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Elon Musk talks Mars, monkey brain implants and Bitcoin in Clubhouse interview – CNET

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

Elon Musk joined the Good Time

Elon Musk, theSpaceX and Tesla head honcho, appeared on theexclusive audio-only Clubhouse app Sunday night, joining the Good Time Show to talk all things Mars, memes and becoming a multiplanet species. The app, which allows people to create rooms for conversation, didn't fare too well. The cap on participants is set at 5,000 -- and it was quickly overwhelmed as Musk fans clamored to hear theworld's richest man speak.

Still, enterprising YouTubers and Discord servers popped up, and far more than 5,000 people got to hear some surprising claims about Mars and monkeys. In his characteristic fashion, Musk made some bold claims about when people might get to the red planet, discussed his Twitter memes and detailed some of the progress his team at Neuralink has made. It was meandering and, at times, bizarre, but Musk did reveal a few interesting details.

Let's start with Mars. If you're wondering what Musk's timeline to get humans on Mars is, you might be surprised.

"Five and a half years," Musk told hosts Sriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy at the beginning of the show.

From the lab to your inbox. Get the latest science stories from CNET every week.

Musk has been known to put ambitious deadlines on his projects, from Tesla to SpaceX, but five and a half years to get Starship off the ground and ferrying humans to another planet? That's a whole other level of ambition. But that's not a hard deadline. Musk listed a number of caveats -- there's a raft of technological advances that must be made in the intervening years.

"The important thing is that we establish Mars as a self-sustaining civilization," he said.

After Mars, Musk got applause for his meme abilities, which he partly attributed to "meme dealers," before the topic swerved to something more serious: Neuralink, the brain-implant startup he founded in 2016.

The last update, which came in August 2020, showed a "Fitbit-like" implant "working" in pigs, but we haven't heard much since -- and there' haven't been any scientific papers published in the meantime. Musk said new videos showing progress would be released in a month or so.

"We have a monkey with a wireless implant in their skull who can play video games using his mind," Musk said. Of course, there's no evidence for this, and it's the second time we've heard Musk discuss it. "Can we have the monkeys play mind Pong with each other?" he mused.

Consider that a caveat, though: Musk pulled it right back and made it clear these were long-term goals for the brain-implant device. The initial research focuses on how it might help those who have experienced brain and spine injuries.

"I want to be clear." Musk said, "the early applications will really just be for people who have a serious brain injury, like, where, it's like the value of the implant is just enormous."

One of the biggest stories in the last week has been the stock market, Reddit and GameStop's huge rally. But it was Bitcoin that Musk focused his attention on. "I'm late to the party but I'm a supporter of Bitcoin," he noted before turning his attention to Dogecoin, which had its own surge over the past week.

That cryptocurrency surged over 300% and reached an all-time high on Thursday, though Musk didn't seem particularly attached to it, beyond its comical nature.

"Arguably the most entertaining outcome, the most ironic outcome would be that Dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth of the future," he joked. Cryptocurrency tracker CoinDesk showed a small dropoff for Dogecoin's price immediately after Musk's comments.

Towards the end of the discussion, Musk rattled off a few things he's watching at the moment. We've thrown some of the quotes below.

Toward the end of discussion, Vlad Tenev, chief executive officer of stock trading app Robinhood, joined the interview to talk about the GameStop-Reddit saga, and Musk prodded him.

"People demand the truth," Musk said. "Did something shady go down here?"

"I wouldn't impute shadiness or anything like that on behalf of the NSCC," Tenev replied, referring to the National Securities Clearing Corporation.

It was typical Musk stream of consciousness, clocking in at about 90 minutes. Clubhouse couldn't keep up with the demand, and the conversation moved at a fierce, confusing pace. But it was weirdly entertaining? When Musk speaks, people seem willing to listen, and you never know where things are going to end up.

See also: Robinhood: What to know about the app at the center of the GameStop drama

Now playing: Watch this: Elon Musk's Neuralink demonstration in 14 minutes

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Elon Musk talks Mars, monkey brain implants and Bitcoin in Clubhouse interview - CNET

Laying out the biggest risks of investing in bitcoin in 2021 – KTAR.com

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

(Pixabay Photo)

No matter where you stand on bitcoin, we can agree on one thing: Its polarizing. Some investors believe its the way of the future and others think its a scam.

However, its gaining popularity. Its likely that the coronavirus pandemic accelerated its acceptance by pushing more retail online. Now, more than one-third of small- and medium-sized businesses will take bitcoin as payment.

And even bigger businesses like Microsoft are starting to accept it. Also, fans of bitcoin see it as a safeguard against inflation. And since the Federal Reserve has been printing money left and right, some are getting nervous about the future of the dollar.

You might be wondering: Should I jump on the bitcoin bandwagon, or run in the opposite direction? Here are four risks I want you to consider before taking the plunge:

Bitcoin is one of the most volatile investments you could make

Bitcoin goes through incredible spikes and plummets in value. Back in July of 2010, a year after bitcoin was released to the world, a bitcoin was worth only eight cents.

The value jumped all over the place until it really started to make some waves in 2017. One bitcoin reached a value of $1,000 early on, then zoomed to $5,000 in October, then doubled to $10,000 in November.

By mid-December one bitcoins value was almost $20,000. The bubble finally burst and the value dropped to about $3,500 by November 2018.

But bitcoins value started to skyrocket again in 2020. Just a couple weeks ago, the value of a bitcoin had hit an all-time high of just under $42,000, but then tanked within 24 hours down to $34,863.

Will it continue to grow in value? We dont know. But the reality is that volatility always equals risk. And risk isnt a bad thing, but you need to be aware of what it might cost in the end.

Bitcoin has a bit of an identity crisis

Does bitcoin have more in common with the U.S. dollar or with gold? The answer is both.

While bitcoin is a currency, Uncle Sam has a different take. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission sees bitcoin as a commodity (like gold), while the IRS treats it like property, which means you guessed it they can tax it.

We need to keep in mind that bitcoin is still the new kid on the block. While its been around for over 10 years now, we still dont have any tried and true best practices for building wealth with bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not regulated by any central bank or nation

Bitcoin has been shrouded in mystery ever since it was released in 2009. It operates without oversight from any bank or nation-state, meaning its exchanged peer to peer.

Its like the Wild West of currencies theres no marshal to uphold the law. For some, this is an attractive feature. Others recognize the risk that comes with zero regulation.

Bitcoin is widely used for illegal activity

Since all bitcoin trading is handled anonymously, the cryptocurrency scene is a hot spot for cybercrimes.

All sorts of shady things, from blackmail to phishing to Ponzi schemes to deals done on the dark web, take place using bitcoin.

Of course, there are plenty of upstanding people who use cryptocurrencies as well. But hackers who know a lot more about coding and software than the average Joe can use that knowledge to their advantage, so be careful.

As youve probably guessed, Im not a fan of bitcoin. I would much rather see you invest your hard-earned cash in proven methods for building wealth, like tax-advantaged retirement accounts and growth stock mutual funds.

But if you want to learn more about bitcoin, check out our full blog post on the subject.

The most important thing is to be aware, informed and in control of your financial choices at all times!

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Laying out the biggest risks of investing in bitcoin in 2021 - KTAR.com

Bitcoin miners raked in more than $1 billion in revenue last month – TechRadar

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

Mining bitcoin is finally profitable again as new data has revealed that miners were able to bring in $1.09bn in revenue last month.

This is significant due to the fact that bitcoin revenue in January reached its highest point since December of 2017 before the cryptocurrency bubble crashed later that month.

At the same time, the revenue for bitcoin miners in January of 2021 also surpassed the level seen during the same time period in 2018 when miners were able to rake in $1.02bn. However, both last month and January 2018 failed to surpass the monthly revenue of $1.25bn for bitcoin miners recorded during December 2017.

Of the over $1bn in revenue made from mining bitcoin last month, $977m came from the network's block subsidies. These block subsidies increased sharply as the cryptocurrency's price jumped above $30k to reach a high of $42k.

Mining bitcoin has also become more expensive recently due to a bidding war for the latest ASIC mining equipment including Bitmain's AntMiner S19 Pro and S19. According to The Block, some customers who preordered the latest ASIC machines due to be delivered last month tried to resell them at premiums of at least 75 percent.

The supply shortage coupled with bitcoin's recent rise lead to miners' daily revenue per each terahash second (TH/s) of computing power increasing to as much as $0.25 which has not been seen since mid-2019.

If you have an unused bitcoin mining rig lying around, now may be the perfect time to fire it up again.

Via The Block

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Bitcoin miners raked in more than $1 billion in revenue last month - TechRadar

Nivolumab Improves Survival in Relapsed Mesothelioma – Medscape

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

In the first ever placebo-controlled phase 3 trial in patients with relapsed mesothelioma, immunotherapy with nivolumab (Opdivo) significantly improved both overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS).

The CONFIRM trial involved 330 previously treated patients with mesothelioma who were randomly assigned to nivolumab or placebo for 1 year or until progression or unacceptable toxicity.

Although recruitment to the study was stopped early because of the COVID-19 pandemic, enough data accrued to show that the immunotherapy improved overall survival by 28% over placebo, and increased PFS by 39%.

"Nivolumab was deemed a safe and effective treatment and should be considered a new treatment option for patients with relapsed mesothelioma," said principal investigator Dean A. Fennell, MD, PhD, professor and consultant in Thoracic Medical Oncology, University of Leicester, United Kingdom.

He presented the results at the World Conference on Lung Cancer, which was held virtually because of the ongoing pandemic.

Rina Hui, MD, PhD, Crown Princess Mary Cancer Centre, Westmead Hospital, Sydney, Australia, who was not involved in the study, told journalists that these results had been a "long time coming."

CONFIRM has added "important, encouraging data on immunotherapy in the salvage setting, particularly that patients were heavily pretreated," Hui said, with two thirds having received two or more lines of therapy.

Fennel noted that "a significant clinical benefit was observed in the epithelioid subtype" of the disease, but not in patients with non-epithelioid disease.

However, there was "no evidence" to support tumor programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression as predictive of outcomes, he added, which does appear to be the case in some trials on lung cancer and other tumors.

Commenting on these observations, Hui said that PD-L1 as a predictive biomarker in mesothelioma has been "controversial", and emphasized that the results from CONFIRM indicate "no evidence of PD-L1 being predictive".

However, she questioned the other observation that clinical benefit appeared to be seen only in the epithelioid subtype.

Hui emphasized that non-epithelioid disease is known to be a "more aggressive, chemo-resistant subtypewith a steep decline in the survival curves."

"Therefore a lot of patients would not have made it to a subsequent line clinical trial, explaining why there were only 12% in the CONFIRM study," and so the sample size may be "too small to detect a difference in outcome."

Consequently, Hui said she "would not deny patients with non-epithelioid histology from considering nivolumab in the salvage setting."

She argued that there was "no clear predictive biomarker for patient selection" emerging from the CONFIRM data.

