I was granted several thousand dollars to do some fairly simple research for AOL.
Some people here appear *angry* that we didn't choose [their favorite instant messaging protocol] and all I can say to you people is "grow up." The AIM/ICQ protocol is a fit for us. Your solution is a fit for you. Get over it. We know *quite well* how to run enterprise servers and community group solutions, and the decision to stick with what we already have was not made by the clueless.
Yes, we use Python. We use TCL. We use C/C++. We use Java. We use Apache. We use FreeBSD. We use Solaris. We use Windows. We use Linux. We use GCC. We use GPL software. We use BSD software. We use proprietary software. We use a lot of things. This isn't really news.
We have an undergraduate course here at my school where several of the laboratories consist of doing just that. One of the professors used to work for Apple, which explains why he has advanced knowledge in this area.
If you email me, I could forward it to the appropriate scholar here at Imperial and see if he can't manufacture a few extra for you.
The latter answer is the easier one - the former is harder, since you would have to find "official" Apple parts to make sure the OS talked nice to all the pieces.
There's nothing "official" about Apple parts. Just like any other computer company, their parts are manufactured and primarily designed by other companies. For example, their PowerPC processors are traditionally made by either Motorola or IBM. It's not as if Apple has a huge research team designing "Apple(TM)" hard disks; they simply buy Western Digital or Seagate drives just like the rest of us.
He had a dozen or so free copies of Mac OS X (10.1 I believe) but no hardware onto which to place this neat new OS.
So, he scoured eBay for the appropriate parts (motherboard, chip, RAM, SCSI hard disks) and pieced together all of the new machines from scratch.
He told me the only real hard part was finding cases. I think he's still two cases short, but ended up simply mounting the components onto a piece of drywall and setting them flat on a lab table!
I've been following censorware/anti-censorware issues for awhile now, both here in the UK and over in the United States.
The inherent problem lies in the fact that your Senate and Congress members strongly disagree on this whole topic, thusly ensuring several competing acts, some for censorware, and the others totally against such information-reducing software methods.
Unfortunately, it seems many of the more prominent members are in favor of censorware. For example, Senator John McCain from Arizona has proposed a bill that will force schools to implement filtering in order to receive a federal communications subsidy. This bill has raised awareness of the censorware situation, because many free speech advocates oppose it.
The Internet is the primary storage place for all information contained in the world, and largely serves as a global resource onto which a price simply cannot be placed.
Therefore, I and many other feel that the actions of those on the executive board of ICANN must be closely monitored. Anyone and everyone who's ever signed onto AOL or Prodigy or even MSN has a stake in these events.
I've attached below a list of some sites to gleam information from about the latest happenings (and scandals) related to ICANN.
I used an analogy to doing laundry, which is something we all* can relate to, so it should be very straightforward and allow you to more fully understand the linked article.
Good luck.
* Well, those of you who aren't Linux zealots are familiar with doing laundry, but I digress...
Some of you may have read an extremely wide execution core and a 16-stage (integer) pipeline in this article's write-up and been extremely confused. I took a few computer architecture courses back in my undergrad days, so I can refresh some of your memories as well as teach basic processor design to those of you who never got to attend a 4-year college and study computer chips in-depth.
Basically, all modern processors are pipelined. This means that they execute various instructions at the same time. Whereas doing a load of wash, waiting for it to finish, putting it into the dryer, waiting to finish, and then folding would take 30 minutes * 3 steps * 3 loads = 4.5 hours, one could PIPELINE such a process, thus removing sequentialism and doing the first load, then while that's drying put the second load into the washer, and so on... this takes a much shorter amount of time.
This is all a processor really does. It does a FETCH, an INSTRUCTION DECODE, then an EXECUTION, then perhaps a MEMORY READ/WRITE, and then a WRITE BACK, perhaps. So this 16-stage pipeline can have 16 different instructions executed all at the same time, but just in different points of its execution. The example in CAPS above is a 5-stage pipeline that's similar to those in MIPS processors.
