IS YOUR SUNDIAL RUNNING? YOU'D BETTER GO CATCH IT!
Because we live in an amnesiac civilization that thinks 2007 was ancient history and that the future will always be OK?
Imagine a cloud blocking the sun--forever.
A sundial would go wrong in a couple of thousand years, wouldn't it? Precession of the equinoxes and all?
To foster long term responsibility, so they say.
A broken sundial is still right twice a day.
I dunno. I lost an imaginary internet friend over saying I wasn't sure why it was so exciting to chuck things at Mars.
You mean that's what it took for your friend to become a real boy?
Being cool and being more trouble don't seem particularly at odds with each other.
But the latter does not automatically bring along the former.
12:There are much worse things some people think are Way Cool and Real Expensive
I could not trust myself to comment on that post.
9: it is exciting to chuck things at Mars because Mars is really weird.
They say Martians brought everyone to this place, but now we've forgotten.
Mars is really weird.
Weird and Gilly, surely.
They say Mars is a great place to raise a kid.
It's in the top quarter, but not outstanding.
Not really the same kind of art at all, but there's a piece at the MIT museum that is a bunch of reduction gears. So the one side is spinning madly away, and the opposite side is set to turn once in a gazillion years. It's surprisingly fascinating.
Surprisingly.
Speaking of gears and all, the Uhrenmuseum in Vienna is pretty sweet.
|| Travel advice needed. It's not Mars, but just as otherworldly: Florida. I arrive late on Saturday night in Ft. Myers and have to be in Ft Lauderdale mid morning Monday. I'll have a car, but nothing else is arranged. What should I do, where should I go? No family with. |>
I bet there are some world-renowned strip clubs along that stretch.
Along the I-75 route is this:
http://www.semtribe.com/TourismAndEnterprises/BigCypress/
If you do the airboat and tip your guide in advance, you will get a hell of a lot of baited gators within 5 feet of you.
There is also more legit fun and canoeing to be done in the actual Park.
No one has to convince me to denounce Florida and all its works!
Big Cypress sounds pretty good. I guess I've driven through, but never alone with time to kill.
If you have a chance to go into an airboat, go into an airboat.
Maybe "go into" should be "ride in." Prepositions: they're confusing.
Despite the UX nightmare of a web page, Butterfly World is also cool:
http://www.butterflyworld.com/
I've always liked the Morikami Museum in Delray.
|| I'm back. As previously posted about, I went into the urgent care clinic on Tuesday, Sept 18, with a small infected on my right leg, and a swollen lymph node in my right groin. Within the hour, I had a 39+ degree fever, and they sent me to the ER overnight. The next morning, I was told that they may have to operate, and given an X-ray that was less negative for gangrene than I liked.
A follow up CAT scan ruled out gas gangrene, but only after a day of contemplating the one-legged life. At this point I'm on IV Vancomycin, Piperacillin, and Cleocin.
On Sunday, the switched me to Cephalexin IV. Monday afternoon, they put me on oral Cephalexin, and released me. Thursday, I had an allergic reaction to Cephalexin, and I was switched to Doxycyclin, which I finished last night.
Today was my first day back to work. I haven't had internet, because in the middle of all this, I moved. That was a week in the hospital and a week of recovery, for a blister the size of the head of a nail.|>
Good lord. Glad to hear everything sounds okay now.
Mars has great schools.
They did, but then curiosity killed the neighborhood.
Wow. Glad you could get care and it fixed you.
I guess I could have read the last few comments before commenting.
Glad you're out of the hospital. That sounds harrowing. I'm going to obsessively wash the blister on my foot now.
Glad you're doing better, but all that for a minor fricking blister!?
Well, my leg looked like a boiled ham. They say it was staph and strep A causing cellulitis.
My leg looks like a pale,, hairy, raw ham in a cheap sock.
in the middle of all this, I moved
You moved? Life wasn't difficult enough??
Wow -- I hadn't seen the previous post outlining any of this. Thank god, or the flying spaghetti monster, if you prefer, that you've more or less recovered. You must be exhausted.
Er, so how long was it between the blister appearing, and the swollen lymph node, and the swollen ham leg? Er, just in case people should be learning folk medicine from the internet, you know. What kind of blister was this? How do you get a staph infection from a blister on your leg?
Or, never mind. I'm sorry; I'm just stunned on your behalf.
The topic was chucking things at Mars, I believe. I didn't think that's quite what we were doing: more like gracefully lobbing, maybe.
(I've said it before: The deal about humans is: If you don't understand it, poke it with a stick. This makes me laugh every time.)
It was a tiny blister, about the size of kernel of corn, of the standard foot rubbing on shoe type. It was about a week, between the blister and the hospital, and about four days of the blister not healing right. I kept the blister covered and treated it with triple antibiotic. The takeaway for internet folk medicine is, if your lymph nodes swell, especially the non-neck ones, get help immediately.
52.2: Wasn't that the moral of Prometheus?
