Complexity ...

Reality is quantum, probability driven, where there is no certitude, which means ... one cannot predict the future. With this in mind, channeling Alan Turing comes to mind regarding how complexity has just taken a big step to make practical quantum computing a reality.

MIP* = RE is not a typo. It is a groundbreaking discovery and the catchy title of a recent paper in the field of quantum complexity theory. Complexity theory is a zoo of “complexity classes” – collections of computational problems – of which MIP* and RE are but two.

In 1936, Alan Turing showed that the Halting Problem – algorithmically deciding whether a computer program halts or loops forever – cannot be solved. Modern computer science was born. Its success made the impression that soon all practical problems would yield to the tremendous power of the computer.

But this is not so as long as the computer in question is serial ...

The class P consists of problems which a known algorithm can solve quickly (technically, in polynomial time). For instance, multiplying two numbers belongs to P since long multiplication is an efficient algorithm to solve the problem. The problem of finding the prime factors of a number is not known to be in P; the problem can certainly be solved by a computer but no known algorithm can do so efficiently. A related problem, deciding if a given number is a prime, was in similar limbo until 2004 when an efficient algorithm showed that this problem is in P.

Another complexity class is NP. Imagine a maze. “Is there a way out of this maze?” is a yes/no question. If the answer is yes, then there is a simple way to convince us: simply give us the directions, we’ll follow them, and we’ll find the exit. If the answer is no, however, we’d have to traverse the entire maze without ever finding a way out to be convinced.

Such yes/no problems for which, if the answer is yes, we can efficiently demonstrate that, belong to NP. Any solution to a problem serves to convince us of the answer, and so P is contained in NP. Surprisingly, a million dollar question is whether P=NP. Nobody knows.

Reality ... is digital with analog overide - Robert E.

Serious Tech ... Serious Car

Oh, if yours truly had the money, the hydrogen powered Hyperion would be on the bucket list 

as hydrogen has serious advantages over lithium ion without question.

The Hyperion XP1 Is A Hydrogen Powerhouse With A 1,000 Mile Range

Aside from the Hyperion XP1's impressive range statistics, the hypercar goes 0 to 60 mph in only 2.2. seconds and recharges in 3 to 5 minutes. It's difficult not to look down the road at a certain other California-based car company. But that's not the plan here. 

It gets better ...

Then there's the environmental benefit of hydrogen itself. Currently, 95% of all hydrogen is sourced from steam reforming of natural gas, meaning it would solve the EV cobalt problem. What's more, since the byproduct of using hydrogen as a fuel is only water, it is incredibly environmentally friendly.

Serious tech - serious car ...

In search of "TRUTH" ...

Looking at this amazing Jan-Otto pix clearly shows just how truth avoidance works in America. Don't face facts, just bs your way out of it or cover your ass using language designed to obfuscate or bamboozle, actions mainline news, politicians and corporations do all the time.

Politics and the English Language,  the masterful essay by George Orwell, shows how it's done ...

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called. transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

Fast foward to 2020 ...

Why us? Over the past few months, I’ve been watching us fall behind practically every other country on Earth in terms of Covid-19 prevention and thinking to myself, Why America? Why are we so vulnerable to misinformation that we have both citizens AND leaders who don’t just ignore the basic truths of the virus, but mock them outright? WHY ARE WE SO FUCKING STUPID?

If you wanna understand why Americans are so hopelessly addicted to lies, you need to understand the unceasing comfort those lies provide.

But that’s been true of America since well before the pandemic. We are a callow nation built on comfortable lies. You see Americans getting cozy with these lies constantly now. Columbus was the progenitor of Native American genocide? Well, okay, but excuse me, he DISCOVERED this country. The Founding Fathers? Yes, they had slaves, but they still built this joint. Slavery itself? Well, we got rid of that (eventually). Racism? Dude, we elected a Black president and then reelected him four years later over the whitest possible alternative.

The police are bad guys? I’m sorry, but I need to know someone out there is protecting me from all the bad people. President Trump is a fascist? Please. That’s just the haters clutching their pearls because Trump had the courage to completely upend a government that every American already despised. They quietly applaud his brashness even if they have to virtue signal some form of tacit disapproval. Why would we elect a fascist? We’re the good guys. Every Spielberg movie said so.

Any questions?

Ceres ... yet another ocean world

Yet another ocean world.

In the foreground, is Cerealia Facula ("facula" means bright area), a 9-mile-wide (15-kilometer-wide) region with a composition dominated by salts. The central dome, Cerealia Tholus, is about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) across at its base and 1,100 feet (340 meters) tall. The dome is inside a central depression about 3,000 feet (900 meters) deep..

Ocean worlds are cropping up all over with Ceres joining Enceladus, Europa and Ganymede as entities containing the elements needed to harbor life as we know it.

Data from NASA's recent Dawn mission answers two long-unresolved questions: Is there liquid inside Ceres, and how long ago was the dwarf planet geologically active?
NASA's Dawn spacecraft gave scientists extraordinary close-up views of the dwarf planet Ceres, which lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. By the time the mission ended in October 2018, the orbiter had dipped to less than 22 miles (35 kilometers) above the surface, revealing crisp details of the mysterious bright regions Ceres had become known for.

Scientists had figured out that the bright areas were deposits made mostly of sodium carbonate - a compound of sodium, carbon, and oxygen. They likely came from liquid that percolated up to the surface and evaporated, leaving behind a highly reflective salt crust. But what they hadn't yet determined was where that liquid came from.

