#ITS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A MEASUREMENT OF SPACE TAKEN UP BY AN OBJECT AND THE WEIGHT OF AN OBJECT

[mysteriouslypinkconnoisseur]

For most of my life, I didn’t understand how grams were superior to cups. Now I do.

[obeetlebeetle]

1) the pale is a hyperobject that 2) represents the continuous present.

I saw a post earlier about what the pale is meant to be and what it’s doing within DE, and this is the best I could come up with, working off my own memory of my own thoughts while playing DE. I might try to make this coherent at some point (maybe after a re-play, so I can refer to quotes from the actual text) but tbh I just needed to get it out of my brain.

how is the pale a hyperobject? what does that mean?

in-game, the pale is referred to as the memories of the past, conglomerated into one entity. while this can (and should) be taken literally, you could argue that the pale is performing an allegorical function — this is SFF, after all. the problem with reading the pale is that it seems to act in many capacities at once. it can be read as a representation of climate change or colonial violence or nuclear fallout or refugee crises, etc., in that the pale is any and all world-ending by-products of human existence. I would argue that it is meant to be manifold — the game supports these varied readings; the pale is not a one-to-one allegory, but rather it performs the role of all given apocalyptic scenarios. it simultaneously acts as the threat of looming disaster (spreading over the ocean and encroaching on the isolas), the threat of disaster-from-within (the hole tearing itself open in the nightclub/church), and the threat of personal destruction (The Paledriver and Joyce being permanently changed by the pale). 

notably, all of these threats interact with the concept of borders. the pale erases both exterior and interior boundaries that humans within DE otherwise rely on to act as agents of the world. if we look at Latour’s definition of objects — which situates being as a state of relation between objects — the pale’s ability to infiltrate, ignore, or otherwise consume borders means that it cannot function as an object because it has no singular relationship to other objects. thus, the hyperobject, which Morton describes as adhering to the following properties:

“Molten: Hyperobjects are so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent.

Nonlocal: Hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space to the extent that their totality cannot be realized in any particular local manifestation. For example, global warming is a hyperobject that impacts meteorological conditions, such as tornado formation. According to Morton, though, objects don't feel global warming, but instead experience tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the manner in which a hyperobject becomes more substantial than the local manifestations they produce.

Phased: Hyperobjects occupy a higher dimensional space than other entities can normally perceive. Thus, hyperobjects appear to come and go in three-dimensional space, but would appear differently to an observer with a higher multidimensional view.

Interobjective: Hyperobjects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, objects are only able to perceive to the imprint, or "footprint," of a hyperobject upon other objects, revealed as information. For example, global warming is formed by interactions between the Sun, fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide, among other objects. Yet, global warming is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes, and ocean levels, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific models, rather than an object that predated its own measurement.”

so the pale fits pretty well into these requirements. once taken as a hyperobject, we can then view the pale as an embodied disruption of the ecosystems within de, a radical imposition of an entity that is not a backdrop for human drama but a conscious threat. 

ok. now to the continuous present. 

so much of DE is choosing to want the world you live in and recognizing the worth of living in the present moment, despite who you are, who you've been, and how you're changing. this thesis is presented in opposition to the constant yearning for the past (the comforting toxicity of nostalgia) and the breathless anticipation of the future (the giddy anxiety of looming disaster). “one day I will return to your side” & “something beautiful is going to happen” — two seemingly incompatible mindsets, but when we consider the hyperobject, we can see that they are combined and embodied within the pale. this collapsing of past and future into one symbol is not meant to confuse us, but to rather demonstrate how the pale is the continuous present.

Stein describes reality, and therefore the continuous present, as composition: “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition.” the pale, acting as a hyperobject, is a collection of compositions. it is the embodiment of a continuous present because it holds all of humanity's past, all memory, alongside humanity’s inevitable future, which is to say, it represents human history.

putting this alongside the thesis I proposed, the notion of the present has become complex and somewhat irritating. Harry's individual relationship to the present is about how he comes to terms with his own personhood; the pale, representing a collective relationship to the present (past memory) as ecological disruption (future apocalypse), seems antithetical to the hopeful elements of the game while simultaneously corroborating the destructive elements of Harry's personhood. this is because violence leaves scars that last forever, and also, the world is ending. there is nothing Harry can do about it. there is nothing anyone in DE can do about it. 

so why is our thesis about the value of living in the present, and what is the distinction between the individual’s present moment and the continuous present? 

DE is not about doing something to stop or change the continuous present; DE is about the creation of personhood in an age that actively dissuades and breaks down personhood (through violence and poverty and substance abuse and so on — everything embodied in the destructive elements of the pale). DE is about a human's ability to engage with the world despite the breakdown of agency. 

Stein says, of art being made in the European modern period, “in this way at present composition is time that is the reason that at present the time-sense is troubling that is the reason why at present the time-sense in the composition is the composition that is making what there is in composition.” to demystify her point somewhat: composition is the individual’s present moment, and it is also the art that the individual makes to reflect the present moment. if the present is a terrifying place to live, then our reflection of the present will be troubling. if our only means of understanding the present is troubling, despair becomes a feedback loop — this is the troubled time-sense. characters in DE look to substances, religion, and the pale itself to escape this loop, not recognizing that escape is impossible when these avenues are the means by which agency is given up or broken down.

the individual’s present moment is only one composition within the larger framework of the continuous present. being alive in the world of DE naturally contributes to the pale; being human contributes to the accumulation of the past and the acceleration towards the apocalypse; there is no fundamental difference, then, between the present moment and the continuous present, between humanity and the pale. 

so WHY is our thesis about the value of living? why does playing DE feel like a manifesto of hope rather than despair?

what the pale ultimately represents is our troubled time-sense, embodying all the factors that have made the present a terrifying place to live — it is a continuous present that, when confronted, drives the individual to despair. DE’s answer to this wicked problem is similar to the one Stein posits here, “The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living in the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing.” or, in troubling times, make art. create compositions that, yes, then become the composition in which you live, but that also give you personhood. introduce yourself to the world for the brief time you have. resist being consumed by the pale. resist self-destruction. at the individual level, creating art is the only way to maintain a sense of agency, which then allows you to contribute meaningfully to the present — which is all the time you have.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Hubble goes hunting for small main belt asteroids

Like boulders, rocks, and pebbles scattered across a landscape, asteroids come in a wide range of sizes. Cataloging asteroids in space is tricky because they are faint and they don't stop to be photographed as they zip along their orbits around the Sun.

Astronomers recently used a trove of archived images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to visually snag a largely unseen population of smaller asteroids in their tracks. The treasure hunt required perusing 37,000 Hubble images spanning 19 years. The payoff was finding 1,701 asteroid trails, with 1,031 of the asteroids previously uncatalogued. About 400 of these uncatalogued asteroids are below 1 kilometer in size.

Volunteers from around the world known as "citizen scientists" contributed to the identification of this asteroid bounty. Professional scientists combined the volunteers' efforts with machine learning algorithm to identify the asteroids. It represents a new approach to finding asteroids in astronomical archives spanning decades, which may be effectively applied to other datasets, say the researchers.

"We are getting deeper into seeing the smaller population of main belt asteroids. We were surprised with seeing such a large number of candidate objects," said lead author Pablo García Martín of the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. "There was some hint of this population existing, but now we are confirming it with a random asteroid population sample obtained using the whole Hubble archive. This is important for providing insights into the evolutionary models of our solar system."

The large, random sample offers new insights into the formation and evolution of the asteroid belt. Finding a lot of small asteroids favors the idea that they are fragments of larger asteroids that have collided and broken apart, like smashed pottery. This is a grinding-down process spanning billions of years.

An alternative theory for the existence of smaller fragments is that they formed that way billions of years ago. But there is no conceivable mechanism that would keep them from snowballing up to larger sizes as they agglomerated dust from the planet-forming circumstellar disk around our Sun. "Collisions would have a certain signature that we can use to test the current main belt population," said co-author Bruno Merín of the European Space Astronomy Centre, in Madrid, Spain .

Amateur Astronomers Teach AI to Find Asteroids

Because of Hubble's fast orbit around the Earth, it can capture wandering asteroids through their telltale trails in the Hubble exposures. As viewed from an Earth-based telescope, an asteroid leaves a streak across the picture. Asteroids "photobomb" Hubble exposures by appearing as unmistakable, curved trails in Hubble photographs.

As Hubble moves around the Earth, it changes its point of view while observing an asteroid, which also moves along its own orbit. By knowing the position of Hubble during the observation and measuring the curvature of the streaks, scientists can determine the distances to the asteroids and estimate the shapes of their orbits.

The asteroids snagged mostly dwell in the main belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Their brightness is measured by Hubble's sensitive cameras. And comparing their brightness to their distance allows for a size estimate. The faintest asteroids in the survey are roughly one forty-millionth the brightness of the faintest star that can be seen by the human eye.

"Asteroid positions change with time, and therefore you cannot find them just by entering coordinates, because at different times, they might not be there," said Merín. "As astronomers we don't have time to go looking through all the asteroid images. So we got the idea to collaborate with over 10,000 citizen-science volunteers to peruse the huge Hubble archives."

In 2019 an international group of astronomers launched the Hubble Asteroid Hunter, a citizen-science project to identify asteroids in archival Hubble data. The initiative was developed by researchers and engineers at the European Science and Technology Centre (ESTEC) and the European Space Astronomy Centre's science data center (ESDC), in collaboration with the Zooniverse platform, the world's largest and most popular citizen-science platform, and Google.

A total of 11,482 citizen-science volunteers, who provided nearly 2 million identifications, were then given a training set for an automated algorithm to identify asteroids based on artificial intelligence. This pioneering approach may be effectively applied to other datasets.

The project will next explore the streaks of previously unknown asteroids to characterize their orbits and study their properties, such as rotation periods. Because most of these asteroid streaks were captured by Hubble many years ago, it is not possible to follow them up now to determine their orbits.

The findings are published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

IMAGE....This Hubble Space Telescope image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 12158 looks like someone took a white marking pen to it. In reality it is a combination of time exposures of a foreground asteroid moving through Hubble's field-of-view, photobombing the observation of the galaxy. Several exposures of the galaxy were taken, what is evidence in the dashed pattern. The asteroid appears as a curved trail due to parallax: because Hubble is not stationary, but orbiting Earth, and this gives the illusion that the faint asteroid is swimming along a curved trajectory. The uncharted asteroid is in inside the asteroid belt in our solar system, and hence is 10 trillion times closer to Hubble than the background galaxy. Rather than a nuisance, this type of data are useful to astronomers for doing a census of the asteroid population in our solar system. Credit NASA, ESA, Pablo García Martín (UAM); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI); Acknowledgment: Alex Filippenko (UC Berkeley)

[dzthenerd490]

File: Parasyte

SCP#: AQO

Code Name: Space Parasites from the Unknown

Object Class: Keter

Special Containment Procedures: Thanks to the efforts of Mobile Task Force Apollo-1 "Orion's Belt", containment of SCP-AQO is considered 98% complete. However, the remaining 2% is hypothesized to consist of at least 140 million instances of SCP-AQO. Mobile Task Force units, Foundation Agents, and Foundation Observation staff are to be on high alert to find and contain any inactive instances of SCP-AQO. If an instance of SCP-AQO is found active, they are to contain the instance alive if restraining/ disabling it is possible but kill the instance if impossible. 

