Bill Evans is considered one of the best jazz piano players that ever lived. He created a whole host of new jazz piano forms and methods, but Blue in Green has to be one of my favorites.
Written in 1959, he later performed it on the Mile’s Davis album Kind of Blue. Miles largely took credit for the song on Kind of Blue and wasn’t exactly cool about it, but it is largely understood that Bill was the genius behind the melody.
Evans had a troubled history with drug use, disease, and personal loss, yet created some of the most beautiful music in jazz. Give Blue in Green a listen.
Want to know what ‘progressive’ activists are like in Portland? Here’s an interview with one: Adam Egelman.
Adam Egelman of Safe Street Rebel is referred to as leader of “a new breed of tactical urbanism that has sprung up across the U.S. and is transforming city streets without the permission of city governments.” “Direct action gets the goods,” reads the title of a panel Egelman participated in. The group participates in confrontation and illegally blocking and modifying roads without working with city transportation permission. One of the activities they were involved in was disabling self-driving cars in San Francisco with traffic cones.
Other quotes:
“Safe Street Rebel is explicitly anti-police.”
“We say ‘bullying works.’ “
“It can be tense with…people who favor car access, or, you know, [people that] oppose safe streets”
I have a serious problem with people like Egelman. They like to break the rules when it suits them, then go running to the cops when it doesn’t go their way. The behavior is designed to silence other voices, and…well…as he says: bully people. This works great when others follow the rules – but as we’re seeing right now in our country – it creates an environment in which ‘might makes right’ and rules and laws are just for chumps. His kind of thinking is how we descend into violent chaos.
Radicals like Egelman encourage others to see following laws and rules as pointless. If people see that you can do whatever you want, then they’ll start doing the same. His kind of thinking is common for extremist of both left and right groups such as the Proud Boys.
Bullying is an act of violence and behavior that unquestioningly harms individuals, harms communities, harms cities, and harms society. We don’t accept bullies at schools. Nobody likes working with bullies. Bullies destroy the best ideas coming out. Bullies don’t listen to others – they silence dissenting voices. We should stand up against bullies and for those oppressed by bullying.
It’s an incredibly arrogant stance to think your opinion is far more important than scientific evidence, community discussion. It’s a profoundly damaging thing for social structure as a whole. It teaches people to ‘do whatever you want’.
I think some of the best jazz of all time was created during the 50-60’s. Laurindo Almeida playing the One Note Samba with the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1964 is such an example along with greats like the Dave Brubeck quartet and Bill Evans.
Optical lithography hit an interesting point in the 1990’s. Once circuit paths shrank to 180nm, we hit the physical limits of what the light wavelength and the optics in the lithography system could imprint on the silicon. You simply could not print silicon circuits any smaller. This was a huge problem for chip companies.
What some clever researchers did was come up with a way to bend these limits. Circuits are printed on silicon using a mask that creates shadows where circuit lines should be, and allows UV light to mark the areas that should be cut away. What they discovered is they would modify the circuit images by adding little ‘corrections’ to the circuit paths. These corrections would cause optical interference patterns that would actually generate the smaller features in the silicon. They started with simple ‘dog ears’ at the ends of circuits. As the features got smaller and smaller, the optical tricks they used got more and more complex.
This image below shows you an example. Each of these 5 lithography pictures generates the same circuit ‘plus sign’ on the left marked ‘no correction’. However, the ones to the right are able to do so at tremendously smaller circuit sizes. The image on the far right, ILT, can only be generated using complex mathematical models that work backwards from the desired final circuit image to the mask that must be put into the lithography machine to generate it. This, however, takes a lot of compute power.
Fast forward to today, and nVidia has released GPU optimized software to compute lithography patterns. Not only that, but they released the software called cuLitho. Using GPU’s, they claim it is 40x faster and uses 1/9 the power of traditional methods to calculate the computed lithography masks
How do domestic airports rank? This year, my Midwest home of Indianapolis gets some love as the #2 airport in the US.
Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport
Indianapolis International Airport
Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport
Palm Beach International Airport
Tampa International Airport
Hartford Bradley International Airport
Minneapolis St. Paul
Long Beach Airport
Portland (Oregon) International Airport
Detroit Metropolitan Airport
Sadly, Portland falls to #9 after having lead the list in years past, but things haven’t been very good at Portland airport in the last few years. We had protesters/counter-protesters assault each other a few times, and then of course a recent woman that fired a few shots at the airport.
ScienceClic English created this 360 experience of approaching and falling into a black hole. You can move your camera around and see in all directions. This is interesting because it’s a different take on some of the older ideas of what would happen if you fall into a black hole.
If you want to know what you’re seeing, here’s an explanation of what’s going on in this video and what the different visual phenomenon are caused by.
Mike Steward decided to recover the original Apollo guidance computer programs that landed man on the Moon in the 1960’s. Unfortunately some of them seem to have been lost to history.
It turns out, chunks of the original hardware still exist – such as the rope core memory which contained the programs. The next question is, how do you read these programs off 50 year old rope core memory hardware? This video below tells you how he did it!
He even wrote a web app that simulates how core memory works. We do a decent job recording history’s events, but I think it’s extremely cool that this kind of historical technical information is not being lost to the ages.
A number of people have reported experiencing eye pain, vision problems, and sunburnt skin after attending ApeFest, a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection event Nov 3-5th in Hong Kong. One person posted he woke up at 4am and could not see anymore. They rushed to the hospital where they are hoping to make a full recovery but were diagnosed with UV eye damage. It turns out, someone was almost certainly using full-spectrum UV-C (often called germicidal) lights instead of black lights.
BigClive on Youtube (who does amazing videos about extremely dangerous and counterfeit electronic devices you can buy and should be cautious of) recently uploaded a video and found the likely culprit. In the photo of the area with the toilets there were fluorescent tubes which are the characteristic teal-blue of mercury vapor discharge which emits quite a bit of UV-C and ozone as well.
Did you know you’re getting about 3.00 mSv of radiation every year if you live in the US? This breaks down to about 0.0082mSv per day.
There’s actually quite a bit of variation in the US depending on where you live. The types of rock in your area, position relative to the planet’s poles, elevation, and wide variety of other factors can affect your daily background radiation dosage.
Approximate effective radiation dose:
Comparable to natural background radiation for:
One day’s background radiation
0.0082 mSv
1 days
A year of background radiation (US average)
3.0 mSv
1 year/365 days
Cross-country flight from New York to Los Angeles
0.04 mSv
4.87 days
X-rays
X-rays are something most people are familiar with. It turns out, however, modern x-rays actually give you a very low dosage. The lowest doses are dental X-rays. For a full panoramic dental x-ray, you’ll get about 0.007 mSv (0.7mrem). How little is that? One full day’s background radiation is about 0.0066 mSv (depending on where you live).
CT scans are particularly troublesome because they actually give you a pretty substantial dose of radiation. How much? Ex: A chest X-ray gives you the equivalent of 10 days of natural background radiation (0.1mSv). This is a very low dosage and highly unlikely to cause permanent or long-term damage.
On the other hand, a chest CT scan gives you 2.6 YEARS of radiation dosage – the equivalent of 77 chest x-rays. See some examples below or click them to see even more dosages based on different body part:
