Sunday, March 20
Ruining Your Devices
How many smartphones have you dropped and shattered? It’s an awful feeling – seeing it falling to the ground and knowing there’s nothing you can do.
Years ago, I put a tempered glass screen protector on my phone. The best part is when you drop your phone, and the glass gets nicked, you simply remove the protector, and it's good as new. Here’s a link to the brand I have used for years, ESR.
Our devices are big investments. You need to treat your tech well to get your money's worth. Regular maintenance is one way to stay ahead of the game. Tap or click for six checkups to do now to avoid a hefty repair bill later.
Based on calls to my show, emails, and questions posted on my website’s tech support forum, here are five common mistakes that could cost you:
1. You’re charging too much
Do you keep your phone plugged in all the time? Apple says that when your iPhone “remain(s) at full charge for prolonged periods of time, battery health can be affected.”
Android phone manufacturers, including Samsung, say the same. “Do not leave your phone connected to the charger for long periods of time or overnight.” Huawei says, “Keeping your battery level as close to the middle (30% to 70%) as possible can effectively prolong the battery life.”
The official word is to keep your phone charged – but not fully charged. Get in the habit of unplugging your tech after it is fully charged.
2. You wait too long to charge your laptop
Laptop batteries have a finite number of charge-discharge cycles. If you frequently let your battery entirely run out of juice, it affects the charge-discharge cycle and diminishes its intended lifespan.
Your laptop battery can also lose efficiency another way. Let’s say you regularly charge your laptop from 30% to 50%, or about 20% each time you charge it. Well, do that five times and you’ll have completed one battery cycle because you’ve charged your laptop 100% in total.
A good rule of thumb is to keep your battery charged to at least 40% most of the time. Tap or click here to check your laptop’s battery health.
Do you keep your phone plugged in all the time? Apple says that when your iPhone “remain(s) at full charge for prolonged periods of time, battery health can be affected.”
Android phone manufacturers, including Samsung, say the same. “Do not leave your phone connected to the charger for long periods of time or overnight.” Huawei says, “Keeping your battery level as close to the middle (30% to 70%) as possible can effectively prolong the battery life.”
The official word is to keep your phone charged – but not fully charged. Get in the habit of unplugging your tech after it is fully charged.
2. You wait too long to charge your laptop
Laptop batteries have a finite number of charge-discharge cycles. If you frequently let your battery entirely run out of juice, it affects the charge-discharge cycle and diminishes its intended lifespan.
Your laptop battery can also lose efficiency another way. Let’s say you regularly charge your laptop from 30% to 50%, or about 20% each time you charge it. Well, do that five times and you’ll have completed one battery cycle because you’ve charged your laptop 100% in total.
A good rule of thumb is to keep your battery charged to at least 40% most of the time. Tap or click here to check your laptop’s battery health.
3. You go with the cheapest option
If you lose your charger or a USB cable gets frayed, resist the temptation to buy the cheapest replacement. The few dollars you save on a low-cost substitute may very likely negatively affect your device’s performance.
One-size-fits-all charger and cable makers don’t want you to know that often their products do not have the proper voltage needed to work with your specific device. Why does that matter? Your battery may end up not getting the juice it needs to charge fully. Worse, it may erode the battery’s life. READ MORE...
Saturday, March 19
Off the Cuff
His father tried to open the storm door, but I held it close to the door frame and said that we already had a church... thanked them... then shut the door. My wife who was standing in the kitchen asked me not to be so rude. While I did not think I was being rude and acted no differently than I would have to any other door-to-door salesperson, my wife thought I should have been nicer to religious people.
For me... a door-to-door salesperson is a door-to-door salesperson... there ain't no difference just because they are selling a local church.
Why is a local church trying to build up its attendance? Is their church not completely full on Sundays or are they trying to increase revenues? Either way, it benefits them more than it does me.
Am I saying that I am not religious? NO! My beliefs are my own, but I will tell you this, I am against institutionalized religion, not religion as a belief. I have a strong religious belief and will never lessen, in fact, it gets stronger as I get older...
But again, my beliefs are not in question here... what is a concern, is why other churches and their congregations try to push their beliefs and their churches on you. If I want to attend a church I will because I made that decision not because one of their members came to my door and invited me... I probably will not attend because they came to my door as I would not want to share my beliefs with someone who had that kind of personality.
Psychedelics Maps Conscious Awareness
Graph showing relation between type of drug, descriptive words and neurotransmitter.
Credit: Danilo Bzdok
Psychedelics are now a rapidly growing area of neuroscience and clinical research, one that may produce much-needed new therapies for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. Yet there is still a lot to know about how these drug agents alter states of consciousness.
