Finally ...

Fig 5. Group averaged auditory responses recorded from channels over the left and right temporal cortex.

HbO (A) and HbR (B) responses shown. Channel numbers are shown above plots. Vertical lines show stimulus onset and offset times at 0 and 15 seconds. 

This set of PLOS ONE squiggles, show, for the first time, tinnitus running in a person's head in real time, something not thought possible until now. With this finding in hand,  the old saw it's just in your head no longer applies as severe tinnitus, along with hearing loss, are conditions yours truly suffers from 24/7. 

Finally, as the title for this blurb, is more than just apropos as this new found ability to measure tinnitus accurately may be the start point needed to solving a truly wicked problem 15% of us rubes constantly deal with every day of our lives.

UP TO 15 PERCENT OF ADULTS around the world are plagued by a constant roaring or ringing in the ears that only they can hear. And with no way to test or treat it, this subjective experience, called tinnitus, can go undiagnosed for years.

But in a new study, researchers announce they can objectively test for both the presence and severity of someone's tinnitus for the first time, using a brain-reading cap and machine learning. In their trials, this technique was able to determine the severity of a person's tinnitus with close to 90 percent accuracy.

Conclusion

WHAT THEY FOUND — Analysis of the fNIRS scans revealed a significant statistical difference in the neural connectivity between cortical areas of the brains of people with and without tinnitus. Interestingly, the researchers also found that people with tinnitus displayed damped responses to both visual and auditory stimuli. This suggests tinnitus may not just interfere with how a person processes sound signals, but other sensory information, too. Essentially, tinnitus may alter a person's entire experience of the world.

Exactly

The hardware used.

A person wearing an fNIRS headcap.Mehrnaz Shoushtarian

Sign me up coach, I'm more than just ready to find out just how intense my tinnitus truly is.

Toons yet again :)

Porcine thoughts

The Gollum

Sleeping it off ...

Channeling Einstein ...

 Putting a lid on it

Communication breakdown ...

 Design cells/ISTOCK.COM

Yours truly has always thought cancer is caused by a breakdown of genetic communication in our cells due to, for the most part, aging as reality is quantum whereby everything is in flux due to the fact subatomic particles are both a wave and a particle at the same time, thus requiring DNA, at it's most basic level, to cope with this inevitable fact in order to keep cancer at bay. 

The structure of part of a DNA double helix

Lohann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 18th-century poet and philosopher, believed life was hardwired with archetypes, or models, which instructed its development. Yet he was fascinated with how life could, at the same time, be so malleable. One day, while meditating on a leaf, the poet had what you might call a proto-evolutionary thought: Plants were never created “and then locked into the given form” but have instead been given, he later wrote, a “felicitous mobility and plasticity that allows them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places.” A rediscovery of principles of genetic inheritance in the early 20th century showed that organisms could not learn or acquire heritable traits by interacting with their environment, but they did not yet explain how life could undergo such shapeshifting tricks—the plasticity that fascinated Goethe.

A polymathic and pioneering British biologist proposed such a mechanism for how organisms could adapt to their environment, upending the early field of evolutionary biology. For this, Conrad Hal Waddington became recognized as the last Renaissance biologist. This largely had to do with his idea of an “epigenetic landscape”—a metaphor he coined in 1940 to illustrate a theory for how organisms might regulate which of their genes get expressed in response to environmental cues or pressures, leading them down different developmental pathways. It turned out he was onto something: Just a few years after coining the term, it was found that methyl groups—a small molecule made of carbon and hydrogen—could attach to DNA, or to the proteins that house it, and alter gene expression. Changing how a gene is expressed can have drastic consequences: Every cell in our body has the same genes but looks and functions differently only due to the epigenetics that controls when and how genes get turned on. In 2002, one development biologist wondered whether Waddington’s provocative “ideas are relevant tools for understanding the biological problems of today.”

In fact, they are. Fifteen years on, a team of Johns Hopkins researchers, inspired by Waddington’s “epigenetic landscape,” recently came up with a powerful new way of seeing epigenetics. Andrew Feinberg, a member of the research team and the director of the Center for Epigenetics at John Hopkins School of Medicine, said that the team’s results “could have major implications for how we treat cancer and other aging-related diseases.” Their approach, detailed in a Nature study, enlisted information theory, a study of the storage and communication of information. By calculating the propensity of DNA methylation to change across regions of the human genome, they could, in effect, understand cells’ methylation landscape as a communication system.

