I do bugger all at school, and put the least amount of effort I can get away with into my homework. People complain about the stress and the annoyance of homework/revision, but it's terribly over-exaggerated. People should just get on with it and shut there pie-holes.
well it came about when i wondered how long it would take to watch every classic movie ever made. at some point it has to be physically impossible to do so.
Steve Zissou: Anne-Marie, do all the interns get Glocks?
It's a matter of scope. It takes a minimum number of particles to store a single bit of data. You can't store the state of the universe at any point in time without creating a second universed-sized repository of matter to store the information. At that point you can move the scope out further: to record the state of both the universe and the adjunct storage space. So the amount of matter needed to store a perfect history grows geometrically.
Okay? Same thing on a human level. What did hitler have for breakfast on april 3rd, 1922? What did the guy who lived two doors down have?
The further more obscure the history, the further the scale is abstracted. To record everything for posterity, everyone on the planet would have to be recording everything they do, 24/7.
I mean, it's obvious. The more history there is to record, the broader the scale will be. The point where there's too much history to keep track of is the moment you decide to start recording.
Eventually, history will simply be "There were 3 major wars in the 20th century. Name 2 of them", etc .
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Yeah, I wasn't talking about recording every bit of insignificant data; I was talking about historic events. I thought it was pretty obvious that I didn't plan on chronologically organizing what everyone ate for breakfast.
Steve Zissou: Anne-Marie, do all the interns get Glocks?
But historical significance is subjective. So while there's mountains of recorded history on, say, the colonization of america, the colonization of egypt by the aliens just just a footnote.
That's what I meant by it being a matter of scope. You can't record everything, so you pick what you think is significant. That you weren't referring to every little scrap of information is evidence of this: it appears ridiculous because it's common sense. But it's still lost knowledge.
It's a matter of scope. It takes a minimum number of particles to store a single bit of data. You can't store the state of the universe at any point in time without creating a second universed-sized repository of matter to store the information. At that point you can move the scope out further: to record the state of both the universe and the adjunct storage space. So the amount of matter needed to store a perfect history grows geometrically.
Maybe you could compress it by only recording the difference to the current universe?
- Ok, you must admit that was the most creative cussing this site have ever seen -
It might work if you had particles with zero energy, but background radiation makes that impossible. Everything's always doing something. Although even that mightn't work on the scale of strings, I'm not sure.
@Radix - Yeah it is common sense, which is why I left it open ended. Any schmuk can determine whether something has historical significance. Hitler eating cheerios - no. Hitler killing millions of Jews - yes. Subjective or not, give a list of random events to anyone and ask them to pick only the important ones, and the results will be on par with everyone else’s choices.
Steve Zissou: Anne-Marie, do all the interns get Glocks?
And the reason for that is because everyone knows you can't record everything.
Pertinence is irrelevant, also. I don't give a flying fuck about, say, Norwegian history. But that doesn't mean other pople don't. I can see how what Hitler ate for each meal every day might be very important information for an empirical study on the impact of nutrition on psychology.
If we had a magical machine that could record everything, everywhere for all time, we'd leave it switched on. But we don't, so we have to scale our interest.
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