Facebook: The Black Hole of the Internet

Ok, yes, I’m back.  Why in the name of all that is digital am I back?

In short: I want to keep posting my awesome science links.  I know a few people read them or watch the vids.  I think that’s worth it altogether.  I have some good friends online. Despite have 130ish ‘friends’ whom I barely speak with, the small few that I do speak with make it worth it.

So, I am going to keep burning the fires for science.  I think it’s critical for the future of mankind.  I’m not kidding!  The day we regress is the day we start burning people as witches and cowering everytime a comet graces the sky.

I will say this though, if the comet is headed towards Earth, feel free to panic, get naked, drink lots, have LOTS of sex, do LOTS of drugs and otherwise be completely irrational.   Why?  If a comet has our name on it, at this point, we are S O L. So, may as well have a good time before it all ends, right?

I hate Digidesign and I Want My Money Back

So, here we go… *deep breath*

/onsoapbox

A couple of weeks ago I wanted to invest in some low budget gear to record music.  I bought an Alesis Micron synth which is just awesome!  I also got myself a small used multi-track.  I wasn’t very sure about it as it was older.  I decided to give it a shot.

Well, turns out I wasn’t so impressed with it.  I take the item back and get a full refund.  Well, I still wanted to record but I wanted more of a PC interface.  The gentleman at Guitar Center recommended the Digidesign Mbox2 Mini.  It came with Pro Tools LE 8 and a box to interface with the computer. Perfect, right?

*another deep breath*

I get home and run the install.  Took a while but it was clean and easy.  I read the start up booklet so I could at least lay down a test track, you know, kick the tires a bit.  It went well and sounded good.  I played with the plugins a bit and thought all was well.

A couple of days later I wanted to really lay down a track and start piecing together ideas for songs.  So, I run my synth in, hit record and start playing.  Roughly 45 seconds in, I get an error. It’s a 6086 error.  I saw it many, many times more after the first time.  It’s a hardware buffer error I do believe.  That much I didn’t care about.  I wanted to fix it and fast.  I kept seeing people suggesting the use of an external hard drive.  Lucky me, I had one!  Plug it in, hit record, ERROR! *sigh*

I was fed up.  I uninstalled all the software, boxed it up and headed back to GC.  I wanted to return this damn thing before I blew a fuse.  Oh, wait, looks like I can NOT return it because the software is open.  Oh. My. God.  So, I was told I had to make my system compatible.  I was initially very irritated.  I was essentially speechless and making ‘dur hur?’ sounds.  Ok, policy is policy.  Not their fault.  I wasn’t going to make a scene.  Back home I go to try to make my system work.

So, I did one google search and was immersed into a sea of people who have this same error!  It’s a very common error in fact.  If you ask me, it is TOO common.  Well, I registered myself on their forums (digidesign) and got to work.  I posted my entire system specs and got a couple of suggestions.  I was going to have to buy a new hard drive regardless.  That was until I saw one final response to my thread.

My motherboard is Nvidia based.  The chipset is Nvidia in other words.  Those chipsets are known to be problematic.  He said I was basically out of luck.  Ok, now I’m getting angry again at this point.

So lets get this straight:  My system clearly and vastly exceeded the requirements on the side of the box.  Yet, I cannot run it because I need an additional hard drive and, oops, my chipset is problematic?  Now I have to eat the $200 I spent on this item?  I don’t think so.

I’m going to put it up on eBay.  I simply have no other choice.  What would you do?  I’m a hobbyist.  I’m not a big time recording guru.  If I were, I wouldn’t have wasted time with this in the first place.  I’m not a big fan of tossing 200+ dollars out the window.  There is someone out there than can use it.

My gripe is that Digidesign continues to sell a flawed product.  Yep, it’s flawed.  If it takes a gargantuan amount of tech support to make the thing work then it IS flawed at the core.  There needs to be a better way of determining system compatibility.  It’d hurt their sales but they’d gain respect as a company, if you ask me.

Many people swear by this product.  I’m sure it’s fan-freakin’-tastic when it works.  For myself, it does not.  It’s crap.

/offsoapbox

Week Two: Sans Facebook

It’s been a couple of weeks, well almost, since we both killed our Facebook accounts.  Mind you, they are deactivated, not deleted.

