The ghost in the machine/rev II

Anduril's Ghost 4 drone can carry systems capable of jamming enemy communications or an infrared laser to direct weapons at a target -  ANDURIL

AI resides everywhere, running beyond the control of man due to real time requirements, now steps into the drone era with a elegant system able to be folded into a soldier's back pack without issue, equipped with sophisticated cameras, and ... at a later date, smart weapons configured as needs warrant.

The new drone, the Ghost 4, shows the potential for AI in military systems. Luckey says it is the first generation that can perform various reconnaissance missions, including searching an area for enemy hardware or soldiers, under the control of a single person on the ground. The vehicle uses machine learning (the method behind most modern AI) to analyze imagery and identify targets, but it also relies on more conventional rules-based software for critical control and decisionmaking among swarm teammates.

Luckey says the drones can carry a range of payloads, including systems capable of jamming enemy communications or an infrared laser to direct weapons at a target. In theory the drone could be fitted with its own weapons. “It would be possible,” he says. “But nobody’s done it yet.”

Skynet's first weapons platform is here ...

Must admit, the damn thing looks very cool does it not?

Compare if you dare :)

Continents and Countries Compared from Visual Capitalist on Vimeo.

 Cool interactive map showing how economics interface with continents and countries.
Interesting to a fault.

For example ...

Surface Area: Does Size Matter?

When it comes to sheer land mass, Asia emerges on top with over one-third of the global surface area. On that front, it certainly has a little help from the combined forces of Russia and China, even as the former overlaps Eastern Europe as well.

Africa comes in second, but doesn’t lag behind by much. A stone’s throw from Europe, Algeria is the largest country on the continent—and the 10th largest in the world.

Failing to grasp the true size of Africa is a common mental mistake, as many maps systematically underestimate its scale. The continent could easily fit the entirety of China, India, the U.S., and multiple European countries within its borders.

Yes indeed, interesting to a fault. :)

Hothouse Earth ...

66 million years of Earth's climate uncovered from ocean sediments 

Credit: Thomas Westerhold / Adam Kutz

A hothouse earth is coming, predicted by the IPCC with the distinct possibility of temperatures rising 9-14 degrees Celsius by 2300, levels last seen 66-50 million years ago in the mid Eocene known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum. Comforting is it not?

"The IPCC projections for 2300 in the 'business-as-usual' scenario will potentially bring global temperature to a level the planet has not seen in 50 million years," Zachos said.

The new global climate record CENOGRID (lower panel) is the first to continually and accurately trace how Earth's climate has changed since the great extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. The record was generated using the oxygen (shown) and carbon isotopes from tiny microfossils found in deep-sea sediments collected by the IODP ship R/V JOIDES Resolution (shown in the photo) and shows the natural range of climate change and variability over the last 66 million years. 

Critical to compiling the new climate record was getting high-quality sediment cores from deep ocean basins through the international Ocean Drilling Program (ODP, later the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, IODP, succeeded in 2013 by the International Ocean Discovery Program). Signatures of past climates are recorded in the shells of microscopic plankton (called foraminifera) preserved in the seafloor sediments. After analyzing the sediment cores, researchers then had to develop an "astrochronology" by matching the climate variations recorded in sediment layers with variations in Earth's orbit (known as Milankovitch cycles).

Now that they have compiled a continuous, astronomically dated climate record of the past 66 million years, the researchers can see that the climate's response to orbital variations depends on factors such as greenhouse gas levels and the extent of polar ice sheets.

"In an extreme greenhouse world with no ice, there won't be any feedbacks involving the ice sheets, and that changes the dynamics of the climate," Zachos explained.

It may be worse if the American Geophysical Union's findings are correct.

Earth may be 140 years away from reaching carbon levels not seen in 56 million years

Date:

February 20, 2019

Source:

American Geophysical Union

Summary:

Total human carbon dioxide emissions could match those of Earth's last major greenhouse warming event in fewer than five generations, new research finds. A new study finds humans are pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a rate nine to 10 times higher than the greenhouse gas was emitted during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a global warming event that occurred roughly 56 million years ago.

We did this to ourselves.

Lightning of a different kind. :)

The best video yet courtesy Juno, the probe checking out Jove big time.

This animation takes the viewer on a simulated journey into Jupiter’s exotic high-altitude electrical storms. Get an up-close view of Mission Juno’s newly discovered “shallow lighting” flashes and dive into the violent atmospheric jet of the Nautilus cloud. The smallest white “pop-up” clouds on top of the Nautilus are about 100 km across. The ride navigates through Jupiter’s towering thunderstorms, dodging the spray of ammonia-water rain, and shallow lighting flashes. At these altitudes -- too cold for pure liquid water to exit – ammonia gas acts like an antifreeze that melts the water ice crystals flung up to these heights by Jupiter’s powerful storms – giving Jupiter an unexpected ammonia-water cloud that can electrify the sky. The animation was created by combining an image of high-altitude clouds from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft with a computer-generated animation.

