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Freedom and Responsibility...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 30, 2017 at 5:14am
Image Source: Link below

Topics: Civil Rights, Human Rights, Science, Research

As a no-knock raid (s) may be going on in Washington, DC or surrounding suburbs, this is a follow-up from the piece "The Right to Science," the material sourced from the American Association for the Advancement of Science as is this post.

In the era of "doubling down" on inanity at 140 characters in wee hours of the mornings (paired with septuagenarian bowel movements), AAAS is being very explicit and direct with reality, not "alternative facts," lies and propaganda.

A quote from my professor in Nano Safety:

"All science and engineering has a moral and philosophical component. It is imperative that as future scientists you pursue your research ethically, thinking also of your impact on society going forward." (I have omitted his name for his privacy)

BTW: The interpolation homework wasn't that bad, and we finished the project report. On to the others in Nano Physics and Safety. I will hibernate after finals.

The freedom to pursue science, apply its findings and share its discoveries is linked to the obligation of the scientific community to conduct its work with integrity and keep the interest of humanity as a core tenet, according to a new statement adopted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Board of Directors.

The AAAS Board of Directors adopted the “Statement on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility” on Oct. 12 to govern the organization, its members and guide scientists across the globe – the first known such position adopted by a scientific organization, according to members of the AAAS committee that developed the statement.

“Scientific freedom and scientific responsibility are essential to the advancement of human knowledge for the benefit of all. Scientific freedom is the freedom to engage in scientific inquiry, pursue and apply knowledge, and communicate openly,” the statement says. “This freedom is inextricably linked to and must be exercised in accordance with scientific responsibility. Scientific responsibility is the duty to conduct and apply science with integrity, in the interest of humanity, in a spirit of stewardship for the environment, and with respect for human rights.”

The four-line statement is meant to be a lasting and widely applicable affirmation, recognizing that freedom necessary to extend the global scientific enterprise requires the scientific community to adhere to and apply high ethical standards, interlocking two longstanding pillars of science.

AAAS Adopts Statement Binding Scientific Freedom with Responsibility Anne Q. Hoy, AAAS

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The time is now

Posted by KENNETH E JAMES on October 30, 2017 at 1:01pm

Woke up to a brisk 31 degrees in Nashville today. I had forgotten what winter felt like for the last 5 years in Florida now is the wake up call. Wake up call is a good phrase to use in this case. Ask yourself what was your wake up call? How did it occur and better yet what have you done about it? I realized today that i have actually been a member of this site since 2012 and I still believe it was a great idea to join this site. I haven't really been on here and I can legitimately come up with more excuses than Martha Stewart has recipes on why i haven't  done anything yet but hey now that's out of the way i can get down to business again. I will be back to punishing this keyboard with work and post on here from now on. I have 7 books to write and number one needs to be finished by March 2018. Hey I have a question and feel free to answer or give your opinion i look forward to hearing them. See i have this plan and as of now it is going into motion what would it take to get you as an artist, animator, publisher, Writer and creator of worlds to actually work as one? Because i don't know about you but i am out to change the world and wreck certain people's nasty agendas and thoughts on who we are and what we should be portrayed as. I am done with the talk now its time to put in the work and show the world at large just how talented we are and most of all show them how to we are leaders as well. So here we go and strike up the band i am now declaring all out war on PROCRASTINATION ON THIS SITE and not doing what we dream of doing and have been dreaming of forever. We all have goals and dreams but the one thing we are missing is action. Me included oh no I am in no means excluded from this as a matter of fact I include myself on this so there it is. OK now.....Your Move! 

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Striking a Balance (minor NSFW section)

Posted by Bill McCormick on October 26, 2017 at 2:00pm

I have read some intelligent, insightful, and meaningful posts up here. This is not one of those. This is just some shameless self promotion I hope you can enjoy.

First off, I recently licensed the IP for Legends Parallel, Pestilent, and Bob: Sins of the Son to Nerdanatix. They will be developing video games, printing and distributing the comics, and looking into other venues for exploitation, including spin off properties. 

This video is a primer designed to give game designers an idea of what they're getting into with Legends Parallel before they slog through the comics and scripts. It is WILDLY NSFW, but it's an accurate preview. It is also a lot of fun to listen to so crank it up and watch it on a big screen.

Legends Parallel Nerdanatix Promo from Bill McCormick on Vimeo.

Next up on my video jukebox today is a brief teaser for my trilogy, The Brittle Riders, which just dropped en toto via Azoth Khem. The basic idea is that the series starts with the death of every man, woman, and child on the planet and then gets kind of dark.

