+1 for Stanslaw Lem, especially for the real geeks in the crowd. Unlike many/most sci fi authors, Lem was trained in mathematics and knew his hard sciences as well. The Cyberiad is funny and charming, but His Master's Voice is one of my favorites -- a glimpse at the dark side of the scientific-military-industrial complex and the unexpected possibilities inherent in scientific discovery, as well as the limits of human understanding.
Lem's story Golem XIV (in the quirky "collection" Imaginary Magnitude) consists of a long monologue from a superintelligent, former-military AI. I found it one of the stranger, more beautiful, and more compelling pieces of sci fi I've encountered.
I have had thoughts along similar lines. In addition to the above suggestion, what if I could (for a fee),
- send email to an address and have it converted into a physical letter to be delivered to the receiver? (Saves cost of shipping except for "the last mile")
- have my mail scanned, delivered via email, and, when I click the appropriate URL, shredded or physically delivered?
I use an awesome multi-sheet scanner which has helped me go almost completely paperless. I would just as soon not receive any physical mail any more, with the possible and rare exception of hand-written notes (and checks, but... PayPal, etc.).
I realize there are services to take care of things like this. But costs could come down if it was available nationwide in a standardized way. Cutting down physical delivery of mail (with its corresponding environmental impact) is one of those things I'd like to see government do (rather than leaving it to a mishmash of private companies).
I prefer to write code this way, too, and have found, to my surprise, that I find it more fun than not doing it (and not just because of the avoidance of the extra debugging pain). Furthermore, this approach leads to more modularity (un-modular code is much harder to test; google "dependency injection" or see this video). Lastly, if you base your implementation only on the tests your code needs to pass, it tends to be simpler in the end.
Python's "doctests" provide a handy way to pursue this kind of development; you put your tests directly in a "docstring" (multiline documentation comment) at the beginning of your class or function and specify exactly how it should behave, exactly as if were an interactive python session. You can then test all your edge cases explicitly in the comments for the code, providing not just a regression test but a fairly complete explanation of what the code does. This is one of the many reasons I prefer to develop in Python when possible.
I guess the reason I find it fun is that you "double your pleasure" of seeing your functionality grow as you iteratively add requirements and satisfy them; AND you are free to refactor ruthlessly because the tests "have your back" -- so the code can be that much better.
Not all the neutrinos, just nearly all. The moon is large enough to catch a statistically discernible (to IceCube) amount of neutrinos, casting a "neutrino shadow" on the Earth.
In principle, a 'neutrino shadow' might be visible, given a sufficiently large detector running for a long enough time; but the paper reported on the muon shadow 'cast' by the moon (I am a member of the Collaboration in question).
There is another thing to consider other than how well you are going to develop your technical chops. At your age, one of the points of going to college/university is to get out there and learn things you didn't even know existed, let alone have a chance to be amazed or enthralled by yet. Software development is a rewarding (in the various meanings of the term) field of study and practice, but if you don't get some broader exposure to human knowledge, you and society will be the poorer for it.
This is the idea of the liberal arts college, anyways, and it still has value (perhaps even more so in these times of hyper-specialization). Society (and the planet) needs real citizens who can educate themselves about a variety of topics and make (and advocate for) informed choices.
The size of the institution matters as well. A good, small school will give you personalized attention which is wonderful, but if you play your cards right at a large school, you can have it all. I studied physics at a large state school, and, by my mid twenties, I had worked on four experiments, travelled to Maui to work nights on a cosmic ray telescope, analyzed data from a satellite experiment, and worked on one of the most important physics detectors in use at the time, at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Then I returned to the same school to study art, and eventually wound up with a Ph.D. in physics (and a minor in art). While my other classes were a mixed bag, it's safe to say that many would not have been on the roster at all in a purely technical school.
In other words, at a large school you can do really interesting technical things AND broaden your horizons a bit, if you play your cards right (generally this involves finding one or two excellent mentors among the grad students and professors).
I too would love to be able to use regexps for normal searches -- but it does make me wonder how they implemented (indexed) this, given that the space of all possible regexp's has got to be much larger than that of a finite sequence of keywords.
The article doesn't really explain what a drawing is or what the difference is between a pencil-and-paper drawing and the various software out there. The software, of course, runs the gamut from full-blown simulation of drawing and painting media (Corel Painter), through vector-based 2D design software to 3D animation and architecture tools.
