PhysicsPhysics

Found an awesome blog, PhysicsPhysics. Informative without question. :)

Start Point for the Terminator

AI is starting to ramp up, as most techies know, but what has not been discussed regarding bots that would house AI in the real world, was the significant issue of being able to develop inexpensive, lightweight muscles able to do real work with low energy requirements akin to The Terminator, a concept considered not feasible until now.

Vanadium dioxide is poised to join the pantheon of superstars in the materials world. Already prized for its extraordinary ability to change size, shape and physical identity, vanadium dioxide can now add muscle power to its attributes. A team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has demonstrated a micro-sized robotic torsional muscle/motor made from vanadium dioxide that for its size is a thousand times more powerful than a human muscle, able to catapult objects 50 times heavier than itself over a distance five times its length within 60 milliseconds – faster than the blink of an eye.

"We've created a micro-bimorph dual coil that functions as a powerful torsional muscle, driven thermally or electro-thermally by the phase transition of vanadium dioxide," says the leader of this work, Junqiao Wu, a physicist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and the University of California-Berkeley's Department of Materials Science and Engineering. "Using a simple design and inorganic materials, we achieve superior performance in power density and speed over the motors and actuators now used in integrated micro-systems."

It get rather interesting when combining this tech to AI using neural net configured chips able to learn in similar fashion to how we learn using trial & error as prime driver to enable us to navigate the world in relatively proper fashion.

The new processors consist of electronic components that can be connected by wires that mimic biological synapses. Because they are based on large groups of neuron-like elements, they are known as neuromorphic processors, a term credited to the California Institute of Technology physicist Carver Mead, who pioneered the concept in the late 1980s.

They are not “programmed.” Rather the connections between the circuits are “weighted” according to correlations in data that the processor has already “learned.” Those weights are then altered as data flows in to the chip, causing them to change their values and to “spike.” That generates a signal that travels to other components and, in reaction, changes the neural network, in essence programming the next actions much the same way that information alters human thoughts and actions.

“Instead of bringing data to computation as we do today, we can now bring computation to data,” said Dharmendra Modha, an I.B.M. computer scientist who leads the company’s cognitive computing research effort. “Sensors become the computer, and it opens up a new way to use computer chips that can be everywhere.”

When taken to logical extremes, an alien intelligence, of our own makig, will emerge, a construct forever unknowable to us as systems such as these will program themselves in order to become more intelligent, a process that will happen millions of times faster than evolution, a notion brilliantly articulated in a new book titled Our Final Invention, James Barrat's wake up call to the profound implications of AI and what it could mean to mankind's continued existence on planet earth.

The Busy Child

artificial intelligence (abbreviation: AI) noun
the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
—The New Oxford American Dictionary, Third Edition

On a supercomputer operating at a speed of 36.8 petaflops, or about twice the speed of a human brain, an AI is improving its intelligence. It is rewriting its own program, specifically the part of its operating instructions that increases its aptitude in learning, problem solving, and decision making. At the same time, it debugs its code, finding and fixing errors, and measures its IQ against a catalogue of IQ tests. Each rewrite takes just minutes. Its intelligence grows exponentially on a steep upward curve. That’s because with each iteration it’s improving its intelligence by 3 percent. Each iteration’s improvement contains the improvements that came before.

During its development, the Busy Child, as the scientists have named the AI, had been connected to the Internet, and accumulated exabytes of data (one exabyte is one billion billion characters) representing mankind’s knowledge in world affairs, mathematics, the arts, and sciences. Then, anticipating the intelligence explosion now underway, the AI makers disconnected the supercomputer from the Internet and other networks. It has no cable or wireless connection to any other computer or the outside world.

Soon, to the scientists’ delight, the terminal displaying the AI’s progress shows the artificial intelligence has surpassed the intelligence level of a human, known as AGI, or artificial general intelligence. Before long, it becomes smarter by a factor of ten, then a hundred. In just two days, it is one thousand times more intelligent than any human, and still improving.

