the reason people build huge, $$ mirrors is to collect more photons - there just ain't a lot of photons from things a gazillion (or so) lightyears away. So, you really want to maximize the number of photons you collect; one way to do this is larger surface area (in a conventional mirror) I think (but don't know) that # photons scales with radius ^2 If the fresnel thingy is 10% efficient that would appear to be a problem
lack of games trashing the system historically, lack of games has been seen as a neg for linux - but perhaps it is the big thing that will get linux widely adopted: if linux doesn't run any games,maybe a lot of school people will use it, which will bootstrap adopttion
a lot of speculation, but does ANYONE have any experimental data, where you figure out what "readible" or "usable" means, and then do an test ? For instance, you might ask people to read an online book, or something like that, and every 20 minutes give them some sort of captcha test with decreasing font sizes; you might ask them to read a complex paragraph and then answer questions, etc..
Or, you could give people adjustable monitors and see what they do (easily adjustable monitors, so ordinary people could vary...)
like hydrocarbon grease and lubricant, paints and coatings with possibly toxic compounds, the plasticizers and antioxidants in the plastic and foam,...... you could keep an entire university of scientists busy for years and alot of the stuff is probably, if you look hard, sourced from china, so it may not even be what it is supposed to be, eg very very toxix pbbs (poly brominated biphenyls) are banned in civilized countrys..
it is clear that papers like the N Y Times plan to ditch the paper version and go online, But even at that they fail miserably - a classic case of the innovators dilemma, they can't abandon the past fast enough for instance, there is almost never a link to a report, eg in Jan 08 they did stories on the un ready state of hte national guard, all based on apdf from some comission,and none of the stories gave a link to the pdf for instance, there blogging on the web is horrible - do they have something good like slashcode or media wiki ? no, they have some awful stuff.
they don't do a lot of original research, but they have 3,000 intelligent people in the news dept sifting through other peoples efforts...do they attmep to put this huge intelligence effort to work in an online wiki or database, no eg, sfaik, there is no database of elected officials charged or convicted of a crime..something the times could easily start and do well on, at least at he national state level.
alot of the comments are along the line of, well brands are ok for joe six pack why do/.ers think they are better or different ? I bet if every person who posted one of these snotty comments honestly went thru and looked at what she or he bought over the last 6 months, they would find that "stupid" marketing drove a lot of hteir purchases. or, as garrison keiler put it, here in lake woebegon, all the childrne are above avg.
there is also a snottyness in putting joe sixpack down for buying a computer cause it is cool. why is that bad ? why is your technical stuff better ? (aside from M$ hatred)
be interesting to find out how often the guy is this wrong. I still remember from the old whole earth catalog, how they recommended these super expensive foam swords - sort of a pre yuppie yuppism.
When people buy apple, they thing they are going to get this great, wonderful product - after all, it looks really cool in the store. But then they get it home, and there are all sorts of problems, often with poorly designed hardware (how apple can consistently sell products with bad hardware and still get called a company with fanatical attention to detail is a mystery). So now the new owner has a mental conflict: he is told that the apple product is great, but his experience says otherwise. This cognitive dissonance can be resovled by either (1)accepting reality, (2) denying reality. Most of us, most of the time, take 2 -which is what appnatics are doing; they know, at some level, that the product is not that good, but they want to live in a world where it is.
also, alot of appnatics are marketing people, who care more about the sale then customer satisfaction.
the reason apple people are so rabid is cognitive dissonance: the thing is so great, yet it actually aint' so, you can either give in to reality - people rarely do - or resolve the conflict by creating a psuedo reality where apple is great.
around the turn of the centruy, another period when a small number of people had truly great wealth, J P Morgan was chair of the NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art ("the met") At the annual board mtg, JP would say, roughly, we have a deficit of 5 million this year (a lot back in 1900) and jp would go around the table Joe, I've put you down for 200K, ed.... well gentleman, that takes care of the deficit our next item of business...
just look at MS - when they get it wrong, you have to pay anyway.... this whole priv enterprise is more efficient then govt - give me some solid studies with data...
evry time the ID/evo debate comes up, someone has some variant of, science is simple, it (list of simple rules, usually including falsifiability) I don't think science is that simple (and I am strongly pro evolution) - these rules may be fine for philosophers, but i don't think most practicing scientists worry about popper or kuhn or falsibiability. it is a matter more then anything else of being critical and strict, which is the main problem with id: if fails not because it isn't falsifiable, or doesnt meeet some other test, but because as science it is garbage - like the "science" of flat earth or the "science" of esp - it is just total nonsense.
