Looking at it like a physicist, the smallest unit of music must be the phonon, or a "quantum of vibration in matter". You really really can't make it smaller, and with individual phonons you can already make some melody.
This may come as a stupid question, but did anyone ever consider really fueling their robot/computer with alcohol/gasoline? Seriously, consider this: a small alternator, a battery, a small engine running on gasoline/alcohol/nitromethane (i.e. engines used in model planes). Could this give enough power (probably yes since you can always upscale your components). How small/light could this be constructed? Just imagine your laptop/robot running on gasoline. "I get 6 miles and 120 gigaflops on one tank, sparky, how about you?";)
hmm I am sorry if I started ranting against the USA a bit in the end of my previous (grandparent) post, but your reply is a bit shortsighted also. "The fact it is a french developed system is reason enough not to use it", you say. First of all, what did the french (and we belgians) do to piss you guys off so much? "You didn't support our Operation Iraqi Liberation" you will probably answer. True, but your own words are also "Why should we - we are an independent country". We have reasons enough to behave the same with respect to you but we generally don't. Do you guys (sorry, your government) support treaties like Kyoto (costs europe a fortune, but the costs are worth it), Geneva, anti-warheads,... Do we therefore stop using american products or hate you about that? When the question can be answered by "yes" or "no", expect it to be the answer you DIDN'T want to hear from time to time.
Second, if you want to go so far as to not using even abstract measuring-methods developed by these french you obviously hate, there will not be much left over I'm afraid. I dare you, take a book about engineering, mathematics, biology,... and trow out all the contributions the french made. Your book will be a lot thinner. Would you still be able to build a car without this knowledge? Are you never going to drink wine anymore? Are you going to tear down the statue of liberty and "return to sender" in pieces?
Here in Belgium altitude-units for airplanes seem to be dependent on the type of plane you consider: In gliderplanes we use meters, in motorized planes (at least the cessna's I have been in) we seem to use feet. Strange isn't it (maybe the cessna's come equiped with these feet-meters out of the USA, while the gliders are european-made...)
In my humble opinion, I think refusing to switch to the metric system is plain stupid. Ok, why it has to be base-10 is pretty arbitrary, but a good reason for this may be that everybody knows and counts in this numbersystem (owkee, except these indians there, those natives on that island and these people that lived thousands of years ago thousands of miles from here...). Maybe a reason for this is one somebody already expressed here before: "you can have my feet/inches/... if you pry them from my cold dead hand". This would fit perfectly in the refusal of a country to accept certain standards laid down on them by other countries because "they know/are better" (not giving names here)
We once had to do an experiment involving a relatively powerfull pulsed laser. The guy explaining all te stuff to us gave us a nice demonstration of the power of these things. He putted a weak convergent lens in the beam, and at about a meter from the lens, a small lightningbolt developed. It was also pulsed (*knack* *knack* *knack*) and about the size of a marble, but really very bright (and smelly, the entire room smelled like ozone within seconds). The air at that point got so hot it ionized. since ionized stuff conducts electricity maybe this can be used to make some sort of "guided lightning"? I.e. make a conductive path with such a point and trow some kiloamps at it...?
I am a firm believer of Darwin's theory of evolution, and as you all know the main point of this theory is survival. This implies that in contrast to what some previous posts here mentioned, there is no need for "optimal", "efficient" or "errorchecking (-free)" coding in the neuro-bio-chemical-whatever way DNA does this coding. Just the fact that it works is enough, you will live, hopefully survive, and pass on this "working" code to your offspring (well, at least pieces of it). One scientist once said: "DNA is the most incredible spaghetti-code you can imagine, that just happens to work out in (our) real world"
Well, what if there are BS pieces of code in there? As long as they don't interfere with the simple fact that the organism "works" there is no reason at all why these chunks shouldn't be there. It is not that each organisms DNA get's carefully designed, debugged, optimized and compiled. Design happens by pure selection, debugging is automatic (if it doesn't work it dies) and optimization is unnecessary.
Another point of view I read before and sounds very plausible to me is that these junk-pieces contain sequences of code that were one time usefull during our evolution into what we are now, but are now deactivated. Look at it as containers of pieces of perfectly good code, but obsolete or unnecessary now. I.e. code to grow tails, fins,... to produce certain chemicals found in (very old) ancestors of us but now not usefull anymore... There is of course not a evolutionary "reason" as to why these pieces of code are kept, but just looking at the mere process of mutation/reproduction and crossing pieces of these code makes it very plausible to assume this may indeed be the case.
