Responses, Trackback, Wolfgang and Me, and FreeDom Blog

I want to start out by saying that I enjoy Wolfgang Flamme's blog. It is one of the first few blogs that I check every day. His first name is alphabetically second to last in the list of blogs that I keep in my aggregator database, and I usually scroll to the bottom and then scan through previous unread documents. Admittedly, I got into this habit because I liked Volker's blog and I had him in my blogroll before I had Wolfgang, but I've stuck with this habit even though Wolfgang now comes up before Volker.

I was really tempted to respond to Wolfgang's article "Can spam prove the existence of a level iv multiverse" because just a few weeks before he posted it I had read an article published in Scientific American that talked about the multiverse concept of parallel universes. It turns out that the article that Wolfgang read in Spektrum der Wissenschaft is written by the same researcher as the article that I had read -- and the Spektrum web site provides a link to the author's home page, which (despite demonstrating all that is evil about frames) is quite fascinating. Some of this stuff makes my brain hurt almost as much as reading Perl code, but it is still fascinating. ;-)

I didn't respond to Wolfgang on that one because his site doesn't support responses. I could have responded in my own blog, of course, or sent Wolfgang an off-line reply... but I suppose I was a little lazy, or not quite inspired enough. But now I am. I think Wolfgang is on to something big here. Black holes are sometimes said to "destroy information", which causes people who believe that information is subject to a conservation law to have to perform a few gymnastics to keep the universe from going all out of whack because of those pesky singularities. Now, has anyone besides me noticed that spam started to become a problem at approximately the same time that the Hubble Space Telescope became operational? Coincidence? I think not!!!

I believe that Wolfgang's theory, combined with my observation of the Hubble-Spam confluence leads quite naturally to the hypothesis that Hawking radiation from black holes in our universe is actually information that was lost in black holes in the parallel multiverse envisioned by Wolfgang. Somehow that lost information leaks into our universe and some sort of quantum effect acting over macroscopic distances is bringing it from our black holes to the Hubble, which is beaming it to earth, where it finds its way to the Internet through open relays. I think that a journal submission to the Annals of Improbable Research is called for! ;-)

A little more recently, and a lot more seriously, Wolfgang and I have been going back and forth and back and forth about issues related to password security. It is flattering to have seen my initial post on the subject elicit such thoughtful responses. And, to be honest, I'm glad that the posts are going into our own blogs, rather than as a series of responses; because I think that with each of us publishing in our own spaces we are each more willing to go into substantial detail. We also probably reach a slightly larger audience this way, since I imagine that I have a few regular readers who don't always read Wolfgang, and vice versa. Since I don't have trackback implemented in my blog, however, our posts don't get quite as well connected to each other as they could be. That's a bit unfortunate.

Also unfortunate is the fact that FreeDom Blog appears to be orphaned. Ed Brill just pointed out (in a post which, by the way, also happened to mention Wolfgang) that not only has Anthony Connell stopped posting to his blog, but the entire FreeDom Blog site seems to be down for the count. Having not received any responses to a couple of emails that I sent to Anthony over the past few months, I guess I'm not surprised. I do hope that he is ok. (If anyone has any word about this, please do let me know.) Anthony did some really outstanding work on his template. The most unfortunate thing, IMHO, is that the license terms on the FreeDom Blog template prohibit redistribution, so even though I know I would willingly take on some maintenance and enhancement issues (e.g., trackback!), and there are probably others who would also be willing, we can't make changes for anyone but ourselves without violating the license. Although I'm very happy with FreeDom Blog, I will probably end up switching to BlogSphere because I don't want to be stuck in limbo.