But actually, I don't see why someone hasn't developed an ATP (?) powered circuit! All you need is a cathode with an enzyme or catalyst that breaks apart sugars and steals their electrons, and any kind of anode. Given the current state of molecular engineering - and certainly cell tinkering - this should be almost easy!
Obviously this has already been buried by Big Oil, along with the Free Energy device, test-tube Cold Fusion, and the Perpetual Stirling Engine.
It's funny you should say how bad Mac OS 9 was, because I have to say that it was a very hard thing sticking by Apple while their cooperative multi-tasking OS was slouching towards obsolescence and gaining very little internally. I used Mac OS then because I admired the quality of the software, the design of interfaces, the general organization of the system, and the more polished appearance of everything. When things worked (7.6.1, 8.6, 9.2) the Mac experience was generally more... fun... than the Windows experience. Within a given application productivity was the same, so it wasn't hard to see the writing on the wall. Apple would not only need to come up to parity with Windows 95, they would also have to differentiate themselves and produce something with a value that transcended Windows on the desktop. When I first heard that Mac OS X would be a Unix-based system my heart leapt. As a web developer I spent years playing with Linux and BSD webservers from the command-line, logging in from my Mac desktop. Suddenly I'd be able to run a webserver right out of the box on my own computer. And my computer would be able to speak natively with all those *nix boxen out there too.
Now, look at us today! Apple's selling a nice, solid UNIX system with arguably the most usable graphical interface ever designed. They've swapped over to Intel chips so now every kid with a Macbook can run Windows apps at native speeds right alongside their Mac apps. Every technical move Apple makes, whether it garners them any kudos in the mainstream press, brings increased quality, power, and speed to their core product. Hackers all over the world are excited to get Leopard running on their Tablet PC's, just to get a slice of the Mac experience and toy around with a decent UNIX. And frankly, Cygwin and WinCVS should be enough reason for any web tech to give Mac a try.
Whoever would say such a thing hasn't yet learned the joy of preference options! Check out the nifty new option at the bottom of the Desktop preference pane (in 10.5.2 anyhow!).
So the poor little feller thinks sharing is bad, and business should have natural access to exploit every ecosystem in existence. He sounds like he's trying to get his balls back from someone.
One site I work on got hit by a PHPBB SQL injection attack and had a tiny iframe inserted into the forum header that pointed to a well-known malware site, hightstats.net (and if you're curious the malicious script is in the strong/044 folder). Google picked up on the iframe's contents being a malicious script and added the malware warning to the search results pertaining to the forums section of our website.
I just wonder how it is that hightstats.net can still be in existence when it contains known malicious stuff that hackers are inserting into unwary websites?!
It all makes sense to me. It's a reasonable question to ask: Does evolution evolve? Certainly it ought to. Those organisms whose DNA better tweaks the likelihood of mutations in useful ways would tend to be better evolvers. If it happens to be a trait of DNA that some regions have more "mutational flexibility" than others, eventually these regions would tend to be arranged to favor useful mutations. And if enough of these regions exist it could form a sophisticated predictive system. Now imagine DNA in which "concerted mutations" benefit the organism, but only in certain reinforcing or complimentary arrangements. Then when certain mutations prove beneficial, those others that compliment them will begin to emerge too.
Interesting stuff, how systems with simple rules can create such amazingly complex systems as ourselves... and in a sense, blindly.
I would like to point out that this is an obvious analogy meant to illustrate the proper approach to what the buddhists refer to as "defilements of the mind" - those unskillful means we have adopted to cope with a world we view adversarially. Christ's parable is saying that rather than stir up the mind by trying to root out idealism through idealism, you should instead follow the effective precepts - love your enemy, practice forgiveness, pray in solitude, consider others, etc. Through a faithful practice of prayer the cortical neurons you would attempt to dissimilate through self-alienation will instead be assimilated into the emergent self at the moment of realization.
The Vipassana method, Zen shikan-taza, or general "mindfulness" meditation all engender the same result, by a continuous practice of letting go we gradually lose our tendency to view the world adversarially, we learn to be open to the conditions of the present moment. Inevitably at some stage the mind transcends the imposed self-other view of the world, and one directly realizes the wholeness of the present moment and one's indivisible part in it.
