Greene's NYT op ed piece perpetuates the silly notion that photons will somehow stop in their tracks and start going backwards due to the accelerating expansion. No they won't, they will just be red shifted further and there will certainly continue to be some asymptotic limit to how far away the furthest galaxies were that we are seeing, but everything we can see now is in a sense in front of the CMB and the CMB will keep coming, no matter how cold it gets.

While it must remain outside the realm of direct observation, I'm more comfortable with the idea of the multiverse as the domain in which physics has evolved through cycles from those Type 1a supernova eggs through some inflating placenta to a next generation Big Bang than I am about any notion that physics is somehow simultaneously testing countless possible variations on its laws. Larger possibility spaces demand smarter exploration techniques.

"Too many" was definitely the right answer here. We totally fail to throw out/pass on those we no longer use, though I have had relatively recent occasion to power up my late mother's 1985 Mac. It's all the ones since that are really the issue.

(Disclaimer: I don't expect to see significant breakthroughs any time soon in the quest to identify a discrete "simple" mechanism at Planck scale or similar, but that hasn't stopped Wolfram and unconnected others treating the possibility seriously. The extremely limited experimental simulations possible on foreseeable computers don't show signs of ruling out the possibility, so the thoughts below are confined to such a model and treat field theories et al as emergent.)

If there is a hypothetical microstructure in the form of a simple graph (as formally defined) or similar which is continually involved in determining the next local state based on the current local state via some "simple" (enough) mechanism/rule/Wolfram "program", then it should be obvious to many of us with deep experience in computing that there is a major unaddressed clock synchronisation problem that must be solved in order to produce the observed consistency of time across regions which cannot share a time signal.

I've recently speculated that the CMB might have a role in this given that, under certain measurement assumptions, space is approximately filled with CMB photons, with their omnidirectional passage being sufficient to stimulate a natural resonance in the microstructure. Obviously the neutrino flux, or the combination of both, could be part of such a story. And that might make local variation in radioactive decay rates correlated with neutrino flux variations no more surprising than the variation in refractive index between various forms of (transparent) condensed matter.

At this stage it is all speculation, and fun, but certainly not anti-scientific.

I'm a dozen years down the same track, though was a lot less intentional when I got back on that horse. Twice, I swore I would never learn another programming language, initially liking the look of C but feeling past it already then looking at Forth and immediately swearing off reverse Polish. I could not have been more wrong. All it took was the right incentive.

Having privileged very early access to a LaserWriter with the tangible reward it provided of high resolution dots on a page very quickly had me at the leading edge of independent PostScript development, but that morphed into a business opportunity and I again moved on, though at least with any barrier to thinking about the previously, to me, obscure notion of graphical programming thoroughly erased. (There is an aside in there about GW Basic and the false hopes it gave me that VB might be the way to go with some legacy Fortran, providing my final disillusionment with anything M$.)

Having spent a decade getting paid more for words than for code, I found myself doing some CGI tweaking with Perl which I soon came to see in its c.1998 incarnation as being the ideal language for an ageing coder to return to. A young colleague's accelerated learning soon dragged me through Perl's object model and MySQL, but there I've been stuck for a decade, still waiting for Perl 6 and earning an ever-decreasing drip feed enhancing a system I designed long ago ... largely through choice as I place other values on whatever productive time I have left.

An aside on SQL: once you accept that it really does very little, it becomes a handy way to deal with lots of stuff. Nowadays I spend as much time writing queries as I do writing Perl 5.

Given the chance to choose again today, I'd focus on JavaScript and keep waiting for Perl 6.

In grade five at a liberal protestant church school our class burnt maybe a dozen teachers over the year, some in as little as three days. At least a few of us went on to make significant contributions in fields requiring at least intellectual competence.

In the first ever year 12 class at a then new suburban state secondary school, our math teacher fell ill and was never properly replaced. Three of us pretty much took on the job of keeping the math classes going and between us got better personal results than we otherwise might have.

But more than once in more recent times I've had to try to help youngsters who had relevant aptitude try to recover from the disaster of an incompetent math teacher at the wrong moment of their education, not an easy task.

While, thankfully, everyone is different, I lean towards more concern that emerging social dynamics, amplified in the cities, are producing a challenge-challenged generation who might really need to keep our richer experiences within reach when we would rather be retiring.

I tried teaching for a while in my early 20s before escaping back to the early days of commercial computing. Years later, by chance, I found out that one of the senior masters had an eye for boys. As far as I know he never crossed the boundary in the school situation where he was recognised as both an outstanding teacher in his field and as the disciplinarian of junior students, back when such a role was still seen as necessary.

As I posted moments ago on my own site, Google is now exceeding M$/IBM/GE/GM/Standard Oil/The East India Co at their worst.

Apple remains Apple. Comparing the two is like calling atheism a religion ... a category error.

You should sign up with put Conroy last.

Mind you with 98%+ voting above the line, that will be quite a struggle.

Never has anything more inappropriate been said by accident.

(Julia has been attacked by a notorious opposition ratbag for being childless by choice.)

... we could give Big Bad Bazza a spare ounce of Julia's self-control and acceptance of responsibility.

Though I'm still gonna put Conroy last.

While Conway's Life has been studied to death for 40 years and some wider categories of simple rules have been studied exhaustively by others, Golly enables you to explore much wider rule sets in the quest of some that are significantly more productive that Life.

For the past 18 months I've been using it to study just one of the Generations rules which were initially surveyed, especially by Mirek Wojtowicz, around 2000. I'm focused almost entirely on Generations 345/3/6, running it on 3 machines including one added just for that purpose. But I've recently noted that 345/2/4 may be even more productive in terms of novel phenomena, although I'm not planning to switch my own research which is nowhere near finished, let alone properly reported.

Beyond that, Golly also supports RuleTable and RuleTree algorithms which allow you to try an unlimited number of new rules, a few more of which are sure to be a lot more interesting than LIfe itself.

That explains it. Those of us who care about design are always working hard to pay our Apple tax.

Apart from a bunch of data pages on locally prominent sports, Whirlpool is very much a now reference.

Delimiter seems to be aiming more for a sociological view of Australian IT.

For me the simple test was Microbee, the only locally developed computer which ever gained significant market share and which is prominent in Delimiter's wiki but absent from Whirlpool.

Clearly the publicity here is already doing some Delimiter good as there are already quite a few more pages and categories than when I looked a few hours ago, including one on Whirlpool.

I'm much more inclined towards dumping my archives and knowledge of the Australian computer industry, especially from the 1980s when I was in the loop with many key players, into something like this than trying to make more than the most minor edits to Wikipedia itself.

For some time I've been saying it would be best if Wikipedia could connect relatively seamlessly with specialised wikis where each local or narrow community could manage their own authentication process.

If I could find some way of better covering living expenses short of selling my soul to assist somebody else's agenda, I could easily spend a hopefully longish retirement working mostly on similar projects. The only problem is that I'm sitting on at least half a dozen other areas where I have more again that should be made available and I doubt Aubrey de Grey is going to keep me alive long enough to get them all done.