A Matter of Size

A wonderful article in Nautilus titled Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy? is informative to the max, complete with a terrific set of illustrations, courtesy John Hendrix.

The size of things in our universe runs all the way from the tiny 10-19 meter scale that characterizes quark interactions, to the cosmic horizon 1026 meters away. In these 45 possible orders of magnitude, life, as far as we know it, is confined to a relatively tiny bracket of just over nine orders of magnitude, roughly in the middle of the universal range: Bacteria and viruses can measure less than a micron, or 10-6 meters, and the height of the largest trees reaches roughly 100 meters. The honey fungus that lives under the Blue Mountains in Oregon, and is arguably a single living organism, is about 4 kilometers across. When it comes to known sentient life, the range in scale is even smaller, at about three orders of magnitude.

Addendum: What about on the supersize end of the spectrum? William S. Burroughs, in his novel The Ticket That Exploded, imagined that beneath a planetary surface, lies “a vast mineral consciousness near absolute zero thinking in slow formations of crystal.” The astronomer Fred Hoyle wrote dramatically and convincingly of a sentient hyper-intelligent “Black Cloud,” comparable to Earth-sun distance. His idea presaged the concept of Dyson spheres, massive structures that completely surround a star and capture most of its energy. It is also supported by calculations that my colleague Fred Adams and I are performing, that indicate that the most effective information-processing structures in the current-day galaxy might be catalyzed within the sooty winds ejected by dying red giant stars. For a few tens of thousands of years, dust-shrouded red giants provide enough energy, a large enough entropy gradient, and enough raw material to potentially out-compute the biospheres of a billion Earth-like planets.

Food for thought, eh? :)

Summing it up

Sounds like Congress but they have a budget, right? :)

Insanity Is ...

Apart from Einstein's wonderful definition of insanity "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.", there are different kinds of insanity like that of the US and it's decent into this wonderful realm regarding politics or the lack thereof.

It’s 2020, four years from now. The campaign is under way to succeed the president, who is retiring after a single wretched term. Voters are angrier than ever—at politicians, at compromisers, at the establishment. Congress and the White House seem incapable of working together on anything, even when their interests align. With lawmaking at a standstill, the president’s use of executive orders and regulatory discretion has reached a level that Congress views as dictatorial—not that Congress can do anything about it, except file lawsuits that the divided Supreme Court, its three vacancies unfilled, has been unable to resolve.

On Capitol Hill, Speaker Paul Ryan resigned after proving unable to pass a budget, or much else. The House burned through two more speakers and one “acting” speaker, a job invented following four speakerless months. The Senate, meanwhile, is tied in knots by wannabe presidents and aspiring talk-show hosts, who use the chamber as a social-media platform to build their brands by obstructing—well, everything. The Defense Department is among hundreds of agencies that have not been reauthorized, the government has shut down three times, and, yes, it finally happened: The United States briefly defaulted on the national debt, precipitating a market collapse and an economic downturn. No one wanted that outcome, but no one was able to prevent it.

Indicators of this dire future becoming true are everywhere from dysfunctional governance, healthcare and infrastructure decay to gross financial inequality ginned by WS and the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex. Factor in the 2016 election as catalyst with two corrupt entities doing the drill and add in the dark troika of environmental degradation, resource depletion and global warming and you have a CF in the making. 

What can be done? As a minimum we need the following as Jefferson said: "Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of nineteen years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right."

• Term Limits: 2 for senate, 4 for house.
• No Gerrymandering.
• 10 year term for SC justices.
• Binding Referendums for issues affecting all Americans. Vietnam, Iraq & Libya anyone?
• No revolving door: When you're out of politics, you don't lobby.
• Public financing of campaigns.
• Part time Congress with pay parsed out accordingly.
• Perks end when politicians leave office.
• HC for politicians, the same as the rest of us.
• Congress shall obey the laws they pass.
• No self imposed raises.
• Transparency in terms of how budgets are created.
• Daily minutes of senate and house posted online.
• Single payer HC. Everybody in, nobody out.
• Restore our civil rights.
• Balance the budget with emphasis given to rebuilding infrastructure and not to endless wars.

