I believe in this one. Every particle is a wave function, and when particles interact their wave functions combine. When the wave function is observed (which is another way of saying that the wave function that is my mind interacts with the wave function I'm observing), it collapses to a point or specific state. After observation it returns to wave state.
Expanding outward, the entire universe is a wave function. Just as a particle exists in all states until observed, the universe also exists in all states (these are the parellel universes); our 'location' in the multiverse wave function determines the universe we experience.
The idea of x-illions of universes being 'created' every second is a little hard to swallow for most people. But I don't think about it in those terms. The multiverse waveform isn't like a wave travelling forward through time. Rather time is contained within the waveform. The entire waveform exists, meaning all of time exists and all the universes already exist. Our experience of 'moving forward in time' is illusory. We are simply a part of the multiverse waveform which 'experiences' the illusion of conciousness and time passage.
Hah! did VIsicalc or Appleworks have a talking paper clip to help with all my problems??? I don't think so. Paperclip helps me make good worksheets, I could never have made them on dumb old visicalc.
If you had a magical machine that could instantly make a copy of any product, and you went to a car dealership and made a copy of a dodge viper, and this was something you could never afford anyways, would it be wrong?
You could sell the magical machine and then buy the dodge viper. I'll bet the machine would be worth billions.
A little off-topic but, the problem as I see it, a civ can become 'modern' and develop technology, but unless they can shake off their 'primitive' behaviors such as nationalistic/religious hatred and dishonestly/selfishness, they will destroy themselves before becoming spacefaring. I assume that all the civs that came before us self destructed. Humanity will most likely do the same.
Stupid technology: how many story years have passed between all the various Trek Tv shows and movies, and the technology is basically all the same. Ships are bigger and faster, that's about it. No new inventions. You'd think they'd have new weapons and such, or maybe implants or wearable computers.
And what is with Picard always saying "Earl Grey, Hot"..? Can't the computer remember prior orders, so that Picard could say "Tea" and it would give him his usual order?
How about the 'conveniently avoided' "transport directly" feature. They rarely use it, even when they are in a hurry they usually walk down to the transporter room. Why the hell do they even need a transporter room in the first place?
What about the holodeck? You can't tell me that that place wouldn't be pr0n heaven.. That stupid episode where Riker fell in love with that skanky dog holodeck chick was a joke. In reality, the men of the ship would be in there with 10 naked holodeck babes every time their turn came up.
And is there any situation that Geordi can get out of?? just once I'd like to hear him say, "No Captain, I have no solution and no ideas either. We're fucked.". It's always "well, if we reroute the floobinator thru the cachafarber we just might be able to override the woozlefart; of course we'll have to re-phaze the blurfer." "Make it so."
Remember that time Picard and the others turned into children? Wouldn't it have been more realistic for all hell to break loose, scientists sent to the location to study the effect, and put it to use to prolong human life, possibly indefinitely? You don't think humans would want that? No, they just fix it and forget all about it.
Similarly, what about the time the ship went to the planet that was an automated weapon sales place. Of course once they get out of the trouble they were in, they LEAVE! Instead of swarming the place, learning about the technology, they JUST LEAVE IT.
Which makes it more likely we should've heard something out of SETI, making the silence even harder to explain.
Assuming first that based on the time of the big bang and subsequent time needed for heavy elements to form to support life let's say conservatively that life as we know it has been possible galaxy wide for 1 billion years. Now let's assume that a civilization capable of producing radio signals we can detect lasts 500 years before being destroyed by war, fundamentalism, pollution, asteroid or comet. Assume optimistically that that civ transmits a powerful radio signal in all directions for the entire 500 years. That gives us a 500 year window to detect it, but only if (a) we look at the right place and (b) more importantly: they lived within the appropriate TIME and DISTANCE.
One billion years is quite a long time. You could have 1000 advanced civs all living a million years apart in time who would never be able to detect each other.
Virtual particles pairs appear near the event horizon. Normally the particles would quickly annihilate each other (conserving energy) but at the event horizon sometimes one of the pair is pulled in while the other escapes. Since you can't create matter or energy, the escaping particle effectively 'steals' the energy from the black hole. These escaping particles are what they are talking about. Or something like that.
Your premise is flawed: "everybody and their dog downloads music and burns it on CD instead of buying it in the store."
Some people download only. Other people download to find new music, which they then purchase. Personally I have bought a lot of CDs because I downloaded music from a band I read about first. In any case the situation is much more complex than you portray, so don't act so confused when it doesn't add up.
"Yet there is a program which presents exactly the same output for every single input, written in C."
