IANAQP (I am not a quantum physicist) but I do have a Nature online account, and I've read the actual scientific paper, so I'll take a stab at it.
This 'echo' is actually an echo of something called the Kondo effect. Basically, when you have a single magnetic molecule (like cobalt) in a non-magnetic metal (like copper) and you lower the temperature, the electrons on the surface of the copper begin to align their spins to cancel the magnetic moment of the cobalt atom. At sufficiently low temp, these shielding electrons enter a many-particle single-spin quantum state that completely masks the cobalt's magnetic moment. This is the Kondo effect. The ellipse on the Cu surface creates a number of possible waveforms (more properly, eigenstates) that can refocus this resonance to the other focus - creating another Kondo effect where there is no cobalt atom. This effect can be measured with a STM (scanning-tunneling electron microscope). IIRC, STM uses a very, very fine molecular 'tip' that is passed above the sample. As the tip moves over an atomic surface, a tunnelling current is generated that is proportional to the distance between the tip and the sample. This is commonly used to generate topographic maps of electron density around single atoms.
Theoretically, this resonance could be used to sample the orientation of a magnetic molecule at a distance. Of course, measuring this moment would disrupt it as per Heisenberg's Uncertaintly Principle, but in this experiment, they are only measuring the presence of the field, not its orientation. Since the effect disappears when the Co atom is moved off the focus of the ellipse, this could also be used sense small movements of atoms at a distance. And it could be used to link the quantum states of two molecules at a distance on a surface, effectively forming a specific quantum 'wire'. They also speculate that ellipsoids could be used to do this in a 3D solid.
Don't get too excited - the effect only happens at 4K (brrrrr) and an electron microscope is a rather impractical sensor, so don't look for it any time soon. But its still cool.
I may very well have butchered some or all of this explanation. I welcome any corrections or clarifications.
I've read most of the postings for this article, and I've tried to suppress it, but I feel a rant coming on. I've always wondered why there is so much crappy scifi in the world, and why its not taken seriously as a genre, and I think I know now. There seems to be no distinction in anyone's list between 'trash' scifi and what I consider 'true' scifi. Now I personally enjoy both types, but I would only recommend the real stuff to another. Allow me to elaborate...
CJ Cherryh, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, David Brin, Alan Dean Foster, Anne McCaffrey, Madeline L'Engle, and the like are excellent excellent examples of trash scifi. I consider most of their work to be on a level with supermarket romance novels. Don't get me wrong, I've read a number of books by all of them, and I did enjoy them, but I'm not proud of that fact. They do, however, have relevance in a list that is designed for a 13 year old. Foster's Spellsinger and McCaffrey's Dragonriders are particularly good for kids. But when I see these authors randomly interspersed in a list with Herbert, Dick, Asimov, etc... it just makes my blood boil. Its like using the names Jean-Claude VanDamme and Bruce Lee in the same sentence as if they were equivalent. While I'm on the subject of trash novels, why not throw in some Robert Jordan - that's some of the most popular and enjoyable fantasy garbage to come out in a while.
Heinlein may seem an bad choice, but I truly wish that I had read fewer of his books. If I had stopped after 'Stranger in a Strange Land' and 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" I would still consider him to be a scifi great. Most of his books are garbage, though. The basic premise of most of them is that in the future, everyone will live long enough that having sex with your mother will be no big deal. Yeah, great scifi...
For the record, here is my (short) list of truly great, must-read, scifi authors. Very little of it is appropriate for a 13 year old, though.
Frank Herbert- the later Dune series gets pretty cerebral, but still very engaging and profound in many ways. His Voidship books, The Lazarus Effect, The Jesus Incident, and The Ascension Factor are some of the most overlooked masterpieces of scifi. Someone else mentioned the Dosadi Experiment, which is also very good.
Phillip K. Dick - My absolute favorite. Too many good books to list here. A number of people have listed "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". While this may be appropriate to a 13 year old, I consider this to be one of his weakest books. Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle are what real scifi is all about.
