It's neat and reminds me of Scott McCloud's comics.
FWIW around 1995 or 1997 I made a 3D interactive presentation on an SGI machine with an early VRML viewer, Cosmo IIRC. By placing photographs in different orientations in a 3D space, clicking on each would send the user on a spinning arc that ended with the next image in sequence being displayed in proper orientation. Going to the next image would involve backflips, twists, sliding across the stars.
Anyway, I was just thinking that Sozi is cool and makes beautiful images, and wondered if there is a way to extend it to 3D or n-D. A simple example would be to zoom in on a planetary surface, or facets of the interior of a home (a mind museum) zooming in on panels or flipping to pages in books in a library, or frames in a film. Seems like an n-D sozi would be a nice interface to the web even.
- Should they be nuclear powered? Or perhaps sufficient to trail a power and comms cable for 1km from nearest comms station. - Should study the exact jobs done by cleanup workers in Fukushima. - It would be great if the workers could stay miles away while an army of robots was slogging through radioactive ground water etc instead. - IANA Robotics Engineer but perhaps very good teleoperation and ability to get through tight spaces, reconfigure, work without wireless capability, and be radiation hardened, is much more important than being self deterministic. - Consider making a batallion of robot army engineers. A number of individual complementary robot types, effectors and utility modules would be useful. - For example a robot batallion could bring along its own high power telescope, power plant, communications gear, wheeled transportation modules they can snap out of, shovels and block and tackle, etc. and create a supply line back to where human operators are. I could see how speed is important, when you need to get something done very quickly, but other times you need to bring in sensitive detectors or perhaps set up a field station.
Make up a list of scenarios and tasks. - Sample scenarios: earthquake has destroyed buildings / infrastructure, volcanic eruption, power plant rupture, perilous natural environments like rockslide, flooding, forest fire and avalanche. - Sample tasks: crossing impassible routes, locating and saving people trapped under rubble, breaking through rubble indoors and outdoors, climbing through ventilation ducts and shafts, diagnosing and fixing engines, hauling hoses, executing operations in a control room, evaluating contamination, running quickly while carrying injured humans or robots, sending tiny auxiliary sensing robots via pipes or airlift from quadcopters and parachutes, mapping and climbing broken buildings and mapping safe paths, braving extremes of temperature / moisture / radiation / smoke / chemical environment / shock from dropping, etc.
Personally I would much rather have a lot of cheap robots with all these capabilities and have them trail tons of cables and local wifi routers, than spend all that time about building smarts into them. Making them stable, robust and reliable is a big challenge itself. Next time we won't have to risk human lives is why.
It would really be useful if there was an easy way for the Mac user to run downloaded programs in a sandbox or in another user account that has very few permissions.
The biggest dangers to Mac users these days from what I have seen are: 1) Hard disk dies and you don't have a bootable image. Even with Time Machine it was not easy for Mom to restore her apps, and had decided not to buy two extra hard disks, 1 for time machine and 1 for full image backup like superduper. I have a feeling this is more common than one would expect. 2) You download a malicious app that trashes your user's home directory.
In either case Macs can have many user accounts but nobody is using this facility much, and it could be quite useful.
The English article edited out some information that was in the Japanese article.
Currently it doesn't tell you the precise amount of radiation being emitted but you get an idea of the highs and lows from it.
The technology that was developed for a detector installed in Japan's next-generation astronomical observatory satellite, the Astro H, to observe gamma ray bursts caused by astronomical events such as old stars exploding into supernovae. JAXA's Professor Tadayuki Takahashi who developed it says, "I want to aim at making this a practical tool quickly." And here is the Prof. Takahashi's cool page and Japanese version which shows news items too.
You will find several English papers on his work by Google: "High-Resolution CdTe Detectors and Application to Gamma-Ray Imaging"
Finally there are links from the Japanese page to a lot of detailed info about the gamma ray camera, though in Japanese there are PDFs including with photos of the supermarket experiment: here,pdf 1. pdf2, here.
I doubt piracy really is such a big reason for any decline (and not sure there is in fact a decline). When I was very young I had copies of tapes from friends, and when I got some money then I bought tapes and CDs until I was in college and started feeling that CDs were way overpriced. I actually remember being very angry about it and thinking about whether I can do without them. As it happens I can. I also do without a TV. I hear music on the radio or on the Internet, I can buy just the songs I want though there are very few good enough. The easy disposable money goes more toward paying a monthly mobile phone bill and going to movies in theaters I would say, as far as entertainment goes, and also buying books. If I buy a video recording it likely is not one from the MPAA. I did not buy Blue-Ray I am happy to say. I do discover and watch music videos on YouTube.
A major part of my decision to do without is the underhandedness of the music industry. I really felt nauseated by the idea of buying a DVD/Blue Ray player that would police my use and disallow my use cryptographically. I bought a Sony Vaio laptop once (well used, for 2000 bucks) and used to own Sony TV, walkman, voice recorder and other players. But I really don't like the way Sony treats customers and won't buy Sony if I can help it ever again.
If I buy music I buy a song at a time. If I buy a film it is a new one not registered with MPAA probably. Maybe I would rent one in a rental shop.
There also are now purchases from Amazon (I even bought some books through my new Kindle which even though I hate DRM can easily be ripped and is instant gratification) and I have consumed a lot of content paid for by ads, you know the way Google made all its money.
My guess is that what is called piracy actually has a small effect and not clearly negative or positive. In fact people back in the day used to always copy and share between each other, before the Internet, and I doubt people have changed that much. People are willing to buy things if they think it is well priced and desirable.
