better drink all your shincha (large hadron collider)

Miscellaneous Discussion. Any topics that don't fit in other areas of the forum.

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May 14th 08 3:12 am
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better drink all your shincha (large hadron collider)

by insanitylater » May 14th 08 3:12 am

http://www.lhcountdown.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

it will be turned on in about 24 hours and could destroy us all

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by PolyhymnianMuse » May 14th 08 3:16 am

hah thats very interesting. I remember reading about the LHC a long while ago. Read the website though, the first thing there says:

A clarification
The countdown timer was set to the 15th of May because there was no definite time given for the actual activation, recent events show that CERN wont be dividing by zero until much later on in the year, so now the countdown timer will be reset again and will be continually tweaked to go by the latest info that CERN are releasing.

So sorry to disappoint you all, but you wont be dying tomorrow.

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by insanitylater » May 14th 08 3:32 am

oh crap i drank it all for nothing

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by PolyhymnianMuse » May 14th 08 3:50 am

insanitylater wrote:oh crap i drank it all for nothing
never for nothing! :lol:

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by tenuki » May 14th 08 4:12 am

PolyhymnianMuse wrote: So sorry to disappoint you all, but you wont be dying tomorrow.
Well, in the case of the black hole creation scenario the subjective experience would be more like ceasing to exist rather than dying. In the case of stranglets we would all be converted to a large hot lump of strange matter, which isn't all that different than what we are today.

In either event I don't think it would be very noticeable or indeed painful so it's really nothing to worry about unless you think your cat will survive and need feeding.

Then again, electrons may be micro black holes. In which case we are all walking doomsday machines already and the hadron accelerator is just gonna make lots of electrons to go with the higgs particles.

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by Sydney » May 14th 08 11:20 am

[whimpers in the corner]

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by ThinkingOutLoud » May 14th 08 11:26 am

OK, now y'all are groovin' to my beat. Check this out:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/scien ... ref=slogin

It has lines like, "If some atoms in another universe stick together briefly to look, talk and think exactly like you, is it really you?" And, "In this universe, at least, the future and the past are different and you can’t remember who is going to win the Super Bowl next week." Isn't that awesome?!

So maybe, in another universe, you Sencha drinkers actually love bagged herbals drunk only out of girly china teacups.

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by Sydney » May 14th 08 11:15 pm

Blasphemer!

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by Pentox » May 14th 08 11:26 pm

ThinkingOutLoud wrote: So maybe, in another universe, you Sencha drinkers actually love bagged herbals drunk only out of girly china teacups.
Wait, that's not normal?

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by PolyhymnianMuse » May 14th 08 11:29 pm

Pentox wrote:
ThinkingOutLoud wrote:
Wait, that's not normal?
What is normal? :P

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by ThinkingOutLoud » May 15th 08 12:21 am

PolyhymnianMuse wrote:
Pentox wrote:
ThinkingOutLoud wrote:
Wait, that's not normal?
What is normal? :P
"Indeed, normality is an expected characteristic of a real number, from a measure-theoretic perspective, since Borel showed that almost all numbers are normal."

See? You just have to be a number. Pick one.

God, I love the 'net. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/94/8/3513

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by tenuki » May 15th 08 12:48 am

ThinkingOutLoud wrote:OK, now y'all are groovin' to my beat. Check this out:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/scien ... ref=slogin

It has lines like, "If some atoms in another universe stick together briefly to look, talk and think exactly like you, is it really you?" And, "In this universe, at least, the future and the past are different and you can’t remember who is going to win the Super Bowl next week." Isn't that awesome?!
Time is most likely created by the intersection of perception/imagination and irreversible chemical processes in the brain, ie it is probably not a property of the universe (disputable but not refutable). Consciousness is not solely machine emergent (again disputable but not refutable). Existence is not contingent on uniqueness (clearly). And everyone knows there is no You over time only You momentary.

As usual the NYT is full of it.

;P
Do something different, something different will happen. ( Gong Fu Garden )

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by ThinkingOutLoud » May 15th 08 10:25 am

tenuki wrote:And everyone knows there is no You over time only You momentary.
With that, I will wholeheartedly agree!