See the Scientific American article. (Not online or I'd give an URL.) Maybe it's just me, but I'd call a surface temperature of around 50 kelvin pretty damn cold. Europa has internal heat, but have no illusions, the surface is *cold*.
The Europan oceans would be getting their heat not from what the Sun or Jupiter radiates, but from the immense gravitational forces from Jupiter and the Jovian moons. The moons may be warm internally, but *not* at the surface.
The human in him is dying in order for the star child to be born. You could read it in all sorts of symbolic, metaphorical ways -- it's an incubation period, a gestation period, a man's death, a man's rebirth, the end of humanity, the rebirth of humanity, the birth of something far, far beyond humanity, finding religion, losing religion. That's what makes it such an amazing movie -- there is no one answer, only what you make of it, what makes sense to you.
The current issue of Scientific American had a long article on this, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be an online version. By the time you read this, maybe they will have updated the online version of the current issue.
The article goes into considerable detail about the effects of torsion from Jupiter and the other moons on Europa and how this generates tidal heat that can keep the sea liquid. The icy "shell" seems to rotate faster than the moon itself, with the sea acting as a kind of bearing. The most interesting evidence for me came from analysis of the Galileo probe's telemetry: subtle perturbations in its radio signal as it moves through its orbit suggests various properties of Europa's gravitational field, which in turn reveals the density at various levels, which ultimately is being used to estimate the thickness of the probable Europan sea, etc. All from a little distortion in the telemetry. Not bad.
The article is very good, and worth going by a news stand or library to look over if you get a chance.
Wow, my car just broke down, but why bother fixing it when I can get one of these things? "Roads? Where we're going we won't need...roads." And I imagine finding a parking space won't be such a big problem if I can just find some unlocked roof entrances... wow this is great...
I did this experiment myself about two years ago, and it has been known since at least the sixties. Dr. Sidney Fox, orginally of UCLA, later of the University of South Alabama, discovered over 40 years ago that a solution of amino acids can be made to organize into what he called "proteinoid microspheres", which for most purposes strongly resemble existing viral & bacterial life forms that have been found both today and in the fossil record from precambrian beds in Australia. Most interestingly, they also resemble the alleged fossils that Nasa revealed from the Martian meteorite a few years ago.
The reaction (or organization or call it what you will) will occur at room temperature if given enough time, but runs faster if done over a hot plate at around 150 degrees Fahrenheit, and faster still if performed over a bunsen burner.
The latter form is how I did the experiment, and any ten year old can do the same in his kitchen. Just mix a few grams of a couple amino acids into distilled water, cook it for a minute or two, and then go for lunch. An hour or so later you will find thousands of these sphere structures floating in the solution.
Are they alive? I don't know, it's a matter of debate. (What is "life" anyhow? You need a good definition before you can really say.) But these microspheres exhibit many of the properties of living things:
They metabolize materials from their environment
They reproduce asexually
They adapt to their environment
They grow, and they die
There is no DNA involved with these spheres, and they are nowhere near as complex as some of the known monocellular life forms. But they strongly resemble fossils that seem to be the ancestors of such life forms, and it seems at least plausible that such structures would have formed from the protean seas of four billion years ago.
Significantly, this reaction is much easier to initiate than the one Dr Stanley Miller famously prepared, since it doesn't require electrical input, and it seems to better reflect the chemical composition of the early oceans as they are now understood.
Dr Fox passed away a year or two ago, and his research never got the publicity that it deserved. I find it insulting that this group can now make these claims without citing those who came before. But then, this wouldn't be the first time the wrong person got the fame for someone else's work (hello Mr Gates). C'est la vie.
why should anyone be worried about *back* doors when the *front* door is wide open? i can't see why a compromise in the security of the backend would be such a big deal when the security of the front end is for all purposes nonexistent.
Many people mention ESR's document, but I think the significance of it stands out most clearly in relation to Frederick Brooks "The Mythical Man Month." What did MMM say? Brooks' Law: adding manpower to a late project makes it later, invariably. What did CatB say? That open source systems such as Linux can create a way around Brook's Law!
Mentioning one without the other is to ignore the historical background & significance of the document. It's like talking about Newton's Principia Mathematica or Einstein's papers on relativity without understanding what a profound change in thinking these documents represented.
(Am I suggesting ESR is on the level of Newton & Einstein? Uhh, no but just to head that one off at the pass...)
Is it me or does the new perl.com look like the love child of Slashdot & O'Reilly? As if one swallowed the other and you end up with a baby blue version of Slashdot or something? It's not bad -- Slashdot's great, O'Reilly's great, I shouldn't have any complaints -- there are poorer online role models out there, but......it feels derivative to me. I think perl.com should set a better example than this, something more innovative & bold.
