The image quality is nowhere near what an SLR can deliver, but you are getting away from the original posters intent and my point of using the camera that you have to learn how to compose images. Sure, cell phone cameras are not going to have as many conveniences or the same image quality as a camera with a sensor larger than a pinhead (about the size of cell phone camera sensors), but you have it with you.

Ideally, I am waiting for a camera company to comet head on with Leica, but at lower prices. I just cannot justify a digital rangefinder in the $7-9 thousand range for the body alone when the image quality out of my Canon's is better. I wish I could as they are remarkably compact and discrete. The Fuji cameras are sooooo close. They need interchangeable lenses and slightly larger sensors, but I can easily see going with a solution like that when available.

Indeed. I regularly use two Canon 1D bodies and the associated lenses that can add up to over 30lbs of gear when on assignments, but I am not going to haul those bad boys around with me wherever I go. For lots of places, particularly when doing something like wearing a suit, a 1D and 70-200 f/2.8 is not always going to make the fashion police cut. ;-)

He *might* not have a good camera in his cell phone... or he might not think about using it do learn more about photography... Why would you assume that he has?

I used to say that and carried a P&S with me wherever I went... Until the iPhone 4 came along. I've been really, really happy with the iPhone 4 camera never before posting images to Jonesblog from anything other than a dedicated camera until then.

A fading light shot is here: http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2011/10/evening-light/

and an indoor shot of the inside of an instrument is here:
http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/12/gravity-probe-b/

To get me back in the point and shoot camera buying club, the camera companies are going to start to have to do something exciting again, like Olympus and Fuji are now doing with the larger sensor sizes.

A good cell phone camera... honestly. The best camera you can learn with is one that you will always have on your person. The latest cell phone cameras can make some really beautiful images: http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2011/06/time-and-space/

When you are ready to go beyond framing and composition, then step up to a basic SLR like a Canon Rebel or a Nikon D40.

In 1995, Microsoft came back to Netscape with another proposal: dividing the market. If Netscape would stop developing its browser for Windows, then Microsoft would leave the Mac and Unix markets entirely to Netscape.

Netscape declined, of course, and so in 1996 came the first release of Internet Explorer for Mac and the announcement of Internet Explorer for Unix.

It seems crazy today to think that Microsoft would have been interested in something so blatantly antitrust as dividing the market, but that's the kind of company they were back then.

Magnetohydrodynamics has been around for quite a while and has long been one of the holy grails of submarine propulsion with prototypes existing now for years. During my last visit to a Los Angeles class submarine, this was a hot topic. Movement of ferrofluids is a natural extension of this concept with applications in everything from medical imaging to cooling of large and small objects. Its pretty exciting, though I am surprised that this is the *first* implementation of this.

You *so* have a deal there.

Best of luck my friend and good to hear that you are back at the mothership.

The wording of this post makes it seem as though the data centers were initiated via policies of the Obama administration. However, the reality is that the data center expansion occurred during the policy of the previous Bush administration with funding requested in 2006, approved in 2007 and implementation initiated in 2008 a full year before the Obama administration took office. The Obama administration approved the continuation of the policy in 2009 and 2010 and are currently altering the data center strategy.

Its nice that Teh Circle is still together. I too was frustrated at the changes Slashdot implemented.... and continued to implement.... Slashdot *could have* owned it, but for whatever reason, could not make the required changes while they insisted on changes their users did not want. Remember the Slashdot Moment in Time experiment on Jonesblog? http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2005/08/slashdot-moment-in-time/ That was an effort for more community that Slashdot made harder over time.

Come on over to G+

We certainly have not in the even very recent past, because we did not understand how biological systems were actually constructed/wired. This project is an attempt to solve that problem and one of the potential outcomes is a general purpose knowledge of connectivity that can be applied to computational problems.

The eyes do not "see" in the sense of processing information. They turn light into nerve impulses. Ho-Hum. We've got that, in fact this isn't about that at all. They are dealing with already captured data anyway.

Actually they do process information. The neural retina is like a miniature parallel supercomputer at the back of your eye that does initial signal processing from the photoreceptors through the over 50 kinds (200 in other invertebrates) of neurons.

Nothing in biology can be applied to this problem directly, only perhaps simple ideas applied rigorously. Stop spouting your favorite rubbish.

No offense friend, but I can't figure out if this is a troll or that you are simply uninformed here. Biological neural systems are *very* good at discriminating differences in data streams. Nested neural systems then further refine those abstractions and you get more advanced logic. The problem in the past has been discerning what those connectivities are as most current models of neural connectivity grossly underpredict the biological reality of neural circuit complexity.