synthozoic

Seconded, mostly because she's the scariest looking robot in this game! So, for me, it's not really a question of physical attractiveness so much as the beauty of meatbag killin' efficiency!

I didn't know Tali'Zorah nar Rayya had such a fixation on eating cakes and pastries. Still playing through ME2 myself here. I'm so out of sync.

I've built a lot of Praetorians, mostly because I like the background better than Paragon or the Rogue Isles.

I'd echo what Nitro said. I may have played most of the story arcs through in Praetoria but I come up with my own stories as to why each of my characters have left to Paragon Earth.

• One is a spy working for the Powers Division delivering intelligence back to Cole's government, pretending to be a hero of paragon but actually aligned as rogue or vigilante.
• Another is simply a fugitive who got caught working for the Resistance and just fled to Paragon Earth to avoid capture. He's a good guy and is aligned as a hero but feels no strong loyalty to Scott's rebellion or liberating his world of origin. He's just glad to be out of there.
• Another is an idealist so fanatical to a perfect world she do whatever it takes to make it happen. Outwardly she's loyal to Emperor Marcus but her long term goal transcends Cole. She wants a true utopia at any cost. She's a vigilante but may ultimately slide into villainy in her pursuit of an ideal. She's a sort of a mixture between Rorschach and Ozymandias.
• Still another one, to get highly confusing in terms of multiversal travel, is from a near duplicate of the Praetorian Universe--Praetoria Double Prime. But that version of Praetoria was successful in invading and occupying a near duplicate of the Paragon universe--Paragon Double Prime. There is no Resistance in Praetoria Double Prime but there is a Resistance in Paragon Double Prime. He was using the metacosmic portal to return to Praetoria Double Prime from Paragon Double Prime but a terrorist bomb damaged the machine and he was randomly sent to Paragon Prime. He immediately got in trouble.

There are lots of ways to build a story for a character from the background. I find it easier to build a story from the background because there already is a complex interplay of politics and tensions. Although the backgrounds in Paragon and the Rogue Isles are rich, the political forces are simpler and painted in broader strokes so I have to improvise and create more detail myself.

I haven't built characters around the First District stories yet.

I really have no comments specific to godmodding but I do have a few characters, usually of natural, science or tech origins, who are often skeptical, atheist or agnostic.

If you were to ask them for a true response to the questions of "Do you think I'm a god?" or "Why don't you bow down in mortal fear of my divinity?" They'd likely answer, "No. I don't think you're divine. I think you're very powerful, wielding technology or energy I don't understand. If you say, 'jump,' I'll ask, 'How high?' simply because I don't wanna die but, no, to be honest, I don't think you're a god."

Playing a lot of synthetic organisms, I have them do that a lot--use pattern recognition to put black bars over ads, bad fashion sense, trolls and other irrelevancies. I envy their ability to do that. When I get my pair of AR glasses, installing ad and logo blocking software is first thing I'm going to do with it!

Okay, that's weapons-grade awesome!

I wouldn't use the word "magic." Instead I'd say, "I don't know the details," or "It's complicated," or "It's a mystery but maybe one day we'll have some answers to it," or, best of all, "Let's go see if we can find the answers."

If Louis CK's daughter cries, and having heard many of his jokes about his child I have a strong suspicion he's actually a pretty decent parent, I think that Louis gave the right response, soldiering on with the right answer despite her tears. It should be thought of as an exercise in growing up--sometimes the universe doesn't work the way we'd like. Einstein was unhappy with many of the implications of quantum theory--ironically despite the fact that his explanation of the photoelectric effect was a key discovery that made quantum theory possible--but sure enough, that's the way the universe works.

Richard Feynman said that his father was never afraid to say, "I don't know," because he'd always follow it up with, "You know what? Let's to the library and figure it out or at least learn if nobody knows yet." His father's tireless curiosity and unshakable skepticism made a very powerful impression on Richard.

I'd argue that it was stuff like this that lead directly to Richard's dunking a chunk of synthetic rubber into a cup of ice water and thereby demolishing hundreds of pages of obfuscation and CYA (Essentially saying, "It's magic folks. Don't worry about it, we've got the matter in hand.") in the investigation of Challenger disaster.

I hate bad journalism and especially bad science journalism. There is good science journalism where writers try their best to explain most of the details as best they can and then also to be unafraid to say, "We don't know that yet."

It is true that this is a world of extreme specialization. It has to be. There is just no practical way to be an expert in everything. I don't read all the verbiage of EULAs or the tax codes. I treasure my ignorance of gardening, farming or home repair. But never do I say these things are magic. People will take advantage of you if you're lazy or fearful of things you don't understand. In fact I say that many of the current debacles on Wall Street due to this problem. We grew lazy and trusted "experts" to handle it all and never asked any questions or ignored the ones that did.

It is true that any sufficiently advanced piece of technology is indistinguishable from magic but, given sufficient time and starting from basic principles, that technology can be explained to anyone, even someone in ancient times. It might take a decade of training but it's merely a matter of education.

Magic, at least by some definitions, is not supposed to be open to rational explanation--otherwise it just becomes another branch of physics or biology.

