We Didn't Start It

 

Worlds Largest Cruise Ship

 

Tachyons Are Cosmic Engines of Time Travel

A reactor core gives off the blue glow of Cherenkov radiation — one of the few ways in which a tachyon may be detected.   Image by Argonne National Laboratory.

Interstellar travel is the greatest challenge mankind will ever face. Not only because it’s so grandiose and marked by impressive shimmering spacecraft — tall and boundless, scaled by materials born of human ingenuity — but because it’s a necessary step in exploration and understanding of the cosmos. 

It becomes ever more necessary as time goes on, and ever more difficult. This is the complication we face.

Soon, even speeds approaching that of light may not be enough as our universe continues to expand at an enormous rate. The light of our closest star systems and galaxies will struggle to make their way to us, their existence visible only in our books and our computer programs which will have to remind us that the surrounding sky didn’t always look so empty. 

At lightspeed today travel between star systems would take years for a one-way trip. As much of a feat as luminal speeds are, they may someday prove to be insufficient themselves. But where the speed of light has presented to us an obstruction, so too is there a peculiar hope. There are, after all, two sides to every limit.

A comment Einstein makes in his 1905 paper reads, “…velocities greater than that of light have no possibility of existence.” 

But modern science and mathematics have found clever ways around this, loopholes which permit superluminal speeds without contradicting the theory of relativity.  READ MORE...

Puppies

 

Filing Our Taxes

Every year on or before April 15, we met with our tax preparer to file an extension.  We file this extension not because we want to delay paying so we can earn more interest on our money but because we don't receive the K-1s that are needed to support our taxes.  They are typically not sent out until August or September of that same year.

The extension gives us an extra 6 months before we have to file our taxes for the previous year.  That new deadline is October 15.  So, sometime around the end of September, we get with our tax preparer with our K-1s to file our taxes.

Many people prepare their own taxes to save the money of having to pay a tax preparer...  but we pay our tax preparer $100 so it saves a lot of hassle for just a little amount of money.  This year we get back $120 and paid out $100 plus a little bit of our time.

While we were there we asked if she could project out taxes for the next year.  After making a few assumptions, it took her 5 minutes to get the answer.  Yes...  next year we will be paying a hell of a lot more in taxes than we paid this year.

REASON:  We made a shitload of money by investing in high yield CDs over a period of 18 months although we are only looking at 12 of those 18 months.

The way that it will work out for us is that our taxes will represent about 11% of what we earned.  This means, we will be able to keep 91% of our earnings which is not a bad return.

Because we are in the state of Tennessee, our Social Security is not taxed.

If we calculate the taxes we will pay as a percentage of our total income for that year, it will be 6%.  Again, we will be able to keep 94% of our total income for that year.

Our positive situation is directly related to the amount of money that we have been able to save over the course of our lifetimes....  or at least up until we retired.

The money you earn while you are working is typically used to pay a mortgage, school loans, food, utilities, insurance, car payments, etc.  More often than not, couples today do not save money for retirement.  They also acquire lots of debt that must be serviced before they retire.

POOR FINANCIAL PLANNING leads to a devastating retired lifestyle...

LEARN TO BE FINANCIALLY SMART WITH YOUR MONEY...

 

Mountain Lake

 

Inbreeding Can Be Beneficial

The Svalbard reindeer, despite significant inbreeding and low genetic diversity, boasts a robust population of over 20,000, having adapted to Arctic conditions with unique traits like smaller size and the ability to digest mosses. Although they have evolved rapidly to past environmental changes, scientists fear the pace of current global warming may outstrip their capacity to adapt, posing a serious threat to their survival.



Reindeer have endured for over 7,000 years on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Will they be able to withstand climate change?


Despite the challenges of inbreeding and limited genetic diversity, the Svalbard reindeer have remarkably adapted to harsh living conditions in an extraordinarily short period, a situation researchers term a genetic paradox. However, the question remains: can they withstand the impacts of climate change?


“Of all the subspecies of reindeer found in the high north, the Svalbard reindeer has the most inbreeding and the lowest genetic diversity,” says Nicolas Dussex, a postdoc at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Department of Natural History.


It was only 7000-8000 years ago that the first reindeer migrated to Svalbard, most likely from Russia via Novaya Zemlya and the islands of Franz Josef Land. Perhaps there were no more than a few animals that established themselves on the Arctic archipelago. Evolutionary theory suggests this is a poor starting point since inbreeding can quickly lead to an accumulation of harmful mutations and genetic variants followed by disease and death.