Any questions?

Exhibit A

Exhibit A as to why NAFTA and the proposed TPP are really bad ideas.

On June 24, foreign oil company TransCanada filed a lawsuit against the U.S. under NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, arguing that the U.S. rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline violated NAFTA’s broad rights for foreign investors by thwarting the company’s “expectations.” As compensation, TransCanada is demanding more than $15 billion from U.S. taxpayers.

TransCanada’s case will be heard in a private tribunal of three lawyers who are not accountable to any domestic legal system, thanks to NAFTA’s “investor-state” system, which is also included in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The controversial TPP would empower thousands of additional corporations, including major polluters, to follow TransCanada’s example and use this private tribunal system to challenge U.S. climate and environmental policies.

TransCanada’s Request for Arbitration follows the Notice of Intent to submit a claim to arbitration that it filed on Jan. 6.

TransCanada’s attempt to make American taxpayers hand over more than $15 billion because the company’s dirty Keystone XL pipeline was rejected shows exactly why NAFTA was wrong and why the even more dangerous and far-reaching Trans-Pacific Partnership must be stopped in its tracks.

Any questions?

This is the end

A great writer just died, Michael Herr, a former Esquire reporter who covered Nam big time, brought home the futility of an absurd war in ways never to be forgotten in Dispatches, the script for Full Metal Jacket and the hypnotic and memorizing intro to Apocalypse Now.

Everyone is terribly sorry about what the war is doing to Vietnam and the Vietnamese, especially since the cities have been brought into it, although somehow most of the official expressions of grief have about them that taint of Presidential sorrow, turning a little grinny around the edges. The Tet Offensive changed everything here, made this an entirely different war, made it Something Else. ("Nonsense," a colonel told me. "We're just doing the same things in the cities that we've done in the boonies, why … for years!" He was not the same man who said, "We had to destroy Bentre in order to save it," but he might have been. He'd be hip to that.) Before Tet, there was some clean touch to jungle encounters, some virtue to their brevity, always the promise of quick release from whatever horror there was. The war went on in bursts, meeting engagements; and covering it—particularly in the Highlands and the Delta, II Corps and IV Corps—you were always a tourist, a tripper who could summon up helicopters like taxis. You would taxi in, the war would break over you suddenly and then go away, and you would taxi out. Enough chances were taken to leave you exhilarated, and, except for the hangovers that any cheap thrill will give you, it was pleasant enough. Now, it is awful, just plain awful, awful without relief. (A friend on The New York Times told me that he didn't mind his nightmares so much as his waking impulse to file on them.) It has finally become that kind of conventional war that the Command so longed for, and it is not going well. And for every month that it continues not going well, the scope of its destruction is enlarged. We are not really a particularly brutal people, certainly no more brutal now than we've been in other wars, acquiring it as the war goes on. But our machine is devastating. And versatile. It can do almost everything but stop.

Michael Herr

“Dispatches,” published in 1977, drew resounding critical praise. It was one of the first books to confront the Vietnam War in all its hallucinogenic awfulness and jarring absurdities. It was instantly placed in the pantheon of great war literature, widely viewed as journalism alchemized seamlessly into art.

The spy novelist John le Carré called “Dispatches” “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.” New York Times book critic John Leonard hailed Mr. Herr’s work as “beyond politics, beyond rhetoric, beyond ‘pacification’ and body counts and the ‘psychotic vaudeville’ of Saigon press briefings. . . . It is as if Dante had gone to hell with a cassette recording of Jimi Hendrix and a pocketful of pills: our first rock-and-roll war, stoned murder.”

Yours truly is waiting for the Michael Herr of 2016 to do a number on America's absurd wars in the Middle East as people need to get a sense of just much was lost for the sake of oil, money and the military/industrial/congressional complex.

R.I.P.

ESPER - Revisited

The ESPER Machine, in Blade Runner, revisited. To yours truly, this was the coolest part of the film.  Seen below is the original, which is as memorizing today as it was back in 1982 when BR was released.

