It's relatively easy to permanently preserve all of mankind's knowledge, just pack it in a rocket and send it Oort-cloud bound. Well permanently as in astronomical timescales. The trick is to preserve all of humanity's knowledge in a way that's useful to humanity in the future.
Even if it was cast in stone, in large letters, most of the information that we could store is useless for another, more poignant reason: it is badly organized.
Let's say you are a survivor of some global catastrophe, you have been knocked back almost to stone age,. How long can you scavenge the remaining of our civilization to survive? At some point you will have to start to produce your own food and tools.
What do you know about farming? Herding? Metalsmith? Even if you were a farmer / breeder / blacksmith how far would you go without modern technology? Think about it: no pesticides, no medicines, no blast furnaces. You have to slowly and painfully start to rebuild civilization again.
How useful would the wikipedia articles on the subject be? And the books in a library? The information they contain is organized in a way that is utterly useless to you. The only thing remotely helpful are survivalist magazines and army manuals. But even those will not tell you how to rebuild technology, how to make a windmill, or a wool spinning wheel. How to forge tools and then use them to work iron and so on until you get back to modern metallurgy.
I really wish someone made the effort to organize modern knowledge so that all of the steps that lead from stone age to space flight were clearly identified and explained. We take way too much for granted, the process of rediscovering everything, of finding out how do you really get from zero to the internet would probably teach us something very important about ourselves and the road we have followed.
Something seems maybe not quite right; wasn't there an engineer(s) who inadvertantly stepped in a pool of radioactive water, and got enough exposure to get skin burns? My google-fu is lacking, I can find references to the incident, but I can't find their estimated doses - I remember it being a big deal at the time, though...
Q: What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?
A: Assuming you’re a reasonably good swimmer, you could probably survive treading water anywhere from 10 to 40 hours. At that point, you would black out from fatigue and drown. This is also true for a pool without nuclear fuel in the bottom.
I think the headline is correct, LHCb has observed CP violation in an experimental domain where it had not been observed before. The headline does not claim that LHCb has discovered CP violation.
Didn't you hear? Everything has to run in the browser now. I'm waiting for the operating system that runs in a browser so I can create an infinite recursive loop of stupidity.
Like this? Why? You just proved Fermilab's not capable of keeping up with the LHC, so I'm left wondering what it would cost to retrofit Fermilab to that level. I think concentrating on CERN is a better basket for our eggs.
Then again, I'm a dilettante (not an expert).
CMS is the Compact Muon Solenoid: a particle detector, a muon collider would be something very different. You can think of it as the successor to LEP (the old CERN electron collider, that was dismantled to make room for LHC), the same way LHC is the successor to Tevatron.
A muon collider would be a machine complementary to the LHC, being able to look for things LHC can't see and to look with grater precision at anything the LHC may find.
(and on LHC too) let me call the conclusions of the article bullshit.
This last hurrah suggests that Tevatron might indeed have found the Higgs ahead of CERN's Large Hadron Collider if they'd secured the funding required.
It took Tevatron 10 years to accumulate as enough data to reach a 4 sigma result (let us not discuss the statistical details). It would have taken years to reach the 5 sigma level. On the other hand LHC has obtained in one year almost as much data as Tevatron in 10. By summer 2012 the amount of data recorded by LHC will be an impossible goal for Tevatron to accomplish. It just made no sense at all to keep the old machine on.
The sad thing is not that Tevatron has been shut down but that the USA government is not investing any money in using the Fermilab infrastructure for some awesome future project (I'd love to see them try a muon collider).
What this guy did is awesome, but for a second while reading the summary I got confused and hoped that someone had mounted a rocket on a balloon to be ignited when the balloon is about to reach its peak altitude. THAT would have been absolutely awesome!
Just put them in an oven that can do more than 250C, and possibly reach 500C, the typical stability temperature of cobalt alloys, the material that usually make the ferromagnetic surface of hard disk platters. Bonus points if you can do 650C, then you will start melting the aluminum and approach the Curie temperature of cobalt alloys. There is physically no way to recover anything once you do that.
Btw I don't know about microwaves, but that may be a nice (and fun) option too. Of course you'd need to dismantle the shielding first, but as someone has mentioned, that wouldn't take more than 10 minutes.
Suppose they prove super-symmetry and find the Higgs Boson, what are we going to be able to do with it. Other than completing the theory, is there any practical use for this new found knowledge?
Nobody knows, but neither did Maxwell 150 years ago when he formuleted his theory of electromagnetism, nontheless without it you wouldn't have radios, ipods or cell phones. Einsten had no idea what his general relativity was good for but without it you wuoln't have GPSs and Li-ion batteries.
