Archive for the ‘thoughts’ Category

The Known Universe

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

After watch­ing this, I just thought of how insignif­i­cant I am in the grand scheme of things. That’s not to say my exis­tence doesn’t mat­ter but we are all but minus­cule mol­e­cules in grains of sand com­pared to all that there is in space.

What’s even more amaz­ing is that we’ve only been able to map out *half* of space, and that’s just with our cur­rent instru­ments. Our near­est neigh­bors are hun­dreds of light-years away, prob­a­bly watch­ing a sim­i­lar video and won­der­ing if they’ll ever meet an alien species. I’d like to say “of course we will” but man … con­sider my mind blown.

War, vio­lence, unrest, your boss, and my next door neigh­bors don’t even mat­ter any­more. How could I focus on such things when there is an abun­dance of what we don’t know?

This is amaz­ing, sim­ply amazing.

How Does the Internet See You?

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

Paul Webb DSGN Journal - How Does the Internet See You? 01

Per­sonas is a com­po­nent of the Metropath[ologies] exhibit, recently on dis­play at the MIT Museum by the Socia­ble Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophis­ti­cated nat­ural lan­guage pro­cess­ing and the Inter­net to cre­ate a data por­trait of one’s aggre­gated online iden­tity. In short, Per­sonas shows you how the Inter­net sees you.

This con­cept is sim­ply too cool. The image above shows you what the Inter­net thinks I look like [Paul Webb is a com­mon name appar­ently so I used my mid­dle name to get this result].

Try it your­self! Of course, if you don’t really have a web pres­ence you aren’t going to get a good rep­re­sen­ta­tion of you. Then again, the results aren’t meant to be taken seri­ously either. Still, I found it interesting.

via Per­sonas / Web App

You Are All Stardust

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand prob­a­bly came from a dif­fer­ent star than your right hand.

It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics : You are all star­dust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the ele­ments — the car­bon, nitro­gen, oxy­gen, iron, all the things that mat­ter for evo­lu­tion for life — weren’t cre­ated at the begin­ning of time.

They were cre­ated in the nuclear fur­naces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode.

So, for­get Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

- Lawrence Krauss

via Space Col­lec­tive