tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-253047532024-03-12T22:05:18.838-04:00The Czar DictatesBecause I think I'm so funny.The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.comBlogger190125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-91157764572595029382020-12-12T07:19:00.000-05:002020-12-12T07:19:28.533-05:00A Brief History of Trumpistan<p>January 21: A coalition of eighteen states led by Texas announce their succession from the United States, forming a new country reviving the name The Confederate States of America, or CSA. The Internet is thrown into a frenzy over whether to call them The Confederacy of Dunces or Trumpistan.</p><p>January 22: The CSA issues a correction to say that they meant "secession" all along, but a software bug planted in Google Docs in collaboration with Hugo Chavez auto-carroted it.</p><p>Later that day a massive convoy of gun-carrying CSA supporters in pickup trucks adorned with Trump 2020 flags arrives at Fort Sumter. Upon arrival they discover that the fort, which has not been an active military installation since 1947, is only accessible by boat. They mill around in confusion for an hour, fire a few shots in the air for the look of the thing, and return home.</p><p>January 23: Mexico announces plans for a wall along its border with Texas. So does New Mexico.</p><p>January 24: The United States recognizes the CSA and announces the closure of all Federal facilities in the CSA, including research labs, airports and military bases, decimating the economies of many towns. The Federal government also announces that drivers' licenses or other ID from secessionist states will no longer be accepted for any purposes. Many citizens of the CSA are stranded in Federal states, unable to board a plane, rent a car, or buy alcohol or tobacco. The latter causes widespread panic among the CSA refugees.</p><p>January 25: Various Federal states announce that cars with plates from the CSA states are no longer legal on their roads and must be registered in a Federal state. Drivers from West Virginia get pulled over in massive numbers in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Unable to pay the fines, their cars are seized and crushed into scrap metal, in most cases significantly increasing their value.</p><p>January 31: The Federal government announces that as of February 1, it will no longer pay Medicare claims from the CSA. There is widespread panic among the citizens as they realize that their new government is completely incapable of providing them with diabetes supplies or Hoverounds. </p><p>February 1: The CSA states meet in constitutional convention at the Austin Convention Center. They meet in the Starbucks as the Center itself is fully booked between an arms and ammo show and a pharmaceutical sales rep convention. Donald Trump is elected Interim President For Life.</p><p>February 10: The other six members of the Colorado River Compact announce the expulsion of Utah and plans to build a canal to divert the river around that state. Desperate, the male citizens of Salt Lake City take to the streets in a massive protest. Since this is Utah, it is the most well-behaved, conservatively dressed street protest in the history of the Americas. The women of Salt Lake City fortify the protesters with huge quantities of green Jello.</p><p>February 11: Green Jello shortages across Utah drive panicky protesters back into the streets. There is polite rioting and orderly looting of grocery stores. In desperation, many turn to yellow and red Jello.</p><p>February 28: CSA citizens begin to notice that no Federal Social Security payments have been received all month. Unable to pay their rent or afford food, white citizens forage for essential supplies, often liberating them from stores without paying, while black people loot.</p><p>March 31: After a month of chaos and disorder, Texas asks to rescind its secession. The Federal government accepts it back under strict conditions regarding the fair conduct of elections. </p><p>April (various): One by the one the other CSA states also ask to rejoin the Union. They are all readmitted, except for the Dakotas, which nobody wanted in the first place.</p><p>April 30: The CSA is formally disbanded. Donald Trump remains Interim President for Life. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-17288006359589414872019-06-09T08:31:00.005-04:002019-08-16T21:23:32.477-04:00Turning in my cool card<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="dfd6v" data-offset-key="fieb9-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<span data-offset-key="fieb9-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">OK, confession time. This is a list of some of the things and people I never really found funny, even though I may have pretended to like some of them at the time just to be cool with my friends:</span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Goon Show</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Spike Milligan</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Kenny Everett</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Steptoe and Son (Sanford and Son for those of you reading this in American)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Lord of the Rings </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Young Ones in general, Rik Mayall in particular</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Absolutely Fabulous (other than Joanna Lumley)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ben Elton</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Blackadder, Mr Bean, and frankly most of Rowan Atkinson's output except for a handful of sketches</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Alexei Sayle</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Pretty much the entirety of the 1980s UK alternative comedy scene, come to think of it</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bill Murray, except Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">National Lampoon, especially Chevy Chase </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">John Hughes</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">John Waters</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And just for completeness, I lost patience with David Lynch somewhere around 1990. Great, David: nothing is what it appears to be. What the fuck is it then?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Phuh. Feels good to get that off my conscience.</span></div>
</div>
The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-14864365455068823922017-01-10T20:15:00.002-05:002017-01-10T20:15:33.070-05:00Why we don't live in a simulated universeThere's an oft-repeated theory that our universe is a simulation -- a computer program (or equivalent) created by some higher form of intelligence. The modern popular form of this claim is generally attributed to philosopher Nick Bostrom, although the basic idea goes back much further.<br />
<br />
And the only problem with this idea is that it is completely wrong.<br />
<br />
The basic "simulation argument" goes like this: imagine that an intelligent race becomes intelligent enough and powerful enough that they could simulate a universe in a computer. (We already do this ourselves, in a very crude sense, when we create computer models to simulate weather or traffic or any other aspect of the real world.) Our hypothetical aliens are able to build such rich simulations, they actually contain simulated intelligent beings of their own -- and those simulated beings would (somehow) perceive themselves to be conscious.<br />
<br />
And here's the clever twist: according to the argument, those simulated beings could become intelligent enough to build their own simulated universes, with simulated intelligent beings of their own, who in turn... Eventually, there would be an enormously large pyramid of simulations-within-simulations. And from a simple probabilistic perspective, it's enormously unlikely that we happen to be in the topmost and only real universe (and sometime in the future will ourselves start simulating universes) rather than one of the vast number of simulations.<br />
<br />
And this is completely mistaken.<br />
<br />
The problem with the argument is that the universe we find ourselves in is <i>enormously complicated </i>from the point of view of having intelligent beings in it. For a start, you could discard the other one hundred billion galaxies in our observable universe and it wouldn't make any difference to us. So it's enormously more likely that the simulated universe we are in would be <i>much simpler</i> than this one. (How much more likely? Borrowing an argument from Roger Penrose, possibly something of the order of 10 to the power [10 to the power 100] -- a 1 with [10 to the power 100] zeroes after it -- more likely.)<br />
<br />
So the simulation argument turns on itself: the exact same argument that leads to the conclusion that we live in a simulation, i.e. that there are many more simulations than real universes, also inevitably leads to the conclusion that this universe isn't simulated, because there would be hugely many more simpler simulations we would be more likely to find ourselves in. The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-41849352936088552092016-03-27T09:20:00.000-04:002018-05-26T08:07:05.708-04:00Batman v Superman: Dawn of Just a Minute...The internet at large has already covered a lot of what's wrong with BvS, so rather than repeat what's already been said, I'm going to restrict myself to a couple of major things not much touched upon, specifically: the Act 3 climax is a huge mis-fire; and the post-climax codicil makes no sense whatsoever.<br />
<br />
First, the climactic battle with Doomsday. The problem here is: who really cares? Comparisons to <i>The Avengers</i> are inevitable, and in that movie we've had all kinds of foreshadowing and build-up: the Avengers <i>must</i> stop Loki from using the Cube and opening the portal, failing every step along the way, until the emotional climax of Stark laying down his life... In <i>BvS</i> by contrast we get a rock-monster with arbitrary powers and an equally arbitrary weakness, that appears <i>deus ex machina </i>(quite literally) with no motivation nor character of any kind, and that is not set up in any emotionally meaningful way by preceding events or threats. And even ignoring the disconnect from the foregoing story, there's neither a logical reason that the Kryptonian spaceship <i>even has the ability to create a Doomsday</i> nor a narrative reason that Lex chooses to do so (contrast <i>Avengers</i>, where opening a portal is Loki's motivation from the very beginning).<br />