It gets better.

New results from NASA's Juno mission at Jupiter suggest our solar system's largest planet is home to what's called "shallow lightning." An unexpected form of electrical discharge, shallow lightning originates from clouds containing an ammonia-water solution, whereas lightning on Earth originates from water clouds.

Other new findings suggest the violent thunderstorms for which the gas giant is known may form slushy ammonia-rich hailstones Juno's science team calls "mushballs"; they theorize that mushballs essentially kidnap ammonia and water in the upper atmosphere and carry them into the depths of Jupiter's atmosphere.

The shallow-lightning findings will be published Thursday, Aug. 6, in the journal Nature, while the mushballs research is currently available online in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

This illustration uses data obtained by NASA's Juno mission to depict high-altitude electrical storms on Jupiter. Juno's sensitive Stellar Reference Unit camera detected unusual lightning flashes on Jupiter's dark side during the spacecraft's close flybys of the planet. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Heidi N. Becker/Koji Kuramura

Awesome to a fault. :)

Dune

This may be the filmic version of Dune people have been waiting for for over 50 years as Herbert's great novel was the first true forway into ecology and SF at deep level. The look resembles Blade Runner 2049, which is a very good look indeed.

 

Elysium

On the surface, Elysium is an action SF flick starring Matt Damon but the flick is more than that as it centers on a dark future, driven by climate change, greed and inequality of a most pernicious kind.

The film takes place on both a ravaged Earth, and a luxurious space habitat (Stanford torus design, one of the proposed NASA designs) called Elysium.[5] The film itself offers deliberate social commentary which explores political and sociological themes such as immigration, overpopulation, transhumanism, health care, worker exploitation, the justice system, and social class issues.[6]

Says it all IMHO.

4.669

Universal constants combined with the laws of physics help define the fundamentals of reality. Speed of light, PI - 3.1416, the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle, the two laws of thermodynamics and E = mc2 — means "energy equals mass times the speed of light squared." It shows that energy (E) and mass (m) are interchangeable; they are different forms of the same thing are just some well-known examples of why this notion rings true. 

Check out the video. You will learn something. I know I have. :)

In mathematics, specifically bifurcation theory, the Feigenbaum constants are two mathematical constants which both express ratios in a bifurcation diagram for a non-linear map. They are named after the physicist Mitchell J. Feigenbaum.

Feigenbaum originally related the first constant to the period-doubling bifurcations in the logistic map, but also showed it to hold for all one-dimensional maps with a single quadratic maximum. As a consequence of this generality, every chaotic system that corresponds to this description will bifurcate at the same rate. It was discovered in 1975.[1][2]

Feigenbaum constant δ expresses the limit of the ratio of distances
between consecutive bifurcation diagram on Li / Li + 1

4.669 resides ... everywhere.

The Logistic Map

Benoit Mandlebrot's fractal is known all over the world but very few know its source as Chaos quietly connects the tiny as per Quantum and the vast as per Relativity ... and yes, the Logistic Map equation, as depicted by this amazing video, will change how one views the world. :)

The Mandlebrot Set

The logistic map connects fluid convection, neuron firing, the Mandelbrot set and so much more. Fasthosts Techie Test competition is now closed! Learn more about Fasthosts here: https://www.fasthosts.co.uk/veritasium Code for interactives is available below...

Animations, coding, interactives in this video by Jonny Hyman 🙌

Try the code yourself: https://github.com/jonnyhyman/Chaos

References:

James Gleick, Chaos

Steven Strogatz, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos

May, R. Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics. Nature 261, 459–467 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1038/261459a0

Robert Shaw, The Dripping Faucet as a Model Chaotic System

https://archive.org/details/ShawRober

Pendulum, orbits, water flows, etc, etc, Chaos resides everywhere, including in BRT. :)

When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. - Edward Lorenz

Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics focusing on the study of chaos—states of dynamical systems whose apparently random states of disorder and irregularities are often governed by deterministic laws that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. 

For example ...

The butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

End result ... initial conditions rule ...

Evolution of different initial conditions as a function of r

Smoke & Mirrors II

Another gem from Vilhjálmur Ingi Vilhjálmsson shows, yet again, in indirect fashion, the smoke & mirrors nonsense both political parties are dumping on us rubes as America moves ever closer to its version of Armageddon vis a vis 11/3/2020. In this piece titled Smoke and Mirrors II, the focus in on the Repugs with Agent Orange careening from one lie to another in hopes of getting re-elected, a thought most disconcerting to say the least. Said convention began on 8/24/2020 with a list of marginal individuals that truly boggles the mind. 

To whit.

