The CIA Report

No need to show the gruesome pictures of the CIA torture engine or belabor just how truly disgusting and damaging this fubar has been and will be to the nation for the foreseeable future as the real question to ask is: WHO AUTHORISED THE CIA TO COMMIT THESE ATROCITIES?? But we already know who, right? and WHAT CAN BE DONE TO BRING THESE PERPS TO JUSTICE? To yours truly, Attica sounds like a viable destination for the sociopaths who told the CIA to start the ball rolling if you ask me. To whit.

Former Bush vice president Dick Cheney staunchly defended the program, telling The New York Times the interrogations were "absolutely, totally justified."

"When we had that program in place, we kept the country safe from any more mass casualty attacks, which was our objective," he said.

It gets better.

Conditions were particularly ghastly at a black-site nicknamed Cobalt, in an undisclosed country, where "at times detainees there were walked around naked and shackled with their hands above their head," the report said.

Management of the program deteriorated so poorly in one country "that the CIA remains unable to determine the number and identity of the individuals it detained," the report said.

The review of 6.3 million pages of documents concluded that use of the techniques "was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee cooperation."

Seven of 39 detainees known to have been subjected to so-called enhanced interrogations "produced no intelligence while in CIA custody," while others "provided significant accurate intelligence prior to, or without having been subjected to these techniques."

And in several cases "the CIA inaccurately claimed that specific, otherwise unavailable information was acquired from a CIA detainee" as a direct result of the harsh interrogations.

Any questions?

Attica

Turning on a dime :)

Had to put this in. Incompetence writ large. Check out the guy coming into the parking lot while this genius performs Bolero with a "Bimmer". Kind of reminds me of Congress and it's allegiance to incompetence at the public's expense. Thank Twisted Sifter for this gem. :)

The Language Construct

BRT has often talked about how language describes reality as language is the only construct enabling man to put in quantifiable terms, his interpretation of how reality might function, something most interesting to yours truly as a lay person forever trying to learn how reality actually works. What's even more amazing is how differently languages of the world are constructed, something most eloquently articulated in an Aeon piece titled There is no language instinct.

The basic ingredients of language, at least from our English-speaking perspective, are the parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and so on. But many languages lack adverbs, and some, such as Lao (spoken in Laos and parts of Thailand), lack adjectives. It has even been claimed that Straits Salish, an indigenous language spoken in and around British Columbia, gets by without nouns and verbs. Moreover, some languages feature grammatical categories that seem positively alien from our Anglocentric perspective. My favourite is the ideophone, a grammatical category that some languages employ to spice up a narrative. An ideophone is a fully fledged word type that integrates different sensory experiences arising in a single action: to pick one example, the word ribuy-tibuy, from the northern Indian language Mundari, describes the sight, motion and sound of a fat person’s buttocks as he walks.

And of course, language doesn’t need to be spoken: the world’s 130 or so recognised sign languages function perfectly adequately without sound. It’s a remarkable fact that linguistic meaning can be conveyed in multiple ways: in speech, by gestured signs, on the printed page or computer screen. It does not depend upon a particular medium for its expression. How strange, if there is a common element to all human language, that it should be hidden beneath such a bewildering profusion of differences.

The Tower of Babel does exist after all. :)

Life on the edge

Schrodinger's Cat, forever residing in the nether world of being either alive or dead, is the glamor puss of quantum mechanics, the star participient in a theory most mystifying when it comes to trying to learn how reality works, is now being applied to the innermost sanction of life, the process that may operate at the edge of the quantum/classical realm, thanks to entanglement, the possible prime driver of reality itself.

When the team shone the laser at the system, (Photosynthesis) they observed a very peculiar light echo that came in beat-like waves. These ‘quantum beats’ were a sign that, instead of taking a single route through the system, the photon energy was using quantum coherence to travel by all possible routes simultaneously. Imagine if, when confronted by the stream, the famous cat somehow divided itself into lots of identical quantum-coherent cats that hop across the chlorophyll boulders by every available route to find the quickest one. Quantum beats have now been detected in many different photosystems, including those of regular plants such as spinach. It appears that the most important reaction in the biosphere is exploiting the quantum world to put our food on our table.

How does life maintain its molecular order long enough to perform its quantum tricks in warm and wet cells?

And if that’s not enough for you, we come at last to the very mechanisms of evolution itself. Schrödinger suggested that mutations could involve a kind of quantum jump. In their classic DNA paper, Watson and Crick proposed that they might involve nucleotide bases switching between alternative structures, a process called ‘tautomerisation’ thought to involve quantum tunnelling. In 1999, the physicist Jim Al-Khalili and I suggested that proton tunnelling might account for one very peculiar kind of mutation – so-called adaptive mutation – which appears to occur more frequently when it provides an advantage. Our paper was entirely theoretical, but we are currently attempting to find experimental evidence for proton tunnelling in DNA. So, watch this space.

