Posts Tagged ‘holy shit’

On dots containing a universe within

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Every point of light is a Galaxy

Every point of light is a Galaxy

Each point of light in that image is a galaxy. Not a solar system, a galaxy.

Each galaxy contains hundreds of billions if not trillions of stars. Want to try to count the points in that image and do the math?

I’ll do a quick approximation, since pretty much every pixel in that image is lit up (not to mention the fact that there are other galaxies behind the ones visible here because this is just a two dimensional projection of a 3 dimensional space). There are 391,040 pixel in that image (for reference, there are approximately 170 billion galaxies in the current known, visible universe). Galaxies range anywhere from 10 million to 100 trillion (yes, trillion) stars, so lets go with a trillion stars as an average (because I’m guessing they obey a bell curve distribution and not the 50.000006 trillion median between the observed star amounts).

That means in this image, you are staring at almost 400 thousand trillion stars. And, percentage-wise, you’re looking at 0.000002% of the currently human-observable universe.

400 thousand trillion stars, 0.000002%. How many of those have planets? Pretty much all of them, I’d guess.

If you take 1 trillion stars as the galactic average (I couldn’t find a good approximation but if anyone’s got an idea please comment), that’s 170 billion trillion stars in the observable universe.

170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. We currently have no idea what the average amount of planets around them is but I’m guessing we can add some multiple of the aforementioned number.

And this is just what we can currently see. Do you begin to get an inkling of the possibility present in our universe?

We used to think regular matter was indivisible. Then we found atoms. We though they were indivisible, then we found quanta. We currently think they are indivisible.

Every time we claim to have found the bedrock, the end-all, be-all… we find something else to continue our scientific search. There may indeed be a limit to these things, but I’ll believe that when I see the end of science.

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Mind/Universe/Matter/Energy/Mind

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

the human mind gathers information from its surroundings.

The human society gathers information from it’s universe, from the very fabric at the smallest to the pattern that *everything* in the universe has expressed.

At different scales, shapes repeat themselves. above a certain mass in space and/or seen from the appropriate distance, objects from planets to galaxies look rather similar. When you get closer, they differentiate, i.e. planets, solar systems, spiral galaxies, nebulae, gas clouds. From the scale of the smallest planets to the size of sand or so, objects begin to take on features rather differentiated, mostly in subtle ways but a plethora of complexity at our level. Look below and things begin to resemble dots, look at those dots and there’s a level of complexity, but when you examine that complexity close enough again, it’s dots. Examine them and there’s more dots, just doing a lot of hard-to-explain stuff. Go back up and look at the universe and see there are filaments and columns and lots of really complex shapes depending on how you zoom, but at some point they all look like dots.

The universe is made out of dots that each contain unimaginable complexity when you look close enough. The unimaginable complexity is made out of dots when you look close enough.

Is it any wonder that we talk of matroishka universes? The “universe” is just the perception-bubble of the consciousness probing it.

All life probes its universe to map it.

Life arises spontaneously out of the complexity of the simplicity below it.

The mind is a map of the universe you build for yourself. A map of the universe the universe builds for itself. Another point that, when examined closely enough, reveals endless complexity that reveals dots that contain endless complexity.

As long as we seek, so shall we find. And let it ever be so.

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Imagine the Tea Party as Black Tea

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.

Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama.

An important and worthwhile read.

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Dr. Albert A. Bartlett on Arithmetic, Population and Energy

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

A.K.A. the most important video you will ever see. And it really is one of the most important. It gives a truly insightful, yet easily graspable understanding of the problems of growth, especially exponential growth.

As an example that all of us can instantly grasp, as computers grow more powerful they also eat more electricity and grow ever hotter. Anyone who’s had a lap-warming session with a laptop knows what I’m talking about. Do you really want that laptop getting any percent hotter every year? Probably not. So yes, growth is a huge issue, especially steady growth. 7% annual growth leads to a doubling every ten years, forever. That means in 20 years it’s a quadrupling, in 30 years an octupling -- ever ten year period uses an amount equal to everything that was used up to the start of that decade, in all of human history.

Definitely something to consider.

He also exposes how data and explanations of data get distorted and misused by media and policy ‘experts.’

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Sumbitch, happy 11 years!

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

The 11 year anniversary of the clubneko domain registration passed on Saturday. @#$%@%^#

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