Kepler-186f, shown in this artist’s concept, is the first Earth-sized planet discovered in its star’s habitable zone. Credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I read the agreeable and insightful blog by Bro. Clifton McMillan Jr. some thoughts came to mind.

http://blacksciencefictionsociety.com/profiles/blogs/my-personal-warning-concerning-technology-and-preparing-for?xg_source=activity

The show Revolution deals with this, as well as, many other media presentations. I am very much into technology, but I have been knowing what he writes for decades.

One of the things that I promote is everyone having a frame of reference from which to understand/overstand reality. Mine is a Afrocentric one-a balance of old and new, past-present and future being cyclical, logic and intuition in harmony and a dissertation worth of many other ideologies.

With that being said, it gives me a different view of things. People's reliance on technology to the point of forgetting basic survival and trade skills is by design. We were mostly rural folks in our beginnings here. We knew about bartering, trade crafts and the whole. We were lured into cities by promises of an easier life for our children and ourselves.

Families in rural areas could support themselves because they controlled their own means of food production. You could have large families of 10-20 people and get by. You could barter for goods and service you did not produce with neighbors. We built our own homes. I remember my mom telling me how my grandmother added a room to her house by herself.

It was much more limited living in cities. Whites controlled food production, most of the jobs and we paid rent for substandard living conditions. Those were some of the major things that facilitated the break down of Black families. After making it more and more difficult for Black men to make livable wage they offered Black women monetary support, if they got rid of the Black men. Hence the welfare system. Welfare was already in place for White women who lost their husbands to war and other misfortunes. Our caveat was to break up with each other in order to survive. Always different rules for us having access to that which was available to them.

The amount vagrancy laws and such that they created just for us and other well known injustices made it possible for us to adopt an unofficial slogan in our communities as stated by Papa Pope in the TV show Scandal, " We must work twice as hard to accomplish half as much as White folks"(paraphrase).

My point is this, Yes we can accomplish whatever we desire, but we have to be ever mindful that out sense of time, production schedule, resources and delays cannot ever be compared to Whites and Asians. They do not operate with the level of intentional distractions - both internal and external - that we operate with, so we cannot place ourselves within their frame of reference when plotting our goals . We have a different view of fairness, work ethic, spirituality and logic. It is imperative that we start to overstand that being "different" is not a four letter word(profane). There IS such a thing as "acting Black" just as there is such a thing as "acting White" that is devoid of the narrowly analyzed, conditioned, negative, Pavlovian responses we spout out when we hear those terms.

Fact, billions of dollars are spent researching, categorizing and exploiting African culture. IF we were all the same, then there would be no reason for the Europeans here and in Europe and the Chinese/Japansese to spend such large sums of money. They would already know because it would a part of their way of thinking.

We have unique gifts that we use daily, but don't see them as such, because we think it is a part of everyone's way of thinking, despite the "others" only giving lip service to it and we being the only ones living by them.

Arabs in control of the regions of Egypt do not know how the pyramids were built. Europeans have sent their best and brightest and most advanced equipment and could not figure it out. So have the so-called smartest folks in the world, the Asians. That leaves us.

Within our physical, mental and spiritual DNA are the origins of civilization and the still labelled mysteries of the ancient world. Info that Whites and Asians, again by spending what could amount to billions of dollars, will use to advance their future. They study and exploit our past for their future progress while conditioning us to "forget the past and look to the future" All of the present and future is a modification of the past.

If we are spending our waking days trying to imitate and assimilate then we will never be able to BE ourselves, just a poor imitation of "others".

Despite us thinking we need to get with their program to progress, we are literally holding ourselves back and limiting ourselves by working within their box. Even outside their box is still using their box as a frame of reference.

We have a cirlce. Our own circle, from which to overstand reality. One that is filled with the solutions to our problems of self-hatred, economic, political and social stagnation and psychotic reliance on peoples that will never appreciate who we are because doing so will jeopardize their power.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

― Frederick Douglass

Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)

To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined, named, created and spoken for by "others".