More likely the reasons for any decline if there in fact is one, is the competition for people's time and disposable income which comes from the Internet (ad-related content, news sites, social networking, and so on) and more expensive monthly payments for mobile Internet capable devices. Also it appears that the quality of products has declined, and that much effort is wasted on sequels and remakes for new formats (blu-ray, 3D theaters, etc.). In addition, the negative karma of the studios is more visible whether it is unconscionable lawsuits against customers, installing malware, ripping off artists with rapacious practices, etc.
The journalist is making it harder to understand what is going on.
IANAP but here's how I understand it thanks to google.
First, 85 tesla have been generated for very short instants in the lab so the article is wrong in saying 60 tesla is higher than ever achieved.
Graphene forms a two-dimensional lattice surface like a chicken wire fence. For each molecule of graphene a single electron sticks out from the surface. These electrons are free to hop around to other atoms. In fact they act just like particles that have no mass and can travel at 1% of the speed of light. These quasiparticles are called massless dirac fermions. A fermion is a particle with certain properties, the nucles of a helium atom being one kind of fermion. Electrons travelling at relativistic speeds is not earth shattering since that is what happens in gold atoms too. But the point is the electrons are free to sweep through the lattice without hindrance, and that if you can control the way the electrons move, you can control the apparent properties of the quasiparticles.
In July 2010 Michael Crommie proved the prediction, by growing bubbles of stretched graphene that stick up like pyramids from the platinum surface they were grown on. The electrons acted as if they were subjected to 300 tesla fields. This technique works at room temperature.
The paper mentioned by the OP talks about designer Dirac fermions which means that you can create quasiparticles possessing the characteristics you desire by simply moving atoms around so they make electrons move in the way necessary to make the quasiparticles appear to exist. You can thereby freely mess with simulated mass, electrical and magnetic fields, etc. which might be very useful. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7389/full/nature10941.html
The technique used in the OP experiment is low temperature and nanoscale. But based on Crommie's work it should not be hard to imagine processes in the future that could allow similar structures to be built quickly on a larger scale.
This is an exciting a relatively new field of research apparently but breathless reports using terms like designer babies or designer electrons when it is really designer quasiparticles, and saying that the fabric of reality is being messed with, is just distracting and does not help people who are not prepared to dive into the actual research paper to find out what is going on.
The OP is only correct in a subset of online data.
Actually the term "comment" is the problem. By definition practically, a comment is a throwaway expression of one's opinion and "comments" are just a whole lot of them.
There is a field called Computer Assisted Meetings. I researched a bit of it and worked on some software designs. At the time my project did not go through due to the extremely high cost of buying enough data input terminals, one per attendee, and there were no smartphones or cheap terminals worth mentioning. Still is a bit of a problem considering older attendees would not be comfortable sending email from their phones, etc.
As someone mentioned, online forums are useful, and I think the reason is Google.
Arxiv is a good example of what happens when people who single-mindedly want to concentrate original information actually are given a tool to do so. However it is based on individual uncoordinated actions, in other words knowledge is concentrated here but the discussion side occurs prior to publication in research teams not at this website.
My own aim was for people to gather and solve problems together. A group at Harvard tried this and closed down. My idea was to create a lens to concentrate information, and it was sparked by wanting to make an ad hoc site for people to bring different things needed to respond to an earthquake when government related institutions were paralyzed. This was a while back. You could imagine people picking slots to put their information into, but without a live person to organize the data it would quickly devolve into a BBS. And this is all we have mostly today.
This was before say, Twitter which is basically just shouting out into the cloud, or Facebook which is based on a friends metaphor. So the metaphor you choose is a big deal. A Facebook "Wall" page is not the best way to run a discussion. Twitter is not aimed at finding conclusions, and so on.
I believe the second term that is a problem is "moderator". In Slashdot, a moderator is someone who feels like trading in posting his own comments to score other people's comments. However in a real live discussion a moderator would be someone who is actively controlling the dynamic of the discussion.
In CAM there are actually methods and tools (some software) such as those developed at Eindhoven U. and there are more advanced methods, wielded by a meeting moderator or guide, to organize brainstormed ideas, find key topics, and pose followup questions in other words to concentrate knowledge.
So it is really a mistake to listen to this gawker guy. It is a lot more important to think about the kinds of interaction you want to enable, and then find a way to do it. Technology is not necessarily the most important part of the equation even.
The WWW is a small part of what is possible, and you know it is just one protocol among many. Currently you can do a video conference among a small number of participants but there are no good models for large gatherings which is what I was interested in, so there is a broad field available for research and experimentation.
Does this suggest that by saving up erasures to be done more slowly, perhaps by flipping bits to 0 near the time when they are flipped to 1, could energy be saved and the Landauer limit approached? Also, are there architectures in which a flipping a bit in one direction uses less power, or when blocks of bits can be deselected by some pointer instead of actually erased, trading memory hardware space for power usage?
Yes of course. I agree with you. I tried Salesforce with a client where it would have helped with up-front costs. But I am not convinced even this is a good argument in most cases.
The interesting part is that Salesforce uses a monolithic, unique system that you cannot back up yourself or run on your own cloud as far as I know. Well actually I heard there is some way but it is so secret I could never get real info about it. They have secret APIs rolled out for special customers so you don't know all the possibilities of the system. And while there are some very interesting things about it - and I spent a lot of time becoming proficient in Apex their managed language - I don't think they put enough effort into the administration of the back end.
