Category Archives: Science and Society

Posts on all things scientific; biology, evolution, all the way to computer science (when it’s not about programming or applications), and also some pieces on politics and society in general.

Humor, Science and Society

Banana control

Neither the gun nor the banana has a will of their own, and still… I bet you’d save more lives with gun control than with banana control…

Update: It should not be hard to argue that it is of vital importance to control bananas (and other food sources) as well. However, in 2015 the number of deaths due to gun violence (in USA) was 13 468 (gunviolencearchive.org) while the death toll for food poisoning is only around 3 000 deaths (CDC). So, the gun control is lagging way behind the banana control…

Humor, Science and Society

The End of Existence!

– According to my prophetic vision, today is the day existence ends!
– Oh! Exalted Leader! How long do we have left?
– Since the destruction of existence begins at the edge of the universe and travels inwards I’d say 50 billion years, give or take… Hey! Where’s everybody going?

Image shows an artist’s impression of a supernova and associated gamma-ray burst by European Southern Observatory
Humor, Science and Society

Legalese for stop

If a person, defined as a two legged mammal of the species Homo Sapiens, over the age of 16, hereby defined as being of the age of 16 metric years and 1 metric second or older, where to come across, meet, bump into, discover, notice, stumble upon, uncover, unearth, intercept, observe, detect, discover, examine, inspect, look at, monitor, note, pay attention to, recognize, regard, scrutinize, study, view, watch, witness or in any other way, shape or form become aware of a red, not yellow, nor white, black, blue, green, pink, azure, orange, magenta, or any color other than red,  eight sided, not one sided, two sided, three sided, four sided, etc up to seven sided, nor nine sided, ten sided or any more sided,  sign, here defined as a metal, wood, plastic, granite, marble, wire, anti gravity, ot other suspension mechanism, topped by a metal, wood, plastic, granite, copper, aluminum,  marble or other material, sign in the shape previously defined with the words “STOP” written in any type font other than Webdings, Open Symbol, or MS Kids across from left to right or right to left or top to bottom or bottom to top or any other angle, and if said person is at the moment of becoming aware as defined above by a sign as defined above, traveling in vehicle defined by but not limited to a car, bike, kite, balloon, ship, tanker, tank, siege machine, airplane, rocket, spaceship, teleportation beam, horse, donkey, dragon, lion, cat, kangaroo, Einstein-Rosen Bridge, or any other known or unknown mode of transportation, shipping, transit, freightage, haulage, passage or any other similar mode, then such a person should immediately as in within reasonable, unhampered, undrugged, uninebriated, undisturbed, unconditional, untraditional, unceremonial, time cease, desist, halt, discontinue, quit, terminate, renounce and relinquish any further transportation and resist and abstain to further travel until such a time as the vehicle as defined above has come to a halt, defined as moving at a speed of less than one meter, not kilometer, millimeter, microinch, yard, foot, fathom, skullbounce, or any other known or unknown, recognized or unrecognized, serious or silly, measurement of distance, per metric hour.

Humor, Science and Society

Don’t keep your enemies close

“Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”

Bullshit!

If you stop calling your enemies your life will quickly become less dramatic and you can do funnier stuff than having enemies all over the place.

Or another way of saying it:

– Aren’t you supposed to keep your enemies close?
– Whomever said that cannot have had many enemies…

Science and Society

There are no facts

People that claim they are using facts to argue their side usually don’t understand that facts almost never exist alone in the head of a person – they are almost always accompanied by an interpretation. So, the argument is not about facts, but about interpretations of facts. And those come in as many flavors as there are people there to interpret.

Computers, Humor, Science and Society

Levels of system maturity

The following is a list of system maturity levels:

  1. Pre-conceptual – no idea, no system, not even an idea that a system is needed.
  2. Conceptual – an idea that a system is needed, nothing developed.
    • Customer: We need a system that does X.
    • Management: What they really say they need is a system that does Y.
    • Developer: What is most technically feasible is a system that does Z.
  3. Not working – a system that doesn’t work, at all.
    • Customer/management: We have no system.
    • Developer: We’re working on a system!
  4. Almost not working – a system that works, kind of.
    • Management: We have a system!!!
    • Customer: We wish we had a system…
    • Developer: Hey! We’re not done yet!
    • Support: Take the system out back and shot it, for the sake of pity and mercy!
  5. Almost working – a system that works, in principle.
    • Management: Didn’t we finish this system months ago?
    • Customer: We have a system! On sunny days…
    • Developer: Just let us…
    • Support: Oh no! Not another update!
  6. Working – a system that works.
    • Management: That was long before my time…
    • Customer: Oh, yeah, I remember that system… didn’t it use to do Z back in the days?
    • Developer: Done!
    • Support: Hands off our legacy system… or seas will turn red with blood and dogs will sleep with cats (or is it lions with lambs… whatever!) Hands off our system!
Science and Society

Why SETI haven’t found alien radio signals…

Here are a few suggestions that doesn’t require the Fermi Paradox to be true, or, for that matter, the theory that we’re the only intelligent or living creatures out there (The Fermi Paradox is in short; since we haven’t heard from any aliens, they’re all dead):

  1. Because radio is too slow – communicating over the vast distances of space via radio is like taking your bike to your overseas vacation. If radio is the only way to communicate aliens have given up doing it a long time ago.
  2. Because distances in space are huge, vast, enormous – the first radio signal from earth that could leave the solar system (the radio transmission form the Berlin 1936 Olympiad) has today covered about 1 / 20 000 000 000 of the volume of the Milky Way.
  3. Because the time we’ve been listening for radio signals, and the fraction of time we’ve sent them out in the universe is about 40 to 80 divided by 15 billion.
  4. The search for extraterrestrial radio signals (the SETI-program) does not cover the whole sky at the same time, in fact, very little of the sky has been covered. With today’s technology, we don’t even know what the Milky Way looks like on the other side of the galaxy center, because we can’t really observe it (since the galaxy center is in the way…)
Header image from Pixabay.