OK, technically it's brownian motion, but isn't that random enough?
In H2G2 Logic: As every object in the universe exerts an influence on every other object in the universe it is in fact possible to extrapolate all of creation from a small fairy cake. Hence it would be a simple extension of the principle used in the total perspective vortex for anyone to know the exact state of your brownian motion producer at any point so long as they have easy access to the necessary baked good.
In the real world: I would say brownian motion is pretty damn random. Theoretically if you new the precise position and velocity of every molecule in the tea at one instant you might be able to predict where it will be at some point in the future. However, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle means that it is impossible to do this even if you have access to the other persons cup of tea.
So if we hit florada with some bombs then we should be spam free right?
One nuke exploded at high altitude over Florida should be adequate. The EMP should blow just about everything electronic in the Sunshine State, or should that be the Spam State:-)
I think bloody is probably the "Chicken Korma" of swear words. For the benefit of those who are not exposed to the Indian style cooking, this is a very mild curry. I cut and pasted the text from the BBC transcript and have no idea why they put stars in, they didn't bleep the video version.
Unfortunately it is true, he died in a Gym. Lalla Ward, actress and friend of Douglas Adams, had this to say on this matter:
I think the only thing that might conceivably have made Douglas laugh was the thought that some of us now have an excuse never to set foot in a b****y gym ever again, because that's where he died.
You can read/listen to the full interview of Lalla Ward here
There are some interesting bits in this interview that show just how many people Douglas Adams knew. For example Lalla Ward met her 2nd husband Richard Dawkins (Famous evolutionary Biologist and author of such books as "The Blind Watchmaker" through Douglas.
Re:great result, but not really a "discovery"
on
Nuclear Fusion Discovered
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Muon catalysed cold fusion has looked like a good possibility for decades. However, as far as I'm aware, the problem is that the muons end up sticking to the fusion products too often rather than going on to catalyse the next fusion. As muons are short lived and "expensive" in terms of energy to produce this is not yet a practical source of power.
I seem to recall that in the forward to one of his books (probably 2010, or one of the other 2001 sequels) Arthur C Clarke talks about this as a possible source of power and that he describes it as working best at about 700C. Very cold compared to every other form of fusion that has been conclusively shown to actually work.
In 1993, players would routinely pay around $3-$6 per hour for text-based....
I'm amazed people were paying! There were thousands of free muds back in 1993. Surprisingly, many of them are still going today. This is rather impressive when you consider how dead the single player text based adventure has become.
Having saved a few cents on O rings here, a few cents on insulating foam there and another few cents on leading wing edges they can now afford to hire the best web artists and B list TV stars to build a really cool website.;-)
Seriously speaking, I'm all for NASA communicating what they are doing but I prefer there older sites which have been more content driven and highly functional rather than "flashy".
They have pork rind buffets? Like... an entire buffet of pork rinds?
I suspect that even at the headquarters of Atkins Nutritionals you wont find a buffet made up entirely or pork scratchings. Although it is a permitted food on the diet:-)
That's not actually as daft as it first sounds, the mobious strip has only 1 side and can form an interesting sculptural piece when made from a suitable material.
I suggest constructing such a case with a brushed steel effect as a vertical figure 8 mounted on a polished slab of black stone.
Should look rather stunning and there is bound to be somewhere to squeeze in a mini-itx case.
Humans wouldn't necessarily appreciate the smell of hydrogen sulphide while being placed into suspended animation
One of the effects of hydrogen sulphide exposure is that is "paralyses" the sense of smell before a fatal dose is reached. This is normally very dangerous as people can think they have left the contaminated area while continuing in fact to breathe in more of the toxic gas.
So chances are you wouldn't have to put up with the smell too long, before you either stop smelling, die horribly or maybe just go into suspended animation.
Lets get the inevitable cheesy comedy pastiche of Conan the Barbarian dialogue out the way...
Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if our posts were good or bad. Why we posted or how we were flamed. All that matters is that today, few posted against many. Valour pleases you, so grant me this one request. Grant me Karma.
And if you do not listen, then to hell with you!;-)
They haven't been used as sources of illumination because they, for a long time, could not produce white light -- only red, green and yellow. Nichia Chemical of Japan changed that in 1993 when it started producing blue LEDs, which combined with red and green produce white light, opening up a whole new field for the technology.
