The larger the temperature difference, the more efficiently we can turn the heat into electricity. Superheated steam is just too difficult to manage over distances so this would make a great first step of collecting the solar energy and transporting it to a single location to make superheated steam.
The best part is that NaCl is non-toxic and doesn't need to be kept under pressure. If you have a natural gas Bunsen burner and good test tubes handy, it is just about possible to melt salt and prove to yourself how stable it is. Just be careful about spilling it because it is hot enough to get things like wood and paper to auto-ignite on contact. The hottest temperature you can expect to achieve with natural gas is around 700 degrees Celsius, if I remember correctly.
(as a side note, this is why low pressure nuclear power plants have such poor efficiency - because the water is only at 100 degrees Celsius after being heated by the nuclear fuel).
Sickle cell is relatively common in the African Continent. Along with malaria and other parasites (snails?) in areas where there is stagnant water. I think that a portable diagnostic microscope would be of great benefit since there are many conditions rampant in less developed nations that can be diagnosed by looking at the blood, especially if it is possible to transmit the picture to an expert for confirmation.
The Toxo infection in rats not only makes the rats reaction time slower: It has been documented in detail that it also appears to modify the behaviour of the infected rats.
Infected rats are likely to be "suicidal" insofar as putting themselves in the path of cats, hanging out near to where they smell feline urination and/or feces.
It is in the interest of the parasite to make the rats exceedingly easy to find/kill so that they may complete their life cycle.
Re:Also an example of lazy/overworked professors
on
Plagiarism Inc.
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't trust a ghost-writer to do a good enough job and I am sure it would stand out like a sore thumb.
While I was at university, I quickly established my own style so that all my work was easily recognisable as mine.
Even when whole pages of a paper were missing, I still would receive an 'B+' grade for the quality.
Google prefers much of it's workforce to work during the same hours because, quite simply, people are much more productive and innovative if they are able to bounce ideas, verbally, off their colleagues immediately without having to wait upon emails/messaging/typing/etc.
As a result, almost all of Google's infrastructure is designed to be able to operate with a percentage of it failed. People are needed to decide if enough of it has failed that action is needed or if it's ok to wait until business hours before doing something about it.
With the scale that Google's infrastructure is, it is impossible to have everything running 100% of the time. For example, a typical hard drive may have a MTBF (mean time before failure) of a million hours. Sounds great? Well, imagine if you have only one hundred thousand of them: Now you have a hard drive failing every 10 hours.
I wouldn't say that their infrastructure IT staff are miserable.
Overworked, maybe... Often frustrated... Over-ambitious but unable to effect change, frequently. Occasionally awakened by their pager, repeatedly, from 3am for the 4th night in a row.... Been there. But I wouldn't ever use the word miserable.
Personally, I am very surprised that Google wasn't on that list.
When I worked at Google, it had a lot of stuff going for it: Reasonable pay, free food, free snacks, free massages, relaxed work environment (as long as you don't mind dodging the occasional finger-rocket or nerf dart), bunch of smart people and a lot more benefits not listed here.
I would say that Google is an excellent place to work for 99.9% of hard-core nerds.
I am pretty sure that most large "glass" mirrors used in astronomy actually use a very thin top layer of aluminium as the reflective layer, perhaps only 3 atoms thick... And I recall reading somewhere that this layer is cleaned off and applied every couple of years because of corrosion.
My company in the late 80's had an online resume system that allowed people to post resumes anonymously, and hiring managers could be notified when their selection criteria was met by someone's posting.
We ran it on the cutting edge PC hardware of the era... It ran on a 10 MHz 80286 ELONEX PC, 640K RAM with a 20MB hard disk, 8 RS232 ports, connected to some 2400 baud modems.
Somewhere, I have kept the three 5 1/4" floppy disks which contain all the source code to the system.
Alas, it didn't take off because our customer base balked at the price of buying a modem.
The PC BIOS started out as a simple nifty way to abstract away the underlying hardware from the operating system so that we didn't have to have drivers for every little thing.
Nowadays, we have drivers for every freaking little thing.
Why? The BIOS failed to evolve into the 32bit era.
It would be great if there could be a piece of flash memory on the motherboard which contains all the Basic I/O driver for each of it's peripherals... And for all expansion cards to have a bit of flash memory for their drivers.
Then the operating system (Windows/Linux/whatever...) can just use all the devices through their firmware driver.
