Crescent

Looking at this beautiful image of Pluto via New Horizons shows why space exploration is so important, something congress seems not to understand given just how small NASA's budget truly is.

Rolling Stone Nails It :)

We Must Stand ...

Kind of says it all, doesn't it?

A Mote in God's Eye

A 14 gigapixel still of Andromeda portrayed in 4k at varying zoom levels never ceases to amaze. BRT showed this clip about a year ago in 2K but wanted to show it again as every dot seen in the pix is a star hiding other stars, a fact that depicts, in small fashion, just how immense Andromeda truly is yet said galaxy is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies residing in our part of the multiverse. Gives one pause doesn't it.

Addendum: Here is the largest image ever taken of the Milky Way. Staggering says it all.

Retro yet not :)

Steampunk is very cool. Retro yet not, digital yet not, something a bar in Romania has in spades. :)

Charles Babbage would be proud.

The Difference Engine/powered by hand, not steam. :)

Theocracy 101

BRT has mocked the Republican candidates as bloviators lacking in class, knowledge and common sense in all things related to governance but what would happen to the 1st Amendment if any of these clowns actually won?

A new PPP survey reveals that Republicans are afflicted most, with 44 percent now favoring installing Christianity as the United States’ official religion. (Lest we forget, the GOP’s roster of potential 2016 candidates is stocked with rabid believers, and even faith-faker Donald Trump is courting evangelicals.) A shocking 28 percent of Democrats are also theocratically inclined. Only 53 percent of Republican and Democratic voters combined oppose declaring Jesus jabberwocky our national faith.

The upshot: almost three out of four adult Americans would, in effect, junk the First Amendment, and with it, our gloriously godless system of governance.

Bertrand Russell's quote regarding religion is something to think about, don't you think? 

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

Maybe Bertrand was channeling the famous computer graphic teapot but that can't be the one as that one exists, in the Boston Computer History Museum.. :)

Passing Thru - To 1700

1700 posts is a pretty big deal to yours truly. As often stated, I am amazed and humbled that you, my loyal readers, have continued to read and comment on the "pearls of wisdom" imparted from me to you over the past few years. No time for pontification but rather, please check out this clip done by your videographer showing how creativity comes in all shapes, forms and sizes, beginning with two amazing places everyone should check out if one has the time. Seen below is the blurb describing what this video's all about.

A journey thru MASS Moca & The Clark with emphasis given to the environments housing the art. With Mass MoCA, it's the linking of factory buildings to create spaces perfect for modern art of all types, for The Clark, it's a minimalist addition of elegance and grace.

1701 coming up, to a computer near you. :)

Dumb & Dumber

Dumb & Dumber, no, not the flick but rather the readability level of the bloviating by the presential candidates, with THE DONALD @ number 1 with a 4th grade Readability Score. In comparison, Washington's  "Farewell Address" was 17.9 and Kennedy's  inaugural 13.9. Since then, the downward spiral's been remarkable. Maybe it's the fast food we eat or the entertainment we watch. In any case, Dumb & Dumber rules. :)

Real estate mogul Donald Trump rose to the top of the Republican field just days after he announced his candidacy in a now-infamous speech at the Trump Tower. But perhaps the most extraordinary part of that address—besides being a seemingly stream-of-consciousness amalgamation of half-baked Reaganisms and Steve Doocy ramblings from the ​Fox and Friends​ couch​—​was its startling simplicity. It was more than just that his plan for dealing with Iran was to take their oil, though: According to ​the Boston Globe, the whole thing was delivered in language a fourth-grader could understand.

The ​Globe​ used an algorithm, known as the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, "​that crunches word choice and sentence structure and spits out grade-level rankings​." Developed by researchers in the 1940s and modified for the U.S. Navy in the 70s, the test measures the complexity of a speaker's diction and, theoretically, concludes the level of education an average person would need to have in order to understand it. 

Dumb & Dumber anyone?

Civilizations 2Step

A quick glimpse into levels of civilization from us @ below Type 1 to Type III, a level way beyond our comprehension given just how fractured society is on planet earth.

