Stuff that 'boggles' your mind.

RomanNose said:
So you're a CS/Physics/EE graduate?
It's a pretty bold claim to be honest, but I bet you are just talking about the programming side.
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I think there's a big difference between understanding how something works and knowing how to write/design it yourself.

I think that if he was claiming to be able to do everything from drawing a circuit diagram for a motherboard up to writing a video codec for VLC, i wouldnt believe him. But saying that he understands the basics of how each part of a computer works is fine. It depends what he meant by it.
 
touch said:
I think there's a big difference between understanding how something works and knowing how to write/design it yourself.

I think that if he was claiming to be able to do everything from drawing a circuit diagram for a motherboard up to writing a video codec for VLC, i wouldnt believe him. But saying that he understands the basics of how each part of a computer works is fine. It depends what he meant by it.
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Yeah. I think that if all technology was wiped off earth, his contribution would be so small and actually it would take thousands and thousands to be able to bring it back to top.
I have a general idea how a few things work but I could never say that I would be able to have enough knowledge to completely reproduce the technology.
Technology is going to be pretty much one of the most important areas of growth in the future, I think we are just going to loose the races if we don't step up our production of technology graduates.
In the last 15 years CS graduates have been falling :o.
 
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That theoretically, time travel is possible given that the light we see from the stars in the sky is millions of years old. If we could travel to that star faster than it's light reaches us, and back again, we would arrive back in a different time. Mind blown
 
The Halk said:
I understand how computers work..from start to finish, from the 1s and 0s to VLC.

I suspect that I'm part of the last generation of people who will. Everybody younger than me has so much technology around them that they can't hope to understand how it works. I'm old enough that microwaves, CDs, the internet, PCs etc all hit mass market in my memory.
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If you did no exactly how computers work you certainly wouldn't be sitting on a small pittyful forum like this. You should be out building your own devices and new technologies & enhancements to life.
 
Lucero said:
That theoretically, time travel is possible given that the light we see from the stars in the sky is millions of years old. If we could travel to that star faster than it's light reaches us, and back again, we would arrive back in a different time. Mind blown
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Theoretically you cannot travel faster than the speed of light thus 'theoretically' time travel isn't possible.

Even if you could travel faster than the speed of light, time travel wouldn't be the right word as it implies you could go both ways. You can't physically go back in time to an event that has already happened. What you could do is experience time relatively differently to everyone else producing the effect of moving forward in time, so 20 mins to you would be 20 years on earth (hypothetical made up calculations but you get the point).
 
Consciousness.

I'm not sure if it's been covered already, but the idea that every other person on the planet is living their own lives, has a lifetime of their own memories, worries, tasks, etc just completely sends me haywire.

Next time you see a car go past your window, just imagine the life of the person driving it. They may pass your vision for a second, but they are living their life, doing whatever it is they need to be doing right now, possibly thinking about the affair they are having, why their knee is giving them jip, still wondering if Mrs Summers back in Year 7 mean to flash her **** at him...

Completely messes with my mind.
 
mrbell1984 said:
If you did no exactly how computers work you certainly wouldn't be sitting on a small pittyful forum like this. You should be out building your own devices and new technologies & enhancements to life.
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I understand everything that happens from the very basic stuff to the end of programs. Please don't paraphrase that to mean something quite different - I don't know every programming language, I don't even know a modern one. I've programmed in interpreted languages, and in machine code though. I don't have the practical skills to make PCBs. I don't own the equipment needed to program chips.

I was a teenager in the 90s, I was a kid in the 80s. I had a computer when they were very simple devices, and back then it was easy to see the individual parts and understand how everything went together. Now it's far more complicated and I can understand why someone 10 years younger (by your username I assume you are) wouldn't have learned the same as me.

I'm not Steve Wozniak :)
 
TruffleShuffle said:
Consciousness.

I'm not sure if it's been covered already, but the idea that every other person on the planet is living their own lives, has a lifetime of their own memories, worries, tasks, etc just completely sends me haywire.

