Perhaps not, but suppose there are billions of universes (aka the multiverse or many worlds theory), all with varying settings for constants and such. Naturally life will develop in the universe with great conditions, and voila here we are.
Oversimplified, a particle like a photon exists as a wave until it is observed. It occupies all possible states. This is what allows it to pass through both slits simultaneously. (google "two slit experiment") Systems of particles can also behave as a wave function. Why not the entire universe? the wave function of the universe would allow the universe to exist in all possible states, including states where life is not possible, and states even more conducive to life than the one we are in.
Now you might not be inclined to accept this as a possibility--why should we postulate the existance of universes that we can't experience or even detect, to explain why ours is so fine tuned. Hmmm, think about it.
"how unique our planet really is"... just like how unique the latest lotto winner is. And yet people do win lotto. When you have 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars each and billions of years, well that's a lot of planets in the lottery.
Not to mention the fact that life could certainly evolve in environments we wouldn't expect. Certainly earthlike planet is not necessary. Look at the various examples of harsh environments on earth that support life: eg bacteria thriving near ocean volcanic vents, or miles underground in earth's mantle. Once life gets a foothold like that, anything is possible, including the evolution of an intelligent species.
Regarding your point that intelligence is overrated, there is an article in a recent New Scientist which basically points out the same; in essense that intelligence is not the 'ultimate' survival adaptation, and plenty of species get by just fine without it. So if you are trying to reason against evolution by saying "why haven't more species evolved to intelligence", it doesn't necessarily follow that natural selective pressure will produce intelligence. It would be like a tiger wondering (if tigers could wonder) why all species hadn't evolved to hunt and kill as efficiently as they.
You sound thoughtful and intelligent; do yourself a favor and read some of the stuff by Richard Dawkins.
None of this is important anyway, since reality as we know it is probably running on a matrix-type simulator.
It's not hard to compute this. Imagine a straight line from the airship to the horizon. This is presumably where the signal will end. Now imagine a right triangle formed by the airship, the center of the earth, and the tangent point where the signal is stopped by the horizon.
The hypotenuse is the distance from the earth's center to the airship. So we have:
(r+12)^2 = r^2 + d^2
d is the distance from the airship to the horizon. Plug in the value 3963 miles for r to get: 309 miles -- which is what NoNeed computed from the other direction.
However NoNeed said the distance is at least 300 miles. Actually the distance is AT MOST 309 miles, and at least 12 miles.
Go do some research on kinetic energy. All that energy has to go somewhere. A 10 km asteroid travelling at 30,000 mph would impart like 50 million megatons of TNT's worth of energy.
As far as a large carbon layer, I doubt the creatures were standing shoulder to shoulder when the end came. Probably more like a few large creature per square km on average.
Note that the iridium layer *does* exist, and is considered to be evidence of that impact.
So in summary what you are saying is "Dang man I done saw some Lisp one time, and then I wrote in it and I says to myself what are all these parenthesis in there for, and then I went back to fix some code what I wrote and danged if I just couldn't figger out what I wrote, I had to delete it and start again.. thank god I have BASIC so all my lines have numbers and I don't get lost.. oh and my boss told me I was a good programmer too, so don't just think I'm dumb"
Hey dipshit, someone can go to allmusic.com, read about a band including influences, followers, similar bands; get a list of band names, go onto P2P and sample those bands. I've done that numerous times and have bought probably 100 CDs directly because of P2P sampling. The other P2P I've done is downloading songs I used to own (but lost/broke the CD or Vinyl). RIAA can go fuck themselves.
Ellie discovers a message in the constant pi, placed there by an intelligence.
Actually since the digits of PI are non-repeating and non-terminating, in theory every possible message (including representations of *your* DNA code, works of Shakespeare, etc.) should be present within it an infinite number of times. I believe this has been discussed here before. Of course finding those messages might take some time. And just think of all the near misses you might encounter.
On a related track, imagine a matrix-like system. Now entities in the reality within the running matrix don't care what kind of hardware they are running on. It could even be an old man on an infinitely large beach (with an infinite amount of time) using twigs and stones to compute each state. In fact the system could be thought of as a huge memory array; the state of the memory array at any moment can be thought of as a massive integer. As the matrix runs from beginning to end you take each of these states and concatenate them into a really supermassive integer. Is the mere existence of this supermassive integer sufficient for the entities to experience the reality? Because in fact that integer should be found in the digits of PI. Maybe our entire reality is the result of this. Whoops I think my medication wore off. What got me thinking about this was The Terminal Experiment.. a really thought provoking book.
