Just out of curiosity, do you have a secret to your 5 hours of sleep (besides lots of caffeine)? Or is that just what your body needs?
I'm curious because I'm a grad student now, and while a few years ago I could seemingly go 5 consequitive nights with 2-3 hours of sleep, my body can't handle those kinds of hours anymore.
Or are you on one of those weird sleep schedules where you take several 20-25 minute naps scattered throughout the day instead of sleeping 6-8 hours (5 in your case) in one block? The idea behind this schedule is that you go right to REM sleep, and thus don't waste time in the other sleep modes which in theory your body doesn't really need. This sleep method is supposed to use only 3 hours of total sleep per day (scattered throughout the day), but takes a few weeks of getting used to.
When my former roommate moved out last summer, he submitted all the mail forwarding forms, but about half his mail continued to arrive in our mailbox -- personal letters, not bulk mail.
I believe that mail forwarding (for reasons I do not understand) only automatically forwards 1st-class mail to the new address (and maybe some bulk 3rd class). Handwritten letters, IIRC, must explicitly state to be forwarded to sender.
Does anybody else dislike most of this bonus material?
I have found a few cases of extra material that is quite cool. My cousin got the Spinal Tap DVD last year, and instead of the "director's commentary" overlay, you have Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Derek Smalls (ie, the core members of the 'band') commenting on the movie in character. It's really hysterical, and also amazing to see how well the work off each other on this commentary of a movie filmed about 20 years ago.
On a different note, my girlfriend and I rented Citizen Kane a few months ago. This DVD had a pretty cool (IMHO) commentary overlay by Roger Ebert who not only explained various symbolism of the scenes being shown, but also explained the technology of how they made the special effects for those scenes. For example, nearly all the scenes at Xanadu didn't exist, and they overlaid various architectural 'prints' over the bits they did film to make what looked like an enormously grand mansion. It was pretty cool to watch.
Other than these two cases, I think most of the 'extras' I've seen are usually pretty crappy and annoying.
Its fabulous musical opening going straight into a full-speed action sequence is one of the most remarkable first five minutes of a film ever.
Actually, I feel just that way about the first movie (although I really like the rest of it too). It's funny because I just saw that opening sequence with my little brother a few years ago, which was his first time seeing it. He didn't realize how many parodied ideas from subsequent movies/comedy shows were originally from that movie. Nearly every scene was incredible - replacing statue with correct weight sand bag, occulting the beam of light, the floor steps that trigger poisonous arrows, the rolling boulder, etc etc. All of it brilliant.
back in high school (around 1993) a chemist came to speak to our class and brought a vial containing what she said were buckyballs. I don't know how pure they were or not.
It looked like some black soot, but behaved really weird when you shook up the vial. Ie, normal soot would fall right to the bottom when you stop shaking it. This stuff would kind of 'roll' around the vial for a few seconds, seeming to keep falling from the top, kind of paralleling the sound a rainstick makes after you flip it - the seeds keep falling when you'd expect them normally to have all fallen to the bottom.
Couldn't we just apply electricity and make all the carbon's in our bodies glow?
I don't know how facetious you're being, but I'll answer anyway. The carbon atoms in a carbon nanotube are in a highly ordered arrangement (a nanotube is essential a crystal with well-defined point symmetry groups), which means the potential energy (ignoring end-effects of the tube) is invariant under certain symmetry operations, namely translation and rotation. These symmetries will manifest themselves when you solve Schrodinger's equation in some form of electronic band structure, probably as a splitting of their corresponding degenerate states. The resulting bandgap is what is most-likely being exploited to emit the photons.
Contrasted to the human body, in which case the carbon atoms don't have much ordering at all, and chemical reactions are constantly occurring. Hence the band structure would be a chaotic non-equilibrium mess.
yes, nanotech is currently one of the 'sexy' topics, and so every two months (or more often, usually) someone gets to publish their new fabrication or measurement technique.
I'm a graduate physics student (experimentalist), and I'll be working with nanotubes. But we're just building up our lab now (my advisor just arrived here only a few months ago). We'll be doing measurements with carbon nanotubes, initially continuing what we did last summer (at her old postdoc lab) by measuring superconducting nanowires. If you're curious, these nanowires are created by sputtering a superconducting alloy (MoGe) on top of a nanotube substrate. They're interesting because the system dimensions are small enough that the wires are effectively one-dimensional, which means they can't support long-range order and thus cannot allow Cooper-pair supercurrents to flow unimpeded through the wire.
