If the disk itself is massive enough, and the viscocity of the material is low enough, the disk's gravitational field can amplify up any spiral patterns that occasionally appear.
Do you have any references? I'm pretty sure I've read about simulations that show that spirals don't evolve from nothing. And simulations showing how interaction with other galaxies can cause spirals.
If spirals can occur in a vacuume then why have the overwhelming number of galaxies which are elliptical not become spiral yet?
The authors argue that carbon nanotube fibers are both strong and light enough that a 100,000 km elevator, constructed of a 2m wide carbon nanotube "ribbon," could be constructed in 10 years for a cost of US $6 billion
Given that nobody is currently manufacturing things out of carbon nanotube fibers, I find this 10 year projection the equivalent of vaporware. I think a very long period of R&D will be needed before a 2m ribbon can be constructed.
This report was obviously written before the US anticompetitive DSL ruling.
What effect will DSL gouging by the baby bells have on consumer adoption rates?
I don't have the bucks to buy the report and see if they factor in pricing.
For the thousands reported every year, the vast majority go completely undetected
The current scale of crop circles no longer impresses me. Maybe one on the scale of hundreds of miles in the Sarah desert would. Or maybe on the Greenland icecap done in yellow snow.
But you have a much better chance of getting into a top graduate school comming from a top undergraduate one. And this is just not snob factor. You are more likely to find professors who can tell you what the leading edge and issues are in your field there.
EverQuest offers a flat monthly rate. Some people pay something like $10 an hour for this, because they only play a couple hours a month. Some people are logged in sixteen hours a day. From an entertainment point of view, the people who are 'addicted to the game' are actually getting more value for their money. Read that again. Addicted to EverQuest: Hopeless gamer, or thifty shopper?>
I think a flat monthly rate actually increases addiction. If you had to pay by the hour for connect time you would force people to ask themselves whether the last 10 hours they just spent online was really worth what they paid for it.
A flat rate encourages people to play more so they get "more" for their money.
Stephen J Gould, often railed against textbook writers for similar practices.
He found many instances where a writer would just copy from another text book rather than look at the sources the textbook was supposedly derived from.
Thus he found many instance of ridiculous errors being propagated for decades.
I often make a mistake in my name - e.g. wrong middle initial or extra or wrong vowels. That way I can catch if the mailing list moves from organization to organization.
Maybe the scientists are doing something similar. And will we see a rise in citation "errors" just to catch the cut-and-paste citers?
the sequence "run 8" in figure 2 in section 9 does not seem to be a valid sequence. I.e. it is not in sorted order and the number 13 appears twice.
Is this a typo?
*(By "a Winging Scientist" I mean someone who has trouble understanding some work done by other scientists and assumes that they are just making up things. Thus a "winger" feels justified in making up thing to sound impressive.)
*(By a "Mislead Scientist" I mean decent people like Pons and Flieshman in their pursuit of cold fusion).
And if you think he looks funny, have a look at all of the coporate officers at
http://www.blacklightpower.com/management.shtml
I could see them as pastors at a fundamentalist church involved in snakehandleing but I wouldn't want have them in company I was involved with.
Sigma 7 wrote: AI has the shortest time frame in the software engineering, but there is no reason it should remain stagnent across the future patches. From these patches, the developers can identify the shortfalls of the old AI, and correct them.
The major problem in AI is the Attention Problem - what features should be paid attention to in order to make a decision and how to ignore the huge ammount of irrelevant information (without explicitly examining that information to determine that it is irrelevant).
Game engines often present a very small "world view" (in terms of feature space) to AI agents because for every simulation cycle each agent has to check facts in its world view to guide its action, and the more complicated the world view the more CPU cycles are used by each agent.
For example, an agent might be exposed to the same fact in 3 ways:
The first uses a hard-coded definition of what near means (that can be precomputed by the engine), the second allows the agent to use its own definition of nearness, while the third allows the agent to decide what distance means (if it has access to map information).
While the 3rd definition is the most flexible, it is also the most computationally expensive particularly when this computation may be run every simulation cycle.
So, what I was trying to say is that much of the flexiblity possible to an AI agent is limited by the feature space it has access to, and this feature space is usually very limited for efficiency purposes.
To improve the behavior of an AI agent, script tweaking may help some, but what is often needed is for the underlying physical engine to expose slightly more information. For example, the above "near" might be split into "sortof-near" and "really-near".
In the article it said: they evolved from just a handful of wolves tamed by humans living in or near China less than 15,000 years ago.
I thought that Dingos were brought to Australia by the aboriginals when they arrived 40,000 years ago.
What of my presuppositions are wrong here?
Slashdot Mirror
If the disk itself is massive enough, and the viscocity of the material is low enough, the disk's gravitational field can amplify up any spiral patterns that occasionally appear.
Do you have any references? I'm pretty sure I've read about simulations that show that spirals don't evolve from nothing. And simulations showing how interaction with other galaxies can cause spirals.
