Publishing

July 7th, 2012

It is impossible to unpublish something. Unpublish is not even a word.

To attempt to unpublish something is worse than futile. Please, just consider the last of the famous to try.

Book burning – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning

Book burning (also biblioclasm or libricide) is the practice of destroying, often …. A much-quoted line in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is Fahrenheit 451, stating, “It follows then that when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly,

Then, please consider basic human law:

First Amendment to the United States Constitution – Wikipedia, the

en.wikipedia.org/…/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constit…

The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an

My suggestion: if you do not like the truth that has been published, please create a better reality for us.  Thank you.

by Daniel Brouse

Baby Formula

June 29th, 2012

Equation for The Meaning Of Live

Ironically, the Brouses coined the phrase “In God We Trust” for the United States Mint.

What is the meaning of life? What makes man different from other animals?

Baby Formula: Equation for the Meaning of Life .mp4 Video



Australia Carbon Tax

June 19th, 2012

On July 1, 2012 Australia will impose a price on carbon emissions.

A price on carbon is the most environmentally effective and economically efficient way to reduce pollution. This means our economy can continue to prosper – without our pollution continuing to grow. The Government’s plan for a clean energy future includes four key components. Firstly, the establishment of a carbon price. Secondly, support for renewable energy. Thirdly, to support improvements in energy efficiency. And fourthly, to store carbon through changed land-use practices. So, they’re the four key foundations, if you like, of our plan for a clean energy future. A carbon price has got a very important role to play because it puts a price tag on pollution. For the first time in our economy, the largest polluters will have to pay a price for every tonne of pollution that they put into the atmosphere, and that creates the incentive to cut pollution and it also creates the pressure to innovate, the pressure to invest in cleaner energy sources. And that’ll be very important for the future of our country and our economy and our living standards, because it’s the countries in the 21st century that have innovated and that have got clean energy as a key part of their economic future that will be the most competitive, and that’s very important for our future as well.

More on Carbon Taxes, Cap and Trade and Emissions Trading
More on Global Warming and Climate Change

Questions Answered

Q. Where will the money raised from the carbon price go?

A.

More than half of the money raised will be used to assist households. The majority of households will receive tax cuts, increased assistance payments  or both. With the rest of the money, the Government will be supporting jobs in the most affected industries and investing in our clean energy future. Find more questions about: Carbon Price , Household / Family

Q. Will I have to pay the carbon price?

A.

No, it’s not a tax on households or small businesses - Australia’s biggest polluters will be required to pay for their pollution under the carbon pricing mechanism. They account for around 60 per cent of our carbon pollution. For more information on Australia’s biggest polluters. Find more questions about: Carbon Price , Household / Family

An environmental problem with an economic solution

Putting a price on carbon is the most environmentally effective and cheapest way to cut pollution. This is a fact that is well recognized by economists from around the world, and respected institutions such as the OECD and the Productivity Commission. Currently, releasing carbon pollution is free despite the fact that it is harming our environment. A carbon price changes this. It puts a price on the carbon pollution that Australia’s largest polluters produce. This creates a powerful incentive for all businesses to cut their pollution, by investing in clean technology or finding more efficient ways of operating. It encourages businesses across all industries to find the cheapest and most effective way of reducing carbon pollution, rather than relying on more costly approaches such as government regulation and direct action.

A carbon price means a strong and growing economy

The economy will continue to grow as Australia embraces a clean energy future. Treasury modelling estimates that under a carbon price:

  • Average incomes grow strongly under a carbon price. Average incomes are expected to increase by about 16 per cent from current levels by 2020, an increase of around $9000 in today’s dollars. By 2050, the increase is expected to be more than $30,000.
  • National employment is projected to increase by 1.6 million jobs by 2020.


Breaking the link between emissions and economic growth

The carbon price is the first element of the Government’s plan for a clean energy future: it will trigger a broad transformation of the economy. Our economy has successfully handled comparable structural changes over its history. In fact, transformative changes – new products and technologies, and the integration of our economy into the global economy set in train by the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s – have underpinned rising prosperity and sustainable growth in Australia. Treasury modelling shows that, under a carbon price, the economy continues to grow.

Figure 1: Gross National Income with and without the carbon price

Breaking the link between emissions and economic growth For more information see: Chapter 3 – Putting a price on carbon pollution. For further details about a carbon price see:

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Music evolution: Is this the end of the composer?

