Today at lunch duplicators and instantiators

I work at a pretty innovative place and the discussions that we have atlunch time are pretty mind bending. The last time I can recall having somany interesting discussions over lunch and breaks was way back when I wasin my first undergraduate degree, but the topics of conversation that tendto come up at my current place of employment are really worth trying torecord.

Today we started off having a couple of split conversation, Euan describingchatting to Martha at Sci-Foo and Euan and I talking about Euler, as you do.Then the conversation quite naturally turned to replicators. We werediscussing the pro's and con's of owning a replicator. It's clear from theconversation that two calsses of replicator exist. One would break the lawsof physics and replicate anything out of nothing (possibly dragging theextra matter out of an alterantive universe, vis a vis the lazy gun inagainst a dark background) and the other type the just melds matter into theshape of whatever might be copies.

Brenda wanted one that would not copy living things, but as someone pointedout, if you could copy living things, and you had one kitten, then you couldhave kittens!

Getting a transfer of ownership form when you copied a beamer might be aproblem, and if you copied the earth then you would be in right trouble.

At the end Gavin wanted one that you could just pass science fiction booksto, and it would make stuff from the book not really a replicator then, butan instantiator.

tags: lunch, replicator