It's hard to create nanotubes, and harder to put them where you want them. One way to create them is to use chemical vapor deposition (CVD), where you basically try to create a controlled environment where some hydrocarbon (eg methane) is ignited (the environment is somewhat oxygen-deficient so CO2 isn't the only carbon species produced) The 'soot' that is subsequently deposited on your substrate should contain nanotubes if the right conditions are met.
To get the tubes in certain places, sometimes little 'seeds' of iron particles are used, in hopes the nanotubes will grow/branch from them.
It's hard to create good SWNT (Single-Walled Nanotubes), but easier to form 'ropes' of many nanotubes intertwined together.
Another difficult factor to control is the 'chirality' of the tube. Basically, a carbon nanotube is a rolled graphite sheet, but when the sheet is rolled, it can have certain 'twist' to it. For example, if you rolled lined paper into a cylinder, you can have zero helicity, in which case your lines will form independent circles. Or you can shift the lines by an integer number, in which case the lines will form helices of varying pitch. This factor in nanotubes determines the electronic band structure, which mandates whether the tubes are metallic or semiconducting. It would be highly desirable to be able to produce consistently tubes of the same chirality.
I hope this makes sense, I was up all night doing E&M homework (ya gotta love Jackson), so my brain is kinda fried right now.
That happened to me with Civ I. i never played Civ II more than about 30 minutes, after getting annoyed by the isometric view (and also having far less time than I did in the old days).
Can anybody who's really played all 3 civ's comment on which is more addictive or better or whatever?
Totally! I usually find occasion to point out civilizations can rapidly advance when they have need to simultaneously invent the wheel, fire, and religion, a la ZFP.
This one's useful too. Make sure you don't trigger your sun to go supernova until you're DAMN sure ALL the bad guys are within the death zone.
Still not sure, though, why a living human gives a ship so much kinetic energy that cannot be replicated by other matter (a 100 kg pile of lasagna, for instance).
Unfortunately, you've hit the nail right on the head, both legally and financially. I realized this when my friend, who was a business major back in our undergraduate days, related how a publically-traded company's ethical priority is it's shareholders.
He put it like this. A company cannot ethically spend money that won't, in some way, help out these shareholders. For example, if employee Joe Blow's wife needs an operation, the company can ethically pay for it because it would most likely improve Joe's ability to work for the company, and hence the shareholders. However, suppose Joe was retiring after a good 50+ years of devotion to the company. They might decide that there's no benefit for the shareholders if they spend this money for Joe. However, it's not fully cut and dry like this, one could argue other employees' morale could be improved seeing retiring Joe get helped out, hence benefitting the shareholders. Anyway, it turns out that said shareholders are ultimately THE BOTTOM LINE.
Shareholders can, and often do, sue companies that make bad financial moves that don't hurt them. For example, I own a few meager shares of VA Linux that I bought back in the day. After the stock market plunge, I got letters in the mail from cla$$-action lawyers wanting to take part in a class-action suit against VA because their stock dropped so much. The investors thought it must have been VA's business model which didn't adequately take the shareholders interests into account (of course, it was primarily silly businessmen trying to buy into this hot-topic called linux that they didn't know much about but heard was a great investment). I declined to take part in the class-action suit (I wouldn't have gotten more than a few pennies anyway).
The point is, most companies aim for maximizing profits. Private companies can do whatever they please, but public companies must do everything possible to maximize profits for the shareholders. It is usually argued that improving product quality improves sales, which gives the most $$$ to shareholders. But quite often large-volume sub-quality sales can outpace smaller-volume higher-quality sales in terms of shareholder benefits. So, voila, your observation becomes a rather standard practice.
Back before the bubble burst, I worked at a national lab (MIT Lincoln Lab) and saw many people leaving to join the ranks of rich private engineers. Specifically, the Optical Communications group fell apart as everybody fled to various startups to make their fortunes. One such startup offered engineers about 10k shares of stock, which eventually sold for $300 within a few days! Overnight multi-millionaires. Of course, the stock has plunged, along with many others. So many of these engineers have found themselves out of work, sometimes with large home mortgages they cannot afford. [Lesson - make sure if you buy a house you're not dependent upon expected stock prices, otherwise you can find yourself really screwed.]