I can't find the reference, but clearly remember reading about the physics of traffic jams 20 years ago. there are a lot of complex things going on, but two simple principles stand out
when someone ahead of you brakes, you need some time (distance) to react if you are far enough away, you will slow the same amount as the person ahead of you if you are to close to the vehicle ahead of you, then your reaction time is such that you will over compensate and over brake; the same to the person behind you and so forth the trnasition between these two regimes is quite sharp
second, people slow for any distraction - a bright sign, a hill, whatever....
most of the methods for making these particles, which are reported in scientific jounals like Analytical Chemistry or Langmuir (both published by the amer chem soc, abstracts are free) don't use solution phase methods, eg you can make janus particles by coating a monolayer on a planar support. untill someone figures out how to make them, it is just a lab curiosity. beyond that, janus particles don't really solve the issues (non specific binding, toxicity, plasma half life) for in vivo reporters
I use to agree with you that copying windows was a loosing game, but look at firefox: you can get a lot of poeple to switch like the new excel 2007 - there is a firefox like opportuiity there, keep the 03 interface and fix all thethings that are so bad in excel....
you might also make an analogy to crystallization, but it is surprising because dna strands in solution are flexible, and the charge density differences are not that great, and, most importantly, in any reasonable solution (water, salt, pH...) the DNA is either heavily charged (and therfore intrinsically self repulsive) or coated with proteins, which give the association property naturally this paper is like a lot of biophysics: completely irrelevant to any property of dna in the real world
When scientists use the word "complete" they are being misleading. There are very large, difficult to sequence regions (, heterochromatin,, eg centromeres) that have not been sequenced, ever, and that are biologically important (centromeres are required in every cell division, to ensure that each cell has the proper set of chromosomes.) Even within the "normal", euchromomatic, sequencable DNA, there are gaps that have not been sequenced. Beyond this, you need to know haplotypes - that is, for most of your DNA there are two copies (except the x and y sex chromosomes) one from dad and one from mom Since these two copies are different, it matters, a lot, what differences are where.
I was a ff fanboy, and was personally responsible for gettting friends, family and every computer at my small biotech company to have fire fox - and a lot of people thanked me (I also get a lot of thanks for the wierd utilitys I install, like screenhunter) then ff became the enemy, google: they pay their ceo more then they spend on rnd and they are now a google captive, that will NOT be net neutral but will help google sell ads no more ff for me,until it forks into something reasonable. maybe this is the way of all successfull companies: they have to abandon their early base of wacko fanboys to grow into a mature company ps: I have worked at 3 small biotech companies in the last 6 years, and i have asked the ceos and it people about linux/ff, and they look at me like i am crazy the cost of MS is simply so low, and the "problems" are PERCIEVED as so unimportant, that switching to linux/ff is just not even on theradar screen
god are you right - multiple functions per button is a terrible idea in the biotech/laboratory instrument sector, where instruments that sell 50 - 2,000 units per year for 10 - 250+K each, the mania for one button/multiple tasks has gotten out of control; sure it saves the vendor a few bucks, cause they replace buttons and displays with some cheap logic circuit they probably had anyway, but it is a nightmare for the user to remember which tasks go with which buttons. I have seen instruments where physical harm could come to the user who forgot that display A could be toggled between two non obvious states (eg, the display tells you how hot the setpoint is and how hot the instrument actually is)
lets hypothesize that it takes x units of energy and pollution to live in an auto dominated suburb and x in nyc what right do you have to cause extra pollution ? OK, if you want to do it, you should pay, fully, the cost it is not that I am against technological improvemtn, it is that i am against ti when it is not necessary: the problem is not technology;' the problem is people who think it is ok to drive a hummer 10 miles to get a coke. the probelm is people who think it is ok to live in a 4,000 sq foot house and have a ski lodge what right do you have to trash the world ?
NASA wanted a pen that would work in zero G; spent millions on RnD The russians used a pencil
much more productive to focus on using less energy in the 1st place, in terms of energy saved/research dollar
these tech fixes are really obscuring the problem: our basic life style is not good. the govt should stop building highways, put money and tax incentives to get homes and jobs at mass transit accessible sites; just getting one or two million people out of suburbs into nyc lifesytles would do more for the enviroment then a million years of Rnd
what about wind ? a lighter then air thing has lift aprox proportional to volume, and surface area is ~~ the cube or square root of volume In any event, a lighter then air vehicle has a problem with wind - for instance, when landing or docking there is also a speed of compensation problem: how fast can you change x cubic meters of He when you hit a pocket of air with diff density
there is also a flying above the weather problem: you lift is less, the higher you go; everyone who has any expeince flying knows height is your friend
Slashdot Mirror
the reason people build huge, $$ mirrors is to collect more photons - there just ain't a lot of photons from things a gazillion (or so) lightyears away.
