19 ms·
It’s an age of marvels
- pfdietz 3y agoI believe GPS also uses multiple wavelengths to allow estimation of signal delay from passage through the ionosphere. The way Martian meteorites are identified is from isotopes of inert gases (neon, argon, for example). Mars has a particular pattern of these that's been measured by landers there. Meteorites from the moon are identified by oxygen isotopes, which are on the same line on the oxygen isotope plot as Earth rocks (this is also a strong clue about the origin of the moon.)
- changoplatanero 3y agoThe gps thing is even more amazing that what he said in the article because it turns out that the receiver doesn’t need an accurate clock of its own for it to work
- perlgeek 3y agoThat's right, you get rid of the requirement of its own clock, and instead accept that you need to "see" one more satellite than you'd need otherwise. The (oversimplified) mental model is this: If the receiver knows the exact time, and sees a signal from one satellite, it knows its position in one spatial dimension. For each satellite signal you add, you can determine the position in one more dimension. Once you get to the 3rd satellite, you have no more dimensions to add. Instead, the 4th satellite lets you drop the requirement for your own (absolute) time keeping. After that, each satellite you see improves the overall precision.
- pfdietz 3y agoIf the receiver has some internal sensors that can also help (gyros of various kinds). I remember as a kid my father was working on the first version of the Air Combat Maneuvering Range (this was back in the late 1960s.) This involved dogfights with simulated missiles and guns. To work, the system needed to accurately track the position of the aircraft. Radars on mountains around the range would give good positions in two dimensions, but poor vertical position (this axis was nearly perpendicular to the line from a radar to a plane). The solution was to add a pod to each aircraft with various gyros and incorporate this information via a Kalman filter. Nowadays such a system would just use GPS, much simpler.
- throwup238 3y agoOn top of that, with modern surveying and an RTK GPS base station you can get centimeter accuracy for very precise measurements of land, all by carrying a stick with a receiver on it. Most populated counties in the US already have a network running so you usually just need the receiver.
- 77pt77 3y ago[flagged]
- keybored 3y ago> That and possibly genetics that would have given a scientific veneer to his extremely racist views. How?
- 77pt77 3y agoPeople will read scientific information in ways to support their prejudices. Franklin would not be different. We like to idolize these historical figures but if this guy was alive nowadays he'd probably be rage posting in alt-right forums only accessible on the dark-web.
- snapcaster 3y agoI kind of think the opposite, that people will basically end up at whatever social status they would be regardless of system so he would just have modern day elite views (instead of mainstream modern day elite views of his time). Just like people today who think they would have resisted the nazis in 1930s Germany but hold all mainstream opinions in the modern day
- 77pt77 3y ago> that people will basically end up at whatever social status they would be regardless of system So what determines that intrinsic and inevitable social status?
- mistermann 3y agoCulture. Terence McKenna's take on it, fwiw: https://ehsto.com/blogs/undertone-journal/terence-mckenna-culture-is-not-your-friend https://ehsto.com/blogs/undertone-journal/terence-mckenna-cu...
- 3y ago
- blacksqr 3y agoMedicine is magical and magical is art Think of the boy in the bubble And the baby with the baboon heart And I believe These are the days of lasers in the jungle Lasers in the jungle somewhere Staccato signals of constant information A loose affiliation of millionaires And billionaires and baby These are the days of miracle and wonder
- goodgoblin 3y agoI also appreciate the marvelous rhythm of the modern world, more miracles per square foot than the life of any saint.
- RetroTechie 3y agoYeah that's sure to blow past peoples' minds: how many of those marvels there are all around us. Few everyday objects that did NOT result from a production+logistics chain 100s of nodes long.
- ks2048 3y agoHate to be a downer, but the bomb in the baby carriage is wired through the radio.
- AStrangeMorrow 3y agoI am just glad to see I am not the only one making up imaginary scenario where I bring people from the past to have them marvel at our world.
- tetris11 3y agoI do this with music, and measure how good a song is by what fraction f of the words I would need to change for me to send it n years back in time to be understood by an older audience. I have a small community (n=1 or 4?) where I write this up: https://lemmy.ml/c/howtimeless https://lemmy.ml/c/howtimeless
- nicbou 3y agoWhich one would require the most explaining, according to you?
