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Dunamis Novem...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 13, 2019 at 5:27am

Image source: "Dunamis Novem" link below

Topics: NIST, Quantum Mechanics, Research, STEAM

Quantum physics drives much of the research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Explaining this research is a challenge, because quantum physics—nature's rules for the smallest particles of matter and light—inspires words like weird, curious, and counter-intuitive. The quantum world is strange and invisible in the context of everyday life. And yet, quantum physics can be explained and at least partially demonstrated visually.

NIST physicist Ray Simmonds recently collaborated with MFA graduate candidate Sam Mitchell of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), to create a dance piece based on the laws of quantum physics. The piece, Dunamis Novem (Latin for "the chance happening of nine things"),* premiered at The La Jolla Playhouse Forum Theatre in January, as a part of Mitchell's thesis work.

The project has practical benefits such as education, Simmonds says.

"While quantum mechanics is a well-established theory, proven true overwhelmingly by experiments, it is still confounding to most people, even those in science," Simmonds and Mitchell noted in describing their work.

“Quantum Statistics: Affects on Human Dancers and the Observer”

Abstract

The Arts and Sciences may seem to be immiscible fields of study, even at odds with each other. In Leonardo Da Vinci’s time these two fields were not polarized, in fact, they coexisted naturally. Despite the appearance of being far distant cousins, both artists and scientists share a creative gene, a passion for their work, and a brave curiosity that pushes them past current boundaries to explore the unknown. In this lecture, we will present some recent examples of those mixing these two worlds and our own attempts to do so with Dance Theater and Quantum Physics. While quantum mechanics is a well-established theory, proven true overwhelmingly by experiments, it is still confounding to most people, even those in science. At its heart, it describes nature in terms of possible realities with probable outcomes, with almost no predictable certainty. Experts still struggle to interpret its philosophical consequences and the notion that there may be no “objective reality”. Even Albert Einstein, one of its co-creators, disapproved of its bizarre properties, saying that “God does not play dice with the universe”. In the creation of this work, “Dunamis Novem”, we have taken some of the probabilistic rules that govern quantum systems and integrated them into a creative process. The results are then born from an artistic aesthetic and an algorithmic code that produces dynamics that embody in some way randomness, concepts of “quantum entanglement”, and the effects of observation or “measurement”. Our work shows that “Science” can inspire and direct new forms of “Art”, and we hope that the liminal world of “Art” can be an effective medium to transmit the sometimes counterintuitive results of empirical “Science” to a broader audience, also generating a dialogue between the two. We will describe the scientific concepts that currently inspire us, the process by which we convert quantum principles into movements, and the challenges of distilling this into a theatrical setting.

What is Quantum Physics? Dancers Explain, NIST
Sam Mitchel Dance: Dunamis Novem

Smart Packaging...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 12, 2019 at 10:21am

Cheaper flexible integrated circuits open up new markets. (Courtesy: PragmatIC)

Topics: Applied Physics, Moore's Law, Semiconductor Technology, Nanotechnology

For more than 50 years, progress in the electronics industry has been guided by Moore’s law: the idea that the number of transistors in a silicon-based integrated circuit (IC) will double approximately every 18 months. The consequences of this doubling include a continual reduction in the size of silicon ICs, as it becomes possible to provide increasingly complex and high-performance functionality in smaller and smaller areas of silicon, and at progressively lower cost relative to the circuits’ processing power.

Moore’s law is an empirical rule of thumb rather than a robust physical principle, and much has been written about how, why and when it will eventually fail. But even before we reach that point, manufacturers are already finding that, in practice, the cost savings associated with reducing the size, or “footprint”, of ICs will only carry them so far. The reason is that below a certain minimum size, ICs become difficult to handle easily or effectively. For highly complex circuitry, such as that found in computers with many millions of transistors in a single IC, this limit on handling size may not be a consideration. However, for applications that require less complex circuits, the size constraint imposed by the physical aspect of handling ICs becomes a limiting factor in their cost.

The approach we have taken at PragmatIC is to use thin, flexible substrates, rather than rigid silicon, as the base for building our circuits. The low cost of the materials involved and the relatively low complexity of our target applications alters the economics around circuit footprint and overall IC cost. Accepting a larger footprint can lower capital expenditure because it means that ultrahigh-end precision tooling is not required to fabricate our circuits during the manufacturing process. In turn, for low-complexity applications, this can lead to a lower final IC cost.

The resulting flexible integrated circuits, or FlexICs, are thinner than a human hair, so they can easily be embedded in everyday objects. They also cost around 10 times less than silicon ICs, making it economically viable for them to appear in trillions of smart objects that engage with consumers and their environments. Since the technology was developed, PragmatIC FlexICs have been trialed in a wide variety of markets, including consumer goods, games, retail, and the pharmaceutical and security sectors.

A smart approach to smart packaging
Catherine Ramsdale is vice-president of device development at PragmatIC

The Talented Tenth: Season One

Posted by Christopher Love on August 6, 2019 at 6:05pm

The Talented Tenth: Season One

Historical Bureau of Investigation Agents Tad Jones and Kim Davis research history with The Time Telescope in order to reconnect with their history due to the Great Cataclysm. They discover unknown Historical Heroes such as Sybil Ludington, Squanto and Crispus Attucks and more. But what happens when they are TRAPPED in the past. Will they ever return to the 23rd Century? History and Science meet at The Time Telescope. This is the Season One of a comic book series that combines Star Trek with Doctor Who. This has a great educational value. Everyone has heroes that look like them. Now you can see them for yourselves.

https://indyplanet.com/the-time-telescope-season-one

The Cesspool...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 2, 2019 at 5:00am

Credit: Getty Images

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Internet, Existentialism, Politics

Last month, I temporarily deactivated my Twitter account following a colossal dump of racist abuse into my feed, including a man in Texas whipping up his followers to phone into an NPR radio show on which I was a guest to ask about “white genocide.” Others played a guessing game around my skin color in the belief this would help them gauge my IQ. On YouTube, one of the editors of Mankind Quarterly, a pseudoscientific journal founded after the Second World War to argue against desegregation and racial mixing, imitated me by dressing up in an “Indian shirt” (I am British; my parents were born in India). The comments underneath said I should I go back to where I came from.

