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no but the clouds and the demon drink will

hey caek did u recently recommend a series of books of historical maps?

yes these ones

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&text=Colin+McEvedy&search-alias=books&field-author=Colin+McEvedy&sort=relevancerank

i've read medieval, ancient, and modern. currently reading american history to 1870 which is great (although i suspect some of the pre-columbian speculation is a little outdated). recent is next.

they are extremely accessible, quick reads. i'm not an expert but they seem like tour de force concise syntheses of huge subjects too.

also engaging wit throughout and occasionally laugh out loud e.g.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CkRdU01WYAAQ_eX.jpg

this is a good twitter account to bring civility to your twitter a few times a day btw

https://twitter.com/dscovr_epic

how is ancient for maps of roman empire?

xp needs some poles imo

anyway i ordered the ancient one so i hope it's good for that xp to myself

the conceit of the entire series is that each spread has a page of text and a map, and that map is the same area of earth on every page. iirc the ancient world one covers all of europe, quite a lot of north africa, and asia to present day northern india. so it's not super high resolution. and each page covers decades, so the temporal resolution isn't high either. the odd battle gets described (and in a couple of cases gets an inset map) but this is more "broad sweep of history" stuff. obviously greece and rome dominate the ancient world.

the medieval book starts with the conversion of constantine, so you're going to want that one too if you're interested in rome in particular. but medieval is great regardless: along with the american one it's the best/most interesting of the series to me.

you can get them used on amazon for $5ish btw

ok u sold me i got like 5 of them

ancient, medieval, modern, america, africa

lmao. recent is the only one you're missing. i don't have africa. it's a different shape book so i'm not sure if it's the same premise, but i'm sure it's great.

those look good, i impulse ordered ancient and medieval.

worst case they are good http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shiterature

love historical atlases. i have the ancient history one in this series which gets my seal of approval, backed by the formidable authority of my related ba and ma from a long time ago.

btw this my bløg https://pinboard.in/u:mike

i'm gonna bookmark that and drink your milkshake by beating you to posting cool articles to ilx ;-)

jks aside thx for the Markov Chain Monte Carlo Without All The Bullshit, was just trying to read about this the other day and getting nowhere

dope you guys thx

xp it's good, right?! i am cowriting a report at work about probabilistic programming and that was one of the more useful pieces of background. we'll be publishing an annotated reading list for the whole "bayesian inference + sampling algorithms + compiler design" thing later this year. will link here if i remember (remind me if i don't, it will be primo PDFs)

lol at this

People react to problems of this sort in different ways. Some build to large safety factors, searching around for extra material to shore up their walls. Others respond more neurotically, erecting many-storyeyed, extremely perilous structures, decked out with advertisements in a special archaeologist-speak that goes like this:

Major new civilization: a particularly disappointing dig
History will have to be rewritten: confirms an existing footnote in the standard work on the subject
A great city: a few hovels, maybe a village
The Venice of its day: any site that has produced a few articles from somewhere else
Earliest known: undated

Great stuff, these atlases. I have to limit myself to the ones I have because otherwise that's a whole other bookshelf taken up.

ha yeah he is particularly salty in the ancient one.

xp needs some poles imo

― mookieproof, Wednesday, August 31, 2016 10:02 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2016-231

ty

hello mate http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Philae_found

http://i.imgur.com/xSBxXJ7.jpg

^^^stealing that

http://i65.tinypic.com/kbvnsx.jpg

http://spacetelescope.org/news/heic1620/

Observable Universe contains ten times more galaxies than previously thought

the universe: no matter how bad you think, it's always worse

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bc/Galaxy_195910.jpg/220px-Galaxy_195910.jpg

My first thought is to ask how does this discovery affect calculations of the total mass of the universe, especially in regards to the amount of dark matter thought necessary to create an oscillating universe?

it likely doesn't very much. the mass distribution of the universe on which those expansion/contraction calculations depend is not found by counting galaxies. it comes from treating those galaxies we can see as probes. how fast they move, etc. tells us how much mass is nearby. so it's not the end of the world if we can't see all the galaxies, at least from the POV of figuring out if the universe is expanding, contracting, etc.

so it's not the end of the world if we can't see all the galaxies

invert that sentence--We can see all the galaxies, and it's the end of the world!--and you have a great bad 1950s pulp story

i think you mean a great good 1950s pulp story

If not a good right-before-the-crackup Silverberg story.

this is a fun story http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/the-cosmologists-who-faked-it

Thought that was going to be about Joe Weber.

That was a great read.

Somehow never thought I would never "hear" Aimless use that exact formulation.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.

HI caek - I know this is not your field, but I don't know any other scientists to ask, and google searches have not been helpful.

Is it possible that the idea that the time dimension is unidirectional is false, and that it is instead a strong force that we might be able to overcome with technological advances? Like say if you were falling from an infinite height toward a centre of gravity, you would perceive that movement was possible only in the single direction "down." But if you were able during that freefall to harness air resistance and glide, moving you in a lateral direction, or if somehow you could manufacture a helicopter and temporarily overcome gravity to move upward, then you would have unlocked the hitherto tyrannical unidirectionality of space movement.

I get that in this scenario you occupy three dimensions while falling (and are also moving along the single time axis) whereas in the real world there's no perceivable evidence that multiple dimensions of time exist, or that the past or future physically exists anywhen, but I'm willing to chalk that up - for the sake of argument - to a handicap of perception.

Am I on the road to a Nobel or should I quit drinking in the daytime?

time is not just another dimension. it's very different to the three dimensions of space.

there are lots of arguments for this (unlike the other dimensions, it gets multiplied by the square root of minus 1 when it crops up in relativity, and other messed up things), but imo the simplest one is: time is special because of the second law of thermodynamics.

that law states that entropy in a closed system must increase with time. traveling in the direction in which time increases is possible because entropy increases that way. but backwards in time entropy decreases, which is verboten. there are ways around this (by spending energy you can decrease entropy), but hopefully it makes the basic point that backwards and forwards in time are not two arbitrary and equally possible bearings in space like north and south.

basically, you can't make an argument that beings "think of time as being just like space" without being very very careful.

the infinite monkey cage special on relativity really helped me with some stuff

im sorry

hey i watched this film on time travel a few times. when you say "energy" needs to work against entropy, would a specialized device, powered by a small plutonium reaction, possibly work?

i have acquired a vehicle that i believe could go fast enough to counteract the physical forces, combined with the device
mentioned above this setup should work

the most famous example of entropy decreasing (in the short term in cosmological terms) is the evolution of life on earth. the energy source there is the sun. if you don't have a star then perhaps a capacitor of some sort.

localized time disruption due to energy from outside sources? idk

yeah doesn't that only work if you consider earth as a closed system?

forgetting the existence of the sun is one of the ways creationists sometimes use the 2nd law to argue that evolution is impossible.

🎶 it's all just a little bit of entropy decreasing (trumpet riff) 🎶

the square root of minus 1