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Cover Reveal for Book II: THE BOY in The Sanctum Trilogy

Posted by Madhuri on April 30, 2014 at 11:56am

It's finally here - April 30th - cover reveal day for THE BOY.

For those of you who don't know me yet, I'm developing a paranormal trilogy called The Sanctum and late last year, published the first book in the trilogy, called THE GIRL. Next month, I'm going to publish book two, called THE BOY. To say I'm thrilled is an understatement. Anyway...

Ever since I got this baby in my hands, I've been humming with excitement, just waiting to share it with everyone.

Because it is gorgeous.

And Michele Mason Holmberg has outdone herself, proving again that she is simply brilliant.

I love her and she knows this and those of you who follow my blog or have read THE GIRL know this, so instead of waxing poetic about Michele and how awesome she is, how about I just shut up already and reveal the cover?

In THE GIRL, Madhuri Blaylock introduced readers to the world of The Sanctum, one corrupted by greed and savagery and hellbent on achieving a single goal: destroying the prophesied hybrid. When one of its most celebrated warriors questioned his allegiances, age-old secrets were unveiled and violence erupted. The journey becomes more perilous and intense as the trilogy surges forward with 

THE BOY

Can you cross the plains of death, collect every piece of your soul and make it back to the land of the living?

And if you complete the journey, will your loved ones welcome your return?

The Ramyan have been answering such questions since the creation of The Sanctum. A mysterious sect of Magicals, haunting the blank spaces of time and memory, they serve no one but themselves and their higher purpose. They exist on a plane removed from earthly matters, shifting easily between the living and the dead, moving in time to the beat of their own drummer. 

At least they did.

Dev and Wyatt change all of that when the prophesied hybrid lands on the steps of Rinshun Palace, seeking help for the wounded Class A Warrior. That decision alters lives and sets old agendas back on course. But at what cost to Dev and Wyatt? And does that really even matter?

 *     *     *

So…what do you think? Are you excited? Intrigued? Tell me, tell me. I want to hear all about it.

To celebrate next month's release of Book II: THE BOY, I'm giving away copies of the eBooks of both THE GIRL and THE BOY to five lucky winners.

All you have to do to enter the giveaway is leave comments at the cover reveal post on my blog at www.madhuriblaylock.wordpress.com about your thoughts on THE GIRL, what you hope happens in THE BOY, questions for me or anything else related to The Sanctum Trilogy in general. Five of you will be chosen at random on May 15th and the winners will be named in a blog post that day. Check back to see if you won. It's that simple.

You can also up your chances of winning by visiting The Sanctum's Facebook page at www.facebook.com/thesanctumtrilogy, clicking on the Giveaways tab and entering there as well.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

#AreYouInTheSanctum?

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Supersymmetry...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 30, 2014 at 8:12am
The best hope for discovering evidence of supersymmetry will come from the Large Hadron Collider, which is currently shut down so that it can be upgraded.
Credit: Thinkstock

The first run of the LHC, which ended in early 2013, produced enough data to allow researchers to identify the long-sought Higgs boson. During the shutdown, scientists and engineers will make improvements to the machine, which will let it reach the highest energies that it was designed for.



Caveat to the link below: crisis in this case for a science publication I'd take to mean "conundrum," which is a good way to sell print copy. When I think of a crisis, I recall the "Black Hole War" between Leo Susskind and Stephen Hawking (a very good read, I might add). However, if you're a string theorist, SUSY or lack thereof can get you a little agitated  I plan to purchase at the local supermarket to have an off-line physical copy.


 Scientific American: Supersymmetry and the Crisis in Physics
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Nano Explosives and Dark Matter...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 28, 2014 at 8:35am
Particles of dark matter should trigger nanoexplosions in certain materials, an idea that could lead to an entirely new generation of detectors, say physicists.

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: One of the great mysteries of modern astrophysics is the nature of dark matter. This is the mysterious stuff that astrophysicists say must exist to provide the gravitational forces necessary to hold galaxies together.



The general consensus is that there is around five times as much dark matter as visible matter in the universe. And this raises obvious questions: what is this stuff and how can we detect it?



These questions have triggered an almighty race among physicists to detect dark matter and measure its characteristics. But the results of their experiments are puzzling and contradictory. Some labs are claiming to have detected the stuff while others appear to rule out the possibility.



What’s needed, of course, is more data from a greater variety of detectors. And today, Alejandro Lopez-Suarez at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a few pals propose a novel idea. They hope to detect dark matter by the effect it has on explosives.



