A 2-D lifeform could also survive if it's insides are shaped like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In other words, you could have a constant opening through the organism, but the two pieces would never float apart because they can't work themselves free.
About the 4-D universe... why does Hawking assume that the values of the primal forces have to be the same as the ones in our universe? If gravity overcomes time, just make gravity less strong and start with a different amount of matter/energy, right?
Now construct an animal that eats, digests, and excretes. Draw it on paper.
Too bad it literally falls apart.
Life in a two dimensional universe would evolve around that problem. It could have multiple valves that open and close in the stomach as the food goes through, keeping the entire organism in one piece. Or it could find a way to filter food particles through mostly solid tissue... a sponge-like quality, right?
Life in a 2-D universe couldn't be nearly as complex. For one, imagine how hard it would be to make out other objects! Color, shape (assuming more than one eye for, heh, 2-D vision) and size all come into play, but think of how little information that would provide! Another aspect is that brains tend to be 3-D, and that is what gives them so much power. And an organism in 2-D would still have to deal with gravity... a liquid environment would be a far better situation than air for a 2-D organism... otherwise all non-flying things would be bumping into each other on their large, round 2-D planet.
/A reference can be found here which is conversation between The Pope and Steven Hawking
/(!). The snippet is taken from Mr. Hawking's wildly popular book A Brief History of Time.
I hate to be a nitpicker, but I believe that it is Dr. Hawking.
On another note, I can assure you that the US public is conservative enough that it would NOT vote for an unmarried man and it would not vote to put a green in the Whitehouse. Some day, maybe, but in the present and near future? No. Way.
Yea. Let's focus on getting a Jewish person to the position of Vice President first. It's an indicator of progress, right? =)
...but my vote is still going to Nader. I won't feel guilty if that dipstick GWB wins by one vote nationally because he wins by one vote in my home state. My concience won't let me live in a two-party plutocracy.
A recent article over at ZDNet had a story telling about how Bush said he was for "Innovation, not litigation." Microsoft may have donated an equally large amount of money to both the Democratic and Republican canidates, but I wonder just how much/more/ Bush has recieved.
Here's a vaguely-related problem that is fun to contemplate over dinner. You've got a square napkin. You can fold it however you want provided that the resulting shape lies in a plane. For example, you could fold a corner over, which reduces the perimeter, and then fold a sub-corner" back (as students do with homeworks when they don't have a stapler.:-) ), which increases the perimeter again. The question is, can the perimeter of the shape you form by folding ever exceed the perimeter of the original napkin?
Nope. There's only so much of the original parameter, (I'll call this the "sharp" edge) and when you fold the paper over the first time, the "bent" edge is always shorter than the sharp edge you just folded away. Now we'll to try to regain some parameter. When you make the second fold, you gain back a portion of the sharp edge that's larger than the bent edge you are now losing. But look -- you should see a triangle on each side of the folded area, each composed of one line of the bent edge and two of the sharp edges. The "inner" two lines of the triangle are the sharp edge. Still with me? It's a rule that the sum of the length of two sides of a triangle are always longer than the third. So the length of the remaining bent edge on the parameter is smaller than the sharp edge you lost, and the second fold only adds back a fraction of the sharp edge. You can never regain back even the original length. That triangle cost you too much space!
Of course we all know its total BS (i.e. one of the main benefits of P2P is that it is virtually free.. how does anyone expect to make money off that??)
Exactly! I mean, just look at how terrible the Linux companies are doing!
They're practically starving that poor penguin!
I thought that formatting the hard drive turned all of those incriminating patterns of 1s and 0s to blocks of 0? Wouldn't a defrag mess it up if it was still there anyway?
I freely admit that I hate Macintosh computers. The idea that Apple computers might assimilate the market scares the hell out of me. But just a second ago, I realized: Apple is not a threat to the PC industry. To be successful in marketing to... erm, those who like computers simple, they have to think in such a simple manner themselves. When the company does things like this they are just trying to improve their image. It's like building a house out of playing cards -- Many Apple customers who bought the cube thought there was a crack in the case, and when they found out that it wasn't, they wanted a refund because it wasn't pretty enough. Apple is building a home out of playing cards. Case in point: Who really buys computers frequently enough to benefit from signing up for a 'one-click' service?
Is there any way for the casual investor to buy stock in Sega? Perhaps if Sega realizes that this isn't what their stockholders want, they would change their behavior?
Isnt it about time we started doing medicine on a quantum level, as everyone who does medicine thinks that they're so damm smart, but all the fuck they do is learn outdated techniques that suck basically. If they want to advance they have to think on a new level
Right. It's imperative that we go straight to the source -- and heal those sick, neglected elementary particles! There's nothing more dangerous than an electron with an advanced case of malaria.
