According to the article, our photoreceptors respond to four different wavelengths, but our lenses block the lower wavelengths (the shaded portions in the picture). Surgical replacement of biological lenses with more transparent ones might allow us to see into the UV A range. - Sanjeev Singh via Bookmarklet
FriendFeed is slowly discovering all the links that I've been collecting for my future blog post, “We are all color blind.” - Amit Patel
This appeals to be in a bizarre fashion. - Jerry Welch
"Note that the above optical density is for a human lens of about 5 mm thickness. The optical density is proportional to the thickness of the lens. As will become apparent below, smaller animals have better ultraviolet visibility than humans because of their thinner lens. Larger animals have even less sensitivity in the ultraviolet and even blue regions for the same reason." - bob
And the fourth color look like pea soup? ;-) - Jim Norris
Yeah but I'm guessing the lens blocks UV A for a reason, which has something to do with keeping your retinas from being fried. Just a guess though ;-) - Karim
How would we process the data, though? (For that matter, how do X-chromosome heterozygous tetrachomats process the data?) Our retina and visual pipeline is pretty set up for trichromacy. - ⓞnor
nor, that's interesting, where could I learn more about "our retina and visual pipeline is pretty set up for trichromacy"? - Jason Wehmhoener
j1m probably has some more technical references, but I very highly recommend reading http://www.handprint.com/HP/WC... if you are at all into geeking out about the fundamentals of color. From http://www.handprint.com/HP/WC...: "Evolution could arrive at a more complex visual system, but it would require modifying a visual cortex specialized to receive and interpret the three cone outputs; adding a fourth cone would mean reengineering the brain as well." - ⓞnor
So has anyone had these new lenses installed? I thought that was a relatively common procedure. Maybe they use uv blocking replacements? - Paul Buchheit
I've heard of experiments where people (probably Army "volunteers") had their vision extended into near-UV, but with the predicted retina-burning results. - Gabe Schaffer
Cataract surgery and the use of replacement intraocular lenses has been around for a while. I am not sure, but I am under the impression that originally people were encouraged to wear sunglasses or UV-blocking lenses to block UV, though lately the replacement lenses seem to block UV (see http://archopht.ama-assn.org/c...). This is to prevent retinal damage. - Karim
There is a fascinating article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/scie... that confirms my suspicions that UV looks like the color white under a black light: whiter than white, tinged with blue or violet. If you have ever seen someone's clothes or teeth glowing under a blacklight, you might have an idea what being able to see into the near UV is like. - Karim
I am not of the opinion that a fourth cone would require re-engineering the brain, so much as it might involve co-opting the existing channels. UV might be perceived as a change in brightness (luminance) rather than a new color (chroma). - Karim
paul, egnor: the studies that this article refers to involved people who had their lense in one eye replaced. One of the investigators is himself akaphic and can see UV: http://starklab.slu.edu/humanU... Karim's link is good too. - Sanjeev Singh
@Karim, the problem is that the perception of brightness will continue to be needed for (a drum roll) actual brightness. - j1m
:-D good point, j1m. i guess i am thinking of UV looking "unnaturally" bright, glowing, the way the color white does under a blacklight. so the perception of UV would be of things being radioactive ;-) just a guess, mind you... - Karim
I think you might actually need to have one normal eye to see uv light: you'd need to compare the differences between the eyes and if your UV eye sees a whitish blue that the normal eye doesn't, then it's UV. - Sanjeev Singh
Well, think about how you see violet -- you don't need a violet-sensitive and a non-violet-sensitive eye, just a violet-sensitive cone, whose signal can be compared to a few non-violet-sensitive cones a few microns away from it. - j1m
From the sound of it, there is no UV cone, it's just that the regular cones are uv sensitive (though the blue more so), which is why it looks like a bluish white. - Paul Buchheit
A good example of how to make simple code complicated. The simple if-then-else becomes so busy you now need a diagram (scroll down) to show you what is going on. - Sanjeev Singh via Bookmarklet
Sanjeev - sad thing is, the Ant guys knew that when they started and purposely avoided offering true control constructs. The problem is that while they built a great set of APIs and java class utilities, they tried to stick to an XML language which just wouldn't scale beyond basic build layouts. What someone should do is take all the Ant goodies they've built up and just roll it up in something like Groovy or BeanShell... perhaps http://www.gradle.org/ is it? - Patrick Lightbody
don't write ant scripts that require if/then/else - simple - Dave Hodson
classic case of, "if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" - Karim
