Spelunking the Universe
Posts tagged Thought Experiment
Brain Fatigue
01 week ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Brains are an unusual thing, even now I’m talking about my brain with my brain. More accurately my brain is talking about itself but using a pseudonym. Or would it be talking in the third person? Similar to “Chad thinks we should go to the mall. Chad really likes what Chad has to say.” “Alright…Chad.”
Well regardless this odd cyclical system of self referential commentary is getting us nowhere! I want you to know that I am so incredibly tired right now. This exhaustion leads to a series of wonderful things. The first being that I am not fully aware of just how slow I am completing tasks or just how well I am completing them. A tired person does not (perhaps cannot) accurately tell how tired they are, similar to a person who is drinking trying to figure out how drunk they are.
The answer is always given as N, but the answer is always N+1 or worse. It gets better because this doesn’t just stretch into my ability to work heavy machinery, juggle chainsaws, or hold a kitten it also goes into just how much sense the things I say make. My ability to rationalize and contemplate topics is completely hindered. Right now I presume I’m saying profound things but I bet by tomorrow morning this will look like the drunken ramblings of the neighborhood urchin.
This ended up giving me a mighty big problem. What was I going to talk about today when my brain has gone full retard? If Minecraft is too brain intensive, what hope do I have to finish a post on here.
Well I realized then that talking about how the brain acts when it is tired as the best option! Attack the problem at its source!
Charge!
![I574B[1]](http://theios.net/content//2012/01/I574B1.png "I574B[1]")
If you are ever trying to decide if you should study all night or wake up early and study then the answer should always be to sleep and study in the morning. All that studying you do overnight is basically wasted time. Much of the progress you’ll make on that test in the morning will be from the studying or class time of the weeks prior, and not that brain stoned stupor of an all night study marathon.
It’s doubly bad if you do it, you waste all that time reading a book but now when you take the test you will be totally hammered by fatigue. The circles will start to warble, you’ll start daydreaming, questions will become a sea of meaningless characters smacked together in an utterly random fashion.
If you are tired enough to wobble, don’t drive. An exhausted person is as dangerous as a drunk person or a person texting while driving. All three of these things are a fantastic recipe for vehicular manslaughter.
I’ve got this.
![lz3OS[1]](http://theios.net/content//2012/01/lz3OS1.jpg "lz3OS[1]")
Brains are pretty much assholes, that’s something that nobody should ever forget. Your brain will never tell you (it?) when there is a major cognitive failure, and for a very good reason: “It doesn’t know what it doesn’t know”. When your computer has registry errors that wipe the records of a disk drive from the system it doesn’t know that they are gone, it doesn’t even know they existed to be gone.
When your brain is in full blown stupid it has no idea it is. Just like a totally inebriated person tends to think they are running on all cylinders. How better to explain this…given my own mental disability at the moment. The brain can’t register that there are problems in the system if the system itself is broken. Yeah…that’s it. I like that.
You know what is crazy? Just a random closing thought, with the passing of ACTA this sort of post could cause this whole website to get taken down. The amount of free time that would open up to me would allow me to play a video game for an extra hour a day.
Oh…my…god.
They passed ACTA so I’d start buying more games.
Jokes on them. Steam already sold me all the games. At this point if the entire spectrum of “free” content out there was nuked from orbit I’d not have a single extra game I’d want to buy. When did this happen? I remember the days when I was clamoring for video games. Now I don’t even look up previews for upcoming titles.
It’s not that all games have turned into complete piles of crap (not all of them have) but I already own the ones that haven’t…unfortunately I own some that have as well.
But wait! Digression alert! Brain cannot handle original train of thought. Time to pack up this stuff and ship it out. Which I’m serious about, I have some Amazon returns I really need to get out tomorrow.
Bubble Butts
01 week ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Man my hands are cold…I should not do deck building downstairs. But as I wait for these 10 sickly digits to warm up to something I can feel I’ll tell you a bit about our kitties. Very little, just one more story to help prove they are evil geniuses. My computer uses 3 screens and I switch between Eyefinity and extended single, there is a single key combination that switches them back and forth. Venus stepped on only two keys, those VERY 2 keys.
She then looked at me, after a light puff of air she walked off. The damage had been done, and dominance had been established.
So I don’t do drugs and I have a pretty solid reason why, well not a single reason, but this one I think is pretty solid. I have weird thoughts while 100% sober. Today I was curious about bubble butts, and I know many people are thinking “Well sure I was thinking about those today too!”