I've always avoided the Atari Lynx because of what I had read about the resolution on screen:
Atari Lynx_____________: 160x102
Game Boy/GB color______: 160x144
Game Gear_____________: 160x144
Game.Com_____________: 200x160, touchscreen (in 8x8 blocks)
Neo Geo Pocket/NGP Color: 160x152
(Color doesn't mean much to me)
However, this Lynx FAQ says that a "160 x 102 "triad" standard resolution (16,320 addressable pixels) (A triad is three LCD elements: red, green, and blue) [A] Capability of 480 x 102 artificially high resolution" is possible.
Sounds squished. Can I flip it sideways and play shooter games that work better with a tall screen, like on the WonderSwan?
Intelligent machines that reproduce using DNA? You're in luck. They're called humans.
I hear that Distributed.net has signed up quite a few of them. They're all hard at work trying to crack who will be the ultimate winner on "Big Brother."
There already was a Netscape 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0. There wasn't a 5.0. They just skipped that generation. Really, the source code which they were going to release as Netscape 5.0 mostly got scrapped and everything was rewritten. At least that's my limited understanding of it all.
And heck, they're already at version 4.75. Why only bother to jump a measily.25?
Concidering the difficulty that we have in hitting missiles on earth, under controlled conditions, I can't see how it would be possible to use a jerry-rigged missile launcher to do so at any point in the near future. Americans, don't kid yourselves - you haven't launched anything of any size to beyond geostationary orbit since the 60's, and the scientists on those projects had great difficulty in making it work.
I don't know about that. We've seem to be very good at smacking things into Mars...
Novels are another great way to focus. Once you can read quickly, a novel moves so much faster than those boring TV shows. I guess I'm lucky, because most ADD people have trouble concentrating enough to read properly.
Not me. It's been more of my experience that when it's something that you really like, it steals your attention more than anything else. If I read a good book, then my mind will tend to go back and be distracted by the memory of the book more than anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
I love it when atheists say "Thank God" :)
I think it may have been a pun. =)
Decimal
(atheist)
and leave Intel with less free spirits and more zombies. Zombies do not inovate.
No... Zombies take up meaningless buzzwords from large corporations like Microsoft and use them as crutons in their word salads.
A 2-D lifeform could also survive if it's insides are shaped like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In other words, you could have a constant opening through the organism, but the two pieces would never float apart because they can't work themselves free.
About the 4-D universe... why does Hawking assume that the values of the primal forces have to be the same as the ones in our universe? If gravity overcomes time, just make gravity less strong and start with a different amount of matter/energy, right?
Imagine a two-d universe. Flat as a paper.
Now construct an animal that eats, digests, and excretes. Draw it on paper.
Too bad it literally falls apart.
Life in a two dimensional universe would evolve around that problem. It could have multiple valves that open and close in the stomach as the food goes through, keeping the entire organism in one piece. Or it could find a way to filter food particles through mostly solid tissue... a sponge-like quality, right?
Life in a 2-D universe couldn't be nearly as complex. For one, imagine how hard it would be to make out other objects! Color, shape (assuming more than one eye for, heh, 2-D vision) and size all come into play, but think of how little information that would provide! Another aspect is that brains tend to be 3-D, and that is what gives them so much power. And an organism in 2-D would still have to deal with gravity... a liquid environment would be a far better situation than air for a 2-D organism... otherwise all non-flying things would be bumping into each other on their large, round 2-D planet.
/A reference can be found here which is conversation between The Pope and Steven Hawking
/(!). The snippet is taken from Mr. Hawking's wildly popular book A Brief History of Time.
I hate to be a nitpicker, but I believe that it is Dr. Hawking.
*gasp*
You mean Hawking isn't a man?!
On another note, I can assure you that the US public is conservative enough that it would NOT vote for an unmarried man and it would not vote to put a green in the Whitehouse. Some day, maybe, but in the present and near future? No. Way.
Yea. Let's focus on getting a Jewish person to the position of Vice President first. It's an indicator of progress, right? =)
...but my vote is still going to Nader. I won't feel guilty if that dipstick GWB wins by one vote nationally because he wins by one vote in my home state. My concience won't let me live in a two-party plutocracy.
A recent article over at ZDNet had a story telling about how Bush said he was for "Innovation, not litigation." Microsoft may have donated an equally large amount of money to both the Democratic and Republican canidates, but I wonder just how much /more/ Bush has recieved.
Here's a vaguely-related problem that is fun to contemplate over dinner. You've got a square napkin. You can fold it however you want provided that the resulting shape lies in a plane. For example, you could fold a corner over, which reduces the perimeter, and then fold a sub-corner" back (as students do with homeworks when they don't have a stapler. :-) ), which increases the perimeter again. The question is, can the perimeter of the shape you form by folding ever exceed the perimeter of the original napkin?
