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Tag Archives: technology

Engaging, becoming and understanding through reading books

30 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by essaybee2012 in affirmation of life, becoming, big questions, books, Books For Life, empathy, engaging, excellence, life shaping, life-guiding wisdom, pleasure, reading

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Wall Street Journal

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-need-to-read-1480083086

  • Life
  • Ideas
  • The Saturday Essay

The Need to Read

Reading books remains one of the best ways to engage with the world, become a better person and understand life’s questions, big and small

ILLUSTRATION:  BRIAN STAUFFER

By

Will Schwalbe

Nov. 25, 2016  9:11 a.m. ET

We all ask each other a lot of questions.  But we should all ask one question a lot more often:  “What are you reading?”

It’s a simple question but a powerful one, and it can change lives.

Here’s one example:  I met, at a bookstore, a woman who told me that she had fallen sadly out of touch with her beloved grandson.  She lived in Florida.  He and his parents lived elsewhere.  She would call him and ask him about school or about his day.  He would respond in one-word answers:  Fine.  Nothing.  Nope.

And then one day, she asked him what he was reading.  He had just started “The Hunger Games,” a series of dystopian young-adult novels by Suzanne Collins.  The grandmother decided to read the first volume so that she could talk about it with her grandson the next time they chatted on the phone.  She didn’t know what to expect, but she found herself hooked from the first pages, in which Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sister’s place in the annual battle-to-the-death among a select group of teens.

The book helped this grandmother cut through the superficialities of phone chat and engage her grandson on the most important questions that humans face about survival and destruction and loyalty and betrayal and good and evil, and about politics as well.  Now her grandson couldn’t wait to talk to her when she called—to tell her where he was, to find out where she was and to speculate about what would happen next.

Other than belonging to the same family, they had never had much in common.  Now they did.  The conduit was reading.

We need to read and to be readers now more than ever.

More on Reading

  • The Classic Books You Haven’t Read
  • Empathy by the Book:  How Fiction Affects Behavior
  • WSJ Book Club:  Author David Gilbert Chooses ‘Moby-Dick’
  • From Megyn Kelly to J.K. Rowling, 10 Books to Read Now
  • Holiday Books:  What to Give
  • Fall Book Preview

We overschedule our days and complain constantly about being too busy.  We shop endlessly for stuff we don’t need and then feel oppressed by the clutter that surrounds us.  We rarely sleep well or enough.  We compare our bodies to the artificial ones we see in magazines and our lives to the exaggerated ones we see on television.  We watch cooking shows and then eat fast food.  We worry ourselves sick and join gyms we don’t visit.  We keep up with hundreds of acquaintances but rarely see our best friends.  We bombard ourselves with video clips and emails and instant messages.  We even interrupt our interruptions.

And at the heart of it, for so many, is fear—fear that we are missing out on something.  Wherever we are, someone somewhere is doing or seeing or eating or listening to something better.

I’m eager to escape from this way of living.  And if enough of us escape, the world will be better for it.

Connectivity is one of the great blessings of the internet era, and it makes extraordinary things possible.  But constant connectivity can be a curse, encouraging the lesser angels of our nature.  None of the nine Muses of classical times bore the names Impatience or Distraction.

The City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.  PHOTO:  GETTY IMAGES/LONELY PLANET IMAGES

Books are uniquely suited to helping us change our relationship to the rhythms and habits of daily life in this world of endless connectivity.  We can’t interrupt books; we can only interrupt ourselves while reading them.  They are the expression of an individual or a group of individuals, not of a hive mind or collective consciousness.  They speak to us, thoughtfully, one at a time.  They demand our attention.  And they demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else’s.  You can rant against a book, scribble in the margin or even chuck it out the window.  Still, you won’t change the words on the page.

The technology of a book is genius:  The order of the words is fixed, whether on the page or on the screen, but the speed at which you read them is entirely up to you.  Sure, this allows you to skip ahead and jump around.  But it also allows you to slow down, savor and ponder.

At the trial in which he would be sentenced to death, Socrates (as quoted by Plato) said that the unexamined life isn’t worth living.  Reading is the best way I know to learn how to examine your life.  By comparing what you’ve done to what others have done, and your thoughts and theories and feelings to those of others, you learn about yourself and the world around you.  Perhaps that is why reading is one of the few things you do alone that can make you feel less alone.  It is a solitary activity that connects you to others.

So I’m on a search—and have been, I now realize, all my life—to find books to help me make sense of the world, to help me become a better person, to help me get my head around the big questions that I have and answer some of the small ones while I’m at it.

I know I’m not alone in my hunger for books to help me find the right questions to ask, and find answers to the ones that I have.  I am now in my mid-50s, a classic time for introspection.  But any age is a good age for examining your life.  Readers from their teens to their 90s have shared with me their desire for a list of books to help guide them.

People have always received life-guiding wisdom from certain types of nonfiction, often from “self-help” books.  But all sorts of books can carry this kind of wisdom; a random sentence in a thriller will give me unexpected insight.  In fact, novels and works of narrative nonfiction can do something extraordinary that most self-help books can’t:  They can increase our capacity for empathy by engaging our imagination as they introduce us to new perspectives.

I also believe that, to paraphrase the Roman lawyer Pliny the Younger, no book is so bad that you can’t find anything in it of interest.  You can learn something from the very worst books—even if it is just how crass and base, or boring and petty, or cruel and intolerant the human race can be.

I’m not a particularly disciplined or systematic seeker.  I don’t give a great deal of thought to the books I choose—I’ll read anything that catches my eye.  Most of the time, when I choose what I’m going to read, it has absolutely nothing to do with improving myself.  Especially when I’m at my happiest, I’m unlikely to search for a book to make me happier.  But it’s often during these periods of non-seeking that I’ve stumbled across a book that has changed my life.

Sometimes these books have changed me in relatively trivial ways at first, but then in more significant ways later.  When I was 5 years old, my parents read to me E.B. White’s 1945 classic, “Stuart Little,” the story of a remarkable mouse born to a human family.  The immediate effect was to make me feel that the thing in life I most desperately wanted was a pet mouse.  After much pleading, I was given a gerbil for my birthday.  (It soon bit me, and I was so upset that I packed a suitcase and ran away from home; I made it 50 yards before I decided to turn back).

Now, when I reflect on “Stuart Little,” I realize this extraordinary tale taught me some powerful lessons.  One of them is this:  Stuart’s human family doesn’t care a whit that he is a mouse.  It’s a tale of radical acceptance—you can be whatever or whoever you are born to be and not risk losing your family.  Every child is in some ways different from her or his parents—even if not so different as Stuart is from his.

While my parents gave me some of my earliest favorites, teachers guided me to many of the books that would shape my life.

In middle school, we read Julius Caesar’s “The Gallic War.”  This was the start of my learning a great truth:  History is long, and I was short.  Caesar accomplished more than I ever could and had written about it in timeless works that would be read as long as people read.  There was no chance I would possibly leave a mark on the globe that measured up to Caesar’s.  Not a bad lesson in humility for a seventh-grader.

In high school, I read “The Odyssey.”  It taught me a lesson very different to the one my teachers might have expected, yet one that was in a way a corollary to the lesson I’d learned from Caesar:  that you should never be ashamed of being mediocre.

Of course, “The Odyssey” is one of the greatest works of all time.  But in telling the story of a very flawed hero, it opens up a different lens on greatness.  Even Odysseus himself would have had to admit that he didn’t do a terrific job getting home.  Others managed to come right home after the war chronicled in “The Iliad.”  It took Odysseus a decade.  But he does eventually make it.  Coming home was essential, and what’s important is that he managed to do it.  Odysseus was superlative at many things, but getting home wasn’t one of them.  He was mediocre at that.

The beauty of accepting or even embracing mediocrity is that it helps you appreciate excellence.  College introduced me to some of the most astonishing books I’ve ever read, as it should.  The experience of reading and studying and revisiting a contemporary masterpiece like Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” reminds me how thrilling true greatness is, whether in literature or other aspects of life.  At the heart of this novel is the migration of a character named Milkman Dead from north to south, the opposite of the 20th century’s “Great Migration” of African-Americans from the rural south to the cities of the north and west.  I will never forget the images of flight that are present throughout—flight as escape from peril and as a symbol of freedom; flight by foot and through the air.  I envy anyone who has yet to read “Song of Solomon.”

Entering the workforce brought me to a different kind of book.  A wise mentor gave me Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gift From the Sea.”  This is a book about priorities.  Unlike recent books that focus on decluttering your home, Lindbergh, who had a busy life as an adventurer, pilot, best-selling author and wife of the famous aviator, shows you how to declutter your brain and your life.  “The world today does not understand, in either man or woman, the need to be alone,” she wrote in 1955.

‘A random sentence in a thriller can lead to an unexpected insight.’

 

After decades of work, I’ve come to believe that the ability to figure out who has your back and who is plotting against you is an essential skill.  Thrillers and works of suspense give us the tools we need to try to figure out whom we can trust.  A recent novel, “The Girl on the Train” by Paula Hawkins, is particularly valuable.  It features a possibly unreliable narrator who isn’t always sure she knows whether she is telling the truth.  Sometimes the person I shouldn’t be trusting is myself.

