Deus ex Machina

We have already lost control as Deus ex Machina does exist in the guise of increasingly unknowable AI entities. To whit ...

Most of those simulations fall into one of two categories: slow and more accurate, or fast and less accurate. But now, an international team of researchers has built an AI that can quickly generate highly-accurate, three-dimensional simulations of the universe — even when they tweak parameters the system wasn’t trained on.

“It’s like teaching image recognition software with lots of pictures of cats and dogs, but then it’s able to recognize elephants,” researcher Shirley Ho said in a press release. “Nobody knows how it does this, and it’s a great mystery to be solved.”

Deus ex machina in classical theatre: Euripides' Medea, performed in 2009 in Syracuse, Italy

To be continued ...

Now for something completely different :)

“Gong Master” Sven plays an 80 inch (2.03m) symphonic gong from Paiste and it sounds straight out of a horror film. Seriously though, is there a cooler job title than Gong Master?

To yours truly, not horrific but rather intensely spacy. :)

Waiting for Godot ...

Waiting for Godot John?

On Thursday, the Supreme Court dealt a historic defeat to redistricting reformers when it ruled 5-4 along ideological lines that challenges to partisan gerrymandering could not be adjudicated under the U.S. Constitution, pushing the next battles over these maps to the states.

Gutless says it all. Yet another reason for term limits for all three branches of the government including the supremes.

Godot never showed up ...

Dumb Shit Foreign Policy ... A case for Impeachment indeed

In Ramification, BRT discussed the background stupidity of the Trump administration regarding Iran, complete with the inept false flag initiative and the possible ensuing blowback leading to economic devastation of the world's economy, the incineration of the Middle East and the specter of WWW III given just how seriously dangerous and foolish this gambit truly is. In this blurb, David Stockman's piece ventures further as to why this is an impeachable offense based on just how dumb and reckless the 3 Stooges of Trump, Bolton and Pompeo are in terms of making America's 60+ year foreign policy fubar even worse then one can ever imagine.

But nothing could be further from the truth. The Donald’s action to terminate the Iranian nuclear deal was a complete triumph for the War Party.

It gutted the very idea of America First because Washington’s renewed round of sanctions constitute economic aggression against a country that is no threat to the US homeland whatsoever.

In fact, Iran did not violate any term of the nuke deal, and as we demonstrate below, scrupulously adhered to the letter of it. So the real reasons for Trump’s abandonment of the nuke deal have everything to do with the kind of Imperial interventionism that is the antithesis of America First.

As Ron Paul cogently observed:

Is Iran really the aggressive one? When you unilaterally pull out of an agreement that was reducing tensions and boosting trade; when you begin applying sanctions designed to completely destroy another country’s economy; when you position military assets right offshore of that country; when you threaten to destroy that country on a regular basis, calling it a campaign of “maximum pressure,” to me it seems a stretch to play the victim when that country retaliates by shooting a spy plane that is likely looking for the best way to attack.

Even if the US spy plane was not in Iranian airspace – but it increasingly looks like it was – it was just another part of an already-existing US war on Iran. Yes, sanctions are a form of war, not a substitute for war.

History lesson

That the Iranians had a case is beyond doubt. The open US archives now prove that the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953 and put the utterly unsuited and megalomaniacal Mohammad Reza Shah on the peacock throne to rule as a puppet in behalf of US security and oil interests.

End game

Iran Never Wanted the Bomb

At bottom, all the hysteria about the mullahs getting the bomb was based on the wholly theoretically supposition that they wanted civilian enrichment only as a stepping stone to the bomb. Yet the entirety of the US intelligence complex as well as the attestation of George W. Bush himself say it isn’t so.

As we have previously indicated, the blinding truth of that proposition first came in the National Intelligence Estimates of 2007. These NIEs represent a consensus of all 17 US intelligence agencies on salient issues each year, and on the matter of Iran’s nuclear weapons program they could not have been more unequivocal:

“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. … We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons. …

“Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.”

Moreover, as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern noted recently, the NIE’s have not changed since then.

