Black Hole

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”--Orwell


Palm Sunday where a direct democracy movement overrides the traditional legal structure and gets the release of Barabbas.

Chris is ready for his surgery.
GoT tonight.
A classic Pirate game, hard fought and tight, with Pittsburgh ahead when Rodriguez gives up back-to-back homers in the eighth to lose it. So they lose exactly the kind of game they want to play.
The Pens play at noon. Chris thinks the bad ice in N.Y. really hurt them -- and that's a good point, but they still have to play better than these guys. 

Season 7 finale of GoT currently holds the record for the most-watched episode of any HBO show ever, with 12.1 million viewers. Game of Thrones live-debut audience has grown an average of 37 percent year over year. Sunday’s episode should clock in at around 14 million live viewers.

Baltimore Orioles first baseman Chris Davis’ historic streak is finally behind him.  The struggling slugger hit a two-RBI single off of Red Sox pitcher Rick Porcello in the top of the first inning of Saturday’s game at Fenway Park, ending a brutal string of 54 hitless at-bats that stretched back to September 14th of last season. Davis had surpassed the record held by former Los Angeles Dodgers utilityman Eugenio Velez (46 ABs) set back in 2011. 

Last year, Davis also set an unflattering record after posting a .168 batting average over the course of 128 games and 522 plate appearances. That batting average is the worst for any qualified hitter in Major League Baseball history since the league adopted the current 162-game schedule.

The Orioles still owe Davis around $92 million in guaranteed money due to the contract extension that he signed in the off-season of 2015. That contract will be paid out in deferred payments through the 2037 season.

In 2014 he was suspended for amphetamine use. Uh oh.

Clive Thompson draws an interesting parallel with capitalism which might have some significance: "Coders might have different backgrounds and political opinions, but nearly every one I’ve ever met found deep, almost soulful pleasure in taking something inefficient—even just a little bit slow—and tightening it up a notch. Removing the friction from a system is an aesthetic joy; coders’ eyes blaze when they talk about making something run faster or how they eliminated some bothersome human effort from a process."

In the city of Baltimore, approximately one out of every four babies is born as an opioid addict. 
What are the long range implications for an addicted infant?

This is what passed for political commentary in 2017: "The military apparatus of this country is about to be handed over to scum, who are beholden to scum, Russian scum! As things are today January 20th will not be an inauguration but rather the end of the United States as an independent country. Donald John Trump…is not a president; he is a puppet, put in power by Vladimir Putin. Those who ignore these elemental, existential facts—Democrats or Republicans—are traitors to this country." (the esteemed Kieth Olbermann)

Purity can not abide a spot. ThinkProgress, the news organ that is a project of, though editorially independent from, the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, put out a video noting that Sanders had stopped maligning millionaires—choosing, instead, to direct his ire at billionaires—when he became a millionaire himself.

The video accompanied a more nuanced article reflecting on the irony of Sanders dragging his feet in releasing his tax returns out of a desire to hide his wealth while President Trump refused to release tax returns in order to keep secret that he wasn’t as rich as he boasted.

The amygdala, the body’s alarm circuit for fear lies in an almond-shaped mass of nuclei deep in the brain’s temporal lobe. The amygdala, from the Greek word for almond, controls autonomic responses associated with fear, arousal, and emotional stimulation and has been linked to neuropsychiatric disorders, such as anxiety disorder and social phobias. It is a big target for research because of the prevalence of anxiety in the modern world. It appeared in an Atlantic article on Holbrooke so I bet it becomes very popular as a meme.

Wes Johnson, Twins pitching coach, personifies a trend in baseball: pairing tech-savvy coaches with a generation of players who crave actionable data. The coach’s pitching background is largely irrelevant; like Johnson, the new pitching coaches for the Los Angeles Angels (Doug White), the Seattle Mariners (Paul Davis) and the Cincinnati Reds (Derek Johnson, formerly of the Milwaukee Brewers) never pitched in an affiliated professional league.

New York, with 8.5 million residents and a population density of 28,000 people per square mile.

According to the Census Bureau, nearly two-thirds of the US population live in cities — but those cities take up just 3.5 percent of the nation’s land area. In 2006, a detailed federal government study of land use in the United States reported that “urban land plus rural residential areas together comprise 154 million acres, or almost 7 percent of total US land area.” Our country is 93 percent empty.

At 28,000 people per square mile, the nation’s entire population would fit comfortably in the combined area of Delaware and Maryland. 

On this day in 1912 the Titanic struck the iceberg. In 1865, Lincoln was shot.

                                                             Black Hole

This is a picture of a black hole, or rather how it looked fifty-five million years ago, the first picture of its kind. This is an extraordinary event--where light is casting its own shadow.
We are entering a world of general belief, if not clear understanding. We believe that this black hole has a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun, but that is truly beyond our real understanding. Like entangled particles or 0/0, we sort of get it but really don't.
Ned quizzed us if light has mass. Well, it is subject to gravity. Light can dislodge electrons from the atoms of several metals. (Photoelectric Effect)  So it has elements of a particle. And it has momentum. Momentum is a function of mass and acceleration, so it must have mass. But it doesn't. He's right; I looked it up--but, while I now know it, I do not understand it. Like infinite universes. Like entangled particles. Like consciousness developing from non-consciousness. We now describe and simply believe.
We are beyond empiricism. Science now requires faith. 

Slide 1 of 146: The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) -- a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration -- was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. This breakthrough was announced in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun.

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1/146 SLIDES © .nsf.gov