Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, beating Donald Trump by a comfortable margin. As a rule, I don’t talk about partisan politics on this blog, but I think it’s OK to post some noteworthy failed predictions about the outcome:
‘America’s most accurate bellwether counties, regions that have a reputation for accurately picking the president, got the presidential election completely wrong.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55062413
“I see the president winning with a minimum [electoral vote count in the] high 270s and possibly going up significantly higher based on just how big this undercurrent is,” Cahaly told host Sean Hannity.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/robert-cahaly-trafalgar-group-2020-election-polls
‘Democrats May LOSE The Election As New Poll Shows Democrats Are Quitting, Biden Warns Polls WRONG’
https://youtu.be/PjjRxPglJmE
‘Tom Del Beccaro: A Trump ‘surprise’ victory is in the offing — here are the 10 tea leaves pointing to it’
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-surprise-victory-tom-del-beccaro
Michael Moore correctly predicted that Biden’s lead among voters in swing states had been significantly exaggerated thanks to polling errors and “shy” Trump supporters, but the error wasn’t big enough to lead to a Trump win, which was Moore’s main prediction.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/michael-moore-trump-2020-election-polls-vote-undercounted-biden-b1442106.html
…OK, enough of that! Back to the non-icky stuff.
Is nothing sacred? Engineers have built a robot that can beat the best humans at the sport of curling.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8788915/Robot-named-Curly-uses-AI-beat-one-worlds-best-curling-teams-game.html
The future of agriculture is farm robots that can monitor and care for every plant, in real time. Fewer pesticides will be needed if robots can mechanically kill animal and plant pests, and less fertilizer will need to be applied if robots can directly introduce smaller amounts to plants, in ways that will guarantee high absorption of it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54538849
Elon Musk in 2015: “Maybe five or six years from now I think we’ll be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-on-the-future-of-driving-2014-10
Four years later: ‘People in a passing car got video of a Tesla driver seemingly sleeping behind the wheel of a Tesla on I-5 near Santa Clarita on Saturday.’
https://abc7.com/tesla-driver-asleep-guy-in-man-navigate-on-autopilot/5488646/
Here’s an impressive video of Chinese army field tests of new UAVs. A multiple-launch rocket system can rapidly create a swarm of them, and the members of the swarm can communicate with each other and fly in formations.
https://youtu.be/QamGaDNczJw
Azerbaijan won its latest war with Armenia, and captured most of the disputed territory of “Nagorno-Karabakh.” While most of the people in that territory are ethnically Armenian, it has been internationally recognized as belonging to Azerbaijan since 1990. The outcome of the war is not so surprising since Azerbaijan’s population and GDP are three and four times bigger (respectively) than Armenia’s.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/azerbaijan-armenia-peace-deal-could-be-the-diplomatic-breakthrough-the-region-needs/
Many official and unofficial photos and videos of combat during the war were uploaded to the internet, and a group of volunteer military enthusiasts used them to count how many military vehicles each side lost. Basic takeaways: Armenia lost more, and the T-72 has weak armor.
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2020/09/the-fight-for-nagorno-karabakh.html
Does the Nagorno-Karabakh war prove that tanks are obsolete, and UAVs at last reign supreme? Probably not. Tank losses to UAVs would have been much lower if the Armenian and Azerbaijani commanders been smarter about how they used them, and if the tank units had some number of mobile antiaircraft defenses.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/09/30/armor-attrition-in-nagorno-karabakh-battle-not-a-sign-us-should-give-up-on-tanks-experts-say/
If you’re putting a tank into long-term storage and don’t want it rusting, why not put it in a big, plastic bag?
https://thedeaddistrict.blogspot.com/2020/10/a-sealed-storage-bag-for-preservation.html
The U.S. Navy’s P-8A Poseidon is already a versatile plane, but might be getting upgrades allowing it to bomb land targets and launch long-range missiles.
https://youtu.be/LkgEmY_85x4
The C-17 is merely a cargo aircraft, but a relatively simple upgrade package could let it launch long-range cruise missiles.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36878/air-force-c-17-launched-a-pallet-of-mock-cruise-missiles-during-recent-arsenal-plane-test
North Korea unveiled several copies of advanced American and Russian combat vehicles during a recent military parade. While outwardly similar in appearance, the copies are surely much less advanced and less capable.
https://thedeaddistrict.blogspot.com/2020/10/copy-paste-from-north-korea.html
A recent U.S. Army experiment showed that two-man tanks are a bad idea. The crewmen are overloaded with tasks, and their battlefield performance drops.
Our current tanks have four-man crews, and Russian tanks have three-man crews (the human shell loader is replaced by a machine). There’s endless discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of those arrangements, with no resolution. It seems to balance out overall.
