Besides, leave it to the child to find some practical use for it. They have a lot of imagination, they'll surely come up with something you didn't even think of!
"The street finds its own uses for things." - William Gibson.
The ceiling of the lunchroom was the color of a Speak & Spell tuned to a dead channel...
Is it so impossible to think that they couldn't come together and develop a set of reasonable ways to understand high quality versus low quality teachers?
Actually, right now it probably is.
Given that current best-practice industrial quality metrics are so poor that we don't even appear to have the ability to tell correct from incorrect software before it ships - and that's pretty much an extremely well-defined, mechanical binary operation for which automated tools exist - and that we just watched trillions of dollars flush away down the banking and war holes - then why do you think we would be able to set up anything approaching a quality metric for something as squishy and fundamentally ill-defined as "education"?
You can't set up standardised social testing and expect it to produce anything but nonsense until you have a rough idea of what you're testing for, and it's clear that as a society, we don't.
SQL injection isn't generally regarded as a database flaw.
It should be. The design of SQL itself promotes injection attacks. A decently secure database wouldn't support plain-text SQL query strings as an API.
Even a simple S-expression translation of SQL using parentheses instead of quotes would be more secure, because you could verify that the parens balanced before accepting an expression. SQL's syntax is an artifact of the 1970s COBOL-era idea that "if a mathematical expression sort of looks halfway like English, it will be simple to use". In fact, it isn't, and all we got was a half-baked syntax that isn't either mathematically elegant or linguistically intuitive.
If we keep propping up broken interfaces, like an abused spouse making apologies for the drunken rages, we'll keep getting hurt. It's time we did the right thing and moved on.
In general, when considering whether "some people shouldn't be allowed to vote", the first people to be put on the list of "not allowed to vote" should be the ones who favour the idea that "some people shouldn't be allowed to vote".
And the next three should be Bertrand Russell, Kurt Goedel and Douglas Hofstadter.
Whether socialism or the free market, the tendency is going to be to a more egalitarian society.
I can see how socialism leads to egalitarianism, since that's the desired end-state that socialism preaches and seeks.
But the free market? It actively promotes winner-take-all competition and cheers when losers are forced to the wall devoured and their assets devoured.
What do you think the free market will do with the mass automation? Well, let's look for precedents. What did the free market do with mass copying? It certainly didn't stand by and say "oh that's just fine, now the price of a DVD can drop to the cost of bandwidth and we'll all go on to do other jobs". No, it lobbied government to make copying without artificially scarce "rights" illegal. Odds are good that's what will happen to all automation: if it becomes cheap enough for you to afford a robot, you won't be allowed to use it to do anything you haven't paid for.
Ruthlessly putting your competitors out of the way is just good business, after all.
A Free Software appraoch to robotics might lead to an egalitarian world. But that's because the ethic of Free Software - the belief that ideas fundamentally must be shared for the benefit of all, not locked and traded - is deliberately socialist, not capitalist.
What happens when most jobs are replaced by robots designed by robots?
I suspect that we'd end up with a generation of really sad robots that couldn't even boot themselves without short-circuiting. And twelve-year old PHP gangs would rule the exploding streets. It would be kind of like "Rise of the Machines" if the Terminators were Furbies.
Look, our best programmers can't even write automated software tools which can build a decent MSI installation package. You think we can get them to write compiler-compiler-compilers without crashing?
"It knows no compassion, no fear, no remorse... and it will absolutely never stop, ever, until it freezes up from memory leaks, which is about five minutes after it connects to the Internet. On a good day..."
I'll believe the computer industry is seriously interested in "automating automation" when Lisp comes back in vogue, and you can say the word "higher order function" in the company of working programmers without pitying looks for the sad math nerd.
Until then, there'll be plenty of unskilled rote labour jobs patching buffer overflows and SQL injection exploits in the C++/Javascript mines.
