No Sound in Space :)

Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration.

Haven't seen the flick yet but the science, like that of 2001, rings true.

Build for Obselesence

Question, what costs $162M per unit, is years behind schedule and is ..., you guessed it, already obsolete even though the $400 billion dollar F 35 Joint Strike Fighter program is the most expensive and inept weapons system ever built, a testimony to government/military incompetence at the highest level.

Versions of the new single-engine stealth fighter are set to replace almost every type of fighter in the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps inventory—including aircraft specifically designed to support ground troops like the A-10 Warthog. That will leave troops in a lurch when the F-35 eventually becomes the only game in town.

“The F-35 will, in my opinion, be 10 years behind legacy fighters when it achieves [initial operational capability],” said one Air Force official affiliated with the F-35 program. “When the F-35 achieves [initial operational capability], it will not have the weapons or sensor capability, with respect to the CAS [close air support] mission set, that legacy multi-role fighters had by the mid-2000s.”

The problem stems from the fact that the technology found on one of the stealth fighter’s primary air-to-ground sensors—its nose-mounted Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS)—is more than a decade old and hopelessly obsolete. The EOTS, which is similar in concept to a large high-resolution infrared and television camera, is used to visually identify and monitor ground targets. The system can also mark targets for laser-guided bombs.  

Can you imagine Apple doing something this stupid? Not

40 years & counting, The A10 Warthog - a military program that will continue until at least 2028.

Any questions?

Data Breaches by the Numbers

AeroMobil 3.0

BRT talked about the AeroMobil in a post titled If it looks good, it will fly well, an elegant approach to the age old dream of a car that flies, a radical yet well thought out project coming ever closer to reality as seen by this latest video about something that does look good and appears to fly very well indeed. OBTY, the site looks pretty damn good as well. :)

Silent Running

Silent Running, a prescient SF movie of the 3rd kind, is particularly relevant as seen in the ongoing 6th Great Dying being perpetrated by us as we move further into the 21st century, something beyond tragic as once a species is gone, it's gone forever, not to mention the negative impact species extinction does to biodiversity, the one essential needed for man to survive on planet earth. To address this critical issue, researchers have found a way to efficiently storehouse invaluable DNA of individual lifeforms before they become extinct, an approach radically different from that of Silent Running but with the same intent.

Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED) have developed a cost-effective way to save a wide range of threatened species, including rare old ones that may be costly to protect.

Their new technique to help maximise both the species and genetic diversity we save helps resolve the dilemma facing conservation managers worldwide: whether to rescue a larger number of recent and more common species or fewer, unique and older species that may be more costly to preserve.
The technology will help nations such as Australia and New Zealand to protect as much diversity of both species and their genes as possible, says lead researcher Dr Joseph Bennett of CEED and The University of Queensland (UQ).

"The global extinction crisis is getting worse, and conservation funds are seldom enough to stop biodiversity from declining," says Dr Bennett. "This is like a library on fire – and we have to save as much of the precious information as we can.

Click on the little guy below to get more information on what CEED is trying to do.

Addendum: Researchers are also doing the same thing with seeds as seen by the svalbard-global-seed-vault,  one of several being built to save as many of the world's plant species before they too disappear. 

Emily Post Etiquette - Eagle Style :)

Bald Eagles are not only magnificent in appearance and stately in demeanor, as seen in this terrific video by Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, but also pretty laid back by allowing crows to partake in the annual fish feast in Homer, Alaska. Enjoy.

Variations

Some late fall/early winter random walks in CT. Enjoy.

The Tallest Peaks

Images like this never cease to amaze. In this case, it's a closeup of Saturn's B ring with ridges approximately 2 1/2 kilometers high. 

Vertical structures, among the tallest seen in Saturn's main rings, rise abruptly from the edge of Saturn's B ring to cast long shadows on the ring in this image taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft two weeks before the planet's August 2009 equinox.

Part of the Cassini Division, between the B and the A rings, appears at the top of the image, showing ringlets in the inner division.

In this image, Cassini's narrow angle camera captured a 1,200-kilometer-long (750-mile-long) section arcing along the outer edge of the B ring. Here, vertical structures tower as high as 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) above the plane of the rings -- a significant deviation from the vertical thickness of the main A, B and C rings, which is generally only about 10 meters (about 30 feet).

