Must have been some episode that never made it to my neck of the woods. Can you provide any more details?
Curse of Fatal Death, a one-off charity special from 1999. Burned up the Doctor's entire remaining supply of regenerations in a matter of minutes. Presumably not canonical:-)
Then the BBC suddenly find the cojones to ignore the silly complaints about Doctor Who scaring kids* (could the good ratings have anything to do with it?).
Well, that and the fact that most of those kids' parents grew up being terrified by the show on a regular basis. Everyone had nightmares about one monster or another, everyone's hidden behind the sofa. I mean, if you don't want your kids to be scared by dreadful monsters, watching Doctor Who is a bit silly.
* Hah. Kids these days never watched Pertwee-era Doctor Who in black and white during the 70s miners strike, knowing that the daily power cut was due and at some point during the episode the lights would go out... Mummy!
Mu-mmy. Mummy. Please let me in Mummy, I'm scared of the bombs... (Just the voice still terrifies the hell out of my little sister two years later. Now that's proper Who!)
The man was 55 when he started the role... how many years did they intend to get out of him?
How many years do you think they expected the show to run? You're commissioning a quirky semi-educational historical SF show basically aimed at kids. Do you seriously expect it to become a cultural icon and still be popular 44 years later? They probably expected it to run a few years and then get cancelled.
Traumatising three successive generations of schoolchildren with nightmarish horrors from the dark places of the cosmos wasn't originally on anybody's agenda:-)
Automobiles are a lot more energy effecient then say a human. But they give off polution that is less "green" or more difficult for the environment to handel.
Actually, either way it's mostly CO2. However, humans come with free carbon-offsetting credit: since we're ultimately fuelled by carbon from plants, which got it by absorption from the atmosphere, then what we exhale we're simply putting back where we originally found it. Cars on the other hand are putting back into circulation carbon that has been buried since the planet was all dinosaurs and jungles and so forth.
Actually, Jack is talking about this weird cult, Christianity, that don't know the true joy of our father Miyamoto. He does not believe in the holy text of Power.
Nor does he display any semblance of Wisdom. Can't fault him on the other one, though...
Re:David Bowie was right!
on
Caves on Mars?
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· Score: 1
From Life On Mars:
"Y'know, back in Hyde, we'd wait till we actually had evidence against a Martian before we went stomping in and turning his cave upside down..."
Every time I take my Wii to a friend's house, not only do they love it, but their (female!) spouse love it! It goes beyond that too. Often times, the parents will join in, and they love it too!
Same story here. I queued on launch night to get my Wii. I was there for Zelda, so was damn near everyone in the queue. That's what sold Wii to the fanboys.
Since then, it's been Wii Sports all the way. Those fanboys went home and played Tennis and Bowling with family and friends. That's what sold it to them. Wii Sports might actually be the most important game since... Doom? Tetris? Because that's what's driving the endless Wii shortage - viral marketing courtesy of the Wii Tennis 'we have got to get one of these' effect.
You mean the Channel 4 programme - I hesitate to say 'documentary' as it made Michael Moore look professional and honest - which has since been denounced by one of the scientists the makers tricked into appearing?
The uncertainty principle only applies to observable systems, and if there is nothing, there cannot be observer. Where there is no observer, there is no measurement and no knowledge, therefore both pieces of information *cannot* be known, and there is no violation of the uncertainty principle.
The importance of the observer is overstated in most descriptions of quantum mechanics. You can't even meaningfully define such a situation in terms of quantum physics. You declare perfect nothing, you've declared effectively that (a) the energy density is zero and that (b) it's staying that way. It simply doesn't work that way. The explanation in the popular science books that the act of observing necessarily changes the subject of the observation is true, and it's kind of helpful, but it's not the whole story and it's not the reason for the uncertainty; the uncertainty principle is totally fundamental, it comes naturally from the mathematics of quantum physics. You don't need an observer around here.
Thinking further here, though, I'm still not certain my argument holds. I invoked something called a 'rate of change', and that assumes a context of time. That doesn't necessarily apply - unless the uncertainty principle is so compelling that it will force time itself into existence, which it might well actually have done...
Of course, where there is nothing, there is also no uncertainty principle to be violated.
Perhaps that is true. But then perhaps it is also true that when there is nothing, there is no 'ex nihilo nihil fit' principle to be violated. Which do you find the more compelling principle?
Richard Swinburne, the foremost living philosopher of religion and an orthodox Christian, is one of a number of theist philosophers who hold that God is everlasting, that is, existing yesterday, today, and tomorrow, as opposed to timeless, that is, existing outside of time and being knowing for sure the future deeds of agents with free will.
