I'm using a hacked Muvo2 (with a 1GB CompactFlash card instead of the original 4GB MicroDrive).
Every night, I use LAME to re-encode all the stuff that I've listened to into ~192 kbps VBR MP3s (this list is generated by a script called by the XMMS "Song Change" plugin). I keep the most recent 3GB of these songs on the hard drive, meaning that there's a few weeks of recently-heard music that I can choose to transfer to my player.
Since my collection is a mixture of MP3, FLAC and Ogg-Vorbis files, this makes it easier for me to handle everything.
With a few scripts, I can also auto-generate playlists based on when the files were added to the player.
Partially wrong. It's true that the eye is more sensitive to the green wavelengths, but flashlight/laser enthusiasts are picking up new green laser modules that have greater than 15mw of power, as compared to the typical red laser pointers that hit only a few mw. FYI, the legal limit for "novelty" laser pointers is 5mw.
This happened at my school's showing of The Last Samurai. I got to the theater, saw assloads of security people wanding, frisking, and looking mean. I thought, "maybe America turned into a police state while I slept," so I turned right around and deposited all my knives in the bushes outside.
For the record, I was carrying 6 knives, since I knew that it'd be a good edged-weapons-fondling movie. Rather ironic that The Last Samurai was about one man who *wouldn't* lay down his weapons.
Recently in Hong Kong, the government installed strange black and yellow machines at the crosswalks.
They look like bathroom soap dispensers, but they're made by either Siemens or Philips. As far as I can tell there's no button on it, but on the front plate, there's a three pronged symbol (reminds me of the biohazard symbol, except the circles are further apart).
These strange machines are replacing the traditional buttons, but I can't figure out how they work. Perhaps some sort of motion detection?
Tinfoil raving: With the recent introduction of smartcard versions of the mandatory ID cards, and the recent public dissatisfaction towards the government, perhaps the government is looking for a way to keep tabs on its citizens. All the more plausible because almost all citizens carry three important things: their ID card, a cell phone, and an RFID stored-value card (used for public transport, convenience store purchases, etc.). Add to that the fact that Chinese people don't mind being drones under the man, as long as they have the right to make money, and I can totally see this happening in 10 years.
There's been a spate of coin forgery in Hong Kong, and it's reached a level where the government is replacing those easy-to-forge coins with higher-tech paper bills.
The funny thing is, the coin was designed to be difficult to counterfeit. It consists of a silver ring around a golden center.
And the payoff? HK$10 = US$1.30. I really wonder how the hell the counterfeiters are making money. They seem to be mostly passing them off to tollbooths and occasionally exchanging them en masse at banks.
In short, Ti02 coatings absorb ultraviolet light, which pushes some of the molecules to specific higher energy bands. This energy is then released and combines with atmospheric water, forming a hydroxyl radical (*OH). This radical is quite a powerful oxidizing agent, and as such has great potential in breaking down all manner of atmospheric pollutants.
In terms of safety, and as far as I've personally encountered, this kind of technology has already seen usage in:
1. Chinese restaurant fish tanks to keep the water clean. The water is just routed through a small box with a UV light and a plate coated with Ti02. Keeps the fish, customers and staff happy.
2. Bathroom tiles and street pavement.
3. "Self-cleaning" glass for use on buildings. On this it also has the benefit of being a more uniform layer, so that steam or mist will disperse more evenly over the glass. This will be good for bathroom mirrors and the windows on boats.
4. Air purifiers. Besides running air through a HEPA-like filter, you can also pass it through a Ti02 + UV light combo. And yes, it can help clear up the smell of bad farts. Personal experience:). In this specific case, the Ti02 technology used is such that it won't clog up beyond having to spray it with water every few years or so.
I'd assume that the spammer's program would first capture the graphics then serve them up to the porn-seeker. If this kind of solution gets popular, I bet captchas will start evolving to be more unpredictable, e.g. having the user describe what's happening in animated clips that hide the target at random positions in a field of static.
I'm in the US, and I've ordered from CD-WOW before. Thought they were based in the UK, but turns out they were shipping out from Hong Kong (my other home). I think they can get their CD's at cheaper prices from Hong Kong CD manufacturers. In these cases there might be very small differences in CD packaging (e.g. slightly different serial numbers, different label, etc.).
There is a single chemical that is largely responsible for dreams. The more the chemical, the more likely you are to remember the dream, all the way up to and including (and past?) lucid dreaming.
I highly doubt that there's a single chemical responsible for "dreams". Maybe you're referring to melatonin (a hormone that regulates part of the sleep cycle, but AFAIK doesn't affect dreaming) or perhaps DMT, a chemical secreted by the pineal gland that's hallucinogenic when administered in the correct doses?
However, there might be some things that can increase dream recall (I've experimented with Vitamin B12, and it does seem to work). My observation, though, is that dream recall can be improved by getting poor sleep, like when the room is too cold, there's too much street noise, or when certain substances have been consumed. Hehe.
Sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming seem to be similar in that they're "sleep states gone bad". I'm often lucid prior to slipping into a hypnogogic state, which means I'm fully aware that I'm becoming paralyzed. Then with this awareness, I can break the paralysis by "fighting" off the fear.
