A CF of historic proportions ...

Two trillion (and counting), the Afghan initiative has been a CF of historic proportions. With this in mind, please read the NYTimes post and weep but note that this fubar, on top of W's excellent adventure in Iraq, Hillary's and Obama's Lybian soiree and Obama's and Trump's intervention in Syria, has cost the US a cool 8+ trillion (and counting) while leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake since 9/11/2001. 

In the land of the blind ... :)

Portraits of a different kind ...

A few fossil bones in clay and limestone have opened a greater vista back into Time than the Indian imagination ventured upon for its Gods: and every day turns up something new.

—Edward FitzGerald to E.B. Cowell, January 28, 18451

And so it begins, the endless fascination of dinos never ends, particularly when one sees what they actually look like as seen by this amazing portrait of a different kind: A life-size model of the early Cretaceous tyrannosaur Yutyrannus huali; from Mark Norell’s The World of Dinosaurs: An Illustrated Tour. Originally part of the American Museum of Natural History’s 2016 exhibition ‘Dinosaurs Among Us,’ curated by Norell, it is twenty-three feet long and is now in the permanent collection of the Dinosaur Gallery at the Center of Science and Industry, Columbus, Ohio.

Yours truly often imagines just how dangerous and wonderous this world must have been as dinos ruled earth for over 250 million years, a length of time dwarfing the age of mammals without issue.  

The reason for this blurb centers on the superb piece in the NY Review of Books titled What Were Dinosaurs For? as said piece delves, in-depth, into the uneasy relationship of science vs. theology, issues Mark Twain described in incendiary fashion in his work titled Letters from the Earth.

In Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, God gathers the archangels and announces that He has made animals. Satan—who else?—asks, “What are they for?” Perhaps you can hear the strangeness, the dissonance in this question, which is the sort that marks the boundary between theology and science. Scientists have no trouble asking what the various parts of an organism are for or what function it has in a food web or an ecosystem. But they tend not to ask Satan’s question because it offers no hypotheses to be tested. What are animals for? Here is God’s chilly answer: “They are an experiment in Morals and Conduct. Observe them, and be instructed.” So Satan goes to Earth and soon concludes that “the people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane.”

In reading Twain, Waiting for Godot comes to mind as Godot never shows up ...

Endgame:

Why do I mention all this? As I was reading some recent books on dinosaurs, I kept wondering, “What were dinosaurs for?” It’s a ridiculous question, and I wondered why I was wondering it. After all, dinosaurs were “for” exactly what we are “for,” what every organism has been “for” since life began. Every species that has ever lived is a successful experiment in the enterprise of living, and every species is closely kinned at the genetic level with all other species. This is harder to grasp than it seems, partly because the logic of that Satanic preposition—“for”—is so insidious, so woven through the problem of time. Teleology is the moralizing of chronology, and nowadays science tries to keep watch for even the slightest trace of it, any suggestion that evolution has a direction tending to culminate in us or in what we like to call intelligence or in any other presumably desirable end point.

To yours truly, it's probabilities. We live in a quantum universe where there are no certitudes, just probabilities. This is why Camus' Myth of Sysiphus rings forever true for yours truly.

Read What are Dinosaurs For? as it is truly extraordinary in every sense of the word. :)

Parker is stellar :)

The Parker Solar Probe is earning its pay in spades as new discoveries keep coming in as Parker continues it's ever closer orbits around the sun.

Cosmic dust, the remnants of epic crashes from which planets, stars, comets and asteroids were born after the Big Bang, is floating all over our solar system. It gets everywhere like glitter. Suspected for years by scientists, the dust-free zone is thought to be a region relatively close to the Sun where the dust would be roasted by extreme solar temperatures, which would eventually morph it into a gas and leave behind a clearer piece of sky. WISPR found that space dust in the proximity of the Sun starts to thin out at about 7 million miles away. As the probe approached, it saw even less dust at 4 million miles.

It gets better.

Parker imaged the corona during its first two ten-day perihelion passes, the perihelion being the point in its orbit closest to the sun. It had quite a view. While it could see things telescopes and satellites can see from further out in space and even from Earth, it was able to see the decrease in F-coronal light intensity that Howard and Vourlidas mentioned, which is indicative of a dust-free zone. If there are multiple dust-free or minimal-dust zones around the sun, then that means one thing—rings of dust in between.

There's more ...

Among the findings are new understandings of how the Sun's constant outflow of solar wind behaves. Seen near Earth, the solar wind plasma appears to be a relatively uniform flow – one that can interact with our planet's natural magnetic field and cause space weather effects that interfere with technology. Instead of that flow, near the Sun, Parker's observations reveal a dynamic and highly structured system, similar to that of an estuary that serves as a transition zone as a river flows into the ocean. For the first time, scientists are able to study the solar wind from its source, the Sun's corona, similar to how one might observe the stream that serves as the source of a river. This provides a much different perspective as compared to studying the solar wind were its flow impacts Earth.