But this has not prevented the Svalbard reindeer from evolving into what is today a viable population of more than 20,000 animals.

“Despite the low genetic diversity, they have managed to develop a number of adaptations to life in the High Arctic. They are, for example, smaller in size and have shorter legs than other northern reindeer and caribou subspecies,” says Dussex.

The ability to digest mosses in the absence of lichens, and to adjust their circadian rhythm to the extreme seasonal variations on Svalbard, are also traits the Svalbard reindeer have developed over the relatively short time they have lived isolated on the archipelago. 

Now, researchers at NTNU and collaborating institutions have analyzed genetic samples from 91 reindeer to see how they differ from their relatives on the mainland.  READ MORE...

Ghostrider Gunship

 

Stingrays

 

Classic Sunday Morning Newspaper Cartoons

 

The Aging Process

Today, represents the first day of October in the year 2023.  Like all months, once the month is over, it will never be seen again unless it is in photographs...  such is the movement of time.

Time moves forward.  Each day that passes, we age a little more.  As our age increases, the passage of time seems to move faster, even though its rate has not changed at all.

We try to maintain our youth with:

• exercise
• diets
• cosmetics
• surgery
• pills and creams
• hair transplants
• tonics

Some people continue to lift weights and take steroids to keep their bodies lean and mean up until the age of 80 and sometimes beyond...  But eventually, bodies break down and muscles atrophy and turn to fat...  it is inevitable.

Yet, we pursue this dream and fantasy nonetheless as if we can somehow manage to evade our destiny.

My hair began to turn grey in my twenties and in my forties, I began losing my hair.  I just accepted what was happening.  I had no desire to try and regrow my hair or change it to another color in an effort to make me look younger.

While I have always been active most of my life until about age 60, I was able to maintain a lean body with a flat stomach, regardless of what I ate or how much of it I ate.  That too changed at age 60 and I started gaining weight.

My immediate response was to start exercising...  but several physical therapists and doctors told me the only way to lose weight was not by exercise but by reducing the amount of food I ate each day.

As one ages one's metabolism changes and one needs to eat less in order to maintain one's current weight.  If one maintains their level of eating, they will automatically gain weight.

I exercise because it helps my heart function properly and because it is a necessary function of recovery from having back fusion surgery.  It is not how long I walk but how often I walk.  I should be walking for about 15-20 minutes 3 times a day.

Walking used to be a normal easy activity for me to accomplish.  I loved to walk and had no problems walking uphill or downhill or flat.  I did not walk fast but I did walk at a normal pace.  I could walk for a long time like that unless it was unusually hot or cold.

After my back surgery, walking was a chore, and it was like I had to force myself to walk.  It was no longer enjoyable.  The surgery was successful because I could walk but it changed how I walked.

All this is part of the aging process, and it is something with which we have to accept and move on...  otherwise, getting old will leave us miserable.

Somewhat Political

 

Einstein Was Wrong About Gravity

Einstein's theory of gravity—general relativity—has been very successful for more than a century. However, it has theoretical shortcomings. This is not surprising: the theory predicts its own failure at spacetime singularities inside black holes—and the Big Bang itself.

Unlike physical theories describing the other three fundamental forces in physics—the electromagnetic and the strong and weak nuclear interactions—the general theory of relativity has only been tested in weak gravity.

Deviations of gravity from general relativity are by no means excluded nor tested everywhere in the universe. And, according to theoretical physicists, deviation must happen.

Deviations and quantum mechanics
According to a theory initially proposed by Georges Lemaître and widely accepted by the astronomical community, our universe originated in a Big Bang. 

Other singularities hide inside black holes: Space and time cease to have meaning there, while quantities such as energy density and pressure become infinite. These signal that Einstein's theory is failing there and must be replaced with a more fundamental one.

Naively, spacetime singularities should be resolved by quantum mechanics, which apply at very small scales.

Quantum physics relies on two simple ideas: point particles make no sense; and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that one can never know the value of certain pairs of quantities with absolute precision—for example, the position and velocity of a particle. 

This is because particles should not be thought of as points but as waves; at small scales they behave as waves of matter.  READ MORE...

AI Revolution

 

A New America

 12% of the population (black) are bitching and moaning because they claim that 60% of the population (white) are controlling through white supremacy...

