samograd

Why do we have to think that this electron is moving through spacetime? With the 9(?) other dimensions that String Theory has given us, I would think that it could be passing through any subset of them. My impression is that thinking this electron curve is moving through spacetime ignores a lot of modern physics.

My Thinkpad X300 running Linux is about as perfect a PC as you can get[1], except for the missing SD card slot. Then Apple came out with the Air and Lenovo just lapped it up. I'm sure the X1 Carbon is nice, but it wieghs the same as my X300, has a chicklet keyboard and costs about $1500 more at current prices.

The X300 was the Ultrabook before the word Ultrabook even existed :)

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Race-Perfect-Ultimate-Portable/dp/...

I have a problem with the image of 'a single electron on a twisty path through spacetime' that you are describing.

The image in my mind is the vibrating, twisty path /out there/, not necessarily in spacetime. Through this path passes a continuous surface that could be be thought of as the 'current moment' of our observable reality. Each crossing/intersection of the electron path through this surface would result in an observable electron. This would then result in the 'single electron' being be the intersection of a uniform diameter path along the reality surface.

But now that I've thought about it more it's starting to make less sense :) I was thinking these intesections would be pure, geometric points, but a google shows that electrons have a physical radius and I'm having a hard time coming up with any way that these intersection points would have a spin.

What would be the appearance of the electron in your model? I couldn't see it being what we would call an electron travelling along this spacetime path because it would have a need to be in multiple places at the same time; althought I'm sure the 'holographic universe' could somehow take this into account. Does your single electron have a form similar to what I described above?

But the article is talking about a single electron on a twisted path that is intersected by the projection surface[1] of reality.

Your statement (1) depends on the existence of multiple electrons, where the whole idea of this article idea is that only one electron exists, which is where my argument comes from.

(2) sounds like math and not something physical or 'real'. If this operator actually existed in reality such that a single electron's spin can be flipped by applying it to an actual physical electron? I'll answer that by saying, I doubt it, but I am not a particle physicist.

If this operator does exist, then one could not say that there was a single electron on a path, unless all electrons in the universe changed spin direction instantly after the application such an operator.

[1] Edit: changed 'plane' to 'surface'.

> It makes the web capable of pushing information to its users, instead of waiting for users to ask for information.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_push.html [1997]

It seems I'm not the only one to remember the promises of this prophecy:

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/01/0...

Part Feynman's idea is that that the electron when travelling backwards through the slicing plane (current moment) become positive electrons that are travelling backwards in time. This then leads people to ask, where are all the positive electrons?

I propose that the electron when going 'backwards' across the reality projection/slicing plane are not actually travelling in time and producing 'negative' electrons with a positive charge, but are actually the 'electrons' we observe with opposite spin. This brings us back to a single electron on a twisted path with a single spin but giving us observations showing multiple electrons with 2 spins.

Paradox again resolved ;-)

> One is to build an abstract mathematical model which you can emulate in your head

The ability to emulate your abstract or concrete programming model in your head cannot be overemphasized. I used to program the original 8-bit B&W Gameboy, which was a machine so simple and small I could literally emulate it at the clock cycle level while I was writing the code for it.

If you can fit your model into your cache (brain) you can do amazing things using just your wetware.

    So if we had to read the above decrement...we’d say: 
    “luslus dec sigfas cen dec bartis a tis pat sigbar soq
    dec soq ketcab pat wutgal tis pel zero a per tislus b 
    tis pat barhep wutcol tis pel a lus pel b per per b buc 
    pel b lus pel b per per.”

Absolute brilliance.

Yay, the 80s UNIX wars all over again:

http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/wars.html

I'm liking OCRA lately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A_font

    apt-get install fonts-ocr-a

That's the most beautiful chart I've ever seen.

I found:

The A^(1)_M automata related to crystals of symmetric tensors G. Hatayama, K. Hikami, R. Inoue, A. Kuniba, T. Takagi, T. Tokihiro J.Math.Phys. 42 (2001) 274 [Open paper's DOI page in a new tab] arXiv: math/9912209 [math.QA,nlin.SI] [Open paper's PDF from the arXiv] [Open paper's arXiv page in a new tab] inSPIRE: [Open paper's Inspire page in a new tab]

after just clicking around wondering if it was functional as a browser too :)

Firemacs is decent, but still has a few hangups:

    https://github.com/kazu-yamamoto/Firemacs

It's the closest thing to a real editor on the I've been able to find.

No, I want a real editor inside my browser.

Now that we've learned from 'Emacs as Operating System', how about we move into the future.

As the saying goes, "Emacs is a great OS but it's got a crappy text editor".

"Firefox/Chrome is a great OS but it's got a really crappy text editor that has about as much power as Notepad(TM)"

How about we figure out how to embed a real text editor into the edit fields of web pages?[1]

Oh, and if it only worked under Linux, I don't see a problem with that.

[1] http://emacs.1067599.n5.nabble.com/An-Emacs-plug-in-for-a-br...