I always felt that many of the same problems confront ghosts as confront fictional time-travel plots: basically, the earth moving. For time travel, it's just the whole arriving-in-the-same-place thing (maybe there've been thousands of time travelers, but they keep ending up in interstellar space, thanks to the surface-planet-sun-galaxy-universe moving). For ghosts, it's similar - why would they "haunt" a place? If they're not matter, then gravity isn't involved - if they can't be picked up electromagnetically, then the earth's EM field isn't involved. And yet they either constitute visible light, and-or effects on air (sounds), or we wouldn't know about them. And if they're something else, that only animals can 'sense', well then what the hell? We have to hypothesize an entirely new force field, just for one class of phenomena, that no rational person believes exists, that is wholly dependent on vertebrate brains? And why should we even bother, since they're always supposedly wearing clothes? I could get on board with some good quark-gluon based ESP crap, but the clothes thing is just too much... Seriously, gravitrons-as-consciousness + manufactured textiles and metallurgy? I mean, there have been some crazy scientific revolutions, but... well... what material are their belt-buckles transmuted into that keeps their pants from falling down?
This'll be statistically indistinguishable from flamebait, but I still don't want to post anonymous. As an atheist, I find your entire religion offensive.:( It really makes me feel bad to say that, to just group a whole chunk of humans into a group that I don't like, but based on your responses below I'm assuming the feeling is mutual:) so let's all just continue to not get along...
as per the politicians and polity, innumeracy is a huge problem, and in my oh-so humble opinion, will eventually lead to our extinction/dark age/zombie holocaust. I don't think it's something we've lost, but something we've never really had, statistically speaking (the audience of slashdot, to a high degree, is certainly not within the standard deviation of global numeracy)
Obligatory and relevant link: itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004992.html
Funny, yes, but your humor could still unintentionally harm future potential users of the exclusive first-person plural subject pronoun, who might prefer not to use the more general and impersonal "people" or too-subjunctive "one" in certain contexts. Of course, the parent actually seemed to be using the inclusive, as a means to clear up an orthographic disparity from the norm - in which case, your rejoinder has no precedent in grammar humor.
pre-emptive disclaimer here: yes, I am aware that there are [x] grammatical errors in my reply. I'm not a grammar Nazi, I'm a die-hard prescriptivist. I defend subject pronouns (and n-1 object pronouns), especially when they are so useful. And I also love the mouse joke, but I'd be a hypocrite if I used it, so maybe this is just sour grapes.
early civilizations=river and coastal regions, rivers that are fertile always flood, cities flood, flood=bad, let's make a story or use floods as a bad thing for our myth. Human collective memory is short and lazy.
If we're talking about undergraduate degrees, and the average amount of debt involved, then yeah, if asked if I was afraid of dying right after graduation, I'd be like, "meh."
"Hey kid, why aren't you working at a fancy workstation like the rest of us? Dontcha know anything about computers?"
"Nah, I mean, I can download stuff - and my grampa taught me how to use facebook, even though that site isn't around anymore; and Of Course I can check email."
But can you, ya know, do any coding? What languages do you know? How about even, I dunno, html? I mean, sure, they never taught us that in school, what with the budgetary issues and shortsightedness of the early 21st century, but still, as long as you had a computer, you could pick it up if you were halfway smart - and you seem like a smart guy. What's the story?"
I... I didn't get my own computer until I was 15, because my Dad said that was how old he was when he got his. He... he never realized that things had changed, computer literacy had changed, hairstyles had changed. But, I mean, I can throw a baseball halfway good... ya know... if you wanna play catch or something..."
Sorry, kid... we're gonna have to send you to the soylent green harvest planet, if you know what I mean..."
In an ironic twist that any American who has visited Vietnam can attest to, the KFC in the socialist republic is literally finger-licking good. It is amazing how good the southeast asian (non-vietnamese) imported chicken is. I think it's from Thailand or something. You can mock the Colonel, but imagine his 11 herbs and spices on really, really good chicken meat.
