Everything

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.

Then, please consider basic human law:

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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

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

(Click on the image for a larger view)

(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.”

NASA Transfers Shuttle Discovery to National Air and Space Museum

Focuses on Bold New Era of Space Exploration

Space Shuttle Rides a Jet to the Air and Space Museum

WASHINGTON, D.C. — NASA transferred space shuttle Discovery to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum during a ceremony Thursday, April 19, at the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, VA.

“Today, while we look back at Discovery’s amazing legacy, I also want to look forward to what she and the shuttle fleet helped to make possible,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “As NASA transfers the shuttle orbiters to museums across the country, we are embarked on an exciting new space exploration journey. Relying on American ingenuity and know-how, NASA is partnering with private industry to provide crew and cargo transportation to the International Space Station, while developing the most powerful rocket ever built to take the nation farther than ever before into the solar system.”

National Air and Space Museum Director, General John “Jack” Dailey said, “Discovery has distinguished itself as the champion of America’s shuttle fleet. In its new home, it will shine as an American icon, educating and inspiring people of all ages for generations to come. The Museum is committed to teaching and inspiring youngsters, so that they will climb the ladder of academic success and choose professions that will help America be competitive and successful in the world of tomorrow.”

In this new era of exploration, NASA will build the capabilities to send humans deeper into space than ever before. NASA is using the space station as a test bed and stepping stone for the journey ahead. The agency is changing the way it does business and fostering a commercial industry that will safely service low Earth orbit, so NASA can focus its energy and resources on sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and eventually to Mars in the 2030s.

The space station is the centerpiece of NASA’s human spaceflight activities in low Earth orbit. It is fully staffed with an international crew of six, and American astronauts will continue to live and work there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, as they have for more than 11 years. Part of the U.S. portion of the station has been designated as a national laboratory, and NASA is committed to using this unique resource for scientific research.

The station is testing exploration technologies such as autonomous refueling of spacecraft, advanced life support systems and human/robotic interfaces. Commercial companies are well on their way to providing cargo and crew flights to the station, allowing NASA to focus its attention on the next steps into our solar system.

For more information about NASA, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

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Do you know why Christians do not like the abbreviation of xmas for Christmas?

It is because the x is short for the cross, and Christmas is not suppose to be about Easter. That is to say, it is offensive to mock the birth with the symbol of his murder.

Suggestion: test your minister, pastor and/or reverend on Christmas Day… ask him/her their position on the use of X-mas.

by Daniel Brouse

Sunday, December 11, 2011
Philadelphia, PA
by Daniel Brouse

Are there any parallels between the creation of Pennsylvania, the American Revolutionary War and the Occupy Wall Street Movement? Yes. It is quite interesting how the Quakers have been involved in all three movements.

As a Quaker in England, William Penn had been arrested six times for speaking out. In 1681, William requested a charter to start an American Colony for a “Holy Experiment”. In honor of William’s father, the King granted the land known as the Forests of Penn — Pennsylvania.

“William Penn was the first great hero of American liberty. During the late seventeenth century, when Protestants persecuted Catholics, Catholics persecuted Protestants, and both persecuted Quakers and Jews, Penn established an American sanctuary which protected freedom of conscience. Almost everywhere else, colonists stole land from the Indians, but Penn traveled unarmed among the Indians and negotiated peaceful purchases. He insisted that women deserved equal rights with men. He gave Pennsylvania a written constitution which limited the power of government, provided a humane penal code, and guaranteed many fundamental liberties.” — The Quakers’ The Freeman

The Quakers also played an important role in the Revolutionary War.

Among the pro-Revolutionary Friends was a group of 200 Free Quakers, who claimed to be “free of the ecclesiastical tyranny of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting,” the governing body of Pennsylvania Quakerdom. The Free Quakers charged the yearly meeting with abandoning the liberty of conscience – the cornerstone of William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” in government and his motive for resettling Europe’s religiously-persecuted peoples in his American colony – and elevating pacifism, a secondary testimony, as the defining principle of Quakerism and a prerequisite for membership in the Society of Friends.

The Quakers of Plymouth Meeting in old Philadelphia County, now Montgomery County, were careful to abide by the discipline of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and thus tried to avoid any involvement with either army during the Revolutionary War. Their meetinghouse, however, was strategically located along Germantown Pike between Philadelphia and Gen. George Washington’s headquarters at Whitemarsh. During the early winter of 1777, when Washington decided to relocate his forces at Valley Forge, the Plymouth Friends’ meetinghouse served as a hospital and campsite for the Continental Army en route to their winter encampment near the Chester County village. — State Of Pennsylvania Historical Markers

Principles
Occupy Philadelphia has founding principles similar to William Penn’s stand on Freedom Of Speech, and his commitment to non-violence. To date, dozens of Occupy protesters have been arrested for speaking out during peaceful demonstrations.

Location
The Friends Meeting House at 15th and Cherry Streets finds itself in a strategic location for the Occupy Philadelphia movement. Due to the proximity of the the Friends Center to the Occupy encampment at Dilworth Plaza, City Hall, Philadelphia, the Friends furnished facilities to cook 1500 meals per day, provide medical treatment and hold meetings. After the forcible eviction of the non-violent protesters from Dilworth Plaza, the Friends continue to offer their hospitality.

Video of the Plymouth Meeting Friends