11 billion years & counting ...

While stupidity in poltics and governance continues to run amuck, there is an oasis of intelligence and innovation like SDSS, NASA and the Planck Institute.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) released today a comprehensive analysis of the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever created, filling in the most significant gaps in our possible exploration of its history.

"We know both the ancient history of the universe and its recent expansion history fairly well, but there's a troublesome gap in the middle 11 billion years," says cosmologist Kyle Dawson of the University of Utah, who leads the team announcing today's results. "For five years, we have worked to fill in that gap, and we are using that information to provide some of the most substantial advances in cosmology in the last decade."

The new results come from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS), an international collaboration of more than 100 astrophysicists that is one of the SDSS's component surveys. At the heart of the new results are detailed measurements of more than two million galaxies and quasars covering 11 billion years of cosmic time.

The SDSS map is shown as a rainbow of colors, located within the observable Universe (the outer sphere, showing fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background).

We are located at the center of this map. The inset for each color-coded section of the map includes an image of a typical galaxy or quasar from that section, and also the signal of the pattern that the eBOSS team measures there. As we look out in distance, we look back in time. So, the location of these signals reveals the expansion rate of the Universe at different times in cosmic history. Image credit: Anand Raichoor (EPFL), Ashley Ross (Ohio State University) and the SDSS Collaboration 

Any questions? :)

A communication construct for the ages :)

Being nearly deaf, this video resonates, not only for BLM but also for just how important American Sign Language truly is as a communication construct yours truly needs to learn in the near future. Check out Unspeakable, a great resource for sure.

The nuances of communicating in sign language were important to get right in the video, Alaquiva said: for instance, the word “black” referring to the color can be signed with one finger pointed out in the ASL 1 handshape moving horizontally across the forehead. But when referring to a Black person, the sign uses four fingers pressed together in the ASL “b” handshape moving horizontally across the forehead, and is generally reserved for use by Black people, Alaquiva said.

Participating in public rallies is often challenging for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people, especially in large crowds with many people wearing face masks that cover their mouths. Activists have worked with the National Alliance of Multicultural Disabled Advocates to push for the #BlackDisabledLivesMatter efforts, to spotlight these challenges, as Teen Vogue columnist Sarah Kim reported. They also seek to call attention to the number of police violence victims who had disabilities.

There's a lot to learn here without question.

Sign Language is gestural communication used as an alternative or replacement for speech. Sign languages resemble oral languages in every way other than their modality. As with oral languages, sign languages are acquired spontaneously and have highly intricate, rule-governed grammar and phonology. The three classes of features that make up individual signs are hand configuration, movement, and position to the body. Sign languages include those of Trappist monks, who have a rule of silence, and Plains Indians, where speakers of mutually unintelligible languages communicated freely. 

Awesome to a fault.

We're all suspects ...

The invasion of our privacy knows no bounds after the Patriot Act was enacted prior to the creation of The Department of Homeland Security, yet another boondoggle of government created by W after 9/11. 

Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet. While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.

Our rights have been systematically violated by W, Obama and now Trump and nothing will change when Trump hopefully gets ousted from office because surveillance 24/7 ensures government control no matter who occupies the White House.

The state of Nooze in America ...

Yes they will. :)

Quantel, ahead of its time, for a time ...

Computer graphics circa 1986 works, especially the guy with the cigar. Awesome.

Quantel’s intuitive pen-driven interface was (and arguably, still is) the best-in-class and what the Paintbox offered would have been impossible to achieve without dedicated hardware. That hardware was, however, expensive and cumbersome. A Quantel engineer recounted how a platter from the massive 14” Winchester hard drive (which held an impressive 70MB of data!) once came loose from its housing, flew across the room and penetrated the wall of the edit suite. 

Although aimed very much at the TV and commercials industry, Quantel were keen to let artists have a go. Here is what happened in 1985 when they let David Hockney loose on it:

Perhaps the definitive Paintbox video of 1986 was the promo for Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’, from the album ‘Brothers In Arms’. Defining the era in many ways, it became one of the most played videos on MTV (launched in the UK  in 1987) and the album the first to sell over a million copies on CD.

Alas, Quantel died even though they were ahead of everyone else in both stills and compositing. Custom hardware combined with outrageous prices created a recipe for disaster in the world of CG.



Quantel carried on with innovative editing systems into the 21st century, but now there was a lot of competition around. The iQ online editing and compositing system introduced in 2000, still using Quantel’s pen-driven interface, led the pack in many ways – it could take any format thrown at it without conversion and handle 4k before anyone was using it – but it was expensive and had a reputation for being very unreliable. Quantel reached their peak with the Pablo – a colour correcting tool which James Cameron used to post-produce the 3D Avatar in 2009. The Pablo was followed by the Pablo Rio, a complete colour correcting and finishing system.

Sadly, Quantel was to go the way of all high-end systems based on proprietary hardware and the company began to contract from 2005 onwards.

Remember, the ultimate luxury becomes the ultimate commodity in the world of CG.

Habitat destruction 101

This pix of a Monarch visiting a wildflower in the Paine Property was shot three years ago when the Aspetuck Land Trust had the field cut in LATE FALL, a practice Huntington State Park has done for years to prevent tree seedlings taking root as they always tend to do. Paine did the late fall cut for years as well until last year and again in 2020 with the end result being: no butterflies, no wildflowers, no swifts, no dragonflies, no nothing, a now-dead space akin to a parking lot at a shopping mall near you save that it's tan, not black, an unintended act of habitat destruction at small scale. 