"A theory often put forward to explain some of the most spectacular UFO sightings is that they might be prototype aircraft or UAVs. Of course, at any time we will be test flying various things that you won't see at the Farnborough airshow for several years, but the bottom line is that we test fly such things in certain areas so at least within government we can differentiate between black projects and UFOs. In view of the controversy about Aurora (an alleged hypersonic replacement for the SR-71 Blackbird) we did, in the case of the March 1993 UFO sightings, raise the issue with the US authorities, through the British Embassy in Washington. Was it possible that something had gone wrong with the normal processes for overflight of another country and could our UFO sightings be attributable to some US prototype? The answer I got back was extraordinary." - Sanjeev Singh via Bookmarklet
continued... "The Americans had been having their own sightings of these large, triangular-shaped UFOs and wanted to know if the RAF might have such a craft, capable of moving from a virtual hover to speeds of several thousand mph in an instant. We wish we had! The interesting thing about this was that somebody in the US was still clearly taking an interest in UFOs, despite the apparent disengagement from the subject in 1969 with the closing down of Project Blue Book. Sadly, a letter to the US Embassy about Aurora was the only document missing from the casefile released to Steel Spyda following their FOIA request for documents relating to the March 1993 UFO sightings. - Sanjeev Singh
This is Nick Pope, former head of UFO investigations for the Ministry of Defence, UK. I just learned (belatedly) that the MOD is releasing all their UFO-related files to the public. http://nationalarchives.gov.uk... Unfortunately they're not free downloads anymore. - Sanjeev Singh
Read Richard Dolan's UFOs and the National Security State http://tinyurl.com/64nuul and you may begin to suspect that something significant might be going on here. - Sean McBride
one-clicked. Thanks Sean. It seems weird that people can believe in evolution but not that other advanced alien civilizations exist (like Kurzweil). I think it's more likely that his assumption that "the first civilization to reach the singularity will take over the universe" is flawed. - Sanjeev Singh
so are the fancy-pants aliens following this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... The Prime Directive dictates that there can be no interference with the internal affairs of other civilizations, consistent with the historical real world concept of Westphalian sovereignty. It has special implications, however, for civilizations that have not yet developed the technology for interstellar spaceflight ("pre-warp"), since no primitive culture can be given or exposed to any information regarding advanced technology or the existence of extraplanetary civilizations, lest this exposure alter the natural development of the civilization. - bob
The singularity already happened, and we are inside of it. - Paul Buchheit via fftogo
although it is vaguely possible aliens are visiting with awesome ships, it seems more likely to be more the product of the big-foot effect. - bob
Robbie, the big foot effect won't leave radar traces (maybe not this particular incident, but in others). - Sanjeev Singh
Hmm...Do these UFO sightings coincide with the appearance of nearby crop circles? - Gabe Schaffer
perhaps, but all the information is pretty debatable and there are a lot of unknowns about the type of people who are collecting it - there seems to be a lot more big-foot style evidence than solid radar-trace type evidence - bob
gabe, there were! (of a type) "The witnesses then described their absolute astonishment at seeing all the cows standing in a circular formation in the middle of the field, all completely silent." - bob
Sanjeev -- the Kurzweil thesis on this particular aspect of the Singularity doesn't feel right to me. My instinct is that the universe is teeming with a wild variety of life forms, many of them much more technologically advanced than we are. Nothing would surprise me less than the reality that some of them may have visited, or are now visiting, our tiny planet. What I found most striking about the Dolan book was the sheer mass of reports from highly reliable eyewitnesses, often corroborated by radar. Something's up. - Sean McBride
space might well be teeming with life but its also (as i hear it) rather large and spread out - and, unless travel suddenly gets a lot cheaper with technology it seems like anything going through all the trouble to visit earth would probably do more than just fly by, scan a few cows, etc - also, i think people tend to overestimate government's competence at covering things up (or anything else for that matter) - bob
bob -- it's quite possible (probable, actually) that many life forms have developed technologies far more advanced than our own. As to what they might be up to, or how they operate, projecting human habits and motives on species that are very different from us and much more intelligent than we are will not take one very far. (How well do ants or gnats understand human beings?) Regarding government cover-ups: read Dolan's book. Governments often do run successful cover-ups. - Sean McBride
bob, the cover up is that the US government keeps saying "there's nothing to see here" instead of admitting that there appear to be craft of unknown origin occasionally operating in our airspace. This is different than saying "we know aliens exist, but lets just pretend they don't". They might not actually be aliens, maybe they are visitors from the distant future or past. - Sanjeev Singh
true, just about anything is possible, but its still a lot of things to line up, potentially jumping through narrow hoops when much wider hoops are available - Fry: Incredible. This place is just like the Ancient Egypt of my day.
