“Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”
Einstein was a clever guy,no doubt about that. We've all been thought that in school if nowhere else. So what did he do exactly. The implications of his work is so mind boggling i can hardly describe it.
Take time and space dilation for example. If we were to travel at close to the speed of light,time to us, would pass more slowly compared to people observing us. If we traveled for a year close to the speed of sound away from the earth and back again, a lot more time would have passed on earth. How much depends on how close to the speed of sound we were travelling. In fact if you have a constant acceleration of 1G travelling the entire known universe in one lifetime is possible. However,when you returned to tell the world about your adventures, millions of years would have passed and the earth as we know it would no longer be. In fact i'm not sure it would exist at all. This is time dilation,a direct consequence on how the space-time works.
And that's not all,not only does time pass more slowly, space itself shrinks when travelling close to c (speed of light constant). Things get closer the faster you travel. How close ?
Now imagine travelling at the speed of light. We can't. But light can and in fact it does! To light, the entire universe becomes a single point. A singularity. Just like the universe was before the Big Bang. Now wait a minute, you said it takes light 4 years to travel from the nearest galaxy to us in your last post,didn't you ?
Yes for us that is true but we observe the light,we are not the light. Due to time dilation, to light,it got here in an instant. And it can get anywhere in an instant. To light,the universe is a single point. Not only that, time would appear to stop,which is just as well because it would imply time passes by infinitely fast, which means the end of the universe will already have happened! To light the beginning and the end of the universe and everything in between happened at the same time. Now. And it all exists at the same time. Now.
Haven't we heard this before ? Ah yes,our old friend,the multiverse theory.
Now tell me again,i'm boring and unimaginative. That if you don't believe in the things we can't observe,and all the things i have described in the last two posts are a direct consequence of what we can observe, you're somehow a bit dull. Huh ?
The nearest star, Proxima Centauri , is 4,29 lightyears away. A decent daytrip by car is 300 km. A lightsecond 300 000 km..... Three hundred thousand kilometers.
There are 3600 seconds on an hour and 24 hours a day and 365 (or so) days a year. So yeah,it's quite a bit away. And that's the nearest star. Just one out of many. How many,you ask,well we don't know.
But imagine this, Proxima Centauri is really really close to Earth on a galaxy scale. Stars clump up in galaxies. Ours is called The Milky Way.
It is roughly 100 000 lightyears across. Probably a bit more but let's not dilly dally. It's 25 000 times larger than the distance to our nearest star. 25 000 times. If that's not large even on a mind blowing scale,i don't know what is. Of course our galaxy is just one among several. The nearest one,the Andromeda Galaxy,is 2.5 million lightyears away.
Now if your mind isn't blown already,imagine this: there are galaxy clusters. They are structures of hundreds of galaxies bound by gravity. Not only that,there's plenty of them too. To avoid a complete headexplosion, let's not go into superclusters, which are clusters of galaxy clusters,mkay ?
In fact i talked to a radioastronomer the other day and i asked if there's anything pointing to the Universe having a limit at all. He answered: As far as we can tell,it's spherical, which apparently is radioastronomer speech for: from what we can observe it's endless. So if you could imagine a supercluster without your head exploding,it's probably quite a bit bigger than that. Of course there are more than one supercluster but still. It's way larger than that. From what we can observe it seems to be endless.
Now we don't know that for sure but that what it looks like. If that is the case and if it has an endless amount of mass (which we don't know either but that's what it looks like) by sheer mathematical coincidence there is going to be a planet that is exactly like this one. Exactly, down to the position of every single atom. And others, almost exactly like this one. In fact,mathematically every single possible combination of earths and every possible permutation of what could have happened since the beginning of time must exist. Simultaneously.
Now where have we heard this before ? Well the multiverse theory that seemed so improbable and a figment of a heavy pot-smokers mind. Hmmm it might just be that way after all.
Another interesting concept is,if i were to go to such a planet and meet the other me,that is exactly the same composition of molecules as me, he would not be me,right ? So what is me ? Do i exist of something more than what is observable ? If i'm not "just" the cluster of molecules clumped up together that is my body,then what am i ? Wow i might just have gotten religious after all! Who would have imagined ?
i can't observe. Don't believe in God (the old statereligion), don't believe in the State (the new statereligion), don't believe there's any inherent morals,don't believe there's an inherent meaning to live and i believe when i die the same thing will happens as happened before i was born,nothing. A pretty accurate description of me would be atheist,anarchist,nihilist and existentialist. Now i don't really claim to know all the details of the above philosophies however when i read the description i agree on most things. This for some reason makes a lot of people think i'm careless,amoral,boring and downright mean. I'm of the opinion that there are no absolute set of rules and that means it's up to you to make moral decisions,to fill your life with meaning,etc. Not just do it because. To me,that's more meaningful,moral,call it what you want, than the opposite.