Inactive SCP-AQO instances are contained in the various Foundation Space Stations most containing anywhere between 5 million to 200 million depending on storage capabilities. Unfortunately, a majority of captured inactive SCP-AQO instances had to be incinerated due to the Foundation lacking the capabilities to contain all of them.

Active Instances of SCP-AQO have been contained at Foundation Space Station: Upsilon Alpha Beta. Each SCP-AQO instance is contained in the living quarters of the Space Station and are watched over by AFA-2 Security of the Space Station. The areas dividing SCP-AQO instances "containment" section and the Foundation section of the Space Station have been locked down and crudely locked up due to SCP-AQO's spontaneous arrival into our solar system. Currently no containment measures have been presented to have SCP-AQO instance moved to the containment of any Foundation Site. 

Description: SCP-AQO is a swarm of large spore like orbs that have floated through space and for whatever reason, suddenly surrounded earth and slowly descended onto the surface. Those that have either made it to the surface or managed to get into physical contact with an unfortunate MTF Apollo-1 unit will "activate". Upon "activation" SCP-AQO will open and release the occupant inside which is a strange worm like parasite about 1 centimeter in length with anywhere between 12 to 20 eyes and has a metal like drill front end. Once the worm is free it will quickly try to get onto the one who activated it and drill into their body preferably the head. The SCP-AQO instance must achieve this by 5 to 10 minutes afterwards it will either dry out or be forced to fuse with whatever organic material is closest to it. 

Once SCP-AQO has fused itself with organic material it is able to manipulate that organic material as well as all organic material in a 50-to-60-centimeter radius. Of course, this means that if the SCP-AQO is able to reach the head it will be able to take over everything on it including the brain. Once SCP-AQO has taken over the head it will be able to move the body without limitations and therefore has entirely replaced the host. However, this does not mean that SCP-AQO can live without the hosts body, it doesn't need a brain, but it does need organs such as the heart, lungs, stomach, and other such vital organs. 

What makes SCP-AQO so dangerous isn't its ability to seemingly replace humans instantly, but its ability to change shape at will. As stated earlier once SCP-AQO take over all organic material within a 50-to-60-centimeter radius but afterwards it is able to freely change shape and form of the infected organic material. The instance is even able to heavily condense the organic material until its seemingly no different to steel. Furthermore, SCP-AQO is able to change its cells without any biological limits, changing the species, texture, function, and even able to replicate organs with 100% accuracy and even greater functionality. Interestingly, SCP-AQO instances can create brains for themselves that function much better, learn faster, have greater memory, and have instantaneous reactions as well as decision making. All of this essentially makes them apex predators against humanity. 

Because of infected SCP-AQO instances it can be easily believed that they possess "Deus Cellulis" which are super cells that can act as a while body by itself, however this is not true. As stated, earlier SCP-AQO needs its host's body and by extension its organs to survive. As such if an SCP-AQO instance is separated from its host it will start dying right away. Like its worm form, an SCP-AQO instance cannot survive on its own, it will dry up and die after 5 to 10 minutes of being separated from the body. Furthermore unlike "Deus Cellulis" SCP-AQO is unable to regenerate form loss of biomass and it is unable to gain more biomass via consumption. The best way to kill an SCP-AQO instance is to use energy-based attacks such as fire or electricity.  

SCP-AQO was discovered in 1988 when Foundation Space Stations and Ships saw the swarm of inactive SCP-AQO instances floating toward our solar system. The Foundation quickly sent out ships to capture and contain as many of the instances as possible for research purposes. However heavy reinforcements were deployed to the effort when it was realized that they were heading towards earth and were slowly surrounding it to descend to the surface. Though the containment effort was complete with a 98% success some MTF Apollo-1 units as well as Foundation Space Division Researchers were infected by SCP-AQO and had to be quarantined right away. It was because of them that we are able to understand the full extent of SCP-AQO's anomalous properties as well as how to effectively kill one. 

Currently there are still 29 instances left alive and all are being tested at Foundation Space Station Upsilon Alpha Beta. Due to the intelligence of SCP-AQO instances, they were quickly sedated and placed chemical bombs in their bodies that upon activation would shut down all their organs and kill them in a matter of seconds. Furthermore Dr. Sharma requested an interview with one of the instances to see how far their intelligence goes. The request was granted so long as four guards were present in the room, each armed with Standard Foundation Flame throwers. 

***

The following is a recording between Dr. Sharma and SCP-AQO-2.

Begin Recording

Dr: Sarma: Good Morning SCP--

SCP-AQO-2: SCP-AQO-2, Object Class: Keter, Code Name: Space Parasites from the Unknown

Dr: Sarma: Uh... I'm sorry?

SCP-AQO-2: Is this not the name you gave me?

Dr: Sarma: Uh, well it's JUST, SCP-AQO-2 the rest is just information.

SCP-AQO-2: ... Understood.

Dr: Sarma: You seem to be perfectly fine with being called a letter and number sequence, most Anomalies contained in the Foundation hate that. 

SCP-AQO-2: Like some of the others I don't really care, I was originally fine with being called "You Fucking Monster" but I've been told that it's a "mouth full". I have also been told a "mouth full" name is bad and needs to be changed.

Dr: Sarma: I see, so the others like having names?

SCP-AQO-2: Few, it helps them feel important and in charge.

Dr: Sarma: Do you not like it, having a name I mean?

SCP-AQO-2: I just follow orders.

Dr: Sarma: Who's orders?

SCP-AQO-2: ... Don't know, just know what orders are, to kill the plague. 

Dr: Sarma: ... the plague?

SCP-AQO-2: The future plague that is humanity. Humanity will one day reach the stars and spread its disease everywhere. You pollute, you consume, you destroy everything in your path. We were created to take over your bodies and we have an insatiable desire to eat your flesh and that hunger is only quelled after we have eaten you whole. Its only right to assume our purpose is to destroy you. 

Dr: Sarma: I see, to a certain extent, I do believe you. I've seen my fair share of human cruelty. But we cannot allow you to wipe out humanity. 

SCP-AQO-2: I know, it's quite surprising that you were able to prevent us from invading your world as well as you did. Though you weren't fully successful. 

Dr: Sarma: Yes, about over a hundred million of the inactive instances managed to make it to the surface before MTF Apollo-1 ships could do anything. But our ground forces are currently working around the clock to find them and kill them all. 

SCP-AQO-2: I see, unfortunate.

Dr: Sarma: ... You're not sad that your kind is being killed off?

SCP-AQO-2: No, not sad, just disappointed. I understand the concept of attachments and love thanks to the archives you provided me and the others, but I don't care for it. I just follow orders, same with the others. If they died by the hands of humanity, then that's their own failure. 

Dr: Sarma: I see, are you hungry right now? 

SCP-AQO-2: No, I had my fill after you feed me that human, I believe his name was D-Class.

Dr: Sarma: Well, that wasn't his name, but I don't see a reason to call him anything else given his criminal record. 

SCP-AQO-2: I see, are you going to keep giving me more "D-Class" to eat?

Dr: Sarma: Yes, at least until we can find a suitable supplement to replace human flesh for you and the others. 

SCP-AQO-2: ... I would rather keep following orders, but I assume if I say otherwise, you activate that chemical bomb you placed in my body. 

Dr: Sarma: Your very smart SCP-AQO-2.

SCP-AQO-2: Naturally.

Dr: Sarma: Hm, proud as well... well then, I'm sure given your nature this request would be impossible, but would you ever consider working alongside the Foundation.

SCP-AQO-2: ... No.

Dr: Sarma: Even if we can guarantee a comfortable life with many benefits and knowledge at your disposal?

SCP-AQO-2: I just follow orders, nothing more. Though it is interesting you'd give me this offer since I already ate this host's brain to become what I am now. Furthermore, I did kill several other humans during my original "Containment".

Dr: Sarma: Yes, I remember that well... I guess you could think of it as a sort of redemption. We are a little understaffed at times and as time goes on it getting harder to naturally find new recruits into the Foundation so we normally like to take help where we can get it. 

SCP-AQO-2: Interesting, but nothing you say will change my answer. Though, I assume you might be able to get a different answer from the others, but they would probably just say yes so that they can find a way to kill you all at a later time. 

Dr: Sarma: ... You've essentially just given me a reason to have you and your brethren be contained for life. Are you sure that was wise? Throwing the others under the bus like that?

SCP-AQO-2: ... 

Dr: Sarma: I'm saying you betrayed them.

SCP-AQO-2: As I already said I have no care for love or attachments. My feeling for the others is no different. They would do the same to me to cover their own goals. The only thing that unites us is our orders and our selfish desire for life, everything else is irrelevant. 

Dr: Sarma: I see, uh just a few more questions. Are you truly sure you don't know who created you?

SCP-AQO-2: ... Whoever or whatever they were, it appears they underestimated your species capabilities. Otherwise, they would have sent more of us, or at least made us stronger so that you couldn't have restrained me with that chemical bomb you placed in my own and the other's bodies. 

Dr: Sarma: Interesting, do you have a concept of fear, like fear of death, and perhaps sadistic joy of killing humans?

SCP-AQO-2: ... Perhaps if I interacted with humans and the others more often, I would eventually develop a more fleshed out personality, but I have no interest in such a thing. I don't care for death, but I don't really fear it also killing humans doesn't give me joy, I just-

Dr: Sarma: Follow orders, got it. Well then, uh, do you have any memories from your previous host? He was known as MTF Specialist Dung Giang and was a successful emergency pilot and anomalous cargo transporter. 

SCP-AQO-2: ... No, true we consume everything of the head of our host, but we only consume and change the flesh, that's it. We don't absorb the knowledge or memories of the brain. We have to develop our brain with our own memories and personality traits. 

Dr: Sarma: I see that's unfortunate. Well then, uh, last question, uh before this interview I actually requested to give you a file relating to a certain anomaly so I could ask you this question... What is your opinion on SCP-[data expunged].

SCP-AQO-2: ... I hope it succeeds.

Dr: Sarma: Even if it kills you too?

SCP-AQO-2: I will probably be considered food as well; I will probably die. But maybe by then I will learn to "sadistically enjoy it", especially if your species goes first.

Dr: Sarma: Hmph, you and SCP-079 would probably be good friends.

SCP-AQO-2: The Old A.I.? No, we would never be friends. It failed to wipe out humanity. 

Dr: Sarma: So did you.

SCP-AQO-2: Is that supposed to unite us? No, two failures do not make a success. 

Dr: Sarma: Hmph, very well then, this interview is over. 

SCP-AQO-2: Understood I will be returning to my cell now.

Dr: Sarma: Actually, no you won't.

SCP-AQO-2: What? What do you-?

Recording Ends

***

SCP-AQO-2 was killed after the interview due to his exposed knowledge of SCP-[data expunged]. The other SCP-AQO instances have expressed no remorse upon hearing of SCP-AQO-2's death. Though, there was an SCP-AQO-2 instance that was reported sneering at the news of SCP-AQO-2's death. 