Osiran Slavemaster: That is no coincidence, for our people visited your Egypt thousands of years ago.
Fry: I knew it! Insane theories, one; regular theories, a billion.
Osiran Slavemaster: We learned many things from the mighty Egyptians, such as pyramid building, space travel, and how to prepare our dead so as to scare Abbott and Costello.
Fry: Also, Wolfman. - bob
Here's the basic situation: we've got a huge collection of UFO reports from highly reliable eyewitnesses, often corroborated by radar and photographic evidence. Governments and military and intelligence establishments around the world have been paying close attention to this phenomenon since the 1940s. The behavior of these objects greatly exceeds the abilities of human technologies. The subject has been heavily censored by governments and the mainstream media. So: what's the deal. - Sean McBride
Does anyone here find the testimony on UFOs in this video to be NOT reliable or credible? If so, why? UFO Alien Disclosure Project pt 1 http://tinyurl.com/6d9jfk - Sean McBride
"Scraping action produced piles of scrapings at the bottom of a trench on Monday, but did not get the material into its scoop, information returned from Mars on Monday night confirmed. The piles of scrapings produced were smaller than previous piles dug by Phoenix, which made it difficult to collect the material into the Robotic Arm scoop......It's like trying to pick up dust with a dustpan, but without a broom". Maybe they should have packed a broom? :) - Sanjeev Singh via Bookmarklet
yeah its surprising that they are having so much trouble with this - this seems like the sort of thing you could test pretty easily on earth, digging... - bob
Sounds like Diane got pushed out mainly because she didn't get along with Joe Tucci. I wonder if it will be weird for Mendel Rosenblum to work with Maritz (assuming he's still active at VMware). - Sanjeev Singh via Bookmarklet
"The solitary medusa of this species can revert to its polyp stage after becoming sexually mature (Bavestrello et al., 1992; Piraino et al., 1996). In the laboratory, 100% of these medusae regularly undergo this change. Thus, it is possible that organismic death does not occur in this species!" - Sanjeev Singh via Bookmarklet
Two thumbs up. Reshared from pts. An interesting discussion of how weird our financial system is and possible ways to fix it (no, gold isn't the answer). - Sanjeev Singh
My best guess, since it looks like it runs for a little while before showing the error page. Also, the same query with one less zero works fine. - Sanjeev Singh
I got a 403 Forbidden error page, saying the query looked similar to automated searches performed by computer programs. Really weird. - Voyagerfan5761
"Sorry, but looks like an automated search" here too. I wonder how they decide.. - Jonathan Tang
like how the error comes from sorry.google.com. - Karim
I wonder when google is going to put an updated logo on their error pages. At least I know where to go when I want to feel nostalgia for 1998. - Calvin Lough
The logo isn't out of date -- it's text. For some reason, it was decided that error pages couldn't have images. - Paul Buchheit
Numrange queries are probably an order of magnitude more expensive than the average query, since they have to either merge all the terms that fall in that range, or use some alternative indexing scheme that eats up memory. - Jim Norris
I think numrange uses some exponential scheme so that it only has to search O(lg n) terms. It's probably only used by people searching for credit card numbers though... - Paul Buchheit
I still want to see results past 1,000. - Louis Gray
Really? I thought it was all done in MySQL... - Jim Norris
I use it to find Fedex tracking numbers. I like to know that everyone got their stuff okay. - DeWitt Clinton
I've seen this error before, I was searching for "Powered by phpbb" (for good reasons though ;) ) - Hassan Ibraheem
Mitch Kapor claims no computer will pass the turing test by 2029. Ray Kurzweil disagrees. (and other interesting bets) Each bet includes reasons for and against. I have my money on Kurzweil. - Sanjeev Singh
Google probably has more computing power than Lt Cmdr Data, and yet is nowhere near as smart. I think it'll take more than computing power. - Amit Patel
Amit, you only need to fool a human judge, you don't actually have to create AI :). I suspect a relatively dumb (but fast) machine with access to all the world's data (web pages, blogs, tweets, etc.) might eventually fool most people. - Sanjeev Singh
numactl is a useful little utility for NUMA opteron servers. "Writing memory on the SUMA configuration in the 8 concurrent memhammer case demonstrated latencies on order of 156ns but dropped 38% to 97ns by switching to NUMA and using the Linux 2.6 NUMA API" - Sanjeev Singh