But I don’t think you are on the same page as me, I created a thought experiment in my head that asked the question: “IF all other things were the same, what would be different if our butts did nothing but blow soap bubbles?”
100% sanitary, all your butt does in this universe is blow soap bubbles throughout the day. The first and most obvious thing is that soap can dry out your skin if you leave it on there too long, so I suspect pants would need to be dramatically different. If nothing else back less chaps would be mighty popular.
But further, would butts be considered dirty? If we presume that these are 100% the same as soap bubbles from soap products its not a matter of sanitation. Also would people be mortified to get hit by a butt bubble of someone else? This seems like a thought that is biased by my own personal feelings on the matter, if someone now were to blow a bubble with their rear I would be an extremely unhappy person to have it land on me.
Would it be funny? We laugh at farts now, would bubble blasts be hilarious to us? I know for me it seems like it would be painfully funny, but if everyone is doing it then I would suspect it would be similar to hearing elbows pop.
How would chairs be designed? The moisture from the bubbles would be terrible on most modern fabrics. Imagine your office chair getting a fresh coating of soapy water each day. The mildew build up and other issues would just be terribly inconvenient.
I’m not sure what the mechanism would be, frankly, how digestion would lead to the production of soap bubbles but I’m sure nature finds its way.
This sort of strange stuff is what racks my brain about once a day or so. I don’t really need any drugs to help me wonder the oddest things.
Although I recall being told in college “I’d love to get you high.” which I thought was a flattering compliment. Although I suspect I’d be incredibly boring stoned. I’d probably say things like “Guys, guys, I’ve been thinking about taxes.”
I’d write more but it is quite difficult to write when it looks like someone is reading it, even though I’m sure they aren’t. (Hint…hint…)
Over thinking It
1 year ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
To say that I over think things would be an understatement of such proportions that it would be far beyond a lie. It is something that keeps me up many nights and causes me to think about situations that all others involved have long since forgotten.
I’ve noticed it all the more recently as I work on “the story”. (Now forgive me as I’m about to compare myself to a truly talented writer, this isn’t to say I am talented, it just happens to be who I’m reading at this moment) I’ve been reading harry potter, yes I know only a decade or so after the rest of the world started. I try my best to be so far back on the bandwagon that I occasionally must rush after it as it scampers off without me. Keeps life refreshing for me that way…in the sense that I can enjoy something and not feel the urge to rant on about it for ages. Although today that will not be the case!
At any rate Rowling manages to present an entire castle worth of characters, likely thousands of students, hundreds of teachers, and a plethora of monsters all working in tandem. The details of what all of them do is scarce, save for about 20 or so major players but it still feels like a very deep and active place to learn. I wonder as I read it, how many hours did Rowling spend plotting out the journeys students with no real importance made each day? Did she spend nights pondering about just what the professors were doing at the moment Harry and Ron walked into that very wet and very empty girl’s bathroom?
How many days of her life were lost to constant thought over just what Dumbledore was eating each day? Did these sort of questions even pop up to her? I find myself plotting distances, times, steps taken, weather patterns, social and economic issues. I’m pondering what characters who won’t even appear for multiple books are doing at the exact moment a situation is going down.
It is swallowing my mind to the point where I’m thinking about it during much of the rest of the day, even when I AM reading Harry Potter. As I plod away through the, admittedly very interesting, tale of this young boy and his friends I am wondering just how the next scene of my own fantasy universe will pan out. I’m hoping by the end of this first novel I’ll have some sort of system down, a series of kill switches to help dull the endless pondering about this place. Because if I don’t I might just wake up one day within the pages.
How many people are you?
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
I’ve been on a journey of sorts through my life, to prove to folks that likely nothing is black and white. Now honestly, could something like “How many people are you?” be that complicated of a question? I mean obviously, you are one person, I am one person, it seems so simple.
Well lets go on a very short journey, through an entirely plausible series of events, merely limited by current medical technology. I’ll then ask a few simple questions and we’ll see how straight forward they are.
For reasons unknown, Markus, has entered a hospital to have a peculiar surgery done. The hospital is going to cut Markus completely in half from tip of his head to his groin. The brain itself can survive as damaged as 50%, which means that a perfect cut with optimum tools and technology would leave two halves that only are limited by the organs that remain. We would need to either build or donate an extra heart and any other organs that are not perfectly split. Essentially the ‘open’ side would then be closed with a bionic enclosure. Nothing fancy, an apparatus that helps enclose both sides so that now we have two living halves that both function.
