don't know if you (or anyone) will read this since I'm posting this two days later, but I do know otherwise
(as I understand it)
the Natural Law Party was founded mostly by people involved with the international TM movement, or who had been as some time. however, as it is now, the NLP doesn't have any real ties to TM, except that they'll recommend that insurance should pay for TM instruction in health care and prisoner rehabilitation (the TM movement has gone to great lengths to conduct legitimate research into the benefits of TM, and I believe that TM probably would be effective in some situations, certainly as effective as things like prayer or stress-management classes)
Yes, they are trying to get publicity, but not for TM. They're really trying to get publicity for government support of preventative medicine (so you can be reimbursed $700 or so for a personal trainer instead of being reimbursed $50000 for massive heart surgery).
anyway, TM has never been a religion, and it doesn't really conflict with religion. people of any religion can do TM, even Atheists. In some ways, TM is a subset of so-called "Ayur-Veda" or the science of life, which is taken from various ancient writings from India, such as the Baghavad-Gita, among others. Some people who do TM study these texts to apply other things from them to their lives, and they come up with herbal medicines, and other such stuff. Just the same, you don't need to believe in, let alone be aware of anything having to do with India to practice TM and get it's benefits; instruction in TM is only instruction in how to practice the TM technique.
there has been some very interesting work in the past few years with regard to polymer gels which change physical properties drastically in response to small changes in environmental conditions such as temperature, ph, light, electrical/magnetic fields, solvents, and others.
in some cases, these changes may be a thousand fold increase in volume, or a change in viscosity from fluid to near solid.
Also, with the strands in the slime being somewhat silk-like, image it being used as a replacement for silk? "No, it's not silk you are wearing,
it's... um... ahh... nevermind"
just the same, though: "Why yes, that's silk you're wearing. Silk is excreted by these little crawly worms, who are then boiled alive to retrieve it.... ahh... um... nevermind"
also just like "Why yes, that's honey, bees regurgitate it from partially digested... ahh... umm... nevermind".
if you're fine with wearing silk, which can also be describe as caterpillar excretia, why would you have any objections to wearing some wonderful new material derived from the threads a hagfish expels with it's mucus?
ambient light causes dyes in the fiber to fluoresce-- fluorescence is when light is absorbeb by something, which re-emits that energy (or some of it) at a different wavelength. this is where Day-Glow colors come from. or how blacklights work.
any surface that isn't a perfect mirror will make a room darker just by sitting there. light can most certainly be absorbed by objects- how else would you be able to heat things by radiation? when the sun shines on you, you feel warm because you are absorbing some of the energy in the sunlight, and it raises your skin temperature.
you don't need current to have the voltage; for a system like an LCD that is like a capacitor, you only need a current to change the voltage.
switching the voltage on liquid crystals requires a lot less power than backlighting... that's why current LCD displays get such good battery life when used in devices.
Do you mean that yellow/green LEDs should be used to provide the ambient light for the fibers? That doesn't make sense, because even if (which I doubt) the dyes the fibers use will flouresce from just yellow/green wavelengths, you end up getting different colors out the ends of the fibers anyway. I suspect the fibers work best with either full-visible-spectrum ambient light, or with predominantly low-wavelength light, like blue/violet/ultraviolet light, because those wavelengths have enough energy to make things flouresce very well.
Or do you mean that we should all look at screens in colors that are close to our peak of vision, because they will appear brighter to us? Wait, I thought we wanted full color screens....
LEDs are mad cool, but if you're going to use them to illuminate these fibers, you'll probably want either white ones, for full spectrum color, or blue ones, for sheer energy to make the dyes in the fibers flouresce.
I wholeheartedly agree...
I can remember many hours of fun playing the original Lemmings, and other great Psygnosis games like Blood Money and Awesome.
there was also no shortage of way cool demos for the amiga showing off it's prowess... one of the original ones was a bouncing red and white checkered ball, I don't remember if it was rendered or if it was a video, but anyway, the ball is still their logo to this day.
actually, I love running sawfish for gnome for Xwindows for linux... I think it is the window manager to end all window managers...
sounds like something is wrong with your box if a pathetic process can take down your whole system.
I've never had to restart due to a buggy program... just 'ps -x | grep net' to find the pid of the offending netscape (for instance) kill it and restart it, good as new. the only program I've had to go so far as to kill my X server and start anew for is esd, which is usually stable but has gotten flaky on me once or twice in the past 6 months or so.
