May 312019
 

Here is a thought that has been bothering me for some time.

We live in a universe that is subject to accelerating expansion. Galaxies that are not bound gravitationally to our Local Group will ultimately vanish from sight, accelerating away until the combination of distance and increasing redshift will make their light undetectable by any imaginable instrument.

Similarly, accelerating expansion means that there will be a time in the very distant future when the cosmic microwave background radiation itself will become completely undetectable by any conceivable technological means.

In this very distant future, the Local Group of galaxies will have merged already into a giant elliptical galaxy. Much of this future galaxy will be dark, as most stars would have run out of fuel already.

But there will still be light. Stars would still occasionally form. Some dwarf stars will continue to shine for trillions of years, using their available fuel at a very slow rate.

Which means that civilizations might still emerge, even in this unimaginably distant future.

And when they do, what will they see?

They will see themselves as living in an “island universe” in an otherwise empty, static cosmos. In short, precisely the kind of cosmos envisioned by many astronomers in the early 1920s, when it was still popular to think of the Milky Way as just such an island universe, not yet recognizing that many of the “spiral nebulae” seen through telescopes are in fact distant galaxies just as large, if not larger, than the Milky Way.

But these future civilizations will see no such nebulae. There will be no galaxies beyond their “island universe”. No microwave background either. In fact, no sign whatsoever that their universe is evolving, changing with time.

So what would a scientifically advanced future civilization conclude? Surely they would still discover general relativity. But would they believe its predictions of an expanding cosmos, despite the complete lack of evidence? Or would they see that prediction as a failure of the theory, which must be remedied?

In short, how would they ever come into possession of the knowledge that their universe was once young, dense, and full of galaxies, not to mention background radiation?

My guess is that they won’t. They will have no observational evidence, and their theories will reflect what they actually do see (a static, unchanging island universe floating in infinite, empty space).

Which raises the rather unnerving, unpleasant question: To what extent exist already features in our universe that are similarly unknowable, as they can no longer be detected by any conceivable instrumentation? Is it, in fact, possible to fully understand the physics of the universe, or are we already doomed to never being able to develop a full picture?

I find this question surprisingly unnerving and depressing.

 Posted by at 1:37 am
May 152019
 

Technology changes. Things that were once revolutionary and new eventually become obsolete.

Sometimes with surprising rapidity.

Which is how I ended up, years ago, buying things that were ultimately not only never used, but were never even taken out of shrink wrap.

Take this 3-pack of high quality SONY 90-minute audio cassettes. When I bought them, I had little doubt that they would be used, and soon, and that future purchases would follow. Never happened.

Or how about this answering machine tape? Back then, I needed them. After all, you never want to be without a spare tape for your answering machine. Except… Well, never mind.

Perhaps a little more surprising is this box of blank DVDs. I have several more boxes of different types, but they have been opened and at least a few disks were put to use. But this box? Completely unused, in the original shrink wrap. Not too long ago, burning a CD or a DVD was something I did almost daily. But when I built new computers a couple of years ago, I no longer even bothered putting DVD drives in them. I have an external USB drive that works fine for software (mostly operating system) installations. And I can still use it, e.g., to rip a CD. But burning one? What for? My USB dongle on my key chain has many times the capacity of a DVD.

I still have never-used floppy disks, too, but not in unopened, shrink-wrapped packages.

Looking around, I am trying to guess what technology will be next, going the way of the dodo. Hard drives, perhaps? Sure they’re being replaced by SSDs but they still offer a price advantage and better reliability as long-term storage. Desktop computers? Unlikely, for content creators or developers like myself. Or maybe things are settling down a bit? I don’t know.

For what it’s worth, I also have a record player and a VCR next to my desk. The VCR was a super-expensive, top-of-the-line VCR that can handle all TV standards, which is why I bought it. I used it to digitize many tapes, including PAL/SECAM tapes from Europe. I have not used that VCR in many years; not even sure it still works. Its display does show the time, but it is very faint. The record player, however, is relatively new. Vinyl has made a comeback of sorts, so record players are being made again. I didn’t buy into the new (retro?) vinyl craze, but we did have a few older records that we liked very much, and which were not readily available on CD, so the player was needed to digitize them as well.

 Posted by at 12:50 pm
May 132019
 

I have learned to love the voice of Doris Day.

Her version of No Moon At All is one of my all-time favorites.

Early this morning, I found out that she passed away. May she rest in peace.

 Posted by at 12:53 pm
May 082019
 

The Globe and Mail managed to publish today one of the saddest editorial cartoons I ever saw:

There really is nothing that I can add. The cartoon speaks for itself.

