Leonid Korogodski

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• Commented on Gadget Patrol: Sony PRS-300 ebook reader
  I'm getting interested in ebooks, but I haven't purchased any reading device yet. For me, the dealbreaker is that I'm a connoisseur of good book design, whereas ebooks are essentially HTML and can reflow on a differently sized screen, destroying...
• Commented on Gadget Patrol: Sony PRS-300 ebook reader
  Charlie@28: Yeah, PDF was created for print consistency, before ebooks. There is no standard size, actually. But once selected, the page size is fixed. That, and many other things, are to ensure than WYSIWYG (what you see is what you...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Dalani@191: Well, the mini-magnetospheric propulsion is really a variant of magnetic sail. The only difference is how the magnetic field is formed, but the dynamics of propulsion are identical. Personally, I think the coil method is more reliable, because the...
• Commented on It's a crime
  I don't really see the apprehension of a criminal as the lack of divergence. Almost any good fiction has the main characters changing toward the end. I don't see why police procedurals must be an exception. I'm yet to try...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Dalani@187: The major advantage of magnetic sail is its superior maneuverability, far beyond any other means of propulsion. A solar sail is pushed forward, a magnetic sail is deflected sidewise. If you have more than one magnetic sail, you can...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  And, a word of advice: Dump solar sails. They are inferior to magnetic sails in so many ways it's almost obscene....
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Ignatius@182: I didn't even consider the cosmic ray stuff. For those, the ship's speed indeed doesn't matter. I thought they were talking about the (relatively) slow-moving plasma....
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Alex@180: Simple. Even in the plane of the ecliptic, the "slow" solar wind becomes superalfvenic (the speed higher than the Alfven speed), and therefore the magnetic field lines can never contract back to the Sun. Never mind the "fast" solar...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Heh, for all we know, the Sun may be one such hotspot, and Alpha Centauri another, with none in between. :)...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Tim@176: The situation isn't quite this dire--depending on where you travel. If you follow a magnetic field-aligned plasma filament (aka "flux rope") a la auroral currents, then neutral matter will accumulate in "hotspot" disks along the way (where the Buneman...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Charlie@171: Imagine for a moment that humans started reproducing exactly. Moreover, that the neurons in the growing brain of an infant mysteriously started establishing connections in exactly the same way (they don't; which is why not even twins or clones...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Jonathan@166: I still maintain (see some of my posts above) that the best way to reach Alpha Centauri is by having a magnetic sail ship follow the Sun's south polar jet. You get continuous acceleration almost for free (you must...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  JBoss@168: I'm glad you mentioned entropy. What you're describing is known in complexity theory as a "complex adaptive system" (the term coined by Murray Gell-Mann in Santa Fe Institute). By Prigogine theorem, these CANNOT be discrete. I'm not saying that...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Gee. So many typos and mistakes. I must be tired....
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Paul@157: Yes, randomness is nothing special in itself. But when manifesting as deterministic chaos in complex nonlinear systems, it means that there are more states that the system can distinguish between. In fact, there is a continuum of states such...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Paul@143: Yes, one can simulate a power law distribution on a digital computer. But how would it correspond to the real thing? The problem is, again, in discrete vs. continuum. As I already said, a discrete system is always predictable,...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Actually, other than being a binary star, the Alpha Centauri system is pretty damn like ours. A is something like 1.1 size of the Sun. B rotates around A at about the same distance as Uranus is from the Sun....
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Heh, I reread what I wrote and it made me wonder: would the alien astronomers think that the Earth is a black hole? One would have to possess a very strong gravitational field to produce the kind of radio radiation...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Heteromeles@127: How would we look from space? A triple system with one star of a moderate size (the Sun), one small brown dwarf active in the radio range (Jupiter), and a very tiny body, also active in the radio range...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Not to mention that fMRI doesn't tell us about the potentials in the synapses and across the neuronal membranes (never mind any individual ion channel). It doesn't even tell us such a coarse indicator as the levels of various neurotransmitters...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Jason@123: MRI gives some useful information, but it doesn't represent the mind, not even close. It shows us the structure of the brain but tells us nothing about neuronal activity. fMRI does tell us a few things about neuronal activity,...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  By the way, for those authors willing to violate the speed of light barrier: Consider the modified Lorentz relativity. The principal difference between Einstein and Lorentz relativity is that in Einstein's, speed affects time and space themselves, whereas in Lorentz...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Denni@90: Mimicing the brain's "design" conceptually doesn't mean simulating every single ion channel. As to the brain having evolved to control movement, you're absolutely right in saying that. But I invite you to take a further step and say, following...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  At the very least, we could send a probe down the polar jet. We may even get an idea of where it goes without it having to follow it all the way. And we can already do it with the...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  ScentOfViolets@95: I suspect we don't need to build such an accelerator. It already exists in the form of the Sun's polar jets. Granted, I don't have a proof that it goes all the way to another star, although I have...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  So, to wit, I suppose it doesn't invalidate the possibility of "uploading" a mind into some other format. But that format will not be truly digital. Not in the sense we understand it. And the computing architecture to sustain that...
• Commented on The myth of the starship
  Charlie, I think the question is not really the loss percentage; it's not quantitative but rather qualitative. But Prigogine's theorem, any discrete system is predictable, whereas a complex nonlinear analog system is not. Even if you have an NP-hard discrete...