Mark’s Blog

I’ve always thought it hilarious, or perhaps sad, when someone considers the universe to be finite or bounded. It’s just far too easy to postulate another universe sized chunk of matter that’s some distance, D, away from ours. It would be imperceptible. Perhaps the light would not even have reached us since it popped into existence.

There’s a very old theory that tries to prove that the universe is finite because if it were infinite the sky would be fully illuminated, because there would be a star along every conceivable line of sight. It’s easy to prove if you just assume there’s an average density to the universe.

What? An average density??? What a crazy assumption!!! Nothing is arranged uniformly! Look at the size of a nucleus, and then the size of an electron shell. Then look at how far apart each atom is. Then take a step up and look at how far apart planets are from suns, and then how far apart suns are from each other, then galaxies from each other. Is this not a clear enough pattern?

Certainly there’s no evidence we can draw from our perception (yet) for a universe-sized clump of galaxies existing somewhere incredibly far away, but is there more reason to speculate that they exist or do not exist? Which is the better bet?

Well, we’re in a universe. So how could it be the only one?

The idea of the anthropocentric principle is something I like about astronomy. Since we’re observing the universe, and since observation is a pretty unusual thing, of course it has certain properties, because we wouldn’t be here observing it if it didn’t!

I think this idea is usually taken in the sense of limiting what’s possible, i.e. there are only so many possible ways the universe we inhabit could be structured. But it certainly implies an enormous plethora of different layouts and arrangements: the ones that we’re not experiencing.

Science often has a strong, emotionally charged resistance to those things that cannot be measured. This is why I liked Einstein’s approach: half mystical, half scientific. Lots of thought experiments. The realm of space that is beyond what we can perceive is, of course, undefined, and therefore subject to our fantasies and subconscious emotional “trips”. Apparently some people want to believe they are living in a bubble. I guess that’s OK, given how large that bubble is, but I feel I should pop it anyway.

I had always assumed that coding for the Mac would mean learning ObjectiveC and becoming familiar with dozens of different APIs, folder structures and other Mac-isms. I had looked forward to the nebulous opportunity to do so some day.

But today I stumbled into a utility that comes bundled with Java on the Mac: the Jar Bundler. It makes quite a bit of sense, really, that there would be ways to develop Java applications for the Mac, but somehow this didn’t occur to me. My mind has been a web development hammer, and the world was filled with web development nails.

So I thought I’d try it with the one application-like chunk of code I’ve worked on recently: the Astrology Clock.

Here it is, bundled as a Mac application:
Astrology Clock application (zipped)

Of course, it should be a DMG. I haven’t gotten there yet.

I had been wanting to build a journal site for over a year and I finally built it over the last few days.

My intention was to specifically make it as easy to use as possible, with a decently modern front end, and for it to be specifically for *private* journaling. In other words, an online journal I’d actually use myself.

Here it is:
http://jujujournal.com

Hasn’t every small child looked up in the sky and wondered to themselves, “I wonder what the RGB values are for our celestial companions?”

If your inner child also thirsts for this knowledge, here it is!

These are very approximate values. I derived them by finding true color images of each planet and averaging them down to a single pixel. Here they are in CSS notation for your convenience:

I was getting interested in using the conception date for astrology instead of the birth date, so to help estimate the time range of conception I built this simple calculator. Some of the interesting research that went into it is in the references at the bottom of the page.

conception calculator

I became curious what planetary motion sounded like translated into sound.

This is the longitude of Mercury through Jupiter, with the sine of the longitude translated into the left channel and the cosine as the right. Time is sped up to some ridiculous rate so this 4 seconds covers some huge span of time. I generated both geocentric and heliocentric versions. I could have used the X and Y components but instead I set volume levels proportional to the frequency to try to hear them all.

Geocentric:
Heliocentric:

On my way back from Africa I built three very similar game sites.

The Imitation Game - I was reading an article by Alan Turing that mentioned this game, and realized it would be a fun and intriguing site. I ended up building two variants of the game: the game as specified by Alan Turing, and another where you pretend to be one of your friends. http://helianthusinc.com/imitation/

ESP - Also inspired by the article by Alan Turing I decided to create a game that would produce statistics that are clean, and in the public domain. http://helianthusinc.com/esp/

Generic Turn-Based Live Player Games - Since I had created both of those sites I felt guilty not building a site for the game my son had designed. I had built an applet for him but hadn’t set it up to be playable online. The site supports a simple model for adding turn-based multi-player games, so I quickly added tic tac toe as well. http://helianthusinc.com/liveplayer/

As a tangent to the research on the stars, I got to wondering what significance it would have that the light emitted from nearby stars arrives during our lifetime. This web page let’s us experiment with this idea:

— try it —