Misleading (largely plain wrong) advertising from US ISP's

 LOLZ. So this also happens abroad, not just in the Philippines

And We havent even mentioned the monthly caps which make this even more LOLZ.

Basically Every ISP Is Trying to Scare You Into Paying for Internet You Don't Need

You thought AT&T was screwing unsuspecting customers into paying obscene bandwidth bills with ridiculous claims of stuff you can't do? Time Warner says you can't have 3 people on the internet without at least 15Mbps. Oh, it gets worse.

And then there's Cox. By being vague, they're a little less bad, but still perpetuating the idea you can't share photos or download music without at least a 10Mbps connection

According to Time Warner, unless you have at least 7Mbps internet, you can't download music, or even "Windows Media Player software." And you need their most expensive plan for "Super Fast Shopping Concert Tickets & Online Auctions" and watching videos

Here's AT&T's ridiculous chart again, which says you need at least 3Mbps to use Facebook, and at least 18Mbps to download movies.

in reference to:

- Basically Every ISP Is Trying to Scare You Into Paying for Internet You Don't Need - ISPs - Gizmodo (view on Google Sidewiki)

Domesticating the Fox

An astounding and audacious experiment showing how animals were domesticated

Belyaev decided to study the genetics of domestication, a problem to which Darwin gave deep attention. Domesticated animals differ in many ways from their wild counterparts, and it has never been clear just which qualities were selected for by the Neolithic farmers who developed most major farm species some 10,000 years ago.

Belyaev’s hypothesis was that all domesticated species had been selected for a single criterion: tameness. This quality, in his view, had dragged along with it most of the other features that distinguish domestic animals from their wild forebears, like droopy ears, patches of white in the fur and changes in skull shape.

Belyaev chose to test his theory on the silver fox, a variant of the common red fox, because it is a social animal and is related to the dog. Though fur farmers had kept silver foxes for about 50 years, the foxes remained quite wild. Belyaev began his experiment in 1959 with 130 farm-bred silver foxes, using their tolerance of human contact as the sole criterion for choosing the parents of the next generation.

“The audacity of this experiment is difficult to overestimate,” Dr. Fitch has written. “The selection process on dogs, horses, cattle or other species had occurred, mostly unconsciously, over thousands of years, and the idea that Belyaev’s experiment might succeed in a human lifetime must have seemed bold indeed.”

In fact, after only eight generations, foxes that would tolerate human presence became common in Belyaev’s stock. Belyaev died in 1985, but his experiment was continued by his successor, Lyudmila N. Trut. The experiment did not become widely known outside Russia until 1999, when Dr. Trut published an article in American Scientist. She reported that after 40 years of the experiment, and the breeding of 45,000 foxes, a group of animals had emerged that were as tame and as eager to please as a dog.

in reference to: Nice Rats, Nasty Rats: Maybe It’s All in the Genes - New York Times (view on Google Sidewiki)

wall socket with extension cord

1 word. BRILLIANT!!!
in reference to: Rambler Socket tucks a recoiling extension cable, pinch of genius within your AC outlet -- Engadget (view on Google Sidewiki)

Kindle hack removes DRM

If there is one near universal gripe folks have with the Kindle, it's the DRM-laden files. It's no wonder, then, that the thing has been a lightning rod for the "information wants to be free crowd," almost since the beginning. Sure, we've seen Mobipocket, .epub, and .pdf files used on the device, but if you really want to bedevil Bezos the thing to do would be to altogether circumvent the DRM from your Amazon e-books -- and it looks like an Israeli hacker named Labba has done just that. For the time being, the hack, which allows you to convert your legally obtained e-books to unencrypted PDF files, is available as a Python script. We're sure that the process will be streamlined for us civilians soon enough -- let's just hope that it happens before the hole gets plugged and your e-reader auto-updated. This is one way to keep hold of your legally purchased Orwell, eh?
in reference to:

"Amazon Kindle gets its DRM stripped"
- Amazon Kindle gets its DRM stripped (for the time being) -- Engadget (view on Google Sidewiki)

No Grace Period for Credit Cards

There are unconfirmed reports that starting 2010, the moment you swipe the CC, there is already interest.

in reference to:

"No Grace Period Na sa Credit Cards"
- TipidPC.com | No Grace Period Na sa Credit Cards (view on Google Sidewiki)

Robinsons holiday mall schedule 2009

December 1 to 23: Extended mall hours (10AM to 10PM), 10AM to 12MN (on December 18, 19 and 23)
December 24: Regular mall hours (10AM to 9PM)
December 25: 12NN to 9PM
December 26 to 29: 10AM to 9PM on weekdays, 10AM to 10PM on weekends
December 30: 10AM to 12MN

source

SM malls Holiday schedule 2009

December 19 to 23: 10AM to 12MN
December 24: 9AM to 7PM
December 25: 10AM to 10PM
December 26 to 30: Regular Mall

