The Carpet makers by Andreas Eschbach is something I would have liked to include in this post; it connects the human to the very big in a gentle chain of nested stories. However, this is a novel you need to appreciate in book form. posted by Tobu at 5:41 PM on November 19, 2008 [1 favorite]
Has anyone seen my pushing and popping potions? I think I need to go see a lizard about a lamp. posted by loquacious at 5:48 PM on November 19, 2008 [4 favorites]
I didn't know he was a Borgesentarian. posted by OrangeDrink at 5:49 PM on November 19, 2008
Did you know that brains can be used to make soft leather? There's some combination of compounds in them that make them perfect for the task, and by odd coincidence, the brain of an "average" animals is just big enough to tan that same animal.
So, if you have a rock you can carefully crack open an animals skull, pulp the brain, and use it to make, e.g., buckskin. posted by boo_radley at 6:04 PM on November 19, 2008 [1 favorite]
Like a Reimann sphere, this post is complex, all over the place yet ultimately finite. I suspect, but cannot prove, that this post is homeomorphic with a good post. posted by GuyZero at 6:07 PM on November 19, 2008 [2 favorites]
Just got back yesterday from a five-day trip. Thought about getting a motel room in Charleston, WV on my way back, but I wasn't too tired yet at 1:00 a.m., so I figured I should keep pushing until I got to Beckley, at least. Didn't realize how bad the weather was going to get. The cold front that pushed down from Canada was causing a lot of ice and snow. Something bad must've happened up ahead of me on I-64, because I wound up in a dead stop over a bridge way before Beckley, and I stayed there for about three hours--all alone, dead of night, snow falling hard and getting tired. By the time we started moving again, it was too late to think about a room. Decided to just push on through to Carolina. Made it home, exhausted, at half-past noon.
My two-year old won't stop hugging me. "Daddy! Daddy! I love you!" I try to break away after a while. She gets emphatic. "Stay here? More hugs please!" I stay. Hugs continue. This is, I think, the best thing in my life so far. Maybe the best thing ever. That would make for a decent eternity. No rocks needed.
If I had eternity and a bunch of rocks I would make a single link FFP on MetaFilter to a XKCD comic that everyone read two days ago. While smoking a Cohiba lancero. posted by fixedgear at 6:15 PM on November 19, 2008 [3 favorites]
Why's everyone calling it a single link? I can count at least three links in the post. posted by Lemurrhea at 6:18 PM on November 19, 2008
More importantly, why is no one answering the question in the FPP?
Fine, I'll go first. With eternity and a bunch of rocks, I'd build a fort. No, wait, I'd build the BEST fort. posted by piratebowling at 6:26 PM on November 19, 2008 [1 favorite]
I'd go floridly insane. My insanity would be so all-encompassing and robust that my delusions would feel utterly convincing. In the midst of my insanity, I'd imagine myself as a nondescript twentysomething with mild depressive tendencies, who invests significant portions of his time surfing the internet for minutiae in an effort to stave of an awareness of his own mortality. Occasionally, some hived-off enclave of my psyche would introduce a cheekily recursive nod to the truth of my existence, such as summarising it in a hit-and-miss minimalist webcomic. And I'd be momentarily troubled... then the feeling would pass, and I'd go back to eating ice cream, playing Mario Kart, and inventing poor puns for my friends. posted by RokkitNite at 6:53 PM on November 19, 2008 [12 favorites]
I'd use it to kill an infinite amount of monkeys trying to submit FPPs write Shakespeare. posted by MiltonRandKalman at 7:21 PM on November 19, 2008
I'd break them into littler rocks, but then I'd be in hell, and this would be my punishment. posted by cjorgensen at 7:50 PM on November 19, 2008
I vaguely remember a 2000 AD story about the smartest man in the galaxy being condemned to eternity alone on a planetoid until he can solve a Rubik Cube. Easy, he thinks, until he's shown the Cube: it's vast so he has to mine ore, smelt it, make tools, etc, until he can build equally colossal machinery to manipulate the Cube. I forget the outcome. posted by raygirvan at 9:03 PM on November 19, 2008
I'd make them into a sphere ten times the size of Jupiter. Then once every thousand years I would swipe at it with a feather. Once I'd worn it down to the size of a pea, I would look back and realize that the amount of time required to do all that would only be half a blink in terms of eternity. So I guess I'd spend the rest of the time listening to Built to Spill albums. posted by penduluum at 9:52 PM on November 19, 2008 [1 favorite]
Which - fortunately or unfortunately - only briefly touches on the cellular automata and related constructs as contained in this post, but wallows more than a bit in both fugues and constructed realities, and is a great place to explore some of these recursive concepts.
Greg Egan has done a lot with this kind of story. "Wang's Carpets" (a short story that became part of Diaspora) features a naturally-occurring version of the stone computer in the comic. And Permutation City deals with universe simulations of this sort, pointing out that, if it's possible to simulate a universe on a computer this way, then you don't actually need the computer, since the patterns represented by the computer already exist (from some perspective) in any random collection of sand grains or dust motes posted by straight at 10:28 AM on November 20, 2008 [1 favorite]
Digg and other sites do a great job of posting every new xkcd cartoon. I like xkcd, but not this post. posted by theora55 at 10:54 AM on November 20, 2008
> Yeah, computation by Turing-complete sets of Wang tiles (can be implemented with DNA) does stretch the idea of running "life" even further. I'm starting to like the Zen-like idea of consciousness being a dream that piggy-backs on the consciousness of the universe. For example, life and consciousness inside the rock verse are those of rock guy, but diluted in homeopathic quantities due to the huge, but still finite, differential in running speed.
The big number angle is interesting, though the time scales involved are much smaller than what you would get with busy beavers; they are just (resolution×size)^(number of dimensions), something like (10^25×10^35)^10, exponentiated once or twice to allow for the performance hit of cellular automata and putting everything on a row. But the xkcd strip puts these numbers in perspective.
The Aktual world, just like the Genie hierarchy of GEB, is a really different beast for involving transfinite numbers. posted by Tobu at 1:01 PM on November 20, 2008
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