It's the Infrastructure stupid

Well, what's it gonna be. The F 35 or fixing the DC Metro, a rather important tranportation system that may go down for 6 months in order to be saved.

The state of Metro is so “dire” that entire Metro lines may need to be shut down for extended periods of time, Metro Board Chairman Jack Evans said Wednesday at a meeting, WTOP reports. 

Metro needs federal money and time to fix the system, Evans said. Track work on nights and weekends will not sufficiently end the delays, single-tracking and dangerous malfunctions that have plagued the system, officials previously told News4's Adam Tuss.

Metro has plenty of plans and those plans need to be implemented soon, Evans said.

It gets better.

Financial problems also are imminent for Metro. Next year, Metro is expected to face a budget shortfall, Evans said.

So what's it gonna be. Military allowed to continue running amuck thanks to the Military/Industrial/ Congressional Complex or cut defense by at least a third to spend a trillion to get this nation running again while hiring people out of work to do it, something Bernie talks about ad nauseum. The choice is up to us.

Cooking the planet

We're cooking the planet, thanks to El Nino, the warming weather system that's killing coral reefs in the Pacific at an unprescidented rate. 

Even as recently as early March, Australian coral reef scientists still hoped that the legendary Great Barrier Reef (GBR) would get off lightly in the current El Niño, the climate phenomenon that brings unusually warm water to the equatorial Pacific, stressing and often killing corals. No such luck. On 20 March, the GBR Marine Park Authority in Townsville, Australia, reported that divers were finding extensive coral bleaching—the loss of symbiotic algae—in remote northern areas of the reef. Many sections were already dead.

Subsequent flyover surveys have confirmed an unfolding disaster: “Only four reefs out of 520 [observed] had no bleaching,” says Terry Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Townsville, who personally checked the northernmost 1000 kilometers of the 2300-kilometer reef system over 4 days last week. “It was the saddest reef trip of my career.” 

The GBR joins a lengthening list of reefs bleached because of the El Niño that started in late 2014. It is now the longest bleaching event ever, and this El Niño, which helped make 2015 the planet's hottest year on record, “isn’t even close to being over,” says Mark Eakin, a coral reef ecologist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in College Park, Maryland. Even though the El Niño is now weakening, its lingering effects could cause bleaching for another year, he adds.

Tragic does not begin to describe what is happening here as we speak.

Seen below is the temperature gradient in the Pacific circa 2014 - 16.

I rigged it just for you ...

The Dems are just as bad as the Repugs in terms of gaming the system since the beginning of time. As the great George Carlin said, YOU HAVE NO CHOICE but now us chickens are seeing this game played out in broad daylight, especially in terms of the Dems and the rigged game the DNC is playing against Bernie, the only one in this sorry ass election that qualifies to be POTUS without question.

While it might sound strange, a coronation of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary will mark the end of the party as we know it. There’s been a lot written about the “Sanders surge,” with much of it revolving around Hillary Clinton’s extreme personal weakness as a candidate. While this is indisputable, it’s also a convenient way for the status quo to exempt itself from fault and discount genuine grassroots anger. I’m of the view that Sanders’ support is more about people liking him than them disliking Hillary, particularly when it comes to registered Democrats. He’s not merely seen as the “least bad choice.” People really do like him.

The Sanders appeal is twofold. He is seen as unusually honest and consistent for someone who’s held elected office for much of his life, plus he advocates a refreshingly anti-establishment view on core issues that matter to an increasing number of Americans. These include militarism, Wall Street bailouts, a two-tiered justice system, the prohibitive cost of college education, healthcare insecurity and a “rigged economy.” While Hillary is being forced to pay lip service to these issues, everybody knows she doesn’t mean a word of it. She means it less than Obama meant it in 2008, and Obama really didn’t mean it.

It gets better.

I just finished watching a surprisingly good and honest 14 minute segment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe which covered how the Democratic National Committee has been rigging the primary in favor of Hillary Clinton. Host Joe Scarborough even went so far as to admit the media’s complicity in the process with regard to superdelegates. He notes:

“And I know the Republican party wishes they rigged the process as well as the Democratic party did right now, because they could rig it against Trump — but the Democratic party rigs their process so that these superdelegates, which by the way can move any direction they want, actually skew the process and the reporting so badly that the voters actually don’t have their say when it comes to voting.”

