|
|||||
|
Less than an hour ago I cited Dr. Arthur Kantrowitz’s work on Science Courts in a Samizdata discussion, and in one of those strange and in this case saddening cases of synchronicity, I have just received an email notification that he passed away on November 29 at the age of 95. Dr. Kantrowitz was a true gentleman of Science and will be much missed by all who have ever crossed his path. I am sure others will have much more to say about his long career in the hard sciences. December 17th, 2008 | Comments are closed
 A hat tip to Counting Cats for the report. Jeff Foust has the story here. I have been waiting for this news, as have many others, for months. Peer review of the test results have shown no reason why the technology will not work, although Dr. Nebel is quick to point out that nothing in the results guarantees it either. Now… onwards to the next set of tests! December 17th, 2008 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Reason TV has a very fine lecture by Bjorn Lomberg on global warming available. Bjorn is one of the few people out there who represent a position similar to mine. Yes, it is happening; yes, there will be winners and losers… but it is not the end of the world. He shows in case after case how governments are throwing away billions upon billions of dollars, pounds, and yen for ‘solutions’ which will have virtually no effect at all. It is well worth watching. December 16th, 2008 | 104 comments - (Comments are closed)
I suppose it is a sign of advancing years, and having lost some close friends to cancer or having been scared by a close relative’s condition that the notion of a cure for the gremlin should weigh on my mind a bit more than it used to. (You are definitely getting old, Ed). I cannot help noticing, when reading Instapundit as I do every day that Glenn Reynolds has been putting up regular links to the growing use of nanotechnology in delivering cancer-busting chemicals to the body with incredible accuracy. Here’s another one. The more accurate the delivery of the drug, so the reasoning goes, the fewer the unpleasant side-effects associated with things like chemo treatments, and the greater chances of beating the cancer. The steady trickle of news items and articles has yet to become a flood, but I have this sense that the flood may be pretty close. When I read Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler back whenever it was, the idea of tiny nanobots being used to treat cancer was, then, still on the edge of what folk thought might be possible. There is a way to go yet but it is a mark of how certain stories get below the radar of current events that nano-medicine has crept up on us so quickly, rather as the internet did about 20-odd years ago. Faster please! December 9th, 2008 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
In an electronics market in China last month, I found these intriguing items for sale. 
Okay, “MP3” I understand. The MPEG-1 standard for digital media storage and transmission contained three audio formats. These were MPEG-1 audio layers 1, 2 and 3. Of these, layer 3 provided the highest audio quality, became the standard for compressed digital audio, and “MPEG-1 layer 3” became abbreviated to “MP3”. “MP4” is slightly more problematic. The successor standard to MPEG-1 was MPEG-2. MPEG-2 is very important, but mainly because it contains much more advanced video formats than MPEG-1. DVDs and most digital television applications use MPEG-2 video. In terms of audio, MPEG-2 contains the three existing formats from MPEG-1 (including MP3) and a more advanced format called Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). Perhaps confusingly, AAC is very seldom used with MPEG-2 video, which is much more frequently paired with the MPEG-1 audio formats, or with Dolby AC-3 (which is not part of any of the MPEG standards). However, AAC is also part of the MPEG-4 family of standards. (There is no MPEG-3). Due partly to AAC being the favourite audio standard of Apple, AAC is commonly paired with the video standards of MPEG-4, the two most common of which are the Advanced Simple Profile (MPEG-4 part 2) and the now favoured Advanced Video Coding (MPEG-4 part 10, known also as ITU-T H.264). This partnering between AAC and the MPEG-4 family of standards can mean that AAC audio is sometimes referred to as “MP4 audio”, with “MP4” as an abbreviation of “MPEG-4”, even though AAC as a format technically preceded MPEG-4. In addition, media of this form is often encoded using the MPEG-4 part 14 container format, which usually has the file suffix “.mp4”. Thus it makes a certain amount of sense for an AAC or MPEG-4 capable media player to be referred to as an “MP4 player”. In this case the “4” in MP4 means something different to the “3” in MP3, but there is some logic to it. As to what an MP5 player might be, that is on a par with the European commission announcing that we must take steps to “put Europe into the lead of the transition to Web 3.0”, I fear. Sadly, I think it is unlikely that they are selling these. December 6th, 2008 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have still not seen any results from the testing earlier this year, but those results must have been at least passingly interesting, because the Navy is funding further development. The Bussard Fusion device, the Polywell, uses pure electrostatic containment and has more in common with the old vacuum tube (or valves as they were know over here) than it does with the multi-billion dollar electromagnetic confinement projects most people are familiar with. It is still far from certain the technology will pan out, but it has gone much further into the the real hardware realm than any other low cost fusion technology to date. If this device does work, what can we do with it? What impacts do you think a device would have which could produce 10 MW of electricity from a 1.5 meter sphere and (initially) perhaps a truckload of auxiliary gear? Submarines, aircraft carriers, laser cannon power systems, entire towns with self-sufficiency in power, ion engines for outer planet exploration, power for lunar and Mars settlements… What can you come up with? December 4th, 2008 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I just love gadgets, and this has to be one of the funniest. Ideal for bloggers at breakfast. November 27th, 2008 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today I am going to do duty as a background extra in a short vampire movie that a friend of mine is starring in. I am to be one of a number of diners in a restaurant. I won’t be paid but I will be fed, and I already know that it’s a very good restaurant because I’ve already been there before. Today I got a look at the email sent out by the production to all whom it concerned, about today’s activities. This was, for me, a glimpse into a whole new world of complexity and managerial drive. Here, just as a tiny for-instance (there are three whole pages of stuff like this), is a list of the kit that will be used by the DOP/Grip/Lighting Department:
