Brilliant!

The only way you'd ever know is if there is a glitch in The Matrix...

rgb

:-)

BTW, nice recursively demonstrative 1337 handle...;-)

rgb

Everybody would at least be trying to be a net positive part of the solution instead of neutral to net negative. As I said elsewhere in the thread, the ideal is probably neither Charles Manson or Mother Teresa, it is probably more like the Boy Scouts -- do a good turn daily and try to be no worse than neutral otherwise. And don't be a butt. Very important that.

rgb

Amen. Line by line, actually. Especially your summary sentence. Although I'd take issue with "become" -- it has always been that way. It is arguably "un-becoming" fucked up, but a glacial pace compared to our capabilities and opposed by the MIC sociopaths and organized crime, who are not necessarily disparate groups.

rgb

Oh, don't worry. This is /. I'm a nerd/geek. I've spent far, far too many hours over the last two weeks playing the Android Icewind Dale remix. And I did my time with the e-cocaine known as minecraft, only quitting when I had built towers from the bottom of the world to its top and realized suddenly that I was bored to tears. Even now I can't get myself motivated to revisit it.

That's how I know that it is doing nothing but skipping sleep.

As for the vanity of the world and the pit of existential despair, hey, minecraft is a better way to cope with it than some I can think of. But I think not the best way.

rgb

And the Sudoku puzzle is good for your brain, and hence isn't all that bad for society to the extent that people with healthy logical brains are better than the alternative. Probably true of minecraft as well -- I certainly enjoyed it for a month or three, just as I enjoyed second life more briefly, World of Warcraft in its day, and am currently enjoying the rebirth of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale on my tablet. But at some point all of these things -- even Sudoku -- become a form of e-crack, a means of withdrawal from the world, a kind of meditation that replaces the struggle with a dirty scary largely unknowable world with something clean and relaxing.

In the end, it's a matter of ethical balance. If you are working long and hard enough to support yourself, far be it from me to criticize what you do with your elective time outside of that (and vice versa) as long as it isn't things like torturing puppies or crafting kiddy porn. Also, as many have pointed out, one individual probably can't fix all of the ills of the world, and so in a sense it is wasteful of your life to devote all of your elective energy in trying at the expense of all joy and diversion. Still, I think that in between spending all of one's life in a drug or mindcraft-induced haze of complete avoidance of the real world and becoming Mother Teresa there is an ethical optimum, probably quite broad, of doing no particular harm, being as responsible for supporting your own personal life and its self-assumed obligations (like children and pets) as circumstance and ability permits, and yeah, out of sheer self-interest if nothing else spending some of your elective energy on making the world a better place for everyone because that makes it a better, safer place for you yourself. It needn't even be false or religious altruism, in other words, even if your personal ethos is a single life to live, no god, no afterlife, most of us would prefer to live in a world that minimized the personal risk of being burned alive by religious zealots, being beaten or killed by thugs and bullies, starving to death because some accident robbed us of the ability to work for and feed ourselves -- and so in a very deep sense fulfilling a "social obligation" to help others is part of an optimized selfish ethic, a way of buying "insurance" through one's actions insuring others.

So how much Sudoku, or Minecraft, or WoW/BG/IWD or Diablo II Expansion is too much, compared to doing something more constructive with some part of that time? That's the choice of each individual, but I think that it is arguable that if you get to where you are building word processors out of Minecraft you m-i-i-g-h-t be a hair over the line...;-)

      rgb

Thank you for so effectively demonstrating the existential ennui that paralyzes our entire civilization. Of course if you look carefully at your replies and actually think for a moment, the answers to each and every one are obvious and there are a rather large number of talented individuals who demonstrate this every day by their actions.

The tragedy is the many competent persons who would rather build giant virtual word processors or make armor to sell in WoW than to take up arms against the world's sea of trouble and, by opposing, end them. All that it takes for evil to prevail is for good persons to do nothing, and honestly, building Minecraft engines is as close to doing nothing as it is possible to do and still breathe.

rgb

ROTFL. Ah, shades of mongo.

rgb

The really important question is whether or not at the Planck scale one finds that we are all one really, really big version of Minecraft, being played by beings that look strangely like turtles. All the way down.

