TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.
This is coming up now. It also promises to be extremely interesting and i do hope that NASA letys us look at it in decent resolution.
One of the corollaries of my cloud cosmology is that even planetoids may turn out to be viable habitats with an inner sun. This is a crazy concept to the mind educated through the lens of Newtonian physics and even to a relativist such as myself. Yet real evidence keeps slowly stacking up if you are looking.
The outer surface may well be covered with a lot of elemental carbon in this particular case.
Otherwise it should merely be broken terrain and impact craters. I would love to have a nice large entry hole along with a strong internal light. Not going to get that of course, We have to build our own Dyson spheres out there..
All about Ultima: New Horizons flyby target is unlike anything explored in space Date: December 27, 2018 Source:
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Summary:
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is set to fly by a target nicknamed 'Ultima Thule,' 4 billion miles from the Sun, on New Year's Day 2019. No spacecraft has ever explored such a distant world. Share:
The Kuiper Belt lies in the so-called "third zone" of our solar system, beyond the terrestrial planets (inner zone) and gas giants (middle zone). This vast region contains billions of objects, including comets, dwarf planets like Pluto and "planetesimals" like Ultima Thule. The objects in this region are believed to be frozen in time -- relics left over from the formation of the solar system.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is set to fly by a distant "worldlet" 4 billion miles from the Sun in just six days, on New Year's Day 2019. The target, officially designated 2014 MU69, was nicknamed "Ultima Thule," a Latin phrase meaning "a place beyond the known world," after a public call for name recommendations. No spacecraft has ever explored such a distant world.
Ultima, as the flyby target is affectionately called by the New Horizons team, is orbiting in the heart of our solar system's Kuiper Belt, far beyond Neptune. The Kuiper Belt -- a collection of icy bodies ranging in size from dwarf planets like Pluto to smaller planetesimals like Ultima Thule (pronounced "ultima toolee") and even smaller bodies like comets -- are believed to be the building blocks of planets.
Ultima's nearly circular orbit indicates it originated at its current distance from the Sun. Scientists find its birthplace important for two reasons. First, because that means Ultima is an ancient sample of this distant portion of the solar system. Second, because temperatures this far from the Sun are barely above absolute zero -- mummifying temperatures that preserves Kuiper Belt objects -- they are essentially time capsules of the ancient past.
Marc Buie, New Horizons co-investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and members of the New Horizons science team discovered Ultima using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014. The object is so far and faint in all telescopes, little is known about the world beyond its location and orbit. In 2016, researchers determined it had a red color. In 2017, a NASA campaign using ground-based telescopes traced out its size -- just about 20 miles (30 kilometers) across -- and irregular shape when it passed in front of a star, an event called a "stellar occultation."
From its brightness and size, New Horizons team members have calculated Ultima's reflectivity, which is only about 10 percent, or about as dark as garden dirt. Beyond that, nothing else is known about it -- basic facts like its rotational period and whether or not it has moons are unknown.
"All that is about to dramatically change on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day," said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, also of SwRI. "New Horizons will map Ultima, map its surface composition, determine how many moons it has and find out if it has rings or even an atmosphere. It will make other studies, too, such as measuring Ultima's temperature and perhaps even its mass. In the space of one 72-hour period, Ultima will be transformed from a pinpoint of light -- a dot in the distance -- to a fully explored world. It should be breathtaking!"
"New Horizons is performing observations at the frontier of planetary science," said Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, "and the entire team looks forward to unveiling the most distant and pristine object ever explored during a spacecraft flyby."
"From Ultima's orbit, we know that it is the most primordial object ever explored. I'm excited to see the surface features of this small world, particularly the craters on the surface," said Deputy Project Scientist Cathy Olkin, of SwRI. "Young craters could provide a window to see the composition of the subsurface of Ultima. Also by counting the number and impactors that have hit Ultima, we can learn about the number of small objects in the outer solar system."
The New Horizons spacecraft is on course to fly by Ultima on New Year's Day, Jan. 1, at 12:33 a.m. EST. For a listing of flyby programming and where to watch it online, visit the New Horizons website at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Where-to-Watch.php.
It is my contention that space time describes the impressed geometry of existence rather well and is very important. Yet it does not describe existence itself.
More simply, existence is an action that initiates a 3D pendulum that thus produces time. While mathematical continuity exists nicely enough in 3D, it does not at all along a proposed time axis. continuity is reflected internally instead and all objects occupy a different space through each step in time.
Recall that photons are bundles of 2D space as well. All this tracks discontinuously through space.
The point is that my formulation absorbs our present understanding of physics while only using the geometry of 3D which we actually experience. The driving metric is the nth ordered Pythagorean in which n is the number of axis involved. For n > 2, the observed scales spiral down.
All this becomes apparent with the mathematics of my third and forth order Pythagorean and understanding my work on the Space Time Pendulum.
These higher ordered Pythagoreans naturally produce our particle universe and its space time geometry as well without any higher dimensions at all.
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Radical dimensions
Relativity says we live in four dimensions. String theory says it’s 10. What are ‘dimensions’ and how do they affect reality?
writes about the cultural resonances of science and mathematics. Her books include The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (1999) and Physics on the Fringe (2012). She also creates art and science projects, including Crochet Coral Reef, which has been exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, the Smithsonian, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.
Writing away at my desk, I reach my hand up to turn on a lamp, and down to open a drawer to take out a pen. Extending my arm forward, I brush my fingers against a small, strange figurine given to me by my sister as a good-luck charm, while reaching behind I can pat the black cat snuggling into my back. Right leads to the research notes for my article, left
to my pile of ‘must-do’ items (bills and correspondence). Up, down,
forward, back, right, left: I pilot myself in a personal cosmos of
three-dimensional space, the axes of this world invisibly pressed upon
me by the rectilinear structure of my office, defined, like most Western
architecture, by three conjoining right angles.
Our architecture, our education and our dictionaries tell us that space is three-dimensional. The OED
defines it as ‘a continuous area or expanse which is free, available or
unoccupied … The dimensions of height, depth and width, within which
all things exist and move.’ In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant argued
that three-dimensional Euclidean space is an a priori necessity
and, saturated as we are now in computer-generated imagery and video
games, we are constantly subjected to representations of a seemingly
axiomatic Cartesian grid. From the perspective of the 21st century, this
seems almost self-evident.