So, you really want to maximize the number of photons you collect; one way to do this is larger surface area (in a conventional mirror)
I think (but don't know) that # photons scales with radius ^2
If the fresnel thingy is 10% efficient that would appear to be a problem
lack of games trashing the system
historically, lack of games has been seen as a neg for linux - but perhaps it is the big thing that will get linux widely adopted: if linux doesn't run any games,maybe a lot of school people will use it, which will bootstrap adopttion
a lot of speculation, but does ANYONE have any experimental data, where you figure out what "readible" or "usable" means, and then do an test ?
For instance, you might ask people to read an online book, or something like that, and every 20 minutes give them some sort of captcha test with decreasing font sizes; you might ask them to read a complex paragraph and then answer questions, etc..
Or, you could give people adjustable monitors and see what they do (easily adjustable monitors, so ordinary people could vary...)
like hydrocarbon grease and lubricant, paints and coatings with possibly toxic compounds, the plasticizers and antioxidants in the plastic and foam,......
you could keep an entire university of scientists busy for years
and alot of the stuff is probably, if you look hard, sourced from china, so it may not even be what it is supposed to be, eg very very toxix pbbs (poly brominated biphenyls) are banned in civilized countrys..
it is clear that papers like the N Y Times plan to ditch the paper version and go online, But even at that they fail miserably - a classic case of the innovators dilemma, they can't abandon the past fast enough
for instance, there is almost never a link to a report, eg in Jan 08 they did stories on the un ready state of hte national guard, all based on apdf from some comission,and none of the stories gave a link to the pdf
for instance, there blogging on the web is horrible - do they have something good like slashcode or media wiki ? no, they have some awful stuff.
they don't do a lot of original research, but they have 3,000 intelligent people in the news dept sifting through other peoples efforts...do they attmep to put this huge intelligence effort to work in an online wiki or database, no
eg, sfaik, there is no database of elected officials charged or convicted of a crime..something the times could easily start and do well on, at least at he national state level.
sturgeon's rule (afte T Sturgeon, amer SF writer, who when asked by a fan why so much sci fi is so bad, said, x% of everything is (crap, bs, garbage)
alot of the comments are along the line of, well brands are ok for joe six pack /.ers think they are better or different ? I bet if every person who posted one of these snotty comments honestly went thru and looked at what she or he bought over the last 6 months, they would find that "stupid" marketing drove a lot of hteir purchases.
why do
or, as garrison keiler put it, here in lake woebegon, all the childrne are above avg.
there is also a snottyness in putting joe sixpack down for buying a computer cause it is cool. why is that bad ? why is your technical stuff better ? (aside from M$ hatred)
be interesting to find out how often the guy is this wrong.
I still remember from the old whole earth catalog, how they recommended these super expensive foam swords - sort of a pre yuppie yuppism.
When people buy apple, they thing they are going to get this great, wonderful product - after all, it looks really cool in the store.
But then they get it home, and there are all sorts of problems, often with poorly designed hardware (how apple can consistently sell products with bad hardware and still get called a company with fanatical attention to detail is a mystery).
So now the new owner has a mental conflict: he is told that the apple product is great, but his experience says otherwise. This cognitive dissonance can be resovled by either (1)accepting reality, (2) denying reality.
Most of us, most of the time, take 2 -which is what appnatics are doing; they know, at some level, that the product is not that good, but they want to live in a world where it is.
also, alot of appnatics are marketing people, who care more about the sale then customer satisfaction.
the reason apple people are so rabid is cognitive dissonance: the thing is so great, yet it actually aint'
so, you can either give in to reality - people rarely do - or resolve the conflict by creating a psuedo reality where apple is great.
around the turn of the centruy, another period when a small number of people had truly great wealth, J P Morgan was chair of the NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art ("the met")
At the annual board mtg, JP would say, roughly, we have a deficit of 5 million this year (a lot back in 1900)
and jp would go around the table
Joe, I've put you down for 200K, ed....
well gentleman, that takes care of the deficit
our next item of business...
just look at MS - when they get it wrong, you have to pay anyway....
this whole priv enterprise is more efficient then govt - give me some solid studies with data...
evry time the ID/evo debate comes up, someone has some variant of, science is simple, it (list of simple rules, usually including falsifiability)
I don't think science is that simple (and I am strongly pro evolution) - these rules may be fine for philosophers, but i don't think most practicing scientists worry about popper or kuhn or falsibiability.
it is a matter more then anything else of being critical and strict, which is the main problem with id: if fails not because it isn't falsifiable, or doesnt meeet some other test, but because as science it is garbage - like the "science" of flat earth or the "science" of esp - it is just total nonsense.