The support engineers are extremely helpful. But they aren't actually administering the system, they are a help desk. The real admins are hidden behind an opaque wall and there are very frequent announcements of one system or another becoming less responsive for some minutes. I guess they are working hard but to me the proper level of service is "fanatical" and I don't feel that at Salesforce. I tried it thinking it would be an interesting market and it might still be but I think any cloud to be trusted has to be a transparent, open cloud backed up by your own systems at the very least.
ABSOLUTELY NOT. I am really insulted by your comment. First time I have used caps in over 10 years of Slashdot.
The famine is 1.5 MILLION people. Check out http://northkorea.org/ This page includes real world articles and a donation drive by a famous journalist.
I built for free and maintained for over a decade a website to donate food and medicine to people in the North Korean famine, on behalf of a courageous journalist who assembled donations of clothing, food and medicine, brought it to North Korea himself and donated it directly to people there while documenting it. I put videos of tiny children terminally ill with malnutrition and coughing with pneumonia online when QuickTime was still something new.
Bernie Krisher, the journalist and past Newsweek editor who did this project, even had a stroke in North Korea once due to the strain of holding a bag of rice up for the camera but he did a lot through one person's extremely stubborn do or die approach. To him anybody who was not interested was a loser. I remember his anger when Japanese milk manufacturers refused to provide infant formula even. He's not a whack-job, he's a world-class reporter who after retirement decided to give something back to the world and was moved by human suffering.
He is a hero, and most of his donation work over the years has been actually in Cambodia, where he built a newspaper, a hospital, hundreds of rural schools, started medical campaigns and so on. I learned a lot watching his work. All I did was put some of them online.
The main message I would like to give you and Slashdot which idiotically gave you a "Score 4: Insightful" is, the Internet is a person to person connection. It doesn't matter what the heck the leader of a country says. You can deal with any person in the world who has a net connection as one human to another. Now put the shoe on the other foot and imagine it was you who is stuck in a malnutritioned unempowered hell like these starving people.
When the famine came during the North Korean flood, and all the crops were washed over with silt and people got to eating tree bark, Bernie was teaching them how to lab cultivate mushrooms and trying any way to make a dent personally. If it was you stuck there in a famine I bet you would have thanked your lucky stars. This is not a band-aid but a crack in the dam that can be widened through the Internet. Whoever is in charge in NK has no bearing whatsoever on what is the right thing to do.
I am not going to comment on the horrific political brinksmanship and lost hopes of all those intergovernmental negotiations. I hope it works this time, I suppose there's a chance, there always is. It would be nice if there is some way to ensure that kids get the food, I expect many will. I put another letter online for Bernie last year, where he is collecting donations.
Maybe you can help boost google traffic to it by linking to it. The famine is 1.5 MILLION people. There are real on the ground photos on that site from another courageous Reuters journalist too. Check them out and see if you still think it is silly to try and save these lives.
I had an outage on Salesforce for 1 week and they did absolutely nothing regarding giving me any free account time or anything except "Sorry". Their explanation was a massive multiterabyte log file had to processed since what corruption they had extended to their backup. Shouldn't ever happen. This was last Autumn. All boy scouts should take away this: Cloud promises are made to be broken.
I once had a contract on the president's desk to bring Snapfish to Japan. They were very enthusiastic and about to sign. It was early time in that market in Japan. However when the economy is on a downturn American companies tend to get tunnel vision, more conservative and domestically oriented. It's predictable. The Board of Directors said, "Japan? Who's that?" and decided to nix it. This left such a bad taste in my mouth that I started working more with European companies which had a slightly longer view even though I'm an American. Now there are output shops all over the place in Japan and it has morphed into a kind of shop where you can plug a phone or camera memory card into a card reader, use a custom application to pick the photos you want, and have it printed in an hour or burned to CD. Using the awesome high speed color photo printers Kodak pioneered, too. The same shop (like Pallette Plaza) also sells phones too, and it is profitable enough that there is a very nice one on one corner I know where the real estate is pretty expensive. This is just one experience and not so recent, but I always wondered about how Kodak was going to hang on if they didn't want to try new markets.
An earlier article by same team: "The Complexity of Relating Quantum Channels to Master Equations" by Toby S. Cubitt, Jens Eisert, Michael M. Wolf (Submitted on 17 Aug 2009 (v1), last revised 12 Sep 2011 (this version, v2)) http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.2128
Here, we give complexity-theoretic solutions to both these open problems which lead to a surprising conclusion: Regardless of how much information one has gained, deducing dynamical equations is in general an intractable problem -- it is NP-hard. More precisely, the task of determining dynamical equations in general is equivalent to solving the (in)famous P versus NP problem [1]. If P != NP, as is widely believed, then there cannot exist an efcient method of deducing dynamical equations.
On the positive side, our work leads to the rst known algorithms for extracting dynamical equations from measurement data that are guaranteed to give the correct answer. For systems with few degrees of freedom, this is immediately applicable to many current experiments. And, indeed, the primary goal of many experiments is to characterize and understand the dynamics of a system.
should end.. I believe it is possible to do experiments at home that show this kind of spectral lines for different substances, by using a prism and the light from a flame, or perhaps by shining light through a gas into a prism.
I am not an astronomer but here is some info based on some basic understanding and our friend Google. Maybe someone else can contribute more.
Short answer:
1) We can see some things on the moon, especially some mirrors we left there, I think we can see the lunar lander too.
2) Just watch this video it rocks. You can match the light from a telescope against the light seen absorbed or emitted from atoms and molecules in the laboratory to tell what is out there. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4yg4HTm3uk&feature=related
Regarding your main question, when light strikes an atom it may be absorbed or reflected. If absorbed, an electron of the atom is boosted into a higher energy state and when that electron drops back down it emits light of a given wavelength that matches the drop in energy of that electron. It works similarly with molecules made of lots of atoms.