Their plan is to create small explosive particles that are sensitive enough to detonate when hit by a lump of dark matter. Having done this, the physicists then sit back and wait for the ensuing fireworks.


 Physics arXiv: New Dark Matter Detector using Nanoscale Explosives
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Diamond Teleportation...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 29, 2014 at 6:42am
The ability to teleport quantum information between diamond crystals that can also store it is a small but important step toward a quantum Internet.

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: The prospect of a quantum Internet has excited physicists for two decades. A quantum Internet will allow the transmission of information around the world with perfect security and make cloud-based quantum computing a reality.



But first, physicists must perfect the technology of quantum routing—the ability to receive and transmit quantum information without destroying it.



That’s a significant challenge. The key is a technique called quantum teleportation, which transmits information from one point to another without it passing through the space in between. This is a routine operation in any decent quantum optics lab but quantum routing—which concatenates the process—is another challenge altogether.



Today, Wolfgang Pfaff at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft in the Netherlands and a few pals say they’ve take a significant step toward this goal with the first demonstration of diamond teleporters that can act as nodes in a quantum network. “These results establish diamond spin qubits as a prime candidate for the realization of quantum networks for quantum communication and network-based quantum computing,” they say.



The fundamental difficulty in quantum routing is that quantum information is fragile stuff. So quantum teleportation has always involved creating a qubit, teleporting it and then immediately measuring it to check whether teleportation has been successful.



However, the process of measurement destroys quantum information. So an important goal is to create routers that can read and write quantum information without destroying it.


 Physics arXiv:
Unconditional quantum teleportation between distant solid-state qubits
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This Dandelion...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 27, 2014 at 10:59am


I discussed in two parts last weekend the pervasiveness of pseudoscience in our culture that in many ways have led to the standoff in Nevada, the shooting at the Jewish Community Center; the curt comments from Bill O'Reilly and now the (alleged) nonplussed commentary on being seen in public with African Americans from LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling to his obviously-young-enough-to-be-his-daughter non-European girlfriend. His famous employee Chris Paul is apparently waiting for confirmation of this rumor, but I seriously doubt there will be a strike, forfeit or walk-off. I think his pending NAACP Image Award has probably been revoked.



Eugenics is an example of the science of evolution being pushed into the realm of pseudoscience: part of Darwin's thesis was comparing artificial selection - breeding - to natural selection, which only requires an inordinate amount of time. (Thus the Jesuit estimate of 6000 years must be adhered to versus the scientific, painstaking calculation by Clair C. Patterson of 4.6 billion years.) No less than Charles Murray has crawled out from under his rock to advise Texas gubernatorial candidate Gregg Abbott how do deal with the GOP's "women problem," and Nobel Prize recipient William Shockley (of the Shockley diode equation) donated his spunk to the cause of selectively breeding geniuses. It has been my experience that academic preparation - even at the highest levels - does not always confer critical thinking skills or wisdom.



My favorite hedge-fund rancher Cliven Bundy is not a welfare queen: that would be a sexist and racist comparison to gaming the system. At 1.2 million dollars in 21 years of free grazing on "we the people," this is outright theft from taxpayers, a slow-mo version of the Wall Street staccato bank heist of 2008 (for which, they paid themselves all handsome bonuses), because of, you know: "liberty."



Taraxacum /təˈræksəkʉm/ is a large genus of flowering plants in the family Asteraceae. They are native to Eurasia and North and South America, and two species, T. officinaleand T. erythrospermum, are found as weeds worldwide.[2] Both species are edible in their entirety.[3] The common name dandelion (/ˈdændɨlaɪ.ən/ DAN-di-ly-ən, from French dent-de-lion, meaning "lion's tooth") is given to members of the genus, and like other members of the Asteraceae family, they have very small flowers collected together into a composite flower head. Each single flower in a head is called a floret. Many Taraxacum species produce seeds asexually by apomixis, where the seeds are produced without pollination, resulting in offspring that are genetically identical to the parent plant.[4] (Wikipedia)



This dandelion is blown in the wind by echo chambers deficit of facts and bereft of values other than profit in the deified "market." It looks innocent enough until it implants in the rich manure of sectarian strife at the pariah 99% levels, fed by ignorance; metastasizes and grows into the weed of violence. As long as we argue the conspiracy theory of the moment and treat other parts of humanity as "the other"; we cannot and will not see the "invisible hand of the market" deftly picking our pockets. The "patriots" are pointing in the wrong direction.



Hosea 8:7 "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up."
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B612...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 26, 2014 at 8:56am
Credit: Link below

Why science/math matters...