Damn, chill out and learn. You just need to work on understanding your software and your system, plus some basics of Mac usage in general.
Mail - You're just flabbergasting yourself, take a breath. To turn off a rule in mail you just uncheck it. Is the Preferences window so large that things are behind the Dock? (It's called the "Dock" by the way.) Hide the Dock then shrink the window... or better yet, just move the window upwards. General advice: Put the Dock on the side of the screen, it works better there.
iMovie - The option you want is "Create Still" and it's in a discoverable place in the menu bar. Control-click is right click, what's your point? If you want to use one hand get a multi-button mouse with a wheel. Spend the $15 and save yourself the headache. "Video Capture" is totally the wrong term, so you wouldn't find what you were looking for. Video capture is the act of capturing video from some source, not converting a frame into a JPEG. What you want is "Frame Capture." Or, if all you want is what you see on the screen, just switch to fullscreen, pause at the frame you want and press Command-Shift-3 to take a screenshot. Why are you digging through the Finder? Because you don't realize there's a simple way, and you didn't bother to find out. Some clever Googling can help you - don't be so quick to assume.
Photobooth - Drag the photo you want from wherever you see it onto the desktop. Done. If you sent it to iPhoto to crop it, then you have given it to iPhoto to care for. You need to understand the paradigm of iPhoto. Once photos are given to iPhoto it becomes your pathway to those images. There is never any good reason to go into the iPhoto album folders. The proper way to send images out of iPhoto is to use EXPORT in the FILE menu. Command-Shift-E. If on the other hand you had dragged the photo to the desktop you could also have any image editor to edit it.
iChat - Yes you can just drag an image on top of your buddy icon to change it, assuming that you're dragging a file proxy. And when you drag an image from iPhoto to iChat you are dragging an image file proxy. I just tried it and it worked fine! Copy-paste from an image viewer/editor to any image target also works. As for expecting iPhoto to have an "Export to iChat" function? Well, first that's the wrong use of the word "Export" which has a formal meaning in most programs. Second of all, iChat isn't really a common target for images. It has an interface to change your buddy icon, but how often is that needed? Should iPhoto also have "Send to TextEdit" just because you can paste images into documents?
Just learn how to use your system, and you'll find it's just fine. You only flabbergast yourself with all these complaints based on ignorance of the software. Get a tutor, and take the time to listen and learn. Breathing exercises may also help, if you have a hard time sitting still.
Trolling or not, as a US native I must agree that this country is definitely going down a road of increasing suckage - mainly due to our adolescent culture of ignorance, shortsightedness, greed and selfishness. On the other hand, we do have the best entertainment media in the world!
I'm thinking, maybe torture should be legal, but the law should be - if an agent of the state tortures you, you have a right to torture them afterwards.
Actually, Colbert's truthy line is "...For as we are all aware, the Facts have a well-known Liberal bias."...his implication being, that when you understand cause and effect, you realize that life is something that needs to be nurtured, not dominated, and that only by investing directly in the health, education, and general welfare of the people do you get a healthy and prosperous body politic.
Those whom he indicts in the government and press for distorting the truth, he also calls cowards. When the truth doesn't serve your ends, it is courageous and moral to change your course. But again and again those who have usurped the reins of power consider only their own distorted ends, without consideration for the reasonable will of the people. They would have us be ruled by false images so that we relinquish all our power.
One only wonders, to what end are they deceiving us and stealing our power? I suppose it must be private elite world domination, and the well-being of the people be damned.
The law can convince you to incriminate yourself, and the evidence is admissible. You may confess a crime if you have one to confess. You have to state that it's by your own free will. However during trial if you fee so-moved, you can invoke the 5th amendment to disavow your earlier statements. This may be taken as hostile to the court, if not decided upon by prior consultation.
If other evidence already obtained points to you, the law can search you or your premises by obtaining a warrant from a court. The warrant must specify what is being sought and what will be seized. Unfortunately many search-and-seizure operations overstep their bounds. Computer communications are there for the taking, a wealth of self-incrimination, and the courts have no problem using them.