Schedule (10AM to 9PM)
December 31: 10AM to 6PM
January 1: 12NN to 10PM
Regular mall schedule resumes on January 2. The regular mall schedule for SM Mall of Asia in Pasay City is from 10AM to 10PM.

link

µTorrent Release Candidate 1 (2.0 build 17668) released

Feature Overview:

UDP trackers are a different protocol for tracker communication that uses significantly less processing power on the tracker end. It's important for us to support this because trackers have limited resources, so this should allow them to support many more users with their current hardware and not crash under the load.

uTP is an alternative communication method for BitTorrent traffic that allows the client to automatically regulate its bandwidth usage to avoid adversely impacting your internet connection. This will allow you or other users on the network to download their torrents but still allow others on the network to function with little difference. This does not require any additional setup.
In addition, uTP in this version has added its own form of STUN, a method of getting incoming connections without direct connectivity to the Internet. This allows µTorrent to punch holes through routers and firewalls to increase connectivity and improve speeds. It is even possible to connect two firewalled peers through uTP's NAT traversal feature.

The transfer cap settings were added in response to various users who have ISP-mandated caps on how much data they can download/upload in a month. Now you can track your usage in MB (with a handy graph to visualize it) and even configure µTorrent to stop torrenting once the limits are exceeded. Currently, you can configure the time interval, the data cap and whether it should stop based on only download, upload, or both combined.
As a privacy notice, this traffic data is not sent back to us or anyone.

-- 2009-12-21: Version 2.0 RC2 (build 17668)
- Fix: disconnect issue with seeds
- Fix: uTP over Teredo at high speeds, and MTU problems on some kinds of networks
- Fix: Add translations to new graph strings

-- 2009-12-15: Version 2.0 RC1 (build 17624)
- Change: New default artwork
- Fix: webui would allow any name for guest account when enabled.
- Fix: download/uploader limiter issues in build 17539

in reference to:

"µTorrent Release Candidate 1 (2.0 build 17668)"
- Download - µTorrent - a (very) tiny BitTorrent client (view on Google Sidewiki)

Notebook batteries, not meant to last?

The prius has such a system, it always keeps the batteies in a narrow range, 80% to 50% or so, in order to extend life.


in reference to:

"Notebook batteries, not meant to last?"
- Notebook batteries, not meant to last? (view on Google Sidewiki)

Heatpipe Wick Structures

I didnt know there were 3 kinds. All I knew was the mesh wick

in reference to:

"Heatpipe Wick Structures"
- Heatpipe Wick Structures Exposed - Sintered Powder, Groove and Multilayered Metal Mesh - FrostyTech.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

PixProfit

PixProfit

I have no idea if this is a scam or not. A quick google search gives a few claims of being paid.

You can try it. $0.001 per captcha.

A very nice post


Source
 

Copernicus’ Law of Science Fiction: Bending the laws of
physics out of service to the story is fine, doing it out of ignorance
is unconscionable.
I don’t mind if the ships in Star Trek can go faster than the speed of
light – otherwise the story would be pretty boring. And I know
there’s no sound in space, but I want Star Destroyers to
rumble, and the Millennium Falcon to have that iconic whine. But if a
director casually gets science wrong for no real reason other than
that he is stupid or lazy (see ARMAGEDDON, THE CORE, and THE DAY AFTER
TOMORROW, to name a few), then to hell with him. If the filmmakers
don’t respect the intelligence of the audience, I’m not going to
respect the movie.
Fortunately, James Cameron has a knack for science that rivals his
moviemaking skills.

THE SCIENCE OF AVATAR

Historically, movie directors have had their asses kicked by
astronomers as far as taking us to exotic worlds. For the most part,
movie planets look like an extreme form of Earth -- they almost always
have an oxygen atmosphere at an Earthlike pressure and gravity. Movie
planets don’t even come close to matching the diversity of worlds in
our solar system: the surface of Io is a mottled, sulfurous
orange-yellow, constantly being repaved by volcanoes shooting hundreds
of miles into the sky. Titan has a thick smog atmosphere that blots
out the sun and rains hydrocarbons. Mars has planet-wide dust storms
and a 17-mile-high volcano that nearly reaches above the atmosphere.
Venus has a crushing, choking sulfur dioxide atmosphere with a
pressure 92 times that of earth, and a temperature that can melt lead.
Enceladus shoots ice geysers into space. And the real Pandora orbits
within the rings of Saturn. These are only a few of the hundreds of
planets, minor planets, and moons in our solar system: we’ve
discovered hundreds elsewhere in the galaxy, some of which seem even
crazier: super-Earths, nearly boiling puffed-up Jupiters, and objects
that may be free-floating rogue planets without a star. So I can’t think of a better use for 3d and a few hundred million
dollars of effects than filmmakers starting to raise the bar to
finally approach the awesome reality of nature. Due to the limits of
budgets, finances, and creativity, I can’t think of another film that
has attempted something near the scale of what Cameron has done here.
I’ll address the different aspects of the science in sections.