- scarby2 3y agoNot OP but it's likely some modern rap. A lot of the language used deviates significantly from what we would consider to be standard English and derives from cants that are not very old (80s/90s maybe).
- genewitch 3y agoIt's the end of the world - R.E.M.; One Week - Barenaked Ladies. That's just off the top(ical) of my head.
- tetris11 3y agohttps://lemmy.ml/comment/5509793 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5509793 Otha Fish by Pharcyde has tons of references ranging from 50s-90s. Scroll down to the main comment to see them explained.
- epiccoleman 3y agoMy favorite "one of these" is the idea of taking a Raspberry Pi, or ATtiny, or modern Macbook Pro back to the ENIAC guys. Can you imagine how they'd have reacted to see these tiny little devices which pack orders of magnitude more computational power than their warehouse-sized computer? The mind boggles.
- ctenb 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240512232147/https://blog.plover.com/tech/its-an-age-of-marvels.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240512232147/https://blog.plov...
- ertgbnm 3y agoMore than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists. You have blueberries for sale in January??? A variety box of tea from 7 different countries? A wall of spices? Pineapples? Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!! All relatively affordable and accessible to the average person.
- Rinzler89 3y ago>I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists Mate, the 7-Eleven Big Gulp, the Walmart 5-gallon bucket of Snickers and the giant Costco bulk bag of peanut butter M&Ms blows my present day European mind, let alone someone from 1900.
- qlm 3y agoThe quantity of chocolate for sale in bulk certainly is surprising. Unfortunately I find American chocolate to be borderline inedible.
- le-mark 3y agoBest not to think of it as “chocolate” similar to how cheese whiz is only loosely related to cheese.
- pockybum522 3y agoAs an American, I agree with you. Most things we call chocolate are painfully and literally disgustingly sweet. We have plenty of good chocolate too. However, anything darker than about 40% gets called "dark chocolate" in America, which is just stupid, so even that isn't a sure sign that it's not loaded with sugar. Most grocery stores will have a few dozen chocolate bars in their candy aisle that actually say a percentage on them. Not only does this tell you what's not sugared to death, but companies that do this tend to make higher quality chocolate anyways. Anything 70% and higher tends to be tasty.
- Bendy 3y ago“The future is going to be boring.” - J. G. Ballard
- genewitch 3y ago"Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than originally thought" - Krista Now
- marssaxman 3y agoWriting to you from several decades into the future of my own past, I can confirm that this is definitely the case.
- ativzzz 3y agoIs it the future that's boring or do we just lose our sense of wonder as we age and become jaded about the world?
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- wiz21c 3y agoComputers. Franklin had none of them and if he'd see ours, he'd had is mind blown.
- gmuslera 3y agoThere are emergent processes that would make people from some centuries ago wonder how they ever become to be. And it goes beyond technology. Pervasive internet, information and social networks, are technologies, but how that has changed us, how we relate to others, wherever they are, and how we see the world should be something to marvel about, for good and bad.
- flobosg 3y ago> The big science news on Friday was that for the first time we have done this for an insect brain. If I’m not wrong, the Drosophila connectome was released last year.
- dotnet00 3y agoIt's refreshing to see a rare openly optimistic article about the world here first thing in the morning. I also like to occasionally appreciate how someone from even just the recent past would see our current world as one full of manmade wonders. Another one of these would be microwaves, although conceptually simple as a box that heats stuff, it'd be pretty mind bending that it does it essentially wirelessly. Adding on to the point about going to the Moon being universally mind blowing, I think it would be (and still is) even more mind blowing that we stopped doing that and didn't bother trying for 50 years, in large part because the people of the time lost interest...
- lordgrenville 3y agoConsidering that it's staggeringly expensive and there's not much to see there, it seems like the right decision to hold off once we'd established it could be done.
