From the mid-80's to the mid-90's I did about a million dollars worth of research for DARPA and AFOSR (the Air Force Office of Scientific Research). Throughout, I found the military officers I dealt with to be decent, honest, hard-working people, intelligent, professional, with respect for others. In contrast, I found my colleagues the academic professors to be arrogant, ill-informed, and anxious to moralize about things they thought they understood but didn't.
By the way, my work was in computer architecture, which like any generally useful thing was good for the military but also good for everyone else.
I've been on an amusement-park ride where you come
down onto (or up thru) the center of a large rotating disc, and you walk at your own speed out to
the edge, whose speed matches the constantly moving
belt (in this case it was a chain of vehicles).
It can be made arbitrarily easy to take by making
the disc bigger.
I'd reccomend (as others have) Vernor Vinge's
A Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.
"Deepness" is a "prequel" so read it first
if you can. Vinge is an amazingly original
writer with a breathtakingly deep sense of
wonder and invented concepts such as the
Singularity. Both these books won Hugos,
I believe. Together they are nearly 1000
pages, ought to keep you busy for a while!
Josh
ps-- the only book I've ever read with a
greater scope is Greg Egan's "Diaspora"...
This patent seems to be mostly about selling space
for ads via an automated market process. FWIW, I published a paper in 1998 describing a similar process (to be used for the design of, e.g., chip layouts). The ref is
Hall, J Storrs, Louis Steinberg and Brian D Davison (1998) "Combining agoric and genetic methods in stochastic design"
Nanotechnology
9 No 3 (September 1998) 274-284
I just recently ran into Lush, a Lisp dialect for scientific programming. It's interpreted and/or compiled, and has interfaces to a large number of packages ranging from BLAS to OpenInventor (including the GSL). It has builtin GUI and plot capabilities.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, my work was in computer architecture, which like any generally useful thing was good for the military but also good for everyone else.
Josh
Actually, iRobot does use Linux in their higher-end robots.
I've been on an amusement-park ride where you come down onto (or up thru) the center of a large rotating disc, and you walk at your own speed out to the edge, whose speed matches the constantly moving belt (in this case it was a chain of vehicles). It can be made arbitrarily easy to take by making the disc bigger.
As I recall, Echo I, the balloon satellite launched in 1960, had its orbit significantly affected by light pressure.
I'd reccomend (as others have) Vernor Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. "Deepness" is a "prequel" so read it first if you can. Vinge is an amazingly original writer with a breathtakingly deep sense of wonder and invented concepts such as the Singularity. Both these books won Hugos, I believe. Together they are nearly 1000 pages, ought to keep you busy for a while! Josh ps-- the only book I've ever read with a greater scope is Greg Egan's "Diaspora"...
Hall, J Storrs, Louis Steinberg and Brian D Davison (1998) "Combining agoric and genetic methods in stochastic design" Nanotechnology 9 No 3 (September 1998) 274-284
the paper can be found here
... the Expect version (by Don Libes, the creator of Expect). It's the only program that has made me laugh out loud when I ran it.
This is a long-time (since 1934) surplus house near Philadelphia. I've been buying robot parts from them since 1980 or so.
Shameless plug: See also my page about an alternative concept which avoids the problem with skyhooks that they are incompatible with satellites.
"We Do Windows"
from one of the Lisp machine companies at a conference in the '80's...
Look at the project homepage on SourceForge.