Seen below is Mike Carroll's amazing graphic of what it would look like flying over the B ring head on. :)

Bullet Time - Ant Style :)

Bullet Time Matrix Style :)

Merry Xmas

Merry Xmas to one and all. :)

A Replicant of the Raptor Kind

Building a replicant starts with mimicking nature, something DARPA wants to do in building a bot able to fly like the Goshawk, the acrobat supreme of the raptor world. 

 "Birds of prey and flying insects exhibit the kinds of capabilities we want for small UAVs. Goshawks, for example, can fly very fast through a dense forest without smacking into a tree," according to a statement in the announcement from Mark Micire,DARPA program manager. "The goal of the FLA program is to explore non-traditional perception and autonomy methods that would give small UAVs the capacity to perform in a similar way, including an ability to easily navigate tight spaces at high speed and quickly recognize if it had already been in a room before."

The focus is so firmly on developing a workable, independent flight intelligence, in fact, that DARPA doesn't even want to talk about what that intelligence would be flying in.

The last statement says it all, don't you think?

Northern Goshawk

Last Days - Why Wildlife Matters

Why wildlife matters.

14M/Hr

Interesting factoids regarding just how much $$ has gone into the never ending war machine since 9/11. 

American taxpayers have shelled out roughly $1.6 trillion on war spending since 9/11, according to a new report from Congress’ nonpartisan research arm. That’s roughly $337 million a day -- or nearly a quarter million dollars a minute -- every single day for 13 years.

The $1.6 trillion estimate, which comes to $14 million per hour since 9/11, from the Congressional Research Service is up roughly half a trillion dollars from its 2010 estimate, which found that the post-9/11 military operations are second only to World War II in terms of financial cost. 

It gets better.

Last week, a Defense Department official disclosed that since August, U.S. taxpayers have already spent more than $1 billion -- or $8 million a day -- on air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Additionally, the Obama administration announced it is deploying 1,300 troops to Iraq in January.

The question to ask is: How successful have these operations been in improving the lives of the people said operations has impacted relative to the enormous profits accrued by the arms merchants supplying the hardware to do the deed? Something to think about, IMHO, as the infrastructure of the country continues to go down the tubes.

Voodoo Economics

David Stockman found religion in terms of intelligent economic analysis after his stint as Reagan's OMB director whereby Voodoo Economics reigned supreme, policies that did not work due to how the system was gamed, something very different to how Eisenhower ran things, a president who, IMHO, understood what sound economic policy was all about.

 Reaganomics (/reɪɡəˈnɒmɪks/; a portmanteau of Reagan and economics attributed to Paul Harvey)[1] refers to the economic policies promoted by U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s. These policies are commonly associated with supply-side economics, referred to as trickle-down economics by political opponents and free market economics by political advocates.

The four pillars of Reagan's economic policy were to reduce the growth of government spending, reduce the federal income tax and capital gains tax, reduce government regulation, and tighten the money supply in order to reduce inflation.[2]

Stockman's latest missive, The Fracturing Energy Bubble Is the New Housing Crash, rings true regarding Shale Oil, fracking's first cousin, the one trick pony whose rather limited act is in its final phase of existence.

In short, the Fed exported bubble finance to the entire world, but most especially China and the EM. The upshot was an extended era of booming but phony global growth, and a consequent artificially high oil prices at $115 per barrel.

When central bank inflated oil prices were coupled with lunatic junk bond yields in the US shale patch at barely 300 bps over the central bank repressed yield on the US treasury note, the result was the same old bubble thing. Namely, a half trillion dollar flow of high yield bonds and loans to the energy sector, and a wholly artificial explosion of US shale liquids production from 1 million to more than 4 million barrels per day.

Like in the case of the housing bubble, the energy boom was an accident waiting to happen— testimony to another even grander experiment by the madmen running the world’s central banks.  It is now exploding right on schedule. The plunging graphs subsequent to the housing bust are now being re-gifted to the energy patch and all the bloated, unstable chains of finance and real economic activity which flow from it.

