The size of space | time killer to the max :)

The Size of Space is a time killer to the max showing us rubes just how enormous space truly is.

Enjoy.

Had to add another

And we haven't even reached galaxy size in any way, shape or fashion. :)

Except now. :)

What lies beyond? No one knows, do one? - Fats Waller 

3 Times greater ...

2050 portends a world radically different from the one we see now based on new projections of the extent of water level rise never thought possible until now. The NYTimes Vietnam image, in particular, simply stuns yours truly given just how intense GW will become as man movers further into the 21st century.

Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities.

The authors of a paper published Tuesday developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic. The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury.

We are so screwed.

Bangkok & Alexandra goes away as well.

Warms the cockles of one's heart doesn't it.

3 Times greater, indeed.

Addendum ...

The US also gets hit.

Miami Beach in 2050

By 2050, sea-level rise will push average annual coastal floods higher than land now home to 300 million people, according to a study published in Nature Communications. High tides could permanently rise above land occupied by over 150 million people, including 30 million in China. Without advanced coastal defense and planning, populations in these areas may face permanent flooding within 30 years.

Miami Beach/2050 - Vertical view

New Orleans, like southern Vietnam, is basically gone. 

Any questions?

Happy Halloween/NASA Style :)

Active regions on the sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern’s face on Oct. 8, 2014. The image was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which watches the sun at all times from its orbit in space.

Happy Halloween everyone. :)

Close encounters ...

Close encounters of the squid kind without question ...

A trio of divers off the western coast of Norway had a close encounter with a drifting gelatinous blob — a squid's egg sac as big as an adult human. 

A video captured and shared on YouTube on Oct. 6 by Ronald Raasch, a diver with the Norwegian research vessel REV Ocean, shows a diver slowly circling a spherical blob surrounded by a transparent membrane, with a dark mass suspended inside. 

As the diver swam around the blob, his flashlight lit up its interior. Inside were numerous tiny spheres — eggs holding baby squid, estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands, according to the video description.

One can't make this up.

A Year in a life ...

Felix Dierich, one of the creators, wrote that the animation was based upon scientific observation data from the meteorological satellite Himawai-8, situated 35786 km above Earth, and which is operated by the Japan Meteorological Agency. The satellite observations were originally processed by the Bureau of Meteorology. He also notes the following meteorological and astronomical events that occur at specific timecodes, amongst many that have not yet been listed:

• March 9th 2016 Total Solar Eclipse: 4:44
• June 2016 Kamchatka Wildfires: 7:26-8:02 (visible as large amounts of smoke emitted from a point in western Kamchatka, eventually filling a large ocean area) - also: June solstice/polar day north pole
• July 2016 Super Typhoon Nepartak: 8:37-8:49
• Aug 2016 Typhoon Lionrock: 10:43-11:09
• Sep 2016 Super Typhoon Meranti: 11:14-11:24
• Dec 2016 December solstice/polar day south pole: from 13:25

A year in a life indeed.

https://ayatgo.wetplanet.de/

The Telescreen ... looms

BRT has written a great deal about AI with one segue leading to the telescreen, the infamous device used by Big Brother to track the Winston Smiths of the world in Orwell's masterpiece ... 1984.

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Now, in 2019, one can see the telescreen writ large whereby said tech not only watches one but also tracks emotion using one's webcam to make it happen.

Levenson decided to base his next film project on this idea. “I thought, given all this access we’ve given them to our faces, what is the most hypothetically awful thing they could possibly be doing to harm us?” he says. He imagined companies potentially analyzing users’ photographs to determine their emotions in each one, then combining this with other data to draw sweeping conclusions about people’s thoughts and preferences. “What if they correlated [the emotional analysis] with other inputs: your location via GPS or maybe the content you’re consuming,” he says. “They would know something about the way you felt about some place, some thing—or maybe even someone, if they examine your text history.” Then the tech giants could turn around and sell these data about your behaviors and opinions to other parties.

It gets better.

So Levenson began researching emotion recognition technology—and quickly realized its use might not be entirely hypothetical. “When I started googling around, I discovered the patents revealing that the tech companies had kind of beat me to it,” he says. “They had clearly been thinking about precisely the same thing for at least like five years now.” He incorporated this research into his new “interactive documentary.”

