Let's say you want to "teleport" your car to work. What you do is first drive there, and then once you're there, you can tell people you teleported it and they have no way to prove you're lying.
I can't even begin to list all the things wrong with this paper. And I'm not just going by the title. Singularities, Hawking radiation, final states, the information paradox...if you believe in all of these things, you can construct a theory that uses them all. But making them work together doesn't mean that any of them exist in the first place.
Black holes are the simplest objects in the universe. They have two variables - mass and spin. They do not spit things out, nor are they giant computers. They are not tunnels to somewhere else. They do not break any laws, and they are not weird. No new physics is required to understand them, because the physics that created them - mass and gravity - are right in front of us.
This guy is clearly well-read and articulate. But you can be articulate and be wrong if your assumptions are faulty.
>if time were running backwards, how would you even know it? It would be "normal" to you.
Exactly. Now for time travel, you would need time to be able to go both forwards and backwards for the same individual (bidirectionality). People hate unidirectional time, it's like half of the dimension is missing.
But isn't it interesting that it's exactly half? Kind of makes sense, doesn't it. It's not like we got 2/3rds of time and the other 1/3 is missing. The dimension got cleaved precisely in half. The other half is probably somewhere else, and those people are shooting up out of their graves trying to figure out if they can make a time machine before they are born.
The arrow of time is a big tease. Where's the arrow of gravity? If people want time to go backwards, where's the push for the recognition of antigravity?
I called you names because you seem to think the universe is incapable of observing itself. The observer to the tree falling could be a bird, it could be a tape recorder, it could be other trees, it could be the sunshine itself.
The law against paradoxes is that objects in the universe interact with each other, and that interaction has to work, otherwise there would be no point. In case you haven't noticed, we live inside of a machine, and that machine continues to function whether we do or not.
You've taken a sound idea - which is that the universe doesn't care about us - and inverted it to the point where humans are required for anything to happen. Actually, the universe cares about itself. That's why there were stars and planets long before there was us to observe them.
>In the presence of no observers, we just cannot tell. It is unknown. Mu.
Right. But every time we look, it happens. So after a while, you can kind of assume it's happening whether you look or not.
Unless your looking causes it to happen, which is true in quantum, but that's not on our scale. To assume that the newtonian world has explicitly quantum properties is pretty farfetched.
Indeed. I don't hold out much hope for quantum computers or teleportation.
If you know anything about fractals being the same at all scales, then you can imagine that electrons are like tiny planets with people living on them. Is the universe going to let us teleport these people around?
Thanks, I've actually read that page before. The traincar example is excellent.
But there's no example of observer 1 seeing A happen before B, and observer 2 seeing B happen before A. They say it can happen, and there's a nice colorful diagram that makes no sense, but they don't explain it.
Let's try this: Let's say all stars die at exactly 6b years. First we would see our own supernova, then 6b years later, we would see the supernova of a star 6b lightyears away. Conversely, people at that star would see theirs first and ours second.
But so what? That's not time inverting itself, that's a lag in transmission. People have known about lag since they used horses to deliver the mail.
Nice. And appeal to authority becomes corruption when authorities start appealing to each other. Then you have a circle-jerk. You stroke my paper, I'll stroke yours.
You're half-right. In the sense that time is a relative yardstick used to measure processes, it's somewhat of an illusion, however, without time nothing would happen.
Space is just as bad. When you move from one place to another, what are you moving through? Nothing? But you can measure the distance you traveled.
People obsess about time because they think it's weirder. Only a God can discriminate between two things. Without a divine power, all aspects of the universe are approximately equal.
>The observation is that when a photon splits into a particle+antiparticle and then later those anihilate you can think of this as a particle going forward in time and another particle going backward in time, whose trajectories intersect at the beginning and the end.
Yep. I heard this here on Slashdot and I heard it again. Very insightful as far as understanding antimatter.
Notice, however, that the antiparticle traveling backwards in time looks like it's moving in regular time to you. Just like a photon (which doesn't experience time at all) does take real time to travel some distance as far as we're concerned.
Wow. You're amazingly stupid. So if a tree falls in a forest, it doesn't make a sound?