The graph above, which shows that every net job created in the US during the last seven years is attributable to the shale states, will be one of the first to morph into a less happy shape.

But there is something else even more significant. The global oil price collapse now unfolding is not putting a single dime into the pockets of American households—-the CNBC talking heads to the contrary notwithstanding.  What is happening is the vast flood of mispriced debt and capital, which flowed into the energy sector owning to the Fed’s lunatic ZIRP and QE policies, is now rapidly deflating.

That will reduce bubble spending and investment, not add to economic growth. It’s the housing bust all over again.

Any questions?

A new kind of inquisition

The Spanish Inquisition, a dark period of human history, has a very mild 2014 successor, in terms of torment and torture, when Spain drove out Google News using, you guessed it, copyright, to make it happen.

But sadly, as a result of a new Spanish law, we’ll shortly have to close Google News in Spain. Let me explain why. This new legislation requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not. As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable. So it’s with real sadness that on 16 December (before the new law comes into effect in January) we’ll remove Spanish publishers from Google News, and close Google News in Spain.

The internet is a system of tubes, right?

Germany previously passed an unsuccessful law of this sort, but the difference is that most media companies waived their right to charge for excerpts because Google created so much traffic. 

To make sure that the Spanish version was more successful, language stipulates that media companies MUST charge! There is no choice in the matter. 

Here's more: 

Today [Google's new service] is available in more than 70 international editions, covering 35 languages. It's a service that hundreds of millions of users love and trust, including many here in Spain. It's free to use and includes everything from the world's biggest newspapers to small, local publications and bloggers. 

... For centuries publishers were limited in how widely they could distribute the printed page. The Internet changed all that -- creating tremendous opportunities but also real challenges for publishers as competition both for readers' attention and for advertising Euros increased. We're committed to helping the news industry meet that challenge and look forward to continuing to work with our thousands of partners globally, as well as in Spain, to help them increase their online readership and revenues. 

Of course, this is not the whole story. From what we can tell and have reported before, copyright only was developed after the advent of the Gutenberg press. Its implementation was at least in part intended to slow the transmission of information that was undermining the sociopolitical and economic system of the time. 

It didn't work very well, of course. The Holy Roman Empire was riven by Lutheranism and eventually the "Divine Right of Kings" – which depended on the endorsement of the Church – also collapsed.

Thank god for fair use, at least in this country, otherwise, BRT, and other blogs like it, would cease to exist.

Happy Days are here again

Xmas came early to Wall Street when CT Representative Jim Himes shepherded in the gutting of

Dodd-Frank in the 1.1 trillion dollar spending bill passed by Congress by re enabling WS to use government backed monies to continue ginning the derivatives game for ever greater profits, thus eliminating risk due to the fact WS will get bailed out yet again, by us  rubes, when the market tanks, as it always does, based on the bubble mentality of how the banks, and significant others, manipulate money to game the system, using tech to make it happen.

Wall Street has for some time attempted to put taxpayers on the hook for its derivatives trades. I highlighted this a year ago in the post: Citigroup Written Legislation Moves Through the House of Representatives. Here’s an excerpt:

Five years after the Wall Street coup of 2008, it appears the U.S. House of Representatives is as bought and paid for as ever. We heard about the Citigroup crafted legislation currently being pushed through Congress back in May when Mother Jones reported on it. Fortunately, they included the following image in their article:

Unsurprisingly, the main backer of the bill is notorious Wall Street lackey Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a former Goldman Sachs employee who has discovered lobbyist payoffs can be just as lucrative as a career in financial services. The last time Mr. Himes made an appearance on these pages was in March 2013 in my piece: Congress Moves to DEREGULATE Wall Street.

Betrayal always has consequences as the French found out when they had their violent revolution (1789 - 1799), based on Popular resentment of the privileges enjoyed by the clergy and aristocracy "that" grew during a financial crisis following two expensive wars and years of bad harvests. something our so called leaders are doing, in similar fashion, in 2014.

Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face.

–  Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice, in 1928

Amendment 28 anyone?

