Israel retaliated against a Hamas terrorist attack in Jerusalem with an attempted assassination of several Hamas leaders in neutral Qatar. The operation went ahead without American permission and involved Israeli stealth fighter jets that intruded into Saudi airspace and fired long-range missiles. The brazen nature of the attack is unprecedented for the Gulf States.
https://nypost.com/2025/09/09/world-news/israel-targets-hamas-leaders-with-strike-on-qatars-capital/
’20 years later, Israelis ask if the Gaza exit backfired — and if it’s time to go back’
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/19/g-s1-89192/israel-gaza-withdrawal-2005
‘A 2019 mission in North Korea, which intended to have Navy SEALs plant an electronic device to intercept communications of the country’s leader Kim Jong Un, resulted in an unsuccessful operation that left unarmed North Koreans dead…’
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/politics/north-korea-navy-seal-mission-nyt
The U.S. Secret Service discovered and disabled an electronic weapon in New York that could have disabled all cell phone service in the city. It was probably emplaced to disrupt a major U.N. summit.
https://apnews.com/article/unga-threat-telecom-service-sim-93734f76578bc9ca22d93a8e91fd9c76
‘Mechanical accuracy is a measure of the accuracy of the rifle itself, irrespective of human or environmental factors. Technically, it could be argued that this should be called mechanical precision, not accuracy, since the primary metric is group size, rather than proximity to the point of aim. But, mechanical accuracy is nevertheless the prevailing term.
You can think of it like this: if you were to bolt your rifle to a concrete table, rendering it utterly incapable of moving in any way, how accurate would it be? With the rifle incapable of moving, human factors like muscle tremors or an improper trigger press become irrelevant; all that matters is the mechanics of the rifle itself. Any inaccuracies will come from imperfections in materials or construction, rather than shooting technique.
…Practical accuracy is a more holistic concept; it considers not only the mechanical accuracy of the rifle but also how the rifle lends itself to effective use by a person in normal conditions. Simply put, practical accuracy is the measure of how accurate an average user is capable of being in normal field conditions.
Practical accuracy takes into account factors like ergonomics, trigger weight, recoil, and even external ballistic factors like velocity and ballistic coefficient, since all else being equal, it is easier to land a hit with a rifle that resists wind and drop better than one that does not.’
https://blog.primaryarms.com/guide/mechanical-vs-practical-accuracy/
Rail guns are weapons built to fully showcase their mechanical accuracy. “Ergonomics” are nonexistent.
https://youtu.be/b4idDEwnLFQ?si=FJiI9v5WAZKFu13h
By contrast, a weapon with low mechanical accuracy but high practical accuracy is the German G36 rifle, with modifications to make it more comfortable and instinctive for the hands to hold. It’s lightweight, ambidextrous and has no sharp edges. However, the rifle is known for losing accuracy as more bullets are shot through it and its barrel heats up.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2010/10/28/the-g36k-idz/
The rifle that killed Charlie Kirk was over 57 years old. Guns last forever if you take care of them.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kirk-assassins-alleged-gun-was-powerful-vintage-hard-trace-rcna231334
The future is now: Israel is the first country to field tactical laser weapons on the battlefield. They are designed to shoot down drones, missiles and mortars, which means they can track fast-moving targets, quickly aim at them, and fire accurately.
Though international law forbids it, there’s no technical reason why these same weapons couldn’t be used against ground targets. The smallest and weakest of Israel’s new laser weapons, “Lite Beam”, can fit in the back of a pickup truck and is 10 kilowatts. A direct hit from a laser that strong would cause a human to erupt in flames. The larger “Iron Beam M” has a 50 kilowatt laser, and a direct hit from its beam might cause instant explosive damage to a human body in addition to being lit on fire.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-867735
By modern aircraft standards, the B-29 is underpowered, hard to fly, and dangerous.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250918-the-airliner-pilot-who-gets-to-fly-world-war-twos-biggest-bomber
‘$2,200,000,000 solar farm in California desert switched off after not serving its purpose’
https://www.unilad.com/technology/news/ivanpah-solar-power-facility-switch-off-california-828436-20250927
China’s electric cars are better and cheaper than anything the West has to offer.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/09/15/the-brutal-fight-to-dominate-chinese-carmaking
‘A microdot is text or an image substantially reduced in size to prevent detection by unintended recipients. Microdots are normally circular and around 1 millimetre (0.039 in) in diameter but can be made into different shapes and sizes and made from various materials such as polyester or metal.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdot
Meta unveiled a new and improved line of augmented reality glasses. They’re very good, and it’s heartening to see the technology still developing, but they remain not good enough or cheap enough for mass adoption.
The Chinese “Unitree G1” robot has an incredible ability to keep its balance even when shoved by humans.
https://youtu.be/bPSLMX_V38E?si=NucFPf_Wciukhw9w
Another month, another record-breaking image generator. This one was released by Google as is named “Nano banana.”
https://www.howtogeek.com/i-experimented-with-googles-gemini-nano-banana-ai-and-the-results-were-wild/
Here’s an economics paper called “We Wont be Missed: Work and Growth in the Era of AGI.” My notes on its key claims:
-Human labor will eventually become worthless.