 Posted by at 11:42 am
May 082019
 

Today was a most unpleasant day for a whole host of reasons, so by the time I finished my dinner, I needed a distraction.

And then I recalled: Just the other day, I read that China’s most successful sci-fi blockbuster to date, The Wandering Earth, is now on Netflix.

So it was time for movie night. I watched it. And it was… fun.

It is not a flawless movie by any means. And the so-called “science” is as warped, as bogus as the science behind any Hollywood blockbuster.

But it was fast-paced, visually stunning, engaging, and occasionally even had sparks of genuine humor, just in the right quantities.

In short, it is on par with any A-rated sci-fi blockbuster from Hollywood.

One suggestion: Watch it with subtitles in the original Mandarin. This is not meant to be a criticism of the voice actors of the English-language dubbed version. It just… didn’t feel authentic. And you might miss out on subtleties, such as (ok, this is one of the less subtle subtleties, I admit) when one character: a blonde, mixed-race Chinese-Australian man from Beijing who speaks Mandarin as a native throughout the film, suddenly shouts “Fuck this shit! No fucking way!” in unaccented English when he makes an uncharacteristically self-sacrificing move, risking his own life.

 Posted by at 12:51 am
May 052019
 

There is this wonderful Tom Waits song (Waits may be the only artist I know who presents cacophonic noise as “music” and yet the result is something I don’t hate), Earth Died Screaming. The title is borrowed from The Earth Dies Screaming, a 1964 British film, scenes from which are used in the Tom Waits music video.

The British movie is about an alien invasion. But a friend of mine used this phrase a lot lately as he is posting about environmental disasters, such as the ever growing islands of plastic in the ocean, the rapid, wholesale disappearance of species, or the still callous attitude of greedy humans who continue to engage in wanton destruction.

And then there are the bugs.

It wasn’t that long ago that I read somewhere online the observation that nowadays, when you go on a highway drive on a summer evening, your windshield no longer gets covered with bugs. Sure, some of it might be explained by the more streamlined shape of automobiles, allowing laminar airflow and letting the bugs escape… but it isn’t a very convincing explanation and I, too, noticed that the bugs are no longer a major problem.

And then, I read about vanishing insect populations in National Geographic.

Here are a couple of sentences worth quoting:

“In October 2017 a group of European researchers found that insect abundance (as measured by biomass) had declined by more than 75 percent within 63 protected areas in Germany—over the course of just 27 years.” Or that “within a relatively pristine rainforest in Puerto Rico, the biomass of insects and other arthropods like spiders had fallen between 10- and 60-fold since the 1970s.”

If this doesn’t scare the bejesus out of you, maybe it should.

 Posted by at 11:26 pm
May 052019
 

I just finished reading Miranda Carter’s superb book, George, Nicholas and Wilhelm, about the three royal cousins who, often unwittingly, helped pave the road to WWI.

Though the book was written many years before Trump ascended to the White House, the parallels between Wilhelm and Trump are frighteningly inescapable.

What this means for the future, I don’t know. Like Trump, Wilhelm was at least as much a symptom as he was a cause: A symptom of a society with deep divisions and unresolved problems. Like the war that began in 1914, a future conflict may end up destroying the fruits of an unprecedented era of prolonged prosperity and progress, leading to chaos and disaster instead. And given the advances in technology and the proliferation of weaponry, including nuclear weapons, a future conflict will be much, much worse than anything the world has seen, including the horrors WWII.

Carter seems to have the same sense of apprehension, if her article published in The New Yorker last year is any indication. And she warns, rightfully in my opinion, that just as it was the case with Wilhelm, the real consequences may only come long after Trump is gone in the White House.

Oh well. To cheer myself up, I began reading Mary Beard’s SPQR instead, a modern history of ancient Rome. Oh wait… the Rome that transitioned from a popular republic to an autocratic empire? Yes, the very same.

 Posted by at 11:20 pm
May 022019
 

I meant to post this yesterday, but I didn’t have the time. Besides, it is not something you post without permission from the other party involved. The other party being my beloved wife Ildiko, that is.

You see, yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of us meeting, on a cloudy, rainy May 1 in the town of Győr, Hungary, where we were both attending a national high school chemistry competition.

And it so happened that a short while (maybe just a few weeks?) later, our high school class had a day trip to the fine town of Pécs, Ildiko’s hometown, so she and I had a chance to meet again. And one of my friends had a Polaroid camera:

Darn, I was so much thinner than today.

Ildiko, on the other hand, looks just as beautiful now as she did on that late spring day in 1979.

 Posted by at 5:56 pm