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This would only be complete with a little "control panel" full
of activities for the baby. |
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Of course, but the knit cap with a glowing blue 3rd eye sewn in would be sold seperately. |
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Baked by someone at one of my nephews' parent and toddler
groups in the mid-'eighties, and that's God's honest truth. |
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To me, the most interesting thing about Genesis Of The
Daleks was the statement "when the Universe was less than
half its present size". When exactly was the Universe half its
present size? |
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That's nothing: until the mid-60's the Universe was in
monochrome - I know so because I saw it on TV. |
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But to answer your question, the Universe was half its size
when it was half its present age (give or take a bit). |
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Well, assuming 'size' was meant to be understood as 'volume' which, in turn, does not take spacetime into account but rather just some kind of xyz coordinate system, then the Universe appears to be expanding (we can tell from the Doppler shift in the observed light from stars). So, if I was a sci-fi writer without so much knowledge of science I would say something along the lons of "Universe...present size" to vaguely represent a long time ago. |
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[MB]: The 'size' growth won't be linear (volume of a sphere varies with cube of radius after all). Plus we have to take the ol' relativity into account... (puts hand up, hoping for a HBer astro-physicist to jump in) |
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// the Universe was half its size when it was half its present age // |
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Wrong. The expansion is exponential; do the math. |
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"Aw! He just said his first "Exterminate"" |
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// the Universe was half its size when it was half its present
age // |
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It wasn't. Even assuming it was a Euclidean sphere expanding
in a linear fashion, when it was half its present age, it
would've had a volume of a quarter its present size.
However, neither is it spherical nor is the expansion linear. |
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- or does our concept of 'size' expand with the universe?
Would the measuring device we're using expand as space
expands? |
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There was a Usenet discussion on this somewhere. |
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No. It just generates more music by Roni Size. |
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//As it expands, then, where does the extra stuff come from? Does it just grow, because someones watering it, or does it convert history into size?// |
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I'd imagine, assuming we can start using the conceptual starting blocks of energy and matter - and extending the concept of their interswappability (e=mc2 and all that) we might maintain the principle of the conservation of "stuff" to suggest that spacetime itself is equally swaparoundable - and that as the universe cools down, energymass-wise, it is through the process of spacetime creation. (This process undoubtedly occuring along the lines suggested by some mockingly simple formula - let's say the differential of e=mc², it could be something like e=2c) |
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Or to put it another way - why is the conservation of energy principle the only conservation one? What about entropy? Why can it always only go down? What if there is a conservation of entropy/universe principle where the missing entropy goes into the generation of space, time - and history? A kind of cosmic engine, always creating the future by losing a tiny bit of entropy in the now. |
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So yes - I think that it is more likely to be a conversion of sorts. Or a decay - depending on how you want to look at it. |
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- If everything is interchangable, energy, mass, space and time - then the mere existance of stuff might, on a fundamental level, generate its own time, and therefore is the root of its own history. Or to put it another way, the big energy that existed in a time when there was no time (at the dawn of the big bang) somehow split itself into a whole bunch of separate components, energy, mass, space and time itself - all the same "stuff", just in different forms. |
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Suggesting that what would appear to be an "expansion" of spacetime, is rather an internal rearranging of various bits and pieces. |
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I have an unpopular view that the Steady State theory is
true or that the Universe is infinite in some other way. |
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Leaving that aside though, my understanding of space is
that it's a relation between objects within it rather than a
container for those objects, so space doesn't actually come
from anywhere. In terms of general relativity, my
understanding is that on a large scale in all cases and in
some cases also on a small scale, the parallel postulate does
not apply. That doesn't mean there's a hypersphere as
such, containing the extra space like a balloon contains air.
It means that the properties of the relations between
different physical locations can't be described in terms of
Cartesian coordinates alone, that the angles of a triangle
always add up to more than a half-turn of a circle, and so
on. |
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Therefore, to say the Universe is less than half its present
size means that the maximum distance between any two
locations was lower at that time. |
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The Cartesian hypersphere will be exterminated! |
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Can we also have a Captain Pike stroller complete with blinking light? |
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"Is widdle baby hungry?" *blink blink* |
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Whatever next? Prof. Hawkings? |
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All of these would be good, but is diversification to that
extent a good idea from a business perspective? I say the
BBC should be gotten to endorse the Davros stroller from
about the time the character next appears in Doctor Who,
then Pike should be timed to coincide with the next Star
Trek movie. After all, you don't want to run before you can
trundle. Also, market the Pike stroller as an educational toy
for learning binary. |
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// a whole bunch of separate component // |
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Hint: you forgot "Dark Matter" ... |
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Would the Davros Stroller have a built-in potty ? |
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Well, as it stands it has a built in potty...person. Presumably
Davros has one in there somewhere. |
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Hey! Why not get babies to communicate everything in
binary as ASCII rather than speaking, signing or learning to
read and write? |
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//communicate everything in binary as ASCII// Why not Morse code? (link) |
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Yes, in Morse code by thinking about playing tennis. |
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Excellent link, [jinbish]. I still prefer to say the word
"scissors" repeatedly though. By the way, that typewriter is
in the first Tomorrow's World book. |
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// get babies to communicate everything in binary // |
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<total digression>
WunWun was a race horse
TuTu was one too.
WunWun won one race and
TuTu won one too!
</td> |
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Thanks for reminding me of that! |
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There's no such thing as tu. |
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Niceness DrBob!. On my 40th B'Day yesterday I got a text in Binary from a friend (clearly sent by his daughter) which said 'Happy Birthday' in Binary. Quick as a flash I replied 'Thanks very much'. Haven't heard from him since. |
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//There's no such thing as tu.// I'm either mad or drunk but I am sure that someone on another website suggested this (regarding Crosswords).
Care to explain? |
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Indeed! DrBob. Your perfidious French cousins even have a verb for calling people 'tu'! On se tutoie maintenant? |
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So... how do you say 'happy birthday' in binary? |
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01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001. 00100000
01000010 01101001
01110010 01110100
01101000 01100100
01100001 01111001
It was my birthday on Wednesday and someone sent me this greeting by text. How helpful am I? |
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[Gnomethang], it's from Futurama. Bender has a dream in binary, wakes up and says "I think i saw a two", to which Fry replies, "Don't be scared. There's no such thing as two." |
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Thanks! So it is just an encoding of the usual 26-character alphabet rather than a fundamental translation. But you are using 3 characters, "0", "1" and " " - does it still make unambiguous sense if the " "s are removed? |
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<pedant alert> That is not how you say "Happy Birthday" in binary, it is how you say it in ASCII. EBCDIC would also be binary, but would be completely different. </pa> |
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