Lifeboat Foundation

Cool read…hhh.

The emergence of Bitcoin as one of the hottest new investment assets has surprised many who once believed the blockchain-driven cryptocurrency would never have real-world value. It has also generated immense amounts of interest from those who had either never heard of Bitcoin before or who knew relatively little about it. As a result, there are now incredible opportunities for making extra money in the cryptocurrency niche.

In the following article, you’ll find out how to make money with Bitcoin and discover a few of the many different ways to capitalize on the cryptocurrency trend and earn Bitcoin in lots of different ways.

Continue reading “How to Earn Bitcoin in 2020 – Free Guide for Beginners” »

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Until now, Aroostook County native Jessica Meir has watched the unfolding coronavirus pandemic from orbit.

Continue reading “Maine astronaut Jessica Meir returns to a changed planet on Friday” »

On April 16, 2020, Intel and Udacity jointly announced their new Intel® Edge AI for IoT Developers Nanodegree program to train the developer community in deep learning and computer vision. If you are wondering where AI is headed, now you know, it’s headed to the edge. Edge computing is the concept of storing data and computing data directly at the location where it is needed. The global edge computing market is forecasted to reach 1.12 trillion dollars by 2023.

There’s a real need for developers worldwide in this new market. Intel and Udacity aim to train 1 million developers.

AI Needs To Be On the Edge.

Most molecules exist in mirror-image forms, and yet life prefers one over the other. How this bias began and why it persisted is one of the most baffling questions in biology – but now we have an answer.

Last Friday, April 16, 1943, I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home, being affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant, intoxicated-like condition characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.

O,.o maybe this could make computronium.

Spin liquids are highly correlated yet disordered states formed by the entanglement of magnetic dipoles¹. Theories define such states using gauge fields and deconfined quasiparticle excitations that emerge from a local constraint governing the ground state of a frustrated magnet. For example, the ‘2-in–2-out’ ice rule for dipole moments on a tetrahedron can lead to a quantum spin ice^2,3,4 in rare-earth pyrochlores. However, f-electron ions often carry multipole degrees of freedom of higher rank than dipoles, leading to intriguing behaviours and ‘hidden’ orders^5,6. Here we show that the correlated ground state of a Ce³⁺-based pyrochlore, Ce₂Sn₂O₇, is a quantum liquid of magnetic octupoles. Our neutron scattering results are consistent with a fluid-like state where degrees of freedom have a more complex magnetization density than that of magnetic dipoles. The nature and strength of the octupole–octupole couplings, together with the existence of a continuum of excitations attributed to spinons, provides further evidence for a quantum ice of octupoles governed by a ‘2-plus–2-minus’ rule^7,8. Our work identifies Ce₂Sn₂O₇ as a unique example of frustrated multipoles forming a ‘hidden’ topological order, thus generalizing observations on quantum spin liquids to multipolar phases that can support novel types of emergent fields and excitations.

Orbits a red dwarf. Probably gravitationally locked too (always showing same side to parent star). So highly unlikely to be any complex life.

‘Intriguing’ world found in data from retired Kepler space telescope.

Doing “whatever it takes” to save the global economy from the coronavirus pandemic is going to cost a lot of money. The U.S. government alone is spending a few trillion dollars, and the Federal Reserve is creating another few trillion dollars to keep the financial system from collapsing. A custom Bloomberg index measuring M2 figures for 12 major economies including the U.S., China, euro zone and Japan shows their aggregate money supply had already more than doubled to $80 trillion from before the 2008–2009 financial crisis.

These numbers are so large that they no longer have any meaning; they are simply abstractions. It’s been some time since people thought about the concept of money and its purpose. The broad idea is that money has value, but that value is not arbitrary. Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker once said in an interview that “it is a governmental responsibility to maintain the value of the currency they issue. And when they fail to do that, it is something that undermines an essential trust in government.”

I n his article on “Posthuman Subjectivity and Singularity in the Nature-Culture Continuum” (2020) Hyun-Shik Jun examines Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity through the post-structuralist and philosophical perspectives of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Whereas the technocratic paradigm seems to have eradicated the subject, Braidotti attempts to reinscribe the subject in current posthuman cultural, political and social landscapes. Jun is sympathetic to Braidotti’s work and aims to illuminate posthuman subjectivity as a dialectical and transversal phenomenon.

Braidotti “holds the nature-culture continuum as the starting point for her theory, seeking to distance herself from the social constructivist approach which, she claims, is constrained by a dualistic understanding of the world and hence an opposition between nature and culture” (Jun 2020, 1). Jun thinks that Braidotti’s posthuman nature-culture continuum is in the right direction but lacks a sufficient dialectic in understanding subjectivity more coherently. Hence he looks to the Hegelian trajectory, one which does not see a dialectical reconciliation of opposites but a dialectical paradox, a sublation of contradictions between similarity and difference, yielding to an open-ended process of being without origin or closure.

Relying on Derrida’s notion of différance and Agamben’s signator, Jun states that “the posthuman subject should be understood as the deferred subject” ; that is, the subject who never arrives at final subjectivity because engagement between nature and culture is a constant, indefinite and dialectical movement. Hence the posthuman subject is “neither the centered self-conscious being nor the decentered unconscious automaton of modernity. The posthuman subject emerges with a sort of ontological fold or gap wherein nature and culture meet”.