Core Dump

I really tried to impress upon people ... how we cannot wait. Even now, as global warming is starting to be made manifest in the world, we have determined the climate now for the next half-century. We will not see the full effects of what we have done for decades. (NASA climate scientist) James Hansen said, if we continue on this path, then by the end of this century, we will have committed ourselves to a world that is so warm as to be practically a different planet.

There is an important sequence of numbers called "the moments of the Riemann zeta function." Although we know abstractly how to define it, mathematicians have had great difficulty explicitly calculating the numbers in the sequence. We have known since the 1920s that the first two numbers are 1 and 2, but it wasn't until a few years ago that mathematicians conjectured that the third number in the sequence may be 42—a figure greatly significant to those well-versed in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

These notes are a miscellany of grammatical rules and explanations, comments on style, and suggestions on usage I put together for my classes. Nothing here is carved in stone, and many comments are matters of personal preference — feel free to psychoanalyze me by examining my particular hangups and bêtes noires. Anyone who can resist turning my own preferences into dogma is welcome to use this HTML edition. Feedback is always welcome.

I should be clear up front: I'm not a linguist, nor a scholar of the history of the language. (If you're curious about who I am, you can look at my CV and decide whether I'm worth listening to.) Linguists are wary of "prescriptive" grammars, which set out standards of "correct" and "incorrect" usage — grammars that usually insist correctness reigned in the good old days, whereas we've been on the road to hell ever since. Professional linguists are adamant that the language isn't "declining," and that many usages censured by self-styled grammarians are in fact perfectly reasonable, whether on historical grounds, logical grounds, or both.

Wired News: The real cost of gas, you argue, is $11 per gallon. How do you get that figure?

Lester R. Brown: Part of that cost is being deferred; part is being paid now. The study that I cite is the most detailed one I've seen. It parallels in methodology the study the Centers for Disease Control did on (the) social cost of smoking cigarettes. The costs to society of smoking a pack of cigarettes they calculated at $7.18. And they included two costs: the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses and the cost of lost worker productivity from those illnesses.

In the case of the cost of a gallon of gas, they included a number of costs: the cost of treating respiratory illnesses, the damage from acid rain and climate change. And that's a very difficult thing to do. There's a quote by Oystein Dahle close to a decade ago now, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was for many years Exxon's vice president for Norway and the North Sea. He said, "Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth." That's a lot of wisdom distilled into those two sentences.

In the last two decades advances in computing technology, from processing speed to network capacity and the internet, have revolutionized the way scientists work. From sequencing genomes to monitoring the Earth's climate, many recent scientific advances would not have been possible without a parallel increase in computing power - and with revolutionary technologies such as the quantum computer edging towards reality, what will the relationship between computing and science bring us over the next 15 years?

This Nature web focus combines commentaries from leading scientists and news features analysis from journalists assessing how computing science concepts and techniques may transform mainstream science by 2020. Visit News@nature.com's newsblog to read and post comments on the future of computing.

We humans have built a creativity machine. It's the sum of three things: a few hundred million computers, a communication system connecting those computers, and some millions of human beings using those computers and communications.
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This creativity machine is the Internet. It has already changed the way we do science, most importantly by enhancing collaboration between researchers. The present-day Internet provides convenient connections between computerized labs, simulations and research databases. It also represents an enormous financial investment that is driven by the demands of hundreds of millions of consumers. As such, the total Internet software and infrastructure investment dwarfs the budgets of scientific research programmes and even of many government defence programmes. And more than any megaproject of the past, the essence of the Internet is to provide coordinated processing of information. For researchers seeking resources, these are facts worth considering.

• Always trust the system more than anyone, but nvoer trust it to be perfect.
• Verify, verify, verify. Scepticism is a way of life.
• Always expect your readers to get lost. Do everything you can to keep them on track.

The feature crew set to work and exposed an XML schema that allows developers to create their own tabs, groups, and almost a dozen different control types, far more than the set of five custom controls offered by CommandBars. Since add-ins give us markup that contains customizations, it's easy for us to fix all of the housekeeping issues: when the add-in disappears, the UI disappears with it, and then markup is also easier to localize, understand, and manage.