Television? Oh yeah I remember that thing -- that's that gadget that shows the video tapes, isn't it? The one Noam Chomsky was complaining about -- saying corporations want to control it. They can have it outright for all I care.
So -- people spend alot of time watching these things you say?
How sad.
We'll have the whole planet at our knees!
on
IANA Deploying IPv6
·
· Score: 1
Ok, so if all the traffic lights get addresses, does this mean that hackers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H crackers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H white^H^H^H^H^H Very Bad But Very Clever People could bring all the world's traffic to a standstill? Make all the lights red, then all green, simultaneously?
Actually they might be. Consider the potential for underground dissidents to collaborate over the internet in places like Burma, Tibet, and East Timor. The ability to organize the voice of dissent has been a profoundly powerful weapon for the people of areas such as this.
Not considering for the moment the infeasibility of this tax, would a bill like this be able to help those groups? I don't know, it's hard to say. But they *do* need help, and the intent here is good even if the method is faulty. In principle, I don't think that taxing bits is such a bad idea if it can provide these kinds of benefits. More importantly, taxation is probably inevitable so you might as well get comfortable with the idea. At least this proposal seems more or less benevolent...
But as was noted, *it's not going to happen anyway*. It was just a *suggestion*, and an apparently off the cuff one at that. Taxation of the networks is still at least a few years off.
A lot of these comments are only scratching the surface. Consider the potential for mating a service like the one webvan provides with a household that can communicate with that service on your behalf.
For example, a fridge can be built that keeps inventory, knowing what it usually contains and how much of each item, with thresholds for how low supplies can get. A fridge in other words that can realize when it is running low on milk. Some pasta sauce wouldn't hurt either. And maybe the pantry can "know" when it's running low on pastrami and pop-tarts. Et cetera.
Now co-ordinate that with a central home computer that communicates with the outside world. Among other things, it can keep track of your habits, knowing for example when you get home from work on a given day. The kitchen tell the home system to order a list of groceries. Maybe the bathroom adds that you could use toothpaste. Whatever.
A bit of automagic folding, spindling, and mutilation takes place, and the house takes the initiative to order your groceries & have them show up an hour after you get home from work. It can place the order, pay with your credit card (assuming you trust it to do so, getting confirmation otherwise), contact you to let you know what's going on (messages like "Hey boss, the house is on fire" would be useful...), et cetera.
The info gathered by the central computer is passed off to Webvan, your email, the fire department, and so on, and those agencies handle things from there. All you have to do is keep your credit in check and come home from work. Not bad, eh?
This might not work well in some parts of the house -- a bookshelf that automatically orders the new So-and-so book might be overkill if it doesn't realize you hated So-and-so's last 4 books -- but the potential for these applications is in place now. The needed components -- internal (home systems, online appliances and such) and external (Webvan, Amazon, FedEx) -- are available "off the shelf."
All that remains is for someone to put the pieces together.
That person, if s/he does it right, might just be positioned to make Gates look like a peasant.
Yeah, if I remember right the NYTimes bought the BGlobe a couple years ago, mainly because they wanted access to the Globe's color printing presses. Notice that the Times isn't always all black & white anymore? The purchase of the Globe was a big factor in that.
Or hell, why stop there? I wanna see Bart Simpson picked for catcher. Elvis Presley as pitcher. Cheech & Chong in deep left field; Pat Buchanan way out in right.
For that matter, I remember reading in high school about a new type of lightbulb that could burn for up to like 20 years (as opposed to ~1000 hours for a plain old incandescent bulb). It was based on some kind of radio transmitter (instead of a filament) that would illuminate the inside of a bulb. Does anyone out there remember &/or know anything about this? I've talked to others that remember this, it has to exist somewhere. Did G.E. or Sylvania buy out & suppress this idea or what?
Yeah, but *lots* of people write on paper, right? Don't necessarily think of it as a computer, think of it as a book, a library, a newspaper magazine sheaf of notes whatever.
Think how cool it could be to have, say, the library of congress on a single sheet (and some kind of processor & memory of course). If you want to scribble all over the books, go right ahead. Someone wants to make different notes? Fine. It doesn't have to interfere with your commentary.
This stuff doesn't have to "recognize" anything, (though it would be cool if it did of course). All it has to do is store and retrieve data -- text, notes, underlining, doodling, etc.
Everything else is just frosting on a very interesting cake.
It's funny how they come up with all these neat ideas (hypertext, object oriented programming, the WIMP model, the mouse...) but -- Xerox being the photocopier company -- the only one they bother to market is fancy paper...