A case for impeachment indeed.

Biodiversity 101 ...

Biodiversity's rather important for without it, earth dies, including us. With this in mind, consider the plight of honeybees, insects that pollinate approximately 33% of the food we eat, based on what we are doing to our planet as we speak.

While the decline of European honeybees in the United States and beyond has been
well publicized in recent years, the more than 4,000 species of native bees in North
America and Hawaii have been much less documented. Although these native bees
are not as well known as honeybees, they play a vital role in functioning ecosystems and also
provide more than $3 billion dollars in fruit-pollination services each year just in the United
States.

For this first-of-its-kind analysis, the Center for Biological Diversity conducted a systematic
review of the status of all 4,337 North American and Hawaiian native bees. Our key findings:

• Among native bee species with sufficient data to assess (1,437), more than half (749) are declining.
• Nearly 1 in 4 (347 native bee species) is imperiled and at increasing risk of extinction.
• For many of the bee species lacking sufficient population data, it’s likely they are also declining or at risk of extinction. Additional research is urgently needed to protect them.
• A primary driver of these declines is agricultural intensification, which includes habitat destruction and pesticide use. Other major threats are climate change and urbanization.
• These troubling findings come as a growing body of research has revealed that more than 40 percent of insect pollinators globally are highly threatened, including many of the native bees critical to unprompted crop and wildflower pollination across the United States.

Time to wake up about caring for the environment don't you think?

A Solar System update :)

Stunning says it all regarding our solar system as envisioned by Tabletop Whale, an amazing science illustration website.

This week’s map shows the orbits of more than 18000 asteroids in the solar system. This includes everything we know of that’s over 10km in diameter - about 10000 asteroids - as well as 8000 randomized objects of unknown size. This map shows each asteroid at its exact position on New Years’ Eve 1999.

Here's another.

This week’s blog post is a topographic map of the planet Mercury - the smallest planet and the one closest to the sun. I wanted to map each of the rocky planets in the same style, so this week’s code tutorial actually also includes code for mapping Mars, Venus, and the Moon.

Although Mercury has very few labeled features, I really liked the IAU naming theme for the planet. Craters on Mercury are named after famous artists - including some of my favorites, Lange (named for Dorothea Lange), Gaudí (Antoni Gaudí i Cornet), and Plath (Sylvia Plath).

Stellar without question. :)

Ramification ...

ram·i·fi·ca·tion
/ˌraməfəˈkāSH(ə)n/
 Learn to pronounce
noun
plural noun: ramifications
a consequence of an action or event, especially when complex or unwelcome.
"any change is bound to have legal ramifications"
synonyms: consequence, result, aftermath, outcome, effect, upshot, issue, sequel; More
a subdivision of a complex structure or process perceived as comparable to a tree's branches.
"an extended family with its ramifications of neighboring in-laws"
FORMAL•TECHNICAL
the action or state of ramifying or being ramified.

Said word is more than appropriate when it comes to Iran and the incredibly stupid and dangerous actions the US is taking against her based on an inept false flag and total ignorance of the fact of international waters regarding Oman, Iran and the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran’s territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz amount to 12 nautical miles (22 km). Since 1959, Iran recognizes only non-military naval transit.

Since 1972, Oman’s territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz also amount to 12 nautical miles. At its narrowest, the width of the Strait is 21 nautical miles (39 km). That means, crucially, that half of the Strait of Hormuz is in Iranian territorial waters and the other half in Oman’s. There are no “international waters”.

Regarding the false flag ... As much as 30% of the world’s oil supply transits the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Wily Persian Gulf traders – who know better – are virtually unanimous; if Tehran was really responsible for the Gulf of Oman tanker incident, oil prices would be going through the roof by now. They aren’t.

Even Israel agrees.



It gets better

For the past few days, intelligence circles across Eurasia had been prodding Tehran to consider a quite straightforward scenario. There would be no need to shut down the Strait of Hormuz if Quds Force commander, General Qasem Soleimani, the ultimate Pentagon bête noire, explained in detail, on global media, that Washington simply does not have the military capacity to keep the Strait open.

