Profile for Student of Trinity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Student of Trinity |
| Member number | 3431 |
| Title | Electric Sheep One |
| Postcount | 3335 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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| Author | Recent posts |
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| Episode 4: Spiderweb Reloaded. Something like that anyway. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, December 10 2007 10:25
Profile
quote:Stop us before we revive again. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Omaha Mall Shooting in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, December 10 2007 10:21
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Homosexuals can marry any person of the opposite sex, same as heterosexuals. That's equality. They can't marry anyone of the sex to which they are attracted. That's not. So in one respect the situations are equal, and in another they are not. Is this just a standoff of perspectives? No, because a dime and a nickel are still unequal even if they were minted in the same year. Piling on equalities in other respects, however many, can never remove an inequality in one. Unequal in any relevant respect is unequal, period. In general there may be much room for debate on what respects are relevant. On whether or not sexual attraction is relevant to marriage, though, I think there is not so much room. It does not follow that equality in all important respects must prevail. I favor letting the marital opportunities of pedophiles be unequal in respect to legality of preferred partner age, for instance. Right or wrong, though, a ban on gay marriage is certainly an inequality. If it is to be defended, it needs to be defended as an inequality. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Omaha Mall Shooting in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, December 9 2007 14:08
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The loss of productive citizens is a huge loss to society. The whole point of modernity is that most people produce more than they consume, so that gradually everybody gets to live better. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, because mankind makes stuff and sells it to me. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Omaha Mall Shooting in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, December 8 2007 23:52
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Thuryl will have to take his equality arguments up with the angel Gabriel. Kelandon was just citing Muslim law, not making his own case. Arguments about civic law and religious doctrine, in western cultures, are like the monkey in Buddha's hand. Run as far as you can, you're still wrapped in its grasp. Christian theory about the relationships between state, faith and culture is as old as the faith itself, and has always been important in it. The origin of the very western idea that state and religion should be separate is surely Jesus's statement that the follower of an all-ruling God still owes taxes to a secular government. Noting that coins all bore Caesar's image, he declared "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's." The principle goes deep. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Omaha Mall Shooting in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, December 7 2007 12:10
Profile
Victims' families may well be able to learn more about the perpetrator, for whatever solace it gives them — I can't see myself how it would give any, but special provision could be made for them if they wished. The rest of the world has no stake in that. Respect for the humanity of random mass murderers is in some sense right. I do not presume to judge their souls. Perhaps if I had lived their lives I would have done no better. I frequently have moral lapses that seem minor or excusable to me at the time, but that's how great evil happens. And even if my judgement of 'minor' is sound, this probably doesn't represent virtue, as much as the fact that my life is relatively easy. But most people live and die without national media attention. In particular the victims of violent crime are generally ignored. There is no human right to fame. Denying publicity to mass murderers would not be taking from them anything to which they are legitimately entitled. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Omaha Mall Shooting in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, December 6 2007 23:32
Profile
When I was very young my family lived for a year in a country that suffered various terror attacks. Years later my dad told me about the policy there at that time: the incident would be reported in the media, but no information about the perpetrators was ever provided. They were simply referred to as 'terrorists', and no public speculation about their affiliation or cause was permitted. I think there is a lot of sense in this, and I think it applies even more strongly to spree and serial killers. They should not be named, and nothing about them should be reported. 'A sicko shot some people' would be enough. Every depressed guy with an ammo crate should know that that would be all the epitaph he would get by going on rampage. Taking away the incentive of posthumous notoriety outweighs any legitimate right the public has to satisfy idle morbid curiosity. And there is nothing to be gained, anyway, by learning more about a mass murderer, whatever their motivations. Investigating why they did it makes as much sense as interviewing a tumor. Nothing that could possibly turn up from investigation could be adequate explanation, let alone justification. It would still amount, in the end, to 'a sicko shot some people'. We should just leave it at that. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What have you been reading lately? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, December 6 2007 14:48
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Banks's titles are great. The books are okay, I guess, but ultra space opera is all beginning to blur together for me now. Already I have only faint impressions of just whose giant spaceships, enormous interstellar cultures and vast cosmic evils are whose. In the end I think the only thing I'll really remember at all from this phase will be A Fire Upon the Deep. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| For all you physics gurus in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, December 5 2007 14:22
