When I showed Drexler's original NAS paper to my grandfather, a physicist who get his Ph.D. under Millikan in 1932, his reaction was, "Hurrumpph, this is pretty presumptious!" And then went on about how alpha helix had been synthesised, but that's a long way from what Drexler was talking about. He died before STMs and the like came on the scene. He still would have "hurrumpphed."
It really is amazing to live in a time of such progress and have the means to observe it, and occasionally participate.
Even the Earth's moon has something of this sort. If I remember right, there's very very thin gaseous Sodium and Potassium (ions?). I think it's heavy enough to stick around for a while.
I thought that Peter's dark matter object in the George thread in Coalescent sounded a lot like the photino birds of the Xeelee saga. I'm far from tired of that universe, so I'm glad to see more.
I really enjoyed how the Regina and George threads finally merged in the first book. Baxter is one of those authors who is good at keeping a lot of things going on at once without getting lost.
I was looking at the math section and glad to find an introduction to unitarity, but I wonder if someone who needs an introduction to complex numbers, polynomials, matrices, etc., is going to be able to absorb quantum mechanics in the same read. However, since my mathematical background only covers the first n, where n < page_count, pages of that chapter, it's probably a good call not to make assumptions and start from the beginning. Besides many of us with mathematical backgrounds, like me, get rusty after years of work which doesn't call for much math.
I heartily agree with other posts that this stuff looks like good wikipaedia fodder, probably across many entries. I also wonder if some of this might be able to contribute to Eric Weisstein's sites. He still has quite a few entries that can be added to.
You've got it all wrong. There was never intended to by an "administrative body" to manage the content of the system. We were just going to provide the container for everyone to put their stuff into.
The Xanadu hypertext system that emerged was designed around protocols that anyone could use. We wanted other software to suppliment ours. While not nearly as function rich, the Web is a single network, as you say, because of the existence of common protocols. In that regard we were no different.
Were the HUGE difference lies between Xanadu and the Web is in the the areas of automatic reverse links (multi-way actually), persistent data (no broken links--ever), and no manual replication of data, just prudent caching and backup managed by the software. "Mirroring," as such, was a built in feature of the system. This way there was never any ambiguity about which copy was the original--there were no real copies.
There are too many other differences to mention here.
As for any psychiatric determinations, we were all a bit nuts. Even pondering this sort of system, let alone spending years working on it, requires one to be a bit off kilter. Many of my 10 years with the project were at best only partly compensated. I was there because I thought it was important. I think most of us still do.
We actually found ourselves having trouble getting "normal" people to understand what we were up to.
A frequent reponse was, "You mean it's like a foo," where foo would be some other known technology of the time. Things like tapes or early public access data services.
We did suffer for a while with that namespace collision. Only later did we acquire a programmer with roller skates.
None of my programming collegues looked like Olivia Newton John ("Olivia Neutron Bomb"). That might have been a good though; we had enough distractions as it was. Some of our associates though...
I often wish I'd kept better contact.
While tardigrades aren't killed by exposure to a space environment, they aren't exactly alive in it. They reanimate when put back in their prefered environment.
What makes the extremophile archea interesting is that they really do "live" in the extreme salty, pH, temperature, radiation, etc. environments. For instance, the oceans that seem to exist in places like Europa are probably very salty.
Check out the object on the right edge toward the bottom of the xlarge picture. It looks remarkably like a spiral galaxy seen edge on. If I understand this image correctly that galaxy wouldn't be visible in the visible through that cloud. If so, it must be terrifically bright in the IR.
That depends on one's point of view. One can also take the position that one role of a technological civilization is to provide a vector to transmit its home planet's biosphere off-planet as a survival mechanism. Just come back in a few million years to see what the adaptive radiation into new environments has led to.
Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever.
--
Konstantin Tsiolkovsy
Ignoring for the moment the question of the existence of any real opposition media in this country...
If anything, the "liberal print media" should be expected to promote trustworthy voting methods during this election cycle. If the "conservatives" were out, they'd be pushing the same thing, not saying, "just trust us."
I guess the "liberal print media" is finally coming into line with all those conservatives in academia.
I'm refering to such places as the assigned protest areas outside the party conventions, the area on the University of Arizona campus where it's OK to preach, and the labeled "First Amendment Area" next to the restrooms at the Muir Woods National Monument.
Never mind byzantine statements by grade school principals over the years about student free speach, these are becoming official policy.
1) Did the police put themselves in a situation where pushing was likely by getting closer to/more mixed up with the crowd than they needed to? "Come on... I dare you..."
2) The crowd probably wasn't in a First Amendment Zone anyway.