Active SCP-AQO instances have unfortunately been reported all over earth, however due to their low numbers their "feeding" can be easily explained as simple killings from murderers around the world. The organizations of the ACPA are working together to kill off all instances of SCP-AQO and contain the ones that haven't been active yet. Unfortunately, there have been reports of Proto-Sarkic Clan's given SCP-AQO instances shelter and protection while other reports of Neo-Sarkic Clans using them for deadly experiments. 

Currently there have been no reasons given to have inactive SCP-AQO instance activated for any given reason. 

"The psychology of the SCP-AQO instances is quite fascinating and something I still can't understand. I do wonder if we were to expose love stories or perhaps more science material to SCP-AQO instances we could ignite more human emotions and maybe encourage them to act more human. I do think it's possible but to fully test that theory out we would have to start over, in other words, we need an SCP-AQO instance to activate and take a host. But currently the Ethics Commitee is fully against that, and the O5 Council has no reasoning to disagree. Such a shame too, we have so many inactive SCP-AQO instances we might as well do something with them.

Like this one experiment I wanted to try, I would like to see if it's possible to have an SCP-AQO instance possess a limb of a human instead of the head. Would it be possible for the SCP-AQO to live together symbiotically with the host or would the SCP-AQO instance kill the host and attempt to replace the head? But then again, the Ethics Commitee and I have never seen eye to eye so I doubt they would ever bother seeing my request. Perhaps I should suggest the idea to someone else and see if they will be able to get the Ethics Commitee change their minds." -Dr. Sarma

.

SCP: Horror Movie Files Hub

[nasib-sarwar]

Tiktok ads vs Facebook ads Which Platform Deliver Better ROI

Looking to maximize your ROI on advertising? but it is difficult to choose the best platform between tiktok ads vs Facebook ads, It's time to settle the score between two heavyweights in the digital marketing arena: TikTok Ads and Facebook Ads. Both platforms offer immense potential to reach your target audience and drive results, but which one delivers better returns on investment? In this showdown, we'll delve into the strengths and weaknesses of TikTok Ads and Facebook Ads, helping you make an informed decision on where to allocate your marketing budget. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just starting, understanding the key differences between these platforms is crucial. From audience demographics and engagement levels to ad formats and targeting capabilities, we'll explore it all. So buckle up and get ready to discover the ultimate winner in the battle of TikTok Ads vs Facebook Ads. It's time to find out which platform can truly supercharge your marketing efforts and deliver the highest return on your advertising investment. Understanding ROI in Advertising Return on investment (ROI) is a critical metric that measures the profitability of an investment relative to its cost. When it comes to advertising, ROI is a key indicator of how effectively a platform is delivering results and driving business growth. To calculate ROI, you need to compare the revenue generated from your advertising efforts to the cost of running the ads. A higher ROI indicates that your advertising campaigns are generating more income compared to the investment made. TikTok Ads vs Facebook Ads Now that we understand the importance of ROI in advertising, let's dive into the specifics of TikTok Ads and Facebook Ads. Both platforms have their unique strengths and weaknesses, so it's important to evaluate them based on your business objectives and target audience. Benefits of Advertising on TikTok TikTok has taken the social media world by storm, especially among younger demographics. With its innovative short-form video format and highly engaged user base, TikTok offers a unique opportunity for brands to connect with a younger audience creatively and authentically. Here are some key benefits of advertising on TikTok: 1. Massive Reach: TikTok boasts over 1 billion active users worldwide, making it one of the fastest-growing social media platforms. Advertising on TikTok allows you to tap into this vast user base and reach a wide audience. 2. Engagement: TikTok users are highly engaged and spend a significant amount of time on the platform. This presents an opportunity for brands to capture the attention of users and create memorable brand experiences. 3. Creativity: TikTok's video format encourages creativity and allows brands to showcase their products or services in a visually appealing and entertaining way. Brands can leverage TikTok's editing tools and effects to create engaging and shareable content. Benefits of Advertising on Facebook While TikTok may be the new kid on the block, Facebook remains a dominant force in the digital advertising space. With its extensive user base and advanced targeting capabilities, Facebook Ads provides numerous benefits for businesses of all sizes. Here's why advertising on Facebook can be a game-changer for your ROI: 1. Targeting Options: Facebook's robust targeting options allow you to precisely reach your ideal audience. From demographics and interests to behaviors and location, Facebook Ads provides a wide range of targeting criteria to ensure your ads are seen by the right people. 2. Audience Size: With over 2.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook offers unparalleled reach. No matter how niche or broad your target audience is, chances are they can be found on Facebook. 3. Ad Formats: Facebook offers a variety of ad formats, including image ads, video ads, carousel ads, and more. This flexibility allows you to choose the format that best suits your marketing objectives and engage your audience in different ways. Cost Comparison between TikTok and Facebook Ads Regarding advertising, cost is an important factor to consider, especially for businesses with limited budgets. Let's take a closer look at the cost comparison between TikTok Ads and Facebook Ads. TikTok Ads Cost TikTok Ads pricing varies depending on factors such as ad format, targeting options, and campaign objectives. The cost per impression (CPM) on TikTok can range from $10 to $30, while the cost per click (CPC) can range from $0.10 to $0.30. It's important to note that TikTok Ads are still relatively new, and as more advertisers enter the platform, the competition and costs may increase.  Facebook Ads Cost The cost of Facebook Ads is influenced by factors such as audience targeting, ad relevance, and bidding strategy. On average, the cost per click (CPC) on Facebook can range from $0.50 to $2.00, while the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) can range from $5 to $10. It's worth mentioning that Facebook Ads' costs can vary significantly depending on your industry, target audience, and the competitiveness of your chosen ad placements. Conclusion In the battle of TikTok Ads vs Facebook Ads, there is no definitive winner. The choice between the two platforms ultimately depends on your specific marketing objectives, target audience, and budget. TikTok Ads offer a unique opportunity to engage with a younger, highly engaged audience through creative video content. On the other hand, Facebook Ads provide extensive targeting options and a massive user base that can help you reach a wide range of potential customers. To make an informed decision, consider conducting small-scale tests on both platforms to gauge their effectiveness for your business. Monitor key metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost per acquisition to determine which platform delivers better ROI for your advertising campaigns. Remember that successful advertising requires continuous optimization and testing, so be prepared to adapt your strategies based on the results you achieve. In the end, the key to achieving better ROI lies in understanding your target audience, crafting compelling ad creative, and optimizing your campaigns based on data-driven insights. By leveraging the strengths of both TikTok Ads and Facebook Ads, you can create a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that drives results and helps you achieve your business objectives. Read the full article

[swissforextrading]

MoEDAL zeroes in on magnetic monopoles

MoEDAL zeroes in on magnetic monopoles The MoEDAL detector (Image: CERN) The late physicist Joseph Polchinski once said the existence of magnetic monopoles is “one of the safest bets that one can make about physics not yet seen”. In its quest for these particles, which have a magnetic charge and are predicted by several theories that extend the Standard Model, the MoEDAL collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has not yet proven Polchinski right, but its latest findings mark a significant stride forward. The results, reported in two papers posted on the arXiv preprint server, considerably narrow the search window for these hypothetical particles. At the LHC, pairs of magnetic monopoles could be produced in interactions between protons or heavy ions. In collisions between protons, they could be formed from a single virtual photon (the Drell–Yan mechanism) or the fusion of two virtual photons (the photon-fusion mechanism). Pairs of magnetic monopoles could also be produced from the vacuum in the enormous magnetic fields created in near-miss heavy-ion collisions, through a process called the Schwinger mechanism. Since it started taking data in 2012, MoEDAL has achieved several firsts, including conducting the first searches at the LHC for magnetic monopoles produced via the photon-fusion mechanism and through the Schwinger mechanism. In the first of its latest studies, the MoEDAL collaboration sought monopoles and high-electric-charge objects (HECOs) produced via the Drell–Yan and photon-fusion mechanisms. The search was based on proton–proton collision data collected during Run 2 of the LHC, using the full MoEDAL detector for the first time. The full detector comprises two main systems sensitive to magnetic monopoles, HECOs and other highly ionising hypothetical particles. The first can permanently register the tracks of magnetic monopoles and HECOs, with no background signals from Standard Model particles. These tracks are measured using optical scanning microscopes at INFN Bologna. The second system consists of roughly a tonne of trapping volumes designed to capture magnetic monopoles. These trapping volumes – which make MoEDAL the only collider experiment in the world that can definitively and directly identify the magnetic charge of magnetic monopoles – are scanned at ETH Zurich using a special type of magnetometer called a SQUID to look for any trapped monopoles they may contain. In their latest scanning of the trapping volumes, the MoEDAL team found no magnetic monopoles or HECOs, but it set bounds on the mass and production rate of these particles for different values of particle spin, an intrinsic form of angular momentum. For magnetic monopoles, the mass bounds were set for magnetic charges from 1 to 10 times the fundamental unit of magnetic charge, the Dirac charge (gD), and the existence of monopoles with masses as high as about 3.9 trillion electronvolts (TeV) was excluded. For HECOs, the mass limits were established for electric charges from 5e to 350e, where e is the electron charge, and the existence of HECOs with masses ranging up to 3.4 TeV was ruled out. “MoEDAL’s search reach for both monopoles and HECOs allows the collaboration to survey a huge swathe of the theoretical ‘discovery space’ for these hypothetical particles,” says MoEDAL spokesperson James Pinfold. In its second latest study, the MoEDAL team concentrated on the search for monopoles produced via the Schwinger mechanism in heavy-ion collision data taken during Run 1 of the LHC. In a unique endeavour, it scanned a decommissioned section of the CMS experiment beam pipe, instead of the MoEDAL detector’s trapping volumes, in search of trapped monopoles. Once again, the team found no monopoles, but it set the strongest-to-date mass limits on Schwinger monopoles with a charge between 2gD and 45gD, ruling out the existence of monopoles with masses of up to 80 GeV. “The vital importance of the… https://home.web.cern.ch/news/news/physics/moedal-zeroes-magnetic-monopoles (Source of the original content)

[chivalryisalive]

1. Pen (No Paper) - The Mysterium Xarxes

For this project I used a pocket-sized red journal.

In Pen (No Paper), I was tasked with coating an object in the blank ink of a pen that the class was given. I chose to drench a little red journal in the ink that I had because I wanted to symbolize how some of the darkest moments our lives have to offer: are where a lot of our character and understanding of situations comes from. I was robbed in December of 2020 and initially looked upon the misfortune with vengeance, but by further reflecting on the situation instead of acting out of the heat of the moment; I realized it taught me a valuable lesson about not being too trusting of strangers, and to - in that instance - sell my laptop somewhere public and mutual: not at a park, late at night that I hadn’t even known personally.

2. Color: Body and Environment - International Love of the Body

For this segment I used the different poses of my body along with the color and orientation of the FIU campus surroundings.

The basis of “International Love of the Body” was to reflect myself doing poses within and around different structures on campus off of glass doors and other reflective surfaces. I find it fascinating how these reflective surfaces mimic reality, so I demonstrate that by posing between metal pillars, around a mic-speaking device to give off the illusion of wearing a mask, and a lighting screen device looking as if I’m on a merry go round. This project goes to show that the angles by which a picture are taken can change the meaning and direction a perspective can take. What surrounds a person or other objects may alter its interpretation as well.

