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Comment Re:He is going to regret this shit. (Score 2) 199

Deep cycle batteries are a type of lead-acid battery. The Leaf uses lithium-ion batteries, which behave very differently. Still, lithium-ion batteries should never be fully discharged, which may be a risk with his modifications.

Any program that measures charge is making a educated guess based on the past behavior of the battery. One of the people interviewed for the article states: “Until you can find out how much is really left in the batteries toward the end of its range, it’s just a guess-o-meter.” Any indicator of charge is making a guess. Perhaps his program is better at guessing, or maybe he just leaves less room for battery health, but any program that works to tell lithium-ion battery charge will have to take into account the discharge profile of that battery (which is non-linear when measured by voltage).

Submission + - Self-publishing a contraversial e-book (amazon.com)

Evildonald writes: My father is publishing a book that is too hot to publish in his home country. He will be exempt from prosecution as long as the book is not published or is directly for sale in the state that it is discussing.

We will be initially publishing on Amazon and Barnes and Noble e-book, but I am concerned that they might bow to legal pressure (whether it has jurisdiction or not) and stop sale of his book.

To protect ourselves, and to have a fallback, what other services are there out there for selling your own e-book? Are there e-publishers that are militantly resistant to legal takedowns? Is there an open-source project that has been made to self-publish reliably?

Please help my dad.

Medicine

Submission + - Portable Microscope Uses Holograms Instead of Lens (gizmag.com)

Zothecula writes: While financial contributions are certainly a great help to health care practitioners in developing nations, one of the things that they really need is rugged, portable, low-cost medical equipment that is compatible with an often-limited local infrastructure. Several such devices are currently under development, such as a battery-powered surgical lamp, a salad-spinner-based centrifuge, and a baby-warmer that utilizes wax. UCLA is now working on another appropriate technology in the form of a small, inexpensive microscope that uses holograms instead of lenses to image what can't be seen by the human eye.

Comment think zombies, not ideas (Score 3, Informative) 283

The problem is that this article badly summarizes the results of computer modeling that is supposed to represent human interactions. Apparently the tipping point for their simulation is 10%. Without seeing the actual original research findings, it is difficult to see if this actually matters, but the available article seems to say that the 10% is irrespective of network structure.

The computer simulation seems more analogous to a disease outbreak than to an idea. Imagine a percentage of people are zombies. They can only attack their friends, who can fight them so long as they have more living than dead friends nearby (I am assuming here that it is 51% that is needed to change status, but who knows what the actual research used). If they don't, then they switch sides and spread the outbreak. So the simulation might be saying that if 10% of people are initially zombies, then mankind is generally doomed. If it is less, then the outbreak will be contained.

I also find it interesting that the study was funded by the military.

Submission + - Burglaries in the Fukushima exclusion zone (yomiuri.co.jp)

mdsolar writes: "

Burglars are apparently targeting houses left vacant because they are within 30 kilometers of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. The National Police Agency said the number of burglaries in Fukushima Prefecture totaled 695 from March to May, an increase of about 40 percent from the same period last year. Fukushima prefectural police have set up a special security unit consisting of about 300 police officers to patrol these areas in cooperation with the Metropolitan Police Department.

It is strange that when a area has been evacuated to protect life, some must return to it to protect property."

Comment Re:Different kind of change (Score 1) 140

I noticed that when I was looking at the unmoving dots, I saw them as individuals. As they started moving together, I reinterpreted them as a single mass made up of dots. It would be interesting to see if the effect is the same when the dots are moving in different directions and at different speeds.

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