IMAGINING THE EPIGENOME:Waddington’s original sketch of the epigenetic landscape (left) shows the tissue environment of a cell shaping its developmental trajectory. A later sketch (right) shows that interacting genes underpin that environment in a complex manner.

We're slowly untangling the notion of caner as it's a communicative and computational issue IMHO.

We're losing these guys ...

Striking a pose

We're losing these guys ... from butterflies to bees, the impact of man regarding habitat loss, pollution, poison and over population, for starters, is eliminating insects at record pace, something being replicated all over the world for all life as the 6th great extinction, known as the Anthropogene, is well underway 24/7, a dire situation capable of ending man's reign on earth without exception.

To whit.

In my recent book, Nature Underfoot, I argue that we crush, poison, and destroy insects and their habitat at our own peril. Yet reasons for acting to prevent insect decline run much deeper than self-interest. Humans cause habitat loss, produce pesticides, and import non-native species. We bear, according to certain strands of philosophical and religious thought, responsibility for the catastrophic losses insects experience today. Some say that insects have moral value since they strive to achieve their ends, just as we and other animals do. Others argue that insects have moral value as a part of God’s creation. Scientists point to the value of insects in global ecosystems, or the value implied by tens or hundreds of thousands of years involved in the evolution of an insect species.

The insect apocalypse has captured headlines, but the situation is more nuanced than that. Scientists find an increase in the overall numbers of arthropods in the Arctic, but a decline in diversity. Certain habitats in the Arctic are also affected more than others.3 In Puerto Rico, insect declines initially attributed to climate change may have resulted instead from hurricanes.4 Some insect species have even increased in numbers—mainly those that are tolerant of human activities or that benefit from associating with humans or from climate change. 

Hanging by a thread

Apropos is it not?

A lunatic without question :)

Your truly is a lunatic as full moons rule in nighttime photography as my loyal readers know. To see the dates and times of the remaining full moons for 2021, click the elegant graphic seen above. :)

This week the alignment of our planet Earth, our moon, and our nearby Sun, created a Full Moon we call a “Wolf Moon.” This is just the first in a line of full moons that’ll appear to us humans over the next 11 months, and we’ve got the lot listed. In the mix are the Snow Moon, Worm Moon, Pink Moon, Flower Moon, and the Strawberry Moon. That one’s not about Prince, but it might as well be – after that is the Buck Moon, Sturgeon Moon, Harvest Moon, Hunter’s Moon, Beaver Moon, and in December we’ll see the Cold Moon!

A Full Moon in all her glory. :)

It's all about the money/rev L

A good friend of yours truly clued me on The Spectator's excellent piece titled Oligarchy in America, an interesting and disquieting topic BRT has copiously written about starting way back in 2011, a long extinct time frame where a modicum of sanity actually ruled.

The fog of the Trump wars is lifting, the road from COVID-19 rising before us, the outlines of the 21st-century American system emerging. Like the bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the change has happened ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’ The age of the democratic republic is over, the age of the American oligarchy beginning.

Oligarchy is the ‘rule of the oligos’, the few: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a self-sustaining elite. It sounds quaint, classical even, as though it couldn’t happen here because it already happened there. But it has, in fact, already happened here. Augustus Caesar, who made himself Rome’s first emperor in 27 BC, would recognize the symptoms of our American novelties. The cult of the founding fathers and the cult of entertainment. The elites divided by violent factionalism and united by naked venality. The decay of republican virtues. The widening of the wealth gap and the rise of the populares, the members of the ruling class who rebel in the name of values already overthrown. And then, when all seems lost, the rise of the imperial oligarchy that offers to restore law and order, but installs a different law and a new order.

Oligarchy happens here because it happens everywhere. It is a recurring reality, the precursor of mob democracy in Plato’s Republic; the alternative to liberal democracy in modern China, Russia and the European Union; the endless present in Arab and African states. The Chinese oligarchy is ‘market-Leninism’ under the ‘princelings’ of the party, from whose ranks Xi Jinping emerged to become a quasi-emperor. The Russian oligarchy is a post-communist, sub-czarist parody of democracy whose winners, the looters of the energy sector and the graduates of the spy services, first returned ‘oligarch’ to modern use in the Nineties. The European states were creating their oligarchy too in that decade, in the unaccountable imperial technocracy that is the European Union. The Nineties were not the decade of the triumph of liberal democracy. They were the decade when oligarchy, illiberal, liberal or semi-liberal, conquered the globe.

