A company produces an interesting variation of a product that has been mass-produced for decades, and it's called a hack?
And how did you manage to get your shiny new favourite word, "terrorist" in a summary on flourescent tubes? Let me read that again.
Interesting story, puerile summary.
I'm the author of an easy to use open source C++ library that helps bridge the gap between your science and a final high quality image, and I thought I might point it out, since it's relevant to the topic.
PNGwriter was originally written with scientists in mind. The need to create an image from the result of a scientific computer simulation arises as a natural part of scientific programming. Getting the data out of the program and into a high quality image in an efficient way can sometimes be hard, especially if the user is not a very experienced programmer. The methods used can often be highly inefficient or too complex to be feasible.
PNGwriter is a very easy to use open source graphics library that uses PNG as its output format. The interface has been designed to be as simple and intuitive as possible. It supports plotting and reading in the RGB (red, green, blue), HSV (hue, saturation, value/brightness) and CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) colour spaces, basic shapes, scaling, bilinear interpolation, full TrueType antialiased and rotated text support, bezier curves, opening existing PNG images and more. Documentation in English and Spanish. Runs under Linux, Unix, Mac OS X and Windows. Requires libpng and optionally FreeType2 for the text support.
It has been packaged for or is a part of Debian (stable), Ubuntu, Arch and FreeBSD.
The website is available in English, Spanish and (in summary form) in Japanese, and contains many examples, an online version of the PDF manual, a FAQ section and more.
Please keep in mind that what is generally sought (or expected) with cold fusion devices is to break even energy-wise, or to generate energy. This experiment does not have this as an objective.
Indeed, there is nothing new about producing fusion using strong electric fields. What is notable about this demonstration is summed up in the last line of the abstract of the published paper:
"Although the reported fusion is not useful in the power-producing sense, we anticipate that the system will find application as a simple palm-sized neutron generator."
The last few paragraphs of the New Scientist article on this experiment (published 27 April) is also interesting:
Microthrusters
One problem is the small number of neutrons the experiment produces - a few hundred per second. A commercial neutron generator would need to produce at least tens of millions of neutrons per second.
Today, neutrons are created in nuclear reactors or particle accelerators which can cost millions of dollars to build and maintain. The prospect of a desktop alternative is a powerful incentive to continue the research and Putterman's team hopes to increase the yield by operating at lower temperatures and by using an array of crystals.
Putterman also suggests the crystals could be used as microthrusters for tiny spacecraft. By accelerating deuterium in one direction, the spacecraft would be propelled in the opposite direction.
Digital media is replacing, and thus should match the longevity of, non-digital media, such as paper and photographs. It would be insane not to aim for the longest term storage possible. Lost protocols may be deduced, but lost media cannot be recovered.
When I clicked on the summary link and went to MSN.com, using Safari, I got a white background, almost text only page that said:
Why does MSN look like this?
Your browser cannot find our style and presentation information. You're welcome to use the page as is, or upgrade your browser to its latest version. If you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer, go to the Microsoft Internet Explorer website to install the latest version. If you are using another browser, see your browser's website for more information.
And here's my comment to their Feedback form:
What utter crap. It's 2005, and you, MSN, part of that lumering behemoth, Microsoft, cannot even make a front page that renders in a mainstream browser, Safari.
hillbilly noun [C] US OLD-FASHIONED DISAPPROVING
a person from a mountainous area of the US who has a simple way of life and is considered to be slightly stupid by people living in towns and cities
(from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)
I wanted to convey my view that the article's author wrote with an overly simplistic character in mind. The scientific education and perception of science by the average person is not aided by this "gosh darn it's beyond me" tone.
Ah, how I love hillbilly journalists. Though the facts of the article itself are not incorrect, the way they are presented reeks of naiveté.
Gamma, the factor that in general relates quantities (time, mass, energy, momentum) in two reference frames in Special Relativity, is non-linear. Being within 0.1% of the speed of light does not place you any 'closer' to breaking it than being within 50% of it.
This is why instead of speaking of the speed of particles and objects travelling close to that of light, we refer to the kinetic energy they have, which gives a much more practical way of understanding these speeds.
