At TARTLE we talk a lot about how our business model – a data marketplace centered on the sovereign individual – can help improve a number of fields. We’ve mentioned how it can help businesses with their marketing and their product development. We’ve spent more time talking about how TARTLE’s data marketplace can be of use in the medical field by directly tracking the habits of individuals and the effects of different foods, medicines, and treatments on them. What about other fields though? Can TARTLE be of use even in the hard sciences?
Before we answer that question, let’s back up a bit, in fact, let’s back up all the way to the peaks of the Andes Mountains in Chile. This mountain range, one of the longest and most imposing in the world, is home to a number of observatories. There are few lights to drown out the stars, little local pollution, and due to the height the air is remarkably thin which means there are fewer obstructions, especially thermal distortions between the telescope and the vacuum of space. These observatories take in tons of data, so much data that teraflops barely begin to cover it. Unfortunately, a lot of that data doesn’t get shared for a long time. It gets locked into the servers at the observatory for later study. Often, images from the telescope can sit for months or years before anyone sees them.
Fortunately, there are those who are working on changing that. The Rubin Observatory and Google have recently entered into a partnership that will get data from the telescope uploaded to the cloud in real time. For the first time, all of that data will be getting put into the cloud where it can be accessed by researchers around the world, as it is gathered. Image after image after image, from the depths of space to the cloud for study. That saves a lot of time, money, and space for the observatory since they don’t have to worry about all the server equipment and its upkeep. Researchers benefit by getting faster access to the latest data. That helps by being able to amend existing theories or even formulate new ones based on the incoming information faster than ever before.
How does all of this relate to TARTLE? After all, we don’t have the servers that Rubin will be uploading to. However, anyone from around the world can sign up to TARTLE and that includes amateur astronomers. That brings us back to our question, how can TARTLE help with the hard sciences?
Let’s just look at the example of amateur astronomy. It’s well known that amateur astronomers discover the majority of comets every year. What if all amateur astronomers were uploading their photos to TARTLE and then sharing them with observatories and universities around the world? How many more discoveries could be made by integrating and comparing them with each other and with the photos taken by the larger observatories? How many comets could be discovered? We would be more likely to pick up a near earth asteroid before it gets too close to act. Study of the sun would also be advanced as amateur scopes can track sunspots.
There are a number of other sciences that could be benefited as well. Geology could benefit from data gathered by rock hounds, marine biology from deep sea fishermen, paleontologists from amateur fossil hunters, meteorologists from tornado chasers, all uploading and sharing their data in real time. The possibilities are endless.
All of these are just further examples of the democratization of data and how individuals can benefit themselves and others through the simple act of signing up with TARTLE and sharing their data. TARTLE is part of a movement that is making it possible for individuals to take part in new and exciting scientific discoveries that will improve the knowledge base of humanity as a whole.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
At TARTLE we talk a lot about how our business model – a data marketplace centered on the sovereign individual – can help improve a number of fields. We’ve mentioned how it can help businesses with their marketing and their product development. We’ve spent more time talking about how TARTLE’s data marketplace can be of use in the medical field by directly tracking the habits of individuals and the effects of different foods, medicines, and treatments on them.
Automated (00:07):
Welcome to Tartle Cast, with your host Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and source data defines the path.
Alexander McCaig (00:25):
Hello, hello. Welcome back to Tartle Cast. We were discussing the absurdity of Greenland.
Jason Rigby (00:33):
Yes, Alex.
Alexander McCaig (00:35):
Were you crying?
Jason Rigby (00:36):
Yes, I was. I was laughing so hard right before this. I'm reading the article that we're going to be talking about, and then I made a comment and you started busting out laughing, and then I started crying.
Alexander McCaig (00:45):
It was so funny, and I'm not going to share it with anyone because it's just for us. That's our own internal funny.