The scientists have passed a historic milestone! For the first time humankind is in the presence of an intelligence greater than its own. Artificial superintelligence, or ASI.

Now what happens?

Any questions?

Addendum: read Why the Future Doesn't Need Us by Bill Joy, a brilliant and chilling analysis of Robotics (W/AI), Genetic Engineering and Nanotech, by one of the true software geniuses of the connected age. If nothing else, it gives pause to the meaning of AI and what it portends to us as we move further into the 21st century.

This is not Photoshopped :)

When it rains at Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni (the world’s largest salt flat), the landscape transforms into a giant and shallow reflection pool. And if you happen to capture the phenomenon at sunset, you get a beautiful photograph like this.

At 10,582 square kilometers (4,086 sq mi) and 3,656 meters (11,995 ft) above mean sea level, Salar de Uyuni is unlike any other place in the world. Equally extraordinary is the salt flat’s ‘flatness’. Over the entire 10,582 square kilometers, there is only an average altitude variation of one meter. [Source]

The area is covered in a several-meter thick salt crust which also covers a pool of lithium-rich brine. In fact, the area is so rich in lithium, 50-70% of the world’s reserves can be found here. One final tidbit: the large area, clear skies and exceptional flatness of the surface make the Salar an ideal object for calibrating the altimeters of Earth observation satellites. How cool is that! [Source]

Break on thru to the other side - Jim Morrison/The Doors

Intense Tech

Yours truly loves intense tech designed to deal with intense environments, in this case, Antarctica, the coldest place on earth where Maria Leijerstam became the first person to get to the South Pole using a recumbent bike designed by Inspired Cycle Engineering to do the deed. 

Until now, no one reached the South Pole through cycling. Last winter, polar explorer Eric Larsen attempted to become the first person to cycle to the South Pole, but due to extreme adverse weather, he was forced to abandon the attempt.

However, this year many people also attempted to become the first person to cycle to the South Pole, and finally, 35-year-old British adventurer Maria Leijerstam has become the very first person, cycling to the South Pole.

However, to become the world’s first person reaching to the South Pole through cycling, Leijerstam used a recumbent fat-tired tricycle, nicknamed the White ICE Cycle, which is manufacturer by the UK’s Inspired Cycle Engineering (ICE).

Pretty cool I must say. :)

Why Gyroscopes are Cool

A Public Service Announcement.

Land of Hope

Land of Hope, the extraordinary Mosaicultures Internationales exhibit at Jardin Botanique Montreal, conveys a message of hope in terms of how we should deal with planet earth. With luck, this tribute to nature, using plants, combined with sculpture and creativity, will inspire man to become a better steward of the world in which we live.

Day for Night

Day for Night, a delightful film done by Francois Truffaut back in 1973, showed, in great detail, how directors, back then, turned day into night using neutral density filters to accomplish the task at hand as the tech, back in 1973, obviously could not film scenes in near darkness in any way, shape or fashion, something all together different when compared to today's rapidly evolvng video technology.

As proof, the short clip seen above, shows stills and video using nothing but moonlight, in conjunction with the whiteness of snow, to illuminate the work in the piece, something Truffaut would have used to great effect, if this tech had been around for him to use back in the day. :)

If you get a chance, watch this film as it's a gem. 

The World Outside My Window

NASA rocks. Check this beauty out. Eye Candy for all. :)

The Great Dying

Back in November of 2011, BRT's post, Something to Consider, addressed the present day great dying we are generating today due to global warming, environment degradation and resource depletion, conditions man made, conditions rectifiable, conditions ongoing, thanks to governmental and corporate collusion performed at planetary scale, something changing life on this planet in ways not seen since the  Great Dying of 250 million years ago.

“We as a species have never experienced 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural resources, and ecology at the University of Arizona and a climate change expert of 25 years, told me. “We’ve never been on a planet with no Arctic ice, and we will hit the average of 400 ppm... within the next couple of years. At that time, we’ll also see the loss of Arctic ice in the summers… This planet has not experienced an ice-free Arctic for at least the last three million years.”

