Avian Soundboards

And of course, the Superb Lyre Bird :)

Nature never disappoints. 

Non Sequitur or ... Once in a Lifetime :)

In a very odd way, Once in a Lifetime | Talking Heads, applies.

[Verse 1]
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?"

[Chorus]
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

[Verse 2]
And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"

[Chorus]
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

[Bridge]
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Any questions?

Invisibility cloak becomes real ...

Harry Potter's invisibility cloak becomes real. Hyperstealth rules ... for now.

Here's another clip. Metamaterials and AI, a heavy combination without question.

Hyperstealth Invisibility Cloak 9 Minute Promotional Video from HyperStealth Corp. on Vimeo.

Any questions?

It's Bad, It's Really Really Bad! :)

Any questions?

Night Walks

Patterns

Archway

Night for Day

Open for Dinner

Red Moon Rising

Fractured Geometry

Fractured geometry, with yours truly's feet purposely left in, shows, in indirect fashion, how tech is generating uncontrolled feedback loops and reality distortions fields to the max, thus driving the US populace into the madhouse as uncontrolled recursions can make one mad, especially when viewing the never-ending regurgitation of news 24/7 with particular emphasis on politics and what it means for America. 

To whit ...

Here’s one big reason that America is driving itself batshit crazy: the explosion of computerized records, emails, inter-office memos, Twitter trails, Facebook memorabilia, iPhone videos, YouTubes, recorded conversations, and the vast alternative universe of storage capacity for all this stuff makes it seem possible to constantly go back and reconstruct reality. All it has really done is amplified the potential for political mischief to suicide level.

It’s a major unanticipated consequence of the digital “revolution.” It has gotten us stuck looking backward at events, obsessively replaying them, while working overtime to spin them favorably for one team or the other, at the expense of actually living in real time and dealing with reality as it unspools with us. If life were a ballgame, we’d only be watching jumbotron replays while failing to pay attention to the action on the field.

Read the rest of Kunstler's piece to see the ramifications of a looming Constitutional Crisis of biblical proportions as we move ever closer to the year of our lord 2020.

A Constitutional crisis looms ...

Illustration by Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone

This illustration by Victor Juhasz truly represents the inner character of The Donald. If one goes to Rolling Stone, one will see other Juhiaz gems of the esteemed POTUS but ... as my loyal readers know, this blurb isn't about a great illustrator but rather about impeachment and what it means for America.

What happens, though, if a president uses the powers of office to disrupt the next election? What if that president does so by brazenly enlisting the aid of a hostile foreign power? Or if he does so by trying in secret to extort cooperation from a foreign ally threatened by that same hostile power? What if the president has denied the existence of an ongoing systematic cyberattack from the hostile power, which every U.S. intelligence service calls a clear and present threat to our democracy? What if the actions of that president raise urgent questions about the legitimacy of the next election and cast a darker cloud over how he gained the office in the first place?

On most of these issues, yours truly agrees but to this writer, the real transgressions lie with the denial of science, the gutting of the EPA and Trump's muzzling  of NOAA/NASA regarding hurricanes or the adverse impact of global warming on the world, as these acts compromise the well being of the country's people and, to me, constitutes the real reason for impeachment (not Ukraine or Russiagate) 

Being above the law also applies  ... 

There have been earlier impeachments and interferences with democratic institutions in our history, but nothing like this one. In this, as he likes to say, Trump truly stands alone. He has assaulted American democracy, claimed he has the authority to do so, and dared anybody to do anything about it, dismissing with contempt Congress’ clear constitutional authority to oversee and check the executive branch. He thinks he can use the office of the presidency as a personal instrument, along with private emissaries, to desecrate the rule of law and then protect himself from the consequences. He even declares in public that he is the law, claiming that, according to Article II of the Constitution, “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Not even the most corrupt and criminal of our previous presidents has tried to pervert our most sacred institutions as openly as Trump has.

Question ... If impeachment does succeed, the stellar Mike Pence becomes god's warrior for America. Warms the cockles of one's heart doesn't it?

The betting pool says ...

The betting pool says, in IMHO, that life on Mars is a given.

