Thursday, October 5
Driving Habits
I have only been one accident while driving as a messenger in a company car when I was 20 years old. It was not my fault. I have had half a dozen speeding tickets, maybe a few more or less, but nothing within the last 5 years.
When I retired in 2015 at the age of 67, I decided that there was very little need or reason to exceed the speed limits other than by 5 miles. Not sure why I decided on 5 miles and not 7 but that the number I selected.
Prior to my 40th birthday, when I got behind the wheel of a car, I drove like a bat out of hell, except inside the city limits.
Prior to my 30th birthday when I was behind the wheel of a car and unless I was going to or from work, I always had a 6 pack of beer sitting next to me in the shotgun seat.
Obviously, over the years I have mellowed but I am also aware that as I get older, my reaction time gets longer and while there is not much difference with regards to reaction time between 70 mph and 80 mph, it is still enough to make me drive cautiously.
These days wherever I am driving to or driving from whether it is within the city limits or out on the highway or on a country 4-lane road that is heavily traveled, the cars that pass me by are driving 15-20 miles over the posted speed limit signs.
Seldom do these speeders get caught by the police which only serves to encourage their behavior, but the fines for speeding are so low, that they act as an incentive to speed not a disincentive.
Over the years, the youth are supposed to be more intelligent that the previous generations and yet when they are behind the wheel that never seems to be the case.
I cannot understand that if many of these speeders are speeding because they are late for work, then why not get up 10 minutes earlier? If you are late getting to work, then what can I assume about the quality of their work?
It is good, bad, or just mediocre?
Is that the kind of employee you want to be?
Is that the kind of parent you want to be if you have children in the car, observing your driving habits?
Driving habits are a little problem with LARGE IMPLICATIONS...
The Giant Magellan Telescope
Artist’s concept of the completed Giant Magellan Telescope. The Giant Magellan Telescope is finalizing its last primary mirror, with the goal to surpass current space telescopes in sensitivity and resolution. Leveraging U.S. manufacturing, it promises unparalleled astronomical insights and aims for operation by the decade’s end. Credit: GMTO Corporation
Seven of the world’s largest mirrors will search the Universe for life beyond Earth
The Giant Magellan Telescope begins the four-year process to fabricate and polish its seventh and final primary mirror, the last required to complete the telescope’s 368 square meter (3,961 square foot) light collecting surface, the world’s largest and most challenging optics ever produced.
Together, the mirrors will collect more light than any other telescope in existence, allowing humanity to unlock the secrets of the Universe by providing detailed chemical analyses of celestial objects and their origin.
Last week, the University of Arizona Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab closed the lid on nearly 20 tons of the purest optical glass inside a one-of-a-kind oven housed beneath the stands of the Arizona Wildcats Football Stadium.
Last week, the University of Arizona Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab closed the lid on nearly 20 tons of the purest optical glass inside a one-of-a-kind oven housed beneath the stands of the Arizona Wildcats Football Stadium.
The spinning oven will heat the glass to 1,165°C (2,129°F) so as it melts, it is forced outward to form the mirror’s curved paraboloid surface. Measuring 8.4 meters (26.7 feet) in diameter—about two stories tall when standing on edge—the mirror will cool over the next three months before moving into the polishing stage. READ MORE...
Wednesday, October 4
MilliMobile An Autonomous Robot
Researchers at the University of Washington have created MilliMobile, a tiny, self-driving robot powered only by surrounding light or radio waves. It’s about the size of a penny and can run indefinitely on harvested energy. (UW Photo / Mark Stone)
University of Washington researchers are rolling out another tiny robotic breakthrough, this time in the form of an autonomous device that relies on surrounding light or radio waves to move in short bursts.
The robot, dubbed MilliMobile, is about the size of a penny and weighs as much as a raisin, and a typical power source, such as a battery, has been kicked to the curb in favor of more environmentally friendly approach.
MilliMobile has a solar panel-like energy harvester that sits above four tiny wheels, enabling the robot to roll — in incremental steps — about the 30 feet in an hour across surfaces such as concrete or packed soil.
Carrying three times its own weight in equipment such as cameras and sensors, the device takes internet-of-things style data collection and makes it mobile. Such tiny robots can be used on a smart farm to track humidity and soil moisture or in a factory to seek out electromagnetic noise to find equipment malfunctions — especially when deployed in a swarm.
