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You are here: Home / 2016 / Archives for January 2016

Archives for January 2016

Stuff You Didn’t Know

January 29, 2016 by

According to Google, this is how every American housewife dressed in the 1950's. Let's make America great again.
According to Google, this is how every American housewife dressed in the 1950’s. Let’s make America great again.
There are some odd perks to doing this blog. While I’ve mentioned our fans in India and Japan a few times, mostly because that’s so random it deserves note, we also pick up other stragglers from around the globe who keep things interesting. They send me emails (yes, that’s my email at the bottom of this post), links, pictures, and all sorts of fun stuff. While I don’t share their personal info or pics, mostly because I think it vacillates between rude and pandering (HEY LOOK! I know a ____insert type of person here_____!), there have been a few things I tucked away for a rainy day. Although it’s technically dry outside I figured today was as good a day as any to clear some space. So, forget about any coherent theme, just sit back and enjoy.

Yeah, how many times have you heard that before?

Let’s start with a fun one. Shortly after Gal Gadot was cast as Wonder Woman I wrote an article about how this was a great idea. After all, Wonder Woman is of Mediterranean descent, does not have English as her first language, and looks hot. Or, is a lot like Gal Gadot. Unfortunately for her, she never got that memo. So, when Zack Snyder and his merry band of mythmakers flew her in from Israel, all she could think was that she was up for the role of …. Cat Woman.

“I mean, I could have guessed,” she admits now. “I thought it was going to be Selina (Kyle), you know?”

“I only knew what role it was when I flew in to test with Ben (Affleck),” she says. “I was very excited. Anytime I had general meetings in LA, I always said that my dream role was to do an empowered, independent woman who doesn’t rely on men.”

Gadot explained a little about her approach to the character, a warrior princess of the Amazons, over 5,000 years old, and – at the point of Batman v Superman – coming out of retirement.

My dream role was to do an empowered, independent woman who doesn’t rely on men.
“She’s seen it all,” says Gadot. “She has seen what humans can do, so it was very hard for her to come back and fight.”

We learn of the sheer commitment to the role Gadot has given. The 30 year-old actress underwent seven months of training before she ever set foot on set. “I was a dancer for 12 years,” she says, unable to believe how lucky she is to be able to parlay all that experience into a film role, “and now I get paid to work out and do crazy stuff with a lasso.”

In spite of the character’s mystical origins, Gadot insists that there is room for humour and a lighter touch. “I don’t want people to think she is perfect,” she insists. “She can be naughty.”

Considering that over the arc of Batman -v- Superman, and her own solo movie, she will be hooking up with Bruce Wayne and Steve Trevor, and based on some of the behind the scenes footage that has leaked, she will be as naughty as a PG-13 rating will allow. Also, if you watch the recently released trailer/promo, you’ll note she beheads a German soldier while riding a horse. This is accurate if you’re a fan of the comics. It will probably confuse the hell out of you if all you knew was Linda Carter.

In other super powered female news, Lana Condor has been cast as Jubilee in the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse film. Yes, the Twitterverse has already vented its spleen about having an Asian cast as Jubilee. You can just move past that now. But, when it came out that Jubilee would no longer be the little girl with the cute fireworks and would, instead, have some bad-ass powers, purists left home to join the Bundy militia.

Jamie Lovett wisely sticks to talking about her powers and ignores the morons.

Jubilation’s powers will be tweaked a bit. It’s nothing as drastic as what happens to her in the comics (losing her mutant powers on M-Day, and then being turned into a vampire), but Condor tells JoBlo, “Her power in the comic books is fireworks. In this film, I can safely say that her power is more fire-plasmoid, electricity type.”

In another change from the comics, Condor says Jubilee will actually be a longtime student at the Xavier Institute, rather than the newcomer she’s usually shown as in other media.

“She is a student at the X-Mansion and she’s been here for about 10 years,” says Condor. “So she’s not new, unlike some of the other characters who have just arrived. She’s mostly with Scott, Jean, and [Nightcrawler]. They’re like her good core friend group. And, I think in this film she serves as a timepiece, cause you’ll never really forget that you’re, like, in the ’80’s. Because if you’ve seen my costume, like I’m straight out of the ’80’s, like, they literally took me out. And, she also serves as kind of comedic relief at times where things are-might be a little more tense and real S-H-I-T is going down.”

First, a note to newbies, Jubilation is her real name in the books and the cartoons and so on. Jubilee is her nickname. As to the rest, a slightly more mature, and powerful, Jubilee should be a welcome addition to the franchise.

You want more powerful women? Sheesh, you’re needy today. Okay, here you go.

Megalyn E.K., which sounds like a sexbot but isn’t, has been the voice for Warner’s Vixen: The Animated Series on their web channel. They are now moving her into the plot of Arrow where she will reprise her role as a live action character.

Russ Burlingame tells us all about it.

Vixen star Megalyn E.K. will appear on the episode of Arrow currently being filmed in Vancouver, and The CW has provided Comicbook.com with the first official look at the character in costume.

Megalyn has been cast in Arrow episode #415 for the role of “Mari McCabe (aka Vixen).” Megalyn had previously voiced this role in CW Seed’s animated digital series, but will now be bringing the character to live-action in Arrow.

Yesterday, series star Stephen Amell tweeted a photo of them together on set:

“I think if it does end up being live action in any way, it’s really cool that I have this warm-up into the character and I really can create my own version of Vixen,” Megalyn E.K. told ComicBook.com of Vixen, the animated, CW Seed-produced series which just got a second season.

Want a better look? Okay, here you go.

Vixen

The cool thing about Vixen in the comic books, and animated series, is she switches between supermodel & superhero at will. It’s an interesting alternate identity. Since Arrow has done so well incorporating unusual characters into their show, HI CONSTANTINE!, I have to admit I’m stoked about this.

