Team Epee & Time Dilation

It's the Prof Duffy Memorial tomorrow. It's an team epee competition and I'm on a team with Niall O'Cleirigh, and Shane. We're entering in as one of the UCD teams, so I know people who won't be impressed with that ;-)

I'm afraid my training hasn't been the best. Last night, I took a very long epee lesson from Evegenny; ever notice how I spell his name differently every time I write it? That's the only training, however, that I've done with an epee this year. It shouldn't be too bad, I'd say we're all around the same level.

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More hard-scifi stuff; While looking up details of relativistic speed, and time dilation I found this link explaining it all. C-ship: Relativistic ray traced images:
Welcome aboard C-ship, exploring flight near the speed of light! C-ship helps you understand Einstein's theory of Special Relativity intuitively through the medium of computer-synthesised images

Call me a geek if you like, bit this paragraph lends itself to the very cool title of Team Epee & Time Dilation, that I've given this entry.

Sitting at someone else's machine in work, at the moment. He has a trackball mouse installed so I thought I'd give it a go. Here's a picture of it:



It's definitely more comfortable then a regular mouse. I hate it when you run out of space on you mouse mat, so you have to pick up the mouse and place it back down in the middle; you don't have this problem with a definitely. On the negative side, I don't have nearly as much control as I would with a regular mouse, that might just be because I've only been using it for one morning though.

Is Irish Epee in decline?

I just posted this little article to the Irish fencing forum:

Irish Fencing :: View topic - Is Irish Epee in decline?:

Way back, when I was a teenager, and subsequently, when I was
competing in college, there was only 1 real weapon: Epee.

Foil was a beginner's weapon. Sabre was an exotic mystery. If you didn't
fence epee you were nobody. All of Ireland's international fencers were
epeeists, and I don't think this was a fluke, I think it was an IAFF policy.

Since the ROI rejoined the Quadrangular to make it the 5 Nations, we have
seen a massive resurgence in the popularity of foil and sabre. Perhaps
because foilists and sabreurs now see a 'career path' in their chosen
weapon as opposed to the dead-end job they had before.

But has this been to the detriment of epee in the country? It seems to me
that the standard is way down. It is a pity that we see so little of
Conor Nagle in competition these days. He is perhaps the last holdover
from a Silver Age of Irish epee; The last survivor of a dying race. When he
does compete in epee, despite engaging in minimal training, Conor still
shines out as being vastly superior to the current opposition. Perhaps by
looking at this gulf in talent, considering that Conor is not in training, and
finally realising that Conor was just one of a host of epee contemporaries
of similar skill; one might begin to fathom how far the standard of epee has
dropped in Ireland.

I'm currently reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss. The title comes from an old joke, perhaps one of the first I ever read by e-mail. It goes some thing like this:

A panda walks into a cafe and orders a large sandwich. After finishing the sandwich he pulls out a pistol and fires two shots into the air. "Why did you do that?" asks the waiter, after the departing Panda. "I'm a panda," he replies, throwing the waiter a dictionary. "Look it up." So the waiter looks up teh dictionary and finds the following entry:

Panda: Bear like animal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.

The book is sub-titled The Zero Tolerance Guide to Punctuation, and to put it simply, it's a reasonably humorous guide to punctuation. Already I'm learning from it. For eacmple the word its is a possesive pronoun ans as such does notrequire an apostrophe.

I'm slowly coming to realise why I got a D in English in the Leaving Cert. (Or should that be Cert'?)

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On a seperate note, did you know that the massive earthquake in Indonisa on St. Stephen's day has affected the length of the day? You now have 2.68 fewer microseconds each day to do whatever it is you do, due to a change in the Earths rotation brought on by the 'quake. See full details at Slashdot.

I feel a disturbance in the force

I have just been reading an article on Slashdot regarding NASA scientists confusion about surface features discoved on one of Saturns moons by the Cassini space probe. Apparently they know of no geological process which could form such features.

Curious, I visited the NASA Website and found the following two pictures of the mysterious moon:


Is is just me or does anyone else think "That's no moon; it's a space station!".

Now I don't want anyone to worry however; information on this threat has been intercepted by the Botham spys, and as we speak is winging it's way to us in the hands of Princess Leia and her two droids...

This has nothing to do with fencing, but I've just read a facinating artical by RAY KURZWEIL
who is apparently an "Inventor and Technologist; Author, The Age of Spiritual Machines". Now from that description he's probably a bit of a futurist, but still it makes great reading for a hard sci-fi fan like myself.

Question: What do you believe but cannot prove?

We will find ways to circumvent the speed of light as a limit on the communication of information.