If you spread the light you get from the telescope through a prism, you can see the spectrum of the light and it will show lines at wavelengths matching these electron transitions, so you will see lines representing the elements or molecules that are out there.
If you are looking in the microwave part of the spectrum you may see a microwave emission that comes from the vibration and rotation of asymmetric molecules like carbon monoxide.
And there are nebulae out in space that are being irradiated by ultraviolet light from nearby hot stars, which emit their own characteristic wavelengths, these are emission nebulae. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_nebula
So you can do experiments in the lab to see what wavelengths are absorbed and emitted by a given molecule, and try to match that to the wavelengths you see in the telescope.
Anyway, apparently for the buckyball molecules C60 and C70 (that's 60 or 70 carbon atoms in each spherical molecule) there are certain peaks in the spectra seen at energy levels 3.7eV, 4.7eV, and 5.7eV. These actual energy levels are in fact due to physical properties of the molecules, for example the difference between the C60 and C70 spectra has to do with the difference in shapes, one is a soccer ball and the other is a rugby ball. (Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9401055)
Apparently when they discovered C60 (buckminsterfullerene) in 1991 they were found characteristic emission lines in the infrared part of the spectrum that matched C60 and no other known substance. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0009261491902455
Finally there seems to be a characteristic spectrum you get when these balls start stacking to make ordered arrays like pyramids or what have you. That's what they found. I guess they could see what shape the substance is in the lab with a scanning-tunnelling microscope (hey that's a pyramid) or maybe just theorize what a pyramid of buckyballs should look like, and then they happen to find the same wavelength in a telescope. Maybe the process was just the reverse of what I just described and they finally figured out what that wierd spectrum was.
This page explains a lot about how astronomers can tell what kinds of atoms and molecules are in space: http://stars.astro.illinois.e
I'm the OP. A word got cut off, it was supposed to say "It will take a week at 200 kph for your party of 30 to reach the 36,000-km-high terminal station, while the counterweight sails along 96 km high, a quarter of the way to the Moon."
I thought I would share some info with you about how one team did this, what was cutting edge work at the time. Not that I am saying you should use these tools although it seems they are one possibility.
Here are links related to a quite interesting software project developed by Christophe Mertz and others at CENA.
The Digistrips system was a user interface prototype demonstration system written in Perl for the design of new touch screen based air traffic controller systems that mimic the traditional system in which paper strips are used to represent aircraft in flight. The demonstration is said to have been successful, and there are a number of papers written about user interaction in the system.
It used Ivy (a cross platform message bus in Perl) and TkZinc (an OpenGL and 2d capable canvas).
Below are numerous links to papers and software sites although the openatc.org website is no longer in service itself. It is possible to download Ivy and TkZinc it seems.
keywords: cena france french aircraft controller prototype perl perl-anim gui prototyping tk-zinc opengl perl strips
Ivy Software Bus http://www2.tls.cena.fr/products/ivy/ http://freecode.com/projects/ivy http://www2.tls.cena.fr/products/ivy/download/desc/ivy-perl-deb.html Ivy is a simple protocol and a set of open-source (LGPL) libraries and programs that allows applications to broadcast information through text messages, with a subscription mechanism based on regular expressions. Ivy libraries are available in C, C++, Java, Python and Perl, on Windows and Unix boxes and on Macs. Several Ivy utilities and hardware drivers are available too.
Ivy is currently used in research projects in the air traffic control and human-computer interaction research communities as well as in commercial products. It is also taught to CS students.
TkZinc http://www.tkzinc.org/tkzinc/index.php http://freecode.com/projects/zincisnotcanvas http://wiki.tcl.tk/2798 TkZinc is a Tk widget developed with Perl/Tk, Tcl/Tk and Python/Tk bindings. TkZinc widgets are very similar to Tk canvases in that they support structured graphics. Graphical items can be manipulated, and bindings can be associated with them to implement interaction behaviors. But unlike the canvas, TkZinc can structure the items in a hierarchy, and has support for affine 2D transforms. Clipping can be set for sub-trees of the item hierarchy and the item set is quite more powerful, including field-specific items for Air Traffic systems. TkZinc is fast enough to allow the implementation of 2k2k radar displays with smooth animations. It is structured enough to allow the implementation of direct manipulation desktop GUIs.
Since the 3.2.2 version, TkZinc also offers as a runtime option, support for openGL rendering, giving access to features such as antialiasing, transparency, color gradients and even a new, openGL oriented, item type : triangles. In order to use the openGL features, you need the support of the GLX extension on your X11 server.
Zinc Is Not Canvas! Tkzinc has been developped at CENA to help building experimental user interfaces for Air Traffic Control. Tkzinc is a Tk widget, with Tcl, Perl/Tk, and Python/Tkinter bindings. Tkzinc is available as open source under the GNU Les
Slashdot Mirror
It's neat and reminds me of Scott McCloud's comics.
FWIW around 1995 or 1997 I made a 3D interactive presentation on an SGI machine with an early VRML viewer, Cosmo IIRC.
By placing photographs in different orientations in a 3D space, clicking on each would send the user on a spinning arc that ended with the next image in sequence being displayed in proper orientation. Going to the next image would involve backflips, twists, sliding across the stars.