Heresay :)

More eye candy, Jovian style :)

Jove in action.

KIC 8462852

Something mysterious this way comes, in this instance, a star residing 1500 light years from earth, invisible to the naked eye but not to Kepler, the exoplanet explorer extraordinaire.

In 2011, several citizen scientists flagged one particular star as “interesting” and “bizarre.” The star was emitting a light pattern that looked stranger than any of the others Kepler was watching.

The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation. That would be expected if the star were young. When our solar system first formed, four and a half billion years ago, a messy disk of dust and debris surrounded the sun, before gravity organized it into planets, and rings of rock and ice.

But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.

It appears to be mature.  

It gets better.

The unexplained signals have been found in data collected by Nasa’s Kepler Space Telescope. The mission was launched in 2009 and was designed to find planets by looking for the small dip in light caused when a planet passes in front of the star and blocks a small portion of the light.

It has been remarkably successful adding thousands of planets to the known roster. But in all the 150,000 stars that Kepler has monitored, none have ever looked like KIC 8462852. It stands out because the star dims so dramatically.

Whereas a planet will drop the light by a percent or two at most, this star dims by up to 20 percent. Also unlike a planet, which orbits the star and causes the drop to repeat, these dimmings took place at random intervals during the 1600 days that Kepler was monitoring the star.

Around the 800-day mark, the star’s light dropped by 15 percent, Then around the 1500-day mark, there was a flurry of dimming with one dropping 20 percent of the starlight. To fall that much, the object passing in front of the star must be almost half the diameter of the star. Yet Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, is only one-tenth the diameter of the Sun.

To rub salt into the wound, KIC 8462852, is estimated to be about 1.5 times larger than the sun, making the necessary object vast indeed. So it cannot be a planet.

Obviously far more research needs to be done to determine if this finding turns out to be actually true but in one sense, it reminds one of Larry Niven's SF classic Ringworld, a tale about how an advanced civilization could build tech able to harvest energy from a star at truly grand scale, something along the lines of what Kepler may have discovered.

They first travel to the Puppeteer home world, where they learn that the expedition's goal is to explore a ringworld: an artificial ring about one million miles (1.6 gigameters) wide and approximately the diameter of Earth's orbit (which makes it about 600 million miles (1,000 gigameters) in circumference), encircling a sunlike star. It rotates, providing artificial gravity that is 99.2% as strong as Earth's gravity through the action of centrifugal force. The ringworld has a habitable, flat inner surface equivalent in area to approximately three million Earth-sized planets. Night is provided by an inner ring of shadow squares which are connected to each other by thin, ultra-strong wire (shadow-square wire).

Another possibility could be the construction of a Dyson Sphere, a concept first articulated by famed SF writer Olaf Stapleton  in Star Maker and popularized by Freeman Dyson.

A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and hence captures most or all of its power output. It was first described by Olaf Stapledon in his science fiction novel, Star Maker. The concept was later popularly adopted by Freeman Dyson. Dyson speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the long-term survival and escalating energy needs of a technological civilization, and proposed that searching for evidence of the existence of such structures might lead to the detection of advanced intelligent extraterrestrial life. Different types of Dyson spheres correlate with information on the Kardashev scale.

Remote Control

Edwin Snowden did the country and the world a service by blowing the whistle on the 24/7 surveillance being conducted against us by the NSA and significant others. Now comes an anonymous WB doing the deed on the heretofore secret policy of using drones to "off" people considered enemies of the US. In depth and explosive, The Intercept, in The Drone Papers, takes the lid off of something that needs to be seen, just as the NSA's activities have been thanks to Edwin Snowden.

The Getaway :)

The Red Drum Getaway from Gump on Vimeo.

A very good friend of mine turned me onto this awesome mashup where Stanley Kubrick is the villain. See if you recognize all the asides to the grand master while Jimmy Stewart Does the Deed as hero as per Hitchcock's  Rear Window. :)

Thanks DD, I needed that. :)

The vastness of reality

Cassini's portrait of Mimas and Pandora, two moons of Saturn, shows how vast, beautiful and mysterious reality truly is. Click the pix to see other images just as astounding as this gem. :)

Have to post another. 

