From the Back Porch

The Valley is cool this morning but will reach up into the 60s...  and into the 70s as the week unfolds...  

It is nice to know that Spring is arriving in the Valley...  it is nice to see the green grass, the blooming of flowers, and eventually the blooming of trees...

HOWEVER, with this blooming of spring comes the inevitable mowing of grass...  and, with that comes the fact that we will be paying over $4/gallon of gasoline for our mowers.  I usually fill up 3 gas cans at one time or 7 gallons.  I was paying $14 for each fill-up and this summer I will be paying close to $30 for each fill-up.

Why is that happening here?

• Some say it is Trump's fault...
• Some say it is the war in Ukraine...
• Some say it is due to COVID-19...
• Some say it is because of Putin...
• Some say it is the gas companies...

BUT, I say it is all BULLSHIT...

When President Biden took office the first Executive Orders that he signed were to stop the USA from being energy independent to becoming energy-dependent and instead of producing our own energy, we started buying it from other countries.

The DEMOCRATS want to do away with fossil fuels once and for all and GO GREEN and save the planet...  but, saving the planet ain't gonna to work unless all the countries in the world GO GREEN and that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.

Are all DEMOCRATS really that unaware that the USA cannot save the world by itself?

BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY - if we do away with fossil fuels, how are we going to fly our airplanes to Europe and go on vacation and spend our money?

What about our cruise ship?

Can they be powered by solar, wind, hydro, or electricity?

What about NUCLEAR ENERGY...  NUCLEAR FUSION?

Motels will have to have electric charging stations at each of their parking slots...  and guess what...  that will increase the price of our vacations.

What about grocery stores?  

Will they install charging stations at all their parking slots?

Or, shopping malls?

Maybe we should just do away with private transportation and create a massive public transportation system network and then we can carry our shopping bags on the bus with everyone else as we make our way back home...

That makes me feel that our society is going backward instead of forward...

For my wife and I, we would stop going on vacation and just travel locally so that we could always recharge our vehicle at home...

How many Americans would be like us?

How would this change our country?  our economy?  our future?

What makes me feel better about this is the fact that 50% of Americans are AGAINST IT...  This means that HALF OUR COUNTRY IS NOT IN FAVOR of what the Democrats want to do...  

HOW DOES THIS DIVIDE HELP the US???  our children???  our future???

House of Wax

 

Limits of Artificial Intelligence

Humans are usually pretty good at recognizing when they get things wrong, but artificial intelligence systems are not. According to a new study, AI generally suffers from inherent limitations due to a century-old mathematical paradox.

Like some people, AI systems often have a degree of confidence that far exceeds their actual abilities. And like an overconfident person, many AI systems don't know when they're making mistakes. Sometimes it's even more difficult for an AI system to realize when it's making a mistake than to produce a correct result.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Oslo say that instability is the Achilles' heel of modern AI and that a mathematical paradox shows AI's limitations. Neural networks, the state of the art tool in AI, roughly mimic the links between neurons in the brain. The researchers show that there are problems where stable and accurate neural networks exist, yet no algorithm can produce such a network. Only in specific cases can algorithms compute stable and accurate neural networks.

The researchers propose a classification theory describing when neural networks can be trained to provide a trustworthy AI system under certain specific conditions. Their results are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Deep learning, the leading AI technology for pattern recognition, has been the subject of numerous breathless headlines. Examples include diagnosing disease more accurately than physicians or preventing road accidents through autonomous driving. However, many deep learning systems are untrustworthy and easy to fool.

"Many AI systems are unstable, and it's becoming a major liability, especially as they are increasingly used in high-risk areas such as disease diagnosis or autonomous vehicles," said co-author Professor Anders Hansen from Cambridge's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. "If AI systems are used in areas where they can do real harm if they go wrong, trust in those systems has got to be the top priority."  READ MORE...

Classic Sunday Morning Newspaper Cartoons

 

Interior of Protons Entangled

If a photon carries too little energy, it does not fit inside a proton (left). A photon with sufficiently high energy is so small that it flies into the interior of a proton, where it 'sees' part of the proton (right). Maximum entanglement then becomes visible between the 'seen' and 'unseen' areas. Credit: IFJ PAN



Fragments of the interior of a proton have been shown by scientists from Mexico and Poland to exhibit maximum quantum entanglement. The discovery, already confronted with experimental data, allows us to suppose that in some respects the physics of the inside of a proton may have much in common not only with well-known thermodynamic phenomena, but even with the physics of... black holes.

Various fragments of the inside of a proton must be maximally entangled with each other, otherwise theoretical predictions would not agree with the data collected in experiments, it was shown in European Physical Journal C. 

The theoretical model (which extends the original proposal by physicists Dimitri Kharzeev and Eugene Levin) makes it possible to suppose that, contrary to current belief, the physics operating inside protons may be related to such concepts as entropy or temperature, which in turn may relate it to such exotic objects as black holes. 

The authors of the discovery are Dr. Martin Hentschinski from the Universidad de las Americas Puebla in Mexico and Dr. Krzysztof Kutak from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow, Poland.

The Mexican-Polish theorists analyzed the situation in which electrons are fired at protons. When an incoming electron carrying a negative electric charge approaches a positively charged proton, it interacts with it electromagnetically and deflects its path. 

Electromagnetic interaction means that a photon has been exchanged between the electron and the proton. The stronger the interaction, the greater the change in momentum of the photon and therefore the shorter the associated electromagnetic wave.  READ MORE...

Dancer

 

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.

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...

Carina Thompson

 

Off the Cuff

 Today, while I was minding my own business at my own home, the doorbell rang, and a middle-aged gentleman and his son were standing on the porch smiling...  I did not know them but I just knew that they were selling something that I immediately thought had something to do with the local high school.  But, when I opened the door, the first comment out of the mouth of the child was targeted as he asked me directly if I wanted to attend his church.

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.

Putin

Caucasian Born

 

Skateboard

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...

Curious Dog

 

A Stoneage Woman

Oscar Nilsson, a forensic artist based in Sweden, spent 350 hours reconstructing the Stone Age woman's likeness. (Image credit: Oscar Nilsson )



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...

Garbage Trucks

 

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...

Robin

My Biased Views

When Tomorrow Arrives...  it is always today...

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.

 

Caught