Middle management ...

Metropolis, the Fritz Lang masterpiece, depicts a futuristic urban dystopia and follows the attempts of Freder, the wealthy son of the city master, and Maria, a saintly figure to the workers, to overcome the vast gulf separating the classes in their city and bring the workers together with Joh Fredersen, the city master. Fast forward from 1927 to 2020 and a new, automated dystopia looms in an excellent The Verge essay titled How Hard Will Robots Make Us Work?

To whit ...

The robots are watching over hotel housekeepers, telling them which room to clean and tracking how quickly they do it. They’re managing software developers, monitoring their clicks and scrolls and docking their pay if they work too slowly. They’re listening to call center workers, telling them what to say, how to say it, and keeping them constantly, maximally busy. While we’ve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager.

These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would — a moment’s downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day. But for workers, what look like inefficiencies to an algorithm were their last reserves of respite and autonomy, and as these little breaks and minor freedoms get optimized out, their jobs are becoming more intense, stressful, and dangerous. Over the last several months, I’ve spoken with more than 20 workers in six countries. For many of them, their greatest fear isn’t that robots might come for their jobs: it’s that robots have already become their boss.

It gets better.

The worker who used Cogito, for instance, had only a minute to fill out insurance forms between calls and only 30 minutes per month for bathroom breaks and personal time, so she handled call after call from people dealing with terminal illnesses, dying relatives, miscarriages, and other traumatic events, each of which she was supposed to complete in fewer than 12 minutes, for 10 hours a day. “It makes you feel numb,” she said. Other workers spoke of chronic anxiety and insomnia, the result of days spent having emotionally raw conversations while, in the words of one worker, “your computer is standing over your shoulder and arbitrarily deciding whether you get to keep your job or not.” This form of burnout has become so common the industry has a name for it: “empathy fatigue.” Cogito, in an ebook explaining the reason for its AI, likens call center workers to trauma nurses desensitized over the course of their shift, noting that the quality of representatives’ work declines after 25 calls. The solution, the company writes, is to use AI to deliver “empathy at scale.”

Read the essay in its entirety to see why Metropolis was prescient to a fault.

Late "winter" ...

Blue Ice

On a very fine line

In Transit

White hot & then some

Thinking Zen

NYC Alligators rule :)

They're everywhere, particularly in the sewers of NYC, a myth that's kinda true as seen in an amazing and amusing NYTimes piece about these denizens lurking in the darkness. Read on if you dare. :)

They are big. They are vicious. Some say they are albinos, because of a lack of sunlight.

They are the alligators that supposedly infest New York City’s sewer system, slithering through the bowels just under the street level, feeding on rats and rubbish and terrorizing sewer workers armed with guns for self-defense.

It gets better. :)

The East Harlem Gator

The seminal New York City sewer-gator event came on Feb. 9, 1935, when some East Harlem teens spied an alligator down a storm drain and then lassoed and hauled it up with a clothesline. After the reptile — roughly eight feet long and 125 pounds — snapped at them, they killed it with their shovels.

“Alligator Found in Uptown Sewer,” read the headline in the The Times. The article speculated that it had escaped from a passing steamer in the East River and had swum into a sewer outflow pipe.

Even better. still :)

In “Alligator,” the 1980 horror-comedy, a baby alligator flushed down the toilet in an unnamed city becomes a gigantic killer mutant gator after feeding on discarded lab rats that were injected with growth hormones.

Yours truly owned one and got it via snail mail for, you guessed it, $1.50. Albert lived about 6 months and got to be almost 3 ft in length whereupon he died a peaceful death after eating hamburger that disagreed with his delicate digestive tract. :)

And so it goes. K. Vonnegut

Traversing the far side ... of the moon.

Another gem from NASA. This time showing what the endangered Apollo 13 astronauts saw when going around the far side of the moon prior to successfully returning home on a mission fraught with danger due to just how damaged their spacecraft truly was. Amazing ingenuity on the part of everyone involved in getting these guys home safe and sound back in the year of our lord 1970.