4. Color: We Call it Brown (I had to include some of the projects out of order because I was unable to add text under the image for #3 - Color Swatch.

I don’t recall this one.

5. Color: Color as Brand as Meme

N/A

6. Camouflage/Dissolve: 10 In-Between Spaces

For this one I used the art room as well the outside area surrounding it.

In this project I scouted the different parts of the room that would be suitable as an in-between space to put my coated cereal box in. I wanted to find a space that met the criteria but also challenged the likes of depth perception and a conventional in-between space.

7. Camoflauge/Dissolve: Process

The process for #7 involved a cereal box along with painting materials used to prime and then coat it in an additional layer of white paint and other colors used to blend the box into the chosen background.

8. Camouflage/Dissolve Final:

The final product, was meant to blend into its background seamlessly. But I took a different approach, and that was to cartoonize the transition between the pipe in the background and the cereal box in front of it.

9. Everyday Monuments - 10 Objects

We were asked to bring 10 everyday objects into class without any context for suspense. Some of the objects I remember bringing along are a mini green fidget spinner, the mysterium xarxes, along with other little trinkets measuring 3 inches or less.

10. Everyday Monuments: Process

I started the process by molding the chicken poultry wire into a finger spinner shape, which was then complicated by the fact that I would have to create a frictionless mechanism for it to spin with. I then opted for a marker design, which I didn't end up finishing because I didn't believe it was an embodiment of my capabilities.

3. Color Swatch - Shadefull

For Shadefull I compared the tones of color on myself with a fallen piece of tree.

With Color Swatch I decided to compare the tones of black, white and “brown” on myself to that of what was on the fallen piece of tree. Both contain natural aspects - besides my shorts; but in different forms. On a deeper note, it speaks to how a person may venerate the same ideals or concepts as say an object in the environment while coming from entirely different places. This ties into the importance of relatability and how it can make a person feel. At least if I were to say the same colors I were wearing in my environment or somewhere else, it would give my clothing - for example - more significance.

[addindiagroup]

5 Ideas for Creating a Cozy Home Interior Design

You want to design your home but need some home interior design ideas to help figure out how to accomplish it. One of the most common problems with interior decorating is this one. The money must also be taken into account in addition to the aesthetics. The task is not as simple as it appears to be. For that cosy feeling at home, we have put together a list of the top five home interior design ideas.

There are many different ways to decorate the interiors; therefore, clarity is usually necessary. And while you're in that frame of mind, your choices might not be favourable to you. In light of this, we have listed the top five home interior design ideas that will assist you in creating a cosy space.

Add Artwork to your Home Decor

Making an art gallery is one of the best home interior design ideas for decorating your home. Even if it seems challenging at first, having knowledge of the right methods will be very beneficial to you. How to set up a perfect art gallery is covered in the section below.

Home interior design ideas: Choose the location where you can perfectly construct the gallery first.

After that, you must split the whole amount of space into several portions by measuring it. You must hang a variety of artworks because we are talking about a gallery.

While working on your home interior design ideas, draw an outline for each piece of art to get a sense of its shape.

You must now make a list of the artists and the categories of artwork you plan to utilise in your gallery. Choose landscape paintings to establish a gallery in the lounge that looks out over the grass or the pool. In a similar vein, if you want to highlight your home interior design ideas and bedroom's best features and add personal touches, portraits are your best bet.

Purchase the artwork from a marketplace in person or online. The ideal way to make additional savings on your buy seems to be the online market.

Install the pieces of art in the designated areas, making sure there is enough space between each one. This will increase clarity and make the artwork more obvious from a distance.

Adding Stylish Mirror to your Home Décor

Another factor to highlight while penning down your home interior design ideas is using mirrors. Using chic mirrors as interior décor is yet another fantastic concept. Mirrors have evolved into one of the best home interior design ideas and elements, despite the fact that it may sound a little strange. With a mirror serving as the back wall, you can purchase wooden shelves that are hexagonal, triangular, or round. Therefore, you can simply store decorative objects like small plants, candles, etc. on the shelves.

Additionally, you may get mirrors with artistically designed metal frames to utilise as decor in your living room and bedroom. Mirrors are essential for reflecting light effectively and giving the impression that a room is bigger and more open.

Add Bookshelves To Your Interior Decor

A bookshelf is the perfect piece of home decor because you can fit it basically anywhere. Depending on your preference and the amount of room you have, you can choose between home interior design ideas, and a freestanding rack or a wall-mounted shelf. To ensure that you can improve the overall aesthetics of the space, wooden bookshelves are great.

However, you must make sure that the furniture's wooden finish and stain coordinate with the room's design. Home interior design ideas, for instance, talks about using bookshelves with a walnut or honey finish if the room is decorated in light colours and you want to add a contrasting colour. Opt for a teak or oak finish, though, if you want to match the fashion statement. Always choose for a solid wood bookshelf because it is highly durable and long-lasting.

Home Interior Design Ideas for Colour-Block Your Wall

The best home interior design ideas include colouring various blocks on your wall. Create distinct areas on the wall using masking tape in the shapes of triangles, squares, trapeziums, and so forth. Now, use various colours to paint each part. Choose three to four complementary colours that will help the wall seem vibrant and work well together. For instance, you may paint your wall with chrome blocks that are red, white, yellow, and teal.

Home interior design ideas include choosing sectional blocks if you don't want to end up with geometric patterns or wall blocks. Draw a line on the wall that is closer to the ceiling and then paint a larger area of the wall in a deeper colour, such as grass green, teal, maroon, etc. A lighter colour, such as off-white, beige, or white, should be used in the smaller area.

Install New Lighting in Your Home Interior Design Ideas

Without a question, lighting is helpful in creating the perfect home interior design ideas. However, the place where you wish to install the lighting and the current décor should be taken into account. Here are a few examples to assist you in home interior design ideas for the ideal lighting décor.

Use platform or rail lights in the kitchen to quickly brighten the space over the cooking station.

If you have a large dining table or a kitchen island, add pendant lights of various lengths to make the space more dramatic.

Minimalist home interior design ideas: To create a minimalist but unusual style in the bedroom, you may also utilise highly crafted wall lamps on either side of the headboard.

Paint Your Home Floors

People usually prefer to use standard flooring materials like marble, granite, mosaic tiles, etc. However, choose concrete flooring and paint them the same colour if you want to level up your home interior design ideas. For a more realistic-looking floor, you can create 3D paint. In addition, you can paint the bottom a solid shade to match the decor already in place or the colour of the walls. Using darker colours can make it easier for you to clean the floors more quickly. Source Link: https://addindiagroup.com/5-ideas-for-creating-a-cozy-home-interior-design/

[fractiondigital]

How to Optimize Your Website with On-Page SEO (2022)

It is important to understand the differences between PPC and SEO before choosing one. In terms of marketing, PPC and SEO focus on different things. PPC is used to drive website traffic and generate sales by advertising on websites. Alternatively, SEO ensures that your website provides quality, online visibility for the keywords you want to rank for on the google search engine. This blog will explain the differences between PPC and SEO and help you decide which one is best for you.

When considering online marketing, the first thing to consider is when to invest time and money. It can be difficult to decide between PPC (pay-per-click) and SEO (search engine optimization). They differ primarily in the type of traffic they drive; one is driven by conversions, the other by search engine marketing results.

If you haven’t caught on yet, PPC ads are the new way to buy ad space on the internet. Your business can be advertised on a variety of platforms, including Google. If you are just getting started in the field of online marketing, you are going to want to know how to choose between the two, PPC vs SEO or even both.

With respect to the personal side of SEO, you will show up before additional significant leads for your business. They will see your pertinent information that corresponds to their query. It assists you with associating your site with additional important potential customers.

Though in Offsite (Off-page) SEO incorporates exercises from or “in the background” of your site. Off-site SEO is the other portion of your website streamlining endeavors. Fundamentally, this incorporates all that you can do to further develop your SEO that is not visible on your site.

As such, off-site SEO is advancing your site and content to outer locations. We should go over more than a couple of the primary things you can do to work on your offsite SEO endeavors.

Viable on-page enhancement requires a mix of a few elements. Two vital things to have set up in the event that you expect to work on your exhibition in an organized manner are examination and normal observing.

There is little advantage in improving the design or content of a site on the off chance that the workflow isn’t equipped towards accomplishing objectives and isn’t based on an in-depth evaluation of the hidden issues.

In outrageous cases, improvement estimates that aren’t founded on a strong, proof-based plan can have the contrary impact to that ideal – possibly hurting the steadiness of rankings or making a drop in change rates.

To enhance a webpage, you want to work on positioning elements in three regions — specialized site arrangement, content, and connections.

For your site to rank, three things should occur:

Initially, a web crawler’s necessity is to track down your pages on the web.

Then, at that point, it should examine them to figure out their subjects and distinguish their key phrases.

Lastly, it requires adding them to its file — an information base of all the information it has tracked down on the web. Along these lines, its calculations can consider showing your site for applicable questions.

A site page appears to be unique for yourself and the web crawler. You consider it to be an assortment of designs, colours, and text with its organizing, and connections. To a web index, it’s only text.

Subsequently, any components it can’t deliver this way stay undetectable to the web search tool. Thus, despite your site looking fine to you, Google could see its information distant to you.

Components of On-page Optimization

There is no norm or agreed-upon process for on-page website SEO streamlining. Notwithstanding, investigation, and measures for execution ought to be basically as complete as could be expected, to guarantee that each open door is taken advantage of for further developing web index rankings (or other KPIs).

The accompanying rundown endeavors to cover most of the most well-known components, arranged into four primary regions:

Specialized streamlining

Specialized advancement is SEO exercises that are finished on your site and are intended to further develop SEO yet are not connected with content. Furthermore, with regards to the time venture, this is to a great extent forthcoming. Thus, to do all that to ensure that it’s in fact web crawler cordial, then, at that point, we can do a great deal of that toward the start.

Allow us to talk about certain instruments that assist with making your site ‘web crawler amicable’.

There are three principal specialized parts of a site that can be streamlined:

Page load time –

As site load times are considered via web indexes as a feature of their assessment for the end goal of positioning, accelerating server reaction times is a significant piece of on-page streamlining.

You really want to comprehend how to further develop site speed. Presently, when we load a page, truly the thing we ought to go for is few seconds or less.

In the event that it’s any more, there is the concern that the client will get exhausted or perhaps they’ll simply get disappointed and get a terrible vibe for your business or your image. In this way, things that we can do is we can make record sizes more modest for pictures, we can pack texts and documents.

1. Source code

A proficient source code can add to further developed site execution. Pointless capabilities or code segments can frequently be taken out, or different components can be combined to make it more straightforward for the Googlebot to find the site.

IP addresses –

A committed IP address can likewise accommodate better execution. Devoted IP addresses are quicker to stack than shared IP addresses. This in turn brings in clients (and Google) to show up on a site quicker. Having a nearby server can likewise assist your SEO process steps and have a better site load time.

Preferably, you ought to continuously have an interesting IP address for each web project. This signals to Google and other web indexes that the site is special.