FLORA AND FAUNA

From a visual perspective, Avatar’s Pandora is breathtaking. While
most movies have only hinted at the exotic nature of their worlds with
an establishing matte painting or two, here Cameron takes us on an
elaborate three-dimensional tour though various habitats, from the
treetops to the forest floor. He’s created a whole ecosystem, from
semi-intelligent trees to giant land and air creatures. Most seem
inter-related via symbiotic relationships. In fact, Cameron has taken
the Gaia hypothesis, that the biosphere of the Earth is itself a kind
of living entity, and sexed it up – the biosphere of Pandora is
essentially a god, and it’s networked! Creatures can plug into each
other via what amounts to USB hair and fiber optic roots. While some
of these ideas are not without their faults (see below), Cameron gets
points for creativity – this is true science fiction, not space opera. I do have one minor complaint, that given their networking abilities,
the Na’vi should not be so technologically inferior to the humans. On
Earth, the largest barrier to technological progression was that
information that existed in the brains of primitive humans could not
be easily shared or preserved. As soon as writing was developed,
suddenly it was possible to store information outside of the brain,
and record and build upon knowledge. The knowledge available to a
human or tribe went from one brain’s worth (and a minimal amount of
oral tradition), to thousands, and ultimately billions of brains’
worth. The result was a technological and social explosion. Hominids
have had technology like spears for about half a million years, but
only 7,000 years after the development of writing we had left the
planet. And the sharing of knowledge is still undergoing a revolution
with the development of the internet. Now we have instantaneous
access to the combined knowledge of the entire history of humanity.
Since the Na’vi have had the ability to download information and share
it in a massive network for long periods of time (evolutionary
timescales), they should be way ahead of us in terms of technological
development. Still, I have to give Cameron a pass here. It is
thematically necessary that the Na’vi are technologically primitive,
and their root-network is necessary to the plot. Maybe you could say
that they could have evolved more technology, but they don’t need it
or want it. Still, that reeks of the “Noble savage” idea, and I have
to agree with Stephen Pinker that that is a bunch of hoo-ha.
But my major complaint from an evolutionary standpoint is that there
is no way in hell that life on Pandora would evolve to look so similar
to Earth life: there are humanoids, space horseys, hammerhead
rhinoceri, and pseudo-pterodactyl beasties. And to make it worse,
they have DNA, and the DNA is close enough to our own that Na’vi and
human DNA can be combined! Again, I have to give Cameron a pass.
First, it is easier for the audience to relate to familiar things.
And more than that there is a significant plot point that I won’t
spoil towards the end of the film that hinges on humans and Na’vi
having similar DNA.
One way out of both my evolutionary nitpicks is the panspermia
hypothesis -- that life in the galaxy was seeded in multiple places by
an advanced civilization. But even then the odds against evolution
producing such similar animals on different planets is astronomical.
Since we have a clear record of evolution on Earth, some civilization
would have had to keep taking specimens from earth, first
pterodactyls, and ultimately humans (after they evolved), and then
would have had to deliver them to Pandora, possibly modified via
genetic engineering. That would be an interesting sequel: humans and
Na’vi come together to confront their godlike humanoid ancestors!
Grade on astrobiology: A for the scale of the ecosystem, C for being
too much like Earth – call it a B overall.