This video uses data gathered from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft to recreate some of the stunning views of the Moon that the Apollo 13 astronauts saw on their perilous journey around the farside in 1970. These visualizations, in 4K resolution, depict many different views of the lunar surface, starting with earthset and sunrise and concluding with the time Apollo 13 reestablished radio contact with Mission Control. Also depicted is the path of the free return trajectory around the Moon, and a continuous view of the Moon throughout that path. All views have been sped up for timing purposes — they are not shown in "real-time."

Credits:
Data Visualization by: Ernie Wright (USRA)
Video Produced & Edited by: David Ladd (USRA)
Music provided by Universal Production Music: "Visions of Grandeur" - Frederick Wiedmann

This video is public domain and along with other supporting visualizations can be downloaded from the Scientific Visualization Studio at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13537

Stellar to the max. :)

In Realtime ...

How movies are being made today.

What director Jon Favreau and the cinematographers and animators of The Mandalorian relied on was actually as simple as good old-fashioned projection screen filming — except this is about a bajillion times more realistic than footage rolling in the background while someone gratuitously turns a steering wheel.

That’s thanks to a 20-foot high, 270-degree semicircular LED video wall, which displayed locations from the ice world of Maldo Kreis to the sinister hideout of The Client. These environments were edited in real time, right up to shooting, and allowed Pedro Pascal, Gina Carano, Werner Herzog, et al., to interact as if they were in a physically built space.

In Realtime indeed.

It takes 3 ...

LASER-cooled atom cloud viewed through microscope camera.

In a first for quantum physics, University of Otago researchers have "held" individual atoms in place and observed previously unseen complex atomic interactions.

When the three atoms approach each other, two form a molecule, and all receive a kick from the energy released in the process. A microscope camera allows the process to be magnified and viewed.

Mikkel Andersen (left) and Marvin Weyland in the physics lab. Credit: University of Otago
"Two atoms alone can't form a molecule, it takes at least three to do chemistry. 

'Nuff said :)

Flying for real ...

Jetman takes off for real.

Jetman Dubai achieved a major company milestone this Friday and performed a ground take-off that transitioned into a high altitude flight. It may not sound like much, however, watching “Jetman” Vince Reffet flying through the air like a superhero is quite an experience.

To give you some info; the carbon fiber wing Jetman’s wearing is powered by four mini jet engines. According to the company, this three-minute flight translates into 150 miles per hour where he reached 6,000 feet (1,800 meters) in altitude.

No words needed. :)

The oldest companies ...

Fascinating piece on the oldest companies in the world, 

some of which were on the dark side of things without question..

At a time when the average company on the S&P 500 only survives for two decades, it’s surprising to see that there are companies that have existed for centuries around the world. The oldest company still operating today is in Japan. It’s a construction firm called Kongo Gumi that dates to 578 and has specialized in building temples for 14 centuries. Today, though the company has been bought by a construction conglomerate, temples still account for 80% of its business.

Read the Fast Company piece to learn more as yours truly certainty has. :)

Thru the Looking Glass - Fragile vs. Robust ... A tiny sample :)

Through the Looking Glass - Fragile vs Robust

A tiny sample :)

Nature: Small periodic fires, started by lightning, clears away dead brush to permit new growth. Robust
Man: By trying to prevent fires of any kind insures the build-up of dead brush to biblical proportions, thus generating the distinct possibility of creating fires unable to be controlled. Channel CA in 2019. Fragile  

To assume is to err. Fragile

Monoculture farming vs 3 sisters.
Monoculture farming depletes soil and encourages insect pests. If a virus hits a monoculture garden, catastrophe ensues. Monsanto and its Bt gene fortified corn, designed to ward off the corn borer beetle, has failed as the beetle adapted. What does Monsanto do now besides enforcing patents on an increasingly compromised product? Fragile

