Panoramix

python 2.2 raised the flag for me

That's not how I understood it. It was more like: As a human, you can mentally rotate an object, recognize a face and do all these extremely expensive computations effortlessly. For doing that, you ne…

Thanks RiderOfGiraffes, I always find your links quite handy. You somehow bring back to my mind Saunt Lora's proposition in Anathem.

It's currently on my waiting list. Right now I'm halfway through "Musashi", which I'm finding quite motivational. I'm not sure how the two books compare though.

Well, you have wormholes (but they require exotic matter) and anything with singularities in it; there is the Gödel solution of a "rotating Universe" (which could be true for a "parallel" universe), t…

As I understood it, this pertains to a specific implementation of a time machine i.e., the Gott time machine. The jury is still out on other implementations, though of course everything seems to point…

The idea of negative|imaginary mass has been studied in more depth, particularly in the context of general relativity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_matter …

I totally agree. In this particular case, Slim became over-the-top wealthy from buying the monopoly "Telmex" right after it was privatized--with some help from the corrupt government. From wikipedia:"…

This list is rather one-sided. What about gravitational waves, nuclear fusion, turbulence, super high energy cosmic rays?

This is he giving a talk about this: http://www.themonthly.com.au/origin-universe-and-arrow-time-... …

That's kind of beautiful. Non-programmer here, so can somebody point me to an application of these beasts? can I use this kind of thing to e.g., speed up something? Not that it would have less merit …

Nice post. I agree with the sentiment, but I'm afraid that it's not really possible to "fight" with everything you read (mostly due to time constraints). I couldn't agree more with the "explain stuff"…

Did you read the book? If so, would you recommend it?

I agree. I used to think that this kind of behavior had no place in this forum. I was scared yesterday, when I noticed that hn had 4 front-page stories in common with reddit. Perhaps limiting the numb…

Actually, there are a number of possible attacks against a quantum cryptosystem; e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography#Attacks …

The comments I've read so far present interesting POV's backed up by data and observations. I don't see how that qualifies as "angry emotional quibbling". I don't see the problem with discussing scien…

What I got from it is that it depends on what kind of measure you use for the randomness of the deck. Using a certain measure they obtain about 7, and with another one they get 11-12.

Indeed, there's no link. But I believe it's the first chapter of his book: http://www.amazon.com/Nemesis-Death-Star-Richard-Muller/dp/1... His website looks rather messy, but as a 65 years old astro…

But there are still fundamental limits, like the speed of light or the Bekenstein bound that forbid arbitrarily powerful computations.

The problem is that the scales involved are so ridiculously large that it could easily take 1 billion years to simulate one second. Even with 1 million years per second, simulation of a thousand years…

One of the problems in these matters is that everybody's definition of god is completely different. You seem to tie it to some Gödel-incompleteness-teoremish thing. This need not be the case for most …

I found the comparison with Microsoft a bit ridiculous.

I agree, but keep in mind that it has been only one day. This could keep going for some more time.

Will hope that it is a major breakthrough, or will say it is a major breakthrough in order to get more funding. One problem is that in science there are (for the most part) no major breakthroughs, but…

He's not the best example as he died at age 93.