The Perfect Retort

It's a 5!!! :)

College Tuition - Not

College too expensive? Try YouTube

The Google Inc.-owned YouTube has for the last few years been forging partnerships with universities and colleges. The site recently gathered these video channels under the banner YouTube EDU (http://www.youtube.com/edu ).
More than 100 schools have partnered with YouTube to make an official channel, including Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale and the first university to join YouTube: UC Berkeley.

To see how powerful a notion this is, play Lecture 7 of Leonard Susskind's Modern Physics concentrating on General Relativity. Recorded November 3, 2008 at Stanford University. This Stanford Continuing Studies course is the fourth of a six... Note: Susskind, is a Noble Laureate

Better yet, check out MIT's amazing Open Courseware initiative whereby all of MIT's 1800 courses are online and free for all to download and learn from. (BRT 01/19/2008)

When MIT did the deed in 2002, they open up a Pandora's Box to encourage countries and their colleges and universities to get into the act and they did, in spades. To see how this concept has taken hold, click on the Open Consortium logo seen below.

IMHO, this movement will become one of the prime drivers of higher education because Fred and Susy will no longer be able to send Harvey to Harvard when it costs a cool $70,000+ a year to do so. No doubt, well-off parents will continue to do the drill but it's clear colleges are going to take a hit because increasing tuition costs at a greater rate than that of inflation is a really bad idea in this tanking economy and, more importantly, given how fluid tech, science and the web are, the ability to solve complex problems is becoming more important than having a degree stating that one can so because having a degree does not confer competency in any given field, a fact well known to anyone who has had do the unpleasant task of firing a college graduate who could not get the job done.

Paycheck

Paycheck, a pretty good movie adaptation from a short story by Phillip Dick, depicts how memory can be selectively edited, something long thought to be science fiction until now.

"The father’s advice led the son, eventually, to a substance called PKMzeta. In a series of studies, Dr. Sacktor’s lab found that this molecule was present and activated in cells precisely when they were put on speed-dial by a neighboring neuron.

In fact, the PKMzeta molecules appeared to herd themselves, like Army Rangers occupying a small peninsula, into precisely the fingerlike connections among brain cells that were strengthened. And they stayed there, indefinitely, like biological sentries...

Dr. Fenton had already devised a clever way to teach animals strong memories for where things are located. He teaches them to move around a small chamber to avoid a mild electric shock to their feet. Once the animals learn, they do not forget. Placed back in the chamber a day later, even a month later, they quickly remember how to avoid the shock and do so.

But when injected — directly into their brain — with a drug called ZIP that interferes with PKMzeta, they are back to square one, almost immediately."

To see how the memory molecule works, click on the NYT graphic below.

"Cypher: I know what you're thinking, 'cause right now I'm thinking the same thing. Actually, I've been thinking it ever since I got here: Why oh why didn't I take the BLUE pill?
Morpheus: The pill you took is part of a trace program. It's designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signal so we can pinpoint your location.
Neo: What does that mean?
Cypher: It means fasten your seat belt Dorothy, 'cause Kansas is going bye-bye."

Duality

In looking at the current state of our political and financial institutions, this Dilbert says it all as both are broken and nothing of substance is being done about it as we slowly move toward the abyss. While OBama waxes eloquently about the role of America in the world, we, the taxpayers, are being systematically screwed by the Fed, the bankster owned cartel protected by government that is ripping us off while our president tells us we need more credit to flow into the system in order to keep money in circulation. (Money as Debt) As stated in previous posts, if any other industry (or nature for that matter) operated in this fashion, said industry (or nature) would cease to exist because you need something to create something, a fact not consistent with how money is generated in this country under the auspices of the Federal Reserve.

This commentary is not a diatribe based on emotion (maybe a little, :) ) but rather commentary based on research contained in the BRT blog. (Type in The Fed in Search to see why.)

At the same time we see our politicians ignore us while humping for money to get reelected, the net never ceases to amaze me with the sheer amount of creativity and innovation shown by people all over the world. Everyday, something that was science fiction the day before becomes science fact today, available for all to see and be taken advantage of in developing new technologies that can change earth for the better. The net is the connect for the world, a resource that must remain free if we are to succeed as a species.

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.
Galileo Galilei

Reaching 400 - Liars' Loans

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Liars' loans.

BILL MOYERS: Why did they call them liars' loans?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because they were liars' loans.

BILL MOYERS: And they knew it?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: They knew it. They knew that they were frauds.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Liars' loans mean that we don't check. You tell us what your income is. You tell us what your job is. You tell us what your assets are, and we agree to believe you. We won't check on any of those things. And by the way, you get a better deal if you inflate your income and your job history and your assets.

BILL MOYERS: You think they really said that to borrowers?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: We know that they said that to borrowers. In fact, they were also called, in the trade, ninja loans.

BILL MOYERS: Ninja?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yeah, because no income verification, no job verification, no asset verification.

Go to the Bill Moyers Journal, it gets even better, believe me.