As I previously reported, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz

would destroy the American economy by detonating the $1.2 quadrillion derivatives market; and that would collapse the world banking system, crushing the world’s $80 trillion GDP and causing an unprecedented depression.

Endgame: If the US is totally out of its mind and shuts off the ability of Iran to ship essential oil exports to countries like China ...

And that adds to Tehran now openly saying that Iran may decide to close the Strait of Hormuz publicly – and not by stealth.

Iran’s indirect, asymmetric warfare response to any US adventure will be very painful. Prof. Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran once again reconfirmed, “even a limited strike will be met by a major and disproportionate response.” And that means gloves off, big time; anything from really blowing up tankers to, in Marandi’s words, “Saudi and UAE oil facilities in flames”.

Hezbollah will launch tens of thousands of missiles against Israel. As

Hezbollah’s secretary-general Hasan Nasrallah has been stressing in his speeches, “war on Iran will not remain within that country’s borders, rather it will mean that the entire [Middle East] region will be set ablaze. All of the American forces and interests in the region will be wiped out, and with them the conspirators, first among them Israel and the Saudi ruling family.”

Remember, Iran is not Arab, its Persian and the location of the country is perfect in terms of defense vis a vis the US. Maybe the idiots in the WH should WTF up and realize this is folly of the most pernicious kind.

Creativity 101

Centerline

Creativity 101:

1. The Act of Creation - Arthur Koestler: The creative act is the joining together of two or more seemingly dissimilar ideas that generate a heretofore unexpected result. i.e. Chemistry - H20 consists of 2 Hydrogen + 1 Oxygen atoms, both explosive yet, when combined, becomes water.
   The joke: Henny Youngman - Take my wife, Please. :)
2. Creativity starts with the asking of a question: Why is this the way it is?
   Question everything - Einstein
3. The ability to see relationships is key because everything is connected as reality is a Quantum space and entanglement stitches it together.
4. Play is indispensable. What if ... is the real deal here. A sense of wonderment is essential. :)
5. Creativity takes courage as new ideas disrupt the "natural" order of things.
6. Creativity is problem-solving. It matters not the discipline used save that said discipline shapes how the creative act is produced.
7. The act itself is ineffable and cannot be explained. Like quantum, creativity just happens. It cannot be forced, only acted upon when the idea shows up. The finished act is anything but as it can be explained after the fact without issue.
8. Practice makes better. Beginners mind and intuition are key.
9. The size of the problem solved dictates the significance of the creative act. i.e. Mixing anchovies with pineapples on a pizza is a creative act. The size or importance of the problem solved, not so much while Einstein's Theory of relativity proving that Newton was wrong at a universal scale, is.
10. Creativity, like tech and existence, has no morality. It simply is.
11. Stay hungry, stay foolish - Stewart Brand/Whole Earth Catalog. :)

Backlight

MAD

It's crucial to monitor and model nuclear weapons testing, which is in part the purpose of this equipment at the Rocky Flats Plant's Critical Mass Laboratory (photographed in 1970). The US and Russia (and before that the USSR) have been sparing over the limits of testing for decades.

MAD/Mutually Assured Destruction, the policy the US and USSR implements to prevent nuclear war, has worked for almost 70 years, something rather amazing given just how easy it is to have an accident or a misread as to what each country will do in a crisis when it comes to tech as fragile and powerful as nukes truly are. With this in mind, it's no wonder posturing, quasi lying and deception become part of the game where there is no winner if missiles are launched to bring about Armageddon, military style.

IN A MAZE of tunnels 900 feet beneath the Nevada desert, US nuclear weapons scientists have since the 1990s been intermittently agitating flecks of plutonium with chemical high explosives, carefully trying to push them to the brink of a chain reaction capable of yielding nuclear force.

IN A SEPARATE network of underground tunnels about 4,800 miles away, in the northern Russian archipelago of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Circle, Russia conducts its own such experiments, meant to model the key chemical and physical actions that occur in the run-up to a full-blown nuclear explosion, without actually causing one.