The Brittle Riders Teaser from Bill McCormick on Vimeo.

Lastly, but far from leastly (my post, my imaginary words), I give you Alokia The Kaiju Hunter. This is the only project I have coming out that is purely directed at teens. The crew hails from Japan, Serbia, and Chicago. I'm the Chicago part. This is early in development, we just finished the character designs so they match my script, but we're shooting for summer of 2018 to start regular issues.

It has a drunken gorilla king, so you know kids will love it.

Alokia The Kaiju Hunter Teaser I from Bill McCormick on Vimeo.

And that concludes my interruption of your day. I hope to see everyone at the Motor City Black Age of Comics Convention on November 18th.

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Possible Go Wrongs...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 24, 2017 at 9:00pm
Image Source: TV Tropes: The All-Devouring Pop Culture Wiki

Topics: Climate Change, Existentialism, Global Warming

Note: I'm writing a report and Power Point presentation on a project in MATLAB on Numerical Methods (Trapezoid Rule, Simpson's Rule and Gauss Quadrature, not that you asked), AND a homework on interpolation (joy). I will resume next Monday on All Hallow's Eve, for no particular superstitious or zombie apocalypse reason.

Tomorrow (October 7th, so this is long past), the EPA is expected to take a first formal step in repealing the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP), a regulation designed to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by approximately 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. This is a terribly irresponsible decision. Recent ferocious storms, intensified by warming oceans and air, remind us of the urgent need to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan is a sensible, flexible, cost-effective rule addressing one of one of the biggest sources of US carbon emissions, and one of the least expensive sources to control.

Notably, it appears from a leaked draft that the EPA does not base its proposed repeal on a change in policy goals, or on any of the usual considerations such as the rule’s costs, feasibility, or impacts. Rather, the EPA hangs its repeal hat entirely on a legal hook—the EPA now claims that the Clean Power Plan violated the law because it regulates “beyond the fenceline” of individual power plants—a claim that is directly contrary to what the EPA and the Department of Justice argued in court just last fall. With this legal sleight of hand, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt once again forsakes the mission of the agency he heads—to safeguard human health and the environment—to pander to fossil fuel interests.

As I've stated before: N = N0 * ert is the exponential growth formula. N0 = initial number; N = final number; r = 0.02 (growth rate for humans); t = years. With a little algebra, you can solve for t and find the population doubles in roughly 35 years, our current world population estimate at 7.6 billion. N = 15,256,782,730 (roughly) in 35 years. The problem with climate change and population is our politics like our enterprise are both myopically focused on business quarters and the next election cycle, not mid or the next century. More people simply mean more competition for limited resources, one of which - for LIFE and social stability - is potable water.

The poet T.S. Elliot is the author of the famous poem "The Hollow Men." How apropos a title to relate to this subject. You owe yourselves beyond my meager excerpts to read the full text here, Source: AllPoetry.com, other sources: Biography, Wikipedia

I

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

Remember us-if at all-not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

III

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man's hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this In death's other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone.

(Elliot's last, most quoted stanza)

V

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Scott Pruitt’s Cynical Move to Rescind the Clean Power Plan Ken Kimmell, Union of Concerned Scientist, President, Oct 9, 2017, 12:47 PM EDT

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Check out my latest book: Justine Mingana!

Posted by Ronald T. Jones on October 19, 2017 at 1:30pm

The peaceful occupation of Earth by the benevolent Calaar opened avenues of opportunity for Justine Mingana and hundreds of millions of other humans trapped in poverty. Mingana achieved what she never thought possible as a child: she became a starship captain. Another alien race arrived in Earth's skies, this one hostile and aggressive, offering a brutal contrast to Calaar altruism. Now, Mingana must make a show of loyalty to a new set of occupiers while pursuing a hidden agenda, one that may lead to the demise of her ship and crew. For the sake of Earth's liberation from the clutches of tyrants, Alien and human alike, Mingana is prepared to make that sacrifice...and she is just as prepared to kill.

https://www.amazon.com/Justine-Mingana-Ronald-Jones-ebook/dp/B071J97HYB/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1508438620&sr=8-1&keywords=Justine+mingana

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Oligarchy...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 20, 2017 at 5:24am
Image Source: Foundations of Government, Slide Player, Slide 5

Topics: Commentary, Existentialism, History, Politics

I let the previous post last Friday stand without any other comment. I'm also working on reports for three projects in graduate school. I have a limited amount of hope that things will change. It is partly the subject of today's commentary.

