A Matter of Size

A wonderful article in Nautilus titled Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy? is informative to the max, complete with a terrific set of illustrations, courtesy John Hendrix.

The size of things in our universe runs all the way from the tiny 10-19 meter scale that characterizes quark interactions, to the cosmic horizon 1026 meters away. In these 45 possible orders of magnitude, life, as far as we know it, is confined to a relatively tiny bracket of just over nine orders of magnitude, roughly in the middle of the universal range: Bacteria and viruses can measure less than a micron, or 10-6 meters, and the height of the largest trees reaches roughly 100 meters. The honey fungus that lives under the Blue Mountains in Oregon, and is arguably a single living organism, is about 4 kilometers across. When it comes to known sentient life, the range in scale is even smaller, at about three orders of magnitude.

Addendum: What about on the supersize end of the spectrum? William S. Burroughs, in his novel The Ticket That Exploded, imagined that beneath a planetary surface, lies “a vast mineral consciousness near absolute zero thinking in slow formations of crystal.” The astronomer Fred Hoyle wrote dramatically and convincingly of a sentient hyper-intelligent “Black Cloud,” comparable to Earth-sun distance. His idea presaged the concept of Dyson spheres, massive structures that completely surround a star and capture most of its energy. It is also supported by calculations that my colleague Fred Adams and I are performing, that indicate that the most effective information-processing structures in the current-day galaxy might be catalyzed within the sooty winds ejected by dying red giant stars. For a few tens of thousands of years, dust-shrouded red giants provide enough energy, a large enough entropy gradient, and enough raw material to potentially out-compute the biospheres of a billion Earth-like planets.

Food for thought, eh? :)

Summing it up

Sounds like Congress but they have a budget, right? :)

Insanity Is ...

Apart from Einstein's wonderful definition of insanity "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.", there are different kinds of insanity like that of the US and it's decent into this wonderful realm regarding politics or the lack thereof.

It’s 2020, four years from now. The campaign is under way to succeed the president, who is retiring after a single wretched term. Voters are angrier than ever—at politicians, at compromisers, at the establishment. Congress and the White House seem incapable of working together on anything, even when their interests align. With lawmaking at a standstill, the president’s use of executive orders and regulatory discretion has reached a level that Congress views as dictatorial—not that Congress can do anything about it, except file lawsuits that the divided Supreme Court, its three vacancies unfilled, has been unable to resolve.

On Capitol Hill, Speaker Paul Ryan resigned after proving unable to pass a budget, or much else. The House burned through two more speakers and one “acting” speaker, a job invented following four speakerless months. The Senate, meanwhile, is tied in knots by wannabe presidents and aspiring talk-show hosts, who use the chamber as a social-media platform to build their brands by obstructing—well, everything. The Defense Department is among hundreds of agencies that have not been reauthorized, the government has shut down three times, and, yes, it finally happened: The United States briefly defaulted on the national debt, precipitating a market collapse and an economic downturn. No one wanted that outcome, but no one was able to prevent it.

Indicators of this dire future becoming true are everywhere from dysfunctional governance, healthcare and infrastructure decay to gross financial inequality ginned by WS and the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex. Factor in the 2016 election as catalyst with two corrupt entities doing the drill and add in the dark troika of environmental degradation, resource depletion and global warming and you have a CF in the making. 

What can be done? As a minimum we need the following as Jefferson said: "Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of nineteen years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right."

• Term Limits: 2 for senate, 4 for house.
• No Gerrymandering.
• 10 year term for SC justices.
• Binding Referendums for issues affecting all Americans. Vietnam, Iraq & Libya anyone?
• No revolving door: When you're out of politics, you don't lobby.
• Public financing of campaigns.
• Part time Congress with pay parsed out accordingly.
• Perks end when politicians leave office.
• HC for politicians, the same as the rest of us.
• Congress shall obey the laws they pass.
• No self imposed raises.
• Transparency in terms of how budgets are created.
• Daily minutes of senate and house posted online.
• Single payer HC. Everybody in, nobody out.
• Restore our civil rights.
• Balance the budget with emphasis given to rebuilding infrastructure and not to endless wars.

Any questions?

Exhibit A

Exhibit A as to why NAFTA and the proposed TPP are really bad ideas.

On June 24, foreign oil company TransCanada filed a lawsuit against the U.S. under NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, arguing that the U.S. rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline violated NAFTA’s broad rights for foreign investors by thwarting the company’s “expectations.” As compensation, TransCanada is demanding more than $15 billion from U.S. taxpayers.

TransCanada’s case will be heard in a private tribunal of three lawyers who are not accountable to any domestic legal system, thanks to NAFTA’s “investor-state” system, which is also included in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The controversial TPP would empower thousands of additional corporations, including major polluters, to follow TransCanada’s example and use this private tribunal system to challenge U.S. climate and environmental policies.

TransCanada’s Request for Arbitration follows the Notice of Intent to submit a claim to arbitration that it filed on Jan. 6.