Jason Rigby (00:50):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (00:53):
Guys, we've got a giant world map over here, and everything's beautiful, colorful, it has all the textures of mountain ranges and everything across Russia, China, South America, North America. And then you just got this big, light blue blob of Greenland.
Jason Rigby (01:11):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (01:13):
The whole country makes no sense.
Jason Rigby (01:15):
No.
Alexander McCaig (01:16):
I know that... I used to work with a woman whose father lived in northern Norway and he found, in his yard, underneath the ice, fossilized palm trees.
Jason Rigby (01:35):
No way.
Alexander McCaig (01:36):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (01:36):
That's crazy.
Alexander McCaig (01:38):
And when I look at that, what that kind of tells me is that, there must've been a polar shift and the pole of the Earth, the magnetic pole, must've been somewhere around the line of where Florida is, because if you needed to shift the hemispheres and the temperatures-
Jason Rigby (02:03):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (02:03):
And almost like the pitch of the Earth, in order to get such a temperate thing, to get a palm tree up in Norway, it would have to be down... the North Pole would have to be down where Florida is.
Jason Rigby (02:14):
Haven't they done it where they've kind of put all the countries together and it made like a puzzle, in a weird kind of way?
Alexander McCaig (02:20):
Yeah, sort of like Pangaea, how they kind of spread out. All planets are expanding.
Jason Rigby (02:24):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (02:25):
All the time, they're all growing in size. The larger a planetary body grows, the more round it is, and Earth isn't perfectly round. The things that are closest to being perfectly round are things like Jupiter.
Jason Rigby (02:35):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (02:36):
Because it's so big. And the sun is so large, it's something that is almost perfectly spherical. But what I think is interesting about that is, that Greenland probably had palm trees on it. If you had palm trees in northern Norway, some tens and thousands of years ago-
Jason Rigby (02:51):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (02:52):
When there was a pole shift, I bet you, underneath the ice in Greenland, there is probably tons of lush palm.
Jason Rigby (02:57):
Yeah. Well, I had talked to somebody and they had this view of canopy theory, where there was protection of ozone, like the Earth, all of the Earth, was perfectly 80 degrees. And then there was a water canopy over it that would separate... And then that's how people were able to live 800, 900 years. [crosstalk 00:03:21]. You know, in the Bible it talks about that, but there's lots of older manuscripts that talk about people living forever.
Alexander McCaig (03:25):
Yeah, living a long time, that's interesting. Abe Lincoln talked about weird stuff like giants living in the U.S.
Jason Rigby (03:29):
Yeah, he was one.
Alexander McCaig (03:31):
And underneath some of the Indian burial sites here in the U.S., there are giants bones.
Jason Rigby (03:36):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (03:37):
I don't know where he got his info from.
Jason Rigby (03:39):
I don't know either, yeah.
Alexander McCaig (03:41):
But I think that's interesting. You can check out the burial sites in Ohio.
Jason Rigby (03:43):
Have you seen... Speaking of the opposite of giants-
Alexander McCaig (03:45):
So off topic.
Jason Rigby (03:45):
Which are little people.
Alexander McCaig (03:47):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (03:47):
Have you seen China, that new thing that they're doing with-
Alexander McCaig (03:51):
No.
Jason Rigby (03:53):
You can literally, this is no lie, they're literally cutting the... What's this, femur?
Alexander McCaig (03:59):
Okay.
Jason Rigby (04:00):
Is this the big?
Alexander McCaig (04:00):
No, the femur's up here and this is your shin.
Jason Rigby (04:02):
Yeah, the shin. They're taking the femur and the shin, cutting it, and then they stretch it and then they have some way... But the bone is actually growing back in-between.
Alexander McCaig (04:12):
Oh, they're lengthening people's legs.
Jason Rigby (04:14):
Legs, yeah.
Alexander McCaig (04:14):
Yeah. That's a weird surgery.
Jason Rigby (04:16):
Yeah. And it takes like a year, year and a half.
Alexander McCaig (04:18):
I'm already 6'5".
