WTFU

To the Imhofe's of the world, WTFU, the global warming phase transition is done and we are in for one hellacious ride.

A hundred years from now, humans may remember 2014 as the year that we first learned that we may have irreversibly destabilized the great ice sheet of West Antarctica, and thus set in motion more than 10 feet of sea level rise.

Meanwhile, 2015 could be the year of the double whammy — when we learned the same about one gigantic glacier of East Antarctica, which could set in motion roughly the same amount all over again. Northern Hemisphere residents and Americans in particular should take note — when the bottom of the world loses vast amounts of ice, those of us living closer to its top get more sea level rise than the rest of the planet, thanks to the law of gravity.

The Antarctic Bottom Water rules. 

Circadian rhythms & then some

Man's a diurnal creature, a being who, way back when, worked by day and slept by night, something not being done now as we move further into the age of never ending light, where the notion of adhering to circadian rhythms has gone the way of the dodo with potentially catastrophic results if the findings of one researcher proves to be true.

FOR MORE THAN 3 billion years, life on Earth was governed by the cyclical light of sun, moon and stars. Then along came electric light, turning night into day at the flick of a switch. Our bodies and brains may not have been ready.

A fast-growing body of research has linked artificial light exposure to disruptions in circadian rhythms, the light-triggered releases of hormones that regulate bodily function. Circadian disruption has in turn been linked to a host of health problems, from cancer to diabetes, obesity and depression. “Everything changed with electricity. Now we can have bright light in the middle of night. And that changes our circadian physiology almost immediately,” says Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut. “What we don’t know, and what so many people are interested in, are the effects of having that light chronically.”

Where it gets interesting

Yet biology at least supports some of the correlations. The circadian system synchronizes physiological function—from digestion to body temperature, cell repair and immune system activity—with a 24-hour cycle of light and dark. Even photosynthetic bacteria thought to resemble Earth’s earliest life forms have circadian rhythms. Despite its ubiquity, though, scientists discovered only in the last decade what triggers circadian activity in mammals: specialized cells in the retina, the light-sensing part of the eye, rather than conveying visual detail from eye to brain, simply signal the presence or absence of light. Activity in these cells sets off a reaction that calibrates clocks in every cell and tissue in a body. Now, these cells are especially sensitive to blue wavelengths—like those in a daytime sky.

But artificial lights, particularly LCDs, some LEDs, and fluorescent bulbs, also favor the blue side of the spectrum. So even a brief exposure to dim artificial light can trick a night-subdued circadian system into behaving as though day has arrived. Circadian disruption in turn produces a wealth of downstream effects, including dysregulation of key hormones. “Circadian rhythm is being tied to so many important functions,” says Joseph Takahashi, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern. “We’re just beginning to discover all the molecular pathways that this gene network regulates. It’s not just the sleep-wake cycle. There are system-wide, drastic changes.” 

Maybe this is why the world seems to be so chaotic, so crazed, so over stressed and so amped. Makes sense to me as yours truly now goes to bed earlier, with no light, no sound, just darkness, similar to how man did it back in the day.

Darkness, Darkness

Be my pillow

Take my hand

And let me sleep

In the coolness of your shadow

In the silence of your deep

Darkness, Darkness

Hide my yearning

For the things I cannot be

Keep my mind from constant turning

Toward the things I cannot see now

Things I cannot see now

Things I cannot see

Darkness, darkness,

Long and lonesome,

Ease the day that brings me pain.

I have felt the edge of sadness,

I have known the depth of fear.

Darkness, darkness, be my blanket,

Cover me with the endless night,

Take away, take away the pain of knowing,

Fill the emptiness of right now,

Emptiness of right now, now, now

Emptiness of ri-ight now.

Darkness, darkness, be my pillow,

Take my hand, and let me sleep.

In the coolness of your shadow,

In the silence, the silence of your deep.

Darkness, darkness, be my blanket,

Cover me with the endless night,

Take away, take away the pain of knowing

Fill the emptiness of right now,

Emptiness of right now now now

Emptiness of right....

Oh yeah Oh yeah

Emptiness, emptiness

Oh yeah  - Jesse Colin Young, The Youngbloods

A really big deal

BRT has waxed enthusiastic about Graphene since 2008 as this material has the potential to change how man conducts business on planet earth due to the unique characteristics of a one atom thick sheet of carbon, the same exact thing as pencil lead save for the form factor just described. Because of this, the difficulty of getting enough graphene to do something serious has been problematic until now.

A new technique invented at Caltech to produce graphene—a material made up of an atom-thick layer of carbon—at room temperature could help pave the way for commercially feasible graphene-based solar cells and light-emitting diodes, large-panel displays, and flexible electronics.

"With this new technique, we can grow large sheets of electronic-grade graphene in much less time and at much lower temperatures," says Caltech staff scientist David Boyd, who developed the method.

It gets better.

The ability to produce graphene without the need for active heating not only reduces manufacturing costs, but also results in a better product because fewer defects—introduced as a result of thermal expansion and contraction processes—are generated. This in turn eliminates the need for multiple postproduction steps. "Typically, it takes about ten hours and nine to ten different steps to make a batch of high-mobility graphene using high-temperature growth methods," Yeh says. "Our process involves one step, and it takes five minutes."

A scaled-up version of their plasma technique could open the door for new kinds of electronics manufacturing, Yeh says. For example, graphene sheets with low concentrations of defects could be used to protect materials against degradation from exposure to the environment. Another possibility would be to grow large sheets of graphene that can be used as a transparent conducting electrode for solar cells and display panels. "In the future, you could have graphene-based cell-phone displays that generate their own power," Yeh says.