Okay, I lied, I did have a theme. I hope you’re not mad at me.

You see, I have nieces, and to see powerful women taking the screens, both big and small, to fan approval, is a wonderful thing for me. And for them. After all, we’ve had superheroes who look like me, yes, I can rock a cape, since Kal-El first graced Action Comics. But, and this seems to come as a shock to some, there is more to the world than white men. Or Anglo versions of other races.

Just go to my Facebook page and you’ll find people of every race and all major religions. They’re not there by accident. I happen to share a planet with them and feel it’s better to have a grip who’s rotating on this big round thing with me. It isn’t like they’re going anywhere.

So, kick back, enjoy, and catch up on cool women doing cool stuff. You’ll be a better person when you do.

Parvati Saves the World, Act3 from Rattapallax on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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Change Your Damn Password!

January 22, 2016 by

Ctrl+Alt+Del is not an option.
Ctrl+Alt+Del is not an option.
One of the beautiful things about the humans who inhabit this world is how they prize their individuality. I got bad news for you Sunshine, you’re special all right, just like everyone else. While society does require a certain level of conformity, there are risks with fitting in too well. If you’re not careful you can end up a cliche. Or worse, you can end up with all your personal data, including finances and porn, splashed all over that new-fangled World Wide Web thingy. Yes, it’s catching on and you really need to learn how to use it. Like mailing checks and using rotary phones, the world no longer abides your bad habits. Another thing it won’t abide is your silly attempts at being clever. Every year, since 2011, Splash Data prints a list of the twenty-five worst passwords. And every year people pay no fucking heed at all. But still I must try. Please peeps, don’t use these. I’ll tell you how to build a password at the bottom.

123456(Unchanged)
password(Unchanged)
12345678(Up 1)
qwerty(Up 1)
12345(Down 2)
123456789(Unchanged)
football(Up 3)
1234(Down 1)
1234567(Up 2)
baseball(Down 2)
welcome(New)
1234567890(New)
abc123(Up 1)
111111(Up 1)
1qaz2wsx(New)
dragon(Down 7)
master(Up 2)
monkey(Down 6)
letmein(Down 6)
login(New)
princess(New)
qwertyuiop(New)
solo(New)
passw0rd(New)
starwars(New)

A good password should contain a combination of CAPITAL letters, small letters, numbers & symbols. It should also be between eight and twelve characters long. It need not be complex either. After all, you’ll need to remember it.

Also, just FYI, using numbers in place of letters such as W1ll1am instead of William is pretty common and easily hacked.

Big!House$$123 is a good example. It’s a mix of all the elements and it’s easy to remember. DON’T USE IT! It’s a common password used by web designers when they set up accounts. But it should give you a better idea how to make one.

SKINDEEP, a story with light (nsfw) from michelengelen.com on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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Strange Days Indeed

January 21, 2016 by

Just walking around the new WNC offices.
Just walking around the new WNC offices.
People have asked me why I quit writing about Florida, specifically, and stupid things people do in red states in general. Most seem to assume that the idiocy has been tamped down to levels seen everywhere else. Most would be horribly wrong. In Florida, alone, the amount of people doing stupid things has risen to such epic levels that the South Central Sun-Sentinel has been forced to hire staff just to keep tabs on them and, for a while, even offered the content as pay-per-view. Oddly enough people weren’t stupid enough to pay to read about stupid people, so they just increased their ad rates and now everybody’s happy. But, quite honestly, I’d be writing about them day and night and still not cover it all. Consider me officially whelmed on that topic. I moved on. Besides, I have to admit, it’s kind of draining. No human should ever read a sentence containing the words “naked” “meth-lab” “strip-club” “infant” and “gun used as dildo” which is delivered without irony. I have read such sentences numerous times. So I don’t do that to myself anymore.

I’ve got a few things in que for you today, so let’s start with aliens. By now most of you have heard of the star KIC 8462852 a/k/a Tabby’s Star, named after Tabetha Boyajian, the woman who led the team that discovered its behavior, it was supposed to have an alien megastructure around it. Like a Dyson Swarm, an array that would collect all the sun’s energy and distribute it evenly across the system for the inhabitants to use. Cool idea, but there was no evidence of transmitted energy. Others, such as yours truly, posited that it could be a swarm of comets. Many smart people said “Yep, that makes sense” and went back to reading Dilbert. Phil Plait, over at Bad Astronomy, says one dude said “oorrrrr, maybe not.” And here’s where the weird turn pro.

But still, the star is weird. And we just found out it’s even weirder than we thought.

Bradley Schaefer is an astronomer at Louisiana State University. He’s a clever fellow and has a habit of thinking outside the box when it comes to astronomical mysteries. When it came to Tabby’s Star, Schaefer realized there might be older observations of it that could help inform its study.

He found that Tabby’s Star has been photographed more than 1,200 times as part of a repeated all-sky survey between the years 1890 and 1989. Using two different methods, he examined those observations and measured the star’s brightness over time.

fading star

Tabby’s Star is fading over time. The blue diamonds are measurements made between 1890 and 1989. The solid line is a linear (straight-line) fit to all the data while the dashed line is just a fit to the starting and ending points. The gray points are from two other stars as controls; they don’t fade over the same period.

Graph from Schaefer, 2016

What he found is rather astonishing: The star has been fading in brightness over that period, dropping by about 20 percent!

That’s … bizarre. Tabby’s Star is, by all appearances, a normal F-type star: hotter, slightly more massive, and bigger than our Sun. These stars basically just sit there and steadily turn hydrogen into helium. If they change, it’s usually on a timescale of millions of years, not centuries. Schaefer examined two other similar stars in the survey, and they remained constant in brightness over the same time period.

The long-term fading isn’t constant, either. There have been times where the star has dimmed quite a bit, then brightened up again in the following years. On average, the star is fading about 16 percent per century, but that’s hardly steady.