Read the entire piece, it's the smart thing to do.

Privacy 101

Data privacy aka the 4th Amendment is moot. We are under surveillance 24/7 but we already know that, right? ... But there is some hope and Apple's the one company who is walking the walk to make privacy a viable reality in the age of the net in spite of what Zuck and FB has to say about the matter.

Today is Data Privacy Day. Don’t kick yourself if you haven’t heard of it—not many people have. Yet it’s never been more important, as technology for capturing, analyzing, and categorizing virtually any imaginable piece of data about us—from our heartbeats to our most private thoughts—becomes only more advanced, invasive, and pervasive.

To mark the day, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a live-streamed keynote speech opening a panel discussion on the importance of user privacy at the Brussels-based Computers, Privacy & Data Protection conference this morning. That he keynoted the panel is no surprise—Apple is the only Big Tech company that’s fully embraced privacy, not just as a feature, but also the mantra that it’s a fundamental human right.

 He's right.

A dictionary for us SF Junkies :)

White Hole

SyFi now has a dictionary!!! No longer does one have to BS to find appropriate words describing Warp Drive or Disrupter. SF junkies like yours truly can look it up in order to vet our BS. Stellar.

Genius is ...

Unknown English artist (formerly attributed to George Gower)[1]

This amazing painting of the greatest monarch of England fascinates yours truly to no end as there is so much history in the work commemorating England's victory over Spain's Spanish Armada in 1588 but ... this blurb is not about Elizabeth and England but rather about the notion of genius and what it actually entails beyond IQ, a specific aspect of intellect so overrated as to be almost meaningless in this writer's opinion.

If Mozart could hear in his head how the music ought to go, Leonardo, judging from his sketches, could simply see in his mind’s eye how the machine should work or the painting should look. Here, too, Leonardo’s natural technical facility is manifest, as seen in the hand-eye coordination that results in correct proportions and the cross-hatching lines that suggest three-dimensional perception. Likewise evident is Leonardo’s relentless curiosity. We watch his mind range across an endless horizon of interconnected interests; on one page, for example, a heart becomes the branches of a tree, which then become the tentacles of a mechanical pulley. How do all these seemingly disparate things of the world hang together? Leonardo wanted to know. With good reason, the cultural historian Kenneth Clark called him ‘the most relentlessly curious man in history’.

Seems I may be right about this. :)

Fetus in the womb - DaVinci

Walking is the act of controlled falling. - Robert E.

Improv ...

As a former jazz/rock musican and currently practicing artist, the excellent Nautilus article discussing the neurology of flow states regarding the creative process is spot on as one does NOT THINK when creating anything of significance. Ask any artist what she is thinking when doing the deed and one will most often find the answer to be "nothing" as improv does this to you. After the fact is a different story  altogether as defining the end result of a given work of art, whether it be a painting, video or the making of an awesome souffle, is easy, at least to this rube who has been creating art for over 50 years. 

Don’t look at the clock! Now tell me: How much time has passed since you first logged on to your computer today? Time may be a property of physics, but it is also a property of the mind, which ultimately makes it a product of the brain. Time measures out and shapes our lives, and how we live our lives in turn affects how we perceive the passage of time. Your sense of time is malleable and subjective—it changes in response to changing contexts and input, and it can be distorted when the brain is damaged, or affected by drugs, disease, sleep deprivation, or naturally altered states of consciousness. However, a new set of neuroscience research findings suggests that losing track of time is also intimately bound up with creativity, beauty, and rapture.

During what psychologists call “flow states,” where one is completely immersed and absorbed in a mental or physical act, people often report an altered sense of time, place, and self. It’s a transportive and pleasurable experience that people seek to achieve, and that neuroscience is now seeking to understand. A great example of flow state is found in many improvised art forms, from music to acting to comedy to poetry, also known as “spontaneous creativity.” Improvisation is a highly complex form of creative behavior that justly inspires our awe and admiration. The ability to improvise requires cognitive flexibility, divergent thinking and discipline-specific skills, and it improves with training.

Exactly :)

Arizona Moonrise

Interdependence rules ...

