This visual is uniquely soothing, reminds me of artist Cory Arcangel, who did an art piece with just the Super Mario clouds drifting on a television screen - hacking into the NES cartridge and getting rid of everything else - to much admiration.

I remember reading an art journalist applauding the Impressionistic feel of the thing, the way Arcangel brought a background object to the fore, and in the process transformed it into something new entirely, with a surprising character and strength of presence.

Here’s a Whitney Museum link to the work.

That is a lot of Morse code happening in this day and age!

I can’t help but wonder what is being transmitted, the airwaves have held a constant sense of mystery and wonder ever since I was a boy, growing up in a town with no FM stations and nested between hills that blocked all FM signals from the big cities of Southern California.

But at night, when the entire region was covered in the low clouds of the marine layer, there were nooks and corners of the town where the radio signals came in loud and clear. Chasing those FM signals became a sort of hobby for some of us in town, we took along a portable radio/cassette player and recorded tapes of live late-night music from Los Angeles or San Diego.

Every once in a long while we picked up signals from stations too distant and weak (at the source) to normally make it as far as my town, but which somehow became amplified in foggy conditions, some far-out-there music from college or pirate radio stations.
The thrill of stumbling upon something like this while scanning the lower extreme of the dial, then suddenly getting a blast of Killing Joke (post-punk) or Koch (lo-fi reggae), was like finding myself in Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” theater: “For Madmen Only - Price Of Admission - Your Mind”.

Through the following years and few decades, I explored AM and shortwave, and I can’t even begin to describe the sensation I felt while scanning the dial very late one night and being confronted by a Numbers Station, that nearly robotic female voice reciting: “eight, nine, five, seven, seven… nine, three, eight, one, seven… four, seven, six, one, seven…”

It was only after all this that the internet came into being, and the very first thing I did with it was search for live radio, the very first app I downloaded was Real Player (“buffering”… lol).
But the romance of electromagnetic waves persists in me, I only listen to stations that also transmit over the airwaves somewhere in the world, there’s a feel to them that online-only stations cannot seem to be able to replicate.

This mathematical visualization is beautiful, like a work of art.
But what is it exactly that we are looking at here?
The continuous vertical and horizontal violet lines, the bursts of light color like a seismograph needle, they look like a word cloud flipped 90° and seen from afar. What do they represent?

Does this sound like the prototypical clickbait headline title, or what do you say?

Here he comes… andtherehegoeeees…! Oops, I think someone just slit me across the throat.

The fastest man alive!

But I think the math of the argument is only about the common center between Earth and the sun, taking away all other planets out of the equation, especially Jupiter.

Meanwhile, Pluto and Charon noticeably orbit each other, the barycenter being fully outside of Pluto’s surface.

It’s called a barycenter, kids, a common center that both objects circle around. That common center happens to be inside the sun, but that’s a topic for next week’s class in this semester’s AP Astrophysics program.

I gotcha, I was just thinking how Patreon has been vital for nurturing a vast digital ecosystem of content creators who are in it as a labor of love.

EDIT: typo

The same goes for a lot of YouTube channels.
In fact, I opened a Patreon account just to show a little monthly support for an excellent, criminally underrated creator of videos on astronomy and its’ history, ParallaxNick.

Among other topics, the guy recently finished a four-part series on Galileo, a two-parter on Kepler before that, a single on Copernicus before that. By my calculations, I’m guessing a six-part masterpiece on Newton is right around the corner.

“We need ten painters to train as astronauts.”
“Why not get ten astronauts, then train them to use paint?”
“How about you shut the fuck up instead?”

This assumes that old thing that your property goes straight up so you also claim ownership of the airspace, as written by Lawrence Lessig in his excellent book “Free Culture”.

In that case, on more than one occasion I’ve had several dozen people over for dinner, as a commercial airliner flew overhead.

People have been constantly bombarded since childhood at home (family, television, internet) and/or church with the propaganda of bogus belief systems. Some places (or homes) are better than others. Others can be much worse. For example, imagine growing up in the mormon environment of Provo, Utah, or the maga environment of rural Atlanta.

Meanwhile, for one reason or another, varying from place to place, the education system has failed them, by leaning on the laziest rest point of least effort in blocks designed for fifty students at a time, such as rote memorization. See active republican sabotage of evolution, history or sex education in red states like Kansas or Florida.

Many do manage to escape this intellectual swamp, despite the peer pressure, but many don’t, and that spark comes from within. What makes the escapees tick? What makes them strive forwards, while so many others idle and stagnate?

Tom Scott and Veritaseum.

Then there’s continental drift, which as Indiana Jones reminded us this past summer, Archimedes didn’t know about when he built his time machine.

Pet peeve: brushing aside the time travel fantasy element, there is not a single shred of evidence of any type of connection between Archimedes and the Antikythera Mechanism.

As if the only person clever enough in Ancient Greece was that one famous dude from Syracuse.
Ionians: “Are we a joke to you?”

But the Seldon Crises don’t depend on the coin toss of whether or not they manage to infiltrate a stronghold and deactivate the thingamajig kajigger in the next fifteen minutes.

Also, “the entirety of psychohistory and the Foundation hinges on us storming X place with guns and explosives in the next fifteen minutes!”

Ugh. Yuck. Hard pass. Go home, Goyer, you’re drunk (on the aroma of your own emissions).

For fun times…
make it Suntory time.

He had the book thrown at him in profound knee-jerk ignorance.
I remember reading the Rolling Stone article when it was published.
Years later in the late 90s, I remember listening to his radio talk show, feeling glad that he landed in a good place, that his ordeal didn’t break him.