"George Takei as Chief Physicist"

Helmsman, swordsman, physicist... the guy can do everything!

Yes! Thanks; I hadn't seen that.

Yes, see NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality, by Scott Aaronson.

But the great thing is, they propose an experiment to *test* whether this is happening.

by John Gribbin, (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, 105(2):120?125, Feb 1985). In that story a powerful particle accelerator seemingly fails to operate, for no good reason. Then a physicist realizes that if it were to work, it would effectively destroy the entire universe, by initiating a transition from a cosmological false vacuum state to a lower-energy vacuum state. In this story, the explanation of the failures assumes a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. So instead of explicit backward causality, there is effective backward causality: only the branches of reality with equipment failures contain observers; therefore, observers can only experience histories with equipment failures. The effect is the same.

I also discussed this idea in the context of novel models of computation in my MIT Ph.D. thesis, Games, Puzzles, and Computation (section 8.2; also published as a book by A.K. Peters). The idea was a bit similar to Nielsen and Ninomiya's proposed experiment. It turns out that by connecting an accelerator capable of destroying the universe to a computation depending on random numbers, one could in principle solve problems that are otherwise intractable. I termed this "doomsday computation", as a variation on the similar concept of "anthropic computation" proposed earlier by Scott Aaronson.

Surely, you mean how many cubic beard seconds is that?

Of course it really took place... just not in our timeline. Duh.

What the hell are Romulans doing in this movie anyway? The first time anyone in the Federation ever saw a Romulan was after this movie is set (Balance of Terror).

The point is that if you're an iPhone developer, you're stuck with sucky camera APIs. There are better, private APIs, which header files are available for. But if you use them, your app will not be approved.

The current (legal) ones really tie your hands.

I've been using LaTeX with subversion for collaboration for years. The LaTeX learning curve is much more an issue than the subversion learning curve.

But if the issue arises at all -- that means you are collaborating, and hopefully somebody in the group knows how to use LaTeX. And that's the best way to learn LaTeX.

No, not quite. You're assuming that the ascending node of Pluto lines up perfectly with the current axis of the Earth, so that when Pluto is 17 degrees above the ecliptic, it's also at its most northerly. But that isn't actually the case.

Pluto's highest declination (angle above the plane of the Earth's equator) is actually only about 24 degrees. So, in fact Pluto does *not* ever pass directly overhead in Illinois.

Unless you want to wait for the Earth's axis to precess to the right alignment. That cycle takes about 17,000 years.