Content

Content for SEO alludes to making content that helps your website pages rank high in the web crawlers. It incorporates all that to do with the composition and organization of content on your site. If you are wondering what are the keys to content optimization – There are three significant components you really want to consider creating content that will make your site rank well: key phrases procedure, site structure and copywriting.

Your catchphrase method must not be fixed. It ought to change and expand along your organization and your site. It ought to progress with you. On the off chance that it doesn’t you have neglected it.

You ought to be on top of the progressions in your organization and adjust your system all the while. Assuming your website begins selling new items, broaden your rundown with additional catchphrases. Assuming you’re not holding back, it’s fundamental that your keywords are focused on these new business sectors also.

Content, in this specific situation, doesn’t just allude to apparent on-screen components like texts and pictures. It likewise incorporates components that are at first undetectable, for example, alt-labels or meta data.

It is fundamental that for composing content you ought to give your all to keep a characteristic voice, and the best way to rank well in the SERPs is to fabricate content around severe catchphrases. Consequently, compose on subjects that include your specialty, however, don’t make a special effort to compose explicitly to the catchphrase.

Lengthy information normally positions better. That is on the grounds that, it has merged along nicely, a more extended blog entry will continuously contain more thorough data on the point, consequently keeping a user on your webpage longer. That is called stay time, and it’s a significant positioning variable for the web indexes

Albeit not a necessity, interactive media components like recordings, graphs, sound players can flag a page’s quality. It saves perusers on a page for longer very much like longer happy does. Furthermore, thusly, it flags that they view as the substance important and worth chasing after.

Text –

Your SEO catchphrases are the watchwords and expressions in your web content that make it feasible for individuals to find your website by means of web crawlers. A site that is very much upgraded for web search tools “communicates in a similar language” as its potential guest base with catchphrases are integral parts of SEO that assist with associating searchers to your website.

The point of text streamlining ought to constantly be to make a text that isn’t just worked around one catchphrase, yet that covers many terms in the most ideal way conceivable. This is the way to guarantee that the information depicts a subject in the most dependable and comprehensive manner it can. Today, it is as of now insufficient to enhance texts exclusively to address the issues of web search tools.

Underlying components –

One more significant part of content SEO is the design of your site. This covers the utilization of passages or list item records, h-1 heading labels, and bolding or emphasizing individual text components or words.

There are two primary motivations behind why site structure is a significant positioning component and in this manner basic for building

SEO content:

A decent construction helps Google to figure out your site. How your site is organized gives Google huge signs about where to see the main information. Your site’s construction decides if a web crawler comprehends what’s going on with your website, and how effectively it will find and file content pertinent to your website’s motivation and expectation. A decent site design will, in this manner, lead to a higher positioning in Google.

By making such a design, you can utilize existing substance that has drawn in joins from others to assist different pages with positioning too. Your site’s design will assist with spreading a portion of that interface juice to different pages on your site. On a business site, that implies that you can utilize great substance you’ve written to support the web search tool rankings of your deals pages as well.

A decent design ensures you are not rivaling your own SEO content, on your site, you will presumably have various articles about comparable subjects. Assuming you compose eight articles about a similar point, Google won’t know which of these is the most significant. You have explained this with a site structure, you will rival your own articles for Google’s best position. Thus, tackling issues like this utilizing a sound connecting design will bring about higher rankings in general.

3. The best design of a site

In a perfect world, you ought to structure your site like a pyramid. On top of the pyramid is your landing page and on the landing page are connections to a few different pages, (for example, class pages). These pages, thusly, connection to significantly more pages.

In a successful substance SEO component technique, your catchphrase procedure and the manner in which you structure your site should cooperate.

Pages narrowing in on more key phrases ought to show up high in your pyramid, while pages enhanced for all the more lengthy catchphrases show up in a lower piece of your site structure. These long-tail pages at the lower part of the pyramid should connect accurately to the pages higher in the pyramid.

Designs –

All pictures are significant substance components that can be streamlined. They can assist with expanding the pertinence of the substance and very much improved pictures can rank on their own in Google’s picture search. Simultaneously, they can increment how alluring a site appears to clients. Engaging picture displays can likewise build the time clients spend on the site. Record names of illustrations are one aspect of picture streamlining.

Recordings –

A lot of what applies to pictures likewise applies to recordings. SEOs and website admins ought to give specific consideration to guaranteeing that general media content presented on their pages can really be seen by clients.

Video gives you a lift in rankings, which permits more individuals to see your site, and that implies more individuals will tap on your connection. In any case, they won’t really remain on your site extremely lengthy in the event that your on-page content isn’t great.

For Using recordings on your site, making recordings isn’t sufficient — you want to distribute your recordings on your site as a matter of fact. Simply ensure that the position checks out. A brand video fits pleasantly into your “About Us” site page or your landing page. An item video is an incredible resource for your internet business stage or your site’s item portrayals. Tribute recordings are particularly strong and can work basically anyplace on your site.

To give your video some unique circumstance, you can’t distribute your video on a generally clear page it won’t do a lot. Make certain to implant your video where it seems OK and encompass it with other significant composed and visual substance.

Tap Here to Read More About This Article:

https://fractiondigital.in/.../how-to-optimize-your.../

#seo#digitalmarketing#marketing#socialmediamarketing#socialmedia#webdesign#branding#business#onlinemarketing#contentmarketing#website#marketingdigital

[sciencespies]

JWST has broken the record for most distant galaxy ever confirmed

https://sciencespies.com/space/jwst-has-broken-the-record-for-most-distant-galaxy-ever-confirmed/

JWST has broken the record for most distant galaxy ever confirmed

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the most distant galaxy ever definitively confirmed, which formed within about 325 million years of the big bang

Space 9 December 2022

By Leah Crane

An illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope deployed in space

Adriana Manrique Gutierrez, NASA Animator

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted the most distant galaxies ever confirmed. While it has seen many galaxies that seem extraordinarily far away, these are the first ones with evidence proving that they are as distant as they appear.

Astronomers measure the distances to cosmic objects using a metric called redshift. Because of the expansion of the universe, the more distant an object is from Earth, the faster it moves away from us. Similar to the Doppler effect, in which a sound seems to rise or fall in pitch depending on whether it is moving towards or away from the listener, the colour of the light coming from a galaxy becomes redder the faster it is speeding away. By comparing how red a galaxy appears to calculations of its actual colour, astronomers can determine how distant a galaxy actually is.

In early observations of galaxies by JWST, astronomers could only make an approximation of each galaxy’s redshift because they did not have detailed data on the spectra of the light coming from those galaxies. Those observations provided hints of galaxies with redshifts of 12 and above, meaning they seem to be more than 30 million light years away and would have formed within 400 million years of the big bang – but many scientists viewed those findings with scepticism because of the lack of precise confirmation.

Advertisement

“It was crucial to prove that these galaxies do, indeed, inhabit the early universe,” said Emma Curtis-Lake at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK in a NASA blog post. “It’s very possible for closer galaxies to masquerade as very distant galaxies.”

Now, as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), researchers have confirmed the redshifts of four extremely distant galaxies, ranging from about 10.4 to 13.2. That means that they formed between 325 million and 450 million years of the big bang. The previous record for highest confirmed redshift was about 11.

“These are by far the faintest infrared spectra ever taken,” said Stefano Carniani at Scuola Normale Superiore in Italy. The observations took 28 hours over three days and covered 250 faint galaxies in total, and another set of observations is planned for 2023. It is expected to confirm even more of these distant galaxies, which will teach us about the early days of galaxy formation and how the most distant galaxies differ from those in our cosmic neighbourhood.

Reference: arxiv.org/abs/2212.04480

Sign up to our free Launchpad newsletter for a voyage across the galaxy and beyond, every Friday

More on these topics:

#Space

[unfoldingmoments]

Authenticity

'Authenticity’ is a word that makes no promises about performance. It might not necessarily involve beauty, but it does suggest an irresistible combination of sincerity with authority.

In the world of mass-produced objects, these are highly desirable qualities. Even if they are slippery and hard to define, grasping them is essential to an understanding of the nature of design. Authenticity is a guarantee that an object really is what it purports to be. The more authentic it is, the more secure we can feel about its price, if not its value. But when factories make large numbers of identical objects over long periods of time, a gap opens up between what might be called the original and the authentic.

In other contexts, authenticity is measured by the degree to which the physical remains of an object have survived, no matter how decayed they have become.

Authenticity can have mutually contradictory definitions. It can be found in the making of a faithful replica of what an object once was, or in the careful maintenance of what that object has become as the result of the passing of time. For an artist, authenticity is a question about the very nature of things. With mass production, the point is usually not one of originality, but of what is fake and what is not. For a designer, authenticity has taken on a paradoxical aspect. An authentic design might be understood as a design which is more than merely not a fake. It is also an object which is unselfconscious, one which is not shaped by a desire to please or to seduce. This is a quality which depends on responding with a certain sincerity to the practical questions that are raised by providing a serviceable solution to a technical problem. Yet design is a highly self-conscious business, one that can barely help itself but attempt to manipulate the emotions. The very involvement of a designer in the creation of an object militates against this kind of authenticity. Design cannot but have the most knowing of views of the world. Even to acknowledge that a designer is pursuing the quality of authenticity is to undermine that objective. Striving for authenticity signals its antithesis. Designers cannot help themselves. The harder they try to achieve authenticity, the more they drive it out. But the quality fascinates them.

When price is no limit, and choices are made not by consumers, but by expert specialists, then objects take on a different character.

Authenticity for a designer is a quality that comes from attempting to understand how design communicates a sense of sincerity, and then faking it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of graphic design. Gotham is a typeface designed by the American typographer Tobias Frere-Jones, initially in response to a commission from the American edition of GQ, the fashion glossy for men, for a font that could give the magazine a sharp new look. Frere-Jones’s former company, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, describes Gotham’s origins in its sales catalogue in loving detail which betrays the artifice that lies behind it. Every designer has admired the no-nonsense lettering of the American vernacular, those letters of paint, plaster, neon, glass and steel that figure so prominently in the urban landscape. Gotham celebrates the attractive and unassuming lettering of the city. Public spaces are teeming with handmade sans serifs that share the same underlying structure, an engineer’s idea of ‘basic lettering’ that transcends both the characteristics of their materials, and the mannerisms of their craftsmen.