I read "Letters at 3 AM: 'O' is for Oligarchy" in the print version of The Austin Chronicle when I lived in Austin, Texas. As in the date in the online version, I remember reading it in 2010. The premises it raised have aged very well, unfortunately.

*****

The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.

So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.

This is not news, you say.

Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here's how they explain it:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power. Source: BBC News, Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy, 17 April 2014

*****

The U.S. government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country's citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern universities has concluded.

The report, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" (PDF), used extensive policy data collected between 1981 and 2002 to empirically determine the state of the U.S. political system.

After sifting through nearly 1,800 U.S. policies enacted in that period and comparing them to the expressed preferences of average Americans (50th percentile of income), affluent Americans (90th percentile), and large special interests groups, researchers concluded that the U.S. is dominated by its economic elite. Source: Business Insider, Zachary Davies Boren, The Telegraph, April 16, 2014

*****

Ganesh Sitaraman carried on this traditional observation of the obvious in The Guardian:

While the ruling class must remain united for an oligarchy to remain in power, the people must also be divided so they cannot overthrow their oppressors. Oligarchs in ancient Greece thus used a combination of coercion and co-optation to keep democracy at bay. They gave rewards to informants and found pliable citizens to take positions in the government.

These collaborators legitimized the regime and gave oligarchs beachheads into the people. In addition, oligarchs controlled public spaces and livelihoods to prevent the people from organizing. They would expel people from town squares: a diffuse population in the countryside would be unable to protest and overthrow government as effectively as a concentrated group in the city.

They also tried to keep ordinary people dependent on individual oligarchs for their economic survival, similar to how mob bosses in the movies have paternalistic relationships in their neighborhoods. Reading Simonton’s account, it is hard not to think about how the fragmentation of our media platforms is a modern instantiation of dividing the public sphere, or how employees and workers are sometimes chilled from speaking out.

Greece, the birthplace of our ideas on democracy as Rome was our ideals of a republic is an apropos historic comparison.

In my March 31 post, The Shattering, oligarchy wasn't mentioned, but implied. I observe the former head of the KGB, he and the other former members of the Politburo have abandoned the ideals of the Communist Manifesto. They don't appear at all interested in "sharing their wealth," but in its avaricious accumulation.

Perhaps their American counterparts have left the "quaint" notion of a federal republic.

Ventrella Quest Cartoon - Free Speech

"We have 'given them the store' of white supremacist bigotry, and our republic. I'm concerned apathy, racism, stupidity and tribalism may well not allow us... to get it back." The Shattering, March 31, 2017

*****

“The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

~quoted in the New York Times, April 9, 1944, Vice President Henry Wallace, Good Reads

Related links:

Facebook’s General Counsel to Testify to Congress in Russia Probe, Jonathan Allen, NBC News

Twitter, With Accounts Linked to Russia, to Face Congress Over Role in Election, Daisuke Wakabayashi and Scott Shane, NY Times

We, Oligarchy...#P4TC, August 2, 2015

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Mori's family adventure Kick-starter

Posted by Nelo Maxwell on October 22, 2017 at 11:30am
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2140728215/moris-family-adventures-kids-international-travel/descriptionMori’s Family Adventures is a family traveling book narrated by my son Mori. The series follows my family as we travel the world, enjoying family fun, and learning a thing or two about the regional cultures.Our goal is to get this book series in front of early grade school students who are just starting to read on their own. We feel that students this age have little to no cultural experiences do to the great cost of traveling abroad. Also the narrow educational direction we commonly see. Mori’s Family Adventures provides children and their teachers a median to show other cultures in an immersive way. The educational goal of the series is to expose different cultures to kids. Show the fun family activities their family can have at these locations. Lastly, to teach some historical information about the region, and get children excited about seeing new things outside of the U.S.https://youtu.be/aGV7QoUXHS0
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future dwelling technology

Posted by Arnold L. Johnson on October 19, 2017 at 10:07am

OK, my latest thinking. The quonset has dormers on each side which is connected to stacked shipping containers. The sea-cons can be porches or room expansion. The quonset ends are flat so you can attach dome-like extensions. I used an octagonal shaped dome in keeping with standard 90 degree building technology. And yes, you don't have to use shipping containers, but they are ready-made steel frames. And you could just as well dock your tiny house on the side of the quonset.

