As I understand it from my layman's reading of science for the layman books and articles (and watching PBS documentaries), the quantum world is grainy. 19th century physicists were looking at black body radiation and it did not behave as though there was a smooth continuum of wave lengths being radiated.
Einstein's theory of space time though, predicts a smooth curvature. I presume quantum gravity does not. So if something could be shown to be truly smooth, that would imply the simulation had to be able to deal with genuine irrational numbers, something a digital simulation could not.
Hmm, so people are saying here that the speed of information can't be faster than the speed of light _in a vacuum_ because of results of events happening before the event, in other words paradoxes. I asked about this in a different subject only a few days ago, and, I don't think it's completely resolved.http://http//slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3164219&cid=41554569
I recently saw a Nova documentary on TV, part of the 'Fabric Of the Cosmos' series, the "Illusion Of Time" chapter, hosted by Brian Greene. In one place he talked about an alien living in a far away galaxy seeing events on earth. If he was moving towards earth, he would see our 'future'. There was a hint that the future might, in some sense, already exist.
It does seem to me that people should not be too cavalier about associating the speed of light with the speed of information unless they can define clearly what information is, and how it is linked in some concrete way to the speed of light.
Something I've been wondering about, but never knew quite where to ask. (Maybe this isn't the place either, but I'll give it a shot.)
i understand (or at least parse the semantic meaning) that the speed of light through space is fixed, and space can expand fasterthan that. Normally, it seems that the speed of information transmission is also tied to the speed of light, mainly I presume, because paradoxes would arise if it weren't. But can information travel across space at an effective speed uninfluenced by the expansion of space without causing paradoxes? Is it possible that information could still reach us even if light could not?
That was my first thought also. But, following a link in the talkbacks to this http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=11&month=09&year=2012 There is the comment that another astronomer, Dan Peterson (not the one who took the video), said the blast only lasted 1.5 to 2 seconds. This is very different from the famous comet smash of 1993 when the marks on the visible part of Jupiter lasted a long time while Jupiter rotated around.
How is it possible that they date the light we see from this messier's star cluster to be about 13 billion years old?
I'm not an astronomer but I read 'science for the layman' type books and watch the documentaries on PBS. I was wondering about the age of these stars as stated in the article compared to the age of the universe myself. But, they aren't saying the light we see is 13 billion years old, anymore than the light we see from the sun is 5 billion years old.
Presumably these stars formed in one of the first galaxies, and they've been around ever since, somehow eventually being captured as a group by the Milky Way.
"I'm sick of that presumption. The point of education SHOULD be to become educated."
I'd say that is only an opinion. The word 'university' comes from a Medieval Latin word that was synonymous with 'guild', and, from very early on, a doctorate was a certificate that allowed one to teach. In other words, you got it as an accreditation needed for a job.
I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the idea of knowledge for knowledge's sake, and the concept wasn't unknown even in the Middle Ages. I seem to recall that in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, there was a scholarly pilgrim who was described as being glad to learn and glad to teach. But, there's always been the commercial side to education as well. It's expensive, and it requires an allocation of resources and the time of the teachers who might otherwise be doing some other productive thing with their education (In the Middle Ages they would be serving their King, or the local Lord, or the Church). It's hard to imagine something like that being maintained without a tangible payback.
Agree about the safety deposit box. Depending on how big a box you have, you can also store DVDs, USB drives, hard drives with information if you want. But whatever is appropriate for paper, put it on paper. No need to worry about incompatible formats or device failures.
If you're really really concerned and feel you can afford it, have copies in 2 different boxes at 2 different locations. This if you live in a place prone to flooding or maybe earthquakes. Maybe even in case for some reason one bank is throwing too much administrative flack at your survivors.
Why the "Ob Faraday" title? The comment is from Ben Franklin. He was observing one of the first balloon flights by the Montgolfier Bros in France, and replied to the question 'What good is it?' from another observer.
I wrote my first, very simple computer program around 1966 in a class in numerical analysis when I was an undergraduate math major. I was going to a small liberal arts college, less than 2000 students. The college computer was a PDP 8. You bought decks of cards, punched them up with your program and submitted them to a clerk in the Admin Building and hoped the thing would run. In the mid-1970s, after a hitch in the Navy, I went back to school at a somewhat larger place on the GI Bill. We timeshared on a Univac 1108 in another county, but, at least we had terminals, at first uniscopes, later hazeltines. You could also still use punch cards if you wanted to. But that was when it was even feasible to offer a computer science degree.