Kurt Vonnegut - He's so good, the establishment refuses to classify it as scifi. Vonnegut has something profound to say about humanity, and he just happens to express it in a scifi context every now and then. He also has an incredible sense of humor. IIRC, there are a number of short stories in 'Welcome to the Monkey House' that would be suitable for a 13 year old. Just be sure to screen them first;-)
Asimov - duh
Tolkien - Yeah, I know its fantasy, but it spawned the whole friggin' genre. This should be an obvious choice.
There are a few others, like Clarke, Miller, and Card, but I feel that the four I listed truly stand out. They had a big impact on me, at least.
I'd love to hear other peoples thoughts on the distinction between great and trash scifi, so flame away. I have a nagging feeling I've forgotten someone...
PS- This is all supposed to be recommendations for a 13 year old, yet not once has anyone mentioned Tom Swift. What is the world coming to?
I can't wait for when they really refine this technology. You could set it up so that the things you need to do most often are automatically triggered by the thoughts you have the most often. I could tie checking email to thinking about naked women, and never go more than 20 seconds without checking my email again. And I could link thinking about work to loading slashdot - virtually insuring that I never get anything done.
No, it is not Good Enough(tm). When I can't tell the difference between looking out a window and looking at a monitor, then it will be Good Enough. And I don't think that the Sound Blaster 16 is Good Enough either. I used to have a very bah-humbug attitude towards the bells and whistles, but with my last machine I splurged and got an SBLive with a Dolby digital speaker system. When a thunderbolt cracks through the speakers, people turn and look outside for lightning. THAT is Good Enough, because it is almost indistinguishable from reality. I have found the 3D effects of Environmental Audio to be incredibly immersive. The more the game resembles reality, the easier it is to suspend your disbelief and really get into the game.
While 3D graphics accelerators are very impressive these days, they are not Good Enough. When they can do realtime radiosity and raytracing (or something of similar quality) at a resolution that is below the physical limits of the human eye, that will be Good Enough.
Even if you don't have the uncontrollable urge to play the latest and greatest game, you have to admit that the demand for The Next Big Thing has fueled a lot of innovation in the last few years. A number of the big players involved (Matrox, Nvidia, Creative, etc...) have released specs to their hardware and started open source driver projects. This lends industrial credibility to the Open Source model in general, as well as helping to make Linux a viable platform for gaming and more serious pursuits like graphical design. And that's a Good Thing(tm).
I've been an avid gamer since the days of the Apple II+. I'm not an audiophile, and I've always had a bah-humbug attitude towards frilly little features like 3D audio, but I had a good sized budget for my last machine, so I decided to get a SB Live and a Dolby Digital 5.1 speaker system to go with it. I was blown away. It is incredibly immersive, not to mention a big advantage in gameplay - you can hear which direction gunfire is coming from. You can hear which direction enemies are approaching from even when you can't see them. I now consider 3D audio to be a crucial element of my games, and an important step in making Linux a rocking game platform.
A while back, I got a dualshock controller for my Playstation - just for the analog joysticks, but I was amazed at how effective those two little vibrators in the handles are at making the game come to life. I'm now a convert to force feedback as well. I picked up a Logitech Wingman Force the other day, and I absolutely love it. Implementing the IForce library in Linux would be a very good thing - has anyone heard about programming specs for the Wingman Force? They have a 16 bit controller onboard and a USB connection - just think, we could make a Beowulf cluster;-)
Oh yeah, sex in space should be great. If you're in to elastic harnesses and inflatable tubes. There's been a supposed NASA document about sex in zero g floating around the web for a while now - click here. It seems to be a reasonable discussion of the topic, but of course its unverified. True or not, its pretty damn funny.
I believe there is an effort underway to store large amounts of sperm and eggs from endangered animals. This is obviously better than cell samples, as complicated cloning is not necessary. You just fertilize the egg and implant it in a similar species.