In the world’s largest study on psychedelics and the brain, a team of researchers from The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) and Department of Biomedical Engineering of McGill University, the Broad Institute at Harvard/MIT, SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, and Mila—Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute have shown how drug-induced changes in subjective awareness are anatomically rooted in specific neurotransmitter receptor systems.
The researchers gathered 6,850 testimonials from people who took a range of 27 different psychedelic drugs. In a first-of-its-kind approach, they designed a machine learning strategy to extract commonly used words from the testimonials and link them with the neurotransmitter receptors that likely induced them.
The interdisciplinary team could then associate the subjective experiences with brain regions where the receptor combinations are most commonly found—these turned out to be the lowest and some of the deepest layers of the brain’s information processing layers.
Using thousands of gene transcription probes, the team created a 3D map of the brain receptors and the subjective experiences linked to them, across the whole brain. While psychedelic experience is known to vary widely from person to person, the large testimonial dataset allowed the team to characterize coherent states of conscious experiences with receptors and brain regions across individuals. This supports the theory that new hallucinogenic drug compounds can be designed to reliably create desired mental states. READ MORE...
A Stoneage Woman
A Stone Age woman who lived 4,000 years ago is leaning on her walking stick and looking ahead as a spirited young boy bursts into a run, in a stunning life-size reconstruction now on display in Sweden.
Although her likeness is new — it debuted last month in an exhibit about ancient people at Västernorrlands Museum — researchers have known about this woman's existence for nearly a century. During the construction of a road in the hamlet of Lagmansören in 1923, workers found her skeletal remains buried next to the remains of a child, likely a 7-year-old boy.
"With our eyes and perhaps in all times, you tend to think that this is a mother and son," said Oscar Nilsson, the Sweden-based forensic artist who spent 350 hours creating the lifelike model. "They could be. Or they could be siblings: sister and brother. They could be relatives, or they could just be tribe friends. We don't know, because the DNA was not that well preserved to establish this relationship."
But as Nilsson molded the woman's posture and sculpted her face, he pretended that she was near her son who was scampering ahead of her. "She's looking with the mother's eyes — both with love and a bit of discipline," Nilsson told Live Science. This stern but tender gaze looks as if she's on the cusp of calling out to the boy, telling him to be careful. READ MORE...
Creating Matrer
E = MC2 MAY BE the most quotidian equation in physics. Everyone’s heard of it and it’s been proven time and again. Did you convert mass into energy? Go tell it to the stars, whose light is generated from mass lost during nuclear fusion.
But there is another way to imagine this fundamental equation.
“You can actually look at this process from both sides,” Daniel Brandenburg, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, tells Inverse.
“In our case, we wanted to take light and convert it into matter.”
That it turns out is a lot less mundane.
On his 143rd birthday, Inverse celebrates the world’s most iconic physicist — and interrogates the myth of his genius. Welcome to Einstein Week.
Brandenburg is a member of the STAR collaboration, a group of more than 700 scientists from 15 countries who use BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC (pronounced “Rick”), to smash gold nuclei together at 99.995 percent the speed-of-light.
For this experiment, the researchers were more interested in the near misses than the hits. Ultra-high-energy photons encircle the gold nuclei like an aura, and auras collide as nuclei zoom past one another. When photons (particles of light; massless, pure energy) collide, they generate an electron and a positron, its antimatter counterpart — both particles that have a mass. This is known as the Breit-Wheeler Process.
“The part that makes the Breit-Wheeler process so hard to achieve is getting photons that have enough energy,” explains Brandenburg. “We’ve crossed this threshold where we can convert the photons into a real electron-positron pair. And that’s where we really can achieve what Einstein talked about, where we take the energy from the photons.”
THE EINSTEIN CONNECTION
E = mc2 is an outgrowth of Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which says that an object’s speed affects how it experiences space and time relative to other objects. (His theory of general relativity adds gravity into the mix.) About two decades after Einstein’s seminal 1905 paper on the matter, two theoretical physicists, Gregory Breit and John Wheeler took his by then famous and accepted equation and deduced the requirements for turning light into matter. READ MORE...
E = mc2 is an outgrowth of Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which says that an object’s speed affects how it experiences space and time relative to other objects. (His theory of general relativity adds gravity into the mix.) About two decades after Einstein’s seminal 1905 paper on the matter, two theoretical physicists, Gregory Breit and John Wheeler took his by then famous and accepted equation and deduced the requirements for turning light into matter. READ MORE...
Friday, March 18
My Biased Views
and... for some reason, we are always disappointed because today never or hardly ever unfolds like we wanted it to...