Nope. There's only so much of the original parameter, (I'll call this the "sharp" edge) and when you fold the paper over the first time, the "bent" edge is always shorter than the sharp edge you just folded away. Now we'll to try to regain some parameter. When you make the second fold, you gain back a portion of the sharp edge that's larger than the bent edge you are now losing. But look -- you should see a triangle on each side of the folded area, each composed of one line of the bent edge and two of the sharp edges. The "inner" two lines of the triangle are the sharp edge. Still with me? It's a rule that the sum of the length of two sides of a triangle are always longer than the third. So the length of the remaining bent edge on the parameter is smaller than the sharp edge you lost, and the second fold only adds back a fraction of the sharp edge. You can never regain back even the original length. That triangle cost you too much space!
Of course we all know its total BS (i.e. one of the main benefits of P2P is that it is virtually free.. how does anyone expect to make money off that??)
Exactly! I mean, just look at how terrible the Linux companies are doing!
They're practically starving that poor penguin!
*ducks and runs*
That's it!! I'll need some fireflies, sheets of plastic, a jackknife, superglue, a bit duct tape...
I'll be right back. I have to make a run to the patent office.
You both forgot how to spell "Athlon".
Do you also pronounce it Ath-a-lon? Eesh. I have a teacher who calls it "Anth-a-lon"
*shudder*
I thought that formatting the hard drive turned all of those incriminating patterns of 1s and 0s to blocks of 0? Wouldn't a defrag mess it up if it was still there anyway?
If the courts fail us, at least we can knock 3 more years off the 17 it takes this "one-click" patent to expire.
*sigh*
(Does this mean Apple will have to purchase the rights again?)
I freely admit that I hate Macintosh computers. The idea that Apple computers might assimilate the market scares the hell out of me. But just a second ago, I realized: Apple is not a threat to the PC industry. To be successful in marketing to... erm, those who like computers simple, they have to think in such a simple manner themselves. When the company does things like this they are just trying to improve their image. It's like building a house out of playing cards -- Many Apple customers who bought the cube thought there was a crack in the case, and when they found out that it wasn't, they wanted a refund because it wasn't pretty enough. Apple is building a home out of playing cards. Case in point: Who really buys computers frequently enough to benefit from signing up for a 'one-click' service?
*Whew*
Apple will do themselves in.
_
-- Decimal
Is there any way for the casual investor to buy stock in Sega? Perhaps if Sega realizes that this isn't what their stockholders want, they would change their behavior?
Eh, you forgot to mention the Dreamcast.
$150
Come play.
Isnt it about time we started doing medicine on a quantum level, as everyone who does medicine thinks that they're so damm smart, but all the fuck they do is learn outdated techniques that suck basically. If they want to advance they have to think on a new level
Right. It's imperative that we go straight to the source -- and heal those sick, neglected elementary particles! There's nothing more dangerous than an electron with an advanced case of malaria.
I've always avoided the Atari Lynx because of what I had read about the resolution on screen:
Atari Lynx_____________: 160x102
Game Boy/GB color______: 160x144
Game Gear_____________: 160x144
Game.Com_____________: 200x160, touchscreen (in 8x8 blocks)
Neo Geo Pocket/NGP Color: 160x152
(Color doesn't mean much to me)
However, this Lynx FAQ says that a "160 x 102 "triad" standard resolution (16,320 addressable pixels) (A triad is three LCD elements: red, green, and blue) [A] Capability of 480 x 102 artificially high resolution" is possible.
Sounds squished. Can I flip it sideways and play shooter games that work better with a tall screen, like on the WonderSwan?
but since they are gone, its dobtful you will ever hear anyone complaining about anything you do with Atari hardware.
Yep. Plus, Hasbro released all rights to develop for the Jaguar. Damn Tramiels... If it weren't for them, Atari would probably still be alive today.
Intelligent machines that reproduce using DNA? You're in luck. They're called humans.
I hear that Distributed.net has signed up quite a few of them. They're all hard at work trying to crack who will be the ultimate winner on "Big Brother."
There already was a Netscape 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0. There wasn't a 5.0. They just skipped that generation. Really, the source code which they were going to release as Netscape 5.0 mostly got scrapped and everything was rewritten. At least that's my limited understanding of it all.
.25?
And heck, they're already at version 4.75. Why only bother to jump a measily
Concidering the difficulty that we have in hitting missiles on earth, under controlled conditions, I can't see how it would be possible to use a jerry-rigged missile launcher to do so at any point in the near future. Americans, don't kid yourselves - you haven't launched anything of any size to beyond geostationary orbit since the 60's, and the scientists on those projects had great difficulty in making it work.
I don't know about that. We've seem to be very good at smacking things into Mars...
Is the light bulb really THAT different from a fire? I'm for copyright, but not patent, if it is used for the same purpose.
A patent only lasts 17 years. A copyright can now go for about 100.
Are you sure?
Well, I don't need to know the song to know the TV show. That was the humor.
Novels are another great way to focus. Once you can read quickly, a novel moves so much faster than those boring TV shows. I guess I'm lucky, because most ADD people have trouble concentrating enough to read properly.
Not me. It's been more of my experience that when it's something that you really like, it steals your attention more than anything else. If I read a good book, then my mind will tend to go back and be distracted by the memory of the book more than anything else.