The relativistic motion of clocks on board GPS satellites exactly accounts for the superluminal effect in the OPERA experiment, says  physicist Ronald van Elburg at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, The Physics arXiv Blog reports.

“From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter,” says van Elburg. By this he means shorter than the distance measured in the reference frame on the ground. The OPERA team overlooks this because it assumes the clocks are on the ground not in orbit.

Van Elburg calculates that it should cause the neutrinos to arrive 32 nanoseconds early. But this must be doubled because the same error occurs at each end of the experiment. So the total correction is 64 nanoseconds, almost exactly what the OPERA team observed.

– http://www.kurzweilai.net/faster-than-light-neutrino-puzzle-claimed-solved-by-special-relativity

You know what that means? It means Einstein proved right, again.

Oh, you. You just couldn’t let me go, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You are truly incorruptible, aren’t you? Huh? You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness. And I won’t kill you because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.

- The Joker

From a logical standpoint, considering the logic as we know it, if there exists an infinite force, an unstoppable force, then it stands to reason that there cannot exist an immovable object. The definition of the immovable object similarly eliminates the possibility of having an unstoppable force because if we have an unstoppable force even the immovable object won’t be able to stop it thereby making itself movable and voiding the existence of itself or by stopping the unstoppable force and putting a rest to it once in for all.

This has been discussed over the years in a lot of different places among a lot of different people and contexts and this is one of the well known logical paradoxes of the human world. Let’s consider for a moment that an immovable object did exist. Now, according to Newton’s first law of motion,

 Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed.

Now, consider the force mentioned in the equation above is the unstoppable force. If the object still fails to move then the force is not really unstoppable. Let’s extend this, even if the force is not unstoppable, the object is still immovable. Meaning it would have infinite mass (in order to have infinite inertia). Because, unless the object has infinite inertia, it cannot be immovable. Is infinite mass even possible?

Einstein proved that an object gains mass as it moves closer to the speed of light and his equations suggest that if an object is accelerated at the speed of light then the mass of that object will become infinite. Out Universe is not infinite. It only stands to reason if the mass of an object is infinite then it would have infinite density due to lack of infinite volume.

A gravitational singularity or spacetime singularity is a location where the quantities that are used to measure the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on the coordinate system. These quantities are the scalar invariant curvatures of spacetime, which includes a measure of the density of matter.

Congratulations people, the object moving at the speed of light has just stopped and is now the gravitational singularity. It has so much gravity that it now is the center of the universe as we know it. It’s no longer moving at the speed of light. Does the singularity collapse at this point? I don’t know. It might, I know of no studies in regards to this matter. The reason might be because infinite mass itself is not possible.

What if, however, we could accelerate a mass-less quantity to the speed of light? CERN thinks they have done that. So, was Einstein wrong? I hope yes. That would be exciting. And if it were really possible to accelerate a particle faster than the speed of light and not have the universe collapse on it – can we finally have an unstoppable force? I wonder…

I don’t have a problem with that. Heck, I know no one cares what I have a problem with. But I am going to say it anyway. Dennis Ritchie is dead and right now not a single company seems to care. They may post things up tomorrow but that is not good enough. That just shows how much they care.

For those who don’t know, Dennis Ritchie was the creator of C language. One of the lead developers in early days of UNIX. C – the language every operating system (almost) is written in. Every company that ever used C (which is almost all the IT companies these days) owes more to this guy than they did to anyone else – yet no one seems to care. Looks like all they cared about was the PR surrounding one man’s (Steve Jobs) death when they were expressing their grief. That’s just sad.

Rob Pike, a co-worker of Ritchie, told Wired, the article mentioned below, what he felt about Ritchie. His words read,

“Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,” Pike tells Wired. “The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on — is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they’re not, they’re written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C”.

Read more in the article on Wired mentioned below.

Here are a few articles I found supporting the same view

• Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On
• Who is Crying for Dennis Ritchie – The Father of C and UNIX?

Disclaimer – I admired Jobs for what he did. I did not agree with all he has done but I respected him. This article is NOT written against Jobs. This is just me feeling sad that no one even cares for a person of a great significance.

So we went on discussing it. He was supporting the usage of these… things? To call them words is essentially the same as accepting them as words. How hard is it to type 2 additional letters? The discussion ended quickly after we knew no one was going to back off and we both had better things to do and that people don’t change and everybody lies (yes, I know, too much House). 

Somehow the discussion ended with we discussing new marketing terms. Apparently marketing people are measuring viewership of television programs in terms of eyeballs. I was browsing a website, check this out people - http://startupista.com/corporate-bullshit-generator/. Apparently what that site generates coincides almost perfectly with the reality.

Anyway, I am wrapping this up now. I am suffering from a really bad writer’s block right now and my skills need some polishing. If someone wants to volunteer, I  already have the wax polish and brush just need some hands. Will leave you with the ending note of my discussion about the ‘eyeballs’ with my friend.