Jason Rigby (04:20):
Yeah, you don't need that. But it's something like three feet or four feet.
Alexander McCaig (04:21):
Is it really necessary to want to be taller?
Jason Rigby (04:24):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (04:24):
Isn't that funny how, in ancient Chinese culture, they had foot binding?
Jason Rigby (04:28):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (04:28):
Let's make feet smaller because it's a sign of beauty, and now they're like, we got to be taller.
Jason Rigby (04:34):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (04:34):
Talk about going to the polar opposite end of the spectrum.
Jason Rigby (04:37):
Yeah. That's crazy, because I know a lot of people weren't very tall back... Napoleon wasn't that tall.
Alexander McCaig (04:41):
No.
Jason Rigby (04:42):
I heard he was pretty short.
Alexander McCaig (04:43):
Yeah, listen.
Jason Rigby (04:44):
He had the Napoleon Complex.
Alexander McCaig (04:45):
Yeah, Napoleon Complex, like my dog, but... I don't know. What's the big deal about being tall? I'm tall, it's a roll of the dice.
Jason Rigby (04:54):
Well the problem, like one guy... because I think it's a hereditary thing where it's like dwarfism or whatever. That always sounds funny to me because I always picture what is it, Sleeping Beauty? No, not Sleeping Beauty.
Alexander McCaig (05:07):
[inaudible 00:05:08], Snow White.
Jason Rigby (05:08):
Snow White, yeah. And those little... the little grumpy guy. [crosstalk 00:05:14], with the picks.
Alexander McCaig (05:13):
Why do they always make them grumpy? I think of Lord of the Rings.
Jason Rigby (05:15):
And then they got like a big... Yeah. And then they got like a big mustache and beard.
Alexander McCaig (05:18):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (05:18):
But they're actually able to...It's stage three right now.
Alexander McCaig (05:23):
Stage three what?
Jason Rigby (05:25):
Medicine, where if they know that [crosstalk 00:05:28].
Alexander McCaig (05:27):
FDA stage three?
Jason Rigby (05:28):
Yeah, FDA stage three, that if you have this... Because it's a genome issue that their faces look different and their body is smaller and all that.
Alexander McCaig (05:38):
Dwarf, yeah. Thank you for explaining dwarfism.
Jason Rigby (05:42):
But no, that they can inject this into a child and it cures that.
Alexander McCaig (05:46):
What?
Jason Rigby (05:47):
Yeah. Isn't that crazy, the advances in medicine we have going on now?
Alexander McCaig (05:53):
I don't know how many dwarfs are around the world, but it's interesting that there's medical investment, financial investment going into that. I think it's just a strange thing. We're curing dwarfism before we cure cancer.
Jason Rigby (06:06):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (06:06):
Come on.
Jason Rigby (06:08):
I think it's great. I know there's a lot of health issues and I know... But it may have been an offside of working on something else or they could have been looking at gene mutation.
Alexander McCaig (06:15):
Yeah, that's probably what it was. They were probably doing some sort of cloning thing like, oh look what we found. We can cure dwarfism too, at the same time.
Jason Rigby (06:21):
Yeah, because I know the site, I was listening to a PhD from Stanford, Andrew Huberman was his name and he's a neuroscientist for eyes and they've pretty much got the whole blind thing.
Alexander McCaig (06:35):
On lock?
Jason Rigby (06:36):
Pretty much. They said within the next five years, everybody that's blind will be able to see.
Alexander McCaig (06:40):
That's incredible. I love that.
Jason Rigby (06:41):
Isn't that cool?
Alexander McCaig (06:41):
Yes. Seeing is such an important sensory thing. And speaking of seeing-
Jason Rigby (06:46):
And being able to see out.
Alexander McCaig (06:48):
And being able to see out, nice job with the bridge, there's a nice advancement that is happening with astronomy.
Jason Rigby (06:56):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (06:57):
Down in the Rubin Observatory, is that what it's called?
