Next Gen ...

Google has always been focused on software, driven by machine learning, and enormous cloud computing capability. Apple has traditionally been about hardware. The death of iTunes highlights the fragmented mess that Apple’s software has become. Google is embedding its Assistant into more and more apps, while Apple’s offerings lack cohesion. If you want practical proof of Google’s strategy paying off, look at the ascendancy of its photography. Google’s A.I. enables inferior hardware to outperform the competition.

Glance over at what Google is trying to do with Stadia, it’s forthcoming game streaming service, and you can see more evidence of an assault on traditional hardware. Maybe there’s a day in the not-too-distant where it really doesn’t matter what device you have in your pocket.

As often said in BRT, It's just a matter of time. :)

G Day yet again. :)

It lines up :)

Credit: Sasha Tchekhovskoy/Northwestern University; Matthew Liska/University of Amsterdam

Black hole secrets are finally being revealed with the latest data stating that the accretion disc lines up with the equator of the black hole.

An international team has constructed the most detailed, highest resolution simulation of a black hole to date. The simulation proves theoretical predictions about the nature of accretion disks—the matter that orbits and eventually falls into a black hole—that have never before been seen.

Credit: Sasha Tchekhovskoy/Northwestern University; Matthew Liska/University of Amsterdam

How they found out.

After a decades-long, global race to find the so-called Bardeen-Petterson effect, the team's simulation found that, whereas the outer region of an accretion disk remains tilted, the disk's inner region aligns with the black hole. A smooth warp connects the inner and outer regions. The team solved the mystery by thinning the accretion disk to an unprecedented degree and including the magnetized turbulence that causes the disk to accrete. Previous simulations made a substantial simplification by merely approximating the effects of the turbulence.

Credit: Sasha Tchekhovskoy/Northwestern University; Matthew Liska/University of Amsterdam

Intense compute power combined with skilled analysis did the deed.

From Bardeen and Petterson until present day, simulations have been too simplified to find the storied alignment. Two main issues have acted as a barrier for computational astrophysicists. For one, accretion disks come so close to the black hole that they move through warped space-time, which rushes into the black hole at immense speed. Complicating matters further, the black hole's rotation forces space-time to spin around it. Properly accounting for both of these crucial effects requires general relativity, Albert Einstein's theory that predicts how objects affect the geometry of space-time around them.

Second, astrophysicists have not had computing power to account for magnetic turbulence, or the stirring inside of the accretion disk. This stirring is what causes the disk's particles to hold together in a circular shape and what causes gas eventually to fall into the black hole.

Sherlock Holmes would be proud. :)

Going for a short spin :)

Going for a short spin. :)

In a new, 1-minute clip taken by a snorkeler off the coast of Spain, a wee jellyfish ventures too close to an air-filled bubble ring rising up on a strong current. When the jelly touches the ring, the bubble doesn't burst — instead, it sucks the unsuspecting medusa into its swirling heart and sends the jelly spinning like a blurry, pink cyclone.

The little guy survived without a problem at all.

Pushing the envelope

ADIFO presentation movie from ADIFO aircraft on Vimeo.

Waiting for this tech to become available. Elegant and very cool without question.

The ADIFO name comes from All Direction Flying Object. ADIFO is the first flying VTOL aircraft in the world, able to fly in all directions, under the same aerodynamics characteristics. Actually, ADIFO is a special circular wing with high flight performances. Let's say that is the first "flying saucer" in the world which really flies and it's designed to reach in the near future more and more high performances, pretty close to the performances described in the popular culture related to such kind of aircraft.

Hope they get $$ for this tech without question.

To Biblical Proportions

BRT has examined climate change for 12+ years with each year showing how CC is inching ever closer to Biblical Proportions as temperates continue to rise at an alarming rate due to not only the increase in fossil fuel emissions but also to the increase of C02 and Methane in the far north driven, in large part, by the conversion of the Arctic from heat reflector to heat sink due to the loss of ice & it's reflective albedo that kept earth cool for millennia. With this being said, the feedback loops that feed off this loss of ice and continued fossil fuel burning promises to amplify the impact of CC in truly terrifying ways if nothing is immediately done to move toward sustainables as man moves further into the 21st century.

