Topic Tuesday #58 2013/08/27 - "Water Clock Running Dry"

Topic Tuesday #58 2013/08/27 - "Water Clock Running Dry"

To return to the core of the 'Can We Fix It?' mission, we have a problem and we need a solution (no pun intended since it's about water). In the United States there is a vast water reserve that is being depleted at an unsustainable rate. The High Plains Aquifer lies beneath eight states from South Dakota to Texas and supplies 30 percent of the nations irrigated groundwater (it is also a key source of potable drinking water in the region). A new study, out of Kansas State University and published online Monday in the journal 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences', has concluded that it will be depleted within 50 years at the current usage rate. David Steward (professor of civil engineering at KSU) said, "It would take an average of 500 to 1,300 years to completely refill the High Plains Aquifer."
This is a complex problem with implications that are stupefying. Bridget Scanlon (Sr. research scientist and lead of 'the Sustainable Water Resources Program' at the University of Texas - Austin) had a few comments about the study.

"We know the aquifer is being depleted, but trying to project long-term is very difficult, because there are climate issues and social aspects that have to be included. Projections are so difficult because I think we're clueless about a lot of things, like extreme weather events. Farmers are trying to make a living, and they're responding to economics," she explained. "Asking them to drastically reduce water might be like asking me to retire now because there are so many unemployed people. This is a very nice study, but we really need to address droughts and socioeconomic issues, and other approaches to figure out the problem, beyond the technical. If we don't know what we're doing, are we just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?"

It's a valid response. It is not dismissive, but urging more inclusion of other factors for strategy, which is a secondary target diverting from the crux of the matter. We are going to run out of water. It's not a matter of 'if'; it's a matter of 'when'.
What can we do? We can continue rationing water supplies. We can improve irrigation methodologies and technologies. At some point, we will need to harvest water from other resources. Desalination and pipelining it to the nation's breadbasket to keep food production going.
What happens when a town runs out of water? The people leave. It's just that simple. If you can't feed the livestock and crops with enough water, they wither and die. Then the farmers leave, and there is a food shortage and then costs rise as demand is shifted. Economies are drastically affected in our global community by a little thing like a drought. It is a fragile situation and deserves attention while there is still a resource to utilize. And... I haven't touched on "Fracking" yet.
Any ideas? Can We Fix It?

Topic Tuesday #56 2013/08/13 - "Knowing Your Audience"

Topic Tuesday #56 2013/08/13 - "Knowing Your Audience"

I have been, recently, coerced into thinking about entrepreneurial ventures. I have had owned businesses before and found I lacked some of the ability to sell the product, especially when it was a more esoteric property; myself. I just realized what it was that I was having trouble with, and it isn't going to make me any happier moving forward. I was playing to the wrong audience.

When there is a product, it has an intrinsic and esoteric value. We can equate it down to very substantial terms. Replacement value. That term can also bend into the realm of the vague and emotional too as it is human nature to displace emotions onto objects and sometimes personify them. Boats are always women. Cars are feminine, while trucks are masculine.  Once you name something... Well I am getting ahead of myself.
Replacement Value: How much did the item cost; to make, to assemble, to deliver, to paint, to store, etc. These are direct monetary measures.
Emotional Value: How much do you have invested into the object, as measured by; age, sentimentality, sweat equity, heirloom, quality, the general perceived worth.

Let's take a piece of furniture as an example. A Chippendale Chair. Thomas Chippendale original was

manufactured out of a particular three species of mahogany from Cuba, Honduras, and Dominican Republic, that is now extinct; it allowed for the finest details to be carved into the work. An original in excellent condition would sell today at auction for several thousand dollars, but only if authentic. Today, an imitation done in the style popularized by Chippendale has all the same form and function, but not the same wood, nor by the same hands, if hands even touched them, would go for a few hundred. The audience separation is clear. The tier that can appreciate the form and function of the chair, but cannot afford the original, buys the knock off, or worse, only looks at museum pieces. The poorest tier, will sit on a box, which serves its purpose equally as well as a Chippendale, I might add.