I know it makes for a great philosophical question, and even leads into discussions about cats in boxes, but...on a practical level, yes, we all know that it does make a sound.
>Does this even seem reasonable? How could all that be stored?
Yep. People who believe in parallel universes don't seem to comprehend the vast amount of data that would need to be stored to make such a thing possible. Every electron twitch - boom, new universe, with all of its state intact, loaded into a new memory location far away from the previous one.
I guess with time travel they are saying all the previous states are still stored. Pretty close to the same thing. You would need a whole other universe whose job is to calculate every combination of ours.
The universe is big, but not arbitrarily powerful where you can just ascribe all sorts of amazing abilities, like the ability to remember every state it's ever been in. Too much.
>and two different observers may disagree about how much time was between two events, and may even disagree about the temporal order of causally unrelated events.
How did you get from time being stretchy to it being able to invert itself?
Time is a yardstick used to measure the distance between events. If the events are practically simultaneous, time is zero. Photons, for example, always have time set to zero, because photons do everything instantly. Distance, likewise, can also be near zero, if two objects are right on top of each other.
But you can't have negative time any more than you can have negative distance. You can walk backwards and call it negative, but from God's eye it still looks like a positive translation from one place to another.
PO boxes. Are routed to their database id's. What the fuck?
If anyone here is familiar with computers, you know that database id's are used internally to cross-reference external object names. In other words, as far as the outside world is concerned, database id's don't exist.
Except at the USPO, where database id's are used to send your mail! PO Box 3794281, anyone?
The USPO would greatly benefit by getting on the information bandwagon, and cross-referencing their PO Box Id's, to actual, sendable mail addresses. For example, PO Box 3794281 maps to "Jane's Hair Care Products," and "Jane Simpson," and nothing else. If you try to send a letter to PO Box 3794281, it fails. You have to know WHO you are sending mail, to get it to work, just spamming boxes should NOT work.
Why is this cool? Because Jane's Hair Care Products could lift town and move to another location, re-number their PO Box and it would still work.
The USPO DOES NOT UNDERSTAND HOW COMPUTERS WORK. In this age, that is fail.
>Well until he does get it, any consideration of how to process it is somewhat moot.
Not quite. He was clear enough to construct a data model. This customer knows what he wants. Problem is, it will take his own efforts to fill in the gaps (in terms of getting access).
"Hi, I want you to install a refrigerator in my apartment. It needs to fit in a hole 30 inches wide by 30 inches deep."
"Will you take a refrigerator 28 inches wide by 26 inches deep?"
"Sure but....lemme talk to my landlord first."
If Zeus descended from the sky and said, "I'll do whatever it takes to get this index online..."
Would Zeus succeed, or would the customer say to him, "I'm not ready?"
P.S. I'm NOT for hire on this job. I am not.even.a.programmer.anymore.
I will, however, take queries as far as I check my email (which is unreliable) and as far as I check this page (until tomorrow at the least).
You asked, you got your answers. 88 comments, perhaps 10 of them were useful. Anyone who says to "use X" is dumb. By the time you figure out how to use it, you could have written your own.
This is 1-3 tables, which for a real-world analogy is like 1-3 sheets of paper. Customer says what? Landlord? Landlord rules 1-3 sheets of paper. Good luck with that access.
>we do run queries that include things such as "give me all articles in Magazine including 'foo' in the title, published between 1950 and 1966"
SELECT * FROM banjo_articles WHERE title LIKE "%foo%", date BETWEEN "1950-01-01" AND "1966-12-31"
You're bragging that your "system" has a single line of code?
I've seen selects ten or twenty lines long, with multiple joins, and joins and selects within joins. Granted it's not fast, but it works, and it takes all of an hour (or less) to write such a query.
It's really not a text indexing problem, unless you are going to throw out rdbms and use a flat text file.
If you will use relational database, then it is a 3-table problem at most. Articles, sources, and articles to sources. If you can join those, you have the core of a classic content management system.
From what I gather, they haven't even gotten that far. It is just a master index of articles that are available (which point to nothing in particular), so it is a 1-table problem.