- somenameforme 3y agoExcept in a parallel world where we continued forward making advances in space we could already be a defacto post-scarcity species (as far as materials are concerned at least), exporting our heavy carbon producing industries to the Moon - simultaneously helping create an atmosphere there, while avoiding any climate impact here, have effectively infinite land to expand outward into, countless high paying jobs perpetuating all of this across the entire solar system if not beyond. And so on endlessly. Instead we're sending toy rovers to Mars, unable to solve climate change in any way that has any chance of actually moving forward, trending rapidly towards WW3 as nations' schemes invariably turn towards each other, with no grand outlet for expansion/growth to otherwise occupy themselves. And so on endlessly. I think it's quite a poor direction we've chosen. And I'd also add that this is assuming there are no revolutionary discoveries out there awaiting discovery. It's basically impossible to imagine something like electricity/electromagnetism before its discovery. As we live on a single planet in a virtually endless - and ever stranger - universe, one can only imagine how many other revolutionary discoveries, things we cannot even really imagine today, await our eventual discovery. It's hard to know what we don't know, but I think there is probably a rather tremendous amount. And it seems reasonable to expect that exploring the cosmos is one way of taking us closer to it.
- jrgd 3y ago"It's a bit fiddly because time isn't passing at the same rate for the device as it is for the satellites, but we were able to work it out." that just knocked my brain down.
- yen223 3y agoThe fact that we worked it out before sending out those satellites is a minor miracle in of itself
- genewitch 3y agoYeah, the idea that you can triangulate from the delay in receiving timestamps that are synchronized within (40ns? seems high, see below) isn't that mind-blowing. If you have synchronized clocks and a mechanism that records timestamps from various locations with those clocks when you get a voltage spike on an antenna, you can triangulate lightning strikes to within several hundred feet - from practically anywhere in the hemisphere (blitzortung.org). But i like pointing out that it was the relativistic part that was impressive, for sure. 40ns seems high since you can have an "error" after many hours of receiving of less than 10ns, and on a good, clear day, you can get to within 1ns, on cheap hardware. My GPS drift is 10 feet over a week, gradually getting smaller. If i put my good receiver in the center of my kitchen, the points converge to within the confines of the walls within 48 hours. However this may just be error correction, and the satellite clocks may be inaccurate to 40ns, i am unsure.
- pushcx 3y agoI think this post is right that Franklin would've been impressed by GPS. The author doesn't call it out, but the Longitude Problem was a significant area of scientific and engineering inquiry in Franklin's lifetime, with special focus on the difficulty of doing so at sea. I haven't looked into it, but given his research mapping the Gulf Stream it seems likely he spent time on the problem himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude
- mckn1ght 3y agoIf only Ben Franklin had access to https://ciechanow.ski/gps/ https://ciechanow.ski/gps/, he could’ve invented GPS to solve it!
- genewitch 3y agothis reminds me of that site linked here last year that explained and diagrammed the inner workings of a wristwatch. I used singlefile to save the page, as i do with any page that impresses me (or is noteworthy or newsworthy or needs to be saved as proof, etc)
- nuancebydefault 3y agoIndeed, GPS is when you think about it, possible in theory but practically impossible. So it must be magic! PS I believe I found a little mistake in the article: '...and because the GPS device also has a perfect clock...'
- tomjen3 3y agoYou also need to take into account what isn't there: How do you think Franklin would take it that we went to every single corner of the earth and killed Smallpox dead? Like every tiny hamlet in India? In fact, let him by the grave yard and note the ages of the dead.
- sethammons 3y ago> let him by the grave yard and note the ages of the dead Suggesting what? That people live longer? That is a modern myth. Socrates died in his 80s. The average lifespan being low was because so many children died. People have been living 70-90 years for thousands of years, likely longer.
- verisimi 3y ago> An obvious winner, something sure to blow Franklin's mind is “yeah, we've sent people to the Moon to see what it was like, they left scientific instruments there and then they came back with rocks and stuff.” But that's no everyday thing, it blew everyone's mind when it happened and it still does. Some things I tell Franklin make him goggle and say “We did what?” and I shrug modestly and say yeah, it's pretty impressive, isn't it. I hate this sort of writing - 'WE did this or that', 'shrugging modestly'. It has this arrogance about it. Pride for being part of something that the individual had nothing to do with. It reminds me of the kid at school that joins the winning team to get a medal, but can't even play the game and only gets in the way.