She agreed that, in patients with mesothelioma who have progressed following platinum/pemetrexed-based chemotherapy as in the first line, "monotherapy nivolumab now can be considered as a treatment option in the secondor third-line setting, after second-line chemotherapy".

However, outstanding questions remain, including whether nivolumab "provides better outcomes than second-line single agent chemotherapy or second-line gemcitabine with the VGFR inhibitor ramucirumab (Cyramza)."

It may also be that nivolumab plus ipilimumab (Yervoy) might be superior to nivolumab alone in the salvage setting.

But a more fundamental question is what should be considered for salvage therapy "if nivolumab and ipilimumab have already been used in the first-line setting?"

Results of first-line immunotherapy combination trials are "eagerly awaitedto determine and develop other salvage treatments," she commented.

Responding on Twitter, Riyaz Shah, MD, PhD, consultant medical oncologist, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, UK, echoed these comments, saying that the results were "very exciting" but he also "cant wait to see the first-line chemoimmunotherapy data."

Stephen V. Liu, MD, director of thoracic oncology at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, commented on Twitter that there was "not a lot of safety data" in the presentation and awaits their eventual publication.

He added that it is "good to have a positive trial" in relapsed mesothelioma, "though the first-line studies will decrease the eventual impact as immunotherapy becomes involved earlier in treatment."

Relapsed mesothelioma is an "unmet need," and until now "there have been no phase 3 trials which have demonstrated improved overall survival," Fennell said in his presentation.

However, three phase 2 trials have shown that immune checkpoint targeting via PD-1 has shown useful clinical activity as a monotherapy in the relapsed setting, and one of these trials has led to approval of nivolumab in Japan for this indication.

CONFIRM was an investigator-initiated phase 3 trial in patients with relapsed mesothelioma who had received more than one prior line of therapy and had a good performance status.

Recruitment began in April 2017, and the "target sample size was 336 patients," Fennell said, but was "halted at 332 patients (in March 2020) due to the peaking of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK."

"However, at the time it was felt there were sufficient events" to justify the current analysis of the co-primary endpoints of PFS and OS, despite the latter being 59 events short of the target of 291.

Fennell said that baseline characteristics were "generally well balanced" between the nivolumab (n = 221) and placebo (n = 111) arms.

However, there were more patients with a PD-L1 Tumor Proportion Score (TPS) 1% among the patients given nivolumab, at 37% vs 29% in the placebo arm.

After a median follow-up of 17.1 months in the nivolumab arm and 14.2 months in the placebo group, overall survival was significantly longer with the active treatment, at 9.2 months vs 6.6 months with placebo, or a hazard ratio of 0.72 (P = .018).

The proportion of patients alive at 12 months was 39.5% in the nivolumab group, and 26.9% in patients given placebo.

Investigator-assessed PFS was also significant longer with nivolumab, at 3.0 months vs 1.8 months with placebo, or a hazard ratio of 0.61 (P < .001).

The proportion of patients disease-free at 12 months was 14.5% with active treatment vs 4.9% months with the placebo.

"The role for PD-L1 as a potential biomarker was assessed," Fennell said, using the Dako 22C3 antibody, with 150 nivolumab and 84 placebo patients divided into those with a TPS <1% or 1%.

He noted that PD-L1 expression in the tumor "did not predict survival for patients in the CONFIRM trial", with neither PD-L1 positive nor PD-L1 negative patients demonstrating a significant improvement in overall survival with nivolumab vs placebo.

"For histology, epithelioid mesothelioma patients benefited from nivolumab," Fennell continued, at a hazard ratio for death of 0.71 vs placebo (P =.021). "However, for the non-epithelioid subgroup, in this immature survival analysisthe P value was not significant," he said, but this was a small subgroup of patients (12% in both nivolumab and placebo groups).

The safety analysis revealed that the proportion of patients with any serious adverse events, of any grade or grade 3, was almost identical between the active and placebo arms, Fennel reported. There were five deaths (3.6%) related to a serious adverse event in the nivolumab arm and four (5.3%) in the placebo group.

This research was funded by the Stand Up to Cancer campaign for Cancer Research UK, supported by Cancer Research UK core funding at the Southampton Clinical Trials Unit, and investigator-initiated support from Bristol-Myers Squibb for free drug labeling and distribution and funding for RECIST reporting.

Fennell reports relationships with Astex Therapeutics, AstraZeneca, Atara Biotherapeutics, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, BMS, Clovis Oncology, Eli Lilly, Inventiva, Lab 21, MSD, and Roche. Hui reports relationships with AstraZeneca, BMS, Eli Lilly, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, and Seagen.

2020 World Conference on Lung Cancer Singapore: Abstract PS01.11. Presented January 30, 2021.

For more from Medscape Oncology, follow us on Twitter: @MedscapeOnc

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Nivolumab Improves Survival in Relapsed Mesothelioma - Medscape

In brief: Block party to go, free tax prep help, women’s business network, library programs and more in Hampton – TribLIVE

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

TribLIVE's Daily and Weekly email newsletters deliver the news you want and information you need, right to your inbox.

Block Party To Go charity fundraiser

Participants in North Hills Community Outreachs annual block party fundraiser wont be able to gather in person this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

But the North Hills charity and social service agency is still planning to party.

Have fun at home with a Block Party To Go party bag. The adult bags include a do-it-yourself pizza kit, wine, dessert, a game and more. The childrens bag includes a craft kit from Dots and Doodles, snacks and other items.

Some of the bags will include a bonus gift card to a local restaurant or business. The first 300 party-to-go kits will include a link to play BuzzWorthy Pub Trivia.

More information and an order form for party bags are available online at: NHCO/Block-Party.

Free tax prep help

A free tax preparation service is being offered by the United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania through April 10.

The service is available virtually or through a combination of online and in-person meetings.

Clients can upload their materials and tax experts will prepare and review the return.

The hybrid tax preparation will require two brief appointments in a safe environment, following covid-19 guidelines, to provide information and review the return.

The service is available to residents in Allegheny, Fayette, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland counties.

Assistance from a volunteer tax preparer is available for people and families with a total annual income of up to $57,000.

A free, do-it-yourself online tax assistance program is available at myfreetaxes.com.

Womens Business Network meetings

The Womens Business Networks three chapters in the North Hills have scheduled free networking sessions for February.

The Cranberry Chapter meets on the first and third Thursday of each month at 7:30 am. The chapter will meet on Feb. 4 and 18. For more information, contact Cynthia at 724-316-3427.

The Wexford Chapter has its meetings on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month at 8:15 a.m. This months meetings will take place Feb. 9 and 23. For details call Jocelin at 724-553-4452.

The Criders Corners Chapter holds regular meetings on the second and fourth Thursday of each month at noon. Februarys meetings are on the 11th and 25th. Call Sherri for details at412-760-9601.

An All Virtual Chapter holds regular meetings via Zoom at 7:30 p.m. on the first and third Wednesday of each month. For details call Jennifer Pasquale at 412-908-1663.

Ash Wednesday service

Hampton Presbyterian Church will hold an Ash Wednesday worship service to mark the first day of Lent on Feb. 17 at 7:30 p.m.

Depending on the covid restrictions in place when the service occurs, ashes might be distributed, according to church officials.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the nursery will not be available. However, children are invited to attend the service with their families.

The service also will be livestreamed to monitors in several locations in the building for people who want to participate but prefer to remain outside the sanctuary.

The church is located at 2942 East Hardies Road in Gibsonia.

Hampton Junior Football registration

Registration is open for the Hampton Junior Football Associations 26th season.

The organization has football teams and cheerleading squads for three age groups: Spikes, 5-8 years old; K9, 9-10 years old; and Dawgs, 11-12 years old.

This year, Hampton will play host to the United Youth Football League championship game.

Association officials say the top priority for its program is player safety.

Registration costs $140 through Feb. 28. The cost to to sign up during March and April is $190. After May 1, the registration fee will be $240.

For more information, see the Associations Facebook page or send an email to: doughjfa@gmail.com.

Block Northway hosting students art exhibit

Art created by students in the North Hills is on display through Feb. 18 at The Block Northway in Ross.

The artwork was made by elementary, middle school and high school students in the Hampton and North Hills school districts and Holy Cross & Blessed Trinity Academy.

The display also features a giant quilt made up of 310 ceramic tiles created by students at Hamptons Wyland Elementary school.

The art is being displayed in the South Corridor, Upper Level between Lands End and DSW. The pieces also will be featured on The Block Northways website throughout the year.

Northern Tier Library activities

Here are some of the upcoming activities and programs at the Northern Tier Regional Library in Hampton. Some programs require registration, which can be done online or by calling the library at 724-449-2665. Additional information and updates about programs also are available on the librarys Facebook page.

Meditating with Plants, Feb. 18 at 6 p.m.: Grace Astraea of TimeSpaceOne Healing Arts will lead a program on connective and calming meditation experiences with your favorite plant via Zoom.

Simple instructions for preparing and implementing a plant meditation will be given. The group also will spend a short period practicing the strengthening relationship to the living world via our plants.

No previous experience is needed, just an open mind and willingness to learn more about your relationship to the plant kingdom. Registration is required to receive the Zoom meeting invitation link.

North Park Bald Eagles, Feb. 9 at 7 p.m.: Bald Eagles are one of the biggest and most recognizable birds in the United States.

Master Naturalist Ken Knapp will present a program via Zoom to share information about this species and provide an update on whats going on with the local eagles.

This program is intended for adults, but all ages are welcome to attend. Registration is required to receive the Zoom meeting invitation link.

Winter Valentines Day at Hogwarts: Request a take-home kit to discover some magical Valentines Day crafts inspired by our favorite Wizarding school.

This craft bundle will be available for pickup on Feb. 11 from 4 to 6 p.m. People who cannot pick up their bundles during those times can retrieve them from the librarys lobby.

This bundle is for all ages and registration is required by Feb. 7 at midnight to ensure enough supplies are available.

Toddler Story Time: Uploads at 10:30 a.m. on Feb. 9 and 23.

Preschool Story Time: Uploads at 10:30 a.m. Feb. 10 and 24.

Rhymes, Songs, & Yoga Poses: Uploads at 10:30 a.m. Feb. 4, 11, and 25.

Take-Home Crafts: Kids and adults of all ages are invited to create and enjoy a simple weekly take-home craft. Runs through Feb. 8.

The Weekly Project: This six-week program features a variety of activities that children can do with their families at home, including cooking, crafting, art and STEM. Register online or by telephone to get take-home materials for the program that runs through Feb. 8.

Take-Home Maker Mondays: Participants can pick up a supply kit and follow a weekly tutorial video that will be posted on the librarys various social media pages. Feb, 8: Mini Valentines Day pillow, Feb. 22: Marble Maze.

Winter Reading Challenge 2021: Join readers from across Allegheny County in the Winter Reading Challenge 2021, which runs through Feb. 28.

Family Movie Nights: Enjoy some movies, a cup of hot chocolate and a bag of popcorn on a cold winter night by picking up a Family Movie Night Kit.

