The Electric Shoe Company in England has piezo-generating shoes on sale. Somebody wore them thru the desert for 100KM abd they worked great. The power level is enough to power cell phones!
I can't believe some of the stuff I'm reading from/.ers about how "trees aren't news for geeks". Come on!!! Trees are where books come from!!! Trees are exercises in fractal mathematics!!! Trees are how apes like us escaped extinction from feline and canine predators!!! Trees are just plain cool in several meanings of the word!!! And extinct trees are yet another arena to play Jurassic Park!!!
Speaking of extinct trees (or those almost so), nothing can top the story of the American Chestnut... from "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" fame. More details here. There is hope that one day these magnificent trees will be
revived...
This Is What Multilevel Marketing (D'OH!) Is About
on
Yo - Pay Attention!
·
· Score: 2
My wife was in one of those herbal product multilevel marketing schemes a year or so ago. They addressed this point (people's attention is increasingly fragmented) over and over and said that was the main strength of MML - the personal touch got the first sale and the lock-in aspect of MML kept the sales coming. I never bought into it - I kept trying to explain to my wife who Ponzi was - and needless to say, we never got rich...
I remember this series as well, and enjoyed it as much or more than Mad Scientists Club. There were several other secondary characters besides the Spartan and the Boy From The Future - the continuity from story to story was nonexistant beyond the narrator, the ubergeek and the Time Machine. I remember one ( a two parter?) published in Boys Life during the civil rights era that had a black teen as part of the gang who got in trouble when they went back to pre-Civil War Kansas. Seems like they met Cantrell of Cantrell's Raiders....
Huh, I learn something every day. When I was a kid I had both MSC books AND the Rocket Manual and I never made the connection they were from the same guy. My parents would never let me try the stuff in RMA. Now I've got a computer, and that's even more dangerous....
This series is so beloved by Slashdotters that it should be brought forward into the 21st century. They grew up and had kids, you know, and those kids are probably out there right now tinkering with DNA, AI, SETI, you name the acronym. Who's gonna catalog their exploits? We should! Any ideas / announcements on starting a (Slashdot sponsored) fanfic website?
Jon's Right, Taco's Wrong, 5 Star Summer Fun
on
Review: Tomb Raider
·
· Score: 1
Hey, it's not Shakespeare, and hey, it's not even Raiders of the Lost Ark. But it's got gorgeous scenery, a gorgeous Laura, more of a plot than a lot of $100 million blockbusters, good action scenes, good backstory and most of all, it's FUN. Most amazing of all, my wife liked it.
Balloons On Venus Can Inject Life There
on
Space Blimps
·
· Score: 1
So your hair follicle will be frozen solid and blasted into oblivion by cosmic rays over the millenia. Big deal. What everybody really wants is to get to space alive. I've had an idea for quite some time that could be expanded to cover this option... and adding YOUR VERY OWN DNA (YVOD, registered trademark) might just provide the funding required....Basically, there are some bacteria that love heat and acid, and Venus just happens to have that environment in cloud droplets at 40-50 Km. So let's get space colonization underway and send these little guys on the ride of their life. Before they go, we could add plasmids spliced with YVOD (tm) and instead of inert frozen DNA, it would actually be active in the bacteria, contributing to its evolution and creation of the Venesian ecosphere by expression of your non-bacterial proteins. This isn't a nutty idea, already there is bacterial ecosystems being discovered in Earth's clouds. Any remaining dot-com millionaires out there who want to provide seed (pun) funding, I actually AM a rocket scientist and would love to get a project based on this idea (minus the plasmids, even) off the ground....or even just start a discussion about it.
Actually mammoths didn't die off as long ago as everbody thought. There was an isolated group on an island that survived until only 5000 years ago. The thinking is that being on a remote island protected them from hunting by man which is why they survived so long. Details here, including the quote: "...surprisingly recent dates on woolly mammoth remains from Wrangel Island in 1990, ranging between 7390-4740 BP. The finds were remarkable for two reasons: they indicated mammoth survival on Wrangel Island for as much as 5000 years after the last known date of mammoths on the Eurasian continent, and they documented the evolution of a distinct dwarf mammoth population on Wrangel Island." Other theories include a virus induced extinction , but I think it was man...