I hope it is true, but I wonder if the advertising industry has done research and established that that's the case. It may be that sometimes the very fact that you're annoyed means you remember the ad and so, when you need the product, that brand is the one that comes to mind.
I saw a documentary not too long ago, about autism (and similar afflictions) and superior ability in some special field. One example was a patient suffering from dementia. His hobby was painting and his doctor noticed that his painting got better as his dementia increased. There were other examples but the theory, which some people were getting ready to test, was that a 'healthy' brain filters out a lot of sensory input. In the case of this patient suffering from dementia, some of that filtering failed and he was seeing the world 'bare' so to speak. The filtering has a survival value in that it keeps us from being overwhelmed. To have the brain processing power to handle a greater input we'd need bigger brains, consuming more resources; birth would be more difficult, etc.
Another thing to consider with people who lack social skills, is that it could be the lack of social skills that leads them to focus on, say, science, as a compensation or a way to pass the time, rather, than their concentration on science leading to underdeveloped social skills. I'm not saying that's the way it is, just that when seeing a correlation, to be careful about which is the cart and which is the horse.
Richard Williams, who was the animator behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit wrote what I thought was an excellent book on animation. As I recall from reading the book, he asked some distinguished animator if he listened to music while working, and the animator said he had to use his whole brain while working. Also, Williams commented on his own experience with people hired to do the dull in-between stuff, and they made stupid mistakes when they were listening to music through their headphones.
I've tried listening to music while working, and I felt it was distracting.
Ok, I googled wr 104 and the latest opinion is that we're not looking down the barrel of a gun. Just wait until some new observation says we are, or we find out the hard way that we are.
I didn't RTFA. I accept that brains adapt to the activities they do, and I understand that that's not the same thing as evolution, so this is not a claim of 'lamarckian' evolution.
My conjecture is that while the brain of a passive browser/lurker may develop one way, that of someone who also posts to the net might develop in another way. Conversations may be discussions of various issues, and interactions on the net could be likened to that but with more time to think about what you're about to say. Feedback in that you see later exactly what you did say (and maybe wince when you do sometimes), plus feedback from numerous people, including the classic "tl;dr" may sharpen certain thinking skills. There've been submissions about that here on slashdot in the past. The question would then be: how many mere lurkers are there out there as opposed to active posters. Plus it's a matter of degree, how much lurking per day, how much posting and thinking about posting per day.
Aren't 'brilliant' mathematicians and scientists supposed to be analytical thinkers? Two examples are Newton and Maxwell. Yet both men were also very religious. Of course, they were also rather...eccentric, so I don't know if their religious convictions were all that standard.
I sometimes wonder if adopting an extreme conviction about some of the things that trouble us in our human condition, and locking it away as a solved problem, frees up the mind to focus more narrowly on something else, like recondite mathematical and physical science problems.
Yeah, I think I know what you mean. I remember in some early math class I had (maybe even in high school), they gave the example of how shepherds would put a pebble in a bag for each sheep that went into a field to forage in the morning, and rounding them up at night, would take a pebble out for each sheep found. As long as there were stones left, the shepherd knew there were sheep unaccounted for.
I can see how stone age peoples might have had words for the first few numbers, 1, 2, and then maybe 'many'. If you look at how writing evolved, it took hundreds, maybe thousands, of years, starting out by putting marks on things. Numbers and arithmetic and their manipulation took a long time also. There were abacuses long before 'arabic' numerals, and maybe the words for larger numbers were associated with representations on abacuses originally.
The energy density of aluminum may be less, but aluminum is a lot more common than lithium. As for rechargeability, as others have pointed out, one could exchange used batteries for new ones, it wouldn't be worse than refilling a tank once the infrastructure was in place. Putting the infrastructure in place would be a big deal though. And, also as pointed out by others, having a rechargeable gives more options, replace or recharge as convenient. I seem to recall that aluminum burns with a very hot flame, so it might have safety issues, but lithium can burn also can't it?