Jason Rigby (07:00):
Yes, yes.
Alexander McCaig (07:00):
Down in Chile, or Chile, it's a great place because it's nice and dark, very high altitude, so the air is thin and you have less diffraction coming through the atmosphere. What that is, is you get these thermal waves that cut across the atmosphere and it distorts your imagery. That's why stars twinkle. But there's something interesting that they're doing with the observatory that... Observatories naturally collect so much information, but a lot of the observatories have been limited by their infrastructure, their data infrastructure. It's like we only have so many servers here at the observatory to crunch numbers and actually catalog and store this radio telescope data that they're actually collecting. Because of that, you have slower processing times, you can't share the information as easily because it's locked down, it's very siloed at the observatory itself.
Alexander McCaig (07:54):
So Google has partnered with the Rubin Observatory down in Chile, and the observatory isn't live yet, but it's a newer one, so that all the radio telescope data that they're going to be pulling from the universe as they observe it, is all going to be put into the Cloud. And because the Cloud is a naturally scalable and flexible infrastructure and the cost of storage has dropped dramatically, it's so cost-effective to store things in the Cloud rather than on your own hard infrastructure there, that the observatory is like, yeah, we would love to partner with Google and their Cloud structure for storage because we're looking to ingest, what'd they say, 500 or-
Jason Rigby (08:39):
Yeah, it was, let me get it right here, my phone is acting up.
Alexander McCaig (08:42):
Petabytes, 500 petabytes, or 5,000?
Jason Rigby (08:44):
With the Best Buy ad.
Alexander McCaig (08:47):
5,000.
Jason Rigby (08:47):
Best Buy is just screwing me up on this.
Alexander McCaig (08:50):
It's 5,000 petabytes?
Jason Rigby (08:52):
Yeah. It's called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, and it's just taking pictures, it's just constant.
Alexander McCaig (08:59):
All it does, over and over and over and over and over. Yeah.
Jason Rigby (09:02):
Yeah. It's a 3,200 megapixel camera used for that. Look at this, look at this, just best buy [crosstalk 00:09:09].
Alexander McCaig (09:09):
How does Best Buy get a full ad like that?
Jason Rigby (09:11):
Look at this. Now it's not letting me.
Alexander McCaig (09:13):
No, that's insane. But I think it was somewhere around 500, 5,000 petabytes.
Jason Rigby (09:18):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (09:18):
Which is something akin to 500,000 terabytes.
Jason Rigby (09:22):
Yeah, but when you think about that much data being... And I had read an article and they were talking about, it's not a picture like we would see. It's not like you could... It's one that the machine learning can understand the picture easier than... So if we look at the pictures, it wouldn't make sense to us.
Alexander McCaig (09:40):
No, a lot of them are layered.
Jason Rigby (09:42):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (09:43):
Over here in New Mexico, we have the Very Large Array and it's across a 22-mile span so that they move these huge radios, radio telescopes. And what it's doing is, it's sending out a radio signal and waiting for it to bounce back, and then it collects that information. They shifted in three different sets. One's a very narrow set, it's like A, B or C. One's a mid-width, and then one is full 22 miles apart, and that gives three different sets of resolutions. And then those resolutions, when you look at them, it doesn't tell you anything. But when you begin to layer them with computational technology, then you actually get an image, then you start to get something that makes sense.
Alexander McCaig (10:21):
When you have something that's taking pictures in frequencies of light that you can't see, it's not going to do you any good, but when the computer can analyze that data, especially so many, 32,000 megapixel pictures being taken, now something special can happen. And when you afford yourself the computational power of many servers across the globe for Cloud storage to analyze this, it removes a lot of the computational burden on the laboratory itself or the observatory, and can offload it on the computers, and then they can efficiently process so much data to drive answers quicker from any sort of astronomical observation.
Jason Rigby (11:00):
Yeah. And I think, I would hope, with that amount of all these observatories taking these pictures, that we'll get a craft on one of them.
