UNIX @ 50

Ken Thompson (sitting) and Dennis Ritchie (standing) in front of a PDP-11. Ritchie annotated this press image for Bell Labs as "an amusing photo," and he joked that he had much "more luxuriant and darker hair" at the time of the photo than when it appeared in magazines like the March 1999 Scientific American (which, unfortunately, incorrectly swapped IDs for the two).

ArsTechinica hits a home run describing the circuitous way UNIX came to be by brilliant guys working in a loose environment that allowed them to be smart and creative in ways that truly boggle the mind. :)

Luckily for computer enthusiasts, constraint can at times lead to immense creativity. And so the most influential operating system ever written was not funded by venture capitalists, and the people who wrote it didn’t become billionaires because of it. Unix came about because Bell Labs hired smart people and gave them the freedom to amuse themselves, trusting that their projects would be useful more often than not. Before Unix, researchers at Bell Labs had already invented the transistor and the laser, as well as any number of innovations in computer graphics, speech synthesis, and speech recognition.

It gets better.

Still, there was one tiny problem for Thompson and his fellow tinkerers at the moment—nobody had a computer. While lab management had no problem with computers as such, McIlroy’s programmers couldn’t convince their bosses to give them one. Having been burned badly by the Multics fiasco, Davis wasn’t sold on the team’s pitch to give them a new computer so they could continue operating system research and development. From lab management’s perspective, it seemed like Thompson and the rest of the team just wanted to keep working on the Multics project.

Scrounging for hardware ...

Acoustics still had that computer, but they weren’t using it and had stuck it somewhere out of the way up on the sixth floor.

And so Thompson, an indefatigable explorer of the labs’ nooks and crannies, finally found that PDP-7 shortly after Davis and Baker cancelled Multics.

With the rest of the team’s help, Thompson bundled up the various pieces of the PDP-7—a machine about the size of a refrigerator, not counting the terminal—moved it into a closet assigned to the acoustics department, and got it up and running. One way or another, they convinced acoustics to provide space for the computer and also to pay for the not infrequent repairs to it out of that department’s budget.

Seventh Edition Unix was an important early release of the Unix operating system from 1979. It was the last Bell Labs release to go widespread before AT&T commercialized Unix. Fun fact: The user ("dmr") and home directory ("/usr/dmr") for Dennis Ritchie are still present.

Sidenote, yours truly actually had one of these ... :)

Eventually, Thompson made it to Murray Hill. To his surprise, he found Bell Labs to his liking and accepted the job offer. And a short while later, he received a box from his friend in Pensacola—a box with a baby alligator inside. Rather than quickly dispatching it, Thompson adopted the gator and kept it in a glass baking dish on the radiator in his office, feeding it bologna and hot dogs from time to time until it escaped. It reappeared some days later in a typing pool on one of the lower floors, standing on its hind legs. Thompson recalled it hissing at a secretary who was standing on her hind legs and screaming. Ultimately, Thompson was allowed to stay on at Bell Labs—but the gator had to go… not before biting a few Nobel Prize winners, at least according to Thompson.

Back in the day where America did things, amazing things like building UNIX, the OS that connects the world was the norm, not the exception, something that needs to be changed now without question.

Endnote, my gator was named Albert who also came in a box. Said predator started at 10 inches, grew to almost 3 feet before mercifully dying of natural causes. Hamburger, hot dogs plus any leftovers of the meat variety were on the menu for this incredibly intense animal. :)

2020 redux???

Could this fubar happen again? ... Absolutely given just how ignorant and passive people truly are regarding Agent Orange and the well oiled political machine striving to put him back in the White House for four more years after the upcoming election follies of 2020 have finally been put to rest.

Early evening, August, Cincinnati. The Queen City’s many bridges are sealed off, its sky is dirty with helicopters, and seemingly every cop for 100 miles is patrolling Pete Rose Way along the Ohio River. A crowd of 20,000 or more stands in punishing heat, waiting to enter U.S. Bank Arena. The evil rumor buzzing down the line of MAGA hats is that not everyone will get in to see Donald Trump.

“Can we just get in for a minute?” complains a boy of about 10 to his mother. There are a lot of kids here.

