If we assume as some have suggested, and extremely conservatively, that there are only about 3 intelligent civilizations per galaxy (my view is that this number will soon be shown to be absurdly low) and also assume fairly conservatively that there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe, this leads us to a rather spectacular number of some three hundred billion civilizations in the universe. Unfortunately we’ve only found one of them.
299,999,999,999 intelligent civilizations to go.
If you want to get lost in the most incredible picture ever taken, or just if you catch yourself feeling too significant, head over to the Hubble website’s zoomable Ultra Deep Field photo. Pull in a few of the approximately 10,000 galaxies in this view for closer inspection, realizing our own entire Milky way galaxy with its approximately 100 billion stars would be but one of these. Then try to wrap your head around the fact (and be sure to realize that we are talking about pure scientific fact here) that the deep field is only showing us a portion of our own night sky that is about one *tenth* the diameter of the moon. A full accounting of all the galaxies in the universe might yield *hundreds of billions” of galaxies although the estimates of the number of galaxies seem to vary wildly. I don’t understand this because it seems we could extrapolate from the Hubble untra deep field’s view a pretty good number for the total assuming a roughly even distribution of galaxies throughout the universe.
As feeble minded humans I don’t think we can even come close to appreciating the significance of the Hubble pictures or the numbers.
My personal guess is that there are already many intelligences in this vast universe that can comprehend the cosmos in a meaningful way, and that we have a shot at that kind of intelligence eventually when we find ways to enhance our intellect with computerized intelligence.
Here is a wonderfully written article by Anthony Doerr on this topic
The Travel Channel is profiling the top ten suites in Las Vegas:
10. Penthouse Suite, Las Vegas MGM Grand. At about $3000 per night offers 19 phones, an elevator to the second floor, and a spectacular view.
9. Palms Hotel, Las Vegas. Adrienne Suite, the “Coolest Suite” in town according to the Travel Channel. For $1500 per night you get a view of the mountains and city and a hotel address at one of the newest and coolest of the Las Vegas hotspots.
8. Sahara Hotel Casino. Ambassador Suite. This “Best Retro Suite offers a 1950’s style look and lots of old vegas glamor and history.
7. Turnberry Place. This “best alternative” to hotel suites is a rich and famous living hotspot. They showcase the 5.25 million dollar Suite, home to a wealthy client and will soon be home to many more Las Vegas luminaries and rich folks.
6. Elvis and Priscilla Suite at the Viva Las Vegas Hotel. This place does not look like my idea of a honeymoon place, but at $175 you even get neon lights and a Pink Cadillac bed.
5. Paris Las Vegas, Napoleon Suite. Over 4300 Square feet of opulence, primarily used by high rollers who often come in via private jet. Normally celebrities don’t stay here.
4. Mandalay Bay Four Seasons’ 180 Degree Suite is the ‘Best Escape” Suite. $2500 per night. A $10,000 hand carved bed is uniquie to the suite as is styling that is not typical Las Vegas. The Four Seasons goal is to remove you from Enjoy iced grapes at the pool where even the towels are chilled.
3. Las Vegas Hilton. Verona Suite. 15,000 Square feet of neo-renaissance opulence abounds in the Verona Suite that is generally for high rollers but unlike many of the other suites the Verona is on the market at $17,500 per night. 25 TV’s and big showers make this Las Vegas’ most expensive suite in terms of building costs according to the Las Vegas Hilton.
2. Venetian Hotel. The Presidential Suite at the Venetian. Sheldon Adelson is the Owner of the Venetian and says he likes to offer the Presidential to very high rollers – those who are gambling for 6-8 million per night and $150,000 per … .hand. Usually playing baccarat. Enjoy a Guggenheim Art Museum right in the hotel.
1. Bellagio Hotel. Villa One Suite. With entry through a private secret tunnel the Bellagio Villa One is a two bedroom, $6,000 per night masterpiece (unless you are a high roller in which case you’ll be paying nothing for the suite, but a lot more over time for the privileges). Staff pampers guests in a private dining room, private gym, and more. There are several villas at the Bellagio and each has a secret garden. The villas have 130 staff to help make the Bellagio’s Villa One the top suite in the Travel Channel’s roundup and the “most stylish suite” in Las Vegas.
