A New America

 12% of the population (black) are bitching and moaning because they claim that 60% of the population (white) are controlling through white supremacy...

The Republicans have a slim majority in the House and are fighting among themselves for power rather than coming together as a single voice to do battle with the Democrats...

The Democrats have managed to get mainstream media on their side along with the DOJ and the FBI who are not supposed to be political, to take power away from the Republicans...

The citizens of America will soon realize, if they do not already that there are more of them than there are law enforcement personnel whose job it is to force Americans to obey the laws of the land...

The laws of the land, DO NOT APPLY to all the illegal immigrants flowing across our southern borders - If they are willing to break the laws to get here, do you really think they will obey all the other laws once they are here...   (Rhetorical Question)

There is a huge push to do away with gasoline vehicles, substituting them for electric vehicles - however, there is currently no infrastructure in place to support all those EVs - this is putting the cart before the horse...

There has been a HUGE INCREASE in illegal drugs and crime in the USA ever since Joe Biden became President - there appears to be a direct correlation here that we are trying to ignore...

Colleges and Universities have diluted and dumbed down their courses so that there are no failures and they can protect their streams of revenues...

China's threat at dominating the world is largely being ignored by the USA authorities because of our nuclear arsenal - they fail to see that this domination will be economical in nature...

The billionaires of the world have a HIDDEN AGENDA that they do not want to share with the rest of the world but it involves destroying the system that made them wealthy in the first place...

Fast Forward

For Over Thirty Years Now

I have been in a relationship that turned into a marriage where I do very little other than what I need to do around the house and want to do for my pleasure.

Let me explain:

• My wife does all the shopping
• My wife writes all the checks
• My wife balances the check book
• My wife plans out our vacations
• My wife researches for new vehicles
• My wife landscapes the yard outside
• My wife decides on inside decor
• My wife selects all appliances and furniture
• My wife does all the cleaning
• My wife does all the washing and ironing
• My wife does all the interior painting

This not to say that she does not ask for my opinion because she does...  so, you could say we decide together, but my responses oftentimes are those she wants to hear.

The reason why she does all of this is because she says her work is better than mine.  Whether or not her work is, in fact, better than mine, is not the issue...  the issue is that she does it.

I am not in a female led relationship because she has no control over me sexually.  I do not sit at her feet waiting for her commands, nor do I share her body with anyone else.

Because she thinks she is better than a man, she does most of the work, they males have typically done in the past.

I mow the lawn and weed eat.  I carry stuff into the house and around the house that is too heavy.  I do all the driving on the interstate and in places where we have not been before...  BUT, when we are at Myrtle Beach, she does all the driving in town.  Not sure why or how that got started but it did.

I tell her that she can spend whatever it is that she wants to spend, just don't get us into debt without my agreement, and leave some money left over for me if and when I want to buy something.  I typically purchase my laptops and tablets but before I retired from working, I had a subscription to AUDIBLE so I could listen to books in the car while I was driving.

It seems like it is a lopsided agreement especially since most husbands manage the money.  Sometimes, the wife and husband will have their own bank accounts and contribute equally or proportionally to monthly expenses...  All of our money is in one checking account and one saving account.

Not all women want to be treated like this, but our arrangement has worked out just fine.

Stone Skimming

 

ESV: A Lithium Free Battery

Nickel-hydrogen-based batteries that have long been used by NASA for its space missions are now making their way to power the grid. California-based EnerVenue is building large Energy Storage Vessels (ESVs) that could be used to power the grid using renewables, a press release said.

With the world making a major transition to renewables, energy storage solutions are the need of the hour. Lithium-ion batteries have been our best bet so far but making large-scale storage solutions is turning out quite expensive and cumbersome.

Li-ion batteries are prone to thermal runaway and large energy storage solutions need additional facilities for cooling, ventilation, and fire suppression to be built to prevent a major mishap. This is where nickel-hydrogen-based batteries could help.

How does a nickel-hydrogen battery work?
A nickel-hydrogen battery is much like any other battery with stacks of electrodes but held inside a pressurized gas tank. The cathode is made of nickel hydroxide, while the anode is hydrogen. When the battery is charged, the reaction produces hydrogen gas, which is oxidized during the discharging process to form water.

The energy-storing process, which involves the production of highly combustible hydrogen gas and a pressurized tank to contain it, raises doubts. However, the peak pressure inside the tank reaches only five percent of that in a hydrogen fuel cell. Moreover, if the pressure of the gas increases further, it results in the conversion of the gas into water again.  READ MORE...