I am looking forward greatly to seeing what this all looks like in practice. I suspect that, in reality, it won’t amount to very much at all. My favourite is the “Manfrotto Fig-Rig”. Time was, when faced with a splendid name like that, you just read and wondered. What kind of Rig would that be? And why “Fig”? But this is the age of the internet, and I can immediately tell you the answer:
So hats off to Manfrotto, and it is called “Fig” after Figgis.  This piece of kit costs around £150 quid. I still don’t quite get how it works, but here’s hoping that I find out. November 21st, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
These are all internet problems and [internet users] think someone should do something about it. Although many internet users think the government should keep out of the internet, I suggest to you that most ordinary people who just use the internet like they use the banking system or the trains think that the government should make sure it all works properly for them and that bad things get stopped from happening. – David Hendon, Director, Business Relations 2, Business Group , Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, speaking to the registrars’ meeting of Nominet. Imagine, if the government regulated it, then the internet would run as well as the banking system and bad things would get stopped from happening. This was a speech made yesterday. (Hat-tip: The Register) November 20th, 2008 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
I had a look at this test and think I would do reasonably okay. The only flaw in PM’s headline is that it refers to skills that men should know, but I would have thought this applies as much to women. As my wife likes to point out, she’s much smarter at changing a tyre on a car than most men we know. November 9th, 2008 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Politics trundles on and the more you pay attention to it the more depressed you are going to get, so what I like to do instead is look at gadgets. Gadgets aren’t everything. An affordable mobile phone is scant consolation if your ludicrously unaffordable house has just been repossessed. Flat screen televisions are only as good as the stuff that’s on them. Cool cars only provide escape from the cares of city life in car commercials, not in cities. Nevertheless, gadgets are still being done well, and every now and again I like to pick out a new one and praise it on Samizdata, both for its own beautiful sake, and because doing this makes the point that life would be so much better if everything (not just gadgets) was done like that, by grasping capitalists in competition with one another instead of by tyrannically pompous bunglers who are clever only at winning elections or at sucking up to such people. The last such gadget that I got excited about here was the Asus Eee-PC, which I now happily possess, and am gradually finding more uses for. And now, I offer you the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1, which is a digital camera, which looks like this:  It doesn’t look anything very special, or very different, does it? And for many people it won’t be. For all those Real Photographers squinting into their optical viewfinders to get the perfect shot with their brick-like Canon or Nikon DSLRs, the G1 would be a severe come-down, because the G1 doesn’t have an optical viewfinder. But for that vast tribe of cheaper and more cheerful digital snappers who prefer cameras that don’t weigh so much, the fact that the G1 has no optical viewfinder is exactly the point. We Billion Monkeys, as I like to call us, look at all those Real Photographers with their clunky black contraptions and we say to ourselves, yes, I’d love my pictures to be as good as theirs are, and it would certainly be nice to be able to use lots of different lenses the way they do, but really, does a camera have to be that big to be that good? The thing is – from where we Billion Monkeys stand, sit or crouch – DSLRs look like a relic of the analog age, like those weird early steam ships that also had sails on them. DSLR stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex, and this refers to the fact – commenters will doubtless correct me to the degree to which I am, I am sure, somewhat-to-completely wrong – that in order for the optical viewfinder to be an accurate foretaste of the picture being attempted, the light that enters a DSLR has to be divided up and sent off to two different places, one of them being the optical viewfinder and the other being the magical electronic surface that turns the light into a digital picture. This process involves … well, it involves a lot of space and a lot of complication. So, the G1 does away with the the optical viewfinder. You can still squint through an eyepiece if you really want to, but what you see is a digital picture, not a merely optical one. More conveniently, you can see the digital picture beforehand on a small screen, which, as with the best little digital cameras, twiddles, and hence lets you take pictures that you can still see even when you are holding the camera way above your head or way down in front of your private parts. Most DSLRs still only show you the picture on their screens afterwards, but the latest ones also have these see-the-picture-beforehand screens, but this combining of optical and digital previewing all adds to the size and the expense. What the G1 does is put all its pre-viewing and post-viewing eggs in the one digital basket. → Continue reading: The Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 is a glimpse of a different and better world November 6th, 2008 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
These pictures are pretty cleverly done. (Via Andy Ross). October 31st, 2008 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||