You may be right. But I am not familiar what this matrix thing is you talk about.
Presumably if there are a lot of threats you would use a spreadsheet or a very, very well administered database? Probably the guys in the room were running out of fingers and toes to count on and somebody said, you know...
p.s. I hereby bequeath to the world this maybe new idea for a wall computer. Display is big and long like a chalkboard or wall sized screen. Has a keyboard like a counter top at the bottom of the chalkboard where erasers normally go. Other possible pointer / input devices like a standard modern planetarium control booth setup, and remote operation from a plurality of networked computers, also okay. Can network with an unlimited of similar devices like a CAVE or CAVERN system, and can display them tiled, or can have such devices on a number of walls / partition walls/ flat surfaces in other orientations in a physical space, including use of displays on standalone devices in the space too. We can call this the chalkboard surface format and be done with it. Bring it on! (or as Apple is saying to MS, "we already thought of that but your is too small so it will suck to use it. come back when you can wallpaper a house with retina display elements, doofus!")
Chalkboard? In other words, change the ergonomic equation and it could work.
Frankly I'd like to try the surface to make my own decision, but I don't want to use Windows. I prefer my 2009 MacBook Pro. However if the display converted to a drawable surface with pressure-sensitive pen like a wacom tablet I would seriously consider it. It might be okay if you can pick the display up off the stand easily, but for everyday use and anything harder than pushing a play button will scream for a mouse, or a horizontal surface, or an arm.
Anyway, FWIW the words are silly (my touchscreen android phone works fine vertically) but there is a bit of truth there (probably I have my elbows close to my body or otherwise am reducing strain unconsciously). Imagine trying to type on your house's doorbell, with your wrist bent back like that it will hurt.
IANA ergonomics expert, but it would seem (based on shooting pains I get from near-carpal tunnel sometimes) that anatomical truths and normal desktop usage position mean some weak muscles are going to get overused when you continually reach over to press or drag across a screen tilted away from you on the other side of the keyboard, without having your arm behind it for leverage even. I can almost feel the pain..
- It would be different if it was a chalkboard / wallscreen. There are a number of nice whiteboard systems out there. the deal is you are standing not sitting, basically you are built to do this kind of gesture. And letters can be big. - If you held it like an ipad of course it would be fine - If you could sit back in your armchair and draw on the screen with a 3d pointer it would be fine. Might be awkward though. - if you have a sit and stand desk that you stand behind, um well it would still suck. But if you put the machine on a cantilevered clamp of some sort so that you could hold it like a baby in one arm while drawing (imagine touching baby's nose) it might not be a strain in any position short of lying on your back.
If it's safety you want, I don't understand why you are trying to get other sites to freely back up your data. Get a real backup service and tell people how it's backed up, poof! safety. Or if you want to make a community resource you can do like sourceforge, ibiblio, etc, free mirrors that point back to your site.
I've long been curious about people who have such strident views on this subject. I mean, are you really a qualified medical doctor? No, I doubt it.
Since everything in biology and chemistry is based on statistical probabilities, I wonder why you cannot imagine cellphone radiation (the heating and directional microwave radiation on wavelengths the same size as some biological structures) as once in a while enhancing the probability of cancer that is already perhaps elevated by other circumstances.
IANA Doctor but it seems that cancer is a preprogrammed failure mode that can be triggered by lots of irritants and probability greatly enhanced by certain factors. No way to say about what the situation is in this isolated case though.
If you consider heating the side of your head for hours a day an irritant there doesn't seem much of a problem with it contributing to disease, even if the frequencies are not in the x-ray region. This is why I put my phone on speakerphone when it is also acting like a wireless router. Since I remember reading somewhere that putting your head next to powerful base stations is a good way to get cooked.
FWIW I have long been wondering what happens as we keep going up into the gigahertz frequencies and zeroing in on the "wavelength equals size of some important biological structure that doesn't like heating". Conceivably he could have been already susceptible and long hours of heating pushed him into the statistical losers cluster.
Anyway just my two cents but the world would be more pleasant to live in, and I think more rational, if we had less strident robots who think they are laying down the law. Of which I accept I have probably been guilty myself.
