Still no idea what that is.

It's the InterActive Map for the Minecraft server. It recently got taken down (temporarily, I hope) because it was using too much of the server's RAM. Bmwsu upgraded the server and we got more RAM, but still the Dynamic Map causes lag because it has to render every single block in the entire world at once.

blacraft uses dynmap and the memory is constantly at something like 95%

after the mapping was finished there has been no noticeable lag though, so that's nice

Is light made of matter? What about sound?  

Light is energy, not matter.  And sound is caused by vibration, and is not made of matter either.  

I knew that light was energy, but I was wondering if energy was matter. I don't think it is, but could it be considered matter?

Depends on what exactly you mean by matter. Light and sound are particles (photons and phonons respectively), but these particles don't have mass.

Matter is energy, not the other way around.

In the event that you have trouble falling asleep and realize you are still wide awake, do you think it's more worthwhile to just mimic sleeping (ie: lie in bed with the lights turned off for hours) and hope to retain some of the benefits that sleeping usually brings, or is it better to abandon all hope and continue doing stuff you would do during the day?

Mimic sleep by far. Just the relaxing helps a lot to rest and you often actually take little catnaps without realizing it. Most importantly, realize that it doesn't matter if you lose a few hours of sleep. There is no use worrying about it.

If you're not tired at all, listening to music in bed seems to help. I used to be kept up all the time by worrying that I wouldn't get enough sleep, lol. It was like... come on brain, get it together.

What do you think of the idea that we might be one of many universes, all composed of different physical laws and constants, and that we might "bump" into others from time to time? The discovery of gravitational waves lends some credence to that apparently. It's cool to think about.

On a related note, what's your take on the theory that the universe as we know it is a highly advanced computer simulation?

A few weeks ago a read an interview of Gerard 't Hooft (Dutch physicist who won the Nobel prize for his work in Quantum Field Theory) where he discussed this. This particular multiverse theory is based on the notion that without the values our natural constants have, our universe couldn't possibly exist. The odds of these constants having these exact values is so low, that would be very improbably for this exact universe to form. So if you assume there are multiple universe, with varying natural constants, then given a large enough amount (such as infinite), there has to be a universe which results in ours.
'T Hooft's argument was that these natural constants need to be approximately the same as they are now to create our universe, but not exactly. The first five digits might be important, but there are still an infinite number of digits after that which apparently are not important at all. So why does our universe have these exact, precise values for the constants when nearly all information contained in them is not relevant at all? In his opinion, it is more likely that there is some undiscovered mathematical relation which shows why our constants have the exact value they have, which removes the necessity of a multiverse.

There might be multiple universes in higher dimensional space that occasionally bump into each other, but there is no need to assume that they have different constants and such. They could be pretty much similar to our universe, with perhaps some deviations caused by quantum mechanics or something. But so far it is nothing more than a cool idea, like the multiple world interpretation of QM.



Complete nonsense. Why would anyone want to simulate a volume this large and detailed? Almost no information can be exchanged between Earth and distant stars, other than the fact that we exist. On a similar note, the smallest distance which makes physical sense and would probably be the size of a pixel is the Planck length, which is approximately 10^-35 m. However the nucleus, the smallest distance which actually matters, is about 10^-15 m. That is twenty orders of magnitude difference.
Now, consider that the universe has a radius of about 46 billion lightyears, which is in the order of 10^25 m, which is a difference of 60 orders of magnitude. Now take the cube of this, because the universe is 3D and we need about 10^180 bytes of data. This when 20 orders of magnitude between smallest and largest scale is more than sufficient, which would need about 10^60 orders of magnitude. I don't think you are very familiar with exponents and orders of magnitude, so you might not realize just how huge this difference is.
In short, the universe is far larger and far more detailed than it actually needs to be for a simulation. Therefor, it is highly improbable that this is actually the case.

I've experimented to falling asleep to music before to see if I could fall asleep easier, weave it into my dreams, or at least influence them. It seemed like it took as long to fall asleep as I usually did. I don't remember my dreams being any different, usually what would happen is a song would reach some loud point and it'd jolt me out of my sleep, even using an instrumental playlist at the lowest possible volumes, there are still loud parts by comparison when you're sleeping, lol.

Yes though, I was giving my brain a stern lecture last night. I didn't get to bed until 3 AM, which isn't too bad I guess. It just bothered me because I wasn't even remotely tired in the slightest, but I still wanted to go to sleep. Usually if I'm having trouble sleeping I at least have some inert sense of being tired. I just ended up watching cartoons until I began to yawn and such.

I think Isa linked me to this page or something like it in the chatbox once when I was depressed.

I have no memories of ever linking things related to the topic of multiple universes, nor discussing them.

It's not directly about multiverses. I once was lamely waxing in the chatbox about the point in life and how I spend my entire life looking at screens or something, and you responded with something along the lines of "if it is possibly to create a computer simulation of real life, we are most likely already living in it" and told me to look up Nick Bostrom, which totally makes sense since he's Swedish.

Oh yeah. I think that what I linked was this fine piece.

Well, we already have games such as Dwarf Fortress, Sim City and the Sims, which are simulations. They are incredibly simplistic, but they are still simulation. And in the academic world we have weather and flow simulations, population simulations, planet simulations and all that sorts of stuff. But as far as I know, none of them have ever managed to introduce a second layer of simulations.

How does a horse use a keyboard?

Same way as humans: by typing on it.

What exactly is "The Goldilocks Zone"? I'm a hardcore Redditor and saw it in an article about alien life. Is it a special kind of planet or type of atmosphere or something?

The Goldilock Zone is the interval of distances from a star between which the surface temperature of the planet is exactly the right temperature for water to exist in liquid, solid and gaseous forms, which is an essential criterion for hydrocarbon based lifeforms to exist. This doesn't take planet size or composition into account yet. I think the term for that was Earthlike or something. A gas giant can also exist in the Goldilocks Zone, although this is very rare, but life is still impossible to form on such planets.
The name comes from the tale of Goldilocks, who rejected the porridge that was too cold and the porridge that was too hot before settling on the porridge that was just right.

Why the long face?





GOOD NIGHT

Being enslaved by humans does that to you. Especially when your main task consists of carrying your masters around everywhere and being whipped when you're going too slow for their tastes.

How the f*** do trees work