A variable signal at heart of the Milky Way
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
He’s got some good stories, but I gave up after realising that I really didn’t need to know what every character, no matter how minor, had for breakfast.
One of the funniest things I've read recently. Literally laughed out loud. Thanks for sharing.
His world building is amongst the best I've ever read and yet his writing is plain, crisp and clear.
Gene Wolfe is also a master of this style, although he employs less metaphor, more ambiguity, and unreliable narrators.
> Understandingly frustrating if you just want to charge through and find out what happens.
"the device of art is that of ‘making things strange’ and of making form difficult, increasing the difficulty and time taken to perceive, since the process of perception in art is an aim in itself and must be prolonged" (Viktor Shklovskii, 1914)
A signal-emitting star being temporarily obscured by massive objects passing close enough to block the signal in our direction, or smaller objects at a further distance? Asteroids? Planets? Other stars? Dwarf stars? Maybe it's a crowded system, which may look like randomness.
If I'm standing on one side of a busy road with a lamp aimed at you and you're on the other side observing the light, the seemingly random passage of vehicles will make the signal look random.
But, as far as I understood, we have catalogued tens of millions of stars we have a clear view of. And when something passes between our system and a visible star, it's often (usually?) an exoplanet in that star's system, of which we've discovered almost five thousand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_pendulum
Where the system is very chaotic and incredibly hard to model, so it appears to be random.
Perhaps this is a complicated multi star system that contains a pulsar and the complex orbits are creating these seemingly random flashes of light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem
And it's also the name of a great book that might be appropriate here...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)
I just love how international Science is.
I think it's more about sky coverage - which parts of the sky can be viewed from which telescopes at any given moment. that would require international collaboration
"The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. We've never seen anything like it."
Makes me wonder if photos of the sky are sufficiently random to be used this way? Does the image vary enough and does an attacker see a sufficiently different view even if really physically close? Etc.
>Hopefully we’ll never need it. Hopefully, the primary sources of randomness used by our production servers will remain secure, and LavaRand will serve little purpose beyond adding some flair to our office. But if it turns out that we’re wrong, and that our randomness sources in production are actually flawed, then LavaRand will be our hedge, making it just a little bit harder to hack Cloudflare.
So, no, it isn't serving a purpose for millions of websites. It's 2kW of lamps running as a backup in an office nobody is going into right now to even look at.
The previous paragraph:
>> "LavaRand is a system that uses lava lamps as a secondary source of randomness for our production servers. A wall of lava lamps in the lobby of our San Francisco office provides an unpredictable input to a camera aimed at the wall. A video feed from the camera is fed into a CSPRNG, and that CSPRNG provides a stream of random values that can be used as an extra source of randomness by our production servers. Since the flow of the “lava” in a lava lamp is very unpredictable,1 “measuring” the lamps by taking footage of them is a good way to obtain unpredictable randomness. Computers store images as very large numbers, so we can use them as the input to a CSPRNG just like any other number."
This is energy spent because it looks cool, not because it's effective.
An even more minimal modification would be to use those USB-powered "glitter" lava lamps. The idea that 2 kilowatts of heat being dumped into molten wax represents some kind of efficiency optimum is completely absurd.
Or cranking up the sensitivity of a sensor.
Or reading the low bit of an ADC.
All of these provide good entropy sources without being wasteful.
Heat pumps.
Do you just prefer blackbody spectrums?
The ideal for this would be an old sensor with lots of noise since anything new would have very little visible at any ISO. Maybe even the sensor in the camera they use for the lava lamps!
A lava lamp has the benefit of being fully analog. There's no way to exploit it to make it predictable without physical access to mess with the chemistry to make the blobs stop moving around, and you'd have to do it to all of them without anyone noticing the blobs stopped blubbing. The camera on it 24/7 would make this a bit hard.
Expected return being size of the pot you can win multiplied by probability of winning. It's the first number that is lower when everybody has the same bright idea at once.
The best strategy is to not play. The second best strategy is to minimize the chance of splitting the pot.
Beware the Emergence...
And the name probably dates to 1980-ish: https://www.flayrah.com/4117/retrospective-illustrated-chron...
As usual in these posts, recommend authors/books. Forever War is ok for central concept, author is meh. Haven't read anything decent recently.
You mean you still liked the book. Hard to know whether you missed something if you skipped or skimmed it. I read this over 10 years ago but the aliens are what I remember most
The gist of the paper was that these beams would be plausible to push an object in the order of magnitude of the size of a spacecraft. But the calculated energy levels of the emitter (as we observe it) would require something like a dyson sphere, which would mean that if it were actually a light sail emitter, we'd expect a highly sophisticated civilization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01109
(my highly sophisticated approach to finding academic papers about outlandish alien technology is to search on Loeb).
And open access version at ArxiV.org: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.00652.pdf
There are lots of 'unusual' radio waves in the universe; astronomers discover them almost daily. May of them are variable. But there's that word 'signal' again. Crap science journalism likes to play on the connotations, the suggestion of purpose, of meaning. Dictionary says: "An indicator, such as a gesture or colored light, that serves as a means of communication."
"the astronomers tried to find the object in visual light. They found nothing." Fairly usual for radio objects. That's why they were missed until Reber came along.
An interesting anomaly, I get that. Rouses the curiosity. Just stop with the 'signal' please, until it fits the case.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2360
[edit] Found : https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00652
Is there some of the signal available so we can analyse the randomness for possible order ?
Signal usually implies intent, doesn't it?
1. a gesture, action, or sound that is used to convey information or instructions, typically by prearrangement between the parties concerned.
2. an electrical impulse or radio wave transmitted or received.
The second definition doesn’t require intent.
1) https://www.livescience.com/gravitational-wave-detector-stra...
> When physicists search for a signal of the Higgs boson, they select particle collisions with observed characteristics similar to those a Higgs production would feature.
The "signal" comes from the process being studied, and the rest (at least whatever parts can be modeled stochastically) is "noise." One person's signal is another person's noise, depending on what each person is studying.
1. https://cms.cern/physics/higgs-boson-terms-and-definitions
> It exhibited a high degree (∼ 25%) of circular polarization when it was visible. We monitored the source with the MeerKAT telescope from 2020 November to 2021 February on a 2–4 week cadence. The source was not detected with MeerKAT before 2021 February 07 when it appeared and reached a peak flux density of 5.6 mJy. The source was still highly circularly polarized, but also showed up to 80% linear polarization, and then faded rapidly with a timescale of one day. The rotation measure of the source varied significantly, from −11.8±0.8 rad m−2 to −64.0±1.5 rad m−2 , over three days. No X-ray counterpart was found in follow-up Swift or Chandra observations about a week after the first MeerKAT detection, with upper limits of ∼ 5.0 × 1031 erg s−1 (0.3–8 keV, assuming a distance ∼ 10 kpc). No counterpart is seen in new or archival near-infrared observations down to J = 20.8 mag.
If you were going to put a signal (that was also a puzzle to be unlocked), seems like the center of the galaxy would be a good place to make it emit from. Kind of obvious place to look.
But yeah, would almost certainly fall into the black hole in the center in a couple million years or whatever.
Is the signal's data available publicly? I wonder what the cryptanalyst community would think of it.
I would think that a intelligent species capable of placing a galactic billboard at the center of the galaxy would be intelligent enough to encode their message in an easy to decipher manner. Although, what does "easy to decipher" mean to a species with that technology. They may have stopped using any form of language that we would understand, generations ago.
Is math a universal language? Could an alien species use a number system that we wouldn't recognize?
There is an open access version at ArxiV.org: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.00652.pdf