Ferocity personified

 

In the South American tropics, where hummingbirds must compete for food, evolution has drastically reshaped their bills.CreditCredit...Kristiina Hurme

Hummers are fierce. How do I know? Well, we have had a group of 7 frequenting two feeders for years with usually one obnoxious male guarding the stash along with one dominant female as silent partner. As often stated, one never grows tired of watching incredible aerial acrobatics and threat posturing to the nth degree in the birds' endless pursuit to get access to the all important sugar water when insects and flower nectar become increasingly scarce.

If you want to know what makes hummingbirds tick, it’s best to avoid most poetry about them.

Bird-beam of the summer day,

— Whither on your sunny way?

Whither? Probably off to have a bloodcurdling fight, that’s whither.

John Vance Cheney wrote that verse, but let’s not point fingers. He has plenty of poetic company, all seduced by the color, beauty and teeny tininess of the hummingbird but failed to notice the ferocity burning in its rapidly beating heart.

The Aztecs weren’t fooled. Their god of war, Huitzilopochtli, was a hummingbird. The Aztecs loved war, and they loved the beauty of the birds as well. It seems they didn’t find any contradiction in the marriage of beauty and bloodthirsty aggression.

In the Aztec religion, Huitzilopochtli (Classical Nahuatl: Huītzilōpōchtli [wiːt͡siloːˈpoːt͡ʃt͡ɬi], About this soundmodern Nahuatl pronunciation (help·info)) is a deity of war, sun, human sacrifice, and the patron of the city of Tenochtitlan. 

Ferocity personified indeed. :)

Late Summer ...

Survivor

Alium

Hosta bloom

Nasturtium in yellow

Sturgeon Moon/rev 1

Sturgeon Moon/rev 2

Solitude

Overlook

War is a racket/rev XX

Eisenhower's farewell speech warning us about the Military Industrial Complex.

As per Smedley Butler, the two time Congressional Medal Winner so forcefully said, War is a Racket, this time, the racket applies to Afghanistan. 

As the hawks who have been lying about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan for two decades continue to peddle fantasies in the midst of a Taliban takeover and American evacuation of Kabul, progressive critics on Tuesday reminded the world who has benefited from the "endless war."

Heads should roll but they won't. 

According to The Intercept:

This is a far greater return than was available in the overall stock market over the same period. $10,000 invested in an S&P 500 index fund on September 18, 2001, would now be worth $61,613.

That is, defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58% during the Afghanistan War.

"These numbers suggest that it is incorrect to conclude that the Taliban's immediate takeover of Afghanistan upon the U.S.'s departure means that the Afghanistan War was a failure," Schwarz added. "On the contrary, from the perspective of some of the most powerful people in the U.S., it may have been an extraordinary success. Notably, the boards of directors of all five defense contractors include retired top-level military officers."

U.S. military presence around the world in 2007. As of 2018, the United States still had many bases and troops stationed globally.

Any questions?

Taking the shot ...

The James Webb Space Telescope will travel 1.5 million kilometres from Earth and look back thirteen billion years.Illustration by Jonathan Djob Nkondo

The Webb, long delayed and way over budget will, if successfully deployed, change how man views the universe.

Twenty-five years and ten billion dollars in the making, the James Webb Space Telescope will enable scientists to see deeper into the past than ever before.

Next month, the James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to take a slow boat from Los Angeles, spend a few days traversing the Panama Canal, and arrive at a spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The telescope will have been twenty-five years and ten billion dollars in the making. Thousands of scientists and engineers from fourteen countries will have worked on it. It could have flown, sure, but it’s a tight squeeze—plus the telescope weighs seven tons, and Kourou’s airfield is connected to its spaceport by seven bridges not built to endure such a load. The telescope will be put into Ariane 5, a European rocket named for a mythical princess who helped a man she loved defeat the Minotaur and escape a maze. Ariane 5 will carry the telescope some ten thousand kilometres in thirty minutes. The J.W.S.T. will then continue on its own, for twenty-nine days, toward a lonely, lovely orbit in space, about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, where we will never visit it, though it will stay in constant communication with us. From Earth, it will appear ten thousand times fainter than the faintest star.

On its way, the telescope will slowly unfurl five silvery winglike layered sheets of Kapton foil, about as large as a tennis court. These sheets, each thinner than notebook paper, will function as a gigantic parasol, protecting the body of the telescope from the light and the heat of the sun, moon, and Earth. In this way, the J.W.S.T. will be kept nearly as dark and as cold as outer space, to insure that distant signals aren’t washed out. Then eighteen hexagons of gold-coated beryllium mirror will open out, like an enormous, night-blooming flower. The mirrors will form a reflecting surface as tall and as wide as a house, and they will capture light that has been travelling for more than thirteen billion years.

