Happy Whatever 2019!

Feliz Lo que sea - Happy Whatever - Best for 2019!!!

In the traditional way of the Piterbarg-Casagrande's here is the Greetings for the end of 2018 and the Best Wishes for 2019:

And Best Wishes for what still is coming! Y los mejores deseos para lo que se venga! Meilleurs voeux pour ce encore est à venir!

Feliz Año Nuevo!

Happy New Year!

Is-Sena t-Tajba

Gezuar Vitin e Ri

Snorhavor Nor Tari

Soursdey Chhnam Tmei

FELIÇ ANY NOU

Xin Nian Kuai Le

GELUKKIG NIEUWJAAR!

Felican Novan Jaron

Bonne Annee

Prosit Neujahr

L'Shannah Tovah

Naye Varsha Ki Shubhkamanyen

Selamat Tahun Baru

Sal -e- no mobarak

Felice anno nuovo

Akimashite Omedetto Gozaimasu

Godt Nyttar

Nupela yia i go long yu

Manigong Bagong Taon!

Feliz Ano Novo

Subha Aluth Awrudhak Vewa

Gott nytt ar!

Sawadee Pee Mai

At least in 2018 I'll add 3 and maybe 4 posts to this story... Years zoom forward faster and faster, or at least it seems to me. My reasoning is that if you are 52 in 2018, and I'll be 53 in March 2019, it means that 2018 was just 2% of my whole life. For my younger daughter the 2018 corresponds to 9% and for my older daughter is 6.66%, let's round up to 7% of her whole life. Yes, as you age years go faster.

No posts does not mean that nothing happened, it has been another year packed down the rabbit hole which is life:

• In August we clicked 5 years in France!
• For the petit it has been primary and now started the college under the French regime;
• The older had the Prom: the end of year party of the last year of College: a milestone not as intense as the US Prom, or the 15 years old party in Argentina (and other parts of Latin America), but here it really means that the second half of 2018 marked the start of a new phase in her studies;

• This past year we went to New Caledonia. Yes, this time, we did all correctly, like not connecting in Australia, and instead flown via Tokyo!

• We visited Tokyo for a week!

• To get into the mood of Japanese manga, there was a lot of preparation before and during the Japanese Expo in Paris!

• Of course that 5 years in a country (33% of her life for the older, and 45% of the the younger's life), a lot of French things start happening: like enjoying a full Republican Day in our petit ville: Puteaux! And enjoy the party together when the football French National team won the World Cup!

• It snowed! Which it used to be more common in Paris, yet it is our 3rd time, but this time was for 3 weeks in a row and a lot of snow!

• Inundations: like in the movie A Monster in Paris, and like previous years, again it happened. Not as bad like 2 years ago, but... the water is going up clearly...

• End of July was the last month of Autolib... We are missing you, we will miss this fantastic service. Apparently it was not making money, so kaput!

• Many friends and family visit us, and we have also many many friend's outings, dinners, and just be together!

• Several visits to Argentina to visit our parents and friends

• Exactly 1 year ago we met with my friend of nearly whole a life (87% of our life we have been friends!) and his family in Spain

• This 2019 we will wake up in Paris watching the most daring flyby ever executed!

As always one picture is worth thousands of words: so let's take a look at the 2018 in review...

http://bit.ly/2019-2018Greetings

The world went crazy?

Brexit? The timer is approaching zero and the British apparently are clueless like 2 years ago; Trump? It is impresentable as ever, and it is clear and confirmed that we have a toddler on command of half of the nuclear warheads worldwide; Putin? He holds more strings worldwide than anyone else, which is scary; Gilet Jaunes... too local to be worth noticing, except for the usual trend that "older times were better, we need to recover our national pride, etc, etc", the typical populist tango... which ends on Brexit, Trump and yielding more power to Putin...

I skipped one year (no post last year), however 2 years ago there was a similar pattern: yes, apparently the World has gone crazy, and past times were better...

But...

A little more than 2 years ago, another event happened: the New Horizons on July 14th 2015 did the flyby of Pluto. It is worth remembering because on January 1st at 00:33 UCT (aprox), the same deep space probe will do the most remote and daring flyby ever of the 2014 MU69, nicknamed #UltimaThule, a Kuiper Belt Object, like Pluto itself. It took New Horizons more than 2 years to cover the 1.6 billion kilometers from Pluto, and this New Year 2019 it is doing the closest approach to this distant object from Earth: at 6.6 billion kilometers. Impressive, isn't it?