When a person watches Stealing Ur Feelings (available here) online, the viewer’s own face—frequently festooned with virtual sunglasses or other digital stickers—appears onscreen at the same time as stock imagery such as cute animals, pizza and random humans. These visuals speed by as a narrator cheerily discusses how emotion recognition works and how tech companies could use it. To demonstrate what this technology can do, the video applies it to viewers: Levenson adapted open-source code into a program that uses a device’s Web cam to analyze the viewer’s face as it reacts to the other on-screen imagery.

In other words, as you watch this video, it watches you right back.

https://stealingurfeelin.gs

The Telescreen ... looms.

Burnin Down the House ...

Burning down the house by Talking Heads is not the raison d'ete of this blurb but rather the gathering storm known as global warming and the increasing impact it's having on the world, in this case, California, the dry land of brush and scrub forest, complete with intense winds, a Petrie dish made for devastating fires of the wild kind.

SAN FRANCISCO — Facing down 600 wildfires in the past three days alone, emergency workers in California rushed to evacuate rural areas of Northern California on Thursday and warned residents that the high winds currently propelling an out-of-control blaze could become even stronger in the coming days.

Remember, it's just the beginning of a long term disaster of our own making.

All this is happening after three straight years of record breaking fires that researchers say are likely to continue in a warming world and which raise an important question: How to live in an ecosystem that is primed to burn?

Interesting question without question is it not?

Surrounded on All Sides :)

Another gem from Dinosaur Comics. Enjoy. :)

The Singleton

Mirror Beach | a piece by yours truly, depicts, in indirect fashion, the looming spectre of AI and what it means for mankind as neural net driven technology is open-ended and intrinsically unknowable as this code learns about its domain independent of the creators who built it in the first place. With this in mind, the notion of a singleton governing the world is no longer fantasy given just how pervasive AI is becoming due, in large part, as to just how much money is being made on an evolving tech that is no longer under our control.

To whit.

• Nick Bostrom's "singleton hypothesis" says that intelligent life on Earth 
  will eventually form a "singleton".
• The "singleton" could be a single government or an artificial intelligence that runs everything.
• Whether the singleton will be positive or negative depends on numerous factors and is not certain.

The question to ask ...

Does history have a goal? Is it possible that all the human societies that existed are ultimately a prelude to establishing a system where one entity will govern everything the world over? The Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom proposes the "singleton hypothesis," maintaining that intelligent life on Earth will at some point organize itself into a so-called "singleton" – one organization that will take the form of either a world government, a super-intelligent machine (an AI) or, regrettably, a dictatorship that would control all affairs.

Something to consider without question.

Click What is a Singleton? to learn why Bostrom's take on civilization 's possible future rings true. 

Future Tense ...

Bubbles of a different kind :)

Yours truly has written copiously about Quantum Foam and how it relates to reality, a take on same that actually seems to be relevant given that said writer's ability with math is limited to say the least. :) With that being said, I must say this Vice article supports, in part, what this rube has written over the years BRT has been in existence.

What was previously assumed to be empty space in the universe now had to be filled with huge amounts of mysterious anti-energy in order to explain observations of the universe’s ever-quickening expansion. Even so, observations of the universe’s expansion suggest that the energy is 60 to 120 orders of magnitude lower than what recent quantum field theory predicts.

What this means is that all of this extra energy is somehow missing when we look at the universe as a whole; either it’s effectively hidden or very different in nature to the energy we do know about.

It gets better ...

To try and solve the mystery of what fills the universe, scientists have been exploring the possibility that it's actually full of bubbles.

In 1955, influential physicist John Wheeler proposed that, at the quantum level, spacetime is not constant but "foamy," made up of ever-changing tiny bubbles. As for what these bubbles are "made" of, recent work suggests that spacetime bubbles are essentially mini-universes briefly forming inside our own.

The spacetime foam proposal fits nicely with the intrinsic uncertainty and indeterminism of the quantum world. Spacetime foam extends quantum uncertainty in particle position and momentum to the very fabric of the universe, so that its geometry is not stable, consistent, or fixed at a tiny scale.