Anyway, I was just thinking that Sozi is cool and makes beautiful images, and wondered if there is a way to extend it to 3D or n-D. A simple example would be to zoom in on a planetary surface, or facets of the interior of a home (a mind museum) zooming in on panels or flipping to pages in books in a library, or frames in a film. Seems like an n-D sozi would be a nice interface to the web even.
- Should they be nuclear powered? Or perhaps sufficient to trail a power and comms cable for 1km from nearest comms station.
- Should study the exact jobs done by cleanup workers in Fukushima.
- It would be great if the workers could stay miles away while an army of robots was slogging through radioactive ground water etc instead.
- IANA Robotics Engineer but perhaps very good teleoperation and ability to get through tight spaces, reconfigure, work without wireless capability, and be radiation hardened, is much more important than being self deterministic.
- Consider making a batallion of robot army engineers. A number of individual complementary robot types, effectors and utility modules would be useful.
- For example a robot batallion could bring along its own high power telescope, power plant, communications gear, wheeled transportation modules they can snap out of, shovels and block and tackle, etc. and create a supply line back to where human operators are. I could see how speed is important, when you need to get something done very quickly, but other times you need to bring in sensitive detectors or perhaps set up a field station.
Make up a list of scenarios and tasks.
- Sample scenarios: earthquake has destroyed buildings / infrastructure, volcanic eruption, power plant rupture, perilous natural environments like rockslide, flooding, forest fire and avalanche.
- Sample tasks: crossing impassible routes, locating and saving people trapped under rubble, breaking through rubble indoors and outdoors, climbing through ventilation ducts and shafts, diagnosing and fixing engines, hauling hoses, executing operations in a control room, evaluating contamination, running quickly while carrying injured humans or robots, sending tiny auxiliary sensing robots via pipes or airlift from quadcopters and parachutes, mapping and climbing broken buildings and mapping safe paths, braving extremes of temperature / moisture / radiation / smoke / chemical environment / shock from dropping, etc.
Personally I would much rather have a lot of cheap robots with all these capabilities and have them trail tons of cables and local wifi routers, than spend all that time about building smarts into them. Making them stable, robust and reliable is a big challenge itself. Next time we won't have to risk human lives is why.
It would really be useful if there was an easy way for the Mac user to run downloaded programs in a sandbox or in another user account that has very few permissions.
The biggest dangers to Mac users these days from what I have seen are:
1) Hard disk dies and you don't have a bootable image. Even with Time Machine it was not easy for Mom to restore her apps, and had decided not to buy two extra hard disks, 1 for time machine and 1 for full image backup like superduper. I have a feeling this is more common than one would expect.
2) You download a malicious app that trashes your user's home directory.
In either case Macs can have many user accounts but nobody is using this facility much, and it could be quite useful.
The English article edited out some information that was in the Japanese article.
Currently it doesn't tell you the precise amount of radiation being emitted but you get an idea of the highs and lows from it.
The technology that was developed for a detector installed in Japan's next-generation astronomical observatory satellite, the Astro H, to observe gamma ray bursts caused by astronomical events such as old stars exploding into supernovae. JAXA's Professor Tadayuki Takahashi who developed it says, "I want to aim at making this a practical tool quickly." And here is the Prof. Takahashi's cool page and Japanese version which shows news items too.
You will find several English papers on his work by Google: "High-Resolution CdTe Detectors and Application to Gamma-Ray Imaging"
Finally there are links from the Japanese page to a lot of detailed info about the gamma ray camera, though in Japanese there are PDFs including with photos of the supermarket experiment: here,pdf 1. pdf2, here.
Earth storms are particle accelerators.
What about these?
IANAP but seems to parallel the recent discovery of an ability to dial up electronic properties through an exotic organic film over metal.
I doubt piracy really is such a big reason for any decline (and not sure there is in fact a decline).
When I was very young I had copies of tapes from friends, and when I got some money then I bought tapes and CDs until I was in college and started feeling that CDs were way overpriced. I actually remember being very angry about it and thinking about whether I can do without them.
As it happens I can. I also do without a TV.
I hear music on the radio or on the Internet, I can buy just the songs I want though there are very few good enough.
The easy disposable money goes more toward paying a monthly mobile phone bill and going to movies in theaters I would say, as far as entertainment goes, and also buying books.
If I buy a video recording it likely is not one from the MPAA.
I did not buy Blue-Ray I am happy to say.
I do discover and watch music videos on YouTube.
A major part of my decision to do without is the underhandedness of the music industry. I really felt nauseated by the idea of buying a DVD/Blue Ray player that would police my use and disallow my use cryptographically.
I bought a Sony Vaio laptop once (well used, for 2000 bucks) and used to own Sony TV, walkman, voice recorder and other players. But I really don't like the way Sony treats customers and won't buy Sony if I can help it ever again.
If I buy music I buy a song at a time.
If I buy a film it is a new one not registered with MPAA probably.
Maybe I would rent one in a rental shop.
There also are now purchases from Amazon (I even bought some books through my new Kindle which even though I hate DRM can easily be ripped and is instant gratification) and I have consumed a lot of content paid for by ads, you know the way Google made all its money.
My guess is that what is called piracy actually has a small effect and not clearly negative or positive. In fact people back in the day used to always copy and share between each other, before the Internet, and I doubt people have changed that much. People are willing to buy things if they think it is well priced and desirable.
More likely the reasons for any decline if there in fact is one, is the competition for people's time and disposable income which comes from the Internet (ad-related content, news sites, social networking, and so on) and more expensive monthly payments for mobile Internet capable devices. Also it appears that the quality of products has declined, and that much effort is wasted on sequels and remakes for new formats (blu-ray, 3D theaters, etc.). In addition, the negative karma of the studios is more visible whether it is unconscionable lawsuits against customers, installing malware, ripping off artists with rapacious practices, etc.
