Actually, some very big bull elephants have reached up to around 12 tons. But that's a minor point, because you're comparing apples and oranges.
"Only" 9 tons...for a flesh-eating biped. Think about that for a bit. No other land-dwelling meat-eater has ever come close to the size of the largest predatory dinosaurs. And all those dinosaurs were bipeds.
Elephants are herbivores, and they are strictly quadrupeds with columnar legs. The dinosaur analog for elephants are the sauropods, the largest of which reached up to 10 times the weight of the biggest elephants.
Yeah, but I wasn't trying to imply something like that. It's only a weak analogy. We humans don't tend to let our bodies pile up in places where we happen to drop dead.:D
Ha! Thank you for first pointing out that my reliance on Wiki was naive, and then also for doing the research to prove that the unsourced Wiki slander might be rightheaded after all.
Glad to be of help.
Me? I don't have an opinion on it. The guy's explanation for the bones sounds reasonable to me, because it jives with my understanding of octopuses as among the brightest species on the planet. Still, I don't normally put a hell of a lot of weight on what one scientist says.
The biggest problem with his claim isn't octopus intelligence, which is definitely quite remarkable. (Still, making self-portraits would still count as extraordinary behavior for any animal, since it implies a particular arsenal of especially complex mental capabilities, and remember this is back in the Triassic, over 200 million years ago, when basic vertebrate brains, and presumably cephalopod brains as well, were still being refined.)
One big problems is that he has taken a site widely accepted as one which has preserved animals that died of various causes and decided that it's actually a predator's killing ground. That's a bit like claiming that bodies in a cemetary are actually a serial killer's victims.
Second is that these victims aren't just any prehistoric sea reptiles--they're shonisaurs, the giants of the ichthyosaurs. These were approaching the size of sperm whales and were arguably among the biggest ocean vertebrates that ever lived before today's great whales evolved. He's imagining that there's some gigantic cephalopod hunting these things, when no cephalopod, living or fossil, has ever been found even approaching such a size. Giant squid are big, yeah, but nowhere near big enough to take on and eat a sperm whale.
Third, he has no clear evidence backing these extraordinary claims--no body parts of the supposed predator, no clear marks of predation on the bones, no candidate animals to fill the role, no real trace fossils, nothing except suppositions about patterns he sees in the bone arrangements. But humans are good at finding patterns even when they don't actually mean anything.
Science is awesome, but keep in mind this disparaging note on the "scientist's" Wiki page: He has earned the nickname McMinimal from his colleagues due to the perceived poor quality of his research, such as suggesting that Agnostids are cannibals and claiming that the Kraken was a real beast..
Whatever you think of this professor's hypothesis, that note was added just hours ago by an anonymous IP editor, without any references. It has since been removed, rightly so.
An English speaker (and for that matter a speaker of any other non-East Asian language) is likely to find Chinese harder to learn than any other reasonably common language, except possibly Japanese. David Moser's paper "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" may provide a useful reality check. He wrote it in 1990 while he was a student of Chinese. (He later got his doctorate in Chinese Studies and is currently Academic Director of the Chinese Studies staff at CET Academic Programs, an American study-abroad organization with a strong Chinese focus. He lives in Beijing with his Chinese wife.)
Looks like both bitsavers and classiccmp are back. I can't see any obvious signs that the classiccmp lists ever discussed a bitsavers outage over the past two weeks, so whatever the problem was, they never noticed it.
More importantly, Bitsavers, an archive or historical technical data,is down, and has been down for days. That site would be a major loss; they have copies of rare documents not available elsewhere. Anyone know what's going on there?
I have no idea on the cause for this outage, but Al Kossow, who founded and still runs bitsavers, is also the software curator for the Computer History Museum. Given their purpose, I'd imagine that any problem with bitsavers would be a high priority for them. I found a brief posting he made today on ba.broadcast.moderated, so it's not like he's out of commission or anything. Most likely it's just a technical problem which will eventually be cleared up.
I tried checking the classiccmp mailing list, which would be the most obvious place to discuss any bitsavers outage, but their site is currently down too. *headdesk*
Well, DEC's PDP-1 sales literature (such as the PDP-1 Handbook scans available here) seems to always list the display among the optional equipment, though it was probably a popular option. The only standard I/O equipment (not counting the front panel) was the console typewriter and the paper tape reader and punch. Seems reasonable, since I'm sure there were some customers who had no need for a CRT.
