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Causality violations

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Jochen Fromm-3

Causality violations

That's strange, in my Mozilla Thunderbird (IMAP) e-Mail client
I can see the response from Russel before the original mail from
Nick about "Friam Digest, Vol 37, Issue 47". Microsoft's Outlook
displays it in the correct order:

Dates in Outlook
Russel's Mail Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 9:09
Nick's Mail Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 6:46

Dates in Thunderbird
Nick's Mail Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 6:45
Russel's Mail Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 21:02

Perhaps it has something to do with the time shift between
USA and Australia. However, the message ordering in Thunderbird
shows clearly a violation of causality: the effect is visible
before the cause. Causality violations are one reason that makes
distributed and complex systems so hard to understand, see
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CAS-Group/message/1149

-J.

Bill Eldridge

Causality violations

I think it's simply that Russel has his computer date wrong (one day early),
and while Outlook uses the local arrival time, Thunderbird uses the remote
sender's time.

Of course it's pretty absurd that in 2006 we still don't have computers on
networks naturally synchronized time-wise by default. At a minimum to within
a second or two.

Jochen Fromm wrote:

> That's strange, in my Mozilla Thunderbird (IMAP) e-Mail client
> I can see the response from Russel before the original mail from
> Nick about "Friam Digest, Vol 37, Issue 47". Microsoft's Outlook
> displays it in the correct order:
>
> Dates in Outlook
> Russel's Mail Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 9:09
> Nick's Mail Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 6:46
>
> Dates in Thunderbird
> Nick's Mail Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 6:45
> Russel's Mail Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 21:02
>
> Perhaps it has something to do with the time shift between
> USA and Australia. However, the message ordering in Thunderbird
> shows clearly a violation of causality: the effect is visible
> before the cause. Causality violations are one reason that makes
> distributed and complex systems so hard to understand, see
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CAS-Group/message/1149
>
> -J.
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
>

Jochen Fromm-3

Causality violations

Yes, you are right. If I sort after the remote sender's time, Outlook
shows the wrong message order, too.

-J.

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf
Of Bill Eldridge
Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 12:01 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Causality violations

I think it's simply that Russel has his computer date wrong (one day early),
and while Outlook uses the local arrival time, Thunderbird uses the remote
sender's time.

Of course it's pretty absurd that in 2006 we still don't have computers on
networks naturally synchronized time-wise by default. At a minimum to within
a second or two.

Russell Standish

Causality violations

I do autosyncronise my computers clock with NTP. Where it all goes
pear shaped is that I send mail from Linux running on VMWare running
on top of Windows. Everytime windows hibernates, VMWare's clock gets
screwed up.

I have a menu item that connects to NTP and syncronise's Linux's
clock, but that requires me to remember to run it, and it doesn't
always work - even when I am online...

On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 01:11:17PM +0200, Jochen Fromm wrote:

>
> Yes, you are right. If I sort after the remote sender's time, Outlook
> shows the wrong message order, too.
>
> -J.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: friam-bounces at redfish.com [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf
> Of Bill Eldridge
> Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 12:01 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Causality violations
>
> I think it's simply that Russel has his computer date wrong (one day early),
> and while Outlook uses the local arrival time, Thunderbird uses the remote
> sender's time.
>
> Of course it's pretty absurd that in 2006 we still don't have computers on
> networks naturally synchronized time-wise by default. At a minimum to within
> a second or two.
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

--
*PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which
is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a
virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this
email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you
may safely ignore this attachment.

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