The Philippines “Presidential Security Group” has the most interesting camouflage uniforms I’ve seen. As wacky as it looks, it actually adheres to the best principles of military camouflage (coarse pixelation, use of parallel and perpendicular lines and hard angles instead of wavy lines). If you changed the color scheme to black with earth-toned green and brown, it would probably do an excellent job concealing you in vegetated areas from people looking at you from typical combat distances (50 meters and above).
https://youtu.be/ZpsXwolf0Oo
A very bold and recent prediction that didn’t fare well.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8277471/North-Korean-defector-says-99-sure-Kim-Jong-dead.html
The Kennedy administration considered building a nuclear bunker 3,500 feet under the Pentagon that could survive 200 megaton surface detonations. The biggest nuclear weapon ever built was ONLY 50 megatons.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33003/the-pentagons-plan-to-build-a-secret-super-command-bunker-3500-feet-under-washington-d-c
During WWII, the British aircraft carriers had 3 inch-thick armor plates right under their flight decks, and also armored walls around the hangars right below that. Because of this, they could carry fewer planes than the un-armored American carriers, but they were also more durable. Several British aircraft carriers probably would have sunk had it not been for their armored decks.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/were-royal-navys-armored-aircraft-carrier-decks-worth-it-152081
After the U.S. had to dock its two Pacific aircraft carriers due to epidemics of COVID-19 among their crews, China sent its own aircraft carrier battle group out, alarming Taiwan.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3079546/taiwan-scrambles-warships-pla-navy-aircraft-carrier-strike
A new analysis about China’s growing naval strength reveals that they could achieve numerical superiority over the U.S. Navy in a conflict in the Western Pacific.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33153.pdf
One of China’s army training bases has a full-size replica of Taiwan’s Presidential Building.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33591/chinas-biggest-base-has-huge-replicas-of-taiwans-presidential-building-and-the-eiffel-tower
Francis Fukuyama thinks that Xi Jinping has made China less free than it was 10 years ago, and that the U.S. should now treat it as an enemy with global ambitions.
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2020/05/18/what-kind-of-regime-does-china-have/
You know you’re broke when your best tank is a T-34, and you shoot it by standing outside and pulling on a long rope tied to the trigger because you’re afraid it might blow up.
https://youtu.be/eMMCYWxAtco
This thermal camera video of a Russian tank parade show that much of a tank’s heat signature comes from its wheels and tracks. As the tank drive around, those metal parts rub against each other, producing heat through friction. I don’t see how this can be ameliorated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6RZ9l_Fw4U
As warfare gets more advanced and sensor/communication-dependent, the size and prominence of each field unit’s “electronic emission signature” grows.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33401/this-is-what-ground-forces-look-like-to-an-electronic-warfare-system-and-why-its-a-big-deal
Ukraine’s military lost half of its aircraft in the first year of war with Russia. While many were destroyed in combat or were captured, some were deleted from the official inventory because they were found to be nonfunctional due to years of neglect when Ukraine desperately tried to activate its whole arsenal.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-russia-nearly-wiped-out-ukrainian-air-force-141857
The U.S. Army is working on small, flying surveillance drones that infantrymen can send airborne using standard 40mm grenade launchers.
