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G-Man's Boring Lawyer Blog
May 24th 2007, 05:31 CEST by Gabe I'm kind of curious. |
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Cheesy: Post your Africa itinerary and costs please. This could be a fun discussion, so I'll indulge. Day 1 Leave JFK in the evening on KLM to go to Amsterdam. Day 2 Arrive Schiphol in the morning, lay over for a few hours then leave on KLM to JRO. Arrive in Arusha in the early evening. Transfer to the Arusha Coffee Lodge. Day 3: Spend the day in Arusha (weren't originally supposed to do this, but airline scheduling made us take another day). Take the N’giresi Village cultural tour and visit Tenguru school and village. Day 4: Leave early in the morning and take a charter flight to the Serengeti and meet our guide. He will take us to the Serengeti Migration Camp. Spend the afternoon (3:00 - 6:00) on a game drive. The basic structure of our safari is to fly out to the Serengeti and work our way back to Arusha. Due to the poor roads in Africa and the parks this saves about 8 hours of driving. Day 5: Full day of game viewing. Game drives are in the morning (6am - 9am) and afternoon (3pm - 6pm) when the animals are most active. You wake up, grab a quick bite to eat and leave. When you come back you have breakfast proper and lunch at noon or one. From what people tell me you nap after the morning game drive and kinda lounge around until the afternoon one. After the afternoon drive you go and have dinner. Day 6: Morning game drive/transfer to the Serengeti Sopa Lodge (I'm a little nervous about the sopa lodges. Their website has been under construction for about 8 months now, even though it was up before. They're not as nice as the first two and I hope that with lowered expectation they'll be OK). Have an afternoon game drive. Day 7: Morning game drive/transfer to the Ngorongoro Crater stopping at Oldupai Gorge for a visit to Richard Leakey's Museum & Archaeological Site along the way. Ngorongoro Sopa Lodge. In the afternoon descend down to the crater floor for a game drive. Day 8: Visit a remote Masai village in the morning and then transfer to Tarangire Park. Stay at the Tarangire Sopa Lodge. Don't know if we get an afternoon game drive or not. Day 9: Morning and day game drives at Tarangire Park. Day 9: Transfer to Arusha for some shopping if there's time. Depart to Nairobi. Lay over for 6 hours then depart on KLM to Amsterdam. Day 10: Arrive at Amsterdam. We were going to stay a couple nights in Amsterdam, but had to cancel that. Lay over for a while and depart to JFK. Arrive JFK early afternoon. |
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Dumdeedum: All that aside though, your ISP's evil-status can be easily determined by whether you use the BitTorrent throttling that is so popular these days. Depends on how you look at it; we've established that approximately 85% of our traffic is being used by 5% of our users and the majority of that traffic is BitTorrent. There's no prizes for guessing that that 5% of users aren't in the high revenue bracket either; for the most part they're the guys that we make next to no money off. |
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That sounds amazing, Cheesy. I'm jealous. |
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YF mentioned Hawaii here. Qt3 can have him. |^^^^^^^^^^^^ |||__
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#297 You'll need another holiday to recuperate from your holiday. Now post your costs! 2005 TOTY 10000 badge winner and proud carrier.
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I don't get it. Where is the shooting elephants/lions/giraffes on that list? Actually, the liberalism of the media - as a general thing - IS a major fallacy. What the media is, is a whore. -LP Johnsen Family
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What do you think a game drive is? Horrible song of the nonce: Left Behind
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Cheesy: Thanks. I too would like to see some rough costs so I can decide whether to steal your itinerary. That Arusha hotel must be expensive since they won't even post prices or conctact info on their website. I'm guessing everything will be a little cheaper though cause you are going there in the middle of the fucking summer. Did Arusha help you plan your itinerary or what? Also, is going to Amsterdam first the only way to get there or the best way or what? In case anyone hasn't noticed, I am trying to use my troll powers for good by attempting to prod discussion along productive lines. It is like giving mouth to mouth to the PC community. |
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#297 by CheesyPoof Don't forget to hire some guards with AK-47s. Only the poor desire wealth.