NASA’s reservation against a direct search for microorganisms ignores the simplicity of the task accomplished by Louis Pasteur in 1864. He allowed microbes to contaminate a hay-infusion broth, after which bubbles of their expired gas appeared. Prior to containing living microorganisms, no bubbles appeared. (Pasteur had earlier determinted that heating, or pasteurizing, such a substance would kill the microbes.) This elegantly simple test, updated to substitute modern microbial nutrients with the hay-infusion products in Pasteur’s, is in daily use by health authorities around the world to examine potable water. Billions of people are thus protected against microbial pathogens.

This standard test, in essence, was the LR test on Mars, modified by the addition of several nutrients thought to broaden the prospects for success with alien organisms, and the tagging of the nutrients with radioactive carbon. These enhancements made the LR sensitive to the very low microbial populations postulated for Mars, should any be there, and reduced the time for detection of terrestrial microorganisms to about one hour. But on Mars, each LR experiment continued for seven days. A heat control, similar to Pasteur’s, was added to determine whether any response obtained was biological or chemical.

The Viking LR sought to detect and monitor ongoing metabolism, a very simple and fail-proof indicator of living microorganisms. Several thousand runs were made, both before and after Viking, with terrestrial soils and microbial cultures, both in the laboratory and in extreme natural environments. No false positive or false negative result was ever obtained. This strongly supports the reliability of the LR Mars data, even though their interpretation is debated. - Gilbert V. Levin, Experimenter of the Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment on NASA’s spectacular Viking mission to Mars in 1976.

So why wasn't the LR on Curiosity or installed on the next rover, scheduled to land on Mars in 2020?

When tragedy becomes farce or ... god has a plan

When tragedy becomes farce ...

First of all, the only time the words “Trump,” “fighting,” and “corruption” go together in a sentence is when it’s something like: “Donald Trump is fighting hard to keep authorities from uncovering his corruption.” 

But let’s pretend, for argument’s sake, that the US president really is interested in fighting corruption abroad. If that were the case, why is he such a strong supporter of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing three sets of corruption charges right now? And why does Trump back some of the more corrupt and ruthless strongmen in the world?

Or better yet, god has a plan

Finally, we figured out why so many “Christians” and their leaders seem to think that Trump was somehow chosen by God, even though this president is the antithesis of the teachings of Jesus, cheated on his third wife with a porn star, and knows less about the Bible than he does about running a profitable casino. It’s because, they’re insisting, God did handpick Trump — but not because of the reasons the president’s base thinks. Instead, it is the only way to get an uncharismatic stiff like Mike Pence into the Oval Office.

Yes, The Lord chose Trump because He knew there was no way that such a corrupt serial liar with a total lack of morals or scruples could stay in office for a full term. But even God could not anticipate that Republicans would turn their backs on Him and bow down at the altar of Trump, instead.

One cannot make this up.

A simple matter of measurement, right???

Yours truly loves science. Why, because, when done right, it's a discipline whose theories are designed to be disproved, something seen in a "simple" matter of measurement, in this case, the Hubble Constant and how it relates to our understanding of the universe.

We're getting something wrong about the universe.

It might be something small: a measurement issue that makes certain stars looks closer or farther away than they are, something astrophysicists could fix with a few tweaks to how they measure distances across space. It might be something big: an error — or series of errors — in  cosmology, or our understanding of the universe's origin and evolution. If that's the case, our entire history of space and time may be messed up. But whatever the issue is, it's making key observations of the universe disagree with each other: Measured one way, the universe appears to be expanding at a certain rate; measured another way, the universe appears to be expanding at a different rate. And, as a new paper shows, those discrepancies have gotten larger in recent years, even as the measurements have gotten more precise.

"We think that if our understanding of cosmology is correct, then all of these different measurements should be giving us the same answer," said Katie Mack, a theoretical cosmologist at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and co-author of the new paper.

The central plot in the paper shows that most measurements of the Hubble constant and mass fraction point to one range of numbers, but the Cepheid-supernova measurement (yellow bar) points to a different range of numbers. (Image credit: Weikang Lin, Katherine J. Mack, and Liqiang Hou)

It's not all bad as new physics might be at hand. :)