The 1st Law

IMHO, the 1st law of Thermodynamics (The conversation of energy) is the most important 

scientific law articulated by man as it provides the raison d'ete as to how the quantum/relativistic reality, in which we all live, is powered. :)

Energy can be neither created or destroyed, only transformed.

Boltzmann and Wheeler are right, reality is information writ large. :)

The eventual successor to Glass

Tech never sleeps as seen by just how fast 3D printing has come along, not only in the first steps to print human organs using patient cells to start the process rolling but also in the first proof of concept to successfully merge electronics to contact lenses using the same tech to make it happen.

Michael McAlpine, the lead researcher, cautioned that the lens is not designed for actual use—for one, it requires an external power supply. Instead, he said the team created the device to demonstrate the ability to "3-D print" electronics into complex shapes and materials.

"This shows that we can use 3-D printing to create complex electronics including semiconductors," said McAlpine, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. "We were able to 3-D print an entire device, in this case an LED." 

The hard contact lens is made of plastic. The researchers used tiny crystals, called quantum dots, to create the LEDs that generated the colored light. Different size dots can be used to generate various colors. 

"We used the quantum dots [also known as nanoparticles] as an ink," McAlpine said. "We were able to generate two different colors, orange and green."

The contact lens is also part of an ongoing effort to use 3-D printing to assemble diverse, and often hard-to-combine, materials into functioning devices. In the recent past, a team of Princeton professors including McAlpine created a bionic ear out of living cells with an embedded antenna that could receive radio signals.

Things, they keep a changin. - Bob Dylan

If you don't love us...

Next kind of says it all, don't you think?

The CIA Report

No need to show the gruesome pictures of the CIA torture engine or belabor just how truly disgusting and damaging this fubar has been and will be to the nation for the foreseeable future as the real question to ask is: WHO AUTHORISED THE CIA TO COMMIT THESE ATROCITIES?? But we already know who, right? and WHAT CAN BE DONE TO BRING THESE PERPS TO JUSTICE? To yours truly, Attica sounds like a viable destination for the sociopaths who told the CIA to start the ball rolling if you ask me. To whit.

Former Bush vice president Dick Cheney staunchly defended the program, telling The New York Times the interrogations were "absolutely, totally justified."

"When we had that program in place, we kept the country safe from any more mass casualty attacks, which was our objective," he said.

It gets better.

Conditions were particularly ghastly at a black-site nicknamed Cobalt, in an undisclosed country, where "at times detainees there were walked around naked and shackled with their hands above their head," the report said.

Management of the program deteriorated so poorly in one country "that the CIA remains unable to determine the number and identity of the individuals it detained," the report said.

The review of 6.3 million pages of documents concluded that use of the techniques "was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee cooperation."

Seven of 39 detainees known to have been subjected to so-called enhanced interrogations "produced no intelligence while in CIA custody," while others "provided significant accurate intelligence prior to, or without having been subjected to these techniques."

And in several cases "the CIA inaccurately claimed that specific, otherwise unavailable information was acquired from a CIA detainee" as a direct result of the harsh interrogations.

Any questions?

Attica

Turning on a dime :)

Had to put this in. Incompetence writ large. Check out the guy coming into the parking lot while this genius performs Bolero with a "Bimmer". Kind of reminds me of Congress and it's allegiance to incompetence at the public's expense. Thank Twisted Sifter for this gem. :)

The Language Construct

BRT has often talked about how language describes reality as language is the only construct enabling man to put in quantifiable terms, his interpretation of how reality might function, something most interesting to yours truly as a lay person forever trying to learn how reality actually works. What's even more amazing is how differently languages of the world are constructed, something most eloquently articulated in an Aeon piece titled There is no language instinct.

The basic ingredients of language, at least from our English-speaking perspective, are the parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and so on. But many languages lack adverbs, and some, such as Lao (spoken in Laos and parts of Thailand), lack adjectives. It has even been claimed that Straits Salish, an indigenous language spoken in and around British Columbia, gets by without nouns and verbs. Moreover, some languages feature grammatical categories that seem positively alien from our Anglocentric perspective. My favourite is the ideophone, a grammatical category that some languages employ to spice up a narrative. An ideophone is a fully fledged word type that integrates different sensory experiences arising in a single action: to pick one example, the word ribuy-tibuy, from the northern Indian language Mundari, describes the sight, motion and sound of a fat person’s buttocks as he walks.

