Gharials - Extremely cool crocs. :)

Gharials are extremely cool crocs without a doubt, something that most people don’t even know it exists.

The gharial, also known as the gavial, is an extremely rare fish-eating crocodile. It’s estimated there are less than 200 individuals in the wild. Native to the Indian subcontinent, this unique crocodilian faced a massively population decline. Currently, the species is limited to only 2% of their historical range.

Cool without question, right? :)

Slip Sliding Away ...

Yours truly loves America, a country loaded with amazing talent, resources and the ability to do great things is now in crisis because endless war is killing our great nation, something that has to be corrected or all is lost as seen by Ike's last great speech depicting the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex, a danger that is destroying our nation as we speak.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist." Dwight Eisenhower

Summing it up ...

According to an investigative report by Open the Government, among the items purchased during the last month of the fiscal year when government agencies go all out to get rid of these “use it or lose it” funds: Wexford Leather club chair ($9,241), china tableware ($53,004), alcohol ($308,994), golf carts ($673,471), musical equipment including pianos, tubas, and trombones ($1.7 million), lobster tail and crab ($4.6 million), iPhones and iPads ($7.7 million), and workout and recreation equipment ($9.8 million).

So much for draining the swamp.

Anyone who suggests that the military needs more money is either criminally clueless or equally corrupt, because the military isn’t suffering from lack of funding—it’s suffering from lack of proper oversight.

Where President Trump fits into that scenario, you decide.

Trump may turn out to be, as policy analyst Stan Collender warned, “the biggest deficit- and debt-increasing president of all time.”

Rest assured, however, that if Trump gets his way—to the tune of a $4.7 trillion budget that digs the nation deeper in debt to foreign creditors, adds $750 billion for the military budget, and doubles the debt growth that Trump once promised to erase—the war profiteers (and foreign banks who “own” our debt) will be raking in a fortune while America goes belly up.

This is basic math, and the numbers just don’t add up.

It's time to take back our country before it's too late

War Games ...

Seems Russia and China have caught up to America regarding war even though we spend way more on defense than they do.

To whit ...

In war games simulating a high-end fight against Russia or China, the U.S. often loses, two experienced military war-gamers have revealed.

"In our games, when we fight Russia and China, 'blue' gets its ass handed to it," David Ochmanek, a RAND warfare analyst, explained at the Center for a New American Security on Thursday, Breaking Defense first reported. U.S. forces are typically color-coded blue in these simulations.

"We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary," he said.

Some specifics as to why this scenario rings true.

The simulated war games showed, the "red" aggressor force often destroys U.S. F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters on the runway, sends several Naval fleets to the depths, destroys US military bases, and through electronic warfare, takes control of critical military communication systems. In short, a gruesome, if simulated, annihilation of some of the most modern of US forces.

“In every case I know of,” said Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense with years of wargaming experience, “the F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky, but it gets killed on the ground in large numbers.”

So, as Russia and China develop fifth-generation fighters and hypersonic missiles, “things that rely on sophisticated base infrastructures like runways and fuel tanks are going to have a hard time,” Ochmanek said. “Things that sail on the surface of the sea are going to have a hard time.”

So when neocons like Bill Kristol, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton bloviate on how "easy" it would be to wax Russia and China in a fire fight, just channel Nam where the VC did a number on the US without having any high end tech like that of the US back in the day. Makes one think real hard about this don't you think?

Playing the long game ...

Yours truly has been fascinated by the rapid rise of China as nascent superpower thanks, in large part, to the largesse of the US in encouraging its corporations to offshore manufacturing to China back in the 1980s, something that has, and is, compromising the US in ways that truly boggle the mind. If that's not enough food for thought, a very good and wise Hong Kong friend of mine, who knows far more about this subject than this rube, generously sent BRT his take on what is happening to America when inept politicians encounter an adversary who plays the long game in the pursuit of global dominance as we move further into the 21st century.

To whit.

China’s industrial development plan named “Made in China 2025” aims to make China largely self-sufficient by 2025 in certain technologies Chinese leaders expect will drive the “4th industrial revolution”. The plan’s longer term goal is global dominance in these technologies by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. 

Already, China has claimed sovereignty over, and militarized the South China Sea in contravention of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and in defiance of a ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague which has determined that China’s territorial claim is illegal. The tepid response to China’s blatant power grab by the United States and the western international community is an ominous harbinger of what’s to come with China’s ascendancy on the world stage.

Equally alarming is the increasingly strident tones of China’s calls for the reunification of Taiwan, again met with no substantive response by America or the western powers. The lack of a firm stance by America prompts the question: Will the United States live up to the security assurances accorded to Taiwan in the event of a military attack by China?

Across the globe, from Latin America to Africa and Asia, China’s strategy of building and financing infrastructure projects with the objective of gaining influence and control continues unabated under its Belt and Road Initiative.

These and other moves by China lend credence to the theory that it is pursuing a highly focused, methodical and relentless strategy to achieve global supremacy and displace America by its target date of 2049. 

The center piece of the game plan is to undermine and sabotage American interests and influence in Asia. To achieve this objective China is manipulating the puppet regime of North Korea and deploying its leader, Kim Jong Un, as a foil against President Donald Trump.

For its part, the current administration is playing right into China’s hands by retreating from the world, leaving behind a vacuum of leadership which the Chinese are only too happy to fill.

Any questions?

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?