Category: Uncategorized

You get what you pay for: Canada only spends 1.2% of its GDP on defense (the U.S. spends 3.5%, and NATO requires all its members including Canada to spend at least 2.0%) and doesn’t have enough fighter pilots or aircraft mechanics, and is now thinking about buying beat-up F/A-18s from Australia.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25050/canadian-auditors-slam-surplus-aussie-hornet-buy-describe-fighter-force-in-collapse

You get what you pay for: The F-5 fighter is cheaper but is less capable overall than the F-16.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25075/how-f-5s-beat-out-f-16s-for-the-navys-latest-commercial-aggressor-contract

The U.S. will help Taiwan keep its F-5 fighters from falling apart.
https://www.janes.com/article/84260/us-seeks-to-sustain-taiwanese-f-5s-alongside-upgraded-f-16s

Taiwan is now using two, American-made frigates. Both were built in 1984, but have somehow been fixed up to last another 30 years (for some reason, this makes me think of Weekend at Bernie’s).
https://www.janes.com/article/84490/taiwanese-navy-commissions-two-cheng-kung-class-frigates

Just as Britain salutes its “Little Ships of Dunkirk” that saved its army during WWII, will China someday celebrate its “Little Ships of the South China Sea” that provided critical surveillance of the U.S. fleet during WWIII?
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/flash-war-74-nearly-forgotten-south-china-sea-showdown-36107

During WWII, the British considered building a massive aircraft carrier made of “pykrete,” a blend of sawdust and ice. It might have actually worked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Project_Habakkuk

Brazil decommissions its sole aircraft carrier, capping a pitiful service record.
https://www.janes.com/article/84831/brazil-decommissions-the-aircraft-carrier-nae-s%E3o-paulo

The sad saga of Russia’s sole aircraft carriers continues.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/huge-floating-drydock-sank-and-nearly-took-russia%E2%80%99s-only-aircraft-carrier-it-35117

As does another sad saga…
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25156/russian-icebreaker-under-construction-bursts-into-flames-injuring-at-least-two

Russia seized three, small Ukrainian navy ships in the Black Sea, and as usual, it’s impossible to get the factual details thanks to the deceit of both sides.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-26/ukraine-s-talk-of-martial-law-raises-fears-over-elections-imf

With the launching of its first ballistic nuclear missile sub, India’s “nuclear triad” is complete.
https://www.janes.com/article/84287/india-declares-its-nuclear-triad-complete

Would “orbital kinetic weapons” be better than nuclear weapons?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/11/orbital-kinetic-bombardment-gets-close-to-nuclear-on-damage-and-cost.html

The latest iteration of the venerable “Sidewinder” missile can hit planes BEHIND the launching plane, and can home in on ground targets.
https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/aim-9x-block-ii-the-new-sidewinder-missile-011572/

The Russian T-14 tank is better than Israel’s Merkava tank in most areas, except “situational awareness,” where it badly lags. That might be the deciding factor in a fight between the two.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/tank-attack-russias-new-armata-t-14-vs-israels-merkava-who-wins-36067

The logical endpoint of various weapon trends is guided bullets. It’s hard to build them since the G-forces imparted on the projectile as it was fired are so strong they could crush the computers, sensors and steering fins inside of it. Note that guided bullets only give you an advantage if you know where your enemy is, and for many reasons, your enemy will by default try to hide from you. This means that even in the distant future, it will be useful to saturate areas of the battlezone with “dumb” projectiles like unguided bullets and bomb shrapnel to hit any bad guys that could be concealed there.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/army-wants-bullets-do-more-hit-target-34882

During the 1918 flu pandemic, there were regional differences in mortality rates partly because of racial differences in resistance to the disease.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181120-what-if-a-deadly-influenza-pandemic-broke-out-today

Immigrants to Western countries have different gut biomes, which might explain their highest incidence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Interestingly, foreign-born parents pass on some of their ethnicity-specific gut biomes to their children born in the West.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/health/immigration-gut-microbiome.html

Vegetarians and vegans have lower bone density than meat-eaters, and vegans are more prone to breaking bones.
https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nutrit/nuy045/5146363

Wine is made exclusively of water, ethanol, and trace chemicals. In theory, there’s no reason why an exact replica of the world’s best wine couldn’t be synthesized in a lab from cheap, common chemicals. This means average schmoes in the future will be able to drink wines only available to the rich today, and to at long last understand that price has almost no bearing on quality.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/31/lab-made-whiskey-lab-made-wine

A $10 digital watch keeps more accurate time than a $10,000 Rolex.
https://gizmodo.com/5983427/why-a-10-casio-keeps-better-time-than-a-10000-rolex

‘The world of self-driving cars and global outsourcing doesn’t want or need [low-income Americans living in places were drug abuse and suicide are rife]. Someday it won’t want you either. ‘
https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Graphene, the “miracle material” with amazing properties, is finally making its way into consumer goods, such as jackets and shoes. This could turn out like aluminum, which was once rarer and more expensive than gold. The discovery of simple electrolysis process to separate aluminum from common bauxite rocks changed that, revolutionizing the world.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/miracle-material-graphene-reinvented-as-pixie-dust

People’s faces get more asymmetrical as they age.
https://sivtelegram.media/scientists-have-found-a-surprising-fact-about-people-2/60629/

GATTACA-style human genetic selection is grows closer each day.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/11/validation-of-simultaneous.html

A Chinese geneticist has claimed (without presenting proof) that he used IVF and CRISPR to create the first genetically engineered humans–twin girls with a genetically enhanced resistance to HIV. I agree with the criticism that human genetic engineering is unethical now because our gene editing techniques are so crude that the risk of accidentally damaging a zygote’s DNA during the attempt to enhance something is too high.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/organizers-gene-editing-meeting-blast-chinese-study-call-pathway-human-trials

‘The aim [of the Earth BioGenome Project] is to create an entirely new inventory of life on Planet Earth by reading the genetic code of every organism belonging to a vast group known as eukaryotes…’
Something like this will inevitably succeed, and there will be a database with the genomes of quadrillions of individual organisms, including billions of humans.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46046494

Satellites can be used to count whale populations from space. If a global surveillance network is created, it might prove more efficient to watch things from the air and space than to put many sensors at ground level.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46046264

WiFi can be used to “see” through walls and doors.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612375/using-wi-fi-to-see-behind-closed-doors-is-easier-than-anyone-thought/

Facial recognition software is being used to identify men in Civil War photos. Imagine what else the technology could reveal if used on all vintage photos.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6399039/The-facial-recognition-software-identify-thousands-faces-Civil-War-photographs.html

“Digital night vision” cameras are extraordinary. Some even display color.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/11/15/digital-night-vision-is-it-worth-while/

Samsung plans to unveil a folding smartphone in 2019. I’ve long predicted such a device. It will render phablets and mini-tablets obsolete.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/11/07/samsungs-next-phone-folds-up-like-book/

This website is an extraordinary compendium of articles, analyses and drawings of future spacecraft designs that are bound by the known laws of physics. For some reason, they’re all oblong (no “Borg cubes”), and if there are any major protrusions perpendicular to the nose-rocket cone axis, they are for heat radiators or rotating human habitat modules.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

Impressive footage of the recent explosion of the Russian Soyuz space rocket.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/dramatic-footage-of-soyuz-accident-shows-rocket-booster-collision/

‘[The notion of sending rockets into space is] utter bilge. I don’t think anybody will ever put up enough money to do such a thing.’
–Richard van der Riet Woolley, Britain’s leading astronomer, 1956
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2017/12/26/arthur-c-clarke-about-predicting-technology/

