The billionaire has already been in touch with the scientists who helped clone Dolly the sheep to see what it would take to clone a dinosaur from DNA
Any scientist with a reputation to protect will keep a million miles from anybody with such a request. Can you imagine the ridicule they'd get at their next conference if their colleagues knew they'd been talking about resurrecting dinosaurs? Maybe one day it will be possible to restore a whole organism from remains millions of years old, but right now the technology is very far from achieving that.
True, though nobody ever said it would be impossible if the specimen were encapsulated in ice.
Trouble is you need to find a place which has continuously stayed below freezing for the last 65 million years, plus a species of dinosaur which would have lived in such a place. I'm unaware of any woolly-mammoth type dinosaur thought to have lived in a freezing climate. And whilst the last of the dinosaurs was walking the earth, Antarctica had a sub-tropical climate.
It requires better accuracy than an Olympic golfer teeing off in London and hitting a hole-in-one in Auckland, New Zealand.
Not it didn't. A car can arrive exactly at its destination after hundreds of miles, but not because it set out with incredibly precise steering. Rockets, like cars, but unlike golf balls, can steer.
And that's not the only difference between sport and space-science.
Once you know the key's shape, all bets are off: you don't need fancy tech to make a copy. You can make a key out of metal with just a few hand tools, and it would probably be quicker than 3D printing too. Brass is easy to work and much stronger than plastic.
People get bored easily: even NASA's Apollo programme had trouble sustaining public interest after the first few missions. And yet you will be far more dependent on audiences than Apollo ever was. What do you expect the Mars colonists' lifespans to be, and how will you maintain funding for that length of time?
isn't it a bit selfish for us to be asking them to use their solar panels to send us video of their daily lives?
They'll need lots of power for heat and to electrolyse water to make oxygen, amongst other things. The few watts needed for communications will be the least of their worries.
...which explains why Google recently disposed of its 3D drawing tool, Sketchup. With the rise of algorithms like Photosynth it was inevitable that hand-drawn features would be superseded by automatic analysis. I just hope that Sketchup or tools like it remain available for drawing features which don't exist (yet). Of course there are plenty of 3D CAD programs available, but for those of us who aren't professional draughtsmen, few approach the ease-of-use that Sketchup has.
This isn't new. The MIT Terasys platform did the same in 1995, and many have since. Nobody has yet come up with a viable programming model for such processors.
Indeed, but PC architecture is going in this direction. The powerful and flexible main CPU will remain, but there are more and more devices with their own specialised processors and memory. First graphics cards, then HDDs and other devices followed suit, and now we think nothing of putting microcontrollers in mice, keyboards, even speakers. Perhaps in the future I/O could be handled entirely by the in-memory processors. The more work the CPU can outsource to specialised processors, the faster it's going to get done.
Because it's not as though Amazon is able to get deals on all the parts for buying them in bulk.
Y'know I think they might have taken that into account. My local friendly electronics store is selling 7" displays for $265, three times the cost estimate in TFA.
I can't tell if you're serious. On my car arc-discharge headlamps are a thousand-euro option; goodness knows what BMW will charge for laser-beams.
Meanwhile my oh-so-inefficient filament headlamps consume about 100MJ/year. Accounting for engine and alternator efficiency that's about half a tank of petrol per year, or 500 euros over the lifetime of the vehicle.
Huh? Every morning I go out to work whilst my cat lies flat-out on the sofa/kitchen-table/garden-wall/expensive-and-fragile-plants, with his eyes closed and a big grin on his face. There's no doubt about who's the slave.
What they mean is that they have tested the symmetry of the electron and found it to be equivalent in all directions, like a sphere. The hair's-width thing is just an analogy to describe the degree to which that symmetry has been tested; the electron does not have an intrinsic size or shape. If there were any detectable asymmetry, that would imply that the electron and positron are not perfect opposites, and may explain why there is so little antimatter in the universe.
You have absolutely no chance to get anything close to it on your own, so just don't.
I'm afraid this is pretty much true, although the hobbyist in me doesn't like to admit it.
The amount of radioactivity you're looking for is small compared to natural background, and small even compared to the normal variations in background. To identify any un-natural contamination you'll need a detector capable of distinguishing different isotopes, in a low-background environment, and it'll need to be regularly calibrated with standard sources. That entails a lot more gear than a Geiger-Muller tube, all of which is very very expensive, not to say tricky to operate.