Another really important question is just how much of the world's creative potential is devoted to creating meta-inventions on top of rulesets intended for something else entirely rather than, say, bringing about world peace, curing cancer, feeding the hungry, or just plain moving out of your mom's basement. Not that I am entirely without sin in this regard myself, but it is a sad commentary on the state of the world (virtual or not) that we appear to live in when solving vast and pointless artificial problems in a virtual reality is more appealing than tackling the real and serious problems that surround us.

rgb

So you're/they're saying mass-energy in any form doesn't have a "weight"? Einstein was even wronger? Rearrangements at constant mass-energy can have different weight? At the Planck scale you can say pretty much anything you like and not have much chance of your words being falsified, and while I'm not a falsificationist and agree that a consistent hypothesis can have meaning even if it can't be verified or falsified, this falls into the same scientific category that magnetic monopoles do, only tens of orders of magnitude worse. At least in the case of monopoles, I can understand all sorts of observationally true sequellae -- like charge quantization -- and they should be easy enough to observe subject only to their Bayesian prevalence and looking in the right places with the right tools. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if magnetic monopoles are eventually observed, adding a really, really important building block to our incomplete TOE. But in the meantime, I accord them only a weak degree of belief because I cannot rule out from a near infinity of hypotheses human have not thought of -- yet -- alternative explanations of the same sequellae that don't involve monopoles and because it becomes increasingly difficult to explain why we haven't observed at least one monopole yet unless there is some truly enormous energy barrier or symmetry breaking that we do not understand.

So I think that there is a very reasonable chance that monopoles exist and that physics completes in that general direction and that we'll eventually be able to take that "chance" (far too weak to call a "true fact") and turn it into a probably true fact through observation. I think that there is almost no chance that the hypothesis that entanglement alters weight at what amounts to the Planck scale ever gets any experimental validation either way. In its own way, it is like hypothesizing that dynamics at that scale is all due to neurotic invisible fairies. Which is, of course, very nearly a perfect metaphor for quantum field theory anyway.

rgb

Hmm, is that true? Granted that many of the water molecules in my body have been inside many, many living animals and passed through one way or another, surely there are (a LOT of) water molecules being made and unmade every day through ionic dissociation. It might be more accurate to say that every atom of H and O in your body has been through a creature, but not necessarily bonded into water. Then there is "new water" produced when primordial hydrogen or methane are oxidized. Finally, I haven't done the statistical mechanics of it, but the ocean (or total volume of existing water) is pretty big, turnover is pretty slow, diffusion is even slower -- I could believe that a significant fraction of "old" water molecules (or the old constituents of younger molecules) in the world haven't been through an animal yet, and of those a few are making their first pass through me. But that's difficult for me to visualize well enough even to do a Fermi estimate of the probabilities, certainly not before my coffee.

The real problem is dissociation of water into H+ and OH-, followed by the formation of H_3O+ and OH-, followed (quite rapidly) by recombination into H_2O with (probably) different H, though. When that happens (and it happens all the time and rapidly in ordinary water) it is almost certain that the H+ that leaves a water molecule in one second is not the one that rebonds to it a moment later, so water molecules have a comparatively short half-life as a unitary identity, two specific H's and one specific O have been one specific water molecule for less than a day (models indicate order of 10 hours). So in that sense, almost none of the water in my body has been in the body of any other animal, as little of the water I drink was in another animal within ten hours of when I drink it, and even it it was, if it persists in my own body for a single day very little of it is still the same water at the molecular level that it was when I drank it.

In the end it is as useful as noting that we are all stardust, that is to say, the excreta of a dying star. That too is more poetically true than literally true, but it sounds way cooler than saying that we are all made of shit (starshit or otherwise:-).