<br />
Consequently, here there's no sense whatsoever that we're building towards this apocalyptic battle -- a problem highlighted by the fact that Wonder Woman decides to get involved in the fight for no adequately explored reason. (More generally, Wonder Woman is woefully underdeveloped -- and not in an intriguing, "show me more backstory!" kind of way, but in a frustrating "what does she want? why is she doing that?" way.) In fact, given that Luthor's main plot is all about manipulating Superman and Batman over many months into fighting each other, the whole Doomsday plot line feels like it was left over from an entirely different draft of the script. Having made the Batman v Superman conflict the core of their movie, the writers apparently had no idea what to give them to do once they had resolved that conflict.<br />
<br />
Second, the post-battle State funeral. Why? In the <i>Death of Superman</i> comic book source material, this makes perfect sense. In the comics arc, Superman is a long-established hero, known and trusted, even loved; and the world watches as he fights Doomsday all the way across the country for days on end, other heroes falling by the wayside, until finally, battered into exhaustion in full view of friends and news cameras, he sacrifices his life to save the world. Of course the world mourns. But in <i>BvS</i>, (i) Superman is mysterious, distrusted, and even disliked; (ii) Doomsday appears out of nowhere and spends around twenty minutes in Metropolis, hardly enough time for everybody to decide that we've tried everything and the world is going to end unless Superman can stop it (frankly, anybody that was there for Zod is probably thinking "meh, I've seen worse"); and (iii) nobody witnesses Superman's self-sacrifice and death except Batman, Wonder Woman, and Lois Lane... but their word is good enough for the US government to throw a funeral fit for a president.<br />
<br />
On reflection, the two best sequences in Dawn of Justice are (i) Batman rescuing Martha Kent, and (ii) Wonder Woman fighting Doomsday. The former is the one fight scene that is most true to the Batman character (I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn it was done entirely by the Second Unit); and the latter the only part of the movie where anybody seems to be having fun. Like Doomsday, Wonder Woman seems to have wandered in from the theater next door where she had been starring in a movie that was a lot more fun than the one I was sitting through.<br />
<br />
And so it struck me: DC could in fact have made a far more interesting movie if Superman never appeared at all. Sure, he's out there in the world somewhere, motivating Lex and the others to their actions, but never actually seen. Edit out every scene with Kent or Superman (except maybe Bruce's nightmare sequences), give Wonder Woman some proper background and motivation, and you've probably got a pretty decent movie about how the rest of the world feels about Superman, and how it copes when he doesn't come flying to the rescue.The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-19274351927863140082015-12-05T15:43:00.001-05:002018-04-28T06:20:05.276-04:00Quantum entanglement does not work like thatWhenever the topic of quantum entanglement -- which Einstein decried as "spooky action at a distance" -- comes up in online conversation, somebody will always ask whether this phenomenon can be used for instantaneous communication. And this is a very reasonable question because although the answer is definitively <b>No</b>, it's far from intuitively obvious why this is so, not least because it depends on details of quantum behavior usually omitted from non-technical explanations -- details that are critical to understanding the phenomenon.<br />
<br />
I originally wrote the explanation below in response to a post on Gizmodo. Several people said it was helpful, so I decided to preserve it online for when the question inevitably comes up again.<br />
<h3>
The Very, Very Short Version</h3>
Entanglement allows you to infer what result somebody else's experiment will get; but it doesn't allow you to influence what result they will get.<br />
<br />
The long version:<br />
<h3>
First, entangle your electrons</h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Suppose you “entangle” two electrons (there are lots of ways to do this; we'll take it as given). What this means is that they are paired in such a way that certain of their properties are reflections of each other. (In technical language we would say they have a "shared state".) In particular, we are interested in the so-called "spin". So you send me one electron and keep the other. Now you measure yours to see if it's spin is pointed up or down; if you find yours is up, you’ll know that if I do the same experiment, mine is pointed down; and vice versa. (The entangled electrons are always opposite, like two sides of a coin). </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Importantly, you won’t know whether you’ll get up or down until you do the experiment -- it’s a coin toss. The only way to tell which is the Up electron and which is the Down, by definition, is to do the measurement. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Anyway: so far, so normal. Up to this point, it's really no more surprising than if you had split a coin down the middle and sent one half to me. It's no surprise that if you kept the heads side, I got the tails side.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But note the really important part here: <b>I can't use this to send you a signal.</b> The typical misunderstanding at this point is to think that since the electrons are always opposite, if I somehow force my electron into the Up position before measuring, yours will instantaneously be in the Down position, and from there with enough entangled electrons I can easily construct a binary code. And the simple fact is, <b>entanglement does not work like that</b>. Although the electrons are opposite to begin with, anything I do to change the state of my electron does not change the state of yours; instead it just breaks the entanglement. I can no more flip your electron by flipping mine than I can turn your half of the coin from heads to tails.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<h3 class="MsoNormal">
Let's get spooky</h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But now it gets quantum. Unlike a coin, there are lots of ways you can measure spin: in fact you can choose any axis you want to measure it along. You don’t have to measure whether your electron is pointing up or down like this: |. You could measure whether it is pointing left or right, like this --. Or along any in-between axis, like / or \. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now here's the critical part: electron spin is <b>quantized</b>. This means that whatever axis you measure spin on, the answer will always be precisely "+1" or "-1" units of spin (using the units that physicists typically choose), regardless of what state you thought the electron was previously in; in other words, either clockwise or counterclockwise. Yes, even if you think your equipment only generates up and down electrons, if you choose to measure it on the left-right axis, its spin will definitely be measured as either one unit of left or right spin. Oh, and of course if I measure mine on the same axis, it is pointing the other way. Or you could measure it on any orientation in between, and if I measure it on the same orientation, I get the opposite.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is no analogy in the macroscopic world for this behavior that I can think of. If you had, say, a spinning basketball and you measured it's spin as "+1" in the up/down axis, it's spin on the left/right axis would be 0, and its spin in the / or \ directions would be somewhere between 0 and 1. This is a crucial difference between the quantum world and the familiar classical world.<br />
<br />
One of the things this tells us is that, unlike basketballs and other classical objects, electrons don't have a definite spin until you measure it (and even then, that spin is only good until you measure it again on a different axis).</div>
<h3 class="MsoNormal">
It gets worse (or maybe better)</h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now, we’re not done. Up to now we've always measured our electrons on the <i>same </i>axis. It gets even spookier if you and I choose to measure our electrons along <i>different </i>orientations. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Suppose you measure on the | axis and, say, get Up; but I choose to measure on the -- axis. Now two things I said above seem to be in conflict: </div>
<ul>
<li>entangled spins are always opposite, so mine must be Down; but </li>
<li>if I measure left/right I must get precisely left or right. </li>
</ul>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So what happens? Well, in fact I get left or right, and with an equal chance of each. It’s <i>as if </i>my electron was pointing Down after your experiment, and randomly chose which of left or right to flip to when I measured it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Notice, by the way, that when I do my measurement, nothing now happens to your electron. If you were to subsequently measure your electron on the -- axis, your result would be completely random. <i>The moment you measured your electron the first time, the entanglement was over.</i> So no amount of cleverness with repeated measurements will let me send a signal either.</div>
<h3 class="MsoNormal">