Hehe I had a//e which I upgraded to a IIgs.. I remember I actually hacked a boss key into Galaxian so that if my parents came in I could hit it and look like i was doing homework.. it would switch the screen to text mode and pause the game.
The monitor (not the screen) was great for stuff like that.. before I could afford to by an assembler I'd type my programs into the monitor after writing them out on paper, computing the branch offsets by hand etc..
TV : "First, we take a delicious bar of chocolate.." Homer : [In a trance] "Chocolate..!!" TV : "Then we wrap it in caramel.." Homer : "Oooohh, sweeeet!" TV : "And finally, we dip it in rich, creamery butter". Homer : "AAarhrhghlll..." [His head drops back, and he drools] Lisa : "A subliminal idea can be planted in your mind without you even knowing it." Homer : "Lisa, that's a load of rich creamery butter."
Hmm, let's see, peer reviewed research study vs. some Slashdot poster's anecdotal example of an exception.. I'm going with the research study..
By the way, do you understand of concept of statistical averages? The point is that on average taller people are getting more money that shorter people for the same job; that doesn't mean that there won't be exceptional examples.
see the defsystem lisp package to see how much unreadable bloat you get when trying to make something run across different lisps
I have a few Common Lisp web apps I have developed that run under ACL (Windows) and CMUCL (Linux) with only small 'portability' differences. I am doing DB access and PDF creation. I use external C libs for PDF output, and for DB access under Linux. (though there is now a PDF output package in CL that wasn't available when I started.) I compile under both environments using the same defsystem files. I don't understand your objection here.. the defsystem files are very terse and understandable.
The portability differences are in the foreign function interface, and in the multiprocessing (aka threading) interface.
Despite not having native thread support, CMUCL does include the MP system and performs comparably to ACL (which does support native threads).
Tell me about it.. my setup at home uses NAT and it is a pain in the ass trying to access my electric toothbrush from work. I need to make sure it is charging!!
Any lexically visible variables that the closure func refers to will be valid for as long as the closure is valid -- in your example when pvar goes out of scope the closure then refers to some random stack value.
Can a moral precept be seen, heard or touched? For that matter can a perfect and loving God be seen heard or touched? Has said entity ever given us any tangible evidence he exists besides a collection of ambiguous, internally inconsistent, and scientifically inaccurate writings of primitive nomads who thought sacrificing animals (or their son on an altar) would please Him?
Does this loving God love to see a universe full of suffering?
Speaking of personalizations, here is a slightly OT rant:
"Tea, Earl Grey, Hot."
Why does Picard always have to say that? Some Star Trek technology is impossible advanced (transporter, instant language analysis/translation), while other things are stupidly (unrealistically) primitive.
Realistically the ship's computer would monitor Picard's vital signs, comparing it to times in the past when he ordered tea and anticipate his order as he walks to the dispenser. In fact what is the dispenser there for? It is based on transporter tech anyway, it should transport to a surface near him. If that's too much he could still instruct the computer to give him a certain order when he said 'Tea'.
I had a similar experience with learning 6502 assy; typing codes into the monitor (//e assembler wasn't much, it translated instruction names, that was about it.. had to compute relative branches by hand, for example), etc. I would write out my code on a paper, computing branch locations, etc, then type it into the monitor. To insert instructions you had to copy the memory, then go back and adjust all the relative branch addresses by hand. Later I saved up and got Orca/M -- it was great!
I wrote a system that would switch into hires (super hires?) on a//e and hook into the char output routine, and it would allow you to use other fonts. It was somewhat slow, but it worked.
Some time later I upgraded to IIGS. My boss at the time gave me a 110 meg SCSI hard drive that the company didn't need. This was in the days of the 6-8 mhz AT with 10-20 gigs inside. I was determined to get that thing to work on my GS. I didn't have much money, but I got a SCSI interface card.. of course there was no driver for my drive, I had to write the SCSI drivers and work up some kind of a cable, etc. I had practically no knowledge of SCSI.. But after a few weeks I actually had it working. The first time I booted up prodos and saw I had 90 meg free on the volume, was pure satisfaction.
I also had an 8 meg card and a CPM card. In fact I used wordstar on CPM on Apple// to write a term paper or two.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps not, but suppose there are billions of universes (aka the multiverse or many worlds theory), all with varying settings for constants and such. Naturally life will develop in the universe with great conditions, and voila here we are.