Scruggs and Baez

 

Decisions... Decisions...

We spend our entire lifetimes making decisions...  to make that claim may sound rather simplistic, but it is probably something that we do not think about often.

We decide quite early in life whether or not we want to follow our parents' advice or not.  In so doing, the decision sometimes works to our advantage and sometimes to our disadvantage.

Later when we are in school, we make the decision of whether or not we want to listen to our teachers and whether or not we want to do the homework that we have been assigned to do.

For those of you who grew up with only one parent, those decisions were influenced differently than those who grew up with two parents.

After high school, we made decisions about:

• college
• marriage
• children
• divorce
• military
• employment
• relocation

Of course, there were hundreds if not thousands of decisions that must be made over the course of one's lifetime, involving a variety of areas, not just the ones listed above.

Every four years, we get to make a decision as to which person we believe will be the best one to lead our nation...  sometimes, that decision has already been made for us, because we have affiliated ourselves with a political party, and agreed to vote for the party not the person.

However, there are those of us who have made the decision to vote for the best person, regardless of their party affiliation.

For me, I was solidly a Democrat and voted for the party not the person.  When I entered the mid point of my life, somewhere around the age of 40, most (but not all) of my values turned conservative.  Not sure why that happened but it did.

With that said, I am not a Republican, nor am I a Democrat, nor am I a Socialist.  I suppose an Independent would be the best description, but I don't feel that I am that either.

I am liberal as well as conservative.  I don't like government, nor do I like the government telling me what I should or should not do.  I want to make up my own mind about owning or not owning a gun, or thinking that the government has the right to tell me what I can or cannot do with my body.

Today, I am faced with a decision that is not just uncomfortable but one that I cannot avoid.  I don't want to vote for Biden for President, nor do I want to vote for Trump. Of all the other GOP candidates, I don't want to vote for any of them.  I detest having to make a decision based upon the lesser of two evils.

Perhaps this is one of those times, where one decides to vote for the party and not for the person?

Thankfully, I have a year before I have to make that decision and, in the meantime, there will be hundreds of other decisions that I will be making.  Some difficult, some relatively easy.

Our decisions mold who we are and/or what we have become.  Our decisions influence our future because our past influences the decisions we make.  To avoid making a decision, is like hiding from the truth and when one hides from the truth, the truth always comes back and bites one in the ass.

American Made

Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation, was on FOX News this morning and was asked a series of questions by Bill Hemmer...  every one of his responses always went back to House Republicans who, he claimed, were holding up Congress from funding the government...

Politically, he did an excellent job representing the Democrats but logically he demonstrated a lack of compassion and a lack of understanding that ANY government shutdown is always a result of both parties...  not just one.  In so doing, he demonstrated to this viewer, that Democrats have become so progressive that they are no longer willing to compromise.

However, what struck me as more important was his comment about Electric Vehicles WILL EVENTUALLY REPLACE gasoline vehicles and do you want those vehicles manufactured in China or the USA?

That's the question that got me to thinking...

If EVs are made in America (USA) then they will cost more than if they are made in China, where the cost of labor is LOW.

AMERICAN MADE is a term that all of us want t support, but American Made can only be purchased by the wealthy...  our middle classes or lower classes will never be able to afford American Made unless many of them go into debt in order to take possession.

In addition to debt ownership, if the battery ever needs to be replaced, they will be forced to invest (borrow) another $8-$10,000.   True, the cost of these replacement batteries will eventually come down, but in the meantime, to these average Americans, that will not matter.

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN, if China builds these electric vehicles, then they will become wealthy and their economy will grow faster than the economy of the USA.  With a more powerful China, the USA will have to face a more powerful adversary for decades to come.

Does anyone know what the true right decision really is? 

Political

 

Underwater Restaurant

 

Programming a Neural Network

In this article, we will build a neural network from scratch and use it to classify handwritten digits.

Why reinvent the wheel/neural network, I hear you say? Can’t I just use my favourite machine learning framework and be done with it? Yes, there are many off-the-shelf frameworks that you can use to build a neural network (Keras, PyTorch, and TensorFlow to name a few). The thing with using one of these is that they make it easy for us to treat neural networks like black boxes.

This isn’t always a bad thing. Often we need this level of abstraction so that we can get to work on the problem at hand, but we should still strive to at least have a basic understanding of what is going on under the hood if we are to use neural networks in our work.

Building a neural network from scratch is, in my opinion, the best way to foster a deep understanding of how they work.

