The length of humanity’s planned journey to Mars will be much more than the 6 months or so that it’ll take to fly there. Though NASA plans to send astronauts to the red planet sometime in the 2030s or 40s, it’s going to take decades of research and testing to develop the equipment to get us there.
The ship that will carry humans to another planet is the Orion capsule, of which NASA is already testing prototypes. And at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Popular Science got to take a look inside an Orion mock-up.
If the spacecraft looks a little cramped for a 6- to 9-month trip, that’s because the capsule won’t be going to Mars alone. The plan is to launch Orion from Earth and, once in space, have it dock with a larger habitat module (whose design is still TBD) before beginning its journey to Mars.
Plus, Orion engineer Stuart McClung says the spacecraft is not all that small compared to what we use to send astronauts to the International Space Station. “If you walk over to the Soyuz capsule on the other side of the building, this is like a big stretch limo compared to that Soyuz capsule.”
The engineers at the Johnson Space Center use the Orion mock-up for designing, training, and testing–for example, deciding on a seat layout and crew interfaces. (Read more from “A Peek Inside the Orion Spacecraft That Will Fly Us to Mars” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-12-09 00:16:382016-04-11 10:55:21A Peek Inside the Orion Spacecraft That Will Fly Us to Mars
Touch-screen ordering at fast food restaurants, robots welding car parts at Tesla factories, apps like Uber taking a bite out of the taxi and limo industry: They’re all good for innovation but perhaps not so great for the workers whose jobs are on the line, according to real estate billionaire Jeff Greene.
“What globalization did to blue collar jobs and the working class economy over the past 30 or 40 years, big data, artificial intelligence and robotics will do to the white collar economy — and at a much, much faster pace,” says Greene.
It’s a problem that will only exacerbate the growing gap between the rich and the poor, he claims, because we’ve left ourselves unprepared for the inevitable automation of many jobs traditionally done by humans.
“I realized that that is the greatest threat we have in our country today,” says Greene. “So I thought, ‘Let’s convene some of the greatest minds from academia, government, business and the nonprofit sector to come together to talk realistically about what’s happening.’”
What he devised is a two-day conference spanning Monday and Tuesday dubbed “Closing the Gap: Solutions for An Inclusive Economy,” hosted by Greene at Palm Beach’s Tideline Ocean Resort & Spa. Speakers include former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, author Thomas Friedman, former Apple and Pepsi CEO John Sculley, lawyer and TV personality Star Jones and boxing legend Mike Tyson. (Read more from “Billionaire Jeff Greene Says Technology Will Kill White-Collar Jobs, Hosts Conference on Inequality” HERE)
The year is 2040, and as you wait for a drone to deliver your pizza, you decide to throw on some tunes. Once a commodity bought and sold in stores, music is now an omnipresent utility invoked via spoken- word commands. In response to a simple “play,” an algorithmic DJ opens a blended set of songs, incorporating information about your location, your recent activities and your historical preferences—complemented by biofeedback from your implanted SmartChip. A calming set of lo-fi indie hits streams forth, while the algorithm adjusts the beats per minute and acoustic profile to the rain outside and the fact that you haven’t eaten for six hours.
The rise of such dynamically generated music is the story of the age. The album, that relic of the 20th century, is long dead. Even the concept of a “song” is starting to blur. Instead there are hooks, choruses, catchphrases and beats—a palette of musical elements that are mixed and matched on the fly by the computer, with occasional human assistance. Your life is scored like a movie, with swelling crescendos for the good parts, plaintive, atonal plunks for the bad, and fuzz-pedal guitar for the erotic. The DJ’s ability to read your emotional state approaches clairvoyance. But the developers discourage the name “artificial intelligence” to describe such technology. They prefer the term “mood-affiliated procedural remixing.”
Right now, the mood is hunger. You’ve put on weight lately, as your refrigerator keeps reminding you. With its assistance—and the collaboration of your DJ—you’ve come up with a comprehensive plan for diet and exercise, along with the attendant soundtrack. Already, you’ve lost six pounds. Although you sometimes worry that the machines are running your life, it’s not exactly a dystopian experience—the other day, after a fast- paced dubstep remix spurred you to a personal best on your daily run through the park, you burst into tears of joy.
Cultural production was long thought to be an impregnable stronghold of human intelligence, the one thing the machines could never do better than humans. But a few maverick researchers persisted, and—aided by startling, asymptotic advances in other areas of machine learning—suddenly, one day, they could. To be a musician now is to be an arranger. To be a songwriter is to code. Atlanta, the birthplace of “trap” music, is now a locus of brogrammer culture. Nashville is a leading technology incubator. The Capitol Records tower was converted to condos after the label uploaded its executive suite to the cloud. (Read more from “Is the Future of Music a Chip in Your Brain?” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-12-08 00:15:482016-04-11 10:55:23Is the Future of Music a Chip in Your Brain?
Just weeks after the discovery in China of bacteria resistant to all known forms of treatment, the same strain has been found in Denmark. Worse: It’s been there since 2012.
