So, the core rotates 1degree faster than the surface every million years. That's not much.
At the current rate of earth's rotation rate slowing, the surface will slow down some 30 degress in the next 400 years (this is a reasonably sound estimate used by people arguing against continuing "leap-seconds", that as the rotation rate slows geometrically, soon we'll be adding a leap second every month, then several a month, and so on. They suggest a leap-hour in 300 or 400 years.)
So...this suggests that the solid core and the solid crust are linked together very closely, so that the core tracks the crust almost perfectly. I find this somewhat hard to believe, given that there is a few hundred miles of not-very-viscous liquid iron/nickel between the inner core and the plastic mantle...
...was on the movie US Marshals. As part of the film, the plane holding the prisoner escapes after a 727 crash. Grant McCune built a 1/3 scale 727 fuselage for the film, it was amazing!
His shop at the time was chock full of every type of model and rig that I could imagine, and several that I couldn't, with his crew of model makers feverishly working on the next projects as ours was finishing up.
At the time he kept his Oscar under a stocking cap on a shelf in his office. Legend has it that he would occasionally pick up the hat to make sure it was still there. I suppose he wanted it close, without it creating a spectacle (as a real Oscar inevitably is)
There are four tests for fair use. The fourth one is "Is the use transformative in any way?" For example, a parody is usually seen as fair use, because it transforms the original.
Technically, your lens loses flexibility, but yah that's about right.
The only good thing about that is that it eliminates one source of problems when watching 3D movies, young people expect to be able to focus on things close to them, and when they can't refocus on things coming out of the screen it is disturbing. Doesn't bother the over-40 crowd a bit.
Launching missles west at dusk will give the most spectacular displays. I'm not sure if that's why they always seem to do it that way from Vandenberg!
In this case, the lighting of the contrails and the clouds is identical, saying that the missile (if that's what it is) is well within the atmosphere; and staying that way. It looks more like a rocket-powered airplane, or a missile that flies within the atmosphere (say, a Standard surface-to-air missile), than an ICBM or an anti-missile missile. Those pop out of the atmosphere pretty fast, and the contrail changes radically when that happens.
Gasoline only has that much energy if combined with "free" oxygen in the air. Explosives have to react with only the chemicals within them. (I put scare quotes around free because it is astonishing that there is so much wildly reactive oxygen in earth's atmosphere these days)
Patents today run for 20 years from time of application, or 17 years from date of grant (whichever is later, although the 17 year rule only applies to patents filed quite some time ago.) Those dates would be Feb 7, 2010 or Oct 5, 2010 respectively. This patent is expired.
Glass is really remarkably strong when it comes out of the furnace. The tensile strength is amazing, it can bend enough to absorb some shocks. It's a great material before it gets to the real world.
But, once it does, it immediately develops microcracks in the surface, and each of these could be the beginning of a fracture that goes through the bulk of the glass. So, what to do?
I don't know if they've taken the hint from the semiconductor industry (look up 'strained silicon') but they did a similar thing with glass. By bombarding the surface of the glass with larger atoms, they create significant stress in the surface, so that any microcracks are immediately pushed shut. But, this is only true down to the level that these atoms diffuse into the surface...not far at all!
So, if you create a significant scratch (and this might just be 100 microns) you are through this surface, and have a potentially catastrophic failure waiting to happen.
A screen-protecting film of plastic would be a good investment.
First things first: the encryption horse has left the barn so long ago that all traces of the barn's foundation have turned to dust. Any reasonably competent adversary will have unbreakable encryption. The US government has helped with standards like AES, even. A large potion of the 'net traffic is already encrypted - every SSL session is encrypted at the ends of the chain, untappable once it's in the network. Changing that mechanism now into something that can be tapped will recreate the whole key escrow debates of the early nineties. The infrastructure required then was enormous, it would be exponentially harder now.
The only thing that makes sense is forcing large scale commercial communications companies to escrow keys, so that casual terrorists can have their communications hoovered up with everybody elses, and then analyzed by NSA in their spare cycles. This will catch a few proto-terrorists, I presume.
With this proposal I have crossed two lines, the first is questioning the governments motives, and the second now questioning their competence
If these are really low frequency ( less than 2 ghz) and really long range (many miles) then they have to be slow if there are many users. It might be good for rural areas though
I agree that this idea has been around a while -- it's still a great idea.
