Slashdot Mirror

What if you recorded every state on a magnetic tape, and then instead of simulating, you would just re-run the tape ? What if if you just spool the tape without actually reading the information from it ? What if you just leave the tape on a shelf ?

This sounds like Greg Egan's dust theory (which isn't explained much by the link).

It doesn't matter how any state is encoded. It may not even matter if it is encoded. Somewhere, in a universe, the current state of your mind may be encoded (by chance) in the arrangement of atoms in a rock; the next state might (by chance) be encoded in flunctuations in a star's surface 10,000,000 years before the rock came into existence.

In a big enough universe, just about anything can be encoded in some fashion, and (so the theory goes, as far as I understand it) conscious beings can therefore experience their reality purely because a chain of internally consistent subsequent encodings of their mind exist somewhere.

Yeah, it's all a bit wishy-washy, really. And I don't think it really explains why we don't experience weird things happening all the time, except that perhaps for some reason only logically consistent subsequent "encodings" of a reality can be experienced. Otherwise, somewhere there is an encoded "me" who is about to experience a velociraptor attA-.khmc. \zs;jdf'GV'oihdfln'@|n

The formula can also be a lazy crutch, deviating from which actually gives it some life.

From Greg Egan's Planck Dive

Sachio inclined his head briefly, fingertips to forehead, downloading information from the polis library. "Do you have any idea what archetypal narratives are?"
"Messages from the gods, or from the depths of the soul; who can say? But they encode the most profound and mysterious --"
Sachio cut him off impatiently. "They're the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity's greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you've created is not only devoid of truth, it's devoid of aesthetic merit."

Either an 8,500 euro transceiver http://www.cubesatshop.com/ind... or an SDR (Software Defined Radio) http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/fil... (or maybe the $18 receiver noted at http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wi... and http://hackaday.com/2012/06/27..., or a SoftRock TXRX http://fivedash.com/index.php?...), an upconverter/downconverter, dual circular polarized antennas, and an S-band broadband amp. See http://mdkenny.customer.netspa... for frequency specs. 73s and best regards, y'all, de K7AAY

Correct link: http://mdkenny.customer.netspa...

Some good info: http://mdkenny.customer.netspace.net.au/ISEE-3.pdf/

How much could I replace/upgrade before the death of my self? I wouldn't even know if it happened (err, being on the death is the ultimate end outlook of life) which means I shouldn't waste my time on concerning myself with such questions.

Greg Egan actually tackles this question with a great amount of rigor (he's also a mathematician) and clarity in his short stories and novels. Highly recommended.

I'd argue that it's closer to what Greg Egan describes in Zendegi: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ZENDEGI/ZENDEGI.html

Lots of good stuff, but not very accessible to the masses.

http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html

That's a great sample, basically describes the birth and development to consciousness of a new digital being. The book that's in extends out to a search for life, and an eventual push to escape the current dimension. Some of his books are easier to find than others, and it seems like only a few have gone digital so far. A lot are out of print, so you have to go used most of the time.

Excellent comment. Just to take it further, active gravitational mass in general relativity is defined by the stress-energy tensor, which also includes a pressure contribution. That implies tension has negative gravitational and inertial mass because tension is just negative pressure. Greg Egan uses this concept masterfully in a short story called Hot Rock, which is set in the same universe as Riding the Crocodile.

Excellent comment. Just to take it further, active gravitational mass in general relativity is defined by the stress-energy tensor, which also includes a pressure contribution. That implies tension has negative gravitational and inertial mass because tension is just negative pressure. Greg Egan uses this concept masterfully in a short story called Hot Rock, which is set in the same universe as Riding the Crocodile.

The difference is that nobody would want to play a chess game on a board that size. Go grew to 19x19 by player preference, not as some artificial limit to make it hard to beat the computer.

Don't be so sure.. The most common Shogi is played on a 9x9 board with 40 pieces. True enough.. Just as the most common western chess is played with an 8x8 board and 32 pieces. That is far from the only Shogi though.

Maka-Dai-Dai Shogi has a 19x19 board, with 192 pieces.

There are plenty of variant rules that make for an even more interesting game, one of which has the piece take on the move of the piece in front of it. Others have specific rules about drops, others don't have drops..

There is a Shogi variant, Tai Shogi which has a 25X25 board, and 354 pieces. Something I've wanted to make for years, even if only as a display piece. And there may be bigger I haven't heard of.