Credit: Alexey Protasov / Adobe Stock

Life impacts the environment, the environment impacts life as interfependence rules due to the fact reality is quantum and certitude but a mirage. 

To whit.

All animals adapt to their environment. Even humans, self-isolating animals that we are, are shaped by our surroundings. Every one of us is interdependent with the environment that we inhabit—it shapes us as much as we shape it.

While the Buddhist notion of interdependence dates back roughly 2,500 years, we didn't understand how profoundly the environment affects biology until Charles Darwin. Now one of his theories, long known as the "wind hypothesis," has been shown to be true. It only took 165 years to verify his observations.

The man himself.

Nature finds a way/rev XX

 The Pinatubo volcano mouse is faring better than ever. Photo: © Danny Balete, Field Museum

Nature finds a way, always. As proof, this little guy seen above, is really doing well even though his volcanic home decided to erupt and do away with his world big time back in 1991.

A huge cloud of volcanic ash and gas rises above Mount Pinatubo, Philippines, on June 12, 1991. Three days later, the volcano exploded in the second-largest volcanic eruption on Earth in this century.

The eruption laid waste to the area, and it might have seemed impossible that a tiny mouse population could have survived.

On the contrary, it appears the mice took the disaster in stride. Balete found more of the species following Pinatubo’s eruption than had ever been found before it. It’s possible, Rickart said, that the mice prefer the ruined-but-regrowing landscape around the mountain to the dense, old-growth forest that preceded the eruption, and which will grow back in future centuries, if given the chance. The team’s survey, for which most of the fieldwork was done in 2012, also noted the return of 16 species besides the mouse, including large mammals like wild pig and deer, suggesting that the biodiversity of the montane forest is on its way back to its former vigor. Among the detected species, the once-rare Pinatubo volcano mouse is the most abundant.

Repopulcation of existing or evolved life always happens as seen by the aftermath of the great extinctions earth has experienced over a billion years. Once we're gone, earth will rejuvenate just as she always has done since the beginning of time.

Monarchs totally rule :)

Nature, the long running treasure of PBS, outdid itself in filming Monarchs resting by the millions while wintering in Mexico. Stellar beyond measure.

In a recent video from Nature on PBS, you'll be able to get super close to resting Monarch Butterflies. As they wait for the temperature to rise, they huddle together to keep warm. Without disturbing any of the butterflies, they've managed to take close-up footage of the butterflies. The way they've managed to do this is by disguising a drone to look like a Hummingbird. As described in the video, hummingbirds are not a threat to the monarch butterflies, and for that reason they don't react to it at all. 

Once the temperature rises sufficiently the butterflies take flight and the scene is simply magical. The butterflies are able to comfortably fly around and even land on the drone without being hurt. This is because the drone has been designed in a way to ensure it cannot harm the butterflies. As the narrator explains in the video, the drones moving parts have been shielded to keep them safe. 

Excellent to a fault. :)

Worst case scenario

Photo by Emanuel Haas on Unsplash

Global Warming is a slow motion disaster of biblical proportions but now, said disaster has become a worst case scenario due to the massive melting of ice on the poles and Greenland.

Melting on the ice sheets has accelerated so much over the past three decades that it’s now in line with the worst-case climate warming scenarios outlined by scientists. 

A total of 28 trillion metric tons of ice was lost between 1994 and 2017, according to a research paper published in The Cryosphere on Monday. The research team led by the University of Leeds in the U.K. was the first to carry out a global survey of global ice loss using satellite data. 

“The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” lead author Thomas Slater said in a statement. “Although every region we studied lost ice, losses from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have accelerated the most.” 

And this ...

From Antarctica to the Arctic, the world’s ice is melting faster than ever, according to a new global satellite survey that calculated the amount of ice lost from a generation of rising temperatures.

Between 1994 and 2017, the Earth lost 28 trillion metric tons of ice, the survey showed. That is an amount roughly equivalent to a sheet of ice 100 meters thick covering the state of Michigan or the entire U.K.—and the meltwater from so much ice loss has raised the sea level just over an inch or so world-wide, the scientists said.

We talk about ice a lot here on Earther—or more specifically, the growing absence of it. A new study puts what’s happening to the planet in striking perspective. While I can tell you the results show 1.2 trillion tons of ice disappeared every year since 1994, it’s a lot easier to grasp as a visual.

