I'm not sure if the alignment of the orbital planes of Earth and Mars allow for such a thing, but if such an event did occur, viewing an Earth-Mars transit from Mars would be more spectacular than vieweing a Venus-Earth transit from Earth for the following four reasons.
Earth is a bit bigger than Venus
The Earth-Mars distance at alignment is smaller than the Venus-Earth distance at alignment (although I'm not sure on this one).
The Sun on Mars would appear smaller, and as a result, the disc of Earth's dark-side would make a greater impact.
Any Terrestrial astronauts viewing it would get a brief reminder of their belovered homeworld, whereas here on earth, we're briefly reminded of the hellish conditions of Venus.
Also, because of the reduced amount solar-radiation that Mars recieves per square-metre, it might be safer to view with the naked eye, but this extra safety will be far negated by the lack of ozone-layer, lack of magnetic-field, thin atmosphere, etc (not to mention that any protection you wear to survive Mars's atmosphere guarantees that your eye is not naked).
Perhaps some kind soul could throw some numbers at the facts I've presented so we know howmany % of the sun's area as seen from Mars is blocked by the passing Earth.
I think Plato mentioned that Atlantis was just beyond the Pillars of Hercules (straits of Gibraltar), so if several lost cities are found along the Mediterranean, all cities east of the Straits of Gibraltar are not Atlantis, but some other lost city. I wrote this post in this article where I speculate on the fate of Atlantis had it been flooded when the ice-caps melted.
Seeing that writing had existed for many thousands of years beforehand, it seems a bit suspicious that the only written account of Atlantis was from Plato's time several thousand years after the alledged destruction of Atlantis. Perhaps the Great Library of Alexandria held more accounts before it was destroyed (which IMO was one of the most tragic episodes of history).
Incidentally, they've recently found a lost city just on land on the coast of Greece. At one time about 2000+ years ago, it was flooded. Some ancient travel writer (could have been Plinny) noted that he saw the tops of the tallest buildings of that city sticking out the water. Since then, many unsuccessful attempts have been made to find it by looking offshore, but the city had in fact somehow returned to the shore (could have been buried under a huge pile of mud, or possibly the land could have risen as well).
Dr Kuehne said he hoped to attract interest from archaeologists to excavate the site. But this may be tricky. The features in the satellite photo are located within Spain's Donana national park.
Would excavating what could be a lost city really wreck a national park? Archaeologists try and be as non-intrusive as possible, and their methods of digging holes are so gentle that they use a toothbrush-like brush to move the dirt. So even if nothing was found after an extensive dig, there would be virtually no ecological damage. And if the city of Atlantis really was found and they decided to excavate everything that could possibly be in Plato's description, would that effect the ecology of the area (providing they did not turn the area into a museum)?
Here's another one - Aphex Twin - Powerpill Pacman . For details on their PowerPill Pacman EP single - follow this link. There are several remixes on this EP Single.
I think that although a usable Lego-computer would cost thousands, building a Lego CPU would be much cheaper. Not much use, but it would be a fun geek-project.
I once knew someone who designed components for a lego-CPU. This included a 'Lego-transistor' to prevent the load that a single gear-wheel would have to drive from becoming too much.
Just out of interest, is there a web-page that has a list of alternaive means of building computational-logic based computers, or other types of computers? I once saw a digital adding machine built up out of water flowing through pipes that formed logic-gates. I also heard of a story about someone building logic-gates that work by heating bi-metalic strips and causing them to bend.
A more accurate translation of that into the world of computational logic would be:
5242880 flip-flops should be enough for anybody
Now work out howmany nuts and bolts you jneed to build a flip-flop, and now, you can translate Bill Gate's quotes into Meccano. Hey - it's a hell of a lot easier porting an actual Bill Gates Monstrossity-OS to a Meccano computer.