We are expanding our computers and communication systems both inwardly and outwardly. Our chips use every smaller feature sizes, while at the same time we deploy greater amounts of matter and energy for computation and communication (for example, we're making a larger number of chips each year). In one to two decades, we will progress from two-dimensional chips to three-dimensional self-organizing circuits built out of molecules. Ultimately, we will approach the limits of matter and energy to support computation and communication.

As we approach an asymptote in our ability to expand inwardly (that is, using finer features), computation will continue to expand outwardly, using readily available materials on Earth such as carbon. But we will eventually reach the limits of the resources available on our planet, and will expand outwardly to the rest of the solar system and beyond.

So how quickly will we be able to do this? We could send tiny self-replicating robots at close to the speed of light along with electromagnetic transmissions containing the needed software. These nanobots could then colonize far-away planets.

At this point, we run up against a seemingly intractable limit: the speed of light. Although a billion feet per second may seem fast, the Universe is spread out over such vast distances that this appears to represent a fundamental limit on how quickly an advanced civilization (such as we hope to become) can spread its influence.

There are suggestions, however, that this limit is not as immutable as it may appear. Physicists Steve Lamoreaux and Justin Torgerson of the Los Alamos National Laboratory have analyzed data from an old natural nuclear reactor that two billion years ago produced a fission reaction lasting several hundred thousand years in what is now West Africa. Analyzing radioactive isotopes left over from the reactor and comparing them to isotopes from similar nuclear reactions today, they determined that the physics constant "alpha" (also called the fine structure constant), which determines the strength of the electromagnetic force apparently has changed since two billion years ago. The speed of light is inversely proportional to alpha, and both have been considered unchangeable constants. Alpha appears to have decreased by 4.5 parts out of 108. If confirmed, this would imply that the speed of light has increased. There are other studies with similar suggestions, and there is a table top experiment now under way at Cambridge University to test the ability to engineer a small change in the speed of light.

Of course, these results will need to be carefully verified. If true, it may hold great importance for the future of our civilization. If the speed of light has increased, it has presumably done so not just because of the passage of time, but because certain conditions have changed. This is the type of scientific insight that technologists can exploit. It is the nature of engineering to take a natural, often subtle, scientific effect, and control it with a view towards greatly leveraging and magnifying it. If the speed of light has changed due to changing circumstances, that cracks open the door just enough for the capabilities of our future intelligence and technology to swing the door widely open. That is the nature of engineering. As one of many examples, consider how we have focused and amplified the subtle properties of Bernoulli's principle (that air rushing over a curved surface has a slightly lower air pressure than over a flat surface) to create the whole world of aviation.

If it turns out that we are unable to actually change the speed of light, we may nonetheless circumvent it by using wormholes (which can be thought of as folds of the universe in dimensions beyond the three visible ones) as short cuts to far away places.

In 1935, Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen described "Einstein-Rosen" bridges as a way of describing electrons and other particles in terms of tiny space-time tunnels. In 1955, physicist John Wheeler described these tunnels as "wormholes," introducing the term for the first time. His analysis of wormholes showed them to be fully consistent with the theory of general relativity, which describes space as essentially curved in another dimension.

In 1988, California Institute of Technology physicists Michael Morris, Kip Thorne, and Uri Yertsever described in some detail how such wormholes could be engineered. Based on quantum fluctuation, so-called "empty" space is continually generating tiny wormholes the size of subatomic particles. By adding energy and following other requirements of both quantum physics and general relativity (two fields that have been notoriously difficult to integrate), these wormholes could in theory be expanded in size to allow objects larger than subatomic particles to travel through them. Sending humans would not be impossible, but extremely difficult. However, as I pointed out above, we really only need to send nanobots plus information, which could go through wormholes measured in microns rather than meters. Anders Sandberg estimates that a one-nanometer wormhole could transmit a formidable 10^69 bits per second.

Thorne and his Ph.D. students, Morris and Yertsever, also describe a method consistent with general relativity and quantum mechanics that could establish wormholes between Earth and far-away locations quickly even if the destination were many light-years away.

Physicist David Hochberg and Vanderbilt University's Thomas Kephart point out that shortly after the Big Bang, gravity was strong enough to have provided the energy required to spontaneously create massive numbers of self-stabilizing wormholes. A significant portion of these wormholes are likely to still be around, and may be pervasive, providing a vast network of corridors that reach far and wide throughout the Universe. It might be easier to discover and use these natural wormholes than to create new ones.

Would anyone be shocked if some subtle ways of getting around the speed of light were discovered? The point is that if there are even subtle ways around this limit, the technological powers that our future human-machine civilization will achieve will discover these means and leverage them to great effect.