I've seen all sorts of weird things in these states, including dead civil war soldiers, glowing rotten corpses, friends with imploding heads, and even Marilyn Manson (spooky!).
One poster mentioned the grey alien phenomenon. I'd like to add that the succubi and incubi in medieval mythology were likely also inspired by sleep paralysis attacks. Similarly, in Chinese culture, sleep paralysis is known as "being sat on by a ghost".
I've personally noticed that sleeping with my arms crossed over my chest (like an Egyptian mummy) *very* frequently brings on sleep paralysis and also lucid dreaming. Apparently, Chinese people explain this as having something to do with covering one's heart with the hand. I wonder if there are parallels in other cultures.
Temperature is another major factor for me. Higher temperatures increase the chances of strange stuff happening during sleep. For example, getting under a heavy blanket after taking a hot shower. I think it has something to do with the body being a bit too hot for consistent REM sleep.
There's quite a high level of neural plasticity in the sensory cortex, and I'd imagine that the adjacent and similarly homunculi-mapped motor cortex would be the same. In the sensory cortex, any change in a afferent input (e.g. linking the sense of touch in two fingers by sewing them together) leads to a gradual (partially reversible, I believe) merging in the two adjacent bits of sensory cortex. Another example is removal of one of the sources of input (like by losing an arm). It can lead to "phantom limb" syndrome, but there's also some remapping of the affective circuitry, such that touching parts of the body can actually "stimulate" the missing limb. See some of Ramachandran's papers for more on this.
So what I'm getting at is that the brain seems to be quite good at managing its connections, and after learning to provide the right input to the neural interface, it should be rather similar to controlling one's own limbs or perhaps wiggling your ears. Of course, since one wouldn't be getting the feeling of *really* moving a limb, immediate kinesthetic feedback would have to be replaced by other information, say a HUD in the plane.
Assuming that the neural connections are sufficiently plastic and the neural interface is "rich" enough for the implantee to activate consistently, I don't think there will be problems related to attention. At least not any more so than when doing other visuo-spatially demanding tasks like driving. After training, the fighter pilots wouldn't be "thinking" about flying, they'd be activating the relevant bits of motor cortex just like when they move their arms.
Somewhat related: Michael Swanwick and William Gibson co-wrote a short-story, called "Dogfight", about neural interfaces for controlling airplane simulations.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm using a hacked Muvo2 (with a 1GB CompactFlash card instead of the original 4GB MicroDrive).
Every night, I use LAME to re-encode all the stuff that I've listened to into ~192 kbps VBR MP3s (this list is generated by a script called by the XMMS "Song Change" plugin). I keep the most recent 3GB of these songs on the hard drive, meaning that there's a few weeks of recently-heard music that I can choose to transfer to my player.
Since my collection is a mixture of MP3, FLAC and Ogg-Vorbis files, this makes it easier for me to handle everything.
With a few scripts, I can also auto-generate playlists based on when the files were added to the player.
Partially wrong. It's true that the eye is more sensitive to the green wavelengths, but flashlight/laser enthusiasts are picking up new green laser modules that have greater than 15mw of power, as compared to the typical red laser pointers that hit only a few mw. FYI, the legal limit for "novelty" laser pointers is 5mw.
This happened at my school's showing of The Last Samurai. I got to the theater, saw assloads of security people wanding, frisking, and looking mean. I thought, "maybe America turned into a police state while I slept," so I turned right around and deposited all my knives in the bushes outside.
For the record, I was carrying 6 knives, since I knew that it'd be a good edged-weapons-fondling movie. Rather ironic that The Last Samurai was about one man who *wouldn't* lay down his weapons.
Recently in Hong Kong, the government installed strange black and yellow machines at the crosswalks.
They look like bathroom soap dispensers, but they're made by either Siemens or Philips. As far as I can tell there's no button on it, but on the front plate, there's a three pronged symbol (reminds me of the biohazard symbol, except the circles are further apart).
These strange machines are replacing the traditional buttons, but I can't figure out how they work. Perhaps some sort of motion detection?
Tinfoil raving: With the recent introduction of smartcard versions of the mandatory ID cards, and the recent public dissatisfaction towards the government, perhaps the government is looking for a way to keep tabs on its citizens. All the more plausible because almost all citizens carry three important things: their ID card, a cell phone, and an RFID stored-value card (used for public transport, convenience store purchases, etc.). Add to that the fact that Chinese people don't mind being drones under the man, as long as they have the right to make money, and I can totally see this happening in 10 years.
There's been a spate of coin forgery in Hong Kong, and it's reached a level where the government is replacing those easy-to-forge coins with higher-tech paper bills.
The funny thing is, the coin was designed to be difficult to counterfeit. It consists of a silver ring around a golden center.
And the payoff? HK$10 = US$1.30. I really wonder how the hell the counterfeiters are making money. They seem to be mostly passing them off to tollbooths and occasionally exchanging them en masse at banks.
I'm currently using a tablet PC to run psychology experiments. It involves a bit of moving about, so it's great to be able to use the tablet mode.
