Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

An interesting read, about Life's increasingly limited options for its continuation as the Universe ages and decays. Interestingly the door of possibility never quite closes as the potential remains for Life to create 'baby universes' when this universe finally poops out.

The timeline at the bottom is very interesting. I'm very curious about what could happen after all the black holes evaporate in 10^100 years, possibly leaving naked singularities all over the universe resulting in, what? Destruction of the Universe? Re-melting of parts of the vacuum into quantum foam and new big bangs all over the place? Very impatient for quantum gravity theory.

http://www.physics.hku.hk/~tboyce/sf/topics/life/life.html

So all these things are in the works. What if we develop artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and DNA machines?

I know some of this may be a long ways off. But I'm not setting a time limit. Seems to me we're on the verge (within a few hundred years anyway) of having living machines.

What do you think the odds are of us actually getting replaced in the evolutionary timeline by one of our technological creations?

Or, what perhaps of the possibility of the machines doing all our interstellar and intergalactic traveling in our stead whilst humanity runs out the clock back here on earth. Current solar system exploration is so far being done this way. After earth and humanity are then gone the machines are still out there, spreading, multiplying and exploring?

What might be the odds that the first extraterrestrial intelligence we contact might actually be artificial, a race of machines of some sort?

What if the universe, or at least our corner of the galaxy, is inherited by machines in this way -- would you find this disturbing, or not matter, i.e. intelligence is intelligence and it doesn't matter what its made of, in other words if we created it then it is, in effect, our evolutionary progeny?

Nice. Right past my house.

:-( :-( :-(

LOL! An atheist Lutheran priest, what next!

Is it just me, or does that guy look a lot like Mr. Bean?

That was fun. Bit one bullet and got 2 hits.

It's kind of set up to trip you up, of course. Starts by asking very vague questions, that you respond to with the given generalized answers. Then late in the game provides you with some specific situations to nail you with.

Without giving any spoilers, an analogous example would be, if they started out by asking you if killing people is wrong, and like a fool you answer 'yes'. Then later they would ask if you if it were okay to kill someone when it was necessary because they were trying to kill you, and you'd say, well yeah, sure. Then they say, "but didn't you say killing was wrong? AHA!!" and they nick you.

1.5% on a 3yr CD

Seriously, I'm kind of just watching and waiting.

Prime is 4.00%, but the long bond is selling off so the 30-year yield is starting to climb. If the economy starts looking good, expect the long rates to go higher.

Locally startng to see some glimmers of hope. Some companies around here are starting to make money again. Not out of the woods quite yet.

As for the stock market, don't know how high the recent run will go, but curious to see how it reacts to rising rates in the bond market.

Prime rate is the short-term debt. In a world of 30-year mortgages, this is the meat and potatoes: the 30-year treasury bond yield. Now up about half a point from the new lows set a couple of weeks ago, quite a pop in 9 days and a substantial pop today. Watching this one like a hawk.

"It's actually an interesting situation. Should a professor be allowed to refuse to take on a doctoral student, based solely on moral issues? The profesor clearly thinks the moral divide between himself, and the candidate, would prevent the close and intimate relationship, that is often required between a doctoral student and his or her sponsor. But is that justification enough, to refuse such a request?"
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It is important to note here that the professor refused the doctoral student without having ANY idea what the student's political or moral views even are. Despite what it may appear from the news, Israelis are not politically monochromatic. So the refusal could not really be argued effectively that it was on moral grounds alone. Will the professor also refuse English students who have pro-Israeli political attitudes? If the answer is yes, then he sets himself a pretty awkward precedent to follow. What other political criteria will he screen potential students by? If the answer is no, then his refusal of the first student is simply based on nationality and he is then guilty of discrimination.

I have no problem with someone taking a stand because of a political stance he believes in. But he must understand that if taking such a stand is important enough to refuse a young person's education, a person about whom he knows practically nothing, then it is important enough to lose one's job over, because that is the likely result.

Old software it seems takes deeper discounts than anything else to sell.

From what I've seen, generally for outdated versions of software you can only hope to get anywhere from 20% to 50% whatever people can find the new version for on other websites, auctions, etc. Whatever price the software itself used to sell for doesn't enter into it, what matters is what can the new version be had for.