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CHARACTER PROFILES: WHY THE DETAILS?

Posted by Ricardo Holliman on June 10, 2015 at 3:41pm

      

         What is Character Profiles? Character Profiles are descriptive details used to describe your character such physical characteristics; family background and history; Likes and Dislikes; Goals and Motivation. The question ask by a beginning writer is " Why The Details?

        Why do I have to go through such great lengths to describe this character? A paragraph or two will just do it. I can type it in Microsoft Word and get it over with. That is what I thought until I came upon the software Celtx.

            The Celtx version of doing character profiles is a challenge for beginning writers.   This software demands details  about your character that Microsoft Word does not.  Celtx break your character into different categories so they can appear more three dimensional. Check out this article on 2D vs 3D characters. 

http://changingminds.org/disciplines/storytelling/characters/2d-3d_characters.htm

          The thing I had trouble with is my Kollege Kids characters were two dimensional if you read the article. The Celtx version  of doing character profiles has challenged me to make these characters more three dimensional. It is time consuming and  you will have several writer block when doing character profiles in Celtx. However it is worth it.  Your character has depth to them and is more believable to your intended audience.  Invest time in your character profiles so you can know what type of story to tell with the characters you created. That is the reason why you need the details.

Be on the lookout for Part 2 of Character Profiles; Why the Details?

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Event Horizon Telescope...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 10, 2015 at 6:40am
The Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope sits atop the plateau of Chajnantor in the Chilean Andes, more than 5,100 metres high. To the left of APEX is the central region of the Milky Way, where the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* lurks. Image credit: ESO/Babak Tafreshi (twanight.org)


Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Atomic Clock, Black Holes, Einstein, Radio Telescope, Research


Astronomers building an Earth-size virtual telescope capable of photographing the event horizon of the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way have extended their instrument to the bottom of the Earth — the South Pole — thanks to recent efforts by a team of astronomers with participation of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany.

Last December, an international team of astronomers flew to the Southern Hemisphere: German, Chilean and Korean scientists led by Alan Roy of the MPIfR, traveled to Atacama, Chile, and American scientists led by Dan Marrone of the University of Arizona flew to the South Pole to arrange the telescopes into the largest virtual telescope ever built — the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT. By combining telescopes across the Earth, the EHT will take the first detailed pictures of black holes.

“The goals of the EHT are to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity, understand how black holes eat and generate relativistic outflows, and to prove the existence of the event horizon, or ‘edge,’ of a black hole,” says Dan Marrone.

Astronomy Now: Planet-sized telescope gives a sharp view into black holes
Research site: Event Horizon Telescope

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Chase Vapor

Posted by Corran Lindsay on June 8, 2015 at 8:13pm
Chase Vapor, is my potential animated series featuring a strong female teenager as its lead, is up for consideration at Amazon studios. If you follow the link you can vote for it and help improve its chances of actually getting made. You do have to sign up to vote, but it's free and would really help us out The more 5 star reviews and positive comments the better. http://studios.amazon.com/projects/79693#ratings/MiniBible/108741
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Computational Imagination...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 8, 2015 at 9:05pm
Image Source: Technology Review


Topics: Computer Science, Image Processing, Politics, STEM


This article grabbed me with excitement and I'll admit, kind of disturbed me as well. The very busy image above in the paper is Figure 13 for reference. I scanned the article for things like "AI"; "Artificial Intelligence" and found nothing, but 48 and 49 in the paper itself does reference two other papers in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, for the true believers in Skynet (it's a nerd joke - really!). However, this could be a milestone in image processing, and with the ubiquitous usage of cell phone videos as witness to malfeasance - police or criminal - this could be very important. The technology for facial recognition could be impacted by this advance, then I got concerned again since civil liberties were up for debate with the recent expiration of the Patriot Act and its replacement by the Freedom Act. With technology we walk a tightrope, thinning inexorably to dental floss.

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Imagine an oak tree in a field of wheat, silhouetted against a cloudless blue sky on a dreamy sunny afternoon. The chances are that most people reading this sentence can easily picture a bucolic scene in their mind’s eye. This ability to read a description of a scene and then imagine it has always been uniquely human. But this precious skill may no longer be ours alone.

