Jeeze Laweez, talk about over- saturation. Just roll.

NY: Bantam, 1984.

This was Brin’s third novel, but it has many of the hallmarks of a first novel — and a pretty good first novel, too. Dennis Nuel is a talented young physicist of a generation or two in the future, a post-doc working on what amounts to a university-financed teleportation machine. They’ve having problems with it, though, so he finds it necessary to go through the portal himself to do a little calibration. Naturally, once there, he’s not going to find it easy to return. And physics doesn’t seem to work the same way on the world of Tatir as on Earth. The basic device is that practice really does make perfect. Throw together a basic “chair” from a few boards and some string, and then treat it like a chair — sit in it regularly and think “comfy chair” thoughts — and the construction will gradually become a better chair. A dungeon becomes a better dungeon when the guards comment frequently on how dark and dank it is, and so on. It’s an original idea and Brin follows the classic Golden Age method of setting up the gimmick and then sitting down to work out what logically happens as a result. It helps that Dennis is a Connecticut Yankee type, able to make gunpowder, distill brandy, and build an airplane. Brin is obviously a fan of Sprague De Camp, too, since he includes not only a Wizard Hero with a Familiar and a Sidekick but also a Fair Princess with a touch of the tomboy about her. And at the end, he makes a stab at coming up with a reasonable explanation — reasonable in science fiction terms, anyway. This is nothing at all like the “Uplift” series or Brin’s other, more serious, books; it’s just a fun yarn and definitely worth a read.

* Howard Dean: Kill the Senate bill. Markos Moulitsas: Insurance companies win. Time to kill this monstrosity coming out of the Senate. It falls to poor Matt Yglesias to declare victory. As I suggested earlier, my pragmatist streak will probably push me to support reform no matter how much Lieberman extracts, and Ezra Klein (still under fire for his rude reminder that policy has consequences) and Steve Benen make that pragmatist case here and here. Still, this rankles. I wouldn’t want anyone who matters (quiet, Ezra) to commit the unpardonable sin of being honest, but I’ll personally send Harry Reid a hundred dollars for his reelection if he turns around and uses reconciliation to pass the public option anyway just as soon as the current insurance reforms are passed.

* Much-needed good news: The DC City Council has endorsed marriage equality.

* Bad Astronomer tackles transporter metaphysics.

* More than 65 million years ago, a cataclysmic event drove a majority of the Earth’s species into extinction, and tragically, wiped out the last of the dinosaurs long before bazookas could be invented and used on them. (Thanks Russ!)

* io9 has the series bible for Batman: The Animated Series.

* And dueling reviews of Avatar insist it does and does not suck. (Thanks to Dan for the “suck” version. “Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.” This I have to see.)

Nu’Urbd, the Sixth of Eight

Nu’Urbd, sixth of eight.

The PhilPapers Survey was a survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views, carried out in November 2009. The Survey was taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students. This has both a survey and a metasurvey that asked a smaller group to predict the results of the original survey. Shockingly, a full 69% percent of philosophers get the teleporter problem wrong:

Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?

Accept or lean toward: survival 337 / 931 (36.1%)
Other 304 / 931 (32.6%)
Accept or lean toward: death 290 / 931 (31.1%)

The consequentialist approach to the trolley problem turns out to have become hegemonic.

Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don’t switch?

Accept or lean toward: switch 635 / 931 (68.2%)
Other 225 / 931 (24.1%)
Accept or lean toward: don’t switch 71 / 931 (7.6%)

Also interesting: pluralities believe philosophical zombies are conceivable but not metaphysically possible (I concur) and rejects the terms of Newcomb’s Paradox (not sure what this can mean in practice). 73% are atheists.

All this and more via MeFi.

Nice new features (read “Teleportation”) should make web hosts using VirtualBox thing about upgrading.

VirtualBox 3.1 adds live migration and branched snapshots

The latest version of VirtualBox delivers some compelling new features, including support for live migration and branched snapshots. Migration capabilities reflect VirtualBox’s potential for ascending into the enterprise arena.
By Ryan Paul | Last updated December 1, 2009 8:20 AM

For Christmas this year I would like:

•  A Lamborghini Murcielago LP650-4 Roadster
• An African Elephant
• £1,000,000,000,000 (That’s an English billion)
• Snow on Christmas Day
• A Puggle (Pug/Beagle)
• An Alaskan Malamute
• Taylor Lautner
• An ability such as flight/teleportation/telekinesis
• Someone to do all my uni work for me, and get really good marks
• Tickets to the Twilight Saga: Eclipse premiere
• Houses in London, New York, Orlando, San Diego, Tokyo, anywhere in Kenya, Beijing
• blink-182
• Someone to love

Please?

