I knew Dr. Kaku's use of the word "parasites" would be like a dog whistle to conservatives. But it also doesn't make any sense. In a world with replicators you would be fully self-sufficient just by owning a replicator. If no one else is conceivably taken advantage of (no host), the parasite analogy falls apart.

>> ^hpqp:

Oh please, this is just bad science. It's barely even worth cheap sci-fi. Where do you get the energy to run the replicator, eh? Does entropy ring a bell? Even without replicators humans are draining the earth of it's energetic resources (including the "sustainable" ones)...
Nice philosophical mindgame, like all utopias for that matter, but nowhere near hard science.
philosophy


Our world is full of achievements that were once beyond the ability of hard science.
How can humans possibly communicate over hundrends of miles? We're already yelling as loud as we can.
How can we possibly run faster than cheetahs? Our legs can't move any faster!
How can I kill Og standing all the way over there? Rock not throw farther!!!

Ultimately, all life shares one common goal; the quest for energy. From single cell creatures harvesting light, heat or chemical reactions to survive...all the way to modern humans with their agriculture, technology and complex social structures; the journey of evolution has been the race for more efficient means of acquiring and managing energy.
Our economies are elaborate means of trading energy.
Our societies organized to maximize the collection of energy.
Our governments created to ensure equitable distribution or energy.

The result of millenia of advancement is that we now expend much less energy to acquire a larger return of energy. And all that excess energy creates the complex world we live in.

But there is the potential, in the future, for technological advancements in science that will create a massive paradigm shift. There is the potential for accessible energy to become inexhaustable. And when the cost, in terms of human effort, of energy approaches Zero....everything changes.

Will the end of human need result in a utopia?
LOL...never. Because we'll always have griefers.

Oh please, this is just bad science. It's barely even worth cheap sci-fi. Where do you get the energy to run the replicator, eh? Does entropy ring a bell? Even without replicators humans are draining the earth of it's energetic resources (including the "sustainable" ones)...

Nice philosophical mindgame, like all utopias for that matter, but nowhere near hard science.
*philosophy

In reply to this comment by alien_concept:
And once more for Guy Fawkes and the desperate wish that someone can come along and replicate his gunpowder plot in the modern age! *promote


i wuv joo!

And once more for Guy Fawkes and the desperate wish that someone can come along and replicate his gunpowder plot in the modern age! *promote

In 1981, Frank Tipler[3] put forth an argument that extraterrestrial intelligences do not exist, based on the absence of von Neumann probes. Given even a moderate rate of replication and the history of the galaxy, such probes should already be common throughout space and thus, we should have already encountered them. Because we have not, this shows that extraterrestrial intelligences do not exist. This is thus a resolution to the Fermi paradox—that is, the question of why we have not already encountered extraterrestrial intelligence if it is common throughout the universe.

A response[4] came from Carl Sagan and William Newman. Now known as Sagan's Response, it pointed out that in fact Tipler had underestimated the rate of replication, and that von Neumann probes should have already started to consume most of the mass in the galaxy. Any intelligent race would therefore, Sagan and Newman reasoned, not design von Neumann probes in the first place, and would try to destroy any von Neumann probes found as soon as they were detected. As Robert Freitas[5] has pointed out the assumed capacity of von Neumann probes described by both sides of the debate are unlikely in reality, and more modestly reproducing systems are unlikely to be observable in their effects on our Solar System or the Galaxy as a whole.

Another objection to the prevalence of von Neumann probes is that civilizations of the type that could potentially create such devices may have inherently short lifetimes, and self-destruct before so advanced a stage is reached, through such events as biological or nuclear warfare, nanoterrorism, resource exhaustion, ecological catastrophe, pandemics due to antibiotic resistance.

A simple workaround exists to avoid the over-replication scenario. Radio transmitters, or other means of wireless communication, could be used by probes programmed not to replicate beyond a certain density (such as five probes per cubic parsec) or arbitrary limit (such as ten million within one century), analogous to the Hayflick limit in cell reproduction. One problem with this defence against uncontrolled replication is that it would only require a single probe to malfunction and begin unrestricted reproduction for the entire approach to fail — essentially a technological cancer — unless each probe also has the ability to detect such malfunction in its neighbours and implements a seek and destroy protocol.

wikipedia my friend

>> ^Januari:

Ok... she is pretty amazing... but what an absurd song... You can pretty much tell that some composer decided... "'I'm going to write this to sound ridiculous hard to sing... as well as pretty much just sounding ridiculous...".
I don't know... maybe someone with an ear for opera can tell me i'm crazy but find listening to that painful.


