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I’ve always understood that photographs can be related visually, such as by form, texture, or color. I’ve also know that photographs could be related by theme, or tell a story. What hadn’t occurred to me until recently is that images could also be connected by the emotion they inspired in me. I love how understanding communication is a never-ending process…

Yeah, the technology, the adventure, the leap into the unknown. But I’ve always imagined turning off my radio at the end of the day, unplugging from Earth and having the cold planet all to myself for a little while in the dusk light. Boots crunching on the dry-ice frost, I’d sit down a rock and look at the sky.

And probably see something like this NASA video of drifting dust in the night-time Martian sky.

These images make me suddenly lonely, happy, and hopelessly yearning all at once.

This would be easier if I wasn’t usually good at things. The last time I went to school, I aced it. I’d like to say I was naturally brilliant, but it probably had more to do with the fact that I’d already been studying on my own for years, just out of curiosity. I didn’t understand my advantage then. There were always a few guys at the back of the class going, “what the hell?” but I was never one of them.

In circus school I definitely sit at the back of the class.
(more…)

But it’s surely not to everyone’s taste. It’s too much about me. (Also, no one can spell it!)

That’s why I have begun another writing project. More of a standard blog, with more frequent updates. Something you can add to your reader, something that most curious people will hopefully find interesting. It’s taken me a few weeks to find my footing, to figure out what it’s actually about, but I think I’m seeing a pattern in the things I want to write about.

JonathanStray.com is a thrice-weekly blog about the world. The subjects vary — I’ve already written articles about internet censorship, safer-sex campaigns, alternative energy, and cultural differences in the concept of “fairness.” The common theme is the attempt to view our world as a whole world. I do not mean to imply that everyone is fundamentally the same. Far from it, and the differences between nations and cultures are fascinating and important. Rather, I am dedicated to the idea of a global perspective in all things, because I believe that this is the necessary future.

In any case, I hope you find it interesting to read.

Go to JonathanStray.com
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Ka-thump.

Ka-thump-thump.

… !

Bang.

Ka-thump.

Ka-thump.

It’s an instant of, not fear exactly, but something that dissipates like a wave through your body. Your heart is still beating. It was just an ectopic beat, probably a PVC. Happens all the time, even in perfectly healthy hearts. Relax.

This is walking down the street, mind you, so you can’t be that ill. A sunny day in Europe, narrow stone houses, people out strolling, cafes. A half-second of dizziness that you knew wasn’t the sun in your eyes, and your hand went to your pulse without having to think about it. Left two fingers to right wrist. Just to see. Just to keep track. Just to keep your seventh sense attuned.

But you’re okay, you’re walking, you’re breathing. That’s the second irregular beat you’ve caught today. And three yesterday. A little too many more than usual. Sometimes months go by without one. Is it a trend or just noise? How much is enough to be worried? Nobody can answer that. Nobody knows. Perfectly healthy people have occasional misfires all the time.

Ka-thump.

Ka-thump.

Ka-thump.

ohshit

Then bang thud, and it falls back into the old rhythm with a contraction that shakes your tightened chest. You’re fine. It’s not today. It will never be that day. It’s a bright sunny day and the adrenaline fades.

Perhaps you’re low on magnesium. Or potassium. Or you’re just tired. In fact, you are tired. Long night last night! Jesus, that was some party, and Fabienne was all over you. Did you really need that last shot, you wonder? Wait, is alcohol bad for the heart? Does it have any documented connection to arrhythmia? Why today? Solve it. Solve it. Figure out some reason, some cause and effect, some explanation other than the grim possibility that this is the beginning of something that will land you in the hospital, that you’re just slowly dying.

We’re all dying. But not today. Let’s sit in that café for a moment.

The really great thing about Europe, you decide, is the cafés. In far too few American cities can you sit on the sidewalk and watch the world go by with a café-au-lait. Starbucks is a sham, a pale suburban imitation of genuine street-level culture. Your skin tingles in the sunlight, and where Fabienne touched it last night. You weren’t thinking about your heart last night, were you?

Most of the time, it just beats. This heart that was someone else’s. They ask you, is it weird having someone else’s heart? No, you bastards, you don’t understand: it’s my heart now. This is not a second chance at life. This is your life. And in your life, you’ve learned to feel your own heartbeat like an extra limb that you wake up and stretch in the morning. Every change in rate, every skipped beat, the small sensations of higher or lower blood pressure, you can feel it all. Your left hand takes your right pulse sometimes as you fall asleep. It’s a security blanket. It’s comfort. It’s home.

So that double-thump of a PVC—

Ka-thump.

Ka-thump.

You lift the wide cup towards your lips.

Ka-thump-thump.

ohshit.

ohshit it stopped that beat’s overdue it’s fractions of a second too late. an involuntary adrenaline pulse, a trained response, years of wondering, is this it, am i going to need surgery again, have i finally lost another heart, will my life once again narrow to hospitals, doctors, tubes and wires and pills and today’s ECG, the simple logistics of survival. oh shit, how many tenths of a second before that marvelous contractile tissue recycles, i know there are three different mechanisms for heartbeat, it’s right down to the cells, and it will go any second now, there’s no way this can be my last—

BANG shudder shudder and the engine fires up again.