The idea is that in spacetime foam, every point in spacetime has the huge amount of vacuum energy—the lowest energy state equivalent to "empty space"—predicted by quantum theory, but behaves differently to other points. For any particular way in which a point in spacetime is behaving, the exact opposite is equally as likely to occur at another point in spacetime. This is the feature of spacetime foam which “cancels out” the extra energy and expansions at a tiny scale, resulting in the lower energy that we observe at the scale of the whole universe.

For this to work, one has to assume that at the quantum level, time has no intrinsic "direction." In other words, there is no "arrow of time." According to Carlip, in the quantum world, this isn't such a wild suggestion. “Most physicists would agree that we don't know at a fundamental level why there's an arrow of time at all,” he said. “The idea that it's somehow 'emergent' on larger scales has been around for a long time.”

Ain't science grand? :)

Avian Soundboards

And of course, the Superb Lyre Bird :)

Nature never disappoints. 

Non Sequitur or ... Once in a Lifetime :)

In a very odd way, Once in a Lifetime | Talking Heads, applies.

[Verse 1]
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?"

[Chorus]
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

[Verse 2]
And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"

[Chorus]
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

[Bridge]
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Any questions?

Invisibility cloak becomes real ...

Harry Potter's invisibility cloak becomes real. Hyperstealth rules ... for now.

Here's another clip. Metamaterials and AI, a heavy combination without question.

Hyperstealth Invisibility Cloak 9 Minute Promotional Video from HyperStealth Corp. on Vimeo.

Any questions?

It's Bad, It's Really Really Bad! :)

Any questions?

Night Walks

Patterns

Archway

Night for Day

Open for Dinner

Red Moon Rising

Fractured Geometry

Fractured geometry, with yours truly's feet purposely left in, shows, in indirect fashion, how tech is generating uncontrolled feedback loops and reality distortions fields to the max, thus driving the US populace into the madhouse as uncontrolled recursions can make one mad, especially when viewing the never-ending regurgitation of news 24/7 with particular emphasis on politics and what it means for America. 

To whit ...

Here’s one big reason that America is driving itself batshit crazy: the explosion of computerized records, emails, inter-office memos, Twitter trails, Facebook memorabilia, iPhone videos, YouTubes, recorded conversations, and the vast alternative universe of storage capacity for all this stuff makes it seem possible to constantly go back and reconstruct reality. All it has really done is amplified the potential for political mischief to suicide level.

It’s a major unanticipated consequence of the digital “revolution.” It has gotten us stuck looking backward at events, obsessively replaying them, while working overtime to spin them favorably for one team or the other, at the expense of actually living in real time and dealing with reality as it unspools with us. If life were a ballgame, we’d only be watching jumbotron replays while failing to pay attention to the action on the field.

Read the rest of Kunstler's piece to see the ramifications of a looming Constitutional Crisis of biblical proportions as we move ever closer to the year of our lord 2020.

A Constitutional crisis looms ...

Illustration by Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone

This illustration by Victor Juhasz truly represents the inner character of The Donald. If one goes to Rolling Stone, one will see other Juhiaz gems of the esteemed POTUS but ... as my loyal readers know, this blurb isn't about a great illustrator but rather about impeachment and what it means for America.

What happens, though, if a president uses the powers of office to disrupt the next election? What if that president does so by brazenly enlisting the aid of a hostile foreign power? Or if he does so by trying in secret to extort cooperation from a foreign ally threatened by that same hostile power? What if the president has denied the existence of an ongoing systematic cyberattack from the hostile power, which every U.S. intelligence service calls a clear and present threat to our democracy? What if the actions of that president raise urgent questions about the legitimacy of the next election and cast a darker cloud over how he gained the office in the first place?

On most of these issues, yours truly agrees but to this writer, the real transgressions lie with the denial of science, the gutting of the EPA and Trump's muzzling  of NOAA/NASA regarding hurricanes or the adverse impact of global warming on the world, as these acts compromise the well being of the country's people and, to me, constitutes the real reason for impeachment (not Ukraine or Russiagate) 

Being above the law also applies  ... 

There have been earlier impeachments and interferences with democratic institutions in our history, but nothing like this one. In this, as he likes to say, Trump truly stands alone. He has assaulted American democracy, claimed he has the authority to do so, and dared anybody to do anything about it, dismissing with contempt Congress’ clear constitutional authority to oversee and check the executive branch. He thinks he can use the office of the presidency as a personal instrument, along with private emissaries, to desecrate the rule of law and then protect himself from the consequences. He even declares in public that he is the law, claiming that, according to Article II of the Constitution, “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Not even the most corrupt and criminal of our previous presidents has tried to pervert our most sacred institutions as openly as Trump has.