“The odds on a Trump impeachment or a Nixon-style resignation are now quite high…It would likely come by the spring of 2018, or whenever Republicans come to believe that Trump is jeopardizing their re-elections in 2018.”
–Dr. Allan Lichtman, 11/1/2017. He became briefly famous when his computer model correctly predicted Donald Trump’s victory when all major pollsters predicted the opposite.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/politics/656473/donald-trump-impeachment-odds-president-allan-lichtman-russia-investigation

Will robots have senses of humor someday? How much better would our lives be if we had companions that constantly cracked jokes tailored to each person’s sense of humor? How many stressful or hostile daily situations would be defused?
https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/a-robot-walks-into-a-bar

Greg Brockman thinks it’s possible an AGI could be built “in the near-term.”
https://youtu.be/YHCSNsLKHfM

Our brains are in our heads thanks to genetic path dependence and the slowness of information transmission through organic nerves. If you weren’t bound by those constraints and wanted to make a human-sized robot that could deal with its physical environment as well as humans, the best body layout might be a headless humanoid with its computer brain located inside its torso. Distributing the mental functions among separate, redundant computers throughout the robot’s body might be even better.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qxljr/why_is_our_brain_in_our_head_and_not_our_chest/

‘The average life expectancy of a dam is 50 years, and 25% of the dams in the Army Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams are now more than 50 years old. This number is projected to increase to 85% by the year 2020. ‘
http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2012/finalwebsite/problem/dams.shtml

England is thinking of converting its natural gas (methane) pipes to carry hydrogen gas. H2 gas can (currently at great cost) be made without releasing emissions and is clean-burning. I wonder if it would be better to just get rid of gas pipes altogether and to switch everyone to electric appliances that got energy from clean sources like nuclear or solar.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/natural-gas-distributors-outline-proposal-to-convert-home-heating-to-hydrogen/

Chevrolet will discontinue three sedan models, including the Volt hybrid car (I remember it being launched a few years ago to great fanfare), thanks to poor sales, and the company will focus on building more SUVs and pickup trucks.
https://qz.com/1474677/gm-kills-the-chevrolet-volt-as-plug-in-hybrids-lose-market-share/

“5D” etched quartz glass could be used as a data storage medium that would not degrade for billions of years. I think the “window of vulnerability” to civilization collapse and/or the loss of most knowledge will close sometime in the next century when machines have created a self-sustaining space infrastructure. Von Neumann probes loaded with all known, useful knowledge will be sent to other star systems and dispersed throughout our own Solar System for the purpose of rebuilding things as they were should civilization be wiped out.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-time-capsules-that-will-outlast-the-apocalypse-1830653288 

In spite of what Hollywood would have you believe, submarines almost never fight each other.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/showdown-story-only-submarine-vs-submarine-battle-34652

Should we replace our aircraft carriers with cargo ships full of containerized missiles and drones?
https://taskandpurpose.com/maritime-airpower-aircraft-carrier/

The U.S. Navy will buy more of its venerable Arleigh-Burke destroyers.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/navy-getting-10-new-flight-iii-destroyers-and-it-could-be-game-changer-32427

The U.S. Army tested an experimental conversion kit that allowed a computer to fly a helicopter designed for a human pilot.
https://www.janes.com/article/84156/us-army-flies-automated-sara-helicopter

The USAF has selected the Boeing “T-X” to be its new training jet. It will replace the T-38, which first flew in 1959. Given the longevity of modern warplanes, the T-X should stay in service until at least the 2060s, by which time fighter and bomber planes might be automated, rendering human pilots obsolete. Thus, the T-X could be the last, or at best the second-to-last, trainer aircraft that the USAF ever makes. AIs won’t need to spend time in a simplified practice plane to learn how to fly. They will just be created in software labs and uploaded directly into frontline combat planes. Someday, the very notion of a “trainer aircraft” will be obsolete.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23889/boeing-wins-big-again-and-claims-the-usafs-huge-t-x-jet-trainer-deal

The T-38 pilot training jet could be converted into a fighter plane, but it would be crappy at its new job, and it would be a poor use of money considering what you’d get in return. Once the U.S. adopts the T-X, we’ll probably transfer our surplus T-38s to poorer allied countries or to aviation museums.
https://www.quora.com/Can-an-aircraft-such-as-a-T-38-be-weaponised-in-a-war-time-situation

Even if a stealth plane is invisible to radar, it will be hotter than the air around it thanks to its jet engine and to air friction against its wings, so you will still be able to see the plane using a thermal camera (e.g. – “Predator” heat vision).
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/rip-stealth-russian-su-35-reportedly-took-picture-f-22-why-might-be-problem-34267

The U2 spy plane’s camera still uses analog film.
https://petapixel.com/2018/06/08/film-photography-at-70000-feet-in-the-u-2-spy-plane/

The U.S. just withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty because Russia had been cheating for years, and the U.S. needs medium-range missiles to deter China in the Pacific.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/23/how-china-plays-into-trumps-decision-pull-out-inf-treaty-with-russia/

The U.S. might start mass producing copies of Russian guns for foreign military assistance. Ukraine and Bulgaria already have factories for making these guns, but apparently they can’t keep up with demand.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24283/russia-rages-at-pentagon-plans-to-build-u-s-made-derivatives-of-soviet-era-small-arms

The USSR planned to quickly nuke Austria if WW3 ever broke out even though Austria wasn’t in NATO and has enshrined neutrality in its constitution.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/1364037/Vienna-was-top-of-Soviet-nuclear-targets-list.html

A police helicopter was used to break up a rowdy college party by flying low over them. The downdraft blew away their tents and lawn furniture. This is one, overlooked reason why flying cars were never built.
https://youtu.be/j4Au-yCQur0

Science is coming around to buttressing what has been common sense forever: Sunlight exposure raises your mood. This finding is particularly interesting since it establishes a biochemical pathway linking skin cells to brain cells.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/12/sunlight-and-the-brain

Another astounding discovery: cardiovascular exercise decreases your risk of death! Of note is that fact that there was no observed ceiling to the benefit.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2707428

Mushrooms and plants that contain hallucinogenic compounds evolved them as protection against insects. The fact that the chemicals also have effects on human brains is entirely coincidental.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/magic-mushroom-drug-evolved-to-mess-with-insect-brains/

Another medical study has found the drug Ecstasy can treat PTSD.
https://reason.com/blog/2018/10/29/another-ptsd-study-finds-dramatic-improv

Taller people might be at higher cancer risk because they have more cells in their bodies.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/24/tall-people-at-greater-risk-of-cancer-because-they-have-more-cells

Gene editing in utero might soon be tried in humans that have congenital diseases caused by single-point mutations.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/09/gene-editing-freely-you-have-received-freely-give

‘In technical papers my research group anticipated years ago that even very complex traits would be predictable once a [human genome] data threshold was crossed. The phenomenon is related to what physicists refer to as a phase transition in algorithm performance. The rapid appearance now of practically useful risk predictors for disease is one anticipated consequence of this phase transition. Medicine in well-functioning health care systems will be transformed over the next 5 years or so.’
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/population-wide-genomic-prediction-of.html

Rapid progress is being made identifying the genes linked to many human traits, including intelligence.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/advances-in-genomic-prediction.html

‘[The] fact that intelligence or personality are caused by many thousands of genes, each of minuscule effect, means that it will be impossibly difficult to create a super-intelligent designer baby.’
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-genes-of-human-behaviour/

‘Universal Family Tree — Eventually we will sequence the full genomes of everyone living, and as many of the recent dead as we have access to. Together with genealogical records, this huge trove of data will give us our first universal family tree. Everyone living will have a place on it in relation to everyone else. ‘   –Kevin Kelly, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-dna-genealogy-privacy-20181012-story.html

Over 100,000 varieties of rice are being held at a global rice “gene bank” in the Philippines.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45828150

The “dbSNP” is an open database of all recorded human alleles.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/SNP/

Will cryonically preserved humans ever be revived? The consensus among the disinterested interviewees (e.g. – the people who aren’t running human cryonics companies and who haven’t written anti-cryonics books) is “No”, unless we get Star Trek-level technology. The freezing process damages the brain at the cellular level, and reversing it would require nanomachines.
https://gizmodo.com/will-cryogenically-frozen-people-ever-be-revived-1829905516

Increased use of keyboards and smartphone screens and the decline of handwriting are eroding fine motor control across the population, with particularly harmful impact on prospective surgeons.
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46019429

A new device called the “Everlast” notebook saves writings and drawings as data files. What kills it is the fact that you have to take photos of what you’ve written on the pages to save them digitally. The pages themselves should be able to detect what the user has written on them, and to upload it to their remote storage drive.

