The current estimated size of the universe is 13.7 billion light-years. Given that light travels at a speed of 186,282 miles per second, how big is that?
Answer, according to WolframAlpha: 8.054×10^22 miles or 1.296×10^23 km.
Just thought you’d like to know.
The Wall Street Journal recently published an interesting piece on the coffee+WiFi culture.
Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables — nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours — and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading. In some places, customers just get cold looks, but in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use have been imposed and electric outlets have been locked. The laptop backlash may predate the recession, but the recession clearly has accelerated it.
Given that free WiFi has been more of a US than a British tradition, the change bites harder over there. (In fact in the UK the only restaurant chain that consistently offers free WiFi is — amazingly — McDonalds, which is why I can sometimes be found under the golden arches with one of their — surprisingly good — black coffees while I connect to down- or up-load something urgent.)
The WSJ piece sparked a thoughful post by Joey Devilla entitled “The Tragedy of the Coffee Shop” in which he puts the coffee-shop phenomenon in a wider context. He points out that the coffee-house has played a venerable role in the evolution of democracy in many European countries.
Then, as now, they functioned as what sociologists like to call “Third Places”: places that are neither home (the “First Place”) nor work (the “Second Place”), but a place that functions a community gathering place where broader, and often more creative social interactions happen. Cafes, community centres, churches, pubs in the U.K., town squares, open-air basketball courts, the parking lots of 7-11s and hackerspaces like Toronto’s HacklabTO are all third places.
In the last decade, the WiFi-enabled coffee shop has played a small but honourable role in the evolution of computer code. The guys who wrote Delicious Library in 2006, for example, did most if not all of their software development in a Seattle cafe — but did so with the permisson of the owner.
Interesting idea in the NYTimes which allows readers to listen to a snatch of the big numbers from the first Woodstock festival and vote for their favourite. When I looked, Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner was way ahead.
Flickr version here.
Hmmm… Another of those ‘digital lifestyle’ pieces from the New York Times…
Karl and Dorsey Gude of East Lansing, Mich., can remember simpler mornings, not too long ago. They sat together and chatted as they ate breakfast. They read the newspaper and competed only with the television for the attention of their two teenage sons.
That was so last century. Today, Mr. Gude wakes at around 6 a.m. to check his work e-mail and his Facebook and Twitter accounts. The two boys, Cole and Erik, start each morning with text messages, video games and Facebook.
The new routine quickly became a source of conflict in the family, with Ms. Gude complaining that technology was eating into family time. But ultimately even she partially succumbed, cracking open her laptop after breakfast.
“Things that I thought were unacceptable a few years ago are now commonplace in my house,” she said, “like all four of us starting the day on four computers in four separate rooms.”
Thanks to Jack Schofield for the link.
For as long as I’ve been blogging, Dave Winer has been one of the most interesting people around. (It was his UserLand software that I used when I decided that my blog should go public.) He’s thoughtful, perceptive, opinionated and very bright. This post about what he calls ‘narrating your work’ is a typical example. Excerpt:
I wouldn’t waste your time with all this theory unless I could show you how all this fits in with Rebooted News and the News System of the Future. Here’s a recital of what happened.
1. As you may know, at roughly noon Eastern time yesterday a plane crashed into a helicopter over the Hudson River in NY, killing all nine people aboard both.
2. I was away from my computer when it happened, didn’t check in until about an hour later, and on Twitter there was a mess of conflicting stories, and lots of individuals “breaking” the news even though it happened over an hour ago.
3. I clicked on the page of NYT editorial people on Twitter that I keep and I saw something very different, and this is the point of this story. I saw a news organization at work. Careful to say what they do and don’t know. Informing each other on experience with similar stories in the past. Whether they were all reading all of the others’ posts, I don’t know. They were reading and passing on reports from other Twitter users, even those that didn’t work at the Times. They were coordinating the work of a larger community than just people who work at the Times.
4. I took a snapshot of the page at that time so we could all look at this.
Now why do I think this is so important? Because it’s a big part of the future Rebooted News system, imho. Today’s reporters don’t think the public wants to see inside their process, but they are wrong about that…
Worth reading in full.
Astonishing story, if true.
President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.
Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.
Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”
This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”
After the 2003 call, the puzzled French leader didn’t comply with Bush’s request. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal. Dr. Romer explained that the Old Testament book of Ezekiel contains two chapters (38 and 39) in which God rages against Gog and Magog, sinister and mysterious forces menacing Israel. Jehovah vows to smite them savagely, to “turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws,” and slaughter them ruthlessly. In the New Testament, the mystical book of Revelation envisions Gog and Magog gathering nations for battle, “and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”
In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush’s strange behavior in Lausanne University’s review, Allez Savoir. A French-language Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, printed a sarcastic account titled: “When President George W. Bush Saw the Prophesies of the Bible Coming to Pass.” France’s La Liberte likewise spoofed it under the headline “A Small Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog.” But other news media missed the amazing report.
Hmmm… Maybe he was pulling Chirac’s leg?
En passant At a dinner party a couple of years ago, a retired (very) senior British civil servant (who had served in Downing Street during the Blair years), told me about Chirac’s visit to Number Ten before the decision to go to war in Iraq. On his way out Chirac said to Blair something along the lines of: “Tony, you’ve never seen warfare or military action. I have; and it’s not something you ever embark upon except as a last resort”. After the President’s entourage had departed, Blair turned to my fellow-diner and said: “Poor old Jacques. He just doesn’t get it, does he?”
