The *other* way to manually produce ozone..
on
Humans Make Ozone
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Oh,I have long known this, although I was thinking of the *other* way of producing ozone. Walk across a thick carpet or rub against an upholstered chair and accumulate some static. Then head to the nearest metal doorknob and put your finger near the knob..you'll probably see an arc jump from an extremity like a finger to the doorknob ("point discharge"). Electric discharges in oxygen can form ozone (O3), and you can actually smell it in some machine rooms, and after a burts of lightning. Of course, the static discharge is not exactly pleasant, but we all have to make sacrifices in the cause of science:-) Unless of course you're one of those people who liked touching battery leads or an electrode hooked up to a lemon to your tongue..
Since an iDisk can be viewed via the WebDAV extensions to HTTP. I've used an iDisk under win me (shudder) and win2k (see this link. Wonder why the pastel coloured OS needs something extra.
On linux, you should be able to mount the iDisk via WebDavFS. I haven't tried this, but it should be possible. See this sourceforge page
From this article, we've learned the most important truth of our time - elvis is possibly the most popular hostname on the internet (since some large fraction of 12% of the 98% of the queries to the root server are for the top level domain elvis, probably because of a misconfigured resolver). What could this mean? Elvis was the messiah and we just didn't know it? Are there more machines named elvis than Jesus? Are there more elvis impersonators than jesus impersonators? On the other hand, I wonder how many machines are named Gandalf.
Hmm - you're right, my little rant on the astronaut's game was uncalled for. But my general statement about the quality of NASA's experiments stands. NASA has thus far failed to experiment in any useful way with things like centrifugal gravity (essential for avoiding long term weightlessness effects such as bone loss), truly closed biospheres (as Benford put it, we're currently "space camping", not experimenting with space habitats), and a great many other essentials.
I'm not certain why this is news - we've long known in the absence of gravity, hydrogen bonds (the cause of surface tension) can do interesting things, like causing goodly amounts of water to form a sphere. While it's interesting to see high school kids send such experiments into space (even those are absurdly expensive, and shouldn't be done more than once every five years or so IMO), I'm astonished that this is the sort of thing trained astronauts are doing out there on their expensive vacations. Gregory Benford, the SF writer and an advisor to NASA, wrote a very interesting column a while ago deploring the quality of NASA's "experiments" and the vast amount of funding for the ISS and the shuttle program (a reusable vehicle that costs $0.5B permission?!) that could be better spent on more promising projects.
I'm surprised DNA Computing doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere in the discussion. It's still in its infancy, but I think it shows great potential, especially for parallelizable computations.
I sympathize with your viewpoint; the incidents in the old wood and the barrow downs were an integral part of the book, as was the scene where the hobbit company meets the elves singing the hymn to Elbereth. As I recall, Tom Bombadil was actually a character in another Tolkien work "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", who was transplanted into LOTR. This is an interesting essay on the subject. The excision of this scene forced Jackson to have Aragorn to dole out the daggers of westernesse from a bag, instead of logically finding them in the barrow downs, where they were deposited by the Dunedain of the north in their war against the witch king of Angmar.
However, in creating a movie, that was a self contained part of the story that was relatively easy to remove. I'm not certain what else could have been removed or shortened with equal ease. Perhaps some of the journey over caradhras, and the b-movie grade Gandalf-Saruman fight..but it's hard to say.
A response to the comments about the scene with the balrog: as you say, I have not seen the extended edition. However, my objection was not to Aragorn's restraining frodo, but to his standing back when he could have helped Gandalf. Perhaps the bridge would have crumbled, but a hero would and should have taken that risk..it didn't look all that fragile to me. If you read the book, you will see that Aragorn and Boromir were close to Gandalf during the confrontation with the balrog, hence my rather vehement comments. Perhaps in the extended edition it looks different, but the movie I saw had Aragorn and Boromir, two stalwarts of the Dunedain, shrinking away from the balrog and denying Gandalf aid.
