Crapification 101

When looking at this amazing movie poster, circa 1987, indirectly promoting schlock, the notion of the crapification of America comes to mind in terms of governance, the economy and the dumbing down of people residing in a dying empire addicted to the buying of stuff. 

To whit ...

One aspect nobody seems to notice is the transformation from a society that once drew its identity from producing quality goods and services to a society that draws its identity from consuming crapified goods and services. Now that Americans define themselves by consuming, they are enslaved to consumption: to limit consumption is to disappear--and 'spending time" on social media is a form of consumption, even if no goods or services are purchased directly, as one's attention / time are valuable commodities. 

In other words, Americans have been trained like Pavlov's dogs to consume, no matter how poor the quality and service. We just buy it anyway, and grumble over the decaying quality and service--but we won't take the only action that would impact corporations and the government: stop buying the products and services.  Opt out, drop out, make it at home, cancel the service, just stop buying abysmally made junk and pathetically poor services. 

Corporations and the government are monopolies or quasi-monopolies, and so they don't have to care whether customers are appalled by poor quality and service: they know the customer has to consume whatever is offered, no matter how crapified. 

Endgame

In the Technicolor fantasy of corporate promoters, enterprises gain sales by making higher quality products than competitors. Two generations ago, this was still a cultural / economic dynamic. 

But then everyone with a line of credit bought everything, and so now everyone owns everything. This saturation of all demand means sales can only decline since durable goods last a long time. The only way to juice sales higher is by making insecure consumers crave the latest fashion, but this artifice has limits. 

The solution was to crapify all products and services via planned obsolescence and endless loops of lousy, over-priced service. Products are now designed to be impossible to repair (eliminating cheapskate do-it-yourselfers) and by using the lowest-quality, lowest-cost components, manufacturers guarantee that the entire product will fail once the lowest-quality component fails. 

Discerning consumers have long noted the crapification of ingredients and the accompanying decline of value via shrinkflation. Discerning DIYers have noted how products are sealed, warranties voided, and simple maintenance jobs like changing the oil in a vehicle are now complicated by various perverse means. 

As for service--Corporate America doesn't have to care about poor quality because they know we have no choice. All the members of the cartel offer the same rapacious pricing and pathetically poor service, so no corporation or institution (hospital, university, local government agency, etc.) has to fear a competitor might disrupt the cozy profiteering--there is no real competition in healthcare, higher education, defense contractors, telecom providers, pharmaceuticals, fast food, agribusiness, etc.--none. 

 George Carlin was right, we have no choice.

A Grand Illusion

A figurative depiction of the helium-4 atom with the electron cloud in shades of gray.
In the nucleus, the two protons and two neutrons are depicted in red and blue.
Not to scale - The nucleus is approximately 1/100,000 the size of the atom.

It's nearly empty space or, in other words, reality is but a grand illusion of solidity based on the fact the nucleus of a given atom is 1/100,000 the size of the atom itself while at the same time, said nucleus comprises 99.9% of the atom's mass so ... why does reality feel solid to us rubes? :)

My trip on this prepandemic morning in November 2018 is to visit the place that, precisely a century before February 8, 2022, saw one of the most pivotal events for the nascent quantum physics. Without quite realizing what they were seeing, Stern and his fellow physicist and collaborator Walther Gerlach discovered quantum spin: an eternal rotational motion that is intrinsic to elementary particles and that, when measured, only comes in two possible versions—“up” or “down,” say, or “left” or “right”—with no other options in between.

Before the Roaring Twenties were over, physicists would reveal spin to be the key to understanding an endless range of everyday phenomena, from the structure of the periodic table to the fact that matter is stable—in other words, the fact that we don’t fall through our chair.

But the reason why I have a personal obsession with the Stern-Gerlach experiment—and why I am here in Frankfurt—is that it provided nothing less than a portal for accessing a hidden layer of reality. As physicist Wolfgang Pauli would explain in 1927, spin is quite unlike other physical concepts such as velocities or electric fields. Like those quantities, the spin of an electron is often portrayed as an arrow, but it is an arrow that does not exist in our three dimensions of space. Instead it is found in a 4-D mathematical entity called a Hilbert space.

It's all about spins & fields is it not?

The state of a vibrating string can be modeled as a point in a Hilbert space. The decomposition of a vibrating string into its vibrations in distinct overtones is given by the projection of the point onto the coordinate axes in the space.

Seen below is an explanation of how quantum computers work. Indirectly, it also shows how spin and fields make up, in part, the quantum mechanical reality in which we all inhabit.

