Study was run by a guy at Duke University in tobacco country. They have a vested interest in keeping pot illegal? Something to consider if you have any free brain cells. Not defending pot smoking, just sayin cigarettes are as bad or worse.
Well, I suppose those types of alternative theories might also fall within the law, but I was limiting myself to theories of the origin of life, i. e., other religions, druids, the book of genesis as interpreted by r. crumb, stuff like that. Also maybe even get kids to think critically by looking at some less wellformed theories and tearing into them. 'spooky action at a distance' comes to mind. stuff nobody knows, like whether or not giraffes and chimps can swim.
Yep it's a challenge to live down here amongst the hillbillies. Tennessee's law actually doesn't mandate teaching creationism, it just prevents a teacher from getting into trouble for teaching alternative theories. As a substitute teacher (between software engineer gigs) I'm amassing age-appropriate clips from as many different religions and prehistoric traditions as I can find, so when the opportunity [resents itself, I'll be ready.
It's terrible to see the country slide backward down the ladder of technological pre-eminence due to these wackos. Decades of badmouthing government are going to take a toll on us pretty soon.
Note also that science shouldn't be taught as set in stone, either. There's a lot we don't know and kids enjoy comparing what was known to be true in my teenage years with what we know now.
Not believing in evolution after you've seen DNA is like sticking to chopsticks after you've seen the fork, no offense intended.
Too broke to purchase the original article but the free article says they deal with 'nodes in a plane' and the African example uses waterways so they are essentially using a tree there. These are npot the most complex data structures imaginable.
Also the means of defeating their algorithm is easy to figure out. Just make it look like the virus came from a well-connected user. These are likely pwned already, anyhow.
I would like to know your thoughts on muon fusion for mars and trips to mars. muon fusion is a great alternative to nuclear fission if muons are available, and outside of earth atmosphere there are a lot of muons although I admit I don't know if there are enough to provide adequate power. upside is safety, simplicity, need to protect against radiation anyway.
The trend line in the Register article is down. Unfortunately the line is only extended up to about 200 years ago, The last little blip of data is left out of the trend line, and would be the blade of a hockey stick, if taken by itself, or would negate the claimed downward trend if included in the rest of the data used to calculate the line.
I'll try to read the Nature article too, because this is hokey schtick
thinking about it some more, stay at home while car goes to mcdonalds for me and gets my stuff, paid for electronically, food bag and drink holder placed in a tray where the driver's seat used to be, send it to walmart without me and use robot shopper service or interactive video on cart, take kids to and from soccer
Haven't quite got the details worked out, but it goes like this:
self-driving cars are just about here.
maybe they don't want to take to the roads at first. how about a killer app to lure people into the idea?
so you go to walmart,
you drive to the front of the store,
you get out,
walmart directs your car to a parking space,
no handicapped parking is necessary, saving parking lot space,
new parking lot geometries can be created, saving much more space, possibly requiring the cars to move more than once while you are in the store,
definitely there does not need to be room between the cars for doors to open -- you got out in front, remember?
when you come out of the store, walmart tells your car to come and get you at the front of the store,
windows can be rolled down and/or air conditioning turned on while the car is driving up to get you,
similar useful application to rental car return at the airport
I'm just a software guy who never could get his mom to use a mouse in part because of her arthritis.
Maybe you could build a voice-command manipulator with a magnified viewer.
You might need a helper to build the first one (see 'outsource' above), then just keep improving them.
After a few generations you should be able to sell it to arthritic surgeons. With voic commands, what could possibly go wrong?
In this case they are directing the thing to crawl around in the least likely area to find life. There are lots of people who want to be able to say 'we looked and didn't find any current life' so they can proceed to endanger any life in the (more likely) places we never looked in, with impunity, for the value of the huge contracts, the dead heroes, and the retro approach: blast everything that goes to Mars from the surface of the Earth (such 20th century thinking!) , instead of learning to build ion-drive spaceships on the Moon and launch them with rail guns from there.
