Daily science stuff

[Entilzha]

You're pure evil . New Technique Could Pinpoint 'Galaxy X': Satellite Galaxies Located Based on the Ripples They Create in the Hydrogen Gas http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110113131425.htm , NASA Satellites Find High-Energy Surprises in 'Constant' Crab Nebula http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110112145404.htm.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

The cloaking device comes nearer...

Invisible Tanks, Planes and Armor Could Hit Battlefields in 5 Years

[Kotik]

The cloaking device comes nearer...

Invisible Tanks, Planes and Armor Could Hit Battlefields in 5 Years

*cough* your avatar *cough* have in bigger resolution ? *drool*

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Sure. Here.

[Entilzha]

insert -30.510719, 115.382311 in to google maps and select satellite view and voilaa a UFO.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

^ The Australian answer to Area 51!

*****

Earth's future supercontinent

[enterprikayak]

is the triangle the ufo?

[Entilzha]

is the triangle the ufo?

Yep

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Triceratops: Not quite dead yet

[enterprikayak]

World's First Portable Computer:

http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5100.html

[Transwarp]

World's First Portable Computer:

http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5100.html

in 1976, I was an engineering student, and a friend drug me to a meeting where I saw a demo of the IBM 5100.

You could program the 5100 in BASIC and APL. I had just discovered APL on the mainframe at school. It's a very powerful language for manipulating matrices and arrays of numbers. You can invert a matrix or solve a system of simultaneous equations in a single line of code, but the operators are represented by symbols that look kind of like greek. As you might expect, program readability suffers as a result. (A common pass time among APL programmers was to present their friends with a dense block of code and the challenge "I'll bet you can't figure out what THIS does!")

I wanted one bad. It was SO Cool. APL on my desk top, and I didn't have to sign up for a time slot on an interactive terminal (often in the wee hours of the morning)!

Alas, $20,000 US dollars was way beyond my means. (That's $20,000 *1976* US dollars.)

Years later (1985), and I'm stationed at Ft. Bragg with the 82d, assigned to the DAMO (Division Automation Management Office), and I go out to a shipping connex behind the office that we used to store office supplies to get a box of printer paper. Imagine my surprise when I see, way back in the back of the bottom shelf, an IBM 5100!

I pulled it out, I took it home, I set it up on my desk next to my Apple II computer, and I wrote a simple benchmark program in basic. (Just a loop that would increment a variable each time through.)

The Apple II was three times as fast.

I unplugged it, took it back to work and stuck it back on the shelf.

[enterprikayak]

I love that whole story.

and this

(A common pass time among APL programmers was to present their friends with a dense block of code and the challenge "I'll bet you can't figure out what THIS does!")

made me realize you've just been waiting for a Bboard like this since the 70's.


Ahhhh: I remember 1976. Good times it was too, waiting in the ether along with elessar and warpgirl...just a-waiting to be born. We all thought you guys wore funny shoes, but those collars attached to your shirt often distracted from the shoes.

s'okay...we were dressed by our mothers in the 80's. it was frightening times.

[justTripn]

It's 1994 and newscasters Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric ask

"What is the Internet?"

Too weird. I probably wouldn't have known either. Hard to imagine now that we ever lived without it.

[enterprikayak]

That. Is. the. Funniest. Thing. Ever.

[Linda]

Geez, for a person who was born in 1948 and grew up in the 1950's and 1960's, hearing people talk about "old" computers is strange. As a kid I thought getting a transistor radio was cutting edge. And I had a pocket mechanical adding machine that I thought was great. You used a stylus to manipulate metal numbers. Oh, and I used a mechanical typewriter all though high school and college. And when I got my first apartment, I thought the alarm clock I bought was top of the line. It did not have a round clock face...it had thin metal plates with numbers that dropped down in a square window.