Computational linguistics and natural language processing, I thought.
Thank you very much! That was very understandable.
The journalist is making it harder to understand what is going on.
IANAP but here's how I understand it thanks to google.
First, 85 tesla have been generated for very short instants in the lab so the article is wrong in saying 60 tesla is higher than ever achieved.
Graphene forms a two-dimensional lattice surface like a chicken wire fence.
For each molecule of graphene a single electron sticks out from the surface.
These electrons are free to hop around to other atoms.
In fact they act just like particles that have no mass and can travel at 1% of the speed of light. These quasiparticles are called massless dirac fermions. A fermion is a particle with certain properties, the nucles of a helium atom being one kind of fermion.
Electrons travelling at relativistic speeds is not earth shattering since that is what happens in gold atoms too. But the point is the electrons are free to sweep through the lattice without hindrance, and that if you can control the way the electrons move, you can control the apparent properties of the quasiparticles.
In 2010 Francisco Guinea in Madrid predicted that stretching graphene along all the axes of it crystal structure will make the electrons act as if subjected to a magnetic field.
http://www.gizmag.com/straining-graphene-creates-strong-pseudo-magnetic-fields/15891/
http://physics.berkeley.edu/research/zettl/pdf/386.Science.329-Levy.pdf
In July 2010 Michael Crommie proved the prediction, by growing bubbles of stretched graphene that stick up like pyramids from the platinum surface they were grown on. The electrons acted as if they were subjected to 300 tesla fields.
This technique works at room temperature.
The paper mentioned by the OP talks about designer Dirac fermions which means that you can create quasiparticles possessing the characteristics you desire by simply moving atoms around so they make electrons move in the way necessary to make the quasiparticles appear to exist. You can thereby freely mess with simulated mass, electrical and magnetic fields, etc. which might be very useful.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7389/full/nature10941.html
The technique used in the OP experiment is low temperature and nanoscale. But based on Crommie's work it should not be hard to imagine processes in the future that could allow similar structures to be built quickly on a larger scale.
This is an exciting a relatively new field of research apparently but breathless reports using terms like designer babies or designer electrons when it is really designer quasiparticles, and saying that the fabric of reality is being messed with, is just distracting and does not help people who are not prepared to dive into the actual research paper to find out what is going on.
The OP is only correct in a subset of online data.
Actually the term "comment" is the problem. By definition practically, a comment is a throwaway expression of one's opinion and "comments" are just a whole lot of them.
There is a field called Computer Assisted Meetings. I researched a bit of it and worked on some software designs.
At the time my project did not go through due to the extremely high cost of buying enough data input terminals, one per attendee, and there were no smartphones or cheap terminals worth mentioning. Still is a bit of a problem considering older attendees would not be comfortable sending email from their phones, etc.
As someone mentioned, online forums are useful, and I think the reason is Google.
Arxiv is a good example of what happens when people who single-mindedly want to concentrate original information actually are given a tool to do so. However it is based on individual uncoordinated actions, in other words knowledge is concentrated here but the discussion side occurs prior to publication in research teams not at this website.
My own aim was for people to gather and solve problems together. A group at Harvard tried this and closed down.
My idea was to create a lens to concentrate information, and it was sparked by wanting to make an ad hoc site for people to bring different things needed to respond to an earthquake when government related institutions were paralyzed. This was a while back. You could imagine people picking slots to put their information into, but without a live person to organize the data it would quickly devolve into a BBS. And this is all we have mostly today.
This was before say, Twitter which is basically just shouting out into the cloud, or Facebook which is based on a friends metaphor.
So the metaphor you choose is a big deal.
A Facebook "Wall" page is not the best way to run a discussion. Twitter is not aimed at finding conclusions, and so on.
I believe the second term that is a problem is "moderator". In Slashdot, a moderator is someone who feels like trading in posting his own comments to score other people's comments. However in a real live discussion a moderator would be someone who is actively controlling the dynamic of the discussion.
In CAM there are actually methods and tools (some software) such as those developed at Eindhoven U. and there are more advanced methods, wielded by a meeting moderator or guide, to organize brainstormed ideas, find key topics, and pose followup questions in other words to concentrate knowledge.
So it is really a mistake to listen to this gawker guy. It is a lot more important to think about the kinds of interaction you want to enable, and then find a way to do it. Technology is not necessarily the most important part of the equation even.
The WWW is a small part of what is possible, and you know it is just one protocol among many. Currently you can do a video conference among a small number of participants but there are no good models for large gatherings which is what I was interested in, so there is a broad field available for research and experimentation.
Stupid to say this on the first year remembrance of the worst nuclear accident in Japan's history. Fuck you.
Does this suggest that by saving up erasures to be done more slowly, perhaps by flipping bits to 0 near the time when they are flipped to 1, could energy be saved and the Landauer limit approached? Also, are there architectures in which a flipping a bit in one direction uses less power, or when blocks of bits can be deselected by some pointer instead of actually erased, trading memory hardware space for power usage?
I am a bit worried about the generation of kids in high school and younger now.
In particular kids need an education about Facebook and Twitter, which feel personal but are really public, before they start using it.
Yes of course. I agree with you. I tried Salesforce with a client where it would have helped with up-front costs. But I am not convinced even this is a good argument in most cases.
