andygates: (Default)
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Longcat is long.

RT Longcat is long.

The signal shell from human cultural transmissions starts with the BBC and ends with Twitter.  Our spacefaring species' zenith was the Moon landings.  We now fall back into self-reference and relative radio silence, cross-spectrum chatter indistinguishable from noise (have you any idea how clever that is? ) and optical data instead of radio.  Fifty years, then, the SETI-identifiable blart of noise that we bald apes produced.  Pump that into the Drake equation - replace the "civilisation lifetime" with "civilisation signal lifetime" - and you hack a few more zeroes off the end number.  It's still a huge number, but it's a tiny signal in a big universe.

The little green men aren't here, meanwhile, 'cos someone on the little green internet is wrong.
andygates: (Default)
Over on a forum, someone has just asked what people plan to do for November 5th.  Resisting the urge to quote V For Vendetta at them, I can't help but wonder... the Gunpowder Plot was an attempt at one hell of a terrorist strike.  Big bomb, lots of VIPs, destruction of a landmark - classic stuff. 

1 - Will people be marking 9/11 in the same utterly disconnected way, with sparklers and baked goods and bonfires with two big wooden "towers" in that are stuffed with fireworks?

2 - I wonder how much of the cool British phlegmatic approach to wild-eyed nutters who makey boom is, in fact, because we have an annual mad-nutter-who-nearly-makey-boom holiday, at which we try our damndest to go "oooh!" and "aaah!" and, in my case, to blow off at least one eyebrow. 

This is your mandatory make-light-of-ter'sm thread, because although I want to comment on Bush's jaw-dropping citation of Vietnam as justification for his cocking around, I simply don't have the words yet.

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