Hello? It's not just a time zone thing. Have you heard of Tivos? I logged onto my system to check email and headlines one last time today before watching the tivo'd episode. I couldn't even *avert* my eyes fast enough, as the spoiler was in the title! If you at *least* put "Spoilers for X-Files" as the title, I could have turned away and left slashdot for tomorrow.
Next time, change the damn title too. It would have saved me from seeing the frickin' spoiler.
(But it is just TV, after all)
You can't have it both ways. If it's 'just' TV, then why'd you even bother posting the story? Because we're down to the last five episodes of a wildly popular SF series, that's why!
Oh well, I probably would have figured out the ending anyway. Even that joy was denied, though.
It's a campy comedy for adults, and succeeds admirably. The Mummy Returns was frickin' hilarious, and if you didn't get the humor, then you're not nearly as subtle as you make yourself out to be.
In short, it may not be a 'film,' but it was the best movie I've seen in months.
Seeing an ewok(*) mummy ride a burning log down in an homage to Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove is going to have me chuckling for days.
(*) Okay, so so a friend told me that they're really a reference to the pygmies in Diablo II, but I still think they do a passable ewok immitation.
That's why you change the default server to one on your own network, rather than the official Debian apt-server. You look over the new stable packages on a trial system first, and if you like them, toss it into your local, private repository for everyone else to pull down during their nightly upgrades.
That said, Debian stable is really darn stable... And the apt tools make maintenance trivial.
Philip W. Anderson (was: Localisation)
on
Time Doesn't Exist
·
· Score: 1
Fascinating, and thanks for taking the time for the nice explanation. More reading to do before heading back to grad school...
I just flipped through my quantum books and can't find a reference for it, though. It sounds like I'd have better luck with the solid state or Atomic&Molecular books. Anyway, I still think that while resorting to an everything is always a probability smudge is a simple and pretty view, it doesn't feel fundamental.
OTOH, I'm not a Nobel Laureate yet, so who am I to talk?:-)
As far back as 1872,the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach argued that the Universe should be described solely in terms of observable things, the separations between its objects.
Which caps one of his early paragraphs, implying that space is not observable. (So he can go on to argue solely in terms or particles.) Space is as observable as anything else around us -- namely by its effects on objects. Witness light bending around a star, witness clocks running slow by an amount depending on what direction they fly around the earth (with or against its spin). Space is as real as you or me.
With this dismissal of space he goes on to focus on Quantum Mechanics solely:
But we know that classical physics is wrong. The world is described by quantum mechanics-and in the arena of Platonia, quantum mechanics kills time.
...and he's correct at least in saying that QM doesn't impose restrictions upon time. Time is in integral component of That Other Theory that he just dismissed, General Relativity. (GR doesn't explain why it goes forward either, mind you, but until we get a unified theory between QM and GR, it's premature to claim that either theory kills time, they just don't address its arrow.)
He then goes on to state that in Platonia, the complete collective of states of possibilities -- the set of all futures, all pasts, all other 'nows' -- are being experienced (somehow, he doesn't say what mechanism exists to do so, but implicit in having different probabilities for each "now capsule" there must be some way for those probabilities to take effect, which in our normal universe requires time.) This in itself reintroduces time into his Platonia. All he's done is to push the problem off to a different level. But let's ignore this for now.
Unless I'm missing something, he also gets rid of any physical level correlation between which "now capsules" take effect. We instead have:
Just as the structure of geological strata and fossils seem to be evidence of a past, our brains contain physical structures consistent with the appearance of recent and distant events. These structures could surely lead to the impression of time passing. Even the direct perception of motion could arise through the presence in the brain of information about several different positions of the objects we see in motion.
Which I take to mean that he thinks we're extrapolating the past from our memories that exist now, and (in my timeline) one second from now I may have a different past, because the memories are provided by the new "now capsule."
So, great. Let's assume that. Why is the universe predictable, then? Why are there laws of physics at all? This structure he's put forth allows all sorts of things to happen, not just the standard observable laws of physics. Where did the structure come from in the first place? 'Always has been, always will be?'