Question ... If impeachment does succeed, the stellar Mike Pence becomes god's warrior for America. Warms the cockles of one's heart doesn't it?

The betting pool says ...

The betting pool says, in IMHO, that life on Mars is a given.

NASA’s reservation against a direct search for microorganisms ignores the simplicity of the task accomplished by Louis Pasteur in 1864. He allowed microbes to contaminate a hay-infusion broth, after which bubbles of their expired gas appeared. Prior to containing living microorganisms, no bubbles appeared. (Pasteur had earlier determinted that heating, or pasteurizing, such a substance would kill the microbes.) This elegantly simple test, updated to substitute modern microbial nutrients with the hay-infusion products in Pasteur’s, is in daily use by health authorities around the world to examine potable water. Billions of people are thus protected against microbial pathogens.

This standard test, in essence, was the LR test on Mars, modified by the addition of several nutrients thought to broaden the prospects for success with alien organisms, and the tagging of the nutrients with radioactive carbon. These enhancements made the LR sensitive to the very low microbial populations postulated for Mars, should any be there, and reduced the time for detection of terrestrial microorganisms to about one hour. But on Mars, each LR experiment continued for seven days. A heat control, similar to Pasteur’s, was added to determine whether any response obtained was biological or chemical.

The Viking LR sought to detect and monitor ongoing metabolism, a very simple and fail-proof indicator of living microorganisms. Several thousand runs were made, both before and after Viking, with terrestrial soils and microbial cultures, both in the laboratory and in extreme natural environments. No false positive or false negative result was ever obtained. This strongly supports the reliability of the LR Mars data, even though their interpretation is debated. - Gilbert V. Levin, Experimenter of the Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment on NASA’s spectacular Viking mission to Mars in 1976.

So why wasn't the LR on Curiosity or installed on the next rover, scheduled to land on Mars in 2020?

When tragedy becomes farce or ... god has a plan

When tragedy becomes farce ...

First of all, the only time the words “Trump,” “fighting,” and “corruption” go together in a sentence is when it’s something like: “Donald Trump is fighting hard to keep authorities from uncovering his corruption.” 

But let’s pretend, for argument’s sake, that the US president really is interested in fighting corruption abroad. If that were the case, why is he such a strong supporter of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing three sets of corruption charges right now? And why does Trump back some of the more corrupt and ruthless strongmen in the world?

Or better yet, god has a plan

Finally, we figured out why so many “Christians” and their leaders seem to think that Trump was somehow chosen by God, even though this president is the antithesis of the teachings of Jesus, cheated on his third wife with a porn star, and knows less about the Bible than he does about running a profitable casino. It’s because, they’re insisting, God did handpick Trump — but not because of the reasons the president’s base thinks. Instead, it is the only way to get an uncharismatic stiff like Mike Pence into the Oval Office.

Yes, The Lord chose Trump because He knew there was no way that such a corrupt serial liar with a total lack of morals or scruples could stay in office for a full term. But even God could not anticipate that Republicans would turn their backs on Him and bow down at the altar of Trump, instead.

One cannot make this up.

A simple matter of measurement, right???

Yours truly loves science. Why, because, when done right, it's a discipline whose theories are designed to be disproved, something seen in a "simple" matter of measurement, in this case, the Hubble Constant and how it relates to our understanding of the universe.

We're getting something wrong about the universe.

It might be something small: a measurement issue that makes certain stars looks closer or farther away than they are, something astrophysicists could fix with a few tweaks to how they measure distances across space. It might be something big: an error — or series of errors — in  cosmology, or our understanding of the universe's origin and evolution. If that's the case, our entire history of space and time may be messed up. But whatever the issue is, it's making key observations of the universe disagree with each other: Measured one way, the universe appears to be expanding at a certain rate; measured another way, the universe appears to be expanding at a different rate. And, as a new paper shows, those discrepancies have gotten larger in recent years, even as the measurements have gotten more precise.

