Cat Fall

 

Floating Cities of the Future

The world’s first prototype floating city that adapts to sea level rise has just been unveiled at UN headquarters in New York.

OCEANIX Busan, in South Korea, aims to provide breakthrough technology for coastal cities facing land shortages and the threat of climate change.

When built, the three interconnected platforms, totalling 15.5 acres, will provide homes for a community of 12,000 people.

It’s one of many solutions being found to the growing issue of rising sea levels.

Housing the growing global population is one of the key challenges facing policymakers today - and one made even more challenging by climate change.

Without curbing emissions, it’s predicted more than 800 million people, living in 570 cities around the world, could be at risk from sea level rise by 2050, according to the C40 network of global cities addressing climate change.

The network estimates the cost of rising sea levels and inland flooding could reach $1 trillion by mid-century.

But it’s hoped that this sustainable floating city prototype could go some way to solving the problem of providing safe homes for vulnerable coastal communities.

‘Solutions to global challenges’
OCEANIX Busan, based in the waters off South Korea’s second-largest city, was recently unveiled at the UN headquarters in New York. It’s a collaboration between UN-Habitat, the Busan Metropolitan City, and OCEANIX, a blue tech company based in New York.

“We cannot solve today’s problems with yesterday’s tools. We need to innovate solutions to global challenges. But in this drive for innovation, let’s be inclusive and equitable and ensure we leave no one and no place behind,” Executive Director of UN-Habitat, Maimunah Mohd Sharif said at the launch.

The floating city is designed as three interconnected platforms, totalling 15.5 acres, that will initially provide homes for a community of 12,000 people, potentially rising to 100,000, with construction due to start in 2023.

Each of the platforms has a specific purpose - living, research, and lodging - while the link-span bridges that connect them to the land create a sheltered lagoon, providing space for recreation on the water.  READ MORE...

Mesmerizing Motion

 

AN OPEN SOCIETY

Open society (French: société ouverte) is a term coined by French philosopher Henri Bergson in 1932 and describes a dynamic system inclined to moral universalism.  Bergson contrasted an open society with what he called a closed society, a closed system of law, morality or religion. It is static, like a closed mind.  Bergson suggests that if all traces of civilization were to disappear, the instincts of the closed society for including or excluding others would remain.

The idea of an open society was further developed during World War II by the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper. Popper saw it as part of a historical continuum reaching from the organic, tribal, or closed society, through the open society (marked by a critical attitude to tradition) to the abstract or depersonalized society lacking all face-to-face interaction transactions.

Popper saw the classical Greeks as initiating the slow transition from tribalism towards the open society, and as facing for the first time the strain imposed by the less personal group relations entailed thereby.

Whereas tribalistic and collectivist societies do not distinguish between natural laws and social customs, so that individuals are unlikely to challenge traditions they believe to have a sacred or magical basis, the beginnings of an open society are marked by a distinction between natural and man-made law, and an increase in personal responsibility and accountability for moral choices (not incompatible with religious belief).

Popper argued that the ideas of individuality, criticism, and humanitarianism cannot be suppressed once people have become aware of them, and therefore that it is impossible to return to the closed society, but at the same time recognized the continuing emotional pull of what he called "the lost group spirit of tribalism", as manifested for example in the totalitarianisms of the 20th century.

While the period since Popper's study has undoubtedly been marked by the spread of the open society, this may be attributed less to Popper's advocacy and more to the role of the economic advances of late modernity. Growth-based industrial societies require literacy, anonymity and social mobility from their members — elements incompatible with much tradition-based behavior but demanding the ever-wider spread of the abstract social relations Georg Simmel saw as characterizing the metropolitan mental stance.

Investor and philanthropist George Soros, a self-described follower of Karl Popper, argued that sophisticated use of powerful techniques of subtle deception borrowed from modern advertising and cognitive science by conservative political operatives such as Frank Luntz and Karl Rove casts doubt on Popper's view of open society.  Because the electorate's perception of reality can easily be manipulated, democratic political discourse does not necessarily lead to a better understanding of reality. Soros argues that in addition to the need for separation of powers, free speech, and free elections, an explicit commitment to the pursuit of truth is imperative.  "Politicians will respect, rather than manipulate, reality only if the public cares about the truth and punishes politicians when it catches them in deliberate deception."

Popper however, did not identify the open society either with democracy or with capitalism or a laissez-faire economy, but rather with a critical frame of mind on the part of the individual, in the face of communal group think of whatever kind.   An important aspect in Popper's thinking is the notion that the truth can be lost. Critical attitude does not mean that the truth is found.