For the uninitiated, in the simplest terms, here’s what an ice-free Arctic would mean when it comes to heating the planet: minus the reflective ice cover on Arctic waters, solar radiation would be absorbed, not reflected, by the Arctic Ocean.  That would heat those waters, and hence the planet, further. This effect has the potential to change global weather patterns, vary the flow of winds, and even someday possibly alter the position of the jet stream. Polar jet streams are fast flowing rivers of wind positioned high in the Earth’s atmosphere that push cold and warm air masses around, playing a critical role in determining the weather of our planet.

We are already @ 400ppm. How high it goes, nobody knows.

As stated before, phase transitions are exponential events, not linear, which give credence to the fact GW is happening faster then previously thought possible, something also being seen in species extinction due to the aforementioned troika of global warming, environment degradation and resource depletion, conditions eerily similar to the Permian era when the great dying occurred save that the changes happening today are thousands of times faster then when the Siberian Traps blew their tops way back when. 

Seen below is the excellent Wikipedia graphic detailing the phase transition from plasma to solid.

Addendum:

We are currently in the midst of what scientists consider the sixth mass extinction in planetary history, with between 150 and 200 species going extinct daily, a pace 1,000 times greater than the “natural” or “background” extinction rate. This event may already be comparable to, or even exceed, both the speed and intensity of the Permian mass extinction. The difference being that ours is human caused, isn’t going to take 80,000 years, has so far lasted just a few centuries, and is now gaining speed in a non-linear fashion.

The Last Taboo

Being an atheist is still difficult as some people of faith have this amazing concept that us heathens have fewer scruples then they, something totally ludicrous to say the least. In politics, being an atheist is tantamount to election death as all the yahoos in congress must and do pledge allegiance to god in order to get elected as this has become the litmus test for electability, not competence, something we see in action by congress, a body of ineptness that truly knows no bounds of just how useless they are except that of pledging allegeance to god 24/7. Just see the never ending senatorial campaign in Arkansas to see why. 

In looking at this issue more closely, one finds that politics and religion are the only two professions not requiring a skill set in anything save the ability to be liked and talk a good line at a moment's notice. 

Regarding electability, check out the Politico chart seen above, showing that any atheist running for president stands little or no chance of winning though there were (gasp) closet atheists in the White House (Taft, Jefferson, Adams et al) and…god forbid, in the Founding Fathers, something the Sara Palins of the world seem to miss when ranting about god and this country being founded as a christian nation.

To start, we atheists had a kindred spirit in Thomas Jefferson, who was often accused of being one of us. In 1787, Jefferson wrote in a letter to his nephew: “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear. … Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others which it will procure for you.” Jefferson fought tirelessly for the separation of church and state and created the University of Virginia to be the first secular university. He was not alone: John Adams wrote in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli that ours was no more a Christian country than a Jewish or Islamic one. The Senate unanimously approved the treaty.

Things are changing for the better, particularly among the young, the most liberal and non religious group in society.  As they increase in number, the tolerance for atheists, like yours truly, will increase as it has for gays, something that bodes well for the reestablishment of women's rights and the eventual move to Single Payer as we move further into the 21st century.

War Games - For Real

War Games for real. Awesome video from Josip Suij.

Seen below is the War Games movie WOPR sequence
where there is no winner in thermonuclear war. :)

In the Blink of an Eye

It’s a simple concept. Flight patterns and common aviation hubs are more accurate predictors of the spread of disease than distances traveled on foot, slow boat, or horse. Brockmann had a lightbulb go off when a student, Daniel Grady, biked to his office at Northwestern University and remarked that no matter how he traveled--by subway, bus, or bike--it always took the same amount of time to get there.

“And that is when it started,” Brockmann said. “In the modern world that’s so connected, old school, conventional geographic distance is not so meaningful anymore.”