Next time you see a car go past your window, just imagine the life of the person driving it. They may pass your vision for a second, but they are living their life, doing whatever it is they need to be doing right now, possibly thinking about the affair they are having, why their knee is giving them jip, still wondering if Mrs Summers back in Year 7 mean to flash her **** at him...

Completely messes with my mind.
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I like your concept - but worry about that man.

Why is he cheating on his wife? Is he a marathon runner (or just finished running with the Olympic torch?) that's why his knee is giving him jip (actually it's a long term condition for which he is taking medication).

He thinks of Mrs Summers full bush and longs to oil his gardening shears.
 
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What really amazes me is simply just how many different species/creatures there are on the planet.

But what also makes me wonder is what happens before we are born? Noting? For the billions of years the earth have been around for? Its hard to explain, but I guess you catch my drift ;)

Oh and also how life started. How this large and complex animal kingdom started in the first place.
 
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Smoogels said:
What really amazes me is simply just how many different species/creatures there are on the planet.

But what also makes me wonder is what happens before we are born? Noting? For the billions of years the earth have been around for? Its hard to explain, but I guess you catch my drift ;)

Oh and also how life started. How this large and complex animal kingdom started in the first place.
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You're thinking about it like humans/life is something special. It's just an arrangement of molecules and beyond that it's just information.

How about this thought, there is really nothing separating "you" from everything else. It's just the relatively mild forces of the molecules in your skin, which really just blend in to to everything else when you think about it. The only thing that defines "you" is your ability to maintain a sort of low entropy state. Apply a little extra energy by say lighting you on fire and your information would quickly merge in to everything else.

Entropy is magical :p

You're just information. Humans look at things through so many mental filters it seems like everything is special or significant.
 
A strip of paper with all a googolplex's 0's written on it that was then scrunched up into a ball would not fit in the known universe. A googolplex is 10 to the power of a googol.

Also I can't get my head round how small the Planck Length is. But then again can anyone?
 
Where are we going? What will life be like in 1000 years? Stuff like that really ****es me off as I know I won't be around to see it happen
 
ElliorR said:
Also I can't get my head round how small the Planck Length is. But then again can anyone?
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It's as small as a bit. Think of it that way. 1 or 0 that's as basic as anything can get. On or off. I know someone will mention qubits but they can be defined through bits also.

The misconception that trips people up is thinking of the universe as infinite and continuous, whereas more and more theories are pointing to a finite and discrete universe.
 
touch said:
I think there's a big difference between understanding how something works and knowing how to write/design it yourself.

I think that if he was claiming to be able to do everything from drawing a circuit diagram for a motherboard up to writing a video codec for VLC, i wouldnt believe him. But saying that he understands the basics of how each part of a computer works is fine. It depends what he meant by it.
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I think I'm in a similer position to Halk, but know a bit about electronics, semiconductors up to transistor level logic circuits. I'd struggle a bit with a video codec but it's not an impossible problem.
Going back to scratch I wouldn't know the chemistry behind semiconductor manufacture, but the manufacture of a vacuum valve would be possible. From there logic circuits, memory and an ALU would be feasible, probably a primitive video display too.
 
TruffleShuffle said:
Consciousness.

I'm not sure if it's been covered already, but the idea that every other person on the planet is living their own lives, has a lifetime of their own memories, worries, tasks, etc just completely sends me haywire.

Next time you see a car go past your window, just imagine the life of the person driving it. They may pass your vision for a second, but they are living their life, doing whatever it is they need to be doing right now, possibly thinking about the affair they are having, why their knee is giving them jip, still wondering if Mrs Summers back in Year 7 mean to flash her **** at him...

Completely messes with my mind.
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I've thought about this too. Like you sit next to someone on a train for say, half an hour, but then you will most likely never see them again, but what were they thinking about? Perhaps they have about 20 years of experiences and memories different from yours. That's a lot of events. A different job, different family members. But you both mean nothing to eachother and most likely forget eachother within a day. We all see the world through our own individual prisms.

I also can't get my head around the vastness of time and the universe. Our whole human history is a tiny blip on the graph of the life of the earth, and our planet is absolutely infinitessimal in the big scheme of things.
 
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