This is the hope, at least.

There's no safety net

There will be no way to go out and fix the J.W.S.T. if anything goes wrong. It’s too far away. Although it’s difficult to imagine such a complex project succeeding, it’s also difficult to imagine that humans have flown a little helicopter on Mars, or that our cell phones speak to satellites in the sky, which then tell us where we are on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. If you were a sky-watcher in the past, you might have looked for the stars to tell you something about your love life, your luck, your finances, or whether or not you should invade Prussia. You might watch to know how to steer your ship, or when to plant your quinoa. What are we looking for now?

The Webb

Infrared differs from visible, the Webb's prime differentiator from the Hubble.

Comparison of the Carina Nebula in visible light (left) and infrared (right), both images by Hubble. In the infrared image, we can see more stars that weren't visible before. Credit: NASA/ESA/M. Livio & Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)

Overall size comparison of Webb and Hubble. Credit: GSFC

Webb will have an approximately 6.5 meter diameter primary mirror, which would give it a significantly larger collecting area than the mirrors available on the current generation of space telescopes. Hubble's mirror is a much smaller 2.4 meters in diameter and its corresponding collecting area is 4.5 m2, giving Webb around 6.25 times (see calculation) more collecting area! Webb will have significantly larger field of view than the NICMOS camera on Hubble (covering more than ~15 times the area) and significantly better spatial resolution than is available with the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope.

Webb's sunshield is about 22 meters by 12 meters (69.5 ft x 46.5 ft). It's about half as big as a 737 aircraft. The sunshield is about the size of a tennis court.

Webb will orbit the sun 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) away from the Earth at what is called the second Lagrange point or L2. (Note that these graphics are not to scale.)

Taking the shot indeed.

Patterns one & all ...

 The nanometer-wide stripes seen in crystal growth (left) closely match those formed in a theoretical model based on Turing patterns (right).

Back in 1952, Alan Turing discovered chaos when he figured out how patterns in nature emerge using two variables, one to generate the pattern and another to inhibit it, thus giving rise to organic lines or stripes whether they reside on fish, tigers, bacteria or galaxies. Now it seems Turing's equations also work at nano scales as seen by new research dealing with crystals and how they grow on a given surface.

The stripes looked like a mistake.

Several years ago, a team of physicists at Stanford University led by Aharon Kapitulnik was trying to grow a thin layer of bismuth crystal on a metallic surface. But instead of forming a uniform sheet, the crystal became a patchwork of uneven growth. In some areas — those where the crystal layer was only one atom thick — a striking design emerged. Small stripes filled up irregular patches, and these regions butted against one another, their stripes oriented at different angles.

Kapitulnik couldn’t explain the stripes. Then on a working trip to Paris in 2017, he showed them to Yuki Fuseya, a theorist at the University of Electro-Communications in Chofu, Japan. “This is like a zebra,” Fuseya told Kapitulnik. And if the stripes were really like a zebra’s, he said, they could be a Turing pattern.

The possibility came as a surprise. Countless patterns in nature, from zebra stripes to psychedelic hallucinations and windswept ripples in sand, are thought to stem from a mechanism that Alan Turing proposed in 1952, between his famed code-breaking work during World War II and his tragic death in 1954. This kind of pattern has since been identified in the arrangement of bacteria, stripes on sea shells, and even the distribution of human settlements. This ever-growing list includes systems on vastly different scales, from embryos to galaxies.

The Turing pattern ...

The Turing pattern is a concept introduced by English mathematician Alan Turing in a 1952 paper titled "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" which describes how patterns in nature, such as stripes and spots, can arise naturally and autonomously from a homogeneous, uniform state.[1] In his classic paper, Turing examined the behaviour of a system in which two diffusible substances interact with each other, and found that such a system is able to generate a spatially periodic pattern even from a random or almost uniform initial condition.[2] Turing hypothesized that the resulting wavelike patterns are the chemical basis of morphogenesis.[2]

Six states generating a Turing pattern

They're everywhere ...

A Turing bifurcation pattern

An example of a natural Turing pattern on a giant pufferfish

Astounding says it all.

L 98-59b

 In It's just a matter of time, BRT discussed the likelihood of life in the universe. Seems this take may be true given that one exoplanet may have all the trappings of an environment capable of sustaining life. 

