In the late 1960’s, former United States President Jimmy Carter, reported seeing an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO). Today unexplained objects, or phenomena, seen in the skies, are referred to as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP). Carter, however, was not expecting to participate in any historic close encounter of the third kind:
While puzzled by the object and its origins, Carter himself later said that, while he had considered the object to be a UFO — on the grounds it was unexplained — his knowledge of physics had meant he had not believed himself to be witnessing an alien spacecraft.
Some people may be unhappy that Carter allowed physics to get in the way of a good story. Because wouldn’t it be great if we could whiz about the galaxy in a vessel the size of the average suburban house, which every other intelligence in the galactic neighbourhood seems capable of, except us.
House-size flying saucers defy the laws of physics, because, you know, their builders seemingly are able to defy the laws of physics. It would however be awesome to zap back and forth to say the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, in a house-size vessel that could travel (presumably/somehow) faster than the speed of light. At least I’m not breaking the laws of dreaming there.
But if close-to-light-speed interstellar travel, together with the possibly of extraterrestrials visiting Earth (from the far side of the Milky Way, no less) intrigues you, read this Twitter/X post, by American physicist Casey Handmer. Visitors from civilisations, from maybe fifty thousand light years across the galaxy, may be mere centuries away from reaching our solar system:
Let’s say that any civilization that can figure out interstellar travel can develop from slow to 99% of the speed of light in 500 years, and they’re coming from the other side of the galaxy — 50,000 years ago. By the time the light of their first (presumably highly energetic, fireworksy) relativistic travel reaches us, they’re already 99% of the way here – just 500 years to roll out the welcome mat.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, perhaps? Manuel Moreale writing the other week about blog post comments:
I’m not a fan of comments in general and I think commenting on something should be done in one of two ways: 1. Privately via email or via direct messaging. 2. Publicly by posting a reply on your own website.
Back in the day, when the first inceptions of disassociated came online in the late 90’s, these were just about the only options for communicating with a personal website owner. There were of course guestbooks, which, contrary to popular belief, are still alive and well. Maybe I’ll bring one back here.
But if you wanted to respond to something someone had written in their online journal, writing a post in reply, on your own website, was the way to go. Blog post comments were unheard of in the nineties, as indeed, for the most part, was the term blog. But posts-in-response were a great way to build rapport with other website owners, network, and even collaborate.
You never knew what might come of some of these ongoing reply-to-something-someone-had-written-on-their-personal-websites confabs.
For a group of mainly Sydney based web creatives, including me, Jen Leheny, and Justin Fox, (sorry, I can’t find websites for the others), the result was the formation of the Australian INfront. And for almost twenty years from 1999, INfront brought Australian web design front and centre globally.
Blog comments were also a great way to build rapport and network, but I almost think the case can be made that they spelt the end of the personal website. Now that readers of a website/blog could respond to a post in the same place, many people no longer needed their own website to do so.
The likes of Twitter, when it arrived, a microblogging platform, where users only needed to create an account to get posting, hastened the decline of the personal website. But, thankfully, nothing resulted, so far, in their extinction.
Post comments are not unheard of here, but I rarely enable them. And that’s because I’ve long believed the best way to comment on something you’ve seen here is to either contact me, or, preferably, write a post on your own website.
Everyone has a book in them, or so they say. It’s a pithy turn of phrase, one that’s possibly inspired the writing of a billion plus manuscripts. Slightly less inspiring though, is the revelation that ninety-six percent of books sell less than one thousand copies.
Everyone has a book in them, but how many readers of that work might they have? I’m not saying you shouldn’t write the book you’ve always wanted to, after all, not everyone wants to see their work published. This in spite of the sometimes years of toil that might go into the writing.
For some people, I’m sure, writing a manuscript is an end in itself. But it’s interesting. I looked up the phrase everyone has a book in them to find out more about it. I hear the words frequently, and have uttered them a number of times myself, but I was curious to learn who coined the phrase.
As I discovered though, the actual quote is everyone has a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay. So usually only part of the phrase is in common use. A little like Albert Einstein’s oft quoted words, imagination is more important than knowledge.
It seems everyone has a book in them, etc., is considered one of late British/American writer Christopher Hitchens’ witticisms, but there’s a bit more to the story. Now that we’ve cleared that up, back to the question at hand. If you have a book in you, should you write it?
I say of course you should. Why keep it yourself? Self-publish if need be. But you’ll need to temper your expectations in regards to how many people might buy it.
