@ACuriousMind okay, so it's just like a 'cluster' of wave packets polarized in all directions?

@NovaliumCompany that's good to here. Daydreaming of playing piano was useful in at least some way hahaha

@JohnRennie According to this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Court_of_the_Crimson_King the lyrics were written by Peter Sinfield.

Probably one of most famous the early anthemic songs of Prog era.

although in all fairness I actually prefer the purer form of Fripp of the later albums: "Lark's tongue in aspic" in particular, with the absolutely mindblowing performance of Bill Bruford on drums; this includes one of my all time favorites: Easy Money.

@JohnRennie I coulda guessed you were a fan.

@ZeroTheHero :-)

I'm told you run a Hawkwind fan site...

This one

do you know if/how it's possible to buy this track: youtube.com/watch?v=JwvI1R9ZEq8

When I was much younger I knew this guy who ran a record store...

just a one-man shop...

he specialized in "unconventional" music...

he couldn't compete with the major chains so he'd get these really interesting bands...

which of course took me to Hawkwind.

There are a quasi-infinite number of Hawkwind mixes and unreleased tracks floating around the net, most of them never officially released.

yes I'm aware of this.

point is... I'd rather give the guy my $$ rather than lift it off YouTube...

I hadn't come across this one before. It sounds very Brocky to me. Really a Brock solo effort rather than truly a Hawkwind track.

are you/were you into King Crimson also?

I was born in 1961, so I was an impressionable teenager just as the prog rock stuff was beginning to make its way to rural Somerset where I lived. So I grew up with prog rock.

I remember seeing them in concert... pretty amazing.

I think it was the "Discipline" tour... small venue...

I've never seen King Crimson live. They had mostly fallen apart by the time I was old enough to go to gigs.

there were indeed are number of "inter-regnum"...

By the time I was of gig going age punk had mostly displaced the bands of the early 70s.

oh come on... I'm slightly younger than you are... I don't believe you never went to a concert underaged.

:D

There was this jazz bar just outside of my school... well... maybe 100 yards away... you had to walk in front of it to get to the bus...

and of course we'd have the occasional late lecture... the bar would happen to be open and the waiters were just happy to see some kids buying beer...

oh well.

wow you saw the Ozrics in concert...

I grew up in a little village in the country. If you wanted to see any major bands you had to go twenty miles to the nearest big city (Bristol or Bath). That made it difficult for yound would be rockers.

I'm tempted to make a snyde comment on the state of bus transit in the UK but I will abstain...

Rural buses are essentially non-existent now. But then that's because no-one wants to use them. My Mum still lives in the village where I grew up and I think they get two buses a day.

I moved away to a city and wild horses wouldn't drag me back :-)

Yes there's quite the discussion right now on the state of public transport in the UK... especially smaller bus services.

and I have a number of colleagues in the UK...

who choose to commute to "larger" cities (read: Bradford, Leeds, Porthsmouth) for work

and it's a problem if the car has an issue.

@JohnRennie Can I discuss an idea with you? (I need your opinion)

@NovaliumCompany hi :-)

I don't know anything about muscles if that's what you want to discuss.

@JohnRennie hi :) I have an idea on how to make VR more realistic. I want the user to be able to feel the objects he touches but in the sense that when he leans on to a wall or touches another player, the bicep activates to pull his arm backwards, you know what I mean?

Yes. That's a staple of science fiction descriptions of VR. They usually use a haptic suit or something similar. Kind of like a wet suit but with actuators that press your skin and make it feel as if you are really touching things.

No such thing exists in the real world, though I think people have tried to make similar devices ina more limited way.

Yeah, the haptic suit deals with touch senses, I'm talking about when you lean into a wall or an object your hand is literally restricted to go through it. If you play Minecraft VR, when punching logs, the suit I'm thinking about could potentially stop your arms as if you are really punching the log.

Do you think this could possibly work to pull the arm (as if it's simulating bicep action)?

(the wire is pulled by some motor carried on the back)

I don't know. You need to ask an engineer.

Alright, thanks.