Intellectual Property Rights

BRT has talked often about the TPP with emphasis on intellectual property rights vis a vis copyright, the disaster first perpetrated on the US thanks to the late Sonny Bono (The Mickey Mouse Act) who extended the length of copyright from the Founders 14 years plus one allowed extension of 14 years (if the cr holder was still alive) to life plus 70, which means Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, written in 1905, could theoretically remain outside of public domain until 2025 as Einstein died in 1955. Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, debuted in 1928. Disney died in 1966, ergo, Steamboat would not enter the PD until 2036. Now, with the TPP, this intellectual rights nonsense goes worldwide, along with extensive expanded CR rights to hollywood and big pharma with us paroles and political representatives not having any say as to why the TPP is a fubar of the most onerous kind.

Perhaps the biggest overall defeat for users is the extension of the copyright term to life plus 70 years (QQ.G.6), despite a broad consensus that this makes no economic sense, and simply amounts to a transfer of wealth from users to large, rights-holding corporations. The extension will make life more difficult for libraries and archives, for journalists, and for ordinary users seeking to make use of works from long-dead authors that rightfully belong in the public domain.

Could it have been worse? In fact, yes it could have; we were spared a 120 year copyright term for corporate works, as earlier drafts foreshadowed. In the end corporate works are to be protected for 70 years after publication or performance, or if they are not published within 25 years after they were created, for 70 years after their creation. This could make a big difference in practice. It means that the film Casablanca, probably protected in the United States until 2038, would already be in the public domain in other TPP countries, even under a life plus 70 year copyright term.

It gets better.

One of the scariest parts of the TPP is that not only can you be made liable to fines and criminal penalties, but that any materials and implements used in the creation of infringing copies can also be destroyed (QQ.H.4(12)). The same applies to devices and products used for circumventing DRM or removing rights management information (QQ.H.4(17)). Because multi-use devices such as computers are used for a diverse range of purposes, this is once again a disproportionate penalty. This could lead to a family's home computer becoming seized simply because of its use in sharing files online, or for ripping Blu-Ray movies to a media center.

In some cases (QQ.H.7), the penalties for copyright infringement can even include jail time. Traditionally, this has because the infringer is operating a business of commercial piracy. But under the TPP, any act of willful copyright infringement on a commercial scale renders the infringer liable to criminal penalties, even if they were not carried out for financial gain, provided that they have a substantial prejudicial impact on the rightsholder. The copying of films that are still playing in movie theaters is also subject to separate criminal penalties, regardless of the scale of the infringement.

& better still.

ICANN, the global domain name authority, provoked a furore earlier this year over proposals that could limit the ability for owners of domain names to shield their personal information from copyright and trademark trolls, identity thieves, scammers and harassers.

The TPP has just ridden roughshod over that entire debate (at least for country-code top-level domains such as .us, .au and .jp), by cementing in place rules (QQ.C.12) that countries must provide “online public access to a reliable and accurate database of contact information concerning domain-name registrants.”

The same provision also requires countries to adopt an equivalent to ICANN's flawed Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), despite the fact that this controversial policy is overdue for a formal review by ICANN, which might result in the significant revision of this policy. Where would this leave the TPP countries, that are locked in to upholding a UDRP-like policy for their own domains for the indefinite future?

The TPP's prescription of rules for domain names completely disregards the fact that most country code domain registries have their own, open, community-driven processes for determining rules for managing domain name disputes. More than that, this top-down rulemaking on domain names is in direct contravention of the U.S. administration's own firmly-stated commitment to uphold the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance. Obviously, Internet users cannot trust the administration that it means what it says when it gives lip-service to multi-stakeholder governance—and that has ramifications that go even even deeper than this terrible TPP deal.

Click here to get the complete Wikileaks TPP Intellectual Property Rights document while you still can. The TPP still has to be ratified, the question to ask is, can we stop it before it's too late.