Woo Hoo, but does he play well with (the) others?
on
ICANN At-Large Results
·
· Score: 1
I think this ought to be interesting. Auerbach has been very critical of the ICANN since it's inception....
I'm pleased with Auerbach's ideology too, and I think it's good that he won, but it's been pointed out to me that he is so radical, calling for such drastic changes in the makeup et c. of ICANN ("so-and-so MUST GO!" [see his platform]), that he may not be able to get any of it done.
As a lower post with some election statistics showed, in Asia/Pacific, Africa, and South America, ICANN-nominated members got most of the votes. Will Karl be able to work effectively with the rest of ICANN, or will he be too idealistic?
your numbers may be right for your Panasonic blue LED, but that LED is a *lot* bigger, and brighter than what you'd use for a computer screen....
I've got some ultra-bright blue LEDs (from Hosfelt.com) sitting on my desk. they've got a very similar power profile to yours: 3.5Vx20ma, bright enough that you don't want to look right at them unless you enjoy seeing blue spots for a while afterwards.
they're 5mm in diameter, so a 1024x768 screen of them would be roughly 5 meters wide by 4 meters high! (roughly 15'x12'). and that's just the blue ones; you'd really need room for the red and green ones too for a display.
anyway, you'd probably end up with a screen around 20'x15', and bright enough to be seen the better part of a mile away. at which point you put it in a baseball stadium, not a laptop, and using 150 kW or so to power it begins to seem reasonable.... (if you own a baseball stadium, and want a big, bright, video screen in it, that is)
yes, lots of organic things have nothing to do with living things, but that's not the point of these LEDs.
the point about these LEDs being made of "organic compounds" is that it means they're *not* made out of semiconductors, like "normal LEDs, which use Gallium Nitride, or Silicon Carbide, or various other semiconductors to do their light-emitting.
now this is just purely speculation on my part, but I imagine that the benefits of making LEDs out of organic materials as opposed to semiconductors may be that the organic materials in question may be cheaper, and may also be more environmentally friendly to produce and discard
actually titanium is forgeable, although it may be
more difficult to forge than iron or steel. if I recall correctly, when you heat titanium to around near normal steel forging temperatures, its crystal structure shifts from hexagonal-close-packed to cubic-close-packed (if I recall incorrectly, I've got those backwards), which results in it being significantly softer, and possible to form. when it is cooled, the crystal structure changes back, and the titanium becomes hard and stiff once again.
I've experienced this phenonmenon firsthand (wearing gloves, it's very hot) with a forge, some burning coke, a titanium rod, a hammer, and an anvil...
as for machining, the bitchiness as far as I know is that it needs a lot of lubrication or special cutting fluid due to titanium's high coefficient of friction and inherent hardness.
Re:No moving parts... no truly "magic" b
on
3D Printers
·
· Score: 2
quite right... as other posts have noted, mechanical strength of rapid-prototyped parts is a big problem too. the new scientist article mentions that this kind of particle by particle assembly may lead to stronger materials than you would get by casting or forging, but controlling the size and shape of the individual crystal grains in an object is far beyond the current capabilities of any of these technologies.
also, having handled some parts produced by relatively sophisticated 3-d inkjet printers, I can say that the results are in pressive, but the surface quality is poor; until someone comes up with a way to print smooth, hard surfaces, moving parts will be out of the question.
a further disadvantage, at least in plastic parts, is that by printing the material from individual droplets of material or some kind of powder in a resin matrix, you lose the benifits of having long chain polymer molecules extending throughout your part... these long chains play a large part in making plastic strong and flexible.
right now, rapid-prototyping technology is probably more useful for the rapid production of molds to cast other parts with, so then high precision machining procedures can be used to get your final result. I imagine many of the technical obstacles to producing useful objects will be circumvented with new techniques in the coming years, but it will be a long time before everyday, durable objects are made this way.
so, your perceptions of liberals are different than mine... I don't watch Oprah, but I know what you're talking about. I guess I just don't percieve liberals as not believing in accountability, but I see why you associate it with 'liberals' in general.
just the same, 'conservatives' suffer from similar
deficiences in rational thought.
honestly, the examples you list for typical liberal statements may be valid-- i.e. bad childhoods may indeed produce wifebeaters. but that doesn't mean wifebeaters don't get punished... for me it's more of a way to look for solutions, or at least understand the problems.
in another example; say I can't learn to deal with people, but while that may be "Social Anxiety Disorder", that doesn't do me any good. What it really is is "MY problem" that I can try to fix or not, and I don't expect others to accomodate me for it.