So, thoughts so far?  I really don’t miss it nor do I think about it much.  The only time I think about it is when I see a great science article online.  If I could somehow just get that stuff out to people without the massive influx of drama.  I do have twitter but it’s not as powerful in that regard.  I can pretty things up and have more room to write in Facebook.

Oh well.  If I did go back I’d reboot my account as a channel of pure science.

I do not miss the social interactions because they were next to non-existent.  I do miss a handful of friends but I know they’re still around if I should choose to go back.  There are other avenues of contacting friends as well.  Also, as time goes by and scenery changes, so too do the people around you.  You can’t be total bud-buds with 100% of everyone you were ever friends with.  You’d go insane.  I have highschool friends I haven’t talked to in a long time.  I can’t stop my life to stalk them.  They have lives too.  Usually it’s just a word in passing and that’s enough for a good long while.

Facebook was a bit too narcissistic for me anyway.  I am proud of what talents I have but I have a rule of thumb: No matter how good you are at something, someone is always better.  I choose the route of being humble.  Sort of like Atticus Finch after he is revealed to be an excellent marksman.  By the way, I’m not telling whether or not I’m an excellent marksman.

For now, Facebook will rest.  I still have a cooking achievement to get in WoW.  It only takes 15 minutes of my day though.

My newest endeavor is getting back into writing music.  I’ve tried a few times in years past with mixed results and good times.  I already put a serious investment into this go round.  I bought myself an Alesis Micron keyboard/synth.  It’ll double as a MIDI controller also.  That will go hand in hand with Pro Tools LE 8 that I got with my Digidesign interface.  These are tools I’ve never used before.  I’ve gotten a small taste of Pro Tools and it’s just insane how powerful even the LE version is.  Next few items will be a bass (short scale perhaps) and a new guitar multi-effects processor.  I need a MIDI interface as well.

It’s nice to have the free time that would have been otherwise wasted on Facebook.  Writing music and showing my kids the joy and work that goes into that is much more constructive.

The Day the Internet Stood Still

Once upon a time there was a website.  It was very small and very few people knew about it.  Five or so years pass and 1/14 of the world population is part of that website.  Think about that; 500 million users.  Those are just the users.  It’s likely that the majority of the world knows about the site.

I joined Facebook very early on.  I’d say only a month or two after it came about.  Back then it was just a blip on the radar.  The big site at that time was MySpace of course.  My Facebook account sat, unused for nearly two years before I came back to it.

Once MySpace lost footing, Facebook moved in for the kill.  Then, as if all at once, it exploded.  Thousands became millions.  Millions became hundreds of millions.

Just a quick side note: It’s a phenomenon full of irony.  Tell anyone that they’re being watched or eavesdropped on and they get pretty ticked off.  In fact, so ticked off that they’re going to make that their status on Facebook.

“I can’t believe this crap, the government is tracking my every move?? I’m getting a burger at Shakey Bakey’s anyone else wanna join me? lol xoxo ”

Yeah.  We’re so defensive about our privacy and yet, we toss it around social networks like some old jacket that barely keeps the cold off.  I know very well that what goes on the web basically stays on the web. Forever.  So I decided that I’d post things I was comfortable with people knowing.  Believe me, there is a lot more info out there about us than we’d like to know about.  Privacy was never a concern for me though, like I said.  Just thought I’d mention it.

The problem for me was time.  The time I spent on Facebook was bad enough.  What I was doing was worse usually.  You see status after status of people doing things you’d like to be able to do.  Go on a vacation, go to a concert, have a night out (just the two of you), sleep in, get a great workout in.  You get the idea.  It was time spent benchmarking myself against other people.  It made me feel like I had to be someone else I guess?

A few weeks back I changed my stance a good bit and decided I’d post only nonsense and science links.  That worked out pretty good but it still wasn’t enough.  I had to kill it.  I’m going to compare it to Doctor Who scenarios because Doctor Who is just awesome. It was like closing that crack in the Universe.  Now it’s all just a memory.

Funny how Facebook works.  As I understand it – once you deactivate – all your updates, links, profile, etc just disappear.  They come back if you reactivate of course.  It is kind of neat how you can seemingly erase your existence.