Hi, and thanks for a great comment. What have found is that there is a clear road to follow in development. Over the years a number of the issues I have submitted, mostly user experience related, are treated as enhancements, even if they are pretty important. Sometimes these get handled much later I think.
The most recent issue I mentioned about RTF and RTFD (LO can't open them but should) was picked up and treated seriously by more than one person and I am excited about that. At least, it is silly if you are on a Mac using TextEdit, Bean, etc. to save an RTF (I keep all my notes in these flat files) but can't open it in LibreOffice.
When I report a bug, I usually find another one or two additional bugs/enhancement issues at the same time. For example, I discovered IIRC that when you try to paste an outline it doesn't work! And I rediscovered the other day (I actually recognized the issue a long time ago) that exporting an LO document with text interleaving two numbered outlines will renumber incorrectly when opened in MS Word. These are really basic!
But let's take a step back. There really is a finite number of use-cases for an Office suite in business. The real problem seems to be a lack of interest or role in the open source project development for a person or team that steers development to real business world issues and pounds on all aspects of user experience including UI, functionality, expectations, interoperability, etc. to ensure that something of high quality will be the answer.
This is the only reason I can figure out the LO still does not have a widget in the scrollbar that you can pull down to make a split view like in MS Word. And you can't tile two windows. So if I wanted to say, translate a Word or PDF technical document into another window I have to drag and align windows in 1 or more applications and not have other windows open in those applications at the same time. The issues about RTF, outline export, and cut and paste are similarly, things that just couldn't happen if there was anybody involved who has a vested interest in making a quality business product. That is why I think there should be a new team added to LibreOffice and maybe other projects, that will have a specific mandate of ensuring ease of use by the business user. These are the people who pay for things after all. I think this might improve as European governments move into LibreOffice but since so many businesspeople have given up on OOo already, I feel there are few people who push to solve these problems, or even do user experience testing (eating their own dog food), otherwise they should discover these problems themselves and be frustrated enough to fix them. My two cents and I certainly love LibreOffice but wish it could be a little better. A little can be a lot.
This. I have done similar comparisons for myself many times. I used OOo way back in the beginning and have contributed bug reports to both OOo and LibreOffice. I upgraded from OOo to NeoOffice to LibreOffice Mac version. But, Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac is STILL superior so I need both! It kills me! The reason why is "LibreOffice will wreck this layout" and "which means I would not be able to share the document with other people", and also "And even simple things like bulleted or numbered outlines get screwed up and wrongly numbered when sending from LO to MSO"!! How utterly braindead. And wasn't there a thing where "passwords are not secure so we won't implement them"? Anyway you just have to have MS Office if you want to do work in the real world, unless you can live in a perfect LibreOffice Oasis and only send PDF, etc to the rest of the world. That, and I was too cheap to buy the most recent MS Office for the Mac which is probably better/faster. However, for my own work I prefer LibreOffice. Main reasons are: - Autocomplete means less keystrokes, so I think my hands hurt less after a long document. - Faster - Draw is useful, I can quickly draw something and then print to PDF (I use the Mac print dialog, for some reason I think it's superior to the PDF Export button?) - The whole database thing is cool though pretty opaque. If only there was a kickstarter to fix LibreOffice, by adding a "Compatibility Mode" that JUST. WORKS. EXACTLY. LIKE. MS OFFICE! (Except the crappy Save as HTML in MS Office that needs to be killed.) (And I am just talking about document interoperability. Some things work better in LibreOffice.) Incidentally my most recent bug report in LibreOffice was about how you can't open RTF and it silently fails. I recommended also opening RTFD, which if that works would be the only way to open RTFD on Windows. Woot! Um, why do I care about OOo anymore?
There's crossing the line, and then there's blowing past it in a rocket car while going for the world land speed record. Did you every think when you were younger, if you remember before the Internet, that your phone company would listen in on your conversations, analyze them word for word, tally them up and present them to advertisers in neat little charts? The government does that? Heck I'm not doing anything wrong. The utility does it for profit? Mmmm.. no. The hulking sasquatch in the corner is that you can in fact find out things about people, or even more easily, about tiny groups of interest, even if you have stripped the caller data. And what if one of your marketing customers has written some finely targeted apps, for which they buy the report? It may be quite easy to integrate the additional data with what they have already got.
