I grew up near a small college in Texas which had terminals that connected to the infant internet. When I was about 15 (late 1970s), my friend's older brother was a math major and had access. We were able to get into the lab late at night and on weekends and connect to a mainframe computer at some distant state university. We played the classic text-mode Star Trek game which was probably written in Fortran.
I'm now recalling that we played this on a teletype machine, so we had these tremendously long printouts of gaming sessions. A few years later, another friend and I reverse-engineered the game in TRS-80 Basic. Initially we did this in 4k RAM with cassette storage (50 baud!), then later in 16k RAM with floppies. (That friend has continued game programming to this day; he now works for Bioware.)
In The Making of a Brief History of Time (film), Steven Hawking waxes eloquent about how amazing it is that the whole behavior of the universe can be summed up in a few equations and a few rules. "But," he adds (I'm quoting from memory), "nowhere does this explain why the universe goes to the bother of existing."
...the full Allen array would be able to detect a signal from as far as 500 light years that is only a few times more powerful than what can now be sent by the Arecibo radio telescope...
If there are a million civilizations in the galaxy, their average separation is 300 light years. (I think this datum is from Shklovskii & Sagan's "Intelligent Life in the Universe".)
(I'm a physician.) To die from "exhaustion" (whatever that is) from 3 days of gaming is ridiculous. I can't even think of a metabolic condition that could kill someone that soon in the absence of some pre-existing severe disease. Hell, even missing a couple of dialysis treatments wouldn't kill most people. And sleep deprivation would take a week or more to kill you, and in fact voluntary sleep deprivation of that severity is probably impossible.
By far the most likely explanation is a blood clot in the leg (deep venous thrombosis or "DVT") that embolized to the lung (pulmonary embolism or "PE"). In some individuals, blood clots can develop from just hours of being motionless; this is why you should flex your calves and preferably get up and walk around during long flights.
This news story was useless. Not even a reference to a pending autopsy? WTF?
Cosmic ray particles get trapped in the galaxy's magnetic field and fly around and around for typically 15 million years or so before they arrive at earth. They generally retain their energy (some particles arriving at earth are within in part in 10^-22 of the speed of light). So really, distance isn't a factor. Only the very fastest particles emitted by supernovae, a minute fraction, travel in anything close to a straight line to be subject to a 1/r^2 law.
The design of that web page is so bad that I refuse to read the article. I have zero tolerance for flashing ads. I clicked on the "print" button hoping to get a more-readable page, but instead got a page of gray text on a blue-gray background, unreadable in Safari.
Don't listen to an iPod or other music player on a airplane. The volume that the music would need to be would be astronomical, on top of the already-very-loud engine noise. Myself, I've been using earplugs when I fly for years.
The signal-to-noise ratio on the linked page is pretty low. I found the printer-friendly version to be much more tolerable. Unfortunatley, you can't link directly to it./slap about.com
In 1948, four high schools students in California built a cyclotron. Here (scroll down a ways) is the article from Physics Today about it. There was a really nice writeup about it in Scientific American's Amateur Scientist column. There was also a Nov 2004 slashdot thread on homebrew cyclotroning.
For the 12 months ended in July, home printing accounted for just 48 percent of the 7.7 billion digital prints made, down sharply from 64 percent in the previous 12 months... The number of photos spewing out of home printers is up quite handsomely, however, because of the overall growth of digital photo printing--up about 68 percent from the year-earlier period.
This chunk of text is begging for a graph. (Didn't RTFA.)
I finally bought HL2 on Friday (even though my Windows machine is dead at the moment). I had been waiting for the price to come down. Friday, it was "on sale" for $50 at FredMeyer; it was $45 at Target. Then I went to WalMart, where it was $29.86. "Gotta be a mistake", I thought to myself, "but I'm definitely getting it now." Remind me to go back to WM and check the price later this week.
Suppose you were invited to be on Earth's first manned mission to Mars. Assume that the chance of returning to Earth alive is less than 100%. How low of a chance of return would you be willing to take: 90%, 50%, 10%, maybe even 0%? If I were given odds of 80% to get there, and 1% to get back, I wouldn't hesitate to go. Heck, I might even go at 0% to get back.
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7 Rules for Maximizing Your Creative Output
I grew up near a small college in Texas which had terminals that connected to the infant internet. When I was about 15 (late 1970s), my friend's older brother was a math major and had access. We were able to get into the lab late at night and on weekends and connect to a mainframe computer at some distant state university. We played the classic text-mode Star Trek game which was probably written in Fortran. I'm now recalling that we played this on a teletype machine, so we had these tremendously long printouts of gaming sessions. A few years later, another friend and I reverse-engineered the game in TRS-80 Basic. Initially we did this in 4k RAM with cassette storage (50 baud!), then later in 16k RAM with floppies. (That friend has continued game programming to this day; he now works for Bioware.)