Well the program and the data are two different things. At least to me they are.
All you need to do is run the program once, get a dump of the entire article list, and import it into your new MySQL table.
And running the program requires, what, DOS? Come on. Forget the web, that's out of the picture now with regards to the old, expired system. You just need ONE copy of the data and you can re-build the web interface yourself with php.
It sounds to me like the data is proprietary and they are being stingy with it. But what other use they have for it, I don't know. You could have all the private libraries index their own collections, and collate the results, but something tells me that would require and extensive level of participation.
So let me get this straight: This is a single table? You have one table (spreadsheet), where each row represents one article. The columns would be title, author, and either five or so columns of keywords, or a single varchar column that would hold them all (comma-delineated or whatever).
Then you need the standard row_id and whatever other crufty columns creep in. If this is all you need, you can do this in Excel (har har). Or install MySQL, create the table (we'll call it mr_article_list), then write the standard php scripts to add, edit, delete, and retrieve entries.
These scripts are basically just web forms that pass through the entered values into the database. You're talking a single code page for each of the inputs, and then a page each for the output/result, or 8 pages total.
For example, the mr_add.php script (mr_ stands for model railroad) retrieves a new row_id from the db. Then it presents a web form with input fields for the title, author, and keywords. Then it does db_insert(mr_article_list, $title, $author, $keywords). Then it calls mr_add2.php, which is either success or failure.
The edit, delete, and retrieve scripts are similarly simple. All you need is a linux box to do this, and the basic scripts could be written in two evenings (or one long one) - assuming you hired someone who does this for a living.
Now this is where it gets interesting:
>many clubs and individuals have vast libraries often spanning 5 or 6 decades of monthly magazines
Do you want to store this information as well, so that people know who to call to get the issue? I assume this would be the real useful feature. So now you need a second table, mr_sources, which is basically a list of clubs/people, so the columns in this table would be like row_id, name, address, phone number (standard phone book shit).
Then you need a third table, mr_article_sources, which is real simple, it just matches up the rows in the article list to the rows in the source list. It's columns are simply row_id, article_row_id, source_row_id. This is a long and narrow table that cross-indexes the two shorter, fatter tables (the list of articles, and the list of sources).
Example, article_id #19 is "How to shoot your electric engine off the tracks in under three seconds." Source_id #5 is Milwaukee Railroad Club, #7 is San Jose Railroad Surfers, and #9 is Bill Gates Private Book Collection. All three of them have this article. So your cross-index table would look like this:
01 19 05 02 19 07 03 19 09
When you search for article #19, it finds sources 5, 7, and 9 in the cross-index table, then queries the source table for the names and phone numbers of those three clubs (and displays them).
Finally, if you're wondering how to query three different tables at the same time, well, databases were made to do exactly this.
>I was told by a distributor nearly ten years ago that my first film was selling side by side with 100 million dollar films in Malaysia for a $1 a copy
And this is bad? You've evened up the odds with blockbusters and this is bad?
And you need Malaysian eyeballs to make a profit?
I pay for my movies, either through Netflix, cable, or theater tickets. The thing is, I don't watch a lot of movies. What are you showing that I need to see?
>The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, and Prodigy are British bands. Techno, or later dance, may have played in the US but it is not easy to remember an US artist in the genre.
True, but would you spin any of those in a set? Those acts may be "memorable" but not really high-quality dance music. More like stuff I would put on a mixtape in high school.
European acts I would think of would be more like Tiesto (dutch), Paul Van Dyk (germany), and Oakenfold (london). And these are just the most high-profile celebrities.
For US, how about Bad Boy Bill (chicago), Joey Beltram (queens), and Josh Wink (philadelphia)?
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say you want to "teleport" your car to work. What you do is first drive there, and then once you're there, you can tell people you teleported it and they have no way to prove you're lying.
So you're saying he posted this bunk to call attention to his other 129 decent, well-written articles? Could be. It would be a clever strategy.
However, check out this paper, "Almost Certain Escape From Black Holes." http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0406/0406205v1.pdf
I can't even begin to list all the things wrong with this paper. And I'm not just going by the title. Singularities, Hawking radiation, final states, the information paradox...if you believe in all of these things, you can construct a theory that uses them all. But making them work together doesn't mean that any of them exist in the first place.