Slashdot Mirror
See the Scientific American article. (Not online or I'd give an URL.) Maybe it's just me, but I'd call a surface temperature of around 50 kelvin pretty damn cold. Europa has internal heat, but have no illusions, the surface is *cold*.
The Europan oceans would be getting their heat not from what the Sun or Jupiter radiates, but from the immense gravitational forces from Jupiter and the Jovian moons. The moons may be warm internally, but *not* at the surface.
The human in him is dying in order for the star child to be born. You could read it in all sorts of symbolic, metaphorical ways -- it's an incubation period, a gestation period, a man's death, a man's rebirth, the end of humanity, the rebirth of humanity, the birth of something far, far beyond humanity, finding religion, losing religion. That's what makes it such an amazing movie -- there is no one answer, only what you make of it, what makes sense to you.
The article goes into considerable detail about the effects of torsion from Jupiter and the other moons on Europa and how this generates tidal heat that can keep the sea liquid. The icy "shell" seems to rotate faster than the moon itself, with the sea acting as a kind of bearing. The most interesting evidence for me came from analysis of the Galileo probe's telemetry: subtle perturbations in its radio signal as it moves through its orbit suggests various properties of Europa's gravitational field, which in turn reveals the density at various levels, which ultimately is being used to estimate the thickness of the probable Europan sea, etc. All from a little distortion in the telemetry. Not bad.
The article is very good, and worth going by a news stand or library to look over if you get a chance.
Wow, my car just broke down, but why bother fixing it when I can get one of these things? "Roads? Where we're going we won't need ...roads." And I imagine finding a parking space won't be such a big problem if I can just find some unlocked roof entrances... wow this is great...
The reaction (or organization or call it what you will) will occur at room temperature if given enough time, but runs faster if done over a hot plate at around 150 degrees Fahrenheit, and faster still if performed over a bunsen burner.
The latter form is how I did the experiment, and any ten year old can do the same in his kitchen. Just mix a few grams of a couple amino acids into distilled water, cook it for a minute or two, and then go for lunch. An hour or so later you will find thousands of these sphere structures floating in the solution.
Are they alive? I don't know, it's a matter of debate. (What is "life" anyhow? You need a good definition before you can really say.) But these microspheres exhibit many of the properties of living things:
- They metabolize materials from their environment
- They reproduce asexually
- They adapt to their environment
- They grow, and they die
There is no DNA involved with these spheres, and they are nowhere near as complex as some of the known monocellular life forms. But they strongly resemble fossils that seem to be the ancestors of such life forms, and it seems at least plausible that such structures would have formed from the protean seas of four billion years ago.Significantly, this reaction is much easier to initiate than the one Dr Stanley Miller famously prepared, since it doesn't require electrical input, and it seems to better reflect the chemical composition of the early oceans as they are now understood.
Dr Fox passed away a year or two ago, and his research never got the publicity that it deserved. I find it insulting that this group can now make these claims without citing those who came before. But then, this wouldn't be the first time the wrong person got the fame for someone else's work (hello Mr Gates). C'est la vie.
why should anyone be worried about *back* doors when the *front* door is wide open? i can't see why a compromise in the security of the backend would be such a big deal when the security of the front end is for all purposes nonexistent.
maybe that's just me though
Can we bounce spam into space & send the marketers the bill?
That's what I want to see...
Many people mention ESR's document, but I think the significance of it stands out most clearly in relation to Frederick Brooks "The Mythical Man Month." What did MMM say? Brooks' Law: adding manpower to a late project makes it later, invariably. What did CatB say? That open source systems such as Linux can create a way around Brook's Law!
Mentioning one without the other is to ignore the historical background & significance of the document. It's like talking about Newton's Principia Mathematica or Einstein's papers on relativity without understanding what a profound change in thinking these documents represented.
(Am I suggesting ESR is on the level of Newton & Einstein? Uhh, no but just to head that one off at the pass...)
Is it me or does the new perl.com look like the love child of Slashdot & O'Reilly? As if one swallowed the other and you end up with a baby blue version of Slashdot or something? It's not bad -- Slashdot's great, O'Reilly's great, I shouldn't have any complaints -- there are poorer online role models out there, but... ...it feels derivative to me. I think perl.com should set a better example than this, something more innovative & bold.
Maybe that's just me though.
Television? Oh yeah I remember that thing -- that's that gadget that shows the video tapes, isn't it? The one Noam Chomsky was complaining about -- saying corporations want to control it. They can have it outright for all I care.
So -- people spend alot of time watching these things you say?
How sad.
Ok, so if all the traffic lights get addresses, does this mean that hackers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H crackers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H white^H^H^H^H^H Very Bad But Very Clever People could bring all the world's traffic to a standstill? Make all the lights red, then all green, simultaneously?
Sounds like fun! Where do I sign up?