I can't find the reference, but clearly remember reading about the physics of traffic jams 20 years ago.
there are a lot of complex things going on, but two simple principles stand out
when someone ahead of you brakes, you need some time (distance) to react
if you are far enough away, you will slow the same amount as the person ahead of you
if you are to close to the vehicle ahead of you, then your reaction time is such that you will over compensate and over brake; the same to the person behind you and so forth
the trnasition between these two regimes is quite sharp
second, people slow for any distraction - a bright sign, a hill, whatever....
most of the methods for making these particles, which are reported in scientific jounals like Analytical Chemistry or Langmuir (both published by the amer chem soc, abstracts are free) don't use solution phase methods, eg you can make janus particles by coating a monolayer on a planar support.
untill someone figures out how to make them, it is just a lab curiosity.
beyond that, janus particles don't really solve the issues (non specific binding, toxicity, plasma half life) for in vivo reporters
that the one laptop[ one child thing was mit smoke hype bs
why didn;t you listen
I use to agree with you that copying windows was a loosing game, but look at firefox: you can get a lot of poeple to switch
like the new excel 2007 - there is a firefox like opportuiity there, keep the 03 interface and fix all thethings that are so bad in excel....
copyright the app, and license it to linux, not ms
why won't someone at least tell me why this is wrong ?
firefox proves that people will migrate
you might also make an analogy to crystallization, but it is surprising because dna strands in solution are flexible, and the charge density differences are not that great, and, most importantly, in any reasonable solution (water, salt, pH...) the DNA is either heavily charged (and therfore intrinsically self repulsive) or coated with proteins, which give the association property naturally
this paper is like a lot of biophysics: completely irrelevant to any property of dna in the real world
When scientists use the word "complete" they are being misleading. There are very large, difficult to sequence regions (, heterochromatin,, eg centromeres) that have not been sequenced, ever, and that are biologically important (centromeres are required in every cell division, to ensure that each cell has the proper set of chromosomes.)
Even within the "normal", euchromomatic, sequencable DNA, there are gaps that have not been sequenced.
Beyond this, you need to know haplotypes - that is, for most of your DNA there are two copies (except the x and y sex chromosomes) one from dad and one from mom
Since these two copies are different, it matters, a lot, what differences are where.
I was a ff fanboy, and was personally responsible for gettting friends, family and every computer at my small biotech company to have fire fox - and a lot of people thanked me (I also get a lot of thanks for the wierd utilitys I install, like screenhunter)
then ff became the enemy, google: they pay their ceo more then they spend on rnd and they are now a google captive, that will NOT be net neutral but will help google sell ads
no more ff for me,until it forks into something reasonable.
maybe this is the way of all successfull companies: they have to abandon their early base of wacko fanboys to grow into a mature company
ps: I have worked at 3 small biotech companies in the last 6 years, and i have asked the ceos and it people about linux/ff, and they look at me like i am crazy
the cost of MS is simply so low, and the "problems" are PERCIEVED as so unimportant, that switching to linux/ff is just not even on theradar screen
god are you right - multiple functions per button is a terrible idea
in the biotech/laboratory instrument sector, where instruments that sell 50 - 2,000 units per year for 10 - 250+K each, the mania for one button/multiple tasks has gotten out of control; sure it saves the vendor a few bucks, cause they replace buttons and displays with some cheap logic circuit they probably had anyway, but it is a nightmare for the user to remember which tasks go with which buttons.
I have seen instruments where physical harm could come to the user who forgot that display A could be toggled between two non obvious states (eg, the display tells you how hot the setpoint is and how hot the instrument actually is)
lets hypothesize that it takes x units of energy and pollution to live in an auto dominated suburb and x in nyc
what right do you have to cause extra pollution ?
OK, if you want to do it, you should pay, fully, the cost
it is not that I am against technological improvemtn, it is that i am against ti when it is not necessary: the problem is not technology;' the problem is people who think it is ok to drive a hummer 10 miles to get a coke. the probelm is people who think it is ok to live in a 4,000 sq foot house and have a ski lodge
what right do you have to trash the world ?
NASA wanted a pen that would work in zero G; spent millions on RnD
The russians used a pencil
much more productive to focus on using less energy in the 1st place, in terms of energy saved/research dollar
these tech fixes are really obscuring the problem: our basic life style is not good. the govt should stop building highways, put money and tax incentives to get homes and jobs at mass transit accessible sites; just getting one or two million people out of suburbs into nyc lifesytles would do more for the enviroment then a million years of Rnd
what about wind ?
a lighter then air thing has lift aprox proportional to volume, and surface area is ~~ the cube or square root of volume
In any event, a lighter then air vehicle has a problem with wind - for instance, when landing or docking
there is also a speed of compensation problem: how fast can you change x cubic meters of He when you hit a pocket of air with diff density
there is also a flying above the weather problem: you lift is less, the higher you go; everyone who has any expeince flying knows height is your friend
icing on a large surface area
run way space if a serious percent of traffic ?