Told by an idiot ...

Out, Out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing. Macbeth Act V, Scene V

Well, the worst debate in history is now history with Biden looking pale and weak and Trump looking robust and insane. To yours truly, Shakespeare's quote sums it up because America is nearing its end if nothing of consequence is done. It's that bad and people know it. A complete reset is needed, beginning with term limits for all three branches and a complete redo of the tax code as endless years of the corruption of Mitch McConnell and significant others, combined with the ever increasing impact of inequality ginned up by the tax code, is killing this nation 24/7.

What does the worst debate in American history look like? It looks like the debate that took place on Tuesday night between President Donald Trump and the former Vice-President Joe Biden. It was a joke, a mess, a disaster. A “shit show,” a “dumpster fire,” a national humiliation. No matter how bad you thought the debate would be, it was worse. Way worse. Trump shouted, he bullied, he hectored, he lied, and he interrupted, over and over again.

But it's not just Trump, it's the system. As George Carlin in The Real Owners said, The real owners own this fucking place. Politicians don't matter, the MIC, banks and the big corporations do and they want this disastrous state of affairs to run forever because in the end, it's all about their money. Always has been, always will be. A revolution is needed, let's hope it's peaceful but they never really are, just ask the French about this.

To be continued.

Universality

 Machine learning doesn't actually have a face. 

But if it ever does, we'd like that face to look something like this.

The Arstechina quote says it all regarding AI, the open ended tech evolving faster than thought possible due to the rise of neural nets, the analog front end of AI but to make the code work on all platforms, an abstraction layer accepted by all must be created and now it's happening as we speak.

URZ will focus its research and programming efforts on a fundamental high-performance computing (HPC) challenge where modern computers utilize different types of hardware for different calculations. Accelerators, including graphics processing units (GPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), are used in combination with general compute processors (CPUs). Using different types of hardware make computers very powerful and provide versatility for a wide range of situations and workloads. Hardware heterogeneity, however, complicates software development for these computers, especially when specialized components from a variety of vendors are used in tandem.

One major reason for this complication is that many accelerated compute architectures require their own programming models. Therefore, software developers need to learn and use a different—and sometimes proprietary—language for each processing unit in a heterogeneous system, which increases complexity and limits flexibility.

oneAP's cross-architecture language Data Parallel C++ (DPC++), based on Khronos Groups' SYCL standard for heterogeneous programming in C++, overcomes these challenges with its single, unified open development model for performant and productive heterogeneous programming and cross-vendor support.

Why this is important.

URZ's collaboration on the oneAPI standard looks like it will be a good start toward fulfilling Intel's promises that oneAPI will be about all hardware, not just Intel's. The development efforts will be led by Aksel Alpay, who is specifically trying to bring AMD (Radeon) GPU support to oneAPI.

To fully understand this, we need to dive a little deeper into oneAPI's underlying technologies. OneAPI is built on top of Intel's Data Parallel C++ (DPC++), which is itself built atop C++ and Khronos SYCL code abstraction layer standards. Alpay is himself the founding developer of the hipSYCL implementation of the SYCL standard, and his work already explicitly supports multiple CPUs, Nvidia GPUs via CUDA, and AMD GPUs via ROCm. creating his exquisite paintings.

hipSYCL is a part of the wider SYCL hardware-abstraction ecosystem, and it targets vendor-neutral, near-native performance on CPUs and GPUs alike.

AI ... will be everywhere. The question to ask is, what kind of AI will it be.

Early Fall 2020

Copacetic

Mirror Smooth

Stay Puff CU

Purple Flower

Surface Tension

Reflection 2Step

WASP 189

Getting broiled is an understatement for the Wasp 189 system.

WASP-189b, the target of the CHEOPS observations, is an exoplanet orbiting the star HD 133112, one of the hottest stars known to have a planetary system. "The WASP-189 system is 322 light years away and located in the constellation Libra (the weighing scales)," explains Monika Lendl, lead author of the study from the University of Geneva, and member of the National Center of Competence in Research PlanetS.

"WASP-189b is especially interesting because it is a gas giant that orbits very close to its host star. It takes less than three days for it to circle its star, and it is 20 times closer to the star than Earth is to the Sun," Monika Lendl says. The planet is more than 1.5 times as large as Jupiter, the largest planet of the solar system.

Which means ...

Monika Lendl further explains that planetary objects like WASP-189b are very exotic: "They have a permanent day side, which is always exposed to the light of the star, and, accordingly, a permanent night side." This means that its climate is completely different from that of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system. "Based on the observations using CHEOPS, we estimate the temperature of WASP-189b to be 3,200 degrees Celsius. Planets like WASP-189b are called "ultra-hot Jupiters. Iron melts at such a high temperature, and even becomes gaseous. This object is one of the most extreme planets we know so far," says Lendl.

How CHEOPS finds these outliers.

When a planet passes in front of its star as seen from Earth, the star seems fainter for a short time. This phenomenon is called a transit. When the planet passes behind the star, the light emitted and/or reflected by the planet is obscured by the star for a short time. This phenomenon is called occultation. Credit: © ESA

We know so little but at least we're trying. :)

 

Variation 2Step

As suspected, Black Holes wobble a bit. :)

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration delivered the first image of a black hole, revealing M87*–the supermassive object in the center of the M87 galaxy. The EHT team has now used the lessons learned last year to analyze the archival data sets from 2009-2013, some of them not published before. The analysis reveals the behavior of the black hole image across multiple years, indicating persistence of the crescent-like shadow feature, but also variation of its orientation–the crescent appears to be wobbling. The full results appeared today in The Astrophysical Journal.