Actually they might be. Consider the potential for underground dissidents to collaborate over the internet in places like Burma, Tibet, and East Timor. The ability to organize the voice of dissent has been a profoundly powerful weapon for the people of areas such as this.
Not considering for the moment the infeasibility of this tax, would a bill like this be able to help those groups? I don't know, it's hard to say. But they *do* need help, and the intent here is good even if the method is faulty. In principle, I don't think that taxing bits is such a bad idea if it can provide these kinds of benefits. More importantly, taxation is probably inevitable so you might as well get comfortable with the idea. At least this proposal seems more or less benevolent...
But as was noted, *it's not going to happen anyway*. It was just a *suggestion*, and an apparently off the cuff one at that. Taxation of the networks is still at least a few years off.
A lot of these comments are only scratching the surface. Consider the potential for mating a service like the one webvan provides with a household that can communicate with that service on your behalf.
For example, a fridge can be built that keeps inventory, knowing what it usually contains and how much of each item, with thresholds for how low supplies can get. A fridge in other words that can realize when it is running low on milk. Some pasta sauce wouldn't hurt either. And maybe the pantry can "know" when it's running low on pastrami and pop-tarts. Et cetera.
Now co-ordinate that with a central home computer that communicates with the outside world. Among other things, it can keep track of your habits, knowing for example when you get home from work on a given day. The kitchen tell the home system to order a list of groceries. Maybe the bathroom adds that you could use toothpaste. Whatever.
A bit of automagic folding, spindling, and mutilation takes place, and the house takes the initiative to order your groceries & have them show up an hour after you get home from work. It can place the order, pay with your credit card (assuming you trust it to do so, getting confirmation otherwise), contact you to let you know what's going on (messages like "Hey boss, the house is on fire" would be useful...), et cetera.
The info gathered by the central computer is passed off to Webvan, your email, the fire department, and so on, and those agencies handle things from there. All you have to do is keep your credit in check and come home from work. Not bad, eh?
This might not work well in some parts of the house -- a bookshelf that automatically orders the new So-and-so book might be overkill if it doesn't realize you hated So-and-so's last 4 books -- but the potential for these applications is in place now. The needed components -- internal (home systems, online appliances and such) and external (Webvan, Amazon, FedEx) -- are available "off the shelf."
All that remains is for someone to put the pieces together.
That person, if s/he does it right, might just be positioned to make Gates look like a peasant.
Yeah, if I remember right the NYTimes bought the BGlobe a couple years ago, mainly because they wanted access to the Globe's color printing presses. Notice that the Times isn't always all black & white anymore? The purchase of the Globe was a big factor in that.
Or hell, why stop there? I wanna see Bart Simpson picked for catcher. Elvis Presley as pitcher. Cheech & Chong in deep left field; Pat Buchanan way out in right.
Or how about a team of Linux penguins?
Heh heh heh
Doesn't the NYTimes own the Globe? Or is that the gag I'm not picking up on from the depths of extreme all-nighter sleep dep...
Hrm. Ok.
You mean when I beat this in 4th grade I shoulda *told* somebody? Doh!
Xerox PARC's project page has their press release and more info:
m ages/matt2.jpg
http://www.parc.xerox.com/dhl/projects/epaper/
There is a picture here of someone apparently writing on the e-paper with some kind of stylus. (You can see a wire running out of the back):
http://www.parc.xerox.com/dhl/projects/epaper/i
Implies that it can handle input & output.
For that matter, I remember reading in high school about a new type of lightbulb that could burn for up to like 20 years (as opposed to ~1000 hours for a plain old incandescent bulb). It was based on some kind of radio transmitter (instead of a filament) that would illuminate the inside of a bulb. Does anyone out there remember &/or know anything about this? I've talked to others that remember this, it has to exist somewhere. Did G.E. or Sylvania buy out & suppress this idea or what?
Yeah, but *lots* of people write on paper, right? Don't necessarily think of it as a computer, think of it as a book, a library, a newspaper magazine sheaf of notes whatever.
Think how cool it could be to have, say, the library of congress on a single sheet (and some kind of processor & memory of course). If you want to scribble all over the books, go right ahead. Someone wants to make different notes? Fine. It doesn't have to interfere with your commentary.
This stuff doesn't have to "recognize" anything, (though it would be cool if it did of course). All it has to do is store and retrieve data -- text, notes, underlining, doodling, etc.
Everything else is just frosting on a very interesting cake.
It's funny how they come up with all these neat ideas (hypertext, object oriented programming, the WIMP model, the mouse...) but -- Xerox being the photocopier company -- the only one they bother to market is fancy paper...
"If it's not paper, it's crap!"
"Ok boss..."