Crafts at Heart: Beginning Feb. 10, adults and teens can pick up kits to create handmade Valentines Day heart-themed crafts.

Categories:Hampton Journal | Local

TribLIVE's Daily and Weekly email newsletters deliver the news you want and information you need, right to your inbox.

‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’: Film Review | Sundance 2021 – Hollywood Reporter

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

8:00 PM PST 1/31/2021byJourdain Searles

In the last 20 years, as the internet steadily integrated itself into every facet of our lives, adolescence has been changed radically. No longer forced into interactions with other people their age by circumstance, more and more teens have found themselves alone on their computers, phones and tablets for immeasurable lengths of time. This has lead to personal discovery divorced from the physical teens are left to explore their bodies and draw their own conclusions based on whatever information they can find. Though the internet offers a wealth of resources, its spread out across countless webpages that one can only find by going down a number of rabbit holes. How can someone find what theyre looking for if they dont know what it is? In general, self-discovery usually occurs by accident, within our chosen online communities. Over time, RPGs (role-playing games) have become an increasingly important vehicle for identity play. Thats what writer-director Jane Schoenbruns debut feature Were All Going to the Worlds Fair is all about.

The film tells the story of Casey (Anna Cobb, in her feature film debut), an isolated teen in an unnamed rural town. She spends most of her time making videos, all of which receive minimal views. Even when shes outside, going on long walks in the woods and along the highways, she brings her camera, recording her thoughts to upload later. Though we spend the majority of the runtime with Casey, we never get to know any more than what she tells us. Even her name is withheld from us she's Casey for her videos, but theres no telling what shes actually called.

The only person she speaks to directly in the film is a man (Michael J. Rogers) she meets over Skype; he is also never named. Both of them are lonely people, grasping at a small yet meaningful connection over a mysterious horror RPG called The Worlds Fair. Casey joins the game by pricking her finger and wiping the blood onto her computer monitor while reciting the phrase I want to go to The Worlds Fair three times. Once shes in the game, she begins to gradually change, getting angrier and more introspective. Screen depictions of puberty often revolve around young love and social conflict. But with Casey, the journey is internal; she uses the game to dig into the depths of her mind. And since she spends most of her time alone, theres no one around to pull her out.

But as her videos become more disturbing, the mysterious man on the other side of the screen begins to take on a parental role in her life. Casey has an actual father, but she avoids him. In one telling scene, she watches his car pull up outside the window and quietly takes her meal up to her room without greeting him. We never see her father onscreen.

There are unmistakable themes of dysphoria in the film, demonstrated by Casey using the game to experiment with her own presentation. In one explosive scene, she covers her face in glow-in-the-dark paint and destroys her favorite childhood toy. Afterward, the tone in her voice changes from menacing to remorseful as if shes been pulled out of the game back into her physical body.

We get to know Casey by what she watches, but more importantly, how the camera watches her. We are often positioned as the screen shes looking at, functioning as some of the few witnesses to her self-expression. The use of dark and glowing lights in the film illuminates the loneliness of her journey.

The music, scored by indie artist Alex G, is slow and melancholy. The sound adds gravity to every scene. Coupled with the slow, deliberate pace of the film, it pushes us as to sit with Casey and witness every small detail of her emotion. Cobbs face is a canvas for a world of yearning that cant fully be revealed to us because she doesnt have the language to articulate it yet. That truth allows the film to feel both specific and universal at the same time. We all are seen and unseen simultaneously; there is no way to reveal the entirety of our souls, not even when we stare directly into the camera wanting desperately to be understood.

In one of the films most tender scenes, Casey is in a barn watching an ASMR video on a projector. On the screen is a woman looking softly into the camera repeating soothing phrases. She wants whoever is watching to calm their mind and go to sleep. She repeats shushing sounds as Casey watches quietly, trying to allow herself to relax. When youre that age, your mind is a fever of rage, sadness and confusing desires. Much like that video, Were All Going to the Worlds Fair is a warm hand for those still trying to figure themselves out. Its alright not to know everything yet. Give it time.

Venue: Sundance (NEXT)Production companies: Dweck Productions Presents, Flies CollectiveCast: Anna Cobb, Matt J RogersWriter-director-editor: Jane SchoenbrunProducers: Sarah Winshall & Carlos ZozayaExecutive producers: David Lowry, Daniel Patrick Carbone, Zachary Shedd, Matthew Petock, Hannah Dweck, Theodore ShaeferDirector of photography: Daniel Patrick CarboneProduction designer: Grace SloanOriginal Music: Alex GCostume designer: Abby HarriCasting: Abby Harri

86 min.

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'We're All Going to the World's Fair': Film Review | Sundance 2021 - Hollywood Reporter

Elon Musk says he has totally happy monkey with brain chip so it can play video games using its mind – The Independent

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

Elon Musk has revealed that his Neuralink startup has implanted a wireless chip into a monkeys brain in order to allow it to play video games.

The technology billionaire, who also heads SpaceX and Tesla, said the monkey looks totally happy and that Neuralinks facilities meet US regulatory requirements.

Speaking during a Q&A session on the Clubhouse app, Mr Musk said the startup had moved beyond experiments on pigs and onto monkeys.

Weve already got like a monkey with a wireless implant in their skull and the tiny wires, who can play video games using his mind. And he looks totally happy. He does not look like an unhappy monkey," Mr Musk said.

You cant even see where the neural implant was put in. Hes not uncomfortable and he doesnt look weird.

Mr Musk added that an inspector with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) described Neuralinks laboratory as the nicest monkey facilities" that they had ever seen. A spokesperson for the agency was not immediately available for comment.

We went the extra mile for the monkeys, Mr Musk said. One of the things were trying to figure out [is] can we have the monkeys playing mind Pong with each other? That would be pretty cool.

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The brain-machine interface startup, which Mr Musk foudned in 2016, is eventually hoping to implant chips into human brains to provide a high-bandwidth link between humans and computers.

The Neuralink device is the size of a coin and can be implanted into the skull

(Neuralink)

In the short term, Neuralink plans to use its wireless chips to treat brain disorders and diseases.

But longer-term goals for the startup are far more ambitious, ranging from the human-AI symbiosis concept, to something the CEO refers to as conceptual telepathy.

This would involve humans thinking about a complex series of concepts and then transferring them directly, uncompressed, to another person.

This would massively improve the quality of communication, and the speed of it, Mr Musk said,

There are other pretty wild things that could be done, he continued. You could probably save state in the brain. So if you were to die your state could be returned in the form of another human body or a robot body You could decide if you want to be a robot or a person or whatever.

A robot designed by Neuralink would insert the 'threads' into the brain using a needle

Neuralink

A fully implantable neural interface connects to the brain through tiny threads

Neuralink

Trials of Neuralink's fully implantable neural interface system will begin in 2021

Neuralink

Neuralink says learning to use the device is 'like learning to touch type or play the piano'

Neuralink

There were some caveats to the futuristic technology, with any downloading or transferring of consciousness potentially resulting in some loss of memory or sense of self.

You wouldnt be exactly the same, thered be a little lost in transfer But its also true that if you wake up today, youre not exactly the same as you were yesterday, Mr Musk said.

There could be something analogous to a video game, like a save game situation, where you are able to upload your last state Maybe lose a few memories but mostly be you.

During a demonstration of the technology last August, Mr Musk also said that Neuralinks wireless chips could solve blindness solve paralysis [and] solve hearing, while simultaneously allowing humans to compete with advanced artificial intelligence.

Neuralink released a video on Saturday of a robot capable of surgically implanting the brain chips into humans, and Mr Musk said more details would be announced about the startups progress next month.

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Elon Musk says he has totally happy monkey with brain chip so it can play video games using its mind - The Independent

Most Marketers Will Increase Spend In 2021; YouTube Readies Its TikTok Rival – AdExchanger

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

Heres todays AdExchanger.com news round-up Want it by email? Sign uphere.

Investment Boost

After hitting the pause button in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, marketers appear ready to increase their investments in 2021 as long as a vaccine rollout goes well. A CMO Council survey of 200 global marketers reveals that 65% plan to boost their investments this year after conserving cash over the past year, according to CampaignUS. Nice to hear, considering global ad spend declined by 5.8% in 2020. Now, just 10% of marketers plan to reduce their marketing budgets year-over-year, and 24% expect to keep their investment stable. What are they spending on? Mainly technology, automation and transformation, but also talent that has proficiency in data and tech. 2020 was a recalibration year for rethinking and redirecting spend, said Donovan Neale-May, founder and director of the CMO Council. CMOs found major savings last year as events and trade shows, which typically take up 25% of marketing budgets, were canceled. All of a sudden, those budgets are freed up, Neale-May said.

Keep It Short

YouTube is hoping for some of TikToks sweet, sweet Gen Z engagement with a feature called Shorts that allows creators to upload brief vertical videos. Its been testing Shorts in India after first announcing the feature in September, Business Insider reports. But YouTube isnt the first big platform to take on TikTok. See: Instagram Reels and Snapchats Spotlight. That battle will heat up even more as YouTube jockeys to be seen as a platform where creators can make money, reach new audiences and build a sustainable business. Spotlight and TikTok have both set up programs of their own dedicated to paying creators on an ongoing basis. Although videos that appear in YouTubes Shorts section dont earn creators any money yet, the engagement is gangbusters. YouTube says its TikTok competitor is getting 3.5 billion views a day in the India test run, according to CNBC, and some creators are saying they see huge audience growth with Shorts.

WhatFace

Its no secret that Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp has been getting a lot of heat and losing users in recent weeks after announcing and then delaying changes to how it uses data. The backlash was swift. Even Tesla CEO Elon Musk took aim at the platform and recommended users move to encrypted messaging apps, such as Signal and Telegram. Regardless, WhatsApp is forging ahead with new privacy and security features, according to TechCrunch, including adding a biometric authentication for logging in on desktop. In other words, people will be able to use their face, fingerprint or iris to verify their identity on their phone when they try to access their WhatsApp account on the web. Then theyll have to scan a QR code on their phone for two-factor authentication. WhatsApp does not see your face or fingerprint data, the company tweeted. Thats comforting. In other news: Is the pot calling the kettle black? According to The Information, Facebook might be gearing up for a big antitrust lawsuit against Apple. Facebook claims that Apples App Store guidelines represent market abuse, because third-party developers have to abide by Apples rules while Apples own apps seem to get a pass.

But Wait, Theres More!

