Well, due to the massive gravitational lensing from the intermediate galaxy a few billion years away, I guess it's not actually a perfect 13½ billion light year sphere right... It's a fair chunk of the photons in the 10 billion light year sphere swept up and focused over a vast area and pointed in our direction.
I get the same amazement when I think about an ant I see on a tree five feet away. A photon was born somewhere in the middle of the Sun thousands (or more) years ago. It eventually made its way to the surface and—at extreme improbability—it traveled directly toward Earth. With more extreme improbability, it found itself on an intercept course with a tiny little ant on a tree.
Layer on yet another high improbability, that photon-ant collision just so happened to send it directly toward me. Wait, not just me, but the tiny little pupil in one of my eyes!
Tremendously large numbers and crazy minuscule fractions can be found in your backyard. Don't even need to leave the Solar System.
Well, it's a good point no? If the universe is expanding as the photons propagate they are spread out into that larger sphere. So for the purposes of light gathering, a galaxy 13 billion years in the past has its photons spread over that much larger sphere into even greater invisibility. Although I guess in this case they were spread out into the larger sphere at the point of the expansion of the universe of a few billion years ago before being focused towards us - so. Some value significantly smaller than 46 but a lot larger than 10. Which makes it even more amazing to think about.
I just ate a bunch of food. I am now more massive. So I have stretched space around me a bit more than I did before I ate. You just need to make an instrument sensitive enough to detect it.
I met Ellsberg when I attended a live recording of the podcast Philosophy Talk in 2019. It was called "The Doomsday Doctrine", it was about the policy of mutually assured distruction. I remember he talked about the difference between "their bomb is in the air, so we're launching" and "their bomb has exploded, we're launching". Politicians vacillate between the two, when history shows us that they are very, very different. Airplanes and bombers encourage the latter, while missile silos encourage the former. This makes missile silos a severe liability, as they encourage first-steike launches.
I remember talking to him briefly after the talk. It impressed me how decisive, opinionated, and well-thought-out he was, at his age.
He liked my T-shirt, which said "Statistics means never having to say you're certain."
I'm glad I got a chance to meet such an important and positive figure in US history.
My bet continues to be optical phenomena - that's why the orbs and other phenomena resemble simple geometric forms, rather than anything with complex structure, service irregularities, etc. Happy to be proven wrong, as this is the most boring explanation, but that's my current hypothesis.
Fifty to sixty military pilots seeing the same thing over and over again while also seeing them on several different sensors isn't convincing enough? I mean I have no idea what they are, but these things are there and they're not just optical illusions.
When they say they turn up via multiple types of sensors simultaneously, thats what makes me second guess that theory. It’s still possible, it less likely. Unless there’s some physics involved that I don’t understand, or I misread the stories
They seem to be marketed for educational purposes. You could simulate them in software easily. They could be useful for research, but they're not directly useful for computing, except as a novelty.
"Gemini Mini is a conditionally portable, entry-level 2-cubit system... The device has built-in CASTOR software, allowing it to simulate the operation of 8 qubits."
Not sure what benefit you get from using real qubits vs just simulating them, even for educational purposes.
Real qubits have flaws, and you could experiment to see under what conditions they work better or worse, like by applying magnetic fields. Simulated qubits are presumably flawless, and so you can't experiment with them.
And they shall make a computer of Dimethylphosphite molecules: 2 or 3 qubits shall be the capacity thereof, and a cubit and a half the length thereof, and a half cubit the breadth thereof…
Japanese also don't distinct v/b and l/r so love [lav] is written as rabu (-u because with exception of -n they don't like to end word on consonant), thus "rabu songu"
Oh, I found the apparently quite limited number of Japanese syllables interesting, and indeed:
> The basic units of the Japanese writing system are syllables. Standard Japanese uses 100 distinct syllables. Of these, 5 are single vowels, 62 are consonants combined with a vowel, and 53 are consonants combined with 'y' plus a vowel. [1]
Which suggests a relatively obvious possibility of a simple writing system, where learning to write and read doesn't require memorizing countless (logographic / concept based) kanji. Though kanji seem to be older. So apparently the syllable/character association was not as obvious as it seems.
It's interesting that assigning syllables characters isn't really practical in Germanic/Romance languages, as there are far more than in Japanese. One source cites 15.000 out of 100.000 possible for English [2]. It's actually cool that someone came up with the consonant/vowel distinction, ages ago, which saves tons of characters, and which proved to be a big advantage (mostly over logographic writing) when the printing press took Europe by storm, while it flopped in China and Korea [3].
> Which suggests a relatively obvious possibility of a simple writing system, where learning to write and read doesn't require memorizing countless (logographic / concept based) kanji. Though kanji seem to be older. So apparently the syllable/character association was not as obvious as it seems.
Its somewhat shocking to me that you are not aware of hiragana and katakana or at the very least romanji. They are mentioned in [1] in the writing section.
From [1]:
> Kanji : Thousands of characters borrowed from Chinese writing, each with a different meaning
> Hiragana : 46 "smooth" style phonetic symbols used for inflected endings, grammatical particles and other Japanese words
> Katakana : 46 "block" style phonetic symbols used for writing foreign loan words, foreign names, and for emphasis
It's not either or, they are used together. Once you become even an intermediate learner of the language lack of kanji actually makes it more difficult to read text that is just in kana. Japanese and Chinese can also present the interesting problem for a learner of perfectly understanding what a written sentence means without having the ability to actually say it out loud.
Also excluding names, there are less than two thousand kanji in modern Japanese. Still a lot but not some insurmountable task.
>Also excluding names, there are less than two thousand kanji in modern Japanese. Still a lot but not some insurmountable task.
The problem with these kanji is that each one has several possible pronunciations/sounds. That, and writing without spaces, increases the difficulty to the maximum. You cannot read a word without previously knowing it, only sightly guess if you have a high level of knowledge and try good luck.
Japanese people can not read old texts in their own language due this.
That pattern looks periodic, but it's super cool! I think the periodic unit is a flower shape consisting of 8 tiles: 2 in the middle making a hexagon, and then 6 more around the hexagon, like the petals of a flower.
Your reaction should be "astronomy fun fact, that will have no direct effects on anyone's life." This black hole is so dim and distant that it required a super powerful telescope to even notice it exists. It will have no effect on life on earth, except by adding to scientific understanding of the cosmos.
Moreover, black holes aren't death machines or anything. This black hole puts out much less light and energy than an equivalent-mass star. It's quite safe.
A lot of people seem to have the impression that black holes are like vacuum cleaners, sucking up anything that comes near.
If the Sun were replaced with a black hole of equal mass, apart from the heat and light going out, we wouldn't notice anything. All the planets would still orbit more-or-less the same.
The scary thing would be a rogue, massive black hole hurtling through our solar system at a fraction of c. Such an event could destabilize orbits enough to make the remaining time on Earth quite terrifying. But, good news: if such an event should ever occur, we would be utterly powerless to change a damned thing, so we can rest easy knowing that panic is a waste of energy better spent on hedonistic pursuit.
Those galaxies are magnified to the point where they are visible by another, much closer galaxy cluster, which is only 3.5 billion light years away.