[1411.1401] Spin Wave Neuroanalog of von Neumann's Microwave Computer

[1411.1401] Spin Wave Neuroanalog of von Neumann's Microwave Computer:



 "Frequency and phase of neural activity play important roles in the behaving brain. The emerging understanding of these roles has been informed by the design of analog devices that have been important to neuroscience, among them the neuroanalog computer developed by O. Schmitt in the 1930's. In the 1950's, J. von Neumann, in a search for high performance computing using microwaves, invented a logic machine based on similar devices, that can perform logic functions including binary arithmetic. Described here is a novel embodiment of his machine using nano-magnetics. The embodiment is based on properties of ferromagnetic thin films that are governed by a nonlinear Schrodinger equation for magnetization in a film. Electrical currents through point contacts on a film create spin torque nano oscillators (STNO) that define the oscillator elements of the system. These oscillators may communicate through directed graphs of electrical connections or by radiation in the form of spin waves. It is shown here how to construct a logic machine using STNO, that this machine can perform several computations simultaneously using multiplexing of inputs, that this system can evaluate iterated logic functions, and that spin waves can communicate frequency, phase and binary information. Neural tissue and the Schmitt, von Neumann and STNO devices share a common bifurcation structure, although these systems operate on vastly different space and time scales. This suggests that neural circuits may be capable of computational functionality described here."



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Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ - NYTimes.com

Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ - NYTimes.com:



 "“Every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable.” Thus spoke President Kennedy in a 1961 address to the United Nations. The threat he warned of was not climate chaos — barely a blip on anybody’s radar at the time — but the hydrogen bomb. The nuclear threat had a volatile urgency and visual clarity that the sprawling, hydra-headed menace of today’s climate calamity cannot match. How can we rouse citizens and governments to act for concerted change? Will it take, as Naomi Klein insists, nothing less than a Marshall Plan for Earth?"



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Drug Gang Killed Students, Mexican Law Official Says - NYTimes.com

Drug Gang Killed Students, Mexican Law Official Says - NYTimes.com:



 "MEXICO CITY — Members of a drug gang arrested in the investigation into the disappearance of 43 college students in September told investigators that they had killed the students and burned their bodies in a pyre of tires and branches, the attorney general announced Friday."



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The S.E.C. Should Copy the D.M.V. - NYTimes.com

The S.E.C. Should Copy the D.M.V. - NYTimes.com:



"THE S.E.C. and other federal regulators have levied over $125 billion in penalties on Wall Street since the global financial crisis of 2008. Yet few believe that these fines are enough to change behavior. For the largest financial institutions, a multibillion-dollar penalty can amount to a speeding ticket — another cost of doing business. Repeat offenders are the real problem, and financial penalties alone are no longer an effective deterrent."



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Jobs Data Show Steady Gains Even as Voters Signal Anxiety - NYTimes.com

Jobs Data Show Steady Gains Even as Voters Signal Anxiety - NYTimes.com:



"Only days after many voters complained that the economy was getting worse, the latest government report on jobs, released Friday, provided fresh evidence that it was getting better. Employers added an estimated 214,000 jobs in October, the Labor Department found, and the official jobless rate, bolstered by a big rise in the number of people finding jobs, dropped to 5.8 percent, down sharply from 7.2 percent last October."



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[1411.1398] Reservoir computing with a single time-delay autonomous Boolean node

[1411.1398] Reservoir computing with a single time-delay autonomous Boolean node:



 "We demonstrate reservoir computing with a physical system using a single autonomous Boolean logic element with time-delay feedback. The system generates a chaotic transient with a window of consistency lasting between 30 and 300 ns, which we show is sufficient for reservoir computing. We then characterize the dependence of computational performance on system parameters to find the best operating point of the reservoir. When the best parameters are chosen, the reservoir is able to classify short input patterns with performance that decreases over time. In particular, we show that four distinct input patterns can be classified for 70 ns, even though the inputs are only provided to the reservoir for 7.5 ns."



