Are we just ants in the Universe?

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I can think of several reasons why we haven’t made contact with an alien race from another planet[1]. For example, traveling through space is tricky. Space is an inhospitable environment for every biological being, which makes travel arrangements a real hassle. You have to build a ship that is protective enough to shield the crew from the dangers of outer space. Then you have to create good enough conditions inside the ship for the crew to be able to operate it for a long time, because everything is too far away.

If you want to travel to Mars, it’ll take you 200+ days[2] and that is one of our nearest neighboring planets. If you want to find “nearby” planets that are habitable and, thus, most likely to be able to sustain life, then you’ll have to travel for 20+ years[3]. Performing this kind of traveling demands hibernating technology that has yet to be invented (or really entertaining games that could keep the crew busy for years).

I’m sure you can find several other obstacles for space traveling or other reasons to justify the fact that we haven’t made contact with an alien race from another planet, but that is not the purpose of this rambling. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that all these obstacles were surpassed by an advanced alien society[4] and that these aliens are actively exploring the Universe searching for other habitable planets and alien races. What if we haven’t made contact with them because we’re not interesting enough?

Imagine that you’re exploring a yet-unkown part of the planet and you come across an ant colony. You may give in to your curiosity and give a bit more attention to the colony than to other surrounding elements. But, unless you’re studying stigmergy, you’ll probably lose interest after a few minutes and carry on. What if we are like “ants” to a visiting alien race? What if to the eyes of an advanced space-traveling alien we are so primitive that we don’t even deserve a second look? Sure, the alien would peek, (as anyone would) but soon enough it’d realize that we’re not worth the expending of resources that further study would require and be on its way towards the search for more advanced societies.

This possibility troubles me more than any other reason for the fact that we haven’t met any aliens yet. It’s just sad to think that an alien would travel such great distances, come across our planet, have a peek and then say:

Meh![5]

  1. Sure, some people may argue that we’ve already been visited by aliens. But I’m talking about a massive scale contact with another culture from outer space, so bare with me. [↩]
  2. With current day technology [↩]
  3. Assuming you can travel at the speed of light, you can reach Gliese 581 in just 20 or so years. [↩]
  4. If you really think about it, most of these obstacles are technological, which means sooner or later any society is able to solve them, given enough time. [↩]
  5. Meh! [↩]

Mosaic Photo Browser for Instagram

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Inspired by what @andr3 did for his brother (@brunoluis) as a Christmas present, I decided I wanted to do something similar for my wife on Valentine’s day: a simple website where she could browse her Instagram photos. But instead of a static website that I’d have to constantly update as she would take more and more photos, I wanted a dynamic web app that would automatically update as new photos would be taken.

So, I had a look at the Instagram API and was quite amazed by how simple and quick it was to set up a simple web app to browse the photos. I just had to apply a bit of CSS and JavaScript wizardry… et voilá! A simple Mosaic Photo Browser for your Instagram photos.

Mosaic Photo Browser

Obviously, after it was developed I realized that, since I used the Instagram API (even though I was only planning to do this for my wife as a present), the web app could be opened to anyone with an Instagram account. So, after Valentine’s day has passed (wifey loved the present, by the way), I just made the quick adjustments to make the site more generic (I think the introductory love message on the site wasn’t suitable for every user) and it should now be ready for primetime.

Now remember, this web app is not meant to be a full-fledged Instagram client (for that, there’s Statigram). It only allows you to browse your photos (and those of the people you follow) in a beautiful mosaic. Although other features can be added in the future, for now the main goal is just to offer a quick way to view your photos when you’re on your computer.

Because it uses the Instagram API, this web app never asks for your username or password. That is done through the Instagram API OAUTH mechanism, which means that this web app never has access to your private information.

Also, this was developed to be used by modern day browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Please, avoid using Internet Explorer. It’ll still work (hopefully), although I can’t guarantee it’ll be a pleasant experience.

If you have any comments, you can just post a comment here or hit me up on Twitter: @tonyvirtual.

What I’ve been reading, Vol. V

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Walter Isaacson – Steve Jobs

My Review: I have conflicting opinions about this book. On one hand, it was great to come to know more about the life of such a prominent figure in the technology world as Steve Jobs, his personality, his goals, his quirks and what drove him. And the first part of the book is great for that. You get an interesting insight of the person he was, what led him to be such a driven person with a difficult personality but with an astute sense of taste and fashion towards the technology world. On the other hand, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Isaacson disliked Jobs and that is subtly shown throughout the book (especially, the second part) where he makes no effort to avoid describing Jobs as a petty man that most of the times acted as if he was a child with a tantrum. Sure, that may be true and I definitely believe that Steve Jobs was an extremely difficult person to work with. But isn’t it also true that everything Jobs touched, turned to gold? He led a garage-founded company into the company that fought the giant IBM. He bought a division of Lucasfilms special effects company and turned it into the leading company in the world for computer animation. He picked up Apple when it was near bankruptcy and led it to be the highest-valued company in the world. So he must have been doing something right. He deserves some credit for that, doesn’t he? At least to say that he had merit in choosing the people he worked with.