So maybe there isn't any correlation between now capsules; he pretty much implies that. But if there isn't, then that means that the laws of physics must apply *inside* the now capsule, which gets us back to our current Universe, leaving us wondering why anything obeys any laws of physics at all.
And what defines the extents of these now capsules? Why haven't we gotten stuck in an infinite loop somewhere in the probability space? (The fact that I keep thinking time is passing shows we haven't found some equivalent 'least energy' point in the probability mist overlaying Platonia; had we, the universe as we know it would stop -- perhaps because Its Destiny Has Been Fulfilled?) And while we're talking about the mist, what are the rules governing its distribution, its relation locally to other parts of the mist? Did it just appear fully formed, Athena like? (It must have, or it then would be evolving, which reintroduces time into Platonia yet again.)
If we take his principles as the foundation of spacetime, then we are left needing to explain far more in terms of why the Universe does what it does. Even if it's all a figment of our imaginations, we still then need to explain why our imaginations obey QM, GR, and thermodynamics, all of which would have to be scrapped and rewritten in his world.
No, AFAIK the string theorists are still running strong. String theory recently (~ 2-3 years ago) explained where all the information goes when you drop something into a black hole. It tied together thermodynamics, information theory, and black holes. It was explained in (mostly) layman terms in a Scientific American a couple of years back.
Unfortunately, while it was a spectacular success for string theory, it's also been pretty much the only success of string theory.
'Course, it's tough stuff -- if Ed Witten has problems with the math, then what chance do us mere mortals have?
Bzzt! If Schroedinger's equation is a pure diffusion equation -- meaning that given a start point for where a particle is, it's eventual location spreads over time. By your argument, all matter would have diffused to everywhere in the Universe by now, and there'd be no way to distinguish between your monitor, your keyboard, and your navel.
The collapse of the wavefunciton isn't some sort of "Please save us from this craziness" cry for help that frightened physicists in the '20s postulated, it's a necessary part of the model to come close to matching reality.
As an avid coffee drinker, I like the news, but there's a lot more research to do. Based on the article, I'm curious what happens in people that take calcium supplements. (The research seems to state that calcium imposed from outside the cell is bad, while releasing it from inside the cell is good -- so what's the good way to get calcium into the cell in the first place, slow diffusion over time?)
The other half of this is that coffee contains something like six or seven dozen different chemicals (if memory serves; it's at least fifty), caffeine is only one of 'em and most of the rest are still unidentified. Translation: we're still not sure what the others do to us...
(Peers over rim of coffee cup) Excuse me, looks like it's time for my next cup.
They claim early on in the article that security is tough stuff, absolutely true. Then they claim that it's only going to get tougher. Absolutely wrong.
If you keep using the latest and greatest stuff then yeah, of course you're going to need someone on staff auditing your system's security all the time. The point they miss, though, is that code matures from people looking at it, fixing holes, and changing the packages to be distributed in a default tightly-locked state. (When was the last time you worried about a vulnerability in finger?)
Admins will always need to be aware of security. But it's getting more and more to the point that you can set it and forget it. Especially if you spend the ten minutes to keep up to date with the new patches on updates.redhat.com.
...by quantum-level laws, this really doesn't impact the alternate version of Moore's Law that affects us day in and day out, which is that computing power will double every 18 months.
I don't think we'll be using molecular computing on our desktops any time soon, nor quantum computing any time in the next few decades (you try lugging around an MRI machine, I dare ya), but all this means is that we'll have to shift paradigms to something else that's massively parallel.
Current technology relies on only a handful of processing paths though a chip being active at any one time. Compare this to our brains which are massively parallel at the cost of having lots of neurons sitting around and doing nothing most of the time. ('Nope, still don't smell anything new; nope, still not smelling anything...') The payoff comes when you want to do lots of things simultaneously, which is what happens in our visual centers, for example, when doing pattern recognition.
The harder problem (than transistor size) to deal with here is that our programming paradigm is going to have to shift to something that can take advantage of a massively parallel machine, which is really difficult. Not all problems can be made parallel, and only a few of them can be made parallel well.
