Survey posted 2005-09-10 22:55 by Jon.

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Unbelievable! I've never seen such a...a...(!)....survey!

How about instead:
"Do you plan to take over the world with your graphing calculator?"
Possible selections:
1) Yes, the world is already mine to command! <evil laugh>
2) Yes, I prepare for this event daily
3) Yes, but it seems hard and I'm too lazy
4) No, who would want to take over the world?
5) No, I've got too much other stuff to do
6) No; sounds interesting, but not with a calculator.
5) Taking over the world? Can you eat it?

At the very least, it would be entertaining to see the responses. Sometimes a break from reality is needed.

That last 5 should be a 7. I sincerely apologize...

if the moon is made of cheese what is the earth made of?

How is this comment on topic?

"We often remove comments that stray from these guidelines. We do this not to "censor" your feedback, but to keep replies on-topic."

-Ticalc.org guidelines for replying to comments

the survay idea did mention eating the earth and cheese is somthing that people eat.

It is not even close to on topic. It's about as random as you can get. (CENSOR IT!!!!!)

i hear it's amazing when the purple stuffed worm from flapped jawed space WITH THE TUNING FORK does a raw blink on hari cari rock. I NEED SCISSORS! 61!

It's made of dirt, duh! :)

Or is it just dirty cheese...

Dirty cheese??!!!? What were you thinking? While I'm sure that possibly somewhere in the annals of quantum mechanics there is a certain provision for the possibility of the earth being made of dirty cheese, the probablility of this actually being the case would need to be expressed with imaginary numbers. Go figure...

Umm...if I remember correctly, probability amplitudes in quantum physics *are normally* represented by complex numbers...

No. You're close, though. I'm taking Quantum Physics right now, and we covered this topic last week.

According to the schrodinger wave equation, everything has a wave function psi associated with it. This function is in the complex plane. The probability density of a particle - the chance that it exists within a certain volume, is psi^2. All these probabilities are real and have an integral over their domain of 1, just like macroscopic probabilites.

Please correct my details, keeping in mind we've only worked on the 2d model.

Excuse me, the probability density function is:

|Psi(r,t)|^2dV

Or, psi squared times volume. r and t are position and time. The absolute value symbols make psi real.

|Psi(r,t)|^2 alone is the intensity of the wave function.

wow, that random statement got a lot of responses...

Well, for all our logical thinking, we programmers do seem to gravitate to the random, the chaotic, the impossible.

there is nothing truly random ;) only psudo random

You could seed your random number generator with white noise data every so often...

There is no guarantee that even quantum fluctuations are random, only that we cannot find a pattern. In fact, for those of us who believe in God, that makes a good explanation for how He could influence the universe without violating the laws of physics. For those who believe the universe is a simulation, QP supports that view also (like how in games you only render what the user(s) can see), in which case it would only be truly random if the simulator had a source of true randomness available.

Arbitrary senarios cannot be predicted EXACTLY without enough prior data. For all practical purposes, using white noise values as a seed would work better than using the computer's random number generator. By "white noise values," I mean using a radio antenna or microwave detector to "listen" to a predetermined set cosmic rays and/or background radiation (i.e. cosmic rays and/or background radiation with frequencies within a predefined range) , and use the frequencies as seeds. To add even more "randomness," you could change the frequency bounds every so often.

Of course, it's actually much easier to seed the random number generator with, say, the x-coordinate of the mouse every so often (assuming the program uses the mouse), or to seed the random number generator with a value chosen at random from video memory or RAM.

Exactly...The generation of random numbers is too important to leave to chance.

Wow, how ironic... :-D

Somewhat amazing that my comment about dirty cheese resulted in a conversation about quantum physics...

Maybe someone can make a survey about that!

2) Yes, I prepare for this event daily

A little correction:

2) Yes, me and my calc prepare for this event daily

Mwuahahahahahahahahahahahahhh!!! *echo sound effect*

That's the spirit!

Hey, this one string of posts is taking up one entire page! Is that a first? We could have a record here!