I think that the GOP is in full-on panic mode, and doesn't care about legitimacy / shot at winning for this election.

They (the party elites) will do absolutely everything they can to prevent Trump from getting enough delegates to lock up the nomination. Hence Colorado and Wyoming. Those actions make it seem like they prefer Cruz, but actually they dislike him close to as much as they hate Trump.

Although it is still mathematically possible for Cruz (559 delegates) to get enough delegates to lock up the nomination (1237 needed), realistically it is out of reach (826 still available). Trump (756 delegates), on the other hand, could well manage it. So, the GOP strategy is to avoid that at all costs by encouraging people to vote for Cruz or Kasich in primaries, or even better to encourage more state GOP offices to hold a smoke-filled room convention that grants all the delegates to #NeverTrump instead of even bothering to let people vote.

If they manage that, the contested national convention will get ugly. They (GOP elites) would turn on Cruz instantly -- cast aside. In any other election cycle they would have turned on him already, but with juggernaut Trump, they have to use him to get to the contested convention.

So the question becomes who if not Trump or Cruz? Who will the GOP try to push in? I think that right now, they aren't as worried about answering that question as they are about trying to get there. That being said, they have some options:

Mitt Romney was their first thought. He took some tentative steps towards playing along with the GOP plans, failed to generate any excitement, and has since faded back into relative obscurity. But he remains an option.

Next up was Paul Ryan. A lot of the GOP see him as the future of the party; the "great white hope". There was a flurry of activity making it seem like he was going to take up the flag, but has since denied that he would be interested in or even accept getting the nod. However, he was cagey and close to as vocal against getting the nod to be speaker of the house, and then accepted that. You never know.

Kasich would be another option. He's relatively benign, and wouldn't offend many more of the republican base than the GOP is already ready and willing to offend in order to prevent Trump (and to a lesser extent Cruz).


Of those, I tend to think that Romney is the most likely choice for the GOP in the end. I think it would be extremely stupid to foist "future of the party" Ryan into this election, which would certainly taint his political future. Kasich makes a lot of sense, but on the other hand, "in for a penny, in for a pound" -- as long as the GOP is willing to go to these great lengths to keep Trump out they might as well just own the illegitimacy of it, shoot the moon, and hand pick someone that a) they have complete control over, and b) has nothing to lose in terms of political future. Voila, Mitt Romney.


I also don't think that the GOP will just throw in the towel if Trump locks down the number of delegates needed for the nomination. I'm sure they already have some last-ditch, scorched earth preliminary plans in place for that contingency.

However, I think that they essentially already have thrown in the towel with regards to the election in general. At least to a sufficient degree that they don't give a rats ass about the chances for whoever is the republican nominee winning. That's a *distant* priority behind NOT TRUMP, among other things. Which is pretty stupid, because the likely nomination of Hillary on the democrat side gives them what should be a *golden* opportunity to steal the election. IF they could come up with a vaguely tolerable candidate ... which they won't.

Knowledge and personal choices don't work the way you want them to, Doug. People hear things and then it processes as logical or illogical -- and beyond that it is not intrinsically associated with action, let alone revolutionizing the world. (I love you, man.)

Action may occur, but that is associated with predetermined tendencies in an individual's mind. I see life as being like stuck in a mandelbrot set (except even more fucked with chaos and shit): You want to get over to one cluster, but you're quickly swept up in the pattern of c, c² + c, (c²+c)² + c, ((c² + c)² +c)² + c, (((c² + c)² + c)² + c. You want to be rational but it is not easily accomplished; perhaps even a complete impossibility. Your truth is only truly applicable to your location in the set and you will never be able to reach the other areas of the set to deliver the truth.

Similar to any fractal, visualized or unvisualized complex mathematical set, there is truth, but the truth that serves one series of nodes (people, regions, cultures, education levels), does not consistently serve or do justice for another node, even if it is the truth. Your truth may be met with hostility or confusion.

One example I can think of in real life is the inconsistency between the western civilization node and the eastern civilization node, wherein we have learned through logic and historical context, that the rights of one people should extend to all people, men and women; yet for some, religious belief is so ingrained within the human brain, it creates a node where they see their restricted freedom as a freedom itself -- I speak of the hijab. This is where truth fractals and the pattern of determinism is becomes more readily apparent. Women in hijabs find it difficult to excercise in a standard hijab, so someone, in an effort to promote healthy lives in Muslim communities, invented a sports hijab -- like the sports bra of the Middle East. Those within the node wherein Islam is true, see this as empowering; while those outside that node, see only restriction to women's rights: confusion. Regardless of how logical you may state it from outside the pattern, it will not serve as truth in the way it serves you in your own ever evolving, shifting node.

The way that I see it is, we live in a biological nightmare where freedom is only an illusion. You'll run around like a wind up toy until you're dead. Everything that is and will be is a series of things fucking with other things; exploding in rage, or taking it solemnly up the ass. But but but -- no, sorry, that's why you don't give a fuck. You found the secret of life -- the true enlightenment that harmony is disorder and that free will is a lie. Enjoy it because it is and ever will be.