As the weird facsimile of a Republican National Convention launched on Monday night, the latest polls for President Trump were almost unremittingly bad. He’s behind everywhere that really matters, including by a hair in the most recent surveys out of Texas and Ohio. What’s more, the news environment was bad for Trump, his family, and his political allies.

Closest to home, word got out that Trump’s niece had surreptitiously taped his sister making disparaging and hurtful remarks about him. Someone else had secretly taped his wife Melania dumping on him and her step kids. One of these step kids, Eric Trump, was in hot water for failing to comply with a subpoena issued by the New York attorney general for Trump Organization records. The president had also just lost a court fight with porn star Stormy Daniels and was ordered to pay her legal fees. That came on the heels of him losing a fight in federal court to shield his tax records from the Manhattan District Attorney.

Meanwhile, Jerry Falwell Jr., whose 2016 endorsement of Donald Trump was critical to his success, was embroiled in the most sordid kind of sex scandal and in the process of being forced out as the president of Liberty University. New scrutiny will be applied to the question of whether Trump bagman Michael Cohen blackmailed Falwell about the affair to secure his support.

The news was horrible, too, for the man and woman who replaced Paul Manafort as Trump’s 2016 campaign leaders. Steve Bannon was arrested on a Chinese billionaire’s yacht, and Kellyanne Conway’s daughter took to TikTok to accuse her parents of abuse and say that she would seek to be legally emancipated from their custody. This, in all likelihood, is what prompted Conway to announce her departure from the White House at the end of the month.

Endgame ... and I need to take a shower, now.

Under the circumstances, the first night of the “convention” went off fairly well and was probably more effective than most liberals recognize or want to admit. If nothing else, it took attention away from all the negative stories that were swirling around. The theory behind the first night’s programming wasn’t difficult to discern. Black voices attested to Trump’s lack of racism, while white voices spoke to suburban fears of Black crime. Trump is trying to cut into Biden’s margins in his areas of strength, and he’ll hope to do it without hurting the enthusiasm of his more rural base. Trump also used his primetime slot to rewrite the history of the COVID-19 outbreak, hoping to make his failures less of a liability for him at the polls.

Based on the goals for the night, it seemed like the Trump campaign achieved its goals. The message was necessarily mixed and contradictory, so the programming was anything but consistent or truly coherent, but the Republican National Committee made the arguments it wanted to make—and it made strategic sense. The confab’s organizers were probably pretty pleased with how it went, but it won’t do much to fix the legal and political problems that keep mounting around the president, his family, and his allies.

Summing it up ...

To turn Donald Trump into a president worthy of a second term, speakers are conjuring an entirely different person in his place. I can tell that Trump is the man they’re talking about, because he keeps popping up amid all the monumental imagery. (Did Leni Riefenstahl consult via séance?)

But I otherwise don’t recognize their version of Trump. Their Trump brims with empathy. Their Trump burns with passion to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. Their Trump heroically spared the country from the worst ravages of Covid-19, which is surely news to the relatives and friends of more than 175,000 Americans (and counting) who have died from it.

Click The Hill to catch up on what's happening with the Repugs.

 

Evolution102

Bird skulls evolved more slowly than the skulls of their dinosaur ancestors. Credit: Ryan Felice

In Evolution 101, BRT discussed the incredible skull diversity of Frogs, in this blurb its bird skull variation even though their theropod ancestors seems to have had a decided edge in that department based on recent findings.

To whit.

What the researchers found was that dinosaurs evolved 1.5 to three times faster than birds in all regions of the skull. After the mass extinction event brought the Mesozoic era to a close and ushered in the Cenozoic era, birds diversified. But they did so far more slowly than their Mesozoic dinosaur forerunners. “Their rate of morphological change declines just as they are taking off as a radiation,” Goswami says.

Why the sudden deceleration? Goswami thinks it reflects a shift in priorities for skull function. Whereas dinosaur skulls have elaborate display and fighting structures and complex feeding mechanisms that require large areas for jaw-muscle attachment, bird skulls are mostly dedicated to housing and protecting the animals’ comparatively large brain, she explains.

It all centers on flight ...

The discovery that bird skulls resulted from relatively low evolutionary rates “is essentially opposite from what we know of the rest of the skeleton,” observes Stephen Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, another outside expert. “Previous studies, including one of my projects, showed that bird skeletons evolved faster than nonbird skeletons. What this means, I think, is that the origin of birds was driven by rapid and remarkable changes to the skeleton: particularly turning the arms into wings for flight. The heads were less important in this transition, and they probably lagged behind the rest of the skeleton.” Early on in their evolution, birds seem to hit on a head design that worked for them, with such features as a beak, big eyes and and a large brain, he says. “Birds didn’t need to radically change any of these things in order to adapt to different niches.” Instead, Brusatte suggests, “after birds split off from other dinosaurs and went into the skies, they adapted to new niches by changing their body sizes, wing shapes and flying styles more than their heads.”

Awesome. :)