In the blink of an eye, 12 Monkeys anyone?

Click here to get an in depth take on just how fast a pandemic could spread from London Heathrow Airport to 80 countries. Scary does not begin to say just how disruptive this event would be.

The Last Remaining Place

Last month, BRT posted an article titled, Agent Smith was right, a piece discssing how man goes from place to place, taking all the resources of said place before moving on to plunder some other place even though we have now basically run out of places to pillage save for the Arctic, a region that was relatively safe from the predation of man until global warming reared it's ugly head, thus opening up a pristine frontier harboring, perhaps, the last significant deposits of oil and natural gas on the planet. 

[AMHERST, Mass. — WHILE many existing oil and gas reserves in other parts of the world are facing steep decline, the Arctic is thought to possess vast untapped reservoirs. Approximately 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil deposits and 30 percent of its natural gas reserves are above the Arctic Circle, according to the United States Geological Survey. Eager to tap into this largess, Russia and its Arctic neighbors — Canada, Norway, the United States, Iceland and Denmark (by virtue of its authority over Greenland) — have encouraged energy companies to drill in the region.]

It gets better.

In addition, the Arctic itself has proved to be a formidable adversary: In the summer of 2012, during Royal Dutch Shell’s first attempt to probe its Arctic deposits, shifting winds and floating ice halted drilling. Several months later, when one of its drilling rigs ran aground during an especially severe storm, Shell announced that it would suspend operations in Alaska’s Arctic waters and that before it proceeded, it would bolster its capacity to operate there.

Shell’s misfortunes have heightened concern that Arctic drilling poses an unacceptable threat to the region. Any major spill that occurs there is likely to prove far more destructive than the one produced in the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon disaster in April 2010, because of both the lack of adequate response capabilities and the likelihood that ice floes and sea ice will impede cleanup operations. As more companies push into the Arctic and accelerate their operations there, the risk of accidents and spills is bound to increase. The fact that Shell — one of the most technically advanced oil companies — has so far proved unable to overcome these risks should provoke intense concern over the prospect that other, less proficient firms will soon be operating in these perilous waters.

Bad tech being introduced into a hostile area, driven by greed and stupidity, is a recipe for disaster but we already know that, right?

NSA - The Daily Show

The Daily Show

Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook

The intro ad is a drag but Jon is not regarding the government's and NSA's serial lying. 

Feature Creep 2

BRT recently posted a blurb titled Feature Creep, whereby the NSA uses the network switch hack to not only scarf up our banking, social and email data but also to gather smartphone locations as needs dictate. Now it's leveraging Google's PREFID cookies to extend its reach into our buying and surfing habits to the nth degree as seen in a Washington Post article titled NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking.  

The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using "cookies" and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.

The agency's internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations.

For years, privacy advocates have raised concerns about the use of commercial tracking tools to identify and target consumers with advertisements. The online ad industry has said its practices are innocuous and benefit consumers by serving them ads that are more likely to be of interest to them.

These specific slides do not indicate how the NSA obtains Google PREF cookies or whether the company cooperates in these programs, but other documents reviewed by the Post indicate that cookie information is among the data NSA can obtain with a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order. If the NSA gets the data that way, the companies know and are legally compelled to assist.

Without privacy we have no freedom, without privacy, 1984 looms. 

Click on the Washington Post graphic to see how the NSA uses Google's cookies to do the deed.

Seymour Hersh is right, Edward Snowden's the real deal without question.

A Small First Step

25% of the Georges Bank is totally protected from deep-sea trawling, the vacuum cleaner approach that nearly wiped out the cod industry back in the 1980's, something Europe should do but did not when they could not institute a similar ban though their seas are suffering as did the banks back in the day.

PARIS — The European Parliament on Tuesday sided with the fishing industry by voting against an overall ban on deep-sea trawling, but it agreed to restrict some of the worst excesses of the practice.