Life Finds a Way/Rev II

I Sing the Body Electric by Walt Whitman, certainly applies to newly discovered microbes that eat electricity in hostile habitats that truly boggle the mind. With this in mind, pardon the pun, it seems more than reasonable that life abounds everywhere given just how tough these organisms truly are.

Though eating electricity seems bizarre, the flow of current is central to life. All organisms require a source of electrons to make and store energy. They must also be able to shed electrons once their job is done. In describing this bare-bones view of life, Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Albert Szent-Györgyi once said, “Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.”

Awesome says it all.

A significant sacrifice

Cassini has been a wonder. Not only in creating photographs of incredible beauty but also in finding out that life could reside on Enceladus, a small Saturnian moon that  most likely has a subsurface ocean thanks to the immense tidal pulls of it's massive master along with Titan, the largest moon in the solar system awash in organics, complete with a weather system early similar to earth driven by methane, not water.  To prevent any contamination or harm to said possible life, this noble probe will end it's existence by merging with Saturn in 2017.

The Cassini spacecraft is dancing toward death — and NASA wants to make sure it doesn’t take any alien life with it.

Since 2004 the probe has twirled around Saturn, studying the gas giant’s rings, storms and moons. But it has recently started preparing for next year, when it will plunge into the planet’s atmosphere and vaporize.

NASA chose the ringed planet as Cassini’s final resting place because the space agency doesn’t want to risk contaminating a potentially habitable world with hardy microbes that may be aboard the craft. Saturn, with its gaseous surface consumed by hydrogen and helium, is inhospitable to life.

The same may not be true for some of its moons.

Science, when done right, never disappoints.

Reflecting on Reality

From day into night is the basis of this short clip. Enjoy

Background Checks :)

In an effort to ensure powerful tools fall only into the correct hands, a new bill would require comprehensive background checks for all gun lobbyists interested in purchasing a sitting United States Congressman.

Calling it an “unyielding assault” on their constitutional rights, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association said, “This is truly a slap in the face to those of us responsible senator-owners who advantageously procure political sway well within the confines of the law.”

Eat Sh**T & Die

On to our chart. One note: most states have different levels for working and non-working people; the levels are higher for those with jobs. I've used the figures for working families. The bars in red are the states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion, and as you can see, almost all of them are clustered at the lowest end of the eligibility spectrum. That means that the states where the Medicaid expansion would have done the most good for the most people are precisely those states where Republican governors and legislatures have told their poor citizens that they're out of luck.

National politicians are covered by generous HC packages as we all know. Full boat stuff that these geniuses will get for the REST OF THEIR LIVES after serving one term, thanks to our stupid largess, gives them a huge leg up on living large but if your a poor rube living in, for the most part, a repubican-governed southern state that refused Medicare Expansion, the chances of getting medicare, unless said rube is truly poor, is chancy at best.

Many people are talking today about this article in today's New York Times, which focuses on the particularly cruel doughnut hole created when the Supreme Court allowed states to opt out of the expansion of Medicaid in the Affordable Care Act. The problem is that if you live in a (mostly Southern) state run by Republicans, you have to be desperately poor to qualify for Medicaid under existing rules. But it isn't until you get to 133 percent of the poverty level ($31,321 in yearly income for a family of four) that you're eligible for subsidies to buy insurance on the exchanges, because when the law was written the idea was that everyone under that income would get Medicaid. When all those Southern states decided to refuse the Medicaid expansion in order to shake their fist at Barack Obama, they screwed over their own poor citizens. So millions of people will be caught in the middle: not poor enough to get Medicaid, but too poor to get subsidies on the exchanges. But when we say "not poor enough," what we're talking about is people who are, in fact, extremely poor. And you'll be shocked to learn that in those states, the poor are disproportionately black. Could that have anything to do with it? Heavens, no!

This is where education comes in because if people truly understood how the ultra rich game the system by doing the us against them bit, they would revolt and vote the bastards out of office who have systemically screwed the citizens they are suppose to represent. 

Scott Walker anyone?

