Comment Re: "Now"? (Score 3, Funny) 47
Not news to me, either, Drew.
Not news to me, either, Drew.
Aaw, I should have told you. Thereâ(TM)s some equation that relates energy, mass, and the speed of light. Probably most physics postdocs have heard of it.
Thanks, Will-O. I quite remember this cia guyâ(TM)s rubber stamp collection with dozens of great stamps: NOFORN, EYES-ONLY, and different fonts of Secret and top secret. Damn, but the guard at the place seized my paper with all those stamps.
On the other hand, I still have a VIP parking pass for the CIA headquarters â" Lets ypu park right at the front steps. Valid, if you have a time machine going back to April 5, 1988.
My warm thoughts fly over to you, Kill (owatt-) Hour â" last weekâ(TM)s eclipse fund me beneath stratus clouds just east of Buffalo, having a wonderful (though cloudy) day with 4 generations of my family. Itâ(TM)s a joy to see how my home town has evolved â" memories of climbing the Michigan Avenue Lift Bridge at midnight and watching them tap the redhot coke ovens at Bethlehem/Lackawanna Steel mills.
Following up, I am honored by the attention and kindness of fellow nerds and online friends. When I first started on that chase in 1986, I had no idea wrhere it would lead me.
A curious accounting error led me through Unix internals, tcp/ip protocols, early Arpanet connections, and backwards to a group of computer hackers working for then Soviet & Stassi agencies. Along the way, I met people from the FBI, NSA, CIA, AFOSI, and plenty of very smart computer jocks.
It was a time of analog phones and dial up modems; when you would carry coins in your pocket to make calls on the street.
Since then, thanks to the support of online friends and math folk, I have explored and shared interests in topology and math. Along the way, Iâ(TM)ve made plenty of mistakes and bloopers; pretty much the same as student times. Goofups in grad school are easier to sweep aside!
To all my friends: May you burdens be light and your purpose high. Stay curious!
- Cliff
Iâ(TM)ve been away from slashdot for a while, and Iâ(TM)m now on a post-eclipse trip on the east coast.
With good fortitune (and Amtrak), Iâ(TM)ll be home in 10 days; Iâ(TM)ll then fill the tsunami of Klein bottle orders that havve arrived in the past few hours. Over a dozenâ" Iâ(TM)ll be catching up for a few days!
Smiles all around,
-Cliff on a rainy Saturday in Potsdam, NU
He started collecting them in 1965, " This giant repository, which celebrated its 50th anniversary "
There was the HandBOOK of Integer Sequences.
Some of my math professors are probably still wondering how I solved those extra credit problems
It was good for party tricks are well, at the right sort of party obviously.
Is for the Supreme Court to find that information that can only be collected by the government under the mosaic theory of information and that could not be gathered by an individual actor is covered by a right of privacy, they manage to find all sorts of rights that we hadn't noticed before, it's time for them to find this one.
Pretorian Technologies of Lincolnshire, UK http://www.pretorianuk.com/ specializes in computer devices for disabled, and semi-disabled users. They make a wide variety of trackballs, joysticks, mouse alternatives, big switches that can be activated by your elbow or knee, iPad switches, bluetooth linked switches etc.
Their devices are aimed at those with "limited hand control, fine and gross motor skill difficulties, poor hand-eye coordination, limited manual dexterity, repetitive strain injury, involuntary muscle spasms, spastic and flaccid paralysis, cerebral movement disorder or central neuromuscular disability and inflammatory or degenerative change"
From their website, http://www.pretorianuk.com/n-a...
The n-ABLER Trackball is the most adaptable Mouse Alternative on the market specifically designed to address the needs of computer users with limited hand control, motor skill difficulties, poor hand-eye co-ordination, lack of manual dexterity and involuntary muscle spasms.
In the USA, their products are available through InclusiveTLC.com
From 1964 through around 1975, planetary astronomers at Tucson's Lunar & Planetary Laboratory used physical models to project and remap the moon's surface. They took high resolution photos through an earth based telescope, and then projected the images onto a spherical, white plaster globe. By carefully controlling the geometry, and knowing distances, angles, and (yes) lunar libation, they created detailed maps of the moon's near side, taking into account geometric distortion around the limbs. In this way, they could rephotograph parts of the lunar far-side.
The rectified lunar atlas can now be seen at https://www.lpl.arizona.edu/si...
This was all done using telescopes, photographs, and optical projection
It was my honor to work with several of these astronomers, including Ewen Whitaker, Gerard Kuiper, Bill Hartmann, and Bob Strom. Brilliant scientists who would be astounded and impressed to see those NASA/Goddard videos. What we take for granted today, once required several years of detailed work.
I was honored to know Glenn Seaborg while working at Lawrence Berkeley Labs in the 1980's. By then, Manhattan Project was long behind him, as was his Nobel prize, the Atomic Energy Commission work, and his chancellorship of the University of California. Yet he was still a kind and supportive scientist who was deeply interested in any research - whether in physics, astronomy, chemistry, or biology. He recognized the need to teach music and art alongside science and math, and would visit local high schools to encourage students.
I once met him at the Lawrence Hall of Science, walking around the old cyclotron. When I asked him about it, he said that he'd been wondering how the field magnets had been mounted (it was perhaps 40 years after the Manhattan Project). After a short chat he invited a few 12 year old kids over, and told stories about using the beast to create new elements. Amazing guy.
Can't resist tooting my own horn. These are from my Klein bottle website:
TOPOLOGY CONSULTANT Part-time design of low-dimensional manifolds in glass, wool, plastic, titanium, niobium, pentium, and unobtanium. Ideal candidate is fresh out of college with 20 years experience in applied topology; and can solve Poincare's, Heawood's, and Hodge's conjectures. Pay & benefits are epsilon above unemployment. Compensation package includes trillions in worthless stock options.
GLASSBLOWER Construct borosilicate manifolds using lampwork. Handy with glass lathe, oxy-hydrogen torch, and bandaids. Must know the usual cuss words to describe breaks & cracks. Experienced in minor burn treatment. Special bonus if you know the difference between inside and outside.
MANIFOLD OPERATOR. Curvaceous, conformal Riemannian vector field desires normalized Ricci tensor with nice eigenvalues. Will relocate within proper metric space. No polymorphic permutations, please.
With various approaches but its not clear that they are so successful. Your particular conversation sounds like it may have been an outlier.
http://www.smartplanet.com/blo...
http://tvnz.co.nz/national-new...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
While it certainly saves the average traveler from having to guess the queue length and service rate for themselves so they can estimate the wait via Little's Law ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... )
It is hard to see how it manages to not be confused by people standing around the entrance and then walking away rather than in, or separate those speeding through the Priority or Pre-Check lines from the regular lines.
It would seem a simple electric eye counter or just giving the guy who sorts you into lines a clicker might do just as good a job. So while I don't like hopping into the tin foil hat explanations too quickly it is hard not to suspect that maybe this is just a cover story for the fact that they are indeed using it for surveillance purposes.
But then they already know everything I am doing in the airport tracking my phone doesn't personally make me any more under their eye than I already am. Not that I like them gathering all this data and lying about what they keep, I'm just not sure this actually adds to the degree I have already had my privacy compromised by the government.
The rule on staying alive as a forecaster is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once. -- Jane Bryant Quinn
