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"Merger In The Universe" The Limits of Human Language

Extrapolating human emotions onto Extraterrestrial Phenomena is a fool's-game at best. A low-minded kind of hubris

Please note the figures of speech used to describe something-outside-of-this-world

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Gravitational waves from star-eating black holes detected on Earth

Spacetime-altering shock waves came from massive neutron stars crashing into black holes millions of years ago

Ian Sample Science editor

@iansample

Tue 29 Jun 2021 08.29 EDT Last modified on Wed 30 Jun 2021 00.10 EDT

 An artist’s impression of the distortion caused by a neutron star merging with a black hole. Photograph: Carl Knox, OzGrav/Swinburne

"There are moments when life as an astrophysicist is like hanging around at the bus stop. You wait ages for a cataclysmic cosmic event to send shock waves through the fabric of spacetime and then two come along at once.

Years after scientists began their search for quivers in spacetime anticipated by Albert Einstein, gravitational wave detectors in the US and Europe have detected the first signals from two neutron stars crashing into black holes hundreds of millions of light years away.

“We are talking about objects that have more mass than the sun that have been gobbled up,” said Dr Vivien Raymond at Cardiff University’s Gravity Exploration Institute. “We would like for the neutron stars to be ripped apart and shredded because then there’s a lot of opportunity for interesting physics, but we think these black holes were big enough that they swallowed the neutron stars whole.”

. . 

Gravitational waves pass through Earth all the time, but the shudders in spacetime are too subtle to detect unless they are triggered by collisions between extremely massive objects. Scientists reported the first detection of gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes in 2016 and have since spotted waves from neutron star mergers. Recording gravitational waves from neutron stars hitting black holes marks another first.

“With these events, we’ve completed the picture of possible mergers amongst black holes and neutron stars,” said Chase Kimball, a graduate student at Northwestern University in Illinois. “That doesn’t mean that there are no new discoveries to be made with gravitational waves. There are plenty of expected gravitational wave sources out there that we’ve yet to detect, from continuous waves from rapidly rotating neutron stars to bursts from nearby supernovae, and I’m sure the universe can find ways to surprise us.”
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Physicists confirm two cases of “elusive” black hole/neutron star mergers

When a neutron star and a black hole love each other very, very much....

Jennifer Ouellette - 6/29/2021, 6:00 AM

 

 "The successful gravitational-wave detections just keep coming for the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, which has now confirmed two separate "mixed" mergers between black holes and neutron stars, sending powerful gravitational waves rippling across spacetime. Those signals were detected last year by the collaboration, just 10 days apart. A year and a half later, the events officially constitute the first confirmed detection of mixed mergers, as described in a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"With this new discovery of neutron star-black hole mergers outside our galaxy, we have found the missing type of binary," said co-author Astrid Lamberts of CNRS, a researcher on the Virgo collaboration in Nice. "We can finally begin to understand how many of these systems exist, how often they merge, and why we have not yet seen examples in the Milky Way."

LIGO detects gravitational waves via laser interferometry, using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington state, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, Advanced VIRGO, came online in 2016. In Japan, KAGRA is now online, and it's the first gravitational-wave detector in Asia and the first to be built underground. Construction began on LIGO-India earlier this year, and physicists expect it will turn on sometime after 2025.

To date, the LIGO collaboration has detected dozens of merger events since its first Nobel Prize-winning discovery, all involving either two black holes or two neutron stars. Most recently, last year, the collaboration announced the detection of two more black hole mergers. One was the most massive and most distant black hole merger yet detected, and it produced the most energetic signal detected thus far. It showed up in the data as more of a "bang" than the usual "chirp." The detection also marked the first direct observation of an intermediate-mass black hole.

As the detectors' sensitivity improves, confirmed events are becoming much more frequent. . ."Following the tantalizing discovery, announced in June 2020, of a black-hole merger with a mystery object, which may be the most massive neutron star known, it is exciting also to have the detection of clearly identified mixed mergers, as predicted by our theoretical models for decades now," said co-author Vicky Kalogera of Northwestern University. "Quantitatively matching the rate constraints and properties for all three population types will be a powerful way to answer the foundational questions of origins."

. . .“These were not events where the black holes munched on the neutron stars like the Cookie Monster and flung bits and pieces about.. .That 'flinging about' is what would produce light, and we don't think that happened in these cases."

. . .

"We've now seen the first examples of black holes merging with neutron stars, so we know that they're out there," said co-author Maya Fishbach, also from Northwestern. "But there's still so much we don't know about neutron stars and black holes—how small or big they can get, how fast they can spin, how they pair off into merger partners. With future gravitational wave data, we will have the statistics to answer these questions, and ultimately learn how the most extreme objects in our universe are made."

DOI: The Astrophysical Journal, 2021. 10.3847/2041-8213/ac082e (About DOIs).

. . .

Pax Transatlantica: America and Europe in the Post-Cold War Era

Distopian AI + “An Amblin/Stanley Kubrick Production” > A One-of-a-Kind Experience

Your expectations might be way less than what this movie delivers on the screen so let's insert part of the storyline in your mindset first to get ahead: (the genesis of the film goes back for 30 years)

". . .In the 22nd century, climate change has led to a rise in sea levels that has wiped out coastal cities, drastically reduced global population, and led to legal sanctions on pregnancies, since human children would tax the world’s limited resources. Monica and her husband, Henry, are chosen as the “perfect” family for David, because their son Martin has contracted a rare disease and is being kept in “suspended animation”, without much hope of recovery. The idea of replacing Martin with a like-aged robot son initially repulses Monica, but she warms to this uncanny being over time and goes through with the imprinting. . ."