The 3 sisters garden 
By the time European settlers arrived in America in the early 1600s, the Iroquois had been growing the “three sisters” for over three centuries. The vegetable trio sustained the Native Americans both physically and spiritually. In legend, the plants were a gift from the gods, always to be grown together, eaten together, and celebrated together. As older sisters often do, the corn offers the beans needed support. The beans, the giving sister, pull nitrogen from the air and bring it to the soil for the benefit of all three. As the beans grow through the tangle of squash vines and wind their way up the cornstalks into the sunlight, they hold the sisters close together. The large leaves of the sprawling squash protect the threesome by creating living mulch that shades the soil, keeping it cool and moist and preventing weeds. The prickly squash leaves also keep away raccoons and other pests, which don’t like to step on them. Together, the three sisters provide both sustainable soil fertility as well as a healthy diet. Perfection! Robust

The net, a chaotic, voluntary system based on open standards and redundancy, works. Robust

But there’s a problem. Like a road network, the Internet has its own highways and intersections that consist of cables and routers. The navigation system that manages the flow of data around the network is called the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). When you visit a website, BGP determines the best path through which the site’s data are to be transmitted to your device thanks to the redundancy of the web. It’s the shortest route solution It works well but ... BGP was designed only to be a temporary fix, a “good enough” solution when the Internet was rapidly growing in the late 1980s. If BGP is compromised, the web stops. i.e., Denial Of Services (DOS) Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.[1] Man in the middle (MITM) In cryptography and computer security, a man-in-the-middle attack (MITM) is an attack where the attacker secretly relays and possibly alters the communications between two parties who believe that they are directly communicating with each other. Black holing In networking, black holes refer to places in the network where incoming or outgoing traffic is silently discarded (or “dropped”), without informing the source that the data did not reach its intended recipient. The black holes themselves are invisible, and can only be detected by monitoring the lost traffic.  Fragile

The supply chain driving the inherently complex production and distribution of smartphones must overcome numerous events able to disrupt the system in a myriad of ways including War, revolution, disease, weather, material shortages, manufacturing issues, truck breakdowns, traffic accidents, container ship mishaps, piracy, etc, etc, etc. Fragile.

Scientific experiments are inherently fragile in order to parse out the inner workings of nature. Discovering the constituent colors in light/Newton, The double-slit experiment/Young and Michelson & Morley accurately determining the speed of light. 

Keeping a teeter-totter perfectly balanced is hard as we all know. Fragile 

When a currency never varies, a slight change makes people crazy. Fragile 

Voltaire - Political systems equipped with periodic assassination gives rise to systems that renew themselves. Robust

Think the ossified 2 party system in the US as it’s always the same two parties without term limits. The system is paralyzed in its inability to improve. This ties in with lobbyists, the MIC, HC, Education and the continued subsidies given to big oil, big pharma & banks too big to fail. Dems over-regulate, the Repugs, under-regulate Fragile

The Athenians selected assemblies by lot. Robust

Top-down political systems are also not robust. Think dictators. Heavy-handed control gives rise to possible rebellion as said systems cannot adapt to the vagaries of society or reality in the long term unless you have the occasional assassination.  The French Revolution happened because the royals couldn’t meet the needs of the bourgeois. Fragile

Extreme and needless complexity defines the medical industry. Ditto government bureaucracy. Fragile

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished and ... she always finds a way. Robust

Computer tech, requiring power to run, is incredibly complex and ... its data, stored as magnetic 0s & 1s on hard drives and SSDs (Solid State Memory), digitally decays within 30 years.  If one bit is wrong, the program won’t work. Fragile

Acid-free fine paper, requiring no power to run, lasts over a thousand years. Think illuminated manuscripts. Robust

Religion, a system designed to be obeyed. Fragile Science, a system designed to be disproved. Robust

Forecasting of any kind is a guesstimate at best. Think Microsoft regarding the rise of the net. Fragile

Modern civilization, due to its extreme complexity, is fragile to the max.

Pequot Library Blues

Mark Naftalin & Friends aka Marco Naftalini e amici make the scene at the Pequot Midwinter Library Book Sale playing acoustic blues the right way. Enjoy.