The really hard part</h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now I do something even more interesting: instead of measuring --, I set my equipment at an angle to yours, lets say at /. If we think of a clock face with Up/Down at 12 o’clock / 6 o’clock, I set mine at 1 o’clock / 7 o’clock. Now what happens? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What I find is that when your result is Up (12), I’ll get 7 most of the time and 1 some of the time (the exact proportions can be predicted, and have been demonstrated experimentally literally billions of times). And if your result was Down (6), I get the opposite results; mostly 1, some 7. Somehow, my electron “knows” what axis you measured along and what result you got -- even though the orientation was not fixed at the beginning before the electrons separated. In fact, even the orientations of our measurements can be chosen long after the electrons have separated, yet the entanglement still occurs. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So maybe there's something here that can be used to communicate? Maybe you can send a signal with the way you choose the axis you measure on, since that influences the distribution of my measurements on a different axis? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Unfortunately, no. And the reason is this:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Remember that when you measure on your end, you <b>always </b>get a random result, either up or down. You can’t <i>force </i>your electron to Up, and thereby influence my distribution; you can only <i>discover </i>whether it is Up or Down (and then infer what I am seeing). You can choose the axis you measure on, but not the outcome you get. (You can't even "separate out" the Up electrons from the Down: the only way to know which is which is to measure them, which destroys the entanglement.) And since you are getting 12 or 6 at random, to me it looks like I'm getting 7 or 1 at random too.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<h3>
One last throw of the dice?</h3>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So perhaps there is one last loophole. If being entangled affects the measurements I get, maybe there is some way I can tell whether our electrons are still entangled? Since entanglement breaking is also instantaneous, maybe <i>that</i> in itself can be used to send a message? But no. Even while our electrons are still entangled, your stream of results looks completely random to you. Similarly on the other end, whatever I measure looks completely random to me: 1 or 7, 7 or 1, with no pattern. It’s only when we bring our results together that we see that whenever you got 12 I was more likely to get 7, and whenever you got 6 I was more likely to get 1, thereby proving that our electrons were entangled.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is what physicists mean when they say our results are <b>correlated</b>, and the degree of correlation (as mentioned above) is precisely predictable, and has been tested in the lab. But it's only by bringing our results together that we see the correlation -- in isolation, each of us appears to get a random series of results. And bringing our results together to compare requires conventional slower than light communication.<br />
<br />
(By the way, this is the basis of quantum cryptography, but that's a long story for another time.)</div>
<h3>
So in summary...</h3>
A lot of the confusion here comes from non-technical explanations being loose in their language when they say that one electron "influences" the other. This is true in the sense explained above -- the result I <i>measure </i>is linked at a distance (yes OK, Albert, "spookily") to the result you <i>measure</i>. But it's <b>not true</b> in the sense that you could change your electron and instantaneously cause a change in my electron. Any change you make to your electron in an attempt to change mine simply breaks the entanglement, and our results are no longer connected in any way.The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-66558004351950085442015-09-24T21:39:00.000-04:002015-09-24T22:02:53.119-04:00Experimental theology: religious footballSomewhere between one third and one half of Americans believe that God / Jesus cares enough about the outcome of sports contests to intervene, typically in favor of those who pray most fervently. I propose to put this belief to the test with the new game of Religious Football.<br />
<br />
The game is very simple. It is played on a conventional American football field with a standard ball. The game begins with the ball at midfield on a tee, and two teams of eleven prayers line up on opposite sides of the field, five yards from the 50 yard line. Each team prays as hard as it can for the ball to move towards the opponents' end zone. Prayers can be spoken or silent, according to each team's ecclesiastical tradition. <br />
<br />
If a team manages to pray the ball across the line, they score a point, the ball is re-centered, and the process begins again. After 60 minutes, the game ends and the team with the most points win.<br />
<br />
This is a game where the "twelfth man" is exceptionally important. Supporters are allowed, even encouraged, to pray along with their team to help move the ball. (Conversely, the 13th man will be hung from the goalposts at half time). <br />
<br />
There are a few other rules and penalties, to maintain order. The major ones include: <br />
<ul>
<li>Offsides: The players must maintain five yards from the ball at all times, so if one team's prayers cause the ball to move, it can advance and the other team must retreat. Approaching closer than that incurs a five yard penalty.</li>
<li>Illegal touching: touching the ball in any way, or causing it to move with anything other than the power of prayer, is a ten yard penalty. </li>
<li>Out of bounds: any reference to an opponent's mother, sister, or other
female relative is completely out of bounds and will be penalized ten
yards. </li>
<li>Roughing the pastor: any contact with the opponent's spiritual leader on the sidelines results in a 15 yard penalty. </li>
</ul>
I propose that we launch this game in Texas where, I'm told, both Jesus and football are popular.The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-25797764317202871312015-06-25T10:06:00.001-04:002015-06-25T10:06:24.596-04:00I Hate BirthdaysThe thing I hate most about birthdays in the Web era is the absurdly
insincere birthday greetings in email and on FB from corporations that
happen to have my birthday in their database. What am I supposed to think about "good wishes" that don't emanate from any actual person? At best, it's an attempt to co-opt the natural human reaction of reciprocity; at worst, it's a crude sales pitch (who doesn't want a new weed trimmer on their birthday, right?).<br />
<br />
If I wanted to read
meaningless, empty, formulaic wishes that don't genuinely emanate from any real
person with real feelings, I would go stand and stare in front of the birthday
card rack at Hallmark for an hour.<br />
<br />
<span data-reactid=".2i.1:4:1:$comment10153005112353660_10153005112773660:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2i.1:4:1:$comment10153005112353660_10153005112773660:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2i.1:4:1:$comment10153005112353660_10153005112773660:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2i.1:4:1:$comment10153005112353660_10153005112773660:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.$end:0:$text0:0">At least, that's what I used to do before the restraining order.</span></span></span></span>The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-40735166966458968362015-06-23T13:30:00.001-04:002019-10-14T21:05:00.505-04:00Some Thoughts On Jurassic WorldOh, and <span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>SPOILERS</b></span>, obviously. <br />
<br />
Here's a couple of thoughts about Jurassic World that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere.<br />
<br />
1. Owen (Chris Pratt) is actually responsible for hundreds of deaths. If instead of trying to escape from the Indominus Rex compound he had heroically accepted his fate and sacrificed his own life so that the others could escape without releasing the dinosaur, nobody else would have died. Also, the movie would have been over much more quickly.<br />
<br />
2. Everybody online is complaining about Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) running around the woods in her high heels and never once sinking in, losing a shoe, or breaking a heel. I think the director missed a great opportunity to capitalize on that. When Owen is pinned down by a pterosaur and Claire saves him, instead of shooting the pterosaur she should have spiked it in the head with her heel.<br />
<br />
And then she and Chris could have exchanged some witty banter about how he's sorry for mocking her footwear, while all around them people continue to be dragged to their horrible deaths, all because Owen didn't sacrifice himself in the first act (see point 1 above).<br />
<br />
3. As an aside, Claire is obviously not from New York or she would have a pair of sneakers in her purse that she changes into when it's time to run for the train.<br />
<br />
4. I don't think I've ever seen such gratuitous product placement in a movie ostensibly about the evils of over-commercialization. Even in actual Mercedes commercials the camera doesn't caress the bodywork so lovingly before coming to rest on such a prominent shot of the emblem. The director of this movie either has the most profound sense of irony on the planet, or none at all. I'm not sure which.The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-88310765001475465802015-05-19T10:02:00.000-04:002015-05-19T10:02:23.951-04:00How to win bar bets with Wikipedia<b>Step 1</b>: Edit Wikipedia to insert a fake "fact". Choose your fact carefully: it needs to be unlikely enough that your mark will bet against it, but not so crazy that it will provoke obvious incredulity ("Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, is a Furry"), causing the mark to doubt the veracity of Wikipedia. You also need to be sure that your edit won't get quickly reverted, so stay away from entries that are closely watched, controversial, or recently in the news ("in 2014, more goats were killed in rail accidents in the US than people").<br />
<br />
<b>Step 2:</b> Choose your mark and place your bet.<br />
<br />
<b>Step 3: </b>"Prove" your claim by looking it up on Wikipedia. Collect your winnings and leave before the mark checks other sources or your Wikipedia edit gets reverted.<br />
<br />
<br />The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-59865460617268596802015-04-15T09:27:00.000-04:002015-04-15T09:27:51.831-04:00Physics Problem: barometers and building heightThere's a physics problem that typically gets presented to children when they learn about pressure (air, water, and often mercury) and barometers. And it seems to me that the problem is broken. The question is: how could you use an ordinary barometer to measure the height of a tall building? And the expected answer is to measure the air pressure at the top and bottom, and then knowing the weight of air, compute the elevation change.<br />
<br />