Snapshots of the M87* black hole appearance, obtained through imaging / geometric modeling, and the EHT array of telescopes in 2009-2017. The diameter of all rings is similar, but the location of the bright side varies. Credit: M. Wielgus, D. Pesce & the EHT Collaboration

But while the crescent diameter remained consistent, the EHT team found that the data were hiding a surprise: the ring wobbles, and that means big news for scientists. For the first time, they can get a glimpse of the dynamical structure of the accretion flow so close to the black hole’s event horizon, in extreme gravity conditions. Studying this region holds the key to understanding phenomena such as relativistic jet launching, and will allow scientists to formulate new tests of the theory of General Relativity.

And the beat goes on ...

Nature at it's finest :)

Nature at it's finest, courtesy the Hubbell.

This stunning image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 5643 in the constellation of Lupus (The Wolf). Looking this good isn’t easy; thirty different exposures, for a total of 9 hours observation time, together with the high resolution and clarity of Hubble, were needed to produce an image of such high level of detail and of beauty.

Yes indeed.

It's all about the teams

It's all about the teams. Something I see 24./7 with my 2 SEAL brothers who I love dearly. :)

Put a fork in it, it's done ...

Flames consumes both sides of a segment of Lake Berryessa during the Hennessey fire 

in the Spanish Flat area of Napa, California on August 18, 2020. JOSH EDELSON/AFP

This surreal image from hell is just the beginning of a hells scape destined to change the world for the worst for hundreds of years as global warming is already baked in no matter what we do in the near term. With this in mind, the notion of an Elysium comes to mind here as the acceleration of this existential nightmare reminds us that we did it to ourselves.

The Age of Megafires: The World Hits a Climate Tipping Point

From Siberia to Australia to the western U.S., massive fires have consumed millions of acres this year and spawned fire-generated tornados and other phenomena rarely seen before. Scientists say the world has entered a perilous new era that will demand better ways of fighting wildfires.

Like so many aspects of the burgeoning number of wildfires, the increase in lightning is connected to climate change. Lighting increases by about 12 percent for every 1 degree Celsius temperature increase. Simple mathematics, and many studies, suggest that there will be much more lightning in some places as temperatures rise by another 2 or 3 degrees C this century in wildlands that are already severely stressed by drought, disease, and insects such as the mountain pine beetle.

Thunderstorms created by the energy of intense fires, known as pyroCbs, have occurred in the past. But they were once rare and few people suspected that they could shoot out lightning that would trigger blazes 20 miles from the fire’s front, as one did in the Alberta tar sands region in 2016. Five pyroCbs erupted in 2017 in the forests of British Columbia and Washington within the space of just five hours — the mother of all pyroCb events, according to David Peterson a meteorologist with the U.S. Naval Defense Lab. No one expected anything to rival that until this year’s fires in Australia generated at least 18 pyroCbs.

Many experts no longer think that Scandinavia and the east coast of North America will be spared because it is expected to be wetter there in the future. Sweden needed outside help to deal with record fires in 2018. The Pinelands of New Jersey may get a lot rain, but 10 days of blue skies, high temperatures, and gusty winds can nevertheless create prime fire conditions. People who live in the Pinelands know this all too well based on the region’s prolific fire history.

Last but not least ... the cost factor as it's only to go up.

Graphs showing wildfire frequency, severity, and firefighting costs in the United States from 1985 to 2017. COURTESY OF THE UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS

A pyroCbs portrait.

A pyrocumulonimbus cloud towers over thick smoke from fires burning near Canberra, Australia, in 2003. The cloud's strong winds caused the fires to explode into the Australian city. Credit: New South Wales Rural Fire Service

Pyrocumulonimbus is the fire-breathing dragon of clouds.

A pyrocumulonimbus storm combines smoke and fire with the features of a violent thunderstorm. Pollutants from these storms are funneled into the stratosphere. 

A cumulonimbus without the "pyre" part is imposing enough -- a massive, anvil-shaped tower of power reaching five miles (8 km) high, hurling thunderbolts, wind and rain.

Add smoke and fire to the mix and you have pyrocumulonimbus, an explosive storm cloud actually created by the smoke and heat from fire, and which can ravage tens of thousands of acres. And in the process, "pyroCb" storms funnel their smoke like a chimney into Earth's stratosphere, with lingering ill effects. 

Disclaimer: This material is being kept online for historical purposes. Though accurate at the time of publication, it is no longer being updated. The page may contain broken links or outdated information, and parts may not function in current web browsers. 

Visit NASA.gov for current information

Said disclaimer is the action of the Trump administration whereby any information pertaining to climate change is prohibited. Said page exists only because of some brave scientists taking action to preserve critical information we the public should know about. For yours truly, this is why Trump must go.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star ... :)

 53 closest stars to us and nearly all have planets. 25 reside in 2 or 3 star systems. Awesome.

The nearest stars to Earth are in the Alpha Centauri triple-star system, about 4.37 light-years away. One of these stars, Proxima Centauri, is slightly closer, at 4.24 light-years.

Of all the stars closer than 15 light-years, only two are spectral type G, similar to our sun: Alpha Centauri A and Tau Ceti. The majority are M-type red dwarf stars.

Quite a cozy neighborhood is it not? :)

Autocracy: Rules for Survival

A wakeup call by Masha Gessen ...

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday. Instead, she said, resignedly,

We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle [that] we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.

The 6 rules guys like Trump and Bolsonaro live by. Ignore them at your peril.

1. Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. 
2. Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.
3. Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. 
4. Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. 
5. Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an “amazing victory for the American worker,” Republican politicians have fallen into line. 
6. Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past.  

Truer words never spoken.