Monday, March 31, 2014

Habeas Corpus


The debate is over, has been for a long time for rational people regarding GW but... for flat earthers refusing to believe earth's becoming an oven because of us, the art of stupid looms, especially with three reports coming in from NASA & NOAA showing how the rise of CO2 levels impacts climate change and the UN's IPCC (350mb - PDF) monster titled Climate Change 2013 providing ever more evidence that GW's a reality show writ large. Because of this, it's time for unbelievers to finally pack it in and realize we're in big trouble and must make radical  changes now regarding energy and it's connect to the environment or face consequences too dire for civilization to even contemplate. 

Click on the National Academies graphic below to get a concise view of why ignoring GW truly is the art of stupid. To learn more about how researchers put together climate models to explain their findings, click here.


The Question to ask now is, does Obama have the guts to pull the plug on Keystone XL?
Well do ya?...

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Burning Down the House


BRT has talked about the Tar Sands operation in Alberta, Canada on numerous occasions (There is a Hell) from the tech perspective while Jacques Leslie's powerful NYTimes op ed piece,  Is Canada Tarring Itself? touches upon her very soul.



It gets better.


Killing Me Softly applies here if you ask me. 


Deep Time



Saturday, March 29, 2014

Emergence


Alan Turing, one of the true giants in both science and technology, has appeared in BRT in numerous articles describing his work, not only as the inventor of AI and the digital computer (along with John Von Neumann) but also on his seminal contribution to Chaos (Stone Soup) when he posited his then revolutionary theory of how patterns emerge from seeming randomness as seen through the coloration of animals. Now, it seems researchers have put Turing's theory to the test and found out he was right about how chaos functions in the real world.

According to Turing’s theory, designs like fur patterns result from the interactions between individual cells; in other words, the state of a cell influences that of its neighbors, and they, in turn, influence their neighbors. You can see the results of this process in the images collected here; they’re a kind of digital representation of Turing’s idea, except using pixels instead of cells. It’s the relationship among these cells and pixels that ultimately produces a pattern from randomness — a relationship that relies on interacting, molecular signals that spread among groups of otherwise identical cells.

Turing called this the reaction-diffusion process, meaning that it’s driven by reactive molecules that can diffuse between cells. He called these molecules “morphogens” because they affect the morphology, or physical character, of a cell. One molecule activates a change, like color, and one inhibits it. Patterns are produced by varying concentrations of the morphogens as they interact and spread through a population of cells.

The video above shows how this interaction works, something, in this case, psychedelic, wonderful and spot on. :) Seen below is a double pendulum example of chaos in action.




Full Moon Tetrad


Full moons fascinate me as readers of this blog well know. It's the light and shadows, particularly on snow, that never cease to amaze, with their definition and coolness of illumination. Interestingly enough, you have to endure the cold to get viable images as cold air is clearer than warm, something astronomers have known about since the beginning of time. With this in mind, check out what's happening, beginning on April 15th, (I know, I know :)) as a bountiful of lunar eclipses are about to begin, an extremely rare event moon watchers like myself anticipate with great excitement while praying for clear skies when nature puts on a show as awesome as this. 



Nature never disappoints - Robert E.


The All Seeing Eye


Yours truly loves to take pictures and do videos as loyal readers know. Having said this, the notion of a lensless camera fascinates this writer to no end, where this tech can go also has no end according to an interesting Physorg piece titled Ultra tiny camera has no lens - uses algorithm to develop pictures.



Times, they keep a'changin. - Bob Dylan


Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Sunday, March 23, 2014

Transition


Life is all about transition as is this video with transport as prime driver. Enjoy

Friday, March 21, 2014

Cosmic Inflation Explained - PHD Comics :)


For even more information on inflation, click BRT's Grand Unification blurb. :)

Difficult at best


Click the Nasa Earth Observatory map to view the interactive version showing the increase of temperature anomalies due to global warming. After that, check out how close we are to collapse due to an interesting mix of self inflicted conditions that must be changed or we become toast if NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center's model of collapse proves to be true.





Overshoot, Greed, & GW, the troika of collapse, looms.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Grand Unification


Ripples in space time, something Einstein dreamed about when formulating General Relativity back in 1905, was considered to be a lock but without proof, gravitons remained forever theoretical and elusive, kind of like the Higgs Boson, "we know it's there but we can't prove it." notion until now.