Oversimplified, a particle like a photon exists as a wave until it is observed. It occupies all possible states. This is what allows it to pass through both slits simultaneously. (google "two slit experiment") Systems of particles can also behave as a wave function. Why not the entire universe? the wave function of the universe would allow the universe to exist in all possible states, including states where life is not possible, and states even more conducive to life than the one we are in.
Now you might not be inclined to accept this as a possibility--why should we postulate the existance of universes that we can't experience or even detect, to explain why ours is so fine tuned. Hmmm, think about it.
"how unique our planet really is"... just like how unique the latest lotto winner is. And yet people do win lotto. When you have 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars each and billions of years, well that's a lot of planets in the lottery.
Not to mention the fact that life could certainly evolve in environments we wouldn't expect. Certainly earthlike planet is not necessary. Look at the various examples of harsh environments on earth that support life: eg bacteria thriving near ocean volcanic vents, or miles underground in earth's mantle. Once life gets a foothold like that, anything is possible, including the evolution of an intelligent species.
Regarding your point that intelligence is overrated, there is an article in a recent New Scientist which basically points out the same; in essense that intelligence is not the 'ultimate' survival adaptation, and plenty of species get by just fine without it. So if you are trying to reason against evolution by saying "why haven't more species evolved to intelligence", it doesn't necessarily follow that natural selective pressure will produce intelligence. It would be like a tiger wondering (if tigers could wonder) why all species hadn't evolved to hunt and kill as efficiently as they.
You sound thoughtful and intelligent; do yourself a favor and read some of the stuff by Richard Dawkins.
None of this is important anyway, since reality as we know it is probably running on a matrix-type simulator.
Don't forget "The Penis Mightier" and "The Rapists"..
It's not hard to compute this. Imagine a straight line from the airship to the horizon. This is presumably where the signal will end. Now imagine a right triangle formed by the airship, the center of the earth, and the tangent point where the signal is stopped by the horizon.
The hypotenuse is the distance from the earth's center to the airship. So we have:
(r+12)^2 = r^2 + d^2
d is the distance from the airship to the horizon. Plug in the value 3963 miles for r to get: 309 miles -- which is what NoNeed computed from the other direction.
However NoNeed said the distance is at least 300 miles. Actually the distance is AT MOST 309 miles, and at least 12 miles.
Go do some research on kinetic energy. All that energy has to go somewhere. A 10 km asteroid travelling at 30,000 mph would impart like 50 million megatons of TNT's worth of energy.
As far as a large carbon layer, I doubt the creatures were standing shoulder to shoulder when the end came. Probably more like a few large creature per square km on average.
Note that the iridium layer *does* exist, and is considered to be evidence of that impact.
um have you heard of the concept of sterilization?
ROFL
So in summary what you are saying is "Dang man I done saw some Lisp one time, and then I wrote in it and I says to myself what are all these parenthesis in there for, and then I went back to fix some code what I wrote and danged if I just couldn't figger out what I wrote, I had to delete it and start again.. thank god I have BASIC so all my lines have numbers and I don't get lost.. oh and my boss told me I was a good programmer too, so don't just think I'm dumb"
Hey dipshit, someone can go to allmusic.com, read about a band including influences, followers, similar bands; get a list of band names, go onto P2P and sample those bands. I've done that numerous times and have bought probably 100 CDs directly because of P2P sampling.
The other P2P I've done is downloading songs I used to own (but lost/broke the CD or Vinyl). RIAA can go fuck themselves.
Great, now maybe irresponsible drunk assholes won't be driving up my insurance rates anymore..
On a related track, imagine a matrix-like system. Now entities in the reality within the running matrix don't care what kind of hardware they are running on. It could even be an old man on an infinitely large beach (with an infinite amount of time) using twigs and stones to compute each state. In fact the system could be thought of as a huge memory array; the state of the memory array at any moment can be thought of as a massive integer. As the matrix runs from beginning to end you take each of these states and concatenate them into a really supermassive integer. Is the mere existence of this supermassive integer sufficient for the entities to experience the reality? Because in fact that integer should be found in the digits of PI. Maybe our entire reality is the result of this. Whoops I think my medication wore off. What got me thinking about this was The Terminal Experiment
someone mod up the parent please
Hehe I had a //e which I upgraded to a IIgs.. I remember I actually hacked a boss key into Galaxian so that if my parents came in I could hit it and look like i was doing homework.. it would switch the screen to text mode and pause the game.