So it appears Tabby’s Star dims and brightens again on all kinds of timescales: hours, days, weeks, even decades and centuries.

Again. That’s bizarre. Nothing like this has ever been seen.

So what’s causing this? Well, think Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is probably the best place to start, and in this case that means one thing is probably behind all this weird behavior. Schaefer looks into this in his paper and concludes that the comet family idea doesn’t explain all the behavior. It might explain the short-term dips (maybe, kinda) but are hugely unlikely to be behind the long-term fading. You’d need truly vast numbers of comets, and they’d have to be huge, much larger than reasonable. And they’d have to be slamming into each other just as we happen to be looking.

So, yeah. Unlikely.

Phil goes on with a list of other, logical, things which could account for the known facts. All of them have been dismissed or deemed highly unlikely. Just for giggles, I posted on a NASA blog what I thought it could be. A ringworld. I expected to get laughed out of the room. Larry Niven’s flight of fancy, a single structure to replace all the planets in a system, has very little practical value.

Except …. it kind of fits. If you were building something like that there would be periods of massive dimming and periods of increased brightness. Also, since the structure would only be capturing solar energy, there would be no transmissions to track. Plus, once completed the dimming would be constant. So my stupid suggestion got added to the list of possibilities. I’ll keep you posted.

A little closer to home Pluto’s still a dwarf planet, but that’s okay. Scientists now know it’s got lots of company out there so it’s not some lonely little wanderer. The problem is that its wanderings, and the wanderings of its buddies, are a little off. As in, off enough that something must be disturbing them. Something big.

Irene Klotz, over at Discovery, says that something is a planet as big as Neptune.

The astronomer who helped kick Pluto out of the planet club believes a much larger body may be lurking in the outskirts of the solar system.

If it exists, the solar system’s ninth planet is estimated to be a gas world about 10 times bigger than Earth, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) astronomer Mike Brown wrote in this week’s Astronomical Journal.

Brown and colleague Konstantin Batygin, also at Caltech, used mathematical models and computer simulations to deduce the planet’s existence, but they also have some observational evidence to support their claim. Several small icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt region beyond Neptune have quirks in their orbits that may be explained by the gravitational influence of a larger, more distant planetary cousin.

Scientists then realized that six of those bodies follow elliptical paths pointing toward the same direction in space.

“It’s almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they’re all in exactly the same place,” Brown said in a press release, adding that the odds of that happening are about one-in-100.

The orbits also are tilted in the same direction, roughly 30 degrees downward relative to the orbital plane of the solar system’s other eight planets.

“We thought something else must be shaping these orbits,” Brown said.

After checking if a batch of other Kuiper Belt objects might be responsible, the scientists started doing computer simulations that included a distant outer planet in various orbits.

They found an unusual match: a massive planet in an anti-aligned orbit, which is an orbit in which the planet’s closest approach to the sun is 180 degrees across from the closest approach of the objects and known planets in the solar system.

“I was very skeptical,” Batygin said in the release. “I had never seen anything like this in celestial mechanics.”

Besides accounting for peculiarities in some Kuiper Belt objects’ orbits, the predicted rogue planet, located at least 200 times farther away from the sun than Earth, also would pin other Kuiper Belt bodies into orbits perpendicular to the plane of the rest of the planets.

“I realized there are objects like that,” Brown said. “We plotted up the positions of those objects and their orbits, and they matched the simulations exactly.”

If true, and all signs point to it being so, a planet like that should have moons. And, as we’ve discovered, many moons have water. That could easily become a staging area for extra-solar exploration.

But first we need to find it.

Even closer to home, the nice folks at the Irish Examiner have noted that aliens may already live among us and, even odder, I may have eaten some of them.

Not to send you into a meltdown or anything but octopuses are basically ‘aliens’ – according to scientists.

Researchers have found a new map of the octopus genetic code that is so strange that it could be actually be an “alien”.

The first whole cephalopod genome sequence shows a striking level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes identified – more than in a human.

Not only that, the octopus DNA is highly rearranged – like cards shuffled and reshuffled in a pack – containing numerous so-called “jumping genes” that can leap around the genome.

“The octopus appears to be utterly different from all other animals, even other molluscs, with its eight prehensile arms, its large brain and its clever problem-solving abilities,” said US researcher Dr Clifton Ragsdale, from the University of Chicago.

“The late British zoologist Martin Wells said the octopus is an alien. In this sense, then, our paper describes the first sequenced genome from an alien.”

The scientists sequenced the genome of the California two-spot octopus in a study published in the journal Nature.

They discovered unique genetic traits that are likely to have played a key role in the evolution of characteristics such as the complex nervous system and adaptive camouflage.

Analysis of 12 different tissues revealed hundreds of octopus-specific genes found in no other animal, many of them highly active in structures such as the brain, skin and suckers.

The scientists estimate that the two-spot octopus genome contains 2.7 billion base pairs – the chemical units of DNA – with long stretches of repeated sequences.

And although the genome is slightly smaller than a human’s, it is packed with more genes.

Reshuffling was a key characteristic of the creature’s genetic make-up. In most species, cohorts of certain genes tend to be close together on the double-helix DNA molecule.

A gene is a region of DNA that contains the coded instructions for making a protein.

In the octopus, however, there are no such groupings of genes with related functions. For instance, Hox genes – which control body plan development – cluster together in almost all animals but are scattered throughout the octopus genome.

It was as if the octopus genome had been “put into a blender and mixed”, said co-author Caroline Albertin, also from the University of Chicago.

Okay, breathe, relax, calm down. Their genes are ordered different than ours, they aren’t actually different than ours. All the parts are there, just like in us, they just never came together like ours did.

Just in case you, for some reason, think we’re the most advanced beings on the planet, I’ll remind you that, in 2016, Louisiana banned oral sex, or any form of sodomy, but kept necrophilia legal.

Now you know why I don’t write about them any more.

