Easy Questions?

[Sibling Lambicus the Toluous]

(have always wanted a few rooms like that, and a host of other oddities....  theremin-circuit based 'sound sculpture' rooms that change according to your proximity to pillars, mirror arrays that allow the viewer to see the back of their own head, indoor lakeshore rooms).

Your theremin room kinda reminds me of something I saw on TV years ago: an artist did up a sort of robotic sculpture (for lack of a better word) that consisted of several arms hanging down from the ceiling.  The arms were made out of dried vines, so they looked more organic than mechanical, and he did his best to camoflage the motors in the arms.

The really funky thing was how they worked, though: each one was equipped with a microphone, and they "flocked".  They'd act randomly until one heard a noise... then that arm would pan around to find the source of the noise.  Once it did, it'd "tell" the other arms by way of DTMF telephone tones, and they'd all swivel around and point the same direction as the first arm.

He had the things rigged so well that they really had a "living" quality to them.  When anyone walked into the room, they'd hear this other-worldly whistling and hooting, as all the other arms "look" up as well and join in the chorus.  Whimsically freaky/freakishly whimsical, I guess.

[beagle]

This is one of the reasons I should never be trusted with large sums of money.

This is reminiscent of the Dilbert where Dogbert makes a fortune. After paying a businessman in a suit thousands of dollars to wallow in a puddle he says "I don't understand how rich people ever get bored".

[Sibling Lambicus the Toluous]

This is one of the reasons I should never be trusted with large sums of money.

This is reminiscent of the Dilbert where Dogbert makes a fortune. After paying a businessman in a suit thousands of dollars to wallow in a puddle he says "I don't understand how rich people ever get bored".

My favourite "what I'd do if I was rich" story is from Canadian Comedian Brent Butt... it involves buying the town of Red Deer, Alberta and riding a giraffe down the main street while wearing a Viking helmet and swinging a bag of gophers around his head.

[Griffin NoName]

....So why does it seem completely counterintuitive to imagine the opposite - a universe that goes on forever into the past, and ending at a singularity sometime in the future?

How about a Toadfish pact that we all set our clocks going in reverse? If a whole community reversed time, may be we'd crack all this ?

[Aggie]

My favourite "what I'd do if I was rich" story is from Canadian Comedian Brent Butt... it involves buying the town of Red Deer, Alberta and riding a giraffe down the main street while wearing a Viking helmet and swinging a bag of gophers around his head.

So, he wants to be in the Stampede parade then? 
You'd have to be pretty rich to pick up Red Deer these days...   maybe Medicine Hat or Moose Jaw SK instead?

[Sibling Chatty]

....So why does it seem completely counterintuitive to imagine the opposite - a universe that goes on forever into the past, and ending at a singularity sometime in the future?

How about a Toadfish pact that we all set our clocks going in reverse? If a whole community reversed time, may be we'd crack all this ?

I have an old battery operated clock from the late 70's that runs backwards if you putt the batteries in wrong. I'll try to find it.

I used to keep it running and on display in my living room.

[Black Bart]

There is a theory that 'Merlin' of King Arthur's court, was living backwards in time...or was that the dream I had after finishing off me Holy Grail Ale!!

[Swatopluk]

Still less problems than with the Douglas Adams linguistic time paradoxes.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Back to the subject, didn't Hawking or someone else discovered that a black hole can be unstable under certain conditions? The point is that perhaps (and I am talking out of my @$$ now) after certain amount (several galaxies) of matter a blackhole can explode creating the equivalent of a big bang, it would be a singularity and who knows what would be the composition of the resulting nebula, think supernova on lots of steroids. I may be perfectly possible that some stuff may have been outside of said black hole (perhaps not emitting light?).

[Swatopluk]

A back hole loses energy (and therewith mass) through the Hawking radiation. But the bigger it is the less it loses. The postulated black mini holes are small enough to lose enough that way to reach the end of their lives within the time the universe exists in its current form. If they pass the minimum treshold they explode in a very hot outburts of radiation (for some time the so-callled gamma bursts were suspected to be exactly that). A large black hole like The Beast in the center of our galaxy has a life expectancy that is many orders of magnitude higher than the current age of the universe.

[Griffin NoName]

According to popular science, the Large Hadron Collider may well sort all this out for us; if it does, we won't be around to know it has. Probably. I find the Uncertainty Principle comforting.

[Swatopluk]

Before this thread dies an old classic:

Why does a three legged table or stool not jiggle (correct verb?)?

Answer in a way that "normal" people can understand !

[The Meromorph]

Because 'wobbling' (better verb - 'jiggling' more properly refers to Boobs) is oscillation between two or more stable states. Three-legged stools or table one have one stable state (all three legs on the ground).
"Jiggling' may invole 'osculation' rather than 'oscillation'.

[Griffin NoName]

A "normal" person may believe a stable state is one where the auotmobile is banned.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

"Jiggling' may invole 'osculation' rather than 'oscillation'.

Sounds like you are one lucky guy...