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Re:Honest question by Anonymous Coward · 2002-09-29 08:49 · Score: 0 · on OSI Approves Two New Licenses

Re:you just dont get it by flegged · 2002-04-08 00:57 · Score: 2 · on Time Travel

That's pretty much my theory. Imagine the entire universe in one moment were a little box. Now imagine that there is one of each of these little boxes for every moment ever, arranged in line a to make a string.

That string is time.

Now imagine you have a bunch of those timelines, side by side - you have every possible combination of reality ever.

Now quantum mechanics gets involved. For every possible action, there are two outcomes - it either happened or it didn't. Imagine that each of these outcomes splits a time string into two - each fork is a reality that could have happened.

When you throw in time travel, some interesting things happen. When you go back to a point in the past, the timeline splits - one string has you arriving at that point in time; the other you didn't, and reality can continue on it's merry way until the event where you decide to go back in time. Paradoxes are impossible, you're just making more possible realities. You can't kill your grandfather, but you can make a new reality where he is dead.

Sliding is even more fun. When you switch lanes, and go to one of these alternate universes, you create a fork in that timeline. Now if, as on "Sliders", the destination is quantumly random, there are an infinite number of possible universes you can end up in. This means that the timelines are split inifinitely, you end up one alternate of every alternate reality. For every universe, there is a fork where you arrived and another where you didn't.

It is possible to get home. Indeed, you will get home every single time you do slide. The problem is getting to experience the being home. Since there are two copies of your life (one that got there by chance and one that didn't) in every reality, the more you slide, the more copies of yourself can appear in other realities.

Now let's try a mindfuck.
Imagine a line. Imagine a line a right angles to that line. Fine, so you have a cross. Now imagine another line at right angles to both of those. You now have a three dimensional cross. Now imagine a line at right angles to those three lines.
Therein lies the mindfuck. The human mind can't deal with more than 3D but we'll have to make do.
Back to three dimensions, imagine that one of them is time. So you have a 2D plane, and you can see time-slices within them. Think about the string bundle again for a bit, and look at the way they're all line next to each other. They need a dimension for that. Make that the third dimension on your cross. So you can see again a 2D plane, but this time you're seeing cross-sections of alternate realities - snapshots of the same time, but in a different reality.

So now we have five dimensions. The basic ones xyz that everyone knows about, t for time, and a fifth, p for probability. Try for a moment to imagine a five dimensional intersection. Ouch.

If you accept that any of these dimensions are infinite, you must accept that they all are. It's easy to see that time is forever because it's impossible to be anything before or after time. So the probability dimension is infinite. Which means that the impossible will happen somewhere far out on that dimension. Somewhere out there, George Bush will declare peace and Britney Spears will learn to sing.

Check out my thoughts on this, although that page is probably not as coherent as this post.

Re:Never underestimate a scripting language... by flegged · 2002-03-21 00:30 · Score: 2 · on SedSokoban

Yeah, I wrote Tetris (and a few others) in JavaScript (for DOM level 1 browsers - Mozilla or IE5 will work) a while back. I also wrote Tetris in C++ (source is here; works under Wine) when I was learning DirectX. The blocks.js became blocks.h with a few search and replaces.

So Tetris is kindof my "Hello World" when learning a new language. I don't think I'll try to write it in sed though. :o)

Re:Never underestimate a scripting language... by flegged · 2002-03-21 00:30 · Score: 2 · on SedSokoban

Yeah, I wrote Tetris (and a few others) in JavaScript (for DOM level 1 browsers - Mozilla or IE5 will work) a while back. I also wrote Tetris in C++ (source is here; works under Wine) when I was learning DirectX. The blocks.js became blocks.h with a few search and replaces.

So Tetris is kindof my "Hello World" when learning a new language. I don't think I'll try to write it in sed though. :o)

Re:Never underestimate a scripting language... by flegged · 2002-03-21 00:30 · Score: 2 · on SedSokoban

Yeah, I wrote Tetris (and a few others) in JavaScript (for DOM level 1 browsers - Mozilla or IE5 will work) a while back. I also wrote Tetris in C++ (source is here; works under Wine) when I was learning DirectX. The blocks.js became blocks.h with a few search and replaces.

So Tetris is kindof my "Hello World" when learning a new language. I don't think I'll try to write it in sed though. :o)