About 10 years ago I cultivated a sense of the direction of the centre of the galaxy.
I’ve lost the knack now, but it was something I would do while I was waiting for the bus each morning.
At the beginning, I used the night sky app Star Walk. It has an augmented reality view, so I would swing the phone round until I found the constellation Sagittarius, and if you look in that direction and head about 26,000 light years, you get to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*.
(The light reaching the centre of the galaxy right now will have left the Earth 26,000 years ago, the Upper Palaeolithic, around the time of the invention of weaving and permanent settlements.)
So I would end up pointing through the pavement, or down a street, and thinking, huh, that’s where it is. And it’s a nice trick if you can do it, but it’s better when you can do it at any time, without an app. Which is what happened.
First I got good at figuring out the ecliptic. That’s the flat disc of the Earth’s orbit (and the solar system). If you wave your arm along the path that the Sun makes across the sky, that’s the disc.
Then I can’t remember how I would locate Sagittarius each day (it lies on the ecliptic) but I trained my intuition by checking the app each day. Over the weeks and months, I could follow how the position changed (at the same time each day as I caught the bus). First through the ground that way, then under the ground further that way, and so on.
Eventually then I had this picture of myself, and the Earth, and the solar system, and the centre of the galaxy which had initially been whirling round me, and now it had flipped, I was turning around it.
It was wildly situating.
The feelSpace belt uses vibrating motors and neuroplasticity to give humans a sense of “north.”
Every morning after he got out of the shower, W?chter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads – the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.
“It was slightly strange at first,” W?chter says, “though on the bike, it was great.” He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. “I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,” he says.
The brain is super good at incorporating this new sensory input. The result? Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place.
I’ve never tried this, though I would love to. Periodically there are semi-commercial versions:
North Paw by Sensebridge: an ankle bracelet
North Sense by Cyborg Nest: a chest wearable
But I haven’t yet seen something that I could imagine myself wearing every day for a few months. I would like it as part of my Apple Watch. (Could that be done?)
Some animals do have a sense of north! Birds can literally see the Earth’s magnetic field – and it’s possible that humans have a north sense too (as previously discussed).
HOWEVER: I did have a glimpse of what this would be like.
A few years back I visited Marrakesh.
The old city is a tangle of roads and alleys and souks and neighbourhoods. It’s fun (and inevitable) to get disoriented and lost.
But one particular day we set off from a junction back to our riad, only to end up back at the junction 30 minutes later. So we set off in another direction… and 30 minutes later we found ourselves back there. Repeat. Repeat.
Then we realised that all the buildings had satellite dishes, and all the satellite dishes were aligned south. So matter how turned-about we got, we could always have a sense of the cardinal directions. It was an incredible moment. I had a tiny peek at how a swallow sees the world, the door opened just a crack to the magnetosensitive avian umwelt.
The satellite dishes oriented me in the city just as a sense of the location of Sagittarius A* oriented me in the galaxy.
Are there words for the cardinal directions of towards/away/etc with respect to the galactic centre? Galinwards. Galockwise.
So I wonder about the best way to re-train myself as to the location of the galactic centre? I enjoyed the perspective. It’s been a decade.
In my imagination I see an iPhone app which displays a 3D model, connected to the gyroscope and the compass and the GPS.
It would show, diagrammatically, the sphere of the Earth and a sharp line where I’m standing, and the ecliptic and the Sun, and glowing at the edge of the disc of the ecliptic: the constellation of Sagittarius. Then a floating arrow labeled, “Galactic Centre: 26,000 light years.”
The whole thing would be in 3D, centred on the icon of me standing on the Earth, and it re-orient as I moved the phone in my hand. So the 3D arrow would point the way. Perhaps it would buzz with increasing intensity until I pointed the phone the right way. Perhaps even it would bother me with a notification at a set time each day to have a guess!
The purpose of showing all the moving parts is to help with building intuition.
Maybe it’s an app. Maybe it’s a mobile website. Every so often I poke around at trying to build this for myself (there are a bunch of astronomical coordinates code libraries out there). But there are slightly too many things I would need to learn for it to bump its way to the top of my project list.