Or at the other end of the scale, a 4X5 Micro Shogi board with 10 pieces.

http://trout.customer.netspace.net.au/ Old VB program that works great on Linux under WINE too. So you can try lots of different variants

Chess is a complex game, but there are a huge number of variants. Most are unknown outside the few who play them.

There's an excellent short story Oracle by Greg Egan imagining what would have happened if Turing's life had gone slightly differently. Egan portrays a very interesting world with heavy emphasis on how Turing might have interacted with C.S. Lewis. See http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/MISC/ORACLE/Oracle.html.

Nope. I'm talking about This Guy.

Eureka Seven? Some anime? Nope. Im talking about an Australian computer scientist and author.

Here is an applet which shows what the universe looks like if you're near or falling into a black hole. It lets you choose either a freely falling observer, or a stationary (hovering) observer. (The latter should only work if you're outside the hole, since there are no stationary observers inside a black hole. Nevertheless, the applet works for stationary observers inside the hole. I don't know what that means.) The applet only deals with a non-rotating black hole.

As you can see, a black hole does not produce a uniform redshift which is the same in every direction, and so it's not an explanation for cosmological redshift. Black holes have weird optical distortions if you're facing toward or away from the horizon and can have both red and blue shift.

>More to the point, causation is highly correlated with correlation (rho=0.977).

Interesting study, but I find it odd that the end result defies logic. Their relationship claims it's possible to have 0.05% causation with 0.00% correlation?! (note the offset in their y-intercept). Am I missing something?

And what the hell is that journal?

"Forthcoming in the International Journal of Observeration, Knowledge and Evidence, Vol. 27 (December, 2007)."

Basic searching came up with nothing. Does it even exist?

anyhoo...

While correlation does not prove causation, it sure does imply causation.

More simply, causation causes correlation. If you don't have correlation, then you can't claim causation.

More to the point, causation is highly correlated with correlation (rho=0.977).

Problems arise when people claim that correlation causes causation. Since causation is a boolean variable while correlation is real-valued, with suitable rounding, then yes, it's true.

It's all very simple really.

Mark this article "correlation IS causation" -- simply because it's so ludicrous. ;)

Yes, of course "correlation is causation". If you look at the data, the two are so tightly correlated, than causation can be inferred.

Greg Egan's Incandescence universe has relativistic femtometer-sized robotic probes called "strong bullets" you can shoot off somewhere to perform observations:

A new generation of observatories had been designed while she and Jasim were in transit, based on strong bullets: specially designed femtomachines, clusters of protons and neutrons stable only for trillionths of a second, launched at ultra-relativistic speeds so great that time dilation enabled them to survive long enough to collide with other components and merge into tiny, short-lived gamma-ray observatories.

Of course, Incandescence is based on a trans-galactic meta-civilization that's existed for hundreds of millions of years, not on barely risen apes who can't even make a decent portable telephone.

Greg Egan's Incandescence universe has relativistic femtometer-sized robotic probes called "strong bullets" you can shoot off somewhere to perform observations:

A new generation of observatories had been designed while she and Jasim were in transit, based on strong bullets: specially designed femtomachines, clusters of protons and neutrons stable only for trillionths of a second, launched at ultra-relativistic speeds so great that time dilation enabled them to survive long enough to collide with other components and merge into tiny, short-lived gamma-ray observatories.

Of course, Incandescence is based on a trans-galactic meta-civilization that's existed for hundreds of millions of years, not on barely risen apes who can't even make a decent portable telephone.

There's a song about everything, even tardigrades.

Mal Webb is an Australian singer... well, he makes noises with his body, I guess you could call it singing.

Try reading through an Australian ISP's Standard Form Of Agreement. Last time I looked, my ISP's one had grown to 112 pages. It was 32 pages when I joined them - god only knows what rights I don't have to use the net these days. It's so long that they actually provide a summarized one for customers, which is only 10 pages long.

Shaper.

Specifically designed to create a digital consciousness from a seed value of 700MB (the amount of data held within our human DNA).

Try Lotus SmartSuite... Get hold of a $7.00 to $30.00 unopened, resold CD. Unfortunately, 1-2-3 has some mouse issues in scrolling in Win4Lin and in VirtualBox (maybe even in windoze), but the STARS of SmartSuite have to be Word Pro and Approach, the WYSIWYG, end-user, no-programming skills-required front end.

