The Cape ... Bay Side/Ocean Side

Starting with a visit to the Mystic Aquarium with our grand daughter, we head north to the Outer Cape to check out the vast difference between the Bay & Ocean sides of the most famous "hook" in this part of the world. :) Enjoy.

Blinded by the "light" ...

As a born again atheist of 65+ years, I find this The Lincoln Project ad both hilarious and disturbing at the same time as the notion of separation of church and state, as articulated by the 1st Amendment, is now gone, a process started when Ike got involved with the National Prayer Breakfast to leverage his presidency in 1953, thus bringing religion into the presidency for the first time, and completed by the Roberts' Court with Hobby Lobby and Greece, NY. In the near future, with luck, separation of church and state will come back as the young are overwhelming atheist or agnostic in terms of religion as praying to an imaginary god or a guy who may or may not have existed in the age of tech makes no sense. 

Watch this piece and laugh and weep at the same time in seeing how these clowns pray for Trump as it's all about politics and money, especially with these prophets for profit charlatans paying homage to a man who is neither religious or ethical in any sense of the word.

Angling for a meal ...

Angler fish, bizarre denizens of the abyss, never cease to amaze given how unique these fish truly are.

An underwater robot exploring the deep seas captured the first video footage ever of a creepy-looking anglerfish — a creature that looks so menacing it is sometimes called the "black seadevil."

Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) were using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to explore the Monterey Canyon ocean trench, a steep seafloor canyon in California that extends about 95 miles (153 kilometers) into the Pacific Ocean.

The robotic sub came across the anglerfish around 1,968 feet (600 meters) below the surface. The researchers used the ROV to take pictures and video of the anglerfish, and then captured the deep-sea creature and brought it back to MBARI for closer study. [See photos of the creepy anglerfish]

The anglerfish is named for the long strip of flesh that sticks out of its head. This "fishing pole" has a luminous bulb that looks irresistible to smaller prey fish or squid swimming through deep and dark waters. Once the prey gets too close, the anglerfish snatches it with its long, needlelike teeth.

Read on if you dare. :)

Have to show another video of this star of the deep with commentary detailing 

how this queen conducts business in the deep.

Needless to say, there are several kinds of these guys as seen in this pix below.

(A) Centrophryne spinulosa, 136 mm SL (B) Cryptopsaras couesii, 34.5 mm SL (C) Himantolophus appelii, 124 mm SL (D) Diceratias trilobus, 86 mm SL (E) Bufoceratias wedli, 96 mm SL (F) Bufoceratias shaoi, 101 mm SL (G) Melanocetus eustalus, 93 mm SL (H) Lasiognathus amphirhamphus, 157 mm SL (I) Thaumatichthys binghami, 83 mm SL (J) Chaenophryne quasiramifera, 157 mm SL.

Interesting without question. :)

Eddie Van Halen died ... what a bummer

The first time yours truly heard Eddie Van Halen was his solo on Beat It by Michael Jackson. Short, quick and something altogether different as no rock guartarist has ever sounded like this before or since. On the Eruption clip seen above, the reason why this is so is his duo hand fingering technique doing simultaneous jams, thus generating sound unlike anyone else. Varese, Zappa and Stockhausen come to mind in listening to this. In an interview a few years before his death, after quitting booze and drugs. Eddie was articulate, open and kind, talking about how important it was to connect with friends and family and not talking about how cool a rock star he is. He looked terrific, which comes as a shock after learning about his death after a long bout with cancer at 65.

“I don’t know shit about scales or music theory,” he told Rolling Stone in 1980. “I don’t want to be seen as the fastest guitar in town, ready and willing to gun down the competition. All I know is that rock & roll guitar, like blues guitar, should be melody, speed, and taste, but more important, it should have emotion. I just want my guitar playing to make people feel something: happy, sad, even horny.”

RIP Eddie Van Halen 10/5/2020

Of bugs, Mars & Full Moons :)

Milkweed Seeds ... ready for delivery :)

FM + Mars B&W

FM + Mars ... how the eye sees it.

