Sightings

 Yet another random walk. :)

Says it all ...

Illustration: Sam Rodriguez

Glen Gould, the electrified and connected recluse, is my favorite pianist. Intense, passionate, intellectual and equipped with technique to the 9s, his take on Bach, Beethoven and Scriabin remains forever timeless.

J.S.Bach "The Goldberg Variations" [ Glenn Gould ] (1955)

"No supreme pianist has ever given of his heart and mind so overwhelmingly while showing himself so sparingly,” said Gould's close friend, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

Says it all indeed.

Random Walk XX

A short clip ranging from water to flowers in yet another random walk taken by yours truly. :)

Altogether now ...

Migrating cranes near Straussfurt, Germany. Climate change and biodiversity are “more deeply intertwined than originally thought,” one of the leaders of the new report said.Credit...Jens Meyer/Associated Press

Biodiversity and climate change are two sides of the same coin and both must be addressed simultaneously if we are to save ourselves from a dark future of our own making. Rewild the world as per David Attenborough is the first thing to do now as without the natural world and its inherent link to biodiversity, civilization, as we know it, will be gone in a flash. 

Some environmental solutions are win-win, helping to rein in global warming and protecting biodiversity, too. But others address one crisis at the expense of the other. Growing trees on grasslands, for example, can destroy the plant and animal life of a rich ecosystem, even if the new trees ultimately suck up carbon.

What to do?

Unless the world stops treating climate change and biodiversity collapse as separate issues, neither problem can be addressed effectively, according to a report issued Thursday by researchers from two leading international scientific panels.

Everything's connected including GW and biodiversity

Young mangrove trees on the outskirts of Ziguinchor, the main town in the Casamance region of Senegal. Credit...John Wessels/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The two groups have operated largely in their own silos. But their subjects are connected by something elemental, literally: carbon itself.

The same element that makes up heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane and soot is also a fundamental building block of the natural world. It helps form the very tissue of plants and animals on earth. It’s stored in forests, wetlands, grasslands and on the ocean floor. In fact, land and water ecosystems are already stashing away half of human-generated emissions.

Another connection between climate and biodiversity: People have created emergencies on both fronts by using the planet’s resources in unsustainable ways.

Time to shape up, right?

 

The Alien ... Earth style :)

Morays are Earth's version of the Alien as seen by the clip above. Awesome without question. :)

All bony fishes — those with skeletons made mostly of bone, rather than cartilage — have pharyngeal jaws in addition to their main jaws. Pharyngeal jaws lie behind the pharynx, or throat. They are smaller than the jaws in fishes' mouths and are used for gripping and piercing or crushing food, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. 

But unlike most fishes' pharyngeal jaws, those in moray eels "are highly mobile" and can spring past the throat and into the morays' mouths, said Rita Mehta, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC).

Long muscles pull morays' pharyngeal jaws forward to grasp prey and then slide it down their throats. (Image credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation (after Rita Mehta, UC Davis))

Our homegrown alien indeed. :)

Draught 101

Source: U.S. Drought Monitor·Conditions during the first week of June.

Anybody buying a house in AZ is nuts.

An intense drought is gripping the American West. Extreme conditions are more widespread than at any point in at least 20 years, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the government’s official drought-tracking service.

And the hottest months of summer are still to come.

The same applies to FL.

Source: U.S. Drought Monitor

Any questions?

It's getting worse ...

A temperature "misery index" shows peak levels across the Southwest (orange and yellow), and the upper air flow shows how the jet stream is being pushed north, away from the heat dome parked over the Four Corners region. (Earth.nullschool.net)

By the numbers: In Death Valley, Calif., which holds the distinction of having recorded the hottest temperature on Earth, the June high-temperature record of 129°F is likely to be threatened Wednesday and Thursday. Death Valley hit 124°F on Tuesday.

The average temperature there for this time of year is about 110°F.

Several noteworthy records were tied or fell on Tuesday, including:

• 107°F in Salt Lake City, tying the city’s all-time record for anytime of the year and beating its previous record for hottest temperature in June, which had stood at 106°F.
• Billings, Montana also tied its all-time hottest temperature on record for any month with a high of 108°F on Tuesday.
• Laramie, Wyo. tied its all-time high temperature record of 94°F on Tuesday.

Again, we did it to ourselves.

20%

 The ice shelf on Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier lost about one-fifth of its area from 2017 to 2020, mostly in three dramatic breaks. (Image credit: Joughin et al./Science Advances)

Global warming, the 900lb gorilla, is alive and well but we already know that, right?

Pine Island Glacier, one of the fastest-shrinking glaciers in Antarctica, hastened its slide into the sea between 2017 and 2020, when one-fifth of its associated ice shelf broke off as massive icebergs, a new study reveals.

The glacier sped up another time in recent history, between the 1990s and 2009, when warm ocean currents ate away at the underside of the ice shelf, destabilizing its structure and causing the glacier to accelerate toward open water, according to a 2010 report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 

(a) Modeled velocity constrained to match the 1996 (GL96) flow speed. The lower-right inset shows the grounding-line positions as observed in 1996 (cyan) and 2009 (magenta). Figure 1a shows the modeled grounding lines, which for simplicity exclude the isolated, grounded region in 2009. (b) Profiles (along black line in Figure 1a) of measured (color) and modeled flow speed (grayscale). Only the average for the three pre-retreat models constrained by the 1996 data (GL96) are shown, since they are almost identical. The GL09 curves show the different model responses to instantaneously moving the grounding line from the 1996 to 2009 position. Black bar indicates the region that ungrounded.

GW acceleration enters primetime 24/7.

Makeup :)

So glad I'm a guy save for the shaving bit. :)

 

Fabbing

 

The last step in AI ascendency is the ability for said tech to design chips in just 6 hours versus the 6 month  process done by us. Warms the cockles of one's heart does it not?

Google says it has developed a way of using deep reinforcement learning (RL) to create computer chip floorplanning in just six hours — a complicated feat that typically requires humans months to achieve. 

The chips Google's AI develops are on par or superior than those humans can create, the team explained in its paper published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, June 9. 

In a first for one of its commercial products, Google's research is being used for the company's upcoming tensor processing unit (TPU) chips, which are optimized for AI computation.

So Google's AI method to design chips can eventually be used to improve and quicken the future development of AI. 

Perhaps our final invention? "No one knows, do one ..."  - Fats Waller

Invisibilities

This pix, taken by yours truly, represents an object with great invisibilities as we see nothing of how the building was made, the raw materials used or the tech involved to erect said sky scraper in the first place and ... we haven's even discussed basic research in learning about what base materials needed to be known beforehand prior to building the construct in the first place. What's interesting about this is the fact the great invisibility applies to virtually everything in reality from dust motes to the universe as everything's connected at levels we will never fully understand.

An illustration of M4, the sponge after four iterations of the construction process

Beginning in 2013, yours truly became fascinated by the fact infinities reside in finite space as shown by geniuses Georg Cantor, Karl Menger and Benoit Mandelbrot, among significant others, which became a series of blurbs in BRT that indirectly connects to the great invisibilities of everything known to exist in a entangled reality we will never fully understand.