This is a key issue that has been driving me up a wall lately. It is journalistic malpractice for media outlets to include superdelegates in the total tally when these Democratic operatives can switch their support at any point between now and the convention.

Even though our so-called Network Nooze environment continues to "show" the opposite is true. 

At least the NY Times got it right in terms of the true delegate count between Clinton and Sanders.

With Trump doing a number on the Repugs, it's rather obvious the anger of the public on both sides of the political spectrum has gone critical vis a vis the establishment as this is the ONLY way us rubes actually have a chance to change things before it's too late. At the same time this insane campaign is being waged, it's no wonder the two parties are on life support, a situation I find rather comforting if you ask me.

Addendum. I like Bernie big time and I'm not alone on this by a long shot. :)

QC ... On your Laptop/Tablet & Smart Phone

Quantum Computing, the holy grail of computation, the prime driver for the rise of The Matrix, is almost here if new research moving this tech onto cheap chips rings true.

In quantum physics, entangled photons are the cornerstone of much cutting-edge technology research, including quantum communications, computing, and encryption. Now an international team of researchers claims to have incorporated a range of quantum technologies on a single integrated chip that is compatible with existing fiber and semiconductor applications, and may soon provide the means to build quantum circuits directly into laptops and cell phones.

Using a bevy of quantum electronic components tested and proven in recent research (including a type of micro-ring resonator and a version of a quantum frequency comb necessary for hyperentanglement and the generation of multiphoton entangled quantum bit, or qubit, states), the team of researchers has achieved a new record in the complexity and amount of entangled photons generated on a single chip.

"This represents an unprecedented level of sophistication in generating entangled photons on a chip," said Professor David Moss, Director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics at Swinburne University of Technology. "Not only can we generate entangled photon pairs over hundreds of channels simultaneously, but for the first time we've succeeded in generating four-photon entangled states on a chip."

Pretty stellar without question.

F-Stops

 

Yours truly, as you loyal readers know, shoots pictures and videos with varying degrees of success. With this in mind, two really informative diagrams illustrating F-Stops is something I refer to from time to time in hopes of better understanding the ratio of aperture/F-Stop to shutter speed & lens length, information that aids greatly in getting anything to look good in camera. 

Matthew Cole's take on this somewhat mysterious subject is a really good read, not only regarding F-Stops but also shutter speeds and ISO. enjoy.

Going slow to go fast :)

MIT's notion of going slow to go fast is very cool, especially when it comers to intersections and smart cars. Enjoy.

Imagine a scenario where sensor-laden vehicles pass through intersections by communicating with each other, rather than grinding to a halt at traffic lights. A newly published study co-authored by MIT researchers claims this kind of traffic-light-free transportation design, if it ever arrives, could allow twice as much traffic to use the roads.

Tech, like rust, never sleeps. - Robert E.

Hurtling toward 2.0

BRT has waxed "poetic" regarding climate change and global warming and how, if we don't do anything about it, our descendants will reap the whirlwind in terms of how just how much man has soiled this planet over a period of just 500 years. With this in mind, NASA's latest research findings will NOT warm the cockles of your heart. 

And given the increasing concentration of carbon in the global atmosphere, which is driving higher long-term temperature increases as well as other extreme weather events, the string of monthly records is a foreboding sign.

Henson and Masters explain:

The real significance of the February record is in its departure from the seasonal norms that people, plants, animals, and the Earth system are accustomed to dealing with at a given time of year. Drawing from NASA’s graph of long-term temperature trends, if we add 0.2°C as a conservative estimate of the amount of human-produced warming that occurred between the late 1800s and 1951-1980, then the February result winds up at 1.55°C above average. If we use 0.4°C as a higher-end estimate, then February sits at 1.75°C above average. Either way, this result is a true shocker, and yet another reminder of the incessant long-term rise in global temperature resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases.

They conclude, "we are now hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2.0°C warming over pre-industrial levels."

And Rahmstorf also notes, "We are in a kind of climate emergency now."

Click NASA Climate to see just how dire the situation truly is. The temperature simulation depicted below shows how we are cooking the planet.