Rising FM/Mars 10/1/2020

Harvest Moon 2020

Itsy bitsy spider ...

Bugs, orange, yellow & black, feasting on MW seeds ...

Wormholes yet again

BRT has waxed "poetic" about the possibilities of black holes being wormholes due to the fact energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed, thanks to the 1st Law of Thermodynamics because if the 1st law applies to objects as extreme as black holes, said energy has to go somewhere and not be crushed out of existence via a singularity, the dark beast residing in black holes, a notion physicists are beginning to question as we speak.

Unusual flashes of gamma rays could reveal that what appear to be giant black holes are actually huge wormholes, a new study finds.

Wormholes are tunnels in space-time that can theoretically allow travel anywhere in space and time, or even into another universe. Einstein's theory of general relativity suggests wormholes are possible, although whether they really exist is another matter.

Of course this is conjecture but nature shows herself to be extremely consistent when 

it comes to energy and how it's expressed.

It gets better ...

Unusual flashes of gamma rays could reveal that what appear to be giant black holes are actually huge wormholes, a new study finds.

Wormholes are tunnels in space-time that can theoretically allow travel anywhere in space and time, or even into another universe. Einstein's theory of general relativity suggests wormholes are possible, although whether they really exist is another matter.

Though wormholes are predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, their existence has yet to be empirically proven. Now, a team led by Mikhail Piotrovich, an astrophysicist at the Central Astronomical Observatory at Pulkovo in Saint Petersburg, Russia, has proposed a new way to search for the hypothetical tunnels: by investigating whether some supermassive black holes are actually entrances to wormholes. 

Wormholes at the center of extremely bright galaxies might “radiate with a distinctive spectrum” that could be observationally detected, according to the team’s forthcoming study in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 

What if this notion of wormholes actually scales down to the Quantum Form as the size of the hole determines its life span, which means these tiny Planck sized entangled entities, described by Einstein–Rosen bridges, would give rise to existence as Quantum Gravity postulates existence is granular, possibly driven by tiny wormholes winking in and out of existence, something we may be indirectly seeing via the Alice in Wonderland world of Quantum Mechanics.

It's a thought, right? :)

Survivability

This pix, showing a caboose, depicts a possible end of the world scenario on planet earth but, there are trillions of planets out there and the laws of probabilities point to the fact end times are happening to some of them. The way the end of the world happens are endless from exploding suns, a giant astroid, a plague of a different kind, you name it, we all die but some deaths may include an entire civilization as pointed out in an excellent Scientific American article titled It’s the End of the World ... Somewhere.

 And perhaps the ultimate in last-ditch attempts to avert a slow-rolling planetary disaster is to send out a distress signal, looking for answers to existential challenges; because at that point why not?

There is a catch though, and it relates to the well-worn ideas of the Fermi paradox. By the time a species is compelled into doing any of these things, and even before its planetary environment is pushed to a Klaxon-like tipping point, perhaps it simply fails. There is no Hail Mary, there isn’t even a noticeable last gasp, instead it all just shuts down. In which case the apparent absence of any evidence for other intelligence in the universe is not just because of our limited searches to date, it is because of a great filter that—like an exhausted parent—just puts an end to any coherent change. There is no bang, and there isn’t even a whimper.

That is of course awfully depressing. But there is a ray of hope, and it’s in the fact that our quest to look for other technological life in the universe is very, very far from complete. We may yet find ourselves detecting the shrieks of civilizations across our galaxy. Even if they’re experiencing their own apocalypse, we would learn critical things about the properties of a great filter; that there might be time yet to slither past it, and that at least we still have a way to go.

BRT has discussed the survivability rate of civilizations on rocky planets such as earth and the betting pool is very close to where they live or die as every civilization will exploit their world to the max with possible devastating consequences. Look at man's stewardship of earth, pretty damn depressing is it not? 

To be continued.

Nature has a way ...

