There's some pretty cool stuff going on in the Mad Science scene. Also, check out Old Science. Like some of Pythagoras' original theorems, before he sold out. Pseudo Science also has some good stuff. Cold Fusion is one of my favorites.
If you don't like Big Science, try supporting your local scientists. Go to their shows, and buy a thesis.
The U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL has a display featuring a 1" or 2" crater that was put in the windshield of a Space Shuttle by an orbiting flake of paint.
I'm from Alabama - a state where allowing the ten commandments to be displayed in the courtroom is a popular campaign platform, and "I didn't come from no monkey" is a viable political argument against teaching evolution in school. I say it's possible that this is no hoax.
Once, a teacher in my junior high school showed the class Geraldo Rivera's devil-worship special as an educational film. In that same place, I was called into the principal's office and threatened with expulsion for devil worship. (I had brought an Ozzy Osbourne tape to school.) I've also attended a church function (involuntarily) in which youth ministers played Rush and Judas Priest albums backwards in order to expose the hidden Satanic messages.
This site may be a parody, but it's not foolish to believe that it's sincere. People like this exist in real life.
If only they were so eager! Even with outrageous pricing, bad tech support, late upgrades, and buggy software, Quark is still preferred by a landslide majority of service bureaus, and is the only thing they teach in graphic design school.
The last major release of Quark (5) was actually quite recent. It is not OS X compatible, but it does attempt to include web authoring capabilities, putting it into direct competition with Dreamweaver - a program that is more popular with web designers, easier to learn, more powerful, several hundred dollars cheaper, classic-mode compatible with OS X, and on the fast track to native support.
While Quark was working on their latest little gem, Apple ripped down their entire operating system architecture and started from scratch to build an operating system built on a different kernel, but able to work with with the same kind of interface, worked the bugs out to the point that it is now more stable than its predecessor, and able to run a native version of something as complex as Photoshop. And Quark accuses Apple of being inadequate. I know who I'd rather believe.
I wonder if Quark is really so clueless, or if their PHBs have settled into a de-facto retirement, and are just using their momentum to ride the gravy train until they run out of track.
These "cavemen" were unearthed from the surrounding "Bedrock", an archeological site scientists described as "a place right out of history."
Faster connections possible with same equipment.
on
64kbps @ 40,000 ft.
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· Score: 3, Funny
An airplane traveling at 50% of light speed in a straight line towards the broadcast satellite should be able to provide access speeds of up to 128 Kbps. Faster even, if you include the effects of time dilation.
Even if 'defective' children live to adulthood, in human society they are much less likely to rear children. People generally find weakness and/or defectiveness unattractive in a mate. Same effect, evolution-wise.
When societies kill their own babies, there's usually some other reason, as with Eskimos, who did it to conserve resources for the healthy ones.
That's because in such a giant colony many workers are unrelated to the queens they help to raise. "Thus, in the long term, selection should decrease the altruistic behavior of workers," he said, because their efforts are not helping transmit copies of their genes via related queens.
Evidently, all of the ants in the supercolony carry the genetic material that allows them to act cooperatively rather than fight to the death. The only ants being systematically cleared out of the gene pool are the ones who don't have this trait. It doesn't matter which sub-genome eventually wins out - this trait will be present in all of them.
Re:BINGO! New game idea for "Post-9/11"
on
Byte Wars
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· Score: 1
I agree. But in a two-three months the noise should be back to normal and peace will return.
And then it will be september, and the media will be full of "After one year of the tragedy...".
Unless O.J. Simpson kills someone on September 10th.
Logic - OS X compatibility was apparently originally scheduled for September 2001. Now version 5 is shipping, and it still isn't compatible. Does anyone have any inside information on this?
Also, does anyone know of an OS X compatible USB audio interface? I have the iLamp, so I can't install a card.
And here I am, contributing to the state's enormous PR problem.
The concept of intelligent people moving to Atlanta is one I can't grasp.
It's the jobs, I guess. Places Rated Almanac (1999) had it listed as the best job market in North America. However, the downtown area reminds me of the kinds of cities featured in science fiction films that want to show you how bad cities have gotten in the year 20xx. Isn't that quaint little town that Matlock tools around in supposed to be Atlanta? Aside from the murder every half-hour, that's laughably inaccurate.
Huntsville, on the other hand, is a strange animal. It's a semi-transient high-tech military economy plopped down in the middle of the bible belt. The friction between the two worlds makes the kids who grow up there very interesting indeed.