WORLD AND STAR SYSTEM

Pandora is a moon of Polyphemus, a fictional gas giant orbiting Alpha
Centauri A. I’ve always wanted to know what the view would be from
the moon of a gas giant. Can you imagine a quarter of the sky being
taken up by a massive cloud-covered planet visible night or day? We
get to see it in Avatar, and since Jupiter is the king of the gods,
maybe majestic is an appropriate word to describe it. I wonder if
Cameron’s choice to set this on the moon of a gas giant wasn’t a slap
in the face to Lucas, as if to say “this is RETURN OF THE JEDI done
right.” (I know it is ambiguous in the Star Wars universe whether or
not Endor orbits a gas giant.) But what had me really geeking out is the choice of the star system.
Alpha Centauri A is perfect. First, as the closest star system to the
sun (4.37 light years), it may well be the first star we travel to.
Second, it is familiar in that you can see it with the naked eye if
you live in the southern hemisphere – it is the brightest star in
Centaurus. Actually, what appears to be a single star can be resolved
as a binary system if you use a telescope. It is Alpha Centauri A, a
bit more massive than the sun (1.1 solar masses), and Alpha Centauri
B, a bit less massive than the sun (0.9 solar masses). The choice of
G-type stars near the mass of the sun is great – they last for
billions of years – plenty of time for life to evolve. They are in an
elliptical orbit around a common center of mass, which means they come
together and drift apart over the course of one 80 year orbit. The
two stars get as close as 11 astronomical units (an AU is the average
Earth-Sun distance; 11 AU is about the distance to Saturn), and get as
far apart as 36 AU (about the distance to Pluto).
Would you see the companion star (Alpha Cen B) in the sky from
Pandora? That depends on where it is in its orbit. At the farthest
distance it would be a few hundred times the brightness of the full
Moon as seen from Earth. But your eyes are logarithmic detectors, so
it would actually only seem a few times brighter than we perceive the
Moon. At its closest approach, Alpha Cen B would be a few thousand
times as bright as we see our Moon. This is not all that bright – in
comparison, on Earth the Sun is about half a million times brighter
than the Moon. So on Pandora, if Alpha Cen B is up in the daytime
then you might not even notice it, depending on how far away it is in
the sky from Alpha Cen A. But if it is up at night (as it would be
for half the year), it would never get completely dark – the sky would
just be kind of dark blue.
Technically, there is a third star in the system, Proxima Centauri,
but it is a tiny red dwarf a huge distance, about 12,000 AU, away – it
is not even clear it is bound to the system. At any rate, it would
not be prominent in the sky as seen from Pandora. Incidentally, my
first job as a graduate student was to help calibrate the fine
guidance sensors on the Hubble Space Telescope to help my advisor look
for planets around Proxima Centauri. Sadly, we didn’t find any.
It is an interesting question as to whether planets around either
Alpha Cen A or B could exist in stable orbits that would last for
billions of years. You might think they couldn’t because the gravity
of the other star would perturb any forming planet.
However, simulations show that at least at Earth-like distances,
stable planets can form in that system.
Grade for astronomy: for the choice of star system, setting in on a
moon, and around a gas giant, Cameron gets an A+.

THE STAR’S EFFECT ON LIFE

Electromagnetic radiation comes in many forms, gamma rays, x-rays,
ultraviolet, visual, infrared, and radio. Our eyes evolved to see in
the narrow range that the sun has its peak output -- the visual band
-- and the flora and fauna of Earth evolved pigments and colors that
work at these wavelengths. But this isn’t universal -- some animals
can see a narrower region of the spectrum than us, and others see
farther into the ultraviolet or infrared. Our cornea blocks most UV
light, but bees, for example, don’t have one and can see farther into
the UV. They can see patterns in flowers that we can’t. In fact, colors are really something manufactured in our brain –
physically colors are just different wavelengths of light ranging
uniformly from short wavelengths (violet) to long (red). What we see
as blue or green or red helps us differentiate sky from grass from
blood, but to a creature from another world, all these things might
appear as the same color. In fact, you could imagine that bats might
use echolocation to “see” rough surfaces as one color and smooth
surfaces as another. So since colors are something created by our
brains and not intrinsic to the universe (only wavelengths of light
are), it is virtually certain Pandorans would see color differently
than we do.
Alpha Cen A has almost the same temperature as the Sun, but it is just
a bit hotter. As a result, the star puts out most of its light at
visual wavelengths just like the Sun. But the star’s output is only
part of the story – the oxygen and ozone in our atmosphere block much
of the ultraviolet light from the Sun, and water vapor blocks some of
the infrared light. Pandora doesn’t have an oxygen atmosphere (if the
movie mentioned what gasses it contains, I didn’t catch it), so we
might expect more of the ultraviolet light to reach the surface. The
creatures there might be able to see farther into the ultraviolet.
There might be all kinds of patterns that the inhabitants of Pandora
can see that just look blue to us. Maybe that’s which there are so
many blue colors in the film. To take this a step farther, I would
have loved to see a scene where a character sees beautiful colors or
patterns as an Avatar, only to have this beauty evaporate into a
uniform sea of blue when he sees the same vista with human eyes.
Another feature of Pandora adding to the ubiquitous shades of blue is
that bioluminescence seems to be a staple of the ecosystem. As
Massawyrm points out, this makes sense for a world that may spend days at a time
shrouded in darkness. Remember that a day occurs when Pandora rotates
on its axis. But it might take a month or so to orbit its gas giant,
which we know looms large in the sky, and could blot out the sun for
days.
Grade for the astrophysics: For the fact that this world doesn’t have
an oxygen atmosphere, and the plausible use of color, A.