Therefore... we never fully appreciate the life that we have been given... and life was given to each and every one of us without our consent... although, we never look at it from that perspective... but, none of us chose to be given life... and yet, life we were given.
Why do you suppose that is?
After living my life for 74 years plus the nine months I was in the womb, I am glad that I was given life even though I have not really accomplished much of anything.
- I have lived overseas
- I am a Vietnam Veteran
- I did survive the 1960's
- I did graduate from college
- I did get married twice
- I am a father
- I did work for 45 years
- I did write a lot of stuff
- I have been on numerous cruises
- I am debt-free
- I did save enough money for retirement
- I am a cancer survivor
I am not wealthy and have never been wealthy and I am glad or rather fortunate that I am not wealthy because I don't think I would be very good at being wealthy as I would always want to give it away to those who did not have much.
That is not a good personality to have if someone is wealthy... even though it is the right thing to do.
All of my tomorrows arrive when I am sleeping as they are always here, without fail, when I awake... and, the older I get the faster my days seem to pass by... so much so that I constantly find myself telling people I never have a bad day.
To some degree, we are all biased and that is probably because of the way we were raised and the influence on us from those who raised us or taught us in school. We are biased because of our experiences whether they were negative or positive or a combination of both. Age causes us to be biased because we no longer have to listen to all the shit that we are being told. And, we are biased because of our race and our gender regardless of how strong we try to deny that is the case.
It is because of all of this, that todays hardly ever or seldom unfold as we wanted them to unfold.
Unleashing Limitless Energy
Since its launch in 2020, a pioneering energy company called Quaise has attracted some serious attention for its audacious goal of diving further into Earth's crust than anybody has dug before.
Following the closure of first round venture capital funding, the MIT spin-off has now raised a total of US$63 million: a respectable start that could potentially make geothermal power accessible to more populations around the world.
The company's vision for getting closer to the center of the Earth is to combine conventional drilling methods with a megawatt-power flashlight inspired by the kind of technology that could one day make nuclear fusion energy possible.
Geothermal energy has become the forgotten renewable. With solar and wind increasingly dominating the market of green energy, efforts to tap the vast reservoir of heat deep beneath our feet remain stubbornly well behind.
It's not hard to understand why. Despite being a perfectly good choice of clean, uninterrupted, limitless power, there are very few places where hot rocks suitable for geothermal energy extraction sit conveniently close to the surface.
Quaise aims to change that by developing technology that will allow us to bake holes in the crust to record depths.
To date our best efforts at chewing our way through the planet's skin have bottomed out at around 12.3 kilometers (7.6 miles). While the Kola Superdeep Borehole and others like it may have reached their limit, though, they nonetheless represent amazing feats of engineering. READ MORE...
Computer Program Predicts Civilization End
While such predictions have always been central to Christianity, it is startling for modern people to look back and see the famed astronomer and physicist indulging them. For Newton, however, as Matthew Stanley writes at Science, “laying the foundation of modern physics and astronomy was a bit of a sideshow. He believed that his truly important work was deciphering ancient scriptures and uncovering the nature of the Christian religion.”
Over three hundred years later, we still have plenty of religious doomsayers predicting the end of the world with Bible codes. But in recent times, their ranks have seemingly been joined by scientists whose only professed aim is interpreting data from climate research and sustainability estimates given population growth and dwindling resources.
Over three hundred years later, we still have plenty of religious doomsayers predicting the end of the world with Bible codes. But in recent times, their ranks have seemingly been joined by scientists whose only professed aim is interpreting data from climate research and sustainability estimates given population growth and dwindling resources.
The scientific predictions do not draw on ancient texts or theology, nor involve final battles between good and evil. Though there may be plagues and other horrible reckonings, these are predictably causal outcomes of over-production and consumption rather than divine wrath. Yet by some strange fluke, the science has arrived at the same apocalyptic date as Newton, plus or minus a decade or two.
The “end of the world” in these scenarios means the end of modern life as we know it: the collapse of industrialized societies, large-scale agricultural production, supply chains, stable climates, nation states…. Since the late sixties, an elite society of wealthy industrialists and scientists known as the Club of Rome (a frequent player in many conspiracy theories) has foreseen these disasters in the early 21st century.
One of the sources of their vision is a computer program developed at MIT by computing pioneer and systems theorist Jay Forrester, whose model of global sustainability, one of the first of its kind, predicted civilizational collapse in 2040. “What the computer envisioned in the 1970s has by and large been coming true,” claims Paul Ratner at Big Think. TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS, CLICK HERE...
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