Utopian Society

A utopian society is an ideal society that does not exist in reality. Utopian societies are often characterized by benevolent governments that ensure the safety and general welfare of its citizens. Society and its institutions treat all citizens equally and with dignity, and citizens live in safety without fear.

According to Raymond Williams...
There are many close and evident connections between science fiction and utopian fiction, yet neither, in deeper examination, is a simple mode, and the relationships between them are exceptionally complex.** Thus if we analyse the fictions that have been grouped as utopian we can distinguish four types: (a) the paradise, in which a happier life is described as simply existing elsewhere; (b) the externally altered world, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by an unlooked-for natural event; (c) the willed transformation, in which a new kind of life has been achieved by human effort; (d) the technological transformation, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by a technical discovery.

The television series STAR TREK was about a utopian of the future in which government took care of everyone's needs and provide everyone with food, shelter, and clothing regardless of whether or not one decided to work.  However, if one decided to work, one received MORE than other people based upon the level of difficulty.

For example, the Captain of THE ENTERPRISE would get MORE CREDITS than the Chief Engineer of that same ship...

The Democrats are trying to create their own brand of a modern day utopia and they are expecting INDUSTRY and CORPORATIONS to pay for it...

Interstellar Objects Visiting

 Science Alert reports:

In October 19th, 2017, the first interstellar object ever detected flew past Earth on its way out of the Solar System. Less than two years later, a second object was detected, an easily-identified interstellar comet designated as 2I/Borisov.

The appearance of these two objects verified earlier theoretical work that concluded that interstellar objects (ISOs) regularly enter our Solar System.

The question of how often this happens has been the subject of considerable research since then. According to a new study led by researchers from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is), roughly seven ISOs enter our Solar System every year and follow predictable orbits while they are here.

This research could allow us to send a spacecraft to rendezvous with one of these objects in the near future.

The research that describes these findings was conducted by multiple researchers from i4is, a non-profit organization dedicated to the realization of interstellar flight in the very near future.

They were joined by researchers from the Florida Institute of Technology, Harvard's Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC), the University of Texas at Austin, the Technical University of Munich, and the Observatoire de Paris.                      READ MORE

Machine Learning Struggling

Ben Dickson of TechTalk writes:

When you look at the following short video sequence, you can make inferences about causal relations between different elements. For instance, you can see the bat and the baseball player’s arm moving in unison, but you also know that it is the player’s arm that is causing the bat’s movement and not the other way around. You also don’t need to be told that the bat is causing the sudden change in the ball’s direction.

Likewise, you can think about counterfactuals, such as what would happen if the ball flew a bit higher and didn’t hit the bat.

Such inferences come to us humans intuitively. We learn them at a very early age, without being explicitly instructed by anyone and just by observing the world. But for machine learning algorithms, which have managed to outperform humans in complicated tasks such as go and chess, causality remains a challenge. Machine learning algorithms, especially deep neural networks, are especially good at ferreting out subtle patterns in huge sets of data. They can transcribe audio in real-time, label thousands of images and video frames per second, and examine x-ray and MRI scans for cancerous patterns. But they struggle to make simple causal inferences like the ones we just saw in the baseball video above.

In a paper titled “Towards Causal Representation Learning,” researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila), and Google Research, discuss the challenges arising from the lack of causal representations in machine learning models and provide directions for creating artificial intelligence systems that can learn causal representations.  READ MORE

No Increase in Taxes

When President Biden was campaigning for office, he reassured the American People that there would be no new taxes for families earning under $400,000 then he changed it to under $200,000 and it is yet to be seen if he keeps his word...  but, let's assume that the does keep his word.

What he did not tell the American People was the fact that he was planning to increase taxes in the following areas:

• Capital Gain tax
• Corporate tax
• Gasoline tax
• Sales tax

Capital Gains is a tax on assets that you sell after owning that asset for a few years, like one HOME or STOCKS or RENTAL PROPERTY...

Corporate tax increases means that companies will have to pay more taxes and will probably do one of two things or both to compensate:

• increase prices
• layoff workers

A gasoline tax would mean that you will not just pay more money per gallon of gasoline but you will pay higher prices for any goods that is transported where gasoline must be purchased.  This includes but is not limited to:

• food and other groceries
• clothes and accessories
• building materials
• Amazon purchases

Sales tax is obvious in that the consumer will pay more for anything and everything that is purchased with cash, credit card, foreign currency, or crypto currency.

BUT...

your income tax that you must file every April 15th if you earn less than so much income will not increase...  it's just everything else will increase...  putting you in a worse financial situation that you were in before.

If you don't believe me...  then, just wait and see for yourself...

Biden Considers Higher Taxes

Bloomberg shares this...

President Joe Biden is planning the first major federal tax hike since 1993 to help pay for the long-term economic program designed as a follow-up to his pandemic-relief bill, according to people familiar with the matter.

Unlike the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 stimulus act, the next initiative, which is expected to be even bigger, won’t rely just on government debt as a funding source. While it’s been increasingly clear that tax hikes will be a component -- Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said at least part of the next bill will have to be paid for, and pointed to higher rates -- key advisers are now making preparations for a package of measures that could include an increase in both the corporate tax rate and the individual rate for high earners.

With each tax break and credit having its own lobbying constituency to back it, tinkering with rates is fraught with political risk. That helps explain why the tax hikes in Bill Clinton’s signature 1993 overhaul stand out from the modest modifications done since.