And yes, we suffer from the same dissociation problem. I am not the same me (in terms of physical constituents) instant to instant as I'm a large, complex, organism and the worldlines of all of the matter that is arguably "me" for at least some brief time if "I" am defined either in terms of chemistry or some physical envelope are a whirling blur around my macroscopic worldline, constantly being spun into my envelope and then spinning out again, with every thread tied to the threads of many, many other living beings by the will of the Norns. Quite a romantic picture, even though sure, the bulk of the ins pass through my nostrils and mouth and the outs pass through many channels including anus and urethra.

So I think I'll stick with stardust woven by the Norns, not a pile of recycled shit.

rgb

Sure, and consider that we do not yet have direct experimental confirmation that antiparticles fall down, instead of up. There's a reason for that, and it is 30 orders of magnitude.

The antiparticle experiment actually might be doable. And it is the thing that is a mere 37 orders of magnitude short of measuring the difference in weight of entangled quantum antiparticles.

So yes, you are right, one cannot be certain that there is no supremely clever way to measure Planck-length scale phenomena without using experimental probes with the energy of a freight train per particle and so on. What we can say with certainty is that at this particular moment, there is no justification for the use of any "measurable" variation of weight. No, there is no measurable variation of weight in particular, and probably no measureable variation of mass. The same laws of quantum mechanics that produce the supposed entanglement make it impossible to measure things at that resolution on a particle scale.

Now, if you could entangle whole planets, or even entire cats, matters might be different. I'd suggest building a scale and put Schrodinger's diabolical apparatus (plus a volunteer cat) onto it. Tell us what you measure regarding the difference in weight of the entangled vs non-entangled cat, bearing in mind that measuring weight is measuring so don't be surprised if the cat's state is collapsed to the classical one of live or dead but not both while you perform the measurement.

rgb

Excuse me? E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4 is the correct statement (or to be pickier, the four vector P = E/c - \vec{P} has conserved length equal to mc). Photons have zero mass, so for them E^2 = p^2c^2. You are thinking of E = \gamma m_0 c^2, which works fine for massive particles where m_0 \ne 0, not so well for light where \gamma = \infty because light travels at the speed of light.

BTW, does /. grok latex if one wraps it, that is, does $$E = \gamma m_0 c^2$$ work? Might as well try it...

No, apparently not. I suppose I'll have to look at actual documentation to see if there is any way to make it work.

Hey /. Dudes! You keep changing the site, improving it and so on! A 21st century website that cannot speak latex is so, not-even-20th century, and when that site is devoted to technology, it is vaguely insulting. Even wordpress can often understand $latex E = \gamma m_0 c^2$.

rgb

You saved me from having to reply. I do not think that this "measurably heavier" means what you think it means (or rather, they think that it means), to quote Inigo Montoya. Let me 'splain. No, there is too much, let me sum up. In addition to the fact (as you have so ably pointed out) that we will never, in the future course of the universe, be able to measure the effect predicted, it is a theoretical prediction based on assumptions in a particular circumstance. If the assumptions turn out not to be correct, it might not be any more correct than the assumptions. And since we will never, ever, ever be able to verify the prediction of measurable changes in weight -- where I am pretty certain that they meant to say "mass" and not "weight", since the former is an intrinsic property of particle configurations and the latter describes the macroscopic Newtonian force between two objects where traditionally at least one of the two is rather large, say a planet or a star -- of two quantum entangled microscopic particles in a Universe where the other forces acting on them are tens of orders of magnitude larger under pretty much all circumstances, we cannot even use this to demonstrate the empirical consistency of the unproven theory.

I'll have it done by lunch time, as long as the lunch is held in the restaurant at the end of the Universe, which I will get to via an infinite improbability drive using the plausibility of measuring the difference in weight of quantum entangled states.