Someone asked me what kind of people would live in my dwellings. I am a bungalow person, smallish but bigger than a tiny house. How to live in a smallish house is living in your mind instead of living by your body. The body requires space and stuff, both of which can be costly. But you can do whatever you imagine, so make choices. Yoda could live with the Hulk (they both are green and powerful) but the Hulk (a big guy) changes into human (a tech stuff buff) who requires lots of space and Yoda ("mind" you) requires less space. If you figured it out, I'm am hooked on what can be built from available stuff today because even if you become super-human, housing design moves like a glacier. I'm just breaking the ice (for tea). You must enlist your powers and "built to suit."

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Polite Society...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 13, 2017 at 6:30am
Image Source: Cap Times, Amy Goodman, Dennis Moynihan related article

Topics: Commentary, Politics, Research

"An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life." Robert A. Heinlein

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre

On the night of October 1, 2017, a gunman opened fire on a large crowd of concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip in the State of Nevada, leaving 58 people dead and 489 injured. Between 10:05 and 10:15 p.m. PDT, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada, fired hundreds of rifle rounds from his suite on the 32nd floor of the nearby Mandalay Bay hotel. About an hour after Paddock fired his last shot, he was found dead in his room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His motive is unknown.

The incident is the deadliest mass shooting committed by an individual in the United States. The crime reignited the debate about gun laws in the U.S., with attention focused on bump firing, a technique Paddock used to allow his semi-automatic rifles to fire at a rate similar to that of a fully automatic weapon. Source: Wikipedia

  • The claim that gun ownership stops crime is common in the U.S., and that belief drives laws that make it easy to own and keep firearms.
  • But about 30 careful studies show more guns are linked to more crimes: murders, rapes, and others. Far less research shows that guns help.
  • Interviews with people in heavily gun-owning towns show they are not as wedded to the crime defense idea as the gun lobby claims.

Guns took more than 36,000 U.S. lives in 2015, and this and other alarming statistics have led many to ask whether our nation would be better off with firearms in fewer hands. Yet gun advocates argue exactly the opposite: that murders, crimes and mass shootings happen because there aren't enough guns in enough places. Arming more people will make our country safer and more peaceful, they say, because criminals won't cause trouble if they know they are surrounded by gun-toting good guys.

Is there truth to this claim? An ideal experiment would be an interventional study in which scientists would track what happened for several years after guns were given to gun-free communities and everything else was kept the same. But alas, there are no gun-free U.S. communities, and the ethics of doing such a study are dubious. So instead scientists compare what happens to gun-toting people, in gun-dense regions, with what happens to people and places with few firearms. They also study whether crime victims are more or less likely to own guns than others, and they track what transpires when laws make it easier for people to carry guns or use them for self-defense.

Most of this research—and there have been several dozen peer-reviewed studies—punctures the idea that guns stop violence. In a 2015 study using data from the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard University reported that firearm assaults were 6.8 times more common in the states with the most guns versus those with the least. Also in 2015 a combined analysis of 15 different studies found that people who had access to firearms at home were nearly twice as likely to be murdered as people who did not.

This evidence has been slow to accumulate because of restrictions placed by Congress on one of the country's biggest injury research funders, the CDC. Since the mid-1990s the agency has been effectively blocked from supporting gun violence research. And the NRA and many gun owners have emphasized a small handful of studies that point the other way.

"For your hands are stained with blood, your fingers with guilt. Your lips have spoken falsely, and your tongue mutters wicked things." Isaiah 59:3

More Guns Do Not Stop More Crimes, Evidence Shows Melinda Wenner Moyer, Scientific American

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Carbon Nanotube FET...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 11, 2017 at 2:24pm
Figure 1. A three-dimensional integrated circuit, made possible with carbon nanotubes (CNTs). The circuit senses and classifies ambient gases using a multilayered stack of devices that are connected by platinum wires known as interlayer vias. In the top layer, roughly 1 million CNT field-effect transistors (FETs) register a change in electrical resistance when the gas molecules adsorb on a CNT. The second layer hosts memory cells that read and store the signals created by the FETs just above them. The third layer contains another million FETs that process the sensor data and implement a machine-learning algorithm to identify the type of gas picked up. Conventional silicon CMOS circuitry on the bottom acts as an interface to external devices. (Adapted from ref. 2.)

Topics: Carbon Nanotubes, Computer Engineering, Nanotechnology, Quantum Mechanics

In 2013 graduate student Max Shulaker, his adviser Subhasish Mitra, Philip Wong, and their Stanford University colleagues built the first computer made entirely of carbon nanotube (CNT) field-effect transistors (FETs). 1 The achievement was eagerly anticipated. Even before their first incorporation into FETs in 1998, CNTs had been touted as a superior substitute for the silicon channel that shuttles current between the traditional FET’s source and drain electrodes.

