by David Solomonoff

In anticipation of the government’s official UFO report coming in less than six months thanks to the COVID-19 omnibus bill, you can now download all of the publicly available CIA documentation on UFOs.

The Black Vault, a clearinghouse for declassified documents, has released a downloadable document archive filled with PDFs containing CIA files on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), the government’s preferred term. . Some of the reports date all the way back to the 1980s, and according to the site’s founder, John Greenewald Jr., the spy agency claims this is all of its documents on UAPs.

The Black Vault blog notes that the CIA claims that this represents all its documents on the file, but there may be no way to verify that and other documents may be out there.

Source: You Can Now Easily Download All CIA UFO Documents to Date

by David Solomonoff

Jesse S. Sommer writes about Albany, New York’s rotting Central Warehouse which has passed from one corrupt and incompetent developer to the next for 40 years. Albany’s paper of record, the Times-Union, suggests using the giant 11-story walls as massive canvases to celebrate upstate New York imagery, thereby exuding “progress and creativity instead of stagnation and decay”.

It’s been a year since the Altamont Enterprise published an op-ed wherein I called for the demolition of Albany’s rotting Central Warehouse.

We agonize over an eyesore that stifles area development and which thereby makes renovating it unappealing, but we fail to appreciate that, when confronted with a chicken-or-the-egg problem, sometimes your best bet is to just give up poultry.

No one is coming to the rescue. It’s on us to protect our firefighters, cease the public subsidization, and liberate our daily commutes from this humiliating testament to Albany’s apathy.

Source: Albany’s Eyesore: public nuisance, public threat | The Altamont Enterprise

by David Solomonoff

The Earth’s rotation is the fastest it’s ever been in 50 years, which means time is passing by quicker than it has in the past five decades.

Because the Earth is spinning faster, time is passing by quicker and now, the 24-hour day is ending just half a millisecond sooner, according to timekeeping scientists.

To those living out their usual days, half a second likely won’t matter, but it could matter for things like satellites and communication relays, which rely on atomic time aligning near exactly with solar time. That’s why scientists are debating the use of a negative leap second.

Source: The Earth Is Spinning Faster Than It Has in 50 Years – IGN

by David Solomonoff

There is much talk of tyranny in the political realm, little said about  tyrannies in the economic realm, primary one being tyranny of high costs: high costs crush the economy from within and enslave those attempting to start enterprises or keep their businesses afloat.

Every high-cost structure is someone’s gravy train: some politically sacrosanct and untouchable special interest or class of insiders depends on ever-higher costs to fund their ever-higher wages, benefits, profits, etc., and they will not be denied their gravy train.

All the tricks to hide our unaffordable cost structure have reached marginal returns. Reality is about to intrude. The tyranny of ever-higher costs is about to crush the economy, and saying it isn’t so doesn’t make it so.

Source: oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: The Tyranny Nobody Talks About

by David Solomonoff

Good overview on the range of new platforms starting now …

The extreme Big Tech censorship has driven a great number of social media participants to search for censorship-resistant alternatives.

Biggest downfall of all these applications is the lack of users, as most people have not gravitated toward decentralized social media, Best thing people can do right now is to start migrating toward social media applications that offer decentralization and blockchain censorship-resistance, because the dystopian world that looks an awful lot like Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 is surely upon us.

Source: Big Tech’s Freedom of Speech Purge Pushes People to Censorship-Resistant Blockchain Social Media | Featured Bitcoin News

by David Solomonoff

Coming at a time of rapidly expanding threats to civil liberties and human rights on many fronts …

As bits and bodies meld and as human flesh becomes permanently entwined with hardware, software, and algorithms, IoB will test our norms and values as a society. In particular, it will challenge notions of human autonomy and self-governance.

Source: Law Review Addresses Legal and Social Challenges of “Internet of Bodies” and “Internet of Things” – Activist Post

by David Solomonoff

Researchers Are Now Giving Neural Networks Virtual Drugs; Research hopes to find answers to the many questions still lingering about psychedelics and the brain.

Scientists from Imperial College London and the University of Geneva were able to successfully recreate drug-related hallucinations by playing around with image-generating neural nets. The end results were published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness last month and were true to how humans described their visual experiences with drugs.

“They can help illustrate how psychedelics perturb perception and can be used to guide hypotheses on how sensory information is prevented from updating the brain’s model of the world.”

by David Solomonoff

In this time of political division, it’s great to see two unlikely groups get together to fight for human rights …

Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal — who is not a doctor, nor a scientist and holds only a bachelor’s degree in history — proposed a massively controversial bill that would mandate the COVID-19 vaccination for New Yorkers. Naturally, she is being met with resistance.

According to the NY Times, Rosenthal says her parents escaped Nazi Germany in the 30’s to come to America. Ironically enough, it was the Nazis who were famous for forcing medical procedures on citizens against their will

Black Lives Matter and MAGA supporters reportedly threw their differences to the wayside to come together in protest of Bill No. A1179.  The event organizer, Cara Castronuova, documented the protest on her Facebook page. 

#MAGA and #BLM came TOGETHER yesterday for a common cause. YES, you heard that right. I personally co-organized a Demonstration with a BLM organizer named Hannah, to fight the Bill proposed by NYS Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal that will make the Covid Vaccination MANDATORY for all New Yorkers.

Source: BLM and MAGA Come Together to Oppose Forced Vaccination Bill in New York

by David Solomonoff

Tech to merge digital tech with biological sensory organs and nervous systems is moving forward rapidly, conversely, so is biomimicry, which uses biological models to design new tech.

With totalitarian regimes like China engaging in large-scale human organ harvesting and a desire to create enhanced humans – initially for military applications – this may lead to some very disturbing results.

Researchers slap a living antenna on a drone to give the machine an insanely keen sense of smell. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the “Smellicopter.”

Source: This Drone Sniffs Out Odors With a Real Moth Antenna | WIRED

Related:

The “Iron Man” of Beetles Could Inspire Super-Durable Cars and Planes;
Diabolical ironclad beetle could be next big thing in biomimicry, inspiring  design of extra-tough planes, cars, more.

Octopus-inspired robot can climb ladders and walls; As a next step, the researchers want to further develop the robot’s artificial intelligence.

Chinese Soldiers Outfitted With Digital Combat Device That Has “Self-Destruction Mode”

by David Solomonoff

Next-gen chip tech will manipulate radio waves with programmable waveguides (think rapidly morphing radio antenna and transmitter rather than wires and switches routing electrons) via metasurfaces (materials whose properties can be changed in realtime with software).

With the help of integrated CMOS technology and electromagnetic design, Princeton researchers have demonstrated a key device that could potentially enable high-speed wireless links at terahertz frequencies.

“The key takeaway is that we are now getting a handle on practical methods for actively controlling the wave front, beam size, beam direction, and other features of terahertz beams.”

Such metasurfaces open up numerous other applications such as high-resolution imaging, gesture recognition, automotive radar, and high-speed links for augmented reality. “Looking ahead, the programmable metasurfaces will need further development to be integrated as components in innovative, next-generation networks,”

Source: Electromagnetic-circuit co-design approach leads to dynamically programmable holographic terahertz metasurfaces

Related: Tunable THz radiation from 3D topological insulator

Work will help further collective understanding of femtosecond coherent control of ultrafast spin currents in light-matter interaction and will also provide an effective way to generate spin-polarized THz waves. Wu notes that the manipulation of polarization is a step toward the goal of tailoring twisted THz waves efficiently at the source.

Will enable the development of THz science and applications in such areas as ultrafast THz opto-spintronics, polarization-based THz spectroscopy and imaging, THz biosensing, line-of-sight THz communications, and information encryption.

Research team develops new material system to convert and generate terahertz waves

Electromagnetic-circuit co-design approach leads to dynamically programmable holographic terahertz metasurfaces

Researchers develop a high-power, portable terahertz laser

A trillion turns of light nets terahertz polarized bytes