I just read the Corante article, with particular attention to the home viewing part. Since this seems to be about copyright in general, the question of printed material comes to mind. Will it be illegal to read a book and skip over the boring parts, like I might with a movie? What about reading a textbook out of order from the authors original intent? This could present a problem with school reading assignments.
I have a hard time imagining that things could become that preposterous with printed material, but media is media, right?
I'd like to think I'm just being silly.
Could be useful in some harsh environments
on
Fluid Logic Chips
·
· Score: 1
It seems that like mechanical microdevices, fluid devices could be resistant to such things as high radiation environments. Sometimes survivability is more important than speed. While I don't have a reference handy, it seems to me that fluid devices might even have an advantage over mechanical devices when mechanical shock resistance is important. While it may interrupt operations, the device wouldn't have any small gears to break off. I'd be interested in hearing about the vulnerabilities of these devices.
PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News
Number 691 July 7, 2004 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein
SWITCHABLE NANOTUBE DIODES made by scientists at the research arm of General Electric combine the practical electrical properties ofcarbon nanotubes (ability to carry high currents; ability to emit
light) with the flexibility of being changed over from a p-n type of diode (allowing current to flow in one direction only) to an n-p diode type (allowing current only in the opposite direction). Most solid state transistors are three-terminal devices: current comes in at one terminal (the source) and exits at a second terminal (the
drain) if a third terminal (the gate) carries a certain voltage, which has the effect of electrostatically clearing out a realm for charge carriers to flow through. In the GE device, the "realm" is a single-walled carbon nanotube (NT), while the "gate" is actually two separate gates located beneath the NT. These split gates can
electrostatically dope the two ends of the NT in such a way that current will flow in only one direction or only in the other depending on
the gate voltages. If you count the source, drain, two gate electrodes, and another electrode attached to an underlying silicon substrate, the device overall has five terminals. Diodes are
intrinsically simpler than transistors, but up till now more work has gone into developing NT transistors than for NT diodes. The GE researchers (contact Ji-Ung Lee, leeji@research.ge.com) expect their device to function as both a field effect transistor (FET) or as a light emitting diode (LED). Because of its ability to carry high currents, and because the company in question is GE, it might also find applications in power electronics, where huge currents and voltages are to be found. (Lee et al., Applied Physics Letters, 5 July 2004, cover story; text at
www.aip.org/physnews/select)
PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE is a digest of physics news items arising from physics meetings, physics journals, newspapers and magazines, and other news sources. It is provided free of charge as a way of broadly disseminating information about physics and physicists. For that reason, you are free to post it, if you like, where others can read it, providing only that you credit AIP. Physics News Update appears approximately once a week.
Unfortunately, the link in the article is for subscribers only.
There's a news item at
GE's site, but it only says about as much as the article linked in the original posting.
Slashdot Mirror
It really is amazing to live in a time of such progress and have the means to observe it, and occasionally participate.
Even the Earth's moon has something of this sort. If I remember right, there's very very thin gaseous Sodium and Potassium (ions?). I think it's heavy enough to stick around for a while.
I really enjoyed how the Regina and George threads finally merged in the first book. Baxter is one of those authors who is good at keeping a lot of things going on at once without getting lost.
I'm looking forward to reading the rest.
Deliver the unpopped kernels to the site, cover tightly with aluminum foil, and then use a giant airborne laser to provide the heat.
My mistake. Must have had the old brain swapped out. Watching to much "24" will do that.
I was looking at the math section and glad to find an introduction to unitarity, but I wonder if someone who needs an introduction to complex numbers, polynomials, matrices, etc., is going to be able to absorb quantum mechanics in the same read. However, since my mathematical background only covers the first n, where n < page_count, pages of that chapter, it's probably a good call not to make assumptions and start from the beginning. Besides many of us with mathematical backgrounds, like me, get rusty after years of work which doesn't call for much math.
I heartily agree with other posts that this stuff looks like good wikipaedia fodder, probably across many entries. I also wonder if some of this might be able to contribute to Eric Weisstein's sites. He still has quite a few entries that can be added to.
This could present a problem for cultures and religions that forbid hair cuts.
The Xanadu hypertext system that emerged was designed around protocols that anyone could use. We wanted other software to suppliment ours. While not nearly as function rich, the Web is a single network, as you say, because of the existence of common protocols. In that regard we were no different.
Were the HUGE difference lies between Xanadu and the Web is in the the areas of automatic reverse links (multi-way actually), persistent data (no broken links--ever), and no manual replication of data, just prudent caching and backup managed by the software. "Mirroring," as such, was a built in feature of the system. This way there was never any ambiguity about which copy was the original--there were no real copies.
There are too many other differences to mention here.
As for any psychiatric determinations, we were all a bit nuts. Even pondering this sort of system, let alone spending years working on it, requires one to be a bit off kilter. Many of my 10 years with the project were at best only partly compensated. I was there because I thought it was important. I think most of us still do.