Black holes are the simplest objects in the universe. They have two variables - mass and spin. They do not spit things out, nor are they giant computers. They are not tunnels to somewhere else. They do not break any laws, and they are not weird. No new physics is required to understand them, because the physics that created them - mass and gravity - are right in front of us.
This guy is clearly well-read and articulate. But you can be articulate and be wrong if your assumptions are faulty.
>if time were running backwards, how would you even know it? It would be "normal" to you.
Exactly. Now for time travel, you would need time to be able to go both forwards and backwards for the same individual (bidirectionality). People hate unidirectional time, it's like half of the dimension is missing.
But isn't it interesting that it's exactly half? Kind of makes sense, doesn't it. It's not like we got 2/3rds of time and the other 1/3 is missing. The dimension got cleaved precisely in half. The other half is probably somewhere else, and those people are shooting up out of their graves trying to figure out if they can make a time machine before they are born.
The arrow of time is a big tease. Where's the arrow of gravity? If people want time to go backwards, where's the push for the recognition of antigravity?
I called you names because you seem to think the universe is incapable of observing itself. The observer to the tree falling could be a bird, it could be a tape recorder, it could be other trees, it could be the sunshine itself.
The law against paradoxes is that objects in the universe interact with each other, and that interaction has to work, otherwise there would be no point. In case you haven't noticed, we live inside of a machine, and that machine continues to function whether we do or not.
You've taken a sound idea - which is that the universe doesn't care about us - and inverted it to the point where humans are required for anything to happen. Actually, the universe cares about itself. That's why there were stars and planets long before there was us to observe them.
>In the presence of no observers, we just cannot tell. It is unknown. Mu.
Right. But every time we look, it happens. So after a while, you can kind of assume it's happening whether you look or not.
Unless your looking causes it to happen, which is true in quantum, but that's not on our scale. To assume that the newtonian world has explicitly quantum properties is pretty farfetched.
Which leads us back to the topic of the article.
>It seems rigged against "utility".
Indeed. I don't hold out much hope for quantum computers or teleportation.
If you know anything about fractals being the same at all scales, then you can imagine that electrons are like tiny planets with people living on them. Is the universe going to let us teleport these people around?
Nobody is teleporting Earth around. *grin*
Thanks, I've actually read that page before. The traincar example is excellent.
But there's no example of observer 1 seeing A happen before B, and observer 2 seeing B happen before A. They say it can happen, and there's a nice colorful diagram that makes no sense, but they don't explain it.
Let's try this: Let's say all stars die at exactly 6b years. First we would see our own supernova, then 6b years later, we would see the supernova of a star 6b lightyears away. Conversely, people at that star would see theirs first and ours second.
But so what? That's not time inverting itself, that's a lag in transmission. People have known about lag since they used horses to deliver the mail.
Nice. And appeal to authority becomes corruption when authorities start appealing to each other. Then you have a circle-jerk. You stroke my paper, I'll stroke yours.
You're not wrong. Great set of posts.
You're half-right. In the sense that time is a relative yardstick used to measure processes, it's somewhat of an illusion, however, without time nothing would happen.
Space is just as bad. When you move from one place to another, what are you moving through? Nothing? But you can measure the distance you traveled.
People obsess about time because they think it's weirder. Only a God can discriminate between two things. Without a divine power, all aspects of the universe are approximately equal.
>The observation is that when a photon splits into a particle+antiparticle and then later those anihilate you can think of this as a particle going forward in time and another particle going backward in time, whose trajectories intersect at the beginning and the end.
Yep. I heard this here on Slashdot and I heard it again. Very insightful as far as understanding antimatter.
Notice, however, that the antiparticle traveling backwards in time looks like it's moving in regular time to you. Just like a photon (which doesn't experience time at all) does take real time to travel some distance as far as we're concerned.
>simply because the universe is not an observer.
Wow. You're amazingly stupid. So if a tree falls in a forest, it doesn't make a sound?
