Wednesday, November 30, 2022

A-rhymic

Channeling Brazilian rhythms using Garage Band as the weapon of choice was the start point for doing this video. :)

Sunday, November 27, 2022

Friday, November 25, 2022

Convergence ...


Convergence

This small image, generated by yours truly on, sadly, no longer existing 3D fractal software, is not AI enhanced nor should it be as there's a time and place appropriate for the melding of AI to art, something I've done for over 50 years in various genres from music composition and writing to the visual including painting, graphics, photography and video with some degree of competency. With this in mind, the long Wired Kevin Kelly piece titled Picture Limitless Creativity at Your Fingertips gives one pause as there is inevitable cost in doing anything thanks to the two laws of thermodynamics.

The word assume yet again.




Kelly is right about the emergent power of AI but Scholars of creativity??? 
What the hell is that? 

Creativity 101:
  1. The Act of Creation - Arthur Koestler: The creative act is the joining together of two or more seemingly dissimilar ideas that generate a heretofore unexpected result. i.e. Chemistry - H20 consists of 2 Hydrogen + 1 Oxygen atoms, both explosive yet, when combined, becomes water. 
  2. The joke: Henny Youngman - Take my wife, Please. :)
  3. Creativity starts with the asking of a question: Why is this the way it is?
  4. Question everything - Einstein
  5. The ability to see relationships is key because everything is connected as reality is a Quantum space and entanglement stitches it together.
  6. Play is indispensable. What if ... is the real deal here. A sense of wonderment is essential.
  7. Creativity takes courage as new ideas disrupt the "natural" order of things.
  8. Creativity is problem-solving. It matters not the discipline used save that said discipline shapes how the creative act is produced.
  9. The act itself is ineffable and cannot be explained. Like quantum, creativity just happens. It cannot be forced, only acted upon when the idea shows up. The finished act is anything but as it can be explained after the fact without issue.
  10. Practice makes better. Beginners mind and intuition are key.
  11. The size of the problem solved dictates the significance of the creative act. i.e. Mixing anchovies with pineapples on a pizza is a creative act. The size or importance of the problem solved, not so much while Einstein's Theory of relativity proving that Newton was wrong at universal scale, is.
  12. Creativity, like tech and existence, has no morality. It simply is.
  13. Stay hungry, stay foolish - Stewart Brand/Whole Earth Catalog. :)
AI is but a tool, the issue now becomes, does the tool become the master? A good question to ask is it not?


Dividing line ...

Thursday, November 24, 2022

45 minutes ...


The quietest place yours truly ever experienced was early morning Death Valley where I did hear my body percolate at grand scale as the air stood still and no wildlife moved about to break the silence. This happened many years ago, prior to the age of tinnitus and deafness "enjoyed" by this rube as we speak. When reading the NYTimes piece titled Can I Survive the 'Quietest Place on Earth'? longer than 45 minutes, considered to be the absolute limit one can tolerate being in the room before going crazy as bandied about by social media without the need to vet said statement, the answer is yes given the intense tinnitus nature has bestowed upon me 24/7 as said condition masks bodily burbles and noises to a large extent without question. 

It would be cool to experience this sense of total silence yet again as the time spent in Death Valley veered close to being mystical as the sound our bodies produce 24/7 is both remarkable and disconcerting at the same time. 

To whit.

In a leafy Minneapolis neighborhood under a thick cloak of ivy stands a modest concrete building. Contained within the building is silence exceeding the bounds of human perception. This hush is preserved in a small room, expensively engineered to be echoless. Certain people find the promise of such quiet irresistible; it entices them, like a soundless siren call, to visit the building at great personal cost. The room of containment, technically an “anechoic chamber,” is the quietest place on the planet — according to some. According to others, it’s more like the second-quietest. It is quieter than any place most people will ever go, unless they make a point of going to multiple anechoic chambers over the course of a lifetime.

