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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| The 10th planet! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, July 31 2005 13:54
Profile
By Wallace and Gromit. It is pure Wensleydale. Or maybe Camembert? -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| RICHARD WHITE LEGAL TEAM in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, July 31 2005 03:50
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quote:Ever heard Glenn Gould's "So you want to write a fugue"? It's a hilarious but serious sung fugue about writing fugues. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The 10th planet! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 19:06
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Perhaps I stand corrected, then, because Sci Am is usually pretty reasonable in what it prints. But I really wonder. Creating a black hole so small it was noticeably subject to quantum mechanics would constitute a laboratory experiment on quantum gravity, and by the standard reckoning, that kind of thing is 16 orders of magnitude away from our current capability. And our current capability is only about 12 orders of magnitude better than banging rocks together with your hands. Interestingly, there is a known way to have FTL without violating causality -- Alcubierre's 'warp drive' metric describes a curved spacetime bubble that carries a little enclosed volume of undistorted space through the universe at an arbitrarily high speed. It is a sort of 'wormhole-as-you-go'. The trouble is that, like wormholes, it would require negative energy density in some places. There is no known way to achieve that within classical physics, and no-one knows how to mix quantum physics with gravity. [ Saturday, July 30, 2005 19:18: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| RP List in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 18:45
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quote:Oh. Well, then, I guess I was just crowing for my change of title. Hooray. I can't believe how much effort that took, posting and posting and posting ... man, it seemed like hundreds of them. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Long-distance relationships? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 18:36
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Well, they can work. My wife of almost ten years and I moved to separate continents shortly after we started going out, and it was nearly six years before we were living together full time. For most of that time living apart we were actually married; I used to joke that we were living in sin. We were also committed, and shared Christian values and spiritual support systems. We were in our late twenties when our relationship started, so we had settled down as people a bit, and we had known each other as friends for a few years before we started dating. Plus while we were living apart we had jobs that paid well enough to afford our outrageous phone bills, and to travel back and forth to see each other fairly regularly. So in fact we spent nearly 1/4 of our time together, in the years we were living apart. We had some adjusting to do when we finally did move in together, but it was worth it. We were lucky, in all the extra things we had going for us, and maybe demonslaeyr is right that we needed that much luck. I can't say. We definitely were serious about our relationship. We only spent a year of long distance relationship before getting engaged and then married, and we had a big formal wedding and bought the nicest rings we could afford. [ Saturday, July 30, 2005 18:38: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| RP List in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 15:31
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Bah, Misc was a pale, feeble thing in comparison with the glorious communion of souls we true oldbies enjoyed back in '34, when we exchanged notes scribbled on ration cards via carrier pigeon, crafted dramas that made Shakespeare look childish, and discovered DNA by pure thought long before Watson and Crick. Then noobies came and danced on our grave. :rolleyes: -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The 10th planet! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 15:07
Profile
Kelandon is right: Einsteinian relativity doesn't prevent us getting to the stars, it just prevents us getting back in time for tea. A star 100 lightyears from Earth can't be reached in less than 100 years of Earth time, but a traveller at nearly the speed of light could arrive within a much shorter personal time. Their voyage might take them only a few weeks; but after a round trip they would return, like Rip van Winkle, to an Earth on which more than two centuries had passed. Perhaps someday becoming a starfarer will be like becoming a seafarer was a few centuries ago -- a decision to cut all ties with a home you will never see again, in favor of a life discovering distant ports of call. A few general relativity corrections: It is not known that wormholes last a short time. In fact, it is not known how they can exist at all; any statements you hear about them are based on saying 'suppose somehow there was a wormhole ...'. Traversable wormholes would not really be anything like black holes. Black holes grow as they absorb matter, and only shrink if they emit it. Stephen Hawking is famous, among other things, for framing an argument (though not a watertight proof) to the effect that black holes do emit thermal radiation. This would imply that an isolated black hole, which was not absorbing anything, would indeed shrink. The only thinking physicists have done about creating black holes in labs is to laugh at how impossible it would be with any foreseeable human technology. A few physicists, of whom I happen to be one, have thought about making experiments with the propagation of sound or light in moving fluids, which would in some ways be a sort of analogy for a black hole. We have naturally played up the words 'black hole' in our publications, but in fact we have not imagined making any real black holes. [ Saturday, July 30, 2005 15:22: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Delete this thread please. in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 14:56
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Masochist: Hurt me! Sadist: No. [ Saturday, July 30, 2005 14:57: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Dream Job... in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 09:35
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I withdraw my sponsorship of the above message by Jumpin' Salmon, now that steroids have shown up in its urine. This does not affect my ongoing sponsorship negotiations with other posts by Jumpin' Salmon, which remain innocent until potentially tainted with scandal that might adversely affect my brand image. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The 10th planet! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 09:10
Profile