The intrinsic thinness of single-wall CNTs—essentially graphene sheets rolled into hollow cylinders a nanometer wide—enables superb control over power dissipation in the transistor’s off state and allows the transistor to switch off and on with much lower energy consumption than is possible with any other material. Moreover, thanks to that one-dimensionality, which suppresses scattering, charge carriers in CNTs have a much higher velocity for a given electric field than in Si. (See the article by Phaedon Avouris, Physics Today, January 2009, page 34.)

The 2013 computer was modest: It contained fewer than 200 FETs, ran at a clock speed of just 1 kHz, and implemented a single instruction. Nonetheless, the instruction was a conditional statement that qualified the computer as “Turing complete,” able to make any calculation given enough memory and time. The achievement also reassured Shulaker, now a professor at MIT, and his Stanford colleagues that CNTs could form the foundation for a much more complex system.

The researchers have now built a prototype system that embodies a vision of a transformative computer architecture—one in which computing, data storage, and input and output technologies are each fabricated into two-dimensional layers that are built up into a 3D integrated circuit.2 Shown schematically in figure 1, the circuit consists of more than 2 million CNT FETs and more than 1 million memory cells. The components are divided among three layers—stacked on the same chip atop a layer of Si CMOS circuitry and interconnected by a forest of fine platinum wires.

The carbon nanotube integrated circuit goes three-dimensional R. Mark Wilson, Physics Today

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Our Dreams are not Big Enough

Posted by Christopher Love on October 9, 2017 at 12:41pm

It was a sunny hot day. It was an Alabama sunny hot day in August. I sat in the parking lot of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center debating to myself whether I should go thru with this.

 

After several minutes, I decided that I came this far, I might as well go all the way. So over my shorts and T-shirt, I placed the thin aluminum style suit on. Not much people noticed me. When I was done and zipped the suit up, I became very warm and unusually uncomfortable. I placed the other accessories on like an old Army pistol belt and boots. The suit was made to resemble a Mercury silver spacesuit. There were no african-american astronauts that were part of the Mercury 7 team, but a person can still dream. They fueled the imagination of many Americans regardless of race and gender.

As I proudly walked to the entrance of the Space and Rocket Center, I then noticed the stares. Little children were pointing their finger at me. All I could do was to wave back at them with a nervous grin.

 

About sixty years ago, other men wore similar suits like mine. The only difference is that theirs was the real McCoy and they were the real pioneers of this new frontier of space.

 

It started with a dream from individuals like Copernicus, Katherine Johnson and Werner Von Braun. They  had a dream and their contributions helped us to the land a man on the moon.

 

In pursuing their wildest dreams, there are setbacks and sacrifices. Many lives were lost in the launch pad for both the United States and the former Soviet Union.

 

But the dream didn’t die.

 

They learned from their mistakes and paid homage to those we lost who dared to believe.

 

The dream went on. From it, it launched new innovations and sciences. From it, we built a shuttle and then a space station where human beings has spent over a year in orbit. We have sent probes to Mars and to the very boundaries of our Solar system and beyond.

 

Those were big dreams.

 

As I walked through the rocket center taking video I would use later on, people began to come up to me to shake my hand. Some employees, who never saw me thought I worked there also. Every person I saw greeted me with a smile.

 

Soon my nervousness went away and I did what I determined to do.

 

My goal is nothing to compare with landing on the moon. But it’s still worthwhile. To show those that anyone, I mean anyone, can fly on a rocket or have impossible dreams. It becomes possible when you begin to believe that you can do it.

 

I left with a sense of accomplishment and pride.

 

From the video footage I filmed, I was able to craft a science fiction short film called Opportunity 7.

 

Dare to Dream.

 

-Christopher Love

 

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Evaporation Caveat...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 28, 2017 at 6:20am
Researchers at Columbia University created an evaporation engine, driven by bacterial spores that swell as they absorb moisture from evaporating water. XI CHEN

Topics: Environment, Green Tech, Research

"Caveat emptor is the only motto going, and the worst proverb that ever came from the dishonest stone-hearted Rome." Anthony Trollope

Please note I'm not quoting Trollope (an apropos name for our times as malapropism) as a critique of the study. All science is preliminary, in iterative steps. "Rome was not built in a day," and neither will sustainable energy solutions that will hopefully replace our current fossil model. It is unfortunate that our easy access to information via search engines have made us all attention deficit as a species and unappreciative of process, either political or scientific.