Unconditional Love to my Sisters and Brothers always and forever,

...the Calm before the Storm

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10203527247562219&set=vb.1245249671&type=2&theater&notif_t=like

Words, I swear to god the trouble they've caused. I awake every morning with questions that torment me. The who, why, how, when of everything unanswered. They taught me to read and write but were more interested in content and context, what I read or didn't read. They taught me to recognize what the marks on paper meant, actually it was an initiation into the foolishness of words. Starting with children's books I learned to open my mind to the foolishness to come. I didn't know words could lie so unashamedly. Behind the mask of ego and motive, like a magicians slight of hand, the amusing joke, I'm doubled-over in laughter while going to my slaughter. Words can kill, damn, I thought words were innocent, some fool said "if".

Words are coined for schools of thought. The more immersed in the school the more serious the words. For a truth, I tell you this surely must be the truth because I so thoroughly believe it to be true. Others from the first written to the contemporary have verified it to be so and all other words are incarnations of evil set to confuse or destroy the believers of the truth. Why isn't the truth itself is destroyed, why the believers of the truth are destroyed? It is because words for and against must occupy the same space. We don't care about the question in question, we care about the words. Oh, how we revere words.

Words are a formula expressed to convey and communicate to others but in the fact that a person can communicate one thing and think another, words are highly suspect. The alien with a big zipper on his forehead, unzipped to reveal a big honking eye, his jaw automatically locked, the full spectrum of his data stream into my mind and I knew his intent, motive and reason, not a word was spoken. I felt like god had descended and swept away years of nonsense, the years of interpretive equations for every occasion and defensive quips to hide my fears. Oh the elation of pure knowledge that stopped all the human foolishness that has enveloped me. I am sure I must tell others.

Words, just words, like other words. My cousin James was abducted by aliens, he said. Oh, they had something about that on TV the other night. What you been smok'n mon? I am a _______________ and we don't believe in that, if you read the _____________you'd know god's word. God's got a mouth now, has lips, speaks words. His words, even if you repeat them are powerful words.

The mind is powerful in how it perceives and believes, conceives and receives, can also deceive and be deceived. Words themselves are the power. They strike the mind through the eye ports, the ear port, the mouth port. Thus we are mostly blind, deaf and dumb by reason of all the words we are bombarded with and the constructs of their definitions we exist in.

He's well read, is a man of letters, has a way with words, is a word mister, a word smith, is a walking lexicon and a con-artist. He is who said it first, coined the word, defined the word and redefined the expression. It's all about the words. Words are the real weapon. Like in Star Wars and every street fight, you play the dozens, can't settle it, then break out the fisticuffs or light sabers or guns. I see we can't settle this with our knowledge of the force (words), have to use the elegant weapons of a more civil time, bashing with stones, swords, throwing bullets, arrows, rockets, packets of erroneous data and viruses, sanctions, all the other things we do to each other because our words have less power that another's words. And it is because our words do not match our reasons and motives. The same is true for both sides. How in the heck can we move forward if our words were true? Both sides ask the same question. On this planet, words are the problem.

A picture speaks a thousand words. We should all be artist. There would be less need to speak. Oh, I forgot, we don't see eye to eye either.

Robot suit: An exoskeleton on display in Brazil is designed to be worn, and controlled, by a paralyzed person.

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

Left: Snapshot of the simulation system. The (20, 20) type carbon nanotube (CNT) combined with two graphite sheets (cyan) solved in a periodic water box represents a nanometre water channel, and a polymer-functionalized nanoparticle (NP) is driven through it by an external electric field. Right: The NP structures with different polymer length and number, and the polymer terminal is charged (green).

Nanotech Web: Determining the translocation of nanoparticles

List your name here to win a FREE signed copy of American Specter!

Five winners will be chosen at random on May 1, 2014.  

Ahem: #9 is kind of big, so be careful!