I'm not really sure if Contiki really is smaller than a Linux kernel can ever become. Contiki has been built mainly for 6502-based systems. What I've heard is that the reason there is no back-end for GCC that produces 6502 code is because the 6502 only has a 256-byte stack, and for reasons unknown to myself, GCC has a problem with this (I'm not sure if Linux also has this problem). Contiki has been built with the CC65 C compiler for 6502's compiler instead. So if the Meccano computer does not have this limitation, then Linux could run just as well as Contiki.
Contiki/Linux just needs to be compiled on a real compiler with a back-end that produces code that the Meccano CPU can run. As for which OS to try out, try and compare the size of a Contiki kernel to thet of a Linux kernel, and go with the smallest (question: Is there a size comparison of the two kernels on a machine that is capable of running both OS's?). As all the flip-flops for memory/storage will have to be built by hand, it would make sense to try the smallest OS on the machine. I suspect that Contiki would be the smallest, but I am not sure if Contiki can run as a server OS, so it would be useless, unless you also made user Input/Output devices out of Meccano as well.
It is in the past for state of the art computers, but in the present for geeks playing around with computers that can easily be built. It's always fun to find an alternative method of building a computing device, and building it just for fun. I've seen logic-gates built out of all kinds of things.
Digital computers are more suited being built electronically (small and fast), but in the early days of computers, many were analog. The transition to digital happened around the same time as the transition from mechanical to electronic. Nowardays, analog computing is virtually unheard of, but I think that sometime during the late 80's/early 90's, they had found an application for analog computing in Neural Networks. I can't remember what it was, but the revival in analog computing has failed to materialise, so it must not have been very important.
I think a more realistic next step would be to build a CPU out of logic-gates. See my other post for how this could be accomplished. After that, build masses and masses of flip-flops, and multiplexers so you can access (2^A)*D of them using A address-lines and D data-lines. Now you have storage, so you can run stored programs. Using an existing computer which has GCC ported to it, write a GCC back-end for your new CPU, and then compile Linux on it.
Of course, you would have to modify this port of Linux to take into account how the Meccano compouter handles IO, etc. Add a means of networking, and you can turn it into a Linux server. Add user Input/Output, and you have a workstation.
>that used 1 inch soda straws for 1's and blank holes fro zeros
How did you prevent the holes in the soda straws from being confused with the blank holes? And besides, if you hold a straw so it's end is facing your face, it looks more like a 0 than a 1.
I recon this guy should try to build a machine that uses computational logic gates (NAND, NOR, etc). From that, he can build up things like binary adders and simple flip-flops. Then, add an instruction-decoder, and an arithmetic-logic unit - and viola - a Meccano CPU.
Having looked at the site and seen how all those early 20th century predictions of mammoth soul-less multi-level cities with swarms of flying cars failed to materialise, I notice that even though we're only 4 (or 3) years into the 21st century, one of the major predictions made at the turn of this century has failed to materialise - the success of the DotCom boom. So it looks like contemporary futurologists are a lot worse than their colleagues from 100 years ago.
The first four responses to this article about climate change were responses to the bit about 'THC slowdown' and not responses to anything else in the article (even the 'first-post' people are hiding behind the woodwork). So when we've completely wrecked the planet, is the plan to just get completely stoned and ignore the dire situation?
This sort of reminds me of my trip to Finland. I also had some reindeer meat, but it was served with cranberries. One of the cranberries was perched on top of a meaty protrusion in the pile of meat, and it looked like I had been served Rudolph the Red Nosed reindeer himself.
At the last job I had (in the UK), at around halfway during 2000, a form was given to all staff in the company asking us to make the decision whether or not to opt out of the working hours directive. It explained that the '48 hours' was an avreage that was calculated over some ridiculously large number of weeks. Also on the form was a reason you had to write for why you did not want to opt out. I chose not to opt out, and the reason I wrote was that I did not think it was necessary, as I hardly worked that many hours. Apparently, quite a lot of people opted out.
Even if you are not likely to be sacked on these grounds, there's always the chance that not opting out could mean you are less likely to be getting promotions or raises. Such a thing would be almost impossible to prove in a tribunal.
