The Zen of Technology & Scientific Discovery! (& Robots)

[Kyoshin]

When I first posted about "Connected" I hadn't yet watched the episode about Benford's law.
I don't really know what to do with myself; that's some straight up sorcery.

Gassho
Kyoshin
Satlah

[Jundo]

I'm from Florida, and I thought that things there were weird ...

Native to Australia, Uraba lugens is a strange caterpillar that stacks its molted heads atop each other. With every molt, the stack becomes an increasingly tall, tapering tower since every head is larger than the last. ... That's how this freaky creepy-crawly got its nickname, the "mad hatterpillar." This morbid headgear serves as a diversion when hungry predators are about.

... "The molted head capsules start stacking early but they are not always visible, as the smaller ones get dislodged over time," Hochuli said. "It's not uncommon to see caterpillars with at least five old heads stacked on top of the one they are currently using."
For weeks before they become moths, these insects carry their dead heads, which can stack up to 12 millimeters (0.47 inches) tall — nearly half of the caterpillar's maximum body length of 25 millimeters.

... "They look bigger, so they're more threatening and look more formidable to a potential predator," Henderson said. "Another theory is that it may provide a false target, so a predator such as a jumping spider or something that's targeting a part of the animal might go for the wrong part. It gives the caterpillar a chance to get away."
https://us.cnn.com/2020/08/09/world/...scn/index.html

Just sayin ...

Gassho, J

STLah

[Onka]

When I first posted about "Connected" I hadn't yet watched the episode about Benford's law.
I don't really know what to do with myself; that's some straight up sorcery.

Gassho
Kyoshin
Satlah

Yes! My partner and I have just watched that episode. My dog! what a mind bender but as the scientist at the end said, it makes me feel small.
My Zazen practice is ridiculously uncomplicated and for some reason this episode really connected my practice to literally everything everywhere. I want to swear so much but this is awesome. Thank you Kyoshin.
Gassho
Onka
ST

[Kyoshin]

I'm from Florida, and I thought that things there were weird ...

Just sayin ...

Gassho, J

STLah

Looks familiar...IMG_20200728_120316064.jpg

Sent from my moto g(7) power using Tapatalk

[Jundo]

Life at the end of the rainbow ...

Rainbow meteorite discovered in Costa Rica may hold building blocks of life

A small, soft space rock smacked into Costa Rica on April 23, 2019. And it may have carried building blocks for life.

The washing machine-sized clay fireball broke up before landing, . Locals found shards scattered between two villages, La Palmera and Aguas Zarcas. And while meteorites turn up all over Earth, these shards were special; the asteroid that spawned them was a soft remnant of the early solar system, made from the dust from the spinning nebula that would ultimately form our solar system, formed in even older stars. And the meteorites that rained down from the event — collectively called Aguas Zarcas — belong to a rare class called carbonaceous chondrites, which form in the wee hours of the solar system's emergence and are typically packed with carbon. This particular space rock contains complex carbon compounds, likely including amino acids (which join to form proteins and DNA) and perhaps other, even more complex building blocks of life.

... life on Earth may have originated from chemicals delivered in meteorites ...

... But landing as they did in the Costa Rican rainforest, Sokol reported, there's still the possibility of contamination. Down the road, even more pristine samples may become available. The Japanese Hayabusa2 probe, launched in 2014 with the goal of sampling the asteroid Ryugu, is already on its way back with Ryugu dust onboard, a sample that may contain carbonaceous chondrite, Sokol noted. And in 2023, NASA will return its own samples from a similar asteroid, Bennu, which Sokol reported is likely related to Aguas Zarcas.

https://www.livescience.com/asteroid-organice-life-clues-costa-rica.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Doshin]

So meteors may be the Johnny Apple Seed of the Universe.

Doshin
St

[Jundo]

This earth does us a "solid" favor, right down to the core ...

Earth's core is a billion years old
The solidification of the inner core may have strengthened Earth's magnetic field.

The solid inner core of Earth is a mere billion years old, new research finds.

