I know. It's really tempting to think conspiracy. I definitly agree that NASA doesn't need to use gossip magazine rumors to attract attention. And I'd definitly like to think that if there was a chance they'd found something, NASA would be excited, and would really look into it. If not what are we doing up there? I'd definitly like to believe that.
David Grinspoon: "We like it when people get excited about Mars exploration. Why would we ever hide the most exciting thing we could find?"
There is of course the idea that members of certain other government groups and departments might not want the total distraction of discovering something on Mars. I've heard that argued plenty.
Personally, I'm really glad they've got some new material out there, and I don't care if people get a little irrational and goofy over it. It's just good to remember that we have a space program. TCS also had a good article last fall on China's burgeoning space program (which I'm having a hard time finding updates about. They're just not into releasing information). I liked the way they put it:
So while the glass-is-half-empty analysis might be that our bureaucrats are now less energetic than the Chinese, the glass-is-half-full analysis might be this: that Chinese bureaucrats, five centuries after dropping the ball, are still playing catch-up to Western entrepreneurialism and energy.
So which is it? Well, the answer to the old "is the glass half-full, or half-empty?" question is "it depends on whether you're drinking, or pouring."
However, I would prefer to see an Internet based voting system that gets rid of the electoral college system....
Dear god help us all. Have you studied why the electoral college was put in? It was to keep the last say from riding in the hands of ignorant commoners like ourselves. Think what the world would be like if we didn't have the upper classes to check and veto all our decisions. Then we might have a true government of the people rather than an illusion of one.
But then again I'm not really fond of too many people.
Alright I'll quit it with the hideous sarcasm. I still maintain that this is indeed both a brilliant move and a sick commentary, but the idea of an internet based voting system doesn't exactly spark my fuses either. Isn't a decent chunk of the internet population 12 year-old boys? Don't tell me they wouldn't find a way into the system eventually. That or sickos like myself would. And besides, how would my grandma vote then?
It's a nice idea, but I don't think the internet is going to be a mainstay channel of our political voices any time soon.
Wow this article is really just an invitation isn't it. But the article does talk about other interesting realms this might affect. This may also lead to a fuller understanding of the health effects of the nanosized particles produced by diesel engines.
Inhalation Toxicology, the journal referenced at the bottom of the article, has some other interesting articles on nanoparticles. I searched for all the cancer-related
articles that mention nanoparticles, and they do have several articles discussing nanoparticles being used in immunizations and various 'cures', which is kind of encouraging. It seems to me that any medication that we could just shoot through the brain/blood barrier, would be quicker and possibly more effective.
Unfortunately, the archived articles require a membership, that I'm too lazy to get, to read.
That's beautiful. I think I'd take some satisfaction from it even if there were errors, just like I enjoy leaving IE on 'ask permission to use internet' so I can tell it no when it's opened automatically by something. Yahoo DSL and a few other programs automatically call up IE, and I can't seem to convince them to try Mozilla.
Is there any way to do that sort of thing with all the Yahoo messaging crap that comes with their DSL now? The easiest way is to do a custom install and not even install it, but my boss's computer is already infected. I can rename the Y! messenger exe but it still puts shortcuts to itself all over the place.
I haven't heard of anyone being strip-searched, but on the trip I took at Christmas, they ran a wand over me and felt up all the areas that make noise.
Note to any females on slash: Do not wear an underwire bra
I rather suspected it might be 2002, but abe has it as 2003, and so does amazon. It's generally listed as February 2003. It's also included in a lot of top ten 2003 lists. I don't have a problem with the possibility of being wrong here or anything, but I couldn't find a definitive date anywhere.
Thank goodness! For some reason my search wasn't pulling up any reference to Pattern Recognition under this story.
I definitly think Gibson's losing his wind, but I can't say I mind. The prose is still phenomenal, he's not blatantly leaving his books uncut, and the plots and essential characters are vaguely familiar, but still much loved.
Now I do have to acknowledge that Gibson's showing signs of running out of ideas. We've got another story about searching for a strange and mysterious anonymous genius of an artist, we've got another character named Case (although, granted now it's Cayce, and she's a girl), we've got a few other blatanly recycled characters.
But I honestly didn't mind. It's new Gibson for chrissakes. Jack it into my arm. I did really like CayceP's quirk about removing the brand names from all her clothing. Especially the bit about the levis logos having been ground off the fronts of the buttons on her new 501s by a confused chinese lock smith in NYC. I also really enjoyed the email and website stuff.
It's about the same Gibson, even with the supposed present tense. It's still a book containing two types of people, the inhuman rich and the raw talents. It's still got great toys and marvelously quirky characters.