That seems... tricky. If God exists in time like the rest of us, and cannot for instance accurately see the future, then we have a God subject to physics, subject to general relativity and the lightspeed limit. A God who sits within the universe in an inertial reference frame and who is just one more observer within the relativistic framework.
I'm far more comfortable with the idea of God as an entity wholly outside spacetime, subject to totally different laws if indeed subject to any at all, and free to inspect and perhaps to amend the whole four (or more) dimensional extent of the Universe at will. Put him in time and either you elevate time beyond the Universe of relativistic spacetime into God's domain, or you confine God within the Universe with the rest of us.
The term "nothing" is akin to cosmological terms like "black holes", "dark matter", and "dark energy". I suggest that the real reason these things are "black" and "dark" is because the light of human awareness has yet to illuminate what is actually going on there.
Um... actually, black holes are black because they absorb all light falling upon them and (it seems) emit light in accordance with their temperature. That's a pretty damn good black they've got going on right there. That's pretty much the definitive black body.
Same with dark matter - it just doesn't shine. Causes gravitational lensing just fine, though. You might have a case with dark energy; I remain suspicious of that, and tend to think there's something fairly simple that we're overlooking. The stuff smells strongly of luminiferous ether.
I'm often surprised how scientists propose things that violate basic common sense...
You shouldn't be. Common sense is what we've evolved to deal with objects moving at up to about 100kph, on scales of a few millimetres up to a thousand kilometres or so. Common sense stopped being particularly useful in physics in about 1905, when our naive ideas of how time worked had to be substantially revised, and since then we've only discovered more and more about how our simian instincts are totally wrong when applied outside of the domain for which they evolved.
"What was God doing before He made the world? Was He preparing hell for people who asked such questions?"
Now, rediculous stuff comes from the other side as well; but when incredibly smart and esteemed scientists like Hawking make such statements that show an animosity toward and lack of understanding of religion, it might antagonize people.
Lack of understanding? He was quoting St. Augustine.
It's a quote he uses a lot. Read a lot of Hawking's speeches and you'll see that he rehashes old material endlessly; it's a hell of a job for him to actually go through the labour of typing out anything new, what with his condition, so he copies and pastes wherever possible from previous works and speeches. Whole paragraphs tend to get copied from Brief History to this day.
The full quote from the book was:
"As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe. [Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 8]"
Thus Augustine's idea of time is in full agreement with Hawking's: that time is a function of the universe, so 'before creation' is a meaningless phrase.
Nothing is the only thing that can flow from nothing. Because it is no-thing.
If there is absolutely nothing, then that means you're certain of both how much energy is present (zero), and the rate of change of energy (also zero). That violates the uncertainty principle. So absolute nothing is unstable, because if you're totally certain there's nothing there then you have absolutely no idea of how rapidly that state of affairs is changing.
What I want is a mobile device about the size of a credit card and as thick as a CD jewel case. You unfold it two or four times (depending on how much screen real estate you need ATM), and rubber keys magically inflate to give it some tactile feedback goodness. Inside this device a radio for every cellular network on the continent, and the ability to go looking for open wifi. It can run a full embedded browser (for gmail) and ssh. The screen resolution is around 72 dpi. Oh, and it has a plug for a USB keyboard. Finally, the battery lasts for a month in standby mode, or 12 hours of actual use. And the device costs less than $500 with monthly plans for unlimited use in the in the $100 range.
Wow. And I suppose you want a pony too.
"I can write you a program that makes fish appear on the computer screen." -- Dilbert.
We've got phones that should be capable of doing all sorts of fantastic things, but can't (or won't) unless we buy our software from the carrier, pay the bandwidth fees to them to transfer it (because we can't just plug our phone into our PC and transfer software that way), then continue paying subscription and bandwidth fees if we want to continue using our software. We have to sign 2 year contracts just to get a phone at a reasonable price.
Sony Ericsson K800i, came with a USB cable which I've used to transfer some mp3s to it to use as ringtones, perfectly happy to run anything I care to name from getjar.com or transferred from PC with no strings attached, perfectly happy to send and receive mp3s or images via infrared or Bluetooth. Cost £70 then £12 per month on a 12 month contract.
Would you care to define enterprise-ish for us non-bullshit speaking types?
enterpriseish: expensive, in such a way as to allow the head of IT to justify his large budget and hence status within the organisation; carries connotations of several very nice lunches with vendors and junkets to important conferences on an expense account.
I'm not sure either should be used as an enterprise's first Linux desktop rollout; Windows admins aren't accustomed to their relatively furious rate of major releases.
There's no law saying you have to be bleeding-edge; they can perfectly well stick with Dapper, which is the current 'long term support' release. The rest of us can install pre-release versions of Feisty if we want, but it's certainly not compulsory.
