The successes of the Anglo-American codebreakers of WWII get a lot of attention today, but their German counterparts had successes of their own.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/revealed-careless-mistake-bletchley-s-enigma-code-crackers-cost-allied-lives-5360971.html
A related article about other Anglo-American blunders that cost many lives during the WWII Battle of the Atlantic.
https://legionmagazine.com/en/2011/02/an-american-blunder-navy-part-43/
Here’s an in-depth video about the Israeli M-50 “Super Sherman” tank. They were mishmashes of leftover M4 tank components.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KyNYO03g1E
In a testament to Pentagon waste, the first Littoral Combat Ship–really just a frigate that was loaded up with too much unproven technology–has been decommissioned after only 13 years of service.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42582/the-first-littoral-combat-ship-has-been-decommissioned-after-just-13-years-of-service
Sadly, the former U.S. aircraft carriers Kitty Hawk and John F. Kennedy won’t be turned into museum ships and will be scrapped instead.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42643/the-navys-last-conventionally-powered-aircraft-carriers-have-been-sold-for-literal-pennies
China has converted several of its decommissioned 1950s-era fighter planes into drones. In a conflict, they would be used sacrificially for reconnaissance and to distract the enemy. I think “drone upgrade kits” could be used to breathe new life into all sorts of obsolete weapons, though they wouldn’t be as effective as new weapons designed from the outset to be crewless. I’m reminded of the German WWII practice of using captured enemy weapons, and even continuing the manufacture the better ones after taking over the countries where their factories were located. If the U.S. Army captured a bunch of Soviet- or Chinese-made tanks in a future war, the old excuse about how we can’t use them because we don’t know how they work or how to maintain them would disappear. The robots would figure it out.
https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2021/10/20/china-shows-off-drones-recycled-from-soviet-era-fighter-jets/
China tested an intercontinental, hypersonic missile that could, if developed further, evade U.S. antimissile systems. While this development should give the American military pause, it should also not be overestimated.
https://www.defensenews.com/land/2021/10/20/chinese-hypersonic-missile-test-unlikely-to-trigger-arms-race-experts-say/
A really bad but plausible war scenario would involve Taiwan surrendering after a Chinese invasion faster than the U.S. can move large numbers of troops there to fight. If Taiwan calls it quits after barely putting up a fight, it will be very hard for politicians over here to justify a costly war of liberation for apparent cowards who didn’t value their own freedom enough to fight hard.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/taiwan-military-readiness-china-threat-us-defense-11635174187
Like several previous attempts, the Pentagon’s latest project to equip ground troops with augmented vision goggles has failed.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42739/army-halts-widely-hyped-multi-billion-dollar-advanced-augmented-reality-goggle-program
A reality check for anti-American declinists.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2021-10-18/russia-no-mideast-superpower
In an ultimate Steampunk moment, several British battleships fired a fusillade of shells at a German zeppelin during the 1916 Battle of Jutland.
http://www.avalanchepress.com/Zeppelin_Scouting.php
The “Cyclocrane” was a unique airship built in the 1980s to lift heavy loads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiU71GFs4Fs
This prediction from Kremlin “experts” that Putin would step down due to Parkinson’s disease didn’t age well.
https://www.the-sun.com/news/1752270/vladamir-putin-resign-next-year-health/
‘Currently, we produce ∼1021 digital bits of information annually on Earth. Assuming a 20% annual growth rate, we estimate that after ∼350 years from now, the number of bits produced will exceed the number of all atoms on Earth, ∼1050. After ∼300 years, the power required to sustain this digital production will exceed 18.5 × 1015 W, i.e., the total planetary power consumption today, and after ∼500 years from now, the digital content will account for more than half Earth’s mass, according to the mass-energy–information equivalence principle.’