But the point of making a company public is to get ALOT of funding when the company is rather young, so it can buy enough resources to adequately compete in the marketplace (ie, for this company to buy lots of ultra-fast optical and electronic equipment, along with attracting the top-quality engineers, etc). However, after this, they have to perform for their stockholders or else all hell breaks loose.
Contrasted with a private company, like LEGO. Less startup money and also venture capitalists will probably not want to invest in private companies as much as public ones. However, once they start making it, they can do whatever they want with their profits that they please. They also don't have to publish all the information that publically-traded companies have to do, etc.
So in the short run, it's most likely worth it to be public. But if you think your company really has an excellent long-term business plan and can keep sales volume high, it could be worthwhile to stay private.
[Caution, I'm a physicist and know very very little about business so I'll probably get schooled here by various MBA's, etc. But that's my take on the situation.]
In addition, we can now write sloppy code and just tell people to install this patch first!
Well, yes and no. Think about the analogy of this to driving. Cars today have a number of safety features, including seat belts, air-bags, anti-lock breaks, etc. Do we drive less safely because of them? More importantly, should we not include these devices in cars to increase driving safety?
I believe it was Chris Rock joking about this in one of his sketches. He claimed that airbags are NOT going to make someone drive safely. He said something like "What you need is a giant spike coming out of the steering wheel. That'll make someone drive safe!".
I've been reading a lot more of the philosophy section of the website lately
Firstly, I really liked the matrix alot. It wasn't hyped when I saw it so I had no idea what to expect (I was actually expecting another sub-par Keanu movie). I was blown away, it had lots of awesome action themes all mixed together - guns and ammo, martial arts, computer hackery, electronica soundtrack, etc. I thought it rocked.
That said, I thought the dialog was rather weak and cheesy at times. Philosophically there was nothing really new to the matrix that hasn't been considered for at least several hundred years. I was a physics/philosophy major in college, so these were all topics we talked about constantly. In one of the philosophy classes called 'theory of knowledge' i think, we spent the first 6-8 weeks merely talking about how one can be sure they're not dreaming or about reality, etc. This, of course, can be nicely summarized in Descartes statement (translated) "I think therefore I am". Meaning the only thing we can ever really be sure of is that we exist, which we know by the fact we're capable of rational thought. None of our senses or other input can be trusted.
Anyway, suffice to say, I thought dialog was pretty cheesy in the Matrix "what is real, is it something we can see and touch or electric impulses in our neurons", etc. Age old material for the philosopher. Also things that most folks that laid back and smoked a doobie probably thought about as well. It was good to see these things brought out into a mainstream Hollywood flick that goes beyond a babe in a bikini doing kung fu. But I didn't think the movie really went particularly deep.
What I'm saying is that it's good this movie seems to have opened new avenues of thinking for you that you weren't aware of. And I'm glad to see it encourage philosophical thought. But if that's your interests, and it sounds like they are, you are doing yourself a dis-service by only reading philosophical commentary on the matrix. If you have real interests, you should go beyond Hollywood to the source and read some of the classics, try Plato (Socratic Dialogs) or Descartes or Nietzsche.
yeah, that value didn't include contact resistance.
but there are losses in the tube itself. carriers aren't purely ballistic (maybe theoretically but not in our samples). We also couldn't be certain if we truly had single-walled tubes, they could have been ropes. Whether metallic or semiconducting can be determined by noting R decreasing at low T.
So far, no one's been able to get a good handle on how to really tailor properties finely (length, twist angle, etc).
yeah, true. What we did when we measured tube resistance is put a drop of a solution containing a dispersion of nanotubes onto a small die-sized substrate. There was a trench etched in the substrate, with patterned metal leads, so by statistics, at the right tube concentration in solution, we'd get a few samples with one tube across the trench for each set of leads. thus, we can measure the resistance using 2 or 4 probe tests.
the tube stuff used in the solution came from a company that grew then in an arc furnace. you're right in that there are several chiralities and diamater tubes in the collection.
Using an arc furnace, though, you can use little iron catalysts to try to grow tubes from one point to another. hard to control, though. and not very repeatable.
Nanotubes come in several chiralities, some of which are semiconducting and some of which are metallic.
