my dad's old linear rule, but the only place I've even seen a circular one is in the 'history of computation' display case in the Physics building...
The one place a slide rule really shines is as a teaching tool--it definitely makes you respect your exponents in scientific notation. (I know a number of people who regularly gain or lose orders of magnitude when they don't notice they've fat-fingered the exponent on a scientific calculator.)
Clearly, they're waiting for some sort of technology where the blind can just carry around a 500 pound scanner (with convieniant wrist strap)...
You mean like this one? (It has a belt loop, rather than a wrist strap. From its size, I'd say it weighs in at under a pound.) The Bank of Canada has designed and circulated new currency specifically considering the visually impaired. The CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind) lends readers to the blind free of charge.
In all likelyhood even if we irradiate the probe, UV pulverize anything that was on it, there will still be traces of some bacteria that would introduce contamination into the system. I am not sure we would relaly ever be able to determine if the life we found was an evolution of amino acids to protienes to cells, or a contamination of natural earth organisms.
Nah, we're actually pretty good at brutally sterilizing scientific and medical tools. As long as your equipment is designed with easy cleaning in mind, introducing contaminants shouldn't be able to happen.
Also, we needn't worry about being tricked by a false positive--if anything recognizably modern grows, we'll know it is contamination.
The only trouble now is finding someone who wants to fund this experiment for a few million years--evolution is a very slow process.
These people literally assembled a lifeform (or does a virus not count??)
Nope, a virus does not count. A virus can't replicate itself without commandeering the cellular machinery of a real lifeform (a bacterium, for example. Or a human being. Or something in between.)
A virus is just a strand or few of DNA or RNA in a simple protein wrapper. The fact that the group in the article could assemble one is still a monumental accomplishment, but we're a long way from being able to put together a living creature from scratch. (Cells are really complicated things, with a lot of tiny parts.)
...research into possible neutrino/hadron shielding materials and techniques.
The problem is that this technique is so grossly, extravagantly, embarrassingly inefficient. A neutrino beam can (and will, in this scheme) pass through a good fraction of the Earth without blinking. Astronomers build neutrino detectors on Earth at great cost and inconvenience because (among other reasons) most neutrinos from fusion the Sun's core travel directly to Earth without interacting with any of the matter in between.
This device would be so horrifically expensive because the vast majority (ninety-nine point several nines percent) of neutrinos are lost to space, out the other side of the Earth. To block a significant fraction of the neutrino beam would require a shield with tremendous density or thickness. We're talking several kilometres of neutron star material (at a density of tons per teaspoon) or light years of lead. Neither solution is particularly practical. Maybe a few decades down the road you could construct artificial black holes, and place them beneath your nuclear stockpile.
As we understand neutrino interactions, they essentially cannot be stopped (they won't pass through the black holes mentioned above--but we can't build those yet.) Your best bets for defense are to keep your nukes well hidded--so your adversaries can't target them--or launching a first strike--use your nukes to destroy this large, obvious, easy-to-hit neutrino generation facility. (An accelerator ring 1000 km across can't be concealed--heck, it won't fit in most countries, let alone be paid for--and it can't be moved to a place of safety.)
If he can succeed, the long-term implications are fantastic. Internet will become too cheap to meter. Inexpensive laser and other types of LOS relays will join windmills and silos as familiar rural landmarks.
If he can succeed, the long-term implications are fantastic. Electricity will become too cheap to meter. Inexpensive home nuclear reactors will join windmills and silos as familiar rural landmarks.
Right, but there's no net benefit to changing currency sizes, cutting corners, et cetera for the blind and Braile isn't durable enough.
It's true; it's difficult to prevent the blind from being ripped off, short of having a trusted companion (or a portable device) verify the bank note denomination.
On the other hand, if different denominations are on notes of different sizes, the blind could certainly verify that a note was on the correct size and texture of paper--not a bad test. Also, sizing, notching, or corner-cutting new bank notes will help the sighted, because it will make 'raising' a note virtually impossible.