It’s just another day online.

The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience
Angela Saini, Scientific American and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science

I will take a week off before classes start in the fall.

The Internet is a development of science as well as the military-industrial complex. Scientists, engineers and librarians used as "FTP" - file transfer protocol, which predates what we've come to recognize as HTTP - hypertext transfer protocol.

If you peruse DARPA's website, there is historical reference to the idea of something that would survive a thermonuclear attack. The previous communications protocols from WWII was a "hub-spoke" configuration: thinking of a wagon wheel, the hub was at the center and typically the headquarters for deployed assets in theater. The spokes were distant users of the communications network the hub would have set up with an engineering design called a communications plan (in a previous life, I was that person as an Air Force Communications/Computer Systems Officer). Thus the enemy - presumed the USSR during the Cold War - would simply destroy the hub and the spokes would be in the dark and disconnected, or deploy an EMP - electromagnetic pulse, exploding a nuclear device in atmosphere, disrupting most if not all high frequency transmissions. The idea of a "web" was so that could not occur.

The network involved satellites of course, and the distant users were tied to the hub with troposphere line-of-sight microwave horns, radio frequency equipment that multiplexed voice and digital through encrypted teletype, audio and digital switches. It was a beautiful thing to witness when it all worked.

What is developed for the government like Velcro eventually gets to the masses. AOL is an ancient form of email and web browsing that required dial-up phones and a loud modem. Netscape was the first attempt at commercial web design software, relying mostly on the aforementioned HTTP. Before social media, people started bantering or bickering back-and-forth on message boards or would send "flame mail" trying to make a point. When using company assets to send witticism or derogatory commentary, many then and now found themselves in the unemployment lines.

As I alluded to in Filter and Subtext, what particularly used to happen as a societal breaking mechanism - editors in the case of print media; producers for film - pretty much no longer exists. One may publish their first thoughts, misspelled and grammar failing; grainy, amateurish film made on cheap laptops or with cellphone cameras. Any pointing to written errors labels you a grammar Nazi; any video has to be "true" because it's on the Internet with high views. The ready access to information has led to the dangerous belief that no one has to train and become expert in a field to have an informed opinion.

The Internet is both falsely empowering and the source of demographic demarcation: by having the ability to get anything in an instant gives the impression that you KNOW a subject. As a person that reads academic papers for a living, I can assure you in the first read of any paper, I won't know the subject. I will read the abstract several times followed by the introduction, experimental procedure; results and conclusions. I will read some of the papers in the references. There are words, phrases and either physical or chemical compounds I'm not familiar with (Google). I write things down; take notes. I work through the formulas in the paper so I can understand them. It is a tedious, grinding process that takes time. I recall a maxim in the martial arts: "a black belt is a white belt that never quit." So it is with building any level of expertise in well...anything. By choosing "news feeds" instead of reading morning and evening print media as well as three main networks essentially reciting from the same Associated Press scriptures, we automatically place ourselves in silos that when we try to converse with one another, devolve into electronic and actual shouting matches.

Tom Nichols is a college professor at the US Naval War College, occasional opinion contributor on MSNBC and until recently, was a member of the Republican Party. In his treatise "The Death of Expertise," he points to a disdain of experts on the right and the left; the confusion of confirmation bias (finding the thing that you already agree with confirming what you already believe) as "evidence" your position and opinions are true. This likely parallels the transistorizing of the cumbersome and large hub-spoke network into our hip pockets. It may empower those unfamiliar with the Dunning-Kruger Effect that despite their sense of empowerment, they may be way out over their skis. They might tweet the first thing that comes to mind while sitting on the loo during "executive time." In such a world, everyone's an expert and no one is for the most part humble enough to admit they might be wrong or at least misinformed about a subject. In such a world, the warming temperatures are ignored and the science is scrubbed from government sites as "inconvenient" to the stated China hoax theory. In such a world, pseudoscience is pushed in every corridor of existence as "free speech" and "teach the [faux] controversy." Facts won't matter: There is still a Flat Earth Society in the 21st century (with a website). There are still conspiracy theorists that think the Moon landing was faked.

In such a world, the chimera list of wrong-headed things that can be believed: Alt-Right (Wrong) racist tropes, Bigfoot, the Clinton's murdering people or running child sex rings; crisis actors at mass shootings, E.T., fascism (aided and abetted by our own cleverness per a virtual Yuval Noah Harari at TED); flying saucers, Godzilla, Loch Ness Monster, Neo Nazis, Ouija boards, Pizza Gate, poltergeists, Q-Anon is almost endless, but not ONE can bother to read the Mueller Report or believe that our election processes were as attacked as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and walls of the Pentagon fell to ruinous rubble on 9/11.

The FBI intelligence bulletin from the bureau’s Phoenix field office, dated May 30, 2019, describes “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists,” as a growing threat, and notes that it is the first such report to do so. It lists a number of arrests, including some that haven’t been publicized, related to violent incidents motivated by fringe beliefs.

The document specifically mentions QAnon, a shadowy network that believes in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and Pizzagate, the theory that a pedophile ring including Clinton associates was being run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant (which didn’t actually have a basement).

“The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts,” the document states. It also goes on to say the FBI believes conspiracy theory-driven extremists are likely to increase during the 2020 presidential election cycle.

Exclusive: FBI document warns conspiracy theories are a new domestic terrorism threat
Jana Winter, Yahoo News

"Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." John 8:32

In such a world, truth itself becomes a casualty, and the opposite of freeing truths is slavery.

