Monday, June 30, 2014

Friday, June 27, 2014

14 Rules to Live By


Where is Kelly Johnson when you need him? You know, the guy who created the Black Bird aka SR-71, on time and within budget, something not possible with the F35, the fubar that keeps on giving as seen by the latest factoid on this ongoing disaster, courtesy of the company the great Kelly Johnson worked for back in the day.

One $100 million Air Force plane leaks oil, another bursts into flame

The F-35 is the world’s most expensive weapons system – $400 billion and counting. The estimated lifetime cost of this military-industrial project is $1.5 trillion. The F-35 is already close to a decade behind schedule and its cost is already more than twice the original estimate. The Pentagon has lowered its performance specs and it’s still years from being operational.

On June 22, at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, an F-35A was taking off on a routine training flight when the tail of the plane burst into flame. The pilot aborted the takeoff and escaped from the cockpit. A ground crew extinguished the fire with foam. There were no injuries, but the $100 million plane was possibly destroyed, according to officials.

All twenty-six F-35s at Eglin were grounded after the fire, while the Air Force tried to figure out why the plane had ignited. Air Force spokesperson Lt. Hope Cronin called the fire “significant,” but the cause is yet unknown. F-35s at other bases continue to fly.

Earlier this month, on June 13, the entire F-35 fleet (more then 100 planes at this point) was grounded because an F-35 was leaking oil in flight. The Air Force, the Marines, and the Navy each have a variation of the F-35 that range in estimated cost from $98 million (Air Force) to $104 million (Marines) to $124 million (Navy).

Seen below is the SR-71, the greatest airplane ever designed.


Johnson had 14 rules to live by, they are:















Mythical Man Month anyone? For more info on the F35, The Art of Invention post comes to mind. :)

The video's not bad either. :)


Nature abhors a vacuum - BRT post 1300


As most folks know, nature abhors a vacuum if one lives on a planet like earth because, due to air pressure differentials, high pressure areas will always move to low (entropy) to equalize things out, something akin to what the US did when destroying viable nations like Iraq and Libya (high), thus creating a power vacuum (low) thus enabling organized groups like ISIS to take advantage of (to fill in/replace) in short order. While the former leaders of Iraq and Libya were not wonderful by any stretch of the imagination, they did lead functioning, secular countries where women had the most rights of any middle eastern nation save that of Israel and things remained relatively stable until now. With that being said, the US "nation building" process of replacing high pressure zones with low, has, in effect, created ISIS, a movement bent on creating a caliphate encompassing Iraq, Syria and beyond if conditions permit it. See the awesome map by Mohammad adil-Rashidun below. 


Now that we know how US "Nation Building" works, consider the following. 





Mission accomplished - "W"

The Great Game - ME Edition explains, in part, why this is happening and why, in this case, how poorly played this edition has been for the world at large.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Rolling the Dice


This time map itself is worth checking out but the article connected to it makes it even better.



As I read this, the notion of From It to Bit comes to mind as John Wheeler's astonishingly original concept of reality being an information appliance of infinite power, where all bits of reality constantly exchange information 24/7 via the laws of thermodynamics, not only makes sense but also gives a clear explanation as to how the multiverse works as a system.


How cool is that? :)

Viable nuclear power - for a change. :)


We all know about the slow motion disaster known as Fukushima and the hazards of nuclear power as seen in that situation but most people don't know, including yours truly, that a viable alternative to the light water reactors like Fukushima does exist, tech that could help make sustainable power at real world levels achievable while getting rid of nuclear waste in cost effective fashion.



Click here to get the Transatomic Power white paper on the design of their molten salt reactor. Pretty cool tech I must say. 


In the Land of the Blind...

Friday, June 13, 2014

Lurching toward catastrophe


BRT has talked about Blowback often as the law of unforeseen consequences, as articulated by the CIA, is more than just apt when talking about Iraq and the rapidly disintegrating Middle East on which actions, carried out by "W" in 2003, set in place an emerging catastrophe of historic proportions, which Obama has enhanced, thanks to continued ineptness when dealing with Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and China.  





Seen below is a terrific NYTimes graphic depicting the success insurgents have had in Iraq. Click it to view what is happening in the country the US destroyed, thanks, in large part, to Shock & Awe


Click here to get the terrific NYTimes Alliance Map. Chaos incarnate without question.