The Founding Fathers, Live! :)

American Pie has a new meaning for us all. Thanks Richard for turning me onto this gem. :)

Ephemerality

Snowstorms like the one depicted in this clip are ephemeral. They last but a day as wind blows off the heavy dusting in just a matter of hours. As per this kind of storm, full moons also last but a day. Enjoy.

A force to be reckoned with ...

The man does not quit. Irascible, smart and above all else, tough and consistent, Bernie's a force to be reckoned with without question.

To whit ...

“He’s what a politician is supposed to be,” Donald McCullough, 55, a long-haired restaurant staffer and graphic designer, told me over the sounds of an all-woman rock band called Bad Larrys—this evening’s opening act of Sanders’ increasingly concertlike rallies. “Politicians are supposed to be working for us.”

“A candidate who will fight for the working class,” said Mike Bizier, 27. “A candidate who has been consistent for 50 years.”

Exactly.

65+ Knots Video

65+ Knots was the wind speed on CT's Fairfield Beach on 2/7/20, a velocity almost knocking yours truly down while taping this short clip. Enjoy the noise, the water and of course the sky as nature shows, in no uncertain terms, who's boss on planet earth. :)

Perpetual motion ...

Earth is heating up. Which means ... her ocean currents are running faster due to global warming.

To whit

Winds over the ocean have been picking up at a rate of 1.9% per decade, the researchers found. This increase in wind speed transfers energy to the ocean’s surface, and subsequently, deeper waters. About 76% of the upper 6,560 feet (2,000 m) of the oceans have seen an increase in kinetic energy since the 1990s. Overall, ocean current speeds have crept up about 5% per decade since the early 1990s, the study found.

What changes this will make, nobody knows.

In the pursuit of "perfection".

You know we're under surveillance 24/7, right? After reading Snowden and Binney, it takes a fool to not realize this is so, especially after reading how "perfect" government surveillance truly is using GPS data purloined from the smartphone residing in your pocket.

To whit ...

“When the government tracks the location of a cellphone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user,” wrote John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, in a 2018 ruling that prevented the government from obtaining location data from cellphone towers without a warrant.

“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the decision, Carpenter v. United States.

With that judicial intent in mind, it is alarming to read a new report in The Wall Street Journal that found the Trump administration “has bought access to a commercial database that maps the movements of millions of cellphones in America and is using it for immigration and border enforcement.”

The data used by the government comes not from the phone companies but from a location data company, one of many that are quietly and relentlessly collecting the precise movements of all smartphone-owning Americans through their phone apps.

Many apps — weather apps or coupon apps, for instance — gather and record location data without users’ understanding what the code is up to. That data can then be sold to third party buyers including, apparently, the government.

Remember, it's all about the money. Always has been, always will be. - Robert E.

60+ Knots ...

60+ pix 1

60+ Pano

60+ pix 2

60+ pix 3/feeding frenzy

Passing Thru/Passing By ...

Using a smartphone as the camera of choice, casual trips taken by train & car show just how interesting cityscapes and countryside can be. Enjoy.

No excuse :)

Powerpoint users violate this Dilbert in ways that boggle the mind :)

A candle in the dark ...

Along the lines of This sentence is false BRT's take on the limits of knowledge and the dumbing down of America is Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World a prescient depiction of a hallowed out nation, stripped of manufacturing prowess and controlled by a tech elite hell-bent on maintaining power no matter what the cost may be.

When reading this piece, one comes away with the fact facts don't matter. Emoji do, where fake news takes precedence over actual news, particularly if the real news doesn't jibe with the world view of the person reading it. 

“Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Thanks D for sending me this gem. :)

A dark truth :)

This immortal picture of Slim Pickins riding the nuke to kick off Armgheddon in Strangelove depicts the dark truth of nuclear deterrence in a tells all piece in the New Yorker titled ALMOST EVERYTHING IN “DR. STRANGELOVE” WAS TRUE.

To whit ...

