Minority Report - coming soon ...

Minority Report - via Project Soli - coming soon ...

Soli sensor technology works by emitting electromagnetic waves in a broad beam.

Objects within the beam scatter this energy, reflecting some portion back towards the radar antenna. Properties of the reflected signal, such as energy, time delay, and frequency shift capture rich information about the object’s characteristics and dynamics, including size, shape, orientation, material, distance, and velocity.

End result: virtual dials, buttons and sliders.

Minority Report indeed.

"Stewards" of the planet

The Dandora Landfill in Nairobi, Kenya is a sprawling 30-acre dump that grows by an average of 850 tons of solid waste a day, according to the U.N. Environment Programme.

Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto

BRT has talked often about the Anthropocene, the 6th great extinction event being caused by us 24/7.  With this sad fact in mind, NPR's Anthropocene Project details, via powerful photography and editorial, how this slow-motion disaster is occurring as we speak. Note that the climate change part of the equation is not being discussed, only environmental degradation, driven by pollution, resource depletion, greed and, of course, fossil fuel production.

Photographer Edward Burtynsky and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier were inspired by this ongoing discussion of the debate over this new geological era. These three Canadian artists traveled to 22 countries to research and document "places of obvious, physical human incursions on the landscape," says filmmaker de Pencier.

They created over 50 images capturing the impact of humans on the Earth, like a sprawling, 30-acre garbage dump in Kenya, seen above ed. large swaths of deforestation in Borneo and waterways damaged by oil siphoning in Nigeria.

An underground potash mine in the Ural mountains of Russia. The potassium-rich salt is mined to produce fertilizer. The team says that the mine shows the impact of modernized agricultural practices that help feed Earth's 7.5 billion people. The spiraled pattern seen here is caused by the machines used to extract the salts. Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto

The spiral patterns remind one of this little guy does it not?

Earth will recover ... once we are gone or finally wake up as to what it really means to be stewards of the planet, take your pick. One can only hope.

Europa ... with a touch of salt

Seems Europa's oceans may be more like our own based on recent findings regarding sodium chloride, the fancy name for table salt.

A familiar ingredient has been hiding in plain sight on the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. Using a visible-light spectral analysis, planetary scientists at Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have discovered that the yellow color visible on portions of the surface of Europa is actually sodium chloride, a compound known on Earth as table salt, which is also the principal component of sea salt.

The discovery suggests that the salty subsurface ocean of Europa may chemically resemble Earth's oceans more than previously thought, challenging decades of supposition about the composition of those waters. The finding was published by Science Advances on June 12

Europa ... with a touch of salt. :)

Weirdo - RIP

Yours truly never knew anything about Weirdo, an underground comix magazine created by the esteemed R. Crumb. The layouts remind me of Upper & Lower Case, a magazine for the ages for graphic designers, which is, IMHO, high praise indeed.

A prodigious purveyor of perverted art and the doyen of underground comix, Robert Dennis Crumb (“R. Crumb” in his signatures) has been illustrating the unhinged imagery lodged in his unconscious for six decades and counting. To his ongoing bewilderment, the controversial and formerly destitute artist’s drawings and cartoons now fetch top dollar at esteemed gallery exhibitions, such as David Zwirner’s recent Drawing for Print: Mind Fucks, Kultur Klashes, Pulp Fiction & Pulp Fact by the Illustrious R. Crumb.

Before he was famous, though, Crumb endured all sorts of problems. Though he’d made a splash in 1968 with his Zap Comix series, which helped define the underground comix aesthetic, his early thirties were plagued by disastrous relationships, lawsuits, financial struggles, heavy LSD use, and copyright infringements (including an X-rated film made about his Fritz the Cat character without his permission). But things started looking up as Crumb approached his 40th birthday — thanks, in part, to Weirdo, an independent magazine he launched in 1981 following a flash of insight during a meditation session.

Running from 1981 to 1990, lasting 27 issues and three editors, Weirdo lived up to its title. It shone a spotlight on the bizarre, the perverted, the grotesque, and the marginalized; comics by schizophrenics, convicts, and homeless people all made their way into its pages. Each issue sported an original Crumb cover and included stories by veteran and newcomer comic artists, oddball ephemera (such as ads for the spoofy Church of SubGenius), and works by forgotten artists (Gene Deitch, Stanislav Szukalski). Weirdo was an important series in comix history, and contained some of Crumb’s best, most refined work. And yet the mainstream art and comic world largely neglected Weirdo during its decade-long run, even as Crumb gained notoriety.

Prodigious talent without a doubt.

Up close & personal :)

A false-color image mosaic shows Daphnis, one of Saturn's ring-embedded moons, and the waves it kicks up in the Keeler gap. Images collected by Cassini's close orbits in 2017 are offering new insight into the complex workings of the rings.

Up close & personal, Cassini captures the inner workings of Saturn's rings in imagery both astounding and mysterious to a fault. 

To whit.

As NASA's Cassini dove close to Saturn in its final year, the spacecraft provided intricate detail on the workings of Saturn's complex rings, new analysis shows.

Although the mission ended in 2017, science continues to flow from the data collected. A new paper published June 13 in Science describes results from four Cassini instruments taking their closest-ever observations of the main rings.

Findings include fine details of features sculpted by masses embedded within the rings. Textures and patterns, from clumpy to strawlike, pop out of the images, raising questions about the interactions that shaped them. New maps reveal how colors, chemistry and temperature change across the rings.

Like a planet under construction inside a disk of protoplanetary material, tiny moons embedded in Saturn's rings (named A through G, in order of their discovery) interact with the particles around them. In that way, the paper provides further evidence that the rings are a window into the astrophysical disk processes that shape our solar system.

