BLOGS

I am a researcher, not because I am doing a college thesis or a gov job, but because I have a need to know. The problem is that the things we have been called and are called do not fully disclose a remedy to our plight. Not as the overall group we are associated with, not as the various camps within the group. Thus we have no rights or privileges other than what we are allowed by the powers that be (over us as a group).

OK, putting all the recent marbles on the table and keeping it brief:

We got off the boat that came from Africa.

We were here in America already.

We are Africans, Egyptians, Hebrew Israelites, native but Black Indians, Moors, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, others and because each designation has their own myth stories that may or may not link us altogether, we can't agree. Why?

You can not put all of us into the same box if only some of us have that particular history. The group who did come from Africa can not claim oneness with the group that were indigenous Black Americans and so on.

We don't all have the same story and so our masters to keep it simple called us slave names from their property ownership titles to derogatory names. We keep looking for a lumped together name with a common history attached. Slavery is the common experience no matter where we came from. History is most always to make political or religious control or to recover from it. Once written history is not removed. False history is not deleted, just challenged by another perspective. You could be teaching/spreading a lie or a spin-off.

Today we are schooled in all the master's arts and sciences and law. None of this has provided a remedy for us in this country. It should be noted that the main problem is not what we call ourselves among ourselves, but how we are defined in the legal system of the country in the constitutional documents (contracts). Forget about the local law stuff, look at the law that governs the country. As I am not trained in those things I don't have the language skills to comprehend well myself but you lawyers of hue do.

It seems that the American Moorish Movement is heading in this direction. I don't agree with being a Muslim as I am a so-called Christian (don't like that either). I also know these are referring to a more esoteric (cosmic understanding and application) knowledge and not the secular perspective. But, you can't get past names and events attached to names (our slavery started with Muslims, converted Jews and Christians). All the major religions say esoteric knowledge are witchcraft, magic and devil worship. There is much evil in the common religions too! Secret societies had hoarded knowledge, thus inviting corruption and decay of the truth and have abused application. While dispersion of knowledge is not a fruit to the masses, a guiding by wisdom is ignored completely, which is why the whole nation is crumbling.

So what I see is that no matter how we name ourselves we are listed in constitutional documents as property in a corporate institution. That is the problem and we need to see what we need to be to secure our rights under the constitutional contract. That might be the missing 2/5. Today the corporation is restructuring. We might be written out of the new plan or assimilated into the matrix. All us old farts are being put aside because we still remember. Or what if the foreign investment is a guardian, we being the perpetual underage ward (via lame schooling, social confusion, financial disenfranchisement, etc), never realizing this is our country. The renters are tearing up the house we own, we think we are from Europe (we learned (slum-lordism) from them their thoughts). This is our home!?

Lots to sort out, but look at the legal first, the constitutional stuff that established this mess.

There is a new documentary on Angela Davis called “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners” see https://www.facebook.com/freeangelafilm and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2350432/.  Black Bloggers Connect (see http://blog.blackbloggersconnect.com/2013/03/black-bloggers-connect-presents-free.html) invited people to blog about why such a film is necessary.  The question can be asked, “Do African and African American astrophysicists need to know about Angela Davis?”  My answer is “Yes!” 

I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Angela Davis PhD when I was a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Davis).  At the time I was playing my role as the first African American graduate student in the Astronomy & Astrophysics department.  I was slowly being worn down by the petty discrimination, insults, and slights that I had to face on a daily basis with no one available within the department with which to decompress.  Enter meeting Dr. Angela Davis and her graduate students.  She and her students helped me put my negative experiences into the context of the USA incarnations of racism, sexism, and who has the right to make new knowledge.  In effect, I learned that what I was experiencing was not specific to just me, UCSC, or to astrophysics.

Dr. Angela Davis is an icon of the Black Power movement in the United States, however when you spend your life studying physics and astrophysics...that part of my education was neglected.  All I knew was the outline of who she was, what she had done, and in the mid-1990s when I met her that she had one of the best jobs in the University of California system: an endowed chair.  What I did not understand at the time that became important to me later was that before she became an internationally recognized political figure, she was already a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles; she was already Dr. Angela Davis with a doctorate in philosophy (see
http://histcon.ucsc.edu/faculty/singleton.php?&singleton=true&cruz_id=aydavis).  This point is important enough that I am going to refer to her as Dr. Davis throughout this blog.