By the end of this article, you will have learned about the feedforward and backpropagation algorithms, what an activation function is, what the difference between an epoch and a batch is, and how to train a neural network. We will finish with an example by training a neural network to recognise handwritten digits.

All code used in this article is available here on GitHub 

What is a neural network?
Neural networks, or artificial neural networks, are a type of machine learning algorithm. They form the core of many deep learning and artificial intelligence systems like computer vision, forecasting and speech recognition.

The structure of artificial neural networks is sometimes compared to the structure of biological neural networks in the brain. I would always urge caution not to draw too much from this comparison. Sure, artificial neural networks look a bit like biological neural networks but it is quite a big leap to start comparing them to something as complex as a human brain.

A neural network is made up of several layers of neurons. Each layer of neurons is activated based on the activations in the previous layer, a set of weights connecting the previous…  READ MORE...

How it Begins

 

Political Party Differences

KEY POLICIES

Democrats
The party favors a mixed economy and generally supports a progressive tax system, higher minimum wages, Social Security, universal health care, public education, and subsidized housing.

Republicans
The party's fiscal conservatism includes support for lower taxes, small government conservatism, free market capitalism, free trade, deregulation of corporations, and restrictions on labor unions.

As you can see, the Democrats favor the working man whereas the Republicans favor corporations.

The Democrats favor a large government and higher taxes whereas the Republicans favor a small government and lower taxes.  The Democrats favor socialism whereas the Republicans favor capitalism.

It would appear that the two parties are polar opposites...  so, how do they agree on anything?  Perhaps, this is why nothing ever gets accomplished except the fact that politicians are getting wealthy.

• Right now, the Democrats have created the following scenarios:
• Open Borders for illegal immigrants
• Higher prices especially in the areas of food and gasoline
• Higher taxes more corporate regulations
• an increase in social programs
• A huge national debt that someone will eventually have to pay off
• A decrease in our military's capabilities
• A war on fossil fuels and the death or gasoline
• An increase in racism due to BLM, WOKE, and CRT
• An increase in crime and violence

Do you see any correlations between what the Democratic President Joe Biden has created and the policies of the Democratic Party?

The UAW Union is striking for higher wages and if they get higher wages, then the American people will be faced with higher prices.

This dilemma is a DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD...  it will benefit the workers but at the same time it will hurt them because everything will cost more.  Most of their wage increases will be eaten up by higher prices...  and their increased wages will put them into a higher tax bracket.

You must decide two things:

First, do you support the agenda of the Democrats?

Second, are you better off since we have had a Democratic President?

Riding a Bicycle

 

Boosting Quantum Devices

MIT physicists, inspired by noise-canceling headphones, have advanced the coherence time of quantum bits by 20-fold, marking significant progress for quantum computing. The team used an “unbalanced echo” technique to counteract system noise, and they believe further improvements are possible. This breakthrough has vast potential, from quantum sensors in biology to advancements in quantum memory.



MIT researchers develop a protocol to extend the life of quantum coherence.

For years, researchers have tried various ways to coax quantum bits — or qubits, the basic building blocks of quantum computers — to remain in their quantum state for ever-longer times, a key step in creating devices like quantum sensors, gyroscopes, and memories.

A team of physicists from MIT have taken an important step forward in that quest, and to do it, they borrowed a concept from an unlikely source — noise-canceling headphones.


Led by Ju Li, the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor in Nuclear Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering, and Paola Cappellaro, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Research Laboratory of Electronics, and a professor of physics, the team described a method to achieve a 20-fold increase in the coherence times for nuclear-spin qubits. 

The work is described in a paper published in Physical Review Letters. The first author of the study is Guoqing Wang PhD ’23, a recent doctoral student in Cappellaro’s lab who is now a postdoc at MIT.


“This is one of the main problems in quantum information,” Li says. “Nuclear spin (ensembles) are very attractive platforms for quantum sensors, gyroscopes, and quantum memory, (but) they have coherence times on the order of 150 microseconds in the presence of electronic spins … and then the information just disappears. 

What we have shown is that, if we can understand the interactions, or the noise, in these systems, we can actually do much better.”  READ MORE...

Aliens!

 

Dark Energy

 

New Way to Measure Dark Energy

Researchers have discovered a method to potentially detect and measure dark energy by examining the motion between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. This technique, still in its early stages, can estimate the upper value of the cosmological constant, a simple model of dark energy, which is five times higher than values determined from the early universe.