I don’t think it’s too much to ask for.

Thanks.

Hayley
xxx

Have a Christmas song. The Pogues and Kirsty McColl – Fairytale of New York ♫ http://blip.fm/~h3p38 Enjoy!

This is a cross-post to my deviantART account, but never mind that. Let’s get straight into it. At the moment, I’m rather interested as to the answers I’ll get.

So, say you had a friend. It can either be an acquaintance, a good friend, or a best friend. Pick one of them – or two of them, or all of the three if you want. How would you treat the copy if:

a) A copy of them was made and the original of the person was kept. The copy knows that it’s a copy.

b) A copy of them was made and the original of the person was destroyed. The copy knows that it’s a copy.

c) A copy of them was made and the original of the person was badly injured/in a coma/otherwise unable to communicate. The copy knows that it’s a copy.

d) A copy of them was made and the original of the person was kept. The copy doesnot know that it’s a copy – it thinks that it is the original.

e) A copy of them was made and the original of the person was destroyed. The copy does not know that it’s a copy – it thinks that it is the original.

f) A copy of them was made and the original of the person was badly injured/in a coma/otherwise unable to communicate. The copy does not know that it’s a copy – it thinks that it is the original.

And there’s one more variable; if the copy does not know that it’s a copy, would you tell it or try to prove to it that it’s a copy?

I’m just interested is all. Also, the definition of the copy will be as follows:
The copy is exactly the person it was copied from, only not the “same person”, if you know what I mean. Its thoughts follow the same as the original, as does it’s body and functions, etc. It is exactly the same in every way that it can be, except that it will never be the original controlling it. It will have a consciousness of its own, in other words, despite being the same in every other way.

Answer if you wish. I’d be interested on what you’d do! And, no, seriously, I haven’t been looking up teleportation. Seriously. And I swear I never looked into the theory that tells you that if you copy one instance and send it over to another place and then destroy the original, that it could be an effective way to teleport. I swear.

Was Andrew Basiago part of a top secret military program revolving around time travel during his childhood? Could he have been teleported from a location in Woodbridge, NJ to Santa Fe, NM via a device derived from Tesla technology? Did he really use this technology to travel to Mars and observe evidence of alien civilization? Maybe, maybe not, but in either case it’s a fascinating story to kick back and listen to. Time travel is definitely among my favourite  Coast to Coast topics and this show is well worth a listen.

Download the full 4-hour show

Apparently when Nicola Tesla died, the War Department and the FBI raced to his apartment to take possession of his papers. The War Dept. Won and the military establishment developed some of the ideas contained in them.

One was teleportation. Tesla had worked out the principles and equations for a teleportation device, which, when Andrew Basiago was 9 years old in 1968, was to become the first human being to be teleported from one location on Earth to another.

By the time he finished his young career in 1981, his “jumps” included trips to Mars and to the year 2045. The latter jump was to pick up a microfilm of the history of the Earth from the time of the jump until 2045.

During his career as a jumper, he learned that the Dept. Of Defence, as it later became known, had a “chronovisor” (could be the same as what Burisch calls the “Looking Glass”) which allowed them to see and film events from the past.

Basiago personally watched a crucifixion which he thought to have been Jesus and he also watched the signing of the American Constitution, recognizing George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

The chronovisor also allowed the military establishment to see events from the future, so that they knew, and briefed, every person who was destined to be an American president – including Barack Obama.

In fact Basiago once met Obama and had an extended argument with him over the relative predatory behaviour of multinationals in which Obama took the centrist position and Bosiago the  left of center.

At the conclusion of the discussion, a friend of Obama’s who witnessed the argument told Basiago that he had better be nice to Obama because Obama was destined to become President of the United States. Only Basiago could appreciate the nature of that knowledge.

Basiago and the other more than a hundred young jumpers were what he calls “branwashed” to forget their experiences, but he worked hard from the time he was 38, ten years ago, to now to recover his memories.

Now that he has, Basiago wants the military to release teleportation technology for the benefit of humanity. 

