DNA animation

Not always.

There's a vestigial example of that, in Fred Hoyle's "The Black Cloud", the only novel I know of with a footnote containing calculus.

A more skilled author can tell you the ending, and have that suck you into reading about the journey. Cordwainer Smith used that technique to good effect.

Nothing *needs* to be solved, but scientists are always curious about how the universe works we could all worship at your Tree of Ignorance and be significantly worse off as a result.

You never know where blue skies research will leads in the long term.

What earthly use could a laser be if the first one required a huge flash tube and a 4" perfect ruby crystal to make it work ever be to anybody?

Now they are ubiquitous and in every laser printer, CD and DVD player.

In fact mostly it is the other way around. Reviewers will be a bit more lenient with an outsider who has an original idea with some merit.

I recall a paper in Nature a long time ago that suggested that the appearance sunspots could be explained by them being jets of flame much like on a gas cooker. The paper went to peer review with minor revisions and at that time it was decided that the idea was a possible explanation so it *was* published despite it coming from a amateur.

David Levy as a comet hunter is well respected as an amateur astronomer in professional circles with 22 comets to his name (as well as some less known in the West Japanese astronomers) including the infamous Shoemacker-Levy 9 which hit Jupiter in 1994. One of my friends has a similar status in the slightly more boring variable star monitoring by amateurs with some staggering number of observations to his name.

With the energetic efficiency of photosynthesis and in a culture where most of the skin must remain covered, I don't see any advantage.

Jeroen Belleman

It would give naturists a whole new meaning!

I think it is a nice example. A pattern in life that can replicate itself in every detail is an interesting and still unsolved challenge.

You got me thinking about the sort of shape that such a Conway Life "alive" pattern might have to be in order to be able to output itself (possibly with a 90 degree rotation).

C H or T like would be my initial guesses.

Managing the glider or spaceship streams to collide far enough away to build another independent one is going to be the big challenge.

BTW I enjoyed the Turing machine paper very much.

And not wear clothes...

Some sun is good but even in the UK which is a fairly high latitude too much of it can prematurely age the skin and cause malignant skin cancer if you are unlucky. Rickets is making a come back thanks to very high factor sun protection being used on children these days.

Friends with very fair skins turn red very quickly if out in the sun.

There certainly does seem to be a latitude correlation but there are other risk factors like genetic susceptibility and possibly infection by the Epstein-Barr virus. Being female seems to carry a serious risk too.

Nonsense; hostility is personal, science is not. You're thinking about 'stuffed-shirt professor stereotype' and not science.

Amateur means the person enjoys the task and doesn't seek other reward, not relevant to 'being a scientist'. You're thinking about 'heroic/manic innovator stereotype' not amateur. It makes a good story when the innovator makes his discovery, but it's only a storytelling trope, not common in practice.

Stanford Ovshinsky's brown solar cells were a real discovery, and science welcomed it only after some opening of the 'trade secrets'. There's not a lot of other examples that come to mind (the Starlite heat shield material is still a mystery).

I naturally enjoy the ones where one or two elecronics people (ie, me and maybe my allies) are presented with a problem owned by non-electronics people, like chemists or physicists or MEs.

AoE should be mandatory study for any scientist. Everything is electronic these days, and it's hard to imagine (irony) anything replacing the universality of electronic instrumentation in science.

Yes. My wife grew up in Boston, got MS after we were married, and miraculously grew out of it. Sometimes that happens.

Like most skills and professions, they can always hire someone to do what is needed in electronics. There is little magic left. Most things can be done by buying modules.

Half a lifetime ago (early 80s) I did a consultancy gig to look at replacing logic with a microprocessor etc. I recommended they did /not/ replace it.

The logic was on unmanned offshore oil rigs, with no electricity on board. Electronics would have introduced BASEEFA(?) requirements, and had no advantages over the existing /hydraulic/ logic.

Yes, I did mention the advantages of remote monitoring/control, but the internet was in its infancy then, e.g. email used bang addressing.

I designed some really slick electronic boiler and throttle controls for the LHA ships. The crew couldn't maintain them, so the navy ripped it all out and installed pneumatics.

Bullshit

It doesn't "slow you down". There is nothing saying that you can't change horses. Absurd.

If you'd said they wanted an answer, rather than a problem solved, it would have made much more sense. It's your ignorance we're discussing here, BTW.

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Which means that krw can't follow the logic, which isn't surprising - the l ogic isn't demanding but krw's brain doesn't seem to work.

Nobody says that you can't change horses, but you do have to pay a bundle f or the extensive redesign required to accommodate new and better technology . It's not as expensive as designing from scratch, but it's still quite exp ensive enough to sink most projects.

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You've got to recognise that there's a problem to be solved before you can start looking for an answer. The most interesting phrase for a scientist is "that's odd ... ". What makes "sense" to krw is stuff that fits his totall y pre-programmed brain, where every question has it's built-in answer.

The real world is a little more complicated, but he's not equipped to engag e with that.

Actually, John Larkin's ignorance. His brain is better than krw's in that i t can recognise that unsolved problems exist, but it's capacity to distingu ish between plausible answers and self-serving propaganda seems to be non-e xistent.

That particular kind of laser isn't used laser printers, compact disk playe rs or digital video disk players. People with more mental depth than krw ar e aware of this.

You really are dumber than a rock!

Here is a concrete example taken from the time when the typical improvement in clock speed and performance was roughly a 3 fold increase for every 5 years elapsed. Once you start running the software you are then committed to the technology that you begin to work with.

Runtime for computation A = 10 years. Initial performance p = 1 Annual performance improvement factor a = 3^(1/5) Wait time before starting execution t = 0

Total time T = t + A/(a^t)

Start computing immediately - wait time t = 0

Total time T = 0 + 10/1 = 10

Wait 5 years t = 5

Total time T = 5 + 10/3 = 8.333'

In fact for a device improving with an exponential law this can be generalised to find the optimum time to start to finish soonest.

T = t + A/(a^t)

dT/dt = 0 = 1 - Aln(a)/a^t

Hence t = ln(Aln(a))/ln(a) = 3.5827 when T = 8.1339

So you can get your difficult result nearly 2 years earlier by spending the first three and a half years doing something else more fun until the computing hardware available is up to the job of running your code.

I'll stick to my D-Types and Nand gates thanks!