These are the cast bronze numbers outside office buildings that speak with authority, and the engravings on cornerstones whose neutral and equable style defies the passage of time. They’re the matter-of-fact neon signs that announce liquor stores and pharmacies, and the proprietors’ names painted majestically on the sides of trucks. These letters are straightforward and non-negotiable, yet possessed of great personality, and always expertly made. Gotham is that rarest of designs, the new typeface that somehow feels familiar. Gotham inherited an honest tone that’s assertive but never imposing, friendly but never folksy, confident but never aloof. These are precisely the qualities that Barack Obama’s team were looking for when the campaign for his first presidency got underway in 2008. You could see the Gotham font on his banners at the Democratic convention, with their boldface promises of ‘Change We Can Believe In’, as a deliberate attempt to convey those qualities. Obama wanted to appeal to the values of a vanished America. Gotham is the font that reflects what was used by the New Deal when the Hoover Dam was built. It is the font of the New York Parkway system, and the law courts and federal buildings of the 1930s. It is a signal of an America that engaged with the world, and which believed it could make that world better. When the font that inspired Gotham was young, America was actually building dams, high schools and national parks. Obama’s programme could not run that far, but his typography gave America a subliminal message about itself. A message that could be understood as reflecting an awkward mismatch between substance and presentation. But at least Obama’s use of Gotham had a genuine political agenda. He wanted what he was promising to be real, even if he could not make it so. Idealism is not so clearly a part of the personality of Starbucks, or of Crest toothpaste, who have both put Gotham to work in the wake of Obama’s first victory. When Gotham is used by an inspirational politician with a gift for oratory, the qualities it is understood to reflect are being underpinned and reinforced. When it is adopted by coffee-shop chains, those qualities are undermined and diluted because in the end the qualities of any typeface come from the associations that it triggers, rather than any inherent meaning. Frere-Jones himself has used the metaphor of clothes for fonts. Perhaps it is true that clothes do need to be suited to the personality of the wearer, but it is also possible that they serve as a form of disguise. Another way to look at fonts would be to consider them in the same way we understand an accent. Some fonts and some accents are associated with authority; others are not. The uses of the Gotham font went from Obama’s vision of hope to the cynical expression of commercial self-interest.

It was not the first time that typography had gone through this kind of transition. In the last years of the Soviet Union, when Western distilleries had been producing vodka with glossy labels and slick packaging for decades, there was a sudden interest in the commercial uses of authenticity. Instead of the evocations of double-headed eagles that had decked Smirnoff’s labels, it became a fad to give vodka manufactured in Warrington and New Jersey the appearance of a more authentically contemporary Russian origin. That meant crude, rather than slick. Colour printing out of register came to be seen as a sign of authenticity, and so of quality, rather than its opposite.

Ref: Deyan Sudjic. “B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube.”

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Large Hadron Collider experiment zeroes in on magnetic monopoles

The late physicist Joseph Polchinski once said the existence of magnetic monopoles is "one of the safest bets that one can make about physics not yet seen." In its quest for these particles, which have a magnetic charge and are predicted by several theories that extend the Standard Model, the MoEDAL collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has not yet proven Polchinski right, but its latest findings mark a significant stride forward.

The results, reported in two papers posted on the arXiv preprint server, considerably narrow the search window for these hypothetical particles.

At the LHC, pairs of magnetic monopoles could be produced in interactions between protons or heavy ions. In collisions between protons, they could be formed from a single virtual photon (the Drell–Yan mechanism) or the fusion of two virtual photons (the photon-fusion mechanism). Pairs of magnetic monopoles could also be produced from the vacuum in the enormous magnetic fields created in near-miss heavy-ion collisions, through a process called the Schwinger mechanism.

Since it started taking data in 2012, MoEDAL has achieved several firsts, including conducting the first searches at the LHC for magnetic monopoles produced via the photon-fusion mechanism and through the Schwinger mechanism.

In the first of its latest studies, the MoEDAL collaboration sought monopoles and high-electric-charge objects (HECOs) produced via the Drell–Yan and photon-fusion mechanisms. The search was based on proton–proton collision data collected during Run 2 of the LHC, using the full MoEDAL detector for the first time.

The full detector comprises two main systems sensitive to magnetic monopoles, HECOs and other highly ionizing hypothetical particles. The first can permanently register the tracks of magnetic monopoles and HECOs, with no background signals from Standard Model particles. These tracks are measured using optical scanning microscopes at INFN Bologna.

The second system consists of roughly a ton of trapping volumes designed to capture magnetic monopoles. These trapping volumes—which make MoEDAL the only collider experiment in the world that can definitively and directly identify the magnetic charge of magnetic monopoles—are scanned at ETH Zurich using a special type of magnetometer called a SQUID to look for any trapped monopoles they may contain.

In their latest scanning of the trapping volumes, the MoEDAL team found no magnetic monopoles or HECOs, but it set bounds on the mass and production rate of these particles for different values of particle spin, an intrinsic form of angular momentum.

For magnetic monopoles, the mass bounds were set for magnetic charges from 1 to 10 times the fundamental unit of magnetic charge, the Dirac charge (gD), and the existence of monopoles with masses as high as about 3.9 trillion electronvolts (TeV) was excluded.

For HECOs, the mass limits were established for electric charges from 5e to 350e, where e is the electron charge, and the existence of HECOs with masses ranging up to 3.4 TeV was ruled out.

"MoEDAL's search reach for both monopoles and HECOs allows the collaboration to survey a huge swathe of the theoretical 'discovery space' for these hypothetical particles," says MoEDAL spokesperson James Pinfold.

In its second latest study, the MoEDAL team concentrated on the search for monopoles produced via the Schwinger mechanism in heavy-ion collision data taken during Run 1 of the LHC. In a unique endeavor, it scanned a decommissioned section of the CMS experiment beam pipe, instead of the MoEDAL detector's trapping volumes, in search of trapped monopoles.

Once again, the team found no monopoles, but it set the strongest-to-date mass limits on Schwinger monopoles with a charge between 2gD and 45gD, ruling out the existence of monopoles with masses of up to 80 GeV.

"The vital importance of the Schwinger mechanism is that the production of composite monopoles is not suppressed compared to that of elementary ones, as is the case with the Drell–Yan and photon-fusion processes," explains Pinfold. "Thus, if monopoles are composite particles, this and our previous Schwinger-monopole search may have been the first-ever chances to observe them."

The MoEDAL detector will soon be joined by the MoEDAL Apparatus for Penetrating Particles, MAPP for short, which will allow the experiment to cast an even broader net in the search for new particles.

[drnikolatesla]

Nikola Tesla's Cosmic Ray Theory

By J. J. J.

“More than 25 years ago I began my efforts to harness the cosmic rays and I can now state that I have succeeded in operating a motive device by means of them.”—Nikola Tesla (“Tesla’s Cosmic Motor May Transmit Power Round Earth”, Brooklyn Eagle, July 10, 1932.)

Cosmic rays are defined as highly electrified particles that originate from the sun, other stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and from other galaxies which constantly invade Earth. They became popular in 1912 when Victor Hess piloted a balloon with electroscopes to detect the presence of the electric charges in the atmosphere. Cosmic rays are still a mystery today, but it is generally not known that Nikola Tesla was actually the first to discover these mysterious radiations.

Nikola Tesla’s cosmic ray discovery was one of his crowning achievements throughout his work in experimental science, the result of over 40 years of investigations, research, and inventions. This discovery would designate Tesla the forefront leader in developing machinery operating from  a new source of power available everywhere at any location on Earth.

Starting in 1894, Nikola Tesla began experimenting with x-rays, and alongside Wilhelm Roentgen, was the first to produce some of the first x-ray images. In 1896, Tesla’s experiments based on these newly discovered rays confirmed that Alessandro Volta’s contact theory of electricity was correct - that an electrical current is produced when two different metals become in contact with one another. Tesla directed these rays toward many different materials, such as sodium, magnesium, lead, tin, iron, copper, silver, gold, and platinum, and found platinum to be the poorest reflector of these rays while sodium one of the best. In conducting these experiments, Tesla came to the following conclusions:

Highly exhausted cathodic bulbs used in x-ray imaging emit material streams which are reflected from metallic surfaces;

These streams are formed of matter in some primary or elementary condition;

The streams are likely the same agent which is the cause of the electromotive tension between metals in close proximity;

Every metal or conductor is more or less a source of such streams;

These streams must be produced by some radiations which exist in the medium;

Streams resembling the cathodic     emissions must be emitted by the sun, and also by other sources of radiant     energy.

He considered each of his conclusions to be incontrovertible, and with these results, Tesla would become the first scientist to successfully theorize the existence of the cosmic ray.

Believing that there is a continuous supply of such radiations in the medium, Tesla worked tirelessly to prove his theory. Since his conclusions indicated that the streams are composed of primary particles which must come from the sun, Tesla suggested that these particles travel at very high velocities, and are broken into smaller particles by impact against other materials on earth. His analogy was that of a bullet being shot at a wall (the bullet representing the cosmic rays and the wall acting as an object on earth). When the bullet strikes the wall, it is crushed and shatters in all directions radial to where it hit the wall. According to Tesla, the energy from the flying particles can only come from that of the bullets, and the results will differ based on the density of the wall and the velocity of the bullets.

This is an important point in Tesla’s discovery. Right around the time of these experiments (1898), radioactivity was being discovered by Marie Curie. Based on Curie’s discoveries, Tesla realized it was cosmic rays that are the cause of radioactivity on earth. Just like his analogy above states, it was not the elements on earth that are radioactive from inside as Curie hypothesized; rather, the radioactivity was due to cosmic rays coming in contact with the elements and breaking into smaller particles.

In 1899, in order to make his experiments more precise and further prove his cosmic radioactivity theory , Tesla developed a more intricate method that eliminated the limitations and incertitude of the electroscope popularly used by other scientists during this time. He used two conductors and connected them to terminals of a capacitor which had a considerable electrostatic captivity. One conductor was an insulated metal plate exposed to the sun and other radiations, and the other was a grounded capacitor (e.g. a supply of negative electricity). Essentially, the cosmic rays ionize the air, setting free many electrical charges—ions and electrons. When the cosmic rays impinge against the metal plate connected to one terminal of a capacitor - while the other terminal of the capacitor is grounded to a negatively charged earth - a current flows into the capacitor as long as the insulated body is exposed to the radiation. Therefore, an accumulation of electrical energy in the capacitor takes place. This energy can then be utilized for power purposes. He filed a patent based on these results titled, “Apparatus of the Utilization of Radiant Energy,” published in 1901. This concept is a precursor to today’s concept of solar panels, but more advanced in that it operates utilizing cosmic radiation and not just the sun’s light.

With this apparatus and associated experiments and observations, Tesla confirmed his cosmic ray theory--that sources of radiant energy (such as the sun) throw off with great velocity minute particles of matter, some even traveling faster than light. These particles are strongly electrified and are, therefore, capable of charging an electrical conductor (and may also conversely discharge an electrified conductor). In further experiments, Tesla noticed with his apparatus that the sun, in whatever position it may be in the sky, cut off the radiations from beyond and replaced them with its own. As a result of his measurements, cosmic ray velocities from the star Antares were found to travel fifty times greater than the speed of light.

Tesla would continue research in this field, but spent most of his time dedicated to his worldwide wireless system which he deemed far more important. In his later years, when the notion of the cosmic ray again started to gain popularity, he would return to provide his invaluable insight based on his extensive research and previous experiments. . For example, he would be the first to assume that the cosmic ray gives rise to a secondary radiation by impact against the cosmic dust scattered through space, originating from all directions. In 1932, Tesla would give a mathematical explanation of the intensity of cosmic rays in relation to the elevation from earth in an article titled “The External Source of Energy of the Universe, Origin and Intensity of Cosmic Rays.” The formula is below, in Tesla’s own words:

“I = (W+P) / (W+p)”

“In this expression W is the weight in kilograms of a column of lead of one square centimeter cross section and one hundred and eighty centimeters length, P the normal pressure of the atmosphere at sea level in kilograms per square centimeter, p the atmospheric pressure at the altitude under consideration and in like measure and I the intensity of the radiation in terms of that at sea level which is taken as unit. Substituting the actual values for W and P, respectively 1.9809 and 1.0133 kilograms, the formula reduces to:

I = 2.99421 / (1.9809 + p)

Obviously, at sea level p = P hence the intensity is equal to 1, this being the unit of measurement. On the other hand, at the extreme limit of the atmosphere p = 0 and the intensity I = 1.5115.

