No beginning and no end?

I’m getting some scientific support for my personal view that ours is just one more in an infinite number of universes, or universe iterations.  I.e., which translates into “there has always been something rather than nothing.”

I saw this on another blog:

Link here.

Excerpt:

That theory, which textbooks call inflation, matches all observations to date and is preferred by most cosmologists. But it has conceptual implications that some find disturbing. In most regions of space-time, the rapid expansion would never stop. As a consequence, inflation can’t help but produce a multiverse — a technicolor existence with an infinite variety of pocket universes, one of which we call home. To critics, inflation predicts everything, which means it ultimately predicts nothing. “Inflation doesn’t work as it was intended to work,” said Paul Steinhardt, an architect of inflation who has become one of its most prominent critics.

In recent years, Steinhardt and others have been developing a different story of how our universe came to be. They have revived the idea of a cyclical universe: one that periodically grows and contracts.  They hope to replicate the universe that we see — flat and smooth — without the baggage that comes with a bang.

So, what do you prefer?  [Waiter standing with towel over arm, ready to take your order]

Door #1: Same universe but another iteration (tweaked).

Door #2: Multi universes, and all at the same time.

Door #3: One universe, Big Bang oriented.  That’s it.  Turn out the lights and lock up.

The elusive Door #4: Other (“God did it” … “I really don’t care, I have enough to think about” … “STFU” … Other “other”😉)

Bits: Revising history; Detecting alien intelligence; Breaking the rule of law down

The Daily Beast writes: 

Middle school students in Florida will soon be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.”

After the Florida Board of Education approved new standards for African American history on Wednesday, high school students will be taught an equally distorted message: that a deadly white mob attack against Black residents of Ocoee, Florida, in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

Dozens of Black residents were killed in the massacre, which was perpetrated to stop them from voting.

Apparently fighting back in self-defense when being physically attacked is equivalent to the attackers attacking for no good reason other than racism. The revisionists say that Blacks did commit violence in the incident. Notice the blatant bad faith in the reasoning the radical right racists rely on to defend the indefensible? If the attacked Black people had not tried to defend themselves, there would be no need to revise history by equating the unjustifiable violence of the White attackers with justified violence of the Black defenders.

This exemplifies just how mendacious, bigoted and cynical America's radical right elites have become.

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The ongoing SETI project reports an improved method to detect alien intelligence in the Milky Way galaxy (the original research paper is here). Before this, if a suspected radio signal looked like it was from an an alien source, a radio telescope in Earth would need to go back and listen to the same spot several times to confirm the signal was not from Earth. By looking at radio sources at least 10,000 light years away from Earth, radio signals travelling through space itself are affected in a detectable way. This phenomenon is akin to stars appearing to twinkle due to starlight passing through the atmosphere. Stars viewed from space do not twinkle. Radio waves passing through enough space do twinkle or "scintillate".

In a significant advancement for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have devised a new technique for detecting potential alien radio signals. This technique involves analyzing signals for signs of having traversed interstellar space, thereby ruling out Earth-based radio interference.

Today’s SETI searches largely rely on Earth-based radio telescopes, which are susceptible to terrestrial and satellite radio interference. False signals, which mimic technosignatures from extraterrestrial civilizations, could come from a variety of sources, including Starlink satellites, cellphones, microwaves, and even car engines. This kind of interference has created false hopes since the inception of the first dedicated SETI program in 1960.

Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia

The new method scrutinizes signals for signs of having traversed through interstellar space, hence eliminating the possibility of the signal being mere Earth-based radio interference.

Graduate student Brian Brzycki developed a computer algorithm, available as a Python script, that analyzes the scintillation of narrowband signals and plucks out those that dim and brighten over periods of less than a minute, indicating they’ve passed through the interstellar medium [ISM]. [Earth-based radio signals dim and brighten over periods of more than a minute]

64-meter Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia

The technique will be useful only for signals that originate more than about 10,000 light years from Earth, since a signal must travel through enough of the ISM to exhibit detectable scintillation. Anything originating nearby — the BLC-1 signal, for example, seemed to be coming from our nearest star, Proxima Centauri — would not exhibit this effect.