So at 7am this morning I closed the crack.  My wife soon followed.  We’re locked away as a memory to the people we knew and as a memory in the system.  Though for all intents and purposes we never existed.  Cool huh?

Of course, we still exist.  We’re real people with lives, jobs and a family.  That’s really the moral of our story.  We were so drawn in by the lives of others that we could barely live ours.  It was always what we’d heard or read or saw on Facebook.  So, today is the first day in a long while we’re going to start living our lives.

I will miss the regular correspondence I had with some good friends but this is truly for the better.  This is where you will find me.  Right here, writing away every other day, living my life the best I can.

I can be reached at laserfloyd at gmail dot com.  I typed it out that way so bots and spammers can’t so easily get a hold of it.

Geronimo!

The Most Random Email I’ve Ever Received

We all get spam.  We all get the emails selling us pills, watches or an education in anything from dinosaur hunting to Moon spelunking.  Well, I occasionally get this email from this one guy.  It’s always the same guy too.  I only get it at work.  I don’t think it’s spam either.  I think this is a real message that someone is typing up.  I also think the person just might very well be on heavy medication.  It’s entertaining to read because it is ALL over the map of randomness.

I share with you now that email.  I’ve formatted it a bit so it’s nice so massive.  There’s a bit of reading to do so I’m going to do the ol’ click to read more trick.

I also decided to record it with my camera.  I extracted the audio.  Reading this out loud is even funnier… Sorry for the poor audio quality.  It was one take for the whole thing.

 

 The Most Random Email Ever: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Read the rest of this entry »

Vincent and The Doctor

I’m reading mixed reviews about this episode of Doctor Who.  I’ll say it though; this is my favorite episode of the season so far.  It’s also been a couple of years since I’ve written a Who Review.  This one is worthy.

Vincent and The Doctor

For most of the episode we’re following The Doctor, Amy and Vincent Van Gogh around.  We learn early on that Van Gogh is being tormented by some invisible monster.  Turns out it is an actual creature that only Van Gogh can see.  This renders The Doctor only able to see it when using a random device he found in the TARDIS.  It sort of works like a rear view mirror for seeing monsters?

Now, I understood, right off, the purpose of the beast.  Van Gogh is fighting these ‘things’ that no one else can see.  The metaphor is there.  Some of us battle demons that others can’t see.  The creature seemed out of place at times and I wasn’t sure how it would tie in at the end.  Despite that slight out of place feeling, it did fit well enough to get the point across.  I think some shadowy faceless figure might have been better.  That’s one ONE nitpick.

Matt Smith is really setting in with me as being The Doctor.  Tennant was amazing but Smith isn’t shabby at all.  Hats off to him.  The character of Amy is really growing on me too.  Forget that she’s an attractive red head.  Her character seems to really test The Doctor almost to the point of bossing him around at times.  Tony Curran really smacked the nail on the head in his portrayal of Van Gogh.  I really love the scene where they all hold hands and he actually describes the Starry Night.

Where did this episode really hit it out of the park for me?  The end.  It’s not to say the whole thing was bust except the end.  The end is where it really just snapped together.  You feel yourself in the position of Van Gogh and how he must have been absolutely floored.  I’m not sure why but it struck a nerve with me. I’m not afraid to admit that scene in the art gallery had me fighting back tears.  Really, there isn’t a way to describe it for it to have the same impact.  You’ll just have to see the episode.  The ending will stick with you.

So, from what I read, there are people that thought it was just ‘ok’.  Other reviews I read say it had them bawling.  If the ending doesn’t make you even a bit emotional – you’re some kind of evil robot bent on world domination.  Dalek perhaps?

We Are Here: The Pale Blue Dot

This all revolves around a photograph taken by a small spacecraft a little over 20 years ago.  Carl Sagan thought for a while it’d be a good idea to have the spacecraft turn around and snap a photo of the Earth.  Fearing damage to the spacecraft the controllers were reluctant.  It was February 14, 1990 and Voyager I had completed all of its primary mission objectives.  Now was the time to have Voyager turn around and snap a photo.  If they had waited much longer the Earth would be too distant to even register.

So here we are.  We are given this photo.