He is on the executive board of this project at Rice University over in the United States.
They're working on similar studies and experiments, and have been doing so since the late 1990s. From what I hear, it's going quite well and the funding is just extraordinary these days now that Republicans are in control of U.S. government policies these days.
Even though most folks think that LCD monitors are the paramount devices through which to interact and view data on computer machinery, they're wrong.
This isn't bad, however, because the up-and-coming OLEDs (as detailed in the introduction to this particle story) are much cheaper to produce and should mature faster than LCDs did in the 1990s, which was their early testing period.
With OLEDs, one also finds a much-increased video brightness, faster response times (no ghosts while gaming or watching DivX;-) rips), much enhanced durability, and lighter, to boot!
Finally, these run much hotter but are much less prone to being affected by temperature fluctuations. This means it could easily serve as a server monitor in a 100 degree PowerEdge server closet or as the primary video output terminal at a physics laboratory in Iceland (where I study in the summer).
Here's some fairly interesting skiddaddle about the paradigm of an asynchronous machine -->
Asynchronous (also called event driven and self-timed) logic is defined here as logic that operates without the co-ordination of a global clock. That being said, here are today's Top 3 interesting details about this kind of computing.
1. When completion detection is used in asynchronous circuit design the computation rate tends towards the average rate of the system components rather than the worst case rate of components as in clocked systems. 2. Because asynchronous components only begin processing data when it becomes available they will only consume dynamic power when doing useful work; as compared with a clocked system which consumes dynamic power on every clock cycle regardless of the work done. This reduces system power consumption which is especially important for portable equipment. 3. Asynchronous circuits are more modular because they rely only on local communication between components as compared to circuits with global clocking. The modularity claim leads to arguments that asynchronous circuits may be easier to design and formally verify.
Already got a beta version....
on
Linux 3.0
·
· Score: -1, Troll
I'm close friends with Alan and he visits here often to spend time with collegues and I over lunch break. We use Linux on nearly every research machine here, so there's definitely a connection there between Alan and the rest of us; he appreciates what we do for the physics community, and we all enjoy using the GNU/Linux free set of utilities.
That being said, 3.0 should absolutely be the cat's meow. Go ahead and read the feature list -- you'll surely be surprised and excited when you see what Linux has in store for your computers around the corner.
Please don't mock me. I'm not sure what you mean by "troll", but it seems like it's not a nice thing to say about someone, and thusly is very hurtful to me.
I don't know everything, but I try to give good advice here at Slashdot. And if you have a problem with that, find some other site to read.
I've also installed Linux a fair number of times and I suppose I tend to do things "right" more often than a new user. I've been using Linux since kernel v0.10, which was back before there were any flavours of Linux. Distributions simply didn't exist, and I had to roll my own tweaked versions of programs.
I've gotten a lot of flack for not liking the Debian dselect installation method, but I stand tall by my opinion. Debian users are the most vocal critters I've encountered, but at least when I complain, the developers see my PhD and know that I mean business and they usually agree with my complaint and say they'll fix it.
But they really haven't, and as such, I've since moved on to Mandrake just for its ease of use. I have it running on probably fourty or fifty machines here in the lab without a hitch.
To be perfectly honest, I'm looking straight and centred to never going back to Debian -- there's simply no reason to. All each flavour of Linux really is is a different set of configuration utilities -- deep down it's all the same Linux code, and doesn't really matter for my experiments.
Yes, Windows has it, but their company is also comprised of successful fathers, mothers, professors, teachers, researchers, and volunteers and has $40 billion stored away in reserves.
They make great products that are the best in their field. They continually profit. They continually dominate and innovate.
Open Source and Free Software are nothing more than Friday night hobby projects by either unemployed basement-dwellers or students who'd rather stare at code on a CRT monitor than get some pussy that night.