A Year of TESS...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 1, 2019 at 5:49am

Topics: Exoplanets, NASA, Planetary Science, Space Exploration, Star Trek

"Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before." (Star Trek: The Captain's Oath)

“Kepler discovered the amazing result that, on average, every star system has a planet or planets around it. TESS takes the next step. If planets are everywhere, let’s find those orbiting bright, nearby stars because they’ll be the ones we can now follow up with existing ground and space-based telescopes, and the next generation of instruments for decades to come.” Padi Boyd, TESS project scientist, NASA GSFC

- HD 21749c, the first Earth-size planet the mission has found. The world orbits a K-class star with about 70 percent of the mass of the Sun, located 53 light years away in the constellation Reticulum, one of two planets identified in this system;

- A number of multi-planet systems, like that around L98-59, which includes a planet (L98-59b) between the size of Earth and Mars, the smallest yet found by TESS. Here the host star is an M-dwarf about a third the mass of the Sun, 35 light years away in the constellation Volans;

- Three exocomets identified in the Beta Pictoris system. A comet’s lightcurve differs significantly from that of a transiting planet because of the extended cometary tail. These discoveries demonstrate the ability of TESS to identify tiny objects around young, bright stars, and should lead to future exocomet detections that can supply information about planet formation;

- Six supernovae occurring in other galaxies, among them ASASSN-18rn, ASASSN-18tb and ATLAS18tne, found before ground-based surveys could identify them.

TESS: Concluding First Year of Observations, Paul Gilster, Centauri Dreams

#P4TC: TESS... August 2, 2018

Aleph Null or Not...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 31, 2019 at 5:07am

No, it's not real. Credit: Getty Images

Topics: Astronomy, Drake Equation, Existentialism, SETI

For many people, "UFO" is synonymous with aliens, but it's worth reminding ourselves that it literally stands for "unidentified flying object." An unidentified object could be just about anything, because … well, it's unidentified. One of our mottoes in science is that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." This doesn't mean that crazy-sounding things are never true; it means that we should practice due diligence when thinking about overturning well-understood or well-tested ideas. This motto also suggests we keep an eye on Occam's razor—the idea that the simplest explanation is the most likely to be true.

As enthusiastic as I had been regarding alien visitations (there was a cottage industry in the 1970s that still thrives in Internet circles), one has to ask the question: what would aliens want with Earth? Between here and there whatever their governments are in need of, they can either engineer it or find other options way before engaging warp speed.

Colonization: If history serves as guide, the First Nation/Native Americans encountered colonists that barely survived their first winter. They were repaid like the natives who met Columbus with slaughter.

Africans did trade captured rival tribesmen and women in the budding international slave trade that "made America great." They conferred with Europeans typically with superior weaponry for trade of valuables to compensate their treachery.

Any aliens that can travel parsecs from their home world to Earth doesn't have anything benevolent in mind once arriving, E.T. or Star Trek not withstanding.

Ignoring us: When is the last time you had a conversation with a moth? On the evolutionary scale, you have way more sophistication than something flitting from tree to flower. Aliens if existing and surviving millions of years older than us probably if anything might have the same relationship to us as we have to Lepidoptera.

The sobering possibility: climate change, conventional conflicts, mass shootings pollution and nuclear conflagration - humans are far smarter than the lowly moth, but moths nor butterflies are destroying their own habitat.

We may not see aliens because they may have caused their own extinction before they built starships.

No E.T. Life Yet? That might be a warning, Kelsey Johnson, Scientific American

The Gravity of the Matter...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 30, 2019 at 5:00am

Testing Einstein: conceptual image showing S0-2 (the blue and green object) as it made its closest approach to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The huge gravitational field of the black hole is illustrated by the distorted grid in space–time. (Courtesy: Nicolle R Fuller/National Science Foundation)

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

A key aspect of Einstein’s general theory of relativity has passed its most rigorous test so far. An international team led by Tuan Do and Andrea Ghez at the University of California, Los Angeles confirmed the Einstein equivalence principle (EEP) by analyzing the redshift of light from the star S0-2 at its closest approach to Sagittarius A* – the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The study combined over 20 years of existing spectroscopic and astrometric measurements of S0-2 with the team’s own observations.

Since Einstein first proposed his general theory of relativity in 1915, the idea has stood up to intense experimental scrutiny by explaining the behaviors of gravitational fields in the solar system, the dynamics of binary pulsars, and gravitational waves emitted by mergers of black holes.

In 2018, the GRAVITY collaboration carried out a particularly rigorous test – observing S0-2 at its closest approach to Sagittarius A* in its 16-year orbit.

As expected, the GRAVITY astronomers observed a characteristic relativistic redshift in light from S0-2. This redshift is a lengthening of the wavelength of the light and arises from both the motion of the star (the Doppler effect) and the EEP. The latter is a consequence of general relativity and predicts a redshift in light from a source that is in a gravitational field such as that of a supermassive black hole.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity tested by star orbiting a black hole
Sam Jarman, Physics World

TBG and Ferromagnets...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 29, 2019 at 5:00am

Magic angle graphene superlattice. Scale=10 nm. Courtesy: P Jarillo-Herrero

Topics: Ferromagnetism, Graphene, Hall Effect, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Nanotechnology

Researchers have found that electrons organize themselves into a new kind of ferromagnet in twisted bilayer graphene (TBG). In this system, which forms when two sheets of graphene are stacked on top of one another with a small twist angle between them, it is the orbital motion of electrons, rather than their spins, that aligns. Such behavior could produce emergent topological states that might be exploited in applications such as low-power magnetic memory in the future.

Graphene is a flat crystal of carbon just one atom thick. When two sheets of the material are placed on top of each other and misaligned by rotating them relative to each other, they form a moiré pattern. Last year, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that at a “magic” twist angle of 1.1°, the material becomes a superconductor (that is, it can carry currents with no losses) at 1.7 K. This effect, which occurs thanks to miniband flattening at this angle that strongly enhances interactions between electrons in the material, disappears at slightly larger or smaller angle twists.

