Somebody Found the Open University CoSy Backups?
Ask David Broadhurst what I am talking about.
Our on-line discussion, some time around 1994, was on this problem:
It ended with David insisting that the answer depended upon knowing the intention of the host, in particular whether or not he was out to deliberately mislead you, and this was something I simply couldn't understand. When I asked him to explain why he knew this, he became rather irritated and terminated the discussion, so I still have no idea what he was getting at!
Here's an extended version of that video with more about Bayes' theorem and conditional dependence:
I used to be the "moderator" of the physics conference on that system, and we had some noteworthy discussions. One particularly heated discussion was over David Bohm's Implicate Order, a version of deBroglie's Pilot Wave interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. I got really annoyed because this pretentious twat, who was a PhD student, I think, said that Bohm's theory was basically a hidden-variables theory, and that Bell had shown that hidden variable theories couldn't explain Quantum Mechanics. I was annoyed because Bell had explicitly written local hidden variables and if people dismissed all hidden variable theories, then they would ignore potentially interesting ideas. I think it will turn out that a non-local hidden variables theory will explain all of Quantum Mechanics quite well enough.
Another weird discussion I remember was on the identity of the empty set in set theory. I thought it pretty obvious that there was only one empty set, but some woman came on and said "Are you sure, Ian?" Another weird discussion was on the conservation of momentum. A guy argued that angular momentum was conserved. That didn't go very far either. And then there was a guy who wanted to know how to write a perl script that did keyboard input, but without echoing the results of keypresses onto the screen. So I showed him how to write a perl script on Windows machines which wrote out a .com executable image and "execed it". This gave you unfettered access to any MSDOS BIOS or BDOS system call from a perl script. God knows what people did with that!
Another memorable, but very brief discussion, was some kid saying he had a theory, which was that of the Universe changed from open to closed, in the sense of not expanding forever, but rather beginning to collapse back under gravitational attraction, at that ’point' time would "start going backwards". Why? I was reminded of this when I read somewhere that this was what Stephen Hawking once believed, but then changed his mind. See:
It is getting very strange in here!
And now the mosquitoes are starting to bite and my phone only has 20% charge and I only have 6 cigarettes, and I'm fucking pissed off!
Our on-line discussion, some time around 1994, was on this problem:
It ended with David insisting that the answer depended upon knowing the intention of the host, in particular whether or not he was out to deliberately mislead you, and this was something I simply couldn't understand. When I asked him to explain why he knew this, he became rather irritated and terminated the discussion, so I still have no idea what he was getting at!
Here's an extended version of that video with more about Bayes' theorem and conditional dependence:
I used to be the "moderator" of the physics conference on that system, and we had some noteworthy discussions. One particularly heated discussion was over David Bohm's Implicate Order, a version of deBroglie's Pilot Wave interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. I got really annoyed because this pretentious twat, who was a PhD student, I think, said that Bohm's theory was basically a hidden-variables theory, and that Bell had shown that hidden variable theories couldn't explain Quantum Mechanics. I was annoyed because Bell had explicitly written local hidden variables and if people dismissed all hidden variable theories, then they would ignore potentially interesting ideas. I think it will turn out that a non-local hidden variables theory will explain all of Quantum Mechanics quite well enough.
Another weird discussion I remember was on the identity of the empty set in set theory. I thought it pretty obvious that there was only one empty set, but some woman came on and said "Are you sure, Ian?" Another weird discussion was on the conservation of momentum. A guy argued that angular momentum was conserved. That didn't go very far either. And then there was a guy who wanted to know how to write a perl script that did keyboard input, but without echoing the results of keypresses onto the screen. So I showed him how to write a perl script on Windows machines which wrote out a .com executable image and "execed it". This gave you unfettered access to any MSDOS BIOS or BDOS system call from a perl script. God knows what people did with that!
Another memorable, but very brief discussion, was some kid saying he had a theory, which was that of the Universe changed from open to closed, in the sense of not expanding forever, but rather beginning to collapse back under gravitational attraction, at that ’point' time would "start going backwards". Why? I was reminded of this when I read somewhere that this was what Stephen Hawking once believed, but then changed his mind. See:
It is getting very strange in here!
And now the mosquitoes are starting to bite and my phone only has 20% charge and I only have 6 cigarettes, and I'm fucking pissed off!
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