In the video immediately above, the ESO provides an artist’s impression of L 98-59b, which lies in its parent star’s habitable zone. Not only does this mean the exoplanet isn’t too hot or cold for life, but, in this instance, that the exoplanet may have an atmosphere. An atmosphere is a key ingredient for shielding life from the dangers of cosmic radiation.

It may be just a matter of time, right?

Counting by numbers 123 ...

The intelligence of corvids like ravens and crows is well known. Recently, crows were even shown to have a numerical ability seen in few other species so far: a grasp of the concept of the empty set — the numerosity zero.

Crows, parrots, bees and frogs, among significant others, know how to count as if their lives depend on it because it does, a finding not so surprising when you take in account just how important knowing how to count truly is to most of the fauna residing in the world.

An understanding of numbers is often viewed as a distinctly human faculty — a hallmark of our intelligence that, along with language, sets us apart from all other animals.

But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Honeybees count landmarks when navigating toward sources of nectar. Lionesses tally the number of roars they hear from an intruding pride before deciding whether to attack or retreat. Some ants keep track of their steps; some spiders keep track of how many prey are caught in their web. One species of frog bases its entire mating ritual on number: If a male calls out — a whining pew followed by a brief pulsing note called a chuck — his rival responds by placing two chucks at the end of his own call. The first frog then responds with three, the other with four, and so on up to around six, when they run out of breath.

But there's a significant difference as to how man does numbers vs animals ...

But impressive as the animals’ accomplishments are, he emphasized that there are critical differences between how animals have been shown to conceptualize numerosity and how humans do it. We don’t just understand quantities; we link them to arbitrary numeric symbols. A set of five objects is not the same as the number 5, Nieder said, and the empty set is not the same as 0.

By taking this step beyond numerosity and building a symbolic system of enumeration, humans have been able to develop a more precise and discrete concept of number, manipulate quantities according to specific rules, and establish an entire science around their abstract use — what we would call mathematics.

In behavioral studies, honeybees have demonstrated an understanding of the numerosity zero. They have also been trained to perform simple acts of arithmetic, although it is not known whether they use this ability in the wild. Anne Moffat for Quanta Magazine

Counting by numbers indeed. 

Code Red

This pix, when taken, was just a nice setting sun, nothing ominous or portentous of anything grave save it was a beautiful summer day coming to a glorious end. Now, when looking at this image, another take comes to mind, that of a coming darkness thanks to us heating up the world. For years, BRT has discussed, in dire terms, the coming GW storm of our own making but you, my loyal readers, already know this. Nothing of consequence is being done and nothing of consequence will be done until a monumental catastrophe happens as change is hard and man doesn't make a move until something big happens, thus forcing change upon us. It's now Code Red. The question to ask is, what are we going to do about it?

Nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded.

Humans have already heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, largely by burning coal, oil and gas for energy. And the consequences can be felt across the globe: This summer alone, blistering heat waves have killed hundreds of people in the United States and Canada, floods have devastated Germany and China, and wildfires have raged out of control in Siberia, Turkey and Greece.

But that’s only the beginning, according to the report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations. Even if nations started sharply cutting emissions today, total global warming is likely to rise around 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next two decades, a hotter future that is now essentially locked in.

Betting pool, 3+ within 50 years. 

The clock is ticking ...

Click here for the IPCC report. 

It's just a matter of time ...

 It's just a matter of time when man discovers extraterrestrial life given just how vast the universe truly is.

A solar system much like ours

Astronomers have found more than 4,000 exoplanets, worlds orbiting distant stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Many reside in planetary systems vastly different from ours. But, on August 5, 2021, astronomers said they’ve found a distant planetary system that has intriguing similarities to our sun’s inner solar system. One of the planets is about half the mass of Venus, the planet next-door to Earth. Another could have oceans. And there might be yet another rocky world in this system’s habitable zone.

This infographic shows a comparison between the L 98-59 exoplanet system (top) with part of our own inner solar system (Mercury, Venus and Earth). There are four confirmed rocky planets and a fifth candidate. Image via ESO/ L. Calçada/ M. Kornmesser/ O. Demangeon.

It just a matter of time ...

Close encounters ...

Close encounters of a deadly kind is in play with the Delta variant of COVID-19. It gives one pause as to whether it might be a good idea to get the jab, right?

It lasted only a few seconds: One man walked past another man in a mall in Sydney. When officials later watched CCTV footage of the encounter, they saw that this was the only interaction between the two. But it was enough for one of the men, who didn’t realize that he was infected with the delta variant of the coronavirus, to infect the other.

