#thought experiments

[prokopetz]

Okay, so there's a red button and a blue button, one of which always tells the truth and one of which always lies.

[danshive]

Thought experiments are commonly meant to make the person consider a specific scenario with specific options.

It is also common for people to want to find alternative solutions for problems.

∴ It is the responsibility of the thought experiment to adequately limit its applicable logic and answers.

This can mean rethinking the entire structure of a thought experiment to be more limited.

For example, a thought experiment in which two buttons appear in front of everyone on Earth. Setting aside where it goes from there…

“Everyone?” At the same time? No matter who, no matter where?

Time zones exist. Are roughly 50% of people getting them asleep? What if someone’s driving? In a medically induced coma? Extremely drunk? A literal baby?

I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS! And that doesn’t need to be the case! That’s not the fault of the thinkers, but of the question.

Narrow the scope.

For example:

You are one of 500 adults of sound mind seated in a room. In front of each of you are two buttons. You can only press one of those two buttons, and no one can leave their seats until everyone has pressed one their buttons.

The first button is a vote to get cake as you leave. The second is a vote for pie. Which do you press?

(Hey, I was just eliminating variables from who’s pressing the buttons and under what conditions. The quality of the question that followed was irrelevant! 😤)

[adorableanimus]

you are locked in a room and meet two people. it doesn't matter what order you meet them, it only matters that they are met separately. one of them is a visual double, who looks exactly like you down to the last pore, but acts thinks and feels in a way that is entirely opposite to you. the other is an emotional double. it thinks feels and acts exactly as you do, but all of its physical features are opposite to yours.

do you realise what they are?

yes for visual, no for emotional

no for visual, yes for emotional

yes for visual, yes for emotional

no for visual, no for emotional

insert all the nuance you want

Voting ended onJan 27

reblog for better reach

[drawfee-quot3s]

the disintegrated man is a man who was born? and the swamp man was formed from marsh molecules that were struck by lightning

- jacob

[eriquin]

WIP Weekend

Tagged by @hbyrde36 and @turinspeachjam.

Rules: Send me an emoji in an ask, and I'll write & share 3 sentences for that WIP!

👑 Crown of Thorns

🔮 The Oracle of Roane County

🐈‍⬛ Cat's in the Cradle

💭 Zeno's Paradox

I have my progress graph:

And snippet from Zeno's Paradox behind the cut.

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie muttered. He leaned back on the couch and rubbed the side of his face that wasn’t covered in bandages. “So we don’t actually have any money yet, but we’re gonna?”

“So they say.” 

He let out a little laugh. “Well, then I guess this was all worth it.” He gestured at himself as he said it. 

Wayne shook his head. “Now, don’t you start that,” he said. “I’m telling you ‘cause I ain’t sure we should take it.” 

Eddie let himself slouch down. His head was starting to hurt and the trailer was cold. He furrowed his brow and let out an involuntary shiver. Wayne got up and pulled the crochet blanket off the back of the couch, tossing it over him. It helped a little. 

“You think we shouldn’t take the money?” he asked quietly. “Why?”

snippet here

Tagging: @vthx, @tinytalkingtina @sidekick-hero @sourw0lfs @penny00dreadful

@pearynice, @queenofshenanigans, @little-annie, @queenie-ofthe-void, @cloudsurfing42,

@felixir-of-moths, @steddiecameraroll, @hawkinsleather, @dame-zoom-a-lot, @pennyplainknits, @steddieas-shegoes, @cassaloopa, @just-my-latest-hyperfixation, @frankenstein-ate-my-left-shoe, @runninriot

Here's some context links for past sentences:

Crown of Thorns

Cat's in the Cradle

The Oracle of Roane County

Zeno's Paradox

[wordsandrobots]

While watching the sub of 08th MS Team over on Gundam Info's YouTube page (sans episode 12 because they are cowards), the thought suddenly occurred that you could move those characters into another of the shows with minimal effort, mostly because they are fairly stock and also because they're enough of a good unit dynamic to work elsewhere.

Obviously, because this is me, I was imagining them in Iron-Blooded Orphans, either as a Gjallarhorn squad in some dismal backwater (with Shiro eventually realising being a member of the colonial police kind of sucks) or as some unaffiliated mercenary group, with Aina perhaps being from Gjallarhorn and that making for a conflict.

And since I'm rubbish at AUs but always need a ready source of OC inspiration for my style of fic-writing, that got me wondering who else you could readily transpose into the Post Disaster timeline.

Obviously the Shangri-La kids from Gundam ZZ are a freebie since they're the most clear-cut precursors to Tekkadan as a concept. You'd barely have to change anything about them except removing the newtype abilities.

Likewise, the antagonistic characters from Gundam Wing swap over with ease because Gjallarhorn is just OZ if it won and then became entrenched for 300 years. Treize, Une, Noin and Zechs just need new uniforms and we're done. You could probably fold in the Gundam boys too, and likely with minimal reworking at that. Heero probably wouldn't be augmented in the same way, but make him a space rat and we're laughing. Quatre can be from the upper classes/colony company side of things, Trowa's human debris, give Duo a spacer/pirate origin and Wu Fei . . .

You know what, Wu Fei as the scion of some kind of warrior monk group that's been maintaining a Gundam since the Calamity War could have legs as a concept. Maybe I should file that one away for later use.

Kudelia already retreads a lot of Relena's schtick in a more pragmatic/cynical manner. Dorothy, however, would make a perfect member of Gjallarhorn high society and Sally can be another disgruntled soldier who comes to realise the money isn't worth it any more.

Gundam 00 is hit and miss. Setsuna is superseded in every way by Mikazuki in terms of character concept. The Innovades and super soldiers are right out. I already kind of imagine Gundam Flauros' original pilot as a variant of Neil!Lockon, though, and Graham is the kind of lunatic who can go with anything if you're not afraid of fun.

Gundam and Zeta Gundam . . . nah. They're just too tied into that original conceptualisation of what the series is about. I don't think the White Base or Argama crews really belong anywhere else. And I feel somewhat similarly about G Fighter, although maybe you could redo some of the stuff with the Devil Gundam to relate to the original IBO Gundam development process?

'Tis an interesting game at least and if anyone else has thoughts in this direction, I'd love to hear them.

[vax-official]

I sometimes wonder about what a 32-bit MS-DOS-like operating system would look like. There are a couple of interesting candidates out there (the now seemingly dead FreeDOS-32 and PDOS come to mind), but just for my own curiosity I would think about what needs to go into it.

And then I remember that modern operating systems don't boot via BIOS anymore, but via UEFI. And UEFI offers an API and a command line prompt, it runs from FAT and uses a Microsoft executable file format (PE)...

... Maybe UEFI and the UEFI shell are the modern 32-bit MS-DOS-like operating system I have thought about, huh!