So perhaps four or more sets of forces have pushed through this change and met no opposition;
1. Programmers want to do a few quick tweaks to the software just before landing the thing. Normally this type of thinking would be quashed by management...
2. Mission fatcats who have known for years that the thing would crash now have a scapegoat.
3. Space profiteers with a vested interest in proving robots do not work, eager to get funding for hugely expensive human missions.
4. People with a vested interest in Biblical teachings not being refuted, who may or may not inhabit the NASA bureaucracy, or who may be allied with group 3 (after humans land on Mars who is to say that any life we find didn't originate here and hitchhike along?) (P.S. I know they didn't sanitize this rover, possibly for the same reason).
From the political end this is either the Republicans setting up the current administration for a big pre-election failure, or the Administration eager to get the rover onto the mountain before election day, call it either way, there is a lot of nasty politics on both sides unfortunately. (For example: "The first shuttle disaster was caused by launching in the cold on the day of the State of the Union address, and the second may well have been caused by using a steeper-than-necessary glide slope due to Cold War-era constraints on overflying enemy territory.")
Regardless, it will be fantastic if we find fossil life in the mountain, that will throw the bible belt into a big enough tizzy. The mountain has the least atmosphere and the highest radiation, so is about the least likely place to look for living things on Mars. Landing in a deep depression, akin to the bottom of the ocean if Mars had any, gives you the highest atmospheric pressure, making landing easier, and puts you closer to whatever habitable zone Mars may have today. Presumably the higher up the side of the mountain you try to land, the less margin you have for sufficient atmospheric drag, and the closer you are to hitting something hard before you have slowed down enough.
I am in about the same boat. I have had a 40-year career so far, and pickings have been slim since taking a nice early retirement package almost a year ago.
Definitely stay in the public eye. Substitute teaching is a valuable service to the community, and gives you an outlet for your skills.
Anyone who has survived on their technical merits as long as you have is probably outside the norm of the crop of twentysomethings and an employer would be a fool not to hire you. (Note to employers who have NOT hired me over the past year: THIS MEANS YOU).
You have to do things to disguise the old-guy smell. I recommend trying to win government contracts, taking a crack at winning challenges such as at innicentive or zintro, and definitely snarfing up a few of the free, excellent, topical courses online from places like coursera and others, the possibilities are growing exponentially right now.
Work on open source if you are adept at something, or learn something and then contribute if you are not.
So you want a CISSP but don't want to relocate from your comfortable home? Get on Dice first and search for CISSP within commuting distance of your home. Alternatively, just set up a daily Dice search for jobs in your area and continually pester the headhunters about any job you feel qualified for, specifying in your resume or cover letter EXACTLY how your skillset covers the job requirements.
Look for opportunities to suggest to an employer that he is better off hiring you AND that recent grad, so you can mentor the kid in all the things he doesn't know anything about (UNIX, SQL, security, perl?) while he backs up your lack of front end development expertise. The employer will end up with two skilled employees for the price of one.
Oh yes, did I mention? Offer to work for a lot less than at your previous job, since you are pretty well set anyway. It will keep you from going crazy and fend off the honeydews.
Keep working on something, whether paid or unpaid. Use and reference your web site to hone your web skills and provide a visible first impression.
Check out www.coursera.org The quality and price are perfect for an older person needing to sharpen skills/develop new skills. No degree or college credit, but a lot of street cred, I hope (I'm taking three of them right now.)
Have we detected the impactor, on the earth or on the moon? If we haven't then it is eminently plausible that the impactor had the same composition as the earth/moon. Or is there a way to suppose that after this collision, all of the mass of the impactor remained separate from the thing it impacted, which became the earth and the moon? Maybe we got hit by dark matter? I think the conclusions are running way ahead of the facts here.
This also would imply that the gravitational radius of a black hole is smaller for a neutrino than for light, so it might imply that black holes could evaporate a bit quicker than previous estimates.
These folks crack a 150-bit elliptic curve in one month (NOT one of the NIST curves...yet) with relatively inexpensive hardware.
Down form hundreds of years. This is non-quantum.