But let's check the feasibility of this with a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. For any realistic earthbound circumstance, we can assume that the pressure drops linearly with altitude; see the chart below. For reference, Denver, Colorado is at about 1600m, and the highest town in Great Britain is under 500m; we won't find much in the way of tall buildings above an altitude of 4000m. <br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-t_DBS9Hu-FM/VS5XOg_3yLI/AAAAAAAAALY/fNS0jZ7hi1g/s1600/Atmospheric_Pressure_vs._Altitude.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-t_DBS9Hu-FM/VS5XOg_3yLI/AAAAAAAAALY/fNS0jZ7hi1g/s1600/Atmospheric_Pressure_vs._Altitude.png" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">("Atmospheric Pressure vs. Altitude" by Geek.not.nerd - Own work. Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons)</span><br />
<br />
So what would our barometer tell us? Since we're just investigating the feasibility here, we're going to round things a little to make the math easy. Don't worry, no truths were harmed during the making of this calculation:<br />
<ul>
<li>For every 1000m of altitude gained, the pressure drops ~10kPa, the chart tells us (at least, over the range we are concerned with).</li>
<li>Thus for each meter, the pressure drops ~10Pa; that's 0.1hPa. (1 hectopascal or 1hPa = 100Pa, and is the modern unit equivalent to millibars, commonly used in meteorology.)</li>
</ul>
A typical household digital barometer can detect a change of +/- 0.5hPa (50Pa), and an analog "certified precision" $600 aneroid barometer is only accurate to 1hPa (100Pa). So with one of these instruments, we can hope to measure building height to, at best, an accuracy of 5 to 10m -- maybe good enough to estimate the number of stories, but not the height.<br />
<br />
Fortunately there are two other possible ways to use a barometer to determine a building's height:<br />
<ol>
<li><b>Drop the barometer off the top of the building and time how long it takes to hit the ground below. </b>For a building in the range of 100m to 200m, timing accurate to 0.01s would give a precision of around 0.5m, so we will probably want to use some kind of electronic timing device rather than a hand-operated stopwatch. (With manual timing we could reasonably only count on a timing accuracy of
1/10s, which by coincidence converts to about the same height accuracy
as the digital barometer.) For example, we could have synchronized clocks at top and bottom, an electromagnet release that records the start time and a sound-activated circuit to record the stop time. For a heavy barometer, we can ignore air resistance. </li>
<li><b>Find the building custodian and say to him "If you can tell me how tall this building is, I will give you this lovely barometer". </b>This is definitely my favorite solution.</li>
</ol>
NOTE TO STUDENTS: do not use this answer in any test unless you are <i>very</i> sure about the sense of humor of your teacher. <br />
<ul>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
<br />The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-35131038011676482892015-04-13T09:20:00.002-04:002015-04-13T09:20:48.229-04:00The American problemThe fundamental tension in America is that the red states want to be
Sparta and the blue states want to be Athens, and the only thing that
unites them in common cause is fear of Persia.The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-21643908223915037402015-04-10T08:31:00.000-04:002015-04-10T08:34:47.541-04:00On the intractability of free will[<b>Author's note</b>: the thoughts here originated as a Letter to the Editors at New Scientist, in response to a somewhat throwaway remark, in an article about randomness, that chance may be essential to the existence of free will. I felt that the point deserved delving into in more depth. New Scientist did publish the letter, but as is typical edited it down for publication -- in particular, many of my adverbs did not survive. Consequently, I wanted to share the full text here.]<br />
<br />
<br />
<div>
<div>
<div>
Randomness may be necessary to "admit free will" in an
otherwise-mechanical universe ("Chance", New Scientist 14 March 2015, p.28ff) but by itself
it is not sufficient. It's hard to argue scientifically about the
existence of free will in the absence of a rigorous definition of what
it <i>is</i>, but we can say something about what it <i>does</i>. And at
a minimum, it's existence requires that the outputs of my brain -- my
actions -- are not completely determined by the inputs plus initial
state. This is, of course, an astonishing proposition that is contrary
to any other known physical system or law. Even if we introduce
randomness, we merely allow a range of outcomes distributed
probabilistically, but we still have no element of intentionality or
purpose, the other essential ingredient in free will. Randomness alone
would make us no more free than tumbling dice.</div>
<br />
One
intriguing possibility, however, is that whatever free will actually is,
randomness provides a means for it to influence the brain <i>without </i>apparently
violating known physical law; a curtain behind which it can hide.
Imagine that free will is able to influence apparently-random outcomes
deep in the brain, to achieve a desired output, but is also constrained
by the need to appear random over the long term. The brain would be like
a rigged casino where the roulette wheel comes up red or black at the
casino's own choosing, but it must still ensure that the two come up
equally over the long term if it is not to be caught breaking the rules.
Correspondingly, we might speculate that free will rigs the brain game
by influencing individual apparently-random quantum outcomes, which
chaotic systems in turn amplify to macroscopic scale, but is limited in
the long run because the overall outcomes must match our probabilistic
quantum expectations.</div>
<br />
Intriguingly, existing psychological
experiments are consistent with this model of free will. For example,
we know that behaviors that are usually considered exercises of free
will such as "paying attention" or "resistance to temptation" are
limited and can be exhausted, requiring time to recharge, even though
they don't seem to be associated with anything as obvious as depletion
of specific neurotransmitters or saturation of synapses. Yet this is
exactly what we expect if free will can only influence a limited number
of outcomes while staying hidden within known physical laws.</div>
<br />
Whatever
free will turns out to be -- assuming it exists at all -- understanding
it will take at least as great a conceptual leap as that from classical
mechanics to quantum theory. And perhaps it is only the reality of
chance that connects these three views of reality into a consistent,
scientifically explicable universe.<br />
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<br />The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-39780910426355192582015-04-01T08:13:00.000-04:002015-04-09T19:02:14.718-04:00Athens and Sparta: A Parable About Open and Closed Source Software<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Among all the city-states of Classical Greece, the most
famous are certainly Athens
and Sparta.
Sometimes allies, often enemies, despite their shared language and culture, these
two could not have been more different. So in the rivalry between Athens and Sparta, who ultimately emerged
the winner?</div>
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<br /></div>
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In the 5<sup>th</sup> century BCE,
the dominant city-state was Sparta.
It was hierarchical, authoritarian and ruled by tyrannical kings and
aristocrats. It’s greatest cultural values were discipline and conformity, and the
kings of this highly militaristic state were also its generals. Sparta was incredibly
effective at concentrating its resources to conquer a chosen goal – the phrase
“the tip of the spear” could have been invented for them. As a result, Spartans
were feared in battle across the Greek world, and Sparta was able to impose its military will
on its neighbors.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But then, Athens
began to rise to prominence and oppose the hegemony of Sparta. It became a famous center of
creativity in the arts, learning and philosophy, home to Plato's Academy and
Aristotle's Lyceum. Athens
also gave the ancient world Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles and many more
philosophers, writers and politicians. Its schools and forums were often
lively, open-air marketplaces for competing ideas. It thrived on chaos. Even
more remarkable were its experiments in democracy that included a unique combination
of direct and representative democracy: everybody was expected to participate
in and contribute to Athenian civic life. In stark contrast to Sparta’s general-kings, Athens elected its generals according to the
needs of each war. </div>
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<br /></div>
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For a century, Athens
and Sparta were
in almost constant conflict for dominance of the Greek world, pausing
occasionally and briefly to unite against a common enemy. Finally, in 404BCE, Athens was defeated for
good and fell under Spartan rule. So did this mean that Sparta had won? Not exactly: Sparta’s dominance was short-lived. Neither
Athens nor Sparta ever fully recovered from the costs and destruction of their
wars, which impoverished most of the Greek world and ushered in the end of
Greek pre-eminence.</div>
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<br /></div>
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So if both Sparta
and Athens
lost, who won? While Sparta
and Athens were
exhausting themselves in civil war, far to the west a small village called Rome was growing into a
regional power. Rome
was something strange and new: it borrowed many ideas from the Greeks, but had no
real artistic culture of it’s own. Its sculpture, painting and poetry were second-rate derivations,
sometimes even direct copies, of the works of the Greeks. It contributed no
significant advances in mathematics or science, and barely anything to
philosophy. Even the gods that the Romans claimed to worship were obvious
imitations of the Greek pantheon. And yet, the Romans were exceptional engineers, great builders and
implementers of others’ ideas. While the Greeks declined, Rome conquered a vast empire, convincing
native populations almost everywhere that it was in their best interests to
assimilate into Roman ways.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the end, neither Sparta
nor Athens won:
both lost to Rome.