Researchers from the University of Cambridge have discovered a new way to measure dark energy – the mysterious force that makes up more than two-thirds of the universe and is responsible for its accelerating expansion – in our own cosmic backyard.

The researchers found that it may be possible to detect and measure dark energy by studying Andromeda, our galactic next-door neighbor that is on a slow-motion collision course with the Milky Way.


Since it was first identified in the late 1990s, scientists have used very distant galaxies to study dark energy but have yet to directly detect it. 

However, the Cambridge researchers found that by studying how Andromeda and the Milky Way are moving toward each other given their collective mass, they could place an upper limit on the value of the cosmological constant, which is the simplest model of dark energy. 

The upper limit they found is five times higher than the value of the cosmological constant that can be detected from the early universe.

Although the technique is still early in its development, the researchers say that it could be possible to detect dark energy by studying our own cosmic neighborhood. The results are reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Everything we can see in our world and in the skies – from tiny insects to massive galaxies – makes up just five percent of the observable universe. 

The rest is dark: scientists believe that about 27% of the universe is made of dark matter, which holds objects together, while 68% is dark energy, which pushes objects apart.  READ MORE...

Cat and Pony

 

Stamping Out Greed

 Eliminating GREED sounds like an honorable and worthy crusade to many Americans and to many foreigners who have experienced the GREED of Americans...

However, it is a losing battle.

We must look at GREED from several different angles in order to have enough information to make an intelligent decision.

• First, we have corporate greed
• Second, we have individual greed
• Third, we have political greed
• Fourth, we have economic greed     

Economic greed is absolutely necessary in order to have a growing economy.  Without economic greed our economy would remain stagnant, and while that would keep prices low, it would not offer much of a future.

Political Greed is not necessary and happens when politicians are more concerned about their financial wealth than they are about passing laws for Americans and their future.  It revolves around re-election, buying stock with insider information, and accepting unreported gifts from Lobbyists and donors.

Individual Greed takes place when individuals use their earning potential to invest in other ventures that generate additional wealth.  Individual wealth is good because these individuals are the one that primarily keep non-profits alive with their donations.  However, the downside is that these people NEVE pay their fair share of taxes since most of their wealth is sheltered in offshore bank accounts.

Corporate Greed is what many people consider to be the most insidious because Corporations have decided that they want to make this huge profit while giving bonuses to management and offering minimal wage increases to labor.  Corporate Greed has caused UNIONS to form to protect employees.  

A case could be made that Corporate Greed while somewhat appropriate should not be as high as they want it to be.  There are pros and cons on both sides of that argument.

Large profits create several opportunities:

1.  Companies can invest in Research and Development.

2.  Companies can invest in opening new markets.

3. Companies can pay dividends to stockholders that finance their operations.

NOTE:  Without these three opportunities, there would be no need for a company to grow and no need for a company to expand and hire more employees.

So, the questions are:  

• How much of a profit do you think is reasonable for companies to make?
• Should companies stop giving management bonuses?
• Should individuals not be allowed to shelter their money from taxes in offshore back accounts?
• How much of a wage increase can a company offer before it has to start increasing prices?

Pool Shark

 

Neutrinos and Dark Matter

PNNL chemist Isaac Arnquist examines ultra-low radiation copper cables specially created for sensitive physics detection experiments. Credit: Andrea Starr, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory



Ultra-low radiation cables reduce background noise for neutrino and dark matter detectors.

Imagine trying to tune a radio to a single station but instead encountering static noise and interfering signals from your own equipment. That is the challenge facing research teams searching for evidence of extremely rare events that could help understand the origin and nature of matter in the universe. 

It turns out that when you are trying to tune into some of the universe’s weakest signals, it helps to make your instruments very quiet.

Around the world, more than a dozen teams are listening for the pops and electronic sizzle that might mean they have finally tuned into the right channel. These scientists and engineers have gone to extraordinary lengths to shield their experiments from false signals created by cosmic radiation. 

Most such experiments are found in very inaccessible places—such as a mile underground in a nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, or in an abandoned gold mine in Lead, South Dakota—to shield them from naturally radioactive elements on Earth. 

However, one such source of fake signals comes from natural radioactivity in the very electronics that are designed to record potential signals.

Ultra-low radiation cables reduce background noise for neutrino and dark matter detectors.

Imagine trying to tune a radio to a single station but instead encountering static noise and interfering signals from your own equipment. That is the challenge facing research teams searching for evidence of extremely rare events that could help understand the origin and nature of matter in the universe. 