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Not sure. I first took a formal course in it as a PhD student, after finishing a Master's. But you pretty much have to do non-interacting QFT in any relativistic QM course, since the basic relativistic wave equations actually make no sense as single-particle Schrödinger equations. So this baby step of QFT is often offered as a first-year grad school course. It's pretty hard to squeeze it into undergrad, since usually people are just getting through something at the Cohen-Tannoudji level by senior year. It's turning on even weak nonlinearity that makes QFT really brutal. You try a trivial computation, like the leading perturbative correction to the ground state energy, and you discover it diverges. Understanding what this really means, and why it's actually not at all the end of the world, is quite hard. In my experience only a minority among people who have been using QFT in research for years fully understand what they are doing. Learning QFT seems to be a task more on the scale of learning Latin than of learning Lagrangian mechanics. One course will only scratch the surface. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| For all you physics gurus in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, December 5 2007 11:44
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Dimensionality matters a lot in QFT, because it controls just how infinitely many are the short-distance degrees of freedom present, and thus how important they are in comparison to the long-wavelength modes. In my own recent and upcoming stabs at teaching QFT I've chosen to stick with QED in 3+1 dimensions. My feeling is that I've got to get there eventually, so I may as well just go straight to it. The big disadvantage with this approach is that you have to learn to quantize a gauge field, which is quite tricky, before you can really do anything else. You're also dragging around all the vector and spinor indices from the beginning. So far I still think it's worth it, to be able to talk about real phenomena that the students already know, right through the course. I'm also old-fashioned in spending a fair while at the beginning with Hamiltonian operators and Hilbert spaces, rather than rushing into path integrals and Feynman diagrams. It quickly shows students why Feynman's specialized formalisms are worthwhile. It is just gruesome to compute the simplest things. But it also makes a few important things much more clear, if you already understand basic QM. For instance I believe I can clearly explain so-called (and badly called) 'wave function renormalization', which is pretty much dealt with in all the texts I know by saying, 'Look, a monkey! And now we have a factor of Z!' The better ones are the ones that follow their lousy argument for it with a short paragraph admitting that it's lousy, then shuffling their feet and mumbling. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| For all you physics gurus in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, December 5 2007 10:42
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It's true that the Feynman propagator does not vanish outside the light cone. But this is not actually a problem. Relativistic quantum mechanics exists and is perfectly compatible with special relativity. It's just that you have to learn a new understanding of what particles are. Then you realise that the hypothetical problem of having a particle certainly localized in one region, then unambiguously detected in another, is not really physical. It involves naive assumptions about the process of particle detection which themselves violate special relativity. These violations are local to the detector, and have nothing to do with how things may reach the detector from distant places. Remove these flaws and consider a fully relativistic detection process, and the possibility to obtain acausal detector clicks miraculously disappears. The details are not trivial, and although both profound and interesting are not well covered in any book I know, because like everything else in interacting QFT, they are appallingly complicated for such a simple question. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Urgent in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, December 5 2007 08:58
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Encryption means never having to say 19un&mlcM,ß. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| For all you physics gurus in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, December 5 2007 01:23
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GR mechanics, no: there are horrible problems. Curved spacetime as a static background: sometimes, at least. The results from this are very interesting (poster child: Hawking radiation). The problem is that, deep down, quantum mechanics lives in Hilbert space, and evolves only in time. Hilbert space and time evolution are the OS of quantum mechanics; space is a feature of some of the apps that it can run. In GR space and time are on an equal footing, and there is in general no preferred notion of exactly which spacetime direction is Time. Except in cases with a lot of symmetry, there is no unique global concept of time, even modulo some finite-dimensional transformation group, along which the entire universe together evolves. So this pretty much stinks. GR is a classical theory, and while we've had good luck translating all other classical theories into quantum versions, GR seems to conflict fundamentally with QM in its treatment of space and time. There are a few practical consequences to our ignorance about the resolution to this apparent paradox, for example in the early universe or in small black holes. More important though is the issue of principle: the discrepancy between QM and GR is so profound, that it means we simply do not really understand space or time or anything, at all. Resolving the paradox would almost certainly require a revolutionary change in our understanding of reality. Or so those of us hope, at least, who want the good time to roll again in our lifetimes. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What have you been reading lately? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, December 4 2007 09:22
Profile
It's rare for someone able to generate an emdash to stoop so low as to steal a sig. So it's kind of a checksum. (The secret of course is to hold the - key down hard, and concentrate. If your chi is strong enough, the — will appear. Do, or do not. There is no "try".) [ Tuesday, December 04, 2007 09:24: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| For all you physics gurus in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, December 3 2007 12:41