In a narrow vote of 342 to 326, with 19 abstentions, lawmakers rejected a proposal to phase out deep-sea trawling in which heavy nets are dragged on the ocean floor at depths of more than 600 meters, or about 2,000 feet.

The Parliament, which meets in Strasbourg in eastern France, did vote to end trawling in areas with ecosystems most at risk, like those rich in slow-growing corals and sponges.

And they inserted a requirement calling for a review of the equipment used in deep-sea fishing — including gill nets, which are either anchored to the ocean bottom or allowed to drift in the current, entrapping fish by their gills. In theory, the review could lead to a ban on all deep-sea fishing with gear found to be especially destructive.

It's a start. For reasons why this tech is wrong, click the whimsical and very informative graphic, courtesy penelope-jolicoeur.com,  to learn about the deep sea and it's denizens before signing the petition to ban this really harmful process because, it's the right thing to do. :)

Another Stunner

Journey Part 1 from Andrew Walker on Vimeo.

Another stunner. A no brainer on how tech, when placed in the hands of an artist, creates magic.

Awestruck & Then Some

Hippo Teahupoo from Chris Bryan on Vimeo.

Awestruck is the operative term here as seen by this amazing video. 

For a concise description of how this masterpiece was shot, go to Redsharknews.com,

Feature Creep

The NSA's reach keeps expanding as seen by the Washington Post blurb titled 

NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

As a techie, I view this news as a perfect example of feature creep where an enterprise like the NSA just extends their ability to spy on us by breaking into the switches of the Verizon's of the world to, in this case, track our cellphone locations, with little extra effort as this mirrors the same approach of ISP network switch hacking the NSA uses to ingest email, banking and social networks data as needs warrant.

Seen below is a network diagram showing a typical connectivity diagram courtesy Wikipedia.

Within Our Reach - Stand By Me

The late, great George Carlin's favorite song was Stand By Me, the Ben E. King composition, part gospel, part soul, all good, something one sees in the rousing and heart felt rendition of this timeless classic by Vaneese Thomas, The Newtown Youth Voices & The Old Town Hall Band done this past summer in Newtown, CT. In this writer's humble opinion, George would have approved of this cover without question. Enjoy.  :)

Raison d'ete

The best explanation of the raison d'ete for religion, ever. :)

Price Gouging as Art Form

This chart, courtesy the NY Times, shows, in small part, the incredible gouging of us chickens regarding the disastrous state of healthcare, a profit-driven environment that victimizes every American not covered by Medicare.  

Then the bills arrived. Ms. Singh’s three stitches cost $2,229.11. Orla’s forehead was sealed with a dab of skin glue for $1,696. “When I first saw the charge, I said, ‘What could possibly have cost that much?’ ” recalled Ms. Singh. “They billed for everything, every pill.”

In a medical system notorious for opaque finances and inflated bills, nothing is more convoluted than hospital pricing, economists say. Hospital charges represent about a third of the $2.7 trillion annual United States health care bill, the biggest single segment, according to government statistics, and are the largest driver of medical inflation, a new study in The Journal of the American Medical Association found.

When looking at this fubar, one readily sees that Obamacare does not fix this problem in any way shape or fashion so, the question to ask is: When will passive Americans get off their butts and demand congress to institute Single Payer because the system, as it stands now, is a lost cause from the get go.

On Further Consideration

A few weeks ago, in a post titled Design 101 or Why Adding People to a Late Project Makes It Later, BRT discussed, in depth, why Healthcare.gov was a disaster from the get go but that it would be fixed ($630 million & counting) while the fools who built the system in the first place, would continue to get paid by us rubes rather then be fired and fined for gross incompetence, something that would have gone down in the private sector without question but won't because it's government and incompetence is a virtue as long as one has the right connections to the agency footing the bill, something all too sad to see as per the NYTimes article titled Inside the Race to Rescue a Health Care Site, and Obama.