The Manna concept actually scares me quite a bit because I find it a lot more feasible than trying to do robotics the hard way by implementing vision and touch. If you just outsource the difficult squishy bits to human-bots with headsets and let the AI do the more abstract goal-planning, it might be actually achievable with the hardware we have now.
I am going on the assumption that in a matter of decades robots will also be autonomously handling farming and food distribution as well - everything in fact.
Sure, but they'll still be programmed to bring profit to the corporate entities which run them, not tp profit the human race as a whole. If Wall Street thinks it will be profitable in the next quarter to let 6 billion people starve, the BPEL scripts in our robotic overlords' positronic brains will say "let 6 billion people starve".
The First Law of Corporate Robotics: A robot shall never give products or services to any customer without payment, nor through inaction allow payment to be withheld.
Constitutionalists seem to argue this point frequently as they would prefer the law was black and white and administered the way the authors of the constitution "intended". Robots would suit them nicely, but I am sure they are not prepared for the consequences of living with law that was made centuries ago.
I don't get this argument against constitutionalism. If you're so sure the Constitution of your country is inapplicable to today's world, there's always the option of changing it via a constitutional amendment. In the USA, it's been done many times before.
But if you're not willing to change your country's constitution, yet you fundamentally disagree with something written in it but still want to claim to live by it, I don't see how it helps anyone to attempt to rewrite it in the courts by interpretation and precedent. Is it so difficult to face up to your beliefs and be willing to put them down in print?
Advocates of the US Constitution being a "living document", but who don't want to commit to actually changing that living document the way it has been changed in the past, don't seem to me to be making a coherent case. If the apparent problem with getting constitutional changes done the correct way (by amendment) is that it's too hard to get a supermajority of states to agree, then perhaps the real problem is that the people simply don't agree with the change you want to make?
If so, then that's a feature of a democratic republic, not a bug.
And yes, objects can travel at a speed equal to the speed of light, the photons hitting your retina at this instant do just that.
Right, that's how I've heard it explained. But, why isn't causality then already violated for photons in a vacuum? If they're travelling at C, how can a photon detect whether it's transmitted first, or detected first? Intuitively one might think that a photon ought to be transmitted "before" it's detected; otherwise how could it have a frequency, polarisation, etc to detect when there's no time experienced between transmission and detection and the two events therefore happen in an indeterminate order? Since we do appear to reliably detect photons with very real physical parameters which seem to match up with their source, wouldn't it be simpler to assume that some non-zero travel time is in fact elapsing from the photon's point of view? Or is the accepted view of reality that yes, photons have some kind of spooky unordered correlation between their source and their destination that transcends the idea of causality?
I seem to recall Feynman diagrams having something to do with the reversibility of time, but I never managed to understand how come time-reversible particle interactions don't translate to causality violations, or to time being reversible in the macroscopic world. This is why physics hurts my head.
They imply that light speed is an invariant under coordinate transformation
For things moving relative to each other which are made of electromagnetic waves, yes. Which is most of what we can measure in the real world.
For things which perhaps aren't? I don't see how Special Relativity has anything to say about those. Yet it is commonly taken to say that "absolutely no information can be transmitted FTL without travelling backwards in time".
It seems to me that it would be simpler to say that "if you move something made of light, it will squish as it moves so as to appear to be shrinking/slowing, but it won't actually be. If you move something not made of light faster than light, then the equations which describe how things move which are made of light simply don't apply, and you'll get another result." This was Lorentz's view, and was the mainstream view before special relativity. I'm not even sure whether Einstein didn't still hold to something like this; I don't know if he worried about that level of abstraction. I think he was more concerned with the behaviour of light than anything else, and saw time as just a mathematical variable to play with which, in some ways, made the maths simpler. And whether he actually achieved what he set out to achieve is an open question. They don't teach much in school about Einstein's failed Unified Field Theory on which he spent the last 40 years of his life, but the general impression one gets is that it was all pretty much a waste of time - but that UFT was where GR and SR logically led, so if UFT failed, as it seemed to, then even SR should be called into question.