Hehe your explanation of orbit reminds me of something i read a while ago about the moons of mars. Mars has two moons, phobos and deimos, and these moons are so light a strong person could trow a hockeyball into orbit. Since there is no atmosphere on these moons you could indeed go into orbit one meter above the surface (which is VERY irregular, which will cause problems...). Imagine an astronaut trowing a piece of equipment away and hitting himself in the back of the head 13 minutes later;)
"However, I would presume there is a limit to the number of times this can occur due to dynamic airframe stress fractures and heat-induced stresses in the SRB structure. Anyone know of such limits?"
Some statistical data may help: I think the solid rocket boosters may on average be used 0.97 times;)
Yes, they do. I don't know about your opinion concerning the "creation of life", but I strongly believe in the theory of evolution. As you all know, one of the main (the only?) rules is "survival of the fittest". Fittest can mean anything (smarter, faster, stronger, long necks, being able to freeze,...), even dying if it has a purpose for your species-community, but in most cases it does not include dying. Now, what species would last the longest, the one that has an irrational fear of anything remotely related to death/dying or the species that lethargically sits around not giving a.... about whether/when it dies.
Here at the physics lab we are doing research about neural networks. This involves simulations that require a lot of memory and cpu-cycles. A problem we have encountered numerous times when building phase-diagrams is that the mathematical routines chrash when we reach critical parametervalues. This is caused by the fact that certain matrices become 'singular'. This problem does not arise however when we use 'double long' formats, or 64-bit floats, because these are way more precise and still can go a long way when 32-bit doubles already jump to zero, thus causing the problems.
We have decided to buy/construct a fast 64-bit workstation where we can run our simulations without chrashes. Now my question to you fellow slashdotters is:
The budget is a few thousand euros, not over 10 000 (this is comparable in dollars). What would the best bang-for-the-euro be? Single-Dual? Xeon-Opteron-Itanium2? It must at least contain 4 gig of RAM.
Thanks for your suggestions, looking at several "comparison-websites" has only made us more confused.
I can safely assume they are more advanced than us, since they got (a message) here with the sole purpose of making contact (Thus they already know we are here).
In this scenario I only hope the relation we have with these beings doesn't evolve into a similar relation as we have with cows (steak and milk), horses (Yeehaa ride that thing! Pull that heavy thing for me dumb creature!), bees (destroy their homes and steal their resources), game (shoot em for food or just for fun), pets...
But this may be a bit unrealistic. Assuming they are waaay more evolved than us, imagine they see us as insects or microbes crowding a perfectly good piece of rock they'd already planned vacations to. Or as nasty little bugs invading their space, polluting their radiofrequencies,... Why wouldn't they get it over with before they ever might get in trouble over this? As fas as I know that is exactly what we do with our less-brainpowered fellow earthcreatures...
Oops too late... Neural nets are already in use everywhere. Reading human handwriting in post-offices, image-filtering to avoid bumpy handcams, cheap and fast controllers to drive a LOT of stuff (including certain applications in airplanes),... and this is on the application level. On the experimental level neural nets of sizes over 1 million neurons have already been made. I have one running right now of 10 000 neurons to calculate the phase-diagram of recognition-tasks. In my university there are robots almost entirely driven by neural nets, and these guys can drive through doors, won't hit you when in the way, can find their way around the building,... (intelligence you say?)
I would rather specify: We are all (quantum)-neurocomputers. Basically our brain consists of a lot of neuronal cells (about 50 billion to be more exact) who all communicate with each other in a very simple way. Each neuron can be "on" or "off". When a neuron is on it just changes the elektrochemical potential of its cell-membrane. A neuron can also be "tickled" by other neurons, and it becomes active ("on") when it is tickled enough.
Now here is the good part. Each neuron has a lot of extensions of its cellular body (2000-5000 depending on which type of cell), through which it can tickle other neurons. Each "connection" has a certain thickness or weight. This way there goes a lot of tickling and turning on/off on in the brain. These sequences of electrical/chemical dynamics is exactly what makes someone "think".