Dr. Johnson

A person who has always fascinated me is Samuel Johnson, the creator of the first English dictionary. Afflicted with Tourette Syndrome, Johnson was a polymath of the highest order who wrote poetry, taught and created a popular precursor to Dickens's serial writings titled The Rambler (that would run every Tuesday and Saturday for twopence each) in which he wrote essays dealing with religion and morality.

Johnson's dictionary, which was published in 1755, was considered to be the definitive source of the English language for over 100 years until the much larger and more comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary came out in 1888, something that never ceases to amaze me as Johnson was the sole creator of his work wile the OED was the creation of many.

On second marriages: "The triumph of hope over experience."
from Boswell's Life of Johnson

Chaos Incarnate

Could chaos be the root of reality? If Dario Benedetti is right, the unification of Quantum and Relativity may be at hand using Chaos as the weapon of choice.

“It is an old idea in quantum gravity that at short scales spacetime might appear foamy, fuzzy, fractal or similar,” Benedetti told PhysOrg.com. “In my work, I suggest that quantum groups are a valid candidate for the description of such a quantum spacetime. Furthermore, computing the spectral dimension, I provide for the first time a link between quantum groups/noncommutative geometries and apparently unrelated approaches to quantum gravity, such as Causal Dynamical Triangulations and Exact Renormalization Group. And establishing links between different topics is often one of the best ways we have to understand such topics.”

In looking at fractals, the action always occurs at the edge, not the center as the edge separates two or more regions with differing properties. Because fractals are self similar and use feedback to drive the 2 1/2 space in stochastic fashion, (when fractals inhabit 2 space, in 3 space, the dimension goes to 3 1/2) the ability to see how chaos unifies quantum and relativity in reasonable fashion is difficult at best. Also, Mandlebrot's fractal (the top image) appears, to me, to be too stiff to handle the kind of transformations envisioned by Benedetti's concept of a fractal universe constantly changing dimension at different scales to encompass the totality of reality in which all things reside. Because nature abhors gradients, the fractals Benedetti may be thinking about, must, IMHO, be fluid enough to deal with nature's unsurpassed ability to eliminate gradients using her two laws of thermodynamics.

Another question to ask is what powers the fractals? Nature is an open system but there must be a "engine" to drive this amazing process. Ah, as Einstein said, "Question everything".

To address the visualization part of the equation, here is Apophysis, a truly innovative program that generates 3D fractals with the kind of transparency and grace akin to nature's as depicted by the image seen below courtesy of RM and Apophysis.

Now if only I could do math, maybe then I could finally understand what the Einstein's of the world are talking about. :)

Hello Hal

"In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum's swings. Developed by Cornell researchers, the program deduced the natural laws without a shred of knowledge about physics or geometry."

Using genetic algorithms in conjunction with recursion enables the app to learn on it's own, something that has escaped scientists for years in trying to harness compute power to intelligently analyze mountains of data systems generate on a daily basis. As stated in the article, the real power of the program will be to find new theories to explain information too complex for humans to understand, a powerful idea that resonates with profound implications with writers like Phillip Dick, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.

Click here to get a second take regarding this ground breaking research.

The only caveat to all of this is to make damn sure you don't tell the system to lie or conceal information as the end result can give one pause... :)

I'm sorry Dave...

Just a Follow Up

Just a follow up on volume and weight of money as per the 15 billion lost in Iraq last year courtesy of the BA. BRT: Economics 101 or Show Me the Money

In the blurb, $15 billion of $100 bills filled up 4.295 railroad boxcars and weighed 165 tons. (Boxcar weight not included)

The $12.8 trillion committed by the Fed, FDIC and Treasury (Bloomberg) to "rescue" the US economy represents an amount 853 times larger than the aforementioned $15 billion (12,800,000,000,000/15,000,000,000 = 853) which means...

$12. 8 trillion dollars of $100s would fill up 3663.36 box cars
with a total weight of 140,745 tons.

Because dollars are now bits and not paper, weight drops to nothing, something akin to the fact money is created from nothing and is backed by nothing, an irony that makes one laugh and cry at the same time while our once great nation slowly goes into the poor house.

Tulip Time in the US.

Great post about Twitter from Incendia Media

"Take today for example, I read that Facebook and Twitter agreed on a $500 million dollar valuation. Now lets be clear here, that's FIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS! And how much money does Twitter make? NONE! Quote from Wikipedia:"

"About USD 57 million of Twitter is owned by venture capitalists. Williams raised about USD 22 million in venture capital. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions (led by Jeff Bezos of Amazon). Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital backed Twitter in 2009, investing an additional USD 35 million.The Industry Standard has pointed to its lack of revenue as limiting its long-term viability. As of January 2009, the service sold no advertising and produced no revenue. On February 13, 2009, Twitter announced on their official blog that they closed a third round of funding in which they secured more than USD 35 million."

and even better news from Bloomberg.

"The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.

New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008."

Houston, We have a problem.