Only the "stupid" part has anything to do with it. Society as a whole, if such a thing can be spoken of, will suffer just as much from the cumulative effects of "stupid (Conservative/whatever Ideology) parents" as from "stupid Liberal parents"....
if there were a way to make people less stupid, we'd be on to something, but I'm a bit pessimistic about that
the fonts are indeed beautiful, and if you go get phzilla, the QNX Mozilla port, you can have really really nice looking antialiased, standards-compliant (mostly) web browsing... I didn't know text on the screen could look this nice. so smooth, so sharp!
it is a bit of a pain though, that the OS is so realtime that it will preempt the media player to refresh your browser window as you scroll, and that there is no drag and drop.... and I miss sawfish more and more by the minute. at this point, I think QNX RTP is a really fun, shiny toy, from a end-user point of view.
oops, I forgot to convey my tone in the above post, sorry if it came across that I was ranting. I was actually wondering at the marvels of the english
language, feeling kinda happy, and I felt like writing about it. it had nothing to do with anyone personally. I'm glad paRcat thought it was funny to read though:)
sorry, but I feel strangely compelled to correct your spelling. you want "reeks" as in "to reek" which means to smell strongly. that's why something can reek strongly of something else, i.e. "my hovercraft reeks of eels", or "her hair reeked of Clairol Herbal Essences"... "to wreak" is something complete different, and means something more like "to inflict" or "to avenge" i.e. "wreak havoc" as in "clicking on a link that points to c:\con\con\ wreaks havoc with an unpatched Windows98 box"
it is very very cool.... fractal frame animations are extremely pretty. the only problems are choppy mpeg playback on linux in general (are there any really good mpeg players available?), or possibly that only a few of the animations have a lot of color in them. every now and then, I like to run electricsheep to watch the psychedelic dancing shapes.
zoom 56k.... but with a poor isp, and not always wanting to leave the modem running overnight. all told, it probably took me 10 hours, longer than it should have. now that I have 768k SDSL, life is much nicer. anyway, we agree that helix-gnome is doable witha modem.
Slashdot Mirror
don't know if you (or anyone) will read this since I'm posting this two days later, but I do know otherwise
(as I understand it)
the Natural Law Party was founded mostly by people involved with the international TM movement, or who had been as some time. however, as it is now, the NLP doesn't have any real ties to TM, except that they'll recommend that insurance should pay for TM instruction in health care and prisoner rehabilitation (the TM movement has gone to great lengths to conduct legitimate research into the benefits of TM, and I believe that TM probably would be effective in some situations, certainly as effective as things like prayer or stress-management classes)
Yes, they are trying to get publicity, but not for TM. They're really trying to get publicity for government support of preventative medicine (so you can be reimbursed $700 or so for a personal trainer instead of being reimbursed $50000 for massive heart surgery).
anyway, TM has never been a religion, and it doesn't really conflict with religion. people of any religion can do TM, even Atheists. In some ways, TM is a subset of so-called "Ayur-Veda" or the science of life, which is taken from various ancient writings from India, such as the Baghavad-Gita, among others. Some people who do TM study these texts to apply other things from them to their lives, and they come up with herbal medicines, and other such stuff. Just the same, you don't need to believe in, let alone be aware of anything having to do with India to practice TM and get it's benefits; instruction in TM is only instruction in how to practice the TM technique.
there has been some very interesting work in the past few years with regard to polymer gels which change physical properties drastically in response to small changes in environmental conditions such as temperature, ph, light, electrical/magnetic fields, solvents, and others.
in some cases, these changes may be a thousand fold increase in volume, or a change in viscosity from fluid to near solid.
links:http://pubs.acs.org/hotart cl/ cenear/970609/gels.html
http://web.mit.edu/physics/tanaka/
also just like "Why yes, that's honey, bees regurgitate it from partially digested... ahh... umm... nevermind".
if you're fine with wearing silk, which can also be describe as caterpillar excretia, why would you have any objections to wearing some wonderful new material derived from the threads a hagfish expels with it's mucus?
whether or not anything is debunked tripe, if people didn't trot it out they would miss the fun of arguing about it.