So, now we are back to that concept of TRUTH...  and, what exactly is truth?  Is truth the conservative points-of-view or is the truth the liberal points-of-view?  

It has always been said and believed that whoever wins the wars writes the history books and the history books give us the truth about what happened...  so, even that is biased...

TRUTH AND THE PRECEPTION OF REALITY is SOROS but, if one's perception of reality can be easily distorted then one's truth is also distorted based upon who distorted the reality...

Truth is synonymous with religion in a sense as they both are perceived by their followers as being the current reality...  and yet, the truth of the religious is disbelieved as truth by those who are not religious citing scientific facts...  and, they make the claim that the religious have had their perceptions of reality distorted...  and yet, to the religious they think...  how can this be?

We will never have an OPEN SOCIETY as there will always be those who for whatever reason will try to manipulate our perception of reality.

Ear Massage

Electric Charging for Boats

A series of quayside electric charging stations for boats have been unveiled.

A number of facilities have been switched on along the perimeter of the Plymouth Sound National Marine Park.


The charging stations will mean electric-powered boats and ships will be able to charge their batteries at three locations in the city.


It is in response to the Government's Clean Maritime Plan which aims to tackle air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions.


Battery-powered boats are starting to be seen more regularly on the water with an electric ferry launched in Plymouth in 2020.


The new stations are at Mount Batten, Queen Anne's Battery and the Barbican landing stage.


'Game-changer'
More installations are being developed along the city's waterfront as well as sites being identified in Devon and Cornwall.


The charging network has been created through the Marine e-Charging Living Lab (MeLL) initiative, a consortium led by the University of Plymouth.


It is in partnership with Plymouth City Council, Princess Yachts Limited and Aqua superPower.


Sarah Fear, project and knowledge exchange manager at the University of Plymouth and lead for the MeLL project, said: "This charging network is a game-changer for Plymouth's forward-thinking marine enterprises, and our ongoing research in this field is enabling the city and region to blaze a trail in clean maritime innovation."

Classic Sunday Morning Newspaper Cartoons

 

Flying Car Lessons

A Dutch company that plans to sell flying cars has set up bases in Coventry and Oxford.

Pal-V is going through the final stages of testing and applying for licences and then plans to offer training to potential pilots at the two locations.

The Pal-V Liberty will cost just over £250,000 (€300,000) and the company hopes to sell them from 2022.

Chief Commercial Officer Marco van den Bosch said it would appeal to men and women with "James Bond in their heart".

Andy Wall, the company's sales director, said the company had been developing the car for 12 years and added: "It's getting so close".

The company already has permission to use the vehicle on the roads, but needs permission to use it in the air.

The car can be converted from light aircraft to car in about 10 minutes and drivers will need a pilot licence to fly them.

In driving mode the Liberty can go up to 99 mph (159 km/h), and in flight mode as a gyrocopter its maximum speed is 112mph (180km/h).

The company said it already had lots of orders and Mr Wall said they were being marketed at people who wanted something different, instead of another boat or supercar.

"We've got a lot of guys who really have got the dream of flying and we say this is the fastest way to become a pilot." He said.

Oopps

 

Erotic Art

                    In the ancient Roman world, sexual pleasure was a cause for celebration rather than a source of shame. Archaeological Park of Pompeii

In the 19th century, the archaeologists tasked with excavating Pompeii and Herculaneum ran into a problem: Everywhere they turned, they found erotic art, from frescoes of copulating couples to sculptures of nude, well-endowed gods.

At a time when sex was widely considered shameful or even obscene, officials deemed the images too explicit for the general public. Instead of placing the artifacts on view, staff at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli stashed them in a secret room closed to all but scholars and, according to Atlas Obscura, male visitors willing to bribe their way in. Between 1849 and 2000, the works remained largely hidden from the public.

Fresco of Leda and the swan Archaeological Park of Pompeii

Not anymore. A new exhibition at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii titled “Art and Sensuality in the Houses of Pompeii” draws on selections from the secret room and other sensual images unearthed in the ancient city to demonstrate the ubiquity of erotic imagery in the Roman world.

The show’s marquee attraction is a fresco of the myth of Leda and the swan. Discovered in 2018, the scene depicts the moment when the god Zeus, disguised as a swan, either rapes or seduces Leda, queen of Sparta. Later, legend holds, Leda laid two eggs that hatched into children: Pollux and Helen, whose “face … launched a thousand ships” by sparking the Trojan War.