Books have also helped me through the worst times in my life, and no book more so than Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield.”  My need to figure out a way to cope with my sadness after finishing this novel was a trial run, of sorts, for dealing with the deaths of friends.  When, as a young teen, I turned the last page, I found myself sobbing because I thought that was the end of my relationship with David Copperfield, and with Steerforth, and with Little Emily, and with Dora.  But I was wrong; it was just the beginning.  I think of them all the time, and I talk to them, too—just as I talk to friends who have died and think about them.

Recently, I read a book that is helping me be a better friend:  Hanya Yanagihara’s devastating novel “A Little Life.”  The story follows the intertwined lives of four men from right after college until middle age.  Along the way, we learn about their childhoods and discover that one of them has been the victim of horrific abuse.  I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that had so much to say about friendship, or about the ways we can and can’t help one another, or about the importance of staying present in our friends’ lives no matter what.

I also turn to books to help remind me of things I know but constantly forget.  “Wonder” by R.J. Palacio is a novel about a boy with a facial deformity who is going to school for the first time.  It has a powerful message delivered by the school’s principal.  He exhorts his students to “choose kindness.”  Quoting J.M. Barrie, he tells them, “Shall we make a new rule of life…always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?”  An excellent maxim for fifth-graders—and the rest of us.

And then there is “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” by Azar Nafisi.  It is the story of a study group for women that the author led in Tehran in 1995, and it reinforced for me and for so many the power of books and literature.  Ms. Nafisi writes, “In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance.  This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world.  Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.”

Rereading this book and others, I’m reminded that reading isn’t just a respite from the relentlessness of technology.  It isn’t just how I reset and recharge.  It isn’t just how I escape.  It’s how I engage.  And reading should spur further engagement.

Books remain one of the strongest bulwarks we have against tyranny—but only as long as people are free to read all different kinds of books, and only as long as they actually do so.  The right to read whatever you want whenever you want is one of the fundamental rights that helps preserve all the other rights.  It’s a right we need to guard with unwavering diligence.  But it’s also a right we can guard with pleasure.  Reading isn’t just a strike against narrowness, mind control and domination:  It’s one of the world’s great joys.

Excerpted from “Books for Living,” which will be published by Knopf next month.  Mr. Schwalbe is also the author of “The End of Your Life Book Club.”

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The future is now: 2016

31 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by essaybee2012 in Bitcoin, clean energy, connectivity, digital doctors, disintermediation, drones, engineering of life, exponential change, humanity, Internet, knowledge

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accelerometer, administrative infrastructure, Africa, Alzheimer's, Amazon.com, Apple Research Kit App, Apple watch, apps, artificial intelligence, artisans, bacteria, bank accounts, battery storage, big data, birth certificates, Bitcoin, blockchain, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, building inspections, carbon dioxide, cell-phones, China, clean energy, climate change, computing, connectivity, contracts, crime, crop yields, CRSPR gene modification, cystic fibrosis, data visualization, death certificates, deeds, developing world, devices, digital currency, digital doctors, digital ledger, digital services, disasters, disintermediation, DNA edits, drones, economics, educational degrees, electricity, embryos, emergency assistance, engineering of life, exponential change, Facebook, Farmers, finance, food, genetics, geopolitics, global markets, Google, groceries, heart-rate sensor, humanity, IBM, immunity, India, Infrastructure, internet, iPhone, knowledge, legal infrastructure, lifestyles, marriage licenses, medical advances, medical records, medical supplies, medicines, microsatellites, Microsoft, Moore's Law, networks, OneWeb, Overstock.com, ownership titles, Paris 2015, plant genes, pollution, printing press, progress, remote villages, renewable energy, roads, Samsung, scientists, self-driving cars, sensors, Silicon Valley, single-cell anemia, single-celled organisms, singularity.com, small goods, smart cities, smart phone screens, smartphone apps, smartphone medical devices, smartphones, social media, solar energy, SpaceX, Starbucks, supercomputers, tax credits, technology, the rich, tipping points, traffic, viruses, vital signs, Vivek Wadhwa, voice-recognition systems, votes, Walmart, wildlife ecology, wind energy

SingularityHub.com

http://singularityhub.com/2015/12/28/these-six-technologies-hit-their-tipping-points-in-2015/?utm_content=bufferf9b60&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Six Technologies That Hit Their Tipping Points in 2015

  • By Vivek Wadhwa
  • ON Dec 28, 2015
  • | Artificial Intelligence, Big Data & Data Visualization, Computing, Tech

To the average person, it may seem that the biggest technology advances of 2015 were the larger smartphone screens and small app updates.  But a lot more happened than that.  A broad range of technologies reached a tipping point, from cool science projects or objects of convenience for the rich, to inventions that will transform humanity.  We haven’t seen anything of this magnitude since the invention of the printing press in the 1400s.  Here are the six:

1. The Internet and knowledge

In the developed world, we have become used to having devices that connect and inform us and provide services on demand, and the developing world has largely been in the dark.  As of 2015, however, nearly half of China’s population and a fifth of India’s population have gained Internet connectivity.  India now has more Internet users than does the U.S., and China has twice as many.

Smartphones with the capabilities of today’s iPhone will cost less than $50 by 2020.  By then, the efforts of Facebook, Google, OneWeb, and SpaceX to blanket the Earth with inexpensive Internet access through drones, balloons, and microsatellites will surely bear fruit.  This means that we will see another three billion people come on line.  Never before has all of humanity been connected in this way.

This will be particularly transformative for the developing world.  Knowledge has always been a privilege of the rich; tyrants rule by keeping their populations ignorant.  Soon, everyone, everywhere, will have access to the ocean of knowledge on the Internet.  They will be able to learn about scientific advances as they happen.  Social media will enable billions of people to share their experiences and help one another. Workers in the remotest villages of Africa will be able to offer digital services to the elite in Silicon Valley.  Farmers will be able learn how to improve crop yields; artisans will gain access to global markets; and economies based on smartphone apps will flourish everywhere.

2. Doctors in our pockets

All of this has been made possible by advances in computing and networks.  In a progression called Moore’s Law, computers continually get faster, cheaper, and smaller, doubling in speed every 18 months.  Our $100 smartphones are more powerful than the supercomputers of the 1970s—which cost millions of dollars.  With faster computers, it becomes possible to design more powerful sensors and artificial-intelligence (A.I.) systems.  With better sensors, we can develop sophisticated medical devices, drone-based delivery systems, and smart cities; and, with A.I., we can develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems, and digital doctors.  Yes, I am talking about applications that can diagnose our medical condition and prescribe remedies.

In 2015, smartphone-connected medical devices came into the mainstream.  Most notably, Apple released a watch that, using a heart-rate sensor and accelerometer, can keep track of vital signs, activity, and lifestyles.  Through its free Research Kit app, Apple provided the ability to monitor, on a global scale, the use of medicines and their efficacy.  Microsoft, IBM, Samsung, and Google too, as well as a host of startups, are developing sensors and A.I.-based tools to do the work of doctors.  These technologies are expensive and geared for the developed world; but companies in China, India, and Africa are working on inexpensive versions.  The sensors that these devices use, and the computing and storage that A.I. systems need cost very little.  Previous generations of medical advances were for the rich; now all can benefit.

3. Bitcoin and disintermediation

One of the most controversial technology advances of late is Bitcoin, an unregulated and uncontrolled digital currency.  It gained notoriety for its use by criminals and hackers and the fall of its price from a peak of about $1100 to $250.  Yet, in 2015, it gained acceptance by retailers such as Overstock.com.  And the technology that underlies it, blockchain, became the basis of hundreds of technology-development efforts.

The blockchain is not useful just for finance.  It is an almost incorruptible digital ledger that can be used to record practically anything that can be digitized:  birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, educational degrees, medical records, contracts, and votes.  It has the potential to transform the lives of billions of people who lack bank accounts and access to the legal and administrative infrastructure that we take for granted.

4. Engineering of life

Another technology that came into the mainstream was CRISPR gene modification.  Discovered by scientists only a few years ago, CRISPRs are elements of an ancient system that protects bacteria and other single-celled organisms from viruses, acquiring immunity to them by incorporating genetic elements from the virus invaders.  Via CRISPRs, DNA can be edited, either removing unwanted sequences or inserting payload sequences, the genetic and chemical components necessary costing as little as $100.

CRISPR modification introduces many new risks if used wrongly—to edit human embryos, for example.  But it could also be used to correct faulty DNA that’s responsible for genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, and Alzheimer’s, and to edit the genes of plants to produce more-nutritious food and require less water.  Labs all over the world are working with this technology to solve a wide range of problems, and we will see breakthroughs.

5. The drone age

It is estimated that Americans will have purchased nearly half a million drones during this holiday season.  With the cost of these flying machines falling to less than $100, the drone age has officially begun.  We will see them everywhere.  As the technologies advance, these will carry increasing amounts of weight and travel over longer distances.  You can expect Amazon and Walmart to deliver your groceries and Starbucks to bring you your morning latte via drone.  And they will monitor traffic and crime, perform building inspections, and provide emergency assistance in disasters.