For three years, the art of stupid has reigned with attacks on science, aiding and abetting fossil fuel companies by gutting the EPA and last but not least, totally screwing the pooch regarding COVID-19, costing America in ways frightening to behold but maybe nature has a way as The Donald, before the virus hit, was well underway to getting reelected as his disastrous tax cuts would not show their true damage to the economic health of the country until 2021. 

During the Black Death, surviving visionaries learned that keeping distant from people having the plague worked, something this fool kept denying while hindering medical experts from doing their job of  dealing with the virus. If he had allowed them do do their job, the bug would have been dealt with and, god forbid, he would still get reelected but noooo, Trump wouldn't allow that. Now, with POTUS having the virus, it seems reasonable to say, put a fork in it, Trump's done, losing to the weakest candidate the dems came up with, Joe Biden, a candidate complete with his own health problems but COVID-19 is not one of them.

WASHINGTON — President Trump revealed early Friday morning that he and the first lady, Melania Trump, had tested positive for the coronavirus, throwing the nation’s leadership into uncertainty and escalating the crisis posed by a pandemic that has already killed more than 207,000 Americans and devastated the economy.

Mr. Trump, who for months has played down the seriousness of the virus and hours earlier on Thursday night told an audience that “the end of the pandemic is in sight,” will quarantine in the White House for an unspecified period of time, forcing him to withdraw at least temporarily from the campaign trail only 32 days before the election on Nov. 3. 

The question to ask now, how will Trump's immune system deal with it? 

Nobody knows, do one? - Fats Waller.

The Toolbox

A good friend of mine clued me in on an amazing work of art, the Stanley Toolbox. Ultiliatan, elegant and above all else, useful, something all too rare in this age of tech unable to be repaired.

Massachusetts piano maker Henry O. Studley built his magnificent tool chest in the 19th century using ebony, mother-of-pearl, ivory, rosewood, and mahogany — refining it over the course of a 30-year career.

However, in the past 30 years as it has changed ownership and gone on and off of display at the Smithsonian Institute, the tool chest has undergone several repairs and missing tools have been replaced.

The Toolbox, exquisite and useful art to the max.

Bird brains?

Crows, parrots and ravens are the Einsteins of the avian world and for good reason as their brains are similar to ours, a notion not considered possible until now.

With enough training, pigeons can distinguish between the works of Picasso and Monet. Ravens can identify themselves in a mirror. And on a university campus in Japan, crows are known to intentionally leave walnuts in a crosswalk and let passing traffic do their nut cracking. Many bird species are incredibly smart. Yet among intelligent animals, the “bird brain” often doesn’t get much respect.

Two papers published today in Science find birds actually have a brain that is much more similar to our complex primate organ than previously thought. For years it was assumed that the avian brain was limited in function because it lacked a neocortex. In mammals, the neocortex is the hulking, evolutionarily modern outer layer of the brain that allows for complex cognition and creativity and that makes up most of what, in vertebrates as a whole, is called the pallium. The new findings show that birds’ do, in fact, have a brain structure that is comparable to the neocortex despite taking a different shape. It turns out that at a cellular level, the brain region is laid out much like the mammal cortex, explaining why many birds exhibit advanced behaviors and abilities that have long befuddled scientists. The new work even suggests that certain birds demonstrate some degree of consciousness.

Why is this so?

Stacho and his colleagues think the findings also represent a glimpse into ancient animal brain evolution. The last common ancestor of birds and mammals was a reptile that roamed the earth around 320 million years ago. And its brain, the team believes, was probably a precursor to that of the two lineages that diverged through evolution. “Nobody knows how exactly the brain of the last common ancestor looked like,” Stacho says. “Most likely, it wasn’t like the neocortex or the DVR. It was probably something in between that, in mammals, developed to a six-layered neocortex and, in birds, to the wulst and DVR.”

Lastly ...

This latest research also undercuts primate exceptionalism. “I hope that more people will be tempted to drop the notion that there is something very unique and exclusive about the human brain,” Herculano-Houzel says.

It's about time don't you think?

The Raven

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

"'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door—

            Only this and nothing more."

Edgar Allan Poe