Prediction: Within 20 years, books and computer tablets will merge into a single type of device that could be thought of as a “digital book.” It will be a book with several hundred pages made of thin, flexible digital displays (perhaps using ultra-energy efficient e-ink) instead of paper. At the tap of a button, the text on all of the pages will instantly change to display whichever book the user wanted to read at that moment. They could also be used as notebooks in which the user could hand write or draw things with a stylus, which would then be saved as image or text files. The devices will fuse the tactile appeal of old-fashioned books with the content flexibility of tablet computers.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/642311833/everlast

In 1911, Thomas Edison erroneously predicted that most household furnishings and appliances would someday be made of steel.
https://www.inverse.com/article/19331-thomas-edison-alternate-futures-steel-home-design

Winston Churchill predicted that humans would someday eat lab-grown meats.
https://qz.com/1383643/seven-weird-food-predictions-from-the-past-including-churchills-lab-grown-chicken-wings/

Ben Goertzel 2008: ‘My own (Ben Goertzel’s) personal intuition is that a human-toddler-level AGI could be created based on OpenCogPrime within as little as 3-5 years, and almost certainly within 7-10 years.’
https://opencog.wordpress.com/2008/07/

Ben Goertzel 2017: ‘I’ll be pretty surprised if we don’t have toddler-level AGI in the range 2023-25, actually.’
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/ai-researcher-ben-goertzel-launches-singularitynet-marketplace-and-agi-coin-cryptocurrency.html

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and research director at OpenAI, predicts that the possibility of AGI be created in as little as five years “can no longer be discounted.” Skip to the 27:00 mark in his speech:
https://youtu.be/w3ues-NayAs

Stephen Hsu, physicist and all-around smart dude: ‘So a timescale > 30-50 years for AGI, even in highly optimistic scenarios, seems quite possible to me.’
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/09/intuition-and-two-brains-revisited.html

In 2013, some guy built a perfect Tetris-playing AI. It clears lines from the screen just as fast as new pieces fall from the sky. As far as anyone can tell, it could play forever.
https://codemyroad.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/tetris-ai-the-near-perfect-player/

The hype about self-driving cars is dying down.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/18/shaken-by-hype-self-driving-leaders-adopt-new-strategy-shutting-up/

The Tesla Model 3 is, by some measures, the safest car ever tested by the NHTSA.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-3-lowest-probability-injury-any-vehicle-ever-tested-nhtsa

A teardown of a Tesla Model 3 reveals it’s an extraordinary piece of technology, but its process of manufacture could be sharply simplified.
https://youtu.be/Lj1a8rdX6DU

ReThink Robotics, the company that made the “Baxter” general-purpose robot, went bankrupt due to low sales and sold itself to a German company.
https://www.therobotreport.com/hahn-group-acquires-rethink-robotics-ip/

We don’t know if there’s enough CO2 sequestered in Mars’ soil to create an atmosphere via terraforming machines. I think that, by the time we have the ability to send large numbers of people to Mars, intelligent machines will probably dominate Earth and cancel any senseless plans to send more than token numbers of resource-hogging meatbags like us there. Multi trillion dollar plans to terraform Mars will also be considered too wasteful to proceed.
http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/so-can-we-terraform-mars-or-not

A simple explanation of how the Asteroid Belt, Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud are different.
http://ryanmarciniak.com/archives/390

‘The total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated to be between 2.8×10^21 and 3.2×10^21 kilograms, which is just 4% of the mass of the Moon.’

That sounds small until you think about this: A Ford-class aircraft carrier is 9.1 million (9.1×10^6) kilograms. A space warship ten times that size–which is in the same ballpark as a Star Destroyer–would thus be 9.1×10^7 kg. If we had space factories and converted just ONE PERCENT of the asteroid belt’s mass (I used the lower of the two estimates) into space warships, we could build 30.7 QUADRILLION ships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt

In theory, a particle accelerator wider than our Solar System could unlock all the mysteries of physics and cosmology.
https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-time-and-space-if-we-ha-1829207595

A Russian Soyuz space rocket exploded after takeoff, but miraculously, the two astronauts it was carrying safely ejected.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/11/656473889/rocket-launch-failure-forces-astronaut-and-cosmonaut-to-make-ballistic-landing

NASA’s “Space Launch System” (SLS) heavy rocket is in even worse shape than thought.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/10/program-build-nasas-moon-rocket-could-double-price-billion-ig-says/

Yes, we still have the blueprints to build Saturn V rockets, but no, it wouldn’t make sense to make more of them for many reasons.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build-saturn-vs-again

In the 1990s, the “DC-X” experimental rocket did test flights that proved rockets could vertically land and be 100% reusable. However, the technology wasn’t commercialized for over 20 years.
https://youtu.be/39cjZTCay24

The “To the Stars Academy,” which was co-founded by the former lead singer of Blink-182 and which publicized last year’s big UFO report, says it has very few assets and huge debts.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1710274/000114420418050766/tv503167_1sa.htm

Scientists have created cheap, artificial wood that is better than real wood.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-create-artificial-wood-that-is-water-and-fire-resistant/

There have been recent technological breakthroughs in our ability to view the three-dimensional structures of small molecules.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/18/small-molecule-structures-a-new-world

Lowered plane travel costs and the growth of the global middle class have caused the number of tourists to explode. The trends will only continue, and I fear someday all the best places in the world will be overrun.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/overtourism-solutions/index.html

I predict that “Choose-your-own-endings” like this will become a common form of entertainment in the future. To appease different factions of fans, the same TV series will exist as “parallel universes” where the plots diverged at critical junctures. A mix of viewer focus groups and instant surveys will guide each divergence, and fanfiction crowdsourcing and AI will pick up the slack writing the multiple scripts. The logical endpoint of this is entertainment custom-tailored to individual people.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-01/netflix-is-said-to-plan-choose-your-own-adventure-black-mirror

During a test, a U.S. MQ-9 drone conducted the world’s first air-to-air shootdown of another drone.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/09/19/mq-9-gets-first-air-air-kill-training-exercise-air-force-official-says.html

First American F-35 does a combat strike.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-f-35-fighters-fly-first-ever-combat-164551915.html

First American F-35 crashes and burns.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23912/marine-corps-f-35b-has-crashed-near-mcas-beaufort-in-south-carolina

I’m surprised the UH-60 didn’t win.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23803/dark-horse-contender-boeing-snags-air-force-deal-to-replace-aging-uh-1n-hueys-with-mh-139