Anyone thinking that these kinds of imaginings are far beyond the ability of today’s computing machines will be surprised by the work of Hiroharu Kato and Tatsuya Harada at the University of Tokyo in Japan.

Today, these guys unveil a machine that can translate a description of an object into an image. In other words, their computer can conjure an image of an external object not otherwise present. That’s a pretty good definition of imagination—in this case of the computational variety.

For sure, these computer imaginings are simple, sometimes confusing and often nonsensical. But the fact they are possible at all represents a significant step forward for computational creativity.

Physics arXiv: Image Reconstruction from Bag-of-Visual-Words
Hiroharu Kato, Tatsuya Harada

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A New Dark Ages...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 7, 2015 at 8:04am
Image Source: CBC Radio link below


Topics: Commentary, Climate Change, Democracy, History, Politics, Science, STEM


"History repeats itself, and that's one of the things that's wrong with history."

Clarence Darrow

The post title is very stark, but not a subject I haven't commented on before. My concern is, this one as far as existential humanity, may be our last.

It's hard not to look at Al Qaeda, ISIS/ISIL, The Tea Party, Right-Wing Evangelicals, Quiverfull, The Westboro Baptist Church and not see similarities: they are all primarily authoritarian, and afraid. Like celebrity chimps they are loud, demonstrative, craving and gaining attention; disrespectful of diversity and boundaries and in some extreme cases deadly. They are afraid of the changes in society and a sense of lost control. This is evidenced on social media and our forms of entertainment. Some high profile recent falls from grace - The Duggars as a part of Quiverfull, a recent example - have logged disappointing performances regarding religious orders in the public sphere in the eyes of more skeptical youth, that are fleeing the pews. The fearful thus gravitate to those who seem to have "the answers": simple, comforting and confirming their own hard-ingrained beliefs.

Fear: evidence may or may not agree with ancient texts, followers of which are operating in the realm of faith as well as culture. It can be a positive characteristic that unifies. There is nothing inherently wrong with that.



There is something inherently wrong when the louder primates force their cognitive dissonance on everyone else. Texas pushed through books last year that identify Moses as a Founding Father in defiance of sense and actual history. The problem being other states are now making their textbook purchases essentially based on land mass. CREATIONISM IS NOT SCIENCE, and I will continue saying that not because it's my opinion: it is simply fact. This lunacy is destructive and self-defeating to our survival as a nation. It's a matter of knowing what is real and reality and what is not; what to be concerned about to make rational decisions or not. We cannot make decisions on climate change, alternative energy solutions, infrastructure renewal because it goes against a dogma - a conservative-free market-libertarian ideology. Fun fact: Ayn Rand did not like libertarians. Demonstrably, or should I say not so: not a single circuit design; not a single Nobel laureate; not a single invention or industry innovation that has impacted the lives of millions or billions of people has come out of this faux sacred naval-gazing! I think it would be rude for anyone to interrupt a Imam, Priest or Rabbi to "correct the science" in a sermon based on ancient texts, but no such courtesy is reciprocated to the scientific community. It is the height of incongruity to fear and loathe science and technology, while relying on it for commerce, entertainment and diatribes. It is highly unrealistic to believe a nation at the forefront of technological advances can stay there forever on this path into willed ignorance. Knowledge is democratizing and ubiquitous, and science will be performed here, or somewhere else. The flow of currency and GDP will be clear evidence of this folly. It was the reason for the decline of Rome: we are its modern doppelganger.

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."

Karl Marx

"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience."

George Bernard Shaw

An enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight. It is therefore imperative that the nation see to it that a suitable education be provided for all its citizens. It should be noted, that when Jefferson speaks of "science," he is often referring to knowledge or learning in general.


CBC Radio: Science Under Siege, Paul Kennedy

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Hafu..

