Posted on by Eddie

Interesting articles, March 2022

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has gone badly. In spite of Russia’s fearsome reputation and its recent military modernization, its battlefield performance has been disappointing and marred by many mistakes. The Ukrainians have fought harder than anyone anticipated, and have inflicted serious losses on their enemy. What was supposed to have been a quick, surgical operation to replace Ukraine’s regime with one friendlier to Moscow is turning into a bloody stalemate. Western sanctions against Russia for the invasion have been very severe, setting the country on course for major economic problems within a few months. It’s clear that Putin badly miscalculated when he decided to launch the war. Here’s a roundup of war articles:

A record high percent of Irish people want their country to join NATO. I think the alliance should focus on “infilling” rather than antagonizing Russia by expanding into ex-Soviet republics.
https://www.politico.eu/article/poll-more-irish-want-to-join-nato/

An interesting bit about NATO standards:
‘Finally, some national standards are recognized as not inferior to NATO standards and do not require revision (in Ukraine, for instance, these are those related to potable water quality). The fact that compliance with all NATO standards is not the norm even for leading states members is evidenced by the fact that no country of the Alliance has achieved the mark of 100%, although in some, including Germany (91%), Great Britain (83%), France, Norway (81% each), Canada (76%), the degree of the implementation of standards is very high…Let us assume that if the current pace of implementation is maintained, Ukraine will implement at least 90% of the existing standards of the Alliance in approximately 13–14 years.’
https://rpr.org.ua/en/news/ukraine-and-nato-standards-progress-under-zelenskyy-s-presidency/

Britain is planning on upgrading its tank fleet to indigenously made Challenger 3’s, but it’s not economical for them to keep such a small fleet of one-off tanks that are specific to their country. They should switch to either the U.S. M1 Abrams or German Leopard 2, and maybe sell their Challenger 2’s to smaller NATO countries, like the Balkan states.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44927/british-armys-next-generation-challenger-3-tank-is-now-under-construction

American and Chinese stealth fighters have encountered each other during patrols over the South China Sea.
https://www.flightglobal.com/defence/f-35s-have-encountered-j-20s-over-east-china-sea-usaf-general/147936.article

The U.S. Navy recovered an F-35C stealth fighter that crashed off an aircraft carrier and sank to the bottom of the ocean. If not for this, a Chinese ship would have hauled it up.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44560/navys-crashed-f-35c-recovered-from-the-bottom-of-the-south-china-sea

The U.S. Navy wants to start decommissioning its expensive, defective Littoral Combat Ships starting next year. The oldest one is only seven years old! The project has been a disaster.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44811/littoral-disaster-navy-wants-to-retire-10-littoral-combat-ships-according-to-report

This German antiaircraft system is basically a giant shotgun meant to destroy drone swarms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5_F4_Eod8

The Soviet VVA-14 was one of the weirdest but potentially most versatile aircraft ever built. Its designer had plans for even more dramatic variants that weren’t built.
https://youtu.be/UD7xiWWs-bs

NASA briefly experimented with “passive” communications satellites that were large balloons made out of radar-reflecting materials. One ground station would aim a powerful radio at it and broadcast a signal, which would bounce off the balloon and deflect at such an angle that another ground station thousands of miles distant would receive it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo

The Lowy Institute predicts that China’s economic growth with sharply decelerate during the 2020s, and that the country will stagnate starting in the 2030s.
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/revising-down-rise-china

‘Oil demand will peak in 2025, years earlier than previously expected, the International Energy Agency said in its World Energy Outlook on Tuesday.’
https://fortune.com/2021/10/13/oil-demand-peak-2025-world-invest-trillions-renewables-iea-world-energy-outlook/