I'm creating a screenplay/dialog management tool in it, and the regrettable thing is there is no stand-alone executable, and no way to simply run the finished files by end-users unless they have the full suite disk and then deselect installation of the other components.

Table linking is simplistic, but works. Similar to how FileMaker used to be.

Unfortunately, Approach has not got horizontal sliders for detail tables, but it has filters, constraints, and sliders. There is a large, vibrant end-users group at IBM and elsewhere:

http://jabrown.customer.netspace.net.au/approach/official.htm

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ssforum.nsf/0/d361cd261211b1e485256e24004dcd75?OpenDocument&Click=

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Approach

BTW, the form shown on the Wikipedia site does an injustice to the things the forms CAN do. It would be nice if /. could resurrect image/file-posting (safely...)... I could submit some screen shots or actual working tables. But, you can also just go into the "Extras" and the SmartMasters (templates) folders and check out the checkbook, movie rental, and other tables.

See:

http://www.bluechillies.com/details/9317.html

See Built For Employees 1.0

SmartSuite has some 20+ application templates, numerous forms files... THAT is what BASE should have been emulating, but unfortunately, NIH syndrome STILL pervades, even after my circa-2001 pleas for them to peruse Lotus Approach. All we end up with is a hodgepodge of tepidly invented and release, hi-geekoid, no-beauty apps the make me feel my stomach was kicked in.

That's ANOTHER topic, but Open Source needs companies like IBM, Google, & Sun to shell out beautification money so Open Source developers can have their warez evaluated and transformed into wares. I dare say that most would-be converts are put off by sheer UGLINESS of many Open Source apps that never got any real polish for non-developers. Yeh, I know TheKompany has an app (Rekall), and they have some former Approach users, but their interface approach left me feeling I'd had a combination of Approach and Abscess melded. I would have stuck with Omnis's (since become Raining Data) stuff, but I hate the overhead, the licensing schemes, and the need to CODE to get done what I want to get done.

What somebody NEEDS to do is:

Take SQLite or MySQL as back ends and Lotus Approach's FRONT END for it's WYSIWYG interface, and update it to the CAPABILITIES but not the COMPLEXITY of FileMaker, and THEN, THEN, THEN Open Source will have a worthy database application for end-users who want to open all the current database files Approach can access, and have the ease-of-use of Approach...

(steps down from soap box)

It is possible that many could even be realized at the same location. As in Greg Egan's dust theory or, relatedly, the Hans Moravec essay that Egan links to.

Interesting stuff.

Anyone who hasn't yet read the "Orphanogenesis" chapter of the novel "Diaspora" by Greg Egan should do it right now: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html - it has an absolutely beautiful description of a birth of an AI mind, from non-sentient set of instruction to self-awareness and awareness of its surroundings.

This reminds me of a rindler horizon

A phenomen that has some similarities with a black hole, but without gravitational effects involved.

This was the subject of a short story by Greg Egan, entitled "The Moat". In it, it is discovered that an unknown group of people are genetically engineering themselves to have different DNA bases, presumably so as to be immune to all viruses. He uses the concept again in his novel Distress.

Or, try Embiggen TinyURL. It works as either a bookmarklet (all browsers), GreaseMonkey script or a button on your twitter, MySpace etc page.

It expands any URLs on the current page to their full version. Very handy for staying safe.

Like you said, "I don't know Approach...". You should find a way to look at it from who the TARGET audience is. Home users of a database don't want nor NEED to become developers. Lotus Approach took me about 2 weeks to get really comfortable. Access, never, for me. Filemaker, ehh. It was too developer-aimed, IMO.

Lotus Approach IS used by some serious development types of work, mainly as a front end to Oracle, MySQL, mssql, and some 10 or 15 other db back ends. The data and forms are separate, and have always been, unlike what, Access, which took YEARS for ms to "get it".

Approach is WYSIWYG, so right from the word GO no one NEED be a developer.

NO ONE should be using spreadsheets to do non-statistical storage of data. This happened because for years either the tools didn't exist to appease the desk-side data analyst-- they had to rely on IT. The other part is some developers were lazy or territorial, and LOTS of companies and IT staff are mixed on hoard the data (not just from protection of data, but for IT job security), or share the data (so IT can concentrate on OTHER more important tasks than to risk backlash of "THAT'S not the report I ASKED FOR...".