Toadies : Summer of the Strange (NSFW) from Kirtland Records on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
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INVENTIONS!

January 15, 2016 by

Science is yummy.
Science is yummy.

Oddly enough today I am not going to be writing about the joys of sexbots. Not that I have anything against them, other than the fact that they are the first step is allowing our cybernetic overlords to enslave us. Instead I’m going to talk about stuff that has actual human benefits. The kind of stuff that can help you live longer, healthier, more productive lives. Even better, not one word of this blog will involve the consumption of kale. Nor will it involve you taking a survey of any kind. You can just sit there naked, eating Cheetohs, being all 50 Shades of Passive, and allow me to pour knowledge into your brain, much like they did in THX-1138. Only without the cattle prods. Or leather clad officials with thigh high boots and helmets.

I’m sorry if you’ll miss that part.

While Japan, naturally, is working on a variety of sexual aids that will have artificial intelligence, think SIRI with a whole new purpose, other scientists have been looking for more practical applications. Nothing wrong with sex but you can’t eat or breathe it. At least not literally.

There is a thing called the Turing Test which is what scientists use to detect sentience. There is a visual aspect and an aural aspect. Each requires cognitive recognition by the subject. Natalie Zutter writes that a cybernetic mind just passed the first part.

In 2014, artificial intelligence experts at the University of Reading celebrated as their AI program managed to pass the Turing test. Coined by Alan Turing in a 1950 paper, the test requires that a computer convince testers that it is human at least 30% of the time through keyboard conversations. Now, this apparent triumph has since been disputed, with opponents pointing out that the AI program was designed to act like a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, putting certain constraints on the conversation at the start. Now, a new research article in the latest issue of Science claims that an AI program has passed the Turing test—but a visual test, not a conversational one.

The test was fairly straightforward: Both a human and the computer system were shown a character that doesn’t belong to any of the world’s alphabets but looks like it could be part of a fictional language; i.e., it shares features with preexisting letters. Each was then asked to redraw the character, but with subtle differences; you can see below that that means changing the proportions while maintaining the original form. In other tests, both the software and the person were given a set of unfamiliar characters (again, not real letters) and asked to create a new one that matches the others in the series.

AI passes visual Turing test
A team of human judges were then asked to guess which set belonged to the human, and which to the AI. Here’s the kicker: They could identify the AI’s characters only about 50 percent of the time, the same as chance.

The fact that this visual test is deceptively simple actually supports the scientists’ reasoning. As the researchers explained in the Science paper,

People learning new concepts can often generalize successfully from just a single example, yet machine learning algorithms typically require tens or hundreds of examples to perform with similar accuracy. People can also use learned concepts in richer ways than conventional algorithms—for action, imagination, and explanation. We present a computational model that captures these human learning abilities for a large class of simple visual concepts: handwritten characters from the world’s alphabets.

Rather than approach the problem like a computer would, the AI mimicked humans’ elasticity of learning, including the ability to learn new concepts from just a few patterns. This computational model is called a probabilistic program, the researchers further explained in a press release from MIT. Josh Tenenbaum, one of the system’s co-developers who comes from the MIT Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, lays it out: “In the current AI landscape, there’s been a lot of focus on classifying patterns. But what’s been lost is that intelligence isn’t just about classifying or recognizing; it’s about thinking.”

Go ahead and try it yourself. It’s not as easy as it seems. But, it’s also what your mind does naturally every day. You can extrapolate concepts from limited data. You don’t need to have a full data set of meteorological research in front of you to know it feels likes it’s going to rain. It’s the basis behind what we know of as sentience.

And that balance we maintain can be disrupted in the most unusual ways. T.J. Raphael writes about how reading digital content can cause your mind to be unable to process real world content, such as newspapers and books.

Manoush Zomorodi, managing editor and host of WNYC’s New Tech City, recalls a conversation with the Washington Post’s Mike Rosenwald, who’s researched the effects of reading on a screen. “He found, like I did, that when he sat down to read a book his brain was jumping around on the page. He was skimming and he couldn’t just settle down. He was treating a book like he was treating his Twitter feed,” she says.

Neuroscience, in fact, has revealed that humans use different parts of the brain when reading from a piece of paper or from a screen. So the more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards “non-linear” reading — a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having your eyes dart around a web page.

“They call it a ‘bi-literate’ brain,” Zoromodi says. “The problem is that many of us have adapted to reading online just too well. And if you don’t use the deep reading part of your brain, you lose the deep reading part of your brain.”

So what’s deep reading? It’s the concentrated kind we do when we want to “immerse ourselves in a novel or read a mortgage document,” Zoromodi says. And that uses the kind of long-established linear reading you don’t typically do on a computer. “Dense text that we really want to understand requires deep reading, and on the internet we don’t do that.”

Linear reading and digital distractions have caught the attention of academics like Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University.

“I don’t worry that we’ll become dumb because of the Internet,” Wolf says, “but I worry we will not use our most preciously acquired deep reading processes because we’re just given too much stimulation. That’s, I think, the nub of the problem.”

Deep reading is also what inspires your imagination and other cerebral attributes that allow you to process data more thoroughly. Not that the internet will make anyone dumb, just that it could limit your ability to survive outside of a well controlled environment.

Like the ones your robot overlords are preparing.

And, as with any venture by humans into any new realm, there can be unintended consequences. Josh L. Davis writes about how global warming is postponing the next ice age.

It appears that through the burning of fossil fuels and filling the atmosphere with carbon, mankind has caused the world to “skip” an ice age, potentially postponing the next one by between 50,000 to 100,000 years. The new research came to this conclusion after modeling the conditions needed to tip the planet into a glacial period. They found that while Earth is at the right point in its orbit around the Sun, the level of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere is far too high.

