History Lesson 101 :)

The late, great George Carlin would relate to this. :)

Not one is ever the same ... :)

Every snowflake is unique due to the vagaries of temperature, moisture, wind and weather in all environs cold enough for snowflakes to be created. In all the time man has ever encountered snow, the exact way on how snowflakes melt has never been properly determined until now.

A new video features a visualization of the first three-dimensional numerical model of melting snowflakes in the atmosphere, developed by scientist Jussi Leinonen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. A better understanding of how snow melts can help scientists recognize the signature in radar signals of heavier, wetter snow -- the kind that breaks power lines and tree limbs -- and could be a step toward improving predictions of this hazard.

Snowflake research is one of many ways that NASA studies the frozen regions of Earth, collectively known as the cryosphere.

Awesome says it all.

Presbyopia

If you look closely at this infrared image on the left side, you will see houses slightly out of focus, not because yours truly screwed up in taking the shot but rather how infrared wavelengths drift out of focus from time to time with lenses & cameras keyed to visible light. Now consider looking at a computer screen or smartphone for 8 hours to see how out of focus eyes can permanently become given just how intense screens on said devices tend to be in the year of our lord 2018.

To see if your own eyes are hardening, look no further than your phone, which should require no exertion; you’re probably already there. Keep peering at your screen, reading and staring, snubbing life’s third dimension and natural hues. The first sign of the eyes’ becoming teeth is the squinting at phones. Next comes the reflexive extending of the arm, the impulse to resize letters into the preschool range. And at last the buying of drugstore readers.

Modern medicine offers little apart from magnifying glasses to treat presbyopia (from the Greek presbus, meaning “old man”). But those $3.99 specs will get you on your feet just fine, which is to say, you can once again relish your phone without squinting or arm-stretching. A remedy for farsightedness evidently succeeds to the degree that it restores a woman or man to the comfortable consumption of texts, email, ecommerce, and social media on a glazed rectangle of aluminum alloys held at a standard reading distance of 16 inches. With reading glasses we live again.

Doesn’t this seem like an unwholesome loop? The eyes may be unwell, but the primary object of our eyesight seems corrosive. We measure our vision against the phone, all the while suspecting the phone itself is compromising our ability to see it.

But there is a common sense remedy to this.

Computer vision syndrome is not nearly as romantic. The American Optometric Association uses it to describe the discomfort that people report feeling after looking at screens for a “prolonged” period of time. When screens pervade the field of vision all day, what counts as prolonged? (Moreover, reports of discomfort seem like not much to predicate a whole syndrome on.) But the AOA’s treatment of the syndrome is intriguing. This is the so-called 20-20-20 rule, which asks that screen people take a 20-second break to look at something 20 feet away every 20 minutes.

The remedy helps us reverse-engineer the syndrome. This suffering is thought to be a function not of blue light or intrusive ads or bullying and other scourges. It’s thought to be a function of unbroken concentration on a screen 8 inches to 2 feet from the eyes. The person suffering eyestrain is taught to look 20 feet away but she might presumably look at a painting or a wall. Twenty feet, though, suggests it’s depth she may be thirsty for.

Yours truly does the 20-20-20 rule to the max even though my eyes vis a vis close up vision crapped out years ago due to age but with that being said, said vision has not gotten any worse looking at screens of all sizes beginning in the late 70's of B&W 80 character displays, courtesy Perkin Elmer, creating fine art 3D graphics on the MAGI system using Fortran 77 as the weapon of choice to create said art in question. :)

The Uncanny Valley writ large

The Uncanny Valley, the place where 3D CG characters so closely resemble humans yet not, giving everyone the creeps, is now being generated in real time, something not thought possible until now.

Fast forward to today, and the tools that are available to budding games creators are incredible. And there’s one graphics and animation engine that is at the forefront of the advancement in realtime graphics realism. Unreal Engine.

From Mortal Kombat to Star Wars, there is no other system as ubiquitous as this, and recently demonstrations of the capabilities of the latest iteration of the system have been doing the rounds. Be prepared to be amazed.