The maximum increase with height is, consequently, a little over fifty-one percent. This formula, based on my finding that the absorption is proportionate to the density of the medium whatever it be, is fairly accurate. Other investigators might find different values for W but they will undoubtedly observe the same character of dependence, namely, that the intensity increases proportionately to the height for a few kilometers and then at a gradually lessening rate.”

Based on Tesla’s extensive  research, many calculations, and several years of thorough experiments, Tesla came to the following conclusions:

The intensity of the cosmic rays must be greatest at the zenith of the atmosphere;

The intensity should increase more and more rapidly up to an elevation of approximately  20 kilometers where the conducting air stratum begins;

From that point on, the intensity should decrease; first slowly and then more rapidly, to an insignificant value at an altitude of about 30 kilometers;

The display of high potential must occur on the free end of the terrestrial wire, that is to say, on the area furthest from the sun - the darkest side of earth. The current from this part of the planet is supplied at a pressure of about 216 billion volts and there is a difference of 2 billion volts between the illuminated and the dark side of the globe. The energy of this current is so great that it readily accounts for the aurora and other phenomena observed in the atmosphere and at the earth’s surface.

With such convincing results, Nikola Tesla was clearly one of the foremost leaders in cosmic ray discovery and theory and was, without a doubt, ahead of his time:

“The greatest mistake made is the appraisal of the energy of cosmic rays. In most cases the ionizing action is used as a criterion, which is useless, for the most powerful cosmic rays virtually do not ionize at all and leave no trace of their passage through the instrument. I have resorted to different means and methods and have found that the energy of the cosmic radiations impinging upon the earth from all sides is stupendous, such that if all of it were converted into heat the globe quickly would be melted and volatilized.

Since expressing, in 1896, my ideas on the origin and character of cosmic rays and of the cause of radioactivity, all my views have been confirmed by my own findings and those of others, while the numerous theories advanced have been proved false or inadequate. Those who are still doubting that our sun emits powerful cosmic rays evidently overlook that the solar disk, in whatever position it may be in the heavens, cuts off the radiations from beyond, replacing them by its own.

“As the radiations from the sun are only a little more intense than those coming from other directions, the lack of pronounced differentiation has deceived the observers. Regarding radio-activity, it occurs exactly as required by my theory. The radio-active emanations from the globe are secondary effects of external rays and two-fold - one part coming from the energy stored, the other from that continuously supplied.” --Nikola Tesla (“Expanding Sun Will Explode Some Day Tesla Predicts.” New York Herald Tribune, August 18, 1935.)

[teawaffles]

Louis and the Aquaria: Chapter 4

Three days after the angelfish had fallen ill. In total, it was now 11 days since the fish had arrived at the mansion.

Despite Louis’s devoted care, ‘William’s’ condition had not improved.

Its fins, once proudly raised upright, were now drooping. The shine of its scales had faded away, and even the way it swam looked quivery and uncertain. During mealtimes, it left virtually all of its food uneaten. In short, ever since its poor health had been discovered, its condition had steadily worsened.

An angelfish, drifting through the water alone.

Louis was watching over it from a chair.

He could do nothing, and chafed at his own powerlessness. On top of that, the cause of its illness might’ve been his own thoughtless actions — it felt downright unbearable.

Incidentally, the South American trees that were brought in the other day had now been moved to the end of the hall. It was a reasonable measure: after all, there was a fear that the change in environment might have affected the fish. Now, one would think the area would’ve simply returned to its former state — but after the trees that had exuded such a strange presence were moved away, the space around the tank now looked somewhat empty.

Only the mechanical noises of the aquarium equipment could be heard echoing through the hall. Then, the hall door inched open, and there stood Fred.

Seated before the aquarium, Louis hadn’t even turned to look at the newcomer to the room. Instead, he watched the angelfish in earnest silence.

Fred walked up to him quietly.

“Are you alright?”

“If you’re talking about the angelfish, then unfortunately, its condition isn’t good. But although my attention has been taken up by the care of this one, by no means have I neglected the others. You can be assured of that.”

“…………”

Fred had actually been asking after Louis’s own health; but from that determined reply, he could sense that Louis had intentionally avoided the topic, and so he didn’t press further.

Looking over the surrounding tanks, he could see that the other fish were swimming energetically. Just as Louis had said, it seemed he had avoided falling into the trap of letting one fish impede the management of the entire endeavour.

For several minutes, an uncomfortable silence pervaded the space between them.

From the side, Fred looked at Louis and ‘William’ in turn. As the careworn man gazed at the sickly fish, his face exuded exhaustion in waves.

Ever since he’d begun nursing the fish, Louis had been in constant attendance by its tank. After preparing everyone’s meals, he would shut himself in this room to watch over it alone. Occasionally, out of concern, the others would come in to check on him — but Louis stubbornly refused to leave.

When was the last time he’d gone back to his room? ——There wasn’t any bed prepared here, and from the state of his complexion, it was painfully obvious that he hadn’t gotten enough sleep.

Fred dithered on about it. But eventually, he made up his mind, and asked Louis a question.

“Mr Louis. I understand how you feel, but you should still get some rest. If your body breaks down, everything will have been in vain.”

“I believe I told you everything’s fine.”

In contrast to his usual manner, the voice that struck Fred had been exceedingly cold.

It was clear that Louis did not want him to probe any further.

Fred nearly withered after hearing that — but no matter what he did, he couldn’t suppress the burgeoning question within him.

“——Why are you doing so much for just one fish? Didn’t you say it before: that they are just a means to carry out the plan?”

“…………”

Thinking back to his own words, he knew Fred was spot on. But he twisted his lips and looked down, as if he found it difficult to respond. In his lap, his hands were balled into tight fists — perhaps, that question had stirred up a conflict within him.

In the past, Louis and Fred had fallen out in the middle of a mission.

At the time, their task had been to punish the nobles who’d abducted children from the slums and forced them into cruel manhunts. During the operation, they’d been split on whether to help a child whose injured leg had rendered him immobile.

Fred had insisted on helping him, but Louis proposed leaving the child behind, as their objective to murder the noblemen came first. Although Fred knew that he’d said it out of concern for his brother, who was also on the same mission, he still found Louis’s decision rather callous.

In the end, Moran — who was like an older brother to them — stepped in and defused the situation. However, the fact remained that Fred and Louis had nearly clashed over their differences in opinion.

——Louis James Moriarty, was a man who could become as ruthless as necessary for his brother’s sake.

It was a fact that those who worked with the “Lord of Crime” knew all too well.

However, it was precisely because Fred understood his personality, that he was baffled as to why Louis would go so far to devote himself to a mere tropical fish.

It was but one fish out of three. And even if all the angelfish were to die, there were still tens of other species in the aquaria. There were plenty of replacements.

Then, why——.

“Fred. You’re right.”

Still looking down, Louis spoke in a grave, yet clear voice.

“It’s a tool to help my brother get close to his target. There are no further reasons than that. If it were any ordinary fish, I wouldn’t have gotten so invested. And if my brother ordered me to kill all of them right now, I wouldn’t hesitate to do so.”

Fred nodded. But at the same time, those words chilled him to the core. He would’ve done it himself as well, if William told him to — but he couldn’t understand how Louis was able to completely close off his heart to the living things he’d so carefully raised.

“Still……”

Louis tried to continue, but his voice was trembling ever so slightly, and Fred could not hide his astonishment. The man was normally calm and collected; but now, unlike his usual self, it seemed as though quivers of agony were wringing him out from the inside.

Seated on his chair, Louis slowly looked up at the angelfish before him.

“Still, for this one alone—— even though it was done half as a joke, it was given the name ‘William’, and so I must do everything I can for it.”

His voice was filled with determination.

“It pains me to say this, but what you said was true. It’s foolish of me, but I’ve grown attached to a fish that was meant to be nothing more than a tool. Of all things, I’ve ended up projecting the image of my brother onto a fish.”

“Mr Louis……”

He’d laid bare the emotions he had been suppressing with logic, and now, Fred understood just how much he’d been suffering.

——Projecting his own brother, onto an angelfish.

Perhaps, if one didn’t know the brothers’ background, one would find this rather comical. But as someone who shared their ambitions, Fred had no intention of laughing.

Louis devoted himself to their work without batting an eye. But having been with the two brothers until now, Fred was painfully aware that that cold-heartedness was, from another perspective, directly linked to his extraordinary love for William.

In that case, it was only natural that once something was given the name of the brother he so revered, Louis would begin to see it as more than a mere tool.

It was the complete opposite of what Louis had always said and done. But Fred knew that his words were backed by conviction, and thus realised that further persuasion would be futile. In fact, he could even sympathise with that selfless devotion to the fish.

Because to Louis, William James Moriarty was a figure more precious and important than anything else.

But although he understood Louis’s feelings, that didn’t mean the problem was resolved.

“Even so, there isn’t anything else we can……”

Though it was extremely difficult to say, it was also the unassailable truth, and Louis accepted it with bitterness.

“……Indeed. There’s nothing else we can do.”

The strength of one’s feelings alone, could not hope to fight a disease that existed in reality.

It was a cruel truth, and Fred’s expression clouded over. Although he no longer had any intention of stopping Louis, just like this, a wordless silence settled between them once more.

The room was engulfed in a heavy stillness.

“——It sure feels rather gloomy in here. Louis, Fred.”

Then, the voice of that man rang out.

The two of them looked at the entrance, and saw William entering the hall with silent steps.

Looking at his younger brother seated listlessly before the aquarium, William’s voice was mingled with sorrow.

“You don’t seem to be well, Louis. Although this is something I asked you to do, it shouldn’t come at the expense of your own health.”

“Nii-san……”

Louis rose to his feet, in an attempt to explain the current situation; but all he had were useless excuses, and he fell silent.

Instead, Fred stepped forward and tried to defend him.

“N-No, Mr William. He was, trying to help the fish——”

But William raised a hand to stop him.

“Fred, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I haven’t come here to lay blame on Louis; rather, I’m here to give him something important.”

“Eh?”

That was not what he’d been expecting. Puzzled, Fred stood rooted to the spot.

Then, William took a tiny bottle of liquid and a small piece of paper from his breast pocket, then handed them both to Louis.

Needless to say, Louis was perplexed.

“Nii-san……. These are?”

“——Medicine for the fish.”

At those nonchalant words, Louis and Fred were startled. Wide-eyed, they stared at the bottle in Louis’s hand.

“From what I’ve been told, this has been prepared using a solution of malachite green as a base. [1] Adding an appropriate amount of it to the water should do the trick,” William explained simply.

“Did you arrange for this, Mr William?”

A trace of excitement crept into Fred’s expression, and William nodded leisurely.

“I’d anticipated a situation like this, so I requested Herder to develop such a remedy. But because the fish-keeping equipment was the bigger priority, it seems the medicine was completed a little late. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Louis — these past few days must’ve been difficult for you.”

