Monthly Archives: January 2021

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va., Jan. 20, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --The night is darkest just before the dawn. The new work, "Singularity" by authors Jayme S. Alencar and Jayme A. Oliveira Filho, sends out a strong and positive message despite the havoc that mankind is doomed to face if the present trends continue unabated.

Alexander, a young man, lives by the motto, 'God's blessings and hard work,' engraved on a bracelet his mother Daisy had given him. His great grandparents immigrated to America at the beginning of the 21st century. An exceptional leader, Alexander works for the International Space Command Center, where he also has a love interest. In the devastating conditions that prevail around him, the fate of mankind rests on Alexander and his crew, who must find a new home.

The future that Alexander lives in is here with us today. In "Singularity," the authors have traced the fate of mankind, moving the narrative from the 21st century up to the beginning of the 22nd century, when the world is in disarray, suffering the consequences of its greed and reckless decisions. All of this happened despite the warnings of climate scientists in the 1980s. If anyone needs any further evidence, they only need to look at the year 2020, a year full of droughts, wildfires, death, and suffering, and to make matters even worse, the Covid-19 pandemic and social turbulence.

"We are living the consequences of global warming. This book shares the effects of climate change on planet Earth and what mankind must do if it is to survive and thrive in the future," say authors Jayme S. Alencar and Jayme A. Oliveira Filho.

"This book is perfect for this year. It explains the consequences of climate change and human innovation. It is full of scientifically driven concepts and explanations. The story is very powerful and awesome too. It is a wonderful sci-fi work. I hope they make a movie out of it," says a recent reader review.

Singularity is unique because it combines the often segmented areas of science, adventure, romance, and religion to create an engaging story. The central theme of the work revolves around decisions that mankind must make as a species to survive in the next century.

Jayme S. Alencar is a 6th grader at St. Patrick Catholic School. His debut work written when he was a 3rd grader is "Brother Bear: A Tale of Two Brothers." Jayme loves to read, and with tremendous interest in science and the universe, he wants to become an astronomer.

Jayme A. Oliveira Filho is a dentist and amateur astronomer who lives in Virginia Beach. He loves astronomy and the universe. With the help of little Jayme, they have opened the 1st Astronomy Club at St. Matthews Catholic School. The universe always fascinated Jayme as he watched Carl Sagan in the Cosmos Series when he was a child.

Singularity by Jayme S. Alencar and Jayme A. Oliveira Filhois available from Amazon in paperback edition.

Media Contact:

Jayme A. Oliveira Filho / Jayme S. Alencar305-409-3977[emailprotected]

Anna ReidGlobal Summit HouseEmail: [emailprotected]

SOURCE Global Summit House

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Global Summit House Announces the Release of "Singularity," A Sci-Fi Tale of Man's Fate in the 22nd Century, Reveals Hope, Blending Science...

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

This Chinese Lab Is Aiming for Big AI BreakthroughsWill Knight | WiredChina produces as many artificial intelligence researchers as the US, but it lags in key fields like machine learning. The government hopes to make up ground. It set AI researchers the goal of making fundamental breakthroughs by 2025 and called for the country to be the worlds primary innovation center by 2030. BAAI opened a year later, in Zhongguancun, a neighborhood of Beijing designed to replicate US innovation hubs such as Boston and Silicon Valley.

What Elon Musks $100 Million Carbon Capture Prize Could MeanJames Temple | MIT Technology Review[Elon Musk] announced on Twitter that he plans to give away $100 million of [his $180 billion net worth] as a prize for the best carbon capture technology. Another $100 million could certainly help whatever venture, or ventures, clinch Musks prize. But its a tiny fraction of his wealth and will also only go so far. Money aside, however, one thing Musk has a particular knack for is generating attention. And this is a space in need of it.

Synthetic Cornea Helped a Legally Blind Man Regain His SightSteve Dent | EngadgetWhile the implant doesnt contain any electronics, it could help more people than any robotic eye. After years of hard work, seeing a colleague implant the CorNeat KPro with ease and witnessing a fellow human being regain his sight the following day was electrifying and emotionally moving, there were a lot of tears in the room, said CorNeat Vision co-founder Dr. Gilad Litvin.

