What does it mean to be human in a world where machines can dream?
Category: science
The Pale Blue Dot
Observe, a Pale Blue Dot… only because I’d recently stumbled across it and feel it’s critically important that we all — every one of us — have some comprehension of where we are.
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.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
You can hear Carl Sagan deliver his remarks, too.
Self Checkout
Second verse. Same as the first… also, this was a draft and was an unexpected post a few hours ago. So, we’ll do it again:
The question (rant?) posed elsewhere was as follows:
Self checkout nightmare
–rhymes with Fetid
At the grocery store today the cashier just closed the register without warning right as it was my turn after I’d waited in line for a while. They were also the only staffed register option open.
The only other option was self checkout so I went there with a full cart which I always hate. In the end a few items wouldn’t scan, and I needed an employee to come and manually enter them into the system which took ages!
So not only was it made significantly more difficult for me than just keeping the register open, but they still needed someone to walk back and forth to me doing it which probably took just as much of their time as scanning them at the checkout would’ve to start with!
Why do they do this??
The response I was going to provide there, but realized that the audience there wouldn’t appreciate my particular perspective, was;
Because, at scale, it’s more sustainable to have people — who have some semblance of personal responsibility — take a few moments to scan and bag their own groceries rather than have a single clerk with human physiology step away for 15 minutes every two hours or go to the bathroom… or lunch… or get sick… or go on vacation… or die without seeking the approval of the exceedingly small number of, although rather vocal, patrons who want to complain.
Or, and just hear me out here: scan your stuff, swipe your card, go about your day.
Hold My Beer…
Ural Airlines appears to have confirmed that they are going to attempt to fly the currently-stranded A320 out of the field near Omsk.
Clearly, they’re going to lighten the aircraft as much as possible and ensure it has minimal fuel load. They’re also awaiting landing gear testing results to ensure it’s at least possible without ripping the struts off of the airframe.
But if you think about it, this is a 50/50 risk scenario. You either succeed spectacularly. Or you fail spectacularly.
Spectacular success means that Ural Airlines, the pilots in command, and even Putin will go down as those who took off from a muddy, Siberian field and, in a way, proved that runways are somewhat optional where aircraft are concerned.
But…
Spectacular failure means that the risk was too high and the struts fail, or other parts of the airframe fail, or family of medium-sized moose saunter casually across the field in front of it while on the takeoff-roll, and all of the flight crew dies in a small fireball in the field.
The risk is expected because Russia has a dwindling number of aircraft and no reliable spare parts to ensure the aircraft remain airworthy.
But somewhere there’s a Russian pilot casually (or drunkenly) saying, “Подержи мою водку.”
Where We Are Today
I’ve no idea when I first saw this, and props to its original creator. But I’d like to underscore that this is exactly where we are today:
Presently, as of 13 August, 2023, we are most absolutely — and after the recent discovery of the sudden temperature increases measured in oceans over the last six months’ time — firmly balanced on the line between the red and yellow sections above.
the rest of me 