The interesting part is that Salesforce uses a monolithic, unique system that you cannot back up yourself or run on your own cloud as far as I know. Well actually I heard there is some way but it is so secret I could never get real info about it. They have secret APIs rolled out for special customers so you don't know all the possibilities of the system. And while there are some very interesting things about it - and I spent a lot of time becoming proficient in Apex their managed language - I don't think they put enough effort into the administration of the back end.
The support engineers are extremely helpful. But they aren't actually administering the system, they are a help desk. The real admins are hidden behind an opaque wall and there are very frequent announcements of one system or another becoming less responsive for some minutes. I guess they are working hard but to me the proper level of service is "fanatical" and I don't feel that at Salesforce. I tried it thinking it would be an interesting market and it might still be but I think any cloud to be trusted has to be a transparent, open cloud backed up by your own systems at the very least.
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
I am really insulted by your comment. First time I have used caps in over 10 years of Slashdot.
The famine is 1.5 MILLION people. Check out http://northkorea.org/
This page includes real world articles and a donation drive by a famous journalist.
I built for free and maintained for over a decade a website to donate food and medicine to people in the North Korean famine, on behalf of a courageous journalist who assembled donations of clothing, food and medicine, brought it to North Korea himself and donated it directly to people there while documenting it. I put videos of tiny children terminally ill with malnutrition and coughing with pneumonia online when QuickTime was still something new.
Bernie Krisher, the journalist and past Newsweek editor who did this project, even had a stroke in North Korea once due to the strain of holding a bag of rice up for the camera but he did a lot through one person's extremely stubborn do or die approach. To him anybody who was not interested was a loser. I remember his anger when Japanese milk manufacturers refused to provide infant formula even. He's not a whack-job, he's a world-class reporter who after retirement decided to give something back to the world and was moved by human suffering.
He is a hero, and most of his donation work over the years has been actually in Cambodia, where he built a newspaper, a hospital, hundreds of rural schools, started medical campaigns and so on. I learned a lot watching his work. All I did was put some of them online.
The main message I would like to give you and Slashdot which idiotically gave you a "Score 4: Insightful" is, the Internet is a person to person connection. It doesn't matter what the heck the leader of a country says. You can deal with any person in the world who has a net connection as one human to another. Now put the shoe on the other foot and imagine it was you who is stuck in a malnutritioned unempowered hell like these starving people.
When the famine came during the North Korean flood, and all the crops were washed over with silt and people got to eating tree bark, Bernie was teaching them how to lab cultivate mushrooms and trying any way to make a dent personally. If it was you stuck there in a famine I bet you would have thanked your lucky stars. This is not a band-aid but a crack in the dam that can be widened through the Internet. Whoever is in charge in NK has no bearing whatsoever on what is the right thing to do.
I am not going to comment on the horrific political brinksmanship and lost hopes of all those intergovernmental negotiations. I hope it works this time, I suppose there's a chance, there always is. It would be nice if there is some way to ensure that kids get the food, I expect many will. I put another letter online for Bernie last year, where he is collecting donations.
Maybe you can help boost google traffic to it by linking to it. The famine is 1.5 MILLION people. There are real on the ground photos on that site from another courageous Reuters journalist too. Check them out and see if you still think it is silly to try and save these lives.
The site is: http://northkorea.org/
I had an outage on Salesforce for 1 week and they did absolutely nothing regarding giving me any free account time or anything except "Sorry".
Their explanation was a massive multiterabyte log file had to processed since what corruption they had extended to their backup.
Shouldn't ever happen.
This was last Autumn.
All boy scouts should take away this: Cloud promises are made to be broken.
I once had a contract on the president's desk to bring Snapfish to Japan. They were very enthusiastic and about to sign. It was early time in that market in Japan. However when the economy is on a downturn American companies tend to get tunnel vision, more conservative and domestically oriented. It's predictable. The Board of Directors said, "Japan? Who's that?" and decided to nix it. This left such a bad taste in my mouth that I started working more with European companies which had a slightly longer view even though I'm an American. Now there are output shops all over the place in Japan and it has morphed into a kind of shop where you can plug a phone or camera memory card into a card reader, use a custom application to pick the photos you want, and have it printed in an hour or burned to CD. Using the awesome high speed color photo printers Kodak pioneered, too. The same shop (like Pallette Plaza) also sells phones too, and it is profitable enough that there is a very nice one on one corner I know where the real estate is pretty expensive. This is just one experience and not so recent, but I always wondered about how Kodak was going to hang on if they didn't want to try new markets.
"Determining dynamical equations is hard" by Toby S Cubitt, Jens Eisert, Michael M Wolf.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.0005
An earlier article by same team:
"The Complexity of Relating Quantum Channels to Master Equations" by Toby S. Cubitt, Jens Eisert, Michael M. Wolf
(Submitted on 17 Aug 2009 (v1), last revised 12 Sep 2011 (this version, v2))
http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.2128
should end.. I believe it is possible to do experiments at home that show this kind of spectral lines for different substances, by using a prism and the light from a flame, or perhaps by shining light through a gas into a prism.
I am not an astronomer but here is some info based on some basic understanding and our friend Google. Maybe someone else can contribute more.
Short answer:
1) We can see some things on the moon, especially some mirrors we left there, I think we can see the lunar lander too.
2) Just watch this video it rocks. You can match the light from a telescope against the light seen absorbed or emitted from atoms and molecules in the laboratory to tell what is out there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4yg4HTm3uk&feature=related
Long answer:
First of all, we have indeed gone back and taken closeups of the Moon lots of times. You can see the lander. Also, NASA left mirrors called retroreflectors on the moon that reflect light back to you from any angle, and you can bounce a beam of light off them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/04-15MoonLight.asp
Regarding your main question, when light strikes an atom it may be absorbed or reflected. If absorbed, an electron of the atom is boosted into a higher energy state and when that electron drops back down it emits light of a given wavelength that matches the drop in energy of that electron. It works similarly with molecules made of lots of atoms.
