Cloud Line

A short clip showing how clouds and sky impact the landscape whether it be woods and fields or lakes & ponds. Enjoy.

Inflection Point

in·flec·tion point

noun

1. MATHEMATICS
    a point of a curve at which a change in the direction of curvature occurs.

2. US
    (in business) a time of significant change in a situation; a turning point.

For Google's DeepMind/AlphaGo and its relationship to go, an inflection point regarding AI and humanity has been reached as machines are now making their first move away from the control of their creators.

‘It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move.’

Rather unexpectedly, I felt this sadness as the match ended and I walked towards the post-game press conference. I was soon stopped by a Chinese reporter named Fred Zhou, whose home country has so closely followed this match. According to Google, 60 million Chinese watched the first game on Wednesday afternoon. Zhou said he was so happy to talk with another technology reporter, lamenting how many journalists were treating the match like sport and hailing the power of Google’s machine learning. But then his tone changed. He said that although he was so very excited to see AlphaGo triumph after Game One on Wednesday, he now felt a certain despair. In the first game, Lee Sedol was caught off-guard. In the second, he was powerless.

Read Wired's post to see why Musk, Altman and Hawking, among significant others, regard this open ended tech with quiet trepidation.

Prescient to a fault

Carl Sagan was a really cool guy. Passionate, visionary and a humanist to the max, he was a quality person in every sense of the word. To that end, in addition to his wondrous Pale Blue Dot quote, which resides in BRT in shining colors, comes another, a disturbing view of the future from 1996 that rings ever true, a cautionary tale for these troubled times.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and whats true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness." - Carl Sagan

Last but not least is Carl's lesson for us rubes to follow aka.

The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking

Methinks Carl channeled the esteemed Mr. Carlin when coming up with this gem. Stellar for sure. :)

The enemy of my enemy ...

The old saw, the enemy of my enemy is my friend rings somewhat true as seen in this NY Times chart due to the different realities Dems and Repugs have regarding allies and enemies of the US, something becoming rather confusing under the chaotic Trump administration, the entity eminently good at pissing off people of every political stripe known to man.

On Thursday, many Americans woke up to a possible diplomatic rift with Australia, after the news that President Trump and the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, exchanged harsh words over a refugee agreement. It was all the more remarkable because a new survey — taken in the days before their conversation was revealed — shows that Australia is the nation that Republicans say is America’s strongest ally.

It gets better.

The episode was not the first international clash of Mr. Trump’s presidency. He belittled Mexico throughout his campaign and has annoyed many Mexicans with his aggressive talk on trade and immigration, insisting that they will pay for a border wall. He has also angered several European nations, including Germany, Britain and Italy, over his administration’s executive order restricting refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United states.

What Australia, Germany, Britain and Italy have in common: Americans of both parties rank them near the top of their list of allies. The survey, conducted from January 28 to February 1, asked respondents to rate whether a country was an ally or enemy of the United States on a five-point scale: ally, friendly, not sure, unfriendly or enemy. The differences at the top of the list — between Australia, Canada and Britain — were small.

Read the post, one will learn a lot. Your truly did without question.

Theocracy 101, Step 1

Theocracy 101, step one ...

In his address at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, President Trump made one clear policy declaration: “I will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment.”

What is that? Is it in Trump’s power to destroy it? And who would want him to do that?

What the Johnson Amendment is: It’s named for Lyndon B. Johnson, who introduced it in the Senate in 1954, nine years before he became president. It bans all tax-exempt nonprofits — which includes churches and other houses of worship, as well as charities — from “directly or indirectly” participating in any political candidate’s campaign.

1st Amendment and Teddy Roosevelt anyone?

It gets better. 

  A leaked copy of a draft executive order titled “Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom,” obtained by The Investigative Fund and The Nation, reveals sweeping plans by the Trump administration to legalize discrimination.

Language in the draft document specifically protects the tax-exempt status of any organization that “believes, speaks, or acts (or declines to act) in accordance with the belief that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, sexual relations are properly reserved for such a marriage, male and female and their equivalents refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy, physiology, or genetics at or before birth, and that human life begins at conception and merits protection at all stages of life.”

The breadth of the draft order, which legal experts described as “sweeping” and “staggering,” may exceed the authority of the executive branch if enacted. It also, by extending some of its protections to one particular set of religious beliefs, would risk violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

The Founding Fathers are spinning in their graves without question.

Blinding Stupidity & Arrogance

 Republican lawmakers have quietly laid the foundation to give away a large portion of America’s 640m acres of national land. These may include areas around the Grand Canyon that feed the Colorado River. Arizona Republicans would like to open up surrounding mineral-rich areas for mining, while conservationists see this move as disastrous Photograph: Michele Falzone/Getty Images

Not only is this really stupid, it also would lose a lot of revenue. To whit.