Modern Earth is like a layer cake, with a solid outer crust, a hot, viscous mantle, a liquid outer core and a solid inner core. That solid inner core is growing slowly as the liquid iron in the core cools and crystallizes. This process helps power the churning motion of the liquid outer core, which in turn creates the magnetic field that surrounds Earth and helps protect the planet from harmful cosmic radiation.

In other words, the inner core is pretty important.

But not much is known about the history of this 1,500-mile-wide (2,442 kilometers) iron ball. Estimates of its age have ranged from half a billion years to more than 4 billion years, almost as old as 4.5-billion-year-old Earth itself. Now, researchers have squeezed a miniscule piece of iron between two diamonds and blasted it with lasers to arrive at a new estimate of 1 billion to 1.3 billion years old — a date range that coincides with a measurable strengthening of the Earth's magnetic field that happened around the same time.

"Earth is unique in our solar system in that it has a magnetic field, and that it's habitable," study author Jung-Fu Lin, a geoscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science. "Eventually our results could be used to think about why other planets in our solar system don't have magnetic fields."

https://www.livescience.com/earth-co...years-old.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

"If all things return to the one, to what does the one return?" (Famous Zen Koan) ...

Could the universe collapse into a singularity? New study explains how.

Has the universe been around forever? If so, perhaps it's been bouncing back and forth in a never-ending cycle of big bangs in which all matter bubbles out of a singularity, followed by big crunches, in which everything gets swallowed up again to form that dense point from which the universe is born again. And the cycle continues over and over and over.

The math of those theories, however, has never really worked out in a way that could tell us whether our universe is cyclic or has one beginning and one end. But recently, a team of theorists has invoked the powers of so-called string theory to solve some fundamental riddles of the early universe. The result could give us the theoretical push needed to build a universe from scratch, and hence lend support to a repeating universe.

...

In the Ekpyrotic scenario, the universe … constantly repeats. Under that perspective, we are currently in a "bang" phase, which will eventually (somehow) slow down, stop, reverse, and crunch back down to incredibly high temperatures and pressures. Then, the universe will (somehow) bounce back and re-ignite in a new big bang phase.

The trouble is, it's hard to replicate the blotches and splotches in the baby picture of the universe in an Ekpyrotic universe. When we attempt to put together some vague physics to explain the crunch-bounce-bang cycle (and I do emphasize "vague" here, because these processes involve energies and scales that we aren't even coming close to understanding with known physics), everything just comes out too … smooth. No bumps. No wiggles. No splotches. No differences in temperature, pressure or density.

And that doesn't just mean the theories don't match observations of the early universe. It means that these cosmologies don't lead to a universe filled with galaxies, stars or even people.

...

[The secret is] S-branes. So you've heard of string theory, right? That's the universe of fundamental physics where every particle is really a tiny, vibrating string. But a few years ago, theorists realized that the strings don't have to be one-dimensional. And the name they give to a multidimensional string? A brane.

As for the "S" part? Well most branes in string theory can roam around freely through both space and time, but the hypothetical S-brane can exist only in one instant in time, under very special conditions.

In this new Ekpyrotic scenario, when the universe was at its smallest and densest configuration possible, an S-brane appeared, triggering the re-expansion of a cosmos filled with matter and radiation (a big bang) and with small variations in temperature and pressure (giving rise to the well-known splotches in the baby pictures of the universe). That's what three physicists propose in a new paper published online in July to the preprint server arXiv, meaning the paper has yet to be peer-reviewed.

Is this idea correct? Who knows. String theory is on thin theoretical ice recently, as experiments like those at the Large Hadron Collider have failed to find any hints of a theory known as supersymmetry, which is a critical underpinning of String theory . And the concept of S-branes is itself a controversial idea within the String Theory community, as it's not exactly known if branes would be allowed to exist only in one moment in time.

There's also the fact that not only is the universe as we know it expanding, but it's accelerating in its expansion, with no sign whatsoever of it slowing down (let alone collapsing) anytime soon. Figuring out what could make it hit the brakes and reverse course, then, is tricky.
https://www.livescience.com/cyclical...ng-theory.html

String theory hangs on apparently ... by a thread. Oh, our brains do come up with some "braney" ideas!

