Yes, of course I have noticed that. For example, it's improbable that we are even here typing to each other at this moment. Life is pretty improbable. That's what got me started thinking about this stuff -- if there is some non-physical plane of conciousness of some sort with the ability to "will" around entropy, that would explain a lot. Why does it seem as if life has an intracate design to it that is improbable to have occured purely randomly?
Like I said, I could be wrong, and these are just my vague ideas. They have absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever. There is no possible way I could test with any certainty that any event happened because I willed it. I could devise a scientific test, but I think it would still be inaccurate -- I may not be able to get into the right mindset, etc -- I am fairly certain that I couldn't do this under pressure. If I had 10 angry/.ers in lab coats standing around me waiting for me to "will" something, I am sure I would not be able to do it -- simply because their "counter-will" would be too strong.
Also, you caught an obvious flaw in the wording of my original post -- I don't see it as "fact" that I have willed some things around. I just think that some highly improbable things have happened partially because I was in the right mindset to "make it happen". This is a distinct mindset, and when I am in it, I know I am in it, and I always seem to have "good luck" in what I am trying to do. That's the only way I correlate the "good luck" and the mindset. Sometimes I do things so unlikely (like rolling 10 dice and all of them coming up "1") that I freak myself out and start laughing uncontrollably, and the mindset goes away. It comes and goes. I've also won blackjack games (not played for money, just fairly meaningless "chips") using almost no logic -- only being in this mindset and doing what my intuition told me to do. So, anyway, I'm not ready to go to the casinos yet. =) In fact I would probably be pretty distracted if I was in a place like a casino, combined with the fact that I would be risking money -- and I don't think I could hold that mindset for very long, if at all.
Come to think of it, when I have been in mindsets where I am almost certain I have "willed" reality around, it wasn't in a prayer like manner at all. But, whatever, I think thoughts could be more powerful than they seem; that was really the only reason I started this thread. I just wish I had more sources to back me up, now that I'm being challenged left and right. (They exist; trust me!) =)
I didn't actually know what study I was referring to. =) I only remember reading about it. That may well have been it -- but there coulld have been others, I'm sure. I'll have to dig around some more and find out if there is any more evidence in favor of this or not. 10% isn't very significant, regardless of how they tweaked the scoring system. I wonder if they were "mindless" prayers or not. =)
I agree with you -- but I am talking about "willing" random events -- not willing myself to be better. The more "random" the event, the better. Like the roll of a dice for example. I think that when I am in the right mindset, I can influence the roll of that dice. I haven't had much luck "willing" psuedo-random events, like a RNG on a computer, but I think it's possible if you can tap into your unconcious and let it tell you the precise time to activate something in order for the RNG to give you the result you want. (much harder, and less likely, than influencing the roll of the dice, I think)
Another example would be beating 25:1 odds and adding a Photography or Astronomy course. This should be completely random (depending on how the instructor does it) -- but I think it's possible to "will" around entropy with enough concentration. (And the more people you have, the better.)
Again, I have no scientific proof to back this up. Only (limited) personal experience -- and I routinely freak myself out. =)
As for sickness -- I tend to think of sickness as either my body's way of telling me I need to do something different (i.e. not drink alcohol, or something). Or, if it's the result of an infection of some kind, I think of it "strengthening my immune system" rather than "sickness". I think this helps tremendously.
Some studies have shown that hospital patients who are prayed for will statistically do better than patients who are not prayed for. The patients do not know that they are being prayed for. An additional study would have to be done with iMacs in a loop repeating prayers for hospital patients, and actual people repeating prayers for a different group of hospital patients. The results would be interesting, but I suspect that the computers would lose.
I base this hypothesis solely on my personal experience and thoughts -- which is that a part of me is operating on some non-physical level -- completely seperate from physical reality. Now, I am not religious, but I can attest to the fact that some improbable things have happened because I have "willed" them (sometimes with help) in a prayer-like manner.
They mentioned that "now computers are operating on the same spiritual level as some Catholics". I thought this was pretty interesting -- I wonder what percentage of Catholics have more than a mindless faith in their religion?
