palordrolap

It’s a fairly common trope in science fiction, and might even be science fact. The idea is that realities split from every decision point, some we’re aware of and some - due to quantum fluctuations - we’re not. Indeed, it might only be the quantum weirdness that’s valid and human decisions are merely emergent phenomena.

If you take a look at any quantum experiment, you get things like particles interfering with themselves and apparently appearing in many places at once. Tissue thin neighbouring universes along some probability axis interfering with each other, one for each possible position of a particle, would explain what’s known as the “many worlds interpretation”. The MWI doesn’t talk about a probability axis though. That’s the fictional part until proven otherwise.

It would still be a dimension even if things were more discrete though. Like, separately identifiable parallel universes where no intermediates exist. Hopping from one to the other could still be interpreted as moving within some extra dimension, and there’s nothing really stopping us from calling that probability.

Is this the first human trial, or just the first officially sanctioned one?

IIRC there was that one guy who experimented on himself and cured his lactose intolerance.

… found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY

Nearly 8 years ago.

So. True story. I did this a few years ago. As an adult. Spun around while looking at the carpet and watched it turn into a circular blur. “This was fun as a kid, why don’t I do this any more?”

Then I stopped and regretted absolutely everything for about 15 minutes afterwards. Was very nearly sick everywhere.

Do not recommend. Strictly for dogs. And kids.

All five dimensions (three space, one time, one probability) exist as a solid unchanging block, an enormous, incomprehensible overarching solution to some equally enormous, incomprehensible mathematical equation.

And if you look at it from one particular direction it almost certainly looks like forty-two.

Openwraps, Hail Marys and cheesebreads.

Why Hail Mary? Burrito means “little donkey”.

Whenever the character came back from the future, his future incarnation had a mouth. And he was drawn with one occasionally before it, uh, stopped being cool to read the strip.

Hate to say it, but I think Adams would have been OK with this. Not with being hated and dead, obviously, but you know.

TBH I haven’t seen (or sought) White Ninja in years, beyond that one “c’mon, do something” poking with a stick meme that escaped into the wild.

Doesn’t work like that for me. If I see someone in pain, I feel their pain. If they cry out, it hurts to my core. That’s empathy.

The hard part for me is not being able to do anything about it. It is often not my place, I don’t know the correct course of action or I don’t have the means. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t play on my conscience.

And it’s harder still is seeing those with the means apparently be able to completely ignore any empathy or conscience they might have. Maybe they don’t have any. Maybe they can’t tell the difference between that and annoyance at the noises the person in pain is making, so they ignore it or try to shut the injured up in other ways.

Well shoot. I was holding out for a change of heart from him because I really resonated with his comics back in the day.

Unfortunately, it seems he only ever had sympathy for those whose misfortunes he shared and never came around on that.

That first tale is clearly a case of when tech aura goes bad.

I mean, we like to let the non-techs believe that our mere presence can cause technology to behave, and we might even like to believe that ourselves, but that comes back to bite us if the hardware breaks instead.

… I’m not saying the tech should have grabbed something heavy and made a show of threatening the device, but I don’t think it would have hurt!

No. You’re right. I’ll never completely understand until my bank account goes negative. Or I have no bank account. And I have to go a day or more without eating.

But I do have anxiety. And a very limited income. My grocery shop spend for two weeks now is about the same price as I paid for one week, fifteen years ago. I have to budget every little thing.

So while I can’t fully understand, I have more understanding than you think I do, and it’s not just me that needs to be careful about ignorance.

This was a long time ago. I think the replacement card I got was the first I got that had a chip in it.

Or I’m misremembering and it was the chip on the card that was acting strangely. Either way, the card was basically worn out.

Not strictly true.

If you have a card long enough (several years between issue and expiry, say) and you use it often enough, the magnetic strip can start to fade and transactions can fail. More and more often. Edit: It might have been a chip problem rather than a magnetic strip problem. I can’t remember now, but it makes no real difference to the story.

And sometimes there might be weeks with no trouble and then you’ll get that one card reader that’s particularly finicky and there’s a cold sweat moment as you realise you don’t have enough cash. “Try it again. It’s done this before.” Please work. Pleeease.

This usually happened to me in the supermarket, so that scene from InnerSpace was playing on loop in my head.

After the third or fourth time, I called the bank and they sent me a new one ASAP.

Surprisingly wholesome for Cyanide & Happiness, tbh.

Where are their communications? Who visits a government website without needing to?

To me it makes sense that they should cover as much ground as possible and have accounts on all major platforms as well as making announcements on TV and radio.

And in order to do so they should have their own accounts on there in order that their message gets across directly without having to go through a third party that has an account on there.

Now, when that site starts espousing “free speech” of the sort that only they like, then it might be a good idea to not use that particular platform any more, because that brings in the third party interference that wasn’t there in the first place, even if the site was technically third party.

But hey whatever, now let’s make, say, the BBC the mouthpiece of the government - it’s not like the Tories didn’t try really hard to do that when they were in power - and have everyone report on that. Far better.

6 bit, 6 bit, 7 bit? Huh. Only 5, 6, and 6, is needed for 24-hr binary-coded-sexagesimal… ohh. It’s binary-coded-decimal-coded-sexagesimal.

15:43:25 in the last panel. Or about a quarter to four in the afternoon.

I suppose the 5,6,6 BCS option would need a lot more mental effort.

Government creates announcement feed. No-one knows about it because they can only advertise it on their own announcement feed.

What now?

Terry Davis tried to do for the PC with TempleOS what the C64’s BASIC and KERNAL did for its hardware.

Terry was all the more a mad lad because he didn’t get to create the hardware spec he was working with.

Could you imagine someone doing the same as Commodore did but starting with 64-bit era hardware?

Taking it another direction, there are free and paid “easy programming” platforms that provide a sandbox not unlike a modern version of what it was like to program a C64.

At a pinch, DOSBox and a copy of QBASIC might suffice.

The 64GS was one of Commodore’s last gasps at trying to make some money using the 8-bit parts they still had left in stock. The whole thing was a disaster.

It wasn’t based on the C64. It was a C64. Without a keyboard and some of the other ports missing. A fact that came to bite anyone who tried a C64 cartridge game that needed keyboard input.

And IIRC one of the games that came bundled with it was a game like that.

They were at least smart enough to have the BASIC startup pointer (the one that otherwise caused READY. to appear) in the ROM patched to go to a neat little graphic telling people to turn it off, plug in a game and turn it back on again.

What Commodore saved by releasing the GS, the customer ultimately paid by needing to buy games in a format more expensive than disk or tape that would run on a regular C64.

… and given the time period, lots of people were buying PCs and offloading their regular C64 hardware and a ton of games for the price of the GS and its handful of games. And that C64 would run any GS game that was likely to come out.

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It may not be a public place per se, but it is a place where a very large cohort of the general public go.

Perhaps my analogy should have been “This is bit like saying that governments shouldn’t make announcements on television and radio stations not under government control.”

The same logic applies there. Of course they should. A large cohort of the general public watch television and listen to the radio (less so these days in the age of the Internet, but people do still watch and listen there.).