time

Champagne OK


This is a random clip taken from “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” (1976). Whether it’s the botched editing job between “oooo-owwww”, the palpable sense of self-satisfaction Robert Reed exhibits after he’s contained the chaos of bubbly eruption, or the final announcement that the disaster has been averted, this tiny element of film makes me feel ok…Champagne OK! After all, having had your child banished to the purgatory of a giant bubble, wouldn’t you-yourself feel that same sense of ‘victory’ having single-handedly contained an outright onslaught of smaller bubbles?

When I was a very young kid, I remember sitting on the couch next to my mom and loving this movie, yet probably not understanding it at all. I just added this to my netflix queue and can’t wait to see it again for the first time.

Comparing Types Of Time Travel In Fiction

MinutePhysics (which, if haven’t checked out already would be worth spending a little of your time on) and a fun whiteboard explainer on the different types of time-travel in various films and books. Specifically, the video synopses how time travel causally affects the perspective of characters’ timelines (Who has free will? Can you change things by going back to the past?).



I appreciate time travel stories that have a nice logic to them. I have to agree with Henry Reich when he says that, “Logical consistency is a thing that you may have noticed I think lays the foundation for good time travel stories.” Which explains why I didn’t like Star Trek: First Contact or the Original Superman.

I Can’t Stop Thinking About The Eclipse.

2017 Eclipse

I can’t stop thinking about the eclipse.

I thought I pretty much knew what to expect from the 2017 solar eclipse. I understood the science. I had already witnessed a few partial/annular eclipses. I’ve been anticipating the event for a few years now and had read about the sensory changes I could expect to witness. I had a few good viewing locations scoped out with choices depending on the cloud coverage or crowds we might run into that day. My 3 1/2-year-old twins had plenty of food, water, sunscreen, eclipse glasses, and excitement. We were prepared for the event. But I soon learned that nothing could prepare me for the experience.

We had a perfect location on a ridge near Muddy Mountain Wyoming that provided 360 degree views. We were away from the crowds. And most importantly it was cloudless with 2 minutes and 18 seconds of anticipated totality.

We spent an hour watching the partial eclipse and eating a picnic lunch in the shade provided by some old, scraggly, Limber Pines. Eventually, the temperature began to drop slowly. Soon our surroundings dimmed and crickets began to chirp. I found myself caught off guard by the strangeness of my environment. The landscape appeared rosy and dimmed – as if I was wearing sunglasses. My stomach flipped with anticipation and anxiety caused by the surreality of my surroundings.

Quickly, much faster than I anticipated, darkness descended on us. The disorienting passage of time was head-spinning. I took my eclipse glasses off to see if I could see the umbra race toward us from across the valley below. But it happened too quickly. It was with a ridiculous suddenness that the moon’s shadow had shrouded us. I quickly turned around and looked up and saw the eclipsed sun glowing in the sky and my brain turned inside out.

My fingers fumbled around for my camera phone and I somehow managed to capture the image above. I tried to take a video of the “sunset” that surrounded us in every direction, but I only managed to catch these three seconds. I was overwhelmed.

The corona was much more bright and lustrous than I envisioned. It shone bright white and with a jaw dropping brilliance. We were all bewildered with its beauty and absolute strangeness. To look up into the sky and see a sparkling shine, unlike anything I have ever seen in my years of looking at the heavens. To share this with my wife and children.

And then it was gone. And now I can’t stop thinking about the eclipse.

What Is Old?

Having recently turned 40, the question “At what point does a person get ‘old’?” holds some interest for me. I like this idea from the above link, “A person becomes old when his mind is more occupied by memories than aspirations”. I like this because it doesn’t stigmatize being old and at the same time allows for becoming old to be a choice. But I think the more honest answer is “One becomes old the minute one is aware of how they are perceived by those who are young.” Old is not a state of mind – at least not your mind – old is inflicted on you by youth.

Hubble eXtreme Deep Field

Hubble eXtreme Deep Field
Image courtesy of NASA

NASA has recently released a new Deep Field image called eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) that improves on the older Ultra Deep Field (UDF) image. The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. This image is a composite of nearly ten years worth of photographic exposures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope – over 2,000 photographs totaling 22.5 days worth of total exposure time. Nearly everything you see in the picture is a galaxy containing billions of stars.

The new full-color XDF image reaches much fainter galaxies and includes very deep exposures in red light from Hubble’s new infrared camera, enabling new studies of the earliest galaxies in the universe. The XDF contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view [than the UDF]. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.


The universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time. Most of the galaxies in the XDF are seen when they were young, small, and growing, often violently as they collided and merged together. The early universe was a time of dramatic birth for galaxies containing brilliant blue stars extraordinarily brighter than our sun. The light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a “time tunnel into the distant past.” The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the universe’s birth in the big bang.

Click on the image above for the gigantic 1.4MB image. And keep looking up.

A list of Events Taking Place In The Very Distant Future

Below is a list of events, given present scientific understanding and models, that are expected to occur in the far future. Entities affected include humans, the Earth, the galaxy and the known Universe. Predictions include the fields of biology, geology, astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics. It should be noted that several alternate future events are listed to account for questions still unresolved.