Late last week researchers at the Technical University of Denmark announced they had found the feared ‘invulnerability’ gene among E. coli bacteria samples taken from humans and food. . .
Five more examples of bacteria containing the mcr-1 gene were found among samples taken from food imported between 2012 and 2014.
Danish researchers fear the untreatable superbug is now firmly embedded in Europe. The man suffering the blood infection had not traveled outside the country and the infected imports were German poultry products. . .
What makes mcr-1 such a threat, other than its immunity to all known antibiotics, is that it can spread fast. It has been found to reside in plasmids, mobile ‘packets’ of DNA which can be copied and transferred between different bacteria. (Read more from “Bacteria Resistant to All Known Forms of Antibiotics Has Now Spread from China to Europe” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-12-07 01:26:412016-04-11 10:55:25Bacteria Resistant to All Known Forms of Antibiotics Has Now Spread from China to Europe
Smoking cannabis can induce psychosis-like effects, similar to the symptoms people diagnosed with schizophrenia endure, scientists have said.
While past research as come this this conclusion in the past, the mechanisms underlying these effects are less clear.
Now, a team of scientists at Yale School of Medicine have found the active ingredient in marijuana, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (delta-9-THC) increases random neural activity, known as neural noise, in the brains of healthy drug-users.
Researchers studied the effects of delta-9-THC on electrical brain activity in 24 human subjects, who took part in a three-day study.
During the experiments, they received two doses of intravenous delta-9-THC or a placebo in a double-blind, randomised, cross-over and counterbalanced design. (Read more from “Cannabis Causes Psychosis-Like Effects in Healthy People That’s Similar to Schizophrenia” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-12-04 21:59:572016-04-11 10:55:29Cannabis Causes Psychosis-Like Effects in Healthy People That’s Similar to Schizophrenia
A former Bridgeport police officer who claimed someone left a racist memo on police letterhead in his mailbox at headquarters in February admitted to writing the letter himself and has been charged with filing a false report, according to police.
Former Officer Clive Higgins reported that he found a racist hate letter in his police mailbox the morning of Monday, Feb. 9 and feared for his life because of it.
The letter, printed on paper marked with the department’s official letterhead, started off with “WHITE POWER” and went on to say “Officer Clive Higgins doesn’t belong here in this Police Department” and “These Black Officers belong in the toilet.”
A month earlier, Higgins was acquitted in connection with a 2011 police brutality case in which officers were caught on camera beating a suspect at Beardsley Park and shooting him with a stun gun. Two other officers were convicted, but a federal jury found Higgins not guilty . . .
The report of the racist letter prompted the Bridgeport Guardians, a minority officers’ organization, to hold a news conference, calling the letter “racial, insensitive and threatening.” They said it was the most recent of at least three hateful notes to circulate within the department within a year. (Read more from “Connecticut Police Officer Who Reported Racist Letter Wrote It” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-12-03 21:50:562016-04-11 10:55:31Connecticut Police Officer Who Reported Racist Letter Wrote It
One of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes points out, as only Lewis could, that Jesus was either the Messiah (and the Son of God) as prophesied in the ancient Jewish scriptures, or He was a liar, a lunatic, or, worse, the “Devil of Hell.”
Wrote Lewis: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Indeed, to my Jewish friends, I say this: We Christ followers love your Messiah. And make no mistake about it, Jesus is your Messiah. He is our Messiah. He is the Messiah. Messiah means savior, and Jesus is the Savior of all mankind.
To be sure, if both Christ’s words and the Holy Spirit-inspired teachings throughout both the Old and New Testaments are to be believed, and they are, then Christianity and Judaism are not competing religions at odds with one another. Rather, Christianity merely represents the final culmination of Judaism, and Christ’s promised incarnation, death and resurrection, the fulfillment of the long awaited Jewish Messiah prophesied throughout the Old Testament.
In his latest book, “The Emmaus Code: Finding Jesus in the Old Testament,” author and attorney David Limbaugh thoroughly unpacks this reality and “unlocks the mysteries of the Old Testament and reveals hints of Jesus Christ’s arrival through all thirty-nine Old Testament books.”
“The key to the secrets of the Old Testament, Limbaugh argues, is the crucial New Testament encounter between the risen Jesus and two travelers on the road to Emmaus,” notes the book’s description. “With that key, and with Limbaugh as a deft guide, readers of ‘The Emmaus Code’ will come to a startling new understanding of the Old Testament as a clear and powerful heralding of Jesus Christ’s arrival. Limbaugh takes readers on a revealing journey from Genesis through Malachi, demonstrating that a consistent message courses through every one of the Old Testament’s thirty-nine books: the power, wonder, and everlasting love of Jesus Christ.”
The “Emmaus Code” is a project that God long-ago placed on Limbaugh’s heart. “Jesus is prophesied in the Old Testament and fulfills those prophecies in the New Testament,” he writes. “For years, I have wanted to write a book to share my enthusiasm for the Old Testament and explain how it is foundational to the New Testament as the first act of a two-act play. I have wanted to show the many ways Christ is foreshadowed in the Old Testament.