Actually public speaking while probably very useful is the most dangerous of all the courses. Most likely politicians who decide to kill science and exploration are guys who took public speaking and not science. Basic chemistry is pretty important if you want to cook, scuba dive, or understand a third of biology, and considering we are entering a materials science and nano/biotech revolution he will live through, a basic understanding is probably important. Otherwise, survey courses teaching a foundation in scientific thinking may be great.. but it seems this can be done in science class and still learn actual science not "how to talk about science". That said, many science courses and teachers are undoubtedly uninspired and dull..
OP of this thread here.. Thanks for your reply. Perhaps I am off base, but checking again with wikipedia I understand that the point is the user is in a locus that is an intersection of spherical surfaces, the spheres being centered on the gps satellites. If you are not carrying an atomic clock of your own, you satellite 1 for that. Then sats 2 and 3 give you an intersection locus that is a two-dimensional circle intersecting the Earth. The intersection of circle and Earth gives you two possible points you may be at. While you ought to have a sat 4 to get just one 3D point, actually instead of sat 4 you can use information you have like your elevation or inertial navigation. I was thinking that solar observation, accelerometer, wifi dictionary like google has, knowing your phone's country code, or sheer common sense would be enough to detect which of the two cities you are in. Does GPS work this way, and since wifi is not always available what would you say the resolution would be in case of 3 sats plus knowing your country and route (giving you general altitude and part of the world)?
If it is a critical webapp or I'm paying money for it, I think it would make less user-friendly since I would, after enough iterations, be peeved about having to read about his wife every time I used it. Whereas it would be quite appropriate on a separate credits page by itself, analagous to the About window that almost all desktop apps have.
I learned this on a homestay program I was on when I was much younger, I went to a school called Haberdashers' Askes in Watford outside London for a month and lived with a kind family. One thing that remains engraved in my mind decades later, besides the epiphany of salt and vinegar crisps, was how history taught in England about what we call the Revolutionary War (which they call the American War of Independence) focused on their dashing generals, battles, etc. whereas U.S. education focused on ours. Sounds obvious and not so different as I explain it now, but at the time I remember being dumfounded when we were talking about the same event but it sounded like we were talking about different worlds. I think they were mystified about reenactments and famous sites in the U.S. Come to think about it, a global course of standardized education based on a wikipedia of facts such as can be objectively determined (quite difficult in the context of Japan-China relations I know) and translations of talented writers of history who try not to grind any axes, might be a good step towards preventing a significant number of deaths. Any takers?
IANAP but would a consequence of the universe being a simulation imply that it may not be holographic?
From my extremely minimal understanding and wikipedia the universe as a hologram comes out of noting a black hole's entropy increases as the square not the cube of its radius, therefore its content can be described by fluctuations in the surface of a sphere containing it. But if the universe is a simulation then this could simply be a kludge that only covers singularities, the rest of the universe indeed being based on a three dimensional lattice.
This question is probably founded on a lot of misunderstandings but I am curious about what the universe as a simulation might mean in terms of future science. Yeah warp drives, magic, ftl, etc.
I wonder, since you can pretty much figure out what city you are in through ordinary radio and wifi beacons, not to mention the help you could get from having a clock and a sun locator, couldn't you really use GPS on the road with just two or three satellites?
Their list has a bunch of things that are neither the next big thing nor needing to be on the list, and lean towards military applications. We have plenty of military applications already. Here is what we basically need:
1) Stop burning petroleum for power. We need to use this precious resource for chemical synthesis.
2) Invest in developing technology to build solar power satellites capable of collecting power over huge surface area and beam to Earth or the moon. Convert power received at base station to hydrogen or some other transportable fuel.
3) Similarly invest more in power generation from renewable sources and nano/biotechnology based solutions.
4) Power the humanitarian items on the list using this power.
5) Of course when they say "mind over matter" they ought to be meaning an intelligently directable self-assembling nanotechnology (or microtechnology even) which would revolutionize production. I guess that is too far away to be considered the "next" big thing?
