>by msaulters (130992) Alter Relationship on Thursday April 20, @06:50PM (#15165944)
>
>Finally, while he's taking ideas from some of the animal world, why not give our new and improved human, >who I like to call Homo Novo, spinnerets so we can make our own rope, easily glue and fasten things or in >a bind even make our own clothes? I admit, it would put the packing tape industry out of business, but it >might afford the chance for some exciting new sports, as competitors try to tie each other up, rapell down >buildings, or even the new art form of web design (oh, I guess we'd have to come up with a different name).
It would have been even more nice if they could've made a simuation where they illustrate how
the light is bent around the merging black holes, by showing how the position of stars behind
would have shifted, perhaps including a possibly exeggerated view of the red/blueshift to
demonstrate the spacial anomaly.
The waves we see in the simulations are not real eg. we talk about a change in the curvature of space here, which is one dimenstion above what we can really can imagine. So ordinary waves will not truly demonstrate the shifting of the curvature of space, other than as an analogy.
Anyway, the space 'brane' we exist in, is very 'stiff' that is - the curving and bending is
extremely small, not like what you could imagine from any 'Star Trek'-episode, so regarding to
this, our Universe is very "boring" with most probably no wormholes, or timeloops and so on.
This would demand a more 'elastic' brane, however it is not clear wether life could excist in such
an Universe. A less stiff brane would possibly have meant a much lower speed of light, though much
easier warp travel, but these will remain wild speculation inspired by the 'Wheel Chair' guy...
We have this in Norway already, typically you can pay for parking and charge your telephone with additional minutes of talking time.This alone is not so bad, however we have tons and tons of "SMS services", where you can participate in polls, competitions, drawing of prizes, and yes, there's the SMS sex market and SMS dating services.
Though this is consumerism at its worst, and the same people who can't resist wasting all their money on internet poker, waste their money on those SMS services. However the environment isn't going to be hurt as much by this, as, for example all these unneccesary plastic products and heavy plastic wrapping, which TV commercials and heavy catalogues already make people buy. Sometimes, the wrapping is so heavy, so you would need the very tool inside the package you try to open, to breach the plastic.
So it isn't like you have a choice anymore, to choose environmentally-friendly products. And btw. norwegians are now soon driving cars as much as americans, which means
we are getting fatter too, since the oil is still relatively cheap in Norway, that is, compared to our levels of salary, an important point many spoiled norwegians don't realise. (UN usually states that Norway is one of the world's richest countries, which is true if you look just at the average income of
norwegian citizens.)
Believe therefore all these SMS competitions and poll services as described above are worse regarding consumerism, than simply being able to pay all those small fees, which demands unpractical amounts of change to reside in your pocket. Parking btw. is mostly paid for, with your credit/debit card, and not with text messages, since the latter IS more unpractical, than simply inserting your card and typing the 4 digit code.
So one could say that perhaps being able to easily pay for your parking (either by credit card or SMS), is somehow contributing to 'consumerism', however paying your cinema tickets, or being able to pay for your tram ride, would not, so it would depend more on the type of service or goods you pay for, if it is consumerism, or not.
They should put up a lot of these super duper ATMs then. Those of us who have been #2 in the queue
and looked forward to a quick withdrawal of cash, only to listen to lots of beeps and reinsertions
of the card by the person in front of you, acting like he or she never have used one of these
machines before, pressing all the wrong buttons, incredibly enough going on for a long period without
getting the card confiscated by the machine due to too many incorrect PIN code entries, KNOW what I mean:
Hopefully, the banks only hand out cards for these new ATMs to persons passing some kind of an IQ-test,
or users who already have an internet-enabled bank account.
Or hopefully they will roll out really many of these machines, to avoid long and irritating queues
because ordinary 'non computer' people simply get too many options to choose between on the spot.
How can this be a perfect solution for credit card fraud?
I'd hoped it would have been
a perfect solution AGAINST credit card fraud, but obviously, the LCD screen will be so perfect, that some clever hacking will make it able to feign someone else's credit card!