When you send an email you have no choice whether it is archived somewhere or not. Recent emails are always sitting in incoming and outgoing mail queues. Thus the only way to opt out and get true privacy is to use encryption. Your concerted choice was to keep communication confidential between yourself and your compadre. If the only way the law can incriminate you is to coerce you, the information obtained cannot be used in evidence against you. You must be willing to volunteer it. If you are not willing to volunteer it, then they must find other avenues to bring evidence.
For the moment torture is still illegal, at least once it's brought before our court system. This is why the prisoners at Guantanamo are being held off from our court system for the time-being. All those cases will inevitably need to be tried here, because no upcoming president will be good enough to sign on to a world court, and no military tribunal can just go off and just hang a group of abused, innocent people. So most of those cases will be thrown out for lack of evidence. And most of those prisoners will counter-sue for false imprisonment. And they will sue the People of the United States for committing illegal acts of torture.
Likewise, persons convicted and thrown into US prisons based on confessions obtained through torture are today counter-suing the People and their torturers.
So there is a lot of hope that torture will remain illegal. However, ask yourself, how much pain and discomfort would I endure to protect my secrets? What if I was held in a room and not allowed to go and urinate? Would I enjoy pissing myself? That's not such a torture, is it? Maybe that's perfectly legal. These things do go on, on all kinds of levels, so just realize that if you've got a PGP pass phrase that somebody wants... they may just get it anyway.
Maybe only tested perception, not interpretation
on
Can Time Slow Down?
·
· Score: 1
This test tested the rate of external sensory perception in relation to discrete events. Unfortunately, perceptual systems have, you might say, hardwired hardware limitations. As I understand it in synapses there is a reuptake reaction that takes at least 1/50th of a second to complete. So perceptual systems should not be expected to form distinct impressions any faster than some relative threshold.
Now, instead of testing perceptual systems that lie far from the region of synthetic awareness, they should have used tests that engage deeper systems of interpretation and physical response time.
It seems to me that what most likely happens in crisis situations is that the brain modulates the routes of high-order thinking. You would expect some higher brain functions to be augmented. while others would be impeded. For example, strategic assessment or spatial awareness should tend to improve. The senses normally passive - like hearing and smell - should perk up. And your subject should be able to report that their experience of time seemed expanded, that they were surprised only a few seconds had passed.
I myself would be happy to design - and volunteer for - tests utilizing pure LSD 25 in order to test time dilation and expansion, as I can vividly recall several occasions where this has happened to me. I believe tests involving speed chess would be very fruitful. Also, there should be comprehensive tests of musical ability while under the influence of these substances, or others that target key areas, because of the similar but distinct high order brain functions involved, and its wonderful dynamic synthesis of perception, interpretation, decision-making, and execution in a well-defined domain.
Ah, I see the media scare tactics are working on you too. We have shark scares every year here too, but shark killings are oh so rare.
I'd be more worried about driving in the US if you're concerned about danger. Over 50,000 people are killed in transportation-related accidents in the US every year. That's the equivalent of sixteen 9-11 attacks per annum committed by our mad culture alone. We just don't happen to see headlines screaming "Highway Slaughters Innocent Thousands!" because - well - you gotta keep working and making the cash, y'all, feed the machine. And besides, we're just talking about the cattle here, not financiers and important people. Acceptable losses and all that...
My girlfriend - born in Newcastle and now living in Brighton/Hove - has visited the United States several times and found the experience overwhelmingly positive and rewarding. Something about the openness of the people and all the space - ah, glorious space! So she's selling her flat and moving here next year. I can't guarantee she won't be shot or die in a traffic accident, but then I can't guarantee the same for you either.
We gain in this life by facing down our fears and taking chances. Often we only get the courage retroactively. Of all the chances you could take in life, moving to the US could hardly be called foolish. But not taking the chance because of school shootings or shark attacks... ehhh...?
I'd be more concerned about the plunge in the quality of US institutions and the shortcomings of our adolescent culture... but then I gather those are recurrent world-wide problems.
I find the most consistency by removing special status of humans or observers and considering the question entirely in terms of physical interactions. When a particle interacts with a detector, that establishes the existence of the particle for the detector, and the detector for the particle. Up to that point the detector and the particle required no parity in order to carry out their independent existences. So what you have is two entirely separate physical systems - and you can consider them as existing in entirely separate universes in that regard - but when they interact they become a single physical system. From that time forward, reality is consistent with that interaction having occurred.