The “Hall–Héroult process” allowed pure aluminum to be extracted from bauxite for much lower cost than previous methods. Its discovery in 1886 marked the start of aluminum becoming a common material. The Hall–Héroult process was crucial to the development of heavier-than-air aircraft, as it allowed the Wright Brothers to make an engine that was light enough to fit on a plane while still being powerful enough to propel it.
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/aluminumprocess.html
https://www.wright-brothers.org/Information_Desk/Just_the_Facts/Engines_&_Props/1903_Engine.htm

Using CRISPR, scientists were able to self-fertilize a female mouse with her own eggs. One of the resulting 12 zygotes lived to adulthood. It was not a clone of her. A clone shares 100% of your DNA, and a natural child shares 50% of your DNA. This new technique could be used to make offspring that shared an unnatural amount of your DNA, like 75 or 85%.
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-mammalian-offspring-derived-unfertilized-egg.html

How will humans change in the next 10,000 years?
https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2022/03/02/how_will_humans_change_in_the_next_10000_years_819486.html

My predictions about humans in 12,022 A.D.:
-There might still be some Homo sapiens, though they will be genetically engineered. Imagine today’s all-star athlete who graduated from high school at 17, went to MIT on an academic scholarship, and is also a model on the side being the average human by then. We could breed with them.
-There will be “human-looking” people that will have radically different genetics and anatomical/physiological features from us. Imagine a person who looks externally normal, but has bird lungs, octopus eyes, and a different number of chromosomes than you. They will be so different that they will count as different species, and we won’t be able to breed with them.
-There will be intelligent but nonhuman-looking life forms that are the products of many iterations of genetic engineering. Imagine something like a horse-sized spider with a big brain occupying most of its torso. It could trace its lineage back to a normal human that is alive today.
-Some members of those three groups of intelligent life forms will be meshed with technology that augments their abilities. There might be a Homo sapien with synthetic, self-healing organs that are superior to his old, natural organs, there might be a “human-looking” Homo neosapien that also has brain implants to make him smarter, and there might be intelligent spiders with nanomachines circulating in their bloodstreams to assist with various bodily processes.

‘[By 1,000 years from now] The bulk of technology will remain simple or semi-simple, while a smaller portion will continue to complexify greatly. I expect our cities and homes a thousand years hence to be recognizable, rather than unrecognizable. As long as we inhabit bodies approximately our size – a few meters and 50 kilos — the bulk of the technology that will surround us need not be crazily more complex. And there is good reason to expect we’ll remain the same size, despite intense genetic engineering and downloading to robots. Our body size is weirdly almost exactly in the middle of the size of the universe. The smallest things we know about are approximately 30 orders of magnitude smaller than ourselves, and the largest structures in the universe are about 30 orders of magnitude bigger. We inhabit a middle scale that is sympathetic to sustainable flexibility in the universe’s current physics. Bigger bodies encourage rigidity, smaller ones encourage empheralization. As long as we own bodies – and what sane being does not want to be embodied? – the infrastructure technology we already have will continue (in general) to work. Roads of stone, buildings of modified plant material and earth, not that different from our cities and homes 2,000 years ago. Some visionaries might imagine complex living buildings in the future, for instance, but most average structures are unlikely to be more complex than the formerly living plants we already use. They don’t need to. I think there is a “complex enough” restraint. Technologies need not complexify to be useful in the future. Danny Hillis, computer inventor, once confided to me that he believed that there’s a good chance that 1,000 years from now computers might still be running programming code from today, say a unix kernel and TCP/IP. They almost certainly will be binary digital. Like bacteria, or cockroaches, these simpler technologies remain simple, and remain viable, because they work. They don’t have to get more complex.’
https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-arc-of-comp/

What happens if you load an enormous amount of data on chemical reactions and human biology into an AI, and then task it with finding lethal compounds against us?