That cube of ice up there towers 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) into the sky like a sunshade over Manhattan and stretches over a huge swath of New Jersey, from Newark Airport to Jersey City. That’s how much we’ve lost to burning fossil fuels on average per year over the past two decades. The skyscrapers of the Financial District and Midtown are toothpicks. More ominously, the cube is getting bigger as ice loss accelerates.

We did this to ourselves.

Subsidence

Subsidence: sub·sid·ence/səbˈsīdns,ˈsəbsədns/

noun:

the gradual caving in or sinking of an area of land.

"the race was abandoned because of subsidence of the track"

Similar: collapse, caving in, falling in, giving way, sinking, settling

AKA: The collapse of aquifers ... happening all over the world due to overuse of planet earth

Researchers have been warning about future water scarcity for decades, but new data reveals a majority of the world’s largest aquifers are already running out of water.

Using NASA satellite data on aquifer changes from 2003 to 2013, researchers from University of California Irvine published a study in Water Resources Research that shows 21 of the world’s 37 largest aquifers have passed the “sustainable tipping point,” meaning they are depleting faster than they recharge. Thirteen of the 21 aquifers cited fall into the “most troubled” category.

Most aquifers take thousands of years to refill, relying on snowmelt and rain to quench depleted reservoirs. But with climate change and drought pressuring parched communities, agriculture, and energy grids, reliance on groundwater is increasing, draining aquifers faster than natural systems can replenish them.

And this.

But scientists haven’t modeled global risks of subsidence—until now. To build their model, Sneed and her colleagues scoured the existing literature on land subsidence in 200 locations worldwide. They considered those geological factors (high clay content), as well as topology, as subsidence is more likely to happen on flat land. They factored in population and economic growth, data on water use, and climate variables.

The researchers found that, planet-wide, subsidence could threaten 4.6 million square miles of land in the next two decades. While that’s just 8 percent of Earth’s land, humanity tends to build big cities in coastal areas, which are prone to subsidence. So they estimate that, in the end, 1.6 billion people could be affected. The modeling further found that worldwide, subsidence exposes assets totaling a gross domestic product of $8.19 trillion, or 12 percent of global GDP.

The Ogallala Aquifer

The grain-growing region in the High Plains of America—known as America’s breadbasket—relies entirely on the Ogallala Aquifer. But long term unsustainable use of the aquifer is forcing states in the region to face the prospect of a regional economic disaster. As the High Plains states reach the verge of a major crisis, the states have taken different approaches to conservation with varying results.

The Ogallala Aquifer supports an astounding one-sixth of the world’s grain produce, and it has long been an essential component of American agriculture. The High Plains region—where the aquifer lies—relies on the aquifer for residential and industrial uses, but the aquifer’s water is used primarily for agricultural irrigation. The agricultural demands for Ogallala water in the region are immense, with the aquifer ultimately being responsible for thirty percent of all irrigation in the United States. The Ogallala Aquifer has long been unable to keep up with these agricultural demands, as the aquifer recharges far slower than water is withdrawn.

This is not sustainable but you already know that, right?

Partners in crime

Its pretty well known groupers and octopuses are smart, what's not really well known is the fact both often hunt together in sophisticated fashion as seen by this amazing video.

As they recount in a study published in the journal Marine and Freshwater Behaviour and Physiology, the researchers even started to decipher some of the signals. When octopuses preceded the hunt with what Bayley and Rose called a “pounce” gesture, engulfing corals with their mantle and turning white, it was their fish partners who ate. When instead octopuses made a “groping” gesture, inserting tentacles into a crack or crevice, it was their turn to dine. “It was very much a give-and-take scenario,” Bayley said. Other gestures and skin-pattern signals remain uninterpreted. (Bayley and Rose did not observe octopuses “punching” their partners, as another team of researchers recently documented in the Red Sea.)

Asked to review the footage, Culum Brown, a behavioral ecologist at Maquarie University who specializes in fish intelligence, said “they are clearly communicating with one another.” Brown, who agrees that the hunts are planned, is curious how about how they’re initiated. Do octopuses give the go-ahead? Or fish? And how are partners chosen? Brown pointed to research on groupers cooperating with moray eels to hunt. Those fish select the most competent eels, demonstrating a collaborative sophistication once thought limited to humans and certain primates. He also noted that, while octopuses seemed to take the lead, the collaborations seen by Bayley and Rose demand quite a bit of intelligence from the fish as well.

