- Another reason why you should always be skeptical of Russian predictions about how strong their military will be within X years.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16175/russia-rolls-out-new-tu-160m2-but-are-moscows-bomber-ambitions-realistic - Russia won’t start mass producing stealth fighters until 2027 at the earliest. (U.S. F-22s started rolling off the assembly line in 2005.)
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-new-su-57-stealth-fighter-s-500-air-defense-system-23383 - Contrary to what is widely believed (thanks to fiction like The Hunt for Red October), the USSR/Russia has always been far behind the U.S. in submarine technology, and the gap is widening.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/why-russias-new-stealth-submarines-have-big-problem-22941 - The Russians used a spy ship with submersible instruments and winches to raise or destroy their two fighter planes that crashed into the Mediterranean during Syrian support operations. They did this within five days of each crash to prevent American subs from snatching them from the seafloor and examining the technology.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16379/russia-scooped-up-wrecks-of-crashed-naval-fighters-off-sea-floor-near-syria - A tale of two military readiness levels (this has just a little bit to do with differences in how well-funded the two forces are).
First: http://www.janes.com/article/75790/over-half-of-bundeswehr-s-leopard-2-mbts-are-not-operationally-ready
Second: http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16366/portlands-142nd-fighter-wing-launches-13-f-15c-ds-eagles-in-rare-snap-readiness-drill - The Air Force is reusing WWII-era shells and 1950s-made barrels for some of their AC-130 gunship cannons. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16523/the-usaf-is-rebuilding-world-war-ii-era-40mm-shells-for-its-ac-130u-gunships - What happens when you try fixing something that ain’t broke:
http://warisboring.com/the-u-s-navy-still-hasnt-figured-out-how-to-make-a-decent-uniform/ - “Compounding the pain for the N.S.A. is the attackers’ regular online public taunts, written in ersatz broken English. Their posts are a peculiar mash-up of immaturity and sophistication, laced with profane jokes but also savvy cultural and political references. They suggest that their author — if not an American — knows the United States well.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/nsa-shadow-brokers.html - “The archives were found by veteran security breach hunter UpGuard’s Chris Vickery during a routine scan of open Amazon-hosted data silos, and these ones weren’t exactly hidden. The buckets were named centcom-backup, centcom-archive, and pacom-archive.”
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/17/us_military_spying_archive_exposed/ - We were supposed to have power armor in 2007. http://www.zdnet.com/article/mit-to-make-tech-exoskeleton-for-army/
- “As it was, Task Force Rogue One met only five out of the ten performance measures that the U.S. Army uses to evaluate a successful raid.”
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2017/02/27/no-more-task-force-rogue-ones-a-tactical-analysis-of-the-raid-on-scarif/ - There’s no evidence that mandatory health checkups reduce the incidence or severity of diabetes, even when the checkups result in early warnings that patients are developing the disease.
https://www.cato.org/publications/research-briefs-economic-policy/preventive-care-worth-cost-evidence-mandatory-checkups - A handful of people are still in iron lungs.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/america-apos-last-iron-lung-222200990.html - Big pharma is less profitable than you probably think, and its profit trajectory is grim.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/11/28/a-grim-future-here-are-the-numbers - A brain exercise has finally been scientifically proven to reduce the odds of getting dementia.
http://news.medicine.iu.edu/releases/2017/11/brain-exercise-dementia-prevention.shtml - Getting you genome sequenced now costs less than $2,000, but prices haven’t dropped in several years. It still isn’t worth the money for most people since we can’t make sense of what it means.
https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcostsdata/ - The genetic mutation inhibits the PAI-1 enzyme, extends lifespan by 10 years and sharply reduces the risk of Type 2 diabetes. It doesn’t seem to carry any downsides.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/well/live/amish-mutation-protects-against-diabetes-and-may-extend-life.html - The ethical concerns about cloning are almost entirely baseless.
FYI, some mammal species are harder to clone than others because of their reproductive cycles and chromosome structures. Sheep and cats are easy, but apes and humans are very hard.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42066629 - “The Amara hype cycle is unfolding today with respect to machine learning.”
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/amaras-law/ - Related:
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/03/24/the-genomic-revolution-shows-up-late-but-shows-up - An excellent lecture. Deep learning is being overhyped, and by itself will never lead to artificial general intelligence. A.I. research probably needs ten times as much funding as it is getting, spread out across different labs approaching the problem from totally different directions.
https://youtu.be/7dnN3P2bCJo - Humans still reign supreme over machines in Starcraft 2. I couldn’t find videos of any of the matches, but I suspect most of the Norwegian AI’s astonishing-sounding 19,000 actions per minute (a world-class human player might do 200 actions per minute) were thanks to the machine ordering its units to do useless things like run around in random, constantly changing patterns.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609242/humans-are-still-better-than-ai-at-starcraftfor-now/ - ‘The twin challenges of too much quantity and too little quality are rooted in the finite neurological capacity of the human mind. Scientists are deriving hypotheses from a smaller and smaller fraction of our collective knowledge and consequently, more and more, asking the wrong questions, or asking ones that have already been answered.’
https://aeon.co/ideas/science-has-outgrown-the-human-mind-and-its-limited-capacities - Is a stressed-out human phone operator who is trained to suppress and fake their own emotions and to read from a script more “personable” than a machine? Will human advantages in jobs requiring emotional interaction and nurturing endure?
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/11/are-humans-actually-more-human-than-robots/545714/ - If you had a human friend who had elementary knowledge of 40 languages and could do basic translations between any two of them, would you be laughing in their face at their mistakes, or would you be in awe of their intelligence?