Don't forget that relativity is based on the synchronisation of clocks by means of light pulses, which literally begs the question (in the philosophical sense) of "is time really slowing or only appearing to slow?" Time in relativity is defined by the relative motion of light, which makes it possible to say "time as defined by relativity really does slow down when you move at high relative speeds"; philosophically, however, that's an entirely different thing from saying all conceivable measures of time really slow down. Relativity simply says "pretend that you're not allowed to ask the question of what any other measures of time are; the only time you're allowed to work with is 'light time', the time defined by travel of light pulses, and that time slows down".
This philosophical question-begging is what bugs me most about special relativity. I'd like to know what's actually going on with light when it moves; but relativity doesn't even attempt to make it possible to ask that question. If it were to turn out that we had other kinds of signals than light which could be used to synchronise clocks, then relativity wouldn't be invalidated for electromagnetic phenomena, but it would be for those other signals.
No. We already know how to generate and detect neutrinos at will. If they travel FTL, then that means we know how to send messages faster than light = backwards in time. This means we can break causality at will. That is a hell of a lot more than a footnote, it would completely upset our entire understanding of the universe.
I think you're missing a step there: 1. IF we can modulate at will sources of neutrinos which travel faster than light 2. AND IF the interpretation of Special Relativity is true that claims that FTL speeds equal motion backwards in time 3. THEN we can transmit information backwards in time.
Further, 4. IF we can transmit information backwards in time, 5. AND IF transmitting information backwards in time allows us to reverse the choice to send that information backwards in time, 6. THEN AND ONLY THEN do we have to worry about causality violation problems.
It's an interesting problem because there's a number of assumptions in this chain of reasoning.
First, I know it's taken as an axiom by physicists that "FTL equals backwards in time because relativity says so", but I'm not sure why we should believe, a priori, that this is in fact the case. We're talking about interpretations of relativity, not the core guts of it - the Lorentz contraction, which is the observable part. Certainly if (1) were true and it turned out that we didn't get (4), then it would seem obvious that (2) is not in fact true. This wouldn't invalidate most of the predictions of Special Relativity, not its usefulness as a rule-of-thumb calculation tool, but it would invalidate the strict interpretation that nothing can ever ever ever go faster than light. It would just turn out that the Lorentz contraction is a dynamical, not a kinematic, effect - something which is generally true about large numbers of ordinary particles, but doesn't have to be the case for a few exceptions.
The general trend in high energy physics has been to see high-level "laws" as emerging from lower levels of reality which obey very different laws, and Einstein's wider relativity program for a Unified Field Theory never managed to describe the quantum world correctly. Why then should we assume that SR is exactly correct, and not just mostly correct? Einstein was smart enough to spot the problem back when he wrote the EPR paper; he believed in a fully real (ie non observer-dependent) world with hidden variables that couldn't send information to, say, update quantum correlations faster than light. Bell's Inequality proves that both of those beliefs can't be correct. We either have to throw away realism, throw away causality, or we have to throw away a hard lightspeed limit. Occam's Razor suggests that it would be a lot simpler to throw away the lightspeed limit than to throw away causality or realism, but ymmv I guess.
Abandoning a strict interpretation of Special Relativity as describing how time and space "really" behave doesn't mean abandoning all the observations built on it. For example, Oleg Jefimenko has constructed equations which model the Lorentz contraction as a dynamical effect resulting from retarded electromagnetic emissions. The equations are a little harder to work with than the relativistic ones, but they appear to allow for a whole realm of FTL phenomena which is not actually violating causality. Some approaches to nuclear forces seem like they get a lot easier if you can postulate FTL signals at the scale of, say, inside an electron.
Carver Mead (the guy who, perhaps more than anyone else really did invent VLSI microchips, and thus is responsible for the computer you're reading this on) also has his own interesting approach to electromagnetism which is much more quantum than classical. Intriguingly like Einstein's own vision of the universe as made of waves, n
...if the Neutrino was a filthy cheat running a hidden nitrous bottle.