In the UK, it used to involve two police officers.
One would drop their arm, raise a flag or some other indicator as a fast-looking vehicle passes... The other would time how long it takes from the time that the first officer indicates to the time that the vehicle passes him. Since the two of them are a known distance apart, say 100 yards or so, it would be trivial to calculate the speed.
So if the driver was speeding or does something (braking like crazy to slow down) to raise reasonable suspicion, he'd be ticketed accordingly.
It may seem intuitive to us to spin the disc at a specific speed (dependent upon where on the disc you're reading from, this is all a massive oversimplification) and then read the data with a photodiode, filtering the signal with a few passive components before feeding that into the composite video input of a television but such details may not seem so intuitive in a few years when old CRT displays and their signaling technology has long disappeared into the sunset of obsolescence.
Did they remember to include information on how to read the BBC Doomsday project laserdiscs?
I believe the required laserdisc players went out of production something more than 10 years ago and spare parts stopped being manufactured something like 5 years ago.
The idea that spraying some water 3000ft into the air in the hopes that it will aid cloud formation seems... stupid.
3000ft isn't very far and if there isn't enough convection, it isn't going to go up much further... The colder denser air would descend and stay near the ground. This idea sounds about as smart as setting up thousands of Van de Graaff generators all over town, hoping that the ozone generated would plug the ozone hole.
I think a much simpler solution would be this:
1. Cover a large area, perhaps the area of 10 football pitches, with good old fashioned black tarmac. 2. Have a simple sprinkler system, not too dissimilar to a lawn sprinkler system, covering the entire area. 3. When the sun shines, turn on the water. 4. Hopefully, the large area, heated by the sun, will cause enough convection to carry the water vapour up through the atmosphere, where it can form clouds.
There is a problem with salt buildup if using seawater, changing the albino of the tarmac... but I'm guessing that if there is some form of drainage system in place where slightly saltier water could drain away, that should suffice.
If they spent the time/effort to examine why someone else has done something better, it is no longer plagarism: It is now research and they would learn something from it.
Unfortunately, some people are quite happy to copy code without learning from it and so fun little Easter-eggs which embed the original author's name sometimes creep through: I have seen that happen in real life.
Plagarism is copying someone else's work and passing it off as your own. Research is the careful examination of many works and then passing the result off as your own, with appropriate references.
The software itself may be a work of art if created by a sufficiently talented artist, so skilled in the art of software engineering.
In a same way, a bridge, such as the Golden Gate Bridge or Iron Bridge may also be considered a work of art because of the artisans who designed them.
Conversely, walking over a bridge or powering up a jet turbine is in itself, not an art. Similarly, executing software is not an art.
However, in the same way that a skilled pilot may create art in the sky with their aeroplane, a skilled gamer may create art in the way that they play a game.
When I ran a tutorial group for fellow students who were taking the Imperative Programming module, I can guarantee that there was no plagiarism nor cheating going on. I helped them learn coursework and each of their assignments were done by them and I only intervened if they had made a mistake. They experienced some frustration because I would not give them the solution: I had them work through it themselves and figure out their own mistake. Only one time, I was concerned that they really were considering throwing me out through the 3rd floor window.
Only after they had completed their assignments, would I show them how I would complete the same assignment.
I think a difference was that each of them really did want to learn the material but many students today taking these courses just want a job and have no personal interest in the topic.
I did think about Firebird for a bit, but while I know the MySQL and Postgres codebase, I don't know the Firebird code at all.
You could have asked Jim for a personal hands-on tour of the Firebird codebase... And the Falcon storage engine looks kinda like a C++ version of the Firebird C internals.:-)
I am not sure of the benefits of a alcoholic drink which "sobers up faster" other than "sells more booze, kaching!".
Since it has dissolved oxygen, would it whiten teeth too?
What would be revolutionary would be a drink which kept the imbibers drunk for a lengthy but known amount of time but after that time, the imbiber would sober up quickly without hangover...
Slashdot Mirror
They could always ask Steve Jobs if he would be CEO of Microsoft. It worked out great for Apple...
This is big news!
The larger the temperature difference, the more efficiently we can turn the heat into electricity. Superheated steam is just too difficult to manage over distances so this would make a great first step of collecting the solar energy and transporting it to a single location to make superheated steam.