I have read the LOTR, the Silmarillion, the hobbit etc. in detail as well, and I think the first movie was far far short of what they could have been. I haven't been able to convince myself to see the second, but I'll probably be dragged to it by friends next week. Let me begin by saying that I thought the sets, costumes (besides Galadriel's severe case of radiation poisoning) etc. were wonderful. Ian McKellen was fabulous as Gandalf, and the fellow playing Boromir was okay, as was Sam. But the rest of the cast was a disappointment. I think a significant fraction of the film consisted of long lingering shots of the vacant expressions on the faces of Frodo and Aragorn. Oh yes, the little drowning scene near the end was..surreal to say the least. It was absolutely pointless and a waste of time..those 5 minutes worth of Sam gasping for air and Frodo with his usual horrified expression could have been put to better use.
Let's see, the balrog scene in Moria. The balrog was great, it was the stuff of nightmares. But what happens then? In Tolkien's version, Aragorn and Boromir stand near Gandalf on the bridge despite his wishes and lend their support while he stares down the balrog. In the movie, Aragorn Boromir and the rest huddle back cowering, and when the balrog's whip snares Gandalf, they have a whole ten seconds to help him but Aragorn instead restrains Frodo. The movie portrays Aragorn as a coward for no reason..read the scene in the book, and you will find that this is not the case. This is one of many seemingly irrational changes. I completely agree with the removal of the willow and Tom Bombadil scenes, they didn't do much to speed the plot along. The scene at the ford of Bruinen strengthens Arwen's character at the expense of Frodo's. Frodo is seen cowering through out the movie, and his innate nobility is not shown even in Lothlorien. Okay, I can rant on and on, but for me at any rate the spirit of Tolkien's writings was never present in the movie, except perhaps in Gandalf's character. And yes, I'll do my best not to watch the second one. I think however, that this movie may do a lot of good, in encouraging more people to read the books. They are seminal works of literature in many respects. Oh, and if you haven't read the tale of Beren and Luthien in the Silmarillion, you should:)
The "windows version" of the iPod that started shipping perhaps a year ago, contains a firewire drive with a FAT32 filesystem. It can be read by win32 systems (and the mp3s can be directly read by the OS, I think there's some sort of obfuscation on macs to satisfy the music industry), and interfaced to by musicmatch jukebox.
I'm not certain why the parent was moderated as "informative"..it's clearly just a bunch of superficially technical sentences strung together to make it look interesting, but it has nothing to do with JUnit. And what's a signal NP-17? (Null Pointer SIGUSR2? grin).
To enable LFS (Large File Support) in glibc (which not all filesystems support), you need to recompile your application with
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 and -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE
This forces all file access calls to their 64-bit variants, and you'll explicitly need to use structs like off64_t instead of off_t where needed. And I believe most large file support is really available only past glibc 2.2
Additionally you need to use O_LARGEFILE with open etc. So legacy applications that use glibc fs calls have to be recompiled to take advantage of this, and may need source level changes. Won't work on older kernels either.
From http://www.paradigmshift.com/pecs.html
a section from the crop circle website (the first link in the story):
Anomalous EM measurements - By doing a fluxgate magnetometer survey of several formations, Colin Andrews determined that the very center of these circles measured 40-50 nano Teslas. This is 10 times the radiation level of a normal field.
It looks like this was a cut-n-paste from
http://www.infosourceresearch.com/tmatt/excerpt3.h tml
where they add:
"Inside the seven patterns, Andrews reported in a recent Sightings Online interview, the magnetic field registered up to 300% of the planet's normal field. "
Statements like these are hard to credit, since the earth's magnetic field is around 0.5 gauss which is 5x10^-5 Tesla (or 50 microTeslas). Magnetic fields don't qualify as "radiation" by any means either. There may be something interesting about crop circles, but the association with crackpots probably scares away real research.
1. Feedback is generally far more important to sellers - negative feedback can be awfully damaging, especially if you've worked a while to build up your reputation.
2. "Feedback wars" - posting negative feedback can lead to retaliation from the postee. This is a serious disincentive when considering posting negative feedback, and it's quite possible many people don't leave feedback if they have a reputation to protect..they just avoid future transactions with the person in question.
