4 Simple Steps :)

Richard Feynman is one of my heroes. Irreverent, funny, brilliant and profound, he saw reality in ways most people can never conceive of in any way, shape or fashion. To that end, his take on understanding and deep learning is equally creative and common sensical to a fault as per this excellent post from Farnam Street titled, The Feynman Technique: The Best Way to Learn Anything.

There are four simple steps to the Feynman Technique, which I’ll explain below:

1. Choose a Concept
2. Teach it to a Toddler
3. Identify Gaps and Go Back to The Source Material
4. Review and Simplify (optional)

In other words ...

If one can't do this, then one cannot learn anything of consequence.

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”— Mortimer Adler

Read the piece in its entirety, it's the smart thing to do. :)

Richard Feynman

Thou Shall Not Grow Old

Yours truly knows how this was done, which is amazing without question. Can't wait to see Peter Jackson's masterpiece when it's released to the world. 

This clip shows the transformation from original footage to something else altogether. 

Bethlehem Steel 1857 - 2003 | Days of Future Past

Bethlehem Steel's foundry, located next to the Lehigh River, occupied 1000 acres or approximately 1.4 square miles. With this being said, the main plant closed down in 1995, never to open again. This clip shows just how vast this facility truly was as all shots taken were with a 16 - 35mm wide angle lens on a Sony A7SII. Check it out as this was a time, as flawed as it was, when America made things of consequence without question.

Phase Transitions

The changing of seasons, in this case, from fall to winter, is often subtle, especially when it comes to water transitioning to ice and day sliding into night.  Check it out as nature never disappoints.

Moon Phases 2019

Being a lover of full moons, this gem from NASA/Goddard is apt without question. :)

Irony indeed :)

George Carlin would appreciate this without question. :)

NYC XMAS 2018

From Grand Central to Rockefeller Center, XMAS lives in NYC. Enjoy and Merry Christmas to all and to all, a Good Night. :)

Merry XMAS to All :)

Merry XMAS to All. :)

2700 & Counting ...

Steel Clad

B&W/Never dies ...

Flotation 5 

Westport @ Night

Channeling Turner

In Transit

2700 & Counting ...

An Absolute Attrocity

Read the NY Times piece titled From Arizona to Yemen: The Journey of an American Bomb

When a bomb like this explodes, it doesn’t just kill people; it rearranges them. and then ask why our foreign policy is not only inept but murderous to a fault. This has to change now.

The World of Pretend

The World of Pretend, an elegant paean to Veronica Lake, tells the story of the leading yet forgotten Film Noire star of the 40s who quietly walked away from Hollywood on her terms. Sung by Emma Kiara and penned by Christopher Teal Davis and significant others, this work will stay with you long after the video fades into darkness. Check it out, worthwhile without question.

Credits:

Emma Kiara: Songstress
Music: Chris Davis
Lyrics: Chris Davis, Chan Davis & Jim Beloff
Ukulele: Chris Davis
Finger Snaps: Chan Davis
The World of Pretend recorded @ Studio Unicorn
Engineer: Paul Avgerinos
Video: Robert E. Moran
Movie Countdown: Movie Vigilante

Download, view etc, etc as there is no restriction on this innovative use of fair use describing a mysterious star who had talent, smarts and above all else, style.

A Guesstimate @ Best :)

Our tax system @ work :)

Composite I

Driven mostly by smartphone, this short experimental clip shows what this tech can do with a little help from a Sony A7SII. Enjoy.

Endgame

This Deep Water Horizon disaster image is more then just apt when it comes to what's happening with Trump, Mueller, the Deep State and the 2016 election as all the entities listed here have secrets to tell, secrets that could lead to a civil war of a most pernicious kind. To whit.