Interim FFC chair Jessica Rosenworcel is also the frontrunner to eventually lead Bidens FCC, and shes got a plan for Silicon Valley to overtake China in 5G and AI innovation. [Business Insider]

Sheraton is rebranding to bring the hotel chain up-to-date with a focus on communal spaces, although it doesnt seem to have a defined audience in mind. [Adweek]

COVID-19 has shaped a sobering Super Bowl ad lineup. Sure, there will still be some laughs, but Indeed, Chipotle, Budweiser and others are tackling tough topics, including job loss, finances, vaccines and the plight of farmers. [The Drum]

MOLOCO has launched an automated buying platform for in-house programmatic advertising that includes bid optimization and Limit Ad Tracking targeting. [AiThority]

Its never too early to get your ducks in a row. Here are six ways that the California Privacy Rights Act could impact businesses and the personal information they collect. [The National Law Review]

AdInMo struck a partnership with InMobi to supply in-game brand ads. [release]

Digitas and Weber Shandwick have become the first advertising agencies to join the Global Video Measurement Alliance. [MediaPost]

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Most Marketers Will Increase Spend In 2021; YouTube Readies Its TikTok Rival - AdExchanger

Why is my internet so slow? Here are 7 reasons and how to fix them – ZDNet

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

As working from home is now quickly becoming entrenched in the workforce, a reliable internet connection is a must.

Bandwidth is now demanded by not only our PCs, but also our mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT) products, smart TVs, gaming consoles, and streaming services. With so many of us now spending a substantial amount of time at home, especially when there are multiple people in the same property, the fight for capacity can lead to a host of connectivity issues.

Also: How to optimize your network for remote work and learning

However, it's not just a fight for access to social media or Netflix. Working remotely and homeschooling have now been added to the mix, and we are more dependent than ever on having a stable internet connection in our daily lives.

Connectivity drops, bottlenecks, slow content streaming and downloads, or simply slow speeds are all common issues with home internet.

Below, we explore seven major reasons why your internet might be slow -- and how to fix them.

A low-cost subscription from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may have once served you well for occasionally checking your email or watching a YouTube video at home. Now, when you need a connection that can manage IoT, you need to maintain a remote Microsoft Teams work meeting, your child is using Zoom while attending a virtual lesson, and another person is gaming at the same time, if you have constant speed problems, this is the first thing you should consider.

Before examining your hardware, you should make sure you are on a package that is likely to be able to cope with today's array of devices and demand. As noted by ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a minimum speed of 30Mbps is recommended.

See also: Slow Wi-Fi? 8 ways to speed up your home office network

If you are already on a package such as fiber and there's no reason why you are suffering slow internet speeds because of what you are paying for, head over to Speedtest.net to check your connection speed in real-time.

This free service will ping and check your download and upload speeds, as shown in progress below:

If you are paying for a package of up to 30Mbps and are only receiving speeds of 2 or 3Mbps, for example, it may be an issue with your ISP and physical cables. At this point, it is worth checking in with your provider to see if there is an outage in the area. Flickering lights on your router may also indicate a problem outside of your home.

However, if it is only a specific service online that you're having trouble with, go to Down for everyone or just me, type in the address, and check to see if your slow speed or failed connection to a domain is a third-party problem or outage.

There are two general categories of hardware used to connect your home: a traditional router or a mesh network.

Traditional routers take on the role of a center point to link you to your ISP service. These routers are centralized hubs that manage traffic through one access point.

Also: Mesh networking vs. traditional Wi-Fi routers: What is best for your home office?

In comparison, mesh networks are a relatively new entrant on the market that create a web of nodes for internet access. Instead of every home device connecting to one router, these products include a hub and nodes that can be dotted around different areas of your home -- and devices will connect to the closest node to access the internet.

If you are using traditional hardware, such as a default router provided by your ISP, you need to keep in mind that the further away you are, the higher the risk of connection problems, slow speeds, and dropouts. A simple solution is to move your router -- perhaps, closer to your home office -- or invest in a Wi-Fi extender to boost signal strength.

Objects, too, can impede connections between your devices and a router. If possible, try to keep clutter around your router to a minimum.

Larger properties or home offices located in a garden or yard, however, may simply not be serviceable by one centralized internet hub. If this is the case, moving your router won't be enough, and it may be time to consider a mesh network instead.

On this note, both categories can provide reasonable speeds -- but mesh networks do tend to sacrifice some speed for improved connectivity. If you require direct, high-speed connections for streaming, gaming, and power-hungry work applications, an upgrade to your standard router is a worthwhile investment and will likely perform better than a mesh setup.

There is also no point in signing up a high-speed internet plan if your old hardware cannot support it, and so you need to consider the age of your router if you are having trouble with slow speeds.

Love Glass Animals? Meet these five local legends from triple j Unearthed. – Unearthed – triple j – ABC News

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

If you hadnt heard of Glass Animals by 2020, youd be forgiven. Itd be deeply surprising, but we could let it go.

Afterall, not everyone knows every band and we all have our musical blind spots. But if thats still the case this week, then surely youve been living off grid.

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The British four piece formed back in 2010 in Oxford, led by the warbling, weird and wonderful vocals of Davey Bayley. Not content with simple writing and singing these eccentric pop songs, Dave also produces them too and has done so across the three records theyve given us across a steadily swelling career. Their debut album Zaba made waves and their second album How To Be A Human Being saw them nominated for a Mercury Award in the UK but this story really gains steam around album three, last years aptly titled Dreamland.

Featuring big singles like Tangerine and Tokyo Drifting (featuring some supreme bars from Denzel Curry) were big singles but the biggest was yet to come the almighty Heatwaves.

Fast a fan favourite, the song set ears on fire and found a steady place in many hearts going on to become first a hot favourite for a high position in the 2020 Hottest before actually winning the damn thing. But you know all that. You know this band is a big deal, you know Daves voice is magic, you know his production is criminally clever and you know that theyve had a global influence in the way theyve married hip-hop beats, pop hooks and indie vocals.

What Im here to hit you with is something new.

If You Like is a regular series from Unearthed thats seen us serve you new crme in the spirit of Lime Cordiale, Benee, Ruel and Chance The Rapper. This time round Glass Animals get the If You Like treatment and we even sat down with Dave Bayley, central figure within the band and deep music fan, who lent us his time to listen to these acts and give us his opinions on them.

Sherbert synths and thundering bass that could level cities and lower mountains. This doesnt necessarily showcase the gallop and pop sensisbilities of a Glass Animals record but that woozy wonky production is front and centre and Abraham Tilbury serves up a left of centre vocal, drenches in production, thatd do Wavey Davey proud.

"I think the voices are amazing. The vocals sounds and production are insane with crazy weird vocal delays and pitches going on. I love an 808 bass, that deep heavy bass theyve got that and my favourite thing wonky drum beats. Where the drums groove but in a really unexpected way. The snare hits in the right place, but not where you expected it. Youve got some amazing chord work in there and theres a little bit in the middle eight where the chords get really tweaked and it sent a little tingle up my spine."

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We know Glass Animals have some deep roots in US hip-hop (listen to the audio special above to hear more about that!) so naturally I had to look deeper into that side of their sound for something fun, bouncy and a little bit thicc. US born but Sydney based rapper Dante Knows partnered up producer Tasker for this crunchy club jam, a slinky, late night bumper with production that sounds like an unravelling mind. Its a little unhinged but very cool.

"Firstly, theres this combination of acoustic drums and electronic drums. I spend a lot of time trying to get analogue sounds to fit with digital sounds so Tasker crushed it. Its really hard to get those worlds to work together! Its got the bass which is great, because if a song doesnt have heavy bass Im like 'Come on, just put one 808 in'. This song paints a picture really well, I feel like Im there. The beat has a real wonk to it so its a credit to Dante Knows, in the way his words and the beat work so well together to make you feel like youre blown out of your mind in the club."

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Ok youre gonna have to bear with me here because this just might be a longbow, but I reckon if you like Glass Animals, youre going to like this song from Molly Millington. Interestingly, Molly comes at music from an entirely different launch pad to Glass Animals with a background in acoustic and folkier pop sounds. She and Sydney producer Xavier Dunn teamed up on this mad and modern record of twisted production choices and pitch shifted vocals.

"Absolutely love it. I love that song, Im gonna listen to it a lot. The production and melody are super clever, its got this childish playful nursery rhyme feel which draws you in before you realize that these lyrics are tweaked. It feels so sinister! Its got so many amazing arrangement movements, big parts, little harmonies, little beat cuts and at the very end this Sergeant Pepper Style blowout? Wicked, Im going to listen to this every morning."

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Holyoak only just recently started uploading his music to Unearthed, with his debut upload Sit Tight. Of the five tracks in this playlist, this is the one that I that sounds most perfectly in line with Glass Animals by virtue of that wobbly vocal and left-of-center hook.

"The soundscape is so well crafted, warm and fuzzy. I want to know how you got that opening bass sound, its really clever, fuzzy and psychy. Youre voice sounds wicked and reminds me of a lot of bands I grew up with. It does make me feel a bit like Im on mushies, wandering through the space of my brain."

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Meet Komang, not just the vocalist and songwriter on this track but the producer too. She says she blends groove based production with her artistry influenced by her Balinese heritage to create vibrant electronic R&B. Its hazy and thick with groove, a great new offering from this modern songwriter.

"I listened to this song at 4am last night and it just felt right. That acid bass really threw me back. When I moved to South London I got into all these bass music like Mt Kimbie, Burial and Joy Orbison and this sort of bass sound takes me back to that time when I would come home from DJing at 4am and would have a little ciggie out the window to cool off, and this would be the perfect song for that moment. The drums sound super crisp and the combination with that bass is just great."

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Love Glass Animals? Meet these five local legends from triple j Unearthed. - Unearthed - triple j - ABC News

A New Study Finds the Limits of Humans’ Ability to Control AI – HYPEBEAST

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

Humans could not stop an artificially intelligent machine from making its own decisions or predict what decisions it might make, according to a recent study out of the Max-Planck Institute for Humans and Machines. Study co-author and research group leader Manuel Cebrian understands that the concept of a human-built machine humans do not understand may sound absurd to some, but he explains that such technology is already in existence.

There are already machines that perform certain important tasks independently without programmers fully understanding how they learned it. The question therefore arises whether this could at some point become uncontrollable and dangerous for humanity, says study co-author Manuel Cebrian, per Business Insider.

Superintelligence poses different barriers than most subjects of robot ethics given their ability to adapt beyond the original scope of their programming. So, to study the problem, the research group conceived of a theoretical calculation called a containment algorithm to see whether an artificial intelligence could be controlled by programming it not to harm humans under any circumstances and to halt if the action is considered harmful. However, the researchers found that within the current bounds of computing, an air-tight algorithm to this effect could not be created; as the research group states the containment problem is incomputable.

If you break the problem down to basic rules from theoretical computer science, it turns out that an algorithm that would command an AI not to destroy the world could inadvertently halt its own operations. If this happened, you would not know whether the containment algorithm is still analyzing the threat, or whether it has stopped to contain the harmful AI. In effect, this makes the containment algorithm unusable, explains Director of the Center for Humans and Machines Iyad Rahwan.

And to extend this line of reasoning, we therefore also may not be able to predict when super-intelligent machines will evolve or even known we theyve arrived. Scientists, including at times controversial figures like Elon Musk have warned in recent years about the more nefarious potentials of powerful AI, and these questions and fears are hardly new among casual followers of tech news. Innovation in the sphere nonetheless continues, with recent project like Mercedes-Benzs 56-inch artificial intelligence hub.