That was a product, but what of a service? Something with very little tangibleness.
Fixing a computer. Your laptop got a virus.
You take it to the big box store while a technician in unflattering clothes runs some diagnostics for a modest fee of $75 bucks, and then tries to sell you a warranty, and a new machine and a new hard drive, more ram, a laptop bag and an extra mouse, a USB hub, a Router and somehow... a new cell phone? But yes, the laptop is repaired, and you avoided the upsells.
OR:
You take your laptop to a buddy and for a case of beer or other such exchanged good or service they remove the offending software and have the decency to not look at your browser history. (That's worth an extra beer by the way).
Both have given the same level of service, in removing the virus, because your buddy does know what they're doing.
Here is where things get a little odd. Your buddy doesn't want a good or service, they want some cash because they have bills to pay.  Would you give them the same $75 bucks that you would have to the folks at the big box upsell-o-rama? In my experience, the answer is a flabbergasted no. Not only that but in my experience, I had someone cancel a check on me.  What I am pointing at here is that for some reason the value of the service suffers dramatically when it hits the wrong audience. As an example a former client of mine hear my price and gave me more because it was worth it to them. A buddy of mine made me feel bad for asking for gas money.

An individual cannot compete on the price that a mega conglomerate big box can get away with. An individual (read: entrepreneur) also should not try to. If your customer only wants to know how much it costs, then perhaps you are wasting your energy.

Know your audience and do not cow-tow to the ones that do not appreciate quality service and product.

Have you seen this disparity in goods and service prices? Have you ever tried to sell a craft and someone offered you $2 for nearly 4 days worth of your work? How do we get them to understand, or do we just say, "No, you can't buy it from me, but you can get something like it at the thrift store."

This can also be expanded to Science. Do laymen know the real value of the Large Hadron Collider? Do laymen understand that for every dollar that NASA spends it generates roughly 3 in return to various other sectors? (This is a conservative ROI as the real ROI figures are nearly impossible to accurately be determined.) Simply, no. They are the wrong audience for big science. Don't get me wrong here; that doesn't mean that they are uninterested. It means we must make them understand.

Topic Tuesday #55 2013/08/06 - "STEM or STEAM?"

Topic Tuesday #55 2013/08/06 - "STEM or STEAM?"

STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. 

You may also hear the use of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, ARTS, and Mathematics).

The National Science Foundation (NSF) uses a broader category to define STEM subjects which includes subjects in the fields of Chemistry, Computer and Information Technology Science, Engineering, Geosciences, Life Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, Physics and Astronomy, Social Sciences (Anthropology, Economics, Psychology and Sociology), and STEM Education and Learning Research.
Lately STEM programs have been in the news and in politics while talking about the competitive ability of the United States with a modern industrial and technology complex like China. Job creation (always a hot topic) drew focus on STEM education as a platform for 21st century job growth.  The Department of Commerce calls careers in STEM fields are some of the best paying and have the greatest potential for job growth. 

STEM is not just a US centric program topic. The UK has also been engaged in building interest and fostering early education in STEM fields. 

Feb 4th 2013 saw House Resolution 51 for the 113th 1st session of Congress. It's short, so I will include it here. If you do not want to read it, in summary, it was to encourage STEM and STEAM program growth. It was referred to two committees (H. Education and the Workforce, and H. Science, Space, and Technology committees) and nothing further has been accomplished at the time of this post.

http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-resolution/51

HOUSE RESOLUTION 51 113th Congress

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that adding art and design into Federal programs that target the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields encourages innovation and economic growth in the United States. 

Whereas the innovative practices of art and design play an essential role in improving Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education and advancing STEM research; Whereas art and design provide real solutions for our everyday lives, distinguish United States products in a global 

marketplace, and create opportunity for economic growth; 

Whereas artists and designers can effectively communicate complex data and scientific information to multiple stakeholders and broad audiences; Whereas the tools and methods of design offer new models 

for creative problem-solving and interdisciplinary partnerships in a changing world; 

Whereas artists and designers are playing an integral role in the development of modern technology; 

Whereas artists and designers are playing a key role in manufacturing; and Whereas May would be an appropriate month to designate as ‘‘STEM-to-STEAM Month’’: Now, therefore, be it 

Resolved, That the House of Representatives— 

(1) recognizes the importance of art and design in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields; 

(2) supports the designation of ‘‘STEM-to-STEAM Month’’; 

(3) encourages the inclusion of art and design in the STEM fields during reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act; 

(4) encourages the inclusion of art and design in the STEM fields during reauthorization of the Higher Education Act; and 

(5) encourages the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of the Department of Education, the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Director of the National Science Foundation to develop a STEM to STEAM Council representative of artists, designers, education and business leaders, and Federal agencies in order to facilitate a comprehensive approach to incorporate art and design into the Federal STEM programs.

Some sentiments from youths about STEM from http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/03/28/students-speak-power-stem

"STEM holds the key to changing the world for the better" - Kensen Shi, 17, A&M Consolidated High School, TX

"STEM provides a link between learning and doing, tying knowledge to experimentation and real-world problems" - Adam Bowman, 17, Montgomery Bell Academy, TN

"Pursuing STEM at any age allows you to discover and answer fundamental questions about the universe, from creating frisbee shooting robots to studying the causes behind cancer" - Lillian Chin, 18, The Westminster Schools, GA

"STEM is cool because it provides opportunities to develop new technologies to improve the quality of life" - Kelly Zhang, 17, College Preparatory School, CA

What benefits can you think of that could emerge from heightened STEM programs? Are you seeing STEM programs in schools near you?

Topic Tuesday #50 2013/07/02 - "CHARGE!!!"

Topic Tuesday #50 2013/07/02 - "CHARGE!!!"

CHARGing you batteries is not the easiest thing to do some days. It gets especially difficult when you do something unusual. For instance you may have seen the MIT/Wilson Solar Grill.

This implementation is unique in the way is stores energy, which is certainly different from the way a cell phone or laptop stores power. This configuration (which has not actually been constructed to my knowledge) uses a fresnel lens to magnify and focus the rays of the sun to melt a lithium nitrate substrate. The melted lithium nitrate, due to its phase change reaction, is able to release its thermal energy for longer periods of time and at higher temperatures than other methods up to now. Heat is then redistributed through convection, which allows for outdoor cooking and heating homes. This method is referred to as "latent heat storage".

Obviously this is a unique application that requires a specific set of criteria. This could also be used to provide electric power or boil water for steam applications. 

Peltier element

Remember any time you have a change of temperature you can utilize that to create power as the heat is exchanged and returns to a neutral state. Peltier coolers use power to create heat, which in turn creates a cold side. With an application such as this, derivatives of that technology can turn a heat source, into power. If done creatively, a refrigerator too. 

Batteries, and power sources in general, are complicated things. The design may be simplistic, but usually a power supply is designed to fit an application.  Some things to consider:

Capacity (Amp Hours)

Weight 

Size (Physical Dimensions)

Discharge Rate (Time to Empty at designed load)

Charge Rate (Time to Charge, when under load and not under load)

Charge Cycles (number of charge/discharge cycles before needing to replace)

Operating temperature range (Affects charge and discharge rates. Batteries can catch fire and explode under the "right" circumstances, like being embedded in a cooking appliance like the solar grill)

Architecture of storage media: Lead-acid? NiCd? NiMH? NiZn? AgZN? NaS? Lithium ion? - and so forth.

Longevity and recyclability:

Obviously what the battery is made of has far reaching implications for the ability to recycle them. Lithium is rare, expensive, and in high demand. Lead Acid (car, marine, UPS batteries) are low cost, high weight, and readily recycled into new batteries given the proper facilities.

So, thank your local engineers for building all this stuff we take for granted all the time, and keep the innovation alive by encouraging our youngsters to... play with electricity, fire, water, light... and anything that interests them. Who knows what problem they might solve.

