Woodstock

 

Device Acts Like Superconductivity Switch

In particle colliders that reveal the hidden secrets of the tiniest constituents of our universe, minute particles leave behind extremely faint electrical traces when they are generated in enormous collisions. Some detectors in these facilities use superconductivity—a phenomenon in which electricity is carried with zero resistance at low temperatures—to function.


For scientists to more accurately observe the behavior of these particles, these weak electrical signals, or currents, need to be multiplied by an instrument capable of turning a faint electrical flicker into a real jolt.     READ MORE...

Cats and Dogs

 

North America's Soap Opera

 For those of you who do not watch the news or watch the news but get a slanted perspective, then I applaud you for your tenacity and will power.

Unfortunately, there are a group of people who do watch the news from an unbiased point-of-view, however, it is damn near impossible to be 100% unbiased...  and, anyone with half a brain knows this.

I watch FOX News who leans conservatively but does the best job of presenting both sides of the story which is, in essence, is what the NEWS was designed to do in the first place.

For those of you who are not news followers, let me share with you what is going on...

First --  there are about 10 million documented illegal immigrants currently in this country and that number could possibly double if and when the undocumented are found and counted.  With them they bring: criminals, disease, fentanyl, rapists, murderers; they don't speak English and have no technical skills.

The current administration wants to call these illegals newcomers.

Second --   ex-President Donald Trump has been charged with 91 felonies that under normal circumstances, the DOJ or DA's would have never charged.  Trump is being charged because the opposition wants to destroy him - just like what would happen in countries like Russia, China, and Iran.

Trump's words and actions have hurt him substantially but that is no reason to destroy the man.

Third --  One of the trials in GA had the DA and Attorney lovers before the court trial started and both lawyers LIED about their relationship.  The judge, ruled that one had to go but the other could stay, even though both were guilty.  The judge also admonished the DA for playing the RACE CARD.

The judge is up for re-election which is why he did what he did (more then likely) but have given plenty reasons for Trump's lawyers to appeal this case to a higher court.

Fourth --  Biden keeps spending money like a drunken sailor and our national debt keeps going up and up...  but that is not the funny part, the blacks are now saying that they should not have to pay taxes in lieu of reparation because of slavery.

I don't know about you, but if that happens, a lot of White Americans will be enormously PISSED OFF.

Fifth --  Biden will not be prosecuted on removing classified documents because he is old with a bad memory...   Here's the JOKE -  Old Biden with a bad memory is in charge of our NUCLEAR LAUNCH CODES.

Don't know about you but that scares the hell out of me...

Monkey Play

 

Dark Energy Achieved Using AI

A UCL-led research team has used artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to infer the influence and properties of dark energy more precisely from a map of dark and visible matter in the universe covering the last 7 billion years.


The study, submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and available on the arXiv preprint server, was carried out by the Dark Energy Survey collaboration. The researchers doubled the precision at which key characteristics of the universe, including the overall density of dark energy, could be inferred from the map.


This increased precision allows researchers to rule out models of the universe that might previously have been conceivable.  READ MORE...

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

 

In The NEWS

At least 20 killed, 70 injured in Russian missile strikes on Odesa, Ukraine.

Officials said two missiles hit the same area in the southern Ukrainian port city, with the second missile killing some first responders who were trying to rescue people from the first attack. The attack is the third on Odesa in two weeks and came as Russians began voting in Russia's presidential election, which President Vladimir Putin is expected to win.



Special prosecutor in Georgia election interference case resigns.

Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor who was working with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on the 2020 election interference case involving former President Donald Trump, resigned Friday. Wade's resignation came shortly after a judge ruled he had to step down for Willis to remain on the case. Willis was accused of hiring Wade while the pair carried on a secret romantic relationship. The judge was tasked with deciding whether to disqualify Willis from the case.



US Supreme Court clarifies when officials can block social media critics.

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Friday public officials who use personal social media accounts to make official statements cannot block users or delete comments and laid out a two-part test for determining when an official's online statements are attributable to the government. The ruling follows conflicting lower court decisions on the issue in two separate cases, one against school board members in California and one against a city manager in Michigan.



Los Angeles Rams star Aaron Donald announces retirement at age 32.

Donald, a defensive tackle, played all 10 seasons of his NFL career with the Rams and won the Super Bowl in 2022. He was picked by the Rams in the first round of the 2014 NFL Draft and won the 2014 Defensive Rookie of the Year award. He was selected as the AP Defensive Player of the Year three times, named an All-Pro eight times, and made the Pro Bowl every season. Donald will be eligible for the Pro Football Hall of Fame in five years.