 A new and surprising rate at which an asteroid collides with Earth has been calculated by the B612 Foundation—a private group dedicated to defending the Earth against such catastrophes.



In spite of lower estimations calculated by other scientists, the B612 Foundation has collected data suggesting that the Earth is capable of being hit by an asteroid once a century, a rate previously thought to be once every 3,000 years. Physicist and former space shuttle astronaut Ed Lu, who is CEO of B612, explains what his data shows.



“There are people who say, ‘Oh, once every million years we have something we have to worry about.’ That couldn’t be more wrong,” says Lu.



“Eventually you’re going to get hit, because it’s just a matter of time,” he adds.



Evidence which supports this prediction was collected and made accessible by Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario. The data gathered was administered by a network of sensors that detect nuclear explosions. Picking up sound waves, the sensors have detected 26 asteroid explosions since 2001. Some of these collisions occurred during 2009 and 2013, one off the coast of Indonesia and the other over Russia, respectively.

The Space Reporter:
Deadly asteroids occur more often than previously thought, Rachelle Flick
Snag Films: Asteroids - Deadly Impact

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Gliding Atoms...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 26, 2014 at 8:59am
The micrograph on the left shows a tiny triangle of metallic molybdenite (labelled 1T) that measures just 3 nm at its base. It has been created within a semiconductor sheet (2H) of the same material. The diagram on the right shows the position of the triangle. Such structures can function as quantum dots. (Courtesy: Kazu Suenaga)

Researchers in Japan say they have watched individual atoms rearrange themselves during the semiconductor-to-metal phase transition in molybdenite (MoS2) – a graphene-like material that can occur in sheets just one molecule thick. Until now, such phase transitions were thought of as collective motions of atoms, but the new observations show that atom-by-atom movements are at play. The result could provide important information to researchers trying to create electronic devices from single sheets of MoS2.



Molybdenite is a direct bandgap 2D semiconductor that shows some promise for use in electronics and optoelectronics devices. The mobility of its electric charge carriers is greater than 100 cm2/Vs (and could be as high as 500 cm2/Vs) – values that compare well to silicon. It is a "van der Waals solid", which means that it comprises robust 2D sheets weakly bonded to each other to form a layered 3D structure much like graphite. This means that molybdenite is stable on a variety of substrates – even transparent or plastic ones. Single-layer molybdenite is only about 0.65 nm thick, which means that it can be used to create very thin transistors.



An important property of molybdenite is polymorphism: it has different electronic characteristics depending on the crystal structure of the layers. It is a semiconductor when the sulphur and molybdenum are arranged in a trigonal prismatic structure and it is a metal when the atoms assume an octahedral structure. Both structural phases can be thought of as a central plane of molybdenum atoms sandwiched between two planes of sulphur atoms. Phase transitions were believed to occur when the planes glided over each other – but such a transformation had never been directly observed in an experiment until now.



 Physics World: Ultrathin material glides from metal to semiconductor

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More vindication of the Science conceived of in the Darkside Trilogy!

Posted by William Hayashi on April 25, 2014 at 11:30am

Blood Of World's Oldest Woman, Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper, Suggests Limits Of Mortality

Her blood tells a story.

And it's a very, very long story.

Born in 1890, Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper once had the honour of being the world's oldest woman. Today — years after her death — her blood is under the microscope.

And it's telling us a lot about the limits of our own mortality.

In a study published this week in the journal Genome Research, Dutch scientists conducted a deep analysis of van Andel-Schipper's blood and tissues, finding that human life does indeed have an expiry date. It's set by our cells' ability to divide.

And it's limited.

Once a stem cell has reached that cap — literally dividing itself to death — it can no longer replenish tissues.

According to New Scientist, van Andel-Schipper was down to just two stem cells at the time of her demise — fueling two-thirds of her white blood cells. Virtually every stem cell she began her long life with had burned out.

"Is there a limit to the number of stem cell divisions, and does that imply that there's a limit to human life?" research head Henne Holstege of the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam told New Scientist. "Or can you get round that by replenishment with cells saved from earlier in your life?"

Van Andel-Schipper's case is especially unique in that she was reportedly in pristine shape until very close to her death in 2005. According to New Scientist, she enjoyed 'crystal clear cognition' and a blood circulatory system free of disease.

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The Baartman Bag, Part II

Posted by Lark Lisle on April 24, 2014 at 1:22pm

Click here to read Part I

 

My pen-mates are arranging themselves on their pallets when Yandi and I return to the great room. It’s ten minutes to 6:00. The baby-faced warden is still positioned by the door, a few yards from the blue dumpster. Yandi winks at him as we walk in and then saunters off to help the kitchen workers fix our plates.

