Time killer to the max ... in a good way :)

Halcyon Mapsp rules, especially when viewing the web from a "traditional" perspective. Delve into this world and learn why the web is something else altogether. :)

Love this section, especially regarding Stackover Flow. :)

After a better part of a year of work, I am excited to show you a brand new Map of the Internet, up to date for the year 2021.

Inspired by design of historical maps, this project aims to concisely, but still comprehensively visualize the current state of the World Wide Web, and document the largest and most popular websites over the period of 2020-2021, along with their countless aspects and features.

Compared to any previous iteration of the Map of the Internet, this new version is many times more detailed and informative. It includes several thousand of some of the most popular websites, represented as distinct "countries", which are grouped together with others of similar type or category, forming dozens of distinct clusters, regions and continents that stretch throughout the map, such as "news sites", "search engines", "social networks", "e-commerce", "adult entertainment", "file sharing", "software companies" and so much more.  In the center of it all can be found ISPs and web browsers, which form the core and backbone of the internet as we know it, while the far south is the domain of the mysterious "dark web".

Wikipedia rules. :)

Adding insult to injury ...

A farmer sprays pesticide on a field. Credit: Getty Images

By 2045 ... , a BRT post describing man's reduced ability to reproduce, thanks to the ingestion of micro plastics and chemicals in our air and food, is a most disquieting read without question. The post in Scientific American discussing the dire impact of pesticides on the world's soils substantiates this concern without issue. 

Scoop up a shovelful of healthy soil, and you’ll likely be holding more living organisms than there are people on the planet Earth.

Like citizens of an underground city that never sleeps, tens of thousands of subterranean species of invertebrates, nematodes, bacteria and fungi are constantly filtering our water, recycling nutrients and helping to regulate the earth’s temperature.

But beneath fields covered in tightly knit rows of corn, soybeans, wheat and other monoculture crops, a toxic soup of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides is wreaking havoc, according to our newly published analysis in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science.

The study, the most comprehensive review ever conducted on how pesticides affect soil health, should trigger immediate and substantive changes in how regulatory agencies like the EPA assess the risks posed by the nearly 850 pesticide ingredients approved for use in the U.S.

Currently, regulators completely ignore pesticides’ harm to earthworms, springtails, beetles and thousands of other subterranean species.

Our study leaves no doubt that must change.

Any questions?

Consumption 101

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Department of Energy

Consumption 101 or how much more energy did the US consume in 2019 vs 2020? Seems quite a bit according to Lawrence Livermore Labs and the Department of Energy. 

To whit.

Every year, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Department of Energy produce Sankey flow diagrams showing where energy in the U.S. comes from and where it's going. Every year, Treehugger has a look at these to see what shocking news we can discern from it. Here's the 2020 version: (seen above):

The single most important number here is the total estimated energy consumption of 92.9 quads. A quad is a quadrillion BTUs (1015) and is equivalent to the energy in 8,007,000,000 gallons of gasoline–it's big. In 2019 the total consumption was 100.2 quads, so the reduction in energy consumption was pretty much exactly what we have to do every year between now and 2030, a pandemic's worth of energy savings every year. That sounds somewhere between daunting and impossible, but if you study the chart you can get a lot of ideas about where our priorities should be.

Here is the 2019 chart (seen below) for comparison, since it is probably a more realistic look at a normal year. The first thing that grabs attention every year is how much of this energy consumption is "rejected energy." That's what is wasted as heat going up the chimney or out the exhaust pipe; they assume 65% efficiency in electricity generation and only 20% in transpotation.

Most of that orange electricity is going into residential and commercial buildings, and these days, that's mostly cooling. So reducing demand by making buildings more efficient can reduce the demand side, but as Saul Griffith has pointed out, there is no rejected energy from solar, hydro, and wind power, there is no chimney. That means you need a lot fewer quads; eliminating the rejected energy from electricity production alone reduces overall energy consumption by a quarter.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Department of Energy

Consumption 101 indeed ...

 

B&W yet again ...

Dandilion Wine :)

Water's Edge

Road Lines

Center Point

Rainy Day Aftermath

Quick Takes ...

