"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:
The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/06/24/the-british-are-frantically-googling-what-the-eu-is-hours-after-voting-to-leave-it/
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
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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