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 |
Recent posts
Pages
| Author | Recent posts |
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| I've been left behind... in Blades of Avernum | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 06:50
Profile
As a physicist toying with a theory of five dimensions, I too believe in unseen angles. Angels also seem perfectly plausible, though the actual evidence for them seems scant, but demons don't make much sense to me except as a metaphor. As a metaphor, they're great -- the universe is full of nasty little things that infiltrate larger systems and subvert them to damaging ends: tumours, viruses, psychoses, stock market bubbles ... -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. 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 20 2005 06:42
Profile
But the votes for Stughalf aren't for 'Stugri-La', so changing PDN to 'Donald Duck' might still catch both sets of votes. -------------------- 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 |
| I win! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 06:39
Profile
L'enfer, c'est les autres. -------------------- 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 |
| hi in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 06:34
Profile
And if you do go crazy, that'll mean one less turtle right there. -------------------- 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 |
| Avernum 4 Complete Wish List in The Avernum Trilogy | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 06:26
Profile
That's why you need the skean dhu. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Northwest corner of Crumbling Lab in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 06:14
Profile
Yes, if you restore Agatha to power in Stonespire, golems clean up Crumbling Lab, and you can get to that door. There are some minor useful items inside (I forget exactly what). -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Regrettable But in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 06:11
Profile
Are you sure this is different from what I said? There may be a lot of backroom dealing, but aren't the convention delegates all technically free to vote as they please in each round? -------------------- 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 |
| What time is it? in Tech Support | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 06:07
Profile
Originally written by Albus Dumbledore: quote:Now there's an unexpected plot twist. [ Wednesday, July 20, 2005 06:08: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Huzzah in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 06:05
Profile
Congratulations on your kilopost. -------------------- 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 Wednesday, July 20 2005 06:03
Profile
I am chillin' and preparing to move to Germany. Time to learn some prepositions. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| hi in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 05:35
Profile
I am frankly astonished that there was enough sanity to support such a large fluffy turtle population even briefly. The creatures must have been hoarding it from the boards' earliest days until now, and then suddenly binged out. Or perhaps this is just Arctic's husbandry, broaching the sanity cask on the rare days when he feels like fluffiness condiments. Perhaps we will therefore be safe from turtle invasions for another few years. -------------------- 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 |
| Alright, NOW what in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 05:26
Profile
Blue cheese is great. Stilton, Roquefort, yum. If it clears your sinuses, so much the better. In general, moldy cheese is cheese gone bad; but the right molds in the right cheese are fantastic. But sometimes your Stilton gets a whiff of ammonia; this is hard to like. It's not supposed to be there. Even blue cheese can go bad. Doesn't mean you have to like Velveeta. Or sometimes your Stilton gets dry and brown, and then it's not so nice either. As my father learned from the Duke of Wellington (harumph!), what you do then is soak it in dry sherry, and it gets better. I have no idea how to take this part as a metaphor, but it's good to know if you like Stilton. -------------------- 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 |
| Regrettable But in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 05:15
Profile
I'd be very surprised to learn that our candidate-proxy system really is used in electing governments anywhere. I think the usual practice is that if a candidate withdraws, all votes for them are simply wasted. Where there are multiple rounds of voting, as in party leadership conventions or papal elections, a candidate who withdraws after one round often endorses another candidate. But this is just a matter of asking their supporters to vote a certain way in the next round. These supporters often obey out of respect for their original choice, but are not bound to do so. The good points of the system we used are that nobody's vote is 'wasted', and the election ends after only one round. The drawback we have found is that it gives more power than we might have intended to losing candidates. (In fact, more power than the winner will ever wield as moderator, though only for a brief time.) If I voted for Kelandon, I didn't thereby declare that I couldn't stomach Alec at any price; and yet Kelandon was free to transfer my vote in order to eliminate Alec. Again, I'm not blaming Kelandon in the slightest, but in retrospect I'm uncomfortable with what he did, and feel that it shouldn't have been legal (as I entirely concede it actually was). -------------------- 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 arrow of time in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 04:56
Profile
Reversible computing doesn't necessarily take infinite memory, just more. You just need to add one bit that starts at 0 for every time that you would normally plan to reset a bit. Then instead of resetting, you swap. If you want to be clever you may be able to reduce the number of extra bits needed, but this is the most you might need. -------------------- 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 arrow of time in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 04:50
Profile