Beneath all these quantum solutions to puzzling vital phenomena, we find ourselves with a deeper mystery. Quantum coherence is an immensely delicate phenomenon, depending on those in-tune particle waves. To maintain it, physicists usually have to enclose their systems within near-perfect vacuums and cool them down to very close to absolute zero temperature to freeze out any heat-driven molecular motion. Molecular vibrations are the mortal enemy of quantum coherence. How, then, does life manage to maintain its molecular order for long enough to perform its quantum tricks in warm and wet cells? That remains a profound riddle. Recent research offers a tantalising hint that, instead of avoiding molecular storms, life embraces them, rather like the captain of a ship who harnesses turbulent gusts and squalls to maintain his ship upright and on-course. As Schrödinger predicted, life navigates a narrow stream between the classical and quantum worlds: the quantum edge.

And here's a short piece from Scientific American showing how wormholes and entanglement are intrinsically connected.

Maldacena and Susskind go so far as to equate the two in the relation ER = EPR, where ER refers to an Einstein–Rosen bridge (or wormhole) and EPR, short for Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen, is another term for entanglement. "Ours is a weaker statement, but it's easier to demonstrate to be true," Karch says. In his version wormholes aren't equivalent to entanglement; rather, 4-D wormholes are mathematically analogous to 3-D entanglement. Karch and his collaborator, Kristan Jensen of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, published their findings November 20 in Physical Review Letters. Building on their work, Julian Sonner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology strengthened the argument in a paper published in the same journal issue.

J. B. S. Haldane: 
"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; but stranger than we CAN imagine." :)

Addendum: Check out Aeon Magazine and Decrypted Matrix, you won't be disappointed.

Bessie

The impact of Bessie and her friends on the environment is huge, so huge that people are starting to rethink the way man grows food on planet earth.

Among the key findings in the report are:

• More than 1.7 billion animals are used in livestock production worldwide and occupy more than one-fourth of the Earth's land.
• Production of animal feed consumes about one-third of total arable land.
• Livestock production accounts for approximately 40 percent of the global agricultural gross domestic product.
• The livestock sector, including feed production and transport, is responsible for about 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. 

Here are some more interesting facts on what goes on mankind's dinner table.

Livestock production — which includes meat, milk and eggs — contributes 40% of global agricultural gross domestic product, provides income for more than 1.3 billion people and uses one-third of the world’s fresh water. There may be no other single human activity that has a bigger impact on the planet than the raising of livestock. But as a new study out today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows, there is tremendous variation in how we raise livestock around the world — and major differences in what that means for the earth and for us.

Boggles the mind doesn't it?

This sentence is false

An "A Ha" moment is serendipity writ large whenever an idea, coming out of the blue, solves a wicked problem in elegant fashion, something Google did by rethinking CAPTCHA and turning it into an concise one click solution to thwart bots and spammers by simply enabling one to click the checkbox I am not a Robot, instead of trying to figure out nonsensical words displayed in often confusing and ugly ways. To yours truly, this is akin to This sentence is false, a logic bomb conundrum Kurt Godel used to great advantage when coming up with his revolutionary Incompleteness Theorem. ReCaptcha, a very cool approach to a noisome problem, will change the net for the better. :)

Kurt Godel

On Reaching 1400

1400, who could have "thunk" it in terms of the number of posts coming from BRT, something yours truly could have never imagined five+ years ago when BRT was created back in the day. :) So, what has transpired since 2008/9? Well quite a bit, some bad, some good and some in between. To whit.