Genetics is only part of the species. Equally important is the role that they play in their environment, instinctive behavior, and learned behavior. Specialized species may not be able to survive if their niche has been destroyed. Instinctive behavior is inherent in brain organization, but the feeding instincts of the young are evolved to complement the parenting instincts of the adult. A discontinuity in this chain could have unpredictable effects - a very literal chicken and egg problem.
One thing that can never be restored are the learned behaviors that each species aquires. Chimps seem to have a form of culture, and while lower animals of course have much simpler traditions, there is still information there that could be lost. Killing a species' meme doesn't even require killing the species - just those members whose brains host the meme.
To anyone who doubts the worth of these more nebulous aspects of a species, I suggest you take a closer look at the amazing interplay of life in the coral reefs. They are disappearing, and when they are gone, no amount of cloning will be able to replicate the intricate web of cooperation and competition.
I extend your line of questioning to display it's absurdity And I question your extension of the line of questioning to display it's absurdity. - Why doesn't everyone focus on writing good apps for Windows instead of Linux? Because Windows sucks. Don't you read slashdot? - Why do companies waste time developing non-intel processors? Because they are heathen infidels. - Why do people around the world waste time learning/reading/writing/speaking non-english languages? That is a damn good question. I have often wondered that myself. It would make my life much easier. - Why do students waste time doing problems listed in their books instead of inventing new problems? Because the professors are too lazy to come up with interesting novel problems. They are far too busy psychologically abusing their graduate students. - Why do we need a dozen search engines? Because they all suck. In combination, they suck a little less. - Why do all these little countries need their own government? Again, that is a damn good question. We should just all get together and agree that our governements suck, then find one that sucks less than the others, and let them take over. Perhaps Canada. They seem to be doing fairly well. Or Holland. - Why do we need all these programming languages. Can't everyone use Java for everything? Err, don't you mean perl?
7x10^5? What does this refer to? The average human cell can divide 50 (+/-10) times before dying (undergoing apoptosis to be technical). Of course, cancers and various immortal cell lines can do much better than that. I wasn't aware that they had any limitation. Although if they do, I suppose it could be something as large as 7x10^5. However, even if the cell divided once an hour (a very fast cell), this would still be 80 years of division before death. I don't think we've had immortal eukaryotic cell lines for 80 years, but I could be wrong. Where did that number come from? This is not intended as flamebait. I'm just curious.
> "Star Wars" has always attracted a > different audience brainier, more > techno-centered, perhaps because it has a > high-minded sounding High Priest in George > Lucas, whereas the Trekkies have to get their > inspiration from William Shatner.
Actually, I think comparing George Lucas to Gene Roddenberry would be a better analogy. And I think that Roddenberry compares quite favorably. The two styles are different. Star Wars are laden with Campbell's 'Power of Myth' epic nature. Good, evil, heroes, princesses etc...the stuff that legends are made of. Roddenberry's works (don't forget to include his legacy Earth:Final Conflict) are more post-modern. Characters are portrayed as good or evil in different lights, their motivations are more complex, and they are altogether more like real people, not archetypes. Personally, I enjoy both types of stories.
Of course, I could adjust the analogy the other way, and pit Shattner against Mark Hamill. That's a whole other can of worms. I think Shattner wins though.
Check out the specs on the webpage - its actually kinda cool. Lenses in the viewer make a larger virtual image than the screen. The eye can't focus on anything that close without these lenses. It has a 26 degree field of view - that corresponds to a monitor 11 inches in diagonal viewed from 2 feet away. Not great, but certainly useful. And very readable. Additionally, each pixel transmits different levels of red, green, and blue, rather than having three separate pixels for each color. That probably makes for very good image quality. As far as only seeing it through one eye...while this is not ideal, it is also very doable. Microscopes have been like this for years. Of course, stero microscopes are more popular these days, as they allow more detail and reduce eye strain, but it is possible to see very well through just one eye. The trick is to keep the other eye open and focused like the eye looking into the eyepiece, but focus your attention on the image. It is even possible to shift your attention between the two images - useful for taking notes and looking at a magnified image without moving your head.