I'm not an astrophysicist, but I'll respond to the part about the amount of energy 'to push the Earth away'. It's all about conservation of momentum. If one planet moves closer to the sun, something else has to move out. Big Jupiter might move in a little by pulling a small planet like earth or Mars out a lot. No energy is 'lost'. One might even argue that energy is not even used, just passed around. To give a relatively simple example of how the motions of the planets are more complicated than the simple models we learn as kids in school, consider that the fact that the moon is slowing down the rotation of the earth though tidal action means that that angular momentum has to go to the moon, so it's orbit is gradually getting further away from the earth. And yeah, some energy is 'lost' in this case because of tidal friction. It would only become 'stable' when the earth was rotating at such a speed as to be in lock step with the orbit of the moon so that the moon was always directly above the same place on the earth like communications satellites are now.
I didn't see anything about how other programming languages fared in the study. I also didn't see anything very detailed about their methodology. It is, of course, a very interesting question on both a purely intellectual and a practical level, and a lot of studies have been done concerning the topic.
In ancient civilizations that had complex writing systems, whenever a newer, easier to learn writing system was introduced, the old guard would resist it because then they wouldn't be able to demand high compensation for their rare, valuable skills. Programmers, in some cases, can adopt a similar attitude, and I say that as a programmer myself. I've sometimes felt a certain anxiety about programming becoming 'easy', rendering my valuable skills obsolete, while at the same time realizing that if I were a businessman having to hire programmers, that's exactly what I'd want to happen.
When trying to look at this objectively, I still think the quality of code depends significantly on what I'll call the human programmer's talent more than the actual language involved (though some languages are certainly more fun to use than others), and it'll probably be that way until the singularity happens.
I remember a sort of zoo, a cheap little place in Florida in the days before Disneyworld, where a chimpanzee liked to squirt water from his mouth on tourists who got too close.
I also read or saw in a documentary about an octopus in an aquarium that would squirt water on unsuspecting visitors, and then do a color change that at least one of the keepers thought was associated with laughing. (I think the aquarium was at some university or research facility, but I don't remember for sure.)
These are only anecdotes and the interpretation could be 'projecting' or 'anthropomorphizing', but, how does one know that other species don't have a sense of humor? Absence of proof is not proof of absence after all.
I remember the old days of Usenet, and the sometimes interesting challenge of filtering the content. I like slashdot because it has a built in filtering mechanism. One learns to skip down through the early stuff of people scrambling for first post and the ones who immediately think of fart jokes and feel like they've got to rush in to demonstrate that they were able to think of something so clever before somebody else. But Slashdot seems to be getting weighed down more and more by this stuff.
There must be some principle of Internet entropy involved. The wikipedia has to struggle with it. Usenet struggled with it and has largely succumbed to it I would say.
Maybe it's just one of the ways the young destroy the old to make way for new things.
I honestly don't know if SmallFurryCreature is being sarcastic or serious. Does everyone in fact want VLC ported from Linux to mobile devices to finally get a decent player?
I don't have a mobile device, nor do I feel a need for one. But then, I don't even like telephones (and I haven't like them since I had a job in the Navy many many years ago when I had to be on the phone all the time.)
I do like being able to get on the internet from the convenience of home with a nice big LCD screen. I use Linux and haven't used Microsoft since the Windows 3.1 days, but then I was programming in a Unix (mostly BSD 4.2) environment in the 1980s. I realize everybody is not like me and I'm not saying everybody should be like me; but, is SmallFurryCreature being sarcastic or not?
You hear stories about carelessness in maintaining passwords: they're easily guessable, or they're written on a piece of paper stuck to the back of the monitor, that kind of thing. One has to do a cost-benefit analysis on how secure/paranoid one wants to be, the more secure, the more inconvenient and expensive. However, it sounds like, in this particular situation, the passwords could be written on something that looks like something else, a bunch of telephone numbers or laundry list or other 'back of the envelope' kind of document and kept in a semi secure place like a locked drawer of a desk. You could tell your siblings about it verbally, but they wouldn't easily break in to get to the paper while you're alive and healthy. Some posters have mentioned subpoenas. The original question didn't mention concern on that point, but I suppose if everybody was closed mouth about it, the law wouldn't know enough to issue a subpoena until the relatives actually started using those passwords, in which case there's nothing to be done about it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand it from my layman's reading of science for the layman books and articles (and watching PBS documentaries), the quantum world is grainy. 19th century physicists were looking at black body radiation and it did not behave as though there was a smooth continuum of wave lengths being radiated.
