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Broken Windows, Shattered Dreams...


Dear Mayor Bill de Blasio,





I share your concern as I as an African American father, have not one, but two sons that I am constantly concerned about.



The concern did not start with Eric Garner, nor Mike Brown, nor Jordan Davis, nor Trayvon Martin, nor Renesha McBride, nor Amadeu Diallo, nor Sean Bell, nor Jonathan Ferrell nor a host of others that have become the current bodies in a dark, efficient version, according the the Guardian, of high-tech lynching.



My concern started when I had an Afro - an impressive one, like your son's - when I was fourteen years old in Winston-Salem, NC.



I pulled out a pick to comb my Afro (had one then). It was one of those folding-handle jobs: one side red, the other green, Black Nationalist colors. I was too young to know that or how it mattered. What I was doing was fixing my “do,” getting my ‘fro right, looking at model cars and toys in King’s Department store as my mother shopped for clothes; reminiscing when this was my whole focus in the world.



He was big: bald receding hairline, hair on the sides like Larry of “Moe, Larry and Curly” but greasy and laid flat with flakes of dandruff. He had a pot belly lapping over his large belt buckle. I was a little over five feet tall and 110 lbs. He was over six feet and outweighed me by about 200 lbs.



“What you doing, boy?”



I was startled, and turned around. I was as respectable as my parents had taught me to be in situations like this: “Nothing,” I said, and turned away.



“What’s in your pocket?”



“My pick!” and frankly, that’s all that was in my pocket. This man, who hadn’t announced who he was or why I was getting the 4-1-1, was beyond annoying me.



“Up against the wall!” he barked.



The wall was again, a shelf of model cars and toys only kids would like. “This isn’t much of a wall,” I quipped.



I was grabbed by the throat and left arm, shoved hard into the toy shelves. An avalanche fell on my ‘fro denting my styling. At this point, I was in shock.



“Who are you, man!?”



“Store detective…” He flipped me like an omelet. I was being bodily frisked…against my will.



“I didn’t steal anything,” I said, “the only thing in my pockets is a pick you prick!”



“SHUT UP, boy: I knows nigras steal!” Source: Old Tapes



Welcome to America: this is the America Dr. Maya Angelou thought had "grown up" after the election of our first black president. This is the America that a representative from South Carolina in the seat of Congress shouts "you lie" disrespectfully during a State of the Union Address. This is an American congress that costs $24 billion in a government shutdown. This is a congress that used the fears of ISIS/ISIL and Ebola to win the midterms that has now "mysteriously" vanished from the news cycle.



This is also, the America where "Broken Windows" became the shared pseudo academic delusion and pursued public policy. It is the spiritual and literal father of "Stop and Frisk"; "Stand Your Ground."



Welcome to the America I have not escaped with extensive and ongoing training and a career in a STEM field - physics. Welcome to the America that causes my pulse to rise, my heart to skip beats when either son doesn't answer their cell phones. These are young men, mind you, that have never committed a crime; never had a record; never seen the inside of a jail cell, yet lately they, I, their mother are all guilty of "existing while black," which covers all the colloquialism bases. Our existence, over a long, painful history that IS America, is an indictment to the American Mythology of Exceptionalism. Every story, every bloodbath, every riot, every acquittal of our murders by citizens or the police only lessens my lifespan: I am constantly and consistently concerned to NOT become the next grieving parent!



Welcome sir, to my America as I, and your children will either witness or sadly experience it, and the ever-present fear of being a part of this darkly efficient, ever-repeating tragedy.



"Black Like Me," John Howard Griffin


"Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison

















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A Golden Spike...

Image Source: Interesting Engineering

Having had the pleasure of lunch in San Antonio with a good friend and scientist I admire along with his wife Alicia and mine (Cassandra), Mark pointed out STEM is difficult, it takes effort to master it and good scientists are usually busy doing...GOOD science. Popular shows have their place in framing the importance of science in our daily affairs, but the best most of us can hope for is a general appreciation for that import, and a vision not to hinder its growth and continuance. 

We used to do great things.

Then, we gave voice to a warped skepticism; a clear evidence of the abhorred vacuum of nature being filled by the inexperienced, the uneducated: the loud, obnoxious nincompoops with a microphone and an audience of willfully ignorant malcontents that sadly: vote. In return for this political Baal worship, they are rewarded with policies against their, and the country's long term best interests.


