I have this totally new way of doing games
on
Second Person
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· Score: 1
I don't even know if there's a name for it, but it's not 1st, 2nd or 3rd person. Here's a sample:
> one looks
One finds oneself in a dark room. One might be eaten by a grue.
> one goes north
One is eaten by a grue. Would one like to restart or quit?
A simply phrased problem about entries in a table results in an error rate of over 10%. And people use tables like these to do their jobs? No wonder my life is dominated by fixing other people's mistakes.
...stop 'exploding', do a 360 degree revolution, and carry on exploding. Are the physicists sure they have this right? I don't think that kind of process could preserve angular momentum, not to mention the vast amounts of energy that seem to be held at bay for significant periods of time.
...'make a pass at' means something like 'reveal your sexual desire for'. What does it mean in American English? Given the context here of governments and telecom immunity I can only assume it means something like "fuc* in the ass".
The focusing of diffraction gratings is heavily wavelength dependent. The article makes it sound easy to shove in an extra Fresnel lens, but it's not that easy. Maybe it'd be better to use this only as a narrow band imager using suitable filters.
...reactor has been running? Surely you just look for people running round glowing green or with extra limbs. And if that's not the case, it seems like the environmental impact of nuclear reactors is less than some people would claim.
I think the reader was trying to find something in the book that was worthy of praise. Complexity was just the last ditch attempt in the absence of any other redeeming qualities.
It's a perfectly well defined question with a concrete answer. Mathematical symbols and techniques are invented by us, just like tools like hammers and microwave ovens. And just like hammers and microwave ovens we can discover interesting, novel and surprising things to do with them. That's it. No mystery.
It's all very well to have free speech written into the constitution, but it's another to have a culture of free speech. Ultimately, it's the culture that is more important. American teenagers grow up thinking that free speech means freedom for individuals to put the word 'fuck' on their T-shirts with no conception that it is one of the ways we keep tyrannies in check and enable the free flow of ideas that leads to the betterment of society. It's easy to get sidelined by trivial free speech issues like nipples at the superbowl and forget that the media should be one of the channels by which we find out if we are heading for tyranny.
Consider Britain during the Thatcher era. Britain lacks strong constitutional free speech protections and so the government imposed a ban on broadcasting the speech of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams (of whom I am no supporter BTW). But the media had a culture of free speech regardless of the law and found ways to work around it, eg. by dubbing video of Adams. A strong culture will trump laws. Unfortunately, Americans are sitting on their laurels and taking their free speech for granted. It's not good enough to be written into law if Americans don't work at it.
We have a well understood and well observed mechanism for getting from primitive life to more complex life. We don't have a well understood mechanism for abiogenesis. So it's interesting that Hawking thinks that abiogenesis is commonplace but that complex life forms are not.
> If they are at all awake they will either realize that the whole world is designed around the idea of one thing eating another.
Can we start with eating you?
Do we outlaw aircraft for violating the laws of gravity, or encourage people to make themselves sick because disease is a fact of nature, or promote gang rape because dolphins do it, or outlaw television because it doesn't occur in nature? I don't look to what happens in nature to tell me what is right or wrong. Do you?
> "Observation" here actually just means interaction with a nearby atom.
That's not enough to qualify as an observation in this context. What you need is some kind of coupling to the environment. That could be a chain reaction starting with an interaction with a nearby atom and ending up with a macroscopic change. But a nearby atom not coupled to anything else wouldn't do.
Quantum effect this, quantum effect that. The fact that your head doesn't fall off is a quantum effect, without which electrons, protons and neutrons couldn't possibly form stable structures. Everything on a small enough scale is a "quantum effect". Saying that chlorophyll works by means of a quantum effect is like saying that computers rely on a one-is-bigger-than-zero effect.
I've stopped laughing at people into voodoo and magic who thought that by stealing part of their intended victim, some hair or maybe a fingernail, they would gain power over them.
On the one hand, I find the alternatives you point out even more implausible, especially the Hyde design space fountain. On the other hand, those wikipedia links connect to a fun little network of wacky science fiction ideas that I hadn't heard of before, and for that, I thank you heartily.
This is like worrying now about what to wear on your 250th birthday. We won't see space elevators in my lifetime, in your lifetime, or in the lifetime of your grandchildren. We can't even come close to constructing even a tiny fraction of a percent of the material of the required strength for a space elevator. A bit of wobble is neither here nor there. And when we do have the technology to make such material in bulk, we'll have already figured out countless solutions to the problem of wobble and most humans will probably think of space elevators as a fun way to get *down* to the old planet their ancestors used to live on rather than as a cheap way to get stuff into space.