Einstein's theory of space time though, predicts a smooth curvature. I presume quantum gravity does not. So if something could be shown to be truly smooth, that would imply the simulation had to be able to deal with genuine irrational numbers, something a digital simulation could not.
I keep reading how space is (or will someday) be expanding faster than the speed of light, and the visible universe will shrink.
I only wish he had given more of the reasoning behind it, but I suppose it would have been too mathematical for a Nova program.
Hmm, so people are saying here that the speed of information can't be faster than the speed of light _in a vacuum_ because of results of events happening before the event, in other words paradoxes. I asked about this in a different subject only a few days ago, and, I don't think it's completely resolved.http://http//slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3164219&cid=41554569
I recently saw a Nova documentary on TV, part of the 'Fabric Of the Cosmos' series, the "Illusion Of Time" chapter, hosted by Brian Greene. In one place he talked about an alien living in a far away galaxy seeing events on earth. If he was moving towards earth, he would see our 'future'. There was a hint that the future might, in some sense, already exist.
It does seem to me that people should not be too cavalier about associating the speed of light with the speed of information unless they can define clearly what information is, and how it is linked in some concrete way to the speed of light.
Something I've been wondering about, but never knew quite where to ask. (Maybe this isn't the place either, but I'll give it a shot.)
i understand (or at least parse the semantic meaning) that the speed of light through space is fixed, and space can expand fasterthan that. Normally, it seems that the speed of information transmission is also tied to the speed of light, mainly I presume, because paradoxes would arise if it weren't. But can information travel across space at an effective speed uninfluenced by the expansion of space without causing paradoxes? Is it possible that information could still reach us even if light could not?
That was my first thought also. But, following a link in the talkbacks to this http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=11&month=09&year=2012 There is the comment that another astronomer, Dan Peterson (not the one who took the video), said the blast only lasted 1.5 to 2 seconds. This is very different from the famous comet smash of 1993 when the marks on the visible part of Jupiter lasted a long time while Jupiter rotated around.
How is it possible that they date the light we see from this messier's star cluster to be about 13 billion years old?
I'm not an astronomer but I read 'science for the layman' type books and watch the documentaries on PBS. I was wondering about the age of these stars as stated in the article compared to the age of the universe myself. But, they aren't saying the light we see is 13 billion years old, anymore than the light we see from the sun is 5 billion years old.
Presumably these stars formed in one of the first galaxies, and they've been around ever since, somehow eventually being captured as a group by the Milky Way.
"I'm sick of that presumption. The point of education SHOULD be to become educated."
I'd say that is only an opinion. The word 'university' comes from a Medieval Latin word that was synonymous with 'guild', and, from very early on, a doctorate was a certificate that allowed one to teach. In other words, you got it as an accreditation needed for a job.
I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the idea of knowledge for knowledge's sake, and the concept wasn't unknown even in the Middle Ages. I seem to recall that in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, there was a scholarly pilgrim who was described as being glad to learn and glad to teach. But, there's always been the commercial side to education as well. It's expensive, and it requires an allocation of resources and the time of the teachers who might otherwise be doing some other productive thing with their education (In the Middle Ages they would be serving their King, or the local Lord, or the Church). It's hard to imagine something like that being maintained without a tangible payback.
Agree about the safety deposit box. Depending on how big a box you have, you can also store DVDs, USB drives, hard drives with information if you want. But whatever is appropriate for paper, put it on paper. No need to worry about incompatible formats or device failures.
If you're really really concerned and feel you can afford it, have copies in 2 different boxes at 2 different locations. This if you live in a place prone to flooding or maybe earthquakes. Maybe even in case for some reason one bank is throwing too much administrative flack at your survivors.
Why the "Ob Faraday" title? The comment is from Ben Franklin. He was observing one of the first balloon flights by the Montgolfier Bros in France, and replied to the question 'What good is it?' from another observer.
I wrote my first, very simple computer program around 1966 in a class in numerical analysis when I was an undergraduate math major. I was going to a small liberal arts college, less than 2000 students. The college computer was a PDP 8. You bought decks of cards, punched them up with your program and submitted them to a clerk in the Admin Building and hoped the thing would run. In the mid-1970s, after a hitch in the Navy, I went back to school at a somewhat larger place on the GI Bill. We timeshared on a Univac 1108 in another county, but, at least we had terminals, at first uniscopes, later hazeltines. You could also still use punch cards if you wanted to. But that was when it was even feasible to offer a computer science degree.