These are an even bigger deal for the developing world.  Large sections of Africa don’t have roads; remote towns and villages can’t get medical supplies; and large cities are clogged with traffic—much of it for delivery of small goods.  Drones will solve many of these infrastructure problems and reduce pollution and traffic.  They will also allow the constant monitoring of the Earth’s changing climate and wildlife ecology.

6. Saving the planet with unlimited clean energy

The biggest geopolitical breakthrough in clean energy in 2015 wasn’t the climate agreement in Paris, between 196 countries, to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide.  It was the deal that U.S. lawmakers struck to extend tax credits for solar and wind capture for another five years.  The good intentions of nations will only take us so far; the U.S. deal will accelerate the progress of clean energy worldwide.

Solar and wind capture are already advancing on exponential curves, installation rates regularly doubling and costs falling.  Even without the subsidies, the costs of U.S. solar installations could be halved by 2022, reducing the returns on investments in homes to less than four years.  By, 2030, solar capture could provide 100 percent of today’s energy; by 2035, it could be free—just as cell-phone calls are today.

The tax credits for renewable energy generation will accelerate and ensure progress.  Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that the extension will add an extra 20 gigawatts of solar power—more than every panel ever installed in the U.S. prior to 2015.  “The US was already one of the world’s biggest clean-energy investors.  This deal is like adding another America of solar power into the mix,” Bloomberg said.

We are also seeing similar advances in battery storage.  Combined with the advances in energy, large swaths of the planet that don’t presently have electricity have the potential to light up in the early 2020s.  Having unlimited, clean energy will be transformative for the developing world—and the planet.

So we have a lot to be cheerful about and a lot to look forward to during the years ahead, as technology makes its major leaps forward.  We just have to be careful to use it for bettering mankind rather than for holding it back—because there are as many risks as opportunities.

Image credit:  Arches National Park/Flickr

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From the earth to the earth–booster intact! Rocketship history advanced.

22 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by essaybee2012 in Amazon.com, Blue Origin, Elon Musk, Falcoln 9 rocket, Jeff Bezos, New Shephard rocket, SpaceX

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'orbital' flights which are required to send humans to Mars., ABC News, Amazon.com, Blue Origin's West Texas launch site, California, Cape Canaveral, Carol Scott, DailyMail.com, Ellie Zolfagharifard, Elon Musk, engineering, ExtremeTech, Falcon 9 rocket, floating ocean platform, GTO orbit, Hawthorne, historic pad 39A, International Space Station, Jeff Bezos, Kennedy Space Center, lower Earth orbit, Merlin 10 Vacuum engine, NASA, NASA Commercial Crew Program, New Shephard rocket, ORBCOMM satellites, orbital-class booster, reusable rockets, robotic Drago cargo capsule, rocket industry, space travel, SpaceX, SpaceX Grasshopper rocket, sub-orbital space, technology, The Verge, Wayne Monteith

DailyMail.com

[ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3369783/WATCH-LIVE-Falcon-9-liftoff-SpaceX-successfully-launches-reusable-rocket-land-Earth-one-piece.html?ito=social-twitter_dailymailus ]

[ For all videos:  see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3369783/WATCH-LIVE-Falcon-9-liftoff-SpaceX-successfully-launches-reusable-rocket-land-Earth-one-piece.html?ito=social-twitter_dailymailus ]

Elon Musk makes space travel history:  Billionaire’s SpaceX rocket blasts into orbit, launches 11 satellites then makes an amazing landing back on Earth

  • The upgraded 23-story-tall rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 8:29 p.m 
  • Main stage of the rocket returned minutes later to a landing site about six miles from the launch pad
  • This is historic first in the Elon Musk’s bid to make rockets reusable to save on launch costs
  • It marks the first SpaceX flight since a June accident that destroyed a cargo ship bound for the ISS

By Ellie Zolfagharifard For Dailymail.com

Published:  20:30 EST, 21 December 2015 | Updated: 01:51 EST, 22 December 2015

SpaceX has made history after successfully launching its Falcon 9 rocket into space and returning it to Earth in one piece.

The upgraded 23-story-tall rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 8:29pm EST, and touched down nearby a few minutes later.

It was the first time an unmanned rocket returned to land vertically at Cape Canaveral, and represented a tremendous success for SpaceX.

The firm, led by billionaire Elon Musk, is striving to make rockets reusable to drive launch costs down and open up space to more people


This long-exposure picture tweeted by the SpaceX team shows the SpaceX Falcon 9 lifting off (left) from its launch pad and then returning to a landing zone (right) at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station

This long-exposure picture tweeted by the SpaceX team shows the SpaceX Falcon 9 lifting off (left) from its launch pad and then returning to a landing zone (right) at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station

The spectacular take-off (left) and landing (right), shown in this long-exposure picture, was the launcher's first mission since a June failure

The spectacular take-off (left) and landing (right), shown in this long-exposure picture, was the launcher’s first mission since a June failure

The SpaceX Falcon 9 lifts off from its launch pad

It returned to a landing zone at the same station

The SpaceX Falcon 9 lifts off from its launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (left) before returning to a landing zone at the same station (right)

The spacecraft landed vertically (pictured) on an 'X' six miles from the launch pad - much to its inventors' delight

The spacecraft landed vertically (pictured) on an ‘X’ six miles from the launch pad – much to its inventors’ delight

Space X has successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket following a series of technical problems. The rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 8.33pm ET (pictured) in perfect conditions

Space X has successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket following a series of technical problems.  The rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 8.33pm ET (pictured) in perfect conditions

The first stage of the rocket was used to propel the payload to 62 miles (100km) into space, before the second stage took over.

The tall, white portion of the rocket then glided back to Earth, its engines burning bright orange against a black night sky, landing about six miles from the launch pad.

‘The Falcon has landed,’ a commentator said above the screams and cheers of people gathered at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

Video images were soon cut off and the SpaceX live webcast returned to its commentators, who described the successful deployment of the rocket’s payload of 11 satellites,

‘The Falcon first stage landing is confirmed,’ SpaceX wrote on Twitter.  ‘All 11 ORBCOMM satellites have been deployed in nominal orbits.’

Welcome back, baby!’  Musk tweeted after touchdown.  ‘It’s a revolutionary moment,’ Musk later told reporters.  ‘No one has ever brought a booster, an orbital-class booster, back intact.’

However competitor Jeff Bezos, who achieved a similar success last month, couldn’t help gloating when he tweeted:  ‘Congrats on landing Falcon’s suborbital booster stage.  Welcome to the club!’

The Amazon founder managed to land a rocket, New Shephard, back on Earth after launch.  However, the New Shephard is designed to take passengers into sub-orbital space, whereas the Falcon 9 is designed to go into the lower Earth orbit, which is higher up.

Bezos was quick to note that SpaceX’s initial success was in sub-orbital space – a sly dig at his competitor.

After his success, Elon Musk tweeted 'Welcome back, baby!'
His competitor Jeff Bezos couldn't help gloating that he had already achieved similar success, tweeting: 'Welcome to the club!'

After his success, Elon Musk tweeted ‘Welcome back, baby!’  Meanwhile his competitor Jeff Bezos couldn’t help gloating that he had already achieved similar success (right), tweeting:  ‘Welcome to the club!’

The launch and successful return of the rocket's first stage, followed by deployment of all 11 satellites delivered to orbit for customer ORBCOMM, marked the first SpaceX flight since a June accident that destroyed a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station

The launch and successful return of the rocket's first stage, followed by deployment of all 11 satellites delivered to orbit for customer ORBCOMM, marked the first SpaceX flight since a June accident that destroyed a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station

The launch (left and right) and return of the rocket’s first stage, followed by deployment of all 11 satellites delivered to orbit for customer ORBCOMM, marked the first SpaceX flight since a June accident that destroyed a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station

What's significant is that this was a useful mission, Musk noted, not merely a practice flight. 'We achieved recovery of the rocket in a mission that actually deployed 11 satellites,' he said. Pictured: The rocket taking off

What’s significant is that this was a useful mission, Musk noted, not merely a practice flight.  ‘We achieved recovery of the rocket in a mission that actually deployed 11 satellites,’ he said.  Pictured:  The rocket taking off

Falcon 9 at the point where the largest amounts of aerodynamic pressure was being applied on the rocket

Falcon 9 at the point where the largest amounts of aerodynamic pressure was being applied on the rocket

The SpaceX Falcon 9 launch appears in the distance from the back of River Rocks dockside restaurant along the Indian River, south of Rockledge, Florida

The SpaceX Falcon 9 launch appears in the distance from the back of River Rocks dockside restaurant along the Indian River, south of Rockledge, Florida

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off over Cocoa Beach, Florida, in this spectacular photo

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off over Cocoa Beach, Florida, in this spectacular photo

The first stage of the rocket was used to propel the payload to 62 miles (100km) into space, before the second stage took over. Pictured is the second engine start up

The first stage of the rocket was used to propel the payload to 62 miles (100km) into space, before the second stage took over.  Pictured is the second engine start up

Musk said the landing appeared close to perfect and the company ‘could not have asked for a better mission or a better day.’

The top officer at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Brig. Gen. Wayne Monteith, noted that the returning booster ‘placed the exclamation mark on 2015.’