  • 10,000 years from now – The end of humanity, according to Brandon Carter’s Doomsday Argument, which assumes that half of the humans who will ever have lived have already been born.
  • 10,000 years from now – The Earth’s axial tilt reaches a minimum of 22.5 degrees. The Gregorian calendar will be roughly 10 days out of sync with the Sun’s position in the sky.
  • 25,000 years from now – The Arecibo Message, a collection of radio data transmitted on 16 November 1974, reaches its destination, the globular cluster Messier 13. This is the only interstellar radio message sent to such a distant region of the galaxy.
  • 50,000 years from now – Niagara Falls erodes away the remaining 20 miles to Lake Erie and ceases to exist.
  • 100,000 years from now – Proper motion (the movement of stars through the galaxy) will make today’s constellations unrecognizable.
  • 500,000 years from now – By this time Earth will have likely been impacted by a meteorite of roughly 1 km in diameter.
  • 1 Million years from now – Highest estimated time until the red supergiant star Betelgeuse explodes in a supernova. The explosion is expected to be easily visible in daylight.
  • 10 Million years from now – The widening East African Rift valley is flooded by the Red Sea, causing a new ocean basin to divide the continent of Africa.
  • 230 Million years from now – The solar system reaches Lyapunov time and the orbits of the planets become impossible to predict.
  • 240 Million years from now – From its present position, the Solar System will have completed one full orbit of the Galactic center.
  • 250 Million years from now – All the continents on Earth fuse into a possible new supercontinent.
  • 600 Million years from now – Tidal acceleration moves the Moon far enough from Earth that total solar eclipses are no longer possible. Carbon dioxide levels in its atmosphere decrease to the point at which C3 photosynthesis is no longer possible. 99% of all plants will die.
  • 1 Billion years from now – The Sun’s luminosity increases by 10%, causing Earth’s surface temperatures to reach an average of 47°C and the oceans to boil away.
  • 5.4 Billion years from now – The Sun becomes a red giant. Mercury, Venus and possibly Earth are destroyed. During these times, it is possible that Saturn’s moon Titan could achieve surface temperatures necessary to support life.
  • 7 Billion years from now – The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy collide.
  • 14.4 Billion years from now – Sun becomes a black dwarf as its luminosity falls below three trillionths its current level making it invisible to human eyes.
  • 20 Billion years from now – The end of the Universe in the Big Rip scenario.
  • 50 Billion years from now – Assuming both survive the Sun’s expansion, by this time the Earth and the Moon become tidelocked, with each showing only one face to the other.
  • 100 Billion years from now – The Universe’s expansion causes all evidence of the Big Bang to disappear beyond the practical observational limit, rendering cosmology impossible.
  • 1 Trillion years from now – Low estimate for the time star formation ends in galaxies as they are depleted of the gas clouds needed to create stars. Once star formation ends and the least massive red dwarfs exhaust their fuel, the only stellar-mass objects remaining are stellar remnants (white dwarfs, brown dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes).
  • 2 Trillion years from now – All galaxies outside the Local Supercluster are no longer detectable in any way, assuming that dark energy continues to make the Universe expand at an accelerating rate.
  • 1015 (1 Quadrillion) years from now – Estimated time until stellar close encounters detach all planets in the Solar System from their orbits. The Solar System will no longer exist.
  • 3×1043 years from now – If protons decay, this is the estimated time for all nucleons in the observable Universe to decay. The Black Hole Era, in which black holes are the only remaining celestial objects begins.
  • 1065 years from now – If protons don’t decay this is the estimated time for rigid objects like rocks to rearrange their atoms and molecules via quantum tunneling. On this timescale all matter is liquid.

  • 101050 years from now – Estimated time for a Boltzmann brain to appear in the vacuum via a spontaneous entropy decrease.

  • 101056 years from now – Estimated time for random quantum fluctuations to generate a new Big Bang.

  • 101076 years from now – All matter collapses into black holes, again.


Current theories suggest that the Universe is open, and thus will not collapse in on itself after a finite time. However, the infinite future potentially allows for the occurrence of a number of massively improbable events, such as the formation of a Boltzmann brain. A more complete list from which the ones included here were taken can be found on Wikipedia.

No Beginning, No End, No Big Bang

Wun-Yi Shu (associate professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan) has proposed a new universal model in which mass is converted into length and time is converted into space as the universe expands. As the universe contracts, the opposite occurs. The conversion factor depends varying gravitational “constant” and a varying speed of light (G/c2). Yeah, he also proposes that the speed of light is not constant.

However, his model explains “how the magnitudes of the three basic physical dimensions, mass, time, and length, are converted into each other, or equivalently, a novel theory about how the geometry of spacetime and the distribution of mass-energy interact. The theory resolves problems in cosmology, such as those of the big bang, dark energy, and flatness, in one fell stroke.”

Big Bang-less models are gaining popularity among cosmologists.

The Top 100 Most Annoying Twitter Accounts

It’s difficult to separate the signal from the noise on twitter. Actually, it’s difficult to tell if there is any signal on twitter at all (but that’s a whole other blog post). There are literally hundreds of over-active accounts, mostly bots, that provide little to no value to your average twitter user. Here are a few of the most blatant abusers.

InternetRadio is the most often updated (with nearly 900,000 tweets), non-news related, active account. It’s a bot that simply lists songs being played on shoutcast.com. I’m not sure what use this is to anyone. Ill Street Lounge and Boot Liquor (almost 420,000 updates) do the same thing for soma.fm

Father Time (over 275,000 tweets) is a bot that updates every minute, on the minute, with the time. That would be 720 times a day. How could that really help anyone? But if that’s not enough for you Is It Now… (over 550,000 tweets) does the exact same thing. At least Big Ben is entertaining.

ThinkingStiff (over 430,000 tweets) appears to be an account the owner is using to climb to the number one spot on the Cursebird leaderboard. This is actually a somewhat interesting project but is still a very annoying twitter account.

Twitterholic keeps a continually refreshed list of the 100 most updated (annoying?) accounts in twitter.

Full disclosure: my incredibly annoying twitter account can be found @hubs.

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