Drug Peddling

Surprise, big pharma spends far more money on drug peddling than for research, something not too surprising given just how much money these companies make due to the fact government doesn't regulate or force drug companies to reduce prices by demanding proof of new drugs’ value in comparison to existing ones and sometimes refusing to cover medicines they doubt are worth the cost.

So, while the US spends the most money on drugs that big pharma states, is necessary in order to cover the cost of research for creating such drugs, reality shows that this is simply not the case if the Washington Post's article rings true.

Prescription drugs are a massive market: Americans spent $329.2 billion on prescription drugs in 2013. That works out to about $1,000 per person in the U.S., as John Oliver pointed out in his show on Sunday night.

Oliver also mentioned that nine out of 10 big pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than on research. León Markovitz of Dadaviz found and graphed those figures from healthcare research firm GlobalData in the graphic (above) The amounts spent on sales and marketing are shown in orange, while the amounts spent on research and development are in blue.

The biggest spender, Johnson & Johnson, shelled out $17.5 billion on sales and marketing in 2013, compared with $8.2 billion for R&D. In the top 10, only Roche spent more on R&D than on sales and marketing.

Thanks Henry, I needed that. :)

Addendum: Here's a price comparison of what the US pays vs countries in Europe.

The Dispersed Public

Bernie is the start point for a revolution. Win or lose, his impact on politics will be profound, something the establishment fears without question. Obviously, yours truly wants him to win but more importantly, the more one reads about his record and approach to running and governing, the more one comes away with the fact that something's afoot, in a good way. :)

Stigler, in his “Theory of Economic Regulation” (1972), explained that regulation, which is presumably put in place to protect the public, will eventually be acquired, or “captured,” by the very companies, industries, or their trade unions that are supposed to be “regulated.”

Olson and Stigler predicted that special interest groups carry the day because they can organize and lobby. They can do this because they can raise a significant amount of resources to push their agenda. These predictions turned out to be very accurate most of the time. The best way to see that is in the vast and growing amount of money being spent by special interest groups on lobbying and campaign contributions, as well as the rents extracted in many industries that get de facto protection from competition The dispersed public was not relevant to this game.

Until 2016. For the first time in recent history, we have a politician who is able to raise serious, big money—the kind of money that can finance a big campaign—from the dispersed public.

Maybe real change can happen before it's too late.  One can only hope.

Happy Spring everyone. :)

Speed Trip

Totally nuts, this shows how fast drone tech has evolved and, when placed in the hands who know how to drive it, the end result is truly astounding. PS, a 14 year old won the race. Reminds me of Ender's Game without question.

Easy Pickings

White storks are addicted to junk food and make round-trips of almost 100km to get their fix – according to new research from the University of East Anglia.

In folklore, storks would carry babies to parents around the world. But since the mid 1980s, increasing numbers no longer migrate from Europe to Africa for the winter.

Instead, many live in Spain and Portugal the whole year round – feeding on ‘junk food’ from landfill sites, which provide an abundant and reliable food supply.

The Anthropocene strikes yet again.

Casper lives :)

Scientists of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) say they may have discovered a new species of octopus while on an operational dive in the deep waters of the Hawaiian Archipelago. With the original intent to collect geological samples, the team spotted the small octopus on a flat rock on the ocean floor at approximately 4,290 meters (14,000 feet) below the surface. With its ghostlike appearance, the animal was nicknamed Casper after the friendly cartoon ghost.

Pretty stellar without question.

Her namesake. :)

When "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread"

An excellent analysis of our military, penned by Dimitri Orlov, is a good read, something along the lines of what BRT has written about regarding fubars like the F 35 and digital weapon systems that go rogue at the most inappropriate times. Asymetrical warfare kind of says it all here.

In general, if the objective is unrealistic, it doesn't matter how much money is wasted in trying to achieve it. More specifically, it's a lot cheaper to break something than to make something work, and the US military, no matter how much money is spent on it, remains quite cheap to neutralize. For instance, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier costs somewhere around $5 billion, while a Russian Kaliber missile that can be launched from a fishing boat from 1200 km away and destroy it is competitively priced at $1.2 million apiece. To put these numbers in perspective, Russia can wipe out the entire US aircraft carrier fleet without exceeding its military training budget for the year.

Read the entire piece, you will be stunned at just how stupid the US can be regarding weapons procurement. IMHO, this fits right in with "W's illegal Iraq war and Hillary's excellent adventures in Syria and Libya if you know what I mean.