 

Even though the menu never changes, an excited murmur fills the air as meal time nears. It’s one of the few bright spots in our day, aside from our daily sun hour and the oil bath.

 

I don’t have an appetite, but I accept the plate handed to me by a young Latina with a rose tattoo on her neck. She looks close to my age and she averts her eyes, almost apologetic, as she passes out the food. Dinner is avocados and nuts with an unappetizing slab of haddock in the middle. I’m still shaken from the horrors I witnessed in the Assembly Room, but I have to stay calm. I can’t let on that I know.

 

Sensing someone staring at me, I look up, locking eyes with Fern. She isn’t eating either. She stirs the tiny mountain of avocado mush with her finger. I don’t want to think about Fern, Grace or any of my pen-mates stretched out on racks – stretched to snapping – like flightless bats. I prefer to think of the teen somewhere coasting down the sidewalk on her skateboard.

 

“You gonna eat that?”

 

It’s Leticia, a Modern Coffee sitting to my right. She gestures to the fish on my plate. I pick up the lukewarm fillet and hand it to her. Our fingers touch.

 

“I was going to ask you for that.” Robyn, a dark-brown girl, sits across from me, watching the exchange. Her hair is starting to grow back in, black and bristly. She purses her lips like a child, although she’s at least eighteen. “You gave ‘Ticia your fish last night.”

 

“Closed mouth don’t get fed,” Leticia says. As she stuffs fish in her mouth, I scrutinize her face, her head. Leticia’s naked scalp bears twin ridges near her hairline, one on each side of her temple, about several inches long. Those dents could be scars left over from infancy, the result of forceps used during a difficult delivery.

 

I glance around the room at the bald heads of my pen-mates, as if I can glean the story of their lives from a scab or keloid. Can they interpret my scars? You can tell by the way some girls duck their head when you speak to them that they are more embarrassed by the absence of hair than they are by the absence of clothes.

 

I wish I could clothe them all, some new skin, impervious to branding and scraping and pickling. I wish I could offer them something more than day-old fish and rough cotton bedding fresh from the dryer. I wish we didn’t have to watch the sunset through the windows of a former guitar factory, where the only music is the buzzing and whirring of machines in the belly of a building with a lust for our blood.

Click here to download Part II

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Ring of Fire...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 24, 2014 at 6:21am
The Moon’s orbit about the Earth is not perfectly circular, so that at different times the Moon can be slightly closer or further away than usual. This composite shot shows the progress of an annular eclipse in May 2013.
Credit: Jia Hao | The National Maritime Museum | Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2013

The sun will look like a ring of fire above some remote parts of the world next Tuesday (April 29) during a solar eclipse, but most people around the world won't get a chance to see it.



Whereas lunar eclipses occur only when there's a full moon, and solar eclipses only happen during a new moon. Half the world saw a lunar eclipse during the full moon on April 15. When a lunar eclipse occurs, it usually means there is also a solar eclipse at the preceding or following new moon.



Tuesday's solar eclipse is known as an "annular" — rather than "total" — lunar eclipse. That’s because Tuesday's eclipse will occur when the moon is close to its farthest distance from the Earth, making it too small to cover the sun completely. The resulting effect looks like a ring of fire, called an “annulus,” appears around the silhouette of the moon. ['Ring of Fire' Annular Solar Eclipse of April 29, 2014 (Visibility Maps)]



But most people won't see the whole eclipse. The only place in the world where this annular eclipse will be visible is a small area in Antarctica. However, partial phases of the eclipse will be visible in other places. Most of those areas are in the ocean — rarely traveled ocean, in fact — but the entire continent of Australia will get a good view.



 Space.com: Solar Eclipse Will Transform Sun into 'Ring of Fire' Next Week, Geoff Gaherty

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The Baartman Bag Video Trailer

Posted by Lark Lisle on April 23, 2014 at 2:28pm


Many authors create video trailers to promote their books. I created a trailer to spread the word about "The Baartman Bag," a short story I'm offering as a free download. I want to engage as many readers as possible about the issues black women face -- invisibility, hair, rage, identity, shadism. Because speculative fiction is my thing, the video embodies the creepy, the bizarre and the provocative. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

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Internet of Things...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 23, 2014 at 9:03am
With the advent of the Internet of things, potentially billions of devices will report data about themselves, making it possible to create new applications in areas as diverse as factory optimization, car maintenance, or simply keeping track of your stuff online. But doing this today requires at least some degree of programming knowledge. Now Bug Labs, a New York City company, is trying to make it as easy to create an Internet of things application as it is to put a file into Dropbox.
Source: Solid State Technology