PHYSICS

Since Pandora is a moon and is presumably smaller than the Earth, the
gravity would be lower. This is alluded to in the film, and creatures
do grow larger and survive falls from greater heights than you could
on Earth. I wonder if Cameron dialed in a different gravity to the
physics engine rendering everything. To my eye, for at least the
human scenes, the gravity looked just like Earth gravity, but then
again if the gravity is close the differences can be subtle.
Virtually all science fiction movies feature planets with gravity at
1g, since, of course, until now, filming has always been done on
Earth. Since here so much of the world was created inside the
computer, I would have liked to see this aspect pushed a bit farther. In one of my biggest pet peeves regarding the science of Avatar, there
is one scene where the gas giant, Polyphemus, can clearly be seen to
be rotating in the span of about a second or two. Let’s say it
rotates about a degree out of 360 degrees in those 2 seconds. That
means it makes one rotation in 720 seconds, or 12 minutes! Jupiter
takes about 10 hours to rotate. So the gas giant in Avatar rotates
about 50 times faster than Jupiter. Winds on Jupiter can exceed 100
meters per second, so the winds on Polyphemus would have to exceed
5000 m/s – this is supersonic and clearly implausible. Here’s one
case where Cameron opted for visual effect over realism, but to me the
bargain isn’t worth it. It looks unrealistic and takes me right out
of the movie. But I do like the look of the clouds on Polyphemus –
they look like a cross between Neptune and Jupiter. The highlight is
a giant storm resembling Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. That is
particularly appropriate for Polyphemus, named after a mythological
cyclops.
But my biggest beef in Cameron’s trading physics for visuals is those
goddamn floating mountains. Seriously, floating mountains? How the
hell do they stay up there? This is such an egregious flouting of the
laws of physics that surely there is some reasoning behind it.
Between the fact that Pandora seems to be sort-of at 1g, the
impossible rotation of Polyphemus, and the floating mountains, physics
is one one area AVATAR gets a marginal fail on Copernicus’ Law of
Science Fiction. But on all the other aspects of science, Cameron
gets either a pass or passes with flying colors.
The dream of interstellar travel will only become a reality far beyond
our lifetimes. But I love the fact that today I can be deeply
immersed in not just a plausible, but a compelling alien world just by
putting on a pair of 3D glasses and visiting my local theater. Even
if I have to drive 100 miles to see it in IMAX, that is nothing
compared to interstellar distances! And I love that there is a
filmmaker that plays more than lip service to the science in his
films, stimulating discussion and thought about distant worlds among
geeks everywhere. I was inspired to do astronomy after seeing STAR
WARS as a kid. I’m willing to bet that a fair fraction of tomorrow’s
astronomers will have decided to devote their life to the discovery of
new worlds because of AVATAR.


