A crack in the world

A Crack in an Antarctic Ice Shelf Is 8 Miles From Creating an Iceberg the Size of Delaware

Once the shelf is gone, there is no cork holding back the groundwater of the glaciers that reside on land. Comforting thought, right?

According to Dr. Rignot, the collapse of Larsen C would add only a tiny amount of water to the global sea level. Of greater concern to scientists is how the collapse of ice shelves can affect the glaciers that flow behind them, because the melting of those glaciers can cause much greater increases in sea level. Scientists see the impending Larsen C collapse as a warning that far larger amounts of ice in West Antarctica could be vulnerable.

“I think of the Larsen C as a natural laboratory that almost lets us do an experiment on an ice shelf,” said Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s effort to study the polar regions. “When it breaks, what the heck happens next?"

Houston, we have a problem.

Liquid Light

Thanks to Quantum Mechanics, we know subatomic particles, like photons, can be a particle and/or a wave depending on how said entity interacts with it's environment. In the elegant Thomas Young interference experiment, the duality of same was shown to be true by one of the most beautiful experiments done in science.

Supposing the light of any given colour to consist of undulations of a given breadth, or of a given frequency, it follows that these undulations must be liable to those effects which we have already examined in the case of the waves of water and the pulses of sound. It has been shown that two equal series of waves, proceeding from centres near each other, may be seen to destroy each other's effects at certain points, and at other points to redouble them; and the beating of two sounds has been explained from a similar interference. We are now to apply the same principles to the alternate union and extinction of colours. - Thomas Young

Now it seems liquid light can do the same thing if one has the smarts and hardware to make it happen.

In recent years, however, research has indicated that light can also behave like a liquid — flowing around objects and reconstituting on the other side. Previously, this phenomenon has only been observed under certain extreme conditions, such as laboratory chambers chilled to near absolute zero.

New research published this week in the journal Nature Physics reveals that light can behave in an even stranger "superliquid" state, in which light particles flow around objects with no friction or viscosity at all. In this state, light exhibits the dramatic effect of "frictionless flow," bending around obstacles with no ripples or swirls whatsoever. Interestingly, this effect can be observed at room temperature and ambient pressure. 

Isn't science grand? :)

Had to put this in to show why Young was a visionary to the max. 

Glass-Steagall yet again

BRT has talked often about the disastrous repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall act separating investment banks from commercial banks to insure fiscal stability, legislation that served this country well until Phil Graham and Bob Rubin axed it in 1999 under the presidency of Bill Clinton in order to "improve" efficiency and lower costs of all financial transactions conducted in America. Needless to say, the end result is rather interesting to say the least.

For 66 years the Glass-Steagall act reduced the risks in the banking system. Eight years after the act was repealed, the banking system blew up threatening the international economy. US taxpayers were forced to come up with $750 billion dollars, a sum much larger than the Pentagon’s budget, in order to bail out the banks. This huge sum was insufficient to do the job. The Federal Reserve had to step in and expand its balance sheet by $4 trillion in order to protect the solvency of banks declared “too big to fail.”

The enormous increase in the supply of dollars known as Quantitative Easing inflated financial asset prices instead of the consumer price index. This rise in bond and stock prices is a major cause of the worsening income and wealth distribution in the United States. The economic polarization has undercut the image and reality of the US as a land of opportunity and has introduced political and economic instability into the life of the country.

These are huge costs and for the benefit only of the rich who were already rich.

So, what we can say about the repeal of Glass-Steagall is that it turned a somewhat egalitarian democracy with a large middle class into the One Percent vs. the 99 percent. The repeal resulted in the destruction of the image of the United States as an open prosperous society. The electorate is very much aware of the decline in their economic situation, and this awareness expressed itself in the last presidential election.

Remember, it's all about the money.

It gets better.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Fed Chariman Alan Greenspan

The deregulation philosophy would pay unwelcome dividends for years to come. In November 1999, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act—the culmination of a $300 million lobbying effort by the banking and financial-services industries, and spearheaded in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm. Glass-Steagall had long separated commercial banks (which lend money) and investment banks (which organize the sale of bonds and equities); it had been enacted in the aftermath of the Great Depression and was meant to curb the excesses of that era, including grave conflicts of interest. For instance, without separation, if a company whose shares had been issued by an investment bank, with its strong endorsement, got into trouble, wouldn’t its commercial arm, if it had one, feel pressure to lend it money, perhaps unwisely? An ensuing spiral of bad judgment is not hard to foresee. I had opposed repeal of Glass-Steagall. The proponents said, in effect, Trust us: we will create Chinese walls to make sure that the problems of the past do not recur. As an economist, I certainly possessed a healthy degree of trust, trust in the power of economic incentives to bend human behavior toward self-interest—toward short-term self-interest, at any rate, rather than Tocqueville’s “self interest rightly understood.”

Remember yet again, it's all about the money.

Dangerous Beauty

Something else altogether. 

Visualizing the unseen

Using the best scientific data garnered on exoplanets, talented artists visualize distants worlds that remain, in effect, invisible due to the immense distances said planets are from terra firma. :)

Hurt, a visualization scientist at Caltech’s IPAC center, was walking outside his home in Mar Vista, California, shortly after he learned of the discovery of these rocky worlds around a star called TRAPPIST-1 and got the assignment to visualize them. The planets had been revealed by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based observatories.