Mods which ruin a WORKING antique and/or rare instrument are no cool regardless
of the coolness of the mod itself. I have actually been looking for a Geiger counter
for years, and the first time I hear about someone having a spare Geiger
counter it is gutted to insert a bloody iPod?!?
Although geeks usually are not so much into woodworks, I would say
that retrofitting modern gadgets into wooden boxes,
made remotely with the same care as a musical instrument or decoration item, would
score many more geek points than just fitting
one item into another box after some gluing and soldering.
This guy has actually silenced his noisy PC by putting it into a wooden case, so it could even be of some practical use to use wood too!
They've already busted a myth regarding a "Static Cannon", which is described below at
this page:
Although, the PVC pipe they tested, looked more like 8 feet, than 8 inch, it seems like no way you can build up a charge that might ignite your clothes like that, unless you've spilled flammable chemicals like acetone (nailpolish remover) or gasoline. A friend of me who attended a welding class, once told about a classmate who used oxygen to blow away some dust from his fleece jacket, and some time later ignited a smoke, which in order ignited his jacket which even many minutes later, contained high amounts of oxygen. It might be true, but I wouldn't believe it completely unless it was confirmed by Mythbusters, of course.
So unless there where flammable liquids spilled right besides where the static spark hit, I find it highly unlikely, that a static spark would ignite the carpet and those clothes.
Think about it - how much larger is the possibility that someone sooner or later drops a burning cigarette on a similar carpet and/or clothes?
We'd hear about it, if there were extremely flammable clothes or carpets like this, and those products/materials would very quickly be pulled
off the market.
It even counts against this story how elaborate it is. One spark and perhaps one little flame or a burn mark? Perhaps yes, but not a melting trail of plastic and/or fire on that carpet, and even in his car, without him detecting what was going on a little sooner! Did those sparks btw jump all the way from his jacket, and into the floor, or via his pants (ouch), or what?
Why not 'your computer', 'your documents',
'your videos' etc?
No, wait - with DRM
in the BIOS already, that would be wrong!
It should of course be 'our computer', 'our documents', 'our videos' etc since they soon will be locked by DRM in the BIOS or even in the processor.
Then perhaps Linux should take over those 'My Folder'
names and tell people that yeah, those documents
are really 'your documents'.
..Isn't it more cost effective to grow your own hydrogen with electrolysis and a solar panel back home?
Another trouble with this solution, and with using hydrogen at all, is that it is not at all energy effecient, there are huge losses when creating hydrogen, (electrolysing water) and either burning it in piston motors or in fuel cells.
You get back only 10-20% of the original electrical energy, to actually move the car, compared with using batteries for storage.
Yes an EV is about 90% effective, a little less or a little more depending on how quickly you use the energy stored in the batteries due to some self discharge.
In the future, we should use EVs for short and medium range transport, and possibly public transport and hybrid (hydrogen or biodiesel) cars for mid and longrange transport, NOT hydrogen alone. If we use hydrogen alone, we'll probably end up with having to build three times as many nuclear power plants than neccessary.
It is already now, fully doable to quick charge even the old style NiCd batteries to 80% charge, in 20 minutes, and battery types with trice the capacity pr weight are already here, and would have been much cheaper, if serial production for cars could've started right now. Those who couldn't afford both a hydrogen car for long range transport and an EV for short range transport, could also do the longer trips, with 20 minute 'coofee breaks' every 300km.
Soon, however, even solar panels will get cheap enough to power battery cars just fine, but as the previous writer mentioned, certainly not hydrogen cars.
I would not feel too safe either, if my neighbours scrambled together parts for their own backyard hydrogen processing facility!
Another problem with hydrogen cars, is that hydrogen is such a small atom, so it has the ability to penetrate even solid metal, making it more brittle. This means that the hydrogen actually wears out metal parts in the car, so it needs more servicing and care than ordinary gasoline cars need, also due to the increased need for safety vs. hydrogen leaks and possible explosions or high temperature burns of hydrogen.
The maximum prison time for breaking the new law, is 3 - three - years, and probably as much to
pay, as the music industry will claim they've lost!
