http://qntm.org the personal website of Sam Hughes http://qntm.org/?w580i Blog: I am not a massive telephone user. I have a dirt-cheap pay as you go plan (if "plan" is the word), out of which I get so little use, I have to completely figure out how to top the thing up from scratch every time I do it. When I first knuckled under and decided to get a mobile phone I walked into Carphone Warehouse, explained that I needed a phone but didn't particularly want one, and was presented with an extremely cheap, functional [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_1101|Nokia 1100]], whose built-in LED torch I used more than the actual phone tools. That was many years ago. But as time passed I realised that I was habitually carrying around both the ultra-cheap phone and an ultra-cheap MP3 player and, on such occasions when I could be bothered, an ultra-cheap digital camera which I had purchased from Tesco's for £20 solely to find out what the catch was. (It was that the pictures sucked.) Thrice as many gadgets as strictly necessary! I was an inefficient, bulky-pocketed geek. So,...]]> 2008-06-20 http://qntm.org/?leaving Fine Structure: [[sundown|Previously]] When Ching's satellite radio starts making noises, he excuses himself from the table and ducks out the back door of the Hornpiper. There's a short set of steps leading down to the car park at the rear. He sits down and turns on the speaker, expecting to talk to Arika. Instead, it is his wife Susie, who is close to hysteria. It takes some effort for Ching to get the story from her. He eventually figures out that Arika came to see Susie at the house like he asked. Instead of telling Susie anything, Arika simply said that she had been told to go home for the day, on account of an experiment going wrong. They had some lunch and watched some television. A few hours later, somebody knocked on the door. From the description, Ching decides it was probably Moxon. At this point, Arika, without explanation, scooped Susie Kuang up in her arms and flew her out of town. They are now both standing in a deserted patch of scrub on a low clifftop overlooking the highway l...]]> 2008-06-19 http://qntm.org/?sundown Fine Structure: Previously: [[unbelievable|1]], [[story|2]] Thousands of years earlier, Plato described something similar. Take a deep, dark cave and chain some prisoners at the bottom, so that they cannot move about or flex their arms or legs. Restrain them in a row, bolting them down so tightly that they cannot even move their heads, so that they have no choice but to all gaze upon the same cave wall. Build a fire behind them, to cast a steady light on the wall. And then march various objects past the light source, so that their shadows are cast on the wall where the prisoners may see. Now imagine that the prisoners have been raised in this cave from birth. Because of the nature of their imprisonment, they would be unaware of any world other than the two-dimensional patterns of light and shadow on the wall ahead of them, and the sounds they heard (and, if they were permitted to talk, made themselves). They would be unaware that they even had limbs. If a dog was marched past the fire, and heard...]]> 2008-06-08 http://qntm.org/?happening Movies: Note 2008-06-17: This was written based on the The Happening trailer. I had not seen any spoilers when I wrote this, but it turns out my "fart gas" conjecture was [[http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=75893f9a-3391-4ab5-88c8-cf7e74bcd835|half-accurate]], as was my "The Happening sucks" conjecture. So [[http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/thehappening/|The Happening]] looks like a pretty stupid movie. I realise it's premature to judge movies based on their trailers, but that's typically because a trailer, by virtue of containing all the expensive awesome shots and one-liners from the final product, generally makes a movie look substantially better than it actually is. But the trailer for The Happening is, as I will now outline, stupid. So how could the movie possibly be better? Every frame, beat and musical cue in the trailer is calculated to build suspense. However, it fails to provide any clear notion of what, exactly, is happening which is suspenseful. You see one guy fall dow...]]> 2008-05-25 http://qntm.org/?alphabet Pub crawls: This crawl is largely untested. This is a refinement on [[atoz|version one]] and several of the pubs and routes listed have not been tested as yet. The current map can be found [[http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=111977375219535081788.00043ff2e7bf6440b5bd4&ll=51.51168,-0.13175&spn=0.037766,0.080338&z=14|here]]. Unless otherwise stated all pubs on the route were selected by me. Start Meet 10:30am at Russell Square Station. Take a photo of all the starters. Depart 11am. Turn right out of the station and left into Marchmont Street. Continue down until you hit Leigh Street on the right and go that way to find: N: [[files/01.jpg|The Norfolk Arms]] (1) 21 Leigh Street, WC1H 9EP; picked by James B. Turn right out of the Norfolk Arms and head along Sandwich Street. Turn left at Hastings Street and then right into Mabledon Place to continue north. Once you reach Euston Road, turn right for: E: The Euston Flyer (2) 83-87 Euston Road, NW...]]