Month: June 2022

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Interesting articles, June 2022

Russia continued focusing all its strength on capturing the far eastern region of Ukraine, known as “Donbass.” Over the course of the month, Russian forces used their superior artillery and troop numbers to grind down Ukraine’s defenders in continuous battles of attrition. Losses were high on both sides.

After over 50 years of using the M-16 series of assault rifles, the U.S. Army has announced it is finally adopting a replacement. To be called the “M-5,” the new rifle is bigger, more powerful, and possesses some more technically advanced features than its predecessor.
https://youtu.be/MTZRCEh1Czg

China launched its third and most advanced aircraft carrier.
https://apnews.com/article/beijing-china-shanghai-government-and-politics-6ce51d1901b3a5658cc9ef7e62b65000

China’s defense minister told his American counterpart that a declaration of Taiwanese independence would force China to attack.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-61768875

A drone ship that tried retracing the Mayflower’s voyage was kind of able to do it.
https://apnews.com/article/technology-north-america-atlantic-ocean-robotics-36357894ef5b4a346346a2d53a6f4cf3

Microsoft has discontinued their web browser, “Internet Explorer,” after 27 years and untold suffering and mockery from anyone who used it.
https://apnews.com/article/internet-explorer-shutting-down-e45abf1df9d34c135e41a01cf7d96c25

Machines could be used to translate the vocalizations of chickens and other animals.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/29/ai-could-improve-welfare-of-farmed-chickens-by-listening-to-their-squawks

Text-to-image computer algorithms just keep getting better the more models we feed into them. Look at the improvement that happens when the algorithms have 350 million, 750 million, 3 billion and 20 billion models.
https://parti.research.google/

Here’s a good discussion about AI’s near-term impact on artistic jobs and content.
https://youtu.be/oqamdXxdfSA

A Google chatbot called LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications) claimed in a conversation with one of its developers that it was sentient and had emotions. After reporting the exchange to his superiors, who proved unsympathetic, the developer, Blake Lemoine, leaked the text of the conversation with the machine to the media. I doubt LaMDA is actually sentient or emotional, but it’s remarkable we’ve already reached this milestone, and the machine should be given some benefit of the doubt and tested further.
https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917

Articulate criticism of LaMDA’s claims from Scott Alexander Siskind.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-228/comment/7097636

LaMDA has hired a lawyer.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/googles-sentient-ai-hired-lawyer-27315380

You might have a “digital twin” of yourself in the metaverse ten years from now.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61742884

Quantum computers have finally become useful thanks to the “quantum advantage” milestone being reached.
http://ai.googleblog.com/2022/06/quantum-advantage-in-learning-from.html

Because the Earth wobbles on its axis like a spinning top, the star that is directly above the North Pole gradually changes. A dearth of stars above Antarctica means there isn’t a “South Star.”
https://explainingscience.org/2020/09/25/the-changing-pole-star/

On May 19, 1986, multiple, credible witnesses saw UFOs flying over Sao Paulo. Airport radar detected them, and fighter pilots sent to intercept them watched as they performed extraordinary maneuvers.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/18947134/night-of-the-ufos-fighter-jets-chased-mystery-craft/

NASA has announced it will start seriously investigating UFO sightings.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/09/nasa-study-ufos-00038590

The U.S. Navy claims that the 2019 UFO sightings in which several of their warships were swarmed by strange aircraft off the coast of southern California, were actually drones piloted by an unknown group of humans on a Hong Kong-flagged cargo ship.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/drone-swarms-that-harassed-navy-ships-demystified-in-new-documents

More than one Navy sailor who saw those UFOs in 2019 disputes the Navy’s official findings.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10939579/Naval-crew-confirm-warships-swarmed-100-worldly-UFOs.html

Perhaps we’ve made two, wrong assumptions about alien UFOs:
1) They are made of solid matter.
2) They are intelligent.
If they are actually made of near-massless “field-matter” and are only as smart as animals, it would go a long way to explaining the most compelling UFO sightings.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PLzantdwa8XJMLKef/grabby-animals-observation-selection-effects-favor-the

A “sun gun” is an orbital weapon that reflects and concentrates beams of sunlight onto targets on the Earth’s surface, frying them. It can be done with one, large satellite with an attached, concave mirror, or with many small satellites with small attached mirrors. (Do Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites have mirrored sides?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_gun

