I think the point is actually that a single-celled organism can do this just as well, or probably better, than any complicated adaptive control system that we can come up with.
Our task is to learn from nature, and that is what is being done here. People might want this to be more exciting, but great research is basic. They took two systems that were well-studied and well-understood (light-sensitive robots and single-celled organisms), smooshed them together, and found out just how well (or not well) we understood them to begin with.
An interesting observation I made when studying for bigger exams:
....
Sometimes I remember the dreams of those nights being about formulas and exams.
It pisses me off so much when I wake up dreaming about the problem I was working on the night before... as if work/school (same thing for me) has completely taken over my life.
In fact, it stresses me out more to be "stumped" than to have a deadline. I have to wonder if this is a natural learning strategy for some people - if you don't understand something at first, it causes stress, which ~overclocks your mind.
This is actually why I think that cramming *doesn't* pay off as well as staying on top of things. If I'm cramming, I'm forcing myself to ingest things rapidly and not focus on understanding the principles as much. If I stay on top of things, I end up focusing on problems one at a time and if I don't understand it I end up doing that stress/dreaming/realizing-the-answer-in-the-shower -and-never-forgetting-it thing several times instead of just once the night before.
Which makes perfect sense IF the user has direct access to it. All you can do is set the number of stars, which, as far as the user knows, could be stored as 0,1,2,3,4,5 or 0,pi,2pi,3pi,4pi,5pi or whatever. If you were going to use one byte to do it why not make it 0, 1, 2, 4, 8? Or 0,1,2,3,4,5 and use the other bits to store other information.
Re:Future considerations, perhaps?
on
More iTunes Math
·
· Score: 1
This guy is certainly less of a crackpot than the other recent space/time travel crackpot on slashdot. At the bottom of the article this guy actually seems to have some reasonable credentials. Not to say he's right, but the other guy was on a whole other level of crackpottery.
Any idea why they would pick 100? There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason to do this over 0 to 5. Memory considerations would peg it to 2^n-1 values wouldn't they?
This dude clearly has no idea what he's talking about. Especially when it comes to differential geometry, which is paramount to the theory of general relativity.
He claims (t,x(t),y(t),z(t)) is a 4-manifold, which is just not true. It's actually a 1-manifold embedded in 4-space. The whole point of writing "x of t" is to say that x is completely parameterized by t. So while this describes something that lives in 4-space (you could actually argue that it lives in 3-space since the dependence on t is trivial), it is completely parameterized by t. Think of a function in the plain - a set of points (x,y) such that y = f(x) (or vice-versa). While the function is embedded in 2-space it is only a 1-dimensional manifold: the entire point is that we can completely specify y in terms of x.
If we place that large restriction on our space, then it's no surprise that "dt/dt" (which is basically nonsense, but we'll assume he means the derivative of the identity function applied to t with respect to itself) is equal to 1, and that the dimensions are "seconds per second". What we really care about is the pull-back of the differential form through the t parameterization: dt + (dx/dt)*dt + (dy/dt)*dt + (dz/dt)*dt. Furthermore, this only makes sense if t lies in a connected region and is single-valued. So if we travel in time from t = now to t = future, then the differential fails to exist.
I thought he might just be goofing off, but if you look at the other crap on his website and his slashdot comments, it seems this guy really is full of crap. It's scary that he's asking for money for this stuff.
never design something so it will hold exactly what it needs to stand up against. Unless you're building for suicidal adventurers, people will appreciate headroom. Especially people behind levees...
Nobody really does this. That's a standard part of engineering education. Find the exact parameters that you need to work within and then work squarely (and safely) between or above them. For example, maybe the levee needs to be X thickness to withstand a reasonably large hurricane, but at Y thickness the cost becomes prohibitive (not just expensive, but approaching impossible... you could make the levees 100 ft thick and 100 ft high but it would take hundreds of years to build). So you work between X and Y (probably closer to Y where safety is concerned).
Nobody designed those levees to be *just* strong enough on purpose.
Odds are, the mechanism would have to be lots bigger than this nanobattery. It's alot harder to manufacture nano-sized mechanical parts (though this is an open topic) than it is to make nano-sized electronics.
