Stop Making Sense

Jonathan Demme's first masterpiece. R.I.P.

Yet another time killer :)

The size of things from the planck scale to whatever ... is a great time killer for sure. Enjoy.

Robert M. Pirsig

Robert Pirsig

Robert Pirsig is a biggie with yours truly as he melded zen with diligence, something artists do all the time as one must work hard learning one's craft with due diligence and concentration and then let go and not think when doing said craft. This wonderful connect is beautifully expressed not only in Persig's work but also with Bill Evan's wonderful linear notes on Kind Of Blue.

There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment.

Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. 

The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see will find something captured that escapes explanation. This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflection, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician. 

Group improvisation is a further challenge. Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result. This most difficult problem, I think, is beautifully met and solved on this recording. 

As the painter needs his framework of parchment, the improvising musical group needs its framework in time. Miles Davis presents here frameworks which are exquisite in their simplicity and yet contain all that is necessary to stimulate performance with a sure reference to the primary conception. 

Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a "take." 

Robert M. Pirsig...

The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.

It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.

And my favorite ...

Quality is the Buddha.

R.I.P.

Early Spring

Even though winter was almost a non-event in CT, early spring still works its magic, albeit very early, thanks to climate change. Enjoy.

Funnies yet again :)

Two losers

Ignore science at your peril.

Free Speech applies to everyone.

Tunnel Flight :)

Hypnotic video showing off the most powerful laser in the world, proving once again science will continue to advance in spite of Trump and the idiots who serve him.

Scientists at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) research center in Germany are hard at work getting the world’s largest X-ray laser, the European XFEL, ready for use. Today, the scientists announced they’ve reached a milestone in its creation by successfully firing electrons through a particle accelerator 2.1 kilometers (1.3 miles) long.

This was one of the last milestones in the European XFEL’s creation, and it remains on track for completion later this year. Once completed, the European XFEL will be able to produce as many as 27,000 X-ray laser flashes in a single second. Because these flashes will be so quick and intense, they’ll allow researchers to generate never-before-seen images of structures and processes on the atomic level.

Any questions?

That's Us/Rev II

Earth yet again.

Texture Mapping to the Max :)

Yours truly loves maps, the older the better but ... they are all inaccurate save for the AuthaGraph World Map

You probably don’t realize it, but virtually every world map you’ve ever seen is wrong. And while the new AuthaGraph World Map may look strange, it is in fact the most accurate map you’ve ever seen.

The world maps we’re all used to operate off of the Mercator projection, a cartographic technique developed by Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. This imperfect technique gave us a map that was “right side up,” orderly, and useful for ship navigation — but also one that distorted both the size of many landmasses and the distances between them.

To correct these distortions, Tokyo-based architect and artist Hajime Narukawa created the AuthaGraph map over the course of several years using a complex process that essentially amounts to taking the globe (more accurate than any Mercator map) and flattening it out:

How he did it, texture mapping to the max.

It gets better.

But a new map called AuthaGraph, created by Tokyo-based artist and architect Hajime Narukawa, just won Japan's distinguished Good Design Award for accurately representing the relative sizes of landmasses and bodies of water on Earth. The map is so proportionally accurate that you can fold it up into a three-dimensional globe.

Thanks Chuck, I needed that. :)

He was in the room

Like Tom Paine and the Founding Fathers,  Harry Huxley was in the room, the room that ushered in the digital age as he worked with Alan Turing on hardware, helped to design the Eniac computer and built the first personal computer in 1954 called the G-15.

Dr. Huskey, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, began his digital career in the mid-1940s with the Eniac, a behemoth that was considered the country’s first general-purpose programmable electronic computer. A top-secret federal government project at the University of Pennsylvania, it measured 100 feet long, weighed 30 tons and contained 18,000 vacuum tubes.

He later worked with the pioneering British mathematician Alan M. Turing on a prototype of another early computer, the Automatic Computing Engine; oversaw development of yet another, the SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer); and in 1954 designed the G-15, a 950-pound predecessor to today’s laptops.

It gets better.

The very word “computer” was so novel that Dr. Huskey described the SWAC as “a large-scale electronic computing machine” when he appeared on the radio quiz show “You Bet Your Life” in 1950 and tried to explain it to the host, Groucho Marx.

“Now, doctor, what is this machine for, this robot?” Groucho asked.

“It’s to carry out sequences of computations, to compare figures,” Dr. Huskey patiently explained.

To which Groucho replied, in his signature manner of gigabit-paced repartee: “If you’re going to compare figures, I don’t need an electric brain for that. It’s called an automatic reflex in my case.”

You can't make  this up and ... he was a genius without question.

The Eniac

Harry with his G-15. :)

Help not needed here

BRT has written copiously about AI, the open ended tech that promises to change everything in ways that cannot be predicted, is now coming for your job whether you like it or not.

