You can also buy smart regulators which do things like charge the battery at optimum rate and switch off for a short time periodically to prevent polarisation. If you live in a cold place and make short trips, they are the difference between being able to start or not start on Monday morning. They aren't cheap, but amazingly they do not get built even into very high end cars. Boat owners, for whom failure to start owing to flat battery is not a matter of calling out the AA, tend to fit them from new.
Google depends on advertising to survive. Unfortunately advertising is the enemy of search engines because the objective of many advertisers is to get you to their site to sell you - anything - . (I just entered "Dead President" into Google and got an offer to supply from SHOP.COM - which is funny if you think about it, but makes the point.) Google is trapped between the desire of advertisers to wreck their search engine, and the desire of users for it not to suck.
Microsoft does not depend on a steady advertising revenue stream. As a result, it could create a search engine which was not at the mercy of unscrupulous advertisers - insisting, for instance, that any advertiser responding to a search term could actually defend it. (Give users a bounty for detecting false returns and make the advertisers pay - a kind of Advertising Standards Authority but with actual teeth.)
I doubt it will happen, but I personally would be prepared to pay for access to a search engine that didn't produce spam adverts, even if, and this is a big concession, it was part of a generalised MS tax.
The same Bosch alternator gets sold at widely different prices depending on the car manufacturer. In fact, the same alternator costs a different amount depending on whether it is in a VW, and Audi or a Skoda. It has to pay for the marketing and the depth of the carpet pile in the showroom.
As for rewinds, I just had a local company make me a version of my standard alternator designed for higher output at low revs. As far as they're concerned, it's just a bit more copper squeezed in and a higher rated regulator, not a problem as the original was a bit under specced for the case size. Cost $80 versus $240 for a new high rated Bosch.
But then I'm so paranoid I won't have remote central locking with the conventional button. No matter how complex the security encoding, somewhere you probably have a single circuit board with RF one side and a relay the other. Inject enough signal at the right frequency and there is a distinct possibility that the relay will be operated regardless of the precautions put on the "official" route.
Electronic ignition, immobilisers, all of these toys mean the vehicle can be put out of action by an EMP that wouldn't even be noticed by an old all-mechanical Diesel truck or marine engine. I really wouldn't like a lighning strike to prevent my car from starting, and then find I couldn't get into the house because the central locking on that had failed.
The crew vehicle is named after the god of war. I always suspected that, deep down, the only interest of the current administration in space is as a way of increasing US military dominance.
That, or NASA is illiterate in the classics. Which I doubt.
But why a variable star? Is that because they expect the program to expand and contract according to the budget, stories on slow news days etc.?
The whole thing about the inflation of names relating to space is more than a little childish. Calling people who barely got out of the Earth's atmosphere "Astronauts" and "Cosmonauts" is a bit like calling a dinghy sailor "Admiral".
The book sounds like a maze of little twisty paths....
Why does Hollywood suck? Because its movies must all be produced in accordance with movie design patterns. There's an alternative word for design patterns: formulaic. Fine when looking at engineering or software design (we want some assurance that we can analyse this thing and gain some assurance that it will work consistently, and that we can find other people to work on it). But to create something with artistic merit we need to transcend the formula. We live in a world which recycles everything, to the extent that just about everything vaguely cultural has to recast, relocate or make ironic reference to something else. But it's self consuming and ultimately sterile. I suspect that nothing new and exciting will come out from anyone who has to seek guidance from the book. Ex nihilo nihil fit.
You were lucky. We had to write our own microinstructions using a 12 bit ALU with no barrel shifter, and then burn them into ROM using a magnifying glass to vaporise the aluminium interconnect. And you had hard disks? We had to hand code on paper tape using a leather punch to make the holes. And we thought we were lucky. Next door, the guys in Alan Turing's department were having to stick together infinite paper tapes for some machine he made in the 30s.
I was going to post at length on this subject, but I'm not. At the risk of being moderated flamebait I have to say it: if you need to track your children you should be asking yourself, very seriously, what this says about you, them and their upbringing. Knowing where they are makes them safer how, exactly?
One thing; when I was at U, I was attacked by a psychopath with a knife while on college premises. Location services are about making money, and they therefore seek to induce the paranoia that causes people to buy them. But how real is the actual security?