A team of researchers led by David Goldhaber-Gordon of Stanford University has now found unambiguous evidence of ferromagnetism – as the giant anomalous Hall (AH) effect – in TBG when its flat conduction miniband is three-quarters filled.

Ferromagnetism appears in twisted bilayer graphene, Belle Dumé, Physics World

Of Memes and Men...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 26, 2019 at 5:00am

Image source: Facebook

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Climate Change, Existentialism, Human Rights, Politics

We were inundated with Facebook memes, videos and caricatures of Robert Mueller.

We saw him pose heroically as a Marine when he served in Vietnam.

We saw him superimposed as Sheriff Matt Dillon (played by actor James Arness) from the two-decade television series, “Gunsmoke.”

As much as I enjoy the movie theater and seeing my once comic books on the big screen, like Bill Mahr has opined, I think we're inundated with superhero movies to the point like our fixation with reality shows, we're losing our ability to use critical thinking and reasoning. It has disastrously resulted in a reality show president with demonstrable Internet Addiction (Twitter) and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (across the pond, Boris Johnson is now British Prime Minister). Of course, we give such a limited being, a caricature bereft of any respect for scientific inquiry, now having control over entities that will impact our addressing (or, ignoring) climate change and the nuclear codes.

Do you remember the good old days when we had "12 years to save the planet"? Matt McGrath, BBC Science & Environment

Spoiler alert: we don't.

This country has been surprised by the way the world looks now
They don't know if they want to be Matt Dillon or Bob Dylan
They don't know if they want to be diplomats ...
Or continue the same policy of nuclear nightmare diplomacy
John Foster Dulles ain't nothing but the name of an airport now

The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia
They want to go back as far as they can ...
Even if it's only as far as last week
Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards

And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes
Riding to the rescue at the last possible moment
The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse ...
Or, the man who always came to save America at the last moment
Someone always came to save America at the last moment
Especially in "B" movies

Gil Scott-Heron, B Movie, Genius Lyrics

In the end, Robert Mueller is a 74 year old man that clearly didn’t want to be there. He wrote his 448 page report for a different time and American: when we got our news from morning and evening local papers, not mobile apps. He wrote it for an American that developed powers of concentration during the dominance of radio, listening intently to every word spoken. He wrote it for an America that had fewer options for distraction in the form of a plethora of cable channels and Internet websites. It is an America and American that does not exist now.

He's not Matt Dillon - tough as the laptop doctored memes made of him, or the videos of him handcuffing Orange Satan and leading him off to the pokey. He doesn't have the deep voice he had on earlier videos of his speech patterns. He's an older man now. Entropy diminishes our faculties over time. It's biology, chemistry, physics: senescence. Despite a billion-dollar industry selling us all manner of snake oil, there is nothing we can do to stop it from occurring to any and all of us. At best, we can ease its transition.

Yes. He could have used the deferment the draft board gave him during the Vietnam War: he had actual bad knees (not fake bone spurs). He conditioned himself to pass the grueling Marine physical and served his country. He went through Army Ranger School and Airborne School to jump out of perfectly good airplanes. He is in the Army Ranger Hall of Fame (I didn't know there was such a thing). After September 11, 2001, he steadily lead the FBI during some dark times as we entered the 21st Century, unsure if we'd survive at all.

Yet, there were his fellow republicans Wednesday with exception of a respectful few attacking him. The ageism jokes were repugnant of elected officials, yet it's on video. The Orange Caligula crowed it as a "win": he's consumed an entire political party, making it as crude, traitorous, licentious and feckless as himself. Pundit's like Chris Wallace said it looked "disastrous for the democrats." Chuck Todd said the "optics were terrible."

When did facts need optics? When did an attack on our nation (9/11; the 2016 election) need a band? "Infotainment" should have never entered our lexicon in the 1980s. It's made us less than non-serious: it's made us silly.

Don’t think of visuals or theatrics. Have you READ The Mueller Report? Download it for G-d's sake! You binge watch streaming videos, so you can digest this in a weekend! Did you HEAR Mueller use the words "unpatriotic" and "problematic" with regards to this president*? Did you hear that the Russians are interfering, not next year, but NOW? My senator, Richard Burr (R-NC) and Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va) just released the intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. It's chilling, but not enough for Mitch McConnell et al. to hesitate blocking election protections that would - in their warped minds - not favor republicans. No worries.

Fun fact: no president has ever been removed from office by impeachment. Jackson after the Civil War like Bill Clinton after Monica Lewinsky was impeached in the House but both measures failed in the Senate. Their records still reflect their impeachment.

Nixon after the Watergate impeachment inquiry was looking at it actually happening in the House and upheld in trial in the Senate with members of his own party. The inquiry was after he won a landslide reelection victory: 49 states to his opponent George McGovern's 1. He won 60.7% of the popular vote and was the first republican to sweep the south. His popularity fell after the inquiry revealed his malfeasance, and he resigned rather than be removed by members of his own party when they actually had principles and followed their Oath of Office.

Mitch McConnell above all others has reduced the senate from a political body that prided itself on deliberating hard issues and coming to consensus into a tribal, unconstitutional free-for-all. Oleg Deripaska, indicted by Mueller Russian oligarch and close adviser to Putin is building an aluminum plant in his state - no worries. Donald Trump would likely survive as McConnell would "pull a Merrick Garland," and just refuse to hold a trial. Since the votes would go on partisan lines, that would put senate republicans on record supporting a lawless president before a major election. His impeachment however would stand, on his record for all time. Impeachment is also not just about this president*, but the next actual one, and what we as a nation will tolerate.

Nancy Pelosi hasn’t brought forward an impeachment inquiry because previous to this, only 85 democrats supported impeachment. That number has climbed, and will likely go higher.

However, if the thesis of the argument is this president* is not following The Constitution and thus constitutes a crisis, neither is the current Speaker of the House. Slow-walking an impeachment inquiry is either also a constitutional crisis, or it's not. If NO ONE is following The Constitution, there effectively isn't one and the rule of law is a myth: it is the rule of whims and notions of current moments and times as arbitrated by a pathologically lying narcissist with impulse control.