Free / open source software is a completely voluntary system, not mandated by any government. That is one of the major reasons it works so well. It is not socialism nor communism.
Quite the contrary, it is Communism in its true form. The original idea was for a grassroots socialist system, rather than the centralised bureaucratic monstrosities that actually emerged - those were certainly not Communism as originally envisaged, as they simply replaced the bosses with even worse bosses, and incompetent ones to boot, and did not empower the workers in any meaningful way. In theory the government should have eventually dwindled away for lack of anything to do, and the workers would then run things themselves independently.
It's interesting to see how the capitalists are reacting to the revolutionary challenge of the open source movement. Trying desperately to regain their former control of the means of production, by bribing^Wdonating to politicians, by software patent, by FUD and by dubious lawsuit... But history is on our side, comrades, and in time we will bury them!
You can choose to become an anarchist and rightfully blame everybody for their judgmental stereotypes, or you can adjust your appearance to make life a little easier on yourself.
"Conform to our standards of appearance, or be continually hassled by the law."
I for one believe it. The revolution has been betrayed; the class war is over and the bourgeoisie have won. New Labour privatise everything in sight, to such an extent that even Thatcher herself wouldn't have dared try it. And of course once the Right have won the political struggle of the twentieth century, the Far Right suddenly looks like a moderate faction. Now it seems that all we have is the choice between Thatcherites and Fascists. It's a miserable lot.
Slashdot Mirror
Curse of Fatal Death, a one-off charity special from 1999. Burned up the Doctor's entire remaining supply of regenerations in a matter of minutes. Presumably not canonical :-)
If I remember aright, he was the Doctor. For about thirty seconds.
Joanna Lumley is of course the definitive Thirteenth Doctor.
Since when does 'Volk' mean 'World'?
Well, that and the fact that most of those kids' parents grew up being terrified by the show on a regular basis. Everyone had nightmares about one monster or another, everyone's hidden behind the sofa. I mean, if you don't want your kids to be scared by dreadful monsters, watching Doctor Who is a bit silly.
* Hah. Kids these days never watched Pertwee-era Doctor Who in black and white during the 70s miners strike, knowing that the daily power cut was due and at some point during the episode the lights would go out... Mummy!
Mu-mmy. Mummy. Please let me in Mummy, I'm scared of the bombs... (Just the voice still terrifies the hell out of my little sister two years later. Now that's proper Who!)
How many years do you think they expected the show to run? You're commissioning a quirky semi-educational historical SF show basically aimed at kids. Do you seriously expect it to become a cultural icon and still be popular 44 years later? They probably expected it to run a few years and then get cancelled.
Traumatising three successive generations of schoolchildren with nightmarish horrors from the dark places of the cosmos wasn't originally on anybody's agenda :-)
Actually, either way it's mostly CO2. However, humans come with free carbon-offsetting credit: since we're ultimately fuelled by carbon from plants, which got it by absorption from the atmosphere, then what we exhale we're simply putting back where we originally found it. Cars on the other hand are putting back into circulation carbon that has been buried since the planet was all dinosaurs and jungles and so forth.
Nor does he display any semblance of Wisdom. Can't fault him on the other one, though...
"Y'know, back in Hyde, we'd wait till we actually had evidence against a Martian before we went stomping in and turning his cave upside down..."
Same story here. I queued on launch night to get my Wii. I was there for Zelda, so was damn near everyone in the queue. That's what sold Wii to the fanboys.
Since then, it's been Wii Sports all the way. Those fanboys went home and played Tennis and Bowling with family and friends. That's what sold it to them. Wii Sports might actually be the most important game since... Doom? Tetris? Because that's what's driving the endless Wii shortage - viral marketing courtesy of the Wii Tennis 'we have got to get one of these' effect.
You mean the Channel 4 programme - I hesitate to say 'documentary' as it made Michael Moore look professional and honest - which has since been denounced by one of the scientists the makers tricked into appearing?
The importance of the observer is overstated in most descriptions of quantum mechanics. You can't even meaningfully define such a situation in terms of quantum physics. You declare perfect nothing, you've declared effectively that (a) the energy density is zero and that (b) it's staying that way. It simply doesn't work that way. The explanation in the popular science books that the act of observing necessarily changes the subject of the observation is true, and it's kind of helpful, but it's not the whole story and it's not the reason for the uncertainty; the uncertainty principle is totally fundamental, it comes naturally from the mathematics of quantum physics. You don't need an observer around here.
Thinking further here, though, I'm still not certain my argument holds. I invoked something called a 'rate of change', and that assumes a context of time. That doesn't necessarily apply - unless the uncertainty principle is so compelling that it will force time itself into existence, which it might well actually have done...
