I'm not sure where you are getting your information. Chimpanzees have 24 pairs of chromosomes and humans have 23 pairs. And what happened is that two of the chromosomes fused into one chromosome. Our chromosome two is essentially two of the chimp chromosomes (2p and 2q) stuck together.
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/hum_ape_chrom.html has a pretty good picture of the chromosome two and its ape versions.
Well, gravity detection and rotational motion detection are more commonly called the vestibular system. We have 5 organs dedicated to vestibular detection (other animals can have a couple more). Two of them are linear accelerometers (an inertial weight (calcium crystals + sticky stuff) on inner ear hair cells) that detect gravity, and linear motion of the head. Three of them are rotational accelerometers and are oriented to detect the three ways you can rotate your head. These are fluid filled tubes (semicircular canals) where the fluid acts as the inertial substance that rushes by the sensory hair cells when you rotate your head (and when you stop spinning around, the fluid keeps going making you feel dizzy). While these are all grouped together as vestibular, the outputs are not completely the same. For example, some of the output of the rotational detectors (technically, ampullae) goes directly to a reflex of your eye muscles to keep your gaze stable while you rotate your head. (As a demo of this, take a piece of paper and try to read it while you move it around quickly. You can't. Now hold the paper still but move your head around at the same rate. Your gaze is held stable while you move your head. Similarly, when you spin around in circles as a kid and stop, the world continues to spin (that is, your eyes continue to move as if you were still spinning as the fluid in the canals is moving but your head is not)). In fact the sensory cells that underlie this are virtually identical to the cells responsible for your auditory input (and for fish to detect water flow or electrical sense along the side of their body), and uses ion channels similar to those that detect extreme temperature, hot chili peppers, wasabi, menthol, and touch.
I think the problem is not that this will be a bad device, but rather that it has nothing that distinguishes it as the flagship of the palmone brand. The device doesn't have a cool slider, camera, wifi, or really anything to make it stand out in a crowd. Advertising "trickle charging" and "USB drive" don't make me think "Wow, palmOne has really neat things". I'll take a cheaper handheld and a jumpdrive. palmOne needed a device that calls people's attention back to them, especially since PPC devices are getting to be pretty darn cool. This is a better Tungsten E, but labeled as their flagship device. Is it really the best they can do?
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
But before you bring them to me,
Run their prints through the device on the door.
I was looking at the orbits of Pluto and Neptune on the applet, and noticed that Pluto is shown as inside Neptunes orbit at present and until 2011, but I was under the impression that Pluto was once again the farthest planet, as of 1999, and wouldn't pass in again until 2226.
So I'm not sure their orbits are correct....
According to their flight log:
Motor light off was achieved at 44,400 feet and 0.55M. Burnout occurred at 1.2M and apogee was 67,800 feet.
The max specs for a 747 are ~45,000 ft.
Yes, they've got a bit more to go, but the 67,800 ft was on their first test of the engine. I'm sure they could have let it go longer and easily gotten higher.
Your point is very well taken, and I didn't mean to characterize Scaled Composites as the Microsoft or Boeing of the contest. My point was more that Scaled designed a rocketship within a plane, funky folding wings, a hybrid rocket engine, etc. that comes off as a perfectly polished affair (and at this point looks the most likely to pull it all off). I love reading the Armadillo struggles/sucesses, really giving you the feeling of a down in the trenches "How the hell are we going to get this thing up in the air?". The difference is that Rutan has experience and infrastructure for building crazy aircraft (such as one that can fly around the world without refueling). Carmack, like most of us, doesn't have the experience or infrastructure, but just thought, what if I could pull this off? Unlike most of us, though, he went after this dream and has made some stellar progress.
Whoever wins, it will be a tremendous advance (and I think NASA could learn a lot from looking at what these folks are pulling off versus the tremendous money spent to keep a 25 year old design flying).
Apparently, Scaled Composites is one of two teams to have applied for a permit from the FAA to launch a spaceflight. The other is Armadillo Aerospace, run by John Carmack of Doom fame. It's interesting to compare and contrast the two companies. Rutan has a sleek ship with lots of cool round windows that launches from a funky big plane, and they have some good solid live testing. The Armadillo team's site really shows you the nitty-gritty of building something that flies in your spare time, with pictures of them welding engines together, making a crew capsule out of whatever they could find, and building a landing gear with some thick cable springs. I'm guessing that Rutan will win, but I'll hold out hope that the garage engineer can pull off at least some type of flight to give courage to that old entrepreneurial spirit....