Experiments at the two sites are used by both nations to help ensure their nuclear arsenals remain viable but conducted under a blanket of secrecy. And so they’ve given rise to suspicions—and accusations—that they violate a 1996 global treaty designed to stymie nuclear weapons innovations by barring any nuclear explosions.

MAD indeed.

Water Wars ...

Global distribution of the current likelihood of hydro-political issues among the main transboundary basins (transboundary basin borders in black, non-transboundary areas.

Water wars, similar in terms of inevitability with nations desiring ever more powerful weapons, become a given due to just how intense the impact of climate change will be on planet earth as man moves further into the 21st century.

Competition over limited water resources is one of the main concerns for the coming decades. Although water issues alone have not been the sole trigger for warfare in the past, tensions over freshwater management and use represent one of the main concerns in political relations between riparian states and may exacerbate existing tensions, increase regional instability and social unrest. Previous studies made great efforts to understand how international water management problems were addressed by actors in a more cooperative or confrontational way. In this study, we analyze what are the pre-conditions favoring the insurgence of water management issues in shared water bodies, rather than focusing on the way water issues are then managed among actors. 

Factor in the issue of too many people and the scenario for chaos becomes even direr.

Changes in population density are expected to exacerbate the anthropogenic pressure on water resources, the availability of which is strongly impacted by changes in climate. The combination of these two factors is estimated to impact negatively on the overall hydro-political risk. The likelihood of water related issues is expected to increase globally, with gridded values averaging between +36.4% in the case of moderate climate change (RCP 4.5) and +37.1% in the case of the more pessimistic climate scenario (RCP 8.5) for the year 2050, and respectively between +39.3 and +46.8% for the year 2100. 

Don't say we haven't been warned.

It's inevitable ...

It's inevitable ... aptly describes the endless pursuit of ever more powerful weapons by every nation on planet earth, a concept particularly apropos to hypersonic weapons, a tech that cannot be stopped, based on large part as to just how fast this hardware can go in delivering death, in minutes, to anyone unfortunate enough to be in its path.

Griffin was referring to a revolutionary new type of weapon, one that would have the unprecedented ability to maneuver and then to strike almost any target in the world within a matter of minutes. Capable of traveling at more than 15 times the speed of sound, hypersonic missiles arrive at their targets in a blinding, destructive flash, before any sonic booms or other meaningful warning. So far, there are no surefire defenses. Fast, effective, precise and unstoppable — these are rare but highly desired characteristics on the modern battlefield. And the missiles are being developed not only by the United States but also by China, Russia and other countries.

Cheap to deploy is an added bonus to defense contractors of almost any size

The enthusiasm has spread to military contractors, especially after the Pentagon awarded the largest one, Lockheed Martin, more than $1.4 billion in 2018 to build missile prototypes that can be launched by Air Force fighter jets and B-52 bombers. 

With a little bit of luck, these weapons might prove to be more successful than Lockheed's F 35, the jet that just can't cut in in ways that truly boggle the mind.

At extremely high altitudes, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps’ versions of the F-35 jet can only fly at supersonic speeds for short bursts of time before there is a risk of structural damage and loss of stealth capability, a problem that may make it impossible for the Navy’s F-35C to conduct supersonic intercepts.

The Defense Department does not intend to field a fix for the problem, which influences not only the F-35’s airframe and the low-observable coating that keeps it stealthy, but also the myriad antennas located on the back of the plane that are currently vulnerable to damage, according to documents exclusively obtained by Defense News.

This is understandable as the US no longer makes anything and lacks the infrastructure to train people on how to make things. Makes sense doesn't it?

The Picture of Everything

Astounding says it all. The Picture of Everything | Howard Hallis.

Q: How big is the original?

A: The original is in 8 pieces. All together they measure around 15 feet high by 14 feet wide.

Q: How many characters do you have in the picture?

A: I have no idea. Thousands.