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 6, 2015 at 9:34am
Ariana Miyamoto - Miss Japan 2015, image source @ link below


Topics: Beauty, Commentary, Civil Rights, Human Dignity, Human Rights


The American enterprise has been emulated since "Exceptionalism" became a neologism in our lexicon. We may have also exported some of our evils.

Perhaps the indigenous population of the Japanese nation don't quite realize they are an amalgamation of several migrating tribes of humanity: Chinese, Korean, Southeast Asian (see link). I'm speculating, I really don't know. Masutatsu Oyama - the founder of Kyokushin Karate - was born Choi Young-Eui in Gimje, South Korea during the Japanese occupation. Wikipedia One of his books - Mastering Karate - traced martial arts to the African continent. We are ALL from the African continent, all aspects and hues of humanity started there as the tropics near the equator was the best incubator for "man-thinking": homo sapiens; tools and opposable thumbs; weapons for defense and offense Going from tree dwellers to hunter-gatherers, we settled in villages with agriculture. City-states emerged, fueled by architecture, writing and trade. Eventually, some of us migrated eastward and northward, probably driven by curiosity, deficit attention spans; greed and power. Over time, our outward appearance due to ultraviolet radiation and Melanin, changed with respect to our environments.

Over time, we thinking men created our own mythologies about our unique tribes. Our deities generally looked like us; our culture and jurisprudence fashioned on not getting struck by their wrath. Slowly, verifiable evidence measured higher than dogma as far as survival. The Scientific Method was born.

Perhaps there are no relatives of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, or at least nowadays in minimal numbers. Perhaps there is no cultural memory of the indignities paid to people like George Takei (Mr. Sulu of Star Trek), when his entire Japanese-American family was interned during World War II for the crime of being Japanese. Or maybe, that's the point here.

Mythologies are self-deluding, and become echo chambers and fill in gaps that actual histories could occupy. One begins to believe the "internal press" about one's culture; one's people...one's exceptionalism.

Ariana Miyamoto is exceptionally beautiful. The fact her parentage is Japanese and African American is irrelevant to that reality. "Hafu" is the Japanese neologism for half-Japanese, similar to light-skinned or Mulatto in the United States. As I said, we've inadvertently exported our sins and dirty laundry.

Beyond tribalism, we should become true cosmopolitans - residents of the Earth and by extension the universe - and part of the tribe called human.

The beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself
Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, BBC News, Tokyo

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Alice's Wonderland...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 4, 2015 at 9:06pm
Image Source: ESA Rosetta Blog


Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Comets, Rosetta, Spectrograph


A close-up of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by NASA's ultraviolet instrument surprised scientists by revealing that electrons close to the comet's surface—not photons from the Sun as had been believed—cause the rapid breakup of water and carbon dioxide molecules spewing from the surface.

Since last August, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft has orbited within a hundred miles of the comet in this historic mission. The spectrograph onboard, named Alice, specializes in the far-ultraviolet wavelength band and was developed by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). Alice examines light the comet is emitting to understand the chemistry of the comet's atmosphere, or coma. A spectrograph is a tool astronomers use to split light into its various colors. Scientists can identify the chemical composition of gases by examining their light spectrum. Alice is the first such far-ultraviolet spectrograph to operate at a comet.
NASA's Alice ultraviolet (UV) spectrograph, seen here during construction, is aboard the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft. Credit: Southwest Research Institute

"The discovery we're reporting is quite unexpected," said Alice instrument Principal Investigator Dr. Alan Stern, an associate vice president in SwRI's Space Science and Engineering Division. "It shows us the value of going to comets to observe them up close, since this discovery simply could not have been made from Earth or Earth's orbit with any existing or planned observatory. And, it is fundamentally transforming our knowledge of comets.