And of course, language doesn’t need to be spoken: the world’s 130 or so recognised sign languages function perfectly adequately without sound. It’s a remarkable fact that linguistic meaning can be conveyed in multiple ways: in speech, by gestured signs, on the printed page or computer screen. It does not depend upon a particular medium for its expression. How strange, if there is a common element to all human language, that it should be hidden beneath such a bewildering profusion of differences.

The Tower of Babel does exist after all. :)

Life on the edge

Schrodinger's Cat, forever residing in the nether world of being either alive or dead, is the glamor puss of quantum mechanics, the star participient in a theory most mystifying when it comes to trying to learn how reality works, is now being applied to the innermost sanction of life, the process that may operate at the edge of the quantum/classical realm, thanks to entanglement, the possible prime driver of reality itself.

When the team shone the laser at the system, (Photosynthesis) they observed a very peculiar light echo that came in beat-like waves. These ‘quantum beats’ were a sign that, instead of taking a single route through the system, the photon energy was using quantum coherence to travel by all possible routes simultaneously. Imagine if, when confronted by the stream, the famous cat somehow divided itself into lots of identical quantum-coherent cats that hop across the chlorophyll boulders by every available route to find the quickest one. Quantum beats have now been detected in many different photosystems, including those of regular plants such as spinach. It appears that the most important reaction in the biosphere is exploiting the quantum world to put our food on our table.

How does life maintain its molecular order long enough to perform its quantum tricks in warm and wet cells?

And if that’s not enough for you, we come at last to the very mechanisms of evolution itself. Schrödinger suggested that mutations could involve a kind of quantum jump. In their classic DNA paper, Watson and Crick proposed that they might involve nucleotide bases switching between alternative structures, a process called ‘tautomerisation’ thought to involve quantum tunnelling. In 1999, the physicist Jim Al-Khalili and I suggested that proton tunnelling might account for one very peculiar kind of mutation – so-called adaptive mutation – which appears to occur more frequently when it provides an advantage. Our paper was entirely theoretical, but we are currently attempting to find experimental evidence for proton tunnelling in DNA. So, watch this space.

Beneath all these quantum solutions to puzzling vital phenomena, we find ourselves with a deeper mystery. Quantum coherence is an immensely delicate phenomenon, depending on those in-tune particle waves. To maintain it, physicists usually have to enclose their systems within near-perfect vacuums and cool them down to very close to absolute zero temperature to freeze out any heat-driven molecular motion. Molecular vibrations are the mortal enemy of quantum coherence. How, then, does life manage to maintain its molecular order for long enough to perform its quantum tricks in warm and wet cells? That remains a profound riddle. Recent research offers a tantalising hint that, instead of avoiding molecular storms, life embraces them, rather like the captain of a ship who harnesses turbulent gusts and squalls to maintain his ship upright and on-course. As Schrödinger predicted, life navigates a narrow stream between the classical and quantum worlds: the quantum edge.

And here's a short piece from Scientific American showing how wormholes and entanglement are intrinsically connected.

Maldacena and Susskind go so far as to equate the two in the relation ER = EPR, where ER refers to an Einstein–Rosen bridge (or wormhole) and EPR, short for Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen, is another term for entanglement. "Ours is a weaker statement, but it's easier to demonstrate to be true," Karch says. In his version wormholes aren't equivalent to entanglement; rather, 4-D wormholes are mathematically analogous to 3-D entanglement. Karch and his collaborator, Kristan Jensen of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, published their findings November 20 in Physical Review Letters. Building on their work, Julian Sonner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology strengthened the argument in a paper published in the same journal issue.

J. B. S. Haldane: 
"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; but stranger than we CAN imagine." :)

Addendum: Check out Aeon Magazine and Decrypted Matrix, you won't be disappointed.

Bessie

The impact of Bessie and her friends on the environment is huge, so huge that people are starting to rethink the way man grows food on planet earth.

