Decisions... Decisions...

We spend our entire lifetimes making decisions...  to make that claim may sound rather simplistic, but it is probably something that we do not think about often.

We decide quite early in life whether or not we want to follow our parents' advice or not.  In so doing, the decision sometimes works to our advantage and sometimes to our disadvantage.

Later when we are in school, we make the decision of whether or not we want to listen to our teachers and whether or not we want to do the homework that we have been assigned to do.

For those of you who grew up with only one parent, those decisions were influenced differently than those who grew up with two parents.

After high school, we made decisions about:

• college
• marriage
• children
• divorce
• military
• employment
• relocation

Of course, there were hundreds if not thousands of decisions that must be made over the course of one's lifetime, involving a variety of areas, not just the ones listed above.

Every four years, we get to make a decision as to which person we believe will be the best one to lead our nation...  sometimes, that decision has already been made for us, because we have affiliated ourselves with a political party, and agreed to vote for the party not the person.

However, there are those of us who have made the decision to vote for the best person, regardless of their party affiliation.

For me, I was solidly a Democrat and voted for the party not the person.  When I entered the mid point of my life, somewhere around the age of 40, most (but not all) of my values turned conservative.  Not sure why that happened but it did.

With that said, I am not a Republican, nor am I a Democrat, nor am I a Socialist.  I suppose an Independent would be the best description, but I don't feel that I am that either.

I am liberal as well as conservative.  I don't like government, nor do I like the government telling me what I should or should not do.  I want to make up my own mind about owning or not owning a gun, or thinking that the government has the right to tell me what I can or cannot do with my body.

Today, I am faced with a decision that is not just uncomfortable but one that I cannot avoid.  I don't want to vote for Biden for President, nor do I want to vote for Trump. Of all the other GOP candidates, I don't want to vote for any of them.  I detest having to make a decision based upon the lesser of two evils.

Perhaps this is one of those times, where one decides to vote for the party and not for the person?

Thankfully, I have a year before I have to make that decision and, in the meantime, there will be hundreds of other decisions that I will be making.  Some difficult, some relatively easy.

Our decisions mold who we are and/or what we have become.  Our decisions influence our future because our past influences the decisions we make.  To avoid making a decision, is like hiding from the truth and when one hides from the truth, the truth always comes back and bites one in the ass.

American Made

Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation, was on FOX News this morning and was asked a series of questions by Bill Hemmer...  every one of his responses always went back to House Republicans who, he claimed, were holding up Congress from funding the government...

Politically, he did an excellent job representing the Democrats but logically he demonstrated a lack of compassion and a lack of understanding that ANY government shutdown is always a result of both parties...  not just one.  In so doing, he demonstrated to this viewer, that Democrats have become so progressive that they are no longer willing to compromise.

However, what struck me as more important was his comment about Electric Vehicles WILL EVENTUALLY REPLACE gasoline vehicles and do you want those vehicles manufactured in China or the USA?

That's the question that got me to thinking...

If EVs are made in America (USA) then they will cost more than if they are made in China, where the cost of labor is LOW.

AMERICAN MADE is a term that all of us want t support, but American Made can only be purchased by the wealthy...  our middle classes or lower classes will never be able to afford American Made unless many of them go into debt in order to take possession.

In addition to debt ownership, if the battery ever needs to be replaced, they will be forced to invest (borrow) another $8-$10,000.   True, the cost of these replacement batteries will eventually come down, but in the meantime, to these average Americans, that will not matter.

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN, if China builds these electric vehicles, then they will become wealthy and their economy will grow faster than the economy of the USA.  With a more powerful China, the USA will have to face a more powerful adversary for decades to come.

Does anyone know what the true right decision really is? 

Political

 

Underwater Restaurant

 

Programming a Neural Network

In this article, we will build a neural network from scratch and use it to classify handwritten digits.

Why reinvent the wheel/neural network, I hear you say? Can’t I just use my favourite machine learning framework and be done with it? Yes, there are many off-the-shelf frameworks that you can use to build a neural network (Keras, PyTorch, and TensorFlow to name a few). The thing with using one of these is that they make it easy for us to treat neural networks like black boxes.

This isn’t always a bad thing. Often we need this level of abstraction so that we can get to work on the problem at hand, but we should still strive to at least have a basic understanding of what is going on under the hood if we are to use neural networks in our work.

