I happened to play with an AFM for an introductory lab course some years ago. What i remember is that by bouncing laser-light of the tip onto a 4-quadrant detector you could detect both the deflection and the twist of the tip. By scanning the tip sideways you get a twist depending on the local 'sticky-ness' of the sample, which could give some extra information about the sample.
Does somebody know why twist is a problem? I tried to look up the RevSciInstr article, but couldn't find it.
First of all the temperature sensors didn't indicate high temperatures, they just went offscale low. This probably means a wire cutting.
Secondly the computer wasn't confused by these sensors errors since they were not essential to the flight dynamics (it were temp sensors).
According to the news conference, first sensor problems were reported at 8.53, some 7 minutes before the accident. The vehicle thus didn't get out of control at first. It looks more like a slow burn-through with lead to structural failure later on.
Not even a remote chance i guess. They have parachutes and a 10 foot boom to slide out the vehicle. No chance of using that at mach 6 and a desintigrating vehicle.
Condolances to NASA....
Don't forget Otto Lilienthal, who is considered the father of gliding. He did lots of experiments with a sort of hangglider in Germany, some 10 years before the Wright Bro's.
I attended a talk some 1.5 years ago by guy from Philips NatLab (home of the CD), which was called "Mo(o)re or less?". Although the talk was extremely boring and i forgot the final conclusions i do remember some potential showstoppers he listed:
-Of course the ultimate limit of a 1 atom transistor, can't remember the date this would occur -Limited speed of signals acros the chip: If the clock frequency gets much larger a signal would require several buffer stages to reach the other side. -Capacity of wires gets more important: the interconnects don't scale at the same pace as the transistors. Their finite capacity limits clock speeds
Some non-technical reasons: -Increasing costs of new fabrication processes: each new increment is more expensive. -Limited manpower to design circuits with more and more transistors. This probably means that a larger area of the chips will consist of 'dumb' circuits like cache.
Re:Depends on the effective distance in the laser.
on
Optical Cellphones
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· Score: 2
This is total BS. Every parallel beam spreads out eventually. The angle at which it does this inversely proportional to the diameter of your beam.
If you want beam that is very narrow, it will spread out very quickly (like in a focused beam).
If you want a beam that does not spread a lot (low divergence) the diameter of the beam needs to be large (that's why they use a big WIDE telescope. This has absolutely nothing to do with the number of roundtrips in the laser cavity.
This idea is not as silly as you claim. There is even an experiment by ESA going on right now! They use optical communication (high power laser diode + telescope + complicated tracking mechanism) to transfer data between two satellites: Artemis (ComSat in GEO) and SPOT (earth observer in LEO). There is even an experiment to communication directly to the ground (telescope on the Canary Islands).
This technique might be used a lot more in future, although i agree it will not really be practical for Joe Soldier to carry a 1 meter telescope and a laser on his back.
You guy's are really considerate: fire destroys network, they do all their best to get it somewhat back to work and then you slashdot it back into oblivion.
Though the arsonist takes a huge part of the blame, i think the university also made some faults. Why put your servers in a building that burns that well? If you have so much expensive equipment, you should consider everything, including arson! A few days ago they were happy that no asbestos was released because it was removed shortly ago. But isn't asbestos a fire retarder??
Anyhow this fire is a huge problem for the university. When i was studying there 2 years ago, their biggest trouble was the financing of new buildings. They were supposed to build a new combined building for Physics, Electronics and Chemistry. When the drawings were almost finished they had to scap the whole thing. Right now several buildings are way beyond their lifetime and could technically be shut down to regulations any moment. Most buildings are already extended with temporary containers (Portacabins). And now this..... If they were a company this would certainly be their bankruptcy.
Mightbe they should offer OsamaBL a free trial version of this interesting device for installing in his camel. Look at all the possibilities, you would never loose your camel! (and so would the missile-loaded predators...)
There IS something impressive about this research. Sure, they started with some very tiny protein fragments that are biologically hardly interesting. But as the nature article (subscription probably required) shows, these tiny fragments can be synthesised and can be investigated. Once agreement between simulation and experiment is proven (which they claim), it is time to move on to the more interesting stuff.
In the beginning they will probably investigate small proteins that are interesting to biophysics people (the fundamentals behind folding). Later on, when enough people switch over from SETI, they might be able to simulate real big proteins that are interesting to biologists.
Although modded funny, i think there is a lot of truth in your statement that geeks have a mild form of autism. Its called Asperger's Syndrome, which is probably what a large part of this audience suffers from.
Read the previous discussion on Slashdot for more information. The Wired article it mentions actually opened my eyes a lot on my own situation.
I am not completely sure but i believe there is even some proof of a weak genetic link between autism and asperger.
Have a look at the source of the patent claims: Intergraph
It has extensive information about this lawsuit and a previous one, including legal docs, tech docs and some flash presentations for the technically impaired.
I believe the Japanese guy that received the prize worked at the Super-Kamiokande detector that damaged half of its photo-multiplyer tubes in a big implosion.
