08 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Science Can Keep You Alive is Magic Fails
Harry thought, considered, chose his weapon. "Draco, you want to explain the whole blood purity thing to me? I'm sort of new."
A wide smile crossed Draco's face. "You really should meet Father and ask him, you know, he's our leader."
"Give me the thirty-second version."
"Okay," Draco said. He drew in a deep breath, and his voice grew slightly lower, and took on a cadence. "Our powers have grown weaker, generation by generation, as the mudblood taint increases. Where Salazar and Godric and Ro... 1 
notes
notesRational Harry Potter explains to Draco the error in his thinking that muggles are thinning out the magic in the world and making it weaker.
06 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Lincoln on the Enthronement of Corporations
As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless (emphasis mine). 1 notes
notesThere is a valid dispute as to whether these words were actually Lincolns, or if they were fabricated to support a political campaign 20 years after his death; regardless, they are prescient words eloquently spoken for their time, no matter the speaker.
03 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
The Chance of Error in Atomic Sized Computers
The first thing that you would worry about when things get very small is Brownian motion--everything is shaking about and nothing stays in place. How can you control the circuits then? Furthermore, if a circuit does work, doesn't it now have a chance of accidentally jumping back? If we use two volts for the energy of this electric system, which is what we ordinarily use, that is eighty times the thermal energy at room temperature (kT=1/40 volt) and the chance that something jumps backward aga... 1 notes
notesAs things get very small we have to worry about brownian motion and quantum effects on the system.
03 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Number of Bits for a Set of Encyclopedias are Minuscule C...
I have estimaged how many letters there are in a the Enclyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10^15). For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredths of an inch wide--which is the barest piece of dust t... 1 notes
notesFeynman estimates the number of atoms neccessary for storing a set of encyclopedias, and then compares that to the amount of data included in a DNA string.
01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus
How the Internet Serves as a Plot Device in Modern Story ...
In the tween movie Twilight, heroine Bella discovers that her boyfriend Edward is a vampire by consulting a website with a convenient link to supernatural occurrences in her very own tiny town. The Internet is here collectively written, but perfectly tailored to exactly her individual needs. It is not the wizened woman in the house down the road that holds the truth to Edward's identity, but an anonymous and multiply sourced repository of lore. A silent film would have cut to an intertitle t... 1 notes
notesThe evolution of storytelling to use the Internet as a device to move the plot forward, where, in the past, other sources of information would have served the characters.
30 NOV -0001 by ideonexus
13 Percent of the English Language is Not Spelled Phoneti...
I received a letter today from the "Reading Reform Foundation," which tells me that "23 million (American) adults are functionally illiterate, unable to read an advertisement, a job application, directions on a medicine bottle." They say "30 percent of all schoolchildren have serious reading difficulties."
I rather believe this, judging from my own limited experience with people. But why is this?
Can it be that part of the reason is the matter of English spelling? The letter tells me that "87...Folksonomies: phonetics
Folksonomies: phonetics
1 If 87 percent of English words are spelled phonetically, then that means more than one in 10 is not, further explaining high levels of illiteracy in our culture.