Meeting Dr. Davis and her intellectual community personally helped me endure a difficult situation long enough to complete my doctorate degree; however, knowing her story is important for our collective Black peers in astrophysics for many reasons, but one stands out.  Mentoring students of astrophysics, the fear emerges of being transformed during the PhD process into someone unrecognizable.  This issue touches on the imposture syndrome (see astrophysicist Dr. John Johnson’s blog on this at http://mahalonottrash.blogspot.com/2012/09/impostor-syndrome.html) which arises from not seeing people like yourself in your profession as well as touches on the fear that in order to succeed in astrophysics you have to ‘whitewash’ yourself.  This whitewashing may include extraction and disassociation from family and community, adopting the value system of the majority, self-imposed silencing on certain topics, and in the extreme the adoption of majority fashion, speaking, and interaction style.  Dr. Davis is our peer in that she earned a doctorate and her working world is academia.  The process of earning a doctorate did not sever her connection to the African American community and did not change her values.  She was and is brave and courageous and willing to stand up for what she believes in and willing to sacrifice a comfortable academic lifestyle in the process. 

Dr. Davis is an example for us Black astrophysicists to emulate.  Our cause is that we want more diversity in astrophysics.  Then we have to bring our values with us and we have to not be silent.  We have to insist that our colleagues create an environment that supports all students especially those we are trying to attract to astrophysics.  Dr. Davis had the California government standing against her (and she was on the FBIs Most wanted list!) and she won.  We simply have to stand our ground to our academic colleagues and dare to forego the comfort of our fairly prestigious positions.  I plan to see “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners” when it comes to my town and I know that I will be better educated for it and I will be inspired. I think that the same will be true of the other African and African American astrophysicists if they make the time to see this film. 

Lopsided universe: Planck’s new skymap shows that one half of the microwave background is brighter than the other, and the universe has a large cold spot. Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration

Discovery: Four Surprises in Planck's New Map of the Cosmos

Flash Fiction is gaining popularity at the speed of light on the Internet. FF  is more than simply creating a story with a beginning, middle and end in less than 1000 words. There should be a plot twist and moral. This is a thin slice from the thick juicy part of  a much bigger story; the reader may have to fill in the blanks.

The BSFS has presented  Flash Fiction on its website -- in many excepts or stand alone pieces. This is good. We need to encourage more writers and webmasters to offer AFRO Flash Fiction to readers.

I have posted AFRO Flash Fiction  on my new website: http://www.afroflash.com

As always, I post a link back to BSFS to encourage us all to reach out and let others know that African Diaspora Speculative Fiction  is trending upwards.

(Image from Black Flash by Caesarium on Deviant Art -- it is not necessarily AfroCentric, but it is cool.)

Electrons traveling through two slits and a single slit

Physics World: Feynman's double-slit experiment gets a makeover
Feynman Physics Lectures: Site Link and You Tube Channel

The Trekkie in me notes: from the phonon pump, the upper-to-intermediate level transition is called "Phaser Emission." Wonder if there's a stun setting?

American Physical Society: Lasers of Pure Sound

Kelcin Okafor

"We've seen our fair share of talented photorealist artists go viral, from Paul Cadden to Diego Fazio. But never before have we been privy to the painstaking process of creating such a detailed masterpiece. That is, until we discovered Kelvin Okafor's videos."

"The London artist's hyperrealistic graphite drawings look far more like photographs than pencil on paper. For skeptics, Okafor provides proof of his works' handmade history by posting the evolution of his pieces online, via photos on his blog and through entrancing YouTube videos."

"The artist describes himself on Twitter as "highly interested in detail and precision," and we can't help but agree."

Last year I watched the best superhero movie I’d ever had the pleasure of seeing: The Avengers. Very recently I finished reading a book that if turned into a live action movie would be a sweeping effects laden spectacle on par with-even exceeding the Avengers. The Omega Nexus, by Roger Reece and Peter Reece, centers around a young man named Ty Slade who discovers that he is an Ascended, a human being with extraordinary abilities. Eventually, circumstances force him to reunite with members of a group also possessing Ascended abilities. The group, called the Omega Nexus, is led by a brilliant scientist, Dr. Brown who, during the Cold War, worked in a secret government program tasked with creating super soldiers. His former partner turned enemy, General Lassiter, controls an opposing organization bent on using Ascended persons to conquer the world.

From there, the action is fast, furious and uncompromising. The superhero/villain clashes explode from the pages with an intensity that brings to mind episodes of Justice League. Omega Nexus is a fun page-turner with the promise of more sequels to come. I’ll be waiting! 

Daily Galaxy: Colossal Bubbles at Milky Way's Plane --"May Be the Annihilation of Dark Matter"

I see a lot of people using Daz Studio to create African characters to put in their stories or use as illustrations for books, book covers, comic books, etc. In this Daz Studio 4.5 tutorial by Keith D Young you will learn how to put together a basic 3 point lighting set-up that will enhance your 3D renders of Daz characters to make them look more realistic and dynamic.