Another Russian superweapon (a nuclear-reactor-powered cruise missile) that was announced with trumpets has failed in secret, which is just par for the course. This one’s a bigger doozy than usual since it involves radioactive contamination.
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/25/649646815/russias-nuclear-cruise-missile-is-struggling-to-take-off-imagery-suggests

South Korea’s “K2” tank is quite good, and since it is indigenously made (unlike Korea’s older, K1 tank), it is free from U.S. end user export rules.
https://www.janes.com/article/82977/dx-korea-2018-hyundai-rotem-readies-k2-mbt-for-middle-east-opportunities

America’s troubled Zumwalt-class “stealth destroyers” are not very stealthy.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23544/navys-revamped-stealth-destroyer-looks-less-stealthy-as-it-leaves-san-diego-for-trials

“[Thanks to our low birth rates,] Twenty years from now, unless [Japan] can replace a considerable number of people with robots, it’ll be hard to maintain the current level of war capability.”
https://japantoday.com/category/national/SDF-recruiters-struggle-as-applicant-pool-dries-up

The U.S. and Britain only became allies around 1900, when Germany’s rise forced Britain to nearly withdraw from the Americas to secure its rear flank and shuffle its limited military resources to Europe.  The U.S. also correctly calculated that it could pressure Britain to the bargaining table if it built its own navy up enough to give it regional superiority to the Royal Navy in the Caribbean. Similarly, if the Chinese achieve regional superiority over the Americans in the South China Sea, it could make U.S. forces peacefully (but begrudgingly) cede control.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-america-beat-queen-victoria%E2%80%99s-britain-without-fighting-30797

For some reason, the Chinese press isn’t reporting on all of its country’s warship launchings. This might lead average Chinese people to underestimate the size of their own navy, but of course every respectable spy agency is seeing everything.
https://www.janes.com/article/83269/china-quietly-increasing-warship-numbers

China’s hospital ship docks in Venezuela to render humanitarian aid and remind the government that socialism doesn’t actually work.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45616736

China’s second and only remaining space station will crash back to Earth in July 2019. It’s first station crashed earlier this year. China says it will get back in the game by launching a third in a few years.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/26/asia/china-tiangong-2-space-lab-intl/index.html

A Japanese space probe has sent back the first images ever from the surface of an asteroid.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45598156

Rumors of China’s coal industry demise have been greatly exaggerated.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45640706

Roads “paved” with solar panels have proven to be as bad as everyone expected. Interesting tidbit: ‘shade over just 5% of the surface of a panel can reduce power generation by 50%.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6195123/Roadways-lined-solar-panels-not-promising-hoped-studies-show.html

Mirrorless cameras are improving, and will make DSL-R cameras obsolete within a few years. I predict it won’t make sense for anyone to buy a DSL-R by 2030, though there may still be a market for them among uninformed consumers and people interested in their nostalgia value.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45627055

Following the recent release of the “iPhone XS Max” impelled this tongue-in-cheek analysis, which projects that iPhones will be as big as small tablet computers by 2025, which is comical. However, I predict the growth trend will continue as predicted, but the iPhones will stay pocket-sized thanks to foldable screens.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/09/13/how-big-will-the-iphone-get

Fields medalist Alain Connes praises the defunct Soviet math academies, and of the general merits of allowing smart people to pursue pure knowledge instead of being pressured to use their talents to make money. If machines make human labor obsolete and everyone is put on welfare–er, a UBI–will people follow their passions and cultivate useful, inborn talents? Or at that point in the future, will human math geniuses just run into more frustration since machines would also be superior at pure math?
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-french-way-alain-connes-interview.html

Autonomous cars would make traffic lights obsolete since the vehicles would wirelessly coordinate with each other to avoid collisions. Perpendicular streams of car traffic could flow through each other’s gaps at road intersections with the precision of Blue Angels stunt pilots. Eliminating stop lights would improve the flow and rhythm of traffic,  reducing jams. I also predict that this ability to coordinate as a swarm will allow for dynamic lane reversals according to acute changes in traffic flow. For example, imagine there’s a city where everyone works, a suburb where everyone lives, and an eight-lane highway connecting the two. Every morning, the four lanes leading into the city are clogged with cars because all the people are trying to get in to their workplaces and the four lanes leading out of the city are empty, and every evening the reverse is true. If all the people have autonomous cars, only a four-lane, one-way highway would be needed since the cars would all switch directions without danger of head-on collisions twice a day to match the changing needs of the flow of people.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/infrastructure/how-vehicletovehicle-communication-could-replace-traffic-lights-and-shorten-commutes

The more interesting and much more plausible future technology the article touches on is automated inventories of all items in your home. Once you have enough cameras in your home, and perhaps a robot butler, they’d set about identifying every object in every room to create a list. (Monitoring of refrigerator contents and automated ordering of replacement foods to replace those verging on exhaustion or spoilage will be another aspect of this.) The frequency with which you used the objects would also be observed, and your machines would encourage you to get rid of things you never used, like your old set of skis. They’ll make it easy by putting ads on eBay and scheduling times for buyers to pick them up. You’ll just have to push the “OK” button. Physical goods will be allocated across the population more efficiently as a result, and prices for things will go down once billions of objects collecting dust in garages and attics enter the market.

Automated personal inventories will also show us how infrequently we use possessions we consider “essential,” like tools (e.g. – you only use your rake two days per year, each autumn), which will probably give rise to “libraries of things” instead of personal ownership. (This is simply an extension of the same logic supporting the idea that Uber-style ridesharing will replace personal car ownership.) When you think about it, it really is kind of crazy to spend money on something that sits idle in your house 99.99% of the time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/style/robot-furniture-beep-beep-boop.html

…And then this article about a “wardrobe rental service” highlights the limitations of the sharing vs. private ownership model. It would probably take more time and energy to move clothes around between people, and the apparent cost savings would be a false efficiency.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45630395

The medical promise of stem cell therapies mostly failed to pan out. Success might still be had if we pumped several billion more dollars into research.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/09/28/fighting-it-out-over-stem-cells

In spite of new records being set in nearly every sport, every year, scientist David Epstein thinks it’s not being caused by human genetic evolution, and in fact, much of the improvement is illusory.
https://youtu.be/8COaMKbNrX0

The 16% of human genes that were known to scientists in 1991 accounted for half of all genetics studies in 2015. 27% of human genes have never been the focus of a science paper. Is this imbalance due to some kind of human bias, or have we rightly focused on studying the genes that are the most important?
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/09/the-popularity-contest-of-human-genes/570586/

The FDA has approved an AI that can diagnose diabetes-induced vision problems by looking at scans of human eyes.
https://qz.com/1371580/can-ai-deliver-on-its-promise-to-close-the-gap-between-rural-and-urban-health-care/

The total number of potential, stable molecules is probably between 1×10^20 and 1×10^30. Put in perspective, the Earth weighs 6×10^30 mg.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/09/06/virtual-compound-screening-the-state-of-the-art

Aerial drones with electric engines and solar panels could be recharged by with ground-based lasers.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a22677285/darpa-drones-recharged-laser-silent-falcon/

In a first, a surfboard-sized autonomous boat with a small solar panel and wind sail crossed the Atlantic by itself.
https://www.apnews.com/f6d0e2a099684468873ab48966590ada/Robot-boat-sails-into-history-by-finishing-Atlantic-crossing 

Someday, robots will be able to see you around corners.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-science-of-seeing-around-corners-20180830/

Someone finally noticed that jet black isn’t a naturally occurring color, and that soldiers would be better camouflaged if their guns had the same earth tones as their uniforms.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/08/07/british-army-to-cerakote-entire-infantry-weapon-fleet/