Source: Physics Database (10 Free Physics Problem Books)

Direct link to books:

1. Problems and Solutions in Elementary Physics
2. Review Problems for Introductory Physics
3. 1000 Solved Problems in Modern Physics
4. Problems and Solutions in Statistical Physics
5. International Physics Olympiad Problems and Solutions
6. Problems in General Physics
7. Mechanics Revision: Problems and Solutions
8. Problems and Solutions: Statistical Physics of Particles
9. Quantum Mechanics: Problems and Solutions
10. Problems and Solutions on Solid State Physics, Relativity and Miscellaneous Topics

Gravitational Waves Mystery May Be Solved Using Powerful Lasers

The ripples from violent cosmic collisions can be felt far across the universe, and thanks to a new, sensitive detector expected to start collecting data next year, scientists might be able to see evidence of those gravitational waves from Earth for the first time.

When two neutron stars (remnants of supernova explosions) merge or when a black hole merges with a neutron star, the reverberations of the merger can extend throughout the cosmos. Light, however, only tells us so much. To learn more about the mass and motion of the collision, astronomers want to use gravitational waves, ripples in space-time created during these massive crashes.

Next year, astrophysicists are set to switch on one of the most sensitive gravitational-wave detectors ever created. The observatory is called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO, for short). It originally had six observing runs between 2004 and 2010, and has been offline for half a decade to make upgrades. The return, its backers say, will be worth it. [Photos: Hunting Gravitational Waves with LIGO]

"It opens us up to [viewing] a larger number of astrophysical events," said David Reitze, the LIGO Laboratory's principal investigator and director. One improvement will be better sensitivity in lower frequencies, which will let astronomers look for black holes of between 100 and 500 times the mass of the sun if they exist.

A new documentary about LIGO, titled "LIGO, A Passion for Understanding," is set to premiere on Space.com April 15. You can watch it on Space.com or directly from the filmmaker Kai Staats here: http://www.kaistaats.com/film/ligo/.

From the Big Bang to big star explosions

Gravitational waves hit the headlines in March when the scientific instrument BICEP2 (short for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) found the first direct evidence of cosmic inflation, or the huge expansion of the cosmos that happened shortly after the Big Bang.

LIGO, however, searches for waves at higher frequencies, in the 10 hertz to 10 kilohertz band. The primordial waves discovered by BICEP2, Reitze said, are 20 orders of magnitude lower in frequency.

While LIGO was not really designed to look for primordial waves, scientists did search for them. Researchers described what was then the most accurate upper limit on the primary gravitational- wave background in high frequencies. The results were published in a 2009 issue of the journal Nature in 2009 (and have since been superseded by BICEP2, Reitze said.)

Another prominent result came when scientists measured how round pulsars — super-dense, tiny, spinning remnants of supernovas — are by tracking asymmetries on their surfaces. "If it has a bump and the bump is big enough, it will generate a gravitational wave," Reitze said.

Measurements of the Crab Nebula's pulsar by LIGO yielded no "mountains" higher than one meter (3.4 feet). "Certain pulsars, are even better, with less than a millimeter high," Reitze added.

Stopping for trains and earthquakes

LIGO originally consisted of two interferometers (telescope receivers that work together) at Hanford (near Richland, Wash.) and one in Livingston, La. The $205 million advanced LIGO has one interferometer in each location, with the third one going somewhere off continent — likely India. The government there is calling this project "one of the hallmark science detectors," Reitze said, and site evaluation is underway.

Wherever the interferometer goes, it has to be a region that is not too prone to earthquakes, lest the sensor get mixed up. Despite advanced stabilization technology, shaking does happen. "And we monitor the shaking to make sure it doesn't corrupt the data," Reitze said. [Watch the trailer for "LIGO, A Passion for Understanding"]

There's a procedure at Hanford and Livingston to stop science work when earthquakes occur. Observations at Livingston also must stop temporarily if a 50-car cargo train rumbles by on a track about 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) away.

"There are automatic protocols (using sensors and software) which monitor earthquakes and take the interferometers out of 'science mode' during seismic disturbances from earthquakes," Reitze said.

Each interferometer works by injecting a laser into a vacuum system, which splits the beam in half to put the resulting beams at right angles to each other. Each beam goes to mirrors about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) away, which reflect back.

