here's a price history graph of the book http://camelcamelcamel.com/Making-Fly-Genetics-Animal-Design/product/0632030488

correct, i saw the article about a decent $10 watch and i didn't read the comments at that time. even with the comments, and even with the fact that al-qaeda uses casio watches as timers for bombs, that doesn't imply anything about people who buy casio watches. if you don't understand why, search wikipedia for "fallacy."

boingboing advocated this watch last december. it wasn't until I bought one and googled for the product manual that I found out that it was an al-qaeda favorite.

Anyone knows how this is any different from (or better than) using a regular CCD and adaptive optics?

From the article I linked: "Curved electro-optical detectors will enable the development of new optical design configurations that can be smaller than conventional flat-field designs, thereby benefiting many aerospace applications." In other words, with curved detectors, you can use lighter, simpler optics. because they don't have to adapt to (correct for) a flat sensor surface.

Here's an interesting 2003 article on curved focal surfaces, including CCDs.

http://www.ptbmagazine.com/content/040103_ora.html

I don't know what happened to fractals (in landscape image generation). I remember the "the Genesis effect" from back before the turn of the century. There's a wikipedia artcile on factal landscapes, but I don't know what's up with that these days.

This person is generating nice repeating patterns (like pleated curtains) with random alterations, using a small number of small image files and a small amount of computation to generate random numbers which guide the placement of those image files. Doing this with fractals would require computation that is orders of magnitude more costly.

Ya me too, cycling sine wave frequencies with different odd/prime values in x and y to generate wobble patterns. I probably learned about this idea when I was a kid playing with a Spirograph. I still like this tiling hack though.

I'm a hacker, over 50. If your uncle is 53, he got his undergraduate degree roundabout 1980. By 1980, C was already in full bloom, and UNIX had been around for 10 years and was becoming widespread in academia. By 1985, while he was still young, personal computing was rampant, with a choice of Apple, Sun, Microsoft, and many other flavors like Apollo, PERQ, SGI, Symbolics/LMI, etc. The choice of commercial OS technologies was much richer then than it is today. If he's still using Fortran 66 or 77 (there was no Fortran 70), it's because he hasn't progressed since those days. I don't pretend to be right on top of all the latest software technologies and fads, because I keep busy with other things, but I see no reason why even an old nerd can't use a modern Linux (or Apple or Win) PC with a language like C and/or a scripting language like Perl/Python/Ruby/Tcl etc. And if your uncle is telling you to loop instead of recurse, you should refer him to Jon Bentley's "Writing Efficient Programs" (1982), where he said that you must measure before you optimize. Just blindly saying that you should use arrays as stacks is silly.

All have half-lives measured in hours or days, with the exception of cesium-137

which has a half-life of 30 years.

Maybe you are thinking of Zork?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork

Truly sir, 20 mils == 508 microns. Make sure you're protected.

The Plymouth Satellite came a bit after tail fins. It is still cool classic.

I imagine that FDA medical device directives would have rules for data security and for RF emissions as well. I am a bit more familiar with CE medical device directives, where there are different classes of compliance - a device that filters your blood has stricter rules than an exercise machine - but besides protecting patient data, I assume a computer or network device in a medical environment would have to have have low RF emissions, so that it doesn't interfere with other medical devices. When your microwave oven interferes with your cordless phone or your wifi network at home, it might be annoying, but a similar situation in a hospital would be a bigger problem.

Problems of an aging and stroke-prone population cross international boundaries. "Who can afford this?" and "Will insurance pay for this?" are good questions, and the answers are different from country to country, and from year to year. Note also that hospitals and insurance companies are slow-moving organizations. If robotic science was a clearly safe magic pill that cured strokes, I assume we would find someone to pay for that cure. But with cures that provide only some degree of improvement, the treatments go through the normal course of medical research, and if the treatments are found to have sufficient and lasting efficacy, the medical and insurance fields eventually adjust to incorporate the new treatments.

As it is, I've seen research that shows repeatable quality-of-life improvements from our robotic therapy, and I've been at clinics and hospitals where patients and their families have given me heartfelt thanks for my work, which, while very gratifying, does not count as a controlled repeatable verifiable research result.