Nice Try

 

BIG is BETTER

 Americans are impressed with big or large when it comes to buying and owning stuff.  We want a big house, a big car, a big swimming pool; we want big meals, big deserts, lots of clothes, and lots of shoes.  But, depending upon where we live the yards that our big houses are sitting upon are relatively small, typically mowing and trimming in an hour.

Most of the Americans that eat big meals and drink lots of beer or other alcohol have big bodies that a doctor would refer to as OBESE...   and, those of us who are in this big category, spending NO TIME at all exercising...  therefore, our big bodies get BIGGER.

Most of the males (but not all) want women with big breasts...  and I am not sure why because anything over a handful is wasted...  still that is what we want and once we have the female with big breasts, we get bored with those big breasts relatively quickly.  However, when we are out in public, those big breasts cause lots of attention from the other males who wish they had a date with big breasts.

Most of the women (but not all) do not really like their big breasts after they turn 40 and seek out a doctor who will perform breast reduction surgery.  Those females who do not get a breast reduction find that by the time they are 60, those big breasts of theirs hang down like the balls on a hound dog, sometimes drooping down to their waist or below.

Executives measure their success in a variety of ways:

1. Their big salaries
2. Their big offices
3. Their big number of employees they supervise
4. Their big compensation packages
5. Their power and influence
6. Their big amount of assets/toys they own
7. Their big homes
8. Their big egos

Those of us who are not obsessed with BIG, realize that there is absolutely no need to have more that you need.  Having more, makes you spend more and when you spend more, you want more.  This viscous circle causes us to make irrational and illogical decisions because we are motivated by BIG. 

Ninja

 

Measuring a Quantum Paradox

Vacuum chamber containing the atom chip. Credit: Thomas Schweigler, TU Wien

How do quantum particles exchange information? An intriguing hypothesis regarding quantum information has recently been validated through experimental verification conducted at TU Wien.

If you were to randomly pick an individual from a crowd who stands remarkably taller than the average, it’s quite likely that this person will also surpass the average weight. This is because, statistically, knowledge about one variable often gives us some insight into another.

Quantum physics takes these correlations to another level, establishing even more potent connections between disparate quantities: distinct particles or segments of a vast quantum system can “share” a specific amount of information. This intriguing theoretical premise suggests that the calculation of this “mutual information” is surprisingly not influenced by the system’s overall volume, but only by its surface.


This surprising result has been confirmed experimentally at the TU Wien and published in Nature Physics. Theoretical input to the experiment and its interpretation came from the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik in Garching, FU Berlin, ETH Zürich, and New York University.


“Let’s imagine a gas container in which small particles fly around and behave in a very classical way like small spheres,” says Mohammadamin Tajik of the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ) — Atominstitut of TU Wien, first author of the current publication.


“If the system is in equilibrium, then particles in different areas of the container know nothing about each other. One can consider them completely independent of each other. Therefore, one can say that the mutual information these two particles share is zero.”   READ MORE...

What If...

 

Perfectly Cooked Scrambled Eggs

 

Blended Wing Aircraft

Blended-wing aircraft have a futuristic UFO look, like something out of a 1950s sci-fi flick. While the configuration was tried unsuccessfully by different air forces in the 1960s, at least three aerospace firms are now convinced these aircraft can compete with—and beat—conventional designs, mostly because of the blended-wing’s superior fuel efficiency.

A blended-wing jet, or “flying wing,” as some call the design, is different from other aircraft because it has no definite fuselage, instead blending the wing and fuselage into one construction.

The entire aircraft provides lift necessary for flight. The Flying V, designed by a team of aerospace engineers and students at TU Delft, and the Airbus Maveric, are the two most famous blended-wing designs. Both firms expect their concepts to be in the air by 2035.

US-based startup JetZero is also working on a blended-wing design called the “Jetliner.”

The company says it will not only be more efficient than a similar-sized commercial jet—with half the fuel burn—but will emit four times less noise, thanks to the engines being on top of the jet. The aircraft will also be ready for zero-emissions fuels like hydrogen fuel cells once that technology comes online.

“Traditional tube-and-wing designs have reached the end of the road on efficiency gains,” said Tom O’Leary, JetZero co-founder and CEO. “Our new airframe meets both the climate challenge and the demands of an underserved mid-market segment.”   READ MORE...

Movement

 

Marketing and Advertising

When I was in graduate school, two of the courses that we had to take were Marketing and Advertising, although advertising is part of a company's marketing mix.

Obviously, when a company advertises, it is trying to get the consumer to PURCHASE that which they do not really want or need.  

What I find humorous is when a company advertises a lot, that is an indication to me that sales are down and they are trying to improve their revenue and bottom line.

So, my question would be what is wrong with the company that they need to advertise?

On the other side of the coin, the more a company advertises, the more a company sells whether they need additional revenue or not.  The odds are always in the favor of the advertiser.

