Searching for prescient tweets…

— Posted inastro-ph, astronomy, social networks, Twitter — 3 min read

Sometimes it happens. You browse the list of papers in astro-ph, as usual. Many papers are “obviously” rather boring (since they are dealing with topics you’re not interested…), but others worth a close inspection (maybe). Sometimes it happens, sometimes you find a paper that you “decide” you perhaps one day may want to read (leaving apart the fact that it will be actually read or not, in the future… probably not). Other times you stumble upon a paper that it’s really odd. Admittedly, it’s dealing with something outside of your research field, nevertheless you’re struck, you cannot avoid to be curios.

Surely one of the  “oddest” paper I managed to find on astro-ph is the recent “Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers” by Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson, two persons working int the Department of Physics of the Michigan Technological University.

In this ambitious work, they try to find evidence of people who have traveled (or will travel, depending on your point of observation) in time. And they use Internet for their investigation. Briefly, the point is to try to reveal persons who have traveled backyard in time. So, how can we discover them? See what they say:

Where a time traveler from the future to aces the Internet of the past few years, they might have left once-prescient content that persists today (…) Such content might have been catalogued by search engines such as Google (google.com) or Bing (bing.com), or remain in posts left on Facebook (Facebook.com), Google Plus (plus.google.com), or Twitter (twitter.com).

So the point is, to search for “prescient” content on Internet. Simply as that. In order to make this process as efficient as possible, the authors focused on a couple of keywords (or properly speaking, hashtags). One is “Comet ISON” and the other is “Pope Francis”. In both cases, the labels came into the public lexicon during the selected “search windows” (they span from 2006 January to 2013 September).

Comet ISON is a comet discovered on 2012 September 21 by International Scentific Optical Network. On 2013 March 16, Bergoglio, the newly elected pope of the Chatolich Church, chose the name  Francis. For both events, the authors speculate about the fact that there is little or no reason, for anyone, to use such terms on Internet before the events happened. Except – obviously – in case of prescient informations.

The paper is quite intriguing and – odd it may seems – it develop the investigation (a bit more complex and comprehensive in respect of my description, to be honest) in a credibile way  – if one can use this term, here. Moreover, it features a detailed analysis of the reliability of finding contents on the most popular search engine and social network, which is valuable di per sé. 

Anyway, no time traveler were detected. This by no means imply that there are no time travelers, as the authors point out. Maybe time travelers do not want to be discovered. Or, “it may be physically impossible for us to find such information as that would violate some yet-unknown law of physics”.

While it may be slightly disappointing, we can close with a smile, recalling the experiment made by Stephen Howking a couple of years ago: the Time Traveller Party …. I would not want to reveal how many persons come… but maybe you can imagine 🙂

500 words a day

— Posted inwriting — 2 min read

Every year is a fresh start. Every year is a beginning. The italian writer Cesare Pavese once sad that “The only beautiful thing is in beginning”. So we spend a lot of words in these days about the things we can do or about the many ways we can improve or get better at this or at that… it’s normal, after all. And it’s also fully normal that after some days, once we are fully entered in the new year, we forgot almost every proposal we have done, and go on making our normal life.

Normal life. Exactly. Too often the “normal life” is a life that happens inside our “confort area”, without much surprise: mainly, without a clear commitment to follow our passions, to follow our dreams.

Among the many words spent and red around the change of the year, I was impressed by a plain statement that I red on Jeff Goins’ blog.

This is the year you become a writer.

Simple as that. I was quite impressed because they were exactly the words I wanted to hear. That my heart was waiting for. If I reflect on myself and on my desires, this is probably one of the first thinks I want it to happen.

So what?

Problem is, I have fear. Fear to fail. Fear not to be accepted. Not to be appreciated. I’m always looking for permission. Which is definitively not a good think, you know.

But fear can’t be the last word. Never. I’m always looking for some way to overcome fears, to let my passion flow. So when I red the Jeff’s post about the January challenge, something resonates in me. I immediately thought, this is for me. I’m in.

He is right. This is the first thing a writer must do. He ’s not supposed to worry about the outcome. He must write.

So Jeff, thanks a lot for helping me in pursuing my passion. I dare to say it: this is the year I became a writer.

A writer: that’s to say, a person who write.