Similar to my research [further explanation below]
on
Build Your Own Cyclotron
·
· Score: 0, Troll
The dissipation regime is observed in magnetometer data as a steepening of the magnetic power spectral slope and a mild but sometimes very apparent systematic magnetic helicity in the range above the cyclotron scale.
Using the cyclotron fluid formalism developed a few years ago, we have been studying the coupling (very different from others' research -- this coupling is paramount for such experiments!) between low-collisional microscales and the fluid scales of the solar wind.
Our model uses cyclotron equations of state for the pressures as well as transport coefficients representing wave-particle momentum transfers.
Physics books typically discuss the molecular nature of sound, but then derive the sound wave equations by modeling air as a continuous elastic medium.
I mean, mathematically this is just fine, but I find it much more satisfying to derive the wave equations directly from the molecular point of view.
I also think this is a more straightforward derivation, since it completely avoids any need to deal with specific heat ratios or adiabatic processes. The effects associated with these terms arise quite naturally directly from the molecular model.
All that one really needs to do is derive basic differential equations of fluid mechanics from the molecular model. If only the RIAA did this, maybe they'd sell some more records with good music on them rather than the same old pop hits time after time.
(I use Netscape v3.04 and the Microsoft browser v4.0. As much as I hate to abet the Microsoft juggernaut, this section looks a lot better with the MS browser.)
I'm not trying to be humourous here, but I honestly feel that somewhere right under the Genius level of intelligence lies a gray area in which many folks with autism tend to lie.
Bill Gates is partially autistic, as are several students who do research here at my university. Autism isn't fatal, but it can have a troubling effect on one's social life. Many Normal folks don't quite understand it and laugh/point fingers at those with autism.
It's nothing more than just an enhanced perception of life, but I guess it is technically a disease of sort.
This new epidemic in California is probably just a bunch of really smart people having children together. It's too bad that the children, though they will be absolutely brilliant, will have to suffer their entire lives as unattractive and anti-social.
The chain will continue with their children's children, etc...
I question the accuracy w/ relation to networking
on
WiFi Triangulation
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Out of the various possible routes taken by a TCP/IP packet in transmission, one line l may be chosen with peak in point p relative to which the line is symmetric (relative distance and velocity, v(p), are minimal).
Therefore, the scalar potential field created by such movement obeys Zipf's Law of Power (so do Web links, but that's for another post perhaps).
Bottom line -- be weary of news releases such as this one that proclaim to track you via traditional IP methods. Unlike the X10 cam, most of these software crocks of crud simply don't work!
Also, here in the UK our 802.11 cards are very different from traditional eth0s you folks may have in the States. Yet another question to ponder...
Movie errors are just as annoying as PC hick-ups!
on
Gnarly Error Messages
·
· Score: -1, Redundant
The special effects representing impacting bullets give off bright flashes of light. Normal bullets, especially handgun bullets, do not. The vast majority of bullets are made of copper-clad lead. They simply don't create bright flashes of light when they strike objects, even if the objects are made of steel.
A.45 cal handgun bullet, for instance, has a mass of 0.015 kg and a muzzle velocity of around 288 m/s (at the upper end of velocity for commercially available ammunition). Kinetic energy is calculated from the mass and the magnitude of the velocity of an object using the following equation:
KE = ½mv2, where KE = kinetic energy; m = mass; v = velocity
Such a bullet has a kinetic energy of 619 J. If this kinetic energy is all converted to thermal energy, the temperature rise is 324 Celsius.
So, computer errors aren't the only things that are weird or bothersome -- just pay close attention to the next movie you watch and you'll see lots of physical innaccuracies! If you're a nerdy physics guy like myself, there won't be some troublesome blonde who distracts you!
After reading this article, I got to thinking about computer networks a bit in detail. Normally, we all worry more about software and more tangible things rather than the bridges that link our computers to the Internet.
I just gave an assignment that dealt with relativistic calculations and using c, the speed of light, which is equal to 3x10^8 m/s.
What I got very curious about was the following -- "Is there a way to measure the speed of light, precisely, with a computer network?"