I like my HTC Evo 4G but.. 1) eats batteries like cookie monster eats cookies 2) email attachments get downloaded repeatedly, and stored in an inaccessible folder 3) bloatware you cannot delete even if you don't use it and phone memory is used up due to #2. 4) not waterproof
Totally without any basis, say it needs another 3 billion to get to market. Instead, spend 1 billion more on education, 1 billion on solar power satellites, and 1 billion reduction of the budget..
It is cool. Might turn a satellite into a cloud of debris, not a slower solid satellite. But is it obvious, if you know astronomy, read manga, or just live in space for a while and try to stop debris with what you have on hand?
From the DARPA zero robotics challenge, "RetroSPHERES satellites launched into a polar orbit to deploy micro dust clouds that can deorbit small pieces of space debris with high velocity collisions (ablation)." A "micro dust cloud" sounds similar to Boeing's cloud of heavy gas (a "nano dust cloud"). http://zerorobotics.mit.edu/ZRHS2012/RetroSPHERES.pdf
Also recent news, but "The US Naval Research Laboratory is proposing to encircle the Earth with tungsten dust in an attempt to bring down dangerous space junk" http://www.technologyreview.com/view/423629/orbiting-dust-storm-could-remove-space-junk/ IANAP but "Their scheme is to release some 20 tons of tungsten dust at an altitude of 1100km, creating a thin shell of particles that will entirely envelop the Earth," that sounds like a baaaad idea!
ARXIV black hole paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9512101.pdf In 1995 these researchers modelled collisions of supersonic gas streams and found they are efficient at circularizing debris orbits.
Coronal Ejection. Basically a gas cloud, IIRC it is known to affect satellites but not sure if effect is primarily electrical or is here also a physical deflection of orbital path?
In PLANETES a space debris cleanup team deorbits junk in LEO, not by shooting it with gas but by pushing, sometimes with a gloved hand, onto a terminal vector. But their guns and bikes are gas propelled. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
In Moonlight Mile, which covers exploitation of the Moon, there are a number of scenes in which clouds of debris moving at orbital speeds cause tremendous damage. Not exactly the Boeing invention though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_Mile_(manga)
I know it's not going to happen but suspend disbelief temporarily please. The issue is "I trust the operators of my favorite website but not the advertisers who buy space on their pages". Advertisers can track you if you load ads from their servers. If you are happy with that then fine. I am not talking about your blog posts at all.
This is a confusing press release. From what I can gather, this bacterium, which has already been discovered decades ago and its genome fully sequenced, was found 3 years ago to reduce toxic gold compounds into metallic gold. The MSU team fed higher concentration gold solution and this created spherical metallic gold "nuggets" around 30 microns up to 1.2 mm in size. The art exhibition which is pretty distracting from the original scientific research, of which it appears there was some, plays on the themes of alchemy and illuminated manuscripts.
Unfortunately the explanation of the cool scientific part is completely overshadowed and twisted by the art exhibition! That is really annoying. Art exhibitions made by or in collaboration with scientists are often interesting but this announcement of research and an art exhibition at the same time means that factually incorrect words are helplessly mixed in with fact, making everything cloudy. It may seem romantic but it really is a bad idea to do that. In fact the only place alchemy really happens that we know of is in a nuclear reaction, which this is not.
ScienceDaily (Oct. 9, 2009) — Australian scientists have found that the bacterium Cupriavidus metallidurans catalyses the biomineralisation of gold by transforming toxic gold compounds to their metallic form using active cellular mechanism. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091007103034.htm
The bacterium Cupriavidus metallidurans strain CH34, originally isolated by us in 1976 from a metal processing factory, is considered a major model organism in this field because it withstands milli-molar range concentrations of over 20 different heavy metal ions. This tolerance is mostly achieved by rapid ion efflux but also by metal-complexation and -reduction. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.pone.0010433
But the course material is virtually identical for all states. If all states got involved there would be 50 times the budget! By using similar systems to those used by software development you could allow a teacher to download the source tree, edit as desired and let students download the nightly build. You could even make a branch for the religious fanatic states, where they can add intelligent design or whatever, no reason to not take their money. With some organization you could make it easy for any teacher or parent to select chapters from a given book. I don't see why California has to go it alone. All states, one tree, each state or school or teacher can select the parts of it they need while contributing to the development.