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I'm not really any kind of expert on this chapter of physics history. Maxwell himself probably did believe in the ether, with at least a fair degree of seriousness, because he went out of his way to describe it in startling terms as (I paraphrase a passage from memory) "the largest object in the creation". Thinking of it as a thing, rather than a substance, is to me a sign that he really took it seriously. But I also read a popular science chapter from about 1902 which clearly presented ether as an unproven hypothesis. I figure that if this viewpoint had reached that level then, it must have become common in scientific circles, if perhaps not universal, a generation earlier. And I wouldn't be so quick to distinguish between Maxwell's commitment to his ether models, and his interest in current continuity. I would think that his ether models (about which in fact I know nothing) were probably constructed to have continuity built into them, so that his faith in his models would to some extent have been based on his faith in continuity. As I said, people drew inspiration from ether theories, and Maxwell was certainly the leading example of this. But only a few years after his theory was published, Hertz could declare, as he tried to judge empirically between rival electromagnetic theories, that 'Maxwell's theory is Maxwell's equations'. The equations were clearly testable, and the ether models that supposedly underlay them were irrelevant. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Mental training in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, December 2 2007 23:13
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I'm skeptical enough that Alex's program can succeed, to be pretty confident that it can do no damage. I agree with Aran's mind theory. Even a glass of water has many levels of description, from a vector in an enormous quantum mechanical Hilbert space, through a soup of tumbling v-shaped molecules, to a continuous fluid, a point mass on larger scales, and ultimately nothing at all on the cosmic scale. I am not a holist. I like to borrow the phrase with which I once heard Steven Weinberg reply to the charge that he was an unqualified reductionist: I am a fully qualified reductionist. So I do not suppose that any extra kind of stuff creeps in somehow between the levels of description. The whole is not more than the sum of its parts — unless you are too naive in your understanding of the summation involved. Such subtle summing of so many parts is extremely complicated. Its principles may be understood, however. In physics we may not be able to describe a glass of water quantum mechanically, but we can trace the chain of approximations that are needed to derive the hydrodynamic description from quantum many body theory. To use the handy computer science analogy: we may only be able to understand the source code, and not the binary; but we did write the compiler. The hydrodynamic description of water is not an illusion. It is a powerful and accurate approximate summary of the microscopic quantum mechanical phenomenon. Water is really like that. So it seems a peculiar emphasis to insist that human brains are 'nothing but' synapses and neurochemicals. The mind-boggling complexity of that many synapses and neurochemicals is easily capable of exhibiting all the phenomena that any non-reductionist mentalist might attribute to immaterial mind. The brain is its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heaven. Some psychological hypotheses may seem much more natural with a naive homunculus picture of mind, but that by no means makes them impossible within reductionist substance monism. Brains are weird. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Mental training in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, December 1 2007 23:49
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I'm surprised by the premise that the subconscious mind (whatever that is) will respond to conscious commands. Why should that work any better than trying to control your car by shouting 'Stop!' and 'Go!' at the engine block? It seems rather quaint to me to imagine that the subconscious understands English, for example. So what's the theory here? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Eat It! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, November 30 2007 12:55
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quote:We may have to bend over backwards to do it, but eventually we can make enough contact with reality to keep our species alive: cooking is less pointless than Runescape. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The New World in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, November 30 2007 00:10
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Yeah, I think Jeff could do something like Arcanum very well. It could carry on a bit of the flavor of Geneforge, but only a bit. The problem is that as an indie Jeff can afford even less than a big company to do anything that seems like it's been done before. If people are willing to rehash something familiar, they at least demand cutting edge graphics with it. So Jeff could do something that was a bit like Arcanum in some respects, but it really couldn't be that much like it. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| For all you physics gurus in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, November 29 2007 03:57
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I've been a professor for three years now. Before that I was a post-doc for an unusually long time. (Post-docs aren't students, by the way, but junior researchers on fixed term contracts.) Jackson is fairly common for senior undergrad courses, though usually the whole book isn't covered. And the German system is kind of different from the North American. Students often cover essentially the same material twice, once in a course taught by an experimentalist professor, then in a course taught by a theoretician. The perspective is expected to be more advanced in the theory version, but the subject matter generally overlaps a lot. I'm not sure yet whether this is excellent pedagogy or appalling inefficiency. [ Thursday, November 29, 2007 04:00: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| For all you physics gurus in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, November 28 2007 23:24
