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Considering how little we know about the process of dreaming, it's not as if we have any idea about lucid dreaming.

Polarization entanglement? ...well the "which path" part is the one I somewhat understand. So, next question: let's say we place a "which path" detector on one of the four slits. Would the interference patterns on both "screens" be destroyed, leaving us with two bars on either screen?

Why exactly is that? I think it's a valid and defensible position. Just as an example: http://www.gallup.com/poll/27847/majority-republicans-doubt-theory-evolution.aspx Now granted, belief in evolution doesn't necessarily translate to a generally better ability to reason based on evidence, but there is a rather interesting divergence here.

My preferred method would be some sort of enormous railgun type of contraption which is able to launch a small projectile containing nanorobots/utility fog. This package could be relatively teensy... thousandths of a gram or less! You could launch it with a giant railgun type of apparatus... maybe thousands of miles long. With such a combination, I don't forsee it being too difficult to get such a package relatively close to light speed, with a rather loose definition of "relatively" (and no pun intended). Half light speed? 75% light speed? It's certainly better than what we could do with a spaceship containing a large and fragile human. Once this little package gets to a suitable destination planet, it can land, and the nanorobots/utility fog can start self-replicating, and building whatever we want on the destination planet, including a "teleporter" machine that can receive a message via radio and build human beings.

My proposed experiment would have a total of four slits. To make it even simpler: how about a source that emits a single photon at a time, passed through a device (a down converter?) that produces pairs of entangled photons which leave the device traveling in opposite directions at a quasi-random angle, ala: |<--------------------- (source) --------------------->| the | things on either end actually consist of plates with two slits. Two plates, two slits, a total of four slits. Behind each of the plates is a material which provides us feedback as to where the photons are actually landing (by changing color or whatever) whenever they manage to pass through the two slits. We allow the device to run for some time. Would we not see this sort of distribution of photon "landing sites" over time occurring on both "sides" of the experiment: http://gravityandlevity.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/double-slit_experiment_results-tanamura.jpg

Is it wrong to say that the Republican base is less capable of evidence-based thinking than the Democratic base?

Science can't explain spitty slurpy!

Natural selection, being a process that finds solutions "by accident", doesn't have the advantage of finding the minimal amount of nucleotides to represent a particular organism. However many it takes is what it ends up with.

I think the freeing of hands from locomotion brought many benefits, but the immediate one is using tools. I would also suspect that early hominids had some sort of gesture language, but I doubt this was the primary driver in freeing the hands from locomotion.

If you attempted to detect which path/slit a particular photon was traveling through (on one side only), wouldn't you see a pattern more akin to this on both sides: than something like:

ifconfig <interface> hw ether <addr> e.g. ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:11:22:33:44:55:66

The "which path detector" is placed next to one of the endpoints, not the beam splitter, the idea being that flipping it on will cause "spooky action" at a distance and collapse the photons on the other side, destroying the interference pattern immediately before the beams are caused to converge onto the screen. Yes, I suppose I could've revived that thread I still don't get what the problem is. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedAnd how about this: Forget the big elaborate nonsensical description above. The device just needs to duplicate the double slit experiment, using pairs of entangled photons. Something like this: |<--------------------- (source) --------------------->| Collapsing the interference pattern on one side should collapse the interference pattern on the other side, no? The main problem I saw raised was that the photons would spontaneously collapse (due to interactions with various particles whizzing about in the "vacuum" of space, I guess?)

For working with video in Java there's JMF although it's probably not the greatest solution.