Slashdot Mirror
You may be right. But I am not familiar what this matrix thing is you talk about.
Presumably if there are a lot of threats you would use a spreadsheet or a very, very well administered database? Probably the guys in the room were running out of fingers and toes to count on and somebody said, you know...
p.s. I hereby bequeath to the world this maybe new idea for a wall computer. Display is big and long like a chalkboard or wall sized screen. Has a keyboard like a counter top at the bottom of the chalkboard where erasers normally go. Other possible pointer / input devices like a standard modern planetarium control booth setup, and remote operation from a plurality of networked computers, also okay. Can network with an unlimited of similar devices like a CAVE or CAVERN system, and can display them tiled, or can have such devices on a number of walls / partition walls/ flat surfaces in other orientations in a physical space, including use of displays on standalone devices in the space too. We can call this the chalkboard surface format and be done with it. Bring it on! (or as Apple is saying to MS, "we already thought of that but your is too small so it will suck to use it. come back when you can wallpaper a house with retina display elements, doofus!")
Chalkboard?
In other words, change the ergonomic equation and it could work.
Frankly I'd like to try the surface to make my own decision, but I don't want to use Windows. I prefer my 2009 MacBook Pro.
However if the display converted to a drawable surface with pressure-sensitive pen like a wacom tablet I would seriously consider it. It might be okay if you can pick the display up off the stand easily, but for everyday use and anything harder than pushing a play button will scream for a mouse, or a horizontal surface, or an arm.
Anyway, FWIW the words are silly (my touchscreen android phone works fine vertically) but there is a bit of truth there (probably I have my elbows close to my body or otherwise am reducing strain unconsciously). Imagine trying to type on your house's doorbell, with your wrist bent back like that it will hurt.
IANA ergonomics expert, but it would seem (based on shooting pains I get from near-carpal tunnel sometimes) that anatomical truths and normal desktop usage position mean some weak muscles are going to get overused when you continually reach over to press or drag across a screen tilted away from you on the other side of the keyboard, without having your arm behind it for leverage even. I can almost feel the pain..
- It would be different if it was a chalkboard / wallscreen. There are a number of nice whiteboard systems out there. the deal is you are standing not sitting, basically you are built to do this kind of gesture. And letters can be big.
- If you held it like an ipad of course it would be fine
- If you could sit back in your armchair and draw on the screen with a 3d pointer it would be fine. Might be awkward though.
- if you have a sit and stand desk that you stand behind, um well it would still suck. But if you put the machine on a cantilevered clamp of some sort so that you could hold it like a baby in one arm while drawing (imagine touching baby's nose) it might not be a strain in any position short of lying on your back.
If it's safety you want, I don't understand why you are trying to get other sites to freely back up your data.
Get a real backup service and tell people how it's backed up, poof! safety.
Or if you want to make a community resource you can do like sourceforge, ibiblio, etc, free mirrors that point back to your site.
Tell that to Lexis-Nexis.
I've long been curious about people who have such strident views on this subject.
I mean, are you really a qualified medical doctor? No, I doubt it.
Since everything in biology and chemistry is based on statistical probabilities, I wonder why you cannot imagine cellphone radiation (the heating and directional microwave radiation on wavelengths the same size as some biological structures) as once in a while enhancing the probability of cancer that is already perhaps elevated by other circumstances.
IANA Doctor but it seems that cancer is a preprogrammed failure mode that can be triggered by lots of irritants and probability greatly enhanced by certain factors. No way to say about what the situation is in this isolated case though.
If you consider heating the side of your head for hours a day an irritant there doesn't seem much of a problem with it contributing to disease, even if the frequencies are not in the x-ray region. This is why I put my phone on speakerphone when it is also acting like a wireless router. Since I remember reading somewhere that putting your head next to powerful base stations is a good way to get cooked.
FWIW I have long been wondering what happens as we keep going up into the gigahertz frequencies and zeroing in on the "wavelength equals size of some important biological structure that doesn't like heating". Conceivably he could have been already susceptible and long hours of heating pushed him into the statistical losers cluster.
