Hope

You write very well indeed kind sir, I was back there in time - with you as a 9 year old ! Perhaps you should write occasionally in such fashion and publish a book from your blog posts? Let's hear some recollections from the perfect age thought out by your 10 year old please.

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In the absence of hope, fear prevails. Fear eats at a man's soul, which is why for all history man has sought a place to pin their hopes.

Question to you: What is hope?

It must be connected in some way to probability. For example, there is no point in hoping against a certain outcome, only a point in hoping against an uncertain outcome, or an outcome that is not 100% guaranteed. But then again, no outcome is 100% guaranteed is it? Still, I think we tend to "hope" in a probabilistic fashion.

In fact, I believe that dictionary.com has a tenth definition of hope that implies that "hope" itself is probability.

10. hope against hope, to continue to hope, although the outlook does not warrant it: We are hoping against hope for a change in her condition.

I'll have a go at defining hope, this is "Hope" according to deep.thought, the best I can do on the spur of the moment that is:

In a system in which the result is indeterminate, "hope" is a conditioning which allows an individual homo sapiens to focus on the outcome that that individual has some positive attachment to.

?

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New Scientist this week published their magazine and the cover refers to an article in the magazine which talks about the laws of nature being different over time in different parts of the Universe. I find this humourous as this was exactly the discussion we were having about a month ago or so. Melvyn Bragg did that to us also with his "In Our Time" radio program, but I can't recall what the subject was in that case, just that it happened. A comment to the Bragg coincidence is in the ascendnextlevel archives somewhere. Sometimes I wonder if there is some kind of una-mind connecting the whole world together, so that thoughts resonate around the collective -- like The Borg! (Not the tennis player).

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T60 !! You mega power house. I think that's an Intel Core Duo (2 cpu's), maybe even an Intel Core 2 Duo - the next iteration of Core Duo that is taking the world by storm, well at least taking AMD by storm as Intel regain their crown as Chipzilla. Do you realize that you now have more power in your lap than a late 80's/early 1990's multimillion pound machine room? And no lap-dancing jokes please !