It's fine with me that he's recycling old plots. So long as they still flow, and theyre still edited.
I wouldn't put it up there with neuromancer or snow crash (which I agree is scores above Stephenson's latest) but it was indeed good.
The opinions of geek readers on this one seem to vary a lot though. I know he's ridiculously popular around here (Bay Area, CA) because he comes here and he reads and signs in tiny sci-fi bookstores and he rants about open source and he basically comes across as one of us. I'm sure the Canada geeks have a similar devotion to his work.
I mean how many authors will sign the electronic copy of their book on your palm and not wince a little bit at your painful, blatant geekhood?
The author aside, I did think Down and Out was a good book in general. More brain candy than Neuromancer, although I do think Snow crash was kind of brain candy-ish. It's definitly an interesting society, while not an entirely new concept. I suspect that I enjoyed it primarily because of my own personal desire to have my brain jacked into a computer network, and to experience various other interesting toys.
There was one classic and promising scifi ethical question that he approached and never really played out. When they're killed, characters in the book get new bodies grown for them, and their memory is uploaded to the new bodies. He does play with the idea of purposefully wiping one's own memory using this trick and with some medical dificulties involved, but he doesn't really get into the meat of it. I think it could have tied in nicely with the main character's personal crisis issues, but ah well.
Like I said, great brain candy. Just edgy and intellectually teasing to keep you engaged, but I certainly wouldn't claim it was profound.
Antibubbles are... Two nested spheres of surfactant, submerged in fluid, between them a thin layer of air, surrounding a pocket of the same fluid... exactly like a bubble is not.
I'd expect that in a pure liquid (They initially felt that it would be impossible to form antibubbles - it is impossible to form antibubbles (or bubbles) using pure water, alcohol or oil - a surfactant is needed.) any potential antibubbles would indeed decompose into regular bubbles. (see previous comment)
From what I can gather, the difference is the way air reacts in a liquid containing surfactants:
Definition: a linear molecule with a hydrophilic (attracted to water) head and a hydrophobic (repelled by water) end. Surfactants tend to clump together when in solution - forming a surface between the fluid and air with the hydrophobic tails in the air and the hydrophilic heads in the fluid.
It actually sounds very similar to the formation of a bubble, but in this case, before the surface tension forces it into the shape of a filled sphere, the two ends of the shape are attracted to each other and attatch, trapping a globule of water. I can definitly see hydrophobic/hydrophilic forces being stronger, or at least quicker than brute surface tension. Instead of it just being a matter of the two substances (the air and water) trying to group their molecules together, there's the added draw of satisfying the hydrophobic/hydrophilic ends of the molecule by butting them up against air and water respectively.
It'd be difficult because bubbles by their definition are suspended in air, and antibubbles by their definition are suspended in water. But If they were large enough they might meet somewhere around the surface of the water, or if we just call bubbles air pockets in water, then they could meet.
If they met, it looks like they'd probably end up forming a larger bubble or antibubble depending on which of the two was more stable.
Picture: Large glob of air suspended in water touches hollow sphere of air (anti-bubble). I'd guess that the antibubble would collapse, perhaps partially doing a 'jellyfish effect' but probably largely the air would reform a bubble with the original bubble. Perhaps it'd go the other way and the air from the bubble would flow in and enlarge the anti-bubble's surface area. It'd probably depend also on the mixture, whether it was more bubble or anti-bubble friendly.
Can anyone find anything to the effect of which is more stable? Which one would make it in a fight, bubbles or antibubbles?
Dr Dorbolo said "We also found that when they die, or burst, they morph into a form of structure which we have nicknamed the jellyfish form because it looks very like a jellyfish swimming through water. It slowly moves and fades away until it disappears altogether."
For anyone who's seen a slow motion video of a bubble bursting, that sounds like it looks very similar. The whole forming and bursting of antibubbles is interesting, because from the articles it sounds like they're very similar to normal bubbles. That seems like it would imply some kind of air-counterpart to surface tension.
Hmm, I just noticed that I instinctively capitalize Spray Mount but not god. Ah well.
Spray mount is definitly your solution. What you want to do (cost-efficiency-wise) is make the interim drafts of your game using spray mount and a sheet of heavy cardboard. Now by heavy cardboard, I do not mean 'hack the side off of a moving box'. Larger stationary stores sell well-compacted, pre-cut sheets of cardboard. So you get one of those, and you wrap the back in paper (christmas present style, folding in around the corners) and then slather on some spray mount. When you put your front on you want to line up two corners and use a ruler to press it across.