Yup, jeez, a day or two later, story gone cold, and still sitting at Score 1. Anyway, I appreciate your comment, one worldly person is worth ten thousand mouth-breathing moderators.
Well, by deep freeze I sort of meant a more Space-stationlike version of "ice box"...:-)
Paul
I've often wondered at how easy it is to read text that is half-covered lengthways. Indeed, in school, I would sometimes see how much of a line of text I could cover before I could no longer read it.
Try this yourself: Find a web page with a large block of text, and scroll the window so that the bottom of the window cuts the last line in half. Read it.
So why don't we just write half our letters and be done with it? Handwritten text would be akward to write, but books and documents, on the other hand, could use 50% less paper.
I will respond to a selected few comments you have made.
I have been to Chile many times. I've talked to people who live there. The 1970s coup was very necessary. The whole country was an economic disaster and there were massive food shortages
I have lived in Chile since 1989, one year before Pinochet miscalculated the support he would get in a second plebiscite and was replaced by a "democratic" government.
The people you have talked to have told you one side of the story. As a matter of fact, you seem to have listened very carefully to them, as you have repeated the far-right-wing speech quite accurately.
Communists hate Pinochet because he was the only person to ever remove a communist government from power.
Might I point out that calling someone a "communist" in Chile amounts to saying that they do not glorify the military government and its actions? Note carefully that the criteria for being a communist has not changed. The difference is that from 1973 onwards you were "disappeared", tortured and often shot, while today you are just looked down upon by the right wing sector of society.
I bid you to take a few moments to think about your words: might it not be more likely that so-called communists resent the military government for having tortured and killed fathers, mothers, friends, family members, and, well, innocent people?
To this day, there is no understanding among the two sides in Chile. Day after day, year after year, the 11th of September comes and goes, and there is no understanding. So-called "communists" are told to their faces that the disappeared "do not exist", that they are a "marxist myth", or that they all ran away abroad. People mindlessly repeat the mantra that Allende's government was a disaster (it was, but not without considerable help from the USA and the Right), that it would have been much worse, look at Chile now, what a miracle, and so on.
Go on, I challenge you to read up about the Chicago Boys, about the amount of money spent manipulating Chile's media, about the right- and CIA- organized trucker strikes, about what Pinochet did to the public health system (AFP and ISAPREs).
Show your commitment to being well-informed, and form an opinion based not upon conversations with one side of an extremely polarised society, but on historical documents.
Slashdot Mirror
A company produces an interesting variation of a product that has been mass-produced for decades, and it's called a hack? And how did you manage to get your shiny new favourite word, "terrorist" in a summary on flourescent tubes? Let me read that again. Interesting story, puerile summary.
I'm the author of an easy to use open source C++ library that helps bridge the gap between your science and a final high quality image, and I thought I might point it out, since it's relevant to the topic.
PNGwriter was originally written with scientists in mind. The need to create an image from the result of a scientific computer simulation arises as a natural part of scientific programming. Getting the data out of the program and into a high quality image in an efficient way can sometimes be hard, especially if the user is not a very experienced programmer. The methods used can often be highly inefficient or too complex to be feasible.
PNGwriter is a very easy to use open source graphics library that uses PNG as its output format. The interface has been designed to be as simple and intuitive as possible. It supports plotting and reading in the RGB (red, green, blue), HSV (hue, saturation, value/brightness) and CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) colour spaces, basic shapes, scaling, bilinear interpolation, full TrueType antialiased and rotated text support, bezier curves, opening existing PNG images and more. Documentation in English and Spanish. Runs under Linux, Unix, Mac OS X and Windows. Requires libpng and optionally FreeType2 for the text support.
It has been packaged for or is a part of Debian (stable), Ubuntu, Arch and FreeBSD.
The website is available in English, Spanish and (in summary form) in Japanese, and contains many examples, an online version of the PDF manual, a FAQ section and more.
Take a look:
http://pngwriter.sourceforge.net/
Hope you find it useful!
That's what I read, anyway. I was rather looking forward to it.
Indeed, there is nothing new about producing fusion using strong electric fields. What is notable about this demonstration is summed up in the last line of the abstract of the published paper: The last few paragraphs of the New Scientist article on this experiment (published 27 April) is also interesting:
Digital media is replacing, and thus should match the longevity of, non-digital media, such as paper and photographs. It would be insane not to aim for the longest term storage possible. Lost protocols may be deduced, but lost media cannot be recovered.
