>Personally the question I want answering is what happens >to all of those socks that vanish from washing machines and why is it only >ever one half of of a pair that vanishes? I'm surprised that so careful a thinker as Steve should still cling to this common delusion. Careful study has shown that the *number* of socks is always *conserved*. It is only the chirality that fluctuates. The best current working model is that the rotation of swirling water causes a local sock transition through a curled spatial dimension or brane, yielding right-left transposition. This is an ordinary example of the far grander chirality dynamics at the Big bang, during which more antimatter switched to normal matter than vice versa, thus accounting for the presence of all of us and our socks. Some counter this explanation by reference to the distinctive color and markings of certain singleton socks. These skeptics seem unaware of the role played by the color charge of quarks and gluons. -- Damien Broderick A weak logic requires a strong coffee. My new first rule of advanced weapon testing: make a backup of yourself before opening fire. -- Kevyn Andreyasn We do it the old-fashioned way: we use brute force. --Ted Fernald I myself am very envious of atoms. It is extremely difficult to perform even minor rolls on the floor while actually engaged in sexual intercourse; atoms intimately making love in molecules can perform spectacular acrobatic feats. Consider the Brownian motion in a precipate reacion. A clear liquid is poured into another and a new substance emerges in a breath-takingly chaotic pattern. If this isn't atomic orgasm, I don't know what is. James Ingraham, alt.sex.bondage.particle.physics Biologists like to think they are chemists. Chemists like to think they are physicists. Physicists like to think they are mathematicians. And mathematicians like to think they are god. Have you whipped your quark today? 'I've said it before, I'll say it again: Can a dog collapse a state vector? Dogs don't use state vectors. I myself didn't collapse a state vector until I was 20 years old.' - Christopher A. Fuchs (2001) The subspace W inherits the other 8 properties of V. And there aren't even any property taxes. -J. MacKay I'm getting my weekly fix of Science ... while bahning to work. This stuff gets more potent with each new batch, either they're cutting it less, or it hits me harder, I don't know which. Eugene Leitl For mad scientists who keep brains in jars, here's a tip: why not add a slice of lemon to each jar, for freshness? - I was thinking how nice it would be to bring more intelligent life into this beautiful world. Just think: a companion who could talk to us; the patter of little feet? - Oh Tom. Always i have wanted a weh-wah of my own. you make me so happy! - Uh? I was thinking about performing innovative brain experiments on a monkey? But i suppose we could have a baby as well. -TOM AND DHALUA STRONG (TOM STRONG #1) "The best mathematician in the world is Maplev in Ontario." - Pertti L. A polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate transform. Be there, or be a circle transformed into polar coordinates! The universe came to a junction When Erwin collapsed his wave function. He lifted the lid And found that it hid A pussy in need of Last Unction. Edward Fagen I have always admired highly localized low entropy regions. -Jay Plutonium wants to be free! Neutrinos have mass!? I didn't even know they were Catholic... Sleep? Isn't that a completely inadequate substitute for caffine? For a good Prime, call: 29819592777931214269172453467810429868925511217482600306406141434158089 -- Bruce Schneier? One morning while eating my Wheaties, I felt the earth move 'neath my feeties. The cause for alarm Was a long lever-arm, At the end of which stood Archimedes. As we grow up, we open an ear, Exploring the cosmic frontier. In this coming of age, We turn in our cage, All alone on a tiny blue sphere. Who needs the balance and check? Screw peer review --- what the heck! Send all of your crap To the internet --- zap! Who cares if it's nothing but dreck! (David Morin, Eric Zaslow, E'beth Haley, John Golden, Nathan Salwen - Harvard team) Bruce Elliot deBroglie, caught quite unawares, Observed a mixed state of affairs: 'Twas Schroedinger's cat Who quietly sat, While running away down the stairs. |If I'm a chemical| |soup. then I hope| |I'm at least the| |SOUP OF THE DAY! Math may well be the Queen of Sciences, but she's slumming in the Silicon Valley. Thomas Scoville, Three of Cubicles "Mathamatics is an all out war, and the enemy is ignorance." Dr. Arlan Ramsay "Integration by parts is always good, even if it does not get you anywhere you still feel good."Dr. Kent Goodrich I think animal testing is a terrible idea; they get all nervous and give the wrong answers. A Bit of Fry and Laurie "Every passing hour brings the Solar System 43,000 miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules - and there are still some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress."