To me, even more interesting is whether or not man killed off Neandertals. These guys were all over Europe for a very long time, and they were smart enought to fight back. A war with them would have truly been "World War One". There is so far only one possible example of a possible human-Neandertal hybrid
, so their disappearance probably wasn't from interbreeding...Let's take a poll, did humans deliberately destroy neandertals or were they the original Homer Simpsons that just died out???
Thermal imaging is nothing. A number of companies are being funded by the Department of Justice to develop a new type of radar that would allow police to scan somebody on a sidewalk to see if they had a gun - without their even knowing it. Details here...
For those of you who don't know, there is a SETI@home team composed of Slashdot netizens here. There are currently almost 2200 members in Team Slashdot that have contributed 700,000+ work units to the SETI@home project, for a team rank of 17th. Teams from HP, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Compaq and Sun are ahead of us! Personally, I'd like to see Team Slashdot show these slackers a thing or two about what nerds can do.
A little effort by an individual goes a long way in Team Slashdot. I've got SETI@Home running full time on a crappy little Pentium computer that has churned out only 35+ units and has taken almost a year to do it, and I've still contributed more units than half the Team Slashdot members. I'm gonna upgrade my input to SETI@home. Join me! Let's get a discussion / confessional / pep rally going here about what we can do to upgrade the Team Slashdot effort for what we all agree is a worthy cause!
Re:Lower quality in Scientific American!!!
on
Nostrildamus
·
· Score: 1
Amen. I don't even see the point of SciAm continuing to publish - Discover has this niche covered. Better they should have quit gracefully than disgrace such a grand institution like this. Incidentally, I did see there is a CD-ROM out of all the Amateur Scientist columns from SciAm's glory days....
In a nutshell, Morris (? - the Man In Black) was running the whole thing as a scam to find / get Eve and tricked out heros plus Eve to show up at an underground vault holding the Holy Grail Database. They were all captured by the SWAT team from the beginning of the episode. To be continued....
The emphasis on guns and violent media detracts from the root cause behind most of these incidents: bullying. I want to see a day where CNN stats shoving mikes in the faces of jocks etc and starts asking "what did YOU say to to the shooter and WHEN did you say it". It would be great television and give the victims a new lawsuit target. Most jocks are specifically trained in their aggressive and violent behavior by the school sports department, which usually has the deepest pockets in the school organization anyway. Don't forget to sue the coaches.
I have long been facinated by neural nets and their potential to develop true machine consciousness. Currently most neural nets are stap-by-step simulations using clock-based CPUs, which somehow seems vulnerable to missing some key factor that makes the natural neural nets in the brain conscious. Most research into actual neural nets (not digital simulations) seem to concentrate on maximizing the number of connections and what training algorithm to use. Can Slashdot readers suggest something beyond these three familiar themes in neural net research (digital simulation, maximizing connections, training algorithm) that gets into how neural nets might be organized to achieve true machine consciousness? If this is achieved in a manner based on the human brain, I imagine numerous neural net "subsystems", each wired differently internally and connected to other subsystems like a patchwork quilt. What are these subsystems? How are their internal wiring schemes different? How are they connected? How do theese subsystems become self-aware?
This topic really bugs me because of my own inconsistencies. I am OK with "wholesome" porn, wish there wasn't sick porn, am dead set against child porn, and consider the First Amendment to be sacrosanct. Logically I think that computer sims of anything can't/shouldn't be illegal, but on a gut emotional level I'm willing to go along with a ban. The thing that really bothers me, tho, is that once you say that a sim crosses a line, then defenders of anything real but borderline/controversial on first amendment grounds have no leverage against those who can point to banned sims. Once anime is banned, how do you cope with attacks against selling old Coppertone Girl ads in a mall antiques booth, or the Calvin Klein ads with sexy waifs, or news documentaries showing video of JonBennet's beauty contests? The problem with this issue is that it redraws the old line of crimes of action (taking sick pictures of actual kids) with crimes of thought (moving a mouse around in a certain pattern). With the conservatives / Christian Coalition / George W using this as the starting point, what else will be a thought crime by 2084?
...would have been to have defined the M. prime formula using their previously defined symbols. Namely, 3 = 2^2-1, 5 = 2^3-1, etc. and then "symbol for largest prime we've found" = 2^3021377-1 then the final page "question mark symbol (what is the largest M. prime YOU have found)" = 2^"question mark symbol"-1
I agree/. has got to keep standards up and go for more content - and the first person to post the content gets $100 (or a free cam, depending on how you look at it)!!! The link offers $100 to a reviewer of this $79 toy....
