The size of space | time killer to the max :)

The Size of Space is a time killer to the max showing us rubes just how enormous space truly is.

Enjoy.

Had to add another

And we haven't even reached galaxy size in any way, shape or fashion. :)

Except now. :)

What lies beyond? No one knows, do one? - Fats Waller 

3 Times greater ...

2050 portends a world radically different from the one we see now based on new projections of the extent of water level rise never thought possible until now. The NYTimes Vietnam image, in particular, simply stuns yours truly given just how intense GW will become as man movers further into the 21st century.

Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities.

The authors of a paper published Tuesday developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic. The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury.

We are so screwed.

Bangkok & Alexandra goes away as well.

Warms the cockles of one's heart doesn't it.

3 Times greater, indeed.

Addendum ...

The US also gets hit.

Miami Beach in 2050

By 2050, sea-level rise will push average annual coastal floods higher than land now home to 300 million people, according to a study published in Nature Communications. High tides could permanently rise above land occupied by over 150 million people, including 30 million in China. Without advanced coastal defense and planning, populations in these areas may face permanent flooding within 30 years.

Miami Beach/2050 - Vertical view

New Orleans, like southern Vietnam, is basically gone. 

Any questions?

Happy Halloween/NASA Style :)

Active regions on the sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern’s face on Oct. 8, 2014. The image was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which watches the sun at all times from its orbit in space.

Happy Halloween everyone. :)

Close encounters ...

Close encounters of the squid kind without question ...

A trio of divers off the western coast of Norway had a close encounter with a drifting gelatinous blob — a squid's egg sac as big as an adult human. 

A video captured and shared on YouTube on Oct. 6 by Ronald Raasch, a diver with the Norwegian research vessel REV Ocean, shows a diver slowly circling a spherical blob surrounded by a transparent membrane, with a dark mass suspended inside. 

As the diver swam around the blob, his flashlight lit up its interior. Inside were numerous tiny spheres — eggs holding baby squid, estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands, according to the video description.

One can't make this up.

A Year in a life ...

Felix Dierich, one of the creators, wrote that the animation was based upon scientific observation data from the meteorological satellite Himawai-8, situated 35786 km above Earth, and which is operated by the Japan Meteorological Agency. The satellite observations were originally processed by the Bureau of Meteorology. He also notes the following meteorological and astronomical events that occur at specific timecodes, amongst many that have not yet been listed:

• March 9th 2016 Total Solar Eclipse: 4:44
• June 2016 Kamchatka Wildfires: 7:26-8:02 (visible as large amounts of smoke emitted from a point in western Kamchatka, eventually filling a large ocean area) - also: June solstice/polar day north pole
• July 2016 Super Typhoon Nepartak: 8:37-8:49
• Aug 2016 Typhoon Lionrock: 10:43-11:09
• Sep 2016 Super Typhoon Meranti: 11:14-11:24
• Dec 2016 December solstice/polar day south pole: from 13:25

A year in a life indeed.

https://ayatgo.wetplanet.de/

The Telescreen ... looms

BRT has written a great deal about AI with one segue leading to the telescreen, the infamous device used by Big Brother to track the Winston Smiths of the world in Orwell's masterpiece ... 1984.

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Now, in 2019, one can see the telescreen writ large whereby said tech not only watches one but also tracks emotion using one's webcam to make it happen.

Levenson decided to base his next film project on this idea. “I thought, given all this access we’ve given them to our faces, what is the most hypothetically awful thing they could possibly be doing to harm us?” he says. He imagined companies potentially analyzing users’ photographs to determine their emotions in each one, then combining this with other data to draw sweeping conclusions about people’s thoughts and preferences. “What if they correlated [the emotional analysis] with other inputs: your location via GPS or maybe the content you’re consuming,” he says. “They would know something about the way you felt about some place, some thing—or maybe even someone, if they examine your text history.” Then the tech giants could turn around and sell these data about your behaviors and opinions to other parties.

It gets better.

So Levenson began researching emotion recognition technology—and quickly realized its use might not be entirely hypothetical. “When I started googling around, I discovered the patents revealing that the tech companies had kind of beat me to it,” he says. “They had clearly been thinking about precisely the same thing for at least like five years now.” He incorporated this research into his new “interactive documentary.”

When a person watches Stealing Ur Feelings (available here) online, the viewer’s own face—frequently festooned with virtual sunglasses or other digital stickers—appears onscreen at the same time as stock imagery such as cute animals, pizza and random humans. These visuals speed by as a narrator cheerily discusses how emotion recognition works and how tech companies could use it. To demonstrate what this technology can do, the video applies it to viewers: Levenson adapted open-source code into a program that uses a device’s Web cam to analyze the viewer’s face as it reacts to the other on-screen imagery.

