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AMD says “we need to start to talk about our ray tracing strategy”

AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, told the press at Computex that the company will discuss ray tracing in mainstream graphics in 10 days (via PCWorld). So we can expect to hear more from AMD’s Next Horizon gaming event on June 10.

Supposedly the Sony PS5 custom chip will do ray tracing, but this year's Navi desktop GPUs (a hybrid of GCN and RDNA) won't. Maybe we'll get a surprise though.

See also: AMD and Samsung's GPU Licensing Deal: A New Era of Collaboration?

Giving in to their intense natural attraction, the electrons and the e-holes venture further and further towards each other from opposite sides of the P-N junction. Into the the semiconductor's forbidden zone of depletion they wander. Ignoring all inhibition to stop, their growing excitement causes the depletion zone to become smaller and smaller. Finally the depletion zone becomes so small it disappears. They are suddenly surprised and shocked by a climactic explosive rush of current. It can only be described as electric. The LED lights up brightly as current flows freely. The LED continues to glow brightly until the forward current blissfully subsides and the forward voltage drops below the threshold. The electrons stop flowing and go to sleep. The depletion zone once again grows in the P-N junction keeping them separated.

Who’s in — and out — of the first Democratic debates

Presidential hopefuls have until June 12 to cross one of two thresholds to qualify for the primary debates, and 13 of the 20 slots available are set. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock is currently out, one of the foremost candidates in danger of missing the stage. His camp blasted what it called the DNC's eleventh-hour "unmasking" of "arbitrary" polling rules, but the DNC said the Bullock campaign has been aware of the criteria for months.

[...] In order to be eligible for the debates, candidates must cross one of two thresholds: earning 1 percent in three polls approved by the DNC, or receiving donations from 65,000 people, with 200 in 20 different states. Thirteen have met both thresholds and clinched their spots. But there are at least 10 credible candidates bidding for the final seven spots — a list that includes two sitting senators, three congressmen, a governor, a former governor and the mayor of New York.

Next week’s deadline is a make-or-break moment for these second-tier candidates, who risk fading into irrelevance if they aren’t among the 20 candidates onstage in Miami.

The 13 candidates who can book their tickets include the race’s top figures. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar and Julián Castro are the top-polling candidates; following a random drawing, they will be split across the two nights, with five on one night and four on the other.

But also meeting both the polling and fundraising thresholds are Tulsi Gabbard, Jay Inslee and two lesser-known figures: Marianne Williamson, best known for authoring spiritual, self-help books, and Andrew Yang, a first-time candidate who wears a baseball cap that says “MATH” on the front as he touts his proposal for a universal basic income.

After those 13 candidates, the rest of the field gets murky. According to a POLITICO analysis, an additional seven candidates have hit the polling threshold: Michael Bennet, Bill de Blasio, John Delaney, Kirsten Gillibrand, John Hickenlooper, Tim Ryan and Eric Swalwell.

#YangGang #Yang2020

2020 Democratic Party presidential debates and forums

1A - Jun 26, 2019
1B - Jun 27, 2019
2A - Jul 30, 2019
2B - Jul 31, 2019
3A - Sep 12, 2019
3B - Sep 13, 2019 (may be cancelled)

See also: DNC Denies 2020 Democrats a Climate Change Debate

Want to defeat Trump? Attack Biden

Anyone angling to be the Democratic nominee should espouse a real progressive agenda – just being “anti-Trump” isn’t enough

Biden campaign's self-inflicted error is one it can't really afford

It’s political malpractice for any modern campaign to lift words, intentionally or not, for its policy plans or website.

That’s especially true if you’re the early Democratic frontrunner. And even more true if your 1988 presidential campaign ended in a plagiarism scandal.

But that’s exactly what happened on Tuesday, when Joe Biden’s campaign rolled out its climate plan — and admitted it forgot to give proper attribution.

“Several citations, some from sources cited in other parts of the plan, were inadvertently left out of the final version of the 22-page document,” the Biden campaign told NBC’s Garrett Haake.