With a new service called Freeboard, Bug Labs is giving people a simple one-click way to publish data from a “thing” to its own Web page (Bug Labs calls this “dweeting”). To get a sense of this, visit Dweet.io with your computer or mobile phone, click “try it now,” and you’ll see raw data from your device itself: its GPS coordinates and even the position of your computer mouse. The data is now on a public Web page and available for analysis and aggregation; another click stops this sharing.
Satlz TPM



Freeboard, expected to be launched Tuesday, makes sense of such streams of data. A few more clicks create quick graphical displays of the shared information, such as location, temperature, motor speed, or simply whether a device is on or off. “We are trying to make the Internet of things far simpler, and far more accessible, to anybody,” says Peter Semmelhack, CEO of Bug Labs, a business that initially focused on the development of open-source modular hardware (see “Bug Labs Adds New Modules”), but which now develops software platforms.
Ibid



 MIT Technology Review: A Dropbox for the Internet of Things, David Talbot

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Earth Two...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 22, 2014 at 6:00am
Kepler-186f, shown in this artist’s concept, is the first Earth-sized planet discovered in its star’s habitable zone. Credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech

From a comic book nerd perspective, it's neat they found a planet in the possible "Goldilocks habitable zone." It is however, 500 light years away, meaning that even if we had rocket ships that could get to 99.9999% of c (speed of light), it would take several human lifetimes to get there. If we had the propulsion systems of SyFy lore, the important point would be the "when" in its planetary development we arrive - dinosaurs or primitive hominoids - and whether we'd treat them like H.G. Wells' Martians in "War of the Worlds" (he gleaned from the real events of the British crown's expansion and the subjugation of Aborigines) or a more contemporary comparison - Native Americans. A prime directive assumes we evolve beyond our current brutality.



Exoplanets are fun and all, but those hot Jupiters and super Neptunes and such are kind of beside the point. Everyone knows the real search is for a planet like ours: rocky, smallish, and capable of hosting liquid water. And now scientists have found one, named Kepler-186f — an Earth-sized planet in its star’s habitable zone, the area where conditions aren’t too hot or too cold, but just right, for liquid water to be possible.



Planet Profile



The planet orbits a star about 500 light-years away called Kepler-186 and was discovered by the Kepler telescope (and then confirmed at the Keck and Gemini Observatories). The discovery technically includes four other exoplanets found around the star, but Kepler-186f is the only one in the habitable zone. Scientists found them all using the “transit method,” which is just basically looking at stars and waiting for planets to pass in front, dimming the star’s light a little bit.



 Discovery: Possibly Habitable Earth-Sized Planet Discovered, Bill Andrews

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The Baartman Bag

Posted by Lark Lisle on April 22, 2014 at 5:03am

The Baartman Bag is a serial short story told in four parts. In a futuristic society, black teen girls are abducted, taken to a slaughterhouse and skinned to make couture purses. One young woman decides to fight back.

First, they lop off your head. Then they saw off your arms and legs – body parts as valuable as dust – until only your naked torso remains. While you are still warm, before your blood knows it’s dead, they shear the skin from your back, breasts and belly with a great whirring blade, careful to preserve your flesh in whole swathes.

Or so the story goes. I have never witnessed the actual process for transforming a black girl into a couture bag.

I was brought to the slaughterhouse, a place my pen-mate Grace calls “the Carvery,” in May. It’s August now. From the outside, the worn aluminum building resembles a post-modern dorm. But only from the outside. Dusty sunlight streams through the small windows that span the length of the great room where about two hundred girls dress, eat and sleep. The slaughterhouse was once a guitar factory. Sometimes when I’m sweeping around our pallets, running my broom along the baseboards, a long-forgotten string or tuning peg gets entangled in the straws.

At eighteen, I’m older than most of the other girls, who range in age from thirteen to nineteen. Our skin tones span the dusky rainbow – from rose brown to plum black. Kunteé believed wealthy patrons of the Baartman bag would be charmed if the purse were available in exotic shades. He labels our complexions Sienna Madre, Tawny Hubris, Modern Coffee and Ghana. The darker the girl, the more premium the purse.

Yandi, a sullen nineteen-year-old, has been here the longest. She’s a Ghana. She likes to whisper about the horrors involved in manufacturing a human bag, blood-soaked tales of skinning and curing that make the younger girls cry. “They drug you first,” Yandi assures the wide-eyed captives as she walks through the great room handing out bedding. “You won’t feel a thing when they chop your head off. Then they soak your skin in salt water to keep it fresh.”