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-42066517/google-pixel-buds-language-translation-tested - Say what you will about Tulsa, Oklahoma, but they’ve enacted outstanding land use laws to minimize the occurrence and damage caused by flooding. Basically, no one can build houses in flood-prone areas, and the city instead builds things like public parks and soccer fields there. Higher sea levels and more frequent floods does not have to mean more deaths.
https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/564317854/how-tulsa-became-a-model-for-preventing-floods - Human adaptation to biodiversity loss is also feasible: “Thirty to 40 percent of species may be threatened with extinction in the near future, and their loss may be inevitable. But both the planet and humanity can probably survive or even thrive in a world with fewer species. We don’t depend on polar bears for our survival, and even if their eradication has a domino effect that eventually affects us, we will find a way to adapt. The species that we rely on for food and shelter are a tiny proportion of total biodiversity, and most humans live in — and rely on — areas of only moderate biodiversity, not the Amazon or the Congo Basin.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/we-dont-need-to-save-endangered-species-extinction-is-part-of-evolution/2017/11/21/57fc5658-cdb4-11e7-a1a3-0d1e45a6de3d_story.html - An environmentalist professor, Mark Jacobson, who published an absurd article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claiming that the U.S. could switch to 100% clean energy by 2050 is suing other professors that wrote a joint rebuttal article. His actions are not going over well in the scientific community.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/03/when-scientists-sue-scientists/ - Plants are green because they don’t absorb the green-colored portion of the visible light spectrum. The pink-colored windows absorb the green light and turn it into electricity.
https://phys.org/news/2017-11-solar-greenhouses-electricity-crops.html - An interesting idea. And if Bitcoin goes extinct, you could rent your server to anyone who needed to do computation (for stuff like protein folding, processing computer game graphics, etc). Two problems though: 1) The economics of this idea are murky since the server would need to be replaced at significant expense every few years as its hardware became obsolete and 2) if everyone had a computer server space heater, then the global supply of server capacity for rent would wildly fluctuate with the seasons. Since most people live in temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, available server capacity would spike in the winter and shrivel away in the summer.
http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/11/08/bitcoin-mining-space-heater/ - The smartest type of smart home might have only a few smart, centralized components monitoring many dumb ones. Trying to make every appliance and feature in a house smart is actually dumb.
“The level of detail smart breakers look at is impressive. Mr Holmquist says that his can, for example, measure the revolutions-per-minute of the compressor in a refrigerator. Not only would this let an app monitor how hard the appliance is working, it could also give warning if that appliance was about to break down.”
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21731610-old-fuse-box-gets-new-lease-life-smart-circuit-breakers - Why having industry standards and two or three established big guys dominating a market is important:
https://qz.com/1132657/an-internet-of-things-flop-means-some-connected-lights-wont-work-anymore/ - It’s just as likely this discovery will end up as another flash in the (bed)pan that goes nowhere, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
http://www.janes.com/article/75947/arl-utilises-bodily-fluids-for-power-generation - Bird tracking devices weighing only a gram will exist soon, allowing smaller birds to be tagged. What happens someday when we have pellet-sized tracking implants that cost almost nothing, and robots that can do the work of implanting them in animals for free?
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/where-the-birds-go/545945/ - Why speculate about creepy future surveillance when Facebook is doing it now?
https://gizmodo.com/how-facebook-figures-out-everyone-youve-ever-met-1819822691 - From my “Rules for good futurism”: A prediction can be wrong in its specifics, but right in principle. “But if Second Life promised a future in which people would spend hours each day inhabiting their online identity, haven’t we found ourselves inside it? Only it’s come to pass on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter instead.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/second-life-leslie-jamison/544149/ - He’s totally right that 1) most “news” content is garbage designed to be consumed instantly and forgotten within days, 2) reading news articles that are several months old is an invaluable tool for seeing just how much garbage is really garbage, and 3) it takes time and a trained mind to recognize garbage without the benefit of hindsight.
https://qz.com/1117962/advice-on-how-to-read-from-a-professor-whose-job-is-to-predict-the-future/ - Some rare, creative thinking. “Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn’t just external. Perhaps it’s already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence.”
http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/is-physical-law-an-alien-intelligence - Telescope capabilities are about to vastly improve. The 2020s will be full of important new astronomy findings.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/11/by-2020-upgrades-to-gravity-wave-detectors-will-detect-one-to-two-neutron-star-collisions-per-month.html - A metaphor for China as a whole.
https://qz.com/1137026/chinas-first-all-electric-cargo-ship-is-going-to-be-used-to-transport-coal/ - 2018 could be the year Venezuela finally implodes. If they run out of foreign currency reserves and default on their loan payments, then that’s it.
https://qz.com/1128894/venezuela-has-finally-defaulted-on-its-debt-according-to-sp/ - I just figured out how robots are going to kill us all in the future. “A baby-aspirin-size amount of powdered toxin is enough to make the global supply of Botox for a year…The LD50 for it in humans is estimated at about 2 nanograms/kilo i.v., 10 nanograms/kilo by inhalation.”
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/11/06/theres-toxicity-and-theres-toxicity - Stephen Hawking doesn’t think he’s the smartest person alive, and he thinks people who boast about their high IQs are “losers.”
https://youtu.be/4lwFK1ImzcA - Do a YouTube search for “how to set a mouse trap”. The earliest video I found was uploaded in 2006–only two years after YouTube was invented–and is perfectly clear. Since then, probably hundreds more instructional videos of this simple task have also been uploaded to the service, the most recent appearing a week ago. What’s the value-add to the videos made after 2006? How much of the ongoing “exponential growth in digital content” is totally redundant?
The Original: https://youtu.be/QBVOFY7SDOg
The (latest) Reboot: https://youtu.be/0xriqCJKgYM
A blog about futurism, science, technology, and military affairs.