Computers are not "smart," in any useful sense of that term. They don't "think." They don't have "intelligence." Computers don't "know" things and they don't have any literal "memories." They're not artificially intelligent sci-fi beings like HAL 9000. Computers are boxes of circuitry, with strings, and slots for the strings. They are not alive and mentally active, they are just sitting there, ordinating. What is "ordinating," exactly? Well, if we'd invested our attention in figuring that out, instead of awkwardly struggling to make these devices think like a human brain does, then we would have successfully explored the very large set of interesting problems that computers turned out to be really good at

Given that documentation is seen by customers as part of a consumer product, given the importance of good documentation to consumers as a purchase decision factor, and given that good documentation, among other things, decreases support costs, why is there a reluctance to make the investment to develop good user support materials? The answers, of course, are neither simple nor clear-cut, and are as context-specific as the question itself. Whether the reason is that management doesn’t understand the correlation between user experience and market success, that the brutal demand for high quarterly results postpones investment in user experience activities, or simply that there is a lack of awareness of what constitutes effective documentation, the results are the same: the end user gets short-changed.

Labels: The Crazy Years

Five years ago, most of the space community considered the space elevator a far-future proposition at best. With the advent of carbon-nanotube composites and the conclusions of recent studies, the space elevator concept is moving toward mainstream acceptance. The current ribbon design has attracted considerable interest from NASA headquarters, the European Space Agency, and the U.S. Air Force. Independent evaluations by NASA and ESA are under way, and it is my belief that their findings will add substantial credibility to the program.

If the initial estimates are confirmed and a space elevator is constructed, it will open space for applications we can barely imagine. With a space elevator providing cheap, easy, low-risk access to space, people's lives on Earth could be immeasurably enhanced as the wealth of the solar system is brought to their door.

All those flame wars you read on the OS bigot websites about user interface issues focus on the wrong thing. Windows is better because it gives you more ways to resize the window. So what? That’s missing the point. The point is, does the UI respond to the user in the way in which the user expected it to respond? If it didn’t, the user is going to feel like they can't control the interface, and they're going to be unsuccessful. That's all there is to it. Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected. Tattoo this on your forehead. Backwards, so you can read it in the mirror.

For 16 years, Aviation Week & Space Technology has investigated myriad sightings of a two-stage-to-orbit system that could place a small military spaceplane in orbit. Considerable evidence supports the existence of such a highly classified system, and top Pentagon officials have hinted that it's "out there," but iron-clad confirmation that meets AW&ST standards has remained elusive. Now facing the possibility that this innovative "Blackstar" system may have been shelved, we elected to share what we've learned about it with our readers, rather than let an intriguing technological breakthrough vanish into "black world" history, known to only a few insiders. U.S. intelligence agencies may have quietly mothballed a highly classified two-stage-to-orbit spaceplane system designed in the 1980s for reconnaissance, satellite-insertion and, possibly, weapons delivery. It could be a victim of shrinking federal budgets strained by war costs, or it may not have met performance or operational goals.

All of these songs descend from a single source. Like John Henry, Paul Bunyan, Robin Hood or King Arthur, Stagger Lee is a folkloric character whose story evolved in oral transmission, a transformation of mundane then-current events into larger than life myth. The “real” Stagger Lee, if such a person can said to exist, was a man named Lee Shelton who, on Christmas night 1895, walked into a St. Louis barroom and had a quarrel with one Billy Lyons. Lee Shelton shot Billy Lyons dead in an argument over, yes, a Stetson hat.

Lee Shelton was in and out of prison for the rest of his life, which ended in 1912. By then, the song he had inspired had already splintered off into many different versions, some bearing little relation to the original events. It’s a virtual certainty that Shelton heard the songs during that time. In bars, bordellos, clubs, and prisons, he would have been witness to the evolution of a legend that he had instigated, but which soon had a life utterly independent of him. He would have seen his story outgrow him, abandon him, and forget that he had ever existed.

So is there any hope for a Serenity sequel, or another series?
You know, we didn’t exactly set the box office aflame. The DVD is doing quite well. Nobody’s said anything. I don’t rule it out, I’d love to do it, but I’m focusing on whatever’s next, as are my actors. If anybody ever calls for us to come back together, that would be a great joy, but the fact that we got to make this film is, in itself, a bit of a miracle, so you don’t ask for another one for a while.

From the side, the nearer stapler looks fine. You can easily see where the staples come out. But if you take the viewpoint of the user, directly above the stapler, you can't see where the staples come out. The lesson here is that when you design a device, take the view point of the user.

The explosions killed 117,000 people on the island, now part of Indonesia, and wiped out the tiny kingdom of Tambora, on the volcano's western flank. The fast-moving avalanche of pumice and ash buried the town under 10 feet of debris, with only 4 of its estimated 10,000 residents surviving.

A team of American and Indonesian scientists has now found remains of what it says is the "lost kingdom of Tambora."

In an announcement yesterday by the Graduate School of Oceanography of the University of Rhode Island, the scientists reported uncovering bronze bowls, ceramic pots, fine china, glass, and iron tools in gullies running through the jungle growth 15 miles from the volcano.