One idea that I had was to have ebay periodically purchase something from each auctioneer, and check for quality (at random intervals), masquerading as a regular buyer. The terms of ebay's contract would of course let ebay return the item at no charge. This would let ebay say that they had made a good faith effort to maintain quality, at any rate.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh,I have long known this, although I was thinking of the *other* way of producing ozone. Walk across a thick carpet or rub against an upholstered chair and accumulate some static. Then head to the nearest metal doorknob and put your finger near the knob..you'll probably see an arc jump from an extremity like a finger to the doorknob ("point discharge"). Electric discharges in oxygen can form ozone (O3), and you can actually smell it in some machine rooms, and after a burts of lightning. Of course, the static discharge is not exactly pleasant, but we all have to make sacrifices in the cause of science :-) Unless of course you're one of those people who liked touching battery leads or an electrode hooked up to a lemon to your tongue..
Since an iDisk can be viewed via the WebDAV extensions to HTTP. I've used an iDisk under win me (shudder) and win2k (see this link. Wonder why the pastel coloured OS needs something extra. On linux, you should be able to mount the iDisk via WebDavFS. I haven't tried this, but it should be possible. See this sourceforge page
From this article, we've learned the most important truth of our time - elvis is possibly the most popular hostname on the internet (since some large fraction of 12% of the 98% of the queries to the root server are for the top level domain elvis, probably because of a misconfigured resolver). What could this mean? Elvis was the messiah and we just didn't know it? Are there more machines named elvis than Jesus? Are there more elvis impersonators than jesus impersonators? On the other hand, I wonder how many machines are named Gandalf.
Hmm - you're right, my little rant on the astronaut's game was uncalled for. But my general statement about the quality of NASA's experiments stands. NASA has thus far failed to experiment in any useful way with things like centrifugal gravity (essential for avoiding long term weightlessness effects such as bone loss), truly closed biospheres (as Benford put it, we're currently "space camping", not experimenting with space habitats), and a great many other essentials.
I'm not certain why this is news - we've long known in the absence of gravity, hydrogen bonds (the cause of surface tension) can do interesting things, like causing goodly amounts of water to form a sphere. While it's interesting to see high school kids send such experiments into space (even those are absurdly expensive, and shouldn't be done more than once every five years or so IMO), I'm astonished that this is the sort of thing trained astronauts are doing out there on their expensive vacations. Gregory Benford, the SF writer and an advisor to NASA, wrote a very interesting column a while ago deploring the quality of NASA's "experiments" and the vast amount of funding for the ISS and the shuttle program (a reusable vehicle that costs $0.5B permission?!) that could be better spent on more promising projects.
I'm surprised DNA Computing doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere in the discussion. It's still in its infancy, but I think it shows great potential, especially for parallelizable computations.
I sympathize with your viewpoint; the incidents in the old wood and the barrow downs were an integral part of the book, as was the scene where the hobbit company meets the elves singing the hymn to Elbereth. As I recall, Tom Bombadil was actually a character in another Tolkien work "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", who was transplanted into LOTR. This is an interesting essay on the subject. The excision of this scene forced Jackson to have Aragorn to dole out the daggers of westernesse from a bag, instead of logically finding them in the barrow downs, where they were deposited by the Dunedain of the north in their war against the witch king of Angmar. However, in creating a movie, that was a self contained part of the story that was relatively easy to remove. I'm not certain what else could have been removed or shortened with equal ease. Perhaps some of the journey over caradhras, and the b-movie grade Gandalf-Saruman fight..but it's hard to say. A response to the comments about the scene with the balrog: as you say, I have not seen the extended edition. However, my objection was not to Aragorn's restraining frodo, but to his standing back when he could have helped Gandalf. Perhaps the bridge would have crumbled, but a hero would and should have taken that risk..it didn't look all that fragile to me. If you read the book, you will see that Aragorn and Boromir were close to Gandalf during the confrontation with the balrog, hence my rather vehement comments. Perhaps in the extended edition it looks different, but the movie I saw had Aragorn and Boromir, two stalwarts of the Dunedain, shrinking away from the balrog and denying Gandalf aid.