To my knowledge, no army in the world has five-man tanks.
https://thedeaddistrict.blogspot.com/2020/11/more-info-about-us-armys-optionally.html
The U.S.S. Ticonderoga, which entered service in 1983 and inaugurated a class of advanced missile cruisers that serves to this day, is being scrapped. I think it’s important enough to be preserved as a museum ship. Are any of the other 22 of the ships still in service worthy of that? Probably not.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36971/the-navys-first-aegis-warship-uss-ticonderoga-is-being-scrapped
India has also decided to scrap its first aircraft carrier, in spite of the ship’s long and storied service. It would be another great museum ship.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36835/historic-indian-carrier-set-to-be-scrapped-after-58-years-of-service-with-two-navies
The small U.S. aircraft carrier that was severely damaged by fire in August will be scrapped because it’s too expensive to fix.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37880/navy-will-spend-around-30-million-to-scarp-fire-damaged-uss-bonhomme-richard
America’s “war” in Afghanistan has been going on so long that it is older than some of the U.S. troops who are now fighting it. Some of those troops’ parents also fought in the war years ago. (These things are also true for Afghan soldiers and insurgents.)
https://www.stripes.com/news/years-after-they-fought-in-afghanistan-us-troops-watch-as-their-children-deploy-to-the-same-war-1.647659
The “Firestick” might be the weirdest technological dead-end niche product ever spawned by people trying to exploit loopholes in U.S. hunting laws.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/10/05/federal-ammunitions-new-firestick-revolutionizing-the-muzzleloader/
Here’s some interesting information about the nature of color vision. Birds and reptiles can see more colors and have a greater variety of body pigmentations than mammals because the latter have had several million extra years to adapt to bright, sunny environments. Mammals only emerged from subterranean, and/or nocturnal lifestyles where color perception is not advantageous relatively recently. Genetic engineering could of course change this state of affairs very quickly.
https://www.quora.com/There-are-green-reptiles-insects-fishes-amphibians-but-no-green-mammals-What-is-the-reason-for-this
A genetic mutation has been found that sharply raises the odds of getting liver cancer, and it is overrepresented among people of Celtic descent.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/common-disorder-increases-chances-of-developing-liver-cancer-research-1.4418161
We now know which genes let us smell the odors of fish, cinnamon, licorice, and lemon. People with rare mutations to those genes can’t smell them.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)31343-9
Here’s a “Periodic Table of Smells,” which correlates the smells of different organic compounds with their molecular structures.
https://jameskennedymonash.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/table-of-organic-compounds-and-their-smells-w12.pdf
Experiments show that hundreds of thousands of surgeries done in the U.S. each year are unnecessary since they are no better at fixing health problems than placebo surgeries or simple lifestyle changes, like losing weight to ease pressure on weak joints.
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2020/11/07/some_surgeries_are_performed_millions_of_times_per_year_even_though_they_are_no_better_than_placebo.html
China now has a human cryonics company.
https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/article/3103054/freezing-bodies-reanimation-china-and-why-countrys
A man who died of hypothermia during a mountain hike was revived at a hospital thanks to an “extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine,” which took over for his heart and lungs by oxygenating his blood outside of his body and pumping it through his blood vessels.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/he-came-back-from-the-dead-mount-rainier-missing-hiker-starts-to-recover-after-getting-rescued-amid-whiteout-conditions/
In a breakthrough for molecular biology, computers can now simulate protein folding with 90% accuracy. It will only improve further with time.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55133972
This is probably the most credible, anti-nuclear power articles I’ve read. Switching to 100% fission power would probably require more uranium and other rare elements than we can economically mine from the ground and the oceans, and it might be shortsighted to exhaust all of our rare element sources now as we might find better uses for them in the distant future. Finding sites to build the new reactors would also be challenge since they need to be near bodies of water, and those areas are already crowded with people. The article is even skeptical of nuclear fusion, and brings up the problem of explosive tritium dust particles, which is new to me.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0096340212459124
‘In the early 1900s, a new invention called the telewriter swept on the scene, allowing people to hand-write messages that could be electronically translated by a robotic arm at a destination up to 50 miles away.’
https://gizmodo.com/this-telewriter-transmitted-handwriting-across-long-dis-1845641043
The cheapest way to move cargo is by ship, followed by rail, and the distant third is by road. Autonomous, electric trucks might let road displace rail.
https://research.ark-invest.com/hubfs/1_Download_Files_ARK-Invest/White_Papers/ArkInvest_101420_Whitepaper_BadIdeas2020.pdf
In 2009, sci-fi author Charlie Stross made several accurate predictions about what the state of computing hardware would be in 2020. It should give weight to the other predictions he made for 2030 and beyond.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/05/login_2009_keynote_gaming_in_t.html
From 2004: ‘A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver
The “Grand Tack Hypothesis” says that Jupiter’s orbit has changed over the eons, and at one point, it was almost as close to the Sun as Mars. The gas giant’s powerful gravity ejected most of the asteroids in its path out of the Solar System, which was bad news for Mars since they would have otherwise collided with the planet and built up its size, perhaps to Earth-like proportions. Jupiter then drifted outward to its current, distant orbit. Had the Great Tack not happened, Mars would be a much bigger planet today, and much likelier to support life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_tack_hypothesis
There are such things as “horseshoe orbits.”
https://www.livescience.com/what-if-earth-shared-orbit-another-planet.html
The International Space Station has been continuously inhabited for 20 years.
https://www.space.com/how-to-destroy-a-space-station-safely
There’s light at the end of the tunnel: Three different vaccines against COVID-19 have passed clinical trials.
https://www.businessinsider.com/moderna-designed-coronavirus-vaccine-in-2-days-2020-11
Why has Britain been the source of so many bad predictions about the pandemic?
From September: ‘The evidence we’ve presented leads us to believe there is unlikely to be a second wave…’
https://lockdownsceptics.org/addressing-the-cv19-second-wave/
From late November: ‘50,000 COVID-19 deaths and rising. How Britain failed to stop the second wave’
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-britain-newwave/