Wrong. In Lisp I can write (defun addn (x) (incf x y))
and it will return a function that will take a value and return a function that will increment that value when called. The key is this will work for any value type complex, rational, int, bignum. In C you are coding for a single data type. Therefore the C program does NOT produce correct output for every single input.
Every time someone comes onto c.l.l. claiming that other languages (eg C) can do anything that Lisp can it amounts to Turing equivalence. The point of Lisp "advocates" is that you can do all of these great things in Lisp without writing tons of extra scaffolding code.
If you want to find out if it was correct just post it on c.l.l. Regarding Naggum, while he does generate a lot of argumentative and fighting posts, he does have a lot of technical skill and often makes informative posts too.
The first C example was not a lexical closure, it was a weak trick that used a static global var. Erik provided an example that would allow something more like a LISP closure, but went on to explain in depth why while providing similar functionality it wasn't providing the generality of LISPs closures.
Your animosity towards Paul Graham and Erik Naggum and Lispers in general is quite obvious. I personally learned a lot from Paul Graham's books.
I would also like to comment that at least on c.l.l. Lispers are plenty willing to provide examples and evidence of why they believe Lisp to be superior. You will find fanaticism in every camp, Lisp included.
the TiVo unit doesn't offer any kind of" commercial skip" or even a "fast-fast-forward" mode, so it offers few benefits compared to a traditional VCR
I don't even understand how you could write this statement. Even if it did have a commercial skip button I would consider that the least of its benefits. (I can already skip commercials just using the existing fast forward.) Here is a list of benefits over VCR as I see them:
1. don't have to mess with tapes 2. don't have to know time or channel for any show, just tell tivo to record by name 3. don't have to deal with purging old shows 4. also does pause, rewind, ff on live tv 5. you can give it a list of shows to watch for, if they are ever broadcast, it will tape them.
Trying to tape shows with a VCR is a huge pain, with Tivo it is effortless.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe in this one. Every particle is a wave function, and when particles interact their wave functions combine. When the wave function is observed (which is another way of saying that the wave function that is my mind interacts with the wave function I'm observing), it collapses to a point or specific state. After observation it returns to wave state.
Expanding outward, the entire universe is a wave function. Just as a particle exists in all states until observed, the universe also exists in all states (these are the parellel universes); our 'location' in the multiverse wave function determines the universe we experience.
The idea of x-illions of universes being 'created' every second is a little hard to swallow for most people. But I don't think about it in those terms. The multiverse waveform isn't like a wave travelling forward through time. Rather time is contained within the waveform. The entire waveform exists, meaning all of time exists and all the universes already exist. Our experience of 'moving forward in time' is illusory. We are simply a part of the multiverse waveform which 'experiences' the illusion of conciousness and time passage.
Hah! did VIsicalc or Appleworks have a talking paper clip to help with all my problems??? I don't think so. Paperclip helps me make good worksheets, I could never have made them on dumb old visicalc.
What problems of Lisp (Common Lisp?) macros are you talking about?
If you had a magical machine that could instantly make a copy of any product, and you went to a car dealership and made a copy of a dodge viper, and this was something you could never afford anyways, would it be wrong?
You could sell the magical machine and then buy the dodge viper. I'll bet the machine would be worth billions.
That guy has got some nerve!
l
http://www.theonion.com/onion3121/billgates.htm
A little off-topic but, the problem as I see it, a civ can become 'modern' and develop technology, but unless they can shake off their 'primitive' behaviors such as nationalistic/religious hatred and dishonestly/selfishness, they will destroy themselves before becoming spacefaring. I assume that all the civs that came before us self destructed. Humanity will most likely do the same.
Why are you assuming that there is only one universe?
Stupid technology: how many story years have passed between all the various Trek Tv shows and movies, and the technology is basically all the same. Ships are bigger and faster, that's about it. No new inventions. You'd think they'd have new weapons and such, or maybe implants or wearable computers.
And what is with Picard always saying "Earl Grey, Hot"..? Can't the computer remember prior orders, so that Picard could say "Tea" and it would give him his usual order?
How about the 'conveniently avoided' "transport directly" feature. They rarely use it, even when they are in a hurry they usually walk down to the transporter room. Why the hell do they even need a transporter room in the first place?
What about the holodeck? You can't tell me that that place wouldn't be pr0n heaven.. That stupid episode where Riker fell in love with that skanky dog holodeck chick was a joke. In reality, the men of the ship would be in there with 10 naked holodeck babes every time their turn came up.
And is there any situation that Geordi can get out of?? just once I'd like to hear him say, "No Captain, I have no solution and no ideas either. We're fucked.". It's always "well, if we reroute the floobinator thru the cachafarber we just might be able to override the woozlefart; of course we'll have to re-phaze the blurfer." "Make it so."
