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User: skylerweaver

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  1. Re:What about secondary interference points? on Harnessing Interference For Faster Wireless Data · · Score: 3, Interesting

    According to the whitepaper, the coefficients to weight each transmitter signal to constructively interfere at your location sets up mathematically orthogonal channels (at lease orthogonal to some SNR, with some leakage from other channels depending on the number/location of devices and antennas).

    The device can send a signal back which will interfere with other devices, but incoming signals at the antennas can be weighted by the same coefficients (or at least derived from the same) to again cancel all the other signals but your own.

    Mathematically, the channel can go both ways with full bandwidth.

  2. Re:better than a group of doctors?!?! on Invent the Medical Tricorder, Win $10,000,000 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually, I find it interesting you used the Magic-8-Ball. While it is just a toy, the 20Q toy (which is somewhat similar in my mind) is very interesting because it tries to guess what you are thinking of by asking you yes/no/sometimes/don't-know questions. The neural net was then built by people playing the game and providing 'better questions' for when the AI got the answer wrong.

    Could you not do the same for medical diagnosis?

    [Do you have a headache?]
    "No."
    [Does your stomach hurt?]
    "Yes."
    [You have an ulcer?]
    "No."
    [What's wrong, and what would have been a better question?]
    "Food poisoning, and 'Did you eat uncooked meat recently?'"
    [Noted. Now I am smarter.]

    It seems that you could make a diagnosis engine that as you rule things out it could come to as good a conclusion as a typical doctor.

  3. anti-collaboration on No U.S. Government Shutdown This Week · · Score: 2

    One of the riders:

    "Prohibits NASA from collaborating with China"

  4. Re:Do they account for hypothesis-mining? on Fermi Lab May Have Discovered New Particle or Force · · Score: 1

    So I simulated your hypothetical experiment. I was going to use a 16 toss sequence, but it was going to take MATLAB 22 hours, so I only had it look for a 8 toss sequence.

    A coin is tossed 1 million times. Then we count the total number of times each possible 8-toss sequence occurs. Turns out that each pattern shows up about the correct number of times. No pattern even comes close to showing up 1.1x more than expected. Let alone, 100x.

    See here: http://i.imgur.com/5F391.png

    Pattern number is just dec2bin, i.e., #0 -> TTTTTTTT and #10 -> TTTTHTHT, etc.

  5. Re:Uh, don't we maybe NEED that hormone? on Accidental Find May Lead To a Cure For Baldness · · Score: 1

    BILLIONS of women mess around with their hormones every month just for being a human woman. I've had shoes thrown at me because of this. Once she started consciously messing with her hormones: no more shoe projectiles.

  6. Re:Um, don't safe reactors already exist? on A New Class of Nuclear Reactors · · Score: 1

    According to TFA, a travelling wave reactor is a type of breed-burn reactor.

    http://www.terrapower.com/Technology/Timeline.aspx

  7. Re:Effect on GPS on Japan Earthquake May Have Shifted Earth's Axis · · Score: 3, Informative

    BTW: GPS satellites are NOT in geo-synchronous orbit.

  8. GPS affected? on Japan Earthquake May Have Shifted Earth's Axis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Many of the comments on here are "1.8 microseconds, oh no I get less sleep! What a stupid finding."

    But seriously, does this have an effect on GPS? GPS satellites need to be corrected for relativistic effects that cause their clocks to tick 38 microseconds/day different than the ground; which would cause error to accumulate at 10km/day. Does 1.8 microsecond difference in our day cause error to accumulate in GPS at the rate of 0.5km/day if not fixed?

  9. Re:Neuromorphic CPUs on A Mind Made From Memristors · · Score: 1

    Because power, delay, and area are correlated to the effective length of the transistor. You do want lower power in portable devices. You also want higher speed. You can get both if you decrease transistor area, which leads to increased density.

  10. Re:Why should I worry? on GPS Tracking Without a Warrant Declared Legal · · Score: 1

    Ha, I thought you meant "Well they had a head start."

  11. Re:Complication for mars missions? on Bacteria From Beer Lasts 553 Days In Space · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I simulated 100 coin flips 1,000,000 times and plotted the percent occurrence for every # of heads:

    http://imgur.com/iVLp9.jpg

    It looks like about 8% chance to get 50/50 and better than 2% chance of getting either 40/60 or 60/40.

  12. Re:No duh on Airport Scanners Can Store and Transmit Images · · Score: 1

    I can't wait for www.celebrityairportscannerpics.com

    I mean, they all travel sometime ;)

  13. Re:If anything comes of this... on New "Wet Computer" To Mimic Neurons In the Brain · · Score: 1

    If you still think that getting a computer to not only run a simulation but also generate all the random events that effect that simulation is still a plausible answer with computer technology today - I don't know how you arrived at that answer.

