Bayou City Hemp Company

I met the local sales rep at the Wheatsville Co-op last Sunday. It has been perhaps six months since any vendor was set up when I was in, so it was a good opportunity to chat and find out about their products.

“We want to take hemp products out of the shadows,” said Sam Curtiss. In that, he succeeded at Wheatsville. He told me that while he was there, he restocked his shelves in the cooler twice. Bayou City Hemp is working on becoming totally vertically integrated from growing to canning and from non-alcoholic beverages to tequilas and beers. In their view, you should not be stuck with just one beverage.

 

 

https://www.bayoucityhemp.com

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Sunday at the Co-op 

Funky Mellow: Feel Good Marshmellows 

Hot Dang Veggie Burger Mix 

Coffee at the Co-op: Tradition and Novelty 

Awesome Austin Foods

Awesome Austin Foods at the Wheatsville Co-op

INVISIBLE CHEATING AND VISIBLE RIGHTS

How do we decide who is worthy? How do we select for competency? A recent Grammarly advertisement hinged on an application for residency. I took that to mean medical residency. Grammarly is helping him with his personal statement and curriculum vitae. I found that disturbing.

Of course, no one test is sufficient. Doctors must be approved by government and professional licensing boards. In the USA, the AMA enjoys quasi-governmental status. So, even if this nice young man is letting Grammarly do his writing, his promotion from hospital intern to hospital resident is not assured. 

 

Right now, so-called “artificial intelligence” products are bringing into question what it means to be original. 

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/03/tech/ai-art-fair-winner-controversy/index.html

AI won an art contest, and artists are furious

By Rachel Metz, CNN Business

Published 10:54 AM EDT, Sat September 3, 2022

CNN Business

 — 

Jason M. Allen was almost too nervous to enter his first art competition. Now, his award-winning image is sparking controversy about whether art can be generated by a computer, and what, exactly, it means to be an artist.

In August, Allen, a game designer who lives in Pueblo West, Colorado, won first place in the emerging artist division’s “digital arts/digitally-manipulated photography” category at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition. His winning image, titled “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” (French for “Space Opera Theater”), was made with Midjourney — an artificial intelligence system that can produce detailed images when fed written prompts. A $300 prize accompanied his win.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/03/tech/ai-art-fair-winner-controversy/index.html

On the Cloudy Nights discussion board, which is mostly dedicated to chat about observational astronomy, in the forum for “Science! Astronomy, Space Exploration, and Others,” a topic title was the question “What can’t artificial intelligence do?”  The introductory post started: “We have made machines that can play chess better than we can. We are close to making machines that can write novels better than we can. Threshold question. Is there a limit? I can see no reason that there should be. The interesting question. What happens when we can make machines that can do everything better than we can?” In 100 replies, I was the only person who pointed out that while an AI could write a better novel, the novel itself was an invention. I received just one "like" for the comment. 

"(As far as we know) only humans can invent something new. You can say that an AI can write a novel better than a human, but the novel is an invention. As a form of narration and history, the novel is relatively recent. Poetry - epic poetry - was first. And before poems were invented, people made lists of things. ... Painting as we know it evolved in a series of quantum leaps. By the 4th century BCE graphical realism had achieved what we regard as modern techniques. The "Renaissance Masters" of Holland painted in a hyper-realistic style that violated "natural" vision. See The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan Van Eyck.  If you were in the room where the painter stood, you would not see the image in the mirror at the back the way it is presented in the painting. It is hyper-real. Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstract, ...  Performance Art.... Even John Cage, an intellectual fraud*, carried out original ideas not requested of him by someone else. That is the essential distinguishing characteristic that explains the difference between human intelligence and machine intelligence."

The question remains unanswered because it is a slippery slope. Grammarly targets two markets: college students writing homework essays; young professionals writing business memoranda. Is it wrong to have someone (something) else proofread your work before you turn it in? I often get red squiggly underlines warning me that I miskeyed or misspelled a word. Whatever the gradient of that slope, we know the difference between having someone (something) else check your work and taking work that was not yours originally. That is plagiarism, and in business, it is theft and fraud.

Whether the impulse to sue for rights originates spontaneously within the plaintiff or was learned by the plaintiff from observing others is irrelevant. The deeper question is how the laws of various geographies will view the action when a computer program insists that it is alive and has rights.

*Having read from his Silence: Lectures and Writings, I changed my opinion of John Cage. 

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

All Volitional Beings Deserve Rights 

Not Invented Here 

Copy Rights and Wrongs 

Objective Intellectual Property Law 

U. S. Patent Law Does Not Add Up 

Patent Nonsense 

Globular Clusters

Despite the shorter nights, summer is great time to pursue globular clusters. Messier objects 4 and 80 are in Scorpius. M22 is in Sagittarius. The Hercules cluster M13 is high in the sky overhead at 11:00 PM about July 15. Under truly dark skies, M13 can be a naked eye object. On the other hand, from the city, even with a moderate telescope, M4 can be hard to obtain as will be the less well known M92 in Hercules. Even so, with the milder nights, if you want to stay up or go out early, you can catch M15 in Pegasus on the meridian about 4:00 AM on July 15. Whether easy or challenging to enter in your observation logs, better appreciation for the success of finding them comes from understanding what you are looking at. (This entry is from my notes collected for an article to appear in the June 9 issue of Sidereal Times of the Austin Astronomical Society.)