Q: Is there anyone you DON'T have in there?

A: Hitler.

Q: Do the sides of The Picture meet each other?

A: Yes. The sides meet, as do the top and bottom. I wanted to have an endless loop.

Q: What was the biggest inspiration for this picture?

A: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s "Bluebeard".

Q: Why isn't there a character key online?

A: The piece is more subjective that way.

Q: Where's Waldo?

A: He's in there twice.

Q: Why are some things in the picture twice?

A: Some people and characters are in there multiple times.

Minority Report - coming soon ...

Minority Report - via Project Soli - coming soon ...

Soli sensor technology works by emitting electromagnetic waves in a broad beam.

Objects within the beam scatter this energy, reflecting some portion back towards the radar antenna. Properties of the reflected signal, such as energy, time delay, and frequency shift capture rich information about the object’s characteristics and dynamics, including size, shape, orientation, material, distance, and velocity.

End result: virtual dials, buttons and sliders.

Minority Report indeed.

"Stewards" of the planet

The Dandora Landfill in Nairobi, Kenya is a sprawling 30-acre dump that grows by an average of 850 tons of solid waste a day, according to the U.N. Environment Programme.

Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto

BRT has talked often about the Anthropocene, the 6th great extinction event being caused by us 24/7.  With this sad fact in mind, NPR's Anthropocene Project details, via powerful photography and editorial, how this slow-motion disaster is occurring as we speak. Note that the climate change part of the equation is not being discussed, only environmental degradation, driven by pollution, resource depletion, greed and, of course, fossil fuel production.

Photographer Edward Burtynsky and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier were inspired by this ongoing discussion of the debate over this new geological era. These three Canadian artists traveled to 22 countries to research and document "places of obvious, physical human incursions on the landscape," says filmmaker de Pencier.

They created over 50 images capturing the impact of humans on the Earth, like a sprawling, 30-acre garbage dump in Kenya, seen above ed. large swaths of deforestation in Borneo and waterways damaged by oil siphoning in Nigeria.

An underground potash mine in the Ural mountains of Russia. The potassium-rich salt is mined to produce fertilizer. The team says that the mine shows the impact of modernized agricultural practices that help feed Earth's 7.5 billion people. The spiraled pattern seen here is caused by the machines used to extract the salts. Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto

The spiral patterns remind one of this little guy does it not?

Earth will recover ... once we are gone or finally wake up as to what it really means to be stewards of the planet, take your pick. One can only hope.

Europa ... with a touch of salt

Seems Europa's oceans may be more like our own based on recent findings regarding sodium chloride, the fancy name for table salt.

A familiar ingredient has been hiding in plain sight on the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. Using a visible-light spectral analysis, planetary scientists at Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have discovered that the yellow color visible on portions of the surface of Europa is actually sodium chloride, a compound known on Earth as table salt, which is also the principal component of sea salt.

The discovery suggests that the salty subsurface ocean of Europa may chemically resemble Earth's oceans more than previously thought, challenging decades of supposition about the composition of those waters. The finding was published by Science Advances on June 12

Europa ... with a touch of salt. :)

Weirdo - RIP

Yours truly never knew anything about Weirdo, an underground comix magazine created by the esteemed R. Crumb. The layouts remind me of Upper & Lower Case, a magazine for the ages for graphic designers, which is, IMHO, high praise indeed.

A prodigious purveyor of perverted art and the doyen of underground comix, Robert Dennis Crumb (“R. Crumb” in his signatures) has been illustrating the unhinged imagery lodged in his unconscious for six decades and counting. To his ongoing bewilderment, the controversial and formerly destitute artist’s drawings and cartoons now fetch top dollar at esteemed gallery exhibitions, such as David Zwirner’s recent Drawing for Print: Mind Fucks, Kultur Klashes, Pulp Fiction & Pulp Fact by the Illustrious R. Crumb.