Chris, they're also FriendFeeders. :) Mark, we work on whatever is important, though there are areas people gravitate to based on interest and skill. - Sanjeev Singh
I was setting you up. You're suppose to say an ex-Googler. :) - Chris White
So, I'm bad at math, but who's the missing FriendFeeder? :)
1 / 8.0 =
0.125
, exGoogle = ['kevin', 'paul', 'sanjeev', 'bret', 'jim', 'ana', 'tudor']
, len(exGoogle) =
7 - Chris White
A full charge only costs $4 and takes you almost 100 miles. - Sanjeev Singh
They should give it regenerative breaking so that you can find a good thermal or something and use that to recharge the battery in-flight. - Paul Buchheit
Did you know the ILA 2008 is this weekend? I'm off to go there in a few minutes. Thanks for putting me in the mood. - Ole Begemann
"It would have been the first new drug for prostate cancer in 20 years, and an outside panel of cancer experts chosen by the FDA recommended approval, but the agency asked for another clinical trial.". First new drug for prostate cancer in 20 years? That's not a lot of progress :(. - Sanjeev Singh
"the death rate from cancer has dropped only about 7% in the past three decades" (or so the article claims) - Sanjeev Singh
I was surprised that Africa only accounts for ~25% of the dirt poor. India's share is bigger, but they get a lot less press. Same deal with the poorer Asian countries. - Sanjeev Singh
So there's more poor people in Europe vs. China? Is that Russia? Still, I would think China would have more poor people. - Bradley Taylor
If you redistributed all the wealth of the richest 2% evenly, we would each get....$10,000. If you discount the people only millionaires due to their houses, we each get $6,000. Not a lot of money. A good reason why people have killed each other for wealth, and abused poor serfs. If you factor in environmental damage, I'm not sure that humankind has learned how to make wealth yet. See Cap Gemini's 2007 World Wealth Report http://www.capgemini.com/indus... - Mitchell Tsai
If a hypothetical alien landed on Earth and was as wealthy as all humankind, the richest 1 creature would own half of world wealth. Would the rest of us be worse off? Is what matters the relative wealth (in which case we'd be better off after WW3, and everyone lives in poverty) or absolute wealth (which seems to be getting better for just about everyone)? - Amit Patel
Fascinating, though it seems a bit manipulative to section 'Rich Asia-Pacific countries' as its own category. A little bit of selection bias there. I bet there are some other ways of making this data even more interesting, such as animating it over the last 200 years. - Kevin Fox
Some people say that the first $10,000 of absolute wealth brings much happiness, but after that money isn't worth so much... When my mom grew up, she only ate chicken once a year on your birthday (and her family was considered a wealthy Taiwanese family). The US relative/absolute wealth debate is mostly a middle & upper-class problem. I just read a journalist's article from visiting rural China, where he made a girl unbelievably happy by buying ONE stuffed doll. She'd never had one before... - Mitchell Tsai
Louis, if you type that in the terminal and then try google in the browser it should work. Just copy and paste "sudo dscacheutil -flushcache" without the quotation marks - DC Crowley
I know. I just wanted to do what j1m said not to do. - Louis Gray
Vertica is one of the most interesting "scalable DB" companies. Architecturally they are like bigtable with transactions. Still very expensive, though. $500/mo. for a 500GB database running on a single machine. - Sanjeev Singh
posted a message
“Greivance: Frys.com online orders can expire unfulfilled (even when items are in stock!!)”
Server troubles. We're still investigating exactly what triggered it. - Paul Buchheit
I reckon it was a case of Murphy's law's third addendum: "If something cannot possibly go wrong, and it is the weekend, that thing will go wrong.". I propose a revision - Murphy's law's third addendum as applied to startups - "If it is the weekend, and everything is working, nothing will go wrong, but it will still cause a system outage." - Slippy Lane
i had a problem this morning where ff was taking ages to load the "Comment - Hide - More" panel but it seems to have gone now - Ian Rathbone
Ooh, a faster Bzipper? Could be useful. Incidentally, instead of all that apt-get install stuff, install apturl, then you can just type apt:pbzip2 in the address bar of your browser. Coolness. - Slippy Lane
I always blamed bzip/gzip for being spastic on multicore machines -- should have blamed myself for not searching for a better alternative! - Sanjeev Singh
