Is glass a liquid???

My parents know quite a lot, and i generally believe them when they tell me things, glass has properties of a liquid, i know they taught me that.. which makes me wonder whether they are wrong about this.

Technical terms aside, if left on it's own over a long enough time scale will or won't glass flow??

I'm trying to understand whether the urban legend is:

1. that glass is 'classified' as a liquid or
2. that glass flows over long (long long) periods of time.

In summary, does glass flow but not enough to qualify it as a liquid? Or does glass not flow over time? (Or do all non-crystalline solids flow over a long enough time scale?)

**also, to the debunkers who claim thin-at-the-top-thick-at-the-bottom glass in antique windows is a result of an old standard glass-creation process, show me (or even tell me there exist) antique windows where they are thick-at-the-top-thin-at-the-bottom and i see no reason not to believe you.
[i posted this here instead of emailing questions to the site's author because the site's author's email no longer functions]

OSC trashes Star Wars

Wow, just read some crazy stuff over on kuro5hin about Orson Scott Card (OSC), and then i read this article by OSC. If anyone didn't think OSC is aware of how much proselytizing can and does happen through sci-fi, this article makes it clear. He really doesn't look at Star Wars objectively at all, he's on a mission to trash it. He has a kind of personal vendetta. I think the Star Wars ideology does hold water if you simply recognise in the movie that no one character is infalible. I also think there is no harm in it (the message does more good than bad). But OSC is foaming at the mouth for some reason.. (shrug)

he's actually starting to scare me a lil.. just a little, because i know he still thinks he's acting for the good. (but that can be the scariest kind of person)

the World Wide Foam

i've devoted excess thinking time to how to apply bitTorrent to mmop2p online worlds.. basically the idea is swarm in the data of the world so that it rezzes in incrementally..

it might be cool to limit such a world to certain primitives or atoms, like deformable spheres (i like to model in deformable spheres simply because i have a short attention span and i prefer to sketch than draw with detail and spheres offer that level of functionality in 3dspace to me) to see what people would do with it, and limit the kind/amount of info that would be swarmed around, let the interaction of the world be complex but the composition of the world be simple. Also, i think this would simplify the whole incremental rendering of such a world that is always swarming in in pieces, as needed.

Not sure how i would block out/off pieces in order to only download the pieces that are relevant to the user in the near-future, in order that the browser doesn't need to maintain the whole state of the whole world-- but i kinda want the whole state o the world to be maintained by all viewing it. Perhaps, the state could be partially determined/defined by the state of those swarming the world (ie. connected to pieces of it) so that it would be somewhat dynamic and immediate and have no over-all lasting existence.

Alternatively, one could view such a MMOSpace to be foamy where each user hosts their own (home) micronode and users visit and micronode-hop. I think the WorldWideFoam would be cool!!! Perhaps the ether between foam-bubbles could be the sort of dynamic-abstract space i spoke of above, but each micronode/bubble could have any kind of design limitations/esthetics/laws the creator/host chose. Again, alternatively, the rules of the bubble could be determined by the shared will of all the participants currently in the bubble...

I guess the overall goal here is to access the truly relative power of the internet as a cooperative dream. The challenge is to pull it off in such a way that mobs don't herd or stampede.. essentially intelligent/creative mobs of people creating/dreaming together.

Ironic advertising

Scientist claims time doesn't really exist.. alongside alzheimers advertisement.
irony.JPG

Ant Paintball

ants can play paintball to:

are these army ants?

Inventing the DeathStar

"That's the precision we have to have," says Moses, the director of a high-energy physics adventure to produce the world's most powerful laser -- one that scientists hope will create in a laboratory the energy found at the center of the sun.

In a building the size of a football stadium, engineers have assembled the framework for a network of 192 laser beams, each traveling 1,000 feet to converge simultaneously on a target the size of a pencil eraser.

The rebel base will be in range in five minutes..

Thunderbird sucks

I've tried and tried to adjust to the Thunderbird world. Even though i think outlook was one of MS's first good pieces of software, i never liked using it. Still, Thunderbird has been nothing but slow, too limited in the functionality it offers and just plain unuseful. There's no ability to autofwd email based on filters.. how is something so basic that it makes its way into gmail missing from Thunderbird?? It was the final straw. No more thunderbird. I'm really happy that Firefox is being pushed and publicized indepedent of Thunderbird because I don't want Firefox to be held back. Firefox is amazing--I have nothing bad to say about it--I love it. (Why can't they fix the pop-under problem??--but at least it's not annoying till you close the firefox window.) I guess open source can't do email well.

Alternately, maybe it's me. Perhaps I have a hate-hate relationship with email in general? Well, i think that was pretty much true until gmail came along--i had basically stopped using email until gmail made me realise it was useful. I just started fwding my work mail to gmail for a backup and so i can access it from home to get things done. Year i think email just makes me feel constrained-- a feeling I get a lot working with any kind of tech in general. Sooner or later i will need to start publishing software/webware that doesn't constrain.

Eliminating truth from the equation

I was reading something I found by way of StumbleUpon (the firefox plugin) about Knowledge/Wisdom/Information. It was talking in the generally confusing way most people talk when trying to explain self-referrential things. In any case, a side point made me think about something: It questioned how we can assess the veracity of any information we find on the web. There seems to be a tremendous amount of disinformation and bias, not to mention wacky conspiracy theories on the web.

When approached with such a problem I like to find counter-intuitive elegant solutions. My first attempt to solve the problem is to throw out truth. Forget about whether information is true or not. Now, if we don't care if the information is true, simply that it exists, what can we learn from this information? I don't yet know, but it's something interesting that I plan to think about. The quickest answer is that the internet becomes in this instance, something akin to one large collaborative work of art where communication (in the sense of relative relationships, not in the sense of transmission of information) is the only thing taking place. Information becomes the clay or the canvas, we can shape it into whatever we can imagine--sky's the limit.

This is a general strategy I've applied in the past. Most notably, and with similar conclusions, to the problem of an MMOP2PRPG. There I eliminated rules, except for the most relative ones, and Truth of Information is in a sense just a really big really strict rule.

[anyways i'm back to working exclusively from my iBook @ home since my Compaq R3240US blew out its lcd backlight again--something faulty about that machine.]