The other problem is that ms popularized excel, and businesses did, too. LOTS of bad habits grew up around the kludge excel is. It is an abominable excuse for a database wannabe.

Approach lets people GET WORK DONE. People who need databases and never before saw one get sample database tables and applications in Approach. They can reverse engineer these and customize them.

The biggest drawbacks of Approach:

-- no runtime executable (royalty free, or otherwise)
-- not a big enough widget set (compared to FMP, Access, et al...
-- poor or non-existent ERD
-- only runs on windoze
-- not separable from Lotus SmartSuite (except the Japanese version IS separate...)
-- only in maintenance/patch mode, since IBM is SITTING on Lotus SmartSuite, letting it die a slow, worthless death, as if even IBM's OWN want it to die, despite their "10 million S/S users..."
-- not built-in way to record and reuse queries; but users created this and sell solutions

Pluses:

- I use it as a front end to my Linux & win98-based MySQL engine
- I am writing a screenplay dialog and script tracking database
- I can build in minutes or hours what would take me and MOST non-developers days or WEEKS to do in access
- It's GREAT for an ad hoc WYSIWYG prototyping tool

You admit you don't know Approach, yet you could almost single-handedly dissuade most readers here from even considering it. Approach -- if IBM opened up its code-- could almost single-handedly kill Rekall, Kexi, and a slew of others that still retain the giant framework, geek-appeal that most END USERS will run from. Approach is good enough that user- and developer-based solutions are sold all the time.

C'mon man, check out Approach.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_SmartSuite

http://xpertss.com/

http://orderdeskxpert.3dcartstores.com/Order-Center_c_1.html

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/Office_Productivity/Office_Suites/Lotus_SmartSuite/Lotus_Approach/Q_22816555.html

http://jabrown.customer.netspace.net.au/approach/index.htm

http://wapedia.mobi/en/Lotus_Approach

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/smartsuite/approachfeatures.html

What COULD happen but isn't is that IBM could:

-- partner with Sun/OpenOffice.org
-- open the code to Kexi, t

Come on people, we've been over this already!

If you look at the scientific studies, correlation is so closely correlated with causation that it's safe to say that one causes the other.

Check the stats for yourself.

Greg Egan - best ideas ever. I'm currently re-re-reading Diaspora
Charles Stross - fun. I read Accelerando (free book!), then bought all his other stuff and wasn't disappointed.
Richard Morgan - really likes his Lone Genetically Modified Male protagonists, but luckily he does them well enough for it not to get old.
Alastair Reynolds - the Revelation Space universe is one of my favourites.
Iain (M.) Banks - The Culture novels are quite interesting, and his other books aren't bad either.

Honourable mentions:

Peter Watts - all his books appear to be online. Blindsight is very, very good, but I've not read much else from him yet.
Greg Bear - some of his older works are among my favourites. Queen of Angels, Slant (literally "/") and Moving Mars are one of my favourite trilogies. I'm behind on his newer stuff though, and his latest "terrorist thriller" makes me suspicious.

Greg Egan - best ideas ever. I'm currently re-re-reading Diaspora
Charles Stross - fun. I read Accelerando (free book!), then bought all his other stuff and wasn't disappointed.
Richard Morgan - really likes his Lone Genetically Modified Male protagonists, but luckily he does them well enough for it not to get old.
Alastair Reynolds - the Revelation Space universe is one of my favourites.
Iain (M.) Banks - The Culture novels are quite interesting, and his other books aren't bad either.

Honourable mentions:

Peter Watts - all his books appear to be online. Blindsight is very, very good, but I've not read much else from him yet.
Greg Bear - some of his older works are among my favourites. Queen of Angels, Slant (literally "/") and Moving Mars are one of my favourite trilogies. I'm behind on his newer stuff though, and his latest "terrorist thriller" makes me suspicious.

---Hmm, I don't know about that. I could be a software copy right now, and I don't control the hardware directly under me as far as I can tell, and I'm surely not so melodramatic as to assert that existence is a sheer hell... television, maybe.

Too true, I was being overly dramatic, but at least we know we die in this life. I'd imagine that being imprisoned inside a computer with resources deprived would we worse than death.