The gravitational waves cause tiny but measurable distortions in the laser beams that cause a "changing interference pattern" in the photosensors that read the laser reflections, Reitze said. "In comparative scale, if you take the nucleus of an atom and take its diameter and divide that by 10,000, that's the type of a distance change we're looking at."

LIGO's capabilities will be 10 times more sensitive than before in searching for binary neutron star mergers, and it will be better able to pick up on many other cosmic phenomena as well – such as black holes and supernovas. The principal funder was the National Science Foundation, and the California Institute of Technology leads laboratory operations.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Quantum computers could benefit from the latest breakthrough in atomic physics. (Courtesy: Shutterstock)

Physics World: Single-atom gates open the door to quantum computing

Universal Greetings to everyone on this site:

I watched the brother's rant just now, and my first issue is "Why does it sound like he is stuck on discussing what Hollywood isn't doing and on certain Black characters from the mainstream comics industry?" This topic goes around in circles every day, month, year, whatever. I've been on different sites and I see and read about this same issue. I've made it plain when I respond to these posts: I do not care what Hollywood is or is not doing with their Black characters! I mean c'mon, its been obvious since the beginning of the American film industry in this country that they do not nor have they ever cared about our culture.

We need to do for self as the great Marcus Garvey kept on emphazising during his time in the early 1900s, and we had our own small, yet creative "Black Hollywood" in those times (and I'm talking about more than the great Oscar Micheaux). We already have a large group of Black superheroes of African culture, science fiction, etc. that we can research and get together to collaborate on to produce them.  I don't care if it comes out on NetFlix streaming service, straight to DVD, Video on Demand (VOD), whatever format would be viable for folks to view it. You want the best deliverable format with the lowest cost of distribution so that you are not overextending your overall budget.  Go to the (small, yet entertaining) various Black comic conventions in this country and meet the creators, talk about their characters, and other future projects or ideas with them.

I am tired of reading posts about only Luke Cage, Black Panther, Storm, etc. My second issue is why do we have to dream cast the same person (s) for a role (I.e. Michael Jai White as either the Black Panther or Luke Cage)? He is not the only male Black actor out there, people! What about Morris Chestnut or Henry Simmons? We have more than Zoe Saldana to act as a comic book-based character, right? It seems to me that television gives more interesting role choices than film is doing. ECBACC, Black Age in Chicago, Motor City in Detroit, etc. are great places to discover our characters and creators. I have a friend and creative partner based in Los Angeles, and for example, he would love to do a massive possibly animated film featuring if not all but those who are willing to contribute based on using the Black Superhero Montage characters. Now wouldn't that be something spectacular? Now maybe folks who are stuck on Hollywood would shut the hell up finally?

It takes a lot of people, a whole lot of money, a definite whole lot of commitment to do for self. Lets stop complaining, stop bringing up racism as a blockade, stop dream casting, lets get off our collective asses and go learn whatever skills we need to have to make these projects become reality. To be continued...

A little under a year ago, I started a side projected called Bad Girl Confidence to showcase a collection of aspiring creatives that I knew. Creatives such as writers, designers, comic book writers, artist, musicians, & entrepreneurs who needed exposure for their work but lacked the resources to drum up support for their work. Find out more here: www.badgirlconfidence.com

This platform is now growing into an online magazine and we will going into print as a result. We will be bringing the website and print magazine at the Northside Festival in June. The print magazine is going to include a variety of artist, all but one are people of color from around the world. There are illustrators, video game designers, graphic artists, fine art creators, and more. If you would like to help us make this magazine a reality, please pledge here: http://igg.me/at/bgcmagazine

Your pledge could earn you a copy of digital and/or print magazine. I am really excited because this is the first step in showing the world the emerging talents coming out from our communities. My main focus is on people of color but I engaged in the spirit of encourage talent full stop! This magazine is here to bring a different perspective and balance the skewed media conversation about what beauty and talent looks like!

Thank you for your help! :)

PBS.org: Forgotten Genius - Percy Julian, PhD
PC Magazine: Chemist Percy Julian Honored With Google Doodle, Chloe Albanesius