The Pale Blue Dot. As taken by Voyager I some 4 billion miles from Earth. February 14, 1990.

It sure doesn’t look like much.  To us, it is everything.  Now, I could go on about this and that regarding the photo.  The thing is, it’s already been done.  In fact, so well done, that to redo or try and out do it would be folly.  Now to read what is said about the photograph is one thing but hearing the voice of Carl Sagan means a little more.  It was his idea, so his words and voice are fitting.

The original audio was from an audio-book I do believe.  Some crafty people have done things with it in videos.  This one is probably the best I’ve found.  It really is moving. (Yes, yes, I posted this video on Facebook a while back, I know.)  So have a look now.

We are here: The Pale Blue Dot

Here is the text:

Consider again, that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say;  That one is worth everything we’ve ever known.

A new type of supernova?

This one exploding star outshines an entire galaxy! The NGC 1260 core is the dimmer object.

Ok, I thought I was all on the up and up with these things and how they worked.  Ok, that is, as much as a layman can be on the up and up.  I am not an astrophysicist (yet)!

So get this: a few years ago we witnessed a strange supernova.  Actually, a little back story first.  The general idea I always had was that stars with several solar masses went supernova.  Reason being, they burned through their fuel at a greater rate.  Once the fuel at the core was gone or fusion wasn’t adequate enough to resist the inward pressure (gravity) the whole thing collapsed.  This releases a tremendous amount of energy and essentially the star explodes.  You get left with a huge amount of ‘stuff’ being blown out into space and you’re left with either a neutron star or black hole at what used to be the core of the star.

That was a super basic overview and back story.  So what is this new supernova?  It is being called a Pair-instability Supernova.  What the what?!  If the name sounds bizarre then wait until you hear about how it works.

So here is how it goes.  First, you need a supermassive star.  A star of 130-250 solar masses seems to be the “zone”.  Instinctively, one thinks “the more massive the star, the more massive the black hole it leaves behind”.  Well, not really.  At least, not in the case of this kind of star.  See, these supermassive stars have low metallicity.  I believe that means they’re almost entirely Hydrogen and Helium with very little other elements present…

…and well, I’m going to just post what Wiki says because I’m feeling lazy:

A pair instability supernova occurs when pair production, the production of free electrons and positrons in the collision between atomic nuclei and energetic gamma rays, reduces thermal pressure inside a supermassive star‘s core. This pressure drop leads to a partial collapse, then greatly accelerated burning in a runaway thermonuclear explosion which blows the star completely apart without leaving a black hole remnant behind.^[1][2] Pair instability supernovae can only happen in stars with a mass range from around 130 to 250 solar masses and low to moderate metallicity (low abundance of elements other than hydrogen and helium, a situation common in Population III stars). The recently observed objects SN 2006gy and SN 2007bi^[3] are hypothesized to have been pair instability supernovae.

So there, you have it.  The star goes kablooey and leaves nothing but the fresh scent of brute.  Ok maybe not.  Incredible though, that a star can completely obliterate itself and leave nothing behind.

With that said, the star SN 2006gy is in a galaxy some 240 million light  years away (ie the light we saw originated 240 million years ago).  There is a star nearer to us, Eta Carinae that might go supernova much in the same way.  If it does, it will likely be brilliantly bright.  Visible during the day and able to be read by at night.

Fact is stranger than fiction, once again.

More info here

And here (this site has multiple links at the bottom)

Facebook is going away

Yes, it is.  No no no, it’s not shutting down.  I mean it’s going away – from me!

This is my typical Facebook regimen:

1. Open browser
2. Click to refresh latest updates
3. Scroll down the updates
4. Look at pictures of people I could mostly care less about (unless it’s a hot chick! bazinga!)
5. Look for any cool links which are seldom found
6. Open any cool links if any are available
7. See who is online
8. Check again to see who is online because FB chat is slow
9. Stare at screen waiting for something clever to say
10. Think hard about a link I could post but realize that no one gives a damn about it anyway so why bother
11. Despite the fact that no one gives a damn about discoveries pertaining to our Universe I post a link anyway waiting in vain for a response of “wow that’s cool!”
12. Instead I notice that the person who posted the status of “Premier of XYZ show tonight” gets 15 comments
13. I am filled with sadness over how a TV show is more important and conversation worthy than understanding the workings of our Universe
14. I close the browser
15. Rinse.
16. Repeat.