There are three standout demonstrations. The first uses 3Lateral’s Meta Human Framework© alongside Unreal Engine to make a volumetric capture of a performance by Andy Serkis, before transposing it to another CGI character. In realtime. The final result is shown above.

This is Andy Serkis’ original performance. Note that what you are watching is still a CGI version of him!

Gotta love Macbeth. :)

Addendum: Charles Darwin capped on this in Voyage of the Beagle in describing the face of a South American bushmaster in the Galapagos. 

The expression of this [Trigonocephalus] snake’s face was hideous and fierce; the pupil consisted of a vertical slit in a mottled and coppery iris; the jaws were broad at the base, and the nose terminated in a triangular projection. I do not think I ever saw anything more ugly, excepting, perhaps, some of the vampire bats. I imagine this repulsive aspect originates from the features being placed in positions, with respect to each other, somewhat proportional to the human face; and thus we obtain a scale of hideousness.

— Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle[65]

Uncanny Valley indeed.

In the eye of the beholder

Is this art or an artificial construct generated by Deep Dream, a Google derived AI with a viewpoint on the world both bizarre and wondrous depending on one's point of view. 

Artistic creation, defined as the production or expression of what is beautiful, appealing or provocative, appears to be well within the capability of machines. Some definitions of art explicitly characterise it as an expression of human skill and creativity, while others place more emphasis on the output as a catalyst for human reflection and contemplation, without saying anything about how it was produced.

Another way in which AI is already creating art is by remixing visual concepts. DeepDream is a computer visualisation tool created by Google engineers that uses convolutional neural networks, which are a type of network well adapted to reading images. It learns to find and enhance patterns in images, but in this case the algorithm was expanded to identify and exaggerate features of an image that have certain characteristics. Style transfer is another technique in which stylistic elements of one image are used to draw the content of another.

Image generated by the Creative Adversarial Network.
Copyright, The Art & Artificial Intelligence Lab, Rutgers University

Compare this piece with Diebenkorn's Large Light Blue. Eerie says it all.

Any questions?

Addendum: Here's a shot by yours truly using DD to do the deed.

Van Gogh anyone? Here's the original.

Emergence - NYC 2018.

4 & More ...

Lions 3

News in the Round

Verticality

Emergence

NYC/Edge Lines

NYC is a city of angles, lines and intensity. Motion of all forms rule as the city prepares for spring. Enjoy.

The Angler Fish :)

Bizarre, awesome and just plain cool, the angler fish rules. :)

Yet now, Science reports that this team has returned the first ever footage of two anglerfish mating in what is certainly one of the most unique rituals in nature.

As the footage shows, the much smaller male anglerfish is fused to the underside of the female, providing sperm, and will continue to latch on until it dies and its body wastes away.

Nature never disappoints. :)

It's computational

For a long time, yours truly has thought the cure for cancer centers on understating how our bodies crunch information because cancer, in essence, is a breakdown of this incredibly complex communicative process that keeps us rubes alive 24/7. With this in mind, the approach to solving this wicked problem is finally going in the right direction based on compute power that's increasing at exponential rates as we move further into the 21st century.

The bad old days ...

A FEW YEARS ago Eric Schadt met a woman who had cancer. It was an aggressive form of colon cancer that had come on quickly and metastasized to her liver. She was a young war widow from Mississippi, the mother of two girls she was raising alone, and she had only the health care that her husband’s death benefits afforded her—an overburdened oncologist at a military hospital, the lowest rung on the health care ladder. The polar opposite of cutting-edge medicine. To walk into such a facility with stage 4 metastatic disease is to walk back in time to the world of the unmapped human genome, when “colon cancer” was understood to have a single cause instead of millions of causes resulting in unique variations, when treatment was the same bag of poison, whether you were in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, or Timbuktu. A time without big data, machine learning, or hope.

John Wheeler was right ... it's computational.

Schadt had just started the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai Hospital, and when he heard about the woman in Mississippi, he said, simply, “That’s exactly the kind of patient we take.” By that he meant patients for whom the current standard of care would fail, for whom the future of medicine—one in which supercomputers sift through masses of genetic data for patterns that could lead to new treatments and cures—could not arrive fast enough.