With her dark complexion, the color of mulberries wilting on the vine, Yandi’s bag would have fetched a high price had she not developed a severe case of eczema during her second month at the Carvery. Instead of hanging her in the yard, as they did to ruined inventory, our captors kept her on. She now serves as a warden.

We never know when our time is coming, when we’ll be sent to the blades. Most of us aren’t here longer than three or four months. One day, you’ll see a girl talking in the yard or strapped down in the oil bath and then you’ll wake up to an empty pallet next to yours. Then more girls are brought in to take their place. I’m number 1815. I have never seen the four numerals seared into the skin behind my ear but I trace the keloid every day with my fingers, rubbing its raised permanence.

Click here to download your free copy of Part I of The Baartman Bag!

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No Compromises on AFM...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 21, 2014 at 6:01am
JILA's modified AFM probes measuring DNA molecules. The older mod (long cantilever, right) eliminated the usual gold coating to enhance long-term stability. The latest version (left) retains the gold coating where needed to reflect light but maintains excellent stability. Researchers also removed a large section to reduce stiffness and friction near surfaces. The new probe provides precise results much faster than before, while reducing “noise” (colored squiggles).
Credit: Baxley/JILA

JILA researchers have engineered a short, flexible, reusable probe for the atomic force microscope (AFM) that enables state-of-the-art precision and stability in picoscale force measurements. Shorter, softer and more agile than standard and recently enhanced AFM probes, the JILA tips will benefit nanotechnology and studies of folding and stretching in biomolecules such as proteins and DNA.



An AFM probe is a cantilever, shaped like a tiny diving board with a small, atomic-scale point on the free end. To measure forces at the molecular scale in a liquid, the probe attaches its tip to a molecule such as a protein and pulls; the resulting deflection of the cantilever is measured. The forces are in the realm of piconewtons, or trillionths of a newton. One newton is roughly the weight of a small apple.



The new probe design, described in ACS Nano,* is the JILA research group's third recent advance in AFM technology. JILA is jointly operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Colorado Boulder.


 NIST:
No Compromises: JILA’s Short, Flexible, Reusable AFM Probe, Laura Ost
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A Nation of Warring Tribes...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 20, 2014 at 8:12am

See previous: "Weaponized Pseudoscience" yesterday. Quoting part of the post: "we're in the aftermath of 'created realities,' and I fear this self-willed ignorance of science is slowly unraveling our nation." We are the sum of the stories we tell of ourselves, some noble; some salacious; some shameful. Some of them are best left unsaid...
Post 2012 election tweets



This is the eventual culmination of pseudoscience run amok - it metastasizes as a weapon: societal instability reaching for an "ideal" that never existed. The rude, reintroduction of  pseudo social science hack Charles Murray as adviser to Gregg Abbott in Texas politics; the so-called "debate" on climate change; the age of the universe (6,000 versus 13.8 billion) and evolution versus "intelligent design" are not designed to enlighten: they are to evade, obfuscate inducing ignorance, an effective method of control. When science and critical thinking skills are properly taught, you ask questions of authority, and authoritarians don't want that. They'd rather you memorize a Bible verse (many they've never read, but their marketing departments find useful in their machinations); they'd rather you repeat a Jingoism/slogan/talking points - thinking is out of the question since it will begat questions. This is no better than the "conspiracy theories" that bloviators use to whip their audiences on right-leaning AM talk radio to frenzied mania, high profits and a spot on network news.

PoliticusUSA.com


 These are the "chickens coming home to roost" of the "Southern Strategy," this is what dog-whistle politics reaps after it's sown in the wind. This is when your ratings are dependent on making everyone afraid of "the other," and that larger-than-life other happens to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. "I want my country back": the 'good old days' for some; the bad ones for everyone else that they don't give a damn about. Meanwhile, we have two years to obsolescence on the global stage when "Made in America" becomes a rarefied artifact.

Never mind that human life originated in Africa; that the oldest known footprints of Homo Erectus happens to have been found in Kenya. It makes us all African, this expressed malady over class, place and pigmentation a form of melanin-envy and self-loathing.

Never mind that hate is not an election-winning strategy and that Karl Rove waisted a lot of billionaire's money trying to throw the election from "We the People" to the oligarchs.

We worship money as a national deity, and no other god really. We're supposedly divided between "makers and takers" and the self-labeled makers seem to have no problem taking another tax cut. Their recipe for job creation has so far equaled Marie Antoinette's famously attributed comment (actually by Maria Theresa 100 years before in Spain): "let them eat cake." There is no room at the oligarch's Inns, mansions, wealth seminars or dinner tables.

