bascule

There is a massive tension, and most strings are roughly Planck length. As to the interrelationship between the two I have no comment.

Laptops (and the iPod) are Apple's bread and butter. That's obviously why he was so obsessive about computational power per watt during his keynote. That's the only reason why IBM's roadmap looks so unimpressive; they have absolutely nothing to offer Apple in the laptop market, and are moving more towards massive parallelism with Cell.

And for those of you talking about where to get hydrogen, our best bet is from coal, not electrolysis: http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/01/carbon_seq/2b2.pdf

Researching hydrogen isn't a bad thing. Not pushing E-85 is. E-85 is a fuel any existing gasoline vehicle today can run on with only slight modification. There's absolutely no reason why every car being manufactured today isn't mandated to support E-85 and other non-gasoline hydrocarbon fuels. Furthermore, E-85 is currently selling for approximately $1.50/gallon versus $2+/gal in most areas.

As I said before, Cell is the answer... except for notebooks, which sadly happens to be Apple's bread and butter. A shame.

Notice I said dual core... the Pentium D has 230 million transistors. Read harder, Homer. You're still correct though, they're roughly equal with the Pentium D having slightly fewer. However, the point still stands that the Cell processor consumes less power and provides an order of magnitude more theoretical GFLOPS.

http://rodan.physics.ucla.edu/pyrofusion/ Paper and supplemental materials available at: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7037/suppinfo/nature03575.html Christian Science Monitory story at: http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/2005/0606/p25s01-stss.html

However, Cell uses less power than the dual core P4, has fewer transistors, and an order of magnitude more GFLOPS. At its heart is a PowerPC core which will be clocked, in the PS3 at least, at 3.2GHz. It's certainly a much better way to go... for everything except notebooks. Given his obsession over computational power per watt, it's pretty clear the problem is exclusively with notebooks. Apple is primarily a notebook and iPod company, and they haven't managed to squeeze the G5 into a notebook. The Freescale processors just aren't up to par. And getting Cell into a notebook is likely an insurmountable challenge. Apple clearly just wants to go with someone oriented at making the most powerful notebook processors available, and the Pentium M is probably Intel's greatest hit; a well designed core for notebook and other low power systems which has sold quite well. In that respect it's probably Intel's best product, and certainly the only area where they're truly ahead of AMD. So, as an enterprise/scientific consumer of Apple products, we get screwed so Apple can have some fancy high performance Pentium M notebooks. I'm a little miffed. Especially after reading the "Little endian, get used to it!" section in the Universal Binary Programming guidelines Apple just released

Step one: Require all cars manufactured/sold in the US be Flexible Fuel Vehicles by <insert arbitrary cutoff date here after feasibility research> Step two: Actively promote ethanol fuels such as E-85. Offer tax incentives to gas stations willing to carry E-85 in addition to gasoline. Offer tax incentives to individuals who have their engines of their current cars modified to support E-85. Instead, Bush is researching hydrogen cars, a technology which won't be feasible for public consumption for the next 30 years (and thus poses no immediate threat to oil companies)

I'm trying to decide if this is the single stupidest thing Apple has ever done. I'm going to have to go with "yes"

I think you're talking about the viewpoint of the philosophical construct of LaPlace's Demon, a creature that exists beyond spacetime which has a gestalt view but therefore sees the structure as its immutable whole and as it is not acting within it has no way to alter it.

Hmm, perhaps this isn't such a big worry after all: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/health/05cnd-virus.html?hp&ex=1118030400&en=008f04349c604d5e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

This seems an awful lot like an old Maxis title, Unnatural Selection

...can they not be defined as embracers of novelty versus embracers of the status quo? And with evolution traditionally favoring useful novelty, will humanity not continue to evolve to be more liberal?

Close... the magnetic field of the sun will flip, not earth. This just happened a few years ago; it happens on a regular cycle.

I think it's easiest to think of them as strings vibrating in a Calabi-Yau space and thus exhibiting both particle-like and wave-like behavior simultaneously, but maybe that's just me

Would you really prefer silent space battles? What would they do with all their fancy THX equipment then? As far as the "sound in space" issue goes, I think a little suspension of disbelief is in order, as otherwise the movie would be rather boring.

Well, even if you don't go by kill count, the hippo is still one of the most dangerous. How many other animals can you think of that can literally bite off your head?

The problems with studying the microengineering of the brain lie in the fact that it varies so much from individual to individual thanks to the brain's ability to reorder and rearrange itself and that multiple functions are implemented in the same location and the overlaps make decoding brain function rather confusing. Combine this with the fact that there's a hundred billion neurons to consider and you have yourself a rather difficult problem...

I think it would prove a rather foolhardy exercise to attempt to surmise the limits of ambiogenesis. We have one case study to work off of and that's obviously not a lot to go on

If you'd really like to know how nerve impulses work you would do yourself well to read Hodgkin and Huxley's papers, for which they were awarded the Nobel prize in 1963: http://neuron.duke.edu/niasite/nia2000/neurolab/pdf/h&hk1952.pdf http://neuron.duke.edu/niasite/nia2000/neurolab/pdf/h&h1952a.pdf http://neuron.duke.edu/niasite/nia2000/neurolab/pdf/h&h1952b.pdf http://neuron.duke.edu/niasite/nia2000/neurolab/pdf/h&h1952c.pdf http://neuron.duke.edu/niasite/nia2000/neurolab/pdf/h&h1952d.pdf

In inflationary cosmology the "beginning", whatever it may be, happened before the Big Bang...

No, but he certainly didn't so anything to prevent it, even though he had concise, spot-on intelligence over a month in advance spelling out the entire 9/11 formula. This is page 2 of the August 6th "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike In US" Presidential Daily Briefing:

Tie dye, birkenstocks, and cammo. Oh yeah

It'd be awesome... if it were real. However I'd be more apt to trust a peer reviewed journal than "cosmoscode.com"