Painted on the wall of a Pompeiian bedroom, the artwork shows a nude Leda smiling invitingly as a swan nuzzles against her chest.

“[The scene] sends a message of sensuality,” Massimo Osanna, then-director of the archaeological park, told CNN’s Barbie Latza Nadeau and Hada Messia in 2019. “It means, ‘I am looking at you and you are looking at me while I am doing something very, very special.’ It is very explicit. Look at her naked leg, the luxurious sandal.”  READ MORE...

Wave Action

 

INDOCTRINATION

Indoctrination is the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.

Instead of teaching our elementary school students about gender identities, why not teach them about:

• Honesty
• Freedoms
• Free Will
• Openness
• Truth
• Fairness
• Life
• Love

It seems to be rather pointless to teach boys that if they have a penis they can still be a girl or girls that if they have a vagina they can still be a boy...  I mean what the hell does that achieve?  Their minds are young and easily manipulated...  when they become adults they can decide what to do about their penis or vagina...

I don't want a bunch of conservatives making decisions for me nor do I want a bunch of liberals making decisions for me either.  I want to hear both sides of the argument and then I will make up my own frigging mind...

Trying to convince me otherwise is an insult to my intelligence which is probably higher than yours if we want to be honest...

1. A two-party system means we have a 50/50 consensus.  
2. A three-party system means we have a 33&1/3 / 33&1/3 / 33&1/3 consensus which could end up 66&2/3 and 33&1/3
3. A four-party system means we have 25/25/25/25 which could end up:  50/50 or 75/25 (which is close to 66&2/3 to 33&1/3)

But, what amazes me more than anything else is the number of people who do not want to think at all, they just want to live their lives and let someone else do all the thinking for them as long as they get what they want...  

Most Americans just want:

• Homes
• Cars
• Job
• Food
• Children
• Alcohol
• Sports
• Recreation
• Cable
• Cell phones
• Facebook

Biden's Disinformation Board

1984 by George Orwell 
Orwell’s novella is a warning for the human race

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

1984 is a dystopian novella by George Orwell published in 1949, which follows the life of Winston Smith, a low ranking member of ‘the Party’, who is frustrated by the omnipresent eyes of the party, and its ominous ruler Big Brother.


‘Big Brother’ controls every aspect of people’s lives. It has invented the language ‘Newspeak’ in an attempt to completely eliminate political rebellion; created ‘Throughtcrimes’ to stop people even thinking of things considered rebellious. The party controls what people read, speak, say and do with the threat that if they disobey, they will be sent to the dreaded Room 101 as a looming punishment.

Orwell effectively explores the themes of mass media control, government surveillance, totalitarianism and how a dictator can manipulate and control history, thoughts, and lives in such a way that no one can escape it.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, begins a subtle rebellion against the party by keeping a diary of his secret thoughts, which is a deadly thoughtcrime. With his lover Julia, he begins a foreordained fight for freedom and justice, in a world where no one else appears to see, or dislike, the oppression the protagonist opposes.

Perhaps the most powerful, effective and frightening notion of 1984 is that the complete control of an entire nation under a totalitarian state is perfectly possible. If the world fell under the control of one or even multiple dictators, the future could easily become a twisted, cruel world where every movement, word and breath is scrutinised by an omnipotent, omnipresent power that no one can stop, or even oppose without the fear of death.

Orwell’s novella is a warning for the human race. It highlights the importance of resisting mass control and oppression.

Is this the kind of society in which you want to live?  A government that decides FOR YOU what is truth and/or what is not truth (DISINFORMATION)...

Right now, we have free will to decide what is truth and what is not truth and it is our choice to decide if we are right or wrong...  but now, the government wants to take away our free will and decide for us...

Is this something that we really want???

A crooked government could take a lie and make it TRUTH...

For instance.... a government could decide that slavery never happened and if someone says that slavery did happen in America is passing out DISINFORMATION...

Education's BIG Mistake

I have been involved with higher education about 30+ years on a 45 year career... and the main problem that I see is that my students don't know how to think...  they don't know how to drill down on a subject...  they don't have any presentation or communications skills and for the most part write at a 10th grade high school level...

However, if you tell them exactly how you want something done, they will copy your instructions exactly because they know in doing so they will get an "A".  Many of them no only have not retained anything but if you ask them what they retained in the class before this one, they will typically say "nothing" or "I cannot remember".