I put Vista on my iMac a couple months ago just to run Halo 2.
I uninstalled Halo 2* last week, so now I have no reason to keep running Vista other than laziness.
*Crappy physics, slow movement, useless weapons.
In The Making of a Brief History of Time (film), Steven Hawking waxes eloquent about how amazing it is that the whole behavior of the universe can be summed up in a few equations and a few rules. "But," he adds (I'm quoting from memory), "nowhere does this explain why the universe goes to the bother of existing."
Actually, that's called a URL. A link would be this.
If there are a million civilizations in the galaxy, their average separation is 300 light years. (I think this datum is from Shklovskii & Sagan's "Intelligent Life in the Universe".)
He has a podcast.
(I'm a physician.) To die from "exhaustion" (whatever that is) from 3 days of gaming is ridiculous. I can't even think of a metabolic condition that could kill someone that soon in the absence of some pre-existing severe disease. Hell, even missing a couple of dialysis treatments wouldn't kill most people. And sleep deprivation would take a week or more to kill you, and in fact voluntary sleep deprivation of that severity is probably impossible.
By far the most likely explanation is a blood clot in the leg (deep venous thrombosis or "DVT") that embolized to the lung (pulmonary embolism or "PE"). In some individuals, blood clots can develop from just hours of being motionless; this is why you should flex your calves and preferably get up and walk around during long flights.
This news story was useless. Not even a reference to a pending autopsy? WTF?
Ars's writeup is a little more fleshed-out than the Scientific American blog posting.
I stopped reading Scientific American for the same reason I don't read USA Today. Because reading it is the same as not reading it.
Now I read American Scientist.
I can't believe that none of you slashnerds have mentioned Revolution OS.
In 1947, four high school students in El Cerrito, California built a cyclotron. Here's a PDF of an article from Physics Today.
Cosmic ray particles get trapped in the galaxy's magnetic field and fly around and around for typically 15 million years or so before they arrive at earth. They generally retain their energy (some particles arriving at earth are within in part in 10^-22 of the speed of light). So really, distance isn't a factor. Only the very fastest particles emitted by supernovae, a minute fraction, travel in anything close to a straight line to be subject to a 1/r^2 law.
Source: "A Thin Cosmic Rain" by Friedlander
Does it come with a helmet?
Speaking as a consumer, this is not a problem for me. I don't click on ads.
Maybe a "Hey! You Kids Get Off My Lawn!" game?
(For the record, I enjoy the neighbors' kids playing on my lawn.)
The design of that web page is so bad that I refuse to read the article. I have zero tolerance for flashing ads. I clicked on the "print" button hoping to get a more-readable page, but instead got a page of gray text on a blue-gray background, unreadable in Safari.
Bite my shiny metal ass, etoychest.org.
....except that he hasn't updated the data since June 2005.
Don't listen to an iPod or other music player on a airplane. The volume that the music would need to be would be astronomical, on top of the already-very-loud engine noise. Myself, I've been using earplugs when I fly for years.
The signal-to-noise ratio on the linked page is pretty low. I found the printer-friendly version to be much more tolerable. Unfortunatley, you can't link directly to it. /slap about.com
In 1948, four high schools students in California built a cyclotron. Here (scroll down a ways) is the article from Physics Today about it. There was a really nice writeup about it in Scientific American's Amateur Scientist column. There was also a Nov 2004 slashdot thread on homebrew cyclotroning.
I, for one, welcome our Gravity overlords!
This chunk of text is begging for a graph. (Didn't RTFA.)
I've had my iPod for almost 4 years now. No scratches on it. I take care of it. Same goes for my 2-year-old cellphone.
I finally bought HL2 on Friday (even though my Windows machine is dead at the moment). I had been waiting for the price to come down. Friday, it was "on sale" for $50 at FredMeyer; it was $45 at Target. Then I went to WalMart, where it was $29.86. "Gotta be a mistake", I thought to myself, "but I'm definitely getting it now." Remind me to go back to WM and check the price later this week.
Suppose you were invited to be on Earth's first manned mission to Mars. Assume that the chance of returning to Earth alive is less than 100%. How low of a chance of return would you be willing to take: 90%, 50%, 10%, maybe even 0%? If I were given odds of 80% to get there, and 1% to get back, I wouldn't hesitate to go. Heck, I might even go at 0% to get back.