Well, gamma rays are dangerous, of course, but how dangerous is a matter of scale and situation. There's an old puzzle that goes something like this: You are given three radioactive cookies, and told one is an alpha emitter, one is a beta emitter, and one is a gamma emitter. You are told which is which. You are also told that you must hold exactly one of the cookies in your hand, you must put exactly one in your pocket, and you must eat the third cookie.
It turns out that the "best" solution is to hold the alpha emitter in your hand, put the beta emitter in your pocket, and eat the gamma emitter. The thickness of your skin should be sufficient to stop an alpha particle, your clothing should be able to stop most beta particles. Why should you eat the dangerous gamma cookie? Gamma rays are so penetrating that it would take at least an inch of lead to stop them. The other two choices (hand or pocket) wouldn't offer any meaningful amount of protection, so it would be best to protect yourself from the alpha and beta rays, and just hope the gamma source doesn't kill you.
And it might well not- most of the gamma particles will pass right through you actually. Some of them probably will collide with particles in your body, of course, and may do some serious damage to your cells. Proteins and lipids can be damaged and denatured- radiation burns. If DNA is damaged, cells may die as new proteins are no longer able to be constructed. The possibility also exists for damaged DNA to have tumor suppressor genes damaged and "turned off" by the radiation, leading to cancers. Yes, gamma radiation can be very dangerous, but its penetrating ability that makes it so dangerous also limits its effects, since most gamma radiation will pass right through you. Look at an even more extreme example of penetrating radiation- neutrinos. At this very moment, billions of neutrinos emitted in fusion reactions in the sun are streaming through your body, and if one happens to strike an particle in your body, it can do damage just as surely as any other form of radiation. In fact, not too long ago there was a story on/. that involved a blue-sky theoretical plan to destroy nuclear warheads with neutrinos.
It all comes down to the idea of mean free path- the average distance a particle will travel before it contacts another particle. When I say that an inch of lead will stop gamma rays, that's just shorthand for saying that the vast majority of gamma ray photons, fired at the lead, will collide with particles in the lead- the mean free path of a gamma ray through lead, then, is less than one inch. In comparision, the mean free path of a neutrino through lead is over a light year. Odds are pretty good that you will live your entire life, bombarded by quadrillions of neutrinos, without a single one interacting with a particle in your body- they are penetrating to the extent of being basically harmless.
Mean free path is dependent in part on the density of the medium a particle passes through, as well as the characteristices of the particle in question. Alpha particles are essentially helium nuclei, 2 protons, 2 neutrons. The doubly positive charge and the large size of this particle (on a quantum scale, anyway) mean that almost any solid or liquid matter is dense enough to stop alpha particles almost immediately. Beta particles are just electrons ejected from the nucleus in beta decay (a neutron "becomes" a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. The latter two are ejected, but the proton stays, raising the atomic number of the atom by 1), and so have a charge of -1 and have about 1/1800 of the mass of a neutron or proton. Still, they're easily absorbed by thick fabric or a sheet of foil. Gamma rays are photons, and so are massless, move at the speed of light, and have no electric charge. It takes a considerable amount of a dense substance (like lead) to absorb gammas.
Heh, the guy was complaining about an emphasis toward U.S. space probes by Western sci-news outlets, and you respond by directing him to search for a bunch of American missions, and no Russian ones. Nice.
Not a bad list, as regards American probes, however- and that link is awesome- a definite bookmark. Adding to it, I would suggest:
Surveyor
Magellan
Viking
and of course, Voyager (though I'm sure you're at least somewhat familiar with that one)
And for the Russians:
Luna
Zond
Venera (yeah, I'm aware that's what the story is about, but there are actually like 15 of these, which met with varying degrees of success)
Mars (might want to drop in a qualifier for this search)
Vega
it's possible to get water in liquid form to over 500 degrees C
Eh, not quite that hot, I don't think. The critical temperature of water is 374 degrees Celsius (647 Kelvin, 705 degrees Fahrenheit), beyond which you will not be able to produce liquid water by increasing the pressure. Supercritical water exists (water at conditions greater than the critical temperature and also the critical pressure, which is 218 atm, something like 3200 psi), but it is definitely not a liquid- it exhibits properties more akin to an organic solvent than any other phase of water. You are right, though, in stating that liquid water can exist at a far higher temperature than its normal (1 atm) boiling point-a fact many people are unaware of.
As an aside, I'm happy to see that the two years I spent poring over steam tables as a chemical engineering major weren't a total waste.
Yeah, the "frozen chicken in the gun" is an urban legend. As the article notes, such devices do exist for the purpose of testing objects for bird impact (but many now use pigeons of the clay species), but the frozen bird goof is not known to have ever happened (other than intentional tests using frozen birds).
What's really funny (and what provides an additional clue that this is an urban legend that's been around the block a few times) is that in most versions of the legend, it is a group of American engineers who have to clue in their foreign counterparts (their nationality varies too) that they have to thaw the birds first. If there's one universal in comedy, though, it's making fun of foreigners.
The OED happens to list both pronunciations, with no indication of a preference, so I believe both are considered correct. Going a bit deeper into etymology, the ancient Greek form (for the god and word for sky, not the planet, which of course wouldn't be discovered for about 2 millennia) is Ouranos, pronounced our-ah-NOSS, and the Latin form is Vranvs, pron. oor-AH-nuss. Notice that the modern pronunciations do not exactly correspond to either of these, in terms of both stresses and vowel sounds. Thus, I think you should just go ahead and use whatever sounds natural. Personally, I've always thought "Georgium Sidus" was a cooler name anyway.
I myself (an American) have been known to use both, but I tend toward the pron. with the long "a" stressed in the middle; in other words, the one that sounds like "your anus."
This is what leads me to use the other pronunciation on occasion, actually, as if I gauge that my audience would erupt into giggles, I usually go with the chiefly British variant.
"Other kinds of decays such as protons from proton-rich nuclei could be studied by the same method but this will have to be proved!"
This could prove to be the most important use of this technique, as most proposed Grand Unified Theories have interactions that can turn quarks into leptons, so that a proton would be expected to eventually decay into a positron and a meson. Unfortunately, this process has never been observed (well, only somewhat unfortunately, as high proton stability is definitely a Good Thing in most ways), and experiment and theory have thus set a lower bound on the lifetime of a proton of roughly 10^33 years, about 23 orders of magnitude greater than the estimated current age of the universe.