Soccer is not just a game that can be "solved" like checkers...It requires a much higher level of artificial intelligence (decision making, goal-based planning, etc.)
It would be very neat to see something like this happen, and I know 47 years is a long time, but it's still an incredibly ambitious goal
So, is your choice of words deliberate, or the result of subliminal suggestion?
...Blu-Ray group (0.1nm)... ...AOD, or Advanced Optical Disc using 0.6nm...
Er. Check your numbers and units. Conventional DVD uses a red 650 nm laser. The new blue laser formats operate at a wavelength of 450 nm. (For reference, CDs use a near IR laser at 780 nm.) 0.1 nm is the approximate size of a single atom.
You might be thinking of the substrate thickness. There is a layer of clear plastic that protects the actual recorded surface from the cruel world around it. This substrate is 0.6 mm (millimetres) thick for classic DVD, and 0.1 mm for the blue laser discs. (The thinner substrate allows you to get closer to the recorded data, but may also make the new discs more vulnerable to scratch damage.)
While the adaptation of colors and revising the layout of the dollar bill is a nice deterrent, there is one thing that would be nice to see: dollar bills that the blind could use.
Here's a link to a detailed list of features that can be used to make currency more accessible to the visually impaired. There's a discussion of pros and cons for each. (For example--Braille or other raised markings seem like a good idea, but they can wear off. Also, when stacking large amounts of currency, raised markings can cause trouble.)
The Appendix to the report also has a list of features that were rejected outright for practical reasons. These include (among many) microencapsulated odorants (different denominations smell different) and acoustic effects from the edge of the bill (different denominations sound different when you blow across their edges.)
If cutting the corner off a bill makes it a five, then give me a pair of scissors and presto - blind people think I'm giving them a five.
You cut fewer corners on higher denomination bills, so that trimming a bill will decrease its apparent value.
For example, no cuts on a $100 bill, lower right on a $50 bill, lower and upper right for $20, lower left and right for $10, lower left and right, and upper right for $5, and all four corners for $1.
Wider adoption of a one dollar coin would also help in the States--it could reduce significantly the number of bills one must handle.
I mean, you can actually have your *mother* operate a computer today.
Do we have to keep using this tired old notion of little old (middle-aged, for the/. crowd) ladies cringing in terror when faced with a computer?
My mother has a B.Math in CS, acquired more than a quarter century ago. Her father is pushing eighty, and he upgrades his computer more often than I do. When he's not busy golfing, he's scanning photographs for digital retouching. (In his age bracket, a man who can remove double chins and smooth wrinkles is very popular.)
The notion that women and/or the elderly are unable to use computers is a generalization that just doesn't hold much water anymore. Maybe some of these people are frightened of (or frustrated with) computers because their exposure to technology is through the 'typical'* arrogant, smug, condescending/.er--concealing his embarrassment over being unable to get a girlfriend behind clouds of technobabble.
*How does it feel to be the target of an unfair stereotype?
That's different. In the Real World, doing that will mean your CDs will be stolen, or perhaps damaged by users who are not careful. On the Internet, you can share without risk.
My local library has been lending (for free) compact discs for years. Just like books. (For what it's worth I'm in Canada, which may or may not be considered part of the Real World.)
.. it is quite another to have the status and prestige of a multinational to implement them...
As someone once remarked to me, "No-one gets sacked for buying Microsoft software"...
You know, that phrase used to be "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Big Blue sold (often) overpriced and underperforming big iron. How? Because their legendary sales force could use that very phrase.
Now, IBM isn't quite the juggernaut it once was--that torch has been passed to Microsoft, for the time being. They still do a damn good sales job, and they've been forced to improve their products and prices through a ton of competitive pressure. You want the status and prestige of a multinational? A company that can support their products 24/7? The stability of a name that goes back for decades?
Hint: Think IBM. Oh, and they're selling Linux stuff.
What would REALLY be neat is if they could make microphones that weren't affected by room dimensions, walls, etc.