Donald Trump doesn’t visit Middle America. He descends upon it. His rallies are awesome spectacles. Gawkers come down from the hills. If NASA traveled the country holding showings of the first captured alien life-form, the turnout would be similar. The pope driving monster trucks might get this much attention.

Welcome to 'Useful Idiots,' a New Rolling Stone Podcast

2020 redux? Possible without question.

Addendum ... Almost everyone in line is wearing 45 merch. Trump is the most T-shirtable president in history, and it’s not even close. Trumpinator tees are big (“2020: I’LL BE BACK”), but you’ll also see Trump as Rambo (complete with headband, ammo belt, and phallic rocket-launcher), Trump as the Punisher (a Trump pompadour atop the famous skull), even Trump as Superman (pulling his suit open to reveal a giant T).

Any questions?

Beyond Meat - Is now prime time :)

Beyond Meat is thrilled to announce that today we became the 1st plant-based food company to go public on a major exchange. Going public will enable us to further invest in R&D and manufacturing, allowing us to bring plant-based meat to more communities and countries around the world.

Through success and struggles, the consumer has been there for us, offering feedback, love and inspiration. Today, together, we are breaking new ground. #GoBeyond

It's about time. :)

Intensity +

Up close and personal, this video shows just how intense fire ants truly are.

As Dr. Smith explains, a fire ant's stinger is made up of two main components. First is a stylet, which is essentially a hollow hypodermic needle attached to a reservoir of venom. Arranged around the perimeter of the stylet are three more needles called lancets, which move back and forth to dig beneath the surface and pump out the venom. It only takes about 75 milliseconds for one lancet to move, so a fire ant can inject a surprising amount of venom in less than a second.

Intensity + without question. The video seen below shows just how tough they truly are.

Ah ... Just Nuke It

Ah ... Just Nuke It, a notion the Donald floated to various agencies regarding the use of nukes to off hurricanes before they hit land has actually been around for over 60 years.

Sunday night, Axios’s Jonathan Swan broke news that Donald Trump—among his many often random musings—appears to have considered one of the worst-but-most-persistent ideas in public policy: Nuking hurricanes.

The idea has evidently surfaced multiple times in the administration, as Swan outlined, including during a hurricane preparedness briefings at the White House. “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?” the president evidently interrupted, according to Swan’s source. “They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?”

Well, why not ...

In those heady early years of the atomic age, many scientists imagined a world where humans could routinely use nuclear weapons to cleave the earth and remake its climate. Decades before climate change became a major concern, one book, Almighty Atom: The Real Story of Atomic Energy, suggested using atomic weapons to melt the polar ice caps, gifting “the entire world a moister, warmer climate.”

It gets better as Trump suggested this "wonderful" idea more than once.

President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States, according to sources who have heard the president's private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments.

But ... as stated before ...

Trump didn't invent this idea. The notion that detonating a nuclear bomb over the eye of a hurricane could be used to counteract convection currents dates to the Eisenhower era, when it was floated by a government scientist.

One cannot make this up, ever. :)

This will not end well ...

This will not end well ...

Hubble yet again ...

The pair of strange, luminescent creatures at play in this image are actually galaxies — realms of millions upon millions of stars.

This galactic duo is known as UGC 2369. The galaxies are interacting, meaning that their mutual gravitational attraction is pulling them closer and closer together and distorting their shapes in the process. A tenuous bridge of gas, dust and stars can be seen connecting the two galaxies, created when they pulled material out into space across the diminishing divide between them. 

From the very small ... Think Butterflies ... to Hubble yet again, shows that reality is something else altogether. :)

Think Butterflies :)

Nuff said. :)

The new land rush ...

Even Trump recognizes the reality of global warming by suggesting to buy Greenland, a region containing vast resources being slowly revealed by the melting of ice as we speak.

President Donald Trump’s much-mocked desire to buy Greenland, which was rebuffed by the Danish government to his great displeasure, might be the closest he has come to acknowledging the gravity of global warming—though hardly the sort of acknowledgment one might hope for. According to the Wall Street Journal article that first broke the news about Greenland, Trump’s interest was piqued when advisers spoke of the island’s “abundant resources and geopolitical importance.” The reason those resources—including reserves of coal and uranium—are available for exploitation is because of Greenland’s rapidly melting ice sheet. Its geopolitical importance has been greatly increased by the melting of Arctic Ocean ice, which has made new shipping routes accessible and opened up a new theater of strategic competition for the United States, Canada, Russia, the Nordic countries and, increasingly, China.

