Tags: hd

Today is my birthday. I am one twentieth of a millenium old. I am eighteen and a quarter kilo-days old. I am six hundred months old. I am somewhere in the order of 26.28 mega-minutes old. I am fifty years old.

The reflected light of the sun that left Earth when I was born has passed Alpha Cephei and will soon reach Delta Aquilae. In that time, our solar system has completed 0.00002% of its orbit around the centre of our galaxy.

I was born into a world with the Berlin Wall. That world ended when I turned eighteen.

Fifty years before I was born, the Irish war of independence was fought while the world was recovering from an influenza pandemic.

Fifty years after I was born, the UK is beginning its post-Brexit splintering while the world is in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic.

In the past few years, I started to speculate about what I might do for the big Five Oh. Should I travel somewhere nice? Or should I throw a big party and invite everyone I know?

Neither of those are options now. The decision has been made for me. I will have a birthday (and subsequent weekend) filled with the pleasures of home. I plan to over-indulge with all my favourite foods, lovingly prepared by Jessica. And I want the finest wines available to humanity—I want them here and I want them now.

I will also, inevitably, be contemplating the passage of time. I’m definitely of an age now where I’ve shifted from “explore” to “exploit.” In other words, I’ve pretty much figured out what I like doing. That is in contrast to the many years spent trying to figure out how I should be spending my time. Now my plans are more about maximising what I know I like and minimising everything else. What I like mostly involves Irish traditional music and good food.

So that’s what I’ll be doubling down on for my birthday weekend.

It’s the summer solstice, the longest day of the day.

Last year I spent the summer solstice visiting a telescope in the woods outside Riga:

we were inside the observatory getting a tour of the telescope at the precise moment that the astronomical summer began.

Later that evening, when I was back in my hotel room, I fired off a quick DM to Chloe, simply saying “Happy Birthday!” (it’s an easy date to remember).

She responded the next day with a curiously distant message. “Thanks Jeremy. Hope you’re well.”

And that was the last DM I ever got from Chloe.

Science Hack Day San Francisco was held in the Github offices last weekend. It was brilliant!

This was the fifth Science Hack Day in San Francisco and the 40th worldwide. That’s truly incredible. I mean, I literally can’t believe it. When I organised the very first Science Hack Day back in 2010, I had no idea how far it would go. But Ariel has been indefatigable in making it a truly global event. She is amazing. And at this year’s San Francisco event, she outdid herself in putting together a fantastic cross-section of scientists, designers, and developers: paleontology, marine biology, geology, astronomy, particle physics, and many, many more disciplines were represented in the truly diverse attendees.

After an inspiring set of lightning talks on the first day, ideas started getting bounced around and the hacking began to take shape. I had a vague idea for—yet another—space-related hack. What clinched it was picking the brains of NASA’s Keri Bean. She’d help me get hold of the dataset I needed for my silly little hack.

So here’s the background…

There are many possibilities for human habitats in space: Stanford tori, O’Neill cylinders, Bernal spheres. Another idea, explored in science fiction, is hollowing out asteroids (Larry Niven’s bubbleworlds). Kim Stanley Robinson explores this idea in depth in his book 2312, where he describes the process of building an asteroid terrarium. The website of the book has a delightful walkthrough of the engineering processes involved. It’s not entirely implausible.

I wanted to make that idea approachable, so I thought about the kinds of people we might want to have living with us on the interior shell of a rotating hollowed-out asteroid. How about the people you follow on Twitter?

The only question that remains then is: which asteroid is the right one for you and your Twitter friends? Keri tracked down the motherlode of asteroid data and I started hacking the simplest of mashups—Twitter meets space rocks.

Here’s the result…

Habitasteroids!

Give it your Twitter username and it will tell you exactly which one of the asteroids in the main belt is right for you (I considered adding an enterprise option that would tell you where you could store your social network in the cloud …the Oort cloud, that is).

Be default, your asteroid will have the population density of Earth, which is quite generously. But if you want a more sparsely-populated habitat—say, the population density of Australia—or a more densely-populated world—with something like the population density of Japan—then you will be assigned a larger or smaller asteroid accordingly.