I've measured resistance of a nanotube of approx. 200 nm in length and about 5-10 nm in diameter to be a few hundred kilo-ohms (sorry, don't have exact numbers with me). This was for temperatures from room (300 K) down to about 2 K. We were looking at verifying some initial claims by groups claiming that nanotubes were superconducting. they aren't.
Nanotubes actually have significant potential for quantum computing. Nanotubes are much more than just a carbon 'wire', they are a well-structured crystal with a number of symmetry groups that can be exploited for interesting solid-state effects.
I know some folks trying to make qubits out of nanotubes by patterning gates on them. Very very hard, they're so damn small standard lithography techniques are out the window.
Nanotubes also have interesting phonon characteristics that make them good candidates for qubit systems. Also, it has been demonstrated that spin-orbit coupling in nanotubes can be drastically reduced, which can greatly enhance coherence times for spintronic qubits.
So, if Intel or NASA is "only" looking at using these guys for interconnects, carbon nanotubes still have significant potential for revolutionary computing breakthroughs.
Hmm, I remember one of the cables we bought for the high-energy project was almost 1cm diameter (i hope i'm not mixing this up with my current research with magnet driver leads that are this thick, that was 7 years ago), and the insulation wasn't that thick. This was before I even heard of monster cable, don't know if it was monster or not. expensive yes, but we needed it really fast and the audio store was open.
You are correct that at audio frequencies impedance matching is of negligible concern.
The only thing that matters in your choice of speaker cable is that you want to keep series resistance much much less than the speaker impedance.
This was my point exactly regarding monster cable, which is basically low-gauge braider copper cabling. This is where you'll actually gain any noticable effects, by cutting down the cable resistance, for tighter bass response.
Any good thick braided cable is good here, and for many people this is most easily obtained at your local high-end stereo shop as monster cable.
Intersting note - a project I was working on with the high-energy physics group at U. Penn many years ago required us to get some really low-gauge wiring for an immediate application. Easiest thing to do was to pick some up directly at the local audio shop.
I assume your "professional" runs the same as the people who pay for Monster Cable and assume that because it costs more, it has to be better.
My old boss, who is a total genius and hardcare audiophile, swears by monster cable, and says it's the easiest thing you can do to make your audio setup sound better.
We were talking about something one day (on our project to make better AD converters by using optical sampling and demultiplexing) and got sidetracked into audio electronics. If you know any basic electronics, then you can understand how the low-impedance output of your amplifier will form a divider with even a few tenths of an ohm of resistance in the speaker wiring. Not just that but you get effective filtering and resonances due to speaker line resistance in series with the speaker coil reactance. If an amplifier wants to cut out the bass after a bass note, it's effectively putting zero-potential between it's two outputs, yet any finite line resistance will not cause this response at the speaker's end due to resistive decoupling. Enter monster cable into the picture - cut down tenths of ohm resistances to thousandths or smaller. What's the ultimate effect - much tighter bass response by cutting out speaker bass resonances.
He says even using a crappy amp and crappy speakers (not sure what level of crappy he's talking about) one can be amazed at the effect of just rewiring with monster cable.
Then again, this guy goes to the max. He'll buy a high-end audio amplifier and then rewire it himself. He'll take out any serial capacitor connections (they are usually used between stages of amplification to pass the AC signal but allow the next ampflier to be DC-biased differently). He then inserts his own DC-coupled subampflier to give the whole amplifier a response function all the way down to DC. [note - he also blew out his speakers after doing this the first time because before the amplifier biased itself for zero-DC output it put out some nonzero DC into the speaker, which blew the coil. So now he has a small timer to allow the amps to all bias before opening the output chain to the speakers].
He also removes any other capacitors coupled to the signal, because to cut costs many amplifier companies, even at high-end gear, use low-cost non-linear dielectrics (like tantalum) which cause non-linearities in the audio signal, and any musical buff wants the primary amplifier to be as linear as possible. So he replaces them with more linear dielectrics (I forget, maybe polystyrene caps).
Ultimate story is that he has a setup with extraordinary linearity (super low intermodulation distortion) and frequency response. And this is frequency response and linearity not measured at the amplifier output, but at the speaker output, which is what really matters. Monster cable helps this significantly by giving very low-impedance connection to the speakers, which cuts down bass resonance.
People have long been putting the NOSPAM identifier in your their address to be displayed publically, but I'm pretty sure spammers robots are by now regex'ing these attempts out.