Addendum: Click here to access the NY Times post. Click the graphic to access the superb interactive NY Times map to see how Americans are getting shafted by our wonderful politicians.

Betting on a 1000

When talking about compute power, the inevitable question is, how many cores can you implement to enable massive parallism to happen. In SOTA cell phones, it's either 4 or 8. In a Mac Pro or amped Linux/Win system, 12 but how about a 1000 powered by AAs?

Scientists have just unveiled the world's first 1,000-processor microchip, capable of working through 1.78 trillion instructions every second.

Each of those 1,000 processors can run independently, which makes the chip supremely suited to intensive tasks like encryption and weather forecasting – and thanks to some low-energy engineering, it can be powered by just one AA battery.

Because each processor can turn on and shut down independently of the others, it's about 100 times more efficient at executing instructions than the laptops of today, according to researchers who developed it at the University of California, Davis and IBM. It's called, logically enough, the KiloCore.

Today's top-end smartphones come with quad- or octa-core processors, so we're talking about more than a 100-fold increase in terms of the number of cores.

It gets better.

While today's laptop CPUs are based on a 14-nanometre scale, the 1,000-processor chip was developed using older 32-nanometre technology. Basically, the lower the number, the more transistors can be squeezed into the same place – which means there's still room for improvement with the KiloCore, even though it packs a whopping 621 million of these transistors right now.

To make the data throughput even greater, the chip's cores transfer data to each other directly, rather than using a shared pool of memory, which can create a bottleneck in other systems.

Beyond Real Time has arrived. :)

Click here to get the full skinny on this bad boy.

Summer Solstice Yet Again

Every time yours truly experiences another summer solstice, sadness ensues as the days will now get shorter by about two minutes a day as we move toward the Winter Solstice on Dec 20th whereby the annual move toward the light begins yet again. Summer's this writer's favorite as light and warmth are the operative terms of the season though August gets rather sticky in this part of CT. The history of determining the solstice goes way back when a very intelligent guy named Eratosthenes discovered not only when the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere of earth occurs but also calculated how big our plant truly is. Awesome says it all. :)

Can you feel the heat? If you find yourself north of the equator, astronomical summer kicks off today with the arrival of the summer solstice. In the southern hemisphere, the reverse is true, as today’s solstice marks the start of winter.

Thank our wacky seasons, and the 23.4 degree tilt of the Earth’s axis for the variation in insolation. Today, all along the Tropic of Cancer at latitude 23.4 degrees north, folks will experience what’s known as Lahiana Noon, as the Sun passes through the zenith directly overhead. Eratosthenes first noted this phenomena in 3rd century BC from an account in the town of Syene (modern day Aswan), 925 kilometers to the south of Alexandria, Egypt. The account mentioned how, at noon on the day of the solstice, the Sun shined straight down a local well, and cast no shadows. He went on to correctly deduce that the differing shadow angles between the two locales is due to the curvature of the Earth, and went on to calculate the curvature of the planet for good measure. Not a bad bit of reasoning, for an experiment that you can do today.

Yet another graphic showing our relation to Sol and the Summer Solstice. 

Biodiversity 101

Looking at this guy tells one why biodiversity is NOT AN OPTION. Any questions?

The Jurists

Arcimboldo is a big favorite of yours truly. His astounding portraits, comprised of fish, fruit, trees, earth, paper, you name it, are artistically brilliant and endlessly fascinating but this post isn't about the genius of Arcimboldo but rather the undue and often ugly influence of lawyers in government, something his portrait, titled, The Jurist, indirectly depicts in rather accurate fashion.

In a new paper to be presented at an upcoming Scholars Strategy Network workshop and obtained exclusively by Salon, Bonica argues that this bias towards lawyers is driven in part by the overwhelming influence of money in politics results in policy biased towards the wealthy. Bonica begins with a jaw-dropping statistic. He finds that,

While comprising 0.4% of the voting age population, there are more lawyers elected to the House than there are representatives from all 24 states west of the Mississippi. Lawyers are even more prevalent in the Senate. In 44 of the past 50 Congresses, lawyer-legislators commanded seat shares large enough to constitute a filibuster proof majority.

