To Be or Not to Be ...

Writing is hard, something yours truly knows first hand as, prior to the wonderful Elements of Style, said blogger wrote egregiously bad prose even though I was an BA english major back in the day. With this notwithstanding, pardon the pun, the NY Times post If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know? poses some interesting questions regarding the ascent of the digital writer in the connected world of 2015.

Consider the opening sentences of these two sports pieces:

“Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning, but Los Angeles recovered thanks to a key single from Vladimir Guerrero to pull out a 7-6 victory over the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday.”

“The University of Michigan baseball team used a four-run fifth inning to salvage the final game in its three-game weekend series with Iowa, winning 7-5 on Saturday afternoon (April 24) at the Wilpon Baseball Complex, home of historic Ray Fisher Stadium.”

If you can’t tell which was written by a human, you’re not alone. According to a study conducted by Christer Clerwall of Karlstad University in Sweden and published in Journalism Practice, when presented with sports stories not unlike these, study respondents couldn’t tell the difference. (Machine first, human second, in our example, by the way.)

Implications

It’s mainly robo-journalism now, but it doesn’t stop there. As software stealthily replaces us as communicators, algorithmic content is rapidly permeating the nooks and crannies of our culture, from government affairs to fantasy football to reviews of your next pair of shoes.

Something to think about if you ask me but fear not ... this is a humble human writing this "wonderful" prose to you, my faithful readers. :)

Little Sis/Opposite Big Brother

Just discovered an interesting site called LittleSis, an environment dedicated to showing how the upper 1% run the world. Very interesting to say the least. As an aside, the pix above is from Forbes, a magazine tangentially connected to some of the denizens depicted in Little Sis aka Opposite Big Brother. :)

Winter 2015

With a modicum of luck, Winter 2015 is finally leaving town. As often stated in BRT, winter's undeniably beautiful and ... unforgiving, something this short clip shows to the max. Enjoy.

The real reason ...

The real reason why the Koch brothers want XL to happen.

“Visualized data from online sources tracking leases in the tar sands territory shows that the Koch brothers, who have more money that any single person on the planet, hold close to two million acres in Alberta, making Koch the largest U.S. leaseholder with almost as many carbon assets at stake than Exxon, Chevron and Conoco’s combined,” according to International Forum on Globalization press release."

And ...

“Keystone XL’s failure could potentially leave Koch with a family fortune of ‘stranded assets’ in Alberta, a fifty year bet on Canadian crude gone bad for the world’s biggest billionaires that would be a boon for our rapidly warming Earth,” International Forum on Globalization concluded."

Any questions?

Alice

Heavy duty hardware doesn't begin to describe Cern's Large Hadron Collider but this drone trip through the environs of same does. Enjoy

Bloatware

Got rid of some bloatware on BRT so hopefully, the site will load faster. :)

Summing it up :)

Kinda sums it up, don't you think?

Duality

In 1801, Thomas Young's  revolutionary Double Slit Experiment changed physics forever by proving that light is both a particle or a wave, depending on how one changed the parameters of the experiment at hand. From that day onward, researchers have tried to image the particle/wave nature of light in real time, a notion considered all but impossible to do, until now. 

A research team led by Fabrizio Carbone at EPFL has now carried out an experiment with a clever twist: using electrons to image light. The researchers have captured, for the first time ever, a single snapshot of light behaving simultaneously as both a wave and a stream of particles.

The experiment is set up like this: A pulse of laser light is fired at a tiny metallic nanowire. 

The laser adds energy to the charged particles in the nanowire, causing them to vibrate. Light travels along this tiny wire in two possible directions, like cars on a highway. When waves traveling in opposite directions meet each other they form a new wave that looks like it is standing in place. Here, this standing wave becomes the source of light for the experiment, radiating around the nanowire.

This is where the experiment's trick comes in: The scientists shot a stream of electrons close to the nanowire, using them to image the standing wave of light. As the electrons interacted with the confined light on the nanowire, they either sped up or slowed down. Using the ultrafast microscope to image the position where this change in speed occurred, Carbone's team could now visualize the standing wave, which acts as a fingerprint of the wave-nature of light

Seen above is the duality of light captured in living "color", something Thomas Young would have appreciated without question. :) Seen below is a cool video showing how the scientists did the deed.

Less than 30

Physiorg's elegant explanation of GW rings true as yours truly is way beyond 30, so us old ones remember how different the weather was back in the day, something my son, who is slightly north of 30, will never experience as we move further into an increasingly hot 21st century.

The variability we observe in surface temperature comes primarily from understood patterns of weather. Many have heard of El Niño, when the eastern Pacific Ocean is warmer than average. The eastern Pacific is so large that when it is warmer than average, the entire planet is likely to be warmer than average. As we look at averages, 30 years, 10 years, or even one year, these patterns, some years warmer, some cooler, become less prominent. The trend of warming is large enough to mask the variability. The fact that there have been 30 years with no month below the 20th century average is a definitive statement that climate has changed.

Another brick in the wall - Pink Floyd

Something to consider :)

Deeper than you think - XKCD strikes again. :)