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A New Study Finds the Limits of Humans' Ability to Control AI - HYPEBEAST

The Atlantic The Great Free-Speech Reversal – The Atlantic

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

These efforts to justify Trumps deplatforming by reference to social-media companies internal speech policiesand in particular, Facebooks willingness to have that decision reviewed by an independent, quasi-judicial Oversight Boardsuggest that the project of platform self-regulation is gaining traction. The important question facing internet users in the United States and around the world is whether the platforms self-regulation will be sufficient to protect the important democratic and expressive freedoms that the American free-speech tradition cares about.

There are reasons to be skeptical that self-regulation will be enough. Perhaps the primary reason is the fact that, notwithstanding their presumably sincere commitment to freedom of speech, social-media companies are, in the end, for-profit entities that offer a forum for speech in order to make money. Will they protect expressive freedom even when it conflicts with corporate profits? Conversely, outside the extraordinary circumstances of the Capitol invasion, will they take down genuinely harmful speech that brings readers to their platforms? Past history suggests that the answer to both of these questions will be no. Certainly the oftenad hoc and inconsistent decision making that the platforms demonstrated during the 2020 election campaign is alone concerning.

Given all of this, it is worth considering a third option that has been used in the past, and could once again be used, to protect expressive freedom from private power: laws requiring that the private media companies governing the mass public sphere abide by basic nondiscrimination and, often, due-process obligations. Even when the First Amendment intruded further into the private sphere than it does today, statutory nondiscrimination and due-process requirements were lawmakers primary tools to ensure that the private companies that controlled the telegraph and telephone wires, the radio and television airwaves, and the cable networks did not use their power to discriminate in favor of certain political viewpoints, or otherwise undermine the vitality of public debate. The most famous, and controversial, example of these laws was the Fairness Doctrine, which imposed extensive, if vague, nondiscrimination duties on radio and television broadcasters, and to an extent, cable-television companies, from the 1930s until the late 80s, when Ronald Reagans FCC repealed it. But the Fairness Doctrine is only one example of a much wider array of media nondiscrimination laws, many of which continue to ensure, to this day, that, as one senator put it in 1926, the few men who control the great publicity vehicles of radio and television do not limit the range of ideas and viewpoints that the public can hear.

In this context as well, a significant shift in political attitudes has occurred. For much of the 20th century, conservatives were the ones who railed against the constraints that federal laws like the Fairness Doctrine imposed on private media companies, and liberals and progressives defended these policies against attack. Today, however, many conservatives argue for the need to impose statutory nondiscrimination duties on social-media companies, while many liberals express alarm about the constraints such bills would impose on the freedom of private companies.

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The Atlantic The Great Free-Speech Reversal - The Atlantic

CNN proves the left doesnt believe in freedom of speech, only freedom of reach as media targeted in wake of Capitol riot – RT

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

Numerous lawmakers and media talking heads have called for more control over speech under the facade of combating misinformation since the US Capitol riot on January 6, and a new CNN segment has taken things even further.

After noting that words like censorship were spewed on right-wing news networks like Fox News and Newsmax hundreds of times during the month of January, CNNs Brian Stelter ironically the host of a show called Reliable Sources launched into one of the most offensive, unintelligent, and blatantly anti-free speech diatribes ever aired on the network.

While some cry, cancel culture, let me suggest a different way to think about this: a harm reduction model, he told his audience.

He went on to note that most people want accurate news and rational views.

In that healthy environment...then we can have great fights about taxes, and regulation, and healthcare, and all the rest, he said.

Stelter seemed to praise tech companies targeting and suppressing what they deem to be disinformation about topics like the Covid-19 pandemic and election fraud, and he then launched into a further rebranding of cancel culture.

Reducing a liars reach is not the same as censoring freedom of speech; freedom of speech is different than freedom of reach, Stelter noted.

If freedom of reach sounds like a fancy way to excuse suppressing someones freedom to express their views while never quite fully admitting youre stopping their freedom of speech specifically, thats because it is. This is word vomit that was luckily called out by many who noted Stelters arguments fly in the face of legal precedents and the Constitution, but sadly, this is only the latest call from a liberal public figure for more censorship in the wake of the US Capitol riot, which is being blown up and used as an excuse to target freedoms.

The Washington Posts Max Boot recently called for the deplatforming of influencers found to be spreading disinformation in a column.

We need to shut down the influencers who radicalize people and set them on the path toward violence and sedition, he wrote, an argument that suggests some sort of policing body needs to keep journalists accountable to incredibly vague standards all in the name of public health.

Even worse, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has suggested a government solution to the problem, arguing in the wake of the riot during which she claims she feared fellow conservative lawmakers would turn her over to protesters that we're going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can't just spew disinformation and misinformation. She said a truth and reconciliation committee is being discussed to push media literacy.

Those are very open-ended, but frightening words from someone holding elected office.

Cancel culture is nothing new. Mostly conservatives have argued for years about the tactics used in both politics and Hollywood to suppress voices that dont toe the liberal narrative line, but we have reached a dangerous point where liberals are not even denying its existence as they used to. They are now using the Capitol riot as an inciting incident for them to kick off a brand new chapter in their crusade to silence voices that disagree with them.

They have a new strategy now, one that is centralized around the supposed dangers of misinformation and disinformation and they will always point to the riot as proof of their wildest fears, using it to justify the suppression of freedoms, just as defenders of the war on terror and the surveillance state will always point to 9/11 to justify their blind eye toward the Constitution and individual freedoms.

We have given up rights and power before to loud talking heads and lawmakers spewing fear-mongering rhetoric, and such compromises never work. Lost freedoms are rarely, if ever, returned. We must be careful now as we are entering a dangerous ground where the table is so clearly being set for serious censorship pushed by the mainstream media and implemented by the government or big tech, and liberals are hungrier now more than ever since they can exploit Januarys riot to justify their single-minded authoritarianism.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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CNN proves the left doesnt believe in freedom of speech, only freedom of reach as media targeted in wake of Capitol riot - RT

Reggie Jackson blasts Curt Schilling over Hall controversy: Freedom of speech got you freed out of the Hall of Fame – The Boston Globe

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

Former Yankees slugger Reggie Jackson said that when it comes to Curt Schilling falling short of the Hall of Fame, he only has himself to blame.

Jackson, who was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1993, told NJ.com Schilling shouldnt blame anyone but himself when it comes to him not reaching Cooperstown.

I would say to Curt, Look at what you did. You took yourself out of the Hall of Fame because of what you say and how to express yourself and how you think, he said. Freedom of speech is great, but we cant have a country with white supremacy, Nazis, Black Panthers, racist stuff and anti-Semitics. We cant have people wearing swastikas because its a freedom of expression. Come on!

Freedom of speech got you freed out of the Hall of Fame. Freedom of speech got your [expletive] out of Cooperstown, bro!

Schilling has been an outspoken conservative on social media, and has used his platforms to promote the QAnon conspiracy theory. Earlier this month, he expressed support for the insurgent attack on the US Capitol.

I dont care if Schilling is conservative or not conservative, Jackson said. That doesnt have anything to do with the fact that hes stepping out on the balcony and yelling out something to defame Jews or Muslims or any other ethnicity or gender. Curt, get away from here with that.

Earlier this month, Schilling drew 285 of the 401 votes cast, 71.1 percent 16 votes short of election. In an open letter to the Hall of Fame, he asked to be taken off the ballot in 2022.

Christopher Price can be reached at christopher.price@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at cpriceglobe.

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Reggie Jackson blasts Curt Schilling over Hall controversy: Freedom of speech got you freed out of the Hall of Fame - The Boston Globe

Does Freedom of Speech Exist in Cryptocurrency Communities? – hackernoon.com

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

"A statement may be both true and dangerous. The previous sentence is such a statement." - David Friedman

Freedom of speech is a topic that many internet communities have struggled with over the last two decades. Cryptocurrency and blockchain communities, a major part of their raison d'etre being censorship resistance, are especially poised to value free speech very highly, and yet, over the last few years, the extremely rapid growth of these communities and the very high financial and social stakes involved have repeatedly tested the application and the limits of the concept.

In this post, I aim to disentangle some of the contradictions, and make a case what the norm of "free speech" really stands for.

A common, and in my own view frustrating, argument that I often hear is that "freedom of speech" is exclusively a legal restriction on what governments can act against, and has nothing to say regarding the actions of private entities such as corporations, privately-owned platforms, internet forums and conferences.

One of the larger examples of "private censorship" in cryptocurrency communities was the decision of Theymos, the moderator of the /r/bitcoin subreddit, to start heavily moderating the subreddit, forbidding arguments in favor of increasing the Bitcoin blockchain's transaction capacity via a hard fork.

Here is a timeline of the censorship as catalogued by John Blocke: https://medium.com/johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43

Here is Theymos's post defending his policies: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h9cq4/its_time_for_a_break_about_the_recent_mess/, including the now infamous line "If 90% of /r/Bitcoin users find these policies to be intolerable, then I want these 90% of /r/Bitcoin users to leave".

A common strategy used by defenders of Theymos's censorship was to say that heavy-handed moderation is okay because /r/bitcoin is "a private forum" owned by Theymos, and so he has the right to do whatever he wants in it; those who dislike it should move to other forums:

And it's true that Theymos has not broken any laws by moderating his forum in this way. But to most people, it's clear that there is still some kind of free speech violation going on. So what gives? First of all, it's crucially important to recognize that freedom of speech is not just a law in some countries. It's also a social principle.

And the underlying goal of the social principle is the same as the underlying goal of the law: to foster an environment where the ideas that win are ideas that are good, rather than just ideas that happen to be favored by people in a position of power. And governmental power is not the only kind of power that we need to protect from; there is also a corporation's power to fire someone, an internet forum moderator's power to delete almost every post in a discussion thread, and many other kinds of power hard and soft.

So what is the underlying social principle here? Quoting Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Slatestarcodex elaborates:

That said, sometimes there is a rationale for "safe spaces" where people who, for whatever reason, just don't want to deal with arguments of a particular type, can congregate and where those arguments actually do get silenced. Perhaps the most innocuous of all is spaces like ethresear.ch where posts get silenced just for being "off topic" to keep the discussion focused. But there's also a dark side to the concept of "safe spaces"; as Ken White writes:

Aha. So making your own safe space off in a corner is totally fine, but there is also this concept of a "public space", and trying to turn a public space into a safe space for one particular special interest is wrong. So what is a "public space"? It's definitely clear that a public space is not just "a space owned and/or run by a government"; the concept of privately owned public spaces is a well-established one.

This is true even informally: it's a common moral intuition, for example, that it's less bad for a private individual to commit violations such as discriminating against races and genders than it is for, say, a shopping mall to do the same. In the case or the /r/bitcoin subreddit, one can make the case, regardless of who technically owns the top moderator position in the subreddit, that the subreddit very much is a public space. A few arguments particularly stand out:

If, instead, Theymos had created a subreddit called /r/bitcoinsmallblockers, and explicitly said that it was a curated space for small block proponents and attempting to instigate controversial hard forks was not welcome, then it seems likely that very few people would have seen anything wrong about this.