Yeah, that’s about how it goes.

Now, if I were a scientist, I’d probably have followers that were also interested in science.  I’d get positive feedback that way I suppose.  I’m not a scientist though, so establishing a base there isn’t happening anytime soon.  Instead most of my friends just aren’t interested in the things that I find stimulating.  I can count about three exceptions and they know who they are.

Or DO they?! Bwa ha ha, they may never know!

On the whole, it’s just time to give it up for a good while.  I’m working hard on simplifying my life. Irony!  It’s true though.  It takes some work to get things back to a simpler state.  I have to tie up loose ends here and there with people I know or maybe someone I was doing work for.

By the way, I do not do sidework anymore for anyone.  It sucks the absolute life out of me.  After a long day at work, the last thing I want is a long night of work at home.  That’s for another post maybe.  It’s ok, nothing to vent about.  It’s just something I had to get rid of.

How does one get rid of Facebook?  Turn it off.  WHOA! That was insane.  I better tone it down.

No, really, you just stop.  It’s not like a cigarette where you’d get physical withdrawal symptoms.  You might crave it in a sense though.  What is it though?  You constantly want to see what other people are doing?  That’s kind of sick I think.   I’ve done it too.  I’ve ‘stalked’ people.  Ok, not really but isn’t that what it is?  You go on their page and look at all their pics, their updates, links, vids, etc.

I know people normally don’t post what they don’t want seen, but that isn’t always the case.  I’ve found things on people’s pages that made me blush or go “hmm….alrighty then!”  It should just be called Stalkbook.  Not to mention that once you put something on the internet, it is there indefinitely.  That drunk photo?  It’s somewhere, even if you deleted it.  I’ve never had a drunk photo of me on the internet… I don’t think.

This world we live in is completely saturated with technology.  We can know anything and everything that happens anywhere in the world at the speed of light (almost).  Sadly, in this world there are many who don’t even understand how any of it works.  That was noted by the late Dr. Sagan.  He also said it was a disaster waiting to happen.  I’m not talking about Teh Internwebz.  I mean science and technology as a whole.  Refer to my sadness from the top.

While social networking is a product of science and technology, as with everything else, moderation is the key.

I do have some genuinely good friends on Facebook.  I have some family on Facebook as well.  Though, if I want to talk to my mom, I will pick up the phone.  If I want to talk to my wife, I’ll walk away from my computer.  Yes, walk away.

For now, the focus is on enjoying simple things in life.  I’ll still bury my head in books regarding the wonders of our Universe but strangely, I find a lot of peace in that.  Doesn’t that sound nice?

P.S. Should I post my Top Ten Most Annoying things people post as status updates?

Things you probably don’t think about: Why can’t we see Venus overhead at night?

We all know the planets are out there, orbiting tirelessly around the Sun.  How do we know? Well, we can see them, and most with the naked eye!  Something you might not have thought about is why we can see all the planets overhead at night except Venus and Mercury.

Why is that?

Here is the simple answer:  Our orbit is outside of Venus and Mercury’s orbit.  Therefore when they are directly overhead it is daytime to some degree.  Have no fear, I’m a fan of using imagery.  Take a look below.

Note: light travels out in all directions obviously and this is not to scale either

So you can see there, when the Sun is overhead, the orbits of Venus and Mercury are also overhead.  Since they never travel outside of the Earth’s orbit, we never see them overhead at night.  Mars on the other hand is commonly visible at night (as is Jupiter and Saturn).  We also go around the Sun faster than Mars so we actually lap it (it goes around every 1.8 Earth years).  Neat huh?

Venus is often called the Morning or Evening Star.  That’s because we see it either before the Sun rises or after the Sun sets, depending on where all the planets are at the time.  After it rises far enough in the morning sky, the sky itself becomes too bright to be able to easily see it.  Though it is possible.  As for setting, it just dips below the horizon.

Just recently we were also able to see Mercury in the evening sky.  The window to capture that rare moment was small; just a couple of weeks I believe.  I snapped a photo which you can see in an earlier post.

So there you have it of something you probably never wondered about in the first place.