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In principle I'm supposed to be using Jackson, but so far I'm actually using a combination of Nolting (German) and Reitz, Milford and Christie. The history of electrodynamics in the 19th century is apparently a total minefield. I had always thought this stuff was pretty simple, and in the rationalized reconstruction that one is supposed to learn in courses like mine, it is, at least by modern standards in physics. But how people actually came up with this stuff historically is quite another story. Yes, there was all that ether stuff, for most of the time. But I don't think it really made all that much difference. Late in the century someone apparently observed that the only real function of the ether was to provide a subject for the verb 'to oscillate', and as far as I see this was a sound insight. People were not much attached to any particular notion of what the ether was like. They made careful observations, and formulated mathematical theories of fields that could reproduce them. Then they felt obliged to construct material models of a space-filling substance whose mechanical stresses and vibrations would in turn reproduce their field theories. But experiments and field equations between them were doing all the actual physics. Did anyone really believe in the ether? I'm not sure. From an old popular book I once read, I believe everyone acknowledged that it was only an unproven working hypothesis. It was a motivation for some work, and an apparently obligatory afterthought for most. Eventually it became clear that ether models were both extraordinarily difficult to construct and essentially irrelevant. Yet there was no really damning evidence that there did not exist some very peculiar form of ether. So the proposal that there was no ether at all would really have been just as irrelevant to actual physics as any other ether model. Denying the ether would not have been bomb-throwing radicalism, but pipe-smoking punditry. An invisible material medium is not so hard to believe in, after all, since we are all familiar with air, wind and sound. To entertain one further invisible medium would not be hard in an age that was discovering many new substances. To state as we do now, that electric and magnetic fields are not made of anything else, but are themselves fundamental entities alongside matter, might well have seemed a greater violation of Ockham's Razor than the ether was, since it introduced an apparently unnecessary new category of fundamental objects, rather than just one more object of an established class. I think that perhaps the first person to really take electromagnetic fields completely seriously as fundamental objects in their own right may have been Albert Einstein. Instead of thinking of the fields as being made of something material, he thought of matter as made of them; and this led him to change space and time themselves in order to make all of physics agree with Maxwell's Equations. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| For all you physics gurus in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, November 27 2007 08:51
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I'm teaching electrodynamics at the moment, and this morning shortly before my first lecture on magnetostatics I made the shocking discovery that the nice conceptual progression from the Lorentz force to the Biot-Savart law was the exact opposite to the historical development. Biot and Savart found the correct expression for the magnetic field produced by a steady current, already in 1820. The correct force on a charge moving through a given magnetic field was first written down by Lorentz in 1892. In between were such momentous events as the bold hypothesis by Hertz, in 1872 or so, that electric field generated by changing magnetic field is electric field, period; it is precisely the same thing that gets generated by electric charge. It boggles my mind to try to see how this apparent tautology could possibly have constituted an insight, but at the time it surely did. Man, were people confused back then! Just as we are today, about different things. Sometimes, in fact, about the same things. And, alarmingly, magnetic forces by themselves are frame-dependent, and do not respect Newton's second law (equal and opposite actions and reactions). Or rather, they are a counterexample to the usual rule that Newton's mysterious 'action' really just means 'force'. Somehow I never quite absorbed this last point in particular, back when I was first learning this stuff myself. Textbooks generally waft deftly over these questions, and I can see why. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Abominal Desktop Thread Continued: A New Abomination in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, November 26 2007 12:27
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I last played EVN only a few months ago, when that quasi-TC Arpia 2 came out. (It was a juvenile project that grew up as it grew, and got some serious graphical assistance from ATMOS.) It's amazing what legs that game has, considering that it's quite old now, is only 2D with sprites (though good 3D looks to the sprites), and has never spawned anywhere near the number of Total Conversions that previous EV games did. Somehow EVN reached the threshold of sound and graphics for space opera to be acceptably realized, and it's fun just to zoom around looking at things. And blasting the heck out of Aurorans. I understand, alas, that the reason there are so few large plug-ins is that the engine is not only complex, but rather buggy. So putting in the huge effort to learn it is by no means guaranteed to let you achieve the cool things you have in mind. I believe I've heard that song around here once or twice, as well; but EVN also requires serious graphics abilities if you don't want your product to look pitifully lame. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Endeavour in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, November 25 2007 08:17
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Except that TRATEOTU has the ultimate line. "It's not so much an afterlife," said Arthur, "more a sort of après vie." For some reason I thought this was the single best line in the whole series. Arguably other things in the series add up to more together, but too many of them were a little kitschy. This one was dry. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Anyone find Avernum 4 not as good as 1-3? in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, November 23 2007 10:16
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It wasn't plotless, and it was a fine game. It just had a plot that people who had finished A2 and A3 could see coming a mile away. So a lot of the board regulars here were disappointed. The general public, to whom Rentar Ihrno was just a bad tenant, liked A4 fine. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Gleep! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, November 20 2007 03:56
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It's all fun and games, people, until somebody gets their eyelid batted. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |