Gimme 3 seconds ...

A 3 second gap, based on more power, particularly on the electric side of things, tells the story of F1 tech circa 2018 vs 2019. :)

In this video you can easily see where the new car is gaining so much speed, largely due to the new electric motor regulations allowing for a much more powerful motor. For certain, there is some extra downforce grip, contributing to better mid-corner speeds, but the power is really where it’s at for this new car.

Gotta have juice without question.

Pulling the trigger ...

Most intelligent people know Trump is bogus to the max. Besides being a fraud (Fred made the money) a serial liar (6420 as of Nov 18, 2018) and alleged sexual predator, he has shown no ability to govern in any way, shape or fashion.

With this being said, he does have charisma, has made a ton of money for the "press" and understands the basic fact that 40% of the populace supports him no matter what, particularly when he sticks to his guns centering on issues like the THE WALL a 5.6 billion dollar barrier "desperately" needed, in his words, to keep out the ever increasing horde of terrorists, drug dealers and low lifes invading the country 24/7, which costs this country hundreds of millions of dollars every year, something that cannot continue and will not continue when the wall goes up. 

Thus far, the end result has been ...

1: A Trump imposed partial government shutdown impacting 800,000 workers including these departments:

-Department of the Treasury

-Department of Agriculture

-Homeland Security Department

-Department of the Interior

-Department of State

-Department of Housing and Urban Development

-Department of Transportation

-Department of Commerce

-Department of Justice

And 2: The dems not giving in to the $5.6 billion price tag.

End result: Trump possibly declaring a State of Emergency to ostensibly force the government to build the wall without congressional approval, an act that should warm the cockles of one's heart given just how much additional power the chief executive instantly accrues if he pulls the trigger and does the unthinkable, something not thought possible until now.

The moment the president declares a “national emergency”—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—he is able to set aside many of the legal limits on his authority.

But will they? Unknown to most Americans, a parallel legal regime allows the president to sidestep many of the constraints that normally apply. The moment the president declares a “national emergency”—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—more than 100 special provisions become available to him. While many of these tee up reasonable responses to genuine emergencies, some appear dangerously suited to a leader bent on amassing or retaining power. For instance, the president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts. Other powers are available even without a declaration of emergency, including laws that allow the president to deploy troops inside the country to subdue domestic unrest.

Lastly ...

“The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality…Clinton did not continue to pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found…The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it…The iron refusal by those who engage in the permanent lie to acknowledge reality, no matter how transparent reality becomes, creates a collective psychosis.” - Chris Hedges

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451,  the 1966 film based on Ray Bradbury's book, depicts a dystopian future where the government's firemen burn books to keep people compliant and illiterate while at the same time providing seamless wall sized video displays to the public, designed to keep the populace happy and compliant while maintaining total control 24/7 over said populace, a vision rather prescient in this writer's opinion given to what's happening in various countries all over the world as we move further into the 21st century.

In the film, the 1984 equivalent to the telescreen is ever present and totally integrated into the living environment, something akin to what Samsung's Micro Leds promise to do when the tech goes live sometime in 2020.

MicroLED is an interesting technology that it seems only Samsung is publicly pursuing at the moment, but two sets it had on display at CES highlighted both its promise and its flexibility. One was a new, bigger version of The Wall that measured an extremely impressive 219 inches; the other was a slightly more practical and much more flexible 75in version aimed at the more typical domestic environment.

This is fabulously flexible. The individual, modular building blocks come in two sections: a back plate that easily hooks into other back plates, allowing customers to build sets in the aspect ratios that suit them (“Ratio Free” sees to be the tagline). Then the actual MicroLED tile simply pops on magnetically.

We don’t often share material made by other sites, but the GIF The Verge put together illustrating how it works is well worth a look to see how easily (and spectacularly) this works in real life.

Modular indeed.

 

Interstellar anyone? :)

Based on initial findings, all the black holes discovered thus far have varying degrees of spin because when a star rapidly collapses, it will never be a uniform process, so spin will always be part of the equation. With this being said, yours truly has always thought about the possibility of black holes being worm holes (entanglement) and that travel through them, if they are big enough and the spin is fast enough, is a viable hypothesis based on conjectures put forth by people far more qualified than this rube in all matters regarding physics, black holes, worm holes and the possibility of interstellar travel. :)

Flying through a black hole

My team at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a colleague at Georgia Gwinnett College have shown that all black holes are not created equal. If the black hole like Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our own galaxy, is large and rotating, then the outlook for a spacecraft changes dramatically. That's because the singularity that a spacecraft would have to contend with is very gentle and could allow for a very peaceful passage.

The reason that this is possible is that the relevant singularity inside a rotating black hole is technically "weak," and thus does not damage objects that interact with it. At first, this fact may seem counter intuitive. But one can think of it as analogous to the common experience of quickly passing one's finger through a candle's near 2,000-degree flame, without getting burned.

Interstellar comes to mind here without question as real science regarding black holes and the possibility of going through them is a prime reason why this film works IMHO.

No sound in space is another reason why this flick works. :)

Science never disappoints. :)

Addendum: Black holes do spin fast, really fast without question ...

 The crumbs left over from a supermassive black hole's recent meal have allowed scientists to calculate the monster's rotation rate, and the results are mind-boggling.

The huge black hole, known as ASASSN-14li, is spinning at least 50 percent the speed of light, research team members said. 

"This black hole’s event horizon is about 300 times bigger than the Earth," study co-author Ron Remillard, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a statement. (The event horizon is the limit beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole's gravitational clutches.) [Images: Black Holes of the Universe]

"Yet the black hole is spinning so fast it completes one rotation in about two minutes, compared to the 24 hours it takes our planet to rotate," Remillard added.