‘This was a first for us at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and I can’t even begin to describe the excitement the team feels right now having been a part of this historic first-stage rocket landing,’ Monteith said in a statement.

Nasa applauded the feat.  ‘Congratulations @SpaceX on your successful vertical landing of the first stage back on Earth!’ Nasa said in a tweet.

Musk is striving to revolutionize the rocket industry, which currently loses many millions of dollars in jettisoned machinery and sophisticated rocket components after each launch.

What’s significant is that this was a useful mission, Musk noted, not merely a practice flight.  ‘We achieved recovery of the rocket in a mission that actually deployed 11 satellites,’ he said.

A view of space just before the satellites were deployed. In this image, the Merlin 10 Vacuum engine has started

A view of space just before the satellites were deployed.  In this image, the Merlin 10 Vacuum engine has started

SpaceX employees broke into cheers and chants, some of them jumping up and down, following the smooth touchdown nine minutes after liftoff.  Previous landing attempts ended in fiery blasts, but those aimed for an ocean platform.

Musk said he ran outside and heard the sonic boom of the returning booster just as it landed; he assumed it had exploded.  He learned the happy truth when he went back into Launch Control and saw video of the standing rocket.

‘I can’t quite believe it,’ he said.  ‘It’s quite shocking.’

Several attempts to land the Falcon 9’s first stage on a floating ocean platform have failed – with the rocket either colliding with the autonomous drone ship or tipping over.

But SpaceX has insisted that each attempt has helped engineers come closer to perfecting the technique.

The launch was due to take place yesterday, but the Musk tweeted ahead of the proposed launch time that a lift off tonight would increase the chances of a good landing by 10 per cent.

He wrote:  ‘Just reviewed mission [parameters with] SpaceX team.  Monte Carlo runs show [tomorrow] night has a 10 per cent higher chance of a good landing.’

It is the first time the rocket has flown in the past six months following an explosion in June when carrying supplies to the ISS.

The firm had planned to launch its rocket on Saturday, but Musk similarly tweeted before the launch time to say the team had been faced with ‘engineering challenges’.

 

The first stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket returns to land (left and right) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station

The first stage booster landing back on Earth.  'The Falcon has landed,' a commentator said above the screams and cheers of people gathered at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California

The first stage booster landing back on Earth.  ‘The Falcon has landed,’ a commentator said above the screams and cheers of people gathered at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California

WHAT WENT WRONG WITH THE LAST LAUNCH OF THE FALCON 9?

The Falcon 9 rocket broke up just minutes after its launch with a robotic Drago cargo capsule for the ISS in June.

SpaceX said the initial part of the liftoff went well, until the vehicle went supersonic.

Elon Musk posted an update soon after saying:  ‘Falcon 9 experienced a problem shortly before the first stage shutdown.

‘There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank.’

In a post-incident press briefing, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told members of the media, ‘We do not expect this to be a first stage issue.

‘We saw some pressurisation indications in the second stage which we will be investigating.’

The privately-held company had flown 18 successful missions with the Falcon 9 before its failure during the summer.

Just minutes after its liftoff in June, the rocket broke up with a robotic Drago cargo capsule for the ISS.

SpaceX said the initial part of the liftoff went well, until the vehicle went supersonic at which point it exploded.

Musk posted an update soon after the explosion saying:  ‘Falcon 9 experienced a problem shortly before the first stage shutdown.

‘There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank.’

After the incident, Musk said that all rockets in the future will have their struts individually tested before flight.

The upcoming launch will test out a new version of the Falcon 9 that will make it easier for the company to recover the rocket after take-off.

Last week, Elon Musk and his team revealed they will be making a ground landing on this attempt.

Earlier this year, the billionaire signed a lease at a landing site at Cape Canaveral, and already painted an X to mark the spot of the landing. 

Nasa confirmed that Space X is using Kennedy Space Center’s historic pad 39A for launches of Falcon Heavy rockets.

The moment the first stage booster landed back on Earth. Loud cheers and chants of 'USA, USA' could be heard in the control room

The moment the first stage booster landed back on Earth.  Loud cheers and chants of ‘USA, USA’ could be heard in the control room

SPACEX’S FAILED ATTEMPTS TO LAND A ROCKET ON A BARGE

Before Jeff Bezos’ successful attempt, Elon Musk dominated the headlines for his SpaceX test flights – but not always for the right reasons.

Earlier this year, Musk released dramatic footage of the Californian company’s third attempt to land a rocket booster on a barge in the Atlantic.

The video, taken from a plane, shows the Falcon 9 booster lowering itself onto the platform, before a gust of wind sways it to one side.

The 14-storey booster manages to hit the barge, but its high speed and tilt causes it to explode on impact.

Landing the rocket upright was always going to be tricky.  SpaceX once compared it to balancing a broomstick on your hand.

The water-based landings were always meant as practice for boosts returning to land, where they can be more easily recovered.

‘Their plan is to try to land (the next booster) out here on the Cape-side,’ said Carol Scott of Nasa’s Commercial Crew Program, shortly after she discussed the plan with a SpaceX executive.

Three previous attempts by the company to land a rocket on a barge in the ocean were ‘almost successful’.

The water-based landings were always meant as practice for boosts returning to land, where they can be more easily recovered.

The company wants to land the first stages of Falcon 9 rockets so that they can be flown again, dramatically saving on launch costs.

And it isn’t the only one.  Last month, Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos’s successfully landed a rocket at a launch site in Texas.

Bezos proudly tweeted:  ‘The rarest of beasts – a used rocket.  Controlled landing not easy, but done right, can look easy.’

But Musk immediately hit back at the achievement, with:  ‘Not quite ‘rarest’. SpaceX Grasshopper rocket did 6 suborbital flights three years ago and is still around.’

The Grasshopper made eight flights and landings before it was retired in late 2013, but the highest it ever flew was around half a mile.

In comparison, Bezos’ New Shepard rocket blasted off from Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site at 12:21pm CST (18.21 GMT) yesterday.

It reached a suborbital altitude of 62 miles (100 km) – much farther than the Grasshopper – and landed back at the launch site eight minutes later.

In suborbital spaceflight, rockets are not traveling fast enough to reach the speed required to counter the pull of Earth’s gravity.

This means they re-enter the atmosphere like a ballistic missile, but the only visible damage to the rocket is scorched metal at its base.

Being able to re-fly a rocket will slash launch costs, a game-changer for the space industry.

‘When you lower the cost of access to space very significantly you will change the markets, you will change what’s possible,’ Bezos said.

Regardless of its distance, Musk didn’t think that the ‘suborbital’ achievement was that much to shout about.

‘Jeff maybe unaware SpaceX suborbital VTOL flight began 2013.  Orbital water landing 2014.  Orbital land landing next’, he wrote.

He wanted to set the record straight on what is considered to be ‘space.’  Suborbital flights, he said, are completely different to ‘orbital’ flights which are required to send humans to Mars.

Last month, Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos (right) successfully landed a rocket at a launch site in Texas. Bezos proudly tweeted: 'The rarest of beasts - a used rocket. Controlled landing not easy, but done right, can look easy.' But Elon Musk (right) immediately hit back at the achievement, with: 'Not quite 'rarest'. SpaceX Grasshopper rocket did 6 suborbital flights three years ago and is still around'

Last month, Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos (right) successfully landed a rocket at a launch site in Texas. Bezos proudly tweeted: 'The rarest of beasts - a used rocket. Controlled landing not easy, but done right, can look easy.' But Elon Musk (right) immediately hit back at the achievement, with: 'Not quite 'rarest'. SpaceX Grasshopper rocket did 6 suborbital flights three years ago and is still around'

Last month, Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos (right) successfully landed a rocket at a launch site in Texas.  Bezos proudly tweeted:  ‘The rarest of beasts – a used rocket.  Controlled landing not easy, but done right, can look easy.’  But Elon Musk (right) immediately hit back at the achievement, with:  ‘Not quite ‘rarest’.  SpaceX Grasshopper rocket did 6 suborbital flights three years ago and is still around’

‘Getting to space needs ~Mach 3, but GTO orbit requires ~Mach 30. The energy needed is the square, i.e. 9 units for space and 900 for orbit,’ Musk tweeted.

This means the Amazon founder’s rocket would need 100 times more power to become orbital.

In a later conference call with the media, Bezos defended the Blue Origin achievement, highlighting that SpaceX is also making a suborbital flight.

A Blue Origin spokesperson said:  ‘SpaceX is only trying to recover their first stage booster, which is of course suborbital.  The SpaceX first stage does an in-space deceleration burn to make their re-entry more benign.

‘If anything, the Blue Origin booster may be the one that flies through the harsher re-entry environment.  Finally, the hardest part is probably the final landing segment which is the same for both boosters.’

Until now, Musk has dominated the headlines for his SpaceX test flights – but not always for the right reasons.

Earlier this year, Musk released dramatic footage of the Californian company’s third attempt to land a rocket booster on a barge in the Atlantic.

The video, taken from a plane, shows the Falcon 9 booster lowering itself onto the platform, before a gust of wind sways it to one side.

The 14-storey booster manages to hit the barge, but its high speed and tilt causes it to explode on impact.

Landing the rocket upright was always going to be tricky.  SpaceX once compared it to balancing a broomstick on your hand.