Scramjets are really pretty simple devices compared to rocket engines. This machine would be like the first and second stages of a three-stage rocket, saving something like 80% of the mass. (OK, most of that mass is relatively cheap kerosene and LOX, but still.) Getting a sled up to Mach 1 to get the scramjets started is really not that challenging. If they don't start correctly, you just slow down... and nothing bad happens.
One thing that people don't point out is that if somebody built this, and it worked as well as it appears, then they would have a huge leg up in the further development of space. You might well have, say, Puerto Rico building the guideway in order to bring development money to the region.
Re:I did this on Fast and Furious/Tokyo Drift
on
HDR Video a Reality
·
· Score: 1
You really can't tell in the final movie -- these were elements used in the rendering and compositing of the Shabuya square shots -- they don't show up as frames on their own.
It was harder than it sounds, as each lens is different, with different distortions (they're all handmade, and not on big production runs, either.) The film scanning process adds its own distortions, and because one of the frames was flipped right-for-left, that distortion was different for each pass.
Still, it was great fun. Damn cold, though!
An interesting challenge is that we apparently didn't pay proper respects to the Yakuza, and they leaned on various building owners to turn off their signs early the night of our shoot. Fortunately, not too many did so.
I did this on Fast and Furious/Tokyo Drift
on
HDR Video a Reality
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
For the third of the Fast and Furious movies, we had to film at night in the spectacular Shibuya Square in Tokyo, with its many animated billboards and video screens. I really wanted to get an HDR film of the billboards.
For the driving green-screen sequences of the film, we had built a plate to mount three cameras, at 0, 45, and 90 degrees, to shoot panoramas driving down the street. To get the nodal points closer together, we had the cameras facing toward each other, with the lenses almost touching. It worked wonderfully.
By taking the center camera out, and replacing it with a beam-splitter, we had a down-and-dirty HDR rig using the other two cameras. Now, this was HDR on film, not video -- but film already has a very high dynamic range -- so two cameras with very different effective exposures gave us a tremendous dynamic range. In the 'normal' exposure all of the brighter signs were blown out, but on the beam-splitter camera you could see all the details of the structure of the lighted billboards. Quite cool.
A reasonable assumption would be that the sensitivity of the sensor is proportional to the area of the photosites (to a first approximation), so if this sensor is 100x as sensitive as, say, a D5MkII, then you would expect the photosites to be about 100x as big. Coincidentally, the 8in x 8in sensor is on the order of 100x the area of the 5D sensor, so the number of pixels is probably about the same (20M or so). To a first approximation, anyway.
bieber is absolutely right. What makes the Canon 5D Mark II amazing is the large sensor (even larger than 35mm motion picture film), enabling good control of depth of field. No matter what you do, with that sensor it's going to look like phone-cam video.
The Equinox fuel-cell vehicles have three high-pressure tanks, that can be filled up to 10,000 psi (more than 3x what a SCUBA tank pressure is)
One of those tanks failing will make a big boom! The fire, if there was one, would probably burn out almost immediately, as the hydrogen will disperse quickly and then got straight up fast.
There's a nice bit in "Dark Sun" about filling the Ivy Mike device with dueterium. All the leftover was burned, and made a roaring news but didn't have any visible fire.
GOCE shows slightly stronger gravity in the Himalayas area, but is only a few tens of meters different from the elliptical earth. The mountains are thousands of meters high over a very extended area. I would expect them to show up more strongly. Does this imply that the earth I'd proportionally less dense under those mountains?
If you're in the industry, I have often wondered about this, and would like to ask a question. There are plenty of extremely power-hungry industries that might well adapt to wind power. Think, say, of aluminum smelting. Right now, the big Aluminum companies site their plants near hydro power, but could there be a wind farm with an aluminum plant in the middle of it? They might vary the rate of production as the wind rises and falls, but if that is taken into account during the design of the plant it shouldn't be a devastating problem.
One could also, say, use wind energy to split water to make hydrogen, either for the hydrogen itself or to make ammonia as part of a fertilizer plant. Generate hydrogen when the wind blows.
With these in-site industries, you don't have to worry about long-distance transmission, or integrating the wind-power into the current electrical grid.
It's certainly possible that these energy-intensive industries are only 5% of the US need for electricity, in which case this doesn't make any sense...but I think it's likely more than that.
If AMD puts a competetive GPU onto the CPU die, comparable to their current high-end graphics boards) then this is a really big deal. Perhaps the biggest issue with GPGPU programming is the fact that the graphics unit is at the end of a fairly narrow pipe with limited memory, and getting data to the board and back is a performance bottleneck and a pain in the butt for a programmer.
