"my conclusion was that people used intelligence to mean whatever could be done better by a human being than anything else"
That's a pretty subtle definition and I admit I didn't like it to begin with. I prefer to think that intelligence carries with it some sense of an original act of creation - be it a piece of writing, or a thought, or even an idea. To that extent I'd like to suggest that your definition is better expressed as 'whatever is done better by a human being than anything else - at this point in history'. I don't see why humanity has a monopoly on intelligence - sufficiently adavanced algorithms might come up with great ideas in future and where will your definition be then?
Miserably inadequate - yes, I think that sums up the bombers' efforts quite accurately.
Whether that should arouse scornful pity or contempt is my point.
8 people fail to murder hundreds - my reaction is not 'That was a pathetic effort', but instead 'Thank goodness they had no idea what they were doing'.
Perhaps we mean the same thing - it matters little.
You sound almost disappointed that no one died.
I could think of several adjectives to describe this attempted mass murder, but I don't think I'd use 'pathetic'.
So as soon as this story started to gain momentum, they issued a fix and a statement offering a replacement disk.
Well, full marks to Sony for learning from recent public relations disasters, but I doubt I'd be so impressed if I was one of the people who had experienced this problem, and I had been complaining left right and centre to no avail for several weeks. Seems as though Sony only back-pedalled on this issue once they feared another DRM PR-storm was the brewing up.
..actually.....it's not intensity that's inversely proportional, it's amplitude. Intensity of a transverse wave is proportional to amplitude squared. So if anything, amplitude will decay with the fourth power of distance.
If you're going to flame, get your physics right. 8-)
Take the maximum distance at which you can read a car registration plate. 20 metres?
I assume what TFA means is: using this technology you would be able to read the plate at 40m.
Fair comment. I'm hypothesising a bit here and my reply isn't specific to the lenses in the article. But I'd guess that the aberrations measured by this guy's laser are a function of the focal length your eye is tuned to at the moment of measurement. And imperfections in your eyesight vary with focal length (whether you're short or long-sighted). Carrying this kind of technology to it's logical conclusion, i.e. a super lens that adjusts itself to iron out imperfections in your sight as a function of focal length - that would be pretty neat. But I'm sure you'd get a lot of headaches whilst you adapt to it.
I can imagine some serious eyestrain coming about if your eye has different ideas to the 'smart lens' about what is supposed to be in focus. The fovea (small area of retina that receives the focussed image) is pretty small. You try to focus on a roadsign 400metres away - the super lenses think you're looking at a tree 500metres away. Hellish biofeedback loop ensues. It's giving me a headache just to think about it...
When an organism reproduces, random genetic mutations are introduced - the offspring is takes a mutated version of the parent(s)' DNA. Over hundreds and thousands of generations, these mutations are responsible for the gradual evolution of the species by Natural Selection - the beneficial mutations tend to predominate and the 'fittest survive'.
For a bug to evolve into an animal would require millions of generations, and that requires tens of millions of years. Bacteria reproduce much more rapidly and the tens of millions of generations required to evolve considerably may only take a few months.
This is why we see evolution taking place more rapidly and more noticably in bacteria and viruses: they reproduce so much faster than, for example, apes.
I read physics at university. An optional Third year course was 'General Relativity'. In the little booklet they gave us to help in choosing what courses to 'major' in (it was an english university), there was an asterisk next to 'General Relativity', as well as 'Cosmology' as a matter of fact. The asterisk denoted 'mathematically rigorous - to be considered only by students with particularly strong mathematical backgrounds'. My friends and I didn't take it - we did things like Computational Physics and Astrophysics instead. In fact, one afternoon, for a laugh (crazy guys that we were) we sat in on a General Relativity lecture to see if we could even keep up. It was a thirty minute lecture on 'Aphelion Procession Using the Scwarzchild Geodesic'. We didn't stand a chance - ball-breakingly tensor analysis. My point is, at that time I knew a hell of a lot more physics than your average guy in the street and I didn't have a clue what was going on in that General Relativity lecture. I read around, spoke to people smarter than I was, spent a fair bit of time trying to get my head around General Relativity I didn't even scratch the surface. And I was a straight-A student back then. I just don't think there exists such a thing as a layman explanation of our understanding of gravity.