Of course, what gets the locals in the door at KFC here is that the Colonel kinda looks like Uncle Ho - same beard,and his hair isn't so obvious in the promotional stencils. I haven't asked, but it's conceivable they might think he was one of Ho's loyal communist colonels in the war for independance.
Ugh. No offense Korea, but robots and language training is the stupidest idea ever. Kids develop more effective language skills with exposure to varied input - this is what allows humans to determine what is and what is not a phoneme - by the varied allowable differentials in timing, pitch, etc. heard in everyday speech from multiple sources, as well as patterns of stress and tone that demonstrate sarcasm, or hesitance, or politeness. Robots are a good way to slow down their natural rate of language development. And if it's for foreign languages (I never RTFA, so I have no idea!), well even better - the kids mostly sound like robots already, with their "fine, thanks. And how are you?"'s.
fwiw, silk is actually harvested before the worms break out of their cocoons by boiling the whole thing to melt the worm inside and loosen up the silk. But the actual process of breaking out of the cocoon isn't a strength issue, it's a chemical process where they secrete an enzyme to break down the thread. If the thread is chemically similar, then it wouldn't be a problem.
If the enzyme does still work, they should manufacture that stuff in spray cans - it would make cleaning the corners of my room a hell of a lot easier.
I've never read any sci-fi about these earlier ships getting sent out, and then being overtaken and boarded by later ships, and then those ships being overtaken, etc., etc. Presumably they'd know what route was taken, and could add a few centuries/years/months/weeks/second to their trip to slow down and scoop them up. That'd also be a great way to encourage the whole human population to maintain reproductive compatibility on these millenia-long flights - just stock the earlier ships with women and some sperm banks, and tell the engineers back on earth that the girls got a head start, get to work. Even though it would take centuries to get anywhere, we'd keep catching up to earlier populations and mixing our gene pools with them.
Can I just skip the hard part and accept my Hugo now?
meh, why don't they just have a dude with a staple gun and little packs of tylenol sitting in the back of a cargo plane - just hand him a mouse, staple the acetaminophen to its head, and drop. Or better yet, staple it to their genitals - in case some survive the drop, the staple, and the snakes.
And the fuel would have to weigh something as well, unless there's some awesome engine we've developed with antimatter and stuff - so add that mass as well and then up the TJ required:(
Unless it was a controlled nuclear explosion coming out the back, then that fuel weight would be considerable - but good news, there'd be less of it later!
This is awesome. This is how global economic power trades hands - as the west frets over various hypothetical, low-probability risks to long-term health, you can observe developing nations (china, india) cramming their schools and govt with wifi, everyone has a cellphone at their crotch, digging mercury out of recycled components and melting plastic indoors. Who cares if <1% of the population gets a brain cloud and dies from bleeding out of their eyes, when the net result is schools with technology and a workforce with practical skills? Those Ontario parents sound like a bunch of spoiled, luddite surrender-monkeys. I, for one, etc., etc...
I like your response, it's a nice way of framing it. I know the paradigm now is flowcharts and network theory, but damned if it doesn't sound tenable. It brings up one question to me, though, concerning the feedback loop that you mentioned: If the universe is this massive, ponderous system/program, how does it really resolve a paradox like the Grandfather thing? I know that the simple programs we use every day will spit out a "parsing error" or "invalid syntax" - but what if our parsers were the size and age of the universe? How would something that large handle exceptions?
I know it's a big silly leap, but instead of "parallel" universes, doesn't it just seem more likely that the universe would reboot (or more likely some other repair subroutine that I don't have the knowledge to conceptualize)? Just destroy everything, start again, and rely on quantum uncertainty to not make that one guy who traveled back in time kill his grandpa. I'm just a non-specialist observer, most of my knowledge comes from pop culture, but the whole multiple==infinite universes thing seems so extraneous.
In 2000 or so years, after a global series of overlapping dark ages, some religious holocausts and continent-wide genocides, it is likely there will be at least 3 distinct sources in archaeological sites of this figure called "Joe Sixpack" who lived in North America and liked hunting squirrels, was satirized in popular culture as a bumpkin, and was disliked for his humble teachings.