> 2008-05-09 http://qntm.org/?discuss News: At the time of writing, the most recent chapter of [[structure|Fine Structure]] is [[story|The Story So Far]], which ties together three major plotlines in the story: Ching's story thread, Mitch's thread and the teleportation saga begun in [[taphophobia|Taphophobia]]. The latest development is that my seemingly unrelated story [[unbelievable|Unbelievable Scenes]], which I wrote in 2006, is part of the Fine Structure. In fact, it always has been. History of FS so far FS has been developing for a long time. Unbelievable Scenes (May 2006) was the first chapter of the story which I wrote. It was always intended to be the start of a very much larger story, although it can also stand alone. After this I wrote several more standalone stories set in the same universe: [[digital|On Digital Extremities]] (July 2006), [[power|Power Of Two]] (December 2006), [[crushed|Crushed Underground]] (May 2007), and [[astronomer|The Astronomer's Loss]] (June 2007). All of these stories make sense if read i...]]> 2008-05-04 http://qntm.org/?story Fine Structure: Previously: [[2048|1]], [[four-dimensional|2]], [[failure|3]] Somebody has systematically exterminated every scientist involved with teleportation research except two: Thomas Muoka, who has sworn to abandon the project forever, and Anne Poole, who is suffering from massive brain damage. Not only this, but teleportation itself is also now physically impossible. Anne Poole has become invulnerable to physical harm and no longer requires air, water or food to survive. Tom Muoka and Mike Murphy have been on the United Kingdom Advanced Physical Laboratory site since the morning. "She can still see and hear," says Tom. "She can't be blinded. Her limbs cannot be overextended or wrenched, but they can be manipulated. She's frozen in time, but she can move. So something's wrong here. Sight and hearing depend on physical changes in the body. Chemical changes which precipitate electrical signals which convey messages. There is simply a point at which such chemical changes are so intens...]]> 2008-05-01 http://qntm.org/?comments News: Well, I have now plumbed in a primitive commenting system. There are some restrictions on account of PHP/MySQL badgery being my fulltime job, so working on my site is more like work than play now, so I can't be bothered to make it more sophisticated. There is no registration system. Currently you just put whatever name you like in. Except "sam", which is reserved for me. No HTML. Line breaks will be interpreted as line breaks. If you want to emphasise something, put it in *asterisks* or _underscores_ or CAPITALS. HTML input sanitisation is unbelievably complex. A certain prerequisite amount of mathematical knowledge is required to post. Posts cannot be edited or deleted by anybody but me, so make sure you get it right first time. I reserve the right to delete any and all comments at any time without warning or explanation, because this is not a democracy or a free speech zone, it's my website. Comments must meet a certain threshold of coherence and insight t...]]> 2008-04-23 http://qntm.org/?failure Fine Structure: [[transporter|Previously]] To whom it may concern: You may or may not know this, but there is an enormous building made of solid stone on the outskirts of the city of Tucson, Arizona. It is as if somebody took a mountain and dropped it on the edge of a light industrial park, and then chipped it and sculpted it into the perfect shape of a fairly slickly-architectured modern science laboratory, and then added signage and parking and maybe roads and paths around it. It looks like the biggest piece of stone sculpture in the world. It weighs over a million tonnes. You probably have no idea why it is there. Or where it came from. Or what happened to the original. That's unless the rock has sunk into the earth under its own weight and there's just a hole there now. That's a possibility too. Or you may not even be able to read this because English, as a language, has been lost. Or, most likely, it is a million years later and this message is dust, having never been read. I think som...]]> 2008-04-04 http://qntm.org/?hl Videogames: This is a work in progress. There is an excellent (and very pretty) Half-Life timeline at [[http://members.shaw.ca/halflifestory/|The Half Life Saga Story Guide]] but I have decided to create my own because it omits quite a lot and, critically, is mostly unsourced. I like to show my working, if you know what I mean. Creating this timeline involves a substantial amount of conjecture on account of the fact that there are no, N. O., explicit dates anywhere in any game set in the Half-Life universe. External sources do help with this, however, and who doesn't enjoy a bit of conjecture? Obviously, major spoilers. To be added: pre-HL events offworld, Decay, HL2, Episode One, Episode Two, plus copious screen shottage Date Event Notes 1953 Aperture Science is founded by Cave Johnson, for the purpose of producing shower curtains. [[http://www.aperturescience.com|Aperture Science website]] ([[files/aperture3.png|screenshot]]). To acces...]]> 2008-03-26