I have read the LOTR, the Silmarillion, the hobbit etc. in detail as well, and I think the first movie was far far short of what they could have been. I haven't been able to convince myself to see the second, but I'll probably be dragged to it by friends next week. Let me begin by saying that I thought the sets, costumes (besides Galadriel's severe case of radiation poisoning) etc. were wonderful. Ian McKellen was fabulous as Gandalf, and the fellow playing Boromir was okay, as was Sam. But the rest of the cast was a disappointment. I think a significant fraction of the film consisted of long lingering shots of the vacant expressions on the faces of Frodo and Aragorn. Oh yes, the little drowning scene near the end was..surreal to say the least. It was absolutely pointless and a waste of time..those 5 minutes worth of Sam gasping for air and Frodo with his usual horrified expression could have been put to better use. Let's see, the balrog scene in Moria. The balrog was great, it was the stuff of nightmares. But what happens then? In Tolkien's version, Aragorn and Boromir stand near Gandalf on the bridge despite his wishes and lend their support while he stares down the balrog. In the movie, Aragorn Boromir and the rest huddle back cowering, and when the balrog's whip snares Gandalf, they have a whole ten seconds to help him but Aragorn instead restrains Frodo. The movie portrays Aragorn as a coward for no reason..read the scene in the book, and you will find that this is not the case. This is one of many seemingly irrational changes. I completely agree with the removal of the willow and Tom Bombadil scenes, they didn't do much to speed the plot along. The scene at the ford of Bruinen strengthens Arwen's character at the expense of Frodo's. Frodo is seen cowering through out the movie, and his innate nobility is not shown even in Lothlorien. Okay, I can rant on and on, but for me at any rate the spirit of Tolkien's writings was never present in the movie, except perhaps in Gandalf's character. And yes, I'll do my best not to watch the second one. I think however, that this movie may do a lot of good, in encouraging more people to read the books. They are seminal works of literature in many respects. Oh, and if you haven't read the tale of Beren and Luthien in the Silmarillion, you should :)
The "windows version" of the iPod that started shipping perhaps a year ago, contains a firewire drive with a FAT32 filesystem. It can be read by win32 systems (and the mp3s can be directly read by the OS, I think there's some sort of obfuscation on macs to satisfy the music industry), and interfaced to by musicmatch jukebox.
I'm not certain why the parent was moderated as "informative"..it's clearly just a bunch of superficially technical sentences strung together to make it look interesting, but it has nothing to do with JUnit. And what's a signal NP-17? (Null Pointer SIGUSR2? grin).
Okay, I didn't see the link to the page which talks about all of this at the end of the article. Oops.
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 and -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE
This forces all file access calls to their 64-bit variants, and you'll explicitly need to use structs like off64_t instead of off_t where needed. And I believe most large file support is really available only past glibc 2.2
Additionally you need to use O_LARGEFILE with open etc. So legacy applications that use glibc fs calls have to be recompiled to take advantage of this, and may need source level changes. Won't work on older kernels either.
From http://www.paradigmshift.com/pecs.html a section from the crop circle website (the first link in the story):
Anomalous EM measurements - By doing a fluxgate magnetometer survey of several formations, Colin Andrews determined that the very center of these circles measured 40-50 nano Teslas. This is 10 times the radiation level of a normal field.
It looks like this was a cut-n-paste from http://www.infosourceresearch.com/tmatt/excerpt3.h tml
where they add:
"Inside the seven patterns, Andrews reported in a recent Sightings Online interview, the magnetic field registered up to 300% of the planet's normal field. "
Statements like these are hard to credit, since the earth's magnetic field is around 0.5 gauss which is 5x10^-5 Tesla (or 50 microTeslas). Magnetic fields don't qualify as "radiation" by any means either. There may be something interesting about crop circles, but the association with crackpots probably scares away real research.1. Feedback is generally far more important to sellers - negative feedback can be awfully damaging, especially if you've worked a while to build up your reputation. 2. "Feedback wars" - posting negative feedback can lead to retaliation from the postee. This is a serious disincentive when considering posting negative feedback, and it's quite possible many people don't leave feedback if they have a reputation to protect..they just avoid future transactions with the person in question. One idea that I had was to have ebay periodically purchase something from each auctioneer, and check for quality (at random intervals), masquerading as a regular buyer. The terms of ebay's contract would of course let ebay return the item at no charge. This would let ebay say that they had made a good faith effort to maintain quality, at any rate.