The command and control of nuclear weapons has long been plagued by an “always/never” dilemma. The administrative and technological systems that are necessary to insure that nuclear weapons are always available for use in wartime may be quite different from those necessary to guarantee that such weapons can never be used, without proper authorization, in peacetime. During the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the “always” in American war planning was given far greater precedence than the “never.” Through two terms in office, beginning in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower struggled with this dilemma. He wanted to retain Presidential control of nuclear weapons while defending America and its allies from attack. But, in a crisis, those two goals might prove contradictory, raising all sorts of difficult questions. What if Soviet bombers were en route to the United States but the President somehow couldn’t be reached? What if Soviet tanks were rolling into West Germany but a communications breakdown prevented nato officers from contacting the White House? What if the President were killed during a surprise attack on Washington, D.C., along with the rest of the nation’s civilian leadership? Who would order a nuclear retaliation then?

“I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” - STERLING HAYDEN - Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper

The thermokarst is thawing ...

Dire news on global warms keeps ramping up along the lines of whack a mole. Todays bon bon  focuses on the Thermokarst, a land surface characterised by very irregular surfaces of marshy hollows and small hummocks formed as ice-rich permafrost thaws, that occurs in Arctic areas, and on a smaller scale in mountainous areas such as the Himalayas and the Swiss Alps. 

This previously hidden entity is thawing at rates researchers never thought possible until now.

It’s perhaps the best known and more worrisome of climate feedback loops: As the planet warms, permafrost—landscapes of frozen soil and rock—begins to thaw. And when it does, microbes consume organic matter, releasing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, leading to more warming, more thawing, and even more carbon emissions.

But here’s something you’ve probably never heard of, and it’s something not even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has really considered: thermokarst. That’s the land that gets ravaged whenever permafrost thaws rapidly. As the ice that holds the soil together disappears, hillsides collapse and massive sinkholes open up. Climate scientists have been working gradual permafrost thaw into their models—changes that run centimeters deep over decades or centuries. But abrupt permafrost thaw happens on the scale of meters over months or years. That shocks the surrounding landscape into releasing potentially even more carbon than would have if it thawed at a more leisurely pace.

Permafrost thaw ponds in Hudson Bay, Canada in 2008.

It's getting serious ...

It's getting serious. The coronavirus is on the move and people are becoming tribal.

To whit ...

GUANGZHOU, China — One person was turned away by hotel after hotel after he showed his ID card. Another was expelled by fearful local villagers. A third found his most sensitive personal information leaked online after registering with the authorities.

These outcasts are from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, which is at the center of a rapidly spreading viral outbreak that has killed more than 420 people in China and sent fear rippling around the world. They are pariahs in China, among the millions unable to go home and feared as potential carriers of the mysterious coronavirus.

And so it begins.

14 common features ...

Umberto Eco, a great writer. knows what fascism was like as he grew up under Mussolini as a young man. With this said, his take on fascism is apt as Trump is using these tenets to become a demagogue we can be truly proud of.

To whit ...

While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism," he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features," writes the novelist and semiotician, "cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Sounds about right, doesn't it. Thanks, Cat for turning me onto this.

What if ...

all the oceans were drained from planet earth? Interesting concept eh? :)

These days the concern may be more about what Earth would look like if all the ice melted – but this look at what we'd see if all the oceans drained away is seriously fascinating.

Now of course, all the oceans can't exactly drain away – where would they go? We have a specific amount of water on the planet, it just moves around in different phases to different places. But it used to be that there was less water in the oceans, back when it was locked up in ice on the land.

In 2008, NASA physicist and animator Horace Mitchell created a video showing what the planet would look like if all the oceans slinked away. More recently, former NASA planetary scientist James O'Donoghue gave the video an update. He tweaked the speed a bit and added depth tracking to show levels.

Cool without question.

Vitriol 101 ...

Vitriol 101 ratchets up into prime time now that Agent Orange escaped impeachment thanks to Mitch McConnell and the complicit repugs in the senate. With that being said, Trump, now unleashed and ready for battle, indicated in no uncertain terms, that the vindictive sh*t show is about to begin.