However, the Toshiba I'm using is kind of crappy in terms of battery life. Takes forever to charge if you're using it at the same time.
In short, Ti02 coatings absorb ultraviolet light, which pushes some of the molecules to specific higher energy bands. This energy is then released and combines with atmospheric water, forming a hydroxyl radical (*OH). This radical is quite a powerful oxidizing agent, and as such has great potential in breaking down all manner of atmospheric pollutants.
:). In this specific case, the Ti02 technology used is such that it won't clog up beyond having to spray it with water every few years or so.
In terms of safety, and as far as I've personally encountered, this kind of technology has already seen usage in:
1. Chinese restaurant fish tanks to keep the water clean. The water is just routed through a small box with a UV light and a plate coated with Ti02. Keeps the fish, customers and staff happy.
2. Bathroom tiles and street pavement.
3. "Self-cleaning" glass for use on buildings. On this it also has the benefit of being a more uniform layer, so that steam or mist will disperse more evenly over the glass. This will be good for bathroom mirrors and the windows on boats.
4. Air purifiers. Besides running air through a HEPA-like filter, you can also pass it through a Ti02 + UV light combo. And yes, it can help clear up the smell of bad farts. Personal experience
I'd assume that the spammer's program would first capture the graphics then serve them up to the porn-seeker. If this kind of solution gets popular, I bet captchas will start evolving to be more unpredictable, e.g. having the user describe what's happening in animated clips that hide the target at random positions in a field of static.
I'm in the US, and I've ordered from CD-WOW before. Thought they were based in the UK, but turns out they were shipping out from Hong Kong (my other home). I think they can get their CD's at cheaper prices from Hong Kong CD manufacturers. In these cases there might be very small differences in CD packaging (e.g. slightly different serial numbers, different label, etc.).
Deviant Shuttle employee: "Kekeke. I Jenny'd slashdot!"
I highly doubt that there's a single chemical responsible for "dreams". Maybe you're referring to melatonin (a hormone that regulates part of the sleep cycle, but AFAIK doesn't affect dreaming) or perhaps DMT, a chemical secreted by the pineal gland that's hallucinogenic when administered in the correct doses?
However, there might be some things that can increase dream recall (I've experimented with Vitamin B12, and it does seem to work). My observation, though, is that dream recall can be improved by getting poor sleep, like when the room is too cold, there's too much street noise, or when certain substances have been consumed. Hehe.
Sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming seem to be similar in that they're "sleep states gone bad". I'm often lucid prior to slipping into a hypnogogic state, which means I'm fully aware that I'm becoming paralyzed. Then with this awareness, I can break the paralysis by "fighting" off the fear.
I've seen all sorts of weird things in these states, including dead civil war soldiers, glowing rotten corpses, friends with imploding heads, and even Marilyn Manson (spooky!).
One poster mentioned the grey alien phenomenon. I'd like to add that the succubi and incubi in medieval mythology were likely also inspired by sleep paralysis attacks. Similarly, in Chinese culture, sleep paralysis is known as "being sat on by a ghost".
I've personally noticed that sleeping with my arms crossed over my chest (like an Egyptian mummy) *very* frequently brings on sleep paralysis and also lucid dreaming. Apparently, Chinese people explain this as having something to do with covering one's heart with the hand. I wonder if there are parallels in other cultures.
Temperature is another major factor for me. Higher temperatures increase the chances of strange stuff happening during sleep. For example, getting under a heavy blanket after taking a hot shower. I think it has something to do with the body being a bit too hot for consistent REM sleep.
There's quite a high level of neural plasticity in the sensory cortex, and I'd imagine that the adjacent and similarly homunculi-mapped motor cortex would be the same. In the sensory cortex, any change in a afferent input (e.g. linking the sense of touch in two fingers by sewing them together) leads to a gradual (partially reversible, I believe) merging in the two adjacent bits of sensory cortex. Another example is removal of one of the sources of input (like by losing an arm). It can lead to "phantom limb" syndrome, but there's also some remapping of the affective circuitry, such that touching parts of the body can actually "stimulate" the missing limb. See some of Ramachandran's papers for more on this.
So what I'm getting at is that the brain seems to be quite good at managing its connections, and after learning to provide the right input to the neural interface, it should be rather similar to controlling one's own limbs or perhaps wiggling your ears. Of course, since one wouldn't be getting the feeling of *really* moving a limb, immediate kinesthetic feedback would have to be replaced by other information, say a HUD in the plane.
Assuming that the neural connections are sufficiently plastic and the neural interface is "rich" enough for the implantee to activate consistently, I don't think there will be problems related to attention. At least not any more so than when doing other visuo-spatially demanding tasks like driving. After training, the fighter pilots wouldn't be "thinking" about flying, they'd be activating the relevant bits of motor cortex just like when they move their arms.
Somewhat related: Michael Swanwick and William Gibson co-wrote a short-story, called "Dogfight", about neural interfaces for controlling airplane simulations.
I've got a cheapy IDE enclosure that claims to support hot-swapping in Windows (with some kind of driver). I've yet to use this feature though.
Can't quite remember how much it cost, but I'm sure it was less than "a couple hundred bucks". Maybe somewhere around $30.