#blue dot

Just a sleepy little Caine for your viewing pleasure! ---

Ok I have a somewhat well assembled red dot/blue dot theory.

In the beginning there was Caine.

The red dot.

They added things to him. Memories, programming, and other things to make him better and more creative like Kinger said.

They were satisfied with the results.

So they tried to make him better and add more to him. This time they weren't quite satisfied with the results. So they put Caine's code in a folder and locked him away.

They copied his basic code and built on that, using what they learned from before. They made Caine out to be the lesser of the two AIs and called him "defective".

They added to the new AI. Abel. This outraged the original, Caine.

Caine broke out and corrupted the new AI. With this came new great power. He created the circus out of nothing.

My take on Abel.

Pale Blue Dot, introduction from The Planetary Society.

The following excerpt from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan’s suggestion, by Voyager 1 on 14 February 1990. As the spacecraft was departing our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, it turned itself around for one last look at its home planet.

Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixels in size.

Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

Omaha Democrat John Ewing Jr. upset Republican incumbent Jean Stothert in the city's election for mayor on Tuesday.

Douglas County, Neb., Treasurer John Ewing Jr. (D) has ousted incumbent Republican Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert in the latest victory for Democrats during President Trump’s second term, Decision Desk HQ projects.  Ewing, who is also a former deputy chief of police for Omaha, will become the city’s first Black mayor. He denied Stothert a chance at an unprecedented fourth consecutive term in office in an election that was officially nonpartisan but featured a Democrat and a Republican facing off against each other.  The city hasn’t had a Democratic mayor since 2013, when then-incumbent Jim Suttle lost his reelection bid for a second term to Stothert, Omaha’s first female mayor, who has enjoyed comfortable electoral victories since then. Her closest race was in 2017, when she won by just less than 6 points.  But Democrats were hopeful about winning the race and electing Ewing. The city of Omaha and the wider 2nd Congressional District it is part of have been considered a “blue dot” where Democrats have found success in recent elections. 

The Blue Dot just got more blue. 🔵

This is the latest election since Trump's inauguration where Republicans were either defeated or suffered significant dropoffs in support.

Democrats notched a major victory in a Wisconsin state Supreme Court race last month in which the liberal candidate comfortably defeated her conservative opponent. Democratic candidates in two strongly Republican-leaning House districts in Florida that same night fell short of winning but made both of their races much closer than would normally be expected.  And the party picked up low-key but still major upset wins in a state Senate district in Iowa in January and a state Senate district in Pennsylvania in March. 

At the New York Times, Mitch Smith provides some background on the area.

Nebraska is dominated by Republicans, but Omaha is politically mixed, with more registered Democrats than Republicans. The city is home to several major businesses, including Union Pacific Railroad and Berkshire Hathaway, and is geographically quite large, with many suburban-feeling subdivisions inside city limits. Among the 40 most populous American cities, Omaha is one of only six with a Republican mayor, according to Ballotpedia. The Omaha area is represented in Congress by a moderate Republican, Representative Don Bacon, who has survived several Democratic attempts to unseat him, including last November by just under 2 points. In that same election, Kamala Harris won the electoral vote in Mr. Bacon’s district by just under 5 points. That congressional district includes suburban and rural areas in addition to Omaha.

Nebraska is unlikely to turn blue outside of the Blue Dot. But a slight but discernible shift seems to be gradually taking place there.

Here's a clip of Mayor-elect Ewing from last night's news coverage.