This is a BASIC Tutorial that is suitable for beginners, though some advanced users may find it helpful, because not only will you learn HOW to create the light set, but you will also be shown WHY this will make your renders better.

This is NOT the definitive lighting tutorial, but you WILL find in it a way to create a great base to start from to enhance the quality of your Daz 3D renders.

I also show you a really cool Photoshop trick to really make your 3D renders appear to jump of the page. Enjoy!

P.S. Please let me know if you're interested in more tutorials of this type as I can create a COMPREHENSIVE 3D video tutorial series that will help all you Daz artists out there take your renders to the next level!

P.S.S. Please let me know how much would you be willing to invest in this type of training?

I am ever on the lookout for good black characters in the world of comics, animation and video games and today I stumbled across a great article about the black female protagonist in the PS Vita game Assassins Creed 3: Liberation.

This interview with Jill Murray, one of the writers who worked on the game, discusses the origins and the process behind creating this complex heroine of French and Haitian descent.

Link to the article - http://kotaku.com/5987083/this-assassins-creed-heroine-is-a-great-black-game-character-heres-how-it-happened

Check it out, then let me know what you think! :-)

The Internet spawned many an unusual technology but none as strange as the Death-Web; a way to allow users to communicate after death with notations, salutations, benedictions and predictions pre-programmed before a person died; a message-in-a-bottle through Time.

Its early adopters were people who knew their impeding time drew near and wanted to leave data-rich missives to loved ones. The terminally ill found it to be of great comfort knowing they could leave messages on anniversaries, birthdays and other important milestones.

But like all things internet others soon found unexpected uses for the idea and began leaving predictions of the future, sometimes of technology, others of faith, some of war and occasionally a well-connected master gardener or farmer might leave a local almanac of planting seasons.

Eventually, it found followers among the technorati who wanted to have an opinion about everything even if they had already died. The technorati and futurists predicted technologies decades into the future and configured the Death-Web to release them upon their death. Keyword algorithms would release their predictions either on the date they were programmed for or in concert with news from active data streams indicating their prediction had come true sooner than expected. To be fair, most tech pundits weren't good at prognostication, but as more of them passed on, that changed.

Living wills were composed on the Death-Web with pre-programmed videos of people mooning hated relatives and leaving vast fortunes to a favored cat or dog. Cuckolded husbands were told off by browbeaten wives, dark secrets revealed to angry children who could no longer take revenge on loathsome parents. As terrible as these things seem, beautiful things were left as well. Graduation videos, songs for anniversaries, still-living eulogies delivered by the Dead at their own funerals.

The Death-Web grew along side the internet, a morbid shadow mimicking life so well, after a while, it began to have an existence all to itself, with predictions for everything from weather, to the stock exchange, world politics and even celebrity gossip. Ten years of Oscar predictions and the Death-Web was always better at picking movies than the living were.

At some point the Live-Web and the Death-Web began to share information, at first tangentially, communication with the Dead were marked as such. Then invisibly, without fanfare, without people being made aware, the Dead were again, among the living. Software algorithms were written which could take an existing stream of social media and extrapolate from the Dead's living stream of choices what choices they might make of new things and ideas. These Amalgams of the social media of a now Dead person, could continue if they chose, to share, curate, and even hold limited conversations with the Living.

Then people began to realize something strange. Not that this wasn't already strange; something really strange. The Dead were right more often than the Living about almost everything.

No one was sure why this was true. Was it a side effect of people only willing to be honest when they had no stake in the game? Were people who knew they were going to die, revealing secrets they would never tell anyone while they were alive? This was a talk show subject of statistical debate for nearly ten years, while the Death-Web grew larger and more accepted worldwide. As families continued to support and pay for services for the Dead, programmers began creating software for the Death-Web at the same rate as any other environment. Companies started developing and harnessing infrastructure for this aberration-turned-engine of prediction.

And then, in a series of events, a group of stockbrokers joined the Death-Web unexpectedly. No one would have noticed them except for their social media streams right after their deaths, predicted an epic crash of the stock markets. All of them. They were dead when their predictions were seen but they had been written while they were alive. At least at first. After their buffered accounts had emptied, their accounts continued to predict the market with alarming accuracy. The source of these predictions could not be ascertained, the only thing known for certain was their accuracy. Soon their calls of collapse were being re-shared, repeated, even cast as news among the Living. And as the market reacted, confidence teetered. Something needed to be done.