Now imagine that one of the physical systems is a human being. Well, as soon as the human interacts with the detector he momentarily becomes part of that physical system, and from that point onward his physical body occupies a universe consistent with all preceding interactions.
Consider also the question, What is a universe? It is a discreet physical system. It has no interactions with anything outside itself. Thus, in a very real sense, all discreet physical systems exist in their own universes.
So the first question is "what counts as an observer?"
Actually, the answer is simple if you don't give any special status to systems that happen to have organized information-processing hardware like we do. First, lose the term "observer." Observation is simply a physical interaction. So your question now becomes "what counts as an interaction?" and that's an easy one. Anything that interacts! The only difference between an eyeball or a stone being hit by a photon is that the eyeball routes the interaction into an information-processing system.
Somehow, the act of passively measuring the photon (which is just EM radiation under a different name) with scientific instruments changes the fundamental character of the interaction - that is, you "collapse the wave function."
I'd rather say that the measurement "collapses the wave function earlier" and this is what gives the "strange" result.
- In the first case, it's only at the point when an interaction occurs at the screen that an absolute event is distinguished.
- In the second case, an absolute event is established by interaction (or not) with the detector.
The results are consistent if you realize that interaction between discreet bodies is exactly what establishes the consensual reality of those bodies. Until they interact they do - in a very real sense - occupy their own distinct universes. In other words, until entity X interacts in some manner with entity Y neither one exists in any regard for the other. This can be extrapolated to chains of interactions, and you can draw your own conclusions about how that establishes common realities.
What I remember about Ghostbusters was... it was really hard to crack the Atari version! You'd think you had it cracked, but in the middle of driving or moving on the map... crash.
Slashdot Mirror
Good pun...
But actually, I don't see why someone hasn't developed an ATP (?) powered circuit! All you need is a cathode with an enzyme or catalyst that breaks apart sugars and steals their electrons, and any kind of anode. Given the current state of molecular engineering - and certainly cell tinkering - this should be almost easy!
Obviously this has already been buried by Big Oil, along with the Free Energy device, test-tube Cold Fusion, and the Perpetual Stirling Engine.
It's funny you should say how bad Mac OS 9 was, because I have to say that it was a very hard thing sticking by Apple while their cooperative multi-tasking OS was slouching towards obsolescence and gaining very little internally. I used Mac OS then because I admired the quality of the software, the design of interfaces, the general organization of the system, and the more polished appearance of everything. When things worked (7.6.1, 8.6, 9.2) the Mac experience was generally more... fun... than the Windows experience. Within a given application productivity was the same, so it wasn't hard to see the writing on the wall. Apple would not only need to come up to parity with Windows 95, they would also have to differentiate themselves and produce something with a value that transcended Windows on the desktop. When I first heard that Mac OS X would be a Unix-based system my heart leapt. As a web developer I spent years playing with Linux and BSD webservers from the command-line, logging in from my Mac desktop. Suddenly I'd be able to run a webserver right out of the box on my own computer. And my computer would be able to speak natively with all those *nix boxen out there too.
Now, look at us today! Apple's selling a nice, solid UNIX system with arguably the most usable graphical interface ever designed. They've swapped over to Intel chips so now every kid with a Macbook can run Windows apps at native speeds right alongside their Mac apps. Every technical move Apple makes, whether it garners them any kudos in the mainstream press, brings increased quality, power, and speed to their core product. Hackers all over the world are excited to get Leopard running on their Tablet PC's, just to get a slice of the Mac experience and toy around with a decent UNIX. And frankly, Cygwin and WinCVS should be enough reason for any web tech to give Mac a try.
Whoever would say such a thing hasn't yet learned the joy of preference options! Check out the nifty new option at the bottom of the Desktop preference pane (in 10.5.2 anyhow!).
All very true, so one wonders how you got so thoughtlessly modded down to -1. Apparently Thomas Swidarski must have some extra mod points!
...Einstein would make a fine Buddhist.
Well why get complicated? It is a story aimed primarily at children after all.
softwareopensyou ...but i just couldn't...
So the poor little feller thinks sharing is bad, and business should
have natural access to exploit every ecosystem in existence.
