That's like going back in time and asking Coulomb or Volta about what applications their research would have.
"I don't know. Well, if you could make a small enough electrochemical cell to hide in your pocket, with wires you could shock people when you shake their hands, as a practical joke. Hee hee."
One way supersymmetry would be useful is at the theoretical level - it gives particle physicists another mathematical tool for predicting yet other kinds of particle to hunt for. It might help with understanding dark matter. When we know enough about space time matter and energy, my secret hope is we'll have insights for building faster than light insterstellar ships, or something else awesome.
Volume is meaningless here. We're searching many square arc minutes of sky. Surely a 2D search space is more tractable than a 3D space?
OTOH, there are the dimensions of time and wavelength. Transit and Doppler detection require data over months or years, and multiple types of astronomical instruments from radio to X-ray wavelengths are needed to find out anything about these planets beyond detection.
I'm a little bit more awed today, when remembering watching the Kepler launch from Orlando - how lucky to have been there to see that - thinking of it in this bigger context. Wow!
"...and generally those with the free time (students etc.) don't have the money to be able to afford breaking expensive equipment."
What we need is a hefty funding source to supply $ and/or stuff to those who have such time. I was quite blessd as a kid, to have been given old TVs and radios, mechanical toys, etc. and have all that free time over summers and xmas vacation.
Not only is spam just as bad as ever, but the last few months my previous boss, a prominent scientist, has been trying to sell me fake rolexes. Lately though, i've apparently been sending myself ads for viagra and junk.
Some years ago i thought it would be a great gag to make a "calculator for astrophysicists" showing only one significant digit, and it would change randomly.
Thankfully, things are getting better, and we now know at least some quantities with as many as two digits precision. or maybe one and a half, at least.
"The imaging Professor Yaroslavsky has in mind has no lenses..."
Reminds me of a science fiction short story where someone mentioned some inventor's "anopticon" which the others heard as "an opticon" so off they went looking for some gadget with lenses - turns out some apparently useless object without any lenses was what they wanted.
I remember not the author, year, or anything else about the story.
For a long time all quantum particles were thought to have integer charges. Then quark theory with 1/3, 2/3 charges caught on and is doing quite well. We can't ever see non-integer charges in free-moving real quanta, but to dig deeper into structure, we rely on theory and quarks do the job. Elsewhere in mathematical physics, we have spinors which can be thought of as a "square root" of vectors, in a way.
Maybe, outside the confines of physical reality, in the more general realms of pure math - information theory has deeper structure requiring some bizarre concept sort of like a fraction of a bit.
And if that scientific speculation doesn't inspire anyone to believe, there's this: my bank often uses a fraction of a bit to represent my life savings!
More bits _DO_ help! With color calibration massaging 8-bit values for any one of the R/G/B channels, with only 256 possible input value and 256 output values, assuming it's doing anything at all you'll be suffering a many-to-one map. Certain output values never occur. This does lead to visible contours in the color-calibrated image, perhaps appearing as faint alternating green/magenta or blue/gold bands. Fine examples of this can be seen in Cassini images officially released at http://ciclops.org/ - but i'm not telling which ones, happy hunting;-) Some of the raw data is 12 bits/channel (we laugh at only 30 bits/pixel, ha! ha!) and much easier to work with for calibration, enhancements and such without getting artifacty. Working with this stuff everyday gives us a good understanding of the value of 4 extra bits - and certainly even just two extra bits would be welcome where we could get them.
I imagine that while this new display may not be visibly better to the average visual duffer, those contours you get after calibrating 8 bit/channel data could be a problem in a number of specialized situation. Most important, though, is mainting 30-bit deep data all the way through the system from camera/3DCG/whatever to the final display.
What if.... decades ago, whoever decided that a "byte" is 8 bits had chosen 12 instead, and all the engineers followed along?
In cutting-edge physics labs, it is important not to wiggle cables around. When i worked at SLAC back in the 80s, i knew people who calibrated cables for beam position monitors and other instruments. Every cable and its measured parameters had to be entered into a database. Yegads, i have no idea what kind of databases anyone used back then ((shudders)). Anyway, bending a cable around to be "neat" would have fricked up its capacitance etc. slightly. Anyone who has ever worked in an audio recording studio knows about "microphonic" cables - same thing there, except with far finickier standards. So just leave that rat's nest as-is.
I would mod this "Quaint" if i could. 99% of the general public doesn't get the distinction and probably never will. "Hacker" has gone the way of other fine old words. If someone from the 19th Century suddenly materialized here and said they were having a "gay old time" they would hear a few snickers. All we need a new word to mean what hacker used to mean.
just y'day at work, Remar Sutton (company page) gave us a presentation about online privacy and id theft. Though i'm savvy about online scams and all, he described some new one i hadn't heard of yet. Those scamsters always innovating. So, while security/privacy wasn't near the top of my list of reasons to avoid online apps, it's moved up a couple notches. Imagine the temptations and potential losses if any of the big online app provides hires a less than honest IT person.
All the other reasons are show-stoppers for me, too.
after each calculation, the rational number needs to be reduced to its lowest terms. This involves factoring, which takes time proportional to the the terms themselves.