As you can see, compared to the suggested lifetime of a proton, even Bi-209 seems unstable. The expected extreme rarity of a proton decay event, however, is somewhat balanced by the overwhelming abundance of protons in the universe.The "lifetime" for an individual proton is more like a life expectancy, an average figure- given a suitably large collection of protons, odds are good that at least one would decay in a reasonable timeframe. If you carefully watch 10^33 protons for a year, for example, and reality agrees with theory (big if), then it is likely (certainly not guaranteed though) you will see at least one decay event. Now, 10^33 may sound like a tremendous amount, but remember that each proton has a mass of only 1.67*10^-27 kilograms, so that 10^33 protons would have a mass of about 1,600 metric tons- a lot, but not outrageous.
The real problem lies in that "carefully watching" part. So many other forms of radiation are much more prevalent, and so might mask the signature of proton decay. Cosmic rays, naturally occuring radioisotopes in places you'd never think to look, solar neutrinos, that sort of thing. Ah, why yes, this is one of those experiments they do in a salt mine and uses a gigantic tank of ultrapure water (your proton source). However, as of yet, no one has found concrete evidence for proton decay from one of these experiments. Go here for a excellent site about a proton decay detector that ran in the 80s, and here for one currently in use.
Perhaps this process will detect this very rare event, lending profound support to one of the many supersymmetric models out there. Unfortunately, if it does not detect proton decay, it will be much more difficult to say just what the result means, it being difficult to prove a negative and all.
I made a beeline for The Stafford Lectures, a series of lectures he gave at Princeton in 1921- which were later collected, translated, and published under the title "The Meaning of Relativity," a copy of which I happen to have. It was fascinating to look at the original notes that eventually would become the text of a book I own. It was even more fascinating that the equations were now the most comprehensible part of the text, as I don't understand much German (pitifully little considering my heritage), and even if I did, Einstein wrote his notes in a messy cursive scrawl with many scratch-outs and replaced passages. Still, it's a very interesting glimpse into Einstein's thought processes.
I'm not going to pay any creedence to a letter that's signed 'anonymous'.
I keep reading comments like this, and I'm reminded of those documents critical to the ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America- the Federalist Papers, written by John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, but under the pseudonym "Publius." Apparently people used to pay creedence to anonymous letters.
The Merovingians weren't terribly interesting in a historical sense- they set up shop in the power vacuum left by the Romans, and ruled over the Franks for a few hundred years (5th to 8th century CE). Their rules regarding inheritance were not terribly well thought out (kingdoms were split among surviving sons), and so the kingdom slowly fragmented. Also, Ummayad Muslims were starting to make incursions over the Pyrennes. With the fragmentation of central royal authority, real power was held by palace mayors. One of these, Charles "The Hammer" Martel turned back the Arabs at Tours, which was a turning point not only against the Arabs, but for the balance of power in the kingdom. Charles Martel's son, Pepin the Short, became king of the Franks. His son, Charles, would go on to found the Carolingian dynasty and become the first Holy Roman Emperor in 800 CE; he is better known as Charles the Great, or Charlemagne.
So, the actual history of the Merovingians, not so exciting. The mythology is better though, and far more relevant to "The Matrix." The founder of the Merovingians, Merovec, is considered to be somewhat mythical. The first Merovingian for which there is good historical evidence for is Merovec's supposed grandson, Clovis. As the above poster notes, one story has Merovec as half beast. Other accounts (with connections to Gnostic Christianity, a subject that has been much discussed in relation to "The Matrix") claim that Merovec was the descendant of Jesus (and Mary Magdelene). Yeah, I know, but just bear with me. Now, after the Carolingians took over, supposedly a secret society was formed to reinstall the Merovingians to the throne (after all, who could have more authority than someone with the bloodline of David and Jesus?). This society is named the Prieure de Sion, or the Priory of Zion. (ominous music plays for effect)
This secret society, as all secret societies eventually must (seems to be a rule of conspiracy theory), has been linked to the Knights Templar (which were quite real, actually (formed during the Crusades, became quite wealthy through guarding banking transactions, like a medieval Brinks, were annihilated by Philip the Fair in 1307), though the mythology that has sprung up regarding them is vast) and through them to every secret society you've ever heard of- the Freemasons, the Illuminati, etc.... In other words, the character "the Merovingian" is connected in name to bunch of real world secret conspiracy plots, just the sort of thing you'd like for a fictional character connected in deep with secret conspiracy plots. I must admit it's nice to see that the brothers Wachowski have really done their homework.
I never said I was smarter than Euler. Far from it. I'm saying that there is a difference between knowledge and brilliance. Euler was brilliant, but I know how to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, whereas Euler did not. I can look up the proof in a book. If Leonhard Euler were around today, he would no doubt still become a math legend, but with today's tools rather than those of his time. But first, he would have to learn today's tools. I, on the other hand, have learned much in the way of mathematics, yet have contributed nothing to its progress. There is a fundamental difference between learning something and creating new knowledge. My statement has nothing to do with my level of intellect, and everything to do with the increase in knowledge and the relentless march of time. I would suspect that many of the people here on/. also know more mathematics than most of the great mathematicians of the past. Equivalently, I know things about chemistry that Boyle and Kekule and Pauling never knew. I know things about physics that Einstein and Gauss and Faraday never knew. It's not an observation of my towering intellect. Do you know anything about string theory? Well, Issac Newton sure the hell didn't, because it was after his time. Thus, if you know any string theory, then you know more string theory than Newton. Does this make you a better physicist than Newton, or smarter than Newton? Probably not. However, if you plan on becoming a physicist today, you will probably acquire knowledge of the subject in excess of that which was available to Newton.
All of those math things you mentioned- Euler's formula, the gamma and beta functions, I can learn about by taking a class or reading a book or typing www.mathworld.com into my browser. I was in fact aware of those things already. That's a world away from inventing these things myself. I can answer the famous Königsberg bridge problem, just like Euler, but that doesn't erase the fact that he was first.
In no way was I trying to compare myself to the great geniuses of the past. Of course Euler owns me- so does everyone else I listed, in terms of genius. I stand by my statement that I may actually "know" more mathematics than most of them, however. (You may be right on Euler, however- I was trying to estimate how far forward in time I could go before I got to a mathematician who came up with stuff I do not understand- an inexact process). That's a world away from saying I'm smarter than them- they could use the knowledge that they had on hand to synthesize new theorems and conjectures- that's a quality you cannot find in any book. This distinction will become more important as access to information becomes more and more widespread- ability to manipulate and synthesize information, rather than just understanding it, will become the standard for intellect.