He sounds like he's trying to get his balls back from someone.
One site I work on got hit by a PHPBB SQL injection attack and had a tiny iframe inserted into the forum header that pointed to a well-known malware site, hightstats.net (and if you're curious the malicious script is in the strong/044 folder). Google picked up on the iframe's contents being a malicious script and added the malware warning to the search results pertaining to the forums section of our website.
I just wonder how it is that hightstats.net can still be in existence when it contains known malicious stuff that hackers are inserting into unwary websites?!
Robert A. Heinlein is ROFL'ing in his grave!
It all makes sense to me. It's a reasonable question to ask: Does evolution evolve? Certainly it ought to. Those organisms whose DNA better tweaks the likelihood of mutations in useful ways would tend to be better evolvers. If it happens to be a trait of DNA that some regions have more "mutational flexibility" than others, eventually these regions would tend to be arranged to favor useful mutations. And if enough of these regions exist it could form a sophisticated predictive system. Now imagine DNA in which "concerted mutations" benefit the organism, but only in certain reinforcing or complimentary arrangements. Then when certain mutations prove beneficial, those others that compliment them will begin to emerge too.
Interesting stuff, how systems with simple rules can create such amazingly complex systems as ourselves... and in a sense, blindly.
I would like to point out that this is an obvious analogy meant to illustrate the proper approach to what the buddhists refer to as "defilements of the mind" - those unskillful means we have adopted to cope with a world we view adversarially. Christ's parable is saying that rather than stir up the mind by trying to root out idealism through idealism, you should instead follow the effective precepts - love your enemy, practice forgiveness, pray in solitude, consider others, etc. Through a faithful practice of prayer the cortical neurons you would attempt to dissimilate through self-alienation will instead be assimilated into the emergent self at the moment of realization.
The Vipassana method, Zen shikan-taza, or general "mindfulness" meditation all engender the same result, by a continuous practice of letting go we gradually lose our tendency to view the world adversarially, we learn to be open to the conditions of the present moment. Inevitably at some stage the mind transcends the imposed self-other view of the world, and one directly realizes the wholeness of the present moment and one's indivisible part in it.
Or so I've come to understand...
If it's a fitting opera you want, I vote for Pagliacci.
Damn, chill out and learn. You just need to work on understanding your software and your system, plus some basics of Mac usage in general.
Mail - You're just flabbergasting yourself, take a breath. To turn off a rule in mail you just uncheck it. Is the Preferences window so large that things are behind the Dock? (It's called the "Dock" by the way.) Hide the Dock then shrink the window... or better yet, just move the window upwards. General advice: Put the Dock on the side of the screen, it works better there.
iMovie - The option you want is "Create Still" and it's in a discoverable place in the menu bar. Control-click is right click, what's your point? If you want to use one hand get a multi-button mouse with a wheel. Spend the $15 and save yourself the headache. "Video Capture" is totally the wrong term, so you wouldn't find what you were looking for. Video capture is the act of capturing video from some source, not converting a frame into a JPEG. What you want is "Frame Capture." Or, if all you want is what you see on the screen, just switch to fullscreen, pause at the frame you want and press Command-Shift-3 to take a screenshot. Why are you digging through the Finder? Because you don't realize there's a simple way, and you didn't bother to find out. Some clever Googling can help you - don't be so quick to assume.
Photobooth - Drag the photo you want from wherever you see it onto the desktop. Done. If you sent it to iPhoto to crop it, then you have given it to iPhoto to care for. You need to understand the paradigm of iPhoto. Once photos are given to iPhoto it becomes your pathway to those images. There is never any good reason to go into the iPhoto album folders. The proper way to send images out of iPhoto is to use EXPORT in the FILE menu. Command-Shift-E. If on the other hand you had dragged the photo to the desktop you could also have any image editor to edit it.
iChat - Yes you can just drag an image on top of your buddy icon to change it, assuming that you're dragging a file proxy. And when you drag an image from iPhoto to iChat you are dragging an image file proxy. I just tried it and it worked fine! Copy-paste from an image viewer/editor to any image target also works. As for expecting iPhoto to have an "Export to iChat" function? Well, first that's the wrong use of the word "Export" which has a formal meaning in most programs. Second of all, iChat isn't really a common target for images. It has an interface to change your buddy icon, but how often is that needed? Should iPhoto also have "Send to TextEdit" just because you can paste images into documents?