I am not so sure about that. It may be better, in some cases, to be lazy about reducing. For a simple example suppose we want to compute A+B where A and B are expressions that happen to work out to, respectively, 8/12 and 9/12. If the + operation is designed to notice that the denominators are identical, it has an easy job spitting out 17/12. OTOH if the implementation were aggressive about reducing every time it was possible, the value of A and B would be made into, respectively, 2/3 and 3/4, giving the addition operator an extra work load.
This is based on my observations of a homebrew rational number arithmetic library, more precisely, a 3D library making use of projective geometry, where a vector would be represented by four numbers (x,y,z,w) and these mapped to the usual rectangular 3-d coordinates as (x/w, y/w, z/w). This had to run fast, and it often happened that,for a given geometric model and calculation to be performed, i'd be adding and subtracting rational values with various numerators but identical denominators (well duh, all divided by some w), when no reductions were performed, and of course that ran much faster than when every calculation aggressively reduced its results.
The trade-off is that one quickly ran out of room when allowing numerators and denominators to build up out of control.
A post about non-S/2005 S1 objects seems a bit off-topic, and so probably deserves no response, but i must point out that the Phoebe image referred to is hardly the "best image so far"! We have 10000000000 times better resolution (it's too late at night to count digits...;-) from Cassini in June 2004. Just crawl out from under fuzzy little rock where you've been living, and have a look at, for example: http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=198 or http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=203 - the smallest craters you see are about the same order of size as football stadiums.
Bad news, indeed, for those of us in Colorado! But it gets even worse when the altitude is one billion miles...
Another practical consequence for computing is processing images from spacecraft. We keep plenty busy wiping out the little buggers from Cassini images http://www.ciclops.org/. For some combinations of camera filters and imaging targets, exposures can be a few minutes long - those images are peppered with little white specks.
Would be interesting to see how the cosmic ray hit rate varies over time and distance - might be a good project for some post-doc. (Any astronomy post-docs out there?)
Gobs and gobs of satellite data are available here - i worked at a small company that made heavy use of this. Takes some effort to figure out all the gobbledygoop, but the effort is all it costs to get data.
Slashdot Mirror
That's like going back in time and asking Coulomb or Volta about what applications their research would have.
"I don't know. Well, if you could make a small enough electrochemical cell to hide in your pocket, with wires you could shock people when you shake their hands, as a practical joke. Hee hee."
One way supersymmetry would be useful is at the theoretical level - it gives particle physicists another mathematical tool for predicting yet other kinds of particle to hunt for. It might help with understanding dark matter. When we know enough about space time matter and energy, my secret hope is we'll have insights for building faster than light insterstellar ships, or something else awesome.
And Spitzer. And Kepler. And Herschel, and....there's actually plenty of work for rocket scientists interested in astronomy.
Volume is meaningless here. We're searching many square arc minutes of sky. Surely a 2D search space is more tractable than a 3D space?
OTOH, there are the dimensions of time and wavelength. Transit and Doppler detection require data over months or years, and multiple types of astronomical instruments from radio to X-ray wavelengths are needed to find out anything about these planets beyond detection.
It is still a very huge search space.
Great words! I like your point of view.
I'm a little bit more awed today, when remembering watching the Kepler launch from Orlando - how lucky to have been there to see that - thinking of it in this bigger context. Wow!
And that's the reason I use only Roman numerals for computational physics. Because it is hard.
"...and generally those with the free time (students etc.) don't have the money to be able to afford breaking expensive equipment."
What we need is a hefty funding source to supply $ and/or stuff to those who have such time. I was quite blessd as a kid, to have been given old TVs and radios, mechanical toys, etc. and have all that free time over summers and xmas vacation.
How is it that he was old enough to own a car and all, but not know he was colorblind? Don't the colorblind usually know about it from a young age?
Not only is spam just as bad as ever, but the last few months my previous boss, a prominent scientist, has been trying to sell me fake rolexes. Lately though, i've apparently been sending myself ads for viagra and junk.
Time for some *new* ideas on the problem...
Well now what do i do with the four million dollars i've been saving?
I have no idea how anyone figures the marketing of these kinds of things, but is this good news for the American-based private space companies?
Some years ago i thought it would be a great gag to make a "calculator for astrophysicists" showing only one significant digit, and it would change randomly.
Thankfully, things are getting better, and we now know at least some quantities with as many as two digits precision. or maybe one and a half, at least.
"The imaging Professor Yaroslavsky has in mind has no lenses ..."
Reminds me of a science fiction short story where someone mentioned some inventor's "anopticon" which the others heard as "an opticon" so off they went looking for some gadget with lenses - turns out some apparently useless object without any lenses was what they wanted.
I remember not the author, year, or anything else about the story.
yesterday's sci fi = tomorrow's gadgets
there's the "drizzling" technique in astronomy. i don't have my notes on it handy, but google it and you will find.
http://auricle.dyndns.org/ALE/
For a long time all quantum particles were thought to have integer charges. Then quark theory with 1/3, 2/3 charges caught on and is doing quite well. We can't ever see non-integer charges in free-moving real quanta, but to dig deeper into structure, we rely on theory and quarks do the job. Elsewhere in mathematical physics, we have spinors which can be thought of as a "square root" of vectors, in a way.