MIT Develops Method for Lab-Grown Plants That May Eventually Lead to Alternatives to Forestry and FarmingDarrell Etherington | TechCrunchIf the work of these researchers can eventually be used to create a way to produce lab-grown wood for use in construction and fabrication in a way thats scalable and efficient, then theres tremendous potential in terms of reducing the impact on forestry globally. Eventually, the team even theorizes you could coax the growth of plant-based materials into specific target shapes, so you could also do some of the manufacturing in the lab, by growing a wood table directly for instance.

FAA Approves First Fully Automated Commercial Drone FlightsAndy Pasztor and Katy Stech Ferek | The Wall Street JournalUS aviation regulators have approved the first fully automated commercial drone flights, granting a small Massachusetts-based company permission to operate drones without hands-on piloting or direct observation by human controllers or observers. The companys Scout drones operate under predetermined flight programs and use acoustic technology to detect and avoid drones, birds, and other obstacles.

Chinas Surging Private Space Industry Is Out to Challenge the USNeel V. Patel | MIT Technology Review[The Ceres-1] was a commercial rocketonly the second from a Chinese company ever to go into space. And the launch happened less than three years after the company was founded. The achievement is a milestone for Chinas fledglingbut rapidly growingprivate space industry, an increasingly critical part of the countrys quest to dethrone the US as the worlds preeminent space power.

Janet Yellen Will Consider Limiting Use of CryptocurrencyTimothy B. Lee | Ars TechnicaCryptocurrencies could come under renewed regulatory scrutiny over the next four years if Janet Yellen, Joe Bidens pick to lead the Treasury Department, gets her way. During Yellens Tuesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee,Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.)asked Yellen about the use of cryptocurrency by terrorists and other criminals. Cryptocurrencies are a particular concern, Yellen responded. I think many are usedat least in a transactions sensemainly for illicit financing.i

Secret Ingredient Found to Power SupernovasThomas Lewton | QuantaOnly in the last few years, with the growth of supercomputers, have theorists had enough computing power to model massive stars with the complexity needed to achieve explosions. These new simulations are giving researchers a better understanding of exactly how supernovas have shaped the universe we see today.

Image Credit: Ricardo Gomez Angel / Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through January 23) - Singularity Hub

It took evolution three or four billion years to produce Homo sapiens. If the climate had completely failed just once in that time, then evolution would have come to a crashing halt and we would not be here now. So to understand how we came to exist on planet Earth, well need to know how Earth managed to stay fit for life for billions of years.

This is not a trivial problem. Current global warming shows us that the climate can change considerably over the course of even a few centuries. Over geological timescales, it is even easier to change climate. Calculations show that there is the potential for Earths climate to deteriorate to temperatures below freezing or above boiling in just a few million years.

We also know that the sun has become 30 percent more luminous since life first evolved. In theory, this should have caused the oceans to boil away by now, given that they were not generally frozen on the early Earth. This is known as the faint young sun paradox. Yet, somehow, this habitability puzzle was solved.

Scientists have come up with two main theories. The first is that the Earth could possess something like a thermostata feedback mechanism (or mechanisms) that prevents the climate ever wandering to fatal temperatures.

The second is that, out of a large number of planets, perhaps some just make it through by luck, and Earth is one of those. This second scenario is made more plausible by the discoveries in recent decades of many planets outside our solar systemso-called exoplanets. Astronomical observations of distant stars tell us that many have planets orbiting them, and that some are of a size and density and orbital distance such that temperatures suitable for life are theoretically possible. It has been estimated that there are at least two billion such candidate planets in our galaxy alone.

Scientists would love to travel to these exoplanets to investigate whether any of them have matched Earths billion years of climate stability. But even the nearest exoplanets, those orbiting the star Proxima Centauri, are more than four light-years away. Observational or experimental evidence is hard to come by.

Instead, I explored the same question through modeling. Using a computer program designed to simulate climate evolution on planets in general (not just Earth), I first generated 100,000 planets, each with a randomly different set of climate feedbacks. Climate feedbacks are processes that can amplify or diminish climate changethink for instance of sea-ice melting in the Arctic, which replaces sunlight-reflecting ice with sunlight-absorbing open sea, which in turn causes more warming and more melting.

In order to investigate how likely each of these diverse planets was to stay habitable over enormous (geological) timescales, I simulated each 100 times. Each time the planet started from a different initial temperature and was exposed to a randomly different set of climate events. These events represent climate-altering factors such as supervolcano eruptions (like Mount Pinatubo but much larger) and asteroid impacts (like the one that killed the dinosaurs). On each of the 100 runs, the planets temperature was tracked until it became too hot or too cold or else had survived for three billion years, at which point it was deemed to have been a possible crucible for intelligent life.