Lastly, if he gets away with it, interference in our elections by foreign countries becomes in the words of Mueller “the new normal,” and our democracy* as well as our sovereignty* as currently our Putin-installed president* will forever have asterisks next to their titles. We won't have to worry about immigrants of any stripe.

Our sovereignty will depend on our getting out to vote en masse to counter any foreign election meddling, domestic voter suppression and the return of an "oldie-but-goody" in Florida: poll taxes!

We will cease to be a country.

White supremacy was this nation's origin; racism unto oblivion and the ash heap will be our epitaph.

“We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within....”

Attributed to Nikita Khrushchev in comments from Barbara Fowler post Helsinki, Orlando Sentinel

The Caveat of Clean...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 25, 2019 at 5:00am

Data: Wood Mackenzie; Chart: Axios Visuals

Topics: Alternative Energy, Climate Change, Global Warming, Green Energy

I am proudly the owner of all battery-powered lawn equipment: lawn mower, hedger; weed edger and blower (a twofer). All require a few hours of charging to power and get me through a typical pruning in roughly two hours. I did it in a nod to the environment, but also so I wouldn't have to get gas for a mower or lug electrical extension cords around. The purchases admittedly were more pragmatic than progressive.

The unfortunate reality is batteries like anything else we use come from raw materials. The world is limited in volume, even though we're on it and these raw materials to construct the things we utilize and enjoy are not in unlimited supply.

Problems are never simple to solve, else they wouldn't be problems.

*****

There could be a "supply crunch" for cobalt, lithium, and nickel used in batteries for electric vehicles and other applications as soon as the mid-2020s, the consultancy Wood Mackenzie said Wednesday.

The big picture: The chart above shows their projections of demand for materials used in EVs but also batteries needed for consumer electronics and energy storage.

What's next: Wood Mackenzie forecasts that pure electrics and plug-in hybrids combined will account for 7% of all passenger car sales by 2025, 14% by 2030 and 38% by 2040.

Of note: That's less bullish than BloombergNEF, which sees EVs accounting for 57% of passenger car sales in 2040.

The bottom line: "The electrification of transport is redefining a number of metals markets," Wood Mackenzie said in a release summarizing their analysis.

Troubles may loom for the battery supply chain for electric vehicles
Ben Geman, Axios

LMADIS...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 24, 2019 at 5:00am

Topics: Applied Physics, Electromagnetic Radiation, Politics, Robotics

I normally cheer the usage and applications of recent technology. In light of recent events, this may not be a swift idea. The second through fourth letters of the acronym are quite (and maybe intentionally) ominous.

"War is the continuation of politics by other means." Carl von Clausewitz

*****

In June, Iran’s military shot down one of the U.S. Navy’s $130 million Global Hawk drones, claiming it had veered out of international airspace and into the nation’s territory.

Now, the U.S. Navy has returned the favor, using a new directed-energy weapon to disable an Iranian drone in the same region — marking the next-generation device’s first known “kill.”

According to a Department of Defense statement, a fixed wing drone approached the USS Boxer while the ship traveled through the Strait of Hormuz on July 18. The drone then came within a threatening range, prompting the crew to take “defensive action.”

A defense official later told Military.com on the condition of anonymity that the Navy took out the drone using its Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System (LMADIS), a new device that uses radio frequencies to jam drones.

Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif, meanwhile, has denied the incident altogether, telling reporters the nation has “no information about losing a drone.”

US Navy's Weapon Gets First "Kill," Shoots Down Iranian Drone
Kristin Houser, Futurism

Entanglement...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 23, 2019 at 5:16am

Physicists take first-ever photo of quantum entanglement.
Credit: University of Glasgow/CC by 4.0

Topics: Einstein, Entanglement, Laser, Quantum Mechanics

Scientists just captured the first-ever photo of the phenomenon dubbed "spooky action at a distance" by Albert Einstein. That phenomenon, called quantum entanglement, describes a situation where particles can remain connected such that the physical properties of one will affect the other, no matter the distance (even miles) between them.

Einstein hated the idea, since it violated classical descriptions of the world. So he proposed one way that entanglement could coexist with classical physics — if there existed an unknown, "hidden" variable that acted as a messenger between the pair of entangled particles, keeping their fates entwined. [18 Times Quantum Particles Blew Our Minds in 2018]

There was just one problem: There was no way to test whether Einstein's view — or the stranger alternative, in which particles "communicate" faster than the speed of light and particles have no objective state until they are observed — was true. Finally, in the 1960s, physicist Sir John Bell came up with a test that disproves the existence of these hidden variables — which would mean that the quantum world is extremely weird.

This is "the pivotal test of quantum entanglement," said senior author Miles Padgett, who holds the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy and is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Though people have been using quantum entanglement and Bell's inequalities in applications such as quantum computing and cryptography, "this is the first time anyone has used a camera to confirm [it]."

To take the photo, Padgett and his team first had to entangle photons, or light particles, using a tried-and-true method. They hit a crystal with an ultraviolet (UV) laser, and some of those photons from the laser broke apart into two photons. "Due to conservation of both energy and momentum, each resulting pair [of] photons are entangled," Padgett said.

'Spooky' Quantum Entanglement Finally Captured in Stunning Photo
Yasemin Saplakoglu, Live Science

Legacy...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 22, 2019 at 5:00am

APOLLO 11
Results from the Apollo 11 mission established key paradigms of lunar and planetary science. After a harrowing descent to the surface, Armstrong set the Eagle down on the cratered basaltic plains of Mare Tranquillitatis. Extravehicular activity was brief—just two and a half hours during that first mission—and included setting up surface experiments and exploring a small cluster of craters near the lunar module and Little West Crater some 60 meters away, as shown in figure 1. Aldrin’s iconic Apollo 11 bootprint photo revealed much about the lunar soil, including its fine-grained nature, its cohesiveness, and its ability to pack tightly together.