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Black Hole Fails to Destroy Mystery Cosmic Cloud

Black Hole Fails to Destroy Mystery Cosmic Cloud:



"A cosmic gas cloud seemingly destined for a deadly encounter with the gigantic black hole at the core of the Milky Way has surprisingly survived a close pass by the monster's maw."



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Triumph of the Wrong - NYTimes.com

Triumph of the Wrong - NYTimes.com:



"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet midterms to men of understanding. Or as I put it on the eve of another Republican Party sweep, politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth. Still, it’s not often that a party that is so wrong about so much does as well as Republicans did on Tuesday."



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In a Mother’s Milk, Nutrients, and a Message, Too - NYTimes.com

In a Mother’s Milk, Nutrients, and a Message, Too - NYTimes.com:



"Milk is not just food. The more closely scientists examine it, the more complexity they find."



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Lollipop, the Latest Version of Android, Is Grown-Up and Accessible - NYTimes.com

Lollipop, the Latest Version of Android, Is Grown-Up and Accessible - NYTimes.com:



 "Google has just released its new version of Android, and the company is showing it off on a new slate of Nexus devices: A 9-inch tablet and a coming phone, the Nexus 6."



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What Does MS Free Mean?

Microsoft just announced a new business model for its very successful software suite.

NYT

MS

This opens new business opportunities.

This company refused for some time, to read the writing on the wall. When Marc Andressen invented Mosaic many years ago, MS was clueless. They didn't see the point in simplifying the use of the Internet for their client base. They were even hostile to Marc, when they should've made him a part of the company right away. The whole thing ended up in court, with MS claiming that their inferior browser was essential for the working of their monopolistic operating system. Professor Cusumano wrote a book: Competing on Internet Time, describing that MS blunder.

Now Gates and Ballmer left, and a more astute leadership team is trying to play catch up, to the boys of Google: Brin & Page.

I saw the importance of the Internet, when I was a visiting scientist at Fermilab in 1994.

Now there are some business opportunities, when the principals finally get it.

Thin clients, and fat servers. That is the way to go.

The money is in the service, not in a bunch of CDs that kids do not even know exist. I can see the day when CDs will be on display as memorabilia, like the vinyl records showing up in stores nowadays!

Scratch your heads, all you entrepreneurs reading this. Time has come!

Andrea Ghez for the Physics Nobel Prize!

Wikipedia

UCLA

arXiv

The only bright political news is that Jerry Brown Won!

In the same state of California, from my Alma Mater, UC, I have other great news.

Andrea Ghez should get 'The Physics Nobel Prize'.  As you may know this year's prize, is going to Shuji Nakamura from Santa Barbara. This note is about Professor Ghez, from Los Angeles, though.

When I was a student at Santa Barbara in the seventies, Professor James Hartle, had invited the foremost expert on Black Holes of the time, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, to give  a lecture. I asked him: When will we observe a Black Hole? He said that not in our lifetimes, because in his view, one will have to detect the event horizon to be sure. To this day nobody has taken a picture of the famous horizon, but here I beg to disagree with Professor Chandrasekhar. It is not necessary to do that. I guess his mathematical mind was not going to be convinced otherwise, but I am a physicist, not a mathematician, and what Professor Ghez just did, has completely convinced me that we have our own Black Hole in the center of the Galaxy in Sagittarius A*.

  

You can read the links at the beginning of this note for more details, here I just state my reasons to be completely convinced of the existence of the Black Hole in Sagittarius A*.

A cloud, G2 gas cloud, was recently discovered, and the first ideas about it, were that we would have a 'light show' in the sky. The predicted time came and went, and we didn't get our show. But as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in one of his stories: The dog did nothing in the night-time, this was a very interesting event.

