After initial overconfidence and battlefield failures, the Russians have pared down their war objectives to conquering only the Russian-majority areas of eastern and southeastern Ukraine. In spite of serious losses, concentrating their forces in those areas led to significant gains of territory, and Russia now controls a swath of Ukraine stretching from Crimea in the south to just east of Kharkiv in the north. The capture of Mariupol provides Russia with a secure overland route to Crimea. Elsewhere, Ukraine has driven Russian troops back across the entire border of Belarus, and back across the northernmost stretch of its border with Russia itself. In a major victory, Ukraine also halted a Russian attempt to capture the northeastern city of Kharkiv. The war is taking economic tolls on both countries, though neither looks like it’s about to lose the capacity to fight soon.
- The last Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol surrendered, after a long and brutal siege. With that, Russia has now taken control of Ukraine’s entire Azov Sea coastline.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-kyiv-prisoners-of-war-71d0dfb842caaaad30b92671637c1f3b - While the West’s sanctions against Russia get a lot of press, Ukraine’s economy is already in much worse shape than Russia’s.
https://time.com/6176748/ukraine-war-economy/ - There have been widespread reports of Russian troops looting things from occupied areas of Ukraine, including expensive farm machinery.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/01/europe/russia-farm-vehicles-ukraine-disabled-melitopol-intl/index.html - Surveillance cameras filmed a group of Russian soldiers shooting two Ukrainian men in their backs at a car dealership, then looting the inside of one of the buildings.
https://youtu.be/1GUrNPPTSWM - In a separate incident, also partly captured by surveillance cameras, Russian soldiers executed eight unarmed Ukrainian civilians in a suburb of Kiev.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/world/europe/russia-bucha-ukraine-executions.html - One of Russia’s second-most advanced tanks, the T-90M, was destroyed in Ukraine. The tank had to be abandoned after suffering battle damage or a malfunction in the field, and then another Russian tank in its unit shot it and blew it up before driving away to prevent Ukrainians from capturing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjx_GMLF–Y - Over 400 Russian troops and dozens of armored vehicles were lost during an attempt to cross the Siverskyi Donets River. Ukrainian forces saw them and fired artillery at them. It is one of Russia’s worst defeats so far in this war.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/05/11/the-russians-lost-nearly-an-entire-battalion-trying-to-cross-a-river-in-eastern-ukraine/?sh=7ce0a1a21689 - ‘SHOCKING video captures the moment a Russian tank is reportedly blown up, sending its turret hurtling 250ft into the air following a Ukrainian missile strike.’
https://youtu.be/QiybJ8UuHXA - Russia is sending obsolescent T-62 tanks towards Ukraine. While many crowed that it proved Russian losses were so high that they had run out of modern tanks, it’s likelier that the T-62s will be used to arm pro-Russian militias in occupied parts of Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNlb8qNykrg - Russia has long equipped those militiamen with weapons and equipment from its old stocks.
https://twitter.com/markito0171/status/1501810755729084421 - Due to manpower losses, Russia has also removed its upper age limit of 40 for people to enlist in its army. However, recruits over that age will only be allowed to serve in specific, non-combat roles.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61619638 - A tourist’s impressions of Ukraine at war.
https://mattlakeman.org/2022/05/15/notes-on-ukraine/ - This March 20 Twitter thread, which predicted Russia’s entire military truck fleet would be incapacitated by now, leaving their frontline forces without supplies, was too dire.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505370275273183239.html - Germany will backfill Greece’s armed forces with newer weapons once Greece donates Soviet-made tanks to Ukraine.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-supply-ifvs-greece-athens-deliver-soviet-weapons-kyiv-scholz-2022-05-31/
“Five, six years ago we wouldn’t be talking about F-35s being adversary air because our adversaries didn’t fly fifth-generation airplanes,” Nahom said. “Well, the Chinese do now. So as the China threat has stepped up, we have to step up our replication.”