Maybe, outside the confines of physical reality, in the more general realms of pure math - information theory has deeper structure requiring some bizarre concept sort of like a fraction of a bit.
And if that scientific speculation doesn't inspire anyone to believe, there's this: my bank often uses a fraction of a bit to represent my life savings!
More bits _DO_ help! With color calibration massaging 8-bit values for any one of the R/G/B channels, with only 256 possible input value and 256 output values, assuming it's doing anything at all you'll be suffering a many-to-one map. Certain output values never occur. This does lead to visible contours in the color-calibrated image, perhaps appearing as faint alternating green/magenta or blue/gold bands. Fine examples of this can be seen in Cassini images officially released at http://ciclops.org/ - but i'm not telling which ones, happy hunting ;-) Some of the raw data is 12 bits/channel (we laugh at only 30 bits/pixel, ha! ha!) and much easier to work with for calibration, enhancements and such without getting artifacty. Working with this stuff everyday gives us a good understanding of the value of 4 extra bits - and certainly even just two extra bits would be welcome where we could get them.
I imagine that while this new display may not be visibly better to the average visual duffer, those contours you get after calibrating 8 bit/channel data could be a problem in a number of specialized situation. Most important, though, is mainting 30-bit deep data all the way through the system from camera/3DCG/whatever to the final display.
What if.... decades ago, whoever decided that a "byte" is 8 bits had chosen 12 instead, and all the engineers followed along?
In cutting-edge physics labs, it is important not to wiggle cables around. When i worked at SLAC back in the 80s, i knew people who calibrated cables for beam position monitors and other instruments. Every cable and its measured parameters had to be entered into a database. Yegads, i have no idea what kind of databases anyone used back then ((shudders)). Anyway, bending a cable around to be "neat" would have fricked up its capacitance etc. slightly. Anyone who has ever worked in an audio recording studio knows about "microphonic" cables - same thing there, except with far finickier standards. So just leave that rat's nest as-is.
I would mod this "Quaint" if i could. 99% of the general public doesn't get the distinction and probably never will. "Hacker" has gone the way of other fine old words. If someone from the 19th Century suddenly materialized here and said they were having a "gay old time" they would hear a few snickers. All we need a new word to mean what hacker used to mean.
amen!
just y'day at work, Remar Sutton (company page) gave us a presentation about online privacy and id theft. Though i'm savvy about online scams and all, he described some new one i hadn't heard of yet. Those scamsters always innovating. So, while security/privacy wasn't near the top of my list of reasons to avoid online apps, it's moved up a couple notches. Imagine the temptations and potential losses if any of the big online app provides hires a less than honest IT person.
All the other reasons are show-stoppers for me, too.
I am not so sure about that. It may be better, in some cases, to be lazy about reducing. For a simple example suppose we want to compute A+B where A and B are expressions that happen to work out to, respectively, 8/12 and 9/12. If the + operation is designed to notice that the denominators are identical, it has an easy job spitting out 17/12. OTOH if the implementation were aggressive about reducing every time it was possible, the value of A and B would be made into, respectively, 2/3 and 3/4, giving the addition operator an extra work load.
This is based on my observations of a homebrew rational number arithmetic library, more precisely, a 3D library making use of projective geometry, where a vector would be represented by four numbers (x,y,z,w) and these mapped to the usual rectangular 3-d coordinates as (x/w, y/w, z/w). This had to run fast, and it often happened that,for a given geometric model and calculation to be performed, i'd be adding and subtracting rational values with various numerators but identical denominators (well duh, all divided by some w), when no reductions were performed, and of course that ran much faster than when every calculation aggressively reduced its results.
The trade-off is that one quickly ran out of room when allowing numerators and denominators to build up out of control.
A post about non-S/2005 S1 objects seems a bit off-topic, and so probably deserves no response, but i must point out that the Phoebe image referred to is hardly the "best image so far"! We have 10000000000 times better resolution (it's too late at night to count digits... ;-) from Cassini in June 2004. Just crawl out from under fuzzy little rock where you've been living, and have a look at, for example: http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=198 or http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=203 - the smallest craters you see are about the same order of size as football stadiums.
Those streaks are stars, making trails as Cassini moves during the long exposure of 82 seconds.
Bad news, indeed, for those of us in Colorado! But it gets even worse when the altitude is one billion miles...
Another practical consequence for computing is processing images from spacecraft. We keep plenty busy wiping out the little buggers from Cassini images http://www.ciclops.org/. For some combinations of camera filters and imaging targets, exposures can be a few minutes long - those images are peppered with little white specks.
Would be interesting to see how the cosmic ray hit rate varies over time and distance - might be a good project for some post-doc. (Any astronomy post-docs out there?)
http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Gobs and gobs of satellite data are available here - i worked at a small company that made heavy use of this. Takes some effort to figure out all the gobbledygoop, but the effort is all it costs to get data.