Sudoku and Velocity Fields...

Image Source: Link below

Topics: Materials Science, Probability, Radiation, X-rays

To see what happens inside a pile of sand or another volume of granular material, researchers rely either on deformation observations at the surface, which don’t always reflect any internal flows, or on simulations. Several existing techniques can image interior flows, but they each have one or more disadvantages, such as limited spatial and temporal resolutions, high costs, and invasiveness. A new technique, developed by James Baker, Itai Einav, and their colleagues at the University of Sydney, overcame those hurdles by using sets of two-dimensional x-ray radiographs to uncover the three-dimensional velocity field inside a volume of opaque grains.

X rays were fired from three orthogonal locations through a container of opaque grains that were being sheared from below by a conveyor belt, as shown in the diagram above. By spatially correlating successive radiographs, the researchers extracted the probability density functions (PDFs) of the two displacement components orthogonal to the x-ray direction for each grid cell. Each PDF was then sampled evenly to generate an unsorted array of the different displacements through the beam direction.

By combining the PDF results orthogonal to each other and solving a Sudoku-style puzzle, the researchers were able to reconstruct the 3D velocity field shown from 2D projections. As in Sudoku, the displacement values that should be placed in each row and column are known from the two sets of PDFs, but how to arrange those displacements in space defines the puzzle. Unlike in Sudoku, though, there is no unique solution.

X-ray correlations assemble a complete velocity field, Alex Lopatka, Physics Today

Ferguson and Barney Fife...

Enough said: source, Facebook

Michael Brown should have finished his first week in college. I am not elevating him to apotheosis, just stating a fact. He was likely going to a community college, perhaps learning a skill as a technician. Or, he may have had higher aspirations and shoring up his study skills and academics in a less challenging setting. The problem is, we'll never know the answer.

Instead, he was gunned down, left in the streets for approximately four hours for apparently the lethal crime of jaywalking. Yes, Chief Barney Fife - over a municipality of approximately 21,000 citizens - released a video no less than the Department Of Justice advised he not release, publicly trying a dead teenager that can't object; alluding his video taped guilt of shop lifting cigars from an convenience store was the motive for stopping him (the incidents were separate events). Then, disavowed all knowledge of the story in his second televised interview (then suggesting his officer might have known after all), leaving shocked reporters figuratively with their mouths wide open at the level of their feet. Michael’s democratic governor was feckless and useless during public rebuke Saturday. Senators Claire McCaskill and Elizabeth Warren (D); Ted Cruz and Rand Paul (R) all decried the excessive force of the Missouri Police Department. The irony is this impressive display of militarism wasn't used at the Cliven Bundy Ranch where militia pointed weapons at Bureau of Land Management agents – a federal offense that ended in no dead bodies, an avoided standoff and the tax-evading $1.2 million dollar moocher still on his ranch.

Since the election of the country’s first African American president, we've seen the ugly side of this country that can be illustrated in this faux-related pattern recognition (attributed to Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, “The Isis Papers”):

AMERICA

A-M-E-R-I-C-A…

I-A-M-E-R-C-A…

I-A-M-R-E-C-A…

I-A-M-R-A-C-E…

“I AM RACE.”

The first African American president (representing a 2.3% probability of "other-than-white-male" since Washington to W) and attorney general are essentially being sued and presumably impeached – individually and/or respectively - for the crime of “president while black”; “attorney general while black” a clear escalation of the “uppity” charge in southern parlance:

Uppity: Taking liberties or assuming airs beyond one's place in a social hierarchy. Assuming equality with someone higher up the social ladder - Urban Dictionary

Michael Brown did the “right things,” though obviously no angel - what teenager is? He “pulled himself up by his own boot straps” which is the usual escape for “we’re NOT going to help you get to whatever your dreams are.” Now he’s the inspiration for the mantra “hands up; don’t shoot!” It is a hash tag; it is a movement in New York, Boston, New Orleans, Howard University and Austin. The veracity of it is currently being investigated as the identity of the officer that shot Michael Brown in the incident report – a public record – has finally been released days after his death – Darren Wilson.

