Blue Moon 2024 aka The Sturgeon Moon

August 19 | 2024 First of 4 super moons :)

A cool guide to full moons of 2024

Complexfication ...

Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff; Getty Images

Complexification, you know, the ability to bamboozle and confuse the great unwashed, like me, is everywhere. From needlessly complex software interfaces hindering one to do something simple like saving a file to a specific location to encountering blister packs requiring the use of industrial strength scissors to gain access to some gizmo residing inside while avoiding the possibility of getting badly cut in the process makes one crazy to a fault. 

As a designer, yours truly knows, from experience, to never let a coder design a front end to anything.

With this notion in mind, the interesting Wired article , Should art be regulated by the SEC: NFT Artists' New Lawsuit Seeks Answers. brings complexification to a whole new level.

Note, Click here to see BRT's take on NFTs if you dare. :)

In 1946, a US Supreme Court ruling about the Howey Company, which sold citrus groves to buyers who shared in their profits, cemented the test for determining what a security is. The “Howey Test” defines securities as “an investment of money in a common enterprise with the expectation of profits from the efforts of others.”

In other words, Gottlieb says, it makes an investment contract a security. That can be tricky to apply to art, analog or NFT-affiliated. “When you sell a certificate, what you're really doing is essentially selling art collectors an interest in your art,” Frye says. That means buyers are investing in the expectation “that you're going to get more famous.” That fame, in turn, makes the art more valuable.

If you look at it that way and apply the Howey Test, Gottlieb says, it can look very much like art buyers are investing in a common enterprise and expecting to benefit from the artist’s efforts. The difference, Gottlieb says, is that “artists don’t owe you anything.” You may hope that your purchase of an autographed Brat album will go up in value as Charli XCX keeps selling out concert venues, but that wasn’t promised with the record’s sale. Same, the suit argues, goes for a digital cat cartoon tied to some blockchain-based code.

Sounds rather specious to me.

Complexification (Lie group) writ large. :)

Nothing is forever ...

Mike Mcquade

Memories depicting our view on reality, range from the internal residing in our minds to the external consisting of, in part, words, sounds, images and video, express, in no uncertain terms, what it means to be human. Said entities are fragile at best, something able to be lost forever at a moment's notice if we let it, is a most disconcerting circumstance thanks to the inevitablilty of entropy, something intrepid people are tying to prevent in ways most inspiring without question.

We shouldn’t try too hard to imagine what future historians would find interesting about us, says Niels Brügger, an internet researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark. “We cannot imagine what historians in 30 years’ time would like to study about today, because we don’t have a clue,” he says. “So we shouldn’t try to anticipate and sort of constrain the possible questions that future historians would ask.”

Instead, Brügger says, we should just save as much stuff as possible and let them figure it out later. “As a historian, I would definitely go for: Get it all, and then historians will find out what the hell they’re going to do with it,” he says.

Nothing is forever ...

We no longer have such space limitations. My iPhone takes thousands of photos a year. Our Instagram and TikTok feeds are constantly updated. We collectively send billions of WhatsApp messages and texts and emails and tweets.

But while all this data is plentiful, it’s also more ephemeral. One day in the maybe-not-so-distant future, YouTube won’t exist and its videos may be lost forever. Facebook—and your uncle’s holiday posts—will vanish. There is precedent for this. MySpace, the first largish-scale social network, deleted every photo, video, and audio file uploaded to it before 2016, seemingly inadvertently. Entire tranches of Usenet newsgroups, home to some of the internet’s earliest conversations, have gone offline forever and vanished from history. And in June this year, more than 20 years of music journalism disappeared when the MTV News archives were taken offline.

For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years. 

The endeavor raises complex questions. What is important to us? How and why do we decide what to keep—and what do we let go?

To be continued ...

The Fall of Phaeton

The Fall of Phaeton - Michelangelo Buonarroti 

(Caprese 1475 - Roma 1564)

The Fall of Phaeton depicts the mythological episode taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and particuarly the end of Phaeton’s life. Zeus, seen frontally and almost touching the cart with his foot, is launching a thunderbolt at proud Phaeton, who had dared ascend towards the heavens. 