Princeton and Northwestern now says the previous experiment in self-governance is over, and is at its inevitable conclusion: we are an oligarchy, well before Putin could reestablish it in Russia. It explains why the authoritarians here so admire his veracity; his bare-shirted cowboy diplomacy - to hell he might cause World War III:

Cliches like, "itchy trigger finger" and "tall in the saddle" and "riding off or on into the sunset." Cliches like, "Get off of my planet by sundown!" More so than cliches like, "he died with his boots on." Marine tough the man is. Bogart tough the man is. Cagney tough the man is. Hollywood tough the man is. Cheap steak tough. And Bonzo's substantial. The ultimate in synthetic selling: A Madison Avenue masterpiece ? a miracle ? a cotton-candy politician...Presto! Macho! (Gil-Scott Heron, "B Movie")

THIS IS A MENTAL DISORDER and psychological warfare foisted writ large on the American public through echo chambers and so-called "think tanks" under the clever auspices of "maintaining traditional values" while in the full spirit of Orwellian doublespeak, annihilating  them. On the day Jared Lee Loughner was sentenced to 7 consecutive life sentences plus 140 years (gees), we'd be mindful that this information age may be overloading weaker minds (he was told "don't retreat: reload" and that he did to disastrous effect). Thus, birth certificates in short or long form; Harvard transcripts and passports demanded by bloviating reality-show hosts that could spend $50 on a good toupee versus 5 million on an empty stunt are irrelevant when you've already a made-up mind that what facts don't agree with your skewed worldview will be judged false. Fear is a political motivator, but moribund when you actually try to run a country on it as well as magical thinking. It worked really well up to 2008 (being facetious), and I'm not inclined to see if repeated, it will self-correct in 2014 or 2016. I end paraphrasing Albert Einstein's observations on the nature of insanity, and quoting verbatim Nietzsche:

 “Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

 TPM: Harder to Handle; More on the Fox Effect, Josh Marshall

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Weaponized Pseudoscience...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 19, 2014 at 8:19am
TeachTheFacts.org

I've used this photo on a previous post. However, we're in the aftermath of "created realities," and I fear this self-willed ignorance of science is slowly unraveling our nation.

 Weaponize (n): to adapt for use as a weapon of war; first known use of Weaponize: 1957 (Merriam-Webster)



A pseudoscience is a belief or process which masquerades as science in an attempt to claim a legitimacy which it would not otherwise be able to achieve on its own terms; it is often known as fringe- or alternative science. The most important of its defects is usually the lack of the carefully controlled and thoughtfully interpreted experiments which provide the foundation of the natural sciences and which contribute to their advancement.



Reference: Pseudoscience: What is it? How can I recognize it?

In "Ode to a Distant Prospect of Eton College," Thomas Gray says a great many things that if you can decipher the old English and British countryside references, (the Thames is mentioned twice), the beginning is essentially the plot of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

 The ending is the origin of "ignorance is bliss":

Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.

The blissful ignorance is their eventual fate with entropy: aging with associated pains and eventual demise. Ignorance is not a way to run a republic.

 Yet lately, I've seen ignorance forged into the weapon of pseudoscience on the anvil of suspicion, anger, rage, huckster-foisted conspiracy theories, division and racial animus.

 Bill O'Reilly tried an "old shtick" (quoting Joan Walsh, see Salon link) with basketball coach John Calipari: “I mean, you are a good guy, coach, but, hey, now the culture has coarsened,” said O’Reilly. “I don’t know if you listen to this rap stuff and the hip-hop stuff. Has that changed their attitude? I mean, how do you impose discipline on kids who are pretty much gonna do what they want to do?” (Salon.com) Coach was there to discuss his book; O'Reilly was riling up his base of older, whiter viewers that feel their country slipping away in a deluge of demographics and diversity. If the big-O and the fogies stopped and did the math, most won't be around in 2042 when it does occur. The question is, will the country still be?

 Cliven Bundy hasn't paid his cattle grazing fees in 21 years, or $1.2 million dollars of tax payer money. He's lost every court case he's tried to defend himself, saying he doesn't "recognize the sovereignty of the federal government." He just uses their/our land; their/our roads to get his product to market; their/our electricity; their/our power; their/our computer systems to balance his books, in essence: Cliven Bundy is a "taker" supported by the echo chamber that birthed the Tea Party April 15, 2009.

