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!

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?

Why many surveys of distant galaxies miss 90 percent of their targets

(PhysOrg.com) — Astronomers have long known that in many surveys of the very distant Universe, a large fraction of the total intrinsic light was not being observed. Now, thanks to an extremely deep survey using two of the four giant 8.2-metre telescopes that make up ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and a unique custom-built filter, astronomers have determined that a large fraction of galaxies whose light took 10 billion years to reach us have gone undiscovered. The survey also helped uncover some of the faintest galaxies ever found at this early stage of the Universe.

Full story here.

Though, I do have my own theory as to where they looked…

There it is! And it has my other sock!

The Scale of the Universe

This is a very clever little bit of flash put together by someone whom I have no idea who they are.   All I know is that the site was blocked at work.  I went in and nabbed the SWF file and I’m going to place it on my blog.  You still have to endure the Newgrounds logo to see the animation.

Use the keyboard to move left or right for a smoother experience.  The largest things in the Universe are mind boggling.  The really fascinating stuff is all of the tiny things that go into making the world around us.  You can see how small a neutrino is for instance; and why it passes unhindered through just about everything  (including entire planets!).

The music is very pleasant too.

How big is space?

Watch the video.  That is all.

I had a big write up on this but why bother?  The video is enough as it is!

We are all made of stars

I know Moby made that phrase popular but hearing that song yesterday just reminded me how awesome everything is.  I got out of my truck to pick our oldest up from school and felt the sun beating down on me.  I looked up and it hit me; this is an amazing place, our universe.

Which reminds me of an awesome miniseries I’m looking forward to in June.  A DiscoveryHD show called When we left Earth.  There is a great ad for it playing using Gimme Shelter from the Rolling Stones.  Can’t wait to see it.  I’ve seen many documentaries and they just don’t get old.  It’s not every day you send something as tall as an office building into outerspace.

When the heavy lift Ares V starts testing it’ll be about as tall as fully stacked Saturn V.  I can’t wait to see those bad boys go up, a guaranteed Earth trembling experience.

Brainy Smurf

I like science.  I love science.  It doesn’t make the world go ’round, it explains why the world goes ’round.  Without it we’d still be in caves.  We’re the only species to fully grasp it and it’s importance.  Even still we haven’t fully grasped everything and I think some things we won’t or some things weren’t meant to be grasped.

Things don’t exist unless observed.  So, we observe the universe.  Would it exist without us?  Is the universe alive and wanting to see what it looks like?  Are we the mirror the universe looks into?

Can we travel through time?  In Back to the Future, Marty McFly nearly erased his existence after disrupting his parents meeting.  In a real world scenario, since the future already exists, doesn’t that mean you basically can’t fail?  Think about it.  You go back in time to kill your Great Grandfather.  You get there and tell him he’s done for.  You pull the gun out and pull the trigger.  Jammed!  It won’t fire!  So you find a large blunt object and lunge at him, you trip and fall.  Every effort you make at his demise is thwarted by some…thing.  Well the trip sprained your ankle and bought time for him to call the police.  You, the crazed madman, gets carted away and your ancestor lives on.  You explain to him who you are and that you were only proving a science experiment.  He posts bail and you zip off to the future with your findings.

This randomness brought to you by the letter N for Nerd.
And the number 9 because it’s king of the single digit numbers.