One cannot control something when one doesn't know how it works. It matters not what kind of entity it is, the fact remains, if the inner workings of any given entity remains unknown, one cannot control it. 

AI is one such entity.

Throughout history many traditions have believed that some fatal flaw in human nature tempts us to pursue powers we don’t know how to handle. The Greek myth of Phaethon told of a boy who discovers that he is the son of Helios, the sun god. Wishing to prove his divine origin, Phaethon demands the privilege of driving the chariot of the sun. Helios warns Phaethon that no human can control the celestial horses that pull the solar chariot. But Phaethon insists, until the sun god relents. After rising proudly in the sky, Phaethon indeed loses control of the chariot. The sun veers off course, scorching all vegetation, killing numerous beings and threatening to burn the Earth itself. Zeus intervenes and strikes Phaethon with a thunderbolt. The conceited human drops from the sky like a falling star, himself on fire. The gods reassert control of the sky and save the world.

As often state in BRT, AI is an open-ended tech able to evolve, something different from anything man has ever done. The kicker is the fact AI's evolving in real time, millions of time faster than us, a most disconcerting fact without question.

AI is an unprecedented threat to humanity because it is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. All previous human inventions have empowered humans, because no matter how powerful the new tool was, the decisions about its usage remained in our hands. Nuclear bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill, nor can they improve themselves or invent even more powerful bombs. In contrast, autonomous drones can decide by themselves who to kill, and AIs can create novel bomb designs, unprecedented military strategies and better AIs. AI isn’t a tool – it’s an agent. The biggest threat of AI is that we are summoning to Earth countless new powerful agents that are potentially more intelligent and imaginative than us, and that we don’t fully understand or control.

Curvature

Being a good neighbor ... :)

A frog and a tarantula make good housemates. Credit: Francesco Tomasinelli and Emanuel Biggi

Tarantulas are cool. Big, hairy and pretty awesome without question but it seems they're good neigbors as well as seen by the pix above. I had numerous pets as a kid but never the big T. Now being a senior, I would love to have one but the upkeep would be steep and my wife would never allow it so this Physorg piece must suffice for now. :)

The research reported for the first time an association between tarantulas and snakes, whip spiders, and harvestmen, and also reported over 60 new cases of partnerships between tarantulas and amphibians from ten different countries.

According to the researchers, the interaction, or even cohabitation, between the tarantulas and other species is often mutually beneficial.

"Apparently, the frogs and toads that live within the retreats of tarantulas benefit from the shelter and protection against their predators. In turn, they feed on insects that could be harmful to the spider, its eggs, and its juveniles. It seems that tarantulas might not be as scary and threatening as their reputation suggests," says researcher and the first author of the study Alireza Zamani from the University of Turku, Finland.

I rest my case. :)

Night Sounds

The night is the best time to hear sounds, whether it be insects tying ther best to survive another night or intense winds issuing forth whenever a fast moving high pressure system makes its presence known. This, plus full moons to illuminate the environment at large, completes the picture as to why nature never disappoints. :)

The Demon-Haunted World

Carl Sagan is one of my heroes. Fearless, visionary, kind and wise, he embodies all that is good regarding critical thinking and why it matters. As a lay scientist and devout atheist, the mantra I try to adhere to is, as per Einstein, is ... Question everything because if you don't, the word assume applies, the most dangerous word in any language as it precludes questioning, the great possible leading to learning how the world operates at deep level.

Carl Sagan

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”

Any questions?

Acadian Driftwood

Listen closely to learn how The Band's Acadian Driftwood captures the tragedy
of the Acadian Diaspora.

The Band in 1969: (left to right) Manuel, Hudson, Helm, Robertson, Danko 

photo by ©Elliott Landy 1969

8" to 12" & counting ...

