Life in optical

Your secret from Jean-Sebastien Monzani on Vimeo.

I dreamt of a night sky full of colourful stars – of course :) What did you think of?

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the famous Pale Blue Dot picture. It was a collective revelation. The day we had to realise all of our egos fit into 3 pixels…

And to quote the words of Carl Sagan:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Read more about the story of the Pale Blue Dot picture

And here is a talk in which Brian Cox tells us why the perspective the Pale Blue Dot gave us 20 years ago still matters today. Enjoy.

In this telephone interview of Nathi Mthethwa, South African minister of police, a BBC journalist is desperately fishing for bad news about South Africa’s security records for the upcoming football world cup after the death of the white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche. The minister’s replies are pragmatic and rational and well balanced and the journalist really appears to be fishing – and failing to get what he wants.

FYI, this is what the minister refers to: The 2009 season of the Indian cricket Premier league coincided with the general elections in India. Due to concerns regarding players’ security, the venue was shifted to South Africa.

I tested this funny tool from MIT that creates a visualisation of your online personality: personas.

I was not convinced by what I got running it several times with my full name in it (astronomy never even appeared!) but when I tried my online nickname, I got only one word: online.

Couldn’t be more accurate: carolune is a nickname I always use online, and never elsewhere. In fact, you could say that I’m onlune (apologies*).