Somewhat Useful Facts Thread

[Senator]

You're not a RationalWiki sysop are you?

Nope. In fact, believe it or not the only places I post online is BCC and rarely the Dresden Codak forum (oh my god. It's full of stars Transhumanists).
(used to be the KA/BCU/Political Crossfire forums as well but not anymore). You have exclusivity!

The funny thing is that if you are really anal, new information can never be created generally. It is like energy, a universal absolute, never created and never destroyed.

Information is what differentiates a Human, from a pile of matter with the mass of a Human.

If they have the same mass, they both have the same energy. It's information, that they have different.
And since information, deep down is all the movements and vectors and interactions of all the atoms together, and they have been said to have the same mass/energy, they actually have the same amount of information as well. We simply define one as useful, and the other one as useless.

But you just know that such concepts will go over creationists heads so much, they have reached their mental escape velocity long ago and that delta V to come around is a bitch. Sometimes you just don't have the energy. Pardon all my puns so far.

[Armondikov]

Hmm... energy/information... you're treading strange ground there. It's nice if you want to do some brain breaking plot twists a la Akira or something but I'm not convinced it works like that. There's a massive difference. Infomation is a concept, it's not like every single piece of knowledge exists and must be collected like all the possible energy in the universe exists and can be collected and transformed and used.

[Senator]

Collect all energy, and you have collected all information. But its not really interesting to look at, I bet it looks like white uniform noise.

It behaves so much like energy because in the end, it IS energy. You need to give information in order to change information, and any act of changing it releases information as well.

The "information" of a small cube of air for example could be said to be the mathematical description of all the positions and interactions of the atoms it contains. In order to change it, you literally have to make them move another way. So you need to provide energy. But because you want them to move in a specific way (eg, one that was going straight now to go diagonally at 30 degrees) you are also going to provide that force in a specific way. That "specific" basically means that you will be providing information too, and the act of change is going to release too as well. All that is not really my crap its basically what information theory is pretty much about.

There just is this subjective thing in the middle between what we concider useful and useless information. ("Knowledge" for example is usually a word referring to some specific bits of it). What is "all knowledge" supposed to mean for example? If you have collected all energy for example, you technically have "all knowledge" as well. If you want to store a memory in your brain as well, thats a bit difficult because the information of the universe, would of cource require something with the storage capacity of "a universe".

And if by "all knowledge" you mean and all the combinations of it, then you will be ending up with a lot of interesting memories (like the knowledge of the great steampunk war with armed trains that laid their own track on the spot, or the knowledge that Iceland is in fact a hologram and under it is the nation of Atlantis) and a hell lot of plain white noise and (#%*#(KRLWJKmjdfjsieie_))(#%*#PENISkfjkejfio stuff. There's a nice short Sci Fi story called "The library of Babel" which was a library containing "all knowledge" but as you can understand it wasn't very useful.

You can access it online here: http://hamete.org/babel/index_en.html
(And you can read the short story here: http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html )

[Armondikov]

Well, that's more like our means of storing infomation. There is only a finite number of quantum states in the universe that we can mess around with to store infomation.

[Senator]

A fun thing showing the whole "you give information" + "available information" = "useful information" is that in the Library of Babel, all books could in fact be readable, if you assumed that they were encrypted, in which case you just need the correct decryption key.

[Senator]

Question: Why do airplanes avoid Jimmy's house?

Answer: because it is a SAM site.

*drum roll*

[Armondikov]

Fact: If you don't like Journey, you are dead inside

[Mustang]

Question: Why do airplanes avoid Jimmy's house?

Answer: because it is a SAM site.

*drum roll*

The TRUE reason is to avoid the bitchmode.

[Weasel]

I thought this was cool, even though it's not really a hot-off-the-presses news item anymore:

U.S. Army Eyes Robotic Super Suit That Amplifies Wearers' Movements
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,356035,00.html

[Mustang]

....Iron Man lives again!!!

[Senator]

A fun little toy I found:
http://www.binarytoys.com/

[Kirk]

A fun little toy I found:
http://www.binarytoys.com/

My new best friend! (Not really, but it is quite amusing!)

[Senator]

There is a bus going around with 7 children inside.
Each child has 7 bags.
Inside each bag there are 7 big cats.
Each big cat has 7 small cats.
All cats have 4 legs each.
How many legs are in the bus?

[El]

9618, that doesn't sound right...

Edit: erm 10990.... I hate number puzzles.

[Senator]

9618

*beeeeeeep* Wrong.

10990

*beeeeeeep* Wrong.

[newman]

10990 would account for all the kids and cats. Assuming there's someone driving the thing, you'd need to add
a pair of legs from the driver so that would total at 10992.
Unless of course each big cat has 7 small ones which aren't in the bus.. but that would just be plain evil

[Senator]

10992

He he, correct.

For the record, the riddle is usually asked with 10990 as the correct answer in mind, but I have personally inserted the "going around" bit to imply that there definatly is a driver.

*cookied*

[Senator]

And now for some flying fish:

[El]

10992

He he, correct.

For the record, the riddle is usually asked with 10990 as the correct answer in mind, but I have personally inserted the "going around" bit to imply that there definatly is a driver.

*cookied*

Which assumes one of the children wasn't driving the bus...

[newman]

That would be against the law. Assuming their legs were long enough to reach the pedals in the first place. Even so, have you ever tried driving a bus with a bag containing a shitload of cats hanging in your lap? Neither have I