Pioneers 10 and 11 are the ones on the way out of the solar system. Pioneer 6 was one of the first to leave the Earth-Moon system and go into an inependent orbit around the sun. It bounces around in a circle between Venus and Mars.
The most unbelievable thing to me about this whole fiasco was what happened in Missouri. Bush goes ON and ON about "Gore trusts government, I trust the people..." Then when St. Louis has huge turnout and polling problems, the Republicans swoop in and get a trio of Republican judges to overturn a lower court ruling to keep the polls open. George W and his gestapo slammed the voting booth door on people he thought at the time were voting against him. If he ends up losing Florida, maybe Microsoft will hire him.
To follow up on my original post, while I have some heartburn about ***Russia***, I think ***Russians*** are a very cool and resourceful people and there are some really great individuals there. They have this love/hate relationship with strict authority, tho, and it saps them of initiative....My biggest shock about Russians was that they avoid looking you in the eye, and don't even seem to be aware they are doing it.
As much as I want to go into space, even I have some hesitation about applying for this. I've been to Russia and built a couple of experiments that have flown on MIR, so I have some first hand observations about this. First, the Russians are in this for the money, period. When I went there as part of a Boeing experiment team, everything was about what could they do to soak more cash from us and they could care less about the flight. Secondly, their infrastructure is shot, particularly at the launch site. Third, they are totally unable to keep to a schedule - look at the Space Station, it's 2 years late from Russians having to delay their main part. Most importantly, this thing can't be declared safe. MIR is fifteen years old, it's had a fire and a major depresurization while US astronauts were aboard, either of which could have easily killed someone. Look at their recent sub disaster and TV station fire, too - they are just stretched too thin running old equipment with people that haven't been paid in far too long. It sounds romantic, but it's being pushed by people with NO spaceflight experience and little if any experience with the realities of Russia today. The Russians aren't going to raise a single flag as long as there's enough zeros on the end of the check. If this pulls thru, it's going to be luck more than anything....
Slashdot Mirror
The Electric Shoe Company in England has piezo-generating shoes on sale. Somebody wore them thru the desert for 100KM abd they worked great. The power level is enough to power cell phones!
I can't believe some of the stuff I'm reading from /.ers about how "trees aren't news for geeks". Come on!!! Trees are where books come from!!! Trees are exercises in fractal mathematics!!! Trees are how apes like us escaped extinction from feline and canine predators!!! Trees are just plain cool in several meanings of the word!!! And extinct trees are yet another arena to play Jurassic Park!!!
Speaking of extinct trees (or those almost so), nothing can top the story of the American Chestnut ... from "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" fame. More details here. There is hope that one day these magnificent trees will be
revived ...
My wife was in one of those herbal product multilevel marketing schemes a year or so ago. They addressed this point (people's attention is increasingly fragmented) over and over and said that was the main strength of MML - the personal touch got the first sale and the lock-in aspect of MML kept the sales coming. I never bought into it - I kept trying to explain to my wife who Ponzi was - and needless to say, we never got rich...
The US Army has such a major interest in simulation that it maintains two separate centers in this area: the National Simulation Center in Fort Levenworth KS and STRICOM (Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command). Check em' out!
Next there will be a legal squabble if you are the first to register existing URLs in newly open languages like Japanese or Chinese ...
I remember this series as well, and enjoyed it as much or more than Mad Scientists Club. There were several other secondary characters besides the Spartan and the Boy From The Future - the continuity from story to story was nonexistant beyond the narrator, the ubergeek and the Time Machine. I remember one ( a two parter?) published in Boys Life during the civil rights era that had a black teen as part of the gang who got in trouble when they went back to pre-Civil War Kansas. Seems like they met Cantrell of Cantrell's Raiders....
Huh, I learn something every day. When I was a kid I had both MSC books AND the Rocket Manual and I never made the connection they were from the same guy. My parents would never let me try the stuff in RMA. Now I've got a computer, and that's even more dangerous....
This series is so beloved by Slashdotters that it should be brought forward into the 21st century. They grew up and had kids, you know, and those kids are probably out there right now tinkering with DNA, AI, SETI, you name the acronym. Who's gonna catalog their exploits? We should! Any ideas / announcements on starting a (Slashdot sponsored) fanfic website?