If you spread the light you get from the telescope through a prism, you can see the spectrum of the light and it will show lines at wavelengths matching these electron transitions, so you will see lines representing the elements or molecules that are out there.
If you are looking in the microwave part of the spectrum you may see a microwave emission that comes from the vibration and rotation of asymmetric molecules like carbon monoxide.
And there are nebulae out in space that are being irradiated by ultraviolet light from nearby hot stars, which emit their own characteristic wavelengths, these are emission nebulae.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_nebula
So you can do experiments in the lab to see what wavelengths are absorbed and emitted by a given molecule, and try to match that to the wavelengths you see in the telescope.
Anyway, apparently for the buckyball molecules C60 and C70 (that's 60 or 70 carbon atoms in each spherical molecule) there are certain peaks in the spectra seen at energy levels 3.7eV, 4.7eV, and 5.7eV. These actual energy levels are in fact due to physical properties of the molecules, for example the difference between the C60 and C70 spectra has to do with the difference in shapes, one is a soccer ball and the other is a rugby ball.
(Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9401055)
Apparently when they discovered C60 (buckminsterfullerene) in 1991 they were found characteristic emission lines in the infrared part of the spectrum that matched C60 and no other known substance.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0009261491902455
Finally there seems to be a characteristic spectrum you get when these balls start stacking to make ordered arrays like pyramids or what have you. That's what they found. I guess they could see what shape the substance is in the lab with a scanning-tunnelling microscope (hey that's a pyramid) or maybe just theorize what a pyramid of buckyballs should look like, and then they happen to find the same wavelength in a telescope. Maybe the process was just the reverse of what I just described and they finally figured out what that wierd spectrum was.
This page explains a lot about how astronomers can tell what kinds of atoms and molecules are in space:
http://stars.astro.illinois.e
My bad (OP). You are correct.
It was supposed to be "sails along". Sorry.
I'm the OP. A word got cut off, it was supposed to say "It will take a week at 200 kph for your party of 30 to reach the 36,000-km-high terminal station, while the counterweight sails along 96 km high, a quarter of the way to the Moon."
I thought I would share some info with you about how one team did this, what was cutting edge work at the time.
Not that I am saying you should use these tools although it seems they are one possibility.
Here are links related to a quite interesting software project developed by Christophe Mertz and others at CENA.
The Digistrips system was a user interface prototype demonstration system written in Perl for the design of new touch screen based air traffic controller systems that mimic the traditional system in which paper strips are used to represent aircraft in flight. The demonstration is said to have been successful, and there are a number of papers written about user interaction in the system.
It used Ivy (a cross platform message bus in Perl) and TkZinc (an OpenGL and 2d capable canvas).
Below are numerous links to papers and software sites although the openatc.org website is no longer in service itself. It is possible to download Ivy and TkZinc it seems.
keywords: cena france french aircraft controller prototype perl perl-anim gui prototyping tk-zinc opengl perl strips
Ivy Software Bus
http://www2.tls.cena.fr/products/ivy/
http://freecode.com/projects/ivy
http://www2.tls.cena.fr/products/ivy/download/desc/ivy-perl-deb.html
Ivy is a simple protocol and a set of open-source (LGPL) libraries and programs that allows applications to broadcast information through text messages, with a subscription mechanism based on regular expressions. Ivy libraries are available in C, C++, Java, Python and Perl, on Windows and Unix boxes and on Macs. Several Ivy utilities and hardware drivers are available too.
Ivy is currently used in research projects in the air traffic control and human-computer interaction research communities as well as in commercial products. It is also taught to CS students.
http://wiki.tcl.tk/9246
Christophe Mertz
Zinc.pm
http://search.cpan.org/~zincdev/tk-zinc-3.303/Zinc.pm
Patrick Lecoanet
http://search.cpan.org/~cmertz/svg-svg2zinc-0.05/svg2zinc.pl
though openatc.org is down.
TkZinc
http://www.tkzinc.org/tkzinc/index.php
http://freecode.com/projects/zincisnotcanvas
http://wiki.tcl.tk/2798
TkZinc is a Tk widget developed with Perl/Tk, Tcl/Tk and Python/Tk bindings. TkZinc widgets are very similar to Tk canvases in that they support structured graphics. Graphical items can be manipulated, and bindings can be associated with them to implement interaction behaviors. But unlike the canvas, TkZinc can structure the items in a hierarchy, and has support for affine 2D transforms. Clipping can be set for sub-trees of the item hierarchy and the item set is quite more powerful, including field-specific items for Air Traffic systems. TkZinc is fast enough to allow the implementation of 2k2k radar displays with smooth animations. It is structured enough to allow the implementation of direct manipulation desktop GUIs.
Since the 3.2.2 version, TkZinc also offers as a runtime option, support for openGL rendering, giving access to features such as antialiasing, transparency, color gradients and even a new, openGL oriented, item type : triangles. In order to use the openGL features, you need the support of the GLX extension on your X11 server.
Zinc Is Not Canvas!
Tkzinc has been developped at CENA to help building experimental user interfaces for Air Traffic Control. Tkzinc is a Tk widget, with Tcl, Perl/Tk, and Python/Tkinter bindings. Tkzinc is available as open source under the GNU Les