Hey, do astrologers even keep track of anything past Saturn (the furthest planet visible to the naked eye, and thus the last one known to the ancients)? And do they actually keep track of any planets accurately, or just apply ancient cycles? I once heard someone give a defence of astrology, to the effect that it is not that the planets affect us, but that the planets simply record the great cyclical shifts of cosmic rhythm, which affect everything. Apparently this is actually a very old rationale for astrology. It's still pretty silly, but not quite as ridiculous as it first sounds. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The 10th planet! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 06:26
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Cool! I wonder what they'll call it. Though it's a bit of a dodge, in a way: Pluto shouldn't really be classed as a planet. There are probably lots of big icy planet/comet things out there; ones almost as big as Pluto have been known for some time. The only claim to fame for this one is that it's actually bigger than Pluto, so if Pluto's a planet it should be too. But it's pretty darn small for a planet, and the most rational plan would probably be to demote Pluto, and call all these distant iceballs something else. Otherwise we'll probably eventually end up with hundreds of 'planets' in the solar system, most of them very small and very far out and very unlike the eight honest, hard-working planets that really deserve the title. Light speed isn't a big deal for interplanetary travel; it's only when you want to go between star systems that it gets to be a pain. Astronomical scales are a bit hard to grasp, but here's an analogy I've used in class a few times. Put the smallest dot you can make with a pen, in the corner of a normal A4/8.5x11 piece of paper. That's the sun. The earth is an invisible pinprick (less than 1/100 the diameter of the sun-dot), about 3/4 inch (2 cm) away from the sun. Most of the rest of the solar system fits on the page; Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto straggle over the rest of your desktop. This new planet would still be in the room. On this scale, the nearest other star is 2-1/2 miles (4 km) away. That's the interstellar scale: stars are very much further apart than planets. It's miles between dots. Keep scattering dot-stars with their desktop systems every few miles, throughout a pancake volume 60,000 miles across, and you have a galaxy. That's the galactic scale. Galaxies are really, really big. 60,000 is too big a number for me to picture, so I can't really visualize a galaxy as composed of 100 billion stars. Galaxies aren't spaced so far apart, proportionally; the typical spacing between galaxies is only around 20 galaxy-widths. So galaxies are spread through space like clouds in a mostly-clear sky. So if one ever achieves galactic travel or civilization, inter-galactic would not be such a big leap from there. There's a complicated 'geography' of galaxies, like continents and oceans: there are concentrated regions, and big voids. And there are really lots of galaxies. The Hubble space telescope has taken a weeks-long exposure picture of a random tiny patch of dark sky that could be covered by a grain of salt held up at arm's length. That picture is more densely packed with galaxies than the night sky seems to the naked eye to be packed with stars. Pascal wrote 'the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me', and he didn't know the half of it. [ Saturday, July 30, 2005 06:31: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Scent of new-mown hay in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 05:54
Profile
Somewhere I heard it remarked that electorates always fear most whatever problem they've experienced most recently. So there's a tendency to follow leader X with leader anti-X. It does seem to me that Bush is something of an anti-Clinton, less articulate but more straightforward. Hindsight is 20/20, but ahead of time it's not easy to tell whether simplicity is stupidity or wisdom. There are cases where hemming and hawing about the complexity of the issue is just being timid, when what is needed is simple and direct action, and then resolution in staying the course. There can be a kind of genius in simplicity. It's far from obvious to me that Bush can claim such a role; but neither is it quite obvious to me that he might not turn out in retrospect to have played such a role. Anyway, I think American culture has a much bigger slice of belief in the genius of simplicity than European culture does, and I think this goes a long way to explaining Bush's differential popularity. Then, the Bush team isn't trying to be popular in the rest of the world. That might make a difference, too. [ Saturday, July 30, 2005 05:59: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Just say no in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 30 2005 05:40
Profile
Hmm, I thought it was me, but perhaps I don't remember the past so well, either. I plan (as opposed to remember) in the future to refer to the problem of remembering the future, so if some distinguished writer used the line first, I should start citing them. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| RICHARD WHITE LEGAL TEAM in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 29 2005 04:19
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Ivory tower experts have to read this stuff every day for a living, so they get jaded beyond what people who read for leisure could imagine. Plus, even if not all the good stuff has been done, a dismayingly large proportion of the good stuff already has dozens of dissertations written on it. So to get your degree, you now have to write a book on the sonnet cycles of obscure mediocrities. After five years of them, you're half-insane and totally bitter, but if you've made it that far then you've also got yourself half convinced there was something to them after all. And so it goes. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Just say no in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 29 2005 04:13
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Telling him to go back to the past? Ah, the irony. I'm afraid, Verelor, that the subtle sorceries of White magic have the last laugh on you. When you sought to eliminate so many loyal members of the order, you were simply banished to the far future. You are only present here now as a sort of portent. Sorry! -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Scent of new-mown hay in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, July 28 2005 04:43
