Posts by Destroy All Monsters

Jimmies rustled - Mission accomplished

"has responded to El Reg teasing last week"

That would be a "tearing", and to be fair, the first issue of Mr. Orlowski's article just rolled over Mr. Fry in a T-34 from nowhere without explaining what the exact problem was nor giving link to reference materials [citation needed].

Indeed, the "universe has a start" is not pleasingly symmetric, which is why at first people assumed a steady state and it took long experimental validation to get where we now are: a pretty much ironclad model of a universe WITH a start but MAYBE WITHOUT AN END (at least along the time dimension).

However, efforts to symmetrize this are still underway. The easiest approach is to change your outlook and look at the universe as a 4D block in which the time dimension is just a large dimension along which the "block" exhibits some special internal properties. At the start an end, this dimension vanishes and fuses with the others, so you don't even have unelegant "cutoff" points and singularities. Very nice.

Or you can collate the start and end to older/newer universes, embed this universe in an eternally inflating Linde universe, or conformally map the full-entropy-and-very-large endstate of this universe to a small-entropy-and-very-compact beginning of another, phoenix like, à la Penrose.

The truth may forever elude us. And maybe this is for the best, BECAUSE....

There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic Ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.

Re: In other news...

Anti-creationism is now trolling?

Oh brave new world.

I shall book a prolonged stay at Raptor Jesus Camp.

Re: I can see it now...

There was also the scene in the original "Terminator" where Arnold quickly consults the blueprint of a manual transmission for a truck he has commandeered.

And of course countless others I certainly don't know about. Definitely in Vernor Vinge's "Deepness In the Sky".

And actually, I do think that the engineers at Boeing or Airbus have already been doing that to facilitate inspection of planes. You can just mark the rivets to inspect in a red glow ...

Totally already invented vague idea. Clearly the USPTO will allow that.

Re: Where do I sign up?

I suppose real libertarians would say "let the market decide", which is a reasonable attitude, while Gaiaists and Greentards would lay the subsidy hose to mine lithium in Afghanistan after bombing it so that 50'000 cars and its concomitant production chain (the "invested capital" - hold on that has to do with "capitalism" and must be bad, right?) can be shat out at enormous cost while the power magically comes from "somewhere" so that they can drive by gas stations smiling and so feel good about actually NOT saving on the carbon emissions.

I hope that beer gives you the runs.

Re: @Chad HLies...damn lies...and statistics.

> "brown-outs" are a thing of the past.

I think you will find they are a thing of the future.

Re: Layman describes something in layman's terms.

Ok. Still, I'm checking amazon for used chinese language course books now.

The idea is...

So, I'm notta looking up Wikipedia, but reciting entirely from memory:

1) We need an Ansatz about what a "mechanical procedure" is to discuss Hilbert's problem of "whether there is a mechanical procedure to decide whether a theorem is true or not"

2) Turing identifies the "mechanical procedure" with the Turing machine, a device controlled by a hardcoded instruction matrix able to read and write symbols on a infinite tape. This is not a practical device, it is a Gedankenexperiment.

3) It immediately turns out that said machine is not powerful enough to solve Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem in general. This is done by diagonalizing: trying to prove on TM "A" that TM "A" halts while proving that TM "A" halts. This pleases Gödel as unprovable theorems are expected in any "sufficiently complicated" axiomated system (though for some reason, they seem hard to come by in practice).

4) Unfortunately no more powerful "mechanical procedure" has ever been found, and it also turns out that the power of the TM is equal to Lamba Calculus and Stack Automatons (which were invented somewhat earlier I think). Breathless tales of "breaking the Turing Barrier" and "hypercomputing" are just that.

5) The question arises whether there is a special Turing Machine "U" that can emulate (by a hardcoded instruction matrix) any other Turing Machine "M" for which a suitable description can be found on the tape. It immediately turns out that yes, there is such a machine (actually, there is an infinite set of such machines). That set is the "Universal Turing Machine".

6) Practial applications or engineering do not come into this. For actual early universal symbol processing machines, see Babbage's Analytical Engine, Atanasoff-Berry Computer etc.

