The term singularity usually means the inside of a black-hole, the site of mysterious and as yet unexplainable physics. But it has another meaning in culture and science-fiction. The technological singularity occurs when artificial or biologically engineered super brains are developed that can solve complex issues mere humans can’t even frame as a question.

It’s the staple of sci-fi scenarios and speculation, where some futurists see the super brains as terminators and others view them as potential saviors. I was always partial to the idea that they wouldn’t have anything against humans — it’s just that we’re made of atoms they can use for other projects.
Good, evil, or indifferent, we may find out soon, because our friends at IBM are working hard to create the real HAL 9000:

IBM has developed a microprocessor which it claims comes closer than ever to replicating the human brain. The system is capable of “rewiring” its connections as it encounters new information, similar to the way biological synapses work. Researchers believe that that by replicating that feature, the technology could start to learn.

Maybe the picture above needs an update, two moons instead of one. At least that’s one explanation for some new findings which refine the Giant Impact:

The study uses new techniques and radioactive isotopes of lead and other elements to date the moon rock at 4.4 billion years old. What’s key is that this is a special type of rock that would have floated up to the moon’s crust soon after its theorized ocean of molten rock cooled. That supposedly happened soon after the moon formed as a result of a spectacular crash between Earth and a planet. The chunks that broke off formed the moon.

One possibility is the impact happened several hundred million laters than thought, another intriguing idea is that one or more moons formed which combined into the single moon we see today. That idea would be difficult to test without lots of lunar samples. But the stark differfence between the side of the moon familiar to all us as the Man in the Moon, and the far side unseen until the 1960s, does offer a that idea some preliminary support.

I was cleaning out some old email, have to make room for Zingularity stuff dontchya know, and I came across a message from a, ummm, fan I guess we’ll call them, accusing me of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Remember good old BDS?

T]he term indicates a belief that some extreme criticisms of President Bush are of emotional origins rather than based on facts or logic. The term has been widely adopted by other writers in the political arena.

Sounds awfully familiar doesn’t it?

The reason a lot of people came to dislike Bush, after he soared to lofty approval ratings in the aftermath of 9-11, was because of what he did. Some objected to the Iraq War, others were angry over tax cuts for zillionaires or the Katrina response. And of couse it was Bush and his GOP buddies who turned a budget surplus into a giant deficit and left the economy in shambles. There’s plenty to be angry about in there. But what struck me about it, agree or disagree with Bush’s decisions, these are all things that actually happened.

Contrast that with the reasons Teaparty bozos hate Obama. He was born in Kenya, he’s secretly a Muslim and trying to enact Sharia Law, he’s a socialist or a marxist or a terrorist who hates America. Obama is scheming to create death panels and kill grandma to save a few bucks on Medicare (The last one sounds a lot more like something the Teaparty would really propose these days). All complete nonsense of course, zombie lies and innuendo served up by wingnut freaks to stoke long simmering ideological and racial prejudice.

Uhuh, and we’re the ones with the syndrome?

Interesting segmenton Rachel Maddow tonight on the latest conservative brainstorm for cutting wasteful government spending, nuclear security, and a new documentary about a retired truck driver who put together a surprisingly plausible design for a Hiroshima type nuclear weapon.

It got me to thinking, there are a lot of people who think they know how to make a nuclear weapon. Odds are they’re deluded. While the basics physics are widely known, the details of building a working nuke are way more complex than most people realize. I know just enough to know I couldn’t do it, and I’d be willing to bet I know way more than most self-professed home nuke builders. Just to give a taste of what is involved, let’s break the hypothetical process up into three stages, design, prototype, and weapon.

The design relies on creating or obtaining weapons grade stuff — which is an article in itself. Fissionable substances are isotopes of uranium or plutonium in which a tiny percentage of the atoms spontaneously release neutrons traveling at the proper speed, what physicists call the correct neutron temperature. Too fast or too slow and the neutrons chip off the wrong kind of particles when they hit other atoms of the same substance. Just right and the neutrons knock lose more neutrons going at the right speed, which knock lose even more neutrons, etc. If enough of that substance is located in one small spot, free traveling neutrons will hit other atoms of the same stuff and the number of speedy little neutrons will grow until the reaction runs away with itself. In principle then our design is simple: you have half the critical mass in one hand and half in the other, you bring them together and, kaboom, you’re part of a mushroom cloud.