The composer wrote this quite probably for a talented interpreter of the period who was actually able to pull this off and make it sound whack!....Real easy to compose pieces impossible for the human voice to replicate, it's that fine-line between impossible and well-executed by very few that makes this piece an etude in extremes.

Dimensions. I want dimensions. Either it can be replicated or it's bullshit. So gimme dimensions.

Signed,

Science.

The cosmic irony is, through science, we have the ability to replicate the picture and put it back the way it was with an almost exact replacement.

Boner: It is still confusing...

Astrophysicists have created the most realistic computer simulation of the universe's evolution to date, tracking activity from the Big Bang to now -- a time span of around 14 billion years -- in high resolution.

Created by a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA) in collaboration with researchers at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), the Arepo software provides detailed imagery of different galaxies in the local universe using a technique known as "moving mesh".

Unlike previous model simulators, such as the Gadget code, Arepo's hydrodynamic model replicates the gaseous formations following the Big Bang by using a virtual, flexible grid that has the capacity to move to match the motions of the gas, stars, dark matter and dark energy that make up space -- it's like a virtual model of the cosmic web, able to bend and flex to support the matter and celestial bodies that make up the universe. Old simulators instead used a more regimented, fixed, cubic grid.

"We took all the advantages of previous codes and removed the disadvantages," explained Volker Springel, the HITS astrophysicist who built the software. Springel, an expert in galaxy formation who helped build the Millennium Simulation to trace the evolution of 10 billion particles, used Harvard's Odyssey supercomputer to run the simulation. Its 1,024 processor cores allowed the team to compress 14 billion years worth of cosmic history in the space of a few months.

The results are spiral galaxies like the Milky Way and Andromeda that actually look like spiral galaxies -- not the blurred blobs depicted by previous simulators -- generated from data input that stretches as far back as the afterglow of the Big Bang, thus portraying a dramatic cosmic evolution (see the above video for a sneak peek of that evolution from four billion years after the Big Bang).

"We find that Arepo leads to significantly higher star formation rates for galaxies in massive haloes and to more extended gaseous disks in galaxies, which also feature a thinner and smoother morphology than their Gadget counterparts," the team states in a paper describing the technology.

Though the feat is impressive -- CfA astrophysicist Debora Sijacki compares the high-resolution simulation's improvement over previous models to that of the 24.5-metre aperture Giant Magellan Telescope's improvement over all telescopes -- the team aim to generate simulations of larger areas of the universe. If this is achieved, the team will have created not only the most realistic, but the biggest universe simulation ever.



>> ^BoneRemake:

this video is a waste without addition information.
what am I looking at. spiraling gas' or something.
what is the significance, why did nine people upvote something they probably do not understand.
what part of the universe is this ? why didnt it start at the beginning ?
WHY WHY FUCKING WHY.

If everybody can agree that the show, its essence notwithstanding, has new characters in new situations then it becomes difficult to sustain the idea of theft. I'm just glad that whatever happened we got some cool content out of it.
In reply to this comment by kymbos:
Really, short of stealing the actual gags to the letter, they've couldn't steal more than the exact concept replicated in a new Olympic city. I read comments from Clarke that they saw it as lifting the essence of The Games, and he saw it as a theft in spirit, even if he couldn't prove it in law. I tend to agree with this. And while I take your point, I really think the 'in defence of art' argument is the last refuge of the one-eyed.

Really, short of stealing the actual gags to the letter, they've couldn't steal more than the exact concept replicated in a new Olympic city. I read comments from Clarke that they saw it as lifting the essence of The Games, and he saw it as a theft in spirit, even if he couldn't prove it in law. I tend to agree with this. And while I take your point, I really think the 'in defence of art' argument is the last refuge of the one-eyed.
In reply to this comment by gorillaman:
Well, we can start with the understanding that faux-documentaries are now fairly common, and that the olympics as a huge public event is very attractive to satire. So two different shows being produced along these lines isn't completely unlikely, and once you have those two shows then there are always going to be similarities.