As COVID-19 cases from the delta variant continue to swell, it’s clear that some things are fairly risky—it isn’t an ideal time to spend hours sitting unmasked in a crowded bar, especially with unvaccinated people. But how risky is it to quickly pass someone at a grocery store or wait in line at a bank?

Some facts about Delta ...

Others have suggested that it’s more likely to happen with delta than with the original virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had originally estimated that “close contact” with an infected person meant spending 15 minutes together, unmasked and indoors. A recent, not-yet-peer-reviewed study suggests that the delta variant may have a viral load that is 1,000 times higher than the original virus. If that’s correct, Céline Gounder, a clinical assistant professor of medicine and infectious disease at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, roughly calculated that the equivalent amount of time for the delta variant would be one second of contact rather than 15 minutes. Still, 15 minutes was never a magic number—the CDC later revised it to say that a cumulative 15 minutes throughout the day would also be considered close contact, and it’s likely that some people were unlucky enough to catch the original virus much faster.

End game

The bottom line: It’s crucial to get vaccinated. There’s still a chance you’ll get sick, but it’s less likely, and it’s much less likely that you’ll end up severely ill or dead. 

As followup ...

A major worry right now is Delta, a highly contagious SARS-CoV-2 virus strain, which was first identified in India in December. It swept rapidly through that country and Great Britain before reaching the U.S., where it is now the predominant variant. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) described Delta as more transmissible than the common cold and influenza, as well as the viruses that cause smallpox, MERS, SARS, and Ebola—and called it as contagious as chickenpox in an internal document, a copy of which was obtained by and reported on in The New York Times. The highest spread of cases and severe outcomes is happening in places with low vaccination rates, and virtually all hospitalizations and deaths have been among the unvaccinated, the CDC says. But the CDC released data in July that showed vaccinated people also can transmit Delta, which officials did not believe to be the case with other variants, and which led the agency to make a prompt revision to its masking guidelines.

Sounds like a plan does it not?

Endless arcs & whorls :)

Subatomic particles become visible as graceful arcs and whorls in bubble chambers 

(this image from 1978) and other detectors. FERMILAB

20th century hieroglyphs comes to mind when looking at elegant particle physics bubble chamber output as per the graphic seen above. Quantum is reality and tech like this shows why this notion rings true.

How particle detectors capture matter’s hidden, beautiful reality

At every moment, subatomic particles stream in unfathomable numbers through your body. Each second, about 100 billion neutrinos from the sun pass through your thumbnail, and you’re bathed in a rain of muons, birthed in Earth’s atmosphere. Even humble bananas emit positrons, the electron’s antimatter counterpart. A whole universe of particles exists, and we are mostly oblivious, largely because these particles are invisible.

To truly fathom matter at its most fundamental level, people must be able to visualize this hidden world. That’s where particle detectors come in. They spot traces of the universe’s most minuscule constituents, making these intangible concepts real. What’s more, particle detectors reveal beauty: Particles leave behind graceful spirals of bubbles, flashes of light and crisp lines of sparks. 

CERN’s UA1 detector was active from 1981 until 1990; its most notable discoveries were the W and Z bosons, together with the UA2 experiment. This image shows a section of the experiment, strung with many fine wires, on display at the CERN museum.

MARK WILLIAMSON/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The truth is out there. :)

Pandering as art form

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty

The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, penned by Tom Payne, challenged organized religion and the political "correctness" of the French Revolution in a crisp biting style totally different from the insane rantings of Trump & company in modern day America. Self-serving and dangerous, the rush to avoid reason and nuance in order to gain power goes beyond anything seen in US politics in this writer's opinion.

These Shameless Republicans Desperate to Outlast Trump Know Better, but They Don’t Care

Trump lives in fear of the vapers and lunatics who support him, and ambitious GOP politicians live in fear of Trump.

Trump Republicans—who, at this point, are almost the only Republicans left. Yet, as the recent political fortunes of Florida’s Ron DeSantis demonstrate, their cynicism could well end up having the better of them.

You can see that cynicism, and the lack of shame, in the likes of JD Vance, a Trump critic now running for Senate as a loyal MAGA man, and first-term Rep. Nancy Mace, two of the party’s smartest and most shameless young politicians, willing to abandon their own stated positions and embrace morally repugnant ones if that’s what it takes to be a member in good standing of the Republican Party. The pandering of Mace and Vance reflects the fact that the Republican Party remains under Trump’s sway, even after he decisively lost the popular vote in 2016, then cost his party control of the House in 2018 and then the White House and Senate in 2020.