I know it makes for a great philosophical question, and even leads into discussions about cats in boxes, but...on a practical level, yes, we all know that it does make a sound.
>Does this even seem reasonable? How could all that be stored?
Yep. People who believe in parallel universes don't seem to comprehend the vast amount of data that would need to be stored to make such a thing possible. Every electron twitch - boom, new universe, with all of its state intact, loaded into a new memory location far away from the previous one.
I guess with time travel they are saying all the previous states are still stored. Pretty close to the same thing. You would need a whole other universe whose job is to calculate every combination of ours.
The universe is big, but not arbitrarily powerful where you can just ascribe all sorts of amazing abilities, like the ability to remember every state it's ever been in. Too much.
>and two different observers may disagree about how much time was between two events, and may even disagree about the temporal order of causally unrelated events.
How did you get from time being stretchy to it being able to invert itself?
Time is a yardstick used to measure the distance between events. If the events are practically simultaneous, time is zero. Photons, for example, always have time set to zero, because photons do everything instantly. Distance, likewise, can also be near zero, if two objects are right on top of each other.
But you can't have negative time any more than you can have negative distance. You can walk backwards and call it negative, but from God's eye it still looks like a positive translation from one place to another.
You should be cautious because he's a Mech E. If his CS and physics ideas had any merit, he'd switch departments.
Indeed I was singing along.
I've had friends laugh at me for considering 8-bit chiptunes, but I think this is the future....
How long did it take to get a working piano? 25 years? So now we can start on our journey....
Here's a (simple) example of how the USPO fails.
PO boxes. Are routed to their database id's. What the fuck?
If anyone here is familiar with computers, you know that database id's are used internally to cross-reference external object names. In other words, as far as the outside world is concerned, database id's don't exist.
Except at the USPO, where database id's are used to send your mail! PO Box 3794281, anyone?
The USPO would greatly benefit by getting on the information bandwagon, and cross-referencing their PO Box Id's, to actual, sendable mail addresses. For example, PO Box 3794281 maps to "Jane's Hair Care Products," and "Jane Simpson," and nothing else. If you try to send a letter to PO Box 3794281, it fails. You have to know WHO you are sending mail, to get it to work, just spamming boxes should NOT work.
Why is this cool? Because Jane's Hair Care Products could lift town and move to another location, re-number their PO Box and it would still work.
The USPO DOES NOT UNDERSTAND HOW COMPUTERS WORK. In this age, that is fail.
It's called communism, and it's making a big comeback. You know, the whole, "I'm dumb, so give me money" angle.
Fight it at your peril. As you said, you have to go up against superior numbers.
>Well until he does get it, any consideration of how to process it is somewhat moot.
Not quite. He was clear enough to construct a data model. This customer knows what he wants. Problem is, it will take his own efforts to fill in the gaps (in terms of getting access).
"Hi, I want you to install a refrigerator in my apartment. It needs to fit in a hole 30 inches wide by 30 inches deep."
"Will you take a refrigerator 28 inches wide by 26 inches deep?"
"Sure but....lemme talk to my landlord first."
If Zeus descended from the sky and said, "I'll do whatever it takes to get this index online..."
Would Zeus succeed, or would the customer say to him, "I'm not ready?"
P.S. I'm NOT for hire on this job. I am not.even.a.programmer.anymore.
I will, however, take queries as far as I check my email (which is unreliable) and as far as I check this page (until tomorrow at the least).
You asked, you got your answers. 88 comments, perhaps 10 of them were useful. Anyone who says to "use X" is dumb. By the time you figure out how to use it, you could have written your own.
This is 1-3 tables, which for a real-world analogy is like 1-3 sheets of paper. Customer says what? Landlord? Landlord rules 1-3 sheets of paper. Good luck with that access.
>we do run queries that include things such as "give me all articles in Magazine including 'foo' in the title, published between 1950 and 1966"
SELECT * FROM banjo_articles WHERE title LIKE "%foo%", date BETWEEN "1950-01-01" AND "1966-12-31"
You're bragging that your "system" has a single line of code?
I've seen selects ten or twenty lines long, with multiple joins, and joins and selects within joins. Granted it's not fast, but it works, and it takes all of an hour (or less) to write such a query.