</div>
The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-13547138806708589332015-03-27T10:12:00.002-04:002015-03-27T10:12:25.580-04:00De-clutteringMy three step plan for de-cluttering my house:<br />
<ol>
<li>Rent a storage locker</li>
<li>Fill it with all the junk that I never use and / or really don't need</li>
<li>Default on the rent</li>
</ol>
The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-31757142744425661402015-03-25T18:30:00.002-04:002015-03-25T18:30:49.638-04:00DietA friend of mine who is big into "natural foods" told me never to eat
anything I couldn't pronounce, which is why I don't eat quinoa or acai. The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-77978302576100503372015-03-19T09:33:00.001-04:002015-03-19T09:33:56.791-04:00What would Jesus do?A church in San Francisco has promised to remove controversial sprinklers it installed to deter rough sleepers, <a href="http://m.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-31957262" target="_blank">reports the BBC</a>. "After an outcry, the city's archdiocese admitted it had been
"ill-conceived" for St Mary's Cathedral to treat homeless people in this
way", it goes on. <br />
<br />
The new policy replaces the sprinklers with landmines and
automatic machine guns.The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-37227745267256018152014-12-05T09:16:00.001-05:002014-12-05T09:16:24.450-05:00Physics and the Marvel MoviesBroadly speaking, the Marvel studio movies have managed to remain largely physically credible; and by this I mean that, while there are conceits that you simply have to accept for the sake of the story, and much of what goes on is often beyond current engineering, medical science, and so on, it is at least plausible. For example, in the <i>Iron Man </i>movies, the suit itself is a fairly reasonable extrapolation of current and experimental military exoskeletons; the arc reactor power source, however, you're just going to have to take at face value.<br />
<br />
By the way, I'm referring here to the interlocking movies produced by Marvel themselves, also known to fans as the MCU, for Marvel Cinematic Universe. The movies made by other studios, such as the X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises, threw credibility overboard a long time ago.<br />
<br />
Next year (2015), the MCU is going to get seriously weird, however. With the introduction of Quicksilver and Wanda to the Avengers, and a Dr. Strange movie -- Stephen Strange was name-checked in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, so presumably this will take place in the same continuity -- it's hard to see how Marvel will explain itself without just shrugging and saying "Magic".<br />
<br />
Before that happens, therefore, I wanted to jot down some notes on the least physical elements of the movies to date, basically because I enjoy this sort of thing. Oh, and I probably shouldn't need to say this, but obviously:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">SPOILERS!</span></div>
<br />
<ul>
<li><b>Iron Man 1</b>: Deceleration is the big issue here. Stark pulls some serious Gs in his flight maneuvers, especially when he opens the flaps to evade the fighter jets; but that's not the biggest problem -- let's just accept that he has invented the world's best pressure suit. No, the big issue is when he lands hard, going from full speed to a three-point landing in nothing flat. It doesn't matter how good his airbags are, his body is coming to a stop in a very short period of time. In any realistic scenario, when they open up the suit after a landing like that, they're going to find a can of Tony Stark soup. (By the way, when I first watched the movie, that wasn't the thing that made me go "Oh, c'mon!". No, that was when Tony returned from Afghanistan and he wants a burger... so he goes to Burger King. He's in California: obviously, he's going to go to In'n'Out. Let's try to keep this at least a little realistic, OK?) </li>
<li><b>Iron Man 2</b>: The "internal problem" in this movie is that Tony's arc reactor is poisoning him so he needs to replace the palladium that is a key component. Using instructions left to him by his father, he creates... a new element. Did anybody involved look at the Periodic Table and ask "Gee, where will this new element, which is chemically and electrically very similar to palladium, fit? I wonder why nobody else noticed that gap?". I suppose it's possible to dismiss this as one of those conceits I mentioned, but a much better solution is at hand: have Tony create a room-temperature superconductor. Not only is this a reasonable extrapolation of current science, it's an area where researchers are exploring many different approaches, so there's plenty of room for Tony to try something new and solve the challenge. Also, Tony is a genius at engineering, not basic science (notwithstanding <i>the Avengers</i>, where he just a generic STEM genius), so it's a better fit for the character. </li>
<li><b>Captain America</b>: One could quibble about just how the Super Serum works, but the big physical problem here is simply conservation of mass: Steve Rogers bulks up by at least 100 pounds in a matter of seconds, so where did all that matter come from? Note that the naive answer "it came from the energy they drew from the electrical grid" doesn't work, because it takes an enormous amount of energy to make a very small amount of mass. To give a sense of scale, consider the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba, the largest hydrogen bomb ever tested. That bomb yielded on the order of 50 megatonnes-equivalent, roughly 10 times <i>all of the conventional explosives combined </i>used in World War II. In order to create Steve Rogers' 100 pound gain, you would need to harness the energy yield of approximately <b>twenty Tsar Bombas</b>, and do so in just a few seconds. </li>
<li><b>The Avengers</b>: This has been <a href="http://www.wired.com/2012/07/could-s-h-i-e-l-d-helicarrier-fly/" target="_blank">well addressed elsewhere</a>, but the most obvious engineering problem is whether or not the helicarrier could fly; and the likely answer is No. At the depicted size of carrier, the rotor blades would have to be much larger. Or at the size of rotor shown, they would have to spin much faster, but then you get into problems of material science (the blades would break apart) or tip speed (what happens if the tip exceeds the speed of sound?). </li>
<li><b>The Hulk</b>: One of the nicer touches in the Hulk movies (and his appearance in <i>the Avengers</i>) is that they take seriously what happens to the ground beneath him when the Hulk jumps and lands. But as with Captain America above, where does the extra mass of the Hulk's body come from? In the comic books, the Hulk is the result of exposure to a fictional "gamma bomb", but as noted even the largest nuclear explosions convert only a few pounds of matter to energy, so even if you could capture all that energy, turned back into matter it would still only amount to the same few pounds. The most plausible explanation I can come up with is that the Hulk, in fact, weighs the same as Banner and his huge size comes from the fact that he is inflatable -- really, they should call him <b>The Inflatable Hulk</b>. I do realize, however, that this theory may be difficult to reconcile with other depicted elements of the character. </li>
<li><b>Guardians of the Galaxy</b>: Obviously there's a lot we just have to take for granted in this movie because aliens, but my gripe is with a very Earthbound technology. Peter Quill has been playing the same cassette tape for over 25 years, and it still isn't a tangled, broken mess? He even plays it in a Sony Walkman without damaging it, which is just downright ridiculous. (On a lesser but related note, when he finally unwraps Awesome Mix 2, it's amazing that the tape hasn't degraded to the point that it is hopelessly stuck together.)</li>
</ul>
I'm sure there's more to be found in the movies not mentioned above, but that's all for now. Comments welcome. The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-76483797899194009602014-10-10T08:55:00.001-04:002014-10-10T08:55:06.784-04:00Quantum Leap: the Movie<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Like many people, I found the ending of Quantum Leap unsatisfactory. I've long had an idea for a story that would wrap it up both more neatly and provocatively. </div>
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<br /></div>
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And by the way, if anybody from the copyright holder (or
anybody who knows somebody...) happens to be reading: I disclaim all rights in
this idea. Use if freely. I'd far rather see this made than get paid (although
a "from an idea by..." credit would be nice.)<br />
<br />
<br />
[fade to black]<br />Open on: the same set and title card that closed out the original TV series. </div>
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Burn in: Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home.<br />
[crossfade to]<br />
Burn in: ...Until today<br />
<br />
Open on Sam, emerging from a leap. He is in an anonymous office bathroom, could
be anywhere in America, any time from the 1980s to the present day. POV over
his shoulder, he looks into a wall mirror and sees... </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
…himself, as young as he looked at the beginning of the project.<br />
<br />
Sam: Oh boy!<br />
<br />
[Titles]<br />
<br />
The story then unfolds: after many years of leaping, Sam has somehow leaped
into his own body. It is 1999 [the "present day" of the project in
the original series], just a few days before the experiment that launched his
first leap. And Sam has just days to decide: knowing what he knows now, does he take the leap or not?