Yet the notion that we inhabit a space with any
mathematical structure is a radical innovation of Western culture,
necessitating an overthrow of long-held beliefs about the nature of
reality. Although the birth of modern science is often discussed as a
transition to a mechanistic account of nature, arguably more important –
and certainly more enduring – is the transformation it entrained in our
conception of space as a geometrical construct.
Over the past
century, the quest to describe the geometry of space has become a major
project in theoretical physics, with experts from Albert Einstein
onwards attempting to explain all the fundamental forces of nature as
byproducts of the shape of space itself. While on the local level we are
trained to think of space as having three dimensions, general
relativity paints a picture of a four-dimensional universe, and string
theory says it has 10 dimensions – or 11 if you take an extended version
known as M-Theory. There are variations of the theory in 26 dimensions,
and recently pure mathematicians have been electrified by a version
describing spaces of 24 dimensions. But what are these ‘dimensions’?
And what does it mean to talk about a 10-dimensional space of being?
In order to come to the modern mathematical mode of thinking about space, one first has to conceive of it as some kind of arena that matter might occupy. At the very least, ‘space’ has to be thought of as something extended.
Obvious though this might seem to us, such an idea was anathema to
Aristotle, whose concepts about the physical world dominated Western
thinking in late antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Strictly speaking, Aristotelian physics didn’t include a theory of space, only a concept of place.
Think of a cup sitting on a table. For Aristotle, the cup is surrounded
by air, itself a substance. In his world picture, there is no such
thing as empty space, there are only boundaries between one kind of
substance, the cup, and another, the air. Or the table. For Aristotle,
‘space’ (if you want to call it that), was merely the infinitesimally
thin boundary between the cup and what surrounds it. Without extension,
space wasn’t something anything else could be in.
Centuries
before Aristotle, Leucippus and Democritus had posited a theory of
reality that invoked an inherently spatialised way of seeing – an
‘atomistic’ vision, whereby the material world is composed of minuscule
particles (or atoms) moving through a void. But Aristotle
rejected atomism, claiming that the very concept of a void was logically
incoherent. By definition, he said, ‘nothing’ cannot be.
Overcoming Aristotle’s objection to the void, and thus to the concept of
extended space, would be a project of centuries. Not until Galileo and
Descartes made extended space one of the cornerstones of modern physics
in the early 17th century does this innovative vision come into its own.
For both thinkers, as the American philosopher Edwin Burtt put it in
1924, ‘physical space was assumed to be identical with the realm of
geometry’ – that is, the three-dimensional Euclidean geometry we are now
taught in school.
Long before physicists embraced
the Euclidean vision, painters had been pioneering a geometrical
conception of space, and it is to them that we owe this remarkable leap
in our conceptual framework. During the late Middle Ages, under a newly
emerging influence deriving from Plato and Pythagoras, Aristotle’s prime
intellectual rivals, a view began to percolate in Europe that God had
created the world according to the laws of Euclidean geometry. Hence, if
artists wished to portray it truly, they should emulate the Creator in
their representational strategies. From the 14th to the 16th centuries,
artists such as Giotto, Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca
developed the techniques of what came to be known as perspective
– a style originally termed ‘geometric figuring’. By consciously
exploring geometric principles, these painters gradually learned how to
construct images of objects in three-dimensional space. In the process,
they reprogrammed European minds to see space in a Euclidean fashion.
The historian Samuel Edgerton recounts this remarkable segue into modern science in The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry
(1991), noting how the overthrow of Aristotelian thinking about space
was achieved in part as a long, slow byproduct of people standing in
front of perspectival paintings and feeling, viscerally, as if they were
‘looking through’ to three-dimensional worlds on the other side of the
wall. What is so extraordinary here is that, while philosophers and
proto-scientists were cautiously challenging Aristotelian precepts about
space, artists cut a radical swathe through this intellectual territory
by appealing to the senses. In a very literal fashion, perspectival
representation was a form of virtual reality that, like today’s VR
games, aimed to give viewers the illusion that they had been transported
into geometrically coherent and psychologically convincing other worlds.
The structure of the ‘real’ went from a philosophical and theological question to a geometrical proposition
The
illusionary Euclidean space of perspectival representation that
gradually imprinted itself on European consciousness was embraced by
Descartes and Galileo as the space of the real world. Worth adding here
is that Galileo himself was trained in perspective. His ability to
represent depth was a critical feature in his groundbreaking drawings of
the Moon, which depicted mountains and valleys and implied that the
Moon was as solidly material as the Earth.
By adopting the space
of perspectival imagery, Galileo could show how objects such as
cannonballs moved according to mathematical laws. The space itself was
an abstraction – a featureless, inert, untouchable, un-sensable void,
whose only knowable property was its Euclidean form. By the end of the
17th century, Isaac Newton had expanded this Galilean vision to
encompass the universe at large, which now became a potentially infinite
three-dimensional vacuum – a vast, quality-less, emptiness extending
forever in all directions. The structure of the ‘real’ had thus been
transformed from a philosophical and theological question into a
geometrical proposition.
Where
painters had used mathematical tools to develop new ways of making
images, now, at the dawn of the ‘scientific revolution’, Descartes
discovered a way to make images of mathematical relations in and of
themselves. In the process, he formalised the concept of a dimension,
and injected into our consciousness not only a new way of seeing the
world but a new tool for doing science.
Almost everyone today
recognises the fruits of Descartes’s genius in the image of the
Cartesian plane – a rectangular grid marked with an x and y axis, and a coordinate system.
By definition, the Cartesian plane is a two-dimensional space because we need two
coordinates to identify any point within it. Descartes discovered that
with this framework he could link geometric shapes and equations. Thus, a
circle with a radius of 1 can be described by the equation x2 + y2 =1.A
vast array of figures that we can draw on this plane can be described
by equations, and such ‘analytic’ or ‘Cartesian’ geometry would soon
become the basis for the calculus developed by Newton and G W
Leibniz to further physicists’ analysis of motion. One way to understand
calculus is as the study of curves; so, for instance, it enables us to
formally define where a curve is steepest, or where it reaches a local
maximum or minimum. When applied to the study of motion, calculus gives
us a way to analyse and predict where, for instance, an object thrown
into the air will reach a maximum height, or when a ball rolling down a
curved slope will reach a specific speed. Since its invention, calculus
has become a vital tool for almost every branch of science.