Biden campaign confirms he supports controversial abortion rule (Hyde Amendment)

Planned Parenthood slammed Biden’s continued support for the Hyde Amendment in a statement to NBC. “The unfair Hyde Amendment makes it so that those who have the least end up having to pay the most to access abortion, and those who are service members or live on reservations are often left with no coverage for abortion care,” Kelly Robinson, Planned Parenthood Action Fund's executive director, said. “We encourage any candidate who doesn't recognize Hyde's impact to speak to the women it hurts most — particularly on women of color and women with low incomes — to learn more about the harmful impacts of this discriminatory policy," Robinson said.

[...] Biden voted against a 1977 compromise that allowed Medicaid to fund abortions with exceptions for rape, incest or medical safety of the mother. He then voted again in 1981 to remove rape and incest exceptions when they passed.

The ex-lawmaker also voted several times to prohibit federal workers from using health insurance on abortion services, with the only exception being to save the life of the mother.

I doubt that any of the current mudslinging at Biden is going to have an effect. Instead, it will take a few heated exchanges at one of the primary debates to cause a reversal. The first ones are scheduled for June 26th and 27th.

Previously: Joe Biden's #MeToo Adventure Continues
Joe Biden Parody Website Outranks Campaign Site

http://the-colossus.com/sciencegoals.html
http://the-colossus.com/technology.html

I was trying to recall this telescope concept but it was very difficult to find as it gets drowned out by other ELTs. It is linked from the very bottom of this page. Go ahead and bookmark it.

This is another overlooked project: the Magdalena Ridge Optical Interferometer (MROI). Except it is actually being built:

Telescope array will spy on spy satellites, star surfaces, and black holes

When it's complete around 2025, the $200 million Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI) will have the equivalent resolution of a gigantic telescope 347 meters across.

MROI's small telescopes can't match the light-gathering power of its giant cousins, so it will be limited to bright targets. But by combining light from the spread-out telescopes, it is expected to make out small structures on stellar surfaces, image dust around newborn stars, and peer at supermassive black holes at the center of some galaxies. It will even be able to make out details as small as a centimeter across on satellites in geosynchronous orbit, 36,000 kilometers above Earth, enabling it to spy on spy satellites.

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope full operations begin in 2022. Extremely Large Telescope and Giant Magellan Telescope will have first light in 2024. JWST scheduled for launch in 2021 or later. So astronomers will be shook in 7 years' time. It's the dark ages until then.

Earth's Minimoons: Opportunities for Science and Technology

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

Don't expect any LSST results before 2022.

Lyme disease a bioweapon gone awry? Rep. Chris Smith pushes Trump to investigate

Now Lyme advocates have a new weapon — an explosive book that alleges the epidemic spawned from an American biological warfare experiment gone awry — and Smith, a Republican whose districts stretches across parts of Monmouth, Ocean and Mercer counties, is appealing to President Donald Trump for action.

The book is “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons” by Stanford University-based science writer Kris Newby. A chronic Lyme sufferer herself, Newby documents how the U.S. military infected ticks with complex, hard-to-detect pathogens in the 1960s. The book’s linchpin is an interview with late scientist Willy Burgdorfer, who did the infecting and references an accidental release of weaponized ticks that might have ignited all of this.

The relationship between the experiments and the continued denial of chronic Lyme is something Smith would like to see explored further.

“If this (book) this is true — and the documentation is very persuasive — we were doing bio-weapons work that was grossly immoral,” Smith said in an interview with the Asbury Park Press prior to Wednesday’s town meeting. “It’s a shocking read, and I hope it adds to our push. Looking at what happened might help us come up with how we deal with it now.”

He wrote a letter to that extent to President Trump and three inspectors general — of the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Agriculture — requesting a “serious and comprehensive investigation” into the book’s assertions.

“We owe it to the overwhelming number of patients currently suffering from Lyme disease,” Smith wrote in the letter, dated May 14. “These individuals — and the American public — deserve to know the truth.”

Although he has not received a formal response, Smith said his appeal got the attention of members of Trump’s inner circle. If Congress won’t act on his bipartisan bill (H.R. 220) to bump up funding for research — currently a measly $11 million for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and $28 million for the National Institutes of Health — he’d like to nudge Trump to enact changes via executive order.

"I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected." -- Donald J Trump, May 30, 2019

It is illegal for foreign nationals or governments to help people get elected.

Nutritionist says pizza is better for breakfast than most cereals

Sage nutritional advice.

Beer Archaeologists Are Reviving Ancient Ales — With Some Strange Results

Boston Dogfish Beer Head Company should patent all the ancient ales.