For the Biden administration, the planned changes are an opportunity not just to fund key initiatives like infrastructure, climate and expanded help for poorer Americans, but also to address what Democrats argue are inequities in the tax system itself. The plan will test both Biden’s capacity to woo Republicans and Democrats’ ability to remain unified.  READ MORE

Ancestry of Cleopatra

Cleopatra (69 BC - 30 BC) was the last Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt. She is perhaps best remembered for her looks and her personality, as well as her liaisons with both Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. Although Cleopatra was the Queen of the Nile and the ruler of Egypt, she was, in fact, the last of a long line of Hellenistic (Greek) rulers from Macedonia.

Cleopatra was a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty and the language of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs was Greek, not Egyptian. Thus, it was generally accepted that Cleopatra had Greek ancestry.

A computerized reconstruction of the skull of Princess Arsinöe reveals physical characteristics of a mix of white European, black African and ancient Egyptian.

A new archaeological study, however, is raising questions about the ancestry of Cleopatra’s family. Apparently, Cleopatra had a younger sister named Princess Arsinöe who vied with Cleopatra for control of the Egyptian throne. Ancient Roman texts suggest that Princess Arsinöe was banished to the city of Ephesus after losing a power struggle with her older sister.

Ephesus was a Greek port city not far from Macedonia on the coast of what is now modern Turkey. In Cleopatra’s time, Ephesus was ruled by the Romans. Cleopatra is thought to have ordered the Roman general Mark Anthony (who was then her husband) to murder her sister, whom she feared as a rival for the Egyptian throne.

An archeological team headed by Hilke Thür of the Austrian Academy of Sciences believes that a tomb in Ephesus contains the remains of Princess Arsinöe. The tomb, which had unusual characteristics, was originally opened and explored in 1926. However, its significance to the Egyptian royal family was not discovered until recently.

Measurements of the skull taken from the tomb in the 1920s were combined with modern technology to create a computerized reconstruction of the face of the young woman who was buried in the tomb. The young woman is thought to be Princess Arsinöe and the computerized reconstruction showed that she had the physical characteristics of a mixture of white European, black African and ancient Egyptian.

According to Hilke Thür, this mixed heritage provides “a real sensation which leads to a new insight on Cleopatra’s family and the relationship of Cleopatra and Arsinöe”. Obviously, this raises the interesting question as to whether Cleopatra had African ancestry as well.

Aged Indifference

I am 73 years old, retired, survived a 3 bypass artery heart attack, continuing to survive the attack of two cancers in my body and I don't give a damn anymore about politics and thinking that politics does what is right for the American People.  Nothing is farther from the truth...

Both Republicans and Democrats only care about getting re-elected and now the Democrats only care about making sure that they control politics for the next several DECADES...

We have the same problems today that we had during the 1960's...

for example:

• Racism
• White Privilege
• Education
• Poverty
• Wealth gap
• Overseas wars
• Global hated of America
• Immigration

Being OLD and RETIRED whatever happens in politics does not really impact me or my wife anymore...  but, it does impact all those who are still working and those who are in high school or in college.  It will be these people who will be impacted by the unintended consequences of what is taking place in 2021.

• My wife and I have Social Security
• My wife and I have Medicare
• My wife and I have saved money
• My wife and I have no debt

What have you got???

Average ANNUAL salary of CEO's    $410,000 to $1,2000,000

Average ANNUAL salary of workers   $31,133

SO...

do you think that our Government is really trying to regulate these kinds of differences in pay scales between management and labor?  Congress wants to increase the minimum wage to $15/hour but will that really do anything to reduce the WAGE GAP.?

SOCIALISM will not FIX THIS PROBLEM EITHER...  unless, our Federal Government decides to take ownership of all our corporations and businesses.  The ultimate idea of socialism is to OWN BUSINESSES and INDUSTRIES but I doubt that this will ever happen in the United States...  but, we will get very close to that endgame.  AND, the way we are going to do that is to give MORE and MORE and MORE to the American People and tax the wealthy and corporations to pay for it...  whether they want to pay for it or not...

Only time will tell us if that is a good more or not...

MEANWHILE...  

CEO will continue to increase their salaries while keeping the worker relatively suppressed. 

AGAIN,

my wife and I will never be bothered by these developments...  because of our age and our retired status.  my wife and I have AGED INDIFFERENCE...

Dark Art

 

Machine Learning

As reported by Leah Crane:

Machine learning, a process used to train artificial intelligences, can take an extremely long time – but a quantum trick could massively speed things up for tasks involving particles of light called photons.

In reinforcement learning, an algorithm runs through the same problem over and over again and is given a numerical reward only when it reaches the correct answer. That process teaches it to find the correct answer more quickly when pitted against similar problems later on.

Now Valeria Saggio at the University of Vienna in Austria and her colleagues have added a quantum twist to accelerate this process. They set up an experiment involving a photon moving through a wave guide and ending up in one of four possible states. They tasked an AI with making sure the photon ended up in one particular state, and rewarded it for doing so.

In the classical version of this experiment, without any added quantum effects, the AI would only be able to move the photon to one specific state at a time, being rewarded when it made a correct guess. However, in the quantum version of the experiment, the AI could put the photon in a superposition of more than one state. This allowed it to narrow down the correct answer before making a final, classical guess at the goal state.

“Imagine you have a robot that is standing at a crossroads, and the robot has two options – it can go left or it can go right,” says Saggio. “If the robot goes right, it does not receive a reward, but if it goes left it receives a reward. At the next round, the probability of it going left will increase.”

That’s the classical version of the experiment, but the quantum version would allow it to go left and right simultaneously at each guess, requiring far fewer guesses before it learns to always go left. This strategy sped up the learning time of the AI by 63 per cent, from 270 guesses to just 100.