Building a neural network from scratch is, in my opinion, the best way to foster a deep understanding of how they work.

By the end of this article, you will have learned about the feedforward and backpropagation algorithms, what an activation function is, what the difference between an epoch and a batch is, and how to train a neural network. We will finish with an example by training a neural network to recognise handwritten digits.

All code used in this article is available here on GitHub 

What is a neural network?
Neural networks, or artificial neural networks, are a type of machine learning algorithm. They form the core of many deep learning and artificial intelligence systems like computer vision, forecasting and speech recognition.

The structure of artificial neural networks is sometimes compared to the structure of biological neural networks in the brain. I would always urge caution not to draw too much from this comparison. Sure, artificial neural networks look a bit like biological neural networks but it is quite a big leap to start comparing them to something as complex as a human brain.

A neural network is made up of several layers of neurons. Each layer of neurons is activated based on the activations in the previous layer, a set of weights connecting the previous…  READ MORE...

How it Begins

 

Political Party Differences

KEY POLICIES

Democrats
The party favors a mixed economy and generally supports a progressive tax system, higher minimum wages, Social Security, universal health care, public education, and subsidized housing.

Republicans
The party's fiscal conservatism includes support for lower taxes, small government conservatism, free market capitalism, free trade, deregulation of corporations, and restrictions on labor unions.

As you can see, the Democrats favor the working man whereas the Republicans favor corporations.

The Democrats favor a large government and higher taxes whereas the Republicans favor a small government and lower taxes.  The Democrats favor socialism whereas the Republicans favor capitalism.

It would appear that the two parties are polar opposites...  so, how do they agree on anything?  Perhaps, this is why nothing ever gets accomplished except the fact that politicians are getting wealthy.

• Right now, the Democrats have created the following scenarios:
• Open Borders for illegal immigrants
• Higher prices especially in the areas of food and gasoline
• Higher taxes more corporate regulations
• an increase in social programs
• A huge national debt that someone will eventually have to pay off
• A decrease in our military's capabilities
• A war on fossil fuels and the death or gasoline
• An increase in racism due to BLM, WOKE, and CRT
• An increase in crime and violence

Do you see any correlations between what the Democratic President Joe Biden has created and the policies of the Democratic Party?

The UAW Union is striking for higher wages and if they get higher wages, then the American people will be faced with higher prices.

This dilemma is a DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD...  it will benefit the workers but at the same time it will hurt them because everything will cost more.  Most of their wage increases will be eaten up by higher prices...  and their increased wages will put them into a higher tax bracket.

You must decide two things:

First, do you support the agenda of the Democrats?

Second, are you better off since we have had a Democratic President?

Riding a Bicycle

 

Boosting Quantum Devices

MIT physicists, inspired by noise-canceling headphones, have advanced the coherence time of quantum bits by 20-fold, marking significant progress for quantum computing. The team used an “unbalanced echo” technique to counteract system noise, and they believe further improvements are possible. This breakthrough has vast potential, from quantum sensors in biology to advancements in quantum memory.



MIT researchers develop a protocol to extend the life of quantum coherence.

For years, researchers have tried various ways to coax quantum bits — or qubits, the basic building blocks of quantum computers — to remain in their quantum state for ever-longer times, a key step in creating devices like quantum sensors, gyroscopes, and memories.

A team of physicists from MIT have taken an important step forward in that quest, and to do it, they borrowed a concept from an unlikely source — noise-canceling headphones.


Led by Ju Li, the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor in Nuclear Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering, and Paola Cappellaro, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Research Laboratory of Electronics, and a professor of physics, the team described a method to achieve a 20-fold increase in the coherence times for nuclear-spin qubits. 

The work is described in a paper published in Physical Review Letters. The first author of the study is Guoqing Wang PhD ’23, a recent doctoral student in Cappellaro’s lab who is now a postdoc at MIT.


“This is one of the main problems in quantum information,” Li says. “Nuclear spin (ensembles) are very attractive platforms for quantum sensors, gyroscopes, and quantum memory, (but) they have coherence times on the order of 150 microseconds in the presence of electronic spins … and then the information just disappears. 

What we have shown is that, if we can understand the interactions, or the noise, in these systems, we can actually do much better.”  READ MORE...