Account creation was the province of Quality Software Services Inc., or QSSI, a company based in Columbia, Md. Its subcontractor, Oracle, flew a high-level team of software engineers to Washington. Experts disagree on what went wrong. But several said that errors in the software code written to stitch the Oracle product into the online system and improperly configured hardware trapped users in endless technological loops. It would take eight days to resolve just that one bottleneck.

In Herndon, as engineers tried to come to grips with repeated crashes, a host of problems were becoming apparent: inadequate capacity in its data center and sloppy computer code, partly the result of rushed work amid the rapidly changing specifications issued by the government.

The website had barely been tested before it went live, so a large number of software and hardware defects had not been uncovered. Fixing the account creation software simply exposed other problems; people still could not register to buy insurance. A system intended to handle 50,000 simultaneous users was fundamentally unstable, unable to handle even a tiny fraction of that. As few as 500 users crippled it, according to people involved.

Relations between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and its prime contractor, CGI Federal, had soured over the summer, well before the website opened on Oct. 1. Contractors responsible for different parts of the portal barely talked to one another, hoping to avoid blame. Among the contractors, rumors were swirling: CGI Federal would be fired. IBM, one of the losing bidders, would take over. The system would be scrapped; it had to be rebuilt from scratch.

Best of all...

Mr. Zients decided the site needed a “systems integrator,” a single company that would take charge. On Oct. 24, Ms. Tavenner put Quality Software Services in that new role — a move that, people familiar with the project say, began to resolve conflicting and contradictory directions from her agency.

Simply unreal. Gee, what an innovative approach, something Fred Brooks discussed, in great length, in Mythical Man Month, as to why a visionary system architect is ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED if any complex project is to succeed and... said visionary must be in place, prior to doing anything of significance, or said project will fail, a prerequisite totally ignored in the disastrous HC.Gov roll out in Oct, 2013. 

Note that even when healthcare.gov becomes capable, the much larger problem of HC itself has not been addressed as this slow motion catastrophe continues to run amuck, something only Single Payer can solve but you already knew that, right?

Factoid: Click on the graphic to find out what states actually allow insurance renewals pre & post Obama.

6 Seconds in Dallas

Josiah Thompson's thought process is incredibly impressive. A true forensic scientist, he looks at cause and effect with persistence, intellect and objectivity, essential traits every real scientist exhibits when trying to discern how reality works at deep level, something the Warren Commission totally ignored when coming up with their take on what actually happened on November 22, 1963. This is a must see video to learn that Kennedy was killed via a conspiracy involving two shooters and possibly three. At the same time, click here to see the Errol Norris documentary of Thompson further explaining why the film and photos taken at the event "self authenticates" what happened in Dallas separate from any commentary that has issued forth from that dark and tragic day. 

Hopefully, his 1967 book will be republished as the analysis done in this work should be read by every American who needs to know what really happened in Dallas. 

Priorities

Two riffs on religion, one on scheduling, the other on women's rights, both dependent on priorities, right? :)

Phase Transition Writ Large

Back in November, 2011, BRT wrote a post titled Something to Consider, a riff on the Permian Extinction AKA the Great Dying whereby 90 - 95% of all life went the way of the Dodo due to a massive "injection of CO2 into the atmosphere", probably due to "the eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps, the stairlike hilly region in northern Russia." which resulted in the "long-term ocean acidification, ocean warming and vast areas of oxygen-poor ocean water." that extinguished nearly  all life on the planet, something we are starting to see today thanks to the continued and unfettered use of fossil fuels, today's answer to the Siberian Traps, when it comes to producing CO2, the start point for all of the mass extinctions life has faced over that past 3.8 billions years.

With this in mind, Last Hours is most apt don't you think?

Maher on Kennedy

Maher gets it right on Kennedy, a president with style and wit, a president yours truly admired as someone who had a clear vision of what the world could be if one had the intellect and courage to make it so, a vision sadly not shared by any of Kennedy's successors following the unspeakable tragedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

To this writer, one sensed Kennedy was different, especially when listening to his electrifying Inaugural speech that will live forever in the hearts of Americans who were alive at that time (including me) when he uttered the words Ask Not on a bitter cold day in Washington, January 20th, 1961. 