Yep. You need to get one of them newfangled psychic microphones--one of the ones that detects what sound you want to hear, rather than recording the sound that is actually incident upon it. Advanced versions of the psychic microphone will also adjust for errors in pitch (particularly for amateur vocalists) and can perform guitar solos.
Seriously, what you want to do can be done (to some extent) in software. I don't know of any hardware that will automagically figure out what's wrong with the acoustics of your room and correct for it.
Then I remembered that European countries have the odd habit of using decimal points to seperate thousands rather than commas... blah.
As I understand it, SI recognizes the ambiguity of the decimal vs. the place value separator. I believe that the encouraged convention is to use a nonbreaking space every three digits to mark place values--this way, either a comma or a period marks a decimal. No ambiguity.
As an aside, the European system makes more sense from a design standpoint. You use the smallest possible symbol (period) to mark groups of three digits. The most important place value you tag with a larger symbol (comma), so it stands out. For the record, I grew up in Canada, and we use the 'American' convention for decimals.
Of course, real/.ers should use scientific notation for everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Word to the wise--since the invasion of Iraq is over now, we're allowed to call them French Bots again.
That's pretty narrow, even for a bike lane. ;)
Ottawa, Canada has done something similar with their Transitway. Ottawa is a rather low-density city, spreading out quite a distance east and west along the Ottawa River, and expanding into new suburbs to the south. Consequently, it can't really afford to support a subway/elevated rail system. Instead, they run regular buses on special lanes of existing roads and highways. Outside the crowded downtown, the city has built separate roads and bridges for much of the Transitway. These separate routes mean that the Transitway buses don't even have to interact with regular traffic much of the time.
The net result is a relatively inexpensive mass transit backbone, to which it is extremely easy and inexpensive to add capacity--and which is relatively resistant to regular roadway traffic. (I lived in Ottawa about three years ago. It was faster for me to take the Transitway to work out at the airport than it would have been to drive. If one counts the time saved not looking for parking, most trips downtown were also shorter--and I never had to worry about finding a designated driver.) In addition, if the city ever feels the need to upgrade to a rail-based system, it already has rights-of-way on the surface for many of the routes.
Aside: Ottawa recently added a light rail line across the southern part of the city, to take advantage of an otherwise unused stretch of track. The new light rail system is called the O-Train. Please try to hold on to your jokes.
True, without question. I don't know whether you mean it as an offhand remark, but what you say is true as a matter of doctrine (official or otherwise) for many fighting forces. A dead enemy soldier is a one less soldier shooting at you. A maimed soldier is two fewer soldiers shooting at you--because somebody has to carry the wounded guy. Additionally, there are major costs in terms of manpower and materiel--not to mention morale--associated with treating a badly injured soldier.
Why do you think there are so many small landmines? They're cheaper to make, sure, but they also are just enough explosive to take off a foot.
You could diamond coat the body work.
Hm. Look at his small handwriting and dotted i's, I conclude that he had better than average eyesight, and a primary school teacher who rapped his knuckles with a ruler every time he forgot to dot an i or cross a t.
I conclude that he had an eye for detail and a healthy imagination based on what's in his writing, not how the letters are formed.
22. And a flight instructor.
I should know better than to ask questions like that on Slashdot. I should realize that at 23, I'm older than a lot of posters... ;)
I didn't realize that circular slide rules were still used in aviation, but it makes perfect sense. I'm also glad you mentioned it; it's a neat bit of trivia. (If anyone reading this is interested, here is a link to pretty pictures of dozens of slide rule watch faces.) In retrospect, the physics department display I mentioned in a previous post--the one containing a circular slide rule--also did say that it had been used aboard a WWII bomber.
Give me a problem (within reason) and I can give you an estimate, usually within 5% of the correct answer...in a few seconds.
Yep. I can do that too--although I usually state a 10% margin for error, just because I like a little more breathing room. It's really scary (and a little bit sad) how many people are dumbfounded by that sort of ability. Interesting that you should mention chemistry--I just finished my B.Sc. in a chemistry program, and nothing teaches the value of sanity checks like a spectroscopy course.