McDonald's system outage disrupts restaurants worldwide.

The system failure caused some McDonald's locations to temporarily suspend operations as customers were unable to place orders. The incident was not a result of a cybersecurity issue and has been fixed, the company said. McDonald's has roughly 40,000 restaurants globally.

SOURCE:  1440 News

Two Religious Truths

Berwyn Lewis - December 26, 2019 — 12.00am

houghts turned to a famous baby on Wednesday. He was conceived through parthenogenesis, a sort of asexual fertilisation process which avoids messy exchanges of bodily fluids and can lead to a virgin birth by a woman. It also avoids troubling questions of paternity.

History is littered with parthenogenesis or virgin births and they’re not all miraculous. Bees do it. Birds do it. Even crayfish and some sharks do it and, while researching my novel, Venice’s Virgin Mother, I discovered that humans have been laying claim to virgin births since time began with the first of the big bangs.

*****

Jesus wasn't the only one believed to have risen from the dead. Stories of resurrection appear in ancient cultures around the world.

But Christianity isn’t the only ancient faith to worship a deity who dies and then rises again, as the Scottish anthropologist James Frazer explained in The Golden Bough, his landmark 1922 study of world religion and mythology.

In the ancient Near East, where the Bible was written, stories of divine death and resurrection were closely tied with the agricultural cycle, and Frazer believed that early Christians likely chose a spring date for Easter to coincide with existing pagan festivals for their resurrected gods.    SOURCE:  History.com

*****

I share these two points with you because, these are the two basic foundations of Christianity and the main reason why we have Christians in the first place...  basically because of the crucifixion & resurrection story since Christ died for our sins and if we believe in him, we will join him in heaven...

However, no one can really tell me where HEAVEN is located, nor can they tell me where HELL is located because the Bible offers no such location...

If we assume that neither Heaven nor Hell is located here on earth, then we must assume that it is located somewhere in the universe...  and, since the universe is already larger than we can mentally imagine, the Hubble Telescope has proven that our universe is still expanding...

This expansion makes it even more difficult to pinpoint the location of Heaven and Hell.

Given that the two main stories of Christianity were most probably copied from other mythologies, we are left with a belief that may or may not be true.  So, is there any proof that our religious faith is TRUE or is our religious faith simply based upon an unsubstantiated belief to make the poor people think they had something to look forward to after death.

The one commonality found in all mythologies and religions is that god-like creatures come down to earth from the sky, and give the people technology that they did not have before...  EXAMPLE:  the building of the great pyramids in Giza, Egypt.  

In 2024, we still have no idea how the damn pyramids were constructed, and the blocks cut so precisely and fitted together to tightly....  not to mention moving the stones from the ground to the top of the structure.

Belief in religion is dwindling simply because of the LOGIC of it all.

Somewhat Political

 

Robot Ships

It sounds like science fiction. Ocean-going ships with no-one on board. But this vision of the future is coming - and sooner than you might think.

You can glimpse it in a Norwegian fjord where a huge, lime-green vessel is being put through its paces. At first glance, it seems like any other ship. Look closer, though, and you suddenly see all the hi-tech kit. Cameras, microphones, radars, GPS and all manner of satellite communications.

"We've added a lot of additional equipment and designed her especially to be what we call 'robotic'," says Colin Field, the head of remote systems at US-UK company Ocean Infinity (OI).

The ship is part of OI's new "Armada" - a fleet eventually of 23 vessels - that will survey the seabed for offshore wind farm operators and check underwater infrastructure for the oil and gas industry.  READ MORE...

White Rabbit

 

In The NEWS

Sports, Entertainment, & Culture
> NCAA basketball conference tournaments to wrap this weekend with March Madness selection shows slated for Sunday; see projected men's bracket (More) | ... and projected women's bracket (More)

> Coldplay, Dua Lipa, Shania Twain, and SZA tapped as headliners for UK's Glastonbury Festival (June 26-30); see full lineup of performers (More)

> Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, returns to Instagram for first time since 2018 to launch new lifestyle brand (More)



Science & Technology
In partnership with Global Air Cylinder Wheels

> Scientists identify brain circuitry and chemistry responsible for translating stress into the sense of fear; findings may lead to treatments for conditions like PTSD (More)