Re: wow

> pollution capable of killing life millions of years in the future long after our species has disappeared

You will find that this is certainly not true. Expecting Chuck-Norris-like-killscale via the few tons of slowly decaying crud is RIDICULOUS. Even today, the fauna and flora around Pripyat are nowhere near dead. You realise that granite is highly radioactive and uranium is a 100% natural product?

Additionally: "species dead" ---> NO ONE CARES

Additionally: "millions of years in the future" ---> A bit of planetary extinction event will probably have come along anyway. Take that, greens.

I am Bear ... WELCOME TO RUSSIA!

Amazingly, it seems that in spite of the Yurop and the USUK FEARTRAIN, fast breeders are being built. Mainly in Russia though (insert picture of a flaming taxi with bear riding shotgun barrelling down a street):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Future_plants

Re: wow

The WHO certainly does not "report to the IAEA".

It may be "underreporting" (it probably is) but the brickshitting "overreporting" by Gaiaists is not helpful either.

The dishwashing universe!

More on this from Jester at Résonaances:

I was a bit surprised by how much emphasis in today's press conferences was put on the small glitches at low multipoles. It seems that Planck people are also a bit frustrated the fact that their results are nothing but a triumphant confirmation of old paradigms. Even at the LHC nobody would make a big deal of a 2.5 sigma anomaly, and in the present case we're in the area of astrophysics where errors are treated more loosely ;-) Moreover, according to Planck, the l=2 quadrupole mode of the fluctuation spectrum is aligned with the ecliptic, which suggests some unknown background or pesky systematics at large angular scales. Of course, many a theorist will come up with a beautiful explanation of the low multipole anomaly. But not because it's convincing, but because there's nothing else to ponder on...

In summary, the cosmological results from Planck are really impressive. We're looking into a pretty wide range of complex physical phenomena occurring billions of years ago. And, at the end of the day, we're getting a perfect description with a fairly simple model. If this is not a moment to cry out "science works bitches", nothing is. Particle physicists, however, can find little inspiration in the Planck results. For us, what Planck has observed is by no means an almost perfect universe... it's rather the most boring universe.

Re: Everyone's got it wrong...

However, it looks like for some reason, we are seriously on the right track, although lots of questions may never be decidable or experimentally verifiable.

If at the end a mathematical structure pops out that has no free parameters and maps perfectly well to the real world, I would consider this, job done, you can has cake!

(Yes, I consider Portal a tale on the fight against a psychopathic, sadistic mother nature. And maybe there is a way to get behind the obviously fake theater props that are offered to us)

See also:

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

Re: Here... the moment this spot was created.

What do you Lilim know about that? Nothing.

Study more Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Planck Data Release is also being LIVE BLOGGED. Those modern scientists!

In particular, we find:

Finally, the emphasis on "anomalies" in the media conference and press release seems like headline-bait to me. By and large these were already known from the WMAP data, and are at large angular scales -- where Planck and WMAP should​ overlap with one another. Any dataset has anomalies and by stressing these, the ESA media-monkeys detract from the huge advance this dataset represents. Planck has provided us with a picture of the early universe with unprecedented clarity and precision, and every cosmologist in the world will have to do their job differently on the strength of it. Working out what it tells us may take years, but it is going to be fun.

Re: Obama's goals

Why is Ann Coulter posting here?

And getting upvotes?

Re: Nothing new under the sun

Yeah but the Economist was also justifying the war on Afghanistan and on Iraq, so...

"Where do you want to your money to go today?"

Now there is a 15 trillion dollar debt carter and 120 trillion uncovered social security benefits (with the wealth increasingly going to political entrepreneurs). And that's just the US.

Asteroid deflection? Not soon.

Re: This just in

> GIven we see as many attacks on SSH ports listening on non-standard ports as those on the standard one

Interesting as I don' see that at all. I specifically moved the port to get rid of all the stupid login scans in the log...

Re: So there are people out there looking for these systems with the tools to do damage.

Ex-employees haxxoring out of the Occupied Palestinian Territories?

Re: America's so called Bogeyman is supposed to be a source of risk

Obligatory DOOM CHART