This is certainly one way to produce a white LED but it is not the common method today. Most white LEDs use a phosphor to convert a blue or ultraviolet LED into a white one. A quick google found the following page that talks about this in more detail:
I would speculate that for normal home lighting using a phosphor will give better results as:
Using separate red, green, and blue emitters increases complexity. Different colour LEDs are often made using different semiconductors.
Using 3 separate LEDs will produce a light that looks white, however as LEDs only produce a very narrow range of frequencies (determined by the band gap as I recall) this may cause some colours to look a bit off. Fluorescent lighting also works by converting UV to visible light and can produce an excellent reproduction of daylight. Providing of course you buy the right tube that uses the approprite magic combination of phosphors.
Speaking as someone with a degree in electronics I can honestly say that the marketing of high end speaker cable is one of the biggest piles of male bovine excrement out there. Both theory and blind listening tests have shown that twin core mains cable actually makes decent speaker cable. The reason is simple, at the frequencies we are talking about the critical parameter is resistance.
There are far too many myths in the area of speaker cables, e.g. silly ideas like its directional. In practice the least linear and most imperfect part of the hifi setup is normally the speakers (or headphones). The frequency response of speaker cable and decent modern amplifiers are very flat.
A lot of "big name" actors consider voice work to be a nice cushy job, which is probably why they do it! No spending hours in makeup, no having their hair done, no messing about in silly costumes. Just sit down, do their lines and collect a big cheque. Half the time they don't even need to be there at the same time as the other actors so they can do it when they want in between other projects.
Its probably a good thing, people like
Tom Baker seem to spend much of their lives doing voice overs for games, documentaries, adverts plus the odd animated film (
Magic Roundabout) and even a comedy series (
Little Britain).
To be honest, I don't see any reason why actors shouldn't go fot this easy money, everyone likes a bit of easy money!
My recollection is that they use a silver halide, in essentially the same way as for normal light sensitive sun glasses. Under exposure to UV light the silver halide splits into metallic silver (that reflects light) and the halogen. These can recombine once the UV is removed.
What I can't recall is what they do to get the reaction rate up, this might be by using different halides (e.g. Silver Chloride and Silver Bromide react at different rates). Or it might be something like changing the grain size size for the silver halide crystals in the glass, much like different film speeds.
Space is very cold, in deep space not much above absolute zero. You might think that the problem facing designers of space suits and space craft is keeping warm. However while space is not an "absolute vacuum" the gas is so incredibly thin that it will not conduct much heat away. So getting rid of the heat generated by the human body is a major problem.
Within the solar system you have hugely fluctuating amounts of inbound solar (e.g. IR) radiation as well to complicate things, as mentioned in the article. Picking a spot with a constant temperature and light level is an advantage as it makes the thermal design easier. However, I suspect picking the relatively warm -50C spot is not that helpful and that a colder spot of constant temperature and light levels would in fact be slightly better.
I also suspect that being on the moon makes things easier than in orbit, while there is still no atmosphere worth talking about there is at least a big chunk of rock you can exchange heat with.
Another interesting factoid is that the visors on space suits have to respond to changes in light levels _very_ quickly compared to the photochromatic lenses in our sunglasses. Otherwise if the poor astronaut looks from the dark towards the sun without the benefit of an atmosphere he is in big trouble! I guess having a constant light level will help with any "windows" for a moon base as well.
That very much depends on your application(s) and your budget. To be honest, if all your going to do is run X Windows it really doesnt matter too much if the driver is a bit suboptimal because all modern cards are darn fast for 2D applications.
There is a scene where the protagonists try to persuade the guard they have over powered to put his hand on the sensor to open the door so they can progress their escape. Naturally he is not helping.
Then Gan says to him: Look, we only need the hand. If you want to stay attached to it, do as you're told.
Every little hint of what was coming in the film has filled me with terror, the people making it, the trailers and the rumours. Looks like it will indeed be pants.
However, don't despair. The tertiary phase of the radio series, first broadcast in the UK late last year, was very reasonable. While not perfect it did manage to remain quite true to the original radio series despite the huge time gap between them.
Dr Evil: I'm sorry Scott I can't help you destroy Alaska today. Daddy has to compete in a competition with Dr. No and the Russian Maffia to see who is the most evil virus writer.
Maybe they are just too busy running their evil empires to compete in competitions?
I can't even remember the last time I saw spam in my inbox.
My "personal" email is first filtered through Brightmail at the ISP. About 60 emails per month make it past the first "layer" of filtering.
I have no way to know how many false positives are eaten. After that Thunderbird acts as a 2nd layer moving spam to the junk folder.