I was merely trying to illustrate the high hurdles that the math students of today must overcome- that students now must know more than their predecessors, simply because there is more math now. If your definition of "genius" merely requires you to know a lot, then yes, every math professor in the world today is a genius compared to their counterparts from 250 years ago- they all have to know much, much more. That doesn't necessarily make them brilliant though.
True, true- but Einstein's best year was probably 1905. In 1905, he published papers that explained the photoelectric effect in terms of Planck's quantum hypothesis, explained Brownian motion, and used his explanation to estimate the size of atoms, and oh yeah, special relativity. He was 26 years old at the time. This is amazing, and yet not unusual for those involved in the revolution taking place in physics at the time- Enrico Fermi, for instance, invented Fermi statistics (now usually known as Fermi-Dirac) at 24. Ten years after his "year of miracles," Einstein published papers on general relativity. While the popular depiction of Einstein is as a genial old man with wild gray hair, I'd argue that most of his best work was accomplished by the age of 36.
As far as age and mathematics go, though, I'd have to agree that the effects of age are, if not disappearing, then at least being shifted back a number of years. Not long ago, I had the fascinating realization that after 3 years of college, I know more mathematics than Euclid, Diophantus, al-Kwahrizmi, Fermat, Newton, Leibniz, Euler, Hamilton, and Abel. This is not because I'm some sort of mathematics genius (I'm not even a math major), but rather because there is simply more mathematics to learn now, and I merely came later than those guys. For centuries, the situation was such that almost all of the human race's mathematics knowledge could exist in few enough books to carry in your hands- namely, Euclid's Elements and Diophantus's Arithmetica, eventually followed by a few others like Fibbonacci's Liber Abacci. In the 17th-19th centuries, mathematics used these simple foundations to create an incredible wave of new mathematics. (Just take a look at Fermat's annotated copy of the Arithemetica.) Now the number of books written on some specialized part of mathematics like Lie algebras or K-theory could fill a library.
Also, mathematics works a bit differently than the natural sciences- it's harder to create a general survey course in mathematics. Just look at the way these subjects are taught- you generally take high school science courses in physics, chemistry, and biology, but math courses in algebra, geometry, and calculus. The specialization has to start much sooner because eachthing builds off of the previous. In my high school chemistry courses, I remember covering some basic p-chem, some orgo, etc, and in my physics courses there was mechanics, E&M, optics, etc.. I of course returned to all of these in excrutiating detail in my college course, but the simple point is that you couldn't do a similar thing with math. In physical sciences, you can give a broad overview of a subject, and then later reurn in depth, because there isn't such an elaborate hierarchy connecting all of the fields. Conversely, mathematics works more like a pipeline, shuttling students from simpler subjects (basic arithmetic, simple Euclidean geometry) to harder ones (integral calculus, diff eq, set theory). The pipe opens up at the top- areas of specialization become apparent, and a frontier is reached where knowledge in one field is not necessary for knowledge in another.
In fact, there are so many fields and subdisciplines now that it has become incredibly difficult to become a polymath (in the quite literal sense of the term) in the vein of Euler or Gauss or Riemann. The idea of a single person making revolutionary discoveries in both, say, topology and number theory is steadily becoming more remote. If this were to happen, it would have to be someone who spent a long time mastering several disciplines, i.e., an old person. It's a sublime paradox- in the past, incredible leaps of insight that would connect disparate theorems and fields of math could only be made by the young mathematicians with the creativity and the daring to do so (or, if you're cynical, the neuronal plasticity), but now such individuals will still be in grad school learning the ropes.
Look at Andrew Wiles- it took him years to learn enough a
Well yes, but later in the same episode, Fry is talking with the leader of the parasitic worms, who informs Fry,"One day you'll be eating a fast-food burger and BOOM, you'll be crawling with us again. Ever wonder what makes special sauce so special? Yo."
Well, that's really just it- neutrinos interact incredibly weakly with matter- whereas most particles have a mean free path (the average distance a particle will travel before colliding with another particle) on the order of microns (depends on particle "cross-section" (relates to its interaction with other particles, and is dependent on particle energy) and the average separation between particles (depends on density of matter in the medium). Neutrinos with a respectable 1GeV energy (1/1,000,000 of the energy proposed here) have a mean free path through solid lead (density of over 11000kg/m^3) of over a light-year.
Now, like I said, the mean free path is an average figure, so a neutrino may interact with a nucleon far sooner, or far later. In the case of earthbound neutrino detectors like Super Kamiokande, the neutrinos that are detected must make it out of the dense plasma of the sun from whence they arise, travel 150,000,000km through interplanetary space (which is basically empty for neutrino purposes), pass through the entire earth, and then into a deep mine shaft filled with something like heavy water or carbon tetrachloride (as you mentioned). A very, very small fraction of the constant torrent of neutrinos passing through this tank will bump into a nucleon and produce a detectable event. Now, if you boost the the energy of these neutrinos up to about 1,000 TeV, the mean free path of each one is reduced to roughly the diameter of the earth. While a tremendous number of neutrinos with this energy,released in a pulse, will either bump into particles somewhere in the earth's interior or will pass straight through, then through the nuke and straight out into space (a small amount would probably make it out of the galaxy eventually), there would probably enough neutrinos hitting particles in the vicinity of the nuke to produce that hadron shower and potentially ruin the bomb.
I do agree that the technology is unrealistic, however- unless a viable 100+ Telsa magnet is found (present record is about 15T for a magnet of the necessary type), the storage ring will have to be 600km in diameter. There are of course many practical problems with this design- the difficulty of aiming this sort of neutrino beam, the incredibly deadly neutron flux produced with the neutrino beam (the prospect of a misfire shooting down an aircraft or irradiating a city block is rather unappealing), and that the authors suggest that a detonation of roughly 3% of the expected nuclear device yield will still occur (or even a full detonation, if the device is a hydrogen bomb, and the "fizzle" explosion and tremendous neutron flux is enough to kickstart fusion). 3 percent of a 20-kiloton device is still the rough equivalent of 600 tons of TNT. If I were the madman dictator of a rogue state, I'd definitely think about keeping my nuclear warheads in populated areas, so the hypothetical "World Government" who holds the keys to the storage ring will have blood on its hands when they use the neutrino pulse to destory a nuke, and 10,000 of my citizens become collateral damage. That would also be an excellent pretext to retaliate with any nukes I have left.
Heh, nice- though I must admit that until I got to the last paragraph, I was thinking of Berkeley, the left-leaning University of California campus (and that your pseudointellectual pal there was spouting some goofy pomo sapience), not George Berkeley, the idealist philosopher and author of Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. His philosophy is also stupid, though.
"It will still have a different watermark and security strip. You could tell the difference in about 15 seconds," Ferguson said.