Tech-seers, who managed the accounts of the Dead, sought out tampering because before this trinity, predictions were accurate but sporadic. The stopped clock metaphor was liberally applied. The Stockbroker Trinity's predictions were not a single event but a stream of events which predicted the slow transformation of the economy and the eventual failure of commerce from a single series of purchases of stock. They told who would make the stocks buys, why they would, and what the result would be. The Tech-seers found no explanation and repeated the mantra "The Living guess, the Dead know" and continued in their work. Their research revealed no tampering and yet these three brokers would consistently predict the stock market for the next two years. After their deaths. Accurately. In a way no living person had or could. They became more successful in death than they ever were in life.

The government monitored the Death-Web much like they did any other social media network. Initially, no one considered anything said there to be of any import, but as time progressed, the Death-stream was a better predictor of human behavior than anything seen before it. Local skirmishes, the next meme, the next great celebrity, the Death-Web was a form of social consciousness, un-tethered from the meat which once created it, unconstrained, un-repentant and alarmingly accurate. No one was ever able to take credit for its capabilities, and once the Deathstream software was ubiquitous, freely given away on the Internet, it was unable to be stopped. It has become a network unto itself.

When the three brokers and their attendant social media streams predicted the market more accurately than living economists, this was not lost on national security agencies, which made every effort to find the companies involved in their predictions and quietly derail their corporate structures in a effort to prevent the impending economic collapse. Their efforts were successful and the predictions of the three brokers, for a time were broken. The Trinity was dead. Again.

The CEO and the board of directors of the corporation upon whom the blame was being placed for this barely averted collapse were killed in a plane crash in the Swiss Alps. Though the outcome was considered tragic, the problem was resolved to the satisfaction of the three-letter agencies worldwide.

The stock market did not collapse and the Death-Web, now behind closed doors called the Seer-web, had proven its value as a potential tool of social management. For another decade, Humanity and its data shadow moved in step, one arrogant in life, the other truthful in death. And three-letter agencies everywhere trembled in fear; for what can you hold over the Dead to keep any secret?

The Last Divide © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved

Black Nerd survey

working on this survey for an article I'm writing. Please feel free to fill out.

Figure 1: See link for descriptions

American Physical Society: Viewpoint: Observing Matter-Antimatter Oscillations

“Zuri, the flesh must be divided evenly.” instructed Leena, pointing to her too generous cuts of the meat given to them by the recently returned warriors. 

“You mean less the largest portion which goes to the Queen.” The young woman stopped cutting the flesh in front of her, took a deep breath and started dividing the portions already cut into smaller pieces.

“I hear she doesn't even eat it.” said another.

“She doesn't. She says the meat from wild beasts smells bad. I tell her that it's all of the meat we have now. She just drinks the muthi and makes me take the stew away most days– I give it to the those in need of it.” said Olufemi. 

“You give it to Wasswa.” teased Nia as she walked by Olufemi carrying a basket full of fruit that somehow she had to divide between so many. 

“We give the best to the King's family while the people are starving. It isn't enough and it never is.” said Olufemi. 

“You can ignore me all you want Olufemi but I see the way he looks at you...and you he.”

“He is a warrior and I am a servant, bound to the king and his family. These eyes wander no further than the Queen's izindlu.” said Olufemi without looking up from her task.

“We do as we are told and we are lucky to have this much meat. The days of hunger will end and we will have rain again. King Nkosana has shared this from the ancestors, that we will suffer for a short time and the Kishnu will kneel at our feet. It is prophesy!”

"Yes, Leena of course." said Olufemi, nodding her head in agreement.

“Leena, you are old and sound just like the King. Do you have any thoughts that are your own? I'm tired of the prophesy and I want to eat everyday. I'm tired of hearing about the ancestors, what about the living? Why can't we till the soil or go fishing in the sea for ourselves? Why must only Nkosana provide?!” asked Nia for the third time since the last rain.

Without a warning, the elder cook rushed to the girl, raised her right hand up above her, landing it across her left cheek with so much force the girl staggered backwards. All of the others stood where they were, speechless. The young cook's pride alone was enough of a dam to keep tears from her face. She raised her hands to the left side of her face for a moment, then dropped them and faced Leena as if she was ready to strike her back. 

“Nkosana comes from a line of kings too great in number for you to count, child. He has always provided us with food even when the land refuses. We don't have to sweat in the hot sun or suffer the dangers at sea like Kishnu women – faces painted black, climbing trees,weapons in hand like men, with not a trace of themselves left recognizable, except for bosoms. Your tongue is a young child running ahead, beyond the reach of your father's spear, into the jaws of a lion. Our duty is to prepare the food given to us by our king. Never again let Nkosana's name pass your lips unless followed by praise or gratitude.”

Copyright 2012 All Rights Reserved.