Topic Tuesday #47 2013/06/11 - "Big Brother / Big Data"

Topic Tuesday #47 2013/06/11 - "Big Brother / Big Data"

Orwell would be pointing a malnourished finger at all of us and chanting, "I told you so".
I don't go into the dystopian conspiracy theories, but as they are part of our culture, they still must be examined. Today the magnifying glass is on "Big Data". You may have heard the term, and if you haven't, you will.
Wikipedia summarized it thusly:
Big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis, and visualization. The trend to larger data sets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to "spot business trends, determine the quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions.

Big Data is just that, BIG. Veritable truckloads of data available on demand and manipulatable to yield a variety of correlations. It's enough to give you the heebie-jeebies, but honestly, it is unavoidable.
Big Data is a side effect of our increasingly technological society. We have devices that generate information that can be captured and logged. Most of it is innocuous. Like temperatures, wind speed, and rainfall.  
We take weather measurements every few seconds (this would be a data set, like a spreadsheet) in thousands of weather stations all over the world (a larger data group, a collection of spreadsheets). Now imagine that you have all this information collected from all the weather stations all over, and now you can see patterns. With patterns you can make predictions. Voila, you have a rudimentary weather model and can start to predict storm patterns.
Now extrapolate that out further. Do you have a credit card? Congratulations you have your own data set of purchasing patterns! This information is stored and used to determine fraud patterns. If suddenly you are outside your normal spending patterns or regions, you may be flagged with a fraud alert, keeping you safe. The dark side of the credit card industry is they have a tendency to sell/share that information with marketers and even law enforcement. In this way your habits become a recognizable pattern. Patterns can be identified, and some are as unique as a finger print.
It is safe to assume that if your have a device that generates a loggable data set, you can be sure someone somewhere is collecting it, and someone else wants it for some reason. Some will want to make life easier for you, others for themselves. Some will profit from it, and others will suffer. And I haven't even got into facial recognition! 

Topic Tuesday #42 2013/05/07 - "Disruptive Tech"

Topic Tuesday #42 2013/05/07 - "Disruptive Tech"

I love technology. I love history. I love science and science fiction (the inspiration for more of the former). The last few days have seen a turn in the direction of what was thought of just at the top of the year as pure science fiction. Well, when I say thought of, I mean all but those with their eyes on a gun manufacturer here in the United States. Defence Distributed, and its front man Cody Wilson, have dreamt up a cottage industry in disruption. Cody, over the last year, has designed and now succeeded in building a fully 3D printed firearm called the Liberator. It's designed as a homage to the single shot weapons that were air dropped over France during WWII. Besides that, the weapon is all plastic save the nail used as a firing pin. The plans have been released to the wild. Anyone can make one of these if they so desired.
And that is outstanding.
Don't think so? Let me explain my stance.
Freedom.
Oh... You probably want more of a platform than that. OK, look at it this way, this is a technology that cannot be stopped. It cannot be regulated to the governments liking and never will be without massive outrage. This is manufacturing in your garage. Dream it one day, make it the next. You don't need permission. You just need the know how, the raw materials and the tools to put them together. Cody made a gun. Will this gun be used to hurt someone? Almost certainly. This is a logical progression to this kind of device (3D printer). Think for a moment as I stroll down technology of years past lane. When Gutenberg and his movable type printing press came on the scene the scribes were out of a job, and it was revolution in the streets (Martin Luther ring a bell?). When the cassette tape was released and you could record onto it easily, the Recording Industry lost their minds. When the VCR came out the Motion Picture Industry went nuts. CD Burners, DVD Burners, BlueRay burners MP3, MP4, JPEG things that can make a copy of something without the originator getting their due, will always be disruptive. I recall that digital copiers were so good at color reproduction that they were used in counterfeiting operations. The Liberator is a statement and a loud extension of this phenomenon. This says, "You can't stop the future. This is the information age, and now we can make use of that information - whatever form it takes."
It is a shake up. It is a wake up call. What that call sounds like changes depending on who hears it, but really it's about freedom.