It’s well documented elsewhere that Robert Mueller’s mission to detect election “collusion” between Russia and Mr. Trump was a bust, and that all he has to show for it is a roll of contrived convictions for lying to federal prosecutors and the FBI. The case of General Flynn lies at the center because he served as Mr. Obama’s Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and he knew too much about US shenanigans around the notorious Iran nuclear deal and other shady doings. They were alarmed when he went over to Mr. Trump’s campaign, and determined to disable him. Once Mr. Trump appointed Gen. Flynn Director of National Security, Mr. Obama engineered an “incident” in late December of 2016 (confiscating Russian properties in Maryland over alleged election meddling and laying down new sanctions), that prompted Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak to phone Gen. Flynn, the incoming DNS. US Intel was prepared for that set-up and recorded the call, which required the illegal “unmasking” of Flynn, a nicety of spycraft. Thus, the FBI had a transcript of the phone call and were easily able to entrap Flynn in mis-remembering the particulars of the call. Where is that transcript?

The predicate for this operation was completely dishonest: that incoming senior government officials are forbidden to speak to foreign ambassadors. In fact it is their duty to consult with foreign officials, especially in Mr. Flynn’s job, and a long-established tradition of every presidential transition. The coup cadres of the Deep State used The New York Times and The Washington Post to persuade the public that Gen. Flynn had done something treasonous, when it was nothing more than routine transition business.

To yours truly, money laundering, combined with greed and connects to the Russians in hopes of building a Trump tower in Moscow, combined with illegal payments made to relevant parties (Stormy et al) is the crux of Trump's problems, not treason and collusion with the Russians on trying to game the election as the resources needed to hack the system at the levels needed to do the job have not been found by the Mueller team at this point in time. With this in mind, read Kunstler's Capture the Flag piece in its entirety. Makes a lot of sense whether one likes Trump or not as the questions raised regarding these matters are worth considering without question.

Some damn good suggestions ...

Every once in a great while, a politician actually has some damn good ideas relating to governance and how this arcane art form can be fixed for the better, something John Dingell delivers in spades in The Atlantic article titled. ...

I Served in Congress Longer Than Anyone. Here’s How to Fix It.

Abolish the Senate and publicly fund elections.

Here, then, are some specific suggestions—and they are only just that, suggestions—for a framework that might help restore confidence and trust in our precious system of government:

An electoral system based on full participation. At age 18, you are automatically registered to vote. No photo ID, no residency tests, no impediments of any kind. Advances in technology can make this happen effortlessly. Yes, voting should be restricted only to American citizens. Strict protections against foreign meddling are also necessary.

The elimination of money in campaigns. Period. Elections, like military service—each is an example of duty, honor, and service to country—should be publicly funded. Can you imagine if we needed to rely on wealthy donors to fund the military? I know there are those who genuinely believe in privatizing everything. They are called profiteers.

The end of minority rule in our legislative and executive branches. The Great Compromise, as it was called when it was adopted by the Constitution’s Framers, required that all states, big and small, have two senators. The idea that Rhode Island needed two U.S. senators to protect itself from being bullied by Massachusetts emerged under a system that governed only 4 million Americans.

Today, in a nation of more than 325 million and 37 additional states, not only is that structure antiquated, it’s downright dangerous. California has almost 40 million people, while the 20 smallest states have a combined population totaling less than that. Yet because of an 18th-century political deal, those 20 states have 40 senators, while California has just two. These sparsely populated, usually conservative states can block legislation supported by a majority of the American people. That’s just plain crazy.

All that needed to complete Dingell's suggestions include ...

1. Term limits for all 3 branches of government.
2. End to gerrymandering.
3. Add referendums on issues like declaring war as Congress should not have total control to commit this country to illegal fubars like Vietnam and W's excellent adventure in Iraq, not to mention never ending lost causes like Afghanistan.
4. Two years service to the country for kids before college. Military or civilian, it makes no difference as JFK was right. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.

50 50 @ best ...

The Taj Mahal is dying thanks to man's never ending ability to soil the planet and it's treasures no matter what the cost may be.

But the Taj Mahal has indeed begun to lose its shine. Its foundations are weakening and cracks are becoming larger, and deeper in the marble dome and the monument. The upper parts of the minarets are said to be on the verge of collapse. In high winds earlier this year, two pillars on an outer building fell to the ground.

Greenland's ice is melting at ever increasing rates due, in part, to the loss of albedo in the Arctic, a prime driver in accelerating global warming on planet earth.