Among the key findings in the report are:

• More than 1.7 billion animals are used in livestock production worldwide and occupy more than one-fourth of the Earth's land.
• Production of animal feed consumes about one-third of total arable land.
• Livestock production accounts for approximately 40 percent of the global agricultural gross domestic product.
• The livestock sector, including feed production and transport, is responsible for about 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. 

Here are some more interesting facts on what goes on mankind's dinner table.

Livestock production — which includes meat, milk and eggs — contributes 40% of global agricultural gross domestic product, provides income for more than 1.3 billion people and uses one-third of the world’s fresh water. There may be no other single human activity that has a bigger impact on the planet than the raising of livestock. But as a new study out today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows, there is tremendous variation in how we raise livestock around the world — and major differences in what that means for the earth and for us.

Boggles the mind doesn't it?

This sentence is false

An "A Ha" moment is serendipity writ large whenever an idea, coming out of the blue, solves a wicked problem in elegant fashion, something Google did by rethinking CAPTCHA and turning it into an concise one click solution to thwart bots and spammers by simply enabling one to click the checkbox I am not a Robot, instead of trying to figure out nonsensical words displayed in often confusing and ugly ways. To yours truly, this is akin to This sentence is false, a logic bomb conundrum Kurt Godel used to great advantage when coming up with his revolutionary Incompleteness Theorem. ReCaptcha, a very cool approach to a noisome problem, will change the net for the better. :)

Kurt Godel

On Reaching 1400

1400, who could have "thunk" it in terms of the number of posts coming from BRT, something yours truly could have never imagined five+ years ago when BRT was created back in the day. :) So, what has transpired since 2008/9? Well quite a bit, some bad, some good and some in between. To whit.

• 2008 - 2014: Liar's Loans and the WS swindle, which continues unabated today, thanks to the gutless justice department 's failure to jail the bastards who stole our money.
• 2009 - Shock & Awe, the worst strategic move the US have ever done, created ISIS,. destroyed a nation and unleashed the hounds of hell all over the middle east thanks to the ineptness of W and the minions who worked for him. Addendum: You hire the people you defeated or blowback to the nth degree is guaranteed.
• 2009 - 2014 - Nation destroying started with Iraq and continued on with Libya and Afghanistan under Obama, the yes we can president, who channels "W" in more ways than one can imagine.
• 2010 - Citizen's United, the amazingly incomprehensible ruling passed by the Supremes, has magically transformed companies like Apple into personhood, thus enabling said companies to create super PACs to provide unlimited funding to never ending campaigns by our esteemed politicians because campaigning for office is eminently easier than actually governing as seen by the do nothing congress that has forgotten what the public weal is all about.
• 2009 - 2014 - The Supremes, as ideological hacks, began establishing their dubious place in history with Citizens United and finished the job with Greece NY, McCutcheon and Hobby Lobby. Next up, Obama care. Addendum: The corporate veil is now gone thanks to Hobby Lobby.
• 2012 - 2014 - The NSA, FBI, CIA & the IRS, among significant others, know where we live 24/7 thanks to the creation of Homeland Security and its rump court FISA, the worst two things Bush did in compromising  our civil rights in America.
• 2002 - 2008 - Torture incorporated, courtesy the CIA with authorization coming from the Bush administration will be forever a stain on America's soul and an egregious violation of the Geneva Accords.
• 1900 - 2014 - Overshoot, the continued plundering of earth's resources, is moving toward the point of no return (June) as accelerating fossil fuel production, environmental degradation and ever increasing numbers of people is creating a situation that could end civilization as
  we know it.
• 1900 - 2014 - GW is real, just look at the stats to see why.
• 2010 - 2014 - Solar is taking off. The best is yet to come though the fossil fuel boys are trying their best to prevent it. Ditto wind and maybe...viable fusion if the gods permit it.
• 2010 - 2014 - The rise of super AI, potentially the most dangerous thing man has ever done, will happen, whether we like it or not.
• 2014 - Quantum computing is coming, a tech that could change everything given just how powerful this tech truly is.
• 2011-2014 - Obamacare, a small step toward Single Payer, is working, something the Supremes may undo, which could create blowback along the lines of a revolution given just how many people have signed on in the last 2 years.
• 2013 - 2014 Inept US foreign policy, driven by the NeoCons, strikes again as the demonization of Russia could pave the way to WW III if the NeoCons continue to do "Stupid Shit".
• 1968 - 2014 - Healthcare, the FUBAR that keeps on giving, continues on, thanks to government regulatory incompetence, IT & insurance collusion and corporate greed in the guise of big pharma and significant others, who want the system to remain as dysfunctional as it is because of just how much money is being made by the powers at be.
• 1960 - 2014 - The military/Industrial & Congressional complex is alive and well, complete with never ending war because the monies made by all parties involved in the war machine make more money than god. Doublethink applies here without question.
• 2010 - 2014 - GMOs, another dangerous tech without question. Black swan anyone?
• 2012-2014 - AL - Artificial Life, another black swan anyone?
• Beginning of Time to the Infinite Future - Hugh Everett's Many Worlds theory is becoming an increasingly viable way to explain how reality actually works as seen by research that's slowly beginning to prove the existence of the multiverse.
• 2013 - Wormhole creation, as a natural part of entanglement, is no longer considered wild conjecture but rapidly is approaching science fact if recent findings on this most interesting of topics prove to be true.
• 2009 - 2014 - The acceleration of tech truly astounds as we touch the fabric of reality every day with ever increasingly powerful and fine grained tools.
• 2009 - 2014 - Stem cell research, science that can change everything regarding immortality.
• 1980 - 2014 - The education hustle whereby college students become wage slaves thanks to CC and institutional buy in, thus creating higher educational debt greater than the debt held by all CC holders in the US.
• The beat goes on as the science/tech equation vis a vis civilization is never ending, a fact that keeps BRT going as the grist in the mill is just too interesting to let go. :)
• Addendum: To my loyal readers, thank you so much for your feedback on BRT because without question, your comments warm the cockles of this writer's heart to the max. :)