I don't think it should be any different under the law, but the motion picture industry seems to have more money and lawyers than the music industry. Plus, the whole reason they decided to go with the DVD standard was because it was "secure", or so they thought. So now they've got their panites in a bunch..
And even though national security policy didn't come up, I suggested that one crucial issue for voters to ponder is this: Whose finger do you want on the ALT-CONTROL-DELETE button?
So, I am still wondering what Mr. Gore is referring to here. This reminds me of a scene from "Austin Powers 2"; I can just see a confused politician saying scratching his head and saying "What button?". What are we rebooting? Civilization? (Is he talking the big red "nuke" button which is in the hands of Russia, and to a lesser extent China, India, Pakastan, and other nuclear capable nations?) Does China have its collective finger on their "Alt-Control-Delete" button, and Al wants to return the control of the button to us? That was just a lame statement, all in all. I suppose he could have been talking about information warfare, but still -- lame.
$20-30? That sounds way overpriced. =) I downloaded the ISO image of RedHat 6.1 from an ftp server for free. I'm not using it, though; Slackware has always been my favorite distribution. And it's equally as cost-effective.
Just a comment on the @ symbols -- HP-UX hates these. You can't effectively use #s and @s on HP-UX, and if you do, you might get locked out of your account. This is because HP-UX will treat @ as a character that means "backspace everything off of the login/password prompt", and # as a "backspace" key. So that password in your example would have been blank in HP-UX. =)
I think it has something to do with the redesigning of slashdot. I seem to be gaining moderator points randomly. But then again, I haven't been active for that long; it might have been doing that before too?
Okay, here's the deal. The USSR does not want us to develop anti-ballistic missle technology. They consider it a violation of the treaty. However, we want to do it to "protect ourselves from rogue nations" such as North Korea, India, etc... which are currently developing ballistic missles. The USSR does doesn't care, and wants the treaties to stay in effect, but we are developing this technology anyway. So, what's happening now is the USSR is pissed off at us, and probably doesn't have the funds to develop their own anti-missle defense system, even though we are trying to convince them that everything is okay and they should develop one to protect themselves against these "rogue nations". They see it as a threat because now they can't attack the US as easily. So they are threatening to develop better missles that we can't defend against.
This is pretty serious -- it's a little known fact that the USSR actually has the capacity to toally decimate our country, and still survive. They have an extensive network of underground nuclear shelters in their country.
Anyway, rant mode off. I am getting tired of typing this as I am in "lynx" right now. =)
I totally agree, though, I really wish there were better mirrors for slackware than cdrom.com. Oh well, I can wait a few days, look at the changelog, and grab what I didn't grab from slackware-latest last week.
Re: (Mutt vs. Outlook) vs. (Cars vs. Evil)
on
Mutt Hits 1.0
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· Score: 1
Command line mail programs are faster and easier than GUI mail programs, and there is much less overhead involved in using them vs. using GUI mail programs. Hence, they are much more efficient.
Your analogy that I am no different than "these people from the beginning of the century who first dismissed cars as an evil machine" is correct. I don't see how we can call cars "progress"; they are *insanely* inefficient. (I don't know the actual number, but I would guess cars have a 20% feul efficiency?) Not only do we use way too much oil maintaining cars, we also have to maintain all the roads that the cars drive on. Not to mention we have to build all the cars in the first place. And we are adding more and more cars all the time, causing the amount of oil we use to exponentially go up, along with the amount of resources we must allocate to roads, and road maintinence.
So, yes, I would say that the evils of the car are somewhat analagous to the evils of a GUI mail program.
I really don't like the idea of copy-protection by country coding. What happens if I move? Will I have to buy new software for all my equpment? Totally lame.
No, even slight changes in climate can cause catastophy for agriculture. This is not a FUD.
Time, from the point of view of light, is stopped!
on
Time Doesn't Exist
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· Score: 1
This reminds me of something I was thinking about awhile ago. I don't have the exact details as my physics book is not handy -- but I was studying the general relativity equations, and I decided to calculate what the distortion of time was for a particle of light in a vaccuum. Of coursre, light moves at the speed of light, c. So if you plug in c and solve the equation, you get division by zero. But if you take the limit of this value, you notice that it is approaches infinity. The divide by zero error is just a minor inconvenience that our mathematics model imposes. So, I concluded that from the point of view of light, time is stopped eternally. Interesting. It made me envision the universe as a static thing that I am moving through frame-by-frame, and envision conciousness as the entity that was guiding me through the universe, frame-by-frame.