"Here's what we know: the guy we're after is either an AT&T, Qwest, Verizon, or Sprint customer" "Good enough for me! Let's get a warrant based on that description and tap them all!" "Stop being silly, we don't need warrants anymore!" Anywho, that's a rather pathetic attempt to sweep the Fourth Amendment issues under the rug. There are still huge concerns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy#Fourth_Amendment_issues

I believe (or perhaps I should say I'm under the mistaken impression) that we can use statistical analysis of the collision points of entangled photons to send information faster than the speed of light. To begin with, we need two light beams, produced by passing our source beam through a beam splitter, which is 50% reflective in one direction and 50% transparent in the other. These beams travel along for awhile and then are optically directed to interfere with each other, producing the classical interference pattern of the double slit experiment. If we are to introduce a "which path detector" on one of the beams coming out of the beam splitter, trying to figure out which path a particular photon took, the interference pattern is destroyed. When the "which path detector" is off, we see the interference pattern, and when it's on, the interference pattern is destroyed and we see only the non-interfering beams. We can place the "which path detector" immediately next to the optical devices causing the two beams to cross. It doesn't matter if the source and the destination + "which path detector" are a light year apart... as long as the "which path detector" is on the interference pattern will be destroyed. So, let's complicate the experiment, by placing down converters which produce entangled photons on each side of the beam splitter, immediately next to where the photons are originally emitted. Now rather than two beams coming out of the beam splitter, being directed at a single endpoint, we have four beams, two coming out of the beam splitter, and then subsequently passing through the two down converters, resulting in a total of 4 beams. The two down converters send parallel beams of entangled photons in opposite directions, and equidistant from the source are devices that direct the beams at each other, resulting in two copies of the interference pattern of the double slit experiment, generated by entangled photons. Provided there is nothing causing waveform collapse besides the "screens" the two beams are being directed onto... So my question is: what happens to the signal on either side if we place a "which path detector" on one of the beams on one of the endpoints? If we take a peek at just one of these four beams to see if a photon has decided to travel that direction, wouldn't the interference pattern be destroyed on both sides simultaneously, because the photons are entangled?

Yes I assume they have homebrewed their own pub/sub mechanism. I don't know how they handle delivery to the entire subscriber list. My guess would be that users are "sharded", and that the pub/sub mechanism looks up what users are on particular shards, delivers a messages to a particular shard, and allows that shard to handle writing out the particular database records, but that's just a guess. It's not a sequential process I hope, but it is still one that is stateful end-to-end. A better architecture would allow all message queues to die and lose all their data from the point a tweet is initiated, and the system could safely recover. Verification happens every step of the way. Every process hands the tweet off to the next process, through their "dumb" Kestrel (previously Starling) asynchronous message queues. Many, many queues exist which implement the pub/sub mechanism natively, and more to the point people have built distributed architectures which implement the Twitter-style pub/sub model without being stateful or requiring complex interfacing between disparate systems over a mechanism like the memcache protocol. Twitter could be done much, much better, given a proper architecture and a proper set of tools. To get to the point: Twitter could seriously use Erlang, a language designed for building these sorts of systems. Not even a faulty or malicious client. Anyone with a large number of followers strains Twitter's system whenever they send a tweet. Yes, it's based on TCP, which isn't necessarily a bad idea, especially on a closed internal network. Twitter's present architecture is bound by disk write speeds, since they log everything to disk every step of the way. It's truly a stupid architecture.

Frankly, most of what you've posted is irrelevant. What really matters is: Mac OS X: Be sure you have the latest CoreAudio drivers for your hardware Windows: Be sure you have the latest ASIO drivers for your hardware CoreAudio/ASIO provide a digital interface, so any noise emitted by your computer is irrelevant. The device containing your DAC/ADC is hopefully sufficiently shielded against external influences. If you're a user of ProTools, for example, you will have well engineered and shielded hardware made by Digidesign. Find some nice recording software, such as ProTools, Logic, or Cubase. Use this in conjunction with the proper audio drivers, and you're good to go.