My Rating: 4/5

Jeff Lindsay – Dexter is Delicious (Dexter #5)

My Review: Having read the previous 4 books about the character that inspired the TV Show Dexter, I decided to pick up the series and read the remaining two books (so far). But this one was a total disappointment. The story was quite boring and cliché, plus Lindsay decided to use the very trending topic of vampires (not real ones, of course) that also happened to be cannibals and didn’t really help improve the story. Also, I still couldn’t decide if the constant witty remarks of the Dexter character are simple traits of his social-ineptitude and naiveness or just excessive sarcasm. Either way, I didn’t like it. Also, this was the first book after Debra (his sister) had discovered his “hobby” and so I was really looking forward to know how that would pan out (considering that is how [SPOILER] the tv show ended the last season). But it really wasn’t a big part of the story. And in the end, you can’t shake the feeling that Dexter got away clean from the huge mess he got himself into without really doing anything and just by being a huge lucky bastard.

My Rating: 3/5

Jeff Lindsay – Double Dexter: A Novel (Dexter #6)

My Review: Now this one was a pleasant surprise, at least compared to the previous book. Much darker and mysterious. The story delivers a different take on the Dexter series, one in which Dexter is now the one being hunted by a prey not that different from him. It still suffers from some of the aspects I pointed out in the previous book (the Dexter character is too naive sometimes, to the point of being dumb) but at least this one has a richer story with interesting developments.

My Rating: 4/5

Arthur C. Clarke – Rendezvous With Rama

My Review: This was one of those science fiction classics that I never had the opportunity to read. And since this year I decided to (try to) read all the classics that I never actually read before, this one was probably as good as any to start with. What a great choice I made. This book has everything you’d expect from a great science fiction novel: mysterious settings, unknown elements, stuff that stirs your imagination and a lot of food for thought. The end can be bitter-sweet, but it is only a reflection of the arrogance of humankind and the self-centric idea that we are alone in the universe. Fully recommended.

My Rating: 5/5

Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games #1

My Review: This book was a mere curiosity. I had seen the trailer for the new movie a few weeks back when I went to the cinema and when I noticed it was based on a novel, I decided to have a look. The formula used is not new, but it mostly works: taking place at a post-apocalyptic America, a Big Brother-like fight-to-the-death game where the contestants are lottery-drawn teenagers from the districts that lost the war against the “Capitol”, the story develops through the eyes of one contestant in particular, Katniss Evergreen. And the choice of the author to use the first person approach works quite well because it creates a stronger connection between the reader and the girl and you’ll end up feeling as lost as her by not knowing what’s happening with the rest of the characters on the book. Unfortunately, as I said, the formula is not new and the story ends up being a bit too easy to predict. Sure, there are some twists but you’ll spot them miles away.

My Rating: 4/5

Related: What I’ve been reading, Vol. I, II, III and IV

An epic journey deserves an epic video

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Traveling through Chile and Patagonia is actually one of my dream voyages. And after seeing this video, my desire to do it just increased tenfold. This is travel video done right:

Thanks, Rechena.

What I’ve been reading, Vol. IV

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Sarah Silverman – The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee

My Review: If you like Sarah Silverman‘s type of comedy (meaning rape or holocaust jokes, or basically anything controversial) and you can go past her huge ego (the book’s foreword and midword – yep, she invented that just so she could brag a little bit more about her book – is written by herself) you’ll love to hear about her life story. I, for one, am a fan and the book did not disappoint. But it’s not brilliant.

My Rating: 4/5

Al Gore – Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis

My Review: This is the handbook that was missing in the “An inconvenient truth” feature documentary. The documentary was all about telling people how bad the planet was, climate-wise. It was alarming but it wasn’t very informative regarding our options or our choices (we won’t change global warming just by changing lightbulbs). This book fulfills that purpose by exposing every possible alternatives while discussing its pros and cons and it does so quite well (with a few exceptions).
I read the iPad app version that, except for some multimedia elements, fails at too many levels to justify this kind of format:

  • You can’t read it in portrait mode. For many people, this is simply unacceptable
  • There’s no clear way of assessing the reading progress. There are no page numbers, no reference to the current chapter and no table of contents for random access. That’s the most basic feature of books!
  • No customization whatsoever. You can’t choose font type, size or color (including for background). No brightness controls too.
  • Multimedia components do not follow iOS’ best practices. For example, there’s no way to control sound or video playback or volume. If something wasn’t clear at first, you have to wait until the video finishes to play it again and listen to the whole thing again.