One reason is that lawyers are far more likely to run for office. But they’re also far, far more likely to win. Bonica finds, that compared to the average American, doctors are 11 times more likely to run for office, while lawyers are 54 times more likely to run for office. But while doctors are only 12 times more likely to be elected, lawyers are a stunning 99 times more likely to be elected (see chart). Why? Bonica argues that a key to winning elections is early fundraising, and the legal profession is one of the most politically active groups in the country.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Everything is connected

Everything is connected as shown by this very interesting analysis of how different the duality of light truly is when viewed as a particle (photon) or as a wave depending on how the experiment is configured. Interesting to say the least.

The process is most often described in terms of the particle nature of light. An atom or molecule in a fluorescent tube enters an excited state when it’s heated, and spontaneously decays to a lower energy state, releasing a photon — the fundamental particle of light. When the photon enters your eye, something similar happens, but in reverse. The photon is absorbed by a molecule in the retina, and its energy boosts the molecule into an excited state.

But light is both a particle and a wave, and this duality is fundamental to the physics that rules the world of atoms and molecules. Despite this significance, the wave nature of light was often ignored, until recently.

It gets better.

According to Murch, all that a photon detector can tell you about spontaneous emission is whether an atom is in its excited state or its ground state. On the other hand, interferometers can catch the atom diffusing through a quantum “state space” made up of all the possible combinations of its two energy states.

What they discovered was really strange. When viewing light in its wave nature, the researchers observed that the artificial atom could move from a lower energy state to a higher one even as it decayed.

Why?

By one of the weirdest of all quantum effects — entanglement. According to quantum physics, when an atom emits light, the light and the atoms must become connected, or entangled, so that measuring a property of one instantly reveals the value of that property for the other, no matter how far away it is.

The Way of Tao rules, everything is connected, something known for over 3000 years.

“Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends.” 

― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

A Moment of Silence

Every time I hear the words A Moment of Silence in reference to yet another shooting by some deranged bastard looking for either justification for his miserable existence or belief in some twisted version of religion X, makes me want to scream. 90% of us want GUN CONTROL! You know, something akin to the ATF version whereby citizen X is going to be fingerprinted, licensed and gun in hand, registered, or you go to jail. The ATF law, The National Fire Arms Act, has been in existence for over 80 years yet is NOT the law we need implemented. Now is the time to do this so when Ryan asked for, yet again, a moment of silence, some pols actually said F' you and rightfully stated the fact the moment of silence was a disgrace to the innocents killed. This is why we need referendums, this is why we need term limits, this is why we need to take back our country from the fools in congress because this crap cannot be allowed to continue. 

The charade of silence used to work for House Republicans. As the death toll from mass shootings rose, and rose, and rose, the feudal serfs of the NRA would engage in a moment of silence.

Then, satisfied that they had done something symbolic, they would do nothing of consequence to address the crisis.

On Monday night, however, the charade of silence did not work for Paul Ryan.

 During the first House session following the worst mass shooting in modern American history—which left 50 dead and 53 wounded, following an attack on an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando—Speaker Ryan literally sought to silence the House of Representatives.

The speaker shushed the House and banged his gavel. Then he announced: “The chair asks that the House now observe a moment of silence in memory of the victims of the terrorist attack in Orlando.”

Ryan, a favorite of social conservatives, did not address what had happened as a hate crime, which targeted lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender people and their allies.

Ryan, a favorite of the National Rifle Association, did not address the fact that the victims were gunned down in a country where innocents are gunned down so frequently that House “moments of silence” have become routine.

The speaker simply walked through the motions.

But something actually good happened ...

 A number of Democrats simply refused to join Ryan in what they decried as “the fetish of silence.”

Led by Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes, they left the floor in protest, rather than participate in Ryan’s charade. Himes, who represents a district that borders Newtown, where 20 children and six adults were slain in 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, referred to House moments of silence following mass shootings had become “obnoxious expressions of smug incompetence.”