Considering
the previous diagram, it’s easy to see how we can add a third axis.
Thus with an x, y and z axis, we can describe the surface of a sphere –
as in the skin of a beach ball. Here the equation (for a sphere with a
radius of 1 ) becomes: x2 + y2 + z2 = 1
With
three axes, we can describe forms in three-dimensional space. And
again, every point is uniquely identified by three coordinates: it’s the
necessary condition of three-ness that makes the space three-dimensional.
But
why stop there? What if I add a fourth dimension? Let’s call it ‘p’.
Now I can write an equation for something I claim is a sphere sitting in
four-dimensional space: x2 + y2 + z2 + p2
= 1. I can’t draw this object for you, yet mathematically the addition
of another dimension is a legitimate move. ‘Legitimate’ meaning there’s
nothing logically inconsistent about doing so – there’s no reason I can’t.
A ‘dimension’ becomes a purely symbolic concept not necessarily linked to the material world at all
And
I can keep on going, adding more dimensions. So I define a sphere in
five-dimensional space with five coordinate axes (x, y, z, p, q) giving
us the equation: x2 + y2 + z2+ p2 + q2 = 1. And one in six-dimensions: x2 + y2 + z2 + p2 + q2 + r2 = 1, and so on.
Although
I might not be able to visualise higher-dimensional spheres, I can
describe them symbolically, and one way of understanding the history of
mathematics is as an unfolding realisation about what seemingly sensible
things we can transcend. This is what Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis
Carroll, was getting at when, in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), he had the White Queen assert her ability to believe ‘six impossible things before breakfast’.
Mathematically,
I can describe a sphere in any number of dimensions I choose. All I
have to do is keep adding new coordinate axes, what mathematicians call
‘degrees of freedom’. Conventionally, they are named x1, x2, x3, x4, x5, x6 et cetera.
Just as any point on a Cartesian plane can be described by two (x, y)
coordinates, so any point in a 17-dimensional space can be described by
set of 17 coordinates (x1, x2, x3, x4, x5, x6 … x15, x16, x17). Surfaces like the spheres above, in such multidimensional spaces, are generically known as manifolds.
From
the perspective of mathematics, a ‘dimension’ is nothing more than
another coordinate axis (another degree of freedom), which ultimately
becomes a purely symbolic concept not necessarily linked at all to the
material world. In the 1860s, the pioneering logician Augustus De
Morgan, whose work influenced Lewis Carroll, summed up the increasingly
abstract view of this field by noting that mathematics is purely ‘the
science of symbols’, and as such doesn’t have to relate to anything
other than itself. Mathematics, in a sense, is logic let loose in the
field of the imagination.
Unlike
mathematicians, who are at liberty to play in the field of ideas,
physics is bound to nature, and at least in principle, is allied with
material things. Yet all this raises a liberating possibility, for if
mathematics allows for more than three dimensions, and we think
mathematics is useful for describing the world, how do we know that
physical space is limited to three? Although Galileo, Newton and Kant
had taken length, breadth and height to be axiomatic, might there not be
more dimensions to our world?
Again, the idea of a
universe with more than three dimensions was injected into public
consciousness through an artistic medium, in this case literary
speculation, most famously in the mathematician Edwin A Abbott’s Flatland
(1884). This enchanting social satire tells the story of a humble
Square living on a plane, who is one day visited by a three-dimensional
being, Lord Sphere, who propels him into the magnificent world of
Solids. In this volumetric paradise, Square beholds a three-dimensional
version of himself, the Cube, and begins to dream of pushing on to a
fourth, fifth and sixth dimension. Why not a hypercube? And a
hyper-hypercube, he wonders?
Sadly, back in Flatland, Square is
deemed a lunatic, and locked in an insane asylum. One of the virtues of
the story, unlike some of the more saccharine animations and adaptations
it has inspired, is its recognition of the dangers entailed in
flaunting social convention. While Square is arguing for other
dimensions of space, he is also making a case for other dimensions of
being – he’s a mathematical queer.
In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, a raft of authors (H G Wells, the mathematician and sci-fi
writer Charles Hinton, who coined the word ‘tesseract’ for the 4D cube),
artists (Salvador Dalí) and mystical thinkers (P D Ouspensky), explored
ideas about the fourth dimension and what it might mean for humans to
encounter it.
Then in 1905, an unknown physicist named Albert
Einstein published a paper describing the real world as a
four-dimensional setting. In his ‘special theory of relativity’, time
was added to the three classical dimensions of space. In the
mathematical formalism of relativity, all four dimensions are bound
together, and the term spacetime entered our lexicon. This
assemblage was by no means arbitrary. Einstein found that, by going down
this path, a powerful mathematical apparatus came into being that
transcended Newton’s physics and enabled him to predict the behaviour of
electrically charged particles. Only in a 4D model of the world can
electromagnetism be fully and accurately described.
Relativity was
a great deal more than another literary game, especially once Einstein
extended it from the ‘special’ to the ‘general’ theory. Now
multidimensional space became imbued with deep physical meaning.
In
Newton’s world picture, matter moves through space in time under the
influence of natural forces, particularly gravity. Space, time, matter
and force are distinct categories of reality. With special relativity,
Einstein demonstrated that space and time were unified, thus reducing
the fundamental physical categories from four to three: spacetime,
matter and force. General relativity takes a further step by enfolding
the force of gravity into the structure of spacetime itself. Seen from a
4D perspective, gravity is just an artifact of the shape of space.
To
comprehend this remarkable situation, let’s imagine for the moment its
two-dimensional analogue. Think of a trampoline, and imagine we draw on
its surface a Cartesian grid. Now put a bowling ball onto the grid.
Around it, the surface will stretch and warp so some points become
further away from each other. We’ve disturbed the inherent measure of
distance within the space, making it uneven. General relativity says
that this warping is what a heavy object, such as the Sun, does to
spacetime, and the aberration from Cartesian perfection of the space itself gives rise to the phenomenon we experience as gravity.