Suddenly, jaywalking can result in lethal force applied to the walker. A video is produced supposedly showing Michael taking cigars from a convenience store. If that is a requisite for deadly force, then the four teenagers that kleptomaniac-ed sneakers as I was being frisked decades ago by the now defunct King's Department Store "defective detective" (inept of logical reasoning, devoid of courtesy and simple police procedure) all should have been shot on sight. The KKK is raising money for the officer that shot Mike Brown as they did for George Zimmerman. And like the case of Eric Garner (“I can’t breathe”) this goes before a Grand Jury, the majority-at-this-point-MAJORITY Grand Jury.

I am angry as an African American male...I am angry as the father of African American males that have never committed a misdemeanor or felony, working in education and engineering respectively to UPLIFT society. I am angry at a society that has made us targets for a rage that is disgusting. I am angry that the six shots - 2 in the head - to subdue Michael Brown for jaywalking were six more than the zero it took to bring Jeffrey Dahmer, James Holmes and Jared Lee Loughner into custody - all mass murderers and the first named a cannibal! They walked into a police office - they were not rolled into a morgue!

Carl Sagan once asked - regarding the environment and somewhat rhetorically: “what are conservatives conserving?”

Answer: the status quo that reactionary minds usually defend. Note this description of the book by author Cory Robin, “The Reactionary Mind” (2011):

Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them?

Tracing conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution, Robin argues that the right is fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market, others oppose it. Some criticize the state, others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality.

Uppity…Jaywalking…“Let’s see the birth certificate!” Then, when they actual see it in long form, not believing it…“I want my country back!”…Uppity.

For the liberal/logical, science-based mind, the election of the first black president in the history of the republic was the “Moses moment”; the culmination of King’s “I Have a Dream” exploited by both liberal and conservative politicians and theologians. On the 2008 election, the recently departed Dr. Maya Angelou reflected: “America has finally grown up!” The only time I will ever disagree with the great lady: 150 years later, we're still fighting the Civil War, as if the outcome is still under contention.

For the conservative, reactionary mind, Barack Obama is “the other,” the usurper: Antichrist in some extreme conspiracies. He's faced continual, relentless opposition that has never been seen for any president and never will after his well-deserved retirement. His youth has been sapped by real and contrived crises; internal and external. He looks 80. He didn't need a Supreme Court to decide the count in the same state as his Governor Brother, but he was illegitimate from the aspect that he’d “left his place”; he got the nuclear codes and didn't start Armageddon; he had the audacity to order the kill shots for Somali pirates, Qaddafi and “The Boogie Man” Osama Bin Laden. Couple that with doubling the Dow Jones since the "Great Recession" of 2008; 40+ months of positive job growth, an unemployment rate of 6.2% and you as opposition have a distinct problem with "message." The reactionary opposition is an anti-government movement (that somehow got elected) with the laughable acumen in civics lower than second graders, and a congress with the low confidence score of 14% only means their schemes for “limited government” is about 86% - a successful score once your perspective is flipped.

The threats started in 2007 when he was Senator from Illinois…CANDIDATE, as also Herman Cain experienced in 2012. His first audacity was to win (2008), and then win again (2012) after the opposition meant his defeat even at sacrifice of the democratic republic. The acceleration of age is in the grey in his hair; the lines in his face. He has to balance the complete anarchy of Iraq spiraling out of control after executing the “Status of Forces Agreement” negotiated by his predecessor. He’s being sued in a carnival circus for not implementing the Affordable Care Act – based on a 1989 position paper by the conservative Heritage Foundation – FAST enough, the same act they voted to DE-fund 52 times and suggest impeachment for: following all that?

“I AM RACE.”