How cool is that?

Of waves & power ...

Nature's raw power, relentless and without morality, simply makes one stop and be amazed, something seen in spades with Chris Bryan's extraordinary video titled Mocean ...

“MOCEAN” is an incredible short film by Chris Bryan that captures the raw power and beauty of waves. All images where shot using a Phantom Flex 4K camera with Leica Summilux lenses and Bryan’s custom underwater housings.

To whit ...

I love filming in the ocean more than anything, it’s not just a job, it’s a passion. And sometimes it’s nice just to document waves without surfers riding them. The feeling of jumping off the rocks in the dark by myself just to capture the very first rays of light hitting the ocean without another soul in sight is unexplainable, it’s one of the most amazing feelings ever, it’s like my own personal therapy.

And to realize that you’re the only person on this planet that got to witness these rare moments of absolute beauty as they happen is a really special feeling.

Yes indeed.

War is a Racket/Rev XX ...

War is a Racket, a no BS essay detailing the raison d'ete for war, written by Major General Smedly Butler, the only two time Congressional Medal of Honor Winner, comes to mind here as he's right, the end product of this dreadful enterprise are the dead and wounded while the weapons makers and  banks who finance this racket, profit, no matter what the cost may be.  With this being said, cluster bombs, manufactured by the millions, show, in no uncertain terms, why war is the vilest enterprise of all.

In early 1991, BLU-97s were a type of explosive submunition making their combat debut. But Crick and other munitions experts knew they were exceptionally hazardous. Cluster munitions are bedeviled by a widespread failing: a high dud rate, meaning that a large percentage fail to detonate when they are supposed to. BLU-97s in particular were sensitive to disturbance and possessed no timed self-destruct feature. Further, whether because of an oversight or by design, they had a particularly nasty feature — once a bomblet was armed, there was no way to disarm it. The weapon’s fuzes could not be safely broken apart or removed, and an armed bomblet was too sensitive to handle. The sole official protocol in 1991 for making a BLU-97 dud safe was to use another explosive to destroy it.

WTF??? Read the rest of the NYTimes piece to see why Buttler's essay rings true.

Major General Smedly Butler

Wired to the max ...

Wired to the max ...

Skynet looms ...

BRT has posted many blurbs about autonomous weapons,  an AI-driven tech becoming commonplace given just how little money it takes to build lethal hardware not imagined just one year ago.

When developing machines that can make own decisions – typically called autonomous systems – the ethical questions that arise are arguably more concerning than those in object recognition. AI-enhanced autonomy is developing so rapidly that capabilities which were once limited to highly engineered systems are now available to anyone with a household toolbox and some computer experience.

Using a variety of techniques, autonomous drones are already a threat. They have been caught dropping explosives on U.S. troops, shutting down airports and being used in an assassination attempt on Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. The autonomous systems that are being developed right now could make staging such attacks easier and more devastating.

Ask the Houthis how effective this tech was against the Saudi oil refineries.

Skynet looms ...

Consider the following wartime scenario: Hoping to spare the lives of soldiers, a country deploys an autonomous weapon to wipe out an enemy force. This robot has demonstrated military capabilities that far exceed even the best soldiers, but when it hits the ground, it gets confused. It can’t distinguish the civilians from the enemy soldiers and begins taking innocent lives. The military generals desperately try to stop the robot, but by the time they succeed it has already killed dozens.

Who is responsible for this atrocity? Is it the commanders who deployed the robot, the designers and manufacturers of the robot, or the robot itself?

End game: We have already lost control because we don't know how the AI driving the tech works.

Interesting is it not?

The Terminator doing backflips et al ...

Ahead of it's time ... by 2000+ years

The word's first computer was built over 2000 years ago, something rather amazing without question.

To whit:

More than 21 centuries ago, a mechanism of fabulous ingenuity was created in Greece, a device capable of indicating exactly how the sky would look for decades to come -- the position of the moon and sun, lunar phases and even eclipses. But this incredible invention would be drowned in the sea and its secret forgotten for two thousand years.

This video is a tribute from Swiss clock-maker Hublot and film-maker Philippe Nicolet to this device, known as the Antikythera Mechanism, or the world's "first computer". The fragments of the Mechanism were discovered in 1901 by sponge divers near the island of Antikythera. It is kept since then at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece.

The Antikythera mechanism (Fragment A – front); visible is the largest gear in the mechanism, approximately 14 centimetres (5.5 in) in diameter

Of Ice & Snow

Dividing Line

Snowbound

Channel Crossing :)

Of ice & snow

Channeling Stuben

'Tis the season