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Ergo From reading Marsh's email, it sounds like he went into the trip hating it from the get-go. North America never had a chance. :( I don't think that's fair. I actually had a great time. I liked the people I met a great deal, both professionally and socially, and ended up seeing some great games. But, the city (physically) I did not like - though I think it's apparent that I was there for about four days only, and it rained and snowed heavily the whole time, which no doubt soured my view of the place. But "North America never had a chance"? Why would I be prejudiced against a whole damn continent? I actually went to Montreal expecting to like it. And in terms of North America, although I was also underwhelmed by Raleigh NC for different reasons, I absolutely loved New York. I'm sure you'll be overjoyed to hear that, knowing the special place that city has in your heart! I'm really looking forward to seeing the west coast - some trips should be coming up soon. I don't know if I'll be going to E3 yet, though. - words and stuff -
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I was hesitant to post some costs, but whatever. First off though, we booked through a tour operator here in the US. They have the contacts in Africa to make everything smooth. There's a bunch, but when we were researching this we got a few that we called and like them the best. Plus we got "free" hats, a duffel bag and two field books. Some people more adventurous than I fly to Arusha and deal with tour operators there to pull it together on the fly. I found the Trip Advisor forums to be helpful, in particular that Karl Gingrich guy. The tour operator has some standard safaris with costs, but they're customizable. For example we got feedback from someone on another forum that a private guide was a must, so we shortened the length (which is why it seems so hectic) and downgraded some of the accommodations (Sopa lodges instead of the Serena ones). So, the costs. Land: $3,700 / person Air (economy): $2,100 / person (bought back in Dec. Now a 1 way ticked to AMS cost that much) Insurance: $330 / person (super deluxe insurance. Pays all emergency medial including air) Inoculations, well, the only thing required to visit TZ are anti-malaria pills, but my wife and I got some other shots just in case. We got yellow fever, tetanus booster, Typhoid, Meningitis (required for all college kids today, so you may have gotten this), hep-A, and hep-B. This cost another ~$500 / person overall, but for the most part are a sunk cost that needs to be done once if not already done. If you're not worried about it all, just get the anti-malaria stuff and call it a day. Other things to include are spending cash for tips (they recommend the guide $10 - $20 / day / person, plus for the hotel staff) and souvenirs. Looking at my invoice, the Arusha Coffee Lodge cost us $125 / day / person, which includes board. It's not to bad. Flying through AMS was the quickest most direct way. There are other options but they included more flights and/or longer layovers. IIRC the only other most direct way was to fly South Africa Air to SA, then connect to TZ, but it's so much longer that I wouldn't want to do that. Unless it's somewhere really remote, I don't want to make more than one stop flying out of JFK so we went with KLM (to check current prices KLM will redirect you to NWA their US code share partner, so you'll probably have to scroll to find the direct flights). |
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Speaking of trips, I'm sitting in a hotel room in San Diego right now, getting ready to go to Sea World in a hour. Good times, but I'm also waiting for the sun to come out. Haha, welcome to June Gloom! It tends to burn off mid to late afternoon, but occasionally it sticks around all day. It is a *bit* cooler than normal, but not by much. |
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If you come to Vancouver let me know Marsh. |
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I think you just gave Jibble a heart attack Cheesy. Anyway, why are you going on so many different individual safaris? The balloon safari sounds cool, but won't the other lodges offer basically the same sights during the game drives? |
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Marsh-- You and Dum need to lighten the hell up. Also, gotcha. You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religions. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough. --Aldous Huxley
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I'm guessing everything will be a little cheaper though cause you are going there in the middle of the fucking summer. I forgot to address this. Tanzania is south of the equator so it's technically fall/winter there. In addition, the northern area of Tanzania is pretty high as it is at the foot of mountains, which helps cool things off. The serengeti is ~5000 feet. Their current weather is more temperate than the shit we're dealing with now. I think the low season is the rainy season, which just passed. This is the beginning of the high season as the great migration should be in full swing when everyone wants to see the herds of thousands of animals on the move. Anyway, why are you going on so many different individual safaris? The balloon safari sounds cool, but won't the other lodges offer basically the same sights during the game drives? The balloon would have been cool, but I think my ass is too fat to do it so we didn't bother investigating it. As for why so many stops? To be honest, I don't know. When looking at safari packages they all had multiple visits along the way so I didn't question it. I figured it was to increase your chances of seeing hard to find game (Rhinos are pretty rare from what I understand) and that's what you do. At least we'll be seeing different terrain and the flora and fauna within. Part of what I'm interested in seeing is the Ngorongoro Crater, which is the worlds largest intact caldera. I'm a bit of a geology nerd, so that will be cool above and beyond the wildlife. |
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Cheesy Sounds like an awesome trip. The Serengeti/Maasai Mara is pretty cool. We managed to see all of the big five when we were there, which apparently doesn't happen very often. However, 6 days of game drives? I think you're going to be sick of wildebeest by the time you're through. - words and stuff -
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I didn't even know World of Warcraft's Un'Goro Crater was a play on Ngorongoro Crater. "…a four-dimensional real vector space equipped with a nondegenerate, symmetric bilinear form."