“Our silence does not honor the victims, it mocks them,” declared Himes.

Inside the House chamber on Monday night, other Democrats they chanted “Where’s the bill?”—demanding a debate on gun legislation.

Where's the bill? We the people demand action, NOW!!!

Addendum:

Omar Mateen bought the assault rifle he used to kill 49 people at Pulse nightclub eight days before Sunday's shooting. The owner of the store that sold him the gun, St. Lucie Shooting Center, said on Tuesday that Mateen passed a background check. (In Florida, a background check is essentially just a query of several databases to determine whether the buyer has any felony convictions, active warrants or domestic-violence injunctions.)

But that was it! There was no waiting period. Under Florida law, he did not need a permit to purchase or carry the rifle, nor a license to own it. 

Here are five things that are harder to get in the state of Florida than an assault rifle.

1. Abortion
2. Drivers's License
3. Solar Panels
4. Voter-registration cards
5. An exotic animal

Am I missing something here?

The NET is NOW a UTILITY! :)

The Net is a NOW a Utility!

A federal appeals court on Tuesday fully upheld the so-called Open Internet rules, regulations backing the principle of net neutrality.

It's the idea that phone and cable companies should treat all of the traffic on their networks equally — no blocking or slowing their competitors, and no fast lanes for companies that can pay more.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected the petition filed by telecom, cable and wireless industry associations alongside AT&T, CenturyLink and several smaller providers. President Obama and various Internet and venture companies and public interest groups backed the Federal Communications Commission.

It's about time.

Awesome!

TL Yet Again/Singapore :)

Eye Candy yet again. This time ... Singapore. :)

Montreal Yet Again :)

3 days, nice on Saturday, 5" of rain on Sunday and sunny on Monday but the city still rocks with a trip to the Botanical Gardens with emphasis given to bugs & Japan plus a night stroll in the environs of a charming city . Enjoy.

Hilbert's Curve explained. :)

Yours truly loves fractals, a way to see infinity without having to be a mathematician using recursion to make it happen. Check out this video, which is somewhat long, but really explains how math is the star point to seeing infinity in an infinite number of ways. Enjoy. :)

Satan Lives... in a Swiss Tunnel

Gotthard Base Tunnel Ceremony, totally rad without question.

European leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Liechtenstein Prime Minister Adrian Hasler, and Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern took part in the opening of the world’s longest tunnel, running 57 km under the Swiss Alps. The historic event was overshadowed by the opening ceremonies which contained blatantly satanic and graphically sexual overtones.

Similar in some respects to the ceremonies which launch the Olympic Games, the extravagant performances, one inside for dignitaries and another outside, included the devil emerging and adored by scantily clad figures repeatedly prostrating themselves before him. The satanic figure with a goat head appears as horrific wailing and screaming are heard over the audio system. The demonic figure simulates sexual acts with several of the male and female performers, many of whom are androgynous.

Ok, so you're a girl dragon. - Donkey  :)

The Notion of Sleaze

The Notion of Sleaze, you know, kickbacks, coverups, use of position to make money, arrogance, hubris and telling people to F... Off if it doesn't correspond to undeserved entitlement kind of says it all regarding Hillary.

Well, how’s that for timing?

This week, Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination and snagged President Obama’s endorsement, defeating a challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders, who argued that she was too cozy with wealthy interests who had an undue voice in government.

The same week, ABC News has reported that a man named Rajiv Fernando, a top donor to the Clinton Foundation, was added to the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board at the behest of the secretary of state’s office. Fernando appeared not to have the same qualifications as many other ISAB members, other than prolific giving to Democratic interests. When ABC started asking the department about Fernando, newly revealed emails show, staffers scrambled to find a way to defend the appointment. Eventually, Fernando stepped down two days after ABC’s initial questions.

As for Trump, the question of bait & switch and using other people's money comes to mind regarding a "university" that never was by any stretch of the imagination.

Following the release, earlier this week, of testimony filed in a federal lawsuit against Trump University, the United States is facing a high-stakes social-science experiment. Will one of the world’s leading democracies elect as its President a businessman who founded and operated a for-profit learning annex that some of its own employees regarded as a giant rip-off, and that the highest legal officer in New York State has described as a classic bait-and-switch scheme?