Remember that time Picard and the others turned into children? Wouldn't it have been more realistic for all hell to break loose, scientists sent to the location to study the effect, and put it to use to prolong human life, possibly indefinitely? You don't think humans would want that? No, they just fix it and forget all about it.
Similarly, what about the time the ship went to the planet that was an automated weapon sales place. Of course once they get out of the trouble they were in, they LEAVE! Instead of swarming the place, learning about the technology, they JUST LEAVE IT.
Ok I'll stop ranting now.
http://www.fractal-recursions.com
You may be ready for Common Lisp now.
Assuming first that based on the time of the big bang and subsequent time needed for heavy elements to form to support life let's say conservatively that life as we know it has been possible galaxy wide for 1 billion years. Now let's assume that a civilization capable of producing radio signals we can detect lasts 500 years before being destroyed by war, fundamentalism, pollution, asteroid or comet. Assume optimistically that that civ transmits a powerful radio signal in all directions for the entire 500 years. That gives us a 500 year window to detect it, but only if (a) we look at the right place and (b) more importantly: they lived within the appropriate TIME and DISTANCE.
One billion years is quite a long time. You could have 1000 advanced civs all living a million years apart in time who would never be able to detect each other.
Thank you Nick Burns.
Hows that going to work? They can just say NANA setup some fake site and photographed it and then used photoshop for touchup.
NASA is going to have to go back there and setup a giant signal beacon that they can use to flash messages back to earth.
BAH.. edible cars.. they promised us those years ago. I just don't see it happening.
Unfortunately, at the end, Hollywood would be saved and live happily ever after.
I would go to the theatre just to see you squash somebodiy's ringing cellphone (and the resulting fight that breaks out)..
The Gateway series by Frederik Pohl has some aliens hiding inside the event horizon of a black hole..
Virtual particles pairs appear near the event horizon. Normally the particles would quickly annihilate each other (conserving energy) but at the event horizon sometimes one of the pair is pulled in while the other escapes. Since you can't create matter or energy, the escaping particle effectively 'steals' the energy from the black hole. These escaping particles are what they are talking about. Or something like that.
Your premise is flawed: "everybody and their dog downloads music and burns it on CD instead of buying it in the store."
Some people download only. Other people download to find new music, which they then purchase. Personally I have bought a lot of CDs because I downloaded music from a band I read about first. In any case the situation is much more complex than you portray, so don't act so confused when it doesn't add up.
Ooops, I meant to say "and it will take a value and return a function that will increment ..."
"Yet there is a program which presents exactly the same output for every single input, written in C."
Wrong. In Lisp I can write
(defun addn (x) (incf x y))
and it will return a function that will take a value and return a function that will increment that value when called. The key is this will work for any value type complex, rational, int, bignum. In C you are coding for a single data type. Therefore the C program does NOT produce correct output for every single input.
Every time someone comes onto c.l.l. claiming that other languages (eg C) can do anything that Lisp can it amounts to Turing equivalence. The point of Lisp "advocates" is that you can do all of these great things in Lisp without writing tons of extra scaffolding code.
If you want to find out if it was correct just post it on c.l.l.
Regarding Naggum, while he does generate a lot of argumentative and fighting posts, he does have a lot of technical skill and often makes informative posts too.
The first C example was not a lexical closure, it was a weak trick that used a static global var. Erik provided an example that would allow something more like a LISP closure, but went on to explain in depth why while providing similar functionality it wasn't providing the generality of LISPs closures.
Your animosity towards Paul Graham and Erik Naggum and Lispers in general is quite obvious. I personally learned a lot from Paul Graham's books.
I would also like to comment that at least on c.l.l. Lispers are plenty willing to provide examples and evidence of why they believe Lisp to be superior. You will find fanaticism in every camp, Lisp included.
Don't you think he's talking about the feathers that are leftover by processing the 8 billion chickens you mentioned??
the TiVo unit doesn't offer any kind of" commercial skip" or even a "fast-fast-forward" mode, so it offers few benefits compared to a traditional VCR
I don't even understand how you could write this statement. Even if it did have a commercial skip button I would consider that the least of its benefits. (I can already skip commercials just using the existing fast forward.) Here is a list of benefits over VCR as I see them:
1. don't have to mess with tapes
2. don't have to know time or channel for any show, just tell tivo to record by name
3. don't have to deal with purging old shows
4. also does pause, rewind, ff on live tv
5. you can give it a list of shows to watch for, if they are ever broadcast, it will tape them.
Trying to tape shows with a VCR is a huge pain, with Tivo it is effortless.
What random flashes of light? Get to the doctor quick man!