I could go on for a while, but let me tell you that real scientists work because they want to understand nature better, regardless of any pratical use that may stem from their work.
paraniod_mode In case you havn't noticed Mubarak didn't need any special law or a big red button to shut off internat access state-wide, just a few well placed phone calls to the the major ISPs.
I wonder if that could ever happen here in the 'civilized' west (in London they chirurgically shut off mobile comunication during the student riots, remember?) and what counter measures would we have.
Could we use the good old phone network to cohordinate? How many of you still remember their home phone number? you mother's? your friends'? How many public phones are there in your city?
So I started investigating the current status of mesh wireless network. There is a significant number of people walking around with a wifi enabled linux phone nowdays, are they enough to build an on-the-fly mesh network? We already have some of the software stack available (http://www.olsr.org/?q=node/30), what seems to be missing is a simple user interface and a messaging system.
And then then what about pratical issues: battery life, interferencies... We should really be experimenting with this stuff now. It may prove to be quite a useful resource in other emergencies too. end: paranoid_mode
paraniod_mode In case you havn't noticed Mubarak didn't need any special law or a big red button to shut off internat access state-wide, just a few well placed phone calls to the the major ISPs.
I wonder if that could ever happen here in the 'civilized' west (in London they chirurgically shut off mobile comunication during the student riots, remember?) and what counter measures would we have.
Could we use the good old phone network to cohordinate? How many of you still remember their home phone number? you mother's? your friends'? How many public phones are there in your city?
So I started investigating the current status of mesh wireless network. There is a significant number of people walking around with a wifi enabled linux phone nowdays, are they enough to build an on-the-fly mesh network? We already have some of the software stack available (http://www.olsr.org/?q=node/30), what seems to be missing is a simple user interface and a messaging system.
And then then what about pratical issues: battery life, interferencies... We should really be experimenting with this stuff now. It may prove to be quite a useful resource in other emergencies too. end: paranoid_mode
In case you havn't noticed Mubarak didn't need any special law or a big red button to shut off internat access state-wide, just a few well placed phone calls to the the major ISPs.
I wonder if that could ever happen here in the 'civilized' west (in London they chirurgically shut off mobile comunication during the student riots, remember?) and what counter measures would we have.
Could we use the good old phone network to cohordinate? How many of you still remember their home phone number? you mother's? your friends'? How many public phones are there in your city?
So I started investigating the current status of mesh wireless network. There is a significant number of people walking around with a wifi enabled linux phone nowdays, are they enough to build an on-the-fly mesh network? We already have some of the software stack available (http://www.olsr.org/?q=node/30), what seems to be missing is a simple user interface and a messaging system.
And then then what about pratical issues: battery life, interferencies... We should really be experimenting with this stuff now. It may prove to be quite a useful resource in other emergencies too.
3D Cinema is a gimmick with novelty appeal. It will die when the novelty wears off just like it did the last n times it was tried.
Unless they stop showing 2D movies in movie teathers, and given that 3D movies are more profitable I fully expect tham to start doing so. In fact it was almost impossible to watch avatar or tron legacy in 2D.
Well, one more reason to just download the blu ray rip from bittorrent I guess.
The science of GATTACA does not seem very sound to me. Many traits cannot be simply related to one gene and an aweful lot of them are only partly genetic (and partly dependent on the ambient) or not genetic at all.
On a side note, if you have some time to spare give Schismatrix (by B. Sterling) a try, I enjoyed his attempt to depict a posthuman society.
They put the PSP private key on the PS3, presumably so you could buy games for your PSP through the PS3 and have the PS3 do all the heavy crypto work instead of encrypting it on the store end.
they did not put any private key anywhere outside the Sony headquarters. They just did something stupid with the encryption algorithm (always use the same seed) so that if you have several objects encrypted with the same key you can reconstruct the original key.
You know... someone should take the tame to setup a wikipedia mirroro with addwords, encourage people to use that instead of the original wikipedia and then donate the revenue to the wikimedia foundation. Just to give Jimbo a taste of the idea.
And what gives one person, Assange, greater credibility than two other people?
This one thing, you might not be very familiar with, called "presumption of innocence until proven guilty". That said, I have no reason to doubt the sweedish judiciary system and I am waiting for the virdict to form a final opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
There is also a user friendly in-browser implementation: https://crypto.cat/ Go check it out.
They have been working on an smartphone version for a while but it's not ready for prime time yet.
How about this:
Open Source Ecology. A lot of work has gone into this.
Very interesting, thank you!
It's relatively easy to permanently preserve all of mankind's knowledge, just pack it in a rocket and send it Oort-cloud bound. Well permanently as in astronomical timescales. The trick is to preserve all of humanity's knowledge in a way that's useful to humanity in the future.
