Habeas Corpus

The debate is over, has been for a long time for rational people regarding GW but... for flat earthers refusing to believe earth's becoming an oven because of us, the art of stupid looms, especially with three reports coming in from NASA & NOAA showing how the rise of CO2 levels impacts climate change and the UN's IPCC (350mb - PDF) monster titled Climate Change 2013 providing ever more evidence that GW's a reality show writ large. Because of this, it's time for unbelievers to finally pack it in and realize we're in big trouble and must make radical  changes now regarding energy and it's connect to the environment or face consequences too dire for civilization to even contemplate. 

Click on the National Academies graphic below to get a concise view of why ignoring GW truly is the art of stupid. To learn more about how researchers put together climate models to explain their findings, click here.

The Question to ask now is, does Obama have the guts to pull the plug on Keystone XL?

Well do ya?...

Burning Down the House

BRT has talked about the Tar Sands operation in Alberta, Canada on numerous occasions (There is a Hell) from the tech perspective while Jacques Leslie's powerful NYTimes op ed piece,  Is Canada Tarring Itself? touches upon her very soul.

START with the term “tar sands.” In Canada only fervent opponents of oil development in northern Alberta dare to use those words; the preferred phrase is the more reassuring “oil sands.” Never mind that the “oil” in the world’s third largest petroleum reserve is in fact bitumen, a substance with the consistency of peanut butter, so viscous that another fossil fuel must be used to dilute it enough to make it flow.

Never mind, too, that the process that turns bitumen into consumable oil is very dirty, even by the oil industry’s standards. But say “tar sands” in Canada, and you’ll risk being labeled unpatriotic, radical, subversive.

It gets better.

Documents obtained by research institutions and environmental groups through freedom-of-information requests show a government bent on extracting as much tar sands oil as possible, as quickly as possible. From 2008 to 2012, oil industry representatives registered 2,733 communications with government officials, a number dwarfing those of other industries. The oil industry used these communications to recommend changes in legislation to facilitate tar sands and pipeline development. In the vast majority of instances, the government followed through.

Killing Me Softly applies here if you ask me. 

Deep Time

Spruce Gran Picea: 9,550 years old (Fulufjället, Sweden)

"This 9,950-year-old tree is like a portrait of climate change. The mass of branches near the ground grew the same way for roughly 9,500 years, but the new, spindly trunk in the center is only 50 or so years old, caused by warming at the top of this mountain plateau in Western Sweden."

Emergence

Alan Turing, one of the true giants in both science and technology, has appeared in BRT in numerous articles describing his work, not only as the inventor of AI and the digital computer (along with John Von Neumann) but also on his seminal contribution to Chaos (Stone Soup) when he posited his then revolutionary theory of how patterns emerge from seeming randomness as seen through the coloration of animals. Now, it seems researchers have put Turing's theory to the test and found out he was right about how chaos functions in the real world.

According to Turing’s theory, designs like fur patterns result from the interactions between individual cells; in other words, the state of a cell influences that of its neighbors, and they, in turn, influence their neighbors. You can see the results of this process in the images collected here; they’re a kind of digital representation of Turing’s idea, except using pixels instead of cells. It’s the relationship among these cells and pixels that ultimately produces a pattern from randomness — a relationship that relies on interacting, molecular signals that spread among groups of otherwise identical cells.

Turing called this the reaction-diffusion process, meaning that it’s driven by reactive molecules that can diffuse between cells. He called these molecules “morphogens” because they affect the morphology, or physical character, of a cell. One molecule activates a change, like color, and one inhibits it. Patterns are produced by varying concentrations of the morphogens as they interact and spread through a population of cells.

The video above shows how this interaction works, something, in this case, psychedelic, wonderful and spot on. :) Seen below is a double pendulum example of chaos in action.

Full Moon Tetrad

Full moons fascinate me as readers of this blog well know. It's the light and shadows, particularly on snow, that never cease to amaze, with their definition and coolness of illumination. Interestingly enough, you have to endure the cold to get viable images as cold air is clearer than warm, something astronomers have known about since the beginning of time. With this in mind, check out what's happening, beginning on April 15th, (I know, I know :)) as a bountiful of lunar eclipses are about to begin, an extremely rare event moon watchers like myself anticipate with great excitement while praying for clear skies when nature puts on a show as awesome as this. 