Whereas
in Newton’s physics, gravity comes out of nowhere, in Einstein’s it
arises naturally from the inherent geometry of a four-dimensional
manifold; in places where the manifold stretches most, or deviates most
from Cartesian regularity, gravity feels stronger. This is sometimes
referred to as ‘rubber-sheet physics’. Here, the vast cosmic force
holding planets in orbit around stars, and stars in orbit around
galaxies, is nothing more than a side-effect of warped space. Gravity is
literally geometry in action.
If moving into four dimensions helps to explain gravity, then might thinking in five dimensions have any scientific advantage? Why not give it a go?
a young Polish mathematician named Theodor Kaluza asked in 1919,
thinking that if Einstein had absorbed gravity into spacetime, then
perhaps a further dimension might similarly account for the force of
electromagnetism as an artifact of spacetime’s geometry. So Kaluza added
another dimension to Einstein’s equations, and to his delight found
that in five dimensions both forces fell out nicely as artifacts of the
geometric model.
You’re an ant running on a long, thin hose, without ever being aware of the tiny circle-dimension underfoot
The
mathematics fit like magic, but the problem in this case was that the
additional dimension didn’t seem to correlate with any particular
physical quality. In general relativity, the fourth dimension was time; in Kaluza’s theory, it wasn’t anything you could point to, see, or feel: it was just there in the mathematics. Even Einstein balked at such an ethereal innovation. What is it? he asked. Where is it?
In
1926, the Swedish physicist Oskar Klein answered this question in a way
that reads like something straight out of Wonderland. Imagine, he said,
you are an ant living on a long, very thin length of hose. You could
run along the hose backward and forward without ever being aware of the
tiny circle-dimension under your feet. Only your ant-physicists with
their powerful ant-microscopes can see this tiny dimension. According to
Klein, every point in our four-dimensional spacetime has a
little extra circle of space like this that’s too tiny for us to see.
Since it is many orders of magnitude smaller than an atom, it’s no
wonder we’ve missed it so far. Only physicists with super-powerful
particle accelerators can hope to see down to such a minuscule scale.
Once
physicists got over their initial shock, they became enchanted by
Klein’s idea, and during the 1940s the theory was elaborated in great
mathematical detail and set into a quantum context. Unfortunately, the
infinitesimal scale of the new dimension made it impossible to imagine
how it could be experimentally verified. Klein calculated that the
diameter of the tiny circle was just 10-30 cm. By comparison, the diameter of a hydrogen atom is 10-8
cm, so we’re talking about something more than 20 orders of magnitude
smaller than the smallest atom. Even today, we’re nowhere close to being
able to see such a minute scale. And so the idea faded out of fashion.
Kaluza,
however, was not a man easily deterred. He believed in his fifth
dimension, and he believed in the power of mathematical theory, so he
decided to conduct an experiment of his own. He settled on the subject
of swimming. Kaluza could not swim, so he read all he could about the
theory of swimming, and when he felt he’d absorbed aquatic exercise in
principle, he escorted his family to the seaside and hurled himself into
the waves, where lo and behold he could swim. In Kaluza’s
mind, the swimming experiment upheld the validity of theory and, though
he did not live to see the triumph of his beloved fifth dimension, in
the 1960s string theorists resurrected the idea of higher-dimensional
space.
By the 1960s, physicists had discovered two additional forces of nature, both operating at the subatomic scale. Called the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear
force, they are responsible for some types of radioactivity and for
holding quarks together to form the protons and neutrons that make up
atomic nuclei. In the late 1960s, as physicists began to explore the new
subject of string theory (which posits that particles are like
minuscule rubber bands vibrating in space), Kaluza’s and Klein’s ideas
bubbled back into awareness, and theorists gradually began to wonder if
the two subatomic forces could also be described in terms of spacetime geometry.
It turns out that in order to encompass both of these two forces, we have to add another five dimensions to our mathematical description. There’s no a priori
reason it should be five; and, again, none of these additional
dimensions relates directly to our sensory experience. They are just
there in the mathematics. So this gets us to the 10 dimensions of string
theory. Here there are the four large-scale dimensions of
spacetime (described by general relativity), plus an extra six ‘compact’
dimensions (one for electromagnetism and five for the nuclear forces),
all curled up in some fiendishly complex, scrunched-up, geometric
structure.
A great deal of effort is being expended by physicists
and mathematicians to understand all the possible shapes that this
miniature space might take, and which, if any, of the many alternatives
is realised in the real world. Technically, these forms are known as
Calabi-Yau manifolds, and they can exist in any even number of
higher dimensions. Exotic, elaborate creatures, these extraordinary
forms constitute an abstract taxonomy in multidimensional space; a 2D
slice through them (about the best we can do in visualising what they
look like) brings to mind the crystalline structures of viruses; they
almost look alive.
A 2D slice through a Calabi-Yau manifold. Courtesy Wikipedia
There
are many versions of string-theory equations describing 10-dimensional
space, but in the 1990s the mathematician Edward Witten, at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (Einstein’s old haunt), showed
that things could be somewhat simplified if we took an 11-dimensional
perspective. He called his new theory M-Theory, and enigmatically
declined to say what the ‘M’ stood for. Usually it is said to be
‘membrane’, but ‘matrix’, ‘master’, ‘mystery’ and ‘monster’ have also
been proposed.
Ours might be just one of many co-existing universes, each a separate 4D bubble in a wider arena of 5D space
So
far, we have no evidence for any of these additional dimensions – we
are still in the land of swimming physicists dreaming of a miniature
landscape we cannot yet access – but string theory has turned out to
have powerful implications for mathematics itself. Recently,
developments in a version of the theory that has 24 dimensions has shown
unexpected interconnections between several major branches of
mathematics, which means that, even if string theory doesn’t pan out in
physics, it will have proven a richly rewarding source of purely
theoretical insight.
In mathematics, 24-dimensional space is rather special – magical things
happen there, such as the ability to pack spheres together in a
particularly elegant way – though it’s unlikely that the real world has
24 dimensions. For the world we love and live in, most string theorists
believe that 10 or 11 dimensions will prove sufficient.
There is
one final development in string theory that warrants attention. In 1999,
Lisa Randall (the first woman to get tenure at Harvard as a theoretical
physicist) and Raman Sundrum (an Indian-American particle theorist) proposed
that there might be an additional dimension on the cosmological scale,
the scale described by general relativity. According to their ‘brane’
theory – ‘brane’ being short for ‘membrane’ – what we normally call our Universe
might be embedded in a vastly bigger five-dimensional space, a kind of
super-universe. Within this super-space, ours might be just one of a
whole array of co-existing universes, each a separate 4D bubble within a
wider arena of 5D space.