One incentive for British workers to become more integrated with the EU is that the 'EU working hours directive' will be better enforced. One of it's features is that nobody should be forced to work more than 48 hours per week. At the moment, the UK has manged to agree an opt-out clause, where an employee may sign away their right not to work more than 48 hours per week. The result is that the bosses are putting preassure on employees to sign away their right. If UK was closer integrated with the EU, could the EU get rid of the opt-out clause?
Does anyone know if people in the UK have been sacked for not signing the opt-out, and if so, have they successfully won an unfair dismissal case on those grounds. Or have the employers just made up excuses for the sacking?
Speaking of which, didn't the US government during WWII translate some of their top-secret documents into one of the languages of the Native Americans? I think they chose that particular language because it had unique properties that made de-cyphering the language almost impossible. I'm not sure if they applied any additional encryption, or what would have happened if the enemy had somehow managed to kidnap a speaker of that language.
Is this just 'security through obscurity', or was there something else involved.
I suspect a lot of countries in the 'old-world' have this property, as until recently, there has been very little migration and people tended to stay in their communities. Countries like Germany and Italy only became countries in the last 150 or so years, and before then, there probably wasn't any attempts at large scale language standardisations. In these two countries, the spoken dialects are radically different from eachother. In fact, 'Low-German' (or Nedersachsisch' (sp?) ) which is what they speak in Northern Germany (and also parts of Eastern Netherlands) is actually considered a separate language. Southern Germany and Switzerland and Austria speak 'High German' which is a distinct sounding dialect (not sure if that is also considered to be another language).
The inhabitants of the 'new world' came from all over the place in the country in the old world that colonised the area. Once there, the different populations assimilated, and differences in the accenst were ironed out. Also because of the vast ammounts of land available, people spread out very quickly without giving their dialects a chance to evolve.
Within the USA, apart from the South-East which has a radically different dialect, most of the USA and Anglophone-Canada is more or less the same. But there are subtle differences in the accents, but as Americans are generally much more spread out, you have to travel far to notice an accent-change.
One thing I'm still curious about is which old-world languages and dialects evolved into the various American-English dialects, and how come the south-east has such a radically different dialect.
About 10000 years ago, this planet was just ending it's ice-age. This meant that a lot of the sea-water was frozen into the expanded polar ice-caps. According to calculations, sea-levels at that time were about 100 metres below what they are today. With such a huge rise in sea-levels, it is inevitable that whole islands would be submerged under the sea.
Plato's work refers to the location of Atlantis as beyond the "The Pillars of Hercules" which is now known as the strait of Gibraltar. This is the gateway between the Mediterranean sea and the Atlantic ocean. This of course is quite far from Cyprus. According to measurements of the bottom of the sea, if the sea-level dropped by 100 metres, a new archipelago of islands would be exposed just beyond the straits of Gibraltar. This is a probable location for Atlantis.
As for the civilisation being more advanced, that could have been because they were on an island that was cut off from the mainland which was infested with barbarians. The islanders could then develop their technology in peace. Seeing that the story took place some 9000 years ago, even 7000 year old technology would seem advanced to outsiders. When the flood came, either everyone on the island drowned, or those that escaped did not manage to establish their advanced civilisation on the mainland (those pesky barbarians again).
Another theory about submerged civilisation being more advanced is that at the time of the end of the ice-age, the lands that are submerged now were more fertile than other lands. Climate models of India have shown that 10000 years ago, the part that is now above sea-level was a desert, and the part now below was fertile. The land could have been fertile because it had remained underwater so long before the last ice-age, and rivers could have been continuously been depositing sediments on the sea-floor. The fertile land encouraged agriculture which made the peoples more sedentary in nature, and thus more likely to become advanced. The people on the highland remained hunter/gatherers, were more nomadic, and consequently, did not develop as well.