If I paid $15/month for napster-to-go, downloaded a thousand songs over the course of 2 years, then decided to stop paying for the service and their DRM made those songs worthless, I'd call THAT disposing of income.
If I had disposable income I'd pay $15/month to have all of the songs I wanted and be ok with discarding them eventually. If you don't download a ton of music it doesn't take long at all to recover the extra cost for the iPod.
It won't help you much, I suppose, but the IMAP server I'm on has an insignificant amount of space (~40 MB) but allows me to set delivery to an external account - so I set it to automatically deliver to gmail. That way I get effectively unlimited storage and a snazzy webmail interface. Granted I don't use thunderbird at all anymore, but if you really wanted to isn't there a pop server for gmail now?
Actually, phase shifting is probably more in reference to the relative "phase" between oscillatory phenomena. Consider a sinusoidal signal s(t) = a*cos(w*t + p) - p is the "phase". If you add another signal, so(t) = a*cos(w*t + p + pi) (pi radians, or 180 degrees, out of phase) the result is s(t) + so(t) = 0. There's also a wave packet theory of matter and energy, saying that quanta are made up of bundles of sinusoids that add together at just the right phase to make a little squiggle. If you were to phase shift some of those components, the packet would lose its coherence and cease to be. So if Spock shoots you with a phaser and your atoms get all phase shifted, you might dissappear.
I'm a fairly casual slashdot user. I read a couple stories a day that I think look interesting, scan the top comments for interesting banter, and comment once or twice a week if I'm not busy (or sometimes if I am busy and need to procrastinate. I would venture to guess that I am an average slashdot reader.
In light of that, what I wanted to say is that in my casual reading I hadn't even noticed this problem, and I would venture to guess that alot of readers are in the same boat. I also have never clicked a submitter's link, and am unlikely to - realizing that it probably points to their personal webpage and in most cases I have no interest in that.
You're right. There is room for reform, but this is my appeal for not just abandoning publicly-funded research.
But I do know that publicly-funded research is profoundly important. I have to reveal my bias - I can pay my rent and buy food because of publicly-funded research. But the bottom line is that alot of important research is just not immediately profitable (consider quantum mechanics, relativity).
Also consider intellectual property issues. I know this first hand. I completed my master's research under private funding and have yet to be able to publish or even present the research because the university and our former sponsors are caught in patent-law hell. This kind of thing generally doesn't happen with public funding, except possibly where security is concerned. Publicly-funded research is (supposedly) funded to benefit the public, and dissemination is working towards that goal.
So there is still a freely-available over-the-air broadcast? In the sense that you can throw up an antenna and pick it up? Does it require a new antenna?
There's lots of information here about how the government is going to (attempt to) subsidize digital-ready television sets for mom and pop, but there doesn't seem to be any suggestion as to how they're going to GET THE SIGNAL TO THEM. These are mostly in places where geographical and/or economic concerns make cable and satellite impractical.
February 17, 2009, millions of government-subsidized digital televisions.... still go blank. (A clearer, digital blank.)
Actually, anime references aside, one of the beautiful things about swarm robotics is that in many cases there is decidedly not a central intelligence. Each unit acts on its own according to relatively simple rules and a relatively low amount of communication with neighbors. The result is often very robust and surprisingly versatile. We are actually taking a cue from biology here. Think of a school of fish... each individual fish having relatively limited "computing power" and "sensor information" yet the fish school in incredibly successful.
Actually, if Ford *hadn't* been selling cars with anti-lock brakes and power steering, and suddenly decided to *start* doing it, that would be big news.
I mean, the google praise on SD does get kind of silly, but still - it's tech news when a big tech company does anything major, like add a substantial feature to one of their biggest "products".
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point is actually that a single-celled organism can do this just as well, or probably better, than any complicated adaptive control system that we can come up with.
Our task is to learn from nature, and that is what is being done here. People might want this to be more exciting, but great research is basic. They took two systems that were well-studied and well-understood (light-sensitive robots and single-celled organisms), smooshed them together, and found out just how well (or not well) we understood them to begin with.
