This one of the best shorts i have read in long time.
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Some interesting developments in tonight’s episode. How many times did you think the very thing that couldn’t have happened? That either Rick or the Governor would shoot the other person. There’s much too much that needs to happen before either man kills the other, but that eventuality shouldn’t have come as a surprise for a show that’s known for surprises. I do have to revise what I think is going to happen: the Governor is going to be killed by a woman, but the question is who?
- Maggie- sexually assaulted by him, still seems to be in shock somewhat.
- Michonne- the favorite as she probably would make it hurt the worst.
- Andrea- she has the best chance considering she’s the only one who has any kind of window of opportunity that doesn’t involve a preceding hail of bullets.
If there’s justice, it’ll be Maggie. Michonne already got his eye and Andrea, although she’s seeing things a lot more clearly, needs to come off as wishy-washy still for the sake of the show. I think the war will happen, the crew that Rick kicked out the prison will be involved, and two to three core cast members will die. Maybe Hershel because he’s living on borrowed time anyway, right? Or Carol, I mean, now that she won’t be midwifing for anyone, what’s her purpose? We already had someone without survival skills get on a learning curve and that was Andrea. And if she dies, that leaves Darryl someone else to pine after and further drives a wedge between him and Merle (if Merle survives, that is–which he won’t).
But don’t be surprised if the Governor is still alive come the season finale. He may yet have more harm to do.
Check out Jay Rauld's The Prophet
The Internet spawned many an unusual technology but none as strange as the Death-Web; a way to allow users to communicate after death with notations, salutations, benedictions and predictions pre-programmed before a person died; a message-in-a-bottle through Time.
Its early adopters were people who knew their impeding time drew near and wanted to leave data-rich missives to loved ones. The terminally ill found it to be of great comfort knowing they could leave messages on anniversaries, birthdays and other important milestones.
But like all things internet others soon found unexpected uses for the idea and began leaving predictions of the future, sometimes of technology, others of faith, some of war and occasionally a well-connected master gardener or farmer might leave a local almanac of planting seasons.
Eventually, it found followers among the technorati who wanted to have an opinion about everything even if they had already died. The technorati and futurists predicted technologies decades into the future and configured the Death-Web to release them upon their death. Keyword algorithms would release their predictions either on the date they were programmed for or in concert with news from active data streams indicating their prediction had come true sooner than expected. To be fair, most tech pundits weren't good at prognostication, but as more of them passed on, that changed.
Living wills were composed on the Death-Web with pre-programmed videos of people mooning hated relatives and leaving vast fortunes to a favored cat or dog. Cuckolded husbands were told off by browbeaten wives, dark secrets revealed to angry children who could no longer take revenge on loathsome parents. As terrible as these things seem, beautiful things were left as well. Graduation videos, songs for anniversaries, still-living eulogies delivered by the Dead at their own funerals.
The Death-Web grew along side the internet, a morbid shadow mimicking life so well, after a while, it began to have an existence all to itself, with predictions for everything from weather, to the stock exchange, world politics and even celebrity gossip. Ten years of Oscar predictions and the Death-Web was always better at picking movies than the living were.
At some point the Live-Web and the Death-Web began to share information, at first tangentially, communication with the Dead were marked as such. Then invisibly, without fanfare, without people being made aware, the Dead were again, among the living. Software algorithms were written which could take an existing stream of social media and extrapolate from the Dead's living stream of choices what choices they might make of new things and ideas. These Amalgams of the social media of a now Dead person, could continue if they chose, to share, curate, and even hold limited conversations with the Living.
Then people began to realize something strange. Not that this wasn't already strange; something really strange. The Dead were right more often than the Living about almost everything.
No one was sure why this was true. Was it a side effect of people only willing to be honest when they had no stake in the game? Were people who knew they were going to die, revealing secrets they would never tell anyone while they were alive? This was a talk show subject of statistical debate for nearly ten years, while the Death-Web grew larger and more accepted worldwide. As families continued to support and pay for services for the Dead, programmers began creating software for the Death-Web at the same rate as any other environment. Companies started developing and harnessing infrastructure for this aberration-turned-engine of prediction.
And then, in a series of events, a group of stockbrokers joined the Death-Web unexpectedly. No one would have noticed them except for their social media streams right after their deaths, predicted an epic crash of the stock markets. All of them. They were dead when their predictions were seen but they had been written while they were alive. At least at first. After their buffered accounts had emptied, their accounts continued to predict the market with alarming accuracy. The source of these predictions could not be ascertained, the only thing known for certain was their accuracy. Soon their calls of collapse were being re-shared, repeated, even cast as news among the Living. And as the market reacted, confidence teetered. Something needed to be done.