That other splendid bugger Dr Richard Feynman once said something like 'If a theory can't be reasonably well explained in a single undergraduate lecture then we don't really understand it at all.' It may be that we don't really understand the theory of General Relativity - maybe there is a far more elegant theory explaining gravity that could be explain gravity in simpler terms. For certain, though, that theory does not currently exist. It's a shame, because like you I was always frustrated by the absence of a simple answer to 'How does gravity work?', Why is it always attractive and never repulsive? Some things are just really, really difficult to model and the only models we have are 'mathematically rigorous'.
In the words of JBS Haldane
'The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynmanhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativityhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_analysis
Sorry, but adding foil to your pocket is *more* likely to set airport detectors off. They detect anything highly conductive, which in most cases means metal. Foil is conductive so you're not going to mask the metal in your pocket by wrapping it in foil.
I travelled throughout South America last year, from Buenos Aires to Los Angles. Overground. That meant a lot of coach and what better travelling companion than, in my humble opinion, the finest Fighting Fantasy Gamebook of them all: Caverns of the Snow Witch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caverns_of_the_Snow_W itch/ Dice. Paper. Pencil. Playing the game properly: which means making every roll and resisting the temptation to 'go back' to the last location if I made the wrong choice. For an old-school, dice-rolling RPG player like myself I couldn't have asked for a better travelling companion. Even after six characters and I still didn't beat the book. One word: SENTINEL. Seriously, though, I earnestly recommend a return to those old Fighting Fantasy books that Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson wrote in the mid-eighties. Dead treeware, dice, and a shedload of red wine - thee aren't many better ways to pass a 23 hour coach ride. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy_Game _Books/
If there's evolutionary benefit to be gained from 'extra sensory powers' it makes sense that a tooth/tusk should evolve in this way.
What surprises me is that something that can be so easily broken should have evolved to be so sensitive. Horns and claws contain no nerves because they're so easily lost in combat.
Well that was my point entirely, I'm sorry if it didn't come across that way. Why encourage piracy when the investment is recouped through sales of games?
The mid air image technique has some problems with air, air has changing refraction index due to humidity and so on.
Hang on, that's not right. Cinemas project movies through humidity, smoke, air-con outlets and all sorts of 'media of differing refractive index' without any problems at all. The real problem with the mid air image technique suggested above is the lack of a screen on which to project the light.
I think this story might give us a lot more entertainment yet. Quite often in space exploration it's what happens after things go wrong that the really interesting stuff begins. I'm thinking about the engineering solutions to the Apollo13 explosion, the Hubble Space telescope and the problems of the deep space probes like Voyager and Mariner as they encountered difficulties never imagined in their design brief - how a bunch of seriously smart software and electrical engineers stuck in a room with a load of coffee and a white board can turn a disasterous situation around. When a project like this gets effectively written off because the probe is in such bad shape, that's when the engineers get to try out "It's a long shot but it just might work" ideas.
I wouldn't bet against the Jap engineers trying some pretty clever stuff to get that probe home - I'm not saying they'll be successful but it could be interesting and entertaining, and we may even learn something from it.
The best lesson I ever learned was to use my work email account solely for work emails and my private accounts for the private stuff. Similarly, work phone's for work stuff, private phone's for all those communications better kept 'out of earshot'.
This makes life a ahole lot easier without needing any slapstick digi-voice box.
Does anybody know whether we could use asteroids to transport probes around space?
Nope, that wouldn't work. The orbital velocity of an asteroid (around the Sun) would have to be matched by any probe wanting to land on it in order to hitch a lift. If you're able to expend that amount of fuel catching up with a rock, you don't need the rock in the first place - you can just blaze your own trail.
You have to wonder just how autonomous this probe is, if the news that it successfully landed (and has subsequently taken off again) comes as a surprise to Mission Control.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but by the time you've told me that's your policy, you've already logged me.