The problem is that 15 seconds is about 14 more seconds than your average counter jockey is going to spend looking at the twenty you just handed over. I can see taking that sort of time to verify a bill if it's a 100, but so many "yuppie food stamps" (crisp 20s, fresh from the ATM) get spent that it wouldn't be difficult to pass off a decent fake. It wouldn't pass muster with a Secret Service agent, of course, but if it can pass a cursory glance by the clerk, it'll go right in the drawer with its legitimate siblings from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
Yes, 5:3 is pretty close to the "natural" aspect ratio- it's no coincidence that 3 and 5 are Fibonacci numbers, and that 5/3 is a reasonable approximation of the Golden Ratio.The aesthetic qualities of a rectangle with ratio of sides equal to the Golden Ratio were known to the ancient Greek, and such rectangles have long been employed in art and architecture, and determine the dimensions of many common items (think 3x5 note cards, or 3x5 and 6x10 photographs, for instance).
The problem with creating objects that exactly obey the Golden Ratio, however, is that the ratio is given exactly by (1+SQRT(5))/2, or approximately 1.6180. It's an irrational number, not the easiest thing to work with in terms of defining dimensions of physical objects. Thus, reasonable approximations like 5:3 have long been used.
Frankly, I'm not exactly sure why then the standard for widescreen televisions is 16:9, when 15:9 might have more natural aesthetic appeal. My best guess is that a 16:9, or 1.777...:1 ratio is simply slightly closer to the aspect ratio of big-screen movies than 5:3 would be, but not as wide, as presumably you might also want to use your television for television, and frankly, there's no reason to have the local evening news in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. Most films shown in the theater are 1.85:1. These can generally be cropped to 1.78:1 with basically no loss of information. Sometimes DVDs are released in 1.85:1 format; these require even 16.9 televisions to provide a very small amount of letterboxing (almost unnoticeable).
And then there are those in 2.35:1 format: these films would be nearly unwatchable on standard 4:3 or even 5:3- black bars would cover well over half of the screen. Why would a film be shot in such a large ratio? Because a 2.35:1 film, projected onto a suitable screen, occupies an incredibly large chunk of your field of vision, making watching such a film an immersive experience- exactly the sort of thing that would put your butt in a seat rather than waiting to watch it in the comfort of your own home.
For instance, he compares the realities of the Vietnam War to simulations that have perhaps twisted their reality in the public mind- "Apocalyse Now" and "The China Syndrome," respectively.
There should be a reference to Three Mile Island somewhere in that sentence- I'm aware that "The China Syndrome" has nothing to do with the Vietnam War. My bad.
Yeah, Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" sorta fits in with the idea of the Matrix, the first chapter, anyway, and interpreted in a literal way. He coined that fantastic phrase, "the desert of the real", actually. He starts off with the suggestion, like the brain-in-a-jar concept, that if a simulation of reality were perfect, we could be "on the map, not the territory," and would not be able to distinguish the two. He then moves to the idea of a possible "hyperreality," a map more accurate than the territory itself, a simulation more real than reality. This is an abstract metaphysical concept to Baudrillard; it is depicted quite literally in "The Matrix."
The real world is a nightmarish wasteland under a ruined sky. The crew of the Nebuchadnezzar wear dirty, torn rags and eat a substance succintly characterized as tasting like "a bowl of snot." They have to pilot their decrepit old ship through old sewers, hiding from terrifying robotic killers, defended only by a desperation weapon. They don't even know what year it is.
Keeping that in mind, the Matrix must seem even more alluring to the crew of the Neb. Not only have they actually seen the real world, and been made aware of its hellish condition, but also when they do enter the Matrix, they get to be effectively demigods on earth. The crew jacks in, and is transformed into a team of badasses. Dressed to kill, and heavily, heavily armed to help them accomplish that task, they are the epitome of millennial cool. Food tastes as it should, they roll a sweet ride complete with suicide doors (judging from the trailers for "Reloaded," though, it would appear that the construct program recently had the "Cadillac" patch installed), they in fact know kung fu. (I realize that they would know martial arts in reality as well, but they would be of limited use against giant metal squid machines with plasma drills.) What's more, the laws of physics apply to them only in a very limited sense (and in the case of Neo now, almost not at all). The illusion of the Matrix presents a land of nearly infinite possibility; it is a remarkable form of reality that does not have the constraint of needing to be realistic. Were it not for those pesky Agents and turncoats like Cypher trying to kill them, the Matrix could well be like a paradise. To paraphrase a fantastic line from another great recent movie, they would be as gods among insects. It's not quite what Baudrillard had in mind when he wrote about the hyperreal (in fact, I'm not entirely sure exactly what he meant, given the wording, but I'll get to that in a sec), but the idea is definitely transmitted in the exchange between Cypher and Trinity (as Cypher is unplugging the crew one by one), where Cypher argues that the Matrix could be far more real than the real world.
It's an interesting idea, that a simulation could be more real than reality itself. If such a thing were arranged, would you ever want to leave? The crew of the Neb are obviously helped out in their decision, as the vast majority of the Matrix can at any time be taken over and transformed into a relentless killing machine that can dodge bullets and punch through walls. But if there were no Agents, it's hard to say whether I'd take the bombed out desert of the real over a perfect computer universe that I could bend to my will. It's hard enough sometimes to pull away from a computer game, which is often a very limited simulation of some part of reality; how on earth could you decide to leave a computer game that could be far better than life in reality could possibly ever be.
You might argue, like Trinity, that "it isn't real." You're right. It's better than reality, more than reality. As even Morpheus, the zealot trying to free all humanity from its "prison," admits, "reality" is defined by "electrical signals intrepreted by your brain." In the desert of the real, these electrical signals transmit that the world involves ugly clothes, disgusting food, plugs in your body, and hiding in sewers from killer robots.
A zoot suit generally refers to a brightly colored, usually baggy suit, often worn with a wide-brimmed fedora and a pocketwatch or wallet chain of absurd length. They were most popular in the 1930s and 1940s, but had a brief upsurge in popularity during that swing music craze a couple years ago. On that subject, the "Zoot Suit Riot" was more than a Cherry Poppin' Daddies hit- it was a real event in 1943?, a vicious 10-day race riot between sailors and hispanics (who wore the namesake garment). And yes, they are still cool.
In the first movie (the feature film, not the Animatrix), the crew of the Neb claims that the only effective weapon the humans possess against the machines is an electromagnetic pulse. Now, at the start of this short, the human race uses what certainly appear to be a large number of nuclear weapons to attack the machine nation of 01. According to the short, the robots survive this assault, as they are made of metal, and robots are strong. But shouldn't those nukes have an attendant EMP, making the 'bots far more vulnerable?