The U.S. Army’s XM-25 rifle grenade launcher is finally kaput after years of failure and cost overruns. Consider this: getting the per-unit ammo cost down to ONLY $1,000 was hailed as a major accomplishment.
https://www.stripes.com/news/army-s-xm25-program-officially-goes-kaput-1.541971#.W22yKxFpNuU.twitter

China has launched a new spy satellite whose resolution is only slightly below that of U.S. satellites.
https://www.janes.com/article/82366/china-closing-the-satellite-imagery-capability-gap

China’s first indigenously made aircraft carrier and first Type 055 destroyer just started sea trials. After this, they will be commissioned into the Chinese navy and put into regular use. Both vessels represent major improvements to China’s naval capabilities are put them ahead of Russia.
https://www.janes.com/article/82621/china-s-second-aircraft-carrier-first-type-055-destroyer-embark-on-sea-trials

New photos of China’s J-20 stealth fighter show it is an impressive machine not to be underestimated. Russia’s stealth fighter program, by contrast, has been basically cancelled.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22534/high-quality-shots-of-unpainted-chinese-j-20-stealth-fighter-offer-new-capability-insights

Epic surprise: Russia can’t afford to buy more than 100 of its new T-14 tanks and instead will do cheaper upgrades to its hodgepodge of Cold War-era clunkers.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22600/russia-cant-afford-its-new-t-14-armata-tanks-turns-to-updated-older-designs-instead

America could theoretically return its WWII battleships to active duty, but it would be cheaper to buy new destroyers, and the battleships would be vulnerable to anti-ship missiles that dive down into their lightly armored top decks.
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-armor-in-an-Iowa-class-battleship-protect-against-Harpoon-and-anti-ship-missiles

This is the future: F/A-18 fighter planes dropped micro-UAVs as part of an experiment. The UAVs formed into swarms and completed missions. The WWII-era “Bat Bomb” will make a comeback courtesy of this kind of tech.
https://youtu.be/ndFKUKHfuM0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

An unmanned surveillance/communication drone called “Zephyr” just spent 25 days aloft continuously. It has an electric engine powered by solar panels on its wings. At its 70,000-foot cruise altitude, it would look like a tiny speck to people on the ground, and I bet with simple active camouflage that would turn its underside the same shade of blue as the sky, it would be invisible. Mass surveillance and ubiquitous internet are probably inevitable.
https://warisboring.com/new-spy-drone-flies-non-stop-for-a-month/

A head-worn device that uses mild electric current to stimulate the wearer’s brain might improve multitasking abilities by 10% (the lab study could have been better).
https://www.janes.com/article/82580/afrl-finds-brain-stimulation-technology-boosts-multi-tasking-performance

Someone built a demonic machine that can find Waldo. Is nothing sacred? Has technology gone too far?
https://youtu.be/-i7HMPpxB-Y

A machine built by OpenAI trounced a team of five leading Dota 2 human players early this month, but then narrowly lost to a different human team later at the world championship. I predict the machine will win at the 2019 championship.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/06/openais-bot-handily-beat-a-team-of-professional-dota-players/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/24/openai_bots_eliminated_dota_2/

An AI can automatically edit video footage to seamlessly alter human mouth movements, meaning we’ll be able to pair it with other technologies (such as machine translation and machine voice imitation) to perfectly dub videos and movies from one language to another.
https://techxplore.com/news/2018-08-ai-dodgy-lip-sync-dubbing.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-ai-tech-can-mimic-any-voice/

Machines can now even alter footage of entire human bodies to simulate entirely fake body movements.
https://youtu.be/PCBTZh41Ris

The stunning advances in AI over the last few years have come at a cost: the amount of computer power required to make each happen has been exponentially rising. It might get too expensive to continue in as little as 3.5 years, after which, the pace of performance improvement will slow.
https://aiimpacts.org/interpreting-ai-compute-trends/

Computers can now predict earthquake aftershocks better than human seismologists.
http://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06091-z

As late as 1961, NASA wanted the Apollo missions to use a single space vehicle that would serve as the command module and lunar lander. It would have been heavier and more expensive than the two-piece vehicle they chose instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lunar_orbit_rendezvous&oldid=851267134

A robot called “RangerBot” has entered use, and will patrol the Great Barrier Reef for invasive starfish species and kill them with poison injections. As I wrote in today’s other blog entry, autonomous machines will someday do multitudes of tasks that the human labor force can’t, yielding radical and unexpected benefits.
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/rangerbot-programmed-to-kill/

If you’re internally debating whether to change jobs, end a relationship, or relocate, then you should probably do it. People are inherently resistant to making lifestyle changes out of laziness and fear, and will concoct all manner of justifications to continue business as usual until they hit the breaking point.
https://80000hours.org/2018/08/randomised-experiment-if-youre-really-unsure-whether-to-quit-your-job-or-break-up-you-really-probably-should/

One step forward for therapeutic cloning.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45046674

Forty years since the birth of the first Test Tube Baby, only 1-2% of annual U.S. births are done through IVF. I think human genetic engineering will follow approximately the same pattern. The first Designer Baby could be born within ten years, but it will be decades longer before even 5% of babies born each year are engineered.
https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/fertility-blog/2018/march/ivf-by-the-numbers

Chinese geneticists used CRISPR to replace disease-causing alleles in human zygotes, without side effects to other parts of the genomes. The zygotes could have been implanted in women through IVF, and if carried to term, the resulting children would have been the first genetically engineered humans in history. I predict the milestone will happen by 2039, and perhaps as soon as 2028.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/scientists-tweak-dna-viable-human-embryos

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s admission that his muscled physique elicited polarized reactions from women (half thought it was hot, half thought it was repulsive) have implications for human genetic engineering. People would use it to make kids that were leaner and stronger, but due to aesthetic concerns, few would push it to the very extreme of what is possible.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/08/arnold-will-to-power.html

Anyone interested in engineering their kid to have a specific eye color should note that there are such things as surgically implanted fake irises that do the same thing. I note that most of the YouTube videos about this (the “Bright Ocular” implant) have titles like “bright ocular removal,” “never get bright ocular” or “bright ocular made me blind.” Maybe iris implants will be better by the time human genetic engineering is widespread.
https://youtu.be/WB0RThNrYHw

The FDA has approved the first RNAi drug. If you want a laugh, research Ray Kurzweil’s past predictions about this class of medicine.
https://www.umassmed.edu/news/news-archives/2018/08/fda-approves-first-drug-to-use-rna-interference-based-on-discoveries-made-at-umass-medical-school/

Your Instagram photo uploads are not original. Right now, the photo matching is being done by humans, but soon machines will do it. As AI and mass surveillance get more pervasive with time, machines will make it clear to us the full, scary scope of how derivative our art is, how much time we waste unwittingly reinventing the wheel, and how many “new” things are really just copies of old things we’ve forgotten about.
https://qz.com/quartzy/1349585/you-are-not-original-or-creative-on-instagram/

Consumerism is a big lie. Your expensive “distressed jeans” are made of normal denim that has been shot with a laser gun.
https://youtu.be/F0ZrZ4h2xGQ

Walmart is making a virtual reality store that will let you browse its wares without having to mingle with the unwashed masses.
https://qz.com/1362577/walmart-wants-to-take-on-amazon-with-virtual-reality-shopping/

How would we detect aliens whose lives were lived in microseconds or geologic timescales? Are rocks alive?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/maximum-alienness/

“Even at their tremendous distances, worlds like Triton, Eris, and Pluto will receive more than four times the energy at their surface that Earth receives today [once the Sun becomes a red giant].”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/08/23/which-worlds-will-survive-when-the-sun-dies/