In other words, as you watch this video, it watches you right back.

https://stealingurfeelin.gs

The Telescreen ... looms.

Burnin Down the House ...

Burning down the house by Talking Heads is not the raison d'ete of this blurb but rather the gathering storm known as global warming and the increasing impact it's having on the world, in this case, California, the dry land of brush and scrub forest, complete with intense winds, a Petrie dish made for devastating fires of the wild kind.

SAN FRANCISCO — Facing down 600 wildfires in the past three days alone, emergency workers in California rushed to evacuate rural areas of Northern California on Thursday and warned residents that the high winds currently propelling an out-of-control blaze could become even stronger in the coming days.

Remember, it's just the beginning of a long term disaster of our own making.

All this is happening after three straight years of record breaking fires that researchers say are likely to continue in a warming world and which raise an important question: How to live in an ecosystem that is primed to burn?

Interesting question without question is it not?

Surrounded on All Sides :)

Another gem from Dinosaur Comics. Enjoy. :)

The Singleton

Mirror Beach | a piece by yours truly, depicts, in indirect fashion, the looming spectre of AI and what it means for mankind as neural net driven technology is open-ended and intrinsically unknowable as this code learns about its domain independent of the creators who built it in the first place. With this in mind, the notion of a singleton governing the world is no longer fantasy given just how pervasive AI is becoming due, in large part, as to just how much money is being made on an evolving tech that is no longer under our control.

To whit.

• Nick Bostrom's "singleton hypothesis" says that intelligent life on Earth 
  will eventually form a "singleton".
• The "singleton" could be a single government or an artificial intelligence that runs everything.
• Whether the singleton will be positive or negative depends on numerous factors and is not certain.

The question to ask ...

Does history have a goal? Is it possible that all the human societies that existed are ultimately a prelude to establishing a system where one entity will govern everything the world over? The Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom proposes the "singleton hypothesis," maintaining that intelligent life on Earth will at some point organize itself into a so-called "singleton" – one organization that will take the form of either a world government, a super-intelligent machine (an AI) or, regrettably, a dictatorship that would control all affairs.

Something to consider without question.

Click What is a Singleton? to learn why Bostrom's take on civilization 's possible future rings true. 

Future Tense ...

Bubbles of a different kind :)

Yours truly has written copiously about Quantum Foam and how it relates to reality, a take on same that actually seems to be relevant given that said writer's ability with math is limited to say the least. :) With that being said, I must say this Vice article supports, in part, what this rube has written over the years BRT has been in existence.

What was previously assumed to be empty space in the universe now had to be filled with huge amounts of mysterious anti-energy in order to explain observations of the universe’s ever-quickening expansion. Even so, observations of the universe’s expansion suggest that the energy is 60 to 120 orders of magnitude lower than what recent quantum field theory predicts.

What this means is that all of this extra energy is somehow missing when we look at the universe as a whole; either it’s effectively hidden or very different in nature to the energy we do know about.

It gets better ...

To try and solve the mystery of what fills the universe, scientists have been exploring the possibility that it's actually full of bubbles.

In 1955, influential physicist John Wheeler proposed that, at the quantum level, spacetime is not constant but "foamy," made up of ever-changing tiny bubbles. As for what these bubbles are "made" of, recent work suggests that spacetime bubbles are essentially mini-universes briefly forming inside our own.

The spacetime foam proposal fits nicely with the intrinsic uncertainty and indeterminism of the quantum world. Spacetime foam extends quantum uncertainty in particle position and momentum to the very fabric of the universe, so that its geometry is not stable, consistent, or fixed at a tiny scale.

The idea is that in spacetime foam, every point in spacetime has the huge amount of vacuum energy—the lowest energy state equivalent to "empty space"—predicted by quantum theory, but behaves differently to other points. For any particular way in which a point in spacetime is behaving, the exact opposite is equally as likely to occur at another point in spacetime. This is the feature of spacetime foam which “cancels out” the extra energy and expansions at a tiny scale, resulting in the lower energy that we observe at the scale of the whole universe.

For this to work, one has to assume that at the quantum level, time has no intrinsic "direction." In other words, there is no "arrow of time." According to Carlip, in the quantum world, this isn't such a wild suggestion. “Most physicists would agree that we don't know at a fundamental level why there's an arrow of time at all,” he said. “The idea that it's somehow 'emergent' on larger scales has been around for a long time.”

Ain't science grand? :)