https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/light-attack-advanced-training/contracted-adversary-air-training-inadequate-high-end
In the bluntest comment yet about the issue, President Biden has said the U.S. will respond militarily if China attacks Taiwan.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/23/politics/biden-taiwan-china-japan-intl-hnk/index.html
During WWII, the Germans captured countless Allied weapons, from small arms to tanks, and even captured foreign weapon factories. They put it all to use, especially as material shortages worsened and undermined their ability to make their own things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAeb1-bI5gA
A typical scenario: A tank is immobilized by damage, but not destroyed. It breaks down near the front lines or in enemy territory. While the tank is technically repairable, fixing it would take time, and the crewmen decide to abandon it and flee because enemy forces are nearby and could burst out of the treeline or come over the hill at any minute and kill them. Intact tanks are commonly lost to the enemy this way, and there were many such incidents early in WWII that let the Axis and Allies capture examples of each others’ best tanks, and to study them in labs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_131
BAE Systems unveiled a “robot tank” in the form of a remote-controlled M113 with an advanced rocket launcher on top. Since the vehicle doesn’t carry humans inside, its roof could be lowered to save weight and make it a smaller target. I predicted robot tanks would be smaller than their manned equivalents.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/army-tests-uncrewed-m113-armed-with-laser-guided-rocket-launcher
A drone carrying guns into Canada from the US was intercepted after it crashed into a tree. Drone aircraft and autonomous ground vehicles will someday be the ultimate “drug mules,” or mules for transporting any kind of contraband.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/03/drone-us-canada-border-intercepted-bag-guns
A Chinese robotics lab built a swarm of flying drones that could navigate an unfamiliar forest without crashing into any trees or other objects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9ZbipO8vxM
Add-on kits are being developed that let people equip their civilian drones to drop small bombs.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/now-theres-a-drum-magazine-for-dropping-multiple-bombs-from-commercial-drones
This video of a soldier holding a 60mm mortar tube and firing the weapon from that position gives a sense of how much recoil it has. No wonder they’re supposed to be firmly set in the ground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB-r352j2FI
It’s The Future, so where are our jetpacks? Well, even if the technology were affordable and practical, it would be too dangerous to use.
https://youtu.be/KWmTZaGpzTo
The first synthetic dye, mauveine, was invented in 1855. For all of human history until 1855, the only way you could add color to a garment was to soak it in natural dyes. Most natural dyes fade shockingly quickly in the sunlight, and the clothing industry has long considered them obsolete. This means, in the old days, people either wore un-dyed clothes or badly faded clothes. Imagine a lot of shades of brown.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273606710_The_rate_of_fading_of_natural_dyes
A new, diamond-based disc can store as much data as a billion Blu-ray discs. I don’t worry about scenarios where all (or most) human knowledge is lost due to a catastrophe like nuclear war or a solar flare frying all our computer hard drives. Someday, we’ll have small, cheap storage devices that can contain all important information we know of, kind of like a thumbdrive containing full downloads of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. It would just take one of them survive a global catastrophe.
https://gizmodo.com/quantum-computing-diamond-disc-could-store-billion-blu-1848853029
The massive volcanic eruption in Tonga last January left a huge, underwater crater.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61567521
Scientists have grown the first plans in Lunar soil, boding well for human colonization of the Moon. They grew poorly, but something is better than nothing.
https://www.space.com/plants-grown-lunar-soil-apollo-missions
Here’s a long interview with professor Chris Mason, a very fascinating man who envisions the future of space exploration and of humankind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C2tPFCGL1U
A small, private space company called “Rocket Lab” used a helicopter to snag one of their rockets in midair as it slowly parachuted back to Earth after putting satellites in orbit. The recovery technique will let them reuse their space rockets, saving large amounts of money.
https://www.space.com/rocket-lab-helicopter-booster-catch-satellite-launch
Russia has given 12 months notice that it will be ending its role on the International Space Station in retaliation for Western-imposed sanctions. The ISS’ projected lifetime didn’t go beyond the 2020s, and the loss of a major supporter will only up the odds of its demise.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-30/russia-will-quit-international-space-station-over-sanctions
In 1971, a plane taking mapping photos of a remote part of Costa Rica captured one of the clearest images of a UFO to date. The film negatives have been re-scanned, and even higher-res photos derived from it were just released.
