Wednesday, May 24
Tuesday, May 23
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...
Marketing and Advertising
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.
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...
Monday, May 22
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...
Majority Rules(?) or Minority Rules(?)
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...
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...
Sunday, May 21
Just Wondering
What an interesting question to answer...
Speaking for myself, I am:
- retired
- a senior citizen
- married
- divorced
- a father
- a brother
- a son
- a parent
- a husband
- a veteran
- a cancer survivor
- a heart attack survivor
- survived a 5 disk lower back fusion
- a scorpion by birth
- an INTJ
- a college graduate
- a teacher
- a professor
- an administrator
- a dean
- a homeowner
- a Christian
- a southerner
- a Tarheel
- a writer
- a poet
- an American
- debt free
- a coffee drinker
- 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.
- Understanding what you know or don't know is not that easy of a task to complete.
Downsizing Progress
For two weeks we have been packing a little bit each day and have about 80-90% of the house ready to go except for movers who will move our beds, televisions, chest of drawers, and one refrigerator that we will keep out in the garage.
Our living room furniture, dining room table and chairs were sold. All our other furniture like a love seat, entertainment center, exercise equipment, cedar chest, and an antique desk along with 10+ garbage bags of clothes were given to Habitat for Humanity. Our kitchen appliances are staying or are being sold.
The house that we are purchasing is about the same size as our old house but the yard is a fifth the size. What took us 3 hours to mow and weed eat will now take us 30 minutes to mow and about 15 minutes to weed eat. This new house does not need anything done to it, however, we are going to invest another $30,000 to make it like new or change it a little.
We are putting down laminate flooring through the house and vinyl flooring in the bathrooms and laundry room. We have purchased new kitchen appliances, new living room furniture, and a new dining table with chairs. We are also going to expand the 8X10 deck to twice its size and screen it all in.
The only thing that I will really miss is my hot tub...
Americans Not Paying Off Their Debt
Credit-card balances hit $986 billion in the fourth quarter last year and remained largely unchanged in the first quarter of this year, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said in its most recent quarterly report on household debt. It looks increasingly likely that credit-card debt is on track to hit the $1 trillion mark this year, and experts say that this number could be an indicator of a looming economic downturn.
This has raised eyebrows among some observers, because people typically pay off their debts from the holiday season in the first quarter of the year. That did not happen this year. This was the first time credit-card debt did not make its customary dip between the fourth and first quarters since the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2001, New York Fed researchers said. That was a recession marked by the end of the dotcom bubble.
“Although inflation is slowing and wages are starting to rise, inflation is still squeezing people’s budgets,” said Mary Eschelbach Hansen, a professor of economics at the American University in Washington, D.C., and author of “Bankrupt in America: A History of Debtors, Their Creditors, and the Law in the Twentieth Century.”
But she said she doubts that the biggest problem is people splurging on gifts over the holidays or postpandemic “revenge travel” that they are now unable to pay off. “It seems likely that part of the fourth-quarter run-up in balances went towards groceries and other everyday bills rather than holiday expenditures, and folks are having a harder time paying that back,” she said.
Others shared her concerns. “I see several worrying trends here,” said Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at Bankrate.com. “Credit-card debt is something that’s easy to get into and hard to get out of. More people carrying balances at higher rates for longer periods of time is definitely a bad combination. We’re seeing more people financing day-to-day essentials on credit cards.” READ MORE...
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