The Republicans have a slim majority in the House and are fighting among themselves for power rather than coming together as a single voice to do battle with the Democrats...

The Democrats have managed to get mainstream media on their side along with the DOJ and the FBI who are not supposed to be political, to take power away from the Republicans...

The citizens of America will soon realize, if they do not already that there are more of them than there are law enforcement personnel whose job it is to force Americans to obey the laws of the land...

The laws of the land, DO NOT APPLY to all the illegal immigrants flowing across our southern borders - If they are willing to break the laws to get here, do you really think they will obey all the other laws once they are here...   (Rhetorical Question)

There is a huge push to do away with gasoline vehicles, substituting them for electric vehicles - however, there is currently no infrastructure in place to support all those EVs - this is putting the cart before the horse...

There has been a HUGE INCREASE in illegal drugs and crime in the USA ever since Joe Biden became President - there appears to be a direct correlation here that we are trying to ignore...

Colleges and Universities have diluted and dumbed down their courses so that there are no failures and they can protect their streams of revenues...

China's threat at dominating the world is largely being ignored by the USA authorities because of our nuclear arsenal - they fail to see that this domination will be economical in nature...

The billionaires of the world have a HIDDEN AGENDA that they do not want to share with the rest of the world but it involves destroying the system that made them wealthy in the first place...

Fast Forward

For Over Thirty Years Now

I have been in a relationship that turned into a marriage where I do very little other than what I need to do around the house and want to do for my pleasure.

Let me explain:

• My wife does all the shopping
• My wife writes all the checks
• My wife balances the check book
• My wife plans out our vacations
• My wife researches for new vehicles
• My wife landscapes the yard outside
• My wife decides on inside decor
• My wife selects all appliances and furniture
• My wife does all the cleaning
• My wife does all the washing and ironing
• My wife does all the interior painting

This not to say that she does not ask for my opinion because she does...  so, you could say we decide together, but my responses oftentimes are those she wants to hear.

The reason why she does all of this is because she says her work is better than mine.  Whether or not her work is, in fact, better than mine, is not the issue...  the issue is that she does it.

I am not in a female led relationship because she has no control over me sexually.  I do not sit at her feet waiting for her commands, nor do I share her body with anyone else.

Because she thinks she is better than a man, she does most of the work, they males have typically done in the past.

I mow the lawn and weed eat.  I carry stuff into the house and around the house that is too heavy.  I do all the driving on the interstate and in places where we have not been before...  BUT, when we are at Myrtle Beach, she does all the driving in town.  Not sure why or how that got started but it did.

I tell her that she can spend whatever it is that she wants to spend, just don't get us into debt without my agreement, and leave some money left over for me if and when I want to buy something.  I typically purchase my laptops and tablets but before I retired from working, I had a subscription to AUDIBLE so I could listen to books in the car while I was driving.

It seems like it is a lopsided agreement especially since most husbands manage the money.  Sometimes, the wife and husband will have their own bank accounts and contribute equally or proportionally to monthly expenses...  All of our money is in one checking account and one saving account.

Not all women want to be treated like this, but our arrangement has worked out just fine.

Stone Skimming

 

ESV: A Lithium Free Battery

Nickel-hydrogen-based batteries that have long been used by NASA for its space missions are now making their way to power the grid. California-based EnerVenue is building large Energy Storage Vessels (ESVs) that could be used to power the grid using renewables, a press release said.

With the world making a major transition to renewables, energy storage solutions are the need of the hour. Lithium-ion batteries have been our best bet so far but making large-scale storage solutions is turning out quite expensive and cumbersome.

Li-ion batteries are prone to thermal runaway and large energy storage solutions need additional facilities for cooling, ventilation, and fire suppression to be built to prevent a major mishap. This is where nickel-hydrogen-based batteries could help.

How does a nickel-hydrogen battery work?
A nickel-hydrogen battery is much like any other battery with stacks of electrodes but held inside a pressurized gas tank. The cathode is made of nickel hydroxide, while the anode is hydrogen. When the battery is charged, the reaction produces hydrogen gas, which is oxidized during the discharging process to form water.

The energy-storing process, which involves the production of highly combustible hydrogen gas and a pressurized tank to contain it, raises doubts. However, the peak pressure inside the tank reaches only five percent of that in a hydrogen fuel cell. Moreover, if the pressure of the gas increases further, it results in the conversion of the gas into water again.  READ MORE...

Scruggs and Baez

 

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!