The Tully Monster :)

The Jabberwocky has nothing on this little guy, a denizen of the Carbonifrous age dating back 300 million plus years. :)

The "Tully monster," a mysterious animal that swam in the inland oceans of Illinois more than 300 million years ago, left behind a tantalizingly detailed map of its body in a well-preserved package of fossils. Unfortunately, nobody could figure out what the creature was for half a century—until now.

Francis Tully found the remains of the tiny beast (it's only about 10 centimeters long) in Illinois in 1958 and gave it the whimsical scientific name Tullimonstrum (nickname: Tully monster). A long stalk extends from the front of its body, which ends in a toothy orifice called a buccal apparatus. Its body is covered in gills and narrows down into a powerful tail that it probably used for propulsion. Its eyes peer out from either end of a long, rigid bar attached to the animal's back.

The Tully monster lived during the Carboniferous period, when the North American Great Basin was an enormous inland sea. Trees were colonizing the land for the first time, transforming the soil and filling the atmosphere with higher levels of oxygen than Earth had known before or since. Giant arthropods, like the 8-foot-long millipede known as Arthropleura, crawled through the new forests. It was a good time to be a weird animal, and the Tully monster probably fit right in.

The Jabberwocky

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

      And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

      The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

      The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;

      Long time the manxome foe he sought—

So rested he by the Tumtum tree

      And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,

      The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

      And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

      He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

      Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

      He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

      And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll

Science and fantasy, what a great combination. :)

SMBHs

A Cult is ...

Interesting question don't you think? :)

Regarding Inequality ...

Nobel Lauriate Joseph E. Stieglitz talks in commonsnse ways in all things relating to economics. Precise, direct and spot on, he walks the walk and talks the talk when describing how humanity relates to economics in a very open-ended and nuanced way, something not often heard in this age of mindless bloviation and endless prevarication. To whit:

Our political system has increasingly been working in ways that increase the inequality of outcomes and reduce equality of opportunity. This should not come as a surprise: we have a political system that gives inordinate power to those at the top, and they have used that power not only to limit the extent of redistribution but also to shape the rules of the game in their favor, and to extract from the public what can only be called large “gifts.” Economists have a name for these activities: they call them rent seeking, getting income not as a reward to creating wealth but by grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would otherwise have been produced without their effort. Those at the top have learned how to suck out money from the rest in ways that the rest are hardly aware of—that is their true innovation.

Indeed, some of the most important innovations in business in the last three decades have centered not on making the economy more efficient but on how better to ensure monopoly power or how better to circumvent government regulations intended to align social returns and private rewards.

Check out Evonomics, is a new site that gives new meaning to finance, economics and the human condition. :)

Joseph E. Stieglitz

Dronesville :)

A very good friend of mine turned me onto this gem. Awesome!!! :)

So True :)

Great pix by Nik Levantis.

Flying Blind ... Not

Factoids on how to fly your drone without getting hosed. :)

Zeno's Paradox

Zeno's Paradox lives ... forever. :)

In Transit

In Transit, a journey from woods to sea and back again as the weather transitions
from winter to spring is the focus of this short clip. Enjoy.

In the Name Of ...

In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people. 

– James Madison, Founding Father and 4th President of these United States

Edwin Snowden was right, the push toward surveillance 24/7 is a knife pointed at our right to privacy and civil rights and for good reason.

Our founding fathers studied power structures over the millennia and knew exactly what they were doing when solidifying the Bill of Rights into the U.S. Constitution. All it took was a couple hundred years, an extraordinarily ignorant and apathetic American public, and a major terror attack to roll back this multi-generational gift.

It gets better.