But what are the capabilities of such a neural network? First of all, 50 billion neurons, each connected with thousands of other neurons is a fairly extended and complex system. When such a system is simulated it seems that just 7 neurons are already enough for making a controller to balance a pole on a moving train. Simulating 10 000 neurons (what I am doing right now) eats a gig of RAM and takes hours to just calculate one cycle (on a PIV 3 GhZ). Imagine then what a brain can...(Where each cycle takes a few milliseconds)
If you could make it technically and legally possible to make everybody pay a small amount for each mail they send (a few cents will do), wouldn't this solve all spam/open-smtp-server problems (And also those damned speed-clicking-must-forward-joke-to-everyone people)? The providers won't complain, and for those few bucks a month extra I wouldn't mind either. The extra raised money could then be used for better infrastructure, security, charity (hahaha!),...
Or at least have some kind of organization that manages mails/adresses and makes people pay to send a mail to their domain. Then use the money to keep this domain clean.
You can do this experiment with other types of particles as well, hell, you can even trow cars through two garage-gates and still have this kind of effect (the wavelenght of a moving car is pretty small though so you will have to look REALLY VERY good to see the waves here;).
But seriously, this effect isn't really so strange when you get used to the different logic one uses in quantum mechanics towards "real" physical things around us. First of all, there is that famous Schrodinger-equation, an equation that describes a relation between the energy, position and time-evolution of stuff (I'm not going into detail here), but the important thing is that this equation only has solutions in the form of "waves". There has been a lot of discussion about what exactly these waves are, but the common consensus is that (the square of) these waves describe probability-distributions of particles. "But a particle is a physical thing, a point in concreto, not a wave"! Correct, but ONLY when it interacts with other particles (for instance hits a wall, bounces with a photon so you can see it,...). As long as it doesn't interact with anything at all, it lives as a wave of probabilities. Only when another particle comes near this wave collapses and, according to its probability distribution, chooses an appropriate "real" physical state (as a point).
Now, these waves can interact with themselves and thus cause these interference-effects described in the two-slit-experiment, just because the particles are waves AS LONG NOTHING HAPPENS in the mean while. When you put both slits open for instance, and you put a detector on each slit to see through which slit it went, the interference pattern disappears. The part of the probability wave that went through the other slit was destroyed (collapsed) by your detection (which requires interaction with at least one photon, electron,...).
But you probably need to work with this kind of things for a while before you start to think of this kind of logic as "logical":)
Thanks that does make it indeed much clearer to me. I seemed to have forgotten that we indeed already have a tremendous starting-speed by our orbit, and that our whole solar system is one huge dynamical system of gigantic gravity wells we can take a ride on.
Slashdot Mirror
Then who should? God himself? Georgy B.? Or that mystical hyperroot I once encountered when stoned
Second, if you want to go so far as to not using even abstract measuring-methods developed by these french you obviously hate, there will not be much left over I'm afraid. I dare you, take a book about engineering, mathematics, biology, ... and trow out all the contributions the french made. Your book will be a lot thinner. Would you still be able to build a car without this knowledge? Are you never going to drink wine anymore? Are you going to tear down the statue of liberty and "return to sender" in pieces?
Damn I started ranting again, my apologies
In my humble opinion, I think refusing to switch to the metric system is plain stupid. Ok, why it has to be base-10 is pretty arbitrary, but a good reason for this may be that everybody knows and counts in this numbersystem (owkee, except these indians there, those natives on that island and these people that lived thousands of years ago thousands of miles from here...). Maybe a reason for this is one somebody already expressed here before: "you can have my feet/inches/... if you pry them from my cold dead hand". This would fit perfectly in the refusal of a country to accept certain standards laid down on them by other countries because "they know/are better" (not giving names here)
Well, what if there are BS pieces of code in there? As long as they don't interfere with the simple fact that the organism "works" there is no reason at all why these chunks shouldn't be there. It is not that each organisms DNA get's carefully designed, debugged, optimized and compiled. Design happens by pure selection, debugging is automatic (if it doesn't work it dies) and optimization is unnecessary.