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Hieronymus’ THz Tutorial, Pt 2 Anaqer, you asked about the possible applications for THz. That’s an excellent question, and lots of people are looking for good applications. At the moment, there are many promising possibilities, but no ‘killer app’. Most of the ideas are not coming from microwave community (e.g. communication), but rather from the far-infrared (e.g. sensing and imaging). THz is sensitive to different characteristics of a material compared to infrared or optical radiation. For example, paper and ceramics are transparent, while glass and water are not. The time-resolution of most THz detectors also allows one to get range information very easily. However, it has been difficult to find an application that can justify the complexity and expense of a typical THz setup. While the technology is steadily improving, anything that requires a Titanium:Sapphire laser is not really turn-key. There are a couple of companies who are making turn-key THz apparatus, such as Picometrix and Teraview. They suggest possible applications such as looking for water pockets in cloth radar domes and examining the coatings of pills in an assembly line. The link that G-Man provided is interesting. RPI has done very good work in the past, but the link is too short on technical details for me to comment further. Another promising possibility in terms of sources are quantum cascade lasers, but they are not yet practical. For the moment though, the primary use of THz is as a research tool. There are a number of natural processes that happen on time-scales corresponding to THz frequencies. For example, electron scattering rates in metals and semiconductors (at certain temperatures and carrier densities) are in the THz. This has led to a number of interesting experiments involving conductivity and carrier dynamics. The feature that is most pertinent to my recent research is that many natural vibrations of molecules or crystals occur at THz frequencies. While similar features in the infrared correspond to motions involving a single bond, the vibrations at THz frequencies correspond to large groups of atoms in the molecule moving as a whole. In addition, one can use the ‘spectral fingerprint’ of the molecules to identify them. A number of research groups are examining how to use this property for screening of drugs and explosives. This is getting lengthy, so I'll (finally) talk about my own research in the next installment. I've finished my move (shakes fist in general direction of football stadium), so there will be less of a delay. |
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Our own Mad Scientist! You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religions. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough. --Aldous Huxley
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How much voltage do you run through your overdimensioned tesla-coils? "…a four-dimensional real vector space equipped with a nondegenerate, symmetric bilinear form."
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1.21 Gigawatts, obviously. |
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and yes, I know volts aren't watts. |
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moran Joker, Ph.D. Procedural Assholian Behaviour, Pedophilosopher
- All your ass are belong to my wang Jafd. Prepare to are penetration. "I fart in THX." - Sgt_Hulka PAY ATTENTION, YA DUMB FUKKAN CACKSUKKAN IGNORANT MORANS. |
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Hieronymus is humanity's last, best hope for workable beamweapons. |
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The feature that is most pertinent to my recent research is that many natural vibrations of molecules or crystals occur at THz frequencies. Crowd suppression weapons! That's what we'll call them in the press release of course. 2005 TOTY 10000 badge winner and proud carrier.
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Will they stun out of control baseball managers? World of Warcraft is a pie eating contest where the reward is more pie.