They would have opposed his ideology, but few (at least in blockchain communities) would try to claim that it's improper for people with ideologies opposed to their own to have spaces for internal discussion. But back in reality, Theymos tried to "annex a public space and demand that people within the space confirm to his private norms", and so we have the Bitcoin community block size schism, a highly acrimonious fork and chain split, and now a cold peace between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

About a year ago at Deconomy I publicly shouted down Craig Wright, a scammer claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, finishing my explanation of why the things he says make no sense with the question "why is this fraud allowed to speak at this conference?"

Of course, Craig Wright's partisans replied back with.... accusations of censorship:

Did I try to "silence" Craig Wright? I would argue, no. One could argue that this is because "Deconomy is not a public space", but I think the much better argument is that a conference is fundamentally different from an internet forum.

An internet forum can actually try to be a fully neutral medium for discussion where anything goes; a conference, on the other hand, is by its very nature a highly curated list of presentations, allocating a limited number of speaking slots and actively channeling a large amount of attention to those lucky enough to get a chance to speak. A conference is an editorial act by the organizers, saying "here are some ideas and views that we think people really should be exposed to and hear".

Every conference "censors" almost every viewpoint because there's not enough space to give them all a chance to speak, and this is inherent to the format; so raising an objection to a conference's judgement in making its selections is absolutely a legitimate act.

This extends to other kinds of selective platforms. Online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube already engage in active selection through algorithms that influence what people are more likely to be recommended. Typically, they do this for selfish reasons, setting up their algorithms to maximize "engagement" with their platform, often with unintended byproducts like promoting flat earth conspiracy theories.

So given that these platforms are already engaging in (automated) selective presentation, it seems eminently reasonable to criticize them for not directing these same levers toward more pro-social objectives, or at the least pro-social objectives that all major reasonable political tribes agree on (eg. quality intellectual discourse).

Additionally, the "censorship" doesn't seriously block anyone's ability to learn Craig Wright's side of the story; you can just go visit their website, here you go: https://coingeek.com/. If someone is already operating a platform that makes editorial decisions, asking them to make such decisions with the same magnitude but with more pro-social criteria seems like a very reasonable thing to do.

A more recent example of this principle at work is the #DelistBSV ampaign, where some cryptocurrency exchanges, most famously Binance, removed support for trading BSV (the Bitcoin fork promoted by Craig Weight). Once again, many people, even reasonable people, accused this campaign of being an exercise in censorship, raising parallels to credit card companies blocking Wikileaks:

I personally have been a critic of the power wielded by centralized exchanges. Should I oppose #DelistBSV on free speech grounds? I would argue no, it's ok to support it, but this is definitely a much closer call.

Many #DelistBSV participants like Kraken are definitely not "anything-goes" platforms; they already make many editorial decisions about which currencies they accept and refuse. Kraken only accepts about a dozen currencies, so they are passively "censoring" almost everyone. Shapeshift supports more currencies but it does not support SPANK, or even KNC. So in these two cases, delisting BSV is more like reallocation of a scarce resource (attention/legitimacy) than it is censorship.

Binance is a bit different; it does accept a very large array of cryptocurrencies, adopting a philosophy much closer to anything-goes, and it does have a unique position as market leader with a lot of liquidity.

That said, one can argue two things in Binance's favor. First of all, censorship is retaliating against a truly malicious exercise of censorship on the part of core BSV community members when they threatened critics like Peter McCormack with legal letters (see Peter's response); in "anarchic" environments with large disagreements on what the norms are, "an eye for an eye" in-kind retaliation is one of the better social norms to have because it ensures that people only face punishments that they in some sense have through their own actions demonstrated they believe are legitimate.

Furthermore, the delistings won't make it that hard for people to buy or sell BSV; Coinex has said that they will not delist (and I would actually oppose second-tier "anything-goes" exchanges delisting). But the delistings do send a strong message of social condemnation of BSV, which is useful and needed. So there's a case to support all delistings so far, though on reflection, Binance refusing to delist "because freedom" would have also been not as unreasonable as it seems at first glance.

It's in general absolutely potentially reasonable to oppose the existence of a concentration of power, but support that concentration of power being used for purposes that you consider prosocial as long as that concentration exists; see Bryan Caplan's exposition on reconciling supporting open borders and also supporting anti-ebola restrictions for an example in a different field.

Opposing concentrations of power only requires that one believe those concentrations of power to be on balance harmful and abusive; it does not mean that one must oppose all things that those concentrations of power do.

If someone manages to make a completely permissionless cross-chain decentralized exchange that facilitates trade between any asset and any other asset, then being "listed" on the exchange would not send a social signal, because everyone is listed; and I would support such an exchange existing even if it supports trading BSV. The thing that I do support is BSV being removed from already exclusive positions that confer higher tiers of legitimacy than simple existence.

So to conclude: censorship in public spaces bad, even if the public spaces are non-governmental; censorship in genuinely private spaces (especially spaces that are not "defaults" for a broader community) can be okay; ostracizing projects with the goal and effect of denying access to them, bad; ostracizing projects with the goal and effect of denying them scarce legitimacy can be okay.

Originally published as On Free Speech with the WTFPL license

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Does Freedom of Speech Exist in Cryptocurrency Communities? - hackernoon.com

JADES will go deeper than the Hubble Deep Fields – EarthSky

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (in its eXtreme version) is the deepest view of the universe yet obtained and will be, until JADES takes over. It stretches approximately 13 billion light-years and includes approximately 10,000 galaxies. It took 11.3 days for the Hubble Space Telescope to collect these ancient photons. Try downloading the largest version and zoom in on different sections. Were seeing these galaxies as they were billions of years ago. How might they look today? Image via NASA/ ESA/ S. Beckwith (STSci)/ HUDF team.

Astronomers announced a new deeper-than-ever sky survey this month (January 15, 2021), to be conducted with the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble telescopes successor, scheduled for launch in October of this year. The new survey is abbreviated JADES, which is short for James Webb Space Telescope Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey. The survey will be like the Hubble Deep Fields, but deeper still. Its main goal is to see far away in space and thus far back into the very young universe and image it just at the end of the so-called Cosmic Dark Ages, that is, at the time when gas in the universe went from being opaque to transparent. This is also the time when the very first stars were forming very large, massive and bright stars in a veritable firestorm of star birth when the young universe was less than 5% of its current age.

The 2021 lunar calendars are here. Order yours before theyre gone!

The Webb telescope will be located near the second Lagrange point a relatively stable region of space, gravitationally speaking, known as L2 some 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) from Earth. To conduct the new survey, the Webb telescope will be staring at a small point of space for nearly 800 hours (approximately 33 days) to be able to see fainter objects than those ever seen before and thus to find the first generation of galaxies. Astronomers want to know, among other things, how fast did these galaxies form, and how fast did their stars form? They also want to look for the very first supermassive black holes, which are thought to lie at the hearts of nearly all large galaxies, including our Milky Way.

The long-anticipated launch of the James Webb Space Telescope has been postponed a number of times for a variety of reasons, most recently because of effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is the formal successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, but is equipped with instrumentation able to image further into the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum than Hubble could.

This capability also makes it a worthy successor to the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope which recently went into retirement.

What makes the infrared part of the spectrum so important for surveys like JADES? If you look really deep, you will also look back in time, and the farther back in time you look, the more redshifted the galaxies are (the farther away they are, the faster they move away from us, and the more their light has been shifted towards the red part of the spectrum). This means that the light we want to observe, originally in the optical (visible) part of the electromagnetic spectrum, might not even show much in the optical part anymore. Instead, its been shifted to longer wavelengths, into the infrared regime.

In other words, the use of infrared cameras is necessary to be able to see the light from the first generation of galaxies. Daniel Eisenstein, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University, said:

Galaxies, we think, begin building up in the first billion years after the Big Bang, and sort of reach adolescence at 1 to 2 billion years. Were trying to investigate those early periods. We must do this with an infrared-optimized telescope because the expansion of the universe causes light to increase in wavelength as it traverses the vast distance to reach us. So even though the stars are emitting light primarily in optical and ultraviolet wavelengths, that light is shifted quite relentlessly out into the infrared. Only Webb can get to the depth and sensitivity thats needed to study these early galaxies.

In fact, the James Webb Space Telescope was built specifically for this purpose. Up to now, infrared images are much less resolved less clear than optical images, because of their longer wavelength. With its much larger collecting area, the Webb will be able to image, in infrared, at the same resolution detail that Hubble could obtain in the optical part of the spectrum.

Get ready for a whole new set of mind-blowing images of the universe, this time in the infrared, from Webb!

After having successfully deployed its solar panels precisely as its supposed to do once its in space the Webb telescope is shown here ready for the final tests on December 17, 2020, at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center. Then it will be packed up and transported to French Guyana, to be launched on October 31, 2021, via an Ariane V rocket. Image via NASA/ Chris Gunn.

The use of deep field surveys is a young science, for two reasons. First, astronomers didnt have the right instrumentation before Hubble to do them. Second, its also because no one initially knew the result of staring into a piece of empty space for a long time. Such a long stare into the unknown would require valuable observation time, and if this long observation didnt produce any results, it would be considered a waste.

But in 1995, Robert Williams, then the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSci), which administrates the Hubble telescope, decided to use his directors discretionary time to point the Hubble toward a very small and absolutely empty-looking part of the sky in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major the Great Bear. There were no stars visible from our Milky Way (or extremely few), no nearby galaxies visible in the field, and no visible gas clouds. Hubble collected photons for 10 consecutive days, and the result, the Hubble Deep Field, was a success and a paradigm changer: A patch of sky about as small as the eye of George Washington on an American quarter (25-cent coin) held out at arms length, showed a 10 billion-light-years-long tunnel back in time with a plethora of galaxies around 3,000 of them at different evolutionary stages along the way. The field of observational cosmology was born.

This was done again in 1998 with the Hubble telescope pointed to the southern sky (Hubble Deep Field South), and the result was the same. Thus we learned that the universe is uniform over large scales.

Next was the installation of a new, powerful camera on Hubble (the Advanced Camera for Surveys) in 2002. The incredible Hubble Ultra Deep Field was acquired in 2004, in a similarly small patch of sky near the constellation Orion, about 1/10 of a full moon diameter (2.4 x 3.4 arc minutes, in contrast to the original Hubble Deep Fields north and south, which were 2.6 x 2.6 arc minutes). And so our reach was extended even deeper into space, and even further back in time, showing light from 10 thousand galaxies along a 13-billion-light-years-long tunnel of space. If youll remember that the universe is about 13.77 billion years old, youll see this is getting us really close to the beginning!

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field was the most sensitive astronomical image ever made at wavelengths of visible (optical) light until 2012, when an even more refined version was released, called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, which reached even farther: 13.2 billion years back in time.

The JADES survey will be observed in two batches, one on the northern sky and one on the southern in two famous fields called GOODS North and South (abbreviated from Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey).

