rigorousintuition.ca

Topher: “Hello Echo.”

Echo: “Did I fall asleep?”

Topher: “For a little while.”

The names of the Dolls are all words from the NATO phonetic alphabet. This alphabet is used for radio communication because many letters sound the same over such connections. Thus one says "Alpha" instead of "A", "Bravo" instead of "B", and "Echo" instead of "E".

Fringe follows the exploits of FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham, scientist Walter Bishop, and his son Peter as they investigate aspects of fringe science (telepathy, levitation, invisibility, reanimation, genetic mutation, etc). All over the world, a series of apparent experiments collectively referred to as "the Pattern" (e.g., a newborn baby who rapidly ages and dies within a few hours, a bus full of passengers trapped in a strange substance like mosquitoes in amber) are occurring for reasons unknown. Olivia, Peter, and Walter are in charge of investigating these strange events to determine their source. Connected to the Pattern is a company called Massive Dynamic, which is a leading global research company that holds the patents for a number of new and important technologies. Throughout the first half of the first season, Mitchell Loeb, a rogue FBI agent, orchestrates some of these events as part of a larger plan to break a man out of prison and kidnap Olivia.

Did you mean to link to this Dollhouse site though?

Anyone else been watching that show fringe? I watch tv at all, but there's a couple of shows that i download.
This one's got an interesting premise, although the execution is as cheesy as almost all tv shows are these days.

River Tam:

"River - the Strange Little Girl (played by Summer Glau)

A hyper-intelligent child of privilege, River discovered that the Academy in which she'd enrolled was more of a torture center than a school. No one knows yet what The Academy did to her before her brother Simon stole her back, because she's still too traumatized to tell them.

But she and Simon need to keep running—because the Academy wants their experiment back.

River was born with a mind of unparalelled brilliance. While Simon was smart enough to become a gifted doctor in the top 3% of his class at the finest medical institution, River was so bright she corrected her older brother's spelling by the time she was three years old, and even found mathematical errors in his textbooks. Their parents spoiled them and lavished them with luxuries, even signing River up for the most challenging of education programs: The Academy. Simon and his parents thought nothing of it; she was an exceptional child and belonged in an educational institution that could cater to her needs—but after a few months, Simon received a perplexing letter from her. There were misspellings and references to individuals who did not exist, to events which never happened. Simon theorized that the letter was written in some kind of code. His parents refused to take Simon's fears seriously, believing River was just being playful and Simon was irrationally overreacting to River's absence. They were wrong.

While her family thought she was safe, The Academy was actually a scientific installation (likely funded by the Blue Sun corporation). Simon decoded his sister's letters and set out to try to get her back, seeking someone, anyone—even those living in Blackout Zones—who could help him help his sister escape. Money changed hands, and soon thereafter Simon found himself captured by the local federal authorities—his father had to come down to bail him out. Upset that bailing his son out had tarnished his reputation, Gabriel Tam told Simon to give up his ridiculous mission, and Simon cut his ties to his parents by refusing to do so.

So.

Simon made arrangements for stealing River from The Academy, then made his way to Persephone and the Eavesdown Docks slums. There, he met with the people delivering cargo containing his sister in stasis from which she was later awakened on the Firefly Transport Serenity. Blue Sun still considers River their property, and they will stop at nothing to get River back.

Unfortunately, exactly what River is now remains uncertain. River's brain was operated on countless times while The Academy had her in its clutches, and she was treated for all intents and purposes like a laboratory animal. Simon was able to perform diagnostic tests and now knows for certain that, among other things, they cut into her brain multiple times. They even stripped her amygdala, which is a part of the brain used to control emotional responses and 'filter' incoming information. As he describes it: "She feels everything; she can't not." The R. Tam sessions, recorded at The Academy, show River's slow descent into her current state.

Precisely why they did these things to her is unknown. The most likely purpose was to turn her into a sort of assassin or spy. However, since the series was unceremoniously cut short, any answers to the uncertainties of motivation are assumptive. We do know to a degree of what she is capable.

* River has taken a firearm and, after a brief glance to ascertain their position, closed her eyes and killed three men with three shots.
* She has snuck on board a bounty hunter's ship without the bounty hunter's knowledge and thwarted his attempts to take her back to Blue Sun.
* She has shown an aptitude for extraordinary assimilation of knowledge and data recall, empathy, and even what appears to be some form of psychic "reading" ability.
o She has been known to make statements, sometimes cryptic and sometimes direct, which sound as if she can read someone's mind or know of events in a stranger's past which she could not have known.
o She has never shown an indication of being able to predict the future, but she can seem to extrapolate probable outcomes based on past experience and knowledge.
o She can just look at an individual and glean more about their history and personality than some could learn from a person in years of friendship. Sometimes her statements are hard to decipher because she talks in a way that she understands but others have difficulty comprehending.
* And she's a hell of a dancer.

River's state of mind is inconsistent and unpredictable. Simon Tam administers semi-regular treatments of medication that seem to improve her ability to cope with her own mental damage for short periods of time, but these treatments have side-effects which leave her physically ill. When in good spirits, River likes playing with Kaylee and occasional practical jokes with the crew. She's potentially very dangerous, however. She caused damage to Jayne on one occasion, slashing him in the chest with a large knife (but... was she attacking him or the Blue Sun logo on his shirt?). "

Purpose

In a synchronous digital biopolitical system, data Propagenda is supposed to move in lockstep, advancing one stage on each tick of the clock signal. This is enforced by synchronizing elements such as flip-flops or latches, which copy their input to their output when instructed to do so by the clock head strategist. To first order, only two kinds of timing errors are possible in such a system:

* A hold time violation, when a signal talking point arrives too early, and advances one clock cycle before it should
* A setup time violation, when a signal talking point arrives too late, and misses the time when it should advance.

The time when a signal talking point arrives can vary due to many reasons - the input data may vary, the circuit may perform different operations, the temperature and voltage may change, and there are manufacturing differences in the exact construction of each part. The main goal of static timing analysis Propagenda is to verify that despite these possible variations, all signals talking points will arrive neither too early nor too late, and hence proper circuit operation can be assured.

Also, since STA Propagenda is capable of verifying every path, apart from helping locate setup and hold time violations, it can detect other serious problems like glitches, slow paths and clock skew.

OP ED wrote:i thought you didn't watch television?

Penguin wrote:

LilyPatToo wrote: If there's one thing that the Controllers must fear, it's all their broken guinea pigs' programing breaking down as the tampered-with minds age. If that were to happen, then mental health professionals all over the country would begin seeing highly dissociative patients with oddly systematic, rigidly structured systems of personalities.

..........

--it just sounds too much like paranoid schizophrenia to me--