“Though the clusters show in their arrangement, a definite relation to the galactic plane, they are not concentrated close to it; indeed, there is a conspicuous absence of globular clusters near the central line of the Milky Way in the sky, and within about 2000 parsecs from the galactic plane in space. There is no known reason why globular clusters should not exist near this plane, and it is probable that those which are there are hidden from us.” [6]

“The globular clusters in the Milky Way are all estimated to be at least 10 billion years old and therefore contain some of the oldest stars in the galaxy. They contain an abundance of low-mass red stars and intermediate-mass yellow stars, but none greater than 0.8 solar masses. There are about 150 known globular clusters in the Milky Way. It is thought that globular clusters formed very early in the vast halo surrounding the nascent galaxy before it flattened to form the spiral disc. Star formation would have stopped in these clusters maybe 13 billion years ago, so only old stars are expected to be found there.” http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Astro/globular.html)

Excellent introductions to the hobby of observational astronomy such as NightWatch by Terence Dickinson all tend to give the same easy explanations. Of 150 or so globular clusters orbiting the Milky Way, about 30 are readily found by dedicated observers with telescopes of larger aperture under darker skies. When it was accepted that the Milky Way is just another galaxy the examination of other galaxies led to new understanding of the nature of globular clusters and to new questions about them. 

Globular clusters are far more prevalent in elliptical galaxies than in spirals and it is accepted as likely that many are in fact the cores of elliptical galaxies. [3.b] Elliptical galaxy M87 (Virgo A) is often available to 60-mm refractors, given dark skies suited to its 8.6 magnitude, second brightest in the Virgo Cluster. It has thousands of globular clusters.[3.b] [3.c] perhaps 15,000 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87]. Close studies of the motions of globular clusters have revealed tidal trails of stars being left behind. [3.b] Globular clusters are also known “in the field,” meaning in the otherwise unorganized free space between galaxies where they are detected by instruments seeking the farthest (oldest) galaxies. [3.c]

Blue Stragglers

In the dense cores of globular clusters, a typical star has a significant chance to undergo a collision. The velocity gradient within a globular cluster is one to two orders of magnitude less than escape velocity. Therefore, almost all of the mass in a collision is retained. Moreover, the velocities of the materials are less than the escape velocities from stellar bodies of the original masses. Therefore, the mass is retained to form the merged product. If the sum of the products is significantly large (more than 1 solar mass), the merged product will remain on the H-R main sequence but will be positioned bluewards on the turnoff from the Main Sequence. These have been labeled “blue stragglers.”[5] 

Blue Stragglers were first identified in 1953 by Alan R. Sandage. His data came from examination of Messier 3 and Messier 95, which are often available to small telescopes and M71 which usually is not. So far, over 400 Blue Stragglers have been identified in 20 globular clusters. They still do have a completely integrated theoretical explanation. Available data strongly suggests a causal link between the unperturbed evolution of binary stars and the existence of Blue Stragglers. [3] 

REFERENCES

1.     The Complex Lives of Star Clusters. David Stevenson. Springer. 2015.

2.    The Ecology of Blue Stragglers. Henry M. J. Boffin, Giovanni Carraro, Giacomo Beccari, editors. Springer. 2015.

3.    Extra-Galactic Globular Cluster Systems. M. Kissler-Patig, editor. Springer.. 2003. 

3.a “Globular Cluster Systems of Spirals” by Pauline Barmby

3.b. “Globular Cluster Systems of Spiral Galaxies Beyond the Local Group” by Katherine L. Rhode

3.c. “The Morphology of the Radial Velocity Distribution of Globular Clusters in NGC 1399” by Tom Richtler, Boris Dirsch, and D. Geisler.

4.     The Gravitational Million-Body Problem: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Star Cluster Dynamics. Douglas Heggie, Piet Hut. Cambridge University Press. 2003.

5.     Stellar Evolution at Low Metallicity: Mass Loss, Explosions, Cosmology. Henry J. G. L. M. Lamers, Norbert Langer, Tilt Nugis, Kaljiu Annuk, editors. Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series volume 353. 2005.

6.     Astronomy: A Revision of Young’s Manual of Astronomy; volume II Astrophysics and Stellar Astronomy. Henry Norris Russell, Raymond Smith Duncan, John Quincy Stewart. Ginn and Company. 1927, 1938.

7.     Discovery and Classification in Astronomy. Steven J. Dick. Cambridge University Press. 2013.

FROM MY LOG BOOKS

Messier 4 - 14 July 2015, 11 and 13 June 2020, and 31 July 2021. 15 March 2022, 26 March 2022.

Messier 13 - 12 July 2015, 11 September 2021, 3 December 2021, 

Messier 22 - 14 July 2015, 15 March 2022, 26 March 2022

Messier 31 - 1 December 2018, 5 November 2020,

Messier 80 - 14 July 2015, 11 July 2020, March and 26 March 2022

See also Celestron AVX Mount: Twelve Nights of Viewing and Learning

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Book Review - Seeing in the Dark: Your Front Row Seat to the Universe 

Measuring Your Universe: Alan Hirschfeld’s Astronomy Activity Manual 

Viewing Mars 

Hypatia of Alexandria