https://www.army.mil/article/234300/grenade_launchers_able_to_fire_armys_new_camera_drones
Boko Haram attacked and defeated a garrison of Chadian soldiers, killing almost 100 of them and capturing their weapons. This is the deadliest terrorist attack in that country.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/central-africa/chad/derriere-lattaque-jihadiste-au-tchad
Russia has sent fighter planes and ground units of its private military contractors to fight for the rebels in Libya’s ongoing civil war. Turkey supports the embattled central government and sent troops to help earlier this year. Syria is of course another battleground between Russian and Turkey proxies.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/russian-camouflaged-fighter-jets-deployed-to-libya-to-back-rebel-air
A large Venezuelan navy patrol ship tried to capture a German cruise ship in the Caribbean. The warship rammed it, not realizing that the other ship had a reinforced hull for breaking through ice, and damaged itself so badly that it sank. The cruise ship had minimal damage.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8189463/Moment-Venezuelan-warship-RAMS-German-liner-Caribbean-sinks.html
A Mickey Mouse plot to take over Venezuela, and involving at least two military contractors from the U.S., failed. It was so amateurish that it’s doubtful the U.S. government ordered it to proceed.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33322/breaking-down-the-absolutely-batshit-botched-coup-attempt-against-venezuelas-maduro
The Apollo 13 near-disaster mission happened 50 years ago. Videos that the crewmen filmed have been used to make new, hi-res still photos through a process that compared the images from multiple frames of video film that showed the same scene (a video camera from that era shot 24 frames per second). It’s similar to the single-pixel camera I linked to in a past blog entry.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52264743
http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-single-pixel-camera-lensless-imaging-0330
The explosion that caused the Apollo 13 crisis resulted from an incredible series of small malfunctions. Also, had the explosion happened a few hours before or after it actually did, the crewmen would have all died.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-checklist-of-what-had-to-go-wrong-for-apollo-13-to-1697567898
“Fata morgana” is a rare atmospheric phenomenon that doubtless explains many UFO sightings.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a32389233/optical-illuson-fata-morgana-ufo-flying-ship/
This video explains why exotic forms of communication, like using only smells, touch, or gravity waves, are impractical and grossly inferior to the forms of communication we use (speech, looking at writing, radio signals). Also, it makes the point that aliens could learn human languages by listening to our radio broadcasts and finding simple patterns, like the fact that the word “breakfast” is mentioned most often in the mornings, and is usually associated with words relating to food and hunger. They could learn our languages, at least to an elementary degree, without interacting with us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thdC-HlRHWg
This video provides a good overview of radar jamming. Radar is of course used to detect the locations of planes and ships. A radar station does this by sending out beams of radio waves, and then waiting to see if any of those waves bounce off a solid object and are reflected back to the station. The radar’s computer compiles any such echoes into a visual representation of the planes and ships, which looks like the familiar, circular computer screen image of little white dots against a black background. A human sits at a chair watching this screen. To jam a radar, you point a radio emitter of your own at the radar station and shoot powerful radio beams at it. The radar station’s receiver is overloaded, and the circular screen displays static, or goes 100% white. It’s conceptually the same as blinding a human by shining a very bright flashlight in his eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su44ZU7NcQU
Large parts of America’s airspace are not monitored by aircraft radars.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/07/22/u-s-radars-have-come-a-long-way-but-gaps-in-coverage-remain-big-a-risk/
Before radar was developed, militaries would use “acoustic mirrors” to listen for the approach of enemy planes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_mirror
“Artillery sound ranging” is a technique in which the location of a piece of enemy artillery is triangulated by measuring the time delay between when the blast of its discharge is heard at different locations. This can also be used to find sources of small arms fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Artillery_sound_ranging
An American private military company has bought Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s personal Boeing 707 and plans to turn it into an aerial refueling plane.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32962/romanian-dictators-boeing-707-makes-first-flight-in-years-for-delivery-to-air-refueling-firm
The article doesn’t make the case that the 737 Max’ computer hardware was the problem. Flying a plane is complicated, but there are only so many variables your computer needs to keep track of, and a 20-year-old processor design might be fully adequate (by the same token, a Godlike supercomputer would not be better at tic-tac-toe than a teenager). Rather, a particular software algorithm installed in the 737 Max planes was the real defect.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/9/21197162/boeing-737-max-software-hardware-computer-fcc-crash
The “Baltimore Stockbroker Scam” is kind of ingenious. It touches on a point I made about good futurism: ‘You can be right thanks to luck alone, and “a stopped clock is right twice a day.”’
