The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Started by Unbeliever, April 25, 2017, 07:55:14 PM

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Baruch

Quote from: SGOS on May 22, 2017, 08:40:31 AM
Just open the box and see if the cat is dead for fuck's sake.  What's the point of a philosophical discussion?  If you want to know, get off your damn lazy ass and look.  Forget the arcane formulas, or bullshit alternatives (the cat is both dead and alive).  Get real.  The cat is either alive or the cat is dead, and I don't give a shit which it is, but don't make a Federal case out of it. 

And what asshole would put a vial of poison with some complicated timing device in a box with a cat?  Most people just put the cat in a sack and throw it in the lake.  I'll bet people wouldn't put up with Schrodinger's thought experiment if it was a cute little puppy instead of a cat. Schrodinger has issues with cats.  It's just that macho thing.  He compensates for his sexual insecurities by talking about tormenting cats.  He thinks it will impress women.  Sometimes it does, but he still has a little wiener when it's showtime.

For some people, statistics is their god, at least 50% of the time ;-)
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Hakurei Reimu

Quote from: Baruch on May 21, 2017, 11:36:03 PM
Superposition is ... spooky action at a distance ... or even just spooky action up close.  Care to defend the consistency of that?
It's only inconsistent because you've decided that it's inconsistent. The math works, even if the action at a distance is spooky â€" the universe is not required to be non-spooky to you. Still can't use it as an ansible, which is the only thing that relativity requires.
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Baruch

Quote from: Hakurei Reimu on May 22, 2017, 05:18:45 PM
It's only inconsistent because you've decided that it's inconsistent. The math works, even if the action at a distance is spooky â€" the universe is not required to be non-spooky to you. Still can't use it as an ansible, which is the only thing that relativity requires.

Typo? "ansible"

As a demigod ... if I am a Republican, 2+2 = 3, if I am a Democrat, 2+2=5.  There is no inconsistency, because accounting comes from the barrel of an anti-aircraft gun - Kim Jong Un.  Want to challenge that?
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Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Unbeliever

Quote from: SGOS on May 21, 2017, 10:51:30 AM
@Unbeliever
Did you pick anything up from the second reading that you missed the first time?
No, I don't think so, but I enjoyed it twice as much.
QuoteOne thing I wish would have been explained is the mechanics that would end the world.  Was it just man's stupidity, a nuclear war, a quantum fluctuation that destroys all matter, or something else?  While the mechanism was identified, the underlying mechanics were left to the imagination.
That's why I'm really hoping for a sequel. The author also didn't get around to resolving the whole issue of how these kalachakras could be in that situation. After all, that was one of Harry's main reason for wanting to work on the quantum mirror, to find out how he could exist.


God Not Found
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Unbeliever

Quote from: SGOS on May 21, 2017, 11:12:51 AM
  Now I can't say I ever understood Schrodinger's thought experiment to begin with, and in my research, it turns out that Schrodinger himself never believed any of it either. 

As I understand it, he was trying to ridicule the whole idea of QM. Much as EPR was trying to ridicule that "spooky action at a distance" stuff coming out of the theoretical models.
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Baruch

Quote from: Unbeliever on May 22, 2017, 08:31:41 PM
As I understand it, he was trying to ridicule the whole idea of QM. Much as EPR was trying to ridicule that "spooky action at a distance" stuff coming out of the theoretical models.

Entanglement is real, and spooky.  At that time it was simply a thought experiment to say ... something is wrong here.  Turns out something is rotten in Denmark after all.  And it isn't in the model.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Hakurei Reimu

Quote from: Baruch on May 22, 2017, 06:17:53 PM
Typo? "ansible"
I thought the reference to relativity would give you a good guess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible

Quote from: Baruch on May 22, 2017, 06:17:53 PM
As a demigod ... if I am a Republican, 2+2 = 3, if I am a Democrat, 2+2=5.  There is no inconsistency, because accounting comes from the barrel of an anti-aircraft gun - Kim Jong Un.  Want to challenge that?
What's there to challenge? Accounting is not arithmetic, or math in general.

