Month: August 2022

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Interesting articles, August 2022

A prediction that failed to come true was that Putin would officially declare war on Ukraine during Russia’s May 9 military celebrations.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/03/europe/russia-ukraine-declaration-of-war-intl-hnk-ml/index.html

This prediction that Putin would declare “victory” over Ukraine on May 9 also failed.
https://www.newsweek.com/exiled-russian-official-certain-putin-will-claim-victory-may-9th-1698023

A car bomb meant to kill a famous Russian ultra-nationalist author and political scientist instead killed his adult daughter, who was following in her father’s career footsteps. The Russian government blames Ukrainian agents, but there is no real proof yet.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/20/europe/darya-dugina-killed-car-explosion-alexander-dugin-russia-intl-hnk/index.html

Last month, an explosion at a POW camp housing Ukrainian soldiers killed over 50 of them. Their Russian jailers blamed a Ukrainian missile strike, but photographic analysis indicates this is false.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/08/europe/olenivka-donetsk-prison-attack/index.html

Ukraine has become a carnival of disparate types of military vehicles and weapons donated by many other countries.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/antique-ferret-armored-car-shows-up-in-ukraine

Ukraine’s recent attack on a Russian airbase in Crimea caused less damage than originally claimed.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/no-major-damage-seen-at-russian-airbase-in-crimea-after-reported-attack

Belgium’s paltry aid to Ukraine shows the poor state of its own military.
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/08/a-show-of-shame-belgian-weapons.html

Russia’s military losses in the Ukraine War are about $34 billion so far. If the War ended today, Russia could replace its losses over the next five years if it raised its defense budget by 12%, which would be a tolerable strain on its economy and taxpayers. It could replace its armored vehicle losses by upgrading old tanks that have been in storage for decades, and by increasing production rates of new vehicles at existing factories. However, the War isn’t going to end today, and it and the associated sanctions could instead turn into a massive resource drain that depletes even Russia’s famously large stockpiles of old weapons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SJHZAG4c2w

Putin has ordered the Russian army to expand by 13%, or 137,000 men, by the end of this year. This is certainly meant to make up for the country’s losses sustained so far in Ukraine (at least 15,000 dead and some multiple of that permanently put out of action by injury), plus those expected to be lost during the next four months.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-government-and-politics-d0f341d2f5c295c0f7be4ee1ba8b60fe

Ukrainian military forces have made a habit of positioning themselves needlessly close to civilians, either hoping that the proximity would dissuade the Russians from firing on them, or that Russian attacks would accidentally kill civilians, eliciting sympathy from the West.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/05/1115767497/amnesty-international-ukraine-military-civilians-war-crimes

China was infuriated when Nancy Pelosi, the third-highest-ranking politician in the U.S., visited Taiwan. China’s military staged massive military exercises in response to intimidate the island and America.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/04/asia/china-taiwan-military-exercises-intl-hnk-ml/index.html

Taiwan’s tanks are old, but still adequate for their intended defensive role. This is because if China invaded, it would only be able to send its light amphibious tanks to the island, and they have weak armor and only average guns. Taiwan’s tanks are a match for them. That said, Taiwan could substantially improve its loss/kill ratios in such a conflict by buying newer, better thanks now. The video makes it clear that a mixed force of modern, heavy M1 Abrams tanks and a much lighter armored vehicle would dominate the Chinese amphibious tanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf2JYLlqoCE

A new tabletop exercise finds that American and Taiwanese forces could repel an all-out Chinese invasion of the island, but at high cost.
https://asiatimes.com/2022/08/chinas-drills-to-change-us-military-assumptions/

Here’s an in-depth analysis of the Russian AK-107 assault rifle, which has a complex “balanced recoil system” that its designers claim almost eliminates felt recoil. In reality, it doesn’t yield enough of a benefit to justify the extra cost, complexity, weight, and reliability penalties that it imposes on an AK rifle. Screwing a simple compensator onto the end of the barrel is a much better way to improve the weapon’s controllability. Like so many advanced Russian weapons, the AK-107’s mystique dissolves once Westerners are able to get their hands on it and do tests and analyses. This is why you should be skeptical of Russia’s claims to have things like working hypersonic missiles and nuclear torpedoes that can make tsunamis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5LTiCZwEOo