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It does, and it was great, but there was a prominent ad for the SBD. Ya gotta wonder what Faulkner would have thought about it. I don't mean the slightest criticism of Drew for passing on such a pitch-perfect parody, but I am a bit surprised at how vehement many people are in their belief that George W. Bush is stupid. Bush commits a lot more verbal bloopers than gifted stand-up public speakers like Bill Clinton, and he's no intellectual. But that ain't stupid. I think he's wrong about some important things, too, but that's not stupid, either. It's a sad truth, but you learn it well from working with brilliant people, that smart people can still be wrong. I guess this bothers me enough to comment on because of a personality quirk of mine: it offends me whenever someone trivializes a complex issue. Any complex issue -- I get riled when a physics paper I'm refereeing takes a trivial approach to a complex problem. And so it bothers me if Bush's opponents just chalk his policies up to stupidity, since it means that they are refusing to acknowledge the opposing case. And especially if the policies in question are in fact wrong, this is a shame, because I don't believe that you can ever beat the devil in the long run without giving him his every due. PLEASE NOTE: I am NOT trying to initiate a partisan discussion. I'm not that interested: I'm a Canadian, and I'll let the Americans govern themselves. Leaving entirely aside the issue of whether ot not Bush is right or wrong on any particular issue, I'm interested in why those who think him wrong seem to attribute his errors to stupidity. In other words, I'M NOT INTERESTED IN BUSH, BUT IN THE POLITICAL CONCEPT OF INTELLIGENCE. Sorry for shouting, but I really don't want to start a flame war ... [ Thursday, July 28, 2005 04:50: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Just say no in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 27 2005 06:13
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Actually the R&D wing went through many wild combinations of small mammals, punctuation, and household objects. Initially high hopes for the case@bat were bitterly disappointed, but out of that setback came the crucial decision to focus on pointy objects. The stick^rabbit proved to be well-motivated but under-armed. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Who plays pencil and paper roleplaying games? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 27 2005 04:17
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I tried Traveller once -- it is very old! I didn't like it, because the combat system seemed to make it very difficult to put enemies down to the point where they weren't any threat at all, but very easy for your own character to become seriously handicapped. And the process of generating your character was a drawn-out trade-off between getting a decent basket of starting skills, and becoming decrepit from old age before you even started playing. I once played Stormbringer, an RPG set in the universe of Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné. Perhaps appropriately, it had a combat system that made it very easy to get your character maimed. It was hard to see how characters could last more than a few games before running out of parts. In retrospect it's clear to me that the funny old D&D system, with armor class and hit points, is ideally suited to RPG playing, because it ensures (most of the time) that characters get hurt gradually, so that players have time to react before permanent things happen. The question of what makes a good RPG combat system is an interesting one. It's not always obvious what will work best. For instance, I once tried to improve on the D&D system by ditching combat 'rounds', and advancing through melee second-by-second. If your character was supposed to strike once per 10-second round before, I gave you a 1/10 chance each second of getting an attack. Since this preserved your average number of attacks per round, I thought this would be fine. What actually happened was that all fighters became startlingly irrelevant, going ages without getting any chance to act, while the spellcasters totally pwned. It was a nice little exercise in probability theory to figure out what I had done wrong. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Official Election Final Round Voting in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 27 2005 03:52
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I knew a bilingual guy once who spoke French in a high squeaky voice and English in a low growly one. I've always wondered what was with that. It was as though he had partitioned his vocal chords' power spectrum. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Damn you Icshi! Damn you!!!!!! in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 27 2005 03:46
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Massachusetts would probably be one of those, of course. The Dr Seuss style was such a stroke of genius. It's things like that that explain how Icshi's company stays in business despite its challenging market environment. That and dark powers. On the frontispiece, with glorious irony, they quote some actual Seuss: Well, I was walking in the woods And I saw nothing scary, For I have never been afraid Of anything -- not very. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Just say no in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 27 2005 03:38
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The needle/ferret is mostly about /ing, of course. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Were we prepared? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, July 25 2005 14:18
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Then there are the apocryphal gospels. These are cool. Well, there are two kinds of apocryphal gospels, and one kind is cool. The later, medievalish ones, where Jesus does all kinds of wacky miracles as a kid, are very hokey. The more ancient ones, that might actually be contemporary with the canonical gospels, are instead a bit spooky. The only one I know at all, which I think is one of the longest and best authenticated ones, is the 'Secret Gospel of Thomas'. It is a 'sayings' gospel, in that it records no action but just lists things Jesus is supposed to have said. Most of them are familiar sayings from the canonical gospels, some of them garbled; several are unrecognizably different in character; and one or two are novel, but have a sort of Jesus-ish ring. I don't know anything much about the original Greek manuscripts of apocryphal gospels, but if you really want to understand the textual traditions, you probably need to include them. [ Monday, July 25, 2005 14:19: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Scent of new-mown hay in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, July 24 2005 07:39
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There's that famous bit of Proust's, which must be rather better known than his enormous big itself, which has something about madeleines and tea triggering some memory ... can't remember exactly how it went, because I have no madeleines handy. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Would you rather play Homeland or... in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, July 24 2005 07:35
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But Richard White remains a potent symbol of all that is obscure, mysterious, and not as good as it could have been. You'll admit that that covers a lot. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Were we prepared? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, July 24 2005 07:28
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Maybe your goats had blemishes. This is apparently important. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |