Posts Tagged "photo"
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Sextant: data and historical old ship GPS navigation
Continuing from our last post on models of historic civilizations and data, we’re drawing a line from Carl Sagan to the Conquistadors (and modern TV documentaries’ theories about them). This historic photo is an antique sextant from 1890. This historical navigation device worked by measuring the angle between the sun (or stars) and horizon using two mirrors. It was the GPS (or Apple Maps) of its day. And, as we learned from Apple Map’s initial glitches, then as now, successful navigation required a lot of information (or data) to work correctly! Since the Internet didn’t exist, this data had to arrive by some other means, which we’ll talk about in a future post. (So we’re also continuing on our earlier mirror theme.) The use of two mirrors’ reflection to align the image of the object with the horizon (when the sextant was set at the correct angle) enabled accurate measurements when on a moving platform, such as by a sailor on a boat at sea.… Read the restSpanish 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 restIOT Internet toilet senses disease (and talks?)
We promised to return to Earth after our previous photo post discussing 3,000-year-old Chinese sunspot observations and catastrophic space weather. How else could we do this other than another important Asian trend that we missed: Internet-connected toilets. Don’t laugh, this isn’t a Google April Fools joke (although Google reportedly has installed an earlier non-IOT model of these “advanced” toilets by the same manufacturer, Toto of Japan, in their offices). IOT Internet toilets actually make a lot of sense. These Japanese units from Toto can automatically detect disease via blood glucose, blood pressure, and BMI sensors. They can transmit this health information via WiFi. As they say in startup world, this is obviously a billion dollar idea. All of this can then be integrated with something like Apple’s HealthKit. Thus, they can be integrated with the rest of iOS. So, in the not to distant future, your toilet should be able to talk to you via Apple Siri.… Read the restWolfram Alpha, von Neumann & digital physics
Continuing our discussion of fractals, digital physics, self-replicating spacecraft, cellular automatons, and von Neumann machines, this is view of a different part of the Mandelbrot Set (produced with a different viewer). Answer to the question at the end of yesterday’s IG photo post involves Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame. His company, Wolfram Research, makes the Wolfram Cloud Programming Language, a potential competitor to something IBM Watson-like, which we discussed in an earlier blog post. This language powers Wolfram Alpha, which is currently part of Apple Siri. So, if you’ve used Siri you’ve probably used this software. When not developing technology that became part of Siri, Stephen Wolfram wrote a bestselling (and somewhat controversial) book on Cellular Automatons, A New Type of Science. In one information-centric view of the universe attributed to Wheeler and others (sometimes called “digital physics”) the universe can be thought of as a collection of cellular automatons (or, equivalently, a Turing machine or perhaps a quantum computer).… Read the restRecent Posts
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