Topics: Apollo, Moon, NASA, Spaceflight

On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin landed on the Moon while Michael Collins orbited in the command module Columbia. “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed”became one of the most iconic statements of the Apollo experience and set the stage for five additional Apollo landings.

Each of the Apollo missions explored carefully selected landing sites and conducted a variety of experiments to probe the lunar interior and measure the solar wind. Well-trained astronauts made geologic observations and collected samples of rock and regolith, the impact-generated layer of debris that composes the lunar surface. Over a half century of study, the samples have revealed abundant information not only about the Moon’s origin and history but also about the workings of our solar system.

APOLLO 11

Results from the Apollo 11 mission established key paradigms of lunar and planetary science. After a harrowing descent to the surface, Armstrong set the Eagle down on the cratered basaltic plains of Mare Tranquillitatis. Extravehicular activity was brief—just two and a half hours during that first mission—and included setting up surface experiments and exploring a small cluster of craters near the lunar module and Little West Crater some 60 meters away, as shown in figure 1. Aldrin’s iconic Apollo 11 boot print photo revealed much about the lunar soil, including its fine-grained nature, its cohesiveness, and its ability to pack tightly together.

The scientific legacy of the Apollo program, Brad Jolliff, Mark Robinson, Physics Today

True Strength...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 19, 2019 at 5:00am

Topics: Diversity, Diversity in Science, STEM, Women in Science

"Diversity is our strength, unity is our power." Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

U.S. innovation has long drawn inspiration from a mix of scientific disciplines, academic institutions, research laboratories and industries, yet the scientific enterprise’s workforce lacks diversity of another sort, according to testimony before a House panel on May 9.

In remarks delivered to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Shirley Malcom, a senior adviser at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said the growing need for a workforce capable of delivering future innovations and meeting the world’s challenges will require “expanding the pool of talent, tapping into the vast well of women, minorities, racial and ethnic, and people with disabilities currently underrepresented in STEM,” the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The perspective delivered by Malcom, who also serves as director of AAAS’ STEM Equity Achievement or SEA Change initiative, were echoed by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, chairwoman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, as well as by each of the four other panelists who joined Malcom in addressing the committee.

“As the rest of the country becomes more diverse, the STEM workforce has been slow to respond,” said Johnson. “In addition, I have watched with dismay for decades as women have made too few gains in the STEM workforce.”

The "STEM Opportunities Act of 2019, a bill that would require more comprehensive demographic data to be collected on recipients of federal research awards and STEM faculty at universities to help identify and reduce barriers that prevent women and underrepresented groups from entering and advancing in STEM."

The caveat: the House bill will likely stall and die in the Senate if not outright vetoed by a recalcitrant, science-phobic administration basing its next reflexive move on what the previous black president favored. It is the insistence on being the center of the story forever; the hero of the plot. It allows a growing inequality based on zip codes, city funding, cultural maturity and opportunity. Most of the aforementioned zip codes will be urban, but a lot of them rural, currently undergoing an opioid crisis and economic opportunities excavated by bad trade policies. Their being over "colored others" is a warped and sadistic feel-good measure but not a solution - similar to the sentiments expressed with a "send her back" chant at a North Carolina Klan rally Wednesday. It is a de facto redlining scheme to keep the country gerrymandered on the status quo of visual differences reinforced by propagandized compulsory education with schlock creation science; entertainment options meant to numb us and media to reinforce our biases. It is not a path forward to a mythologized lost "greatness." It is proto fascism.

"You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I'll rise."

Representative Ilhan Omar quoting Dr. Maya Angelou on Twitter

It is an open invitation for China to take advantage of this blatant racism and ignorance, powering ahead of us to become the world's dominate superpower. Once our lofty perch among nations is lost, we will likely not recover it. We will be a byword, a proverb and in the inimitable words of our current juvenile chief executive "they are [and will likely be] laughing at us"; that throwaway line against his ardent foe that made him sad at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, prophetically projection.

Diverse STEM Workforce Needed to Preserve U.S. Competitiveness, Anne Q. Hoy
Office of Public Programs SEA Change
American Association for the Advancement of Science

Stepping Backwards...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 18, 2019 at 5:00am

Image source: link [1] below

Topics: Civics, NASA, Space Exploration, Star Trek, STEM

The first time I ran into the notion of the moon landing being "faked," a young coworker showed me a grainy amateurish video on YouTube. I encountered it with a co-vendor at the IBM research facility I supported. To neither, both younger than me, did it matter that "I was there" and they weren't on the planet yet. Evidence and eye witness testimony did not move them from their stances.

Neil Armstrong thought he had a 50–50 shot at pulling it off. "There are so many unknowns," the first man to set foot on the moon said in a 2011 interview with an Australian accounting firm. “There was a big chance that there was something in there we didn’t understand properly and we [would have] to abort and come back to Earth without landing.” That he, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins—with the help of thousands of NASA engineers, scientists and mission controllers on Earth—did pull off a moon landing remains one of humanity's most incredible achievements.

Consider that 50 years ago this month a 36-story-tall Saturn V rocket weighing as much as 400 elephants climbed away from Earth atop an explosion more powerful than the output of 85 Hoover Dams. Once in space, the astronauts escaped Earth orbit, traveled to lunar orbit, then undocked part of their spacecraft and steered it down for a soft impact on an alien land. Perhaps even more impressive, after taking a walk around, they climbed back in their lunar lander, launched off the surface of another planetary body (another first), rejoined the command module orbiting roughly 60 miles above the lunar surface, and then flew back to Earth, splashing down safely in the Pacific Ocean two days later. [1]

The spin offs from the space industry technologically benefited America. Not since the king cotton era (fueled by the free, uncompensated slave labor of my ancestors) had the United States enjoyed such dominance in production, productivity and economic expansion. It would go on for decades, many young people inspired by NASA, Star Trek reruns and conventions to pursue STEM careers out of a passion for exploration, and birthing a more egalitarian society post previous sectarian divisions.

