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cosmolinguistTons of cool things today.
First, NASA's going to fix Hubble after all. After reading that stuff has been breaking on it recently, I'm especially glad to hear that.
It's a robotic mission, so they're still being panises as far as sending people into space goes (well, sending people in our own shuttles, at least; we just borrow the Russians' Soyuz capsules to get people and stuff to and from the ISS ... who would've thought that the US would come to regard Russian technology as safer than their own?). But at least they're going to actually make some effort to take care of the telescope.
Of course, the manned mission planned for less than year and a half from now would still be better than this one, which will take three years, but it's a lot better than nothing, so I won't complain. Too much.
Next, it seems that Microsoft considers open-source stuff 'a formidable opponent' these days, says an MSNBC article.
For someone like me, the joy in reading about Microsoft's efforts to defeat the evil scourge that is Linux are in the perspective they bring. Things like 'There's no set architecture in Linux. All roads lead to madness.' Microsoft finally sees Linux as a potential challenger to its supremacy, and so like a nervous political incumbent it's gone from 'We will continue to be great, as we always have been. Remember when we invented ones and zeros? Yeah, that was awesome!' to 'Our opponent lies! We can do everything they can do, better!' Time for the mud-slinging.
No one argues that Microsoft is a giant corporation and Linux is merely the core of some software, written by a guy from Finland, modified by him and everybody else who wants to, and distributed by all kinds of people all over the world. So what Microsoft is really trying to sell is that their way of producing software is better. In this they have help from people who say that Linux is communism, or that terrorists could use it against the US. Linux's fundamental differences from Microsoft are not in the code as much as in the philosophy and underlying attitude.
Along with saying 'Linux at some point could be good enough to run home PCs' (a statement that amuses me and probably others who are already using it on ours), the article points out that 'it has just a 3% market share for desktop software, mostly in schools and overseas.' I'm sure that's due to the fact that Linux is cheap, but I wonder if a bit of the reason it's more popular in schools and other countries is that academic institutions have a reputation of wanting information to be freely available to everyone (Richard Stallman started the GNU project, from whence lots of popular free software comes, because he wanted an environment like he experienced at MIT during an earlier generation of computers, before people worried about everything being proprietary), and other countries do not think Linux is evil, any more than they would think socialized health care is evil.
Next, for you AIM users, notice that a serious security hole in the product could allow remote attackers to execute malicious code on your computer. AOL says they'll have a new version of the software out by the end of the week, but might I also suggest switching to something sensible like Trillian or Gaim--which, besides being cool, also let you use multiple instant-messaging protocols (MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, etc.) at one time with the same program. At least update the AOL software when you get the chance; these days there are too many security problems with software not to fix the easily-fixable ones.
Now, for the really cool stuff. Here's an interesting idea: SETI may never find aliens by looking for radio signals. Contact may not happen like Contact after all. Frank Drake (the guy responsible for the equation that makes SETI seem worthwhile) pointed out that soon the Earth itself will disappear, as far as radio waves go. Any aliens looking for it with their alien radio telescopes soon wouldn't find anything, as television broadcasting increasingly uses technologies (cable and satellites) that don't leak radio waves into space. Our search for the signals that 'are the strongest signs of our existence,' thanks to TV, may just date us. TV broadcasts have been sent into space for the last 50 years, but that may continue to be so for only another 50 years.
SETI might instead start focusing on looking for high-powered optical beacons--lasers. While optical communications across interstellar distances was initially thought impractical, military research has led to lasers sufficiently powerful to make such signalling much more efficient than any radio beacon. Nuclear-powered lasers currently on the drawing boards could 'outshine the Sun by a factor of 10,000.'
(I don't know why aliens would be pointing giant laser beams at stars, and the article didn't say. Still cool, though.)
Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence is hard. How should we look? Where? For what? The answer to these questions could really be anything in the universe. It's hard to find a message when you don't know how the message-senders think ... or, indeed, if there are any at all. This article presents a clever method.
First, NASA's going to fix Hubble after all. After reading that stuff has been breaking on it recently, I'm especially glad to hear that.
It's a robotic mission, so they're still being panises as far as sending people into space goes (well, sending people in our own shuttles, at least; we just borrow the Russians' Soyuz capsules to get people and stuff to and from the ISS ... who would've thought that the US would come to regard Russian technology as safer than their own?). But at least they're going to actually make some effort to take care of the telescope.