My work email relies just on Thuderbird's built in "learning" spam filter. Spams get past the filter every day. It marks legit email as spam often enough that I have to check the junk folder for false positives. I can't afford to risk not replying to a customer issue or missing a genuine email about a real business proposal.
Sure there are probably better spam filtering solutions but why should we waste our valuable time to becoming spam filtering experts so we can install and configure the best solution?
Spam filtering is like taking a pain killer for the headache you are getting from a brain tumour. It might make you feel better and let you get on with your life for a while but its not dealing with the actual problem.
*insert counter-argument involving anti-spam companies helping the economy*
That's like arguing AIDS is a good thing because without it there wouldn't be a decent market for protease inhibitors and antiretroviral drugs. Or, that we shouldn't throw thieves in jail as the problem is that we have easily broken glass windows. Should we all install iron bars and polycarbonate glass?
I'm amazed how many people have disagreed with this posters assessment that this sentence was fair.
Lets do the calculation for how much time this spammer has wasted every day. If he sends 10 million spams per day and each spam takes 1 second of someone's time to delete then every day he wastes about 10000000/60/60/7.5/230 = 1.6 man years. Don't forget, that's 1.6 man years every day.
This is damaging the economy. Damaging the economy means less income for governments round the world, which means less money is available to pay for health care, road safety improvements, famine relief etc. He is not just wasting time he is hurting people.
Certainly many of us have spam filters, and they do help. But they are no a magic bullet, we often manually check our spam folders for false positives, still have to filter some spams manually as the filters don't catch everything and so forth.
Email used to be a fast and reliable way to contact people, now its unreliable thanks to all the spam filters we have put in to mitigate the hassle caused by assholes like this spammer.
I'm sure I'm not alone in hoping the Mounties will continue with their tradition of always getting their man. Now if only we could set them loose on the people filling our inboxes with spam as well. Or maybe the SAS:-)
The way things are going in the western world at the moment I do fear that we are sleep walking towards some kind of Orwellian nightmare. We face a determined foe who are willing to die for what they believe in. Yet we are willing to throw aside our own hard won values of freedom and justice in the interest of "safety".
Freedom is Slavery was a propaganda slogan from the book 1984, designed to keep the masses happy with being oppressed. Every time I hear Tony Blair or George Bush reducing our rights to "protect freedom" I'm reminded of this.
Our scientists, who can predeict when an eclipse will occur, also reckon the end of the world is about 5 billion years away. At this point the nuclear fusion process in the sun will run out of "steam" and the stars core will contract while the outer layers expand to engulf the inner planets (including the earth).
Slashdot Mirror
In H2G2 Logic: As every object in the universe exerts an influence on every other object in the universe it is in fact possible to extrapolate all of creation from a small fairy cake. Hence it would be a simple extension of the principle used in the total perspective vortex for anyone to know the exact state of your brownian motion producer at any point so long as they have easy access to the necessary baked good.
In the real world: I would say brownian motion is pretty damn random. Theoretically if you new the precise position and velocity of every molecule in the tea at one instant you might be able to predict where it will be at some point in the future. However, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle means that it is impossible to do this even if you have access to the other persons cup of tea.
So if we hit florada with some bombs then we should be spam free right?
One nuke exploded at high altitude over Florida should be adequate. The EMP should blow just about everything electronic in the Sunshine State, or should that be the Spam State :-)
I think bloody is probably the "Chicken Korma" of swear words. For the benefit of those who are not exposed to the Indian style cooking, this is a very mild curry. I cut and pasted the text from the BBC transcript and have no idea why they put stars in, they didn't bleep the video version.
Unfortunately it is true, he died in a Gym. Lalla Ward, actress and friend of Douglas Adams, had this to say on this matter:
I think the only thing that might conceivably have made Douglas laugh was the thought that some of us now have an excuse never to set foot in a b****y gym ever again, because that's where he died.
You can read/listen to the full interview of Lalla Ward here
There are some interesting bits in this interview that show just how many people Douglas Adams knew. For example Lalla Ward met her 2nd husband Richard Dawkins (Famous evolutionary Biologist and author of such books as "The Blind Watchmaker" through Douglas.
Muon catalysed cold fusion has looked like a good possibility for decades. However, as far as I'm aware, the problem is that the muons end up sticking to the fusion products too often rather than going on to catalyse the next fusion. As muons are short lived and "expensive" in terms of energy to produce this is not yet a practical source of power.