June 19th, 2012

You might think that creating the perfect piece of music – whether it’s a classical great, jazz masterpiece or pop hit – is all down to the composer’s talent, flair or even genius.

Not so, according to Armand Leroi from Imperial College London.

“What we are trying to find out is whether you need a composer to make music,” says the professor of evolutionary developmental biology.

“And we don’t think you do.”

He believes a much more fundamental force of nature is at work.

“We don’t often think of music as evolving, but everybody knows it has a history and it has traditions. But if you think about it, it really has evolved, it is changing continuously,” Prof Leroi explains.

Wolfgang Mozart Scientists think that creating good music may not be the sole preserve of composers such as Mozart

“There are all the same forces of change, variation, selection and recombination as different musical traditions join together, transmute and fuse and divide again.

“This is all the stuff that is familiar from our understanding of the biological world, but we see it here in music as well.”

He adds: “We believe music evolves by a fundamentally Darwinian process – so we wanted to test that idea.”

Enter Dr Bob MacCallum, mosquito researcher at Imperial College London by day, creator of DarwinTunes by night.

The idea behind it is simple: to see if music can evolve out of noise – without the controlling hand of a composer.

To begin with, the computer program randomly churned out two short loops of noise.

“The notes are in any place, in any order, and the types of sound – the instrument – is completely randomly generated as well,” says Dr MacCallum.

Then, as in nature, the program let the two original loops to “breed”, to recombine and mix up their material, with some random mutations thrown in for good measure, to create four new loops.

Continue reading the main story

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The big result of the experiment is that you can evolve music without a composer”

Prof Armand Leroi Imperial College London

Those four went on to “reproduce” to create 16 new loops, and so on – until 100 random tunes were in the musical mixing pot.

At which point, the public were brought in.

Through the internet, volunteers were asked to rate the songs that were being produced: from love to indifference to pure hatred.

Those tunes that were detested were thrown out. But the more popular ones were kept and allowed to “breed” to create a new generation of songs.

“In the beginning, [the loops were] pretty horrible,” says Dr MacCallum.

“But occasionally, one was slightly less horrible, so the volunteer would give that a higher rating, and that loop and a few others that were slightly less bad than the others would go forward and have offspring. And then as evolution proceeds the music does get better.”

Tastes plateau

The team found that the quality of the music improved quickly from its discordant beginnings.

Jukebox The tunes improved as more and more generations of music evolved

A few hundred generations down the line and the clashing chords began to vanish and better rhythms started to emerge.

A few thousand generations on, and the music improved again. But the random mutations that happened every now and again also started to give rise to some musical surprises.

Dr MacCallum says: “After about 3,000 generations had been listened to, there starts to be a kick drum or a bass drum, and that just spontaneously came, we didn’t put any drum sounds into the algorithm.”

But then, the standard of the songs started to plateau, according to a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).

Continue reading the main story

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Market forces – consumer choice – is itself a creative force, one that is actually much more important than we appreciate”

Prof Armand Leroi Imperial College London

Prof Leroi says that this was partly because of some limitations with the program, but it was also reflective of a process that can occur in life.

“Evolution of all sorts, whether you are talking about out there in the wild or in the lab, you always find you get a rapid phase of very fast evolution, and then it slows down,” he says.

“Of course it never slows down forever, it never just stays there. Eventually you will get another burst of evolution as something new comes along and breaks through a boundary, and we think that will happen here too.”

He also added that the system missed out one other crucial factor: the influence of our peers.

He says: “We know from studies that when kids are allowed to see what other people are choosing, what they choose is very different from actually what they decide themselves is the best.

“And it turns out that when that happens you get very different evolutionary dynamics, and if you throw marketing into that equation, the influence of big business then it changes all over again.”

Future music

However, despite some limitations, Prof Leroi says the results from DarwinTunes confirmed his suspicions.

Record player The scientists believe the system could create the ultimate music if it was scaled up

“You can evolve music without a composer,” he explains.

“It’s just a matter of market forces. It tells us that market forces – consumer choice – is itself a creative force, one that is actually much more important than we appreciate.”

But if musicians and composers aren’t already quaking in their boots, Prof Leroi has a grand vision for the future of the Darwinian music machine.

He says: “I’ve no doubt that if we ran this experiment for longer, using bigger, faster computers, and millions of people rather than thousands, and for years, instead of months, we could evolve fantastic music.

