Thursday

16 November 2017

— fog bound again

Good Morning All,

If you suffer, as do I, with a mild case of PTNSAD (Post-Traumatic Net Surfer Addiction Disorder), you may have found today’s history list particularly alluring. Within my one-hour-per-day rule, where should I go first? Two non-singers winning a Grammy was tempting.

But, being a numismatist, I could not resist the Hoxne Hoard, which turned out to be some lucky guy (with one of those wonky metal-detector-disk-on-stick gadgets you sometimes see in use on public beaches) chancing upon the biggest stash of Roman coins ever found in the erstwhile Roman Empire. In an oaken chest. We are talking 14,865 Roman gold, silver, and bronze coins, all dated after AD 407, plus a couple of hundred items of silver tableware and gold jewellery. Supposition is that it all belonged to a wealthy family, but since large vessels are missing it is likely there is a larger stash still in the ground. Mr. Lawes must have been an honest fellow, since it’s all now at the British Museum. Valued at £3.27 million.

With a half hour left, I set sail for the Arecibo message, which is basically we earthlings doing a sort of Facebook profile to send out to the universe, asking for friends. It was written by Dr. Frank Drake at Cornell with some help from Carl Sagan. The whole thing is in binary code, (0000 1010 0000 1010 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1, etc.), just 0s and 1s that create the picture below. (The actual message is not color coordinated, but color is added here for the explanation of picture below.)

White: the numbers 1 through 10.

Purple: atomic numbers hydrogen, carbon oxygen, phosphorus which make up deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

Green: sugars and bases in nucleotides of DNA.

White and Blue: Number of nucleotides in DNA and the graphic double helix of DNA.

Blue/White, Red, White: height of average man, human, earth population.

Yellow: Solar System with Earth sticking up a bit.

Purple, White, Blue: Arecibo radio telescope, dimension, transmitting antenna.

Of course, this message will take 25,000 (minus 33) years to get there, and the chances are that some sentient being receiving it will say something like, “Say, Harry, come check this out! About the longest game of tick-tac-toe I ever seen." And even if some sentient being did crack the code, we’d still have to wait another 25,000 years for a reply, by which time you and I will probably be in an old folks home on one of the moons of Jupiter.

Still, it makes me feel really good. As hugely insignificant as we tiny little humans are, here we are nonetheless up on the blower shouting, “Anybody home?”

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Given the extra pics up there, I better play it safe and not include two Holly snaps.