Similar to Confucious, and Laozi, and Jesus, and the Buddha, long-branch attraction eradicates actual identities. Some people with these names surely existed, but we have no way of historically reconstructing any of them accurately - you have to ask yourself, perhaps there were two men named Socrates who both lived at the same time and the same place. How would we know which one was the real Socrates? We wouldn't - which is a nice way of saying that even if there were one single Socrates, he's probably unlike our historical conception.
... sure the wide open vacuum of space changes everything, but so does the sheer vastness of it all. in future space battles, it wouldn't be surprising for a peace to be signed, the agreement beamed to combatants at light speed... and yet the battle still rages on for weeks, months, maybe even years. the battlefield might be lightyears away from the capitols
Jesus. That explanation is like a metaphor for my life. Sorry for the off-topic, but man - everything's so clear now.
Do you foresee a time when you won't be able to type into correctable word-processors? WIll you ever be in a spelling bee? Do you think society will technologically fail and we will be required to write out all our communication? If after typing something, do you lack(due to some condition or accident) the basic cognitive ability to see whether it is correct or incorrect, something that is harder to lose than rote-memory spelling knowledge? If your answer was yes to any of those questions, then you have a problem. Otherwise, its not something to worry about.
I know a lot of people constantly griping about how kids today can't write in cursive; it doesn't matter. Largely, spelling doesn't matter either - in fact, for most of written history, spelling "correctly" wasn't a big deal. Just ask Shakespeare. Can you communicate? Then congratulations!
"retarded teen drinking and swearing" is my favorite genre, right after "retarded teen in work training and taking the bus." Of course, after they edit the language for network broadcast, the absence of swearing then changes the genre. Funny how that works.
This is terrible - it's only a matter of time before they start incorporating this gene into our food supply; sleepless tomatoes, sleepless grapes, sleepless chickens up at all hours of the night, making their meat tender and juicy with their insomnia
Slashdot Mirror
I always felt that many of the same problems confront ghosts as confront fictional time-travel plots: basically, the earth moving. For time travel, it's just the whole arriving-in-the-same-place thing (maybe there've been thousands of time travelers, but they keep ending up in interstellar space, thanks to the surface-planet-sun-galaxy-universe moving). For ghosts, it's similar - why would they "haunt" a place? If they're not matter, then gravity isn't involved - if they can't be picked up electromagnetically, then the earth's EM field isn't involved. And yet they either constitute visible light, and-or effects on air (sounds), or we wouldn't know about them. And if they're something else, that only animals can 'sense', well then what the hell? We have to hypothesize an entirely new force field, just for one class of phenomena, that no rational person believes exists, that is wholly dependent on vertebrate brains? And why should we even bother, since they're always supposedly wearing clothes? I could get on board with some good quark-gluon based ESP crap, but the clothes thing is just too much... Seriously, gravitrons-as-consciousness + manufactured textiles and metallurgy? I mean, there have been some crazy scientific revolutions, but... well... what material are their belt-buckles transmuted into that keeps their pants from falling down?
This'll be statistically indistinguishable from flamebait, but I still don't want to post anonymous. As an atheist, I find your entire religion offensive. :( It really makes me feel bad to say that, to just group a whole chunk of humans into a group that I don't like, but based on your responses below I'm assuming the feeling is mutual:) so let's all just continue to not get along...
as per the politicians and polity, innumeracy is a huge problem, and in my oh-so humble opinion, will eventually lead to our extinction/dark age/zombie holocaust. I don't think it's something we've lost, but something we've never really had, statistically speaking (the audience of slashdot, to a high degree, is certainly not within the standard deviation of global numeracy)
Obligatory and relevant link: itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004992.html
Funny, yes, but your humor could still unintentionally harm future potential users of the exclusive first-person plural subject pronoun, who might prefer not to use the more general and impersonal "people" or too-subjunctive "one" in certain contexts. Of course, the parent actually seemed to be using the inclusive, as a means to clear up an orthographic disparity from the norm - in which case, your rejoinder has no precedent in grammar humor.
pre-emptive disclaimer here: yes, I am aware that there are [x] grammatical errors in my reply. I'm not a grammar Nazi, I'm a die-hard prescriptivist. I defend subject pronouns (and n-1 object pronouns), especially when they are so useful. And I also love the mouse joke, but I'd be a hypocrite if I used it, so maybe this is just sour grapes.
early civilizations=river and coastal regions, rivers that are fertile always flood, cities flood, flood=bad, let's make a story or use floods as a bad thing for our myth. Human collective memory is short and lazy.