The Bellagio, a 1.6 billion dollar hotel is only one of 58 five diamond hotels in the world.
Mint, the very timely and innovative startup that offers to organize *and optimize* your personal finances, won the TechCrunch 40 “competition” in Silicon Valley today.
I’m optimistic that Mint could be a great new company if it can get past the obvious key challenge – gaining enough trust from users that they’ll share banking passwords. This is a non-trivial problem given the incredible vulnerability you’d have if *all* your banking information was taken. For this reason I’m wondering if there is any way for Mint to figure out a way to offer some form of “insurance” to guarantee the protection of assets in the even of a Mint security breach. The challenge for them is that the depth of liability here is potentially enormous since they are “protecting” all of a users financial information.
Mint.com | TechCrunch | Mint Wins | Mint reviewed by VentureBeat
O. J. Simpson has just been charged with armed kidnapping after an incident at a Las Vegas Hotel called the Palace Station.
No, I don’t usually blog about such stuff but this is another optimizing test. This is only a test. Do not be alarmed or fear that O.J. Simpson will come to your Las Vegas Hotel room. For the next sixty seconds please ignore this test.
One of those with O. J. taped the fracas and it seemed clear from the tape that there were guns and the threat of violence. O. J. Simpson appears to be claiming he’s totally innocent of these charges and that it was all a misunderstanding between O.J. and the memoribilia dealer who had the Palace Station Hotel room.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled blogishness.
Social networks are the key to understanding the “new” online world so I’m paying a lot of attention to Yahoo’s entry into this space called Mash. Myspace, with close to 100,000,000 profiles remains by far the king of this heap though Facebook is catching up fast. Yahoo failed to aquire Facebook after offering – according to most reports – about a billion dollars for what is arguably the best programmed and highest potential social networking environment.
With Mash, several of the beta testing folks including me are asking the question Li Evans correctly is asking over at Yahoo Mash:
… do we really need another Social Network?
I think the answer is basically “yes”, because we need to improve social networking so that you don’t have to sign up separately and build profiles and hassle with friends for every Mash, Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace that comes along.
We need social networking that breaks down the things that separate people from pure online interactions on their own terms, at their own time, and with the information they want to provide to others. Facebook and Mash admirably are starting to do this with open architectures and developer programs and we are already seeing some great stuff come out of the Facebook environment. Mash, correctly, is also working to keep development easy and open though they seem to be looking to compete with Myspace more than Facebook. This may be a good idea from a profitability perspective but it’s disapointing to those of us who want some fun but mostly work related interactions with folks.
OK to email me if you need an invite to Mash beta jhunkins @ gmail.com
The New York Times has come to understood that traffic, and therefore increased ad revenues, is a better way to go than paid content and tomorrow they’ll not only stop charging for subscriptions, they are going to put archives online without any paywall.
This is a win win for everybody. NYT has some of the best coverage in the world and it’s going to be easier and cheaper to get at that content soon. That’ll bring millions more to the site, so NYT will also win big in this deal. Their quality content will drive millions of new visitors and tens of millions of new pageviews to the site monthly and increase their advertising revenue by (I’m guessing wildly here) approximately $600,000 per month (this is based on 40,000,000 new page views and the $15 CPM I think NYT can easily command from their huge stable of old and new advertisers) .
People have such a funny, contradictory, and largely misunderstood relationship to advertising. Like it or not, advertising in various forms drives not only much of the content we work with online, view on TV, hear on radio, and read in print. I’d argue that print is the least distorted by the relationship of the media to advertising though I’m not sure why that is. Online varies quite a bit from sites with very pristine content and no ads to those who monetize content with very relevant ads to “made for adsense” sites where the only reason for existence is PPC monetization. TV is probably the most distorted by advertising. Not so much because advertisers can dictate content, but because unprofitable networks or shows will fail, so the evolution of news has been to celebrity gossip and superficial garbage rather than the more important stuff that does not attract our prurient superficial primate interest in sex, drugs, rock and roll, and Britney Spears.
