The Facile Eclectic

Just today I finished recovering my wife's PC from a rather nasty bit of malware that had completely corrupted her hardrive  My wife, I'm afraid, has always been a Mac user so she is unaware of the darker side of computing that haunts Windows users. She said "This window popped up and said I needed to download something, so I did". To quote Charlie Brown "AAAAARGH!". On to the always joyful task of reformatting the hardrive and installing the system from scratch. This took five hours. I've done this on my Macs recently and the process takes less than 2. In addition the recovery script was buggy and I had to massage it a number of times along the way. This has been my Windows experience in general in the two months since I got this machine. When the thing does an update the desktop flickers and icons flash in and out of existence for no apparent reason. It's like the machine is prone to epileptic seizures. Despite a 2ghz AMD dual core, the system is also painfully slow. And god forbid if you click the mouse too many times during one these arduous background processes. The thing will seize up like a reptile thrown into a bucket of ice water. It's clunky, slow, poorly designed, the graphics are cheesy, it blows up at the slightest provocation ...... And then it struck me.  It's a Pinto. Windows is the Ford Pinto of computer OS's and Bill Gates must be the greatest huckster of all time. He's managed to convince most people in the world that a vehicle thats poorly designed, under powered, has a tendency to self destruct, and is just plain ugly, is the one to buy simply because it is cheaper. Imagine the world if he had worked at Ford instead. They could have just changed out some plastic wheel covers, added fuzzy dice and bolted on some curb feelers every five years, then call it a new car! And with Bill's PR campaign to play down the explosion issue, they could have sold the same vehicle for twenty years at an enormous profit. You know, you rarely see a Pinto on the road these days. It seems folks have more sense when it comes to cars.

Posted by Ben Wortham at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There's fairly recent theory in physics called quantum loop gravity. It doesn't have a lot of traction yet in the physics community and is by no means close to being proven. It does however make one prediction that caught my attention. It implies that below the level of the quantum flux, which is thought to give rise to all forms of matter and energy, there might be nothing but pure information. In other words, the universe might be a giant quantum computer with no real physicality. This brought to mind an essay I read 20 years ago in Douglas R. Hofstadter's, "The Minds Eye". The essay begins with the premise of a powerful enough computer to run a simulation program that would create a universe like our own. To the inhabitants of this simulation everything would appear as it does to us and therefore they would not be aware of existing inside a computer program. I've been wondering lately what a physicist inside the program might see. You might see simulated atoms, made of simulated particles, made of simulated quarks, etc. until finely the software code itself. This would be limit of what you could learn about your simulated universe from the inside. In other words it would look like what quantum loop theory predicts.   Maybe the Buddhists where right all a long. A computer also implies a maker but not necessarily the one we usually think of. If human beings can conceive of a way to make universes in a bottle then the maker of ours may be no more divine than us. And what is the purpose of a computer universe? Perhaps we live in somebody else's version of a video game. I think a lot of us have suspected the universe is a bit out of whack all along. It brings to mind the last message of God to his creation before he left in Doug Adams "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy". "So long, and sorry for all the mess!"

Posted by Ben Wortham at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)