The Verge points out that the Falcon 9 and New Shephard are completely different vehicles and shouldn’t be compared to each other.

The Falcon rocket is designed to launch satellites and cargo into orbit, which is why its so thin and tall.

The shapes creates less drag, allowing it to go deeper into space.  But it also makes it much harder to land back on Earth.

SpaceX was originally planning to launch its rocket on Saturday, but Musk similarly tweeted to say the team had been faced with 'engineering challenges.' It will be the first time the rocket (picutred) has flown in the past six months following an explosion in June when carrying supplies to the ISS

SpaceX was originally planning to launch its rocket on Saturday, but Musk similarly tweeted to say the team had been faced with ‘engineering challenges.’  It will be the first time the rocket (pictured) has flown in the past six months following an explosion in June when carrying supplies to the ISS

Read more:

  • Blue Origin | Historic Rocket Landing
  • Blue Origin:  Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Successfully Launches, Returns Rocket – ABC News
  • Why you shouldn’t compare Blue Origin’s rocket landing to SpaceX | The Verge
  • SpaceX wants to land next booster at Cape Canaveral
  • SpaceX may have run into trouble with Thursday’s Falcon 9 rocket test | ExtremeTech
  • ORBCOMM-2 – YouTube
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3369783/WATCH-LIVE-Falcon-9-liftoff-SpaceX-successfully-launches-reusable-rocket-land-Earth-one-piece.html#ixzz3v3Q86Wc1
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Classic Propaganda Techniques and Barack Obama

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by essaybee2012 in Barack Obama, Donna Carol Voss, progressivism, propaganda

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advertisers, agendas, America, atheism, bandwagon, Barack Obama, bias, Bill Gates, buying behavior, capitalism, card-stacking, caribou population, China’s carbon emissions, clean air, clean water, cleaner environment, climate change, commander in chief, compassion, compromise, consumers, Costco, Democrats, Donna Carol Voss, Ebola, energy production, experts, folks, generations, glittering generalities, global community, global consensus, goodness, government manipulation, human ingenuity, ISIL, Islamic State, knuckle-draggers, marketing, markets, mass shootings, Microsoft, Mormanism, name calling, natural cycle, negotiation, paganism, Paris, patriotism, persuasion, plain folks, planet, political cause, political ideology, progressivism, propaganda, propaganda techniques, Republicans, responsibility, scientists, Superbowl commercials, technology, terrorism, testimonial, TheBlaze.com, Trans-Alaska oil pipeline, transfer, two-party political system, U.S.-style brand of mass shooting, University of California - Berkeley, values, world leaders

The Blaze.com

[ http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/seven-classic-propaganda-techniques-president-obama-used-to-sell-his-progressive-ideology-in-paris/ ]

Contribution
Seven Classic Propaganda Techniques President Obama Used to Sell His Progressive Ideology in Paris.
Dec. 2, 2015 1:53pm
Donna Carol Voss

Donna Carol Voss is an author, blogger, speaker, and mom.  A Berkeley grad, a former atheist then pagan, she is now a Mormon on purpose and an original thinker on 21st century living, especially 21st century women.  Her memoir, “One of Everything,” traces the path through one of everything she took to get here.  http://www.donnacarolvoss.com

 

Propaganda is a derogatory term referring to information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, that is used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

Hail to the Chief, anyone?

As I watched President Barack Obama’s press conference in Paris, I found myself thinking back on an undergraduate marketing class I took many (many) moons ago; when the phrase “glittering generalities” floated into my awareness, I realized why!
Obama feet on tableAP photo

President Obama was using the same classic propaganda techniques advertisers use to manipulate buying behavior.  President Obama was trying to manipulate our buying behavior—only he was selling an ideology not a product.  And, man, was he working his ABC – Always Be Closing!

A quick recap of the seven propaganda techniques used by advertisers:  glittering generalities; name calling; testimonial; plain folks; bandwagon; transfer; and card-stacking.  I have taken the liberty of rephrasing them as befits the hawking of a political ideology.

~

Glittering Generalities:  Nice words to represent the ideology, like goodness or patriotism.

During his press conference, Mr. Obama referred to “human ingenuity” as the triumphant, all-conquering weapon against climate change.  So rigid is his ideology that he caught and corrected himself when he referred to it initially as “American ingenuity.”  The most shining of our American characteristics, more American than apple pie, was thus dimmed and diluted across a global community of “other smart folks.”

~

Name Calling:  Trash-talking anyone not in lockstep with the ideology for sale.

The American two-party political system is a give-and-take process of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise.  Rather than acknowledging Republicans as worthy Americans with a different ideology, Mr. Obama reduced their challenges to his agenda as “a matter of the games Washington plays.”

~

Testimonial:  A famous person endorses the ideology.

Mr. Obama made sure to let us know that “Bill” (as in Gates) was on board with inventing new technologies to combat climate change.  In the president’s irksome—and to my mind, affected—way of talking to us like we’re his BFFs, he joked that Microsoft knew “a little somethin’” about inventing new technologies.

~

Plain Folks:  Appeals to “the folks” that invoke our values.

Reaching out to help others is a core American value, and President Obama well knows it.  His call to address the perils of climate change sooner than at once stoked our sense of responsibility and compassion; we must live our lives today “without condemning the next generation to a planet that is beyond its capacity to repair.”

~

Bandwagon:  An appeal to be part of the group.

This is where President Obama artlessly bludgeoned us with the “everyone is doing it” of global consensus on climate change.  We were enticed to join “not just the 99.5 percent of scientists and experts but the 99 percent of world leaders” who think climate change “is really important.”  Of course “really important” is code for “Would you look at those knuckle-draggers who think climate change might be a natural cycle!  The idiots actually think a warmer environment can confer some advantage!” (Yes, we would answer.  See quadrupling of Caribou population after the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline was built.)

~

Transfer:  An appeal that helps us see ourselves as part of the bright, shining progressive ideology on a hill.

“I’m optimistic,” he said.  “I think we’re gonna (BFFs again) solve [the problem of climate change].”

In a fleeting acknowledgement that Islamic State might also be “really important,” President Obama opined that “In some ways, [climate change] is akin to the problem of terrorism and ISIL.  In the immediate aftermath of a terrible attack like happened here in Paris, sometimes it’s natural for people to despair.  But … look at Paris!  You can’t tear down Paris because of the demented actions of a handful of individuals.  The beauty, the joy, the life, the culture, the people, the diversity … that’s gonna win out every time.”

~

Card-stacking:  Manipulating information to make the ideology appear better than it is, often by unfair comparison or omitting facts.

Let me count the ways.

Our president compared the vanquishing of eternal doom for our planet, AKA climate change, to the vanquishing of Ebola.

“We went, what, a month, a month and a half where people were pretty sure Ebola was gonna kill us all.  Nobody asks me about it anymore.”

As Mr. Obama clearly demonstrated, if we can stem the outbreak of a potentially lethal virus across a few countries, we can most certainly control the temperature of—and China’s carbon emissions into—our atmosphere.

And my favorite move of all, President Obama invoked the beauty of capitalism and the power of markets to incentivize a cleaner environment.  He then erroneously stated that “the market doesn’t price clean air or clean water on its own” as the rationale for government manipulation of energy production.  (Someone might want to tell Costco there’s no market for the pallets and pallets and pallets of “clean” bottled water they sell.)

Finally and not unique to advertising propaganda, there’s plain old stupidity or lying, take your pick.  When our commander in chief said our U.S.-style brand of mass shooting “just doesn’t happen in other countries,” he was standing a relatively short distance away, as the crow flies, from two now infamous public locations where innocent civilians were gunned down like dogs in the street.  I’m not sure I see the nuance of difference between our mass shootings and theirs.

President Obama’s Superbowl commercial … I mean press conference behind him, he has moved on to the next stop on his ideological tour—the aptly titled “I trust the wisdom of the American people to replace me with a Democrat in 2016.”

Left behind in his wake, we the consumer choose to buy what he’s selling or not.  As for me and my house, I think we’ll pass.

Donna Carol Voss is an author, blogger, speaker, and mom.  A Berkeley grad, a former atheist then pagan, she is now a Mormon on purpose and an original thinker on 21st century living, especially 21st century women.  Her memoir, “One of Everything,” traces the path through one of everything she took to get here.  http://www.donnacarolvoss.com

–

TheBlaze contributor channel supports an open discourse on a range of views.  The opinions expressed in this channel are solely those of each individual author.

