daniel brian

dan brian's thought collider

[howstrangethemusicsoundstome]

So people are saying that they might make Pluto a planet again. This isn’t like the last time where it was just a huge misunderstanding (that “Harvard scientists say” thing from a few months back? Yeah, that was fake), but this is based on actual closer observations of the object in question. I...

[danielbrian]

I agree, but your initial grounds for acceptance that Pluto was a dwarf planet were based in scientific classification, and it's hard not to agree with peer reviewed science. I equate the whole argument to people crying out that a crab apple is just an green apple, when it's similar to a green apple, but still not the same as a green apple as we know it. Actually, I still don't understand people's emotional attachment to Pluto's demotion. It's still there and it's still Pluto, it's just a different genus... For the moment.

[8bitfuture]

Relax on Kepler-16b - Where your shadow always has company

Like Luke Skywalker’s planet “Tatooine” in Star Wars, Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars. Depicted here as a terrestrial planet, Kepler-16b might also be a gas giant like Saturn. Prospects for life on this unusual world aren’t good, as it has a temperature similar to that of dry ice. But the discovery indicates that the movie’s iconic double-sunset is anything but science fiction.

[danielbrian]

Morning!

It’s been a while, but I haven’t stopped writing, I’ve just been overly absorbed in a personal scratch pad on my Evernote. It’s been good for me to dump my brain out before work, but it has digressed into a mundane daily journal of things mixed with my work projects. It’s not a bad thing, but it doesn’t pose the challenge of cultivating a few entertaining paragraphs every morning for an audience (even if no one is reading this). Audiences are excellent catalysts; it’s what keeps my Twitter feed from going completely off the rails into either complete depravity or ennui. 

  So, I’m back here on my public facing scratch pad in an effort to balance this out. I feel like there should be an infographic displaying the many layers of notebooks writers keep, outlining the various levels of exposure and content. A mind on paper.

Well, if you read anything this morning, it should be this brief introduction to DACS, Distributed Autonomous Corporations. Robo companies running themselves like something straight out of William Gibson. Dwell on that a bit. More on it tomorrow.

[danielbrian]

[A map of the Darién Gap via Google Maps]

Unbelievably, I had not heard of the Darién Gap until a few days ago and it has lingered like a vacuous hole in my thoughts ever since. The Pan-American highway is a set of roads stretching from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina; a highway from the arctic circle of North America to the southern most tip of South America. The only problem is the road is divided by an impassable gap of land along the Panama-Columbia border where Central America meets its southern counterpart. Poetic.

The Gap stretches almost 100 miles across, the Panama side punctuated by a lush, mountainous rainforest, while the Columbian side settles into a vast marshlands fed by the delta of the Atrato River. The terrain makes road building extremely expensive and little incentive has emerged to connect the two sections of highway. Currently, the Gap is home to a few native tribes and the Marxist rebel group, FARC, who commit regular insurgencies against the Columbian government.

What fascinates me about the Gap is that there remains a crucially positioned piece of land that won’t yield to progress’ persistent hammer and shovel; a massive piece of intercontinental infrastructure short circuited by 100 miles shadowy wilderness. South America is probably the continent I think about the least, my knowledge of it loose and lacking (sadly), and I can’t help but think the Gap is partially responsible. A dark, wild barrier separating several cultures by the impossibility of a road trip, shrouding the opposing lands in a mystery that can only be unraveled by an expensive flight. Geographic psychology.

The Darién Gap is the sort of fringe land that incubates myths and monsters.

[danielbrian]

In a conversation about whether gravity is a particle or a wave, the sagely Neil Degrasse Tyson dropped some practical philosophy on his podcast, Star Talk Radio.

It’s a very human thing to say is it this, or is it that? It is a planet or is it not a planet? Is it less filling or is it great taste? Is it gum or is it candy? These are sort of false dichotomies, something can be both, but our language requires that it fit into one word or another. What we’re not recognizing is that it’s not a fault of the object or the concept, it’s a defect in our language, and if our thoughts follow language, we have trouble thinking things can fit into more than one category. I think it’s the source of most human ailments in the world, cultural ailments. Are you gay or are you not gay? Are you black or are you not? Are you this or are you that?  Are you male or female? …and it’s like, chill out. Just let things be what they are. Allow there to be a spectrum in all that you see.