Mail Copernicus
-- Copernicus

Thanks for the enthusiastic response to the article. Thanks for all
the emails, and it is nice to see some interesting discussion in the
talkbacks (who knew?). A few updates:
People have sent links to several sources that explain many of the
questions I had. One is the pandorapedia. Another is A
Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of
Pandora. And people sent the script treatment. I have not read
the entirety of that last one yet, but the first two are interesting
reading.
Levitating mountains: As dozens of people have pointed out, the
mountains supposedly contain unobtainium, a room-temperature
superconductor. Superconductors expel magnetic field lines, and as a
result magnets can levitate above a superconductor. Here
superconducting mountains are apparently levitating over the strong
magnetic field of the moon or planet, or both. I had thought about
some kind of mechanism like that but dismissed it for two reasons:
(1) how could mountains form, stay in place, be weathered and shaped,
etc. (2) if there is unobtanium in the floating mountains, why not get
it there so as not disrupt the Na'vi. But I think I was just
short-sighted. In the case of (1), the intention is that the
mountains started out attached, but broke off and floated upwards at a
certain point, and now they sort of float around. I buy that, at
least enough for a cool movie scene. And for (2), maybe the
unobtanium in the mountains isn't the right kind, or isn't pure, or is
hard to mine. Interestingly, a geologist emailed me with another
sighting indicating the strong magnetic field of the planet: the stone
arches seen at the climax seem to be from mineral growth along
magnetic field lines. Awesome.
Plenty of people have asked where the water comes from for the
waterfalls in the floating mountains. To me, it is just like a normal
mountain, with the bottom missing. Where does the water come form in
normal mountains with waterfalls: rain and snow. Yes there was tons
of water, but have you ever been to Yosemite in the spring? When the
snow melts it all comes down at once, and it is an impressive sight.
And this is a little out of the purview of this article, but plenty of
people have also asked why the humans didn't nuke the planet from
orbit. (A) maybe they didn't bring any -- the proverbial "somebody's
gotta go back and get a shitload of dimes" problem, and (B) you people
scare me! Why doesn't the US just nuke countries we don't like? That
is not cool, man.
Planet rotation: Someone affiliated with the film who asked me not to
name them (but who ought to know) says the planet rotation scene was
intended to be time lapse. Brilliant. I'll have to see it again to
confirm that, but I'd buy it, because I think there were other shots
where the planet didn't seem to be rotating quickly.
Oxygen atmosphere: I said that Pandora doesn't have an oxygen
atmosphere, but I was wrong about that -- it does, but it has other
gasses that are poisonous to humans. Clearly Cameron, a fellow diving
and deep sea enthusiast, thought of this, because the people only need
simple gas masks to breathe, and not huge oxygen tanks.
DNA: The Pandorapedia says the Avatars don't have DNA, just something
analogous so that you can map to it. Great! Although, from my
memory, the movie implies they do have DNA. I'd need to see it again
to be sure. Maybe the character explaining it knows as much about DNA
as most people do and just got it wrong. If I had a nickel for every
time I was at a partly and someone told me that they heard that "they"
(meaning scientists) have broken the speed of light, teleported
something, etc.
Interstellar travel: From the pandorapedia: "Mission Profile: 0.46
year initial acceleration @ 1.5 g to reach 0.7 c; 5.83 years cruise @
0.7 c; 0.46 year deceleration; 1 year loiter in orbit around Pandora;
Mission Duration: 6.75 + 1.0 + 6.75 = 14.5 Earth years. However,
relativistic effects shorten the time onboard ship to slightly less
than 6 years each way."
Hmm, I don't think that calculation is quite right, but it is close
enough. To see, let's take the special relativistic part, the
cruising speed. If ET is Earth Time, ST is Ship Time, v is velocity,
and c is the speed of light, then ET=ST/SQRT(1-v^2/c^2). So
ST=5.83*SQRT(1-0.7^2)=4.1 years for the cruising. Even if you assume
there is no time dilation on the accelerating and decelerating parts,
then the trip is only 5 years, not 6. Maybe they are including the
hanging out on Pandora time. To do the calculation correctly I'd have
to drop some GR on you bitches, and I'm too lazy and you'd be bored.
70% of the speed of light is a good figure though -- it is almost
plausible! From what I've read of the ship technologies, they sound
very well thought out too.
Eyes: One of those sources mentioned that some of the creatures have
two pairs of eyes -- one visual, and one that sees in the IR for
nighttime hunting. Sweet! This is not without precedent. We have
two separately evolved "circuits" for vision in our brains -- one
primitive automatic one and another one for conscious sight. Look up
"blindsight," where people with damage to the latter circuit can't
consciously see, but can catch a ball. And of course we have two
types of cells for day / night vision in our eyes: cones that allow
you to see color when there is plenty of light, and rods that allow
you to see black and white only, but give you night vision. Try this:
put an eye patch on while you are inside for about 30 minutes, then go out where it is dark and blink between your dark and light adapted eyes. You can really see the color difference. It is awesome.

Wow, it appears that many of my nitpicks about the science were actually taken into account by the filmmakers and there are answers. I'm impressed! Hats off to Cameron and company for getting all this right. I can't wait to use this film in my introductory astronomy classes.
-Copernicus

there's a related post here

source

waiting for the post office :<

Its been around 2 months and my fenix e01 flashlight plus a couple of ebay items still have not arrived. I went to my local post office. First impression was, wow, its smaller than I imagined. Probably understandable in the age of text and email. They looked in the ledger (still not computerized) and my name wasnt there yet. They said it usually takes > 3 months if its from the states.

Sigh!!

Why console ports suck

Reasons why some console ports to the PC suck, IMHO.

* They are not optimized for PC hardware. So you find games with equivalent graphics but lower system requirements.
* Simplified controls. Again this is due to the lack of buttons on consoles. One specific example are quickslots. Some games have only 8. I've seen MMORPG's that use ~ to + and F1 to F12. And there are games that really need some more quick slots. But sometimes if done right this can result in elegant gameplay. Another example is menus. So your weapon has several functions. In the PC you would give each function a hotkey on the keyboard. With ports you press a button to bring up a menu and you choose. Its SLOW man in the heat of battle.
* Checkpoints instead of saves. Even with old old games like castle wolfenstien or doom 1, we could save anywhere. But consoles initially lacked write memory so they had checkpoints. Games could be so frustrating at high difficulty and would be easier if you could save right before or after a difficult spot. Not to mention it saves time. Save files could be archived and you could go back but some cases, you cant do that with checkpoints. Sometimes the game saves only at the start of a level. The level is divided into checkpoints but it is saved only in ram because if your PC hangs, when you start the game again, you are back to the start of the level.
* Limited save slots. With most PC games save slots are limited only by hard drive space. If you're unlucky you only have 1 save slot per user ID. The problem with that what if the game hangs and the save file is corrupted. When that happens either you use a level skip cheat or you start back at the beginning of the game. Around 6-10 slots would be ok so you could go back and repeat. Why the F*** should pc gamers be made to endure the low techness of a console that doesnt have write capability.
* Unskippable intros and cutscenes. What?? Only PC gamers have ADD?? Thank God for no intro hacks. Really frustrating combined with the checkpoint system when you have a checkpoint then a long slog through enemies then a long long cutscene then a difficult battle where you die. And you have to go through all of that again. Even more frustrating if the game hangs and you have to restart the game often. Its a poor excuse if you say that there is no esc key in consoles and you were too lazy to add the code when you ported it to PC.
* Sometimes slower to adapt new PC tech like Direct X, all in the name of compatibility with the console which is frozen in time.