How about the Feynman lectures? I don't think it would be too bad just listening to them, instead of watching them, given Feynman's charisma.
Anyway, you can probably find an audiobook like this one.
Paul
Thansk for clarifying that, yours was a detailed and clear post. And sorry for the delay in replying ;-)
Exactly the same as yours. Strange, no?
Why not post an actual link to the new non-beta search engine in the summary?
MSN Search
And here's my comment to their Feedback form:
Sigh.
hillbilly
;-)
noun [C] US OLD-FASHIONED DISAPPROVING
a person from a mountainous area of the US who has a simple way of life and is considered to be slightly stupid by people living in towns and cities
(from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)
I wanted to convey my view that the article's author wrote with an overly simplistic character in mind. The scientific education and perception of science by the average person is not aided by this "gosh darn it's beyond me" tone.
And yes, I live in a city
Ah, how I love hillbilly journalists. Though the facts of the article itself are not incorrect, the way they are presented reeks of naiveté.
Gamma, the factor that in general relates quantities (time, mass, energy, momentum) in two reference frames in Special Relativity, is non-linear. Being within 0.1% of the speed of light does not place you any 'closer' to breaking it than being within 50% of it.
This is why instead of speaking of the speed of particles and objects travelling close to that of light, we refer to the kinetic energy they have, which gives a much more practical way of understanding these speeds.
Yup, jeez, a day or two later, story gone cold, and still sitting at Score 1. Anyway, I appreciate your comment, one worldly person is worth ten thousand mouth-breathing moderators. Well, by deep freeze I sort of meant a more Space-stationlike version of "ice box"... :-)
Paul
I've often wondered at how easy it is to read text that is half-covered lengthways. Indeed, in school, I would sometimes see how much of a line of text I could cover before I could no longer read it.
Try this yourself: Find a web page with a large block of text, and scroll the window so that the bottom of the window cuts the last line in half. Read it.
So why don't we just write half our letters and be done with it? Handwritten text would be akward to write, but books and documents, on the other hand, could use 50% less paper.
I will respond to a selected few comments you have made.
;-)
I have been to Chile many times. I've talked to people who live there. The 1970s coup was very necessary. The whole country was an economic disaster and there were massive food shortages
I have lived in Chile since 1989, one year before Pinochet miscalculated the support he would get in a second plebiscite and was replaced by a "democratic" government.
The people you have talked to have told you one side of the story. As a matter of fact, you seem to have listened very carefully to them, as you have repeated the far-right-wing speech quite accurately.
Communists hate Pinochet because he was the only person to ever remove a communist government from power.
Might I point out that calling someone a "communist" in Chile amounts to saying that they do not glorify the military government and its actions? Note carefully that the criteria for being a communist has not changed. The difference is that from 1973 onwards you were "disappeared", tortured and often shot, while today you are just looked down upon by the right wing sector of society.
I bid you to take a few moments to think about your words: might it not be more likely that so-called communists resent the military government for having tortured and killed fathers, mothers, friends, family members, and, well, innocent people?
To this day, there is no understanding among the two sides in Chile. Day after day, year after year, the 11th of September comes and goes, and there is no understanding. So-called "communists" are told to their faces that the disappeared "do not exist", that they are a "marxist myth", or that they all ran away abroad. People mindlessly repeat the mantra that Allende's government was a disaster (it was, but not without considerable help from the USA and the Right), that it would have been much worse, look at Chile now, what a miracle, and so on.
Go on, I challenge you to read up about the Chicago Boys, about the amount of money spent manipulating Chile's media, about the right- and CIA- organized trucker strikes, about what Pinochet did to the public health system (AFP and ISAPREs).
Show your commitment to being well-informed, and form an opinion based not upon conversations with one side of an extremely polarised society, but on historical documents.
For your convenience, here are a few links, starting with an interview with Noam Chomsky: Secrets, Lies and Democracy, The Lawless State , U.S. Responsibility for the Coup in Chile. Please, take some time to Google a bit (or, heaven forbid, go to your local library