Category: The Unknown

Gimbals & Tic-Tacs

  • December 17, 2019

Back in 2004 sailors on the USS Nimitz that was at the time doing training exercises reported sightings of UFOs. This is not highly unusual: there is a rich history of UFO sightings by fighter pilots and near military assets. What makes this encounter strange is that it was recorded, and you can watch it yourself:

This video was leaked by a sailor many years after and the incident became part of an effort by interested parties to obtain more UFO information from the Navy.

You may have heard of one of the results of such efforts: the Navy has now legitimized UFO sighting reporting, and personnel are encouraged to come forward rather than keep silent in fear of recrimination.

It’s also led to other videos being released, which last month the Navy confirmed as unidentified. Quite literally, these videos show UFOs.

This is the so-called ‘gimbal’ UFO. Watch it rotate at the end:

And here is footage of the ‘go fast’ UFO, which as with all these others was filmed by fighter pilots:

When the news that the navy had changed its tack on UFO reports emerged earlier this year there were a few pilots coming forward with astonishing stories of sightings, and the official admission a few weeks ago that yes, navy pilots have seen (and recorded) UFOs will likely lead to more pilots speaking out. It seems, after 70 years, the military is finally acknowledging strange things in the sky.

But what are they? As I’ve said here before I absolutely believe in extraterrestrial life, but I find it hard to accept living beings making interstellar journeys. The vastness of space also makes finding other civilizations no easy task. So the odds seem stacked against them being alien or from parts unknown. I’d love to be wrong though.

For now I’ll accept the navy definition. These are unidentified. This simply means we don’t (yet) know what they are, not that we claim them to be anything specific 🙂

  • Posted in Science
  • Robert

Infinite Ape Simulator

  • November 14, 2019

I’ve been thinking about the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which postulates that an infinite amount of monkeys banging away on keyboards randomly forever would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. You can read about this in detail here.

I thought to myself, rather than use dirty monkeys to reproduce Shakespeare (which has been attempted), why not use a machine brain? So I turned to an actual honest-to-goodness computer and wrote a simulation.

My machine was the Commodore 64, and I wrote a simple piece of code to randomly generate three letters in order and test to see if they spelled ‘act’, the first word of Hamlet. I was testing the water, so to speak, instead of diving right into a full reproduction of the entire play.

Now it’s fairly simple statistics to calculate that of the 17576 possible three letter words, only one is ‘act’. But I started by looking for words that started with ‘a’ (ie. of the form a–) of which there are 676, and then words starting with ac-, of which there are 26. I timed my result to see if – as expected – each successively correct letter took approximately 26 times as long to generate as the previous.

Here’s my code alongside one example output looking specifically for ‘act’:

The time is in seconds, and I ran 12 searches each for a– and ac- and 5 (due to the time required) for act. Here are the average times to generate each type of result:

A–: 3 seconds
AC-: 84 seconds
ACT: 2027 seconds

These numbers are close to 26x multiples of each other as expected, and I imagine were I to do enough tests they would converge to that value. From these results we can speculate how long it may take for my C64 to recreate Hamlet…

But first some facts: Hamlet has 132680 letters and 199749 characters in total including spaces and seven punctuation signs. Including these but ignoring case, there are 34 potential candidates for each character and 199749 characters need to be generated. My predictions that follow are based on times equal to 34/26 of those listed above.

The expected (ie. 50% chance) time it would take my C64 to randomly generate Hamlet would be 34^199746 times 1908 seconds which is (approximately) 34^199739 million years. The minimum time is about 1.7 hours ( if it got it right on the first go) and the maximum is of course infinity.

But – given our universe is only less than 14,000 million years old – this means I’m confident in saying my C64 would never randomly generate Hamlet. In fact were I to expand the sim to look for the sequence ‘Act 1’ I would expect the average successful attempt to take about one month. If I extended the sim all the way to the first spoken word – over 100 characters in – I’d expect the Earth would be consumed by the sun before my C64 did it.

Some of you say “that’s just a C64!”, which is primitive compared to the device you’re reading this on. But even if your fancy phone or laptop is a trillion times more powerful, this is nothing compared to a factor of ~10^200k.

It’s pleasant to think of infinite typing apes (or computers) randomly spewing out a work of art, but it would never happen 🙂

(Incidentally and somewhat related; the world is still awaiting the results of B’s testing of this!)

The Ballad Of Dust

  • April 29, 2019

At first I didn’t notice,
Or pretended to ignore.
Yet the more I used the camera,
The more I saw.

A blemish on the image,
A ghostly disc appeared.
What should never happen.
What we all feared.

Something on the lens
Left a shadow signature.
I cleaned and wiped and wiped and cleaned
But still it was in the picture!

The Internet to the rescue:
Force will remove it!
I shook the phone like a maniac
But all I did was move it!

I gave not up and set to work
Shaking like a fiend.
I shook so much I near passed out
My hand incarnadined.

And then when I came to
An image I did capture…

The photo was clear!
The dust was gone!

And in this home…
Was rapture.