If we're talking about undergraduate degrees, and the average amount of debt involved, then yeah, if asked if I was afraid of dying right after graduation, I'd be like, "meh."
I respect your argument (more fun for kids), but your evidence ("just like playing ... cowboys and indians") is not valid. Yeee-hah!!!!
"Hey kid, why aren't you working at a fancy workstation like the rest of us? Dontcha know anything about computers?"
"Nah, I mean, I can download stuff - and my grampa taught me how to use facebook, even though that site isn't around anymore; and Of Course I can check email."
But can you, ya know, do any coding? What languages do you know? How about even, I dunno, html? I mean, sure, they never taught us that in school, what with the budgetary issues and shortsightedness of the early 21st century, but still, as long as you had a computer, you could pick it up if you were halfway smart - and you seem like a smart guy. What's the story?"
I... I didn't get my own computer until I was 15, because my Dad said that was how old he was when he got his. He... he never realized that things had changed, computer literacy had changed, hairstyles had changed. But, I mean, I can throw a baseball halfway good... ya know... if you wanna play catch or something..."
Sorry, kid... we're gonna have to send you to the soylent green harvest planet, if you know what I mean..."
We already do have that - too many powerful explosions would result for it to be practical.
In an ironic twist that any American who has visited Vietnam can attest to, the KFC in the socialist republic is literally finger-licking good. It is amazing how good the southeast asian (non-vietnamese) imported chicken is. I think it's from Thailand or something. You can mock the Colonel, but imagine his 11 herbs and spices on really, really good chicken meat.
Of course, what gets the locals in the door at KFC here is that the Colonel kinda looks like Uncle Ho - same beard,and his hair isn't so obvious in the promotional stencils. I haven't asked, but it's conceivable they might think he was one of Ho's loyal communist colonels in the war for independance.
haha that IS funny... but uh, did you ever find out where the JPEGs came from?
Ugh. No offense Korea, but robots and language training is the stupidest idea ever. Kids develop more effective language skills with exposure to varied input - this is what allows humans to determine what is and what is not a phoneme - by the varied allowable differentials in timing, pitch, etc. heard in everyday speech from multiple sources, as well as patterns of stress and tone that demonstrate sarcasm, or hesitance, or politeness. Robots are a good way to slow down their natural rate of language development. And if it's for foreign languages (I never RTFA, so I have no idea!), well even better - the kids mostly sound like robots already, with their "fine, thanks. And how are you?"'s.
fwiw, silk is actually harvested before the worms break out of their cocoons by boiling the whole thing to melt the worm inside and loosen up the silk. But the actual process of breaking out of the cocoon isn't a strength issue, it's a chemical process where they secrete an enzyme to break down the thread. If the thread is chemically similar, then it wouldn't be a problem.
If the enzyme does still work, they should manufacture that stuff in spray cans - it would make cleaning the corners of my room a hell of a lot easier.
I've never read any sci-fi about these earlier ships getting sent out, and then being overtaken and boarded by later ships, and then those ships being overtaken, etc., etc. Presumably they'd know what route was taken, and could add a few centuries/years/months/weeks/second to their trip to slow down and scoop them up. That'd also be a great way to encourage the whole human population to maintain reproductive compatibility on these millenia-long flights - just stock the earlier ships with women and some sperm banks, and tell the engineers back on earth that the girls got a head start, get to work. Even though it would take centuries to get anywhere, we'd keep catching up to earlier populations and mixing our gene pools with them.
Can I just skip the hard part and accept my Hugo now?
meh, why don't they just have a dude with a staple gun and little packs of tylenol sitting in the back of a cargo plane - just hand him a mouse, staple the acetaminophen to its head, and drop. Or better yet, staple it to their genitals - in case some survive the drop, the staple, and the snakes.
