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archives push me to post webmail :: xenii mail the hive :: for trading and raiding polymorph :: a cosmographia universalis chrisnelson.ca :: chiefwagonburner has a blog fortune cookie distro :: x's distro
I've uploaded Since its designers encourage its free distribution, you can find it on our server, here. Its size is 4.85 megabytes zipped.
jimmy bydesign My toilet seat cover is broken. I had no choice but to take it off completely. Thankfully the seat is still functional; I have to play guitar somewhere. But who designed my bathroom? See, the towel rack is right above the toilet, on its right side. This morning my towel fell in. Blah. Let me get coffee and perhaps I'll edit this message into something meaningful. bydesign My heart is broken. I had no choice but to break it off with her completely. Thankfully the friendship is still alive; I have to get my feelings out somewhere. But who designed this mating game? See, things like jealousy are always hanging above our heads. This morning I thought about the past 5 years. Blah. Let me get some more coffee and perhaps I'll edit this message into something meaningful. bydesign Green donuts. Mmmmm.
jimmy Just walked into the office. Got myself a cup of tea (it's tea with a cheese roll, coffee with a donut) and logged into the slackers lounge. Slackness is the natural state of humans. It is a proverb that we take the path of least resisitance. Anyone not taking this path is really screwed up and needs professional help. I mean an electric current given the choice of passing through two resistances choses to pass through the smaller resistance. A ball half way up a hill choses to roll down rather than up. We all know that yet we tell our children to work harder. Stress is the fuel of civilisation (or is it a toxic by-product of it?). Friday today! I feel a dream coming on tonight. Roger over and out.
Ashok Oh, Physics. With a capital P. I remember when I was younger, back in 7th or 8th grade, I was so excited about Physics and astronomy. I thought it was my life calling, that I could find absolute truth in physics somehow and I was such a fanatic about it. It'd take out Physics books from the library. Strangely enough, this year I'm actually taking Physics now, and it's been very...ehhhh. Well, more eehhhh due to the large amounts of work I have in my other classes. See, I'm cut out for slackdom. I've explained this to every single person in my classes already. I'm taking all honors classes including AP US History. Everyone else in my class is used to having to work their asses off, stay up till 10 or 11 reading things carefully, taking large amounts of notes and getting up early again at 5 to study again or for some sort of swim/running/sports pratice type event. I am not. Certainly my efforts made in studying have been less than these people whom I shall deem "overachievers" (they are certainly very good people, just a bit overachieving) and I've still gotten good results. But it's going to crash down on me. Not to mention I've been working harder than I have last year -- I've been going to bed at 10, 10:30 with my poor little girl eyes burning out of their sockets and no time to work on my zine or my distro. I'm not cut off for this kind of work! I can work hard, sure, but not for something I don't even particularly care about! I think it's trickery of some sort -- I'm not supposed to be in these honor classes if I'm slaving away and doing so much work, and drowing under the loads and loads of essays, reading assignments and tests. Not to mention my english teacher last year never really taught me to write a proper essay. Which isn't a bad thing, but it just means I'm not going to do well this year in english with my wannabe British blonde teacher who is absolutely insane and wants everything done "university style" and perfect. She is crazy. Today her profound realization to share with us was "You honors students should never swear. Remember, honor students do not swear. They also do not get drunk either, after all, a true gentleman or lady knows when to stop." fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. there, I'm done. (can you tell I have an essay due tomorrow? no, really, i'm not procrastinating)
x The BBC article brought this to mind. Baa!