Another point of view I read before and sounds very plausible to me is that these junk-pieces contain sequences of code that were one time usefull during our evolution into what we are now, but are now deactivated. Look at it as containers of pieces of perfectly good code, but obsolete or unnecessary now. I.e. code to grow tails, fins, ... to produce certain chemicals found in (very old) ancestors of us but now not usefull anymore... There is of course not a evolutionary "reason" as to why these pieces of code are kept, but just looking at the mere process of mutation/reproduction and crossing pieces of these code makes it very plausible to assume this may indeed be the case.
Some statistical data may help: I think the solid rocket boosters may on average be used 0.97 times ;)
Yes, they do. I don't know about your opinion concerning the "creation of life", but I strongly believe in the theory of evolution. As you all know, one of the main (the only?) rules is "survival of the fittest". Fittest can mean anything (smarter, faster, stronger, long necks, being able to freeze, ...), even dying if it has a purpose for your species-community, but in most cases it does not include dying. Now, what species would last the longest, the one that has an irrational fear of anything remotely related to death/dying or the species that lethargically sits around not giving a .... about whether/when it dies.
1.1*10^20 diameters of earth
9.8*10^15 times distance earth-sun
1.5 million times the diameter of the milky way
So if the milky way is a millimeter (like the size of a ballpoint), then the universe is 1.5 kilometer (like, a mile)
I could have miscalculated of course, correct me if I am wrong :)
We have decided to buy/construct a fast 64-bit workstation where we can run our simulations without chrashes. Now my question to you fellow slashdotters is:
The budget is a few thousand euros, not over 10 000 (this is comparable in dollars). What would the best bang-for-the-euro be? Single-Dual? Xeon-Opteron-Itanium2? It must at least contain 4 gig of RAM.
Thanks for your suggestions, looking at several "comparison-websites" has only made us more confused.
But this may be a bit unrealistic. Assuming they are waaay more evolved than us, imagine they see us as insects or microbes crowding a perfectly good piece of rock they'd already planned vacations to. Or as nasty little bugs invading their space, polluting their radiofrequencies, ... Why wouldn't they get it over with before they ever might get in trouble over this? As fas as I know that is exactly what we do with our less-brainpowered fellow earthcreatures...
Me: phew, almost our entire university network down, just by one stupid virus. Luckily I'm using Linux.
The other guy: What the hell is Linux???
Now here is the good part. Each neuron has a lot of extensions of its cellular body (2000-5000 depending on which type of cell), through which it can tickle other neurons. Each "connection" has a certain thickness or weight. This way there goes a lot of tickling and turning on/off on in the brain. These sequences of electrical/chemical dynamics is exactly what makes someone "think".
But what are the capabilities of such a neural network? First of all, 50 billion neurons, each connected with thousands of other neurons is a fairly extended and complex system. When such a system is simulated it seems that just 7 neurons are already enough for making a controller to balance a pole on a moving train. Simulating 10 000 neurons (what I am doing right now) eats a gig of RAM and takes hours to just calculate one cycle (on a PIV 3 GhZ). Imagine then what a brain can...(Where each cycle takes a few milliseconds)
Or at least have some kind of organization that manages mails/adresses and makes people pay to send a mail to their domain. Then use the money to keep this domain clean.
But seriously, this effect isn't really so strange when you get used to the different logic one uses in quantum mechanics towards "real" physical things around us. First of all, there is that famous Schrodinger-equation, an equation that describes a relation between the energy, position and time-evolution of stuff (I'm not going into detail here), but the important thing is that this equation only has solutions in the form of "waves". There has been a lot of discussion about what exactly these waves are, but the common consensus is that (the square of) these waves describe probability-distributions of particles. "But a particle is a physical thing, a point in concreto, not a wave"! Correct, but ONLY when it interacts with other particles (for instance hits a wall, bounces with a photon so you can see it, ...). As long as it doesn't interact with anything at all, it lives as a wave of probabilities. Only when another particle comes near this wave collapses and, according to its probability distribution, chooses an appropriate "real" physical state (as a point).
Now, these waves can interact with themselves and thus cause these interference-effects described in the two-slit-experiment, just because the particles are waves AS LONG NOTHING HAPPENS in the mean while. When you put both slits open for instance, and you put a detector on each slit to see through which slit it went, the interference pattern disappears. The part of the probability wave that went through the other slit was destroyed (collapsed) by your detection (which requires interaction with at least one photon, electron, ...).
But you probably need to work with this kind of things for a while before you start to think of this kind of logic as "logical" :)
Two words: So what?
Thanks