Interesting Stats

GW, the 900lb gorilla in the closet, continues to generate rather interesting stats showing why climate change will soon become the greatest challenge to the survivability of mankind, a notion deemed not acceptable to the millions of GW deniers who insist that climate change is nothing but a nefarious conspiracy peddled by inept scientist and the liberal media that supports them.

The numbers are stark. Carbon dioxide emissions: up 60 percent. Global temperature: up six-tenths of a degree. Population: up 1.7 billion people. Sea level: up 3 inches. U.S. extreme weather: up 30 percent. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica: down 4.9 trillion tons of ice.
"Simply put, we are rapidly remaking the planet and beginning to suffer the consequences," says Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.

THE OCEANS
The world's oceans have risen by about 3 inches since 1992 and gotten a tad more acidic—by about half a percent—thanks to chemical reactions caused by the absorption of carbon dioxide, scientists at NOAA and the University of Colorado say.

Every year sea ice cover shrinks to a yearly minimum size in the Arctic in September—a measurement that is considered a key climate change indicator. From 1983 to 1992, the lowest it got on average was 2.62 million square miles. Now the 10-year average is down to 1.83 million square miles, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

That loss—an average 790,000 square miles since 1992—overshadows the slight gain in sea ice in Antarctica, which has seen an average gain of 110,000 square miles of sea ice over the past 22 years.

Read the Physorg article to get the whole picture of why injecting more energy into any system makes it wilder.

Ingenuity + :)

Interesting twist on CG, time travel and problem solving. Enjoy. 

Almost Alien

An amazing achievement is a vast understatement when it comes to describing the significance of the Antikythera Mechanism, the world's first analog computer, something almost alien in terms of just how advanced this system truly was when built around 205 BC.

"The complex clocklike assembly of bronze gears and display dials predates other known examples of similar technology by more than 1,000 years. It accurately predicted lunar and solar eclipses, as well as solar, lunar and planetary positions," the Times described the ancient mechanism, which measures just about 8 inches across.

For good measure, the mechanism also tracked the dates of the Olympic Games. Although it was not programmable in the modern sense, some have called it the first analog computer.

Interestingly enough, this may only be the beginning.

Last fall, an expedition led by Woods Hole and Greek government scientists began the first systematic, scientific investigation of the site of the shipwreck where the mechanism was found. The dive was shortened to just five days because of bad weather, but the scientists plan to return next spring.

