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10000000000000th Post !!!


Randomizer

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Anyone reading this post has just lost the Game.

 

10000000000000 base 2 = 2 to the 13th power = 8192 base 10

 

Did anyone really think there have been that many posts?

 

Not suffering from triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13), I decided to finally mark a milestone after over 4 years of postage. Now I need an interesting number for the next one.

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Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES
Originally Posted By: Dintiradan
I'm still grumpy no one HTML-enabled my 2112th post.
It has now been HTML-enabled. Among other things.

Hey, be careful what you wish for. ^_^
Slarty's taken care of everything,
The words you read, the songs you sing,
The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes...
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Originally Posted By: Randomizer
Anyone reading this post has just lost the Game.
I didn't. I actually quit with the last thread lock. Normally I only play against myself, and as there's really no way I can win or lose, it's not exactly fun.
Quote:
triskaidekaphobia
You know, I made a level for SubTerra called "Triskaidekaphobia." It's in the 2008 expansion pack.
Quote:
Now I need an interesting number for the next one.
I'm getting (relatively) close to my 2000th post, and was planning to post a thread on it when I did; but I could hold out for 2048, or 2^11. Or I could really hold out, and make that thread the first new post of 2011.
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Originally Posted By: Phanes
Quote:
I didn't. I actually quit with the last thread lock. Normally I only play against myself, and as there's really no way I can win or lose, it's not exactly fun.


You cannot quit the game.


Correction: you can't. Others are perfectly capable of being free of it. Sounds like you have more of a personal problem, there.
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Originally Posted By: Randomizer
After all Albert Einstein said,"God does not play dice."

Not exactly what he said. For one thing, it was in German. For another, he was protesting quantum mechanics, which has held up pretty well and which does, in fact, involve something very close to rolling dice. For a third, you already know this.

—Alorael, who on the contrary believes not only that God plays dice but that the dice are loaded. The Chairman said so!
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Originally Posted By: Albert Einstein
Gott würfelt nicht.

Originally Posted By: Niels Bohr
Einstein, hör auf Gott zu sagen was er mit seinen Würfeln machen soll.


Or, in English:
AE: God does not roll dice.
NB: Einstein, quit telling God what he should do with His dice.

Actually Einstein wasn't unhappy with randomness. He was a pioneer of the theory of stochastic forces, and would have been a major figure in an important subfield of physics, to the point where it would probably have won him a Nobel prize if he had lived long enough, even if he had never done any of the several other things for which he is well known.

What he seems to have objected to was the perverse mixture of determinism and randomness in quantum mechanics. Randomness appears in classical mechanics as a fuzzy and clumsy approximation, invoked by humans just because we can't follow too much complexity. It's a crudely practical detail, not a fundamental principle. In classical physics, randomness knows its place. It sits still in back of the lecture hall, and comes out quietly at night to clean the chalkboards.

In quantum mechanics, though, the elegant fundamental laws prescribe the rigidly deterministic behavior ... of probabilities. It's as though the air is thick with incense in St. Peter's as the College of Cardinals stand assembled in their scarlet to consecrate the new Pope ... and the new Pope arrives in jeans and cowboy boots, smoking a joint. It's unsettling.
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Randomness results from out inability to measure both position and momentum accurately below the quantum limit. In Newtonian physics, the uncertainty in measurements far exceeds the quantum limit so we don't notice it and most people assume they are making accurate measurements and know exactly what is happening.

 

Now if we were able to take an arbitrarily large system of particles and measure all the initial positions and momenta without changing them, we could calculate what is going to happen without resorting to statistics and probabilities to determine the outcome.

 

Einstein's objection could refer to the fact that God can do this but we poor mortals can't and have to suffer with randomness.