coop ![[4D Hypersurface graph]](http://www.xenius.org/hive/hyper4d.gif) I looked all around for the executable and didn't see it anywhere and couldn't swim through the impossibly high number of ads. I'm not sure, but there may be one in the hive but it's difficult to tell for sure. ;) <---BOWIE NO!!!!! A friggin' wink?? Yeah. I'm pretty sure it was freely available, but not for distribution. I will delete it at this time tomorrow. _______________________- And an unrelated topic: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/europe/2281011.stm And looking through the DPGRaph site, I found this: http://members.tripod.com/modularity/ I haven't checked it out myself yet. -jimmy -jimmy
jimmy Y'all are embarrassing me with this "Coop rules" stuff. Unless you really are willing to join my campaign staff / secret society to elevate me to Intergalactic Empress, which has always been my dream. *g* Right now, I am only the queen of Zicam, (the zinc stuff you squirt in your nose when you have a cold, Bowie help me, it actually works) cough drops, and bad herbal tea. I am very glad that the blog is to everyone's liking. Hey Jimmy, they were selling donuts that color last spring. They were supposedly watermelon flavor, with jelly beans on top. No doubt enjoyed by the same kind of people who like that questionable ice cream with pieces of actual bubble gum in it, that you chew when you're done eating. The universe is a nasty green watermelon-flavored donut. This explains a lot. As somebody who didn't even take calculus, I must agree with Ashok that there is a lot of physics you can digest without it. Graphs help a lot. I was never really afraid of math, it just made me angry. Very, very angry. (fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate... shut up, Yoda) I shouldn't have been skipped ahead in math in school, I still can't do long division worth shit. But my entire yuppie-spawn* peer group was going from regular sixth-grade math into the "special" class, where we really did nothing except play Oregon Trail and kick each other under the tables. I'd hate to have been left out of those fond memories. The cold meds must be making me crabby this morning. Sure, that's it... the drugs. *Disclaimer: Not me! Bowie, no.
coop A lot of material to think about. Thanks for reminding me of many things regarding relativity and some new stuff. That is the problem with this subject I think - have to keep a lot of material in mind at the same time. Can not really think of this piece-meal. That was a cool diagram. Already thinking of getting DPgraph2000 for my son. The maths was beyond me I'm afraid. I've been afraid of maths all my life. And now I am finding that my son (Rahoul has just started A levels) is experiencing the same thing. And, ironically, I am trying to reassure him that there is nothing to be worried about. And doing the maths with him I am learning it for the first time the second time round. Only the first few weeks yet. I don't think that we will cover Lorentz transformations though! I think a person can still think about a fair amount of physics without maths. That sounds defensive so I'll change the subject! Panic attack over imaginary numbers? Wow - I'm now looking forward to the picturebook 'Feeling Mathematics'. I remember when I first read about 3D space being the surface of the exploding universe. I found it hard (and exhiliriting at the same time) to think of an atom buried under the full mass of Mount Everest as being on the surface same as an atom floating in the air. Some surface eh. Once it struck me that memory must be involved somehow in the 'operation' of the universe. Not human memory, I'm talking about the universe having a memory. Not necessarily a long term memory. In fact just enough to make this universe a 'two-stroke engine'. And I would like to propose gravity as that memory. Don't know what this means. Einny tells us that in a relativity universe gravity is required so the an observer accelerating can say she (for it is Coop!) is at rest. Why is it so important to have a relativity universe? Why can't we have an absoulte universe? Could consciouness not exist in an absoulte universe? 'Plump virgins', I would have asked for at one time Jeffron. Now on my altar I just ask for a donut. Oh and some coffee to dunk it in. Talking of coffee...