Tech-seers, who managed the accounts of the Dead, sought out tampering because before this trinity, predictions were accurate but sporadic. The stopped clock metaphor was liberally applied. The Stockbroker Trinity's predictions were not a single event but a stream of events which predicted the slow transformation of the economy and the eventual failure of commerce from a single series of purchases of stock. They told who would make the stocks buys, why they would, and what the result would be. The Tech-seers found no explanation and repeated the mantra "The Living guess, the Dead know" and continued in their work. Their research revealed no tampering and yet these three brokers would consistently predict the stock market for the next two years. After their deaths. Accurately. In a way no living person had or could. They became more successful in death than they ever were in life.
The government monitored the Death-Web much like they did any other social media network. Initially, no one considered anything said there to be of any import, but as time progressed, the Death-stream was a better predictor of human behavior than anything seen before it. Local skirmishes, the next meme, the next great celebrity, the Death-Web was a form of social consciousness, un-tethered from the meat which once created it, unconstrained, un-repentant and alarmingly accurate. No one was ever able to take credit for its capabilities, and once the Deathstream software was ubiquitous, freely given away on the Internet, it was unable to be stopped. It has become a network unto itself.
When the three brokers and their attendant social media streams predicted the market more accurately than living economists, this was not lost on national security agencies, which made every effort to find the companies involved in their predictions and quietly derail their corporate structures in a effort to prevent the impending economic collapse. Their efforts were successful and the predictions of the three brokers, for a time were broken. The Trinity was dead. Again.
The CEO and the board of directors of the corporation upon whom the blame was being placed for this barely averted collapse were killed in a plane crash in the Swiss Alps. Though the outcome was considered tragic, the problem was resolved to the satisfaction of the three-letter agencies worldwide.
The stock market did not collapse and the Death-Web, now behind closed doors called the Seer-web, had proven its value as a potential tool of social management. For another decade, Humanity and its data shadow moved in step, one arrogant in life, the other truthful in death. And three-letter agencies everywhere trembled in fear; for what can you hold over the Dead to keep any secret?
The Last Divide © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (12 March 1824 – 17 October 1887) was a German physicist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy, and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects.
He coined the term "black body" radiation in 1862, and two sets of independent concepts in both circuit theory and thermal emission are named "Kirchhoff's laws" after him, as well as a law of thermochemistry.
Kirchhoff Current Law (KCL): At any node (junction) in an electrical circuit, the sum of currents flowing into that node is equal to the sum of currents flowing out of that node, or: The algebraic sum of currents in a network of conductors meeting at a point is zero.
Kirchhoff Voltage Law (KVL): The directed sum of the electrical potential differences (voltage) around any closed network is zero, or: More simply, the sum of the emfs in any closed loop is equivalent to the sum of the potential drops in that loop, or: The algebraic sum of the products of the resistances of the conductors and the currents in them in a closed loop is equal to the total emf available in that loop.
Wikipedia: Gustav Kirchhoff
A team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken an important step closer to finding the birth certificate of a star that's been around for a very long time.
"We have found that this is the oldest known star with a well-determined age," said Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa., and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.
The star could be as old as 14.5 billion years (plus or minus 0.8 billion years), which at first glance would make it older than the universe's calculated age of about 13.8 billion years, an obvious dilemma.
But earlier estimates from observations dating back to 2000 placed the star as old as 16 billion years. And this age range presented a potential dilemma for cosmologists. "Maybe the cosmology is wrong, stellar physics is wrong, or the star's distance is wrong," Bond said. "So we set out to refine the distance."
The new Hubble age estimates reduce the range of measurement uncertainty, so that the star's age overlaps with the universe's age — as independently determined by the rate of expansion of space, an analysis of the microwave background from the big bang, and measurements of radioactive decay.
This "Methuselah star," cataloged as HD 140283, has been known about for more than a century because of its fast motion across the sky. The high rate of motion is evidence that the star is simply a visitor to our stellar neighborhood. Its orbit carries it down through the plane of our galaxy from the ancient halo of stars that encircle the Milky Way, and will eventually slingshot back to the galactic halo.
Hubble Site: Hubble Finds Birth Certificate of Oldest Known Star
working on this survey for an article I'm writing. Please feel free to fill out.