Phys.org: Alice instrument's ultraviolet close-up provides a surprising discovery about comet's atmosphere

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Cartoon Physics...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 5, 2015 at 6:37am
Image Source: Amazon.com


Topics: Comic Books, Physics Humor, Physics and Pop Culture


Comic books are our modern mythology. We await with baited breath the donnybrook also known as Batman v Superman, though we don't yet know why the "Super Friends" start their inevitable bromance with a grudge match. Avengers: Age of Ultron answered who else was "worthy" enough - Vision - to lift Thor's hammer - forged in the heart of a dying star, which kind of suggests a Brown Dwarf or White Dwarf, meaning nothing in the universe worthy or not should be able to lift a teaspoon of Mjolnir (except apparently, a nail on the wall of Dr. Jane Foster's apartment in "Dark World" - seriously, look again). Technically, Vision came to life from it, so a one-armed curl shouldn't be past his AI abilities. Of course, there are others who lift "the smasher" - including the Hulk, who heretofore couldn't no matter how mad he got!

Currently in vogue on television are series like Agents of Shield (with the exception of enhanced humans and demigods, pretty terrestrial in its physics); Arrow (essentially, Batman with a bow); Gotham (that is so dark, it's a wonder Bruce Wayne or Jim Gordon WANT to stay there); and of course the breakout hit, the societal, self double entrendre: The Flash.

The series ended (spoiler alert) with a lot of cockeyed physics, like running at twice the speed of sound, colliding with a single proton in an accelerator and opening a wormhole so his nemesis - The Reverse Flash (a really pissed-off psychopath that comes back to create The Flash to KILL him - ahem: keep up), so he could go home. Home in this case, the 25th Century, bypassing Kirk and Picard's paltry epochs by two centuries where they apparently have time travel, but no cows for hamburgers, if Rev is to be "believed." The cliffhanger was Barry doing the heroes sacrifice of running into a black hole opening above Central City - that in real world physics would have killed most of the population with its radiation and ground the Earth into hamburger meat, Flash included. Ray Bradbury would be proud of the echo from his "A Sound of Thunder," an apocryphal foundation for time travel stories since its inception.

Of course, it's all hokey fun. Doing a serious and somewhat tongue-in-cheek search on the actual physics of superluminal (i.e. faster than light speed travel) resulted an interesting paper and related article [1, 3]; some humorous posts [2, 4], also tongue-in-cheek funny. Humor is always a good hook for STEM lectures and teenagers.

I enjoy the shows just like anyone else. For any story line to sell its audience, there is the usual suspension of belief in the verisimilitude of the fictional world and its "laws of cartoon physics." Alas, poor Yorick - our laws are binding. Even the Batman - my favorite, since he was for me the most believable - can't escape the laws we're subject to on a daily basis - like all of us mere mortals subject to Entropy, he wears out too. Life without magic is kind of a drag, but there's still much wonder in reality.

For any of these shows, I become that kid on 25th and Cleveland Avenue in Winston-Salem, NC that used to enjoy a nerdy Saturday with my best friend - trading and reading comic books, something sadly I don't think kids do much of anymore. I'm trying not to be the sour physics guy pointing out every impossibility in a movie or TV series - as I've gotten older, I'm better in large groups at keeping my mouth shut.


Smiley Faces

1. Physics arXiv: How superluminal motion can lead to backward time travel
Robert J. Nemiro and David M. Russelly
2. Geek: Quantum physics just solved one of the great paradoxes of time travel, Graham Templeton
3. Scientific American: Time Travel Simulation Resolves “Grandfather Paradox”, Lee Billings
4. PBS News Hour: Spider-Math and Bat-Physics: Science in a Superhero World, Rebecca Jacobson

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Sci-Fi Writer Ursula K Le Guin launches broadside on Amazon's 'sell it fast, sell it cheap' policy

Posted by William Hayashi on June 4, 2015 at 12:00am

The grande dame of fantasy Ursula K Le Guin has weighed in forcefully to the debate about Amazon’s role in publishing. In a blogpost on the site Book View Cafe, entitled “Up the Amazon with the BS Machine, or Why I Keep Asking You Not to Buy Books from Amazon”, the American author has spoken out against what she describes as the company’s increasing influence not only on the bookselling market but also on which books get published, promoted and read. Her fierce conclusion is: “Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.”

