Posts Tagged "Sagan"
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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 restMandelbrot set: cellular automatons & fractal islands
Mandelbrot set: fractal math. After spending some time in space, we wanted to come back down to Earth. Continuing on our previous photos, should we talk about Conquistador economics or the invention of writing and 3,000 year-old Chinese sunspot observations? First let’s talk about von Neumann machines and cellular automatons. This is the famous Mandelbrot set, an image generated from pure mathematics. There are an infinite number of beautiful images inside the Mandelbrot set. The Mandelbrot set isn’t normally constructed as a cellular automaton (although it certainly can be as cellular automatons are Turing-complete for the computer scientists out there.) However, many other famous fractals are easily expressed as cellular automatons. The two fields are closely related, as many fractals (including Mandelbrot) are related to bifurcation problems on recursive functions (famously related to automaton simulations). We’ll just note for now that Cellular Automatons are another name for von Neumann machines, which you may remember from Arthur C.… 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 restOh send in the trolls. Oh where are the trolls? There aren’t any trolls….
Send in the trolls…. Oh where are the trolls…. (With apologies to Stephen Sondheim) Our Miley Cyrus SQL Server Hadoop article got trolled on Twitter today. And we thought ‘yes! Finally! A troll.’ Then it turned out he had no Twitter readership. We admit there was a problem with the article. We didn’t list the fact that some people think  Miley Cyrus and using SQL Server together with Hadoop are both somewhat messed up. Mea culpa. (Also, we did not come down nearly hard enough on Microsoft. The article goes on endlessly with its tepid praise for SQL Server. If you can’t afford Oracle and need an top-of-line SQL solution it is actually quite a cost effective solution. If you can afford the risk of running Windows, that is. Mainly we attack MySQL. We thought that we’d at least get some MySQL fans trolling us. No, some random Microsoft type apparently thought their honor had been grievously offended with our insufficient praise of Redmond.)… Read the restRecent Posts
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