It is hard to know if we’ll ever be able
to confirm Randall and Sundrum’s theory. However analogies have been
drawn between this idea and the dawn of modern astronomy. Europeans 500
years ago found it impossible to imagine other physical ‘worlds’ beyond
our own, yet now we know that the Universe is populated by billions of
other planets orbiting around billions of other stars. Who
knows, one day our descendants could find evidence for billions of other
universes, each with their own unique spacetime equations.
The
project of understanding the geometrical structure of space is one of
the signature achievements of science, but it might be that physicists
have reached the end of this road. For it turns out that, in a sense,
Aristotle was right – there are indeed logical problems with the notion
of extended space. For all the extraordinary successes of relativity, we
know that its description of space cannot be the final one because at
the quantum level it breaks down. For the past half-century, physicists
have been trying without success to unite their understanding of space
at the cosmological scale with what they observe at the quantum scale,
and increasingly it seems that such a synthesis could require radical
new physics.
After Einstein developed general relativity, he spent
much of the rest of his life trying to ‘build all of the laws of nature
out of the dynamics of space and time, reducing physics to pure
geometry’, as Robbert Dijkgraaf, director of the Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton, put it recently. ‘For [Einstein], space-time was the
natural “ground-level” in the infinite hierarchy of scientific
objects.’ Like Newton’s world picture, Einstein’s makes space the
primary grounding of being, the arena in which all things happen. Yet at
very tiny scales, where quantum properties dominate, the laws of
physics reveal that space, as we are used to thinking about it, might
not exist.
A view is emerging among some theoretical physicists
that space might in fact be an emergent phenomenon created by something
more fundamental, in much the same way that temperature emerges
as a macroscopic property resulting from the motion of molecules. As
Dijkgraaf put it: ‘The present point of view thinks of space-time not as
a starting point, but as an end point, as a natural structure that
emerges out of the complexity of quantum information.’
A leading proponent of new ways of thinking about space is the cosmologist Sean Carroll at Caltech, who recently said
that classical space isn’t ‘a fundamental part of reality’s
architecture’, and argued that we are wrong to assign such special
status to its four or 10 or 11 dimensions. Where Dijkgraaf makes an
analogy with temperature, Carroll invites us to consider ‘wetness’, an
emergent phenomenon of lots of water molecules coming together. No
individual water molecule is wet, only when you get a bunch of them
together does wetness come into being as a quality. So, he says, space emerges from more basic things at the quantum level.
Carroll writes that, from a quantum perspective, the Universe ‘evolves in a mathematical realm with more than 10(10^100) dimensions’ – that’s 10 followed by a googol
of zeroes, or 10,000 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion
trillion trillion trillion zeroes. It’s hard to conceive of this almost
impossibly vast number, which dwarfs into insignificance the number of
particles in the known Universe. Yet every one of them is a separate
dimension in a mathematical space described by quantum equations; every
one a new ‘degree of freedom’ that the Universe has at its disposal.
Even
Descartes might have been stunned by where his vision has taken us, and
what dazzling complexity has come to be contained in the simple word
‘dimension’.
The bottom line is that all forests need to be actively managed under best practice rules that optimize the produced fiber. This includes particularly forest grooming and timely prescribed burns as well. such a forest produces a healthy diverse undercover as well.
That does mean some form of title and forest farms along with hard maintenance rules. Today most everywhere we have non working wood lots that are part of farms. Addressing this though the local tax code at least would be a sound start to determine a scale and problems.
In the meantime, shifting regulations is a good start. Bad regs led to this disaster this year, along with seriously scary building practices that came home to roost...
.
Trump Overhauled The Way We Prevent Wildfires And The Media Totally Missed It
Trump Takes Steps To Prevent Catastrophic Forest Fires, Including More Logging
7:22 AM 12/24/2018 | Energy
Michael Bastasch | Energy Editor
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/12/25/trump-overhauled-the-way-we-prevent-wildfires-and-the-media-totally-missed-it/ President Trump issued an executive order allowing agencies to do more to prevent massive wildfires. The order came one day after Trump signed GOP-backed wildfire legislation. Wildfires have burned more than 8.5 million acres this year.
President Donald Trump moved forward with policies aimed at preventing catastrophic wildfires while the media breathlessly covered the government funding battle.
Trump issued an executive order Friday to allow for active management of forest and rangelands, including thinning and removing debris from millions of acres of federal lands.
The order also calls on federal officials to streamline regulations and permitting processes to allow the harvest of at least 3.8 billion board feet from U.S. Forest Service lands and 600 million board feet from Bureau of Land Management lands.
That represents a massive increase in timber sales from federal lands. For example, loggers harvested 2.9 billion board feet from Forest Service lands in 2017, according to federal figures. But even Trump’s increased allowance for loggers is still about one-quarter of what was harvested in 1973.
U.S. President Donald Trump visits the Skyway Villa Mobile Home and RV Park, a neighborhood recently destroyed by the Camp fire, Nov. 17, 2018. REUTERS/ Leah Millis.
Western Republicans welcomed Trump’s order. GOP lawmakers said that a change in policies was sorely needed after the devastating 2018 wildfire season, which saw more than 8.5 million acres burned.
“While litigation activists thwarted forest management reforms, the Senate also failed to pass legislation to help minimize forest fires,” Utah GOP Rep. Rob Bishop, chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, said in a statement.
“As a result, parts of the West were left in ashes. We cannot ignore these systemic issues any longer,” Bishop said.
Environmentalists railed against Trump’s executive order, characterizing it as a “gift” to the logging industry that would do little to prevent wildfires.
“It won’t work, and we know that,” Denise Boggs with the group Conservation Congress told The Sacramento Bee. “All the fire ecologists are saying the same thing: You can’t log your way out of this situation.”
An used car dealership is seen engulfed in flames during the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, U.S., on Nov. 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephen Lam.
“Logging in the back country is just a gift to the timber industry,” said Boggs, adding the order didn’t mention global warming or thinning around communities in wildfire-prone areas.