Putting the GPU on the die could mean massive bandwidth from the CPU to the hundreds of streaming processors on the GPU. It also strongly implies that the GPU will have access directly to the same memory as the CPU. Finally, it would mean that if you have a Fusion-based renderfarm then you have GPUs on the renderfarm.
If they are OLEDs, they emit light relatively isotropically. So infrared light hitting the film would be turned into visible light, but it would be completely diffused -- like if you had a piece of translucent plastic. The only way it could work if the light was transformed in frequency but kept the same direction.
I'd love to do remote desktop viewing for distributed, Linux-based, artistic productions. For HP machines their proprietary Remote Graphics Software is very nice, and fills the bill perfectly, but it does require you to use HP boxes (at least for the server, if not necessarily the viewer). Are there any other open-source or widely-available proprietary desktop sharing systems for Linux?
I wonder if something that makes this volcano different than all other volcanoes is that it's erupting at a time when almost all translatlantic flying is done on two-engine planes. To get long-range over-water certification (ETOPS), the manufacturers and maintenance organizations go to great lengths to ensure that there is no common threat to the two engines. The engines are serviced separately by independent crews, fueled separately, and so on. Flying into an ash cloud, though, even if the threat is small, it is certainly a common threat to both engines at the same time.
I was looking for flights to Europe recently, and couldn't find a single 747 or A340 -- it was all 767, 777, or A330. I know 747s fly those routes, but they are a small minority now.
I don't know if I'd use this for games, but I saw a demo of this running some very expensive software recently, and it was pretty amazing. If you could rent time on the software at a reasonable price, and get good performance over OnLive, it might be worthwhile.
Say you are a CAD designer. It turns out that there are six or seven high-end CAD packages, that each have their strengths and weaknesses. If you could rent the one you need for a particular job, it might be a good deal, rather than fork out $5000 per package.
It does require that the software vendors allow this kind of thing -- after all, they win when somebody buys there software, whether the person uses it every day or just a few times a year.
LTOs (and the DLTs that preceded them) really are designed for reliability in a way that exabytes absolutely weren't. Exabytes were fast and cheap, and insanely unreliable. We have thousands of LTO tapes in our libraries, we might have one tape a year that has problems. Really, this is a solved problem.
Slashdot Mirror
So, the core rotates 1degree faster than the surface every million years. That's not much.
At the current rate of earth's rotation rate slowing, the surface will slow down some 30 degress in the next 400 years (this is a reasonably sound estimate used by people arguing against continuing "leap-seconds", that as the rotation rate slows geometrically, soon we'll be adding a leap second every month, then several a month, and so on. They suggest a leap-hour in 300 or 400 years.)
So...this suggests that the solid core and the solid crust are linked together very closely, so that the core tracks the crust almost perfectly. I find this somewhat hard to believe, given that there is a few hundred miles of not-very-viscous liquid iron/nickel between the inner core and the plastic mantle...
...was on the movie US Marshals. As part of the film, the plane holding the prisoner escapes after a 727 crash. Grant McCune built a 1/3 scale 727 fuselage for the film, it was amazing!
His shop at the time was chock full of every type of model and rig that I could imagine, and several that I couldn't, with his crew of model makers feverishly working on the next projects as ours was finishing up.
At the time he kept his Oscar under a stocking cap on a shelf in his office. Legend has it that he would occasionally pick up the hat to make sure it was still there. I suppose he wanted it close, without it creating a spectacle (as a real Oscar inevitably is)
RIP Grant. Good times...
There are four tests for fair use. The fourth one is "Is the use transformative in any way?" For example, a parody is usually seen as fair use, because it transforms the original.
Well yeah, that's the whole point!
Every machine built in the last 20 years is exactly as capable as anything else. Software is really important!
Technically, your lens loses flexibility, but yah that's about right.
The only good thing about that is that it eliminates one source of problems when watching 3D movies, young people expect to be able to focus on things close to them, and when they can't refocus on things coming out of the screen it is disturbing. Doesn't bother the over-40 crowd a bit.
Launching missles west at dusk will give the most spectacular displays. I'm not sure if that's why they always seem to do it that way from Vandenberg!
In this case, the lighting of the contrails and the clouds is identical, saying that the missile (if that's what it is) is well within the atmosphere; and staying that way. It looks more like a rocket-powered airplane, or a missile that flies within the atmosphere (say, a Standard surface-to-air missile), than an ICBM or an anti-missile missile. Those pop out of the atmosphere pretty fast, and the contrail changes radically when that happens.