Cover and Decomposition Attacks on Elliptic Curves
Vanessa VITSE
Joint work with Antoine JOUX
Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin, Laboratoire PRiSM
Elliptic Curve Cryptography – ECC 2011
Cover and Decomposition Attacks on Elliptic Curves
ecc2011.loria.fr/slides/vitse.pdf
Let's forget about the dead heroes in the epic quest to get men to Mars and back (See the race for the South Pole for how it goes.) Lets forget about the quadrillions of dollars. Let's forget about the speed of advances in robotics that have made it possible to explore the Titanic and the deepest points in the ocean with no risk and at low cost.
We do not know what kind of life may still exist on Mars. It may be anywhere in the top couple hundred kilometers of the surface.
I went to Antarctica and saw first-hand what even a bunch of careful scientists can do to trash a place, and it is entirely possible we could destroy all life on Mars before we even knew it was there, if we go in person.
We might also bring back something that we did not consider alive. Andromeda Strain, Alien, etc.
We are being more careful to avoid corrupting Lake Vostok (google it) than we are planning to be with a far more exotic place. There could be entirely new approaches to DNA-based and non-DNA-based life on Mars. The last thing we want to do is go charging in there with guns blazing.
If you want to spend some money, build a huge solar array and send a humongous laser beam to an unmanned vehicle to get it going really fast and lets get something in orbit around a nearby star in the next hundred years or so. Make up some really long-baseline interferometry telescopy application for it when it gets there.
Or play around on the moon. slightly less deadly, get to work on solar powered self-replicating robots to build massive underground habitats for us where we'll be a little safer from impacts and radiation. Start growing a stockpile of food. And then send people up there if you really have to.
DO NOT POOP ON MARS.
"Proofs and Confirmations" by Bressoud doesn't seem to have gotten on the list yet, nor has "A=B" by Petkovsek and Zeilberger. These books introduce a student to the growing impact of computers in advancing theoretical mathematics, and don't require much background for most of the subject matter. If the school has a Maple or other math package, this would allow experimentation.
Assume the shuttle is inspected and after reentry has just started, a tile breaks off. Is there any way of altering the trajectory so that the shuttle bounces back up to a higher altitude, cools off, and then falls back again, repeat as necessary, until the reentry temperatures remain nonlethal to the shuttle airframe?
The idea is to limit the worst-case outcome to be a splashdown in an ocean or a crash landing, by actively controlling the trajectory before the temperatures cause the airframe to break up.
There's also the possibility of using plasma fields surrounding the vehicle rather than ceramic tiles, to thermally protect future vehicles.
Just call me old fashioned. I don't care who owns the other end of my lifeline, I'd like to be untethered. If I lived on the moon I wouldn't want to be dependent on Earth for my daily needs. Wars and other stuff happen on earth. I'd want to have the capability of feeding myself, generating oxygen,
and generating power without technology that I couldn't maintain for myself. Building a solar collector from lunar materials isn't easy but it should be the highest priority. I don't see the need for a nuke on the moon, and I don't think NASA would own my solar panels any more than I think I am a subject of Ferdinand and Isabella just because Columbus 'discovered' America. One key point of going to the moon is to perpetuate the human race if/when a dictator with nukes starts WWIII.
I don't think the pervasiveness of the dust was anticipated before Apollo. I remember the events pretty well. I was 19 and a nerd. People were afraid the first lander would sink out of sight, even thought there was some unmanned lunar lander experience base. No unmanned mission before OR SINCE Apollo has brought any lunar material back to earth.
I'm thinking the lunar residents aren't going to want to be tethered to a reactor from the home planet for their survival, and I would dearly hope that a goal of living on the moon would be to achieve self-sufficiency in case we mess up and destroy civilization.
Slashdot Mirror
Study was run by a guy at Duke University in tobacco country. They have a vested interest in keeping pot illegal? Something to consider if you have any free brain cells. Not defending pot smoking, just sayin cigarettes are as bad or worse.