troll? redundant maybe, but I didn't see the other post when I posted. I thought I was just answering the question.
ambient light causes dyes in the fiber to fluoresce-- fluorescence is when light is absorbeb by something, which re-emits that energy (or some of it) at a different wavelength. this is where Day-Glow colors come from. or how blacklights work.
any surface that isn't a perfect mirror will make a room darker just by sitting there. light can most certainly be absorbed by objects- how else would you be able to heat things by radiation? when the sun shines on you, you feel warm because you are absorbing some of the energy in the sunlight, and it raises your skin temperature.
you don't need current to have the voltage; for a system like an LCD that is like a capacitor, you only need a current to change the voltage.
... that's why current LCD displays get such good battery life when used in devices.
switching the voltage on liquid crystals requires a lot less power than backlighting
Do you mean that yellow/green LEDs should be used to provide the ambient light for the fibers? That doesn't make sense, because even if (which I doubt) the dyes the fibers use will flouresce from just yellow/green wavelengths, you end up getting different colors out the ends of the fibers anyway. I suspect the fibers work best with either full-visible-spectrum ambient light, or with predominantly low-wavelength light, like blue/violet/ultraviolet light, because those wavelengths have enough energy to make things flouresce very well.
Or do you mean that we should all look at screens in colors that are close to our peak of vision, because they will appear brighter to us? Wait, I thought we wanted full color screens....
LEDs are mad cool, but if you're going to use them to illuminate these fibers, you'll probably want either white ones, for full spectrum color, or blue ones, for sheer energy to make the dyes in the fibers flouresce.
I wholeheartedly agree...
I can remember many hours of fun playing the original Lemmings, and other great Psygnosis games like Blood Money and Awesome.
there was also no shortage of way cool demos for the amiga showing off it's prowess... one of the original ones was a bouncing red and white checkered ball, I don't remember if it was rendered or if it was a video, but anyway, the ball is still their logo to this day.
actually, I love running sawfish for gnome for Xwindows for linux... I think it is the window manager to end all window managers...
sounds like something is wrong with your box if a pathetic process can take down your whole system. I've never had to restart due to a buggy program... just 'ps -x | grep net' to find the pid of the offending netscape (for instance) kill it and restart it, good as new. the only program I've had to go so far as to kill my X server and start anew for is esd, which is usually stable but has gotten flaky on me once or twice in the past 6 months or so.
I'm pleased with Auerbach's ideology too, and I think it's good that he won, but it's been pointed out to me that he is so radical, calling for such drastic changes in the makeup et c. of ICANN ("so-and-so MUST GO!" [see his platform]), that he may not be able to get any of it done.
As a lower post with some election statistics showed, in Asia/Pacific, Africa, and South America, ICANN-nominated members got most of the votes. Will Karl be able to work effectively with the rest of ICANN, or will he be too idealistic?
your numbers may be right for your Panasonic blue LED, but that LED is a *lot* bigger, and brighter than what you'd use for a computer screen....
I've got some ultra-bright blue LEDs (from Hosfelt.com) sitting on my desk. they've got a very similar power profile to yours: 3.5Vx20ma, bright enough that you don't want to look right at them unless you enjoy seeing blue spots for a while afterwards.
they're 5mm in diameter, so a 1024x768 screen of them would be roughly 5 meters wide by 4 meters high! (roughly 15'x12'). and that's just the blue ones; you'd really need room for the red and green ones too for a display.
anyway, you'd probably end up with a screen around 20'x15', and bright enough to be seen the better part of a mile away. at which point you put it in a baseball stadium, not a laptop, and using 150 kW or so to power it begins to seem reasonable.... (if you own a baseball stadium, and want a big, bright, video screen in it, that is)
yes, lots of organic things have nothing to do with living things, but that's not the point of these LEDs.
the point about these LEDs being made of "organic compounds" is that it means they're *not* made out of semiconductors, like "normal LEDs, which use Gallium Nitride, or Silicon Carbide, or various other semiconductors to do their light-emitting.
now this is just purely speculation on my part, but I imagine that the benefits of making LEDs out of organic materials as opposed to semiconductors may be that the organic materials in question may be cheaper, and may also be more environmentally friendly to produce and discard
actually titanium is forgeable, although it may be more difficult to forge than iron or steel. if I recall correctly, when you heat titanium to around near normal steel forging temperatures, its crystal structure shifts from hexagonal-close-packed to cubic-close-packed (if I recall incorrectly, I've got those backwards), which results in it being significantly softer, and possible to form. when it is cooled, the crystal structure changes back, and the titanium becomes hard and stiff once again.