I don't know much about the idea that The Games was being pitched to the BBC and who from those meetings went on to produce Twenty Twelve. There is a suggestion that the makers of The Games had gone so far as to lend the writer of Twenty Twelve DVDs of their show before he went off and wrote his, which is pretty hilarious.

Regardless I think it's fair to say Twenty Twelve isn't a direct copy of The Games; it had its own tone and told its own jokes. (Whether you think those jokes are funny or not.) Stealing the general idea 'satirical mockumentary about the olympics organisers' would actually be totally legit - that happens all the time and is pretty much how art advances, by building on earlier ideas; stealing lines and situations wouldn't be, but I don't see that happening. If I were plagiarising The Games the genetically-engineered horse and 94m 100m track would have gone straight into my script, for starters.

In reply to this comment by kymbos:
Ok, I've only watched one episode, but the similarities were overwhelming to me. How is it different?

The cradle is better than the track because it allows for larger weights, where the track would require a denser material or hollow particles; but the track is easier for measuring incoming and outgoing force because on a steady grade, it’s simply a measure of distance, which is easy to capture roughly, even without a camera.

If momentum = velocity*mass, then doubling the velocity will double the momentum. Using the cradle, if you drop a ball from very very close to the first stationary ball, a single ball will move from the other side and move a very very short distance. If you then drop the ball from perpendicular, a single ball will move from the other side, and rise to (nearly) perpendicular. I have seen this much in my own observations. I don't think we need to do any calculations to understand that the impact velocity in the first essay is way less than half the impact velocity in the second essay (we don’t need exact numbers; we just need to know that the impact velocity is more than double). That means we have met your criteria for increasing the momentum to more than that of two balls at the first velocity, yet one ball still comes out.

A mental model to demonstrate my theory of “two particles in = two impacts = two particles out” is to imagine a bit of sponge between the last two balls in a Newton’s cradle. Pull the second ball out (which will push the first ball ahead of it) to a great enough height that the momentum of the outside ball’s impact is enough to completely squeeze the sponge and cause a second impact wave. The second ball would impact measurably later than the first, and before the ejected particle came back. Pretty clearly, two balls will emerge from the other side. This is what I think is happening on a micro scale when two independent balls are dropped together.>> ^oritteropo:

Thanks <img class="smiley" src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/smile.gif">
I was actually going to suggest that the first part of the experiment should be fairly easy to replicate, with a track and marbles or ball bearings or similar. Unless you have a constant grade the velocity (and therefore momentum) calculations will be a bit tedious, and it occurs to me that angular momentum may have some effect too, so perhaps a video camera and some marks on the track (or sensors and a microcontroller) to directly measure the velocity just prior to impact would be easier. To confirm or disprove my assertion you want to keep increasing the momentum of impact until it's more than the momentum of a two balls, and see what happens.
There are videos of a Newton's cradle type setup only with different sized balls, I might go looking tonight.
>> ^messenger:
That shoulda been @oritteropo too.

Thanks

I was actually going to suggest that the first part of the experiment should be fairly easy to replicate, with a track and marbles or ball bearings or similar. Unless you have a constant grade the velocity (and therefore momentum) calculations will be a bit tedious, and it occurs to me that angular momentum may have some effect too, so perhaps a video camera and some marks on the track (or sensors and a microcontroller) to directly measure the velocity just prior to impact would be easier. To confirm or disprove my assertion you want to keep increasing the momentum of impact until it's more than the momentum of a two balls, and see what happens.

There are videos of a Newton's cradle type setup only with different sized balls, I might go looking tonight.

p.s. Didn't find that one, but did find a good explanation of the one vs two ball collision issue in Newton's cradle:



Based on that, I wonder if a slowmo of the ball in the original video might've shown that it bounced slightly before coming to rest?
>> ^messenger:

That shoulda been @oritteropo too.

My 7 year-old is way in to Technic and Mindstorm. I guarantee that once he sees this he will be trying to replicate it.

God bless Legos!