No less than the UN is publishing a study at the end of August on our compliance with the elimination of all forms of racism - I'm guessing our "grade" will be below a C-. The ugly underbelly of American bigotry/hierarchy is being exposed to the world via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all new mediums as transformative to political engagement as television was to world opinion on the brutality visited upon marchers in the Civil Rights Movement; the opposition to the Vietnam War generated at home. The militarization of policing in communities of color by Barney Fife with MRAPs, tear gas, and sub-machine guns with rubber bullets originated in '72; accelerated in '94, and especially after 9-11 with the "global war on terror," like the "war on drugs" designed as never-ending. In this regard, Barney doesn't shoot the floor inches from his toes and an eye-rolling, groaning Andy Griffith takes his one bullet - his substantial armory is for the battlefield. Otis – the Mayberry town drunk – still staggers in on Friday nights to let himself in his cell; he has nothing, NOTHING to worry about from MRAPs, machine guns, rubber bullets or tear gas…he’s not "the threat" Barney’s likely to react violently to. I don't know how long the global economy will tolerate this until the Dollar is replaced by the Yuan and Euro, and for our reaching back to an "Ozzie and Harriet" utopia that never existed - seals our irrelevance in the pages of history.

The wretchedness of racism is as evident in 2014 as was in 1914 or 1864. Renisha McBride, Michael Brown, Jonathan Ferrell, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis are the president and attorney general in effigy; they are accessible targets of Barney's et al delusional psychopathic hatred...they will eventually find other targets not based on melanin.

"We The People" all are.

Commander William Adama - Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi series)

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Martin Niemöller, US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Added:
Democracy Now!:
Ferguson Protests Erupt Near Grave of Ex-Slave Dred Scott, Whose Case Helped Fuel U.S. Civil War
PBS: Dred Scott case: the Supreme Court decision

Catharsis...

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: The Doomsday Argument is the idea that we can estimate the total number of humans that will ever exist, given the number that have lived so far. This in turn tells us how likely it is that human civilisation will survive far into the future.

The numbers are not optimistic. Anthropologists think some 70 billion humans have so far lived on Earth. If we assume that we have no special status in human history, then simple probabilistic arguments suggest that there is a 95 per cent chance that we are among the last 95 per cent of humans that will ever be born. And this means there is a 95 per cent chance that the total number of humans that will ever exist will be less than 20 x 70 billion or 1.4 trillion.

These guys look at the scenario in which many civilisations have evolved throughout the universe, the so-called “universal doomsday” argument. “In that case, we should consider ourselves to be randomly chosen from all individuals in that universe or multiverse,” they say.

Now suppose that the world population stabilises at 10 billion and our life expectancy is 80 years, then the remaining humans will be born in the next 10,000 years. That’s not a long future for humanity. Today, Austin Gerig at the University of Oxford and a couple of pals put forward a new argument with a (slightly) happier ending.

These guys look at the scenario in which many civilisations have evolved throughout the universe, the so-called “universal doomsday” argument. “In that case, we should consider ourselves to be randomly chosen from all individuals in that universe or multiverse,” they say.

In the past, these universal arguments have been no more optimistic than the ordinary ones. They generally state that long-lived civilizations must be rare because if they were not, we would be living in one. What’s more, because long-lived civilizations are rare, the prospects for our civilisation ever becoming long-lived are poor.

This new approach approach allows Gerig and co to take a more fine-grained look at the odds that humanity will survive for much longer in future than it has existed in the past.

The results are complex but their main conclusion gives some reason for hope. “If [the number of existential threats] is not too large, the probability of long-term survival is about a few percent,” they say.

It's comforting to muse that we can actually know the future, and the likelihood of a predicted outcome. We guffaw when the weather anchor "gets it wrong," and somehow think that global warming means if the entire planet isn't becoming the Sahara Desert (and it snows somewhere), there's nothing to it. In the need for accuracy and truth, science revises itself through a rigorous process of peer review, and adherence to The Scientific Method. Modeling and probability always have a margin for error, so in reading the link, think of that.

One of the ways to "increase our odds" is addressing "existential threats" (meteors, nuclear war, pandemics, poverty), and becoming a space faring species. On "a few percent": Growing up under the "duck and cover" drills of the 60s during the Cold War (during which I never thought we had a snowball's chance), I'll TAKE that!

My Pascha post...

Physics arXiv: Universal Doomsday: Analyzing Our Prospects for Survival