Ok, point well taken. There is more to Xanadu than the brief description I gave, and being able to get commentary and rebuttal on pieces of text that you are reading is tres cool. Being able to add links to other people's documents without permission is pretty cool too.
If you look at my original post, you'll find I did reference Xanadu directly. I did my homework, and the brief description I gave of Xanadu was taken from their homepage. In the two brief paragraphs of intro, backwards link tracing is not mentioned, but the copyright/fee issue is discussed - it is obviously a priority for them.
Xanadu is an intelligent and noble idea, but it is doomed because nobody likes being nickle-and-dimed and because of the delays;-) in development. I do appreciate Ted Nelson's contribution to hypertext and I agree with his pronouncemnet that some type of transclusive hypertext will be prominent in the future of publishing, but if he wants Xanadu to succeed, he's going to have to drop the royalty thing. Or hope that people contributing to the docuverse don't ask for royalties in the first place. Also, I don't know that a single source for information is really a good idea, even if the system involved does foster free speech and complexity. Like Dalzell said, 'The strength of the Internet is chaos.' The idea of having one docuverse bothers me, even though I know very well that it is designed to be resistant to tampering and all inclusive.
So basically COSS is a means of tracking all contributions to a project and paying out royalties to the original authors? Sounds a lot like the Xanadu project, and I'm sure its destined for similar success.
There is a lengthy and unflattering discussion of the Xanadu story in this Wired article. Ted Nelson's response to this articel can be found here. Here's a quick summary:
Ted Nelson is credited as the inventor of hypertext. For the last thirty years or so, he has been working on a project called Xanadu, an effort to create a hypertext 'docuverse' where information may be included (or 'transcluded') into any document while preserving the author information for all pieces and preserving the author's ability to collect royalties for every single piece of his work that is downloaded, no matter how small a fragment. It sounds like a good idea, IMHO, until you get to the royalties part.
There are many lessons in software development that can be gleaned from the story of Xanadu. A lesson for COSS is that this type of system is ridiculously complicated, perhaps prohibitively so. And it is probably not even something that anyone wants. Another, more tangential, lesson for OSS in general is that lunatic leaders can be divisive and irritating enough to totally screw projects that are otherwise good ideas. But I digress.
Even if Xanadu software shipped tomorrow (there is actually a program called zigzag), why would anyone want it when html has so much more infrastructure? Similarly, I think that COSS will not be able to attract people away from pure OSS. COSS may be appropriate for companies like Apple that are trying to recruit more eyeballs, but I think that most of us will stick to truly free software. I think that OSS is doing fine, and it is certainly meeting my needs as a programmer and an end user. I'm sure that a lot of you out there feel the same way. And with every office package and video driver that is released, the number of people whose needs are met by pure OSS solutions increases. I don't think that current open source hackers will get involved with COSS, and thus it will suffer from the same problems that proprietary software has. It will not benefit from many bug-fixing eyeballs, and people who get involved with COSS are likely to be just looking for a quick buck, the sort of people who will find a way to subvert the COSS system for their own purposes. These people will try to confine the exchange of information in such a way that they make money. Again, like the Xanadu project.
Information longs to be free. It will not permit restrictions. This is not a moral judgement, it is just an observation.
Well that took less than 40 minutes to/. that server out of existence. It leaves me wondering what the record is. It might be interesting to monitor these sites' behavior as the/. effect takes its toll. Sort of like that post a few days ago that monitored it from the viewpoint of the server - but from the outside, maybe using pings and/or simple fetches every minute, and plotting response time. Slashdot itself could do this, then maybe add a little icon to the headline when the server goes down. It would be nifty to be able to click to see a graph describing the death of these unfortunate servers.