If he does leap, he knows he may never get home again. This may be his one and only
chance to break out. But if he doesn't leap, does he change history and erase all the good he has
ever done? He has no idea... and no help (at first).<br />
<br />
Back in his own timeline [our present day], a long-retired Al dozes in a chair. The QL project
was shut down years ago. They had lost contact with Sam, and after months
with no sign of him, everybody had assumed he was lost in time. The one exception:
Al never gave up hope, and even though the project is mothballed, he still has
the comm device gathering dust in a drawer of his desk.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And after all these
years it blinks into life, and starts bleeping, waking Al.<br />
<br />
So now Al, with the help of a grown-up Sammy Jo, tries to reboot Ziggy, contact
Sam in 1999, and figure out the consequences of his decision. But the closer
they get to the choice to leap or not, the more erratic and unhelpful Ziggy
becomes: instead of converging, her predictions and probabilities are bouncing wildly, as every
choice Sam makes seems to involve terrible paradoxes and instabilities. Whatever Sam chooses seems to be wrong...</div>
The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-45144186088023422092013-11-18T16:53:00.002-05:002013-11-18T16:53:58.276-05:00On the fallibility of autobiographical memoriesI suspect that most people who have not actively studied the subject have a fairly naive view of how autobiographical memories work. They imagine our memories of events in our lives to be little home movies, tucked away in slots in our brains, ready to be recalled when prompted by circumstance or demanded by our conscious selves.<br />
<br />
That this model is entirely inadequate was brought home to me the other day when I was recalling a particular drive I used to take on a weekly routine in my early 20s, when I lived in England. The memory was crisp and detailed, including the undulations of the road, signposts to various villages along the route, and the appearance of the landscape at different times of year. Just one detail was wrong: in my memory, I was driving on the <i>right </i>and sitting in the <i>left-hand</i> seat, as one would in America or Europe; of course, since these events took place in England, the reverse would have been how it actually took place.<br />
<br />
As I thought about it more, I realized that the same was true for (almost) all of my memories of England involving cars. In my mind's eye I am opening the wrong door, getting in or out of the wrong side of the car, driving on the wrong side of the road. Only by a conscious effort of will can I restore the image in my head to how reason tells me it actually must have happened. <br />
<br />
What this tells us is that autobiographical memories are not really like a movie, but more like the script of a movie. Somewhere in my memory is stored a script about that familiar drive, perhaps associated with a high-fidelity description or image of the landscape, and a slug line such as: <br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">EXT. DAY: CARL drives a late-model compact through winding country roads. </span><br />
<br />
...and from that, like a movie director, my brain constructs the movie, using its library of backdrops and knowledge of what driving involves. Only now that I have spent more years driving on the right than I ever did on the left, it defaults to the more habitual perspective, like an American movie director setting a scene in England and forgetting that they drive on the other side there.<br />
<br />
I said "almost" above, for good reason. A few of my English driving memories are correctly oriented, invariably ones involving some amount of drama. For example, once while driving on the M25 I was witness to a multiple-car pile-up that caused a huge back-up on both sides of the motorway. In my memory of that event, I remember every moment with great precision, including which lane I was in and how I avoided being part of the accident myself. <br />
<br />The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-87625491021390139492013-10-24T09:28:00.001-04:002013-10-24T09:28:48.087-04:00Time Travel Does Not Work Like ThatWhenever a discussion thread turns to time travel, somebody will always raise the challenging question: If you jump forward in time, say by a week, shouldn't you reappear in outer space because the Earth has continued to move and is now seven days further along in its orbit?<br />
<br />
And I always feel obliged to answer: Time travel does not work like that.<br />
<br />
This conception of time travel typically imagines a time machine as a box of some kind that jumps in time but stays in the same place. And written into that conception are some assumptions that mislead. One is the assumption that you can "jump" discontinuously from one point in time to another. A second is the assumption that movement in time can be considered separately from movement in space. And a third is the implication that the expression "in the same place" is well-defined: as Relativity taught us, we have to ask "the same place relative to what? The Earth? The sun? The center of the galaxy?" (and once we answer that question, we realize that we have pretty much answered our own conundrum.) To properly understand what should happen in time travel, we need to overturn each of those assumptions.<br />
<br />
So as far as we know* there is no possibility of
"a box that travels through time but doesn't travel through space".
It's not just hard, it's an oxymoron -- although in order to understand why,
you have to teach yourself to think about spacetime properly, instead of
thinking of space and time as separable.<br />
<br />
So we have to take a few steps back, discard the <b>presumption </b>that
such a box exists, and ask what an actual time machine could be like. And it
turns out that (realistic) <b>time travel is a characteristic of a region of
spacetime, not a characteristic of a particular machine</b>.<br />
<br />
The first thing to understand is that nothing ever moves through space alone
or through time alone**. Everything is moving through spacetime, all the time
(so to speak). And that movement is always continuous. It simply doesn't make
sense to say that a particle X moved from time t1 to time t2 without specifying
space coordinates too. The only thing that makes sense is to say that X moved
from spacetime position (x1, y1, z1, t1) to (x2, y2, z2, t2). This is so basic that, Relativity shows, even basic concepts like "before", "after", and "simultaneous" are not well defined if you don't specific both time and space coordinates.<br />
<br />
The second thing to understand is that physicists have dreamed up lots of
ways that time travel might be possible, and all of them involve a <i>continuous</i>
path through spacetime, not a mysterious jump. The trick is, the spacetime curves in such a way that
when you return to the same coordinates in space, you arrive at a different
time from, say, an identical twin who stayed home. However, at no point do you
perceive anything "weird" or discontinuous happening. Think of it as
being like an extreme version of the famous Twins Paradox from Relativity. In
that "paradox" you leave home with a clock that reads 2pm, travel in
a big loop at almost the speed of light, come home, and your clock now reads
3pm while an identical clock that stayed home reads 4pm. (This happens all the
time, on a smaller scale, right here on Earth: the GPS satellites you rely on
for satnav have to correct for the fact that their atomic clocks drift slightly
from identical clocks on the surface of the Earth). If the spacetime path you
follow is <i>sufficiently </i>warped, when you get home your clock might read 3pm while the one on Earth reads 1pm -- congratulations, you've traveled an hour
into your own past!<br />
<br />
<b>Of course</b>, we should also note that when you return from
your big loop you might be a little surprised to discover that the Earth isn't
where you expected it to be, it's actually a little earlier in its orbit from
where you would calculate <b>according to the clock that traveled with you</b>,
so you have to adjust your path in spacetime a little to navigate back to it.