The study reports that the onset of a major glaciation, in which ice sheets would cover most of Europe, North America, and Russia, was prevented at the start of the Industrial Revolution, as the burning of coal caused the amount of greenhouse gasses being emitted to rise above threshold levels, at 240 parts per million of carbon. Since then, as the amount of carbon in our atmosphere has been steadily rising (currently sitting at around 400 parts per million), the researchers calculate that we’ve probably pushed the event back by around 100,000 years.

“The bottom line is that we are basically skipping a whole glacial cycle, which is unprecedented,” explains Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research’s Andrey Ganopolski, the lead author of the study. “It is mind-boggling that humankind is able to interfere with a mechanism that shaped the world as we know it.”

The new paper gives further weight to the notion that we have entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – in which the Earth and its climate is impacted by humanity, to such an extent that it will still be affected tens of thousands of years into the future.

Before you break out the cargo shorts in celebration, keep in mind that we have arable soil, that stuff that grows stuff, thanks to the last ice age. Also keep in mind that without the regular cooling there are many other bad things that can happen to our planet. Rising water levels, expanded deserts, less land for agriculture, and so on. Since we need land to live on and food to eat, those are things worthy of your concern.

So, do I have any good news? Actually, yes. Chris Matthews reports that Ghana has started a space program.

Ghana?

Yes, Ghana. And for a series of reasons that should make you want to grow ours.

Nestled on the top floor in between university classrooms and engineering laboratories, the epicentre of ANUC’s space initiative is a small, unassuming room. Multiple monitors on one side make up its ground station while a prototype of its CubeSat and a white board of ideas draw your attention at the other.

“I remember the very first day we heard a voice,” said Bennett. “We were here one evening just tracking satellites… and we turned it on and we could hear a voice. [It’s] not very common in our region to hear a live voice signal. We were very excited and jumping around the place.”

This excitement for space science was spurred by Ghana’s government, which in 2011 launched the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute (GSSTI). It follows in the path of several other African nations in promoting space science and looking to the final frontier to help address on-the-ground issues and local problems.

Approaching the gates of Ghana’s Atomic Energy Commission in Accra, where two guards stand in front, I enter and pass down the long driveway and a cluster of concrete buildings hidden from the roadside come into view.

Individuals in white coats and suits walk around the well-kept lawns as staff from the GSSTI drive me around the complex. Here, development work for the government program is underway, but is kept under wraps during my visit. GSSTI’s conversion of a 32-metre satellite antenna into a telescope as part of its radio astronomy project is off limits, although GSSTI said it should be completed in June.

In addition to unveiling a telescope and astronomy centre in collaboration with the South African government, GSSTI has designs to send its first satellite to space by 2020. The government allocated GHC$38.5 million (US$10 million) to nuclear and space science technology in 2015 as it aims to further space education and benefit from its own satellite imagery.

A short drive outside the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission is the University of Ghana’s graduate school where many GSSTI staff are based, including Eric Aggrey, a project manager at the institute.

“[People] always see space science as just sending man to the Moon,” he explained. “I am very much keen about human development… most of the time our teaching ends on the blackboard and now we can have people practising their skills. [That] will help us a lot.”

The government has 20 staff at its institute, while the nearby University of Ghana has started courses in astronomy, as does the Kwame Nkrumah University in Kumasi. ANUC’s initiative currently employs six people, and the school has aspirations to start academic courses in astronomy and space science. Outreach programs on space education are also happening at primary schools across the country.

But the value of the nascent Ghanaian space program isn’t just for education. At present, the nation is reliant on satellite images from foreign companies, but by having its own independent satellites, Aggrey and others believe significant benefits can be felt across society.

“God willing, we will also go into launching our own satellite. In the next couple of years we are going to be able to clearly define our needs and design a satellite to fill our needs,” Aggrey said.

“If we have our own or a regional satellite then we will have a common agenda if it is for agriculture, environmental degradation, storms… then we can use them to address local problems,” said Godfred Frempong, chief scientist at the country’s Science and Technology Policy Research Institute (STEPRI).

“[In] Ghana, for example, illegal mining is destroying our environment,” Frempong continued. “So if we have a satellite [in orbit] we can use it to pinpoint where activity is going on. That would perhaps not be activity of interest to the US, but it is of interest to us.”

As you might have noted, their concerns aren’t about harvesting asteroids but getting a better grip on their agriculture and natural resources. A working space program can give them that. In fact it’s really the only way.

Here’s something else a space program can provide; materials that can handle horribly adverse conditions. Why does that matter to you? Well, the next time a plane crashes keep in mind that, thanks to Vladimir Tatarenko utilizing these new technologies, instead of dying you could float safely to the ground.

“Surviving in a plane crash is possible,” claims Ukrainian aviation engineer Vladimir Tatarenko who devoted much of his life to inventing a life-saving capsule that can help thousands to survive in aviation accidents.

While working at the Antonov serial production plant, the aircraft manufacturing company in Kyiv, Tatarenko was often a member of special commissions, working on the scenes of accidents.

“Looking at these horrible scenes and knowing the statistics of crashes I came to certain conclusions. People are wrong about air disasters, because some 80% of them happen due to human error,” the inventor told in an interview to the Ukrainian e-zine AIN.UA

“While aircraft engineers all over the world are trying to make planes safer, they can do nothing about the human factor,” Tatarenko added, explaining how he came up with the idea of a rescue container.

After five-decade research Tatarenko has received a patent on the invention of the escape capsule system designed to rescue crew and passengers of a civil aircraft in case of emergency.

 

The idea of an ejecting capsule in the commercial aircrafts is not new, Russian inventor Gamil Halidov has also come up with the similar concept of a passenger compartment with a huge parachute.

 

“For years the research community was unable to bring it to life, because engineers could not find a suitable material. But we have used carbon-fiber – a very strong and lightweight material, which proved to be suitable,” Tatarenko said.

