A friend just gave me her old Roomba to hack, so this is great timing! I'm going to use it to realize an idea (dunno if it's original or not) wherein the hacked Roomba lets me turn any room into a gigantic pinball machine.
It'll have more bump sensors, a frantic motion algo, a crap-load of blinky lights and sound-effects, plus a digital display (in big red numbers) that keeps score. You set it down, aim it into the room, and let it go. A timer stops it after X minutes. High score wins (or whatever). I'm gunna call it "Roomball" . . . or maybe "Pinba". My cat will never forgive me.
Hey friendly pessimist, at least one neighboring state to Cali is a significantly more sustainable location than just about anywhere else in the entire country, so there, nyaaaa!
(yeah, yer troll worked . . .:P )
Don't know squat about OC but from the request made in the original post, particularly in mentioning an "elegant flow chart" solution, and given that the poster had even considered using hyperlinks in HTML docs, maybe Visio (or something with similar functionality) would work.
Shapes (their properties, actually) in a Visio diagram can be linked to each other and to almost any database. The database connections can be uni or bi-directional . . . change the shape properties and the database reflects the changes, or change the database entries and the shape properties change. I use Visio for "smart" diagrams that change according to database values. My work involves the coordination of around 75,000 documents, each with about a hundred mapped variables. Updates, publishing, use (traffic), and several other parameters of these docs need to be reflected in an intuitive and quickly analysable way. Visio saves me a whole lot of time and grief putting these reports together.
MIT's Marvin Minskey has said that intelligence has much to do with the ability to learn. He goes on to say that genius is a function also mediated by ones ability to integrate and use the things they've learned. A "genius" is someone who can learn more efficiently than the majority of the population. (Society of Mind is the book I'm alluding to.) Indeed, in our societies, when one can learn and utilize knowledge more efficiently than someone else, that person is generally considered to be more intelligent.
Learning and using that knowledge efficiently is a key survival skill. It's not about focus on any particular topic or class of knowledge, it's about ones ability to learn anything and then make the right associations with everything else they know to give them a better chance at survival.
Under this theory, if a technology accelerates and enhances ones ability to learn, then it's a boon.
Don't plan on running that too long on two AA batteries. At 3 watts and 3 volts, you are pulling 1 amp. AA batteries won't last too long at that rate of delivery, and some will get pretty hot trying (be careful).
Luxeons are awesome indeed... I've been using them for over a year now. I mix white with other colors to make pastel blends that are very pleasent in a living environment. They are cool enough, and light enough to use in ways never possible with incandescent or flourescent lamps.
TKTRX
I want an active sun visor . . . an area of the windscreen that darkens in just the right spot to cast a shadow across my eyes. A simple head-tracker in the ceiling and a sun location sensor coupled to a fairly coarse grid of some quick-response electro-chromic elements coated onto the glass. Car position, sun position, head position all factor to update the location of the shadow-spot every 1/30th of a second or so. Can't be that hard to do . . .
Re:Not very scientific
on
Killer Ozone?
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· Score: 1
And based on study, the chances of you dying prematurely are increased by a whopping.52%. This assumes you are already going to die prematurely. If you start with 0 chance of dying prematurely and move to one of these cities, you will have an increase of.52% over 0. Wow . . . 0%
So, this is all moot unless you already know what your current chances are of dying prematurely (assuming of course, that you will).
"It's at the point of uncertainty that all things are possible. This can be a real problem."
Not having seen the geometry of this setup, this is just a stab, but there are some "single-path" arrangements that could use the short coherence length of a diode laser.
Note that this system uses a diverging lens. The wave front from the laser will be spherical, and cone-shaped. Point the laser/lens at the film from a distance such that the beam will fill most of the film area. Place a small object within the area of the cone between the laser/lens and the film. Insert film and expose.The light scattering off the object that hits the film will interfere with the light hitting the film directly from the laser. Voila! Careful placement of the object can produce some pretty cool effects.
Prolly mentioned somewhere in all the replys, but lighting is seriously important . . . if you're going to use flourescents, use the high frequency type. The effects from the flicker produced by 60Hz ballasts are well hated. Our new office has suprisingly nice wide spectrum, no-flicker flourescents and the fatigue factor (for me, anyway) has dropped a lot. Also, put good lighting around the mirrors (not just over them) in the loos, especially in the womens loo.