Well for starters, "8 by 10" isn't meaningful. 8 by 10 inches? Centimeters? Even then, without knowing the resolution (in dots per inch/pixels per inch) you can't make the calculation. The formula is effectively: [math]Area * DPI * BPP[/math] Area: in square inches DPI: dots per inch BPP: bits per pixel will yield the number of bits required to store the image. I hope the rest follows from there. The number of colors represented by a colorspace of a particular bit depth is: [math]2^{depth}[/math]

I don't consider psychology a science. For the most part they do a good job having a rigorous methodology and pursue evidence-based research as much as possible, but they are not a science. The closest thing to a science of consciousness is cognitive science. Cognitive scientists do follow a rigorous, double-blind experimental methodology, have peer reviewed journals, and remove themselves from the experimental process. Their conclusions mostly provide for understanding of the human sensory process, and provide repeatable experiments for how human sensation of various inputs functions. Because of this, their results are repeatable among the population of normally functioning human beings. Psychology is far more complex and therefore cannot be based on the same experimental rigor as cognitive science. For what it's worth, psychologists cannot prescribe drugs, only psychiatrists can, because they are classes as physicians with diagnostic experience in mental disorders, not human cognitive function as a whole. Ed: I see this has been addressed, but it's a distinction worth reiterating.

Transmitting inner mental states is a potential application of brain/computer interfaces once they are sufficiently developed.

Perhaps by the time we surpass the 1nm barrier, we won't be making "chips" based off silicon wafers. Perhaps by that time we will have moved on to optoelectronic, spintronic, or quantum components which require a non-traditional manufacturing process. To reiterate what has already been said: who knows?

Some Democratic senators are moving to shut down warrantless wiretapping programs. Among them: Al Franken. http://washingtonindependent.com/60611/al-franken-reads-the-4th-amendment-to-justice-department-official The tacit opinion expressed by Mr. Kris both concerns and enrages me: It's okay until the Supreme Court says otherwise! That sort of attitude sickens me. ANY US Attorney questioned as to the constitutionality of their actions should have a suitable rationale in their mind. Responding "this is surreal" when questioned as to the constitutionality of their actions simply enrages me and screams ineptitude. But I get it, they simply respond to executive policy, regardless of its constitutionality. It's Bush's name on those executive orders... who are they to question it? Al Franken isn't alone in his concerns. A group of Democratic Senators has pushed the Senate Judiciary Committee to reconsider the present position on warrantless spying on American citizens: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/09/telco-spy-immunity/ What do you think?

Yes, the concept is simple: Twitter provides what's called a pub/sub system (i.e publish/subscribe). This model is prevalent throughout the Internet: mailing lists, IRC, RSS, etc. all implement pub/sub systems. Twitter is effectively backed by a content management system: subscribers get incoming tweets added to their timeline, so when a message goes out, it's delivered to all subscribers and written out to their respective timelines (e.g. in a database somewhere) The way Twitter chose to implement all of this is, well, fairly retarded: Twitter stores the state of processing a tweet incrementally throughout the system. That means if any part of the processing chain breaks down, they lose tweets! It also means that if any of these systems breaks, they have to get that particular system back online and processing its disk log to recover those tweets. And worse: everything is written to disk every step of the way, further adding to the latency of the system. A better approach is to create a system which is stateless, meaning that messages "in flight" are transient and if they are lost the system can recover, and a system which is idempotent, meaning that if a message is accidentally processed more than once it has no effect on the system. Compounding all of this is that Twitter decided to write pretty much all of the pieces of their system from scratch. While there are many robust message queues and message queuing protocols, some designed specifically around short messages (i.e. STOMP), Twitter decided to write their own message queue, in Ruby, and use memcache as their queueing protocol, something it was never designed for. Twitter leveraged none of the existing technology out there for doing what they're doing and they've been paying for it ever since.

Well, based on "looking at the graph" alone, I see the same trend exhibited in both graphs, just more pronounced in one than the other. Also, "looking at the graph" isn't exactly the most methodological approach. Can you paste the relevant analysis of the data (not your own) that these graphs are supposed to supplement? From a peer reviewed paper, I assume? Also, you never answered my previous question, but perhaps I should ask a different one: do you believe the data do not support the position that Arctic temperatures are the highest they've been in 2000 years?

As has been discussed ad nauseam both here and on other threads, there are pros and cons to both. My question was specifically addressing the fact that the reasons people are giving here for choosing Java aren't particularly unique to Java (e.g. platform independence), and thanks to the JVM apply equally as well to any JVM language.