Submitted: that on the evidence of the SCO case, the USPTO should review its ban on claims to have developed perpetual motion machines. The SCO share price oscillates continuously without the input of external energy, and the air emerging from the case is at a higher temperature than the input air, showing that energy is continuously being extracted.
Although this is not directly related to the SCO case, which is about copyright and licensing rather than patents, it could be argued that the decision of the USPTO to award patents based on software or business processes has created the conditions in which legally based perpetual motion machines are feasible.
You're clearly a victim of cultural conditioning. Most human beings who don't live in cities see a mixture of browns and greens whenever they look outside, and don't have a problem with it. We tend to go for the same colors inside houses, too. Brown wood panelling for walls has up-market associations, but the lobbies of expensive hotels presumably don't remind the visitors of shit. There is no a priori reason why computer screens should have blue backgrounds.
In Chatwin's Songlines, he argues for the sabre tooth being the human predator and that a lot of our culture and mythology derive from this.
There is also some evidence, I believe, that far from being repurposed wolves dogs are the descendants of a scavenging ancestor. By disposing of rubbish, dogs helped the evolution of stable human settlements - because without dogs, primitive man had to move on before the surroundings got too smelly. At a later stage dogs were tamed, and all of a sudden the human race had two forms of projected power to use against predators - ballistic weapons, and dogs. The rest is history (or herstory if you believe that women create civilisations and men try to destroy them)
Have had a rough equivalent to the meter (metre). In many places in Europe where there were Scandinavian invasions, old towns are built on a metric where a house is approx. 6M wide or a multiple thereof. (Mine is, and though it is only 160 years old it is built on foundations that probably ultimately go back to around 700AD). And the Beaker People seem to have had a unit of length just short of a metre, and called the "neolithic yard" by some archaeologists. There is obviously some deep reason for it, perhaps based on the marching pace.
Problem with/. is that the young geeks nowadays aren't nearly geeky enough.
He pornaia, a prostitute. Graphein, I write or draw.
Pornography is writing about or making pictures of people who receive payment for engaging in sexual acts.
By this definition, Manet's Olympia is pornography because the subject is a prostitute and is presented as such.(but was intended to shock.) Botticelli's Venus is not pornography because neither of the women in the picture is a prostitute and there is no suggestion at all of the sale of sexual services(the picture was clearly intended to give rise to a number of complex emotions including tenderness towards and respect for women). The figure of Luxury in Poussin's Dance to the Music of Time is not pornographic (the woman is simply presented as enjoying herself and making this clear to the viewer.)
The lines become slightly blurred when considering some "actresses" who get paid for simulated sex or nudity, but in a world without highly paid lawyers and MPAAs I suspect that a number of mainstream films would be classed as pornographic on this definition. Which, actually, is why I like it. A definition that omits the rich and powerful from possible opprobium is a poor definition.
Obscene material including unpaid "amateurs" is still pornographic because they are doing it in hope of future revenue, i.e. it's prostitution with deferred compensation. And material including the unwitting or unwilling is a violation of people's rights (in countries where people have rights) and is simply criminal.
The question of whether people should be allowed to look at porn in public libraries is quite different, as it is about societal norms not definitions, and in my mind has a lot to do with whether you would want to use their chair afterwards.
Back in the 60 when radioactivity was good and uranium was the wonder fuel of the future, I spent a year of out of school chemistry working on chemical separation of short lived isotopes from uranium.
Once I'd actually been accepted by Cambridge, I never went near chemistry again. (The joke was that after all that I passed the exam with enough points not to proceed to oral interview, so I never got to talk to anyone about my "research project". And, anyway, when I got there I found that what I was doing was just low grade industrial stuff, and real research wasn't anything like that at all.)
AFAIK Mazda's engine still burns far more lubricant than a piston engine and has never been commercially viable for genuine mass production. The dead giveaway is that no-one is building bread and butter Wankel engines; they remain overpriced toys for posers. Hardly a role model for Third World engineering.
WhisperGen already make space heaters with approx 1kW electricity output, but they are many times too expensive. Faced with a choice between a £10000 ($18000) WhisperGen and a £500 Dickinson oil stove plus a £500 Honda generator - no brainer time, especially when you figure in the installation costs.