Democrats and environmentalists tend to blame global warming for the increasingly massive western wildfires. Republicans, however, argue more active management of forests through thinning, clearing of dead and dying trees and logging is needed to prevent wildfires from getting out of control.
“This executive order will save lives and communities throughout the West!” the Congressional Western Caucus tweeted Friday.
“However, this issue will only be fixed through congressional action,” Bishop said.
“The House and Senate must work to implement statutes that protect our environment and the many communities across the country who live every day with the threat of wildfire,” Bishop said.
I do think that we are still dealing with copper, but we are working with nano-scale effects which are mostly poorly understood. If that it the case it is an important new tool as the catalytic aspects proves.
I actually studied the behavior of nano scaled carbon particles and soon came to appreciate the potential even to the point of understanding that carbon could easily surpass zeolites in agricultural uses back in 1993. We discovered the existence of biochar in the literature in 2007. I am likely still the only chap who really understands them at all and what is going on.
Put simply, a gold mallet will produce blunt force injuries while a gold syringe will pass through you. Nano gold can interact with a single molecule and that can be really useful. .
Breakthrough: Chinese Scientists Turn Copper Into 'Gold'
A team of Chinese researchers from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Liaoning, has transformed copper into a new material “almost identical” to gold, according to a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, and first reported by the South China Morning Post on Saturday.
Professor Sun Jian and his team of scientist blasted a copper target
with a stream of hot, electrically charged argon gas. The fast-moving
ionized particles smashed the copper atoms. The atoms cooled
and condensed on the surface of a collecting device, producing a thin
layer of sand.
South China Morning Post said each grain of sand measured a few nanometers, or a thousandth of the size of a bacterium.
The researchers placed the material in a reaction chamber and used it
as a catalyst to turn coal to alcohol, a complex and intricate chemical
process that only precious metals can handle efficiently.
"The copper nanoparticles achieved catalytic performance
extremely similar to that of gold or silver,” Sun said in a statement on
Saturday.
“The results … proved that after processing, metal copper can transform from ‘chicken’ to ‘phoenix’,” claimed Sun, who was not available for comment.
Copper has a similar weight and looks to gold.
The research paper notes that the new material based on copper can
replace gold and silver in the manufacturing process of electronic
devices, which requires significant amounts of precious metals. This would be a game changer for the Chinese manufacturing complex.
Copper, alone, cannot function as well as gold in industrial applications, due to fewer electrons. These electrons are unstable, so copper tends to react more efficiently when combined with other chemicals.
The procedure developed by Sun’s team can inject a large amount of
energy into copper atoms and made the electrons more dense and stable,
they said.
"The new material can resist high temperatures, oxidization, and erosion," according to the researchers.
It is “like a warrior with golden armor in a battlefield, capable of withstanding any enemy assault,” they said.
The new material will be of little use for counterfeiters since
its density remains the same as copper, therefore making fake gold bars
with it would be worthless.
However, the new material would revolutionize industries with readily
available and inexpensive raw materials, adding to the deflationary
pressures.
An excellent answer to an excellent question. I will add that we are no longer acclimatized at all to cold weather exposure and so we shy away from it. The fact is that we can accommodate severe conditions and acclimatize. Think soldiers in Flanders where it was cold and continuously wet..
Fabrics block rapid heat loss, even when damp. After all most of the contact is with air, due to the weave. Circulation can handle the difference. It may take a bit, but you must simply get used to it.
One good reason to expose yourself to foul conditions is to stimulate your natural protections. However it is also wise to follow that with a hot soak. It is our high body temperature that suppresses viruses and the like.
During WWII the Finns would have their soldiers spend time in a sauna before going on patrol or taking their post. This made them fully effective against Russian soldiers made almost comatose by the cold.
How did the Vikings avoid hypothermia when out in the rough seas?
John Bartram, I learn history through the archaeology I study and places I visit.
I
grew up sailing in the same seas also, before modern, artificial
fabrics, so how I sailed was pretty-much as did the Vikings and other
Norse of ancient times. Even my boats were wooden, with natural-fibre
cordage and sails. They sure would get heavy when wet and I really
appreciated the modern materials when they became available.
Wet-weather
gear were called oilskins and I remember my father standing in the face
of storms, wearing his (expensive) oil-soaked silk jacket. The point
here is the oil, so an oiled skin would resist water and provide warmth.
We
wore the heaviest, wollen gear possible, the sort made for fishermen up
in the isles off the north of Scotland. Mind you, when a wave crashes
over you, I never did find a means of stopping the cold water running
down my chest. I wore masses, from undergarments, to woollens, to
oilskins. You might think I’d drown if overboard, but I could swim in
any weather, weighed down by any clothes except boots (which you kick
off). Really, I was tested in winter and in waters riven by
cross-currents.
Faroese postage stamp with a picture of a Viking helmsman in a wadmal tunic.
This is an extraordinary protocol that needs to be honored as it engages the spirit community directly in the creation of a child and produces a spirit song that is applied throughout the life of the individual.
Our present knowledge of the spirit world and practice makes complete sense of this and it needs to be applied more universally, it only to provide the child's birth song to possibly ease the physical birth itself.
That this was possible has never been imagined in our civilization and now it needs to be broadly shared and applied.
Of
all the African tribes still alive today, the Himba tribe is one of the
few that counts the birth date of the children not from the day they
are born nor conceived but the day the mother decides to have the child.
When a Himba woman decides to have a child, she goes off and sits under
a tree, by herself, and she listens until she can hear the song of the
child who wants to come. And after she's heard the song of this child,
she comes back to the man who will be the child's
father and teaches him the song. When they make love to physically
conceive the child, they sing the song of the child as a way of inviting
the child.
When she becomes pregnant, the mother teaches that
child's song to the midwives and the old women of the village, so that
when the child is born, the old women and the people gather around
him/her and sing the child's song to welcome him/her. As the child grows
up, the other villagers are taught the child's song. If the child falls
or gets hurt, someone picks him/her up and sings to him/her his/her
song. Or maybe when the child does something wonderful or goes through
the rites of puberty, then as a way of honoring this person, the people
of the village sing his or her song.
In the Himba tribe, there is
one other occasion when the "child song" is sung to the Himba
tribesperson. If a Himba tribesman or tribeswoman commits a crime or
something that is against the Himba social norms, the villagers call him
or her into the center of the village and the community forms a circle
around him/her. Then they sing his/her birth song to him/her.