- Ransom K. Ferm "Sex and drugs? They're nothing compared with a good proof!" Konferenser är absolut nödvändiga om man inte vill få någonting gjort. --- John Kenneth Galbraith Getting a SCSI chain working is perfectly simple if you remember that there must be exactly three terminations: one on one end of the cable, one on the far end, and the goat, terminated over the SCSI chain with a silver-handled knife whilst burning *black* candles. -- Anthony DeBoer - Are you for real? - No, I'm the result of a failed exercise on an AI course Mikael Ståldal >>>As crop circles proliferate across the entire globe the vast amount of >>>conclusive scientific evidence continues to be silenced. > >I swear, this is practically the mating call of the pseudoscientist. Curt Adams Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain! Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone. In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our symptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. I'll grant the random access to my heart, Thoul't tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove And in our bound partition never part. Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die Had he but known such a-squared cos 2(thi)! Stanislaw Lem Sometimes ZEN NAVIGATION is referred to as "doing scientific research," where A is a state of mind being considered as pre- PhD, and B (usually a different) state of mind, known as post- PhD. While your time spent in state C, somewhere inbetween A and B, is usually referred to as "being a nobody." comp.ai.genetic FAQ Alright, now, everyone's familiar with the old "Nature vs. Nurture" argument. For those who might not be, it goes something like this: Nature: Mom, Nurture pushed me! Nurture: Did not! Nature: Did too! Nurture: Did not! "It doesn't take a very strong vacuum to squelch human life." Pete Abamonte, experimentalist "I like pro-active rather than re-active. It sounds like we're doing something smart. A physicist on the west coast. "Don't worry, you're not the first grad student who has considered jumping out a window. That's why the windows in your office don't open all the way." Vijay Pandharipande Q: How did you get into artificial intelligence? A: Seemed logical -- I didn't have any real intelligence. "I can swallow a lot of things, but not 4 orders of magnitude." Charles Plager "Empires can rise and fall in the time it takes an I/O request to finish." Dan Reed "I'm not worried about that, I'm more worried about an invisible monster that's mutating." Vijay Pandharipande debugs fortran code. "Yes, the question is academic. However, since we are in academia, we must answer it. Vijay Pandharipande "Why speculate when you can calculate?" Vijay Pandharipande "Some people have proposed using Krypton gas in scintillator detectors." "Won't that scare away the superstrings?" --- "This is NP-complete, which, if you don't recognize that, it's something we in computer science use to frighten small children." --Prof. Eric Cooper in 15-312. "Theoretical physicist---a physicist whose existence is postulated, to make the numbers balance, but who is never actually observed in the laboratory." A recent study has found that concentrating on difficult off-screen objects, such as the faces of loved ones, causes eye strain in computer scientists. Researchers into the phenomenon cite the added concentration needed to "make sense" of such unnatural three dimensional objects ... Sex is just a sublimation of the math urge. --- THE CAT LIVES/DIES! The shortest distance between two points is under construction. - Noelie Altito - With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster 13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress. - Ransom K. Ferm - To be or not to be, those are the parameters. Not-so-old Zen saying: Quantum fluctuation of vacuum happens! EWEINMANN@delphi.com All that glitters has a high refractive index. Haiku double-plus: The object-oriented Poetic format. The Universe is a big place... perhaps the biggest "This is the nineties, Bubba, and there is no such thing as paranoia. It's all true!" Hunter Thompson I did not believe. He said When my robots storm your front lawn you will understand. -- Christopher Kline Those mesons may not have a long lifespan, but boy can they party! Death is God's way of cutting down on your CPU usage (Jeremy's .sig) Jeremy Close *God pressed "M-x light-mode" and there was light* Jonas Bülow "God loves space! After all, He made an awful lot of it." "Truth decays into beauty, while beauty soon becomes merely charm. Charm ends up as strangeness, and even that doesn't last, but up and down are forever." - The Laws of Physics "Mr. Worf, scan that ship." "Aye, Captain... 300 DPI? The computer is mightier than the pen, the sword, and usually, the programmer. EARTH...If You Love It, Leave It<- ERROR: REALITY.SYS Corrupted -- Universe unrecoverable Eat quadrotriticale....3.56 billion tribbles can't be wrong! As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing. "It is not alive, Jim, at least not alife as we know it" "The only system which is truly secure is one which is switched off and unplugged, locked in a titanium lined safe, buried in a concrete bunker, and is surrounded by nerve gas and very highly paid armed guards. Even then, I wouldn't stake my life on it." (Never pour Jolt on a computer scientist after midnight!) >The 3 Rules of Neuroscience : > >1) All seizures eventually stop. > >2) All bleeding eventually stops. > >3) Don't mess with the hypothalamus. Beepilepsy The brief seizure people sometimes suffer when their beepers go off, especially in vibrator mode. Characterized by physical spasms, goofy facial expressions, and stopping speech in mid-sentence. "since oral sex is topologically equivalent to anal sex, converting one to the other is simply a matter of finding the right conformal map." -- Robert Bowler. Give me modularity or give me death. Rob McElrath Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of Pascal and other programming languages, has propounded two new Parkinson's Laws for software: "Software expands to fill the available memory," and "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware gets faster." Read my Lisp...no new syntax. (nil) This sentence is false with probability 0.5. Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the ones in movies. -- Bill Bulko Knock Knock. Who's There? Recursion. Recursion who? Knock Knock... Latin is a dead language dead as it can be. First it killed the Romans and now it's killing me. Protons may decay, Black holes may radiate away, Yet my love for you will always stay. Our psi-waves Are perfectly in phase And when we meet we lase. But oh, by Maxwell's demon, My heart is heavier than neutronium, Because you're being colder than liquid helium. Why do you redshift when I go to blue? Love, what does 137 mean to you? We said we would be Stronger than entropy; Why, why break our symmetry? "I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind! The answer is twelve? I think I'm in the wrong building." -- Charles Schulz "Sömn är ett symptom på för mycket blod i koffeinomloppet!" Urpo Keltamäki, 1996 A list is only as strong as its weakest link. - Don Knuth "Ode to Spot" Lieutenant. Commander Data Felis Catus is your taxonomic nomenclature An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses I find myself intrigued by your sub-vocal oscillations A singular development of cat communications That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion Oh Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display Connote a fairly well developed cognitive array And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend "And the Lord said to Peter Shor: I COMMAND YOU TO BUILD A COMPUTER. The height shall be three hundred qubits..." -- Genesis, Act VI, Scene XIII. sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky it pisses me off they cut down so many trees for Internet books Dicko > >How about "Heisenberg be with you"? How about: "How fortunate! The tiny devils that are responsible for the probabilistic operation of state-vector reduction have taken a personal liking to you! Congratulations on your success as a result of completely random chance owing nothing to your personal effort!" Or: "You don't know where you are, or where you're going. Heisenberg be with you!" Or: "In the name of the Transcendent Powers, I command Maxwell's Demon and all other entities responsible for the enforcement of Murphy's Law and related pessimistic formulations to get OUT!" Naaah. Personally, I'll take: "Fare well wherever you fare, till your eyries receive you at your journey's end." -- sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky