When I first signed up for a twitter account I had no idea my choice of handle (@thorsonofodin) would lead me down som many harrowing rabbit-holes.
Many thanks to Liz Neeley for kicking off an epic battle of wits on twitter via #vikingoff. Liz was kind enough to assemble the best bits into a tidy Storify. Ready? #vikingoff!
"How the structure in the
universe grew over time...a conceptual version using the filament for structure
pieces that take shape." ~Paul
News Flash: McMurdo Station, Antarctica (TPG) -- The ten-meter-telescope at the South Pole has breaking data strongly indicating that our universe is a product of a 7-D printer. The big bang was simply the moment the printer was turned on. That's right! Some unknown entity has created and is operating a printer that can render in seven dimensions and has created our universe, matter, black holes, spiral nebulae, ferns, moons, galaxies and suns. And you. In conjunction with the Neutrino detector, famously known as “ice cube” and the cosmic ray detector, scientists have strong evidence that everything we have observed to this date is the direct result of a giant machine that is printing the designs of its maker. “To ascertain the intelligence of a being that would imagine and build a machine to print in seven dimensions is impossible” says Paul Sullivan, South Pole Science Manager. No one has ever thought to put together data from three concurrent science experiments until last December when a graduate student toured the facilities at McMurdo Station on her way to South Pole. “What I found was astounding” said Ashaika Jones. “The data from the Cosray detector in McMurdo corresponded almost exactly with the neutrino hits and the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) numbers. And when you look at the current estimates for Dark Matter, then it really starts to make a compelling argument. It all makes sense when we realize that Dark Matter is only the raw material for the printer, like plastic. CMBR is the exhaust of the machine. Neutrinos are the stray, wasted power particles and time is simply the fourth dimension. Can we have some Pink Floyd now, please... To have the capability to print a black hole would require at least seven dimensions of accuracy and thus the current, conservative estimate from astronomers as to the size of the printer. “It could be that the printer has many more dimensions at its disposal” says someone important from NASA. “Why would we think that we are the only thing that has been printed by a such a wonderful contraption?” This new information, while still under confirmation by peer-review, has already thrown the stock-markets into chaos, the Vatican into submission and the general public into silence. The three big questions are now irrelevant and no one is sure where to go next. The "Intelligent Design" wing of the Tea Party is now claiming divine knowledge and is launching education reform and multiple candidates for state and national positions. Global Warming watchdogs have stopped selling carbon credits and Space Exploration has been put on hold indefinitely. Top scientists from all three experiments and collaborators from around the world have issued statements that confirm the findings but urge caution until all the data has been scrutinized. In a way, we have discovered the Aliens, but creatures so remote and large that we would have little chance of communicating or interacting with them. It would be like a bacteria, trying to communicate with us. Not even bacteria, it would be as if a molecule we printed tried to make contact. We would not even think to look for it. Aside from the obvious consequences of our entire known universe being a tchotchke on a shelf, a trivial plaything of some grandly larger universe, life may or may not go on as usual down here on Earth.
Certainly we will all be humbled into a reality very different from the one we now know. Certainly, we will reconsider many things, from epitaphs to charitable contributions to fresh drinking water. We will, most likely, note the day that the mystery was stripped from our psyche and replaced with the certainty of inconsequence. Perhaps we will stop funding science altogether, knowing that we really don't want to know the answers to our questions. So thank you, Ashaika Jones, for your great discovery. I hope you know that your Nobel Prize will be printed on the 7-D printer along with the rest of it and I hope it makes you very, very happy.
This is a TPG Guest-Post from the mind of Terra Sinclair ;)
If you think this guy is a joke after watching the above video consider this - Ray Kurzweil is the current director of engineering at Google!
When he speaks of having gateways to the cloud in our brains I can't help think we are already there in many ways.
Let me tell you what I did today and yesterday on my iPhone. Along my daily bike ride into the lab I saw a beautiful flower. I had not seen this flower yet this season and was unaware of its identity. However, I knew that either my mother or my girlfriend or both would know the name of the mysterious purple flower.