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 The WaPo writes:

Alabama legislature passes redistricting maps 

that Democrats say defy court order

The Republican-led House and Senate in Alabama approved dueling congressional maps Wednesday that would increase the percentage of Black voters in the state’s 2nd District — but not by enough, Democrats argued, to comply with a federal court order to create two districts in the state with at least close to a majority-Black population.

The legislature is in special session this week following a Supreme Court opinion in June that found lawmakers previously drew districts that unlawfully dilute the political power of its Black residents in violation of the Voting Rights Act. While Black people make up about 27 percent of Alabama’s population, only one of the state’s seven districts is currently majority-Black.

The unanimous three-judge panel of the federal court, which includes two appointees of former president Donald Trump, has given the legislature until Friday to come up with a new map. The two chambers will need to reconcile their plans to meet that deadline.

No matter how many times the courts slap the radical racists down, they refuse to comply with court orders in good faith.

This exemplifies just how authoritarian and brutally cynical toward the rule of law and free and fair elections that America's bigoted radical right elites have become. 

Bits: DJT's legal situation; Quick AI update; Fake electors charged with felonies

Everyone is reporting about the letter inviting the traitor in for an arrest related to his treason in the 1/6 coup attempt. The NYT comments on how Republicans are reacting: 

Like so much of the Trump presidency itself, the extraordinary has become so flattened that Mr. Trump’s warning on Tuesday that he was facing a possible third indictment this year, this time over his involvement in the events that led to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, drew shrugs from some quarters of his party and a muddled response from his rivals.

At one Republican congressional fund-raising lunch on Tuesday in Washington, the news of a likely third Trump indictment went entirely unmentioned, an attendee said. Some opposing campaigns’ strategists all but ignored the development. And on Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump’s allies quickly resumed their now-customary defensive positions.  

Justin Clark, who served as Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2020 and whose firm, National Public Affairs, has conducted polling of the primary race, said the challenge for his rivals is the voters themselves. Data from Mr. Clark’s firm shows that Republicans view an attack on Mr. Trump “as an attack on them,” he said.

More importantly, the rabble at reddit have some interesting insights:

iStayedAtaHolidayInn commented: This guy is getting really familiar with the arraignment process. He’s gonna slam those little fingers on the fingerprint pad like a pro

Shady_Nasty_77 responded: “a man came to me.. tears in his eyes…and said Sir, no one has ever slammed that fingerprint process like that..it was beautiful.”

AdrianInLimbo commented: Larry, bring me the small ink blotter. Donny is coming in.

Thomascgalvin astutely observed: Most arrested former President in American history!

tdevine33: More impeachments than terms. More indictments than impeachments.

And, there's the thug Matt Gaetz ready to step in to vindicate the rule of law the old-fashioned GOP way, i.e., stop the investigation:

Matt Gaetz launches bill to defund Jack Smith probe as Trump 

asks Capitol allies for Jan 6 indictment help

Rep Matt Gaetz of Florida said on his podcast that he will in the coming days introduce a bill to defund Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into former President Donald Trump as Mr Trump reportedly asks Capitol Hill allies for help as he faces another potential indictment.

What a stinking mess. But at least its entertaining in a sick sort of way.

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Artificial intelligence software is scaring a growing swath of workers in AI-replaceable jobs. The NYT writes about people in call centers:

‘Training My Replacement’: Inside a Call Center Worker’s Battle With A.I.

To many people, chatbots and other technology feel like a ticking time bomb, sure to explode their work. But to some, the threat is already here.

Like so many millions of American workers, across so many thousands of workplaces, the roughly 230 customer service representatives at AT&T’s call center in Ocean Springs, Miss., watched artificial intelligence arrive over the past year both rapidly and assuredly, like a new manager settling in and kicking up its feet.

Ms. Sherrod, 38, vice president of the call center’s local union chapter, who exudes quiet confidence at 5-foot-11, regarded the new technology with a combination of irritation and fear. “I always had a question in the back of my mind,” she said. “Am I training my replacement?” .... “If we don’t talk about this, it could jeopardize my family,” she said. “Will I be jobless?”