However, I overstated things when I said the display "would have added quite a bit to the cost". It only seems to have increased the cost by around 15% or so.
As previous replies have pointed out, advances in hardware were key. In 1962, integrated circuits were still in their infancy. They had only been invented four years earlier, and the only ones in production were being built for U.S. military projects like the Minuteman nuclear ballistic missile. And even those were very small-scale circuits, with only a few logic gates per chip.
Computers like the PDP-1 were built using thousands of discrete transistor components for their logic and magnetic cores for their main memory. The price for a basic PDP-1 at that time was around $100,000 in 1962 dollars, equivalent to about $800,000 today. That's a *basic* system; the point-plotting CRT display used in Spacewar! would have added quite a bit to the cost. The machine with all its peripherals took a good fraction of a room and probably weighed at least 2000 pounds. And running Spacewar! pretty much consumed the PDP-1's entire processing power. (Since the display was point-plotting only, the spaceships had to be drawn as series of dots, and the display had no storage ability, so a lot of processing overhead was needed to constantly refresh the entire list of currently displayed dots.)
When Spacewar! was written, the video game was basically a science-fiction concept, and computer graphics itself was just beginning to develop. Arcade games at that time were purely electromechanical games, such as pinball. The first commercial arcade video games (Galaxy Game and Computer Space, both of which were ports of Spacewar!) didn't appear until 1971; Atari's Pong came out the following year. Arcade video games of the early 1970s used custom state machines built from TTL logic chips instead of programmed computer systems; the first microprocessor-based arcade video games appeared starting in 1975 with Taito's Gun Fight, which used the Intel 8080. It was those programmable microprocessor-based systems that really allowed video game development to take off; for example, Asteroids was based on a 6502. Incidentally, Asteroids' vector display system first appeared in an arcade game with Cinematronics' Space Wars in 1977.
Spacewar! was widely ported to various computer systems during the 1960s and 1970s, so it's no surprise that Asteroids bears a strong resemblance to it.
I'm too lazy to calculate the energy density of a "wide", poorly collimated laser beam at 3 miles, however considering that these beams are usually powered by 5/1000ths of a watt or so, it's not a lot of energy to start with (the sun puts out around 24 times much energy per square centimeter).
The devices which people are concerned about are much more powerful, 0.1 watts and up. These are not legal for use as laser pointers in many countries, but they can easily be purchased online and can also be built from components used in consumer electronics.
The Wikipedia article on lasers and aviation safety may be of interest. Judging by the content there, this has clearly become a real concern for aviation people.
Those examples are all well and good but I can also point to the tremendous amount of latin and greek words that came into English without war being involved.
The Romans invaded Britain too.
And as I explained above, they added their words not to English, but to the British languages which English displaced. Some Latin-derived words in English come from French via the Norman invasion; other Latin words and Greek words were imported later through contact with continental Europeans, who used Latin and Greek as common languages of trade and academic correspondence.
As you said, there's no shortage of invasions in the history of English, but they're not the entire story.:)
English did not necessarily draw from other languages, it was not always voluntary. Germanic tribes conquered England... All these invaders forcibly altered the english language.
While your other examples are good, the Germanic Anglo-Saxon tribes who "conquered England" did not alter English. They were the ones who imported the language in the first place. Before they arrived, there was no "England", only the Roman province of Britannia, and the Romano-British spoke British languages or Latin. The British languages died out in England after the Anglo-Saxon conquest; their closest descendants are Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, the product of refugee Britons in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany.
Unfortunately, this liberal approach leaves them a bit unprepared to deal with "uppity" neighbors.
To be fair, they did that after a civil war, and their democratic government has since been stable for the last 60 years. Considering the tendency for Central American militaries to get involved in government, Costa Rica seems to be doing pretty well. If worse comes to worse, they could always raise a citizen levy. Might not be as effective as a professional force, but their motivation might more than make up for that...
From the article it sounds like Costa Rica is quite disturbed about this. Depending on how much Nicaragua cares about its image, it seems to me that simply having some civilians camping out in the area with guns and cameras might be enough to dissuade further shenanigans. If Nicaragua is rash enough to challenge them, it ends up looking like the bad guy and possibly enraging its neighbor into amassing a large citizens' militia for war.
This comment on the article at Technology Review challenges the conclusions reached. Quoted below; I've added in square brackets a couple of little elaborations of terms.