Fast and Furious: Neutrino Run
HE's an undercover cop on the edge, infiltrating the underground world of illegal high-energy particle acceleration SHE's a young rebel magnetic confinement specialist from Stanford with nothing to lose by thumbing her nose at the Standard Model
Together, they fight entrenched theoretical physics bureaucracies by painstakingly recalibrating the #53 cryogenic helium manifold for fifteen hours straight!
Facebook isn't necessarily the best implementation of social networking, but it's the best we have at the moment, and it's made my life significantly richer. I'm 40, and I've been able to reconnect with hundreds of friends who have drifted through my life over the past two decades. And yes, it's the little trivia updates which are the glue that hold that connection together. You might think hearing about a friend's cat or their five-year-old's new word is the most boring thing imaginable - but actually, it's all those little moments that real friendships are made up of. Of course if you don't want to hear about their cat and their five-year-old, they probably aren't that much of a friend, so feel free to unfriend them. For the rest of us, that stuff is precisely why we stick around.
Tell me about it. Stock standard recessed downlights with high-K fluorescent bulbs? Utterly pedestrian, darling. Get Athena to whip you up some kind of LED chandelier, she's good with the tech stuff.
You might laugh, but that's exactly what happened a few generations ago, and yet here we are. I guess they managed to figure it out? Are you saying we're so much dumber than our grandparents that we've lost touch with our basic instincts and need extensive pre-match practice? I mean, really?
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, leave it to the child to find some practical use for it. They have a lot of imagination, they'll surely come up with something you didn't even think of!
"The street finds its own uses for things." - William Gibson.
The ceiling of the lunchroom was the color of a Speak & Spell tuned to a dead channel...
Is it so impossible to think that they couldn't come together and develop a set of reasonable ways to understand high quality versus low quality teachers?
Actually, right now it probably is.
Given that current best-practice industrial quality metrics are so poor that we don't even appear to have the ability to tell correct from incorrect software before it ships - and that's pretty much an extremely well-defined, mechanical binary operation for which automated tools exist - and that we just watched trillions of dollars flush away down the banking and war holes - then why do you think we would be able to set up anything approaching a quality metric for something as squishy and fundamentally ill-defined as "education"?
You can't set up standardised social testing and expect it to produce anything but nonsense until you have a rough idea of what you're testing for, and it's clear that as a society, we don't.
SQL injection isn't generally regarded as a database flaw.
It should be. The design of SQL itself promotes injection attacks. A decently secure database wouldn't support plain-text SQL query strings as an API.
Even a simple S-expression translation of SQL using parentheses instead of quotes would be more secure, because you could verify that the parens balanced before accepting an expression. SQL's syntax is an artifact of the 1970s COBOL-era idea that "if a mathematical expression sort of looks halfway like English, it will be simple to use". In fact, it isn't, and all we got was a half-baked syntax that isn't either mathematically elegant or linguistically intuitive.
If we keep propping up broken interfaces, like an abused spouse making apologies for the drunken rages, we'll keep getting hurt. It's time we did the right thing and moved on.
their bourgeois capacity
It is burgeoning.
In general, when considering whether "some people shouldn't be allowed to vote", the first people to be put on the list of "not allowed to vote" should be the ones who favour the idea that "some people shouldn't be allowed to vote".
And the next three should be Bertrand Russell, Kurt Goedel and Douglas Hofstadter.
Whether socialism or the free market, the tendency is going to be to a more egalitarian society.
I can see how socialism leads to egalitarianism, since that's the desired end-state that socialism preaches and seeks.
But the free market? It actively promotes winner-take-all competition and cheers when losers are forced to the wall devoured and their assets devoured.