Even if it was cast in stone, in large letters, most of the information that we could store is useless for another, more poignant reason: it is badly organized.
Let's say you are a survivor of some global catastrophe, you have been knocked back almost to stone age,. How long can you scavenge the remaining of our civilization to survive? At some point you will have to start to produce your own food and tools.
What do you know about farming? Herding? Metalsmith? Even if you were a farmer / breeder / blacksmith how far would you go without modern technology? Think about it: no pesticides, no medicines, no blast furnaces. You have to slowly and painfully start to rebuild civilization again.
How useful would the wikipedia articles on the subject be? And the books in a library? The information they contain is organized in a way that is utterly useless to you. The only thing remotely helpful are survivalist magazines and army manuals. But even those will not tell you how to rebuild technology, how to make a windmill, or a wool spinning wheel. How to forge tools and then use them to work iron and so on until you get back to modern metallurgy.
I really wish someone made the effort to organize modern knowledge so that all of the steps that lead from stone age to space flight were clearly identified and explained. We take way too much for granted, the process of rediscovering everything, of finding out how do you really get from zero to the internet would probably teach us something very important about ourselves and the road we have followed.
Something seems maybe not quite right; wasn't there an engineer(s) who inadvertantly stepped in a pool of radioactive water, and got enough exposure to get skin burns? My google-fu is lacking, I can find references to the incident, but I can't find their estimated doses - I remember it being a big deal at the time, though...
Q: What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?
A: Assuming you’re a reasonably good swimmer, you could probably survive treading water anywhere from 10 to 40 hours. At that point, you would black out from fatigue and drown. This is also true for a pool without nuclear fuel in the bottom.
http://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
Somehow I strongly doubt that any such epigenetic (or other) monogamy-influencing event takes place when humans mate.
Tell that to your oxytocin receptors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_motivation_and_hormones#Oxytocin_and_vasopressin)
I think the headline is correct, LHCb has observed CP violation in an experimental domain where it had not been observed before. The headline does not claim that LHCb has discovered CP violation.
FYI: wayland can use android drivers http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/04/11/2147208/jolla-ports-wayland-to-android-gpu-drivers
Well, I hope a clone comes out sooner or later.
Isn't this the plot of an old Michael Crichton novel? The only difference is that the protagonist was affected by epilepsia rather than parkinson.
Didn't you hear? Everything has to run in the browser now. I'm waiting for the operating system that runs in a browser so I can create an infinite recursive loop of stupidity.
And here you go!
Like this? Why? You just proved Fermilab's not capable of keeping up with the LHC, so I'm left wondering what it would cost to retrofit Fermilab to that level. I think concentrating on CERN is a better basket for our eggs.
Then again, I'm a dilettante (not an expert).
CMS is the Compact Muon Solenoid: a particle detector, a muon collider would be something very different. You can think of it as the successor to LEP (the old CERN electron collider, that was dismantled to make room for LHC), the same way LHC is the successor to Tevatron.
A muon collider would be a machine complementary to the LHC, being able to look for things LHC can't see and to look with grater precision at anything the LHC may find.
(and on LHC too) let me call the conclusions of the article bullshit.
This last hurrah suggests that Tevatron might indeed have found the Higgs ahead of CERN's Large Hadron Collider if they'd secured the funding required.
It took Tevatron 10 years to accumulate as enough data to reach a 4 sigma result (let us not discuss the statistical details). It would have taken years to reach the 5 sigma level. On the other hand LHC has obtained in one year almost as much data as Tevatron in 10. By summer 2012 the amount of data recorded by LHC will be an impossible goal for Tevatron to accomplish. It just made no sense at all to keep the old machine on.
The sad thing is not that Tevatron has been shut down but that the USA government is not investing any money in using the Fermilab infrastructure for some awesome future project (I'd love to see them try a muon collider).
For direct download:
http://av.vimeo.com/48323/967/69379567.mp4?token=1319148574_68f532a970ac33e3a5fb0a2b7cb02a82
If it does not work you can use this: http://savevideo.me/
What this guy did is awesome, but for a second while reading the summary I got confused and hoped that someone had mounted a rocket on a balloon to be ignited when the balloon is about to reach its peak altitude. THAT would have been absolutely awesome!
Fire, exactly!
Just put them in an oven that can do more than 250C, and possibly reach 500C, the typical stability temperature of cobalt alloys, the material that usually make the ferromagnetic surface of hard disk platters. Bonus points if you can do 650C, then you will start melting the aluminum and approach the Curie temperature of cobalt alloys. There is physically no way to recover anything once you do that.
Btw I don't know about microwaves, but that may be a nice (and fun) option too. Of course you'd need to dismantle the shielding first, but as someone has mentioned, that wouldn't take more than 10 minutes.