This false-color image to the right shows an infrared spectral map of Saturn's A, B and C rings, captured by Cassini's VIMS. Infrared image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/CNRS/LPG-Nantes Saturn image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/G. Ugarkovic

A mosaic showing Daphnis in the Keeler gap on the lit side of the rings, with three wave crests of the structure raised by Daphnis in the gap’s outer edge. (Middle and bottom) Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer radial scans across the lit side of the main rings, displayed as false-color images. Reddish colors signify a higher fraction of components other than water ice. The boxed region in the middle panel indicates the location of the bottom panel.

Cassini, the little probe that could. RIP.

Learning curve

You want to learn why AI is so powerful, check this out, it's all you need to know why this is so.

In this fascinating demonstration, programmer Johan Eliasson teaches a neural network to drive a car around a track. On YouTube he adds:

Teaching a neural network to drive a car. It’s a simple network with a fixed number of hidden nodes (no NEAT), and no bias. Yet it manages to drive the cars fast and safe after just a few generations. Population is 650. The network evolves through random mutation (no cross-breeding). Fitness evaluation is currently done manually as explained in the video.

Any questions?

The AGC - An unsung hero

The AGC: Apollo Guidance Computer is the unsung hero in the race to the moon, a visionary piece of hardware that had to work, always, was something totally new, a compact digital computer designed to enable man to navigate in space with no margin for error. 

When Apollo 11 touched down in the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969, it was more than a triumph of the human spirit, it was also the story of a cybernetic wonder called the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), which helped the Apollo astronauts safely navigate to the Moon and back. It was a computer so advanced for its time that the engineers who created it said they probably wouldn't have tried to do so if they'd known what they were getting themselves into.

The Apollo Guidance Computer is one of the unsung successes of the Space Race. This is probably because it was so phenomenally successful, having had very few in-flight problems – and most of those were due to human error. Carried aboard both the Command Service Module (CSM) and the Lunar Module (LM), it flew on 15 manned missions, including nine Moon flights, six lunar landings, three Skylab missions, and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Mission in 1975.

At the time it was the latest and most advanced fly-by-wire and inertial guidance system, the first digital flight computer, the most advanced miniature computer to date, the first computer to use silicon chips, and the first onboard computer where the lives of crew depended on it functioning as advertised.

The reason for the AGC.

The reason why all the Apollo missions carried at least one of these computers is that the Moon missions involved navigation problems that would have made Captain Cook go bug eyed. On Earth, navigation is, at its simplest, about finding one's way from one fixed point on the globe to another. For a trip to the Moon, it's like standing with a rifle on a turntable that's spinning at the center of a much larger turntable on which is a third turntable sitting on the rim, with all the tables spinning at different and varying speeds, and trying to hit the target by aiming at where it will be three days from now.

Why it worked ... always.

That was when computer pioneer Halcombe Laning came up with a solution. Instead of timesharing, the AGC was programmed for priority. In other words, each program was numbered in order of importance at any particular point in the mission timeline. If a higher priority program needed the computer, the others would simply stop and wait for it to finish, then resume. Meanwhile, the temporary memory held the data up to the point of stoppage in a way similar to that of a modern computer going into sleep mode. This not only eliminated crashes, but also allowed the crew to interrupt a running program with new data as it came in.

Read the entire New Atlas piece as its exquisitely detailed and utterly fascinating to the max. Without question, you will learn how really creative people invented new tech on the fly that went to where no man has ever gone before.

Click here to run the AGC simulator. Stellar to a fault.

119 years ago ...

119 years ago ...

There was magic in the air that day after all — movie magic. Nevil Maskelyne, a performing magician who also happened to be a pioneering filmmaker, preserved the spectacular event — as the moon passed between Earth and the sun — on celluloid, from a location in North Carolina.

More than a century later, Maskelyne's film of the eclipse has been digitally scanned and restored in a collaboration between the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) and the British Film Institute (BFI), and is free to view online. The film, titled "Solar Eclipse," is thought to be the world's oldest surviving astronomical film, Joshua Nall, chair of the RAS Astronomical Heritage Committee, said in a statement. [ In Images: Solar Eclipses Depicted in Fine Art]

Very cool indeed.

A vortex of a different kind ...

NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this view of an area within a Jovian jet stream showing a vortex that has an intensely dark center. Nearby, other features display bright, high altitude clouds that have puffed up into the sunlight.

The color-enhanced image was taken at 12:55 a.m. PDT (3:55 a.m. EDT) on May 29, 2019, as the spacecraft performed its 20th science flyby of Jupiter. At the time, Juno was about 9,200 miles (14,800 kilometers) from the planet's cloud tops, above approximately 52 degrees north latitude.

A vortex of a different kind indeed.

Dr. John - RIP

Tripped out and so late 60's, Dr John was a lurking presence @ Berklee and Boston 69-70. Intensity +

Writing for Rolling Stone in 1999, Tom Moon declared “I Walk on Guilded Splinters,” the closing track from Dr. John’s 1968 album Gris Gris “everything you want in voodoo music.” Fifty-one years ago, who knew they even wanted voodoo music?

Gris-Gris/rev II

& of course, Right Place Wrong Time says it all regarding Dr. J. :)

Working with Allen Toussaint in 1973 meant that Dr. John got the producer’s young and rising house band, the Meters. This is when things got, as Mac would say, desitively funky, and the tight, creeping groove of “Right Place Wrong Time” landed him his first and only Top 10 hit. In a review for Rolling Stone in 1973, Jon Landau opined that the Meters were “the greatest R&B studio band since Booker T. and the MGs” and that furthermore, “genius drummer Joseph ‘Zigaboo’ Modeliste drives the song with more power than we have any right to expect.”

RIO Dr. J. We will miss you big time.

Had to add one more.