For some reason people tend to think that if there are no absolute set of rules,be it from God,morals (whatever that is),the state that we would quickly descend into insanity and chaos. I don't steal candy from kids because God tells me not to or because it's inherently wrong. I'm not completely sure why i don't but i have decided for myself i don't do that. The kid gets sad and i get sad because i'm not a psychopath,maybe that's reason enough. Maybe it's just more "profitable" for me not to do it. But i do it (or rather don't do it) because of me,i have considered it and deemed it something i don't do.
The other day i said,the future and the past doesn't exist. The now is the only thing that exists. I don't see how you can object to that (actually i can,more on that later). That just because of that simple fact you would not care about anything anymore and just piss your life away. I see it as an inescapable fact and it's up to you to do the best of it.
Another thing that rubs me the wrong way is because i only believe in what can be observed people think i'm boring and unimaginative. Well if you knew the amazing things we can actually observe i don't think you would think that anymore. My world is filled to the brim with just mind-boggling things. In fact my favorite pasttime is having my mind blown on a regular basis. Physics is awesome. Einstein was one clever dude for example. The implications of his work are staggering and so far removed from boring it's not even funny (hmmmm,that don't sound right). The next two posts will be about amazing things we can observe. As a quick setup for them let's just go briefly thru the multiverse theory.
In fact there are several and at first glance one might suspect the ones who came up with them to be heavy cannabis smokers. In each instance where a choice can be made the universe splits into another universe so both choice exists at the same time in parallel universes. So everything that could have happened has happened in some universe. Yeah right.
Another theory is that time as such does not exist.
What is time anyways,think and read some about that i can guarantee you to have your mind blown. Unless you're boring and unimaginative,of course.
The past,the present and the future and all possible permutations of possibilities in between,exists at the same time,in parallel. Yeah right. Or....
So it's just an ordinary Friday evening like any other. Sitting in front of the computer listening to some old German 80ies pop, like you do, crying, like you do, to the realization that the simply marvelous woman from that video does no longer exist. Claudia Brücken is still alive however she isn't the same person she was then.
She doesn't look like that anymore, she's had her heart broken a few times, been let down,lied to, been thru some ups and downs, realized she's mortal, i could go on.
This was quite a rude awakening. I didn't really want to live in a world where she didn't exist anymore,way to dull. So i figured i must find her. But where ? Berlin seems like a good start. Maybe she has a niece or something. But that felt a bit overwhelming. Berlin is quite big,i could go forever without finding her. Maybe she's not even in Berlin,then what ? I kind of accepted my fate and convinced myself she is out there and one day i'll run into her.
The one day a few weeks later it struck me like a ton of bricks. She IS out there and not only that,she works in my grocery store! The alabaster skinned, white haired young woman who works there,one day turned her head to something and i observed her in profile. It was then it dawned on me, she looks exactly like Claudia did in her early 20ies. She looks so amazingly clean all the time i bet she don't even shower,she simply doesn't get dirty. That's how i imagine it anyway.
Now you might think this is the, same old same old, dirty midlife crisis pigs preferring young women because of their looks and their youth. I'd say you're half-right. Looks doesn't enter in to it besides many woman nowadays looks way better at 40 than they do at 20. For example Heidi Klum, Gwyneth Paltrow and Anne Heche, there's no comparison.
To paraphrase Usher: she reminds me of a man that i once knew.
I once saw here briefly outside a bar, she didn't notice me. She was running to the next place with a bunch of friends and just then it struck me what a wonderful age 20 something is. She looked so happy. At that time you haven't settled, anything is possible, you're going to move soon anyways so why not move to New York or Tibet ? You haven't been deceived yet so you trust people. You haven't had your heart broken so you're going to love him like you've never been hurt before,love him like you're indestructible. Death seems like an impossibility,you're immortal and everything you do,you do for the first time. Things are still fresh and really exciting.
Now i'm not thinking she wants anything to do with an old farting, hairy, broke-ass bum like me,that's not the point. The point is,she IS out there,there's still hope. The world is a slightly better place now that 'ive discovered her. Slightly more fun.
This is like the geekiest thing ever. Love it. Embrace the geek. Embrace your inner geek.
Swapping places between two values in a computer is a bit more involved than one would first think.
A = B ;
B = A;
doesn't work since in the first line A gets the value from B and in the second B gets the value from A (which is now B) so the value for A is lost. You need a temporary storage. When swapping places in the real world,say two glasses, you simply take one in each hand and swap them. The problem is the computer only has one "hand". So you need to do something like:
C (temporary storage) = A;
A = B;
B = C;
No biggie right ? There's plenty of memory nowadays and C can be reused right after we're done.
But what if you're programming for a really tiny embedded processor like a PIC for example ? Or you have a tightly optimized Assembly loop and you have used all registers ? Memory access is sllooowwww compared to register access and can wreak havoc with performance in critical sections of the code.
Enter you new best friend: the XOR swap algorithm:
A= A xor B;
B = A xor B;
A= A xor B;
or in x86 Assembly
xor eax,ebx
xor ebx,eax
xor eax,ebx
Voila! The value of register a is now in b and vice versa and we only used 2 registers instead of 3.
My inner geek gets all misty eyed and weepy. Love it.