If this particular Stirling engine design is capable of being made in volume at a sensible price and is not simply an over-priced toy for rich yacht owners like the WhisperGen, it deserves to succeed.
One reason it might just is crime. You could make a perfectly adequate generator for a village using standard technology, but it would get stolen in no time. A washing machine sized design is going to be much harder to steal.
However, as with many alternative technologies, the likely problem is going to be seals. Seals have been the problem with Stirling engines in the past (and are the continuing problem with the Wankel.)
As a matter of fact a lot of research has been done into high temperature Diesel engines. My one time boss at AE, Bob Munro, was the guy who proposed replacing aluminium pistons with suitable steels, and a lot of work was done on high temp piston crowns (it's the piston crowns melt first in Diesels) Interesting fact: he came from the nuclear industry, a rare example of technology transfer. Modern Diesels are made of iron, partly because of superior sound abosrbtion and partly because you can get better thermal stability of castings than you can with reasonably priced light alloy.
Unfortunately lubrication is necessary and there are just no suitable really high temperature lubricants. You also have to get the fuel in without its vaporising. Even so, large Diesels do indeed do a lot better than electric motors given generation and transmission losses. And even in cars, many Diesels need oil fueled winter heaters because the engine does not waste enough heat at moderate speeds in traffic to warm the compartment sufficiently. This leads to the strange paradox that my car heats up faster when it is very cold (and the oil fueled heater comes on) than it does in weather which is just above the critical temperature.
A lot of people have to do relatively boring jobs which are now done in front of a screen. At least in the past there was limited activity involved - real interaction with fellow workers, handling real files and physical books. Douglas Adams kind of predicted what I'm presenting here, but I think he had a point. This is the idea that eventually game technology will merge with business applications to produce "skins" around the applications that fit into a virtual world. For instance, doing your accounts (or even online banking...) will give you the option of doing it via metaphors ranging from the present field/dropdown/button to an immersive virtual reality in which you enter a virtual bank and interact with a virtual teller. Why are we going to need this? Because otherwise what are the majority of people going to do for the rest of their lives? As the other well known Adams- Scott - has pointed out, the few interesting jobs going will gradually reduce in number and become available only to the most intelligent. Pulling in a third dystopian futurologist, Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World he speculated that many jobs would specifically not be automated to provide work for everyone. That works in a world with a small population, but not in ours. We need plenty of work for middle rank people that does not involve large expenditure of resources.
Virtual reality applications could address some of this. You can imagine a virtual reality in which the underlying messaging is pure business, but the metaphors are different at each end. The buyer may interact with the seller with the buyer using the metaphor of a marauding Viking and the seller using the metaphor of a bazaar in a Middle Eastern country, but the messaging will do the translation. When people get bored with their jobs they will change the metaphor or go to a company doing similar work but with a different corporate virtual world.
The main problem (and opportunity) with this as a concept is that the US way of doing business is to try to make the rest of the world behave like Americans. But the Chinese, the Indians and newly emerging trading states like Dubai won't wear this. Virtual reality metaphors could help facilitate world trade.
Also, by making it possible for people to do business in an interesting way while staying at home, they could significantly reduce world energy demands.
Any venture capitalists out there with a few spare billions and the urge to fund the next dotcom bubble - just post a reply and perhaps I'll get back to you. Or not.
Ouranos was the Greek God of the sky. So, as you would expect, when William Herschel discovered an extra planet beyond Saturn, he wanted to call it the Georgian planet in the hope the King at the time would give him a knighthood, or something. However, the King didn't come through, or something, so in honour of the Royal connection he named it Uranus, keeping the phonetic resemblance to Ouranos in his back pocket in case someone wised up the King.
Well, that's about as reliable as some Wikipedia, anyway. And yes, English is my native language, but do I have some good points as well.
In fact, from the point of view of generating a mathematical model of planetary orbits from observation it doesn't matter whether the Earth or the Sun is taken as the centre (especially since neither is correct.) The problem was not ad hoc explanations - it was that Aristotle had said that heavenly bodies moved in circles, the Church had bought into this, and in dealing with the Church (just like today with biology) scientists had to be careful. So in order to explain actual motions they used combinations of circles called epicycles. Nikolaus Kupfernigk claimed, over 500 years ago, that the epicycle model was simplified if the Sun was at the centre - but, as he was working to better observations that existed in the past, he actually needed more epicycles than earlier astronomers. It was not surprising that there was dispute over his findings.