Sure once you've got a well-designed game that flows, you can probably afford to put out for a pro job, but cards and the board front can be pretty easily made with a nice color printer (go to a copy center if you have a crappy one).
As far as plastic molds, I'd just hit a second hand store and buy orphaned peices for a while. No use getting nice ones made till you're doing a final draft.
Note: it's really easy to make pewter or tin figures. I mean you can melt that stuff with a candle. Make a nice mold using plaster, rubber, or fine clay and make some metal peices a la Monopoly or Clue.
Yea, I'd love to get exactly what all those things are. The eight maids-a-milking, I suppose that doesn't include the price of the cow ($41 traditional, yeah right) but just the labor. Is that a couple hours? One would think it ought to be like a 9 to 5 for the day that you get them.
And dang those pipers are expensive! I guess they use the same number of hours for each person who's doing some action (dancing, leaping, milking or piping.)
That'd make the pay per person ratio come out thusly:
milkmaids - 5.15
drummers - 178.97
pipers - 180.22
lords - 392.14
ladies - 470.10
Now, perhaps some of them charge by the job, but this is in terms of effective hourly rates. There's no way we can tell if the maids just milk one cow and the lords dance all day.
Dennis Murphy wrote, "Once again, Duke Nukem Forever is the definitive vaporware. Hell, even Warcraft III made it out this year. You know, I think I'm going to set up a script to submit Duke Nukem Forever every year."
It is time, my brothers. Has anyone written a script?
The article mentions other uses of this concept than just cryogenic freezing and space travel. Those are merely the two that our fellow/.ers have focused on (go figure).
By replicating the squirrel's trick, transplant organs would have a longer shelf life.
Use your imagination (for something other than sci fi). There are plenty of sane scientific uses for this concept, that still guarantee keeping a steady -3 degrees.
Then again, there's cryogenic freezing, and that's pretty much what I'm living to wait for now.
My thoughts exactly. This would of course imply that the Golgafrinchans on Earth (a race of middlemen) would have somehow evolved two-thirds of their population into useful people.
Good point. Going with the survival of the fittest concept, there's also the point that women (historically, although no longer of course *ahem*) relied on men not only for their freely dispensed semen, but also for hunting, shelter and protection. Therefor seeing photographs of attractive females, might incite competitiveness, which could induce 'irrational discounting'.
Plus there's the chance that there were dykes in there. Actually, I'd be extremely interested to see how homosexuals reacted in comparison with their hetero counterparts.
There's also the possibility that the male tendency for irrationality around attractive women has nothing to do with effort expended to reproduce, but just with chances of reproduction period.
From a propagation of one's own genes standpoint:
If a female is successful in getting pregnant, she will indeed have to spend the next 9 months, and really the next couple years, out of the game. If a male succeeds in impregnating a woman, he can go to it again 5 minutes later (or several hours in some cases) but in theory 5 minutes later. Therefor it'd be in his interest (propagation-wise) to be a little fickle, and to make quick, instant-gratification decisions. The woman's primary concern for propagating her genes is to keep that kid alive. So she's more likely to be focused on the future.
Personally, I don't identify with that whole mindset, but hey, I'm not straight. Maybe I think like a man.
I just discovered this site, and the indexing is so ridiculously exciting that I'm probably going to end up posting something from it 5 or 6 times in comments as a whole today.
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in
a very narrow field. - Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962)
Slashdot Mirror
My. Such gluttonous beauty. A well-crafted troll, and such a lovely turn-out.
David Grinspoon: "We like it when people get excited about Mars exploration. Why would we ever hide the most exciting thing we could find?"
There is of course the idea that members of certain other government groups and departments might not want the total distraction of discovering something on Mars. I've heard that argued plenty.
Personally, I'm really glad they've got some new material out there, and I don't care if people get a little irrational and goofy over it. It's just good to remember that we have a space program. TCS also had a good article last fall on China's burgeoning space program (which I'm having a hard time finding updates about. They're just not into releasing information). I liked the way they put it:
So while the glass-is-half-empty analysis might be that our bureaucrats are now less energetic than the Chinese, the glass-is-half-full analysis might be this: that Chinese bureaucrats, five centuries after dropping the ball, are still playing catch-up to Western entrepreneurialism and energy.
So which is it? Well, the answer to the old "is the glass half-full, or half-empty?" question is "it depends on whether you're drinking, or pouring."
The Chinese, clearly, are pouring. Are we?
But then again I'm not really fond of too many people.