It turns out that when you are trying to tune into some of the universe’s weakest signals, it helps to make your instruments very quiet.

Around the world, more than a dozen teams are listening for the pops and electronic sizzle that might mean they have finally tuned into the right channel. These scientists and engineers have gone to extraordinary lengths to shield their experiments from false signals created by cosmic radiation. 

Most such experiments are found in very inaccessible places—such as a mile underground in a nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, or in an abandoned gold mine in Lead, South Dakota—to shield them from naturally radioactive elements on Earth. 

However, one such source of fake signals comes from natural radioactivity in the very electronics that are designed to record potential signals.  READ MORE...

Dark Matter

 

Peace Through Strength

 This is not my message, but it was the message of former President Ronald Reagan...  actor turned politician.  

At the time, I was a Democrat and thought it was ludicrous to have a Hollywood actor become President of the United States.  However, he had been governor of California and that did not bother me too much...  but President...  that was going a little too far for me.

Over the years, I left the Democratic Party and became a conservative, not at Republican, because of the business angle that the conservatives represented.

• Small Government
• Less Taxes
• Less Government Regulations
• Strong Military

I still believe in those values, but they come with several drawbacks.

• Less Social Programs
• Corporate Power and Wealth
• Marginal Wealth For Most Americans
• Less Consumer Protection

However, after the debacle during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and our pullout from Afghanistan, I am convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that our military strength is VITAL to global peace.

China has declared without any hesitation that they want to dominate the world both economically and militarily...  that is a non-acceptable possibility for a variety of reasons:

1. China is a communist country
2. Russia is a communist country
3. North Korea is a communist country
4. Iran favors communism over democracy
5. Our global economy would suffer
6. There would be an elimination of FREEDOM

While there are drawbacks with USA Democracy and all its freedoms and capitalism based upon a free-market enterprise system of commerce, our system provides its citizens with a vast array of opportunities not available in communist countries.

I do not like wars.

I do not like senseless killing.

I do not like the bombing of countries.

I do not like damage done to innocent people.

BUT COMMUNIST COUNTRIES ONLY UNDERSTAND AND RESPECT AND FEAR POWER...  and, it is that fear that will keep the world safe.

Buffalo Springfield

 

ChatGPT Art Generator

OPENAI HAS ANNOUNCED Dall-E 3, its latest AI art tool. It uses OpenAI’s smash-hit chatbot, ChatGPT, to help create more complex and carefully composed works of art by automatically expanding on a prompt in a way that gives the generator more detailed and coherent instruction.

What’s new with Dall-E 3 is how it removes some of the complexity required with refining the text that is fed to the program—what’s known as “prompt engineering”—and how it allows users to make refinements through ChatGPT’s conversational interface. 

The new tool could help lower the bar for generating sophisticated AI artwork, and it could help OpenAI stay ahead of the competition thanks to the superior abilities of its chatbot.

Take this image of the potato king, for example.

This kind of quirky AI-generated art has become commonplace on social media thanks to a number of tools that turn a text prompt into a visual composition. 

But this one was created with a significant amount of artistic assistance from ChatGPT, which took a short prompt and turned it into a more detailed one, including instructions about how to compose it correctly.

That’s a big step forward not just for Dall-E, but for generative AI art as a whole. Dall-E, a portmanteau of the Pixar character Wall-E and the artist Salvador Dalí that was announced in 2021 and launched in 2022, consists of an algorithm that’s fed huge quantities of labeled images scraped from the web and other sources. 

It uses what’s known as a diffusion model to predict how to render an image for a given prompt. With sufficiently huge quantities of data this can produce complex, coherent, and aesthetically pleasing imagery. What’s different with Dall-E 3 is in the way humans and machines interact.  READ MORE...

Somewhat Political

 

There's Only Two Genders

Regardless of what you think or what you may want to believe or think you want to believe, there are only two genders:  Females and Males...

You can have your testicles and penis removed and you can have breast implants, but you are still biologically a male.

Call yourself transgendered if you would like, but you are still a male.

Males have different bone structures, muscle and tendon structures than a female.

This has nothing to do with my religious beliefs or preferences...  this is biology 101.

Body composition differs between men and women. Men have more lean mass, and women have more fat mass than men. Men are more likely to accumulate adipose tissue around the trunk and abdomen, whereas women usually accumulate adipose tissue around the hips and thighs.   SOURCE:  National Insitute of Health.gov

I am not opposed to males having their Gentelia removed, in fact, if that is what they really want, I support them wholeheartedly...  They can even take female hormones if they so desire.  Again, this is their choice and I support their freedom to make that choice.