You can easily tune a piano in just temperement (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation), but for one key only - it would sound rubbish in all other keys (some more than others), and thus you wouldn't be able to change keys during the song. The advent of equal temperement meant that you can change the key as you play, which is a major advantage.

Tuning a piano in equal temperement is to tune each string "absolutely", each being slightly off. If you want a just intonation in all keys absolutely in many different keys at once, you'd have to change the tuning or the strings every time you change the key during the song.

The problem is not a lack of technology, the problem is rather that it is a mathematical impossibility.

I thought it was clear-cut, but there appears to be some debate:
"Whether mathematics itself is properly classified as science has been a matter of some debate. Some thinkers see mathematicians as scientists, regarding physical experiments as inessential or mathematical proofs as equivalent to experiments. Others do not see mathematics as a science, since it does not require an experimental test of its theories and hypotheses. Mathematical theorems and formulas are obtained by logical derivations which presume axiomatic systems, rather than the combination of empirical observation and logical reasoning that has come to be known as the scientific method. In general, mathematics is classified as formal science, while natural and social sciences are classified as empirical sciences."
More on the subject here.

Closest we got to *mathematics.

A collision with two cars head on with a combined impact speed of 200km/h is not actually equivalent to this test at all. If you do the math you actually work out that two cars each travelling at 100km/h hitting head on generate the same forces on their occupants as a single car hitting a fixed barrier at 100km/h. (reference, sadly light on mathematical proof)

The 5th gear test at 193km/h resulted in occupant deceleration of 400g (100g is survivable, although you can expect injuries such as detached retina, and I have heard of someone surviving 179g). Robert Kubica's accident resulted in a peak g-force reading of 75g.

I thought the video made a good point, but rather different from the one I assumed it was going for before watching.

As I was finishing up my senior year of High School after 4 years of taking crap for being a nerd etc., a friend/acquaintance of mine was starting her freshman year. She got picked on also, probably worse than I had had it. She made it through 1 semester before dropping out. Then she got a part time job for a half-year, took night classes at the local community college, and got her GED.

At the time, I thought she was making a terrible decision by not sticking it out and trying to get through High School the usual way -- 4 years of hell. But then, the next year she ended up at the same University where I was, both as Uni-freshmen, and she handled the much more mature University environment just fine.

It ended up completely turning the tables for me, to the point that I thought that her path of dropping out -> GED -> Uni was actually objectively superior to my suffering through the more traditional path.

So, that's what I thought "don't stay in school" was going to refer to.


But the actual message is good as well. The best classes that I had in Middle and High School were more practical things. But oddly enough, the best examples of that for me were my math classes. I had the same teacher for Geometry, Algebra 2, Pre-Calc, and Calculus (AP, so equivalent to Calc 1 at a University). He stressed the real-life applications of advanced mathematics by doing lots of word problems, and only teaching topics that he could point to concrete, real-world applications for. And by letting us use calculators for everything as long as we could explain WHY specific operations were needed to answer the questions.


...So, long-winded response boiled down:
I like the message. More practical stuff in school is better. And feel free to drop out -- especially if doing so is just a shortcut to further education at a University, Vo-Tech, or whatever.

http://videosift.com/video/Numberphile-Problems-with-the-Number-Zero

Skip to 10 minutes for 0/0 if you don't want the background. A quick spoiler clue is that x/x = 1; Also, 0 x 0 = 0, which implies the answer is 0. Indeed, there are a number of different mathematical constructs one can make to demonstrate that the answer is any number one likes.

Mathematics needs to be uniform and consistent, and an operation that can return infinite legitimate values depending on your approach is a disaster as far as this is concerned. Suddenly the whole enterprise of mathematics is ruined. Better to call 0/0 undefined.

Into English and cookies. How many cookies does nobody get when you don't divide cookies among no people? Does this make sense?

Into speed. If I am travelling at speed and you want to measure it you need distance travelled and time taken. If I travelled 100 kilometres in 1 hour you can say I'm travelling 100kph. If I travelled 50 kilometres in half an hour (50 / 0.5) , you can say the same thing. 25km in quarter of an hour (25 / 0.25) and so on and so forth. All come out at 100kph. But what if you decide to measure how far I travel in 0 seconds? I travel 0 metres. 0 / 0 = ? 0kph? And if you took this narrowly focussed measurement every few seconds you would see that my speed remains at 0kph but I manage to cover 100km in an hour anyway. Maths is now broke

I'll keep this fairly brief for once but, why is everyone so hung up on the idea that the theoretical "simulation" is somehow distinct from "reality"?

To put it another way, what are the laws of physics themselves?

