mjcohen

(This has nothing to do with the post, but the title is so similar that I had to include it. Written a few days after seeing "Inception".

Inception Rejection

(Why the dreams-within-dreams in the movie "Inception" could never happen as shown even if the technology worked as described.)

((Though this would have been a lot easier to do as an essay, the poeming was challenging and fun.))

The basis of "Inception", although it may leave you confused, is that in the brain while waking only five percent is used.

To process things in daily life this certainly has been plenty. That mental surplus means our dreams go faster by a factor of twenty.

The magic device that drives the film (the idea's at least sixty years old) allows dreams not only to be observed but changed as they they unfold.

When this device is dreamt of, unlikely as it seems, if used like in the real world, the result is dreams within dreams.

Inception's filled with dreams in dreams, each twenty times faster than before. Unfortunately, here's the problem this movie does ignore:

Level one's dream factor is twenty; four hundred at level two. Level three's factor's eight thousand - two hours there is less than a second for you.

In the first dream at twenty times the brain goes at full speed; there's no excess capacity that the next dream down would need.

A dream in a dream can only be dreamt by the real brain at the top. The faster brain that's in the dream is no more than a prop.

To go faster by four hundred, the dream at level two would need a brain twenty times as fast as the one you carry with you.

So the speed of the dreams that are further down could be no faster than the dream that's first. A quite ingenious plot device here has its bubble burst.

I have used Audio Hijack for recording a meeting (M1 13" MBP). How does this compare?

For very philosophical writings about this, read "Last and First Men" and "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon. Written in the 1930's, these describe on a very expansive scale the history of, respectively, humanity and the universe. Very mind bending.

Deepseek seems to be one of the few LLMs that run on a iPod Touch because of the older version of ios.

Clifton Fadiman edited two collections of mathematical fiction "Fantasia Mathematica" and "The Mathematical Magpie". I have them and enjoyed both.

I found this an enjoyable read. I also have Wilkinson, both text and Algol book, which I used many years ago to write a fortran eigenvalue/vector routine. Worked very nicely. Done in VAX fortran and showed me that having subscript checking on added 30% to the run time.

10 million

I have the first two Animusic reels (vhs and dvd) and thought they were great. Unfortunately, the creator scammed people by taking money for Animusic 3 and then not making anything.

Most of them are on youtube.

I read UHH over 30 years ago and learned a lot about UNIX. Very useful.

Only 7k? They are slipping.

Then you might enjoy "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapeldon. It is available on Amazon.

My eyes are sensitive to glare, so in my last job I took to wearing the visor I wore outside also inside. Got some weird looks but it was a lot easier on my eyes.

When you get old enough, your eyes stop focussing.

Fortran has arbitrary-based indexing forever (as does Ada). The default is 1 but it can be specified as anything. I don't see why this capability is so rare.

If 0 is not an allowable value for b is necessary but not generally sufficient.

Knuth vol 2 has a nice discussion of floating point operations and shows how to reason about them. Wilkinson's classic "Rounding Errors in Algebraic Processes" (1966) also has a good discussion.

Chess is not stateless. Three repetitions of same position is a draw.

What is Vanity?

Wow - that is fiendish!

Look into a disease called faceblindness (there is a fancy name I forget).

How abut the following proofs that sqrt{2} is irrational.

1. If 2=a^2/b^2 with a and b relatively prime then a^2=2b^2 so a is even, and, letting a=2c, b is also even a contradiction.

2. Use the lemma that a positive real r is rational if and only if there is a positive integer b such that br is an integer. (Proof left to the reader.) if sqrt{2} is ration then there is an integer b such that bsqrt{2}=a for some integer a. Let b be the smallest such integer. Then, if c=b(sqrt{2}-1) then c is smaller than b, c=bsqrt{2}-b is an integer, and sqrt{2}c=sqrt{2}b(sqrt{2}-1)=2b-b*sqrt{2} is an integer, a contradiction (this uses infinite descent).

3. Use the theorem that if x, y, and n are positive integers such that x^2-ny^2=1 then sqrt{n} is irrational, and apply with n=2, x=3, y=2. Proof of theorem. a. If x^2-ny^2=1, then using (x^2-ny^2)^2=(x^2+ny^2)^2-n(2xy)^2 to show that there are arbitrarily large solutions to x^2-ny^2=1. b. If n=a^2/b^2 then 1=x^2-(a^2/b^2)y^2 so b^2=b^2x^2-a^2y^2=(bx+ay)(bx-ay)>=bx+ay>bx so b>x but this contradicts the existence of arbitrarily large x.

How are any of these the same as any other?

Anything that helps consumers is on that chopping block, and CFPB is at the head of the list.

Interesting to see which optimizations are never used.

If you (or your client) are ok with your data going off premises.

For the Amiga, one of my favorite games was "Hole-in-one Miniature Golf."

Bookman Old Style (my favorite font) seems to do this.

Looks ok to me - can't see anything wrong.

Join the Fibonacci Quarterly - I find it quite enjoyable.

Its not regulated if a government does it.

A while ago, I was using an emulator for a 32-bit processor I was writing code for. To detect access of non-initialized storage, instead of having an out-of-band bit for each word, it stored hex deadbeef in each word before program start and, at each memory read, checked for this. If it was found, the enulator halted with an error.

This was very handy in catching errors. I never saw this particular word actually generated, so it never indicated a false error.