Missing Mary Road

my bi-annual push to get all my readers over to linux is here. ubuntu jaunty jackalope just got released. go and get your copy today.

A curse to trekkies and BSG fans the world over…

Bad news I’m afraid — it looks as if faster-than-light travel isn’t possible after all. That’s the conclusion of a new study into how warp drives would behave when quantum mechanics is taken into account. “Warp drives would become rapidly unstable once superluminal speeds are reached,” say Stefano Finazzi at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and a couple of friends.

Warp drives have been the focus of science fiction writers for decades.

so how long would it take for all the sea water to move around once the ice caps and glaciers melt after all the global warming and what would happen to it.

well here’s your answer!

Twenty inches per decade — that’s the estimate of how rapidly the oceans rose in the last interglacial period about 121,000 years ago, in research appearing in Nature. That’s eight feet over 50 years, in a world just 2°C warmer than we are today.

Not good.

But one little detail bugs me: while we can make educated guesses as to what triggered the sea level increase (glacial melts, presumably), there’s no way of knowing from the fossil evidence when that trigger happened. That is, how long between the prehistoric Antarctic ice sheet collapse (for example) and the resulting surge of ocean water actually making it to the rest of the world?

It turns out that, due to some major currents and the sheer mass of the ocean, dumping megatons of ice (or rock, or whatever) into one part of the sea doesn’t make the whole world’s sea level pop up immediately. It will, eventually, but it takes time, potentially decades — or even centuries.

Imagine that on learning of an impending disaster – perhaps a catastrophic asteroid strike on its planet – the machine resets its memory. Now, an observer sat next to the machine can verify that the “same machine” will still face disaster after the reset. But from the perspective of the machine’s reset memory, the state of the universe in the many-worlds scenario becomes “undetermined”. After all, for all the machine knows, the reset probably occurred for a mundane reason, such as a crash of its operating system.

The next part defies our natural instincts: according to the many-worlds interpretation, all of these undetermined possibilities actually exist and open up to the machine. Even though it followed one particular history up to its resetting, it can be dealt a new card, says Mitra.

another cheat sheet on how america spends it’s tax dollars…

a cheat sheet for time travel.

but i’m pretty sure i know how this guy does it. see if you can figure it out and then we shall discuss.

create your own brute below and we shall go ahead and consume each other in battle.

http://ahhalai.mybrute.com

i’ve seen a lot of bad television growing up in the 80’s with state run television. and since there was only one channel which was on, we watched anything that it showed. anything in english was a bonus. luckily, i was too young to care what i saw and was only allowed an hour or two in the evening during dinner. but i caught up pretty quick. going through this website brought back a lot of fond memories of really bad shows. there’s some great art work there and i went through each and every single image. easily take you a half hour to go through them all but well worth it. i sincerely admire all the artists who have the vision to put together this sort of stuff and grateful that they would share it online for us. i think my favourite image is of danger mouse showed below. click on through for some wonderful memories.

facebook did a press release and threw a bunch of numbers about the site. i’m glad to announce i’m not one of their statistics.

General Growth
More than 200 million active users
More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older

User Engagement
Average user has 120 friends on the site
More than 3.5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
More than 20 million users update their statuses at least once each day
More than 4 million users become fans of Pages each day

Applications
More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 8 million videos uploaded each month
More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
More than 2.5 million events created each month
More than 25 million active user groups exist on the site

International Growth
More than 40 translations available on the site, with more than 50 in development
About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Platform
More than 660,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
More than 52,000 applications currently available in the Facebook Application Directory
More than 5,000 applications have 10,000 or more monthly active users
More than 8,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008

Mobile
There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
There are more than 150 mobile operators in 50 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products