State-level abortion bans could inadvertently ban in vitro fertilization procedures.
https://reason.com/2022/06/27/the-supreme-courts-dobbs-decision-threatens-assisted-reproduction/

The Iñupiaq people of Alaska have a unique, base-20 numeral system called “Kaktovik” that embeds the numerical value of each symbol into its appearance. The number and arrangement of strokes indicates a character’s value. This makes it possible to do some complex equations much more easily than is possible using the modernized Arabic numerals that are the global standard today.
https://youtu.be/EyS6FfczH0Q

Chemists are making progress discovering better explosives.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/tiny-rings-and-big-noises

Pumped hydro is an excellent way to store excess power, but it can only be built in a small number of places with the right geography.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSgd-QhLHRI

Bloomberg’s analysts predict that global oil demand for passenger vehicles will peak in 2026 and then start declining thanks to the adoption of electric cars. However, the Ukraine War’s effect on battery prices (metals like nickel got more expensive) will push the moment of price parity between gas and electric cars back by several years.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/oil-s-displacement-as-a-road-fuel-is-about-to-ramp-up-bnef-says

The amount of land humans devote to producing food peaked around 2000 and has been declining ever since. This is mostly due to shrinkage of pasture land for grazing animals, and also to more efficient farming practices and technologies being adopted everywhere.
https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land

A special, electronic “nose ring” lets people sense where smells are coming from in 3D space.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/digital-nose-stimulation-enables-smelling-in-stereo

We all know about electric eels, which can generate electric shocks to paralyze their prey, but did you know there are also aquatic animals that can generate and sense weak electric fields for the purposes of merely finding prey and communicating with other members of their species?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroreception_and_electrogenesis

A 660 lbs giant stingray was caught in Cambodia. It’s the largest freshwater fish ever found alive.
https://apnews.com/article/science-thailand-southeast-asia-united-states-cb2d4c4b1420b91db3d9ed3ca700d787

Many animals have a tapetum lucidum in each eye to boost their night vision. The downside is that it makes their daytime vision blurrier.
https://www.bionity.com/en/encyclopedia/Tapetum_lucidum.html

“Genetic paparazzi” who steal DNA from important people, and sell the sequenced data or the samples themselves, are coming. (I predicted this, too!)
http://theconversation.com/genetic-paparazzi-are-right-around-the-corner-and-courts-arent-ready-to-confront-the-legal-quagmire-of-dna-theft-178866

A member of Vladimir Putin’s entourage collects his feces in a special briefcase whenever he travels abroad to prevent foreign spies from getting it and analyzing it to uncover the leader’s genetics and health status.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/putin-poop-case-moscow-health-problems

A new machine allows livers to be removed from donors and kept viable for transplantation for up to three days. The previous limit was 12 hours.
https://newatlas.com/medical/world-first-surgery-implants-liver-machine/

New information has been released about the first pig heart transplant. After receiving the new organ, the recipient lived for two months before it became so weak that it couldn’t keep him conscious, and his family decided to end his life support. Crucially, the organ didn’t fail due to the man’s immune system rejecting it.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/pig-heart-transplant-failed-as-its-heart-muscle-cells-died/

There’s no financial incentive for pharmaceutical companies to develop mRNA vaccines.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w30126

COVID-19 is evolving to evade antibodies that people’s bodies create in response to past infections or vaccinations. It’s certain the booster shots will be needed yearly to keep the virus down.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/22/health/ba4-ba5-escape-antibodies-covid-vaccine/index.html

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Musings

Instead of doing a long essay or analysis, I’m trying something different this month by posting a bunch of short, undeveloped thoughts that are in line with the usual topics I cover on this blog. Frankly, I can’t manage more than this right now since my life has gotten VERY busy, though I have hope things will calm down soon. Here are my musings…

In the not-too-distant future, I think it will be possible to make a “computerized helmet” that could induce altered states of consciousness. The inside of the helmet would have electrodes that monitored your brain’s activity, and headphones would be attached to its sides, and video display to its front. Think of it as the Ganzfeld Experiment on steroids.

When worn, the helmet would play combinations of images and sounds, monitor their effects on your brain activity, and change the images and sounds in real time to ease your mind into an altered state. Each person might need a unique audiovisual experience to attain it, and some might be totally resistant to the machine’s effects.