Lady Luck favors the hopelessly insane. - Brain : Pinky, Elmyra, and the Brain
This moving 'DNA robot arm' is just another of many examples of macromolecules that exhibit controlled motions in response to some change in evironment. Ion channels open in response to voltage change. Proteins frequently change conformation in the presence of activators/inhibitors/substrates whatever. The lab I work in has compiled a list of some known examples of macromolecular motion. Check it out at http://bioinfo.mbb.yale.edu
Slashdot Mirror
IANAQP (I am not a quantum physicist) but I do have a Nature online account, and I've read the actual scientific paper, so I'll take a stab at it.
This 'echo' is actually an echo of something called the Kondo effect. Basically, when you have a single magnetic molecule (like cobalt) in a non-magnetic metal (like copper) and you lower the temperature, the electrons on the surface of the copper begin to align their spins to cancel the magnetic moment of the cobalt atom. At sufficiently low temp, these shielding electrons enter a many-particle single-spin quantum state that completely masks the cobalt's magnetic moment. This is the Kondo effect. The ellipse on the Cu surface creates a number of possible waveforms (more properly, eigenstates) that can refocus this resonance to the other focus - creating another Kondo effect where there is no cobalt atom. This effect can be measured with a STM (scanning-tunneling electron microscope). IIRC, STM uses a very, very fine molecular 'tip' that is passed above the sample. As the tip moves over an atomic surface, a tunnelling current is generated that is proportional to the distance between the tip and the sample. This is commonly used to generate topographic maps of electron density around single atoms.
Theoretically, this resonance could be used to sample the orientation of a magnetic molecule at a distance. Of course, measuring this moment would disrupt it as per Heisenberg's Uncertaintly Principle, but in this experiment, they are only measuring the presence of the field, not its orientation. Since the effect disappears when the Co atom is moved off the focus of the ellipse, this could also be used sense small movements of atoms at a distance. And it could be used to link the quantum states of two molecules at a distance on a surface, effectively forming a specific quantum 'wire'. They also speculate that ellipsoids could be used to do this in a 3D solid.
Don't get too excited - the effect only happens at 4K (brrrrr) and an electron microscope is a rather impractical sensor, so don't look for it any time soon. But its still cool.
I may very well have butchered some or all of this explanation. I welcome any corrections or clarifications.
I've read most of the postings for this article, and I've tried to suppress it, but I feel a rant coming on. I've always wondered why there is so much crappy scifi in the world, and why its not taken seriously as a genre, and I think I know now. There seems to be no distinction in anyone's list between 'trash' scifi and what I consider 'true' scifi. Now I personally enjoy both types, but I would only recommend the real stuff to another. Allow me to elaborate...
;-)
CJ Cherryh, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, David Brin, Alan Dean Foster, Anne McCaffrey, Madeline L'Engle, and the like are excellent excellent examples of trash scifi. I consider most of their work to be on a level with supermarket romance novels. Don't get me wrong, I've read a number of books by all of them, and I did enjoy them, but I'm not proud of that fact. They do, however, have relevance in a list that is designed for a 13 year old. Foster's Spellsinger and McCaffrey's Dragonriders are particularly good for kids. But when I see these authors randomly interspersed in a list with Herbert, Dick, Asimov, etc... it just makes my blood boil. Its like using the names Jean-Claude VanDamme and Bruce Lee in the same sentence as if they were equivalent.
While I'm on the subject of trash novels, why not throw in some Robert Jordan - that's some of the most popular and enjoyable fantasy garbage to come out in a while.
Heinlein may seem an bad choice, but I truly wish that I had read fewer of his books. If I had stopped after 'Stranger in a Strange Land' and 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" I would still consider him to be a scifi great. Most of his books are garbage, though. The basic premise of most of them is that in the future, everyone will live long enough that having sex with your mother will be no big deal. Yeah, great scifi...
For the record, here is my (short) list of truly great, must-read, scifi authors. Very little of it is appropriate for a 13 year old, though.