SITTING IN AN office in San Francisco, Igor Barani calls up some medical scans on his screen. He is the chief executive of Enlitic, one of a host of startups applying deep learning to medicine, starting with the analysis of images such as X-rays and CT scans. It is an obvious use of the technology. Deep learning is renowned for its superhuman prowess at certain forms of image recognition; there are large sets of labelled training data to crunch; and there is tremendous potential to make health care more accurate and efficient.

Dr Barani (who used to be an oncologist) points to some CT scans of a patient’s lungs, taken from three different angles. Red blobs flicker on the screen as Enlitic’s deep-learning system examines and compares them to see if they are blood vessels, harmless imaging artefacts or malignant lung nodules. The system ends up highlighting a particular feature for further investigation. In a test against three expert human radiologists working together, Enlitic’s system was 50% better at classifying malignant tumours and had a false-negative rate (where a cancer is missed) of zero, compared with 7% for the humans. Another of Enlitic’s systems, which examines X-rays to detect wrist fractures, also handily outperformed human experts. The firm’s technology is currently being tested in 40 clinics across Australia.

A computer that dispenses expert radiology advice is just one example of how jobs currently done by highly trained white-collar workers can be automated, thanks to the advance of deep learning and other forms of artificial intelligence. The idea that manual work can be carried out by machines is already familiar; now ever-smarter machines can perform tasks done by information workers, too. What determines vulnerability to automation, experts say, is not so much whether the work concerned is manual or white-collar but whether or not it is routine. 

In reading this, consider what is going to happen to healthcare, the most inefficient system in America save for the Pentagon where 

1. An office visit to a doc to deal with the flu costing $150 is replaced by purchasing a set of $2.00 labs on a chip, via Amazon, to be used at home, as needs warrant.
2. Said chip, with connects to the web and Dr. Watson, delivers blood sample data to Watson for realtime analysis.
3. Dr. Watson, after analyzing the sample, tells the patient what's wrong, prescribes, if necessary, the drug to deal with the condition in question and sets up a time for another visit as needs warrant. Price for said service, $1.00.
4. “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.” - Peter Drucker .

Yours truly knows a few GPs and they fear AI big time. The ortho guys, dentists or specialists dealing with serious illness like cancer, heart or diabetes, not so much though the push toward patient stem cell in situ organ regeneration is starting to encroach upon those areas as well.

Lawyers are also in the crosshairs as well as many other jobs that are, as per The Economist, routine in nature.

Addendum: A stunning 94 percent of the 9 million new jobs created in the past decade were temp or contract-based gigs.

Tech, like research and money, never sleeps. - Robert E.

That's Us

The Earth & the Moon, courtesy Cassini, the little probe that can. :)

Carl Sagan would be proud.

A man who got it right

General Smedley D. Butler

Here's a quote from a guy who got it right regarding war, racketeering and why this country needs to take a real hard look at itself regarding its place in the world and in terms of its relationship with the MIC.

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

If the country actually did this, the entire way America deals with the world and with itself would change overnight, for the better.

Huxley was right

Huxley was right. LSD, Mescaline and Psilocybin do heighten consciousness but yours truly already knows that from past experience with said bon bons back in the day. :)

Brain scans have revealed the first evidence for what appears to be a heightened state of consciousness in people who took psychedelic drugs in the name of science.

Healthy volunteers who received LSD, ketamine or psilocybin, a compound found in magic mushrooms, were found to have more random brain activity than normal while under the influence, according to a study into the effects of the drugs.

Without question, Aldous Huxley was an amazing man.

Click here to see some of the art he connected with while tripping. 

I'm okay with that :)

What every women should say to bozos intruding upon their private sex lives.

Critical Thiking 101

The Well Informed. 

I can see clearly now.

Getting the facts straight

Fly the Friendly Skies

Ready, Fire, Aim/Rev II

Well, it's seems this Ready, Fire, Aim administration has lived up to it's reputation regarding the Sarin gas attack it says was perpetrated by Assad against his people based on intel questionable at best as described in a 9 page report by Theodore Postol, MIT Emeritus Prof, stating that a four-page report released by the Trump administration yesterday intended to blame the recent chemical attack in Syria on the Syrian government “does not provide any evidence whatsoever that the US government has concrete knowledge that the government of Syria was the source of the chemical attack

This issue of false intel has been a prime driver that got us into Nam, into Iraq and nearly got us into yet another quagmire with the purported Syrian Sarin gas attack in 2013 as gaming intel for political gain has gone on since the beginning of time.

It gets better.

Where Was CIA’s Pompeo on Syria?

There is a dark mystery behind the White House-released photo showing President Trump and more than a dozen advisers meeting at his estate in Mar-a-Lago after his decision to strike Syria with Tomahawk missiles: Where are CIA Director Mike Pompeo and other top intelligence officials? Robert Parry

The photograph released by the White House of President Trump meeting with his advisers at his estate in Mar-a-Lago on April 6, 2017, regarding his decision to launch missile strikes against Syria.

Something wicked this way comes - Ray Bradbury

Had to add this bon bon.

Read the piece accompanying this pix. A good read for sure.