". . .Though it’s been 20 years since AI polarized audiences, the genesis of the film extends another 30 years before that, when Stanley Kubrick picked up the rights to the 1969 Brian Aldiss short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long and began the slow development process that didn’t always result in an actual film. (See also: Napoleon, Aryan Papers and scores of others unrealized projects.)

When the title “An Amblin/Stanley Kubrick production” comes on screen, you can anticipate the cognitive dissonance between the two film-makers:

Kubrick the cold clinician, taking inventories of man’s hypocrisies and destructive nature; Spielberg the slick entertainer, a brand name in Hollywood storytelling.

How could those sensibilities possibly be reconciled?

That’s a rhetorical question to those who consider AI a failure, but for the others who admire it, like me, the tension between Kubrick and Spielberg results in a one-of-a-kind experience, a bleak film about human nature disguised as a sentimental science fiction fairytale. . .

AI at 20: Spielberg’s misunderstood epic remains his darkest movie yet

The odd combination of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg brings a unique quality to this heartbreaking story of a robot in search of love

Scott Tobias

Tue 29 Jun 2021 02.05 EDT Last modified on Tue 29 Jun 2021 02.31 EDT

Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law in AI: Artificial Intelligence.

Photograph: c.Warner Br/Everett/REX

“I thought this would be hard for you to understand. You were created to be so young.”

This heartbreaking line arrives toward the end of AI: Artificial Intelligence, many centuries after David, an uncommonly sophisticated mechanical child (or “Mecha”), has embarked on a quest to become “a real boy”, like Pinocchio, and reunite with the human mother he’s been programmed to love. The years have not aged him, of course. He is eternally young, incapable of acquiring the wisdom and perspective that come with age. He can’t comprehend the passage of time, much less the absurd and quixotic nature of his mission. He just wants his mommy.

The purity of that feeling is something Steven Spielberg has been chasing for much of his career, how the innocence of a child is expressed through wonder on one end and intense vulnerability on the other. The magic of Spielberg’s ET the Extra Terrestrial is that it extracts tears at both ends of the spectrum, whether young Eliot is lifting off on his bicycle or connecting with his alien friend as he falls under the cold scrutiny of grown-ups. AI is much more about vulnerability than wonder, and it may be Spielberg’s darkest film, darker than Schindler’s List, which seeks out a sliver of redemption from an overwhelming historical horror. There’s a redemption arc in AI, too, but it’s as synthetic (and as real) as the android at the center of it. . ."

These are just some brief extracts. . .Go get the entire article written by Scott Tobias  > https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jun/29/ai-20th-anniversary-steven-spielberg

 

*** $5.3T Sitting-on-the-Sidelines *** Gramercy’s El-Erian, Koenigsberger on Liquidity Risks, Credit, EM...and what

GOP Medical Witnesses: COVID-19 'Exactly What You'd Expect If You'd Gone...

Malware Strikes Again!

O No! More

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Microsoft digitally signs malicious rootkit driver

Company still hasn't revealed the cause of this serious security lapse.

Dan Goodin - 6/29/2021, 1:50 PM

"Microsoft gave its digital imprimatur to a rootkit that decrypted encrypted communications and sent them to attacker-controlled servers, the company and outside researchers said.

The blunder allowed the malware to be installed on Windows machines without users receiving a security warning or needing to take additional steps. For the past 13 years, Microsoft has required third-party drivers and other code that runs in the Windows kernel to be tested and digitally signed by the OS maker to ensure stability and security. Without a Microsoft certificate, these types of programs can’t be installed by default.

Eavesdropping on SSL connections

Earlier this month, Karsten Hahn, a researcher at security firm G Data, found that his company’s malware detection system flagged a driver named Netfilter. He initially thought the detection was a false positive because Microsoft had digitally signed Netfilter under the company’s Windows Hardware Compatibility Program.

After further testing, Hahn determined that the detection wasn’t a false positive. He and fellow researchers decided to figure out precisely what the malware does. . .

Serious security lapse

In a brief post from Friday, Microsoft wrote, “Microsoft is investigating a malicious actor distributing malicious drivers within gaming environments. The actor submitted drivers for certification through the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program. The drivers were built by a third party. We have suspended the account and reviewed their submissions for additional signs of malware.”

The post said that Microsoft has found no evidence that either its signing certificate for the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program or its WHCP signing infrastructure had been compromised. The company has since added Netfilter detections to the Windows Defender AV engine built into Windows and provided the detections to other AV providers. The company also suspended the account that submitted Netfilter and reviewed previous submissions for signs of additional malware.

Microsoft added:

The actor’s activity is limited to the gaming sector, specifically in China, and does not appear to target enterprise environments. We are not attributing this to a nation-state actor at this time. The actor’s goal is to use the driver to spoof their geo-location to cheat the system and play from anywhere. The malware enables them to gain an advantage in games and possibly exploit other players by compromising their accounts through common tools like keyloggers.

It’s important to understand that the techniques used in this attack occur post-exploitation, meaning an attacker must either have already gained administrative privileges in order to be able to run the installer to update the registry and install the malicious driver the next time the system boots or convince the user to do it on their behalf.

Despite the limitations the post noted, the lapse is serious. Microsoft’s certification program is designed to block precisely the kind of attack G Data first discovered. Microsoft has yet to say how it came to digitally sign the malware. Company representatives declined to provide an explanation.

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