A few days ago the United States Congress passed a law stipulating that video-sharing social network TikTok either be sold by Chinese owned company ByteDance, or face being banned in America. It seems like drastic move, but American lawmakers have their reasons.
The proposal has been on the table for some time, and when I heard about it early last year, I wondered what might happen to the American TikTok influencers, many of whom make a living through their activities on the app. I guess we’re going to find out.
Apparently nearly half of the US population are TikTok members, and a reasonable number of them would be deriving some sort of income from it. But I doubt US TikTok influencers could launch a campaign to have the law overturned, by encouraging voter turnout for a particular political party.
The law had strong bi-partisan support from both the Democrat and Republican parties, so the outcome of upcoming elections in the US would probably make no difference. From the point of view (I should say POV) of American TikTok members who livelihoods depend on the app, I hope a buyer favourable to the US government comes along, if that means TikTok continues operating in America.
Light may have an infinite lifetime. Who’d have thought? Even after the eventual, possible, heat death of the universe, photons may live on as beacons of light in an impossibly dark cosmos… maybe:
One such candidate for a truly stable entity is the photon: the quantum of light. All of the electromagnetic radiation that exists in the Universe is made up of photons, and photons, as far as we can tell, have an infinite lifetime. Does that mean that light will truly live forever?
Sounds like life everlasting to me. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? If we could, somehow, infuse our consciousness, our living essence, into photons, could we — to lift a line from the Space Odyssey novels written by Arthur C. Clarke — preserve our “thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light?”
If so, we could then dispense with the botox regimens, followed by cryonics. This is an idea totally worth looking into.
Let’s not forget Portrait of a Lady on Fire either. But what puzzles me is the inclusion of Before Sunrise. After all, did we not eventually change our memory of that day? Unless we’re looking at the story in isolation, and ignoring the sequels, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight.
On the subject of Before Midnight, it has been eleven years since its release. The Before films were coming along every nine years, but the main players, namely Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, and series director Richard Linklater, were unsure whether to proceed with a fourth instalment.
So called “pay or ok” consent models allow social media users to access services such as Facebook or Instagram, without adverts, if they’re prepared to pay a subscription. Otherwise they’ll see ads, possibly targeted ads, at some point, and obviously be OK with that. At face value, this seems reasonable. There’s no such as a free lunch. If people want to continue using big social networks, they either need to pay to do so, or accept the presence of ads.
But regulators at the European Union’s (EU) European Data Protection Board (EDPB) aren’t happy with the “pay or ok” arrangement. In particular, the idea of targeted advertising. Long story short, to place targeted ads in a social media user’s content feed, it’s necessary to track that user. This is something the EDPB objects to.
Instead, they’d prefer a third option. Freely available access to social media services, but with non-targeted advertising. This might be akin to radio and television advertising, where a more blanket approach is taken to ad placement. As far as the social networks go, this sort of strategy could prove to be hit and miss though. One or two revenue generating ads may be relevant to a user, but not enough to be viable.
I didn’t want to write in-depth today on the topic of online tracking, whether consensual or not, but a point John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball, made last week caught my eye. According to Gruber, the majority of EU residents, when it comes to the likes of Facebook and Instagram at least, prefer free access to these social networks, and are prepared to see targeted ads in return.
Gruber paraphrases late Apple founder Steve Jobs in making the point that people are smart, and perfectly capable of making informed choices when it comes to — in this instance — accepting targeted ads on their social media services. Gruber suggests regulatory bodies such as the EDPB believe many people are not so switched on though:
But Jobs was right too: people are smart, and they can — and should be allowed to — make their own decisions. And many people are more comfortable with sharing data than others. The privacy zealots leading this crusade in the EU do not think people are smart, and do not think they should be trusted to make these decisions for themselves.
That seems reasonable. Or is it? Jack Baty suggests the problem isn’t to do with how smart people are, but rather their general lack of concern. Particularly when it comes to comes to opting into targeted ads, in exchange for a payment-free social media experience.
I wouldn’t say I’m a zealot, but I think John mis-characterizes people here. It’s not that people aren’t smart, it’s that they don’t care. If we can’t get them to care about doing things that might be harmful to themselves or others, maybe the government should step in and care for them.
Baty’s point raises the question: how much thought are people really giving to some of the decisions they make? Do we indeed need the support of lawmakers because we may not be fully aware of what we’re agreeing to sometimes? It’s a pertinent point. For my part, I know I have, on occasion, clicked the “agree” button when presented with a text-wall of small print, so I can gain access to an app or service quickly.