The terrain looks suspiciously like the surface of Mars. Don't be a sucker. This could not work in Earth gravity.
Well, I suppose those types of alternative theories might also fall within the law, but I was limiting myself to theories of the origin of life, i. e., other religions, druids, the book of genesis as interpreted by r. crumb, stuff like that. Also maybe even get kids to think critically by looking at some less wellformed theories and tearing into them.
'spooky action at a distance' comes to mind. stuff nobody knows, like whether or not giraffes and chimps can swim.
Yep it's a challenge to live down here amongst the hillbillies. Tennessee's law actually doesn't mandate teaching creationism, it just prevents a teacher from getting into trouble for teaching alternative theories. As a substitute teacher (between software engineer gigs) I'm amassing age-appropriate clips from as many different religions and prehistoric traditions as I can find, so when the opportunity [resents itself, I'll be ready.
It's terrible to see the country slide backward down the ladder of technological pre-eminence due to these wackos. Decades of badmouthing government are going to take a toll on us pretty soon.
Note also that science shouldn't be taught as set in stone, either. There's a lot we don't know and kids enjoy comparing what was known to be true in my teenage years with what we know now.
Not believing in evolution after you've seen DNA is like sticking to chopsticks after you've seen the fork, no offense intended.
Too broke to purchase the original article but the free article says they deal with 'nodes in a plane' and the African example uses waterways so they are essentially using a tree there. These are npot the most complex data structures imaginable.
Also the means of defeating their algorithm is easy to figure out. Just make it look like the virus came from a well-connected user. These are likely pwned already, anyhow.
I would like to know your thoughts on muon fusion for mars and trips to mars. muon fusion is a great alternative to nuclear fission if muons are available, and outside of earth atmosphere there are a lot of muons although I admit I don't know if there are enough to provide adequate power. upside is safety, simplicity, need to protect against radiation anyway.
The trend line in the Register article is down. Unfortunately the line is only extended up to about 200 years ago, The last little blip of data is left out of the trend line, and would be the blade of a hockey stick, if taken by itself, or would negate the claimed downward trend if included in the rest of the data used to calculate the line.
I'll try to read the Nature article too, because this is hokey schtick
thinking about it some more, stay at home while car goes to mcdonalds for me and gets my stuff, paid for electronically, food bag and drink holder placed in a tray where the driver's seat used to be, send it to walmart without me and use robot shopper service or interactive video on cart, take kids to and from soccer
Haven't quite got the details worked out, but it goes like this: self-driving cars are just about here. maybe they don't want to take to the roads at first. how about a killer app to lure people into the idea? so you go to walmart, you drive to the front of the store, you get out, walmart directs your car to a parking space, no handicapped parking is necessary, saving parking lot space, new parking lot geometries can be created, saving much more space, possibly requiring the cars to move more than once while you are in the store, definitely there does not need to be room between the cars for doors to open -- you got out in front, remember? when you come out of the store, walmart tells your car to come and get you at the front of the store, windows can be rolled down and/or air conditioning turned on while the car is driving up to get you, similar useful application to rental car return at the airport
this was predicted here http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=mark+cuban yesterday in a larger context
I'm just a software guy who never could get his mom to use a mouse in part because of her arthritis. Maybe you could build a voice-command manipulator with a magnified viewer. You might need a helper to build the first one (see 'outsource' above), then just keep improving them. After a few generations you should be able to sell it to arthritic surgeons. With voic commands, what could possibly go wrong?
A few days ago http://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/news/20120607/coffee-may-help-turn-tide-on-alzheimers-disease came out. so sleep and get alzheimers or stay awake and get a stroke... I'd consider skydiving lessons...
In this case they are directing the thing to crawl around in the least likely area to find life. There are lots of people who want to be able to say 'we looked and didn't find any current life' so they can proceed to endanger any life in the (more likely) places we never looked in, with impunity, for the value of the huge contracts, the dead heroes, and the retro approach: blast everything that goes to Mars from the surface of the Earth (such 20th century thinking!) , instead of learning to build ion-drive spaceships on the Moon and launch them with rail guns from there.