“I just stopped dead in my tracks, and I just stared at it,” Hurt said in an interview. “I was imagining that could be, not our moon, but the next planet over – what it would be like to be in a system where you could look up and see continental features on the next planet.”

So began a kind of inspirational avalanche. Hurt and his colleague, multimedia producer Tim Pyle, developed a series of arresting, photorealistic images of what the new system’s tightly packed planets might look like -- so tightly packed that they would loom large in each other’s skies. Their visions of the TRAPPIST-1 system would appear in leading news outlets around the world.

Here are three gems for us rubes to check out. Stellar says it all. :)

JPL/NASA - The site will blow you away.

More Eye Candy from the Jovian side :)

Glorious says it all. 

Botany 101 :)

A short clip showing a potpourri of plants and insects in the environs of Easton & Redding. :) Enjoy.

On the take

Being on the take is the rule of law in congress where our so called representatives mooch for money in order to get reelected no matter what the cost may be. We have a healthcare system that's an unmitigated disaster and a drug policy environment gamed for big pharma that, in effect, kills people by making drugs too expensive to buy thanks to the trolls in congress who are on the take from lobbyists representing, you guessed it, big pharma.

 Amidst all the angst and acrimony of last year's trench-warfare presidential campaign, there was one area in which the two major-party candidates purported to agree. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump favored allowing the importation of cheap drugs from Canada.

After another demoralizing loss to a monstrous candidate, Democrats need a reboot

Drug reimportation would be a no-brainer policy move if actual human beings ran our government. Disgust with high prescription drug prices is nearly universal – 77 percent say drug prices are "unreasonable" – and 71 percent of respondents favor allowing the importation of cheaper drugs from Canada.

The entire pharmaceutical industry is floated by a protectionist racket. Drugs that are in fact very cheap to make are kept artificially expensive – we have drugs that cost $1,000 a pill here in America that sell for $4 in India, for instance.

The means of keeping prices high vary, but include lengthy patents to push production of generics into the future, the barring of foreign competition (usually on "safety" grounds), and the prohibition of negotiations to lower prices for bulk purchases by both the federal and state governments. Without government intervention, the pharmaceutical industry would be profitable, but it wouldn't be the massive cash factory it is now. In 2015, for instance, the 20 largest drug companies made a collective $124 billion in profits.

All the industry needs to protect those sums is the continued cooperation of Congress.

So naturally it spends money – not a lot by industry standards, but a ton by the standards of the ludicrously cheap dates we call federal politicians – to make sure they always have just enough dependable people in office to block change.

The sad thing about it is the fact these trolls are so easy to buy while they continue to be supported by us rubes to include complete coverage of HC including, of course, drugs. Make sense to me, right?

Surf's Up :)

Surfs up, Cassini style. :)

Daphnis creates waves in the edges of the gap through its gravitational influence. Some clumping of ring particles can be seen in the perturbed edge, similar to what was seen on the edges of the Encke Gap back when Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004.

Awesome without question.

Missteps

Attack after attack by ISIS, the entity from hell, created by military and diplomatic missteps perpetrated by Bush and Obama, continues yet unabated thanks, in large part, to a neocon foreign policy mired in failure for over 60 years beginning with the CIA's removal of Iran's Prim Minister elect Mossadegh in 1953. Since that time, the US won exactly one war, Grenada, and lost Vietnam, and, in effect, Iraq, based on lies and incredibly stupid strategic blunders that have cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives, maimed and killed thousands of Americans, destroyed legitimate nations and have generated an immigrant crisis that threatens the very existence of Europe and for what, besides lining the pockets of the MIC as you got to have a boogeyman in order to maintain profits for an entity that does not benefit the country, or the world, in any way, shape or fashion.

Most of the terrorist attacks in Western Europe in the past few years have had some link to the Islamic State. Two of the deadliest, the attacks in Paris in November 2015 and in Brussels in March 2016, were directed by the Islamic State, and carried out by operatives who trained with the group in Iraq and Syria.

Five of the deadly attacks involved gunmen, and five used a vehicle as a weapon, including the attack last year on the promenade in Nice, France, that killed 86. The Manchester attack is one of three that used explosives.

Anthony Zinni was right back in 2003 and he's right today. 

"There has been poor strategic thinking in this," says Zinni. "There has been poor operational planning and execution on the ground. And to think that we are going to 'stay the course,' the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it's been a failure."

Zinni spent more than 40 years serving his country as a warrior and diplomat, rising from a young lieutenant in Vietnam to four-star general with a reputation for candor.

Now, in a new book about his career, co-written with Tom Clancy, called "Battle Ready," Zinni has handed up a scathing indictment of the Pentagon and its conduct of the war in Iraq.

In the book, Zinni writes: "In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption."

"I think there was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the ground and fully understanding the military dimensions of the plan. I think there was dereliction in lack of planning," says Zinni. "The president is owed the finest strategic thinking. He is owed the finest operational planning. He is owed the finest tactical execution on the ground. … He got the latter. He didn't get the first two."

Anthony Zinni