Trump probably doesn’t realize it, but he’s not the first president in recent years to look at the coming impact of climate change and decide to buy land. And with dislocated populations and scarcer resources looming on the horizon, he might not be the last.

He won't be as nothing is being done as we move toward climate disruption of the most pernicious kind.

Fake News/rev XX

Fake news is everywhere. From Fox News to CNN, spin is part of the vocabulary of the news channels to 1, sell ads to the specific viewer demographic in question and 2, to shape public opinion as the real owners, so eloquently articulated by the late great George Carlin, don't want critical thinkers capable of understanding just what the hell is going on in a world spinning increasingly out of control. With that being said, more fake news is being generated by AI because 1, it's CHEAPER and 2, AI is getting better at it.

AI vs AI

AI can be used to spread fake news, write fake reviews and to create a pretend mob of social media users aimed at bombarding comments sections with specific agendas.

However, according to MIT researchers, it can now also be used to spot fake artificially-generated text — apparently, it takes one to know one.

But there's hope.

Though the technology for misinformation is advancing at a worryingly fast pace, the same broad toolset can thankfully be used to catch this type of misinformation. Fake news, deepfakes and twitter bots might have their days numbered by the very technology that helped create them.

Harvard University and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab researchers recently developed a new tool that spots text that has been generated by AI.

The tool called the Giant Language Model Test Room (GLTR), takes advantage of the fact that AI text generators use fairly predictable statistical patterns in text.

While these patterns might not be easy to spot for your average reader, it seems that an algorithm can do a pretty good job at it. The AI tool, essentially, can tell if the text is too predictable to have been written by a human.

Factoid:  6 corporations own 90% of all US media.

The mind's eye ...

How we see is a mystery given how the eye captures and transfers visual data to the visual cortex via a tiny nerve channel, something akin to using a straw to drain water from an Olympic size swimming pool.

To whit.

This is the great mystery of human vision: Vivid pictures of the world appear before our mind’s eye, yet the brain’s visual system receives very little information from the world itself. Much of what we “see” we conjure in our heads.

“A lot of the things you think you see you’re actually making up,” said Lai-Sang Young, a mathematician at New York University. “You don’t actually see them.”

The mystery deepens ...

There are some things we know for sure about vision.

The eye acts as a lens. It receives light from the outside world and projects a scale replica of our visual field onto the retina, which sits in the back of the eye. The retina is connected to the visual cortex, the part of the brain in the back of the head.

However, there’s very little connectivity between the retina and the visual cortex. For a visual area roughly one-quarter the size of a full moon, there are only about 10 nerve cells connecting the retina to the visual cortex. These cells make up the LGN, or lateral geniculate nucleus, the only pathway through which visual information travels from the outside world into the brain.

Not only are LGN cells scarce — they can’t do much either. LGN cells send a pulse to the visual cortex when they detect a change from dark to light, or vice versa, in their tiny section of the visual field. And that’s all. The lighted world bombards the retina with data, but all the brain has to go on is the meager signaling of a tiny collection of LGN cells. To see the world based on so little information is like trying to reconstruct Moby-Dick from notes on a napkin.

“You may think of the brain as taking a photograph of what you see in your visual field,” Young said. “But the brain doesn’t take a picture, the retina does, and the information passed from the retina to the visual cortex is sparse.”

The visual cortex has a mind of its own. - Robert Shapley

The mind's eye indeed.

What if ...

Excellent visualization on what the earth would look like if all the ice melted, something that could definitely happen if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the rate we are currently doing.

As National Geographic showed us in 2013, sea levels would rise by 216 feet if all the land ice on the planet were to melt. This would dramatically reshape the continents and drown many of the world's major cities.

Pretty scary without question and we haven't even talked about the impact of same. Something to think about without question don't you think?

The History of the World ... Every Year

Since 200,000 BCE, humanity has spread around the globe and enacted huge change upon the planet. This video shows every year of that story, right from the beginning.

Fascinating without question.

The GOAT

No words needed ...

