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August 08, 2006
"What is Valis, then? Why, it is the Cosmic Christ, Point Omega. I have seen what Teilhard de Chardin wrote about, although I had never read any of his writing."
Today, in the last moments of the Connecticut senatorial primary, Joe Lieberman's campaign accused Ned Lamont's campaign of hax0ring their website with a DoS attack. The reality? Lieberman had crappy hosting.
2Dog Media, LLC has not hosted the joe2006.com website for over 3 months. When the site was hosted with us, it was on a dedicated server with unlimited bandwidth and daily server back-ups. The Lieberman Campaign was paying much more than $7 a month for this service. The campaign manager, Sean Smith, came on board and decided he would rather work with a friend of his that he had worked with in the past.
Kos explains just how crappy Lieberman's hosting was:
They are paying $15/month for hosting at a place called MyHostCamp, with a bandwidth limit of 10GB. MyHostCamp is currently down, along with all their clients.
Here's the deal -- you get what you pay for. My hosting bill is now over $7K per month. A smaller site doesn't need that much bandwidth, but if you're paying $15 because your $12 million campaign is too freakin' cheap to pay for quality hosting, then don't go blaming your opponent when your shitty service goes out.
This is what happens when people with lab time get bored: What came out of my ear, a chemical analysis of earwax. via
So I co-spotted my earwax (EW) against cholesterol (C) and squalene (SQ). Both were in there, along with some unidentified component with an intermediate Rf that streaks a bit. No clue what that is. -addition- One of the commenters proposed that the middle spot is lanosterol; biosynthetic intermediate on the way from squalene to cholesterol.
I read a nifty article about the Omega number earlier today. via
It's also deeply non-computable; meaning that not only is it non-computable, but even computing meta-information about it is non-computable. And yet, it's almost computable.
It's sometimes called the halting probability. The idea of it is that it encodes the probability that a given infinitely long random bit string contains a prefix that represents a halting program.
1. Non-computable: no program can compute Ω. In fact, beyond a certain value N (which is non-computable!), you cannot compute the value of any bit of Ω.
2. Uncompressible: there is no way to represent Ω in a non-infinite way; in fact, there is no way to represent any substring of Ω in less bits than there are in that substring.
3. Normal: the digits of Ω are completely random and unpatterned; the value of and digit in Ω is equally likely to be a zero or a one; any selected pair of digits is equally likely to be any of the 4 possibilities 00, 01, 10, 100; and so on.
Ω is definable. We can (and have) provided a specific, precise definition of it. We've even described a procedure by which you can conceptually generate it. But despite that, it's deeply uncomputable. There are procedures where we can compute a finite prefix of it. But there's a limit: there's a point beyond which we cannot compute any digits of it. And there is no way to compute that point. So, for example, there's a very interesting paper where the authors computed the value of Ω for a Minsky machine; they were able to compute 84 bits of it; but the last 20 are unreliable, because it's uncertain whether or not they're actually beyond the limit, and so they may be wrong. But we can't tell!
What does Ω mean? It's actually something quite meaningful. It's a number that encodes some of the very deepest information about what it's possible to compute. It gives a way to measure the probability of computability. In a very real sense, it represents the overall nature and structure of computability in terms of a discrete probability.
How maciej lost walking privileges in Beijing: via
I took Claude's rebuke about not having my passport in stride - it was true, I didn't like to walk around with it because of my knack for losing important documents. But I was hurt when he took me to task for not having registered my address with the local police. Here I was, a white guy, living in the middle of a highly technologically sophisticated police state, speaking no Chinese, surrounded by willing informants, adhering to a rigid daily routine. How hard could it be to figure out where I was? Granted, keeping the gate of their secret aerospace facility closed apparently lay beyond the capabilities of the Chinese secret police, but did they require this level of handholding in everything?
Apple's fully reopened the source of Mac OS X, and totally recommitted itself to open-source in general. Or, at least, they're making a good show of it. via
Posted by Jon Rubin at August 8, 2006 10:48 PM
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