What I have done in the past is to disguise the @ and . chars with other characters and include instructions how to fix it. For example, sign your posts like : email address me at "johndoexfakeyemailycom" and change the x to @ and the y to .
That technique might eventually fail if a large database of domains is built up such that it's easy to figure out where the x and y are. At that point, you can add longer words like 'xyzzy' instead of just 'x' for the @ substitution, etc.
Other good techniques I've seen is putting an email like "johnappledoe@fake.orange.email.banana.com" and then saying "remove all fruits to email me".
Although, whenever possible, I think embedding a picture of an email address is a great idea. I'll start doing that on my own webpages.
Seriously.
According to this guy none of the robber barrons or and trust owners in the 1800's were in a 'greed is good'. How could they be, they didn't have spreadsheets to facilitate their ability to take over railroads and steel industries.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious because I'm a grad student now, and while a few years ago I could seemingly go 5 consequitive nights with 2-3 hours of sleep, my body can't handle those kinds of hours anymore.
Or are you on one of those weird sleep schedules where you take several 20-25 minute naps scattered throughout the day instead of sleeping 6-8 hours (5 in your case) in one block? The idea behind this schedule is that you go right to REM sleep, and thus don't waste time in the other sleep modes which in theory your body doesn't really need. This sleep method is supposed to use only 3 hours of total sleep per day (scattered throughout the day), but takes a few weeks of getting used to.
I believe that mail forwarding (for reasons I do not understand) only automatically forwards 1st-class mail to the new address (and maybe some bulk 3rd class). Handwritten letters, IIRC, must explicitly state to be forwarded to sender.
I have found a few cases of extra material that is quite cool. My cousin got the Spinal Tap DVD last year, and instead of the "director's commentary" overlay, you have Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Derek Smalls (ie, the core members of the 'band') commenting on the movie in character. It's really hysterical, and also amazing to see how well the work off each other on this commentary of a movie filmed about 20 years ago.
On a different note, my girlfriend and I rented Citizen Kane a few months ago. This DVD had a pretty cool (IMHO) commentary overlay by Roger Ebert who not only explained various symbolism of the scenes being shown, but also explained the technology of how they made the special effects for those scenes. For example, nearly all the scenes at Xanadu didn't exist, and they overlaid various architectural 'prints' over the bits they did film to make what looked like an enormously grand mansion. It was pretty cool to watch.
Other than these two cases, I think most of the 'extras' I've seen are usually pretty crappy and annoying.
Actually, I feel just that way about the first movie (although I really like the rest of it too). It's funny because I just saw that opening sequence with my little brother a few years ago, which was his first time seeing it. He didn't realize how many parodied ideas from subsequent movies/comedy shows were originally from that movie. Nearly every scene was incredible - replacing statue with correct weight sand bag, occulting the beam of light, the floor steps that trigger poisonous arrows, the rolling boulder, etc etc. All of it brilliant.
It looked like some black soot, but behaved really weird when you shook up the vial. Ie, normal soot would fall right to the bottom when you stop shaking it. This stuff would kind of 'roll' around the vial for a few seconds, seeming to keep falling from the top, kind of paralleling the sound a rainstick makes after you flip it - the seeds keep falling when you'd expect them normally to have all fallen to the bottom.
I don't know how facetious you're being, but I'll answer anyway. The carbon atoms in a carbon nanotube are in a highly ordered arrangement (a nanotube is essential a crystal with well-defined point symmetry groups), which means the potential energy (ignoring end-effects of the tube) is invariant under certain symmetry operations, namely translation and rotation. These symmetries will manifest themselves when you solve Schrodinger's equation in some form of electronic band structure, probably as a splitting of their corresponding degenerate states. The resulting bandgap is what is most-likely being exploited to emit the photons.
Contrasted to the human body, in which case the carbon atoms don't have much ordering at all, and chemical reactions are constantly occurring. Hence the band structure would be a chaotic non-equilibrium mess.
Yup. Do I know who you are? Come on, at least give me a little hint...
