Minitrue

BRT has written about the 24/7 spying on the part of the NSA ad nauseum but the NSA is not the only entity doing the drill as the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and British Intel, GCHQ also get in on the act whether we like it or not. News regarding GCHQ's recent actions, however, shows how unbridled surveillance becomes the start point to building the 2014 version of  the propaganda engine of 1984, aka Mintrue, using deception to manipulate human behavior on the net through false information, innuendo and ad homenum attacks of the lowest order.

To whit:

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents...

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group) are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. 

Seen below are three images from the "enthusiastic" GCHQ handbook on how to defame anyone who may have contrary notions to how, in this case, governance or business should operate in England. 

The Ministry of Truth - Minitrue, in Newspeak - was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: 

WAR IS PEACE 

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY 

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. The were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided: the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty. 

INGSOC anyone?

English Socialist Party - The logo of Big Brother

The five countries at the bottom of the two blue slides comprise the 5 Eye allegiance to share intel.

They are: The US, Australia, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand.

Entanglement - of the Quantum Kind

PHD Comics is a gem. Funny, erudite and above all else, accurate in explaining the often arcane intricacies of physics, a fascination yours truly has had, at lay level, for over 40 years. This episode deals with entanglement of the quantum kind. Enjoy.

Addendum: To make entanglement even more mysterious, physicists now think entanglement and spooky action at a distance, via wormholes, may be intrinsically connected. 

Wormholes and entanglement—two of science fiction's favorite concepts from modern physics—may in reality be two sides of the same coin, physicists say. The findings may offer a way to solve puzzling mysteries about black holes and perhaps help reconcile theories of gravity and quantum physics, which has been the dream of physicists since the mid–20th century.

Something's afoot - Sherlock Holmes

Lorentzian Wormhole

The One True North :)

To loyal readers of this "wonderful" blog, the notion yours truly loves maps is an understatement, particularly regarding antique ones, brimming with elegant artistry and, at times, whimsical takes on a world largely unknown back in the golden age of map making from the 14th to 17th century. With this in mind, the one constant in the creation of these pieces was the fact North tended to reside on top of the map, a notion totally arbitrary when one looks at how reality works from the physics perspective, which means, the wonderful McArthur's Universal Corrective Map of the World is just as correct as the ones we're so familiar with, because, as stated before, there is no one true north save those created by biased mapmakers beginning in the 1300s, as explained in a terrific article from Aljazeera titled How the north ended up on top of the map.

Why do maps always show the north as up? For those who don’t just take it for granted, the common answer is that Europeans made the maps and they wanted to be on top. But there’s really no good reason for the north to claim top-notch cartographic real estate over any other bearing, as an examination of old maps from different places and periods can confirm.

Read on as learning about maps is akin to following the white rabbit into Wonderland. :)

K-Pax

K-Pax, a sci fi flick with intelligence to spare, is a delight to watch with Kevin Spacy as the mysterious alien Prot, considered crazy without question, and Jeff Bridges, a shrink who tries to help him while at the same time trying to find out if Prot is for real. In the scene above, Prot shows astronomers the heretofore unknown celestial mechanics of the K-Pax solar system. Needless to say, in this case, Prot is the real deal. Enjoy. :)

The Red Pill Redux

We all know this picture, right? It's Neo seeing the Matrix for what it is, a digital simulation of its reality, a construct BRT wrote about in The Red Pill, a piece done a year ago discussing how researchers are finding similarity of the propagation of cosmic rays to the 3D render space of computer graphics. http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847 Seems the NYTimes has picked up on this a year later in an article titled, Is the Universe a Simulation?, a well written blurb using the same source as BRT's in showing why this "crazy" notion may ring true due to the unique properties of mathematics, a discipline wholly independent of time and space, connected to yet forever separate from the complex reality in which we all live.

Many mathematicians, when pressed, admit to being Platonists. The great logician Kurt Gödel argued that mathematical concepts and ideas “form an objective reality of their own, which we cannot create or change, but only perceive and describe.” But if this is true, how do humans manage to access this hidden reality?

We don’t know. But one fanciful possibility is that we live in a computer simulation based on the laws of mathematics — not in what we commonly take to be the real world. According to this theory, some highly advanced computer programmer of the future has devised this simulation, and we are unknowingly part of it. Thus when we discover a mathematical truth, we are simply discovering aspects of the code that the programmer used.

Morpheus: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Minding One's Business :)

There was one small break in this very cold winter about a week ago and yours truly took advantage of it photographing seagulls as they are masters of the universe when it comes to the beaches they inhabit along the coasts of CT. When looking at gulls, one intuitively sees how each one minds its own business when it comes to eking out a living 24/7, 365 days/year. 

Enjoy.

Reflection 2 Step

Yours truly created this video as a paean to the unseasonably harsh Winter of 2014, a harbinger of things to come as we move further into the unknown territory of Global Warming. Enjoy.

Texas Chain Saw Massacre :)

My son turned me onto Wired's Absurd Animal of the Week series. 

This week's star, the Lyre Bird.

Seen below is a another example of the songbird supreme's awesome repertory. :)

In the blink of an eye

The coolest eyes on the planet belong to the ferocious Mantis Shrimp, a carnivore supreme possessing stun gun weapons in the form of two heavily modified claws able to modify prey via pulverization or knockout depending on the base configuration of said prey. Seen below is a side shot of this most fearsome predator.

While the researchers aren’t sure exactly what the shrimp are doing instead, it’s possible that their visual system functions somewhat like a satellite sensor. The eyes of a mantis shrimp move independently—like chameleons’ eyes—and are perched atop stalks on their heads. To see, the shrimp move their eyes across whatever they are looking at, scanning it sequentially with their visual cells.

Seen below is Ze Frank's over the top description of interesting facts about this amazing animal.

Edge Line

Edge Line shows but a short glimpse into the intricate strategies life takes to effectively deal 

with the radically different environments of land and sea during the winter of 2014. :)