Kinda says it all regarding Kavanaugh :)

:)

There is a better way

Tim Berners Lee, the guy who actually invented the web, wants to do a redo, something that's truly needed if we want the net to remain open and available to all regardless of how rich or powerful a given entity may happen to be. 

“The intent is world domination,” Berners-Lee says with a wry smile. The British-born scientist is known for his dry sense of humor. But in this case, he is not joking.

This week, Berners-Lee will launch, Inrupt, a startup that he has been building, in stealth mode, for the past nine months. Backed by Glasswing Ventures, its mission is to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it. In other words, it’s game on for Facebook, Google, Amazon. For years now, Berners-Lee and other internet activists have been dreaming of a digital utopia where individuals control their own data and the internet remains free and open. But for Berners-Lee, the time for dreaming is over.

“We have to do it now,” he says, displaying an intensity and urgency that is uncharacteristic for this soft-spoken academic. “It’s a historical moment.” Ever since revelations emerged that Facebook had allowed people’s data to be misused by political operatives, Berners-Lee has felt an imperative to get this digital idyll into the real world. In a post published this weekend, Berners-Lee explains that he is taking a sabbatical from MIT to work full time on Inrupt. The company will be the first major commercial venture built off of Solid, a decentralized web platform he and others at MIT have spent years building.

Sounds like a plan without question.

Disheartening says it all.

I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure. - Agent Smith | The Matrix

Of course the machines were prime polluters as well but one gets the point, especially when seeing what is happening to Orcas, the prime predator on planet earth. 

At least half of the world’s killer whale populations are doomed to extinction due to toxic and persistent pollution of the oceans, according to a major new study.

Although the poisonous chemicals, PCBs, have been banned for decades, they are still leaking into the seas. They become concentrated up the food chain; as a result, killer whales, the top predators, are the most contaminated animals on the planet. Worse, their fat-rich milk passes on very high doses to their newborn calves.

PCB concentrations found in killer whales can be 100 times safe levels and severely damage reproductive organs, cause cancer and damage the immune system. The new research analysed the prospects for killer whale populations over the next century and found those offshore from industrialised nations could vanish as soon as 30-50 years.

Disheartening says it all.

Channeling nature yet again :)

Manta Rays aka the Devil Fish, is an elegant filter feeder that glides through the ocean with incredible grace and power while at the same time feeding on plankton and other tiny delicacies without the need to clear it's throat no matter how many goodies it gets during the day.

The car-size, kite-shaped fishes filter their plankton food from seawater, but they don’t pause, close their mouths and snort clogs from their filters nearly as often as you would expect, according to Misty Paig-Tran, a marine biologist and a professor at California State University, Fullerton. If their filters work like sieves, then they must get clogged over time, like all similar systems, from vacuum cleaners to your water-filter pitcher.

But Dr. Paig-Tran and her colleagues’ latest research, published Wednesday in Science Advances, shows that the manta ray is using a previously unknown method of filtration that causes particles to glide over its straining system, rather than go through it. It doesn’t need to clear its filters much because they’re rarely clogged.

Nature never disappoints, ever.

NYC | un petite voyage avec mes amis

Checking out the city with friends is very cool, especially when said friends, and us, have never seen the 9/11 Memorial until now. Enjoy.

The definition of "is" ...

Just a matter of time

Eyes wide shut

Same as it ever was

Mia not culpa

Arthur's Murry's School of Dance

Generation Blues Band

Aretha lives with GBB covering her classic Chain of Fools with style in Redding Rock'n Roots Revival 2018. Enjoy.

For my own pocket all the time | Boss Croker

From Who.What.Why are some classic quotes regarding power and the drivers that make it happen.

I have a problem with people who take the Constitution loosely and the Bible literally. (Bill Maher)

Religion: a sixteenth-century term for nationalism. (Sir Lewis Namier)

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful. (Seneca)

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil. (Eric Hoffer)

Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide. (Joseph P. Kennedy)

Even the best-intentioned of great men need a few scoundrels around them; there are some things you cannot ask an honest man to do. (Jean de la La Bruyère)

In politics, nothing is contemptible. (Benjamin Disraeli)

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer “Present” or “Not Guilty.” (Theodore Roosevelt)

Read the post, it's the smart thing to do.

