unreality

thanks

Okay, thanks. DudleyDude has offered to be a replacement if we end up needing one. So I guess if either hasn't checked in by 11pm on the 28th, we'll bring in DD.

Does anybody know where dawh or Segul are? It's been 24 hours since the roles were released.

Okay that leaves two roles left for Segul and dawh [the roles left are Brontson and Fabricius]. Whoever gets on first and claims one, give the other role to the other person, and I will begin the game

a few questions: the random number is 1 to 100 inclusive right? and when you say "switch two", does that mean he can make 2 total swaps, or just 1 swap (involving switching the locations of 2 cards)? Also, can he choose to do zero swaps?

Brontson's Team: [1] Framm [2] Araver [3] maurice [4] Blablah [5] dawh [6] Hirkala [7] Segul [8] GMaster479 [9] woon [10] Izzy Here are the 10 roles: (first come, first serve). Each one has a bunch of additional secret information known only to that person. They vary in information, responsibility, ability, as you'll see. All Names are Male/Female interchangeably (you pick the gender) Gregor/Gregora Ivanov - the cook - fled Russia after the February Revolution (which actually happened in March with the calendar system we use now). Vice Admiral Sebastian/Samantha Mordock - oversight - discharged with much honor from the Royal Navy after sustaining heavy injuries in a somewhat vicious battle 2 years prior. Vick/Vicky Brontson - Bront's only child - known to be rash and often periodically at odds with father. Willem/Wilhelmina Klein - a Dutch botanist and close friend of Charles Norway - has worked for many years with the (somewhat limited) flora & fauna of the Himalayas. Hieronymus Fabricius - the doctor - lost all of his brothers (also medics in the army) to the Germans' poison gas in the battle of Caporetto. Left Italy to use his surgical and medicinal expertise elsewhere. John/Joan the Savage - renowned for being able to survive in extreme circumstances, without food and water. Reads a lot of Shakespeare. Became sought after in the world of eager explorers; however, Brontson's vision and potential attracted the Savage to the team. Scout - always bundled in thick layers of protective clothing and optical/protective gear, nobody knows who Scout really is… only that the team would be long gone without the skills of this mountain master. Before each nocturnal advancement, the team relies on Scout to explore the next elevation's terrain. Mr/Mrs. Kirkpatrick - a very wealthy American, the CEO of several Great-War conglomerate companies. Privately funded Brontson's entire expedition in search of Charles Norway… of course, explorers are content to take the sponsorship, but it was a shock to everyone when Kirkpatrick himself/herself insisted on joining the expedition as well. Nischal/Sunita - the local guide (from Nepal) - has been getting increasingly restless as the expedition continues. This is a land of spirits whose hearts are as cold as the temperature. Brother/Sister Mandrake - accompanying priest/ess - an ex-prisoner that became a proponent of peace. A natural leader when it comes to solving problems when… resources don't match up with the number of people...

this one will be a little different ;D But thanks for signing up!

signups end at 11 pm (EST) tonight (in about 4 hours), after that I will post the roles that you can choose from for example if I wanted to be Bob, I would then edit the roster to say: [1] someone [2] someone [3] unreality = Bob [4] someone [5] someone ... then nobody else can be Bob

Brontson's Team: [1] Framm [2] Araver [3] maurice [4] Blablah [5] dawh [6] Hirkala [7] Segul [8] GMaster479 [9] ...

yeah I won't close off signups until sometime tonight, at least another 8-10 hours from now

I'm thinking the 26th will be the last day of signups

SANCTUARY Somewhere high in the vast jagged eternity of the Himalayas exists a timeless cluster of weathered stone buildings, clinging to the icy cliff face, attacked by howling alpine winds, only accessible by an ancient winding path, a stone stairway said to be cut into existence by the gods themselves. Nobody has climbed this stairway in centuries. In 1907, British explorer Charles Norway, said to have gone insane in search of the elusive Yeti (whom only his fierce Australian rival Buck Lancaster claimed to have witnessed a year earlier), took his team of fellow explorers, assistants and admirers with him into the deadly peaks of the Himalayas, never to be seen again. After a month of pointless wandering, their last known contact with the outside world, at the monastery of Paro Taktsang, went down in legend as being bizarre. Norway, caked in ice and missing many digits (as well as most of his crew), was said to have been speaking in tongues, uttering things about a terrible disease, about a prisoner of the gods, about a simple truth that threatened to undermine society. Then he and his most loyal friends and mountaineers disappeared again, forever. Ten years later, near the end of World War I, renowned expeditioner Bront Brontson and an international crew of dedicated scientists, mountaineers, military officers and local Nepalese are on the trail after a decade of fading public interest in the story of (posthumously knighted) Sir Norway. It began with the discovery of Norway's base camp at the foot of a colossal, antediluvian staircase carved directly into a massive mountain, a mountain too newly discovered (or rather, re-discovered) to even have been named yet. However, something quickly became clear. Due to the nature of the mountain and surrounding topography, every day vicious winds slice across the face, making it impossible to travel. Night is calmer but not by much, forcing the explorers into a nocturnal assault. It's constantly snowing. It's tough going - the staircase has been eroded and reshaped over many many years into a hazardous ascent: part ice-chute, part collapsing ruin. In some places where the mountains have oozed apart, blocks are dangerously close to dropping directly into abysses and chasms below. It's cold. There may not be enough supplies. And there's something out there, in the snow. Something deadly. And not just that. The very first day of the staircase's discovery, at the same instant everyone beheld the much distant shape of what might just be a building near the top of the mountain, Bront Brontson was murdered, from behind, with an icicle. When I see how many people join I'll then put up the names/professions/slight backstory of everyone in the group, you can choose which you want. But of course each role has secrets too. There are more things going on than meets the eye. Brontson's Team: [1] … [2] … …