It turns out that Joe Biden was right to predict that Trump’s defeat would induce an “epiphany” in the Republican Party—but terribly wrong about what that epiphany would be. A party that’s lashed itself to a proven loser and his most devoted supporters is rapidly becoming ever more enthusiastic in its appeals to racism, nativism, conspiracy theories and frontal attacks on democracy itself.

It’s an approach that is as politically nonsensical as it is morally abhorrent, a descent into overt fascism that is the product of two complementary dynamics: Trump’s fear of losing the support of the extremists and bigots he invited into the party and its seats of power and the fear of the party’s “leaders” of losing the support of Trump himself.

Read the Daily Beast's piece in its entirety to see how how pandering becomes a dark art in the land of the free and home of the brave. 

George Cruikshank's The Radical's Arms (1819), 

pillorying the excesses of the French revolution

Tiny ones save Red 1 & Queen Ann's Lace :)

Brown Damsel

Tiny Web Weaver

Queen Ann's Lace

Red 1

I'll take three ...

 3 it is. :)

Squabbling Galactic style :)

Three galaxies going at it, seen by this amazing Hubble shot, shows just how immense the universe truly is.

A dramatic triplet of galaxies takes center stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which captures a three-way gravitational tug-of-war between interacting galaxies. This system – known as Arp 195 – is featured in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a list which showcases some of the weirder and more wonderful galaxies in the universe.

Observing time with Hubble is extremely valuable, so astronomers don't want to waste a second. The schedule for Hubble observations is calculated using a computer algorithm which allows the spacecraft to occasionally gather bonus snapshots of data between longer observations. This image of the clashing triplet of galaxies in Arp 195 is one such snapshot. Extra observations such as these do more than provide spectacular images – they also help to identify promising targets to follow up with using telescopes such as the upcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.

Science never sleeps.

Orders of magnitude ...

Orders of magnitude ... without a doubt.

It's all about the money :)

Yes indeed. :)

The denial of history ...

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The 1st Amendment has costs. Whether it be letting neo Nazies march in Skokie, Ill or describing the ascent of Hitler in Germany, the inherent costs of allowing free speech can be summed up by the famous Salman Rushdie quote ... “Nobody has the right to not be offended." With this in mind, the censoring of data, such as Hitler's rise to power, is being increasingly controlled by algorithms and entities like Facebook and governments all over the world as speaking unpleasant truths is deemed no longer acceptable as seen by the US taking down confederate statures instead of posting on said statues why they were put up in the first place. To deny history evokes 1984 ... "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

100 years ago yesterday — on July 29, 1921 — Adolph Hitler was elected leader of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, later known as the Nazi Party. The combustible Army corporal succeeded the party’s original leader, Anton Drexler, whom Hitler originally been sent to spy on, but whose ideas he came to admire (he may even have shaved his mustache to emulate his predecessor). The 533-1 delegate vote set in motion a series of events that would dominate the next two and a half decades of world history.

 

This is fact and ...

Marotta’s accounts remind us that the past was once news, that stories we now remember as ossified, fixed narratives captured in black and white were once fresh, suspenseful events, that filled contemporaries with excitement, and uncertainty.

Whether it’s a snapshot of a socialist congress in Lille, France that at the time might have seemed the beginning of a global Western revolution, or a cartoon showing both sides of the prohibition debate that showed how extremes of opinion dominated discourse even back then, Marotta has a nice touch for putting readers in the mood of the era, while keeping our thoughts in the present. He is very much the opposite of a Nazi or a fascist, and posts about history in the hope that people will learn from it. “I have a step-grandmother who’s a Holocaust survivor,” he says. “That’s part of the reason I started the account.”

 After the war, disillusioned and bankrupt, the odd little Corporal worked as an intelligence agent for the government. While gathering information on the new German Workers’ Party, he grew fond of it and joined it. Today, he’s become its leader.
 

The denial of history ...

There is no politicking or advocacy observable here, not as standalone posts and still less in the context of hundreds of other entries about other scenes as disparate as Thomas Edison taking a nap under a tree, a woman on Tremont Street in Boston turning heads by wearing pants, or a Soviet ship shelled in the Russian Civil War.

Nonetheless, Instagram pulled Marotta’s post on Hitler’s election, saying it violated “community guidelines.” When he appealed the decision, the rejected him again, saying his content went against their guidelines on “violence or dangerous organizations”:

The denial of history indeed.