On the bright side, it's mostly the hard ones like pattern recognition that work well parallel, so maybe the future is brighter than we think.
("Computer? Commm-PUTE-errr?" "Scotty, try the keyboard.")
There's also angular diffraction from light interacting with the object (moon) itself. However, scattering from the air and diffraction from the moon isn't what we're seeing here. In this case the largest part of the effect is because the source (sun) and the object (moon) are the same size as seen from the screen (earth).
If the sun were instead a point source, then the shadow would be much sharper. Since it and the moon are the same angular size, though, the center of the shadow gets complete blockage of the sun, a quarter of the way out from the center you get mostly complete blockage, etc. This continues all the way out to the edges where the moon is only nibbling away at the sun's disc, and the shadow on the Earth is correspondingly minimum.
(And they said my Physics degree would be useless:-).)
One could argue that the Atari STacy portable computer was built primarily for musicians, and therefore is covered by this patent. It had multiple MIDI ports (note that the music format is unimportant as specified in the patent), and had lots of specialized software packages to record music streams and send them back out again, faster than realtime if necessary for storage. A lot of musicians used 'em for their concerts.
And yes, I've read the patent, and before you answer with "It doesn't cover all 18 claims," I'll say it myself: This doesn't cover all 18 claims. However, one of the requirements for a patent to be granted in the first place is that it is new art and not easily derived from existing technology.
In this case, the STacy argument covers claims:
1
most of 2 (I'd argue all, if anyone ever paid for connect time to Compu$erve to download a MIDI file)
3 (for the same reason)
claim 4 is slightly confusing since, AFAICT, they're laying claim to the fact that the music was transported at all rather than how it was transported
5 is trivially covered by any modern computer
6 is simply an update of the technology (Commercial Off The Shelf -- COTS), and already covered by sweeping clause #4
7 is again covered by 4, which beginng to appear to be just too general to be of any use
8 covered.
9 covered.
10 is quite covered thank-you-very-much by any of the software available for the STacy that lets you control a song play-set for a concert or performance.
11 mostly covered (again, each impingement by prior art weakens the validity of the patent).
12 Duh, yes.
13 See 12 (I know someone who used the joystick interface to control the music programming selections so that he didn't have to ride the keyboard)
14 covered by any reliable exchange protocol (encryption is not necessary since the wording in the patent is "preferably includes an appropriate time dependent encryption/decryption keys")
15 COTS.
16 COTS (closed captioning decoding for TVs)
17 yes.
18 yes, with the caveat that I don't know of anyone who actually encrypted their MIDI streams.
So, while it's not perfect, it's certainly a start on showing that the patent is easily derivable from existing technology, and is not new art, but rather a simple and intended as possible application implementable upon existing technology.
I think this is another example that shows the Patent Office just doesn't have the expertise or manpower necessary to research technology related claims.
Slashdot Mirror
Next time, change the damn title too. It would have saved me from seeing the frickin' spoiler.
You can't have it both ways. If it's 'just' TV, then why'd you even bother posting the story? Because we're down to the last five episodes of a wildly popular SF series, that's why!
Oh well, I probably would have figured out the ending anyway. Even that joy was denied, though.
In short, it may not be a 'film,' but it was the best movie I've seen in months.
Seeing an ewok(*) mummy ride a burning log down in an homage to Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove is going to have me chuckling for days.
Ray
--
That's why you change the default server to one on your own network, rather than the official Debian apt-server. You look over the new stable packages on a trial system first, and if you like them, toss it into your local, private repository for everyone else to pull down during their nightly upgrades.
That said, Debian stable is really darn stable... And the apt tools make maintenance trivial.
Ray
--
I just flipped through my quantum books and can't find a reference for it, though. It sounds like I'd have better luck with the solid state or Atomic&Molecular books. Anyway, I still think that while resorting to an everything is always a probability smudge is a simple and pretty view, it doesn't feel fundamental.