We've Been Down This Road Before
This model suffers from the same problem as the dry gully hypothesis put forth by Shinbrot et al. (2004) (http://www.pnas.org/content/101/23/8542.abstract). Yes, you can get an alcove and an apron, but it's missing the key defining characteristic of gullies, which is the channel. Their experiments did not produce the sinuous, anastomosing [branching and reconnecting] channels often observed in martian crater wall gullies. They call some features in their experiments "channels," but terrestrial geologists studying landslides on sand dune faces wouldn't call those features channels. They're more like chutes [a term from avalanche geology]. The gullies on Mars also aren't just simple landslides of loose sand/dust on slopes; in many places the channels cut into the underlying rock, which requires something able to erode such rock (i.e. liquid water).
Interesting. Such giant microbial mats used to be the dominant biological communities in the Precambrian, often forming structures called stromatolites, but most of them were believed to have met their demise during the Cambrian, when lots of new large multicellular critters could literally munch or burrow their way through them. Stromatolites are still present today in a few places, generally in environments too harsh for multicellular organisms to live in, like Shark Bay in Western Australia. But this discovery would indicate that large microbial mat communities proved more evolutionarily durable than previously thought.
For smaller stars, yes, but very massive stars only last for around 10 million years before going supernova. For the most massive ones, the lifetime can be as short as a few million years.
Yeah, but that doesn't sound like what the original poster meant by "beating the 6502", nor would I count it as such. I think it's misleading to use the future development of the architectures as arguments for competitive strength or weakness of their ancestors. During the 8-bit computer era, the 6502 was a very strong competitor to the Z80. True, the 6502's descendants ceased to be major players, but that's a different issue from the 6502's own competitiveness in its heyday.
Intel's 8086 family, although it kept some features of the 8080 and 8085, wasn't a direct descendant of the 8085, let alone of Zilog's Z80, which was a different line of development. 8085 assembly code could be automatically converted to 8086 code, and the 8086 could use some 8085 peripherals, but that was the limit of the compatibility.
The Z80 I had took four clock cycles for the first memory access (the first byte of the instruction) and three for each following memory access. There were a few exceptions, but overall that was pretty accurate. There were instructions that took four cycles.
*goes back and checks*
Argh, you're absolutely right. It was 3 to 4 cycles, not 2 to 3. That's what I get for trusting my own memory rather than checking it. Thanks for setting that straight.
Slashdot Mirror
Fox News Should Be Pulled Apart By Wild Weasels.
What did wild weasels ever do to you?
Probably blew up all his SAM batteries.
Actually, some very big bull elephants have reached up to around 12 tons. But that's a minor point, because you're comparing apples and oranges.
"Only" 9 tons...for a flesh-eating biped. Think about that for a bit. No other land-dwelling meat-eater has ever come close to the size of the largest predatory dinosaurs. And all those dinosaurs were bipeds.
Elephants are herbivores, and they are strictly quadrupeds with columnar legs. The dinosaur analog for elephants are the sauropods, the largest of which reached up to 10 times the weight of the biggest elephants.
Yeah, but I wasn't trying to imply something like that. It's only a weak analogy. We humans don't tend to let our bodies pile up in places where we happen to drop dead. :D
Ha! Thank you for first pointing out that my reliance on Wiki was naive, and then also for doing the research to prove that the unsourced Wiki slander might be rightheaded after all.
Glad to be of help.
Me? I don't have an opinion on it. The guy's explanation for the bones sounds reasonable to me, because it jives with my understanding of octopuses as among the brightest species on the planet. Still, I don't normally put a hell of a lot of weight on what one scientist says.
The biggest problem with his claim isn't octopus intelligence, which is definitely quite remarkable. (Still, making self-portraits would still count as extraordinary behavior for any animal, since it implies a particular arsenal of especially complex mental capabilities, and remember this is back in the Triassic, over 200 million years ago, when basic vertebrate brains, and presumably cephalopod brains as well, were still being refined.)
One big problems is that he has taken a site widely accepted as one which has preserved animals that died of various causes and decided that it's actually a predator's killing ground. That's a bit like claiming that bodies in a cemetary are actually a serial killer's victims.
