Rotwang

I obviously insinuated no such thing. What are you, [insert offensive national stereotype I've just made up] or something?

This thread is now about false-coloured sunsets:

Would it surprise you to learn that I've received death threats in a newsgroup about mathematics? I'm pretty sure that this being a psytrance forum has nothing to do with it.

The whole internet is weird. Believe it or not, this is one of the tamer forums I've used.

No need to thank me; it was a joy for me as well, since our previous disagreements were as much my fault as yours. I'm not going to do that yet. Give it a day and ask me again if you still feel the same way, but we'd all much rather you didn't.

How on Earth would I know that? Well, you should care. Whether you mean to be offensive or are just appallingly ignorant, you should stop. But you never stop, no matter how many times you've been asked, and now another valued member wants to leave Psynews because of it. Usually I'd ask Insejn and RTP's permission first, but I'm going to go ahead and give you a temporary ban because I'm sufficiently confident they'd agree with me if they were here right now. When the ban is lifted your behaviour had better be noticeably, and permanently, improved; otherwise you'll be joining Kris.

Pfft, really? We can't go three days without someone else threatening to leave? Radi: please apologise for your ridiculous slight against Brazilian people, and also your comments about what you think gay people sound like in another thread. Both were incredibly silly and offensive.

Like I said, I don't know if it counts as a remix. But one of its melodies is very famous: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuuObGsB0No

I've noticed that I often fill my writing with a lot of excess verbiage and tortuous phrasing that I wouldn't use in speech. It's not intentional and I'd rather stop. It makes me sound like a pseudo-intellectual bellend.

Yes. He's an immensely disagreeable person. He's been banned from Psynews numerous times over the years, kept coming back with the promise that he wouldn't cause any trouble, but drama follows him around like a bad scent. Eventually he admitted he had no interest in psytrance any more and just posted to wind people up, so we told him to piss off.

In fact they stopped the day before I went to see the doctor and haven't come back, so it sounds to have just been a minor infection.

Votes add to a member's reputation (visible in his or her profile). Doesn't look like scores for individual posts are visible.

People weren't trying to help Colin out because they thought he needed it. People were responding to the unprovoked insults that Neurogen was throwing at Colin with the derision that they felt those insults deserved. He won't. He's permabanned.

Kinda. Time plays several different roles in modern physics, and it's not yet entirely clear how those different concepts of time relate to one another. General Relativity (GR) says that the universe is a four-dimensional "manifold" (a kind of mathematical structure that generalises flat space) and that time is one of those dimensions; in fact there's no unique way to separate the different directions in spacetime into time and space, much like there's no unique way to separate the two dimensions on a map into left/right and forwards/backwards (it depends on which way you're facing). By itself, though, GR doesn't explain why we perceive time as something that passes. In fact the equations of GR stay the same if the direction of time is reversed, and so do those of our current best theory of particle physics (almost). There are some properties of the particular universe we live in that, unlike the underlying laws of physics that that universe seems to obey, do give rise to an "arrow of time"; there's the second law of thermodynamics, for example, which roughly says that systems without outside influence become more chaotic over time (a special case of this is the fact that if you put a hot object and a cold object in contact then heat will flow from the hot one to the cold one, rather than the other way around). It's plausible that this explains why our brains think of the past and the future differently, but I don't know whether this theory has been confirmed.

This is a question that physicists ponder. If superstring theory is correct, for example, then the universe should actually have ten dimensions rather than the four we see. This doesn't necessarily mean that superstring theory is wrong; rather, it is possible that there are extra dimensions that are "curled up" so as to be too small to see (similarly to how a narrow straw has a two-dimensional surface but looks like a one-dimensional line from a distance). The question then becomes why four of those dimensions should be much larger than the others. There may turn out to be an explanation for that, for example from the anthropic principle (there might be many universes, but those with four large dimensions might be much more likely to allow the evolution of intelligent beings for some reason, so any such intelligent beings would expect to find themselves in one of the four-large-dimensional universes). I don't know what the current thinking is on that, having been out of the field for a few years.

Well, you know how to see this as a 3-dimensional object, right? One way to think of it is like this: a square is a two-dimensional figure, in that it extends in two directions (e.g. it has width and length). Now suppose you have a large number of equally-sized squares of paper. If you put those pieces of paper into a pile they can make a cube; that has an additional dimension, namely height. In the image above you see two squares with diagonal lines between them, depicting a cube. If the cube is our pile of square paper, one square might depict the top piece of paper and the other the bottom piece, and the four diagonal lines would then depict the four vertical corners of the pile. Now, just as you can think of a cube as a large number (actually infinitely many) of horizontal squares at different heights, you can think of a hypercube as infinitely many cubes separated by a new dimension. It might help to think of this new dimension as time. So all of our cubes are in the same place, but they are at different times. Just like there was a top square and a bottom square in our pile of squares that made a cube, there's a first cube and a last cube in our bundle of cubes that makes a hypercube. The hypercube image I made earlier just generalises the cube image above: I drew the first cube, and the last cube, and then I joined their vertices with lines representing the edges that are aligned with the time dimension. Does that help?

I was in Kefalonia with my family a few weeks ago. It was nice, the food was probably my favourite thing about it.

It was a thread about what artists who bill themselves as "live" do on stage. Neurogen mentioned his preference for artists who don't just pretend to play live while actually playing pre-recorded stuff, and cited one particular artist he liked. Colin said that he actually knew from talking with said artist and standing behind him while he played that he was one of the fake live acts Neurogen claimed to dislike. Neurogen took exception to that, and various posters pointed out that Colin is both well-respected and well-qualified to talk about the subject. Then it turned into a fight. You were involved, though nothing you said to Neurogen was particularly antagonistic (which didn't stop him reacting as if it were). Eventually Neurogen asked for his account to be deleted; I tried to talk him out of it but he was quite insistent.

We didn't say anything because we didn't want to cause any unnecessary trouble. You weren't banned, you just chose to leave and come back with a new identity, and we saw no reason not to respect your desire for anonymity. That's what you said last time. If you change your mind again there's really no need for the smoke and mirrors stuff. You're still welcome here. What are you talking about?

Condolences.

+1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7yn6spOAFI

Yes.

Not sure whether this counts as a remix, but this seems like a good enough excuse to post it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf2tUc3eegY

Nice first post, welcome to Psynews.