Re:Parallel universe theory not an excuse
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
When you go back into the past and change events there, thereby altering the future, that's analogous to climbing down to the trunk of the tree, and then back up to a different branch than the one you started from.
I don't think you'd have a contingency tree branching in the direction of the past. Although we don't know the architecture of time, we do know that entropy always increases with time, and therefore, always decreases in the reverse direction of time. While moving in reverse, all the events and decisions leading to those possible-universe branches would be undone. You'd end up on the trunk, or more accurately, a more central branch.
I understand the 1d, 2d time analogy, but when people say 'time machine', they're usually talking about 1d time.
Just to play devil's advocate, it's also possible that there is only one possible future, and all our thoughts and decisions were predetermined by the laws of physics from the moment of the big bang. (Of course, if they really are, what then? It's just a fun thought.)
So what if it does borrow from mythology? Mythology's value is that it tells stories common to all people. If it were especially intelligent or innovative, it wouldn't have been understood by enough people to become mythology.
Mythology's value is that it is old, not good. How many people do you know who have read the Bible cover to cover? How many good movies have been made about Gilgamesh?
Re:Parallel universe theory not an excuse
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
Again, here you make the assumption that time travel is limited in a linear fashion to visit only the immediate past of one's own future.
I'm imagining a branching universe in which events now could lead to any number of different parallel universes one instant from now. I could decide to do a thousand different things, and each decision would send me to a different universe.
However, each of those universes would share this universe as an ancestor. Time travel one instant backwards from any of those universes would always lead me back here.
Consider climbing a tree. Climbing up could lead you to any specific branch, while climbing down can only lead you to the trunk.
Of course, if I really knew what I was talking about, I'd be saying this with math. : )
Seriously. Alabama could use another ten Huntsvilles to keep intelligent people from moving to Atlanta out of embarrassment.
More Warner von Braun! Less Judge Roy Moore! And when someone leaves for the Jerry Springer studio, pay 'em to stay there!
Re:Parallel universe theory not an excuse
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
First of all, why would they travel to your space and your time?
To study history maybe? Nothing is as interesting to humans as other humans, so if humans were to travel back in time, it would probably be to visit their own civilization. On the other hand, the technical or energy requirements for time travel may be so vast as to severely limit the total amount of travel. In that case, there would probably be no frivolous attention-grabbing time-tourism.
Add to that the fact that they could travel to any number of infinitely possible parallel time dimensions and you have a very small chance of being visited.
The whole point of this post was to say that the total number of parallel universes may not matter. It seems to me that if a time traveller went back into the past, it would necessarily be a past whose possible futures include the birth of that time traveller. That would presuppose human civilization, and the possibility of time travel, so the number of universes arrived in must be, even if infinite, limited in scope - so a civilization in any given universe may have a very large chance of being visited, depending on how common time travel becomes in the average universe that includes human civilization.
You can never prove 100% with certainty that they have never visited the Earth because you have never been everywhere on the earth for all time.
This is true.
Check out the movie "contact", it's a really cool movie.
I agree. The book is good, too. Carl Sagan is my hero.:)
Earth-dwellers can expect to see a new yellow-orange nebula in the night sky as Bruce Willis and Tea Leoni, upon impact, explode into their component cheese atoms.
Parallel universe theory not an excuse
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
The existence of parallel universes would not excuse the absence of time-travelling tourists in our own timeline.
Let's say that starting in 1970, time travel is successfully invented in ten percent of all possible futures. In each of these universes, there are an average of one-thousand reverse time machine uses whose destinations lie within the last three decades of the twentieth century.
That means there would be an average of one-hundred time travelers available to arrive in the seventies, eighties, or nineties of every possible child timeline of our parent timeline, starting in 1970.
Even if the "why don't I remember meeting myself" paradox makes it impossible to arrive in one's own past, the chance of being visited by a traveler from some parallel universe would approach certainty! We must assume that either none of these one-hundred or so visits we've had from time-travelers in the last three decades were noticeable, or that this sort of time travel will never happen.
Of course, I have made a few unwarranted assumptions here, like the percentage of possible time-travel futures, or the number of time-traveller visits, but they are only for argument's sake. I just wanted to have a thought experiment to point out another possible hitch.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a little inspiration for private efforts at spaceflight.
It's definitely cheap. I'm still holding my breath on the "crew survivability" issue.
Would that be in the regular sense of being dead, or in the career path sense?
There's some pretty cool stuff going on in the Mad Science scene. Also, check out Old Science. Like some of Pythagoras' original theorems, before he sold out. Pseudo Science also has some good stuff. Cold Fusion is one of my favorites.