“We took inspiration from ‘intermittent computing,’ which breaks complex programs into small steps, so a device with very limited power can work incrementally, as energy is available,” said the UW’s Kyle Johnson. “With MilliMobile, we applied this concept to motion. We reduced the robot’s size and weight so it takes only a small amount of energy to move. And, similar to an animal taking steps, our robot moves in discrete increments, using small pulses of energy to turn its wheels.”
MilliMobile was tested both indoors and out and in very low light situations, and was still able to inch along. The robot is also able to steer itself, navigating with onboard sensors and tiny computing chips.
Johnson, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, was co-lead author on research that the team will present Monday at the ACM MobiCom 2023 conference in Madrid, Spain. READ MORE...
An American Tragedy
- Not getting what you want
- Getting what you want
Take a minute or two and think about the implications of what he is saying, then reflect on this statement...
50% OF ALL FIRST MARRIAGES END IN DIVORCE
It has been this way since 2000
Obviously, this is a result of getting what you want...
Can you imagine how many children grow up in one parent homes?
Can you imagine the mental trauma through which they are constantly experiencing?
Will these sons and daughters be successful?
Will they get married and divorce like their parents?
It is difficult on children growing up with two parents, so I can just imagine what it would be like with only one parent.
Can the mother fill the role of the father?
Can the father fill the role of the mother?
I am sure this happens all the time, but these single parent adults are the exception to the rule not the rule.
If we think about what might happen to children with only one parent, maybe we should change our mind about abortion... that is to say, maybe we should start encouraging abortion rather than discouraging it...
I do not support abortion.
I support a woman's right to choose.
But what is worse abortion or single parent families?
Success and Happiness like beauty is in the eye of the beholder... so, who's to say that these children will not be successful or happy. Who's to say that these children will not become criminals or drug dealers because they only had a single parent.
Life is a crap shoot... children of divorce are like playing with loaded dice.
Tesla's Bot Video
In the wake of Agility Robotics announcing their intention to scale production to 10,000 bipedal humanoid robots every year, Fourier Intelligence, a technology-driven company specializing in exoskeleton and rehabilitation robots, released a new video showcasing its GR-1 humanoid robot and production facilities.
Set in Salem, Oregon, “RoboFab”, Agility Robotics’ 70,000-square-foot robot factory is slated to open later this year and manufacture the company’s bipedal robot Digit.
“When you’re building new technology to improve society, the most important milestone is when you’re able to mass produce that technology at a scale where it can have a real, widespread impact,” Agility Robotics’ co-founder and CEO Damion Shelton said.
With recent developments in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics engineering, the prospects for a human-esque robot capable of performing the actions of real people have been better than ever before.
Fourier Intelligence’s GR-1— first unveiled at the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai— is equipped to assist patients from their beds to wheelchairs and pick up objects, boosted by the ability to carry loads of up to 110lb (50kg).
The newly released video flaunts Fourier Intelligence’s production prowess, custom-built actuators, and body parts that are being 3D printed.
And it isn't just Fourier Intelligence seemingly interested in reminding the public of their existence.
Optimus not-at-its-prime.
Tesla issued an update on its take on a humanoid robot, Optimus, with a video that eerily looks CGI-like.
What seemed like a half-baked idea from Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk when first announced was not helped by an underwhelming demo organized by the company at Tesla AI Day last year.
Optimus, barely able to walk about and wave wearily at the crowds, has since gained strength and credibility, reported Electrek.
The new video released by Tesla depicts the bot autonomously sorting objects by color amidst human interruption and self-calibrating its arms and legs.
The humanoid leverages vision and joint position encoders to locate its limbs in space, which allows for precise calibration and efficient learning of tasks. Optimus now trains using a neural network that runs entirely on-board.
The company claims Optimus' capabilities to include learning new tasks such as un-sorting and ended the video with the bot flaunting its dexterity. “Time to stretch after a long day of work,” the company captioned. READ MORE...
Tuesday, October 3
Ancient Human Remains in Spain
Human remains are found in a cave, and unearthed to be analyzed by Tibicena, an archaeology company, in Galdar, on the island of Gran Canaria, Spain March 13, 2023.(photo credit: Tibicena Arqueologia y Patrimonio S.L./Handout via REUTERS)
Ancient human remains that were buried in caves in Spain have been shown to be modified prior to their burial, according to a recent study.
The research, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE on Wednesday last week, examines the Cueva de los Marmoles, one of the most important cave contexts from southern Spain.