Alright I'll quit it with the hideous sarcasm. I still maintain that this is indeed both a brilliant move and a sick commentary, but the idea of an internet based voting system doesn't exactly spark my fuses either. Isn't a decent chunk of the internet population 12 year-old boys? Don't tell me they wouldn't find a way into the system eventually. That or sickos like myself would. And besides, how would my grandma vote then?
It's a nice idea, but I don't think the internet is going to be a mainstay channel of our political voices any time soon.
Of course it's nothing new. Didn't Card already discover this about the descolada in the third book of the Ender's series?
Inhalation Toxicology, the journal referenced at the bottom of the article, has some other interesting articles on nanoparticles. I searched for all the cancer-related articles that mention nanoparticles, and they do have several articles discussing nanoparticles being used in immunizations and various 'cures', which is kind of encouraging. It seems to me that any medication that we could just shoot through the brain/blood barrier, would be quicker and possibly more effective.
Unfortunately, the archived articles require a membership, that I'm too lazy to get, to read.
Is there any way to do that sort of thing with all the Yahoo messaging crap that comes with their DSL now? The easiest way is to do a custom install and not even install it, but my boss's computer is already infected. I can rename the Y! messenger exe but it still puts shortcuts to itself all over the place.
That was quick. Did anybody catch a mirror? Or at least get some text so we have something to comment on other than each other?
Note to any females on slash:
Do not wear an underwire bra
I rather suspected it might be 2002, but abe has it as 2003, and so does amazon. It's generally listed as February 2003. It's also included in a lot of top ten 2003 lists. I don't have a problem with the possibility of being wrong here or anything, but I couldn't find a definitive date anywhere.
I definitly think Gibson's losing his wind, but I can't say I mind. The prose is still phenomenal, he's not blatantly leaving his books uncut, and the plots and essential characters are vaguely familiar, but still much loved.
Now I do have to acknowledge that Gibson's showing signs of running out of ideas. We've got another story about searching for a strange and mysterious anonymous genius of an artist, we've got another character named Case (although, granted now it's Cayce, and she's a girl), we've got a few other blatanly recycled characters.
But I honestly didn't mind. It's new Gibson for chrissakes. Jack it into my arm. I did really like CayceP's quirk about removing the brand names from all her clothing. Especially the bit about the levis logos having been ground off the fronts of the buttons on her new 501s by a confused chinese lock smith in NYC. I also really enjoyed the email and website stuff.
It's about the same Gibson, even with the supposed present tense. It's still a book containing two types of people, the inhuman rich and the raw talents. It's still got great toys and marvelously quirky characters.
It's fine with me that he's recycling old plots. So long as they still flow, and theyre still edited.
The opinions of geek readers on this one seem to vary a lot though. I know he's ridiculously popular around here (Bay Area, CA) because he comes here and he reads and signs in tiny sci-fi bookstores and he rants about open source and he basically comes across as one of us. I'm sure the Canada geeks have a similar devotion to his work.
I mean how many authors will sign the electronic copy of their book on your palm and not wince a little bit at your painful, blatant geekhood?
The author aside, I did think Down and Out was a good book in general. More brain candy than Neuromancer, although I do think Snow crash was kind of brain candy-ish. It's definitly an interesting society, while not an entirely new concept. I suspect that I enjoyed it primarily because of my own personal desire to have my brain jacked into a computer network, and to experience various other interesting toys.
There was one classic and promising scifi ethical question that he approached and never really played out. When they're killed, characters in the book get new bodies grown for them, and their memory is uploaded to the new bodies. He does play with the idea of purposefully wiping one's own memory using this trick and with some medical dificulties involved, but he doesn't really get into the meat of it. I think it could have tied in nicely with the main character's personal crisis issues, but ah well.
Like I said, great brain candy. Just edgy and intellectually teasing to keep you engaged, but I certainly wouldn't claim it was profound.
Nothing like using Stephenson's 900 page opuses to give your place that geek chic flair.
Antibubbles are... Two nested spheres of surfactant, submerged in fluid, between them a thin layer of air, surrounding a pocket of the same fluid... exactly like a bubble is not.
From what I can gather, the difference is the way air reacts in a liquid containing surfactants: Definition: a linear molecule with a hydrophilic (attracted to water) head and a hydrophobic (repelled by water) end. Surfactants tend to clump together when in solution - forming a surface between the fluid and air with the hydrophobic tails in the air and the hydrophilic heads in the fluid.