Implications of this research boggles the mind as 
  1. Guth's theory of inflation (to explain why the universe is homogenous in texture) is valid.
  2. Gravitons, the quantum carriers of the gravitational force, most likely exist, and work, in similar fashion, to photons, the quantum carriers of electromagnetism, which means...
  3. A possible grand unification of quantum mechanics to relativity, a goal Einstein pursued in vain until his death in 1955, now becomes possible because of the fact gravity is most likely a quantum entity like the three other forces seen in nature, the strong, weak and electromagnetic.
  4. The Multiverse, a theory independently proposed by Hugh Evertt, Andrei LindeDavid Deutsch and Bryce De Witt among significant others, becomes ever more plausible as inflation is not only seen to be real and eternal but also to be fractal in nature, able to spawn multiple universes without issue. 




Last but not least, here is a beautiful diagram of the history of "our' universe. :)




Taking Back the Net


Articulate, uncompromising and resolute, Edward Snowden walks the walk and talks the talk in his analysis concerning why it's imperative we take back the net before it's too late. BRT has discussed this at length as loyal readers know but listening to Snowden is something people should do to better understand what's at stake here. 

Robert E.


History of Film in a Minute


The history of film in a minute. Awesome without question. :)

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

The Thermo-haline et al



But this "conveyor belt", which acts as the world's thermostat, is slowing due to global warming.

The largest source of the coldest water in the world's oceans ceased producing Antarctic Bottom Water in 1976. The surface water around Antarctica, which has be been freshening since the 1950's, formed a lid of low-density water stopping the overturning process in the Weddell sea near the coast of Antarctica. The Weddell Sea polynya, an area of open water the size of New Zealand, was the most productive source of cold Antarctic bottom water in the 1970s. Relatively warm salty water is pushed upwards by ocean currents moving over a ridge in the Weddell sea. Before 1980 this salty water reached the surface releasing large amounts of heat, then cooled and sank to the bottom of the ocean. The heat kept the huge hole in the ice pack called a polynya open, and a massive oceanic convection cell formed in the Antarctic winter. This convection cell cooled the global oceans while warming the air around Antarctica. Antarctic Bottom Water, the most voluminous water mass in the oceans, is now being replaced by warmer, less dense water masses as the deep oceans warm.

Which means...

The strengthened winds have spun up the strong current that rings Antarctica called the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. This ring of fast moving water tends to block the transport of warm subtropical water towards Antarctica. However, the geography of the northern hemisphere has the opposite effect on the poleward transport of warm subtropical water. The Atlantic ocean is aligned to funnel warm subtropical water into the Arctic ocean as the subtropical highs strengthen and the trade winds speed up. Thus, the collapse of the Weddell Sea polynya has lead to increased transport of oceanic and atmospheric heat towards the Arctic. The rapid warming of the Arctic and the extraordinarily rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, which was not predicted by climate models, is a likely consequence of the collapse of the Weddell Sea polynya, which had been the most productive source of Antarctic Bottom Water (ABW). The authors of this report don't discuss the effects of the end of Weddell Sea bottom water formation on the global ocean circulation or the Arctic (the discussion here is based on my extensive review of paleoclimatology research) but they do hint at the importance of the decline in ABW formation.

Which means... the jet stream is weakened as well because when the arctic becomes warmer, the temperature gradient from north to south lessens, thus causing the jet stream to lose strength and move south as a result, which enables such events as the Polar Vortex and intense snow storms to occur with greater frequency.

  
A study in 2001 found that stratospheric circulation can have anomalous effects on the weather regimes.[29] In the same year researchers found a statistical correlation between weak polar vortex and outbreaks of severe cold in the Northern Hemisphere.[30][31] In more recent years scientists identified interactions with Arctic sea ice decline, reduced snow cover, evapotranspiration patterns, NAO anomalies or weather anomalies which are linked to the polar vortex and jet stream configuration.[29][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] However, because the specific observations are considered short-term observations (starting c. 13 years ago) there is considerable uncertainty in the conclusions. Climatology observations require several decades to definitively distinguish natural variability from climate trends.

Summing it up, does global warming exist when taking in all these factors? Yes, particularly if there's an increase in anomalies, the precursors to phase transitions, where one state replaces another due to an environmental change such as heat, the agent that transforms water into a solid, a liquid or to a gas, depending on how hot the environment gets. 

)


Addendum, Click 15 Seconds, a short BRT bulb showing just how hot the world has become in the last 60 years. Something for thought if you ask me.

Strandbeest Evolution


A good friend of mine turned me onto Strandbeest Evolution, incredibly beautiful and mysterious work created by Dutch artist Theo Jansen. Enjoy.



Works for me. :)