Quote from: Baruch on May 22, 2017, 09:32:30 PM
Entanglement is real, and spooky.  At that time it was simply a thought experiment to say ... something is wrong here.  Turns out something is rotten in Denmark after all.  And it isn't in the model.
If it wasn't in the model, how did Einstein et al know enough about it to construct thought experiments to argue against it in the first place? Entanglement was implied by QM theory long before it was observed and proven real.
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Baruch

Quote from: Hakurei Reimu on May 23, 2017, 07:15:50 PM
1. I thought the reference to relativity would give you a good guess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible
2. What's there to challenge? Accounting is not arithmetic, or math in general.
3. If it wasn't in the model, how did Einstein et al know enough about it to construct thought experiments to argue against it in the first place? Entanglement was implied by QM theory long before it was observed and proven real.

1. Thanks.
2. Tell that to a CPA ... they add, subtract, do other things (not necessarily honestly or accurately).
3. Per our old buddy Joe, Einstein was a god ;-)  I prefer Feynman, at least he thought QM was real.  Thought experiments are ... fictions.  Einstein guessed well, sometimes.  Just ask him how the Unified Field Theory is going.  Einstein was always better at physical intuition (mental spooky) rather than math (his buddies had to help him).  Feynman was very good at math.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Hakurei Reimu

Quote from: Baruch on May 23, 2017, 07:35:30 PM
2. Tell that to a CPA ... they add, subtract, do other things (not necessarily honestly or accurately).
Arithmetic tells you what numbers you should get when you add, subtract or do other things for mathematically consistent results. It's up to you to decide what those numbers mean, and to use numbers connected to reality. If your model of how money behaves is wrong, why is it arithmetic's fault that you got a funny answer?

Quote from: Baruch on May 23, 2017, 07:35:30 PM
3. Per our old buddy Joe, Einstein was a god ;-)  I prefer Feynman, at least he thought QM was real.  Thought experiments are ... fictions.  Einstein guessed well, sometimes.  Just ask him how the Unified Field Theory is going.  Einstein was always better at physical intuition (mental spooky) rather than math (his buddies had to help him).  Feynman was very good at math.
Thought experiments may be fictions but they are sometimes useful. Sometimes. I still find it bizarre that you think that the phenomenon of entanglement is a "contradiction," or "inconsistent." Please show how that is the case.
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Baruch

Quote from: Hakurei Reimu on May 23, 2017, 09:54:55 PM
1. Arithmetic tells you what numbers you should get when you add, subtract or do other things for mathematically consistent results. It's up to you to decide what those numbers mean, and to use numbers connected to reality. If your model of how money behaves is wrong, why is it arithmetic's fault that you got a funny answer?

2. Thought experiments may be fictions but they are sometimes useful. Sometimes. I still find it bizarre that you think that the phenomenon of entanglement is a "contradiction," or "inconsistent." Please show how that is the case.

1. Exactly the problem.  Credit vs debit.  Your credit is my debit, and vice versa.  So adding or subtracting depends on whose ox is being gored, which balance sheet is being looked at.  In that case accounting is much more than arithmetic ... just ask the IRS.

2. Consistency in context.  You can always reduce your axioms to just one, and it is necessarily consistent with itself, but a trivial example.  Entanglement is a contradiction to classical physics (that context) .. but not to QM (itself).  But a Platonist would say that QM always was the one truth, and that the classical guys simply got it wrong.  Planck had a better magic Greek organ than Newton.  Or the optimist would say we are getting closer and closer to the one true Greek organ.