So the two questions to ask are: 

1. Who are you going to vote for? & ...

2, Out of a nation of 350 million, is this the best we can do?

Answers:

1. None of the above & ...

2. Given the sad state of politics in this once great nation, the answer is unfortunately yes.

And so it goes. - K. Vonnegut

A form factor like no other

Yours truly loves to do video and stills, but you, my loyal readers, already know that. With that passion comes a cost, something you folks already know as well due to the fact BRT always talks about costs relating to any endeavor, in this case, the bulkiness of glass lenses used to create so-called "masterpieces", a form factor for capturing imagery that has not changed for almost 200 years until now.

Just 2mm across and far thinner than a human hair, the tiny device can magnify nanoscale objects and gives a sharper focus than top-end microscope lenses.

It is the latest example of the power of metamaterials, whose novel properties emerge from their structure.

Shapes on the surface of this lens are smaller than the wavelength of light involved: a thousandth of a millimetre.

"In my opinion, this technology will be game-changing," said Federico Capasso of Harvard University, the senior author of a report on the new lens which appears in the journal Science.

The lens is quite unlike the curved disks of glass familiar from cameras and binoculars. Instead, it is made of a thin layer of transparent quartz coated in millions of tiny pillars, each just tens of nanometres across and hundreds high.

Singly, each pillar interacts strongly with light. Their combined effect is to slice up a light beam and remould it as the rays pass through the array (see video above).

Computer calculations are needed to find the exact pattern which will replicate the focussing effect of a conventional lens.

The advantage, Prof Capasso said, is that these "metalenses" avoid shortfalls - called aberrations - that are inherent in traditional glass optics.

"The quality of our images is actually better than with a state-of-the-art objective lens. I think it is no exaggeration to say that this is potentially revolutionary."

The only lenses that don't have chromatic aberrations are reflex mirror lenses like the Nikkor 500mm and the Hubble telescope, both beautifully crafted instruments using tech designed by Dmitry Dmitrievich Maksutov, a visionary Russian Astronomer of the first order.

A Maksutov telescope

The image below shows just how different this metamaterial derived tech is from the type of lenses used by us rubes. 

The lens is much more compact than a traditional microscope objective

The micro pillars of the metamaterial lens, star point for a new way of seeing. :)

Humboldt was right

In 1800, Alexander Von Humboldt conducted a cruel experiment regarding Electric Eels and horses whereby horses were herded into a remaining small pool, caused by the dry season, where said trapped eels were residing. Needless to say, the eels defended themselves forecefully by leaping out of the water and discharging lethal jolts of electricity to the trapped horses, with one of the them dying as a result. These findings were scorned, until now. 

Click here to get the full report on this amazing research.

Intense says it all.

Free Fall to the Nth Degree

LIGO did the deed in finally proving gravitational waves exist. Now, LISA, when it becomes operational, will be able to sense gravitational waves from various sources throughout the known universe. Pretty cool without question.

Then, on March 1, the probe (LISA Pathfinder) began its six-month science mission, performing a variety of experiments, including a crucial one that attempted to place the test masses in a virtually perfect free fall. LISA Pathfinder used its thrusters to maneuver precisely, shielding the masses from external forces — and did so incredibly effectively.

Artist's impression showing the core of the LISA Pathfinder technology package, which consists of two gold-platinum cubes kept in close to a perfect free-fall state.

Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

The relative acceleration between the two test masses was lower than 1 part in 10 millionths of a billionth of Earth’s gravitational acceleration, mission team members said. This result — which is based on the first two months of data collection, and was published today in the journal Physical Review Letters — proves out the key technologies required to detect and study gravitational waves in space, Danzmann said.

"At the precision reached by LISA Pathfinder, a full-scale gravitational-wave observatory in space like LISA would be able to detect fluctuations caused by the mergers of supermassive black holes in galaxies anywhere in the universe," he said.

Ain't science grand? :)