Luminal

I understand the .dll file is a dynamic link library, I just couldn't figure out what it's purpose was when I had already linked a static .lib library. I guess the author of the program should have made it clear to link two libraries? I can run the demo. I receive about 60 undeclared (or related) messages. I receive it when attempting to compile for the first time. I just copied and pasted the "Get Start" tutorial's code from the SPE website.

Should I assume Martin Bojowald is not the same Martin posting in this thread?

What compiler do you use? I could never get Visual Studio to work on Windows Vista by the way, even after I DLed the service package, so I think that's out of the option. On the site, it mentions " Download d3dx9_29.dll if you need". What exactly is this and if I need to link it how do I do so?

Prepare yourself for a dumb question... Having used Java up to this point, I've tried to switch over to C/C++ because that is the dominant language I've run across in commercial applications. http://spehome.com/document.php Can someone explain the first line to me? The part about importing the library? I successfully configured my IDE (Dev-C++) to include the right files (include and lib folders), but I'm getting massive errors of dozens of types and variables being undeclared. So I'm assuming it has to do with the "Import the Library" part. Is "Importing the Library" different than configuring your directories so that it can find the .lib and .h files? I would appreciate it tremendously if someone could help, I've been stuck on this for 2 weeks now and can't find help in any C++ books. As you can see, I'm stubborn and am reluctant to ask for outside help for fear of looking like an idiot... which I'm sure I do.

The only reason I mentioned the ocean is due to uses of distilling the water as it vaporized and providing fresh water from the process. And it wouldn't restrict how much sunlight you could collect, because that would all be done above sea level and focused (through, as I mentioned, lenses or mirrors) into the below-the-surface chamber. The reason it would be below the surface is obviously so that water would naturally fall into place at the required rate rather than needing to be pumped and wasting energy.

I just re-read your responses, and realized you thought I was talking about solar panels. I only mentioned them to show how they are inefficient and an entirely different design could be used using magnification, bodies of water, and steam power (as in coal plants) that would lose very little energy in heat by re-using the heat multiple times.

Yes, I didn't explain it correctly. Basically, a large mirror or magnification lense would focus sunlight onto an area several meters below sea level which is sectioned off from the ocean. This area would be composed of the best material to absorb light and reflect as little as possible; there are good candidates for the material but that's not relevant to the discussion. This chamber several meters below sea level would become extremely hot (based on how much magnification is taking place). The water would enter the chamber via a pipe wound around the chamber, thus heating from the radiating warmth and then truly vaporizing as soon as it contacted the surface, as would drops of water upon an oventop would vaporize on contact. In short, the water's pathway into the chamber would encircle the structure (perhaps in tight corckscrews, but the details can come later). The radiating heat would heat the water as it is flooding into the chamber. Imagine it like this: a cubic meter of water comes through a pipe (being heated itself by the radiation) each second from the ocean and sloshes across the surface of the superheated material. The steam would traverse back up an adjacent or inner pipe (thus another way to re-use the lost heat) and turn some turbines. Of course, as it condensed and fell back down, it would turn more turbines. I hope that's detailed enough.

After reading up on solar energy extensively, it seems the major drawback is of course that is absorbs less than 20% of the sun's rays as energy, and the rest becomes heat. Why do we not see commonly (if at all?) simple mirrors or magification lenses placed on top of bodies of water (such as the ocean) and a chamber which traps all the heat? As the water moved into the chamber, the focused thermal energy would vaporize the water. To increase its efficieny further, the outside of the "chamber" would have a small outer chamber which would absorb radiating heat from inside and warm the water before it ever entered the middle, thus reducing the amount of energy inside needed to vaporize it. A primer layer, so to speak. Keep adding outer layers until almost no radiating heat is lost, and you have over 90% efficiency. This is so simple a second grader could design it. Why do we never see such devices implemented? Something deceptively simple I'm overlooking?

In plain English, I could pick any positive number of y, no matter how large, and get that value by plugging in a large enough value into the square root of x. Try it. For example, when f(x) = 10^100, x must be 10^200. When f(x) = 10^10,000, x must be 10^20,000. Any positive number can result from the square root of x. The exponent must simply be twice as large. If it was a horizontal asymptote, you couldn't get any result, only those below it.

Precisely. Since I have a nice job about an hour from my school, I have a painful commute each day. When I get to class, the professor jumps into his lecture and I tune him out. I read and digest the book at my pace, wait until the lecture is over, and head home. This process has gone on for years, and between the daily commute and time in class, I spend the majority of my time devoted to simply "being there" so that the professor does not drop me from the class. I would not only learn as proficiently at home as in the university environment, I would assuredly learn better without the distractions (group participation as you mentioned) and the dozens of hours each week that I would have back. Alas, one system for six billion people, and it is never going to change.