Which is why I’m sharing it here. I’d love to have a go if you make it.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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About 10 years ago I cultivated a sense of the direction of the centre of the galaxy.
I’ve lost the knack now, but it was something I would do while I was waiting for the bus each morning.
At the beginning, I used the night sky app Star Walk. It has an augmented reality view, so I would swing the phone round until I found the constellation Sagittarius, and if you look in that direction and head about 26,000 light years, you get to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*.
(The light reaching the centre of the galaxy right now will have left the Earth 26,000 years ago, the Upper Palaeolithic, around the time of the invention of weaving and permanent settlements.)
So I would end up pointing through the pavement, or down a street, and thinking, huh, that’s where it is. And it’s a nice trick if you can do it, but it’s better when you can do it at any time, without an app. Which is what happened.
First I got good at figuring out the ecliptic. That’s the flat disc of the Earth’s orbit (and the solar system). If you wave your arm along the path that the Sun makes across the sky, that’s the disc.
Then I can’t remember how I would locate Sagittarius each day (it lies on the ecliptic) but I trained my intuition by checking the app each day. Over the weeks and months, I could follow how the position changed (at the same time each day as I caught the bus). First through the ground that way, then under the ground further that way, and so on.
Eventually then I had this picture of myself, and the Earth, and the solar system, and the centre of the galaxy which had initially been whirling round me, and now it had flipped, I was turning around it.
It was wildly situating.
The feelSpace belt uses vibrating motors and neuroplasticity to give humans a sense of “north.”
The brain is super good at incorporating this new sensory input. The result?
I’ve never tried this, though I would love to. Periodically there are semi-commercial versions:
But I haven’t yet seen something that I could imagine myself wearing every day for a few months. I would like it as part of my Apple Watch. (Could that be done?)
Some animals do have a sense of north! Birds can literally see the Earth’s magnetic field – and it’s possible that humans have a north sense too (as previously discussed).
HOWEVER: I did have a glimpse of what this would be like.
A few years back I visited Marrakesh.
The old city is a tangle of roads and alleys and souks and neighbourhoods. It’s fun (and inevitable) to get disoriented and lost.
But one particular day we set off from a junction back to our riad, only to end up back at the junction 30 minutes later. So we set off in another direction… and 30 minutes later we found ourselves back there. Repeat. Repeat.
Then we realised that all the buildings had satellite dishes, and all the satellite dishes were aligned south. So matter how turned-about we got, we could always have a sense of the cardinal directions. It was an incredible moment. I had a tiny peek at how a swallow sees the world, the door opened just a crack to the magnetosensitive avian umwelt.
The satellite dishes oriented me in the city just as a sense of the location of Sagittarius A* oriented me in the galaxy.
Are there words for the cardinal directions of towards/away/etc with respect to the galactic centre? Galinwards. Galockwise.
So I wonder about the best way to re-train myself as to the location of the galactic centre? I enjoyed the perspective. It’s been a decade.
In my imagination I see an iPhone app which displays a 3D model, connected to the gyroscope and the compass and the GPS.
It would show, diagrammatically, the sphere of the Earth and a sharp line where I’m standing, and the ecliptic and the Sun, and glowing at the edge of the disc of the ecliptic: the constellation of Sagittarius. Then a floating arrow labeled, “Galactic Centre: 26,000 light years.”
The whole thing would be in 3D, centred on the icon of me standing on the Earth, and it re-orient as I moved the phone in my hand. So the 3D arrow would point the way. Perhaps it would buzz with increasing intensity until I pointed the phone the right way. Perhaps even it would bother me with a notification at a set time each day to have a guess!
The purpose of showing all the moving parts is to help with building intuition.
Maybe it’s an app. Maybe it’s a mobile website. Every so often I poke around at trying to build this for myself (there are a bunch of astronomical coordinates code libraries out there). But there are slightly too many things I would need to learn for it to bump its way to the top of my project list.
Which is why I’m sharing it here. I’d love to have a go if you make it.