Sunday, August 28, 2016

Tidal Lock


The moon is tidally locked to earth whereby it's "honeymooners" face always faces us, as seen in the graphic above, something scientists are now finding, with Kepler and earthbound telescopes, with tidally locked planets orbiting stars of all types, on almost a daily basis. With the "Eyeball" planets, as described by Sean Raymond in Nautilus, the interesting part is not the tidally locked condition but rather the zone residing between the light and dark side of the planet, where life can evolve just as life might be evolving in Enceladus and Europa, in subterranean oceans, due to the constant flexing of these moon's cores by the enormous gravitational pull of Saturn and Jupiter. 



Life finds a way... Always - Robert E.

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Infrared & Then Some


A moving version of infrareds & a touch of B&W. Enjoy. :)


Did a slight color mod of same. Check it out.

Thursday, August 25, 2016

Losing It US Style


Seems losing arms, like losing wars (Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq etc., etc.), is an art form if the piece from the NY Times rings true.



It gets better


This is along the lines that the favorite truck of choice for Isis is Toyota, courtesy of another way of how to lose things US style. 






Largesse, isn't it grand?


Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Channeling Norse


Interactive to the max, here are all the cargo ships in the world doing their thing circa 2012.
Who is Norse? Click here to find out. :) 



The Aethetics of Infrared


Subtle beauty to the max.

Baddecision


Edward Snowden is right. The NSA got hacked. The question is, who are the ShadowBrokers as the dataset extracted was intense, legitimate and potentially dangerous as the purloined tool kits can be used against us in ways the NSA can never imagine.



It gets better.

Rather than the NSA hacking tools being snatched as a result of a sophisticated cyber operation by Russia or some other nation, it seems more likely that an employee stole them. Experts who have analyzed the files suspect that they date to October 2013, five months after Edward Snowden left his contractor position with the NSA and fled to Hong Kong carrying flash drives containing hundreds of thousands of pages of NSA documents. 

So, if Snowden could not have stolen the hacking tools, there are indications that after he departed in May 2013, someone else did, possibly someone assigned to the agency’s highly sensitive Tailored Access Operations.

In December 2013, another highly secret NSA document quietly became public. It was a top secret TAO catalog of NSA hacking tools. Known as the Advanced Network Technology (ANT) catalog, it consisted of 50 pages of extensive pictures, diagrams and descriptions of tools for every kind of hack, mostly targeted at devices manufactured by U.S. companies, including Apple, Cisco, Dell and many others. 

Like the hacking tools, the catalog used similar codenames. Among the tools targeting Apple was one codenamed DROPOUTJEEP, which gives NSA total control of iPhones. "A software implant for the Apple iPhone,” says the ANT catalog, “includes the ability to remotely push/pull files from the device. SMS retrieval, contact-list retrieval, voicemail, geolocation, hot mic, camera capture, cell-tower location, etc.” 


Blowback's a bitch - Robert E. 

Addendum



To the highest bidder so it seems. 


Sunday, August 21, 2016

Arctic Sea Ice - Circa 2016



Of Mortality & JC



Astounding says it all when JC gets involved with health, ideology, politics and finance, something Texas has done with ruthless efficiency when stripping funding for Planned Parenthood and reproductive clinics as seen by the Guardian article titled Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world, study finds.

To whit:

The rate of Texas women who died from complications related to pregnancy doubled from 2010 to 2014, a new study has found, for an estimated maternal mortality rate that is unmatched in any other state and the rest of the developed world.

The finding comes from a report, appearing in the September issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, that the maternal mortality rate in the United States increased between 2000 and 2014, even while the rest of the world succeeded in reducing its rate. Excluding California, where maternal mortality declined, and Texas, where it surged, the estimated number of maternal deaths per 100,000 births rose to 23.8 in 2014 from 18.8 in 2000 – or about 27%.

But the report singled out Texas for special concern, saying the doubling of mortality rates in a two-year period was hard to explain “in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval”.

No other state saw a comparable increase.

In the wake of the report, reproductive health advocates are blaming the increase on Republican-led budget cuts that decimated the ranks of Texas’s reproductive healthcare clinics. In 2011, just as the spike began, the Texas state legislature cut $73.6m from the state’s family planning budget of $111.5m. The two-thirds cut forced more than 80 family planning clinics to shut down across the state. The remaining clinics managed to provide services – such as low-cost or free birth control, cancer screenings and well-woman exams – to only half as many women as before.

At the same time, Texas eliminated all Planned Parenthood clinics – whether or not they provided abortion services – from the state program that provides poor women with preventive healthcare. Previously, Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas offered cancer screenings and contraception to more than 130,000 women.

Am I missing something here?

Thursday, August 18, 2016

A Journey to Forever

Pedal to the Metal

Monday, August 15, 2016

Reality Check


Armata T-14 - The most advanced tank in the world.

Whenever I think about the NeoCons, including Hillary, and their really stupid notions about war,  especially with Russia, something these people have never been a part of, let alone military service, images like this come to mind, really powerful tech backed by a real country more than willing to defend itself, who knows how to build weapons designed to handle the vagaries of the real world  AK47 vs. the F35. better then the US. Adding to this blinding stupidity is the notion war is an affair that can be controlled, a notion completely at odds with reality, something the MICC  
Military/Industrial/Congressional/Complex seems utterly incapable of understanding in any way shape or fashion.





As an aside, yours truly did two years in the the Army with a stint in Korea instead of Nam, thank god.

Addendum:





Saturday, August 13, 2016

A different kind of meander :)


Quanta Magazine is a gem. Science for the rest of us, particularly physics, warms the cockles of yours truly's heart, especially when it comes to the mysterious connect between order and disorder, a subject that never ceases to amaze given just how profound the connect truly is. With this in mind, the eyes of birds have an interesting tale to tell with it's indirect link to random walks, chaos and close packing, commonplace phenomena that show the inner workings of reality in subtle and interesting ways.


Random Walk


Chaos - Lorenz attractor aka The butterfly effect


Close packing of cannon balls


When this notion of unordered yet uniform distribution is connected to the universality of phase transitions and the permutations of randomness, a more comprehensive view of reality emerges.





Mandelbrot would get this research without question.

The Body Electric & then Some :)


Seems electricity and it's impact on us has a long and storied history as seen by this excellent Aeon essay penned by Iwan Rhys Morus titled Bodies Electric.


It gets better.


Read the article, you'll learn a lot about juice and how it relates to us rubes. :)


Tuesday, August 02, 2016

More NASA Eye Candy

Brain Mapping

Lab on a chip/Rev II


Realtime diagnostics on a chip will change everything regarding medical, especially when combined with AI and the ubiquity of the net, facts most disquieting to the present day disaster known as HC in America, where costs run amok and people not getting what they paid for when being treated for malady X. With IBM's Lab on a chip tech, the move toward a digital Dr. Welby, as described in BRT circa 2013, is one step closer to reality.

IBM scientists have developed a new lab-on-a-chip technology that can, for the first time, separate biological particles at the nanoscale and could enable physicians to detect diseases such as cancer before symptoms appear.

As reported today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the IBM team's results show size-based separation of bioparticles down to 20 nanometers (nm) in diameter, a scale that gives access to important particles such as DNA, viruses and exosomes. Once separated, these particles can potentially be analyzed by physicians to reveal signs of disease even before patients experience any physical symptoms and when the outcome from treatment is most positive. Until now, the smallest bioparticle that could be separated by size with on-chip technologies was about 50 times or larger, for example, separation of circulating tumor cells from other biological components.

Times they're are a changing - Dylan