With photo-text on my phone and the three characters - ID? - I was able to procure the information I wanted within seconds - common name Periwinkle, Latin name Vinca minor. While I road my bike past another periwinkle in bloom this morning I again took its photo. This time I was armed with the ID so I posted the photo to twitter and facebook and labeled it with time, date and geo-coordinates. This image has now become a phenological data point in the cloud. I hope it will one day be deposited into a massive data-set and mapped to a model of earth's surface so we can look back at the phenological record as captured by citizen-scientists all over the world. If you are not familiar with the word phenology see my earlier post and video on the topic.
Me on my favorite part of the dam-ride; east side of Horsetooth Reservoir - Fort Collins, CO
Today I woke up in a terrible mood and I had no idea why. The regular tasks like making breakfast, taking out the trash or finding my keys just aggravated me. There was no reason to be in a bad mood. It just seemed to be circumstance; off serotonin levels, bad night sleep, I don't know. When I got on my bike to start the commute to work that bad mood fell away. I feel like a kid and a superhero all at the same time when I'm on a bicycle. There is pure joy in it for me. As my metabolism gets crankin' so do my thoughts. More visions of the illuminated phylogenetic tree burst into my head and plans were made to send out e-mails, assemble a team to make it happen.
While thinking about my affection for the act of riding a bike I recalled reading an amazing passage in Earnest Hemingway's Moveable Feast last year. In it he describes attending the velodrome races in Paris. I recall getting that tingling sensation you get when you hear a moving piece of classical music of see a painting close enough to notice the brush-strokes.
Here it is. I hope it strikes the same chord with you that it did with me.
I have started many stories about bicycle racing but have never written one that is as good as the races are both on the indoor and outdoor tracks and on the roads. But I will get the Velodrome d'Hiver with the smoky light of the afternoon and the high-banked wooden track and the whirring sound the tyres made on the wood as the riders passed, the effort and the tactics as the riders climbed and plunged, each one a part of his machine; I will get the magic of the demi-fond, the noise of the motors with their rollers set out behind them that the entraineurs rode, wearing their heavy crash helmets and leaning backwards in their ponderous leather suits, to shelter the riders who followed them from the air resistance, the riders in their lighter crash helmets bent low over their handlebars, their legs turning the huge gear sprockets and the small front wheels touching the roller behind the machine that gave them shelter to ride in, and the duels that were more exciting than anything, the put-puting of the motorcycles and the riders elbow to elbow and wheel to wheel up and down and around at deadly speed until one man could not hold the pace and broke away and the solid wall of air that he had been sheltered against hit him.
There were so many kinds of racing. The straight sprints raced in heats or in match races where the two riders would balance for long seconds on their machines for the advantage of making the other rider take the lead, and then the slow circling and the final plunge into the driving purity of speed. There were the programmes of the team races of two hours, with a series of pure sprints in their heats to fill the afternoon, the lonely absolute speed events of one man racing an hour against the clock, the terribly dangerous and beautiful races of one hundred kilometres on the big banked wooden five-hundred-metre bowl of the Stade Buffalo, the outdoor stadium at Montrouge where they raced behind big motorcycles, Linart, the great Belgian champion that they called 'the Sioux' for his profile, dropping his head to suck up cherry brandy from a rubber tube that connected with a hot-water bottle under his racing shirt when he needed it towards the end as he increased his savage speed, and the championships of France behind big motors of the six-hundred-and-sixty metre cement track of the Pare du Prince near Auteuil, the wickedest track of all where we saw that great rider Ganay fall and heard his skull crumple under the crash helmet as you crack a hard-boiled egg against a stone to peel it on a picnic. I must write the strange world of the six-day races and the marvels of the road-racing in the mountains. French is the only language it has ever been written in properly and the terms are all French and that is what makes it hard to write. Mike was right about it, there is no need to bet. But that comes at another time in Paris.
I live tweeted this event. See the resulting Storify below. I'm still playing with the best way to deliver a "Storify" via blog post. Let me know what you think of the "slideshow" format. Funny, you can hear iPhones vibrating with tweets during the recording :) Glad to know some of those were me!
