Time machines are easy. Just bury something vaguely valuable (with a
note) in a safe place no-one can find (at least for a while). When it
becomes valuable and found it will fund the needed research to build the
machine for you and come back and get you.
There was a nice SF story based on this concept. The little boy who
buried his prize possessions was terminally ill with no funding for the
cure. Wish I could remember title and author: anyone?
Thanks
Robert
PS SF in this case stands for Science Fiction and not any of the notable
US cities.
On 1/25/10 10:35 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
Douglas Roberts wrote:
As long as we're dreaming, let's bring back Time Warp. One that
works, this time.
I used to think I needed to spend all of my time developing
time-travel so I could go back in time to do all the things I didn't
get done while I was wasting my time on time-travel. But then I
realized it was going to take more than one lifetime for me to build a
time machine so I thought maybe putting my time into developing
cloning technology so I could work on the problem in parallel would be
the answer.
Then I realized that I wouldn't be able to decide how to distribute
the work among myselves so I decided to work on the problem of
parallel universes so that rather than breaking the problem up into
smaller pieces and then putting the pieces back together, I could
instead pursue all of approaches to the problem including the
extremely low-probability but high-payoff strategies.
Then I realized that in the multiverse, this is already happening and
one (many) of my alternate selves has already cloned himself so he
could do the bruteoforce parallel solution to developing a time
machine so he (they) could go back in time to solve whatever the
original problem they didn't have time to solve in real time.
And then I realized that there had to be many more versions of me in
the multiverse that had gone through this gedankenexperiment and
realized the futility and silliness of it all.
Somewhere, some version of me is actually doing productive work.
- Steve
--Doug
On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 10:01 PM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
No, just computer architectural ignorance.
I think building a traditional "super computer" is likely an
error. Maybe we could get Roger Fry and the Connection Machine
gang to give it another shot. We should be thinking thousands of
processors with at least mesh memory, if not hyper-cube.
But even better would be gigabit networking or more to more than
a thousand nodes within the state, each running "interesting
architectures" including massive GPU farms.
Most of the current thinking is your basic application server on
steroids. Google will eventually beat all these efforts because
they are thinking plumbing/networking with scalable data stores
(NoSql). Just one smart node is not the way to go. State wide,
easy access networking with massive, low latency storage is the
first step. The institutions will add the surprises.
-- Owen
On Jan 24, 2010, at 9:19 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
political bullshit?
http://www.kob.com/article/stories/S1381807.shtml?cat=500
--
Doug Roberts
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
--
Doug Roberts
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
------------------------------------------------------------------------
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