These "media" (using both the old and new sense of the word) have a lot in common. As a painter of a few decades I can say that the important thing is the thought processes behind the work. What ideas or energies are you trying to express? Your choice of tools, digital or otherwise, will depend on this. I believe it was Robert Beverly Hale, a venerable teacher of figure drawing at the Art Student's League in New York, who said "drawings are thoughts with lines around them." This is true regardless of whether you're using pencil, drawing tablet, or mouse, or thinking in terms of marks, lines, curves, or volumes. These "thoughts" consist of thousands of myriad decisions about shape, proportion, motion, light, mass.
Figure drawing does help immensely, partly because our minds give us so much more feedback about images of bodies than, say, trees, but also because we live in the body: by connecting lines to felt, physical gesture you can get much more expression into your work.
The beautiful thing about pen/brush/pencil and paper/canvas/panel/... is the absolutely sensitive, sensual nature of mark-making, which is still not quite matched by the digital media. But if a student has powerful graphic ideas and practices their expression assiduously, she will have an impact regardless of her tools. Artists need to learn about traditional tools (for their exquisite sensitivity and to connect with tradition) and the new ones (to take advantage of new visual and technical possibilities).
Am I the only one who is impressed that a single PowerPC (not multi-core Intel) Mac Mini can survive a slashdotting? (Not to mention the additional DoS attacks -- and with rather zippy response time to boot.)
- Former Badger, glad I ordered one of those new MacBooks
There is always a tremendous amount of science going on in Antarctica, but this year will mark the first deployment of sensors in the IceCubeneutrino detector at the South Pole, one of the largest Antarctic science projects to date.
If all goes well this Austral Summer, IceCube will deploy four "strings," each with 60 light sensors attached, at a depth of about 2 km. Subsequent years will deploy more sensors until a total of 4800 is reached, making the cubic-kilometer sized detector one of the largest on Earth.
IceCube's quarry is primarily neutrinos of extraterrestrial origin. For the uninitiated, neutrinos are extremely elusive subatomic particles produced by high energy interactions. Candidate sources include the supermassive black holes at the heart of so-called "Active Galactic Nuclei", dark matter, and the mysterious Gamma Ray Bursts.
A recent
article has more information.
See also a previous Slashdot post about IceCube's predecessor, AMANDA.
Wikipedia has this introduction to neutrinos.
I noticed noone here has commented on the toxicity of carbon nanotubes. From the NIH website:
"These results show that, for the test conditions described here and on an equal-weight basis, if carbon nanotubes reach the lungs, they are much more toxic than carbon black and can be more toxic than quartz, which is considered a serious occupational health hazard in chronic inhalation exposures."
Not sure I'd wear a shirt or even chain mail made of these things....
Cerenkov radiation is caused by charged particles moving through a medium at a speed faster than light IN THAT MEDIUM. So neutrons (being neutral) travelling through your eye won't radiate Cerenkov light, although their decay products might.
Also, Cerenkov light can be generated in the air itself (the speed of light in air is slightly slower than in vacuum), so the flux of charged particles doesn't necessarily have to travel through your eyeballs to be detected. This is how some earth-bound cosmic ray detectors work (they "see" the sudden blue Cerenkov footprint on the ground caused by showers of particles produced by very high energy cosmic rays hitting the top of the atmosphere).
You'd have to work out the fluxes and efficiencies to see if one could have seen Cerenkov light from the reactor, but my suspicion is that any Cerenkov light produced near the reactor would have been drowned out by other light sources.
If both bodies were the same shape the larger would have eight times the volume.
Um, assuming spherical asteroids, (1.5)^3 ~= 3.4, not 8. The increased ratio of volumes is still appreciable, though.
There is an upside to this, of course. If your Website is honest and informative you might find yourself in jobs where your employer respects you above and beyond what you're able to accomplish for him/her.
Example, I'm an artist. My last (science/tech) employer not only tolerated this (hiring me half time which was somewhat rare in my field), but took an avid interest in my work (several coworkers attended shows and bought artwork).
If I go into a job interview and say, "I'm an artist," they may roll their eyes and write me off, but if they see I have a professional attitude about both my work for them and as an artist as well, it may help. And if it hurts, well, I don't want to work for them.
Hi, I work for this project (or rather its successor, IceCube) and I have to clarify something. I believe the sky map shown is a map of neutrino BACKGROUND events, not a map of neutrino sources. Background events occur when energetic cosmic rays strike the earth and produce neutrinos which travel through the earth and trigger the detector. Any extraterrestrial neutrino sources would show up as "hot spots" in the sky map under discussion (with the exception of diffuse sources). At this point, AMANDA is NOT claiming the detection of any extraterrestrial source, AFAIK. Most predicted sources are thought to require a larger detector, which is currently under construction.