There are some, still to this day, who doubt the moon landing ever happened. Never having lived during the era or too young to have witnessed it for themselves, their evidence are web articles of dubious expertise and sourcing; Internet videos that can be fabricated on laptops and uploaded to web sites NOW: neither sites, laptops or URLs existed during those days.

The technology we use today is a direct spin off from the space program. The integrated circuit was initially developed due to reducing rocket payloads. Newtonian physics is what we use at the moment to get satellites or astronauts into orbit. Our 238-year experiment in self-government seems to work on cartoon physics at the moment.

We've driven a golden spike into the trail leading inexorably into the future leading to the first manned landing on Mars; the mining of asteroids and Helium 3 on a moon base and more of us having the "Overlook Effect" as we become a space faring species. It will be a paradigm shift technologically, politically and sociologically. Only myopia, fear, draconian budget cuts, conspiratorial and magical thinking will drive us into another inexorable, tragic direction: back to tribalism, the caves and dissolution of the nation state.

We used to do great things. Maybe we can do it...again.
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Al-Jabr...

Image Source: Kevtak Algebra Readiness Classroom and Homework page

This reminds me of a student in one of my first math classes I taught at the high school level - Algebra 1 - stating emphatically he "didn't need math to be a mechanic." A visit to the web page for UTI, and that "troubleshooting" and electronic technology involves a considerable amount of math managed to refocus him successfully (the Pre-Calculus class was a bit older, and concentrated on graduating - I didn't need to do much "pep-talking").

A little history for perspective: we use it to balance chemical equations; the first high school physics you'll ever learn before you run into Calculus will be based on this foundation.

Image source: Famous Scientists

Muhammad al-Khwarizmi

Baghdad in the 9th century was a global center of culture and trade, a hub connecting India and China with the Mediterranean and Europe. It was a rich city, a center of learning, and scholars from all over the world would come to study at the House of Wisdom, a renowned library and academy where Muhammad al-Khwarizmi lived as a scholar.

Ideas traveled in consort with commerce along the roads of Baghdad, and al-Khwarizmi embodied the wide range of the city's global vision. The Muslim scholar expanded upon the work of Greco-Roman astronomers such as Ptolemy, created one of the oldest surviving treatises on the Jewish calendar and employed and popularized the Hindu number system of 1, 2, 3... (which, because of al-Khwarizmi's work, we now refer to as the Hindu-Arabic numeration).

But his most influential work dealt with methods to solve complete equations. In "The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing," al-Khwarizmi demonstrated how to simplify equations by adding or subtracting an identical quantity from both sides. For example, adding 4x to each side of 6x = 40 - 4x reveals that 10x = 40. This "act of completion" - al-jabr - gave mathematicians a new tool: algebra.

From Time, Special Editions: Great Scientists - The Geniuses, Eccentrics and Visionaries Who Transformed Our World, Mathematics, page 21.

And, in the spirit of irony as well as completion: x = 4 (today). Smiley Faces
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Due to a question asked me on Twitter, I've refreshed and republished this post. This article was also posted on the 4RV Publishing Blog.on 12/09/12


So, you've decided you want a unique book cover for your book. You don't want it to look like every other book on the shelf or web browser.

You hop on Twitter or Facebook and put some feelers out, searching for a cover artist or designer. You get dozens and dozens of responses, from both amateurs and professionals. How do you know you are going to get what you want and that it's unique?

 First you must learn a few key terms.


1- cover designer

Designers are trained in typesetting, photo-manipulation, and composition. Though rare, some designers are also trained photographers and/or traditional artists. It's accepted, once an image is altered it is a 'new work', and by law, that is true. All it takes are three distinct changes. If you are looking for something more original than manipulated parts of stock photos that could potentially be used on another book cover, be sure to tell the cover designer you are not interested in using stock imagery. A cover designer may or may not be trained for what you are looking for.