The simulation results give a definite answer to this habitability problem, at least in terms of the importance of feedbacks and luck. It was very rare (in fact, just one time out of 100,000) for a planet to have such strong stabilizing feedbacks that it stayed habitable all 100 times, irrespective of the random climate events. In fact, most planets that stayed habitable at least once did so fewer than 10 times out of 100. On nearly every occasion in the simulation when a planet remained habitable for three billion years, it was partly down to luck. At the same time, luck by itself was shown to be insufficient. Planets that were specially designed to have no feedbacks at all never stayed habitable; random walks, buffeted around by climate events, never lasted the course.

Repeat runs in the simulation were not identical: 1,000 different planets were generated randomly and each run twice. (a) results on first run, (b) results on second run. Green circles show success (stayed habitable for 3 billion years) and black failure. Toby Tyrrell, Author provided

This overall result, that outcomes depend partly on feedbacks and partly on luck, is robust. All sorts of changes to the modeling did not affect it. By implication, Earth must therefore possess some climate-stabilizing feedbacks, but at the same time, good fortune must also have been involved in it staying habitable. If, for instance, an asteroid or solar flare had been slightly larger than it was, or had occurred at a slightly different (more critical) time, we would probably not be here on Earth today. It gives a different perspective on why we are able to look back on Earths remarkable, enormously extended, history of life evolving and diversifying and becoming ever more complex to the point that it gave rise to us.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: PIRO4D from Pixabay

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Earth Has Stayed Habitable for Billions of Years. Exactly How Lucky Did We Get? - Singularity Hub

Devin Townsend has checked in with an update on his new project that is currently in the works.

"Over the last 6 months, Ive been working on two 'scores' that have become a film, two albums, and a graphic novel among other things called The Puzzle. Its become a massive project with a lot of great people involved. Its not 'song oriented' and is complicated and abstract. The film has become a tremendous undertaking and we will be streaming it online when it debuts, (along with physical product that is pretty next level).

The concept is meant to describe the last year of chaos and the psychological process it required of us all. The music and visuals act as an analogy for it. The number of people involved (30-40) represents a sort of community amidst it. Theres two albums: Puzzle is chaos and meant to represent the internal dialogue in a fundamentally absurd time, Snuggles is meant to be a beautiful balm that acts as a conclusion and something you can listen to on loop to feel better. Both have a film.

The concept of it all (which Ill explain in YouTube clips pior to the release) is such that I hope it inspires people- if visually inclined- to make their own graphic novels, films, books etc, using the music as a soundtrack. The Puzzle is written to be my version of a soundtrack to a kind of universal experience weve shared, I guess. The movie and books we are producing are meant as examples of the concept... as in: 'everybodys puzzle is unique, based on the same experiences.'

My work has always really just been a product of a compulsion to reflect whats going on in my life. If things are chaotic, its bound to be chaotic. Its been a very bizarre work flow, but its starting to come together now. Delivery date is March 22, release 2-3 months later.

Finally in August, I will be begin recording my next actual album (with songs) for release early 2022. (Untitled so far) but before that, The Puzzle is something very different and really fascinating I think.

Ill be back to podcasts and twitch streams when the workload lightens a touch here. Be well and thanks for everything."

Details have yet to be released, but Sheet Happens Publishing have confirmed that they will release an official guitar transcription book for Devin Townsend's Empath album. A release date has yet to be determined. Watch the official Sheet Happens website here for updates.

Empath was released in March 2019.

Tracklisting:

"Castaway""Genesis""Spirits Will Collide""Evermore""Sprite""Hear Me""Why""Borderlands""Requiem""Singularity Part 1 - Adrift""Singularity Part 2 - I Am I""Singularity Part 3 - There Be Monsters""Singularity Part 4 - Curious Gods""Singularity Part 5 - Silicon Scientists""Singularity Part 6 - Here Comes The Sun"

"Spirits Will Collide" video:

Evermore video:

"Genesis" video:

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DEVIN TOWNSEND Shares Details Of Forthcoming Release, The Puzzle - "A Film, Two Albums, And A Graphic Novel Among Other Things" -...