The U.S. Army will buy up to 473 new “Bradley fighting vehicles,” but they’re so different from older variants that they probably shouldn’t be called “Bradleys” anymore.
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2018/06/27/army-makes-massive-bradley-buy-up-to-473-vehicles-to-prep-for-major-power-war.html
Upgrade details: https://breakingdefense.com/2016/10/rebuilding-the-m2-bradley/

A Pentagon OIG report says that old Soviet Mi-17 Hip helicopters are better-suited to service in Afghanistan the newer American UH-60s. In a saner world, this would put the brakes on our plans to sell UH-60s to them, but the DoD operates in a world of its own.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21558/pentagon-admits-afghanistans-new-black-hawks-cant-match-its-older-russian-choppers

At the White Sands Missile Range, there’s a facility where antiaircraft weapons are tested on helicopters, which are strung up on a long cable stretched between two mountaintops.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21834/theres-a-place-where-helicopters-fly-on-high-wires-and-get-pummeled-by-missiles

Weirdly, the Ukrainian military is buying RPG-7 rocket launchers that are made in America, even though Ukraine has its own factory for making them.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/05/21/national-guard-of-ukraine-purchases-american-made-rpgs/

The Sun never sets on the U.S. military empire.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321

It turns out the widely mocked 1950s “Duck and Cover” slogan and accompanying cartoons were actually sage advice. Nuclear war is survivable.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/11/would-you-know-what-to-do-during-a-nuclear-attack-218675

[North Korea said] “[The] imperialist yankees can sometimes be helpful.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Hong_Dan_incident

According to virtual wind tunnel simulations, the fighter craft from Star Wars have poor aerodynamics. Yes, it doesn’t matter when they’re flying through the vacuum of space, but what about all the times they’ve been shown flying in a planet’s atmosphere?
https://youtu.be/PilQTjw1Qis

I think nuclear missiles will be common space weapons. Newton’s Third Law would also make it hard to shoot projectile weapons since it would nudge your ship in the opposite direction. There would also probably be “effective speed limits” on how fast the space ship would travel, since burning up 51% of your fuel to charge headlong at the enemy will mean certain death for you if you are pointed towards the depths of space.
https://www.quora.com/What-would-a-realistic-space-battleship-look-like

Facebook has abandoned its project to use high-endurance flying drones to broadcast internet to poor parts of the world. However, Google’s counterpart, which uses high-altitude balloons, is still going strong.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44624702

Just think: In only about five years, there will be A.I.s that can debate politics with humans on Facebook, never tiring, never taking offense, and replying instantly to anything you write.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44531132

The criminal who just committed a mass shooting at a Maryland newspaper was hard to fingerprint at the police station and he refused to give his name, so the police took a photo of him and quickly identified him by uploading it to the Maryland Image Repository System (or MIRS), “which includes over ten million photos drawn from known offenders and the state’s entire driver’s license database.”
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/29/17518364/facial-recognition-police-identify-capital-gazette-shooter

Since it was announced that a DNA genealogy website had been used to catch the Golden State Killer in April, four other cold case murders have been solved using the same technique.
https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611548/a-dna-detective-has-used-genealogy-to-point-police-to-three-more-suspected/

Pigs that are genetically engineered for disease resistance have been created and might be destined for widescale use.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44388038

If you want an idea of how radically we could improve humans through genetic engineering, read articles like this and then consider that IQ is at least 50% genetic.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44668452

Richard Feynman was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, but as a child scored a mere 124 on an IQ test (smarter than average, but not genius-level). It’s possible that the disappointing score simply owed to the fact that there was too low a ceiling to the difficulty of the math questions.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-iqs-of-eminent.html

Between 2000 and 2015, pneumonia and meningitis vaccine drives in poor countries saved the lives of almost 1.5 million children under age 5.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-million-children-hib-pneumococcal-vaccines.html

The FDA just approved a cannabis-based drug to treat people with seizures.
https://apnews.com/16829deb1ce0489aa7e0bd1afa02eb73/Medical-milestone:-US-OKs-marijuana-based-drug-for-seizures

A new study suggests that 70,000 American women with breast cancer make needless use of chemotherapy. For them, chemo doesn’t improve survival rates more than using other treatments with milder side effects.
https://apnews.com/9f30770a3a3d42538cd3f14672cd6529/Many-breast-cancer-patients-can-skip-chemo,-big-study-finds

Gerontologists in Italy have found that the mortality rate hits 50% once a person turns 105, and stays at that level indefinitely, suggesting that the ultimate limit on human lifespan is unknown.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05582-3

In the distant future, there will be a single database with the genomes of quadrillions of different organisms, including DNA from all humans. If paired with something like a cloning lab, it could create any organism in the database from scratch. It reminds me of a combination of the “Universal Constructor” from the Deus Ex video game and the use of organic “blanks” in The 6th Day movie to rapidly make human clones.
https://qz.com/1315829/the-dna-of-all-the-animals-on-earth-will-be-recorded-in-an-enormous-new-genetics-project/

The Straight Dope, one of the best sources of mythbusting and digestible anecdotes about the oddities of history and science, may be shutting down for good.
https://www.straightdope.com/a-note-from-cecil-adams-about-the-straight-dope/

Old photos that have turned black with age can be restored using an x-ray scanner. Someday, we’ll be able to use more advanced techniques to restore/upgrade old film footage and photos to perfect clarity. They’ll do highly accurate and natural-looking colorizations of black and white photos.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/new-technique-brings-secrets-out-of-old-daguerreotypes/

“If AI rationally allocates resources through big data analysis, and if robust feedback loops can supplant the imperfections of “the invisible hand” while fairly sharing the vast wealth it creates, a planned economy that actually works could at last be achievable.”
This same thought occurred to me a few years ago. Communists shouldn’t get too excited though, since the same AI-powered mass surveillance system would also keenly understand the abilities of each human and could track whether they put in an honest day’s work or not, which would in turn affect the AI’s decisions about how “fair shares” of the day’s wealth should be allocated.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/05/03/end-of-capitalism/

If you’re only counting animals that might have consciousness and can probably feel pain, daily births are in the billions per day. Since those species’ populations are mostly steady-state (neither growing nor declining overall), then the same number of deaths must happen each day. Many of those deaths are agonizing because they owe to untreated injuries, disease, or slaughter at the hands of unskilled humans. There’s a fringe coalition of transhumanists, altruists, and animal rights advocates who think it is humanity’s ultimate mission to use technology to end this cycle of suffering, possibly by capturing all wild animals and putting them in something like The Matrix. All humans would also go vegetarian or switch to lab-grown meats.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44412495

‘The Summit’s theoretical peak speed is 200 petaflops, or 200,000 teraflops. To put that in human terms, approximately 6.3 billion people would all have to make a calculation at the same time, every second, for an entire year, to match what Summit can do in just one second. ‘
That is probably not true. We don’t know how much computation the human brain does, but the best guesses converge on the “tens of petaflops” realm, plus or minus one order of magnitude. So what this milestone really means is that, for $400-600 million, we can now build a supercomputer with the same raw processing power as 1-10 human brains. That sounds pretty snicker-worthy until you remember the cost-performance of supercomputers improves by an order of magnitude every 5-7 years. So using a conservative extrapolation, a supercomputer with the same power as 1-10 human brains should cost single-digit millions of dollars by 2033, putting them within reach of midsized businesses and second-tier college Computer Science departments. Big entities like militaries, spy agencies and Google will collectively have tens or hundreds of thousands of them. If we haven’t built an artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 2040, it won’t be thanks to deficient or costly computer hardware. It will be because we don’t know how to properly arrange the hardware to support intelligent thought and because of a failure to develop the software of intelligence.
https://qz.com/1301510/the-us-has-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-again-the-200-petaflop-summit/
https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-the-cost-of-computing/