It was Kepler who realised that ellipses could be the correct model for orbits, and even there, to try and keep the Church happy, he tried to fit the major and minor axes into the shapes of the "Platonic solids".
History suggests that the example you are quoting is the opposite of what you want to show. It is better to let scientists come up with initially ad hoc explanations because they lead to the truth. Making initial unscientific assumptions and treating them as dogma suppresses and delays progress. Scientists are ambitious and a good way to become important is to replace someone else's theory - so scientists can be relied on to do that. For every established Dark Matter theorist there are probably several PhD students who would love to annihilate Dark Matter.
The line of argument in the parent annoys me because it tries to suggest that scientists left to themselves will produce ridiculous non-explanatory theories and then cling to them forever. It's the anti-scientific agenda of the Creationists who want to discredit science. Creationists and their like want to confuse the public as to the explanatory status of different scientific theories so they can claim their snake oil is on an explanatory par with plate tectonics, quantum electrodynamics or evolutionary biology.
For those who may not know, St. Andrews is an ancient Scottish university which has a long involvement with astrophysics. When I considered going there, all those years ago, students still wore gowns in public - I wonder if they still do.
Unfortunately, like Cambridge, St. Andrews has suffered from negative publicity as a result of its taking occasional pupils from failing schools and admitting them with A level scores which would not normally allow a student to be admitted. But at least it meant that some of the Windsors got access to higher education, so perhaps the policy is defensible.
Anyway, I'm very pleased that the astrophysics tradition is continuing. But I'm still left with a question: Why are the nicest British Universities (Cambridge, Durham, St Andrews) in such bloody cold places?
No. Forms like IX for 9 are scribe contractions, and I've never seen a form like CIIL (I've spent time in most of the main European cathedrals and I like reading tombstone inscriptions, so this is anecdotal but based on evidence.)
Slashdot Mirror
You can also buy smart regulators which do things like charge the battery at optimum rate and switch off for a short time periodically to prevent polarisation. If you live in a cold place and make short trips, they are the difference between being able to start or not start on Monday morning. They aren't cheap, but amazingly they do not get built even into very high end cars. Boat owners, for whom failure to start owing to flat battery is not a matter of calling out the AA, tend to fit them from new.
Microsoft does not depend on a steady advertising revenue stream. As a result, it could create a search engine which was not at the mercy of unscrupulous advertisers - insisting, for instance, that any advertiser responding to a search term could actually defend it. (Give users a bounty for detecting false returns and make the advertisers pay - a kind of Advertising Standards Authority but with actual teeth.)
I doubt it will happen, but I personally would be prepared to pay for access to a search engine that didn't produce spam adverts, even if, and this is a big concession, it was part of a generalised MS tax.
As for rewinds, I just had a local company make me a version of my standard alternator designed for higher output at low revs. As far as they're concerned, it's just a bit more copper squeezed in and a higher rated regulator, not a problem as the original was a bit under specced for the case size. Cost $80 versus $240 for a new high rated Bosch.
Electronic ignition, immobilisers, all of these toys mean the vehicle can be put out of action by an EMP that wouldn't even be noticed by an old all-mechanical Diesel truck or marine engine. I really wouldn't like a lighning strike to prevent my car from starting, and then find I couldn't get into the house because the central locking on that had failed.
That, or NASA is illiterate in the classics. Which I doubt.
But why a variable star? Is that because they expect the program to expand and contract according to the budget, stories on slow news days etc.?
The whole thing about the inflation of names relating to space is more than a little childish. Calling people who barely got out of the Earth's atmosphere "Astronauts" and "Cosmonauts" is a bit like calling a dinghy sailor "Admiral".
