Blood Sweat & Tears

 

Controlling Autonomous Robots

In the film "Top Gun: Maverick," Maverick, played by Tom Cruise, is charged with training young pilots to complete a seemingly impossible mission—to fly their jets deep into a rocky canyon, staying so low to the ground they cannot be detected by radar, then rapidly climb out of the canyon at an extreme angle, avoiding the rock walls. 

Spoiler alert: With Maverick's help, these human pilots accomplish their mission.

A machine, on the other hand, would struggle to complete the same pulse-pounding task. To an autonomous aircraft, for instance, the most straightforward path toward the target is in conflict with what the machine needs to do to avoid colliding with the canyon walls or staying undetected. 

Many existing AI methods aren't able to overcome this conflict, known as the stabilize-avoid problem, and would be unable to reach their goal safely.  MIT researchers have developed a new technique that can solve complex stabilize-avoid problems better than other methods. 

Their machine-learning approach matches or exceeds the safety of existing methods while providing a tenfold increase in stability, meaning the agent reaches and remains stable within its goal region.

In an experiment that would make Maverick proud, their technique effectively piloted a simulated jet aircraft through a narrow corridor without crashing into the ground.  READ MORE...

Justice

 

Change of Location

My wife and I have lived in the same location for 23 years.  We have an upstairs and a downstairs and if we want to get out to the backyard we have to walk down stairs just like for the basement.  We  have an acre of yard that is mostly in the back and the mowing and weed eating takes 2-3 hours with a riding lawn mower.  

We also have several areas where we have planted flowers that need weeding and other annual maintenance.  Our 26' round pool requires a top cover for the winter that we hold down with landscaping bricks that weigh 10-12 pounds each.  Taking them off is quite a chore each year, especially as the bending over gets harder from one  year to the next.

So, we decided to downsize and found a house, 200 square feet larger but with no stairs and a yard that can be mowed and weed eaten in an hour.  We purchased the house about two weeks ago and on Wednesday of this week, our new appliances and furniture arrive.  I say new because we sold all of our old stuff.  The movers come the next day (Thursday) and except for a few odds and ends, we are MOVED.

We want to put our old house up for sale as close to the end of June as possible.  We are hoping that the improvements we made to it and the areas that we newly painted will attract a buyer quickly.

We had a glitch with Lowes in ordering our flooring so the soonest they they put down the floor is July 24.  We are looking around for another installer and will meet with him this Thursday while the movers are here.  Hopefully, he will be able to do the job in the next several days.

We have the money to stay where we are and have someone tend to the yard and open and close the pool but the sets of stairs that we have to constantly go up and down is only going to get worse with age.  I had 5 disks fused together a year ago and have lost strength in my right leg when walking up stairs.  My wife has numerous back issues as well including another hip that needs to be replaced.

Downsizing in one's 70s makes sense from a physical standpoint.  It also FORCED us to sell, give away, or trash a lifetime of accumulation that we no longer needed.  Memories that we had forgotten all about.  We discarded bunch of clothes we no longer needed as well.

It will take us a couple of weeks to unpack, sort out, and arrange all our stuff but our pace will be much slower.

Our neighbors are much better than the ones we had so that is encouraging.  No more loud traffic sounds on the road where we were, no more barking dog, and more silence as we move deeper into our community.

The house is about as good as the one we are leaving, built about the same time, with few repairs needed.  We made some changes that we did not need to do but wanted to do to accommodate our tastes.

By August/September, it will be like we never lived anywhere else...

Secrets

 

A New Phase of Matter

Physicists have discovered a new phase of matter, the “chiral bose-liquid state.” This state, discovered through the exploration of kinetic frustration in quantum systems, exhibits robust properties such as unchangeable electron spin and long-range entanglement. The discovery, requiring high magnetic fields for observation, expands our understanding of the physical world and could have applications in fault-tolerant digital data encoding.

For Experimental Physicists, Quantum Frustration Leads to Fundamental Discovery
“Chiral bose-liquid state” is a new phase of matter, according to UMass Amherst professor.

A team of physicists, including University of Massachusetts assistant professor Tigran Sedrakyan, recently announced in the journal Nature that they have discovered a new phase of matter. Called the “chiral bose-liquid state,” the discovery opens a new path in the age-old effort to understand the nature of the physical world.

Under everyday conditions, matter can be a solid, liquid, or gas. But once you venture beyond the everyday—into temperatures approaching absolute zero, things smaller than a fraction of an atom or which have extremely low states of energy—the world looks very different. “You find quantum states of matter way out on these fringes,” says Sedrakyan, “and they are much wilder than the three classical states we encounter in our everyday lives.”

Sedrakyan has spent years exploring these wild quantum states, and he is particularly interested in the possibility of what physicists call “band degeneracy,” “moat bands” or “kinetic frustration” in strongly interacting quantum matter.  READ MORE...

Five Situations Be Silent

 

Light

 

Partial De-Dollarization is Possible

The world could soon see the dominance of the US dollar start to wane, amounting to a partial de-dollarization of the global economy, according to JPMorgan, but that doesn't mean it's at risk of being replaced by a competitor like the yuan.

In a recent note, strategists at the bank explained that even if China's economy surpasses that of the US, it is still unlikely that the hegemony of the greenback would take much of a hit, and history suggests that any shift would happen at a glacial pace.

