Flat Earthers, rejoice :)

Flat Earthers rejoice, earth is flat, at least in the most accurate 2D map of our planet known to man. :)

The object here is to find map projections that minimize the sum of the squares of the errors—a technique that dates back to the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. The Goldberg-Gott error score (sum of squares of the six normalized individual error terms) for the Mercator projection is 8.296. The lower the score, the smaller the errors and the better the map. A globe of the Earth would have an error score of 0.0. We found that the best previously known flat map projection for the globe is the Winkel tripel used by the National Geographic Society, with an error score of 4.563. It has straight pole lines top and bottom with bulging left and right margins marking its 180 degree boundary cut in the middle of the Pacific.

We seem to be reaching a limit on improving the Winkel tripel. When that occurs in science, one often needs a breakthrough, some out-of-the-box thinking, to make any radical progress. Richard Feynman once said that in physics when we are stuck, when all the old methods don’t work, then the new trick, the new method that is going to work, is going to look very different from anything we have seen before.

Yes indeed.

You gotta flip it to see the South Pole & its environs :)

But while the new map excels at addressing distortion, Dr. Kerkovits said it also introduced a new weakness. You can see only half of the planet at once, unlike the Winkel Tripel and Mercator. That undermines the basic premise of flaying out the whole world for inspection on a single page or screen.

The Winkel Tripel projection, which is so-called because it aims to minimize three kinds of distortion: area, direction and distance.Credit...Daniel R. Strebe, via Wikimedia Commons

A 1569 Mercator projection map.Credit...via Wikimedia Commons

Where it all began. :)

“For the People Act” of 2021.

 Security fencing around the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 19, 2021. Photo: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

We have been held hostage, not only from the catastrophic fubar known as Citizens United but also from gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement and the inability of small donors to make an impact on who gets elected. Said "For the People Act" could change things for the better, something this country separately needs as America moves further into the 21st century.

SINCE THE 117TH Congress was convened on January 3, over 2,000 bills have been introduced in the House and Senate. But the very first legislation proposed by the Democratic Party majorities in both chambers — making it both H.R.1 and S.1 — is the “For the People Act” of 2021.

This is appropriate, because the For the People Act is plausibly the most important legislation considered by Congress in decades. It would change the basic structure of U.S. politics, making it far more small-d democratic. The bill makes illegal essentially all of the anti-enfranchisement tactics perfected by the right over the past decades. It then creates a new infrastructure to permanently bolster the influence of regular people.

The bill’s provisions largely fall into three categories: First, it makes it far easier to vote, both by eliminating barriers and enhancing basic outreach to citizens. Second, it makes everyone’s vote count more equally, especially by reducing gerrymandering. Third, it hugely amplifies the power of small political donors, allowing them to match and possibly swamp the power of big money.

The Stakes

The For the People Act also includes a huge number of other positive measures. It would reform the Federal Election Commission, which is now all but toothless, letting campaigns commit obvious violations of the law. It would lessen the power of super PACs. It would create a code of ethics for the nine Supreme Court justices, something which, incredibly enough, has never existed in U.S. history.

If the bill passes with its main provisions intact, a new era could dawn with a creative, lively, nationwide progressive movement. (Conversely, those provisions would also empower authentic grassroots conservative movements, if any truly exist.) Policies supported by the majority of Americans — on health care, the climate crisis, taxes, unionization — could finally become law. Millions of new people could be permanently drawn into public life, because they would see in concrete ways that their involvement could change the country.

This bill has to happen if America is to survive as a democracy.

The 70's weren't all bad :)

The 70's weren't all bad, particularly the late 70's with Weather Report, Return to Forever, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Head Hunters and Steely Dan, with of course, Miles inventing this genre of jazz fusion in the first place beginning back in 1970. With this in mind, good friends and pianists extraordinaire, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock do a concert together for us rubes, reminding us yet again, the 70's, outside of horrible colors, marginal cars and wretched fashion was not all bad by any stretch of the imagination. :)

We all respected each other; we learned from each other. So there was never any kind of animosity. I remember going to see Miles with Chick in the band, and that was the first time the electric piano was used live with Miles. It was Chick playing the Fender Rhodes piano. I played the Fender Rhodes on some records with Miles but never live in concerts or in clubs. It was great; I loved it.

