Don't blog myself (mostly due to imposter syndrome), but I'd imagine the biggest plus would be the ability to connect with like-minded individuals without the noise / constraints / biases imposed by bigger platforms.
On that note, what would be a recommended approach to connecting with individuals? Just throw in a contact email? I hate the idea of a Disqus or other commenting system forcing you to throw away ownership of the user interaction.
"They found strong indications of a 157-day activity cycle; 121102 seems to flare up for 90 days and then go silent for 67, the team reported in a new study."
Maybe there's nothing to it, but both 157 and 67 are primes.
They may be primes, but they are primes of an Earth day, which, as far as I am aware, is the only place where those numbers would be 157 & 67.
As an example, our day on Earth is roughly 1440 minutes, while on Mars it is 1477 minutes. So on Mars it would be 153 & 65 day intervals.
I deliberately chose the closest comparison to Earth. Had I chosen any other planet in our solar system, the numbers would have been much, much more different (on Jupiter it would be 406 & 173 days, respectively).
A "day" has no meaning anywhere but on Earth. So if you are going to make the leap that the usage of primes is a sign of intelligence, you would also have to believe that this message was meant for us and only us. However the burst seems to originate from 3 billion light-years away so they would have had to start sending the message very shortly after life began on the Earth. Seems incredibly unlikely.
EDIT: Also an Earth day is not a constant value. It would have been much shorter 3 billion years ago and this cycle wouldn't be repeating in prime numbers. This theoretical alien intelligence would therefore need to not only be able to recognize life on Earth in the first few hundred million years it existed. It would also need to be able to accurately model the Earths orbit over the next 3 billion years in order to customize the message for when it would be received. All that work to send the message and they still needed to luck out that the 3 billion year journey happened to reach us at nearly the perfect time for our technology to advance enough so we could hear it.
It wouldn't have to do any of that if it was simply keeping an activity:non-activity ratio that resulted in 2 primes. I'm not sure to what degree of precision this flashing is happening but if it's very precise then there you go. 2 primes result no matter what your day/timescale/number system is.
Also they would have had to infer our day cycle from observations originated 6 billion years ago, which would be strange because the age of the solar system is estimated to be 4.5b years.
Started as a simple python script to scratch my own itch to track USCIS Visa Bulletins and my Green Card progress. Due to demand by friends and co-workers who had the same need, I used it as a learning opportunity and created a website powered by Django and Beautiful Soup:
https://www.seekingvisa.com/
This was originally a script running in my desktop and used only by me, but I made it into a site when I realized many of my friends wanted to keep an eye on the USCIS Visa bulletins every month as well. If you're one of us that keeps checking USCIS bulletins every month, then site is for you. You get an email as soon as the bulletin is released and you can see what changed this month instantly. No more refreshing the state department's site manually.
I'm very eager to see any feedback on what is / is not useful with the site.
I'm not your target user, but my intuition is that many people:
1. Know what category of visa they've applied for
2. Know their priority date
3. Need just two pieces of information: (i) is my priority date being processed already?, (ii) if not, how many months are there between my priority date and the priority date of applications that are being processed.
So having just those two pieces of information in an email could be helpful.
As I said, I'm not your target user, so I could be way off!
Right now when they land on the website, they can see which priority dates are current, although they don't get to see a customized view of how many days behind the dates are from _their_ priority dates. Thanks for the feedback, that would also be useful information in the email that goes out as well.
On that note, what would be a recommended approach to connecting with individuals? Just throw in a contact email? I hate the idea of a Disqus or other commenting system forcing you to throw away ownership of the user interaction.