Posts Tagged "Sagan"
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Hamming distance: Crazy Quilt Error-correcting Codes
Shown here are Hamming distance error-correcting codes in an illustration resembling a crazy quilt. In yesterdays’ post we pondered that aliens looking at the Sagan-designed Pioneer Plaque might have a hard time finding Earth due to the various data error. (These were due to the limits of science back in the 1970s.) Some people might regard the errors as a good thing. (Maybe we don’t want aliens to find us. 🙂 But there is some redundancy in the Quasar timing uses. (In part, there had to be, because the timings will slowly change.) Sending a message with extra, redundant information to help the receiver correct errors is known in coding theory as a Forward Error Code. Space aliens trying to decipher the plaque might have to use something more advanced — probably based on Bayesian statistics, the sort of statistics error-detecting and correcting algorithms we’re starting to see in advanced artificial intelligence algorithms that use statistical inference.… Read the restPioneer Plaque: Sagan designed infographic
The Carl Sagan-designed golden record (“Pioneer Plaque”) sent on 1970s Pioneer spacecraft is today considered an infographic. (An infographic intended to be read by space aliens. Which means that, continuing our IG series on data visualization, you can’t get much more far out that this visual.) The golden-plated engraving is designed to survive a billion years in space, quite a feet given that the Earth itself will be very different in a billion years (and was extremely different 1 billion years ago). The Pioneer Plaque infographic was designed by Carl Sagan and drawn by Sagan’s then wife, an artist. It includes anatomically-correct drawings of humans (cropped-off due to IG community standards where this was originally published :). For this, Sagan was accused of sending smut into interstellar space. Most of the information in the Pioneer Plaque references the atomic timing of a hydrogen, used elsewhere as a unit of measurement (the same throughout space, so the same to space aliens).… Read the restKardashev scale: information, energy and civilization
This illustration of a future Dyson Swarm in #space connects many of our past photos to Carl Sagan. 🙂 Suppose we could do one of the endless “I’m just Sagan” meme photos here, but we are trying to be original. 🙂  In our last photo blog post, we talked about information theorist Claude Shannon and the links between data science (or information) and energy gradients (or entropy or thermodynamics). In 1964 Soviet (Russian) astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed the Kardashev scale. A Type I civilization could harness terrestrial power equivalent to 1960s Earth, Type II civilization an entire star, and a Type III civilization the energy output of an entire galaxy. Kardashev was expanding on earlier work by Leslie White who attempted to use a similar system to classify ancient human civilizations (thus connecting this photo with our very first photo on the Singularity and math models of ancient human societies). Carl Sagan modified this scale to interpolate between the different values and created a decimal system.… Read the restSteam Locomotives, Entropy, Information and Data Science
This is the first in series of short photo blog posts discussing the ideas of Carl Sagan (and others) relating civilization, energy, and information. Let’s start of by discussing entropy (energy), thermodynamics and information. There are multiple links (thermodynamics species a minimum amount of energy usage required for computation). The first one we’re interested in here is due to MIT professor Claude Shannon. Prof. Shannon provided the mathematical foundations relating information, data science, and thermodynamics. Specifically, his mathematical formulation for information is identical to that of negative entropy. (Entropy, sometimes confused with the similar concept of energy or rather energy gradients, is the disorder in the universe. You can think of it as the useable energy available. We’ll come to the steam locomotives in the photo in a bit.) There’s another relationship as well: it takes energy to perform computation, and there is a thermodynamic minimum on the amount of energy necessary for computation.… Read the restRecent Posts
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