Maybe--at least by my opinion--this is what distinguishes magic from stuff like paranormal phenomena (Which I personally think is all bogus, but let's put personal opinions aside.). The parapsychologist claims that psychic phenomena, if they exist at all, are subject to scientific examination. I don't think anyone seriously claims that magic is.

Heh! Clever story, although I don't know why they don't consider a recursive loop that only looks like an infinite chain. In other words there is only one simulator and it's simulating the world it resides in, sort of like Escher's print gallery containing itself.

Just chiming in on this concept--

Yes, this idea has been floating around, in one form or another, for several decades, at least since Guth gave us the Inflationary Era to solve some problems in the Big Bang model. In Guth's words, the universe itself is the ultimate free lunch, springing into being, with no prior cause, from nothing.

The roots of the idea, in some ways go back even further, to the virtual particles of quantum theory. On the quantum scale, space is a sea of virtual particle and antiparticle pairs springing into being and then annihilating into gamma ray photons. The matter and energy balance of these particles is always zero and we really only notice their effects in extreme circumstances or when we look at matter on the quantum scale.

But essentially, yes, quantum theory allows matter or energy to spring into being from nowhere--although:

1. It's not really accurate to think of space in a vacuum as "nowhere." Space itself is something. The classical vacuum doesn't exist.
2. There is the issue of the vacuum rest energy to consider and the complications that causes for general relativity. (This problem is still unsolved.)

But that historical footnote aside, the universe could be the same-- acausally springing, like a virtual particle, from "nowhere" or, as Guth would have it, from the quantum foam.


Anyway, it turns out the Guth's Inflationary Big Bang solves a lot of problems but as time went on we found that it created new ones. In fact some of our current multiversal speculations are due to current attempts to solve problems with Inflation.

Ah, the ineffable, the unnameable, Cantor's Absolute. Godel demonstrated that mathematics must remain incomplete and therefore infinite. That suggests to me that science, which is strongly dependent on math, is also forever incomplete and infinite.

As an ex-physics major, I was always skeptical there'd be a final theory of physics. By that I mean that, yes, we'd figure out how unify the four forces that we know and we'd finally reconcile quantum theory and general relativity but, the solution would then only lead to new as yet unimagined questions.

And as huge fan of science, that's really the way I prefer it. Just to know, or to suspect really, that there is infinite amount of scientific mysteries to explore and figure out. That's the kind of universe I'd rather live in. If we ever come to some final answer--how utterly dull!

And then again, science is pretty useless when we're talking about the subjective. Science can tell us a lot about how something works, or what it is, and what are the causal reasons for its existence but it really tells us nothing about what it means. Does it mean anything, cosmically speaking, if you don't get up and go to work in the morning? On that science is silent. If you want meaning make art, not science.

There are some that say there is some kind of cosmic or absolute meaning to everything. Or at least they say that they need something like that to get along in daily life.

Me, I'm just fine without that. I'm perfectly happy with meaningless existence. To me meaning is always personal or social. It only matters to me, my friends and the society we live in. Meaning is something humans invent.

Anyway, I read Sagan's Contact and I wondered about the pi stuff at the end. The book had it that mathematics itself was an artifact of some being. But that seemed like an appeal to Platonism or the mysticism of the Pythagorians. I don't know.

But since we talking about Sagan, and bringing us full circle about significance and the cosmic scale, I'm sure you've all seen this.

Phew, the ultimate in software bloat and creeping featurism, eh?

I'd also point out that we are speculating about the motives of beings we've never even met yet. That's always risky or at least not very productive.

So to recap, we speculating about the motives of myserious beings using speculative ideas in physics to build simulators based around speculative ideas in computing. Phew, that's a lot of speculation!

If the universe is singular and doomed to annihilation and an eternity of
non-existence that's really depressing, I'll agree.

There are few physicists, Freeman Dyson and Frank Tipler are the ones I can think of, who've speculated about ways we could avoid the end of the universe.

• Tipler's idea focused on how we could control the way the universe collapses in a Big Crunch. He imagined ways we would build machines that would continue to work as the universe got hotter and hotter. His required a close universe.
• Dyson thought about ways to build computers that continued to run as the universe got colder and colder in the heat death. His idea required an open but nearly flat universe.

Sadly both of these ideas are now out of date. We now know the universe is doomed to "The Big Rip" long before a Heat Death or a Big Crunch. The recently discovered cosmic acceleration and dark energy is going end the universe many zillions of years sooner than the Heat Death or Big Crunch will.

I guess someone clever is going to have to figure out how to survive in a universe fated for the Big Rip.

Isaac Asimov explored what to do about the end of the universe in his short story, "The Last Question." Of course this question was given to a computer to solve.

But if the universe is a multiverse that is infinite and eternal, this problem will never come up. Entropy may win locally but Eternal Inflation and Poincare's Recurrence win globally.

I don't follow your logic here. Are you saying that if we discover that this is the only universe there is, we are doomed to decay, quiescence and decadence--or something? Why is that? I'm confused, please clarify this
paragraph.


Well, as I say, what time is and how it works is a tough set of questions.