What Professor Ghez and collaborators just proved, in the article posted in Los Alamos electronic repository linked at the beginning of this note, is that the cloud had an owner, actually two owners. Two stars very close together, which had not been detected prior to this work, kept the integrity of the observed object. These stars are still going around our nearest super-massive black hole after getting very close to it. It was the big Ghez's database, which allowed the group to detect previous pictures of these objects.

The authors of the article propose, that a good fraction of the stars observed by them, in the past decades were formed that way. The black hole produces an environment in which small objects link up to make bigger objects, which can be observed on Earth, as relativistic stars, moving at velocities very close to that of light.

If Professor Chandrasekhar were alive, maybe he could invent all kinds of alternative explanations. I am sorry, to me it looks like a duck, it moves like a duck, and it quacks like a duck: IT IS A DUCK! 

UCLA astronomers solve puzzle about bizarre object at the center of our galaxy | UCLA

UCLA astronomers solve puzzle about bizarre object at the center of our galaxy | UCLA:



For years, astronomers have been puzzled by a bizarre object in the center of the Milky Way that was believed to be a hydrogen gas cloud headed toward our galaxy’s enormous black hole."



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[1410.1884] Detection of Galactic Center source G2 at 3.8 $\mu$m during periapse passage

[1410.1884] Detection of Galactic Center source G2 at 3.8 $\mu$m during periapse passage:



 "We report new observations of the Galactic Center source G2 from the W. M. Keck Observatory. G2 is a dusty red object associated with gas that shows tidal interactions as it nears closest approach with the Galaxy's central black hole. Our observations, conducted as G2 passed through periapse, were designed to test the proposal that G2 is a 3 earth mass gas cloud. Such a cloud should be tidally disrupted during periapse passage. The data were obtained using the Keck II laser guide star adaptive optics system (LGSAO) and the facility near-infrared camera (NIRC2) through the K' [2.1 μm] and L' [3.8 μm] broadband filters. Several results emerge from these observations: 1) G2 has survived its closest approach to the black hole as a compact, unresolved source at L'; 2) G2's L' brightness measurements are consistent with those over the last decade; 3) G2's motion continues to be consistent with a Keplerian model. These results rule out G2 as a pure gas cloud and imply that G2 has a central star. This star has a luminosity of ∼30 L⊙ and is surrounded by a large (∼2.6 AU) optically thick dust shell. The differences between the L' and Br-γ observations can be understood with a model in which L' and Br-γ emission arises primarily from internal and external heating, respectively. We suggest that G2 is a binary star merger product and will ultimately appear similar to the B-stars that are tightly clustered around the black hole (the so-called S-star cluster)."



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Recent Elections Missed the Biggest Challenge of All - NYTimes.com

Recent Elections Missed the Biggest Challenge of All - NYTimes.com:



"We’ve just had a nonsense midterm election. Never has more money been spent to think so little about a future so in flux. What would we have discussed if we’d had a serious election? How about the biggest challenge we’re facing today: The resilience of our workers, environment and institutions."



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[1409.3128] Searches for Large-Scale Anisotropy in the Arrival Directions of Cosmic Rays Detected above Energy of $10^{19}$ eV at the Pierre Auger Observatory and the Telescope Array

[1409.3128] Searches for Large-Scale Anisotropy in the Arrival Directions of Cosmic Rays Detected above Energy of $10^{19}$ eV at the Pierre Auger Observatory and the Telescope Array:



"Spherical harmonic moments are well-suited for capturing anisotropy at any scale in the flux of cosmic rays. An unambiguous measurement of the full set of spherical harmonic coefficients requires full-sky coverage. This can be achieved by combining data from observatories located in both the northern and southern hemispheres. To this end, a joint analysis using data recorded at the Telescope Array and the Pierre Auger Observatory above 1019 eV is presented in this work. The resulting multipolar expansion of the flux of cosmic rays allows us to perform a series of anisotropy searches, and in particular to report on the angular power spectrum of cosmic rays above 1019 eV. No significant deviation from isotropic expectations is found throughout the analyses performed. Upper limits on the amplitudes of the dipole and quadrupole moments are derived as a function of the direction in the sky, varying between 7% and 13% for the dipole and between 7% and 10% for a symmetric quadrupole."