 A short clip taking quick takes of a small sampling of flora and fauna in Fairfield County. Enjoy. :)

The Whip Spider

Whip Spiders, neither spiders nor scorpions, harmless but menacingly cool looking as hell, are now making their move into the mainstream of science. :)

So he was taken aback in 2019 when one of the air-raid tunnel guides sent him a snapshot of a cartoonishly evil-looking creature — like a cross between a tarantula and a crab, with skin-crawlingly long legs, barbed pincers, and a brownish coat of armor. To Colla, it was unmistakable. This was a harmless arachnid called an amblypygid, sometimes known as a whip spider or tailless whip scorpion, which was neither spider nor scorpion. And it was not supposed to be in Italy at all.

She couldn’t stop looking at the creature’s front legs. These are the whips that give whip spiders their name — elongated, antenna-like — and they were sweeping around in all directions, as if piecing together a picture of the world. Even now, over 20 years later, she isn’t sure how to describe the grace of that movement. It was like a blade of grass fluttering in the wind, if a blade of grass were purposeful. It was like an octopus tentacle. “I just immediately fell in love,” she said.

Reginald Innes Pocock - Pocock R. I. (1900) The Fauna of British India Including Ceylon and Burma. Arachnida, London: Taylor 

Awesome to a fault. :)

Democracy resides on a knife's edge ...

Senate Republicans on Friday blocked the creation of an independent commission to investigate the deadly Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. The final vote, 54 to 35, fell short of the 60 senators needed. Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

Democracy resides on a knife edge thanks to The Turtle, McCarthy and the specter of The Donald holding the country hostage by keeping the repugs in line by denying the need to know exactly what happened on 1/6/2021. With this being said, a good friend waxes poetic on why this sad state of affairs holds sway as the nation lurches toward a most uncertain future starting with midterms in 2022 and the presidential in 2024.

The GOP and all supporters WANT a dictatorship, above the laws of democracy.  America is dead to them; Republican as a word now means “those who cannot hack the courage, compromise, empathy, fairness snd generosity it takes to be the United States, the world’s first, best democracy.”  It’s just too hard for these people.

Consider this:  If you watched TV sitcoms back in the day, you may remember the motto that the Seinfeld show runners and writers adopted, as a reaction against the moralizing, sentimental sitcom pap shoveled into our living rooms every week:  “On our show, there is no hugging, no learning.”  They meant to feature a group of selfish, self-absorbed, spoiled non-empathetic friends who could care less, indeed found sensitivity a laughable weakness.  The series finale featured the entire cast being jailed for exactly those petty crimes against humanity. 

At the time, it seemed a sharp and cynical joke, a poke in the eye of “Me Decade” culture. 

But now, I see this satire on the Spoiled American is in fact the documentary truth.  People who cannot stomach ANY level of empathy or emotion (BTW rage is not an emotion) … and who want a big raging Daddy to run the country by smacking down all attempts at human civility snd kindness. Republicans officially are the cult of No Hugging, No Learning, No Truth, and No Reality. 

Thanks D, truer words never spoken. 

River-runner

A new map called River Runner lets you trace the long path of water throughout the U.S.: Click on any spot or enter an address, and it will show where the water is likely to flow. Data analyst Sam Learner started working on the project after thinking about how water travels from the Continental Divide. “I though that journey would be really interesting,” he says. “If we start at the top of a mountain on the Continental Divide, just watching this split—one journey a few hundred miles to the Pacific, and another to the Gulf of Mexico. As I started digging into the data, I realized that the scope of it could be much bigger.”

It certainly is. Check it out to be amazed. I was and still am. :)

On capturing time

Charles Minard's map of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. The graphic is notable for its representation in two dimensions of six types of data: the number of Napoleon's troops; distance; temperature; the latitude and longitude; direction of travel; and location relative to specific dates.[4]

IMHO, the greatest design depicting how time shapes a given process is Charles Minard's masterpiece depicting the catastrophic campaign of Napoleon vis a vis Russia where distance and weather, combined with a war of attrition, > 450,000 - < 10,000 doomed his chances of conquering the largest nation on earth. 