Greenland's ice sheet melt has 'gone into overdrive' and is now 'off the charts'

"Melting of the Greenland ice sheet has gone into overdrive," said Luke Trusel, a glaciologist at Rowan University and lead author of the study. "Greenland melt is adding to sea level more than any time during the last three and a half centuries, if not thousands of years," he said.

Ice loss from Greenland is the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise, which is predicted to lead to inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities around the world over the next several decades and centuries.

Like Greenland's ice sheet ... 

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

The world’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising at a faster pace in 2018 than they did last year, researchers said Wednesday, the latest evidence that planet-warming pollution is proliferating again after a three-year lull in the middle of the decade. That trend is accelerating the earth’s collision course with some of the most severe consequences of climate change, scientists warned.

Worldwide, carbon emissions are expected to increase by 2.7 percent in 2018, according to studies published in three respected scientific journals by the Global Carbon Project. Emissions rose 1.6 percent last year, the researchers said.

James Lovelock was right. We're screwed. Earth will survive but us? 50 50 @ best if we stay the present course as we move further into the 21st century.

Mergers of a different kind

Ligo mergers

All that hard work paid off with the discovery of GW170729, GW170809, GW170818, and GW170823, referencing the dates on which the black holes were detected. "Having a collection of events is how we learn things about the Universe that can't be learned from just a few observations," Larson wrote. Among the things scientists have learned so far: all stellar black holes were formed from stars 45 times less than the mass of our Sun. That can tell scientists something about how black holes form and grow together, which can in turn yield insights into the evolution of stars.

The National Science Foundation's LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and the European-based VIRGO gravitational-wave detector have published new results from the first two Observing runs. Four new black hole mergers are newly announced, The LIGO and Virgo collaborations have now confidently detected gravitational waves from a total of 10 stellar-mass binary black hole mergers and one merger of neutron stars, which are the dense, spherical remains of stellar explosions.

Mergers indeed. :)

Killing me slowly ...

For the past couple of months, yours truly has tried to focus on the essential terrestrial organisms that, if eliminated from the environment, would cause environmental collapse. With this in mind, insects are prime candidates as they inhabit every continent (including Antarctica's Belgica antarctica, the Antarctic midge) and are intimately involved with all aspects of life on this planet as we know it. Note: We haven't even talked about the sea and land-based microfauna and flora, the baseline lifeforms on which all life on this planet depends. Note II: The oceans are not part of this blurb although it too is under the same amount of manmade stress as well.

Because insects are legion, inconspicuous and hard to meaningfully track, the fear that there might be far fewer than before was more felt than documented. People noticed it by canals or in backyards or under streetlights at night — familiar places that had become unfamiliarly empty. The feeling was so common that entomologists developed a shorthand for it, named for the way many people first began to notice that they weren’t seeing as many bugs. They called it the windshield phenomenon.

When the investigators began planning the study in 2016, they weren’t sure if anyone would sign up. But by the time the nets were ready, a paper by an obscure German entomological society had brought the problem of insect decline into sharp focus. The German study found that, measured simply by weight, the overall abundance of flying insects in German nature reserves had decreased by 75 percent over just 27 years. If you looked at midsummer population peaks, the drop was 82 percent.

Let's think about this while reading Bill McKibben's  in-depth New Yorker article stating the fact earth, in terms of arable use, is shrinking every day due to GW, environmental degradation and resource depletion.

The poorest and most vulnerable will pay the highest price. But already, even in the most affluent areas, many of us hesitate to walk across a grassy meadow because of the proliferation of ticks bearing Lyme disease which have come with the hot weather; we have found ourselves unable to swim off beaches, because jellyfish, which thrive as warming seas kill off other marine life, have taken over the water. The planet’s diameter will remain eight thousand miles, and its surface will still cover two hundred million square miles. But the earth, for humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet and in our minds.

The Anthropocene is gathering speed as we speak.

Killing me slowly indeed.

Late Fall | 2018

A short clip showing the end of fall starting from strong winds on a crisp fall day to quietude to the max on a full moon night in the environs of Fairfield, CT. Enjoy.