Frank Herbert- the later Dune series gets pretty cerebral, but still very engaging and profound in many ways. His Voidship books, The Lazarus Effect, The Jesus Incident, and The Ascension Factor are some of the most overlooked masterpieces of scifi. Someone else mentioned the Dosadi Experiment, which is also very good.
Phillip K. Dick - My absolute favorite. Too many good books to list here. A number of people have listed "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". While this may be appropriate to a 13 year old, I consider this to be one of his weakest books. Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle are what real scifi is all about.
Kurt Vonnegut - He's so good, the establishment refuses to classify it as scifi. Vonnegut has something profound to say about humanity, and he just happens to express it in a scifi context every now and then. He also has an incredible sense of humor. IIRC, there are a number of short stories in 'Welcome to the Monkey House' that would be suitable for a 13 year old. Just be sure to screen them first
Asimov - duh
Tolkien - Yeah, I know its fantasy, but it spawned the whole friggin' genre. This should be an obvious choice.
There are a few others, like Clarke, Miller, and Card, but I feel that the four I listed truly stand out. They had a big impact on me, at least.
I'd love to hear other peoples thoughts on the distinction between great and trash scifi, so flame away. I have a nagging feeling I've forgotten someone...
PS- This is all supposed to be recommendations for a 13 year old, yet not once has anyone mentioned Tom Swift. What is the world coming to?
I can't wait for when they really refine this technology. You could set it up so that the things you need to do most often are automatically triggered by the thoughts you have the most often. I could tie checking email to thinking about naked women, and never go more than 20 seconds without checking my email again. And I could link thinking about work to loading slashdot - virtually insuring that I never get anything done.
While 3D graphics accelerators are very impressive these days, they are not Good Enough. When they can do realtime radiosity and raytracing (or something of similar quality) at a resolution that is below the physical limits of the human eye, that will be Good Enough.
Even if you don't have the uncontrollable urge to play the latest and greatest game, you have to admit that the demand for The Next Big Thing has fueled a lot of innovation in the last few years. A number of the big players involved (Matrox, Nvidia, Creative, etc...) have released specs to their hardware and started open source driver projects. This lends industrial credibility to the Open Source model in general, as well as helping to make Linux a viable platform for gaming and more serious pursuits like graphical design. And that's a Good Thing(tm).
I've been an avid gamer since the days of the Apple II+. I'm not an audiophile, and I've always had a bah-humbug attitude towards frilly little features like 3D audio, but I had a good sized budget for my last machine, so I decided to get a SB Live and a Dolby Digital 5.1 speaker system to go with it. I was blown away. It is incredibly immersive, not to mention a big advantage in gameplay - you can hear which direction gunfire is coming from. You can hear which direction enemies are approaching from even when you can't see them. I now consider 3D audio to be a crucial element of my games, and an important step in making Linux a rocking game platform.
;-)
A while back, I got a dualshock controller for my Playstation - just for the analog joysticks, but I was amazed at how effective those two little vibrators in the handles are at making the game come to life. I'm now a convert to force feedback as well. I picked up a Logitech Wingman Force the other day, and I absolutely love it. Implementing the IForce library in Linux would be a very good thing - has anyone heard about programming specs for the Wingman Force? They have a 16 bit controller onboard and a USB connection - just think, we could make a Beowulf cluster
Oh yeah, sex in space should be great. If you're in to elastic harnesses and inflatable tubes. There's been a supposed NASA document about sex in zero g floating around the web for a while now - click here. It seems to be a reasonable discussion of the topic, but of course its unverified. True or not, its pretty damn funny.
I believe there is an effort underway to store large amounts of sperm and eggs from endangered animals. This is obviously better than cell samples, as complicated cloning is not necessary. You just fertilize the egg and implant it in a similar species.