> Three-decade-long study reveals link between teen pregnancy and increased risk of early death; Canadian teen mothers were twice as likely to die before the age of 31 (More)

> Undersea cable damage knocks out internet access to a number of countries across Africa; Ivory Coast reported as little as 4% connectivity throughout yesterday (More) | See map of the world's undersea internet cables (More)



Business & Markets
> US stock markets close lower (S&P 500 -0.3%, Dow -0.4%, Nasdaq -0.3%) following report showing higher-than-expected inflation (0.6%) in February for wholesale goods (More)

> Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin working to form an investor group to buy TikTok from Chinese-based ByteDance (More) | See previous write-up on House vote to ban the app (More)

> Morgan Stanley names first head of artificial intelligence; company was previously the first Wall Street firm to implement OpenAI's ChatGPT into financial advisers' workflow (More)



Politics & World Affairs
> Biden administration sanctions Israeli settlers in the West Bank and outposts for ties to violence against Palestinians (More) | Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) calls for Israeli elections to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (More) | Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas appoints adviser as prime minister amid calls for reform (More)

> Trump administration reportedly authorized CIA effort on Chinese social media to drive antigovernment sentiment, according to new report (More) | Manhattan district attorney calls for up to 30-day delay in Trump hush money trial following receipt of 100,000 new documents from investigators (More)

> James Crumbley, father of 2021 Oxford High School shooter in Michigan who killed four students, convicted of involuntary manslaughter; Crumbley had purchased the gun used in the shooting and failed to properly secure it (More)

SOURCE:  1440 News

Focus on Celebrities

What bothers me more than anything else is the attention that celebrities receive from the general public...  that is to say that the media focuses on celebrities as if their problems are somehow more severe than the general public and therefore deserve greater attention...

If a celebrity announces that they have cancer, the media goes crazy regarding how terrible that this celebrity has a grave disease...

In point of fact, thousands of Americans have cancer and go through all sorts of problems, especially because they do not have the finances to take care of themselves like the celebrities have.

And cancer is just one of many issues that the media focuses in on in an attempt to explain how celebrities should be pitied because they are having problems.

The media focuses on celebrities because they think that in so doing they will increase their ratings or sell more newspapers or magazines.  Obviously, no one cares about the general public so highlighting them will not be financially popular.

This focus on celebrities will eventually work against them as people are realizing that celebrities are not that special after all....  especially Hollywood actors and actresses...  since most of them are drug and alcohol addicts and are not good role models for our children.

In point of fact, money changes people...  and just because they may or may not have cancer, there is nothing special about their lives.

Somewhat Political

 

Outgunned in the Drone Fight

The British Army began World War I with only two machine guns per infantry battalion. One gun was a spare, meaning the effective ratio was one per 1,000 soldiers. Historian John Ellis summarized, “For the British commanders, on the eve of the First World War, the machine gun simply did not exist.” 

The inability to grasp the changing technological character of ground combat cost British forces dearly early in the war. In what remains the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army, tens of thousands of British soldiers were mown down by German machine gunners in the 1916 Battle of the Somme, despite automatic weapons having existed in a similar form since 1893.

The adoption of the machine gun is an apt analogy for the integration of small unmanned aerial systems in the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. military. As with the adoption of the machine gun, failure of vision, traditionalism, and bureaucratic resistance are leading to insufficient numbers and delayed force modernization.

 Despite observing small drones proliferate globally and their growing use on modern battlefields, the U.S. military has still not equipped its infantry with adequate numbers or pushed ownership of these systems low enough to have an impact.    READ MORE...

Asked and Answered

 

The Devil Went Down to Georgia

 

Gemini's Historically Inaccurate AI Images

Following controversy over historically inaccurate images, Google’s generative AI tool is under fire again by the company’s cofounder.

Sergey Brin, Google’s cofounder and former president of Google parent Alphabet, said Google “definitely messed up on the image generation,” and that he thinks “it was mostly due to not thorough testing.”

“[I]t definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people,” Brin said at San Francisco’s AGI House. He added that Google doesn’t know why Gemini “leans left in many cases,” but that it isn’t intentional, and other large language models could make similar errors.

“If you deeply test any text model out there, whether it’s ours, ChatGPT, Grok, what have you, it’ll say some pretty weird things that are out there that you know definitely feel far left, for example,” Brin said. He also said, "he kind of came out of retirement just because the trajectory of AI is so exciting.”   READ MORE...

Somewhat Political