geofpetch

[geofpetch]

Will some label sign this 9th-grader, please. Carlee Rose Sonenclar.

[geofpetch]

A link to Geof Petch on BrandYourself. Please have a look at this link for some more information about Geof Petch.

[geofpetch]

ISS astronaut photographs "supermoon" sinking into Earth's atmosphere.

The physics behind this photo: refraction. The light from the bottom half of the moon passes through the atmosphere of Earth which is in the line of sight of the astronauts on board of the ISS. The bending of light (= refraction) is more intensive in a dense medium and so the light of the lower half is refracted considerably more than the light from the upper half of the moon (which does not pass through the atmosphere). The result is this squished moon where the central part of it "disappears" as we see the heavily refracted light from the bottom half there.

[geofpetch]

Ten Corporations Control Almost Everything You Buy.

It All Comes Back To The Big Guys.

Remember my The Capitalist Network That Runs The World? 

This is a great follow-up.

[geofpetch]

Unexplained Explosions Now Worldwide

They started in Clintonville, Wisconsin. They were dismissed as a local phenomenon. But they have now spread to 12 states, the United Kingdom and possibly Lithuania. They are loud, often metallic-sounding explosions of unknown origin. In the UK, a powerful explosion heard over most of southern England was explained as a sonic boom caused when two Typhoon jets were scrambled in response to an as-yet unexplained 'rare' emergency signal that came from a small helicopter hovering over Bath. The two jets were observed circling the helicopter. One witness reported a silver disk in the area. Meanwhile, unexplained explosions have now been heard both from the air and from underground in 12 states in the United States. They have nothing to do with fracking and are not a new earthquake-related geologic phenomenon. Just saying ....

[geofpetch]

But Zynga and Facebook? They seem more able to be toppled. It seems possible to knock them off of their throne. Two companies, OMGPOP and Instagram, came out of nowhere and became viable competitors. That’s kind of amazing. It’s amazing to me that Instagram got 30 million users in no time at all. It’s crazy that Draw Something can get 50 million downloads in 50 days. It’s mind blowing that Pinterest went from nothing to 10 million users in the blink of an eye. It’s amazing how fragile it all is. Facebook may be the first viable threat to Google, but its own market dominance is by no means assured.

Instagram and the Age of Upsets | Betabeat — News, gossip and intel from Silicon Alley 2.0.

A whole new world. My latest column for Betabeat. 

(via rickwebb)

[geofpetch]

Pandora Re-Plosion!

Not one to mince words - but also not one to receive such an immediate response - I was surprised at the reaction. My posting of Randora Plosion! received an immediate response from Pandora (who must use one of those services to hear what folks are saying about them). Not easily impressed,  I was doubly so at how serious they were in uncovering the issue and expanding a solution over their customer-facing business practice. This is how it should be done.

My faith in Pandora and its ability to thrive (and be a learning organization) is welcomingly renewed.

[geofpetch]

Stop Worrying...There Probably Is An Afterlife

A book project that will suggest that dying isn't half as bad as it's made out to be...Woody Allen once wrote "It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens." His words probably mirror the thoughts of most human beings alive today: we try to ignore the fact of our own mortality by viewing death as something that  happens to other people, hiding the concept beyond our sight by employing euphemisms such as "passed on" (or with pets, "went to sleep"). 

Get behind the work of Greg Taylor and his latest book effort - he needs some help with research expenses and is offering a great deal on his crowd-funding site. Stop Worrying…There Probably Is An Afterlife. Check it out!

[geofpetch]

Pandora Plosion!

So I was listening away on Pandora last night and then, BING, I received an email telling me to upgrade to Pandora One. Odd I thought as I am a Pandora One user since last mid-April and I had never before received an email from Pandora.

Turning back to the music I saw that - BOOM! - I was no longer a Pandora One subscriber. It appears that my subscription expired on April 7 - the day, the minute, the nano-second of the notice.

Now some may be pissed, peeved, or just a bit ticked and then re-up. Me? (Remember I founded CRM Magazine - customer relationship management magazine.) Nope, not me. This is the most stupid thing I have seen in the modern age where customer retention is far more economical for the bottom line that customer acquisition. Did I mention how STUPID this move by Pandora is? Seriously, give a customer - someone that gives you money to keep you in business - a heads-up, maybe a month, a couple of weeks, a few days, notice before throwing them out.

Honestly, it is not my business or concern to keep track of the date on which my subscription began or expires - it is the business of the business to let me know and to make it easy for me to give them more money.

Thank goodness I'm not an investor in Pandora - this is not a sustainable business model. (It may be a good short if they continue this mismanagement of the customer experience.)

[geofpetch]

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

Gabriel García Márquez

[geofpetch]

The Three Little Pigs coverage as envisioned by The Guardian. It follows the developing story of the pigs' arrest for killing the Big Bad Wolf.

The Guardian covers it all with gusto, from the paper's front page headline, to outcry on Twitter, a simulation of the Big Bad Wolf blowing the houses down, and finally, a very surprising conclusion to the age-old fairy tale.

[geofpetch]

A supercell thunderstorm.

[geofpetch]

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.

GK Chesterton

[geofpetch]

Track The Giant Mass Of Tsunami Junk Headed For The U.S.

The monster earthquake and ensuing tsunami that ravaged Japan in March 2011 left behind a ton of floating debris in its wake—25 million tons to be exact.  

And now that giant mass of garbage, carrying everything from small fishing vessels to cars to TV sets, is headed toward California's beaches, scheduled to reach the U.S. West Coast as early as 2014, according to researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. 

The Daily Mail dug up a computer animation created last April by Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner from the university's International Pacific Research Center that predicts the likely pathways of the tsunami debris.

The model projections show the trajectory of the floating wreckage from March 11, 2011, to 2019.  

According to the report the debris should take this path:

The debris first spreads out eastward from the Japan Coast in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. In a year, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument will see pieces washing up on its shores; in two years, the remaining Hawaiian islands will see some effects; in three years, the plume will reach the US West Coast, dumping debris on Californian beaches and the beaches of British Columbia, Alaska, and Baja California. The debris will then drift into the famous North Pacific Garbage Patch, where it will wander around and break into smaller and smaller pieces. In five years, Hawaii shores can expect to see another barrage of debris that is stronger and longer-lasting than the first one. Much of the debris leaving the North Pacific Garbage Patch ends up on Hawaii’s reefs and beaches.

[geofpetch]

The best of this week's auroras.

[geofpetch]

Auroras from yesterday's solar storm.

[geofpetch]

It Is Mathematically Impossible That We Are Alone In Our Galaxy

I wrote about a recent report that brought out the fact that there are at least 100 billion x 170 billion planets in the known universe - and then later I wrote about what it may mean about our search for co-inhabitants in the universe.

Now I read in the Economist about a new unpublished study that reveals that our Galaxy - not the universe, and there are 170 billion galaxies - should have been colonized by now.  The Economist reviews an unpublished paper by Thomas Hair and Andrew Hedman that profoundly reaffirms the conundrum that is the Fermi Paradox, an observational problem that is sometimes referred to as the Great Silence.

What's fascinating about the Hair and Hedman paper is that they are not cosmologists or astro-biologists, but rather mathematicians—and it is through the lens of number-cruching that they sought an answer to the question of how long it would take a civilization to colonize its local region given a specific set of parameters. And their findings are disturbing: No matter how they reworked the numbers, they came to the same conclusion:                   

The Galaxy should be colonized by now:

To arrive at their conclusion Dr Hair and Mr Hedman assumed that outer space is dotted with solar systems, about five light years apart. They then asked how quickly a single civilisation armed with the requisite technology would spread its tentacles, depending on the degree of colonising zeal, expressed as the probability that intelligent beings decide to hop from one planet to the next in 1,000 years (500 years for the trip, at a modest one-tenth of the speed of light, and another 500 years to prepare for the next hop). All these numbers are necessarily moot. If the vast majority of planets is not suitable, for instance, the average distance for a successful expedition might be much more than five light years. And advanced beings might not need five Earth centuries to get up to speed before they redeploy. However, Dr Hair and Mr Hedman can tweak their probabilities to reflect a range of possible conditions. Using what they believe to be conservative assumptions (as low as one chance in four of embarking on a colonising mission in 1,000 years), they calculated that any galactic empire would have spread outwards from its home planet at about 0.25% of the speed of light. The result is that after 50m years it would extend over 130,000 light years, with zealous colonisers moving in a relatively uniform cloud and more reticent ones protruding from a central blob. Since the Milky Way is estimated to be 100,000-120,000 light years across, outposts would be sprinkled throughout the galaxy, even if the home planet were, like Earth, located on the periphery.  Crucially, even in slow-expansion scenario, the protrusions eventually coalesce. After 250,000 years, which the model has so far had the time to simulate, the biggest gaps are no larger than 30 light years across. Dr Hair thinks they should grow no bigger as his virtual colonisation progresses. That is easily small enough for man's first sufficiently powerful radio transmissions (in the early 20th century) to have been detected and for a reply to have reached Earth (which has been actively listening out for such messages since the 1960s). And though 50m years may sound a lot, if intelligent life did evolve more than once, it could easily have done so billions of years before this happened on Earth. All this suggests, Dr Hair and Mr Hedman fear, that humans really do have the Milky Way to themselves. Either that or the neighbours are a particularly timid bunch.

So, the next time somebody smugly shrugs off the Fermi Pardox by suggesting that "it takes too long to colonize the Galaxy" or that "there hasn't been enough time," or that "the Galaxy is too big," tell them to shut-up and read this paper.