Does the MiG-21 have an undeserved reputation for being unsafe to fly? Everyone agrees it is a difficult plane to land, but the high number of crashes seem due to poor maintenance and to the planes being used for roles they weren’t designed for.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-wrong-with-the-MiG-21-Why-do-they-keep-crashing-all-the-time
The MiG-29 has excellent aeronautical performance, had an advanced missile system for the 1980s and 90s, but is inferior to Western counterparts like the F-16 in every other way (inefficient engines that are a hassle to fix; weak radar; short range, old-fashioned cockpit that forces the pilot to constantly look at gauges, dials, and paper maps in his lap instead of looking out the canopy for enemies).
https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/truth-about-mig-29-180952403/
What a mess: The Indian Army now imports three rifles from three countries that use three different sized bullets.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/why-did-indian-army-decide-buy-sig-sauers-716-rifle-164532
Here’s a roundup of a few of the U.S. military’s failed military projects.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/5-weapons-us-military-almost-built-disaster-165284
Seventy-five years ago, the first atom bomb was detonated.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-07-16/trinity-a-bomb-75-years-ago
The USS Yorktown was a U.S. aircraft carrier that sank during the pivotal Battle of Midway in 1942. After being bombed by Japanese planes, it started filling with water and leaning to one side. At 2:28 pm on June 4, all of its crew abandoned ship, convinced it would soon sink.
They were wrong. The damage was not fatal, and from the safety of another U.S. warship, they saw that the Yorktown was still afloat hours later. Fourteen hours after leaving, they started returning to the stricken carrier to fix it. They worked feverishly for the next 24 hours, and were making progress pumping water out of the ship, reducing its tilt. Unfortunately, a Japanese sub spotted them and torpedoed the carrier, this time destroying it for good. The sub also blew up another U.S. ship.
This makes me wonder what would have happened if the crew had never abandoned the Yorktown in the first place. That extra 14 hours of time might have enabled them to sufficiently repair and move the ship out of the area to prevent it from falling prey to the sub.
https://navylive.dodlive.mil/2013/06/02/battle-of-midway-timeline-of-significant-events/
The 1941 Pearl Harbor attack cost over 2,000 Americans their lives. In 1944, an accidental explosion involving naval ammunition killed another 163 to 392 people at the Harbor.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/forgotten-history-1944-pearl-harbor-once-again-went-flames-164267
The B-1B bomber has a 1:1 digital simulation, and soon the UH-60L helicopter will, too.
‘It is taking each aircraft apart piece by piece, scanning them using high-fidelity scanners, and creating three-dimensional (3D) computer-aided design (CAD) models of the parts.’
https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/wichita-state-university-creates-digital-models-of-uh-60l-b-1b-aircraft
It costs $10.9 million to train a pilot how to fly an F-22 fighter, and $1.1 million to train one to fly a C-17 cargo plane. All the USAF’s costs for training pilots for its other types of planes are in between. Of course, that’s not the end of it. Those are only the costs of getting a new person UP TO the level of being able to fly their plane. Since people forget things, the pilots have to frequently undergo retraining and re-certification, which means more money spent each year (the RAND analysis doesn’t show those figures) as a continual expense. This means the cost savings of inventing computers that can fly warplanes as well as humans will be massive. There will also be no risk of pilots being shot down over enemy territory, captured, and used as political pawns.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/04/09/the-cost-of-training-u-s-air-force-fighter-pilots-infographic/
The FAA doesn’t know who was responsible for the mass drone formations that flew over the Great Plains last winter.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/34662/faa-documents-offer-unprecedented-look-into-colorado-drone-mystery
Are aliens hibernating until the day the universe gets colder? If they are intelligent machines, then they would generate a lot of heat, and a colder environment would let them radiate that heat more efficiently, allowing them to do more computation. “[If such aliens hibernated until the universe’s temperature dropped from 3 Kelvin to less than 1 Kelvin] they could achieve up to 10^30 times more than if done today.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-new-theory-on-why-we-haven-t-found-aliens-yet
Turing Award-winner John Hopcroft thinks machines will make human workers obsolete, and he points out that, just because humans have been able to climb up the skills ladder in the past faster than machines could automate old jobs, doesn’t mean we will be able to do that forever. Past trends don’t continue indefinitely, and there’s no reason why we couldn’t get into a situation where machines took over 1 million human jobs in a given year, but only 900,000 new jobs for humans were created during that same period. Hopcroft suggests dealing with this by spreading out the remaining jobs among more humans by finding ways to shorten the amount of time the average person works.
https://youtu.be/htfNuoJ3Ecc
Elon Musk is still scared of AI. He thinks they could get smarter than humans in five years, and that things would get “unstable or weird” shortly after. I think his prediction is way too optimistic, and what might happen in five years is a machine passing the Turing Test, meaning it can carry on conversations with people and answer questions as well as a human. Things will get “weird” after that because many people dealing with such machines will mistakenly assume that they are “intelligent,” and perhaps even smarter than humans (e.g. – you’ll be able to ask a machine to do a complex math problem, and it will give you the solution right away). But the Turing Test machines and the autonomous cars we’ll have by the end of this decade will not actually be intelligent, self-aware, or capable of creative thought. Only at the surface level will they seem so. I doubt a true AI will be built earlier than midcentury.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-maureen-dowd-ai-google-deepmind-wargames-2020-7
Musk is one of the world’s richest men, and his business achievements have been extraordinary, but he also has many stalled and failed ventures. Also, Tesla’s high stock price is probably unjustified, and Musk’s claims about future growth and the introduction of fully autonomous car models are likely too optimistic.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-07-22/why-the-stock-market-is-so-high-and-tesla-even-higher
A coast-to-coast network of fast charging stations that can recharge an electric car battery in 20 minutes has been completed in the U.S.
https://mashable.com/article/electric-vehicle-charging-cross-country/
Intel is falling behind other computer chip manufacturers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53525710
An experiment shows that sound waves can be used to move tiny objects around inside of bodies.