Been using Idea for a few months and am generally quite impressed. But I used Visual C++ about two years ago and loved how easy it was to lay out GUI components in a WYSIWIG manner. I don't think you can do that in Idea; I think you can in JBuilder. Can you in Eclipse?
Slashdot Mirror
+1 for Stanslaw Lem, especially for the real geeks in the crowd. Unlike many/most sci fi authors, Lem was trained in mathematics and knew his hard sciences as well. The Cyberiad is funny and charming, but His Master's Voice is one of my favorites -- a glimpse at the dark side of the scientific-military-industrial complex and the unexpected possibilities inherent in scientific discovery, as well as the limits of human understanding.
Lem's story Golem XIV (in the quirky "collection" Imaginary Magnitude) consists of a long monologue from a superintelligent, former-military AI. I found it one of the stranger, more beautiful, and more compelling pieces of sci fi I've encountered.
I have had thoughts along similar lines. In addition to the above suggestion, what if I could (for a fee), ... PayPal, etc.).
- send email to an address and have it converted into a physical letter to be delivered to the receiver? (Saves cost of shipping except for "the last mile")
- have my mail scanned, delivered via email, and, when I click the appropriate URL, shredded or physically delivered?
I use an awesome multi-sheet scanner which has helped me go almost completely paperless. I would just as soon not receive any physical mail any more, with the possible and rare exception of hand-written notes (and checks, but
I realize there are services to take care of things like this. But costs could come down if it was available nationwide in a standardized way. Cutting down physical delivery of mail (with its corresponding environmental impact) is one of those things I'd like to see government do (rather than leaving it to a mishmash of private companies).
I prefer to write code this way, too, and have found, to my surprise, that I find it more fun than not doing it (and not just because of the avoidance of the extra debugging pain). Furthermore, this approach leads to more modularity (un-modular code is much harder to test; google "dependency injection" or see this video). Lastly, if you base your implementation only on the tests your code needs to pass, it tends to be simpler in the end.
Python's "doctests" provide a handy way to pursue this kind of development; you put your tests directly in a "docstring" (multiline documentation comment) at the beginning of your class or function and specify exactly how it should behave, exactly as if were an interactive python session. You can then test all your edge cases explicitly in the comments for the code, providing not just a regression test but a fairly complete explanation of what the code does. This is one of the many reasons I prefer to develop in Python when possible.
I guess the reason I find it fun is that you "double your pleasure" of seeing your functionality grow as you iteratively add requirements and satisfy them; AND you are free to refactor ruthlessly because the tests "have your back" -- so the code can be that much better.
Not all the neutrinos, just nearly all. The moon is large enough to catch a statistically discernible (to IceCube) amount of neutrinos, casting a "neutrino shadow" on the Earth.
In principle, a 'neutrino shadow' might be visible, given a sufficiently large detector running for a long enough time; but the paper reported on the muon shadow 'cast' by the moon (I am a member of the Collaboration in question).
There is another thing to consider other than how well you are going to develop your technical chops. At your age, one of the points of going to college/university is to get out there and learn things you didn't even know existed, let alone have a chance to be amazed or enthralled by yet. Software development is a rewarding (in the various meanings of the term) field of study and practice, but if you don't get some broader exposure to human knowledge, you and society will be the poorer for it.
This is the idea of the liberal arts college, anyways, and it still has value (perhaps even more so in these times of hyper-specialization). Society (and the planet) needs real citizens who can educate themselves about a variety of topics and make (and advocate for) informed choices.
The size of the institution matters as well. A good, small school will give you personalized attention which is wonderful, but if you play your cards right at a large school, you can have it all. I studied physics at a large state school, and, by my mid twenties, I had worked on four experiments, travelled to Maui to work nights on a cosmic ray telescope, analyzed data from a satellite experiment, and worked on one of the most important physics detectors in use at the time, at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Then I returned to the same school to study art, and eventually wound up with a Ph.D. in physics (and a minor in art). While my other classes were a mixed bag, it's safe to say that many would not have been on the roster at all in a purely technical school.
In other words, at a large school you can do really interesting technical things AND broaden your horizons a bit, if you play your cards right (generally this involves finding one or two excellent mentors among the grad students and professors).
I too would love to be able to use regexps for normal searches -- but it does make me wonder how they implemented (indexed) this, given that the space of all possible regexp's has got to be much larger than that of a finite sequence of keywords.