---Which Egan universe are we talking, here? Because in at least one, destruction of the hardware platform is pretty irrelevant, as well as some forms of suicide (is it suicide to engineer your "final" memories into a tight, "self-perpetuating" loop of existence? or forsake your sequentiality and factor your memories and personality into a bunch of concurrent people?).

Take your pick (from the singularity based ones). For example, in Diaspora, Orlando's clone died. That meant only one thing, in that the clone chose suicide. Yes, that clone diverged at a point 50 years prior, but those independent thoughts are not recoverable unless they release them. When concerning sentient software, data integrity and security is more important than anything else, as it IS a basic human right (security of ones self).

To see what happens if these rights are not maintained, go read Permutation City (if you havent already done so). They lose control of the hardware, and nasty things happen.

---And like other rights, such as the right to self-termination in the first place, it was easily circumvented on the hardware/OS level if the need arose.

I'm not quite sure if that was the case in all of his books. Shaper does seem to require quantum computers, which would be "hard" to emulate ;) One of his short stories does seem to use them also.

And if "suicide rights" were revoked, I cant see how they'd stop you from corrupting your own programming and crashing the Shaper.

---Maybe at first, but I tend to think software rights are pretty much inevitable, it's just a matter of how long/do we last that long. Not that I, or anyone else, can base that on anything other than wild conjecture. What I find much more troubling is that the debate will probably start far too late. If strong AI is your thing, then you probably think that when we start experimenting with higher-level reasoning systems (probably brain copies before anything truly artificial), we're basically experimenting on conscious entities. Now, with a 100% "flesher" population (remember, by definition we're only just beginning to experiment with the alternatives), how many people do you think are actually going to care what "happens to software in a computer"? I'm just glad I wasn't "born" one of the first few generations of AI, because that's probably going to be a pretty fucked up existence.

Then there's really only one way to get people to care, and that is to provide an end-term migration to durable substrates. When families migrate, people will care about the laws and ethics thereof, and I hope that will bring honorable means and ends. However, right now and the foreseeable future, there will be no AI ethics, which is sad as it teaches them the worst about us.

Yes, Strong AI does scare me somewhat, but I hope that a human is the first Strong AI. What terrifies me to no end is the gray goo.. If nanites are created to process carbon, they could literally liquidize the world within 90 minutes, according to Kurzweil. Rogue nanites could be the scourge to the earth worse than any asteroid could ever be. However, our manipulation of matter requires them, but can also unmake us.

Still, nice chatting with you.

Not all authors are bad.

Try some of Greg Egan. Of course, he does fiction, but he also visits arXiv.

As well as Brin, and I guess Bear, Benford and Forward (some of the better-known "hard SF" authors around), I recommend Australian writer Greg Egan. Heck he even supplies technical notes to his books on his home page.

Though my favourite Egan works tend to be more philosophical than scientific (eg the short story "Learning To Be Me").

For those who want to see how this REALLY works...
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/APPLETS/2 0/20.html

This is probably the worst article I've ever read. The journalist's dubious explanation of the findings and complete lack of understanding of how these findings fit into known science is a perfect example of how modern journalism is often at odds with the spread of knowledge.

The findings are IN NO WAY "at odds" with relativity.

The team did not "change the state of a vapour in a way that light travelling(sic) through it would travel faster than normal." They created a pattern of interfering waves that made a pulse that traveled faster than normal. This is like saying that swinging the end of a jump-rope changes the state of the surrounding air to make the rope move faster, when in reality the ends of the rope are stationary and only a pulse is moving down the rope.

This was on Fark yesterday and it was even lower than THEIR scientific standards. I'm waiting for it to hit Digg so 500 people can comment that there is a massive conspiracy to suppress FTL technologies.

It is not true that the map of freedom will be complete
with the erasure of the last invidious border
when it remains for us to chart the attractors of thunder
and delineate the arrhythmias of drought
to reveal the molecular dialects of forest and savanna
as rich as a thousand human tongues
and to comprehend the deepest history of our passions
ancient beyond mythology's reach

So I declare that no corporation holds a monopoly on numbers
no patent can encompass zero and one
no nation has sovereignty over adenine and guanine
no empire rules the quantum waves

And there must be room for all at the celebration of
understanding
for there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold
imposed by force, resisted
or escaped.

Greg Egan, author of Distress.
Shamelessly copied without permission.

Despite the fact that the theory was worked out more well over a century ago, almost every modern pop science story about manipulating the speed of light leaves out these crucial points.