Partners in crime indeed. :)

1 - 45 ...

No doubt about it, America's had some really marginal presidents as it seems we often choose mediocracies to run the place including some exceptionally inept and venial individuals as seen by Trump, Harding, Pierce and Andrew Johnson, among significant others. Various polls stay pretty consistent with the top 10 but variances do occur as one moves toward the bottom feeders like Buchanan, considered by many to be the worst until Trump came along.

 James Buchanan, who served as president from 1857 to 1861, is often considered by historians to be the worst U.S. leader because of his actions in the lead-up to the Civil War. 

Credit...National Archive, via Newsmakers

With this in mind, yours truly's take on presidential rankings would put W near the bottom based on his disaster known as shock and awe, the worst strategic initiative this country has ever done, aided and abetted by the weapons of mass destruction lie. Lyndon Johnson and the nadir of Nam also comes to mind as this catastrophic endeavor also was started by the Gulf of Tonkin lie even though Johnson's push for civil rights via his Great Society programs elevates his status to some degree. 

Even conservatives from Atlanta, where Mr. Cooper lives, have had it with Mr. Trump, he said. “He has tarred and feathered himself, and I think it will blemish him for a long, long, long time.”

Douglas G. Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University and a member of the advisory panel for C-SPAN’s Presidential Historians Survey, said that Mr. Trump “was a bad president in just about every regard.”

“I find him to be the worst president in U.S. history, personally,” Mr. Brinkley said, “even worse than William Henry Harrison, who was president for only one month. You don’t want to be ranked below him.”

Mr. Brinkley brought up Richard Nixon, the only president to resign in disgrace.

“At least when Nixon left, he put the country ahead of himself at the last minute,” Mr. Brinkley said. “Now he looks like a statesman compared to Trump.”

Any questions?

12 Monkeys

12 Monkeys, a masterpiece for the ages, is highlighted in a wonderful and lengthy oral history piece in Inverse. Check it out. Worthwhile to the max.

To whit.

QUARTER OF A CENTURY AFTER ITS RELEASE, TERRY GILLIAM STILL CAN’T BELIEVE ANYONE LET HIM MAKE 12 MONKEYS.

“You have your moment when you’re a golden boy and they listen to you,” the director tells Inverse.

Read on, you won't be disappointed. 

Covid-19, not 12 Monkeys but ...

R. U. R.

1/25/1921 ...

DOMIN: Sulla, let Miss Glory have a look at you.

HELENA: (stands and offers her hand) Pleased to meet you. It must be very hard for you out here, cut off from the rest of the world.

SULLA: I do not know the rest of the world Miss Glory. Please sit down.

HELENA: (sits) Where are you from?

SULLA: From here, the factory.

HELENA: Oh, you were born here.

SULLA: Yes I was made here.

HELENA: (startled) What?

DOMIN: (laughing) Sulla isn't a person, Miss Glory, she's a robot.

HELENA: Oh, please forgive me...

R.U.R. is a 1920 science fiction play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. R.U.R. stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum's Universal Robots).[1] The English phrase "Rossum's Universal Robots" has been used as a subtitle.[2] It premiered on 25 January 1921 and introduced the word "robot" to the English language and to science fiction as a whole.[3]

It's inevitable.

According to a historical analysis conducted by Mr. Muro and others at Brookings, recessions such as the one we’ve been in are the times businesses are most likely to replace humans with automation. This happens because, when recessions hit, revenue falls faster than wages. The result is that automation goes from a nice-to-have to a perceived necessity for cash-strapped companies.

Even when the economy recovers, that automation isn’t going away, adds Mr. Muro. While in the long run automation increases economic productivity and creates more jobs, in the short term it can mean unemployment and worse jobs for those swept aside by it. There is also the chronic and worsening problem that America is experiencing ever-greater economic inequality despite increased productivity from automation.

When she gave talks a decade ago, says Dr. Knight, she told her audiences that the robot revolution was already well under way, only it was happening behind closed doors, in places like factories and warehouses. What’s different now is that the robot revolution is happening in public, and is therefore unavoidable, even personal. In our homes, our places of work, on our streets, in our skies, robots are becoming a part of our everyday lives as they have never before.

 As stated before in BRT, it's different now.

6 for the price of 1 ...