Marketing, on the other hand is the overall approach to selling a product.  This overall approach is called the Marketing Mix.  It includes advertising, discounts, coupons, rebates, two for one gimmick, etc.

One's marketing mix or plan figures the basic cost of goods sold which includes raw materials, use of machinery if applicable, overhead (factory utilities), and labor which is sub-divided into direct and indirect labor (administrative and sales).

Once the basic per item cost is calculated, the company must add shipping, warehousing or storage, and the cost of advertising and other promotional ideas, as well as consignment costs

After all these costs are determined, the company decides how much profit they want to make and that determines what the item will sell for to the consumer.

Most companies hire cost accountants to figure out all these costs and report to management what the cost of goods sold is and what the other costs are per item so that they can determine the sale price.

These prices are constantly being adjusted due to inflation, increased labor costs, or gasoline costs.  Most of the time, when labor costs go up, the company will raise the price rather than reduce profit.

Companies are also constantly looking at re-engineering the processes to save money by reducing steps and increasing throughput which lowers per item costs.

When I worked as a consultant to businesses and industry, my work was focused on process re-engineering and saving the company money by working with the employees who, for the most part, already knew what shortcuts could be made.  They were not allowed to make those changes unless the idea to change came from management.

Management claims to be so smart and yet, I often found just how stupid they really were...  it was rather embarrassing to discover that the workers had known this shortcut for years, saving the company millions of dollars.  Arrogant management is still our worst enemy.

Morning Kitten

 

Potential Superbug Killer

An antibiotic developed some 80 years ago before being abandoned and forgotten could again offer exciting new solutions, this time to the emerging threat of drug-resistant superbugs.

Half of the bacteria-killing drugs we use today are variations of compounds that were found nearly a century ago, during this 'golden age' of antibiotics. One called streptothricin was isolated in the 1940s, drawing attention for its potential in treating infections caused by what are known as gram-negative bacteria.

Unlike gram-positive bacteria, these microbes lack a robust cell wall that many antibiotics target. Finding alternatives has been one of the big challenges for the pharmaceutical industry. In 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a list of the most dangerous, drug-resistant pathogens out there. Most were gram-negative bacteria.

But despite its potential for killing bacteria, streptothricin didn't make the cut. It was deemed too toxic to the health of human kidneys in an initial study and was subsequently buried in the scientific literature.

Pathologist James Kirby from Harvard University and his colleagues are now digging it back up, exploring its potential under a new name – nourseothricin.

"Now with the emergence of multi-drug resistant pathogens, for which there are few if any active antibiotics available for treatment, it is time to revisit and explore the potential of what we have previously overlooked," Kirby told ScienceAlert.

Nourseothricin is a natural product made by soil bacteria that are gram-positive. It is actually a mixture of antibiotics, given individual names such as streptothricin F (S-F) and streptothricin D (S-D).

While nourseothricin and S-D show toxic effects on kidney cells in the lab, Kirby and his colleagues have now established that isn't the case for S-F. This compound is still highly effective at killing drug-resistant gram-negative bacteria but at concentrations that are not toxic.

In mouse models, S-F actually managed to kill off a strain of bacteria that has proved resistant to numerous existing drugs, all with minimal to no toxicity.  READ MORE...

GEMINI

 

Dots & Lines

 

AI on the Dark Web

OpenAI's large language models (LLMs) are trained on a vast array of datasets, pulling information from the internet's dustiest and cobweb-covered corners.

But what if such a model were to crawl through the dark web — the internet's seedy underbelly where you can host a site without your identity being public or even available to law enforcement — instead? A team of South Korean researchers did just that, creating an AI model dubbed DarkBERT to index some of the sketchiest domains on the internet.

It's a fascinating glimpse into some of the murkiest corners of the World Wide Web, which have become synonymous with illegal and malicious activities from the sharing of leaked data to the sale of hard drugs.

It sounds like a nightmare, but the researchers say DarkBERT has noble intentions: trying to shed light on new ways of fighting cybercrime, a field that has made increasing use of natural language processing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, making sense of the parts of the web that aren't indexed by search engines like Google and often can only be accessed via specific software wasn't an easy task.

As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper titled "DarkBERT: A language model for the dark side of the internet," the team hooked their model up to the Tor network, a system for accessing parts of the dark web. It then got to work, creating a database of the raw data it found.

The team says their new LLM was far better at making sense of the dark web than other models that were trained to complete similar tasks, including RoBERTa, which Facebook researchers designed back in 2019 to "predict intentionally hidden sections of text within otherwise unannotated language examples," according to an official description.

"Our evaluation results show that DarkBERT-based classification model outperforms that of known pretrained language models," the researchers wrote in their paper.  READ MORE...

Turtles

 

Majority Rules(?) or Minority Rules(?)

