And so it starts.

Apparently Google, which purchased an AI company a while back, is starting to use an AI to lessen power usage in one of its facilities. Here's a graph of what the AI is doing.

Here's some of the article.

DeepMind used historical data -- such as temperatures, power and pump speeds -- that had already been collected by thousands of sensors in its data centers and used it to train the A.I.'s neural networks on the average future PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness), "which is defined as the ratio of the total building energy usage to the IT energy usage."

Additional neural networks were then used to predict the future temperature and pressure of data center in order to recommend actions.

"Our machine learning system was able to consistently achieve a 40% reduction in the amount of energy used for cooling, which equates to a 15% reduction in overall PUE after accounting for electrical losses and other non-cooling inefficiencies. It also produced the lowest PUE the site had ever seen," Google said.

Imagine if this kind of knowledge is applied to more and more facilities. Even a reduction of 15% overall would be a tremendous achievement.

Are you there yet, AI?

Oh how the mighty fall.

The hubris of Roger Ailes: A dose of “accountability” for someone who thought he was untouchable

Ailes is being fired from Fox for sexual harassment. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Except maybe for this guy.

Twitter Bars Milo Yiannopoulos in Wake of Leslie Jones’s Reports of Abuse

Another misogynistic creep bites the dust.

MeWorld is in turmoil. Populations are shifting in vast numbers, climate changing, monetary systems being controlled by a few "emperors, religious factions tearing at one another. Life is getting  tougher for everyone.

Solutions seem possible.

First some basic assumptions:

1. To survive, people need water, food, shelter from the elements (ranging from clothes to housing), electrical power, and, (in order to have some control of personal space) transportation.

2. People are generally more comfortable with their own kind. This is not a call for segregation but simple recognition that different groups have different cultures and feel most comfortable when living with others of similar culture (language, morals, religions, etc.). This is also not intended to prevent those who wish to live in other cultures the right to do so.

I propose that the populations who are shifting to find a better life be asked to return to those areas. Right now millions from the Middle East are moving. There are so little resources in many of these vast spaces like the Middle East (besides their oil reserves) that eking out a living is difficult. But if people had access to inexpensive water, food, and power, life would be much more tolerable for those souls trapped in barren lands.

So. First water. We lend  our scientists and engineers to help them construct desalination plants. We still have lots of ocean water despite its now less than pristine nature. Building and maintaining plants will offer jobs to the population, but, more importantly, pumping millions of gallons of fresh water into arid areas will go far in meeting the second need: food.

Here again, we could help put barren land into production of food. More jobs. (And great practice for turning the barren lands of other planets into something that will sustain humans?)

Most places already have housing, electricity and transportation systems. Where they don't, we can build them.

I think having "advanced" groups helping those less fortunate might ease tensions.

Instead of letting the very few control the financial system perhaps we should just change systems. Maybe something like Bitcoin. Or a whole new systems entirely. Make their money relatively worthless. (Vigilance in preventing them from taking over the new system.)

What a day.

My TV has been acting up with some channels so I had to call Comcast. Nightmare.

On a personal level, today was very productive.

First Weight Watchers first thing this morning. -4.2 lbs for total loss of 40 lbs. Then a stop at Big Y for ingredients for Pho. (Making it for family.) Hot coffee at McDonald's then back home. Finished Pho and packaged bowl for brother. Did laundry and vacuumed downstairs. Started to mow lawn but tractor broke down. Luckily I remembered similar symptoms years back and actually managed to get tractor running again. Finished lawn, took shower, folded clothes, and cleaned up kitchen.

The main news today is the horrific shootings of people in Dallas, Louisiana and Minnesota. Certainly nothing I can add to the discourse already taking place.

A bright note for me is the ongoing legal battle between Gretchen Carlson and Roger Ailes. She's suing him for sexual harassment. Ailes asked the judge to dismiss the case because he says the suit is a publicity stunt by Carlson. Six women have come forward since the filing to claim he did the same to them. What an ego on that guy has. The case should be dismissed because he says so. Maybe this beagle-jowled emperor will finally get his comeuppance.

Despite finding myself swimming through a sea despair, I see a twinkling lighthouse in the distance. A ray of hope.

I speak of Juno, the spacecraft NASA sent to Jupiter. It arrived last night and supposedly has fallen into orbit around a planet so big that it is double in size of all of the other planets combined! So amidst my angst at the state of humanity in general and my country in particular, I am buoyed by the realization that despite my own failings as a human, there are those among us who can achieve the miraculous.

A few facts: Juno traveled 1.74 billion miles traveling at 165,000 mph for 5 years. It is intended to orbit the planet 37 times in the next 20 months. Stunning numbers. People did that.

And if that achievement alone wasn't mind-bending enough, more humans imagined and built a metal machine that is a bunch of more miracles interacting together on our behalf. They have so many cool things on this machine.

• Gravity Science – GS
• Magnetometer – MAG
• Microwave Radiometer – MWR
• Jupiter Energetic Particle Detector Instrument – JEDI
• Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment – JADE
• Radio and Plasma Wave Sensor – Waves
• Ultraviolet Spectrograph
• Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper – JIRAM
• JunoCam

Pretty obscure until you read about the Instrument Overview on the NASA web site. May not have the intelligence to understand explanations of each instrument but am smart enough to be thrilled by the kind of stuff we can learn. 

And there is the box protecting vital parts. Taken directly from NSAS site:

"Juno is basically an armored tank going to Jupiter," said Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator, based at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "Without its protective shield, or radiation vault, Juno's brain would get fried on the very first pass near Jupiter."

An invisible force field filled with high-energy particles coming off from Jupiter and its moons surrounds the largest planet in our solar system. This magnetic force field, similar to a less powerful one around Earth, shields Jupiter from charged particles flying off the sun. The electrons, protons and ions around Jupiter are energized by the planet's super-fast rotation, sped up to nearly the speed of light.

Jupiter's radiation belts are shaped like a huge doughnut around the planet's equatorial region and extend out past the moon Europa, about 650,000 kilometers (400,000 miles) out from the top of Jupiter's clouds.

"For the 15 months Juno orbits Jupiter, the spacecraft will have to withstand the equivalent of more than 100 million dental X-rays," said Bill McAlpine, Juno's radiation control manager, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "In the same way human beings need to protect their organs during an X-ray exam, we have to protect Juno's brain and heart."

The strategy? Give Juno a kind of six-sided lead apron on steroids.

With guidance from JPL and the principal investigator, engineers at Lockheed Martin Space Systems designed and built a special radiation vault made of titanium for a centralized electronics hub. While other materials exist that make good radiation blockers, engineers chose titanium because lead is too soft to withstand the vibrations of launch, and some other materials were too difficult to work with.

Each titanium wall measures nearly a square meter (nearly 9 square feet) in area, about 1 centimeter (a third of an inch) in thickness, and 18 kilograms (40 pounds) in mass. This titanium box -- about the size of an SUV's trunk – encloses Juno's command and data handling box (the spacecraft's brain), power and data distribution unit (its heart) and about 20 other electronic assemblies. The whole vault weighs about 200 kilograms (500 pounds).

The vault is not designed to completely prevent every Jovian electron, ion or proton from hitting the system, but it will dramatically slow down the aging effect radiation has on electronics for the duration of the mission.

That's some pretty amazing stuff.

So while some people slaughter their fellow man (and women), others help us explore the (for all practical purposes) environment in which we are embedded. What a dichotomy.