What do you think the free market will do with the mass automation? Well, let's look for precedents. What did the free market do with mass copying? It certainly didn't stand by and say "oh that's just fine, now the price of a DVD can drop to the cost of bandwidth and we'll all go on to do other jobs". No, it lobbied government to make copying without artificially scarce "rights" illegal. Odds are good that's what will happen to all automation: if it becomes cheap enough for you to afford a robot, you won't be allowed to use it to do anything you haven't paid for.
Ruthlessly putting your competitors out of the way is just good business, after all.
A Free Software appraoch to robotics might lead to an egalitarian world. But that's because the ethic of Free Software - the belief that ideas fundamentally must be shared for the benefit of all, not locked and traded - is deliberately socialist, not capitalist.
What happens when most jobs are replaced by robots designed by robots?
I suspect that we'd end up with a generation of really sad robots that couldn't even boot themselves without short-circuiting. And twelve-year old PHP gangs would rule the exploding streets. It would be kind of like "Rise of the Machines" if the Terminators were Furbies.
Look, our best programmers can't even write automated software tools which can build a decent MSI installation package. You think we can get them to write compiler-compiler-compilers without crashing?
"It knows no compassion, no fear, no remorse... and it will absolutely never stop, ever, until it freezes up from memory leaks, which is about five minutes after it connects to the Internet. On a good day..."
once you automate automation itself
I'll believe the computer industry is seriously interested in "automating automation" when Lisp comes back in vogue, and you can say the word "higher order function" in the company of working programmers without pitying looks for the sad math nerd.
Until then, there'll be plenty of unskilled rote labour jobs patching buffer overflows and SQL injection exploits in the C++/Javascript mines.
The Manna concept actually scares me quite a bit because I find it a lot more feasible than trying to do robotics the hard way by implementing vision and touch. If you just outsource the difficult squishy bits to human-bots with headsets and let the AI do the more abstract goal-planning, it might be actually achievable with the hardware we have now.
I hope it turns out not to be.
I am going on the assumption that in a matter of decades robots will also be autonomously handling farming and food distribution as well - everything in fact.
Sure, but they'll still be programmed to bring profit to the corporate entities which run them, not tp profit the human race as a whole. If Wall Street thinks it will be profitable in the next quarter to let 6 billion people starve, the BPEL scripts in our robotic overlords' positronic brains will say "let 6 billion people starve".
The First Law of Corporate Robotics: A robot shall never give products or services to any customer without payment, nor through inaction allow payment to be withheld.
Constitutionalists seem to argue this point frequently as they would prefer the law was black and white and administered the way the authors of the constitution "intended". Robots would suit them nicely, but I am sure they are not prepared for the consequences of living with law that was made centuries ago.
I don't get this argument against constitutionalism. If you're so sure the Constitution of your country is inapplicable to today's world, there's always the option of changing it via a constitutional amendment. In the USA, it's been done many times before.
But if you're not willing to change your country's constitution, yet you fundamentally disagree with something written in it but still want to claim to live by it, I don't see how it helps anyone to attempt to rewrite it in the courts by interpretation and precedent. Is it so difficult to face up to your beliefs and be willing to put them down in print?
Advocates of the US Constitution being a "living document", but who don't want to commit to actually changing that living document the way it has been changed in the past, don't seem to me to be making a coherent case. If the apparent problem with getting constitutional changes done the correct way (by amendment) is that it's too hard to get a supermajority of states to agree, then perhaps the real problem is that the people simply don't agree with the change you want to make?
If so, then that's a feature of a democratic republic, not a bug.
And yes, objects can travel at a speed equal to the speed of light, the photons hitting your retina at this instant do just that.
Right, that's how I've heard it explained. But, why isn't causality then already violated for photons in a vacuum? If they're travelling at C, how can a photon detect whether it's transmitted first, or detected first? Intuitively one might think that a photon ought to be transmitted "before" it's detected; otherwise how could it have a frequency, polarisation, etc to detect when there's no time experienced between transmission and detection and the two events therefore happen in an indeterminate order? Since we do appear to reliably detect photons with very real physical parameters which seem to match up with their source, wouldn't it be simpler to assume that some non-zero travel time is in fact elapsing from the photon's point of view? Or is the accepted view of reality that yes, photons have some kind of spooky unordered correlation between their source and their destination that transcends the idea of causality?