Try reading some Greg Egan. Especially Learning To Be Me or Permutation City

Tangential question here:

No pun intended?

If you were in a spaceship hovering just above the event horizon of a black hole (accelerating away from is just sufficiently to keep that distance) - and neglecting for the moment that you couldn't biologically survive that sort of acceleration - then looking out to your left or right, toward the "horizon" of the sphere contained within the event horizon, you would see in the distance your own self, however many light-seconds in the past it takes for light to travel around the black hole, correct?

Only if you're at the "photon sphere" (1.5 times the Schwarzschild radius); that is the location at which light can circularly orbit a black hole. Outside the photon sphere light will spiral outwards from the black hole, and inside it it will spiral inwards, and in either case will not return to you where you are hovering.

For some visualizations of what it looks like to hover near a black hole, see Greg Egan's applet and summary.

So my question is, under high acceleration in open space, such that you have this "acceleration black hole" behind you, would you see the same sort of effects? Look left or right or up or down (here saying the black hole is "behind" you rather than "below" you as above) or anywhere along the circle perpendicular to your line of motion, and you'd see the image of your own spaceship? If so, how does that work? And if not, why not?

This "acceleration horizon" (the Rindler horizon) is not a sphere, so light cannot orbit it. It's more like a "wall".

Tangential question here:

No pun intended?

If you were in a spaceship hovering just above the event horizon of a black hole (accelerating away from is just sufficiently to keep that distance) - and neglecting for the moment that you couldn't biologically survive that sort of acceleration - then looking out to your left or right, toward the "horizon" of the sphere contained within the event horizon, you would see in the distance your own self, however many light-seconds in the past it takes for light to travel around the black hole, correct?

Only if you're at the "photon sphere" (1.5 times the Schwarzschild radius); that is the location at which light can circularly orbit a black hole. Outside the photon sphere light will spiral outwards from the black hole, and inside it it will spiral inwards, and in either case will not return to you where you are hovering.

For some visualizations of what it looks like to hover near a black hole, see Greg Egan's applet and summary.

So my question is, under high acceleration in open space, such that you have this "acceleration black hole" behind you, would you see the same sort of effects? Look left or right or up or down (here saying the black hole is "behind" you rather than "below" you as above) or anywhere along the circle perpendicular to your line of motion, and you'd see the image of your own spaceship? If so, how does that work? And if not, why not?

This "acceleration horizon" (the Rindler horizon) is not a sphere, so light cannot orbit it. It's more like a "wall".

No, the "accelerational black hole" scenario does take into account relativity; it is known as a "Rindler horizon". Very quickly, each of the two travelers will exit from the other's past causal horizon. Time dilation does exist, but it's also true that past a certain point, light from one of the travelers can never reach the other, so long as the other keeps accelerating.

The only situation in which the photons can never catch up, is if they pass the event horizon of a black hole

It's also impossible for photons to catch up if you continually accelerate away from their source, with enough of a head start, and never stop accelerating. This can happen even in ordinary special relativity, in the absence of gravity. See the Rindler horizon. This is not a "true" event horizon, like a black hole's, because it only exists for the accelerating observer. A real horizon will exist for all observers.

Tomorrow, I suppose I'm just going to live on a chip.

Maybe not tomorrow, but relatively soon.

The aforementioned "enthusiasts who extend Blogger in useful, novel and unexpected ways" are still digesting the implications of this change for their carefully-constructed, hand-wrought hacks. Especially those that supplement Blogger's lack of categories and comment feeds.

A good jumping off point can be found at this post: Blogger Beta Explored.

This site has a nice illustrative applet on group velocity which helps to visualise some of the points in the parent posts: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/APPLETS/2 0/20.html
You can also use it to show why you can't transfer information faster than light.

Sorry that's not what's happening.

This: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/APPLETS/2 0/20.html is what is happening.

LIGHT IS NOT MOVING BACKWARD! Only the "pulse" is.

Look at the simulator and just imagine changing the waves slightly so that the pulse moves backward instead of forward.

The "science" here is not new at all, and the real kicker is this piece of nonsense: "Boyd is already working on ways to see what will happen if he can design a pulse without a leading edge."

He sort of redeems himself by saying: If I do that then it won't work. But just asking the question seems to me that he doesn't understand what's happening here, and is far too excited about something rather simple.