What happens to people inside the windowless steel room is the subject of wild and terrible speculation. Public fascination with the room exploded 10 years ago, with an article on The Daily Mail’s website. “The Longest Anyone Can Bear Earth’s Quietest Place is 45 Minutes,” The Mail declared. The story left readers to extrapolate their own conclusions about why this was so from the short, haunting observations of the room’s soft-spoken proprietor, Steven J. Orfield, of Orfield Laboratories.

“You’ll hear your heart beating,” Orfield was quoted as saying. And: “In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.” The experience was so “disconcerting,” The Daily Mail reported, that no one had ever “survived” a visit of longer than 45 minutes. In the decade since, the legend has been propagated, and sometimes further embellished with details about room-induced hallucinations, in outlets from Smithsonian Magazine (the official journal of the Smithsonian Institution) to UberFacts (an online trivia font with 13.6 million Twitter followers, no connection to the ride-sharing app and a tenuous one to facts).

Remember ...

The body is only totally still — totally silent — in death.

Happy T-Day. :)


Winter's coming ... No. 4200


Channel Crossing ...

Winter's coming, the season of elemental simplicity, the fabric of reality becoming easier to see for all willing to take the time it requires to understand why this is so. 

Any questions? :)



Any questions? :)

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Its all about the eyes :)



Cats, wild animals allowing themselves to live with humans, remain forever mysterious, a characteristic totally opposite from dogs, pack animals totally attuned to how humans function. With this in mind, yours truly had a fierce calico, only allowing me to carry her to the garage when a hellacious winter storm decided to come our way. The opposite is true with my son's cats as they, both males & siblings, allow themselves to be "loved" by two rambunctious young girls aged 3 & 6 with their only reaction to all this chaos expressed by slipping quietly away in order to prepare themselves for more affection. :)

Why this take? Well, it seems there's a way to communicate with cats in a deep way by simply blinking slowly, very very slowly according to research done by scientists who obviously love cats. 

Cats have a bit of a reputation for standoffishness, especially compared with dogs. But if you find your feline friend is a little hard to bond with, maybe you're just not speaking their language.

Research shows that it's actually not so difficult. You just need to smile at them more.

Not smile in the human way, by baring your teeth, but the cat way: by narrowing your eyes and blinking slowly.

In a study published in 2020, scientists observed cat-human interactions, and were able to confirm that this act of blinking slowly makes cats – both familiar and unfamiliar animals – approach and be receptive to humans.

"As someone who has both studied animal behavior and is a cat owner, it's great to be able to show that cats and humans can communicate in this way," psychologist Karen McComb of the University of Sussex in the UK explained when the results of the study were published.

"It's something that many cat owners had already suspected, so it's exciting to have found evidence for it."



Gotta try this without question. :)

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Infinity/Nothing ...


6:00 AM

While taking a walk, yours truly finally understood the connect of infinity to nothing as each is endless. Both entities extend to forever, something in concert with Tao and the Yang/Yin symbol showing how one aspect of reality endlessly slides into the other while both possess some of the characteristics of the other until the end of time. Simply astounding says it all. 

Zero also works. :)

Monday, November 21, 2022

Map of the observable universe


Minuscule to the max we are, especially when checking out the Map of the observable Universe, an interactive viewing engine for the ages.

Take a voyage to see why we are not even a dust mote in a reality we will never fully understand. :)


Check out the site and be amazed. I was. :)

Sunday, November 20, 2022

Transitions

From a road trip to a lunar eclipse 3 years ago, this is but a short random walk during early winter 2019.

Saturday, November 19, 2022

The legitimacy question ...


In 2014, the fix was also in as another breach of an SC ruling, this time Hobby Lobby, was posted "weeks before it was announced." according to Rev. Rob Schenck, an anti-abortion paster.

As the Supreme Court investigates the extraordinary leak this spring of a draft opinion of the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a former anti-abortion leader has come forward claiming that another breach occurred in a 2014 landmark case involving contraception and religious rights.