By analyzing data collected near the end of the mission, Dawn scientists have concluded that the liquid came from a deep reservoir of brine, or salt-enriched water. By studying Ceres' gravity, scientists learned more about the dwarf planet's internal structure and were able to determine that the brine reservoir is about 25 miles (40 kilometers) deep and hundreds of miles wide.

Ceres doesn't benefit from internal heating generated by gravitational interactions with a large planet, as is the case for some of the icy moons of the outer solar system. But the new research, which focuses on Ceres' 57-mile-wide (92-kilometer-wide) Occator Crater - home to the most extensive bright areas - confirms that Ceres is a water-rich world like these other icy bodies.

But she is closer to the sun than the ocean worlds listed in this piece. :)

Addendum ... “The material found on Ceres is extremely important in terms of astrobiology,” she said.“We know that these minerals are all essential for the emergence of life.”

The resolution varies from about 11 feet (3.5 meters) per pixel in the bright regions to about 115 feet (35 meters) per pixel in the background. The color data that is overlain on the topographic data was obtained during the prime mission in 2015 when the spacecraft was at an altitude of 915 miles (1470 kilometers). It has a resolution of 450 feet (140 meters) per pixel.

Fragility/Rev XX

Fast-moving tropical storm Isaias visited the Northeast on Monday, August 3rd with relatively moderate winds and virtually no rain yet the power outages wrought by the storm far exceeded 2012's Cat 3 Hurricane Sandy by a long shot. Why may you ask ... because of trees because trees are really heavy and totally uncooperative when they fall and snap power lines with the greatest of ease. Imagine if Isaias was a Cat 3 or Cat 4 storm. The impact of the hurricane would close down the Northeast corridor for months or ... maybe forever due to the dire straits the US finds itself in as we move further into the year of our lord 2020. To this rube, it points out the irrevocable fact the foundation of modern civilization is comprised of sticks, where any given disruption can bring the system to its knees in an NYC second just as Isaias did 8 days ago. Something to consider, don't you think?

Any questions?

Isaias storm track 

At one point, nearly 100 tornado warnings were issued 

across ten states as the storm raced up the East Coast. 

The Great Unraveling/Rev III

BRT has waxed "poetic" about why America is in such dire trouble. From gross and inept malfeasance performed by W and Weapons of Mass Destruction to The Donald mishandling COVID-19 to the nth degree, this once great nation has been ravaged by the so-called owners of the country in ways boggling the mind and ... we haven't even discussed the bankrupting kleptocracy of the MIC or the acceleration of climate change, the existential gorilla threatening to end our sorry ass existence on planet earth. 

To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering over the global economy for some time will be the sober realization that all the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never be enough to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases to function, with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice between economic and biological survival.

Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in history. But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America.

In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

Read the rest of Wade Davis' excellent and detailed article as to why America is unraveling, a notion yours truly has been writing about for quite a long time.

Adding insult to injury comes from an insightful blurb from Australia titled We are witnessing the fall of a great power describing the rottenness of the US political system with passion and accuracy, a take yours truly concurs with without question. In reading both pieces, a connect to the French Revolution comes to mind due to the fact America cannot handle the truth of a flawed political system needing a complete reset if the nation is to survive as a viable entity as it moves further into the 21st century. 

Just how rotten is the United States' political system? The answer is rotten, as in it will only take a small kick for the whole edifice to fall in, let alone a big kick like COVID-19.

The idea is about as fanciful as the collapse of the Soviet empire seemed in 1987, when President Ronald Reagan famously demanded: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Yet, a short time later, a little chink in the Iron Curtain at the Hungary-Austria border saw the whole rotten regime collapse.

"Viewed from 2020, exactly 50 years since it was published, Amalrik's work has an eerie timeliness. He was concerned with how a great power handles multiple internal crises - the faltering of the institutions of domestic order, the craftiness of unmoored and venal politicians, the first tremors of systemic illegitimacy. He wanted to understand the dark logic of social dissolution and how discrete political choices sum up to apocalyptic outcomes."

Tragically, American exceptionalism - 'we are the first and best democracy on Earth' - contributes to the self-delusion of indestructibility. There is nothing automatically self-correcting in US democracy.

Just look at US foreign policy for the past 60+ years to see why this take rings true.

Asleep @ the switch :)

Asleep @ the switch comes to mind when talking about a lazy black hole but what it means to star-making is anything but.

"Without the black hole actively pumping energy into its surroundings, the gas can cool enough so this impressive rate of star formation can happen," said co-author Carter Rhea, also of the University of Montreal. "This kind of black hole shut down may be a crucial way for stars to form in the early Universe."

Awesome to a fault. :)

Mid Summer

Beauty, stealth, survival and renewal, the four states of the cycle of life apply
to all living entities without exception. Enjoy.

Uranus ...

Factoids "r" us. :)

What’s the most interesting fact you know about Uranus? The fact that its rotational axis is completely out of line with every other planet in the solar system?  Or the fact that Uranus’ magnetosphere is asymmetrical, notably tilted relative to its rotational axis, and significantly offset from the center of the planet?  Or the fact that it’s moons are all named after characters from Shakespeare or Alexander Pope?

Any questions? :)

Sad but true

The Juice Media rocks without a doubt. :)

Climate change anyone?

Sad but true without question.