Anyone curious about the mechanics of Kevyn’s time-travel adventure needs to read this unsolicited piece of fanmail that arrived not half an hour ago…

Ok I have the rough estimates.. sort of Galileo's equations of gravity compared to Einstein+Superstring.

Ok the issue is that the Galaxy and its related dark matter dropped out of the rest of the universe. This allows for bounding of the 3 main dimensions and the 5? string dimensions, but most importantly the time dimension. The walls of the time are when the anomaly started in the panel that said oops (or something like that long ago), and the other end is when the entire micro-universe destroys itself.

The bounding allows for a near infinite quantum wave state. It is not infinite because then the Andromeda gate would not work at all. And time would be fixed.. as per the writeup of Oedipus and Cassandra.. they would know they were doomed but couldnt do anything about it. Instead the Andromeda gate allows for a quantum tunnelling to micro-universises that allow for Schroedingers cat to break out of his cage (so in this case the cats are a bunch of marines with guns who are really peeved that there is a bottle of cyanide. I hope Dr Schroedinger's life insurance is paid up.)

Anyway. The fact is that the quantum tunneling allows for multiple waves to form. As long as they are short lived and do not overly disrupt the master wave then the universe doesnt do a smack down on it. That is how the universe allowed for the additional mass from the second probe. There is a leakage of energy out, but not too much to cause the quantum wave to collapse to a null state. Now Petey using the gate to multiply himself over and over again in 10 minute bursts would cause the wave to collapse rapidly as seen in todays comic. Schlock and Kevyn cause a similar effect by causing the wave to start leaking out of the near infinite wave guide. This effectively causes the gate to wink out as space around it hits null. [The funny thing is I was working this out last night before I saw todays comic and said 'AHA! It works!'

This doesnt mean that Kevyn will be successful in re-writing history. The universe may hit a null state still (but what fun is that). It does mean that the hard-physics still works.

Now to work on how to use the micro-tunneling through dark-matter to get past the current teraport blocks.

--
SJ
an unspecified National Laboratory


What can I say? My readers are waaay smarter than I am.

–Howard

I watched “King Arthur” this evening with Sandra…

What a bloody waste of time. That’s “bloody,” the adjective, meaning “spattered with, drenched with, drowned in, and soaked clear through with human circulatory fluids.” I’m not using the UK English epithet, though that probably applies too. That movie went nowhere. The only worthwhile moments:

1) a long shot towards the beginning, with people doing their wash stooped over at the shore of a lake.
ME: “There’s some lovely filth over here.”
SANDRA: *giggle*

2) Some dude telling young Arthur why he is the commander of these knights, and what his responsibility will be. Cut to vaguely apprehensive faces of the boy-knights riding off to be trained…
ME: “King, eh? Well I didn’t vote for you.”
SANDRA: *giggle*

I didn’t have the heart to pantomime the coconuts, or quip “it’s only a model” every time we saw castles.

Most of the rest was chopping and hacking and grimy people and “chunky” sword-splatters and smoke and stupid unfinished CGI shots of “Hadrian’s Improbably smooth and perfect 400-year-old Wall.” Oh, and Kiera Knightly in warpaint.

There was some dialog, including some repeated babblings about “freedom,” but it didn’t seem to be worth paying attention to, so I tuned it out.

–Howard

Link!

The footnote under this strip talks about how unusual it is for sentient elephants to wear clothing.

The Google ads are for maternity clothes.

–Howard

Lookit me, ever’body! I’m blogging from my NEW (to me) LAPTOP!

The Novell Linux Desktop seriously rocks. It even had a dvorak keyboard driver waiting for me in the setup phase. And it even USED that driver when the time came to start entering configuration data.

It’s the little things that make me happy.

Getting The Internets into this wee box was a trick, but that’s because I had to
a) dig around in my basement for a hub
b) locate a 7.5 volt 600ma power supply for the hub
c) locate two ethernet cables
d) Test all components BEFORE banging my head against the wall when I couldn’t make Linux talk to The Internets
e) wait for frickin’ Comcast to come back online.

The actual configuration of the network was a snap. I’m anticipating a similar “snap” experience when I get my hands on a wireless card.

The only problem I’ve had thus far was the Suspend to RAM feature. That hung hard. Suspend to Disk works like a charm, though.

Oh, and then there was the fact that the BIOS was set for Network Service Boot. Scrubbing the drive of the old OS (Win98… ah, where was I 7 years ago?) did NOT solve this problem obviously. And NOT obviously, the keystroke for getting into the BIOS is “F10.” That took 15 minutes of Googling, giving up on Google, and another 10 minutes of searching the online manuals found at hp.com. But I FOUND it.

So… it works. I’m sure there are things that DON’T work that I have yet to stumble across (I haven’t tried to play a DVD yet… I hold out little hope of THAT working out-of-the-box) but the machine does what I need it to do.

–Howard