That brings us to the prototype, because the ‘hand method’ wouldn’t actually work. The two subcritical masses would be very hot, way too hot to hold (Not to mention radioactive as hell). But even if you were working in a shielded glove box it wouldn’t work. When those subcritical masses approach one another they get hot, fast. They go from red-hot to melting to gas to plasma in a micro second, in other words they get so so hot they’ll turn into blazing hot expanding gas and blow apart with the force of a stick of dynamite before the reaction can go super critical. The prototype will have to ‘weld’ the two masses together into one strong, solid chunk and this has to happen in an instant. Early prototypes did this by the collapsing sphere or gun method, illustrated right. It’s a lot harder to do than it looks, the traditional explosives must all detonate precisely, the pieces must fit together perfectly, they have to come together at the exact speed to be hot enough to mash together into a single piece but not so hot they turn into runny liquid or gas, and even then it doesn’t always work. This is a prototype device that may go off, but there’s also a chance it will create what weapons designers call a fizzle yield, producing a tiny fraction of the potential explosive power of a real nuke and creating a big dirty-bomb mess.

Which brings us to the final phase: weapon. To be a weapon the prototype has to be both reliable and secure. That means a lot of things, no doubt some of them classified. But two unclassified items, purely for illustrative purposes, are a neutron trigger and a tamper. A neutron trigger is a device which floods the interior with neutrons from another source just as the subcritical masses are uniting. A tamper is a heavy metal, like lead, that fills in around the forming critical mass and helps keep it in a small volume for a few moments longer by sheer inertia when it tries to expand violently as it approaches its boiling point. The advantage of additions like a trigger and tamper are twofold: they make the weapon much more reliable and they provide a separate, independent system which has to be armed for the weapon to work, thus giving an extra level of security. This is a weapon that detonates when you want it to and, perhaps more importantly for you Dr. Strangelove fans, does not go off when you don’t want it to.

Needless to say going from design to prototype to weapon takes a lot of research and money. And no, you won’t find reliable data on that technology on the internet despite what some people think they know — if my tax dollars are doing any good, what you should find is a bunch of misinformation! — with the possible exception of the occasional dumbass Bush WH officials who released some hard data conveniently written in Arabic while trying to backstop the invasion of Iraq. In short it takes a relatively wealthy country with a dedicated and educated professional workforce to do all that. Terrorists working in a cave aren’t likely to pull it off.

But stealing the components, or better yet an assembled bomb, is a different story. That’s what nuclear security agencies try to prevent. And that’s what these nutbags in Congress are toying around with defunding. The word idiot hardly describes them.

I use the word logic jokingly of course, as lack of logic has become a defining characteristic of the Teaparty Republicans. Remember, lo these many blog years ago, what set these guys off initially was Bush’s failures and the bank bailouts. But that was then, when they rallied around Ron Paul — a man who occasionally said some rational things — before they were bought out by the conservative business establishment. Consider for a moment just how far gone these clowns are now:

• With the exception of torture, wiretapping, and shipping suspects off to secret third-world shithole prisons without trial or due process, they’re staunch defenders of American liberty!
• The government should stay the hell out of the people’s personal business, and get serious about policing the people’s uterus and decreeing who can marry who!
• Deficits are evil; ergo we must elect the same bug-fuck crazy idiots who ran the debt through the roof and have never even come close to balancing the budget in 40 years!
• The economy is awful; the only solution is to reject policies with a proven track record of creating jobs and reelect the clueless know-nothings whose short-sighted greedy stupidity crashed the entire world and left us holding trillions in past due bills!
• The 9-11 terror attacks changed everything. Clearly the best way forward is empower the guys and gals who attacked the wrong goddamn country, to the tune of a trillion borrowed dollars, and penalize the party who shot bin Laden in the head at the price of a few million bucks without causing a single injury to the good guys!

(BTW I break into a rant and bust their sorry ass chops like this on Twitter at SAndrewDKos once or twice a week)

It just goes on and on. They have been almost perfectly wrong. Every thing they touch turns to shit. For example, we don’t have to debate what lowers the deficit or how best to neutralize terrorist kingpins, because recent empirical facts demonstrate precisely how to do that and more. But no, it’s the same old tired crap about shadowy conspiracies, trickle down dollars, and deregulation, always sticking it to the middle class and coddling the ultra rich. The latest epiphany being to steal Social Security and Medicare and toss them into the ravenous jaws of Wall Street for the benefit of a few dozen billionaires.