I seem to recall that in the forward to one of his books (probably 2010, or one of the other 2001 sequels) Arthur C Clarke talks about this as a possible source of power and that he describes it as working best at about 700C. Very cold compared to every other form of fusion that has been conclusively shown to actually work.
I'm amazed people were paying! There were thousands of free muds back in 1993. Surprisingly, many of them are still going today. This is rather impressive when you consider how dead the single player text based adventure has become.
Having saved a few cents on O rings here, a few cents on insulating foam there and another few cents on leading wing edges they can now afford to hire the best web artists and B list TV stars to build a really cool website. ;-)
Seriously speaking, I'm all for NASA communicating what they are doing but I prefer there older sites which have been more content driven and highly functional rather than "flashy".
I suspect that even at the headquarters of Atkins Nutritionals you wont find a buffet made up entirely or pork scratchings. Although it is a permitted food on the diet :-)
That's not actually as daft as it first sounds, the mobious strip has only 1 side and can form an interesting sculptural piece when made from a suitable material.
I suggest constructing such a case with a brushed steel effect as a vertical figure 8 mounted on a polished slab of black stone.
Should look rather stunning and there is bound to be somewhere to squeeze in a mini-itx case.
One of the effects of hydrogen sulphide exposure is that is "paralyses" the sense of smell before a fatal dose is reached. This is normally very dangerous as people can think they have left the contaminated area while continuing in fact to breathe in more of the toxic gas.
So chances are you wouldn't have to put up with the smell too long, before you either stop smelling, die horribly or maybe just go into suspended animation.
Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if our posts were good or bad. Why we posted or how we were flamed. All that matters is that today, few posted against many. Valour pleases you, so grant me this one request. Grant me Karma.
And if you do not listen, then to hell with you! ;-)
They haven't been used as sources of illumination because they, for a long time, could not produce white light -- only red, green and yellow. Nichia Chemical of Japan changed that in 1993 when it started producing blue LEDs, which combined with red and green produce white light, opening up a whole new field for the technology.
This is certainly one way to produce a white LED but it is not the common method today. Most white LEDs use a phosphor to convert a blue or ultraviolet LED into a white one. A quick google found the following page that talks about this in more detail:
http://www.marktechopto.com/engineering/white.cfm
I would speculate that for normal home lighting using a phosphor will give better results as:
Speaking as someone with a degree in electronics I can honestly say that the marketing of high end speaker cable is one of the biggest piles of male bovine excrement out there. Both theory and blind listening tests have shown that twin core mains cable actually makes decent speaker cable. The reason is simple, at the frequencies we are talking about the critical parameter is resistance.
There are far too many myths in the area of speaker cables, e.g. silly ideas like its directional. In practice the least linear and most imperfect part of the hifi setup is normally the speakers (or headphones). The frequency response of speaker cable and decent modern amplifiers are very flat.
A lot of "big name" actors consider voice work to be a nice cushy job, which is probably why they do it! No spending hours in makeup, no having their hair done, no messing about in silly costumes. Just sit down, do their lines and collect a big cheque. Half the time they don't even need to be there at the same time as the other actors so they can do it when they want in between other projects.
Its probably a good thing, people like Tom Baker seem to spend much of their lives doing voice overs for games, documentaries, adverts plus the odd animated film ( Magic Roundabout) and even a comedy series ( Little Britain).
To be honest, I don't see any reason why actors shouldn't go fot this easy money, everyone likes a bit of easy money!
My recollection is that they use a silver halide, in essentially the same way as for normal light sensitive sun glasses. Under exposure to UV light the silver halide splits into metallic silver (that reflects light) and the halogen. These can recombine once the UV is removed.
What I can't recall is what they do to get the reaction rate up, this might be by using different halides (e.g. Silver Chloride and Silver Bromide react at different rates). Or it might be something like changing the grain size size for the silver halide crystals in the glass, much like different film speeds.
Anyone know for sure?
Space is very cold, in deep space not much above absolute zero. You might think that the problem facing designers of space suits and space craft is keeping warm. However while space is not an "absolute vacuum" the gas is so incredibly thin that it will not conduct much heat away. So getting rid of the heat generated by the human body is a major problem.
Within the solar system you have hugely fluctuating amounts of inbound solar (e.g. IR) radiation as well to complicate things, as mentioned in the article. Picking a spot with a constant temperature and light level is an advantage as it makes the thermal design easier. However, I suspect picking the relatively warm -50C spot is not that helpful and that a colder spot of constant temperature and light levels would in fact be slightly better.
