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7695. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 11/22/2008 8:11:16 PM 
7696. magoseph - 12/11/2008 2:51:03 PM Forty years ago, geeks: stanford.edu
Notable moments in mouse history
1963: Bill English constructs first mouse prototype based on Douglas Engelbart’s sketches. This mouse uses two perpendicular wheels attached to analog potentiometers to track movement. The first mouse has only one button, but more are to come.
1968: Douglas Engelbart gives a 90-minute demonstration on December 9 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. Among other things, it showcases a refined SRI mouse with three buttons.
THE DEMO
On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.
7697. alistairconnor - 12/11/2008 3:28:28 PM Mago :
I have a friend in NZ who was (according to her) babysitted in California by "the guy who invented the mouse". 7698. alistairconnor - 12/11/2008 3:35:01 PM Steven Chu, Obama's excellent choice for Energy Secretary :
(cribbed from a blog, I agree)
Nuclear has to be a necessary part of the portfolio," Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, said during the annual economic summit organized by Stanford University.
"The fear of radiation shouldn't even enter into this, he said. "Coal is very, very bad."
A very good choice
Chu was also involved with biofuels: Researchers such as Caltech's Simon have been analyzing microbes extracted from the termite's digestive system, looking for the enzymes that enable the bugs to turn wood cellulose into sugars.
... Chu is peak oil aware :
3 megabyte powerpoint from 2005
slide 15 and 16 show peak oil. "world production predicted to peak in 10-40 years" from 2004 when the stats referred to in the slide
"energy conservation can lengthen time by a factor of about 2 but the fundamental problem remains"
In 2007, 2008. Helios project replacing oil with solar and advanced biofuels
Steven Chu signed (Aug 2008) a nuclear energy position document along with the other directors of the national labs. The position was : A coherent long term nuclear power strategy is needed and nuclear power is a major and essential part of solving our energy problems.
-maximize current reactors (plant life extensions, uprate)
-deploy advanced light water reactors
-license Yucca mountain and research advanced fuel management
-aggressive R&D on advanced reactors
7699. magoseph - 12/11/2008 4:43:03 PM Ali,that's exciting about your friend. I spent much time this morning reading about Chu after I read his autobiography here:
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1997, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1998. This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Excerpt: In 1950, we settled in Garden City, New York, a bedroom community within commuting distance of Brooklyn Polytechnic. There were only two other Chinese families in this town of 25,000, but to our parents, the determining factor was the quality of the public school system. Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'être. Virtually all of our aunts and uncles had Ph.D.'s in science or engineering, and it was taken for granted that the next generation of Chu's were to follow the family tradition. When the dust had settled, my two brothers and four cousins collected three MDs, four Ph.D.s and a law degree. I could manage only a single advanced degree.
In this family of accomplished scholars, I was to become the academic black sheep. I performed adequately at school, but in comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the highest cumulative average for our high school, my performance was decidedly mediocre. I studied, but not in a particularly efficient manner. Occasionally, I would focus on a particular school project and become obsessed with, what seemed to my mother, to be trivial details instead of apportioning the time I spent on school work in a more efficient way.
The paragraphs that follow this excerpt concerning his teachers and professors are particularly interesting to me. 7700. magoseph - 12/11/2008 4:46:38 PM The first two sentences and the last one are mine, thanks to our expert, Ali, our chief geek. 7701. thoughtful - 12/13/2008 5:40:59 PM So we met with yet another a/v person last night to discuss the audio video home security situation for our new house and are extremely unhappy.
He started out like the first guy offering us a great system for "only" $40,000 +
He's nuts
So I explained what I'm looking for and got it down to probably in the realm of $15-20k, but that still seems excessive.
I'm thinking of trashing the whole idea...getting just a security system and then having the electrician pull the CATV wires where we want them and leave it at that...individually we can handle the surround sound and go wireless in the house and be done with it.
My extreme frustration is that somehow, with all this electronic wizardry, getting a system that is smart, simple, and easy to install/operate and inexpensive by this the 21st century should be a done deal. Instead it seems it's only gotten more expensive, more complicated, and further from end-user friendliness than ever!