When automation swallows up jobs, it often comes for customer service roles first, which make up about three million jobs in America.

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Sixteen fake electors in Michigan have been indicted:

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced on Tuesday that 16 fake electors who signed certificates falsely claiming that then-President Donald Trump had won Michigan in the 2020 election — including Kathy Berden, a Republican National Committeewoman from the state and Meshawn Maddock, the former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party — have been charged with crimes related to the scheme.

As CNN reported, all 16 individuals were charged with multiple felonies "for their role in the alleged false electors scheme following the 2020 U.S. presidential election," Nessel's office announced. The charges range from counts of election law forgery, which carries a maximum of five years in prison, to conspiracy to commit forgery, which carries a maximum of 14 years in prison.

One can only hope those 16 spend some time in jail before they get pardoned by a Republican president. There sure are a lot of felons in the GOP leadership.

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Ted Cruz got his knickers in a bunch over the new Barbie movie. MSNBC reports:

A growing number of voices on the right are accusing the upcoming Barbie movie of pushing Chinese propaganda. The film, which comes out July 21, stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, who leave Barbie Land to explore the real world. In one scene before they leave, a rough, hand-drawn map of the world can be seen in the background. The map includes the so-called nine-dash line, a much-disputed division of territory in the South China Sea.

The accusation is incredibly foolish. As Dan Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, explained last week, the cartoonish image from the film is “a nonsense map. There are squiggles and arrows and hashtags and dotted lines all over the damn place. To the extent that the map is supposed to depict the Pacific Rim, the dotted line is nowhere close to where the actual nine-dash line is.”

In other words, the map is not a secret message, intended to warp audiences' minds.

And yet, there was Cruz, taking an exceedingly weird interest in the movie. In fact, a spokesperson for the senator told the Daily Mail last week, “China wants to control what Americans see, hear, and ultimately think, and they leverage their massive film markets to coerce American companies into pushing [Chinese Communist Party] propaganda — just like the way the Barbie film seems to have done with the map.”

Soon after, Cruz kept at it, suggesting that “Barbie” is somehow responsible for promoting Chinese propaganda.

Since this sounded too stupid to be true, it warranted further investigation. By golly, there is an 8-dash line in the map! 

Barbie - Chinese spy

(allegedly)

A real map with the real nine-dash line

China claims everything inside as 

its territorial waters

Vietnam and the Philippines are very nervous about it

U.S. women's suffrage movement

On this day in 1848, the women's suffrage movement in the United States was launched with the opening of the Seneca Falls Convention, which sought to gain certain rights and privileges for women, notably the right to vote.

https://www.britannica.com/on-this-day/July-19

The Women's Suffrage Movement

Getting the right to vote didn't come easy for women. Here's how they got it done.

The movement begins

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES

In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first convention regarding women’s rights in the United States. Called the Seneca Falls Convention, the event in Seneca Falls, New York, drew over 300 people, mostly women. They wanted to be treated as individuals, not dependents of men. They wanted more employment and education opportunities. They wanted the option to run for office, speak in front of Congress, and vote.

On the second day, the attendees signed the Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances. Stanton modeled the document after the Declaration of Independence, which mentions only men. She wrote that men and women should be created equal and have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A hundred people signed the declaration, which included 12 resolutions that supported women’s rights. These resolutions, including the right to vote, would be the guiding principles for the women’s suffrage movement.

The Seneca Falls Convention was attended mostly by white women, even though northern states like New York had outlawed enslavement. But in 1851, Black women, such as Sojourner Truth, a former enslaved person who became a women’s and civil rights advocate, attended the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

Sojourner Truth

PHOTOGRAPH BY MPI / GETTY IMAGES

When white men tried to take over the meeting, Truth got angry. She stood up and made up a speech on the spot. Called “Ain’t I A Woman,” her speech argued that because she did the same things as men when she was enslaved, she should also have the same rights as men. It was one of the first speeches to address both gender and racial discrimination and is remembered as one of the greatest speeches of the women’s rights era.

More on the history:

https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/womens-suffrage-movement