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Dancing with the billionaires: Cuban vs. Trump

24 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by essaybee2012 in Donald Trump, Mark Cuban, political correctness, politics

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abortion, America, Ben Carson, billionaires, Carly Fiorina, Cyber Dust, Dairy Queen, Dallas Mavericks, Donald Trump, FOX News Channel, gay marriage, GOP, GOP debate, Joshua Friemel, kryptonite, Mark Cuban, personal finance, political correctness, politicians, politics, POTUS, presidential candidates, Republicans, Sharknado, smoking pot, success, taking ecstasy, technology, Ted Cruz, The Dallas Morning News, voters

The Dallas Morning News
[ http://mavsblog.dallasnews.com/2015/08/mark-cuban-on-how-donald-trump-fashioned-himself-a-killer-of-political-correctness-how-to-understand-the-politician.html/ ]
Sports Day DFW
SportsMavericks Dallas Mavericks Blog

Mark Cuban on how Donald Trump ‘fashioned himself a Killer of political correctness;’ how to understand the politician

Joshua Friemel Follow @Josh_Friemel Email jfriemel@dallasnews.com
Published: August 23, 2015 6:24 pm

Dallas owner Mark Cuban pumps his fist as Dallas pulls away in overtime of their 111-101 win during the Portland Trail Blazers vs. the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball game at the American Airlines Center in Dallas on Saturday, February 7, 2015. (Louis DeLuca/The Dallas Morning News) 03032015xBIZ

Dallas owner Mark Cuban pumps his fist as Dallas pulls away in overtime of their 111-101 win during the Portland Trail Blazers vs. the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball game at the American Airlines Center in Dallas on Saturday, February 7, 2015. (Louis DeLuca/The Dallas Morning News)

While the Dallas Mavericks are still in the midst of their offseason, owner Mark Cuban has divulged on his favorite “sport.”

Politics has been the topic of conversation, as well as Donald Trump.

Cuban took to Cyber Dust to talk about the political lightning rod and how to understand him.

Below you can find Cuban’s message typed out exactly how he sent it.  [Please note that I’ve incorporated brackets to correct many of Cuban’s grammatical errors.]

–

5 weeks till training camp.  I’m so ready.

But until then Donald Trump watching is a sport 🙂 so here is my Cyber Dust 2 minute guide to understanding Donald[:]

First.  I like him.  Will I vote for him?  Way too early to decide.

Now here is what you need to know about DJT:

1.  His most important word is Killer.

If you are not a killer, he doesn’t respect you.  If you are a smart killer, you have used knowledge, effort and something that makes you special to accomplish what most dream of.

He does not think any of the other candidates in either party is a killer.  Which is why he has no trouble criticizing them.

He knows the best most can do is talk about their political accomplishments which no potential voter that is paying attention now respects.  If our politician[‘]s approvals are at all time lows, saying u are great at i[t] plays right into his hands[.]

As far as fiorina and ben, they have not had enough personal finance success for him to consider them a threat.

If you want to beat Donald in the summer and winter you have to be a smart killer that can go toe to toe with him and crush him with his kryptonite.

His kryptonite is technology.  He doesn’t understand it.

He is lucky I am not running.  I would toy with him 🙂

There is no one running that can stand up to him.  He knows it.  That’s why he isn’t leaving anytime soon.  He smells the kill.

2.  You have to understand how DJT approaches problems.  He looks at any issue like a business issue and asks himself “can I solve it and how[.]” 99pct. of the time he will have the confidence to think he can.  Like most ultra successful people he sees solutions and thinks it’s a matter of effort to go from concept to result.  He knows he could fail.  But he will deal with that when he gets there[.]

3.  He doesn’t see downsides.  This is what the media doesn’t understand.  They always look at the “fallout[.]”  Donald listens for applause.  He is always selling and [i]n the summer and winter applause, ratings and bodies at events are votes.  He knows everyone hates every politician, so no matter what he says as long as ratings and bodies are there, he is winning.

That’s it. that is all you need to know about DJT to understand him[.]

I said pay attention to how DJT says things more than what he says.  People hate politicians.  Donald fashioned himself a Killer of political correctness.  A Killer of politics as usual.  A killer of those, both real and imagined who would threaten American’s future.

Donald Trump has changed politics.  We want to vote for a killer of those who threaten our future.  He has sold his way to that position.  I think even those who hate him now, when the number of candidates thin, may come around and reali[z]e that he may be a better alternative and vote for him, even if they don’t like him[.]

Will he be the next POTUS?  I still think the odds are against it.  But it will be a fun sport to watch[.]

–

Follow Joshua Friemel on Twitter at @Josh_Friemel.

More on Mark Cuban, Donald Trump

trump cubes.jpg

Mark Cuban on how Donald Trump ‘fashioned himself a Killer of political correctness;’ how to understand the politician

Mark Cuban:  I would prefer to be a Republican, but the party has one big problem that’ll crush them in every Presidential election

QUIZ:  Who said it, Mark Cuban or Donald Trump?

Mark Cuban:  Fox News made Donald Trump focal point of GOP debate to drive ratings, then found ‘reasons to rip him’

Why Mark Cuban wasn’t happy with Donald Trump during GOP debate; Mavs owner says Ted Cruz made his skin crawl

What Mark Cuban would like if Donald Trump becomes president

Mark Cuban ‘doesn’t agree with much’ of what Donald Trump says, but does say he could change how politicians run their campaigns

Donald Trump says he’s ‘rapidly’ becoming a Dallas Mavericks fan following Mark Cuban’s ‘nice words’

Mark Cuban:  Congrats, Donald:  You’re best thing to happen to politics in a long time

Mark Cuban:  Donald Trump is a ‘Paper Tiger’ whose net worth is a ‘play number’

More on Cuban

mavsblog.dallasnews.com_files_2015_08_NS_20MAVS7MA_41358397.jpg

(Michael Ainsworth/The Dallas Morning News)

10 things you might not know about Mark Cuban, including his day at Dairy Queen, rugby, a Guinness World Record, and more

In his ‘Sharknado’ role, Mark Cuban learns what it takes to be POTUS

He said what?  The greatest quotes from Mavericks owner Mark Cuban

Flashback:  How Mark Cuban went from beer-stained floors, flat broke to billions

Flashback:  Mark Cuban on abortion, gay marriage, smoking pot, taking ecstasy

Photos:  Best of Dallas Mavericks billionaire owner Mark Cuban

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“Mother’s Little Helper” revisited: 3D-printed pharmaceuticals

23 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by essaybee2012 in 3-D printing, medicine, pharmaceuticals, pills

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3-D printing, all-in-one 3D printer, Aprecia, biotechnology, chemputer, Cima, DIY at-home use, dose uniformity, Doughnut-shaped Tylenol pills, downloadable medicine, drug blueprints, drug dosages, drugs, epilepsy, epileptic seizures, FabRx, FDA, Forbes, GlaxoSmithKline, hacking, Lee Cronin, legislative issues, medicine, Michael Cima, MIT, molecular 3D printer, Mother's Little Helper, multiple pills, nervous system drugs, patented drugs, personal pill printing, personalized medicine, pharmaceuticals, pill shapes, pill-printing technology, pills, Polymer-based skull implants, powdered medication, prescription drugs, prosthetic arms, pyramid-shaped pills, round pills, Shelly Fan, singularityhub.com, SPRITAM levetiracetam, Steven Kotler, technology, The Pharmaceutical Journal, The Rolling Stones, Tylenol, University of College London, University of Glasgow, ZipDose

SingularityHub.com

[ http://singularityhub.com/2015/08/14/first-3d-printed-drug-ushers-in-era-of-downloadable-medicine/?utm_content=buffer4e161&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer ]

First 3D-Printed Drug Ushers in Era of Downloadable Medicine

  • By Shelly Fan
  • ON Aug 14, 2015
  • | 3D Printing, Featured, Tech

3D-printed widgets are taking the medical world by storm.  Polymer-based skull implants?  Check.  Doughnut-shaped Tylenol pills?  Check.  Totally rad-looking prosthetic arms with a $150 price tag?  Check again.

Aprecia's 3D printed pill.

These, and plenty other medical novelties clearly illustrate the potential of 3D printing to radically change the biotech and pharmaceutical industry.  With its extreme versatility and inherent ability to customize products, many experts believe that 3D printing will finally blow the field of affordable personalized medicine wide open.  Yet so far it’s been mostly hope — and plenty of hype — with little sign that the radical technology might actually become a medical mainstay.

Until now.

Last week, the FDA approved the first 3D-printed prescription drug, essentially validating the technology as a new heavyweight player in big pharma.  “This may be the first truly mass manufactured product made by 3D printing,” said Dr. Michael Cima, a professor at MIT who helped invent the pill-printing technology back in 1997, in an email to Singularity Hub.  “It’s revolutionary.”

The printed pill, SPRITAM levetiracetam, is a drug that fights many kinds of epileptic seizures.  The brainchild of a little-known Ohio-based company Aprecia, SPRITAM is essentially an old drug ingredient packaged into a brand new, more effective delivery system.  Unlike current formulations of the same drug, SPRITAM immediately dissolves upon contact with water and bursts into effect — a property obviously beneficial when trying to curtail sudden-onset seizure episodes.

For video, see:  [ http://singularityhub.com/2015/08/14/first-3d-printed-drug-ushers-in-era-of-downloadable-medicine/?utm_content=buffer4e161&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer ]

~

The secret to SPRITAM’s favorable kinetics is its porous structure.  The pill is made with ZipDose, a powder-liquid 3D printing technology that stitches together layers of powdered medication into a porous, water-soluble matrix.  With a sip of liquid, the matrix dissolves and releases the active drug ingredient for action.

There are other ways to make such tablets, said Cima, but they’re quite limited in dose since they require far more bonding agents.  In contrast, according to Aprecia’s website, ZipDose can package up to 1,000 milligrams of drugs (the equivalent of two extra-strength Tylenols) into one nifty, easy-to-swallow pill.