-Economic, scientific, and technological growth will untether itself from the size and skill of the human population.
-Intelligent machines will become so smart and numerous that their workforce will be orders of magnitude more productive than the human workforce could be.
-Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage doesn’t imply that humans will forever have employment niches in the intelligent machine era.
-People who own data centers and microchip factories will get incredibly rich, not just in absolute terms but relative to the rest of the human population.
-Lack of work will challenge humanity’s sense of purpose.
https://conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f227505.pdf
Customized AI-generated content will fracture global culture and eliminate the influence of gatekeepers like Hollywood studio executives.
‘AI will make isolation dramatically easier. Right now, if you want to shield your kids from mainstream culture, you have to constantly fight an uphill battle. You need to review books, movies, and websites. You need to find alternative curricula for every subject. You need enough like-minded families nearby to form a community. It’s exhausting work that requires constant vigilance and often means accepting lower-quality substitutes for mainstream options. But AI changes all of this. Want a library of ten thousand novels that share your values but are actually as engaging as secular bestsellers? Your AI can write them. Want a tutor who can teach calculus at MIT level while never mentioning evolution? Done. Want to monitor everything your kid sees online and get alerts about concerning patterns? No problem. The technical barriers to creating a totalizing information environment will disappear.’
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8aRFB2qGyjQGJkEdZ/christian-homeschoolers-in-the-year-3000
AI radiologists aren’t as good as advertised (yet).
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-algorithm-will-see-you-now/
Within hours of American right-wing celebrity Charlie Kirk’s assassination, AI-generated books about the crime were for sale on Amazon.com.
https://san.com/cc/apparent-ai-generated-books-on-charlie-kirks-assassination-flood-amazon/
‘AI Chatbots Might Already Be Better Than Humans at Debating’
https://reason.com/2025/09/15/chatbots-win-the-debate/
‘Gemini achieves gold-medal level at the International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals’
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/gemini-achieves-gold-level-performance-at-the-international-collegiate-programming-contest-world-finals/
‘Nvidia’s $100bn bet on OpenAI raises more questions than it answers’ :
Either the big tech companies will invent artificial general intelligence within a few years and start making trillions of dollars, or they will fail and the biggest stock bubble since 2008 will pop.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/09/22/nvidias-100bn-bet-on-openai-raises-more-questions-than-it-answers
In the 1700s and 1800s, an industry arose in the U.S. dedicated to the collection of ice from bodies of freshwater in the winter, its storage in insulated underground warehouses, and its sale to consumers during the hot months of the year. After mechanical refrigeration was invented and ice could be produced at will, the natural ice industry waged a public campaign against “artificial ice.” It included paying doctors to make dubious claims about the safety of consuming artificial ice and the rise of voluntary labelling by natural ice vendors.
https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-war-on-lab-grown-ice
The Perseverance rover found the best evidence that microbial life was at least present on Mars in the past.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/did-nasas-perseverance-rover-actually-find-evidence-of-life-on-mars-we-need-to-haul-its-samples-home-to-find-out-scientists-say
‘Unlike air conditioning, a solar shade for the elite has the advantage that it will also cool off non-elite regions of the Earth, at least to a small extent. The constellation of sun shades for NYC could move to provide relief to equatorial cities in the spring and fall and then be repositioned to provide shade to Southern Hemisphere cities during their summer.’
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2025/08/31/could-we-shade-the-earth-or-at-least-some-cities-now-that-starship-is-working/
After its curious and embarrassing inability to respond to last year’s mysterious mass drone sightings across the Eastern U.S., the military has created a rapid reaction force for future incidents.
https://www.twz.com/air/new-quick-reaction-force-will-counter-military-base-drone-incursions
Reminds me of how the xenomorph lifecycle can vary depending on the circumstances: ‘A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species. These queen Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus) are sexual parasites that rely on the sperm of males of the ant species Messor structor. They use this sperm to breed an army of robust worker ants, which are hybrids of the two species.
Data now show that, in the absence of nearby M. structor colonies, M. ibericus queens can clone male M. structor ants by laying eggs that contain only M. structor DNA in their nuclei.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02807-0
A man was convicted of an unsolved 1987 rape based solely on DNA evidence even though he has a twin brother. This was thanks to a technique called “somatic mutation analysis,” which can spot minute genetic differences between twins, which start arising once they’re born.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/22/twins-dna-test-cold-case/
53 genes have been discovered that control mathematical ability.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-025-03237-0
A tribe of people living in arid northern Kenya has genetically evolved to function on less water than everyone else.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-genetic-turkana-people-harsh-climate.html
President Trump made an unscientific declaration that Tylenol consumption during pregnancy can cause autism in unborn children.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/health/trump-autism-announcement-cause-tylenol
During a meeting in Beijing, Putin and Xi Jinping were overheard discussing the prospect of radical life extension this century.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15061901/Hot-mic-catches-Putin-discussing-achieve-immortality-President-Xi-Kim-Jong-Un.html
At the same summit, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had an assistant sanitize a chair he had been sitting in to prevent anyone from collecting his DNA samples from it.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/36555635/kim-jong-un-dna-destroyed-putin/