Here’s a nifty new device: rubber bands that go around the barrels of rifles and change colors as they get hotter. Gun barrels warm up as more bullets are shot through them, which temporarily warps the metal and changes the trajectories of the bullets. A shooter could adjust his aim accordingly if he could tell at a glance how hot his barrel was.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2022/08/25/caveman-spark-ar-15-crush-washers/

The USSR’s legendary T-34 tank was overrated in many ways. These men go inside one and show how fundamentally unsafe and uncomfortable it was for its crewmen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBqCLHfcHGY

The U.S. has an enormous economy of scale advantage when it comes to the defense sector, that in turn guarantees the global primacy of American weapons. It makes no economic sense for countries will smaller economies to even try developing their own high-end weapons like fighter planes.
https://youtu.be/7Z_gTGJc7nQ

I agree with all of Henry Kissinger’s opinions about U.S. foreign policy, China and Russia.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/henry-kissinger-is-worried-about-disequilibrium-11660325251

Quantum supremacy has been lost…for now.
https://www.science.org/content/article/ordinary-computers-can-beat-google-s-quantum-computer-after-all

Recent advances in computer-generated art, writing, and other types of content creation suggest a deluge of high-quality, customized digital content is coming in the near future. Maybe humans will end up living in billions of Matrix simulations, with each one optimized for the needs and tastes of each human.
https://socialwarming.substack.com/p/the-approaching-tsunami-of-addictive

Google has unveiled experimental house robots that can obey human voice commands to do simple tasks like handing people cans of soda. I’m surprised that machines haven’t mastered such skills, yet can now create artwork as well as the best humans. Expect more counterintuitive improvements to machine capabilities as time passes. It won’t be like in the movies.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/ok-google-get-me-coke-ai-giant-demos-soda-fetching-robots-2022-08-16/

These plumbing leak sensors are all impractical due to cost and/or limited leak detection ability. A much better alternative to hooking up an electronic water flow meter to each water fixture in your house would be to have a robot walk around and check them once a week. You could probably get away with doing it much less often than that. You’d get the most bang for your buck by having a robot monitor your house’s water meter during periods of time when no water was being used in your house, like multi-hour stretches when you were away at work. If the meter showed water consumption was happening during those times, the robot would know a pipe was leaking somewhere in your house, and it would look for it.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/smart-gadgets-save-homes-from-water-leaks/

Here’s a fascinating interview with world-renowned cosmologist and thinker Martin Rees.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50r-5ULcWgY

We still have no good explanations for the recent, high-profile UFO sightings by U.S. military people.
https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/features/mystery-of-the-damn-things/

NASA has chosen landing sites near the Moon’s south pole that its astronauts will visit during this decade’s missions there.
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2022-08-19/nasa-reveals-where-next-americans-land-moon-7040435.html

‘The Moon is an ideal location to launch intercepting missions to life-threatening and catastrophic asteroids. The effectiveness of the interception greatly depends on the weight of the spacecraft. Unfortunately, interceptors launched from the Earth lose more than 98% of their weight by burning the majority of their onboard fuel and by jettisoning their lower stage structures before entering a heliocentric orbit. However, if interceptors are launched from the Moon by a lunar surface accelerator, they can enter a heliocentric orbit without consuming any onboard fuel or jettisoning any part of the spacecraft. A 5-ton construction package, which consists of robots and industrial production equipment, would enable mining on the moon and construction of a 3.5 km-long, 5,000-ton accelerator.’
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468896717300617

Here’s a Twitter thread about advances in hydrogen energy technology.
https://twitter.com/gnievchenko/status/1545409816130207744

Batteries only need to get a little bit better for it to make financial sense to convert smaller cargo ships to use electric engines. Today, those ships use diesel engines that burn very dirty fuel and are very polluting.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y

Solar panels will be installed over canals in California, reducing evaporation and unwanted plant growth.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-solar-panels-canals-drought/

For the first time, Americans spent more time watching internet-streaming video than cable TV.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-spent-more-time-streaming-than-watching-cable-tv-in-julya-first-11660827184

Like wildfires, floods are natural events that are part of nature’s cycle of renewal. Floods only became “problems” once humans started building structures too close to rivers and lakes.
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/many-effects-flooding