Anyway just my two cents but the world would be more pleasant to live in, and I think more rational, if we had less strident robots who think they are laying down the law. Of which I accept I have probably been guilty myself.
Hi, and thanks for a great comment.
What have found is that there is a clear road to follow in development. Over the years a number of the issues I have submitted, mostly user experience related, are treated as enhancements, even if they are pretty important. Sometimes these get handled much later I think.
The most recent issue I mentioned about RTF and RTFD (LO can't open them but should) was picked up and treated seriously by more than one person and I am excited about that. At least, it is silly if you are on a Mac using TextEdit, Bean, etc. to save an RTF (I keep all my notes in these flat files) but can't open it in LibreOffice.
When I report a bug, I usually find another one or two additional bugs/enhancement issues at the same time. For example, I discovered IIRC that when you try to paste an outline it doesn't work! And I rediscovered the other day (I actually recognized the issue a long time ago) that exporting an LO document with text interleaving two numbered outlines will renumber incorrectly when opened in MS Word. These are really basic!
But let's take a step back. There really is a finite number of use-cases for an Office suite in business. The real problem seems to be a lack of interest or role in the open source project development for a person or team that steers development to real business world issues and pounds on all aspects of user experience including UI, functionality, expectations, interoperability, etc. to ensure that something of high quality will be the answer.
This is the only reason I can figure out the LO still does not have a widget in the scrollbar that you can pull down to make a split view like in MS Word. And you can't tile two windows. So if I wanted to say, translate a Word or PDF technical document into another window I have to drag and align windows in 1 or more applications and not have other windows open in those applications at the same time. The issues about RTF, outline export, and cut and paste are similarly, things that just couldn't happen if there was anybody involved who has a vested interest in making a quality business product. That is why I think there should be a new team added to LibreOffice and maybe other projects, that will have a specific mandate of ensuring ease of use by the business user. These are the people who pay for things after all. I think this might improve as European governments move into LibreOffice but since so many businesspeople have given up on OOo already, I feel there are few people who push to solve these problems, or even do user experience testing (eating their own dog food), otherwise they should discover these problems themselves and be frustrated enough to fix them. My two cents and I certainly love LibreOffice but wish it could be a little better. A little can be a lot.
This. I have done similar comparisons for myself many times.
I used OOo way back in the beginning and have contributed bug reports to both OOo and LibreOffice.
I upgraded from OOo to NeoOffice to LibreOffice Mac version.
But, Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac is STILL superior so I need both! It kills me!
The reason why is "LibreOffice will wreck this layout" and "which means I would not be able to share the document with other people", and also "And even simple things like bulleted or numbered outlines get screwed up and wrongly numbered when sending from LO to MSO"!! How utterly braindead. And wasn't there a thing where "passwords are not secure so we won't implement them"? Anyway you just have to have MS Office if you want to do work in the real world, unless you can live in a perfect LibreOffice Oasis and only send PDF, etc to the rest of the world.
That, and I was too cheap to buy the most recent MS Office for the Mac which is probably better/faster.
However, for my own work I prefer LibreOffice. Main reasons are:
- Autocomplete means less keystrokes, so I think my hands hurt less after a long document.
- Faster
- Draw is useful, I can quickly draw something and then print to PDF (I use the Mac print dialog, for some reason I think it's superior to the PDF Export button?)
- The whole database thing is cool though pretty opaque.
If only there was a kickstarter to fix LibreOffice, by adding a "Compatibility Mode" that JUST. WORKS. EXACTLY. LIKE. MS OFFICE!
(Except the crappy Save as HTML in MS Office that needs to be killed.) (And I am just talking about document interoperability. Some things work better in LibreOffice.)
Incidentally my most recent bug report in LibreOffice was about how you can't open RTF and it silently fails. I recommended also opening RTFD, which if that works would be the only way to open RTFD on Windows. Woot!
Um, why do I care about OOo anymore?
We all switched from NeoOffice to LibreOffice Mac!
There's crossing the line, and then there's blowing past it in a rocket car while going for the world land speed record.