Assuming there's an answer to that, I didn't really anticipate the machines capturing full-grown human beings and placing them in the Matrix. This may be more of just a mistaken assumption on my part, but I always figured that the machines wouldn't even bother trying to insert humans used to the real world into the Matrix- that they would readily reject the simulation. If someone like Neo, who had been born inside the Matrix and had no idea of what the actual state of the world was until he woke up in a vat of pink goo, could exist in the Matrix (prior to being set free) and feel that there was something wrong with reality ("splinter in your mind"), then surely at least some adult humans who had lived in the bombed out hell of the real world, who had watched as the machines took over, who writhed and screamed as the machines drilled a dozen holes into their bodies, would perhaps have a difficult time accepting the sunny new version of "reality" that confronted them. Especially since, according to the film, Matrix ver. 1.0 wasn't terribly believable anyway.
I guess I just figured that if the robots have that swank artifical womb technology, they could just extract gametes from captured humans and use those to produce embryos, which at the appropriate size are hooked up to the powerplant. Given that a few captured humans could each provide enough gametes to potentially produce thousands of offspring, it would be possible to breed numerous large crops from a relatively small pool of humans, with plenty of sperm and ova tucked away in cold storage just in case of crop failure (which of course happened, according to the film). Attempting to place adult humans in the Matrix as the first generation would not only be difficult, it would be totally unnecessary. A better use for the humans that were captured (once an appropriate amount of genetic material was gathered) would be simply to liquefy them and feed them to their progeny. Admittedly, the idea of forcing captured humans into the Matrix does have the whole humiliation and subjugation thing working for it.
I think that if the steps for building a 5000 dollar DIY cruise missile are going to be made freely available on the internet, I think the responsible thing to do would be for someone to post plans for a 5000 dollar DIY Phalanx Close-In Weapons System so we can shoot the damn missiles down. Any takers?
I could see myself checking my email while evacuating my bowels, I suppose. I'm kinda curious why anyone would want 6-channel surround sound while web-browsing in a latrine though. Oh, and I hope those keys are coated in phenol or something- it's one thing when Microsoft products have a vulnerability to a computer virus, and quite another when they have a vulnerability to an actual virus....
This reminds me of an old Penny Arcade: "There are absolutely no details at this time! I'm so excited!"
On another note, I'd love to see potential scripts for some of these flicks, particularly ones where the main character in the video game has no
speaking part, or where little to no concrete plot exists. Actress: "What's my character's motivation?" Director: You're on this secret island, and you have to fight all of these guys in a mysterious tournament by using very sexy martial arts skills. And you're wearing nothing but this piece of dental floss." Or better yet, Actor: "What's my motivation?" Director: "You have this hunger, this insatiable hunger, for these dots, you see...."
I would also like to see an accounting of all of the drugs, illegal, prescription, and OTC, that will be used by the team planning on turning friggin' Pac-Man into a "live-action fantasy adventure."
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It turns out that the "best" solution is to hold the alpha emitter in your hand, put the beta emitter in your pocket, and eat the gamma emitter. The thickness of your skin should be sufficient to stop an alpha particle, your clothing should be able to stop most beta particles. Why should you eat the dangerous gamma cookie? Gamma rays are so penetrating that it would take at least an inch of lead to stop them. The other two choices (hand or pocket) wouldn't offer any meaningful amount of protection, so it would be best to protect yourself from the alpha and beta rays, and just hope the gamma source doesn't kill you.
And it might well not- most of the gamma particles will pass right through you actually. Some of them probably will collide with particles in your body, of course, and may do some serious damage to your cells. Proteins and lipids can be damaged and denatured- radiation burns. If DNA is damaged, cells may die as new proteins are no longer able to be constructed. The possibility also exists for damaged DNA to have tumor suppressor genes damaged and "turned off" by the radiation, leading to cancers. Yes, gamma radiation can be very dangerous, but its penetrating ability that makes it so dangerous also limits its effects, since most gamma radiation will pass right through you. Look at an even more extreme example of penetrating radiation- neutrinos. At this very moment, billions of neutrinos emitted in fusion reactions in the sun are streaming through your body, and if one happens to strike an particle in your body, it can do damage just as surely as any other form of radiation. In fact, not too long ago there was a story on /. that involved a blue-sky theoretical plan to destroy nuclear warheads with neutrinos.
It all comes down to the idea of mean free path- the average distance a particle will travel before it contacts another particle. When I say that an inch of lead will stop gamma rays, that's just shorthand for saying that the vast majority of gamma ray photons, fired at the lead, will collide with particles in the lead- the mean free path of a gamma ray through lead, then, is less than one inch. In comparision, the mean free path of a neutrino through lead is over a light year. Odds are pretty good that you will live your entire life, bombarded by quadrillions of neutrinos, without a single one interacting with a particle in your body- they are penetrating to the extent of being basically harmless.
Mean free path is dependent in part on the density of the medium a particle passes through, as well as the characteristices of the particle in question. Alpha particles are essentially helium nuclei, 2 protons, 2 neutrons. The doubly positive charge and the large size of this particle (on a quantum scale, anyway) mean that almost any solid or liquid matter is dense enough to stop alpha particles almost immediately. Beta particles are just electrons ejected from the nucleus in beta decay (a neutron "becomes" a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. The latter two are ejected, but the proton stays, raising the atomic number of the atom by 1), and so have a charge of -1 and have about 1/1800 of the mass of a neutron or proton. Still, they're easily absorbed by thick fabric or a sheet of foil. Gamma rays are photons, and so are massless, move at the speed of light, and have no electric charge. It takes a considerable amount of a dense substance (like lead) to absorb gammas.
The damaging effects of these
Not a bad list, as regards American probes, however- and that link is awesome- a definite bookmark. Adding to it, I would suggest:
Surveyor
Magellan
Viking
and of course, Voyager (though I'm sure you're at least somewhat familiar with that one)
And for the Russians:
Luna
Zond
Venera (yeah, I'm aware that's what the story is about, but there are actually like 15 of these, which met with varying degrees of success)
Mars (might want to drop in a qualifier for this search)
Vega
Happy hunting.
Eh, not quite that hot, I don't think. The critical temperature of water is 374 degrees Celsius (647 Kelvin, 705 degrees Fahrenheit), beyond which you will not be able to produce liquid water by increasing the pressure. Supercritical water exists (water at conditions greater than the critical temperature and also the critical pressure, which is 218 atm, something like 3200 psi), but it is definitely not a liquid- it exhibits properties more akin to an organic solvent than any other phase of water. You are right, though, in stating that liquid water can exist at a far higher temperature than its normal (1 atm) boiling point-a fact many people are unaware of.
