What if ...

Yours truly has often thought about this but Aeon fleshed out this idea big time. :)

Our ingrained understanding of the daily movements of the Sun, Moon and stars from the vantage point of Earth can make it eerily transporting to see unfamiliar celestial objects floating above the landscape in sci-fi films and TV shows. This imaginative short video is perhaps more surreal still, combining mundane, roadside scenes with the peculiar spectacle of planets from our solar system replacing the Moon in the dusk sky. The physics of it all is, of course, a bit creative, but the planets are shown at the same distance from Earth as the Moon. The result, in addition to the intriguing, almost ominous visuals, is a striking sense of the scale of our nearest planetary neighbors – many of which more usually appear as mere pinpricks or bright dots in our familiar night sky.

Stellar to a fault IMHO. :)

Late winter 2019

A Zen Space

Sherwood yet again

Dividing line

Prelude to snow

Composite II

The Great Wave ...

The Great Wave off Kanagawa (神奈川沖浪裏 Kanagawa-oki nami ura, "Under a wave off Kanagawa") "かながわ-おき なみ うら", also known as The Great Wave or simply The Wave, is a woodblock print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. It was published sometime between 1829 and 1833[1] in the late Edo period as the first print in Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. It is Hokusai's most famous work, and one of the most recognizable works of Japanese art in the world.

The image depicts an enormous wave threatening three boats off the coast of the town of Kanagawa (the present-day city of Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture) while Mount Fuji rises in the background. While sometimes assumed to be a tsunami, the wave is more likely to be a large rogue wave.[2] As in many of the prints in the series, it depicts the area around Mount Fuji under particular conditions, and the mountain itself appears in the background.

When looking at this amazing work, one sees that the wave is a fractal in motion, where self similarity rules akin to how the center of a sunflower is created using a fibonacci fractal as the means to make it happen or the branching of trees where 7 or 8 subdivisions rule depending on the species of tree encoutered. 

The Fibonacci Sequence appears in many plants, and can be seen in the distribution of the seeds in the sunflower above.

The Fibonacci numbers are easily defined by an iterative process. We set F(0) = 0 and F(1) = 1 and let F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2) for n = 2, 3, 4, … . Thus, the first few numbers of the sequence are

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 and 233.

Each entry is the sum of the preceding two. As the values increase, the fractions formed by successive Fibonacci numbers – like 8/5, 13/8 and 21/13 – tend to a definite limit, about 1.618 or, more precisely,

φ = (1+√5)/2.  

I.E - The Golden Ratio/Golden Mean

With this being said, researchers now know that the great wave is a rogue, something suspected but not proven to be true until now.

A team of researchers based at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh have recreated for the first time the famous Draupner freak wave measured in the North Sea in 1995.

The Draupner wave was one of the first confirmed observations of a freak wave in the ocean; it was observed on the 1st of January 1995 in the North Sea by measurements made on the Draupner Oil Platform. Freak waves are unexpectedly large in comparison to surrounding waves. They are difficult to predict, often appearing suddenly without warning, and are commonly attributed as probable causes for maritime catastrophes such as the sinking of large ships.

The team of researchers set out to reproduce the Draupner wave under laboratory conditions to understand how this freak wave was formed in the ocean. They successfully achieved this reconstruction by creating the wave using two smaller wave groups and varying the crossing angle – the angle at which the two groups travel.

Ain't science grand? :)

Getting Hyper ... :)

Getting hyper is very cool if you are NASA testing out ultra high speed aircraft as seen by the pix above. Awesome to a fault.

Had to do another. :)

NASA captured the photos using a Beechcraft B200 Super King Air, a twin-turboprop aircraft with a top speed of about 350 miles per hour (570 kilometers per hour). The speed of sound is, of course, considerably faster at roughly 767 miles per hour (1,234 kilometers per hour). The subject of the photos is a pair of T-38 jets with a higher top speed. The B200 didn’t need to keep up, though. It just had to be in the right place at the right time as the jets flew in formation, passing about 600 meters from the observer aircraft.

NASA upgraded the camera aboard the B200 to capture wide frames and improved the connection to data storage so it could snap 1,400 frames per second. The final images are a result of a technique called schlieren imagery, which is used to visualize pressure fields. They also happen to look neat.

How these pix were done.

Schlieren photography (from German; singular "Schliere", meaning "streak") is a visual process that is used to photograph the flow of fluids of varying density. Invented by the German physicist August Toepler in 1864 to study supersonic motion, it is widely used in aeronautical engineering to photograph the flow of air around objects.

Very cool indeed.

Revolutionary indeed ...

A very close friend of mine, who happens to be really smart, unfortunately, turned me onto this amazing article that promises to change how medical & tech deal with amputation. Kudos to D who turned me onto this stellar NYTimes piece A Swimmer Saved by What She Lost. :)

Five years earlier, (Morgan) Stickney had dreams of becoming an Olympian. At 15, she ranked in the top 20 nationally in the mile, a freestyle event, and was a rising star out of Bedford, N.H.

But by the time she was wheeled into surgery last May, her Olympic dream had long since vanished. A relatively minor foot injury in 2013 had dragged her down a rabbit hole of five surgeries, numerous examinations and untold theories, none of which relieved — or even explained — the constant, excruciating pain that left her unable to walk by day and then, cruelly, stabbed her awake at night.

It gets better, really ...

Forced out of the pool by unrelenting pain, Stickney elected to have her leg amputated below the knee in a new medical procedure developed primarily by Matthew Carty, a specialist in limb restoration at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital in Boston.

The amputation procedure that Carty performs is designed to enhance the vitality and the possibilities for the portion of the limb that remains. Those possibilities include the potential of one day connecting the lower leg muscles to a futuristic robotic prosthesis currently in development across the Charles River at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The developers of the prosthetic hope it will operate much like a natural ankle and foot.

The operation is not yet perfect — Stickney will require at least one more surgical procedure — but it could forever change how amputations are performed. But in Stickney’s case, it has been transformative: Within weeks of her amputation last spring, Stickney, now 21, was back in the pool, swimming before she could even walk. By December, she had won the 400- and 100-meter freestyle races at the U.S. Paralympics national championships in Arizona. And while her experience has not been seamless, Stickney’s national team dreams, once abandoned, are flickering back into view.

Tech & medicine, when done right, never disappoints.

Stickney's physician, Matthew Carty. The amputation procedure that Carty performs is designed to enhance the vitality and the possibilities for the portion of the limb that remains.

Stellar without question.

Emergence ... for real

Artificial life now lives in a quantum computer with many of the same characteristics of the original as seen by It's Alive!, a blurb from Digital Trends.

The work was achieved by researchers from the University of the Basque Country in Spain. With the aid of an IBM QX4 quantum computer, they created tiny simulated life forms capable of carrying out many of the behaviors seen in real-world life forms — including reproduction, mutation, evolution, and death. They hope that doing so will help researchers to better understand the origins of life and whether it can be explained through quantum mechanics. This is something that has been hypothesized for decades, dating back to Erwin Schrödinger’s influential 1944 book What is Life?

Both James D. Watson,[2] and Francis Crick, who jointly proposed the double helix structure of DNA based on X-ray diffraction experiments by Rosalind Franklin, credited Schrödinger's book with presenting an early theoretical description of how the storage of genetic information would work, and each independently acknowledged the book as a source of inspiration for their initial researches.[3]

Conway's game of life writ large without question.

The Rules

For a space that is 'populated':

• Each cell with one or no neighbors dies, as if by solitude.
• Each cell with four or more neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
• Each cell with two or three neighbors survives.

For a space that is 'empty' or 'unpopulated'

• Each cell with three neighbors becomes populated.

Any questions?

It was a leak ...

Rod Goldstein, Deputy Attorney General

For over two years, the dems have screamed the Russkies did it regarding the DNC data heist showing that Bernie got screwed by the dems in embarrassing emails showing this to be true. This "obvious" fact of spearfishing has been touted by Mueller, and significant others, to be the only way this info was garnered and subsequently given to Wikileaks to embarrass Clinton and to enable Trump to become president. While this Wikileaks/political conjecture remains outside the province of the blurb, the specifics regarding how the data dump went down is not, especially when it comes to intel pros like William Binney/NSA and Larry Johnson/CIA, senior spooks who know how events like this can happen.

If the Russians actually had conducted an internet based hack of the DNC computer network then the evidence of such an attack would have been collected and stored by the National Security Agency. The technical systems to accomplish this task have been in place since 2002. The NSA had an opportunity to make it clear that there was irrefutable proof of Russian meddling, particularly with regard to the DNC hack, when it signed on to the January 2017 “Intelligence Community Assessment,” regarding Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election:

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.

The phrase, “moderate confidence” is intelligence speak for “we have no hard evidence.” Thanks to the leaks by Edward Snowden, we know with certainty that the NSA had the capability to examine and analyze the DNC emails. NSA routinely “vacuumed up” email traffic transiting the U.S. using robust collection systems (whether or not anyone in the NSA chose to look for this data is another question). If those emails had been hijacked over the internet then NSA also would have been able to track the electronic path they traveled over the internet. This kind of data would allow the NSA to declare without reservation or caveat that the Russians were guilty. The NSA could admit to such a fact in an unclassified assessment without compromising sources and methods. Instead, the NSA only claimed to have moderate confidence in the judgement regarding Russian meddling. If the NSA had hard intelligence to support the judgement the conclusion would have been stated as “full confidence.”

It gets better

An examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23, 25 and 26 May respectively. The fact that they appear in a FAT system format indicates the data was transfered to a storage device, such as a thumb drive.