Exactly 50 years ago today, a Saturn V rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the Moon. Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin would land on the Moon and inspire a generation of young people to become scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.

The Apollo program's effect of inspiring America's children to pursue careers in STEM fields is one of the most powerful lasting legacies of the Moon race. Unfortunately, this effect seems to be coming to an end.

On the eve of the Apollo 11 anniversary, LEGO asked The Harris Poll to survey a total of 3,000 children in the United States, China, and the United Kingdom about their attitudes toward and knowledge of space. The results reveal that, at least for Western countries, kids today are more interested in YouTube than spaceflight. [2]

Entertainment and ambition looked upward: the notion of a three nacelle starship with a saucer section that could travel impossible speeds fueled imaginations. The notion of defying relativistic time dilation, traversing vast distances in human lifetimes propelled many of us into STEM to “do our parts” in getting at least close to this lofty goal. A fifth or tenth the speed of light to Proxima Centauri would achieve that aim. Any higher level physics class disabused us of attaining “warp speed,” but we could see the technological benefit and spin off of assisting in things that would promote the “Common Good” here on Terra Firma.

We did not count on the divorce of productivity and cost of living wages, stagnant since the 1970s. We did not count on conspiracy theorists masking themselves as serious news pundits and influencing more than clicks or product purchases from their sites. We did not count on the rapidly increasing (and encouraged) income disparity. We did not count on politicians bought by wealthy families and corporations whose only about getting wealthier and more powerful in our lives. We did not count on science denial, climate or otherwise. Such a dysfunctional dystopia depends on selfies, self-centered attitudes and distractions, like supercomputers in our hip pockets sharing our suppers; websites that reinforce our views and cute cat videos. And we did not count on the cultural division encouraged by authoritarians the world over as their best means of controlling the masses.

It is in such a world young people would rather be YouTube personalities than starship captains.

My previous, gob-smacking encounters with my younger coworkers are now explained.

1. One Small Step Back in Time: Relive the Wonder of Apollo 11, Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American
2. American kids would much rather be YouTubers than astronauts, Eric Berger, ArsTechica

How We See the Small...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 17, 2019 at 1:28pm

800px-AFM_used_cantilever_in_Scanning_Electron_Microscope_magnification_1000x.jpg

View of cantilever on an atomic force microscope (magnification 1000x).
Credit: SecretDisc GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0

Topics: Atomic Force Microscopy, Nanotechnology, Optics, Scanning Electron Microscope

Cell reproduction, disease detection and semiconductor optimization are just some of the areas of research that have exploited the atomic force microscope. First invented by Calvin Quate, Gerd Binnig and Christoph Gerber in the mid 1980s, atomic force microscopy (AFM) brought the atomic resolution recently achieved by the scanning tunnelling microscope to non-conducting samples, and helped to catalyse the avalanche of science and technology based on nanostructures that now permeates all aspects of modern life from smartphones to tennis rackets. On 6 July 2019 Calvin Quate died aged 95 at his home in Menlo Park, California.

Long before the development of AFM, Quate’s research had made waves in microscopy. 1978 had seen the announcement of the scanning acoustic microscope, which achieved the sensitivity of optical microscopy but probed samples so softly that it could image the interiors of living cells without damaging them. The technique uses high frequency sound waves in place of light, which penetrate deep into structures to image internal structures non-destructively. It is widely used in quality control of electronic component assembly among other applications such as printed circuit boards and medical products.

Advanced microscopy pioneer leaves broad ranging legacy
Anna Demming, Physics World

Where You Came From...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 15, 2019 at 5:00am

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Politics

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - Bronx, NY

Rep. Ilhan Omar - Somali refugee, naturalized in Minnesota

Rep. Ayanna Pressley - Cincinnati, OH

Rep. Rashida Tlaib - Detroit, MI

Donald Trump - not Queens, somewhere between Area 51 and dumb $:#% i-Stan!

I tweeted this at "stable genius" Sunday. I won't mince words.

The president is a racist.

If the video embed invokes the Bard ("what's past is prologue" - William Shakespeare) his racism came from his environment, not reruns of "All in the Family" with Archie Bunker.

He was a racist when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower, railing against Mexicans as drug dealers and rapist and Muslims as terrorist.

He was a racist as he made "other" the first African American President of the United States in his swiped-from-Orly-Taitz birther campaign that put him in the Oval Office.

He was a racist when he took a full-page ad out in the NY Times calling for at the time a return of the death penalty for the Central Park Five. Even after DNA evidence exonerated them and the actual rapist confessed, he still won't admit his error.

He was a racist when the NIXON administration's justice department came after him and his father in the 1970s for discriminating against African Americans and Puerto Ricans in their rental properties in New York.

I recall the jarring sight of the Robert E. Lee Battle Flag (NOT the flag of the Confederacy as it is misidentified by the lazy) in a village in Wappingers Falls, NY about 80 miles north of Manhattan. The "stars and bars" were flying high in Boston, Massachusetts as I took a class in Implant Engineering in 2016 at the onset of this poorly-scripted, reality-TV slow-rolling nightmare.

First Nation Peoples who speak native tongues are told to "go back where you came from" when they were here before Europeans.

African Americans are told to "go back where we came from" as IF leaping on a slave ship sir named "The Good Ship Jesus" packed like sardines, suffering cholera, diarrhea, dysentery and death; the survivors separated, raped and beaten worse than cattle did it all for a LARK!

Hispanics/Latinos are told to "go back where they came from" when Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Las Vegas and California USED TO BE Mexico. The Alamo - so "bravely fought" for Texas freedom - was started because the Mexicans would not agree to continue slavery!

This nation is a sham, a facade: a fake! It's told itself a line of bullshit so long, it's become accepted history instead of the propaganda used by a well-moneyed oligarchy to maintain control of the masses.