At stake are areas managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), National Forests and Federal Wildlife Refuges, which contribute to an estimated $646bn each year in economic stimulus from recreation on public lands and 6.1m jobs. Transferring these lands to the states, critics fear, could decimate those numbers by eliminating mixed-use requirements, limiting public access and turning over large portions for energy or property development.

In addition to economic stimulus from outdoor activities, federal land creates revenue through oil and gas production, logging and other industrial uses. According to the BLM, in 2016, it made $2bn in royalty revenue from federal leases. The Outdoor Industry Association estimates federal tax revenue from the recreation economy at almost $40bn.

Greed, stupidity and loss of money from land we the people own? Of resources that can never be restored once "developed". Where is Teddy when we need him? Anger does not begin to describe the feeling yours truly has about this.

The new piece of legislation would direct the interior secretary to immediately sell off an area of public land the size of Connecticut. In a press release for House Bill 621, Chaffetz, a Tea Party Republican, claimed that the 3.3m acres of national land, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), served “no purpose for taxpayers”.

But many in the 10 states that would lose federal land in the bill disagree, and public land rallies in opposition are bringing together environmentalists and sportsmen across the west.

In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. - HG Wells

Addendum: Chaffetz spiked his bill after getting serious blowback from his constituents. Awesome.

Yet Another Stunner

It's difficult to get a sense of scale when viewing Saturn's rings, but the Cassini Division (seen here between the bright B ring and dimmer A ring) is almost as wide as the planet Mercury. (See A Full Sweep of Saturn's Rings for a labeled panorama of features in the rings.)

This natural color mosaic, taken from 10 degrees below the illuminated side of the rings, shows, from left to right, radially outward from Saturn, the C ring (with its Colombo and Maxwell gaps); the B ring and the Cassini division beyond, with the intervening Huygens gap; the A ring (with its Encke and Keeler gaps); and, on the far right, the narrow F ring. The total span covers approximately 65,700 kilometers (40,800 miles)

Glorious is it not? Had to add one more. :)

The view here is of the outer edge of the B ring, at left, which is perturbed by the most powerful gravitational resonance in the rings: the "2:1 resonance" with the icy moon Mimas. This means that, for every single orbit of Mimas, the ring particles at this specific distance from Saturn orbit the planet twice. This results in a regular tugging force that perturbs the particles in this location.

To boldly go ... :)

Another Brick in the Wall

First it was chess, than Jeopardy, followed up by Go and now Poker, four games of incredible complexity crunched by AI without mercy. 

FOR ALMOST THREE weeks, Dong Kim sat at a casino in Pittsburgh and played poker against a machine. But Kim wasn’t just any poker player. This wasn’t just any machine. And it wasn’t just any game of poker.

Kim, 28, is among the best players in the world. The machine, built by two computer science researchers at Carnegie Mellon, is an artificially intelligent system that runs on a Pittsburg supercomputer. And for twenty straight days, they played no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em, an especially complex form of poker in which betting strategies play out over dozens of hands.

About halfway through the competition, which ended this week, Kim started to feel like Libratus could see his cards. “I’m not accusing it of cheating,” he said. “It was just that good.” So good, in fact, that it beat Kim and three more of the world’s top human players—a first for artificial intelligence.

It gets better.

Libratus, for one, did not use neural networks. Mainly, it relied on a form of AI known as reinforcement learning, a method of extreme trial-and-error. In essence, it played game after game against itself. Google’s DeepMind lab used reinforcement learning in building AlphaGo, the system that that cracked the ancient game of Go ten years ahead of schedule, but there’s a key difference between the two systems. AlphaGo learned the game by analyzing 30 million Go moves from human players, before refining its skills by playing against itself. By contrast, Libratus learned from scratch.

End result or is it just the beginning?

"This is a landmark step for AI," said Libratus creator and Carnegie Mellon University professor Tuomas Sandholm in an email. "This is the first time that AI has been able to beat the best humans at Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em. More generally, this shows that the best AI's ability to do strategic reasoning under imperfect information has surpassed that of the best humans."

I'll take just the beginning.

Delusions of Grandeur :)

Wish fulfillment.

It's all about me, dammit!

Locker room talk - NOT!

4 more years ... of this? OMG

Fake News Redux :)

Lists of Deities shows just how imaginative man is in trying to understand how reality works. :)

The image illustrates the Hindu belief that each part of the cow embodies a particular deity.