"We think that if our understanding of cosmology is correct, then all of these different measurements should be giving us the same answer," said Katie Mack, a theoretical cosmologist at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and co-author of the new paper.

The central plot in the paper shows that most measurements of the Hubble constant and mass fraction point to one range of numbers, but the Cepheid-supernova measurement (yellow bar) points to a different range of numbers. (Image credit: Weikang Lin, Katherine J. Mack, and Liqiang Hou)

It's not all bad as new physics might be at hand. :)

Hidden passage???

Physicists conceptualize black holes spin at almost the speed of light. With this being said, it stands to reason that the extreme inertia generated by such spin rates could transform black holes into wormholes, a notion being seriously studied by researchers checking out the supermassive black hole residing in our Milky Way galaxy.

Wormholes are a controversial topic in physics, to say the least. Not only is the idea of traveling through these theoretical passageways between two disparate regions of spacetime debatable, but their very existence is unclear. A forthcoming paper, however, suggests a method to look for a wormhole inside a black hole—and those observations could occur within a decade.

Seems BRT's take on black holes possibly being wormholes is not too far fetched after all. :)

We live in interesting times.

Something's afoot/rev XX

Something's afoot applies here as there is not one drop of blood nor are there any tracks to cattle mutilated in Oregan.

Five young purebred bulls mysteriously showed up dead on the ranch this past summer, drained of blood and with body parts precisely removed.

Coming upon one of the dead bulls is an eerie scene. The forest is hot and still, apart from a raven's repeating caw. The bull looks like a giant, deflated plush toy. It smells. Weirdly, there are no signs of buzzards, coyotes or other scavengers. His red coat is as shiny as if he were going to the fair, but he's bloodless and his tongue and genitals have been surgically cut out.

Jenkins says the cases have been tough, with little evidence and no credible leads.

On his whiteboard, he has a running list scrawled in green marker with the top theories. What's clear: It isn't bears, wolves, cougars or poisonous plants. Nor were the animals shot.

The FBI won't confirm or deny that it's looking into the multiple slaughters.

Two years ago and 200 miles south, near New Princeton, Ore., one of Andie Davies' cows was also found cut up and bloodless.

She and her husband drove concentric circles around the corpse, but they never found any tracks.

And in this dusty country, "everything you do leaves tracks," Davies says

Something;s afoot indeed ...

Captain Chaos ...

As most intelligent people know, The Donald is Captain Chaos to the max, As long as everything centers on him, it's ok, as long as people's lives are not on the line, a situation not the case with people in combat, where coolness of temperament, combined with battlefield competence, is key to keeping people alive under the most trying conditions possible. With this information is factored into the equation, people in the know know that Trump is not qualified to be commander in chief in any way, shape or fashion.

To whit.

Amid threats spanning the globe, from nuclear proliferation to mined tankers in the Persian Gulf to terrorist attacks and cyberwarfare, those in command positions monitor the president’s Twitter feed like field officers scanning the horizon for enemy troop movements. A new front line in national defense has become the White House Situation Room, where the military struggles to accommodate a commander in chief who is both ignorant and capricious.

It gets better ...

I. HE DISDAINS EXPERTISE

Trump has little interest in the details of policy. He makes up his mind about a thing, and those who disagree with him—even those with manifestly more knowledge and experience—are stupid, or slow, or crazy.

As a personal quality, this can be trying; in a president, it is dangerous. Trump rejects the careful process of decision making that has long guided commanders in chief. Disdain for process might be the defining trait of his leadership. Of course, no process can guarantee good decisions—history makes that clear—but eschewing the tools available to a president is choosing ignorance. What Trump’s supporters call “the deep state” is, in the world of national security—hardly a bastion of progressive politics—a vast reservoir of knowledge and global experience that presidents ignore at their peril. 

Read the entire Atlantic piece to learn why this guy doesn't cut it as CIC.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. - Erasmas

Reddingites ...

Need your input without question.

GB without a doubt ...

Being a former jazz drummer and Berklee Alum, hearing this gem brings back memories. Long tracks but worthwhile to the max.

There were a few moments when we were playing when I felt like, I must be dreaming. That’s the thing I try to hang onto. Those moments when I was young and you’d get that rush, the joy of music. And so playing with Ginger, it was like I had this direct line — like you’d plug into an electrical current, directly into the main source of what got you going in the first place. - Bill Frisell.