In addition to Toyota's trumpet player, both Sony and Honda have developed robots that run/dance/etc., that they have no hope of immediately recooping the expenses on.
And look at the DARPA Grand Challenge that happened this weekend, several of the teams were run directly or indirectly through tech companies (and you can be sure they weren't in it for the $1M). Even the non-corporate teams received tons of donations of equipment, sensors, vehicles, etc to support the crazy dream of driverless car in the desert.
I don't think you've considered the immense complexity of simply adjusting your speed/direction to avoid a rock or pothole. Turn too fast, you flip (as at least one vehicle did). Next time you get in your car pay attention to just how many tiny speed/direction adjustments you make even on straight paved roads. Now add stuff you have to avoid and the process is incredibly complicated!
The whole thing makes you conisder just how much processing power we use to control our speed around curves and avoid potholes when we're driving. We can integrate a hell of a lot of information, process the relavent signals and adjust our behavior in milliseconds. And that's not adding the additional struggle of trying to get your iPod to play through the stereo system....
I still think that some of the greatest games were produced by Infocom. Doesn't get much simpler technologically, but you could loose days in those worlds puzzling around. Since the Wolfenstein/DOOM days, so many games have shifted over to pure death and destruction with only video frame rates to separate one from the other. Even the better multiplayer games are either team destruction or just graphical MOOs. Technology can make a great game fascinating, but making an old idea pretty won't bring in the bucks.
For those interested in seeing video from the qualifying trials...
Some slow lumbering vehicles, (not to mention huge file size), but pretty cool nonetheless.
Prior to this October, telemarketing calls were a national scourge. Amazingly, since we signed up for the Do-Not-Call list, we've only received 2 illegal calls. I'm rather surprised, in fact, at the relatively uniform acquiescing to this law. While spam, coming from all corners of the earth and is more anonymous, will be harder to enforce, some law with real teeth may be a good start.
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I'm not sure where you are getting your information. Chimpanzees have 24 pairs of chromosomes and humans have 23 pairs. And what happened is that two of the chromosomes fused into one chromosome. Our chromosome two is essentially two of the chimp chromosomes (2p and 2q) stuck together. http://www.gate.net/~rwms/hum_ape_chrom.html has a pretty good picture of the chromosome two and its ape versions.
Well, gravity detection and rotational motion detection are more commonly called the vestibular system. We have 5 organs dedicated to vestibular detection (other animals can have a couple more). Two of them are linear accelerometers (an inertial weight (calcium crystals + sticky stuff) on inner ear hair cells) that detect gravity, and linear motion of the head. Three of them are rotational accelerometers and are oriented to detect the three ways you can rotate your head. These are fluid filled tubes (semicircular canals) where the fluid acts as the inertial substance that rushes by the sensory hair cells when you rotate your head (and when you stop spinning around, the fluid keeps going making you feel dizzy). While these are all grouped together as vestibular, the outputs are not completely the same. For example, some of the output of the rotational detectors (technically, ampullae) goes directly to a reflex of your eye muscles to keep your gaze stable while you rotate your head. (As a demo of this, take a piece of paper and try to read it while you move it around quickly. You can't. Now hold the paper still but move your head around at the same rate. Your gaze is held stable while you move your head. Similarly, when you spin around in circles as a kid and stop, the world continues to spin (that is, your eyes continue to move as if you were still spinning as the fluid in the canals is moving but your head is not)). In fact the sensory cells that underlie this are virtually identical to the cells responsible for your auditory input (and for fish to detect water flow or electrical sense along the side of their body), and uses ion channels similar to those that detect extreme temperature, hot chili peppers, wasabi, menthol, and touch.
I think the problem is not that this will be a bad device, but rather that it has nothing that distinguishes it as the flagship of the palmone brand. The device doesn't have a cool slider, camera, wifi, or really anything to make it stand out in a crowd. Advertising "trickle charging" and "USB drive" don't make me think "Wow, palmOne has really neat things". I'll take a cheaper handheld and a jumpdrive. palmOne needed a device that calls people's attention back to them, especially since PPC devices are getting to be pretty darn cool. This is a better Tungsten E, but labeled as their flagship device. Is it really the best they can do?
