Category "History"
There are 32 results found
Spanish conquistadors, armies, aliens, history, war, and data science?
How is a painting about conquistadors from Spain related to information or data science? And, by extension, armies or war? What about Sagan’s fear of advanced civilizations in the form of alien or extraterrestrial conquistadors from space? How can data science be used to study history? Avid readers of our recent posts will have a clue, but it’s been covered in some recent popular books and TV documentaries. (Hint: it also relates to our Sagan posts. This includes our discussion of the Kardashev scale as extended by Sagan, which measures a civilizations progress in terms of energy and information. It’s interesting to contrast these ideas with mathematical models of civilization collapse such as those proposed by Tainter. These topics directly address our own, as one civilization’s progress can be another’s collapse. Sagan was concerned about what might happen if advanced space-fearing civilizations found us; would it be a replay of the conquistadors?… Read the restSpace weather, sun storms, “Black Swan” & Carrington events
This giant prominence erupted from the sun on Aug 31, 2012, sending a shockwave towards Earth that could have caused some very serious problems. This sun storm illustrates how space weather can cause so-called “Black Swan” events: potentially devastating events like the Carrington event that are low probability and therefore may not be properly modeled or planned for. Continuing on the theme from our last two photos of data and mathematical models of civilizations, we already pointed out (in our Dyson swarm photo) that a civilizations capable of harnessing all of the energy from the sun would be a Type II civilization. Mathematical models of civilizations (including historical human civilizations) is a recurring theme on our blog and here on IG. Our first photo linked to a blog article discussing this. We’ll almost certainly revisit this subject in the future, perhaps to take a look at the conquistadors, or our own, current civilization (aka economics or operations research).… Read the restVR Data Preservation: Is this dutch masterpiece painting really a 400-year old photograph made by a human?
Coming back to our earlier posts on data modeling of the impacts of investment in world literacy (represented by another 400-year-old dutch masterpiece painting of a schoolhouse) and 3D-digital big data preservation of the Buddha destroyed by the Taliban (also related to literacy as we’ll discuss in the future), we wanted to circle back around and discuss just the data and Virtual Reality aspects of these dutch masterpieces themselves. Texas inventor Tim Jenison noticed that the Dutch master artist Vermeer had perfectly captured the pattern of light dappling in the background, although this cannot be seen by an unaided human eye. (Although you can see the light is dappled, your brain still reinterprets most of the shading as a flat surface with a single color, preventing you from seeing the subtle variations of grading. To get exact shades as perfect as in the painting, Jenison feels an optical device must have been used the obscures most of the image, so that each the shade in each ‘pixel’ can be matched exactly by the painter.… Read the restType 3 civilization (Hoag object ring galaxy photo)
Continuing our earlier Carl Sagan civilization post, today’s photo is Hoag’s object, a non-typical ring galaxy. A type III civilization would, be definition, be able to harness the entire energy of a reference galaxy. We left off earlier on the important wrinkle that Sagan added to the Kardashev scale on civilization advancement (and, by extension, the Leslie White scale on historical civilizations). Both of these scales focus on technology (with Kardashev focused on technology to harness energy), but Sagan also added information processing (data science!) to the scale. He defined a scale from A-Z to represent the amount of information available to a civilization, each letter representing a 10-fold increase, with A representing 10^6 and Z representing access to 10^31 bits of information. Sagan believed no civilization could yet have achieved a Z status, as not enough time had passed in the history of the universe to allow this much exchange of information.… Read the restRecent Comments
- florimee on genetic disease turns you into a real-life vampire
- Acculation on Alien Pioneer plaque starmap to 3D printed jewelry transmedia: maker movement data-driven multiplatform media
- Acculation on Free Video Data Science Assessment Tool
- Acculation on Free Business Advice Chatbot Product
- Acculation on Online Consultation with Dr. Krebs (Big Data and Management Consulting)
Featured Posts
Tags
analytics
animal
art
artwork
bigdata
blue
book
business
california
careers
classic
collage
colors
cool
data
drawing
encore
famous
figure
gadget
glitch
glitched
green
historic
historical
ideas
illustration
intelligent
light
mirror
more
old
photo
pop
popart
post
red
Sagan
science
space
story
tech
us
warhol
water