The system envisages that the capsule with seats for passengers and crew is installed inside the aircraft’s fuselage. It could escape through the rear hatch of the aircraft within two to three seconds in case of almost all emergencies – engine failure, fire on board, technical problems triggered by bad weather conditions and other troubles.

The benefits there are self-explanatory. Right now the only downside is that all luggage would be lost, but they’re working on it. Unlike your robot overlords, they put people first.

Well, someone had to.

Now, I’m sure that you’ve seen those cute electric cars on TV and the occasional street. And I’m sure your first reaction was “GO BACK TO BERKELEY YOU FUCKING TREE HUGGER!”

That’s okay. Not everyone reacts well to change. That said, one basic problem with them is that you have to charge them every few hours and random strangers tend to frown on you pulling up to their homes and plugging your car into their electrical outlets.

That was then. This is now. Inventor Ismael Aviso, in the Philippines, has come up with a self charging motor. All verified independently by the Philippine’s Department of Energy (DOE).

DOE Test Results

The Technology Application and Promotion Institute, a division of the Philippine Department of Energy, tested two technologies developed by Ismael Aviso: his electric car and his repelling force.

In testing the electric car, they compared the efficiency of the DC motor using a conventional power supply (MERALCO), to the efficiency of the DC motor using Aviso’s power source.  Their measurement equipment included a dynamometer (which measures the torque produced by the spinning wheel); and oscilloscopes, to measure electrical output.  They ran three tests of each type.

As was expected, the efficiency of the DC motor using the conventional power supply coming from a wall outlet was 45%.  More than half the energy is being wasted as back-EMF, resistance, and heat.

But with Aviso’s apparatus in place, the DC motor measured the efficiency as 133% — meaning that more energy was produced than was consumed; validating the claim of “self-running” (with unseen energy being harvested from the environment).

In his preparatory meeting with them last week, he told them that the “conventional” mode will show the DC motor running at its rated efficiency of around 65%, while the Aviso mode will show at least 90% efficiency; and he told them he wouldn’t be surprised if it showed 140% efficiency – very clearly harnessing energy from the surroundings.  Now today, he nearly reached the 140% high projected.

In the repelling force test, his mode of propelling a one kilogram weight 33 feet in the air consumed four times less energy than by means of an ordinary low speed motor.

Aviso said the full test results report will be made available next week, after which they will recommend the funding of his technology (not by the Philippine government, which does not have the budget for this, but by qualified third parties).

Evidence

Aviso provided the following video of today’s testing, most of it in time-lapse mode to speed up the video.

Here’s a letter that the department sent Aviso on February 14 to schedule today’s test.  It says that the testing would be witnessed by members of the Inter-Agency Technical Evaluation Committee at the UP-VTRL compound of the Technology Application and Promotion Institute, a division of the Department of Energy.

As mentioned in our last story about this technology, Aviso was featured Monday morning on Channel 7, the largest TV network in the Philippines.  They accompanied him to the meeting with the Department of Energy on February 17, in which the proposed testing procedure was discussed.  Here’s the video of their coverage that they posted today on their site.


For the latest Philippine news stories and videos, visit GMANews.TV

If you click Ismael’s link above you can even get the plans to build your own engine and try it out yourself. For a micro-car or two-seater, it works fine.

In America, legendary drag racer, Big Daddy Don Garlits, has developed an electric motor which can attain speeds of over 200 mph. So the engines needed to make electric cars commercially feasible now exists. With Ismael’s new technology you can look forward to quiet, high speed, environmentally friendly, vehicles that would have many commercial applications.

Just consider this some more fun stuff science has done while you were out.

Idles – 26/27 from Felix Drake on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
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Water, Water, Everywhere

January 4, 2016 by

Water. It's not just for swimming anymore.
Water. It’s not just for swimming anymore.

People rarely stop to think about water. And that’s a shame. Because we end up doing lots of bad things to it and all it really exists for is to help us. Humans are the abusive partner in this relationship. However, as it turns out, not all humans are assholes. Some have started trying to do good things to, and with, our pal water. I’ve already written about The Ocean Cleanup, currently based near Tsushima, an island between Japan and South Korea. It’s taking on the daunting task of removing billions of pounds of trash out of the ocean. Just FYI, most of it comes from those cruise ships you see advertised on late night television which offer you the chance to hang out with KISS or Paula Deen. Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me, but click the links if that’s your thing. Anyway, lots of people have done lots of bad things to water. Now, since 97% of our body is water based, and we require water to live, this is not a good thing. I’ll keep it simple for you. Without water there is no vodka. That alone should spurn you to care.

While The Ocean Cleanup is a laudable project, it will take decades to accomplish its goals. That means we need to step in and help out a little ourselves. Kimberly Mok, over at Tree Hugger, says a couple of Aussies are doing just that.

Inventors and surfers Andrew Turton and Pete Ceglinski both spent their younger years around the water, and were compelled to quit their jobs to design a solution they believe will help address the urgent problem of plastic pollution. The Seabin is designed as an 24/7 alternative to more costly alternatives like dedicated trash boats or humans trawling harbours for garbage. It’s also small and unobtrusive enough that it can be placed in “problem areas” in marinas. Say the designers:

The Seabin is more efficient than a marine worker walking around with a scoop net. By working with these marinas, ports and yacht clubs we can locate the seabin in the perfect place and mother nature brings us the rubbish to catch it. Sure we can’t catch everything right now but its a really positive start.

The Seabin is a floating trash bin made from 70 to 100 percent recycled polyethylene plastic. It’s attached to a dock, and uses a water pump to suck water and trash into its interior, where garbage and other nasty fluids can be filtered out of the water via a natural fiber bag. Clean(er) water is then pumped out.