I also suspect that being on the moon makes things easier than in orbit, while there is still no atmosphere worth talking about there is at least a big chunk of rock you can exchange heat with.
Another interesting factoid is that the visors on space suits have to respond to changes in light levels _very_ quickly compared to the photochromatic lenses in our sunglasses. Otherwise if the poor astronaut looks from the dark towards the sun without the benefit of an atmosphere he is in big trouble! I guess having a constant light level will help with any "windows" for a moon base as well.
That very much depends on your application(s) and your budget. To be honest, if all your going to do is run X Windows it really doesnt matter too much if the driver is a bit suboptimal because all modern cards are darn fast for 2D applications.
I think ever since seeing the classic sci-fi series http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/classic/blakes7/Blake's 7 as a kid the idea of biometric locks has filled me with dread.
There is a scene where the protagonists try to persuade the guard they have over powered to put his hand on the sensor to open the door so they can progress their escape. Naturally he is not helping.
Then Gan says to him: Look, we only need the hand. If you want to stay attached to it, do as you're told.
Strangely enough, instant compliance!
Every little hint of what was coming in the film has filled me with terror, the people making it, the trailers and the rumours. Looks like it will indeed be pants.
However, don't despair. The tertiary phase of the radio series, first broadcast in the UK late last year, was very reasonable. While not perfect it did manage to remain quite true to the original radio series despite the huge time gap between them.
For more info see http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/newseries. shtml
or http://www.abovethetitle.com/content/programmes/hi tchhikers/hitchhikers_solong.html
A fourth series is planned.
Maybe they are just too busy running their evil empires to compete in competitions?
I can't even remember the last time I saw spam in my inbox.
My "personal" email is first filtered through Brightmail at the ISP. About 60 emails per month make it past the first "layer" of filtering. I have no way to know how many false positives are eaten. After that Thunderbird acts as a 2nd layer moving spam to the junk folder.
My work email relies just on Thuderbird's built in "learning" spam filter. Spams get past the filter every day. It marks legit email as spam often enough that I have to check the junk folder for false positives. I can't afford to risk not replying to a customer issue or missing a genuine email about a real business proposal.
Sure there are probably better spam filtering solutions but why should we waste our valuable time to becoming spam filtering experts so we can install and configure the best solution?
Spam filtering is like taking a pain killer for the headache you are getting from a brain tumour. It might make you feel better and let you get on with your life for a while but its not dealing with the actual problem.
*insert counter-argument involving anti-spam companies helping the economy*
That's like arguing AIDS is a good thing because without it there wouldn't be a decent market for protease inhibitors and antiretroviral drugs. Or, that we shouldn't throw thieves in jail as the problem is that we have easily broken glass windows. Should we all install iron bars and polycarbonate glass?
I'm amazed how many people have disagreed with this posters assessment that this sentence was fair.
Lets do the calculation for how much time this spammer has wasted every day. If he sends 10 million spams per day and each spam takes 1 second of someone's time to delete then every day he wastes about 10000000/60/60/7.5/230 = 1.6 man years. Don't forget, that's 1.6 man years every day.
This is damaging the economy. Damaging the economy means less income for governments round the world, which means less money is available to pay for health care, road safety improvements, famine relief etc. He is not just wasting time he is hurting people.
Certainly many of us have spam filters, and they do help. But they are no a magic bullet, we often manually check our spam folders for false positives, still have to filter some spams manually as the filters don't catch everything and so forth.
Email used to be a fast and reliable way to contact people, now its unreliable thanks to all the spam filters we have put in to mitigate the hassle caused by assholes like this spammer.
I'm sure I'm not alone in hoping the Mounties will continue with their tradition of always getting their man. Now if only we could set them loose on the people filling our inboxes with spam as well. Or maybe the SAS :-)
The way things are going in the western world at the moment I do fear that we are sleep walking towards some kind of Orwellian nightmare. We face a determined foe who are willing to die for what they believe in. Yet we are willing to throw aside our own hard won values of freedom and justice in the interest of "safety".
Freedom is Slavery was a propaganda slogan from the book 1984, designed to keep the masses happy with being oppressed. Every time I hear Tony Blair or George Bush reducing our rights to "protect freedom" I'm reminded of this.
Our scientists, who can predeict when an eclipse will occur, also reckon the end of the world is about 5 billion years away. At this point the nuclear fusion process in the sun will run out of "steam" and the stars core will contract while the outer layers expand to engulf the inner planets (including the earth).