If you don't like Big Science, try supporting your local scientists. Go to their shows, and buy a thesis.
The U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL has a display featuring a 1" or 2" crater that was put in the windshield of a Space Shuttle by an orbiting flake of paint.
I'd hate to run into a 1/4" washer at 5 mi/sec.
I'm from Alabama - a state where allowing the ten commandments to be displayed in the courtroom is a popular campaign platform, and "I didn't come from no monkey" is a viable political argument against teaching evolution in school. I say it's possible that this is no hoax.
Once, a teacher in my junior high school showed the class Geraldo Rivera's devil-worship special as an educational film. In that same place, I was called into the principal's office and threatened with expulsion for devil worship. (I had brought an Ozzy Osbourne tape to school.) I've also attended a church function (involuntarily) in which youth ministers played Rush and Judas Priest albums backwards in order to expose the hidden Satanic messages.
This site may be a parody, but it's not foolish to believe that it's sincere. People like this exist in real life.
And yes, Jack T. Chick is that nutty!
If only they were so eager! Even with outrageous pricing, bad tech support, late upgrades, and buggy software, Quark is still preferred by a landslide majority of service bureaus, and is the only thing they teach in graphic design school.
The last major release of Quark (5) was actually quite recent. It is not OS X compatible, but it does attempt to include web authoring capabilities, putting it into direct competition with Dreamweaver - a program that is more popular with web designers, easier to learn, more powerful, several hundred dollars cheaper, classic-mode compatible with OS X, and on the fast track to native support.
While Quark was working on their latest little gem, Apple ripped down their entire operating system architecture and started from scratch to build an operating system built on a different kernel, but able to work with with the same kind of interface, worked the bugs out to the point that it is now more stable than its predecessor, and able to run a native version of something as complex as Photoshop. And Quark accuses Apple of being inadequate. I know who I'd rather believe.
I wonder if Quark is really so clueless, or if their PHBs have settled into a de-facto retirement, and are just using their momentum to ride the gravy train until they run out of track.
These "cavemen" were unearthed from the surrounding "Bedrock", an archeological site scientists described as "a place right out of history."
An airplane traveling at 50% of light speed in a straight line towards the broadcast satellite should be able to provide access speeds of up to 128 Kbps. Faster even, if you include the effects of time dilation.
Even if 'defective' children live to adulthood, in human society they are much less likely to rear children. People generally find weakness and/or defectiveness unattractive in a mate. Same effect, evolution-wise.
When societies kill their own babies, there's usually some other reason, as with Eskimos, who did it to conserve resources for the healthy ones.
...to help out the 270,000 disenfranchised Californians who have not yet founded a dot-com startup.
From the article:
That's because in such a giant colony many workers are unrelated to the queens they help to raise. "Thus, in the long term, selection should decrease the altruistic behavior of workers," he said, because their efforts are not helping transmit copies of their genes via related queens.
Evidently, all of the ants in the supercolony carry the genetic material that allows them to act cooperatively rather than fight to the death. The only ants being systematically cleared out of the gene pool are the ones who don't have this trait. It doesn't matter which sub-genome eventually wins out - this trait will be present in all of them.
I agree. But in a two-three months the noise should be back to normal and peace will return. And then it will be september, and the media will be full of "After one year of the tragedy...".
Unless O.J. Simpson kills someone on September 10th.
Consumers are concerned that the recording industry has begun copying music instead of making it.
Logic - OS X compatibility was apparently originally scheduled for September 2001. Now version 5 is shipping, and it still isn't compatible. Does anyone have any inside information on this?
Also, does anyone know of an OS X compatible USB audio interface? I have the iLamp, so I can't install a card.
It's Wernher, not Warner.
*embarrassed*
And here I am, contributing to the state's enormous PR problem.
The concept of intelligent people moving to Atlanta is one I can't grasp.
It's the jobs, I guess. Places Rated Almanac (1999) had it listed as the best job market in North America. However, the downtown area reminds me of the kinds of cities featured in science fiction films that want to show you how bad cities have gotten in the year 20xx. Isn't that quaint little town that Matlock tools around in supposed to be Atlanta? Aside from the murder every half-hour, that's laughably inaccurate.
Huntsville, on the other hand, is a strange animal. It's a semi-transient high-tech military economy plopped down in the middle of the bible belt. The friction between the two worlds makes the kids who grow up there very interesting indeed.
When you go back into the past and change events there, thereby altering the future, that's analogous to climbing down to the trunk of the tree, and then back up to a different branch than the one you started from.