A NASA illustration shows the complex sextuple orbits of the nearby star system Castor. 

The newly-discovered system has a similar arrangement of stars. (Image credit: 

NASA/JPL-Caltech; edited by Nicholas Beeson)

Imagine if earth was centered inside this stellar carousel known as the Castor 6 star system. Tatoone, of Starwars fame, equipped with just two, would be a nothing while the complex light variances of the Castor system would be something else altogether with one innocent question ... would there ever be darkness? 

Ever ridden a teacup ride at a state fair? If so, you might have a small taste of life in a whirling, twirling sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system.

"Sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system" is astronomer-speak for a system with six stars all orbiting each other and all regularly eclipsing one another from the perspective of Earth — and astronomers have just found one named TIC 168789840.

With the Greek Myths being a biggie with yours truly, why is said star system named Castor? Well ... the Castor system, better known as the constellation Gemini, is associated with the twins Castor and Pollux in Greek mythology.

Which tells a most interesting tale. :)

Dioscuri, also called (in French) Castor and Polydeuces and (in Latin) Castor and Pollux, (Dioscuri from Greek Dioskouroi, “Sons of Zeus”), in Greek and Roman mythology, twin deities who succoured shipwrecked sailors and received sacrifices for favourable winds. They were the children of Leda and either Zeus, the king of the gods, or Tyndareus, Leda’s mortal husband and the king of Lacedaemon. According to the usual version, Castor was the son of Tyndareus and thus was mortal, while Pollux was the son of Zeus (who famously had approached Leda in the form of a swan)

Leda and the Swan, 16th-century copy after the lost painting by Michelangelo

Even bigger ...

Super massive black holes are humongous with some giants the equivalent of mass 10 billions times greater than that of the sun but researchers are conjecturing SLAB/Stupendously Large Black Holes of a size considered not possible until now.

A recent study suggests the possible existence of 'stupendously large black holes' or SLABS, even larger than the supermassive black holes already observed in the centers of galaxies.

The research, led by Queen Mary Emeritus Professor Bernard Carr in the School of Physics and Astronomy, together with F. Kühnel (Münich) and L. Visinelli (Frascati), investigated how these SLABs could form and potential limits to their size.

The key to the possible existence of SLABs centers on the flexibility of source material these entities may have devoured in the distant past.

In this study, the researchers propose another possibility for how SMBHs could form, which might evade this limit. They suggest that such SLABs could be 'primordial," forming in the early Universe, and well before galaxies.

As 'primordial' black holes don't form from a collapsing star, they could have a wide range of masses, including very small and stupendously large ones.

The search is on.

 

Fleeting Winter yet again ...

Anvil Ice

A different kind of Blue

Looking for the Center

Crosswalk @ 9:00PM

Channeling Jeremy Bentham

11 years ago, yours truly wrote about ...  a most ingenious "device" to keep prisoners in check by making it impossible for any of the denizens of such prison to see if they were, in fact, being spied upon via a visionary approach to surveillance known as the panopticon. 

To whit ...

The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched.

Fast forward to 2012 & beyond where Palantir's digital version of the panopticon is alive and well, not only operating in Afghanistan but also now in the states as surveillance and the art of tracking behavior is big business 24/7 due to Palantir's unique ability to sift through vast amounts of visual and textural content to enable the military and police, among significant others, to find specific skeins of data impossible to locate by any other means.

An aerostat is a giant surveillance balloon. Its onboard cameras and sensors suck up vast amounts of data on what’s happening on the ground. That raw data gets processed, organized, and aggregated into an army intelligence product thanks to software developed by Palantir Technologies. 

It gets better.

Activity-based intelligence began in the war theater with the presumption You are what you do, but it is now being pushed into a new realm, says Biltgen. One that asserts: Because we know what you did, we think we know what you are going to do next. “Just like [the film] Minority Report predicted in 2002.” Today, some of these same methodologies are being used by the US federal government, including the Department of Health and Human Services, to tag, track and locate people who might carry the coronavirus. This raises concerns among legal scholars of a burgeoning biometric cybersurveillance state.

The question to ask here is ...

Who controls what data gets saved as potential evidence, and what data gets deleted—including data that could potentially act in a defense? What happens to the rule of law when individual citizens are persistently surveilled without knowledge of, or access to, the information that is being collected on them? -  Annie Jacobsen - Wired