Faster Than Light Travel

Astrophysicist at Göttingen University discovers

new theoretical hyper-fast soliton solutions.

Image to show how long it would take different types of spacecraft to travel from our solar system to Proxima Centauri (the nearest known star). Currently, the only option would be to use a chemical rocket meaning a journey time of over 50,000 years. Credit: E Lentz

If travel to distant stars within an individual’s lifetime is going to be possible, a means of faster-than-light propulsion will have to be found. To date, even recent research about superluminal (faster-than-light) transport based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity would require vast amounts of hypothetical particles and states of matter that have “exotic” physical properties such as negative energy density. This type of matter either cannot currently be found or cannot be manufactured in viable quantities.

In contrast, new research carried out at the University of Göttingen gets around this problem by constructing a new class of hyper-fast ‘solitons’ using sources with only positive energies that can enable travel at any speed. This reignites debate about the possibility of faster-than-light travel based on conventional physics. The research is published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

The author of the paper, Dr. Erik Lentz, analyzed existing research and discovered gaps in previous ‘warp drive’ studies. Lentz noticed that there existed yet-to-be explored configurations of space-time curvature organized into ‘solitons’ that have the potential to solve the puzzle while being physically viable. A soliton – in this context also informally referred to as a ‘warp bubble’ – is a compact wave that maintains its shape and moves at constant velocity.

Lentz derived the Einstein equations for unexplored soliton configurations (where the space-time metric’s shift vector components obey a hyperbolic relation), finding that the altered space-time geometries could be formed in a way that worked even with conventional energy sources. In essence, the new method uses the very structure of space and time arranged in a soliton to provide a solution to faster-than-light travel, which – unlike other research – would only need sources with positive energy densities. No “exotic” negative energy densities needed. READ MORE

A Serene Water World Once

Michelle Starr of Science Alert reports:

It's tricky to figure out what Earth might have looked like in the early years before life emerged. Geological detectives have now obtained more evidence that it was rather different to the planet we live on today.

According to a new analysis of the features of Earth's mantle over its long history, our whole world was once engulfed by a vast ocean, with very few or no land masses at all. It was an extremely soggy space rock.

So where the heck did all the water go? According to a team of researchers led by planetary scientist Junjie Dong of Harvard University, minerals deep inside the mantle slowly drunk up ancient Earth's oceans to leave what we have today.

"We calculated the water storage capacity in Earth's solid mantle as a function of mantle temperature," the researchers wrote in their paper.

"We find that water storage capacity in a hot, early mantle may have been smaller than the amount of water Earth's mantle currently holds, so the additional water in the mantle today would have resided on the surface of the early Earth and formed bigger oceans.

"Our results suggest that the long‐held assumption that the surface oceans' volume remained nearly constant through geologic time may need to be reassessed."

Deep underground, a great deal of water is thought to be stored in the form of hydroxy group compounds - made up of oxygen and hydrogen atoms. In particular, the water is stored in two high-pressure forms of the volcanic mineral olivine, hydrous wadsleyite and ringwoodite. Samples of wadsleyite deep underground could contain around 3 percent H2O by weight; ringwoodite around 1 percent.  READ MORE

Of Extraterrestrial Origin

IceCube Detection of a High-Energy Particle – Antineutrino 

“Unmistakably of Extraterrestrial Origin”

A visualization of the Glashow event recorded by the IceCube detector. Each colored circle shows an IceCube sensor that was triggered by the event; red circles indicate sensors triggered earlier in time, and green-blue circles indicate sensors triggered later. This event was nicknamed “Hydrangea.” Credit: IceCube Collaboration

The South Pole neutrino detector saw a Glashow resonance event, a phenomenon predicted by Nobel laureate physicist Sheldon Glashow in 1960 where an electron antineutrino and an electron interact to produce a W- boson.

On December 6, 2016, a high-energy particle called an electron antineutrino hurtled to Earth from outer space at close to the speed of light carrying 6.3 petaelectronvolts (PeV) of energy. Deep inside the ice sheet at the South Pole, it smashed into an electron and produced a particle that quickly decayed into a shower of secondary particles. The interaction was captured by a massive telescope buried in the Antarctic glacier, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.

IceCube had seen a Glashow resonance event, a phenomenon predicted by Nobel laureate physicist Sheldon Glashow in 1960. With this detection, scientists provided another confirmation of the Standard Model of particle physics. It also further demonstrated the ability of IceCube, which detects nearly massless particles called neutrinos using thousands of sensors embedded in the Antarctic ice, to do fundamental physics. The result was published today (March 10, 2021) in Nature.

Sheldon Glashow first proposed this resonance in 1960 when he was a postdoctoral researcher at what is today the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. There, he wrote a paper in which he predicted that an antineutrino (a neutrino’s antimatter twin) could interact with an electron to produce an as-yet undiscovered particle — if the antineutrino had just the right energy — through a process known as resonance.

When the proposed particle, the W– boson, was finally discovered in 1983, it turned out to be much heavier than what Glashow and his colleagues had expected back in 1960. The Glashow resonance would require a neutrino with an energy of 6.3 PeV, almost 1,000 times more energetic than what CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is capable of producing. In fact, no human-made particle accelerator on Earth, current or planned, could create a neutrino with that much energy.  READ MORE

UFO's: Three Theories

From FOX NEWS TODAY...

The former UFO program chief at the Pentagon, Luis Elizondo, detailed the three leading theories on where UFOs originated from and the five defining characteristics of UFOs that break the U.S.’s current understanding of the laws of physics.