Click here for the full story

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Cosmic Old Faithful...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 2, 2015 at 10:28pm
This artist's impression illustrates how high-speed jets from a supermassive black hole would look. Credit: ESA/Hubble, L. Casada (ESO)

Topics: Astrophysics, Black Holes, Cosmology, Einstein, General Relativity

Powerful jets of material spewing from the edge of monster black holes may be more likely to arise where two galaxies have merged together, a new study suggests.
Like a cosmic version of Old Faithful (the famous Yellowstone geyser), some black holes at the center of galaxies will spew jets of material into space that stretch for thousands of light-years. You can see an illustration of what these gushing pillars look like in a video of the galaxy crash discovery.
Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, new research suggests these jets are more likely to be found in galaxies that are the product of galaxy mergers.

Scientific American: Galaxy Crashes May Give Birth to Powerful Space Jets, Calla Cofield and SPACE.com

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Quantum Spin Liquid...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 1, 2015 at 11:08pm
Data taken with synchrotron diffraction indicates a short range, honeycomb-based nanostructure, which is the basis for the anomalous magnetism of Ba3CuSb2O9. NCNR neutron scattering data confirmed this structure and provided evidence for the resulting quantum spin liquid.
Credit: H. Sawa/Nagoya University
View hi-resolution image


Topics: Ferromagnetic, Fluid Mechanics, NIST, Quantum Mechanics, Spin, Superconductivity, Superfluidity


Back from a "blog break." I saw this article last month, but delayed it until the first due to a series of work-related classes (tiring, but very good I might add). I anticipate a few more, as I have that and two family reunions this summer. Not complaining about my people, but as far as my families, they could stagger these...just saying.

Trivia: Today is my wife's birthday; yesterday we went to Shadows Restaurant - her favorite. It's also (to be seen) the expiration of the Patriot Act. CNN and 24-hour cable news was born on this day in 1980. Since I can recall the era of three major network channels, a few UHF stations and television going off at midnight, I don't know if that's a good thing or not. Due to the massive amounts of competition with channels that produce movies on demand, music and reality shows, cable news has trended towards yellow journalism. Happy 35th birthday CNN, for better or worse...

Gaithersburg, Md.—An international team of researchers including scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found what may be the first known example of a "spin-orbital liquid," a substance in a never-before-seen quantum mechanical state.

The discovery, reported May 4, 2012, in the journal Science, has been sought for years by the physics community. Though the team does not posit immediate applications for the material, its properties relate to the same quantum effects that give rise to superconductivity, in which electricity flows through a material with no resistance, and superfluidity, in which a liquid flows across a surface with no friction.

The term "spin liquid" can be deceptive, as it describes a substance that in many ways fits our conventional understanding of a solid. Indeed, the material the team studied looks like a chunk of earth, but at the molecular level, it is made of copper, oxygen, barium and antimony atoms arranged in a crystalline lattice structure. In this particular structure the copper atoms exhibit unusual properties generally associated with liquids. Specifically, their magnetic orientation remains in a constant state of flux.

When materials with magnetic atoms—like iron—solidify, they generally do so in crystal structures whose atoms have an orderly arrangement of magnetic orientations. (When magnetic atoms interact "ferromagnetically" you get a refrigerator magnet.) Because magnetism stems from a quantum property in the atom's electrons called spin, another way of saying this is that the spins in these atoms' electrons all line up in a single direction. Ferromagnets feature an orderly, static arrangement of electron spins.

NIST Contributes to Discovery of Novel Quantum Spin-Liquid, Chad Boutin

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That Darn Diversity

Posted by Marcus Haynes on May 30, 2015 at 3:50pm

My website, "The Ratchedemic" continues to discuss issues as they arise in the world around us. Today, with all the recent comments about Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch and Jaden Smith possibly (probably) playing Static, diversity in comics has once again become a highly discussed issue. So of course, I gave my own take on it here. Check it out! 

