[ALIEN ANAL]

i am no longer a virgin
and it wasnt like american pie, it went for hours.. :P

hi guys, im back

[Green_mind]

haha, congratulations Alien and welcome back man.

[ALIEN ANAL]

thank u very much

[sonicl]

Originally Posted by sonicl

We've just been for a walk to the village to buy some eggs from the lady who keeps chickens, and there was a little yellow duckling on the duckpond, all cute and fluffy like in a childrens book. We're going back tomorrow with a camera, so expect to see pictures.

 

And this is the cat that likes to hang out in our garden:

 

[Pookie]

Originally Posted by sonicl

And this is the cat that likes to hang out in our garden:

 

I find a water pistol is good for getting rid of cats.

[sellouteater]

yawn

[floatingslowly]

What to do about the universe?

Slashdot mentioned the paper Universal Limits on Computation by Lawrence M. Krauss and Glenn D. Starkman. They demonstrate that in a de Sitter spacetime (which the universe will approximate if dark energy is dominant) the amount of energy that can be scooped up and used for computation by any civilization is finite.
It is a nice example of clearly reasoned physical eschatology, even if the conclusion is a bit depressing. But then again, it is hard to get the fire-and-thunder drama of Tiplerian omega points in an open universe in the first place, and rapidly expanding open universes are especially nasty. We need to fix it.
The basic result of the paper seems very robust. In a de Sitter spacetime there is a horizon beyond which no information or matter can reach an observer. Hence the amount of computation a finite-sized system can achieve is finite, even given infinite time. They show that you can get 3.5e67 J by spreading replicating von Neumann probes converting rest mass into energy and sending it back to their origin, roughly the total energy of baryonic matter within today's horizon. They also show that distributed processing achieves 1/6 less information gain than having it all at the origin (and this assumes no energy losses due to transmission).
The real killer is the hbar H/2 pi k_B Hawking radiation from the horizon, since it is constant. This makes the cost of erasing one bit of information (necessary for error correction even if reversible computation is used otherwise) constant, and the total amount of information processing finite. If the universe got cooler fast enough the amount of information processed could diverge.
So we need to either find a way of cooling off parts of the universe so that we can do more computation, change the spacetime topology to get rid of horizons or construct a more liveable baby universe.
Cooling requires a heath bath colder than the horizon Hawking radiation. A neat idea suggested by Wei Dai is to use big black holes. But to get colder than the horizon, we need holes with radii larger than it, so that scheme won't work. To my knowledge there are no other suitable heat baths, although maybe one could pump entropy from baryonic matter into weakly interacting particles like neutrinos (neutrino cooling). Unfortunately they do interact weakly (duh!), so in the long run both heat reservoirs will tend to equilibrate. But as a short run or local solution it might work well.
Changing spactime topology seems to be hard, since any action done to remove the horizon has to reach it, but the accelerating expansion of the universe makes it recede. There are likely other, deeper. reasons why they can't be removed like the Penrose inequalities and other global constraints.
That leaves building a new universe. The Krauss and Starkman paper gives us how much mass-energy we could in principle gather together. It is obvious that we could just pile it up into a big black hole (which, according to some models such as the Linde-Smolin model, might spawn a baby universe or more), but it might be possible to convert it to something more useful. Especially if inflation holds it ought to be possible to cause the formation of a new inflationary domain, which would hopefully be more hospitable. Energy-wise it seems plausible that 1e67 J could be used to drive the energy density to the Planck level in a fairly large region enabling inflation to kick in. The key problem here might be that the new domain receedes too fast from the current spacetime for us to follow, and of course (as noted by Tipler) that the amount of information we can squeeze into the "wormhole" into it is finite. However, when using it as an escape hatch to an universe with unbounded future this might be acceptable. A more pressing and interesting problem is whether it is possible to do chaos control on chaotic inflation to achieve the right symmetry breaking for pleasant physics and the right kind of vacuum energy.

 

[king_buzzo]

suck.

[jico.]

sometimes i hate musical deja-vus. especially when i notice that some of me favorite songs were ripoffs... eh...

[A Thousand Threads]

I have private phone numbers of all (well, most of the important ones) austrian politicans!

What to do now?
arghh

[A Thousand Threads]

Originally Posted by myself

I have private phone numbers of all (well, most of the important ones) austrian politicans!