Personally, I knew this was coming, and making my own gun if just not my cup of tea. Personally, I would rather be the toy maker or make replacement parts and mockups for my own projects. But that is what most people will do. Again, take the internet as a case in point. When it was started, there was no security, no anti virus, no pictures... It was innocent, with innocent ideals. None of those early engineers considered that it would be used for terrorism, free speech, porn, dating, and social networking, or even voice and video. It proved to be disruptive. In a very short time, look how far it has come! Now, where will 3D printing go as the technology becomes less and less expensive?  In less than 10 years, I can see the personal 3D printer all over. Remember inkjet printers were very expensive when they first came on the scene; now they are practically disposable. The printer they used for the gun, was $10,000 on ebay second hand. You can get a MakerBot for considerably less. http://store.makerbot.com/ And I encourage you to go make something.

What will your imagination make next? Will regulation over these devices stifle creativity and rapid prototyping with red tape? Will it just be impossible to regulate, like desktop printing and copy machines?
What do you think?

Topic Tuesday #34 2013/03/12 - "Going Paperless"

Topic Tuesday #34 2013/03/12 - "Going Paperless"

The modern information age has presented a few problems our forebearers did not consider.
In a day (24 hour period):
If you read the newspapers you see around 30 headlines, with the attributing article.
If you then use the internet for news, you are likely to pass by over 300 news articles, with various links to other articles and source material and pictures and media and blah blah blah. 

Carry on to email and search and other various tasks; on average somewhere around 200 web pages will be encountered.
With all this, daily we encounter roughly 500,000 words. To put that in context; Leo Tulstoys's 'War & Peace' was only 460,000 words.
So we have a plethora of information at our fingertips and clouding our minds, our inboxes, and our desks.

What do we do with all this? How can we manage all this information?
The simplest way is filters. A way to index and search for what you want out of all your sources. The problem with this is that we can't index paper by much more than some basic keywords, like author, subject, date, etc. The full text remains hidden to us. Solution: Going paperless.

How do we do that?
It's a good question and one that is still very much in debate. I have seen in my daily work that most "paperless offices" actually generate MORE paper than they did before they were paperless. Doesn't make much sense, until you add the human quality of mistrust of new technology into the mix. In a few more years, the hard copies will start to become less and less. Until such time, they do have the advantage, at the end of the day, of being able to search all those papers virtually.

What does it take?
The Source Material, An imaging unit to make the source digital, A place to store the files it creates, A way to recognize the text and make it searchable and editable, Time, Effort, and An organizational plan.

You have the stuff you want to scan, that's easy to identify. Now what?
What will you use to make an image?
I have taken pictures with my phone, used a flatbed scanner, a digital copier, and sadly, hand transcription back into a document. Once you have the image then you need a program to turn the print into editable and searchable text. This is called OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Most scanners will come with one that will perform this task, like Abby Finereader. Some are better than others; you have been warned. Many also come with document management software, like PaperPort. Others will have complete package solutions that you will either love or hate, like NeatDesk. You need to be cognisant that you will be living with the imaging solutions for years to come. Many scanners outlive their computer counterparts by a decade. I recommend you select a manufacturer that has a good track record for updating drivers quickly and not abandoning products. Read the reviews. Think ahead. Think of what you would like to have the ability to do.

That said, I have some more genealogy documents to get scanned, and I'm going to buy one of these solutions and cross my fingers that the pile of papers I have, soon becomes a mass of easily indexed 1s and 0s.

What solution have you tried?

Fujitsu ScanSnap iX50

Epson WorkForce GTS50

Brother ADS2000

Xerox XDM1525-WU DocuMate 152

NeatDesk

Topic Tuesday #26 2013/01/15 - "Keeping Your Sanity & Your Files"

Topic Tuesday #26 2013/01/15 - "Keeping Your Sanity & Your Files"