Well, of course nothing is going to change, regardless of what ideas are put out, even if there were 10 million like-minded individuals. The academic system is thousands of years old, and it's not going to change in our lifetimes (unless we build chips that download information into cortex ). With that said, I've played with the idea of having Test A for those who show up to class every day and do papers, and Test B for those who do not show up. Test A is multiple choice and the such; Test B has additional and more challenging problems, with fill-in the blank, essay questions, and the like. Another idea, this time for applied learners, "Application Tests" in which people are required to actually do whatever it is in their subject that is theorized about instead of yap on about it. Some people are great at application, terrible at wording a theory. For example, ask someone to build an advanced robot in a Robotics class for credit in the course, rather than delving into technical talk on a written test. Yet as I said, nothing is ever going to change, and teachers would not want to put in the extra effort to grade multiple tests. This is more or less me complaining about taking a CompSci I course about the basics of object-oriented programming when I've known C/C++ and Java since I was 13-14.

I would say yes, it is. Each human being learns in a slightly different way (some more than slightly), yet each and every last one of them are channeled through the same academic system. For me, the proof is in the way I learn, which is not exactly the norm. Perhaps I am ADD, or perhaps I am simply an introvert, but I do not learn well in typical classroom settings with homework and papers and the like. Yet I have been forced to go through this system for nearly two decades (from the moment I first entered a classroom when I was four). I learn by reading, then by letting it settle in my brain for a while, then reading some more, and perhaps drawing visual diagrams and the like. In any university class I've attended in the last several years, this method has been quite successful (usually in the top 2-3 in any class). Yet I've wasted literally thousands of hours in classrooms learning nothing at all, and even more on homework and papers, in which I absorb even less. The point being, everyone learns in a different way. In classrooms, I tune out the teacher immediately because I cannot take in the teacher's spoken words and train of thought fast enough. So, I just read the subject's textbook in class, draw diagrams to help me, and tune out the teacher. Within a few days into each semester, I'm usually many chapters ahead of the current lecture. Why can the system not be more adaptive? The current system actually takes time away from valuable hours every week I could spend learning new material in other subjects, yet I'm slavishly doing papers on topics I'm already quite proficient at so that some man or woman who went through the same flawed system can claim that I know or do not know some subject based on whether I learn in the way everyone else does. In short, human beings are a very diverse group; do not treat them as if they have identical neuroplastisity. If anyone else learns in a different way, please share as well. I would be most interested in hearing.

Hello. I was curious if there are any programs that can plot the terrain of a real landscape (such as person's room) with a camera and construct a simulation that resembles it. Preferably, a program I could download or buy and run on my own computer. Basically, it would just need to be something that could take the input from a camera and turn it into a model that can be tested with physics simulations, and things such as that. Thank you greatly in advance; I would have no idea where to start looking.

I was merely curious if anyone had a link to information regarding the approximate number of atoms in a normal cell, a normal chromosome, and a normal adult human body. A ballpark estimation within an order of magnitude is all I'm looking for. Thank you.

Let's get to the crux of the matter. Either energy has always existed; was created during the birth of the Universe; or was brought about in "another reality" in which our logic, causality and laws do not and cannot apply. As I've said, if it has always existed, what determined the arbitrary amount of energy that is contained in the Universe? Why not just enough energy for one particle to form... or enough energy for a Universe 10^500 larger? For that matter... what determined any of the constants and laws? I believe it is naive to claim that every constant, every law, and even the amount of energy in the Universe has always existed exactly the way it is today. I liken that thought process to the geocentric model of the Universe before modern times. "After all, it looks like everything is spinning around Earth and there's nothing we can observe to contradict that... so I guess it must be." Actually, the post I was responding to implied that. Although, I believe it to be the case as well.

If the laws/constants can be changed, how are they laws/constants? That would make them more of "general guidelines" for non-singularities.

Yes, I know. My post is in regard to the Big Bang. For energy to have always existed, space and time would have always needed to exist as well. I do not believe this is the current understanding of the Big Bang. I'm under the impression that energy was brought into being as a byproduct of the Universe coming into being. And if energy has always existed, what determined the amount in the Universe? How could the value be completely arbitrary? I believe the answer is beyond "Some utterly random amount of energy has always existed." Think about it in reverse. If all the space in the Universe shrunk and eventually ceased to exist completely, would not the energy inside the Universe also cease to exist, as it had nowhere to go? Likewise, as space expands, could not the amount of energy in the Universe increase along with it, since there was more "elbow room" for the energy to exist?