To learn more about Iraq and the foibles of US foreign policy from sources outside of the mainline corporate controlled press, check out informationclearinghouse,  The National Interest, Global Research and Aljazeera/America as they write about world events from different political perspectives. There are many more links on BRT regarding news so getting viable information as to why the US has screwed the pooch in terms of foreign policy is not rocket science by any stretch of the imagination. 

Addendum: To add fuel to the fire, this Zero Hedge piece regarding Russia and the dollar should warm the cockles of your heart.




Any questions?

Addendum II: Click The Grand Game - ME Edition to see a possible raison d'etre as to why this catastrophe came to be. Chilling to say the least.

7 Billion

What Do 7 Billion People Do?

by annavital.
Explore more visuals like this one on the web's largest information design community - Visually.

Visually is pretty damn cool I must say. This factoid is interesting to say the least in terms of what us rubes do on planet earth. :)


Thursday, June 12, 2014

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

4/C & Then Some :)

Nature and it's inherent connect to tech never ceases to amaze. Back in the day, yours truly was a corporate identity designer using 4/C printing (CYMK - Cyan, Yellow, Magenta & Black/K - used to enhance the printing process) to produce annual reports and ad supplements for companies as CYMK enables printers to recreate the full color spectrum without issue whether the print process be inkjet, offset or rotogravure. Correspondingly, as described in the Physorg piece, four colors were also used by cartographers because...


Now it appears researchers use the same centuries old approach to manipulating color to better understand the nature of crystals.



Seen below is the RGB (Additive colors - used for video) and CYMK (Subtractive colors used for print) diagram set showing how colors interact to generate the full color set populating every image output device known to man. Note: K - Black is always used in quality printing as subtractive inks are "dirty", thus requiring black to enhance the printing process. :)


Monday, June 09, 2014

The Turing Test




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

Addendum: Turing's amazing article, Computing Machinery and Intelligence will blow you away with just how prescient it truly was in defining how computing and AI could evolve using the test as a means to make it happen.


Ingenuity + :)


Seeing young people create something really useful is a joy. Check out what Remya Rose did while still in school.


Never Pristine


Data is never pristine. Why? Because man produces it, something your's truly often forgets when writing about tech and science but Nate Silver never forgets as seen in his terrific article titled Be Skeptical of Both Piketty and His Skeptics.



Buyer beware, anyone? :)

Monday, June 02, 2014

Diamonds are Forever


BRT has talked about quantum computers on several occasions as said devices are not only incomprehensively fast due to the superpostion of qubits but, more importantly, have the potential of creating reality in finite space, but before getting to that computing nirvana requires flawless quantum teleportation of information via entangled quibits, something not considered doable until now.


Seen below is a short video showing how information can be processed via quantum teleportation.


The Matrix - phase 1.

Realizing robust quantum information transfer between long-lived qubit registers is a key challenge for quantum information science and technology. Here, we demonstrate unconditional teleportation of arbitrary quantum states between diamond spin qubits separated by 3 m. We prepare the teleporter through photon-mediated heralded entanglement between two distant electron spins and subsequently encode the source qubit in a single nuclear spin. By realizing a fully deterministic Bell-state measurement combined with real-time feed-forward quantum teleportation is achieved upon each attempt with an average state fidelity exceeding the classical limit. These results establish diamond spin qubits as a prime candidate for the realization of quantum networks for quantum communication and network-based quantum computing.

Sunday, June 01, 2014

1.618


Fibonacci & Phi - Can't get any better then this. :)


Not just for the 3rd world


Knowing just how overpriced medical hardware tends to be in America's profit-driven healthcare system gives one pause but there's hope, especially when talented scientists work with innovative techs to create inexpensive and elegantly designed hardware that makes a difference, as seen by this very cool CerviScope,  developed by David Walmer and Duke's biomedical engineering group.



How cool is this? :)


The Image Factor


Image recognition is now a big deal, especially with the NSA. Intense tech, combined with 24/7 connectivity to the web at unimagined levels of ubiquity, enable the agency to achieve the 1984 ultimate, the complete dossier of potentially anyone whose picture appears on any social outlet on the net.




Warms the cockles of your heart, right?