The best part is that NaCl is non-toxic and doesn't need to be kept under pressure. If you have a natural gas Bunsen burner and good test tubes handy, it is just about possible to melt salt and prove to yourself how stable it is. Just be careful about spilling it because it is hot enough to get things like wood and paper to auto-ignite on contact. The hottest temperature you can expect to achieve with natural gas is around 700 degrees Celsius, if I remember correctly.
(as a side note, this is why low pressure nuclear power plants have such poor efficiency - because the water is only at 100 degrees Celsius after being heated by the nuclear fuel).
Sickle cell is relatively common in the African Continent. Along with malaria and other parasites (snails?) in areas where there is stagnant water. I think that a portable diagnostic microscope would be of great benefit since there are many conditions rampant in less developed nations that can be diagnosed by looking at the blood, especially if it is possible to transmit the picture to an expert for confirmation.
The Toxo infection in rats not only makes the rats reaction time slower: It has been documented in detail that it also appears to modify the behaviour of the infected rats.
Infected rats are likely to be "suicidal" insofar as putting themselves in the path of cats, hanging out near to where they smell feline urination and/or feces.
It is in the interest of the parasite to make the rats exceedingly easy to find/kill so that they may complete their life cycle.
I wouldn't trust a ghost-writer to do a good enough job and I am sure it would stand out like a sore thumb.
While I was at university, I quickly established my own style so that all my work was easily recognisable as mine.
Even when whole pages of a paper were missing, I still would receive an 'B+' grade for the quality.
Bingo!
You hit the nail on it's head.
Google prefers much of it's workforce to work during the same hours because, quite simply, people are much more productive and innovative if they are able to bounce ideas, verbally, off their colleagues immediately without having to wait upon emails/messaging/typing/etc.
As a result, almost all of Google's infrastructure is designed to be able to operate with a percentage of it failed. People are needed to decide if enough of it has failed that action is needed or if it's ok to wait until business hours before doing something about it.
With the scale that Google's infrastructure is, it is impossible to have everything running 100% of the time. For example, a typical hard drive may have a MTBF (mean time before failure) of a million hours. Sounds great? Well, imagine if you have only one hundred thousand of them: Now you have a hard drive failing every 10 hours.
I wouldn't say that their infrastructure IT staff are miserable.
Overworked, maybe... Often frustrated... Over-ambitious but unable to effect change, frequently.
Occasionally awakened by their pager, repeatedly, from 3am for the 4th night in a row.... Been there.
But I wouldn't ever use the word miserable.
(Former Google SRE)
Personally, I am very surprised that Google wasn't on that list.
When I worked at Google, it had a lot of stuff going for it: Reasonable pay, free food, free snacks, free massages, relaxed work environment (as long as you don't mind dodging the occasional finger-rocket or nerf dart), bunch of smart people and a lot more benefits not listed here.
I would say that Google is an excellent place to work for 99.9% of hard-core nerds.
Shouldn't the CSR's job titles be amended to be "Customer Service, Verizon Representative"?
Then there would be no doubt for whom they should be representing.
Adding to parent comment..
I am pretty sure that most large "glass" mirrors used in astronomy actually use a very thin top layer of aluminium as the reflective layer, perhaps only 3 atoms thick... And I recall reading somewhere that this layer is cleaned off and applied every couple of years because of corrosion.
My company in the late 80's had an online resume system that allowed people to post resumes anonymously, and hiring managers could be notified when their selection criteria was met by someone's posting.
We ran it on the cutting edge PC hardware of the era... It ran on a 10 MHz 80286 ELONEX PC, 640K RAM with a 20MB hard disk, 8 RS232 ports, connected to some 2400 baud modems.
Somewhere, I have kept the three 5 1/4" floppy disks which contain all the source code to the system.
Alas, it didn't take off because our customer base balked at the price of buying a modem.
The PC BIOS started out as a simple nifty way to abstract away the underlying hardware from the operating system so that we didn't have to have drivers for every little thing.
Nowadays, we have drivers for every freaking little thing.
Why? The BIOS failed to evolve into the 32bit era.
It would be great if there could be a piece of flash memory on the motherboard which contains all the Basic I/O driver for each of it's peripherals... And for all expansion cards to have a bit of flash memory for their drivers.
Then the operating system (Windows/Linux/whatever...) can just use all the devices through their firmware driver.
(Fed up of drivers)
In the UK, it used to involve two police officers.
One would drop their arm, raise a flag or some other indicator as a fast-looking vehicle passes...