“My new book, ‘The Emmaus Code: Finding Jesus in the Old Testament,’ is the culmination of a project I began some 20 years ago. In the book, I try to demonstrate that the Christ-centeredness of the Old Testament is the key to understanding all of Scripture. The book is a primer on the Old Testament. I take you through each period of Old Testament history, introduce and discuss all the threads and themes pointing to Jesus in the Old Testament, and finally give you an overview of each book of the Old Testament and detail how each one prefigures Jesus Christ.
“My goal is to increase the reader’s appreciation for the Old Testament and for its Christ-centeredness, for once we have a better handle on the Old Testament and understand that Jesus is its focus, the Bible will come alive for us in ways we never anticipated and our faith will be strengthened and energized. That is certainly my experience, and I pray the same thing happens for you.”
Having just finished the book, I can say with enthusiastic certainty that Limbaugh accomplishes his goal. He demonstrates, like the trial lawyer proving his case beyond any reasonable doubt, that Jesus is not just hinted at in the Old Testament, but that His presence permeates the ancient Jewish texts. As John 1:1 reminds us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Christ is the Word and the Word is God.
The “Emmaus Code” will change your whole perspective on the Bible. The Old Testament will come to life for you and you will see clearly, perhaps for the first time, that its primary purpose was, and is, the foretelling of the coming of Christ Jesus.
When Jesus asked the apostle Peter, “Who do you say I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God” (see Matthew 16:15-16).
“Jesus replied, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven’” (Matthew 16:17).
Christ points to Himself as the Old Testament Messiah.
David Limbaugh establishes, masterfully, the veracity of Christ’s claim. (For more from the author of “Incredible Book ‘Emmaus Code’ Shows Jesus Is the Messiah” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-12-03 03:39:262016-04-11 10:55:32Incredible Book ‘Emmaus Code’ Shows Jesus Is the Messiah
More Americans had their backgrounds checked purchasing guns on Black Friday than any day in the on record, according to data released by the FBI this week.
The National Instant Criminal Background Check System processed 185,345 requests on Nov. 27, one of the largest retail sales days in the country.
“This was an approximate 5% increase over the 175,754 received on Black Friday 2014,” wrote Stephen Fischer, the FBI’s chief of multimedia productions. “The previous high for receipts were the 177,170 received on 12/21/2012.”
Previous spikes for background checks, conducted before a gun buyer can obtain a firearm, occurred after prominent mass shootings, like in December 2012 in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
Other Black Friday shopping days in 2014, 2013 and 2012 occupied the FBI’s “top 10” list of the most background checks processed in a 24-hour period. (Read more from “Black Friday Breaks Record with 185K Gun Background Checks” HERE)
The Chinese scientist behind the world’s biggest cloning factory has technology advanced enough to replicate humans, he told AFP, and is only holding off for fear of the public reaction.
Boyalife Group and its partners are building the giant plant in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, where it is due to go into production within the next seven months and aims for an output of one million cloned cows a year by 2020 . . .
Boyalife is already working with its South Korean partner Sooam and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to improve primate cloning capacity to create better test animals for disease research . . .
The firm does not currently engage in human cloning activities, Xu said, adding that it has to be “self-restrained” because of possible adverse reaction.
But social values can change, he pointed out, citing changing views of homosexuality and suggesting that in time humans could have more choices about their own reproduction. (Read more from “China ‘Clone Factory’ Scientist Eyes Human Replication” HERE)
An 18-year-veteran of the Marine Corps who did tours of service in Iraq and Afghanistan earning a Bronze Star was hoping for some much-needed dad time with his kids.
So retired 1st Sgt. Jeromie Slaughter, 38, planned a deer-hunting trip with them a few hours from his Houston-area home — a trip that became an odyssey when he took a wrong turn and wound up arrested in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, for carrying weapons.
And when his family tried to find a Mexican lawyer to represent him, the ones they contacted asked for cash in U.S. dollars to help secure his release, Slaughter’s mother, Beverly McKinney, said . . .
According to McKinney, the Texas City resident piled into his pickup with his 14-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter after Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday. They were heading for a deer lease – private property that’s open to hunters for a fee – near Rocksprings, about 70 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, about a 6-hour drive.
Instead, Slaughter made a wrong turn and, at about 1 a.m. Friday morning, wound up crossing a bridge into Ciudad Acuña, across the border from Del Rio, Texas. . . It was frustrating, [Slaughter’s mother told Fox] on Monday, because Mexican officials “were treating him like he is a terrorist. He was on a hunting trip, [he is] not a terrorist. He has fought them, he isn’t one.” (Read more from “Former U.S. Marine on Hunting Trip With Kids Arrested After Entering Mexico by Mistake” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-12-01 01:13:352016-04-11 10:55:36Former U.S. Marine on Hunting Trip With Kids Arrested After Entering Mexico by Innocent Mistake