Updates to the operating system of my smartphone are one example of what I mean. I try to skim read what I’m being asked to agree to, often numerous pages of legalese, but I can imagine many time-poor people would baulk at the prospect. Particularly those who need to use their phone urgently. And in doing so, not fully reading what they’re agreeing to, what tribulations might they be setting themselves up for later on?
People probably aren’t asked to read voluminous terms and conditions when agreeing to targeted ads appearing in their content streams, but are they aware of just what they’re signing away? The exact degree of privacy they might be forfeiting? Targeted ads can only be generated by tracking, but just how deep does this tracking go?
Mohamed Aboelez recently learned his roommate, a person he shared a residence with, had died. But no one called to say so, instead Aboelez read the news on Facebook:
I froze. I hadn’t seen Paul in about two days. I had assumed he’d been with his friend. But not dead. Of course not dead.
What a terrible thing to happen, and what an awful way to find out: through social media.
If I found out today, via social media, that someone I lived with, in the same apartment/house had died, something would be seriously wrong. People would be asking, quite rightly, what planet I thought I was living on.
But dial back to my days of share house living, and that may not be quite so bizarre. I resided in a number of share houses, and it was not unusual for housemates to be absent for several days at a time. Nor was it unusual — in the normal course — for anyone to say they’d be away either.
It wasn’t that anyone was being aloof or evasive, because often their absences were not — initially at least — intentional. Someone would leave the house in the morning, likely planning to return later that day, but end up getting, perhaps, side tracked. And remain that way for a day. Or three.
Back then, I think someone would need to go unseen for a good week, or their share of the rent had gone unpaid, before concerns were raised. But there was also the point that determining a period of an absence could be tricky. Let me illustrate. Flatmate A is away for two days. I (unknowingly) end up being away for three days afterwards, but leave before Flatmate A comes back in. When I return three days later, Flatmate A has been in the house for a few days, but again gone walkabout for a few days, by the time I arrive back. And so on.
Twenty-somethings, hey?
Unless Flatmate A left all the dishes unwashed, or some such, I might have no idea they’d been back. Equally, I’d have no way of knowing that they hadn’t. Confusing, much? To make matters (sort of) worse, we often didn’t have each other’s mobile numbers, or emails, because, you know, there was no need: we lived in the same house. We could obviously communicate face-to-face.
In these sorts of circumstances then, it may not be entirely strange to learn that a housemate had met with misfortune, on a social media channel. In my case though, all, thankfully, turned out to be well. My flatmates were absent precisely because they wanted to be. Sadly, this was not the case for Aboelez’s roommate.
Anyone checking into their Instagram or Facebook pages in the last few days, will have no doubt noticed the presence of Meta’s AI “assistant”, named, um, Meta AI.
The tech giant said on Thursday that it is bringing Meta AI to all of its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, calling it “the most intelligent AI assistant you can use for free.” The AI assistant can be used in platform feeds, chats, and search. Meta also said the AI assistant is faster at generating high quality images, and can “change with every few letters typed,” so users can see it generating their image.
Awesome.
On the Instagram iPhone app (mine at least), the search bar-like assistant hovers at the top of the search page, partly blocking content it sits above. Annoying. No, hold that, not annoying. Since the “default” content displayed on the search page is Meta “suggested” (for want of a better word) content, based on what they think you want to see — which just about couldn’t be any further from the mark — the AI bar actually helps obscure some of this rubbish.
Accordingly, I’d be in favour of a full screen size AI assistant, blocking all the useless meme-like junk appearing there. That would be “the most intelligent AI assistant you can use for free.”
A conquering interstellar civilisation could bring the entire galaxy under its yoke in about a million years, assuming said civilisation could traverse the Milky Way at about ten percent the speed of light. I expect it’d be a multi-generational undertaking.
It’d also be up to those who conceived of the original vision to conquer the galaxy, to find a way to keep their descendants motivated. A million years is a long time.
This might be one reason why we’ve not encountered any extra-terrestrial lifeforms so far. No one has the energy to invade the whole galaxy, so they’ve stayed in their corner, undetected. But there is another possibility. The all-powerful invaders are being picky.
They’re only acquiring sections of the Milky Way, and the planets in those regions, that are of some sort of value to them. Perhaps Earth is not in that category.
This is the upshot of the latest Kurzgesagt video presentation. An interesting theory. We are not alone, but we are not wanted.