Gasoline only has that much energy if combined with "free" oxygen in the air. Explosives have to react with only the chemicals within them. (I put scare quotes around free because it is astonishing that there is so much wildly reactive oxygen in earth's atmosphere these days)
Patents today run for 20 years from time of application, or 17 years from date of grant (whichever is later, although the 17 year rule only applies to patents filed quite some time ago.) Those dates would be Feb 7, 2010 or Oct 5, 2010 respectively. This patent is expired.
Glass is really remarkably strong when it comes out of the furnace. The tensile strength is amazing, it can bend enough to absorb some shocks. It's a great material before it gets to the real world.
But, once it does, it immediately develops microcracks in the surface, and each of these could be the beginning of a fracture that goes through the bulk of the glass. So, what to do?
I don't know if they've taken the hint from the semiconductor industry (look up 'strained silicon') but they did a similar thing with glass. By bombarding the surface of the glass with larger atoms, they create significant stress in the surface, so that any microcracks are immediately pushed shut. But, this is only true down to the level that these atoms diffuse into the surface...not far at all!
So, if you create a significant scratch (and this might just be 100 microns) you are through this surface, and have a potentially catastrophic failure waiting to happen.
A screen-protecting film of plastic would be a good investment.
First things first: the encryption horse has left the barn so long ago that all traces of the barn's foundation have turned to dust. Any reasonably competent adversary will have unbreakable encryption. The US government has helped with standards like AES, even. A large potion of the 'net traffic is already encrypted - every SSL session is encrypted at the ends of the chain, untappable once it's in the network. Changing that mechanism now into something that can be tapped will recreate the whole key escrow debates of the early nineties. The infrastructure required then was enormous, it would be exponentially harder now.
The only thing that makes sense is forcing large scale commercial communications companies to escrow keys, so that casual terrorists can have their communications hoovered up with everybody elses, and then analyzed by NSA in their spare cycles. This will catch a few proto-terrorists, I presume.
With this proposal I have crossed two lines, the first is questioning the governments motives, and the second now questioning their competence
If these are really low frequency ( less than 2 ghz) and really long range (many miles) then they have to be slow if there are many users. It might be good for rural areas though
I agree that this idea has been around a while -- it's still a great idea.
Scramjets are really pretty simple devices compared to rocket engines. This machine would be like the first and second stages of a three-stage rocket, saving something like 80% of the mass. (OK, most of that mass is relatively cheap kerosene and LOX, but still.) Getting a sled up to Mach 1 to get the scramjets started is really not that challenging. If they don't start correctly, you just slow down ... and nothing bad happens.
One thing that people don't point out is that if somebody built this, and it worked as well as it appears, then they would have a huge leg up in the further development of space. You might well have, say, Puerto Rico building the guideway in order to bring development money to the region.
You really can't tell in the final movie -- these were elements used in the rendering and compositing of the Shabuya square shots -- they don't show up as frames on their own.
It was harder than it sounds, as each lens is different, with different distortions (they're all handmade, and not on big production runs, either.) The film scanning process adds its own distortions, and because one of the frames was flipped right-for-left, that distortion was different for each pass.
Still, it was great fun. Damn cold, though!
An interesting challenge is that we apparently didn't pay proper respects to the Yakuza, and they leaned on various building owners to turn off their signs early the night of our shoot. Fortunately, not too many did so.
For the third of the Fast and Furious movies, we had to film at night in the spectacular Shibuya Square in Tokyo, with its many animated billboards and video screens. I really wanted to get an HDR film of the billboards.
For the driving green-screen sequences of the film, we had built a plate to mount three cameras, at 0, 45, and 90 degrees, to shoot panoramas driving down the street. To get the nodal points closer together, we had the cameras facing toward each other, with the lenses almost touching. It worked wonderfully.
By taking the center camera out, and replacing it with a beam-splitter, we had a down-and-dirty HDR rig using the other two cameras. Now, this was HDR on film, not video -- but film already has a very high dynamic range -- so two cameras with very different effective exposures gave us a tremendous dynamic range. In the 'normal' exposure all of the brighter signs were blown out, but on the beam-splitter camera you could see all the details of the structure of the lighted billboards. Quite cool.