Why does Hollywood suck? Because its movies must all be produced in accordance with movie design patterns. There's an alternative word for design patterns: formulaic. Fine when looking at engineering or software design (we want some assurance that we can analyse this thing and gain some assurance that it will work consistently, and that we can find other people to work on it). But to create something with artistic merit we need to transcend the formula. We live in a world which recycles everything, to the extent that just about everything vaguely cultural has to recast, relocate or make ironic reference to something else. But it's self consuming and ultimately sterile. I suspect that nothing new and exciting will come out from anyone who has to seek guidance from the book. Ex nihilo nihil fit.
That's Maya (illusion.) Zen is about here and now. Now instead show me something real about Zen, or thirty blows for you!
You were lucky. We had to write our own microinstructions using a 12 bit ALU with no barrel shifter, and then burn them into ROM using a magnifying glass to vaporise the aluminium interconnect. And you had hard disks? We had to hand code on paper tape using a leather punch to make the holes. And we thought we were lucky. Next door, the guys in Alan Turing's department were having to stick together infinite paper tapes for some machine he made in the 30s.
One thing; when I was at U, I was attacked by a psychopath with a knife while on college premises. Location services are about making money, and they therefore seek to induce the paranoia that causes people to buy them. But how real is the actual security?
Although this is not directly related to the SCO case, which is about copyright and licensing rather than patents, it could be argued that the decision of the USPTO to award patents based on software or business processes has created the conditions in which legally based perpetual motion machines are feasible.
You're clearly a victim of cultural conditioning. Most human beings who don't live in cities see a mixture of browns and greens whenever they look outside, and don't have a problem with it. We tend to go for the same colors inside houses, too. Brown wood panelling for walls has up-market associations, but the lobbies of expensive hotels presumably don't remind the visitors of shit. There is no a priori reason why computer screens should have blue backgrounds.
On second thought, insult to sharks. Sorry, guys.
two acronyms: ESX,GSX
that should start to get the numbers down.
There is also some evidence, I believe, that far from being repurposed wolves dogs are the descendants of a scavenging ancestor. By disposing of rubbish, dogs helped the evolution of stable human settlements - because without dogs, primitive man had to move on before the surroundings got too smelly. At a later stage dogs were tamed, and all of a sudden the human race had two forms of projected power to use against predators - ballistic weapons, and dogs. The rest is history (or herstory if you believe that women create civilisations and men try to destroy them)
Problem with /. is that the young geeks nowadays aren't nearly geeky enough.
Pornography is writing about or making pictures of people who receive payment for engaging in sexual acts.
By this definition, Manet's Olympia is pornography because the subject is a prostitute and is presented as such.(but was intended to shock.) Botticelli's Venus is not pornography because neither of the women in the picture is a prostitute and there is no suggestion at all of the sale of sexual services(the picture was clearly intended to give rise to a number of complex emotions including tenderness towards and respect for women). The figure of Luxury in Poussin's Dance to the Music of Time is not pornographic (the woman is simply presented as enjoying herself and making this clear to the viewer.)
The lines become slightly blurred when considering some "actresses" who get paid for simulated sex or nudity, but in a world without highly paid lawyers and MPAAs I suspect that a number of mainstream films would be classed as pornographic on this definition. Which, actually, is why I like it. A definition that omits the rich and powerful from possible opprobium is a poor definition.
Obscene material including unpaid "amateurs" is still pornographic because they are doing it in hope of future revenue, i.e. it's prostitution with deferred compensation. And material including the unwitting or unwilling is a violation of people's rights (in countries where people have rights) and is simply criminal.
The question of whether people should be allowed to look at porn in public libraries is quite different, as it is about societal norms not definitions, and in my mind has a lot to do with whether you would want to use their chair afterwards.
Once I'd actually been accepted by Cambridge, I never went near chemistry again. (The joke was that after all that I passed the exam with enough points not to proceed to oral interview, so I never got to talk to anyone about my "research project". And, anyway, when I got there I found that what I was doing was just low grade industrial stuff, and real research wasn't anything like that at all.)
AFAIK Mazda's engine still burns far more lubricant than a piston engine and has never been commercially viable for genuine mass production. The dead giveaway is that no-one is building bread and butter Wankel engines; they remain overpriced toys for posers. Hardly a role model for Third World engineering.
If this particular Stirling engine design is capable of being made in volume at a sensible price and is not simply an over-priced toy for rich yacht owners like the WhisperGen, it deserves to succeed.