Marcia Rieke, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona who co-leads the JADES Team with Pierre Ferruit of the European Space Agency (ESA), explained:

We chose these fields because they have such a great wealth of supporting information. Theyve been studied at many other wavelengths, so they were the logical ones to do.

View larger. | Look closely. Every single speck of light in this image is a distant galaxy (except for the very few ones with spikes which are foreground stars). This telescopic field of view is part of the GOODS South field. Its one of the directions in space thatll be observed in JADES, a new survey that aims to study the very first galaxies to appear in the infancy of the universe. Image via NASA/ Hubble Space Telescope/ James Webb Space Telescope site.

The GOODS fields have been observed with several of the most famous telescopes, covering a great wavelength range from infrared through optical to X-ray. They are not fully as deep (the observations dont reach as far back) as the Ultra Deep Field, but cover a larger area of the sky (4-5 times larger) and are the most data-rich areas of the sky in terms of depth combined with wavelength coverage. By the way, the first deep field, HDF-N, is located in the GOODS north image, and the Ultra deep field/eXtreme (dont you love these names?) is located in the GOODS south field.

There are a large number of ambitious science goals for the JADES program pertaining to the composition of the first galaxies, including the first generation of supermassive black holes. How these came about at such an early time is a mystery. As well, the transition of gas from neutral and opaque to transparent and ionized, something astronomers call the epoch of reionization, is not well understood. JADES team member Andrew Bunker, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who is also part of the ESA team behind the Webb telescope, said:

This transition is a fundamental phase change in the nature of the universe. We want to understand what caused it. It could be that its the light from very early galaxies and the first burst of star formation It is kind of one of the Holy Grails, to find the so-called Population III stars that formed from the hydrogen and helium of the Big Bang.

People have been trying to do this for many decades and results have been inconclusive so far.

But, hopefully, not for much longer!

Bottom line: JADES is an ambitious new deep sky survey to be observed with the James Webb Space Telescope, once launched. It will reach further back in time and space than any survey before, to study the very first generation of galaxies after the universe transitioned from opaque to transparent.

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JADES will go deeper than the Hubble Deep Fields - EarthSky

Space-themed decor brings heavens indoors – Jacksonville Journal-Courier

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

Kim Cook Associated Press

Rachel Magana, senior visual designer at the sustainable furniture-rental company Fernish, says she picked up some cosmological decorating ideas from a colleagues recent nursery project. Base your color palette around deep blue tones, then splash in bits of color like yellow, white or red.

Photo: Dustin Walker Photography | Fernish (via AP)

Space-themed decor brings heavens indoors

It was a tough year here on Earth, but 2020 was a bright spot for space exploration. SpaceX sent its futuristic Starship to new heights, three countries launched Mars missions, and robots grabbed debris from the moon and an asteroid.

Next year promises more, including a planned launch of the Hubble Space Telescopes successor.

Perhaps its no surprise then that space themes are having a moment in home decor. When so many of us Earthlings are stuck at home because of the pandemic, space imagery can add a sense of adventure or whimsy to rooms, walls and ceilings.

Ive done outer space, and starry skies, says New York interior designer Patrice Hoban. My clients love using stars as a backdrop in nurseries. Ive also worked with glow-paint to add an extra pop to kids rooms and home theaters.

She sticks tiny glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling; the light can last for hours. Its the closest thing Ive found to being in a planetarium, she says.

Rachel Magana, senior visual designer at the sustainable furniture-rental company Fernish, picked up some cosmological decorating ideas from a colleagues recent nursery project.

Base your color palette around deep blue tones, then splash in bits of color like yellow, white or red, she says.

Or create your own galaxy wall, she says. Paint a blue wall, then use some watered-down white paint to splatter it with fine droplets. You may just create some new constellations.

She suggests adding fun, space-agey lamps, and vintage NASA posters.

Outer space has inspired designers for decades. In the 1960s, the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, along with the development of space age-y, synthetic materials, led to a surge in futuristic furniture like molded plastic chairs and Sputnik-shaped lighting.

These days, you can download artwork directly from NASA at solarsystem.nasa.gov, or find it at retailers like Red Bubble, Etsy and Zazzle.

Magana also suggests making a letter board with a space-themed quote like Neil Armstrongs famous One small step for man phrase.

Much of the astronomy-themed art in the marketplace would be striking in any room. There are lunar graphics on canvas at Target. Tempapers got constellation wallpapers, but if you cant do wallpaper, consider Kenna Sato Designs constellation decals for walls or ceilings.

Galaxy Lamps has a sphere that looks like a planetoid. Charge it up with the included USB and cycle through 16 colors with three lighting modes. Theres a moon version, too. And at Beautiful Halo, find a collection of rocket-ship ceiling fixtures.

German designer Jan Kath has created a rug collection called Spacecrafted inspired by imagery of gas clouds and asteroid nebulae from the Hubble telescope.

Studio Greytak, in Missoula, Montana, has designed a Jupiter lamp out of the mineral aragonite, depicting the whirling, turbulent gases of the planet. And theres the Impact table, where a chunk of desert rose crystals is embedded with cast glass, as though a piece of asteroid had plunged into a pool.

Zodiac wall decals and a Milky Way throw rug can be found at Project Nursery. There are hanging mobiles of the planets and of stars and clouds, at both Crate & Kids and Pottery Barn Kids.

A glow-in-the-dark duvet cover printed with the solar system is also at PBK, but if youre ready to really head to the stars, check out Snurk Livings duvet set. The studio, owned by Dutch designers Peggy van Neer and Erik van Loo, has designed the set photoprinted with a life-size astronaut suit.

Creating a night sky on the ceiling of a home theater seems to be popular; Houzz has hundreds of examples for inspiration.

Maydan Architects in Palo Alto, California, designed one for a recent project.

Our clients grandfather was the owner of multiple movie theaters, says Mary Maydan. One of them had a retractable ceiling that enabled guests to experience the starry sky at night. When our client decided to build their home theater, this installation was actually fulfilling a lifelong dream.

The ceiling isnt retractable, but has an eight-paneled fixture depicting the Milky Way and a shooting star.

It provides very soft light and was intended to be kept on during the screening of the movie and create a magical experience, says Maydan.

Space-themed decor brings heavens indoors - Jacksonville Journal-Courier

Space-themed decor brings the heavens indoors – The Columbian

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

This year promises more, including a planned launch of the Hubble Space Telescopes successor.

She sticks tiny glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling. Its the closest thing Ive found to being in a planetarium, she says.

Rachel Magana, senior visual designer at the sustainable furniture-rental company Fernish, picked up some cosmological decorating ideas from a colleagues recent nursery project.

Base your color palette around deep blue tones, then splash in bits of color like yellow, white or red, she says.

Or create your own galaxy wall, she says. Paint a blue wall, then use some watered-down white paint to splatter it with fine droplets. You may just create some new constellations.

She suggests adding fun, space-aged lamps, and vintage NASA posters.

These days, you can download artwork directly from NASA: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov, or find it at retailers like Red Bubble, Etsy and Zazzle.

Magana also suggests making a letter board with a space-themed quote like Neil Armstrongs famous One small step for man phrase.

German designer Jan Kath has created a rug collection called Spacecrafted inspired by imagery of gas clouds and asteroid nebulae from the Hubble telescope.

Studio Greytak, in Missoula, Mont., has designed a Jupiter lamp out of the mineral aragonite, depicting the whirling, turbulent gases of the planet. And theres the Impact table, where a chunk of desert rose crystals is embedded with cast glass, as though a piece of asteroid had plunged into a pool.

Zodiac wall decals and a Milky Way throw rug can be found at Project Nursery. There are hanging mobiles of the planets and of stars and clouds, at both Crate & Kids and Pottery Barn Kids.

Creating a night sky on the ceiling of a home theater seems to be popular; Houzz has hundreds of examples for inspiration.

Read the original here:

Space-themed decor brings the heavens indoors - The Columbian

Good morning, Starshine! Scroll through the universe with the most iconic images of space – Hindustan Times

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

Its a big year for astrophysicists. In October, NASA will launch the worlds largest, most powerful observatory into space. The James Webb Space Telescope, much delayed, much redesigned, has already cost $9 billion. But when its been installed just beyond the Moons orbit, its infrared sensors will peer through interstellar gas and dust, to see deeper into space than mankind has ever been able to.

The Moon, at the speed of light, is just over a second away. The Sun is eight minutes away. As you look further into space, youre essentially looking further back in time, seeing objects not as they are, but as they were when the light that youre seeing first left them.

Just as, theoretically, you could be looking at stars in the sky that have long since died, NASA says the new telescope can look far enough to see what stars, galaxies and solar systems looked like in the first billion years after the Big Bang (which occurred over 13 billion years ago). Crucially, a specially developed on-board camera will beam images back in high resolution. Pics or it didnt happen, right?

If youve been paying attention to the heavens, or at least astronomy news, youll have noticed how much clearer our views of space have become in the last few years. Until the 1990s, images of the cosmos looked like the inside of a discotheque random pinpoints of bright light, bright blurry patches, mists of pinks, blues and purples.

Since then, space agencies and observatories have zoomed in on multicolour nebulas, starbursts, black holes, the Sun in close-up and the moons on Mars. The Hubble Telescope, launched into low-Earth orbit in 1990, has revealed the depths of the universe with better and better clarity. The New Horizons spacecraft flying by Pluto, 3 billion miles away, revealed in 2015 that the dwarf planet has a heart-shaped feature on its side.

Varun Bhalerao, assistant professor with the department of physics at IIT-Bombay and a scientist who worked on Indias first robotic telescope in 2018, says visuals are integral to the field. Astronomy, because of its nature and scale, has no control over its experiments we cant fast-forward to see how the Sun might evolve. So observation is everything.

No ones looking through telescopes to make those observations, anymore. Complex machines, often working in tandem with dozens of others, do the peering, measuring and data-collecting instead. And as theyve improved, so has the view. The visualised data bridges the gap between academic knowledge and what one would see in space. Its not unlike discovering a work of art like the Mona Lisa, and seeing a whole new world, Bhalerao says.

Those pictures have a history of changing life on Earth. Copernicuss sketches indicating that it was the Sun, not the Earth, at the centre of the universe, shook the foundations of 16th-century Europe and brought about a scientific revolution. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, didnt pack a camera in his Vostok capsule in 1961. But the Apollo 8 crew, headed to the Moon in 1968, did. Their photo, Earthrise, depicting Earth peeking over the desolate lunar surface, showed us for the first time just how fragile this planet is, reminded us that it is all we have, and helped popularise the environmental movement.

SPECKS AND SPECIFICATIONS

Taking a photo in space isnt quite a point-and-shoot affair. Even on the International Space Station, orbiting only 408 km above Earths surface, the Suns too bright, shadows too stark, and everything goes by too fast theres a sunrise and sunset every 90 minutes. But visiting astronauts now get mandatory training on how to operate the dozens of on-board, always-on cameras to take the best shots of a changing Earth. As a result, theyve captured erupting volcanoes, Australias wildfires, snow melting off the Himalayas and coastlines as theyve changed over time.