Microlattice - the lightest metal ever

Lattices are very cool, especially when applied to the creation of the lightest metal ever, courtesy Boeing. Pretty wild without question. 

Boeing released a video where we see scientists exhibit its lightness by effortlessly blowing it away, and it floats to the floor like a feather. While being lightweight, its smart structure enables it to compress so it's excellent at absorbing energy. In the video we also see the Microlattice, which is claimed to be one of the strongest and lightest materials known to science, being squashed and twisted then simply bouncing back to shape.

Inspiration comes from studying the structure of bone, solid on the outside, mostly hollow on the inside as seen in this extreme closeup, courtesy wikipedia. 

Humvees "r" us

BRT has stated in the past that the US created ISIS because of an inept neocon foreign policy that started when "W" decided to invade Iraq back in 2003 even though several senior military commanders warned against this action in the strongest of terms. As proof of America's stupidity regarding why this fact is true, check out this video of the hardware ISIS uses, in part, to commit atrocities throughout the middle east as a direct result of destroying a nation without a viable fallback position, something the Brits instituted without question when they had an empire back in the day. (Hire the people you conquer).

For more info, click here for a rundown of just how incredibly able the US is in screwing the pooch in the most violent region on planet earth.

Aesop lives

Amazing film, amazing fable. Well worth checking out without question.

I don't know

The Secret :)

Honoré Daumier's piece titled “Meeting of thirty-five heads of expression" sums up the gossip mongering quality of man to a "T". From feigned disgust to salacious laughter, the never ending symphony of gossip or the keeping of secrets never ceases to amaze anyone who is part of the human race, particularly when seen through the eyes of an artist as skilled as Daumier.

What is it about a secret — by definition, something you don’t know — that makes it so irresistible? It’s a black hole. A blank. Something you can only speculate about. It’s none of your business, so of course you want to know all about it. It is forbidden, so you think its discovery will be enormously entertaining or shocking or both. Preferably both.

The funny thing is, there is a reverse situation: To paraphrase Voltaire — the secret to being a bore is to tell all. Don’t leave out a single detail, no matter how dull or irrelevant! I have fantasies of the CIA’s John Brennan listening in to my gabby old Aunt Kate (who was very thorough when telling all), and being cured — by aversion therapy — of ever wanting to listen in again. This could become a secret weapon in the war for privacy.

In the meantime, we will continue to wonder about our fellow human beings — those who do not tell all. Here are some intriguing comments that should make the process of wondering all the more enjoyable.

KEEPING SECRETS

Of course I can keep secrets. It’s the people I tell them to that can’t keep them. (Anthony Haden-Guest)

He that communicates his secret to another makes himself that other’s slave. (Baltasar Gracian)

A secret’s worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept. (Carlos Ruiz Zafón)

Confidante: One entrusted by A with the secrets of B confided to herself by C. (Ambrose Bierce)

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. (Sigmund Freud)

The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one. (Margaret Atwood)

Delicious, is it not?

Honoré Daumier - The painter writ large. :)

Betting on Mammon

BRT has talked about the REAL REASON why we remain in Afghanistan on several occasions, courtesy the excellent in-depth research the Russians did in the 1980s regarding the mineral wealth of this war ravaged country, something writ large in this map showing the end results of said research along with recent studies done by the US. Interesting to say the least.

When the United States decided to invade Afghanistan to grab Osama bin Laden—and failed, but stayed on like an unwanted guest—could it have known that the Afghans were sitting on some of the world’s greatest reserves of mineral wealth?

We’ve raised this topic before (see here)—where we noted the dubious 2010 claim, published by the New York Times, that “the vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was [recently] discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists.” Other evidence, and logic, point to the fact that everyone but the Western public knew for a long time, and before the 2001 invasion, that Afghanistan was a treasure trove.

So we were interested to see a new piece from the Times that emphasizes those riches without stressing the crucial question: Was the original impetus for the invasion really Osama—or Mammon?

It's all about the resources, right? At least it's not for naught as seen by examples of truly stupid reasons for war as seen by this History Channel post of  six of the finest conducted by us rubes on planet earth.