My Rating: 4/5

Tina Fey – Bossypants

My Review: I’m a big fan of 30 Rock but I have to admit I didn’t quite know Tina Fey before that TV Show. So, obviously, once I knew she had a book coming out, I saw it as an opportunity to know a bit more about her. And I was not disappointed at all. This is the perfect example of what a biography should be: part life story novel, part comedian tutorial, part parenting manual, part LFMF book, all awesome.

My Rating: 5/5

Simon Pegg – Nerd Do Well

My Review: This one is not that different from Tina Fey’s Bossypants since it follows more or less the same approach in biography style. A lot of humiliating episodes, a lot of funny and hilarious moments but most of all, Simon describes his path towards success with constant wit and self-consciousness that really makes you crave for more. However, I don’t really know how to explain it but I didn’t like it as much as Bossypants. Perhaps they shouldn’t even be compared, but since I read one after the other, the comparison is inevitable. And because of that, Nerd Do Well falls short. But it’s still worth a read since it’s terribly hilarious sometimes.

My Rating: 4/5

Ray Kurzweil – The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

My Review: if you’re really interested in this kind of subject (the singularity and the general concept of the next step in the evolution of the human race), this book is definitely a must-read. However, Kurzweil fails in some aspects of the book although, luckily, not the ones that really matter. Kurzweil likes to call himself a futurist and, because of that, the accuracy of his predictions and his statements throughout the entire book are of the utmost importance…for him. That is, every statement that he makes on the likelihood (or the time-frame) of something happening has to be justified to exhaustion. And I mean, exhaustion in the most literal sense of the word. We get it, Kurzweil, technological advancements are exponential. But do you really need 300 pages to show us that? But as I said, luckily, after that phd-thesis period of the book passes, the rest of the reading is quite pleasant and totally fulfils its purpose: to speculate on the future of the human race if the singularity does occur. I still have some doubts that we’ll actually get there, but it’s always interesting to think/discuss about it :)

My Rating: 3/5

Related: What I’ve been reading, Vol. I, II and III

Chicken Science

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Part of my job as a researcher is to attend conferences and to go through some painful presentations from people that have absolutely no idea on how to make their research interesting to other people that are not exactly as familiar to the subject as them.

The following presentation (that even has the corresponding paper for consultation) is obviously a caricature for those kind of presentations but I’m pretty sure that I’ve sit through some presentations from which I retained as much on the subject as on this one:

Via Wired

The importance of quality (and not quantity) in the world wide web

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The Web is getting filled with blogs that are mere “reposters” that don’t actually bring anything new to the community. These are usually the ones looking for a quick way of attracting readers with a lot of posts (to monetize on the page views) and for which “quantity” is a good-enough metric for success.

But as more and more online publications turn to this approach of “more is better”, effectively reducing the quality of individual posts, the Web becomes nothing more than a noise-filled medium that inevitability loses its appeal. And then, readers start looking for alternatives that fill the void left by these “reposters”. Alternatives that chose the “quality before quantity” approach.

Alternatives like this:

We’re actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago (from 848 to 572 in December; 943 to 602 in January). So: 33 percent fewer posts; 40 percent greater traffic.

It sounds simple, maybe obvious, but: We’ve gone back to our primary mission and have been focusing on originality. And it’s working.

Relax, Apple doesn’t want to screw you over iBooks

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2 weeks ago, amidst all the hype surrounding the iBookstore and the business model chosen by Apple to allow people to sell iBooks on the iBookstore, I asked the following question:

When I publish something through the iBookstore, am I the copyright holder of the book’s content?

Why was this question so important? Because, If the creator of the iBook is in fact the copyright holder of the book’s content, he/she can then publish the same book in other formats to reach out to other “readers”. If not, that’s a more serious issue because then authors are “stuck” with Apple’s format and cannot publish their books in more “widely-accepted formats”.

At the time, this was not clear in the iBook Author’s EULA. Rather, the wording in the EULA suggested that Apple was not only the owner of the format of book (.iBook) but also of the book’s content.

This raised several concerns to authors (as pointed out above), which is only natural, but now Apple has decided to make the EULA quite clear and stated the following:

If the work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service) and includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, the work may only be distributed through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary); provided, however, that this restriction will not apply to the content of the work when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author. You retain all your rights in the content of your works, and you may distribute such content by any means when it does not include files in the .ibooks format generated by iBooks Author.

I think authors can relax now. Basically, Apple is saying: if you want to sell iBooks, you can only do it through the iBookstore. If you want to sell your own e-book (with the same content as the iBook as long as you don’t use any of the same files in the iBook) somewhere else, you’re free to do so.