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| Figure 1: See link for descriptions |
While quantum mechanics is by now a well-established theory, it nonetheless still fascinates both newcomers and experts alike with unusual phenomena. The paradox of Schrödinger’s cat and the subtleties of the two-slit interference are timeless classics. Another less-familiar quantum effect, the oscillations of neutral mesons (bound states of a quark and an antiquark), has also intrigued legions of physicists for nearly sixty years [1]. These mesons oscillate back and forth between particle and antiparticle states. The theoretical ideas underlying this behavior involve concepts that are woven deeply into the history of particle physics. In Physical Review Letters, the LHCb Collaboration has now reported [2] the first significant single-measurement observation of oscillations in the neutral D -meson system.
American Physical Society: Viewpoint: Observing Matter-Antimatter Oscillations
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| This graphic shows the comet’s expected positions in the sky throughout March. Image credit: NASA |
On March 9 and 10, Pan-STARRS will be at its brightest, because that’s when it’s closest to the sun. Visible to the naked eye (but looking even better through binoculars or a telescope) at a dark site, the comet will appear as a bright “smear” of light low in the west up to an hour after sunset. And next week’s crescent moon can help locate Pan-STARRS: On March 12, the comet will lie to the moon’s upper left, and on the next night it will be on the moon’s lower right. After two weeks, the comet will have faded enough to require optical instruments to see it.
Discovery D-brief: Where Can I See Comet Pan-STARRS?
The saga of the Osguards continues in Malcolm Dylan Petteway's third book in the series, Osguards: Armageddon. And what a thrill it is! The author truly turns it up a notch. Book One chronicled Laurona and Nausona Osguard's Earthbound experiences prior to the founding of the Universal Science, Security and Trade Association of Planets. In Book Two, war continues to rage between USSTAP and its implacable enemy, the Kulusks. Armageddon rips away the curtain to reveal the shadowy, driving force behind the Kulusk's war on USSTAP: the Tuits, a warlike Amazonian race that rules over a domain far larger than USSTAP. When these two mighty polities clash, the universe itself is ripped asunder in a horrific welter of bloody conflict that will see entire star systems washed away in a broiling tide of destruction. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Tentacles of intrigue weaves fluidly through this tale, extending from the top levels of USSTAP authority to a White House administration thirsting for the benefits of USSTAP technology.
There are heroes and villains in this book, but the heroes are flawed and the villains' motivations bear traces of nobility. The excitement the author delivers in this third installment is threefold. Osguards: Armageddon is a delectable read that will leave you, as it left me, wondering what the author will have in store for us in Book Four. I can't wait to find out!
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| Space Review |
The biggest single experiment, in terms of both size and cost, on the ISS is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (officially designated AMS-02 to differentiate it from a prototype, AMS-01, flown on the STS-91 shuttle mission in 1998, but usually simply called AMS.) Weighing nearly 7,000 kilograms and costing an estimated $1.5 billion to develop, NASA installed AMS on the exterior of the ISS on the penultimate shuttle mission, STS-134, in May 2011 (see “The space station’s billion-dollar physics experiment”, The Space Review, May 16, 2011).
At a press conference February 17 during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, Samuel Ting, the MIT physicist who is the principal investigator for AMS, said his team was working on a paper analyzing a subset of the AMS data involving detections of high-energy electrons and positrons. “We waited for 15 years—actually, 18 years—to write this paper,” he said. “We have finished the paper and are now making the final checks.” He said he anticipated that the paper would be completed and submitted to a journal (as yet undecided, although Ting said later one possibility is Physical Review Letters) in two to three weeks.
While Ting didn’t disclose any of the results that will be in that paper, he did discuss what the paper would cover. It will examine the ratio of positrons to electrons as a function of energy from 0.5 to 350 billion electron volts. (The AMS can detect particles up to a trillion electron volts, but Ting said they didn’t yet have a statistically significant sample of data at the higher energies.) It will also measure changes in the ratio as a function of direction to see if its distribution is the same in all directions or has peaks in a particular direction, such as towards the center of the galaxy.
Changes in that positron/electron ratio as a function of energy, including increases or sharp drops, could provide evidence for one candidate of dark matter known as weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Dark matter comprises about 23 percent of the universe, but its influence has only been detected indirectly, such as the rotation curves of galaxies. Scientists hypothesize that if dark matter is made of WIMPS—in particular, a particle known as a supersymmetric neutralino—it will produce antimatter particles like positrons when it collides with each other, creating a signature in the data detected by AMS.