He has maintained his whistle-blowing campaign in the face of death threats from the Bush administration, feeling that some people are obliged not to fear death in the face of making the difference for humanity that the release of teleportation technology would bring.

I listened to Basiago on George Noory’s Coast to Coast AM broadcast last night. That may eventually work its way onto Youtube.

Another broadcast of Basiago’s is featured at this site: http://tinyurl.com/yc8nn2r

Basiago’s own website is under construction but can be found at: http://www.projectpegasus.net/

His Mission Statement reads:

Project Pegasus was begun in 1968 by Andrew D. Basiago, when he was serving as a child participant in the US time-space exploration program, Project Pegasus.

Andy, a lawyer in private practice in Washington, was the first American child to teleport and one of America’s early time-space explorers, as told in his soon-to-be-published book, Once Upon a Time in Time’s Stream: My Adventures in Project Pegasus at the Dawn of the Time-Space Age.

Andy serves as Team Leader of Project Pegasus.

The mission of Project Pegasus is to lead the legal and political campaign to urge the US government to disclose its teleportation capability, so that this life-advantaging technology can be used by humanity to achieve planetary sustainability.

So back to another stupid ass myth from vampire [sic] pop culture.

Every time a vampyr in one of these movies or shows needs to miraculously be on the other side of the room to save the damsel in distress, he just “shazaam” turns into a blur and is over there in a split second.

Or needs to visit “the Queen” (see lesson 9) he can “glimmer” into a special other dimension.

Or old school vampyrs would move room to room as some kind of a foggy vapor. Or fly around as bats.

Let’s now discuss reality. Vampyrs are humans. When you are given this disease that causes you to lust for blood, unfortunately there is no “little bonus” waiting at the bottom of the box. No powers. No special abilities.

So how do vampyrs get around? Well, how do you get around dumbass? That’s how I get around.

If I am at Katz’s Deli, and some damsel is in distress in Central Park, she can’t just think of my name and I will shimmer into dust and miraculously appear next to the Turtle Pond. No. Not at all.

She would have to call me. Well text me, as I probably wouldn’t interrupt a big juicy brisket sandwich to answer a call, but I might glance at a text. Then I would have to pay for my sandwich, and catch, what? An uptown F or V, probably, then get out at the bottom of the park and figure out which unnecessarily circuitous walking path gets me remotely close to where she is.

Needless to say by this time, depending on the original cause of her distress, she has been (in increasing order of personal terror) robbed, mugged, subjected to 30 minutes of street theater, beaten, kidnapped, raped, murdered or inducted to the Church of Scientology.

I should have just finished that sandwich.

Hey everyone, please support Andrew D. Basiago’s quest to lobby the US government to disclose its teleportation secret so that teleportation can be adopted on a global basis: projectpegasus.net/

Check out the stamping madness the Brits are up to next year, an enticing adventure in teleportation. It will surely call forth a colourful combo of stamp aficionados and music nerds alike.

The Royal Mail apparently consulted Greatest Album Cover polls and U.K. music editors to put together their top ten list of album covers, which I graciously typed out for you below:

1. Blur Parklife
2. New Order Power, Corruption and Lies
3. Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin IV (aka ZoSo)
4. Primal Scream Screamadelica
5. Rolling Stones Let It Bleed
6. David Bowie Ziggy Stardust
7. The Clash London Calling
8. Mike Oldfield Tubular Bells
9. Pink Floyd The Division Bell
10. Coldplay A Rush Of Blood To The Head

F YEAH stars to picking Blur over Oasis, and for including New Order and Primal Scream instead of all the new crap that hasn’t been crossing over well since this decade. But where’s Moz and RADIOHEAD? Where the hell are THE BEATLES, and since when does Coldplay get dibs on the R.M.S. throne? Are they even considered British anymore?

To conclude, are We (royal) really saying that this crap…

is more striking than, oh, say…this gorgeous glacier of electronic genius?

C’mon guys…you’ve had better bands, festivals, and drinking laws than the Americans since music was cool. Can’t you at least represent yourselves fairly?

Before I get started, let me highlight that this post is going to be very theoretical and hence not very well-thought-out.

In your n number of years alive, where n is a positive real number, your brother or any physics geek has at least told you that the speed of light, c  is the greatest speed achievable in this Universe.

The geek is right. The speed of light is the pesky, theoretical speed barrier of physical bodies.

But the geek is wrong, too. The speed of light is not the greatest speed achievable.