My first question is a simple one. What would each side know? Would one side be able to speak and the other not? Does the brain store certain information in a raid between both halves? What would the halves say to one another?
Perhaps some deeper more philosophical questions. Would the halves themselves feel one another? In theory if we have a soul we would be dealing with one entity that now experiences two separate sets of sensation. What metaphysical ramifications come from each not communicating with the other?
Now I ask you. Given this situation that could quite easily happen with some small gains in the medical field. Is this just one person or two people? If you argue that it is one person, would you arrest one half if the other (unbeknownst to it) robbed a bank? If you didn’t arrest both of them then you are acknowledging that they are both separate people.
But now we have a new question. At what point did we take one person and make them two? What was it that defines a person? Is it simply the bridge between the two hemispheres? Or is it merely how many functioning bodies are present. In the face of the split man you have taken one functioning body and made it into two with a few modifications.
So that’s my conundrum. A problem that could be so easily fixed by just having a brain that does not operate when the hemispheres are disconnected from one another. This of course isn’t my finest work but the simple scenario and questions should keep folks busy which is what is important.
A Waste of Time
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
It is a term that gets thrown around so much that it got me thinking. Following off the theme of the last post my question is this: Is anything you do not a waste of time?
Perhaps it is just a matter of the glass being half empty, half full, or perhaps just twice as big as it should be. But isn’t everything a waste of time?
Every book you read, every thing you do, every mark you make, each of these things will be null in respect to you once you die. Every person you influence in any manner will also die and with them the events become null. Given humanities overall inability to separate from ancient fantasy I have doubts that humanity will ever make it off the Earth. We are likely to see cycles of intellectual growth, great destruction caused by fantastical ignorance, and then a recovery period. This will extend the time and resources needed to reach a colony in space and just might push us up until the big end.
That big end for the Earth of course being when the sun expands and swallows it. Every single activity ever committed by a person will be scorched to cinders and yanked into the center of the sun. In that moment every single action of humanity becomes moot. For the exception of maybe some satellites that are well out of harms way but it is only a matter of time before something destroys them.
So really isn’t everything a waste of time? Then again how do you properly use time? Who is the judge of what is a constructive use of time? These are questions that so frequently seem to be treated as self evident when the answers are hardly so.
Why shouldn’t we be here?
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
People often ask the question of “Why are we here?” Which I believe I’ve touched on before but most recently it popped a similar thought into my head. To be succinct “Why Not?” Of the massive number of possible formula’s for universes that could possibly exist each has the same chance of existing as every other universe.
Mathematics, Physics, Biology, and every other science that I don’t fully understand are based specifically within our own universe. It is one of those tautological “It is because it is.” kind of situations. So we are no more special than any other possible universe, sure we have life as we know it, but that is a self fulfilling setup. Anytime we find life it’ll be life as we know it because we have found it and thus we know it.
Life as we know it has changed over the entire span of human existence and was different before we existed. Life as we know it will continue to change and if we discovered another universe (or even another planet) with different life following rules that we do not fully understand we will now have a new understanding of life as we know it.
All that separates life in this universe from another universe that may or may not exist from being under our oh so wonderful “life as we know it” tag is us finding it.
Because of this I see nothing special about this universe which makes me wonder. So it isn’t a question of why we are here, there is no reason why we shouldn’t be here. Not all why questions are necessarily ones that have an actual answer. Just like “Why do people generate more energy than the sun.” I can’t take credit for that revelation, Richard Dawkins had a similar one “Why are Unicorns Hollow.” Just because you can ask it doesn’t necessarily mean it is a valid or important question.
My question isn’t necessarily better. I realize the irony or hypocrisy in me asking it, but I am finding it odd to assume that life shouldn’t be here. There is no better chance of any other universe than this one, and everything that makes it special is only special because it involves us in some manner or another.
As a point of clarification before closing this little thought, I don’t hate our reality, in fact I find it very awesome, but I don’t need some unanswerable question to justify that feeling. Since we exist I see reason enough.
Thought Experiment: Life and Intelligence
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
The following is not necessarily fact, indeed this is just a thought experiment on why I’m not too amazed that there is life or that life can manifest itself from a universe that is seemingly non-living.