 

Debbie pepe 19 hours ago — Great quarter road Sandy hook

About a year ago, yours truly made a guesstimate as as to how much time we have left regarding relative normalcy vis a vis global warming. The guesstimate was 3 years before the gorilla's true impact finally begins to take off. Seems the gorilla's getting rather impatient as CT just got between 8 to 12 inches of rain on August 17 - 18, an amount equivalent to what Houston got, courtesy 2017's Hurricane Harvey but without the wind, thank god. 

With this being said, let's talk about how climate change will impact the making of stuff, you know, the material one endlessly buys in today's materialist world as the prognosis' not good by any stretch of the imagination. In 2024, we are producing the most stuff ever, something that will radically change because GW's just beginning, a most disconcerting fact without question.

Rob White 19 hours ago — Oxford House / Oxford CT / RT6

Photo by William Bossen on Unsplash

Fire and Ice | Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Seems fire and water will suffice but what do I know. I'm just a rube trying to cope in these uncertain times. 

Life ... finds a way

Summer is the best time to see just how persistent life truly is because nature's a tough place due to the fact competition for limited resources never ends, something readily seen with the intensity of bumble bees and Viceroys in their endless pursuit of nectar. Enjoy.

The age of extinction ... is here.

Image Credit: Living Planet Index

Do you remember when your windshield required constant cleaning caused by insects meeting their maker at speed, usually taking on a lime green color as your view of the road became increasingly compromised. Well, I do but not now as in the year 2024, yours truly's windshield remains virgin territory, showing yet again, the age of extinction is upon us thanks to climate change, the 900 lb gorilla promising to change how mankind lives on planet earth in ways differing from any other kind of disaster encountered thus far as said changes are happening in real time, a most disquieting circumstance entirely of our own making.

The Living Planet Report 2022 is a comprehensive study of trends in global biodiversity and the health of the planet. This flagship WWF publication reveals an average decline of 69% in species populations since 1970. While conservation efforts are helping, urgent action is required if we are to reverse nature loss.

To whit

“The staggering rate of decline is a severe warning that the rich biodiversity that sustains all life on our planet is in crisis, putting every species at risk — including us.”

“Across the world, and in the UK, nature is on its knees and our leaders are risking catastrophic consequences for people, planet and our economy by failing to act. We are hurtling towards a hotter planet where nature — and with it, our food, our homes and livelihoods — will be unable to survive without urgent action now to save our climate.”

Download the full report Here.

As we all know, nothing of real consequence is being done as man needs a catastrophe in order to really make change happen. As stated in BRT a while ago, the potential for a true catastrophe centers on India as that nation lies in the epicenter of a wet bulb future.

India experiences temperature/humidity indices in excess of the numbers seen above which means ...

As George Carlin says, it's not the earth's that's in trouble, we are.

The Wire Mill

The Wire Mill

The company, founded in 1834 by Benjamin Gilbert and Sturges Bennett in the Georgetown section of Redding, Connecticut finally ceased operations in 2001. 

In 2020, Redding took ownership of the 44 acre Wire Mill property in 2020 after a lengthy foreclosure process, beginning in 2015, which ended as a victory for the town after a favorable decision was made by the Connecticut Supreme Court.

In 2024, the cleanup and restoration of this historic property will begin in earnest but before this happens, this clip readily shows just how complex and intense the remediation task will be in the months and years ahead.

Enjoy. 

A sense of wonder ...

Two films posing the existential question, are we alone? Seems, as per recent findings on Mars  by Perseverance and Curiosity, the answer's becoming rather obvious but when one watches K-Pax and Contact, a sense of wonder issues forth regarding the possibility of intelligent life existing elsewhere as we know so little but that's ok. As per Richard Feynman, it's ok to not know everything but it's not okay to think you do.

Wanna take a ride? :)

Project 2025 ...

Photo by Pixabay, on Pexels

Going medieval seems to be the mission of the Heritage Foundation and the repugs with the intent modernity must be revoked and white men put in charge no matter how incompetent and evil said white men can be. With the SC already corrupted, thanks to Trump, Mitch and the Heritage Foundation as start point, why not finish the job and implement Project 2025 immediately after the Orange Menace becomes POTUS.