The current climate crisis, they say, is larger and more complex than any humans have ever dealt with before. General climate models — like the one that the United Nations' Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used in 2018 to predict that a global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) could put hundreds of millions of people at risk — fail to account for the sheer complexity of Earth's many interlinked geological processes; as such, they fail to adequately predict the scale of the potential consequences. The truth, the authors wrote, is probably far worse than any models can fathom.

It gets better ...

What might an accurate worst-case picture of the planet's climate-addled future actually look like, then? The authors provide one particularly grim scenario that begins with world governments "politely ignoring" the advice of scientists and the will of the public to decarbonize the economy (finding alternative energy sources), resulting in a global temperature increase 5.4 F (3 C) by the year 2050. At this point, the world's ice sheets vanish; brutal droughts kill many of the trees in the Amazon rainforest (removing one of the world's largest carbon offsets); and the planet plunges into a feedback loop of ever-hotter, ever-deadlier conditions.

"Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability," the authors hypothesized.

End game ...

The result, according to the new paper, is "outright chaos" and perhaps "the end of human global civilization as we know it."

Note: As often said in BRT, we haven't even talked about environmental degradation, resource depletion and the issue of too many people, let alone the slow reduction of intelligence caused by the injection of more C02 into the atmosphere (415/ppm & climbing) as C02 makes one dumber by depriving us rubes of enough oxygen to remain relatively smart. Ask WWII submariners about this inconvenient fact while perusing this blurb. Yours truly certainly has.

X-Rays to the Max :)

In fact, this is a map of the entire sky in X-rays recorded by NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), a payload on the International Space Station. NICER’s primary science goals require that it target and track cosmic sources as the station orbits Earth every 93 minutes. But when the Sun sets and night falls on the orbital outpost, the NICER team keeps its detectors active while the payload slews from one target to another, which can occur up to eight times each orbit.

The map includes data from the first 22 months of NICER’s science operations. Each arc traces X-rays, as well as occasional strikes from energetic particles, captured during NICER’s night moves. The brightness of each point in the image is a result of these contributions as well as the time NICER has spent looking in that direction. A diffuse glow permeates the X-ray sky even far from bright sources.

Here's the same pix complete with labels detailing just how amazing the universe truly is. :)

The man is NOT STUPID ... 2020 looms

The man is NOT STUPID in any way, shape or form. Crass, corrupt and venal, yes but stupid, not a chance, something the Dems just don't seem to understand in any way, shape or fashion.

The digital campaign for Donald Trump is already running at full speed. Same people, same tactics as four years ago, only this time it’s better. Better targeting, better focus on voter segments necessary to win again.

In 2008 and 2012, everyone marveled at how a tiny New York digital outlet called Blue State Digital broke the rules and played a critical role in Barack Obama’s elections. Today, the Democratic party is left in the dust. Blue State, acquired by WPP, is no longer part of the political game and, by and large, the Dems seem already outrun by the Republican digital machine.

Donald Trump started his reelection campaign almost the day he entered the White House. In fact, no candidate in recent US history has raised and spent so much in the first two years of office, as shown in this chart from the Wall Street Journal (numbers exclude money raised and spent by PACs) The digital campaign for Donald Trump is already running at full speed. Same people, same tactics as four years ago, only this time it’s better. Better targeting, better focus on voter segments necessary to win again.

The art of the sell ...

“ Hillary Clinton’s team made 66,000 [different messages]. My team made 5.9 million ads. Those are ads targeted directly to people the way they want to consume them. I stopped looking at people as demographics, groups, personas. I said: let’s look at people as individuals, how do they act. Because two people who look the same might act differently. That is the future of political marketing”.

Vision quest ...