About two years ago I suffered a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) failure. This was a particularly large array, at 14TB, and I was grief stricken for quite some time. What really ate at me was that I wasn't even sure what I had lost. One might think that a blessing, but I am cursed with the unknown loss. I have grieved and moved on. I rebuilt my RAID and subsequently swore never to have such a catastrophe again. It was about this time that I was listening to one of the TWiT Podcasts, Macbreak Weekly and Alex Lindsey over at Pixel Corps was singing the praises of a Drobo disk array. That was nice and all, as Alex is known for buying the nicest and most expensive of toys, but there was a reason he was talking about backup. Photographers, in particular digital media artists, have a great deal of unique intellectual property that needs to be kept safe. Leo Laporte (of TWiT network, and of Screen Savers and Call for Help fame) mentioned the 3-2-1 backup strategy. Peter Krogh in his book The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers, came upon the notion and it goes like this:
3 – Your important files should exist in three different places. This could be your computer, your spouses computer, an external drive, a burned DVD, a remote backup, a friend’s house, whatever. Just three distinct copies of the files.
2 – Those files should be on at least two different types of media. Media can be hard drive, DVD, memory card or stick, or even original paper or film.
1 – At least one of those copies should be maintained off-site. That is away from the site of the original. Preferably in a different city or state. Think about common natural disasters. Off-site should be out of reach of those natural disasters.

Another way to look at it is, one copy of anything, might as well not exist.

FYI-Hard drive platters are made of glass.

So what do we do? Backing up is not as easy as we would like it to be. We don't want to think about it!
I took the approach of spending large amounts of money on a big expensive infrastructure of RAID drives and that still didn't help me. Anyone that backed up their data to an external hard drive and had it fail on them will feel my pain, to some degree. So I rebuilt my RAID, with better knowledge from the school of hard knocks under my belt. That takes care of some of it, since my RAID will survive drive failure.
My RAID will not survive a flood or other act of nature of vandalism or theft... So I need to have an offsite solution. In the old days we would burn copies of the important things on to optical storage (CD/DVD) or magnetic tape (DAT) and send them off to a friend or relative, safe deposit box, or secure storage facility like Iron Mountain or Recall.
Now thanks to high speed internet and cloud storage prices coming down we have more options, and new ones are popping up all the time. I looked at several, and the easiest to use is Carbonite.com. They have the simplest interface and reasonable rates, but they do not pass the Trust No One (TNO) security model. If you are not concerned with someone at the company being able to access your data for law enforcement, they are a great bet. I have many computers and wanted a more economical model to work with them. Crashplan.com has a family plan that will let you backup 10 computers for the same fee and works on Linux, Mac and PC. If you are not concerned with TNO, you can set the standard password and access your files on the go via your phones and tablets, just like Carbonite. If you are concerned, you can set a private key and then the data is encrypted before it leaves your computer, safe and sound. You can also backup to one of your other computers or a friend for free, which is a thing a beauty.
Another subscription based backup is Mozy. Mozy is cross platform, but I am not sure about its security model as I have no experience with it.
If you don't like to pay monthly for SaaS (Software as a Service), there are two that are buy once-use forever. On the Mac side there is ARQ Backup from Haystack software. On the PC side is Cloudberry. They both support Amazon S3 & Amazon's new very affordable Glacier long term storage product and are TNO compliant. They both have lots of other bells and whistles too so go check them out.
If security really is no concern, there are many more options. Google Drive, Microsoft Sky Drive, Box.com, Dropbox.com, and many more. These offer an amazing array of free and scalable storage sync option. Anything in one of their folders will go to their servers (which they have access to your files through) and whatever machines you choose to sync to. Great if you have low security things you want to work on in multiple places. Available in these services for affordable prices are things like undelete, multiple file versioning, and in the case of Google drive; simultaneous collaborative editing. The cloud is powerful, just watch your butt on the security you give up for all the cool features.

Bottom line, all of the services I mentioned will fix you up very well for a solid backup where your files are backed up automatically, off site and since you have a copy, and they have a copy (and a service level agreement to keep your files safe and backed up) you can consider their backup solutions for your data as part of your own. Just... Don't keep all those baby pictures on that portable drive on the edge of your desk and consider them "backed up" when the cat knocks it off onto the tile floor and it skids across the floor under the foot of someone that then trips and falls into the water cooler spilling 5 gallons of refreshing spring water all over your precious 1s and 0s. I want you to be able to buy me a beer when you remember that all of your eggs are not in that one soggy basket.

Topic Tuesday #20 2012/12/04 - "Are we alone?"