[danielbrian]

[Portrait of NGC 281 by Martin Pugh]

The universe keeping in lockstep with my current ruminating and fascinations, I came across this article via Warren Ellis’ public scratch pad, morning.computer, about how life in the universe might be far less abundant than originally thought. Out of the billions of galaxies floating through the black, only 10 percent of them may be capable of birthing complex life due to the universe’s natural and consistent reset button, the gamma ray burst, explosions of highly energetic photons from collapsing and colliding stars that can wipe out huge swaths of life across a galaxy.

Scientists detect these bursts about once a day. That’s a potentially thousands of light years of flourishing life being irradiated to extinction everyday.

The universe is close to fourteen billion years old.  For the first five billion years, the whole universe was a gamma-ray oven.  Nobody ever totally subscribes to the “we are the only intelligent life in the universe” theory, because the mathematics are entirely against it.  It has long seemed to me, however, that the mathematics also suggest that we are the only intelligent life we will ever meet, because almost all of the universe before us is a blackened field.

Warren Ellis, morning.computer

Ellis paints a poignant, bleak picture, but I feel that it only accounts for the ultra-subjective definition of what we consider life, beings like us (I use the pronoun “us” in the broad sense of carbon based, cellular life), ants declaring anything not an ant as non-living. Trying to define life beyond our spectrum of chemical signaling processes edges toward that unearthly sense of the “world without us,” a world that can only be experienced by its negative presence within our own perceptions. That being said, artificial life researcher, Christoph Adami, took an excellent crack at defining “life we can’t imagine” in a 2011 TED Talk. It's definitely worth watching.

The words “star demons” are scrawled on my forearm right now (still haven’t finished In The Dust Of This Planet, and sometimes I take notes on my arm) and that feels strangely synergistic this morning. The notion of stars flaring at one another in an intelligent network spanning millions of lightyears doesn’t seem like a possibility outside of the scope of “life we can’t imagine.”

[danielbrian]

I happened upon a Glenn Beck segment discussing nihilism versus whatever conservative mantra he is brandishing right now. Despite the somewhat comical nature of Beck’s conclusions/deviations, I discovered a neat, little book called “In The Dust Of This Planet” by Eugene Thacker because of it. I was drawn in by the book’s title and stark, beautiful cover.

Beck condemns “In The Dust Of This Planet” as an attractive nihilist manifesto for the young (a book he openly admits he’s never read in the same segment), but in reality it’s an interesting, philosophical piece about an unthinkable world –what Thacker calls “the world without us”– that the author explores through supernatural and horror themes. Thacker cites HP Lovecraft early in the book as an author who often scared us with “the world without us”, the unknown becoming known and the results driving us mad.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

– H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call Of Cthulu"

The “world without us” is an idea that has sat precariously at the edge of my brain for years now, a feeling that humanity can never fully understand a universe without them (an idea that can only be explored through its negative presence) and that the universe’s true nature is ultimately meaningless. In the past, the idea came to me in the form that there is no other intelligent, self-aware life in the universe (at least aware to humanity's level), because –for some odd reason– self-awareness doesn't seem to be in the universe's nature. This is all very contrary to my love of science fiction and deep hope to learn of alien life's existence one day. It sounds terribly bleak, I know, but reading the book is a wonderful thought experiment and is not nearly as saddening or dooming as it sounds.

The book’s core argument does harbor a deep sense of nihilism, but in the sense that Thacker is trying his best to convey the idea of a purely objective universe. To me, I’ve always found the objective nature of nihilism liberating, like a clean slate for all of your ambitions and morality. Obviously, nihilist inclinations can be destructive and painful, the universe breaking down before you into a purposeless, black maw that undermines society’s default expectations and cultural ideals. But I’d rather look at it as an opportunity to shape your life how ever you would like, attach meaning to whatever you want, however you want, with the Golden Rule hanging high in your consciousness. NOTE: I understand that this approach to life is probably not technically nihilism the moment you attach meaning to something, but it’s an excellent baseline.

Regardless, “In The Dust Of This Planet” is a slightly tedious but excellent read that will send you into deep meditations about the infinite black ocean always lapping at the dark shore just around the corner of your consciousness.

