Hummings of a Happy Hurkle

You’ve heard of Einstein’s attempts to formulate a Grand Unified Theory, you’ve probably heard of String Theory and perhaps even Quantum Gravity. But have you heard of Holographic Space-Time?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html?full=true

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I like to be equipped for any eventuality.

I normally carry roughly one small handbag’s worth of stuff in pockets. Keys, money, penknife, phone (with full load of contacts and calendar), plastic cards, business cards, small notebook, pens, rubber (eraser to you!), name badge (surprisingly useful for getting into places!), handkerchief (cloth). Depending on the jacket, I might include a tie, alternate business cards, mints, maybe a USB stick.

The penknife includes blade, scissors, file, screwdrivers (flat and cross point), bottle opener, can opener, spike (otherwise known as the thing for getting stones out of horses hooves), tweezers and toothpick. Lots more stuff in the car: toolkit, office equipment, cables, camera, torch, spare parts, etc, etc.

Man is essentially a tool-using animal, and where would we be without our tools of trade?

Scientific American recently published an article by Max Tegmark, which provides calculations for a particular kind of infinite universe.
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/PDF/multiverse_sciam.pdf

Although I think his use of the word “infinite” is a bit loose, he is careful to define exactly what he means, and his logic is scientifically valid. His argument is as follows:
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How much energy do you use? Do you have any idea?

Here in Melbourne we have been subjected to an unrelenting campaign of messages and restrictions aimed at reducing speeding and drink driving. No-one can have missed the message, and anyone who gets caught must not have been paying attention. Anyone driving here will know it works.

Likewise there has been a campaign of rules and announcements aimed at making us conscious of our water usage and reducing how much we use. This is personal consumption, where you get to turn off the tap. Everyone now knows that the target is 155 litres per person per day. It works: usage has dropped.

If anything energy usage and conservation is even more important, but does anyone know how much energy they use or how much they should be using? There is little doubt that a similar public awareness campaign could achieve similar results to reduce the the energy we have direct and personal control over as a consumer: the energy each of us could use less of by our own direct actions.
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The events in Copenhagen have made me do some thinking about what individuals are going to have to do to have an impact on climate change. I can identify roughly 4 broad categories.
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Tom just bought 100 animals for a total of $100. The 100 animals consists of sheep, pigs and hens.

The sheep cost $10 each. The pigs cost $2 each. The hens cost 50c.

How many of each animal did he buy?
It’s not too hard to solve by trial and error, but we are looking for a logical solution so we can be sure it’s unique.

Solution over the fold.

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Why do people play games of chance, like roulette, where the odds are known and you are bound to lose in the long term?

I am sure some of them play purely for entertainment. At a cheap table your minimum bet is less than $500 per hour and your losses are around 3% of that. That’s about the same cost as a movie and rather cheaper than (say) the opera.

But there must be a lot of roulette players who believe that the results of the spins follow a pattern and if you can detect that pattern you can beat the game. My impression is that (a) most people don’t really think about it, but of those who do the commonest fallacies are (b) trends (c) reversion to the mean. They accept that the wheel is random over the long term, but they expect short term fluctuations to either continue in runs or streaks and/or eventually to somehow balance out. Without quite knowing how or why, they seem to believe that (say) a run of red will continue for some time into the future and/or will make a future run of black more likely. Ditto odds/evens etc.

It’s actually quite hard to explain how the wheel will appear random over time, especially if you’ve just seen a run of what looks very non-random. The maths for that is way beyond most people.

Imagine that the universe is a simulation. What kind of computer would it take to run that simulation?

Just to be clear, imagine that every human intelligence on the planet is actually a piece of software running in a cosmic supercomputer, and that nothing else really exists. Everything you see, every sensory impression of any kind, is the result of executing an algorithm and evaluating some formulae. The sky, oceans, plants, even other living animals are all created to the extent that anyone is paying attention to them, and otherwise are simply not there. Ditto for physics, astronomy and the heavenly bodies: created and modelled for those who look at them.

[Yes, we could economise by only simulating a few people and creating all the others as needed, but that’s not the point.]

So how much computer power would it take? Hard to say, but perhaps not as much as you might think.

Mind you, whoever created the simulation and is now watching its progress might themselves be a simulation in some higher computer. Think about that for a while!

If you don’t know what a boomershoot is, take a few seconds to speculate on what you might get if you put boomer and shoot together, in a US context.

http://boomershoot.org/

Be sure to check out the video. There is a link on how to make the stuff too.

The things some people get up to. I would too, except we seem to have laws against it.

Have you heard this one?
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar.
The first one orders a beer.
The second one orders half a beer.
The third one orders a quarter of a beer.
The bartender interrupts the fourth: “How about I just give you 2 beers and let you all work the rest out.”

And another thing:
This atom walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, “I think I lost an electron here last night.” The bartender says, “Are you positive?”
Atom says: “No, I’m reduced.” Bartender says: “No charge.”

I guess not everyone will see the humour, but it sure tickles my funnybone.