John Battelle‘s already giving up on Mash and I think that’s too bad. He’ll be back because I think it’ll catch on… unless Yahoo fails to evangelize properly. Umm – wait a minute. Yahoo ! Evangelize!!!!!
Here’s the comment I could not post over at Searchblog because I gave up on the 4th time with the captcha. Searchblog is still a good resource though I think it suffered greatly when John went off to build the Federated Media Empire. Today’s challenge posting was a perfect example of why I’m getting tired of putting in my “valuable” comments at A list websites only to be treated poorly by tech problems, short replies, or no feedback.
Social media / social centric blogging will soon trump the current elitism that is damaging blogging and that’s a good thing. I’m finding the best stuff is coming from peole who are not read enough. That can be fixed though Google’s ranking system is getting in the way of that for sure – but this is for another post.
—— To John at SearchBlog —-
Wow John, I think you’ve given up too soon. Yes it’s too much like Myspace but there are some great features that bring Yahoo’s strength to bear in social networking. Blog and picture integration are good features but the threaded conversations *across different profiles* is a feature I’ve not seen before – it’s a very good way to get people talking, like MyBlogLog does.
For example I’ve given up on SearchMob and even commenting here because as much as I appreciate your wisdom on things this is very one-sided. I give my .02 in thoughtful comments and get back…very little, because most A list folks are far too busy building empires to actively engage with the rifraff bloggers out there. That’s OK, but’s regular blogs don’t reflect the web in all its powerful 2.0 social glory. The holy grail for blog/social media is where we get away from the “A list” and towards socializing that is spawned from the belly of the internet beast itself – ie where socializing springs from natural relationships of people and sites. Facebook and now Mash are facilitating that change, and it’s a great one.
I’m enjoying Yahoo Mash so far. email me if you need an invitation as it is still in beta: jhunkins@gmail.com
Here are some observations for what they are worth:
* Lots of search and SEO folks in the beta so far. This will probably make early feedback very different,and a lot more sophisticated than what it would be with a normal online sample.
* Business features lacking. I agree with others who are noting this is a bit “too much” like MySpace which is inferior to Facebook and LinkedIn. You can do a hybrid of all these here, so bring in more biz networking features ASAP and it’ll get early adopters and influencers on board fast.
* More blog integration /mybloglog stuff would be nice. I’d like to use Mash as a way for people to talk about blog posts at my blog and others. I can’t get the RSS feed to work in my Mash profile so far ( joeduck.wordpress.com/atom/ )
Mash has a GREAT idea with the comments crossing across all profiles and the convo feature which allows people to carry on a conversation across their profiles. I think this is a really neat breakthrough in interactivity though I’m still processing this feature, which I have not seen elsewhere.
Yahoo’s MyBlogLog, combined with Mash, could actually be the killer application (though I assume MySpace and Facebook would soon copy it but that’s fine) . For most onliners like me there is a huge problem with the amount of time spent navigating and participating in social networking plus blogging, not to mention “real” work on websites and such. Needed badly are ways to seamlessly travel online, carrying your profile and important ID elements, blog posts, and more around with you. IMHO MyBlogLog has come the closest to this holy grail so far because it allows people to do their own thing AND interact with others who are doing their own thing.
Yahoo gets this in a big way which is why they bought MBL and have created certain features in Mash. Good going so far Yahoo!
Disclaimer: I’m a Yahoo stockholder, so I’m rootin’ for them but remain pretty darn objective otherwise.
I just found this *great* website devoted to the type of diets that are now considered best for optimal health. Like most of my fellow Americans I’m a high fat lovin’ meat and potatoes, burger and fries and please pass the extra large coca cola kind of guy. But that better change since I really don’t want to have a heart attack until *after* the singularity when Ray Kurzweil assures me I’ll be good to go on without a heart.
So, check out this great recipe site, cook up some garlic coated mushrooms and join me in a red wine toast to better living and eating: Mediterrasian.com
Joe Duck 