Oh, one last thing. Everything is in a quantum entangled state. Literally everything. All of the time. After all, there is no "outside" of everything to perform a classical measurement and force the system to disentangle. Something to think about, while contemplating the Nakajima-Zwanzig equation -- for the Universe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

rgb

Note well that historically, MOST parallel computers have profited the MOST from parallelizing totally linear tasks. Not the tasks themselves -- embarrassingly parallel tasks, simply running many instances of completely independent code or many instances of code that is extremely coarse grained so that one can run almost all of the task as linear code with only infrequent communications with a "central" controller. Classic examples are plain old multitasking of the operating system with code that doesn't make heavy use of bottlenecked resources (the reason most users see some small benefit from e.g. quad core vs single core processors, as there is enough often enough work being done to keep 3-4 cores busy at least some of the time without much blocking, and this keeps the processor itself from thrashing by providing the illusion of parallelism through multitasking with time slices. It works best if the cores have independent caches and contexts and if there is sufficient task affinity. Also, classic "master-slave" parallel computing, where e.g. a Monte Carlo computation might spawn N slaves, each one with its own random number generator seed, and run N "independent" samplings of some process that are only infrequently aggregated back to the master. Again, the characteristic is lots of nearly independent serial computation with only short, infrequent, non-blocking, non-synchronous communications back to some collection point. Two programs that often were used to demonstrate the awesome advantages of scaling at the limits of Amdahl's law were parallel povray (rendering can be broken up into nearly independent subtasks in master-slave) and a parallel Mandlebrot set generator/displayer (where each point has to be tested independently, so whole subsets of the relevant parts of the complex plane could be distributed to different processors and independently computed, with the master collecting and displaying the results.

Sadly (well, not really:-) modern processors are so damn fast you can get to the accessible bottom of the Mandlebrot set with almost no perceptible delay from rubber banding even with a single core, so the latter isn't so dramatic, but the point remains -- quite a lot of work that can be done with multiple cores (arguably MOST of the work that can efficiently and easily be done with multiple cores) is trivial parallelism, not parallel programming. Instance 1 is the richest source of advantage for a parallel system, and tasks that will scale out to 1000 cores are almost certainly ONLY going to be trivially/embarrassingly parallel tasks because Amdahl's law and the complexity of unblocking communications between subtasks is a royal bitch at 1000 processors no matter how you architect things. SETI at home, maybe. Solving a system of partial differential equations on a volume with long range interactions not so much.

The fundamental problem with 2 and 3 is that they have to be hand coded. Really pretty much period. Sure, you can get away with getting some advantage from using e.g. a parallel linear algebra program as a link step in a program that can run on serial resources, but typically the gains you can get are limited and will not scale well, certainly not to anywhere near 1000 cores, even for case 2. To use 1000 cores for a tightly coupled parallel computation where every core talks to every other core per step of the computation -- well, that just isn't going to happen without an incredible (literally) boost in interprocessor communication speed, reduction in communication latency, elimination of resource blocking at both the hardware and kernel level. The problem at some point becomes NP complete (I suspect, of course pending the issue of whether P = NP etc) and simply working out ways for the communications to proceed in a self-avoiding pattern to eliminate collisions or delays due to asynchronicity is itself a "hard problem", forget the problem you're actually trying to solve.

So I'm largely with Linux on this one. Advantages to parallelism at the OPERATING SYSTEM level probably saturate in almost all contexts long before one can put 1000 cores to use. Even if you provision every core with its own L1, its own L2, its own L3, even if you have unprecedented mastery at the hardware level of locking in parallel pathways to main memory, you have some serious hardware limitations and economic tradeoffs to consider. Here is a nice little article outlining some of the tradeoffs between comparatively expensive L1 and less expensive L2:

http://www.extremetech.com/ext...

I can believe that 64 cores can still be manipulated in ways that are beneficial, in server environments where there are likely to be 64 semi-independent threads (that only rarely seek to access shared blocking resources) that can be kept on-chip and in both chip context and and cache. 128 cores I start to get to be very skeptical. By 1024 cores, there just isn't going to be MUCH benefit except for a tiny fraction of the work people might buy CPUs to do, and the effort of writing sufficiently efficient code to put all those cores to work is itself a daunting, expensive thing to consider.

rgb