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/09/2011999117
The discovery that some colon cancers are caused by the bacterium F. nucleatum raises the possibility that a vaccine could be created, saving lives.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/22/bacteria-and-colon-cancer
A new algorithm can look at cell biopsy images and diagnose prostate cancer with almost perfect accuracy.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(20)30159-X/abstract
A farm combine can weigh over 20 tons. As the vehicles slow drive over farm fields, their tires compact the soil, damaging its ability to grow more crops. Smaller farm robots wouldn’t do this.
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-big-wheel-ruts-economic-losses.html
Solar panels are really helping Afghanistan’s heroin farmers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53450688
An experimental trimaran generates electricity from the ocean’s waves.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200718-the-revolutionary-electric-boat-powered-by-the-ocean
Flooding has become a worse problem in New Orleans and some other coastal areas because of “land subsidence.” As humans pump aquifer water, oil, and natural gas out of the ground, all the little voids empty out, the dirt compacts, and the ground level sinks. This problem is not connected to global warming, and shows that some flooding is not due to rising sea levels or worsening storms.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0518/How-fast-is-New-Orleans-sinking-Faster-and-faster-says-new-study
The Mediterranean Sea was warmer during the Roman Era than it is today.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67281-2
Humans might have migrated to the Americas from Asia 10,000 years earlier than is widely believed.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2509-0
Genetic studies of black people in the Americas have revealed new information about the slave trade, and about the pervasiveness of white masters raping their female slaves.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53527405
Cosmic rays are responsible for the right-handed chirality of DNA. If the rays are omnipresent in the galaxy and have the same energetic properties everywhere, alien DNA should share our chirality.
DNA and RNA are also more structurally suited to their roles storing genetic information than any other type of biomolecule, so it’s likely that all but the most primitive types of aliens will use DNA and RNA.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8483125/DNA-living-things-right-handed-bias-cosmic-rays-blasting-young-Earth.html
But what if aliens used some completely different type of biomolecule to store their genetic information? Well, then they’d probably be biochemically inefficient compared to us.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/09/18/and-now-for-a-bit-of-quantum-mechanics
Silicon-based, ORGANIC life forms are unlikely to exist.
‘Only a tiny fraction of the theoretical chemical space of silicon chemistry can be stable in water (Section 3.2.1). In fact, some of the commonly held views about the low diversity of silicon chemistry come directly from the instability of silicon chemistry in water. Silicon chemistry in water also requires substantially more energy to access than equivalent carbon chemistry (Section 3.3). For all of the above reasons, we argue in this subsection that silicon is unlikely to be a scaffold element or a common heteroatom element in water.’
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/10/6/84
Infrared cameras can see through some plastics and fabrics that look opaque to the human eye.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/12072610/oneplus-phone-x-ray-camera-clothes-plastic-banned/
Here’s an amazing upscaling of footage of Tokyo street scenes from the 1910s. Even better video reconstructions than this will be available in the future.
https://youtu.be/MQAmZ_kR8S8
In 1969, Richard Nixon’s speechwriters prepared an address for him to read to the nation in case the Apollo 11 moon landing failed. Using deepfake technology, we can see what it would have looked like.
https://youtu.be/LWLadJFI8Pk
In the 1970s, there was an ambitious project to compile a 6 million-page history of America from its founding to WWI into a document called the Library of American Civilization. It would have been in “ultrafiche” format, with each ultrafiche being 3″ x 5″ and containing up to 1,000 page images, shrunk from original size by a factor of 55 to 90. The idea was to distribute the document, along with ultrafiche readers, to every major library in America.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED082753.pdf
Einstein and Leo Szilard invented three refrigerators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpwyU96budw
Donald Trump was right! His prediction that either Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden would be the Democratic nominee for President was correct.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6930369/Trump-predicts-Biden-Sanders-2020-Dem-finalists.html
This prediction from May turned out wrong: ‘Professor Carl Heneghan from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University said: “I think by the end of June we’ll be looking at the data and finding it difficult to find people [in Britain] with [COVID-19], if the current trends continue in the deaths.”‘
The daily death toll never reached zero in June–the lowest point was 25 deaths on June 29th. Also, on the last day of the month, 689 Britions were diagnosed with COVID-19.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11693720/coronavirus-study-predicts-date-uk-will-have-no-cases/
This is a smart, new metric: Number of positive results per 1,000 COVID-19 tests. It corrects for the fact that the number of daily tests is growing. That metric, along with the number of excess deaths above the expected baseline, is the most foolproof for understanding the scope and trend of the pandemic.
https://reason.com/2020/07/21/trump-is-wrong-spreading-epidemic-is-responsible-for-most-of-the-rise-in-covid-19-cases/
Bill Gates thinks the U.S. should send all its pre-teens back to school this fall, in spite of the disease risk.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/28/bill-gates-on-back-to-school-during-coronavirus-pandemic.html
Preliminary results from one of the COVID-19 vaccines are good.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/20/more-pfizer-phase-i-results-antibodies-viral-mutations-and-t-cells