So far, the Seabin team has tested the prototype out in Mallorca, Spain, and it seems to have been a success. (No fish were harmed). Despite the hefty price tag of USD $3,825 per bin, the crowdfunding campaign did achieve its goal, raising more than $240,000 to push the project to the next level. So, we may see more of these unassuming floating marine filters in the future, ridding the waters of garbage, one marina at a time. In the meantime, we can all do our personal part by reducing our plastic waste or going zero-waste all together. For more information, visit Indiegogo and Seabin Project.

The cool thing about Seabin is that it’s passive. Just drop it in the water and let it do its thing.

Another thing water provides us is electricity. But hydroelectric plants can do just as much harm to the environment as a strip mine if they’re not properly created and maintained. Those giant dams that look so epic on TV documentaries wipe out thousands of acres of viable land.

Feargus O’Sullivan, from the Atlantic City Lab, tells us of one alternative.

Just outside the Welsh city of Swansea, the U.K. is planning one of the most innovative power plants ever constructed. It’s not the plant’s size that is striking, though it could ultimately provide power to 155,000 homes for 120 years. It’s the source of its power that breaks ground: tides channeled into an artificially constructed lagoon.

Granted full planning permission this June, the Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon will be the world’s first ever plant to generate electricity using this method. Should it prove successful, the plant’s template could be adopted worldwide as a way of generating green power while simultaneously providing sea wall protection to coastal communities.

Tidal electricity generation in itself is nothing new, of course. Tidal power stations have been producing electricity since France built the world’s first in 1966. Swansea’s tidal lagoon model nonetheless takes the technology to a new stage, making it more adaptable and softening its environmental impact.

Tidal power plants built so far work on the tidal barrage model, where embedded turbines within a dam are strung across a site that has naturally strong and reliable tidal flow, typically an estuary. As the tide flows through, the barrage’s blockage creates a difference in water levels, the resulting pressure pushing water through the turbines to generate electricity. The key limitation of this model is that it only works in sites where tides pass through some form of easily bridgeable gap.

The tidal lagoon model gets round this problem by actually altering the coastline to create the correct conditions. Instead of bridging a river mouth, it requires the construction of what is effectively an artificial harbor, a stretch of water enclosed by a semicircular, rock-clad barrier built up from the seabed. A harbor mouth is created within this barrier, where the inflow and outflow of water powers a set of turbines.

This technology is environmentally friendly and can save people money on their electric bills. It’s a win win situation. Also, as noted above, since all they need is gravity to make it work, and we have plenty of that all over the world, this little device could bring unlimited power to any place in the world.

One of those places in the world, Portland, Oregon, has come up with an ingenious solution to creating electricity without damaging the planet. Rafi Schwartz, from Good Magazine, tells us all how they’re using existing infrastructure to bring power to their residents.

This is a really cool idea, too.

You’d be forgiven if the phrase “Portland goes green with innovative water pipes” doesn’t immediately call to mind thoughts of civil engineering and hydro-electric power. And yet, that’s exactly what Oregon’s largest city has done by partneringwith a company called Lucid Energy to generate clean electricity from the water already flowing under its streets and through its pipes.

Portland has replaced a section of its existing water supply network with Lucid Energy pipes containing four forty-two inch turbines. As water flows through the pipes, the turbines spin and power attached generators, which then feed energy back into the city’s electrical grid. Known as the “Conduit 3 Hydroelectric Project,” Portland’s new clean energy source is scheduled to be up and running at full capacity in March. According to a Lucid Energy FAQ detailing the partnership, this will be the “first project in the U.S. to secure a 20-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for renewable energy produced by in-pipe hydropower in a municipal water pipeline.”

A short promotional video describes the technology and benefits involved in harnessing energy from municipal water pipelines:

 

Lucid Energy Overview with President and CEO Gregg Semler

 
As the video explains, Lucid Energy’s system isn’t affected by the sort of external conditions (namely: the weather) upon which other renewable energy sources–like solar and wind power– are reliant. Nor does the technology, completely ensconced within a pipe, have adverse effects on a surrounding environmental ecosystem, as an exposed hydroelectric dam might.

Fast Company points out that, in order to be cost and energy effective, Portland’s new power generators must be installed in pipes where water flows downhill, without having to be pumped, as the energy necessary to pump the water would negate the subsequent energy gleaned. However, Fast Company also notes that the system does more than simply provide electricity: It can monitor both the overall condition of a city’s water supply network as well as assess the drinking quality of the water flowing through it.

That little doohickey will save a lot of money in the long run. Cities spend more than you might think testing water and making sure it’s safe. If they’re getting that information in real time with no effort those resources can be allocated elsewhere, or just pocketed. Add in the money saved by generating their own power and you have a happy city.

A little while earlier I wrote about those abysmal cruise ships that cater to the great unwashed. It turns out that a guy named Gianluca Santosuosso had similar thoughts. However, since he’s one of the world’s best engineers, and not just some dude hanging at the bar, he was able to do something about it. And what he did was create the MORPHotel.

It looks like this.

Here’s a better look.

The MORPHotels concept is based on four main strategies:

1- SPACE IN BETWEEN: using the sea not only as a medium to move tourists from one place to another (as cruise ships do) but also to discover unknown places, taking advantage from this “space in between”; avoiding the traditional concept of cruise ships – where the fuel consumption, at an average cruise speed of 20 nodes, is 470 litres/km – this strategy would change the rules about sea trips; MORPHotels are constantly moving at slow speed around the world ( following sea currents) and tourists can get on board wherever it is. While tourists on cruise ships depart from point A, reach their destination (point B) and then go back, in MORPHotel the segment A-B they experience is just a small part of the entire-endless journey of the hotel.

2- PLUG-IN CITY-HARBOUR: this artificial organism, during its continuous journey around the oceans and the seas, stops for short or long periods in cities encountered throughout its trip, becoming a temporary extension to them; as a temporary extension of the hosting city, the MORPHotel will become an added value for its inhabitants, who will take advantage from its services (a theatre, a commercial area, a linear garden, restaurants and a fitness centre). The city, in turn, will open its doors to MORPHotel tourists. In this way, the traditional separation between ‘tourist’ and ‘citizen’ will disappear, leaving space for a new entity: the “tourizen”.