Alexander McCaig (11:08):
Yeah, that'd be cool.
Jason Rigby (11:10):
You would think.
Alexander McCaig (11:10):
Yeah, you would hope. You would hope.
Jason Rigby (11:13):
Yeah, and that it would be released.
Alexander McCaig (11:14):
Well, the funny part is, you ever looked through a telescope?
Jason Rigby (11:17):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (11:18):
You're looking at something really far away, so something that's relatively close, it goes right by too quick.
Jason Rigby (11:23):
Yes, yeah.
Alexander McCaig (11:23):
It'll just be out of resolution, so whatever you're taking a picture of, it'd have to be super far out there.
Jason Rigby (11:28):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (11:28):
Even though the resolution's high and you get a picture of a star, it's millions of light years away, .
Jason Rigby (11:33):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (11:34):
That craft would have to be enormous.
Jason Rigby (11:37):
Yeah. It would have to be-
Alexander McCaig (11:37):
When I say enormous, it would have to be so big, you'd probably not fathom that. [crosstalk 00:11:45].
Jason Rigby (11:44):
Yeah, see, we don't even think about that. We're like, oh, we could just take a picture of this small spaceship just scooting on by.
Alexander McCaig (11:50):
Could you imagine trying to lock that in on a telescope or something.
Jason Rigby (11:53):
Oh yeah. I bet they have technology for that though, nowadays.
Alexander McCaig (11:56):
Well, if you think about-
Jason Rigby (11:56):
I know satellites, they can do that here. You can lock in on a person.
Alexander McCaig (11:59):
Well, Raytheon had their missile-tracking, like when you're in a fighter jet, that's an incredible technology. It's like a little square and it tries to catch up to it and right when it's on it, it's on it. And it'll track that thing as it's going thousands of miles an hour.
Jason Rigby (12:11):
Isn't that amazing? Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (12:12):
It's really amazing.
Jason Rigby (12:13):
Yeah. I love that stuff. When we look at data and we look at... We can obviously Google, it's helping science here, but when we look at Tartle and we look at our ability to be able to help humanity, what does that look like, especially when it comes to our philosophy on data?
Alexander McCaig (12:32):
Yeah, let's look at the stars as a metaphor. When you get all these different observatories across the globe, collectively focusing on one thing, we get a very clear image. We can analyze a black hole and all of the data, to truly understand what's going on. We can search for that anti-matter because the targeted focus of all those resources are on one specific thing. It's like all those telescopes are beaming into one isolated position in space and that allows us to derive some sort of answer. If you pair that over to what we're doing with Tartle, what we're doing is, we're getting all the people all over the globe to take their data and target it towards one specific cause that they may care about. And then when we have that, we can define very clear pictures and put all of our evidence together so that we can solve whatever that thing might be. Does that make sense?
Jason Rigby (13:28):
Yeah. When you did that, you pointed to Greenland.
Alexander McCaig (13:32):
Greenland haunts me.
Jason Rigby (13:33):
Yeah, you keep looking at it.
Alexander McCaig (13:34):
It's something about it. I got this weird attraction to Greenland today.
Jason Rigby (13:38):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (13:39):
Okay?
Jason Rigby (13:40):
There's something up there.
Alexander McCaig (13:41):
9:30 AM, Christmas Eve, Greenland.
Jason Rigby (13:44):
There's probably an oath tree.
Alexander McCaig (13:45):
Yeah. There's probably an Eila up there. Yeah, that's right. There's a big palm oath tree up in Greenland.
Jason Rigby (13:50):
Well, we've gone a few minutes over thinking about this.
Alexander McCaig (13:53):
But did that make sense, my metaphor for-
Jason Rigby (13:55):
Yes. Yeah, no. I think it did. And I hope that helps people, especially those that are interested in astronomy.
Alexander McCaig (14:01):
Yeah. Listen, it's collective power.
