Monthly Archives: September 2015

“Can you hear it?”

RIP Log Lady (AKA Catherine Coulson)

I’ve made several posts here discussing the scale of the universe and how we fit into it. Also, some others about the nature of light and its behavior. The problem with understanding each of these topics is that they are so damned difficult to relate to – they are both beyond our experience. Recently, I’ve come across two new videos that address these topics in a very visceral manner.

Both of these videos involve the solar system. Recently, the New Horizons probe became the first vehicle to visit the dwarf planet, Pluto. To many of us, who grew up in the time between 1930 and 2006, when Pluto was the ninth planet from the sun, this represents the limit of our solar system. The much older Voyager spacecrafts have recently been measuring a different limit to our solar system – that distance at which the influence of the sun ceases to the dominant force  – i.e., the place where you truly enter interstellar space.

The first video is our solar system modeled in a dry lakebed

The second is a simulation of what it would look like if you were riding on a photon emitted from the surface of the sun.

Amazingly, in this second video, we find that traveling at the speed of light suddenly feels unsatisyingly slow. Why doesn’t it look more like this cockpit view of the Millennium Falcon making the jump to light speed?

you don’t want to bounce too close to a star…

In fact, we know that in Star Wars ships travel all over the galaxy. For a point of reference, the Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years across, which means that even for ships traveling at light speed, they’re getting nowhere near one another. Luckily, I’m not the only one who has thought about this problem. Chris Lough, at Tor.com, has already worked out the math using a few arbitrary numbers that can at least give us an idea of how fast we would need to go to make this kind of Sci Fi realistic. It turns out that the Millennium Falcon must be going somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000+ light years / hr. At that speed, we might just be able to see the stars whipping past our ship just like the movie.

It might be easier just to fold space, a la Dune, than yo ever get a hunk of metal to move that fast.

My family and I just moved into a new house last month and we are trying to get some organization in our lives.

This has involved making some pretty stark choices about what to keep (i opted for my guitar, which I am now trying to learn to play) and what must go (my baby grand Piano had to find a new home or it would essentially be the only thing that fit in our whole downstairs).

One thing that historically takes up a lot of physical space, but doesn’t need to anymore, is media: tapes, CDs, DVDs, albums …. 8 tracks(?). The only thing is… if I transfer everything I have to digital, how can I keep track of it?

There are a lot of solutions out there, but which is the right one? What if I pick the wrong company to keep all my data and they go away? or change their pricing? or I forget my password?

Really, the only solution I’m seriously considering is Apple’s iTunes Match. This is one of Apple’s many forays into music services that is based on keeping all of your music ‘in the cloud’ and available for download or streaming at any time. One thing that’s required, then, is good internet. We have Time Warner Cable, which was the only high speed choice available to us and has been modestly dependable.

Don’t get me wrong – we pay for 300 MB/s downloads and have never seen better than 70MB/s (currently, I just tested us at 14MB/s) – so dependable is relative. But that’s not what I want to get at.

Instead, I wanted to say that I am just starting to use the Matching program and want to report now and again on how it goes.

My first day experience is that it does take some time to get up and running because it scans through your whole iTunes music library to see what you have, but I think that this hurdle has been put behind us now.

Some notes on the limitations of service:

1. It will only match 25000 songs (excluding those purchased through iTunes). I’m not sure whether this will be a problem or not. So far, my current library has a bit over 3000 songs, but I still have a lot of music to load / consolidate.
2. Only ten devices can sync to one account. That sounds like a lot, but since I have a MacBook, iPad, and iPhone – that’s three right there. My son has an iPad and my wife has a MacBook, iPhone, and iPad too, so we are up to seven total. If our family was larger, the ten device limit might feel limiting quickly.
3. A lot of the service is based on Streaming of content, which can chew up a lot of data if you’re using a cellular network often.

Another issue I am having is that I have a bunch of iTunes libraries backed up from different devices over the years and putting all of these together efficiently and without duplication has always been a chore.

And, finally, there is simple confusion: iTunes Music Match IS NOT Apple Music IS NOT Ping, but it is (sort of) iCloud.

Apple Music is a completely different (but compatible) service. Where iTunes Match gives you DRM-free access to all of your music on any device either streaming of for download, Apple Music is not limited to your own purchased music, but is, instead, a streaming service that is DRM-limited and costs substantially more.

I guess Ping – the service that Jobs introduced to us as the Twitter or facebook for music that is NOT twitter and is NOT facebook is … closed. Ironically, Wikipedia (the encyclopedia with a sense of humor) tells us that “Apple officially closed [Ping] on September 30, 2012, and replaced it with Facebook and Twitter integration in iTunes.”

Finally, iCloud is more about storage space than it is about any specific item that you do store there. It is where your music is stored – along with other data you want to park there.

I’ll post more as I either become frustrated with the service or feel the need to proselytize.