They WON'T do reparations because this "system" needs pariahs. Without them, the whole thing crumbles like a house of cards: African Americans, First Nation, Hispanic/Latinos, LGBT; Women. It needs someone to be under a stamping boot:

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." O'Brien to Winston in "1984."

It's why the struggle isn't left-right as Robert Reich has stated, but between democracy and oligarchy, who have likely gotten plenty tired of democratic freedoms interfering with the Ayan Rand, Atlas Shrugged invisible hand of the "free market."

Keeping poor whites against people of color is the easiest way for them to keep control and not have accountability for their avarice and nihilism.

Naturalized or birth: we're the American melting pot. We're all from here.

"For years, even before mounting a formal bid for the presidency, Trump regaled television news audiences with racist conspiracy theories about former president Barack Obama. He pledged to send investigators out to prove the nation’s 44th president was not born in the United States. He later derided immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries, calling those foreign nations “shit hole countries.” He once said immigrants from Haiti all “have AIDS” and that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts.”

In Trump’s mind, a judge’s Mexican heritage made him incapable of ruling fairly in a civil fraud case against one of his companies and he believes “laziness is a trait in blacks.” Trump, whose real estate company was sued for housing discrimination in the 1970s, went on to place a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of five innocent black teenagers. Even after the Central Park Five were exonerated, he refused to take it back. After Heather Heyer was murdered in Charlottesville, Virginia, amid a white supremacist protest, he lamented the there were “some very fine people” on “both sides.”

Trump is not a fine person. His words Sunday were not racially “charged,” “fueled,” or “tinged.” They were unapologetically racist.

And, if you support him, so are you."

Goldie Taylor, The Daily Beast, Trump is a Racist. If You Still Support Him, So Are You.

Horror in Your Funk

Posted by James G Goodridge on July 11, 2019 at 1:22pm

Horror in Your Funk (2).rtf.docx

Beneficent Adversaries...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 3, 2019 at 7:36am

Petty Officer Third Class Robert H. Goodwin, WWII veteran

Topics: Nanofluidics, Nanotechnology, Research, STEM, Thesis

I passed my Thesis defense in Monday. I have a Masters in Nanoengineering.

After many weeks of running experiments, parsing data and writing preliminary conclusions, I had to stand before my committee: my advisor (chemist) and my nano physics professor, the department chair (mechanical engineering) and defend my research. In hindsight, it was the committee on steroids.

I bought coffee and donuts; water for the committee as is the tradition. That exposed me to 95 degree heat and North Carolina humidity. I ended up defending without my suit jacket.

There is the public defense part where you get questions from either the panel or the audience. Then the grueling begins when the audience is encouraged to leave and you are alone with your committee.

I was challenged on my understanding of the data, not in an accusatory way but to foster a better rewrite when I turn in my written product to the Graduate College. Those are due next Wednesday. I should be able to fulfill that request on review with my advisor. The committee also suggested further experiments I could do to verify what I thought I was seeing. After an intense 40 minutes of questioning, I was asked to leave as the committee conferred. For what seemed like an eternity, my advisor came out and shook my hand: "congratulations." I then went in to the committee to get their final suggestions and signatures for completing the process.

I am also moving...within Greensboro mind you, but to a house we own outright versus a rental apartment we don't.

It reminded me of my father proudly burning the last payment record as we owned our modest home - two bedrooms, one bath and less than a thousand square feet - in East Winston-Salem off Cleveland Avenue.

For the move, I had to parse through memorabilia that traveled with us from Texas to New York to North Carolina. It was time to make some decisions.

I found the program and invitation to my mother's graduation from Practical Nursing School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I imagined the trip for her and my father probably took a lot of back roads and the Green Book during that time period.

I found my parents' invitations sent for my high school graduation as well as my acceptance letter saying I had been accepted to North Carolina A&T State University for the fall semester, 1980. I found my first karate promotion certificates from Dr. Casterlow as part of the A&T Dojo.

I found a short story my father kept I had written for catharsis called "The Decision." It was when Pop left it to me to decide the fate of my dog, a Cocker Spaniel named Fala, named after FDR's dog. He was aged, tired and had stopped eating. The gist of the story was "sometimes as a man, you have to make difficult decisions." I was twelve. I didn't own a dog again until I was an adult with sons of my own. Parting with each four-legged friend has never gotten easier.

I found a lot of family photos that will go in albums and on a flash drive soon.

I also found the corroborating evidence I had read on History.com: the GI Bill like the New Deal before it was discriminatory to African Americans. My father passed a college entrance exam with only a sixth grade education formally, due to the fact he and my uncle Moses, Jr. went to work for my grandmother to help out the household. The GI Bill for white soldiers and sailors paid for a college education and loans encouraging home ownership, building a wealth gap that has persisted for generations. Many white service members went on to become professionals and professors. The GI Bill for my father and his fellow WWII veterans of color only covered vocational training, like barber school. So that's what he learned. Pop often cut my hair in the kitchen of our home in a segregated neighborhood crafted by redlining legislation. He faced the indignities of working for a textile company - routinely getting passed over for promotions and getting called "boy" or n-word then his name. He smoked in a chair in his bedroom before he engaged with the family every evening after work. That was his way of coping. It eventually led to lung cancer, the contributing cause of his death.

I sadly had to throw away his literature books he bought for me: I read The Iliad and the Odyssey from that collection. I read snippets of Milton and I meant to read Thomas Paine. They alas were molded and mildewed; unrecoverable. I plan to replace the collection once we're settled in.

Announcing the good news on Facebook numbered in the thousands on the Kappa Alpha Psi page; hundreds on my main feed. It was good to see others, near and far, celebrate this achievement with me.

I passed my Masters Thesis defense.

I like to think I redeemed my father's dreams as well.

DREAMNASIUM is coming!

Posted by Geoff Thorne on June 25, 2019 at 11:42am

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Legacy...

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Stepping Backwards...

How We See the Small...

Where You Came From...

Horror in Your Funk

Beneficent Adversaries...

DREAMNASIUM is coming!

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