Spring's answer, that the future hasn't happened yet, deserves comment, because it's the obvious answer, and the reason that physicists are not happy with it is old (for physicists) but important. Where is tomorrow before it happens, and where is yesterday when it is gone? Questions like this sound simple, but are very subtle, so the only hope for humans to make any progress on them is to be very careful in deciding on their essential meaning, and not get distracted by connotations of their wording. For instance, 'where' is just a metaphor. It is conceivable that God keeps yesterdays in boxes somewhere, but when we ask our question we are not really insisting that the answer has to be about spatial locations. What the question is really about, as far as physicists are concerned, is determinism. Are the past and the future implicit in the present? Could the instantaneous state of the universe, at this moment, have arisen from only one prior sequence of states? Is there one unique sequence of states that must follow the present one? Is the entire history of the universe, in fact, predestined and unalterable? Common sense may well answer these questions with 'Hell, no!'; but physics basically assumes their answer is Yes, for the equations of natural law as we now know them have this implication. Could we but know the exact state of the universe at any moment, the equations would fix the entire past and future. In practice, of course, we can't come remotely close to knowing the exact state of the universe at any moment; so we are not going to be able to predict everything. But the point is that this could be done in principle, and so the whole future and the whole past are implicit in any present instant. This means that, effectively, the future does already exist. We just haven't gotten to it yet. But we are advancing steadily towards it, at a rate of one second per second. :) -------------------- 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 arrow of time in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 04:34
Profile
The home run is certainly a good example of something that would let you tell whether the film is running forwards or backwards. Unfortunately, though, I'm pretty sure that the source of the time asymmetry here is the human brains of the batter and pitcher, which are at least as complicated as fire and water. So I'm still looking for a simple system with an arrow of time. -------------------- 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 arrow of time in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 04:31
Profile
Thuryl's idea that human memory requires increasing entropy is probably true; but all it does is unify the psychological and thermodynamic arrows, which most people already think are unified (for reasons just like this). The thermodynamics of information processing, as opposed to information theory per se, is a fascinating but underdeveloped subject. The main result at this point is due to one Rolf Landauer, a giant in this under-recognized field. He showed, not that remembering increases entropy, but that forgetting does. It also costs energy. Resetting one bit to zero requires, on average, at least one unit of thermal energy (i.e. k_B T, Boltzmann's constant times the ambient absolute temperature). (Actually, I don't think it's an exact inequality like Heisenberg, but an "order-of" figure.) In conventional computing architecture, this minimal input energy is converted to heat. Since heating is a major practical problem in current computers, there has been some interest in reversible computing, in which no information is ever discarded, so no heat (or entropy) is generated. This uses more memory, though, and since I don't think that current heat generation is anywhere close to Landauer's minimum, I don't think reversible computing is going to show up at Intel anytime soon. It is, however, a requirement for quantum computation; so there has been an academic revival of interest in it for this purpose. -------------------- 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 Wednesday, July 20 2005 04:06
Profile
Chiselled spelling isn't as good as either, of course, but it's a start. Alas, I am no longer in contact with that hamster, since my BU teaching gig finished. If the parallel cryptographic attack that consumed all its power (and prevented me from running Thunderbird and Firefox simultaneously, grrr) is now finished, I recommend it be fed to the needle/ferrets. -------------------- 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 20 2005 03:59
Profile
I think they only became mutants recently, and ill tempered very shortly after that. EDIT: Hey, can you restore the original version so that my reply makes even a bit of sense? *Thinks about becoming ill-tempered, but doesn't want to risk qualifying for the assassination team.* RE-EDIT: Thanks, that's great. And what about great Whites, though? [ Wednesday, July 20, 2005 06:31: 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 20 2005 03:54
Profile
Ah, the needle/ferret, most deadly weapon in the history of assassination. Truly nothing can evade the needle/ferrets of RW's elite fanatic geneforged drugged cyborg mentat assassin teams. [ Wednesday, July 20, 2005 04:02: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Recommended Reading in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, July 19 2005 14:38
Profile
Well, the series is limping. It seems to run on reviving various Taken and making them out to be a whole heck of a lot harder to kill than they ever were in the original trilogy. Warmed over villains, yech. -------------------- 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 |
| hi in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, July 19 2005 12:41
Profile
And miserably disappointing to eat. Grrrr. The Enron of fruit! [ Tuesday, July 19, 2005 12:42: 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 |
| The arrow of time in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, July 19 2005 11:41
Profile
The technical point is that for every initial state after which a log burns into ash and smoke, or a stream plunges into foam, there is another initial state after which ash and gas assemble into a log, and turbulent spray launches up a cliff and flows smoothly away uphill. Among the states we encounter, these alternative initial states are evidently incredibly rarer than the first one. But among possible states, they are equally common. So what is it that selects typical states? Fire and water are both good examples for this question, but unfortunately are very complicated. It's hard to see just what is the issue of principle involved, under the ferocious complexity. I'm trying to identify the simplest system that might exhibit an arrow of time; if I succeed I'll publish a paper. -------------------- 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 arrow of time in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, July 19 2005 11:11
Profile
I suppose it is, but I'm afraid physics pretty much kicked itself free of semantics a long time ago, and observations like that don't really get acknowledged as advances any more. The main question is why time goes one way. If we could settle that, the question of which way it goes would be less profound, but still real, even though whichever way it went would determine our terms 'past' and 'future'. For whichever way it does go, one can still ask, why not the other way? Here's a question most people think is related to the real arrow of time. How can you tell when a film is running backwards? -------------------- 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 |
| Recommended Reading in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, July 19 2005 10:56
Profile
It's amazing how long the Black Company books have been in print. 20 years is a long, long time for fantasy paperbacks that never get made into movies. They're grim and down to earth in ways that I think were original. How often does the climactic battle of a fantasy trilogy turn on genealogical records? -------------------- 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 |