In Norway - three years in prison as a maximum sentence, is VERY strict, probably about the same as for manslaughter, rape or bank robbery, when the circumstances for the defendant aren't pointing in a serious direction. (If there is a bad family history, or anything that could explain the defendant's poor behaviour, and which could be corrected, you seldom get three years in prison for violence in Norway. A psychopath or someone who don't regret their actions, will get a more servere sentence - sometimes!)
No, actually the law says that ripping the stream for playing on devices that are "irrelevant" for the CD-format, is illegal.
So ripping, or copying to a CD for playing on a CD-player that cannot read the copy protected original CD is allowed, but not ripping/copying for playing on an Ipod or any other type of device (non-CD player) that plays an other (compressed) format.
Yes, 99% of us norwegians (probably) stalls on this use of the term "irrelevant" in the law.
And what about those players which plays 8cm CDs , which can play *.wav OR *.mp3 - are they in some kind of borderland here, noone really knows!
If I had to bet, I'd say they were illegal, as it seems the law ONLY make an exception so you can override faulty copyright protection when it prevents playing of the CD on a regular CD player.
Recordings of my and a friend's automatic pianos!
on
Automata On The March
·
· Score: 0
Actually, player pianos can sound really cool, and they are NOT obsolete antiques from the past.
The sound is completely real, even better than the most costly surround system that ever excisted.
That is, if you tune the piano and restore the inner workings correctly, of course, in addition to being a
good pianolist.
The automatic mechanism operates via a complex maze of vacuum hoses, valves and pneumatics (small bellows) and the piano roll which contains holes read by a tracker bar which tell small pneumatics when to collapse, which in order, moves the keys of the regular piano, something which is further illustrated and explained here.
Nearly all player pianos can be played by hand as a regular piano by the way. One interesting detail is that on European pianos, the keys often don't move when the player plays automatically, while on most of the american ones, the keys move like we see in those western movies. Some pianos have electrical driven pumps, most others have foot pedals - mine has both! Pianos with food pedals are very easy to pump, if they are in tight working condition!
Here are a some examples of high quality mp3 recordings of two old pianos, one Stroud pianola residing in an art café, called Thomasgaarden in the old norwegian copper mining town Røros
and my own Weber Pianola !
Lion Tamer Rag
Artcraft roll played on the Weber piano
Frühlingsrauschen by the norwegian composer Christian Sinding.
Aeolian roll played on the Stroud piano
American Patrol
Aeolian roll played on the Stroud piano
Chicago March
Artcraft roll played on the Weber piano
Can-can
Some old noname roll played on the Stroud piano
One should notice that even if the Stroud pianola is somewhat untuned, its tone is quite better than mine, which sounds more like a perfectly tuned home piano ready for taking those boring piano lessons.
But guess what - there no more boring piano lessons to take when you have an automatic piano!
And if I need more rolls, My friend Douglas Henderson, who is the mastermind behind Artcraft still supplies newly made rolls!
Artcraft is by the way
a one man business where the rolls are made the hard way with this amazing punching equipment.
Here are some pictures of the inside of my piano - and yes, I should long ago made a home page with these pictures.
Did you by the way get distracted by the LGBtrain on top of my Weber piano?
Anyway - here are some more pictures from the inside of the piano too, here's the wind motor which pulls the roll and the
Excuse me, but doesn't the space elevator actually 'steal' momentum from the Earth's rotation when bringing mass into the space, which accounts for the huge "energy savings" when using the space elevator vs. a regular rocket?
Think about a spinning ballett-dancer who stretches her arms out, and then her rotational speed decreases.
Are there some math heads here who can calculate how much mass we can move out how far, before the rotation of the Earth has dropped to a questionable level?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... seems like we have to call in the Mythbusters on this one...
>by msaulters (130992) Alter Relationship on Thursday April 20, @06:50PM (#15165944)
>
>Finally, while he's taking ideas from some of the animal world, why not give our new and improved human,
>who I like to call Homo Novo, spinnerets so we can make our own rope, easily glue and fasten things or in
>a bind even make our own clothes? I admit, it would put the packing tape industry out of business, but it
>might afford the chance for some exciting new sports, as competitors try to tie each other up, rapell down
>buildings, or even the new art form of web design (oh, I guess we'd have to come up with a different name).
Uh, Spiderman?
It would have been even more nice if they could've made a simuation where they illustrate how the light is bent around the merging black holes, by showing how the position of stars behind would have shifted, perhaps including a possibly exeggerated view of the red/blueshift to demonstrate the spacial anomaly. The waves we see in the simulations are not real eg. we talk about a change in the curvature of space here, which is one dimenstion above what we can really can imagine. So ordinary waves will not truly demonstrate the shifting of the curvature of space, other than as an analogy. Anyway, the space 'brane' we exist in, is very 'stiff' that is - the curving and bending is extremely small, not like what you could imagine from any 'Star Trek'-episode, so regarding to this, our Universe is very "boring" with most probably no wormholes, or timeloops and so on. This would demand a more 'elastic' brane, however it is not clear wether life could excist in such an Universe. A less stiff brane would possibly have meant a much lower speed of light, though much easier warp travel, but these will remain wild speculation inspired by the 'Wheel Chair' guy...
Nuclear power will probably get much safer the day America no longer has a president who thinks it's spelled 'nucular'...
We have this in Norway already, typically you can pay for parking and charge your telephone with additional minutes of talking time.This alone is not so bad, however we have tons and tons of "SMS services", where you can participate in polls, competitions, drawing of prizes, and yes, there's the SMS sex market and SMS dating services.
Though this is consumerism at its worst, and the same people who can't resist wasting all their money on internet poker, waste their money on those SMS services. However the environment isn't going to be hurt as much by this, as, for example all these unneccesary plastic products and heavy plastic wrapping, which TV commercials and heavy catalogues already make people buy. Sometimes, the wrapping is so heavy, so you would need the very tool inside the package you try to open, to breach the plastic.
So it isn't like you have a choice anymore, to choose environmentally-friendly products. And btw. norwegians are now soon driving cars as much as americans, which means we are getting fatter too, since the oil is still relatively cheap in Norway, that is, compared to our levels of salary, an important point many spoiled norwegians don't realise.
(UN usually states that Norway is one of the world's richest countries, which is true if you look just at the average income of norwegian citizens.)
Believe therefore all these SMS competitions and poll services as described above are worse regarding consumerism, than simply being able to pay all those small fees, which demands unpractical amounts of change to reside in your pocket. Parking btw. is mostly paid for, with your credit/debit card, and not with text messages, since the latter IS more unpractical, than simply inserting your card and typing the 4 digit code. So one could say that perhaps being able to easily pay for your parking (either by credit card or SMS), is somehow contributing to 'consumerism', however paying your cinema tickets, or being able to pay for your tram ride, would not, so it would depend more on the type of service or goods you pay for, if it is consumerism, or not.
They should put up a lot of these super duper ATMs then. Those of us who have been #2 in the queue and looked forward to a quick withdrawal of cash, only to listen to lots of beeps and reinsertions of the card by the person in front of you, acting like he or she never have used one of these machines before, pressing all the wrong buttons, incredibly enough going on for a long period without getting the card confiscated by the machine due to too many incorrect PIN code entries, KNOW what I mean: Hopefully, the banks only hand out cards for these new ATMs to persons passing some kind of an IQ-test, or users who already have an internet-enabled bank account. Or hopefully they will roll out really many of these machines, to avoid long and irritating queues because ordinary 'non computer' people simply get too many options to choose between on the spot.
How can this be a perfect solution for credit card fraud?
I'd hoped it would have been a perfect solution AGAINST credit card fraud, but obviously, the LCD screen will be so perfect,
that some clever hacking will make it able to feign someone else's credit card!
Mods which ruin a WORKING antique and/or rare instrument are no cool regardless of the coolness of the mod itself.
I have actually been looking for a Geiger counter for years, and the first time I hear about someone having a spare Geiger counter it is gutted to insert a bloody iPod?!?
Although geeks usually are not so much into woodworks, I would say that retrofitting modern gadgets into wooden boxes,
made remotely with the same care as a musical instrument or decoration item, would score many more geek points than just fitting
one item into another box after some gluing and soldering.
This guy has actually silenced his noisy PC by putting it into a wooden case, so it could even be of some practical use to use wood too!
Guess I don't need to buy the 1kW power supply for this system, or...?
Now, if they also would come up with a laptop cold fusion unit...
Mythbusters!
They've already busted a myth regarding a "Static Cannon", which is described below at this page:
Although, the PVC pipe they tested, looked more like 8 feet, than 8 inch, it seems like no way you can build up a charge that might ignite your clothes like that, unless you've spilled flammable chemicals like acetone (nailpolish remover) or gasoline. A friend of me who attended a welding class, once told about a classmate who used oxygen to blow away some dust from his fleece jacket, and some time later ignited a smoke, which in order ignited his jacket which even many minutes later, contained high amounts of oxygen. It might be true, but I wouldn't believe it completely unless it was confirmed by Mythbusters, of course.
So unless there where flammable liquids spilled right besides where the static spark hit, I find it highly unlikely, that a static spark would ignite the carpet and those clothes. Think about it - how much larger is the possibility that someone sooner or later drops a burning cigarette on a similar carpet and/or clothes? We'd hear about it, if there were extremely flammable clothes or carpets like this, and those products/materials would very quickly be pulled off the market. It even counts against this story how elaborate it is. One spark and perhaps one little flame or a burn mark? Perhaps yes, but not a melting trail of plastic and/or fire on that carpet, and even in his car, without him detecting what was going on a little sooner!
Did those sparks btw jump all the way from his jacket, and into the floor, or via his pants (ouch), or what?
I say this myth is completely BUSTED!
Why not 'your computer', 'your documents', 'your videos' etc?
No, wait - with DRM in the BIOS already, that would be wrong!
It should of course be 'our computer', 'our documents', 'our videos' etc since they soon will be locked by DRM in the BIOS or even in the processor. Then perhaps Linux should take over those 'My Folder' names and tell people that yeah, those documents are really 'your documents'.
..Isn't it more cost effective to grow your own hydrogen with electrolysis and a solar panel back home?
Another trouble with this solution, and with using hydrogen at all, is that it is not at all energy effecient, there are huge losses when creating hydrogen, (electrolysing water) and either burning it in piston motors or in fuel cells.
You get back only 10-20% of the original electrical energy, to actually move the car, compared with using batteries for storage.
Yes an EV is about 90% effective, a little less or a little more depending on how quickly you use the energy stored in the batteries due to some self discharge.
In the future, we should use EVs for short and medium range transport, and possibly public transport and hybrid (hydrogen or biodiesel) cars
for mid and longrange transport, NOT hydrogen alone. If we use hydrogen alone, we'll probably end up with having to build three times as many nuclear power plants than neccessary.
It is already now, fully doable to quick charge even the old style NiCd batteries to 80% charge, in 20 minutes, and battery types with trice the capacity pr weight
are already here, and would have been much cheaper, if serial production for cars could've started right now. Those who couldn't afford both a hydrogen car for long range transport and an EV for short range transport, could also do the longer trips, with 20 minute 'coofee breaks' every 300km.
Soon, however, even solar panels will get cheap enough to power battery cars just fine, but as the previous writer mentioned, certainly not hydrogen cars.
I would not feel too safe either, if my neighbours scrambled together parts for their own backyard hydrogen processing facility!
Another problem with hydrogen cars, is that hydrogen is such a small atom, so it has the ability to penetrate even solid metal, making it more brittle. This means that the hydrogen actually wears out metal parts in the car, so it needs more servicing and care than ordinary gasoline cars need, also due to the increased need for safety vs. hydrogen leaks and possible explosions or high temperature burns of hydrogen.