I am unsure of the exact mechanics of DNA and RNA. Nor do I know if these are the most basic of building blocks for life. However I am going to assume, for the sake of argument, that they are. If they are not you can quite easily, without breaking the point, replace their names with the actual names of the basic building blocks of life.
If you were to take the chemicals that naturally occur upon Earth that are responsible for these basic building blocks and you placed them in a large vat. Lets say a vat the size of a stadium, something far smaller than the size of the Earth (almost ridiculously so) and you left them to constantly react to one another every moment of every day, for years and years, I am certain that you would in return find yourself with extremely simple life.
This life would have an intelligence, however it would be absolutely basic. The operations of generating energy and replicating would be all that it does. Why? Well even non-living elements on the periodic table are (misnomer alert) instinctively searching to complete their outer electron shell. There is an inherent motivation to have a full ring and it is an ever present reality in our Universe. This basic need moves right on into life, the ever present desire to consume energy in order to complete operations that sustain a stable life pattern that gives the longest period of time to replicate and repeat this action.
This function is so fantastically simple that it requires little in the way of blind faith to accept. It essentially is the spawning of a billion light switches that have binary modes. They have two extremely basic functions and they repeat these functions over and over.
It is through this process of repetition and the ever present reality that nothing can (to our or at least my knowledge) perfectly replicate itself that we received change. These simple creatures began to have errors in their coding that resulted in extra operations becoming present. These extra operations, just like newer mechanical gadgets, presented even more gears to break. The more complicated anything gets the more there is to worry about after all.
These compounding functions, of replication, error, and growth result over a period of time to what we see today. It is not difficult to believe either, when watching bacteria replicating at nearly breakneck speed I find myself wondering just how many sneezes are going on in the process. How unrelated the bacteria a few days later are from their great ancestors of the days prior (assuming the bacteria has a short lifespan of course).
The shorter the lifespan of an organism the more present are these mechanisms I believe, because the shorter the lifespan of an organism, the more quickly it consumes and reproduces thus providing far more chances for replication and error. I’m sure this is not breaking science news for anyone but it is something I was thinking about recently. The point however is that at the most basic level of life. You really just have the same operations that are committed (at least in concept) at the electron level of elements. They are attempting to complete a simple circuit to establish a level of stability. It is this simple action that is present even in the non-living that drives all of life. Not necessarily the only thing, but I’m quite sure that the primary need of any organism is to maintain a stable energy level since every other operation after that requires it. You can’t exactly mate if you are dead…usually…ok there was that one time…wait…nevermind I’ve said too much.
I hope you enjoyed this thought experiment. Tonight I will also be publishing my final version of the Alabaster Bonobo: Tides of Chaos. If you ever needed a reason to dislike Microsoft here it is: They have Wal-Mart in their dictionary but not Bonobo.
God Vs. The Devil: A Thought Experiment.
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
It is often said that God sent the Devil to Hell as punishment for defying him and attempting to overthrow the kingdom of Heaven. Sure this makes absolutely no sense at all but lets just run with it and assume that it does. So with this in mind the Devil has established a very powerful trait, the Devil defies God. This fact enrages the Lord and thusly he reacts win the same manner as any Tyrant and banishes the Infidel.
The story goes that the Devil is behind all the pain we go through. Sure Eve tricked Adam into eating the Apple but it was the Snake (Devil) that tricked her. So the idea stretches on to say that the Devil is hurting all people to get back at God for being an asshole who can’t take a little insurrection.
I would think that there is a much easier way to get back at God. In fact an action that would be so infuriating that there would likely have to be a new even worse punishment (perhaps being made non existent). This would be not harming people, or even worse still helping them. In doing so the Devil would be defying God once again and would create a system where Heaven would be depleted of its members and the Devil would then essentially own his own Heaven. It would infuriate the one asshole he never could get a long with and it would absolve him of doing exactly what his old leader demanded.
What I find almost incomprehensible is the idea that the Devil has not already thought this up. Considering the fact that I am merely a mortal and the Devil was originally an Angel of Heaven (the top angel wasn’t it). This leads me to ask the question of whether or not the Devil (if existent) is actually already doing this. If this is the case then it follows to ask who is causing all the pain in the world?
What better way to get people into your following than to hurt those around you and put the blame on someone else. It is entirely possible that God, being defied by Satan again, has no other option but to hurt people in order to maintain the belief that Satan is harming folks and to perpetuate the system God originally put in place to get people into the club.