Before he was famous, though, Crumb endured all sorts of problems. Though he’d made a splash in 1968 with his Zap Comix series, which helped define the underground comix aesthetic, his early thirties were plagued by disastrous relationships, lawsuits, financial struggles, heavy LSD use, and copyright infringements (including an X-rated film made about his Fritz the Cat character without his permission). But things started looking up as Crumb approached his 40th birthday — thanks, in part, to Weirdo, an independent magazine he launched in 1981 following a flash of insight during a meditation session.

Running from 1981 to 1990, lasting 27 issues and three editors, Weirdo lived up to its title. It shone a spotlight on the bizarre, the perverted, the grotesque, and the marginalized; comics by schizophrenics, convicts, and homeless people all made their way into its pages. Each issue sported an original Crumb cover and included stories by veteran and newcomer comic artists, oddball ephemera (such as ads for the spoofy Church of SubGenius), and works by forgotten artists (Gene Deitch, Stanislav Szukalski). Weirdo was an important series in comix history, and contained some of Crumb’s best, most refined work. And yet the mainstream art and comic world largely neglected Weirdo during its decade-long run, even as Crumb gained notoriety.

Prodigious talent without a doubt.

Up close & personal :)

A false-color image mosaic shows Daphnis, one of Saturn's ring-embedded moons, and the waves it kicks up in the Keeler gap. Images collected by Cassini's close orbits in 2017 are offering new insight into the complex workings of the rings.

Up close & personal, Cassini captures the inner workings of Saturn's rings in imagery both astounding and mysterious to a fault. 

To whit.

As NASA's Cassini dove close to Saturn in its final year, the spacecraft provided intricate detail on the workings of Saturn's complex rings, new analysis shows.

Although the mission ended in 2017, science continues to flow from the data collected. A new paper published June 13 in Science describes results from four Cassini instruments taking their closest-ever observations of the main rings.

Findings include fine details of features sculpted by masses embedded within the rings. Textures and patterns, from clumpy to strawlike, pop out of the images, raising questions about the interactions that shaped them. New maps reveal how colors, chemistry and temperature change across the rings.

Like a planet under construction inside a disk of protoplanetary material, tiny moons embedded in Saturn's rings (named A through G, in order of their discovery) interact with the particles around them. In that way, the paper provides further evidence that the rings are a window into the astrophysical disk processes that shape our solar system.

This false-color image to the right shows an infrared spectral map of Saturn's A, B and C rings, captured by Cassini's VIMS. Infrared image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/CNRS/LPG-Nantes Saturn image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/G. Ugarkovic

A mosaic showing Daphnis in the Keeler gap on the lit side of the rings, with three wave crests of the structure raised by Daphnis in the gap’s outer edge. (Middle and bottom) Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer radial scans across the lit side of the main rings, displayed as false-color images. Reddish colors signify a higher fraction of components other than water ice. The boxed region in the middle panel indicates the location of the bottom panel.

Cassini, the little probe that could. RIP.

Learning curve

You want to learn why AI is so powerful, check this out, it's all you need to know why this is so.

In this fascinating demonstration, programmer Johan Eliasson teaches a neural network to drive a car around a track. On YouTube he adds:

Teaching a neural network to drive a car. It’s a simple network with a fixed number of hidden nodes (no NEAT), and no bias. Yet it manages to drive the cars fast and safe after just a few generations. Population is 650. The network evolves through random mutation (no cross-breeding). Fitness evaluation is currently done manually as explained in the video.

Any questions?

The AGC - An unsung hero

The AGC: Apollo Guidance Computer is the unsung hero in the race to the moon, a visionary piece of hardware that had to work, always, was something totally new, a compact digital computer designed to enable man to navigate in space with no margin for error. 

When Apollo 11 touched down in the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969, it was more than a triumph of the human spirit, it was also the story of a cybernetic wonder called the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), which helped the Apollo astronauts safely navigate to the Moon and back. It was a computer so advanced for its time that the engineers who created it said they probably wouldn't have tried to do so if they'd known what they were getting themselves into.

