Re:'Nanosystems' for the rest of us
on
Nanotechnology
·
· Score: 1
Please talk to Mark and/or Daniel at some point. They're both busy, but they both care a lot. Mark intended this book to be exactly that--aimed at you and the general public.
Prof. Ratner teaches the general chemistry class at Northwestern every fall (Chem 101) and is excellent at figuring out how to put material at the right level.
I think they both put in the science background chapters for those who need them, but aimed the rest of it nicely to balance between those of us who know the field and those with some general science knowledge.
-Geoff
(Full disclosure: I'm a grad student of Prof. Ratner's.)
Mark has long been in the chemistry department (he's been the chairman at least once). So yes, he's part of WCAS--he was also a dean in WCAS once.
IIRC, Daniel has been lecturing at Kellogg.
But since Mark is out of the country right now, I can't ask him.
In any case, there's a distinction between materials chemistry and materials science/engineering. Mark is certainly part of the Materials Research Center here at Northwestern, but lectures the general chemistry (Chem 101) class every fall. Quite good.
No, there's no reason to change the newsletter. (And certainly CRYPTO-GRAM isn't the only e-mail newsletter that's run into problems with spam filtering.)
IMHO, spam filters are always going to be an evolving act--more obviously so with pseudo- and full Bayesian methods.
So let's treat this as part of the corpus of "non-spam" or "ham" or whatever you'd like to call it and code accordingly. If this brings more focus to improving filters and addressing non-technical methods (i.e. legal action, petitions, legislative advocacy), great.
But do we need another discussion of spam filtering?
-Geoff
(In my case, I simply filter off known good messages first before sending it to the Junk Mail filtering.)
Why can't this data come from the ISS, which has a long-term crew? Is the Shuttle critical to operating ISS
The Shuttle is pretty critical to the ISS. Yes, you can get people, fuel and supplies up with other means (i.e. Russian rockets) and we'll probably be doing this for some time now.
But the shuttles were used to do assembly (i.e. spacewalks), bring up the various new ISS modules, and to lift the ISS. Remember that the ISS is a huge beast and slowly sinks due to the small amount of air resistance. The shuttles are the easiest/best way to lift the ISS up to its normal orbit.
Bottom line--if you think the ISS is a good idea then you'll need to use the shuttles to keep it up.
Unfortunately it's a lot harder goal to reach. I've heard people throwing around 5-7% recently (which would be fantastic), but I haven't seen the data to back it up.
I think before we get there, we need to know more about charge transport in materials like the polythiophenes (which BTW, have been studied for about 20 years now).
Xerox's announcement may or may not be interesting. Those who were at the talk didn't see any actual *data*.
So let's get to it! After all, we just need better transparent conducting plastics, right?
Hello? So far the feature-length films they've done have been *for* Disney!
I'd guess that the intent is exactly that--they're currently making movies for kids, particularly Disney movies for kids, so they aim for a particular look.
I would expect that when their contract with Disney is up, they may move towards other areas.
OK, so I'll grant that most of the OLED devices I've seen at seminars and read about aren't horribly toxic. No lead, cadmium, or some of the other nasty stuff in your TV.
But *you* eat the OLED. I think I'll stick to eating something with tried-and-true edibility.
(Honestly, I doubt they're really "non-toxic" yet. Maybe they won't kill you outright immediately. Maybe someone *could* design a non-toxic one. But it'd be pretty inefficient.)
I can make a color-changing paint *now*. It turns out that many organic electronic materials change color very fast (i.e. ~0.1sec) and from essentially transparent to highly colored (red, blue, green, etc.) So I layer some red polymer, green polymer, blue polymer in a pixel and change the transparency as I wish. (within reason)
Or take a different road... Let's say I want an organic light-emitting diode like some high-end cell phones. But there's research prototypes of such displays with micron-scale or nanoscale pixels. These can turn on or off in nanoseconds.
It *can* be done. Maybe even by 2005 (hey, I helped make slides for a proposal for this stuff).
The fundamental question is *COST*.
Can I cheaply manufacture enough "nano suits" or "chameleon tanks" on the scale of the US Army?
You clearly haven't studied much materials science or chemistry at the moment.
I can make a colloid of gold particles of a certain size and it's a red vial.
I can make a colloid of gold particles of a slightly different size and it's a blue vial.
What's different is that the slight change of nm dimensions changes the wavefunctions of the gold particles. Quantum Mechanics at work! Most of these systems not only absorb certain frequencies of light but also have particular scattering phenomena.