One reason it might just is crime. You could make a perfectly adequate generator for a village using standard technology, but it would get stolen in no time. A washing machine sized design is going to be much harder to steal.
However, as with many alternative technologies, the likely problem is going to be seals. Seals have been the problem with Stirling engines in the past (and are the continuing problem with the Wankel.)
Unfortunately lubrication is necessary and there are just no suitable really high temperature lubricants. You also have to get the fuel in without its vaporising. Even so, large Diesels do indeed do a lot better than electric motors given generation and transmission losses. And even in cars, many Diesels need oil fueled winter heaters because the engine does not waste enough heat at moderate speeds in traffic to warm the compartment sufficiently. This leads to the strange paradox that my car heats up faster when it is very cold (and the oil fueled heater comes on) than it does in weather which is just above the critical temperature.
Douglas Adams kind of predicted what I'm presenting here, but I think he had a point. This is the idea that eventually game technology will merge with business applications to produce "skins" around the applications that fit into a virtual world. For instance, doing your accounts (or even online banking...) will give you the option of doing it via metaphors ranging from the present field/dropdown/button to an immersive virtual reality in which you enter a virtual bank and interact with a virtual teller.
Why are we going to need this? Because otherwise what are the majority of people going to do for the rest of their lives? As the other well known Adams- Scott - has pointed out, the few interesting jobs going will gradually reduce in number and become available only to the most intelligent. Pulling in a third dystopian futurologist, Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World he speculated that many jobs would specifically not be automated to provide work for everyone. That works in a world with a small population, but not in ours. We need plenty of work for middle rank people that does not involve large expenditure of resources.
Virtual reality applications could address some of this. You can imagine a virtual reality in which the underlying messaging is pure business, but the metaphors are different at each end. The buyer may interact with the seller with the buyer using the metaphor of a marauding Viking and the seller using the metaphor of a bazaar in a Middle Eastern country, but the messaging will do the translation. When people get bored with their jobs they will change the metaphor or go to a company doing similar work but with a different corporate virtual world.
The main problem (and opportunity) with this as a concept is that the US way of doing business is to try to make the rest of the world behave like Americans. But the Chinese, the Indians and newly emerging trading states like Dubai won't wear this. Virtual reality metaphors could help facilitate world trade.
Also, by making it possible for people to do business in an interesting way while staying at home, they could significantly reduce world energy demands.
Any venture capitalists out there with a few spare billions and the urge to fund the next dotcom bubble - just post a reply and perhaps I'll get back to you. Or not.
Well, that's about as reliable as some Wikipedia, anyway. And yes, English is my native language, but do I have some good points as well.
It was Kepler who realised that ellipses could be the correct model for orbits, and even there, to try and keep the Church happy, he tried to fit the major and minor axes into the shapes of the "Platonic solids".
History suggests that the example you are quoting is the opposite of what you want to show. It is better to let scientists come up with initially ad hoc explanations because they lead to the truth. Making initial unscientific assumptions and treating them as dogma suppresses and delays progress. Scientists are ambitious and a good way to become important is to replace someone else's theory - so scientists can be relied on to do that. For every established Dark Matter theorist there are probably several PhD students who would love to annihilate Dark Matter.
The line of argument in the parent annoys me because it tries to suggest that scientists left to themselves will produce ridiculous non-explanatory theories and then cling to them forever. It's the anti-scientific agenda of the Creationists who want to discredit science. Creationists and their like want to confuse the public as to the explanatory status of different scientific theories so they can claim their snake oil is on an explanatory par with plate tectonics, quantum electrodynamics or evolutionary biology.
Unfortunately, like Cambridge, St. Andrews has suffered from negative publicity as a result of its taking occasional pupils from failing schools and admitting them with A level scores which would not normally allow a student to be admitted. But at least it meant that some of the Windsors got access to higher education, so perhaps the policy is defensible.
Anyway, I'm very pleased that the astrophysics tradition is continuing. But I'm still left with a question: Why are the nicest British Universities (Cambridge, Durham, St Andrews) in such bloody cold places?
No. Forms like IX for 9 are scribe contractions, and I've never seen a form like CIIL (I've spent time in most of the main European cathedrals and I like reading tombstone inscriptions, so this is anecdotal but based on evidence.)