Trying to find a short story I read around 20 years ago. Probably from the 60s/70s, it's about a man in the Cold War, shot in an experimental rocket that goes into hyperspace or something. It specifically mentions that society in America is now pretty much the same as the USSR - the USSR not being able to win the Cold War outright, but have succeeded in making USA into a controlling surveillance society. It turns out that the universe is very unstable and changes every couple of hours. As he was out of the universe when it changed the man is the only person who moves with it. He meets a people who zap him with a ray gun so that he speaks their strange guttural language. They know all this, and know they've only existed for an hour and will vanish in an hour. The universe keeps changing, the man essentially becomes God, and he recreates the world he comes from. The stinger is that everyone now speaks in the weird language of the people who explained what was happening to him. Any ideas you might have about who wrote it would be greatly appreciated.
Here's what I remember about it:   The protagonist is sent a relatively short distance into the future (maybe a year? I've forgotten). When he arrives in this "future" he finds himself in a completely different world, with non-human inhabitants. The inhabitants use a machine to teach him their torturous language. He tries to return home, and (eventually) finds himself in a realm of chaos/nothingness. He laboriously reconstructs in his mind everything he can remember about his home and finds himself back there somehow. The twist is      that in his "home" reality everyone speaks the language he was taught by the non-human inhabitants at his first stop.
I have a rechargeable vacuum cleaner with NiMH batteries, 1800mAh and 14.4 volts, 12 cells. The charger is 18v 200mA. The batteries have now died.  Can I replace the batteries with 4 cell Li-ion in series?   That will be 14.4 volts, if considered 3.7v each. Of course, I know it will be roughly 4 volts when fully charged.  Li-ion batteries in my mind: 18650, 2500mAh.  Also, can I charge them with the same charger? How to quickly send commands to nested tmux sessions? I have the following in my .tmux.conf  set -g prefix M-j bind-key j  send-prefix   I need to press (Atl+J) + (J) + bound-key to send something to the nested tmux session. I feel it is rather slow. Is there any better way? For example, I would love to be able to do (Alt+J) + (2x bound-key) to do stuff in the nested session. I constantly execute commands in the top tmux session instead of executing them in the nested one. Also, how come everybody binds prefix to C-a? I find it awfully slow and unpleasant to type this combination. Am I missing something? Is it legal to use car manufacturers' names in a game? Is it legal to use car manufacturers' names in a game?   For example:   to describe Audi's quattro drive system? to display a rendering of an Audi? to include a photo (to which I have rights) of an Audi? There is a book I read in the 1980s or 1990s from a Ca.  library. It was a hard copy not a paperback. It is not "To Outlive Eternity/Tau Zero" by Poul Anderson (I have that one). It may have been written by a woman or someone whose last name starts with an "L".  A large crew of men and women are in a new super fast space ship. They are being chased by someone and they outrun the collapse of the universe, but they have lost their home planet. They watch as the universe is reborn. They go into orbit around a planet that looks like it can support life like theirs. They are moving super fast. They look like a ring of radiation going around the planet. They put down 10 super metal markers with scientific info onto the surface of the planet. They watch the planet develop and form life like the dinosaurs and then evolve into human like life forms.  There are 2 warring countries on the planet. They block or turn off the sun to freeze the planet and force the countries to form one world government. The planet gets freezing cold and the people start to freeze. The countries agree to form one world government. The people on the ship are welcomed to the planet. Ubuntu Detects 2 monitors when I only have one How to select more layers with GIMP? In Adobe Photoshop I am able to select multiple layers at once with Shift+Click.  How can I do that in GIMP? Radius of Convergence when using Series[] How to calculate Area Under the Curve (AUC), or the c-statistic, by hand Let's say I have two planets that are one hundred thousand lightyears away from each other. I and my immortal friend on the other planet want to communicate, with a strong laser and a tachyon communication device.  I record a message on the tachyon communication device and release the message at exactly the same time as I activate the laser, both of which are directed to the other planet which is one hundred thousand lightyears away. Say it is the year 0 for both of us at the time I did this.  If tachyons existed, then the message would arrive to my friend before the photons in the laser. It would arrive, say, a thousand years earlier. From my vantage point, that message will arrive to her at year 99,999; the same would be true for my friend's vantage point. However, she will only see the laser at year 100,000.  So since she got the message at year 99,999, she immediately sends me a reply back going through the same procedure as I did. She records a message and releases it at the same time as the laser. The tachyons will arrive 1,000 years earlier than the laser, so for me, I will receive the message at year 199,998. I will receive the laser, however, at year 199,999.  It seems to me that communication this way does not violate causality. I will still have received the message after I had sent it.   If tachyons truly violated causality, though, I realize it should arrive at year -1 for her, and so she can reply to me at year -2, which would mess me up by year 0 as I will ask her how she knew I was planning on sending her a message before I sent it. I could send her a different message, which she would end up receiving at year -1, and will end up confusing her as she would have received one message asking her out, and the other asking her how did she know I was asking her out. She then decides I am crazy and sends me a message at year -2 that she does not want to date me, and so she will have both turned me down and entertained me before I have even asked her out.  On the other hand, let's go back to year 0 and add a third device to our list: an Alcubierre drive. After I send out the message and the laser, I get impatient and do not feel like waiting 99,999 years, so I get on my Alcubierre drive spaceship and arrive on her planet at the same year 0. My friend is not in her office, so I leave a note to her also immortal secretary saying I dropped by and that she should expect a message for her in year 99,999.  I then get back on my Alcubierre drive and land back on my planet, still on year 0. Meanwhile, the tachyons and photons I sent out are still racing to arrive to her. By year 99,999, she receives the message just as I Alcubierre drive back to her, and I pick her up for dinner.  But the point of my question is, it seems to me that just going faster than light, if that alone was what you had, would not violate causality. It must be something else. I understand time dilation and that things with mass cannot travel at the speed of light, but using the Alcubierre drive, hypothetically speaking, I was still able to outpace the photons while also having mass. It still did not produce causality problems. Alcubierre drives are also valid solutions to GR.  It seems circular to me to say that what makes traveling faster than light violate causality is because it violates causality (if faster than light communication was divorced from causality problems, then the causality problem would cause itself -- thereby violating causality and, hence, we would scrap it and conclude that there is no causality problem after all).  What is it that I am missing? If someone could help me out, that would be excellent. I've been itching to ask my friend out for a few millenia now. :) Show that if the smallest prime factor $p$ of the positive integer $n$ exceeds $\sqrt[3]{n}$, then $\frac{n}{p}$ must be prime or 1.  I'm stuck trying to prove this. 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