Lifeboat Foundation

America’s working class is falling further behind.

The rich-poor gap — the difference in annual income between households in the top 20 percent and those in the bottom 20 percent — ballooned by $29,200 to $189,600 between 2010 and 2015, based on Bloomberg calculations using U.S. Census Bureau data.

Computers and robots are taking over many types of tasks, shoving aside some workers while boosting the productivity of specialized employees, contributing to the gap.

Continue reading “America’s Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Replaced by Robots” »

Elon Musk was on stage at the 2017 TED Conference in Vancouver on Friday, and he revealed some of his tunnel work and aspirations, but he also talked about a few ongoing Tesla projects he’s referenced before. The multi-CEO showed a shadowy image that gives us our first look at what his forthcoming electric Semi Truck will look like, and also let drop the suggestion that Tesla will likely announce four new global Gigafactory locations sometime this year.

Elon Musk teased semi-truck at TED talk. pic.twitter.com/sY0w7KSsTx

Cars will be lowered into the tunnel from the roads on what Musk calls a car “skate.”

We’re so used to murder mysteries that we don’t even notice how mystery authors play with time. Typically the murder occurs well before the midpoint of the book, but there is an information blackout at that point and the reader learns what happened then only on the last page.

If the last page were ripped out of the book, physicist Kater Murch, PhD, said, would the reader be better off guessing what happened by reading only up to the fatal incident or by reading the entire book?

The answer, so obvious in the case of the murder mystery, is less so in world of quantum mechanics, where indeterminacy is fundamental rather than contrived for our reading pleasure.

Most significant events list for Milner’s Breakthrough Listen (SETI) project. This is 11 of the highest statistical significance events that they’ve recorded.

They’ve said these will mostly prove to be local interference of various sorts. They just haven’t excluded them yet.

A lot of them are 1380 Mhz, which is a common frequency for surveillance video cams (I looked it up).

Siegel explains how this is possible:

“As the black hole first formed, the event horizon first came to be, then rapidly expanded and continued to grow as more matter continued to fall in. If you were to put a coordinate grid down on this two-dimensional wrapping, you’d find that it originated where the gridlines were very close together, then expanded rapidly as the black hole formed, and then expanded more and more slowly as matter fell in at a much lower rate. This matches, at least conceptually, what we observe for the expansion rate of our three-dimensional universe.”

Continue reading “An Alternate Universe: Our Cosmos May Have Been Spawned by a Hypermassive Black Hole” »

It’s at the opening evening reception. I’m also giving a formal 45-min talk tomorrow at 1:30PM. Join me at the Santa Clara Marriot in San Jose for the convention. https://ca.lp.org/speakers/ www.zoltanistvan.com

Space Apps Weekend begins!

Physicists have come up with what they claim is a mathematical model of a theoretical “time machine” — a box that can move backwards and forwards through time and space.

The trick, they say, is to use the curvature of space-time in the Universe to bend time into a circle for hypothetical passengers sitting in the box, and that circle allows them to skip into the future and the past.

“People think of time travel as something as fiction. And we tend to think it’s not possible because we don’t actually do it,” says theoretical physicist and mathematician, Ben Tippett, from the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Continue reading “Physicists Just Came Up With a Mathematical Model for a Viable Time Machine” »