Hey, it's not Shakespeare, and hey, it's not even Raiders of the Lost Ark. But it's got gorgeous scenery, a gorgeous Laura, more of a plot than a lot of $100 million blockbusters, good action scenes, good backstory and most of all, it's FUN. Most amazing of all, my wife liked it.
Recently, bacterial ecosystems have been discovered in Earth's clouds. This opens the possibility of using balloons on Venus to inject heat and acid loving bacteria into Venus' cloud droplets at 40-50 Km. Let's start colonizing space today!
So your hair follicle will be frozen solid and blasted into oblivion by cosmic rays over the millenia. Big deal. What everybody really wants is to get to space alive. I've had an idea for quite some time that could be expanded to cover this option ... and adding YOUR VERY OWN DNA (YVOD, registered trademark) might just provide the funding required....Basically, there are some bacteria that love heat and acid, and Venus just happens to have that environment in cloud droplets at 40-50 Km. So let's get space colonization underway and send these little guys on the ride of their life. Before they go, we could add plasmids spliced with YVOD (tm) and instead of inert frozen DNA, it would actually be active in the bacteria, contributing to its evolution and creation of the Venesian ecosphere by expression of your non-bacterial proteins. This isn't a nutty idea, already there is bacterial ecosystems being discovered in Earth's clouds. Any remaining dot-com millionaires out there who want to provide seed (pun) funding, I actually AM a rocket scientist and would love to get a project based on this idea (minus the plasmids, even) off the ground....or even just start a discussion about it.
Actually mammoths didn't die off as long ago as everbody thought. There was an isolated group on an island that survived until only 5000 years ago. The thinking is that being on a remote island protected them from hunting by man which is why they survived so long. Details here, including the quote: "...surprisingly recent dates on woolly mammoth remains from Wrangel Island in 1990, ranging between 7390-4740 BP. The finds were remarkable for two reasons: they indicated mammoth survival on Wrangel Island for as much as 5000 years after the last known date of mammoths on the Eurasian continent, and they documented the evolution of a distinct dwarf mammoth population on Wrangel Island." Other theories include a virus induced extinction , but I think it was man... To me, even more interesting is whether or not man killed off Neandertals. These guys were all over Europe for a very long time, and they were smart enought to fight back. A war with them would have truly been "World War One". There is so far only one possible example of a possible human-Neandertal hybrid , so their disappearance probably wasn't from interbreeding...Let's take a poll, did humans deliberately destroy neandertals or were they the original Homer Simpsons that just died out???
Thermal imaging is nothing. A number of companies are being funded by the Department of Justice to develop a new type of radar that would allow police to scan somebody on a sidewalk to see if they had a gun - without their even knowing it. Details here...
For those of you who don't know, there is a SETI@home team composed of Slashdot netizens here. There are currently almost 2200 members in Team Slashdot that have contributed 700,000+ work units to the SETI@home project, for a team rank of 17th. Teams from HP, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Compaq and Sun are ahead of us! Personally, I'd like to see Team Slashdot show these slackers a thing or two about what nerds can do. A little effort by an individual goes a long way in Team Slashdot. I've got SETI@Home running full time on a crappy little Pentium computer that has churned out only 35+ units and has taken almost a year to do it, and I've still contributed more units than half the Team Slashdot members. I'm gonna upgrade my input to SETI@home. Join me! Let's get a discussion / confessional / pep rally going here about what we can do to upgrade the Team Slashdot effort for what we all agree is a worthy cause!
Amen. I don't even see the point of SciAm continuing to publish - Discover has this niche covered. Better they should have quit gracefully than disgrace such a grand institution like this. Incidentally, I did see there is a CD-ROM out of all the Amateur Scientist columns from SciAm's glory days....
In a nutshell, Morris (? - the Man In Black) was running the whole thing as a scam to find / get Eve and tricked out heros plus Eve to show up at an underground vault holding the Holy Grail Database. They were all captured by the SWAT team from the beginning of the episode. To be continued....
The emphasis on guns and violent media detracts from the root cause behind most of these incidents: bullying. I want to see a day where CNN stats shoving mikes in the faces of jocks etc and starts asking "what did YOU say to to the shooter and WHEN did you say it". It would be great television and give the victims a new lawsuit target. Most jocks are specifically trained in their aggressive and violent behavior by the school sports department, which usually has the deepest pockets in the school organization anyway. Don't forget to sue the coaches.