Topic Tuesday #20 2012/12/04 - "Are we alone?"

One of the pages I follow posted a graphic of the radio signal bubble from Earth. This struck me as a moment of possible revelation. "The first AM broadcast was on Christmas Eve, 1906, and Hitler’s broadcasting of the 1936 Olympics is regarded as the first signal powerful enough to be carried into space - which is a rather disturbing thought." Since 1936, Hitler's voice has been traversing space. At the speed of light, the 1936 Olympic introduction speech has only traveled, 76 light years. Proxima Centauri, our closest celestial neighbor star, is located only 4.243 light-years from the Sun. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Therefore 60x60x24x365=seconds in a year 31,536,000 x 186,000 =
5,865,696,000,000 miles in a lightyear. x4.243 = 24,888,148,128,000 miles to the Alpha Centauri Cluster. We have not detected life there. So the old axiom, 'If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound?" comes to mind, though more importantly, does it matter if it did?

The trouble with the cosmos is that it is so very large and we... are not. Everything is scaled up. The most precious of these scalings, is that of time. We have discovered EXO-Planets, worlds of other stars. We detect them crossing in front of their stars. But I digress which is easy to do with this topic. To think that no other life has formed in a universe large enough to have more stars (with planets) than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of our pale blue dot, is either terribly egotistical or simply short sighted. I know nothing for sure, but I have plenty of reasons to believe we are not alone. So what's the real question? The question is does it matter. Then the complex answer, yes and no. It matters because we don't like to be alone. It matters because so much of our own sensibilities are shrouded in the arrogance that it was all made for us. Statistics lean towards there being other life in the galaxy, and in the universe at large. Why it doesn't matter: because that alien species might not be there anymore. Consider our own infancy as a species. We are a very young species; when we talk of geological ages, humanities recorded history is less than a 1,000th of a percent of the age of just the Earth. In less time than Hitlers voice has been traveling outward, we have been on the verge of destruction of our entire species and most of the other inhabitants of this world, countless times. It's easy to look at the Cuban Missile Crisis and see that we were close to annihilation This distinction is important. We look to the heavens and ask if we are alone. A young boy sits and reads of Superman coming from Krypton, while global super powers glower over a table perched on mutually assured destruction. If there is other life out there, would it survive long enough to ask the same questions as the boy? Will be have a planet to visit when the Grexian's that live 300 light years away start listening to Elvis Presley decide we are worth a closer investigation? At the speed of light, it will take them 300 years to come pay us a visit. The question is, will we humanity exist long enough to not walk alone in the universe? Or will we become nothing more than a disembodied voice traveling out forever?
At any rate, the answer is not as important as the question: "Are we alone?".
What do you think?

Thanks to https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLoveScience & http://zidbits.com/2011/07/how-far-have-radio-signals-traveled-from-earth/

Topic Tuesday #11 2012/10/02 "Oh the Humanity?"

Topic Tuesday #11 2012/10/02 "Oh the Humanity???"

In todays world we continue to push the limits of science. What tends to follow the science - is the philosophy...
Today, I want to look at what it takes to be human.

March 2011: Enter a dying man, Craig Lewis, 55, Dying from amyloidosis. Craig had 12-24 hours to live when his wife Linda okayed an experimental procedure by two innovated doctors at the Texas Heart Institute. Dr. Billy Cohn and Dr. Bud Frazier, successfully replaced his heart with a continuous flow pump. Two venturi like pump motors served as a replacement for the failed muscle. There was a catch though; Craig no longer had a pulse. EKG was flatlined. Linda Lewis said, "I listened and it was a hum, which was amazing. He didn't have a pulse." The technology passed multiple animal trials and it certainly passed this test.

I've included the short documentary on it below.

Heart Stop Beating | Jeremiah Zagar from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo
As technology changes us, as we lose those telltale markers that we are alive, how will we adapt? Our minds are a series of electrical impulses and it's a trivial jump to reason that one day we will "backup" our consciousness, and perhaps be downloaded back into a new or greatly repaired body. How will humanity deal, with immortality? Will we still be human? With no need of an afterlife, will we need religion?