An interesting observation I made when studying for bigger exams:
r -and-never-forgetting-it thing several times instead of just once the night before.
....
Sometimes I remember the dreams of those nights being about formulas and exams.
It pisses me off so much when I wake up dreaming about the problem I was working on the night before... as if work/school (same thing for me) has completely taken over my life.
In fact, it stresses me out more to be "stumped" than to have a deadline. I have to wonder if this is a natural learning strategy for some people - if you don't understand something at first, it causes stress, which ~overclocks your mind.
This is actually why I think that cramming *doesn't* pay off as well as staying on top of things. If I'm cramming, I'm forcing myself to ingest things rapidly and not focus on understanding the principles as much. If I stay on top of things, I end up focusing on problems one at a time and if I don't understand it I end up doing that stress/dreaming/realizing-the-answer-in-the-showe
It's called "percent".
Which makes perfect sense IF the user has direct access to it. All you can do is set the number of stars, which, as far as the user knows, could be stored as 0,1,2,3,4,5 or 0,pi,2pi,3pi,4pi,5pi or whatever. If you were going to use one byte to do it why not make it 0, 1, 2, 4, 8? Or 0,1,2,3,4,5 and use the other bits to store other information.
That's pretty reasonable.
This guy is certainly less of a crackpot than the other recent space/time travel crackpot on slashdot. At the bottom of the article this guy actually seems to have some reasonable credentials. Not to say he's right, but the other guy was on a whole other level of crackpottery.
Any idea why they would pick 100? There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason to do this over 0 to 5. Memory considerations would peg it to 2^n-1 values wouldn't they?
...they've been advertising the special on The Science Channel all week. Slashdot as usual on the cutting edge in science news.
This dude clearly has no idea what he's talking about. Especially when it comes to differential geometry, which is paramount to the theory of general relativity.
He claims (t,x(t),y(t),z(t)) is a 4-manifold, which is just not true. It's actually a 1-manifold embedded in 4-space. The whole point of writing "x of t" is to say that x is completely parameterized by t. So while this describes something that lives in 4-space (you could actually argue that it lives in 3-space since the dependence on t is trivial), it is completely parameterized by t. Think of a function in the plain - a set of points (x,y) such that y = f(x) (or vice-versa). While the function is embedded in 2-space it is only a 1-dimensional manifold: the entire point is that we can completely specify y in terms of x.
If we place that large restriction on our space, then it's no surprise that "dt/dt" (which is basically nonsense, but we'll assume he means the derivative of the identity function applied to t with respect to itself) is equal to 1, and that the dimensions are "seconds per second". What we really care about is the pull-back of the differential form through the t parameterization: dt + (dx/dt)*dt + (dy/dt)*dt + (dz/dt)*dt. Furthermore, this only makes sense if t lies in a connected region and is single-valued. So if we travel in time from t = now to t = future, then the differential fails to exist.
I thought he might just be goofing off, but if you look at the other crap on his website and his slashdot comments, it seems this guy really is full of crap. It's scary that he's asking for money for this stuff.
never design something so it will hold exactly what it needs to stand up against. Unless you're building for suicidal adventurers, people will appreciate headroom. Especially people behind levees...
Nobody really does this. That's a standard part of engineering education. Find the exact parameters that you need to work within and then work squarely (and safely) between or above them. For example, maybe the levee needs to be X thickness to withstand a reasonably large hurricane, but at Y thickness the cost becomes prohibitive (not just expensive, but approaching impossible... you could make the levees 100 ft thick and 100 ft high but it would take hundreds of years to build). So you work between X and Y (probably closer to Y where safety is concerned).
Nobody designed those levees to be *just* strong enough on purpose.
Firefox 's Ping Attribute: Useful or Spyware?
Yes.
Odds are, the mechanism would have to be lots bigger than this nanobattery. It's alot harder to manufacture nano-sized mechanical parts (though this is an open topic) than it is to make nano-sized electronics.
Disposable income?
