No words needed

NASA's Juno probe has flown closer to Jupiter and its largest moon, Ganymede, than any other spacecraft in more than two decades — and the images it beamed back of the gas giant and its icy orb are breathtaking. 

Juno approached Ganymede on June 7, before making its 34th flyby of Jupiter the following day, traveling from pole to pole in under three hours. 

On Thursday, NASA released an animated series of images captured by the spacecraft's JunoCam imager, providing a "starship captain" point of view of each flyby. They mark the first close-up views of the largest moon in the solar system since the Galileo orbiter last flew past in 2000.

A 'Reichstag moment'

President Donald Trump, joined by from left Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, pauses as he speaks to media during a briefing with senior military leaders in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, Monday, Oct. 7, 2019. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, AP)

We came close to a 'Reichstag moment'.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — an advisory body to the president — was actively planning for a confrontation with Trump over what Milley saw as the former president's stoking of tensions in an attempt to the lay the groundwork for a coup

The alarm only increased after the election, when Trump and his allies contested the results of the 2020 election and called on his supporters to oppose the legitimacy of the electoral process, often implying violence may be necessary.

The top brass was so disturbed by Trump's rhetoric casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election before it was held that the leaders discussed contingency plans for how to thwart any illegal power grabs by the president, including how and when to resign in protest over his actions.

"They may try, but they're not going to f****** succeed," Milley told his officers, according to Leonnig and Rucker. "You can't do this without the military. You can't do this without the CIA and the FBI. We're the guys with the guns."

We dodged a bullet this time.

It's time ...

Virtual detail of an integrated circuit through four layers of planarized copper interconnect, down to the polysilicon (pink), wells (greyish), and substrate (green)

It's time for the US to start making it's own chips again before its too late as America's losing it's mojo thanks to Ronnie offshoring manufacturing to China and significant others back in the 80's in order to gin profits for stockholders.

To whit.

AMERICAN INNOVATION, FROM smartphones to search engines to gene sequencing, is built on a foundation of impossibly intricate, perfectly etched silicon. But few of those semiconductors are actually made in the US. Only 12 percent of chips sold worldwide were made in the US in 2019, down from 37 percent in 1990.

For decades, that wasn’t seen as a problem. US companies were world leaders in designing cutting-edge chips, the most valuable and important part of the process.

Now, that’s changing. Supply disruptions caused by the pandemic and an intensifying technology rivalry with China are prompting industry executives and policymakers to say the US must actually make, not just design, chips.

The start point ...

Jack Kilby's original hybrid integrated circuit from 1958. 

This was the first integrated circuit, and was made from germanium.

It's time ...

It's universal

A model of percolation through a porous medium that relates to important recent work on the symmetries of phase transitions.

Phase transitions are never linear but they all occur the same way.

For more than 50 years, mathematicians have been searching for a rigorous way to prove that an unusually strong symmetry is universal across physical systems at the mysterious juncture where they’re changing from one state into another. The powerful symmetry, known as conformal invariance, is actually a package of three separate symmetries that are all wrapped up within it.

“This universality result is even more intriguing” because it means that the same patterns emerge regardless of the differences between models of physical systems, said Hugo Duminil-Copin of the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) and the University of Geneva.

Universality indeed.

It's subjective ...

 

Illustration: Hiroshi Watanabe

We view the world in subjective terms as every human's different as are governments and cultures, something readily seen in differing Google's search engine results generated from various parts of the world depicted by Search Atlas, a powerful new tool showing how subjectivity skews the search in question.

GOOGLE’S CLAIM TO “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has earned it an aura of objectivity. Its dominance in search, and the disappearance of most competitors, make its lists of links appear still more canonical. An experimental new interface for Google Search aims to remove that mantle of neutrality.

Search Atlas makes it easy to see how Google offers different responses to the same query on versions of its search engine offered in different parts of the world. The research project reveals how Google’s service can reflect or amplify cultural differences or government preferences—such as whether Beijing’s Tiananmen Square should be seen first as a sunny tourist attraction or the site of a lethal military crackdown on protesters.

An experimental interface for Google Search found that it offered very different views of Beijing's Tiananmen Square to searchers from the UK (left), Singapore (center), and China. Courtesy of Search Atlas

Click the Search Atlas PDF to see why SA's important.

Pareidolia

 

This wall in an old town in Tuscany, Italy, illustrates the phenomenon of facial pareidolia, or seeing faces in things.

We see faces in everything, whether it be clouds in the sky or veggies displaying a face in their greenery. This take is universal and ... we read into these faces the same way we read faces in our fellow humans.

Human beings are champions at spotting patterns, especially faces, in inanimate objects—think of the famous "face on Mars" in images taken by the Viking 1 orbiter in 1976, which is essentially a trick of light and shadow. And people are always spotting what they believe to be the face of Jesus in burnt toast and many other (so many) ordinary foodstuffs. There was even a now-defunct Twitter account devoted to curating images of the "faces in things" phenomenon.

The phenomenon's fancy name is facial pareidolia. Scientists at the University of Sydney have found that, not only do we see faces in everyday objects, our brains even process objects for emotional expression much like we do for real faces rather than discarding the objects as "false" detections. This shared mechanism perhaps evolved as a result of the need to quickly judge whether a person is a friend or foe. The Sydney team described its work in a recent paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale? Polonius: Very like a whale. - Hamlet/Shakespeare

Pareidolia personified.

