Evolution in real time

For those rubes not believing in evolution, don't view this short clip as deeply held beliefs dependent on rather shaky ground from the scientific perspective is a non starter for the ages, kinda like Flat -Earthers not accepting the rather obvious fact earth is a sphere revolving around the sun but we won't go there, for now. :)

The cast members are bacteria. Their set is a large acrylic dish, four feet wide and two across. It is filled with a nutritious agar jelly that contains varying amounts of an antibiotic. The outermost sections are free of the drug—a safe zone in which microbes can easily grow. But as they move towards the dish’s centre, the concentration of antibiotic goes up in 10-fold increments, and conditions become increasingly deadly. To survive in these toxic zones, they need to evolve resistance.

And that’s what they do. At the start of the video, bacteria are dropped into the edges of the dish and soon colonise the outer safe zones. Then they hit their first antibiotic wall, which halts their progress. After a few moments, bright spots appear at this frontier and start spreading outwards. These are resistant bacteria that have picked up mutations that allow them to shrug off the drug. They advance until they hit the next antibiotic zone. Another pause, until even more resistant strains evolve and invade further into the dish. By the end of the movie, even the centre-most stripe—the zone with the highest levels of killer chemicals—is colonized.

Superbugs, it's just the beginning as nature finds a way... always.

Burning Man 2016

Words not needed. :)

NOAA never stops moving

Deniability :)

The politician's way to deny wrongdoing... until the coverup breaks down. :)

A subversive act

Michelangelo was subversive to the nth degree. So was Leonardo. Awesome. :)

Michelangelo secretly painted symbols of the female anatomy on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a team of researchers have said. In analysing the central fresco, The Creation of Eve, a team led by Deivis de Campos of the UFCSPA in Brazil claims there are several representations of female anatomy the artist likely concealed, potentially as a subversive act and to hide his knowledge of anatomy through dissection.

The Creation of Eve in the Sistine Chapel - Eve's arm positioning shows an upward V shape, representing the female anatomy

And so it begins

BRT has written ad nauseam about GW and how it's accelerating beyond any researcher's expectations due to esoterica like Albedo and the Antarctic Bottom Water combining to transform earth into a world possibly as warm as the Cretaceous due to the injection of Co2 into the atmosphere through the extensive use of fossil fuels for over 500 years. 

NORFOLK, Va. — Huge vertical rulers are sprouting beside low spots in the streets here, so people can judge if the tidal floods that increasingly inundate their roads are too deep to drive through.

Five hundred miles down the Atlantic Coast, the only road to Tybee Island, Ga., is disappearing beneath the sea several times a year, cutting the town off from the mainland.

And another 500 miles on, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., increased tidal flooding is forcing the city to spend millions fixing battered roads and drains — and, at times, to send out giant vacuum trucks to suck saltwater off the streets.

For decades, as the global warming created by human emissions caused land ice to melt and ocean water to expand, scientists warned that the accelerating rise of the sea would eventually imperil the United States’ coastline.

Now, those warnings are no longer theoretical: The inundation of the coast has begun. The sea has crept up to the point that a high tide and a brisk wind are all it takes to send water pouring into streets and homes.

The NYTimes interactive graphic rules.

Epicycles writ large

Epicycles or the concept of circles within circles, the prime mechanism used to make the Ptolemaic earth centric system a viable enterprise. certainly applies when analyzing the "scientific" approach of how Silicon Valley escapes the taxman by turning dollars into bits in moving monies from one country to another to avoid paying their fair share 24/7 in the same fashion epicycles were used to explain a flawed scientific system lasting for over 1200 years.

For sheer ingenuity, you can’t beat Silicon Valley—especially at outsmarting the tax man. By selling intellectual property rights to sock-puppet subsidiaries, tech giants shift profits to low-tax nations like Ireland. But that’s just a start. Sublicense the IP to a second Irish unit that books global sales, have entity B pay onerous royalties back to A (wiping out its earnings), then show that A is headquartered in the Caribbean, making its royalty income untaxable in Ireland. Slick! Only problem: Until the IRS gets its cut, the companies can’t bring the cash back home to use it. Hmm … not so genius after all.

Bermuda, the Caymans and Singapore, the perfect places to stash cash shows just how easy it is to move bits instead of dollars to said locations when it comes to maximizing profit 24/7 while stiffing the US in the process. Hell of a way to do business, right?

Epicycles writ large :)

Rinse & Repeat

When yours truly sees this pix, it reminds me of what is happening in America where illiteracy, stupidity and propaganda rule while the country continues to slide toward an abyss of our own making. 

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities. 

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book. 

Combine this with the incredible incompetency and deceitfulness of Hillary's interview with the FBI where any intelligent person with an ability to read anything of consequence, can see why this nation is so screwed in more ways then this writer can count.

According to the FBI’s notes, between March 25 and March 31 of 2015, someone mistakenly deleted Clinton’s archived mailbox from her server and exported files. The name of the person who deleted the emails was redacted.

“In a follow-up FBI interview on May 3, 2016, ------ Indicated he believed he had an 'oh s--t' moment and sometime between March 25-31, 2015 deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from PRN server and used BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files he had created on the server system containing Clinton’s emails,” the report stated.

BleachBit is a software designed to prevent the recovery of deleted files. 

Investigators also found that the State Department issued a guidance to employees not to use their personal emails for work during Clinton’s tenure. Clinton stated she did not recall this specific notice.

She also said she received no direction from State on preserving her records when she left the department in early 2013 — but claimed she could not recall every briefing she received at that time because of a concussion she suffered in late 2012.

Rinse & Repeat, Rinse & Repeat: Let's not talk about the number of unsecured devices she had (13?), that cannot be found or that she could not remember being trained by the State Department on handling or retaining classified information.

It gets better. 

GONE, GIRL

Hillary Clinton’s Team Lost a Laptop Full of Her Emails in the Actual Mail

A laptop filled with Hillary Clinton’s emails is missing, the FBI just revealed. It makes the stink around Hillary’s private account even worse.

Rinse & Repeat, Rinse & Repeat or maybe it's true, it's turtles all the way on down, right?

Better yet, Keystone Cops antics apply in this never ending saga of gross incompetence and inept lying to the nth degree in mishandling sensitive and corrupt content to the nth degree.

K. Cops to the rescue.:)

First Take

Juno's going to surprise everyone with it's take on Jupiter, the king of planets.

“First glimpse of Jupiter’s north pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “It’s bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms. There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to -- this image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter. We’re seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features.”

This infrared image gives an unprecedented view of the southern aurora of Jupiter, as captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft on August 27, 2016.

The planet's southern aurora can hardly be seen from Earth due to our home planet's position in respect to Jupiter's south pole. Juno's unique polar orbit provides the first opportunity to observe this region of the gas-giant planet in detail.

Intensity plus. :)

Jove as seen head on. 

What the king is made of.

The South Pole of the King.

Jupiter;s "voice"

Why We're Going to Hell :)

At 1,188 feet long and 226,000 tons, the Royal Carribean ocean liner (Harmony of the Seas) is only slightly larger than its predecessor, Oasis of the Seas. Guests and staff equal around 8,000 people, and tickets range from $1,000 to $7,000. The entire experience is guaranteed to whisk you away on what amounts to a floating Mall of America. “It gives you the sense of traveling without doing it,” says photographer Alberto Bernasconi.

Any questions? :)

The 3 Story Cyclone & Typhoon waterslides await.