Forgot your password?

typodupeerror

Comment: Well, what else would they do? (Score 1) 212

by AdamHaun (#40083279) Attached to: The Price of Military Tech Assistance In Movies

I attended a Comic-Con panel last year where some of the military liaisons to Hollywood talked about their jobs. They were pretty open about having criteria for accepting a script. It's not clear to me why anyone would expect them to spend time and money helping filmmakers portray them in an unflattering light. The article does give a couple odd examples of rejected films (Independence Day?), but aside from that seems to make a mountain out of a molehill.

IIRC, the panelists said that the US military doesn't/can't support historical settings, which would limit this issue to movies that comment on current events.

Comment: Re:Just follow the physics diet. (Score 1) 649

by AdamHaun (#40017107) Attached to: The Mathematics of Obesity

The founder of Autodesk takes a similar approach. His guide is very detailed and motivating. I lost sixty pounds through simple calorie counting. (And then put it back on during some bad times last year, but at least it's under my control.)

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/

If you're seriously overweight (50-100+ pounds), this translates to all kinds of good news:

* The fatter you are, the more calories you burn. This really adds up at 100 pounds overweight. I was eating three hot, filling, satisfying meals a day and still losing two pounds per week.
* It's easy to get calorie counts for junk food and fast food -- just check the label or the web site! Eating poorly actually makes it easier to lose weight.
* Progress will be rapid and visible.

Most of the magazine articles and other popular material are written for neurotic skinny women who freak out about being 5-10 pounds overweight and want a simple answer to their self-image problems. Don't let them mislead you into looking for magic when the science is right in front of you. It really is this simple.

Comment: Re:Wrong wrong wrong (Score 2) 145

by AdamHaun (#40016761) Attached to: DDR4 May Replace Mobile Memory For Less

For circuit analysis, it becomes V=IZ, where Z is the complex impedance, and describes the time-varying relationship of voltage and current in resistors, capacitors, inductors and pretty much anything else you will find in a circuit.

Even in plain linear circuit analysis, this is not correct. Voltage and current sources (including dependent sources) are not modeled as impedances. Neither are switches (an admittedly trivial example). Voltage/current decay in inductors and capacitors is usually described in terms of exponential time constants.

In a real circuit you will have electronic components, which are not in any way linear or Ohmic. The "ideal" diode equation is exponential, as is the Ebers-Moll model for BJTs. The simplest MOSFET equation is quadratic. All electronic devices have complex higher-order behavior. You can model them as linear over a small range, but they're still more complex than a simple impedance.

Comment: Re:1.2V of power? (Score 5, Informative) 145

by AdamHaun (#40012859) Attached to: DDR4 May Replace Mobile Memory For Less

Nerds should know Ohms law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm's_law

and that there is no difference between voltage and power.

Voltage and power are related, but that doesn't mean they're the same. In fact, Ohm's Law says that they're not -- you still need information about the current (or resistance) to determine power dissipation.

Transistor switching in digital circuits is very different from plain resistance. It's more like charging and discharging capacitors. Energy loss is proportional to voltage squared, at least for dynamic power. That's why lowering the voltage is the most important thing for power consumption.

Comment: Re:Not only that... (Score 1) 569

by AdamHaun (#39911873) Attached to: Some USAF Pilots Refuse To Fly F-22 Raptor

When you are finished bitching about the US, tells us about the untold millions and millions that died under Stalin, food lines, the invasions of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, the 'Stans, including Afghanistan, the rape of Chechnya, and the Berlin Wall, where people were killed trying to escape an ideology.

Er... you do know the Soviet Union was dissolved twenty years ago, right? Russia may still be a crappy place to live, but think about how long it's been since the last time it was a nice place to live.

Ah, who am I kidding. Guess this is just the latest in the flood of AC trolls.

Comment: Re:Apple is not a semiconductor company (Score 1) 226

by AdamHaun (#39876191) Attached to: Why Intel Leads the World In Semiconductor Manufacturing

There is plenty of demand for ICs built on non-leading-edge technology. For instance, On Semiconductor has custom foundry services at 0.18u, 0.25u, 0.35u, 0.6u, and 0.7u. 0.35 micron is about 14 years old now, IIRC.

To elaborate on this, older/larger processes have several advantages:

* Power consumption -- smaller transistors are leaky.
* Startup cost -- mask sets on new processes are insanely expensive.
* Yield -- older processes have better yield, which means more good die per wafer.
* Quality -- older processes usually have fewer problems, and the test software has been updated to catch more defects. This is particularly important in safety-critical markets like automotive, aerospace, and medical.
* Some products are pad-limited, which means that the number of external connections forces a minimum die size larger than the space needed for the core transistors. In this case, shrinking the core only costs extra money.

Comment: Re:TI has their own fabs (Score 2) 226

by AdamHaun (#39872689) Attached to: Why Intel Leads the World In Semiconductor Manufacturing

I work at TI. We do have our own fabs, but we also outsource manufacturing to foundries too. The new 65nm flash process I work on was developed at TSMC, and all manufacturing will be done there. I know that other processes run in TSMC as well, but I'm not sure which ones (we have a lot).

Comment: Re:Bad article, little information [Re:Short summa (Score 3, Informative) 140

Of course. The question is, how much more cancer is caused by a given dose of radiation?

Unfortunately, this is a question that the paper in question does not answer, because it completely neglects to mention actual numbers. (The pretty colored graphs have units of "excess relative risk." How do you convert that to deaths? You can't. What are the units-- per year? Per lifetime? they don't say. Relative to what? They don't say.) I'd like to see a number, like "excess cancers per year per sievert of exposure," but they don't give one. They compare different studies, but never discuss whether the differences are statistically significant.

As the article states, the graph is taken from another study, Preston et al (2007) Solid Cancer Incidence in Atomic Bomb Survivors: 1958–1998. You can find many tables with actual numbers there. The caption on the graph also answers some of your questions:

FIG. 3. Solid cancer dose–response function. The thick solid line is
the fitted linear gender-averaged excess relative risk (ERR) dose response
at age 70 after exposure at age 30 based on data in the 0- to 2-Gy dose
range. The points are non-parametric estimates of the ERR in dose categories.
The thick dashed line is a nonparametric smooth of the categoryspecific
estimates and the thin dashed lines are one standard error above
and below this smooth.

Comment: Re:Can people actually tell the difference? (Score 1) 607

by AdamHaun (#39833933) Attached to: <em>Hobbit</em> Film Underwhelms At 48 Frames Per Second

Er... which part? The TV upscanned the video to a higher than normal frame rate without anyone in the room knowing in advance. That is both double-blind and increasing FPS. It's not the same as having different source material, but it is at least a partial answer to the question.

Comment: Re:Can people actually tell the difference? (Score 1) 607

by AdamHaun (#39827325) Attached to: <em>Hobbit</em> Film Underwhelms At 48 Frames Per Second

I haven't seen 48fps, but I was accidentally subjected to a double-blind test on a 120Hz TV when I watched a Return of the Jedi DVD at my mom's house. It looked like a sitcom, and I figured out within a minute or two what was wrong. I guess I associate high frame rates with cheap TV shows.

O Lord, grant that we may always be right, for Thou knowest we will never change our minds.

Working...