What to do now?
arghh

What to do for god's sake?!?

tell me

[nicfit]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEUCH!

 

[floatingslowly]

new hunky aroma?

hahahaha that's sick.

[jon boy]

was early for work so i could get some stuff done (there is a massive backlog of paperwork) and the computer systems went down, called the tax office because i am getting taxed too much and they said i was not who i said i was! and wouldnt help me, job centre dont even know if they have my appeal form about the money they owe me let alone are anywhere near to paying me it and the boss decided to give me masses of extra work this afternoon despite literally being under piles of paper. this so far has been my day.

also found out a label wants to release some more of my stuff so you know not all doom and gloom.

[jico.]

who else got their summer ruined? it's fucking raining everyday

[sellouteater]

fly Boy Be Runnin Wit Da moves Yeah

[jon boy]

Originally Posted by Nefeli

jon boy, when you ll become rock star you ll pay less taxes!


badly need to rest, i ll try to do nothing tonight. with a slight expeption, getting my brother from airport tonight.

i already am a rockstar! in quatamala. they hold me as some kind of god out there and my face festoons everything! i was thinking of starting a war with another country, just for the fuck of it.

[Pookie]

I'm off to the museum now, to do some cave painting.

[sonicl]

Try not to steal anything while you're there.

[sonicl]

Bed and breakfast at Ikea

The hotel's bridal suit is free, but guests be warned! Oversleep, and you're likely to find yourself surrounded by several hundred shoppers checking out the bed linen and prodding the mattress.

Welcome to "Hostel Ikea" -- a startling if very temporary foray by the Swedish furniture giant into the hospitality sector. All this week, the Ikea warehouse in the Norwegian capital Oslo is offering sleepovers in its showrooms, free of charge.

Choices include a bridal suite, complete with hanging chandelier and a round bed, and a luxury suite that includes breakfast in bed. Other guests can opt for the "dormitory" which, while lacking the relative privacy and opulence of suites, has the advantage of allowing guests to choose their mattresses from the wide selection carried by the warehouse.

With their wedding just a few days away and their savings exhausted, Alexander Augst, 28, and his fiance Angelica Brockme, 23, managed to score a night in the bridal suite on Tuesday. "We're getting married on Saturday and spent all our money on the wedding. We have nothing left for a hotel and a honeymoon, so we thought it would be fun to sleep at Ikea instead," Brockme said.

Fun maybe, but not overly romantic. Guests are advised to bring eye masks and earplugs as the overhead lights remain on, though dimmed, throughout the night, and Ikea staff start moving palettes laden with goods between the beds from 4:00am.

"The lights, the noise ... I think this is a once-only experience," was Augst's bleary-eyed judgement the next day.

One Norwegian family saw the event as an original way to round off the summer break. "Our three kids spotted the offer on the internet. We were going to spend our holidays around Oslo and thought staying at Ikea would be a fun thing to do as a family," said mother-of-three Vanya Olsen, 35, in a bedroom with fake en-suite bathroom. "It's cool that we're sleeping in a shop," said 12-year-old Emmely as her little sister Emilie, 9, ran around excitedly around the showroom. "It's cheap, it's different and we can shop before going home. I quite like that table in our room. Maybe I am going to buy it tomorrow," added their mother.

At 10:00pm, an hour before closing time, guests were welcomed by a bell-boy in red uniform as two chambermaids in black dresses and white aprons readied the mattresses. Bedsheets, bathrobes and slippers were also provided. A free dinner of prawn sandwiches was served at 11:00pm before an employee read a bedtime story, which told the tale of a little girl who gets locked up in .... Ikea.

After a comfortable if brief night's sleep, the early wake-up time allowed guests, clad in bathrobes and slippers, to tour the inner workings of the warehouse as staff busied themselves restocking shelves. That was followed by a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and cold cuts in the store's kitchen department, before the store opened again to the public.

Of the 1,200 people applied for the chance to stay at the Ikea Hostel, only 150 were selected.

Olsen and her family certainly appeared to have enjoyed their stay. "It was better than a hotel. I would do it again," said the paramedic. "Or maybe we could do it if the event happens at the Ikea where we usually shop in Sweden. Now that would be really surreal."