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part 3, the reckoning The standard way of examining a molecule (again, in the research environment) is to mix some powdered material with some powder transparent to THz (such as polyethylene) and press it into a pellet approximately 1 cm across and 1-2 mm thick. A standard THz setup produces a collimated THz beam a few mm across. One places the pellet in the beam, and measures the absorption at different frequencies. (Technically, we time-resolve the transmitted THz pulse and take the Fourier transform to get the spectrum.) This is a very general and powerful technique. However, the sample is comprised of micro-crystals with random sizes and orientations. These different crystals vibrate at slightly different frequencies resulting in a relatively spectral broad absorption line (a.k.a. inhomogeneous broadening). There is an additional source of (homogeneous) broadening which is due to thermal effects. Broad lines effectively reduce your spectral resolution. Even at low temperatures, the inhomogeneous broadening can result in a number of lines overlapping and appearing as one large feature. This is detrimental to both ‘spectral fingerprinting’ as well as obtaining more information about the molecule via its vibrational frequencies. We have developed a new technique that minimizes inhomogeneous broadening. This results in narrower lines, effectively increasing our spectral resolution. First, we deposit the molecular film onto a metal plate, usually by dissolving the molecule in some solvent and drying the solution onto the plate. For some materials and for some types of preparation, the molecule forms into crystals which are oriented relative to the metal surface. This ordered film has significantly less inhomogeneous broadening than the corresponding pellet. The ordered polycrystalline film is measured by incorporating the plate into a parallel plate waveguide. Metal waveguides are standard technology for microwaves, where (roughly speaking) the electromagnetic radiation is confined between two conductors. For example, a co-axial cable acts as a radio frequency waveguide. For us, we take the standard design of a microwave parallel plate waveguide (which is, yes, two parallel metal plates) and shrink the dimensions by a factor of 100 to agree with the corresponding decrease in wavelength. This is simply two polished aluminum or copper plates with a 50 to 100 micron gap between them provided by spacers. In a rather neat example of how THz is at the boundary of microwaves and far-infrared, the THz radiation is coupled in and out of this waveguide using lenses. Since glass is opaque to THz, we use lenses made out of silicon. The THz is confined in the gap and is forced to propagate along the ordered polycrystalline film, which absorbs the THz at certain frequencies. This confinement also improves our sensitivity compared to the traditional pellet technique. The whole assembly is cooled down to liquid nitrogen temperatures (-196 C) in order to minimize homogenous broadening. With both types of broadening reduced, we can get quite narrow lines, typically five times better than the corresponding pellet. In some cases, we can see previously broad lumpy features resolve into distinct doublets or triplets. So far, we have found a number of organic molecules where we can use the technique. The tricky part is to find the particular method to form an ordered polycrystalline film given a particular molecule. The paper I recently submitted describes our work extending this technique to small biological molecules such as DNA components (i.e. nucleobases and nucleosides) and amino acids. This could possible be used for identification purposes, but is more likely to be used as a research tool to study the lowest order vibrational (and possibly conformational) dynamics of these molecules. That’s it; I’m done. You can now cool off your scroll-wheels. |
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Gist: I'll show them! I'll show them all! |
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I read it, and its interesting. Thanks, Hieronumopotomous! World of Warcraft is a pie eating contest where the reward is more pie.
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<gruff millitary commander voice> Talk english man!, can we shoot the aliens down or not?" No I'll second McBain's statement. Good, albeit flies-over-my-head, stuff. What do you actually do on a day-to-day basis? You don't futz around with pellets or shave mice I assume… "…a four-dimensional real vector space equipped with a nondegenerate, symmetric bilinear form."
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Crystals, huh? And lasers? I get dibs on the first light saber. |
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Well, we just refurbished our own pellet making machine (i.e. a hydraulic press), so I have been fussing around with pellets lately. Myself and a Ph.D. student do most of the hands-on experimental work, such as maintaining the equipment, making the films, aligning the waveguides, doing the measurements, analyzing the data, and so forth. I try to come up with interesting ideas now and again, but most of my daily work is nuts and bolts stuff (sometimes quite literally). Being a postdoc is great fun. All of the good work, none of the crappy administration stuff, none of the crazy stress put on students. Too bad it's not permanent. |
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I'm sure this will come across as an absolutely absurd question to you but why are glass and water not invisible to THz. How does THz perceive glass differently than say, aluminum or any other substance for that matter? Just kind of curious. |
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Materials are opaque to electromagnetic radiation at a given frequency (say THz at lower frequencies or visible light at higher frequencies) if the materials interact with the radiation in some manner. Different physical mechanisms become dominant at different frequencies. For visible light, the dominant mechanism is electronic transitions, in other words, the way the electrons orbit around the nucleus of the individual atoms can be changed by the light. Materials which are transparent in this region (such as water and glass) typically have these type of interactions at very high frequencies (in the ultra-violet) so visible light is unaffected. For infrared light, the dominant mechanism is vibrations of individual bonds; while for THz, the dominant mechanism is vibrations of many bonds at once. Water molecules absorb THz because it naturally rotates at these frequencies. I'm not sure of the exact mechanism for glass (and it probably depends strongly on the type of glass), but it is probably related to either vibrational or stretching modes of various bonds. Aluminum is a conductor, so it's dominant mechansim is due to the electric field driving the free electrons at both THz and at visible frequencies. In short, there are very few materials which are transparent over a huge band of frequencies, because different physical factors are taken into account at different frequencies. |
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So what you're saying is that aliens who see in a different band could wear kick-ass metal sunglasses. Horrible song of the nonce: Left Behind
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Like Geordi LaForge! Oh, wait. dethstryk: My friend bought some porno mags. He's single-handedly holding up the porn industry.