AI

Watched Spielberg's Kubrick inspired AI again, a film most provocative, particularly in terms of how David, the AI little boy misreads the emotional nuances of humanity in his never ending quest to love and reunite with his "mother". The scene most powerful to yours truly is at dinner when David laughs, slightly "off" key, along the lines of the uncanny valley, where his laughter is "kinda" right but not. This misread plays out with great power throughout the film along with the inherent uneasiness man has with the specter of AI and what this open ended tech potentially means for the future of mankind.

She loves what you do for her, as my customers love what it is I do for them. But she does not love you David, she cannot love you. You are neither flesh, nor blood. You are not a dog, a cat, or a canary. You were designed and built specific, like the rest of us. And you are alone now only because they tired of you, or replaced you with a younger model, or were displeased with something you said, or broke. They made us too smart, too quick, and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us. That's why they hate us, and that is why you must stay here, with me. - Giglio Joe. 

There are girls your age that are just like me. We are the guiltless pleasures of the lonely human being. You won't get us pregnant or have us to supper with mommy and daddy. We work under you, we work on you and we work for you. Man made us better at what we do than was ever humanly possible. - Giglio Joe

David:

I like your floor.

Composite 1

Composite 1

If one looks closely, one will see intrusions of different realities placed in a Times Square pix taken by yours truly, a composite piece indirectly referring to the metaverse, an alternate digital reality separate from the analogue version us rubes reside in 24/7.

The biggest ideas in tech often lurch into the lexicon before they are truly coherent. Jargon appears out of nowhere, underexplained and overused: the internet of things, the sharing economy, the cloud.

In some rare cases, the terminology sticks. A lot of people talk a lot about a lot of loosely related things, and then those things merge into a single semi-comprehensible thing. Then we live our lives within that thing forever. Remember hearing about “the internet”? Get ready for “the metaverse.”

The term comes from digital antiquity: Coined by the writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel, “Snow Crash,” then reimagined as the Oasis in the Ernest Cline novel “Ready Player One,” it refers to a fully realized digital world that exists beyond the analog one in which we live.

The kicker ...

Video games like Roblox and Fortnite and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, in which players can build their own worlds, have metaverse tendencies, as does most social media. If you own a non-fungible token or even just some crypto, you’re part of the metaversal experience. Virtual and augmented reality are, at a minimum, metaverse adjacent. If you’ve attended a work meeting or a party using a digital avatar, you’re treading into the neighborhood of metaversality.

Angle 1

Are you experienced? - Jimi Hendrix

Synchronicity

Synchronous fireflies in the Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee.Credit...Floris van Breugel/Nature Picture Library, via Alamy

Synchronicity, not the album by the Police, but rather synchronicity generated by fireflies happens when males, wanting to hook up with females, begin the process by sending cascading waves of flashes through a swarm at the point it becomes dense enough for the males to do their thing. 

Swarms of synchronous fireflies are rather like melting ice, or at least that’s how Raphael Sarfati, a physicist, sees it. Ice remains solid until it warms to a certain temperature and becomes a liquid. Likewise, a loose swarm fireflies will flash the lanterns in their abdomens randomly. But when the swarm reaches a certain density, the fireflies begin to blink in unison.

“Above that threshold, it is almost perfect synchronization,” with rhythmic, coordinated waves of light, said Dr. Sarfati, a postdoctoral associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

It's not just fireflies ...

The 3-D reconstruction allowed the researchers to characterize several complex patterns in the swarm’s behavior. The male fireflies did not flash instantaneously, but rather in a cascading wave across the swarm. For example, sometimes the flashes would begin at the bottom of the ridge and move toward the insects at the top. This relay-like propagation of flashing suggests that fireflies interact with the swarm locally, taking their cues from the fireflies around them, Dr. Peleg said.

This propagation pattern is also found in other animal swarms such as schools of fish, she added, where local interactions between fish can ripple out to the entire group.

“I see my neighbor is flashing, so I flash as well,” Dr. Sarfati explained.

Fireflies caught in the act in the daytime. :)

Life ... residing in Enceladus?

This artist’s impression depicts NASA’s Cassini spacecraft flying through a plume of presumed water erupting from the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Credit: NASA

Life ... residing in Enceladus? It's possible thanks to Methane, a key ingredient for life found in the plumes of a tiny moon orbiting Saturn.

An unknown methane-producing process is likely at work in the hidden ocean beneath the icy shell of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, suggests a new study published in Nature Astronomy by scientists at the University of Arizona and Paris Sciences & Lettres University.

Giant water plumes erupting from Enceladus have long fascinated scientists and the public alike, inspiring research and speculation about the vast ocean that is believed to be sandwiched between the moon’s rocky core and its icy shell. Flying through the plumes and sampling their chemical makeup, the Cassini spacecraft detected a relatively high concentration of certain molecules associated with hydrothermal vents on the bottom of Earth’s oceans, specifically dihydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide. The amount of methane found in the plumes was particularly unexpected.

It gets better.

The results suggest that even the highest possible estimate of abiotic methane production — or methane production without biological aid — based on known hydrothermal chemistry is far from sufficient to explain the methane concentration measured in the plumes. Adding biological methanogenesis to the mix, however, could produce enough methane to match Cassini’s observations.

This cutaway view of Saturn’s moon Enceladus is an artist’s rendering that depicts possible hydrothermal activity that may be taking place on and under the seafloor of the moon’s subsurface ocean, based on results from NASA’s Cassini mission. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Something's afoot yet again. :)