
Showing Off to the Universe: Beacons for the Afterlife of Our Civilization - jedwhite
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2018/01/showing-off-to-the-universe-beacons-for-the-afterlife-of-our-civilization/
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creep
I really like the subtle emphasis on traditional engineering, whereby we tend
to use the simplest methods to produce something predictable, and can
therefore recognize it as "unnatural". It ignites the imagination to think of
what an unpredictable, "natural" engineering scheme may produce for us in
terms of beauty or unexpected utility. For example, I always thought it best
to learn outdoors and that 90-degree angles hinder me, they make me anxious
and tense. What about a classroom with smooth, round edges, walls of varying
but somehow synergistic colors schemes, and beams of varying lengths,
textures, and widths, like what you'd see in a natural setting? All precisely
calculated and predictable, but the effect would be abstractly beautiful
rather than concretely unexpected.

When I was a kid I lived on a street with a hill and field and some very large
deciduous trees growing out back. There was a windstorm in summer that broke
off entire limbs from these trees which collected in a loose pile by the
trunks. The branches fell in such a way that you could go inside the pile,
like a little hut. The neighborhood kids and I moved some around and made a
more secure version, but the base structure was the same. It inspired us
greatly, I think we slept out there for two days.

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twic
You might be interested in the architecture of Antoni Gaudí, who wasn't very
keen on rectangles. In particular, your description of the pile hut makes me
think of the crypt of the church of the Colonia Güell, which is a weird,
sinuous space supported by irregular columns. it's difficult to take good
photos of, but here are two of my best:

[https://imgur.com/a/FRwo9](https://imgur.com/a/FRwo9)

You can probably search up a few videos of the interior, which might give you
a better impression.

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throwaway7645
So only a little off topic, but does anyone here use the Wolfram language and
Mathematica for research and common coding tasks? I've been pleasantly
surprised so far with the depth of the language (the import statement is a
single unified way to import everything from CSV, text, excel files,
mathematical optimization (.mps) files, graphviz dot files...etc). I'm just
starting to use it and the fact that you can wrap a oneliner in a single
command to turn it into an interactive widget with a slider, or convert it to
C code, JIT it, or run it in parallel or on a GPU is crazily well integrated.
I love python (open source and free instead of proprietary and expensive), but
in Python every one of those things is a separate library if it exists. I've
always known about Cython/Jython/PyPy, but that requires a lot more effort to
utilize in the same way.

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indubitable
Wolfram Alpha [1] is another tool from them that's simply phenomenal for a
multitude of purposes, including research. It's what I'd really like to see in
a search eventually. It tries to actually directly deliver answers instead of
correlating searches to a prioritized list of websites which is slowly
degenerating search into 'search trendy websites by keyword.' For instance
search google for "price of google stock in 2009", and then do the same search
on Wolfram Alpha.

As that project evolves, it could eventually be the sort of searchable
knowledge database that would render current search obsolete. Google itself
could be a literal query of 'list high traffic SEO'd sites that mention
[search term]'. Who actually wants that result other than the sites in
question, ...and the companies that profit from their advertising, is beyond
me.

[1] - [https://www.wolframalpha.com/](https://www.wolframalpha.com/)

~~~
throwaway7645
Yea I used it a bit in college. It is pretty neat when it has the information
you need, but a lot of people are using proprietary information not on the
public wolfram alpha cloud. So Alpha is a little gimmicky to me although great
for helping with homework.

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Avshalom
>>Should we think of this “piscifact” as some great achievement of puffer fish
civilization, that should be celebrated throughout the solar system?

Well I for one am very proud of that little pufferfish and wish him the best
and would definitely put it on the fridge if iwashis mother.

(It's a thing male pufferfish do to attract a mate, I'm not just using 'him'
as generic pronoun, also pufferfish are adorable and super cool and you should
fall down the Wikipedia hole if you have an hour)

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LeifCarrotson
It's just an example, but this comment:

> _Then there are cases where it’s not even clear whether something represents
> a language. An example is the quipus of Peru—that presumably recorded “data”
> of some kind, but that might or might not have recorded something we’d
> usually call a language_

is slightly out of date: As of December, at least some khipus have been shown
to exactly match with Spanish census documents!

[https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/khipus-inca-empire-
har...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/khipus-inca-empire-harvard-
university-colonialism)

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Avshalom
So there's a dead comment pointing out the cartoonish predictably of Wolfram's
self-promotion which yeah that's definitely in the article--which includes at
least two extended talks about cellular automata for example followed by short
dismissals of them for the purpose-- however having hate-read a lot of
Wolfram's articles: this one actually grapples with the topic where most of
his articles are simply "Mathematica is the solution".

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acqq
> There’ve been other messages sent, including a Doritos ad, a Beatles song,
> some Craigslist pages and a plant gene sequence—as well as some arguably
> downright embarrassing “artworks”.

He seems to refer to:

"Joe Davis is an artist and a research affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. In the mid-1980s, he became concerned that no image of humans had
been sent into space representing the details of human genitals or
reproduction. So he led a project to transmit the sounds of vaginal
contractions towards neighbouring star systems. To do so, he recorded the
vaginal contractions of ballet dancers."

There's nothing "downright embarrassing" in sending these sounds, and sending
them isn't conceptually different than sending all other "samples" mentioned
in the whole article.

It just tells something about Stephen Wolfram (and others who share his
evaluation of that).

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Pica_soO
Take a coherent ray of light, shine it with Morse code encoded information on
the green zone of a star systems predicted planets position, ahead of time.
Repeat with a realistic rhythm of generations.

The best beacon is a automated light house.

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omeid2
Hacker News Community, 4 out of 8 comments as it stand is basically a longer
version of "Stephen Wolfram is a narcissist".

This is pretty poor form, if not for the fact that it is a cliché critique,
because it fails to consider that Stephen is a businessman and it is natural
to promote his work and businesses by extension.

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TeMPOraL
I count only 2 such comments; one already dead, and the other I just flagged.
I'm for (and unilaterally supporting) site-wide ban for the "Wolfram
narcissist" comments, as it's a tired cliché and detracts from the good points
made by the author.