Of course, the manned mission planned for less than year and a half from now would still be better than this one, which will take three years, but it's a lot better than nothing, so I won't complain. Too much.
Next, it seems that Microsoft considers open-source stuff 'a formidable opponent' these days, says an MSNBC article.
For someone like me, the joy in reading about Microsoft's efforts to defeat the evil scourge that is Linux are in the perspective they bring. Things like 'There's no set architecture in Linux. All roads lead to madness.' Microsoft finally sees Linux as a potential challenger to its supremacy, and so like a nervous political incumbent it's gone from 'We will continue to be great, as we always have been. Remember when we invented ones and zeros? Yeah, that was awesome!' to 'Our opponent lies! We can do everything they can do, better!' Time for the mud-slinging.
No one argues that Microsoft is a giant corporation and Linux is merely the core of some software, written by a guy from Finland, modified by him and everybody else who wants to, and distributed by all kinds of people all over the world. So what Microsoft is really trying to sell is that their way of producing software is better. In this they have help from people who say that Linux is communism, or that terrorists could use it against the US. Linux's fundamental differences from Microsoft are not in the code as much as in the philosophy and underlying attitude.
Along with saying 'Linux at some point could be good enough to run home PCs' (a statement that amuses me and probably others who are already using it on ours), the article points out that 'it has just a 3% market share for desktop software, mostly in schools and overseas.' I'm sure that's due to the fact that Linux is cheap, but I wonder if a bit of the reason it's more popular in schools and other countries is that academic institutions have a reputation of wanting information to be freely available to everyone (Richard Stallman started the GNU project, from whence lots of popular free software comes, because he wanted an environment like he experienced at MIT during an earlier generation of computers, before people worried about everything being proprietary), and other countries do not think Linux is evil, any more than they would think socialized health care is evil.
Next, for you AIM users, notice that a serious security hole in the product could allow remote attackers to execute malicious code on your computer. AOL says they'll have a new version of the software out by the end of the week, but might I also suggest switching to something sensible like Trillian or Gaim--which, besides being cool, also let you use multiple instant-messaging protocols (MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, etc.) at one time with the same program. At least update the AOL software when you get the chance; these days there are too many security problems with software not to fix the easily-fixable ones.
Now, for the really cool stuff. Here's an interesting idea: SETI may never find aliens by looking for radio signals. Contact may not happen like Contact after all. Frank Drake (the guy responsible for the equation that makes SETI seem worthwhile) pointed out that soon the Earth itself will disappear, as far as radio waves go. Any aliens looking for it with their alien radio telescopes soon wouldn't find anything, as television broadcasting increasingly uses technologies (cable and satellites) that don't leak radio waves into space. Our search for the signals that 'are the strongest signs of our existence,' thanks to TV, may just date us. TV broadcasts have been sent into space for the last 50 years, but that may continue to be so for only another 50 years.
SETI might instead start focusing on looking for high-powered optical beacons--lasers. While optical communications across interstellar distances was initially thought impractical, military research has led to lasers sufficiently powerful to make such signalling much more efficient than any radio beacon. Nuclear-powered lasers currently on the drawing boards could 'outshine the Sun by a factor of 10,000.'
(I don't know why aliens would be pointing giant laser beams at stars, and the article didn't say. Still cool, though.)
Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence is hard. How should we look? Where? For what? The answer to these questions could really be anything in the universe. It's hard to find a message when you don't know how the message-senders think ... or, indeed, if there are any at all. This article presents a clever method.
Put yourself in the situation of the aliens. They surmise that Earth looks promising for the emergence of intelligent life one day, but they have no idea when. There would be little point in beaming radio messages in this direction for eons in the vague hope that one day radio technology would be developed here and someone would decide to tune in.There's a bunch more stuff, speculation on the details. I must admit it sounds kind of crazy, and parts of it sound really crazy, but it's still such a cool idea, I can't help liking it. I don't have much patience for genetics and molecular biology, but this could change my mind! At the very least, it could make some great science fiction.
A better plan would be to leave a message for us to find when we are ready. The trouble with this set-and-forget strategy is the time factor. Life takes billions of years to evolve intelligence. [Well, it took us that long anyway, I don't know if that's a standard thoughout the universe ... but then, I don't know that it's not, either.] That is a long time for an artefact to survive.
Putting the text inside a large metal object and plonking it on the Earth's surface is expensive in transportation costs, and risky. The artifact could easily end up buried or drowned or eroded to scrap.
