going for a week trip with school to poland to visit camps and learn about world war 2 and the holocaust.
so i wont be active this week.   
this is will be the first time i ever travel to another country and its will be without the family

Have fun Spacer

Did just a lot of posts from the last few days disappear?

Did just a lot of posts from the last few days disappear?

Yes. There was a problem with the forum website.

I was about to watch the videos posted about "nothing" in one of the science threads, but the post was gone.  I found the PBS Spacetime video, but there was another.  Does anyone have a link?

midtskogen, I reposted it.

Thanks, but I think there was another video on "nothing", which Wats commented on.  I hadn't time to see it at the time or read Wats' comments, so it's a bit fuzzy what the video was.  I don't think it was about aging.

I think it was this video (or at least the same lecture).  

[youtube]tqn73A5Csi0[/youtube]

I didn't comment too much besides saying that it's a great lecture on the interplay of cosmology and thermodynamics.

The main point is to investigate the arrow of time, and the origin of the Big Bang as a low entropy event.  How did that condition arise?  One hypothesis he touches on is that of Boltzmann Brains.  If locally entropy-reducing fluctuations are inevitable given enough time (which in an ever-expanding universe there is plenty of) then one predicts that it is more likely we exist as a product of those fluctuations rather than as products of the cosmological evolution that we think we are.  Carroll doesn't subscribe to this idea (neither do I), and he uses some simple observations to reject it as implausible, then goes on to investigate other possible conclusions.

Naturally this leads more to the theoretical and untestable, but unlike many other speakers who talk about this sort of thing it is pretty well grounded in established physics and there isn't much mystical woo.

If locally entropy-reducing fluctuations are inevitable given enough time (which in an ever-expanding universe there is plenty of) then one predicts that it is more likely we exist as a product of those fluctuations rather than as products of the cosmological evolution that we think we are.

I think it's hard to construct an argument that stays clear of absurdities.
One could go on argue that the cosmological evolution that we observe and are a product of itself is a random fluctuation just assuming that the universe (or multiverse) outside our observable universe is sufficiently large, i.e. absurdly large compared to what we can observe.  Not that the Big Bang was such a fluctuation, but that there the entire apparent history of the universe was a fluctuation.  A variant of Last Thursdayism, which cannot be proven wrong.

[youtube]J_CnDD_MXq4[/youtube]

back from the trip now, took lot of images of nuture and more i will soon share! 
first flight ever it was so exciting i even took images of simple clouds from above

i am checking the album i took in the trip right now and this is one of the images, it is very beautiful and i want to share:
this was taken in warsaw old jewish Cemetery
autumn colors on tree trunks...if only i had a better camera for sharper view!  and panorama of warsaw old city square: (open in new tab for big size and sharper resolution)

Can anyone find a really fast Mandelbrot viewer? I would be so happy just zooming around a seamlessly generated Mandelbrot image.
(I didn't know anywhere better to put this.)

Can anyone find a really fast Mandelbrot viewer?

On Linux I like fraqtive.  It's fast, draws beautifully, and it also shows the corresponding julia set.  You can zoom in to about 10^13.

Here's a nice zoom (to 10^99).  I don't know of any fast software capable of going that deep, as it requires custom arithmetic.
[youtube]aSg2Db3jF_4[/youtube]

Can anyone find a really fast Mandelbrot viewer?

On Linux I like fraqtive.  It's fast, draws beautifully, and it also shows the corresponding julia set.  You can zoom in to about 10^13.

Here's a nice zoom (to 10^99).  I don't know of any fast software capable of going that deep, as it requires custom arithmetic.
[youtube]aSg2Db3jF_4[/youtube]

Sorry, I have Windows, not Linux. Any for Windows?