As an aside, I'm happy to see that the two years I spent poring over steam tables as a chemical engineering major weren't a total waste.
What's really funny (and what provides an additional clue that this is an urban legend that's been around the block a few times) is that in most versions of the legend, it is a group of American engineers who have to clue in their foreign counterparts (their nationality varies too) that they have to thaw the birds first. If there's one universal in comedy, though, it's making fun of foreigners.
I myself (an American) have been known to use both, but I tend toward the pron. with the long "a" stressed in the middle; in other words, the one that sounds like "your anus."
This is what leads me to use the other pronunciation on occasion, actually, as if I gauge that my audience would erupt into giggles, I usually go with the chiefly British variant.
How deliciously twisted would that be if someone's internet Counter-Strike game were ruined by a real life "AWP wh0re?"
This could prove to be the most important use of this technique, as most proposed Grand Unified Theories have interactions that can turn quarks into leptons, so that a proton would be expected to eventually decay into a positron and a meson. Unfortunately, this process has never been observed (well, only somewhat unfortunately, as high proton stability is definitely a Good Thing in most ways), and experiment and theory have thus set a lower bound on the lifetime of a proton of roughly 10^33 years, about 23 orders of magnitude greater than the estimated current age of the universe.
As you can see, compared to the suggested lifetime of a proton, even Bi-209 seems unstable. The expected extreme rarity of a proton decay event, however, is somewhat balanced by the overwhelming abundance of protons in the universe.The "lifetime" for an individual proton is more like a life expectancy, an average figure- given a suitably large collection of protons, odds are good that at least one would decay in a reasonable timeframe. If you carefully watch 10^33 protons for a year, for example, and reality agrees with theory (big if), then it is likely (certainly not guaranteed though) you will see at least one decay event. Now, 10^33 may sound like a tremendous amount, but remember that each proton has a mass of only 1.67*10^-27 kilograms, so that 10^33 protons would have a mass of about 1,600 metric tons- a lot, but not outrageous.
The real problem lies in that "carefully watching" part. So many other forms of radiation are much more prevalent, and so might mask the signature of proton decay. Cosmic rays, naturally occuring radioisotopes in places you'd never think to look, solar neutrinos, that sort of thing. Ah, why yes, this is one of those experiments they do in a salt mine and uses a gigantic tank of ultrapure water (your proton source). However, as of yet, no one has found concrete evidence for proton decay from one of these experiments. Go here for a excellent site about a proton decay detector that ran in the 80s, and here for one currently in use.
Perhaps this process will detect this very rare event, lending profound support to one of the many supersymmetric models out there. Unfortunately, if it does not detect proton decay, it will be much more difficult to say just what the result means, it being difficult to prove a negative and all.
I made a beeline for The Stafford Lectures, a series of lectures he gave at Princeton in 1921- which were later collected, translated, and published under the title "The Meaning of Relativity," a copy of which I happen to have. It was fascinating to look at the original notes that eventually would become the text of a book I own. It was even more fascinating that the equations were now the most comprehensible part of the text, as I don't understand much German (pitifully little considering my heritage), and even if I did, Einstein wrote his notes in a messy cursive scrawl with many scratch-outs and replaced passages. Still, it's a very interesting glimpse into Einstein's thought processes.
I keep reading comments like this, and I'm reminded of those documents critical to the ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America- the Federalist Papers, written by John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, but under the pseudonym "Publius." Apparently people used to pay creedence to anonymous letters.
So, the actual history of the Merovingians, not so exciting. The mythology is better though, and far more relevant to "The Matrix." The founder of the Merovingians, Merovec, is considered to be somewhat mythical. The first Merovingian for which there is good historical evidence for is Merovec's supposed grandson, Clovis. As the above poster notes, one story has Merovec as half beast. Other accounts (with connections to Gnostic Christianity, a subject that has been much discussed in relation to "The Matrix") claim that Merovec was the descendant of Jesus (and Mary Magdelene). Yeah, I know, but just bear with me. Now, after the Carolingians took over, supposedly a secret society was formed to reinstall the Merovingians to the throne (after all, who could have more authority than someone with the bloodline of David and Jesus?). This society is named the Prieure de Sion, or the Priory of Zion. (ominous music plays for effect)
This secret society, as all secret societies eventually must (seems to be a rule of conspiracy theory), has been linked to the Knights Templar (which were quite real, actually (formed during the Crusades, became quite wealthy through guarding banking transactions, like a medieval Brinks, were annihilated by Philip the Fair in 1307), though the mythology that has sprung up regarding them is vast) and through them to every secret society you've ever heard of- the Freemasons, the Illuminati, etc.... In other words, the character "the Merovingian" is connected in name to bunch of real world secret conspiracy plots, just the sort of thing you'd like for a fictional character connected in deep with secret conspiracy plots. I must admit it's nice to see that the brothers Wachowski have really done their homework.
All of those math things you mentioned- Euler's formula, the gamma and beta functions, I can learn about by taking a class or reading a book or typing www.mathworld.com into my browser. I was in fact aware of those things already. That's a world away from inventing these things myself. I can answer the famous Königsberg bridge problem, just like Euler, but that doesn't erase the fact that he was first.
In no way was I trying to compare myself to the great geniuses of the past. Of course Euler owns me- so does everyone else I listed, in terms of genius. I stand by my statement that I may actually "know" more mathematics than most of them, however. (You may be right on Euler, however- I was trying to estimate how far forward in time I could go before I got to a mathematician who came up with stuff I do not understand- an inexact process). That's a world away from saying I'm smarter than them- they could use the knowledge that they had on hand to synthesize new theorems and conjectures- that's a quality you cannot find in any book. This distinction will become more important as access to information becomes more and more widespread- ability to manipulate and synthesize information, rather than just understanding it, will become the standard for intellect.
I was merely trying to illustrate the high hurdles that the math students of today must overcome- that students now must know more than their predecessors, simply because there is more math now. If your definition of "genius" merely requires you to know a lot, then yes, every math professor in the world today is a genius compared to their counterparts from 250 years ago- they all have to know much, much more. That doesn't necessarily make them brilliant though.
