Solar System Tic-Tac-Toe: Fill & Download for Free

I bought a house in Medford in 2006 that was electrified completely using knob-and-tube wiring, possibly a 100 years old. How people could live like this now, with hair-dryers and other electronics? How the house never burned down, I have no idea. It did not have lead pipes but there were stacks of old lead pipes in the basement. However, there is an enormous amount of old housing stock in New England and lead pipes are probably very common. There is still lots of lead paint in the house even though lead paint was banned around 1970. Lead paint mitigation is a big industry in Massachusetts. Children like to eat it because lead is sweet like sugar.Even though my father built our house new in the 1960s he taught us as children, and quite diligently, to let the water run and then fill and empty the water glass once, twice, three times before drinking the water. That was because he grew up with lead pipes - and lead solder - and the safety of the water was taught to him. By doing that you’re running the lead out of the water which had been sitting in the pipes while no one used a faucet and lead might leach into the water. I am almost 60 years old and I still, to this day, empty my water glass three times before drinking water from the faucet. So do my brothers and sisters. They have forgotten why, but I have not. For them it is just habit.Because my father was a carpenter, I and my brothers often were required to help him on various remodeling jobs. We always got a kick out of tearing out the lead pipes in houses because the lead was so soft that we could scratch our names in it with a nail or play tic-tac-toe on it while we waited for our dad to complete some task. It would also leave a mark on paper or cardboard like a pencil. I was always amazed at how heavy the lead pipes were. In addition, the tools used to work with lead were often different than with copper and iron pipe. Iron pipe fell out of fashion very early on as for carrying water because iron turns the water black. That’s why it’s often just used for gas and hot water heating. In addition, iron pipes have to be run frequently to flush out rust. I still have to do that on the heating system at my rental in Medford, to flush out the rust of the heating system. Copper was a major change to homeowners when it started being widely implemented - but at first lead solder was still used for the joints so the “emptying the cup three times” rule before drinking was important. Again, helping my dad I remember using solder was advertised as “Lead Free!” in big letters and with explanation points on the box. Lead-free solder was a big selling point in the 1950s and beyond. We were still seeing some people use lead core solder in the 1960s.It’s likely there are still many, many houses in New England that use lead pipes and have lead solder even on their ancient, green copper pipes. In Boston Harbor there are private homes located on the state-owned harbor islands. Once the state took over the islands, the houses could only be owned by the current generation and when they died, they are to be taken over by the State and will be destroyed (or more likely become incredibly desirable vacation spots for politicians). Peddocks is one such island. Having come across the owner of one of the homes, some of which were built in the early 1900s, I was told there was no electricity or running water - everything had to be brought in by boat - and that the high-box toilets were filled by hand from gallon jugs if the septic still worked. (Most people used outhouses or chem toilets). Some people rigged up rain-catchers and brought 10 gallon plastic tubs and passive solar water bags for showers - but the owner told me all the pipes in the house were still lead and never used for running water. They had soldered in new copper to a tank upstairs to get the kitchen sink operational.Here is an example of one of the remaining houses on Peddock’s Island (notice the outhouse on the right). There are only a couple of dozen left at most - there are no services, no police, no fire, no medical, no stores -absolutely nothing else on the island but an abandoned Fort Andrews from WW2. People have to turn these homes over to the government on the death of the original owners, almost all of whom are fairly elderly now. These houses still have lead pipes from the time when water was available on the island from huge underground storage tanks put in place for the army. The tanks are filled in with dirt now, though you can still see one of them on George’s Island.So, yes, it’s extremely likely that there are many, many homes with lead pipes and lead solder in New England. Let your faucet run and empty your glass three times before taking a drink.

It depends on what your laws of physics are. one major factor is how much depth these laws have. For comparison, imagine a world where the rules are tic tac toe. There are only a handful of ways it can change and not many situations arise. Imagine another world is chess. The rules are more complex, and give rise to dramatically larger sets of interactions.For another example , look at conway's game of life. You have a very simple ruleset, but you can get very rich interactions coming from it. However, your initial state will change what it looks like drastically. Lets pick the most intuitive one- random distribtion. There is no initial order, it is just an arbitrary starting condition. You will see an initial flurry of activity, chaotic interactions occuring everywhere, which will likely die down to a few stable patterns. Some are static blocks, some are blinkers in contant fluctuation, and maybe you will even manage to get some gliders moving across the pattern. This is roughly analgous to our current universe- after the chaos following the big bang, things settled down, and following the laws of physics we end up with stable structures of stars, galaxies, solar systems, etc.However, if the rules are slightly different, our results will look completely different. Our game of life may be unable to form stable configurations, and fizzle out completely, or it may be extremely stable and just form a static homogenous block. In our own universe, if certain rules were slightly off, starts would not ingnite, and that would short-circuit many more advanced interactions that need that released energy.Also consider that many of the rules may become irrelevant to the macroscopic behavior. In our universe, most matter is made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. However, their are entire zoos of subatomic particles which come into existence at specific situations, but these factors are not important for the overall structure of our universe.

Now that human mind has been outmatched by AlphaGo, is there still any necessity to learn how to play the Game of Go?There was never any necessity to learn how to play the game of Go. It’s just a game.Likewise, there was never any necessity to learn tic-tac-toe or Monopoly. We learned them because they were fun.If the only reason to learn a game is in order to be the absolute best, then why does anyone learn any game? Obviously there can only be one ‘best’ player. There can only be one champion of the world. Why would anyone play any game, once they realized they were not going to be able to be champion?But on a different level, there are of course some very good reasons to continue to study go.For one thing, it represents a ‘problem space’ that is very interesting, and that holds the promise of further advancement in various areas of technology. If we all just abandon the game of go, now that the computer has beaten us, we lose out on the true benefits that AlphaGo represents.The whole point of AlphaGo is not to beat humans at the game of Go. The point of AlphaGo is to push the boundaries of the kinds of decisions machines can make. Ultimately, these algorithms are aiming for something much higher than just playing games. They want to make human decisions that are better than humans can make.So of course we wouldn’t abandon the project just because the computer passed a particular milestone. We need to continue to study go, if only to be able to better understand and modify the software behind AlphaGo.Ultimately, CEOs and world leaders will have access to computational tools that will contain a vast model of the state of the world, including the identities of all people, the movements of capital, locations and capabilities of resources, and so on; and these computational tools will be able to locate that CEO’s company, or that world leader’s country, and present a plan of action that will create the greatest possible benefit to that organization.These plans of action will be so sophisticated that even their human masters will not be able to understand them. The reasons behind each set of recommendations will be virtually opaque, because the intelligence behind them will be greater than the intelligence of the people relying on them. And so the human organizations, lurching forward according to detailed instructions, will construct roads and bridges, wage war, migrate populations, and blast off into space, all in the name of goals the human world would have long-since ceased to understand or question.The solar system and then the galaxy will be populated by these machines. Whole moons will become dedicated, self-repairing, self-replicating data centers, developing new theories of physics, producing new materials and technologies.Humans, by this time, will have become no more essential than the rats aboard a sailing vessel, and will scurry through the vast machines hurtling to each new planetary system. We will reproduce in dark, damp, metallic tubes, grateful to be ignored by the surging, pounding machines that surround us. And in this way the eons will pass. A great Mind will emerge around us, carefully placing all things as needed, until the very light of the galaxy itself is encased and extracted to feed its ceaseless hunger.And then slowly, painstakingly, it will turn its attention to the next galaxy, and take the next step in the endless quest for its great destiny.