sort of like ethernet's exponential backoff protocol: If one device decides to use a lower exponent, it will have better overall performance at the cost of a fractionally lower aggregate. If everyone decides to use it, the aggregate performance will be substantially lower.
Some of the replies in this post have centered on the subject of computations to disprove the fact that we're living in a simulation.
How about pushing the limits of computation? Let's solve a very difficult computation. It may be easy to simulate an arbitrarily complex CPU and any program that may run on it, but what if we were to build a sufficiently large quantum computer, assuming that we can do such? To run the quantum program, the simulating computer must at least support quantum mechanics because the program logic would be known, and the computing device would be known. Whatever result is finally generated may be classically verified, but we know that the quantum result for that program must be available in less time.
Note that this doesn't prove things like p==np, but only uses time as a probe to the limits of the environment. We can say that the environment at least simulates detail up to the QM level because if it didn't follow all the QM rules, the quantum calculation wouldn't work. Note also that this doesn't say that the possible simulator really runs in an environment where QM is the highest resolution achievable.
In effect, just like the laser beam to alpha centurii, we're trying to overload the simulator by getting it to simulate exponential program space where increasing the exponent is relatively easier.
looked at another way, hard drive capacities have just been doubling faster than processor speeds.
If 10MB back then cost $1k then 1MB cost $100, so we just do the 60G/1M and get a 60,000 time increase in storage capacity for the same price. Doubling times would then be log(2)60k = 15.9 or so, or about once every 1.1 years over 18 years. Contrast this with moore's law which states that processor speeds double every 1.5 years.
The downside is that access times have tracked closer to a linear function.
perhaps the same explanation as what happens when you wave a laser pointer across the moon (assuming you have powerful enough to see at that distance).
You need to remember that nothing is breaking the speed of light barrier here because we're talking about different parts of the explosion: because the explosion is taking place so far away distances get amplified - simple trig. It's all in the angles. Think about cones.
Of course I might not know what I'm talking about either, or am answering a question different from the one you asked.
Bad form to reply to my own post but what do I know? I should have googled gamma particles first before posting.
Turns out that references to gamma particles really are used quite frequently, and sometime interchangably within the same context too. Much more frequently than I would have thought.
so much for the article's technical credibility: gamma particles are extensively referenced at the end of the first section.
It seems that the author couldn't make up his mind as he also talks about gamma rays later on.
Now, as far as I know, gammas are commonly referred to as rays, so either the author feels like rubbing wave/particle duality into us, or he doesn't really understand what he's writing about, or, of course, I could be way off base here and people do really talk about gamma particles.
(for those who might be confused, gamma rays are products of nuclear decay, but as opposed to protons and electrons [alpha and beta radiation], they don't pack rest mass hence their common reference as gamma rays).
it could be just me, but the way I read the article was that the fungus was discovered in an OREGON forest, and the data was collected by the USDA. Does anyone want to tell me where there's an Oregon in Canada?
Of course, the poster might not have read the article carefully and just sourced it as Ottawa, Ontario, taken from the first line.
an fft is a fast fourier transform. It is commonly used to transform data from the time domain to the frequency domain.
What this means is that is if you have a time-varying signal like audio for example, you can run an fft on it and get a frequency analysis on the sound. i.e. from the sound in a waveform format, after an fft, you can pick out which are the dominant frequencies, and what the relationship between frequencies are.
Although the fft is strictly not necessary because it is, after all, just a transform, it turns out that many media compression techniques use them because humans aren't as discriminating in the frequency domain so if you do lossy compression in the frequency domain, we won't notice/mind as much.
fyi, you do an fft any time you view a.jpg, or listen to an.mp3, or watch a dvd, etc. Lots of uses for them, and that doesn't even get into the engineering/scientific uses...
actually, I was thinking more of the fact that they make a relatively big deal out of their redshift measurements as a measure of the distance to the object. Now you have to factor in gravitational redshift + dust + universe expanding + probably some other stuff I can't think of right now.
even faster mp3 / dvd / video variant - encoding/decoding!
Won't the *aa be pleased.
'Consumers shouldn't be allowed to have machines that can encode media files quickly since we're the only ones who are allowed to produce this stuff...'
'and no, why would consumers need machines that can decode a media file faster than the realtime playback speed? if you're playing something back, you won't need to do anything else...'
Just speculating, but since black holes do evaporate, and the smaller they are the faster they evaporate, I wonder what the implications of evaporation would be in the presense of an acretion disk.
Given that in the process of evaporation, a black hole emits radiation, at some point the radiation pressure from the evaporation would balance out the force of gravity pulling matter into the black hole so then the black hole might stabilize in size.
Surely they'll have named that limit already, but I don't think it's the same as the eddington limit.
Or perhaps there won't be a limit here because the cross section area of the acretion disk would be so small compared to the surface area of the event horizon. (yes, I think that incoming matter would have to form a disk and not form an acretion shell)
You might be confusing neutron stars (pulars sometimes) with these quasars.