In 2020, the operation is different. This is going to be a much larger ground game. This is going to entail new technologies, new things. Look, Facebook is still going to have a play but we’ve already harvested really what we need off Facebook. — Face the Nation

“Running re-election is a lot about marketing, advertising, understanding data, and analytics, building out, you know foundational structures to understand the President’s message and how to deliver it. There are considerable things that come from just understanding on how to build out the infrastructure to be able to communicate with tens of millions of people and — and how to effectively spend five, six hundred million dollars.” [Later, Parscale admitted spending could reach a billion dollars]. — Face the Nation

2020 looms ...

All-American Despair

Your's truly has talked often about infrastructure or the lack thereof but have never discussed the devastating impact of lack of infrastructure in terms of helping people in need, issues laid bare in a powerful Rolling Stone piece written by Stephen Rodrick titled All-American Despair.

Facts ...

The Centers for Disease Control recorded 47,173 suicides in 2017, and there were an estimated 1.4 million total attempts. Many of society’s plagues strike heavier at women and minorities, but suicide in America is dominated by white men, who account for 70 percent of all cases. Middle-aged men walk the point. Men in the United States average 22 suicides per 100,000 people, with those ages 45 to 64 representing the fastest-growing group, up from 20.8 per 100,000 in 1999 to 30.1 in 2017. The states with the highest rates are Montana, with 28.9 per 100,000 people; Alaska, at 27 per 100,000; and Wyoming, at 26.9 per 100,000 — all roughly double the national rate. New Mexico, Idaho and Utah round out the top six states. All but Alaska fall in the Mountain time zone.

The journey ...

Last summer, I began a 2,000-mile drive through the American West, a place of endless mythology and one unalterable fact: The region has become a self-immolation center for middle-aged American men. The image of the Western man and his bootstraps ethos is still there, but the cliché has a dark turn — when they can no longer help themselves, they end themselves. I found men who sought help and were placed on a 72-hour hold in a hospital ward, and say they were sent home at the end of their stay without any help, collapsing back into the fetal position — the only thing accomplished was everyone in the small town now knew they were ill. I found men on both sides of the Trump divide: One whose anger toward his abusive parents was exacerbated by hours in his basement watching Fox News and Trump while drinking vodka; the other was a Buddhist mortician whose cries for help were met by scorn in a cowboy county that went 70 percent for Trump.

Making it easy ...

I found something else: guns, lots of them. Guns that could be procured in an hour. A house where a wife did a gun sweep and found dozens hidden. I found suicidal men who balked at installing gun locks on their pistols because they were afraid of being caught unarmed when mythical marauders invaded their homes. And I found that the men who survived suicide attempts had one thing in common: They didn’t use guns. Pills can be vomited, ropes can break, but bullets rarely miss.

Read Rodrick's piece in its entirety to see how America has lost her way, something truly tragic without question.

The need to connect ...

The need to connect, you know, the need to do Facebook or to have one's nose pointed obsessively toward the smartphone is a phenomenon akin to They Live, John Carpenter's unsung masterpiece of subtle alien control and critique of rampant capitalism, but ... this blurb is not about the flick but rather about how the need to connect has created the perfect system of world wide surveillance 24/7 thanks to high tech and digital computation. 

"We're in the midst of the greatest redistribution of power since the Industrial Revolution, and this is happening because technology has provided a new capability," Snowden said.

"It's related to influence that reaches everyone in every place," he said. "It has no regard for borders. Its reach is unlimited, if you will, but its safeguards are not."

Without such defenses, technology is able to affect human behavior.

It gets better ...

Institutions can "monitor and record private activities of people on a scale that's broad enough that we can say it's close to all-powerful," said Snowden. They do this through "new platforms and algorithms," through which "they're able to shift our behavior. In some cases they're able to predict our decisions—and also nudge them—to different outcomes. And they do this by exploiting the human need for belonging."

"We don't sign up for this," he added, dismissing the notion that people know exactly what they are getting into with social media platforms like Facebook.

Endgame ...

"And now," he added, "these institutions, which are both commercial and governmental, have built upon that and... have structuralized that and entrenched it to where it has become now the most effective means of social control in the history of our species."

"Maybe you've heard about it," Snowden said. "This is mass surveillance."

The need to connect rules ...