Nothing is contradictory to itself (if it is not total nonsense) ... except actual databases, which might have contradictory (implicit or explicit) data entries, and frequently do.  If you have a perfect database, then no worry.  Just think of Facebook ;-(  Frequently business rules have to work on that inconsistent data ... hence the attempt thru Relational Database theory, to avoid the more obvious fallacies.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Hakurei Reimu

Quote from: Baruch on May 23, 2017, 10:58:27 PM
1. Exactly the problem.  Credit vs debit.  Your credit is my debit, and vice versa.  So adding or subtracting depends on whose ox is being gored, which balance sheet is being looked at.  In that case accounting is much more than arithmetic ... just ask the IRS.
So in other words, what is the sound of one hand clapping?

Look, it's not as if the IRS came up with this numerical voodoo that you're on about. You being on the hook for some amount is actually kind of valuable for the lendee. You did promise to pay that guy back with interest. On the other hand, you have ready money that you might not have been able to raise on your own in a short enough time to matter. So there is actually some value to being a debtor as well.

These patterns occur again and again, governments or not, so we may suspect that they are a feature of money and commerce than any coersion on the part of any authority.

Quote from: Baruch on May 23, 2017, 10:58:27 PM
2. Consistency in context.  You can always reduce your axioms to just one, and it is necessarily consistent with itself, but a trivial example.  Entanglement is a contradiction to classical physics (that context) .. but not to QM (itself). But a Platonist would say that QM always was the one truth, and that the classical guys simply got it wrong.  Planck had a better magic Greek organ than Newton.  Or the optimist would say we are getting closer and closer to the one true Greek organ.
You know, I like it how you think that somehow science is so conceited to think that it ever has the final answer. While most people outside science think that science is a list of "final answers," anyone who has been on the inside, doing real science knows that this is merely appearances, and that "final answers" are merely an approximation, much like classical physics is to quantum mechanics and the relativity twins.

There have been discoveries that definitively answered a huge number of important questions about how our world works, and it's usually these that people think of as "final answers." This is only an approximation. A good approximation, but still an approximation. Nobody expects the principle of energy conservation to be overturned anytime soon, and if it were to occur, we would know where they would occur. By any reasonable criterion, this is a "final answer," yet it still might even after this be subject to revision. Furthermore, since scientists thrive on new discovery, they will always be probing those frontiers in hopes that one of those "final answers" might give a bit, or even break altogether.

The classical physics that you learned in high school is an approximation, but on the scale we normally work and live it is an approximation that is so good that any error in prediction is going to be overwhelmingly due to errors in measurement or characterizing the system than in the fact that it is an approximation. But the fact that classical physics is an approximation has been known from at least the 1910's when physics realized that Einstein was right and that classical physics didn't square well with Maxwell's electromagnetism, and the problems cascaded from there â€" but only on the scales of the very small, or the energy levels of the really fast, or the gravity fields that are really strong. Otherwise, classical mechanics works extremely well.

Quote from: Baruch on May 23, 2017, 10:58:27 PM
Nothing is contradictory to itself (if it is not total nonsense) ... except actual databases, which might have contradictory (implicit or explicit) data entries, and frequently do.  If you have a perfect database, then no worry.  Just think of Facebook ;-(  Frequently business rules have to work on that inconsistent data ... hence the attempt thru Relational Database theory, to avoid the more obvious fallacies.
Databases are not lists of unprocessed data. They are catalogued and organized into tables, which will very quickly show you the most common inconsistencies. Consistency checks upon entry of data into the database catches the rest. You don't use databases to answer questions that you don't know how to solve, and as such, you would already know the relevant consistency constraints.
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Baruch

#41
Consistency checks on data entry into databases?  I work with one of the largest DB on Earth ... and it is a mess, because of human interaction with it.  There is always a data entry override, and it is used liberally.  See with DB, what users want, is free text, no fields, not tables, no data type control ... just free text.  Users wanna be free.