Frazier Glenn Miller, 73, founder of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan murdered three fellow humans opening fire outside a Jewish Community Center and a nearby retirement community. He managed to kill two Methodists: a doctor and his fourteen-year-old grandson and a woman visiting her aged mother.

Tomorrow: "A Nation of Warring Tribes"

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Good Friday SALE!!! -- Offering a special rate, specially focused on Steampunk book covers and art.

Posted by Aidana WillowRaven on April 18, 2014 at 2:09pm


I am offering a special rate for all authors this weekend, with an added discount for all steampunk genres.

I wish to incorporate more punk in my portfolio.  I have a good bit of fantasy, and a sprinkling of sci-fi, but I want more period and 'Punk' inspired pieces. Not just steampunk, but cyberpunk, dieselpunk, clockwork punk, and all of the sub-genres often grouped with steampunk.

It's a dilemma because many authors won't hire me if they think I can't successfully portray this amazing genre, and all of it's sub-genres, only because there are so few, if any, in my folio.




Since I can't justify taking time away from paid projects to just build my folio, I am offering an automatic 30% off, on top of all of my regular discount incentives to authors specializing in punk.

Along side punk, I also need more ethnic diversity (which will get you an added discount), so why not combine the two needs into some great book cover art at a great discount?

While looking at my VidFolio, keep in mind that I am painfully aware that very little of it could be interpreted as punk.

If you have a project in mind,  let's talk about your book cover needs via Live Chat on my website, so we don't need to stress over that little window below, lol.



Onto wrapping up the next book :D

Until next time ...


This post edited by*:


*Blurbs and quotes provided are not edited by WillowRaven, but posted as provided by author/publisher.
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Micro Robotics...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 18, 2014 at 9:18am
Building big: A team of three small, magnetically steered robots worked together to build this structure from toothpick-sized carbon rods.

Someone glancing through the door of Annjoe Wong-Foy’s lab at SRI International might think his equipment is infested by ants. Dark shapes about a centimeter across move to and fro over elevated walkways: they weave around obstacles and carry small sticks.



A closer look makes it clear that these busy critters are in fact man-made. Wong-Foy, a senior research engineer at SRI, has built an army of magnetically steered workers to test the idea that “microrobots” could be a better way to assemble electronics components, or to build other small structures.



Wong-Foy’s robotic workers have already proved capable of building towers 30 centimeters (two feet) long from carbon rods, and other platforms able to support a kilogram of weight. The robots can work with glass, metal, wood, and electronic components. In one demonstration, they made a carbon truss structure with wires and colored LEDs mixed in to serve as the lab’s Christmas tree.



“We can scale to many more robots at low cost,” says Wong-Foy, who thinks his system could develop into a new approach to manufacturing. Many electronic components are the right size to be handled by his microrobots, he says, and teams of them might prove a good way to lay them out onto circuit boards.



MIT Technology Review:

Tiny robots that work together like ants could lead to a new way to manufacture complex structures and electronics, by Tom Simonite
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Proto Tony Stark...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 17, 2014 at 5:47am
Robot suit: An exoskeleton on display in Brazil is designed to be worn, and controlled, by a paralyzed person.

I cautiously wish him good luck...



In less than 60 days, Brazil will begin hosting soccer’s 2014 World Cup, even though workers are still hurrying to pour concrete at three unfinished stadiums. At a laboratory in São Paulo, a Duke University neuroscientist is in his own race with the World Cup clock. He is rushing to finish work on a mind-controlled exoskeleton that he says a paralyzed Brazilian volunteer will don, navigate across a soccer pitch using his or her thoughts, and use to make the ceremonial opening kick of the tournament on June 12.



The project, called Walk Again, is led by Miguel Nicolelis, a 53-year-old native of Brazil and one of the biggest names in neuroscience. If it goes as planned, the kick will be a highly public display of research into brain-machine interfaces, a technology that aims to help paralyzed people control machines with their thoughts and restore their ability to get around.



But the Walk Again project is drawing doubters. Saying the demonstration is as much publicity stunt as science, they question whether it will illustrate any real degree of thought control. That’s because it relies on a fairly old, imprecise brain-recording technology called EEG, or electroencephalography.



At least three other research groups have recently published reports of EEG-controlled exoskeletons. Yet so far, none have managed to do much more than send a start or stop signal. They let the robotic harness do the rest of the work on a preset trajectory, with plenty of outside assistance in balancing.



 MIT Technology Review:
World Cup Mind-Control Demo Faces Deadlines, Critics
A Brazilian neuroscientist says brain-controlled robotics will let the paralyzed walk again. By Antonio Regalado

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