1. Programmers want to do a few quick tweaks to the software just before landing the thing. Normally this type of thinking would be quashed by management...
2. Mission fatcats who have known for years that the thing would crash now have a scapegoat.
3. Space profiteers with a vested interest in proving robots do not work, eager to get funding for hugely expensive human missions.
4. People with a vested interest in Biblical teachings not being refuted, who may or may not inhabit the NASA bureaucracy, or who may be allied with group 3 (after humans land on Mars who is to say that any life we find didn't originate here and hitchhike along?) (P.S. I know they didn't sanitize this rover, possibly for the same reason).
From the political end this is either the Republicans setting up the current administration for a big pre-election failure, or the Administration eager to get the rover onto the mountain before election day, call it either way, there is a lot of nasty politics on both sides unfortunately. (For example: "The first shuttle disaster was caused by launching in the cold on the day of the State of the Union address, and the second may well have been caused by using a steeper-than-necessary glide slope due to Cold War-era constraints on overflying enemy territory.")
Regardless, it will be fantastic if we find fossil life in the mountain, that will throw the bible belt into a big enough tizzy. The mountain has the least atmosphere and the highest radiation, so is about the least likely place to look for living things on Mars. Landing in a deep depression, akin to the bottom of the ocean if Mars had any, gives you the highest atmospheric pressure, making landing easier, and puts you closer to whatever habitable zone Mars may have today. Presumably the higher up the side of the mountain you try to land, the less margin you have for sufficient atmospheric drag, and the closer you are to hitting something hard before you have slowed down enough.
Definitely stay in the public eye. Substitute teaching is a valuable service to the community, and gives you an outlet for your skills.
Anyone who has survived on their technical merits as long as you have is probably outside the norm of the crop of twentysomethings and an employer would be a fool not to hire you. (Note to employers who have NOT hired me over the past year: THIS MEANS YOU).
You have to do things to disguise the old-guy smell. I recommend trying to win government contracts, taking a crack at winning challenges such as at innicentive or zintro, and definitely snarfing up a few of the free, excellent, topical courses online from places like coursera and others, the possibilities are growing exponentially right now.
Work on open source if you are adept at something, or learn something and then contribute if you are not.
So you want a CISSP but don't want to relocate from your comfortable home? Get on Dice first and search for CISSP within commuting distance of your home. Alternatively, just set up a daily Dice search for jobs in your area and continually pester the headhunters about any job you feel qualified for, specifying in your resume or cover letter EXACTLY how your skillset covers the job requirements.
Look for opportunities to suggest to an employer that he is better off hiring you AND that recent grad, so you can mentor the kid in all the things he doesn't know anything about (UNIX, SQL, security, perl?) while he backs up your lack of front end development expertise. The employer will end up with two skilled employees for the price of one.
Oh yes, did I mention? Offer to work for a lot less than at your previous job, since you are pretty well set anyway. It will keep you from going crazy and fend off the honeydews. Keep working on something, whether paid or unpaid. Use and reference your web site to hone your web skills and provide a visible first impression.
Check out www.coursera.org The quality and price are perfect for an older person needing to sharpen skills/develop new skills. No degree or college credit, but a lot of street cred, I hope (I'm taking three of them right now.)
So does this data allow me to figure out YOUR mother's maiden name?
Have we detected the impactor, on the earth or on the moon? If we haven't then it is eminently plausible that the impactor had the same composition as the earth/moon. Or is there a way to suppose that after this collision, all of the mass of the impactor remained separate from the thing it impacted, which became the earth and the moon? Maybe we got hit by dark matter? I think the conclusions are running way ahead of the facts here.
mangu: "if there's an effect here, it should probably be related to neutrinos-through-matter vs neutrinos-through-vacuum"
Cerenkov radiation shows ordinary matter can travel faster than light in a non-vacuum. This would be different but not that different.
http://lbne.fnal.gov/neutrino-beam.shtml indicates another experiment is possibly coming soon
This also would imply that the gravitational radius of a black hole is smaller for a neutrino than for light, so it might imply that black holes could evaporate a bit quicker than previous estimates.
