You could give Tank a half-point for (presumably) cracking the "phone" system to give them exits. Then again, he might just be a script kiddie...
But I'd give them a full point because the GUIs on their monitors were so ugly and complex that they just had to be running X windows with Motif. (Hmmm.. so I guess Linux prevails after all...)
Oh yeah... and the "Matrix code" was clearly just: od/dev/matrix_kmem
Yes, the term "open" is overloaded... I think the consensus is that the Universe is "geometrically closed" -- that is, it is like the surface of a 4-sphere: a straight line extended in any one direction will return to its starting point.
This would seem to jibe especially well with string theory, where the compact dimensions are "circular" in the same fashion. I would be very surprised if the extended dimensions were not also circular.
The argument seems to be whether the Universe is "open" from a temporal perspective: that is, a 4-sphere can continue expanding forever ("open"), or can collapse on itself ("closed").
Personally, I'm rooting for "closed", for two main reasons:
Aesthetically, I want all dimensions to be bounded, and that includes time.
I don't believe in Steady State, so I don't like the idea of an open Universe since we'd ultimately end up with "heat death": a big, cold, empty cosmos where nothing can happen.
However, there's a theory that in regions of very empty space, new Universes could "bud" off of our own, so maybe heat death isn't death after all...
Except that there is no such paradox for black holes. You don't fall in for eternity: you reach the singularity in a finite amount of time, at least from your perspective. Sure, the last few photons you emit as you pass the event horizon will take arbitrarily long to reach an outside observer (and they'll be terrifically redshifted), but that's it.
...it makes me wonder if non-graphical applications of lossy compression might be worthwhile. I imagine the first time anyone suggested the idea, the response was something like: "lose data *intentionally*??? are you nuts?" But JPEGs are pretty durn popular.
Hmmm, let's see... I could LZIP my Perl code by taking out the comments and insignificant whitespace; that would probably render it every bit as understandable, so no problem there...
HTML pages? Get rid of every tag other than 'H*' and 'P'. Think of the possibilities: we could all go back to using NCSA Mosaic!
.o/.a files could be stripped of symbols. Debuggers are for wimps anyway (personally, I debug with printf()s and lots of coffee).
Mail messages could be stripped of
sigs and anything other than raw readable
text.
...and/. archives could be stripped of idiotic musings like this, of course.
I'm not a physicist, but if I remember correctly, the reason the unextended dimensions are thought to have "remained small" after the Big Bang is that they were prevented from expanding due to having strings would *around* them, like lassos.
The analogy is that a loop of string can exist on a cylinder in two basic ways: wound around it, or not. The strings we encounter in our 3 extended dimensions are the latter kind, but we'd expect to see the former kind in the "curled up" dimensions.
This gets back to why we have extended dimensions in the first place. One theory [as I understand it] is that at one point *all* the dimensions had string wound around them, and then enough wound pairs cancelled each other out in some dimension that it was able to expand and become our first
extended dimension.
So why only 3? Probability. As the topology of space changed with each new extended dimension, it became less and less likely for enough wound-string pairs to cancel each other out (just like it's far more likely for 2 randomly-moving pool balls to collide on a 1-meter-square table than it is for them to collide in a 1-cubic-meter space.
So basically, I agree with you: I'd expect Planck-sized dimensions. Although the 0.1 mm is an interesting number: I seem to recall that the Planck mass is a lot larger than one would think, and that string theory had to explain why subatomic particles are not more massive than they appear to be. Maybe there's some relationship?
Slashdot Mirror
But I'd give them a full point because the GUIs on their monitors were so ugly and complex that they just had to be running X windows with Motif. (Hmmm.. so I guess Linux prevails after all...)
Oh yeah... and the "Matrix code" was clearly just: od /dev/matrix_kmem
:-)
Yes, the term "open" is overloaded... I think the consensus is that the Universe is "geometrically closed" -- that is, it is like the surface of a 4-sphere: a straight line extended in any one direction will return to its starting point.
This would seem to jibe especially well with string theory, where the compact dimensions are "circular" in the same fashion. I would be very surprised if the extended dimensions were not also circular.
The argument seems to be whether the Universe is "open" from a temporal perspective: that is, a 4-sphere can continue expanding forever ("open"), or can collapse on itself ("closed").
Personally, I'm rooting for "closed", for two main reasons:
However, there's a theory that in regions of very empty space, new Universes could "bud" off of our own, so maybe heat death isn't death after all...
You fall in, you die. Fast.
...and /. archives could be stripped of idiotic musings like this, of course.
Only TeX convertex against Pi and Metafont against e.
And Perl, which I believe is rapidly converging on 2*PI.
(By contrast, considering the progression from 95 to 98 to 2000, M$ Windows version numbers would probably fit the curve y=x^x.
The analogy is that a loop of string can exist on a cylinder in two basic ways: wound around it, or not. The strings we encounter in our 3 extended dimensions are the latter kind, but we'd expect to see the former kind in the "curled up" dimensions.
This gets back to why we have extended dimensions in the first place. One theory [as I understand it] is that at one point *all* the dimensions had string wound around them, and then enough wound pairs cancelled each other out in some dimension that it was able to expand and become our first extended dimension.
So why only 3? Probability. As the topology of space changed with each new extended dimension, it became less and less likely for enough wound-string pairs to cancel each other out (just like it's far more likely for 2 randomly-moving pool balls to collide on a 1-meter-square table than it is for them to collide in a 1-cubic-meter space.
So basically, I agree with you: I'd expect Planck-sized dimensions. Although the 0.1 mm is an interesting number: I seem to recall that the Planck mass is a lot larger than one would think, and that string theory had to explain why subatomic particles are not more massive than they appear to be. Maybe there's some relationship?