Suppose they prove super-symmetry and find the Higgs Boson, what are we going to be able to do with it. Other than completing the theory, is there any practical use for this new found knowledge?
Nobody knows, but neither did Maxwell 150 years ago when he formuleted his theory of electromagnetism, nontheless without it you wouldn't have radios, ipods or cell phones. Einsten had no idea what his general relativity was good for but without it you wuoln't have GPSs and Li-ion batteries.
I could go on for a while, but let me tell you that real scientists work because they want to understand nature better, regardless of any pratical use that may stem from their work.
paraniod_mode
In case you havn't noticed Mubarak didn't need any special law or a big red button to shut off internat access state-wide, just a few well placed phone calls to the the major ISPs.
I wonder if that could ever happen here in the 'civilized' west (in London they chirurgically shut off mobile comunication during the student riots, remember?) and what counter measures would we have.
Could we use the good old phone network to cohordinate? How many of you still remember their home phone number? you mother's? your friends'? How many public phones are there in your city?
So I started investigating the current status of mesh wireless network. There is a significant number of people walking around with a wifi enabled linux phone nowdays, are they enough to build an on-the-fly mesh network? We already have some of the software stack available (http://www.olsr.org/?q=node/30), what seems to be missing is a simple user interface and a messaging system.
And then then what about pratical issues: battery life, interferencies... We should really be experimenting with this stuff now. It may prove to be quite a useful resource in other emergencies too.
end: paranoid_mode
paraniod_mode
In case you havn't noticed Mubarak didn't need any special law or a big red button to shut off internat access state-wide, just a few well placed phone calls to the the major ISPs.
I wonder if that could ever happen here in the 'civilized' west (in London they chirurgically shut off mobile comunication during the student riots, remember?) and what counter measures would we have.
Could we use the good old phone network to cohordinate? How many of you still remember their home phone number? you mother's? your friends'? How many public phones are there in your city?
So I started investigating the current status of mesh wireless network. There is a significant number of people walking around with a wifi enabled linux phone nowdays, are they enough to build an on-the-fly mesh network? We already have some of the software stack available (http://www.olsr.org/?q=node/30), what seems to be missing is a simple user interface and a messaging system.
And then then what about pratical issues: battery life, interferencies... We should really be experimenting with this stuff now. It may prove to be quite a useful resource in other emergencies too.
end: paranoid_mode
In case you havn't noticed Mubarak didn't need any special law or a big red button to shut off internat access state-wide, just a few well placed phone calls to the the major ISPs.
I wonder if that could ever happen here in the 'civilized' west (in London they chirurgically shut off mobile comunication during the student riots, remember?) and what counter measures would we have.
Could we use the good old phone network to cohordinate? How many of you still remember their home phone number? you mother's? your friends'? How many public phones are there in your city?
So I started investigating the current status of mesh wireless network. There is a significant number of people walking around with a wifi enabled linux phone nowdays, are they enough to build an on-the-fly mesh network? We already have some of the software stack available (http://www.olsr.org/?q=node/30), what seems to be missing is a simple user interface and a messaging system.
And then then what about pratical issues: battery life, interferencies... We should really be experimenting with this stuff now. It may prove to be quite a useful resource in other emergencies too.
3D Cinema is a gimmick with novelty appeal. It will die when the novelty wears off just like it did the last n times it was tried.
Unless they stop showing 2D movies in movie teathers, and given that 3D movies are more profitable I fully expect tham to start doing so. In fact it was almost impossible to watch avatar or tron legacy in 2D.
Well, one more reason to just download the blu ray rip from bittorrent I guess.
The science of GATTACA does not seem very sound to me. Many traits cannot be simply related to one gene and an aweful lot of them are only partly genetic (and partly dependent on the ambient) or not genetic at all.
On a side note, if you have some time to spare give Schismatrix (by B. Sterling) a try, I enjoyed his attempt to depict a posthuman society.
They put the PSP private key on the PS3, presumably so you could buy games for your PSP through the PS3 and have the PS3 do all the heavy crypto work instead of encrypting it on the store end.
they did not put any private key anywhere outside the Sony headquarters. They just did something stupid with the encryption algorithm (always use the same seed) so that if you have several objects encrypted with the same key you can reconstruct the original key.
You know... someone should take the tame to setup a wikipedia mirroro with addwords, encourage people to use that instead of the original wikipedia and then donate the revenue to the wikimedia foundation. Just to give Jimbo a taste of the idea.
thanks :)
And what gives one person, Assange, greater credibility than two other people?
This one thing, you might not be very familiar with, called "presumption of innocence until proven guilty". That said, I have no reason to doubt the sweedish judiciary system and I am waiting for the virdict to form a final opinion.