With a GM counter about the best you can do is to try to measure the radioactive decay of a sample, although most relevant isotopes have very long lifetimes which will be too hard to measure. 131-iodine is easy to detect and has a measurable half-life at 8 days, but I expect the authorities would find it before you do, and anyway most of it has gone by now.
Alternatively you might befriend a physicist at your nearest nuclear research institute. Even then he or she will need to be quite a good friend, because the time and effort involved is significant, and this kind of expensive gear tends to be permanently in-use.
Beta detectors can be both very small and very sensitive, but I agree they are generally less useful than gamma detectors.
There is a use in health-physics for detectors which can distinguish gamma and neutron radiation. But they exist already, and have done for years and years.
My old school had a sign-in system based on face-recognition. Nobody ever found a way to circumvent it. This was 25 years ago, but I believe others were using a similar system even earlier.
Evolution has played out countless thousands of battles to the death, and only the very best survivors are left. So we will inevitably continue the tooth-and-nail fight to survive and pass on our genes, because that is how nature has made us.
I think the very concept of "stealing" time is arse-backwards. I don't care or count how many hours my team puts in. I judge them by what they do: how many tasks or projects they complete, and how much help they needed. If anybody seems easily able to deal with their workload, I give them more challenging tasks. And if they complete those too, I use that to justify a raise at the end of the year (theirs, not mine).
If an above-average guy only does an average amount of work and spends half his time web-surfing, that's no reason to fire him. But he'll only get an average review.
Agreed, but SPICE can help make sure when you build something it will work. Especially with limited hobbyist resources and without coworkers to perform design reviews.
There is a simple joy in building something without coworkers to perform design reviews.:)
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The billionaire has already been in touch with the scientists who helped clone Dolly the sheep to see what it would take to clone a dinosaur from DNA
Any scientist with a reputation to protect will keep a million miles from anybody with such a request. Can you imagine the ridicule they'd get at their next conference if their colleagues knew they'd been talking about resurrecting dinosaurs? Maybe one day it will be possible to restore a whole organism from remains millions of years old, but right now the technology is very far from achieving that.
True, though nobody ever said it would be impossible if the specimen were encapsulated in ice.
Trouble is you need to find a place which has continuously stayed below freezing for the last 65 million years, plus a species of dinosaur which would have lived in such a place. I'm unaware of any woolly-mammoth type dinosaur thought to have lived in a freezing climate. And whilst the last of the dinosaurs was walking the earth, Antarctica had a sub-tropical climate.
It requires better accuracy than an Olympic golfer teeing off in London and hitting a hole-in-one in Auckland, New Zealand.
Not it didn't. A car can arrive exactly at its destination after hundreds of miles, but not because it set out with incredibly precise steering. Rockets, like cars, but unlike golf balls, can steer.
And that's not the only difference between sport and space-science.
Once you know the key's shape, all bets are off: you don't need fancy tech to make a copy. You can make a key out of metal with just a few hand tools, and it would probably be quicker than 3D printing too. Brass is easy to work and much stronger than plastic.
People get bored easily: even NASA's Apollo programme had trouble sustaining public interest after the first few missions. And yet you will be far more dependent on audiences than Apollo ever was. What do you expect the Mars colonists' lifespans to be, and how will you maintain funding for that length of time?
isn't it a bit selfish for us to be asking them to use their solar panels to send us video of their daily lives?
They'll need lots of power for heat and to electrolyse water to make oxygen, amongst other things. The few watts needed for communications will be the least of their worries.
...which explains why Google recently disposed of its 3D drawing tool, Sketchup. With the rise of algorithms like Photosynth it was inevitable that hand-drawn features would be superseded by automatic analysis. I just hope that Sketchup or tools like it remain available for drawing features which don't exist (yet). Of course there are plenty of 3D CAD programs available, but for those of us who aren't professional draughtsmen, few approach the ease-of-use that Sketchup has.
This isn't new. The MIT Terasys platform did the same in 1995, and many have since. Nobody has yet come up with a viable programming model for such processors.
Indeed, but PC architecture is going in this direction. The powerful and flexible main CPU will remain, but there are more and more devices with their own specialised processors and memory. First graphics cards, then HDDs and other devices followed suit, and now we think nothing of putting microcontrollers in mice, keyboards, even speakers. Perhaps in the future I/O could be handled entirely by the in-memory processors. The more work the CPU can outsource to specialised processors, the faster it's going to get done.