“We’re on this exponential growth curve, where your mind naturally projects all the way into the future, and you think: We’re going to figure this out,” he says. “In the end, we will know what all these cells are doing, what all these perturbations do. The humbling part is that as we are on this growth curve, we are continually struck by the increasing complexity that is revealed.”

In the end, Wheeler eloquently explains what reality is all about.

I, like other searchers, attempt formulation after formulation of the central issues and here present a wider overview, taking for working hypothesis the most effective one that has survived this winnowing: It from Bit. Otherwise put, every it — every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely — even if in some contexts indirectly — from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes or no questions, binary choices, bits.

It from Bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe - John Wheeler

John Wheeler

The "Art" of Persuasion

When one combines high end analytics/data mining with political dirty tricks, the end result is Cambridge Analytica.

The data mining company Cambridge Analytica, which is owned by the billionaire Robert Mercer, made headlines for a second time in less than a week. On Monday Britain's Channel 4 News broadcast the results of a four month long investigation into the company. The explosive report shows the company's CEO Alexander Nix bragging about using dirty tricks to entrap politicians. Here's a short clip from the program.

NEWS REPORT: After a four-month undercover investigation, tonight a glimpse into how they really operate. Prepared, it seems, to ruin their clients' opponents through handouts and honey traps. Through sex, secrets, and spies.

It get better.

Joining me now to discuss the Channel 4 report on Cambridge Analytica and related matters is Bill Black. Bill is a white collar criminologist and former financial regulator and Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri Kansas City. He is the author also of "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." Thanks for joining us again, Bill.

Bill Black: Thank you.

GREG WILPERT: Bill, What is your initial reaction to these latest revelations about Cambridge Analytica dirty tricks?

BILL BLACK: So, Americans understand the Koch brothers. But if you distilled the Koch brothers down to the absolute essence of evil then you'd have the Mercer father-daughter team. They want to produce a world that's authoritarian and they want to produce a world that is nationalistic, along the lines of, basically, pure blood and those types of things. And they've taken over this entity Cambridge Analytica that used to be just sort of a regular company. They purged all of the moderates. So it's deeply, deeply right wing.

But it's more than that. It's, basically, you have to think of these people as mercenaries, as in mercenaries in the old days that would go in and take over a country by force of arms. Now they do it in a more sophisticated fashion. They have no country that they believe in. Former spies type such, but they are entirely out for power and money in these areas.

BRT talked about CA, with homage to Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda, in a piece titled Data Set, which, in indirect ways, shows how CA helped Trump become POTUS by leveraging data garnered from Facebook in ways that boggle the mind.

Addendum: Here is the 5 part Channel 4 News video series on CA's excellent adventure.

Edward Bernays

Roadtrip+

A quick 4 day excursion into Fl complete with water, tourists, resorts, pelicans, sand and astoundingly clear and sunny skies is the focus of this short trip shot with a smartphone and iPad. Enjoy.

The edge of night

Cassini yet again with another gem, this time the rings of Saturn on the edge of night. :)

Saturn’s shadow sweeps across the rings in a view captured on Nov. 5, 2006 by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. In the bottom half of the image, the countless icy particles that make up the rings bask in full daylight. In the top half, they move through Saturn’s shadow. On the right side of the image, the planet’s night side, dimly lit by reflected ringshine, can be seen through gaps in the darkened rings.


This view is a mosaic of four visible light images taken with Cassini's narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 932,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Saturn.

Eye Candy in 360 :)

Photographer William Briscoe captured this spectacular 360° 8K timelapse on January 31st near Fairbanks, Alaska.

“Here is a 360 video of the Lunar Eclipse, Alaska style, which I filmed on January 31st near Fairbanks. Lady Aurora, being the Diva she is, just couldn’t let the moon have all the attention that night, so she made a nice showing as well.”

The full video is only a minute and ten seconds long, but that doesn’t mean it was easy to shoot. Responding to a comment on YouTube, Briscoe revealed that it was -31°F (-35°C) out that night, so just getting his 360° rig (a custom-built array of numerous 35mm DSLRs) to work was a challenge.

Intense without question. :)

The enemy of my enemy ...

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. 