I don't think you'd have a contingency tree branching in the direction of the past. Although we don't know the architecture of time, we do know that entropy always increases with time, and therefore, always decreases in the reverse direction of time. While moving in reverse, all the events and decisions leading to those possible-universe branches would be undone. You'd end up on the trunk, or more accurately, a more central branch.
I understand the 1d, 2d time analogy, but when people say 'time machine', they're usually talking about 1d time.
Just to play devil's advocate, it's also possible that there is only one possible future, and all our thoughts and decisions were predetermined by the laws of physics from the moment of the big bang. (Of course, if they really are, what then? It's just a fun thought.)
So what if it does borrow from mythology? Mythology's value is that it tells stories common to all people. If it were especially intelligent or innovative, it wouldn't have been understood by enough people to become mythology.
Mythology's value is that it is old, not good. How many people do you know who have read the Bible cover to cover? How many good movies have been made about Gilgamesh?
Why is it that a story about a new species of whale does not tell us what the new species' name is,
"New Whale"
what the similar species name is
"Classic Whale"
or what factors of the DNA distinguish the two from each other
gaca - tcag - gacc - caga - ttag - cacg - ggat - ttcg - gcta - aacc - tatc - ccag - gccg - agac - gacc - caga - tcag - gacc - tatc - ccag - gcaa - aacc - tatc - ccag - gccg - agac - gacc - caga - tcag - gacc - tatc - ccag - gcaa - tcag
Glad I could help.
Again, here you make the assumption that time travel is limited in a linear fashion to visit only the immediate past of one's own future.
I'm imagining a branching universe in which events now could lead to any number of different parallel universes one instant from now. I could decide to do a thousand different things, and each decision would send me to a different universe.
However, each of those universes would share this universe as an ancestor. Time travel one instant backwards from any of those universes would always lead me back here.
Consider climbing a tree. Climbing up could lead you to any specific branch, while climbing down can only lead you to the trunk.
Of course, if I really knew what I was talking about, I'd be saying this with math. : )
Seriously. Alabama could use another ten Huntsvilles to keep intelligent people from moving to Atlanta out of embarrassment.
More Warner von Braun!
Less Judge Roy Moore!
And when someone leaves for the Jerry Springer studio, pay 'em to stay there!
First of all, why would they travel to your space and your time?
:)
To study history maybe? Nothing is as interesting to humans as other humans, so if humans were to travel back in time, it would probably be to visit their own civilization. On the other hand, the technical or energy requirements for time travel may be so vast as to severely limit the total amount of travel. In that case, there would probably be no frivolous attention-grabbing time-tourism.
Add to that the fact that they could travel to any number of infinitely possible parallel time dimensions and you have a very small chance of being visited.
The whole point of this post was to say that the total number of parallel universes may not matter. It seems to me that if a time traveller went back into the past, it would necessarily be a past whose possible futures include the birth of that time traveller. That would presuppose human civilization, and the possibility of time travel, so the number of universes arrived in must be, even if infinite, limited in scope - so a civilization in any given universe may have a very large chance of being visited, depending on how common time travel becomes in the average universe that includes human civilization.
You can never prove 100% with certainty that they have never visited the Earth because you have never been everywhere on the earth for all time.
This is true.
Check out the movie "contact", it's a really cool movie.
I agree. The book is good, too. Carl Sagan is my hero.
It is. But on the other hand, the moon is a harsh mistress.
Earth-dwellers can expect to see a new yellow-orange nebula in the night sky as Bruce Willis and Tea Leoni, upon impact, explode into their component cheese atoms.
The existence of parallel universes would not excuse the absence of time-travelling tourists in our own timeline.
Let's say that starting in 1970, time travel is successfully invented in ten percent of all possible futures. In each of these universes, there are an average of one-thousand reverse time machine uses whose destinations lie within the last three decades of the twentieth century.
That means there would be an average of one-hundred time travelers available to arrive in the seventies, eighties, or nineties of every possible child timeline of our parent timeline, starting in 1970.
Even if the "why don't I remember meeting myself" paradox makes it impossible to arrive in one's own past, the chance of being visited by a traveler from some parallel universe would approach certainty! We must assume that either none of these one-hundred or so visits we've had from time-travelers in the last three decades were noticeable, or that this sort of time travel will never happen.
Of course, I have made a few unwarranted assumptions here, like the percentage of possible time-travel futures, or the number of time-traveller visits, but they are only for argument's sake. I just wanted to have a thought experiment to point out another possible hitch.