[danielbrian]

My phone has felt like a lifeless husk in my pocket for several weeks now. Less useful, more forgettable. I left Twitter a month ago, fleeing the ugly sadness shooting out of its orifices. The #BeenRapedNeverReported hashtag shouldn’t have to exist, and it is just ONE of the many injustices that were being gutted and put on display for the world to rubberneck. It felt like a good time to manage my Twitter addiction.

What have a I seen since then? Not much. The world feels more continuous now, time is no longer stitched together with incessant updates, random thoughts, or dumb jokes. The first few days were weird, my thumb absently swiping through home screens looking for something that wasn’t there, but that passed much quicker than expected. Sure, there were a few days (3!) I jumped on briefly to pore through my news/science feeds and comment on some big stories (the Antares rocket explosion, the electoral bloodbath, Philae landing on a fucking COMET), but for the most part Twitter was easy to avoid.

Things that happened:

• I signed up for a bunch of email newsletters from writers and general weirdos to keep my inbox lively.

• I walked to and from work consciously contemplating the physical world around me and found that my city’s daily hustle is just as boring as I thought it would be, but watching the leaves change was great.

• I became a mega-fuck-ton more productive at work.

• I read even more and watched much basketball without the usual interruptions Twitter invited. I could savor these things better.

• I wrote tiny emails to my family sharing things I loved with them. I bugged my friends with more links (this urge to share was difficult to quell).

• The world felt more confined, but Twitter’s presence felt smaller. No one is on Twitter.

• I realized I got a lot of my news from Twitter and that my web surfing hinged on it.

• I had to relearn how to treasure little, random moments instead of just writing them down and vomiting them on the world.

• I saw a lot of people staring at their phones, even on bicycles!

Things that didn’t happen:

• I didn’t get more creative work done. In fact, I may have gotten less done, somehow. I think I just started reading more instead.

• I didn’t reconnect with nature or the world around me. At least, not in some mind altering revelatory sense. In fact, I felt less connected, I felt more alone. It wasn’t the worst thing, but I felt like I was missing the proxy digital presence of legitimate friends. I had not expected this.

But my biggest revelation was that Twitter had been my public-facing scratch pad for years, a lazy outlet for my thoughts and inspirations being fanned by the exposure to the creative weirdos and alcoholics I follow on there. Also, that I’m a bit of an introvert without Twitter.

People constantly advocate for the "necessity of face time”. “Our kids won’t know how to interact without it,” they say. Well, from my own experience without social media these past weeks, I didn’t seek out more face time with people. I barely reached out more via email than I already did. I just lived with same level of face time I had before. My guess is that this is why you hear older folks say –more often than we ever will– that they have friends they miss and lost contact with long ago even though they still live in the same town. Socially, there was probably about the same level of face time 20 years ago as there is now. We all settle into routines and are too lazy, exhausted or busy to go visit neighbors/friends more regularly than we already do. At least with social media, despite all its other problems, there’s a chance to check in with those people in our spare moments. But again, this is subjective. Feel free to disregard it.

Eventually, the thought of going back on Twitter filled me with anxiety. Mainlining all that information again seemed overwhelming, and that’s when I realized I was addicted to a lot of crap on there. 95% of my feed is not worth reading, that’s why I have lists (small curated selections of people I choose to pay more attention to than others), and probably 70% of those updates aren’t worth reading, either.

The whole experience has been a mixed bag with its unforeseen losses (exposure to the weirdos, digital camaraderie) but increased quality of life (stemmed interruptions, connection to immediate environment). Ultimately, I feel like my life can be richer with social media than without it. But if I want back in, I’ll need to wade carefully, stick to the shallows and avoid the rip tide. I'm still on the fence though.

IDEAS: Better curated lists, more proxy/robo tweets (tweets delivered via 3rd party services), no apps at work.

[warrenellis-deactivated20200730]

NGC 4762: A Galaxy on the Edge via NASA http://ift.tt/1sfkkZS

[danielbrian]

[JILA's new Strontium atomic clock, the most accurate clock in the world measuring at 430 trillion ticks per second]

I listened to a piece on NPR this morning about JILA's new Strontium clock, the latest device in hyper-accurate time measurement. Atomic clocks have been around for decades, but never had I heard of one so accurate that it was effectively measuring the influence of gravity on time itself just by lifting the clock a few centimeters from the floor.