As far as age and mathematics go, though, I'd have to agree that the effects of age are, if not disappearing, then at least being shifted back a number of years. Not long ago, I had the fascinating realization that after 3 years of college, I know more mathematics than Euclid, Diophantus, al-Kwahrizmi, Fermat, Newton, Leibniz, Euler, Hamilton, and Abel. This is not because I'm some sort of mathematics genius (I'm not even a math major), but rather because there is simply more mathematics to learn now, and I merely came later than those guys. For centuries, the situation was such that almost all of the human race's mathematics knowledge could exist in few enough books to carry in your hands- namely, Euclid's Elements and Diophantus's Arithmetica, eventually followed by a few others like Fibbonacci's Liber Abacci. In the 17th-19th centuries, mathematics used these simple foundations to create an incredible wave of new mathematics. (Just take a look at Fermat's annotated copy of the Arithemetica.) Now the number of books written on some specialized part of mathematics like Lie algebras or K-theory could fill a library.
Also, mathematics works a bit differently than the natural sciences- it's harder to create a general survey course in mathematics. Just look at the way these subjects are taught- you generally take high school science courses in physics, chemistry, and biology, but math courses in algebra, geometry, and calculus. The specialization has to start much sooner because eachthing builds off of the previous. In my high school chemistry courses, I remember covering some basic p-chem, some orgo, etc, and in my physics courses there was mechanics, E&M, optics, etc.. I of course returned to all of these in excrutiating detail in my college course, but the simple point is that you couldn't do a similar thing with math. In physical sciences, you can give a broad overview of a subject, and then later reurn in depth, because there isn't such an elaborate hierarchy connecting all of the fields. Conversely, mathematics works more like a pipeline, shuttling students from simpler subjects (basic arithmetic, simple Euclidean geometry) to harder ones (integral calculus, diff eq, set theory). The pipe opens up at the top- areas of specialization become apparent, and a frontier is reached where knowledge in one field is not necessary for knowledge in another.
In fact, there are so many fields and subdisciplines now that it has become incredibly difficult to become a polymath (in the quite literal sense of the term) in the vein of Euler or Gauss or Riemann. The idea of a single person making revolutionary discoveries in both, say, topology and number theory is steadily becoming more remote. If this were to happen, it would have to be someone who spent a long time mastering several disciplines, i.e., an old person. It's a sublime paradox- in the past, incredible leaps of insight that would connect disparate theorems and fields of math could only be made by the young mathematicians with the creativity and the daring to do so (or, if you're cynical, the neuronal plasticity), but now such individuals will still be in grad school learning the ropes.
Look at Andrew Wiles- it took him years to learn enough a
Well yes, but later in the same episode, Fry is talking with the leader of the parasitic worms, who informs Fry,"One day you'll be eating a fast-food burger and BOOM, you'll be crawling with us again. Ever wonder what makes special sauce so special? Yo."
Now, like I said, the mean free path is an average figure, so a neutrino may interact with a nucleon far sooner, or far later. In the case of earthbound neutrino detectors like Super Kamiokande, the neutrinos that are detected must make it out of the dense plasma of the sun from whence they arise, travel 150,000,000km through interplanetary space (which is basically empty for neutrino purposes), pass through the entire earth, and then into a deep mine shaft filled with something like heavy water or carbon tetrachloride (as you mentioned). A very, very small fraction of the constant torrent of neutrinos passing through this tank will bump into a nucleon and produce a detectable event. Now, if you boost the the energy of these neutrinos up to about 1,000 TeV, the mean free path of each one is reduced to roughly the diameter of the earth. While a tremendous number of neutrinos with this energy,released in a pulse, will either bump into particles somewhere in the earth's interior or will pass straight through, then through the nuke and straight out into space (a small amount would probably make it out of the galaxy eventually), there would probably enough neutrinos hitting particles in the vicinity of the nuke to produce that hadron shower and potentially ruin the bomb.
I do agree that the technology is unrealistic, however- unless a viable 100+ Telsa magnet is found (present record is about 15T for a magnet of the necessary type), the storage ring will have to be 600km in diameter. There are of course many practical problems with this design- the difficulty of aiming this sort of neutrino beam, the incredibly deadly neutron flux produced with the neutrino beam (the prospect of a misfire shooting down an aircraft or irradiating a city block is rather unappealing), and that the authors suggest that a detonation of roughly 3% of the expected nuclear device yield will still occur (or even a full detonation, if the device is a hydrogen bomb, and the "fizzle" explosion and tremendous neutron flux is enough to kickstart fusion). 3 percent of a 20-kiloton device is still the rough equivalent of 600 tons of TNT. If I were the madman dictator of a rogue state, I'd definitely think about keeping my nuclear warheads in populated areas, so the hypothetical "World Government" who holds the keys to the storage ring will have blood on its hands when they use the neutrino pulse to destory a nuke, and 10,000 of my citizens become collateral damage. That would also be an excellent pretext to retaliate with any nukes I have left.
Heh, nice- though I must admit that until I got to the last paragraph, I was thinking of Berkeley, the left-leaning University of California campus (and that your pseudointellectual pal there was spouting some goofy pomo sapience), not George Berkeley, the idealist philosopher and author of Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. His philosophy is also stupid, though.
The problem is that 15 seconds is about 14 more seconds than your average counter jockey is going to spend looking at the twenty you just handed over. I can see taking that sort of time to verify a bill if it's a 100, but so many "yuppie food stamps" (crisp 20s, fresh from the ATM) get spent that it wouldn't be difficult to pass off a decent fake. It wouldn't pass muster with a Secret Service agent, of course, but if it can pass a cursory glance by the clerk, it'll go right in the drawer with its legitimate siblings from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
The problem with creating objects that exactly obey the Golden Ratio, however, is that the ratio is given exactly by (1+SQRT(5))/2, or approximately 1.6180. It's an irrational number, not the easiest thing to work with in terms of defining dimensions of physical objects. Thus, reasonable approximations like 5:3 have long been used. Frankly, I'm not exactly sure why then the standard for widescreen televisions is 16:9, when 15:9 might have more natural aesthetic appeal. My best guess is that a 16:9, or 1.777...:1 ratio is simply slightly closer to the aspect ratio of big-screen movies than 5:3 would be, but not as wide, as presumably you might also want to use your television for television, and frankly, there's no reason to have the local evening news in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. Most films shown in the theater are 1.85:1. These can generally be cropped to 1.78:1 with basically no loss of information. Sometimes DVDs are released in 1.85:1 format; these require even 16.9 televisions to provide a very small amount of letterboxing (almost unnoticeable).