In a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and in interviews with The New York Times, the Rev. Rob Schenck said he was told the outcome of the 2014 case weeks before it was announced. He used that information to prepare a public relations push, records show, and he said that at the last minute he tipped off the president of Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain owned by Christian evangelicals that was the winning party in the case.

The legitimacy question ...

The minister’s account comes at a time of rising concerns about the court’s legitimacy. A majority of Americans are losing confidence in the institution, polls show, and its approval ratings are at a historic low. Critics charge that the court has become increasingly politicized, especially as a new conservative supermajority holds sway.

In May, after the draft opinion in the abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, was leaked in what Justice Alito recently called “a grave betrayal,” the chief justice took the unusual step of ordering an investigation by the Supreme Court’s marshal. Two months later, Mr. Schenck sent his letter to Chief Justice Roberts, saying he believed his information about the Hobby Lobby case was relevant to the inquiry. He said he has not gotten any response.



Question questions ...

Thursday, November 17, 2022

Up, Up & Away



 A very long OP-ED piece from the NYTimes detailing how The Donald could succeed in avoiding prison while running for president never disappoints. If nothing else, Agent Orange, like the Honey Badger, will never quit or apologize for being what he is, the charasmatic con man extraordinaire. 

Donald Trump and his business empire are currently the subjects of no fewer than five major simultaneous investigations, a truly extraordinary challenge for anyone, let alone a former and possibly future president of the United States. These are complicated investigations, with long and winding paths to resolution. They involve scores of federal and state investigators and witnesses across the country, from politicians eager to shield themselves from scrutiny to employees turning on their colleagues to a former president who knows how to navigate — and manipulate — the legal system like no one else.


Read the entire piece to see how the skater can skate free ... dozens of ways without question.

Solitude


The Sun/The Moon

Life satisfaction, what does that mean? Good question is it not? For yours truly, restlessness is part of the equation but many times, solitude works in reacquiring balance in one's life without question. Less noise in the system applies as it seems solitude is more than just apt according to the Big Think article titled Why very smart people are happiest alone.



150 seems about right ...

Any more than that, crazy comes into play.

The data they analyzed supports the assumption that good friendships — and a few good ones are better than lots of weaker ones — do significantly increase life satisfaction for most people.

In highly intelligent people, though, the finding is reversed: Smart people feel happier alone than when others, even good friends, are around. A “healthy” social life actually leaves highly intelligent people with less life satisfaction. Is it because their desires are more aspirational and goal-oriented, and other people are annoyingly distracting?

However, just in case this makes too much sense, the study also found that spending more time socializing with friends is actually an indicator of higher intelligence! This baffling contradiction is counter-intuitive, at least. Unless these smart people are not so much social as they are masochistic.

Works for me. :)


Blade Runner ...

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Toons

 

Wish fulfillment


Having a friend for dinner


Under construction


A forbidden romance


& pigs fly

A certain kind of Krazy


A certain kind of Krazy looms now that Agent Orange announced, for a third time, his pursuit of the presidency in order to stay out of jail, also includes the Freedom Caucus, poised  to make life hell for Kevin McCarthy, the toady forced to walk the tight rope in trying to manage the razor thin majority the repugs will have in the house beginning in January 2023.

To whit ...

Votes are still being counted in several states, but it appears that Republicans will very likely win a majority of House seats, while falling short in the Senate. The midterms will come down to several outstanding House races in California and Colorado where the GOP candidates are currently ahead, plus the Senate runoff in Georgia. Should present trends hold, Republicans will have something like 220 House seats and 49 Senate seats.

While this would mean Democrats have lost their national trifecta, it’s not great for Republicans either. They were eagerly expecting a massive electoral sweep, with a comfortable 20- to 40-seat margin that would give them firm control of the House. Instead it’s going to be a razor-thin margin with a notably unruly caucus.

Meanwhile, conservative elites have widely attempted to blame Trump for the poor result, but he is not going away quietly. On the contrary, he announced his presidential campaign on Tuesday night, and is already launching savage attacks on expected challengers like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—or “Ron DeSanctimonious,” as Trump recently called him. The next two years of internal GOP politics are going to be a reality TV catfight for the ages.