Seen below is the English translation of what the map describes.

Figurative Map of the successive losses in men of the French Army in the Russian campaign 1812–1813.

Drawn by M. Minard, Inspector General of Bridges and Roads (retired). Paris, November 20, 1869.

The numbers of men present are represented by the widths of the colored zones at a rate of one millimeter for every ten thousand men; they are further written across the zones. The red designates the men who enter Russia, the black those who leave it. — The information which has served to draw up the map has been extracted from the works of M. M. Thiers, de Ségur, de Fezensac, de Chambray and the unpublished diary of Jacob, the pharmacist of the Army since October 28th.

In order to better judge with the eye the diminution of the army, I have assumed that the troops of Prince Jérôme and of Marshal Davout, who had been detached at Minsk and Mogilev and have rejoined near Orsha and Vitebsk, had always marched with the army.

On capturing time applies, does it not?

Lost in translation

In the BRT piece, On Language and reality, a take on Arrival and the Sapir-Whorf interpretation of language was discussed as language shapes how we view the world and, as conjecture, this would also apply to aliens as well due to the fact language is considered a universal requirement for any intelligent species to function but ... how a given language would actually work, among differing civilizations, is a guesstimate at best. Think Chinese, the 20,000+ pictographic language, consisting of lego block connects to convey meaning, totally differs from the modualar 26 letter construct of English, which not only poses difficult translation issues of one language into another but also in how the two cultures view reality, a notion I know first hand as I have a Chinese daughter in law who has taught me a great deal on how she views the world from a truly different perspective. With this in mind, an insightful article about the possibility of communicating with aliens via Arstechnica gives added insight into just how difficult a process this can be.

To whit.

Human languages all have syntax," she explained. "You have distinct pieces that you can put together in different orders to get different effects. Even sign languages have this. No animal communicative system has it."

"How can I possibly ask an alien, 'What's your word for friendship?'"

Beyond syntax, another feature of language is the concept of displacement. "I can talk about things," she said. "Distance, and time, and place. Your dog can't do that. Your dog can scratch at the door to communicate that she wants to go outside, but she's not going to be able to say she wanted to go outside yesterday."

It's more involved.

She continued: "You can't even assume they have things like nouns and verbs. These are things that Chomsky assumes to be part of our cognitive endowment, part of the universal grammar. There are things like nouns and verbs in every language. Why should that be true for an alien language? The naïve answer would be, 'Well, there are actions that you need to label and there are objects that you need to label.' Except that verbs aren't really action words despite what third grade teachers tell kids. A word like stagnate isn't an action word."

I asked her then as an aside—because I was legitimately curious—if nouns and verbs are universal components in all known terrestrial languages.

"Yes," she answered, "but I think there are languages without adjectives. I think there are languages without prepositions. Definitely, languages without determiners. What I tell my classes is a noun isn't a person, place, thing, or idea as you're told. Sincerity is none of those things. The only difference between the word sincere, adjective, and the word sincerity, noun, is where they go in a sentence. The meaning is basically the same thing except that one is the noun form and one is the adjective form. Yet, this whole notion of having sentences with parts of speech that play different roles, that could just be a terrestrial thing that isn't actually necessary to communication."

End game ...

Dr. Birner thought about it for a moment, then replied with a short list of things without which understanding likely cannot happen. The first of those things, she explained, is a theory of mind. Both parties need to have some reason to believe the other party has a somewhat similar cognition—that there is some basis for even bothering to communicate.

After that, symbolism is next on the list—both parties need to know that they can communicate in representative terms. This isn't necessarily literary symbolism like in high school English class. This is the notion, as discussed, that words are representative of objects and concepts. The idea that when I show you a clock, for example, I'm showing you a device that measures time rather than just a thing with numbers on it—or the idea that my spacecraft's instrumentation represents conditions inside and outside the spacecraft, rather than just being a bunch of pretty lights and dials.

Then, both parties need some incarnation of the cooperative principle Dr. Birner mentioned earlier—because otherwise, there's no biological incentive to cooperate in the first place.

 Any questions?