The action starts on April 15th when the full Moon passes through the amber shadow of Earth, producing a midnight eclipse visible across North America. So begins a lunar eclipse tetrad—a series of 4 consecutive total eclipses occurring at approximately six month intervals. The total eclipse of April 15, 2014, will be followed by another on Oct. 8, 2014, and another on April 4, 2015, and another on Sept. 28 2015.

"The most unique thing about the 2014-2015 tetrad is that all of them are visible for all or parts of the USA," says longtime NASA eclipse expert Fred Espenak.

Nature never disappoints - Robert E.

The All Seeing Eye

Yours truly loves to take pictures and do videos as loyal readers know. Having said this, the notion of a lensless camera fascinates this writer to no end, where this tech can go also has no end according to an interesting Physorg piece titled Ultra tiny camera has no lens - uses algorithm to develop pictures.

An extremely tiny lensless camera, developed by Rambus, has been slowly making waves over the past year. Researchers for the company, David Stork and Patrick Gill won a Best Paper award at last year's Sencomm 2013 for describing what the company has created. They spoke again at last month's Mobile World Congress, describing their new type of camera—one that might someday soon be used to give virtually any digital device, some degree of vision.

The camera is both simple and complex, it's really just a very tiny chip (CMOS imager) embedded in a piece of glass. Instead of a lens, a pattern is etched into the glass above the chip—the imager reads the light that is received, processes it using an algorithm developed by Rambus and converts it into a recognizable image. What's amazing is that the etched pattern on the glass and the chip are both roughly the size of a period at the end of a sentence.

Times, they keep a'changin. - Bob Dylan

A Thought Experiment X 3 :)

Thought experiments rock, thought experiments via Minute Physics rock even more. 

Today's experiment - Parallel Universes. :)

Transition

Life is all about transition as is this video with transport as prime driver. Enjoy

By hook or by crook

Seems we will be getting tar sands crude with or without Keystone as seen by the disturbing news from Climate Process.

But while critics and proponents of Keystone XL have sparred over the last few years, numerous pipelines — many of them slated to carry the same Canadian tar sands crude as Keystone — have been proposed, permitted, and even seen construction begin in the U.S. and Canada. Some rival Keystone XL in size and capacity; others, when linked up with existing and planned pipelines, would carry more oil than the 1,179-mile pipeline.

It gets better.

“Some of these pipelines have been in the ground for 40, 50, 60 years, so they were put in the ground before pipelines had the latest and greatest coatings or before the welding was up to snuff,” he said. “So there’s lots of issues about how you verify that the pipe that’s been in the ground that long is really up to additional pressures.”

Just ask Mayflower Arkansas how easy is it to clean up tar sands crude.

Any questions?

360

This is not an endorsement of pretty cool tech but rather a spot on look into the design process. 

Very well done, it shows how smart peopler collaborate in making something with real promise. :)

Cosmic Inflation Explained - PHD Comics :)

For even more information on inflation, click BRT's Grand Unification blurb. :)

Difficult at best

Click the Nasa Earth Observatory map to view the interactive version showing the increase of temperature anomalies due to global warming. After that, check out how close we are to collapse due to an interesting mix of self inflicted conditions that must be changed or we become toast if NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center's model of collapse proves to be true.

These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These social phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years."

Modeling a range of different scenarios, Motesharri and his colleagues conclude that under conditions "closely reflecting the reality of the world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid." In the first of these scenarios, civilisation:

".... appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature."

Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that "with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites."

Overshoot, Greed, & GW, the troika of collapse, looms.

Grand Unification

Ripples in space time, something Einstein dreamed about when formulating General Relativity back in 1905, was considered to be a lock but without proof, gravitons remained forever theoretical and elusive, kind of like the Higgs Boson, "we know it's there but we can't prove it." notion until now.

Using the Bicep2 telescope, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and other institutions discovered that microwave radiation coming from the early universe exhibits a type of polarization that is expected to result from primordial gravitational waves, the scientists said. These waves — ripples in the fabric of space and time — became imprinted on the shape of the universe during “inflation,” a period of rapid expansion during the universe’s first instant.