Just learn how to use your system, and you'll find it's just fine. You only flabbergast yourself with all these complaints based on ignorance of the software. Get a tutor, and take the time to listen and learn. Breathing exercises may also help, if you have a hard time sitting still.
Good luck mastering your Mac experience!
Trolling or not, as a US native I must agree that this country is definitely going down a road of increasing suckage - mainly due to our adolescent culture of ignorance, shortsightedness, greed and selfishness. On the other hand, we do have the best entertainment media in the world!
I'm thinking, maybe torture should be legal, but the law should be - if an agent of the state tortures you, you have a right to torture them afterwards.
Actually, Colbert's truthy line is "...For as we are all aware, the Facts have a well-known Liberal bias." ...his implication being, that when you understand cause and effect, you realize that life is something that needs to be nurtured, not dominated, and that only by investing directly in the health, education, and general welfare of the people do you get a healthy and prosperous body politic.
Those whom he indicts in the government and press for distorting the truth, he also calls cowards. When the truth doesn't serve your ends, it is courageous and moral to change your course. But again and again those who have usurped the reins of power consider only their own distorted ends, without consideration for the reasonable will of the people. They would have us be ruled by false images so that we relinquish all our power.
One only wonders, to what end are they deceiving us and stealing our power? I suppose it must be private elite world domination, and the well-being of the people be damned.
IANAL but my law view is this...
The law can convince you to incriminate yourself, and the evidence is admissible. You may confess a crime if you have one to confess. You have to state that it's by your own free will. However during trial if you fee so-moved, you can invoke the 5th amendment to disavow your earlier statements. This may be taken as hostile to the court, if not decided upon by prior consultation.
If other evidence already obtained points to you, the law can search you or your premises by obtaining a warrant from a court. The warrant must specify what is being sought and what will be seized. Unfortunately many search-and-seizure operations overstep their bounds. Computer communications are there for the taking, a wealth of self-incrimination, and the courts have no problem using them.
When you send an email you have no choice whether it is archived somewhere or not. Recent emails are always sitting in incoming and outgoing mail queues. Thus the only way to opt out and get true privacy is to use encryption. Your concerted choice was to keep communication confidential between yourself and your compadre. If the only way the law can incriminate you is to coerce you, the information obtained cannot be used in evidence against you. You must be willing to volunteer it. If you are not willing to volunteer it, then they must find other avenues to bring evidence.
For the moment torture is still illegal, at least once it's brought before our court system. This is why the prisoners at Guantanamo are being held off from our court system for the time-being. All those cases will inevitably need to be tried here, because no upcoming president will be good enough to sign on to a world court, and no military tribunal can just go off and just hang a group of abused, innocent people. So most of those cases will be thrown out for lack of evidence. And most of those prisoners will counter-sue for false imprisonment. And they will sue the People of the United States for committing illegal acts of torture.
Likewise, persons convicted and thrown into US prisons based on confessions obtained through torture are today counter-suing the People and their torturers.
So there is a lot of hope that torture will remain illegal. However, ask yourself, how much pain and discomfort would I endure to protect my secrets? What if I was held in a room and not allowed to go and urinate? Would I enjoy pissing myself? That's not such a torture, is it? Maybe that's perfectly legal. These things do go on, on all kinds of levels, so just realize that if you've got a PGP pass phrase that somebody wants... they may just get it anyway.
This test tested the rate of external sensory perception in relation to discrete events. Unfortunately, perceptual systems have, you might say, hardwired hardware limitations. As I understand it in synapses there is a reuptake reaction that takes at least 1/50th of a second to complete. So perceptual systems should not be expected to form distinct impressions any faster than some relative threshold.
Now, instead of testing perceptual systems that lie far from the region of synthetic awareness, they should have used tests that engage deeper systems of interpretation and physical response time.
It seems to me that what most likely happens in crisis situations is that the brain modulates the routes of high-order thinking. You would expect some higher brain functions to be augmented. while others would be impeded. For example, strategic assessment or spatial awareness should tend to improve. The senses normally passive - like hearing and smell - should perk up. And your subject should be able to report that their experience of time seemed expanded, that they were surprised only a few seconds had passed.