Slashdot Mirror
- Earth is a bit bigger than Venus
- The Earth-Mars distance at alignment is smaller than the Venus-Earth distance at alignment (although I'm not sure on this one).
- The Sun on Mars would appear smaller, and as a result, the disc of Earth's dark-side would make a greater impact.
- Any Terrestrial astronauts viewing it would get a brief reminder of their belovered homeworld, whereas here on earth, we're briefly reminded of the hellish conditions of Venus.
Also, because of the reduced amount solar-radiation that Mars recieves per square-metre, it might be safer to view with the naked eye, but this extra safety will be far negated by the lack of ozone-layer, lack of magnetic-field, thin atmosphere, etc (not to mention that any protection you wear to survive Mars's atmosphere guarantees that your eye is not naked).Perhaps some kind soul could throw some numbers at the facts I've presented so we know howmany % of the sun's area as seen from Mars is blocked by the passing Earth.
Seeing that writing had existed for many thousands of years beforehand, it seems a bit suspicious that the only written account of Atlantis was from Plato's time several thousand years after the alledged destruction of Atlantis. Perhaps the Great Library of Alexandria held more accounts before it was destroyed (which IMO was one of the most tragic episodes of history).
Incidentally, they've recently found a lost city just on land on the coast of Greece. At one time about 2000+ years ago, it was flooded. Some ancient travel writer (could have been Plinny) noted that he saw the tops of the tallest buildings of that city sticking out the water. Since then, many unsuccessful attempts have been made to find it by looking offshore, but the city had in fact somehow returned to the shore (could have been buried under a huge pile of mud, or possibly the land could have risen as well).
Here's another one - Aphex Twin - Powerpill Pacman . For details on their PowerPill Pacman EP single - follow this link. There are several remixes on this EP Single.
The lyrics to Buckner & Garcia - Pac Man Fever
Ambassadors of Funk (feat. M.C. Mario) - Super Mario Land
This is somewhat Techno/Rave and came out during 1992
I think that although a usable Lego-computer would cost thousands, building a Lego CPU would be much cheaper. Not much use, but it would be a fun geek-project.
I once knew someone who designed components for a lego-CPU. This included a 'Lego-transistor' to prevent the load that a single gear-wheel would have to drive from becoming too much.
Just out of interest, is there a web-page that has a list of alternaive means of building computational-logic based computers, or other types of computers? I once saw a digital adding machine built up out of water flowing through pipes that formed logic-gates. I also heard of a story about someone building logic-gates that work by heating bi-metalic strips and causing them to bend.
BTW, 'viola' is also a musical instrument. It's bigger than a violin and smaller than a cello.
5242880 flip-flops should be enough for anybody
Now work out howmany nuts and bolts you jneed to build a flip-flop, and now, you can translate Bill Gate's quotes into Meccano. Hey - it's a hell of a lot easier porting an actual Bill Gates Monstrossity-OS to a Meccano computer.
Contiki/Linux just needs to be compiled on a real compiler with a back-end that produces code that the Meccano CPU can run. As for which OS to try out, try and compare the size of a Contiki kernel to thet of a Linux kernel, and go with the smallest (question: Is there a size comparison of the two kernels on a machine that is capable of running both OS's?). As all the flip-flops for memory/storage will have to be built by hand, it would make sense to try the smallest OS on the machine. I suspect that Contiki would be the smallest, but I am not sure if Contiki can run as a server OS, so it would be useless, unless you also made user Input/Output devices out of Meccano as well.
Digital computers are more suited being built electronically (small and fast), but in the early days of computers, many were analog. The transition to digital happened around the same time as the transition from mechanical to electronic. Nowardays, analog computing is virtually unheard of, but I think that sometime during the late 80's/early 90's, they had found an application for analog computing in Neural Networks. I can't remember what it was, but the revival in analog computing has failed to materialise, so it must not have been very important.
Of course, you would have to modify this port of Linux to take into account how the Meccano compouter handles IO, etc. Add a means of networking, and you can turn it into a Linux server. Add user Input/Output, and you have a workstation.
