ndlxs - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Wheat and grains (Score 3, Insightful) 477

by ndlxs on Saturday September 04, 2010 @01:17PM (#33475856) Attached to: White House Fingers PlayStation As Obesity Culprit

Actually, it's all down to heavy consumption of wheat and grains, and starches too, high fructose corn syrup, and the demonization of saturated fat.

I have always thought that perhaps federal corn price supports have lead to overproduction of corn, thus artificially cheap high fructose corn syrup, thus artificially cheap sodas/crap foods, thus obesity.

Submission + - How To Build A Short Foucalt Pendulum (arxivblog.com)

Submitted by

KentuckyFC

on Friday February 13, 2009 @10:47AM

KentuckyFC writes: "Set a pendulum in motion and you'll inevitably give it an ellipsoidal motion, which naturally tends to precess. That's bad news if you want to build a Foucalt Pendulum, a bob atttached to a long wire swinging in a vertical plane that appears to rotate as the Earth spins beneath it. The natural precession always tends to swamp the rotation due to the Earth's motion. There is a solution, however: the behaviour of the ellipsoidal motion is inversely proportional to the pendulum's length. So the traditional answer has been to use a very long pendulum (Foucalt's orginal in Paris is 67 meters long). Now scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have another solution (abstract). They've created a motor that drives a pendulum in a way that always cancels out the precession. That means the effect of Earth's rotation can be seen on much shorter pendulums such as the 3-meter pendulum they've tested their motor on. That's just the start though. They say there is no limit to how short the new generation of Foucalt Pendulums can be and even talk about the possibility of tabletop devices."

Comment Sim Air Pollution (Score 1) 126

by ndlxs on Friday March 01, 2002 @10:53AM (#3089917) Attached to: PC Games To Help Public Policy Initiatives

I work at a governmental air pollution agency; I have long thought that what the decision makers needs at my agency is Sim Air Pollution, along the lines of the industrial simulations that Maxis did 10 years ago. What they really want to do is to game; they want to lower the emissions, throw in a few scenarios like energy shortages, and see how that affects smog.

It tooks me quite a while to get the nerve to actually suggest this approach; eventually I found a few people who really like the approach. Of course, what we do is considerably more complicated; we have models for everything from emissions from cars, to photochemical models, etc.

Games a great model for accessibility to all users. You just can't beat their approach to user interfaces.

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