During an appearance on "Fox & Friends," Elizondo, the former Director of ATTIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) said that the United States government applied the same methodology used in terrorism intel operations in regards to UFO’s and found that they are not only "real," but the information surrounding them is "compelling."

The Pentagon has presented three potential theories on the origin of UFOs.

The first "highly unlikely" theory purports that UFOs are secret U.S. technology that has flown under the radar due to a lack of communication between government agencies.

The second theory speculates that UFOs are "foreign adversarial" technology created without the intelligence of the U.S. government.

"This would be a huge intelligence failure of [the United States] because we’ve been technologically leapfrogged," said Elizondo.

Elizondo stopped short of concluding that UFOs could be alien technology when discussing the third and final theory.

"If it’s not ours and it’s not [another country] well, then it’s someone or something else."

Elizondo also outlined the five "unique observables" that help to distinguish UFOs from other identifiable aerospace technology.  READ MORE

Intelligence Types

 A Harvard Psychologist Claims:

We’re not all naturally skilled at the same things. Some are more athletic and have better coordination. Some pick up on language and words faster at a young age, while others are good with numbers and visualizing patterns.

But most people don’t fully understand their range of abilities, and as a result, may end up in the wrong careers. Or, they might enjoy their jobs, but struggle to identify effective learning techniques that will help them excel further.

The theory of multiple intelligences
To get a better sense of your skills and capabilities, I often recommend starting with the theory of multiple intelligences.

First introduced in his 1983 book “Frames of Mind,” Howard Gardner, a psychologist and professor at Harvard University, states that there are eight types of human intelligence — each representing different ways of how a person best processes information.



Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences
Credit: Kumar Mehta, CNBC Make It

How high you score in one category does not necessarily influence how (high or low) you score in another.

If you want to learn to be exceptional at something, your best bet is to understand the unique areas of intelligence where you have an advantage, and then build upon those strengths.

For example, consider someone who struggled with writing until they attempted to create a graphic story, which turned into a compelling narrative. Or a student who couldn’t seem to grasp fractions until they visualized separating apples into slices.

Below are the eight types of intelligence identified by Gardner. As you go through each, score yourself on a scale of one (doesn’t come naturally) to five (comes very naturally).  READ MORE

CHINA: World Domination

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/business/china-us-tech-rivalry.html

New York Times reports:

China is freeing up tens of billions of dollars for its tech industry to borrow. It is cataloging the sectors where the United States or others could cut off access to crucial technologies. And when its leaders released their most important economic plans last week, they laid out their ambitions to become an innovation superpower beholden to none.

Anticipating efforts by the Biden administration to continue to challenge China’s technological rise, the country’s leaders are accelerating plans to go it alone, seeking to address vulnerabilities in the country’s economy that could thwart its ambitions in a wide range of industries, from smartphones to jet engines.

China has made audacious and ambitious plans before — in 2015 — but is falling short of its goals. With more countries becoming wary of China’s behavior and its growing economic might, Beijing’s drive for technological independence has taken on a new urgency. The country’s new five-year plan, made public on Friday, called tech development a matter of national security, not just economic development, a break from the previous plan.

The plan pledged to increase spending on research and development by 7 percent annually, including the public and private sectors. That figure was higher than budget increases for China’s military, which is slated to grow 6.8 percent next year, raising the prospect of an era of looming Cold War-like competition with the United States.  READ MORE

America is Changing

The one commonality between most Americans is the fact that
nobody wants to have their taxes increase for whatever reason...

We are living in unique times in the USA these days what with COVID Pandemic Lockdowns, Public Education Closures, BLM and ANTIFA movements, the Cancel Culture, and an unprecedented outflow of government spending as well as a crisis increase in immigration.  In order to pay for all of these expenditures, government will need to raise taxes and could raise 

taxes in a variety of areas:

• annual income tax increase
• gasoline tax increase
• capital gains tax increase
• corporate income tax increase

Wealthy people has a way to shelter their money in offshore tax shelter accounts and even if the income tax does increase on them, the impact will be minimal because of those tax shelters.  Therefore, tax increases will flow downhill to those people who cannot shelter their money...  this is not a guess...  it is logical when the government needs money.

Gasoline tax increases will PISS OFF a lot of Americans, but they have to drive so they will purchase the gasoline they need...  and perhaps put off the vacations they had planned because of those increases.

Capital Gains tax increases will cause people to sell off assets (like stocks) in order to avoid a higher tax in the future...  in other words they will sell now rather than sell later.  This selling will cause the STOCK MARKET to fall and people's wealth in the stock market to decline.

A corporate tax increase will cause American companies to be less globally competitive and will result in one of two things or both to happen:  hire less people and raise prices.

Public Education is suffering in some States and the parents are getting very angry at the Governors and at the School Boards and Teacher's Unions  The school boards and unions want the teachers to receive COVID vaccines ahead of everyone else, they want salary increases, they want improved ventilation systems, and the want police departments defunded before they return to work.

Immigration is going to hurt America worse than all these other problems because we are allowing ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS to enter this country which is a violation of RULE OF LAW foundations...

The history books will write negatively about this moment in time in our country...  and more importantly, America is losing its positive reputation throughout the rest of the world.  

• China is against us
• Russia is against us
• Middle East is against us
• North Korea is against us
• Europe is against us
• Africa is against us
• South America is against us

WAKE UP AMERICA...

Cosmology

 

Charlemagne

 

Keystone and Politics

 

Quantum Tunnels

 Natalie Wolchover believes that No sooner had the radical equations of quantum mechanics been discovered than physicists identified one of the strangest phenomena the theory allows.