A while back, we noted a report showing that the “sneak-and-peek” provision of the Patriot Act that was alleged to be used only in national security and terrorism investigations has overwhelmingly been used in narcotics cases. Now the New York Times reports that National Security Agency data will be shared with other intelligence agencies like the FBI without first applying any screens for privacy. The ACLU of Massachusetts blog Privacy SOS explains why this is important:

What does this rule change mean for you? In short, domestic law enforcement officials now have access to huge troves of American communications, obtained without warrants, that they can use to put people in cages. FBI agents don’t need to have any “national security” related reason to plug your name, email address, phone number, or other “selector” into the NSA’s gargantuan data trove. They can simply poke around in your private information in the course of totally routine investigations. And if they find something that suggests, say, involvement in illegal drug activity, they can send that information to local or state police. That means information the NSA collects for purposes of so-called “national security” will be used by police to lock up ordinary Americans for routine crimes. And we don’t have to guess who’s going to suffer this unconstitutional indignity the most brutally. It’ll be Black, Brown, poor, immigrant, Muslim, and dissident Americans: the same people who are always targeted by law enforcement for extra “special” attention.

In conclusion, this means ...

The wall separating “foreign” intelligence operations from domestic criminal investigations has finally, fully collapsed. The FBI now plans to act on a rule change initiated by the Bush administration and finally massaged into actionable policy by Obama: Soon, domestic law enforcement agencies like the FBI will be able to search through communications collected under the mysterious authority of executive order 12333. Now, FBI agents can query the NSA’s database of Americans’ international communications, collected without warrants pursuant to Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. That law put congress’ stamp of approval on the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was widely denounced as totalitarian when the New York Times‘ James Risen exposed it to the world in 2005.

The death of every empire, in this writer's opinion, centers on three factors;

1. Over reliance on military & security.
2. The abandoment of infrastructure maintenance through sound economic planning and ...
3. The betrayal of the empire's citizens by incompetent, corrupt politicians who serve the power elite at the expense of the empire itself.

 They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
 deserve neither liberty nor safety. Ben Franklin

Addendum: 1. Executive Order 12333 2. An analysis of same 3.  The PDF version

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Hieronymus Bosch is a guilty pleasure. His The Garden of Earthly Delights is a treasure trove of beauty, lust and the never ending pain of endless damnation, captured on a triptych of endless fascination. The Bosch interactive exploration of this master work includes background sound effects perfectly attuned to this ageless masterpiece delineating the foibles of mankind in exquisite detail with a bit of the surreal thrown in for good measure, a concept Salvdore Dali explored with great success 450 years after Bosch finished the garden.

The Dream - Salvdore Dali

Not Even

Not Even describes the skill set of Bryn Atkinson on a mt bike and a trail that defies description. :)

Just a matter of time

Over the years, machines have topped the best humans at checkers, chess, Othello, Scrabble, Jeopardy!, and so many other contests of human intellect. But they haven’t beat the very best at Go. As Google likes to point out, there are more possible positions on a Go board than atoms in the universe—more than even the most powerful computers can contemplate. The scope of the game is so enormous that top human players must rely on more than careful analysis to succeed. They play based on what the board looks like, how it feels. To beat these humans, a machine must, in some way, reproduce this magic.

It won the first of 5 games against one of the best Go players in the world.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — After an extraordinarily close contest, Google’s artificially intelligent Go-playing computer system has beaten Lee Sedol, one of the world’s top players, in the first game of their historic five-game match at Seoul’s Four Seasons hotel. Known as AlphaGo, this Google creation not only proved it can compete with the game’s best, but also showed off its remarkable ability to learn the game on its own.

As often stated in BRT regarding strong AI, It's just a matter of time.

Addendum: Deep Mind goes 3-0 thus winning the best of 5 match.

22 pts.

Black Swans rule & Bernie just nabbed one in Michigan. Awesome!!!

As everybody knows, Michigan was said to be headed for a huge Hillary victory by a big margin…

Yesterday.

Yesterday, in Nate Silver’s view, a 99% slam-dunk for her.

Yesterday, it was viewed as one of the last nails in the campaign coffin for Bernie. 

Today it’s quite something else.

With luck, change is afoot. :)

To Scale ... For a Change :)

To Scale: The Solar System from Wylie Overstreet on Vimeo.

Often overlooked, here's an entertaining video showing our SS to scale. :)

Weather Watch :)

Excellent advice from Pioneer Settler forecasting the weather. Good info for sure. :)

Seen below is the infographic laying out PS tips, graphic style.

13.4 Billion ...

Reaching out kind of says it all. Can't wait for the Webb to make the scene. :)

This is the timeline on which the galaxy resides.

Skylight

Gotta love eye candy like this. :)

Of Wood & Water

Of Wood & Water, one shows it's age, the other never does. 

Enjoy