The answer, I think, is a resounding YES!
I believe that if I can simply reflect packets of data between adjoining computers on an Ethernet (perhaps here in my lab) and measure the time it takes to complete a round trip, then my collegues and I could use a few simple electromagnetic equations to compare electrical signals in cable with visible light, thus measuring the speed of light to a very precise value!
Who would've thought the Ping utility would be so handy!
I did some undergraduate research in this area when I was back at Trinity College.
One of my favorite areas of study in this filed was the derivation of optimum receiver principles (including intersymbol interferences and equalization). You really can't appreciate a cellular phone and its chat/texting abilities until you understand just how hard it is to ensure lossless cellular communication between two carriers.
The modulation and coding for fading wireless channels, as well as spread spectrum communication analysis is rather tedius in my opinion, but overall it didn't taint my feeling that wireless is where the future is going and that what I was studying had some actual real-world application to it.
All too often academia is just going thru the motions without delving into the real trials/tribulations/concerns of modern-day corporate research.
Traditional holograms are made from two beams of monochromatic light.
Using any old He-Ne laser you may have lying around the house, provide the light source.
The beam from the laser is divided into two paths. One beam is used to illuminate the object; the other is just a reference beam; you could even shine them while watching Baywatch or something as long as you can keep them fairly steady during the bouncing juggly scenes.
Also, try to find something in the kitchen or basement that has eight segments coated with a high-quality aluminum to provide for reflectivity in steps from 10% to 80% at 45 incidence (use a ruler or tape measure for quick measurements).
Oh, one more thing -- the laser should be on for about a half-hour to allow it to stabilize. If it's not warmed up enough after that time and doesn't seem to be very bright at all, peek into where the light comes out while it's on to check for any dust specs that may be impacting the light's exit from the device.
Slashdot Mirror
I was granted several thousand dollars to do some fairly simple research for AOL.
Some people here appear *angry* that we didn't choose [their favorite instant messaging protocol] and all I can say to you people is "grow up." The AIM/ICQ protocol is a fit for us. Your solution is a fit for you. Get over it. We know *quite well* how to run enterprise servers and community group solutions, and the decision to stick with what we already have was not made by the clueless.
Yes, we use Python. We use TCL. We use C/C++. We use Java. We use Apache. We use FreeBSD. We use Solaris. We use Windows. We use Linux. We use GCC. We use GPL software. We use BSD software. We use proprietary software. We use a lot of things. This isn't really news.
OK, so where can I (legally) buy a Mac BIOS chip?
We have an undergraduate course here at my school where several of the laboratories consist of doing just that. One of the professors used to work for Apple, which explains why he has advanced knowledge in this area.
If you email me, I could forward it to the appropriate scholar here at Imperial and see if he can't manufacture a few extra for you.
Good luck.
The latter answer is the easier one - the former is harder, since you would have to find "official" Apple parts to make sure the OS talked nice to all the pieces.
There's nothing "official" about Apple parts. Just like any other computer company, their parts are manufactured and primarily designed by other companies. For example, their PowerPC processors are traditionally made by either Motorola or IBM. It's not as if Apple has a huge research team designing "Apple(TM)" hard disks; they simply buy Western Digital or Seagate drives just like the rest of us.
He had a dozen or so free copies of Mac OS X (10.1 I believe) but no hardware onto which to place this neat new OS.
So, he scoured eBay for the appropriate parts (motherboard, chip, RAM, SCSI hard disks) and pieced together all of the new machines from scratch.
He told me the only real hard part was finding cases. I think he's still two cases short, but ended up simply mounting the components onto a piece of drywall and setting them flat on a lab table!
I've been following censorware/anti-censorware issues for awhile now, both here in the UK and over in the United States.
The inherent problem lies in the fact that your Senate and Congress members strongly disagree on this whole topic, thusly ensuring several competing acts, some for censorware, and the others totally against such information-reducing software methods.
