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Go back to bed, America

About a year ago, I had expressed some apprehension about the dangers of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and how the experiments it was designed to carry out could spell disaster for all the atoms that make up my body and all my stuff.

Since then, the project’s scientists have quashed suggestions that the experiment could cause the destruction of the Earth. Meaning we can all breathe easy now. Or as Homer once said (sorry, not that Homer), “I’m alive! From this day forward, I vow to live life to its fullest!”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a bag of pork rinds to eat in front of the TV.

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Shiva and the Case for The Big Crunch

Yes, the universe is expanding, and I’m sad to report, it’s speeding up. By this time a dozen billion years or so from now*, all the matter in the universe will be so dissipatted that each celestial body will be beyond the reach of the other’s gravity and the universe will keep expanding and cooling, until it’s nothing more than the proverbial dust in the solar wind. Enjoy it while it lasts.

*assuming you aren’t reading this in 12,000,002,007 A.D.

Why is the universe expanding and where will it all end? This deserves a longer explanation than I’m capable of, involving gravity, dark matter and the cosmological constant. But what I can do is sum up the end of the universe thusly:

Have you ever known an explosion to collapse back in on itself?

I am the light of the world

I just had a religious experience. Or, at least as close as I’m going to get to one.

It was over a TV program called “The Sun” — a show so minor, The Science Channel doesn’t even have a web page for it. In it, Dr. Paul Scowen of Arizona State University described the simple process by which our universe went from a soup of positively-charged quanta of energy, each orbited by its own negatively-charged, smaller unit of energy, to you at this very moment reading these words. Stopping to consider that, I was reminded of just how elegant and beautiful the universe is. And it all started with a cloud of atoms.

It will sit there for thousands, and in some cases, millions of years… What you need to do to get the star formation process going is you need to kick it with something. That can be an impact on the cloud from one side by a supernova blast wave — a massive star has gone boom at the end of its life, and that sends out in all directions, very energetic compression waves that hit the gas and compresses it.

The first stars formed out of dense clouds of hydrogen. Then, when they died, their supernovas sent out shockwaves to jumpstart the creation of another generation of stars. It’s a perfectly simple method for increasing complexity in the universe, and it all runs automatically!

</dying of embarrassment>

My friend Todd is usually up on current technology trends, so I was excited when he sent me an article from my hometown’s very own newspaper, The Free Lance, about a new portable entertainment device! I couldn’t wait to find out more. Apparently it’s a machine called an “iPod”.

It’s a little contraption – about the size of a deck of cards – but it can almost literally put heaven and earth at your finger tips.

Almost in disbelief, I checked and re-checked, but there was no denying it: this article was dated today.

What other gems did this article offer up? It continues:

A podcast is almost like an electronic version of a magazine or radio show that people subscribe to for free. The term is a combination of the Apple MP3 player “iPod” and the word “broadcast.”

So this will be helpful if you ever need to explain what a podcast is to your grandma. To learn more about iPod, find the whole mortifying story here: Becoming Pod People

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Another dimension. Another Dimension. And now that you mention, another dimension!

Rob Bryanton, for his new book, Imagining the Tenth Dimension offers up a quick Flash tutorial that takes the viewer from the first to the tenth (and final?) dimension, and the viewer’s brain from a functioning organ to complete mush: www.tenthdimension.com

…in the biggest picture possible, we could say that the 4th dimension is a line that joins the big bang to one of the possible endings to our universe.

Now entering the seventh dimension, we’re about to imagine a line that treats the sixth dimension as if it were a single point. To do that, we have to imagine all possible timelines which could’ve started from our big bang, joined to all the possible endings of our universe — a concept which we often refer to as infinity — and treat them all as a single point.

So for us, a point in the 7th dimension would be infinity — all possible timelines.”

I could understand 10 dimensions, but 11 would just be silly. Once you start tacking on extra dimensions to string theory, you start to get into the dangerous territory of “Meme-Theory”, in which the different ways of conceptualizing the known universe all start getting their own dang dimensions.

Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth

My first thought when reading this was that I’m not accomplishing nearly as much as I should be.

Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth

If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible right now. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.


As a sidenote, some Franco-Swiss scientists have already built a machine that could make that plan a reality.

Better start living deliberately, because it’s being switched on in a year.

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The 1981 Computer Will Seduce You

This is a surprisingly less-than-dated look at the future of computers from a 1981 news piece and, unsurprisingly, it gives me a big nerd-boner thinking about the home computer as “the world’s biggest backyard fence to talk over.” Of special note is millionaire Steven P. Jobs discussing how computers will “seduce you.” Done and done!