Profesor Anton Zelinger has an interesting paper on this very topic: http://www.quantum.univie.ac.at/zeilinger/philosop.html which points up some good reasons why the Copenhagen interpretation may be more correct. Zelinger headed up the academic team that just performed the first banking transaction protected by quantum-key cryptography . . . I'd guess he is in a (super) position to know something about this stuff.
Why use fibers or any other light-guiding media? A simple, fairly low resolution hologram can route one beam to hundreds of unique points, or sequence a unique pattern of thousands of on-off signals to a single photo-transistor as it's being slid in and out of the lock.
To overcome optical-flooding hacks, modulate the source at some unique frequency so that any other light is ignored. Use IR for better signal-to-noise.
The holographic key would be manufactured the same way credit card holograms are made. This is currently done with a mechanical stamping system. The stamping dies can be designed to accomodate a means to rapidly and uniquely program each holographic key.
Building the key right into the credit card itself would provide an extra security function into the same already-ubiquitous form factor. A low-cost, small (>2cm^3) monolithic module containing a source LED, phototransistor(s), and any optics(molded/embossed plastic) can be engineered for inclusion in card-readers and security devices. Much more complex keys can be implemented using a simple CMOS or CCD linear or 2D array.
Anyway . . . holographic methods should be cheaper and more informationally robust than hard-wired routing methods. And the manufacturing infrastructure is essentially in place already.
Religion is simply a nostalgic lament for the loss of internal direction that was extant in preconcious humans. Considering the evidence that "modern" conciousness only dates from around 600 BC, the echos of those now-lost directive "voices" still provide a strong impetus to provide a replacement . . . which many industrious folk have leveraged to considerable financial advantage (practically every Western religion you can name).
In preconcious humans, nothing was really left to question . . . everything was understood as a directive and no questions were asked. Hell, they didn't even see themselves as having a choice, nor did they think in terms of a life-span or even have notions of good and evil. Our ancestors were in essence, automatons.
Anyway, the point is that religion and science are about as related as toenails and tires. Science at least tries to make some sense of a shared reality. Religion has nothing to do with reality . . . it's just a long, heartaching sigh goodbye.
Hey look, I'm channeling Julien Jaynes!
I believe this is a feature of Norton Internet Security (the consumer firewall product from Symantec), not NAV. Doesn't seem like a bad feature for a firewall . . . and you can turn it off and pull sites from the block list (in other words, create a whitelist). In fact, there is a little Web assistant thingy that lets you configure ad blocking on the fly.
What NIS 2004 won't do however, is block the pieces of your sky from falling, IYKWIM.
Info from the Nasal Rangers application guide (page1) says:
(5) Citizen Monitoring - The implementation of citizen odor monitoring with Nasal Ranger Field Olfactometers can be part of an interactive community outreach program.
Yeah, guess it is funnier than Caleb and Josiah at my door looking like missionaries.
Most Americans wouldn't be watching a channel like this. But then, it doesn't take the better part of 200 million people to make a cable channel a success, either. The whole notion of narrowcasting wouldn't be the success it is if it took a whole country to get behind it. Besides, there's prolly more tech and science savvy Americans than ever.
Uh . . . I think you're a bit confused here. The aerospike engine tested with the rocked develops 1000 lbf or 1356 Newtons/M, and the shuttle generates 2,174,286. That's 1/1603 the size of the shuttle. I think you were looking at the stats provided for the Boeing angine.
All that said, the test vehicle could easily lift several 10's of gerbils. I imagine that the gerbils would hate the part about "transitioning into a ballistic terminal descent"
Photomultipliers tubes (which are the devices used in this observatory) are similar to a light bulb working in reverse. In a light bulb, a flood of electrons (either in an arc/plasma, filament, or semiconductor) are converted to light. In a PMT, the reverse happens . . . photons initiate a flood of electrons. In a digital camera, light knocks a few electrons about, creating a minute charge that is clocked out of the chip . . . not at all like a PMT.
Capturing a neutrino, eh? Uh... hardly. This system records the "shockwave" (Cherenkov radiation) created by something moving faster than light through a medium (yeah, yeah... but that's in a vacuum). Duh!