http://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2020/05/how-to-predict-future-simply-predict.html
The Apple Watch is five years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apple_Watch&oldid=956160178
The average human’s brain size has significantly shrunk over the last 20,000 years. Have we gotten dumber as a result? Maybe.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/if-modern-humans-are-so-smart-why-are-our-brains-shrinking
Most of the fruit fly’s brain has been mapped. It’s a step forward, though it should be remembered that a human brain has 600,000 times as many neurons. Mapping the brains of progressively larger, smarter animals will be a long pathway to building AI.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.07.030213v1
Another small step towards building an AGI: “With Agent57, we have succeeded in building a more generally intelligent agent that has above-human performance on all tasks in the Atari57 benchmark.”
https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Agent57-Outperforming-the-human-Atari-benchmark
The rise of AI will revolutionize warfare because it will let countries build arbitrarily large numbers of combat robots. The size of a country’s military will no longer be limited by the size of its human population. Conventional warfare will become as big a threat to humanity’s existence as nuclear war is now.
“We envision fleets of smaller, multi-mission vessels, operating with surface warfare leadership. People talk about a 355-ship Navy, how about a 35,000-ship Navy?,” Maj. Gen. David Coffman…[he] explained it as a “family of combatant craft, manned and unmanned, integrated in a distributed maritime operation.”
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/autonomous-navy-ships-could-revolutionize-amphibious-assault-156481
It will be interesting to see the prototype ship designs that result from this.
‘NOMARS will challenge the traditional naval architecture paradigm, designing a seaframe from the ground up with no provision, allowance, or expectation for humans at sea. By removing the human element from all ship design considerations, NOMARS will demonstrate significant advantages, to include size, cost (procurement, operations, and sustainment), at-sea reliability, survivability to sea-state, survivability to adversary actions (stealth considerations, resistance to tampering, etc.), and hydrodynamic efficiency (hull optimization without consideration for crew safety or comfort).’
https://beta.sam.gov/opp/fd0ba75d1ef64d569db637571f659dbb/view
The examples of the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors might offer insights into how AGIs could take over the world. Machines could play different human groups against each other, and then turn on their allies at the end.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ivpKSjM4D6FbqF4pZ/cortes-pizarro-and-afonso-as-precedents-for-takeover
This interesting exploration of “slack” underscores why species and civilizations are more successful if they all for some diversity, even if that diversity makes them slightly sub-optimal most of the time. This is part of why I doubt intelligent machines will eradicate the human race.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
I like it when a distinguished but elderly scientist (Dr. Martin Rees) states that we’re going to evolve into genetically engineered cyborgs, some of whom will live on Mars.
https://youtu.be/A1dfjX0STEk
Ben Goertzel offers good challenges to the notion that suffering and death give meaning to human life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LbGwcDOmiQ
The citizens of the U.S. and Canada would get richer if their countries fully merged. Even with a “free trade agreement,” there’s a lot of potential cross-border trade that isn’t happening, costing everyone money. A fully unified internal market would solve that.
“Borders and Growth” https://www.nber.org/papers/w9223.pdf
“Gravity with Gravitas” https://www.nber.org/papers/w8079.pdf
“National Borders Matter” https://online.fliphtml5.com/tcva/smhp/#p=2
Here’s an interesting list of everyday things that have improved for Americans since the 1990s.
https://www.gwern.net/Improvements
The process of innovation and invention is a team effort full of trial-and-error, failed experiments, and small modifications to existing ideas and things. It can also be slowed or quashed by something as mundane as government red tape.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/innovation-can-be-quashed/
The ACLU is suing “Clearview AI,” for violating the privacy rights of some Americans by compiling a searchable, massive trove of face photographs taken from publicly available internet sites.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-sues-clearview-ai
If manmade impermeable surfaces (e.g. – roads, roofs, parking lots, sidewalks) increase by 1%, then the frequency of floods grows by 3.3%. What fraction of today’s flooding is caused by this and not by global warming?