Neutron stars are prevented from collapsing into black holes because of nuclear repulsion / neutron degeneracy (instead of electron repulsion). In fact, there's so much pressure that the electrons get squeezed into the protons of the atoms - hence neutron stars.
Black holes have enough gravity to overcome nuclear repulsion and collapse further than neutron stars. I think there's a couple theories about just what happens inside the black hole, but the commonality is that particles don't mean much whether or not you're talking about a singularity, or the non-singularity quantum foam theories.
this is how normal stars work too. The radiation pressure generated by the core keeps the core from collapsing into itself. - well not quite the same, but same idea.
But I haven't heard of the eddington limit before either. Neat.
at least that's what I remember from astronomy classes. The article doesn't say if they take that into account or not - and if it's really so far away, that would be a lot of dust that light travelled through. If they do, they would have to assume some uniform amount of dust?
How do they get the image from the thing that they're looking at back to that gold needle of theirs? Sure, it might be a point source, but even with a point source that small you're going to have problems focusing - the same problems they were talking about, about the thing they're imaging being smaller than the wavelength of the light that they're using.
They _do talk about trying to get the first _optical_ images of smaller molecules, unless I'm reading it wrong.
With some people already accusing bugtraq of being a repository for exploits that anyone could use for exploit purposes, you'd think that the same could happen to the spam archive.
Soon we'll see old spam being recycled as the new breed of spam trolls mine the archive for inspiration - and maybe just material reuse.
Then, of course, it's not like we don't see recycled spam anyway, so maybe this isn't such a bad thing...
(And if I sound incoherant, it's 2 in the morning. I should be sleeping.)
Asking for a slashdotting is one thing, but asking to be an archive for spam is another.
I wonder if anyone knows just how much of the stuff is out there, and if it's even possible to store all that. Of course, spam being mostly duplicates and all, maybe they have a chance. But with spammers staying ahead of the game and rotationg their text, I wouldn't count on it.
On the other hand, why not just set up a couple of hotmail accounts, bait them a bit, and just watch the spam come in? Why even bother asking for it?
Slashdot Mirror
sort of like ethernet's exponential backoff protocol: If one device decides to use a lower exponent, it will have better overall performance at the cost of a fractionally lower aggregate. If everyone decides to use it, the aggregate performance will be substantially lower.
can't happen if the do not call list takes precedence.
in the interest of conserving paper in deference to the needs of their legal team, the 20 pages were printed with a really small font.
Fiestaware I believe. I want to get some of those plates too.
Some of the replies in this post have centered on the subject of computations to disprove the fact that we're living in a simulation.
How about pushing the limits of computation? Let's solve a very difficult computation. It may be easy to simulate an arbitrarily complex CPU and any program that may run on it, but what if we were to build a sufficiently large quantum computer, assuming that we can do such? To run the quantum program, the simulating computer must at least support quantum mechanics because the program logic would be known, and the computing device would be known. Whatever result is finally generated may be classically verified, but we know that the quantum result for that program must be available in less time.
Note that this doesn't prove things like p==np, but only uses time as a probe to the limits of the environment. We can say that the environment at least simulates detail up to the QM level because if it didn't follow all the QM rules, the quantum calculation wouldn't work. Note also that this doesn't say that the possible simulator really runs in an environment where QM is the highest resolution achievable.
In effect, just like the laser beam to alpha centurii, we're trying to overload the simulator by getting it to simulate exponential program space where increasing the exponent is relatively easier.
you might be thinking along the lines of the connection machine?
looked at another way, hard drive capacities have just been doubling faster than processor speeds.
If 10MB back then cost $1k then 1MB cost $100, so we just do the 60G/1M and get a 60,000 time increase in storage capacity for the same price. Doubling times would then be log(2)60k = 15.9 or so, or about once every 1.1 years over 18 years. Contrast this with moore's law which states that processor speeds double every 1.5 years.
The downside is that access times have tracked closer to a linear function.
perhaps the same explanation as what happens when you wave a laser pointer across the moon (assuming you have powerful enough to see at that distance).
You need to remember that nothing is breaking the speed of light barrier here because we're talking about different parts of the explosion: because the explosion is taking place so far away distances get amplified - simple trig. It's all in the angles. Think about cones.
Of course I might not know what I'm talking about either, or am answering a question different from the one you asked.
Bad form to reply to my own post but what do I know? I should have googled gamma particles first before posting.
Turns out that references to gamma particles really are used quite frequently, and sometime interchangably within the same context too. Much more frequently than I would have thought.
so much for the article's technical credibility: gamma particles are extensively referenced at the end of the first section.
It seems that the author couldn't make up his mind as he also talks about gamma rays later on.
Now, as far as I know, gammas are commonly referred to as rays, so either the author feels like rubbing wave/particle duality into us, or he doesn't really understand what he's writing about, or, of course, I could be way off base here and people do really talk about gamma particles.
