Day: August 25, 2016

Of course, cockroaches aren’t too worried about climate change

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❝ As the planet warms, insects will migrate into new habitats and environments as they adapt…For some insight into the not-so-humble cockroach and its future, Nexus Media News reached out to journalist Richard Schweid, author of The Cockroach Papers: A Compendium of History and Lore.

Public perception is that cockroaches would survive a nuclear holocaust (though the science on that has been mixed), but are they thriving in a warming planet?

❝ Whether or not cockroaches would survive a nuclear holocaust depends on the level of radiation released, of course. They were reported to have survived the blasts at Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s grounds zero. What is certain is that they can survive substantially higher doses of radiation than Homo sapiens. What’s more, if both species face extinction, it’s a pretty sure bet that we’ll disappear before the roaches will, regardless of whether the cause is radiation, climate change, or some other, as of yet unimagined threat to our fragile existence.

Roaches are designed for survival; compared to them we are barely hanging on. So, unless climate change is reversed, we may be heading toward a planet where cockroaches are the dominant species, thriving and multiplying in a world where humans were a blip on the geological timeline and roaches have inherited the earth. They were here before us, and unless we pay closer attention to how we treat our world, they will inherit it…

What traits have allowed roaches to adapt to a dynamic world?

❝ The cockroach is one of evolution’s grand success stories, a wholly admirable design for survival of a species. It can and will eat anything apart, it is said, from cucumbers.

What they will eat and metabolize ranges from book-binding glue to human feces, dead skin and toenails, to rotten anything-at-all. Those that live far from humans are able to eat whatever their world provides — presumably — from rotting trees to dead animals.

What’s more, cockroach species seem to mutate readily in order to protect themselves.

RTFA. Amusing, scientifically accurate. Perhaps providing additional motivation for you to nudge the political animals in our government most closely resembling cockroaches. You do understand that the pimps for fossil fuel barons and other climate change deniers are certain they are assured immortality.

Applications for unemployment benefits stay below 300K

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We could always go back to Republican solutions

❝ Slightly fewer people filed for U.S. unemployment benefits last week, a sign the American job market remains healthy.

❝ THE NUMBERS: The Labor Department said Thursday that applications for jobless aid slipped by 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 261,000. The less volatile four-week average dropped by 1,250 to 264,000. Overall, the number of people receiving unemployment checks fell by 30,000 to 2.15 million, down 5 percent from a year earlier.

❝ THE TAKEAWAY: Applications are a proxy for layoffs. They have remained below 300,000 for 77 straight weeks, longest streak since 1970. The current reading is even more impressive because the population has grown considerably since then…

❝ KEY DRIVERS: The U.S. unemployment rate is 4.9 percent. Employers added 255,000 jobs in July and 292,000 in June.

❝ Solid hiring amid slow growth is worrisome. It shows that the economy is less productive, with more workers needed to produce the same or slightly more output. Productivity, or the amount of output per hour, has dropped 0.4 percent over the past year.

Discussions about productivity are like the newly hot topic of the value of GDP analysis. Becoming the signal statistic after World War 2, the US economy has been dramatically altered by time, technology, inevitable globalization and political pimps to the military-industrial complex.

I wouldn’t even post about this topic – boring you to semi-consciousness – except the populist pimp hisself keeps throwing it out as evidence of dastardly plots by Progressives, Liberals and banks that won’t re-mortgage Trump Towers.

Fact remains that since the Bush’s Great Recession, Obama’s halfway-competent utilization of modern economics to whip Congress into motion – followed by simple and simplistic nudges from the Fed – have kept our dullish economy functioning better than most in the Western World. 77 straight weeks of sub-300K unemployment applications speaks to that point.

The inevitable whine about rigged numbers from Trumpkins is hilarious – since the essentials haven’t been altered since the days of Nixon who was responsible for criminal manipulation as often was his wont.

China’s quantum satellite is designed to teleport data and create an unbreakable code

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China’s quantum satellite launched from Jiuquan, August 16th – Reuters/China Daily

❝ A few days ago, China launched the world’s first quantum satellite. So what exactly does this mean?

“The satellite is designed to establish ultra-secure quantum communications by transmitting uncrackable keys from space to the ground,” Xinhua, China’s state news agency, wrote after the equipment was launched on a rocket from the Gobi desert. “It could also conduct experiments on the bizarre features of quantum theories, such as entanglement.”…

❝ Most human technology is built around the classical physics that Isaac Newton and his inheritors came up with…When engineers hit on electricity…they perceived it in aggregate as a kind of a force; it’s either on, or it’s off. This understanding led to electric switches, which became transistors, and when you put all those transistors in a box and start turning them off and on with instructions encoded “11010001101”… it’s a computer.

But as scientists were developing electric computers in the 20th century, theorists beginning with Max Planck were ripping up the rule books. Their experiments with light suggested that something about classical physics didn’t quite add up. Soon they developed mathematical proofs to explain that the tiny particles that make up matter — protons, neutrons, and electrons — don’t necessarily behave like you would expect particles to behave. They can act as if they are in two plac es at once, for instance…This is quantum theory. The first and most famous application of these ideas came in nuclear weaponry and energy.

Physicists are still trying to agree on how classical and quantum physics come together coherently. But quantum theory already underlies a lot of modern technology; the transistors on a silicon chip, in fact, wouldn’t work without it. Now engineers are trying to apply it to more futuristic things…

❝ Scientists have done experiments with quantum teleportation already. They have instantaneously exchanged information about the quantum states of photons, which are particles of light, transmitted 143 km between two of the Canary Islands.

But testing quantum teleportation at extremely long distances requires going to space. It’s the easiest way to set up laser communication between two distant points on the earth’s surface. That’s what the Chinese satellite, developed in cooperation with the Austrian Academy of Science, intends to do.

❝ Besides demonstrating a super-long entanglement, the scientists working with the satellite want to test new communications technology…This is where the unbreakable code comes in…

❝ It may be easy to see in this shades of the Cold War race for technological dominance, but Spiros Michalakis at CalTech is confident that research will be shared within the scientific community. His hope is that this experiment is the first step toward a global network of research facilities sharing access to entangled particles beamed down from space—a kind of global, cloud-based quantum computer.

At the moment, though, it’s China that looks like the pacesetter.

I expect China’s scientists will share the main body of their research. It’s only human to expect the leading edge bits and pieces may be held aside as processes and experiments are worked out. Completed experiments will be published for peer review. That’s where science is moved forward – along with specialized conferences and convocations. Conservative steps tread the stairways of real science.

OTOH, do I think White House and Pentagon eggheads and Congressional know-nothings will start to panic over a “Quantum Gap”? You betcha!