DB consistency only happens in toy applications built in college by students, and are checked by TAs.  That doesn't happen in the real world ;-(  And even if you use tables and fields, there are anomalies that develop in reports, per relational database theory.  This is why there are multiple levels of "normalization" to control that.  But it isn't completely controlled, you can only rule out the most obvious anomalies ... assuming the data is any good (which it often isn't).

The IRS partly does what Congress tells it, and partly does its own thing as "interpretation" of the Congressional mandate.  And yes, like a stiff drink, debt is OK in moderation.  But don't do too much of it.  Certainly billions is too much, let alone quadrillions (CDS market).  And yes, authority never coerces ... right Dr Mengele?

Yes, Hitler approximately won the war ... so much for approximations.  All written out numbers, have a finite number of digits, they are all rationals.  It is impossible to explicitly list an irrational number.  But it is possible to imagine them, even if they aren't imaginary numbers.

Energy conservation was overturned by Einstein, Einstein.  And mass-energy conservation was overturned by the same guy, in gravitational waves and the Big Bang (yes, he fought against universe expansion ... and it still is freaky).  Adding additional digits onto known constants ... that is what they thought physics would be in the 20th century, 120 year ago.  They were wrong, arrogant Victorian pricks that they were.

Your explanation of approximation is ... humanities level, very odd for a statistics guy.  Pi is approximately 3.14, and better approximately 3.14159 ... but that isn't what makes Newton different from Maxwell/Einstein or QM.  Already, Planck, trying to make a more efficient incandescent bulb ... overturned all of fucking Newton.  Maxwell (as perfected by Einstein) already did too.  There are equation tricks, called approximation, that classical physics is to reality as h-bar approaches zero ... but it isn't zero ... there is no approximating.  That is like saying the circumference of the Earth is approximately zero, relative to the size of the solar system.  Muddled explanation.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Hakurei Reimu

I don't believe for a second that you are actually working with a real database, Baruch. I don't and didn't believe you when you said that you were an engineer working on the Hubble, even tangentially. I've known engineers and you don't speak like one, nor do you seem to have any expertise that intersects with any engineering field. You certainly have no expertise that intersects with any scientific field. When you talk about energy conservation being overturned by Einstein, my only response is "Really?" When you talk about mass-energy conservation being overturned by Einstein in general relativity, my only response is, again, "Really?" Because I have no less than four books on relativity (general and special) and they say otherwise. When you say that Plank overturned Newton, again, I have to say, "Really?" Wow! Newton was wrong, completely and totally! The NASA engineers (you know them, right?) who sent man to the moon and interstellar probes to the planets will certainly want to hear about that, because they've been using Newtonian mechanics to calculate orbits so they must be told or they'll miss... oh, wait, they didn't. Huh. Imagine that.

And of course your expertise with history is just as questionable as your expertise of... well, anything. You somehow imagine that "Hitler won the war" to be of the same league of historical approximation as predicting when a space probe will arrive at a planet to be a mechanical approximation. Of course, we know that isn't true. But the problem is not with approximations, it's all with you, with your false equivalency bullshit. You're angling to make yourself sound good even in the face of intellectual failure. Your word nonsense sounds to me like I always suspected it is â€" excuses to distract from the fact that you have no technical knowledge whatsoever and are trying to bullshit your way through this forum.

I've had enough. Not only is the modern world and modern science beyond your comprehension, you seem to revel in that fact. You invoke paraconsistency like a shield in many of your arguments, when in my opinion, paraconsistency is merely a way to make "giving up" into something respectable-sounding. Sorry, it's just more excuses.

And you're very good at making them.

And you know what they say about people who are good at making excuses â€" they're seldom good for anything else.

Call me a "bad professor" or whatever excuse you want to make for yourself. I don't care anymore.
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Baruch

I know you are the biggest "expert" on the Internet.  I can see your gigantic ego, from here, even without the Internet.  Seek help, dude.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Unbeliever

God Not Found
"There is a sucker born-again every minute." - C. Spellman