And then there are those in 2.35:1 format: these films would be nearly unwatchable on standard 4:3 or even 5:3- black bars would cover well over half of the screen. Why would a film be shot in such a large ratio? Because a 2.35:1 film, projected onto a suitable screen, occupies an incredibly large chunk of your field of vision, making watching such a film an immersive experience- exactly the sort of thing that would put your butt in a seat rather than waiting to watch it in the comfort of your own home.
For instance, he compares the realities of the Vietnam War to simulations that have perhaps twisted their reality in the public mind- "Apocalyse Now" and "The China Syndrome," respectively. There should be a reference to Three Mile Island somewhere in that sentence- I'm aware that "The China Syndrome" has nothing to do with the Vietnam War. My bad.
The real world is a nightmarish wasteland under a ruined sky. The crew of the Nebuchadnezzar wear dirty, torn rags and eat a substance succintly characterized as tasting like "a bowl of snot." They have to pilot their decrepit old ship through old sewers, hiding from terrifying robotic killers, defended only by a desperation weapon. They don't even know what year it is.
Keeping that in mind, the Matrix must seem even more alluring to the crew of the Neb. Not only have they actually seen the real world, and been made aware of its hellish condition, but also when they do enter the Matrix, they get to be effectively demigods on earth. The crew jacks in, and is transformed into a team of badasses. Dressed to kill, and heavily, heavily armed to help them accomplish that task, they are the epitome of millennial cool. Food tastes as it should, they roll a sweet ride complete with suicide doors (judging from the trailers for "Reloaded," though, it would appear that the construct program recently had the "Cadillac" patch installed), they in fact know kung fu. (I realize that they would know martial arts in reality as well, but they would be of limited use against giant metal squid machines with plasma drills.) What's more, the laws of physics apply to them only in a very limited sense (and in the case of Neo now, almost not at all). The illusion of the Matrix presents a land of nearly infinite possibility; it is a remarkable form of reality that does not have the constraint of needing to be realistic. Were it not for those pesky Agents and turncoats like Cypher trying to kill them, the Matrix could well be like a paradise. To paraphrase a fantastic line from another great recent movie, they would be as gods among insects. It's not quite what Baudrillard had in mind when he wrote about the hyperreal (in fact, I'm not entirely sure exactly what he meant, given the wording, but I'll get to that in a sec), but the idea is definitely transmitted in the exchange between Cypher and Trinity (as Cypher is unplugging the crew one by one), where Cypher argues that the Matrix could be far more real than the real world.
It's an interesting idea, that a simulation could be more real than reality itself. If such a thing were arranged, would you ever want to leave? The crew of the Neb are obviously helped out in their decision, as the vast majority of the Matrix can at any time be taken over and transformed into a relentless killing machine that can dodge bullets and punch through walls. But if there were no Agents, it's hard to say whether I'd take the bombed out desert of the real over a perfect computer universe that I could bend to my will. It's hard enough sometimes to pull away from a computer game, which is often a very limited simulation of some part of reality; how on earth could you decide to leave a computer game that could be far better than life in reality could possibly ever be.
You might argue, like Trinity, that "it isn't real." You're right. It's better than reality, more than reality. As even Morpheus, the zealot trying to free all humanity from its "prison," admits, "reality" is defined by "electrical signals intrepreted by your brain." In the desert of the real, these electrical signals transmit that the world involves ugly clothes, disgusting food, plugs in your body, and hiding in sewers from killer robots.
A zoot suit generally refers to a brightly colored, usually baggy suit, often worn with a wide-brimmed fedora and a pocketwatch or wallet chain of absurd length. They were most popular in the 1930s and 1940s, but had a brief upsurge in popularity during that swing music craze a couple years ago. On that subject, the "Zoot Suit Riot" was more than a Cherry Poppin' Daddies hit- it was a real event in 1943?, a vicious 10-day race riot between sailors and hispanics (who wore the namesake garment). And yes, they are still cool.
Assuming there's an answer to that, I didn't really anticipate the machines capturing full-grown human beings and placing them in the Matrix. This may be more of just a mistaken assumption on my part, but I always figured that the machines wouldn't even bother trying to insert humans used to the real world into the Matrix- that they would readily reject the simulation. If someone like Neo, who had been born inside the Matrix and had no idea of what the actual state of the world was until he woke up in a vat of pink goo, could exist in the Matrix (prior to being set free) and feel that there was something wrong with reality ("splinter in your mind"), then surely at least some adult humans who had lived in the bombed out hell of the real world, who had watched as the machines took over, who writhed and screamed as the machines drilled a dozen holes into their bodies, would perhaps have a difficult time accepting the sunny new version of "reality" that confronted them. Especially since, according to the film, Matrix ver. 1.0 wasn't terribly believable anyway.
I guess I just figured that if the robots have that swank artifical womb technology, they could just extract gametes from captured humans and use those to produce embryos, which at the appropriate size are hooked up to the powerplant. Given that a few captured humans could each provide enough gametes to potentially produce thousands of offspring, it would be possible to breed numerous large crops from a relatively small pool of humans, with plenty of sperm and ova tucked away in cold storage just in case of crop failure (which of course happened, according to the film). Attempting to place adult humans in the Matrix as the first generation would not only be difficult, it would be totally unnecessary. A better use for the humans that were captured (once an appropriate amount of genetic material was gathered) would be simply to liquefy them and feed them to their progeny. Admittedly, the idea of forcing captured humans into the Matrix does have the whole humiliation and subjugation thing working for it.
I think that if the steps for building a 5000 dollar DIY cruise missile are going to be made freely available on the internet, I think the responsible thing to do would be for someone to post plans for a 5000 dollar DIY Phalanx Close-In Weapons System so we can shoot the damn missiles down. Any takers?
I could see myself checking my email while evacuating my bowels, I suppose. I'm kinda curious why anyone would want 6-channel surround sound while web-browsing in a latrine though. Oh, and I hope those keys are coated in phenol or something- it's one thing when Microsoft products have a vulnerability to a computer virus, and quite another when they have a vulnerability to an actual virus....
Is there really a bad kind of six pack? Other than Pabst Blue Ribbon, I mean.
On another note, I'd love to see potential scripts for some of these flicks, particularly ones where the main character in the video game has no speaking part, or where little to no concrete plot exists. Actress: "What's my character's motivation?" Director: You're on this secret island, and you have to fight all of these guys in a mysterious tournament by using very sexy martial arts skills. And you're wearing nothing but this piece of dental floss." Or better yet, Actor: "What's my motivation?" Director: "You have this hunger, this insatiable hunger, for these dots, you see...."
I would also like to see an accounting of all of the drugs, illegal, prescription, and OTC, that will be used by the team planning on turning friggin' Pac-Man into a "live-action fantasy adventure."