Mission Statement

The Left has spent millions fearmongering about Project 2025, because they’re terrified of losing their power. And they should be. Project 2025 offers a menu of solutions to the border crisis, inflation, a stagnant economy, and rampant crime. It shows how we can take on China, fix our schools, and support families. But most importantly, it dismantles the unaccountable Deep State, taking power away from Leftist elites and giving it back to the American people and duly-elected President.

Let's talk Deep State, AKA the defacto existence of the power elite residing in every civilization whether it be ancient China and Greece or modern day England and France because the rich and powerful, along with the military, have always run things as it's all about the money and its connect to power.
Always has been, always will be. 

Apart from this startling statement of actual truth, Project 2025 harkens to the past in very big ways.

To whit, as per Wikipedia ...

Project 2025, also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project,[3] is a political initiative published by the Heritage Foundation that aims to promote conservative and right-wing policies to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election.[4][5] The Project asserts that the entire executive branch is under the direct control of the president under unitary executive theory.[6][7] It proposes reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers as political appointees in order to replace them with people loyal to the president.[8][9] Proponents of the project argue it would dismantle what they view as a vast, unaccountable, and mostly liberal government bureaucracy.[10] The Project seeks to infuse the government and society with conservative Christian values.[11][12] Critics have characterized Project 2025 as an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan to steer the U.S. toward autocracy.[11][13][14][15] Legal experts have said it would undermine the rule of law,[16] separation of powers,[5] separation of church and state,[17] and civil liberties.[5][16][18]

Project 2025 envisions widespread changes to economic and social policies and the federal government and its agencies. The plan proposes taking partisan control of the Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Commerce, Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), dismantling the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuels.[16][19] The blueprint seeks to institute tax cuts,[20] but its writers disagree on protectionism.[21] It recommends abolishing the Department of Education, whose programs would be transferred or terminated.[22][23] Funding for climate research would be cut, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be reformed along conservative principles[vague].[24][25] The project seeks to cut Medicare and Medicaid,[26][27] and urges the government to explicitly reject abortion as health care.[28][29] The project seeks to eliminate coverage of emergency contraception[26] and enforce the Comstock Act to prosecute those who send and receive contraceptives and abortion pills.[29][30] It proposes criminalizing pornography,[31][32] removing legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,[32][33] and terminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs[5][33] and affirmative action[34] by having the DOJ prosecute "anti-white racism".[35] The Project recommends the arrest, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants.[36][37][38] It proposes deploying the military for domestic law enforcement.[39] It promotes capital punishment and the speedy "finality" of those sentences.[40][41]

Question, do you actually think any rational person would like to see Project 2025 implemented?

I thought so. 

When the center goes ...

When the center goes, the rest of a given entity goes as well, something researchers fear will happen regarding Greenland's ice and the ongoing reality of climate change.

To whit.

"Finding these fossils in the center of the ice sheet is unambiguous evidence that Greenland's ice has disappeared [in the past]," said Bierman. "And once you lose the center of the ice sheet, you've lost it all."

The findings supports what's called the "fragile Greenland" hypothesis: that nature, outside of human influence, has caused the ice sheet to melt at least once since it formed, Bierman said. 

At 656,000 square miles, the Greenland ice sheet currently covers around 80% of the island territory. To put that into perspective, it's about three times the size of Texas.

Drill dome and camp for GISP2, in Summit Greenland. Christine Massey

End game ...

"In the early years of the climate warming, it was mountain glaciers that were doing most of the melting and adding water to the ocean," he said. "Now it's Greenland."

While it could be a few thousand years before the entire Greenland mass melts, Bierman said, the consequences would be dire: hundreds of millions of people could lose their homes and businesses. Places we hold near and dear to our hearts would be lost.

"As I like to say when people ask me, why does it matter? I say think about your favorite beach. And then imagine your favorite beach with 25 feet of water on it," Bierman said.