Unfortunately, it seems many of the more prominent members are in favor of censorware. For example, Senator John McCain from Arizona has proposed a bill that will force schools to implement filtering in order to receive a federal communications subsidy. This bill has raised awareness of the censorware situation, because many free speech advocates oppose it.
The Internet is the primary storage place for all information contained in the world, and largely serves as a global resource onto which a price simply cannot be placed.
b ylaws.html
Therefore, I and many other feel that the actions of those on the executive board of ICANN must be closely monitored. Anyone and everyone who's ever signed onto AOL or Prodigy or even MSN has a stake in these events.
I've attached below a list of some sites to gleam information from about the latest happenings (and scandals) related to ICANN.
- http://www.icannwatch.org/
- http://www.icannwatch.com/
- http://www.atlargestudy.org/index.html
- And, for reference, http://www.domainhandbook.com/archives/comp-icann
I gave a brief overview of pipelining in one of the earlier comments up above (you may have missed it).
I used an analogy to doing laundry, which is something we all* can relate to, so it should be very straightforward and allow you to more fully understand the linked article.
Good luck.
* Well, those of you who aren't Linux zealots are familiar with doing laundry, but I digress...
Some of you may have read an extremely wide execution core and a 16-stage (integer) pipeline in this article's write-up and been extremely confused. I took a few computer architecture courses back in my undergrad days, so I can refresh some of your memories as well as teach basic processor design to those of you who never got to attend a 4-year college and study computer chips in-depth.
... this takes a much shorter amount of time.
Basically, all modern processors are pipelined. This means that they execute various instructions at the same time. Whereas doing a load of wash, waiting for it to finish, putting it into the dryer, waiting to finish, and then folding would take 30 minutes * 3 steps * 3 loads = 4.5 hours, one could PIPELINE such a process, thus removing sequentialism and doing the first load, then while that's drying put the second load into the washer, and so on
This is all a processor really does. It does a FETCH, an INSTRUCTION DECODE, then an EXECUTION, then perhaps a MEMORY READ/WRITE, and then a WRITE BACK, perhaps. So this 16-stage pipeline can have 16 different instructions executed all at the same time, but just in different points of its execution. The example in CAPS above is a 5-stage pipeline that's similar to those in MIPS processors.
Hope this was helpful!
He is on the executive board of this project at Rice University over in the United States.
They're working on similar studies and experiments, and have been doing so since the late 1990s. From what I hear, it's going quite well and the funding is just extraordinary these days now that Republicans are in control of U.S. government policies these days.
Even though most folks think that LCD monitors are the paramount devices through which to interact and view data on computer machinery, they're wrong.
;-) rips), much enhanced durability, and lighter, to boot!
This isn't bad, however, because the up-and-coming OLEDs (as detailed in the introduction to this particle story) are much cheaper to produce and should mature faster than LCDs did in the 1990s, which was their early testing period.
With OLEDs, one also finds a much-increased video brightness, faster response times (no ghosts while gaming or watching DivX
Finally, these run much hotter but are much less prone to being affected by temperature fluctuations. This means it could easily serve as a server monitor in a 100 degree PowerEdge server closet or as the primary video output terminal at a physics laboratory in Iceland (where I study in the summer).
I seem to have forgotten the quotes.
Here's some fairly interesting skiddaddle about the paradigm of an asynchronous machine -->
Asynchronous (also called event driven and self-timed) logic is defined here as logic that operates without the co-ordination of a global clock. That being said, here are today's Top 3 interesting details about this kind of computing.
1. When completion detection is used in asynchronous circuit design the computation rate tends towards the average rate of the system components rather than the
worst case rate of components as in clocked systems.
2. Because asynchronous components only begin processing data when it becomes available they will only consume dynamic power when doing useful work; as compared with a clocked system which consumes dynamic power on every clock cycle regardless of the work done. This reduces system power consumption which is especially important for portable equipment.