The Earth got its first selfie also 50 years ago: during the amazing Apollo 8 mission: December 24th 1968, the crew, Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell , were the first humans to circumnavigate another space object. And they took this amazing picture of our Pale Blue Dot...

Twenty Eight years ago, the Voyager 1, on February 14, 1990, look "back" from Neptune to capture our planet, Earth, from that perspective, giving us another dimension of how humbling astronomy is.

It was some time between the 14th and 15th centuries that we started a journey that changed our perception in the Universe. A journey that can be marked by the invention of the spyglass or telescope, improved by Galileo. And with it he made in 1610 the discoveries of the moons of Jupiter that unmistakably showed that the Universe is bigger, much bigger than anyone dare to imagine. Except maybe Giordano Bruno.

Nearly 4 centuries after and following on the footsteps of many others, we started the exploration of the Solar System with small robots, including humans on the Moon, and sending probes beyond the limit of our Solar System. We are looking long into the most remote past of the Universe , we have found a more than 2 thousands planets, and the 2018 has been a busy year in Space, landing on the asteroid Ryugu, another lander in Mars, Insight, a probe to the Sun (Parker Solar Probe) and a new exoplanet searcher in orbit: TESS.

A usual criticism of Space Exploration is that we should be concentrating on our problems on Earth. Besides missing the point on how much money is expend on Space Exploration versus other things (less than 0.5% of the GDP of the countries that are doing it, see here), it is almost a straw man argument:

We could not do these amazing things if everything else were not better down here! The World is a better place today than 20, 50, 70, 200, 500, 1000, 5000, 10000, etc etc years ago... Of course that we have short life spans as a species, and our daily or yearly life events look like a curve going up and down, sometimes more downs than ups, in a very arrhythmically pattern, so just looking back a year can look very bad an our perception is that past times were better....

Ole Peters explain why if we only look at our short time life span, things usually look worst in average:



We extrapolate from our perception of our parents's life, grand parents and maybe grand-grand parents, and we conclude "today, this last year, it has been the worst and next year is going to be worst"

https://xkcd.com/1601/

https://xkcd.com/1348/

https://xkcd.com/603/

And enjoy this one in full: https://xkcd.com/1227/

Perception? Here the good, or bad, news to any caro lector: your perception, particularly across big numbers and looking back into the past are wrong. The reason? We are very bad are estimating things and big numbers:

https://xkcd.com/2091/

It makes sense: in comparison to geological or astronomical times (it took the New Horizons 16% of my life to reach Pluto, and 23% to reach 2014 MU69) our life are very very very very very short. The Voyager 1 and 2, beyond the Solar System in Interstellar Space, are so far away that one way signal to them needs 20 hours for Voyager 1to reach it, and 16 hours for Voyager 2.

Only they have been flying for 41 years, or 78% of my life!

How bad are our perceptions?

Just measure yourself up: https://www.perilsofperception.com/quiz/index.html

And that's particularly dangerous. Why?

Ipsos have been running for 5 years a survey to evaluate our (mis)perceptions on things like "crime and violence, sex, climate change, the economy and other key issues". The verdict? We are very bad on estimating things across big data sets and populations, and we tend to error in the negative side. For more you can check the slides in their microsite on Perceptions

Ipsos Perils of Perception 2018 from Ipsos MORI

How bad or better or world is today?

Max Roser in a 2018 entry has said "The world is much better; The world is awful; The world can be much better", and "All three statements are true"

Nothing better than an image to show this:

And I highly recommend to read the article in its entirety: https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better

So, my wishes for 2019? That your day to day curve has more ups than downs!
And my recommendation for you for the 2019? Review the big numbers again and again:

• https://ourworldindata.org/
• https://www.gapminder.org/
• http://timharford.com/articles/
• https://jasoncollins.blog/
• https://mindhacks.com/2018/01/03/the-backfire-effect-is-elusive/

To finish, like 2 years ago, so, forget some potentially dangerous clowns in charge of this blue dot, and remember again Carl Sagan's words:

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994"

Until the next entry!