• 2008 - 2014: Liar's Loans and the WS swindle, which continues unabated today, thanks to the gutless justice department 's failure to jail the bastards who stole our money.
• 2009 - Shock & Awe, the worst strategic move the US have ever done, created ISIS,. destroyed a nation and unleashed the hounds of hell all over the middle east thanks to the ineptness of W and the minions who worked for him. Addendum: You hire the people you defeated or blowback to the nth degree is guaranteed.
• 2009 - 2014 - Nation destroying started with Iraq and continued on with Libya and Afghanistan under Obama, the yes we can president, who channels "W" in more ways than one can imagine.
• 2010 - Citizen's United, the amazingly incomprehensible ruling passed by the Supremes, has magically transformed companies like Apple into personhood, thus enabling said companies to create super PACs to provide unlimited funding to never ending campaigns by our esteemed politicians because campaigning for office is eminently easier than actually governing as seen by the do nothing congress that has forgotten what the public weal is all about.
• 2009 - 2014 - The Supremes, as ideological hacks, began establishing their dubious place in history with Citizens United and finished the job with Greece NY, McCutcheon and Hobby Lobby. Next up, Obama care. Addendum: The corporate veil is now gone thanks to Hobby Lobby.
• 2012 - 2014 - The NSA, FBI, CIA & the IRS, among significant others, know where we live 24/7 thanks to the creation of Homeland Security and its rump court FISA, the worst two things Bush did in compromising  our civil rights in America.
• 2002 - 2008 - Torture incorporated, courtesy the CIA with authorization coming from the Bush administration will be forever a stain on America's soul and an egregious violation of the Geneva Accords.
• 1900 - 2014 - Overshoot, the continued plundering of earth's resources, is moving toward the point of no return (June) as accelerating fossil fuel production, environmental degradation and ever increasing numbers of people is creating a situation that could end civilization as
  we know it.
• 1900 - 2014 - GW is real, just look at the stats to see why.
• 2010 - 2014 - Solar is taking off. The best is yet to come though the fossil fuel boys are trying their best to prevent it. Ditto wind and maybe...viable fusion if the gods permit it.
• 2010 - 2014 - The rise of super AI, potentially the most dangerous thing man has ever done, will happen, whether we like it or not.
• 2014 - Quantum computing is coming, a tech that could change everything given just how powerful this tech truly is.
• 2011-2014 - Obamacare, a small step toward Single Payer, is working, something the Supremes may undo, which could create blowback along the lines of a revolution given just how many people have signed on in the last 2 years.
• 2013 - 2014 Inept US foreign policy, driven by the NeoCons, strikes again as the demonization of Russia could pave the way to WW III if the NeoCons continue to do "Stupid Shit".
• 1968 - 2014 - Healthcare, the FUBAR that keeps on giving, continues on, thanks to government regulatory incompetence, IT & insurance collusion and corporate greed in the guise of big pharma and significant others, who want the system to remain as dysfunctional as it is because of just how much money is being made by the powers at be.
• 1960 - 2014 - The military/Industrial & Congressional complex is alive and well, complete with never ending war because the monies made by all parties involved in the war machine make more money than god. Doublethink applies here without question.
• 2010 - 2014 - GMOs, another dangerous tech without question. Black swan anyone?
• 2012-2014 - AL - Artificial Life, another black swan anyone?
• Beginning of Time to the Infinite Future - Hugh Everett's Many Worlds theory is becoming an increasingly viable way to explain how reality actually works as seen by research that's slowly beginning to prove the existence of the multiverse.
• 2013 - Wormhole creation, as a natural part of entanglement, is no longer considered wild conjecture but rapidly is approaching science fact if recent findings on this most interesting of topics prove to be true.
• 2009 - 2014 - The acceleration of tech truly astounds as we touch the fabric of reality every day with ever increasingly powerful and fine grained tools.
• 2009 - 2014 - Stem cell research, science that can change everything regarding immortality.
• 1980 - 2014 - The education hustle whereby college students become wage slaves thanks to CC and institutional buy in, thus creating higher educational debt greater than the debt held by all CC holders in the US.
• The beat goes on as the science/tech equation vis a vis civilization is never ending, a fact that keeps BRT going as the grist in the mill is just too interesting to let go. :)
• Addendum: To my loyal readers, thank you so much for your feedback on BRT because without question, your comments warm the cockles of this writer's heart to the max. :)

Interesting Stats

GW, the 900lb gorilla in the closet, continues to generate rather interesting stats showing why climate change will soon become the greatest challenge to the survivability of mankind, a notion deemed not acceptable to the millions of GW deniers who insist that climate change is nothing but a nefarious conspiracy peddled by inept scientist and the liberal media that supports them.

The numbers are stark. Carbon dioxide emissions: up 60 percent. Global temperature: up six-tenths of a degree. Population: up 1.7 billion people. Sea level: up 3 inches. U.S. extreme weather: up 30 percent. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica: down 4.9 trillion tons of ice.
"Simply put, we are rapidly remaking the planet and beginning to suffer the consequences," says Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.

THE OCEANS
The world's oceans have risen by about 3 inches since 1992 and gotten a tad more acidic—by about half a percent—thanks to chemical reactions caused by the absorption of carbon dioxide, scientists at NOAA and the University of Colorado say.

Every year sea ice cover shrinks to a yearly minimum size in the Arctic in September—a measurement that is considered a key climate change indicator. From 1983 to 1992, the lowest it got on average was 2.62 million square miles. Now the 10-year average is down to 1.83 million square miles, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

That loss—an average 790,000 square miles since 1992—overshadows the slight gain in sea ice in Antarctica, which has seen an average gain of 110,000 square miles of sea ice over the past 22 years.

Read the Physorg article to get the whole picture of why injecting more energy into any system makes it wilder.

Ingenuity + :)

Interesting twist on CG, time travel and problem solving. Enjoy. 

Almost Alien

An amazing achievement is a vast understatement when it comes to describing the significance of the Antikythera Mechanism, the world's first analog computer, something almost alien in terms of just how advanced this system truly was when built around 205 BC.

"The complex clocklike assembly of bronze gears and display dials predates other known examples of similar technology by more than 1,000 years. It accurately predicted lunar and solar eclipses, as well as solar, lunar and planetary positions," the Times described the ancient mechanism, which measures just about 8 inches across.

For good measure, the mechanism also tracked the dates of the Olympic Games. Although it was not programmable in the modern sense, some have called it the first analog computer.

Interestingly enough, this may only be the beginning.

Last fall, an expedition led by Woods Hole and Greek government scientists began the first systematic, scientific investigation of the site of the shipwreck where the mechanism was found. The dive was shortened to just five days because of bad weather, but the scientists plan to return next spring.

I, for one, cannot wait to see whether other artifacts like the mechanism may come forth in the spring of 2015. :)