To the programmers. WTF are you doing? Stop programming like it was 1980. Consoles have evolved.

Hiding something on A moon

A little scifi musing.

What If there was an alien civilization that hid an artifact on A moon (not THE moon) and expected to come back? Kind of like a pirate burying treasure. Where would they place it? Since they would not want just anybody to be able to find it placing a big obvious marker would be out of the question and it would be well hidden.

If the moon in question over the large scale had a homogenous appearance, i.e. there would be no big terrain features that can act as a marker. So for a featureless moon, there would always be 2 constant points. The north and south poles. If the moon is tidally locked, a third point, might exist, the center of the face facing the planet. But due to librations and parallax, the point may be inexact

Social networking 101 for physicians: friendster, facebook, blog tips

A very nice guide for docs to avoid mistakes

Social networking 101 for physicians

Managing the risks of Facebook, Twitter and other social media

By Eric T. Berkman

October 19, 2009

The usefulness of online social networking is undeniable and it’s no surprise that physicians are embracing it.
But lawyers and other experts warn that these tools present a minefield of legal and professional hazards for medical professionals who don’t take the utmost care in how, what and where they post.
“If you can’t do something at a cocktail party without people staring and looking at you strangely, you shouldn’t be able to do the same thing online,” says Jim Tobin, president of Ignite Social Media, a Cary, N.C., social-media agency that is developing a social-networking program for the Massachusetts Medical Society and its members.
Physicians are using these tools to discuss medical news, pick other doctors’ brains about clinical or practice-management issues, market their practices or just generally feel connected.
In June, MMS polled approximately 800 of its members and found that the usage of social media grew 50 percent in the last year, with usage by doctors aged 45 to 54 tripling.
Whether blogging, participating in open networks like Facebook and Twitter, or visiting physician-only networks such as Sermo or iMedExchange, physicians can reduce their legal risk by doing the following:

• Be mindful of patient confidentiality.

Online networking presents a risk of a doctor compromising patient information and facing a compliance action under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or a lawsuit.
Take, for example, a physician who shares a detailed anecdote about a patient on his or her personal Facebook page, or on Sermo.
The information a physician shares “needs to be generic enough that nobody can identify a patient in the course of reading a post,” says David Harlow, a Newton lawyer and health care consultant who writes the blog HealthBlawg.
Though this sounds like common sense, the potential for carelessness is always present, says Kevin Pho, an internist in Nashua, N.H., whose 5-year-old blog, KevinMD.com, is one of the most popular health care blogs on the Internet, currently boasting more than 26,000 RSS subscribers.
“The easier it is to publish something, like a [Facebook] status update or a [tweet], the easier it is to slip up and give identifying information,” says Pho, who has more than 500 Facebook fans and 14,000 followers on Twitter, a “microblogging” site where users can post 140 character “tweets” on issues of interest.
Daniel Palestrant, the Cambridge-based founder and CEO of Sermo, says the same is true for doctors posting on his site.
“Though Sermo is a secure site and we make every effort to keep information in the community, there may be situations where information is cut and pasted out or someone is motivated to pull information out of the community in one way or another,” says Palestrant, himself a physician.
Confidentiality issues may also arise when doctors allow patients to post on their websites or Facebook pages. A patient might be too open in a “wall” post and later realize he’s made his own information public. He might then blame - and perhaps sue - the doctor.
“Once a patient posts, [he or she has] essentially consented that it be public, but most [patients] won’t view it that way,” says Harlow.
There’s no guarantee such a case would hold up in court. But to be safe, Harlow advises doctors to block patient access to their personal Facebook pages, and provide clear warnings on any public sites against posting medical information.

• Remember that your patients are not your ‘friends.’

A physician who gets too close to his patients puts himself at risk.
That’s why Cambridge internist Phoebe Cushman refuses to accept Facebook “friend” requests from current or former patients.
“I just hit ‘ignore.’ …  I think it’s very important to have boundaries in the physician-patient relationship,” says Cushman, who also maintains the strictest privacy settings on her account.
That’s a good approach, says Harlow, suggesting that doctors set up a separate page representing their practice and enabling patients to become “fans.”
“This is a way of connecting and allowing folks to follow your updates without blurring that personal/professional line,” he says.

