Balance. :)

Petr Horálek on Instagram

There is no need to dance anymore, I’m told. 

There never was a need to dance in the first place, but it gave us joy, hope, happiness… It gave us a soul. 

And I laugh at the mere thought of stopping.

Prints and Commissions Twitter - deviantART - Insta - Kofi - Mastodon

Someone dropped a paper somewhere.

academia.edu

Can an AI gain consciousness?

In response to the allegations made by an AI engineer that a linguistic model exhibits sentience, both "authorities" and Google re

Lilith by AetherionArtOG

Fairy nap

I'd like to call the attention of you in the audience for this terrible disease. Help to raise awareness, share.

https://www.academia.edu/resource/work/84103601

academia.edu

A pictorial review of pediatric brain tumor response assesment, part one

Diffuse midline gliomas (DMGs) are a type of brain tumor located in the midline of the brain, characterized by complex molecular characteris

Earth can be studied like a machine, a very complicated one indeed. In this view, it can be subdivided in many parts, each one a subsystem that can also be interpreted as a machine interconected to many others to form the entire Earth system. One of this parts is the biosphere, and a subsystem of the biosphere refers to human activity. Since human activity can be approached by economics, it is appropriate to talk about economics as part of the entire Earth system, as a piece of the biosphere machinery. This is the view of Ecological Economics.

As it happens to any machine, Earth has to obey the second law of thermodynamics, entropy can only increase with time. And what is the power source of the Earth machine? Easy, the solar radiation. Everything that has ever occurred, occurs, or will occurs could only take place in Earth because of solar radiative energy. Even these lines that I am writing, would not be here if not because the sun shines.

That is why it is so important to be aware of the energy cycles of Earth to understand everything, including economics. Think about it: the energy that powers the device you're using now, and ultimately the brain that is thinking and taking decisions now, every single joule of this energy was once photons leaving the sun towards Earth. Think of this interconnectedness and believe, and worry, and care about Earth, the biosphere, the econosphere and humankind, because everything is One!

More large VtM doodle dumps–mixed of old and new, you can tell when I finally got a visual reference of the guy–this one specifically starring Manuel’s Ventrue employer (and slow burn love interest): Rosario de Angelis (who belongs to @bettiqua)! 

While Manuel acts as Rosario’s loyal ghoul and right hand man around New York, these two have a very messy history with each other that they’re only recently beginning to chisel away at after years of spiteful miscommunication and misunderstandings. A very simple summary of them would be that they’re two vulnerable men who have been hurt in the past and have been too prideful (and scared) to want that to happen to them again, only now discovering this about the other to the point they can begin to truly connect.

In short: they’re two idiots in love (even if one party is aware of their feelings but don’t see the other returning it, while the other refuses to believe they are). A little toxic but suited perfectly for each other.

Detecting new particles around black holes with gravitational waves

Clouds of ultralight particles can form around rotating black holes. A team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam and Harvard University now show that these clouds would leave a characteristic imprint on the gravitational waves emitted by binary black holes.

Black holes are generally thought to swallow all forms of matter and energy surrounding them. It has long been known, however, that they can also shed some of their mass through a process called superradiance. While this phenomenon is known to occur, it is only effective if new, so far unobserved particles with very low mass exist in nature, as predicted by several theories beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.

Ionizing gravitational atoms When mass is extracted from a black hole via superradiance, it forms a large cloud around the black hole, creating a so-called gravitational atom. Despite the immensely larger size of a gravitational atom, the comparison with sub-microscopic atoms is accurate because of the similarity of the black hole plus its cloud with the familiar structure of ordinary atoms, where clouds of electrons surround a core of protons and neutrons.

In a publication that appeared in Physical Review Letters this week, a team consisting of UvA physicists Daniel Baumann, Gianfranco Bertone, and Giovanni Maria Tomaselli, and Harvard University physicist John Stout, suggest that the analogy between ordinary and gravitational atoms runs deeper than just the similarity in structure. They claim that the resemblance can in fact be exploited to discover new particles with upcoming gravitational wave interferometers.

In the new work, the researchers studied the gravitational equivalent of the so-called ‘photoelectric effect’. In this well-known process, which for example is exploited in solar cells to produce an electric current, ordinary electrons absorb the energy of incident particles of light and are thereby ejected from a material – the atoms ‘ionize’. In the gravitational analogue, when the gravitational atom is part of a binary system of two heavy objects, it gets perturbed by the presence of the massive companion, which could be a second black hole or a neutron star. Just as the electrons in the photoelectric effect absorb the energy of the incident light, the cloud of ultralight particles can absorb the orbital energy of the companion, so that some of the cloud gets ejected from the gravitational atom.

Finding new particles The team demonstrated that this process may dramatically alter the evolution of such binary systems, significantly reducing the time required for the components to merge with each other. Moreover, the ionization of the gravitational atom is enhanced at very specific distances between the binary black holes, which leads to sharp features in the gravitational waves that we detect from such mergers. Future gravitational wave interferometers – machines similar to the LIGO and Virgo detectors that over the past few years have shown us the first gravitational waves from black holes – could observe these effects. Finding the predicted features from gravitational atoms would provide distinctive evidence for the existence of new ultralight particles.

IMAGE…An atom in the sky. If new ultralight particles exist, black holes would be surrounded by a cloud of such particles that behaves surprisingly similar to the cloud of electrons in an atom. When another heavy object spirals in and eventually merges with the black hole, the gravitational atom gets ionized and emits particles just like electrons are emitted when light is shone onto a metal. CREDIT UvA Institute of Physics

Godzilla 2019