But notice there was still no "jump" involved: you traveled away from
Earth, you traveled back to Earth, and found something unexpected, because the
paths you and Earth followed through spacetime put your clocks out of sync.<br />
<br />
Note also that I pulled a little sleight of hand in that paragraph. When I
said "where you expected the Earth to be", I should really specify <b>relative
to what</b> for the sentence to have any meaning. And what I really mean
is "relative to where you would expect it to be if you had traveled at low
speed through flat spacetime and your clock had kept time with Earth
clocks". This is kind of a subtle point, but it is at the heart of what's
going on here. <b>Your </b>clock tells you where Earth
"should" be, and relative to <b>your </b>clock Earth has
moved "out from under you" -- but that is only because you assume
that you and your clock traveled in flat spacetime. If you could look back with
a telescope and watch the Earth the whole time you were on your trip you would
see nothing odd happen, other than that it's position drifts slowly more and
more backwards from where your clock says it should be. But at no point does
Earth blink out of view and reappear further back in its orbit, the way a
"time jump" is typically depicted in sci-fi.<br />
<br />
So really, when I say "return to the same coordinates", I need to
specify relative to what. If I "return to the same coordinates"
relative to the Earth, it's right where I expect. If I choose some other point
of reference relative to which the Earth is moving, it's not.<br />
<br />
By the way, one of the first people to demonstrate rigorously that this kind
of thing could happen in General Relativity was Einstein's good friend Kurt
Godel. He showed that if the universe is rotating and sufficiently large, you
could follow a very long loop around the universe and return to your starting
point at an earlier time. Reportedly, Einstein was quite upset by this.<br />
<br />
Now, when we see time travel in TV or movies, one way to think about it is
to assume that the device is creating its own region of curved spacetime that
is extremely small and very severely curved. I like to pretend that the
time travel in <i>7 Days</i> works this way: the device creates a highly
distorted region of spacetime around the capsule. The capsule travels in that
highly distorted region which takes it both into space (relative to the Earth)
and back in time (again, relative to the Earth). It then emerges from that
distorted region and navigates back to Earth traveling in our (relatively) flat
spacetime. But rather than "jumping 7 days into the past", I think of
it as "traveling 7 days into the past and elsewhere in space".<br />
<br />
Another way to think about it is this: the most consistently realistic depiction of time travel in fiction is wormholes: a wormhole connects two different points <i>in both space and time</i>. If you had a pair of wormholes -- or a single wormhole that connects two points close to each other in space but distant in time -- you would effectively have the classic time machine. And in fact, the wormhole is simply an extreme*** example of curved spacetime. <br />
<br />
I have an even longer answer than this that also explains why we haven't met time travelers from the future yet, but it runs to several pages, and I'm
saving it for the book I'm never going to write, "Physics for Smarties: an
essential math-free guide for curious arts and humanities students".<br />
<br />
Anyway, I hope that helps a little bit, and if you take away nothing else,
remember "continuous path through spacetime" and "doesn't travel
in space -- relative to <i>what</i>?"<br />
<br />
<br />
<u>Footnotes </u><br />
<br />
<br />
*And yes, I readily concede that "as far as we know" is not very
far, but the fundamental character of General Relativity is very, very
suggestive on this point.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">**OK, you could imagine such a thing if you wanted to,
but we have no idea what physics would describe it, so basically you could
decide how it behaves completely arbitrarily. It does whatever you want it to
do. You just have to bear in mind that there are no absolute coordinates in
spacetime, so if you define that your box "doesn't travel through
space", it's up to you define what you mean by that: doesn't travel
relative to what frame of reference? In short, your time box does whatever you
choose it to do, because you are making it up.</span><br />
<br />
***Insert your own Wormhole Extreme! reference here.<br />
<br />The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-39847168376389291882013-09-13T09:30:00.000-04:002013-09-13T09:30:17.927-04:00Fulfilling workI've been struggling for a while to figure out what makes, for me at least, a fulfilling or satisfying job. Yesterday it struck me that the answer was more or less at my fingertips in the form of a book by my friend Tharon Howard called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Design-Thrive-Creating-Networks-Communities/dp/0123749212/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1379077528&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Design to Thrive</a>. In that book, Tharon lays out a model for how to think about a successful online community around the handy mnemonic RIBS: R<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;">emuneration, Influence, Belonging, and Significance. It occurred to me that a tweak on that model would equally well describe what I would want from the ideal job:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><b>Remuneration</b>: Obviously this includes salary and benefits, but beyond a certain point salary doesn't make much difference (until you are talking about start up IPO levels of Walk Away money). But remuneration also comes in other form such as respect of colleagues and industry peers, thanks for a job well done, or the knowledge that you've made a difference. In fact, the R in RIBS could stand for a whole collection of Rewards including Respect and Recognition.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><b>Influence</b>: It's well established that people are happier in their work when they have more control over their environment rather than feeling like helpless drones working on one assignment after another. That can mean little things like personalizing your workspace, more substantive things like flex time, and ultimately having a significant say in what assignments you are working on. This concept can be seen in so-called self-managed teams, and in the development world it's a significant (if often overlooked) element of the Agile movement. Even something as simple as believing that your opinion is taken into consideration in your manager's decisions makes a difference.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><b>Belonging</b>: This is a huge element of the success of online communities, and includes the rituals and stories that people tell each other to reinforce their sense of belonging to something greater than themselves. Many companies have a "founding myth" that, factual or not, helps new employees adapt to the culture. The team I'm in right now has been fairly good at this kind of thing: we have ritualized expressions ("Yes, and..." instead of "Yes, but..." is one) and running jokes that we initiate new team members into.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><b>Significance</b>: This one is probably the hardest to achieve when you're in the depths of a large company. I've left jobs before even when the day to day work was interesting and satisfying ("remuneration") because it felt like what I produced made no more difference than throwing stones into the ocean, that nothing I did or said or wrote would matter to anybody a month from now. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Everybody will weight these four elements differently, but for me significance is the biggest one. I get very restless when I feel that my job amounts to no more than shuffling paper, reviewing other people's proposals to evaluate considering investigating something, or spreadsheet engineering. To be satisfying to me, my work has to at least appear to matter to somebody's real life.</span>The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-92022324628695193202010-12-30T17:19:00.000-05:002010-12-30T17:19:57.956-05:00Flash Fiction: Of All Possible Worlds<div class="MsoNormal">[Note: this story was written for the New Scientist 2010 competition <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19561-flash-fiction-competition-2010-forgotten-futures.html">Forgotten Futures</a>, which asked entrants to write a very short story -- 350 words or fewer -- about how things might have worked out if some scientific event or discovery had turned out differently. My entry wasn't shortlisted, so I'm sharing it here.]</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Hugh Everett III eased himself into the oversized leather chair, taking care not to spill his cognac. Outside, he could hear the laughter of his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, still loudly celebrating the 80<sup>th</sup> birthday of the Grand Old Man of Physics, as he had become known. The door opened quietly and his son Mark slipped inside, cradling the glass display case that held Hugh’s Nobel Prize medal. Mark reverently returned the medal, the centerpiece of the party, to its accustomed place on the bookcase. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Hugh gestured to the chair next to him where another glass of cognac waited, and Mark settled in next to his worlds-famous father. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“It’s ironic,” said Hugh, toasting the medal with his glass. “The press called me ‘the new Einstein’, and just like him, they gave me the Prize for my second-best work.” Few people outside the physics community realized that Everett’s Prize had been awarded for his audacious doctoral thesis that introduced the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, not his later quantum gravity insights that had led to the exploitation of Dark Energy, the basis of the peace and prosperity enjoyed by everybody on Earth, not to mention it’s colonies on Mars and Ganymede. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I’ll tell you what else is ironic,” replied Mark with a mischievous smile. “If everything possible happens in some universe, then somewhere out there is a world where everything went as wrong as it possibly could. Imagine if nobody had paid attention to your thesis and you had abandoned physics. In that world you became bitter and disillusioned, turned to cigarettes and drink, and died long before your time, leaving a world still suffocating and sweltering in its own pollution.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Hugh laughed warmly. “Mark, that story gets worse every time you tell it. Many Worlds requires everything possible to happen, but it doesn’t allow for the impossible.” He took another sip of cognac and pushed away the thought of a life and a world gone to ruin. What ever might be might be, he mused to himself, but whatever must be must be.</div>The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-62575388210761085722010-09-02T10:00:00.000-04:002010-09-02T10:00:54.066-04:00The worst romantic comedy in recent movie historySomebody recently referred to "Something's gotta give" in my hearing as "charming". Hence this rant...<br />
