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FRAGMENT FROM NATURE carries on from last weekend and concludes this weekend on the probability argument for the sample space searched in our exploration of outer space, specifically for signs of life biosignals, and the variety they could assume. Instead of simply taking a flat-footed binary position, this paper presents a thoughtful discussion on the topic. We can all use a refresher in logical thought. View in LinkedIn

This alley way in Girona, St Lorenç, is particularly hard to capture in a photo due to the light. View in LinkedIn

UNDER MILK WOOD. “It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless" "and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched," "courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the" "sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.” https://lnkd.in/d_SJ2Qe View in LinkedIn

HAYSTACK. “This "needle in a haystack" metaphor is especially appropriate in a SETI context because it emphasizes the vastness of the space to be searched, and it nicely captures how we seek an obvious product of intelligence and technology amidst a much larger set of purely natural products.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

Majorcan sobrasada pickled meat in a cow stomach. View in LinkedIn

FARMER TALK. Working on a Herefordshire mixed sheep farm for a spell at 18, the farmer mysteriously advised me as we entered a field with two tractors to start ploughing: “go up the smooth and down the rough.” After a while, it made sense. Later in life, I discover on sanding wood a similar common truth which made me think of the farmer: sand with the grain, not across it. Common sense is not always common. View in LinkedIn

BACK OF ENVELOPE. “However, perhaps more importantly for now, even order-of-magnitude estimates of the SETI space searched to date are valuable because they rebut the pervasive misconception that SETI work to date has significantly "sharpened" the Fermi Paradox or proven so dispositive that SETI can be said to have "failed" to find what it seeks.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

WOEFUL COMPLETENESS. “We show that these assumptions allow us to do our calculation analytically, and we get a result very similar to that of another haystack, as calculated by Tarter et al. (2010): our current search completeness is extremely low, akin to having searched something like a large hot tub or small swimming pool's worth of water out of all of Earth's oceans.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn