We all found our coping strategies for riding out the pandemic in 2020. Biomedical engineer Gough Lui likes to tinker with tech—particularly vintage tech—and decided he’d try to recreate what it was like to connect to the Internet via dialup back in the late 1990s. He recorded the entire process in agonizing real time, dotted with occasional commentary.
Those of a certain age (ahem) well remember what it used to be like: even just booting up the computer required patience, particularly in the earlier part of the decade, when one could shower and make coffee in the time it took to boot up one’s computer from a floppy disk. One needed a dedicated phone line for the Internet connection, because otherwise an incoming call could disrupt the connection, forcing one to repeat the whole dialup process.
How does something as immaterial as consciousness arise from something as unconscious as matter? This is known as the Hard Problem and this theory gets around this problem by explaining consciousness as electrical activity that is aware of its own electrical potential. This is possible because the light photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force. Because light has momentum and momentum is frame dependent electrical activity in the brain is always in the centre of its own reference frame in ‘the moment of now’ with a potential future that is always uncertain and a past that has gone forever. It is because consciousness is always in the centre of its own reference frame that we have the concept of ‘mind’ with each one of us having our own personal view of the Universe. This is within a process formed by the spontaneous absorption and emission of light a process of continuous energy exchange forming the ever changing world of our everyday life. If our eyes where more sensitive to light we would be able to see that everything is radiating EMR or light continuously because the Universe is never at absolute zero. In this theory consciousness is the most advanced part of a universal process that can be explained by physics. There are no paradoxes in this theory! We are in the centre of our own reference frame being able to look back in time in every direction at the beauty of the stars. We can also look down into individual reference frames seeing the future unfold photon by photon relative to that frame of reference. The greatest affect this process of continuous energy exchange has on us is the aging process with photon energy from the Sun cascading down forming greater degrees of freedom for the continuous increase in entropy or disorganization. But above all this is a creative process with the future coming into existence relative to the energy and momentum or actions of each individual life form. The wave-particle duality of light is acting like the bits or zeros and ones of a computer. This forms a blank canvas for life to form its own future relative to its position and the energy and momentum of its own actions. The Universe is a continuum with spacetime as an emergent property with an Arrow of Time for each object or life form with a future coming into existence relative to their energy & momentum with each new photon electron coupling or dipole moment. I believe this is what we are seeing when we see an artist at work we are seeing the future unfolding relative to the energy and momentum of the artist! In this theory creation is truly in the eye and hand of the beholder! Thanks for watching please share and subscribe on YouTube and be part of the promotion of this theory!
A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have made a serendipitous scientific discovery that could potentially revolutionize the way water is broken down to release hydrogen gas—an element crucial to many industrial processes.
The team, led by Associate Professor Xue Jun Min, Dr. Wang Xiaopeng and Dr. Vincent Lee Wee Siang from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering under the NUS College of Design and Engineering (NUS CDE), found that light can trigger a new mechanism in a catalytic material used extensively in water electrolysis, where water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. The result is a more energy-efficient method of obtaining hydrogen.
This breakthrough was achieved in collaboration with Dr. Xi Shibo from the Institute of Sustainability for Chemicals, Energy and Environment under the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR); Dr. Yu Zhigen from the Institute of High Performance Computing under A*STAR; and Dr. Wang Hao from the Department of Mechanical Engineering under the NUS CDE.
Semiconductors are small, ubiquitous, and underappreciated. They are the brains of every modern device.
When Nancy Pelosi traveled to Taiwan in August, it made front-page news around the world and raised the specter of an all-out war between the U.S. and China.
Early in October, the Biden administration made a far more decisive move against China — but it barely made the news in Australia.
For the first time, a group of researchers from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, IBM, ETH Zurich, MIT and Harvard University have observed topological phases of matter of quantum states under the action of temperature or certain types of experimental imperfections. The experiment was conducted using quantum simulator at IBM.
Quantum simulators were first conjectured by the Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman in 1982. Ordinary classical computers are inefficient at simulating systems of interacting quantum particles These new simulators are genuinely quantum and can be controlled very precisely. They replicate other quantum systems that are harder to manipulate and whose physical properties remain very much unknown.
In an article published in the journal Quantum Information, the researchers describe using a quantum simulator with superconducting qubits at IBM to replicate materials known as topological insulators at finite temperature, and measure for the first time their topological quantum phases.
Well, consumer devices can’t run on lasers just yet. But in recent years, researchers have been working hard to make this dream a reality.
In the most recent breakthrough, a new chip can bend laser light to transmit 1.8 petabits, or over 1 million gigabits, per second. To put things in perspective, that’s nearly twice the world’s internet traffic per second.
This breaks the May 2022 record of 1.02 petabits per second, as reported by New Atlas.
When in 2015, Eileen Brown looked at the ETER9 Project (crazy for many, visionary for few) and wrote an interesting article for ZDNET with the title “New social network ETER9 brings AI to your interactions”, it ensured a worldwide projection of something the world was not expecting.
Someone, in a lost world (outside the United States), was risking, with everything he had in his possession (very little or less than nothing), a vision worthy of the American dream. At that time, Facebook was already beginning to annoy the cleaner minds that were looking for a difference and a more innovative world.
Today, after that test bench, we see that Facebook (Meta or whatever) is nothing but an illusion, or, I dare say, a big disappointment. No, no, no! I am not now bad-mouthing Facebook just because I have a project in hand that is seen as a potential competitor.
I was even a big fan of the “original” Facebook; but then I realized, it took me a few years, that Mark Zuckerberg is nothing more than a simple kid, now a man, who against everything and everyone, gave in to whims. Of him, initially, and now, perforce, of what his big investors, deluded by himself, of what his “metaverse” would be.
We live in very interesting times, especially if you happen to be a tinkerer, hobbyist, or what is commonly called a “maker” these days. From affordable palm-sized computer boards like the Raspberry Pi to the almost magical 3D printers, it has never been easier to bring ideas to life or, at the very least, prototype designs quickly before they hit final production. Not everyone might have access to these parts and tools, though, but those same things have also made it easier to create and sell products that bigger companies would never dare make. Those include niche yet popular designs, like this quirky pocket computer kit that you can assemble on your own to become not just a portable game emulator but a real computer you could use for more serious business, like even developing your own retro-style game on the go.
Visual effects (VFX) can help to make videogames more engaging and immersive for players. However, they are often also designed to support players, for instance, by pointing them to specific locations or highlighting helpful game features.
Researchers at University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) have recently carried out a study investigating the ways in which VFX can help videogame players to make sense of the virtual worlds and environments they are navigating. Their paper, pre-published on arXiv and presented at the IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH), could guide the future development of both videogames and data visualization tools.
“Our study mostly builds upon our engagement with two distinct communities: the data visualization research and the videogame communities,” Henry Zhou, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “The Computational Media department at UCSC has a mixture of scholars interested in both media artifacts. The paper originated from my colleague Angus G. Forbes’ observation of a general minimalist aesthetic as practicing wisdom in the data visualization research community, especially when it comes to visual effects (VFX) and animation.”