Jack O'Lanterns on Town Green ...

Had to do another. :)

In spite of the intense weather and trees falling down, the Redding Garden Club's Jack O'Lanterns on Town Green was a success. :) Enjoy.

Spooktacular

Had to do this video for the old home town. Lots of work but also lots of fun. Halloween rules. :)

Great tusker ... RIP

Magnificent says it all with this extraordinary portrait of an old matriarch moments before her death.

The photographer who captured the images, Will Burrard-Lucas, seems to have a knack for spotting creatures of this ilk. He's just released another series, this time of a majestic "tusker" elephant, of which there are thought to be fewer than 20 left on Earth.

The Elephant Queen, as Burrard-Lucas called her, died soon after he took the photos. She was known by the code F_MU1 and lived in the Tsavo region of Kenya.

It is remarkable then that this elephant lived to be over 60 and died of natural causes.

Yes indeed.

The most elegant experiment in physics

Thomas Young's 1801 double-slit experiment.

Click the Molecular Expressions graphic below to see why Young's experiment was so profound.

Elegant indeed

An important version of this experiment involves single particles (or waves—for consistency, they are called particles here). Sending particles through a double-slit apparatus one at a time results in single particles appearing on the screen, as expected. Remarkably, however, an interference pattern emerges when these particles are allowed to build up one by one (see the above image). 

Quantum weirdness indeed. :)

Had to add a live version of the image seen above and ... there is no objective reality. :)

Hot, Hot, Hot

Peppers large and small have varying degrees of hotness but with Euphorbia, the hotness factor is literally off the charts. 

In Morocco there grows a cactus-like plant that’s so hot, I have to insist that the next few sentences aren’t hyperbole. On the Scoville Scale of hotness, its active ingredient, resiniferatoxin, clocks in at 16 billion units. That’s 10,000 times hotter than the Carolina reaper, the world’s hottest pepper, and 45,000 times hotter than the hottest of habaneros, and 4.5 million times hotter than a piddling little jalapeno. Euphorbia resinifera, aka the resin spurge, is not to be eaten. Just to be safe, you probably shouldn’t even look at it.

But while that toxicity will lay up any mammal dumb enough to chew on the resin spurge, resiniferatoxin has also emerged as a promising painkiller. Inject RTX, as it’s known, into an aching joint, and it’ll actually destroy the nerve endings that signal pain. Which means medicine could soon get a new tool to help free us from the grasp of opioids.

One never knows, do one? - Fats Waller

It's built in ...

A very good friend of mine clued me in on this NYTimes piece titled We Teach A.I. Systems Everything, Including Our Biases, a notion made all the more disquieting as programmers no longer know how AI works due to the fact these systems learn in real time, thus generating code to handle the knowledge gained independent of the creators that created them.

Last fall, Google unveiled a breakthrough artificial intelligence technology called BERT that changed the way scientists build systems that learn how people write and talk.

But BERT, which is now being deployed in services like Google’s internet search engine, has a problem: It could be picking up on biases in the way a child mimics the bad behavior of his parents.

BERT is one of a number of A.I. systems that learn from lots and lots of digitized information, as varied as old books, Wikipedia entries and news articles. Decades and even centuries of biases — along with a few new ones — are probably baked into all that material.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

― George Orwell, 1984

Heading toward the abyss

Looking at this frightening picture, complete with a burning scale model of Hong Kong, says it all in terms of this conflict ending up in an abyss of violence and suppression as China tightens its grip on the former British colony no matter what the cost may be.

The other spasm of violence Monday took place on an overpass across town from the shooting. There, a middle-aged man reprimanded a group of protesters, accusing them of lacking patriotism for the Chinese motherland. He was set ablaze.

“Go back to the Greater Bay Area!” protesters shouted at him, using Beijing’s term for the region of southern China that includes Hong Kong and neighboring cities.

The Hospital Authority said that both the protester who had been shot and the man who had been set on fire were in critical condition.

Echos of Paris '68 n'es pas?

In transit

The intrepid traveler Mercury tracks across the sun yet again. :)

On May 9, 2016, Mercury passed directly between the sun and Earth. This event – which happens about 13 times each century – is called a transit. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, studies the sun 24/7 and captured the entire seven-and-a-half-hour event. This composite image of Mercury’s journey across the sun was created with visible-light images from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager on SDO.

In transit indeed. :)

A close up of the intrepid traveler. :)

Image the world ...

64 mb sensor in a cell phone - yes indeed. 108mb sensor in a cell phone - yes indeed yet again. 2020 changes how cell phones image the world ... forever.

To whit ...

108MP camera mode confirmed

According to XDA Developers, the Samsung Camera app code has a 108MP photo mode. Max Weinbach found out  that the latest version of the camera software in the One UI 2.0 beta — Samsung’s flavor of Android 10 — contains support for 12,000 x 9,000 pixel images. In other words: 108 megapixels. 

XDA Developers claim that the camera software will most likely not output at that resolution by default. Instead, it will choose to group the pixels in the Isocell Bright HMX sensor in clusters of 4 o 9 pixels, saving 27MP or 12MP photos. That will dramatically increase the light sensitivity of the device.

The Isocell Bright HMX has a larger surface than any other sensor in the market, which in theory means it will be able to capture more light than all the competition — especifically from the Sony sensors found in the iPhone and Huawei phones. Sony is reportedly working on a much larger chip to compete with the Samsung sensor, dubbed the IMX686.

Let the new smartphone wars begin ...

This VERY rarely happens ... :)

This VERY rarely happens, AFAIK, as users tend to be relatively intelligent and don't accuse a vendor of imagined transgressions in such hilarious fashion but ... the notion of a software company actually calling you, let alone have a real person online able to help you, in today's age, goes beyond the realm of comprehension.

In yours truly's limited (thank god) experience with the help desk, there were just two vendors that stepped up, the first was an SGI (Silicon Graphics), software engineer who talked me through a nasty code problem with humor and grace and the other, an AWS network guru who saved the day for this old user getting access to a difficult AWS server environment. Without question, these two sessions proved that competency and wanting to help has not been totally extinguished in the year of our lord 2019.  :)