After a long hiatus, Richard Branson’s “Spaceship Two” returned to the air and made a successful test flight. If all goes well, he could be sending passengers into space in a few years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/29/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-just-got-another-step-closer-to-flying-tourists-to-space/

Here’s an in-depth analysis of what it would take to make a solar sail spacecraft that could reach 20% of light speed and go to Alpha Centauri. The engineering challenges are formidable, but not insurmountable.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/the-material-science-of-building-a-light-sail-to-take-us-to-alpha-centauri/

Instead of there being a multiverse, what if there’s only one universe, but different realms within it have distinct ground states?
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/dont-be-afraid-of-the-multiverse/559169/

Crews scanning the ocean floor for Malaysia Air Flight 370 stumbled upon two shipwrecks from the late 1800s.
https://www.apnews.com/77038501654b4eb7925d567d37cb7ab8/Historians-name-2-Indian-Ocean-19th-century-shipwrecks

An ocean buoy detected a 78 foot high wave south of New Zealand, making it the largest wave ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. As the number and density of automated sensors like buoys, weather stations, and drones grow, so will data and film footage of extraordinarily rare occurrences and life forms. In 20 years, you’ll be able to ask your computer to “Show me everything weird that happened today” and spend the next several hours watching video clips from around the world, including places devoid of humans.
https://newatlas.com/record-wave-southern-ocean/54602/

BAE hopes to build a solar-powered, autonomous plane that could stay aloft for 12 months. It could do aerial surveillance and some functions currently performed by satellites.
https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2018/05/03/bae-systems-partners-with-drone-specialist-for-solar-powered-uav/

“Ocado” is a British grocery store chain that has no brick-and-mortar retail stores and only does home deliveries. Their food warehouses, where groceries are stored and packaged, are heavily automated and use hundreds of robots.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43968495

A fascinating piece that highlights some of the less-obvious ways autonomous vehicles will change the world.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/self-driving-technology-is-going-to-change-a-lot-more-than-cars/

It will also probably be easy to program autonomous vehicles to drive in ways that use as little fuel as possible. Many human truck drivers have a hard time keeping up these habits because they require near-constant focus and patience. Moreover, since machines don’t need to sleep, autonomous trucks could structure their routes in such a way that they were mostly on the roads during non-peak hours, like the middle of the night, meaning fewer traffic jams for everybody and less wasted gas.
http://www.fleetowner.com/fuel_economy/fuel-economy-0701

One of the NYT’s auto experts thinks gas-powered cars will be obsoleted by fast-recharging electric cars within five years, and sales of both will sharply shift to reflect this. Without giving a deadline for autonomous cars, he drops a lot of hints it will take substantially longer than five years to become mature and ubiquitous.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/technology/personaltech/electric-self-driving-flying-cars.html

‘”I’ve been at [Consumer Reports] for 19 years and tested more than 1,000 cars, and I’ve never seen a car that could improve its track performance with an over-the-air update,” Jake Fisher, director of auto testing at Consumer Reports, said in a blog post.’
http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/30/technology/consumer-reports-model-3-recommended/index.html

A famous and still thought-provoking analysis of the cost-effectiveness of 500 different safety/health interventions. Yes, you can put a price on human life.
https://www.slideshare.net/myatom/tengs-et-al-cost-effectiveness-of-500-life-saving-interventions-2776562

Will America’s new “Right to Try” policy that allows terminally ill people to take drugs still in Phase II clinical trials help much? Probably not, and not just because only 10% of drugs prove themselves effective during Phase II.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/05/25/federal-right-to-try

The FDA shut down two “stem cell therapy” clinics after their treatments for people with vision problems made several of them go blind.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/09/fda-seeks-injunction-to-stop-two-stem-cell-companies-after-patients-blinded/

The reality about “personalized cancer treatments” is that only 15% of cancer patients are eligible, and only 1/3 of them could benefit from it.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/05/02/cancer-sequencing-hype-and-reality

‘The National Cancer Institute’s new goal is to “eliminate suffering and death due to cancer” by 2015.’
–NCI Director Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, 2003
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(06)68718-7/fulltext

A meta-analysis of women who got the HPV vaccine proves beyond doubt that it works and has no side effects.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/08/health/hpv-vaccines-cervical-cancer-review/index.html

A meta-analysis of fMRI studies that “proved” male and female brains operate differently suggests they might have been flawed, and researchers might have failed to publish null findings.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23976-1

People who go to art school are likelier to get schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/artistic-creativity-and-risk-for-schizophrenia-bipolar-disorder-and-unipolar-depression-a-swedish-populationbased-casecontrol-study-and-sibpair-analysis/B3FFC439154C19A01F779365AF16B3C7

Electroconvulsive therapy has been unfairly maligned, and is actually the most effective treatment for some people with severe mental illness.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180502-the-surprising-benefits-of-electroshock-therapy-or-ect

MDMA, commonly called “Ecstasy,” has proven a remarkably effective treatment for PTSD in preliminary clinical trials. If all goes well, it could be legal for medicinal use in 2021.
https://reason.com/archives/2018/05/02/a-forbidden-remedy-for-veterans-nightmar

America’s early school start times are awful for students and their parents. As early as 1913, the practice’s ill effects on sleep, learning and quality of life were noted. Why do we do it anymore?
https://schoolstarttime.org/early-school-start-times/

Machines hit a new milestone in automating chemical synthesis work.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/05/14/give-it-to-the-machines

Amateur chemist claims to have made a distilling process that can “age” whiskey the equivalent of 20 years in six days. Whether or not his claim is genuine, I think someone will make it work someday.
https://reason.com/reasontv/2018/05/09/bryan-davis-lost-spirits-distillery-booz

Did Betamax actually have better picture quality than VHS? This side-by-side footage analysis suggests not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oJs8-I9WtA

“[Intelligence] is a spectrum of abilities since there are many different goals you can have, so it makes no sense to quantify something’s intelligence by just one number [like an IQ score]. To see how ridiculous that would be, just imagine if I told you that athletic ability could be quantified by a single number, the ‘Athletic Quotient,” and whatever athlete had the highest ‘AQ’ would win all the gold medals in the Olympics.”
https://youtu.be/p9eLpRbRk4c

Some alternatives to America’s state borders. I’ve long been a fan of breaking up states with big populations and merging states with small populations to help “even things out.”
https://www.quora.com/Do-U-S-state-borders-make-sense-for-modern-times

There’s substantial evidence that American judges allow their personal political and cultural views to influence their court rulings. Though judges claim to be coldly analytical and objective, it does actually matter whether they’re Republicans or Democrats.
https://www.apnews.com/cc39185fe15346d7a7c7c021bc3d4d90/Is-Trump-right-about-judges’-leanings?-Maybe,-review-shows

Here’s a supposedly genuine military report about the 2004 encounter between a U.S. Navy F/A-18 and a UFO off the coast of San Diego. The sighting was first described in a December 2017 New York Times article. The report deduces that the UFO could change altitude at ballistic missile speeds, was nearly invisible to radar, and might have had a cloaking ability on the visible light spectrum.
https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document_dev/2018/05/18/TIC%20TAC%20UFO%20EXECUTIVE%20REPORT_1526682843046_42960218_ver1.0.pdf