Did you every think when you were younger, if you remember before the Internet, that your phone company would listen in on your conversations, analyze them word for word, tally them up and present them to advertisers in neat little charts?
The government does that? Heck I'm not doing anything wrong.
The utility does it for profit? Mmmm.. no.
The hulking sasquatch in the corner is that you can in fact find out things about people, or even more easily, about tiny groups of interest, even if you have stripped the caller data. And what if one of your marketing customers has written some finely targeted apps, for which they buy the report? It may be quite easy to integrate the additional data with what they have already got.
Actually public speaking while probably very useful is the most dangerous of all the courses. Most likely politicians who decide to kill science and exploration are guys who took public speaking and not science.
Basic chemistry is pretty important if you want to cook, scuba dive, or understand a third of biology, and considering we are entering a materials science and nano/biotech revolution he will live through, a basic understanding is probably important. Otherwise, survey courses teaching a foundation in scientific thinking may be great.. but it seems this can be done in science class and still learn actual science not "how to talk about science". That said, many science courses and teachers are undoubtedly uninspired and dull..
OP of this thread here.. Thanks for your reply. Perhaps I am off base, but checking again with wikipedia I understand that the point is the user is in a locus that is an intersection of spherical surfaces, the spheres being centered on the gps satellites. If you are not carrying an atomic clock of your own, you satellite 1 for that. Then sats 2 and 3 give you an intersection locus that is a two-dimensional circle intersecting the Earth. The intersection of circle and Earth gives you two possible points you may be at. While you ought to have a sat 4 to get just one 3D point, actually instead of sat 4 you can use information you have like your elevation or inertial navigation. I was thinking that solar observation, accelerometer, wifi dictionary like google has, knowing your phone's country code, or sheer common sense would be enough to detect which of the two cities you are in. Does GPS work this way, and since wifi is not always available what would you say the resolution would be in case of 3 sats plus knowing your country and route (giving you general altitude and part of the world)?
If it is a critical webapp or I'm paying money for it, I think it would make less user-friendly since I would, after enough iterations, be peeved about having to read about his wife every time I used it. Whereas it would be quite appropriate on a separate credits page by itself, analagous to the About window that almost all desktop apps have.
I learned this on a homestay program I was on when I was much younger, I went to a school called Haberdashers' Askes in Watford outside London for a month and lived with a kind family.
One thing that remains engraved in my mind decades later, besides the epiphany of salt and vinegar crisps, was how history taught in England about what we call the Revolutionary War (which they call the American War of Independence) focused on their dashing generals, battles, etc. whereas U.S. education focused on ours. Sounds obvious and not so different as I explain it now, but at the time I remember being dumfounded when we were talking about the same event but it sounded like we were talking about different worlds. I think they were mystified about reenactments and famous sites in the U.S. Come to think about it, a global course of standardized education based on a wikipedia of facts such as can be objectively determined (quite difficult in the context of Japan-China relations I know) and translations of talented writers of history who try not to grind any axes, might be a good step towards preventing a significant number of deaths. Any takers?
Sounds like they are saying, if it is a simulation then it isn't a very advanced one!
#3 also being questioned I would think. If a tree falls in a forest...
IANAP but would a consequence of the universe being a simulation imply that it may not be holographic?
From my extremely minimal understanding and wikipedia the universe as a hologram comes out of noting a black hole's entropy increases as the square not the cube of its radius, therefore its content can be described by fluctuations in the surface of a sphere containing it. But if the universe is a simulation then this could simply be a kludge that only covers singularities, the rest of the universe indeed being based on a three dimensional lattice.
This question is probably founded on a lot of misunderstandings but I am curious about what the universe as a simulation might mean in terms of future science. Yeah warp drives, magic, ftl, etc.
I wonder, since you can pretty much figure out what city you are in through ordinary radio and wifi beacons, not to mention the help you could get from having a clock and a sun locator, couldn't you really use GPS on the road with just two or three satellites?
Their list has a bunch of things that are neither the next big thing nor needing to be on the list, and lean towards military applications. We have plenty of military applications already. Here is what we basically need:
1) Stop burning petroleum for power. We need to use this precious resource for chemical synthesis.