Implications of this research boggles the mind as 

1. Guth's theory of inflation (to explain why the universe is homogenous in texture) is valid.
2. Gravitons, the quantum carriers of the gravitational force, most likely exist, and work, in similar fashion, to photons, the quantum carriers of electromagnetism, which means...
3. A possible grand unification of quantum mechanics to relativity, a goal Einstein pursued in vain until his death in 1955, now becomes possible because of the fact gravity is most likely a quantum entity like the three other forces seen in nature, the strong, weak and electromagnetic.
4. The Multiverse, a theory independently proposed by Hugh Evertt, Andrei Linde, David Deutsch and Bryce De Witt among significant others, becomes ever more plausible as inflation is not only seen to be real and eternal but also to be fractal in nature, able to spawn multiple universes without issue. 

Rounding out the known laws of physics with an extra ingredient called “supersymmetry” causes three of the forces of nature to attain equal strengths at high energies. New results suggest that inflation happened at exactly the energy where this “grand unification” of the forces would occur.

Last but not least, here is a beautiful diagram of the history of "our' universe. :)

Taking Back the Net

Articulate, uncompromising and resolute, Edward Snowden walks the walk and talks the talk in his analysis concerning why it's imperative we take back the net before it's too late. BRT has discussed this at length as loyal readers know but listening to Snowden is something people should do to better understand what's at stake here. 

Robert E.

History of Film in a Minute

The history of film in a minute. Awesome without question. :)

Winter 2014 Stills 3/17/2014

A compilation of stills "commemorating" the winter of 2014, a season to remember. :)

Winter 2014 - The Good Parts

A brutal winter yet filled with beauty. Enjoy

It's Ok...

National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden called out Sen. Dianne Feinstein after her fiery floor speech Tuesday assailing the CIA, calling her anger hypocritical.

Snowden released a statement after the California Democrat spent nearly an hour on the Senate floor decrying the CIA for accessing Senate Intelligence Committee computers and interfering with staffers’ investigations into CIA interrogation tactics.

“It’s clear the CIA was trying to play ‘keep away’ with documents relevant to an investigation by their overseers in Congress, and that’s a serious constitutional concern,” Snowden said in a statement to NBC News and confirmed to POLITICO by a Snowden associate. “But it’s equally if not more concerning that we’re seeing another ‘Merkel Effect,’ where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it’s a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them.”

hy·poc·ri·sy

hiˈpäkrisē

noun

1. the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense. 

Non sequitur :)

The Thermo-haline et al

The thermohaline circulation (Fig. 1)  is that part of the ocean circulation which is driven by density differences. Sea water density depends on temperature and salinity, hence the name thermo-haline. The salinity and temperature differences arise from heating/cooling at the sea surface and from the surface freshwater fluxes (evaporation and sea ice formation enhance salinity; precipitation, runoff and ice-melt decrease salinity)... It can be regarded as a big overturning of the world ocean, from top to bottom

But this "conveyor belt", which acts as the world's thermostat, is slowing due to global warming.

The largest source of the coldest water in the world's oceans ceased producing Antarctic Bottom Water in 1976. The surface water around Antarctica, which has be been freshening since the 1950's, formed a lid of low-density water stopping the overturning process in the Weddell sea near the coast of Antarctica. The Weddell Sea polynya, an area of open water the size of New Zealand, was the most productive source of cold Antarctic bottom water in the 1970s. Relatively warm salty water is pushed upwards by ocean currents moving over a ridge in the Weddell sea. Before 1980 this salty water reached the surface releasing large amounts of heat, then cooled and sank to the bottom of the ocean. The heat kept the huge hole in the ice pack called a polynya open, and a massive oceanic convection cell formed in the Antarctic winter. This convection cell cooled the global oceans while warming the air around Antarctica. Antarctic Bottom Water, the most voluminous water mass in the oceans, is now being replaced by warmer, less dense water masses as the deep oceans warm.

Which means...