As proof ...

Moreover, several House seats that Republicans picked up are exceptionally vulnerable. In New York, they won several districts that went comfortably for Biden in 2020. Facing likely political extinction, some of those members might be induced to vote for a compromise nonpartisan Speaker, or even switch parties.

But the Freedom Caucus—about 50 of the craziest Republican House members, which is to say, about 50 of the craziest people in the entire country—is already making outlandish demands and plotting against McCarthy. They have presented “requests” that he essentially surrender his formal powers to the committee chairs, and are pondering running someone against him for Speaker. Reportedly, they haven’t settled on anyone yet, but one possibility is Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), last seen joking about Nancy Pelosi’s husband being assaulted with a hammer by a deranged conservative extremist.


A certain kind of Krazy indeed.

When you think about it ...

 

Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times

When you think about it, Agent Orange is like a honey badger, relentless, never giving up and ... hate to say it, charismatic, as the money he's made for the networks, while president, was truly epic and ... DeSantimonious is not charismatic in any way, shape or fashion.

A notion devoutly to be unwished ...

Because American politics has been so dominated by an entertainer, the most inevitable thing in the world is a sequel.

Donald Trump is expected to announce his inevitable 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday in Florida. He is not as weak a candidate as many people might expect — or hope — him to be. I believe he is most likely to be the 2024 Republican nominee for president, and since we have only two major political parties, he could win in the general election — and that would be bad for the country.

Unless and until somebody else comes into the arena and proves otherwise, and despite disappointing Republican midterm election results that many people blamed Mr. Trump for, he remains the leader of the Republican Party. His style of personalized politics is incompatible with coalitional politics of any kind, and his agenda for personal rule in a second term is shaping up to be a nightmare.

He sets out in this pole position because the G.O.P. is a mess. What the midterms exposed again is that the party as it is currently configured doesn’t make any political sense and is a losing electoral proposition.

But that is not necessarily a problem for Mr. Trump. In fact, a Republican Party that is in disarray and divided by bitter recriminations and factional rivalries is the perfect environment for him. After all, bitterness and recriminations are his main instruments, and it is when Republicans are at their lowest political ebb — when they are feeling the most vulnerable, victimized and marginalized — that Mr. Trump is at his political best.

When you think about it ...

Getty Images

Always alert to an opportunity to position himself at center stage, former President Trump held a rally on Saturday in Latrobe, Pa.

Ostensibly a platform for the Republican candidacies of Mehmet Oz for senator and Doug Mastriano for governor, Trump turned the gathering into a promotion for his own 2024 presidential restoration. 

“We’re winning big, big, big in the Republican Party for the nomination like nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said, referencing an unspecified poll. “There it is — Trump at 71. Ron DeSanctimonious at 10 percent.”

A honey badger indeed.

Monday, November 14, 2022

Near Real Time


 
The Blood Moon 2022 is the start point of this clip with emphasis on recording a most unusual sunrise on the morning after a total lunar eclipse seen by all on the east coast willing to get up at four and face the wind while watching as nature puts on a show for us rubes. Enjoy.

Daffy Duck anyone?

 


Question, would you trust this man to run your business or go out with your daughter as these were the same questions asked of Agent Orange when Trump was running for president.

I think not but Herschel's not the chosen one for smarts, he's the chosen one to be a rubber stamp for the repugs.






Exactly.

Sunday, November 13, 2022

Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte



Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte's storyline goes like this ...


Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte.jpg

In indirect fashion, Charlotte also applies to how many countries the US military is surreptitiously involved with in the year of our lord 2022 as the MIC has also gone mad in its endless pursuit of money.


... and we don't include Vietnam in this truly excellent adventure as this CF started over 50 years ago.

What's worse is the fact congress and DOD appear to be in the dark as well.