Aliens!

 

Dark Energy

 

New Way to Measure Dark Energy

Researchers have discovered a method to potentially detect and measure dark energy by examining the motion between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. This technique, still in its early stages, can estimate the upper value of the cosmological constant, a simple model of dark energy, which is five times higher than values determined from the early universe.




Researchers from the University of Cambridge have discovered a new way to measure dark energy – the mysterious force that makes up more than two-thirds of the universe and is responsible for its accelerating expansion – in our own cosmic backyard.

The researchers found that it may be possible to detect and measure dark energy by studying Andromeda, our galactic next-door neighbor that is on a slow-motion collision course with the Milky Way.


Since it was first identified in the late 1990s, scientists have used very distant galaxies to study dark energy but have yet to directly detect it. 

However, the Cambridge researchers found that by studying how Andromeda and the Milky Way are moving toward each other given their collective mass, they could place an upper limit on the value of the cosmological constant, which is the simplest model of dark energy. 

The upper limit they found is five times higher than the value of the cosmological constant that can be detected from the early universe.

Although the technique is still early in its development, the researchers say that it could be possible to detect dark energy by studying our own cosmic neighborhood. The results are reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Everything we can see in our world and in the skies – from tiny insects to massive galaxies – makes up just five percent of the observable universe. 

The rest is dark: scientists believe that about 27% of the universe is made of dark matter, which holds objects together, while 68% is dark energy, which pushes objects apart.  READ MORE...

Cat and Pony

 

Stamping Out Greed

 Eliminating GREED sounds like an honorable and worthy crusade to many Americans and to many foreigners who have experienced the GREED of Americans...

However, it is a losing battle.

We must look at GREED from several different angles in order to have enough information to make an intelligent decision.

• First, we have corporate greed
• Second, we have individual greed
• Third, we have political greed
• Fourth, we have economic greed     

Economic greed is absolutely necessary in order to have a growing economy.  Without economic greed our economy would remain stagnant, and while that would keep prices low, it would not offer much of a future.

Political Greed is not necessary and happens when politicians are more concerned about their financial wealth than they are about passing laws for Americans and their future.  It revolves around re-election, buying stock with insider information, and accepting unreported gifts from Lobbyists and donors.

Individual Greed takes place when individuals use their earning potential to invest in other ventures that generate additional wealth.  Individual wealth is good because these individuals are the one that primarily keep non-profits alive with their donations.  However, the downside is that these people NEVE pay their fair share of taxes since most of their wealth is sheltered in offshore bank accounts.

Corporate Greed is what many people consider to be the most insidious because Corporations have decided that they want to make this huge profit while giving bonuses to management and offering minimal wage increases to labor.  Corporate Greed has caused UNIONS to form to protect employees.  

A case could be made that Corporate Greed while somewhat appropriate should not be as high as they want it to be.  There are pros and cons on both sides of that argument.

Large profits create several opportunities:

1.  Companies can invest in Research and Development.

2.  Companies can invest in opening new markets.

3. Companies can pay dividends to stockholders that finance their operations.

NOTE:  Without these three opportunities, there would be no need for a company to grow and no need for a company to expand and hire more employees.

So, the questions are:  

• How much of a profit do you think is reasonable for companies to make?
• Should companies stop giving management bonuses?
• Should individuals not be allowed to shelter their money from taxes in offshore back accounts?
• How much of a wage increase can a company offer before it has to start increasing prices?

Pool Shark

 

Neutrinos and Dark Matter

PNNL chemist Isaac Arnquist examines ultra-low radiation copper cables specially created for sensitive physics detection experiments. Credit: Andrea Starr, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory



Ultra-low radiation cables reduce background noise for neutrino and dark matter detectors.

Imagine trying to tune a radio to a single station but instead encountering static noise and interfering signals from your own equipment. That is the challenge facing research teams searching for evidence of extremely rare events that could help understand the origin and nature of matter in the universe. 

It turns out that when you are trying to tune into some of the universe’s weakest signals, it helps to make your instruments very quiet.

Around the world, more than a dozen teams are listening for the pops and electronic sizzle that might mean they have finally tuned into the right channel. These scientists and engineers have gone to extraordinary lengths to shield their experiments from false signals created by cosmic radiation. 