By Victor Davis Hanson| The Providence Journal

VictorDavisHanson (authorvdh@gmail.com) is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution atStanford University.

The newly formed President's Advisory 1776 Commission just released its report. The group was chaired by Churchill historian and Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry P. Arnn. The vice chair was Dr. Carol M. Swain, a retired professor of political science. (Full disclosure: I was a member of the commission.)

The unanimously approved conclusions focused on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the historical challenges to these founding documents and the need for civic renewal. The 16-member commission was diverse in the widest sense of the familiar adjective. It included historians, lawyers, academics, scholars, authors, former elected officials and past public servants.

Whether because the report was issued by a Donald Trump-appointed commission, or because the conclusions questioned the controversial and flawed New York Times-sponsored 1619 Project, there was almost immediate criticism from the left.

Yet at any other age than the divisive present, the report would not have been seen as controversial.

First, the commission offered a brief survey of the origins of the Declaration of Independence, published in 1776, and the Constitution, signed in 1787. It emphasized how unusual for the age were the founders' commitments to political freedom, personal liberty and the natural equality endowed by our creator all the true beginning of the American experiment.

The commission reminded us that the founders were equally worried about autocracy and chaos. So they drafted checks and balances to protect citizens from both authoritarianism, known so well from the British Crown, and the frenzy of sometimes wild public excess.

The report repeatedly focuses on both the ideals of the American founding and the centuries-long quest to live up to them. It notes the fragility of such a novel experiment in constitutional republicanism, democratic elections and self-government especially during late-18th-century era of war and factionalism.

The report does not whitewash the continuance of many injustices after 1776 and 1787 in particular chattel slavery concentrated in the South, and voting reserved only for free males.

Indeed, the commission explains why and how these wrongs were inconsistent with the letter and spirit of our founding documents. So it was natural that these disconnects would be addressed, even fought over, and continually resolved often over the opposition of powerful interests who sought to reinvent the Declaration and Constitution into something that they were not.

Two of the most widely referenced Americans in the report are Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. Both argued, a century apart, for the moral singularity of the U.S. Constitution. Neither wished to replace the founders' visions; both instead demanded that they be fully realized and enforced.

The report details prior ideological and political challenges to the Constitution as we approach America's 250th birthday. Some were abjectly evil, such as the near-century-long insistence that the enslavement of African Americans was legal an amorality that eventually led to more than 600,000 Americans being killed during a Civil War to banish it.

Some ideologies, such as fascism and communism, were easily identifiable as inimical to our principles. Both occasionally won adherents in times of economic depression and social strife before they were defeated and discredited abroad.

Perhaps more controversially, the commission identified other challenges, such as continued racism, progressivism and contemporary identity politics. The report argued how and why all those who insisted that race might become a basis from which to discriminate against entire groups of people were at odds with the logic of the Declaration.

Historically, progressivism assumed that human nature is malleable. With enough money and power, Americans supposedly can be improved to accept more paternalistic government, usually to be run by technocrats. Often they sought to curb the liberties of the individual, under the guise of modernist progress and greater efficiency.

The commission was no more sympathetic to the current popularity of identity politics or reparatory racial discrimination. It argued that the efforts to insist that race, ethnicity, sexual preference and gender define who we are, rather than remain incidental in comparison to our natural and shared humanity, will lead to a dangerous fragmentation of American society.

Finally, the commission offered the unifying remedy of renewed civic education. Specifically, it advocates far more teaching in our schools of the Declaration and the Constitution, and other documents surrounding their creation.

It most certainly did not suggest that civic education and American history ignore or contextualize past national shortcomings. Again, the report argued that our lapses should be envisioned as obstacles to fulfilling the aspirations of our founding.

The commission may be short-lived with the change of administrations, given that it was born in the chaos of the divisive present. President Joe Biden reportedly planned to terminate the commission through an executive order.

But any fair critic can see that the report's unifying message is that we are a people blessed with a singular government and history, that self-critique and moral improvement are innate to the American founding and spirit, and that America never had to be perfect to be both good and far better than the alternatives.

(Victor Davis Hanson was a member of the 1776 Commission. His views here are his own and are not necessarily those of other commission members. The report can be read athttps://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/The-Presidents-Advisory-1776-Commission-Final-Report.pdf.)

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Opinion/Hanson: Thoughts on the 1776 Commission and its report - The Providence Journal