Between new plane purchases and upgrades of existing planes, the U.S. Navy plans to have at least 650 “Block 3” Super Hornet F/A-18E’s and F’s by 2025. They’re better than the current “Block 2” Super Hornets in every way.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21045/here-is-boeings-master-plan-for-the-f-a-18e-f-super-hornets-future

And in classic fashion, the Navy is dumping its worn-out, excess F/A-18C and D Hornets (note the lack of “Super”) on the Marine Corps. The Navy has 270 of these older fighter planes and will give the Marines 136 of them, mostly to be cannibalized for spare parts. The Navy’s final 134 Hornets will probably be transferred in the future as it gets more Super Hornets and F-35C’s.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19040/navy-to-slash-legacy-f-a-18-hornet-fleet-to-prop-up-beleaguered-usmc-squadrons

The hardships of a Marine Corps F/A-18 mechanic struggling to fix planes that are older than he is. At some point, everything wears out, and the time and money spent on maintenance gets so bad that it’s actually cheaper to buy a newer replacement.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20019/life-on-the-flight-line-confessions-of-a-u-s-marine-f-a-18-hornet-maintainer

Brazil has an 81-year-old river patrol ship still in active service. It originally had a steam engine and now has a helipad.
http://warisboring.com/one-of-the-worlds-oldest-military-ships-is-sailing-down-a-river-in-brazil/

Israel has developed an affordable upgrade kit that converts Soviet-era multiple launch rocket systems into guided weapons.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21023/israeli-made-bolt-on-kit-turns-122mm-grad-artillery-rockets-into-precision-weapons

Israel also used small quadcopter drones to snag incendiary kites released by militant Gazans who were trying to randomly start wildfires across the border in Israel.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20853/israel-uses-drone-racers-to-down-incendiary-kites-and-drones-to-dispense-tear-gas-over-gaza

Some Korean War-era U.S. M41 light tanks are still in service in Third World armies.
http://warisboring.com/m-41-tanks-are-museum-pieces-and-still-in-service/

Indonesia has bought several brand-new U.S. AH-64E attack helicopters and will fly them alongside their old Soviet Mi-35 helicopters.
http://www.janes.com/article/80207/update-indonesia-formally-accepts-first-apache-helos

Greece is upgrading its F-16s and plans to keep them in use until 2048. The prototype F-16 first flew in 1974.
http://www.janes.com/article/79703/update-greece-moves-ahead-with-f-16-modernisation

Boeing got a patent for a detachable, automatic cannon that could be installed in the bomb bays of semi-stealth B-1 bombers, turning them into gunships. The U.S. military first experimented with this kind of weapons system in 1971. Prototype cannons were installed in the bomb bays of bombers made in the 1950s.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20782/boeings-been-granted-a-patent-for-turning-the-b-1b-into-a-gunship-bristling-with-cannons

The U.S. Air Force is heavily upgrading the cockpits of their F-15s.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21081/the-usaf-has-quietly-added-large-multi-function-cockpit-displays-to-its-f-15c-fleet

China has just launched its second aircraft carrier, which could be thought of as an upgraded copy of their first carrier, which was built by the USSR and launched 33 years ago. Does this milestone mean China’s shipbuilding prowess has surpassed Russia’s?
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2145890/chinas-first-domestically-built-aircraft-carrier-begins

Did you know you can build a somewhat OK bullet proof vest out of a thick textbook and a 1′ x 1′ ceramic floor tile?
https://youtu.be/ECug_76_NLg

The Basque Separatists have disbanded, thanks to an improved Basque economy (assisted by investment from Madrid) and a graying of the population. How many other ethnic secession movements could be defused with the same combination?
https://www.apnews.com/448d0d7510b0447abba9597c9c319f63/ETA%27s-bloody-history:-853-killings-in-60-years-of-violence

In 1872, English writer Samuel Butler published the book Erehwon. In it, the main character visits a futuristic, closed society that banned machines because they were improving too fast and people feared they would become smarter than humans and take over. Butler was inspired by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and by the rapid industrialization he saw in England over his lifetime. It’s the earliest example of the the “robot uprising” trope I’ve seen.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/butler-samuel/1872/erewhon/ch23.htm

A few bummer remarks about the state of artificial intelligence. FIRST: ‘The current ways of trying to represent the nervous system…[are little better than] what we had 50 years ago.’  –Marvin Minsky, 2013
https://youtu.be/3PdxQbOvAlI

SECOND: ‘Over the next 30 years, we’re not going to see Commander Data…there is an A.I. bubble right now and people are making a fundamental error on estimating how good A.I. is going to be [and] how quickly.’ –Rodney Brooks, 2017
https://youtu.be/ig1qaqyMIXc

THIRD: ‘I suspect that [building the first true A.I.] means getting rid of back-propagation…I don’t think [back-propagation is] how the brain works.’ –Geoffrey Hinton (helped invent back-propagation in 1986), 2017
https://www.axios.com/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-says-we-need-to-start-over-1513305524-f619efbd-9db0-4947-a9b2-7a4c310a28fe.html

FOURTH: ‘We’re very far from having machines that can learn the most basic things about the world in the way humans and animals can do. Like, yes, in particular areas machines have superhuman performance, but in terms of general intelligence we’re not even close to a rat.’ –Yann LeCun, 2017
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/26/16552056/a-intelligence-terminator-facebook-yann-lecun-interview

Computer scientist Judea Pearl is slightly more optimistic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/machine-learning-is-stuck-on-asking-why/560675/

A fascinating short video showing how a computer-generated Paul Walker was inserted into Furious 7 after the actor died during filming. Within 20 years, I don’t think we’ll be able to tell apart human actors and CGI versions of them.
https://jalopnik.com/how-extensive-special-effects-helped-finish-furious-7-a-1825917978

Unreal Engine 4 – (2018) – Ridiculous Realistic Looking Characters!
https://youtu.be/Vh9msqaoJZw

Google’s “Duplex Assistant” can perfectly imitate humans during brief phone calls. I think machines will pass the Turing Test within 11 years, and shortly thereafter, we won’t be able to tell the difference between human speakers and CGI versions of them: we’ll be able to make machines that can speak using a real human being’s voice, to intelligently carry on conversations with other humans, and to even answer questions and put forth topics of conversation as the imitated human would.
https://youtu.be/ijwHj2HaOT0

Non-invasive, wearable sensors that monitor muscle and nerve activity can be used to accurately represent a person’s physical movements in a virtual reality avatar. The demo video is incredible.
https://youtu.be/5Z5aZK2C3ew

The world’s oldest spider is dead at 43. It was a trapdoor spider, and it survived that long by staying in one hole in the ground its whole life, conserving its energy and avoiding risks (good life advice?).
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/04/27/farewell-no-16-scientists-left-miserable-worlds-oldest-spider/

Airborne lead particles that drifted to Greenland from Europe and got trapped in successive layers of ice tell the tale of Rome’s rise and fall. The quantity of lead smelting positively correlates with periods of prosperity.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/05/14/roman-empire-rise-and-fall-revealed-greenland-ice/608819002/

The longest possible straight-line journeys over sea and land are uncovered, at long last! I wonder if the estimate would change if the Arctic Ice Cap were counted as dry land (explorers have walked across the whole thing before).
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/ocean-path-will-take-you-longest-straight-line-journey-earth

Russia launched the world’s first floating nuclear reactor. It will be towed to the Arctic sea to provide power to a remote town.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/30/607088530/russia-launches-floating-nuclear-power-plant-its-headed-to-the-arctic

Burying nuclear waste in shafts drilled into the seafloor might be the best permanent disposal option.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/10/the-sub-seabed-solution/308434/