Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with carl

So ET won't be picking up the Olympic Games in 1936 Berlin?

MrMulan — Tue, 12 May 2009 11:18:32 -0800

Do radio waves attenuate and become noise or do they go on forever? In Carl Sagan's Cosmos and his novel Contact, he writes how radio waves go on forever. I just finished seeing the Discovery Planet special "Life after People", where in the closing segment, the narrator states that new research has shown that radio waves probably attenuate after 4 light years to become nothing more than noise. This occurs because of cosmic dust, radiation, planetary systems, asteroids, ect.

I thought radio waves go on indefinitely in a vacuum, and space is mostly a vacuum because of the distances involved, even with all the cosmic dust and whatnot.

So has another cherished belief of mine hit the dustbin?

Help Figuring Out this Stick Thing

macinchik — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 20:18:37 -0800

I recall something that I believe I heard Carl Sagan say either in an episode of Cosmos or in one of his earlier books, that one could store enough information to hold an entire encyclopedia by putting a notch in a stick, if only one could measure where the notch lies to some absurd astronomically precise figure. Am I imagining this? Could have something to do with Anaximander, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher.

This one has been bugging me for decades...

Pass it over here, Carl...

Gankmore — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:25:32 -0800

Carl Sagan filter: what is the thing that Carl is releasing into the wind so profoundly in this shot from the beginning of Cosmos? I always understood it to be a dandelion seed, but it doesn't look like one I would recognize... What is that thing?

What is the name of the tune at the beginning of "Kung Fu Fighting"?

Brian James — Sat, 07 May 2005 13:45:09 -0800

What is the name of the tune at the beginning of Carl Douglas' "Kung Fu Fighting"? In that song it is played on a recorder or something, but I have heard it elsewhere played on stringed instruments, etc. I know the tune predates that song because I heard it as a child in old cartoons. Whenever a character was from or sent to a generic Asian destination, they would play that tune to set the location. I have googled every combination of terms I can think of to narrow this down, but come up with nothing. I want it for a ringtone.