Beautiful World

Swimming with the rays in Belize *

I took these shots with a cheap sports camera that probably had very old film inside. But I like the spooky blue-grainy effect.

Daily life in Caye Caulker, a small coral island (pop. 1,300) off the coast of Belize.

Taxi – The roads are paved with sand and the taxis are all golf carts

Rush-hour traffic…

Fishermen’s Wharf – Pelicans gather to catch a free meal

A Frigate bird tries to steal the catch. Frigates are huge, gliding birds who rule the sky in Caye Caulker. Pelicans are excellent fliers at low altitudes, but they aren’t as speedy or maneuverable. When they got together, we saw some excellent dogfights.

Local game

[Financial district] – View from the roof of the Lazy Lizard – In the evening most of the town gathers at the Lazy Lizard cafe and bar, which offers excellent (and cheap) happy hour rum drinks and a great view of the sunset. There’s also a swimming and snorkeling spot, which is nice as long as you avoid the boats going through the canal.

View from the roof, to the north

Nightlife

Florist’s Window

Graveyard near WTC

He’s not the Soup Nazi, he’s the Soup Man

Taking a photo of the NY Stock Exchange

More photos of Wall St. and the South Street Seaport up on Flickr

Thanks to National Geographic:

What makes up our world? Dive into this photo-mosaic portrait of the Earth to see it through the eyes of users like you. It’s made up of hundreds of photos of the natural world, each submitted by users to My Shot. (Submit a photo) Move the yellow square over an area you would like to explore, click, and go. Double-click on an image to see more information about it. Keep clicking—and diving deeper into the Infinite Photograph—to get a truly boundless picture of Earth.

Black Hole Creates Spectacular Light Show

A jet of gas spewing from a huge black hole has mysteriously brightened, flaring to 90 times its normal glow.

For seven years the Hubble Space Telescope has been watching the jet, which pours out of the supermassive black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy. It has photographed the strange phenomenon fading and then brightening, with a peak that even outshines M87′s brilliant core.

Scientists have dubbed the enigmatic bright blob HST-1, and are so far at a loss to explain its weird behavior.

“I did not expect the jet in M87 or any other jet powered by accretion onto a black hole to increase in brightness in the way that this jet does,” said astronomer Juan Madrid of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who conducted the Hubble study. “It grew 90 times brighter than normal. But the question is, does this happen to every single jet or active nucleus, or are we seeing some odd behavior from M87?”

Many supermassive black holes have jets of material that spray out perpendicularly from the donut-shaped ring of matter falling onto the black hole. These beams of hot gas are thought to result from magnetic field lines that are twisted by the black hole’s mass, and propel charged particles outward.

But most rays do not appear to blaze up with such extreme intensity as HST-1. Scientists aren’t sure if it is an exceptional case, or if it represents a normal event for black hole jets, which are still not very well understood. In this case, the bright knot of HST-1 is about 214 light-years from the M87 galaxy’s core…

Has the singularity arrived? Not yet, but we can see it from here.

Metal/silicon based computers will probably not be able to mimic or replicate human intelligence in the near future. However, they are currently able to crunch enough numbers to literally read (and record) human thought processes. Since most thoughts, feelings and dreams can be seen and recorded by machines, it’s possible that one’s thoughts and one’s emotional selfhood ** could, in the near future, be downloaded.

A computer’s ability to read that kind of data implies that we may someday be able to download ideas and concepts onto a remote database in the same way we blog, without the annoyance of typing.

We’ve also made a lot of progress in the field of biomimetics (bionics). We’re heading towards the point where we will be able to replace most parts of the human body, either through artificial implants or cloning.

We’ve already created a form of contact lens that can cure some forms of blindness. Other “bionic eyes” can transmit data across your field of vision, a kind of contact-lens iPhone. Combined with a subdermal implanted chip, it can also transmit information about one’s health to a computer manned by medical technicians. In the not-too-far future, these kinds of lenses/subdermal chips could be used to record all information about a person’s thoughts and emotional/physical well being. After a person dies, their accumulated knowledge could be stored, read, or transported.

I’m sure Google is working on this right now

With the right combination of all the above technologies, annoying problems in space and time travel become solvable. It will probably take us centuries to be able to create an artificial intelligence that can think or emote the way we do (like the Cylons who improbably evolved from mindless robots to humanoids with reproductive ability in a ridiculously short period of time) but the ability to copy and download our existing consciousness from one storage unit to another could be do-able by the end of this century.

So, if we wanted to travel from point A to point B, instead of moving our delicate, high maintenance bodies, we could transmit the data from one bio-storage unit to another, from body A on earth to machine body B on mars. Machine body B explores mars while body A stays home, gets work done and analyzes data.

Or consciousness could be transmitted from body A in 2145 AD and immediately read by body B in 2147. Or vise versa. If we see space and time travel as the transmission of data/consciousness rather than as the transportation of bodies, all sorts of possibilities open up. Transmitting data through space is easier than transmitting cumbersome bodies, and it’s likely that data could be transmitted through time as well.

While data/consciousness couldn’t travel faster than the speed of light, it’s more likely to be able to travel (and survive the trip) through “warped” space-times, wormholes or superluminal travel through a timespace curved.

In a recent episode of the “Sarah Connor Chronicles”*, the robot John Henry laments the fact that human souls can’t be ‘downloaded.’ That really is the key to the transcendence of the singularity.

* The illustration above uses an illustration for the “Sarah Connor Chronicles” combined with NASA’s image of “NGC 346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud”.

** Link thanks to Infidel 753