    I merely only implied that it is possible to generate random numbers, which is very useful.

    Perhaps you want to simulate something very specific and you know that the random part of the simulation has very specific characteristics (e.g. transient noise in SPICE), this is something that is easy to implement in software.

  14. Re:If anything comes of this... on New "Wet Computer" To Mimic Neurons In the Brain · · Score: 1

    While pseudorandom number generators are deterministic (LFSR, etc), there is no reason that we can not implement a true random generator in hardware.

    There are many ways to do this. For example, amplify the noise from a resistor, quantize it, and use the LSBs. These should be random.

  15. Re:Meanwhile in Canada... on Factorization of a 768-Bit RSA Modulus · · Score: 1

    I am no expert in cryptography, but I remember my CS friends talking about 2 locks on a briefcase.

    The shared key is encrypted with key A by Adam and sent to Betty (who can not open it without key A). Betty encrypts this with key B and sends it back to Adam. Adam decrypts this with key A and sends in back to Betty. Since the message now is only encrypted with key B, Betty can open it and get the shared key.

    Or is this only a educational exercise and in actuality if you eavesdrop all of these transactions you can determine key A and B?

  16. Re:Meanwhile in Canada... on Factorization of a 768-Bit RSA Modulus · · Score: 1

    I thought they share a key with the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie-Hellman_key_exchange

    So it doesn't matter if someone captures the initial handshake.

  17. Re:The human eye can dectect 30 on Framerates Matter · · Score: 1

    With this I absolutely agree and I concede.

    There will definately be vestigal stuff left over unless there is evolutionary pressure to remove it, and usually there isn't.

  18. Re:The human eye can dectect 30 on Framerates Matter · · Score: 1

    By iteratively solving across the entire solution space and comparing this to the algorithm output.

    For a class project, this is possible; however, I understand that you would truly apply optimization algorithms to problems in order to NOT iteratively solve them.

  19. Re:The human eye can dectect 30 on Framerates Matter · · Score: 1

    Are you implying that the genetic algorithm doesn't find the global maximum?

    optimize - to make as perfect, effective, or functional as possible

    "As a general rule of thumb genetic algorithms might be useful in problem domains that have a complex fitness landscape as recombination is designed to move the population away from local optima that a traditional hill climbing algorithm might get stuck in." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm

    While it is true that sexual crossover of genes will only optimize to the best solution available in the gene pool, mutation allows a global solution to be found. When I tested this algorithm myself, I specifically chose an over-constrained problem that had many local maxima and no clear "best-solution." The genetic algorithm then found the multiple "best" solutions and had 3 distinct gene groups, with the largest being the most fit according to the fitting function. So while the entire gene pool did not converge to a single maximum, it did find the global maxima.

  20. Re:Any animator knows... on Framerates Matter · · Score: 1

    It would be an interesting experiment to make a webpage that presents you two equivalent flash movies with varying frame rates (as you described).

    Have the two movies in a random order with a random frame rate (say, 12, 15, 24, 30, 45, 60, etc)

    Then have the user merely select which looks "better/smoother."

    It would be interesting (as you point out) to see at what frame rate there is no longer a clear winner.

  21. Re:The human eye can dectect 30 on Framerates Matter · · Score: 1

    How about "optimize" instead of fashion.
    After doing some programming work with genetic algorithm optimization, I realized that although evolution may choose one gene path or another, the end result is always the same: the most optimized solution for survival, tool making, etc.
    So I agree, not designed; absolutely optimized.

  22. Re:There's a reason this doesn't happen often on HD Video From the Edge of Space, On the Cheap · · Score: 1
  23. Re:Today electronics; tomorrow ??? on Do Not Flush Your iPod · · Score: 1

    Better yet. All passengers are sedated for the duration of the flight.

    This is a great idea for a number of reasons.

  24. Today electronics; tomorrow ??? on Do Not Flush Your iPod · · Score: 4, Funny

    Banning all liquids was a good idea because of the given threat.

    Soon *the terrorists* my find a way to detonate their clothing and all clothing will be banned in the cabin. This sounds pretty cool at first, but keep in mind how often is the random person sitting next to you a slammin' hottie?

    After that *the terrorists* will find a brilliant plot to set themselves on fire by rubbing their arms together REALLY FAST. Once this happpens, all PASSENGERS will be banned from being in the cabin. Very smart.

    Terrorists win.