“Would it be Mozart? No, I don’t think so. It would have no composer behind it, it wouldn’t be the act of any individual musical genius, it would just be the people’s music in its purest form.”

By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC News

Professor Armand Leroi from Imperial College London explains why he thinks a Darwinian computer program that can evolve music from noise could kill off the composer

More on This Story

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Education In The Western World

June 19th, 2012

“We have not come here to be lectured on our inadequacies.”
– the Europeans

Linux Wisdom: Flying Saucers

June 15th, 2012

When you login to a computer server running on Linux, it gives you free words of wisdom. After posting the article on the Voyager Golden Records, these words happen to appear:

Flying saucers on occasion
Show themselves to human eyes.
Aliens fume, put off invasion
While they brand these tales as lies.

Voyager Golden Record

June 15th, 2012

The Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them.

“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings.” – Jimmy Carter

Golden Record
(Click on the image for a larger view)

Golden Record
(Click on the image for a larger view)

“In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0,70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. Below this drawing is a side view of the record and stylus, with a binary number giving the time to play one side of the record – about an hour.

“The information in the upper right-hand portion of the cover is designed to show how pictures are to be constructed from the recorded signals. The top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of a picture. The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines, similar to
ordinary television (in which the picture is a series of horizontal lines). Picture lines 1, 2 and 3 are noted in binary numbers, and the duration of one of the “picture lines,” about 8 milliseconds, is noted. The drawing immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered “interlace” to give the correct picture rendition. Immediately below this is a drawing of an entire picture raster, showing that there are 512 vertical lines in a complete picture. Immediately below this is a replica of the first picture on the record to permit the recipients to verify that they are decoding the signals correctly. A circle was used in this picture to insure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction.

“The drawing in the lower left-hand corner of the cover is the pulsar map previously sent as part of the plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11. It shows the location of the solar system with respect to 14 pulsars, whose precise periods are given. The drawing containing two circles in the lower right-hand corner is a drawing of the hydrogen atom in its two lowest states, with a connecting line and digit 1 to indicate that the time interval associated with the transition from one state to the other is to be used as the fundamental time scale, both for
the time given on the cover and in the decoded pictures.

“Electroplated onto the record’s cover is an ultra-pure source of uranium-238 with a radioactivity of about 0.00026 microcuries. The steady decay of the uranium source into its daughter isotopes makes it a kind of radioactive clock. Half of the uranium-238 will decay in 4.51 billion years. Thus, by examining this two-centimeter diameter area on the record plate and measuring the amount of daughter elements to the remaining uranium-238, an extraterrestrial recipient of the Voyager spacecraft could calculate the time elapsed since a spot of uranium was placed aboard the spacecraft. This should be a check on the epoch of launch, which is also described by the pulsar map on the record cover.”

Photosynthetic Puzzle

June 13th, 2012

Quantum physics and plant biology seem like two branches of science that could not be more different, but surprisingly they may in fact be intimately tied.

Quantum physics and plant
biology seem like two branches
of science that could not be
more different, but surprisingly
they may in fact be intimately
tied.

Quantum physics and plant biology seem like two branches of science that could not be more different, but surprisingly they may in fact be intimately tied.

Researchers at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory and the Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame used ultrafast spectroscopy to see what happens at the subatomic level during the very first stage of photosynthesis. “If you think of photosynthesis as a marathon, we’re getting a snapshot of what a runner looks like just as he leaves the blocks,” said Argonne biochemist David Tiede. “We’re seeing the potential for a much more fundamental interaction than a lot of people previously considered.”

The quantum effects observed in the course of the experiment hint that the natural light-harvesting processes involved in photosynthesis may be more efficient than previously indicated by classical biophysics, said chemist Gary Wiederrecht of Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials. “It leaves us wondering: how did Mother Nature create this incredibly elegant solution?” he said.

Linux Widsom

June 9th, 2012

This is what the computer just said, “Your picture of the world often changes just before you get it into focus.”

Linux is an operating system that interacts with humans and welcomes you with wisdom

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury

June 6th, 2012

Ray Bradbury, infamous sci-fi writer has died at age 91. His best known science fiction works include “The Martian Chronicles,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “Dandelion Wine” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes”, as well as, more than 600 short stories.

“I’m not a science fiction writer,” he was frequently quoted as saying. “I’ve written only one book of science fiction [“Fahrenheit 451”]. All the others are fantasy. Fantasies are things that can’t happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.”



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