Tag Archives: Information Technology

The Universal Computer

Computing...

Computing…

I’ve written here before about chaos theory and how it prevents us from calculating certain physical models effectively. It’s not that these models don’t accurately reflect the physics involved; it’s that any attempt to use actual numbers introduces tiny errors into the process. These cause the result to drift more and more as the calculation extends into the future.

This is why tomorrow’s weather prediction is fairly accurate but a prediction for a year from now is entirely guesswork. (We could make a rough guess based on past seasons.) Yet the Earth itself is a computer — an analog computer — that tells us exactly what the weather is a year from now.

The thing is: it runs in real-time and takes a year to give us an answer!

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Corporate Corpus

The awkward Supreme Court ruling, known as “Citizens United,” has generated a lot of discussion about corporations being people. Note that this 2010 ruling did not establish corporations as people: that’s been on the books since the early 1800s.

The Citizens United ruling allowed them to spend vast sums of money as “free speech.”

Anyone not terribly alarmed by this and what it implies for our political future isn’t paying attention.

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