3- ADAPTIVE SHAPE: the advantages offered by the adaptive shape of MORPHotel makes it possible for it not only to reach the harbour cities, adapting itself morphologically to the territory, but also to become it itself an independent aquatic organism. In fact, given its massive proportions (the whole spine is one kilometre long) it can become a floating harbour during its long ocean crossings; it does this by spiralling into itself and generating an artificial bay where boats and ships can find shelter.

4- SELF-SUFFICIENCY: one of the fundamental goals that we want to attain in this project is to create a big, independent, self-sufficient artificial organism. The self-sufficiency covers several functional aspects of MORPHotel. With regard to energy, this will be provided to the whole system through the combination of two different eco-friendly technologies: 1- Solar panels distributed along the upper part of the hull and glass panels; 2- The two ends of the spine will be destined to the production of energy through the movement of waves. Several examples of already existing projects (e.g. The Pelamis Wave Energy Converter) show that using these systems allows the production of relevant quantities of energy. As a logical consequence, the production of drinking water will be related to the production of renewable energy. A part of the self-produced energy will be used on the one hand to filter and store the rainwater collected, and on the other hand to desalinate sea water.

The self-sufficiency will also regard the hotel’s ability to produce certain types of food; in fact, each of the central vertebra will contain a small vegetable garden. This part of the hotel will work as a big floating farm where it will be possible to grow vegetables, rear animals and store foodstuffs.

PROGRAMME: tourizens will enter the hotel through a “barycentric dock” whose function will be to plug MORPHotel to the harbour of the city where is located in that moment, to serve as a helicopter landing platform, to take vehicles aboard and to serve as a pier where visiting boats can dock.

Entering the main vertebra – where all the reception, administration and catering services are located – the guests will reach the services offered by this structure, which are located along the central axis of the structure (this consists in a covered “linear park” that serves as a connection between the different sectors). The two ends of the structure will contain the hotel rooms; these are conceived as capsules attached to the organism’s spine that will have varying degrees of luxury and comfort: from glass room located at the water level, to luxury rooms that function as independent boats that can leave the main structure and sail within a fixed range established for security reasons; passengers will be free to explore the areas that MORPHotel will cross during its perpetual and slow movement across the world.

A secondary pier for staff use only will be used to take on supplies for the journey and to allow boats to dock for refueling, delivering and unloading of goods.

By using the natural currents of the water, and only minimal energy for steering, this floating city leaves a near zero footprint on the ocean. Additionally, since it is its own port it need not clog up traditional sea lanes. It can go anywhere it wants. It is truly a revolutionary idea.

Okay, so now you’ve got clean water, cheap to free power, and a place to hang out when you get tired of home. What do you do with these riches? Our old pal Kimberly Mok says you might consider building the world’s cheapest greenhouse that will allow you to grow food year round.

Growers in colder climates often utilize various approaches to extend the growing season or to give their crops a boost, whether it’s coldframes, hoop houses or greenhouses.

Greenhouses are usually glazed structures, but are typically expensive to construct and heat throughout the winter. A much more affordable and effective alternative to glass greenhouses is the walipini (an Aymara Indian word for a “place of warmth”), also known as an underground or pit greenhouse. First developed over 20 years ago for the cold mountainous regions of South America, this method allows growers to maintain a productive garden year-round, even in the coldest of climates.

Here’s a video tour of a walipini that shows what a basic version of this earth-sheltered solar greenhouse looks like inside:

How a Walipini works and how to build one

© Benson Institute

It’s a pretty intriguing set-up that combines the principles of passive solar heating with earth-sheltered building. But how to make one? From American sustainable agriculture non-profit Benson Institute comes this enlightening manual on how a walipini works, and how to build it:

The Walipini utilizes nature’s resources to provide a warm, stable, well-lit environment for year-round vegetable production. Locating the growing area 6’- 8’ underground and capturing and storing daytime solar radiation are the most important principles in building a successful Walipini.

The Walipini, in simplest terms, is a rectangular hole in the ground 6 ‛ to 8’ deep covered by plastic sheeting. The longest area of the rectangle faces the winter sun — to the north in the Southern Hemisphere and to the south in the Northern Hemisphere. A thick wall of rammed earth at the back of the building and a much lower wall at the front provide the needed angle for the plastic sheet roof. This roof seals the hole, provides an insulating airspace between the two layers of plastic (a sheet on the top and another on the bottom of the roof/poles) and allows the sun’s rays to penetrate creating a warm, stable environment for plant growth.

SilverThunder/via

This earth-sheltered greenhouse taps into the thermal mass of the earth, so that much less energy is needed to heat up the walipini’s interior than an aboveground greenhouse. Of course, there are precautions to take in waterproofing, drainage and ventilating the walipini, while aligning it properly to the sun — which the manual covers in detail.

Best of all, according to the Benson Institute, their 20-foot by 74-foot walipni field model out in La Paz cost around $250 to $300 only, thanks to the use of free labour provided by owners and neighbours, and the use of cheaper materials like plastic ultraviolet (UV) protective sheeting and PVC piping.

Cheap but effective, the underground greenhouse is a great way for growers to produce food year-round in colder climates. More over at the Benson Institute and the Pure Energy Systems Wiki.

While the site may be called “Tree Hugger” it offers practical solutions to real world problems. The fact that they work and are inexpensive is just a bonus. If you own an average suburban home you could build, and operate, a Walipini in your backyard. If you’re unwilling, or unable, to do the digging required, a few extra bucks and a rented back-hoe will get you done.

So here you go, kick your year off right by helping to save the planet and reduce the stress on your wallet.

Balmins, naturist beach from julianen on Vimeo.

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