..
The monitor (not the screen) was great for stuff like that.. before I could afford to by an assembler I'd type my programs into the monitor after writing them out on paper, computing the branch offsets by hand etc
Shrug, I thought Keifer Sutherland was just fine in this movie.. Dark City is awesome!
TV : "First, we take a delicious bar of chocolate.."
Homer : [In a trance] "Chocolate..!!"
TV : "Then we wrap it in caramel.."
Homer : "Oooohh, sweeeet!"
TV : "And finally, we dip it in rich, creamery butter".
Homer : "AAarhrhghlll..." [His head drops back, and he drools]
Lisa : "A subliminal idea can be planted in your mind without you even knowing it."
Homer : "Lisa, that's a load of rich creamery butter."
By the way, do you understand of concept of statistical averages? The point is that on average taller people are getting more money that shorter people for the same job; that doesn't mean that there won't be exceptional examples.
I'll vote for TinyFugue as well; I've done some cool scripts for mudding in it..
How about a mud advert:
Marches of Antan:
antan.dns2go.com 3000
a little different than your average mud.
or search http://www.mudconnect.com/ for antan
see the defsystem lisp package to see how much unreadable bloat you get when trying to make something run across different lisps
I have a few Common Lisp web apps I have developed that run under ACL (Windows) and CMUCL (Linux) with only small 'portability' differences. I am doing DB access and PDF creation. I use external C libs for PDF output, and for DB access under Linux. (though there is now a PDF output package in CL that wasn't available when I started.) I compile under both environments using the same defsystem files. I don't understand your objection here.. the defsystem files are very terse and understandable.
The portability differences are in the foreign function interface, and in the multiprocessing (aka threading) interface.
Despite not having native thread support, CMUCL does include the MP system and performs comparably to ACL (which does support native threads).
Tell me about it.. my setup at home uses NAT and it is a pain in the ass trying to access my electric toothbrush from work. I need to make sure it is charging!!
-they could also smash rocks together and discover 'tools'--hammers, arrowheads, axes
-they could also smash (or melt) rocks and discover metals such as iron, copper, or tin..
All of this stuff was in fact quite important for the development of civilization as we know it..
Can a moral precept be seen, heard or touched? For that matter can a perfect and loving God be seen heard or touched? Has said entity ever given us any tangible evidence he exists besides a collection of ambiguous, internally inconsistent, and scientifically inaccurate writings of primitive nomads who thought sacrificing animals (or their son on an altar) would please Him?
Does this loving God love to see a universe full of suffering?
Speaking of personalizations, here is a slightly OT rant:
"Tea, Earl Grey, Hot."
Why does Picard always have to say that? Some Star Trek technology is impossible advanced (transporter, instant language analysis/translation), while other things are stupidly (unrealistically) primitive.
Realistically the ship's computer would monitor Picard's vital signs, comparing it to times in the past when he ordered tea and anticipate his order as he walks to the dispenser. In fact what is the dispenser there for? It is based on transporter tech anyway, it should transport to a surface near him. If that's too much he could still instruct the computer to give him a certain order when he said 'Tea'.
Ah memories..
//e and hook into the char output routine, and it would allow you to use other fonts. It was somewhat slow, but it worked.
// to write a term paper or two.
I had a similar experience with learning 6502 assy; typing codes into the monitor (//e assembler wasn't much, it translated instruction names, that was about it.. had to compute relative branches by hand, for example), etc. I would write out my code on a paper, computing branch locations, etc, then type it into the monitor. To insert instructions you had to copy the memory, then go back and adjust all the relative branch addresses by hand. Later I saved up and got Orca/M -- it was great!
I wrote a system that would switch into hires (super hires?) on a
Some time later I upgraded to IIGS. My boss at the time gave me a 110 meg SCSI hard drive that the company didn't need. This was in the days of the 6-8 mhz AT with 10-20 gigs inside. I was determined to get that thing to work on my GS. I didn't have much money, but I got a SCSI interface card.. of course there was no driver for my drive, I had to write the SCSI drivers and work up some kind of a cable, etc. I had practically no knowledge of SCSI.. But after a few weeks I actually had it working. The first time I booted up prodos and saw I had 90 meg free on the volume, was pure satisfaction.
I also had an 8 meg card and a CPM card. In fact I used wordstar on CPM on Apple
Another vote for Vernor Vinge here. Across Realtime is a great book, one of my all time favorites.