Why didn't I think giving my regular user root? I think when I get home from work the first thing I am going to do is edit my passwd file and change my UID to 0. That'll certainly save me a lot of trouble, no? While I'm at it, I think I'll enable my guest account! Who needs security anyway; it's inconvenient and "dumb".
Slashdot Mirror
Like I said, I could be wrong, and these are just my vague ideas. They have absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever. There is no possible way I could test with any certainty that any event happened because I willed it. I could devise a scientific test, but I think it would still be inaccurate -- I may not be able to get into the right mindset, etc -- I am fairly certain that I couldn't do this under pressure. If I had 10 angry /.ers in lab coats standing around me waiting for me to "will" something, I am sure I would not be able to do it -- simply because their "counter-will" would be too strong.
Also, you caught an obvious flaw in the wording of my original post -- I don't see it as "fact" that I have willed some things around. I just think that some highly improbable things have happened partially because I was in the right mindset to "make it happen". This is a distinct mindset, and when I am in it, I know I am in it, and I always seem to have "good luck" in what I am trying to do. That's the only way I correlate the "good luck" and the mindset. Sometimes I do things so unlikely (like rolling 10 dice and all of them coming up "1") that I freak myself out and start laughing uncontrollably, and the mindset goes away. It comes and goes. I've also won blackjack games (not played for money, just fairly meaningless "chips") using almost no logic -- only being in this mindset and doing what my intuition told me to do. So, anyway, I'm not ready to go to the casinos yet. =) In fact I would probably be pretty distracted if I was in a place like a casino, combined with the fact that I would be risking money -- and I don't think I could hold that mindset for very long, if at all.
Come to think of it, when I have been in mindsets where I am almost certain I have "willed" reality around, it wasn't in a prayer like manner at all. But, whatever, I think thoughts could be more powerful than they seem; that was really the only reason I started this thread. I just wish I had more sources to back me up, now that I'm being challenged left and right. (They exist; trust me!) =)
Was that directed at me? Because I have no faith or beliefs in prayer, personally.
I didn't actually know what study I was referring to. =) I only remember reading about it. That may well have been it -- but there coulld have been others, I'm sure. I'll have to dig around some more and find out if there is any more evidence in favor of this or not. 10% isn't very significant, regardless of how they tweaked the scoring system. I wonder if they were "mindless" prayers or not. =)
I agree with you -- I think this is a phenomenon which is not on a physical, measurable level.
Another example would be beating 25:1 odds and adding a Photography or Astronomy course. This should be completely random (depending on how the instructor does it) -- but I think it's possible to "will" around entropy with enough concentration. (And the more people you have, the better.)
Again, I have no scientific proof to back this up. Only (limited) personal experience -- and I routinely freak myself out. =)
As for sickness -- I tend to think of sickness as either my body's way of telling me I need to do something different (i.e. not drink alcohol, or something). Or, if it's the result of an infection of some kind, I think of it "strengthening my immune system" rather than "sickness". I think this helps tremendously.
Some studies have shown that hospital patients who are prayed for will statistically do better than patients who are not prayed for. The patients do not know that they are being prayed for. An additional study would have to be done with iMacs in a loop repeating prayers for hospital patients, and actual people repeating prayers for a different group of hospital patients. The results would be interesting, but I suspect that the computers would lose.
I base this hypothesis solely on my personal experience and thoughts -- which is that a part of me is operating on some non-physical level -- completely seperate from physical reality. Now, I am not religious, but I can attest to the fact that some improbable things have happened because I have "willed" them (sometimes with help) in a prayer-like manner.
They mentioned that "now computers are operating on the same spiritual level as some Catholics". I thought this was pretty interesting -- I wonder what percentage of Catholics have more than a mindless faith in their religion?
I don't think it should be any different under the law, but the motion picture industry seems to have more money and lawyers than the music industry. Plus, the whole reason they decided to go with the DVD standard was because it was "secure", or so they thought. So now they've got their panites in a bunch..