The strengthened winds have spun up the strong current that rings Antarctica called the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. This ring of fast moving water tends to block the transport of warm subtropical water towards Antarctica. However, the geography of the northern hemisphere has the opposite effect on the poleward transport of warm subtropical water. The Atlantic ocean is aligned to funnel warm subtropical water into the Arctic ocean as the subtropical highs strengthen and the trade winds speed up. Thus, the collapse of the Weddell Sea polynya has lead to increased transport of oceanic and atmospheric heat towards the Arctic. The rapid warming of the Arctic and the extraordinarily rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, which was not predicted by climate models, is a likely consequence of the collapse of the Weddell Sea polynya, which had been the most productive source of Antarctic Bottom Water (ABW). The authors of this report don't discuss the effects of the end of Weddell Sea bottom water formation on the global ocean circulation or the Arctic (the discussion here is based on my extensive review of paleoclimatology research) but they do hint at the importance of the decline in ABW formation.

Which means... the jet stream is weakened as well because when the arctic becomes warmer, the temperature gradient from north to south lessens, thus causing the jet stream to lose strength and move south as a result, which enables such events as the Polar Vortex and intense snow storms to occur with greater frequency.

  

A study in 2001 found that stratospheric circulation can have anomalous effects on the weather regimes.[29] In the same year researchers found a statistical correlation between weak polar vortex and outbreaks of severe cold in the Northern Hemisphere.[30][31] In more recent years scientists identified interactions with Arctic sea ice decline, reduced snow cover, evapotranspiration patterns, NAO anomalies or weather anomalies which are linked to the polar vortex and jet stream configuration.[29][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] However, because the specific observations are considered short-term observations (starting c. 13 years ago) there is considerable uncertainty in the conclusions. Climatology observations require several decades to definitively distinguish natural variability from climate trends.

Summing it up, does global warming exist when taking in all these factors? Yes, particularly if there's an increase in anomalies, the precursors to phase transitions, where one state replaces another due to an environmental change such as heat, the agent that transforms water into a solid, a liquid or to a gas, depending on how hot the environment gets. 

)

Earth's Northern Hemisphere over the past 30 years has seen more "hot" (orange), "very hot" (red) and "extremely hot" (brown) summers, compared to a base period defined in this study from 1951 to 1980. This visualization shows how the area experiencing "extremely hot" summers grows from nearly nonexistent during the base period to cover 12 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere by 2011. Watch for the 2010 heat waves in the Middle East, Western Asia and Eastern Europe, and the 2011 heat waves in Texas, Oklahoma and Mexico. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Addendum, Click 15 Seconds, a short BRT bulb showing just how hot the world has become in the last 60 years. Something for thought if you ask me.

Strandbeest Evolution

A good friend of mine turned me onto Strandbeest Evolution, incredibly beautiful and mysterious work created by Dutch artist Theo Jansen. Enjoy.

Recognizing life as a concept is, in many ways, liberating. We no longer need to recoil from our impulse to endow Mr. Jansen’s sculptures with “life” because they move on their own. The real reason Strandbeest enchant us is the same reason that any so-called “living thing” fascinates us: not because it is “alive,” but because it is so complex and, in its complexity, beautiful.

Watch a Strandbeest’s sail undulate in the wind, its gears begin to turn, its legs bend and extend in sync over and over — so dauntless, so determined. It does not matter whether this magnificent entity is alive or not. Just look at it go.

Works for me. :)

Pastafarianism

Jesus and Mo strikes again, this time concerning Pastafarianism, better known as... 

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Seen below is man being touched by "His Noodly Appendage." :)

Lest you have skepticism about the validity of Pastafarianism, consider this:

Can I be a member if I don’t literally Believe in the FSM?

Yes you can.  For the same reason that many in other religions don’t literally believe their scripture, you can be a Pastafarian without being a True Believer of our scripture.   In other words, do you know Christians who don’t take the Bible literally – but who consider themselves True Christians, nonetheless?  So do I.  In fact, True Belief is not often a requirement of religion.   Most religions are comprised of a group of people with similar – but not exact – world views.  Pastafarianism is no different in that regard.

Whatever you decide, remember this

FSM is a real, legitimate religion, as much as any other.  The fact that many see this is as a satirical religion doesn’t change the fact that by any standard one can come up with, our religion is as legitimate as any other.  And *that* is the point.

Something to consider, don't you think? :)