Sunday, December 15, 2019

Ringworld - Wikipedia


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld

Just finished the audiobook for this on YouTube.  Great book.    https://youtu.be/4DMkDqIjEuI

I read the novel around 30 years ago. The YouTube version of this is a little uneven on quality.  I suspect that it was copied from audio tape. 

I already have listened to the next two books on Audible.  I may listen to them again.  I started with the 4 prequels on Audible and I'm slowly  working my way through the entire series. 

Multiple authors have contributed to the "Known Space" universe that Larry Niven created.  There may be as many as 40 books. 


Best wishes,

John Coffey

Friday, November 22, 2019

Ringworld Audiobook

I'm going to highly recommend this audiobook.  I read the 1970 book about 30 years ago, but now I find the audiobook to be a delight to listen to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DMkDqIjEuI

This is the most famous and most award-winning of about 40 books that take place in the "Known Space" Universe created by Larry Niven.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Known_Space

Other recordings of this book have been removed from youtube, most likely for copyright reasons.  This particular recording seems odd and not particularly the best quality, as if it was copied from audiotapes and maybe from more than one source.  The quality is not consistent.  You can barely hear some background interference like it is being copied from tapes.

However, I wasn't bothered by the inconsistency of the recording.  The story is so good that I really enjoyed listening to it.

There are four recent prequels to this novel in the "Fleet of Worlds" series, which are not a prerequisite, but a delight to listen to.  I paid Audible to listen to those.

Monday, October 21, 2019

Is Time Travel Impossible?

https://youtu.be/pGnMiGrYmPE

I still have a problem with "space-time" as a unified thing. This leads to conclusions like time didn't exist before the Big Bang, which I find highly questionable. However, Special Relativity depends upon it. In order for space-time to not exist, we would need a completely different model of the universe.

Sunday, September 1, 2019

The Egg

This is a nice fairy tale, but I don't buy it.  This seems like an odd mix of pantheism, Hinduism, and Mormonism to create something unique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI

Friday, July 5, 2019

Why I believe in UFOs, and you should too... | Ben Mezrich | TEDxBeaconStreet

I'm extremely skeptical.  There is a real lack of evidence.  

The distances between stars are so vast that the energy requirements for interstellar travel are by our standards almost infinite.  The cost of the moon program in modern dollars was around a hundred billion dollars.  Sending little robots to Mars costs several billion dollars.  Any kind of interstellar program would cost at least a trillion dollars.  It is not about money.  It is about resources required, either by us or by another civilization, which are enormous.

There are also practical considerations.  Space is very radioactive making it impractical for travel.  It takes a great deal of effort to keep humans alive in space.  Also, anything moving faster than 1% the speed of light is in danger of being obliterated by a grain of sand that happens to be in the way.  At 10% the speed of light, the super thin interstellar gasses, although almost non-existent, are enough to create considerable resistance.  I have heard that it would difficult to go any faster than this.

For this reason, if I were designing an interstellar craft, I would make it shaped like a giant needle with it being very thin.  I don't know if this is practical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urKhVssiygA


Wednesday, June 19, 2019

If the universe is only 14 billion years old, how can it be 92 billion light years wide?

There was a time when parts of the universe were moving away from other parts of the universe faster than the speed of light. That time is right now. The point is space itself is expanding everywhere at a very rapid rate. It was even more in the very early universe, during a period called super inflation. Then it settled down to something reasonable, but because of Dark Energy, the expansion will become greater over time.

This video explains and clarifies what we mean by the visible universe and the microwave background radiation. However, it takes some effort to understand it.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIJTwYOZrGU

Monday, May 20, 2019

My Video Went Viral. Here's Why

Anybody who is anybody is on some form of social media, and that includes youtube. The amount of content on youtube dwarfs everything else combined.  This is an interesting discussion about why some youtube videos go viral and how the youtube algorithm works.


The video he is talking about is here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxPdPpi5W4o

Saturday, February 2, 2019

Linus Tech Tips on Youtube

This guy is amazing. He has 8 million subscribers. Some people are supporting themselves with 100,000 subscribers.  There are a lot of cable shows that might only get half a million viewers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOTpArWyaUM

Recently, the actor Jack Black started a youtube channel and immediately got six million subscribers with hardly doing anything because he is Jack Black.