"my conclusion was that people used intelligence to mean whatever could be done better by a human being than anything else" That's a pretty subtle definition and I admit I didn't like it to begin with. I prefer to think that intelligence carries with it some sense of an original act of creation - be it a piece of writing, or a thought, or even an idea. To that extent I'd like to suggest that your definition is better expressed as 'whatever is done better by a human being than anything else - at this point in history'. I don't see why humanity has a monopoly on intelligence - sufficiently adavanced algorithms might come up with great ideas in future and where will your definition be then?
Because you have to go through a basic tutorial and pass a rudimentary exam before they let you start categorising the galaxies.
Miserably inadequate - yes, I think that sums up the bombers' efforts quite accurately. Whether that should arouse scornful pity or contempt is my point. 8 people fail to murder hundreds - my reaction is not 'That was a pathetic effort', but instead 'Thank goodness they had no idea what they were doing'. Perhaps we mean the same thing - it matters little.
You sound almost disappointed that no one died. I could think of several adjectives to describe this attempted mass murder, but I don't think I'd use 'pathetic'.
So as soon as this story started to gain momentum, they issued a fix and a statement offering a replacement disk. Well, full marks to Sony for learning from recent public relations disasters, but I doubt I'd be so impressed if I was one of the people who had experienced this problem, and I had been complaining left right and centre to no avail for several weeks. Seems as though Sony only back-pedalled on this issue once they feared another DRM PR-storm was the brewing up.
Artists need to make more money ?! Like Madonna is short of cash and needs to charge 250 a ticket?
..actually.....it's not intensity that's inversely proportional, it's amplitude. Intensity of a transverse wave is proportional to amplitude squared. So if anything, amplitude will decay with the fourth power of distance. If you're going to flame, get your physics right. 8-)
Take the maximum distance at which you can read a car registration plate. 20 metres?
I assume what TFA means is: using this technology you would be able to read the plate at 40m.
Fair comment. I'm hypothesising a bit here and my reply isn't specific to the lenses in the article.
But I'd guess that the aberrations measured by this guy's laser are a function of the focal length your eye is tuned to at the moment of measurement. And imperfections in your eyesight vary with focal length (whether you're short or long-sighted). Carrying this kind of technology to it's logical conclusion, i.e. a super lens that adjusts itself to iron out imperfections in your sight as a function of focal length - that would be pretty neat. But I'm sure you'd get a lot of headaches whilst you adapt to it.
I can imagine some serious eyestrain coming about if your eye has different ideas to the 'smart lens' about what is supposed to be in focus. The fovea (small area of retina that receives the focussed image) is pretty small. You try to focus on a roadsign 400metres away - the super lenses think you're looking at a tree 500metres away. Hellish biofeedback loop ensues. It's giving me a headache just to think about it...
When an organism reproduces, random genetic mutations are introduced - the offspring is takes a mutated version of the parent(s)' DNA. Over hundreds and thousands of generations, these mutations are responsible for the gradual evolution of the species by Natural Selection - the beneficial mutations tend to predominate and the 'fittest survive'.
For a bug to evolve into an animal would require millions of generations, and that requires tens of millions of years. Bacteria reproduce much more rapidly and the tens of millions of generations required to evolve considerably may only take a few months.
This is why we see evolution taking place more rapidly and more noticably in bacteria and viruses: they reproduce so much faster than, for example, apes.
I read physics at university. An optional Third year course was 'General Relativity'. In the little booklet they gave us to help in choosing what courses to 'major' in (it was an english university), there was an asterisk next to 'General Relativity', as well as 'Cosmology' as a matter of fact. The asterisk denoted 'mathematically rigorous - to be considered only by students with particularly strong mathematical backgrounds'. My friends and I didn't take it - we did things like Computational Physics and Astrophysics instead. In fact, one afternoon, for a laugh (crazy guys that we were) we sat in on a General Relativity lecture to see if we could even keep up. It was a thirty minute lecture on 'Aphelion Procession Using the Scwarzchild Geodesic'. We didn't stand a chance - ball-breakingly tensor analysis. My point is, at that time I knew a hell of a lot more physics than your average guy in the street and I didn't have a clue what was going on in that General Relativity lecture. I read around, spoke to people smarter than I was, spent a fair bit of time trying to get my head around General Relativity I didn't even scratch the surface. And I was a straight-A student back then. I just don't think there exists such a thing as a layman explanation of our understanding of gravity. That other splendid bugger Dr Richard Feynman once said something like 'If a theory can't be reasonably well explained in a single undergraduate lecture then we don't really understand it at all.' It may be that we don't really understand the theory of General Relativity - maybe there is a far more elegant theory explaining gravity that could be explain gravity in simpler terms. For certain, though, that theory does not currently exist. It's a shame, because like you I was always frustrated by the absence of a simple answer to 'How does gravity work?', Why is it always attractive and never repulsive? Some things are just really, really difficult to model and the only models we have are 'mathematically rigorous'. In the words of JBS Haldane 'The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_analysis
Sorry, but adding foil to your pocket is *more* likely to set airport detectors off. They detect anything highly conductive, which in most cases means metal. Foil is conductive so you're not going to mask the metal in your pocket by wrapping it in foil.