yotsuya: What's he doing with the other hand? |
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Metals are a problem. They abosrb from DC to the ultra-violet due to the free carriers. They become slightly more transparent at higher frequencies, but then inter-band transitions kick in and they're opaque again. Current mirrored sunglasses from metal thin films work just as well for visible frequencies. Even if you could get solid metal sunglasses to work, they also look just as dated. Now solid ceramic glasses, that would be cool. Of course, if aliens could see THz they could also see through clothing, but not on a humid day. (Perhaps this could be a killer app, hmmm.) |
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Now we're talking sience! Garbage unreasonable. Refuses to be taken away.
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next up, spelling. "Testiculos habet et bene pendentes" — "He has testicles, and they dangle nicely."
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Thoroughly unimpressed... granted, I still respond, so 0.5/10 it is. Garbage unreasonable. Refuses to be taken away.
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so does that mean by peaking the heterodynes you could cause bursts of UVlaser hot enough to plasmatise titanium? no? damn, FM Busby lied to me ! |
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#331 I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I understood that...mostly. Thanks. |
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Hieronymus: How do patents affect your work/research? Discuss please. |
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I'm curious to know that as well. It seems the patent game in large companies is to use the size of your portfolio to extort licensing fees, or in reality, to reduce how much IBM can extort from you in licensing fees. The individual patents don't seem to matter so much unless one's a biggie that has obvious business implications (i.e. Amazon One-Click). From what I've been told, software patents are the easiest to challenge because of the patent office's cursory investigation, but no software companies ever let a fight get to that point because it's so damn expensive to litigate. So, IBM comes to one company and says 'we have 2,500 patents that you *could* be violating, so let's avoid all of that bother, shall we? Just give us $20,000 per month and call it a day. That company has two choices: 1) No software patents, bend over and pay. 2) Them: 'you know what, we have 1,250 patents that *you* could be violating, so let's cut that to $5,000, OK?' IBM: 'Are you kidding? $10,000 per.' Them: 'Deal.' So, most companies in the tech space I know are making patent submissions a big deal, and providing all sorts of classes and incentives to get them filed. I feel dirty in filing them, but hearing that a team of four people I work with each got five patents this year, to the tune of $1500 each in bonus per patent, I'm feeling a little green. So, Hieronymus, I'm curious to see how it's the same/different in your field. Gman, feel free to riff of my post, correct me if I'm wrong, or whatever. I find the whole thing fascinating. |
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So the new Macbook Pros are out. Because I'm an ATI guy I don't have a clue, is a NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT a decent card to run XP/Vista and do a little gaming?. Actually, the liberalism of the media - as a general thing - IS a major fallacy. What the media is, is a whore. -LP Johnsen Family
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At the moment, patents do not affect me at all. This is because I'm at a university setting, and my supervisor is not terribly interested in getting patents. This gives me considerably more freedom in discussing and publishing my work. If I was working in an area with a number of competing groups, I would have to be very careful not to be scooped. The work I've discussed here has been submitted for publication and been presented at a conference, so I'm comfortable talking about it in a public forum. For most academics, publications are the method to gain recognition (and eventually compensation) from your work. However, there are a number of other universities which are very keen on spin-off companies. In these situations, and in the private sector in general, patents are necessary in order to profit from r and d. Here, it is a constant struggle how much information to disclose. There are very few patents in THz, but in other areas of optics (particularly telecom), they are prevalent. It might make the industry a little less friendly, but it is necessary in very competitive environments. However, there are a few examples where over-broad patents have stiffled research and innovation. Finally, I would to assure any potential employers in industry who have googled this that I am more than willing to keep my mouth shut when necessary and I recognize the value of intelectual property. |
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Nice save, Hiero. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in
"I'm not sure it's possible to make a "subtle" jab at Matt's writing ability." - Ergo |
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So the new Macbook Pros are out. ...hm...did they recently release a new line of MacBooks (the regular version), or should I wait a little while longer before turning to the dark side? Lady, people aren't chocolates. But you know what they are, mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling.
Blog. 203 lbs. 23 to go. |
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They released new macbooks a couple weeks ago, they were basically the same shit. |
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