I, for one, cannot wait to see whether other artifacts like the mechanism may come forth in the spring of 2015. :)

On a Wing but Not a Prayer :)

The Dutch have a pragmatic and innovative approach to life, something readily seen in the TU Delft Ambulance drone, a quick way to deliver cardiac resuscitation within timeframes nearly impossible to achieve using the traditional means of getting hardware to site whether it be by car, ambulance or helicopter. Pretty awesome application of tech without question.

Each year nearly a million people in Europe suffer from a cardiac arrest. A mere 8% survives due to slow response times of emergency services. The ambulance-drone is capable of saving lives with an integrated defibrillator. The goal is to improve existing emergency infrastructure with a network of drones. This new type of drones can go over 100 km/h and reaches its destination within 1 minute, which increases chance of survival from 8% to 80%! This drone folds up and becomes a toolbox for all kind of emergency supplies. Future implementations will also serve other use cases such as drowning, diabetes, respiratory issues and traumas.

Now all that's needed is to link it to an HC system able to take this data in real time and send it to appropriate parties as needs warrant, something a near impossibility given just how inept the US HC system truly is.

CO2 up close & personal

A must see to learn why global warming is for real.

On the Notion of Rainbows

BRT has talked often about how language defines our notion of reality based on how said language is constructed, whether it be pictographic like Chinese and Japanese or modular like English or Russian. To that end, a good friend of mine posted an awesome link showing how English differs from Chinese when it comes to color, a most important aspect of describing reality without question.

Here's a fascinating visualization (seen above) created by Muyueh Lee that shows the differences between how the English language and Chinese language each describe colors. On the left, you can see the number of English names for color hues (there's a lot!) and on the right, the number of Chinese names (there's a little!).

Shown below is a dataset depicting specific breakdowns of color descriptions.

This is English

This is Chinese

Interesting, eh?

To see how this works in interactive 3D, Muyueh Lee's amazing site is the place to go as the interrelational aspects of just how deep this finding goes is truly astounding.

To yours truly, the notion that language describes our take on reality rings true as shown by Lee's incredibly creative and innovative research.

PS. Thanks Mark for turning me onto this. :)

Reflection 2 Step

It's amazing how seemingly transparent glass acts like a mirror when the angle, background and lighting is just right as seen here in a shot taken during my time in Chicago, an awesome place to drink beer, talk with people and walk the streets in relaxed fashion. Enjoy.

In Other Words

Who knows, speaking in tongues may have inspired "Spoken Singing", 

a musical technique pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg and significant others back in the 1910s. 

"One never knows, do one?" - Fat Waller :)

Sprechgesang (German: [ˈʃpʀɛçɡəˌzaŋ], "spoken singing") and Sprechstimme (German: [ˈʃpʀɛçˌʃtɪmə], "spoken voice") are expressionist vocal techniques between singing and speaking. Though sometimes used interchangeably, Sprechgesang is directly related to the operatic recitative manner of singing (in which pitches are sung, but the articulation is rapid and loose like speech), whereas Sprechstimme is closer to speech itself (because it does not emphasise any particular pitches).[1]

The earliest compositional use of the technique was in the first version of Engelbert Humperdinck's 1897 melodrama Königskinder (in the 1910 version it was replaced by conventional singing), where it may have been intended to imitate a style already in use by singers of lieder and popular song,[3] but it is more closely associated with the composers of the Second Viennese School. Arnold Schoenberg asks for the technique in a number of pieces: the part of the Speaker in Gurre-Lieder (1911) is written in his notation for sprechstimme, but it was Pierrot Lunaire (1912) where he used it throughout and left a note attempting to explain the technique. Alban Berg adopted the technique and asked for it in parts of his operas Wozzeck and Lulu.

Chicago 2014

Had to put this pix up. Carl Sandburg was right, Chicago is the city with Big Shoulders. :)

Hog Butcher for the World,

   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

   Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

   Stormy, husky, brawling,

   City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,

   Bareheaded,

   Shoveling,

   Wrecking,

   Planning,

   Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,

Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,

Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,

                   Laughing!

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.