These folks crack a 150-bit elliptic curve in one month (NOT one of the NIST curves...yet) with relatively inexpensive hardware.
Down form hundreds of years. This is non-quantum.
Cover and Decomposition Attacks on Elliptic Curves
Vanessa VITSE
Joint work with Antoine JOUX
Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin, Laboratoire PRiSM
Elliptic Curve Cryptography – ECC 2011
Cover and Decomposition Attacks on Elliptic Curves
ecc2011.loria.fr/slides/vitse.pdf
Let's forget about the dead heroes in the epic quest to get men to Mars and back (See the race for the South Pole for how it goes.) Lets forget about the quadrillions of dollars. Let's forget about the speed of advances in robotics that have made it possible to explore the Titanic and the deepest points in the ocean with no risk and at low cost.
We do not know what kind of life may still exist on Mars. It may be anywhere in the top couple hundred kilometers of the surface.
I went to Antarctica and saw first-hand what even a bunch of careful scientists can do to trash a place, and it is entirely possible we could destroy all life on Mars before we even knew it was there, if we go in person.
We might also bring back something that we did not consider alive. Andromeda Strain, Alien, etc.
We are being more careful to avoid corrupting Lake Vostok (google it) than we are planning to be with a far more exotic place. There could be entirely new approaches to DNA-based and non-DNA-based life on Mars. The last thing we want to do is go charging in there with guns blazing.
If you want to spend some money, build a huge solar array and send a humongous laser beam to an unmanned vehicle to get it going really fast and lets get something in orbit around a nearby star in the next hundred years or so. Make up some really long-baseline interferometry telescopy application for it when it gets there.
Or play around on the moon. slightly less deadly, get to work on solar powered self-replicating robots to build massive underground habitats for us where we'll be a little safer from impacts and radiation. Start growing a stockpile of food. And then send people up there if you really have to.
DO NOT POOP ON MARS.
"Proofs and Confirmations" by Bressoud doesn't seem to have gotten on the list yet, nor has "A=B" by Petkovsek and Zeilberger. These books introduce a student to the growing impact of computers in advancing theoretical mathematics, and don't require much background for most of the subject matter. If the school has a Maple or other math package, this would allow experimentation.
Assume the shuttle is inspected and after reentry has just started, a tile breaks off. Is there any way of altering the trajectory so that the shuttle bounces back up to a higher altitude, cools off, and then falls back again, repeat as necessary, until the reentry temperatures remain nonlethal to the shuttle airframe? The idea is to limit the worst-case outcome to be a splashdown in an ocean or a crash landing, by actively controlling the trajectory before the temperatures cause the airframe to break up. There's also the possibility of using plasma fields surrounding the vehicle rather than ceramic tiles, to thermally protect future vehicles.
Just call me old fashioned. I don't care who owns the other end of my lifeline, I'd like to be untethered. If I lived on the moon I wouldn't want to be dependent on Earth for my daily needs. Wars and other stuff happen on earth. I'd want to have the capability of feeding myself, generating oxygen, and generating power without technology that I couldn't maintain for myself. Building a solar collector from lunar materials isn't easy but it should be the highest priority. I don't see the need for a nuke on the moon, and I don't think NASA would own my solar panels any more than I think I am a subject of Ferdinand and Isabella just because Columbus 'discovered' America. One key point of going to the moon is to perpetuate the human race if/when a dictator with nukes starts WWIII.
I don't think the pervasiveness of the dust was anticipated before Apollo. I remember the events pretty well. I was 19 and a nerd. People were afraid the first lander would sink out of sight, even thought there was some unmanned lunar lander experience base. No unmanned mission before OR SINCE Apollo has brought any lunar material back to earth. I'm thinking the lunar residents aren't going to want to be tethered to a reactor from the home planet for their survival, and I would dearly hope that a goal of living on the moon would be to achieve self-sufficiency in case we mess up and destroy civilization.