“Quantum tunneling” shows how profoundly particles such as electrons differ from bigger things. Throw a ball at the wall and it bounces backward; let it roll to the bottom of a valley and it stays there. But a particle will occasionally hop through the wall. It has a chance of “slipping through the mountain and escaping from the valley,” as two physicists wrote in Nature in 1928, in one of the earliest descriptions of tunneling.

Physicists quickly saw that particles’ ability to tunnel through barriers solved many mysteries. It explained various chemical bonds and radioactive decays and how hydrogen nuclei in the sun are able to overcome their mutual repulsion and fuse, producing sunlight.

But physicists became curious — mildly at first, then morbidly so. How long, they wondered, does it take for a particle to tunnel through a barrier?

The trouble was that the answer didn’t make sense.

The first tentative calculation of tunneling time appeared in print in 1932. Even earlier stabs might have been made in private, but “when you get an answer you can’t make sense of, you don’t publish it,” noted Aephraim Steinberg, a physicist at the University of Toronto.

It wasn’t until 1962 that a semiconductor engineer at Texas Instruments named Thomas Hartman wrote a paper that explicitly embraced the shocking implications of the math.

Hartman found that a barrier seemed to act as a shortcut. When a particle tunnels, the trip takes less time than if the barrier weren’t there. Even more astonishing, he calculated that thickening a barrier hardly increases the time it takes for a particle to tunnel across it. This means that with a sufficiently thick barrier, particles could hop from one side to the other faster than light traveling the same distance through empty space.

In short, quantum tunneling seemed to allow faster-than-light travel, a supposed physical impossibility.  Read More

Visiting Space: Another Frontier

Tom Ravenscroft writes...

The first commercial space hotel will be more like a cruise ship than Stanley Kubrick's sleek space station from 2001, says Tim Alatorre, senior design architect of the Von Braun Space Station.

The Gateway Foundation is designing the world's first space hotel – the Von Braun Space Station – with the aim of making visiting space accessible to everyone.

It will have gravity, full-working kitchens, bars, and interiors made with natural materials and colours.

"Eventually, going to space will just be another option people will pick for their vacation, just like going on a cruise, or going to Disney World," Alatorre told Dezeen.

"The goal of the Gateway Foundation is to have the Von Braun operational by 2025 with 100 tourists visiting the station per week, he continued.

"Because the overall costs are still so high most people assume that space tourism will only be available to the super rich, and while I think this will be true for the next several years, the Gateway Foundation has a goal of making space travel open to everyone."

The Von Braun Space Station will build on technology used at the current International Space Station (ISS), however, unlike its predecessor the space hotel will have artificial gravity making both visiting and long-term habitation much more comfortable.

The design is based on concepts developed in the 1950s by Wernher von Braun – after whom the hotel is named.

The station will consist of a 190-metre-diameter wheel that will rotate to create a gravitational force similar to that felt on the moon. Around the wheel will be 24 individual modules fitted out with sleeping accommodation and other support functions.

"There will also be many of the things you see on cruise ships: restaurants, bars, musical concerts, movie screenings, and educational seminars," explained Alatorre.

Some modules will be sold as private residences, while others will be rented to governments for scientific purposes. In total the Gateway Foundation expect the population of the station to be around 400.  READ MORE

US Supreme Court

There are five sources that have guided interpretation of the Constitution: 

(1) the text and structure of the Constitution

(2) intentions of those who drafted, voted to propose, or voted to ratify the provision in question

(3) prior precedents (usually judicial)

(4) the social, political, and economic consequences of alternative interpretations

(5) natural law

There is general agreement that the first three of these sources are appropriate guides to interpretation, but considerable disagreement as to the relative weight that should be given to the three sources when they point in different directions. 

Many interpreters of the Constitution have suggested that the consequences of alternative interpretations are never relevant, even when all other considerations are evenly balanced. 

Natural law (higher law, God's law) is now only infrequently suggested as an interpretive guide, even though many of the framers of the Constitution recognized its appropriateness. 

Persons who favor heavy reliance on originalist sources (text and intentions) are commonly called "originalists." 

Persons who favor giving a more substantial weighting to precedent, consequences, or natural law are called "non-originalists."

In practice, disagreement between originalists and non-originalists often concerns whether to apply heightened judicial scrutiny to certain "fundamental rights" that are not explicitly protected in the text of the Constitution.

The following definitions are generally accepted by the Supreme Court Justices...

• Textualist: An originalist who gives primary weight to the text and structure of the Constitution. Textualists often are skeptical of the ability of judges to determine collective "intent."
• Intentionalist: An originalist who gives primary weight to the intentions of framers, members of proposing bodies, and ratifiers.
• Pragmatist: A non-originalist who gives substantial weight to judicial precedent or the consequences of alternative interpretations, so as to sometimes favor a decision "wrong" on originalist terms because it promotes stability or in some other way promotes the public good.
• Natural Law Theorist: A person who believes that higher moral law ought to trump inconsistent positive law.

CHINA: First Contact

Ross Andersen writes in The Atlantic

Last january, the Chinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China’s preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country’s southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at America’s Arecibo Observatory, in the Puerto Rican jungle, the new Chinese dish is the largest in the world, if not the universe. Though it is sensitive enough to detect spy satellites even when they’re not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including an unusual one: The dish is Earth’s first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. If such a sign comes down from the heavens during the next decade, China may well hear it first.

In some ways, it’s no surprise that Liu was invited to see the dish. He has an outsize voice on cosmic affairs in China, and the government’s aerospace agency sometimes asks him to consult on science missions. Liu is the patriarch of the country’s science-fiction scene. Other Chinese writers I met attached the honorific Da, meaning “Big,” to his surname. In years past, the academy’s engineers sent Liu illustrated updates on the dish’s construction, along with notes saying how he’d inspired their work.  READ MORE

Ancient Aliens in China

 

China: World's Largest Navy

Brad Lendon of CNN Reports...