- dotnet00 3y agoIt's more like a kid who is really proud that the current champion at their sport was an alumni of the same school. It's inspiring without doing any harm. Perhaps you're being too bitter about life if you think that the only things people are allowed to feel a connection to are the things they've personally played a role in. In this specific example, considering that most of us are under 50 and thus weren't even alive to be able to participate, and thus can only see it as part of our collective history as a species.
- Ferret7446 3y agoI felt the same, during a low period in my life. Now that I am older, more experienced, and recognize my own contributions to society, I no longer feel this guilt or project it onto others.
- sethammons 3y agoSee every sports fan, political armchair pundit, etc. "what we need to do is..."
- beginning_end 3y agoThere's so much cool stuff these days, like interstellar iron: https://physicsworld.com/a/antarctic-snow-yields-interstellar-iron/ https://physicsworld.com/a/antarctic-snow-yields-interstella...
- Tom3849 3y ago[flagged]
- fooblaster 3y agoDon't forget about our terrible marvels. We have a red button in Washington and if we press it, within 15 minutes we can turn half of the cities on the planet into a burning hellscape.
- pfdietz 3y agoThere's a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal about the fantasy of explaining current knowledge to leading lights of the past, but I can't find the link. Anyone?
- fritzo 3y agoRibosomes. People are filled with 10^20 little printing presses whose typeface contains four letters, and whose newspapers conduct microscopic commerce. All of life is based on ribosomes.
- wwarner 3y agoWe can feel superior to the past, but by the same logic, how will the past judge us? I suppose it depends on what problems we manage to solve in the future; i.e. the future will have a lot of the same problems we have today, but which ones?
- the_af 3y agoA related thought-exercise I sometimes engage in, inspired by Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is this: Ok, so I have a university education and know lots about computers. If I traveled back to the Middle Ages -- actually, make it the (inaccurately named) Dark Ages or even more ancient times, say the Roman Republic -- how much of my modern day knowledge would I be able to use to impress the natives? The telephone? Nope. I cannot even explain how the telegraph works. Electricity? Sort of. But how would I use it? Hm... computers are completely out of the question, I wouldn't be able to explain how they differ from an abacus or why they are so novel. TV? Not without an example. The... um, steam machine? Look, I cannot really make anything with my hands, so I understand the principle but wouldn't be able to replicate it. The... um... the printing press maybe? Or tell them to wash their hands thoroughly before/after touching an open wound? In conclusion: I suck.
- ghaff 3y agoAssuming someone would take your word as gospel your amateur medical knowledge is probably worth more than most of your knowledge of engineering which just requires too much of a tech tree. Maybe if you’re a gunsmith on the side or something.
- marssaxman 3y agoYou may enjoy the novel "Lest Darkness Fall" by L. Sprague de Camp, who explored this idea back in 1939.
- the_af 3y agoThanks for the recommendation! It seems I will enjoy it; it belongs in the same theme as Mark Twain's novel, only it's not humorous. On that note, Wikipedia took me to "The Man Who Came Early" by Poul Anderson, which fits what I'm saying exactly: a modern day man is taken back to Viking-age Iceland, where his knowledge fails him catastrophically as he is unable to explain it or put it into practice, to disastrous results.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoYou could calculate stuff, just by using arabic numerals rather than roman. You could calculate even more stuff with calculus. Between those two, you could solve lots of impressive problems. (Again, though, they'd have to trust you, because they wouldn't understand the answers at all.)
- bandyaboot 3y ago“That’s all really amazing, but I’m having trouble with the thing you said about how despite all of this half the country thinks things are terrible?” “Yeah, but get this, the half that thinks things are terrible regularly flips and vice-versa.” “Really? What’s changing so drastically?” “Nothing. Let’s talk about microchips.”
- inasio 3y agoNice article! I used to have a similar "friend" I liked to chat with and impress him with our modern marvels, not quite Benjamin Franklin though, I read a ton of pirate books and this particular Malaysian gentleman was pretty impressed by what modern artillery could do, and lately about those insanely fast hydrofoil sailboats/kitesurfs/windsurfs
- asdfman123 3y agoI hate to play the pessimist here, but I wish we could balance these amazing technological advances with the wisdom on how to use them. Phones are awesome to look up information or video chat family members on another part of the planet. But staring at them for emotional regulation while avoiding real people around you is a mistake. I wonder how we're going to solve this problem culturally. I'm trying to change my own habits, but it's hard.