(for those who might be confused, gamma rays are products of nuclear decay, but as opposed to protons and electrons [alpha and beta radiation], they don't pack rest mass hence their common reference as gamma rays).
it could be just me, but the way I read the article was that the fungus was discovered in an OREGON forest, and the data was collected by the USDA. Does anyone want to tell me where there's an Oregon in Canada?
Of course, the poster might not have read the article carefully and just sourced it as Ottawa, Ontario, taken from the first line.
the nyt is slow. I thought I saw this earlier.
t ai l.asp?channel_id=9&news_id=929
mar. 14
http://mediresource.sympatico.ca/health_news_de
oops, my mistake. Got my series mixed up there.
an fft is a fast fourier transform. It is commonly used to transform data from the time domain to the frequency domain.
.jpg, or listen to an .mp3, or watch a dvd, etc. Lots of uses for them, and that doesn't even get into the engineering/scientific uses...
What this means is that is if you have a time-varying signal like audio for example, you can run an fft on it and get a frequency analysis on the sound. i.e. from the sound in a waveform format, after an fft, you can pick out which are the dominant frequencies, and what the relationship between frequencies are.
Although the fft is strictly not necessary because it is, after all, just a transform, it turns out that many media compression techniques use them because humans aren't as discriminating in the frequency domain so if you do lossy compression in the frequency domain, we won't notice/mind as much.
fyi, you do an fft any time you view a
actually, I was thinking more of the fact that they make a relatively big deal out of their redshift measurements as a measure of the distance to the object. Now you have to factor in gravitational redshift + dust + universe expanding + probably some other stuff I can't think of right now.
from the article:
"Split data seems to be much faster with SIMD architectures"
caching associativity and memory interleaving anyone?
even faster mp3 / dvd / video variant - encoding/decoding!
Won't the *aa be pleased.
'Consumers shouldn't be allowed to have machines that can encode media files quickly since we're the only ones who are allowed to produce this stuff...'
'and no, why would consumers need machines that can decode a media file faster than the realtime playback speed? if you're playing something back, you won't need to do anything else...'
Just speculating, but since black holes do evaporate, and the smaller they are the faster they evaporate, I wonder what the implications of evaporation would be in the presense of an acretion disk.
Given that in the process of evaporation, a black hole emits radiation, at some point the radiation pressure from the evaporation would balance out the force of gravity pulling matter into the black hole so then the black hole might stabilize in size.
Surely they'll have named that limit already, but I don't think it's the same as the eddington limit.
Or perhaps there won't be a limit here because the cross section area of the acretion disk would be so small compared to the surface area of the event horizon. (yes, I think that incoming matter would have to form a disk and not form an acretion shell)
You might be confusing neutron stars (pulars sometimes) with these quasars.
Neutron stars are prevented from collapsing into black holes because of nuclear repulsion / neutron degeneracy (instead of electron repulsion). In fact, there's so much pressure that the electrons get squeezed into the protons of the atoms - hence neutron stars.
Black holes have enough gravity to overcome nuclear repulsion and collapse further than neutron stars. I think there's a couple theories about just what happens inside the black hole, but the commonality is that particles don't mean much whether or not you're talking about a singularity, or the non-singularity quantum foam theories.
this is how normal stars work too. The radiation pressure generated by the core keeps the core from collapsing into itself. - well not quite the same, but same idea.
But I haven't heard of the eddington limit before either. Neat.
at least that's what I remember from astronomy classes. The article doesn't say if they take that into account or not - and if it's really so far away, that would be a lot of dust that light travelled through. If they do, they would have to assume some uniform amount of dust?
they had to write out the long way how many zeroes a quadrillion had...
How do they get the image from the thing that they're looking at back to that gold needle of theirs? Sure, it might be a point source, but even with a point source that small you're going to have problems focusing - the same problems they were talking about, about the thing they're imaging being smaller than the wavelength of the light that they're using.
They _do talk about trying to get the first _optical_ images of smaller molecules, unless I'm reading it wrong.
With some people already accusing bugtraq of being a repository for exploits that anyone could use for exploit purposes, you'd think that the same could happen to the spam archive.
Soon we'll see old spam being recycled as the new breed of spam trolls mine the archive for inspiration - and maybe just material reuse.
Then, of course, it's not like we don't see recycled spam anyway, so maybe this isn't such a bad thing...
(And if I sound incoherant, it's 2 in the morning. I should be sleeping.)
Asking for a slashdotting is one thing, but asking to be an archive for spam is another.
I wonder if anyone knows just how much of the stuff is out there, and if it's even possible to store all that. Of course, spam being mostly duplicates and all, maybe they have a chance. But with spammers staying ahead of the game and rotationg their text, I wouldn't count on it.
On the other hand, why not just set up a couple of hotmail accounts, bait them a bit, and just watch the spam come in? Why even bother asking for it?