You’ll also be told by how much you should increase or decrease the rotation of the asteroid to get one gee of centrifugal force on the interior. Figuring out the equations for calculating centrifugal force almost broke me, but luckily I had help from a rocket scientist and a particle physicist …I’m not even kidding. And I should point out that the calculations take some liberties—I’m assuming a spherical body, which is quite a stretch, given the lumpy nature of most asteroids.

At 13:37 on the second day, the demos began. Keri and I were first up.

Give Habitasteroids a whirl for yourself. It’s a silly little thing, but I quite like how it turned out.

Speaking of silly things …at some point in the proceedings, Keri put the call out for asteroid data to her fellow space enthusiasts on Twitter. They responded with asteroid-related puns.

@PlanetaryKeri So you’re not as investa’d in Ceres as the rest of the team? @motorbikematt @adactio #LordOfThePuns

— J.L. Galache (@JLGalache) October 5, 2014

@jlgalache @planetarykeri @motorbikematt @adactio Don’t Juno better than to make puns like that? @brianwolven

— lukemonster (@lukedones) October 5, 2014

@lukedones @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio Recruiting the rest of your astro Pallas to get in on the asteroid pun action?

— Brian Wolven (@brianwolven) October 5, 2014

@brianwolven @lukedones @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio Your puns give me the Hebe jeebies.

— ｂｒｘ０ (@brx0) October 5, 2014

@brx0 @brianwolven @jlgalache @planetarykeri @motorbikematt @adactio @paix120 At this point we’ve all been led Astraea :-(

— lukemonster (@lukedones) October 5, 2014

@brx0 @lukedones @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio Ida feeling that might happen eventually.

— Brian Wolven (@brianwolven) October 5, 2014

@brianwolven @lukedones @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio It’ like you’re Psyche or something.

— ｂｒｘ０ (@brx0) October 5, 2014

@lukedones @brx0 @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio @paix120 With this crew, at least the pun Themis pretty obvious.

— Brian Wolven (@brianwolven) October 5, 2014

@brianwolven @lukedones @brx0 @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio You guys sure know Alauda asteroid names.

— Renee (@paix120) October 5, 2014

@brianwolven @lukedones @brx0 @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio Europa creek if u’re Wikipedia’ing like me. Thisbe the end.

— Renee (@paix120) October 5, 2014

@paix120 @brianwolven @lukedones @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio The end? So this is the last Gaspra?

— ｂｒｘ０ (@brx0) October 5, 2014

@brx0 @paix120 @brianwolven @jlgalache @planetarykeri @motorbikematt @adactio We should probably stop at Gaspra before we reach Eros.

— lukemonster (@lukedones) October 5, 2014

@brianwolven @paix120 @lukedones @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio I Echo this sentiment.

— ｂｒｘ０ (@brx0) October 5, 2014

@lukedones @paix120 @brianwolven @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio Too late. Pandora’s box has been opened.

— ｂｒｘ０ (@brx0) October 5, 2014

@brx0 @lukedones @brianwolven @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio tho, someone might Summanus to the Psyche ward.

— Renee (@paix120) October 5, 2014

@paix120 @brx0 @brianwolven @jlgalache @planetarykeri @motorbikematt @adactio Have Merxia on us all!

— lukemonster (@lukedones) October 5, 2014

@paix120 @lukedones @brianwolven @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio Every other Twitter pun game Pales in comparison.

— ｂｒｘ０ (@brx0) October 5, 2014

They have nice asteroids though: @brianwolven, @lukedones, @paix120, @LGalache, @motorbikematt, @brx0.

Oh, and while Habitasteroids might be a silly little hack, WRANGLER just might work.

The travelling time is underway. I’m in Denmark right now, leading an HTML5 workshop at NoMA, the Nordic Multimedia Academy, and thanks to some excellent questions from the students, it’s all going smoothly.

Last week I was in Belgium for the Phare conference, which also went smoothly. I enjoyed giving my presentation and I really enjoyed the excellent hospitality of the Ghentians.

While I was in Belgium, the occasion of my fortieth birthday arrived with a sense of long-foreseen inevitability. I spent it in Bruges.

Four zero. The big four oh. Two squared times ten. The answer to life, the universe and everything minus two.

The photons that were reflected from Earth at the time of my birth are arriving at GJ 1214 b. Or, to put in another way, the light that left GJ 1214 at the moment of my birth is entering our solar system, perhaps even reaching the retinas of human beings somewhere on this planet who happen to be looking into just the right part of the sky at just the right time.