The SPARC64 VIIIfx can carry out 8 floating-point instructions per core per cycle.
88,128 cpus x 8 cores x 2.0e9 cycles/s x 8 flops/cycle = 11.28 petaflops maximum theoretical speed.
Because it's not as though Amazon is able to get deals on all the parts for buying them in bulk.
Y'know I think they might have taken that into account. My local friendly electronics store is selling 7" displays for $265, three times the cost estimate in TFA.
I can't tell if you're serious. On my car arc-discharge headlamps are a thousand-euro option; goodness knows what BMW will charge for laser-beams.
Meanwhile my oh-so-inefficient filament headlamps consume about 100MJ/year. Accounting for engine and alternator efficiency that's about half a tank of petrol per year, or 500 euros over the lifetime of the vehicle.
According to the article, BMW is getting 170 lumens per watt as compared to 100 lumens per watt for LED lights.
Ahhh, it's a money-saving measure. Of course.
leverage (I hate that frigging market-speak word)
There's always a way to elegantly express yourself whilst avoiding the mangled nouveau-English spoken in offices. Try "exploit" or even "use".
Yes please!
timg73 gmail
PETA believe pet ownership is slavery
Huh? Every morning I go out to work whilst my cat lies flat-out on the sofa/kitchen-table/garden-wall/expensive-and-fragile-plants, with his eyes closed and a big grin on his face. There's no doubt about who's the slave.
What they mean is that they have tested the symmetry of the electron and found it to be equivalent in all directions, like a sphere. The hair's-width thing is just an analogy to describe the degree to which that symmetry has been tested; the electron does not have an intrinsic size or shape. If there were any detectable asymmetry, that would imply that the electron and positron are not perfect opposites, and may explain why there is so little antimatter in the universe.
You have absolutely no chance to get anything close to it on your own, so just don't.
I'm afraid this is pretty much true, although the hobbyist in me doesn't like to admit it.
The amount of radioactivity you're looking for is small compared to natural background, and small even compared to the normal variations in background. To identify any un-natural contamination you'll need a detector capable of distinguishing different isotopes, in a low-background environment, and it'll need to be regularly calibrated with standard sources. That entails a lot more gear than a Geiger-Muller tube, all of which is very very expensive, not to say tricky to operate.
With a GM counter about the best you can do is to try to measure the radioactive decay of a sample, although most relevant isotopes have very long lifetimes which will be too hard to measure. 131-iodine is easy to detect and has a measurable half-life at 8 days, but I expect the authorities would find it before you do, and anyway most of it has gone by now.
Alternatively you might befriend a physicist at your nearest nuclear research institute. Even then he or she will need to be quite a good friend, because the time and effort involved is significant, and this kind of expensive gear tends to be permanently in-use.
Beta detectors can be both very small and very sensitive, but I agree they are generally less useful than gamma detectors. There is a use in health-physics for detectors which can distinguish gamma and neutron radiation. But they exist already, and have done for years and years.
My old school had a sign-in system based on face-recognition. Nobody ever found a way to circumvent it. This was 25 years ago, but I believe others were using a similar system even earlier.
Incompetence? Distraction? Tiredness? They don't matter! Only speed matters!
If there was a type of radar for detecting and quantifying incompetence, distraction and tiredness, the world would be a better place.
"I'm sorry sir, you're over the state incompetence limit. You'll have to come with me."
And road congestion would be a thing of the past.
Coming soon: how to mill new floorboards out of titanium, after the old floor was shattered by a falling calculator.
Evolution has played out countless thousands of battles to the death, and only the very best survivors are left. So we will inevitably continue the tooth-and-nail fight to survive and pass on our genes, because that is how nature has made us.
I think the very concept of "stealing" time is arse-backwards. I don't care or count how many hours my team puts in. I judge them by what they do: how many tasks or projects they complete, and how much help they needed. If anybody seems easily able to deal with their workload, I give them more challenging tasks. And if they complete those too, I use that to justify a raise at the end of the year (theirs, not mine).
If an above-average guy only does an average amount of work and spends half his time web-surfing, that's no reason to fire him. But he'll only get an average review.
That's my system, and I think it's fair.
Agreed, but SPICE can help make sure when you build something it will work. Especially with limited hobbyist resources and without coworkers to perform design reviews.
There is a simple joy in building something without coworkers to perform design reviews. :)
Arrrgh! SPICE is work. There is a simple joy in building something physical, that works and which you can show to people.