Uh, better turn that amazement into something like "extremely concerned", or better yet, "not suprised". Take a good look around . . . the US is rapidly becoming an autonomous power-machine without a user interface . . . or even effective closed-loop feedback. A few wild oscillations that quickly turn into chaotic behavior pretty well describes the future of the US, unless something dampens the system. Global competition might do it.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend just gave me her old Roomba to hack, so this is great timing! I'm going to use it to realize an idea (dunno if it's original or not) wherein the hacked Roomba lets me turn any room into a gigantic pinball machine. It'll have more bump sensors, a frantic motion algo, a crap-load of blinky lights and sound-effects, plus a digital display (in big red numbers) that keeps score. You set it down, aim it into the room, and let it go. A timer stops it after X minutes. High score wins (or whatever). I'm gunna call it "Roomball" . . . or maybe "Pinba". My cat will never forgive me.
Hey friendly pessimist, at least one neighboring state to Cali is a significantly more sustainable location than just about anywhere else in the entire country, so there, nyaaaa! (yeah, yer troll worked . . . :P )
Don't know squat about OC but from the request made in the original post, particularly in mentioning an "elegant flow chart" solution, and given that the poster had even considered using hyperlinks in HTML docs, maybe Visio (or something with similar functionality) would work.
Shapes (their properties, actually) in a Visio diagram can be linked to each other and to almost any database. The database connections can be uni or bi-directional . . . change the shape properties and the database reflects the changes, or change the database entries and the shape properties change. I use Visio for "smart" diagrams that change according to database values. My work involves the coordination of around 75,000 documents, each with about a hundred mapped variables. Updates, publishing, use (traffic), and several other parameters of these docs need to be reflected in an intuitive and quickly analysable way. Visio saves me a whole lot of time and grief putting these reports together.
Learning and using that knowledge efficiently is a key survival skill. It's not about focus on any particular topic or class of knowledge, it's about ones ability to learn anything and then make the right associations with everything else they know to give them a better chance at survival.
Under this theory, if a technology accelerates and enhances ones ability to learn, then it's a boon.
Don't plan on running that too long on two AA batteries. At 3 watts and 3 volts, you are pulling 1 amp. AA batteries won't last too long at that rate of delivery, and some will get pretty hot trying (be careful). Luxeons are awesome indeed... I've been using them for over a year now. I mix white with other colors to make pastel blends that are very pleasent in a living environment. They are cool enough, and light enough to use in ways never possible with incandescent or flourescent lamps. TKTRX
I want an active sun visor . . . an area of the windscreen that darkens in just the right spot to cast a shadow across my eyes. A simple head-tracker in the ceiling and a sun location sensor coupled to a fairly coarse grid of some quick-response electro-chromic elements coated onto the glass. Car position, sun position, head position all factor to update the location of the shadow-spot every 1/30th of a second or so. Can't be that hard to do . . .
And based on study, the chances of you dying prematurely are increased by a whopping .52%. This assumes you are already going to die prematurely. If you start with 0 chance of dying prematurely and move to one of these cities, you will have an increase of .52% over 0. Wow . . . 0%
So, this is all moot unless you already know what your current chances are of dying prematurely (assuming of course, that you will).
"It's at the point of uncertainty that all things are possible. This can be a real problem."
Not having seen the geometry of this setup, this is just a stab, but there are some "single-path" arrangements that could use the short coherence length of a diode laser.
Note that this system uses a diverging lens. The wave front from the laser will be spherical, and cone-shaped. Point the laser/lens at the film from a distance such that the beam will fill most of the film area. Place a small object within the area of the cone between the laser/lens and the film. Insert film and expose.The light scattering off the object that hits the film will interfere with the light hitting the film directly from the laser. Voila! Careful placement of the object can produce some pretty cool effects.
Somehow, that looks like a Photoshop eclipse. Where's the cool red color? At least the vid *looked* authentic.
Prolly mentioned somewhere in all the replys, but lighting is seriously important . . . if you're going to use flourescents, use the high frequency type. The effects from the flicker produced by 60Hz ballasts are well hated. Our new office has suprisingly nice wide spectrum, no-flicker flourescents and the fatigue factor (for me, anyway) has dropped a lot. Also, put good lighting around the mirrors (not just over them) in the loos, especially in the womens loo.