The maximum prison time for breaking the new law, is 3 - three - years, and probably as much to pay, as the music industry will claim they've lost! In Norway - three years in prison as a maximum sentence, is VERY strict, probably about the same as for manslaughter, rape or bank robbery, when the circumstances for the defendant aren't pointing in a serious direction. (If there is a bad family history, or anything that could explain the defendant's poor behaviour, and which could be corrected, you seldom get three years in prison for violence in Norway. A psychopath or someone who don't regret their actions, will get a more servere sentence - sometimes!)
No, actually the law says that ripping the stream for playing on devices that are "irrelevant" for the CD-format, is illegal.
So ripping, or copying to a CD for playing on a CD-player that cannot read the copy protected original CD is allowed, but not ripping/copying for playing on an Ipod or any other type of device (non-CD player) that plays an other (compressed) format.
Yes, 99% of us norwegians (probably) stalls on this use of the term "irrelevant" in the law.
And what about those players which plays 8cm CDs , which can play *.wav OR *.mp3 - are they in some kind of borderland here, noone really knows!
If I had to bet, I'd say they were illegal, as it seems the law ONLY make an exception so you can override faulty copyright protection when it prevents playing of the CD on a regular CD player.
Actually, player pianos can sound really cool, and they are NOT obsolete antiques from the past.
The sound is completely real, even better than the most costly surround system that ever excisted.
That is, if you tune the piano and restore the inner workings correctly, of course, in addition to being a good pianolist.
The automatic mechanism operates via a complex maze of vacuum hoses, valves and pneumatics (small bellows) and the piano roll which contains holes read by a tracker bar which tell small pneumatics when to collapse, which in order, moves the keys of the regular piano, something which is further illustrated and explained here.
Nearly all player pianos can be played by hand as a regular piano by the way. One interesting detail is that on European pianos, the keys often don't move when the player plays automatically, while on most of the american ones, the keys move like we see in those western movies. Some pianos have electrical driven pumps, most others have foot pedals - mine has both! Pianos with food pedals are very easy to pump, if they are in tight working condition!
Here are a some examples of high quality mp3 recordings of two old pianos, one Stroud pianola residing in an art café, called Thomasgaarden in the old norwegian copper mining town Røros and my own Weber Pianola !
Lion Tamer Rag Artcraft roll played on the Weber piano
Frühlingsrauschen by the norwegian composer Christian Sinding. Aeolian roll played on the Stroud piano
American Patrol Aeolian roll played on the Stroud piano
Chicago March Artcraft roll played on the Weber piano
Can-can Some old noname roll played on the Stroud piano
And yes, I also recorded St. Lois Blues and Tiger Rag when I visited that café last summer.
One should notice that even if the Stroud pianola is somewhat untuned, its tone is quite better than mine, which sounds more like a perfectly tuned home piano ready for taking those boring piano lessons. But guess what - there no more boring piano lessons to take when you have an automatic piano!
And if I need more rolls, My friend Douglas Henderson, who is the mastermind behind Artcraft still supplies newly made rolls!
Artcraft is by the way a one man business where the rolls are made the hard way with this amazing punching equipment.
Here are some pictures of the inside of my piano - and yes, I should long ago made a home page with these pictures.
Did you by the way get distracted by the LGB train on top of my Weber piano?
Anyway - here are some more pictures from the inside of the piano too, here's the wind motor which pulls the roll and the
Excuse me, but doesn't the space elevator actually 'steal' momentum from the Earth's rotation when bringing mass into the space, which accounts for the huge "energy savings" when using the space elevator vs. a regular rocket? Think about a spinning ballett-dancer who stretches her arms out, and then her rotational speed decreases. Are there some math heads here who can calculate how much mass we can move out how far, before the rotation of the Earth has dropped to a questionable level?
Now, if you can get some more of these cars and play networked GTA with your friends...
$100 for an el cheapo PC running some crippled version of Windows?
Heck! 100$ is the cost for the extra RAM or hard drive I have to insert each time M$ issues another faulty service pack!
Steve Ballmer might not have accounted for all those kinds of non Windows operating systems which would install perfectly on older/weak systems.