How did you prevent the holes in the soda straws from being confused with the blank holes? And besides, if you hold a straw so it's end is facing your face, it looks more like a 0 than a 1.
I recon this guy should try to build a machine that uses computational logic gates (NAND, NOR, etc). From that, he can build up things like binary adders and simple flip-flops. Then, add an instruction-decoder, and an arithmetic-logic unit - and viola - a Meccano CPU.
Having looked at the site and seen how all those early 20th century predictions of mammoth soul-less multi-level cities with swarms of flying cars failed to materialise, I notice that even though we're only 4 (or 3) years into the 21st century, one of the major predictions made at the turn of this century has failed to materialise - the success of the DotCom boom. So it looks like contemporary futurologists are a lot worse than their colleagues from 100 years ago.
In that case, instead of 'Action Man', the figure would be called "Passiveness Man".
--
Norway? More like Snoreway
The first four responses to this article about climate change were responses to the bit about 'THC slowdown' and not responses to anything else in the article (even the 'first-post' people are hiding behind the woodwork). So when we've completely wrecked the planet, is the plan to just get completely stoned and ignore the dire situation?
This sort of reminds me of my trip to Finland. I also had some reindeer meat, but it was served with cranberries. One of the cranberries was perched on top of a meaty protrusion in the pile of meat, and it looked like I had been served Rudolph the Red Nosed reindeer himself.
Even if you are not likely to be sacked on these grounds, there's always the chance that not opting out could mean you are less likely to be getting promotions or raises. Such a thing would be almost impossible to prove in a tribunal.
Does anyone know if people in the UK have been sacked for not signing the opt-out, and if so, have they successfully won an unfair dismissal case on those grounds. Or have the employers just made up excuses for the sacking?
Is this just 'security through obscurity', or was there something else involved.
The inhabitants of the 'new world' came from all over the place in the country in the old world that colonised the area. Once there, the different populations assimilated, and differences in the accenst were ironed out. Also because of the vast ammounts of land available, people spread out very quickly without giving their dialects a chance to evolve.
Within the USA, apart from the South-East which has a radically different dialect, most of the USA and Anglophone-Canada is more or less the same. But there are subtle differences in the accents, but as Americans are generally much more spread out, you have to travel far to notice an accent-change.
One thing I'm still curious about is which old-world languages and dialects evolved into the various American-English dialects, and how come the south-east has such a radically different dialect.
Plato's work refers to the location of Atlantis as beyond the "The Pillars of Hercules" which is now known as the strait of Gibraltar. This is the gateway between the Mediterranean sea and the Atlantic ocean. This of course is quite far from Cyprus. According to measurements of the bottom of the sea, if the sea-level dropped by 100 metres, a new archipelago of islands would be exposed just beyond the straits of Gibraltar. This is a probable location for Atlantis.
As for the civilisation being more advanced, that could have been because they were on an island that was cut off from the mainland which was infested with barbarians. The islanders could then develop their technology in peace. Seeing that the story took place some 9000 years ago, even 7000 year old technology would seem advanced to outsiders. When the flood came, either everyone on the island drowned, or those that escaped did not manage to establish their advanced civilisation on the mainland (those pesky barbarians again).
Another theory about submerged civilisation being more advanced is that at the time of the end of the ice-age, the lands that are submerged now were more fertile than other lands. Climate models of India have shown that 10000 years ago, the part that is now above sea-level was a desert, and the part now below was fertile. The land could have been fertile because it had remained underwater so long before the last ice-age, and rivers could have been continuously been depositing sediments on the sea-floor. The fertile land encouraged agriculture which made the peoples more sedentary in nature, and thus more likely to become advanced. The people on the highland remained hunter/gatherers, were more nomadic, and consequently, did not develop as well.
I can't find links for everything offhand, but do have a look at Graham Hancock's web-site.
Art is a mapping between a physical object and an abstract thought.