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. But before you bring them to me, Run their prints through the device on the door.
I was looking at the orbits of Pluto and Neptune on the applet, and noticed that Pluto is shown as inside Neptunes orbit at present and until 2011, but I was under the impression that Pluto was once again the farthest planet, as of 1999, and wouldn't pass in again until 2226. So I'm not sure their orbits are correct....
According to their flight log: Motor light off was achieved at 44,400 feet and 0.55M. Burnout occurred at 1.2M and apogee was 67,800 feet. The max specs for a 747 are ~45,000 ft. Yes, they've got a bit more to go, but the 67,800 ft was on their first test of the engine. I'm sure they could have let it go longer and easily gotten higher.
Your point is very well taken, and I didn't mean to characterize Scaled Composites as the Microsoft or Boeing of the contest. My point was more that Scaled designed a rocketship within a plane, funky folding wings, a hybrid rocket engine, etc. that comes off as a perfectly polished affair (and at this point looks the most likely to pull it all off). I love reading the Armadillo struggles/sucesses, really giving you the feeling of a down in the trenches "How the hell are we going to get this thing up in the air?". The difference is that Rutan has experience and infrastructure for building crazy aircraft (such as one that can fly around the world without refueling). Carmack, like most of us, doesn't have the experience or infrastructure, but just thought, what if I could pull this off? Unlike most of us, though, he went after this dream and has made some stellar progress. Whoever wins, it will be a tremendous advance (and I think NASA could learn a lot from looking at what these folks are pulling off versus the tremendous money spent to keep a 25 year old design flying).
Apparently, Scaled Composites is one of two teams to have applied for a permit from the FAA to launch a spaceflight. The other is Armadillo Aerospace, run by John Carmack of Doom fame. It's interesting to compare and contrast the two companies. Rutan has a sleek ship with lots of cool round windows that launches from a funky big plane, and they have some good solid live testing. The Armadillo team's site really shows you the nitty-gritty of building something that flies in your spare time, with pictures of them welding engines together, making a crew capsule out of whatever they could find, and building a landing gear with some thick cable springs. I'm guessing that Rutan will win, but I'll hold out hope that the garage engineer can pull off at least some type of flight to give courage to that old entrepreneurial spirit....
In addition to Toyota's trumpet player, both Sony and Honda have developed robots that run/dance/etc., that they have no hope of immediately recooping the expenses on. And look at the DARPA Grand Challenge that happened this weekend, several of the teams were run directly or indirectly through tech companies (and you can be sure they weren't in it for the $1M). Even the non-corporate teams received tons of donations of equipment, sensors, vehicles, etc to support the crazy dream of driverless car in the desert.
I don't think you've considered the immense complexity of simply adjusting your speed/direction to avoid a rock or pothole. Turn too fast, you flip (as at least one vehicle did). Next time you get in your car pay attention to just how many tiny speed/direction adjustments you make even on straight paved roads. Now add stuff you have to avoid and the process is incredibly complicated!
The whole thing makes you conisder just how much processing power we use to control our speed around curves and avoid potholes when we're driving. We can integrate a hell of a lot of information, process the relavent signals and adjust our behavior in milliseconds. And that's not adding the additional struggle of trying to get your iPod to play through the stereo system....
Perhaps a pain in the butt to deal with, but a tracking client for Linux is available.
I still think that some of the greatest games were produced by Infocom. Doesn't get much simpler technologically, but you could loose days in those worlds puzzling around. Since the Wolfenstein/DOOM days, so many games have shifted over to pure death and destruction with only video frame rates to separate one from the other. Even the better multiplayer games are either team destruction or just graphical MOOs. Technology can make a great game fascinating, but making an old idea pretty won't bring in the bucks.
For those interested in seeing video from the qualifying trials... Some slow lumbering vehicles, (not to mention huge file size), but pretty cool nonetheless.
Prior to this October, telemarketing calls were a national scourge. Amazingly, since we signed up for the Do-Not-Call list, we've only received 2 illegal calls. I'm rather surprised, in fact, at the relatively uniform acquiescing to this law. While spam, coming from all corners of the earth and is more anonymous, will be harder to enforce, some law with real teeth may be a good start.