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL086480
Global warming will make snowstorms less frequent and less severe in the U.S.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/26/climate-change-reduce-big-winter-snowstorms-study/5258663002/
The cost of solar power has dropped faster than any credible person predicted, even ten years ago. This supports my prediction that the 2020s will be the decade when better, cheaper solar panels and grid storage batteries will make solar power cost-competitive with standard forms of energy, even without government subsidies.
https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020/
A big problem with solar and wind power is intermittency. To compensate for their sudden swings in electrical output over the course of the day, the people in charge of the electric grids have to throttle other power plants up and down. Natural gas power plants are best suited for this, but quickly dialing them up and down still greatly reduces their efficiency, releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere than they otherwise would. (We REALLY need to invent better batteries for grid energy storage.)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/03/11/what-happens-when-we-put-renewables-on-the-grid-to-green-our-electric-cars-is-really-complicated/#53b195e57022
There are genetic differences between northern and southern Italians.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8348963/First-study-Italians-genetic-diversity-reveals-dates-19-000-years-ago.html
A graduate math student just solved the 50-year-old “Conway Knot Problem.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/graduate-student-solves-decades-old-conway-knot-problem-20200519/
Just as the air gets thinner as you go up a mountain, it gets thicker as you go down into a mine.
https://www.saimm.co.za/Journal/v105n06p387.pdf
Here’s a video of 300 Amish men picking up a barn and moving it across a field with their bare hands. When robots become cheap and widespread, we’ll be able to use them to do things like this all the time.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8320953/Amazing-moment-300-Amish-men-lift-huge-barn-bare-hands-field.html
Finland’s big experiment with giving a UBI to unemployed people found that the money doesn’t make them any likelier to get jobs, but it makes them feel happier. (Who would have thought free money would do that?)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-06/milestone-free-money-study-shows-happiness-grows-but-jobs-don-t
Internal U.S. State Department communiques show that diplomats were concerned about lax safety protocols at a Chinese animal disease lab in Wuhan. The lab had samples of diseases similar to COVID-19.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/
Is the COVID-19 pandemic SAVING some lives? The lockdown means less air pollution, which in turn means fewer people dying of respiratory distress. (Also, less car traffic means fewer road fatalities)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8180063/Coronavirus-lockdown-slashes-air-pollution-China-25-36-000-lives-month.html
The U.S. COVID-19 death toll has hit 100,000. Remember the White House press conference from two months ago when Trump’s advisors put forth that number, and how sobering it was? It’s strange that we’ve arrived there.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/3/31/21202188/us-deaths-coronavirus-trump-white-house-presser-modeling-100000
In this interview from two months ago, Bill Gates predicted that that the number of active COVID-19 cases would peak in every part of the U.S. by late April. He was pretty accurate, though a handful of states didn’t peak until early May, and Arizona has still not peaked. Gates went on to predict that a month would have to pass after those peaks for states to start safely lifting their lockdowns, meaning that we’d start seeing a lot of that around late May (now). Again, he was right.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/03/27/bill-gates-coronavirus-town-hall-shutdown-april-peak-sot-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/stories-worth-watching/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/05/14/coronavirus-pandemic-covid-19-peak-dates-for-every-state/111695368/
Bill Gates now predicts:
-The world won’t return to its pre-COVID-19 state until a good vaccine has been invented and given to almost the whole human population.
-A vaccine won’t be invented until early 2021 or mid-2022.
-After that, distributing the vaccine to everyone will take months or years.
-By the end, the COVID-19 pandemic will have cost the world tens of trillions of dollars. (2019 global GDP was $85 trillion)
-The vaccine will probably become part of the standard vaccine schedule given to infants.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/What-you-need-to-know-about-the-COVID-19-vaccine
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/at-a-time-when-leadership-is-rare-bill-gates-stands-tall-on-covid-19/
Though we’ll endure a sucky “new normal” for the next year or two, I disagree with predictions that the pandemic will permanently alter how people interact (e.g. – no more hugging, no more going to restaurants). Such predictions run contrary to human nature.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/i-predict-your-predictions-are-wrong/611896/