The
Himba views correction not as a punishment, but as love and remembrance
of identity. For when you recognize your own song, you have no desire or
need to do anything that would hurt another.
In marriage, the
songs are sung, together. And finally, when the Himba
tribesman/tribeswoman is lying in his/her bed, ready to die, all the
villagers that know his or her song come and sing - for the last time
that person's song.
Little Grandmother Kiesha
March 10 ·
Of all the African tribes still alive today, the Himba tribe is one of the few that counts the birth date of the children not from the day they are born nor conceived but the day the mother decides to have the child.
When a Himba woman decides to have a child, she goes off and sits under a tree, by herself, and she listens until she can hear the song of the child who wants to come. And after she's heard the song of this child, she comes back to the man who will be the child's father, and teaches him the song. When they make love to physically conceive the child, they sing the song of the child as a way of inviting the child.
When she
becomes pregnant, the mother teaches that child's song to the midwives
and the old women of the village, so that when the child is born, the
old women and the people gather around him/her and sing the child's song
to welcome him/her. As the child grows up, the other villagers are
taught the child's song. If the child falls, or gets hurt, someone picks
him/her up and sings to him/her his/her song. Or maybe when the child
does something wonderful, or goes through the rites of puberty, then as a
way of honoring this person, the people of the village sing his or her
song.
In the Himba tribe there is one other occasion when the "child
song" is sang to the Himba tribesperson. If a Himba tribesman or
tribeswoman commits a crime or something that is against the Himba
social norms, the villagers call him or her into the center of the
village and the community forms a circle around him/her. Then they sing
his/her birth song to him/her.
The Himba views correction not as a
punishment, but as love and remembrance of identity. For when you
recognise your own song, you have no desire or need to do anything that
would hurt another.
In marriage, the songs are sung, together. And
finally, when the Himba tribesman/tribeswoman is lying in his/her bed,
ready to die, all the villagers that know his or her song come and sing -
for the last time that person's song.
This is unexpected and important. It infers that THC combined with an anti inflammatory becomes safe in the niche of vulnerability. As we will surely shift fully to oral protocols, combining with natural anti inflammatory products is strongly indicated for general safety.
The problem was concerning and such a simple answer is good news as both THC and CBD will be entering mainstream medicine and the recreational and health suppliment markets in multiple variations to optimise benefits.
All good then.
How marijuana can harm teenage brains, and what may be done to prevent the damage
It was discovered in mouse experiments that anti-inflammatory drugs could protect against any potential cognitive damage from THC administered at a young age
In a compelling new study, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have established a fascinating hypothesis attempting to explain how marijuana use in some teenagers can result in cognitive impairment in adulthood. The research also suggests anti-inflammatory therapies may be able to prevent the marijuana-induced brain damage.
"Now that marijuana is moving toward widespread legalization and recreational use, it's important to learn more about why it's not harmless to everyone," says co-senior author of the new research, Atsushi Kamiya. "There's still a lot that we don't know about how pot specifically affects the brain."
Several studies have confidently linked adolescent marijuana use to certain cognitive impairments in later life. However, the connection has not been consistent across all research leading many scientists to suspect there must be an underlying genetic component that amplifies the adverse effects of the drug. This would explain why some people can smoke marijuana as a teenager with no adverse effects in later life while others may develop memory impairments or suffer from metal health issues.
To try and better understand how marijuana can trigger cognitive problems the researchers began by focusing on a specific mouse model genetically engineered to have a mutation in a gene called DISC1. The effects of a mutation in DISC1 were first discovered in a family found to have a major heritable history of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression. So, for this new research the mutated gene acts as a good bellwether for studying whether THC amplifies its effects.
The first stage of the research revealed that when the DISC1 mice were administered THC in their adolescent stages, they went on to display enhanced cognitive deficits in later life, compared to animals not administered THC. The next step was to home in on what specific brain cells and genes were activated after THC exposure that could be associated with the worsened cognitive effects.
It was discovered that cognitive problems in the mice only developed when THC exposure triggered the mutated DISC1 gene in astrocyte cells in the brain. Astrocytes are important star-shaped glial cells that surround, and protect, neurons in the brain. Alongside this revelation the researchers discovered that 56 genes specifically related to inflammation were seemingly catalyzing the cognitive problems in relation to THC exposure.
What all this fundamentally means is that exposure to THC seems to be increasing inflammation in astrocyte brain cells, and in the presence of a specific genetic mutation, this ultimately results in brain damage and cognitive dysfunction.
"The inflammation we saw in our mice is probably activated in many people who smoke marijuana, but our results may help explain why and how some mice – and some people – are genetically predisposed to experience an enhanced inflammatory response and brain damage," says Mikhail Pletnikov, a researcher working on the project.
To test this hypothesis further the researchers restaged their experiment, but this time administered the DISC1 mice with an anti-inflammatory drug before the animals were treated with THC. The results were incredibly compelling, with the mice tested for memory or cognitive impairments later in life and displaying absolutely no signs of brain damage. The anti-inflammatory agent essentially protected the animal's brain from THC-mediated damage in adolescence.
"If our results turn out to be applicable to people, they suggest we could develop safer anti-inflammatory treatments to prevent long-term consequences of marijuana use," notes Pletnikov.
Developing a drug that protects against the potential negative effects of adolescent marijuana use isn't the primary goal of this research, though, the more pressing outcome is to better understand and identify those young people that are most at risk from the harmful effects of marijuana. The next step for this research is to further investigate the different genetic vulnerabilities that amplify marijuana's harmful cognitive effects, and hopefully be able to better target the teenagers that are most susceptible to these effects.
From this it appears that the flap in Cuba most likely was caused by a problem with the air conditioner and its likely placement. It is also a strong reminder that while having an air conditioner is often necessary, having the hardware outside is completely necessary. Leaks will happen and proper venting is your protection.
As noted here the administrators did not call in either the Architects or the engineers who are seeing this problem elsewhere. Why folks who did show up also failed to address the obvious and call upon the folks who built the building escapes me. It actually borders on professional negligence.
Coolants do produce symptoms and they are also known. In fact, a doctor should have picked up on this immediately. So why was no one standing in front of a good fake story?.