The Art of War/rev XX

Afghan Pashtun children watch a soldier in the 1st Battalion, 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division during a patrol near Zoldag Mongah west of Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Oct. 8, 2010. Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

The Art of War details how entities should conduct war in proper fashion, something the US seems to not understand in any way, shape or fashion given the catastrophic excellent adventures in foreign policy beginning with the house arrest of Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad by the CIA. From Nam to Iraq to Afghanistan, the inability of the US to understand the proper tenents of military and foreign policy is truly mind-boggling, something readily seen in an excellent article written by Nick Turse in The Intercept.

Parker, the little probe that can :)

Parker, the little probe that can, has done it again, this time, imaging Venus in visible light.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has taken its first visible light images of the surface of Venus from space.

Smothered in thick clouds, Venus’ surface is usually shrouded from sight. But in two recent flybys of the planet, Parker used its Wide-Field Imager, or WISPR, to image the entire nightside in wavelengths of the visible spectrum – the type of light that the human eye can see – and extending into the near-infrared.

In the time since Parker Solar Probe captured its first visible light images of Venus’ surface from orbit in July 2020, a subsequent flyby has allowed the spacecraft to gather more images, creating a video of Venus’ entire nightside. A full analysis of the images and video, published on Feb. 9, 2022, in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, is adding to scientists’ understanding of the planet likened as Earth’s twin.

The images, combined into a video, reveal a faint glow from the surface that shows distinctive features like continental regions, plains, and plateaus. A luminescent halo of oxygen in the atmosphere can also be seen surrounding the planet.

Parker's primary mission ... touching the sun. :)

For the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has now flown through the Sun’s upper atmosphere – the corona – and sampled particles and magnetic fields there. 

The new milestone marks one major step for Parker Solar Probe and one giant leap for solar science. Just as landing on the Moon allowed scientists to understand how it was formed, touching the very stuff the Sun is made of will help scientists uncover critical information about our closest star and its influence on the solar system. 

Parker, the little probe that can. :)

QC's other uses ...

In Valeria Saggio’s Vienna lab, she directed a laser of single photons into a special quantum circuit to show how the vagaries of quantum physics can improve machine learning.

What's curious about quantum systems is the sole focus by the press on said tech being the end-all for breaking encryption instead of discussing why QC would also be perfect for AI-driven neural nets and ray tracing due to the inherent parallelism of qubits being in superposition to enable quantum computers to escape the limitations of serial processing forever.

For Valeria Saggio to boot up the computer in her former Vienna lab, she needed a special crystal, only as big as her fingernail. Saggio would place it gently into a small copper box, a tiny electric oven, which would heat the crystal to 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Then she would switch on a laser to bombard the crystal with a beam of photons.

This crystal, at this precise temperature, would split some of those photons into two photons. One of these would go straight to a light detector, its journey finished; the other would travel into a tiny silicon chip — a quantum computing processor. Miniature instruments on the chip could drive the photon down different paths, but ultimately there were only two outcomes: the right way, and the many wrong ways. Based on the result, her processor could choose another path and try again.

The sequence feels more Rube Goldberg than Windows, but the goal was to have a quantum computer teach itself a task: Find the right way out. For Saggio, a quantum physicist who moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a few weeks ago, the project was akin to sticking a robot in a maze. The computer must learn the right path without any prior knowledge of where to turn along the way. It’s not too hard a chore — a normal classical computer could brute-force its way through dead ends and lucky guesses. But Saggio wondered, “Can quantum mechanics help?” She and her collaborators showed last year that it can.

Crucially, the chip is not just moving through faster cycles of trial-and-error, said Lucas Lamata, a quantum machine learning expert at the University of Seville. “The novelty in this paper is that they show a speedup in learning. [It’s] an important breakthrough.” Quantum mechanics makes the system learn in fewer steps. In that sense, it shows in an experiment what Temme’s theoretical speedup promised: Quantum physics can outwit — not just outrun — classical computing. 

It's all about kernels.

Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine

The story of MAGI Mathematical Applications Group Incorporated begins with the “simple” question, “What paths would radiation take when a 20 megaton nuke goes off? Hypothetical target? NYC." 

MAGI was tasked to answer the question by inventing ray tracing to track the radiation paths of the nuke’s blast to the environment but also to apply the same technique to imaging as a nuke is a single energy source like a light bulb and blast and light rays propagate exactly the same but with the difference being light rays nondestructively intersect with objects and react according to the kind of characteristics the objects in question may possess like color, texture, transparency and reflectivity, using the laws of physics to generate an accurate 3D rendering of the scene in question. Computationally intense, ray tracing, and it's even more complex sibling, radiosity, are the most accurate ways to render high-resolution 3D scenes known to science. Note, in reality, rays propagate from light sources to illuminate the scene in question. 

Which means QC would be perfect for this kind of intense image creation without question.