Second is that these victims aren't just any prehistoric sea reptiles--they're shonisaurs, the giants of the ichthyosaurs. These were approaching the size of sperm whales and were arguably among the biggest ocean vertebrates that ever lived before today's great whales evolved. He's imagining that there's some gigantic cephalopod hunting these things, when no cephalopod, living or fossil, has ever been found even approaching such a size. Giant squid are big, yeah, but nowhere near big enough to take on and eat a sperm whale.
Third, he has no clear evidence backing these extraordinary claims--no body parts of the supposed predator, no clear marks of predation on the bones, no candidate animals to fill the role, no real trace fossils, nothing except suppositions about patterns he sees in the bone arrangements. But humans are good at finding patterns even when they don't actually mean anything.
Some other, rather more reliable indications that this guy may indeed be full of crap:
Brian Switek's commentary on the story on his Laelaps palaeontology blog
P. Z. Myers' view of the story on his Pharyngula blog
Discussion of the story on an archive of geologists' conversations on Twitter
The professor's own profile page, which shows he has quite a history of making far-reaching claims.
Science is awesome, but keep in mind this disparaging note on the "scientist's" Wiki page: He has earned the nickname McMinimal from his colleagues due to the perceived poor quality of his research, such as suggesting that Agnostids are cannibals and claiming that the Kraken was a real beast..
Whatever you think of this professor's hypothesis, that note was added just hours ago by an anonymous IP editor, without any references. It has since been removed, rightly so.
The GP is a nice troll, but he does have his points.
That's because he copied his points from this paper without giving credit. The paper makes much better reading than his post.
An English speaker (and for that matter a speaker of any other non-East Asian language) is likely to find Chinese harder to learn than any other reasonably common language, except possibly Japanese. David Moser's paper "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" may provide a useful reality check. He wrote it in 1990 while he was a student of Chinese. (He later got his doctorate in Chinese Studies and is currently Academic Director of the Chinese Studies staff at CET Academic Programs, an American study-abroad organization with a strong Chinese focus. He lives in Beijing with his Chinese wife.)
Looks like both bitsavers and classiccmp are back. I can't see any obvious signs that the classiccmp lists ever discussed a bitsavers outage over the past two weeks, so whatever the problem was, they never noticed it.
More importantly, Bitsavers, an archive or historical technical data,is down, and has been down for days. That site would be a major loss; they have copies of rare documents not available elsewhere. Anyone know what's going on there?
I have no idea on the cause for this outage, but Al Kossow, who founded and still runs bitsavers, is also the software curator for the Computer History Museum. Given their purpose, I'd imagine that any problem with bitsavers would be a high priority for them. I found a brief posting he made today on ba.broadcast.moderated, so it's not like he's out of commission or anything. Most likely it's just a technical problem which will eventually be cleared up.
I tried checking the classiccmp mailing list, which would be the most obvious place to discuss any bitsavers outage, but their site is currently down too. *headdesk*
Well, DEC's PDP-1 sales literature (such as the PDP-1 Handbook scans available here) seems to always list the display among the optional equipment, though it was probably a popular option. The only standard I/O equipment (not counting the front panel) was the console typewriter and the paper tape reader and punch. Seems reasonable, since I'm sure there were some customers who had no need for a CRT.
However, I overstated things when I said the display "would have added quite a bit to the cost". It only seems to have increased the cost by around 15% or so.
... the simulated frame buffer (if a PDP-1 used one) ...
It didn't. The display was a point-plotting CRT which had to be dynamically refreshed by the CPU.
As previous replies have pointed out, advances in hardware were key. In 1962, integrated circuits were still in their infancy. They had only been invented four years earlier, and the only ones in production were being built for U.S. military projects like the Minuteman nuclear ballistic missile. And even those were very small-scale circuits, with only a few logic gates per chip.
Computers like the PDP-1 were built using thousands of discrete transistor components for their logic and magnetic cores for their main memory. The price for a basic PDP-1 at that time was around $100,000 in 1962 dollars, equivalent to about $800,000 today. That's a *basic* system; the point-plotting CRT display used in Spacewar! would have added quite a bit to the cost. The machine with all its peripherals took a good fraction of a room and probably weighed at least 2000 pounds. And running Spacewar! pretty much consumed the PDP-1's entire processing power. (Since the display was point-plotting only, the spaceships had to be drawn as series of dots, and the display had no storage ability, so a lot of processing overhead was needed to constantly refresh the entire list of currently displayed dots.)