3. Asynchronous circuits are more modular because they rely only on local communication between components as compared to circuits with global clocking. The modularity claim leads to arguments that asynchronous circuits may be easier to design and formally verify.
I'm close friends with Alan and he visits here often to spend time with collegues and I over lunch break. We use Linux on nearly every research machine here, so there's definitely a connection there between Alan and the rest of us; he appreciates what we do for the physics community, and we all enjoy using the GNU/Linux free set of utilities.
That being said, 3.0 should absolutely be the cat's meow. Go ahead and read the feature list -- you'll surely be surprised and excited when you see what Linux has in store for your computers around the corner.
Please don't mock me. I'm not sure what you mean by "troll", but it seems like it's not a nice thing to say about someone, and thusly is very hurtful to me.
I don't know everything, but I try to give good advice here at Slashdot. And if you have a problem with that, find some other site to read.
I've also installed Linux a fair number of times and I suppose I tend to do things "right" more often than a new user. I've been using Linux since kernel v0.10, which was back before there were any flavours of Linux. Distributions simply didn't exist, and I had to roll my own tweaked versions of programs.
I've gotten a lot of flack for not liking the Debian dselect installation method, but I stand tall by my opinion. Debian users are the most vocal critters I've encountered, but at least when I complain, the developers see my PhD and know that I mean business and they usually agree with my complaint and say they'll fix it.
But they really haven't, and as such, I've since moved on to Mandrake just for its ease of use. I have it running on probably fourty or fifty machines here in the lab without a hitch.
To be perfectly honest, I'm looking straight and centred to never going back to Debian -- there's simply no reason to. All each flavour of Linux really is is a different set of configuration utilities -- deep down it's all the same Linux code, and doesn't really matter for my experiments.
Thanks for reading.
Yes, Windows has it, but their company is also comprised of successful fathers, mothers, professors, teachers, researchers, and volunteers and has $40 billion stored away in reserves.
They make great products that are the best in their field. They continually profit. They continually dominate and innovate.
Open Source and Free Software are nothing more than Friday night hobby projects by either unemployed basement-dwellers or students who'd rather stare at code on a CRT monitor than get some pussy that night.
The dissipation regime is observed in magnetometer data as a steepening of the magnetic power spectral slope and a mild but sometimes very apparent systematic magnetic helicity in the range above the cyclotron scale.
Using the cyclotron fluid formalism developed a few years ago, we have been studying the coupling (very different from others' research -- this coupling is paramount for such experiments!) between low-collisional microscales and the fluid scales of the solar wind.
Our model uses cyclotron equations of state for the pressures as well as transport coefficients representing wave-particle momentum transfers.
Bottom line -- cyclotrons rock!
Physics books typically discuss the molecular nature of sound, but then derive the sound wave equations by modeling air as a continuous elastic medium.
I mean, mathematically this is just fine, but I find it much more satisfying to derive the wave equations directly from the molecular point of view.
I also think this is a more straightforward derivation, since it completely avoids any need to deal with specific heat ratios or adiabatic processes. The effects associated with these terms arise quite naturally directly from the molecular model.
All that one really needs to do is derive basic differential equations of fluid mechanics from the molecular model. If only the RIAA did this, maybe they'd sell some more records with good music on them rather than the same old pop hits time after time.
(I use Netscape v3.04 and the Microsoft browser v4.0. As much as I hate to abet the Microsoft juggernaut, this section looks a lot better with the MS browser.)
I'm not trying to be humourous here, but I honestly feel that somewhere right under the Genius level of intelligence lies a gray area in which many folks with autism tend to lie.
Bill Gates is partially autistic, as are several students who do research here at my university. Autism isn't fatal, but it can have a troubling effect on one's social life. Many Normal folks don't quite understand it and laugh/point fingers at those with autism.
It's nothing more than just an enhanced perception of life, but I guess it is technically a disease of sort.
This new epidemic in California is probably just a bunch of really smart people having children together. It's too bad that the children, though they will be absolutely brilliant, will have to suffer their entire lives as unattractive and anti-social.