Genetics is only part of the species. Equally important is the role that they play in their environment, instinctive behavior, and learned behavior. Specialized species may not be able to survive if their niche has been destroyed. Instinctive behavior is inherent in brain organization, but the feeding instincts of the young are evolved to complement the parenting instincts of the adult. A discontinuity in this chain could have unpredictable effects - a very literal chicken and egg problem.
One thing that can never be restored are the learned behaviors that each species aquires. Chimps seem to have a form of culture, and while lower animals of course have much simpler traditions, there is still information there that could be lost. Killing a species' meme doesn't even require killing the species - just those members whose brains host the meme.
To anyone who doubts the worth of these more nebulous aspects of a species, I suggest you take a closer look at the amazing interplay of life in the coral reefs. They are disappearing, and when they are gone, no amount of cloning will be able to replicate the intricate web of cooperation and competition.
I extend your line of questioning to display it's absurdity
And I question your extension of the line of questioning to display it's absurdity.
- Why doesn't everyone focus on writing good apps for Windows instead of Linux?
Because Windows sucks. Don't you read slashdot?
- Why do companies waste time developing non-intel processors?
Because they are heathen infidels.
- Why do people around the world waste time learning/reading/writing/speaking non-english languages?
That is a damn good question. I have often wondered that myself. It would make my life much easier.
- Why do students waste time doing problems listed in their books instead of inventing new problems?
Because the professors are too lazy to come up with interesting novel problems. They are far too busy psychologically abusing their graduate students.
- Why do we need a dozen search engines?
Because they all suck. In combination, they suck a little less.
- Why do all these little countries need their own government?
Again, that is a damn good question. We should just all get together and agree that our governements suck, then find one that sucks less than the others, and let them take over. Perhaps Canada. They seem to be doing fairly well. Or Holland.
- Why do we need all these programming languages. Can't everyone use Java for everything?
Err, don't you mean perl?
7x10^5? What does this refer to? The average human cell can divide 50 (+/-10) times before dying (undergoing apoptosis to be technical). Of course, cancers and various immortal cell lines can do much better than that. I wasn't aware that they had any limitation. Although if they do, I suppose it could be something as large as 7x10^5. However, even if the cell divided once an hour (a very fast cell), this would still be 80 years of division before death. I don't think we've had immortal eukaryotic cell lines for 80 years, but I could be wrong. Where did that number come from? This is not intended as flamebait. I'm just curious.
> "Star Wars" has always attracted a
> different audience brainier, more
> techno-centered, perhaps because it has a
> high-minded sounding High Priest in George
> Lucas, whereas the Trekkies have to get their
> inspiration from William Shatner.
Actually, I think comparing George Lucas to Gene Roddenberry would be a better analogy. And I think that Roddenberry compares quite favorably. The two styles are different. Star Wars are laden with Campbell's 'Power of Myth' epic nature. Good, evil, heroes, princesses etc...the stuff that legends are made of. Roddenberry's works (don't forget to include his legacy Earth:Final Conflict) are more post-modern. Characters are portrayed as good or evil in different lights, their motivations are more complex, and they are altogether more like real people, not archetypes. Personally, I enjoy both types of stories.
Of course, I could adjust the analogy the other way, and pit Shattner against Mark Hamill. That's a whole other can of worms. I think Shattner wins though.
Check out the specs on the webpage - its actually kinda cool. Lenses in the viewer make a larger virtual image than the screen. The eye can't focus on anything that close without these lenses. It has a 26 degree field of view - that corresponds to a monitor 11 inches in diagonal viewed from 2 feet away. Not great, but certainly useful. And very readable. Additionally, each pixel transmits different levels of red, green, and blue, rather than having three separate pixels for each color. That probably makes for very good image quality. As far as only seeing it through one eye...while this is not ideal, it is also very doable. Microscopes have been like this for years. Of course, stero microscopes are more popular these days, as they allow more detail and reduce eye strain, but it is possible to see very well through just one eye. The trick is to keep the other eye open and focused like the eye looking into the eyepiece, but focus your attention on the image. It is even possible to shift your attention between the two images - useful for taking notes and looking at a magnified image without moving your head.