I'm a graduate physics student (experimentalist), and I'll be working with nanotubes. But we're just building up our lab now (my advisor just arrived here only a few months ago). We'll be doing measurements with carbon nanotubes, initially continuing what we did last summer (at her old postdoc lab) by measuring superconducting nanowires. If you're curious, these nanowires are created by sputtering a superconducting alloy (MoGe) on top of a nanotube substrate. They're interesting because the system dimensions are small enough that the wires are effectively one-dimensional, which means they can't support long-range order and thus cannot allow Cooper-pair supercurrents to flow unimpeded through the wire.
It's hard to create nanotubes, and harder to put them where you want them. One way to create them is to use chemical vapor deposition (CVD), where you basically try to create a controlled environment where some hydrocarbon (eg methane) is ignited (the environment is somewhat oxygen-deficient so CO2 isn't the only carbon species produced) The 'soot' that is subsequently deposited on your substrate should contain nanotubes if the right conditions are met.
To get the tubes in certain places, sometimes little 'seeds' of iron particles are used, in hopes the nanotubes will grow/branch from them. It's hard to create good SWNT (Single-Walled Nanotubes), but easier to form 'ropes' of many nanotubes intertwined together.
Another difficult factor to control is the 'chirality' of the tube. Basically, a carbon nanotube is a rolled graphite sheet, but when the sheet is rolled, it can have certain 'twist' to it. For example, if you rolled lined paper into a cylinder, you can have zero helicity, in which case your lines will form independent circles. Or you can shift the lines by an integer number, in which case the lines will form helices of varying pitch. This factor in nanotubes determines the electronic band structure, which mandates whether the tubes are metallic or semiconducting. It would be highly desirable to be able to produce consistently tubes of the same chirality.
I hope this makes sense, I was up all night doing E&M homework (ya gotta love Jackson), so my brain is kinda fried right now.
Can anybody who's really played all 3 civ's comment on which is more addictive or better or whatever?
Zork taught me never to wander about in the dark, period. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
This one's useful too. Make sure you don't trigger your sun to go supernova until you're DAMN sure ALL the bad guys are within the death zone.
Still not sure, though, why a living human gives a ship so much kinetic energy that cannot be replicated by other matter (a 100 kg pile of lasagna, for instance).
He put it like this. A company cannot ethically spend money that won't, in some way, help out these shareholders. For example, if employee Joe Blow's wife needs an operation, the company can ethically pay for it because it would most likely improve Joe's ability to work for the company, and hence the shareholders. However, suppose Joe was retiring after a good 50+ years of devotion to the company. They might decide that there's no benefit for the shareholders if they spend this money for Joe. However, it's not fully cut and dry like this, one could argue other employees' morale could be improved seeing retiring Joe get helped out, hence benefitting the shareholders. Anyway, it turns out that said shareholders are ultimately THE BOTTOM LINE.
Shareholders can, and often do, sue companies that make bad financial moves that don't hurt them. For example, I own a few meager shares of VA Linux that I bought back in the day. After the stock market plunge, I got letters in the mail from cla$$-action lawyers wanting to take part in a class-action suit against VA because their stock dropped so much. The investors thought it must have been VA's business model which didn't adequately take the shareholders interests into account (of course, it was primarily silly businessmen trying to buy into this hot-topic called linux that they didn't know much about but heard was a great investment). I declined to take part in the class-action suit (I wouldn't have gotten more than a few pennies anyway).
The point is, most companies aim for maximizing profits. Private companies can do whatever they please, but public companies must do everything possible to maximize profits for the shareholders. It is usually argued that improving product quality improves sales, which gives the most $$$ to shareholders. But quite often large-volume sub-quality sales can outpace smaller-volume higher-quality sales in terms of shareholder benefits. So, voila, your observation becomes a rather standard practice.
Back before the bubble burst, I worked at a national lab (MIT Lincoln Lab) and saw many people leaving to join the ranks of rich private engineers. Specifically, the Optical Communications group fell apart as everybody fled to various startups to make their fortunes. One such startup offered engineers about 10k shares of stock, which eventually sold for $300 within a few days! Overnight multi-millionaires. Of course, the stock has plunged, along with many others. So many of these engineers have found themselves out of work, sometimes with large home mortgages they cannot afford. [Lesson - make sure if you buy a house you're not dependent upon expected stock prices, otherwise you can find yourself really screwed.]
But the point of making a company public is to get ALOT of funding when the company is rather young, so it can buy enough resources to adequately compete in the marketplace (ie, for this company to buy lots of ultra-fast optical and electronic equipment, along with attracting the top-quality engineers, etc). However, after this, they have to perform for their stockholders or else all hell breaks loose.