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

The universe is vast, yet sometimes even the galaxies bump elbows ...

Andromeda galaxy's 'halo' is nudging the Milky Way

The Andromeda galaxy, our Milky Way galaxy's largest and nearest neighbor, is surrounded by a massive halo that is actually bumping up against our own galaxy's halo, according to new research using the Hubble Space Telescope.

A halo is the large envelope of gas that surrounds a galaxy. Scientists used Hubble to comprehensively study and map Andromeda's halo and were surprised to discover its unique structure, as well as its massive size.

The halo extends out 1.3 million light-years from the galaxy, almost halfway to our galaxy, and as much as 2 million light-years in other directions.

These galaxies are actually on a collision course that will cause them to merge 4 billion years from now. This merger will form one giant elliptical galaxy. And given the extension of Andromeda's halo in our direction, it's already nudging the Milky Way's galactic halo.

Oh, I hope that the Milky Way has air bags!

The article continues:

... "This reservoir of gas contains fuel for future star formation within the galaxy, as well as outflows from events such as supernovae. It's full of clues regarding the past and future evolution of the galaxy, and we're finally able to study it in great detail in our closest galactic neighbor."

... Given how similar the two galaxies are, understanding Andromeda's halo could shed light on the Milky Way's halo as well -- which is harder to study because we live inside the Milky Way. ...

... Andromeda, which likely contains as many as 1 trillion stars, is similar in size to our large galaxy, and it's only 2.5 million light-years away. That may sound incredibly distant but on an astronomical scale, that makes Andromeda so close that it's visible in our autumn sky. You can see it as a fuzzy cigar-shaped bit of light high in the sky during the fall.
And if we could see its massive halo, which is invisible to the naked eye, it would be three times the width of the Big Dipper constellation, dwarfing anything else in our sky.
While the gaseous halo may be invisible to our eyes, it's clear to Hubble's ultraviolet light capabilities.

... This illustration shows the gaseous halo of the Andromeda galaxy if we could see it.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

It is all in the numbers:

Humans are used to keeping time by measuring Earth's movement relative to the sun. But while Earth's trips around its star are noteworthy to life on our pale blue dot, that journey is pretty insignificant when compared with the epic voyage that carries the sun — and our entire solar system — around the center of the Milky Way.

Orbiting the Milky Way galaxy just once takes the sun approximately 220 million to 230 million Earth years, according to Keith Hawkins, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin.

In other words, if we were to measure time by this galactic "clock," Earth would be about 16 years old (in galactic, or cosmic years), the sun would have formed about 20 years ago, and the universe would be just about 60 years old.

The solar system's journey around the galaxy resembles Earth's orbit around the sun. But rather than orbiting a star, the sun circles the supermassive black hole that lies at the center of the Milky Way and exerts a tremendous amount of gravity on everything in the galaxy, Hawkins said.

"The sun is moving with enough speed — about 230 kilometers a second, about the equivalent of 500,000 miles per hour — that it continues to revolve around the center of the galaxy in sort of a circle" instead of getting pulled toward the black hole, he said.

https://www.livescience.com/how-long-galactic-year.html

That means that, during much of the period when the dinosaurs lived between from about 245 to 66 million years ago years ago or so, the planet was on the complete other side of the galaxy!

And from a different article, looking at the future:

Half the atoms in the planet could be digital data by 2245

Information might seem immaterial.

But within a few short centuries, the total amount of digital bits produced annually by humanity could exceed the number of atoms on our planet and, even more unexpectedly, account for half of its mass.

Those are the conclusions of a mind-bending new study looking at the growth of data over time and its potentially catastrophic consequences.

... BM and other technology research companies have estimated that 90% of the world's current digital data was produced in the last decade alone, prompting physicist Melvin Vopson of the University of Portsmouth in England to wonder where we might be headed in the future.

His analysis began with the fact that Earth currently contains roughly 10^21, or 100 billion billion, bits of computer information.