A brief physics lesson: If you're standing on the first floor of a building right now and a coworker or friend or whoever is standing on the second floor above you, technically time is moving more quickly for the person upstairs by infinitely minute fractions of a second. This is because they are further away from the center of Earth's gravity well than you. The more gravity interacting with space, the slower time moves.

What really blew my mind about this clock was that the most minute changes in the environment could throw it off (well, not "throw off" but more like measure time under a different level of gravitation). Lifting it, moving it, shifts in the Earth's crust are all enough to shift the clock's relative time measurement. It might even be accurate enough to measure resulting gravitational waves of collapsing stars as they pass through our region of space! If they built two of these clocks, they could never be synced up.

But this means that we live in an ever shifting temporal landscape, however unnoticeable it might be to us.  The time my brain is experiencing is slightly different than what my fingers typing out these words are experiencing. Weird.

[danielbrian]

Firs and Frost

[danielbrian]

["It was the best of times, it was the BLURST OF TIMES?!"]

Looming on the horizon like a storm cloud of social awkwardness and exhaustion, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is descending on us scribblers. For the first time in two years I will be taking an honest stab at this. I have an outline, distraction free writing application, clean office, and whisky. Try and stop me!

Here are some great, dumb pieces about writing that I’ve collected over the years to, you know, get you pumped or whatever:

6 Signs That You’re A Writer by Kalen Horton SO, YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER? by Ken Layne Male Novelist Jokes by Mallory Ortberg Guy In Your MFA by @GuyInYourMFA

Best books on writing:

On Writing by Stephen King On Writing Well by William Zinsser Storyteller by Kate Wilhelm (probably my favorite)

[danielbrian]

[Recent sunspots via NASA]

I’m slumped over a laptop this morning reading about how cutlery/chewing may have helped shaped the look of our faces over time, and now I’m wondering if our species is ready to become a civilization of humpbacks. The article is a speculative piece on Soylent, a sustenance alternative to those who are weary of preparing and chewing their food. It’s a good piece and when you pair it with Nicola Twilly’s wonderful new “Gastropod” podcast, it’ll have you mulling over how important your mouth hole is.

From a newsletter by one of my favorite writers:

My Twitter winter hermitage is begun. You will still see "broadcast" posts from me there, but they're all routed to Twitter from other services. The pervasive sadness of social media is just exhausting to me now.

I am on day 4 of my own Twitter hermitage, and I have been questioning whether or not I was crazy, stubborn, or an idiot for having launched out of the Twittersphere, but I seem to be in good company. The instinctual twitch to check my phone has died some and has been easier to overcome than expected, but the urge to output short, decisive thoughts on the screen has been more difficult to dampen. The largest revelation thus far was how often I was using Twitter as a notebook to jot down inane, but entertaining, thoughts (to me, at least). Now I feel this bizarre sensation of having to internalize a lot more. I saw a young woman wearing a brand-spankin’ new Kansas City Royals cap last Friday walking into work and thought that was wonderful. Reaching for my phone to vomit words, I realized that I would have to keep this moment to myself and internalize it (well, until now, I guess). It felt odd but rewarding in a certain way. I’m so used to laying my mind out on the web that I kind of forgot what it was like not to have that ability.

The experiment continues onwards.

[danielbrian]

[ABOVE: The Heart Nebula by Ivan Eder]

I’m taking a sabbatical from Twitter. Tweetdeck and Twitter apps have been removed from all of my devices and I’m plowing headlong into the wilderness of limited social media (probably just this Tumblr).

I left Facebook almost two years ago and never looked back, but that was easy. Twitter has been a significant part of my brain space for almost seven years, and I shudder to think what percentage of my time I’ve spent basking in its glow. I’ve composed over 20,000 tweets. 20,000! At an average length of 77 characters, that’s two or three novels worth of words. Words I could have spent actually writing a novel.