- pyrale 3y ago> I hate to play the pessimist here, but I wish we could balance these amazing technological advances with the wisdom on how to use them. This article left me with the same feeling. Technology advances so fast we're simply unable to collectively process the power we have. We're the equivalent of a toddler finding daddy's gun.
- aftbit 3y agoOr this quote from Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars: "We're like dwarves in a waldo[.] One of those really big waldo excavators. We're inside it and supposed to be moving a mountain, and instead of using the waldo capabilities we're leaning out of a window and digging with teaspoons. And complimenting each other on the way we're taking advantage of the height." We don't even realize what is possible with our current technology.
- hackable_sand 3y agoIt seems like the dwarves are using the machine exactly how it was intended to be used: to move a mountain. If you want a better analogy, ask yourself what the purpose of a "Where's Waldo?" book is.
- nicklecompte 3y agoMinor nitpick: > A past what-the-fuck was that we know exactly how many cells there are (959) in a particular little worm, C. elegans, and how each of those cells arises from the division of previous cells, as the grows from a fertilized egg, and we know what each cell does and how they are connected, and we know that 302 of those cells are nerve cells, and how the nerve cells are connected together. (There are 6,720 connections.) We have no clue what most C elegans neurons actually do, we only know how they are connected. The behavior of most individual C elegans neurons (and by extension the brain) is basically a mystery, and it might take a few decades of experimental advances to figure it out. Not to downplay the coolness of this. But a lot of people seem to think "we know the C elegans connectome" means "we know how the C elegans brain works." In fact it tells us very little about the brain - an analogy I like is that it's akin to understanding a complex circuit purely by wires and solder, without knowing if you're connecting to a capacitor, an inductor, etc. The information is necessary but far from sufficient.
- afpx 3y ago"What I cannot create, I do not understand." - Richard Feynman
- andbberger 3y agono one but sebastian seung and his gang of hacks actually thinks this. the connectome is but a very useful, _very_ expensive tool. and, actually as of writing, we have a connectome for the _adult_ drosophila brain (more than one actually). two orders of magnitude larger, 200,000 neurons. neuroscience discussions on orange website are always a sight to behold but, uh, even more so than the connectome (we spent $50M peeling atomically thin layers off the most important fly to have ever lived and then hundreds of man years annotating it) the techniques of modern neuroscience would blow people away. we routinely image from the entire drosophila brain at several hertz, while it is running on a virtual reality treadmill using biological sensors genetically engineered to be expressed in a specific subset of neurons.
- corytheboyd 3y agoI’d like to imagine explaining e-sports to a ye olde person. Alright so we invented computers, cool I guess, but then we made video games, which are like movies you get to drive yourself with a human interface device (we just call it a controller). We then developed competitive skill based games over time, and the ability for many humans to play at the same time in the same video game world. Then we created leagues and tournaments, to the point where it’s a serious career. We love fantasizing about what future sports would look like in sci-fi, but… we kinda already have them now! Way more interesting than “football… but in space!” Fun to think about, loved this article :)
- sanderjd 3y ago> The Internet? Well, again yes, but no. The complicated engineering details are complicated engineering, but again the basic idea is easily within the reach of the 18th century and is not all that astounding. I get that this is a set-up to the more astounding inventions discussed further on, but I think this one is a stretch. I buy the paragraph as a description for why telegraphs would not have been astounding, but I think there are a few step-changes from there to the global broadband packet-switched internet that exists today. I don't think this is the same "basic idea" as telegraphs.
- actuallyalys 3y agoYeah, I think the idea of a single interconnected network across the planet would be astounding, even if the idea of using wires for communication is not.