Illustration of the ray-tracing algorithm for one pixel (up to the first bounce)

The ray-tracing algorithm builds an image by extending rays into a scene and bouncing them off surfaces and towards sources of light to approximate the color value of pixels.

It's only the beginning. :)

Yet another guilty pleasure :)

Yours truly has another guilty pleasure, raunchy humor, a trait picked up from my two "wonderful" older brothers while growing up. The fun inevitably starts when having a meal together as food brings out the worst of us but friends actually think we're funny, which brings me to Jackass Forever, a film I intend to see based on the trailer seen above. Even the NYTimes agrees in a stellar review detailing why this film works. :)

The Jackass guys have gotten older but, thankfully, their maturity levels have stayed the same. Over 22 years, three television seasons and movies on screens big and small, Johnny Knoxville’s lovable goons have been whacked so often that their orchestra of moans could play “O Fortuna.”

In “Jackass Forever,” the director Jeff Tremaine’s original cast — now solidly middle-aged war horses — expands to include younger, more elastic bodies like the rapper Jasper Dolphin (real name: Davon Wilson); an adult man who calls himself “Poopies” (Sean McInerney); and the stand-up comic Rachel Wolfson, the franchise’s first girl, who is dared to lick a stun gun.

In conclusion ...

Two things continue to hoist “Jackass” above its legion of imitators, many of whom are now found on TikTok. First, the razor-sharp slow-motion cinematography, which immortalizes writhing men in wet underpants with the devotion of Michelangelo sculpting “The Pietà.” Second — and more important — is the crew’s friendship, which is evident as they egg on the wounded and apply a healing salve of applause in nearly every scene. Bones get brittle. The heart muscle remains strong.

Gotta see the flick. :)

Being digital ...

Burning or banning books, a great idea is it not? Especially in the good ole USA where right-minded folks "know" what people should read, right? With this in mind, there's a way to snuff out this urge to censor one's access to information and it all begins with being digital and connected to the net.

Hardly a day goes by when we don't hear from a school or library somewhere in the United States that they've removed a book from circulation following complaints from parents or constituents. 

Last week, in a school district in Tennessee, it was the removal of MAUS, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, that retells the Holocaust story through the eyes of mice oppressed by fascist cats. 

This week, we learned of a Texas school district, Granbury (pop. 11,000), removing over 125 titles from library shelves. This comes amid the news of pushback by parents to proposals by Rep. Matt Krause, R-TX, and other lawmakers to pull hundreds of titles from libraries in Texas school districts due to content related to race and sexuality.

The varied politicized agendas in our not-so-United States seem to be driving us down a dark, dystopian path familiar to any reader of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451; school districts -- fashioning themselves as modern-day Guy Montags -- are removing works of literature lest their children are exposed to whatever values they view as improper, obscene, or not politically acceptable. 

But's there's a way out.

Let's call it the Freedom Archive.

I envision a publicly accessible website and app made available for the four major computing platforms -- iOS, macOS, Android, and Windows. This entity would contain a running inventory of books and other written content that have been banned historically and currently -- including banned content by libraries worldwide. 

This Freedom Archive -- which could be formed as an independent 501(c)6 -- would have commentaries and news included about each banned work.

Electronic media cannot be censored, particularly when replicated across multiple cloud providers and cloud service provider platforms. And that is why it is clear and incumbent upon these providers to act now.

Exactly.

The first law ...

Composite One

Energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed. 1st Law of Thermodynamics

To yours truly, T 1 is the most profound law in physics as energy drives reality because without it, there is nothing. As corollary, the unfolding of space/time driven by energy writ large makes sense as seen by the Big Bang Expansion diagram depicted below. From this lay person's vantage point, doesn't it make sense space/time and gravity are not originating constructs of reality but rather are products of something more fundamental like entanglement. A logical question to ask is it not?

A pair of researchers have uncovered a potential bridge between general relativity and quantum mechanics — the two preeminent physics theories — and it could force physicists to rethink the very nature of space and time.

Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity describes gravity as a geometric property of space and time. The more massive an object, the greater its distortion of spacetime, and that distortion is felt as gravity.

In the 1970s, physicists Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein noted a link between the surface area of black holes and their microscopic quantum structure, which determines their entropy. This marked the first realization that a connection existed between Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Less than three decades later, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena observed another link between between gravity and the quantum world. That connection led to the creation of a model that proposes that spacetime can be created or destroyed by changing the amount of entanglement between different surface regions of an object.

Yet theoretical physicist Mark Van Raamsdonk suspects that entanglement and spacetime are actually linked. In 2009, he calculated that space without entanglement couldn’t hold itself together. He wrote a paper asserting that quantum entanglement is the needle that stitches together the cosmic spacetime tapestry.