The results speak for themselves:  I can’t think of a single Teaparty idea that might work, hell I can’t think of one that hasn’t already been proven utterly disastrous. Their ideas are so internally inconsistent, so completely bereft of basic cause and effect rationale, that most of them can be debunked in 140 characters, or less, on Twitter. Sure, they have the passion, as the DC gasbags love to tell us, it’s just that they’re like an athlete who has speed and agility, but gets mixed up and runs full tilt for the other teams wrong endzone

There’s an old saying about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By that standard the Teaparty is literally insane.

 

 

See that graph above produced by NASA? Rick Perry thinks it’s all made up so that scientists can keep struggling for a few research grants and teaching positions. Talk about projection:

“A substantial number of scientists [have] manipulated data to keep the money rolling in,” New Hampshire Union Leader editorial page editor Drew Cline quoted Perry saying on the stump in a tweet. Before that, Cline quoted Perry saying, “I do believe the issue of global warming has been politicized.”

Of course the real money is in the denial side, fossil fuel lobbysts. Any well known climatologist like Mike Mann or James Hansen coudld rake in millions if they were willing to sell out. Perry the Parrot is just repeating wingnut talking points. Nothing’s going to stop that. But you know what I don’t get? Instead of this bullshit song and dance about how NASA data is wrong and scientists are engaged in a ridiculous global conspiracy lasting decades, why not just tell the damn truth?

Because the truth is pretty simple: Yes, burning fossil fuels produces greenhouse gases, yes we may be raising the earth’s temperature, and if you don’t like that, then try using less freakin energy. Find ways to cut back on your carbon loading. Because that’s what’s causing this shit. Energy companies aren’t producing electricity for fun, they’re doing it because it’s profitable, because people buy it. We don’t burn oil and coal because they smell good, we use them because they the cheapest source of easily transportable energy available on the massive scale the world demands and without energy we’d be sleeping in the dirt.
Seriously, just a modicum of honesty like that would so refreshing.

There are chemical signs of life on earth in the oldest sedimentary rocks we have. That early life may have been simple anaerobic microbes, primitive archaea, RNA world, or something we have no knowledge of at all. This was an alien looking world! As seen above, the moon was much larger and closer in those days (Yeah, that’s the moon, not the sun), in fact the days themselves whirled by in about half the time it takes now! The earth was probably hotter, with a thicker atmosphere painted yellow and orange with prodigious amounts of greenhouse gases and volcanic emissions.

But around 2.5 billion years ago a newcomer evolved that could use light to turn water and carbon dioxide into simple sugars. Over time these bacteria gave rise to blue-green algae which would transform the world and change the color of the sky by creating a deadly poison: oxygen. New evidence suggests the ancestors of the poison loving bugs may have been around a lot longer than once thought:

The ‘Great Oxidation Event’ (GOE), nearly 2.3 billion years ago, marks the point when oxygen started to make an impact on the atmosphere, stimulating the evolution of air-breathing organisms. But new research from MIT suggests that oxygen may actually have been around hundreds of millions of years earlier, in ‘oxygen oases’ in the oceans. And the team says there’s good evidence that tiny aerobic organisms may have evolved to survive on extremely low levels of the gas in these spots.

Of course we tend to think pretty highly of oxygen, without it we die! But oxygen is corrosive stuff, organisms that couldn’t handle it probably perished or clung or in low oxygen environments. Oxygen may have done more than change life, it probably change the color or the oceans and the sky. It may have also caused a huge drop in greenhouse gases leading to a series of global glaciations called Snowball earth, but that’s a post for another day.

Looks like the rebels in Libya may be closing in on the capital city, Tripoli in the next few weeks:

The key factor is the bloody battle for Zawiya — an strategically important city just west of Tripoli, engulfed in urban warfare on Tuesday. Rebels have made advances in the south and the east. But if those fighters eventually gain control of Zawiya, that will be a major stride in putting a stranglehold on the Gadhafi-controlled seat of power. “We will be very careful entering Tripoli, which we hope to do by the end of this month,” said Col. Ahmed Banni, military spokesman for the opposition National Transitional Council.