I have long been facinated by neural nets and their potential to develop true machine consciousness. Currently most neural nets are stap-by-step simulations using clock-based CPUs, which somehow seems vulnerable to missing some key factor that makes the natural neural nets in the brain conscious. Most research into actual neural nets (not digital simulations) seem to concentrate on maximizing the number of connections and what training algorithm to use. Can Slashdot readers suggest something beyond these three familiar themes in neural net research (digital simulation, maximizing connections, training algorithm) that gets into how neural nets might be organized to achieve true machine consciousness? If this is achieved in a manner based on the human brain, I imagine numerous neural net "subsystems", each wired differently internally and connected to other subsystems like a patchwork quilt. What are these subsystems? How are their internal wiring schemes different? How are they connected? How do theese subsystems become self-aware?
This topic really bugs me because of my own inconsistencies. I am OK with "wholesome" porn, wish there wasn't sick porn, am dead set against child porn, and consider the First Amendment to be sacrosanct. Logically I think that computer sims of anything can't/shouldn't be illegal, but on a gut emotional level I'm willing to go along with a ban. The thing that really bothers me, tho, is that once you say that a sim crosses a line, then defenders of anything real but borderline/controversial on first amendment grounds have no leverage against those who can point to banned sims. Once anime is banned, how do you cope with attacks against selling old Coppertone Girl ads in a mall antiques booth, or the Calvin Klein ads with sexy waifs, or news documentaries showing video of JonBennet's beauty contests? The problem with this issue is that it redraws the old line of crimes of action (taking sick pictures of actual kids) with crimes of thought (moving a mouse around in a certain pattern). With the conservatives / Christian Coalition / George W using this as the starting point, what else will be a thought crime by 2084?
...would have been to have defined the M. prime formula using their previously defined symbols. Namely, 3 = 2^2-1, 5 = 2^3-1, etc. and then "symbol for largest prime we've found" = 2^3021377-1 then the final page "question mark symbol (what is the largest M. prime YOU have found)" = 2^"question mark symbol"-1
I agree /. has got to keep standards up and go for more content - and the first person to post the content gets $100 (or a free cam, depending on how you look at it)!!! The link offers $100 to a reviewer of this $79 toy....
Pioneers 10 and 11 are the ones on the way out of the solar system. Pioneer 6 was one of the first to leave the Earth-Moon system and go into an inependent orbit around the sun. It bounces around in a circle between Venus and Mars.
The most unbelievable thing to me about this whole fiasco was what happened in Missouri. Bush goes ON and ON about "Gore trusts government, I trust the people..." Then when St. Louis has huge turnout and polling problems, the Republicans swoop in and get a trio of Republican judges to overturn a lower court ruling to keep the polls open. George W and his gestapo slammed the voting booth door on people he thought at the time were voting against him. If he ends up losing Florida, maybe Microsoft will hire him.
To follow up on my original post, while I have some heartburn about ***Russia***, I think ***Russians*** are a very cool and resourceful people and there are some really great individuals there. They have this love/hate relationship with strict authority, tho, and it saps them of initiative....My biggest shock about Russians was that they avoid looking you in the eye, and don't even seem to be aware they are doing it.
As much as I want to go into space, even I have some hesitation about applying for this. I've been to Russia and built a couple of experiments that have flown on MIR, so I have some first hand observations about this. First, the Russians are in this for the money, period. When I went there as part of a Boeing experiment team, everything was about what could they do to soak more cash from us and they could care less about the flight. Secondly, their infrastructure is shot, particularly at the launch site. Third, they are totally unable to keep to a schedule - look at the Space Station, it's 2 years late from Russians having to delay their main part. Most importantly, this thing can't be declared safe. MIR is fifteen years old, it's had a fire and a major depresurization while US astronauts were aboard, either of which could have easily killed someone. Look at their recent sub disaster and TV station fire, too - they are just stretched too thin running old equipment with people that haven't been paid in far too long. It sounds romantic, but it's being pushed by people with NO spaceflight experience and little if any experience with the realities of Russia today. The Russians aren't going to raise a single flag as long as there's enough zeros on the end of the check. If this pulls thru, it's going to be luck more than anything....