Charybdis - 21st century style :)

Unlike Charybdis, this whirlpool generates clean power to the max. :)

1178B, 0401.ODY.7 from The Dorian Gallery.

The other crag is lower—you will see, Odysseus—
though both lie side-by-side, an arrow-shot apart. 
Atop it a great fig-tree rises, shaggy with leaves, 
beneath it awesome Charybdis gulps the dark water down.
Three times a day she vomits it up, three times she gulps it down, 
that terror! Don’t be there when the whirlpool swallows down—
not even the earthquake god could save you from disaster.

Studies in B&W

 Glissando 2

Liquid Metal

Moonglow

Glissando 1

Solitude

In winter, beaches are places of solitude where few people interrupt one's quiet connect with nature. 

Quinn

Quinn, the intense Nor'easter, roared through CT with a vengeance with 20+" of snow and howling winds knocking out power to the max. With all this being said, the inherent beauty of Quinn is zen like with extremely heavy snow transforming the landscape into a textured whitespace of delicate beauty. Enjoy.

Can you see what I see? :)

Extremely cool optical illusion. Warning: Click mute before viewing as the music score sucks.

 A 3-D painted zebra crosswalk in Ísafjörður, Iceland

Ísafjörður's optical illusion of a crosswalk is designed to get motorists to slow down. And there's potentially more three-dimensional painted zebra crossings to come in this remote Icelandic town. (Video screenshot: Gústi Productions/YouTube)
Iceland is a place of such dramatic, otherworldly beauty that many visitors have a hard time believing their very own eyes. Over the past several years, the island-bound Nordic nation has emerged, for better or worse, as the world’s preeminent blink twice and rub-your-peepers-to-make-sure-you’re-not-hallucinating destination. Double takes, audible gasps, and veering rental cars off of roads while gawking are all par for the course.

It’s that last reaction — distracted driving while speeding to get to the next awe-inspiring site — that’s problematic. To address this, Ísafjörður, a lively fishing and tourism hub in northwest Iceland’s far-flung Westfjords region, has embraced a novel approach to improving traffic safety: fighting rubberneck-inducing fire with rubberneck-inducing fire.

Dreamt up by town environmental commissioner Ralf Trylla and executed by local pavement marking company GÍH Vegamálun, a traditional, striped crosswalk in the center of town has been transformed into a pedestrian right-of-way that appears to be hovering directly above the asphalt.


To be clear, this shifting 3-D optical illusion doubling as a run-of-the-mill crosswalk is a distraction (and disorienting, to boot). However, the town is confident it will slow traffic, if not bring it to a complete stop, without freaking out too many overwhelmed out-of-towners already dazed by the unreal-looking natural scenery of the Westfjords.

Imagine this in NYC. :) A crowd pleaser or crowd annoyance depending on one's POV. :)

It's all about the money

Again, it's all about the money.

Winter's End

Winter's slowly ending in CT with ice ebbing away, the sun rising higher in the sky and a fierce Nor'easter named Riley notwithstanding. Enjoy.

Update, I may have to add to this bad boy if the weather forecast rings true March 7th & 8th. :)

History lesson :)

Terrific piece on earth's history. The only thing missing, the advent of the anthropocene. 

Pangea lives. :)

Had to post Wikipedia's amazing graphics yet again.. :)

Behavior Modification - Stage 1

Minority Report looms with 24/7 face recognition glasse combined with AI, courtesy the Chinese police.

You’ve probably heard of Transitions lenses that can adapt to changing light conditions. Now, get ready for facial recognition lenses.

Police officers in Zhengzhou, China have been spotted wearing sunglasses equipped with facial recognition software that allows them to identify individuals in a crowd. These surveillance sunglasses were actually rolled out last year, but a recent report from China’s QQ published a series of photos of the glasses in action.

China has consistently been ahead of the curve in terms of utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) for surveillance. The country’s CCTV system tracked down a BBC reporter in just seven minutes during a demonstration in 2017. But this new technology, developed by LLVision, takes China’s surveillance efforts to a whole new level. Not just in theory, either — reports from the official People’s Daily newspaper seem to indicate that it’s improving police work.

Gives you the warm fuzzies, right?