State of Affairs

The US is in trouble. No money, no oil, nada, zilch, something BRT eluded to in The Long Emergency.

Common Dream's take is just as compelling:

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

The sense of helplessness is even reflected in this year’s presidential election. Each contender offers a sense of order - and hope. Republican John McCain promises an experienced hand in a frightening time. Democrat Barack Obama promises bright and shiny change, and his large crowds believe his exhortation, “Yes, we can.”

Platitudes and BS don't cut it anymore. Both pols running for president, to date, haven't a clue about what's to be done. Here are some suggestions.

1. Tell the Truth! Americans need to know we are in very deep doo doo. Patriotic claptrap telling everyone why we are great is crap.
2. Be courageous as the decisions to be made are the kind that the powers at be are not going to like.
3. Be visionary in approaching the problems that face us.
4, Be inclusive and open in making change, don't approach problems like the way Hillary approached Health Care.
5. Do, not try a la FDR and his first 100 days.
6. Demand excellence. Stupidity is no longer acceptable, nor is sloth, greed or corruption as the earth does not need us and other nations in the world hate us.
7. Ride the horse, don't let the horse ride you and last but not least...
8. Good luck, you're going to need it.

End of rant - RM

Addendum: Climate change combined with man's shortsightedness forms a toxic brew worthy of Dune's Giedi Prime.

George, We will miss you

I am going to miss George big time. Irreverent, brilliant and mind-bendingly funny, George was one of my heroes. His riffs on religion, stupidity, prejudice and sloth absolutely hit the mark on defining the true state of America. Click here to get the bio on one of the greatest comedians (philosophers) of all time. To me, he and Richard Prior were the best and now both are gone.

Click here to read a relatively recent Mother Jones interview with George C.
Click here to see why the guy mattered.

Let's cut the crap. - George Carlin

Renaissance

Billboard Woman: I like being beautiful. I like to stay fit. That's why I like Avalon. With Avalon, I know I'm beautiful. And I'm going to stay that way.

Stylish beyond words, a look unique and a story line worthy of The Third Man, I saw Renaissance late at night while hanging out with my brother. Sin City comes to mind here but unlike SC, the real person characters (rotoscoped & chromo keyed) are truly composited into the flick whereas Bruce Willis and company (not rotoscoped but chromo keyed) play their parts in front (like dancers in front of a background). Both generes are extremely cool but Renaissance's visual cues are more integrated (Check out the transparencies generated by one shade of gray.). See the film, it will stun you with it's take on Sci Fi, society and the unsettling notion we are all under surveillance.

300 would make the cut but the dialog is really lame, thus compromising a wonderful synthesis of CG and live action.

Head Space

Of course Murry C would give me the heads up on mind-driven computing with his email titled, Solving the haptics problem...aka, Minority Report without the Gloves. Seems that Emotiv has developed a headset that can take brains waves to drive a computer. The product description and software set used to run the hardware include the following:

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) neuro-technology.
The Affectiv™ suite measures discreet emotional states.
The Cognitiv™ suite detects conscious thoughts.
The Expressiv™ suite can identify facial expressions in real-time.

Meatspace, your days are limited.

Holodeck 1.0

A holodeck is a simulated reality facility located on starships and starbases in the fictional Star Trek universe. The holodeck was first seen in the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Encounter at Farpoint"
Needles to say, this is science fiction, right?? Well...

The HoloVizio is a 3-D screen that will allow designers to visualise true 3-D models of cars, engines or components. Better yet, gesture recognition means that observers can manipulate the models by waving their hands in front of the screen. The function offers enormous scope for collaboration across the globe.

Said system runs on Linux and Windows and uses Voxels to generate 3D imagery without the need for glasses. (Voxel processing is a means of visualizing 3-dimensional shapes and structures implied by a series of cross-sectional images.) Cost of same probably necessitates a bank roll the size of Bill Gates' but, as people know, tech advances at double exponential speeds so one of the babies will sell at, god forbid, Walmart, for 29.95 around the year 2020.

Light Waves

When a weak intensity and high intensity beam are aimed at a liquid crystal valve, the output pulse is split into different diffracted pulses, each showing a different group velocity. The images above demonstrate image delay: image (a) is an original image imposed on the input pulse, and image (b) is the image from an output pulse delayed by several milliseconds.

Using pioneering research done by Havard's Lene Hau and Ronald Walsworth to slow light to a crawl (using supercooled rubidium gas & two lasers), scientists now have done the same thing using liquid crystals operating at room temperature. Because the form factor is small and the tech is mature, the impact this research will have on all things digital will be profound.

Optical computing/storage/networking, interferometry (Click on the image above to see how interferometers work.) and last but not least, image delay...

They imposed a 1-cm2 image on the low-intensity beam for a pulse duration of 180 milliseconds, and illuminated the image with the high-intensity beam. The output beams showed that the image was delayed by 82 milliseconds as it traveled through the liquid crystal. The image, which had a spatial resolution of 15 micrometers, appeared without any significant distortion due to the crystal’s homogeneity.

Through the Looking Glass & What Alice Found There - Louis Carroll

How Many Angels...

How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin? Depends on the size of the angels and the size of the pin. - R. Moran

In the case of tech, the question to ask is How Many Microbots Can Dance on the Head of a Pin? The answer, Ask Duke University as ..."videos produced by the team, two microrobots can be seen pirouetting to the music of a Strauss waltz on a dance floor just 1 millimeter across."


There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics - Richard Feynman

Economics 101 or Show Me the Money

$100 dollar bills are approximately 6.125 inches long by 2.5 inches wide. A 1" layer = 500 $100 dollar bills or one ream, the way the Fed packages money).


A standard box car is 50' long, 10' wide and 12.5' high. The volume of same totals approximately 6250 cubic feet (50'X10'X12.5'). Weight capacity, approximately 70 tons.

Using these dimensions, 4656 $100 bills would cover the floor of said box car (48 X 97 = 4656). A 1" layer (or one ream) would amount to 2,328,000 bills (4656 X 500 = 2,328,000) or be worth $23,280,000 (2,328,000 X $100). Filling one box car up would generate a cool $3,492,000,000 ($23,280,000 X 149 [12,5' = 150"- 1" {the ream already computed} or 149]).

Endgame: $15,000,000,000 divided by $3,492,000,000 = 4.295 box cars filled with $100s.

Addendum: The weight of each note is one gram. There are 454 grams in one U.S. pound, therefore, there should be 454 notes in (1) pound. Ergo: 150,000,000 bills divided by 454 (1 pound of $100s) = 330,396 pounds or 165 tons (30396/2000 = 165) .

Question: How does one lose $15,000,000,000 or 4.295 box cars filled with $100s weighing 165 tons?

Answer: Ask the Pentagon.

Oh, I forgot, they don't know. Maybe Haliburton might or the BA or better yet, the Tooth Fairy because she knows when you lose a tooth so finding something like $15,000,000,000 shouldn't be a big deal at all.

Stop Making Sense - Talking Heads

Addendum II: With the Iraq/Afghanistan wars projecting to cost 3 Trillion, the monies, if converted to cash, would be truly astounding. Just multiple 15 billion by 200 and do the math.

Same as it ever was - Talking Heads

Addendum. The amount may be 23Billion. Click here to see why.

Person Richard Cheney

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I Am the Walrus

Walruses are cool! As per the NYT article; “The first thing the walruses will do when they come over is start pushing at you, pressing their heads right into your stomach,” he said. “Don’t let them get away with that. No matter how hard they push, you have to stand your ground.”

I stopped short, confused.

“If you don’t stand your ground, you’ll be knocked over or backed against a wall in no time,” Dr. Schusterman said.

But but ... I sputtered. How was I supposed to stand my ground against an animal the size of a Honda Civic? This sounded less like “friendly and playful” than “aggressive and possibly dangerous.”

“Just push back on the snout with the palm of your hand and blow in its face,” Dr. Schusterman instructed. “A walrus really likes to be blown in the face.”

But suddenly there I was in the pen, time expanding as I watched Sivuqaq, a 2,200-pound adult male, roll toward me like a gelatinous, mustachioed boulder and head straight for my solar plexus. Somehow, either out of professional pride or rigid terror, I managed to stay standing and stuck out my palm; when Sivuqaq nuzzled against it, all my fears fell away. I stroked his splendid vibrissae, the stiff, sensitive whiskers that a walrus uses to search for bivalves through the seabed’s dark murk, and that feel like slender tubes of bamboo. Then I blew in his face, and he half-closed his eyes, and I huffed and puffed harder and he leaned into my breath, all the while bleating and grunting and snorting for more."

Amazing stuff here, all the more reason to stop bickering about the causes of global warming and doing something about it. Man is creating the equivalent of a Permian Extinction through gross mismanagement of the earth's resources. We are in desperate trouble yet we continue to, for the most part, act as if climate change is "a ways off" so we can continue to pollute and generate ever more greenhouse gases that will kill off the kind of magnificent animals like the Walrus and Polar bear.

As stated in a previous BRT article (click here) , the tech is there to do something about it, the question remains, do we have the will to do something about it?

XO-2

"At OLPC's Global Country workshop today, founder Nick Negroponte unveiled the next-gen XO Laptop, and it totally blows the original away. About half the XO 1.0's size and more like a foldable book, it does away with the keyboard and trackpad to go totally touchscreen—that's right, dual touchscreens, straight out of the future, like a kid's book in Minority Report. Folded all the way out, the displays work like a single continuous one, for say, a sweet game of Pong. Like XO 1.0, the display by Pixel-Qi will look fine indoors or in bright sunlight. Unfortunately, it really is from the future: Due in 2010, they're aiming for $75 and one-watt power consumption. "

Hey Apple, MacBook needs a redo, now.

Click here to get another take on this very cool machine. Click here to see a BRT review of XO1, a system that is still ahead of it's time.