IANAKG (i am not a kernel guru), but as i understand the Hurd is running on top of Mach which is a microkernel. This is supposed to have some (at the moment still theoretical?) advantages such as running drivers in user space (and some potential speed improvements??).
I believe the idea is to replace Mach in the end by the more advanced L4 kernel, which is an area of active research.
Does anybody know if there are other applications for this kind of hardware except for listening to sound transmissions (radio/chatbox/intelligence)?
One of the things i could imagine is the DCF77 signal here in Europe (radio broadcast of atomic precision time at 77 kHz). Others might be GPS (although this probably is to complicated to do entirely in software).
This might get the discussion a bit off-topic, but i think you should concentrate a bit more on the root cause that prevents getting this kind of sane people in congress instead of supporting a probably hopeless battle against big money.
In my opinion this is the district-system. If votes are counted only in small regions that yield only one seat, you effectively create a two-party system. These two usually keep each other in close balance: you stay in power until you screw up and then the other party gets its chance for a few years.
Here in Europe (except for England and France?), the votes are usually counted in the whole country (usually with a threshold of a few percent). Most countries therefore have a mix of parties (green, labour, liberal, christian,...) which represents the general opinion more closely. This might also reduce the chance of big money influence.
There are probably some tricks to prevent this. You could embed the active part (the epoxy with the tiny spheres) within a layer of homogeneous material (e.g. epoxy without the spheres) and use a lens to access the inner part.
This is similar to the trick they use in CD's. At the metal layer containing the information the light is focused to a few micron. This layer is burried almost a millimeter deep inside the plastic. At the surface the beam has a much larger diameter and tiny scratches are no problem.
His team used the 32-metre Medicina radio telescope near Bologna to look for water "maser" emissions. These are telltale microwaves that might come from water in a planet's atmosphere when it is bathed in the infrared light of its star.
Microwave radiation has a wavelength of some centimeters, infrared is in the micrometer range. It is thus probably not absorption, but fluorescence they are looking at.
Seriously, I have always been wondering why they don't use this kind of technique for sensitive information. For example if you have a top secret memo on the Iraqi army, insert some tiny differences in each version of the memo. If the story leaks to the press, just look up the number of soldiers (scuds, secret wives of Saddam, etc.) it cites and kill the appropriate congres member.
I think it would take less force/momentum/energy/whatever to give it a kick in the opposite direction and let it burn up in the earth's atmosphere.
Getting it in an elliptical orbit with one part skimming the upper atmosphere would be good enough. It then only takes some patience to watch the satellite slowly getting into lower orbits and finally burn up (similar to aerobreaking at Mars, except for the final stage).
NO, the surface plasmons they mention are a combination of an electromagnetic field (=light) with electrons that oscillate at the same frequency in the metal.
These are perfectly legal solutions of Maxwell's equation and only occur on the surface (hence the name) of metals.
Angular resolution (width of your pixel on the sky) scales with (wavelength / baseline). Bigger baseline is thus better.
Sensitivity is related to the number of photons you collect, thus with the area of your telescopes. Only increasing the distance between the telescopes (your baseline) does not increase the area thus sensitivity stays the same.
This does not mean that you can increase the baseline without limits. If the number of pixels increases and you still have the same collecting area means that you have to make longer measurements to get the same number of photons per pixel (for a good S/N ratio).
Slashdot Mirror
Does somebody know why twist is a problem? I tried to look up the RevSciInstr article, but couldn't find it.
The article speculates that a scientist stole the recipe for the electrolyte and sold it (probably for a lot of money) to the competitor.
How difficult would it be to buy just one capacitor from your competitor (for $0.05), open it up and do a chemical analysis on it?
First of all the temperature sensors didn't indicate high temperatures, they just went offscale low. This probably means a wire cutting.
Secondly the computer wasn't confused by these sensors errors since they were not essential to the flight dynamics (it were temp sensors).
According to the news conference, first sensor problems were reported at 8.53, some 7 minutes before the accident. The vehicle thus didn't get out of control at first. It looks more like a slow burn-through with lead to structural failure later on.
Not even a remote chance i guess. They have parachutes and a 10 foot boom to slide out the vehicle. No chance of using that at mach 6 and a desintigrating vehicle. Condolances to NASA....
Shockproof: More than 900G (when not running)
which probably means you could put such a thing in a tennisbal and have Sampras hit an ace with it...
Don't forget Otto Lilienthal, who is considered the father of gliding. He did lots of experiments with a sort of hangglider in Germany, some 10 years before the Wright Bro's.
I attended a talk some 1.5 years ago by guy from Philips NatLab (home of the CD), which was called "Mo(o)re or less?". Although the talk was extremely boring and i forgot the final conclusions i do remember some potential showstoppers he listed:
-Of course the ultimate limit of a 1 atom transistor, can't remember the date this would occur
-Limited speed of signals acros the chip: If the clock frequency gets much larger a signal would require several buffer stages to reach the other side.
-Capacity of wires gets more important: the interconnects don't scale at the same pace as the transistors. Their finite capacity limits clock speeds
Some non-technical reasons:
-Increasing costs of new fabrication processes: each new increment is more expensive.