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Nanorods and Photovoltaics...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on May 22, 2015 at 11:14am
FIG. 1.
(a) Morphology of the NRs with 5–10 nm Ag nanoparticles. (b) Magnified image of 1(a). One NR with 5–10 nm Ag nanoparticles. (c) SEM image of the reference sample without Ag nanoparticles.
Citation: J. Appl. Phys. 117, 193101 (2015); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4921424


Topics: (100), Nanoparticle, Nanorod, P-Type Silicon Substrate, Photoluminescence, Photovoltaic, Raman Spectroscopy, Wurzite


Abstract:

The test structures for photovoltaic (PV) applications based on zinc oxide nanorods (NRs) that were grown using a low-temperature hydrothermal method on p-type silicon substrates (100) covered with Ag nanoparticles (NPs) were studied. The NPs of three different diameters, i.e., 5–10 nm, 20-30 nm, and 50–60 nm, were deposited using a sputtering method. The morphology and crystallinity of the structures were confirmed by scanning electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy. It was found that the nanorods have a hexagonal wurtzite structure. An analysis of the Raman and photoluminescence spectra permitted the identification of the surface modes at 476 cm−1 and 561 cm−1. The presence of these modes is evidence of nanorods oriented along the wurtzite c-axis. The NRs with Ag NPs were covered with a ZnO:Al (AZO) layer that was grown using the low-temperature atomic layer deposition technique. The AZO layer served as a transparent ohmic contact to the ZnO nanorods. The applicability of the AZO layer for this purpose and the influence of the Ag nanoparticles on the effectiveness of light acquisition by such prepared PV cells were checked by reflectance and transmittance measurements of the AZO/glass and AZO/NPs/glass reference structures. Based on these studies, the high-energy transmittance edge was assigned to the ZnO energy gap, although it is blueshifted with respect to the bulk ZnO energy gap because of Al doping. It was also shown that the most optimal PV performance is obtained from a structure containing Ag nanoparticles with a diameter of 20–30 nm. This result is confirmed by the current-voltage measurements performed with 1-sun illumination. The structures show a plasmonic effect within the short wavelength range: the PV response for the structure with Ag nanoparticles is twice that of the structure without the nanoparticles. However, the influence of the Ag nanoparticle diameters on the plasmonic effect is ambiguous.

American Institute of Physics:
Si/ZnO nanorods/Ag/AZO structures as promising photovoltaic plasmonic
E. Placzek-Popko1,a), K. Gwozdz1, Z. Gumienny1, E. Zielony1, R. Pietruszka2, B. S. Witkowski2, Ł. Wachnicki2, S. Gieraltowska2, M. Godlewski2,3, W. Jacak1 and Liann-Be Chang4

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Unexceptionalism...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on May 24, 2015 at 10:00am

Topics: Economy, Education, Exceptionalism, OECD, Politics, United States, Singapore


Exceptionalism: It's not even really a word, it's a mythology we tell ourselves, over and over like a meditative mantra. As with most naval gazing, we tend to believe our own inner press instead of examined facts and data. Self-myth is Linus's security blanket.

It traces back to Tocqueville, even though it's obvious we've retained the old world's sins: classism, racism, the ability and willingness to wage war.

"In recent years scholars from numerous disciplines, as well as politicians and commentators in the popular media, have debated the meaning and usefulness of the concept. Roberts and DeCuirci ask:

"Why has the myth of American exceptionalism, characterized by a belief in America’s highly distinctive features or unusual trajectory based in the abundance of its natural resources, its revolutionary origins and its protestant religious culture that anticipated God’s blessing of the nation—held such tremendous staying power, from its influence in popular culture to its critical role in foreign policy?" Wikipedia

However: of The 10 smartest countries based on math and science, America is exceptionally left out of the top ten...we tie with Italy at twenty-eighth.

What we're exceptional at is pseudoscience like creation science/museums and anti-vaxxers, the inane devotion to the testing industrial complex (making a killing on standardized tests in all 50 states) that Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Finland, Estonia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada (the only one from the North American CONTINENT) have no relevant equivalent in this continued lunacy. As Ken Ham builds an ark and sues to only hire young Earth creationists - legalizing a patently discriminatory hiring practice; Bill Nye the Science Guy is crowd funding a solar sail. Go figure...