Another possibility, she says, is to introduce intentionally imperfections into graphene's lattice structure to create specific mechanical and electronic attributes. "If you can strain graphene by design at the nanoscale, you can artificially engineer its properties. But for this to work, you need to start with a perfectly smooth, strain-free sheet of graphene," Yeh says. "You can't do this if you have a sheet of graphene that has uncontrollable defects in different places."

Tech, like money, never sleeps. :)

The Highs & Lows of Planet Earth

Orders of magnitude?

Carbon 3D's approach to 3D printing could be a game changer without question.

A tiny wonder

On a walk on the beach, yours truly chanced upon this little bit of wonder, an impossibly thin strand of ice extending into space, unencumbered by gravity or the wind, unnoticed by all as the day was the first true harbinger of spring in NE, something us rubes have been pining for from way back when.

Enjoy.

Why are barns red?

Yours truly loves factoids, you know, the kind that illuminate just how wonderful and rich the reality in which we all live truly is. In this light, here is a enlightening explanation of why barns are always red. :)

Have you ever noticed that almost every barn you have ever seen is red? There’s a reason for that, and it has to do with the chemistry of dying stars. Seriously.

Yonatan Zunger is a Google employee who decided to explain this phenomenon on Google+ recently. The simple answer to why barns are painted red is because red paint is cheap. The cheapest paint there is, in fact. But the reason it’s so cheap? Well, that’s the interesting part.

Red ochre—Fe2O3—is a simple compound of iron and oxygen that absorbs yellow, green and blue light and appears red. It’s what makes red paint red. It’s really cheap because it’s really plentiful. And it’s really plentiful because of nuclear fusion in dying stars. Zunger explains:

The only thing holding the star up was the energy of the fusion reactions, so as power levels go down, the star starts to shrink. And as it shrinks, the pressure goes up, and the temperature goes up, until suddenly it hits a temperature where a new reaction can get started. These new reactions give it a big burst of energy, but start to form heavier elements still, and so the cycle gradually repeats, with the star reacting further and further up the periodic table, producing more and more heavy elements as it goes. Until it hits 56. At that point, the reactions simply stop producing energy at all; the star shuts down and collapses without stopping.

As soon as the star hits the 56 nucleon (total number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus) cutoff, it falls apart. It doesn’t make anything heavier than 56. What does this have to do with red paint? Because the star stops at 56, it winds up making a ton of things with 56 neucleons. It makes more 56 nucleon containing things than anything else (aside from the super light stuff in the star that is too light to fuse).

The element that has 56 protons and neutrons in its nucleus in its stable state? Iron. The stuff that makes red paint.

And that, Zunger explains, is how the death of a star determines what color barns are painted.

Any questions? :)

Emergence

Haven't seen Ex Machina yet but I will as it's gotten excellent reviews while posing questions similar to the Start point for the Terminator piece posted in BRT regarding AI and the potential dangers it presents to humanity. 

"We have Cortana and Siri and Google Now setting up a competitive tournament for where's the best intelligent assistant going to come from... and that kind of competition is going to heat up the research and investment, and bring it more into the spotlight."

'Existential threat'

Mr Horvitz's comments were posted online in a video marking his receipt of the AAAI Feigenbaum Prize - an award for "outstanding advances" in AI research.

Stephen Hawking has warned of the threat AI poses

But while the Microsoft executive describes himself as being "optimistic" about how humans might live alongside artificial intelligences, others are more cautious.

The physicist Prof Hawking has warned that conscious machines would develop at an ever-increasing rate once they began to redesign themselves.

"Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded," he said.

Elon Musk - chief executive of car firm Tesla and rocket-maker SpaceX - has also suggested AI poses the greatest "existential threat" humankind faces.

"With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon," he told an audience of students in October.

"In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like yeah he's sure he can control the demon. Didn't work out."

Adding to this is a truly excellent paper from AI researchers, like Horvitz, who put together a survey of research questions for robust and beneficial AI in hopes of keeping the bad genie in the bottle when AI becomes sentient, as it surely will, as we move further into the 21st century.

Contents (partial listing)

1 Introduction 1

2 Short-term research priorities 4

2.1 Optimizing AI’s Economic Impact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

2.1.1 Measuring and Forecasting Economic Impact of Automation and AI . . . . . . . . . . 4

2.1.2 Policy research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

2.1.3 Managing potential adverse effects of automation and AI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

2.2 Law and Ethics Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2.3 Computer Science Research for Robust AI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

2.3.1 Verification (“Did I build the system right?”) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

2.3.2 Validity (“Did I build the right system?”) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

2.3.3 Security (“How can I prevent unauthorized access?”) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2.3.4 Control (“OK, I built the system wrong, can I fix it?”) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Something to consider, don't you think? Click the Futre of Life Institute link who posted the survey. Worthwhile without a doubt. PS. Go to To Be or Not to Be to see where AI can get it's literary chops.

Timeless

Exquisite technology never grows old. For example, this shot was taken with a 60+ year old 135mm f 2.8 Steinheil lens given to yours truly by his grandfather. The shapness of the image is as good as it gets, something truly remarkable in this day and age of advanced technology. As an added bonus, the beast is incased in solid aircraft grade alumenum weighing almost 3 lbs, a weapon of mass destruction if there ever was one. Without question, Gramps knew what quality mean't, something Robert Persig waxed poetic about in his two masterworks, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. 

House Swap :)

A charming video showing how Hermit Crabs house swap. Nature never dissapoints. :)