Here is today
hereistoday.com
hereistoday.com
And since I felt so strongly about this reaction, I messaged the guy behind the site (Luke Twyman) saying "Thanks for the inspiration!"
It's quite a feeling being (a) inspired by something that you just bump into one day, and (b) being able to shoot the guy/gal behind it telling him/her how much you enjoyed their stuff. It's always a great feeling getting positive feedback for some of my blog articles, and I'm strangely feeling perhaps just as positive and cheery for giving such a thumbs up to someone!
Edit: went to your website and found out, no, you're not Haruki Murakami. Sorry for confusing you with him!
http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/
TL;DR:
A round clock face is used to represent the history of the earth and a narrator tells us the geological events that happen as the clock hands travels around the clock face. At a few seconds to midnight, we're told this is when humans appear.
I thought it was a clever way of illustrating how human history occupies such a tiny segment in the overall scale of the earth's history. (I don't know if the exhibit is still there)
There's a growing academic discipline called "Big History"[1] that attempts to examine all of history from the big bang to the present. Bill Gates sponsors a project to teach a free public course to high school students[2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 [2] http://www.htwins.net/scale2/
Two reactions to that, either: ahhhhh sweeeeeeet, or I feel sick, pass me a bucket. So, up vote for sweet, or down vote for bucket. :)
(Normally I like a Sunday rant. I feel different today)
There are many other forms of radiometric dating, though. Uranium-lead dating has proven relatively accurate for periods of time between 1 million to 4.5 billion years ago.
Note: I'm not a geologist. I remembered that carbon was only effective for a few thousand years from a geology course I had in college, but all of this information is actually taken from articles on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating
1) Verify the half-life value. Radiometric dating works on the same principle: look at the ratio of pre-substance to fissioned substance. If you have a good half-life value, you can determine the age of the specimen using those values.
2) Use two different methods for getting the same age. If you use multiple, independent methods of determining the age of something, and they all come out the same, you have greatly lessened the probability that you're wrong or missed something.
Of course there are ways that these can be strengthened even more using practices like double blinding the measurements.
A theory in science is a model backed by the huge majority of observational evidence and the collective experience of the model's community. There are no other equivalent human institutions for reliability. None.
So saying "it's just a theory" in the case of uranium-dating is a fairly unreasoned attitude.
People have done this many times, and most of the error comes from different levels of uncertainty in the decay constants from one system to another. Many of the decay constants have not been updated for decades (e.g. Steiger and Jager 1977) and are suspected to be a few percent off, but the people who are qualified to make such measurements (physicists + chemists) aren't the people who want to use them in applications (geochronologists and geochemists). So the incentives aren't aligned and I doubt anyone will ever fix them.
Note: Was a geology/geophysics PhD student until recently.
Other systems (like samarium-neodymium) are most often used when trying to date things older than the Earth, e.g. meteorites.
That's the short answer.
How it works: they bind the getPosition function the mousedown event, which in turn starts the appropriate draw function. They have 19 frames, each of which has its own draw function that draws rectangles. Every 1000/FPS seconds, the the update and beginDraw functions are called, which are responsible for tween effect.
At a certain point, you want to represent today as a scale of everything else...but at certain point, the line for today would definitely be smaller than a single pixel.
Just a thought, obviously this is not practical by any measure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E1bNmyPWww
"Many moons have risen and fallen long, long before you came. So which way is the wind blowin', and what does your heart say? So follow, follow the sun, and which way the wind blows when this day is done."
No. Picked it up from r/dataisbeautiful[1].
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1d9c1y/here...
By contrast, language, which leverages the imagination, can be even more effective at revealing how insignificant we are:
"...stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire [4.5 Billion year] history of the Earth. On this scale...the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, 'and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.' " (from Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything)
Another example of language illustrating an abstract concept better than visual/graphic design: If you filmed or animated the following thought-experiment, would it render it any more effective?
"Imagine people's height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.
The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America's median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall."
If we assume that the width of the bar for the life of the earth is 1500 pixels (the width changes depending on the window size), then the period we have been around will be around 0.06 pixels wide (1500/23000 = 0.065). Much closer to zero pixels than one pixel.
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I hope you resolve this downtime as comments are favorable, and it appears interesting.
We have a vision of the past, of the future, of a huge portion of the universe. And that's not nothing.
But once someone starts preaching about how this means we are insignificant I lose interest quickly.
If we are the only sentient life in the universe, then we are extremely significant in the grand scheme of things. If there was/is a god or another alien civilization from another universe, they would certainly conclude that the evolution of sentient life is one of the top ten wonders of this universe.
I get tired of all this "insignificant" talk, its simply not true. Our minds are perhaps behind the wonder of life in the first place, but not that far behind, and life is one of the greatest things about our universe. How inanimate material started to think and move and do things. I think that is in no way insignificant, even if life only exists for a fraction of the time the universe will exist.
I guess what I wrote is entirely subjective, I wonder how many people would agree or disagree with my statement, or at least my feeling towards how others would view our sentience and life in general?
I really don't think humanity and life is insignificant even when we are small in comparison to giant stars and distances and short-lived in comparison to the age of the universe.
People who say humanity is the summit of some mountain might as well be saying "we are living in the newest day to ever have happened." Technically true, but far from certain that it means anything. Personally, I think it behooves the character of humanity to sit quietly in humility.
An eon from now, when the technological lifeforms which have succeeded recall instantly this thread from their archive, and witness how you once crowed about the grandness of humanity, they may experience an emotion which you might call humor -- only with a dimension and richness that your mind cannot possibly fathom. Or they may experience disdain, contempt, and ridicule at the thought that you had anything to do with them or their existence. Do you credit the millionth timid mammal, your potential forebear, for surviving the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction? Of course not -- not unduly at least -- it was only doing what was assigned to it, a biological directive.
And you consider the mind so great, which we scarcely understand -- to direct your own mind toward the contemplation of its grandness seems, at least, arrogant. If you should live so long, in your own lifetime it will not only decay, but before that it will trick you, deceive you and trap you. And soon, it will also be made obsolete. What did it do in between that was so great? Gamify some social metrics to increase ROI and user engagement? Contemplate and slightly reduce the runtime complexity of an algorithm whose need will be eliminated within a decade? Eat, sleep, shit and fuck?
So I'm not sure what exactly you mean by calling us significant, you don't know that at all. The statement means less than calling today the youngest day to ever have happened, because at least that is true.
In sum: all that you consider to be esteemable and worthy of elevation will be reduced with time. Whatever significance you imagine it holds is a function of another observer who -- if it exists -- is driven by motives and a character you don't understand.
Or in other words, just live today; it won't matter in the grand scheme of things. And likely, neither will humanity.
Pick... some?
Think about that for a second: The universe is--gasp--actively trying to 'kill' life.
For us to undertake the greatest mass extinction of all times (that is to say, rival or exceed mass extinction caused by natural causes itself on Earth), we'd have to destroy at least--at least--another 10,000 Earth-like planets, each one replete with life as Earth is currently.
I would love to see Humans possess such amazing technological prowess one day[0], but alas, that will not be today, tomorrow, nor even this century.
[0] Wanting to see possession of technological capabilities does not imply I want to see future Humans use it to destroy extra-terrestrial planetary life.