For objects far, far away, such as the nearest black hole a dark something in a sea of dark nothing its a waiting game. Eight telescopes across Earth collaborated to create the 2019 image of the supermassive black hole and its shadow (the dark space in the centre, the point of no return) in the centre of the galaxy, M87. And even after the pictures were taken, it took two years to collect and process them the data was too large to transfer online.

Because everything is moving in space rotating, revolving, exploding, expanding or collapsing even familiar objects take time to capture. To shoot the icy, gritty rings on Saturn, our solar systems most photogenic inhabitant, the spacecraft Cassini spent at least a decade examining them more closely. It needed to find an angle that looked straight through the rings, and take enough shots to piece together the composite of translucent arcs that we finally saw in 2018.

For scientists like Bhalerao, the images are a way to see the world outside the numbers and calibrations that typically fill an astronomers day. For us, usually, seeing the data is enough to fill us with wonder kind of like a composer who can hear the aria in their mind using only the sheet music, he says. But its quite something to see how vast the Andromeda galaxy is, or how brightly the young stars shine in the Pillars of Creation nebula. Its a breath-taking side-effect. And it makes you wonder who we are and our relationship with the cosmos.

SEEING HEAVEN IN YOUR VIEWFINDER

1. What on Earth is a Magnetar? Its not on Earth; its in space. The little purple dot right in the centre is a dense star with the most powerful magnetic field in the universe. How magnetic? About 100 million times stronger than the most powerful magnets made by humans. We only know of 31 of these, and discovered this Magnetar, known as J1818.0-1607, last year. Its 500 years old, so probably among the youngest out there. It pulses bright and spins furiously, about 21,000 light years away. Scientists combined X-rays from the Chandra satellite telescope and infrared data from other observatories to create this composite, the first high-resolution image of J18, released on January 8, 2021.

2. Who knew that our sun was a glowing mosaic up close? The Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, the worlds most powerful tool for observing the sun, started sending out test images only in January 2020. This is its best work, the highest-resolution image ever taken of the Sun from Earth. Those yellow bits (each as vast as the Indo-Gangetic plain), are hot plasma cells turbulently rising from inside the star. The dark borders indicate where plasma is cooling and sinking. The original image, if you printed it, would cover an area of 36,500 sq km you could literally look at it for days.

3. A swirly side to Mars: This image was acquired a week before Christmas 2020. It looked like the red planet was getting into the festive mood too. The European Space Agencys Mars Express probe used a high-resolution stereo camera to capture what looks like a haloed angel sinking into cappuccino foam at Marss watery south pole. Notice the heart on her side? Its a dark mineral field. Mars Express has been orbiting our neighbour since 2003. This image, along with thousands of others, has helped us understand its geography better.

4. Star trails of a local kind: What are we looking at? Earth, in fast forward. NASA astronaut Christina Koch, on board the International Space Station, took over 200 photos in a span of six minutes in October 2019, as the ISS travelled over Namibia towards the Red Sea. This resulting time-lapse composite features both natural and artificial lights. See the thin tread marks? The yellow-and-white dotted streaks are city lights. The dark orange strips are from fires in Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. White splotches are lightning storms. And the arcs are from stars in space, with a few travelling satellites thrown in.

5. A smorgasbord of sky: With the human eye, youll see, at best, only half the sky, a hemisphere oriented to where youre standing. But in December 2020, scientists compiled data from more than 1.8 billion stars to plot a 360-degree-view map of the sky. The European Space Agencys Gaia satellite drew on the colour and brightness of stars it has observed since 2013. Its a lot to take in at once. Bright areas indicate dense star clusters, dark patches occur where the stars are fewer and fainter. The bright strip is our Milky Way. Were somewhere in there.

6. By Jove, hes stormy! Weve been looking at Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, since at least the 7th century BCE. By 1610 CE, Galileo had used a telescope to discover four of its largest moons; weve since counted 79. Then sharper telescopes spotted the storm larger than Earth that forms its Great Red Spot. Weve been flying past and sneaking peeks since 1973, but its only in August 2020 that the Hubble Space Telescope offered this detailed look at its atmosphere. The weather report: A new storm brewing under the Great Red Spot. Researchers are calling it Red Spot Jr. The new image also features the Jupiter moon Europa. Therell be even better views soon. The European Space Agencys Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer is due to launch in 2022, and NASAs Europa Clipper mission will follow two years later.

7. All the space you need: In many ways, this is the image that started it all. In January 2015, NASA released to the public its highest-quality picture, an image of our neighbouring spiral galaxy, Andromeda, 2.5 million light years away. It is massive, made up of 1.5 billion pixels. To view it without zooming out, youd need 600 HD TV screens. The composite draws on photographs taken by the Hubble Telescope over three years, from more than 411 points, and has been helping scientists make precision studies of large spiral galaxies. There are 100 million stars in the image, any one of which could harbour planets that support life.

8. One of our own: Finally, beautiful images of space from an Indian programme. When ISRO launched its Mars Orbiter Mission in 2013, there was trepidation. Only the Soviet Union, the United States and the European Space Agency had sent voyagers to Mars none had succeeded on their first attempt. But in 2014, our spacecraft entered the Red Planets orbit, making us blush with pride. On board was the Mars Colour Camera, designed to closely study the planets morphological features and atmospheric phenomena. It went to work immediately, beaming back these gorgeous shots in its first year. Over the years, the orbiter has set back some 1,000 images, enough for ISRO to fill an atlas. Weve had rare glimpses of Marss clouds and dust; the dark side of its moon, Deimos; and as recently as July 2020, its other moon Phobos. Not bad for a mission that was expected to last only six months.

VIEW A SLIDESHOW OF MORE IMAGES HERE

9. How a star explodes and dies: The elements that make up life on Earth come from inside the furnaces of stars and the explosions that mark their deaths. Which is why researchers are fascinated by supernovas and their remnants, and are so interested in Cassiopeia A, the debris of a starburst 11,000 light years away, which possibly exploded in 1680. Because a supernova is millions of degrees hot, their glow needs X-ray vision that Earth-based telescopes cant manage. Thankfully, NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory has been orbiting Earth since 1999. Its mirrors pick up X-rays 100 times better. Chandra made 16 pointings at Cas A between 2000 and 2010. In 2017 it released this image capturing the volume and locations of silicon (red), sulphur (yellow), calcium (green) and iron (purple). The blue veins show high-energy X-ray emission. That blue outer ring is an expanding blast wave. Hows that for spectacle?

10. Black holes are really donuts: Black holes are not things, but places; collapsed stars or star groups with such strong gravity that they suck in everything around them, including light. Albert Einstein theorised on their existence in 1916, but astronomers only identified one in 1971. Then, in 2017, came visuals. The Event Horizon Telescope, eight radio telescopes working across international borders, observed something unusual in the centre of the galaxy Messier87, which is 55 million light years away. It looked like a bright ring, a shape that could only be formed when light itself was being bent. A black hole. It turned out to be huge about 6.5 billion times bigger than our sun. The telescopes next planned target is the centre of our own galaxy, a suspiciously dark corner long said to hold a black hole too. Who knows what well see.

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Good morning, Starshine! Scroll through the universe with the most iconic images of space - Hindustan Times

Right At Home: Space-themed dcor brings the heavens indoors – The Providence Journal

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Danzig

By Kim Cook| The Associated Press

This year promises more, including theplanned launch of the Hubble Space Telescope's successor in October.

Perhaps it's no surprise then that space themes are having a moment in home decor. When so many of us Earthlings are stuck at home because of the pandemic, space imagery can add a sense of adventure or whimsy to rooms, walls and ceilings.

"I've done outer space, and starry skies," says New York interior designer Patrice Hoban. "My clients love using stars as a backdrop in nurseries. I've also worked with glow-paint to add an extra pop to kids' rooms and home theaters."

She sticks tiny glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling; the light can last for hours. "It's the closest thing I've found to being in a planetarium," she says.

Rachel Magana, senior visual designer at the sustainable furniture-rental company Fernish, picked up some cosmological decorating ideas from a colleague's recent nursery project.

"Base your color palette around deep blue tones, then splash in bits of color like yellow, white or red," she says.

"Or create your own galaxy wall," she says. "Paint a blue wall, then use some watered-down white paint to splatter it with fine droplets. You may just create some new constellations."

She suggests adding fun, space-agey lampsand vintage NASA posters.

Outer space has inspired designers for decades. In the 1960s, the "space race" between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, along with the development of space age-y, synthetic materials, led to a surge in futuristic furniture like molded plastic chairs and Sputnik-shaped lighting.

These days, you can download artwork directly from NASA at solarsystem.nasa.gov, or find it at retailers like Red Bubble, Etsy and Zazzle.

Magana also suggests making a letter board with a space-themed quote, like Neil Armstrong's famous "One small step for man" phrase.

Much of the astronomy-themed art in the marketplace would be striking in any room. There are lunar graphics on canvas at Target. Tempaper's got constellation wallpapers, but if you can't do wallpaper, consider Kenna Sato Designs' constellation decals for walls or ceilings.

Galaxy Lamps has a sphere that looks like a planetoid. Charge it up with the included USB and cycle through 16 colors with three lighting modes. There's a moon version, too. And at Beautiful Halo, find a collection of rocket-ship ceiling fixtures.

German designer Jan Kath has created a rug collection called Spacecrafted inspired by imagery of gas clouds and asteroid nebulae from the Hubble telescope.

Studio Greytak, in Missoula, Montana, has designed a Jupiter lamp out of the mineral aragonite, depicting the whirling, turbulent gases of the planet. And there's the Impact table, where a chunk of desert rose crystals is embedded in cast glass, as though a piece of asteroid had plunged into a pool.

Zodiac wall decals and a Milky Way throw rug can be found at Project Nursery. There are hanging mobiles of the planets and of stars and clouds, at both Crate & Kids and Pottery Barn Kids.

A glow-in-the-dark duvet cover printed with the solar system is also at PBK, but if you're ready to really head to the stars, check out Snurk Living's duvet set. The studio, owned by Dutch designers Peggy van Neer and Erik van Loo, has designed the set photoprinted with a life-size astronaut suit.

Creating a night sky on the ceiling of a home theater seems to be popular; Houzz has hundreds of examples for inspiration.

Maydan Architects in Palo Alto, California, designed one for a recent project.

"Our client's grandfather was the owner of multiple movie theaters," says Mary Maydan. "One of them had a retractable ceiling that enabled guests to experience the starry sky at night. When our client decided to build their home theater, this installation was actually fulfilling a lifelong dream."

The ceiling isn't retractable, but it has an eight-paneled fixture depicting the Milky Way and a shooting star.

"It provides very soft light and was intended to be kept on during the screening of the movie and create a magical experience," says Maydan.

Kim Cook writes AP's Right at Home column, which looks at themes in home dcor and home products. Follow her at: http://www.kimcookhome.com

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Right At Home: Space-themed dcor brings the heavens indoors - The Providence Journal

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