I seem to recall Feynman diagrams having something to do with the reversibility of time, but I never managed to understand how come time-reversible particle interactions don't translate to causality violations, or to time being reversible in the macroscopic world. This is why physics hurts my head.
They imply that light speed is an invariant under coordinate transformation
For things moving relative to each other which are made of electromagnetic waves, yes. Which is most of what we can measure in the real world.
For things which perhaps aren't? I don't see how Special Relativity has anything to say about those. Yet it is commonly taken to say that "absolutely no information can be transmitted FTL without travelling backwards in time".
It seems to me that it would be simpler to say that "if you move something made of light, it will squish as it moves so as to appear to be shrinking/slowing, but it won't actually be. If you move something not made of light faster than light, then the equations which describe how things move which are made of light simply don't apply, and you'll get another result." This was Lorentz's view, and was the mainstream view before special relativity. I'm not even sure whether Einstein didn't still hold to something like this; I don't know if he worried about that level of abstraction. I think he was more concerned with the behaviour of light than anything else, and saw time as just a mathematical variable to play with which, in some ways, made the maths simpler. And whether he actually achieved what he set out to achieve is an open question. They don't teach much in school about Einstein's failed Unified Field Theory on which he spent the last 40 years of his life, but the general impression one gets is that it was all pretty much a waste of time - but that UFT was where GR and SR logically led, so if UFT failed, as it seemed to, then even SR should be called into question.
Don't forget that relativity is based on the synchronisation of clocks by means of light pulses, which literally begs the question (in the philosophical sense) of "is time really slowing or only appearing to slow?" Time in relativity is defined by the relative motion of light, which makes it possible to say "time as defined by relativity really does slow down when you move at high relative speeds"; philosophically, however, that's an entirely different thing from saying all conceivable measures of time really slow down. Relativity simply says "pretend that you're not allowed to ask the question of what any other measures of time are; the only time you're allowed to work with is 'light time', the time defined by travel of light pulses, and that time slows down".
This philosophical question-begging is what bugs me most about special relativity. I'd like to know what's actually going on with light when it moves; but relativity doesn't even attempt to make it possible to ask that question. If it were to turn out that we had other kinds of signals than light which could be used to synchronise clocks, then relativity wouldn't be invalidated for electromagnetic phenomena, but it would be for those other signals.
And that would be just fine.
Einsteins Special Relativity theory doesn't prohibit speeds faster than light. It just prohibits speeds EQUAL to the speed of light.
Well, except for light, of course....
No. We already know how to generate and detect neutrinos at will. If they travel FTL, then that means we know how to send messages faster than light = backwards in time. This means we can break causality at will. That is a hell of a lot more than a footnote, it would completely upset our entire understanding of the universe.
I think you're missing a step there:
1. IF we can modulate at will sources of neutrinos which travel faster than light
2. AND IF the interpretation of Special Relativity is true that claims that FTL speeds equal motion backwards in time
3. THEN we can transmit information backwards in time.
Further,
4. IF we can transmit information backwards in time,
5. AND IF transmitting information backwards in time allows us to reverse the choice to send that information backwards in time,
6. THEN AND ONLY THEN do we have to worry about causality violation problems.
It's an interesting problem because there's a number of assumptions in this chain of reasoning.
First, I know it's taken as an axiom by physicists that "FTL equals backwards in time because relativity says so", but I'm not sure why we should believe, a priori, that this is in fact the case. We're talking about interpretations of relativity, not the core guts of it - the Lorentz contraction, which is the observable part. Certainly if (1) were true and it turned out that we didn't get (4), then it would seem obvious that (2) is not in fact true. This wouldn't invalidate most of the predictions of Special Relativity, not its usefulness as a rule-of-thumb calculation tool, but it would invalidate the strict interpretation that nothing can ever ever ever go faster than light. It would just turn out that the Lorentz contraction is a dynamical, not a kinematic, effect - something which is generally true about large numbers of ordinary particles, but doesn't have to be the case for a few exceptions.