We actually found ourselves having trouble getting "normal" people to understand what we were up to. A frequent reponse was, "You mean it's like a foo," where foo would be some other known technology of the time. Things like tapes or early public access data services.
We did suffer for a while with that namespace collision. Only later did we acquire a programmer with roller skates.
None of my programming collegues looked like Olivia Newton John ("Olivia Neutron Bomb"). That might have been a good though; we had enough distractions as it was. Some of our associates though...
I often wish I'd kept better contact.
This is a geocentric system after all.
What makes the extremophile archea interesting is that they really do "live" in the extreme salty, pH, temperature, radiation, etc. environments. For instance, the oceans that seem to exist in places like Europa are probably very salty.
Check out the object on the right edge toward the bottom of the xlarge picture. It looks remarkably like a spiral galaxy seen edge on. If I understand this image correctly that galaxy wouldn't be visible in the visible through that cloud. If so, it must be terrifically bright in the IR.
Obviously the keyboard makers are at fault for producing such blatantly enabling technology. Let them get sued.
Looks like a hardware announcement.
Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever.
-- Konstantin Tsiolkovsy
Don't forget tumbleweed.
If anything, the "liberal print media" should be expected to promote trustworthy voting methods during this election cycle. If the "conservatives" were out, they'd be pushing the same thing, not saying, "just trust us."
I guess the "liberal print media" is finally coming into line with all those conservatives in academia.
I'm refering to such places as the assigned protest areas outside the party conventions, the area on the University of Arizona campus where it's OK to preach, and the labeled "First Amendment Area" next to the restrooms at the Muir Woods National Monument.
Never mind byzantine statements by grade school principals over the years about student free speach, these are becoming official policy.
The subject says it all.
1) Did the police put themselves in a situation where pushing was likely by getting closer to/more mixed up with the crowd than they needed to? "Come on... I dare you..."
2) The crowd probably wasn't in a First Amendment Zone anyway.
I just read the Corante article, with particular attention to the home viewing part. Since this seems to be about copyright in general, the question of printed material comes to mind. Will it be illegal to read a book and skip over the boring parts, like I might with a movie? What about reading a textbook out of order from the authors original intent? This could present a problem with school reading assignments.
I have a hard time imagining that things could become that preposterous with printed material, but media is media, right?
I'd like to think I'm just being silly.
It seems that like mechanical microdevices, fluid devices could be resistant to such things as high radiation environments. Sometimes survivability is more important than speed. While I don't have a reference handy, it seems to me that fluid devices might even have an advantage over mechanical devices when mechanical shock resistance is important. While it may interrupt operations, the device wouldn't have any small gears to break off. I'd be interested in hearing about the vulnerabilities of these devices.
Folks around the world have been producing antiparticles for quite some time. They're also created by natural processes, but don't last long in high matter density environments.
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News
Number 691 July 7, 2004 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein
SWITCHABLE NANOTUBE DIODES made by scientists at the research arm of General Electric combine the practical electrical properties ofcarbon nanotubes (ability to carry high currents; ability to emit light) with the flexibility of being changed over from a p-n type of diode (allowing current to flow in one direction only) to an n-p diode type (allowing current only in the opposite direction). Most solid state transistors are three-terminal devices: current comes in at one terminal (the source) and exits at a second terminal (the drain) if a third terminal (the gate) carries a certain voltage, which has the effect of electrostatically clearing out a realm for charge carriers to flow through. In the GE device, the "realm" is a single-walled carbon nanotube (NT), while the "gate" is actually two separate gates located beneath the NT. These split gates can electrostatically dope the two ends of the NT in such a way that current will flow in only one direction or only in the other depending on the gate voltages. If you count the source, drain, two gate electrodes, and another electrode attached to an underlying silicon substrate, the device overall has five terminals. Diodes are intrinsically simpler than transistors, but up till now more work has gone into developing NT transistors than for NT diodes. The GE researchers (contact Ji-Ung Lee, leeji@research.ge.com) expect their device to function as both a field effect transistor (FET) or as a light emitting diode (LED). Because of its ability to carry high currents, and because the company in question is GE, it might also find applications in power electronics, where huge currents and voltages are to be found. (Lee et al., Applied Physics Letters, 5 July 2004, cover story; text at www.aip.org/physnews/select)
PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE is a digest of physics news items arising from physics meetings, physics journals, newspapers and magazines, and other news sources. It is provided free of charge as a way of broadly disseminating information about physics and physicists. For that reason, you are free to post it, if you like, where others can read it, providing only that you credit AIP. Physics News Update appears approximately once a week.
Unfortunately, the link in the article is for subscribers only.
There's a news item at GE's site, but it only says about as much as the article linked in the original posting.