The other would time how long it takes from the time that the first officer indicates to the time that the vehicle passes him. Since the two of them are a known distance apart, say 100 yards or so, it would be trivial to calculate the speed.
So if the driver was speeding or does something (braking like crazy to slow down) to raise reasonable suspicion, he'd be ticketed accordingly.
Depends upon your definition of "easier"...
It may seem intuitive to us to spin the disc at a specific speed (dependent upon where on the disc you're reading from, this is all a massive oversimplification) and then read the data with a photodiode, filtering the signal with a few passive components before feeding that into the composite video input of a television but such details may not seem so intuitive in a few years when old CRT displays and their signaling technology has long disappeared into the sunset of obsolescence.
Reading the "dots" wouldn't help you in seeing the image data stored on a laserdisc: It's not a binary format.
Did they remember to include information on how to read the BBC Doomsday project laserdiscs?
I believe the required laserdisc players went out of production something more than 10 years ago and spare parts stopped being manufactured something like 5 years ago.
Lame, replying to my own posting: Office Home and Student is $150.
I should learn to proofread what I post sometime...
I wouldn't be surprised if the following calculation was used:
( (Total number of x86 CPUs sold) - (Total number of Windows licenses sold) ) x ($Cost of Windows 7 + Office) = ($Size of worldwide piracy)
So, lets feed in some numbers...
Multiply... I calculate the number at $42 billion.
Roughly the same number so I'm guessing that is exactly how the number was calculated.
The idea that spraying some water 3000ft into the air in the hopes that it will aid cloud formation seems ... stupid.
3000ft isn't very far and if there isn't enough convection, it isn't going to go up much further... The colder denser air would descend and stay near the ground. This idea sounds about as smart as setting up thousands of Van de Graaff generators all over town, hoping that the ozone generated would plug the ozone hole.
I think a much simpler solution would be this:
1. Cover a large area, perhaps the area of 10 football pitches, with good old fashioned black tarmac.
2. Have a simple sprinkler system, not too dissimilar to a lawn sprinkler system, covering the entire area.
3. When the sun shines, turn on the water.
4. Hopefully, the large area, heated by the sun, will cause enough convection to carry the water vapour up through the atmosphere, where it can form clouds.
There is a problem with salt buildup if using seawater, changing the albino of the tarmac ... but I'm guessing that if there is some form of drainage system in place where slightly saltier water could drain away, that should suffice.
If they spent the time/effort to examine why someone else has done something better, it is no longer plagarism: It is now research and they would learn something from it.
Unfortunately, some people are quite happy to copy code without learning from it and so fun little Easter-eggs which embed the original author's name sometimes creep through: I have seen that happen in real life.
Plagarism is copying someone else's work and passing it off as your own.
Research is the careful examination of many works and then passing the result off as your own, with appropriate references.
The software itself may be a work of art if created by a sufficiently talented artist, so skilled in the art of software engineering.
In a same way, a bridge, such as the Golden Gate Bridge or Iron Bridge may also be considered a work of art because of the artisans who designed them.
Conversely, walking over a bridge or powering up a jet turbine is in itself, not an art. Similarly, executing software is not an art.
However, in the same way that a skilled pilot may create art in the sky with their aeroplane, a skilled gamer may create art in the way that they play a game.
Art is in the eye of the beholder.
When I ran a tutorial group for fellow students who were taking the Imperative Programming module, I can guarantee that there was no plagiarism nor cheating going on. I helped them learn coursework and each of their assignments were done by them and I only intervened if they had made a mistake. They experienced some frustration because I would not give them the solution: I had them work through it themselves and figure out their own mistake. Only one time, I was concerned that they really were considering throwing me out through the 3rd floor window.
Only after they had completed their assignments, would I show them how I would complete the same assignment.
I think a difference was that each of them really did want to learn the material but many students today taking these courses just want a job and have no personal interest in the topic.
AFAIK, what you described isn't too far off the technique used by Google to scan non-valuable material.
You could have asked Jim for a personal hands-on tour of the Firebird codebase... And the Falcon storage engine looks kinda like a C++ version of the Firebird C internals. :-)
I am not sure of the benefits of a alcoholic drink which "sobers up faster" other than "sells more booze, kaching!".
Since it has dissolved oxygen, would it whiten teeth too?
What would be revolutionary would be a drink which kept the imbibers drunk for a lengthy but known amount of time but after that time, the imbiber would sober up quickly without hangover...