Ka-thump.

Ka-thump.

Ka-thump.

Soft and steady like clockwork. A deep rhythm both sweet and threatening. The first time you tried to listen to Dark Side of The Moon you had to stop, you couldn’t take that spooky introductory heartbeat. It meant too much.

The cup reaches your lips and you sip the rich sweetness of sitting in a café in Europe and waiting for your lover, let the taste roll down your tongue. No one has noticed your split-second drama. Your head clears and you breathe deeply of your life this fine morning.

It will work out. It always has. There’s a necessary faith here.

Just after transplant, the ping of the cardiac monitor. Your heartbeat up on a screen, alarms ready for who nurses were standing by. You awoke three days after the surgery and realized you were still alive. Day four, sitting up in bed. Day five, standing. Day seven, a brief walk. At night, the ping ping ping of your continued life. Twelve days. At home now, taking your pulse, temperature, and blood pressure every day. Your hand on your wrist replacing the pings, the beginning of a habit. Twenty days. Fifty-three days. Losing interest in being a patient, not needing the constant reassurance of that ping and those doctors. Eighty days, and it’s easier to measure in weeks now. Then weeks become months become years. Before you know it you’re writing a thank-you note on the tenth anniversary of your transplant. Ten years. 3,652 days. You couldn’t attend the reunion, you were traveling around the world at the time, flying far above that long-forgotten worry. But your body is still the foundation of it all.

Ka-thump.

Ka-thump.

Ka-thump.

Ka-thump.

Ka-thump.

After half a minute, you take your hand off your wrist. Probably nothing. You’ll keep an eye on it. You bet your magnesium levels are low. Your diet keeps changing as you travel, so these things happen. It’s all worth it, this trade of life for life. You just don’t find plazas like this in the New World, and the buzz of text message tells you that Fabienne will be here soon.

Fourteen years, five months, twelve days. 5,185 days.

The breeze picks up the scarf of a woman walking down the street. She smiles as she sees you, her face breaking into fine lines of pleasure. She sits down and looks at you slightly sideways over the rims of her dark glasses. Her hair catches the light. Fabienne has arrived.

Some time after midnight, warm in the embrace of near-sleep, your hand goes back to your wrist. In your last waking thought you realize that you never had the chance to worry about whether day 5,186 would ever come.

Instead, I started thinking about the problem of interstellar communication the other way around. I just assumed that a network of technological civilizations already exists, and asked what the protocol would be for connecting to it. Node discovery. Address acquisition. DHCP on a galactic scale. Maybe they don’t breathe oxygen, but I bet our alien friends have worked out the same fundamentals of network engineering that we have, and simple numbers says it’s much cheaper for us to announce our position than for them to search for us. It just makes sense in this galactic year’s current fiscal climate.

Right, so where is the nearest node of the galactic internet and how do we signal it?

First of all, a little reading of current SETI research has convinced me that we should be using lasers, not radio waves. It’s an old idea, going back at least to this 1965 article, however, a simple calculation in this 1999 paper from Harvard revealed that

A high-intensity pulsed laser, teamed with a moderate sized transmitting telescope, forms an efficient interstellar beacon. To a distant observer in the direction of its slender beam, such a laser transmitter, built with “Earth 2000″ technology only, would appear (during its brief pulse) a thousand times brighter than our sun in broadband visible light

The best part of this is, such a focussed pulse is in fact so bright that searching for a particular wavelength is unnecessary. A simple photon counter pointed through a telescope at the distant star — the Harvard team is using photomultiplier tubes — would be more than sensitive enough to distinguish a nanosecond pulse of optical photons of any frequency from the background light of our sun, over distances of hundreds or thousands of light years, depending on how strong the laser is. This completely eliminates the formidable frequency search problem.

Of course, we still have to figure out where to send our message. Again, I propose thinking like a network engineer, because network engineers clearly rule. Now that everyone uses the internet, they’re cool enough to have friends.

So, supposing you wanted to build the galactic internet, where do you put the nodes? And not just any nodes, but the big central nodes where expensive listening-post equipment would be scanning for messages from previously unknown civilizations. The five year-old in me wants to answer “at the bright stars!” but actually, this may not be the most practical answer. Instead, nodes need to be at the inhabited stars which are most “central” in the sense of minimizing both the communications lag (light is slow) and the number of links needed to cover all the civilizations in the galaxy. One way to to determine this formally would be to compute the minimum spanning tree of all inhabited systems, and then pick high-degree nodes in the tree as very likely locations for listening posts.

Except that we don’t really know what systems are inhabited (but we do have a growing catalog of extra-solar planets), or what the maximum practical range of interstellar optical communications might be (but we can guess), and there’s no reason to restrict the network topology to a tree (but we can still put cost constraints on the graph)… Still, no matter how far fetched this idea is, listening for messages sent to us so far hasn’t worked. Thinking about the problem from the other side — how one would build an galactic network that allows for new technological civilizations to make first contact — is certainly a strategy that’s never been tried.

And you gotta wonder what we might learn from a random page on Galactipedia.