Now this might sound preposterous however it really does fall on some pretty simple facts. These tactics have been used in Governments in Human History and it has been proven that the best way to Infuriate someone you can’t kill is to disobey them and to showcase just how powerless they actually are.
Also doesn’t help that all of the mass murders in the Bible were perpetuated by God. Unless someone found a verse that says that the Devil was killing innocent babies, creating mass floods, and murdering hundreds of thousands of people to prove a point.
Thought Experiment: Bilateral Cloning
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
When discussing cloning there is a general question of whether or not the new clone would retain the memories of its parent organism. Generally speaking I can think of absolutely no reason why this would be the case however it got me thinking.
I believe I’ve discussed before the fact that the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain can function while entirely separated from their sister lobe assuming they still have all the connections to the body that keep them alive. While these are both in the same body it appears that the person still is a single person.
What would happen though if we split a person bilaterally from top to bottom and connected each side to the required machinery to keep them alive. Perhaps in a future with advanced cybernetics we could give them half mechanical and half organic. At any rate, my point is this, would each function as the original did? We have created two people out of one person and not only that but each has the ability to function just as the originally did, however half as fast (well not literally but a separated brain does not function as well as a full brain…which isn’t a shock).
Would each side make the same choices when presented with the same stimuli? How evenly split would the memories of the person be? How well would they function as a team? Do we consider this as two individual people or one person? That final question is the one that is blowing my mind a bit.
Is a person split in half and still alive a single person or two people? It seems to break the black and white view of a person or an organism in general. It is another case of something seemingly obvious that is in no way obvious. It also is an important question when looking at a mother and the child within her. At what point do we consider them as two individual people, is it because they have each a set of organs? If so would that mean that a person split bilaterally would now no longer be a person at all?
The things that keep my brain moving are so odd sometimes…
The Möbius Code (Part 5)
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
[ Index ]
Part 1 – The Introduction
Part 2 – From Universe to Solar System
Part 3 – From Solar System to Earth
Part 4 – From Solar System to Earth
So time has passed and we have reached what we would now call Humans, Homo Sapiens, or any other clever naming agent you can grow to love. There is little to talk about here, not because much hasn’t happened, but because it is all easily accessible in the plethora of required history courses you will take in school.
One can hope we’ll survive ourselves. Assuming we do we have many millions of years to go before the current theorized end comes (the scientific one not all the religious ones that pop up annually). We are 
years away from what is the predicted end. That’s a much less clean way of saying 1 Googol years from now, or (arguably) even cleaner would be 1 with 1 hundred zeroes following it. It’s a fantastically long time that even I didn’t quite grasp till I saw it written out in this post.
Over this time we’ll have stars born and stars die. Black holes will grow and shrink (via a process championed by Stephen Hawking). Galaxies will soar away from one another with each passing day, planets will be consumed in the expansion of stars, the Earth will be scorched by the sun (all things left as they are). Eventually all matter will be stretched to an extreme and ever widening point where heat is no longer generated. This will leave an entire universe with absolutely no action which technically would also mean that time has ‘ended’.
I’m skeptical as I’ve stated before. We have not accounted for the excess gravity all over (the idea behind the possible existence of dark matter) and frankly there tends to be new information found with each passing year and certainly with each passing decade. It’s not to say we don’t have ages, 1 Google years is an amazing amount of time. So many wonderful (and unfortunately terrible) things can transpire between now and the purposed end.
My theory? While I’m hardly a better source than any astrophysicist I think that there is some currently unknown rubber band response to the expansion. At a certain point the stretch will get so extreme that everything will then rocket inwards. It seems quite reasonable to assume that this is what has happened the X amount of times in the past and will happen the X amount of times in the future. Of course there is also the possibility that the recoiling inwards is exponentially proportional to the expulsion outwards with each ‘bang’ and perhaps we are experiencing what will end up being the final shot. Who knows, it would be quite unfortunate but we still have far more time than needed for just about anything.
It is currently the state of all things mortal or otherwise to reach a state of inaction, it would be nice if we put more energy into prolonging and enhancing the time of action we each have. With each dollar we spend on death instead of life we are creating a large imbalance that could indeed snowball one day. I just hope it hasn’t already begun.
I’ve left out unimaginably large amounts of time, but that’s because who knows what will happen down to the number. The chaos effect makes estimating things highly difficult if not impossible. Neat stuff.