And the fuel would have to weigh something as well, unless there's some awesome engine we've developed with antimatter and stuff - so add that mass as well and then up the TJ required:(
Unless it was a controlled nuclear explosion coming out the back, then that fuel weight would be considerable - but good news, there'd be less of it later!
This is awesome. This is how global economic power trades hands - as the west frets over various hypothetical, low-probability risks to long-term health, you can observe developing nations (china, india) cramming their schools and govt with wifi, everyone has a cellphone at their crotch, digging mercury out of recycled components and melting plastic indoors. Who cares if <1% of the population gets a brain cloud and dies from bleeding out of their eyes, when the net result is schools with technology and a workforce with practical skills? Those Ontario parents sound like a bunch of spoiled, luddite surrender-monkeys. I, for one, etc., etc...
I like your response, it's a nice way of framing it. I know the paradigm now is flowcharts and network theory, but damned if it doesn't sound tenable. It brings up one question to me, though, concerning the feedback loop that you mentioned: If the universe is this massive, ponderous system/program, how does it really resolve a paradox like the Grandfather thing? I know that the simple programs we use every day will spit out a "parsing error" or "invalid syntax" - but what if our parsers were the size and age of the universe? How would something that large handle exceptions?
I know it's a big silly leap, but instead of "parallel" universes, doesn't it just seem more likely that the universe would reboot (or more likely some other repair subroutine that I don't have the knowledge to conceptualize)? Just destroy everything, start again, and rely on quantum uncertainty to not make that one guy who traveled back in time kill his grandpa. I'm just a non-specialist observer, most of my knowledge comes from pop culture, but the whole multiple==infinite universes thing seems so extraneous.
In 2000 or so years, after a global series of overlapping dark ages, some religious holocausts and continent-wide genocides, it is likely there will be at least 3 distinct sources in archaeological sites of this figure called "Joe Sixpack" who lived in North America and liked hunting squirrels, was satirized in popular culture as a bumpkin, and was disliked for his humble teachings.
Similar to Confucious, and Laozi, and Jesus, and the Buddha, long-branch attraction eradicates actual identities. Some people with these names surely existed, but we have no way of historically reconstructing any of them accurately - you have to ask yourself, perhaps there were two men named Socrates who both lived at the same time and the same place. How would we know which one was the real Socrates? We wouldn't - which is a nice way of saying that even if there were one single Socrates, he's probably unlike our historical conception.
... sure the wide open vacuum of space changes everything, but so does the sheer vastness of it all. in future space battles, it wouldn't be surprising for a peace to be signed, the agreement beamed to combatants at light speed... and yet the battle still rages on for weeks, months, maybe even years. the battlefield might be lightyears away from the capitols
Jesus. That explanation is like a metaphor for my life. Sorry for the off-topic, but man - everything's so clear now.
I have no modpoints but I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Child D has died of dysentery
Do you foresee a time when you won't be able to type into correctable word-processors? WIll you ever be in a spelling bee? Do you think society will technologically fail and we will be required to write out all our communication? If after typing something, do you lack(due to some condition or accident) the basic cognitive ability to see whether it is correct or incorrect, something that is harder to lose than rote-memory spelling knowledge? If your answer was yes to any of those questions, then you have a problem. Otherwise, its not something to worry about.
I know a lot of people constantly griping about how kids today can't write in cursive; it doesn't matter. Largely, spelling doesn't matter either - in fact, for most of written history, spelling "correctly" wasn't a big deal. Just ask Shakespeare. Can you communicate? Then congratulations!
"retarded teen drinking and swearing" is my favorite genre, right after "retarded teen in work training and taking the bus." Of course, after they edit the language for network broadcast, the absence of swearing then changes the genre. Funny how that works.
This is terrible - it's only a matter of time before they start incorporating this gene into our food supply; sleepless tomatoes, sleepless grapes, sleepless chickens up at all hours of the night, making their meat tender and juicy with their insomnia