The actors' fees may have been a significant part of the film's cost. If the actors were unknowns perhaps the film would have done better on the balance sheet. I appreciated the movie because it was focused on the implications of a single technological field. Scifi is always a tension between fantasy and prediction and I liked that Gattaca didn't need to make myriad predictions about technological issues that were peripheral to the plot. It felt chiseled down to its essentials, a well proportioned but stylised film. But YMMV:)
Um. In the book (and the movie), its a large but not record breaking telescope that first receives the Message. The world only gets together and cooperates in receiving the rest of the Message, deciphering it and following the instructions. The why not a 2sq km is the same as why not 0.5 sq km on the far side of the moon - of course it comes down to money. 1km is ambitious enough for now - we still don't have the tech to economically deal with all that data.
Yeah a blanket 'no 3 letter words indexed' policy is pretty dumb. Just drop the obvious ones like 'the', 'and', 'etc'. Even some 2 letter words should be indexed, like G4, RH, MS.
Its the speed of terminal velocity that increases when the air pressure is lower, while the speed of sound decreases, giving a handy crossover point where you fall at mach 1, prolly somewhere around 20-30km up. Maybe its getting used to imperial measurements and then learning the metric system later that makes US science education so abysmal.
I can't remember the version, but this was back in 1997-8. I read about Javascript and was thinking, OK I should give this a try, fired up Jscript in IE4 (can't remember the precise version now) and tried doing some simple arithmetic. 5+5 gave 1, 2, 254, -5 but never ever gave me 10. The same code worked flawlessly in Netscape. That turned me off Javascript until, well, forever.
Maybe we need significantly different taxes for renewable vs nonrenewable inputs to the economy, to encourage businesses to make the distinction between capital and income resources.
Our economy does have a fundamental problem assigning a decent value to things that are hard to measure in dollars, like quality education, health, environment. The tendency is to devalue those things.
The analogy still works... the particle beam is derailed or a micro black hole appears and turns into a macro black hole...
Still, there are elephants in the world and we have to learn how to deal with them.
:)
The scab just split up and is slowly moving into the pacific. Um.. isn't the pacific growing?
To come close on this one we'd have to look at roughly where the continents were when the supposed impact happened. Maybe 'pangea' the supercontinent was a relic of the moon-genesis impact, kindof like the tharsis bulge that was probably caused by the impact which created the hellas basin on the opposite side of mars.
Note - this is rambling speculation. I love thinking about cataclysms.
Re:virtual blackhole images rendered with OpenGL
on
Virtual Astronomy
·
· Score: 1
what would a virtual blackhole look like rendered in OpenGL ?
> rain power. Roofs covered in tiny hydroelectric turbines, and a dam in every gutter.
Good thinking! Though you don't need to dam a water flow to take energy from it - turbines in place and small diversions are sufficient and dont silt up like dams.
A lot of 70's 'hysteria' was (and is) justified. Our propensity to landfill is not just an issue of having room to do it. It is polluting in the short and long terms - and long term sealed landfills would be very expensive. Not to mention its philosophically weak - we should be (and are) working on adaptable/sustainable solutions for the longer term. I like the idea that many companies should be forced to dispose of their used product, so it won't be in the company's interest to use non-recyclable materials.
The moon will only become a dump for the most difficult to manage wastes - possibly spent uranium etc. Its a good thing there is no ecosystem to wreck there, and we could mine it for millenia without affecting the tides.
Now, mulching only releases CO2 that was fixed recently, and used in a garden will aid living plants in fixing more CO2 while using less water (another greenhouse gas).
BTW given we are due for an ice age, the humanitarian impact of which is at least as dire as mild warming, we shouldn't be taking a simplistic view of Co2 == bad juju.
He's talking about when you measure it. Its rather difficult to measure a quantum system without forcing it to make a choice (though some team from cambridge succeeded at this using SQUIDs some time back)
I and many others on/. use networked X a lot. When its over ssh its still using the network features of X - just unix domain sockets instead of inet. X just specifies talking over a socket and doesn't care if its unix or inet.
