Saturday 2 July 2016

Weekend Update 02/07/2016 – Independence Weekend.



"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Benjamin Franklin

To all celebrating freedom, liberty and independence this weekend, we wish them a great weekend.

Three great nations are celebrating freedom and liberty this weekend. Friday July 1st, was Canada Day, whereby Canada celebrates the anniversary of the July 1, 1867 enactment of the Constitution Act, 1867 which united the three separate colonies of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick into a single self- governing dominion within the British Empire called Canada. The great diverse nation of  Canada has prospered and thrived in freedom and rule of law, under God, ever since.

Monday July 4th is Independence Day in the United States of America, whereby Americans  commemorate and celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, by the Continental Congress, declaring that the thirteen British American colonies regarded themselves as a new nation free from the rule of Great Britain. After the rebellion was turned into a successful revolution with the American-French victory at the Surrender at Yorktown of British forces and their commander Lord Cornwallis, the 13 former colonies, enlarged,  prospered and thrived in freedom and rule of law, under God, ever since, though they did fight a civil  war along the way.

This weekend Great Britain commemorates and honours the courage and sacrifice of the men who fought and died at the Battle of the Somme in France, which started 100 years ago on Friday July 1st.  By its end on the 18th  November 1916 It was the largest battle of the First World War on the Western Front; with more than one million men were wounded or killed. British dead were about 480,000, French dead about 250,000, German dead about 235,000.

Great Britain is also still celebrating this weekend, its remarkable coming escape from the sclerotic, bureaucratic, wealth and young peoples’ jobs destroying European Union.

Below, part of the United States of America Declaration of Independence. Someone needs to mail a copy, to Juncker and the other 4 EU presidents in Brussels, plus copies to Merkel and Hollande, and the lesser national leaders. The EU must use Great Britain’s great escape as final opportunity to really embrace reform and democracy.

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

More

“What Is The European Union?”
N. Jason Jencka July 1, 2016 10:27 pm ET
A week has passed since the “officially cataclysmic” decision British voters made to withdraw from the grand European experiment. As the results of the vote became clear, global media outlets reported with great vigor that there had been a spike in UK based Google search queries asking “What is the EU?” and variations thereof. This was taken as a sign that many British voters that had voted for Leave were unaware of just what they had done, unlike the presumably enlightened and cultured supporters of Remain. This assumption is not only a broadside insult of more than 17 million Britons but glazes over a fact that is inconvenient for those who seek “an ever closer Union”: The EU as a political and monetary union has an identity crisis that runs so deeply as to cast doubt over its fundamental nature and utility. What began as the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950, a mechanism to promote postwar peace through trade, has evolved into a form of shadow government that seeks to integrate countries without a fully democratic mandate. Democratic illegitimacy and the perception thereof is the fuel that propels the wave of discontent that resulted in Brexit and threatens to spread throughout continental Europe.

As a case in point, the Treaty of Lisbon was passed by referendum in Ireland only after a second vote in the space of a year. In essence, the message to the Irish was that they were best served to reconsider their initial opposition. It can be expected that the most ardent supporters of European integration will take advantage of the global narrative that British voters have made a grave error in judgment to attempt to gloss over the results of the June 23rd referendum. As long as the mindset remains in Brussels that displays of harmony are to be prioritized over expressions of democratic free will, a near irreconcilable diplomatic and political tension will pervade. The E.U. can continue as a political entity only as a “coalition of the willing”, validated through national referendum. Unless and until this occurs in each of twenty seven member states, the question of “What is the E.U.” and what its functional purpose is will remain unanswered from Brussels clear to Bucharest.

Sources:
Brendan O’Neil-The Guardian Opinion: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/13/eu-ireland-lisbon-treaty

N. Jason Jencka is presently studying Finance and Economics at Sierra Nevada College, located near the shores of Lake Tahoe on the border of California and Nevada.His interests include the interplay between world markets and the global political sphere, with a focus on developments of both sides of the Atlantic in North America and Europe.In his leisure time he enjoys connecting with those people that have an interesting story to tell and a genuine desire to make an impact in the world.

We end for the week with some really disturbing news out of Russia. Home made nukes next?

"This work, in our opinion, opens up completely new ways to analyze nuclear and resonance chemical reactions," says Kukulin. "It can also be useful for solving a large number of computing tasks in plasma physics, electrodynamics, geophysics, medicine and many other areas of science. We want to organize a kind of training course, where researchers from various scientific areas of peripheral universities that do not have access to supercomputers could learn to do on their PCs the same thing that we do."

Home PC outperforms a supercomputer in complex calculations

Michael Irving June 30, 2016
The GPU in your gaming rig performs crazy amounts of calculations to really bring to life the Cyberdemon in the new Doom, but scientists are increasingly applying that power to more academic pursuits. Russian physicists have put a computer running a consumer-level Nvidia GPU to work on equations that are normally performed using a powerful supercomputer, and found that the home PC solved them in 15 minutes – far faster than the supercomputer's time of two or three days.

A GPU is designed with multiple threads of processing power, which allows it to perform many more simultaneous calculations than a CPU. The researchers from the Lomonosov Moscow State University wanted to take advantage of that, and test whether consumer-level tech would make an accessible alternative to supercomputers, in situations where many equations had to be run parallel to each other.

The GPU tackled few-body scattering equations, which describe how multiple quantum particles interact with each other. Where three or more of these bodies are involved, the equations become extremely difficult to calculate, involving a table containing tens or even hundreds of thousands of rows and columns of data. Running on Nvidia software as well as custom programs written by the researchers, the GPU performed better than expected.

"We reached a speed we couldn't even dream of," says team leader Vladimir Kukulin. "The program computes 260 million complex double integrals on a desktop computer within three seconds. No comparison with supercomputers! My colleague from the University of Bochum in Germany carried out the calculations using one of the largest supercomputers in Germany with the famous blue gene architecture, which is actually very expensive. And what took his group two or three days we do in 15 minutes without spending a dime."

In using consumer technology, the team's goal was to make these areas more accessible. Generally, only supercomputers are up to such tasks, and even then it's a time-consuming process. That means only a few groups around the world have the resources to perform these calculations, which hinders the overall progress of the fields of study related to them, including quantum mechanics and nuclear and atomic physics.

The processors used by the team retail for between US$300 – $500, which is far easier on the wallet than the hundreds of millions of dollars an institute can spend on a supercomputer. In fact, GPUs have been capable of this kind of application for the past 10 years or so, but their value is only now beginning to be appreciated.

"This work, in our opinion, opens up completely new ways to analyze nuclear and resonance chemical reactions," says Kukulin. "It can also be useful for solving a large number of computing tasks in plasma physics, electrodynamics, geophysics, medicine and many other areas of science. We want to organize a kind of training course, where researchers from various scientific areas of peripheral universities that do not have access to supercomputers could learn to do on their PCs the same thing that we do."
Source: Lomonosov Moscow State University

"For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."

Nelson Mandela           

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