Hong Kong (CNN)In 2018, Chinese President Xi Jinping donned military fatigues and boarded a People's Liberation Army Navy destroyer in the South China Sea.

Spread out before him that April day was the largest flotilla Communist-ruled China had ever put to sea at one time, 48 ships, dozens of fighter jets, more than 10,000 military personnel.

For Xi, the country's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, the day was a way point to a grand ambition -- a force that would show China's greatness and power across the world's seven oceans.
"The task of building a powerful navy has never been as urgent as it is today," Xi said that day.

China was already in the midst of a shipbuilding spree like few the world has ever seen. In 2015, Xi undertook a sweeping project to turn the PLA into a world-class fighting force, the peer of the United States military. He had ordered investments in shipyards and technology that continue at pace today.
By at least one measurement, Xi's plan has worked. At some point between 2015 and today, China has assembled the world's largest naval force. And now it's working to make it formidable far from its shores.

In 2015, the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) had 255 battle force ships in its fleet, according to the US Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).

As of the end of 2020, it had 360, over 60 more than the US Navy, according to an ONI forecast.
Four years from now, the PLAN will have 400 battle force ships, the ONI predicts.

Go back to 2000, and the numbers are even more stark.

"China's navy battle force has more than tripled in size in only two decades," read a December report by the leaders of the US Navy, Marines and Coast Guard.

"Already commanding the world's largest naval force, the People's Republic of China is building modern surface combatants, submarines, aircraft carriers, fighter jets, amphibious assault ships, ballistic nuclear missile submarines, large coast guard cutters, and polar icebreakers at alarming speed."

Some of those will be the equal or better of anything the US or other naval powers can put in the water.
"The PLAN is not receiving junk from China's shipbuilding industry but rather increasingly sophisticated, capable vessels," Andrew Erickson, a professor at the US Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute, wrote in a February paper.                  READ MORE

Magnoncs:

In a first-of-its-kind discovery, researchers in the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and Argonne National Laboratory announced they can directly control the interactions between two types of quantum particles called microwave photons and magnons. The approach may become a new way to build quantum technology, including electronic devices with new capabilities.

Scientists have high hopes for quantum technology, which has advanced by leaps and bounds over the past decade and could become the basis of powerful new types of computers, ultra-sensitive detectors, and even “hack-proof” communication. But challenges remain in scaling up the technology, which depends on manipulating the smallest particles in order to harness the strange properties of quantum physics.

Two such quantum particles are microwave photons—elementary particles that form the electromagnetic waves that we already use for wireless communications—and magnons. Magnons are the term for a particle-like entity that forms what scientists call ​“spin waves” — wave-like disturbances that can occur in magnetic materials, and can be used to move information.

Getting these two types of particles to talk to each other has emerged in recent years as a promising platform for both classical and quantum information processing. But this interaction had proved impossible to manipulate in real time, until now.

“Before our discovery, controlling the photon-magnon interaction was like shooting an arrow into the air,” said Xufeng Zhang, a scientist in the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory and the corresponding author of the study. ​“One has no control at all over that arrow once in flight.”

The team’s discovery has changed that. ​“Now, it is more like flying a drone, where we can guide and control its flight electronically,” said Zhang.

Through smart engineering, the team employs an electrical signal to periodically alter the magnon vibrational frequency and thereby induce effective magnon-photon interaction. The result is the first-ever microwave-magnonic device that scientists can “tune” to their wishes.

The team’s device can control the strength of the photon-magnon interaction at any point as information is being transferred between photons and magnons. It can even completely turn the interaction on and off. With this tuning capability, scientists can process and manipulate information in ways that far surpass current versions of hybrid magnonic devices.  READ MORE

COVID Cooking

Like most individuals and/or couples, my wife and I have pretty much spent the last year inside the house 24/7 except leaving the house for doctor appointments, grocery shopping, and going out for breakfast about 6 times...  otherwise, we are inside the house doing "our thing" whatever that might be...  but, I can assure you that we have spent more time watching Cable, Netflix, and Hulu than every before.  When shows are not being watched, I write on my blogs or I spend time cooking.  

When I am cooking, I always start with the following:

1 large onion

1 large bell pepper

1 large tablespoon of garlic

3 stalks of celery

1 cup of mushrooms

1 tablespoon olive oil

Note:  All of these items are typically diced

To this mixture, I can add all sorts of ingredients...  bearing in mind that I can add all of these ingredients or I can add just one or two of them:

1. White Beans
2. Kidney Beans
3. Pinto Beans
4. Black Beans
5. Broccoli
6. Kale or Spinach
7. Small Peas
8. Lima Beans
9. Diced Tomatoes
10. Diced Potatoes
11. 1/3  or 1/2 Cup of Rice
12. Diced Chicken Breasts/tenders
13. Sausage
14. Lentils

Note:  I can make this soup-like mixture watery or thick depending upon how I feel at the time

Of course, I also make a lot of omelets fully loaded with meats and veges as well as sausage, eggs, and grits.

Not too long ago, I made LASAGNA with turkey burgers, Ricotta, cheese mixture, and spinach and even though it was my first attempt it turned out pretty good.  I did however forget to cook my flat noodles before putting them in the dish but they cooked all the way through anyway.

My food conglomerations don't always taste that good because I rarely ever follow a recipe...  the only time I remember following a recipe was when I made bread in a Dutch Oven.  It turned out good and had a crust on top and did not crumble when cut.

