you can be wakling on the beach, meet a stranger, strike up a conversation,
they'll say 'geez i can't believe it's October already!',
while the wind blows.
and you think,
i like this person -
one of my favourite things - maybe in this world,
is how there are some subjects -
that we all struggle with.
we are all very-much the same single person
our brains are basically wrecked.
nobody can grasp onto some subjects -
how must a bill must pass the .. senate?
but then it gets reviewed by .. the house?
or DNA becomes ... tRNA ... ?
ancient egypt was like 1,000 years ago ... ?
or ten thousand?
i like this, about people.
it's very charming, actually.
next time you are out in the night,
and you see the moon
ask somebody -
where will the moon be tomorrow, at this time?
it's a lovely thing,
to watch the answer come out.
it takes a few minutes.
and a few tries
the observer effect would not be given credibility,
if spaceflight began today.
and it's not just the cringe of it -
it's declaring exclusive, priveledged knowledge.
that doesn't really fly today.
The observer effect is actually a very sweet and romantic idea,
and we allowed it in a rare way, that we never do.
it's referenced today in a protected way -
with a slow male voice,
and expensive, slow footage.
I believe in the observer effect.
and desperately want to have it.
and I am on the ground.
we are on a ball -
we don't realize it
and we are very bad at thinking about it.
and quietly,
we'd all go
- oooooooh
it's a ball.
fuuck -
.... right...
-
the ground is a ball.
and we lie down on it, like ball-people.
ohhhh,
it's just down there ↓
it's some thing that we're on.
and like idiots we always forget
Douglas Coupland was once rushing somewhere,
and he went to tie his shoe,
and - pop - his shoelace broke.
- and he had a brief moment,
where he was like
.. whoa, shoelaces can break??
the ground is a thing
in the early covid days, this joke got passed around -
that you could see these lines now:
people began to wonder what these would actually look like.
it was a good time for this.
- how many lines would you really see?
if you're in Houston, and I'm in Dallas,
how much sky do we share
when we both look up?
if you wanted New-York and Chicago to see your firework,
how high would you need to set it off?
the answer is that we share
none of it.
the sky is like, the width of a city.
because it's very close
the boundary to space is 100km
a good commute, in good traffic.
if you could bike up, you could bike to space.
rockets barely go in the air.
they are screaming across the ground.
there was a reddit post where a guy was in the middle of the Atlantic,
and mused that the closest people to him were
the astronauts on the ISS -
and people in the comments were like,
yeah dude, same in Lake Erie.
Our sky is nothing.
Everest is only 8km
I'll walk that horizontally, for some groceries.
sometimes you'll see on a globe, little ridges for mountains.
little bumps, like braille.
and even these are wildly exaggerated:
the rockies, here shown charitably
in 2021, the Inspiration4 mission went to 450km
much further than anyone has gone in decades
which really looks like the whole earth.
Houston and Dallas could both see a firework, if they lit it -
maybe?
but it would be pretty low in on the horizon, in both places.
but chicago + new york?
sydney + brisbane?
not a chance.
they don't - share a sky
even though it looks like they would -
it's weird.
there's this awkward shot, sometimes during a rocket launch:
it's a little disorienting.
you can see it with a long-exposure camera:
rockets go sideways.
they barely go up.
they look like they go up though - don't they?
it sure seems like it.
they go up for like 25 seconds.
and then once they're off camera,
they secretly turn hard.
we were crossing the oceans for centuries,
before we went even a little bit up -
is named after this -
the guy who suggested
that we could go faster,
if we went up a bit, first.
I used to wonder, with spacecraft - why not just gently glide down?
can't you just enter in slowly?
like a blimp, with no fire?
required viewing is Bret Copeland's how to land the shuttle talk
astronauts talk about hitting the atmosphere,
or bounching-off the atmosphere.
that's what it's like -
our air is rubber.
it's like hitting water -
and it gets thicker so quickly, that it is effectively solid.
if you explained the earth to someone,
they would say - no that wouldn't work.
people would suffocate when they climbed a mountain!
a fast object with wings would float!
it would be ludicrous.
sometimes children have this phase,
where they worry if the wind blows too hard,
that they won't be able to breathe.
which makes sense.
but our air is packed, to a hilarious amount
we're fully squeezed
drive a few miles up, open the windows,
and our bodies explode outwards.
or could you get a feel
for the planet moving?
god bless the creators of this software.
I read countless explainers for the night sky,
watched endless youtubers,
none of them helped anything
always just pointing out stuff.
I watched all the Brian Cox shows,
and said - wow that's neat -
and then turned off the tv.
then last year, I played with stellarium for a few minutes.
what clicked -
there's this random spot - in a place in the sky,
and the whole sky goes around it -
moon, stars, everything.
this helped me a lot
i'm sometimes a little slow.
the crazy thing -
there's actually a bright star
it's an outrageous coincidence.
(for the northern hemisphere)
you know?
everyone's got a different 'straight up'
but you should go out on your driveway,
and point at your celestial pole one time.
everyone's got this fancy sky-point,
so it's possible to identify geo-locations, from a photo.
even if it's indoors, and there's a window -
there's a bunch of creepy papers on this,
i'm surprised it's not more common.
In 2018, the BBC claimed to determine the date of a military conflict in Cameroon, using this process.
one the developers described their basic method here.
many have spoken about the pornography doomsday,
if a good face-recognition database ever leaks.
but there could also be a location-doomsday, too.
if there's a shadow, then game over for any location
or even any time.