The chain will continue with their children's children, etc...
Out of the various possible routes taken by a TCP/IP packet in transmission, one line l may be chosen with peak in point p relative to which the line is symmetric (relative distance and velocity, v(p), are minimal).
Therefore, the scalar potential field created by such movement obeys Zipf's Law of Power (so do Web links, but that's for another post perhaps).
Bottom line -- be weary of news releases such as this one that proclaim to track you via traditional IP methods. Unlike the X10 cam, most of these software crocks of crud simply don't work!
Also, here in the UK our 802.11 cards are very different from traditional eth0s you folks may have in the States. Yet another question to ponder...
The special effects representing impacting bullets give off bright flashes of light. Normal bullets, especially handgun bullets, do not. The vast majority of bullets are made of copper-clad lead. They simply don't create bright flashes of light when they strike objects, even if the objects are made of steel.
.45 cal handgun bullet, for instance, has a mass of 0.015 kg and a muzzle velocity of around 288 m/s (at the upper end of velocity for commercially available ammunition). Kinetic energy is calculated from the mass and the magnitude of the velocity of an object using the following equation:
A
KE = ½mv2, where KE = kinetic energy; m = mass; v = velocity
Such a bullet has a kinetic energy of 619 J. If this kinetic energy is all converted to thermal energy, the temperature rise is 324 Celsius.
So, computer errors aren't the only things that are weird or bothersome -- just pay close attention to the next movie you watch and you'll see lots of physical innaccuracies! If you're a nerdy physics guy like myself, there won't be some troublesome blonde who distracts you!
Much obliged for that link, but I feel sick to my stomach. Do you know how difficult one has it when trying to think of original physics theorems?
After reading this article, I got to thinking about computer networks a bit in detail. Normally, we all worry more about software and more tangible things rather than the bridges that link our computers to the Internet.
I just gave an assignment that dealt with relativistic calculations and using c, the speed of light, which is equal to 3x10^8 m/s.
What I got very curious about was the following -- "Is there a way to measure the speed of light, precisely, with a computer network?"
The answer, I think, is a resounding YES!
I believe that if I can simply reflect packets of data between adjoining computers on an Ethernet (perhaps here in my lab) and measure the time it takes to complete a round trip, then my collegues and I could use a few simple electromagnetic equations to compare electrical signals in cable with visible light, thus measuring the speed of light to a very precise value!
Who would've thought the Ping utility would be so handy!
I did some undergraduate research in this area when I was back at Trinity College.
One of my favorite areas of study in this filed was the derivation of optimum receiver principles (including intersymbol interferences and equalization). You really can't appreciate a cellular phone and its chat/texting abilities until you understand just how hard it is to ensure lossless cellular communication between two carriers.
The modulation and coding for fading wireless channels, as well as spread spectrum communication analysis is rather tedius in my opinion, but overall it didn't taint my feeling that wireless is where the future is going and that what I was studying had some actual real-world application to it.
All too often academia is just going thru the motions without delving into the real trials/tribulations/concerns of modern-day corporate research.
Traditional holograms are made from two beams of monochromatic light.
Using any old He-Ne laser you may have lying around the house, provide the light source.
The beam from the laser is divided into two paths. One beam is used to illuminate the object; the other is just a reference beam; you could even shine them while watching Baywatch or something as long as you can keep them fairly steady during the bouncing juggly scenes.
Also, try to find something in the kitchen or basement that has eight segments coated with a high-quality aluminum to provide for reflectivity in steps from 10% to 80% at 45 incidence (use a ruler or tape measure for quick measurements).
Oh, one more thing -- the laser should be on for about a half-hour to allow it to stabilize. If it's not warmed up enough after that time and doesn't seem to be very bright at all, peek into where the light comes out while it's on to check for any dust specs that may be impacting the light's exit from the device.
Bottom line -- (cos^2)(theta) dependencies rock!