I myself would be happy to design - and volunteer for - tests utilizing pure LSD 25 in order to test time dilation and expansion, as I can vividly recall several occasions where this has happened to me. I believe tests involving speed chess would be very fruitful. Also, there should be comprehensive tests of musical ability while under the influence of these substances, or others that target key areas, because of the similar but distinct high order brain functions involved, and its wonderful dynamic synthesis of perception, interpretation, decision-making, and execution in a well-defined domain.
Just some thoughts as I take another bong hit.
Ah, I see the media scare tactics are working on you too. We have shark scares every year here too, but shark killings are oh so rare.
I'd be more worried about driving in the US if you're concerned about danger. Over 50,000 people are killed in transportation-related accidents in the US every year. That's the equivalent of sixteen 9-11 attacks per annum committed by our mad culture alone. We just don't happen to see headlines screaming "Highway Slaughters Innocent Thousands!" because - well - you gotta keep working and making the cash, y'all, feed the machine. And besides, we're just talking about the cattle here, not financiers and important people. Acceptable losses and all that...
My girlfriend - born in Newcastle and now living in Brighton/Hove - has visited the United States several times and found the experience overwhelmingly positive and rewarding. Something about the openness of the people and all the space - ah, glorious space! So she's selling her flat and moving here next year. I can't guarantee she won't be shot or die in a traffic accident, but then I can't guarantee the same for you either.
We gain in this life by facing down our fears and taking chances. Often we only get the courage retroactively. Of all the chances you could take in life, moving to the US could hardly be called foolish. But not taking the chance because of school shootings or shark attacks... ehhh...?
I'd be more concerned about the plunge in the quality of US institutions and the shortcomings of our adolescent culture... but then I gather those are recurrent world-wide problems.
Mac OS X doesn't do multiple desktops. It does multiple spaces. There is still only one desktop per user.
I find the most consistency by removing special status of humans or observers and considering the question entirely in terms of physical interactions. When a particle interacts with a detector, that establishes the existence of the particle for the detector, and the detector for the particle. Up to that point the detector and the particle required no parity in order to carry out their independent existences. So what you have is two entirely separate physical systems - and you can consider them as existing in entirely separate universes in that regard - but when they interact they become a single physical system. From that time forward, reality is consistent with that interaction having occurred.
Now imagine that one of the physical systems is a human being. Well, as soon as the human interacts with the detector he momentarily becomes part of that physical system, and from that point onward his physical body occupies a universe consistent with all preceding interactions.
Consider also the question, What is a universe? It is a discreet physical system. It has no interactions with anything outside itself. Thus, in a very real sense, all discreet physical systems exist in their own universes.
So the first question is "what counts as an observer?"
Actually, the answer is simple if you don't give any special status to systems that happen to have organized information-processing hardware like we do. First, lose the term "observer." Observation is simply a physical interaction. So your question now becomes "what counts as an interaction?" and that's an easy one. Anything that interacts! The only difference between an eyeball or a stone being hit by a photon is that the eyeball routes the interaction into an information-processing system.
Somehow, the act of passively measuring the photon (which is just EM radiation under a different name) with scientific instruments changes the fundamental character of the interaction - that is, you "collapse the wave function."
I'd rather say that the measurement "collapses the wave function earlier" and this is what gives the "strange" result.
- In the first case, it's only at the point when an interaction occurs at the screen that an absolute event is distinguished.
- In the second case, an absolute event is established by interaction (or not) with the detector.
The results are consistent if you realize that interaction between discreet bodies is exactly what establishes the consensual reality of those bodies. Until they interact they do - in a very real sense - occupy their own distinct universes. In other words, until entity X interacts in some manner with entity Y neither one exists in any regard for the other. This can be extrapolated to chains of interactions, and you can draw your own conclusions about how that establishes common realities.
What I remember about Ghostbusters was... it was really hard to crack the Atari version!
You'd think you had it cracked, but in the middle of driving or moving on the map... crash.
Although I do tend to pronounce the word "misled" as "myzled" I still know how to spell it.