Stellar and ... I bet Elvin listened to this as well. 

State of the Art ...

State of the Art says it all regarding Pixar and 3D animation. Years ago, yours truly beta-tested Pixar code from the user perspective. Something altogether amazing without question. :)

Lin was interviewed for FMX's Professional Spotlight series in 2016, in which he explains what exactly he does as a DP for animated films. This video offers some real clues as to why he insists on making the cinematography in Pixar's films as true to life as possible. When asked if his cinematic approach changes between live-action and animation (around the 1:40 mark in the video below), he responded:

"I think it's exactly the same between a live-action shoot and computer animation in terms of the sensibility, because what our goal is is to tell a story visually, and the way to do it is exactly the same. How you set up a camera, what kind of lens you use, what kind of camera angle you use...it doesn't matter if it's live-action or an animated film, the technique is the same."

Brilliant artistry without a doubt.

Inside Out 2015

Toy Story 4 2019

Artistry to the max indeed.

This clip shows how Pixar's tech has evolved over the years. Interesting without question.

Cat 6 & counting ...

Dorian deserves to be a Cat 6 hurricane,
the first of many to come as civilization moves further into the Anthropocene.

Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes are rare. Only 7% of the 243 hurricanes observed since accurate satellite measurements began in 1983 have reached that catastrophic intensity. And it is truly exceptional to see a category 5 hurricane as strong as Hurricane Dorian, which powered ashore on Great Abaco Island in The Bahamas on September 1, 2019, with sustained winds of 185 mph and gusts up to 220 mph. Winds of this strength would make Dorian worthy of a category 6 rating, if it existed. (For those of you unfamiliar with me, know that there is already a Category 6—it’s the name of a blog I co-author with Bob Henson over at Weather Underground, specializing in daily updates of global tropical cyclone activity).

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which is used to rank hurricane winds on a scale of one to five, stops at category 5: sustained 1-minute average wind speeds of at least 157 mph (70 m/s). If we were to add a category 6 to the scale, we must consider that the scale is not quite linear. Winds for a category 2 hurricane span a range of just 15 mph, for example, but winds for a category 4 storm span a range of 27 mph. Regardless of this non-linearity, a one-category increase in intensity on the scale results in approximately four times more wind damage, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Cat 6 candidates to date ...

If one uses 185-mph winds as the threshold for category 6, only five Atlantic hurricanes in recorded history would qualify. If we lower the threshold to 180 mph, there are a total of eight that would rate as a category 6:

• 190 mph: Allen 1980
• 185 mph: Dorian 2019, Labor Day 1935, Gilbert 1988, Wilma 2005
• 180 mph: Mitch 1998, Rita 2005, Irma 2017

It's just a matter of time.

Defending Science

BRT has long questioned the Trump administration's adverse take on science and it's 24/7 push to subvert or politicize the same for political gain and/or corporate profits as needs warrant but people are resisting because turning one's back on science guarantees the slow demise of any country as the world moves ever forward into the 21st century.

To whit ...

In recent years, the norms and expectations that once ensured that our government was guided primarily by the public interest rather than by individual or partisan interest have significantly weakened. There are now far fewer constraints to deter abuse by executive branch actors. This report focuses on two distinct areas: the growing politicization of government science and research and the breakdown of processes for filling key government positions.

It gets better.

Now, we are at a crisis point, with almost weekly violations of previously respected safeguards.

• The acting White House chief of staff reportedly instructed the secretary of commerce to have the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — a part of the Department of Commerce — issue a misleading statement in support of the president’s false assertion about the trajectory of a hurricane, contradicting an earlier statement released by the National Weather Service. 
• The secretary of commerce reportedly threatened to fire top NOAA officials in pressuring them to act.
• The Department of Agriculture relocated economists across the country after they published findings showing the financial harms to farmers of the administration’s trade policies.
• The Interior Department reassigned its top climate scientist to an accounting role after he highlighted dangers posed by climate change.
• The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) adopted rules that prevent leading experts from serving on science advisory boards and encourage participation by industry-affiliated researchers.
• The White House suppressed a report showing a toxic substance that is present in several states’ water supplies endangers human health at levels far lower than previously reported by the EPA.

Dangeville without a doubt. Click here for the full National Task Force Report.