Garrrr! 7702. wonkers2 - 12/13/2008 6:12:56 PM Our security system consists of secure locks on the doors and motion detector-actuated outside lights. Also we use timers to turn several inside lights on when we aren't home. We live in a low-crime suburb. Total cost under $50. 7703. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 12/16/2008 5:00:22 AM Assault on Science: Hall of Fame
7704. wonkers2 - 12/16/2008 6:40:11 AM Thanks, Wiz. I was surprised to see that Ben Stein won an "assault on science" award. I wasn't aware of that side of him. He doesn't go into intelligent design in his NYT columns. 7705. wabbit - 1/24/2009 7:50:52 PM The Impossible Project
I don't know if these folks will ever make a profit, or break even for that matter, but I wish them well. It was fun to play with the emulsions. 7706. alistairconnor - 1/26/2009 7:37:34 PM There is also the world's last VHS tape factory which has just closed down, in southwestern France, if anyone wants to buy that...
Probably doesn't have the same sentimental value. 7707. iiibbb - 2/2/2009 11:26:02 PM
Protein synthesis as interpreted by people on something. 7708. arkymalarky - 2/3/2009 4:14:37 AM Just saw Thoughtful's post. We have a gun and dogs, but we have a good friend who does video cameras for cheap. Motion lights would be hard out here. All of which reminds me, I hate those Brinks fear-mongering commercials. 7709. iiibbb - 2/3/2009 6:25:50 AM Not just because of the fear-mongering... I just start thinking "stab stab stab stab stab". How's Brink's gonna stop that? 7710. robertjayb - 2/15/2009 3:45:34 AM Thought I was feeling a bit warm...(Reuters)
CHICAGO (Reuters) - The climate is heating up far faster than scientists had predicted, spurred by sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries like China and India, a top climate scientist said on Saturday.
"The consequence of that is we are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously," Chris Field, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
Field said "the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious" than any of the climate predictions in the IPCC's fourth assessment report called "Climate Change 2007."
Come back, Al Gore. All is forgiven...
7711. alistairconnor - 2/17/2009 11:39:14 AM Well, I was just thinking that a really deep recession, with a precipitous decline in manufacturing in China and India, might give us a bit of a climate reprieve. (you do realize, Robt, that the current "cold snap" is all about La Niña plus sunspots? I'll explain one of these days)
On the other hand, less industrial smoke from Asia might well have the opposite effect : coal smoke in particular creates a "global dimming" effect that literally blocks out the sun and has a marked cooling effect on regional climates. 7712. thoughtful - 2/17/2009 8:31:21 PM I don't know why you are worried about gcc...after all the world will end in 2012. The Mayan calendar ends in 2012, St. Malachy's list of popes ends with the guy after Pope Benedict, and a very big solar maximum is expected to be reached on 2012 which means our entire electrical grid can be wiped out by one large solar storm, helped by the earth's weaker magnetic field as it enters a phase of reversing magnetic poles. 7713. alistairconnor - 2/24/2009 12:30:50 PM Here ya go, Robt and Tful :
2008 was the COLDEST YEAR OF THE CENTURY!! ... and the ninth warmest since records started in 1880...
“Given our expectation that the next El Niño will begin this year or in 2010, it still seems likely that a new global surface air temperature record will be set within the next one to two years, despite the moderate cooling effect of reduced solar irradiance,” said James Hansen, director of GISS. The Sun is just passing through solar minimum, the low point in its 10- to 12-year cycle of electromagnetic activity, when it transmits its lowest amount of radiant energy toward Earth.
So if Con's magnolia tree survives this winter, it will surely flourish. 7714. robertjayb - 3/12/2009 4:09:11 AM MIT claims better battery...
CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. engineers have found a way to make lithium batteries that are smaller, lighter, longer lasting and capable of recharging in seconds.
The researchers believe the quick-charging batteries could open up new applications, including better batteries for electric cars.
And because they use older materials in a new way, the batteries could be available for sale in two to three years, a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
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