Turn up the radio

In recent years, astronomers have discovered new faraway planets, gotten close looks at distant objects like asteroids and comets, and driven lots of robots around Mars.

All of this is in service of exploring the physical universe and learning more about why things are the way they are, basically. That's exciting! But there is also this sort of deeper human need to find out whether we're all there is in terms of intelligent life. Scientists and philosophers argue about the odds--on the one hand, they're infinitesimal because shouldn't we have seen something by now given how old the universe is? On the other hand, they're quite good because the universe is as vast as it is old... that's a lot of planets.

Anyhoo, there's not much evidence to go on in that regard. There's the WOW! signal, which no one ever really figured out. And lately there have been "fast radio bursts," which are also mostly unexplained. This week, more of those bursts were announced, including an unprecedented repeating burst.

“When these bursts happen once only, it’s really hard to figure out what created them,” Cherry Ng, a radio astronomer at the University of Toronto and lead author on the paper about the repeating FRB, tells The Verge. “Now we’re showing, no, at least one other repeats.”

I've always felt like this is the way we'd get evidence of "other life out there"--something pretty inscrutable and outwardly mundane, as opposed to in the movies where detailed messages or even space ships arrive.

what will the aliens' morning drive zoo crews sound like?

To be clear, these bursts are almost certainly caused by natural (if distant) phenomena. That doesn't make them any less fascinating... it's a new physical mystery to unravel.

But it's sure fun to think about the tiny chance they're more than that.

It's been a rough few years for this planet, and finding life on another one would somehow make that feel more bearable.

My name is China and I'm here to say/I love infrastructure spending in a major way

My name is China and I'm here to say/I love infrastructure spending in a major way

As you know, Dear Readers of the Blog, I manage business-news-things at a major news organization in That City What Got Blowed Up in "Pacific Rim." And I felt like you deserved a quick post here to help you understand some of the major macroeconomic trends--and their consequences--of mainland China in the 20th century.

Wait, what's that? You find these things boring and don't want to discuss them? Fine. I'll let Loawai Style drop some knowledge on you.

Word.

Be careful what you wish for

Just a quick post on what "news" seems to mean to many in the 21st Century.

In the wake of the Boston bombings, the story moved fast. So fast, in fact, that several outlets reported incorrect information. Today's latest screwup seems to be CNN reporting that someone had been arrested in connection with the bombing. That turned out not to be true. Ouch.

But what is driving all this incompetence?

It's not a lack of smarts or--I hope--a lack of training. It's the desire to be at the front of the pack in reporting a story in which every detail was being followed, posted, tweeted, retweeted and blogged. The adage is that as a journalist, your goal is to get the story first but your duty is to get it right. But the pressure to lead the digital herd has, apparently, flipped that on its head.

This is not an attack on digital journalism, by the way. The Internet is where the readers are, it's where most people consume their news, and it offers a remarkable spectrum of tools for presenting that news.

And speaking of tools, the wide and instant dissemination of information creates another opportunity... and problem. The opportunity is for crowdsourcing: investigators can easily reach millions of people instantly with information, and those people can instantly reach investigators. The odds that "someone saw something" are high; with the immediacy of the Internet, it is extremely likely that such information winds up in the hands of investigators.

The problem is that crowdsourcing an investigation can quickly and easily snowball into the digital version of vigilante justice. Sites like Reddit and 4Chan, which are essentially fast-moving message boards, have  spawned conversation threads in which users have sifted through the thousands of images from April 15 and "deduced" the identities of several "suspects." (I'm not going to link to the threads for obvious reasons.)

The guy in the green vest was seen near the site of the bombings. SUSPECT!

The quotes, if it's not clear, indicate skepticism. After this New Yorker piece about a guy of Arabic origin--wounded in the blast--who was tackled while running away, it's a little disheartening to see that no one seems to have learned a goddamn thing about jumping to conclusions.

"Arabic running guy" was tackled because he looked suspicious. Suspicious, in this case, basically meant "brown." So maybe we should be a little cautious about posting pictures of people online and linking them to a fatal bombing because they were, for instance, carrying backpacks at the Boston Marathon.

It's easy for anyone these days to post about hearing "chatter" (usually code for "I read it on Twitter") or identify a "suspect" based on nothing more than what the person was wearing or carrying.

Yeah, so many scare quotes. Sorry. But these days, it's scary to see what rushing into a story can do.

Grammar can be fun

Just kidding. Grammar is not fun. But making fun of common spelling mistakes is!

This is actually one that trips me up a lot more than it should. Who knows why. And I feel awful about all the dolphins I have inadvertently slaughtered over the years.