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Books

Remembering Sealab 138

An anonymous reader writes "'Some people remember Sealab as being a classified program, but it was trying not to be,' says Ben Hellwarth, author of the new book Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor, which aims to 'bring some long overdue attention to the marine version of the space program.' In the 1960s, the media largely ignored the efforts of America's aquanauts, who revolutionized deep-sea diving and paved the way for the underwater construction work being done today on offshore oil platforms. It didn't help that the public didn't understand the challenges of saturation diving; in a comical exchange a telephone operator initially refuses to connect a call between President Johnson and Aquanaut Scott Carpenter, (who sounded like a cartoon character, thanks to the helium atmosphere in his pressurized living quarters). But in spite of being remembered as a failure, the final incarnation of Sealab did provide cover for a very successful Cold War spy program."
Supercomputing

How the Tevatron Influenced Computing 66

New submitter SciComGeek writes "Few laypeople think of computing innovation in connection with the Tevatron particle accelerator, which shut down earlier this year. Mention of the Tevatron inspires images of majestic machinery, or thoughts of immense energies and groundbreaking physics research, not circuit boards, hardware, networks, and software. Yet over the course of more than three decades of planning and operation, a tremendous amount of computing innovation was necessary to keep the data flowing and physics results coming. Those innovations will continue to influence scientific computing and data analysis for years to come."

Comment We're in a sad state when... (Score 5, Insightful) 213

The hospital is still treating patients in emergency situations but is asking people with minor ailments, such as sore throats or sprained ankles, to contact their regular providers, Okun said.

We're in a sad state when people need to go to the hospital to deal with sore throats and sprained ankles.

Robotics

Hobby Humanoid Robot KHR3HV Rides Bike At 10k/h 114

An anonymous reader points out a fun robot project from Japan, writing: "The robot pedals with its feet at variable speed. The steering is done by the robot hands as with a normal bike, and remote controlled by a human. Stability is achieved by relying on the inertial centrifugal effect of the front wheel and on a gyro aided by a PID controller that takes over steering when driving in a straight line. Seems like when the robot steers his arms he also bends the waist leaning a bit into the turn. Braking is achieved by taking the feet off the pedals and pointing them down to the ground using the metal feet as friction breaks."

Comment Re:"overwhelming feedback with no notable dissent. (Score 1) 574

Your opinion is fascinating, but not relevant. If you'd read the bug report you'd know that people aren't complaining on the basis of aesthetics. The problem is that a tab is only big enough to display the favicon and a small number of characters for the page's title, the more tabs are open the fewer characters can fit. This behavior constrains the usefulness of the title tags and there's a lot of websites that haven't adapted to handle it.

Note: I'm posting this using Chrome so don't interpret this as a Google bash, I'm just acknowledging that these people have a point.

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