BUT THEY ARE NOT FEMALES...

However, if individuals were born with both female and male Gentelia then fortunately have the ability to chose one or the other or both.    And, this happens.  There are always mutations of the DNA and that is a scientific fact.

Those people I suppose would need to be treated differently...  but again, they are not the normal and they are different biologically than males who want to become females.

If two males want to marry that if their decision and I support that.

If two females want to marry that is their decision as well and I support that.

If a trans male/female wants to marry another trans male/female or wants to marry a straight male/female, I support their choices as well...

But, that is not he issue here and because that happens, it does not mean that there are more than two genders.  It just means that those two genders have choices and have decided to exercise those choices.

 

Survival Instincts

 

World's Fastest Growing Cities

In this article, we will be taking a look at the 15 fastest growing cities in the world economically. If you want to skip our detailed analysis of emerging economies you can move directly to the 5 Fastest Growing Cities in the World Economically.

According to a report by the International Monetary Fund, the global growth rate is expected to fall to 3% in 2023 and 2024 from an expected 3.5% in 2022. The report suggests that rising inflation rates have contributed to the current state of the global economy. 

As per the current data, the global headline inflation rate is expected to fall from 6.8% in 2023 to 5.2% in 2024. Moreover, world trade growth is expected to decline from 5.2% in 2022 to 2.0% in 2023.

However, the future of the global economy is not as bleak as it may seem right now. The report suggests that 2024 may be slightly better for the world. The world trade rate is expected to rise to 3.7% in 2024. 

Emerging economies are expected to experience significant growth by the end of 2023 and 2024, at 4.0% and 4.1%, respectively. Particularly, emerging economies in Asia are expected to experience the highest growth globally and global growth is on track to rise to 5.3% in 2023 and 5.0% in 2024.

BRICS May Drive Future Economic Growth
Brazil, Russia, India, and China first grouped to form BRIC in 2006. In 2011, South Africa joined the group, which led the cluster to be renamed to the BRICS. These economies were grouped as expectations of high economic growth dominated the prospects for each country. 

You can take a look at some countries that are expected to experience significant economic growth.

On January 1 2024, BRICS is set to welcome new members formally. These include Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. On August 23, Forbes reported how the new arrangement between the BRICS countries could be a political move to attain energy dominance. 

As per the report, the arrangement immensely benefits China. Saudi Arabia, a major oil supplier to China, will benefit the country by the Riyadh-Teheran détente. The new treaty between Iran and Saudia Arabia promises trade and friendship between the two countries.  READ MORE...

Flying Pod

 

Alien Life

 

Company Wants to Pick Up Space Trash

In the middle of a space flight, an astronaut heard a massive bang. He looked up and saw a piece of space junk embedded in the window of the shuttle.

If the debris had been bigger, it could have blown out the window, and the crew would have all died, the astronaut told Joel C. Sercel, the founder and CEO of TransAstra.

"Space junk is one of the greatest perils that astronauts face in low Earth orbit today," Sercel told Insider.

TransAstra was recently awarded an $850,000 contract from NASA to explore the possibility of cleaning up space junk with a giant "capture bag" that the company has dubbed Flytrap, Sercel said.

"It's kind of like picking up trash on the side of the highway," Sercel said.

Only much, much more complex and expensive.

Earth's backyard is a giant dumpster
As humans expand into space, we're leaving a big mess.

The European Space Agency estimates over 330 million pieces of space debris are circling the Earth. Space debris can reach speeds up to 17,500 mph and pose a risk to astronauts, shuttles, and satellites.

TransAstra's Flytrap bags were initially developed to capture asteroids that, in the future, could be mined for rare elements, Sercel said.

But the more Sercel and the team looked into asteroid mining, the more they "became aware of the space junk problem, and we thought this is a really good solution for cleaning up orbital debris," Sercel told Insider.  READ MORE...