Annoyed customers are not paying customers.
I hope it is true, but I wonder if the advertising industry has done research and established that that's the case. It may be that sometimes the very fact that you're annoyed means you remember the ad and so, when you need the product, that brand is the one that comes to mind.
Does anybody know of some solid research on this?
I saw a documentary not too long ago, about autism (and similar afflictions) and superior ability in some special field. One example was a patient suffering from dementia. His hobby was painting and his doctor noticed that his painting got better as his dementia increased. There were other examples but the theory, which some people were getting ready to test, was that a 'healthy' brain filters out a lot of sensory input. In the case of this patient suffering from dementia, some of that filtering failed and he was seeing the world 'bare' so to speak. The filtering has a survival value in that it keeps us from being overwhelmed. To have the brain processing power to handle a greater input we'd need bigger brains, consuming more resources; birth would be more difficult, etc.
Another thing to consider with people who lack social skills, is that it could be the lack of social skills that leads them to focus on, say, science, as a compensation or a way to pass the time, rather, than their concentration on science leading to underdeveloped social skills. I'm not saying that's the way it is, just that when seeing a correlation, to be careful about which is the cart and which is the horse.
Richard Williams, who was the animator behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit wrote what I thought was an excellent book on animation. As I recall from reading the book, he asked some distinguished animator if he listened to music while working, and the animator said he had to use his whole brain while working. Also, Williams commented on his own experience with people hired to do the dull in-between stuff, and they made stupid mistakes when they were listening to music through their headphones.
I've tried listening to music while working, and I felt it was distracting.
Ok, I googled wr 104 and the latest opinion is that we're not looking down the barrel of a gun. Just wait until some new observation says we are, or we find out the hard way that we are.
I didn't RTFA. I accept that brains adapt to the activities they do, and I understand that that's not the same thing as evolution, so this is not a claim of 'lamarckian' evolution.
My conjecture is that while the brain of a passive browser/lurker may develop one way, that of someone who also posts to the net might develop in another way. Conversations may be discussions of various issues, and interactions on the net could be likened to that but with more time to think about what you're about to say. Feedback in that you see later exactly what you did say (and maybe wince when you do sometimes), plus feedback from numerous people, including the classic "tl;dr" may sharpen certain thinking skills. There've been submissions about that here on slashdot in the past. The question would then be: how many mere lurkers are there out there as opposed to active posters. Plus it's a matter of degree, how much lurking per day, how much posting and thinking about posting per day.
Aren't 'brilliant' mathematicians and scientists supposed to be analytical thinkers? Two examples are Newton and Maxwell. Yet both men were also very religious. Of course, they were also rather...eccentric, so I don't know if their religious convictions were all that standard.
I sometimes wonder if adopting an extreme conviction about some of the things that trouble us in our human condition, and locking it away as a solved problem, frees up the mind to focus more narrowly on something else, like recondite mathematical and physical science problems.
Confession, I did not read the article, but:
Yeah, I think I know what you mean. I remember in some early math class I had (maybe even in high school), they gave the example of how shepherds would put a pebble in a bag for each sheep that went into a field to forage in the morning, and rounding them up at night, would take a pebble out for each sheep found. As long as there were stones left, the shepherd knew there were sheep unaccounted for.
I can see how stone age peoples might have had words for the first few numbers, 1, 2, and then maybe 'many'. If you look at how writing evolved, it took hundreds, maybe thousands, of years, starting out by putting marks on things. Numbers and arithmetic and their manipulation took a long time also. There were abacuses long before 'arabic' numerals, and maybe the words for larger numbers were associated with representations on abacuses originally.
The energy density of aluminum may be less, but aluminum is a lot more common than lithium. As for rechargeability, as others have pointed out, one could exchange used batteries for new ones, it wouldn't be worse than refilling a tank once the infrastructure was in place. Putting the infrastructure in place would be a big deal though. And, also as pointed out by others, having a rechargeable gives more options, replace or recharge as convenient. I seem to recall that aluminum burns with a very hot flame, so it might have safety issues, but lithium can burn also can't it?
Nobody knows the future.