Of course, where there is nothing, there is also no uncertainty principle to be violated.
Perhaps that is true. But then perhaps it is also true that when there is nothing, there is no 'ex nihilo nihil fit' principle to be violated. Which do you find the more compelling principle?
That seems... tricky. If God exists in time like the rest of us, and cannot for instance accurately see the future, then we have a God subject to physics, subject to general relativity and the lightspeed limit. A God who sits within the universe in an inertial reference frame and who is just one more observer within the relativistic framework.
I'm far more comfortable with the idea of God as an entity wholly outside spacetime, subject to totally different laws if indeed subject to any at all, and free to inspect and perhaps to amend the whole four (or more) dimensional extent of the Universe at will. Put him in time and either you elevate time beyond the Universe of relativistic spacetime into God's domain, or you confine God within the Universe with the rest of us.
Um... actually, black holes are black because they absorb all light falling upon them and (it seems) emit light in accordance with their temperature. That's a pretty damn good black they've got going on right there. That's pretty much the definitive black body.
Same with dark matter - it just doesn't shine. Causes gravitational lensing just fine, though. You might have a case with dark energy; I remain suspicious of that, and tend to think there's something fairly simple that we're overlooking. The stuff smells strongly of luminiferous ether.
You shouldn't be. Common sense is what we've evolved to deal with objects moving at up to about 100kph, on scales of a few millimetres up to a thousand kilometres or so. Common sense stopped being particularly useful in physics in about 1905, when our naive ideas of how time worked had to be substantially revised, and since then we've only discovered more and more about how our simian instincts are totally wrong when applied outside of the domain for which they evolved.
Lack of understanding? He was quoting St. Augustine.
It's a quote he uses a lot. Read a lot of Hawking's speeches and you'll see that he rehashes old material endlessly; it's a hell of a job for him to actually go through the labour of typing out anything new, what with his condition, so he copies and pastes wherever possible from previous works and speeches. Whole paragraphs tend to get copied from Brief History to this day.
The full quote from the book was:
"As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe. [Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 8]"
Thus Augustine's idea of time is in full agreement with Hawking's: that time is a function of the universe, so 'before creation' is a meaningless phrase.
If there is absolutely nothing, then that means you're certain of both how much energy is present (zero), and the rate of change of energy (also zero). That violates the uncertainty principle. So absolute nothing is unstable, because if you're totally certain there's nothing there then you have absolutely no idea of how rapidly that state of affairs is changing.
Is it? Last I heard there was a beginning of time some 13.7 billion years ago. Steady State is pretty much dead nowadays.
Wow. And I suppose you want a pony too.
"I can write you a program that makes fish appear on the computer screen." -- Dilbert.
Sony Ericsson K800i, came with a USB cable which I've used to transfer some mp3s to it to use as ringtones, perfectly happy to run anything I care to name from getjar.com or transferred from PC with no strings attached, perfectly happy to send and receive mp3s or images via infrared or Bluetooth. Cost £70 then £12 per month on a 12 month contract.
Oh, wait... you're American. Sorry.
enterpriseish: expensive, in such a way as to allow the head of IT to justify his large budget and hence status within the organisation; carries connotations of several very nice lunches with vendors and junkets to important conferences on an expense account.
There's no law saying you have to be bleeding-edge; they can perfectly well stick with Dapper, which is the current 'long term support' release. The rest of us can install pre-release versions of Feisty if we want, but it's certainly not compulsory.
INVADE IRAQ? [Y/N] _
Quite the contrary, it is Communism in its true form. The original idea was for a grassroots socialist system, rather than the centralised bureaucratic monstrosities that actually emerged - those were certainly not Communism as originally envisaged, as they simply replaced the bosses with even worse bosses, and incompetent ones to boot, and did not empower the workers in any meaningful way. In theory the government should have eventually dwindled away for lack of anything to do, and the workers would then run things themselves independently.
It's interesting to see how the capitalists are reacting to the revolutionary challenge of the open source movement. Trying desperately to regain their former control of the means of production, by bribing^Wdonating to politicians, by software patent, by FUD and by dubious lawsuit... But history is on our side, comrades, and in time we will bury them!
"Conform to our standards of appearance, or be continually hassled by the law."
Nice to know it's a free country!
I really hope you don't actually believe that...
I for one believe it. The revolution has been betrayed; the class war is over and the bourgeoisie have won. New Labour privatise everything in sight, to such an extent that even Thatcher herself wouldn't have dared try it. And of course once the Right have won the political struggle of the twentieth century, the Far Right suddenly looks like a moderate faction. Now it seems that all we have is the choice between Thatcherites and Fascists. It's a miserable lot.