by cameron | May 3, 2007 | Uncategorized
Oh I hope I’m wrong. Please tell me I’m wrong. It’s quite possible. It’s 1am and I’m still kind of drunk. But as I was trying to get to sleep, this question bugged me:
“How many people lived and died for me to be here?”
In other words, “How many direct ancestors do I have?”
The reason this is an important question is because I know that I am the legacy of those ancestors. In most cases, the ONLY thing they left behind to show they were here, were their children and grandchildren. Their DNA. I am their legacy.
So how many direct ancestors do I have?
I know I had two parents. They had to live for me to be here. They each had two parents. And so forth and so on, back in time. Let’s say that, on average, each set of parents procreated the next generation when they were about 30 years of age. How many ancestors do I have?
This problem bothered me enough that I had to get back up and knock out a simple spreadsheet to work it out.
I got as far as 10,000 years (approximately 8000 B.C.E.) and gave up.
If I go back 60 years, I have 6 ancestors – my parents (2) and my grand-parents (4) = 6.
If I go back 90 years, I have 14 – the above plus my great-grandparents (8).
Now… if I go back 500 years, I have 262,142. Feeling the burden of responsibility yet??
Go back 1000 years – 34,359,738,366 (aka 34 billion).
Go back 2000 years – 295,147,905,179,353,000,000 (295 quintillion).
Go back 10,000 years – 34,996,011,596,528,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000 (yeah.. whatever. But it’s 3.4996E+100).
Now… how old is the human race (fundamentalist Christians need not answer)? According to Wikipedia
“The most widely accepted view among current anthropologists is that Homo sapiens originated in the African savanna around 200,000 BP.”
I don’t think Excel could handle those orders of magnitude.
So unless I’m wrong (PLEASE tell me I’m wrong), this many humans lived, scratched out a living in the dirt, fought desperately against the elements, and then died – all so I could be here. So YOU could be here.
WE ARE THEIR LEGACY.
Here’s the question I am asking myself – WHAT AM I DOING TODAY TO LIVE UP TO THAT RESPONSIBILITY?
……..
Here’s my spreadsheet.
Please tell me I’m wrong.
I’m going to try to go to sleep.
by cameron | May 3, 2007 | Uncategorized
As you know, I have had a particularly tricky virus on my PC which, apart from popping up sites all the time, had disabled my ability to restart, shutdown or hibernate my PC.
I tried AVG, Windows Defender and Ad-Aware. None of them got rid of it. Tonight I finally installed Spybot S&D and guess what! It found the little bugger, healed it, and when I re-booted (manually shutting the power off) – the problem is solved. I can shutdown again! Hooray! Thank you Spybot S&D.
by cameron | May 1, 2007 | Podcast, Uncategorized
Wow. I just had one of those whooooooo moments, when the world spins. I was reading Brook Turner’s article on George Miller from last week’s Australian Financial Review magazine. Anyone who knows me well knows how much I admire George. MAD MAX and MAD MAX II are obviously the greatest Australian films ever made and two of the greatest films ever made full stop. On top of that, I’ve always admired Miller’s auteurness, the way he has avoided the Hollywood system, followed his own vision, done it his way. That appeals to the rebel in me.
So just imagine when I read these paragraphs in the article:
“Miller’s first big eureka moment came when he attended a lecture by the maverick American thinker and polymath Buckminster Fuller at university in the late sixties.”
And then, a few paragraphs later…
“Miller’s second great epiphany came when he heard the American writer Joseph Campbell speak on a rainy night in Santa Monica after he had made MM (Mad Max).”
Again, anyone who knows me well knows that Joseph Campbell has been a major influence on my thinking for 20 years. And recently I have been obsessed with Fuller. So weird. I also know that my friend Peter Ellyard has been heavily influenced by both of them as well. As, I guess, have lots of people. It’s just weird when you find out that someone you’ve admired for a long time has had very similar influences to yourself. If the article had said he was also a fan of Napoleon, I probably would have choked on my cereal.
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Rage Against the Machine reunites! It might have only been for a one-off concert but we can only hope that the boys will put the band back together. God knows we need them now more than ever. I am a HUGE fan of RAtM. I haven’t heard that kind of anger or genuine passion in music since they left us 7 years ago (can it really be that long??). Even Lou and Bruce can only summon a fraction of the heat and intensity of Zack. And now you do what they told ya….
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I said to a friend of mine today “I was watching a great speech by Vint Cerf today”. The friend replied “Should I know who that is?”.
This person is a webmaster for a pretty big company. When I explained that Vint is the co-inventor of the internet, the friend replied “Does that have anything to do with the term “surfing” the internet?”
Which lead me to think…
Vint Cerf has to be (with Bob Kahn) perhaps the most successful inventor in history, certainly if you measure the success of an inventor as ‘adoption of the invention over time’. Since they invented the internet in 1973, it has grown to over one billion customers. Even Microsoft doesn’t have that many customers. If you stop the average person in the middle of any street anywhere in the world and ask them “Have you heard of the internet?”, I think the response rate will be pretty high, even if they aren’t fortunate enough yet to be a ‘user’. However, I wonder – if you ask the same person “Who is Vint Cerf?”, they probably won’t be able to answer you. I wonder how that feels? I should get him onto the show and ask him. I’ve been watching this speech he recently gave to Hungarian “TV University” and he comes across as a nice guy, a regular human being. Can you even begin to imagine the impact he has had on the future of the human race? Bucky Fuller would have loved the internet. Talk about being a future maker!
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The Silverlight demo that Microsoft announced last night at MIX07 is pretty cool. Sean Alexander, the product manager, is coming on the G’Day World this week or maybe next to talk to us about it in more depth.
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I was getting very excited last night about the HUGE increase in audience to my Napoleon podcast during April (400%) until I got the full TPN stats today. It looks like we’ve had a few very naughty people trying to DOS my servers during the month. Fortunately they failed but in the process they completely screwed my stats. Either that or it’s innocent and someone inadvertently tried to download a couple of our shows tens of thousands of times over a couple of days. Either way, it’s ruined my day.
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Marshall Kirkpatrick and the folks at Splashcast today launched their new application which looks like a very cool media player. Unfortunately, they have chosen to brand it “MyPodcastNetwork”. Obviously I have issues with that. So I have sent them an email requesting a discussion immediately. Hopefully we can resolve this in a polite fashion.
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by cameron | May 1, 2007 | TPN
I just noticed that in April TPN served up over 12 terabytes. I remember back in December 2004 when our first hosting provider in WA fell over because we did a few gig or something craahahazy like that. I still think it’s a shame that we aren’t being hosted out of Australia though. A few local companies have tried to help out over the years – WebCentral, AAPT, OzHosting, to name a few – but none of them could even begin to match the prices I am getting out of Texas. Texas has to be good for something other than making and killing Presidents, right?