Some apps run faster in Classic on OS X b/c the underlying subsystems can run faster on OS X. For example, parts of the I/O and memory subsystems are reported to be faster under OS X. (I'd guess I/O can be faster because the filesystem cache is probably much better.)
Plus, on multi-CPU machines, Mac OS X can use real SMP to offload a process (e.g. Classic) to one CPU while the other can do housework.
It's like the Classic app is a car -- the interface is the same, but running Classic under OS X rather than OS 9 means that the engine has changed somewhat.
Not only does BookSense support the Tattered Cover (and tons of other local independent bookstores), but you can easily order from *your* local bookstore. Can Amazon beat same-day pickup?
(BTW, the American Bookseller's Association which runs BookSense.com is partially supporting the Tattered Cover legal fees.)
Most projects would love to see more help--simply find lead developers or maintainers and say hello. Or send a message to the project mailing list and ask about projects, suggestions, etc.
There are always features that have sat on the back burner, code to be cleaned up, etc. And of course I can tell you that as an undergrad, you often have more time to code.
"Not as good as Google,"
OK, fair enough. Have some suggestions for how to improve it? Unlike Google, you can tailor all the search weightings in ht://Dig.
Either general suggestions like "titles should be weighted more" or parameter changes would be quite welcome.
It's open source, it's yours. So don't you want to see it improve?
Nah. Keep in mind that the ht://Dig project has several contributors. A few contributions of code go a long way.
Keep in mind, though, that ht://Dig already implements many "Google-like" features such as indexing the text of links to documents and keeping track of the backlink count.
http://www.htdig.org/attrs.html#backlink_factor
http://www.htdig.org/attrs.html#description_fact or
A proximity weighting would be nice, but there's some work to be done before that.
But I've also seen a pile of scientific apps miscompile on Intel or Portland Group compilers. Yes, I like 30% performance improvements on my calculations. No I do not like it when I get incorrect numbers because someone introduced some compiler bugs in those optimizations.
I'm pretty happy to see GCC's compiler test suite and public results INCLUDING performance regressions. I think GCC's working hard to be the most bug-free compiler out there. And yes, they are working on improving performance.
If you read some of the author's previous comments, it took him some 36 hours (not straight) to play through Halo. He also claims that it has significant replay value.
People have continued playing previous Bungie titles for ages. I still enjoy playing Marathon and company. How many Myth fans are there?
Bungie loves story. I wouldn't be surprised if there are parts of Halo that people will debate for years to come. e.g http://marathon.bungie.org/story/
The mifluz project uses a compressed Berkeley DB for word indexing. Depending on your application, you may find much of the code less useful, though the db/ directory contains code for creating compressed Berkeley B-Tree databases.
You should consider contacting Loic Dachary--his address is on the Senga project pages.
Well, organic semiconductors don't have the same size market as Si or Ge at the moment. But that's not saying the market isn't already huge.
* Organic LED displays have already been incorporated into cars (e.g. Lexus and Acura).
* Every roll of Agfa or Kodak film is coated with a thin film of organic semiconductor (a polythiophene derivative) as an antistatic film--this accounts for some 100 million square meters.
There are more applications, but I have to go prepare my seminar on the subject at the moment. (Sound like Fermat?)
Slashdot Mirror
Please talk to Mark and/or Daniel at some point. They're both busy, but they both care a lot. Mark intended this book to be exactly that--aimed at you and the general public.
Prof. Ratner teaches the general chemistry class at Northwestern every fall (Chem 101) and is excellent at figuring out how to put material at the right level.
I think they both put in the science background chapters for those who need them, but aimed the rest of it nicely to balance between those of us who know the field and those with some general science knowledge.
-Geoff
(Full disclosure: I'm a grad student of Prof. Ratner's.)
Mark has long been in the chemistry department (he's been the chairman at least once). So yes, he's part of WCAS--he was also a dean in WCAS once.
IIRC, Daniel has been lecturing at Kellogg.
But since Mark is out of the country right now, I can't ask him.
In any case, there's a distinction between materials chemistry and materials science/engineering. Mark is certainly part of the Materials Research Center here at Northwestern, but lectures the general chemistry (Chem 101) class every fall. Quite good.
Cheers,
-Geoff
(I'm a grad student of Mark's.)