I loved [Return to Forever]. I loved what he was doing. I loved Mahavishnu Orchestra and what [guitarist] John McLaughlin’s band was doing. Weather Report was already formed. I loved what they were doing; it was great. And the whole phrase “jazz-rock” was part of the vocabulary. That was a new thing — the influence of rock on jazz — but I didn’t come from rock, I came from funk, and there was nobody else really doing that with jazz, so that’s what I did with the Headhunters band.

Chick Corea RIP. You will be missed.

Miles yet again.

Pinball Wizard ...

Seems Jupiter may have been the pinball wizard in changing the direction of a comet originating from the Oort cloud vs an astroid in wiping out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago if Harvard's research stands up to scrutiny.

Some 66 million years ago, a catastrophic event occurred that wiped out three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, most notably taking down the dinosaurs. An errant asteroid from the asteroid belt has been deemed the most likely culprit. However, in a new paper published in Scientific Reports, Harvard astronomers offer an alternative: a special kind of comet—originating from a field of debris at the edge of our solar system known as the Oort cloud—that was thrown off course by Jupiter's gravity toward the Sun. The Sun's powerful tidal forces then ripped pieces off the comet, and one of the larger fragments of this "cometary shrapnel" eventually collided with Earth.

The evidence ...

Siraj and co-author Avi Loeb concluded from their analysis that Jupiter's gravitational field was strong enough to bump many such long-period comets from the Oort cloud off course, bringing them very close to the Sun. Such comets are known as "sun grazers"; about 20 percent of long-period comets become sun grazers, per the authors. And the Sun's powerful tidal force in turn can break them into fragments.

Siraj likened the effect to a pinball machine. "When you have these sun grazers, it's not so much the melting that goes on, which is a pretty small fraction relative to the total mass, but the comet is so close to the Sun that the part that's closer to the Sun feels a stronger gravitational pull than the part that is farther from the Sun, causing a tidal force," he said. "You get what's called a tidal disruption event, so these large comets that come really close to the Sun break up into smaller comets. And basically, on their way out, there's a statistical chance that these smaller comets hit the Earth."

The chemistry ...

Their findings also offer evidence that the unusual composition of the Chicxulub impactor—carbonaceous chondrite—indicates it originated from the Oort cloud and not from the main asteroid belt. It's a rare composition for main-belt asteroids, but it's common among long-period comets. The authors also point to other impact craters with similar composition, most notably the Vredefort crater in South Africa—the result of an impact some 2 billion years ago—and the Zhamanshin crater in Kazakhstan, from an impact within the last million years. Those time frames are in line with Siraj and Loeb's calculations, which indicate such objects should strike Earth every 250,000 to 730,000 years.

Stellar research without a doubt.

Holographic entanglement ...

Holography has been around for a long time as it's the only real way to reconstruct a 3D image emitting from a 2D surface as described by Physorg.

Classical holography creates two-dimensional renderings of three-dimensional objects with a beam of laser light split into two paths. The path of one beam, known as the object beam, illuminates the holograph's subject, with the reflected light collected by a camera or special holographic film. The path of the second beam, known as the reference beam, is bounced from a mirror directly onto the collection surface without touching the subject.

The holograph is created by measuring the differences in the light's phase where the two beams meet. The phase is the amount that the waves of the subject and object beams mingle and interfere with each other, a process enabled by a property of light known as 'coherence."

But now, entanglement comes into play, promising a revolution in tech that's been around for a while.

Credit: University of Glasgow

In standard holography, the two paths would then be superimposed on each other, and the degree of phase interference between them would be used to generate a hologram on the camera. In the most striking aspect of the team's quantum version of holography, the photons never overlap with each other after passing through their respective targets.

Instead, because the photons are entangled as a single 'non-local' particle, the phase shifts experienced by each photon individually are simultaneously shared by both.

The interference phenomenon occurs remotely, and a hologram is obtained by measuring correlations between the entangled photon positions using separate megapixel digital cameras. A high-quality phase image of the object is finally retrieved by combining four holograms measured for four different global phase shifts implemented by the spatial light modulator on one of the two photons.

End result, much higher definition  of said holograms, expecially useful for medical imaging et al.

Spontaneous parametric down-conversion process can split photons into type II photon pairs with mutually perpendicular polarization.