How do we know? The truth lies in the “last modified” time stamps on the Wikileaks files.  Every single one of these time stamps end in even numbers.  If you are not familiar with the FAT file system, you need to understand that when a date is stored under this system the data rounds the time to the nearest even numbered second.  

We have examined 500 DNC email files stored on Wikileaks and all 500 files end in an even number—2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If a system other than FAT had been used, there would have been an equal probability of the time stamp ending with an odd number. But that is not the case with the data stored on the Wikileaks site. All end with an even number.

The DNC emails are in 3 batches (times are GMT).

Date        Count       Min Time    Max Time FAT  Min Id Max Id

2016-05-23  10520  02:12:38      02:45:42 x    3800   14319

2016-05-25  11936  05:21:30       06:04:36 x    1         22456

2016-08-26  13357  14:11:36       20:06:04 x    22457  44053

The random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power or approximately 1 chance in 10 to the 150th power - in other words, an infinitely high order. 

This data alone does not prove that the emails were copied at the DNC headquarters. But it does show that the data/emails posted by Wikileaks did go through a storage device, like a thumbdrive, before Wikileaks posted the emails on the World Wide Web.

This fact alone is enough to raise reasonable doubts about Mueller’s indictment accusing 12 Russian soldiers as the culprits for the leak of the DNC emails to Wikileaks. A savvy defense attorney will argue, and rightly so, that someone copied the DNC files to a storage device (Eg., USB thumb drive) and transferred that to Wikileaks.  

The question to ask here is ... why didn't Mueller ask guys like Binney and Johnson to get as much unbiased information as possible as to what actually went down in 2016 regarding the DNC and the data that was purloined at that point in time as this would absolve Mueller from any negative pushback regarding this very important part of his investigation.

Red scare anyone?

Last but not least ...

At the time I reported on the findings of VIPS and associated forensic scientists, that the most fundamental evidence that the events of summer 2016 constituted a leak, not a hack, was the transfer rate—the speed at which data was copied. The speed proven then was an average of 22.7 megabytes per second. That speed matches what is standard when someone with physical access uses an external storage device to copy data from a computer or server and is much faster than a remote hack, reliant on communications topology available at the time, could achieve.

Binney experimented into the autumn. By mid-autumn he had tested several routes—from East Coast locations to cities in eastern Europe, from New Jersey to London. The fastest internet transfer speed achieved, during the New Jersey–to–Britain test, was 12.0 megabytes of data per second. Since this time it has emerged from G-2.0’s metadata that the detected average speed—the 22.7 megabytes per second—included peak speeds that ran as high as 49.1 megabytes per second, impossible over the internet. “You’d need a dedicated, leased, 400–megabit line all the way to Russia to achieve that result,” Binney said in a recent interview.

Regarding Guccifer, the entity stating it was a hack ...

Binney visited Campbell in Brighton, England, early this past spring. They examined all the metadata associated with the files G–2.0 has made public. They looked at the number of files, the size of each, and the time stamps at the end of each. It was at this time that Binney and Campbell established the peak transfer rate at 49.1 megabytes per second.

But they discovered something else of significance, too. At some point G–2.0 had merged two sets of data, one dated July 5, 2016, which had been known, and another dated the following September 1, which had not been known. In essence, Campbell reverse-engineered G–2.0’s work: He took the sets of data G–2.0 presented as two and combined them back into one. “G–2.0 used an algorithm to make a downloaded file look like two files,” Binney explained. “Those two shuffled back together like a deck of cards.”

G–2.0 then took another step. Running another algorithm, he changed all the dates on all the files. With yet another algorithm, he changed the hours stamped on each file. These are called “range changes” among the professionals. The conclusion was then obvious: G–2.0 is a fabrication and a fabricator. Forensicator had already proven that the G–2.0 entity had inserted Russian “fingerprints” into the document known as the “Trump Opposition Report,” which G-2.0 had published on June 15, 2016. It is clear that no firm conclusions can be drawn at this point as to when or where G–2.0 did what he did.

“Now you need to prove everything you might think about him,” Binney told me. “We have no way of knowing anything about him or what he has done, apart from manipulating the files. We detected activity in the Eastern time zone. Now we have to ask again, ‘Which time zone?’ The West Coast copy operation [discovered by Forensicator] has to be proven. All the data has been manipulated. It’s a fabrication.”

Binney is right, all of this information has to be vetted without question 

Something's afoot - Sherlock Holmes.

 Addendum: VIPS: Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings promises to add fuel to the fire as to whether's Mueller's insistence on the Russians hacking the election is a valid assessment or is politically motivated. Either way, great theater, if nothing else, will be forthcoming as we move further into 2019.

Of fog & birds

Intersect

Tree Line

Aperture

Incoming

The Snow Moon Supermoon 2019 :)

Let's hope the weather cooperates. :)

Environs

From subways to reservoirs and all things in between, NYC has varied environs to the max. Enjoy