... Assuming a 20% annual growth rate in digital content, Vopson showed that 350 years from now, the number of data bits on Earth will be greater than all the atoms inside it, of which there are about 10^50 or a hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion. Even before this time, humanity would be using the equivalent of its current power consumption just to sustain all these zeros and ones.

"The question is: Where do we store this information? How do we power this?" Vopson said. "I call this the invisible crisis, as today it is truly an invisible problem."https://www.livescience.com/information-catastrophe.html

And yet, no matter how much data is produced, and wherever we are in the galaxy ... we shall continue to drop it all away on the Zafu cushion, with no other place in the universe to go!

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Musk-backed Neuralink unveils upgraded brain-implant technology
Neurotech start-up shows how device can broadcast pig’s neural activity


Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.

https://www.ft.com/content/fa214593-c7ba-4fb0-93a5-cd35c78abd7a

Elon Musk-backed Neuralink announced an improved prototype of the brain implant it unveiled a year ago, with the Tesla chief executive calling it a “Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires”.

In a live-streamed event, the private neurotech start-up on Friday showed off a pig, Gertrude, which had undergone surgery to have a coin-sized device called The Link implanted into its skull.

The company showed how the device can broadcast the pig’s neural activity and, one day, Mr Musk said, it should be able to “correct” electronic signals to “solve everything from memory loss [to] hearing loss, blindness, paralysis, depression, insomnia, extreme pain seizures, anxiety, addiction, strokes, brains damage”.

https://youtu.be/KsX-7hS94Yo

Gassho, J

STLah

[Inshin]

"If all things return to the one, to what does the one return?" (Famous Zen Koan) ...



String theory hangs on apparently ... by a thread. Oh, our brains do come up with some "braney" ideas!

Gassho, J

STLah

"And the cycle continues over and over and over."
Reminds me of the ending of the "The Dark Tower" series by Stephen King.
Gassho
Sat

[Jundo]

This map lets you see where your hometown was on the Earth millions of years ago

A California paleontologist has created an interactive map that allows people to see how far their hometowns have moved over 750 million years of continental drift.

The online map, designed by Ian Webster, features a range of tools that also make it easy to discover more about the Earth, such as where the first reptiles lived or when the first flower bloomed.

"It shows that our environment is dynamic and can change," Webster, 30, told CNN. "The history of Earth is longer than we can conceive, and the current arrangement of plate tectonics and continents is an accident of time. It will be very different in the future, and Earth may outlast us all."

... Webster's map visualization lets users enter their location and then plugs that location into plate tectonic models. The result is that users can see where towns and cities were located hundreds of millions of years ago. For example, you can see where New York City was located on the Pangea supercontinent. ... The map will even show users what dinosaurs used to live nearby in the area they search.

"It is meant to spark fascination and hopefully respect for the scientists that work every day to better understand our world and its past," he said. "It also contains fun surprises, for example how the US used to be split by a shallow sea, the Appalachains used to be very tall mountains comparable to the Himalayas, and that Florida used to be submerged."

Try it here:

https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#120

Notice where it says on the bottom "Use the <- -> keys to step through time," and start from today, jumping back in x million year increments. That is really neat.



Gassho, J

STLah

[Nengei]

Try it here:

https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#120

Gassho, J

STLah

Okay, that was way cooler than I thought it would be.

Gassho,
Nengei
Sat today. LAH.

[Jundo]

"A star is (un)born" ...

A 'monster' star 2 million times brighter than the sun disappears without a trace

The star's mysterious disappearance could hint at a new type of stellar death.

In 2019, scientists witnessed a massive star 2.5 million times brighter than the sun disappear without a trace.

Now, in a new paper published today (June 30) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of space detectives (see: astrophysicists) attempt to solve the case of the disappearing star by providing several possible explanations. Of these, one twist ending stands out: Perhaps, the researchers wrote, the massive star died and collapsed into a black hole without undergoing a supernova explosion first — a truly "unprecedented" act of stellar suicide.