what about my answer to B?

yep! kudos

That's what intuition may tell you, but not true. Try it with sqrt(2). sqrt(2) = 1.414214 sqrt(2)^sqrt(2) = 1.632527 sqrt(2)^ 1.632527 = 1.76084 sqrt(2)^1.76084 = 1.840911 keep going and it converges on 2. However sqrt(2) isn't quite the limit, you can go higher yet. (But not so high as sqrt(e) which was k-man's last guess)

Ah there it is, thanks! Back to the drawing board If my answer to B is right though I think I can fairly easily extrapolate it to part C

Well said. Those are the conclusions I always come back to anytime I try to consider self-simulation. This little story (I've posted it here before) is a fun read on the matter: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1857290 I haven't read the link nor even the entirety of the wikipedia article I posted, but it outlines a general thoughtline that I think is worth discussing: our bodies, our brains, etc, our physical self, reacts with neurochemistry and all the parts of the body working together. The self-aware "mind" exists as the "epiphenomenon" that thinks it has free will but of course is just observing what the physical brain is already computing and deciding. I've brought that up before in this topic and for keeping spirits up (maybe just my own) usually end with something like "but it's not so bad for the Lazy-Bones paradox because the mind that seems to arise from the epiphenomenon-alism is that which 'agrees' with the brain such that the 'choices' the brain makes are (usually) what the mind wants as well". So it's kind of like your conscious mind is making choices although it's just an illusion. And sometimes your body makes choices for you, especially in situations where your epiphenomenon isn't equipped for it (like primeval fear/fight/flight responses or whatnot). Which seems close to what reality might be yup most likely

sqrt(2) is 1.41421356 However, And regarding the derivative, that may be another valid way of expressing it, I don't know without your steps, but if you:

Yes - any deterministic system that keeps itself "blackboxed" in a way. I'm sure my understanding of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is very very very lacking - and I really should read up on it a lot more because I seem to mention it a lot haha - but even if physics is deterministic, the "algorithm" so to speak that computes the next time-step of the universe from the previous one is hidden to observers. Or maybe not the algorithm (the laws of physics?) but rather the data itself (position/momentum of particles a la heisenberg). So even if the algorithm is known (or for that matter, really simple) we can't compute if we lack the data. But harkening back to the original topic somewhat, I was reading this (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/introcs/15inout/command.txt) and any time I read neal stephenson I end up googling words and one of them I googled was 'epiphenomenon' (though the way he used it was more of the medical context) but this led me to the philosophical context, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism which describes a good portion of my view on the manner. Maybe not all of it is relevant, but it's an interesting topic of debate maybe

I don't really stake all that much in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it has a lot of faults. But for a really simple model it works decently well with a lot of generalizations We ourselves are a great ape. Other great apes have a lot of similar physiological but also neurological qualities. If we're looking for animal philosophers, that'd be the first place I'd look

I guess I mean that with economics, we could model every piece of money in the universe, objects, where it is, has been, whatever. On second thought it wouldn't be very easy but that's why I said with enough "data and computing power". But then we wouldn't be able to predict the future with even that, of course (due to irrational human decision making), just model the present. We can't even model the present for physics, it's just fundamentally impossible. I guess there's not really that much of a distinction, especially if you isomorphically map them one-to-one (or at least good enough to preserve physic's uncertainty) by introducing the ability to purchase the naming rights to 'x' atom or 'y' galaxy. So yeah you're right, it's very fuzzy. Forget the economics thing hahaha

yeah it's a bit more complex than that

Maybe another great ape is a better example to use instead of a donkey. And about the African farmers, I think it's presumptious to make that kind of blanket statement. Some have probably thought about it in great detail and are great philosophers, others not so much