If you look up the Wikipedia page for WordStar and try to trace who owns the assets now, you find a tall stack of software companies that were acquired by others and eventually it seems to loop.
* WordStar was created by MicroPro International
* They were acquired by SoftKey
* They acquired The Learning Company and took that name
* Then they were acquired by Mattel
* ...which sold the assets to Gores Technology Group
* ...which split into GAME Studios, yet another "The Learning Company", and Broderbund
* ...which was acquired by SoftKey?
Or maybe it was part of one of those Learning Companies that sold its assets to Riverdeep Interactive Learning Limited? I think they're now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Learning Technology.
The Learning Company acquisition by Mattel was one of the worst deals ever. There was strong evidence at the time that the financials for The Learning Company were overstated.
And yet Kevin O'Leary's various opinions on business and political matters are, for some reason, widely reported even to this day.
Yes, it should be a book. I didn't change the original title of emacsomancer's work; his original typeset image could have easily made it into a book, whereas my version suffers from some size inflation.
This is like saying, "Isn't it curious that after the Emancipation Proclamation, those same abolitionists then argued for granting citizenship to former slaves, and then after winning that, they switched to demanding they also be allowed to vote?"
That's not a "syndrome"; it's three righteous and related causes advocated for in series because social progress happens one step at a time and activitism is often most effective if performed this way.
I tried asking Claude variants where N was something other than a nonnegative integer, and he properly pointed out the absurdity, but was willing to play along once I brought up theoretical physics:
[...] So, in our quantum mechanics interpretation, how many sisters does Alice's brother have? It's a superposition of states:
1. In one state, he has Alice as his sister (+1) and the "antisister" (-1), totaling 0 sisters. If they met, they'd annihilate, leaving him sisterless!
2. In another state, he has Alice (+1) and owes a future sister to the quantum family field (-1). Currently, that's 0 sisters, but he's in "sister debt."
3. In a third state, he has Alice (+1), but his family's entanglement means another family's loss of a sister affects him too (-1). Bizarrely, he experiences both having and not having a sister simultaneously.
This interpretation is, of course, a playful and highly metaphorical application of quantum concepts to something they don't actually apply to—family relationships. In reality, quantum effects like superposition and entanglement are incredibly delicate. They typically only persist in highly controlled conditions, like ultra-cold atoms or isolated photons. The constant interactions in a family would "decohere" any such quantum states almost instantly.
Some theoretical physicists have demonstrated there are some theoretical models of the universe consistent with current observations that aren’t just regular spacetime.
There’s no evidence _for_ exotic spacetime. Just there isn’t evidence that rules it out.
The rest of it is an ELI5 explanation of topology concepts and pablum about how important this research is.
> Because of the many twists, the universe could contain copies of itself that might look different from the original, making them less easy to spot in maps of the cosmic microwave background.
This fails the brain-in-vat test. Put mine in one, give it the exact same signals, and I’m still sentient and will experience hunger even without a stomach.
Or even without the science fiction: people with amputated limbs frequently report phantom itches on them.
I would disagree with the experience hunger without a stomach part, based on my empirical experiences with remembering being under general anesthesia. I didn't even feel my heartbeat and calmly wondered if I was dead until I came to. Phantom limbs are a thing certainly, but there seems to be a certain amount of dependence upon bodily inputs.
I don't think you can generalize it like that. Hunger comes from signals originating in your stomach. Without a stomach, you're brain would lose energy -- and I'd wager the symptoms would be more like oxygen deprivation than "hunger".
With reasoning, and logic. Phantom limb syndrome is a real thing. Extending that to a 'phantom stomach' that always reports that it is empty (missing) is not far fetched...
So 'know': no, no one knows what it's actually like to be a brain in the vat... but it's a reasonably good guess that you might experience something like this.
In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita created 176 emoji as part of NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, used on its mobile platform.[25][26][27] They were intended to help facilitate electronic communication, and to serve as a distinguishing feature from other services.[6]
As in the title of the linked article, the earliest emoji are not from 1999, or 1997, but from 1988. I know, because I'm the guy that discovered them.
But, yes, they're emoji because they were created and named in Japan. The IBM set serves a different purpose and exists in a different context. But, they are both living happily alongside each other in Unicode.
* WordStar was created by MicroPro International
* They were acquired by SoftKey
* They acquired The Learning Company and took that name
* Then they were acquired by Mattel
* ...which sold the assets to Gores Technology Group
* ...which split into GAME Studios, yet another "The Learning Company", and Broderbund
* ...which was acquired by SoftKey?
Or maybe it was part of one of those Learning Companies that sold its assets to Riverdeep Interactive Learning Limited? I think they're now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Learning Technology.
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