Somewhat Political

Examples of Socialism in the USA

1. 
   One of the rare examples of ownership of the means of production of a product in the USA is California’s recent announcement that it will produce its own insulin.
2. Up to 75% of water services in the USA are owned and operated by a government entity, employing public servants (Warner, 2009).
3. Public infrastructure—bridges, roads, electricity, water and sewer systems, and other government infrastructure—is considered socialist. It is usually owned and operated by the government and paid for by a mix of taxation and user fees.
4. Fire protection services and fire departments are socialist programs funded by tax revenue and provided free at the point of use.
5. Public transportation systems, including buses, subways, railway stations, etc., are another great example of socialism in America.
6. Like firefighting departments, police departments are fully socialized. No one directly pays the police to come out to their house or to patrol the streets. It comes out of general revenue.
7. Public parks belong to everyone. They are usually free to get into, although increasingly pay per use is being instituted to recuperate costs and minimize land erosion.
8. Public schools, universities, and community colleges are another form of socialism in the US.
9. The US Postal Service, also known as the USPS, the Post Office, US Mail, or simply Postal Service, is a government-run service that’s responsible for accepting and distributing postal services within the country.
10. Medicare and Medicaid may be considered government-run socialist healthcare programs. They help cover the medical costs for individuals with limited income.
11. Signed into law by former President Roosevelt in 1935, the Social Security Act replaces a percentage of a worker’s pre-retirement income based on his/her lifetime earnings. It also ensures access to health care for the unemployed, the disabled, the sick, and the retired among others.
12. The US military is a socialist organization – in fact, it’s one of the biggest government-owned and operated employers in the world.

When the Republicans yell, piss, scream, and complain about the Democrats taking the country into SOCIALISM...  either they are stupid in their awareness of socialism, or they are trying to INTENTIOALLY MISLEAD the general public...

We are already up to our eyeballs in socialistic programs, and it has been this way since I was a little boy in the 1950s.

So, I am not really sure why the Republicans are against the Democrats as they push for more social programs unless it is because the Republican Party is typically against RAISING TAXES.

So, instead of focusing in on taxes, they have focused in on socialism.

However...  true socialism is when the GOVERNMENT OWNS ALL BUSINESSES AND INDUSTRIES...  and, no matter how bad the Democrats want socialism, I doubt they will ever create a situation in this country where the government business and industry...  it just will not happen.

The wild card here is the BILLIONAIRES and the MULTI-MILLIONAIRES...

It is possible that someone can convince these people to share their wealth with everyone else and that would increase the number of social programs without raising taxes.

Tiger

 

Escape Routes Get a Quantum Overhaul

When it comes to natural disasters, every second counts—and the clock may just be ticking a little slower following a collaboration between Terra Quantum and Honda Research Institute Europe (HRI-EU).

By entangling quantum computing with traditional algorithms, the team has paved a ‘superposition’ of escape routes designed to evacuate people more quickly and efficiently in emergency situations.

This hybrid approach fuses the world of quantum mechanics with the urgency of real-world crises, aiming to create not just the shortest path out, but the ‘quantum leap’ in emergency response we’ve been waiting for.

According to the Honda/Terra Quantum team, disasters have increased fivefold over the past 50 years, primarily due to climatic changes and extreme weather conditions.

In such high-stakes scenarios, emergency response measures like evacuation routes are essential for public safety. “Common” traditional algorithms, such as Dijkstra’s node-wise shortest path algorithm, often encounter limitations when applied to dynamic and unpredictable situations like natural disasters.

The project delved into the capabilities of hybrid quantum technologies in the context of emergency evacuations. A proof-of-concept (POC) was implemented, simulating an earthquake on a realistic small-town map. The problem was modeled as a dynamic computational graph, where the earthquake affects certain areas, creating changes in traffic flows, particularly near the exit points of the town.

The team used a hybrid quantum machine learning model, specifically employing feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) neural networks. These networks were split into classical and quantum components running in parallel, imitating the node-wise Dijkstra’s algorithm on dynamically changing graphs. The FiLM layer used earthquake coordinates as input features to modulate the traditional neural network, thus making real-time adjustments to the evacuation routes.

The model was trained on simulated data that replicated a town map impacted by an earthquake, collecting routing data generated through Dijkstra’s algorithm.

According to Honda Research, this ML architecture managed to work with less than 1% of the total map data, an advantage in an evolving emergency scenarios.

The team claims their quantum hybrid model demonstrated superior performance in comparison to purely classical approaches.  READ MORE...

Perpetual Motion

 

Free Will

 

Smallest Known Way to Guide Light

Scientists at the University of Chicago found a glass crystal just a few atoms thick can trap and carry light—and could be used for applications. The material is visible as the thin line in the center of the plastic, held by study co-author Hanyu Hong. Credit: Jean Lachat



2D optical waveguides could pave the way for innovative technology.

Channeling light from one location to another is the backbone of our modern world. Across deep oceans and vast continents, fiber optic cables transport light containing data ranging from YouTube clips to banking transmissions—all within fibers as thin as a strand of hair.