So, I am still wondering what Mr. Gore is referring to here. This reminds me of a scene from "Austin Powers 2"; I can just see a confused politician saying scratching his head and saying "What button?". What are we rebooting? Civilization? (Is he talking the big red "nuke" button which is in the hands of Russia, and to a lesser extent China, India, Pakastan, and other nuclear capable nations?) Does China have its collective finger on their "Alt-Control-Delete" button, and Al wants to return the control of the button to us? That was just a lame statement, all in all. I suppose he could have been talking about information warfare, but still -- lame.
$20-30? That sounds way overpriced. =) I downloaded the ISO image of RedHat 6.1 from an ftp server for free. I'm not using it, though; Slackware has always been my favorite distribution. And it's equally as cost-effective.
Just a comment on the @ symbols -- HP-UX hates these. You can't effectively use #s and @s on HP-UX, and if you do, you might get locked out of your account. This is because HP-UX will treat @ as a character that means "backspace everything off of the login/password prompt", and # as a "backspace" key. So that password in your example would have been blank in HP-UX. =)
I think it has something to do with the redesigning of slashdot. I seem to be gaining moderator points randomly. But then again, I haven't been active for that long; it might have been doing that before too?
The information is available, it just hasn't been widely publicized. Do enough research and ye shall find.
The USSR does not want us to develop anti-ballistic missle technology. They consider it a violation of the treaty. However, we want to do it to "protect ourselves from rogue nations" such as North Korea, India, etc... which are currently developing ballistic missles. The USSR does doesn't care, and wants the treaties to stay in effect, but we are developing this technology anyway.
So, what's happening now is the USSR is pissed off at us, and probably doesn't have the funds to develop their own anti-missle defense system, even though we are trying to convince them that everything is okay and they should develop one to protect themselves against these "rogue nations". They see it as a threat because now they can't attack the US as easily. So they are threatening to develop better missles that we can't defend against.
This is pretty serious -- it's a little known fact that the USSR actually has the capacity to toally decimate our country, and still survive. They have an extensive network of underground nuclear shelters in their country.
Anyway, rant mode off. I am getting tired of typing this as I am in "lynx" right now. =)
And what about the girls downloading slack? =)
I totally agree, though, I really wish there were better mirrors for slackware than cdrom.com. Oh well, I can wait a few days, look at the changelog, and grab what I didn't grab from slackware-latest last week.
Your analogy that I am no different than "these people from the beginning of the century who first dismissed cars as an evil machine" is correct. I don't see how we can call cars "progress"; they are *insanely* inefficient. (I don't know the actual number, but I would guess cars have a 20% feul efficiency?) Not only do we use way too much oil maintaining cars, we also have to maintain all the roads that the cars drive on. Not to mention we have to build all the cars in the first place. And we are adding more and more cars all the time, causing the amount of oil we use to exponentially go up, along with the amount of resources we must allocate to roads, and road maintinence.
So, yes, I would say that the evils of the car are somewhat analagous to the evils of a GUI mail program.
I really don't like the idea of copy-protection by country coding. What happens if I move? Will I have to buy new software for all my equpment? Totally lame.
No, even slight changes in climate can cause catastophy for agriculture. This is not a FUD.
This reminds me of something I was thinking about awhile ago.
I don't have the exact details as my physics book is not handy -- but I was studying the general relativity equations, and I decided to calculate what the distortion of time was for a particle of light in a vaccuum. Of coursre, light moves at the speed of light, c. So if you plug in c and solve the equation, you get division by zero. But if you take the limit of this value, you notice that it is approaches infinity. The divide by zero error is just a minor inconvenience that our mathematics model imposes.
So, I concluded that from the point of view of light, time is stopped eternally.
Interesting. It made me envision the universe as a static thing that I am moving through frame-by-frame, and envision conciousness as the entity that was guiding me through the universe, frame-by-frame.
Why didn't I think giving my regular user root?
I think when I get home from work the first thing I am going to do is edit my passwd file and change my UID to 0. That'll certainly save me a lot of trouble, no?
While I'm at it, I think I'll enable my guest account!
Who needs security anyway; it's inconvenient and "dumb".