2) Invest in developing technology to build solar power satellites capable of collecting power over huge surface area and beam to Earth or the moon. Convert power received at base station to hydrogen or some other transportable fuel.
3) Similarly invest more in power generation from renewable sources and nano/biotechnology based solutions.
4) Power the humanitarian items on the list using this power.
5) Of course when they say "mind over matter" they ought to be meaning an intelligently directable self-assembling nanotechnology (or microtechnology even) which would revolutionize production. I guess that is too far away to be considered the "next" big thing?
I like my HTC Evo 4G but..
1) eats batteries like cookie monster eats cookies
2) email attachments get downloaded repeatedly, and stored in an inaccessible folder
3) bloatware you cannot delete even if you don't use it and phone memory is used up due to #2.
4) not waterproof
Totally without any basis, say it needs another 3 billion to get to market.
Instead, spend 1 billion more on education, 1 billion on solar power satellites, and 1 billion reduction of the budget..
It is cool. Might turn a satellite into a cloud of debris, not a slower solid satellite.
But is it obvious, if you know astronomy, read manga, or just live in space for a while and try to stop debris with what you have on hand?
A "micro dust cloud" sounds similar to Boeing's cloud of heavy gas (a "nano dust cloud").
http://zerorobotics.mit.edu/ZRHS2012/RetroSPHERES.pdf
Also recent news, but "The US Naval Research Laboratory is proposing to encircle the Earth with tungsten dust in an attempt to bring down dangerous space junk"
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/423629/orbiting-dust-storm-could-remove-space-junk/
IANAP but "Their scheme is to release some 20 tons of tungsten dust at an altitude of 1100km, creating a thin shell of particles that will entirely envelop the Earth," that sounds like a baaaad idea!
ARXIV black hole paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9512101.pdf
In 1995 these researchers modelled collisions of supersonic gas streams and found they are efficient at circularizing debris orbits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_Mile_(manga)
I know it's not going to happen but suspend disbelief temporarily please.
The issue is "I trust the operators of my favorite website but not the advertisers who buy space on their pages".
Advertisers can track you if you load ads from their servers.
If you are happy with that then fine.
I am not talking about your blog posts at all.
This is a confusing press release. From what I can gather, this bacterium, which has already been discovered decades ago and its genome fully sequenced, was found 3 years ago to reduce toxic gold compounds into metallic gold. The MSU team fed higher concentration gold solution and this created spherical metallic gold "nuggets" around 30 microns up to 1.2 mm in size. The art exhibition which is pretty distracting from the original scientific research, of which it appears there was some, plays on the themes of alchemy and illuminated manuscripts.
Unfortunately the explanation of the cool scientific part is completely overshadowed and twisted by the art exhibition! That is really annoying. Art exhibitions made by or in collaboration with scientists are often interesting but this announcement of research and an art exhibition at the same time means that factually incorrect words are helplessly mixed in with fact, making everything cloudy. It may seem romantic but it really is a bad idea to do that. In fact the only place alchemy really happens that we know of is in a nuclear reaction, which this is not.
ScienceDaily (Oct. 9, 2009) — Australian scientists have found that the bacterium Cupriavidus metallidurans catalyses the biomineralisation of gold by transforming toxic gold compounds to their metallic form using active cellular mechanism.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091007103034.htm
The bacterium Cupriavidus metallidurans strain CH34, originally isolated by us in 1976 from a metal processing factory, is considered a major model organism in this field because it withstands milli-molar range concentrations of over 20 different heavy metal ions. This tolerance is mostly achieved by rapid ion efflux but also by metal-complexation and -reduction.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.pone.0010433
But the course material is virtually identical for all states.
If all states got involved there would be 50 times the budget!
By using similar systems to those used by software development you could allow a teacher to download the source tree, edit as desired and let students download the nightly build.
You could even make a branch for the religious fanatic states, where they can add intelligent design or whatever, no reason to not take their money.
With some organization you could make it easy for any teacher or parent to select chapters from a given book.
I don't see why California has to go it alone. All states, one tree, each state or school or teacher can select the parts of it they need while contributing to the development.