-Limited manpower to design circuits with more and more transistors. This probably means that a larger area of the chips will consist of 'dumb' circuits like cache.
If you want beam that is very narrow, it will spread out very quickly (like in a focused beam). If you want a beam that does not spread a lot (low divergence) the diameter of the beam needs to be large (that's why they use a big WIDE telescope. This has absolutely nothing to do with the number of roundtrips in the laser cavity.
This technique might be used a lot more in future, although i agree it will not really be practical for Joe Soldier to carry a 1 meter telescope and a laser on his back.
I hope you mean insured against fire (=verzekerd tegen) instead of assured of fire (=verzekerd van)
You guy's are really considerate: fire destroys network, they do all their best to get it somewhat back to work and then you slashdot it back into oblivion.
Though the arsonist takes a huge part of the blame, i think the university also made some faults. Why put your servers in a building that burns that well? If you have so much expensive equipment, you should consider everything, including arson! A few days ago they were happy that no asbestos was released because it was removed shortly ago. But isn't asbestos a fire retarder??
Anyhow this fire is a huge problem for the university. When i was studying there 2 years ago, their biggest trouble was the financing of new buildings. They were supposed to build a new combined building for Physics, Electronics and Chemistry. When the drawings were almost finished they had to scap the whole thing. Right now several buildings are way beyond their lifetime and could technically be shut down to regulations any moment. Most buildings are already extended with temporary containers (Portacabins). And now this..... If they were a company this would certainly be their bankruptcy.
Mightbe they should offer OsamaBL a free trial version of this interesting device for installing in his camel. Look at all the possibilities, you would never loose your camel! (and so would the missile-loaded predators...)
There IS something impressive about this research. Sure, they started with some very tiny protein fragments that are biologically hardly interesting. But as the nature article (subscription probably required) shows, these tiny fragments can be synthesised and can be investigated. Once agreement between simulation and experiment is proven (which they claim), it is time to move on to the more interesting stuff.
In the beginning they will probably investigate small proteins that are interesting to biophysics people (the fundamentals behind folding). Later on, when enough people switch over from SETI, they might be able to simulate real big proteins that are interesting to biologists.
Although modded funny, i think there is a lot of truth in your statement that geeks have a mild form of autism. Its called Asperger's Syndrome, which is probably what a large part of this audience suffers from.
Read the previous discussion on Slashdot for more information. The Wired article it mentions actually opened my eyes a lot on my own situation.
I am not completely sure but i believe there is even some proof of a weak genetic link between autism and asperger.
Have a look at the source of the patent claims:
Intergraph
It has extensive information about this lawsuit and a previous one, including legal docs, tech docs and some flash presentations for the technically impaired.
I believe the Japanese guy that received the prize worked at the Super-Kamiokande detector that damaged half of its photo-multiplyer tubes in a big implosion.
Famous quote at the time of the incident: Thank goodness we got our Nobel already cooking
IANAKG (i am not a kernel guru), but as i understand the Hurd is running on top of Mach which is a microkernel. This is supposed to have some (at the moment still theoretical?) advantages such as running drivers in user space (and some potential speed improvements??).
I believe the idea is to replace Mach in the end by the more advanced L4 kernel, which is an area of active research.
Does anybody know if there are other applications for this kind of hardware except for listening to sound transmissions (radio/chatbox/intelligence)?
One of the things i could imagine is the DCF77 signal here in Europe (radio broadcast of atomic precision time at 77 kHz). Others might be GPS (although this probably is to complicated to do entirely in software).
In my opinion this is the district-system. If votes are counted only in small regions that yield only one seat, you effectively create a two-party system. These two usually keep each other in close balance: you stay in power until you screw up and then the other party gets its chance for a few years.
Here in Europe (except for England and France?), the votes are usually counted in the whole country (usually with a threshold of a few percent). Most countries therefore have a mix of parties (green, labour, liberal, christian,
This is similar to the trick they use in CD's. At the metal layer containing the information the light is focused to a few micron. This layer is burried almost a millimeter deep inside the plastic. At the surface the beam has a much larger diameter and tiny scratches are no problem.
Seriously, I have always been wondering why they don't use this kind of technique for sensitive information. For example if you have a top secret memo on the Iraqi army, insert some tiny differences in each version of the memo. If the story leaks to the press, just look up the number of soldiers (scuds, secret wives of Saddam, etc.) it cites and kill the appropriate congres member.
Getting it in an elliptical orbit with one part skimming the upper atmosphere would be good enough. It then only takes some patience to watch the satellite slowly getting into lower orbits and finally burn up (similar to aerobreaking at Mars, except for the final stage).
These are perfectly legal solutions of Maxwell's equation and only occur on the surface (hence the name) of metals.
Sensitivity is related to the number of photons you collect, thus with the area of your telescopes. Only increasing the distance between the telescopes (your baseline) does not increase the area thus sensitivity stays the same.
This does not mean that you can increase the baseline without limits. If the number of pixels increases and you still have the same collecting area means that you have to make longer measurements to get the same number of photons per pixel (for a good S/N ratio).