I've experienced this phenonmenon firsthand (wearing gloves, it's very hot) with a forge, some burning coke, a titanium rod, a hammer, and an anvil...
as for machining, the bitchiness as far as I know is that it needs a lot of lubrication or special cutting fluid due to titanium's high coefficient of friction and inherent hardness.
it's sure not just you :(
quite right... as other posts have noted, mechanical strength of rapid-prototyped parts is a big problem too. the new scientist article mentions that this kind of particle by particle assembly may lead to stronger materials than you would get by casting or forging, but controlling the size and shape of the individual crystal grains in an object is far beyond the current capabilities of any of these technologies.
also, having handled some parts produced by relatively sophisticated 3-d inkjet printers, I can say that the results are in pressive, but the surface quality is poor; until someone comes up with a way to print smooth, hard surfaces, moving parts will be out of the question.
a further disadvantage, at least in plastic parts, is that by printing the material from individual droplets of material or some kind of powder in a resin matrix, you lose the benifits of having long chain polymer molecules extending throughout your part... these long chains play a large part in making plastic strong and flexible.
right now, rapid-prototyping technology is probably more useful for the rapid production of molds to cast other parts with, so then high precision machining procedures can be used to get your final result. I imagine many of the technical obstacles to producing useful objects will be circumvented with new techniques in the coming years, but it will be a long time before everyday, durable objects are made this way.
just the same, 'conservatives' suffer from similar deficiences in rational thought.
honestly, the examples you list for typical liberal statements may be valid-- i.e. bad childhoods may indeed produce wifebeaters. but that doesn't mean wifebeaters don't get punished... for me it's more of a way to look for solutions, or at least understand the problems.
in another example; say I can't learn to deal with people, but while that may be "Social Anxiety Disorder", that doesn't do me any good. What it really is is "MY problem" that I can try to fix or not, and I don't expect others to accomodate me for it.
Only the "stupid" part has anything to do with it. Society as a whole, if such a thing can be spoken of, will suffer just as much from the cumulative effects of "stupid (Conservative/whatever Ideology) parents" as from "stupid Liberal parents"....
if there were a way to make people less stupid, we'd be on to something, but I'm a bit pessimistic about that
the fonts are indeed beautiful, and if you go get phzilla, the QNX Mozilla port, you can have really really nice looking antialiased, standards-compliant (mostly) web browsing... I didn't know text on the screen could look this nice. so smooth, so sharp!
it is a bit of a pain though, that the OS is so realtime that it will preempt the media player to refresh your browser window as you scroll, and that there is no drag and drop.... and I miss sawfish more and more by the minute. at this point, I think QNX RTP is a really fun, shiny toy, from a end-user point of view.
oops, I forgot to convey my tone in the above post, sorry if it came across that I was ranting. I was actually wondering at the marvels of the english language, feeling kinda happy, and I felt like writing about it. it had nothing to do with anyone personally. I'm glad paRcat thought it was funny to read though :)
ahh, but can you stop the acid from the command line? also, can your acid handle dpms mode? we must be concerned about saving power here.....
sorry, but I feel strangely compelled to correct your spelling. you want "reeks" as in "to reek" which means to smell strongly. that's why something can reek strongly of something else, i.e. "my hovercraft reeks of eels", or "her hair reeked of Clairol Herbal Essences"... "to wreak" is something complete different, and means something more like "to inflict" or "to avenge" i.e. "wreak havoc" as in "clicking on a link that points to c:\con\con\ wreaks havoc with an unpatched Windows98 box"
it is very very cool.... fractal frame animations are extremely pretty. the only problems are choppy mpeg playback on linux in general (are there any really good mpeg players available?), or possibly that only a few of the animations have a lot of color in them. every now and then, I like to run electricsheep to watch the psychedelic dancing shapes.
RedHat 7 will include OpenSSH by default, according to this article that I found linked from deadly.org
zoom 56k.... but with a poor isp, and not always wanting to leave the modem running overnight. all told, it probably took me 10 hours, longer than it should have. now that I have 768k SDSL, life is much nicer. anyway, we agree that helix-gnome is doable witha modem.