If we are in a simulated universe, the Great Programmer can play all kinds of games with hash tables and such to make mince meat of our perceptions of time, sure. But lacking any real evidence that this is true, maybe it's better to just invoke Occam's Razor and keep it simple.

But we can speculate all we want here and that's certainly fun.

No disagreements there.

I'll grant that.

I guess that's what I was thinking about then. But as you say, even this is limited by our concept of what kind of "hardware" we imagine this simulated world is running in.

The Revenge of the Nerds was the rise of the personal computer and the Internet. Now we run the planet, give you rick-rolls, iPads, the EFF and anti-SOPA protests, TVTropes, ceiling cat and hot and cold running porn that's too cheap to meter.

Speculation concerning the hyperoperators, transfinites or busy beaver numbers is just part of our nerdy package, along with the role-playing games and the Trek uniforms at science fiction conventions. Apologies. Our often maligned and feared intellect and creativity made all these nice things happen. No, Ogre, we will not fix your computer until you acknowledge that and are nice to us, dig?

Well there might be a point to it if we discover there is no multiverse, no alternate histories or parallel universes to explore or if they are impossible for us to get to.

If that's so, maybe one day we'll build computers out of the nucleonic matter of neutron stars just to have simulators powerful enough to simulate the Earth down to atomic granularity.

I don't know.

One of my points to Arcanaville was that if we lived in such a simulation maybe there might be ways to prove we live in a simulation.

But my main point was that learning what time is and how it works is a scientific question.

But that's just it, if the universe is big enough your uniqueness fades away. That's one of the many implications of the Boltzman Brain:

• Richard Feynman of Boltzman Brains
• Wikipedia article on Boltzman Brains

Now it may be that the universe is sufficiently small that we are all unique but this still isn't saying much cosmically speaking. And considering the cruelties we level on each other, it seems that humans don't really value that uniqueness very much either.

But of course science is going to keep looking anyway. That's what science is all about. We're going to keep doing experiments and keep making observations. Maybe one day we'll crack this. Or maybe we won't. But we shouldn't give up.

Yes, I'm well familiar with the simulated world idea in relation to the nature of time. But then the next question arises, how can we prove this is a simulation or not? It never stops.

And as you point out there are lots of ideas about what time is and how it works. Hopefully physics will allow us to discard the speculations that are false and let us focus on the ones that might be true. Science is all about falsifiability.

Actually, the way that Kirby drew them, the unstable molecule suits of the Fantastic Four were very tame by today's standards. They were slightly baggy and bunching up like real tights made of cotton instead of spandex, let alone the insane and unrealistic body painting or vacuum sealing to the contours of their bodies of today's uniforms (Please excuse the Submariner in his mighty swim trunks!):



I really wouldn't mind a return to this. Kirby drew head gear that any comic artist of today could learn from. The only thing Sue lacks is pockets. Maybe I just can't see them in all the folds.

Wasn't aware of it until now but, now that I see it, maybe I will!

Ah yes, the view of time as provided by general relativity. The universe is a giant four dimensional, static manifold where in any observer's present moment is equivalent to a "slice" through the manifold and different observers take, or experience, different slices.

But this only produces other questions. For example, why do we experience the passage of time if time doesn't really "pass?"

Physics is the endless refinement of our understanding of what time and space are.


Well, assuming there is a multiverse of some kind and if some form of hugely faster than light travel is possible (And I mean hugely. I mean being able to travel 10^^4 light years in a tiny fraction of a second. That's 4 tetrates 10, ten exponentiated by itself four times, a number many zillions of times bigger than than googleplex.) at some point we'll have to confront such infinite immensity.

Just as Hubble's discoveries back in the teens and twenties of the last century forced us to confront the cosmos as we now know it.

Then again, maybe there isn't any multiverse, let alone an infinite one, so we can lie safe in our beds comforted at the notion that we only have to contend with the hundreds of billions of galaxies out there.

But then we have to confront the recently discovered facts about dark matter and dark energy and the visible stuff that we see is at most 4% of the actual universe.

Point taken. But obviously even if these weak criteria are so difficult to meet, we may as well make the criteria as exacting as is reasonable just to make certain the test remains valuable as trends change in film. For example, we could extend the Bechdel Test to include a few more criteria:

1. Can't be pornography.
2. Can't feature Beckinsale in blue contacts or blue lighting.
3. ??

Perhaps infinitely so, assuming that some of those speculations in physics and cosmology are true. And some of those speculations say that anything that can physically happen will happen in all possible ways with infinite duplication. This gives us the ultimate in absurdity. In such a multiverse, nothing you do really matters cosmically speaking because it all happens all possible ways with an infinity of duplicates. Unless I suppose you contrive a way to destroy the entire infinitely large multiverse--mwahahaha.

Then again humans are great at ignoring the microscopic and cosmic. To us anything that matters is usually on our scale.

So let us heroes fight for what's right! Let us ignore that it doesn't matter a tinker's cuss on the cosmic scale!

While I mostly agree with the positions you've taken here, I think the Bechdel Test, while funny and telling in its day really isn't adequate anymore. Like the Turing Test, it's not really sufficient alone to prove positive, heroic female role models.