Inside Earth's Core

While most of us take the ground beneath our feet for granted, written within its complex layers, like pages of a book, is Earth's history. Our history.

Now researchers have found more evidence for a whole new chapter deep within Earth's past - Earth's inner core appears to have another even more inner core within it.

"Traditionally we've been taught the Earth has four main layers: the crust, the mantle, the outer core and the inner core," explained Australian National University geophysicist Joanne Stephenson.

Our knowledge of what lies beneath Earth's crust has been inferred mostly from what volcanoes have divulged and seismic waves have whispered. From these indirect observations scientists have calculated that the scorchingly hot inner core, with temperatures surpassing 5,000 degrees Celsius (9,000 Fahrenheit), makes up only one percent of Earth's total volume.

Now Stephenson and colleagues have found more evidence Earth's inner core may have two distinct layers.

"It's very exciting - and might mean we have to re-write the textbooks!" she added.

The team used a search algorithm to trawl through and match thousands of models of the inner core with observed data across many decades about how long seismic waves take to travel through Earth, gathered by the International Seismological Centre.  SOURCE:  ScienceAlert.com        TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, Click Here...

Corruption

 

Education: K through 12

 WHY SHOULD OUR CHILDREN 
SUFFER THROUGH THE POOR QUALITY 
OF 
PUBLIC EDUCATION???

I don't necessarily like the politics of the Democratic Party, but I like the way they spend money, especially knowing that the bill will not come due until the next generation...  I also like the fact that the Democratic Party is spending money like a drunken sailor and since I was a drunken sailor for two years, I can identify with their mentality.

If we look at our public education as it currently relates to the rest of the world, AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION is ranked 15th among the rest of the countries in the world....  and, our private schools are still ranked FIRST in the world.  Therefore, Congress should pass a bill that would pay for every child in America, including illegal immigrants to attend private education if they so desire.

Our children deserve the best from their POLITICIANS...  especially since they are going to paying the bills eventually.

Warp Drive Mr. Scott

A group of physicists have put together the first proposal for a physical warp drive, based on a concept devised back in the '90s. And they say it shouldn't break any of laws of physics.

Theoretically speaking, warp drives bend and change the shape of space-time to exaggerate differences in time and distance that, under some circumstances, could see travelers move across distances faster than the speed of light.

One of those circumstances was outlined more than a quarter of a century ago by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His idea, proposed in 1994, was that a spacecraft powered by something called an 'Alcubierre drive' could achieve this faster-than-light travel. The problem is it requires a lot of negative energy in one place, something that's simply not possible according to existing physics.

But the new study has a workaround. According to researchers from the independent research group Applied Physics based in New York, it's possible to ditch the fiction of negative energy and still make a warp drive, albeit one that's maybe a bit slower than we'd like.

"We went in a different direction than NASA and others and our research has shown there are actually several other classes of warp drives in general relativity," says astrophysicist Alexey Bobrick, from Lund University in Sweden.

"In particular, we have formulated new classes of warp drive solutions that do not require negative energy and, thus, become physical."

Why is negative energy such a big deal? The need for negative energy gets around some of the general relativity problems of faster-than-light travel, by allowing for space to expand and contract faster than light, while keeping everything within its warping within universal speed limits.

Unfortunately, it introduces more problems of its own – primarily that the negative energy we'd require exists only in fluctuations on a quantum scale. Until we can figure a way to scoop up a Sun-sized mass of the stuff, this kind of drive just isn't possible.

The new research works around this – according to the paper, negative energy wouldn't be required, but a hugely powerful gravitational field would be. The gravity would do the heavy lifting of bending space-time so that the passage of time inside and outside the warp drive machine would be significantly different.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, Click Here...

Cost of Living and Wages

Wage increases for 2020 was 1.3-1.6% and is expected to stay the same for all of 2021.  Cost of living increases for 2020 was 1.3% and it too is expected to stay the same...  however, some economists warn that the Covid Relief Bill could cause inflation which could increase the cost of living increase to almost 2% .

Providing that everything remains somewhat stagnant, those who are working, on average, will be earning .3% more money than it will cost them to live.  What this means is that for every $1,000 earned, they will have $3 more in their pocketbooks.  If you are making $30,000 annually, you will have $90 more in 2021 and if you are making $50,000 you will have $150 more in 2021.

Bear in mind that in the cost of living increases just 3/10 of 1%, then the average worker will break even.  In other words, the wage increases will be totally offset by cost of living increases.  And... the cost of living index does not take into consideration, increases in health insurance.

What I discovered when I was earning an hourly wage was that every time we got a wage increase, our health insurance would also increase pretty much eliminating that wage increase.

Good news for retirees...

Congress is looking into increasing Social Security allotments by 3%...  which means that for every $1,000 we will receive an additional $30...

Personally, I think this is an economic and fiscal mistake, but who I am to look a gift horse in the mouth...  take the money and run, as the song says.

In order for Congress to increase Social Security, the US Government would have to borrow money or print up more money...  If they borrow money, then my grandchildren's children will have to eventually pay the bill.  And, since I don't have any grandchildren...  what the hell...

Energy Storage

 

Going to College

Average cost of a College Education is about $40,000 for tuition and another $12,000 for room and board making the total cost about $50,000 a year and it takes 4 years to complete a college degree so the final cost would be about $200,000...  or about the cost of an average home.  The average salary for a college graduate is $50,000 annually or after taxes about $3,334 each month.  And, the average cost of living about $2,500 to $3,500 depending upon one's location and their style of living.