I agree its missing features, otherwise Berlin and other projects might not have even started. And X seems heavyweight in ram and cpu for what it does.
But my biggest gripe with X is how inefficient it is with network resources. I can use a windoze terminal server app over a 56k link fine, but a comparable X app on the same link is way slow and frustrating.
I think he meant tritium, a proton and 2 neutrons. Rarer still and prolly matches the few metric tons on the planet he was talking about.
Or did he mean helium3? I remember reading that can be fused with hydrogen to make lithium and all the products of the reaction are charged - kinda handy for magnetic containment. There was a/. article on the moon having millions of tons of the stuff.
Bucky Fuller also wrote in 'A Critical Path' about building huge geodesic spheres half a mile or more in diameter, from aluminium and glass. At that size he reckoned the weight of the structure is insignificant compared to the weight of the air it contains.
Make it airtight and wait for a sunny day, open the windows and the greenhouse effect heats the air within, which expands and drives some air out, and it floats. Then close the windows to retain the pressure difference.
I think this idea is also mentioned in passing by William Gibson in the short story 'Red star, winter orbit' from 'Burning Chrome'
Have a look on Freshmeat for QCL and QDD, these are efforts to get the software ball rolling (somewhat) while we still don't have the hardware.
Of Course this isn't practically useful, but we can forsee many software/language changes that are in store. These are theoretical exercises that let you sniff around and prototype but not test.
The first company that puts a quantum register on a PCI card will make a pretty penny:)
*sigh* I believe our friend was saying that due to sensitive dependence on initial conditions (or state divergence) exhibited by many nonlinear systems, the effects of quantum events aren't simply averaged out in the macroscale and swallowed by the law of large numbers. The butterfly effect for nonlinear systems like weather, or parts of our own brains, should apply right down to the quantum scale. Computing consiousness may require quantum algorithms as Penrose indicates.
Slashdot Mirror
The actors' fees may have been a significant part of the film's cost. If the actors were unknowns perhaps the film would have done better on the balance sheet. :)
I appreciated the movie because it was focused on the implications of a single technological field. Scifi is always a tension between fantasy and prediction and I liked that Gattaca didn't need to make myriad predictions about technological issues that were peripheral to the plot. It felt chiseled down to its essentials, a well proportioned but stylised film.
But YMMV
Um. In the book (and the movie), its a large but not record breaking telescope that first receives the Message. The world only gets together and cooperates in receiving the rest of the Message, deciphering it and following the instructions.
The why not a 2sq km is the same as why not 0.5 sq km on the far side of the moon - of course it comes down to money. 1km is ambitious enough for now - we still don't have the tech to economically deal with all that data.
Yeah a blanket 'no 3 letter words indexed' policy is pretty dumb. Just drop the obvious ones like 'the', 'and', 'etc'. Even some 2 letter words should be indexed, like G4, RH, MS.
You can stare directly at an eclipse, like I did when I was 5. Just make absolutely sure it is during totality, ie not a penumbral or annular eclipse.
Its the speed of terminal velocity that increases when the air pressure is lower, while the speed of sound decreases, giving a handy crossover point where you fall at mach 1, prolly somewhere around 20-30km up.
Maybe its getting used to imperial measurements and then learning the metric system later that makes US science education so abysmal.
I can't remember the version, but this was back in 1997-8. I read about Javascript and was thinking, OK I should give this a try, fired up Jscript in IE4 (can't remember the precise version now) and tried doing some simple arithmetic.
5+5 gave 1, 2, 254, -5 but never ever gave me 10.
The same code worked flawlessly in Netscape. That turned me off Javascript until, well, forever.
Maybe we need significantly different taxes for renewable vs nonrenewable inputs to the economy, to encourage businesses to make the distinction between capital and income resources.
Our economy does have a fundamental problem assigning a decent value to things that are hard to measure in dollars, like quality education, health, environment. The tendency is to devalue those things.
The analogy still works... the particle beam is derailed or a micro black hole appears and turns into a macro black hole...
Still, there are elephants in the world and we have to learn how to deal with them.