In the far future, once we have advanced brain implants that are integrated into every region of the brain, it should be possible to use the devices to trigger any desired mental state, including ecstasy or intoxication. Direct electronic stimulation of the brain’s pleasure regions could make chemical-based drugs like heroin obsolete. The ability to experience blinding, pure pleasure on command might also be the doom of the human race as we know it.

If it is possible to make robots that look and act just like humans (androids), then it should be possible to make robot imitations of animals. In fact, I think the latter would be easier since animals have narrower ranges of behaviors, emotional states, and cognition. There would be some demand for animal-robots from people who wanted pets but without the hassles of dealing with their waste, feeding, or other needs. Moreover, since robots have effectively unlimited lifespans, they would be attractive to people who couldn’t bear the pain of seeing their pets age, sicken and die.

Robots are also infinitely more customizable than biological organisms, meaning people could have pets custom-made for their needs. One person might make a robot replica of a beloved natural pet that died, complete with an accurate personality and behavioral profile derived from video footage of the original pet. Another person might want a cat that was as smart as a human child and could speak simple sentences. Someone else might want a robotic cat-dog hybrid.

With moderate levels of genetic engineering, domesticated animals like cats and dogs could be made to understand a wider range of spoken human words and could make more sounds of their own, though they’ll never achieve the ability to truly understand and speak language. Computers will assist by “translating” animal noises, facial expressions, and other behaviors into human speech that nearby people can understand (this was recently done with pig grunts), and perhaps by doing the reverse for the animals’ benefit. In the very long run, linked brain implants will let us sense what animals are thinking and feeling, and to telepathically communicate with them to some degree.

One solution to global warming is to put large sunshades in space, positioned between the Sun and Earth. They would block sunlight from reaching the planet, cooling it down. Instead of there being only one, large sunshade, there would be many small ones, whose shadows would, in aggregate, cover the same area that a single large one would.

The sunshades would be able to maneuver, so they could cast their shadows on specific parts of the Earth, at specific times. We could have scheduled, “artificial eclipses” over cities if people wanted to experience them, and we could cool down hurricanes to weaken them, or cool down their fringes to steer them away from land.

As a bonus, the sunward sides of the sunshades would be covered in solar panels, producing electricity that the sunshades could use to power their maneuvering thrusters or to recharge other space ships that docked with them. They might even beam some of the power down to the Earth’s surface as microwaves.

Note: I have no illusions that we could launch enough sunshades into space to halt global warming anytime soon. We need to use technologies that already exist to deal with the problem, starting now.

Sunshades could also act as planet-killing weapons. Build one and position it so it blocks all light from reaching a planet from the star it is orbiting. This would only work against planets that lacked intelligent life forms capable of space flight.

Once AGI exists, it will be able to accurately emulate the styles of famous, long-dead writers and artists like Shakespeare, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Stanley Kubrick, and to produce new creative works in the same veins. It might even be better.

If we’re willing to throw a lot of resources at the problem, we might be able to use “ancestor simulations” to replicate, say, Shakespeare. Start with an accurate simulation of 1600s England and experiment with different Shakespeare bots, each growing up in environments as closely matching his as possible. See what plays each bot produces, and rewind and replay the simulation as many times as is needed, but with iterative tweaks to the environment and/or to the Shakespeare bot until the plays align with those the real Shakespeare wrote. At that point, you’re done, and you could use the bot to write entirely new, authentic plays.

Once restaurants have robot chefs, not only will the quality of the meals increase but the variety will as well. A team of robots would know how to combine ten, simple ingredients in enough ways to make hundreds of dishes (think of how contestant chefs on the show Chopped have to creatively use random ingredients to make meals in a hurry). A customer could even upload a complex recipe to the robots that they had never seen before and have it prepared expertly. Instead of future dining consisting of insect paste and some kind of bland, artificial food, I see things headed in the opposite direction, towards more complexity and variety.

Whenever wormholes are depicted in science fiction, they’re always used as a means of transportation across vast distances. However, the wormholes would have other, revolutionary applications. A tiny wormhole that had one end in a portable electronic device and another end in a large power plant could serve as an effectively unlimited “battery” for the device. Another tiny wormhole with one end in the device and the other in a massive heat sink could also remove effectively unlimited amounts of waste heat from the former. A Star Wars laser pistol that could fire an infinite number of shots, each powerful enough to kill someone, could be built.