Hopper

A Bug's Life, Pixar's action comedy for the ages, introduced a villain for the ages, Hopper, a power hungry grasshopper actually possessing no power at all when the ants finally wake up and realize said villain is a paper tiger after all, a reality that may actually mirror what's beginning to happen to Agent Orange now that Kamala Harris has replaced Joe Biden in the most important election this country is having since the Civil War. With this being said, the fever dream of The Donald may finally be ending if  Buttigieg's right regarding the insane, would be dictator who aspires to be king, if the orange menace wins the presidency in 2024.

Photo illustration by Devin Oktar Yalkin

This past month has been one of the most consequential and dizzying periods in modern American politics. It began with President Biden’s disastrous debate in late June. Then came an assassination attempt against former President Trump. A week later, President Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. And now Harris is already the de facto Democratic nominee.

What I’m hearing you say, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is if Donald Trump is defeated in this election, then perhaps the Republican Party can be freed from his grip?

I think so. I made myself watch the first couple Republican presidential debates, and we had a lot of Republican candidates this cycle. There were still some things that I thought were pretty fringe, and just about everything I heard I disagreed with, but apart from some of the darkness of Vivek’s populism, you could be forgiven for thinking you were looking at a more normal Republican Party. Look, we have fooled ourselves many times before into thinking that the fever would break. We thought it would happen before he was elected, when the “Access Hollywood” tape revealed that he had boasted about sexual assault. We thought it would happen when he was defeated, but he wasn’t in 2016. We thought it might happen after Jan. 6, and it very, very nearly did. So many of the people who are now kissing up to him basically turned their back on him then. We got so close to the fever breaking, but it didn’t quite break, because Republicans found that their access to power still depended on their standing with Donald Trump. If he leads this party to defeat a third time, I believe that the self-interest, just the internal power dynamics of the G.O.P., the very power dynamics that have kept them enthralled to him, even though so many of them know better(notably including, by the way, JD Vance, who, back when he was speaking truthfully and for himself, referred to Donald Trump as an idiot and compared him to an opioid, which is an exceptionally dark thing to say about somebody if you are from or connected to Appalachia as JD Vance is, right? And that was in public. In private, comparing him to Hitler, and now turning around and supporting him) — all of that finally breaks loose if they realize that attaching yourself to Donald Trump doesn’t just destroy your character; it destroys your access to power.

If is a big word ...

Bring out the dead ...

A vulture in northern India, in 2020. A drug given to cattle in the 1990s nearly wiped out the birds in South Asia.Credit...Sanjay Baid/EPA, via Shutterstock 

Blowback or the law of unforseen consequences rules, in this case, regarding vultures and why they are so important to biodiversity and the survival of other species, including us, as somebody has to take care of the dead and vultures are some of the best at it as India found out when the janitors of the natural world were prevented from doing their job.

To whit ...

To say that vultures are underappreciated would be putting it mildly. With their diet of carrion and their featherless heads, the birds are often viewed with disgust. But they have long provided a critical cleaning service by devouring the dead.

Now, economists have put an excruciating figure on just how vital they can be: The sudden near-disappearance of vultures in India about two decades ago led to more than half a million excess human deaths over five years, according to a forthcoming study in the American Economic Review.

Rotting livestock carcasses, no longer picked to the bones by vultures, polluted waterways and fed an increase in feral dogs, which can carry rabies. It was “a really huge negative sanitation shock,” said Anant Sudarshan, one of the study’s authors and an economics professor at the University of Warwick in England.

The findings reveal the unintended consequences that can occur from the collapse of wildlife, especially animals known as keystone species for the outsize roles they play in their ecosystems. Increasingly, economists are seeking to measure such impacts.

It's not just vultures either.

A study looking at the United States, for example, has suggested that the loss of ash trees to the invasive emerald ash borer increased deaths related to cardiovascular and respiratory illness. And in Wisconsin, researchers found that the presence of wolves reduced vehicle collisions with deer by about a quarter, creating an economic benefit that was 63 times greater than the cost of wolves killing livestock.

Emerald Ash Borer Beetle