OTOH, I'm not a Nobel Laureate yet, so who am I to talk? :-)
Which caps one of his early paragraphs, implying that space is not observable. (So he can go on to argue solely in terms or particles.) Space is as observable as anything else around us -- namely by its effects on objects. Witness light bending around a star, witness clocks running slow by an amount depending on what direction they fly around the earth (with or against its spin). Space is as real as you or me.
With this dismissal of space he goes on to focus on Quantum Mechanics solely:
But we know that classical physics is wrong. The world is described by quantum mechanics-and in the arena of Platonia, quantum mechanics kills time.
He then goes on to state that in Platonia, the complete collective of states of possibilities -- the set of all futures, all pasts, all other 'nows' -- are being experienced (somehow, he doesn't say what mechanism exists to do so, but implicit in having different probabilities for each "now capsule" there must be some way for those probabilities to take effect, which in our normal universe requires time.) This in itself reintroduces time into his Platonia. All he's done is to push the problem off to a different level. But let's ignore this for now.
Unless I'm missing something, he also gets rid of any physical level correlation between which "now capsules" take effect. We instead have:
Just as the structure of geological strata and fossils seem to be evidence of a past, our brains contain physical structures consistent with the appearance of recent and distant events. These structures could surely lead to the impression of time passing. Even the direct perception of motion could arise through the presence in the brain of information about several different positions of the objects we see in motion.
Which I take to mean that he thinks we're extrapolating the past from our memories that exist now, and (in my timeline) one second from now I may have a different past, because the memories are provided by the new "now capsule."
So, great. Let's assume that. Why is the universe predictable, then? Why are there laws of physics at all? This structure he's put forth allows all sorts of things to happen, not just the standard observable laws of physics. Where did the structure come from in the first place? 'Always has been, always will be?'
So maybe there isn't any correlation between now capsules; he pretty much implies that. But if there isn't, then that means that the laws of physics must apply *inside* the now capsule, which gets us back to our current Universe, leaving us wondering why anything obeys any laws of physics at all.
And what defines the extents of these now capsules? Why haven't we gotten stuck in an infinite loop somewhere in the probability space? (The fact that I keep thinking time is passing shows we haven't found some equivalent 'least energy' point in the probability mist overlaying Platonia; had we, the universe as we know it would stop -- perhaps because Its Destiny Has Been Fulfilled?) And while we're talking about the mist, what are the rules governing its distribution, its relation locally to other parts of the mist? Did it just appear fully formed, Athena like? (It must have, or it then would be evolving, which reintroduces time into Platonia yet again.)
If we take his principles as the foundation of spacetime, then we are left needing to explain far more in terms of why the Universe does what it does. Even if it's all a figment of our imaginations, we still then need to explain why our imaginations obey QM, GR, and thermodynamics, all of which would have to be scrapped and rewritten in his world.
What a quack.
Unfortunately, while it was a spectacular success for string theory, it's also been pretty much the only success of string theory.
'Course, it's tough stuff -- if Ed Witten has problems with the math, then what chance do us mere mortals have?
The collapse of the wavefunciton isn't some sort of "Please save us from this craziness" cry for help that frightened physicists in the '20s postulated, it's a necessary part of the model to come close to matching reality.
As an avid coffee drinker, I like the news, but there's a lot more research to do. Based on the article, I'm curious what happens in people that take calcium supplements. (The research seems to state that calcium imposed from outside the cell is bad, while releasing it from inside the cell is good -- so what's the good way to get calcium into the cell in the first place, slow diffusion over time?)
The other half of this is that coffee contains something like six or seven dozen different chemicals (if memory serves; it's at least fifty), caffeine is only one of 'em and most of the rest are still unidentified. Translation: we're still not sure what the others do to us...
(Peers over rim of coffee cup) Excuse me, looks like it's time for my next cup.
Livin' on the edge, that's me.
If you keep using the latest and greatest stuff then yeah, of course you're going to need someone on staff auditing your system's security all the time. The point they miss, though, is that code matures from people looking at it, fixing holes, and changing the packages to be distributed in a default tightly-locked state. (When was the last time you worried about a vulnerability in finger?)
