In A.E. van Vogt’s The Players of Null-A (1956), the sequel to The World of Null-A (1948), the main character, Gilbert Gosseyn, uses a similar technique to teleport himself:

http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Van-Vogt/Null-A.html

“The Gosseyn bodies each possess a secondary brain jammed into their skulls. Using this, Gosseyn develops an interesting way to teleport himself. It involves memorizing a stretch of ground or floor to ‘twenty-decimal similarity’. Thereafter, during the single day that each location remains sharp in his memory, he can teleport himself to his memorized locations. There are conditions under which this doesn’t work, but this similiarization allows him to survive some sticky situations.”

I’m currently reading Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which includes the following passage, in which a character, Hunter Penhallow, is on a boat near Iceland (page 136):

“And in the ceaseless drift of the ice, the uncountable translations and rotations, meltings and freezings, there would come a moment, maybe two, when the shapes and sizes of the masses here at this ‘Venice of the Arctic’ would be exactly the same as those of secular Venice and its own outlying islands. Not all of these shapes would be dry land, of course, some would be ice, but, considered as multiply-connected spaces, the two would be the same, Murano, Burano, San Michele, the Grand Canal, each small waterway in painstaking detail, and for that brief instant it would be possible to move from one version to the other. All through his boyhood, Hunter Penhallow had watched for the fateful moment, prayed for its thunderous assault on his sensorium, for immediate translation miles and years away from here, to the Ctiy of Silence and Queen of the Adriatic herself.”

I was reading the Blog today. A lot of talk about panpsychism
and hylozoism which I had to look up on Wikipedia. I was
wondering about today’s ordinary government agencies but
set in the Post-Singular world (PS1 and PS2). What would
global surveillance be like for the National Security Agency?
What would “Stranger than Fiction” (2006) (Will Ferrell,
Emma Thompson) http://www.imdb.com be like in the Post-Singular
world? Where the nants would distribute knowledge about
the Earth like between Computer Science students taking
a course and their teacher. And kids typing email messages
to their friends only to have the nants distribute it also to
an author or the latest pop songwriter and singer. Or kids
talking on the phone with their grandmother to have their
aunts and uncles hear their conversation from cities across
the Earth.

If ever a Lifebox gets made, it will be Apple Mac who do it.

Your time is too valuable to waste on silly Windows PC problems.

Just finished Mathematicians in Love. Reading Mad Professor now.
Both as great as Mac OS X !!

And, actually moondawg, exactly the same kinds of issues can come up with mac bios flash. Macs are just computers like all the others. But, yes, it is less common for Mac users to flash their BIOS. Instead they buy new BIOS chips from Apple.

The thing is, I LIKE flashing the BIOS. When I was a kid my big brother was always working on his car, greasy, under the hood, and I admired that. I like the tweaker aspect of the open-platform Unix and Windows worlds, where you are buying weird components by third parties and putting them in. I used to teach Intel Assembly language, and for many years I taught Windows programming, so I have a pretty good understanding of what’s going on inside the Windows code.

For me, it’s fun to get my hands dirty with the innards. I did use a Mac for awhile, but I didn’t in fact like it better. I felt like too many tweak details were being hidden from me…and I like obsessing over the details.

And I always had a big problem with the one button mouse too although, yes, I’m aware that you can get other mice for mac.

I’ve never quite understood why mac users are so evangelical in wanting to convert everyone. It’s a fine machine, good for some people, there’s room for all of us but, once again, they’re all just von Neumann architecture machines. Live and let live.