 

Sniffing it out ... in 2050

 

Smell is an incredibly powerful sense even though us rubes are pretty bad at it. From onions to roses, the world is a better place for not only happiness but also for health as science is beginning to tap into this often under looked sense to sniff out disease without the need for probes, needles or other instruments of destruction. :)

It’s 2050 and you’re due for your monthly physical exam. Times have changed, so you no longer have to endure an orifices check, a needle in your vein, and a week of waiting for your blood test results. Instead, the nurse welcomes you with, “The doctor will sniff you now,” and takes you into an airtight chamber wired up to a massive computer. As you rest, the volatile molecules you exhale or emit from your body and skin slowly drift into the complex artificial intelligence apparatus, colloquially known as Deep Nose. Behind the scene, Deep Nose’s massive electronic brain starts crunching through the molecules, comparing them to its enormous olfactory database. Once it’s got a noseful, the AI matches your odors to the medical conditions that cause them and generates a printout of your health. Your human doctor goes over the results with you and plans your treatment or adjusts your meds.

Dogs are really good at this as are rats ...

ODOR & HOOCH: Peer-reviewed studies show dogs can be trained to detect signature scents of diseases, including cancer and tuberculosis. But in the long run, a “sniffing” computer would be more economical and effective.

Recent research finds that many diseases, including cancer, tuberculosis, and Parkinson’s, can manifest themselves through volatile compounds that change the person’s scent. Our bodies release certain metabolites—products of our metabolic activities. Some of these molecules are volatiles and become part of our scent, or “odorprint.” When we become sick or start developing a disease, our metabolic processes start functioning differently, emitting different volatile molecules or mixtures of them, so our odorprint changes too. “These molecules carry information about our state of health,” Koulakov says. For example, patients with Parkinson disease produce an unusually high amount of sebum,1 a waxy lipid-rich biofluid excreted by the sebaceous glands of the skin, which sensitive noses can detect. Deep Nose could grab this information from the thin air. That could allow physicians to detect disease sooner, easier, and perhaps avoid some invasive diagnostic procedures. “It would essentially revolutionize the diagnostics system,” Koulakov says.

Yes indeed.

The Thought Police circa 2021 ... looms

“We are the dead,” and out of the shadows a third voice interjects, “You are the dead.” Suddenly, the two realize that a telescreen is hidden behind the picture of St. Clement’s Church. Stomping boots echo from outside; the house is surrounded. A familiar voice speaks the last lines of the St. Clement’s rhyme: “Here comes a candle to light you to bed / Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!” - 1984

The Thought Police circa 2021 is coming to you as we speak if this tech scales ...

Our thoughts are private – or at least they were. New breakthroughs in neuroscience and artificial intelligence are changing that assumption, while at the same time inviting new questions around ethics, privacy, and the horizons of brain/computer interaction.

Research published last week from Queen Mary University in London describes an application of a deep neural network that can determine a person’s emotional state by analyzing wireless signals that are used like radar. In this research, participants in the study watched a video while radio signals were sent towards them and measured when they bounced back. Analysis of body movements revealed “hidden” information about an individual’s heart and breathing rates. From these findings, the algorithm can determine one of four basic emotion types: anger, sadness, joy, and pleasure. The researchers proposed this work could help with the management of health and wellbeing and be used to perform tasks like detecting depressive states.

As often said in BRT, we have lost control ...

Above: An Arizona State University PhD student demo’s a mind-controlled drone flight in 2016.

It gets better ...

If this seems farfetched, consider that researchers at Kyoto University in Japan developed a method to “see” inside people’s minds using an fMRI scanner, which detects changes in blood flow in the brain. Using a neural network, they correlated these with images shown to the individuals, and projected the results onto a screen. Though far from polished, this was essentially a reconstruction of what they were thinking about. One prediction estimates this technology could be in use by the 2040s.

Read the entire VB piece, no doubt it will warm the cockles of your heart.

Blowback/Rev XX ... AKA No. 3400

blow·back

/ˈblōbak/

noun

1. 1. 

   a process in which gases expand or travel in a direction opposite to the usual one, especially through escape of pressure or delayed combustion.

1. the unintended adverse results of a political action or situation.

   "this is the blowback from all those aggressive public health campaigns"

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Definitions from Oxford Languages

This term blowback usually refers to the CIA but in this case, it has to do with geoengineering and the inherent risks this poses to earth as we mover further into the anthropocene.

Definition ...

