InternationalCow - Slashdot User

Submission + - Dying Man Shares Unseen Challenger Video (nycaviation.com) 1

Submitted by longacre on Monday February 01, 2010 @12:47AM

longacre writes: An amateur video of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion has been made public for the first time. The Florida man who filmed it from his front yard on his new Betamax camcorder turned the tape over to an educational organization a week before he died this past December. The Space Exploration Archive has since published the video into the public domain in time for the 24th anniversary of the catastrophe. Despite being shot from about 70 miles from Cape Canaveral, the shuttle and the explosion can be seen quite clearly. It is unclear why he never shared the footage with NASA or the media. NASA officials say they were not aware of the video, but are interested in examining it now that it has been made available.

Comment Not so hot (Score 0, Flamebait) 150

by InternationalCow on Saturday October 13, 2007 @04:50AM (#20964307) Attached to: New Car Sensor System Simulates Birds-Eye View

I mean, Toyota has this system where the car parks itself (http://www.hiptechblog.com/2006/02/25/toyotas-parallel-parking-assist/). So tell me, how does this Nissan toy improve over that?

Comment Coincidental fortune (Score 1) 359

by nucal on Thursday August 30, 2007 @04:55AM (#20408993) Attached to: AT&T Stops 'Time', Ends An Era

At the bottom of the page:

"Our vision is to speed up time, eventually eliminating it." -- Alex Schure

When the Earth Was Purple 278

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @04:38AM from the how-violet-was-my-valley dept.

Ollabelle writes "It's always been a bit of a mystery why plants absorb red and blue light, reflecting green, when the sun emits the peak energy of the visible spectrum in the green. A new theory offers one possible answer: that the first chlorophyll-utilizing microbes evolved to exploit the red-and-blue light that older green-absorbing microbes didn't use, eventually out-competing them through greater efficiency and the rise of oxygen."

Submission + - Jeff Hawkins' Cortex Simulation Platform Available

Submitted by

UnreasonableMan

on Tuesday March 06, 2007 @05:28PM

UnreasonableMan writes: "Jeff Hawkins is best known for founding Palm Computing and Handspring, but for the last eighteen months he's been working on his third company, Numenta. In his 2005 book, On Intelligence, Hawkins laid out a theoretical framework describing how the neocortex processes sensory inputs and provides outputs back to the body. Numenta's goal is to build a software model of the human brain capable of face recognition, object identification, driving, and other tasks currently better suited to humans.

For an overview see Hawkins' 2005 presentation at UC Berkeley. It includes a demonstration of an early version of the software that can recognize handwritten letters and distinguish between stick figure dogs and cats. Whitepapers are available at Numenta's website.

Numenta wisely decided to build a community of developers rather than try to make everything proprietary. Yesterday they released the first version of their free development platform and the source code for their algorithms to anyone who wants to download it."

Milky Way's Black Hole a Gamma Source? 100

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 06, 2007 @04:56PM from the high-energy-pinball dept.

eldavojohn writes "A paper recently accepted for publication (preprint here) proposes a sound explanation for the source of the gamma rays that permeate our galaxy. The Milky Way's central object Sagittarius A*, widely believed to be a supermassive black hole, is now suspected to be the source. To test this theory, two scientists created a computer model to track the protons, flung outward with energies up to 100 TeV by the intense magnetic fields near the event horizon, as they make a random walk through the plasma environment. It can take thousands of years for them to travel 10 light-years from the black hole, where they collide with lower-energy protons to form pions. These decay into gamma radiation emanating from a torus-shaped region around the central object."

Submission + - Nielson Results Reveal Consoles on the Rise

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Tuesday March 06, 2007 @10:42AM

eldavojohn writes: "Nielson ratings are in and the results are that gaming is continuing its steady trend upward. From the article, "In a study released on Monday entitled, "The State of the Console," Nielsen Media Research found that 41.1 percent of households with televisions in the U.S. now have gaming consoles. That number represents an 18.5 percent increase since 2004, according the research firm, who used a sample of 12,000 TV-viewing households for its report." More ammo for Jack Thompson or simply proof that game consoles are universally enjoyed?"

Submission + - Wikipedia Used for Artificial Intelligence

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Sunday January 07, 2007 @11:13AM

eldavojohn writes: "It may be no surprise but Wikipedia is now being used in the field of artificial intelligence. The applications for this may be endless. For instance, the front of spam fighting is a tough one and it looks as though researchers are now turning towards an ontology or taxonomy based solution to fight spammers. The concept is also on the forefront of artificial intelligence and progress towards an application passing the Turing Test and creating semantically aware applications. The article comments on uses of Wikipedia in this manner:
"... spam filters block all messages containing the word 'vitamin,' but fail to block messages containing the word 'B12.' If the program never saw 'B12' before, it's just a word without any meaning. But you would know it's a vitamin," Markovitch said. "With our methodology, however, the computer will use its Wikipedia-based knowledge base to infer that 'B12' is strongly associated with the concept of vitamins, and will correctly identify the message as spam," he added.
"

Submission + - Open Project to Develop Renewable Energy System

Submitted by

rohar

on Sunday January 07, 2007 @11:02AM

rohar writes: "We have been working on a system that combines some existing indirect solar technologies to build a location independant, renewable, reliable and economically feasible indirect solar electrical power generation system. The idea is to "roll-your-own" geothermal source by capturing heat from the ambient air with a solar powered absorption heat pump, store it underground and generate electricity from the air cooling convection. When the air is cooler the stored heat is then used in a reverse process to generate electricity by transferring the heat back to the air when it is cooler (at night or seasonal). There are many additional benefits including clean water capture from the "dehumidifier" effect of the air cooling, construction from common materials and thermal storage that may be incorporated into dwelling heat systems."

Comment About Spatial Mode... (Score 3, Informative) 495

by Amoeba Protozoa on Thursday September 08, 2005 @03:10AM (#13507118) Attached to: GNOME 2.12 Released

Not keeping up with the Joneses or the latest discussion about the latest version of Gnome, I was left in the dark when it came to know what was meant when the poster mentioned, "spacial tree browsing." I found the following two articles useful:

However, I don't have the foggiest as to what spacial tree mode really means. Can anybody enlighten me or point me at some screen shots?

-AP

Journal Journal: Useless

Journal by InternationalCow on Sunday May 08, 2005 @06:46PM

This journal is useless. I'm not a blogger (don't think that my daily life is interesting) nor am I a real writer. So I'm not gonna write any more in this useless journal. Nobody reads it anyway. I don't read it.

Journal Journal: iMacs do not

Journal by InternationalCow on Monday August 09, 2004 @04:41PM

The imac's drive died. Damn. Now i will have to open it and put in a new one :) The Steve Jobs w/cancer episode made me think about what Apple really is. And for all intents and purposes, IMHO Apple == Jobs. If he croaks, so will Apple. I do not doubt that Jonathan Ive is a great designer but without Jobs I don't think he will have much fun at Apple dealing with management weenies. So I am now considering my next laptop. Maybe I will go all Linux and run it on a Savrow or Vood

Journal Journal: Maine Coons rule!

Journal by InternationalCow on Sunday May 30, 2004 @03:26PM

Today, I went to a small village in central Holland to get a nice iMac (beautiful Indigo specimen) for my kids. Hey, they are of an age that they need to use a computer, might as well get a good one with a good OS that is easy to use. Anyways, they people that had this iMac (and another one, a prime 700 MHz Graphite specimen) also had two Maine Coon cats! These cats are so sweet, it's incredible. They're HUGE but adorable. I want one! Or more. I think our current cat won't have that though.

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