If you look at my original post, you'll find I did reference Xanadu directly. I did my homework, and the brief description I gave of Xanadu was taken from their homepage. In the two brief paragraphs of intro, backwards link tracing is not mentioned, but the copyright/fee issue is discussed - it is obviously a priority for them.
Xanadu is an intelligent and noble idea, but it is doomed because nobody likes being nickle-and-dimed and because of the delays ;-) in development. I do appreciate Ted Nelson's contribution to hypertext and I agree with his pronouncemnet that some type of transclusive hypertext will be prominent in the future of publishing, but if he wants Xanadu to succeed, he's going to have to drop the royalty thing. Or hope that people contributing to the docuverse don't ask for royalties in the first place. Also, I don't know that a single source for information is really a good idea, even if the system involved does foster free speech and complexity. Like Dalzell said, 'The strength of the Internet is chaos.' The idea of having one docuverse bothers me, even though I know very well that it is designed to be resistant to tampering and all inclusive.
There is a lengthy and unflattering discussion of the Xanadu story in this Wired article. Ted Nelson's response to this articel can be found here. Here's a quick summary:
Ted Nelson is credited as the inventor of hypertext. For the last thirty years or so, he has been working on a project called Xanadu, an effort to create a hypertext 'docuverse' where information may be included (or 'transcluded') into any document while preserving the author information for all pieces and preserving the author's ability to collect royalties for every single piece of his work that is downloaded, no matter how small a fragment. It sounds like a good idea, IMHO, until you get to the royalties part.
There are many lessons in software development that can be gleaned from the story of Xanadu. A lesson for COSS is that this type of system is ridiculously complicated, perhaps prohibitively so. And it is probably not even something that anyone wants. Another, more tangential, lesson for OSS in general is that lunatic leaders can be divisive and irritating enough to totally screw projects that are otherwise good ideas. But I digress.
Even if Xanadu software shipped tomorrow (there is actually a program called zigzag), why would anyone want it when html has so much more infrastructure? Similarly, I think that COSS will not be able to attract people away from pure OSS. COSS may be appropriate for companies like Apple that are trying to recruit more eyeballs, but I think that most of us will stick to truly free software. I think that OSS is doing fine, and it is certainly meeting my needs as a programmer and an end user. I'm sure that a lot of you out there feel the same way. And with every office package and video driver that is released, the number of people whose needs are met by pure OSS solutions increases. I don't think that current open source hackers will get involved with COSS, and thus it will suffer from the same problems that proprietary software has. It will not benefit from many bug-fixing eyeballs, and people who get involved with COSS are likely to be just looking for a quick buck, the sort of people who will find a way to subvert the COSS system for their own purposes. These people will try to confine the exchange of information in such a way that they make money. Again, like the Xanadu project.
Information longs to be free. It will not permit restrictions. This is not a moral judgement, it is just an observation.
Well that took less than 40 minutes to /. that server out of existence. It leaves me wondering what the record is. It might be interesting to monitor these sites' behavior as the /. effect takes its toll. Sort of like that post a few days ago that monitored it from the viewpoint of the server - but from the outside, maybe using pings and/or simple fetches every minute, and plotting response time. Slashdot itself could do this, then maybe add a little icon to the headline when the server goes down. It would be nifty to be able to click to see a graph describing the death of these unfortunate servers.
Lady Luck favors the hopelessly insane.
- Brain : Pinky, Elmyra, and the Brain
This moving 'DNA robot arm' is just another of many examples of macromolecules that exhibit controlled motions in response to some change in evironment. Ion channels open in response to voltage change. Proteins frequently change conformation in the presence of activators/inhibitors/substrates whatever. The lab I work in has compiled a list of some known examples of macromolecular motion. Check it out at http://bioinfo.mbb.yale.edu