I'd guess the problem is that there are a huge range of the forces that the external world exerts on us. You've given one example, but you'd need a very complex array of such actuators to be convincing.

That's true.

Also, I don't have VR :P

I guess it's a project to crunch over time in my brain

Has anyone tried to simulate a big-bang-like environment and see if, through chance, evolution can build plants, animals and maybe humans...? What if the key to AGI is not programming an agent (using some currently unknown algorithm) but more like programming a system that can, supposedly through an evolution-like mechanism, build up AGI without us having access or understanding to the ways (and the algorithms) through which the AGI works?

@NovaliumCompany bit ambitious

@Slereah everything is "bit ambitious" and even "impossible" before some crazy-ass dude decides to give it a try

I mean if you do a simulation from the big bang that includes all of earth, that's like $\approx 10^{30}$ things to simulate

bit large for memory

And that's assuming that nothing outside of the sun and earth influence evolution

keep making excuses, some day, I'm giving it a try

well you can try

People do simulate stuff like that btw, but usually they do it to study the formation of large scale structures

@Slereah coolio

The problem you have is basically scale

ie big bang (very big scale) versus life (very small scale)

you can't make the simulation rougher because for life to appear you need to simulate very small scale chemical processes

It is best to either simulate life alone or cosmology alone

okio

Apparently Reichenbach did a book on axiomatization of relativity and it's not on libgen

Do you guys think Donald Trump will be re-elected?

US elections are too weird and close to really say for sure

I'd say he probably wouldn't win the popular vote, but that doesn't mean much

No US elections aren’t that weird.

They're weird enough that Trump won the first time around.

Every country is weird, Justin is charming but his act of doing that with Andressacu was quite weird for a President

@Knight First I've heard of that, but just looking it up, it doesn't seem that bad. He took pictures with a young woman who won a tournament, and because he's close to her and smiling, people seem to be assuming it's something more. Regardless, I would take Trudeau, the NDP candidate or even the Conservative candidate over Trump any day. As a world leader, Trudeau is a lot more "normal" than Trump.

Everyone thinks the same for their country. At least, Trump speaks against Islamic Terrorism openly and I like that. However, Mr. Obama was best.

One problem I have is that Trump speaks about a lot of things. Given how his words and actions don't line up all the time, him speaking against things doesn't have a whole lot of weight for me. He speaks out against terrorism because that's what people want to hear; but it's hard to tell if he actually does anything, because he speaks as if he solves everything regardless.

Plus he's just really bad at putting a good face on his country IMO. He says and does things on a regular basis that loses him a lot of respect from other world leaders, which is typically not good for any country that deals internationally.

Trump thinks that speaking ill would make him more famous. He doesn’t have any traits of good President.

But saying “Americans are weird at choosing their leaders” is not at all right.

We can never know what they will do after becoming President, and we believe the Party who makes them the candidate

Therefore, we choose between the only two options

That's exactly my big issue with him. He doesn't have traits of a good leader, and that's why it's pretty strange that he was elected in the first place. Also, in general I think it's actually pretty weird to be in a two-party system in the first place, so I don't think calling Americans "weird" at choosing their leaders is much of a stretch.

But we elected Mr. Obama, Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Eisenhower and ....

On and on and on and on...

Having some good results doesn't mean that the process isn't weird. The two party system has some really strange quirks. For example, a businessman with no real political experience being elected. That's pretty weird.

"Weird", weird weird weird werid werid werid werid werid weird

Weird

WEIRD WEIRD WEIRD

I really, REALLY hope Donald Trump gets re-elected for reasons you can find online.

If Trump get re-elected, something will happen between US and Bulgaria.

@JohnRennie Reminds me...is Chester actually pronounced like it's written or is it a thing like Worchester?

@Korra I don't know what you mean by "polarized" there, really. As I said there is no notion of being polarized for a generic quantum wavefunction

@ACuriousMind it is pronounced as it's written

there's circular rotation and hyperbolic rotation

does anyone ever study images of these two rotation schemes, after using a nonlinear operator to transform these types of rotation to a different space?

And Trump did lead people to the polls, as personally distasteful as I may find that