The Space Review: Turning ISS into a full-fledged space laboratory
Everybody, it's here!!!!
My first book, "From Slate to Crimson" has been released through Whispers Press in e-book format. Here is the overview:
"Talante, for 10,000 years has governed his clan like a father in the endless war with their hated enemy over the fate of humankind. One winter's night, he chances to meet Amelia Grayson, a human whose blood arouses his desire, and whose presence arouses his compassion in a way no mortal ever has before. Distracted and terrified by all but alien emotions and instincts by this burgeoning bond in a prelude to what may be his clan's most desperate hour, Talante is caught between duty and desire, until he is forced by choice and circumstance to decide whether to hold to the one he has grown to love more than his immortal life, or in spite of the cost, let go for the sake of his people and Amelia's safety, in spite of twofold danger: one from a ravenous enemy that has hunted her kind for millennia … and the other from the seductive bond that would make her forever his, body and soul."
For those of you wanting to listen to an excerpt of the story, click here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldtphCEzl2I
To purchase the book, simply come on down to Whispers Press here:
http://whispershome.com/products-page-2/recent-book/from-slate-to-crimson/
Thank you so much for your interest and support. Thoughts and critiques are very much welcome! Happy reading!
-Brandon
When's cake?
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| Time and Date dot com |
Today is International Women's Day in Women's History Month.
One Billion Rising: the organization lists it's "birthday" on 14 February 2013. Inspired by several recent turn of events, two of note: the brutal public gang rape and murder of a New Delhi woman sparked outrage across the globe; Malala Yousafzai, a young Afghan activist shot in the face for promoting education and erasing ignorance was also a catalyst.
As so should have been Hadiya. When honor students are murdered, it should be a time of mourning, and a response of resolve.
As so should be Tonya McDowell. Judging from the verdict, the court in Connecticut forgot the mercies and sympathy poured on to Sandy Hook (the majority killed there were women): apparently, wanting the best for a six-year-old in Orwellian speak is now thoughtcrime. And, the best place for a six-year-old is not at the side of his homeless mother who's doing the best she can under circumstances engineered way above her pay grade: it's obviously in the foster care system, where he will most likely end up on a collision course with the same criminal justice system that just sentenced Tonya to 12 years in prison.
It has been lately, not easy to be a woman. For the "fairer sex," it's been no more easier to be a woman than it is to be a minority, or gay, middle class or a teacher. Quvenzhané Wallis could not enjoy her night at the Oscars: apparently, nine-year-old talented actresses are somewhat threatening to small minds, in possession of Napoleonic smaller male appendages, that hide behind the 1st Amendment and the nebulous non-action statement "they have been disciplined" (not fired).
"In time we hate that which we often fear." William Shakespeare
Organizations, mostly dominated by men, are telling everyone else what they can be, how they can act, what to do with decisions about their own welfare, bodies and careers.
I think of my "little engineer," an endearing term I use not as a slight but a realization: at 8, she's kind of short! Her name is Naomi ("pleasant"). She has a smile that would light up a room on a grey, cloudy day. She and her young female friend/electronics lab partner at a science fair I organized at our church, engineered a simple switch for a flying saucer/helicopter when they ran out of parts (I had 31 kids - pizza = popular). It was amazing; THEY were amazing! They deserve to inherit a world a little less dangerous; a little less bigoted towards their gender.
On Friday March 8, we should make sure that the women in our institutions enjoy a coffee or a lunch. Let them talk and exchange their thoughts, and take pictures to show the world that there are women in science, and sharing their experience on Twitter and Google+ (hashtag #WomenOfScience). They are here, not a majority, but they are an important part of scientific work and discussion.
For all the "little scientists and engineers," and the pleasant world I would like them to inherit...
Official Site: International Women's Day
Office of Science and Technology Policy: Women in STEM
US Department of Commerce: Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation
NSF: Women, Minorities and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering
Cosmic Diary: Featuring the Women of Science
STEM connector: 100 Women Leaders in STEM
WAMC: Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
STEMinist: Voices of Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math
I repost this poem from time to time to remind myself of why I write... and because I love it :). Namaste Fam!
(for my man Quinton Veal, my children and my beautiful, beautiful writing famiy)
With blood beating at my temples
and horizons beckoning for discovery
land, magical strange taboo
waited for my pen
Miles and Coltrane's nightingales
awoke to trill of moonbeams
and desire
Zora,Langston and Octavia whispered: "We waiting
on you, you better create worlds..."