Most such experiments are found in very inaccessible places—such as a mile underground in a nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, or in an abandoned gold mine in Lead, South Dakota—to shield them from naturally radioactive elements on Earth. 

However, one such source of fake signals comes from natural radioactivity in the very electronics that are designed to record potential signals.

Ultra-low radiation cables reduce background noise for neutrino and dark matter detectors.

Imagine trying to tune a radio to a single station but instead encountering static noise and interfering signals from your own equipment. That is the challenge facing research teams searching for evidence of extremely rare events that could help understand the origin and nature of matter in the universe. 

It turns out that when you are trying to tune into some of the universe’s weakest signals, it helps to make your instruments very quiet.

Around the world, more than a dozen teams are listening for the pops and electronic sizzle that might mean they have finally tuned into the right channel. These scientists and engineers have gone to extraordinary lengths to shield their experiments from false signals created by cosmic radiation. 

Most such experiments are found in very inaccessible places—such as a mile underground in a nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, or in an abandoned gold mine in Lead, South Dakota—to shield them from naturally radioactive elements on Earth. 

However, one such source of fake signals comes from natural radioactivity in the very electronics that are designed to record potential signals.  READ MORE...

Dark Matter

 

Peace Through Strength

 This is not my message, but it was the message of former President Ronald Reagan...  actor turned politician.  

At the time, I was a Democrat and thought it was ludicrous to have a Hollywood actor become President of the United States.  However, he had been governor of California and that did not bother me too much...  but President...  that was going a little too far for me.

Over the years, I left the Democratic Party and became a conservative, not at Republican, because of the business angle that the conservatives represented.

• Small Government
• Less Taxes
• Less Government Regulations
• Strong Military

I still believe in those values, but they come with several drawbacks.

• Less Social Programs
• Corporate Power and Wealth
• Marginal Wealth For Most Americans
• Less Consumer Protection

However, after the debacle during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and our pullout from Afghanistan, I am convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that our military strength is VITAL to global peace.

China has declared without any hesitation that they want to dominate the world both economically and militarily...  that is a non-acceptable possibility for a variety of reasons:

1. China is a communist country
2. Russia is a communist country
3. North Korea is a communist country
4. Iran favors communism over democracy
5. Our global economy would suffer
6. There would be an elimination of FREEDOM

While there are drawbacks with USA Democracy and all its freedoms and capitalism based upon a free-market enterprise system of commerce, our system provides its citizens with a vast array of opportunities not available in communist countries.

I do not like wars.

I do not like senseless killing.

I do not like the bombing of countries.

I do not like damage done to innocent people.

BUT COMMUNIST COUNTRIES ONLY UNDERSTAND AND RESPECT AND FEAR POWER...  and, it is that fear that will keep the world safe.

Buffalo Springfield

 

ChatGPT Art Generator

OPENAI HAS ANNOUNCED Dall-E 3, its latest AI art tool. It uses OpenAI’s smash-hit chatbot, ChatGPT, to help create more complex and carefully composed works of art by automatically expanding on a prompt in a way that gives the generator more detailed and coherent instruction.

What’s new with Dall-E 3 is how it removes some of the complexity required with refining the text that is fed to the program—what’s known as “prompt engineering”—and how it allows users to make refinements through ChatGPT’s conversational interface. 

The new tool could help lower the bar for generating sophisticated AI artwork, and it could help OpenAI stay ahead of the competition thanks to the superior abilities of its chatbot.

Take this image of the potato king, for example.

This kind of quirky AI-generated art has become commonplace on social media thanks to a number of tools that turn a text prompt into a visual composition. 

But this one was created with a significant amount of artistic assistance from ChatGPT, which took a short prompt and turned it into a more detailed one, including instructions about how to compose it correctly.

That’s a big step forward not just for Dall-E, but for generative AI art as a whole. Dall-E, a portmanteau of the Pixar character Wall-E and the artist Salvador Dalí that was announced in 2021 and launched in 2022, consists of an algorithm that’s fed huge quantities of labeled images scraped from the web and other sources. 

It uses what’s known as a diffusion model to predict how to render an image for a given prompt. With sufficiently huge quantities of data this can produce complex, coherent, and aesthetically pleasing imagery. What’s different with Dall-E 3 is in the way humans and machines interact.  READ MORE...