Mark Twain once famously remarked: "there are lies, damned lies and statistics," but this is not a lie, damnable or otherwise. Callously, politicians are telling people what they want to hear versus what they need to; making them comfortable to merely hold onto their positions for 20...30+ years and accomplish nothing.

There is still good work being done in high tech in this country. That good work is being done by engineers and scientists that are daily...getting older. They will eventually be pushed out (sadly), or retire. National prosperity is not the result of magical thinking. To continue our leadership and advances in STEM fields, the current workforce will have to have replacements once they can no longer produce at the same level as they did when they were younger; when there was industry, commerce and manufacturing that demanded their brilliance. Our university professors are in the same boat. They can only train students based on demand, and that demand cannot increase when our employment is freely traded across oceans to meet the bottom-line of "bean counters" oblivious to the real world between lattes.

We are exceptionally prone to conspiracy theories: false links to vaccines and autism; every shooting a "false flag" operation; the common nomenclature for military exercises - the exercise code name + YY (e.g. "15") - made into "the boogie man" in Texas by Alex Jones ditto head nincompoops that confuse the strict rules regarding research with disparate links of search engine results after an obvious drunken stupor.

As we advance in technology, there is a fear of it. Everyone has become Al Qaeda, The Tea Party, the Unabomber or ISIS: who all want us all in huts, cabins or caves; women covered head-to-toe, not driving or working, barefoot and pregnant (always) and living in some Shangri-La parallel to the voices loudly booming in their heads.

Hopefully, Robert De Niro's sage yet colorful advice to his co laborers in the arts is not appropos to the rest of the nation. We're sliding down an incline, slowly...inexorably...sliding. Rock bottom will hurt unless we start back up the incline.

I'll be out in a class. My 1,962 post and coincidentally the year of my birth. See you 1 June.
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Quantum Biomimetics...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on May 20, 2015 at 3:12pm
Image Source: Technology Review and Physics arXiv


Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Biology, Biomimetics, Computer Science, Humor, Quantum Computers, Quantum Mechanics


This reminded me of the Old Star Trek episode "The Devil in the Dark." It was unique in that it posited the Horta wasn't carbon-based (as we are), but silicon-based life, and a mother. Talk about "seek out new life." The write up and the paper are intriguing in that it does speculate something we altogether have never encountered, and if we did - or, in this case, create it, what then? What would we call it; what would it call us (mom/dad, or irrelevant/obsolete?), and how would we deal with our uncomfortable insignificance as a species in current 21st Century geopolitics? It's Wednesday, and I probably shouldn't think too deeply on such things. I just hope I haven't broken the three rules of Gremlins, and inadvertently fed the trolls...

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Computer scientists have long known that evolution is an algorithmic process that has little to do with the nature of the beasts it creates. Instead, evolution is set of simple steps that, when repeated many times, can solve problems of immense complexity; the problem of creating the human brain, for example, or of building an eye.

And, of course, the problem of creating life. Put an evolutionary algorithm to work in a virtual environment and it doesn’t take long to create life-like organisms in silico that live and reproduce entirely within a virtual computer-based environment.

This kind of life is not carbon-based or even silicon-based. It is a phenomenon of pure information. But if the nature of information allows the process of evolution to be simulated on an ordinary computer, then why not also on a quantum computer? The resulting life would exist in virtual quantum environment governed by the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics. As such, it would be utterly unlike anything that biologists have ever encountered or imagined.

But what form might quantum life take? Today we get an insight into this question thanks to the work of Unai Alvarez-Rodriguez and a few pals at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. They have simulated the way life evolves in a quantum environment and use this to propose how it could be done in a real quantum environment for the first time. “We have developed a quantum information model for mimicking the behavior of biological systems inspired by the laws of natural selection,” they say.

Physics arXiv: Artificial Life in Quantum Technologies
U. Alvarez-Rodriguez, M. Sanz, L. Lamata, E. Solano

Related Link
Science Alert:
An Electronic Memory Cell Has Been Created That Mimics the Human Brain
Fiona MacDonald

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Dark Matter Shine...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on May 21, 2015 at 6:39am
An artist's concept shows a black hole eating material from a nearby star. Researchers say its possible dark matter swirling around a black hole could radiate gamma rays that could be seen by telescopes.
Credit: An artist's concept shows a black hole eating material from a nearby star. Researchers say its possible dark matter swirling around a black hole could radiate gamma rays that could be seen by telescopes.