2- cover artist

In years past, publishers hired a cover artist to do the visual artwork and a cover designer to do the typesetting and layout. In today's tough job market, more and more designers are doing both the cover image (see above) and the design under one job. On that same note, more and more illustrators or cover artists are tackling the job of design. It is prudent to verify, before trusting your book to anyone that the person you hire is trained and skilled to do what you want for your cover. After all, your cover will be the first impression potential readers will have.


3- custom vs original

Many designers and websites that boast cheap 'custom' cover designs or art can be misleading. Again, let's look at the laws regarding art. By law, if an image (art or design), is altered in three ways, it is a new work. If an artist or designer manipulates two images by combining a figure from one and changing the color of something from another, all they have to do is add text. By law, that is a custom cover. That may be acceptable to you. Designs like this tend to be a cost-effective way to dress a book. However, some authors want a more detailed, more story-relevant cover, that does not include mixing existing stock imagery. If you are in that group, be sure to hire someone who insures the art is original, not simply custom. You'll likely pay more, but as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.


How do you recognize the difference between cover art and cover design when looking through portfolios?

A cover artwork should be able to stand alone and still tell a story. A design, though it may look awesome and fitting with the title and cover text, if presented alone it would just be a cool visual. Does the portfolio use photographs? And if so, were they taken by the designer or a photographer they hired? Or, if you are looking for artwork, does the artist also do the design aspect of the cover. How well does their design compliment the art?

These are all questions that should be answered before money changes hands.


If anybody has questions as to what is considered original vs custom, or the difference between cover design & cover art, please leave comment or contact me at my signature links.


Onto wrapping up the next book :-D


Until next time ...


This post edited by Grammarly*


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


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'Endless Shards of Jazz for a Brutal World'.

That's the sub-title of the movie. In a way, it actually signifies the concept of the film itself: which shall be a collage of scenes and sentiments, feelings and ideas, dramatic poems and songs,  guitars and blood, nooses and belts, sun and moon - all attempting to affix themselves on one large canvas whose sole goal is to express the pain of a life that feels and sees too much.

Punk, Vampires, & Afro-Futurism: Director Dennis Leroy Kangalee & Numa Perrier
Punk, Vampires, & Afro-Futurism: Director Dennis Leroy Kangalee & Numa Perrier

The past 7 months have been rather overwhelming.  Not because of the work load but because of the challenges I had finding the right actress for my upcoming feature film, Octavia: Elegy For A Vampire, a drama about a 150 year old African-American vampire who wants to die due to the world's cruelty, apathy, and seemingly eternal racism.  The film was conceived as a cinematic poem and "theatrical-cubist-drama" that meditates on identity, colonization, and the spiritual battle Black people throughout the diaspora must undergo as we push further in the 21st century - a world that seems, once again, to have lost its "center." It's not that there are no morals.  It's that there is no consciousness.  And man's derangement has corrupted the very blood flowing through his veins.  This alone frightens the vampires in my film.  But it's no so much the blood that the vampires need -- it is a re-affirmation of who they are, a reminder of their identity, a reiteration of truth in the world.  Truth is blood.  Without it, we are nowhere, no one...no thing. 

It was hard getting actresses' to commit to such a low budget, yet artistically luxurious project. The script alone either attracted or confounded actors.  It subverted the "vampire-horror" genre, emphasized the horrors of the real world as opposed to some adolescent fantasy world and it zeroed in on the pain of being alive in a world that you know hates you.  As is the case with my dramatic productions, there would be an emphasis on language, dialogue, and emotional connections between everyday observations, history, and political crisis.  The role of Octavia demanded someone unafraid, intelligent, and open enough in their emotional life to connect and explore themselves and the themes contained in the script.

I am happy to say that NUMA PERRIER, the Los Angeles based actress, producer, and artist has been cast my leading lady and has taken up the challenge gallantly and with a great deal of finesse, passion, and confidence.  Three qualities Octavia herself must possess.

This past weekend we shot the teaser for the film and held a promotional publicity-photo session of the punk band, the Savage Paws, Octavia's rock & roll trio - featured in the film.  Slowly, it all started to come together.  It is taking shape. It has become real.  We got our sonogram. We are closer to realizing our vision and illuminating the script; bringing this incredible story to the screen, and introducing a new character for our times.  We will stop at nothing to express it all.

Principal photography commences late February-early March, 2015.

More updates to follow.  A teaser will be released next week - along with our next crowdfunding campaign.