If spirals can occur in a vacuume then why have the overwhelming number of galaxies which are elliptical not become spiral yet?
the intricate structure of this particular disk is probably caused by a nearby companion star rather than by embedded planets starting to form.
I thought that standard opinion on spiral forms (e.g. galaxies) was that they were created by interaction with massive companions.
Who has ever proposed that internal bodies can cause a spiral form?
When you try to get any of the full text versions from http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/0303110 all you get is the abstract.
I'm a big fan of tabs. I wish the folks at Mozilla could get their act together and define some way that Javascript can be used to open a new tab. They seem to be bogged down in an endless discussion on what is really the right thing to do.
For example, I would like to be able to make Jon Udell's Library Lookup bookmarklet create a new tab.
The authors argue that carbon nanotube fibers are both strong and light enough that a 100,000 km elevator, constructed of a 2m wide carbon nanotube "ribbon," could be constructed in 10 years for a cost of US $6 billion
Given that nobody is currently manufacturing things out of carbon nanotube fibers, I find this 10 year projection the equivalent of vaporware. I think a very long period of R&D will be needed before a 2m ribbon can be constructed.
This report was obviously written before the US anticompetitive DSL ruling. What effect will DSL gouging by the baby bells have on consumer adoption rates? I don't have the bucks to buy the report and see if they factor in pricing.
does the OX X software in the XSERVE offer and must have capabilities that can't be found in a cheaper Linus implementation?
For the thousands reported every year, the vast majority go completely undetected
The current scale of crop circles no longer impresses me. Maybe one on the scale of hundreds of miles in the Sarah desert would. Or maybe on the Greenland icecap done in yellow snow.
But you have a much better chance of getting into a top graduate school comming from a top undergraduate one. And this is just not snob factor. You are more likely to find professors who can tell you what the leading edge and issues are in your field there.
But I thought most married couples used to watch Jay Leno during sex. PVRs open up new options.
From the site: the majority of the responses were sent in by feral young children and pre-teenage gamers
Sounds kinda kinky to me.
where is the residual radiation?
EverQuest offers a flat monthly rate. Some people pay something like $10 an hour for this, because they only play a couple hours a month. Some people are logged in sixteen hours a day. From an entertainment point of view, the people who are 'addicted to the game' are actually getting more value for their money. Read that again. Addicted to EverQuest: Hopeless gamer, or thifty shopper?>
I think a flat monthly rate actually increases addiction. If you had to pay by the hour for connect time you would force people to ask themselves whether the last 10 hours they just spent online was really worth what they paid for it.
A flat rate encourages people to play more so they get "more" for their money.
Banks really run on for all intensive purposes "Virtually Private Networks".
Those networks aren't cheap. I probably costs them a nominal egg.
Stephen J Gould, often railed against textbook writers for similar practices. He found many instances where a writer would just copy from another text book rather than look at the sources the textbook was supposedly derived from. Thus he found many instance of ridiculous errors being propagated for decades.
I often make a mistake in my name - e.g. wrong middle initial or extra or wrong vowels. That way I can catch if the mailing list moves from organization to organization. Maybe the scientists are doing something similar. And will we see a rise in citation "errors" just to catch the cut-and-paste citers?
Why don't these news articles give a ref to the actual study? Anyway, it can be found here: http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/?0212043
the sequence "run 8" in figure 2 in section 9 does not seem to be a valid sequence. I.e. it is not in sorted order and the number 13 appears twice. Is this a typo?
*(By a "Mislead Scientist" I mean decent people like Pons and Flieshman in their pursuit of cold fusion).
And if you think he looks funny, have a look at all of the coporate officers at http://www.blacklightpower.com/management.shtml
I could see them as pastors at a fundamentalist church involved in snakehandleing but I wouldn't want have them in company I was involved with.
The major problem in AI is the Attention Problem - what features should be paid attention to in order to make a decision and how to ignore the huge ammount of irrelevant information (without explicitly examining that information to determine that it is irrelevant).
Game engines often present a very small "world view" (in terms of feature space) to AI agents because for every simulation cycle each agent has to check facts in its world view to guide its action, and the more complicated the world view the more CPU cycles are used by each agent.
For example, an agent might be exposed to the same fact in 3 ways: The first uses a hard-coded definition of what near means (that can be precomputed by the engine), the second allows the agent to use its own definition of nearness, while the third allows the agent to decide what distance means (if it has access to map information).
While the 3rd definition is the most flexible, it is also the most computationally expensive particularly when this computation may be run every simulation cycle.
So, what I was trying to say is that much of the flexiblity possible to an AI agent is limited by the feature space it has access to, and this feature space is usually very limited for efficiency purposes.
To improve the behavior of an AI agent, script tweaking may help some, but what is often needed is for the underlying physical engine to expose slightly more information. For example, the above "near" might be split into "sortof-near" and "really-near".
In the article it said: they evolved from just a handful of wolves tamed by humans living in or near China less than 15,000 years ago. I thought that Dingos were brought to Australia by the aboriginals when they arrived 40,000 years ago. What of my presuppositions are wrong here?