NOW...  if one were to borrow $200,000 to buy a home and agreed to payments for 30 years, the monthly charge would be a little over $1,000.

If you are a single college graduate earning $50,000 a year and living with monthly expenses of $2,500, you would still not have enough money to pay $1,000 on your student loan debt.

However, you have choices:

• Find a job where you would earn more than $50,000 a year
• Extend you student debt loan to greater than 30 years
• Share your expenses with a roommate

Of course, there are other ways to make the financial burden of college work.  You could first spend time in the military and use the GI Bill to attend college.  You could work during the day and go to college at night either in the classroom or online.  You could go to a Community College for your first two years and attend a public college near where you live where the in-state tuition is much less.

In TN for example, if you attend a Community College, you pay no tuition for your first two years which can save an enormous amount of money and then transfer your credit to another College or University for the last two years.

OR...  you could select a profession where you do not need a college degree at all...

OR...  you could join the military after high school and spend 20 years there where you could use the military to help pay for your education...  If you joined at 18, you would be 38 when you could retire and either use your military training or education or both to work another career for 20 years, retiring a second time at 58...

The point is that a College Education is not always the best direction to take...

Spring Forward

Across most of the Southern States, spring has entered the record books from the standpoint that it has arrived rather then setting new records.  East TN, where I live, is going to have temperatures in the mid to high 60's all week as well as rain and while most gothic horror stories revolve around the downpour of rain as being ominous, rain is the life blood of the South and all the crops that the rain feeds with growth.

The air is cool as the skies prepare to release their moisture and the birds have taken shelter in nearby trees some with leaves while a vast majority of the trees have not yet replaced their fall loses.  A gentle wind blows strong and consistent as it raises pool covers up and down, pushing all previous water to one side as the pump works as it was instructed redistributing the water like Congress redistributes wealth and the poor receive tokens of appreciation from the new administration in the hopes that they will constantly want more...  more...  more...

The Graceland album plays in my ears even though it is silent to the rest of the community especially those neighbors who watch me sitting outside through their windows, afraid that the outside is not yet a hospitable for human consumption.  Paul Simon, in my opinion, is at his best...  of course, he has always been one of most favorite singers...  and, not just because of the variety of music that he creates, but because of his LYRICS...  good lyrics are difficult to come by these days...  especially when one looks at RAP and the incomprehensible words that are being used and the perpetuation of HATE and VIOLENCE that continues to sow the seeds of racism, instead of the seeds of harmony, peace, and love.

Spring is here...  and, the winter...  longer than anticipated because of COVID, is finally coming to a close and the vaccines are pouring out of the factories as Americans move towards herd immunity and we will return to some kind of normalcy in the near future.  However, most of our Southern States are not locked down and children are attending schools, factories and businesses are open, and restaurants have been serving clients for weeks while observing face masks and social distancing requirements.

I cannot imagine living in New York City, or New York State, or the State of California with all the restrictions that have been imposed on those residents.  I also cannot imagine living in the violence that continues to take place in Oregon, Chicago, and other cities because of all the racial turmoil that exists in those cities.  Why would anyone want to live in cities in the first place...  all crowed together.

SOUTHERN LIVING IS FREEDOM AT ITS BEST...

Killer Hornets

The year 2020 is not one that beekeepers in Washington state and the Canadian province of British Columbia are likely to forget in a hurry. Since the spring, experts in both regions have been gripped by fears of Vespa mandarinia, a hulking insect whose voracious appetite for honeybees and stealthy spread could pose a threat to the region’s vulnerable ecosystem.

While the eradication of an Asian giant hornet nest in Washington in October was a success, officials to the north in Canada have dealt with a number of setbacks in their own bid to eradicate the hornets.

This summer, British Columbia’s chief beekeeper Dr Paul van Westendorp and his team deployed bottle traps, streamers and radio transmitters in the hope of killing the invasive insects – or leading researchers to underground nests. But they came away empty-handed.

The trouble is, the Asian giant hornet, despite its size, is incredibly difficult to locate, given its tendency to stick to forested areas. Unless a member of the public spots one by chance, there is little officials can do to find them.  SOURCE:  The Guardian                TO READ ENTIRE ARTI LE, Click Here...

Intelligent Applications

The underlying components that make up AI today: machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning—have existed in an evolving form for many years. Over the past year or so, software application vendors started experimenting with embedding AI into business software applications. This approach of embedding AI capabilities into the workflow of the applications (better referred to as “intelligent applications”) will continue to grow in 2017 and beyond.

Intelligent applications are developing along two distinct functional use cases:

1. Automating simple routine tasks that take time away from more value add activities.
2. Provide relevant data to the application user (person or team) that needs it, at the appropriate time and with the proper context.

Both of these approaches take advantage of the rapidly growing mass of structured and unstructured data that can be accessed and used by companies to make better business decisions. These use cases open up opportunities to improve productivity and decision accuracy, as well as employee and customer experience.

The first function, automating simple, routine tasks, is straightforward and relieves users from tasks that distract and consume time, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks. An example would include virtual assistants that manage schedules, providing the capability to coordinate meetings without user intervention. An AI agent could also perform tasks that require coordination of available data into an output, like a project plan, a resupply order or even a bill of materials.

The second use case, providing decision support to users that need to evaluate large data sets, has many applications across a business operation. Perhaps the simplest example is in medical diagnosis. An intelligent app doesn’t make the diagnosis, but it can sort through massive data sets to look for patterns, potential diseases and treatments. It can manage electronic health records, test data, patient and family history, and genetic information: ordering and contextualizing relevant data to make the physician’s job more manageable.  SOURCE:  Learning Hub