Storm warning ... Jovian style :)

Storm warning ... Jovian style :)

NASA's Juno spacecraft saw this striking vista during its most recent close flyby of Jupiter. This view highlights the contrast between the colorful South Equatorial Belt and the mostly white Southern Tropical Zone, a latitude that also features Jupiter's most famous phenomenon, the persistent, anticyclonic storm known as the Great Red Spot.

Awesome to a fault.

Acronym 101 :)

Acronym 101 indeed. :)

Channeling The Flying Crowbar ...

The Cuban Missle crisis almost blew mankind away. The flying Crowbar, a thankfully abandoned weapon of doom of America's making, could have done the same thing without issue.

To whit ...

At its core, Project Pluto was just a cruise missile. Well, not “just” a cruise missile. It was a cruise missile designed around a nuclear ramjet engine, and the acronym for it should give another big clue about the pants-filling nature of it: SLAM, for Supersonic Low Altitude Missile. That means that this giant, nuclear-powered beast would be screaming around at oh, treetop level or so.

The nuclear ramjet engine at the heart of Project Pluto is key to what made this weapon so horrific. A ramjet is a very simple engine design, with essentially no moving parts. Once the missile was launched with conventional rocket boosters, the air velocity going into the ramjet’s intake would be fast enough to let the engine function, and an essentially unshielded nuclear reactor would heat the air as it entered, where it would expand and be expelled out of the engine’s nozzle, providing both lots of thrust and plenty of radioactive material.

Kubrick should have highlighted this beauty in Dr. Strangelove, IMHO. :)

The Russians channelled this fubar but its version of this doomsday device failed, for now ...

A few days ago, on August 8, there was an explosion on a barge in the White Sea near Nyonoksa, Russia. That explosion tragically killed seven people, nuclear engineers and technicians working on a project. The project was described as “an isotopic power source for a liquid engine installation,” but let’s be completely clear here: they were developing the nuclear propulsion system for a genuinely brutal and terrible weapon.

That weapon is known as 9M730 Burevestnik, known to NATO as the SSC-X-9 Skyfall, but is perhaps best understood as a modern rebirth of a terrifying American weapon concept from the 1960s known as the Flying Crowbar.

A mysterious explosion at Russia’s Nenoksa Missile Test Site on Aug. 8, 2019 killed at least seven people and caused a radiation spike that sent everyday Russians hurrying to pharmacies to buy anti-radiation pills.

The explosion reportedly involved a small nuclear reactor that powers a new kind of long-range cruise missile.

“United States intelligence officials have said they suspect the blast involved a prototype of what NATO calls the SSC-X-9 Skyfall,” The New York Times reported.

“That is a cruise missile that [Russian president Vladimir] Putin has boasted can reach any corner of the earth because it is partially powered by a small nuclear reactor, eliminating the usual distance limitations of conventionally fueled missiles.”

An accidental explosion is exactly the risk that Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, feared when he described the SSC-X-9 as “batshit crazy.”

Batshit crazy kinda says it all, doesn't it?

Questions, Questions ...

Seth Rich or ...  The ghost "that" haunts the courts.

As if it weren’t enough of a downer for Russiagate true believers that no Trump-Russia collusion was found, federal judges are now demanding proof that Russia hacked into the DNC in the first place.

It is shaping up to be a significant challenge to the main premise of the shaky syllogism that ends with “Russia did it.”

If you’re new to this website, grab onto something, as the following may come as something of a shock. Not only has there never been any credible evidence to support the claim of Russian cyber interference, there has always been a simple alternative explanation that involves no “hacking” at all — by Russia or anyone else.

As most Consortium News habitués are aware, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (which includes two former NSA technical directors), working with independent forensic investigators, concluded two years ago that what “everyone knows to be Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee” actually involved an insider with physical access to DNC computers copying the emails onto an external storage device — such as a thumb drive. In other words, it was a leak, not a hack.

VIPS based its conclusion on the principles of physics applied to metadata and other empirical information susceptible of forensic analysis.

But if a leak, not a hack, who was the DNC insider-leaker? In the absence of hard evidence, VIPS refuses “best-guess”-type “assessments” — the kind favored by the “handpicked analysts” who drafted the evidence-impoverished, so-called Intelligence Community Assessment of Jan. 6, 2017.

Questions Questions indeed ...

The Great Unraveling ...

In the scheme of things, a freak lightning storm near the North Pole probably isn’t the biggest concern about the rapidly warming Arctic. But it’s yet another sign that the Arctic continues to have an abnormal one this summer.