Profesor Anton Zelinger has an interesting paper on this very topic: http://www.quantum.univie.ac.at/zeilinger/philosop .html which points up some good reasons why the Copenhagen interpretation may be more correct. Zelinger headed up the academic team that just performed the first banking transaction protected by quantum-key cryptography . . . I'd guess he is in a (super) position to know something about this stuff.
To overcome optical-flooding hacks, modulate the source at some unique frequency so that any other light is ignored. Use IR for better signal-to-noise.
The holographic key would be manufactured the same way credit card holograms are made. This is currently done with a mechanical stamping system. The stamping dies can be designed to accomodate a means to rapidly and uniquely program each holographic key.
Building the key right into the credit card itself would provide an extra security function into the same already-ubiquitous form factor. A low-cost, small (>2cm^3) monolithic module containing a source LED, phototransistor(s), and any optics(molded/embossed plastic) can be engineered for inclusion in card-readers and security devices. Much more complex keys can be implemented using a simple CMOS or CCD linear or 2D array.Anyway . . . holographic methods should be cheaper and more informationally robust than hard-wired routing methods. And the manufacturing infrastructure is essentially in place already.
Religion is simply a nostalgic lament for the loss of internal direction that was extant in preconcious humans. Considering the evidence that "modern" conciousness only dates from around 600 BC, the echos of those now-lost directive "voices" still provide a strong impetus to provide a replacement . . . which many industrious folk have leveraged to considerable financial advantage (practically every Western religion you can name). In preconcious humans, nothing was really left to question . . . everything was understood as a directive and no questions were asked. Hell, they didn't even see themselves as having a choice, nor did they think in terms of a life-span or even have notions of good and evil. Our ancestors were in essence, automatons. Anyway, the point is that religion and science are about as related as toenails and tires. Science at least tries to make some sense of a shared reality. Religion has nothing to do with reality . . . it's just a long, heartaching sigh goodbye. Hey look, I'm channeling Julien Jaynes!
I believe this is a feature of Norton Internet Security (the consumer firewall product from Symantec), not NAV. Doesn't seem like a bad feature for a firewall . . . and you can turn it off and pull sites from the block list (in other words, create a whitelist). In fact, there is a little Web assistant thingy that lets you configure ad blocking on the fly. What NIS 2004 won't do however, is block the pieces of your sky from falling, IYKWIM.
Info from the Nasal Rangers application guide (page1) says: (5) Citizen Monitoring - The implementation of citizen odor monitoring with Nasal Ranger Field Olfactometers can be part of an interactive community outreach program. Yeah, guess it is funnier than Caleb and Josiah at my door looking like missionaries.
Most Americans wouldn't be watching a channel like this. But then, it doesn't take the better part of 200 million people to make a cable channel a success, either. The whole notion of narrowcasting wouldn't be the success it is if it took a whole country to get behind it. Besides, there's prolly more tech and science savvy Americans than ever.
Uh . . . I think you're a bit confused here. The aerospike engine tested with the rocked develops 1000 lbf or 1356 Newtons/M, and the shuttle generates 2,174,286. That's 1/1603 the size of the shuttle. I think you were looking at the stats provided for the Boeing angine. All that said, the test vehicle could easily lift several 10's of gerbils. I imagine that the gerbils would hate the part about "transitioning into a ballistic terminal descent"
Photomultipliers tubes (which are the devices used in this observatory) are similar to a light bulb working in reverse. In a light bulb, a flood of electrons (either in an arc/plasma, filament, or semiconductor) are converted to light. In a PMT, the reverse happens . . . photons initiate a flood of electrons. In a digital camera, light knocks a few electrons about, creating a minute charge that is clocked out of the chip . . . not at all like a PMT. Capturing a neutrino, eh? Uh... hardly. This system records the "shockwave" (Cherenkov radiation) created by something moving faster than light through a medium (yeah, yeah... but that's in a vacuum). Duh!
Uh, better turn that amazement into something like "extremely concerned", or better yet, "not suprised". Take a good look around . . . the US is rapidly becoming an autonomous power-machine without a user interface . . . or even effective closed-loop feedback. A few wild oscillations that quickly turn into chaotic behavior pretty well describes the future of the US, unless something dampens the system. Global competition might do it.