The general trend in high energy physics has been to see high-level "laws" as emerging from lower levels of reality which obey very different laws, and Einstein's wider relativity program for a Unified Field Theory never managed to describe the quantum world correctly. Why then should we assume that SR is exactly correct, and not just mostly correct? Einstein was smart enough to spot the problem back when he wrote the EPR paper; he believed in a fully real (ie non observer-dependent) world with hidden variables that couldn't send information to, say, update quantum correlations faster than light. Bell's Inequality proves that both of those beliefs can't be correct. We either have to throw away realism, throw away causality, or we have to throw away a hard lightspeed limit. Occam's Razor suggests that it would be a lot simpler to throw away the lightspeed limit than to throw away causality or realism, but ymmv I guess.
Abandoning a strict interpretation of Special Relativity as describing how time and space "really" behave doesn't mean abandoning all the observations built on it. For example, Oleg Jefimenko has constructed equations which model the Lorentz contraction as a dynamical effect resulting from retarded electromagnetic emissions. The equations are a little harder to work with than the relativistic ones, but they appear to allow for a whole realm of FTL phenomena which is not actually violating causality. Some approaches to nuclear forces seem like they get a lot easier if you can postulate FTL signals at the scale of, say, inside an electron.
Carver Mead (the guy who, perhaps more than anyone else really did invent VLSI microchips, and thus is responsible for the computer you're reading this on) also has his own interesting approach to electromagnetism which is much more quantum than classical. Intriguingly like Einstein's own vision of the universe as made of waves, n
...if the Neutrino was a filthy cheat running a hidden nitrous bottle.
Fast and Furious: Neutrino Run
HE's an undercover cop on the edge, infiltrating the underground world of illegal high-energy particle acceleration
SHE's a young rebel magnetic confinement specialist from Stanford with nothing to lose by thumbing her nose at the Standard Model
Together, they fight entrenched theoretical physics bureaucracies by painstakingly recalibrating the #53 cryogenic helium manifold for fifteen hours straight!
One might say, even at the speed of... ah, skip it.
...Twitter?
184 coauthors can keep a secret, if 183 are dead.
And there's the plot of Final Destination 6: Einstein's Revenge.
If time is relative then my great-aunt Ethel is the last weekend in October.
Light is faster than neutrinos, in Soviet Russia!
Say what you like about Stalin, at least he made the photons run on time.
It could be bunnies.
Bunnies aren't just cute like everyone supposes!
They got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses!
+a million.
Facebook isn't necessarily the best implementation of social networking, but it's the best we have at the moment, and it's made my life significantly richer. I'm 40, and I've been able to reconnect with hundreds of friends who have drifted through my life over the past two decades. And yes, it's the little trivia updates which are the glue that hold that connection together. You might think hearing about a friend's cat or their five-year-old's new word is the most boring thing imaginable - but actually, it's all those little moments that real friendships are made up of. Of course if you don't want to hear about their cat and their five-year-old, they probably aren't that much of a friend, so feel free to unfriend them. For the rest of us, that stuff is precisely why we stick around.
Kinda how Zeus and his lightings are scary.
Tell me about it. Stock standard recessed downlights with high-K fluorescent bulbs? Utterly pedestrian, darling. Get Athena to whip you up some kind of LED chandelier, she's good with the tech stuff.
Well, it is and it isn't.
You might laugh, but that's exactly what happened a few generations ago, and yet here we are. I guess they managed to figure it out? Are you saying we're so much dumber than our grandparents that we've lost touch with our basic instincts and need extensive pre-match practice? I mean, really?