Admins will always need to be aware of security. But it's getting more and more to the point that you can set it and forget it. Especially if you spend the ten minutes to keep up to date with the new patches on updates.redhat.com.
I don't think we'll be using molecular computing on our desktops any time soon, nor quantum computing any time in the next few decades (you try lugging around an MRI machine, I dare ya), but all this means is that we'll have to shift paradigms to something else that's massively parallel.
Current technology relies on only a handful of processing paths though a chip being active at any one time. Compare this to our brains which are massively parallel at the cost of having lots of neurons sitting around and doing nothing most of the time. ('Nope, still don't smell anything new; nope, still not smelling anything...') The payoff comes when you want to do lots of things simultaneously, which is what happens in our visual centers, for example, when doing pattern recognition.
The harder problem (than transistor size) to deal with here is that our programming paradigm is going to have to shift to something that can take advantage of a massively parallel machine, which is really difficult. Not all problems can be made parallel, and only a few of them can be made parallel well.
On the bright side, it's mostly the hard ones like pattern recognition that work well parallel, so maybe the future is brighter than we think.
("Computer? Commm-PUTE-errr?" "Scotty, try the keyboard.")
There's also angular diffraction from light interacting with the object (moon) itself. However, scattering from the air and diffraction from the moon isn't what we're seeing here. In this case the largest part of the effect is because the source (sun) and the object (moon) are the same size as seen from the screen (earth).
:-).)
If the sun were instead a point source, then the shadow would be much sharper. Since it and the moon are the same angular size, though, the center of the shadow gets complete blockage of the sun, a quarter of the way out from the center you get mostly complete blockage, etc. This continues all the way out to the edges where the moon is only nibbling away at the sun's disc, and the shadow on the Earth is correspondingly minimum.
(And they said my Physics degree would be useless
Who cares if you can't fit a friggin' header in, compute everything you need on the fly and shuttle it out the port as you do it!
That would be the Nyquist theorem, not the 'Shannon sampling theorem.'
Ray
--
Every truth has a context.
One could argue that the Atari STacy portable computer was built primarily for musicians, and therefore is covered by this patent. It had multiple MIDI ports (note that the music format is unimportant as specified in the patent), and had lots of specialized software packages to record music streams and send them back out again, faster than realtime if necessary for storage. A lot of musicians used 'em for their concerts.
And yes, I've read the patent, and before you answer with "It doesn't cover all 18 claims," I'll say it myself: This doesn't cover all 18 claims. However, one of the requirements for a patent to be granted in the first place is that it is new art and not easily derived from existing technology.
In this case, the STacy argument covers claims:
1
most of 2 (I'd argue all, if anyone ever paid for connect time to Compu$erve to download a MIDI file)
3 (for the same reason)
claim 4 is slightly confusing since, AFAICT, they're laying claim to the fact that the music was transported at all rather than how it was transported
5 is trivially covered by any modern computer
6 is simply an update of the technology (Commercial Off The Shelf -- COTS), and already covered by sweeping clause #4
7 is again covered by 4, which beginng to appear to be just too general to be of any use
8 covered.
9 covered.
10 is quite covered thank-you-very-much by any of the software available for the STacy that lets you control a song play-set for a concert or performance.
11 mostly covered (again, each impingement by prior art weakens the validity of the patent).
12 Duh, yes.
13 See 12 (I know someone who used the joystick interface to control the music programming selections so that he didn't have to ride the keyboard)
14 covered by any reliable exchange protocol (encryption is not necessary since the wording in the patent is "preferably includes an appropriate time dependent encryption/decryption keys")
15 COTS.
16 COTS (closed captioning decoding for TVs)
17 yes.
18 yes, with the caveat that I don't know of anyone who actually encrypted their MIDI streams.
So, while it's not perfect, it's certainly a start on showing that the patent is easily derivable from existing technology, and is not new art, but rather a simple and intended as possible application implementable upon existing technology.
I think this is another example that shows the Patent Office just doesn't have the expertise or manpower necessary to research technology related claims.
Ray
--
Every truth has a context