Cheers.
Erm. How old are you, anyway? ;)
I just finished a B.Sc. in a physics-related discipline, and I've never been called upon to use a slide rule. For novelty's sake, I'm familiar with the principles of their operation, and I can usually get the right answer out of one--but to be frightened that few people can use one is a little much.
Also--circular? Those were pretty rare, even back in 'the day'. I use my dad's old linear rule, but the only place I've even seen a circular one is in the 'history of computation' display case in the Physics building...
The one place a slide rule really shines is as a teaching tool--it definitely makes you respect your exponents in scientific notation. (I know a number of people who regularly gain or lose orders of magnitude when they don't notice they've fat-fingered the exponent on a scientific calculator.)
You mean like this one? (It has a belt loop, rather than a wrist strap. From its size, I'd say it weighs in at under a pound.) The Bank of Canada has designed and circulated new currency specifically considering the visually impaired. The CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind) lends readers to the blind free of charge.
My point exactly.
Nah, we're actually pretty good at brutally sterilizing scientific and medical tools. As long as your equipment is designed with easy cleaning in mind, introducing contaminants shouldn't be able to happen.
Also, we needn't worry about being tricked by a false positive--if anything recognizably modern grows, we'll know it is contamination.
The only trouble now is finding someone who wants to fund this experiment for a few million years--evolution is a very slow process.
Nope, a virus does not count. A virus can't replicate itself without commandeering the cellular machinery of a real lifeform (a bacterium, for example. Or a human being. Or something in between.)
A virus is just a strand or few of DNA or RNA in a simple protein wrapper. The fact that the group in the article could assemble one is still a monumental accomplishment, but we're a long way from being able to put together a living creature from scratch. (Cells are really complicated things, with a lot of tiny parts.)
The problem is that this technique is so grossly, extravagantly, embarrassingly inefficient. A neutrino beam can (and will, in this scheme) pass through a good fraction of the Earth without blinking. Astronomers build neutrino detectors on Earth at great cost and inconvenience because (among other reasons) most neutrinos from fusion the Sun's core travel directly to Earth without interacting with any of the matter in between.
This device would be so horrifically expensive because the vast majority (ninety-nine point several nines percent) of neutrinos are lost to space, out the other side of the Earth. To block a significant fraction of the neutrino beam would require a shield with tremendous density or thickness. We're talking several kilometres of neutron star material (at a density of tons per teaspoon) or light years of lead. Neither solution is particularly practical. Maybe a few decades down the road you could construct artificial black holes, and place them beneath your nuclear stockpile.
As we understand neutrino interactions, they essentially cannot be stopped (they won't pass through the black holes mentioned above--but we can't build those yet.) Your best bets for defense are to keep your nukes well hidded--so your adversaries can't target them--or launching a first strike--use your nukes to destroy this large, obvious, easy-to-hit neutrino generation facility. (An accelerator ring 1000 km across can't be concealed--heck, it won't fit in most countries, let alone be paid for--and it can't be moved to a place of safety.)
If he can succeed, the long-term implications are fantastic. Electricity will become too cheap to meter. Inexpensive home nuclear reactors will join windmills and silos as familiar rural landmarks.
Too cheap to meter, indeed.
It's true; it's difficult to prevent the blind from being ripped off, short of having a trusted companion (or a portable device) verify the bank note denomination.
On the other hand, if different denominations are on notes of different sizes, the blind could certainly verify that a note was on the correct size and texture of paper--not a bad test. Also, sizing, notching, or corner-cutting new bank notes will help the sighted, because it will make 'raising' a note virtually impossible.
It would be very neat to see something like this happen, and I know 47 years is a long time, but it's still an incredibly ambitious goal
So, is your choice of words deliberate, or the result of subliminal suggestion?
Such a change in the notes could also be accompanied by a small change in their size or aspect ratio, to avoid confusion with old notes.