No wonder Aprecia is excited.  Founded in 2003, the company bought out MIT’s pill printing technology with the aim to boost the speed of printing to commercial production rates.  Really, that’s the company’s main challenge and achievement, emphasized Cima.  SPRITAM shows that manufacturing millions of parts simultaneously with a 3D printer is possible, and that’s revolutionary.

What it doesn’t represent is the dawn of personalized medicine, according to Cima.

No more multiple pills?

No more multiple pills?  Image Credit:  Robbie Sproule

Sure, “each tablet is essentially made one-at-a-time at very high speed by computer control,” says Cima, “that means it’s theoretically possible to tailor each tablet to the individual patient’s needs.”  So doctors could have the option to adjust drug dosages on the fly.  And if proper contamination controls are set in place, it may even be possible to pack a patient’s entire prescription into one pill that is manufactured at the pharmacy on demand.  This would be especially helpful to seniors, who often have to remember to take multiple pills many times in a day.

All that’s certainly possible, but I’m just not sure how practical that would be in terms of cost, cautioned Cima.

Others are far more optimistic.

Lee Cronin, a chemist at the University of Glasgow who is building an all-in-one 3D pill printer (the “chemputer”) believes that in the future, patients will be able to download blueprints for drugs and print them at home.  However, he concedes that personalized medicine isn’t the technology’s only goal. “  Personalization is the ‘sexy’ driver but I think distribution and reach are the winners here — especially in the developing world,” he noted in the June 2015 issue of The Pharmaceutical Journal.

Molecular 3D printer.

Molecular 3D printer.  Image Credit:  L. Brian Stauffer.

SPRITAM may be the first FDA-approved 3D-printed pill, but it certainly won’t be the last.  Aprecia is working hard to implement ZipDose for other central nervous system drugs.  Elsewhere, the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline is running an early stage program to determine the feasibility of large-scale 3D printed pills using its own platform.

Many startups are also vying for a slice of the pill-printing pie.

FabRx, a small company founded by a team of researchers at the University of College London, is using 3D printing to manufacture pill shapes unobtainable through conventional production techniques.  Their inspiration came from a study that showed that the rate of drug release depends on the pill’s surface area to volume ratio.  A pyramid-shaped pill, for example, releases drugs slower than conventional round pills.  This would be useful for extended release formulations and complement fast-dissolving drugs like SPRITAM.  Eventually, the company hopes to 3D print a whole line of pills with varied absorption rates.

When asked about safety concerns in 3D pill printing, Cima cited dose uniformity. That is, companies will have to have quality systems in place to ensure that the labeled dose is actually in the product.  “But then it’s not really any different from current manufacturing processes,” he added.

The real safety concerns — and a whole lot of legislative issues — come when 3D pill printers are finally cheap enough for DIY at-home use.  Would the FDA be able to oversee personal pill printing?  Should they?  If an automated pill printer goes out of whack and misprints medication, would the blame fall on the machine’s manufacturers or the operators (i.e., the patients)?  What if the machines were hacked?  If people can reverse engineer patented drugs through 3D printing, how can those patents be protected?  Will it be a detriment to drug development?

And — as Steven Kotler asked in Forbes ­— will people be able to hijack pill printers to manufacture illicit drugs?

It’s a new “Wild West” in the land of 3D-printed pharmaceuticals.

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One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature (2014)

15 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by essaybee2012 in children's classics, children's literature, Grolier Club, literature

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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Andrea Immel, autograph letters, book collectors, Brian Alderson, catalogue, Charlotte's Web, children's literature, Chris Loker, classic literature, dolls, education, essays, games, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Grolier Club, Grolier Hundreds, Harry Potter, hornbooks, illustrations, ivory alphabet discs, Jill Shefrin, John Windle, Justin G. Schiller, literacy, manuscript drafts, Nick Clark, novels, Oak Knoll Press, One Hundred Books Famous in Children's Literature (2014), Peter Pan, Peter Rabbit, picture books, Rachel Eley, rhymes, stories, technology, The Cat in the Hat, The Wizard of Oz, Tom Sawyer, toys, Treasure Island, Where the Wild Things Are, Winnie-the-Pooh

ONE HUNDRED BOOKS FAMOUS IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE.

Loker, Chris.
  • New York: The Grolier Club, 2014.
  • 8.5 x 11 inches
  • hardcover
  • 320 pages
  • ISBN 9781605830496 / Order Nr. 121913

Price: $95.00  other currencies

View Excerpt (PDF)
View Table of Contents (PDF)
         

This milestone catalogue showcases one hundred enduring classics of children’s literature, each printed between 1600 and 2000.  It contains brief but informative descriptions and color photographs of all one hundred famous children’s books as well as provenance information for each specific copy shown.  The books are organized chronologically, which allows readers to see the variety and growth of genres of literature for children from early forms of instructional primers to exuberant expressions of rhymes, stories, novels, and picture books.  An appendix lists historic artifacts related to the books, including original illustrations, autograph letters, manuscript drafts, antique hornbooks, ivory alphabet discs, toys, dolls, and games, in order to demonstrate the interrelationships between children’s books and the culture of their times.

Four scholarly essays address various aspects of children and their books during different historical eras.  The essays explore children’s literacy and education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the impact of technological developments on children’s book design, production, and marketing in the nineteenth century, and the evolution of the picture book genre in the context of important art and illustration movements in the twentieth century.  Also included is a two-century history of children’s book collectors, many of whose books are found in this catalogue.

Some of the beloved books included herein are Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, Winnie-the-Pooh, Charlotte’s Web, The Cat in the Hat, Where the Wild Things Are, and Harry Potter.  These classics and others-many famous today, some only in their time-will delight adults and children alike.

One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature is the sixth in the series known as the Grolier Hundreds.  The Grolier Club has published only five such catalogues in its 130-year history, focusing previously on English Literature (1903), American Literature (1946), Science (1958), Medicine (1994), and Fine Printed Books (1999).  These admired works have set the standard for book collecting and reading enjoyment in their fields, and the compilers expect no less from this new addition to the Grolier Hundred canon.

– See more at: http://www.oakknoll.com/pages/books/121913/chris-loker/one-hundred-books-famous-in-childrens-literature#sthash.D7dAPwMc.dpuf

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Pizza Hut’s new Subconscious Menu

04 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by essaybee2012 in food, Pizza Hut, technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

eye movements, eye-tracking technology, Huffington Post, Kathryn Austin, Kerry Flynn, mind reading, Pizza Hut, Subconscious Menu, tablet-based menu, technology, Tobii Technology, United Kingdom

Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/01/pizza-hut-eye-tracking_n_6249078.html?utm_hp_ref=technology&ir=Technology

Pizza Hut’s New Menu Supposedly Reads Your Mind Then Picks Your Toppings (In 2.5 Seconds)

The Huffington Post  | By Kerry Flynn
Posted:  12/01/2014 4:18 pm EST Updated:  12/02/2014 12:59 pm EST
 ~

[For video, see:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/01/pizza-hut-eye-tracking_n_6249078.html?utm_hp_ref=technology&ir=Technology ]

Pizza lovers who just can’t make up their minds about what to order, rejoice!  Pizza Hut has developed a new tablet-based menu that relies purely on customers’ eye movements to create their perfect pizza.

The “Subconscious Menu,” which is only in test mode in the United Kingdom for now, first syncs a customer’s eye movements to a tablet by asking the customer to follow a moving Pizza Hut logo on the screen.  Then, the screen shows images of the chain’s 20 most popular ingredients.


Mmm … barbecue sauce.

After just 2.5 seconds, voilà!  The menu reveals the customer’s “perfect” pizza based on the ingredients he or she has been staring at the longest.  There are 4,896 possible combinations, according to a Pizza Hut press release from Nov. 28, so that’s pretty fast.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t try out the system ourselves, and neither can you — yet.

So far, Pizza Hut has only tested the system with select journalists and customers in the UK, and claimed in the release that it has had a 98 percent success rate.  The company did not immediately provide further details about the methodology of the trials it conducted.

But obviously, no one’s tied to the first suggestion that the menu generates.  If the customers aren’t happy with their pizza, they’re able to start the process over again, or they can just order the traditional way.

The system is powered by Swedish company Tobii Technology, which specializes in eye-tracking technology.  A spokesperson for Pizza Hut restaurants told The Huffington Post in an email that the software is not yet available for purchase, but is expected to become publicly available in 2015.

“This menu innovation really is ahead of its time,” the spokesperson wrote.

The technology, which took six months to develop, is being incorporated into Pizza Hut’s ordering shortly after the chain unveiled a new menu and other rebranding measures.

“We love to excite and innovate,” Kathryn Austin, Pizza Hut’s head of marketing, said in the press release.  “This year we’ve redesigned restaurants up and down the country and launched a brand new menu with lots tasty new options.  But we don’t just want to stop there.”

But as to when we’ll get to allow our subconscious to create pizza, the future is unclear.