If I paid $15/month for napster-to-go, downloaded a thousand songs over the course of 2 years, then decided to stop paying for the service and their DRM made those songs worthless, I'd call THAT disposing of income.
If I had disposable income I'd pay $15/month to have all of the songs I wanted and be ok with discarding them eventually. If you don't download a ton of music it doesn't take long at all to recover the extra cost for the iPod.
It won't help you much, I suppose, but the IMAP server I'm on has an insignificant amount of space (~40 MB) but allows me to set delivery to an external account - so I set it to automatically deliver to gmail. That way I get effectively unlimited storage and a snazzy webmail interface. Granted I don't use thunderbird at all anymore, but if you really wanted to isn't there a pop server for gmail now?
Actually, phase shifting is probably more in reference to the relative "phase" between oscillatory phenomena. Consider a sinusoidal signal s(t) = a*cos(w*t + p) - p is the "phase". If you add another signal, so(t) = a*cos(w*t + p + pi) (pi radians, or 180 degrees, out of phase) the result is s(t) + so(t) = 0. There's also a wave packet theory of matter and energy, saying that quanta are made up of bundles of sinusoids that add together at just the right phase to make a little squiggle. If you were to phase shift some of those components, the packet would lose its coherence and cease to be. So if Spock shoots you with a phaser and your atoms get all phase shifted, you might dissappear.
I'm a fairly casual slashdot user. I read a couple stories a day that I think look interesting, scan the top comments for interesting banter, and comment once or twice a week if I'm not busy (or sometimes if I am busy and need to procrastinate. I would venture to guess that I am an average slashdot reader.
In light of that, what I wanted to say is that in my casual reading I hadn't even noticed this problem, and I would venture to guess that alot of readers are in the same boat. I also have never clicked a submitter's link, and am unlikely to - realizing that it probably points to their personal webpage and in most cases I have no interest in that.
You're right. There is room for reform, but this is my appeal for not just abandoning publicly-funded research.
But I do know that publicly-funded research is profoundly important. I have to reveal my bias - I can pay my rent and buy food because of publicly-funded research. But the bottom line is that alot of important research is just not immediately profitable (consider quantum mechanics, relativity).
Also consider intellectual property issues. I know this first hand. I completed my master's research under private funding and have yet to be able to publish or even present the research because the university and our former sponsors are caught in patent-law hell. This kind of thing generally doesn't happen with public funding, except possibly where security is concerned. Publicly-funded research is (supposedly) funded to benefit the public, and dissemination is working towards that goal.
Actually, when I first read it, I wondered who was questioning the rhombus' rights to be involved in patent law.
Thanks. I didn't know that. Alot of the media coverage of the subject skips these "details".
So there is still a freely-available over-the-air broadcast? In the sense that you can throw up an antenna and pick it up? Does it require a new antenna?
There's lots of information here about how the government is going to (attempt to) subsidize digital-ready television sets for mom and pop, but there doesn't seem to be any suggestion as to how they're going to GET THE SIGNAL TO THEM. These are mostly in places where geographical and/or economic concerns make cable and satellite impractical.
February 17, 2009, millions of government-subsidized digital televisions.... still go blank. (A clearer, digital blank.)
Actually, anime references aside, one of the beautiful things about swarm robotics is that in many cases there is decidedly not a central intelligence. Each unit acts on its own according to relatively simple rules and a relatively low amount of communication with neighbors. The result is often very robust and surprisingly versatile. We are actually taking a cue from biology here. Think of a school of fish... each individual fish having relatively limited "computing power" and "sensor information" yet the fish school in incredibly successful.
Can't image things until you can find them. Can't find them if the starlight is making it impossible to discern the planet.
Actually, if Ford *hadn't* been selling cars with anti-lock brakes and power steering, and suddenly decided to *start* doing it, that would be big news.
I mean, the google praise on SD does get kind of silly, but still - it's tech news when a big tech company does anything major, like add a substantial feature to one of their biggest "products".
Not that I want to be skeptical, or claim to know the real story, but do you have any non-catholic sources for that information?
Did this make anyone else think of Canadian Bacon?
.. and let me be the first to welcome our new Canadian masters.