His acquittal in the Senate assured, the emboldened president will take his victory and grievance to the campaign trail, no longer worried about congressional constraint.

Emerson was right ...

WASHINGTON — Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to foresee the lesson of the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump. “When you strike at a king,” Emerson famously said, “you must kill him.”

Mr. Trump’s foes struck at him but did not take him down.

But the real star of this magnificent sham is the Turtle, Mitch McConnell, the totally corrupt but extremely competent Senate Majority leader from Kentucky.

With all apologies to the president, who I'm sure is going to enjoy his festival of innocence very much over the coming days and weeks, the person who deserves the most credit for the acquittal that is now a foregone conclusion in the Senate impeachment trial is not Donald Trump himself but Mitch McConnell.

I say this not because I expected Trump to be removed from office for pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. That was never in the cards. But I don't think that anyone expected this process to go the way it has, which is to say, from the perspective of the GOP Senate majority leader, more or less perfectly.

Yes indeed.

Toons yet again :)

Witness protection program

The enabler

Having your ass handed to you

The fast & the furious - not.

The electric kool aid acid test :)

All is dry, for now ...

Feb 2, 2020, all is dry for SB LIV but 20 years from now, not so much as seen by this pix below of Hard Rock Stadium, the location of this year's edition.

A photo illustration of what Hard Rock Stadium, where the 2020 Super Bowl is being played on Sunday, Feb. 2, 2020, could look like under 1.5 feet of water in a flood event 6 feet above the local high tide line. Estimated time frame - 2030/40

Ah, the Super Bowl, a bonanza of overeating and watching men brutalize each other (brain health be damned), punctuated by 30-second reminders to spend money. This weekend the spectacle will play out at Hard Rock Stadium, a lovely open-air structure mere miles from Miami Beach, which is disappearing into the sea.

Fast forward a few years and ...

Sea levels are going nowhere but up, and fast: By the middle part of the century, we could see 2 to 4 feet of sea level rise in Florida, according to coastal scientist Harold Wanless of the University of Miami. And within 50 years, it could rise by 3 to 6 feet, or maybe more.

As rising seas encroach on Miami from the east, they’re also causing grief from below. The city is built on highly porous rock, limestone that’s almost like Swiss cheese. As the sea level rises, it pushes inland under the ground, raising the water table closer to the surface. When a heavy rain comes, the ground is already waterlogged. So instead of trickling down into that Swiss cheese, the water has nowhere to go. It accumulates on the surface, leading to flooding.

So enjoy it while you can as all is dry, for now. :)

Frame Dragging

 

Well, Einstein's right again. Massive objects warp space-time, something never actually seen until now.

One of the predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity is that any spinning body drags the very fabric of space-time in its vicinity around with it. This is known as "frame-dragging".

In everyday life, frame-dragging is both undetectable and inconsequential, as the effect is so ridiculously tiny. Detecting the frame-dragging caused by the entire Earth's spin requires satellites such as the US$750 million Gravity Probe B, and the detection of angular changes in gyroscopes equivalent to just one degree every 100,000 years or so.

Luckily for us, the Universe contains many naturally occurring gravitational laboratories where physicists can observe Einstein's predictions at work in exquisite detail.

Our team's research, published today in Science, reveals evidence of frame-dragging on a much more noticeable scale, using a radio telescope and a unique pair of compact stars whizzing around each other at dizzying speeds.

The motion of these stars would have perplexed astronomers in Newton's time, as they clearly move in a warped space-time, and require Einstein's general theory of relativity to explain their trajectories.

The white dwarf-pulsar binary system PSR J1141-6545 discovered by the CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope. The pulsar orbits its white dwarf companion every 4.8 hours. The white dwarf’s rapid rotation drags space-time around it, causing the entire orbit to tumble in space. Mark Myers/ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav)

Frame Dragging explained.

Science never disappoints when done right. :)