Even the most cursory look at the history of modern visual and electronic media (printed broadsheets, camera obscura, phantasmagoria, magic lantern, radio) makes it clear that media technologies have always been bound up with the imagination in its archetypal as well as cognitive senses. Media technologies not only mimic and...
The idea that #AI#content is produced by some kind of emergent intelligence doesn’t bother me
Nor is the counterpoint lost on me, that this is not actually an “intelligence,” just a hyper-recursive recombinant data processor boosted by cloud power
I think what makes me nervous is that humans — actual organic minds — are so eagerly outsourcing their creative faculties to this thing. Like, “here. This mysterious thing I can do? Just do it for me, would you?”
A spherical shell-like structure 1 billion light-years in diameter named Ho’oleilana is discovered in the distribution of relatively nearby galaxies. We posit this is the 1st observation of an individual Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO).
Acoustic waves generated in the hot plasma of the early universe became imprinted in baryon fluctuations. The prediction was made in 1970 by Jim Peebles and others. Indirect evidence of the BAO phenomenom came in 2005 by observing a peak in the pair-wise separations of galaxies.
By contrast, the discovery of Ho'oleilana represents the 1st direct evidence of a BAO, as an individual entity and a new confirmation of the standard model of cosmology.
A discovery made 53 years after the prediction - that's more time elapsed than for e.g. Higgs and his boson!
Ho'oleilana was found unexpectedly in the distribution of galaxies of the Cosmicflows-4 Catalog, within its SDSS PV "Peculiar Velocities" subsample of early-type galaxies, derived from fundamental plane measurements.
The cosmography of Ho'oleilana is pretty amazing: its shell includes some of the largest known structures of the universe: the Sloan Great Wall, CfA Great Wall, Hercules Supercluster, Corona-Borealis Supercluster... At its core is the Boötes Supercluster.
A video visualization of the cosmography of Ho'oleilana is part of the paper. Major components in proximity to the shell are highlighted and identified by name. The historic Boötes Void lies interior to the shell structure.
A major aspect of the study presented in this paper is the analysis conducted by Cullan Howlett to understand the significance of this discovery against a physical BAO model, using in particular mock galaxy catalogs with and without BAO features.
Last but not least, a new measurement of the Hubble Constant is obtained by analyzing the geometrical properties of Ho'oleilana: 76.9 (+8.2)(-4.8) km/s /Mpc
This value is consistent with other direct local probes, and further exacerbates the "Hubble tension" in the ΛCDM model.
Ka’iu and Larry Kimura named other astronomical objects before: the interstellar asteroid ʻOumuamua, the imaged black hole Pōwehi (M87*), and others as part of the "A Hua He Inoa" program: Leleākūhonua an extreme transneptunian, Pōniuāʻena a quasar, ...
Ho'oleilana - a fossil from a time near the birth of the universe
Check out this video for more context and insights on the process of formation of Baryon Acoustic oscillations - with credits to ARC Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO)
A special thanks to digital artist Frédéric Durillon for this beautiful view of Ho'oleilana.
Credits: Frédéric Durillon, Animea Studio; Daniel Pomarède, IRFU, CEA University Paris-Saclay; government funding provided by France 2030 (P2I Graduate School of Physics) ref ANR-11-IDEX-0003
We’re told that discretion equals compassion, but has this ever been true, in life or in literature? That we should bury character flaws in complex protagonists if those blemishes – however empathetically rendered – might fuel racist, xenophobic, or other hateful rhetoric. And yet, survivors understand viscerally how...
You might assume that the right half of an image goes through the right side of the lens, the left part through the left side, etc, but it doesn't.
Every point in your image goes through every point across the lens opening, generally speaking (exceptions apply).
Every point on your subject emits or reflects light, in all directions. The lens captures the part that hits its entire surface and focusses it back into one point on your sensor/film. And it does that for every point simultaneously.
When a point in front of the camera is out of focus, it means that it doesn't get fully focused back into a point on the sensor/film plane but instead becomes a circle.
The aperture iris of the lens then restricts how much of each circle passes through at their widest point, making the circles that don't get reduces to a point smaller, resulting in less pronounced blur.
That's also why "bokeh" has the shape of the aperture iris.
This is basically all you need to know to understand how aperture and depth of field work, or rather why they work the way they do.
Deriving practical use cases from this takes some mental gymnastics so we typically don't think about it on this level.
We just say "smaller aperture (higher f number) makes more of the subject around the focus distance appear in focus", but the reason it does that is it makes more of the those circles near the focus distance small enough to register as sharp points on our pixels or film grains.
Einstein once said: Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. Shows his view on the subject of unlocking imagination, doesn’t it?...
A Brief History of Imaginal Machines - Erik Davis, PhD (www.youtube.com)
Even the most cursory look at the history of modern visual and electronic media (printed broadsheets, camera obscura, phantasmagoria, magic lantern, radio) makes it clear that media technologies have always been bound up with the imagination in its archetypal as well as cognitive senses. Media technologies not only mimic and...
When fiction shrinks to memoir we all lose out - Dina Nayeri (www.fictionable.world)
We’re told that discretion equals compassion, but has this ever been true, in life or in literature? That we should bury character flaws in complex protagonists if those blemishes – however empathetically rendered – might fuel racist, xenophobic, or other hateful rhetoric. And yet, survivors understand viscerally how...
The Why Files - The evidence we are living in a Simulation is everywhere. All you have to do is look. (www.youtube.com)
Is this reality? Well, we're experiencing ... something right now so maybe the better question is: what is reality?...
Unlocking Imagination: Throw Away the Rules to Succeed (digitalsparkmarketing.com)
Einstein once said: Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. Shows his view on the subject of unlocking imagination, doesn’t it?...