Saturday, October 13, 2007

Just got in my Sanyo Eneloop batteries! My new digital camera hates old rechargeable batteries. While they work well, they seem to output 0.9 volts after the first few snaps, and the camera shuts down when the voltage drops under 1.1v. The Eneloops are supposed to sustain 1.17v, and the biggest thing is that they come pre-charged and lose their charge much more slowly than traditional NiMH rechargeables. Suposedly they only lose 15% of their charge over the course of a year just sitting around, whereas trad NiMH lose up to 1%/day while inactive. This means they can be used in slow drain devices like clocks and TV remotes. There is really no reason to buy disposable batteries again.
The Impossibility of All Possible Worlds

Okay, so this post comes partially from a dream that I had this morning. The dream itself is unimportant, and my thoughts can probably be refuted by any person who has had beyond two weeks in junior high physics, but here we go...

When I hear people talk about about how all possible universes exist simultaneously, they usually say something along the lines of "There's a universe where you wore a red shirt today, one where Al Gore became president in 2001, where the Cubs win every World Series..." And it is at this point that I know that this premise is false.

The inevitability of the Cubbies ineptitude serves here to illustrate what is the anthropocentric view of the all possible universes conceit. It's always painted as human decision-making that multiplies the universe out to all its possibilities, and frankly, that's BS. Our whims are not the only possibility generators around. When the cat decides to poo in your right shoe or the left one, that is a possibility. But let's go ahead and skip all the way to the pot-head infinite regression scenario. There are an infinite number of possibilities for every sub-atomic particle, so every instant (way shorter than a second, folks) spins off an infinity of its own.

Now, I know infinity is bigger than I can imagine, but multiplying infinity to the power of infinity by an infinite number of yoctoseconds just strikes me as silly. Pardon my incredulity.