- credit_guy 3y agoThat's nothing. The thing Benjamin Franklin would have marveled at is how many things we refuse to do. If you told Franklin that within 9 months of us getting hit by a new virus we would start mass-producing a vaccine, he would be impressed, but not all that much. But if you told him hundreds of millions of people refused to take the vaccine, he'd then be truly astonished. If you told Franklin that only 65 years after first flying an airplane we landed humans on the Moon, he would give an appreciative nod. If you told him we built and tested a thermal nuclear rocket engine and it was working better than one could hope, and then we completely shelved the project, he will admit that his brain is too small to comprehend that. Make sure you do not mention GMOs to Ben Franklin.
- bmitc 3y agoMy threshold for marvel is much higher. I feel we're in an age of un-marvels. Nearly every technological "improvement" feels worse than the thing it replaced. I'm not even that old, but things were once much, much more simple before the Internet controlled us all. Except when it comes to healthcare related advances, I feel we'd be much better off without all this technology we've slaved ourselves to.
- rlhf 3y agoAgree with the comment "Trying to handle the stolen use case but not allowing nefarious tracking seems to be at odds with each other."
- femto 3y ago> and because the GPS device also has a perfect clock The smart thing about GPS is that the GPS device doesn't need a perfect clock. It's comparing the phase of signals from multiple satellites, so avoiding an absolute time of flight measurement, which would require an accurate clock.
- physicles 3y agoCame here to post this comment. It's a common misconception even among people who sort of know how GPS works.
- jvm___ 3y agoWe've convinced sand and various metals, at the nano-scale level, to allow us to remotely view - in real-time - things that are out of sight. Time-machine back to 1900 and tell someone that. You'd be burnt at the stake as a witch (not really, but you'd sound insane).
- GMoromisato 3y agoFor real existential-crisis-inducing marvels, you have to go with evolution. Once Darwin worked out natural selection, and it was combined with Mendel's genes, a whole host of primal questions were suddenly answered: Who created us? Why are we here? What is our purpose? If you were to give Franklin a copy of "The Selfish Gene", I'm curious if he would believe it. Would he reject it and become (remain?) a creationist? Or would he accept that everything he believed about why we are here is wrong.
- w0de0 3y agoIn fairness to the explicitly agnostic, I don’t think evolution or genetics are teleologies of humankind, or of consciousness, or even of simple life. These primal questions remain unanswered, if not unanswerable. Granted, a whole host of prior answers were revealed to be nonsense. (I’m sure Franklin would be unsurprised at this; an enlightenment polymath can hardly have credited the common man’s creationism - Jefferson, by way of comparison, was a rational deist.)
- GMoromisato 3y agoThis is an excellent point. And you're probably right that Franklin and maybe Jefferson might have understood and accepted evolution--Darwin's world of the 1860s was not that different from Franklin's era. But even today, I think many people do not understand the philosophical implications of evolution. Daniel Dennet wrote a whole book on this: "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" (which, perhaps you're familiar with). I think Franklin would have been shocked at evolution's explanatory power. It's hard to talk about things like emotions (anger, lust, jealousy), ethics (justice, retaliation), medicine, or even sexuality without invoking genetics and evolutionary theory. I agree with you that evolution does not (and cannot) disprove the existence of God (or gods) or even that we were created 6,000 years ago (maybe God created the world to look as if it's ancient). But I think Franklin would see that evolution has shrunk the numinous realm down to a very small box, and I think that would have shocked him.
- w0de0 2y agoYour response made me reconsider two of my claims. Evolution _can_ provide a teleology of both humankind and of consciousness. The latter may be understood as a genetic trait which provides extraordinary survival fitness, and so existence, to the former. We and our traits arise from, and have been fashioned to function within, the system of evolution. The traits, and us, want for no more purpose than this - just as the output of any function wants for no more purpose than the input parameters. Life, though - that system and its output, holistically - still lacks self-evident purpose. (Which is not to say that it must have one.) Why was this function written? Is it merely the output of a higher-order function? (Involving cosmic turtles?)
- soueuls 3y agoI truly enjoyed the read, my only criticism is about the « internet » Yes, down to the core it’s indeed just transmitting electrical current from one side to the other. But I believe Franklin would be amazed by the sheer ingenuity that followed. The absurd hacky ways we found to make video games. The protocols. The encryption and all the people that make completely useless stuff, just for the beauty of it. Like implementing a Turing complete machine inside the game of life, to build a game of life from it