Yes. Lymph nodes swelling, I know. (Just for reference, I had what seemed like a lump in my breast once, which of course freaked me out and sent me to the doctor, and which turned out to be a swollen lymph node under my armpit due to a sunburn on my chest a week or so previous, requiring more serious treatment than I'd been giving it. So pay attention to those lymph nodes.)
Very glad you're better, Light Rail.
Wasn't that the moral of Prometheus?
I don't know. It wouldn't have been my first thought. Possibly I'm being dense.
I wasn't advancing a moral, to be honest: it's just a thing that humans revert to when they don't know what else to do. (Poke it with a stick.)
LRT, that sounds horrific in every detail. I am glad you survived.
OT: I am an old stick in the mud, but I would appreciate it if my gym stopped inviting/exhorting me to get my _____* on.
* Zumba, bronze, meditation (!), Pilates, Gyrotonic, etc., etc.
New tune, Flippanter? "Get your ____ on Blueberry Hill"?
Moby, come on, your legs aren't that sexy.
Sorry about the ordeal, LRT. Doesn't sound fun.
I tried panicking, I got shin splints. I'm thinking I should consult a work of literature.
First, find some healing herbs. You'll want to brew them over a fire, then make a poultice with deer fat and pine gum.
an opinionated person is trying to get me back on the devil's herb.
I was just thinking my favorite part of Prometheus is when he gets back down with his liver all chewed up and just gives everyone the finger for the rest of their lives.
Don't do that, son. You have a family? Someone who cares about you? You don't want them to get the bad news from somebody like me.
68: You know why not. Geez. It's like people haven't poked that question with enough sticks yet.
But. You haven't been around for quite a while, and if you have a conundrum, you'd have to explain it.
my first conundrum. why would anyone not vote for obama? that is suspect, parsimon.
my second conundrum. is parsimon really going to explain things to me?
Ladies, I've got your conundrum ... right here.
[Bow chicka chicka chicka wow wow chicka chicka wow.]
my third conundrum. how many times should I ram this boat?
how many times should I ram this boat?
Ladies....
75: Not too many times, I think. Balance, I always say.
Romney looks like a mannequin on stage compared to Obama.
Oh wait, change the timestamp on that to 15 minutes later.
I'm going to miss the first 30 minutes of debate in transit from the airport. Hopefully there won't be a shocking surprise.
my third conundrum. how many times should I ram this boat?
Once. Then backwater fast, haul off and lie off her quarter. You can rake her from your bow chasers and wait for her to sink. Don't try and carry her by boarding, she's got ten times the crew you have and those infidels fight like tigers when they're cornered.
Is the fourth conundrum "what do we do with a drunken sailor"?
41: Dude, glad you're better. I had the same thing when I was young, though I was saved from the week in the hospital by coming into the hospital about 6 hours earlier than you did (or so it sounds, from what my doctors said would have happened if we'd waited until morning). My wound was so small we never did find it. People, watch out for infections!
I'm a fan of the Long Now Foundation and their clock. Getting people to think beyond the next quarter/election cycle/whatever seems to me like a very worthy project. I don't know if the clock is going to make much of a difference, but the foundation is doing other things that might help a bit.
Also, throwing things at mars is (a) awesome and (b) vastly superior to many ways we piss away money. Plus we might learn things that are useful.
4: Most places a sundial won't even give you the right time for 24 hours.
Plus it can't help you find the longitude.
re: 85
You'd need a nice universal astrolabe. Which, come to think of it, also won't give you the longitude, but it'll do lots of cool things anyway.
I don't know if anyone is working on it, but a Ten Thousand Year Library seems like it'd be a more valuable/interesting project than the clock. Which is fun as a
Bah. Hit post, and now can't remember what I meant to type. 'Fun as a whimsical project', or 'Fun but limited' or something like that.
85: it can help you find the longitude if you carve "YOU ARE STANDING AT LONGITUDE 2 DEGREES 32 MINUTES 11 SECONDS" on the base. Yes, it can't help if you move it around, but you can't move the 10,000 Year Clock around either.
The British always assume sometime will speak English if you shout.
Ten Thousand Year Library
Like, some form of digital storage that would last ten thousand years, with generalized instructions on decoding the formats that a future interpreter should be able to bootstrap their way through? Or something else?
86: My "if I win the lottery" project is a 10,000 year archive technology. You'd need to make it so it was accessible to people who not only don't speak English but also may have no access to any contemporary technology. It would be a fun challenge. The simplest thing is just plain old books printed on some kind of extra robust paper, but that gets bulky fast. Ideally you have some kind of high density medium that does not require a fancy reader. I think it might be possible to do it holographically, but I have not worked through the details.
re: 91
I've really no idea. That might be one way. Or some sort of more sophisticated variation on the Voyager golden record thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
Or, just compressed writing, on a decent non-corroding robust material. Microfilm on toughened glass, or engraving on thin gold sheets, or whatever.