It actually sounds very similar to the formation of a bubble, but in this case, before the surface tension forces it into the shape of a filled sphere, the two ends of the shape are attracted to each other and attatch, trapping a globule of water. I can definitly see hydrophobic/hydrophilic forces being stronger, or at least quicker than brute surface tension. Instead of it just being a matter of the two substances (the air and water) trying to group their molecules together, there's the added draw of satisfying the hydrophobic/hydrophilic ends of the molecule by butting them up against air and water respectively.
If they met, it looks like they'd probably end up forming a larger bubble or antibubble depending on which of the two was more stable.
Picture: Large glob of air suspended in water touches hollow sphere of air (anti-bubble). I'd guess that the antibubble would collapse, perhaps partially doing a 'jellyfish effect' but probably largely the air would reform a bubble with the original bubble. Perhaps it'd go the other way and the air from the bubble would flow in and enlarge the anti-bubble's surface area. It'd probably depend also on the mixture, whether it was more bubble or anti-bubble friendly.
Can anyone find anything to the effect of which is more stable? Which one would make it in a fight, bubbles or antibubbles?
For anyone who's seen a slow motion video of a bubble bursting, that sounds like it looks very similar. The whole forming and bursting of antibubbles is interesting, because from the articles it sounds like they're very similar to normal bubbles. That seems like it would imply some kind of air-counterpart to surface tension.
Spray mount is definitly your solution. What you want to do (cost-efficiency-wise) is make the interim drafts of your game using spray mount and a sheet of heavy cardboard. Now by heavy cardboard, I do not mean 'hack the side off of a moving box'. Larger stationary stores sell well-compacted, pre-cut sheets of cardboard. So you get one of those, and you wrap the back in paper (christmas present style, folding in around the corners) and then slather on some spray mount. When you put your front on you want to line up two corners and use a ruler to press it across.
Sure once you've got a well-designed game that flows, you can probably afford to put out for a pro job, but cards and the board front can be pretty easily made with a nice color printer (go to a copy center if you have a crappy one).
As far as plastic molds, I'd just hit a second hand store and buy orphaned peices for a while. No use getting nice ones made till you're doing a final draft.
Note: it's really easy to make pewter or tin figures. I mean you can melt that stuff with a candle. Make a nice mold using plaster, rubber, or fine clay and make some metal peices a la Monopoly or Clue.
And dang those pipers are expensive! I guess they use the same number of hours for each person who's doing some action (dancing, leaping, milking or piping.)
That'd make the pay per person ratio come out thusly:
milkmaids - 5.15
drummers - 178.97
pipers - 180.22
lords - 392.14
ladies - 470.10
Now, perhaps some of them charge by the job, but this is in terms of effective hourly rates. There's no way we can tell if the maids just milk one cow and the lords dance all day.
Dennis Murphy wrote, "Once again, Duke Nukem Forever is the definitive vaporware. Hell, even Warcraft III made it out this year. You know, I think I'm going to set up a script to submit Duke Nukem Forever every year."
It is time, my brothers. Has anyone written a script?
The Gulf War II Drinking Game:
"Drink when:
The words 'Weapon(s) of Mass Destruction' are used.
x2 if its shortned to 'WMD'"
By replicating the squirrel's trick, transplant organs would have a longer shelf life.
Use your imagination (for something other than sci fi). There are plenty of sane scientific uses for this concept, that still guarantee keeping a steady -3 degrees.
Then again, there's cryogenic freezing, and that's pretty much what I'm living to wait for now.
Truly, there is hope.
History repeats itself - Beware dirty telephones.
Plus there's the chance that there were dykes in there. Actually, I'd be extremely interested to see how homosexuals reacted in comparison with their hetero counterparts.
There's also the possibility that the male tendency for irrationality around attractive women has nothing to do with effort expended to reproduce, but just with chances of reproduction period.
From a propagation of one's own genes standpoint:
If a female is successful in getting pregnant, she will indeed have to spend the next 9 months, and really the next couple years, out of the game. If a male succeeds in impregnating a woman, he can go to it again 5 minutes later (or several hours in some cases) but in theory 5 minutes later. Therefor it'd be in his interest (propagation-wise) to be a little fickle, and to make quick, instant-gratification decisions. The woman's primary concern for propagating her genes is to keep that kid alive. So she's more likely to be focused on the future.
Personally, I don't identify with that whole mindset, but hey, I'm not straight. Maybe I think like a man.
But of course, gotta love the net, I also found it for $8, with a link to 'buy it on amazon' where it is once again $98 at the minimum.
If you want the book, I'd recommend just hitting a bunch of used bookstores (ask for ISBN: 0671740601 ). Good luck (here's the google, for reference.)
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field. - Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962)