Demographics in the USA 2022:

60%  White, non-Hispanic or Latino

19%  Hispanic or Latino

12%  Black or African American

06%  Asian

03%  Other

100%

According to the DEMOGRAPHIC DATA, the white, non-Hipanic/Latino population should have the majority rule in this country...  However, the Blacks, who only represent 12%, are making the claim that because white comprise the biggest population that this is WHITE SUPREMACY...  and not DEMOCRACY.

The Blacks who only represent 12% if the US Population want to control the country...   They justify this because of how they were treated during slavery, also making the claim that WHITES are continuing to treat them as slaves because they have the MAJORITY.

THAT'S BULLSHIT...  plain and simple...

WOKE - CRT - BLM - 1619 and all the other crap that the Blacks are pulling out of their rearends is nothing more that A MINORITY trying to control the MAJORITY and using SLAVERY as the excuse and/or rationale for their movement.

THE MAJORITY RULES...  plain and simple...

WHOEVER WINS THE ELECTIONS DECIDES THE GAME THAT IS TO BE PLAYED...

With all the illegal immigrants coming across our southern and northern borders, it would appear that our HISPANIC and LATINO populations are going to increase substantially, putting the Blacks and African Americans farther down on the Demographic Data Pile....

The only reason why the BLACKS are getting what they want right now is because there is a DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT and numerous DEMOCRATIC GOVERNORS....   When those positions change to REPUBLICAN, the WHITE SUPREMACY game, let's have EQUITY will be over...

Solar System

 

Mayan Deity Statue

Archaeologists excavating construction sites along the new Maya Train route in Mexico have found a rare statue of the Mayan god K’awiil. The work is part of a recovery mission ahead of the railroad’s construction to ensure that the area’s ancient artifacts and monuments are not accidentally damaged.

The stone idol is dedicated to the Maya god of power, abundance, and prosperity, and is typically identified by his large eyes, upturned snout and a stone celt sticking out of his forehead.

Though this particular pre-Hispanic deity has more often been seen represented in paintings, relief sculpture, and the Dresden and Maya codices of Mexico, in this case his rare three-dimensional image was found on top of an urn.

“This finding is very important because there are few sculptural representations of the god K’awiil so far. We only know three in Tikal, Guatemala, and this is one of the first to appear in Mexican territory,” said Diego Prieto Hernández, general director of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.

The discovery was made in section 7 of the Maya Train, an intercity railroad that loops around the Yucatán Peninsula and is expected to be completed next year. It has not been without its critics who say it is disruptive to the local environment, culture, and communities.

Other finds that have been made on the archaeologists’ previous rescue missions in sections 1-5 of the railroad include vessels, pottery fragments, bones, and the foundations of ancient structures belonging to Mesoamerican Mayan civilization. These objects are now being cleaned and classified in a dedicated lab in Chetumal.

“All this work should give rise to the analysis of the vast information, the preparation of academic reports and a great international research symposium on the Mayan civilization, which will be organized for this year,” said Prieto Hernández, who has also promised the construction of a new museum in Mérida to house the precious discoveries.  READ MORE...

Gravity Batteries

 

Just Wondering

Who are You?

What an interesting question to answer...

Speaking for myself, I am:

1. retired
2. a senior citizen
3. married
4. divorced
5. a father
6. a brother
7. a son
8. a parent
9. a husband
10. a veteran
11. a cancer survivor
12. a heart attack survivor
13. survived a 5 disk lower back fusion
14. a scorpion by birth
15. an INTJ
16. a college graduate
17. a teacher
18. a professor
19. an administrator
20. a dean
21. a homeowner
22. a Christian
23. a southerner
24. a Tarheel
25. a writer
26. a poet
27. an American
28. debt free
29. a coffee drinker
30. a non-smoker

I am sure that there are other items I could add to this list, but 30 is enough to make my point about who I am.

What do you know?

Another interesting question and all I can do is answer it from my point of view.

I could say that I don't know what I don't know, or I could say I do know what I don't know which is not in the list of what I know.

But, to make a list of all the things I know or don't know would take a lot longer that listing out who I am...  why?  

It is a more difficult question to answer first of all because knowing something is not the same as understanding that knowledge, nor is it the same as retaining that knowledge.

For example:

I know calculus math but I don't understand the math, nor do I remember much of what I learned.  So, can I really say that I know calculus?

The same holds true for the languages of:  French, Spanish, and Arabic.  I have classes, so I know the languages, but my retention level is very, very low.  So, can I really say that I know these languages?

I know the difference between black and white but I do not know how each color is created.

I know the difference between day and night, but I cannot tell you when the actual transition takes place as the rising and setting of the sun is gradual.  However, night is without sunlight and day is with sunlight.

I know that I am a male and not a female.

I know that I am white and not black.

I know how old I am and I know how tall I am and how much I weigh (at least the last time I weighed myself).

I know of chemistry, but I don't know chemistry.

1. Understanding what you know or don't know is not that easy of a task to complete.