<br />
The essence of any rom-com is an ill-matched couple, kept apart by some apparently insurmountable barrier, destined to somehow be together by the end of the movie. "Sleepless in Seattle": they live on opposite coasts. "You've got mail": opposing political beliefs. etc. Age, culture, distance, class, political beliefs, disapproving families: something has to keep the couple apart for ninety minutes before we can all go home happy.<br />
<br />
"Something's gotta give" offers us the unique sight of a romantic comedy about a couple who are kept apart by... absolutely nothing.<br />
<br />
Harry and Erica are two independent, financially stable people of similar age, both well-established in life and successful in their careers. Both are single and unencumbered. Circumstances force them to live in the same house. Erica has no obligations as her adult daughter is self-sufficient. Everybody approves of their relationship, including Erica's daughter (who might have been expected to object since she had previously dated Harry) and Erica's ex-husband, with whom she has such a comfortable relationship that he drops by for coffee. Even Harry's rival in love, Julian, simply smiles and gracefully steps aside when the moment comes, accepting that Harry and Erica should be together. There's not a shred of conflict or difficulty or incompatibility in this entire setup.<br />
<br />
The only reason they're not a couple after the first five minutes? "He only dates younger women", the other characters repeatedly tell us, although this essential fact is something that the movie completely fails to <i>show</i>. We don't even get to see all of these alleged younger girlfriends until almost the end of the movie, and none of them is dignified with a name, let alone a personality, a story, or a motivation for dating <i>him</i>. We have to take the word of the other characters, sitting around a dinner table, that he is a desirable, eligible, notorious bachelor who was featured as such on the cover of a New York magazine. (I believe that "featured on a magazine cover" is what movies go for to illustrate that somebody or something is well-known when they can't afford the obligatory scene of Jay Leno telling jokes about their movie's subject: "How about that Harry Sanborn? His latest girlfriend is so young, he has to leave her outside when he goes into a bar!". Or perhaps there are some things that even Jay Leno won't do?) Oh, and there's also some business about her being too busy/vulnerable for a relationship, although again there's no reason offered for why. <br />
<br />
And since the movie provides no coherent explanation for why Harry collects notches in his headboard, we also get no explanation for what resistance he is trying to overcome nor why he chooses to change. At the start of the movie, he doesn't date women his own age; at the end of the movie, he does. <br />
<br />
Even the title of the movie falls flat. "Something's gotta give" implies that both of them have deeply-held positions that are incompatible and that one of them will have to "give". Harry could accept that he should date women closer to his own age; or Erica could... I don't know, become a younger woman? <br />
<br />
Once Erica and Harry have met, the rest of the movie is just marking time until it delivers its unearned and emotionally flat payoff and pairs them off. There's not a single moment in the entire film that rings true, emotionally or dramatically.The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-64929857191574639702010-08-19T21:54:00.001-04:002010-09-01T13:51:58.217-04:00NFL Season Media GuideWith dress rehearsals for the NFL season well underway, it's time for my guide for what to expect from the networks' NFL coverage:<br />
<br />
<ul><li><b>Fox</b>: The studio has been replaced by the high school jocks' lunchroom table. They are having much more fun than you are. Meanwhile, Joe Buck will talk in a bizarre singsong cadence about other programs coming up on Fox while a football game takes place in the background. </li>
<li><b>CBS</b>: Two middle-aged men in blazers, ties and slacks are mildly annoyed to have been dragged away from a very good Sunday lunch at their country club and are embarrassed to find themselves at a football game rather than a golf tournament. </li>
<li><b>NFL Network</b>: Two business travelers are killing time in the bar of a soulless chain hotel. They make polite but awkward conversation about the football game playing on the bar's TV set, even though neither of them really understands the game or cares about the teams involved. Everybody finishes the night even more depressed than when they started. </li>
<li><b>ESPN</b>: Three frat boys have broken into the broadcast booth and are making each other laugh with fart jokes. They have no idea the microphones are on. Meanwhile back in the ESPN studio, Chris Berman and a dozen other people would like to tell you how awesome ESPN is. </li>
<li><b>NBC</b>: Please don't interrupt. The adults are talking.</li>
</ul>The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25304753.post-51445337055798248122010-08-15T12:47:00.000-04:002010-08-15T12:47:26.844-04:00The oddness of Star Wars technologyI've observed in previous posts that the Star Wars saga would have been very different if the Rebel Alliance had access to e-mail or torrent so that they didn't need to drag those droids across the galaxy. (Also handrails...).<br />
<br />
It struck me recently that this is actually one example of something much more general in the Star Wars universe. As far as I can recall, <i>there is no new technology whatsoever</i> in the entire "galaxy far, far away". Everything shown in the movies either existed on Earth at the time that Star Wars was made, or was a well-established element of other space operas. Space ships and lasers and blasters and flying cars and robots were more realistically rendered and executed better in Star Wars than they had even been before, but were far from new. And earthbound imagination shows up in the absence of technologies we take for granted, such as mobile phones, personal computers, or credit cards. The medical technology is also oddly primitive despite being administered by robots: how did nobody know in advance that Padme was carrying twins? What kind of prenatal care are they giving senators and queens out there?<br />
<br />
The one original contribution of Lucas appears to be the lightsaber. Although there may be inspirations and echoes of some <a href="http://moongadget.com/origins/lightsabers.html">earlier story elements</a>, the lightsaber as a complete, unified concept can, I think, be attributed to Lucas. He also imbued it with rich symbolic meaning in the original trilogy, rather than merely using it as a shiny prop. Lightsabers, and the duels they are used in, all mean something significant in Luke Skywalker's "hero's journey". (One of the tragedies of the prequel trilogy is that they somehow managed to make lightsaber duels dull by repetition.)<br />
<br />
The other odd element of Star Wars technology is that Lucas appears to have been familiar with the fiction but not the science of science fiction. In other words, his script is littered with the vocabulary of existing sci-fi, but without any apparent understanding of established meanings. For example, robots are famously known as "droids", an apparent abbreviation of android. But as any sci-fi fan will tell you, an android is a robot designed to resemble a human being (and that resemblance is the jumping off point for rich explorations in the sci-fi literature of the nature of what it means to be human, whether an android can truly be alive, etc.). No droid in Star Wars looks remotely like a living creature of any species -- the closest perhaps is C3-PO, who at least is roughly human-shaped. Similarly, C3-PO's role is described as "human-cyborg relations"; a cyborg, of course, is a hybrid of a living creature enhanced with robotic technology, something that is never actually seen or even referred to ever again, raising the question of the need for a droid specializing in relations with them?<br />
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The same odd dissonance applies to space travel technology. The terms "jump to lightspeed" and "jump to hyperspace" are used more or less interchangeably, often when speaking about the same vessel (ruling out the possibility that both technologies exist side by side). These are two completely unrelated technologies, about as different as "drive faster" and "take a shortcut" as ways to get to your destination sooner. Similarly, references to the speed of travel make no sense. At one point the Millenium Falcon, famously one of the fastest ships out there, is described as being capable of "point-five above lightspeed"; it's hard to imagine any reasonable interpretation of that term that wouldn't still leave you requiring years to travel between star systems. Amusingly, when the Millenium Falcon escapes (again) from capture by Darth Vader, a crew member comments a few seconds later that "if they've made the jump to lightspeed, they could be on the other side of the galaxy by now". In reality, at 1.5x the speed of light, it would take the Falcon about 5 minutes to travel the distance from the Earth to our Sun, and assuming the Star Wars galaxy is typical of the ones we know, tens of thousands of years to get to the other side!<br />
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There are many more such internal inconsistencies -- for instance, why do large spacecraft fight like naval battleships at sea, all oriented the same way up, while the small craft dodge and roll like fighters using wings in an atmosphere for lift? -- and this kind of "World War II in space" transplant is exactly what leads fans of serious Sci-Fi to dismiss Star Wars as "space opera".<br />
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The overall effect is of Lucas as somebody who knows all of the notes and none of the music.The Czar Dictateshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06158043357104789508noreply@blogger.com3