I'm not an astrophysicist, but I'll respond to the part about the amount of energy 'to push the Earth away'. It's all about conservation of momentum. If one planet moves closer to the sun, something else has to move out. Big Jupiter might move in a little by pulling a small planet like earth or Mars out a lot. No energy is 'lost'. One might even argue that energy is not even used, just passed around. To give a relatively simple example of how the motions of the planets are more complicated than the simple models we learn as kids in school, consider that the fact that the moon is slowing down the rotation of the earth though tidal action means that that angular momentum has to go to the moon, so it's orbit is gradually getting further away from the earth. And yeah, some energy is 'lost' in this case because of tidal friction. It would only become 'stable' when the earth was rotating at such a speed as to be in lock step with the orbit of the moon so that the moon was always directly above the same place on the earth like communications satellites are now.
I didn't see anything about how other programming languages fared in the study. I also didn't see anything very detailed about their methodology. It is, of course, a very interesting question on both a purely intellectual and a practical level, and a lot of studies have been done concerning the topic.
In ancient civilizations that had complex writing systems, whenever a newer, easier to learn writing system was introduced, the old guard would resist it because then they wouldn't be able to demand high compensation for their rare, valuable skills. Programmers, in some cases, can adopt a similar attitude, and I say that as a programmer myself. I've sometimes felt a certain anxiety about programming becoming 'easy', rendering my valuable skills obsolete, while at the same time realizing that if I were a businessman having to hire programmers, that's exactly what I'd want to happen.
When trying to look at this objectively, I still think the quality of code depends significantly on what I'll call the human programmer's talent more than the actual language involved (though some languages are certainly more fun to use than others), and it'll probably be that way until the singularity happens.
I remember a sort of zoo, a cheap little place in Florida in the days before Disneyworld, where a chimpanzee liked to squirt water from his mouth on tourists who got too close.
I also read or saw in a documentary about an octopus in an aquarium that would squirt water on unsuspecting visitors, and then do a color change that at least one of the keepers thought was associated with laughing. (I think the aquarium was at some university or research facility, but I don't remember for sure.)
These are only anecdotes and the interpretation could be 'projecting' or 'anthropomorphizing', but, how does one know that other species don't have a sense of humor? Absence of proof is not proof of absence after all.
I remember the old days of Usenet, and the sometimes interesting challenge of filtering the content. I like slashdot because it has a built in filtering mechanism. One learns to skip down through the early stuff of people scrambling for first post and the ones who immediately think of fart jokes and feel like they've got to rush in to demonstrate that they were able to think of something so clever before somebody else. But Slashdot seems to be getting weighed down more and more by this stuff.
There must be some principle of Internet entropy involved. The wikipedia has to struggle with it. Usenet struggled with it and has largely succumbed to it I would say.
Maybe it's just one of the ways the young destroy the old to make way for new things.
I honestly don't know if SmallFurryCreature is being sarcastic or serious. Does everyone in fact want VLC ported from Linux to mobile devices to finally get a decent player?
I don't have a mobile device, nor do I feel a need for one. But then, I don't even like telephones (and I haven't like them since I had a job in the Navy many many years ago when I had to be on the phone all the time.)
I do like being able to get on the internet from the convenience of home with a nice big LCD screen. I use Linux and haven't used Microsoft since the Windows 3.1 days, but then I was programming in a Unix (mostly BSD 4.2) environment in the 1980s. I realize everybody is not like me and I'm not saying everybody should be like me; but, is SmallFurryCreature being sarcastic or not?
You hear stories about carelessness in maintaining passwords: they're easily guessable, or they're written on a piece of paper stuck to the back of the monitor, that kind of thing. One has to do a cost-benefit analysis on how secure/paranoid one wants to be, the more secure, the more inconvenient and expensive. However, it sounds like, in this particular situation, the passwords could be written on something that looks like something else, a bunch of telephone numbers or laundry list or other 'back of the envelope' kind of document and kept in a semi secure place like a locked drawer of a desk. You could tell your siblings about it verbally, but they wouldn't easily break in to get to the paper while you're alive and healthy. Some posters have mentioned subpoenas. The original question didn't mention concern on that point, but I suppose if everybody was closed mouth about it, the law wouldn't know enough to issue a subpoena until the relatives actually started using those passwords, in which case there's nothing to be done about it anyway.