(c) Photo of Writer/Director Dennis Leroy Kangalee and Numa Perrier as "young" Octavia with her blood-stained Stratocaster guitar with custom finish ("Silverback") by award-winning photographer & cinematographer Erik Swain; wardrobe and styling by Nina Fleck; Rockefeller Center November 23, 2014. 

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Wake Up, Jibo and Pepper...

In case you're wondering, Pepper's on the left; Jibo on the right

While we slept, Rosie came into being.

I read the article about JIBO in an issue of Popular Mechanics on the way back to New York from Austin, Texas. An excerpt:

Breazeal stands a few feet from Jibo and says, in a voice only slightly different from the one she uses to talk to humans, "Wake up, Jibo."

Nothing.

Breazeal looks at the man.

"Wait," he says, adjusting, fiddling. "Hold on. Okay. Go ahead."

Again Breazeal looks at her robot and says with purpose and hope, "Wake up, Jibo."

The robot's round head twists on its base, a remarkably human wiggle. A white circle appears on its round screen, like an eye opening. In a voice like an animated movie character—cute, cheerful, but not treacly or grating—Jibo responds, "Hello, Cynthia!"

Pepper is our first C-3PO (fluent in 17 languages); associating JIBO naturally as R2-D2's progenitor. Pepper uniquely will be the first robot that can "read" our emotions and tailor it's conversation to you.

JIBO is apparently not an acronym, and looking up the definition online can vary from the profound to the profane. All of this, JIBO and Pepper will come with a price: that is the price of accepting something "new"; strange, different, without immediately fearing it for the sake of its uniqueness. It is that fear of technology that keeps us backwards, tribal and far behind than we ought to be. These are the things that occur while we sleep.



For a friend who has an acute interest in robotics: Parama Roy. Remember her name.



Beta Boston:
Robot startup Jibo unveils a multi-purpose 'social-bot' for the home
Scott Kirsner

IndieGoGo: JIBO, Worlds First Family Robot. 4,800 Pre-Sold!
(and, $2,287,609 raised in a $100,000 initial crowd-funding goal)

That's Really Possible:
Presenting our first real R2-D2 and C-3PO: JIBO and Pepper!
Glyn Taylor

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Bio Circuits...

Illustration: Christine Daniloff/MIT (yeast cell images from National Institutes of Health)

Researchers have made great progress in recent years in the design and creation of biological circuits — systems that, like electronic circuits, can take a number of different inputs and deliver a particular kind of output. But while individual components of such biological circuits can have precise and predictable responses, those outcomes become less predictable as more such elements are combined.

A team of researchers at MIT has now come up with a way of greatly reducing that unpredictability, introducing a device that could ultimately allow such circuits to behave nearly as predictably as their electronic counterparts. The findings are published this week in the journal Nature Biotechnology, in a paper by associate professor of mechanical engineering Domitilla Del Vecchio and professor of biological engineering Ron Weiss.

The lead author of the paper is Deepak Mishra, an MIT graduate student in biological engineering. Other authors include recent master’s students Phillip Rivera in mechanical engineering and Allen Lin in electrical engineering and computer science.

MIT News: New device could make large biological circuits practical,
David L. Chandler

#P4TC: Bio-Computer

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clone, charley no.5

Story seeds, go for it.

Saw uTube vid about viable heart grown from stem cells, a full face transplant. These are what we are allowed to see. Who knows how far we've really come. Implanted organ anti-rejection device, you open a hatch and pop in a small capsule. Organic nanos adjust the body to except new DNA streams. Talk of consciousness transfer and live donors. The medical world has become an industry, a business with a dark underbelly. There is hope for a few and merciless terror for others. Bodies like cars and OEM replacement parts. The critics bash the science by the uncovered mishaps, the egos of ones who can pay to live forever and coined a new word "donor nation".

There was a hospital incident, confusion, intercom voice to evacuate. Guy gets dressed runs out, doesn't know where he's going. Bums on the street direct him to a shelter. No ID, no name, too many questions, sits in lobby watching reruns of Six-million Dollar Man and Robocop. Has flashbacks, flees out the door in anguish screams. No special powers or abilities, an ordinary guy...............