TransCanada’s attempt to make American taxpayers hand over more than $15 billion because the company’s dirty Keystone XL pipeline was rejected shows exactly why NAFTA was wrong and why the even more dangerous and far-reaching Trans-Pacific Partnership must be stopped in its tracks.

Any questions?

This is the end

A great writer just died, Michael Herr, a former Esquire reporter who covered Nam big time, brought home the futility of an absurd war in ways never to be forgotten in Dispatches, the script for Full Metal Jacket and the hypnotic and memorizing intro to Apocalypse Now.

Everyone is terribly sorry about what the war is doing to Vietnam and the Vietnamese, especially since the cities have been brought into it, although somehow most of the official expressions of grief have about them that taint of Presidential sorrow, turning a little grinny around the edges. The Tet Offensive changed everything here, made this an entirely different war, made it Something Else. ("Nonsense," a colonel told me. "We're just doing the same things in the cities that we've done in the boonies, why … for years!" He was not the same man who said, "We had to destroy Bentre in order to save it," but he might have been. He'd be hip to that.) Before Tet, there was some clean touch to jungle encounters, some virtue to their brevity, always the promise of quick release from whatever horror there was. The war went on in bursts, meeting engagements; and covering it—particularly in the Highlands and the Delta, II Corps and IV Corps—you were always a tourist, a tripper who could summon up helicopters like taxis. You would taxi in, the war would break over you suddenly and then go away, and you would taxi out. Enough chances were taken to leave you exhilarated, and, except for the hangovers that any cheap thrill will give you, it was pleasant enough. Now, it is awful, just plain awful, awful without relief. (A friend on The New York Times told me that he didn't mind his nightmares so much as his waking impulse to file on them.) It has finally become that kind of conventional war that the Command so longed for, and it is not going well. And for every month that it continues not going well, the scope of its destruction is enlarged. We are not really a particularly brutal people, certainly no more brutal now than we've been in other wars, acquiring it as the war goes on. But our machine is devastating. And versatile. It can do almost everything but stop.

Michael Herr

“Dispatches,” published in 1977, drew resounding critical praise. It was one of the first books to confront the Vietnam War in all its hallucinogenic awfulness and jarring absurdities. It was instantly placed in the pantheon of great war literature, widely viewed as journalism alchemized seamlessly into art.

The spy novelist John le Carré called “Dispatches” “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.” New York Times book critic John Leonard hailed Mr. Herr’s work as “beyond politics, beyond rhetoric, beyond ‘pacification’ and body counts and the ‘psychotic vaudeville’ of Saigon press briefings. . . . It is as if Dante had gone to hell with a cassette recording of Jimi Hendrix and a pocketful of pills: our first rock-and-roll war, stoned murder.”

Yours truly is waiting for the Michael Herr of 2016 to do a number on America's absurd wars in the Middle East as people need to get a sense of just much was lost for the sake of oil, money and the military/industrial/congressional complex.

R.I.P.

ESPER - Revisited

The ESPER Machine, in Blade Runner, revisited. To yours truly, this was the coolest part of the film.  Seen below is the original, which is as memorizing today as it was back in 1982 when BR was released.

Life Finds a Way/Rev II

I Sing the Body Electric by Walt Whitman, certainly applies to newly discovered microbes that eat electricity in hostile habitats that truly boggle the mind. With this in mind, pardon the pun, it seems more than reasonable that life abounds everywhere given just how tough these organisms truly are.

Though eating electricity seems bizarre, the flow of current is central to life. All organisms require a source of electrons to make and store energy. They must also be able to shed electrons once their job is done. In describing this bare-bones view of life, Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Albert Szent-Györgyi once said, “Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.”

Awesome says it all.

A significant sacrifice

Cassini has been a wonder. Not only in creating photographs of incredible beauty but also in finding out that life could reside on Enceladus, a small Saturnian moon that  most likely has a subsurface ocean thanks to the immense tidal pulls of it's massive master along with Titan, the largest moon in the solar system awash in organics, complete with a weather system early similar to earth driven by methane, not water.  To prevent any contamination or harm to said possible life, this noble probe will end it's existence by merging with Saturn in 2017.

The Cassini spacecraft is dancing toward death — and NASA wants to make sure it doesn’t take any alien life with it.

Since 2004 the probe has twirled around Saturn, studying the gas giant’s rings, storms and moons. But it has recently started preparing for next year, when it will plunge into the planet’s atmosphere and vaporize.

NASA chose the ringed planet as Cassini’s final resting place because the space agency doesn’t want to risk contaminating a potentially habitable world with hardy microbes that may be aboard the craft. Saturn, with its gaseous surface consumed by hydrogen and helium, is inhospitable to life.

The same may not be true for some of its moons.

Science, when done right, never disappoints.

Reflecting on Reality

From day into night is the basis of this short clip. Enjoy

Background Checks :)

In an effort to ensure powerful tools fall only into the correct hands, a new bill would require comprehensive background checks for all gun lobbyists interested in purchasing a sitting United States Congressman.

Calling it an “unyielding assault” on their constitutional rights, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association said, “This is truly a slap in the face to those of us responsible senator-owners who advantageously procure political sway well within the confines of the law.”