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On the one hand it's true that quantum randomness is not qualitatively different from any other kind of randomness. Experiments that approach quantum noise limits see random results on each run, even when they do everything they can to make each run identical. But the same thing would happen if they had failed to notice a mouse that was gnawing on their cables and producing random noise each run. The only special things about the quantum noise are that nothing can make it go away, and that the statistical distribution of the random results fit the precise formulas predicted by quantum mechanics. Any other kind of noise, such as from mice, could fit the same pattern; but it would be a huge coincidence if it actually did, because only quantum noise has to have that pattern.

 

But on the other hand it's a mistake to imagine that position and momentum of particles actually exist simultaneously, and that Heisenberg's famous principle is just a mysterious limitation on our ability to measure both at once.

 

What quantum mechanics says is that position and momentum are related to each other exactly as musical pitch and timing are related. Is it possible for any instrument to sound a clear concert A at a moment specified precisely to within a millisecond? No, it isn't, and the impossibility is no mystery, but a simple contradiction. The note A means, by definition, a regular cycling of air pressure up and down 440 times every second. It takes at least a few hundredths of a second for an air pressure sequence to even have such a clear 440-cycles-per-second pattern.

 

An A that lasts a millisecond is a contradiction in terms. It's not just an unfortunate limitation on human ears, that we can't hear pitch well in very short notes. Timing and pitch are both meaningful concepts, and definite notes following each other at definite times is what makes up music; but it is a logical contradiction for any note to have its pitch and its timing simultaneously defined exactly. Music lives entirely in the wiggle room that's allowed if neither timing nor pitch is quite exactly determined. Classical physics does the same thing with position and momentum.

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Originally Posted By: Hypnotic
Originally Posted By: The Mystic
Or I could really hold out, and make that thread the first new post of 2011.


Never say something like that if there is a New Zealand lurker. We are always first.
Well, if it's not the first post in the world in 2011, I'd be willing to settle for the first post in my home time zone.

However, at the rate I'm going, I might end up hitting the 2000 post mark by August.
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Originally Posted By: The Mystic
Originally Posted By: Hypnotic
Originally Posted By: The Mystic
Or I could really hold out, and make that thread the first new post of 2011.


Never say something like that if there is a New Zealand lurker. We are always first.
Well, if it's not the first post in the world in 2011, I'd be willing to settle for the first post in my home time zone.

However, at the rate I'm going, I might end up hitting the 2000 post mark by August.


Perhaps if you took an extended vacation to the Bahamas after hitting 1999, until New Years Eve rolls around, you could get what you wanted.
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Indeed I don't have much to say about philosophy. Drawing philosophical conclusions from quantum mechanics is usually wrong; if you hear somebody justifying some philosophical claim by appealing to the Uncertainty Principle or relativity or something, you should probably write them off as an idiot right there.

 

If you are interested in quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle really is exactly the point that a note cannot simultaneously have exactly defined pitch and timing. The fact that this principle applies to the position and momentum of a particle is, unfortunately, not so easy to explain; but if you want to know just what the principle says, the music thing is it.

 

If you've never heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, nothing I've said is worth reading, but you could google 'quantum mechanics' if you're curious. It's up there in physics with E = mc^2 and F=ma.

 

I don't think "It's impossible to be perfect" is really a good summary of the principle, because there is nothing imperfect about a musical note that lasts at least a few cycles, or about a short chirp of sound that includes many overtones. Thinking of Heisenberg's 'uncertainty' as an imperfection is a mistake. The ideal of a perfectly pitched note that is also exactly timed is an invalid extrapolation from actual music, just as the edge of the flat earth is an invalid extrapolation from local geography. It's not a theoretical ideal whose attainability fails in practice, but a mistaken concept.

 

What I guess you could say is that it's probably worth looking at any other concept of perfection and asking whether maybe it's a mistaken concept in a similar way, as well. That might be smart. Since anything called perfection is probably not approached very often, it likely is defined more through extrapolation than through direct experience, and extrapolation can be tricky. But it would be a big jump to conclude that all concepts of perfection are mistaken.

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