Geoengineering, the large-scale manipulation of a specific process central to controlling Earth’s climate for the purpose of obtaining a specific benefit. Global climate is controlled by the amount of solar radiation received by Earth and also by the fate of this energy within the Earth system—that is, how much is absorbed by Earth’s surface and how much is reflected or reradiated back into space. The reflectance of solar radiation is controlled by several mechanisms, including Earth’s surface albedo and cloud coverage and the presence in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2). If geoengineering proposals are to influence global climate in any meaningful way, they must intentionally alter the relative influence of one of these controlling mechanisms. - Encyclopedia Britannica 

In essence, this is man's guesstimate as to how to ameliorate the impact of GW or, as Elizabeth Kolbert, who knows far more about this issue than this rube will ever know, asks the existential question. What could possibly go wrong?

Q. You’ve reported on climate change for a long time. How does it feel to see geoengineering being explored as a more valuable — and potentially necessary — option?

A. Well, one thing I learned in the course of reporting the book was that what we now refer to as “geoengineering” was actually the very first thing that people started to think about when they realized we were warming the climate. The very first report about climate change that was handed to Lyndon Johnson in 1965 wasn’t about how we should stop emitting — it was: “Maybe we should find some reflective stuff to throw into the ocean to bounce more sunlight back into space!”

It’s odd, it’s kind of almost freakish, and I can’t explain it, except to say that it sort of fits the pattern of the book.

Q. There’s been a longstanding fight in environmentalism between a “technology-will-save-us” philosophy and a “return-to-nature” philosophy. Based on the reporting in this book, do you think that the technology camp has won?

A.  I think the book is an attempt to take on both of those schools of thought. On some level, technology has won — even people who would say “don’t do geoengineering” still want to put up solar panels and build huge arrays of batteries, and those are technologies! But where does that leave us? It goes back to Ruth Gates and the “super coral project”. There was a big fight among coral biologists about whether a project like that should even be pursued. The Great Barrier Reef is the size of Italy — even if you have some replacement coral, how are you going to get them out on the reef? But Gates’s point was, we’re not returning. Even if we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, you’re not getting the Great Barrier Reef back as it was in a foreseeable timeframe.

My impulse as an old-school environmentalist is to say “Well, let’s just leave things alone.” But the sad fact is that we’ve intervened so much at this point that even not intervening is itself … an intervention.

Have just started reading Under a White Sky, a take on the ultimate Wicked Problem AKAIK.

May you live in interesting times - Chinese Proverb

 

PSA - COVID mutations ...

Scientific American strikes yet again, this time via a video showing how this "intelligent" virus continues to wreak havoc on mankind.

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus seems to be suddenly acquiring mutations at a rapid rate. The most worrying variants, first discovered in South Africa and Brazil, increase the virus’s contagiousness and may even help it evade the human immune system. These characteristics are helping the new variants outcompete the original virus, allowing them to spread quickly around the world.

The Fight Club ... for science :)

The Fight Club ... for science is for real as seen by the fight for food or domanence on the part of giant mesquite bugs as seen by the clip above. Said bugs, like many other denizens in the insect world, have defense structures used in the fight to get food or get mates as needs warrant. 

To whit.

Scientists at the University of Arizona set up their own "Bug Fight Club" in the lab, staging wrestling matches between insects to learn more about defensive structures and the evolution of weapons in the animal kingdom. They outlined their findings in two separate papers, one published last fall in the journal Functional Ecology and the other published last month in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

It gets better. :)

"Biologists have generally assumed that the individual who inflicts more damage on their opponent will be more likely to win a given fight," said co-author John J. Wiens of the University of Arizona while explaining the reasoning behind Bug Fight Club. "Surprisingly, this fundamental assumption had yet to be tested in an experimental study."

Male and female giant mesquite bugs (<em>Thasus neocalifornicus</em>) on a branch in a mesquite tree in Southern Arizona, their natural habitat. Zachary Emberts/University of Arizona

So Wiens decided to design just such an experiment in his laboratory, using giant mesquite bugs (Thasus neocalifornicus). This is a species of the so-called coreid family, also known as leaf-footed bugs. They have thickened forewings as defensive structures. For offense, most coreid species will charge, kick, wrap around/squeeze, or grapple with opponents. Co-author Zachary Emberts, a postdoc in Wiens' lab, likened it to a college wrestling match, where the two bugs will approach and lock onto each other, trying to inflict damage with the enlarged spikes on their hind legs. "Think of it as a wrestling match where the opponents sneak knives in," Wiens added.

The loser usually retreats. Read the Ars piece. Detailed to the max. :)

 

To study the damage inflicted during wrestling matches between male giant mesquite bugs, the researchers outfitted some of them with body armor consisting of patches of faux leather glued onto their backs.