EMBASSY PERSONNEL IN CUBA PROBABLY POISONED BY SYNTHETIC COOLANT
Architects and Civil Engineers are trained to simultaneously analyze thousands of variables in a structure in order to assure the safety of its occupants. Their exclusion from the federal government investigation into the strange health problems, which afflicted Havana embassy personnel, turned the situation into a political propaganda game. The US Department of State ignored input from professional architects and engineers about the obvious cause of the illnesses among their personnel.
So therefore, I am publishing my letter to the State Department on LinkedIn and the People of One Fire.
Someone should have paid attention to my letter
One would think that when the U. S. Department of State had funded a special multi-agency task force to determine the cause of severe health problems among embassy personnel in Havana, Cuba, they would welcome information from any experienced professional on the matter. They didn’t. Several mechanical engineers, civil engineers and at least one architect (me) were rebuffed by the politically motivated bureaucrats involved. I am a Registered Architect with 8 years of college, including six years at Georgia Tech, 46 years of professional experience and 10 international, national or state architectural awards. I wrote the task force that both the previous owner of this house and myself had exactly the same symptoms and it had been traced to a widely sold synthetic coolant that had NEVER been tested by the FDA, but was known to be extremely toxic to animals.
No one at the US State Department ever responded to my letter, but I waited to read the final report of the task force before going public. There was no mention of refrigerant poisoning as a possible cause of the embassy staff health problems, even though any investigator should have been aware of the similarity of symptoms. There was merely a statement that “mechanical and electrical systems were found to be functioning normally.” Well, no . . . all one would have to do is unscrew a valve to poison the occupants and then tighten it later. Synthetic freon is chemically similar to propane gas . . . including being highly flammable . . . and the gas in warm temperatures either dissipates or chemically breaks down.
You see, freon is not carcinogenic or generally toxic to humans, but most of the new synthetic freons are definitely toxic and NEVER been tested by government agencies for carcinogenic effects. The public assumed that they were safe alternatives to freon, which would be far less harmful to the environment. The synthetic freons are now being mass distributed in retail stores such as Walmart. Since the federal government has never officially classified them as toxic, the manufacturers are not required to tell you of their extremely dangerous effects, if inhaled.
Background
The previous occupant of my house was a retired widow, who was described by neighbors as “having strange problems with her head and body.” She was chronically fatigued and would have periods when her sense of balance was so impaired that she could not leave her bed. She went through most of her and her late husband’s retirement savings paying doctor’s bills, which produced no cure. Eventually, she was so impoverished by America’s “great” healthcare system that she couldn’t make repairs to the house or pay the utility bills. At that point, she abandoned the house and moved to another part of the country.
The house stayed on the market for 3 ½ years because most realtors assumed that it would have to be torn down and mortgage companies would not issue a loan on it. At the time I bought the house last May, it was the least expensive “real” house in North Georgia.
I came to this house with a lot of health problems due to a dead animal being dropped in my well shaft, a horrific rat infestation and a mold infestation after a tornado blew the roof off the rental cabin in March 2017 and the owner didn’t repair the roof properly. However, I quickly began feeling much better after moving here and got a lot accomplished in its repair. Soon the bumps that were all over my body, disappeared.
I paid for the HVAC company that had serviced the heat pump system for the elderly lady, to check it out, since the house had been unoccupied for over three years. The serviceman said that he had always had to add a few pounds of synthetic coolant at the end of each season, but once he filled up the unit for me, it ran perfectly. He told me that he checked the evaporator coils in the house and saw no leaks. I had no idea that coolant was leaking into the house. Normally leaks occur outside at the compressor or in the heating coil. The toxic gasses drift away, unnoticed. Refrigerant coolants are invisible, odorless and tasteless. When exposed to heat in open air, they breakdown chemically. They make a perfect poison . . . if that is what someone desires.
In July 2018, I began running the air conditioner in the afternoon. My energy level declined precipitously. Being on the brow of a mountain, cooling was rarely needed at night or in the morning. Once the air conditioning was being used again, I became increasingly fatigued. My stomach swelled like a balloon from water retention. On several occasions I fell asleep sitting in a chair in the day time, while working on the computer. However, I would feel better at night, when the windows were open. On two occasions, I suddenly lost my balance and fell flat on my face – once on a concrete slab and then on a tree stump. In both occasions there were bad injuries to my head. However, all these symptoms went away when I the air conditioning was no longer needed.
When I began turning on the heat pump at night, all the strange symptoms that were described by the US State Department letter appeared with a vengeance – much worse than during the summer. When I laid down in the bed, my body would feel like it was a spinning top. I could not sleep deeply and awoke each morning weak. I tied a rope to a door knob so that I could pull myself up out of bed.
Applying the logical analysis that was taught me at Georgia Tech, I zeroed in on the leaking coolant as the culprit. I dipped into a retirement account and bought a Buck Wood Stove. I had been Buck Stove’s architectural consultant in Asheville. As soon as the Buck Stove was installed, all the weird symptoms disappeared . . . except for two days when my firewood was too wet to burn. If I run the heat pump at night, my inner ears are bonkers in the morning.
Who Dunit?
I have no idea who or what was responsible for exposing our State Department personnel to toxic coolants. It could be intentionally or unintentionally installed flaws in cooling systems. It could be an inept American contractor, who got the job because of political donations. It could be crazy Satanists or Anarchists, who want to create mayhem. It could be crazy Cuban Communists, who feared normalization of relations with the United States. It could be crazy American Nazis, who wanted to embarrass the Obama Administration.
It appears that the investigation of the health problems among State Department employees in Havana was headed by FBI and CIA personnel. It was treated as a conventional criminal investigation. CDC personnel were involved, but they were steered toward the identification of microbes. This might be a case of criminal activity or politically motivated sabotage, and might not, but the fact that the disease symptoms were associated with the occupation of certain buildings should have sent up warning flags.
The investigation should have been headed by design professionals, who are intimately familiar with the construction and operation of buildings . . . not crime busters, CIA intelligence agents or political hacks. Hopefully, permanent damage between Cuba and the United States has not occurred. Even the Castro Brothers ultimately realized that Communism does not work over the long haul. They merely exchanged the Cuban people being the serfs of American organized crime cartels to being the serfs of the Soviet Union . . . and now, without the subsidies of the Soviet Union . . . are trapped in dysfunctional economic and political systems.