:)
The scab just split up and is slowly moving into the pacific.
Um.. isn't the pacific growing?
To come close on this one we'd have to look at roughly where the continents were when the supposed impact happened. Maybe 'pangea' the supercontinent was a relic of the moon-genesis impact, kindof like the tharsis bulge that was probably caused by the impact which created the hellas basin on the opposite side of mars.
Note - this is rambling speculation. I love thinking about cataclysms.
what would a virtual blackhole look like rendered in OpenGL ?
Already done (minus the OpenGL):
To paraphrase Obi Wan Kenobi:
That's no troll, its a weather balloon!
> rain power. Roofs covered in tiny hydroelectric turbines, and a dam in every gutter.
Good thinking! Though you don't need to dam a water flow to take energy from it - turbines in place and small diversions are sufficient and dont silt up like dams.
A lot of 70's 'hysteria' was (and is) justified. Our propensity to landfill is not just an issue of having room to do it. It is polluting in the short and long terms - and long term sealed landfills would be very expensive. Not to mention its philosophically weak - we should be (and are) working on adaptable/sustainable solutions for the longer term. I like the idea that many companies should be forced to dispose of their used product, so it won't be in the company's interest to use non-recyclable materials.
The moon will only become a dump for the most difficult to manage wastes - possibly spent uranium etc. Its a good thing there is no ecosystem to wreck there, and we could mine it for millenia without affecting the tides.
Now, mulching only releases CO2 that was fixed recently, and used in a garden will aid living plants in fixing more CO2 while using less water (another greenhouse gas).
BTW given we are due for an ice age, the humanitarian impact of which is at least as dire as mild warming, we shouldn't be taking a simplistic view of Co2 == bad juju.
He's talking about when you measure it. Its rather difficult to measure a quantum system without forcing it to make a choice (though some team from cambridge succeeded at this using SQUIDs some time back)
I and many others on /. use networked X a lot. When its over ssh its still using the network features of X - just unix domain sockets instead of inet. X just specifies talking over a socket and doesn't care if its unix or inet.
I agree its missing features, otherwise Berlin and other projects might not have even started. And X seems heavyweight in ram and cpu for what it does.
But my biggest gripe with X is how inefficient it is with network resources. I can use a windoze terminal server app over a 56k link fine, but a comparable X app on the same link is way slow and frustrating.
I think he meant tritium, a proton and 2 neutrons. Rarer still and prolly matches the few metric tons on the planet he was talking about. /. article on the moon having millions of tons of the stuff.
Or did he mean helium3? I remember reading that can be fused with hydrogen to make lithium and all the products of the reaction are charged - kinda handy for magnetic containment. There was a
Bucky Fuller also wrote in 'A Critical Path' about building huge geodesic spheres half a mile or more in diameter, from aluminium and glass. At that size he reckoned the weight of the structure is insignificant compared to the weight of the air it contains.
Make it airtight and wait for a sunny day, open the windows and the greenhouse effect heats the air within, which expands and drives some air out, and it floats. Then close the windows to retain the pressure difference.
I think this idea is also mentioned in passing by William Gibson in the short story 'Red star, winter orbit' from 'Burning Chrome'
Didn't ocelotbob say we're at the stage digital computers were at in the 1930's?
ie we have them but its very limited and 'ivory tower' at the moment
Have a look on Freshmeat for QCL and QDD, these are efforts to get the software ball rolling (somewhat) while we still don't have the hardware.
Of Course this isn't practically useful, but we can forsee many software/language changes that are in store. These are theoretical exercises that let you sniff around and prototype but not test.
The first company that puts a quantum register on a PCI card will make a pretty penny :)
*sigh*
I believe our friend was saying that due to sensitive dependence on initial conditions (or state divergence) exhibited by many nonlinear systems, the effects of quantum events aren't simply averaged out in the macroscale and swallowed by the law of large numbers.
The butterfly effect for nonlinear systems like weather, or parts of our own brains, should apply right down to the quantum scale.
Computing consiousness may require quantum algorithms as Penrose indicates.
My quantum tentacle presses the Submit button...