These "media" (using both the old and new sense of the word) have a lot in common. As a painter of a few decades I can say that the important thing is the thought processes behind the work. What ideas or energies are you trying to express? Your choice of tools, digital or otherwise, will depend on this. I believe it was Robert Beverly Hale, a venerable teacher of figure drawing at the Art Student's League in New York, who said "drawings are thoughts with lines around them." This is true regardless of whether you're using pencil, drawing tablet, or mouse, or thinking in terms of marks, lines, curves, or volumes. These "thoughts" consist of thousands of myriad decisions about shape, proportion, motion, light, mass.
Figure drawing does help immensely, partly because our minds give us so much more feedback about images of bodies than, say, trees, but also because we live in the body: by connecting lines to felt, physical gesture you can get much more expression into your work.
The beautiful thing about pen/brush/pencil and paper/canvas/panel/... is the absolutely sensitive, sensual nature of mark-making, which is still not quite matched by the digital media. But if a student has powerful graphic ideas and practices their expression assiduously, she will have an impact regardless of her tools. Artists need to learn about traditional tools (for their exquisite sensitivity and to connect with tradition) and the new ones (to take advantage of new visual and technical possibilities).
- Former Badger, glad I ordered one of those new MacBooks
If all goes well this Austral Summer, IceCube will deploy four "strings," each with 60 light sensors attached, at a depth of about 2 km. Subsequent years will deploy more sensors until a total of 4800 is reached, making the cubic-kilometer sized detector one of the largest on Earth.
IceCube's quarry is primarily neutrinos of extraterrestrial origin. For the uninitiated, neutrinos are extremely elusive subatomic particles produced by high energy interactions. Candidate sources include the supermassive black holes at the heart of so-called "Active Galactic Nuclei", dark matter, and the mysterious Gamma Ray Bursts.
A recent article has more information.
See also a previous Slashdot post about IceCube's predecessor, AMANDA.
Wikipedia has this introduction to neutrinos.
"These results show that, for the test conditions described here and on an equal-weight basis, if carbon nanotubes reach the lungs, they are much more toxic than carbon black and can be more toxic than quartz, which is considered a serious occupational health hazard in chronic inhalation exposures."
Not sure I'd wear a shirt or even chain mail made of these things....
Cerenkov radiation is caused by charged particles moving through a medium at a speed faster than light IN THAT MEDIUM. So neutrons (being neutral) travelling through your eye won't radiate Cerenkov light, although their decay products might.
Also, Cerenkov light can be generated in the air itself (the speed of light in air is slightly slower than in vacuum), so the flux of charged particles doesn't necessarily have to travel through your eyeballs to be detected. This is how some earth-bound cosmic ray detectors work (they "see" the sudden blue Cerenkov footprint on the ground caused by showers of particles produced by very high energy cosmic rays hitting the top of the atmosphere).
You'd have to work out the fluxes and efficiencies to see if one could have seen Cerenkov light from the reactor, but my suspicion is that any Cerenkov light produced near the reactor would have been drowned out by other light sources.
If both bodies were the same shape the larger would have eight times the volume.
Um, assuming spherical asteroids, (1.5)^3 ~= 3.4, not 8. The increased ratio of volumes is still appreciable, though.
There is an upside to this, of course. If your Website is honest and informative you might find yourself in jobs where your employer respects you above and beyond what you're able to accomplish for him/her. Example, I'm an artist. My last (science/tech) employer not only tolerated this (hiring me half time which was somewhat rare in my field), but took an avid interest in my work (several coworkers attended shows and bought artwork). If I go into a job interview and say, "I'm an artist," they may roll their eyes and write me off, but if they see I have a professional attitude about both my work for them and as an artist as well, it may help. And if it hurts, well, I don't want to work for them.
Hi, I work for this project (or rather its successor, IceCube) and I have to clarify something. I believe the sky map shown is a map of neutrino BACKGROUND events, not a map of neutrino sources. Background events occur when energetic cosmic rays strike the earth and produce neutrinos which travel through the earth and trigger the detector. Any extraterrestrial neutrino sources would show up as "hot spots" in the sky map under discussion (with the exception of diffuse sources). At this point, AMANDA is NOT claiming the detection of any extraterrestrial source, AFAIK. Most predicted sources are thought to require a larger detector, which is currently under construction.
Been using Idea for a few months and am generally quite impressed. But I used Visual C++ about two years ago and loved how easy it was to lay out GUI components in a WYSIWIG manner. I don't think you can do that in Idea; I think you can in JBuilder. Can you in Eclipse?