Blog archives for January, 2008

Planning for failure

Most of the e-commerce sites upon errors generate some cryptic self-exonerating error messages such as “Oops, something unexpected happened, come back soon” or “Error C333. Please describe in detail what you were doing, and what you were wearing, and send it over to our technical team for further investigation”. Not Pottery Barn, which seems to plan ahead for failures. Whether it’s shrewd planning, or an ordering system that consistently screws up, Pottery Barn has a separate notification system in place for the cases when you tried to buy something off their site, and failed at checkout.

Pottery Barn

NYT on Boltzmann’s brains and infinite Universes

There’s a pretty interesting article in today’s New York Times on Boltzmann’s brains and probability of a human reincarnation arising purely from the entropy in the Universe. Among the infinitesimal amount of atoms, what is the probability of a combination forming, replicating your structure entirely?

In an interview Dr. Linde described these brains as a form of reincarnation. Over the course of eternity, he said, anything is possible. After some Big Bang in the far future, he said, “it’s possible that you yourself will re-emerge. Eventually you will appear with your table and your computer.” But it’s more likely, he went on, that you will be reincarnated as an isolated brain, without the baggage of stars and galaxies. In terms of probability, he said, “It’s cheaper.”