unforum

[DelVillan.]

[Mason]

I don't think that 'never' was there when I looked. Hmm.

Also, Stuart replied with the tie question:

[DelVillan.]

That was another anagram for Threatening Deceit, but I dismissed it because...well, it's kinda nonsense.

Wish I would've posted it, too.

[enaxor]

Eric just contacted me using Google Talk. Sorry, but I've been so busy I'm not quite sure what's up.

[Scribe]

Nice work all, wiki updated mostly.

The whois for gatethreeincident.com also shows it was registered just the other day, on 26th June. Seems weird - he first mentioned gate 3 on the 23rd. Maybe registration takes a few days to go through? Or maybe he just wanted us to find the gate 3 article?

[Edit - forgot I was going to post other stuff ]

[Scribe]

Did some coding Attached is a file containing a text representation of the black and white pixels in the original black/white noise-or-barcode picture. Each 0 or 1 represents a single "block" in the original picture (i.e. 2 or 3 pixels wide/high), with 0 = black and 1 = white.

Interesting things to note:

1. The pixel array is 256 pixels wide by 256 pixels high.

2. There seem to be 2 areas, each rotated 180 degrees and placed beneath itself. There's the "main" area, on the right, which we found before, and there's a 4-pixel-wide strip on the left hand side which is rotated and placed "below". In essence then, once the rotations have been removed, I think there are 2 things here: a 4x128 strip in the top-left of the image, and a 251x128 "body" in the top-right.

It's also worth noting that we can't tell where the "break" in rotation is - it's possible that the top half has been rotated to get the bottom half, but also possible that the left half of each area has been rotated to get the right.

3. It doesn't seem to convert into ASCII, at least, not using it in the format it is now. I looked at it on it's side (i.e. so the left hand edge becomes the top) but can't see any obvious signs of ASCII (no repeated 0110xxxx patterns).

4. Perhaps with all the talk of PGP here, we're looking at a key and a code, or a public key and a session key? The left-hand strip is a total size of 512 bits, which could be a public key. I'm not sure how session keys work in PGP, or what size they're likely to be though.

Busy this evening, so I'm sure plenty will happen I'll look into this more when I get a chance, or if it looks extremely relevant, hum...

[James Stone]

Just to let you know I have been trying to sort things out in my head and created a wiki to assist.

http://wikihost.org/wikis/6op1libra/wiki/start

[Mason]

[DelVillan.]

While we're on the subject of wikis, here's what I've got so far for some wikilogos. I'll probably do a handful more tonight/tomorrow, but I want to have these up for suggestions while I'm doing others to keep them in mind.

I'm aware that they're larger, but it's easier to work that way. They look fine at the appropriate size. :) Keep in mind this is "untouchedup," but I'm not going to spend time on that if people totally don't like a logo or something.

Edit: please view at full size. Looks terrible compressed like that.

[James Stone]

[tipsila]

[Scribe]

I bumped into Nick from Heavenly Media yesterday, and had a quick chat. He suggested I was the rabbit - but then again, also suggested anyone nearby could also be the rabbit, so bah. One thing that stood out was he mentioned a meteorite hitting the earth at some point - can't remember *why*, but maybe that's why it stood out. It would fit in with the "panspermia"/life from extraterrestrial sources theme perhaps.

Currently looking at: Panspermia and the RNA World Hypothesis at Wikipedia.

Also, Wow - agreed: great logos, DelVillan! No criticism from here...

[tipsila]

Just thought I would pass along a very informative site. Do check out the meteors and meteorites section, as well as the craters section. Additionally, I found a meteor-impact-crater map.



http://www.daviddarling.info/

About this site

The Worlds of David Darling is a large on-line collection of information on astronomy, astrobiology, spaceflight, physics, and other areas of science and mathematics, both conventional and speculative (teleportation, time travel, etc). It has been developed and is updated daily by author and astronomer David Darling. Regular users include aerospace companies, NASA and other space agencies, the military, and academic institutions, as well as a broad swathe of the general public.



http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/D/dirpans.html

Directed Panspermia

The idea that life might have been intentionally spread throughout space and seeded on the surface of other worlds by a guiding intelligence. A detailed version of this hypothesis was put forward in 1973 by the molecular biologists Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) and Leslie Orgel.1 The chances of microorganisms being passively transported from world to world across interstellar distances, they felt, were small. The probability of successful seeding would be greatly increased, they pointed out, if the fertilization were carried out deliberately by an existing technological civilization. Their argument depended first upon demonstrating that it was possible for an advanced extraterrestrial civilization to have developed in the Galaxy before life first appeared on Earth. This they were able to do (see extraterrestrial civilizations, ancient). As for the means of dispensation:

The spaceship would carry large samples of a number of microorganisms, each having different but simple nutritional requirements, for example, blue-green algae, which could grow on CO2 and water in "sunlight". A payload of 1,000 kg might be made up of 10 samples each containing 1016 microorganisms, or 100 samples of 1015 microorganisms.

Crick and Orgel further suggested that directed panspermia might help resolve one or two anomalies in the biochemistry of life-forms on Earth. One of these was the puzzling dependence of biological systems on molybdenum. Many enzymes, for example, require this metal to act as a cofactor. Such a situation would be easier to understand if molybdenum were relatively abundant on Earth (see elements, terrestrial abundance). However, its abundance is only 0.02% compared with 0.2% and 3.16%, respectively, for the metals chromium and nickel, which are chemically similar to molybdenum. Crick and Orgel commented:

If it could be shown that the elements represented in terrestrial living organisms correlate with those abundant in some types of star-molybdenum stars, for example-we might look more sympathetically on "infective" theories.

A second example they give concerns the genetic code:

Several orthodox explanations of the universality of the code can be suggested, but none is generally accepted to be completely convincing. It is a little surprising that organisms with somewhat different codes do not coexist. The universality of the code follows naturally from an "infective" theory of the origin of life. Life on Earth would represent a clone derived from a single set of organisms.

There might be a variety of reasons why an advanced civilization would wish to intentionally initiate life elsewhere: as an experiment in astrobiology using an entire world as a laboratory; to prepare a planet for subsequent colonization (see terraforming); or, to disseminate the genetic material of the donor world to ensure its survival in the event a global catastrophe (see extraterrestrial civilizations, hazards to).

[DelVillan.]

My personal favorite. I've taken the zodiac Libra symbol and made us a little ET.

[Scribe]

That is extremely cool, DelVillan - gets my vote, although the others are still great. Thanks for the link, Tipsila - very interesting stuff.

A couple of things:

1. Stuart has questioned whether the rabbit is white. Nick has suggested that he, me.. everybody! could be the rabbit. Perhaps the rabbit is just the entire human race - i.e. our genetic structure. Then anybody could be a rabbit, be they white or otherwise.

2. Reply from Eric quoted below. Not much apart from some background info, and making me feel guilty for asking him what's going on