Jason Rigby (14:02):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (14:03):
That's what we're doing.
Jason Rigby (14:04):
And we would love to help any type of astronomy with Tartle. That would be [crosstalk 00:14:11].
Alexander McCaig (14:10):
Absolutely, whatever you want to know. Wouldn't astronomers want to analyze what people are just naturally observing.
Jason Rigby (14:17):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (14:18):
Would research labs want to purchase amateur telescope data? Of course they would.
Jason Rigby (14:22):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (14:23):
Why not?
Jason Rigby (14:24):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (14:24):
There's so many other people collecting things and when we can bring them all together, you're doing a lot of good stuff.
Jason Rigby (14:29):
Yeah. We're the eBay of data.
Alexander McCaig (14:31):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like eBay and Acorns blended together.
Jason Rigby (14:35):
Blended together, yeah.
Alexander McCaig (14:37):
Earn money over time, blah, blah, blah. And I can also sell my data, this is great.
Jason Rigby (14:40):
Somebody will want this.
Alexander McCaig (14:42):
I hope they do.
Jason Rigby (14:43):
It's a collectible, somebody wants it.
Alexander McCaig (14:45):
Yeah, it's a collectible.
Jason Rigby (14:45):
Whether it's a [crosstalk 00:14:46].
Alexander McCaig (14:46):
Idata's a collectible.
Jason Rigby (14:48):
We're going to squirrel here, but I was looking at... Because I have all those Starbucks mugs of where I go somewhere.
Alexander McCaig (14:54):
I've been drinking one right here.
Jason Rigby (14:55):
You got the Washington State one.
Alexander McCaig (14:56):
I've almost spilled this coffee ten times.
Jason Rigby (14:57):
I think it has Sasquatch on it.
Alexander McCaig (15:01):
There he is. Yeah, there he is.
Jason Rigby (15:01):
Of course, I notice that first.
Alexander McCaig (15:03):
Yeah, that's the only thing you're looking at.
Jason Rigby (15:04):
My conspiracy theory, yeah.
Alexander McCaig (15:06):
Can you look at something normal like the goat?
Jason Rigby (15:07):
No. But speaking of goats, I have goat protein. You saw that yesterday.
Alexander McCaig (15:14):
I thought that was quite interesting.
Jason Rigby (15:15):
Yeah, they have-
Alexander McCaig (15:17):
Isn't that because goat milk's the closest thing to breast milk in terms of digestibility?
Jason Rigby (15:22):
Yeah, and I know that... Yeah. It's supposed to be more digestible and cleaner, but where this supposedly comes from, the goat farm, they feed them apple cider vinegar every morning and everything's organic.
Alexander McCaig (15:33):
Sounds like my diet.
Jason Rigby (15:35):
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You need to take apple cider vinegar every morning. [crosstalk 00:15:39].
Alexander McCaig (15:38):
Why do you think the Greek were obsessed with it?
Jason Rigby (15:41):
I take a tablespoon. How much do you take?
Alexander McCaig (15:42):
I just chug.
Jason Rigby (15:43):
Yeah, you chug apple [crosstalk 00:15:45].
Alexander McCaig (15:45):
I chug until it burns.
Jason Rigby (15:46):
Yeah. I can't do that. Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (15:47):
It's really disturbing.
Jason Rigby (15:48):
I don't know how much you're supposed to take.
Alexander McCaig (15:50):
I don't know.
Jason Rigby (15:51):
I know it gets your enzymes and everything flowing in the morning before you eat.
Alexander McCaig (15:54):
Gets me jacked up.
Jason Rigby (15:55):
Yeah, ready. Speaking of that, getting jacked up, let's go to Greenland.
Alexander McCaig (15:59):
Yeah. See ya.
Jason Rigby (16:00):
Let's dig. [crosstalk 00:00:16:11].
Automated (16:11):
Thank you for listening to Tartle Cast, with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and the source data defines the path, the path. What's your data worth?