Large volcanic eruptions are a greater threat to Earth and humans than asteroid impacts, yet the latter gets more attention and more preventative funding. We should spend more money to monitor volcanoes and investigate the feasibility of defusing volcanoes before they erupt by drilling ventilation holes into their magma chambers.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02177-x

This year’s massive volcanic eruption in Tonga put so much water vapor into the stratosphere that it will temporarily worsen global warming by a tiny amount.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115378385/tonga-volcano-stratosphere-water-warming

An unmanned boat, remotely piloted by people on the other side of the world, has been using sonar to map the underwater volcano in Tonga.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62606589

“Kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage are all varieties of a single magical plant species.” This makes me wonder what new types of plants with new flavor profiles are possible with genetic engineering and selective breeding.
https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/8/6/5974989/kale-cauliflower-cabbage-broccoli-same-plant

The human eye and its associated nerves and muscles have many design flaws. Octopi and squid actually have better-evolved eyes than we do. Radically redesigned eyes are a good example of a improvement that our descendants will have in the future, courtesy of genetic engineering. Externally, their eyes will look like ours, but the amount of genetic reprogramming necessary to make theirs will be so great that they won’t have Homo sapiens genomes.
https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-008-0092-1

Lab-made corneas composed of collagen extracted from pigs cured blindness in several people with “keratoconus.”
https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/artificial-cornea-cure-blindness-12082022/

The first synthetic mouse embryos, which were made from only the mother’s DNA, have been created. This or another technique will eventually be used on humans, and will allow single people to conceive children regardless of their own natural fertility status, and without need of a partner’s DNA. It will also inaugurate an era of unauthorized human cloning, where DNA samples of unwitting third parties will be surreptitiously collected and then traded on black markets.
https://apnews.com/article/synthetic-mouse-embryos-created-7f75da0c53f9d22c4e4dbf8a847d75bf

In the long run, the slowdown in the human population growth rate and possible decline is nothing to worry about. Technology will provide solutions to it.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/slightly-against-underpopulation

The leading theory about what causes Alzheimer’s disease–agglomerations of protein plaques in the spaces between brain cells–might be wrong. In fact, a seminal scientific paper supporting the theory might be full of fraudulent data. Billions of dollars have been spent developing Alzheimer’s drugs that target the protein plaques in the brain, and all have failed to help patients. If a scientist’s deliberate fraud caused this, then I think it should be considered a crime against humanity.
https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease

Minoxidil was approved as a hair loss treatment in 1988, and came as a liquid that men sprayed on their scalps. Recently, doctors have discovered that putting the medicine into swallowable pills is more effective. It’s remarkable that no one thought of this sooner.
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/an-old-medicine-grows-new-hair-for-pennies-a-day-doctors-say/

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Aliens and posthumans will look the same

Among people who think about intelligent alien life, the first question is whether the latter exist at all, and the second is usually “What do they look like?” People who claim to have seen aliens on Earth (and often, to have been abducted by them) usually say they are humanoid, but with considerable variation in other aspects of their appearance. Typically, the aliens are said to have larger heads than humans, meaning their brains are larger, giving them higher intelligence and perhaps even special mental abilities like telepathy. Hollywood has provided us with an even more diverse envisagement of alien life, from the beautiful and inspiring to the grotesque and terrifying.

Betty Hill with a sculpture of one of the aliens that allegedly abducted her and her husband in 1961. They became famous five years later when a book was published about it.
“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was released in 1977 and was a hit film. Its aliens were similar to what the Hills described. The “Grey alien” is now a familiar sci-fi trope.

I think intelligent aliens exist, and look like all of those things, and nothing in particular. They’re probably “shapeshifters,” either because their bodies can morph into different configurations, or because they can transplant their minds from one body to another, just like you change outfits.

As the multitude of animal species on our planet demonstrates, there is no single “best” type of body to have. Depending on your environment (terrestrial, underwater, airborne), role (predator, herbivore, parasite), and other factors, your optimal body plan will vary greatly. The best species is thus one that can change its form and function in response to the needs of the moment.

Humans have been so successful as a species because our big brains and opposable thumbs give us the ability to create technology, which is a way around the limitations of our fixed anatomy. For example, we originated in Africa where it was hot, and so lacked thick fur to keep us warm in cold climates. Rather than being stuck in Africa forever, we invented clothing, and so gained the ability to spread to the temperate and polar regions of the planet.