Open Ended ... rev xxx

BRT has written copiously about AI as my loyal readers know as this is open-ended tech with ramifications far too important to ignore. In many instances, people think of AI as a thing, not as a set of millions of interconnected things, an ever-evolving entity as digital is an environment where duplication, modification and updating of real-time code work at speeds far beyond the kin of man. With this in mind, an excellent article by Henry Kissenger, How the Enlightenment Ends in The Atlantic, connects AI to the Enlightenment at deep level, a piece that should be read by everyone concerned about how this technology will impact society as we move further into the 21st century.

Heretofore, the technological advance that most altered the course of modern history was the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which allowed the search for empirical knowledge to supplant liturgical doctrine, and the Age of Reason to gradually supersede the Age of Religion. Individual insight and scientific knowledge replaced faith as the principal criterion of human consciousness. Information was stored and systematized in expanding libraries. The Age of Reason originated the thoughts and actions that shaped the contemporary world order.

But that order is now in upheaval amid a new, even more sweeping technological revolution whose consequences we have failed to fully reckon with, and whose culmination may be a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms.

We are not ready for this ...

Third, that AI may reach intended goals, but be unable to explain the rationale for its conclusions. In certain fields — pattern recognition, big-data analysis, gaming — AI’s capacities already may exceed those of humans. If its computational power continues to compound rapidly, AI may soon be able to optimize situations in ways that are at least marginally different, and probably significantly different, from how humans would optimize them. But at that point, will AI be able to explain, in a way that humans can understand, why its actions are optimal? Or will AI’s decision making surpass the explanatory powers of human language and reason? Through all human history, civilizations have created ways to explain the world around them — in the Middle Ages, religion; in the Enlightenment, reason; in the 19th century, history; in the 20th century, ideology. The most difficult yet important question about the world into which we are headed is this: What will become of human consciousness if its own explanatory power is surpassed by AI, and societies are no longer able to interpret the world they inhabit in terms that are meaningful to them.

Questions to consider without question.

And so it goes. K. Vonnegut

Fragile indeed

An excellent piece in The Atlantic succinctly explains why the Constitution is so fragile.

The system isn’t working. But even as the two parties agree on little else, both still venerate the Constitution. Politicians sing its praises. Public officials and military officers swear their allegiance. Members of Congress keep miniature copies in their pockets. The growing dysfunction of the government seems only to have increased reverence for the document; leading figures on both sides of the aisle routinely call for a return to constitutional principles.

What if this gridlock is not the result of abandoning the Constitution, but the product of flaws inherent in its design?

To whit ...

In this telling, the Constitution created not a radical democracy, but a very traditional mixed monarchy. At its head stood a king—an uncrowned one called a president—with sweeping powers, whose steadying hand would hopefully check the factionalism of the Congress. The two houses of the legislature, elected by the people, would make laws, but the president—whom the Founders regarded as a third branch of the legislature—could veto them. He could also appoint his own Cabinet, command the Army, and make treaties.

The Convention placed limits on the president’s powers, to be sure: Some of his actions would be contingent on approval by the Senate, or subject to overrides. But these hedges on presidential authority did not make the office a creature of Congress. Having defeated the armies of George III, the Framers seized upon a most unlikely model for their nascent democracy—the very Stuart monarchy whose catastrophic failure had produced the parliamentary system—and proceeded to install an executive whose authority King George could only envy.

To add fuel to the fire. The Atlantic strikes yet again.

James Madison traveled to Philadelphia in 1787 with Athens on his mind. He had spent the year before the Constitutional Convention reading two trunkfuls of books on the history of failed democracies, sent to him from Paris by Thomas Jefferson. Madison was determined, in drafting the Constitution, to avoid the fate of those “ancient and modern confederacies,” which he believed had succumbed to rule by demagogues and mobs.

James madison died at Montpelier, his Virginia estate, in 1836, one of the few Founding Fathers to survive into the democratic age of Andrew Jackson. Madison supported Jackson’s efforts to preserve the Union against nullification efforts in the South but was alarmed by his populist appeal in the West. What would Madison make of American democracy today, an era in which Jacksonian populism looks restrained by comparison? Madison’s worst fears of mob rule have been realized—and the cooling mechanisms he designed to slow down the formation of impetuous majorities have broken.

Fragile indeed | twice two.