blake johnson

Paul Davies' article in the nytimes has garnered a lot of commentary on my usual blog reading list. For instance, there is a lot going on in the comments at Dave Bacon's site and Chad Orzel has started more discussion.

For what it's worth, while I usually find Davies to be a bit suspect, I would agree that there is an element of science which requires faith. On a very basic level, the scientific method is based upon the belief that the universe is ordered by laws and that these laws can be probed by experiment. It requires belief that if one repeats an experiment one should get the same result. I have written about this before a long time ago.

I have recently gotten sucked into the TV series Heroes. I think I watched the entirety of Season 1 in about two weeks. Those that know me are probably unsurprised that I like this show... what can I say, I like superheroes. In any case, I thought the first season had great momentum. The episode "Five Years Gone" is probably one of the best TV episodes of anything I've seen in the last year. Season 2 has faltered a bit. The show has lost its momentum by getting dragged down in new characters (the Maya story is SOOOOO boring) and love stories (Hiro spent far too much time in Japan).

Last week, Heroes finally returned to form with the episode "Out of Time". (Spoiler warning) I found the reveal at the end that Adam is/was Takezo Kensei to be fantastically intriguing. Theories were spilled left and right in my living room when the show ended. I thought I would voice mine here for general amusement.

So, if Adam exists in both 17th century Japan and in 21st century America, I figure that there are two possibilities:

a) Adam is immortal/has an extremely long life span. He really was born 400 years ago and has been around the entire time. This is the most straightforward possibility, but also probably the least interesting.

b) Adam was actually born 400 years after the era of Takezo Kensei. He somehow convinces Peter Petrilli to teleport him back to 17th century Japan. He would then, presumably, kill the real Takezo Kensei and pretend to be him. Adam's motives for this latter course are unknown at this point, which gives the writers a lot of flexibility.

Thoughts?

Let me show you what I have been looking at every time I try to play Far Cry or Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast for more than 5-10 minutes:

I get to look at that garbage, for which the only option is a hard reboot of the computer. I have been trying to track down the source of the problem. First of all, I discovered that I was probably pushing my RAM a little too hard (I had the CAS timing set to 2.5 but it should have been 3 ns). Then I discovered that I was inadvertently overclocking the AGP bus from 66 MHz to 68 MHz. I am told that my graphics card (an NVidia GeForce 6800GT) really requires that the bus be locked to 66 MHz. Alas, while I was initially hopeful when on my first attempt after correcting these problems I played 15-20 minutes of Far Cry without a problem, eventually I got stuck with the same fuzz of pixels.

So, let's analyze the potential culprits:

1. The system is overheating - I have put a lot of work into fixing this, so I find it unlikely.
2. My power supply is not supplying a stable current - another distinct possibility given the type of problem. I would find this more likely if I didn't have a high-quality power supply (an Antec TrueBlue 480W).
3. My DRAM is hosed - a likely possibility. I would like to run Memtest86 for a few hours to test this, but at the moment my CD/DVD drive is also refusing to read burned media, so I need to replace the DVD drive before I can check this.
4. My CPU is hosed - I haven't experienced any computer trouble outside of video games. Processor-intensive tasks such as encoding video to H.264 work fine, so I doubt this.
5. My video card is hosed - the most likely candidate in my mind. This card has always run very hot, and it doesn't get extensive use in my computer except when I play games, which is when I am having trouble.

Sadly, if the problem is the video card, I don't have very good upgrade options. My system requires an AGP video card, which is no longer supported by the video card manufacturers (PCI Express has widely replaced the AGP standard). I think it is silly to put $100 into buying an old video card which would work with my current setup when that money could go towards overhauling my entire system. With that in mind, I have specced out a new CPU, motherboard, and video card. I think I can put together a system which can run the latest games at respectable framerates (at very high/max settings) for only $600.