The significance of this cave is that it "returned a large number of commingled skeletal remains suggesting its funerary use from the Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age," the study said. However, the reason why these buried remains were modified still remains a mystery to researchers.
Researchers in the study also explored the fragmentation patterns that characterized different skeletal regions and took both macroscopic and microscopic analyses of whatever modifications were made to the human remains.
Radiocarbon data
The study concluded that through radiocarbon data, the remains date back several millennia, and also estimates that the minimum amount of people's remains discovered number up to 12 - seven adults and five children.
The study concluded that through radiocarbon data, the remains date back several millennia, and also estimates that the minimum amount of people's remains discovered number up to 12 - seven adults and five children.
The research does acknowledge that caves have been used as burial sites in the Iberian Peninsula for thousands of years, with its practice being originated in the 4th millennium BCE. READ MORE...
How To Live Your Life
- Yes, they are rich
- Yes, they are attractive
- They overconsume alcohol
- They overconsume drugs
- They are obsessed with tattoos
- They have multiple marriages
- They have multiple children
- They believe the law does not apply to them
Is this who you really want to emulate?
What's wrong with who you are?
So, the first lesson to living a successful life is accept who you are and stop worrying about who you would like to be.
Next, forget about following the advice of your parents, your teachers, your preacher, your peers, or your friends...
So, what the hell do I do now?
Well... use the internet to find out what you want to be and what it takes to get there.
There are lots of jobs that will provide you with a financially safe future if you just look for them and put your preconceived ideas and biases behind you.
Go to college if you want to but be smart about it.
Go to a community college your first two years.
Work while you go in order to pay for your next two years or sometimes your employer will pay.
Start out small and work up. I talked with a restaurant owner the other day who told me he started out as bussing tables. He worked his way up and eventually became the manager and then the owner. He is financially well off and has no college loan debt. His life has been happy, and he feels successful.
So... what's wrong with that?
The second lesson to a successful life is always give 110% even when you don't feel like it. In so doing, you will begin to look for things that need to be done, rather than being told what to do. While you work for someone else, you are actually managing yourself not the other way around.
The third lesson is kind to people. Do unto others what you would like them to do unto you EVEN WHEN THEY DON'T DO IT... It is easy to get made and want revenge, but it is difficult to walk away and let it pass. You want to control anger and not let anger control you... regardless of the situation in which you might find yourself.
The fourth lesson is learn how to balance your life so that you can give everyone, INCLUDING YOURSELF, what they/you need. That includes, work, family, friends, and rejuvenation of self. You must learn to sharpen the saw... the saw being yourself. You also must learn to focus. When at home, don't think about work and when at work, don't think about home. There is a time and a place for everything... it will take a little time to learn that.
The fifth lesson is learn to enjoy life. See life as something that is positive rather than negative. Tun negatives into positives. Plan for the best but expect the worst. In other words, have contingency plans. The better you are at planning the better your life will be. Don't make a plan and file it away. Execute that plan every day and revisit the plan every week.
Don't look back - always look ahead.
FedEx's New Robot
The new robot aims to use artificial intelligence to stack rows of differently sized boxes inside a delivery truck as efficiently as possible, attempting to maximize how many will fit.
That task is far from easy for a machine. “Packages come in different sizes, shapes, weights, and packaging materials, and they come randomized,” says Rebecca Yeung, vice president of operations and advanced technology at FedEx.
The robot uses cameras and lidar sensors to perceive the packages and must then plan how to configure the available boxes to make a neat wall, place them snugly without crushing anything, and react appropriately if any packages slip.
“A few years ago, AI was not at a stage where it was smart enough to handle this kind of complex decision-making,” Yeung says. DexR is currently in testing, ahead of a wider rollout at FedEx at some point in the future.
While generative AI tools like ChatGPT have created a sense in many industries that AI technology is ready to take on just about anything, handling objects in the messy, unpredictable real world still poses formidable challenges for algorithms.
“A few years ago, AI was not at a stage where it was smart enough to handle this kind of complex decision-making,” Yeung says. DexR is currently in testing, ahead of a wider rollout at FedEx at some point in the future.
While generative AI tools like ChatGPT have created a sense in many industries that AI technology is ready to take on just about anything, handling objects in the messy, unpredictable real world still poses formidable challenges for algorithms.
Most industrial robots are designed to carry out highly repetitive jobs with extreme precision, but no variation.
READ MORE...
READ MORE...
Monday, October 2
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...
Filing Our Taxes
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...
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...
Sunday, October 1
The Aging Process
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.
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