It's really not a text indexing problem, unless you are going to throw out rdbms and use a flat text file.
If you will use relational database, then it is a 3-table problem at most. Articles, sources, and articles to sources. If you can join those, you have the core of a classic content management system.
From what I gather, they haven't even gotten that far. It is just a master index of articles that are available (which point to nothing in particular), so it is a 1-table problem.
For 1-table problems I generally use Excel.
Well the program and the data are two different things. At least to me they are.
All you need to do is run the program once, get a dump of the entire article list, and import it into your new MySQL table.
And running the program requires, what, DOS? Come on. Forget the web, that's out of the picture now with regards to the old, expired system. You just need ONE copy of the data and you can re-build the web interface yourself with php.
It sounds to me like the data is proprietary and they are being stingy with it. But what other use they have for it, I don't know. You could have all the private libraries index their own collections, and collate the results, but something tells me that would require and extensive level of participation.
So let me get this straight: This is a single table? You have one table (spreadsheet), where each row represents one article. The columns would be title, author, and either five or so columns of keywords, or a single varchar column that would hold them all (comma-delineated or whatever).
Then you need the standard row_id and whatever other crufty columns creep in. If this is all you need, you can do this in Excel (har har). Or install MySQL, create the table (we'll call it mr_article_list), then write the standard php scripts to add, edit, delete, and retrieve entries.
These scripts are basically just web forms that pass through the entered values into the database. You're talking a single code page for each of the inputs, and then a page each for the output/result, or 8 pages total.
For example, the mr_add.php script (mr_ stands for model railroad) retrieves a new row_id from the db. Then it presents a web form with input fields for the title, author, and keywords. Then it does db_insert(mr_article_list, $title, $author, $keywords). Then it calls mr_add2.php, which is either success or failure.
The edit, delete, and retrieve scripts are similarly simple. All you need is a linux box to do this, and the basic scripts could be written in two evenings (or one long one) - assuming you hired someone who does this for a living.
Now this is where it gets interesting:
>many clubs and individuals have vast libraries often spanning 5 or 6 decades of monthly magazines
Do you want to store this information as well, so that people know who to call to get the issue? I assume this would be the real useful feature. So now you need a second table, mr_sources, which is basically a list of clubs/people, so the columns in this table would be like row_id, name, address, phone number (standard phone book shit).
Then you need a third table, mr_article_sources, which is real simple, it just matches up the rows in the article list to the rows in the source list. It's columns are simply row_id, article_row_id, source_row_id. This is a long and narrow table that cross-indexes the two shorter, fatter tables (the list of articles, and the list of sources).
Example, article_id #19 is "How to shoot your electric engine off the tracks in under three seconds." Source_id #5 is Milwaukee Railroad Club, #7 is San Jose Railroad Surfers, and #9 is Bill Gates Private Book Collection. All three of them have this article. So your cross-index table would look like this:
01 19 05
02 19 07
03 19 09
When you search for article #19, it finds sources 5, 7, and 9 in the cross-index table, then queries the source table for the names and phone numbers of those three clubs (and displays them).
Finally, if you're wondering how to query three different tables at the same time, well, databases were made to do exactly this.
>I was told by a distributor nearly ten years ago that my first film was selling side by side with 100 million dollar films in Malaysia for a $1 a copy
And this is bad? You've evened up the odds with blockbusters and this is bad?
And you need Malaysian eyeballs to make a profit?
I pay for my movies, either through Netflix, cable, or theater tickets. The thing is, I don't watch a lot of movies. What are you showing that I need to see?
>The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, and Prodigy are British bands. Techno, or later dance, may have played in the US but it is not easy to remember an US artist in the genre.
True, but would you spin any of those in a set? Those acts may be "memorable" but not really high-quality dance music. More like stuff I would put on a mixtape in high school.
European acts I would think of would be more like Tiesto (dutch), Paul Van Dyk (germany), and Oakenfold (london). And these are just the most high-profile celebrities.
For US, how about Bad Boy Bill (chicago), Joey Beltram (queens), and Josh Wink (philadelphia)?