When Spacewar! was written, the video game was basically a science-fiction concept, and computer graphics itself was just beginning to develop. Arcade games at that time were purely electromechanical games, such as pinball. The first commercial arcade video games (Galaxy Game and Computer Space, both of which were ports of Spacewar!) didn't appear until 1971; Atari's Pong came out the following year. Arcade video games of the early 1970s used custom state machines built from TTL logic chips instead of programmed computer systems; the first microprocessor-based arcade video games appeared starting in 1975 with Taito's Gun Fight, which used the Intel 8080. It was those programmable microprocessor-based systems that really allowed video game development to take off; for example, Asteroids was based on a 6502. Incidentally, Asteroids' vector display system first appeared in an arcade game with Cinematronics' Space Wars in 1977.
Spacewar! was widely ported to various computer systems during the 1960s and 1970s, so it's no surprise that Asteroids bears a strong resemblance to it.
I'm too lazy to calculate the energy density of a "wide", poorly collimated laser beam at 3 miles, however considering that these beams are usually powered by 5/1000ths of a watt or so, it's not a lot of energy to start with (the sun puts out around 24 times much energy per square centimeter).
The devices which people are concerned about are much more powerful, 0.1 watts and up. These are not legal for use as laser pointers in many countries, but they can easily be purchased online and can also be built from components used in consumer electronics.
The Wikipedia article on lasers and aviation safety may be of interest. Judging by the content there, this has clearly become a real concern for aviation people.
Those examples are all well and good but I can also point to the tremendous amount of latin and greek words that came into English without war being involved.
The Romans invaded Britain too.
And as I explained above, they added their words not to English, but to the British languages which English displaced. Some Latin-derived words in English come from French via the Norman invasion; other Latin words and Greek words were imported later through contact with continental Europeans, who used Latin and Greek as common languages of trade and academic correspondence. As you said, there's no shortage of invasions in the history of English, but they're not the entire story. :)
English did not necessarily draw from other languages, it was not always voluntary. Germanic tribes conquered England ... All these invaders forcibly altered the english language.
While your other examples are good, the Germanic Anglo-Saxon tribes who "conquered England" did not alter English. They were the ones who imported the language in the first place. Before they arrived, there was no "England", only the Roman province of Britannia, and the Romano-British spoke British languages or Latin. The British languages died out in England after the Anglo-Saxon conquest; their closest descendants are Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, the product of refugee Britons in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany.
Unfortunately, this liberal approach leaves them a bit unprepared to deal with "uppity" neighbors.
To be fair, they did that after a civil war, and their democratic government has since been stable for the last 60 years. Considering the tendency for Central American militaries to get involved in government, Costa Rica seems to be doing pretty well. If worse comes to worse, they could always raise a citizen levy. Might not be as effective as a professional force, but their motivation might more than make up for that...
From the article it sounds like Costa Rica is quite disturbed about this. Depending on how much Nicaragua cares about its image, it seems to me that simply having some civilians camping out in the area with guns and cameras might be enough to dissuade further shenanigans. If Nicaragua is rash enough to challenge them, it ends up looking like the bad guy and possibly enraging its neighbor into amassing a large citizens' militia for war.
Reminded me of the Flying Bedstead.
Interesting. Such giant microbial mats used to be the dominant biological communities in the Precambrian, often forming structures called stromatolites, but most of them were believed to have met their demise during the Cambrian, when lots of new large multicellular critters could literally munch or burrow their way through them. Stromatolites are still present today in a few places, generally in environments too harsh for multicellular organisms to live in, like Shark Bay in Western Australia. But this discovery would indicate that large microbial mat communities proved more evolutionarily durable than previously thought.
For smaller stars, yes, but very massive stars only last for around 10 million years before going supernova. For the most massive ones, the lifetime can be as short as a few million years.
This isn't physics. It's math and programming, with someone interpreting it as a physical possibility.
That's what theoretical physics is. It's the experimentalists and observationalists who confirm or refute the theorists' predictions.
Intel's 8086 family, although it kept some features of the 8080 and 8085, wasn't a direct descendant of the 8085, let alone of Zilog's Z80, which was a different line of development. 8085 assembly code could be automatically converted to 8086 code, and the 8086 could use some 8085 peripherals, but that was the limit of the compatibility.
*goes back and checks*
Argh, you're absolutely right. It was 3 to 4 cycles, not 2 to 3. That's what I get for trusting my own memory rather than checking it. Thanks for setting that straight.