‘In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible. These new molecules were predicted to be more toxic, based on the predicted LD50 values, than publicly known chemical warfare agents.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9

The newest language models are measurably better than GPT-3, which was only released 18 months ago. However, they’re still a long way from being able to pass the Turing Test.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yYkrbS5iAwdEQyynW/how-do-new-models-from-openai-deepmind-and-anthropic-perform

This economic model suggests we’re probably 140 years away (or, seven more doublings of global GDP away) from inventing an AGI. Once it is invented, the GDP growth rate will sharply accelerate within 10 years.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ftdCgGmkQ3bPyDadA/phase-transitions-and-agi

A new poll on Americans’ attitudes towards futuristic technologies like autonomous cars, human genetic engineering, and brain implants has been conducted. I’m surprised at how positively they view them.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/03/17/ai-and-human-enhancement-americans-openness-is-tempered-by-a-range-of-concerns/

For the first time, a person in a “locked-in” medical state has been able to communicate, thanks to a brain implant.
http://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/for-the-first-time-a-completely-locked-in-patient-can-communicate-thanks-to-brain-implant-359819

This analysis predicts that the U.S. trucking industry will probably switch to a “transfer-hub” model where autonomous trucks transport goods over long, simple highway routes, while human drivers in smaller trucks move the cargoes over shorter distances at both ends.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01103-w

People prefer mates that are similar to themselves.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28774-y

Not only is IQ heritable, but specific types of cognitive talents are, too.
http://biorxiv.org/lookup/doi/10.1101/2022.02.05.479237

Small doses of radiation might actually benefit human health thanks to a process called “hormesis.” Note that nuclear power is so expensive partly because the power plants aren’t allowed to release any radiation at all to the surrounding environment, and that requirement is predicated on the assumption that any amount of radiation exposure hurts people.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/832949v1

The first person to receive an implanted pig heart has died. He survived for two months with the animal organ.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2022/03/09/human-pig-heart-transplant-patient-dies/9437650002/

I agree that the fake meat industry has been overhyped. Though meat substitutes are cheaper and more convincing than ever, they will not render meat consumption extinct. Not even close. Lab-grown meats will eventually eliminate the need to kill animals for food, but the technology won’t be good enough until near the end of this century (it’s not as good or advancing as fast as its contemporary cheerleaders claim).
https://reason.com/2022/03/05/the-fake-meat-revolution-has-stalled/

Computers have translated pig noises into a basic “vocabulary” of emotional and mental states. A variety of technologies will let us communicate with animals in the future, and possibly to even share thoughts with them.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07174-8

Bulldogs are so inbred that genetic testing might be needed to prevent further breeding of unhealthy members of the species.
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/15/1085173405/bulldogs-health-breed-ban

There’s a plan to use genetic technology to resurrect the extinct Tasmanian tiger species. The last one died in 1936, and full genomes have been recovered from preserved tissue samples.
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/the-9-steps-to-de-extincting-australia-s-thylacine

“DAM-ATOLL” was a proposed structure that would generate electricity from ocean waves.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1979mroe.proc…86H/abstract

North Korea still operates some Japanese-made trains from the 1930s. Thanks to the country’s socialist economy, labor is practically free, making it financially possible to keep fixing the trains in spite of their age. Once robots have made labor free across the world, will it become common for manufactured objects of all kinds to stay in service much longer than they do now?
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2021/07/blast-from-past-north-koreas-whacky.html

The German gunboat Graf von Goetzen was launched in 1915 and sent to Tanzania (then a German colony) to dominate Lake Tanganyika. Though the Germans left, the ship didn’t, and it remains in service to this day as a ferry, renamed the Liemba.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Liemba

We now know of 5,000 exoplanets. I remember when we discovered the first one, and what a big deal it was.
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/22/1088009414/there-are-more-than-5-000-confirmed-exoplanets-beyond-our-solar-system-nasa-says

There’s a new scientific paper claiming that ivermectin doesn’t treat COVID-19. Instead, it kills parasitic worms in people, boosting their immune systems just enough to let them survive COVID-19. Parasites are only common in tropical areas.
https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.3079

The pandemic isn’t over: China just locked down one of its biggest and most important cities due to a surge in COVID-19 cases. It will have global economic consequences.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-60893070

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