"While the US surpassed Great Britain as the world's largest economy in the latter part of the 19th century, the US dollar is commonly perceived to have overtaken the British pound as the world's foremost reserve currency only by the end of WWII," JPMorgan strategists wrote. 

"Historical experience thus suggests that if China were to overtake the US as the world's largest economy around 2030, dollar dominance may persist even into the second half of the 21st century."  READ MORE...

Our Debt

 

Our Local Lowes Needs New Management and Employees

 It's a pain in the ass to move from one home location to another, especially if that new home location is in another state.  It is worse than a pain in the ass, if the couple moving is in their 70's.  But, it is unbelievably miserable, if you have placed a flooring order with LOWES to redo the entire house with two different kinds of flooring and LOWES SCREWS UP THE ORDER by ordering only one kind.

No RED FLAGS popped up...

My wife and I ordered vinyl for the bathrooms and laundry room and laminate for the rest of the house, three bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, and closets.   LOWES ordered vinyl for the entire house.

My wife had arranged for there to be absolutely nothing in the house for the installers to have to work around.  All our furniture was going to be delivered the next day.   To us, this would be a dream job for installers.  On the scheduled day, they arrived and spent two days, taking up the old flooring (which they did not have to do) and installed the vinyl.

LOWES reordered the materials and they are to arrive today but the installers cannot come back until July 24 which is over a month away as the movers are moving our house on June 22.

The installers will not move us up on the schedule because it would piss off other customers.  LOWES is now saying that the BLAME is OURS because we did not read the invoice and discover the ERROR that they had made.

Talk about PISS POOR customer service!!!

So, for a month we have to live on subflooring throughout the house except for in our bathrooms and laundry room.

We cannot unpack stuff and put anything away because we would just have to take everything back out of the drawers for instance, so that the furniture could be moved around.

Now the installers are going to have to move everything over to one side, put half the flooring down, then move everything back over to the other side so they can put the other half down.  Their job will now be much worse.

I have no more respect for LOWES in general because of the ignorant level of employees they hire.  Any company that blames the customer for their mistake, is not going to stay in business very long....

THIS CANNOT BE BLAMED ON WHITE SUPREMACY...

Protect Data

 

Scientists Search for Aliens Searching for US

A team of scientists will scan the sky near a supernova explosion in search of signals from an advanced civilization. Credit: International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA // Image Processing: J. Miller (Gemini Observatory / NSF’s NOIRLab) / M. Rodriguez (Gemini Observatory / NSF’s NOIRLab) / M. Zamani (NSF’s NOIRLab) / T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage / NSF’s NOIRLab) & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)





Scientists around the world have turned their telescopes in the direction of the Ursa Major constellation to gaze at a supernova discovered there last month.

When something awesomely bright and powerful explodes, humans are instinctively compelled to look.

That's exactly what James R. A. Davenport and his team of collaborators were thinking when they designed a new study that will scan the space around the supernova over the next few months. What they're looking for are potential radio signals from an advanced alien civilization that might use the star's blast as something akin to a flare gunshot or a Batman-esque bat signal.

Astronomers have mulled this concept since at least the 1970s, Davenport told Mashable, though this is the first observation coordinated to look for alien technology around a supernova.

"It's an old idea that goes back to how you get somebody's attention, especially if you don't have the ability to just put up a giant neon sign that says 'We are here,'" he said. "It's hard to transmit a signal over light-years, even for presumably an advanced civilization."  READ MORE...

Slavery

 

Biden is Home Free

 

Man Saves Baby Elephant

 

Talking About Happiness

Many of us are taught to believe that we need to be in perfect control of our lives in order to be successful or accepted. But that mindset made me unhappy for years.

Growing up nonbinary, I spent a lot of time escaping to an imaginary world where I controlled everything, including what other people thought of me. I constantly chased this idea that if I could just get that boyfriend, that job, or that money and acclaim, I could finally relax and be happy.

To break this toxic mental habit, I did something drastic: I moved to the woods and lived amongst a community of Buddhists, and have since spent 20 years studying Zen Buddhism.

At the monastery, I learned a valuable lesson about happiness that people often overlook: We can’t control everything that happens to us, but we can control how we treat ourselves. Allowing ourselves to feel happy, no matter what our life looks like, is the key to real happiness.  READ MORE...

More Docs

 

A Failing Democracy

Each morning I watch FOX News until about 10/11:00 am from the time I wake up which is about 7:30 am.  I watch FOX because the other networks censor the news by not reporting on items that are taking place around me.  All news should be reported whether or not we like it as a consumer and all news should be reported whether or not the station agrees with it politically.

But, apparently ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN don't agree with those sentiments because they are censoring all news, not just that they don't agree with, but news that negatively impacts the Democratic Party.

One party domination and censoring cannot take place in a Democracy.  A democracy that we have in the USA is predicated upon a two party system and predicated upon nothing being censored unless it might have something to do with national security.

Socialism, Communism, and Dictatorship are all based upon ONE PARTY RULE and DOMINATION.  Opposing views are not only censored but those who offer opposing views are jailed or killed to keep their voices from being heard.

Could this happen in the USA?  Yes, it could and it is heading in that direction now...

Once its gone...  it's gone...  it ain't coming back.

 

My Party