Ashok Welcome Ashok. You sound like some sort of Incan or Aztec God. If so, I will offer up a sacrifice at the earliest opportunity. I was following yer post and Jimmy's up until the picture of the radioactive green donut that symbolizes our universe when all I could think was 'Mmmmm.....radioactive green donut universe..... *slobber* Actually, relativity is a very important Slack issue. Just as the clocks were different on planes, the same goes for very tall buildings. A worker at the top floor, for example, will actually work less time than the worker at the bottom. By, like, a billion billion quadbillionth billionth of a nanosecond. But it's true. I've worked it all out, and it's on my time card. They did the same experiment with atomic clocks on one of the Apollo missions and that came out right too. The thing is, this concrete idea that we have of time, in relativity it is a function of speed and space (or distance between moving objects). So it is not concrete actually, it depends on where you are. Which makes a sort of sense. If everyone is on a different train, and all the trains are moving at different speeds but passing the same tree, that experience of the tree is going to seem very different to all the viewers. But the tree, and the viewers, and the inside of the trains, they all exist. But they might not all be able to use the phone at the same 'time'. Everything I learned about relativity comes from a book called "Einstein: A Picturebook of Relativity". I got it because looking at Einstein's actual work made me all fuzzy-headed. This book is great b/k it has these pictures of Einstein that aren't photos or drawings but photos of an Einstein action figure. How cool is that! Screw superheroes. I want the physicist action figure collection. Tycho Brahe, with his Removable Gold Nose and Exploding Guts! Newton with his Apple and Anti-Social Shoo Kick! Galileo with his Mournful Expression of Religious Oppression! Okay, I gotta go post my rant and sleep. Oh, and I just have to add 1) How awesome it is to be able to go back and ADD 2) How f-ing beautiful an add-less page with diagrams and equations is and 3) how much Coop rules in figuring out how to make this work. I caint wait for Blogs: The Picturebook.
jeffron x Space too is known to contract as well due to the same effect, which I believe is called the "gamma factor". Time and space are intimately combined in some way I would like to understand. Speeding objects shrink in the direction of change, but not because their mass is compressing, but because space is. The cartoonists were right after all. Sort of. A new article in the Scientific American supports my suspicions that “space is finite”. If Space itself has a toroidal shape (a donut), then looking at the stars would be like looking into a the gaping infinity produced when two mirrors are facing one another. You would just see copies and copies of the same old galaxies, but they’d look different because you’re seeing them over and over again. The only thing is, with the vastness of space, some of those copies are billions of years older than others. It would be like looking at yourself at 12 years old, then 24, then 36, etc. The thing though, is that they are saying space has the shape of the surface of a torus. This is so quite different. We are not inside the donut, but three dimensional space is exists on the surface of a four dimensional donut. A good analogy which was also used in the article is the old Atari game "Asteroids". In Asteroids, flying your ship to the top of your screen and beyond places you at the bottom of the screen at the same horizontal position you left the top of the screen with. Moving right beyond the edge of your screen places you at the left edge of the screen. This is essentially like the surface of a donut expressed in two dimensions.  Yummy, I made that using a program called DPgraph2000. It's yay cool. Wow! I'm really only putting these pictures in here to test how cool blogger is, and I have to say: COOP IS ROCK!! “Wow, what a mindjob.” –the traitor in “The Matrix” I'm not sure, Ashok, but I think that clock was there next to the other one as expected because it had "experienced" the passing of time differently. Less time had passed for it then for the other clock, though they are both in the present and positioned next to one another in space and damn, you asked a mind boggling question. I actually don't know what to think of it anymore. The equation (Lorentz transformation) says it all, though. t=1/((1-(v^2/c^2))^(1/2)) Damn those parentheses look awful. Hope this works.  