That is amazing news. Assuming human beings eventually possess technology in which they could interact with and/or control singularities, they could possibly generate matter and energy. This implies humans could prevent the Universe from ending in a heat death. A hundred trillion (approximately) years is plenty of time for humans to acquire the technology needed to master singularities. This brightens my whole day.

During some process prior to this very moment in which I am typing this, energy was somehow brought into existence in this Universe. Or I wouldn't be typing this. That directly indicates that there is a physical process capable of bringing energy into existence (or into the Universe from an "outside" source, at least), does it not? Even if this process occurred (or occurs) outside of the space-time continuum and thus has no causal origin, the process still is possible. And since there is nothing that indicates human technology will cease from rising to the level in which it can influence the "fabric" of space and time, then it is reasonable to believe that humans will one day be able to bring energy (and hence matter) into existence (or as I said, from some source "outside" the Universe). Either way, if the Universe created its on energy or imported it, the First Law of Thermodynamics is incorrect.

Now hold on a second. How is destroying a body and reassembling it any different at all (since you say that matter is not a factor) from making a copy of the process? In both situations, a copy is made. However, in the first situation, the original is left intact and in the second the original no longer exists. With this reasoning, the copy is part of the same process, and it was "interrupted" during the tiny amount of time it took to assemble its body and restarted as soon as the process was initialized (in the exact same way the in the second situation the body was destroyed and the process initialized after assembly). I do not see how you can claim there is any difference in the two situations outside the fact that in one the original is left alive and in the other it isn't.

You are putting too much emphasis on the process. I believe it is irrelevant. If the body was destroyed (as in, demolecularized) for one second and reassembled with no change, the original process was destroyed, and the new process is only a "copy". However, the information and matter are exactly the same. Would you say the original person is gone? Of course not. Nothing at all is different except a span of time in which their particles were separated from each other. The process "died" and person's point-of-view and identity were not affected whatsoever.

In any case, I do not think it is relevant because an extended length of time is not necessary to the consideration at hand. Even if one atom were to move in a particular way for a thousandth of a nanosecond, it would still qualify as a "process" that could be identical in a copy. However, even if identical copies changed due to quantum effects, it only calls more attention to the problem: that the copies do in fact diverge in their point-of-view when all else is equal except the specific particles of which they are composed (i.e. matter).

I cannot agree. To make this thought experiment more rigid (and of course no physical laws or principles are being violated), let us take an individual and make this copy at the same time with the same biochemical processes occurring within nanoseconds of each other (close enough that your awareness could not distinguish the separation of time). Place both in identical white rooms next to each other. In one white room, the door is opened and another person walks in. In the other white room, nothing occurs. This clearly establishes two different point-of-views with matter being the only variable. Thus, matter does matter. If matter is not the cause, what could possibly be? The process is identical, the information is identical, even the environment is identical.

Let me make sure I understand your position correctly: the information (or state) constitutes the entirety of the properties exhibited by the entity. Matter can be exchanged with no effect on the life-form, as long as its state (information) is unchanged. I used to believe this, but yes, there is a problem with this concept. I only wish it was as simple as this. Again, let's suppose that a molecular copy of you was constructed. Would you be seeing from the eyes of the copy or from your eyes? Common sense indicates from your eyes, as you wouldn't even be aware of the copy until you saw it. That is the problem. Where does your "point-of-view" go as the matter changes? Using common sense, if a copy of you was made, then matter would be the only distinguishing factor, as the state/information of both entities would be the same. Forget the words "consciousness" or "identity" and consider your point-of-view.

This is all well and good, but it does not answer the question at hand. You only display that it goes unnoticed by the human because it is a seamless process (which more or less adds to the conundrum rather than lessening or resolving it). You or I have almost none of the same matter from 2 years ago that we have today. As I posed in my first post, consider if all of the waste material from the cells in your brain (and whole body for the matter) was collected and recycled, creating a new human with your exact molecular information. Would your point-of-view/consciousness/identity reside in the 'copy' constructed with all of your former matter, or with the seamlessly transitioned new matter? That is the extremely difficult question we have at hand. Every opposing answer leads into a apparent breakdown of reason and logic. ---------------------- This question becomes more than a simple amusing hypothetical to think about in our free time, when we consider that our matter is being removed and distributed throughout nature constantly. Are we 'dying' constantly? Is a new consciousness created everytime our matter is completely recycled? Are we being reborn in whatever lifeforms reuse our former matter? Before you answer "no" to the constant death notion, consider if a perfect molecular copy of you (which is exactly what you are after a complete transition of biochemicals) walked up and stabbed in you in the chest. The fact that the copy is made of different matter would be very significant to you as you lay dying on the ground.