A reasonable assumption would be that the sensitivity of the sensor is proportional to the area of the photosites (to a first approximation), so if this sensor is 100x as sensitive as, say, a D5MkII, then you would expect the photosites to be about 100x as big. Coincidentally, the 8in x 8in sensor is on the order of 100x the area of the 5D sensor, so the number of pixels is probably about the same (20M or so). To a first approximation, anyway.
bieber is absolutely right. What makes the Canon 5D Mark II amazing is the large sensor (even larger than 35mm motion picture film), enabling good control of depth of field. No matter what you do, with that sensor it's going to look like phone-cam video.
The Equinox fuel-cell vehicles have three high-pressure tanks, that can be filled up to 10,000 psi (more than 3x what a SCUBA tank pressure is)
One of those tanks failing will make a big boom! The fire, if there was one, would probably burn out almost immediately, as the hydrogen will disperse quickly and then got straight up fast.
There's a nice bit in "Dark Sun" about filling the Ivy Mike device with dueterium. All the leftover was burned, and made a roaring news but didn't have any visible fire.
Thad
GOCE shows slightly stronger gravity in the Himalayas area, but is only a few tens of meters different from the elliptical earth. The mountains are thousands of meters high over a very extended area. I would expect them to show up more strongly. Does this imply that the earth I'd proportionally less dense under those mountains?
If you're in the industry, I have often wondered about this, and would like to ask a question. There are plenty of extremely power-hungry industries that might well adapt to wind power. Think, say, of aluminum smelting. Right now, the big Aluminum companies site their plants near hydro power, but could there be a wind farm with an aluminum plant in the middle of it? They might vary the rate of production as the wind rises and falls, but if that is taken into account during the design of the plant it shouldn't be a devastating problem.
One could also, say, use wind energy to split water to make hydrogen, either for the hydrogen itself or to make ammonia as part of a fertilizer plant. Generate hydrogen when the wind blows.
With these in-site industries, you don't have to worry about long-distance transmission, or integrating the wind-power into the current electrical grid.
It's certainly possible that these energy-intensive industries are only 5% of the US need for electricity, in which case this doesn't make any sense...but I think it's likely more than that.
If AMD puts a competetive GPU onto the CPU die, comparable to their current high-end graphics boards) then this is a really big deal. Perhaps the biggest issue with GPGPU programming is the fact that the graphics unit is at the end of a fairly narrow pipe with limited memory, and getting data to the board and back is a performance bottleneck and a pain in the butt for a programmer.
Putting the GPU on the die could mean massive bandwidth from the CPU to the hundreds of streaming processors on the GPU. It also strongly implies that the GPU will have access directly to the same memory as the CPU. Finally, it would mean that if you have a Fusion-based renderfarm then you have GPUs on the renderfarm.
This is exciting!
If they are OLEDs, they emit light relatively isotropically. So infrared light hitting the film would be turned into visible light, but it would be completely diffused -- like if you had a piece of translucent plastic. The only way it could work if the light was transformed in frequency but kept the same direction.
I'd love to do remote desktop viewing for distributed, Linux-based, artistic productions. For HP machines their proprietary Remote Graphics Software is very nice, and fills the bill perfectly, but it does require you to use HP boxes (at least for the server, if not necessarily the viewer). Are there any other open-source or widely-available proprietary desktop sharing systems for Linux?
I wonder if something that makes this volcano different than all other volcanoes is that it's erupting at a time when almost all translatlantic flying is done on two-engine planes. To get long-range over-water certification (ETOPS), the manufacturers and maintenance organizations go to great lengths to ensure that there is no common threat to the two engines. The engines are serviced separately by independent crews, fueled separately, and so on. Flying into an ash cloud, though, even if the threat is small, it is certainly a common threat to both engines at the same time.
I was looking for flights to Europe recently, and couldn't find a single 747 or A340 -- it was all 767, 777, or A330. I know 747s fly those routes, but they are a small minority now.
I don't know if I'd use this for games, but I saw a demo of this running some very expensive software recently, and it was pretty amazing. If you could rent time on the software at a reasonable price, and get good performance over OnLive, it might be worthwhile.
Say you are a CAD designer. It turns out that there are six or seven high-end CAD packages, that each have their strengths and weaknesses. If you could rent the one you need for a particular job, it might be a good deal, rather than fork out $5000 per package.
It does require that the software vendors allow this kind of thing -- after all, they win when somebody buys there software, whether the person uses it every day or just a few times a year.
LTOs (and the DLTs that preceded them) really are designed for reliability in a way that exabytes absolutely weren't. Exabytes were fast and cheap, and insanely unreliable. We have thousands of LTO tapes in our libraries, we might have one tape a year that has problems. Really, this is a solved problem.