Eyeballs

This blog is now officially PG-13.

Many people have raised questions about the movie. The initial concept, lack of information about the device that lets you tap into someone else’s mind, the dreams within the dreams… People say he has not explained things clearly and that there are a lot of lose ends to be tied up. One of the questions everyone asks is – what exactly is the device? How can you go into someone else’s dreams? I don’t want to get into that argument in this post. There are a lot of movies which do not answer a lot of questions.

Then I stumbled upon an episode of SouthPark. Insheeption. It’s a parody of Inception and I like it more than the movie in a way (I know I am comparing Linux with BSD here). The way they have done things is unique. The dialogs like taco inside a taco inside a Taco Bell inside a McDonalds inside a mall…. you get the point. It’s a very funny, well written and properly executed script. A must watch for all Inception fans and haters alike.

Those of you who follow me on twitter would know that I have been on a good virtualization machine hunt for a long time now. I tried VirtualBox, XEN, QEMU – nothing was good enough. My friend recently brought it to my attention that the current version of VMware player, the free one, allows VM creation. I installed it. It runs smooth, fine without any problems. It is awesome. I just compiled the kernel modules for VMware and installed it on Arch, my primary system.

This led to some pretty good results actually. Incepted an idea in my mind. What I did was, I went in a dream inside a dream. I installed a virtual machine, inside a virtual machine. That is a 3 level deep virtual machine. It’s like a taco inside a taco inside a Taco Bell inside McDonalds which is in a mall… The similarities are uncanny.

Just like in the dream world, there is time dilation. What the host can do in 1 clock cycle now takes multiple of the host cycles and the 3rd level takes even more cycles per cycle of the host cycle. Then the waking up part – if the host crashes, so do all the levels down below. The limbo is the BSoD. It’s only time before the deepest level starts a process overloading the levels above it leading to a system crash. They’re coming, the war is coming – 4 8 15 16 23 42….

He wrote about dreams. What they are, what they mean. How people try to find some meaning where in reality – there exists none. There’s a similar concept explored in one of the books I read. Fooled by Randomness. It’s about people. People who try to find patterns. People who try to find patterns where none exist.

Human brains are hardwired to think in a particular way. People who do not suffer low latent inhibition. People like you. Humans are weak. They are aware of everything that happens around them but they don’t like to admit it. The need to explain everything. The need to find the reason. The weakness.

There is no higher cause or greater good. It’s all random. It’s all white. It has no definite aim or purpose; not sent or guided in a particular direction; made, done, occurring, without method or conscious choice; haphazard.

People think of things. They think more about the causes of the events. They don’t like to think about the events themselves. Nothing fits a model. Nothing….

What about human behavior then? All this rambling. All the characteristics. Everything that I wrote till now – is thinking about random things as if they were not random a non-random behavior pattern in itself? Would that make the behavior pattern a deterministic model? Is thinking about random things – even according to a rule – a truly random thing at all?

Which brings us – me – the blog – to Chaos Theory. What is chaos? The disordered formless matter supposed to have existed before the ordered universe. We are not interested in that. Chaos theory is – in basic words – an attempt to find the ‘underlying order’ behind things that seem apparently random. But are things really deterministic? I spent a whole lot of this article saying otherwise (with references). Chaos theory has an answer to that. The Butterfly Effect.

The flapping of a single butterfly’s wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month’s time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn’t happen. Or maybe one that wasn’t going to happen, does. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)

This is interesting since with this phenomenon taken into account, anything can be attributed to a butterfly flipping its wings – literally. Parallax, noise, inaccurate instruments, human errors – all are things of the past. It’s a butterfly that’s causing your hard-drives to fail.

A similar thing can be said about fractals. A rough fragmented geometric shape that can be broken into parts, each of which is – at least approximately – a reduced size copy of the whole. Which again is an attempt to find a governing algorithm. A governing dynamics for how things in nature actually are. When you look at it – the Nash Equilibrium – a way of predicting what will happen if several people or several institutions are making decisions at the same time, and if the outcome depends on the decisions of the others. Is this the ‘grand design’ of the Butterfly effect? An organization opening its wings? An individual perhaps?

Bobby Fischer – arguably the best chess player to have walked the Earth – proposed a new (?) variation of chess, Shuffle Chess (or Chess 960) because he felt the game was becoming too predictable with opening theories and emphasis on initial moves. It was his attempt to remove predictability in the game. Changes in the initial conditions, ever so slightest, can bring about the desired randomness. How ever – here we believe that the classic chess was becoming predictable and adhering to a deterministic pattern.

The point of this article is – there is no point. Just something that got me thinking after reading Awati’s post I mention in the first paragraph. I am not a physicist and my knowledge of all the theories and theorems mentioned here is bare minimum. It’s just something that shot into my mind at that point. It’s possible that 99% of the things are pure crap and incorrect. I wonder – is it a pattern?