University of Chicago Prof. Jiwoong Park, however, wondered what would happen if you made even thinner and flatter strands—in effect, so thin that they’re actually 2D instead of 3D. What would happen to the light?

Through a series of innovative experiments, he and his team found that a sheet of glass crystal just a few atoms thick could trap and carry light. Not only that, but it was surprisingly efficient and could travel relatively long distances—up to a centimeter, which is very far in the world of light-based computing.

The research, recently published in the journal Science, demonstrates what are essentially 2D photonic circuits, and could open paths to new technology.

“We were utterly surprised by how powerful this super-thin crystal is; not only can it hold energy, but deliver it a thousand times further than anyone has seen in similar systems,” said lead study author Jiwoong Park, a professor and chair of chemistry and faculty member of the James Franck Institute and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. “The trapped light also behaved like it is traveling in a 2D space.”

Guiding light
The newly invented system is a way to guide light—known as a waveguide—that is essentially two-dimensional. In tests, the researchers found they could use extremely tiny prisms, lenses, and switches to guide the path of the light along a chip—all the ingredients for circuits and computations.  READ MORE...

Sailing

 

Our New Abode - 90 Days Later

We have lived in our new home for over 90 days, but it is far from new construction as it is over 20 years old.  We have spent a lot of money getting it fixed up the way we want but have used not one penny of our own money, but we spent the profit made on our old house.  

It was so well maintained that we did not have to do anything at all if we did not want to, but since it is going to be our last house, we decided the makeover was what we needed to do.  While the house is a tad larger than our old house, it is better laid out an the yard is 1/4 the size of our old house.  Plus, there are no staircases to climb up and down.

And, while I have mentioned this all before in previous posts, I had not had the opportunity to live here a while.  So far so good as they say.  This house did fine over the summer once we got a portable AC/heating unit for the sunroom.  Now, the final test is to see how this house fairs over the winter.

Our three cats like this house better as well, even though they no longer have access to a basement.  How do I know this?  All three cats are displaying a more outgoing behavior since we moved here.  And all three cats are venturing outside whereas only 1 venture outside before.  Our backyard is not as big for one thing plus there is a tall barrier of trees and bushes that acts as a fence between us and the house behind us.  The cats seem to appreciate that closed in concept.

We no longer have a pool, a large deck, and a hot tub but neither my wife nor I miss that...  and we especially will not miss it during the winter when we have to put bricks on the tarp to hold it down and then remove those bricks in the spring when we open it up.  Those bricks weight about 12-15 pounds and there were 50 of them that we used.

Needless to say, we are pleased with our move and are confident that it will continue to be that way.

Blast of Rain

 

Hydrogen Internal Combustion Engine

Some agree that batteries are the clear winner in the race against hydrogen technologies, while others think the opposite. There's no such debate among internal combustion engine proponents. Almost all of them believe that replacing fossil-fuel-based fuels with H2 is feasible. However, there are some significant caveats to H2ICEs.

The Latin phrase "Inter duos combatentes, tertius vincit" translates to "between two combatants, the third wins." I always feared the fierce debate between battery-electric propulsion enthusiasts and hydrogen-powered systems supporters would benefit the internal combustion engine devotees.

And I was not wrong, as recently, e-fuels seduced many to believe that phasing out of an almost obsolete technology is not necessary anymore. Moreover, these people believe that internal combustion engines deserve not only a top spot in history but also a bright future, along with new high-tech-green technologies.

That's because many in the transport industry and policymakers believe more and more in the potential of combining hydrogen and ICEs.

The fuel-cell sand castle
Currently, Toyota is the most stubborn carmaker willing to keep on investing big money in hydrogen technology for passenger cars. Besides small evolutions in fuel-cell technology – which are marketed as giant leaps, but analysts agree it's not the case – the Japanese also make efforts to use hydrogen for internal combustion engines.

BMW and Hyundai are still in the game, but the new iX5 Hydrogen demonstration vehicles failed to impress, while Hyundai Nexo's future is uncertain. Honda took everyone by surprise when the main rival of Toyota in the fuel cell realm announced it put the hydrogen program on hold to prioritize hybrids and EVs.

As for Volkswagen, their conclusion is sharp: "In the case of the passenger car, everything speaks in favor of the battery, and practically nothing speaks in favor of hydrogen." Mercedes-Benz also joined the "ditch the fuel-cell" bandwagon after 30 years of pursuing the H2 dream.  READ MORE...

Pleasure and Happiness

 

Somewhat Political