One day, educators are going to wake up and realize what they have done...

Floating Ice

Backwards in Time

A wild new theory suggests there may be another "anti-universe," running backward in time prior to the Big Bang.  The idea assumes that the early universe was small, hot and dense — and so uniform that time looks symmetric going backward and forward.

If true, the new theory means that dark matter isn't so mysterious; it's just a new flavor of a ghostly particle called a neutrino that can only exist in this kind of universe. And the theory implies there would be no need for a period of "inflation" that rapidly expanded the size of the young cosmos soon after the Big Bang.

If true, then future experiments to hunt for gravitational waves, or to pin down the mass of neutrinos, could answer once and for all whether this mirror anti-universe exists.

Preserving symmetry
Physicists have identified a set of fundamental symmetries in nature. The three most important symmetries are: charge (if you flip the charges of all the particles involved in an interaction to their opposite charge, you'll get the same interaction); parity (if you look at the mirror image of an interaction, you get the same result); and time (if you run an interaction backward in time, it looks the same).

Physical interactions obey most of these symmetries most of the time, which means that there are sometimes violations. But physicists have never observed a violation of a combination of all three symmetries at the same time. If you take every single interaction observed in nature and flip the charges, take the mirror image, and run it backward in time, those interactions behave exactly the same.

This fundamental symmetry is given a name: CPT symmetry, for charge (C), parity (P) and time (T).

In a new paper recently accepted for publication in the journal Annals of Physics, scientists propose extending this combined symmetry. Usually this symmetry only applies to interactions — the forces and fields that make up the physics of the cosmos. But perhaps, if this is such an incredibly important symmetry, it applies to the whole entire universe itself. In other words, this idea extends this symmetry from applying to just the "actors" of the universe (forces and fields) to the "stage" itself, the entire physical object of the universe.

Creating dark matter
We live in an expanding universe. This universe is filled with lots of particles doing lots of interesting things, and the evolution of the universe moves forward in time. If we extend the concept of CPT symmetry to our entire cosmos, then our view of the universe can't be the entire picture.

Instead, there must be more. To preserve the CPT symmetry throughout the cosmos, there must be a mirror-image cosmos that balances out our own. This cosmos would have all opposite charges than we have, be flipped in the mirror, and run backward in time. Our universe is just one of a twin. Taken together, the two universes obey CPT symmetry.

The study researchers next asked what the consequences of such a universe would be.  They found many wonderful things.  READ MORE...

Flowing Grasses

 

One Way Time Travel

Have you ever made a mistake that you wish you could undo? Correcting past mistakes is one of the reasons we find the concept of time travel so fascinating. As often portrayed in science fiction, with a time machine, nothing is permanent anymore – you can always go back and change it. But is time travel really possible in our universe, or is it just science fiction?

Our modern understanding of time and causality comes from general relativity. Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein's theory combines space and time into a single entity – "spacetime" – and provides a remarkably intricate explanation of how they both work, at a level unmatched by any other established theory.

This theory has existed for more than 100 years, and has been experimentally verified to extremely high precision, so physicists are fairly certain it provides an accurate description of the causal structure of our Universe.

For decades, physicists have been trying to use general relativity to figure out if time travel is possible. It turns out that you can write down equations that describe time travel and are fully compatible and consistent with relativity. But physics is not mathematics, and equations are meaningless if they do not correspond to anything in reality.  READ MORE...

White Shark

 

The Space Plane

The X-37B looks like something our of a sci-fi movie. What is the plane’s actual mission? Was it designed to fight a space war against Russia or China? At first glance, you think you are looking at a miniature version of the space shuttle, but the X-37B is an unmanned and autonomous space plane with its own quirks and characteristics. 

The craft is also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle, and it has flown six missions since 2010. At only 29-feet long, the X-37B is just a fraction of the size of the space shuttle. It’s also boosted into space on a rocket, and it lands horizontally like an airplane. Let’s take a look at just why the United States needs such a curious spacecraft.

Most missions and their details are classified. Could it be used to take out enemy satellites? That question has been bandied about by space war analysts. But the U.S. military denies such offensive activities and claims the X-37B is for peaceful purposes as a technology and scientific testbed. 

For example, it could be trying out new tech for spy satellites and other types of orbiting vehicles. The X-37B could also be gathering data on vertical launch mechanisms for flight control and testing other space components.  READ MORE...