Easy remedy, cut in the late fall as before if you want this kind of scene to return as nature bounces back if you let her. :)

Nature never disappoints. :)

Silence is golden

Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado is so quiet that noise levels often fall below acoustic equipment's measurement threshold. NPS/KRIS ILLENBERGER

Yours truly is deaf. Powerful hearing aids make it somewhat possible to hear but deafness, combined with tinnitus makes conversation difficult at best, particularly over a smartphone. At the same time, loud noise makes yours truly crazy as it physically hurts and adds stress, especially when wearing said hearing aids.

45 years ago, Great Sand Dunes National park was a destination for the ages for my wife and I as it was silent (I could hear then) and it was wonderful. Silence is golden as it preserves not only sanity but also enables animals of planet earth to conduct business, something becoming ever more difficult, especially for denizens living in the sea. 

Human-created noise is more than annoying. Decades of research has implicated it in a host of chronic health conditions, including low sleep quality and high blood pressure, as well as increased risk of heart attack or stroke, diabetes, and even cancer. “Noise is a known psychological and physiological stressor,” says Marie Pedersen, an epidemiologist at the University of Copenhagen who studies how environmental exposures affect pregnancies and children. Wildlife is affected too: Studies show that the auditory landscape is a key component of habitat, and human noise masks critical sounds. Animals listen for prey, predators, and territorial alarm calls, to locate group members, and find sexual partners.

Truer words never spoken.

Blackout :)

 One specimen of the ultrablack fish species Anoplogaster cornuta. A unique arrangement of pigment-packed granules enables some fish to absorb nearly all of the light that hits their skin,

so that as little as 0.05 percent of that light is reflected back.

Going ultra black in the abyss pays off, not only in terms of avoiding predators but also to remain hidden when presenting bioluminescent lures to attract prey within striking distance. Vantablack's living rival rules.

"In pretty much all ultra-black materials you need both scattering and absorption," said co-author Alexander Davis, a graduate student at Duke. "In all other animals that we know of, the scattering in ultra-black coloration comes from either a chitin or keratin matrix, like a bird feather or butterfly scale, and the absorption comes from melanin embedded within those matrices. In these fishes, the scattering and absorption are both coming from the melanosomes themselves. This makes the mechanism a bit simpler because there is no structural scaffold necessary."

Several ultrablack species seem to have independently evolved the exact same adaptation; Osborn and her colleagues found these pigment patterns in 16 distantly related species.

The Pacific black dragon has a bioluminescent lure that they use to attract prey, and
if not for their ultrablack skin and transparent, anti-reflective teeth, the reflection
of their lure would scare prey away.

Vantablack in action ...

Vantablack is the brand name for a new class of super-black coatings.
The coatings are unique in that they all have hemispherical reflectances
below 1% and also retain that level of performance from all viewing angles. 

Have to show a closeup. :)

The Pacific blackdragon also has light-producing organs below their eyes that scientists expect might be used as a searchlight to spot prey.

Statistically impossible ...

It's statically impossible to refute the fact Siberia is roasting, thanks to human-induced climate change. Anyone who doubts this is a fool. Dangerville awaits as civilization moves further into the future.

As with many extreme weather events in recent years, a team of scientists has completed a rapid analysis of the role of climate change in all this. The scientists analyzed both that record high temperature and the warm January-to-June across the region, concluding “in both cases that this event would have effectively been impossible without human-induced climate change.”

Any questions?

Sit on it ...

Like a hulking monster in a cheesy horror movie of the late 50's, Trump looms over 11/3/2020 like a disheveled Frankenstein, ready to do whatever it takes to stay in office in order to not go to jail, courtesy the Southern District of New York.

In June, President Trump sat in the Oval Office for one of his periodic interviews-turned-airing-of-grievances. When the conversation turned to the 2020 election, Trump singled out what he called the “biggest risk” to his bid for a second term. It was not the mounting death toll from COVID-19, or further economic damage inflicted by the pandemic, or anything else a reality-dwelling president might fret about.

“My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits,” Trump told the Politico reporter he’d invited. He was referring to the series of lawsuits filed by his campaign and the Republican National Committee that fight the expansion of mail-in voting and seek to limit access to the ballot box in November. “We have many lawsuits going all over,” he said. “And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think — I think it puts the election at risk.”

It gets "better."

But Trump defied the prewritten obituaries in 2016, and he could do it again this year. In recent months, a central theme of his re-election strategy has come into clear, unmistakable focus: Trump and his Republican enablers are putting voter suppression front and center — fear-mongering about voting by mail, escalating their Election Day poll watching and so-called ballot-security operations, and blocking funding to prepare the country for a pandemic-era election. “The president views vote-by-mail as a threat to his election,” a lawyer for the Trump campaign recently told 60 Minutes. Attorney General William Barr told Fox News that vote-by-mail  “absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud.” And Trump blasted out in a May tweet that “MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE. IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY. WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR NATION.”

“They’re shouting the quiet part out loud,” Marc Elias, one of the Democratic Party’s top election lawyers, tells Rolling Stone. “They’re not whispering it. They’re shouting it.”

The camel's nose is in the tent yet again.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY VICTOR JUHASZ FOR ROLLING STONE