spacetrucker

Sick.. PM'd

PM'd (#2)

PMed

Nice giveaway.. count me in

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9. Crested T. grandiflorus, 70x40mm, $15 thanks!

yeah I'll take 3. Super pedro thanks! PM'd

Drop Dead Thread

PM'ed

Yeah, I'm not 100% sure but I think they may actually be the same plant

I believe its a Cereus Peruvianus Monstrose. It must have been huge judging by the size of some the old stumps.. it was pruned back heavily it seems.

I recently knocked on a door and had the pleasure of meeting a lovely interesting lady with a passion for cacti. She was happy for a chat and showed me around her property. My eyes were popping out of my head looking at some of the plants growing there. I took a few pics until my camera battery ran out . She told me some of the specimens were planted around 40 years ago. Enjoy... No funny camera angles here, it really does tower above the house:

Thought some people here might find it interesting http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/342/

If we had the tech to be able to download a mind into a computer, what would would it feel like? I imagine that to scan a brain to the level of detail required to recreate a virtual functional copy of your brain, your real brain may need to be destroyed. But assuming that it is possible without destroying your brain... Imagine you go to the mind-scan clinic and hop into a machine and get your brain/body scanned. The data is downloaded into the host computer and the simulation is started. Your copy running inside the simulation, if actually aware of its existence, would remember being scanned one minute then suddenly be inside a totally different world. It would have all your memories of the external world, more or less up to to point of the completion of the scan. It would be as if your subjective stream of experience has branched into two seperate streams. So now you have a copy of yourself experiencing existence inside the computer. From your point of view you would not experience existing inside the computer. You would be more or less the same as you were before the scan, but would now have an interesting toy to play with. From the simulations point of view it could be interesting. For one thing its perception of time would be dependant on the speed of the hardware it was hosted on. So if it were running on a really fast box, it could operate many times faster than a organic brain. Time in the outside world would appear to slow down. Also if it didn't want to wait for some future event, it could temporarily halt its own program until some future point in time, thus not experiencing the passage of time. But the again, maybe the simulation would find that a human brain is far from an ideal architecture for a consciousness in a digital world. The human brain is quite adaptable, but imagine... A simulated brain running in a computer could have a million eyes, a million ears, radar, sonar, etc, many more types of sensors than the human brain is equipped to process. The only way I can imagine actually experiencing my awareness existing in a pure digital information world would be something more like where you have a bunch of wires hooked into your nervous system, or maybe something less invasive like some precise high tech magnetic brain stimulation device. But that would be more like VR with an advanced brain-computer interface than actually downloading mind into the computer. But your body could still get sick with you mind in the virtual world, so its not a pure informational existence. Reminds me of a Red Dwarf episode where they have a game "Better Than Life", where people spend years living out their fantasies in a virtual world, while their bodies exist as a node of wasting flesh wired into a computer network. What could possibly go wrong?

nabraxas: Rotted One Note is pretty different to the other Squarepusher albums I've heard, more real instrument playing, more improvised. His other albums I've heard are more electronica, drum n bass, glitch, Aphex Twin-esque... I'm not really up on my electronica sub-genre terminology... I quite like that album, myself.