The ideal solution would be to encode the message inside a large number of self-replicating, self-repairing microscopic machines programmed to multiply and adapt to changing conditions.
Fortunately such machines already exist: they are called living cells. The cells in our bodies, for example, contain genetic messages written by Mother Nature billions of years ago.
DNA, the molecule that contains the script of life, encodes its data in a four-letter alphabet. This would be an ideal medium for storing a cosmic calling card. [Is it just me or is this article excessively cute?] In many organisms, humans included, genes make up only a tiny fraction of their DNA. Much of the rest seems to be biological gobbledygook, often called "junk DNA". There is plenty of room there for ET to etch a molecular message without damaging any vital genetic functions.
How long would such a message survive? Mutations continually scramble sequences of DNA, especially the junk part. Recently, however, scientists in the United States have discovered whole chunks of human and mouse junk DNA that seem to have remained virtually unchanged for tens of millions of years. That would be a good place to store a message.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 10:08 am (UTC)I for one have great patience for genetics and molecular biology, but I have to admit that the method for leaving a message such as that you described never occurred to me. Very interesting!
As for the radio telescope thing: I am glad that a real scientist said that, as opposed to regular guys like myself and
Again, cool post. If only you brought up baseball somehow, then it would have been a perfect post.... [GRIN]
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 10:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 10:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 10:30 am (UTC)One of Dawkins' books features a fantasy about an imprisoned scientist encoding a plea for help in a flu virus - the relevant bit of sequence is flagged up with some tell-tale pattern (encoded primes or a Fibonacci sequence or something). When the CDC sequence the latest bug to make a cure, they find the message. "HELP, I AM BEING FORCED TO USE RESTRICTION ENZYMES AGAINST MY WILL".
There's a bit in Vitals (Greg Bear) that suggests non-US countries are transmitting enciphered messages in the DNA of migratory animals as a way of bypassing Echelon. Could work.
I don't think encoding a message into a cosmic virus that incorporates itself into living cells would really work.
(a) How would the senders know enough about the biology of the target cells? Viruses generally use specific host receptors to trick their way in.
(b) It would be hard to predict whether a particular message would be conserved - you don't know the context it would appear in. So even if your virus worked, odds are its "junk" would be lost within a couple of generations. The only sequence that's conserved over a timescale of a billion years is the functional stuff.
Maybe I could buy a sort of metavirus that has a toolkit of different infective strategies, and a set of genes that are designed to ensure its sequence is conserved in the host genome.
It'd be really easy to find any kind of intelligently designed message in the human genome - you'd need one postgrad with a fast desktop computer, I'd imagine.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 11:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-11 02:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-11 11:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 11:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 11:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 11:44 am (UTC)There's no set architecture in Linux. All roads lead to madness.
More like; all roads have the potential to lead wherever YOU want. And if Linux is communism, then Windows is a fascist dictatorship.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 06:33 pm (UTC)You are making a mistake: the association of communism with the likes of Stalin, Castro, and Mao. None of these are/were particularly communist; it is a common mis-perception that central ownership of all property constitutes communism.
In actuality, true communism and liberty would do well together, as long as the people realize that the prerequisite for liberty is the assumption of responsibility. When individuals assume responsibility for their own behavior, then they can form—by reasoned choice—a society in which all that is produced is collectively owned and distributed first, according to the basic needs of every person.
Linux (and GPL-type licensed software in general), then, is like communism in that all the members of the community have access to the resources (the software), never to be denied; in exchange, anything new that they build also becomes part of the wealth of the community. Note that this does not preclude any individual freedom aside from the possibility of personal gain at the expense of others' loss.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 07:39 pm (UTC)I would argue that in this respect Linux does correspond more to communism (in the sense that Linux users do seem to compare loosely to tribal organization, those users who can do so, make contributions to the tribe as a whole, with all sharing the benefits.) Microsoft is more like facism, with a capitalist structure and a ruthless central decision maker who is alternately contemptuous and paranoid about competitors.
Macintosh is democracy with a bad marketing department.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-11 01:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 07:33 pm (UTC)Linux is easy to work on yourself, if anything goes wrong a bit of know how and you can get it running again, but it's not terribly polished or neat and a certainly wouldn't want to take a long trip in adverse conditions with it.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-11 01:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-11 10:11 am (UTC)And I really like the sci-fi story possibilities inherent in the DNA message idea.