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[1410.1536] Search for gamma-rays from the unusually bright GRB 130427A with the HAWC Gamma-ray Observatory

[1410.1536] Search for gamma-rays from the unusually bright GRB 130427A with the HAWC Gamma-ray Observatory:



 "The long gamma-ray burst (GRB) 130427A was the most powerful burst ever detected with a redshift z≲0.5, featuring the highest energy photon so far detected from a GRB and the longest lasting emission above 100 MeV. The HAWC Gamma-ray Observatory is a new extensive air shower detector currently under construction in central Mexico. It features two data acquisition (DAQ) systems - one designed to readout full air-shower events (main DAQ) and the other one counting the signals in each photomultiplier tube (scaler DAQ). The burst occurred at a zenith angle of 57∘, when HAWC was running 10% of the final detector and collecting data with the scaler DAQ only. Based on the observed light curve at MeV-GeV energies, 8 different time periods have been searched for prompt and delayed emission from this GRB. In all cases, no statistically significant excess of counts has been found and upper limits have been placed. It is shown that a similar GRB close to zenith would be easily detected by the full HAWC detector, which will be completed soon. A detection could provide evidence for a synchrotron self-Compton emission scenario that has been invoked by some authors for GRB 130427A. The observation of a possible cut-off beyond the LAT energy range could be the signature of gamma-ray absorption, either in the GRB or along the line of sight due to the extragalactic background light."



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[1410.1536] Search for gamma-rays from the unusually bright GRB 130427A with the HAWC Gamma-ray Observatory

[1410.1536] Search for gamma-rays from the unusually bright GRB 130427A with the HAWC Gamma-ray Observatory:



 "The long gamma-ray burst (GRB) 130427A was the most powerful burst ever detected with a redshift z≲0.5, featuring the highest energy photon so far detected from a GRB and the longest lasting emission above 100 MeV. The HAWC Gamma-ray Observatory is a new extensive air shower detector currently under construction in central Mexico. It features two data acquisition (DAQ) systems - one designed to readout full air-shower events (main DAQ) and the other one counting the signals in each photomultiplier tube (scaler DAQ). The burst occurred at a zenith angle of 57∘, when HAWC was running 10% of the final detector and collecting data with the scaler DAQ only. Based on the observed light curve at MeV-GeV energies, 8 different time periods have been searched for prompt and delayed emission from this GRB. In all cases, no statistically significant excess of counts has been found and upper limits have been placed. It is shown that a similar GRB close to zenith would be easily detected by the full HAWC detector, which will be completed soon. A detection could provide evidence for a synchrotron self-Compton emission scenario that has been invoked by some authors for GRB 130427A. The observation of a possible cut-off beyond the LAT energy range could be the signature of gamma-ray absorption, either in the GRB or along the line of sight due to the extragalactic background light."



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Fugitive Mexican Mayor and Wife Are Detained in Case of Missing Students - NYTimes.com

Fugitive Mexican Mayor and Wife Are Detained in Case of Missing Students - NYTimes.com:



"MEXICO CITY — The fugitive mayor of the Mexican town where 43 college students were apparently abducted in September after he reportedly ordered the police to attack them has been detained along with his wife, a federal official said on Tuesday."



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Business vs. Economics - NYTimes.com

Business vs. Economics - NYTimes.com:



"TOKYO — The Bank of Japan, this country’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve, has lately been making a big effort to end deflation, which has afflicted Japan’s economy for almost two decades. At first its efforts — which involve printing a lot of money and, even more important, trying to assure investors that it will keep printing money until inflation reaches 2 percent — seemed to be going well. But more recently the economy has lost momentum, and last week the bank announced new, even more aggressive monetary measures.

"



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