• Monitor your web presence regularly.

Harlow points out that the pervasiveness of social networking has resulted in some people transmitting all their communication through Facebook and Twitter and expecting others to be there to receive their messages.
Doctors who enable such communication without properly monitoring their sites run the risk of missing urgent messages or a patient’s medical history details and possibly facing a malpractice action for failing to respond, he says.
While social media is obviously not a reliable means of clinical communication with a doctor, it’s hard to tell where a jury’s sympathies might lie.
“There are now more than 300 million Facebook accounts,” says Harlow. “Do you run the risk of going to trial and facing a jury full of people who rely on Facebook as their primary means of communication? They might say someone should have been monitoring the account.”
David S. Szabo, a partner at Edwards, Angell, Palmer & Dodge in Boston, agrees.
“If you start using [social media] as a means of regular communication or an element in how you communicate with people, perhaps you could be charged with at least looking at it on a reasonably regular basis and being aware of information sent that way,” he says.

• Take advice from online doctors’ forums with a grain of salt.

Physician-only discussion boards like Sermo have become a valuable replacement for the traditional “curbside consult” with colleagues about complex cases.
But Harlow warns that free advice is “worth what you pay for it” and thus “should be taken with a grain of salt.” After all, relying on advice outside the standard of care could constitute malpractice.
Also, since all users post under pseudonyms, “you have to be confident that whoever’s replying [to your inquiry] is who they say they are,” says Pho.
Palestrant reiterates Sermo’s extensive physician verification process, adding that when a user clicks on another member’s profile, he or she can see the member’s specialty, the history of his activity on the site, and his rating by fellow users.
Nonetheless, Palestrant adds, physicians should of course solicit information from multiple sources, such as journals, peers, or non-physician colleagues such as nurses and physician’s assistants.

• Be aware that you’re never truly anonymous on the web.

In 2007, a Boston-area pediatrician, known as “Dr. Flea,” blogged about his ongoing med-mal defense, sharing candid musings on defense strategy, the jury, opposing counsel and the plaintiff’s case.
He thought everything was safely cloaked in anonymity until his cross-examination at trial, when plaintiff’s counsel - who had been following the blog and noting similarities - outed him to the jury. The case settled the next day.
Szabo says this is a cautionary tale that anything posted on the web can be traced back, with severe consequences.
“When you start throwing in little details, if you have any connection to someone, it may not be too tough for that person to figure out who you are,” he says.
Pho adds that anything you write on Twitter or your blog is indexed by Google and kept permanently.
“So never write anything disparaging about your hospital, patients or other doctors, because it can be found,” he says.
Further, Szabo warns that Internet service providers, websites and social-networking companies are under no obligation to resist subpoenas in a civil lawsuit. Accordingly, they might decide to produce information like an IP address or e-mail address that could identify the name of a person who posted offending content.
Finally, says Tobin, the existence of vehicles like Facebook and Twitter does not change existing copyright, slander and libel laws.
“We’re under the same restrictions we’ve always been under,” he says. “The only difference is that saying something is much easier. You can send a tweet or a Facebook status update in seconds. So you need to pause and think before you hit that ‘update’ button.”

in reference to:

"Social networking 101 for physicians"
- Social networking 101 for physicians : Mass Medical Law Report (view on Google Sidewiki)

The fictional language of James cameron's avatar

Its interesting to know that they went to the trouble of creating an entire fictional language just for a movie.
in reference to: Language Log » Some highlights of Na’vi (view on Google Sidewiki)

shattered horizon

Probably the first dx10 only game. Halo 2 doesn't count because it was only artificially locked to vista and can be hacked to run on XP. Wiki entry here.

Very interesting concept. It might give you vertigo though. And plus points to people who are reminded of Ender's game.

System requirements are pretty high

Minimum Requirements:
Shattered Horizon requires DirectX 10 on Windows Vista or Windows 7.
There is no support for Windows XP or DirectX 9.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 / AMD Athlon64 X2 5600+
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT / ATI Radeon HD 3870
GPU memory: 256MB
Hard disk space: 1.5 GB
RAM: 2GB
Sound: Windows Vista compatible sound card

Recommended Requirements:
Shattered Horizon requires DirectX 10 on Windows Vista or Windows 7.
There is no support for Windows XP or DirectX 9.


CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 / AMD Phenom II X4 940
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 / ATI Radeon HD 4870
GPU memory: 512MB
Hard disk space: 1.5GB
RAM: 2GB
Sound: Windows Vista compatible sound card

source
in reference to: No gravity, one gun, no problem: Shattered Horizon interview (view on Google Sidewiki)