A space ship on a long journey. The suspended animation device has been outfitted with a slew of clone bodies. The idea is to keep someone conscious during the whole trip to run the ship, record and experience. An object strikes the ship, the mind transfer device turns transceiver, picks up an assortment of human souls, all the clones animate. The ship's computer becomes parent, referee, and god..............

Man discovers that photos of people contain a part of the soul. Indians knew this, they warned us. He rigged a way to access the photo soul and record it's experiences. Then he wrote a book about traveling the world in an envelope, the sea in a bottle. He destroyed all data when he recorded a photo soul's experience in a copy machine, a paper shredder and a photographer's studio fire. Today he reads books with no pictures.

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A Democratic Technocracy...



Bernal Sphere interior, complete with California-style wine and cheese party, and human powered flight in the lower-gravity area near the axis. Painting by Rick Guidice courtesy of NASA. Source: National Space Society



A Democratic Technocracy I’d define as "a representative democratic republic of elected officials independent of outside financial interests with experience in and/or an appreciation of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to effectively govern a nation and global economy exquisitely dependent on STEM."



More in the embed/link below as well as my observations of the movie "Interstellar."

Snarky Commentary 3 by Reginald L. Goodwin

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Out of the Office...



As in past breaks, please enjoy all the previous posts.

Short observation of the announced Executive Action on Immigration Reform: Pass a bill. Yes, at 844 pages, Senate Bill 744 is a hefty thing, but that's why you hire staff to read it and give you the "Cliff Notes" summary. It would also help if the congress worked a sizable amount of a year like every other American. I don't expect the bill's current form to survive a House committee without amendments. Its form will naturally change.


That's politics: the art of compromise that through social media atomizing us into the very factions George Washington warned about in his 1796 Farewell Address has become lost. We've become tribal, "E pluribus unum" a quaint Latin phrase; "United States" oxymoron and national poetry, not reality.

We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means.

Chapter 1, Section 24, in the Princeton University Press translation (1976)

Variant translation: War is merely the continuation of politics by other means. Carl von Clausewitz, "On War," Source: Wikiquote

Horror vacui: "nature abhors a vacuum" and so does politics in this post "Citizens United" and McCutcheon oxymoronic era. We're making fascism inevitable and "rational"; Oligarchy a natural progression from our laziness as an electorate to be informed; to participate and to actually shape the agendas of the "collectivist conspiracy" also known as self-government.


Spending time with friends and family. Blogging will resume 3 December. Peace.
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Spidey and van der Waals...

Figure 2 from the paper

Three frames from a video (electronic supplementary material, movie S1) showing a 70 kg climber ascending a 3.7 m vertical glass surface using a synthetic adhesion system with degressive load-sharing and gecko-inspired adhesives. The time between (a) and (c) is about 90 s and includes six steps.



Geckos, when not shilling for insurance companies, are most known for their climbing abilities that let them scale walls effortlessly. Thanks to their biology, geckos have one major advantage over humans who want to move vertically: they are small, and their bodies are light, so their natural adhesive just has to be good, not great. But a team of scientists from Stanford University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering have now one-upped the gecko, creating a hand-sized adhesive surface that allows humans to vertically scale glass walls.



I don't plan on rock climbing sheer faces of office buildings any time soon, but the fact they've figured this out (without the proverbial radioactive genetically enhanced spider) is pretty neat!



Popular Science:
Scale a Glass Wall With Gecko-Inspired Adhesive on Your Hands, Kelsey D. Atherton

Royal Society Publishing:
Human climbing with efficiently scaled gecko-inspired dry adhesives
Elliot W. Hawkes, Eric V. Eason, David L. Christensen, Mark R. Cutkosky

Wikipedia:
van der Waals Force
van der Waals Equation

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3D Topological Insulator...

Purdue University's Yang Xu inspects devices made from topological insulators under a microscope before electrical measurements are made on the samples. (Courtesy: Purdue University/Ting-fung Chung)

Researchers in the US say that they have made the best 3D topological insulator to date. The material is called bismuth antimony tellurium selenide (BiSbTeSe2) and could be of fundamental importance for testing a number of condensed-matter and particle-physics theories. The material could also find use in spintronics devices and be used to build robust topological quantum bits (qubits) for quantum computers.