Van Damme Rules :)

An Unexpected Gem

New Dan on Flickr shot this gem, another reason why the net rocks. Enjoy.

Agent Smith was right

In The Matrix, Agent Smith describes man as a virus, a species moving from place to place, consuming all resources of said place before moving on but now, there is no other place, a reality being played out as we speak, regarding the Monarch Butterfly, wild bees and other insects crucial to our survival. 

This year, for or the first time in memory, the monarch butterflies didn't come, at least not on the Day of the Dead. They began to straggle in a week later than usual, in record-low numbers. Last year’s low of 60 million now seems great compared with the fewer than three million that have shown up so far this year. Some experts fear that the spectacular migration could be near collapse.

“It does not look good,” said Lincoln P. Brower, a monarch expert at Sweet Briar College.

It is only the latest bad news about the dramatic decline of insect populations.

Another insect in serious trouble is the wild bee, which has thousands of species. Nicotine-based pesticides called neonicotinoids are implicated in their decline, but even if they were no longer used, experts say, bees, monarchs and many other species of insect would still be in serious trouble.

That’s because of another major factor that has not been widely recognized: the precipitous loss of native vegetation across the United States...

A big part of it is the way the United States farms. As the price of corn has soared in recent years, driven by federal subsidies for biofuels, farmers have expanded their fields. That has meant plowing every scrap of earth that can grow a corn plant, including millions of acres of land once reserved in a federal program for conservation purposes.

Another major cause is farming with Roundup, a herbicide that kills virtually all plants except crops that are genetically modified to survive it.

As a result, millions of acres of native plants, especially milkweed, an important source of nectar for many species, and vital for monarch butterfly larvae, have been wiped out. One study showed that Iowa has lost almost 60 percent of its milkweed, and another found 90 percent was gone. “The agricultural landscape has been sterilized,” said Dr. Brower.

What's interesting is the fact Monsanto is a primary player in this sad scenario as the maker of Roundup, along with Bayer and Shell (Neonicotinoids), as GMO foods (corn/soy etc, etc.) require extensive use of Roundup and insecticides in order to survive, something that's beginning to change as nature always finds a way to subvert artificiality via, in the case of GMO corn, the corn borer beetle, as seen in a BRT post titled Monarchs & GMO Corn.

For Agent Smith fans, here is the virus quote courtesy YouTube.

Light Echo

 Space is vast, so vast that one can actually see light moving through a nebula produced by a variable star known as V838, even though the speed of light in a vacuum = 186,000 miles per second.

The unusual variable star V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon) continues to puzzle astronomers. This previously inconspicuous star underwent an outburst early in 2002, during which it temporarily increased in brightness to become 600,000 times more luminous than our Sun. Light from this sudden eruption is illuminating the interstellar dust surrounding the star, producing the most spectacular “light echo” in the history of astronomy.

As light from the eruption propagates outward into the dust, it is scattered by the dust and travels to the Earth. The scattered light has travelled an extra distance in comparison to light that reaches Earth directly from the stellar outburst. Such a light echo is the optical analogue of the sound echo produced when an Alpine yodel is reflected from the surrounding mountainsides.

8 minutes is all it takes for light from the sun to reach us rubes.

Where Credit is Due

Click the graphic to go to a wonderful NYTimes graphic depicting the byzantine world of credit and how it has changed finance forever. When finished, scroll down to Addicted to Growth to learn why the loan is the prime driver to all the manifestations of Where Credit is Due. :)

Addicted to Growth

Scott Erickson's a terrific writer and environmentalist who cuts to the chase when it comes to explaining why growth is no longer sustainable using the clever alias of a 14 year old girl named Amy, who explains, in wonderfully clear language, where growth comes from and why it has to stop. 