Topics: Black Holes, Cosmology, Dark Matter, General Relativity


Dark matter circling the drain of a massive black hole could radiate gamma-rays that might be visible from Earth, according to new research.

Dark matter is five times more plentiful in the universe than regular matter, but it does not emit, reflect or absorb light, making it not just dark but entirely transparent. But if dark-matter particles around black holes can produce gamma-rays (high-energy light), such emissions would give scientists a new way to study this mysterious material.

The process responsible for creating the gamma-rays is somewhat counterintuitive, because it seems to defy two common assumptions: that nothing can escape from a black hole and that there's no such thing as a free lunch.
A 3D computer model of what the dark-matter gamma-ray signal might look like around a black hole. Because the particles are orbiting around the black hole (left to right) the signal is only visible on one side.
Credit: Jeremy Schnittman

Space.com: Black Holes Might Make Dark Matter Shine, Calla Cofield

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Pairing Without Superconductivity...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on May 19, 2015 at 8:14pm
Schematic diagram of the single-electron transistor. The long green line on the right of the diagram is the gate. The two green lines connected to the yellow structures are the source and drain. The nanodot is the isolated green line between the source and drain. (Courtesy: Guanglei Cheng et al./Nature)


Topics: Electrical Engineering, Nanotechnology, Quantum Mechanics, Superconductivity


Electron pairing without superconductivity has been seen for the first time by a team of physicists in the US. Confirming a prediction made in 1969, the electron pairs were spotted in strontium titanate using a single-electron transistor. The observation could provide useful insights into the nature of superconductivity, and perhaps even help in the design of new high-temperature superconductors.

In a conventional superconductor, electrons with opposite spin come together to form Cooper pairs that pass through the atomic lattice without scattering. This interaction occurs because the presence of one electron pulls in positive ions from the lattice, and this in turn attracts the next electron. These pairs then interact with each other to form a condensate from which individual electrons cannot be easily scattered. For this to work, however, the electrons have to be relatively close together. This is not the case in strontium titanate, which has a very low electron density yet is a superconductor at temperatures below a critical temperature (TC) of about 300 mK (millikelvin).

Physics World: Electron pairing without superconductivity seen at long last, Tim Wogan

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Soft Matter Physics...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on May 14, 2015 at 8:07pm
The humble soap bubble – a whole new field of physics. Photograph: Alexander Boden/flickr


Topics: Materials Science, Soft Matter Physics, Theoretical Physics


Respectfully, in memory of Sir Sam Edwards...

Many of the objects in the everyday world around us are squidgy when squashed, flow easily, or are very sensitive to changes in temperature. These sorts of materials – ranging from paint to frogspawn, from yogurt to snot – fall into the category of ‘soft matter’: materials whose dynamics are governed by timescales of seconds rather than hugely longer or shorter times.

The study of these systems, which are often complex and heterogeneous, grew out of the more traditional field of condensed matter physics. Whereas condensed matter physicists of the early-mid twentieth century traditionally studied in minute detail the properties of simple, one-phase materials such as copper or silicon, as soft matter grew as a discipline the range of material types studied expanded enormously.

There are two towering figures, both theoretical physicists, who are usually identified with the birth of this new field: Pierre Gilles de Gennes and Sir Sam Edwards. Both were trained as conventional theorists, both saw the richness of the newer materials and how the mathematical tools they were familiar with could be taken over to the study of this new class of materials.

It was the Frenchman de Gennes who won the 1991 Nobel Prize for this work with a citation that read “for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymers”. But his friend and friendly rival the Welshman Sir Sam Edwards, who died last week at the age of 87, was equally active and influential; many felt he was unlucky not to share the prize.

The Guardian: The birth of soft matter physics, the physics of the everyday,
Athene Donald

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