Well, there's always something with more features and cheaper just around the corner. But the iPod is here and it's slick and has fast data transfer.
Oh, and yes, you can easily update the firmware to the iPod. Both the firmware and iPod software have been updated several times in the last year.
-Geoff
No, there's no reason to change the newsletter. (And certainly CRYPTO-GRAM isn't the only e-mail newsletter that's run into problems with spam filtering.)
IMHO, spam filters are always going to be an evolving act--more obviously so with pseudo- and full Bayesian methods.
So let's treat this as part of the corpus of "non-spam" or "ham" or whatever you'd like to call it and code accordingly. If this brings more focus to improving filters and addressing non-technical methods (i.e. legal action, petitions, legislative advocacy), great.
But do we need another discussion of spam filtering?
-Geoff
(In my case, I simply filter off known good messages first before sending it to the Junk Mail filtering.)
The Shuttle is pretty critical to the ISS. Yes, you can get people, fuel and supplies up with other means (i.e. Russian rockets) and we'll probably be doing this for some time now.
But the shuttles were used to do assembly (i.e. spacewalks), bring up the various new ISS modules, and to lift the ISS. Remember that the ISS is a huge beast and slowly sinks due to the small amount of air resistance. The shuttles are the easiest/best way to lift the ISS up to its normal orbit.
Bottom line--if you think the ISS is a good idea then you'll need to use the shuttles to keep it up.
Unfortunately it's a lot harder goal to reach. I've heard people throwing around 5-7% recently (which would be fantastic), but I haven't seen the data to back it up.
I think before we get there, we need to know more about charge transport in materials like the polythiophenes (which BTW, have been studied for about 20 years now).
Xerox's announcement may or may not be interesting. Those who were at the talk didn't see any actual *data*.
So let's get to it! After all, we just need better transparent conducting plastics, right?
-Geoff
Hello? So far the feature-length films they've done have been *for* Disney!
I'd guess that the intent is exactly that--they're currently making movies for kids, particularly Disney movies for kids, so they aim for a particular look.
I would expect that when their contract with Disney is up, they may move towards other areas.
-Geoff
Actually... I wouldn't mind having that many processors, even ignoring that the Altivec uses single-precision floats rather than doubles.
Sorry, can't resist. Imagine a cluster of PPC970s, each with 4 fast processors and a huge memory bandwidth. Not bad.
-Geoff
Uh...
OK, so I'll grant that most of the OLED devices I've seen at seminars and read about aren't horribly toxic. No lead, cadmium, or some of the other nasty stuff in your TV.
But *you* eat the OLED. I think I'll stick to eating something with tried-and-true edibility.
(Honestly, I doubt they're really "non-toxic" yet. Maybe they won't kill you outright immediately. Maybe someone *could* design a non-toxic one. But it'd be pretty inefficient.)
Mmm.. Donuts.
-Geoff
I can make a color-changing paint *now*. It turns out that many organic electronic materials change color very fast (i.e. ~0.1sec) and from essentially transparent to highly colored (red, blue, green, etc.) So I layer some red polymer, green polymer, blue polymer in a pixel and change the transparency as I wish. (within reason)
Or take a different road... Let's say I want an organic light-emitting diode like some high-end cell phones. But there's research prototypes of such displays with micron-scale or nanoscale pixels. These can turn on or off in nanoseconds.
It *can* be done. Maybe even by 2005 (hey, I helped make slides for a proposal for this stuff).
The fundamental question is *COST*.
Can I cheaply manufacture enough "nano suits" or "chameleon tanks" on the scale of the US Army?
Hmm, maybe not.
-Geoff
No offense...
You clearly haven't studied much materials science or chemistry at the moment.
I can make a colloid of gold particles of a certain size and it's a red vial.
I can make a colloid of gold particles of a slightly different size and it's a blue vial.
What's different is that the slight change of nm dimensions changes the wavefunctions of the gold particles. Quantum Mechanics at work! Most of these systems not only absorb certain frequencies of light but also have particular scattering phenomena.
-Geoff
Nope.
Some apps run faster in Classic on OS X b/c the underlying subsystems can run faster on OS X. For example, parts of the I/O and memory subsystems are reported to be faster under OS X. (I'd guess I/O can be faster because the filesystem cache is probably much better.)
Plus, on multi-CPU machines, Mac OS X can use real SMP to offload a process (e.g. Classic) to one CPU while the other can do housework.