H/T: Entrepreneur

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Needy and clingy lovers

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by essaybee2012 in clinginess, communication, lovers, marriage

≈ Leave a comment

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clingy lovers, communication, David Bird, E.ON, email, friends, honesty, humour, independent, Katy Winter, loyalty, MailOnline, mobile phones, neediness, needy partners, relationships, social networking, technology, telephone, trust

MailOnline

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2854962/Have-mobile-phones-turned-nation-clingy-lovers-One-six-Brits-needy-expect-hear-partner-HOUR.html

Feedback

Have mobile phones turned us into a nation of clingy lovers?  One in six Brits are so needy they expect to hear from their partner every HOUR

  • Technology means 41 per cent now expect their loved ones to be in touch several times a day
  • Study also suggests we would rather have fewer but closer friends 

By Katy Winter for MailOnline

Published:  11:20 EST, 30 November 2014 | Updated:  11:20 EST, 30 November 2014

One in six Brits are so needy they expect to hear from their partner every hour

They say a healthy couple is one where both partners are independent and happy being separated.

But modern technology has made near- constant contact the norm, and a staggering one in six Brits are so needy they expect to hear from their partner every hour of the waking day, according to a new study.

Mobile phones and social networking means 41 per cent now expect their loved ones to be in touch several times a day.

The research looked at our relationships with loved ones and businesses – and found Brits choose quality over quantity.

The study suggests we would rather have fewer but closer friends, than a load of pals that aren’t close to us.

Two thirds said they have no more than five close friends.

And one in eight (13 per cent) say having fewer friends makes them feel healthier.

The study of 2,000 British adults found we value the same traits in personal relationships as we do with businesses.

Six in ten – 60 per cent – believe trust is the most important aspect to business relationships while 71 per cent say it’s the most important for personal ones.

Trust, honesty and loyalty are key components to a strong business relationship whereas trust, loyalty and humour make for a strong personal relationship.

However, where 85 per cent would rather see loved ones in person, customers would rather deal with business by email (51 per cent) and telephone (46 per cent).

Proving many still hold a torch for an ex, 43 per cent say they’d get back together with an old flame.

Psychologist Dr Lynda Shaw said:  ‘In both business and personal relationships, communication goes to a higher level of understanding once we’ve earned trust.

Mobile phones and social networking means 41 per cent now expect their loved ones to be in touch several times a day

‘If you don’t have loyalty in business relationships, you are never going to get loyal customers.

‘Trust and loyalty are vital to building long-standing relationships – and businesses must make sure they are there for their customers.’

David Bird, from E.ON who conducted the study, said:  ‘We recognise it takes time to build a bond in any relationship, be it business or personal.

‘Strong bonds are important and are based on factors such as trust, honesty and loyalty.

‘Good relationships are crucial for any business.  It’s so important to build up trust and loyalty with them.’

Read more:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2854962/Have-mobile-phones-turned-nation-clingy-lovers-One-six-Brits-needy-expect-hear-partner-HOUR.html#ixzz3KlDk4vmi
Follow us:  @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

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The Science of “Interstellar”

23 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by essaybee2012 in Cinemagic, Creepy Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Albert Einstein, Andy Bohn, Anna Carmichael, ArXiv, astronomy, Big Bang, black holes, California Institute of Technology, Carl Sagan, Contact (1997), Cornell University, Daily Galaxy, Darius Bunandar, evolution, Francois Hebert, General Relativity, Google Scholar, gravitational lensing, gravitational physics, gravity, Hawking Radiation, International University Bremen, Interstellar (2014), Katherine Henriksson, Kip Thorne, Mark A. Scheel, National Science Foundation (NSF), Nature Journal, Nicholas W. Taylor, Pedro Marronetti, Saul Teukolsky, science fiction, Sergey Solodukhin, singularity, space-time, Stephen Hawking, supernovas, technology, Thibault Damour, time machines, What Would a Binary Black Hole Merger Look Like (2014), William Throwe, wormholes

The Daily Galaxy

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2014/11/the-physics-behind-interstellars-stunning-wormhole-images.html

November 22, 2014

The Science Behind “Interstellar’s” Stunning Wormhole Voyage (Weekend Feature)

Maxresdefault

Similar in premise to many other science fiction films, something sets Interstellar apart:  Many of the images are–for the most part–scientifically accurate, based on lensing calculations produced by Cornell University and California Institute of Technology scientists that show what black holes or wormholes look like.  At this point, the blockbuster movie has created such a stir that one would almost have to be inside a black hole not to know about it.  And while the science fiction thriller may have taken some liberties with science to make its Hollywood plot work, the imagery comes straight from science–National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded science, in fact.

“Gravity bends the path that light follows in space,” said Pedro Marronetti, an National Science Foundation program director for gravitational physics and Google Scholar.  “The stronger the gravitation, the more dramatic its effect.”In the plot of Interstellar, Earth is dying; to save the human race, astronauts and scientists search for a new planet via a wormhole, essentially a shortcut through space to find a giant black hole at the other end.  Interstellar producers sought to make visual representations of the wormhole as accurate as possible.  They worked closely with Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist at Caltech and the film’s executive producer, who gave the special effects team the scientific equations to create a reasonable facsimile of a wormhole.  Thorne’s involvement in this gravitational lensing project led him to talk with the three Cornell grad students and their Caltech collaborators.  The research of Bohn, Hébert and Throwe “on visualizing colliding black holes by gravitational lensing is very interesting and important,” Thorne said.Interstellar-film-physik-540x304

Wormholes do not actually exist in space, but black holes do, Throwe said, so the students created two short videos for Thorne, which showed what moving by a black hole in space would look like.  It would be impossible to move through an actual black hole, they said, because the pull of gravity would tear a person apart.

Astronomers haven’t been able to visually observe black holes because nothing can escape from them, not even light or radiation.  They can only be studied by noting their effects on nearby objects.  That’s what makes this recent research so important–because it creates a new visualization.

The four graduate students who work in NSF-funded, Cornell astronomy professor Saul Teukolsky’s group–Andy Bohn, François Hébert, William Throwe and Katherine Henriksson–as well as NSF-funded Caltech researchers Mark A. Scheel, Nicholas W. Taylor and undergraduate Darius Bunandar–have been doing related research and recently published their work about binary black holes on an online repository for scientific papers called ArXiv.  The paper, “What Would a Binary Black Hole Merger Look Like?” immediately garnered media attention, including in Nature.

“We know [interstellar travel through wormholes is] kind of crazy, but it makes a good story,” Throwe said.  Thorne used the students’ videos to help explain to the special effects team what kinds of information would be needed to make the visualizations believable.

While much is known about what a single black hole would look like in space, little was known about what two merging black holes would look like.  New technology allowed the students to do that for their paper.

“The idea that you’re going to be one of the first people to look at what a merging pair of black holes would look like is a good incentive to keep going,” Hébert said.

One of the best descriptions of wormholes in science fiction was the movie Contact, based on a novel by Carl Sagan.  While Sagan was writing the novel, he also consulted an expert in General Relativity, Kip Thorne,  to make sure that the way wormholes were treated in Contact was actually as close to being scientifically correct as possible.  Ellie, played by Jodie Foster, travels through a series of wormholes to a place near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, where the crew meets the senders of a message to Earth guised as persons significant in the lives of the travelers.

Studies from French and German physicists suggest that some unexplained objects in the universe might actually be “wormholes” -portals to other universes.  Thibault Damour and Sergey Solodukhin of the International University Bremen, believe that wormholes mimic black holes so closely that it might be impossible to distinguish.

Black holes and wormholes each distort the space and around them in a similar way, but though topically similar, they are, pardon the pun, universally different:

Black holes are the evolutionary endpoints of stars at least 10 to 15 times as massive as the sun.  When a star of that proportion undergoes a supernova explosion, it may leave behind a burned out stellar remnant.  With no outward forces to oppose gravitational forces, the remnant will collapse in on itself.  In other words, all of its mass is squeezed into a single point where time and space stop.  The point at the center of this black hole is called a singularity.  Within a certain distance of the singularity, the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing – not even light – can escape.

Wormholes, on the other hand, are theoretical warps in the fabric of space-time.  If wormholes could exist, they could potentially function as time machines.  (They also provide the fodder for many science fiction novels…)  According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, time passes more slowly for a highly accelerated body.  If one end of a wormhole were accelerated to close to the speed of light while another were stationary, a traveler entering into the stationary hole would emerge in the past from the accelerated hole.

Physicists like Stephen Hawking, however, aren’t convinced that wormholes even exist, arguing that properties of wormholes would be physically forbidden by basic universal laws.  If time travel existed, it would cause irresolvable paradoxes: it would be impossible, for example, to travel back in time and kill your former self.

Ironically, Damour and Solodukhin theoretically differentiate the two by using “Hawking Radiation,” the existence for which Hawking himself argued in 1974.  Hawking radiation is an emission of particles and light which should only come from black holes and would have a characteristic energy spectrum.  Both Damour and Solodukhin found this radiation to be so weak, however, that it would be completely swamped by other sources, such as the background glow of microwaves left over from the big bang.

Unfortunately, it seems the only way to definitively resolve the question is to make the plunge inside one of these massive holes – but considering that doing so would cause the instantaneous explosion of every atom of anyone or anything daring enough to try, our closest experience is still a visit to the science fiction section of local bookstores.

The Daily Galaxy via Anna Carmichael, Cornell University cunews@cornell.edu

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