Topological insulators are materials that are electrical insulators in the bulk but can conduct electricity on their surface via special surface electronic states. "Most topological insulators made to date have not been completely insulating in the bulk, because of impurities (unintentionally introduced during material synthesis or processing) that doped the bulk and made it conducting," explains Yong Chen of Purdue University, who led the research. "Our topological insulator appears not to conduct at all in the bulk but does so only at its surface."



The researchers worked this out by measuring how thin flakes of BiSbTeSe2 of various thicknesses conducted electricity. They found that the conductance of different samples was almost independent of their thicknesses. Such behaviour is completely different to that seen in normal 3D materials, in which conductance is proportional to sample thickness.



Physics World: New 3D topological insulator is the nearest to perfection yet
#P4TC: Hopping To Open Bandgap

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Source Credit: http://www.npr.org

Article by Charles Pulliam-Moore

Last month Marvel Studios announced the roster for some upcoming features. In addition to Ant-Man and a female-led Captain Marvel film, Marvel's Kevin Feige confirmed that on November 3, 2017, the studio planned to release one of its longest-rumored projects: The Black Panther.

Wesley Snipes portrayed Blade in 1998 and later in the film's two sequels. Halle Berry has reprised her role as Storm in every X-Men film since 2000. Depending on which of the Iron Man films you're watching, either Terrence Howard or Don Cheadle is moonlighting as War Machine. Most recently, Anthony Mackie played sidekick to Captain America as the Falcon.

The thing that makes the Black Panther exciting isn't really his race, it's where he's from – the great nation of Wakanda.

A secretive and isolationist country, Wakanda possesses the world's largest deposit of vibranium, a vibration-absorbing metal that is exceedingly valuable for its technological applications. (It's also the substance that composes Captain America's shield.)

Wary of conflict and foreign exploitation, Wakanda shut out the rest of the world, choosing instead to become a largely self-sustaining society. Through Wakanda, Marvel toyed with and subverted stereotypical depictions of Africa as "wild" or "exotic."

Instead, Wakanda was a futuristic African nation that had never been conquered or touched by colonialism.

--------------

An Interesting read.

Full Article on NPR:  http://n.pr/1tF85oW

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Source: Link below

Note: Dr. Holt represented New Jersey, but hey: we're close enough! Okay, he was actually a plasma physics person, but you get the drift. Go with the bit...

Rush Holt, a physicist, educator, and eight-term Democratic member of Congress, has been named the new CEO of AAAS (which publishes ScienceInsider). He will succeed Alan Leshner, a neuroscientist who is stepping down this winter after leading AAAS since 2001.


Holt, 66, has represented a New Jersey district since 1999, but in February announced he would not seek another term. Although not known for sponsoring legislation, Holt has earned kudos from both Republican and Democrat colleagues for being an effective, behind-the-scenes advocate for additional funding for research and science education. He was part of an unofficial, bipartisan “physics caucus” in Congress that, at its peak, totaled three members who held physics Ph.D.s.

Holt was a vocal—but often lone—advocate in Congress for reviving the Office of Technology Assessment, a well-regarded in-house think tank for legislators that Congress abolished when Republicans took control in 1995. He admitted that it was an uphill battle, but felt the fight was worth waging. “I would say that most members of Congress value science and respect scientists,” he told ScienceInsider in February. “But I don’t see more scientific thinking evidence-based, critical thinking.”

And now...there are none.

"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." Carl Sagan



Science Mag: Rush Holt, physicist and congressman, to lead AAAS, Jeffrey Mervis

Tomorrow: A Democratic Technocracy

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LakeSim...

Source: Last link in third paragraph below

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

A hundred years ago, one out of every five people lived in urban areas. By 2050, that number will balloon to over four out of five.




This rapid urbanization presents significant problems to the world. Even a modest annual population growth of three or five percent can mean thousands of new inhabitants, and each new resident will require energy, transportation, potable water, food and other infrastructure services that strain finite resources.



Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago are developing tools that merge urban design with scientific analysis to improve the decision-making process associated with large-scale urban developments. One such tool, called LakeSim, has been prototyped with an initial focus on consumer-driven energy and transportation demand, through a partnership with the Chicago-based architectural and engineering design firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Clean Energy Trust and developer McCaffery Interests. LakeSim began with the need to answer practical questions about urban design and planning, requiring a better understanding about the long-term impact of design decisions on energy and transportation demand for a 600-acre development project on Chicago’s South Side—the Chicago Lakeside Development project.
Chicago Lakeside : A technology infused community from McCaffery Interests on Vimeo.

More Videos: Chicago Lakeside Development Project
Argonne National Laboratories: Designing Future Cities, Justin H. S. Breaux

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The Shadow Knows...

Image Source

The Shadow knows (or, at least "they" do).



"They" know without any critical thinking skills, reason, logic or investigative training. "They" know without any expertise that climate change is a hoax (even write books of pseudoscience on it), get reelected with committee appointments in congress over environmental regulation. Clean air; clean water; survival of the species: no problem! I guess the Department of Defense can scrap that whole pesky, fact-based road map.



The moon landing was faked, "they" say (and a few sadly, trained in STEM). "They" know, despite having never worked at NASA, or in my case at near seven-years-old, having my Saturday morning cartoons interrupted the day before (I quickly got over it). Never mind if it had been, the Russians would have broadcast our shortcomings, gloated at our obtuse obfuscations, then traveled there themselves just to prove the superiority of their system over ours.



Almost immediately after the Sandy Hook Massacre, these speculators spun tales of government "false flag operations"; "the children were actually alive"; "the parents were in on the plot," etc. Boorish, insane and insensitive to the families that everyday: their losses are quite real. The truth is, fear, bamboozle and boondoggle are quite profitable; bankruptcy the only muzzle provocateurs would ever respect.



There were 1,500 inadvertent leaks with the Manhattan Project (you know, the one that built the nuclear bomb), and we're to assume not a peep has come out from a so-called faked Moon Landing?



The Keystone pipeline may actually increase gas prices at the pump by 20 cents per gallon as its done in the Midwest despite the most optimistic propaganda; the purported "thousands of good, blue collar jobs" may only number in the hundreds; instead of making us energy independent, we'll see Canadian shale processed in Texas refineries and put on ships out to the global open market, but no matter. We're being sold a bill of goods by consummate, pathological liars and con artists cum "elected" officials. Instead of reasoned debate, we get: birth certificates...death panels...votes against what was a market-based solution from the Heritage Foundation...UFOs and government cover-ups...Apocalypse...demonic possession requiring telecommuting exorcism (now a state senator despite a colorful military record)...Bigfoot! All fanciful and colorful; worrisome that there is no distinction from reality and fantasies for some citizens determined to propagate them.



When China eventually sets up camp on a new moon base and spin off the world's first trillionaires from the Helium-3 mineral wealth abundant on the lunar surface that will make fossil fuels obsolete (as well as the billionaires profiting from it), I'm sure "they'll" have another explanation: the Chinese (will have) faked it! The profits, political and economic leverage however, will be quite real and felt here as well as globally. Ignorance won't be pleasant.

As humorous as this post attempts to be, my observation is we're addicted to "reality TV"; becoming un-moored from actual reality and facts; prone to the bill of [not] goods snake oil salesmen sell that poses as "information" supporting our worldviews, warped or otherwise to ensure they remain in or gain power.

History bears no evidence adherence to fantasies ever generating, in the long term, national prosperity.



Skeptic:
Conspiracy Theories: Who, Why and How, Michael Shermer and Pat Linse
Skeptical Science: The History of Climate Change

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Hi All -

My name is Martin Reese and I have recently re-launched a new and improved Kickstarter for the short live action fantasy film Mulogo and His Quintuple of Trouble. The story deals with a young wizard's apprentice from Kush who unwittingly recites a spell from a forbidden book of magic and conjures up a powerful five-headed dragon. The dragon is more than eager to make him pay for his mistake. Our Kickstarter will run until December 15th.  You can check it out  at this link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1549181393/mulogo-and-his-quintuple-of-trouble-a-magical-shor?ref=category  We humbly ask for your support of this project. If we want more of us featured in positive roles in science fiction and fantasy films then we have to prove that we will support films that feature us in such roles. We have a great creative team and cast in place. All we need is your help. Thank you for any support you are willing to give.

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