Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3306 - 3310 (12th to 16th September 2016)
brasca:
--- Quote from: BenRG on 14 Sep 2016, 23:07 ---It says sad things about Claire and Clinton's relationship to date that he's expecting his sister's first reaction to be a tidal-wave of ironic abuse. Admittedly, Claire has given him reason to expect it. I'm glad that she's growing out of it and, for that matter, the Clinton is growing up too.
Well, I did say some time ago that Clinton's gender role models were probably pretty bad. No, according to orthodox social rules, males are not allowed to have any emotion except righteous anger. I've always found that ridiculous but I imagine that someone who wasn't raised by their mother in a single-parent family probably has a much harder time resisting that social programming than I ever did.
--- Quote from: hedgie on 14 Sep 2016, 22:36 ---My archive-fu is failing me, but IIRC, Emily's attitude towards heels is "never again".
--- End quote ---
For some reason, I've always imagined that Emily's only experience with heels was falling off of them. She has further to fall, after all!
--- End quote ---
They have a tendency to snipe at each other which we've known ever since we found out that Claire and Clinton were siblings. The greatest example was the party at Emily's beach house. Claire may be refraining from this since she realizes it's immature, but Clinton still expects it since its been their routine much of their lives. It's all quite realistic and they have a healthier relationship than Dora and Sven.
Gyrre:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 11 Sep 2016, 22:04 ---Pintsize becomes upset because some artist in Boston has salvaged his Butt Rocket and is now passing it off as her own original work of art. He confronts her, but she's delighted to meet him and wants to team up for their next project - his transformation into a dildo chassis! It turns out her porn collection is both larger and weirder than his own and she has three exes who are all somewhat traumatized by having known her.
--- End quote ---
She has a friend named Marcie who claims to have worked for a mysterious "Department of Irradiation", and owns an assortment of strange 'peripherals' for online interaction with her long distance boyfriend.
Gyrre:
--- Quote from: JimC on 12 Sep 2016, 03:48 ---
--- Quote from: oddtail on 12 Sep 2016, 02:10 ---On top of that, if an AI created a device that no science can adequately explain, there's ten different reasons why this special device would not be crammed into consumer electronics.
--- End quote ---
Not quite convinced, consider the work that's been done on genetic algorithms and evolved circuits - eg Thompson http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50.9691&rep=rep1&type=pdf . There's a possible line of development there.
--- End quote ---
Hell, just look at how pharmaceuticals are released in our own world. Then there's the long-term ramifications of GMOs (some will be fine, others are more worrisome). Then there's the laws that get past.
"LOL, what are long term effects? I just want reelected and to find my golden meal-ticket."- some Congressman probably
Granted, I'd wager that the QCverse must have better politician. Either that or certain key families from our universe never came to power there, thus making things substantially better. Either way, I'm curious as to what sort of alternate history the QCverse clearly must have.
Thrudd:
--- Quote from: Perfectly Reasonable on 14 Sep 2016, 18:47 ---While some people try to think outside the box, Emily thinks outside the Solar System.
--- End quote ---
No no, you are still thinking Euclidean Space.
Her thoughts are more exotic in that
(click to show/hide)the Hilbert space of physical states of any physical system is a positively definite complex vector space i.e. the squared proper length may be computed as
ds2=|da1|2+|da2|2+…
We may also split the complex coordinates ("amplitudes") ai to the real parts and imaginary parts which turns the N-dimensional complex space to a 2N-dimensional real Euclidean space. Under this transition, we may also define the angles between two vectors, via cos(α)=|⟨u|v⟩||u|⋅|v|
There are several basic generalizations of this "Euclidean" space to a non-Euclidean one.
First, some of the terms |dai|2 in the formula for the ds2 could be given negative coefficients; more generally, the bilinear form could be indefinite. If it is negatively definite, we obtain an isomorphic Hilbert space and we should just flip the overall sign of ds2 to achieve the usual, positively definite convention. But if ds2 is really indefinite, i.e. allowing both signs, we have a problem with the interpretation of quantum mechanics because ds2 is interpreted as a probability by quantum mechanics and probabilities just can't be negative (can't have both signs).
So the indefinite Hilbert spaces are not possible for a theory that may be physically interpreted. However, indefinite Hilbert spaces actually often appear in modern theories as an intermediate step – in theories with gauge symmetries, bad ghosts, and good ghosts (BRST quantization). For example, it is natural to have a Hilbert space with 4 polarizations of a photon for each allowed vector kμ ; the signature of this 4-complex-dimensional space is 3+1, just like for the spacetime. But the gauge symmetry and the related Gauss' law render 1+1 polarizations unphysical, leaving just 2 physical polarizations (say x,y) with a positively definite norm. This is a master example for all analogous situations.
Another possible non-Euclidean generalization could be a curved, Riemannian space. The Hilbert space can't be deformed to a curved one because of the superposition principle – in quantum mechanics, the linear combination of two allowed vectors simply has to be allowed, too. No known consistent nonlinear deformation of quantum mechanics is known and it probably cannot exist. After all, the freedom to consider linear superpositions is just the complex counterpart of the freedom to consider linear superpositions of probability distributions.
One could also try to discuss noncommutative generalizations of the Hilbert space. But due to the irrelevance of the overall scaling of a vector, |ψ⟩→a|ψ⟩
, there should be no parameter analogous to the "noncommutativity parameter" on the Hilbert space, either. Noncommutative spaces are useful in quantum mechanics but they generalize classical phase spaces (because p,x don't commute in quantum mechanics), not Hilbert spaces. :-D
freeman:
--- Quote ---Nobody explains this to guys!
--- End quote ---
Wait, who explained this to Claire?
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