It's like the Classic app is a car -- the interface is the same, but running Classic under OS X rather than OS 9 means that the engine has changed somewhat.
-Geoff
Heck, Apple even used the emulator for parts of the Classic MacOS. They switched to PowerPC and didn't have to rewrite their OS.
Of course the advantage was that even emulated, 68k code ran about the same or faster on PPC.
-Geoff
Actually, this is what that "soldier nanotechnology" proposal is about.
/. users probably already know about thermoelectric coolers. You can use them on your massivly-overheated overclocked CPU.
Thermoelectric materials can either:
a) Use a temperature gradient to generate electricity
b) Use electricity to create a temperature gradient
Most of these
But you can also change heat into electricity.
So to foil heat/IR imaging, you just need thermoelectric fabrics. Then you'd charge your night-vision goggles with your body heat.
One catch... Current thermoelectrics are very brittle ceramics. It's hard enough to make plates of them, much less flexible fabrics.
So we'll see if it works. But it's definitely something the US Army is interested in.
-Geoff
Better yet, please link to BookSense.com
http://www.booksense.com/
Not only does BookSense support the Tattered Cover (and tons of other local independent bookstores), but you can easily order from *your* local bookstore. Can Amazon beat same-day pickup?
(BTW, the American Bookseller's Association which runs BookSense.com is partially supporting the Tattered Cover legal fees.)
-Geoff
Most projects would love to see more help--simply find lead developers or maintainers and say hello. Or send a message to the project mailing list and ask about projects, suggestions, etc.
There are always features that have sat on the back burner, code to be cleaned up, etc. And of course I can tell you that as an undergrad, you often have more time to code.
-Geoff
"Not as good as Google,"
OK, fair enough. Have some suggestions for how to improve it? Unlike Google, you can tailor all the search weightings in ht://Dig.
Either general suggestions like "titles should be weighted more" or parameter changes would be quite welcome.
It's open source, it's yours. So don't you want to see it improve?
-Geoff
Actually, saying it doesn't have all the fancy matching algorithms isn't really fair.
t or
Granted, we can't implement Google's patented things, but that's not to say we don't come close.
Indexing the text of links to documents? Yes.
http://www.htdig.org/attrs.html#description_fac
Keeping track of the weight of links pointing to a document? Yes.
http://www.htdig.org/attrs.html#backlink_factor
Probably the big "missing link" is a proximity weighting. Interested? Help is always welcome!
-Geoff
Nah. Keep in mind that the ht://Dig project has several contributors. A few contributions of code go a long way.
t or
Keep in mind, though, that ht://Dig already implements many "Google-like" features such as indexing the text of links to documents and keeping track of the backlink count.
http://www.htdig.org/attrs.html#backlink_factor
http://www.htdig.org/attrs.html#description_fac
A proximity weighting would be nice, but there's some work to be done before that.
-Geoff
Don't take my word for it. Check the true expert in comparing search engines at searchtools.com
Has just about everything on search engine use, including comparisons.
http://www.searchtools.com/
http://gcc.gnu.org/steering.html
I think you'll find GCC development currently to be some of the most transparent and open of any project out there. Period.
But I've also seen a pile of scientific apps miscompile on Intel or Portland Group compilers. Yes, I like 30% performance improvements on my calculations. No I do not like it when I get incorrect numbers because someone introduced some compiler bugs in those optimizations.
I'm pretty happy to see GCC's compiler test suite and public results INCLUDING performance regressions. I think GCC's working hard to be the most bug-free compiler out there. And yes, they are working on improving performance.
If you read some of the author's previous comments, it took him some 36 hours (not straight) to play through Halo. He also claims that it has significant replay value.
People have continued playing previous Bungie titles for ages. I still enjoy playing Marathon and company. How many Myth fans are there?
Bungie loves story. I wouldn't be surprised if there are parts of Halo that people will debate for years to come. e.g http://marathon.bungie.org/story/
You should consider contacting Loic Dachary--his address is on the Senga project pages.
Well, organic semiconductors don't have the same size market as Si or Ge at the moment. But that's not saying the market isn't already huge.
* Organic LED displays have already been incorporated into cars (e.g. Lexus and Acura).
* Every roll of Agfa or Kodak film is coated with a thin film of organic semiconductor (a polythiophene derivative) as an antistatic film--this accounts for some 100 million square meters.
There are more applications, but I have to go prepare my seminar on the subject at the moment. (Sound like Fermat?)
-Geoff