Sagittarius A*



In the center of the Milky Way lurks a fairly quiescent monster, a relatively small supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A*, a tiny entity compared to its much larger cousin, M87. How these engines of creation and destruction work vis a vis the galaxies that house them has perplexed researchers for years but with sophisticated tools such as the Event Horizon Telescope, these objects of fascination and dread are becoming better understood as seen by Knowledgable Magazine's in-depth article titled What the image of the Milky Way’s black hole really shows.






Read the rest of this detailed piece to see how our black hole was imaged if you dare. :)

Friday, November 11, 2022

Something's Afoot ... :)

Halloween Rocks. Nuff said. :)

600 billion ...


 In A self-inflicted CF,  yours truly complimented Musk on his engineering skills while at the same time, commenting, with vigor, on his disastrous purchase of Twitter, a truly bad investment of historical porportions as the man knows not his limitations in any way shape or fashion. Seems I'm not alone on this take as seen by Barry Gander's excellent article seen below.

Tesla’s stock has just dropped almost 50% to $193/share year-to-date.

Much of the drop comes from Musk’s purchase of Twitter…seen as a bad move. And now Musk wants to put Twitter behind a paywall.

Technical analyst John Roque of 22V Research says that Tesla’s $100/share is possible if things don’t start improving for the auto maker. If it reaches the $100 mark, Tesla’s market value will have fallen from a high of $1.2-trillion in January 2022 to $300-million. At its current price of $200/share, it is worth $600-billion. So even if it doesn’t drop to $100, it has lost $600-billion in less than a year.

For reference, Ford’s stock price only dropped 6% — so the problem is not in the auto market.

It gets better ...

I have nothing against Elon Musk and hope he succeeds, but let’s get real. Very few of his operations make business sense. If it weren’t for the fantasies of the stock market, he would still be a South African rich guy with pockets full of emeralds. Not a bad gig, but not the razzle-dazzle the markets are agog over.

Here’s how unhinged the investment mind-set is: Consider the business logic of the Tesla operation. The stock market puts Tesla’s value at $700-billion (down from $900-billion a month ago). This means that investors need a return of $70-billion a year for the next ten years. At a current profit margin of 15% — not sustainable, BTW, now that the other companies are in the EV game — Tesla requires sales of $480-billion. To get that, Tesla has to sell 10 million cars a year. The entire global passenger vehicle market sold under 75 million units in 2021. The largest firm, Toyota, has about a 10% market share (7.5-million vehicles). Tesla needs to sell more cars than Toyota to be worth the stock market value. BTW, currently it produces less than 1-million cars/year.

What were investors thinking, that they could get a return ten times higher than reality could deliver?

Factoids ...

Tesla in fact would not have got off the ground at all without help from the government: a $465 million Energy Department loan issued in 2010. The funds were double the amount that Tesla raised when it went public that year. This drew criticism from Republican 1.0 politicians like Mitt Romney, who called the company a “loser”. Investor Jim Chanos called Tesla a “walking insolvency”.

In the book Ludicrous — The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, by Edward Niedermeyer, he notes that:

- Tesla can’t make affordable cars;

- Telsa’s ‘Full Self Drive’ function does not work;

- Tesla is not an automotive story, it’s a celebrity story

He sums it up pretty harshly, concluding that Tesla is a confidence game.

In closing, a question to ask the rich ...

Socialism, BTW, obviously does not apply to businesses. However…If you are a taxpayer making (say) $50,000 a year, then $36 of your taxes goes to support food stamps, and $4,000 goes to corporate subsidies. Which group is the socialist group? Which is really living on “economic rent”?

But you would be comforted, no doubt, by the knowledge that you were at least paying taxes and doing your part. In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now among the world’s richest men, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes. Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.

These guys could end global hunger, eradicate homelessness, and end malaria, and still have $20-Trillion to take home and split among themselves. You know, in case the polo ponies needed polishing. They could give away $139-Trillion and still be worth as much as they were in 2000.

But Musk is a Republican, so it’s OK.

But it's not ok and, as stated before ...

The purchase of Twitter is one reason for the decline of Tesla’s value.