Art of a Different Kind

Art of a different kind, akin to Steuben Glass at its height, comes to mind when looking at IBM's massive quantum computer, something almost otherworldly in its remote beauty, packaging tech that will change the world in ways we cannot imagine.

"Imagine a car," he told Engadget, "but take off the shiny exterior of the car. And then move the battery over to one side. Instead of having a very tightly integrated set of electronics in the powertrain and things like that, start pulling them apart into pieces and just kind of spreading them all around the car. It might still be functional. But it's not a great design [in terms of] integration, right?"

Roughly one year ago, IBM set out to make something better: a fully integrated system that was modular, easily upgradable and optimized for quantum computing. The result, which is being unveiled at CES today, is called the IBM Q System One.

And it looks wild.

Art of a Different Kind indeed.

NYC @ Nite ...

The French Building (Naturally) :)

Purple +

Wisdom +

Wisdom on High :)

Thinking Yellow

2018 in review

Dave Barry nails it. Thanks Anne for the link. :)

We can summarize 2018 in two words:

It boofed.

We’re not 100 percent sure what “boofing” is, despite the fact that this very issue was discussed in a hearing of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. All we know for certain about boofing is that it is distasteful and stupid.

As was 2018.

In spades.

Read Barry's blurb and weep at the state of our union circa 2018 ... & counting.

The National Security State

Beyond our control kind of says it all regarding the 24/7 surveillance performed on us rubes courtesy the National Security State created immediately after 9/11 thanks to W, Congress and the willingness to allow FUD to take over our lives no matter what the cost may be.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

Note,The Hidden World piece is almost 9 years old, think of how many more hidden agencies there are since 2010, designed to track us even more thanks to initiatives created by Obama and Trump. Warms the cockles of one's heart doesn't it.

Stitching together Reality

Quanta Magazine is a treasure, filled with insightful articles written in a way this rube can actually understand, something in concert with how Richard Feynman described the 4 easy steps needed for one to attain deep learning back in the day.  To this end, the recent article, How Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error-Correcting Code centers on different levels of entanglement combined with the notion of space and time, two concepts analogous to analog, the tech able to cope with the vagaries of reality without issue.

In their paper conjecturing that holographic space-time and quantum error correction are one and the same, they described how even a simple code could be understood as a 2D hologram. It consists of three “qutrits” — particles that exist in any of three states — sitting at equidistant points around a circle. The entangled trio of qutrits encode one logical qutrit, corresponding to a single space-time point in the circle’s center. The code protects the point against the erasure of any of the three qutrits.

In other words ...

“It’s really entanglement which is holding the space together,” he said. “If you want to weave space-time together out of little pieces, you have to entangle them in the right way. And the right way is to build a quantum error-correcting code.”

After reading this, it seems that reality may really be Digital with Analog Override after all. :)

Analog with Digital Override

Yours truly has always thought reality is analog with digital override given that the building blocks of life are digital, as seen by DNA using a 4 letter data set (ATCG) to codify information and energy, needed by life & other processes, being distributed throughout the universe in discrete packets (Quantum Mechanics) but there's a twist as subatomic particles, and atoms, exist in a state of superposition (unless decohered), constantly varying in states (wave/particle) depending on its environment, operating in analogous fashion to analog, a process that measures the continuously variable physical quantities of a given system.  Note: Digital counts, Analog measures. Note II: Entanglement is not part of this blurb though it may give rise to reality itself if new research regarding worm holes proves to ring true. :)

Wavefunctions of the electron in a hydrogen atom at different energy levels. Quantum mechanics cannot predict the exact location of a particle in space, only the probability of finding it at different locations.[1] The brighter areas represent a higher probability of finding the electron.

For life to function, there must be slippage, the ability to adapt and interact with the noisy environment in realtime, along the lines of the OODA loop or die, something that is not the case as seen by the myriad of life forms on planet earth. In order to life to do this, analog rules as seen by the OODA loop diagram whereby the ability to stay alive depends on observation of chaotic outside events, adaptive interaction with the environment, proper response to feedback loops driven by the environment and intelligent decision making based on an ever changing situation filled with uncertainties, something beyond the kin of baseline digital computation as seen by the rise of neural nets, the front end analog engine of AI. 

The OODA Loop

Why all this palaver? Well, two reasons, one is the move Her, a wonderful film of a guy falling in love with an AI only to see her go beyond the realm of man into a space shared with other AIs, never to be seen again and two, a provocative Edge article penned by George Dyson titled Childhood's End  discussing AI as an entity already beyond our control, a notion shared by this author without question.

All revolutions come to an end, whether they succeed or fail.

The digital revolution began when stored-program computers broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Numbers that do things now rule the world. But who rules over the machines?

Once it was simple: programmers wrote the instructions that were supplied to the machines. Since the machines were controlled by these instructions, those who wrote the instructions controlled the machines.

All revolutions come to an end, whether they succeed or fail.

Two things then happened. As computers proliferated, the humans providing instructions could no longer keep up with the insatiable appetite of the machines. Codes became self-replicating, and machines began supplying instructions to other machines. Vast fortunes were made by those who had a hand in this. A small number of people and companies who helped spawn self-replicating codes became some of the richest and most powerful individuals and organizations in the world.

Then something changed. There is now more code than ever, but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who has their hands on the wheel. Individual agency is on the wane. Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around. The digital revolution has come full circle and the next revolution, an analog revolution, has begun. None dare speak its name.

What people tend to miss is, it's not just one AI like Google's Deep Mind or IBM's Watson society is facing, it's millions being developed as there is simply too much money to be made not to do so, something rather disquieting to say the least as these said entities are linked to the net, the petri dish of petri dishes when it comes to data, the perfect place for analog/digital constructs to evolve into entities beyond the control of us, something that's already happening as we move further into the 21st century.