That's I when I knew it was time to speak
rivers-- funky motifs
rip a piece of soulful sinew
Sweeten it
Season it
cry loud my passion
And shards of gold flecked violet
split the air with sound and fury!
With laughter, love and tears
I touched my lips to them
breathed life into these spirits
freed them to walk across
the page
In that hour liberation found me
In that hour I embraced her
And gave voice to my writing hand
Copyright 2009 Valjeanne Jeffers
Published in Liberated Muse: How I Freed My Soul Vol I
Available at http://www.OutskirtsPress.com/LiberatedMuse
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc: "after this, therefore, because of this."
Not saying Dr. Tyson is "committing" a post hoc fallacy. He eludes to the dangers of simple conclusions, and what I'd term "market-driven-bottom-line" education. As expressed by one teen I recall tutoring: "is THIS the answer?" That's a very "bottom-line" question in the moment as said teen was very concerned about the state standardized exam, rather than developing the skills to (and the pleasure in) solving the problem. Just see his responses to Soledad, and you'll get the idea.
You may not become an astrophysicist; the director of a planetarium, or feature in a Superman comic, but you'll THINK clearly, you'll come to decisions in a logical manner, and in this day and age, that's a very important (and waning) skill.
Web site: STEMCareer.com
Well, it's March, folks! And that means my book, "From Slate to Crimson," will soon be released. Stay tuned! It's currently in the "coming soon" section of the Whispers Press website, and will be available later this month as an e-book. I will certainly keep all who are interested in touch. Incidentally, is anyone interested in this? Let me know, and I will personally send you notification of its release. And please, tell anyone you think will be interested!
“You will be torn apart by bullets or teeth.”
Now if you don’t see the huge parallels between Rick and Morgan, then you’re not paying attention. Two fathers, two husbands, two men who should have kept their families safe, both failed or failing.
Morgan is Rick (he’s also the Governor, but more on that in a moment) which means he wears the weight of responsibility for the people around him. I imagine Rick would have been very much the same way had he lost Lori and Carl. He’s halfway to being like Morgan having only lost his wife. And it’s all so important to remember what Morgan said when he saw Rick’s face. You’re wearing a dead man’s face. That’s just another way of saying he’s seeing a ghost. Just like Rick currently is.
I have to amend my predictions a little here. Now that we know the shooter is Morgan, don’t expect they’re partying ways with tonight’s episode to be the last we see of him. Morgan is going to be the person who saves Rick. When he said that Rick would die, that the good guys die and the bad guys die, but weak people like him survive, that’s a bit of foreshadowing. Expect Morgan to play a part in the resolution of this season. With Morgans ability to make traps and his plethora of weapons, Rick’s group is going to be pinned down and just wanted looks like they are on the verge of being overwhelmed, Morgan will arrive.
He will save Rick from death and trade places with him. Morgan will either kill the Governor directly or setup the circumstance which results in his death.
The real question is, who will the Governor take with him?
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| Ars Technica |
The first lunar base on the Moon may not be built by human hands, but rather by a giant spider-like robot built by NASA that can bind the dusty soil into giant bubble structures where astronauts can live, conduct experiments, relax or perhaps even cultivate crops.
We've already covered the European Space Agency's (ESA) work with architecture firm Foster + Partners on a proposal for a 3D-printed moonbase, and there are similarities between the two bases—both would be located in Shackleton Crater near the Moon's south pole, where sunlight (and thus solar energy) is nearly constant due to the Moon's inclination on the crater's rim, and both use lunar dust as their basic building material. However, while the ESA's building would be constructed almost exactly the same way a house would be 3D-printed on Earth, this latest wheeze—SinterHab—uses NASA technology for something a fair bit more ambitious.
Ars Technica: Giant NASA spider robots could 3D print lunar base
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| Space Daily |
In this month's special edition of Physics World, focusing on quantum physics, Thomas Jennewein and Brendon Higgins from the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, Canada, describe how a quantum space race is under way to create the world's first global quantum-communication network.
The field of quantum communication - the science of transmitting quantum states from one place to another - has received significant attention in the last few years owing to the discovery of quantum cryptography.
Upon measuring the state of a particle you instantly change this state, meaning an encryption key made of photons can be passed between two parties safe in the knowledge that if an eavesdropper intercepts it, this would be noticed.
The transmission of encryption keys over long distances still remains a significant challenge for scientists, however, as the intensity of signals tends to weaken as they travel further because photons get absorbed or scattered off molecules.
Space Daily: Space race under way to create quantum satellite