Somewhere over the last two years, a seed was planted in my brain that maybe Twitter wasn’t good for me, that it had grown into a full fledged addiction that was crippling certain parts of my life: work, creativity, and personal growth activities (mostly reading and learning). Luckily, I was spared in letting it hinder my social life and am probably in the minority of people that believes that it has actually enriched that area of my existence, having developed new friendships, galvanized existing ones, and even spurred romantic relationships. But I started realizing that significant portions of my nights would be blank or missing. I’d sit down at 9pm and look up at the clock to find that it was 11pm. Where did the hours go? Down the Twitter hole clicking links and making dumb jokes as I half watched some show on Netlfix. I’d close the app on my iPad and instinctively pick up my phone and open the Twitter app there. It’s bad, real bad.

But with the advent of Gamergate –a fake issue about game journalism ethics that is being used as a trojan horse to scare women out of the game development business– the seed in my head cracked open, its new tendrils wrapping around the pleasure centers of my Twitter brain, choking the life out of them. The rancor on both sides of GG has risen to a fever-pitch and the online environment has become corrosive. Even before Gamergate, Twitter had started to become an eerily hostile place over the last few years. Jokes became less frequent or more social commentary, and large segments of its users became polarized mobs moving from punishing one company’s/group’s/person’s misstep to the next, torches always burning, pitchforks always sharp. Content creators became at risk of having social awareness beaten into their work, not that this is a bad thing, but it’s a hard, ugly way to learn a lesson, and one I’d rather not watch as often as I do..

Twitter is less fun that it used to be, having gone the way of Facebook with self-righteous displays and flame wars; Gamergate was just the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. It used to be a place of hilarious, sardonic foolery and weird, beautiful things that people shared with the world. It feels less like that now. Instead, there seems to be a lot anger and misery in my feed, and the addiction was shooting that straight into my brain. Having struggled through depression the past two years, I need less of that in my life.

You might be asking, “Is he just using his dumb feelings as a scapegoat to silently condemn the frothing social movements on Twitter?” No. I promise. I whole-heartedly support the things that many of those people are fighting for (well, the ones fighting for equality, at least). But the world needs less opinions, less fights, less straight, white men talking. The best thing I feel I can do is remove myself from that equation and live by example. Just treat people as I would want to be treated. Simple! The Golden Rule. But harder to enact when you can flog somebody at a distance through social media. No one likes to be lectured, no one likes to be lectured through a heavy-handed piece of entertainment (comedy, games, books, movies, TV, music, etc…), no one likes to be told how to live their life. It puts them on guard, and even defensive. I try to take my cues and inspirations from people who don’t have to vocalize their views, who instead treat people fairly and reflect that in their creative work, without having to dumb it down to some thinly-veiled allegory of how they think the world should work.

I want to be that person for someone else. Maybe, hopefully, I already am to a TINY extent (probably not), but I have a lot of creative work I need to get out of me before I die, and Twitter is only going to delay that.

We’ll see how it goes.

[danielbrian]

[ABOVE: A map of the proposed Qattara Depression project]

I've read or heard about most bizarre public works projects, but this one slipped by me somehow.

In one of those man-playing-god with the environment moments, there have been plans since 1912 to dig tunnels/canals from the Mediterranean Sea out to the Qattara Depression at the Egyptian edge of the Sahara, resulting in a source hydro-electric power in the middle of the desert. The depression, maxing out at a depth of 436 feet below sea level and spanning 7,500 square miles, would fill with sea water creating a lagoon, but the arid climate would cause the lagoon to evaporate creating a constant flow of water through the hydro-electric plant.

The result would no doubt have major repercussions on the surrounding environment and sounds like a project on the scale of terraforming. Part of me wants to see this happen.

[danielbrian]

[ABOVE: Dilapidated house on Sable Island by Paul Toman, Sable Island via satellite]

Scouring through Google Earth for geographic oddities is an inadvertent past time of mine, and Sable Island is one of my favorite discoveries.

Sable Island isn't so much an island as a thin sandbar that stretches 26 miles long, 190 miles east of Nova Scotia. It's less than a mile wide and yet remains home to 400 free-roaming horses and over 350 shipwrecks. It is known as the "graveyard of the Atlantic".

The whole thing is believed to be the result of a terminal moraine, the final resting place of a massive glacier long past. It slowly moves like a wave across the ocean as the sea ebbs away at its western coast but deposits sand on its eastern coast.

[warrenellis-deactivated20200730]

The Bubble Nebula via NASA http://ift.tt/1rxAphS