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Electric Dragon

Listed below are comments made by Electric Dragon between Tuesday, 11th November 2008 and Tuesday, 12th May 2009.

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David Bain's Brain Strain 4:40pm on 12 May 2009 jimternet - yes, I know the episode in question ("Second Chances").

What I'm trying to get at: suppose I were transported: is it the same me that comes out the other end? Do I experience being disassembled and reassembled, or do I die when dematerialised and the person who steps out the other end merely an identical clone? And how could we ever tell by objective experiment - the 'clone' would surely insist they are me? Is conciousness real or a fiction of memory - in which case, why do I see the world from my point of view rather than someone else's?
David Bain's Brain Strain 3:14pm on 12 May 2009 A related question. Since Star Trek is back in the cinema at the moment, let us consider the transporter on the USS Enterprise. As we know, the transporter works by disassembling an object's atoms in one place and reconstructing the object elsewhere. Suppose the object is Captain Kirk - is the Captain Kirk who is reassembled on the planet the same one as the one who was beamed down from the ship? He may claim to be the same, he may have the same memories, but is he really the same? Has one Kirk died and a new Kirk been created?

Suppose the transporter malfunctions, and fails to dematerialise Kirk on the Enterprise, but simply copies his pattern and assembles a new Kirk on the planet. Which is the real Kirk now? They both have the same memories, they are both identical down to the atomic level.
Weekly Bonus Question 12:16pm on 01 May 2009 Steven Spielberg's next film will be called "Indiana Jones And The..." what?
Paper Monitor 1:31pm on 16 Feb 2009 I often wish I could use NTK's regular end line at work - "Sending >500Kb email attachments is forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Your country may be at risk if you fail to comply." No doubt it would have turned up lots of Daily Mail factual errors to juxtapose with the Wikipedia article.
What know you of James Patterson? 2:55pm on 06 Feb 2009 I've not read his books myself, but I was intrigued by the excessive promotion of him at stations where the posters would say "THE NEW JAMES PATTERSON THRILLER" and the picture of the book cover that had "JAMES PATTERSON" in big letters and in smaller letters underneath "with A. N. Other".

Turns out that Patterson contents himself with coming up with ideas and plot outlines and leaving the actual writing to others, before polishing the final draft himself.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1578012/James-Patterson%27s-Kentucky-fried-books.html

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/authors/or_sometimes_a_ghost_is_just_a_ghost_27653.asp
If the BBC would just cheer up the recession might not be so bad.....discuss. 12:43pm on 28 Jan 2009 Nobody ever seemed to complain when "the media" were talking the economy up. There were no questions in the House of Commons about all the news reports of soaring house prices, or all the "how to make money in property development" programmes on the television. Increases in retail sales were nearly always portrayed in a positive light, without mentioning how much of it was being financed by credit card and home equity borrowing.
Letsby Avenue. 7:46pm on 22 Dec 2008 Streets should never be named after living (or recently deceased) people. What happens if those people turn out to be involved in a scandal?

Say this had been around in the Seventies. A poll decides that a street should be named after a local pop star in the "glam rock" genre. 25 years later, living in "Gary Glitter Avenue" looks a good deal less attractive. Consider also naming it after a local football chairman - "Robert Maxwell Close".

Also remember polls can be stuffed and voters can vote maliciously (Man City nearly ended up with a stand named after Colin Bell).
Eurovision. 09:51am on 05 Dec 2008 Disappointing. My vote would have gone to Paddy O'Connell, who has ably commentated on the semi-final for the last few years.
Caption Competition 2:28pm on 20 Nov 2008 The choice of "I'm a Little Teapot" as backing track for John's jive was sure to go down well.
The Glass Box. 00:33am on 11 Nov 2008 Perhaps if government agencies were forced to make their data available to the public domain, they wouldn't need "competitions" and "development funding" - people would just use the data however they saw fit. Innovation would arise naturally.

http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/

In the USA, as a matter of law, all works published by the federal government are in the public domain. There is therefore no restriction on what can be done with the data.

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