Profile: Magenta

Personal background
Statistician and social science researcher/evaluator from Wellington. Cat and goldfish owner. I live in Wellington, New Zealand, so I am very particular about my coffee. :) I have read A Brief History of Time. I am stuck on the slit experiment of light. I can follow some of the maths, but not most of it. At this stage I am reminded of a song, probably copyright:
Whenever life get you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough.
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
And you feel that you've had quite enu-hu-hu-huuuuff!
Just - remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
and revolving at 900 miles an hour,
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
the sun that is the source of all our power.
The Sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our Galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars,
it's 100,000 light-years side-to-side,
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick,
but out by us it's just 3000 light-years wide.
We're 30,000 light-years from galactic central point,
we go round every 200 million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
in this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whizz,
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
because there's b*gg*r all down here on Earth.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I run SETI as one of my friends knows some people involved with the project at Berkeley. I think it's a long-shot to find the signal showing other evolved life forms, however I also think it is a bit immodest to believe we are the only intelligent(?) life-forms in the universe. However, I do think that if intelligent life are trying to contact us, why do they persist in targetting rural folks in pick-up trucks in rural America? Oi - try New Zealand. We got Shrek the sheep onto primetime television, I'm sure we can do a bit better with aliens.
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