Comment Re:My Grandpa would count (he's been dead since 20 (Score 1) 553
He certainly did it from paper, not doing it real time.
He certainly did it from paper, not doing it real time.
Yeah, my dad would count, too. We had tons of punchcards at home when I was a kid, and he at one point mentioned programming by setting a bunch of toggle switches and then pushing the spring loaded toggle at the end to push the byte into memory. I'm at the very leading edge of Gen X and have been using computers pretty much all my life (not as my main thing post school though), and manage to be reasonably current for something that's mostly peripheral to my work. If I had to, I could go to the beach and make a computer from scratch and then program it, though it might take a while.
Now I wish those kids would get offa my lawn! (throws handful of 4004s at them)
only the ali'i and kahuna were allowed on the Mauna, not commoners like them
When Isabella Bird wanted to go to the summit of Mauna Loa in the 1870s, the only major issue was that there were no warm clothes on the island of Hawaii because nobody went to the summit. They rounded up some warm clothes for her (scoured the islands for them) and she did a solo camping trip.
But then, there wasn't much interest in Astronauts driving around the moon, because it interrupted soap operas and game shows on TV.
Shuttle stopped making the news a long time ago except when it was threatened with shutdown, hubble was threatened with shutdown, or one crashed. People have been in LEO fairly regularly for a long time now.
The problem with that is *something* is *always* offensive to someone. No matter what.
If I pick a male face it's offensive because I underrepresent women. If I pick a black face it's offensive because I'm a racist. If I pick an Asian female I'm sexualizing. If I pick a cute animal I'm promoting abuse. And so on and so forth.
Whatever.
Use the six face panel that the onion uses for the person on the street interviews. It's diverse and everybody will recognize the source and get a chuckle. You probably have to get permission though.
You must have conniption fits when you go to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Or the Los Angeles County Art Museum's Egyptian section.
Those are not for children, and they don't require mandatory attendance.
We had field trips to the Detroit Institute of Arts nearly every year throughout elementary school after 4th grade or so, and occasionally later in school, and yes, we did see the racy stuff from the 16th-18th centuries. The trips weren't manadatory, but I don't recall anybody getting opted out by their parents. But in the 70's you could dress your kid as a 50lb bag of weed for halloween and send them to their 3rd grade class and people would say "how cute!" rather than sending them to prison as an adult and confiscating your home.
You can't have your luggage deliberately fly on a plane without you. It's common for luggage to get on an earlier or later flight when there's weather, delayed planes, or baggage issues, but they'll pull your bags if you check in and check your luggage and then don't fly.
A battery is a simpler design, requires no maintenance, and it's able to alert you when its capacity drops to a level that's likely to cause you problems if you ever need to use it. That additional functionality makes the battery superior to the point there's good reason to choose it over a gasoline engine even if it supposedly costs more dollars.
I went through exactly this trade in putting together a UPS for my mom when she was on oxygen. She was in a city with occasional severe weather that could lead to blackouts and needed her O2 generator to function so she could move around at all. A friend of hers was at the home depot and saw generators on sale and called her, pushing her to get one. She had him call me, and I had to explain that there was no way it would be useful-- it would have to be stored in the house (out of the weather), maintained, and then if there was a power outage would have to be moved out and started up, probably in the dark with bad weather, by a 68 year old dependent on a high flow of oxygen. After that I put together a 1 kWh battery backup system with a Tripplite inverter/charger and some scooter batteries that her O2 machine ran off and would give her enough time to sleep through most of a power outage without knowing it, and then get to the LOX supply and switch to that. Almost no maintenance and no active operation required for the user. It cost more than a cheap generator, but it met the use case and worked.
It depends on where you live. In SoCal people use the AC for the heat-- it's often ~100+F and 10% RH in the hot months. People sit around in my neighborhood and report the line voltage over email until it goes out completely. I don't have AC - a couple oak trees over the house take care of that about 99.9% of the time, but neighbors without trees run their AC pretty hard.
LFD might be slightly better at this but holography is the ultimate solution here.
Holography is much further off than practical LFD, which is further off than stereogram goggles. Realtime holographic imaging with useful performance has only become practical recently, and still only in limited applications. Realtime true holographic display is a whole different animal.
There are numerous 3D depth perception cues, among which are stereo-vision,
stereo vision is constructed in your brain from the two slightly different images on your retinas. Your brain does a lot of complicated things in constructing 3D models-- to the extent that you can have perfect refraction in both eyes and perfect retinas, but be missing half of your field of view due to neural damage in between your eyeball and your conscious brain.
depth of field
which is part of the 2D map of photons on your retina. I can construct a 2D image that has proper DOF cues.
prior knowledge of the objects size
which is also in your brain and unnecessary for a 3D display (but is necessary in the computer that constructs the images to project)
LFD can make the job easier so you can be less vomit-inducing without retinal tracking, but it's not necessary.
Neither holography nor light-field-display is necessary for a goggle based device. Each retina collects photons on a surface and with a single eye you get a 2D image*. Your brain combines the images from your eyes in very complex ways to create a 3D internal model, but as far as what needs to get shined into your eyes, it's just the 2D image constructed on your retina that matters. Slightly different images to form a realtime stereogram is all that's necessary.
(*although with one eye that moves around your brain can construct 3D models. I've known people with one eye that had very depth perception for athletic things, and have experimented a little throwing and catching with one eye and it is possible to be accurate).
Probably not long after you can get the on-road version.
There are very real commercial applications for OR autonomous driving, and keep in mind that this was 10 years ago and those were self-funded (or by whatever sponsors they could round up) university teams doing one-off vehicles. If you look at what they achieved for what they spent, and extrapolate it to mass production it's very reasonable to expect off-road autonomy to be available on the same time scale as on-road.
And as zippthorne notes, you have to put a ton of time in to get any good at driving off road. With the autonomous version you pay some money and get tens of thousands of hours of experience built into the system at delivery.
You mean like in the DARPA grand challenge?
Only complaint I have, I really wish most of these telescopes were open to the public. I have never had the opportunity to look through anything bigger than a backyard telescope and it would be amazing to be able to see what a thirty meter telescope can do.
You don't really "look through" them so much as reserve time and then sit in a control room in Waimea, or more likely your home institution anywhere in the world, and wait for digital data. Some stuff is done with a realtime observer making decisions (based on the digital data), but a lot of it's automated and planned on schedules that optimize the amount of observing vs. the amount of repointing and other overhead. There's various ways to get access, but mostly they require being part of a research institution and proposing for time. The various institutions involved in building them get observing time in return, and then some amount is probably also available through gov't grants to "buy" time. A nice thing about ground based telescopes over space based is the amount of effective observing time relative to things like calibration and maintenance, so they're effectively accessible to more people. The number of people on the summit is getting to be fairly small and tending toward the people who are doing construction, maintenance, installation, or any kind of hand-on instrument calibration or adjustment, but observing is moving to be more and more remote, which also makes it more accessible to more people.
What is algebra, exactly? Is it one of those three-cornered things? -- J.M. Barrie