Contrasted with a private company, like LEGO. Less startup money and also venture capitalists will probably not want to invest in private companies as much as public ones. However, once they start making it, they can do whatever they want with their profits that they please. They also don't have to publish all the information that publically-traded companies have to do, etc.
So in the short run, it's most likely worth it to be public. But if you think your company really has an excellent long-term business plan and can keep sales volume high, it could be worthwhile to stay private.
[Caution, I'm a physicist and know very very little about business so I'll probably get schooled here by various MBA's, etc. But that's my take on the situation.]
Well, yes and no. Think about the analogy of this to driving. Cars today have a number of safety features, including seat belts, air-bags, anti-lock breaks, etc. Do we drive less safely because of them? More importantly, should we not include these devices in cars to increase driving safety?
I believe it was Chris Rock joking about this in one of his sketches. He claimed that airbags are NOT going to make someone drive safely. He said something like "What you need is a giant spike coming out of the steering wheel. That'll make someone drive safe!".
On a related note, was there a bathroom in the 'house' of MSFT Bob? If not, maybe this is the way for that team of engineers to get some completion...
I had a game on my old TRS-80 called Firebird. I wonder what company made it, but it's probably way too late for them to do anything about it.
Firstly, I really liked the matrix alot. It wasn't hyped when I saw it so I had no idea what to expect (I was actually expecting another sub-par Keanu movie). I was blown away, it had lots of awesome action themes all mixed together - guns and ammo, martial arts, computer hackery, electronica soundtrack, etc. I thought it rocked.
That said, I thought the dialog was rather weak and cheesy at times. Philosophically there was nothing really new to the matrix that hasn't been considered for at least several hundred years. I was a physics/philosophy major in college, so these were all topics we talked about constantly. In one of the philosophy classes called 'theory of knowledge' i think, we spent the first 6-8 weeks merely talking about how one can be sure they're not dreaming or about reality, etc. This, of course, can be nicely summarized in Descartes statement (translated) "I think therefore I am". Meaning the only thing we can ever really be sure of is that we exist, which we know by the fact we're capable of rational thought. None of our senses or other input can be trusted.
Anyway, suffice to say, I thought dialog was pretty cheesy in the Matrix "what is real, is it something we can see and touch or electric impulses in our neurons", etc. Age old material for the philosopher. Also things that most folks that laid back and smoked a doobie probably thought about as well. It was good to see these things brought out into a mainstream Hollywood flick that goes beyond a babe in a bikini doing kung fu. But I didn't think the movie really went particularly deep.
What I'm saying is that it's good this movie seems to have opened new avenues of thinking for you that you weren't aware of. And I'm glad to see it encourage philosophical thought. But if that's your interests, and it sounds like they are, you are doing yourself a dis-service by only reading philosophical commentary on the matrix. If you have real interests, you should go beyond Hollywood to the source and read some of the classics, try Plato (Socratic Dialogs) or Descartes or Nietzsche.
yeah, that value didn't include contact resistance. but there are losses in the tube itself. carriers aren't purely ballistic (maybe theoretically but not in our samples). We also couldn't be certain if we truly had single-walled tubes, they could have been ropes. Whether metallic or semiconducting can be determined by noting R decreasing at low T.
yeah, true. What we did when we measured tube resistance is put a drop of a solution containing a dispersion of nanotubes onto a small die-sized substrate. There was a trench etched in the substrate, with patterned metal leads, so by statistics, at the right tube concentration in solution, we'd get a few samples with one tube across the trench for each set of leads. thus, we can measure the resistance using 2 or 4 probe tests.
the tube stuff used in the solution came from a company that grew then in an arc furnace. you're right in that there are several chiralities and diamater tubes in the collection.
Using an arc furnace, though, you can use little iron catalysts to try to grow tubes from one point to another. hard to control, though. and not very repeatable.
I've measured resistance of a nanotube of approx. 200 nm in length and about 5-10 nm in diameter to be a few hundred kilo-ohms (sorry, don't have exact numbers with me). This was for temperatures from room (300 K) down to about 2 K. We were looking at verifying some initial claims by groups claiming that nanotubes were superconducting. they aren't.
I know some folks trying to make qubits out of nanotubes by patterning gates on them. Very very hard, they're so damn small standard lithography techniques are out the window.