... The star in question, located about 75 million light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, was well studied between 2001 and 2011. The bloated orb was a superb example of a luminous blue variable (LBV) — a massive star approaching the end of its life and prone to unpredictable variations in brightness. Stars like this are rare, with only a handful confirmed in the universe so far. ... Normally, when a star much larger than our sun reaches the end of its life, it erupts in an enormous supernova explosion. These explosions are easy to spot, as they stain the sky around them with ionized gas and powerful radiation for many light-years in every direction. (Sometimes, this looks downright beautiful.) Following the blast, the dense core of leftover stellar material may collapse into a black hole or a neutron star — two of space's most massive and mysterious objects.

The missing LBV left no such radiation. It simply disappeared.

... One explanation could be that the star dimmed considerably after its outburst, and was then further obscured by a thick veil of cosmic dust. If this were the case, then the star could reappear in future observations.

The weirder and more exciting explanation is that the star never recovered from its outburst, but instead collapsed into a black hole without going supernova.

https://www.livescience.com/disappea...supernova.html

But, did it disappear in ALL realities, or only in some? ... And if there is nobody to observe the disappearance? ... And what if they have a friend watching them watch the disappearance? ...

New quantum paradox throws the foundations of observed reality into question

... In many cases, quantum theory doesn't give definite answers to questions such as "where is this particle right now?" Instead, it only provides probabilities for where the particle might be found when it is observed. For Niels Bohr, one of the founders of the theory a century ago, that's not because we lack information, but because physical properties like "position" don't actually exist until they are measured. And what's more, because some properties of a particle can't be perfectly observed simultaneously — such as position and velocity — they can't be real simultaneously.

[Now, let's consider] a pair of distant particles in a special state now known as an "entangled" state. When the same property (say, position or velocity) is measured on both entangled particles, the result will be random — but there will be a correlation between the results from each particle. [This is sometimes called "spooky action at a distance."]

For example, an observer measuring the position of the first particle could perfectly predict the result of measuring the position of the distant one, without even touching it. Or the observer could choose to predict the velocity instead. This had a natural explanation, [skeptics like Einstein] argued, if both properties existed before being measured, contrary to Bohr's interpretation.

However, in 1964 Northern Irish physicist John Bell ... showed [mathematically] that if the two observers randomly and independently choose between measuring one or another property of their particles, like position or velocity, the average results cannot be explained in any theory where both position and velocity were pre-existing local properties. That sounds incredible, but experiments have now conclusively demonstrated Bell's correlations do occur. For many physicists, this is evidence that Bohr was right: physical properties don't exist until they are measured.

But that raises the crucial question: what is so special about a "measurement"?

In 1961, the Hungarian-American theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner devised a thought experiment to show what's so tricky about the idea of measurement.

He considered a situation in which his friend goes into a tightly sealed lab and performs a measurement on a quantum particle — its position, say.

However, Wigner noticed that if he applied the equations of quantum mechanics to describe this situation from the outside, the result was quite different. Instead of the friend's measurement making the particle's position real, from Wigner's perspective the friend becomes entangled with the particle and infected with the uncertainty that surrounds it. This is similar to Schrödinger's famous cat, a thought experiment in which the fate of a cat in a box becomes entangled with a random quantum event.

For Wigner, this was an absurd conclusion. Instead, he believed that once the consciousness of an observer becomes involved, the entanglement would "collapse" to make the friend's observation definite.

But what if Wigner was wrong?

... Our experiment

[In our experiment] there are two physicists — call them Alice and Bob — each with their own friends (Charlie and Debbie) in two distant labs. There's another twist: Charlie and Debbie are now measuring a pair of entangled particles, like in the Bell experiments. quantum mechanics tell us Charlie and Debbie should become entangled with their observed particles. But because those particles were already entangled with each other, Charlie and Debbie themselves should become entangled — in theory.

... Our experiment goes like this: the friends enter their labs and measure their particles. Some time later, Alice and Bob each flip a coin. If it's heads, they open the door and ask their friend what they saw. If it's tails, they perform a different measurement.