Really, there's nothing that prevents an unscrupulous individual from lying about the value of current notes, either.
Er. Check your numbers and units. Conventional DVD uses a red 650 nm laser. The new blue laser formats operate at a wavelength of 450 nm. (For reference, CDs use a near IR laser at 780 nm.) 0.1 nm is the approximate size of a single atom.
You might be thinking of the substrate thickness. There is a layer of clear plastic that protects the actual recorded surface from the cruel world around it. This substrate is 0.6 mm (millimetres) thick for classic DVD, and 0.1 mm for the blue laser discs. (The thinner substrate allows you to get closer to the recorded data, but may also make the new discs more vulnerable to scratch damage.)
Here's a link to a detailed list of features that can be used to make currency more accessible to the visually impaired. There's a discussion of pros and cons for each. (For example--Braille or other raised markings seem like a good idea, but they can wear off. Also, when stacking large amounts of currency, raised markings can cause trouble.)
The Appendix to the report also has a list of features that were rejected outright for practical reasons. These include (among many) microencapsulated odorants (different denominations smell different) and acoustic effects from the edge of the bill (different denominations sound different when you blow across their edges.)
You cut fewer corners on higher denomination bills, so that trimming a bill will decrease its apparent value.
For example, no cuts on a $100 bill, lower right on a $50 bill, lower and upper right for $20, lower left and right for $10, lower left and right, and upper right for $5, and all four corners for $1.
Wider adoption of a one dollar coin would also help in the States--it could reduce significantly the number of bills one must handle.
Do we have to keep using this tired old notion of little old (middle-aged, for the /. crowd) ladies cringing in terror when faced with a computer?
My mother has a B.Math in CS, acquired more than a quarter century ago. Her father is pushing eighty, and he upgrades his computer more often than I do. When he's not busy golfing, he's scanning photographs for digital retouching. (In his age bracket, a man who can remove double chins and smooth wrinkles is very popular.)
The notion that women and/or the elderly are unable to use computers is a generalization that just doesn't hold much water anymore. Maybe some of these people are frightened of (or frustrated with) computers because their exposure to technology is through the 'typical'* arrogant, smug, condescending /.er--concealing his embarrassment over being unable to get a girlfriend behind clouds of technobabble.
*How does it feel to be the target of an unfair stereotype?
My local library has been lending (for free) compact discs for years. Just like books. (For what it's worth I'm in Canada, which may or may not be considered part of the Real World.)
As someone once remarked to me, "No-one gets sacked for buying Microsoft software"...
You know, that phrase used to be "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Big Blue sold (often) overpriced and underperforming big iron. How? Because their legendary sales force could use that very phrase.
Now, IBM isn't quite the juggernaut it once was--that torch has been passed to Microsoft, for the time being. They still do a damn good sales job, and they've been forced to improve their products and prices through a ton of competitive pressure. You want the status and prestige of a multinational? A company that can support their products 24/7? The stability of a name that goes back for decades?
Hint: Think IBM. Oh, and they're selling Linux stuff.
Yep. You need to get one of them newfangled psychic microphones--one of the ones that detects what sound you want to hear, rather than recording the sound that is actually incident upon it. Advanced versions of the psychic microphone will also adjust for errors in pitch (particularly for amateur vocalists) and can perform guitar solos.
Seriously, what you want to do can be done (to some extent) in software. I don't know of any hardware that will automagically figure out what's wrong with the acoustics of your room and correct for it.
As I understand it, SI recognizes the ambiguity of the decimal vs. the place value separator. I believe that the encouraged convention is to use a nonbreaking space every three digits to mark place values--this way, either a comma or a period marks a decimal. No ambiguity.
As an aside, the European system makes more sense from a design standpoint. You use the smallest possible symbol (period) to mark groups of three digits. The most important place value you tag with a larger symbol (comma), so it stands out. For the record, I grew up in Canada, and we use the 'American' convention for decimals.
Of course, real /.ers should use scientific notation for everything.