Nanotubes also have interesting phonon characteristics that make them good candidates for qubit systems. Also, it has been demonstrated that spin-orbit coupling in nanotubes can be drastically reduced, which can greatly enhance coherence times for spintronic qubits.
So, if Intel or NASA is "only" looking at using these guys for interconnects, carbon nanotubes still have significant potential for revolutionary computing breakthroughs.
Hmm, I remember one of the cables we bought for the high-energy project was almost 1cm diameter (i hope i'm not mixing this up with my current research with magnet driver leads that are this thick, that was 7 years ago), and the insulation wasn't that thick. This was before I even heard of monster cable, don't know if it was monster or not. expensive yes, but we needed it really fast and the audio store was open.
The only thing that matters in your choice of speaker cable is that you want to keep series resistance much much less than the speaker impedance.
This was my point exactly regarding monster cable, which is basically low-gauge braider copper cabling. This is where you'll actually gain any noticable effects, by cutting down the cable resistance, for tighter bass response.
Any good thick braided cable is good here, and for many people this is most easily obtained at your local high-end stereo shop as monster cable.
Intersting note - a project I was working on with the high-energy physics group at U. Penn many years ago required us to get some really low-gauge wiring for an immediate application. Easiest thing to do was to pick some up directly at the local audio shop.
My old boss, who is a total genius and hardcare audiophile, swears by monster cable, and says it's the easiest thing you can do to make your audio setup sound better.
We were talking about something one day (on our project to make better AD converters by using optical sampling and demultiplexing) and got sidetracked into audio electronics. If you know any basic electronics, then you can understand how the low-impedance output of your amplifier will form a divider with even a few tenths of an ohm of resistance in the speaker wiring. Not just that but you get effective filtering and resonances due to speaker line resistance in series with the speaker coil reactance. If an amplifier wants to cut out the bass after a bass note, it's effectively putting zero-potential between it's two outputs, yet any finite line resistance will not cause this response at the speaker's end due to resistive decoupling. Enter monster cable into the picture - cut down tenths of ohm resistances to thousandths or smaller. What's the ultimate effect - much tighter bass response by cutting out speaker bass resonances.
He says even using a crappy amp and crappy speakers (not sure what level of crappy he's talking about) one can be amazed at the effect of just rewiring with monster cable.
Then again, this guy goes to the max. He'll buy a high-end audio amplifier and then rewire it himself. He'll take out any serial capacitor connections (they are usually used between stages of amplification to pass the AC signal but allow the next ampflier to be DC-biased differently). He then inserts his own DC-coupled subampflier to give the whole amplifier a response function all the way down to DC. [note - he also blew out his speakers after doing this the first time because before the amplifier biased itself for zero-DC output it put out some nonzero DC into the speaker, which blew the coil. So now he has a small timer to allow the amps to all bias before opening the output chain to the speakers].
He also removes any other capacitors coupled to the signal, because to cut costs many amplifier companies, even at high-end gear, use low-cost non-linear dielectrics (like tantalum) which cause non-linearities in the audio signal, and any musical buff wants the primary amplifier to be as linear as possible. So he replaces them with more linear dielectrics (I forget, maybe polystyrene caps).
Ultimate story is that he has a setup with extraordinary linearity (super low intermodulation distortion) and frequency response. And this is frequency response and linearity not measured at the amplifier output, but at the speaker output, which is what really matters. Monster cable helps this significantly by giving very low-impedance connection to the speakers, which cuts down bass resonance.
What I have done in the past is to disguise the @ and . chars with other characters and include instructions how to fix it. For example, sign your posts like : email address me at "johndoexfakeyemailycom" and change the x to @ and the y to .
That technique might eventually fail if a large database of domains is built up such that it's easy to figure out where the x and y are. At that point, you can add longer words like 'xyzzy' instead of just 'x' for the @ substitution, etc.
Other good techniques I've seen is putting an email like "johnappledoe@fake.orange.email.banana.com" and then saying "remove all fruits to email me".
Although, whenever possible, I think embedding a picture of an email address is a great idea. I'll start doing that on my own webpages.
Seriously.
According to this guy none of the robber barrons or and trust owners in the 1800's were in a 'greed is good'. How could they be, they didn't have spreadsheets to facilitate their ability to take over railroads and steel industries.