Notice that if v increases without bound, t becomes imaginary (t is time and is the symbol on the left side and v is velocity, which is like speed but with direction). What the hell does that mean? The imaginary plane runs orthogonal to the other mathematical planes. It's a new world (at least for me). I once had a panic attack because of imaginary numbers. [tcint post #1007] I’m not sure about this for sure. I’m going to do some reading in my spare time this week. I broke out my old relativity book. Written by the man himself. His books are fun. He has quite a sense of humor. He’s also a total slacker. TOTAL slacker. Xenius? I think though, that time travel is a very confusing issue. For example, in the movies, when one travels through time, space is completely ignored. Indeed, if you and I were to travel 1 day into the future as they do in the films, we would actually end up floating in deep space because the earth would have long since left the position it once was in on its usual course and has not bothered to wait a day for us to return to our secret labratory in Siberia or wherever. This is the difference between how the idea of time travel and the reality of time travel work, I guess. Very much like the difference between how fire and ice actually work when pitted against one another in life, and in comic books. Iceman and Firestar (the comic book characters) have opposing powers, to comic book junkies. Hence their powers behave as opposites do when combined. They cancel each other out, compliment each other in odd ways, add up to zero, etc.. Iceman and Firestar both have powers of ice and fire respectively. Comic book writers then appeal to the ideas of fire and ice, and so if they try to use their powers against one another (even though they're friends) the writers neglect all of the nasty and complicated effects that come concurrently with the mixing of fire and frozen water. The city below doesn’t get scalded by thousands of gallons of near boiling water everytime Firestar has to battle Iceman because his mind is under Magneto’s control. Ah well. They’re comics. Comics produce brilliant young boys and girls whose ideas are better in theory than in application. Every day. Every single day, someone in one of the neighboring houses plays "Let it Be" on the piano. Now I love this song. I just don't want to get sick of it. If they're practicing piano, I think they should move on to more difficult areas of play, because they've mastered the "fake book" version of this classic. Man. How bad would I feel if I found out the person had no arms and was playing the song with their feet? I think though, that that is not a reason to feel bad. To feel bad for someone like that is an expression of sympathy in place of what your true feelings would be if the person were not disadvantaged, right? In other words, you feel badly for saying it because somehow you have judged that that person deserves your sympathy, and that is just suck. So yes. Even if the person has no arms, I am dead sick of the f-ing song. Yeah. Right.
jimmy Thank you Coop for the invite. I get out so seldom that your invite is the highlight of 2002! Now I'm here I suppose I better say somethig. Hmm. I know - there was a documentary a couple of years ago about two synchronised clocks (accurate to some foolish degree like millionth of a second or so). Anyways one clock was put abroad a plane and taken at speed around a circuit (a rather large one you understand). On landing the two times were compared and lo and behold the one that had been enjoying the ride was showing a time a little behind the earth bound one. And the time lag was exactly as predicted by Einstien. So far so good - but what I want to know is if the clock was on an earlier time why was it there next to the other one? Surely it should be in the past? Time travel means that doesn't it? If I travel to the past then I'm no longer here in the present. But there it was, bold as brass, showing an earlier time and in the present. Maybe time is an illusion after all. Then it struck me that when Einny coined the phrase space/time (or whoever it was) what he meant was space and te illusion it (space) gives i.e. time. I was just becoming comfortable with this when it struck me that I don't really know what distance is either. Sure I can hold my hands apart and say this is 10 inches (wishful thinking!) but just what is a distance?? 'Funny the things that strike me', said the man throwing up a stell ballbearing and failing to catch it.
Ashok Damn, you are so Ziggy Stardust. Actually, it's more like Damn, you are so Miss Speck and The Giant Librarians.
jeffron x Actually, I think it should probably be Giant Mess.... sheesh. I had quite the wild and crazy rock star weekend. goodness. Josh and a couple of my other friends had a party in the city on saturday night called Digitall, which was pretty fun, but when it was over at 3am, Josh and I decided to hit the road and drive 2 1/2 hours up to Willits to go raver camping at the Sunset Campout. It's a party that some friends of mine throw every year up on some old hippies' land. It's very fun and quite hedonistic to say the very least. Anyhoo, we showed up at 6am and danced and took pills and whatnot. As my friend Gideon said, "Fair fuckin' play, Librarian. (another nickname...) Anyhoo, we had a blast indeed, but it took us 12 hours to drive home Sunday night because we were oh so very tired from not having slept at all. We fell asleep in the back of my car a t a Walmart parking lot for 5 hours. tee hee hee... ah yeah. Giant Mess...
Miss Speck and the Giant Librarians Awww. Speck, the girl with eyes that stars make wishes on. That's so sweet. Much more charming than Giant Miss. What about Miss Giant Speck?
jeffron x Hey everybody, don't forget to hit "publish" when you are done with your posts. Otherwise, you'll be able to read it on the edit screen in Blogger, but it will not appear on the web. Thanks!
coop 
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