This different measurement always gives a positive outcome for Alice if Charlie is entangled with his observed particle in the way calculated by Wigner. Likewise for Bob and Debbie.

In any realisation of this measurement, however, any record of their friend's observation inside the lab is blocked from reaching the external world. Charlie or Debbie will not remember having seen anything inside the lab, as if waking up from total anaesthesia.

But did it really happen, even if they don't remember it?

... [In one scenario] each friend saw a real and unique outcome for their measurement inside the lab, independent of whether or not Alice or Bob later decided to open their door. Also, what Alice and Charlie see should not depend on how Bob's distant coin lands, and vice versa.

We showed that if this were the case, there would be limits to the correlations Alice and Bob could expect to see between their results. We also showed that quantum mechanics predicts Alice and Bob will see correlations that go beyond those limits.


Next, we did an experiment to confirm the quantum mechanical predictions using pairs of entangled photons. The role of each friend's measurement was played by one of two paths each photon may take in the setup, depending on a property of the photon called "polarisation". That is, the path "measures" the polarisation.

Our experiment is only really a proof of principle, since the "friends" are very small and simple. But it opens the question whether the same results would hold with more complex observers.

We may never be able to do this experiment with real humans. But we argue that it may one day be possible to create a conclusive demonstration if the "friend" is a human-level artificial intelligence running in a massive quantum computer.

What does it all mean?

...

There are theories, like de Broglie-Bohm, that postulate "action at a distance", in which actions can have instantaneous effects elsewhere in the universe. However, this is in direct conflict with Einstein's theory of relativity.

Some search for a theory that rejects freedom of choice, but they either require backwards causality, or a seemingly conspiratorial form of fatalism called "superdeterminism".

Another way to resolve the conflict could be to make Einstein's theory even more relative. For Einstein, different observers could disagree about when or where something happens — but what happens was an absolute fact. However, in some interpretations, such as relational quantum mechanics, QBism, or the many-worlds interpretation, events themselves may occur only relative to one or more observers. A fallen tree observed by one may not be a fact for everyone else.

All of this does not imply that you can choose your own reality. Firstly, you can choose what questions you ask, but the answers are given by the world. And even in a relational world, when two observers communicate, their realities are entangled. In this way a shared reality can emerge.
...
https://www.livescience.com/quantum-...-comments-3471

Maybe we should ask AI Jesus what he thinks ...

New 'AI Jesus' can deliver a sermon, but will you understand it?

... What happens when you train a neural network using the King James Bible? You get "AI Jesus" — artificial intelligence (AI) that expounds on topics as Jesus from the King James edition of the New Testament might have done.

Well, almost.

... AI Jesus' "brain" is made up of units that process data sequences — such as strings of text — as neurons do. Working together, units in the network helped the AI "learn" the language of the King James Bible, enabling AI Jesus to generate original phrases that mimicked the style of the biblical text.

But thus far, AI Jesus' oratory prowess doesn't quite live up to that of its namesake.

... AI Jesus delivered its debut "sermon" from a more modern platform — Twitter — and while the language was similar to that of the King James Bible, the words were somewhat less inspiring and more puzzling.

"Power and godly, and have commanded the children of the world, and will set my face against thee, and thou shalt be called the people," the neural network tweeted on Aug. 30.

... "For I will fill the land which the LORD thy God hath given thee a time to eat the force of the LORD of hosts," read one AI response. "And the soldiers of the prophets shall be ashamed of men," read another.

... Then again, even when neural networks learn from lots of examples, the results can be weird. An AI that was trained on a database of 30,000 cookbook recipes came up with instructions for making bizarre treats such as Crock Pot Cold Water, Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake and Completely Meat Circle.

https://www.livescience.com/news/new...rstand-it.html

"For I will fill the land which the LORD thy God hath given thee a time to eat the force of the LORD of hosts"

That kind of thing is was keeps mystical oracles and prophets in business! A new "Book of Revel-AI-tions."

Look, if we fed all the Buddha Suttas and Sutras into AI, it would be even more of a mess, for sure!



Gassho, J

STLah