Earth is struck by lightning roughly 8 million times per day. That’s 100 strikes per minute. But very few of those lightning bolts hit in the northern tier of the world, and very rarely near the Arctic. Yet over the weekend, the National Weather Service’s Fairbanks office reported lightning within 300 miles of the North Pole.

The Great Unraveling indeed.

WISPR

The solar wind, courtesy, the Parker Solar Probe.

Parker Solar Probe's WISPR instrument captures images of solar wind structures as they stream out from the Sun, allowing scientists to connect them with Parker's in situ measurements from its other instruments.

This video, which spans Nov. 6-10, 2018, combines views from both WISPR telescopes during Parker Solar Probe's first solar encounter. The Sun is out of frame past the combined image's left side, so the solar wind flows from left to right past the view of the telescopes. The bright structure near the center of the left edge is what's known as a streamer —  a relatively dense, slow flow of solar wind coming from the Sun — originating from near the Sun's equator.

The video appears to speed up and slow down throughout the movie because of the ways data is stored at different points in Parker Solar Probe's orbit. Near perihelion, the closest approach to the Sun, the spacecraft stores more images — and more frames for a given section make the video appear to slow down. These images have been calibrated and processed to remove background noise.

Seen below is a very elegant animation of the solar wind. :)

How cool is that? :)

In the shadow ...

Yet another reason why science rocks. :)

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

This 17-minute film explores the efforts that led to this historic image, from the science of Einstein and Schwarzschild to the struggles and successes of the EHT collaboration.

Like money, science never sleeps.

Jove's Great Red Spot yet again :)

Jove's Great Red Spot yet again. :)

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals the intricate, detailed beauty of Jupiter’s clouds in this new image taken on 27 June 2019 by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, when the planet was 644 million kilometres from Earth — its closest distance this year. The image features the planet’s trademark Great Red Spot and a more intense colour palette in the clouds swirling in the planet’s turbulent atmosphere than seen in previous years.

Here is Jove in motion.

Impressive without a doubt.

The ultimate predator + 1 :)

Had to add an intruder :)

A mysterious Tuft :)

An Epic Fail

An epic fail was Mueller's testimony as the esteemed Mr. Mueller was dazed and confused due to the fact he could not answer basic questions like ... who is Fusion GPS, the entity that kicked off the anti-Trump fubar known as Russiagate on behalf of the Clinton 2016 campaign and the DNC. 

To whit.

Mueller on the stand was a potted plant. Reporters saw Moses and Jesus.  If you need evidence we’re in a religious mania, look no further. This was a pure exercise in restoring an idol for worship.

It gets better.

The conspiracy tale has validated every Trump criticism about both crooked media and the deep state. The whole narrative is the brainchild of Clinton hacks, a handful of overzealous intelligence nuts, and a subset of the Democratic Party’s weakest elected minds, in particular, murine ex-prosecutor Schiff, a man who should be selling Buicks back in his hometown Burbank.

Take a good look at Schiff, at our paranoid outpatient of an ex-CIA chief John Brennan, and at excuse-making Clinton campaign chief Robby Mook (a.k.a. the captain of the Democratic Titanic), and ask if you really want to be re-writing history for those people.

They’re making the press accomplices in the most imbecilic effort at political opposition in recent American history. Hence the desperate public comments and the string of wacked-out stunts, like putting Mueller under oath. Impeachment will be the next adventure in doubling down blind.

An Epic Fail indeed.

Pitch Black ... for real :)

A world without night? Certainly possible given that LTT 1445b zips in a tight orbit around the biggest star in a triple-star system just 22.5 light-years from Earth, "transiting" between Earth and its host star on each pass. 

It gets better ...

Standing on the surface of the planet, which orbits its star at just one-tenth the distance between the sun and Mercury, "you'd see one big orange sun and two much smaller orangey-red suns in the distance," said Jennifer Winters, lead author on the study and an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "The primary star would look really big in the sky. It's really close. The other two are much farther away. They'd look about 100 times brighter than Venus, and about the same … size in the sky."

So ... does LTT 144b experience night? One never knows, do one. Pitch Black comes to mind from this rube's perspective as the planet depicted in the flick also has 3 suns. :)

Are you afraid of the dark?