Sorry about the bad links. The articles exist in Wikipedia, fuck knows why they didn't link properly.
I travelled throughout South America last year, from Buenos Aires to Los Angles. Overground. That meant a lot of coach and what better travelling companion than, in my humble opinion, the finest Fighting Fantasy Gamebook of them all: Caverns of the Snow Witch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caverns_of_the_Snow_W itch/ e _Books/
Dice. Paper. Pencil. Playing the game properly: which means making every roll and resisting the temptation to 'go back' to the last location if I made the wrong choice. For an old-school, dice-rolling RPG player like myself I couldn't have asked for a better travelling companion. Even after six characters and I still didn't beat the book. One word: SENTINEL. Seriously, though, I earnestly recommend a return to those old Fighting Fantasy books that Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson wrote in the mid-eighties. Dead treeware, dice, and a shedload of red wine - thee aren't many better ways to pass a 23 hour coach ride.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy_Gam
If there's evolutionary benefit to be gained from 'extra sensory powers' it makes sense that a tooth/tusk should evolve in this way.
What surprises me is that something that can be so easily broken should have evolved to be so sensitive. Horns and claws contain no nerves because they're so easily lost in combat.
Well that was my point entirely, I'm sorry if it didn't come across that way. Why encourage piracy when the investment is recouped through sales of games?
Not if they're selling the consoles at a loss to recoup the investment on games.
The mid air image technique has some problems with air, air has changing refraction index due to humidity and so on.
Hang on, that's not right. Cinemas project movies through humidity, smoke, air-con outlets and all sorts of 'media of differing refractive index' without any problems at all. The real problem with the mid air image technique suggested above is the lack of a screen on which to project the light.
I think this story might give us a lot more entertainment yet. Quite often in space exploration it's what happens after things go wrong that the really interesting stuff begins. I'm thinking about the engineering solutions to the Apollo13 explosion, the Hubble Space telescope and the problems of the deep space probes like Voyager and Mariner as they encountered difficulties never imagined in their design brief - how a bunch of seriously smart software and electrical engineers stuck in a room with a load of coffee and a white board can turn a disasterous situation around. When a project like this gets effectively written off because the probe is in such bad shape, that's when the engineers get to try out "It's a long shot but it just might work" ideas. I wouldn't bet against the Jap engineers trying some pretty clever stuff to get that probe home - I'm not saying they'll be successful but it could be interesting and entertaining, and we may even learn something from it.
The best lesson I ever learned was to use my work email account solely for work emails and my private accounts for the private stuff.
Similarly, work phone's for work stuff, private phone's for all those communications better kept 'out of earshot'.
This makes life a ahole lot easier without needing any slapstick digi-voice box.
Does anybody know whether we could use asteroids to transport probes around space?
Nope, that wouldn't work. The orbital velocity of an asteroid (around the Sun) would have to be matched by any probe wanting to land on it in order to hitch a lift. If you're able to expend that amount of fuel catching up with a rock, you don't need the rock in the first place - you can just blaze your own trail.
Kamikaze style...Japanese probe....Very droll... 8-)
You have to wonder just how autonomous this probe is, if the news that it successfully landed (and has subsequently taken off again) comes as a surprise to Mission Control.