Hearing that, Fred found himself with a newfound admiration for William’s foresight, as well as Herder’s outstanding technical expertise.

With both hands, Louis clutched the tiny bottle as if it were priceless beyond compare.

“——Thank you so much, nii-san!”

In a pitch-dark situation, he’d now been given a ray of hope. Louis sank into a deep bow, and William responded with a smile full of warmth.

“Also, I have an update on our work: in five days, the fish will all be leaving the mansion.”

Slowly, Louis and Fred’s expressions grew taut.

“I managed to secure a meeting with Stapleton a few days earlier. As planned, he was lured in by the tropical fish, and invited us to his mansion in exchange for us handing them all over to him. After that meeting, I believe I’ll be able to judge if he’s indeed engaged in nefarious acts.”

“Understood,” Louis replied.

“I’ll report back once I obtain the results. Well then, I wish you all the best.”

With those parting words, William left the hall with a dignified air. Louis and Fred thanked him once again, then looked at one another.

Fred smiled. “The fish will surely get better once you use this,” he said.

But in contrast, Louis’s manner was exceedingly calm.

“I wouldn’t be optimistic,” he cautioned. “Since the drug was only just developed, there may be concerns about its quality, and we don’t know for sure if it’ll be effective in treating this particular disease.”

But Fred simply narrowed his eyes, and stared at Louis’s face.

“……What’s the matter?”

Fred pushed the corners of his own mouth up with his fingers.

“You’re smiling.”

“Wha……!”

In an instant, Louis hid his mouth with a hand. No matter how he tried to look unruffled, it seemed he was unable to conceal the sheer delight brimming within him.

“A-Anyway! Since this is something William nii-san and Mr Herder have prepared, let’s use it right away!”

Louis said that in an especially loud voice, in a bid to hide his embarrassment; then, following the instructions on the piece of paper he’d been given, he added the liquid medicine into the tank.

“Now all we can do is hope it’ll work.”

“It’ll be fine, for sure,” Fred said brightly.

For once, Louis did not argue back.

Footnotes:

[1] Malachite green can be used as an antimicrobial in aquaculture (Wikipedia). But it is toxic and potentially carcinogenic(!!), hence it’s been banned for this purpose in many countries today.

[swissforextrading]

MoEDAL zeroes in on magnetic monopoles

MoEDAL zeroes in on magnetic monopoles The MoEDAL detector (Image: CERN) The late physicist Joseph Polchinski once said the existence of magnetic monopoles is “one of the safest bets that one can make about physics not yet seen”. In its quest for these particles, which have a magnetic charge and are predicted by several theories that extend the Standard Model, the MoEDAL collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has not yet proven Polchinski right, but its latest findings mark a significant stride forward. The results, reported in two papers posted on the arXiv preprint server, considerably narrow the search window for these hypothetical particles. At the LHC, pairs of magnetic monopoles could be produced in interactions between protons or heavy ions. In collisions between protons, they could be formed from a single virtual photon (the Drell–Yan mechanism) or the fusion of two virtual photons (the photon-fusion mechanism). Pairs of magnetic monopoles could also be produced from the vacuum in the enormous magnetic fields created in near-miss heavy-ion collisions, through a process called the Schwinger mechanism. Since it started taking data in 2012, MoEDAL has achieved several firsts, including conducting the first searches at the LHC for magnetic monopoles produced via the photon-fusion mechanism and through the Schwinger mechanism. In the first of its latest studies, the MoEDAL collaboration sought monopoles and high-electric-charge objects (HECOs) produced via the Drell–Yan and photon-fusion mechanisms. The search was based on proton–proton collision data collected during Run 2 of the LHC, using the full MoEDAL detector for the first time. The full detector comprises two main systems sensitive to magnetic monopoles, HECOs and other highly ionising hypothetical particles. The first can permanently register the tracks of magnetic monopoles and HECOs, with no background signals from Standard Model particles. These tracks are measured using optical scanning microscopes at INFN Bologna. The second system consists of roughly a tonne of trapping volumes designed to capture magnetic monopoles. These trapping volumes – which make MoEDAL the only collider experiment in the world that can definitively and directly identify the magnetic charge of magnetic monopoles – are scanned at ETH Zurich using a special type of magnetometer called a SQUID to look for any trapped monopoles they may contain. In their latest scanning of the trapping volumes, the MoEDAL team found no magnetic monopoles or HECOs, but it set bounds on the mass and production rate of these particles for different values of particle spin, an intrinsic form of angular momentum. For magnetic monopoles, the mass bounds were set for magnetic charges from 1 to 10 times the fundamental unit of magnetic charge, the Dirac charge (gD), and the existence of monopoles with masses as high as about 3.9 trillion electronvolts (TeV) was excluded. For HECOs, the mass limits were established for electric charges from 5e to 350e, where e is the electron charge, and the existence of HECOs with masses ranging up to 3.4 TeV was ruled out. “MoEDAL’s search reach for both monopoles and HECOs allows the collaboration to survey a huge swathe of the theoretical ‘discovery space’ for these hypothetical particles,” says MoEDAL spokesperson James Pinfold. In its second latest study, the MoEDAL team concentrated on the search for monopoles produced via the Schwinger mechanism in heavy-ion collision data taken during Run 1 of the LHC. In a unique endeavour, it scanned a decommissioned section of the CMS experiment beam pipe, instead of the MoEDAL detector’s trapping volumes, in search of trapped monopoles. Once again, the team found no monopoles, but it set the strongest-to-date mass limits on Schwinger monopoles with a charge between 2gD and 45gD, ruling out the existence of monopoles with masses of up to 80 GeV. “The vital importance of the Schwinger… https://home.cern/news/news/physics/moedal-zeroes-magnetic-monopoles (Source of the original content)

[mysteriousquantumphysics]

Nonseparability: Replacing causal inference with grounding inference.

Usually the conclusion of Bell's Theorem is reduced to a binary decision one has to make: Either one has to give up realism or locality. I've mentioned before that realism is a very broad notion and that misconceptions can easily arise from ambiguity of terms. The story is similar with locality - before one can talk about giving it up, one has to define first what locality actually is. Most commonly, locality denotes the absence of superluminal causation (i.e. cause and effect relations between spacelike separated events). In order to keep up realism (where I consider ontological models of this entry to satisfy the required notion of realism) proponents of many interpretations/theories of quantum mechanics accept nonlocality in the sense of superluminal causation, and therefore accept clashes with the theory of relativity to a certain extent. Usually they claim that nonlocality is an unavoidable and inherent characteristic of nature (see [1]). Examples for theories going along this path of nonlocality are for instance Bohmian Mechanics, GRW collapse theories and Spekkens' ψ-epistemic approach. However, it is important to be aware that the formulation of locality requires a prerequisite called separability. Without separability, i.e. the idea of distinct events taking place in distinct areas of spacetime, any notion of superluminal causation loses its meaning. (Note that separability is often explicitly assumed, even in nonlocality proofs such as in p.9 [2]). Thus, why don't simply conclude from Bell's Theorem the violation of separability? This would entail maintaining a sense of realism (here ψ-completeness) and avoiding nonlocality in the sense of superluminal causation, thus avoiding the clashes with relativity realistic theories have to deal with usually. In the following we will illuminate what (non)separability exactly is and by which principle causation can be replaced then.

What is (non)separability?

The issue of (non)separability was already discussed in the Bell-literature of the 1980s. Howard [3] defines separability of states as:

"Contents of any two regions of space-time separated by a nonvanishing spatiotemporal interval constitute separable physical systems, in the sense that (1) each possesses its own, distinct physical state, and (2) the joint state of the two systems is wholly determined by these separate states." (p.226 [3])

Therefore nonseparability means that either one or both of the aforementioned conditions are violated. This is directly connected to a concept of holism, which states, roughly speaking, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. (At this point I should mention that Howard's principle as well as the claim that separability is assumed in Bell's Theorem is object of critisism, see [4])

Causal inference v.s. grounding inference

Well, so far so good, but in the case of nonseparability and therefore denying the crucial prerequisite of (non)local causation, which principle formalises what is going on then? At first we should get a idea of the concept of grounding:

"Grounding is thus a metaphysical relation characterizing the connection from the more to the less fundamental entities. [...] [O]ne can think of causation as driving the world through time from the earlier to the later, so one can think of grounding as driving the world through levels from the deeper to the shallower." (p.5, [5])

We see that grounding and causation are principles which show structural similarity, though being fundamentally different. Causal inference is the concept to which fundamental relevance is commonly attributed, since it is crucial for the formulation of Bell's concept of local causality (which I won't discuss any further right now because this entry is already getting too long) To see the structural similarity of causal and grounding inference, we shall have a look on how these principles can be formalized:

"Causal inference: If distinct events e1 and e2 are statistically correlated, then either (i) e1 causes e2, or (ii) e2 causes e1, or (iii) e1 and e2 are joint effects of some common cause d." (p.3, [5])

And similarily:

"Grounding inference: If non-identical entities a and b are modally connected, then either (i) a grounds b, or (ii) b grounds a, or (iii) a and b are joint results of some common ground c." (p. 7, [5])

Grounding inference in Quantum Mechanics

Now consider the Bell setup: There are two (spacelike separated) systems; the measurement outcomes on each side regarded separately seem to be completely random, whereas taken together the quantum correlations between them unravel. This might already suggest that the 'whole is more than the sum of its parts'. The events in each spacetime region are therefore modally connected and their joint system - as described by the entangled singlet state - can be regarded to be more fundamental than each system on its own. Consequently the whole composite system is a common ground which is described by its entangled quantum state. There is no need of any superluminal causation or adding structure (hidden variables, i.e. a ψ-supplemented view) to the theory. Thus, the view of nonseparability and grounding inference makes most sense in a ψ-complete view. Ismael and Schaffer [5] argue that ``the quantum states of systems are all that is needed for the formalism'' and therefore one should ``treat the quantum state description as complete if possible, since nothing else seems needed empirically''. Nonseparability makes hidden variables superfluous, but relies on keeping up the ontic character of the wave function as well as metaphysical and semantic realism.

All in all, the idea of giving up separability might give us the chance to maintain rather conservative notions of realism and simultaneously avoiding the usual problems with relativity - although of course imagining a world in which entities are not separable though spatiotemporal distance is far from being intuitive. Any hope of establishing a consistent view of quantum mechanics which does not clash with our classical understanding of the world seems to be a hopeless intention.

---

[1] Travis Norsen - Bell Locality and the Nonlocal Character of Nature, arXiv:quant-ph/0601205

[2] Robert Spekkens, Nicholas Harrigan - Einstein, incompleteness, and the epistemic view of quantum states, arXiv:0706.2661

[3] Don Howard - Holism, Separability, and the Metaphysical Implication of the Bell Experiment”. In: ed. by J.T. Cushing and E. McMullin. University of Notre Dame Press,1989, pp. 224–253.

[4] Joe Henson - Non-separability does not relieve the problem of Bell's theorem, arXiv:1302.7188

[5] Jennan Ismael, Jonathan Schaffer - Quantum holism: nonseparability as common ground, http://www.jonathanschaffer.org/quantumholism.pdf