There’s nothing funny about war, one of my colleagues at Daily Kos has family in Libya and his cousin-in-law was killed fighting for the rebels a few months ago. But watching the same apologists who used up gallons of ink and scads of electrons defending Bush’s trillion dollar Iraq blunder now up in arms because the commander in chief is now a democrat has been rather hilarious.

The rebels are going to win of course, everyone knows that, just like they won in Egypt and just like they will win in Syria. It’s just a matter of time. Qadaffi is among the worst terrorists in the world, he’s old, and no one likes him; except possibly the Teaparty Republicans who would love to see what was once referred to as the world’s greatest terrorist come out on top.

Mars rover Opportunity is said to be near the end of its life. But it’s been a hell of a pay off on a probe that was designed to last a few months at most!

Opportunity is still providing great images and data for scientists back on earth like the gorgeous picture above taken from the rim of a 14 mile crater called Endeavour located near the equator in a place called Meridiani Planum. Opportunity is looking for signs of ancient water or water ice buried beneath the dry dusty surface. The current thinking among astrobiologists is, if microbes ever thrived on Mars, they would probably have been in an ancient ocean or lake.

And earth bound biologists are working on strains of bacteria that might one day survive on the Martian surface, giving rise to a sort of microbiological farming industry:

In its quest to colonize space, NASA has awarded a $750,000, three-year grant to researchers at South Dakota State University, the School of Mines and Technology and Oglala Lakota College to make fuel, oxygen and clean water for colonists. Those researchers already are genetically manipulating cyanobacteria – commonly known as blue-green algae – so that it produces and secretes the renewable carbon molecules necessary for gasoline, jet fuel and diesel.

Shut up and eat your algae you ungrateful brat! Why back in my day we had to eat … Kidding aside — hey it’s the Zingularity — Mars is a worthy goal for human exploration. It’s by far the nearest planet where humans can actually survive on the surface. The problem is Mars will probably never grab the public’s imagination like the moon did. The moon may be way smaller than Mars, but it’s also much closer. It’s been hanging up there, big and beautiful, since our ancestors stumbled out of a Pliocene forest on two shaky legs. Poems and songs have been written about it, lovers have gazed into each other’s eyes under its ghostly glow and fallen in love. Mars is a spark of light most people can’t find in the night sky without help. The moon is just way more ubiquitous for most people. That may not be a scientific analysis, but it is human nature.

Billionaire Warren Buffet, the sage of Omaha, had an eye opening op-ed today in in the Sunday New York Times:

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. … If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

Buffet notes he paid less than 18% in taxes, as compared with the middle class employees in his home office who paid around 35%.

Something reeks in this nation, and the source of the stench comes straight from hard-right ideologues like the ones making up Texas Governor Rick Perry’s base. And Perry had an odd take on the growing third-world income distribution in the US. He’s complaining about the tiny 2.5% sliver in the pie chart; you middle class working stiffs aren’t paying enough:

We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax. And you know the liberals out there are saying that we need to pay more. We are indignant about leaders who do not listen and spend money faster than they can print it.

Of course Perry fails to mention that those ‘freeloaders’ earn a tiny fraction of the income, or that they’re soaked by sales and consumption taxes of the type Perry and his ilk would love to hike, or that they pay more payroll taxes than Warren Buffet. The chart shows networth, i.e., wealth, of which that bottom half has very little of. About the only tangible asset they have is the Social Security and Medicare they’ve built, the same assets assholes like Perry think are unconstitutional. Code for an implicit promose to rip off the last cent these folks have and feed it to the wealthy elite who fund his perverse campaign and cheer his sick ideology.

But then that’s Rick Perry’s platform. Cut taxes for Paris Hilton and stick it to the rest of us. The same as it ever was. In the history of mankind, nothing has been easier and more cowardly than sticking up for the wealthy and privileged, and that’s Gov Perry in a nutshell. If he had lived in ancient Egypt he would have been chasing Moses and trying to mow down the Exodus, in Roman times he would have been standing next to Caesar watching early Christians being fed to lions. Today he works for the Koch brothers. What a classic scumbag.