Physicists have high hopes for where this entanglement-spacetime connection will lead them. General relativity brilliantly describes how spacetime works; this new research may reveal where spacetime comes from and what it looks like at the small scales governed by quantum mechanics. Entanglement could be the secret ingredient that unifies these supposedly incompatible views into a theory of quantum gravity, enabling physicists to understand conditions inside black holes and in the very first moments after the Big Bang.

The ancient Greeks may have indirectly foretold this theory back in the day. :)

The Moirai were the three Fates in Greek mythology.

The three weaving goddesses was a well-known image in Greco-Roman culture. While the goddesses themselves were sometimes seen in different ways, their endless weaving was a constant.

From the time of the poet Hesiod (8th century BC) on, however, the Fates were personified as three very old women who spin the threads of human destiny. Their names were Clotho (Spinner), Lachesis (Allotter), and Atropos (Inflexible). Clotho spun the “thread” of human fate, Lachesis dispensed it, and Atropos cut the thread (thus determining the individual’s moment of death)

The three Fates spinning the web of human destiny, sculpture by Gottfried Schadow, 1790, part of the tombstone for Count Alexander von der Mark; in the Old National Gallery, Berlin.

Home at last ...

The Dividing Line

Looking without judgment is the start point for creating art as this approach enables one to freely see how seemingly unrelated ideas come together in the act of creation, something readily seen in Ulysses, Joyce's monumental loose connect to the Odyssey. a novel reflecting, in part, the 20th-century revolution of art and science, a masterwork both wondrous and mysterious to behold.

Loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses give the account of a single day in Dublin, Ireland: June 16th, 1904. It follows the life of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom. But the story takes a back seat in this book, putting the beautifully creative, hilariously odd, and truly genius prose to the fore. This book is a literary masterpiece that implements many unique writing techniques, many of which Joyce invented (such as “stream of consciousness”).

It is a book of music, color, life, vitality. It’s is a literary yes to the mundaneness of every day life. 

Bloom's meander thru Dublin ...

Locations

1. Ulysses Dublin map[11] Leopold Bloom's home at 7 Eccles Street[12] – Episode 4, Calypso; Episode 17, Ithaca; and Episode 18, Penelope
2. Post office, Westland Row – Episode 5, Lotus Eaters
3. Sweny's pharmacy, Lombard Street, Lincoln Place[13] (where Bloom bought soap) – Episode 5, Lotus Eaters
4. the Freeman's Journal, Prince's Street,[14] off of O'Connell Street – Episode 7, Aeolus
5. And – not far away – Graham Lemon's candy shop, 49 Lower O'Connell Street; it starts Episode 8, Lestrygonians
6. Davy Byrne's pub – Episode 8, Lestrygonians
7. National Library of Ireland – Episode 9, Scylla and Charybdis
8. Ormond Hotel[15] on the banks of the Liffey – Episode 11, Sirens
9. Barney Kiernan's pub – Episode 12, Cyclops
10. Maternity hospital – Episode 14, Oxen of the Sun
11. Bella Cohen's brothel – Episode 15, Circe
12. Cabman's shelter, Butt Bridge – Episode 16, Eumaeus
13. The action of the novel moves from one side of Dublin Bay to the other, opening in Sandycove to the South of the city and closing on Howth Head to the North.

To yours truly, who actually read the book twice, the most amazing part is Molly Bloom's Soliloquy, a description of love, lust and remembrance, distilled to a lyric essence by a writer at the absolute top of his game.

Past the point of no return ...

Pedalos on the banks of the Marmara Sea covered with sea snot. As the climate crisis heats the seas, plankton are on the move, with potentially profound consequences for ocean life and humans. Photograph: Yasin Akgül/AFP/Getty

Three entries in BRT titled Put a fork in it pertain to climate change and the unfolding catastrophe it's bringing to the world. The upshot here is the fact we passed the point of no return back in 2014, a most disquieting bit of news without question.

Extreme heat in the world’s oceans passed the “point of no return” in 2014 and has become the new normal, according to research.

Scientists analysed sea surface temperatures over the last 150 years, which have risen because of global heating. They found that extreme temperatures occurring just 2% of the time a century ago have occurred at least 50% of the time across the global ocean since 2014.

In some hotspots, extreme temperatures occur 90% of the time, severely affecting wildlife. More than 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is absorbed by the ocean, which plays a critical role in maintaining a stable climate.

“By using this measure of extremes, we’ve shown that climate change is not something that is uncertain and may happen in the distant future – it’s something that is a historical fact and has occurred already,” said Kyle Van Houtan, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, US, and one of the research team. “Extreme climate change is here, it’s in the ocean, and the ocean underpins all life on Earth.” 

Land of the double sun ...

Put a fork in it is more than just pertinent is it not?