The companies used for this fraud include the name of a Chinese port city in their official name. These cities
include: Raohe, Fuyuan, Jixi City, Xunke, Tongjiang, and Dongning.

Odd that they'd use the term "port city", as these don't sound like major transportation hubs. What's interesting is that all these places they've named are actually places on or near the border of Russia and China, in Heilongjiang Province.

I don't know where New Scientist got their 1490 number, but the IAEA report on Chernobyl (http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1239_web.pdf) cited by Wikipedia gives an upper tier of 1480+ kBq/m^2 of cesium-137, except that 3100 km^2 of land in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus had at least that level of contamination. If you look at the total area at 555+ kBq/m^2 of cesium-137, you get 10300 km^2 of land which had at least that level of contamination. You'd need a circle with a radius of ~57 km to contain that much land.

Since 18 March, MEXT has repeatedly found caesium levels above 550 kBq/m2 in an area some 45 kilometres wide lying 30 to 50 kilometres north-west of the plant.

The wording here is kind of weird. Why are they using a single length to describe area? Furthermore, does "repeatedly found caesium levels above 550 kBq/m^2" mean that the entire area has that level of radioactivity or that simply they measured it in a few places and got high readings? The New Scientist article then gives high peak rates like 6400 kBq/m^2 of cesium, but fail to provide a comparison with Chernobyl. And to finish it off, they move onto talking about a totally different isotope (iodine-131). Becquerels measure the number of decay events per second, so comparing becquerel readings between two different isotopes is kind of pointless -- it doesn't compare the amount of energy being released.

There's nothing that requires a hologram to change colors as you change the viewing angle; it's just that there are many different techniques for generating holograms and the rainbow hologram happens to have been adopted widely in the commercial regime. Classic holograms were monochrome and required coherent illumination to see. The rainbow hologram is nice in that you can see it under white light, but suffers from color issues (obviously) and also only presents a three-dimensional view along one axis (try tilting your VISA card 90 degrees next time and the eagle should appear flat). I don't know if the exhibit is still there or not, but the MIT Museum in Cambridge had a really nice hologram exhibit with lots of different holograms. A bunch of them were full color and didn't have that rainbow effect.

This article does make me more curious about surface plasmons, however, since I hear that mentioned a lot nowadays and don't have a very good understanding of them.

Just a nitpick, but...

• Increasing the number of megapixels while keeping everything else the same does not change the amount of light the sensor collects, although each individual pixel gets less light.
• Increasing or decreasing the fill-factor or changing the total sensor size does.
• In low light situations, statistics of the intensity of light should be Poisson, which means that 4 pixels at 1/4 the area, when averaged together, should result in the same amount of SNR, assuming relatively small read noise, which should be dominated by the Poisson shot noise in this situation.
• Thus, the only downside of having just more pixels on a sensor if everything else was equal (note that fill factor of pixels would probably be different between different sensors) is that there's now a lot more bandwidth coming out of the sensor, which could be an issue with power efficiency. This could possibly be mitigated by reducing the bit depth on each individual pixel, if you assume there's going to be more noise.
• One upside is that if the pixel size is smaller than the diffraction spot size, then the relative size of your Bayer mosaic should make demosaicing easier.
• To summarize... if you had more pixels in the same sized sensor and can deal with the extra bandwidth, then you should be able to, in the worst case, downsample to achieve similar or higher performance compared to what you had before.

Don't worry... you have brethren in Japan ;)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-2DLove-t.html

If I remember correctly, one of the issues with current three-dimensional displays is that there's a disparity between vergence and accomodation in the eye. That is, normally, you point your eyes inwards to look at something closer, and you focus your lens closer as well. With 3D displays, what happens is that you have to focus at a different distance (i.e. where the actual display is) than what your eyes are verging on (i.e. the apparent depth of the image)... I guess you'll get used to it when you lose accomodation in your eyes as you age... :p

You know... FLAC doesn't actually compress down from WAV all that much. Given current storage sizes, why not simply just sell fully uncompressed audio files? You can use FLAC or whatever as the transmission medium and/or storage server-side to be less of a bandwidth burden, but the user should just see an incoming WAV file, etc. that he can do whatever he wants with...

Personally, I rip all my CDs to --preset-extreme MP3 to listen, since I can just pull out my CD if I really needed a bit-perfect copy (e.g. for voice track extraction).

Well, DEC's PDP-1 sales literature (such as the PDP-1 Handbook scans available here) seems to always list the display among the optional equipment, though it was probably a popular option. The only standard I/O equipment (not counting the front panel) was the console typewriter and the paper tape reader and punch. Seems reasonable, since I'm sure there were some customers who had no need for a CRT.

However, I overstated things when I said the display "would have added quite a bit to the cost". It only seems to have increased the cost by around 15% or so.

It didn't. The display was a point-plotting CRT which had to be dynamically refreshed by the CPU.

As previous replies have pointed out, advances in hardware were key. In 1962, integrated circuits were still in their infancy. They had only been invented four years earlier, and the only ones in production were being built for U.S. military projects like the Minuteman nuclear ballistic missile. And even those were very small-scale circuits, with only a few logic gates per chip.

Computers like the PDP-1 were built using thousands of discrete transistor components for their logic and magnetic cores for their main memory. The price for a basic PDP-1 at that time was around $100,000 in 1962 dollars, equivalent to about $800,000 today. That's a *basic* system; the point-plotting CRT display used in Spacewar! would have added quite a bit to the cost. The machine with all its peripherals took a good fraction of a room and probably weighed at least 2000 pounds. And running Spacewar! pretty much consumed the PDP-1's entire processing power. (Since the display was point-plotting only, the spaceships had to be drawn as series of dots, and the display had no storage ability, so a lot of processing overhead was needed to constantly refresh the entire list of currently displayed dots.)

When Spacewar! was written, the video game was basically a science-fiction concept, and computer graphics itself was just beginning to develop. Arcade games at that time were purely electromechanical games, such as pinball. The first commercial arcade video games (Galaxy Game and Computer Space, both of which were ports of Spacewar!) didn't appear until 1971; Atari's Pong came out the following year. Arcade video games of the early 1970s used custom state machines built from TTL logic chips instead of programmed computer systems; the first microprocessor-based arcade video games appeared starting in 1975 with Taito's Gun Fight, which used the Intel 8080. It was those programmable microprocessor-based systems that really allowed video game development to take off; for example, Asteroids was based on a 6502. Incidentally, Asteroids' vector display system first appeared in an arcade game with Cinematronics' Space Wars in 1977.

Spacewar! was widely ported to various computer systems during the 1960s and 1970s, so it's no surprise that Asteroids bears a strong resemblance to it.

16-bit audio has around 100dB of dynamic range assuming that the signal peaks. What if you're listening to a source that isn't hitting the peak? For instance, you can have a solo flute or violin part that is playing very softly before the rest of the orchestra kicks in.