https://www.uapmedia.uk/articles/costarica-ufo?format=amp
In 1994, one of the most credible UFO and alien sightings in history happened at a school in Zimbabwe. New evidence from the incident has just been released.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10833597/New-photos-imprints-left-UFO-spotted-Zimbabwe-1994.html
Congress held its first public hearings on UFOs in decades. Military officials even revealed a new video of such an object.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/16/intelligence-agencies-congress-ufo-hearing-00032713
NVIDIA’s Tiny New AI Transforms 2D Photos Into Full 3D Scenes in Mere Seconds
https://singularityhub.com/2022/03/27/nvidias-tiny-new-ai-transforms-photos-into-full-3d-scenes-in-mere-seconds/
Ten years ago, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy wrote an essay decrying the primitive state of computer intelligence. He presented a photo and described all the ways that even the smartest computer would fail to understand what was being depicted in it. This month, another AI researcher named Roman Ring used a new narrow AI called “Flamingo” to correctly interpret every aspect of the same photo.
2012 Karpathy essay: https://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-vision/
2022 Ring response: https://twitter.com/Inoryy/status/1522621712382234624
More on Flamingo: https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/29/flamingo_deepmind_ai/
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says task-specific, narrow AIs are clearly improving at a fast rate, and will soon have major impacts on many spheres of life (workplace, social life, internet (dis)information), but we’re decades away from building a general AI. I agree with him.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-ceo-ai-is-near-a-key-tipping-point-but-generalized-ai-is-still-decades-out/
DeepMind has built an AI that is neither narrow nor general, called “Gato.” They call it a “general-purpose agent.”
https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/A%20Generalist%20Agent/Generalist%20Agent.pdf
An AI researcher at DeepMind, Nando de Frietas, thinks an AGI could be built by making existing machines like Gato more powerful. No fundamental breakthroughs in software are needed.
https://thenextweb.com/news/deepmind-researcher-claims-new-gato-ai-could-lead-to-agi-says-game-is-over
Half of Joe Biden’s Twitter followers are bots. Elon Musk has also paused his plan to buy Twitter because he realized how many of the network’s accounts are bots.
https://www.newsweek.com/half-joe-biden-twitter-followers-are-fake-audit-elon-musk-1707244
Quantum computers will be so powerful in the future that it will be possible to create accurate simulations of groups of individual atoms and their internal and external forces. This will lead to advances in battery design and materials science more generally as engineers will be able to rapidly experiment with all kinds of simulated alloys and element combinations to discover materials that have the optimal properties for different applications.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/how-quantum-simulations-are-set-to-revolutionize-lithium-batteries
The first “exascale” supercomputer, called “Frontier,” has been built. It does 1018 calculations per second. The upper estimate for a human brain is 1016 calculations per second.
https://singularityhub.com/2022/05/30/age-of-exascale-wickedly-fast-frontier-supercomputer-ushers-in-the-next-era-of-computing/
Obesity might now be a bigger public health problem in India than malnourishment. Half the country’s urban population is obese by one estimate.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61558119
Genetic engineering will make common foods like strawberries more flavorful and nutritious.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01117-z
In Madagascar, people of mainland African descent reproduced more than people of Indian Ocean rim descent because the former are more genetically resistant to malaria. Only in the central highlands, where mosquitoes are rarer, do non-Africans still predominate.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03342-5
More proof that human intelligence has a strong genetic component: Most of the world’s mathematicians fall into just 24 scientific ‘families’, one of which dates back to the fifteenth century.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20491
Imagine this: the world is wracked by a mysterious disease that some claim the government deliberately created and released as part of a secret plan to expand its power. Infected people and even those suspected of being infected are forcibly quarantined and arrested. The police are the faceless enforcers of these rules, and wear high-tech helmets that thermographically scan passersby, and visually highlight people with high body temperatures on the police officer’s computerized visor. China has turned into a Deus Ex video game.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202004/biometric-face-scanning-helmets-reading-the-temperatures-of-people-in-crowds-in-china
Exposure to sarin nerve gas is probably what caused Gulf War Syndrome. It’s amazing how such faint contact with a substance can cause chronic illness and early death to so many people. The human body is frail.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61398886
China’s prideful reliance on a homegrown COVID-19 vaccine that turned out to be far less effective than those invented in the West has caused them enormous suffering and economic loss.
https://apnews.com/article/covid-science-technology-health-00e7e5ebf9460bad115b491009b58bef