The Apollo Guidance Computer is one of the unsung successes of the Space Race. This is probably because it was so phenomenally successful, having had very few in-flight problems – and most of those were due to human error. Carried aboard both the Command Service Module (CSM) and the Lunar Module (LM), it flew on 15 manned missions, including nine Moon flights, six lunar landings, three Skylab missions, and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Mission in 1975.

At the time it was the latest and most advanced fly-by-wire and inertial guidance system, the first digital flight computer, the most advanced miniature computer to date, the first computer to use silicon chips, and the first onboard computer where the lives of crew depended on it functioning as advertised.

The reason for the AGC.

The reason why all the Apollo missions carried at least one of these computers is that the Moon missions involved navigation problems that would have made Captain Cook go bug eyed. On Earth, navigation is, at its simplest, about finding one's way from one fixed point on the globe to another. For a trip to the Moon, it's like standing with a rifle on a turntable that's spinning at the center of a much larger turntable on which is a third turntable sitting on the rim, with all the tables spinning at different and varying speeds, and trying to hit the target by aiming at where it will be three days from now.

Why it worked ... always.

That was when computer pioneer Halcombe Laning came up with a solution. Instead of timesharing, the AGC was programmed for priority. In other words, each program was numbered in order of importance at any particular point in the mission timeline. If a higher priority program needed the computer, the others would simply stop and wait for it to finish, then resume. Meanwhile, the temporary memory held the data up to the point of stoppage in a way similar to that of a modern computer going into sleep mode. This not only eliminated crashes, but also allowed the crew to interrupt a running program with new data as it came in.

Read the entire New Atlas piece as its exquisitely detailed and utterly fascinating to the max. Without question, you will learn how really creative people invented new tech on the fly that went to where no man has ever gone before.

Click here to run the AGC simulator. Stellar to a fault.

119 years ago ...

119 years ago ...

There was magic in the air that day after all — movie magic. Nevil Maskelyne, a performing magician who also happened to be a pioneering filmmaker, preserved the spectacular event — as the moon passed between Earth and the sun — on celluloid, from a location in North Carolina.

More than a century later, Maskelyne's film of the eclipse has been digitally scanned and restored in a collaboration between the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) and the British Film Institute (BFI), and is free to view online. The film, titled "Solar Eclipse," is thought to be the world's oldest surviving astronomical film, Joshua Nall, chair of the RAS Astronomical Heritage Committee, said in a statement. [ In Images: Solar Eclipses Depicted in Fine Art]

Very cool indeed.

A vortex of a different kind ...

NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this view of an area within a Jovian jet stream showing a vortex that has an intensely dark center. Nearby, other features display bright, high altitude clouds that have puffed up into the sunlight.

The color-enhanced image was taken at 12:55 a.m. PDT (3:55 a.m. EDT) on May 29, 2019, as the spacecraft performed its 20th science flyby of Jupiter. At the time, Juno was about 9,200 miles (14,800 kilometers) from the planet's cloud tops, above approximately 52 degrees north latitude.

A vortex of a different kind indeed.

Dr. John - RIP

Tripped out and so late 60's, Dr John was a lurking presence @ Berklee and Boston 69-70. Intensity +

Writing for Rolling Stone in 1999, Tom Moon declared “I Walk on Guilded Splinters,” the closing track from Dr. John’s 1968 album Gris Gris “everything you want in voodoo music.” Fifty-one years ago, who knew they even wanted voodoo music?

Gris-Gris/rev II

& of course, Right Place Wrong Time says it all regarding Dr. J. :)

Working with Allen Toussaint in 1973 meant that Dr. John got the producer’s young and rising house band, the Meters. This is when things got, as Mac would say, desitively funky, and the tight, creeping groove of “Right Place Wrong Time” landed him his first and only Top 10 hit. In a review for Rolling Stone in 1973, Jon Landau opined that the Meters were “the greatest R&B studio band since Booker T. and the MGs” and that furthermore, “genius drummer Joseph ‘Zigaboo’ Modeliste drives the song with more power than we have any right to expect.”

RIO Dr. J. We will miss you big time.

Had to add one more.