Our technology has let us spread, but its has limitations. Nothing but a fundamental alteration of human biology will let us live in oceans and lakes, to fly naturally, or to live comfortably in extraterrestrial environments. For example, on other planets and moons, our ideal heights and limb proportions will vary based on gravity and temperature levels, and in the weightlessness of space, legs are almost useless and should be replaced with a second pair of arms.

And making any of those changes to tailor a human to such an environment would make them less suited for conditions on Earth’s land surface, where we are now. Biology is very constraining.

For those reasons, AI’s and some fraction of our human descendants, who I’ll call “posthumans” for this essay, will find it optimal to not have fixed bodies or “default” physical forms at all. Intelligent machines will exist as consciousnesses running on computer servers, and posthumans as brains inside sealed containers. Those containers will have integral machinery to support the biological needs of the brains, and to interface the organ with other devices.

Whenever the AIs or posthumans wanted to do something in the physical world, they would take temporary control of a body or piece of machinery that was best suited for the intended task. For example, if an AI wanted to work at an iron mine, it would assume control over one of the dump trucks at the site that moves around rocks. The AI would see through the truck’s cameras as if it were its own eyes, and hear its surroundings through the vehicle’s microphones. In a sense, the dump truck would become the AI’s “body.” If a posthuman wanted to experience what it was like to be an elephant, it would take control of a real-looking robot elephant whose central computer was compatible with the posthuman’s cybernetic brain implants. The posthuman’s nervous system would be connected to the artificial elephant’s sensors, effectively turning it into the posthuman’s temporary body.

AIs and posthumans could physically implant their minds into those bodies by inserting their servers or brain containers into corresponding slots in the bodies, in the same way you would put a movie disc into a Blu-Ray player to display that movie. The downsides of this are 1) they could only take over larger bodies that had enough internal space for their servers/brain containers and 2) they would put themselves at risk of death if the commandeered bodies got damaged.

A much better option would be for AIs and posthumans to keep their mind substrates in safe locations, and to remotely control whatever bodies they wanted. Your risk of death is very low if your brain is in a bulletproof jar, in a locked room, in an underground bunker. (Additionally, if posthumans were liberated from all the physical constraints of human skulls and bodies, their brains could grow much larger than our own, giving them higher intelligence and other enhanced abilities.)

This kind of existence will be more fulfilling than your current life.

Finally, being able to switch bodies and to indulge in risky activities without fear of death would make life richer and more satisfying in every way. Intelligent aliens would presumably be gifted with logical thinking just as we are, and they would see all these advantages of having changeable, remotely controlled bodies. While such aliens would probably look very different from us during their natural organic phase of existence, once they achieved a high enough level of technology, they wouldn’t have physical bodies anymore, and so wouldn’t look “alien.” They would look like nothing and everything.

This part of why I’m skeptical of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens who tried to cover up their actions by sneaking up on the people at night and then “wiping” the abductees’ memories of the event afterward. If aliens wanted to keep their activities secret, why wouldn’t they temporarily assume human form before abducting people? If they did that, then the abductees would assume they had been kidnapped by a weird cult or maybe a secret government group. Their stories would not attract nearly as much interest from the public as alien stories, and no one would suspect that the abduction phenomenon was related to alien life. It would be assumed that the henchmen were doing some dark religious rituals, were sex fetishists, or were doing medical experiments that were illegal but whose results were potentially valuable.

Have you ever checked to make sure every bird you see flying through the air is actually a real bird?

Surely, if aliens are advanced enough to travel between the stars, their space ships much have manufacturing machines that can scan life forms they encounter on other planets and then build robotic copies of them that the aliens can remotely control from the safety of their ships. Using fake human drones, they could ambush and abduct real humans almost anywhere without risk that anyone would suspect aliens were involved.

A team of scientists built a robot gorilla (right) with a camera in its right eye to infiltrate a troop of real gorillas in Africa.

This belief about the protean nature of advanced aliens is comforting since it lets me dismiss the stories of nightmarish abductions by grey aliens. However, it’s also disquieting since it makes me realize they could be here, possibly in large numbers, disguised as animals or even as people. We could be under mass surveillance.