Let’s say you get a loan for $100, but because of the interest you pay back $110. Here’s an interesting question: Where did that extra $10 come from? 

It didn’t come from you, since you can’t create money. Only banks can – by making loans. So the extra money could only come from one place: More loans! If you trace money to where money comes from, it almost always comes from a loan. 

People can get personal loans, but what’s more important for the economy is business loans – loans to start or expand a business. Of course all the loans have interest, which means paying back more money. But we’ve already figured out that money is “created” by banks issuing loans. So to pay off past loans, somewhere else in the economy there has to be new loans which create more money. But then THOSE loans have to be paid off with money, which means MORE loans. 

It always comes back to the banks making more loans to pay off the existing loans. This has been going on for hundreds of years, which is how the economy “grows.” 

Economic growth needs more money, but more money needs more economic growth, which needs more money. And it doesn’t stop. It can’t stop. 

That’s not only how the economy grows, but why it HAS to grow. We can never get to a point where growth is “enough.”

This is why we’re addicted to economic growth. We’re not creating money; we’re creating debt! Like with any addiction, we keep doing it even when it’s not working any more. 

Read the rest of this wonderful excerpt from the book, you won't be disappointed. :)

I like his splash image as well.

Mistakes were made

Kind of says it all, don't you think?

Pick-Up-Sticks

Like a moth drawn to a flame, one is drawn to the slow motion disaster known as Fukushima,  an ongoing catastrophe that could end our short term residency on planet earth.

Specifically, the greatest short-term threat to humanity is from the fuel pools at Fukushima.

If one of the pools collapsed or caught fire, it could have severe adverse impacts not only on Japan … but the rest of the world, including the United States.   Indeed, a Senator called it a national security concern for the U.S.:

The radiation caused by the failure of the spent fuel pools in the event of another earthquake could reach the West Coast within days. That absolutely makes the safe containment and protection of this spent fuel a security issue for the United States.

Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen and physician Helen Caldicott have both said that people should evacuate the Northern Hemisphere if one of the Fukushima fuel pools collapses. Gundersen said:

Move south of the equator if that ever happened, I think that’s probably the lesson there.

Former U.N. adviser Akio Matsumura calls removing the radioactive materials from the Fukushima fuel pools “an issue of human survival”.

So the stakes in decommissioning the fuel pools are high, indeed.

What's even more terrifying is the fact a magnitude 7 earthquake (all that's needed to bring down the fuel pools @ Fukushima) hitting Japan within the next 3 years is estimated to be 95%, which could be the closest thing to a done deal regarding the most serious threat mankind has ever faced during his tenure on a tiny planet we call home.

Pick-up-Sticks, a game requiring mental dexterity and physical skill under pressure, is basically what has to be done at Fukushima but with the added fun of having to pick up thousands of damaged rods loaded into damaged racks, which reside in a deteriorating, water filled environment in danger of collapsing at any moment. Adding to this rosy scenario are the absolute requirements that said rods must remain in water at all times (or they will explode) and cannot touch one another in any way, shape or fashion (or they will explode) because if they do either, uncontrolled fission will ensue, thus making Chernobyl a walk in the park.

Factoids: Carefully plucking more than 1,500 brittle and potentially damaged fuel assemblies from the plant’s unstable Reactor No. 4 is expected to take about a year, and will be seen as a test of Tokyo Electric Power Co’s ability to move ahead with decommissioning the whole facility – a task likely to take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars.

If the rods – there are 50-70 in each of the assemblies, which weigh around 300 kg (660 pounds) and are 4.5 metres (15 feet) long – are exposed to air or if they break, huge amounts of radioactive gases could be released into the atmosphere.

Addendum: This is a picture showing the impact the earthquake and tsnuami had on Reactor 4's spent fuel rod pool building. Reassuring, right?

Needless to say, the rods in the pool no longer look like this.

But rather like this.

Any question as to why Fukushima is a fubar beyond description?