Next up, the impact of proton decay on the stability of your home.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't even know if there's a name for it, but it's not 1st, 2nd or 3rd person. Here's a sample:
> one looks
One finds oneself in a dark room. One might be eaten by a grue.
> one goes north
One is eaten by a grue. Would one like to restart or quit?
Suitable for butlers or royalty.
English as spoken in England is just a dialect spoken by a minority.
A simply phrased problem about entries in a table results in an error rate of over 10%. And people use tables like these to do their jobs? No wonder my life is dominated by fixing other people's mistakes.
...stop 'exploding', do a 360 degree revolution, and carry on exploding. Are the physicists sure they have this right? I don't think that kind of process could preserve angular momentum, not to mention the vast amounts of energy that seem to be held at bay for significant periods of time.
...'make a pass at' means something like 'reveal your sexual desire for'. What does it mean in American English? Given the context here of governments and telecom immunity I can only assume it means something like "fuc* in the ass".
Theophilist pervert!
Really, so what? Why are you publicising this guy?
Overall, I like this idea a lot.
Haven't these people heard of computers? You know, those things you use to rapidly search for digital needles in digital haystacks?
...reactor has been running? Surely you just look for people running round glowing green or with extra limbs. And if that's not the case, it seems like the environmental impact of nuclear reactors is less than some people would claim.
I think the reader was trying to find something in the book that was worthy of praise. Complexity was just the last ditch attempt in the absence of any other redeeming qualities.
It's a perfectly well defined question with a concrete answer. Mathematical symbols and techniques are invented by us, just like tools like hammers and microwave ovens. And just like hammers and microwave ovens we can discover interesting, novel and surprising things to do with them. That's it. No mystery.
I'm hoping that one day we'll put a black cuboid with sides in the ratio 1:4:9 on the Moon.
Consider Britain during the Thatcher era. Britain lacks strong constitutional free speech protections and so the government imposed a ban on broadcasting the speech of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams (of whom I am no supporter BTW). But the media had a culture of free speech regardless of the law and found ways to work around it, eg. by dubbing video of Adams. A strong culture will trump laws. Unfortunately, Americans are sitting on their laurels and taking their free speech for granted. It's not good enough to be written into law if Americans don't work at it.
We have a well understood and well observed mechanism for getting from primitive life to more complex life. We don't have a well understood mechanism for abiogenesis. So it's interesting that Hawking thinks that abiogenesis is commonplace but that complex life forms are not.
Can we start with eating you?
Do we outlaw aircraft for violating the laws of gravity, or encourage people to make themselves sick because disease is a fact of nature, or promote gang rape because dolphins do it, or outlaw television because it doesn't occur in nature? I don't look to what happens in nature to tell me what is right or wrong. Do you?
That's not enough to qualify as an observation in this context. What you need is some kind of coupling to the environment. That could be a chain reaction starting with an interaction with a nearby atom and ending up with a macroscopic change. But a nearby atom not coupled to anything else wouldn't do.
Quantum effect this, quantum effect that. The fact that your head doesn't fall off is a quantum effect, without which electrons, protons and neutrons couldn't possibly form stable structures. Everything on a small enough scale is a "quantum effect". Saying that chlorophyll works by means of a quantum effect is like saying that computers rely on a one-is-bigger-than-zero effect.
Paper. You'll need to wear suitable shades to protect you from the awfulness of the font in which it is written.
I've stopped laughing at people into voodoo and magic who thought that by stealing part of their intended victim, some hair or maybe a fingernail, they would gain power over them.
Do you thing the DoD use GET or POST for launching nuclear warheards? Is there a guideline about that?
On the one hand, I find the alternatives you point out even more implausible, especially the Hyde design space fountain. On the other hand, those wikipedia links connect to a fun little network of wacky science fiction ideas that I hadn't heard of before, and for that, I thank you heartily.
This is like worrying now about what to wear on your 250th birthday. We won't see space elevators in my lifetime, in your lifetime, or in the lifetime of your grandchildren. We can't even come close to constructing even a tiny fraction of a percent of the material of the required strength for a space elevator. A bit of wobble is neither here nor there. And when we do have the technology to make such material in bulk, we'll have already figured out countless solutions to the problem of wobble and most humans will probably think of space elevators as a fun way to get *down* to the old planet their ancestors used to live on rather than as a cheap way to get stuff into space. Next up, the impact of proton decay on the stability of your home.
Where 'objective' = 'fits the /. groupthink'
Damn! Does it show?