You'd want to include some sort of Rosetta stone in there to, to maximize the chances that someone would recognize a language and be able to reconstruct the others.
Very dense information storage could also be included if there were more readable instructions on how to extract it.
Not gold - gold leaf tends to fuse together under pressure. You'd find that the pages of the books got stuck together.
The deeper problem is that using a book degrades it. So you have to decide, is this a library I am building, or a time capsule? Is the idea to build it, shut the hatch, and have someone in ten thousand years open the hatch and be able to read the books? Or to have a library that will be usable for the next ten thousand years? Obviously the second one is harder. For the first, just plain PET - plastic - would do fine, if you kept it in cool, dark conditions. It doesn't biodegrade but it photodegrades.
This may be the first question ever asked on unfogged to which the solution actually is to be found in a mineshaft.
If you kept your microfilm in space in a vacuum, would it degrade? Good point about translation hints. People who discuss this kind of thing reckon that all trace of a root language becomes unidentifiable in less than 11,000 years by normal linguistic evolution, so that might be hard.
For the second, as Umberto Eco and Neal Stephenson (who works just down the hill from the 10,000 Year Clock site) have both pointed out, the best answer is monks. A working library has to be self-maintaining; you need an organisation dedicated to recopying books as they wear out.
98: you'd need to keep updating the Rosetta Stone then. Every hundred years people need to make a new copy in up-to-date language.
That process in itself might slow down linguistic drift. Italian drifted barely at all after Dante wrote the Divine Comedy. Arabic hasn't drifted much since the Koran was written - certainly not compared to most other languages.
If you kept your microfilm in space in a vacuum, would it degrade?
Yeah: thermal cycling.
re: 97
I was thinking more in terms of a repository, rather than a working library. For the latter, yeah, monks. Or universities if you can keep the business-fuckholes from wrecking them.
We work with stuff that's thousands of years old, reasonably often, at work. But a lot of that was just lucky to survive, rather than intrinsically robust. Vellum isn't bad, though.
It depends on the backing. Polyester film will last a very long time. Just keep it cool and under 40% relative humidity.
Yeah. There's a reason why lots of institutions have adopted microfilm [on PET/polyester] as their archival medium. There are companies that sell digital microfilm writers, that take digital files and expose them onto 35mm microfilm at speed, to produce supposedly robust archival surrogates.
I think real-world testing of microfilm archives has shown them not to entirely live up to their promise, though. Partly because institutions haven't adhered to preservation microform standards as tightly as you'd like, and partly just storage issues [fungus, etc].
Vellum would be pretty good. If you kept it in an oxygen-free environment it might be even better - I'm guessing it biodegrades, if anything?
You've got the translation problem then. Rosetta Stones are a good start - one of the languages on the stone might survive ten thousand years, especially religious ones or widely spoken ones. But you can't bet on that.
Picture books, so you can learn English from scratch?
Or you need a good incentive for people to keep speaking English, or at least to keep understanding it. Put a satellite in high orbit, so it'll stay there for 10,000 years without the orbit degrading, broadcasting weather forecasts in English only. As long as people keep the knowledge of how to build radios, they'll keep the knowledge of how to speak English, because it'll be useful to speak it.
105.2: but those will be archives in constant use. More difficult to keep them uncontaminated, etc, than a time-capsule archive. You can purge that out with nitrogen or whatever, lock the door and leave it.
Not gold - gold leaf tends to fuse together under pressure. You'd find that the pages of the books got stuck together.
The angel Moroni would like to have a quiet word with you.
Just don't get that vellum wet.
Steganography using porn might well meet our long term requirements better than monks. Of course that assumes the NMM rule only applies locally.
re: 107
I'm talking about repositories. Places microfilming their stuff and whacking it in long-term storage. Then pulling it later and finding it's knacked.
But yeah, you could, probably fairly easily, design a microfilm based repository that avoided the problems actual existing ones have had. By processing to a higher standard, setting much more stringent quality control testing on the quality of the materials used, and so on.
re: 109
Vellum can, I believe, be washed. As long as it's dried properly. But yeah, you don't want to store them somewhere really humid or really dry for a long time, as they crack or get mouldy.
Around here, they store records in old mines. Nice, constant air quality.
re: 111
We stick a load of stuff in a salt mine in Cheshire. As do lots of other people.
113 misread as "We stick a load of stuff in a salt mine in Cheshire. And lots of other people."
We don't know why the Cheshire cat smiles, but the salt mine's is no longer a mystery.
99: the best answer is monks.
For a second I thought you meant encoding it in their DNA--but probably the wrong starting group for a scheme like that.
86: Someone (maybe Long Now) is thinking of nickel disks with text engraved on them in a spiral of diminishing size, so it starts w/characters visible to unaided eyesight and leads the reader down to max-density size. Don't know why people wouldn't melt them down.
Also, crystal storage has been invented. Looks like a coverslip.
116: not if you mummify them carefully. To the salt mines!