How can the geek be right and wrong, then?

I will have to remind you that speed is the change in distance per unit time. Anything that travels a distance in a given time can be said to have, well, traveled. And I’m gonna remind you, anything, not just physical bodies, is qualified to use the verb ‘travel.’

Information can in fact travel faster than the speed of light. The very important remark here is that, information is carried by physical bodies like cables, or maybe pulses or electromagnetic waves, like light. The physics Nazi would now say, “Aha! The fastest medium of transport, light, travels  at the speed of light! You are clearly wrong.”

Welcome to the microscopic world. I’m going to use a very crude analogy first, before bringing in the essence of the discussion. This analogy is not thought by me, of course, but it works so well that it is always fun using it.

Imagine that you have a spinning coin in a box. You place this box deep in the Pacific Ocean. Don’t ask why is it spinning or what is keeping it spinning! I already said that it is not a well-thought-out story. It’s just spinning, okay. Suppose you have another identical box with a spinning coin. You place it on a moon 23 light-years away. (I said don’t ask how!)

Suppose that the first coin comes down heads. Instantaneously the second coin, separated by a distance of 23 light years, comes down tails.

It happens as though information has traveled 23 light years in a fraction of a second. Except that it really did travel at a speed greater than c!

Spin is a property of electrons. We designate clockwise and anticlockwise spins to electrons. For a pair of electrons, the sum of the spins must always be zero. Now we have the two electrons separated by a sufficiently great distance and we do not know their individual spin. Now we open the “box” and observe the spin of the first electron. You see it and it’s clockwise. Almost without a delay, the spin of the second electron would be anticlockwise.

We say that the first electron is entangled with the second electron. They are in fact dependent of one another. They are one entity. Changing one property would instantaneously change the property of the other. In this sense, we have traveled at a speed greater than the speed of light.

This property can be exploited to teleport objects. Teleportation is simple, really. There are several ways to teleport, but we’ll only look at teleporting from entanglement today.

Say we transmit information in bits and we assign “0″ and “1″ to these bits. If we have entity A and B and we code “0″ into A, then B would spit out “1″ in no time. We have managed to transmit “1″ to the other end of the universe. If this process is repeated many times, you can send the message “Physics is Rubbish” or “The Geek is Lame” to a faraway civilization in a very short time. That’s the theoretical foundation of this form of teleportation. And physics is not rubbish.

That’s it for now. Before that I would like to clarify one thing. The geek is not wrong! The speed of light is indeed the barrier and physical objects cannot travel faster than that. And the clever use of entanglement as above has not been entirely workable because of the almighty Uncertainty Principle. It’s theoretically correct but good old Uncertainty Principle once again defends nature. We can, of course, try to outsmart* it. What I’ve shown here is just the basic style of communication of this sort. And by now if any of you are curious of the mechanism behind this peculiar event, I’ll have to defer you to the core idea of quantum theory, which I suspect you already know.

Noel H. Wan

*By outsmarting the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is by no means working against it. No one, I repeat, no one has ever found a way to defeat this powerful principle. But we can devise strategies as to make use of the principle to circumvent around the principle itself.

P/s : I find this topic very interesting. Also, Many key ideas have not been explored. I might return to some key ideas discussed/missed out in this post.

Fringe: Season 1: Episode 14: “Ability”

FBI on the case.

How to defuse a bomb…with your brain! This episode was refreshingly easy to watch.

This episode is debunked at Popular Mechanics and Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. Club.

Random thoughts

Mr. Jones is back, and apparently not in best of health post-teleportation. Judging by the hole in the hospital wall, though, the disintegration/reintegration has turned him into some kind of super-villain! Or perhaps a Goblin King (tenuous connection: David Robert Jones is David Bowie’s real name, and he played Jareth the Goblin King in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth).

Why would Olivia yell for a medic, and then attempt to perform the tracheotomy herself? I’m sure that the doctor would be better trained. And for that matter, it should be possible to keep an airway open no matter how quickly “scar tissue” is growing – just a matter of a longer hose or regular incisions.

“Ask yourself why Broyles sent you to the storage facility.” Could it be Cortexiphan, a chemical that prevents brain “limitation”? This is actually quite interesting, carrying overtones of synaptic pruning and neuroplasticity – if people could retain their brain’s malleability, would it result in enhanced learning abilities? Perhaps this is why Olivia is so good at remembering faces.