Monthly Archive for August, 2007

Voyager Golden Record

Published on August 16, 2007 in Space. 4 Comments


Thanks to my pals at Radio Lab1 I found out a great deal more about Voy­ager. Yeah, that Voy­ager. And it involves Carl Sagan. Between my lim­ited knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence, I hadn’t heard about this before Radio Lab intro­duced it to me.

So it’s 1977, Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan, put together a com­pi­la­tion of all the world’s media, a basic view of human­ity to be launched into space. The idea began with Pio­neer 10 and 11, “des­tined to be the first man made object to escape from the solar sys­tem into inter­stel­lar space,” which car­ried small plaques to show sci­en­tif­i­cally edu­cated inhab­i­tants of some other star sys­tem, who might inter­cept it mil­lions of years from now, when Pio­neer was launched, from where, and by what kind of beings.“2 Whoa. Right? So they were so inspired by this idea that they wanted to do some­thing on a larger scale.

The plan was to include gold records on two probes sent into inter­stel­lar space. Using gold the records will last for a very long time. Longer than life will exist on Earth. A really long time. The records were coated in Ura­nium some­thing, which “has a half-life of 4.51 bil­lion years.“3 THAT long. (Plus, gold records look really bad-ass.) The idea was to send a mes­sage with these probes, a short descrip­tion of where they orig­i­nated. Unlike the plaques on Pio­neer 10 and 11, the gold records would include sound. The con­tents of the records are well doc­u­mented else­where, if you want to read more about it. NASA also has a sam­ple of the record­ings and images.

Where is Voy­ager now? About here. Some­where in open space. WHAT? The fur­thest human­made object away from Earth? Whoa, this is seri­ously beyond my mind’s capacity.

Voy­ager 1 is now at the outer edge of our solar sys­tem, in an area called the heliosheath, the zone where the sun’s influ­ence wanes. This region is the outer layer of the ‘bub­ble’ sur­round­ing the sun, and no one knows how big this bub­ble actu­ally is. Voy­ager 1 is lit­er­ally ven­tur­ing into the great unknown and is approach­ing inter­stel­lar space. Trav­el­ing at a speed of about one mil­lion miles per day, Voy­ager 1 could cross into inter­stel­lar space within the next 10 years.

“Inter­stel­lar space is filled with mate­r­ial ejected by explo­sions of nearby stars,” Stone said. “Voy­ager 1 will be the first human-made object to cross into it.“4

It’s been about 2 weeks since I orig­i­nally heard about this, and I can’t decide what to think about it. I’m blown away that an object we made is that far into the unknown. I keep trip­ping on the idea of an eter­nal time cap­sule (not really eter­nal, but come on! It’s close enough.) AND the dis­tant, unlikely event of some­one ever find­ing and play­ing the record! All that trav­el­ing through space and time to arrive where?!

So what I’m get­ting at, what would you choose to be a semi-eternal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of your­self or human­ity? And, I know, this is sort of a hypo­thet­i­cal ques­tion, but it is still important.

1The orig­i­nal Radio Lab show:

2 http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2000–001623.html
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
4 http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

Fixed!

Published on August 16, 2007 in Bicycle. 4 Comments


Fixed! (Dou­ble mean­ing indeed!)

I don’t really remem­ber when I started this project exactly, roughly it’s been just under a year. It is per­haps the best feel­ing to have it finally fin­ished. Speak­ing of finally fin­ished Prescott Fam­ily is get­ting pretty darn close. Any­ways, need­less to say, yes­ter­day was a pretty good day. 1) I picked up my bike, 2) We got jars for mak­ing the kom­bucha, 3) I ate udon noo­dles, 4) PLUS! BONUS! We watched the Office (by the way, have you seen this or this?)

So the bike! I’m look­ing for­ward to becom­ing less sheep­ish about going fast down hills; I’m get­ting used to the whole “stop­ping” thing. I feel pretty proud of this lit­tle project though. I replaced the bot­tom bracket, cranks, ped­als, sad­dle, han­dle­bars, rear wheel, the won­der­ful blue chain… It’s so sexy. I guess it’s not com­pletely done. I still need to tape the han­dle­bars, fig­ure out the front brake sit­u­a­tion (It’s the law, right? Or even if it’s not, I would feel a lit­tle more con­fi­dent in going really fast…), and it would be nice to get a match­ing front wheel. But all that isn’t nec­es­sary, I can ride it now. I CAN RIDE IT NOW!!! It’s been too long lit­tle bike. It feels so right because a) my other bike is huge, my body gets all tense rid­ing it for too long, and b) rid­ing fixed gear feels so log­i­cal, you’re mov­ing, the bike is mov­ing. If any­one wants to ride soon, well, in two weeks, after our trip, hit me up because I’m so down.

Magic Markings (Markets)

Published on August 6, 2007 in Social Networking. 3 Comments

I1 recently joined meta-markets. (My sta­tus so far.) At this point it is invite-only-beta(alpha)-testing, as GMail has gone before us, join­ing the ranks with Joost, Vimeo v. 5, etc. I have one invite left (of the allot­ted 3), if you want it, email me or com­ment or some­thing. My source on this mat­ter is the ever amaz­ing Cati.2
In cel­e­bra­tion of my recent com­ple­tion of dinner:

“Your aware­ness,” he said. “That is a new qual­ity in the Uni­verse, which exists only because there are human beings. Physi­cists must from now on, when pon­der­ing the secrets of the Cos­mos, fac­tor in not only energy and mat­ter and time, but some­thing very new and beau­ti­ful, which is human aware­ness.“

Kil­gore Trout, Time­quake

1I was look­ing through iPhoto and found this, my hair was even longer at a point.
2 If you aren’t already, it would be a great use of your time to fol­low Cati’s blog Archi­tec­tradure. “My blog kicks ass. It always takes a while to rec­og­nize real talents.”