We do appear to inhabit a reality defined by laws we can describe mathematically. The mathematical models may be abstracted, but whatever they describe is presumably in some sense analogous in its "true" nature right? (even if we can't get at it directly)

If you take the leap into thinking that reality may be more mathematical than physical in nature (or rather that "physical" is a property of what we could think of as mathematical phenomena interacting in the right way), then questions about who's computer were in kind of become moot.

If reality itself is fundamentally mathematical in nature, we don't need a computer in which to run it, so much as reality itself is the computer.

I really don't think it's an either or thing, more like a shift in how we think about the concept of "reality" itself. Even if an experiment could prove that the universe is holographic in nature, it needn't change anything about it's validity as a "real" thing.

The "simulation" and "reality" needn't be mutually exclusive, merely different ways of understanding the same phenomenon i.e. that we exist and experience things.

That's true only if there's only one person in the simulation. If we are supposed to ALL be in a simulation, you either need a separate simulation for each person, or one that combines all simulations into one.

The problem here is he makes silly assumptions in his math. It's like he's saying 'you can either be wet, or dry, so mathematically I can say 1/2 of people are underwater.'. It simply doesn't follow.

And his argument also completely ignores the 'why'. A simulation takes energy to operate, reality just operates on it's own. Why would it make sense to use the huge amounts of energy and effort to 'trap' entities in a simulation and keep them there? The whole 'humans as batteries' thing was the worst part of the Matrix by far, IMO. You know what makes a better energy capture/storage device? Just about anything.

No, WOW toons don't know anything....but you know they're toons when you interact with them, no?
There's one hell of a lot of assumptions and mathematical fudging in his argument.

As I understand it, there were actually quite a number of female programmers in the 60's and into the 70's particularly at NASA and in the defense industry. The work started off as converting mathematical equations to machine instructions and then encoding them on punch cards, and this was seen as sort of 'secretarial' work so there wasn't a lot of objection to women doing it (they typically were well educated and had degrees in mathematics, but this was as far as they could go professionally). The mathematical equations were written by physicists and mechanical engineers ("men's work"), but it was the people doing the encoding who where the first proper computer programmers as this became a profession unto itself.

I don't understand this desire to try and "one up" scientific thought, as if the concept of a demiurge were religion's alone. It's not for man to decide what is truth and what is not, it is for us to discover only that which we may mechanically use, whether through ystem theories, mathematic constructs, or physically engineered structures.

Science may be harmonious but only if it is honest and seeks only that which is not fueled by attachment to being. Any reward, whether in heaven or on earth is a materialistic concept which separates us from the body of human experience. Rather than naturally progress within our own capabilities, we obsess over grand concepts of our narcissistic, non transitory being and the entity of of a God. Meanwhile, our minds suffer at the leaps and bounds that imagination inflicts upon our honest beings. Behavior modification for the sake of a concept you would seek to elevate over the hard earned work of the scientific process.

Again, I don't understand why you pounce on these sudden epiphany driven straws lying amidst a rigorously disciplined field as the sciences. You have straws with no tangible truth, only the ability to prove that, yes, you are a pattern detecting being. I can find a 1000 faces of a 1000 gods in a spackled piece of drywall, don't mean any one of them is real or if any were, that it's the god that I've put a name to.

Now for a lesson in system analysis: determining whether the pattern you've detected within a metaphysical concept is congruent with reality as we know it, or have you detected a false positive. Also known as the proof between a Christian God and every other concept of the concept of God, through all its faces back to its ultimate being: Infinity. The Infinity could be ANYTHING.

tldr: Actually, games do this all the time, but usually only for water surfaces!

The reason for this is that the way you render a proper reflection is to "flip" the camera to the other side of the reflective surface plane: looking down on a lake, you'd render the water reflection from the point of view of the camera looking up from under the water surface, flipped over. This is called "planar reflection". In order to do this, you render your entire scene again, so it's not cheap. Also, the reflection only works for that one plane: if you had two altitudes of water (or two differently angled mirrors) they'd be on different planes and so you'd have to render a reflection for each one.

You can't render curved surface reflections this way, though. For example it doesn't work on a car (what plane would you flip the camera over?). For that, the trick is called "cubic environment maps". I won't go into the details, but it only really works well for faking reflections on objects since it shows the correct view from a single point. You can create them dynamically for things like racing games, but they require 6 scene renders (one for each face of the cube) for each environment map.

Half Life offered both techniques for water reflections, so one could fire that up and compare them that way.

This demo seemed to use environment maps for the mirrors and I suspect all of the other shiny surfaces.

Note that these techniques are to get detailed reflections: specular lighting (where you don't reflect an image, but instead mathematically simulate simple light bouncing) is easier and cheaper, since it's just math to get a color and strength.

You could do planar reflections for every mirror, but it's a full scene re-render for each one so your frame rate would tank or you'd have to take out other features. Compromises!

Game graphics is all trade-offs and smoke and mirrors: it's our job to fake things and make you think the game is doing sophisticated simulation when actually it's doing as little as it can to get as much as possible.