Technology that can tap into the renewable power of natural water evaporation could produce a huge portion of the nation's energy needs—at least theoretically (see "Scientists Capture the Energy of Evaporation to Drive Tiny Engines").

Prototype "evaporation-driven engines" generate power from the motion of bacterial spores that expand and contract as they absorb and release air moisture. If it could be done efficiently and affordably, the devices could provide more than 325 gigawatts of electricity-generating capacity, outpacing coal, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.

That, however, would require covering the surface of every lake and reservoir larger than 0.1 square kilometers in the lower 48 states, excluding the Great Lakes, with arrays of the devices. Obviously, that would directly conflict with existing economic and recreational uses, and raise a host of serious aesthetic and environmental concerns. Notably, interfering with evaporation on a large enough scale, across a big enough lake, could even alter local weather.

But study coauthor Ozgur Sahin says that the paper is more of a thought experiment designed to underscore the potential of the technology and the importance of advancing it beyond lab scale, rather than any sort of literal development proposal.

Evaporation Engines Could Produce More Power Than Coal, with a Huge CaveatJames Temple, MIT Technology Review
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Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 29, 2017 at 6:01am
Image Source: Seminar link below
Topics: Diversity, Diversity in Science, Education, STEM

I saw Dr. Oluseyi speak at the National Society of Black Physicists, Austin, Texas in 2011 (where I met Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg). I signed up to hear him speak again today, obviously scheduled as a pick-me-up for graduate students before midterms. We could all use it.

And there, at Tougaloo College, you had a breakthrough.

Yes.These three grad students from MIT and Harvard came to Tougaloo, where I was one of two physics students in 1986. They were all black physics students from the Cambridge area – and each of them thought they were the only one! They came to realize that kids from certain communities just have no idea that physics as a career exists. They decided they’d start the National Council of Black Physics Students, to help the most down-and-out kids in the country. So where did they go? Mississippi. They showed up on our campus.

Because of them, I ended up meeting recruiters from Stanford University that ended up accepting me to Stanford for grad school. In all of Stanford’s history, at that time, there were only two black professors in all of the six schools of natural sciences and mathematics. One was my PhD advisor, Art Walker, who was also the PhD advisor of Sally Ride. Just being in his presence showed me a different model of how I could be.

But in the end, Art’s support changed it for me. It was like two different lives. I ended up changing my name from James Edward Plummer to reflect how my life had changed so drastically. I wanted my middle name to reflect how I am. So my middle name is Muata and it means “He seeks the truth.” I wanted my first name to reflect what I want to become. My first name Hakeem means “wisdom.” And my last name is from the West African Yoruba people, and it means “God has done this.”

Rise of a gangsta nerd: Fellows Friday with Hakeem Oluseyi, TED Blog

NC A&T Seminar link: NCAT.edu/oluseyi
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Nano Mirror...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 27, 2017 at 5:59am
Credit: Joshua Edel

Topics: Optical Physics, Nanotechnology, Quantum Mechanics

Note: My study group is preparing for midterms next week. I give my apologies for what will be an erratic posting schedule. I'm merging two colloquialisms: drinking from fire hoses and eating elephants one bite at a time. I should resume posting normalcy - as far as grad school goes - the 9th of October, until finals week in December.

From last Friday's posting, it's obvious what I thought of the (lack of) humanity pursuing the deaths of millions to give tax cuts for the few. I'm glad for the moment the Affordable Care Act hasn't met the zombie apocalypse. I have no doubt like the pertinacious walking dead, they will try again.

Surface plasmons—collective, light-driven oscillations of electrons in metal—have given us stained glass, flat lenses, and home pregnancy tests. Now they bring us the mirror–window, a liquid mirror whose reflectivity can be tuned, or eliminated altogether, with an applied voltage.

Developed by researchers led by Alexei Kornyshev, Anthony Kucernak, and Joshua Edel at Imperial College London, the device makes use of gold nanoparticles inside a cell filled with two immiscible electrolyte solutions—one aqueous, the other oily. Dispersed throughout one phase or the other, the nanoparticles interact negligibly with light, and the cell is transparent. But when the particles form a dense monolayer at the liquid–liquid interface, their plasmon resonances couple to each other and they become optically reflective.

Now you see this nanoplasmonic mirror. Now you don’t.A tunable assembly of gold nanoparticles can go from reflective to transparent with the flip of a switch.Ashley G. Smart, Physics Today
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