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0019941
China has its own version of GPT-3.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/scaling/2021-10-11-xinzhiyuan-inspursource10gpt245b.html
Using a language “entropy” model, this guy predicts that the first machine will probably pass the Turing Test by early 2025.
https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8329/human-level-language-models/
The “International Phonetic Alphabet” is an alphabet containing one letter for every sound that exists in every human language. Languages as diverse as English, Mandarin and Arabic can all be written IPA, with no distortion. The IPA even has symbols representing the “click” sounds that some tribal African languages have. If everyone in the world used the IPA, it would make it easier to learn other languages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTzkT3j9pHI
‘Yet despite the complexity of birdsong and whale song, animals don’t seem to have that much to say to each other. “Stay away from my territory,” “Beware of the leopard” and “Come mate with me” sum up most of the messages we expect from animals. They could combine their sounds in almost infinitely varied ways, but they use just the tiniest fraction of these possibilities.’
https://www.wsj.com/articles/alien-languages-may-not-be-entirely-alien-to-us-11616817660
The “Waddington Effect” says that too much maintenance on a machine actually reduces the machine’s reliability because of the nonzero chances that workers will accidentally damage the machine during maintenance, or that a newly installed part will be defective.
http://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2011/03/waddington-effect.html
In the 1970s and 80s, it was believed that hovercraft would make traditional ships obsolete. That never happened, principally thanks to hovercrafts’ high costs.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a16836/hovercrafts-failed/
The technology used in airplane black boxes and in aircraft traffic control systems is shockingly primitive. Your smartphone is much more advanced.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/09/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-black-box
Tesla is now a trillion-dollar company.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-briefly-hits-1-trillion-market-cap-as-shares-rally-to-record-high-171840451.html
Someone is keeping close track of Elon Musk’s future predictions, and is collecting betting odds of their success.
https://www.metaculus.com/visualizations/elon-musk-timeline/
Twelve predictions for the future of music. Imagine a lifelike hologram of Elvis singing in your local bar.
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/12-predictions-for-the-future-of
I agree with almost all of Erik Hoel’s predictions for 2050.
https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/futurists-have-their-heads-in-the
Foldable QLED sheets bring us a step closer to active camouflage clothing.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-021-00643-4
‘What does ultraviolet look like? Prof Stark possesses UV vision because he is aphakic in one eye and, with Professor Karel Tan, has published research on the nearest visible equivalent. His conclusion is that it looks whitish blue or, for some wavelengths, a whitish violet. This appears to be because the three types of colour receptor (red, green and blue) have similar sensitivity to ultraviolet, so it comes out as a mixture of all three – basically white, but slightly blue because the blue sensors are somewhat better at picking up UV.’
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2002/may/30/medicalscience.research
The peer-review process is good at weeding out the worst papers, but that’s it. The “quality” ratings that peer reviewers assign to published papers are highly subjective, and there’s little positive correlation between a published paper’s quality score and its eventual “impact” score, which refers to how many times other academics cite the paper in their own work. A large fraction of papers that can only get published in second-tier journals actually belong in top-tier journals, and vice versa.
http://arxiv.org/abs/2109.09774
In birds, the mother carries the sex-determining chromosome instead of the father.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system
‘During a routine analysis of biological samples from two California condors in the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s managed breeding program, scientists confirmed that each condor chick was genetically related to the respective female condor (dam) that laid the egg from which it hatched. However, in a surprising twist, they found that neither bird was genetically related to a male—meaning both chicks were biologically fatherless; and accounted for the first two instances of asexual reproduction, or parthenogenesis, to be confirmed in the California condor species.’
https://stories.sandiegozoo.org/2021/10/28/san-diego-zoo-wildlife-alliance-conservation-scientists-report-first-confirmed-hatchings-of-two-california-condor-chicks-from-unfertilized-eggs/
A good argument in favor of human embryo genetic screening, even with today’s limited technology.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2021/10/embryo-screening-and-risk-calculus.html
For the first time, a pig kidney was transplanted into a human and not rejected by the person’s immune system. The organ had been genetically modified to trick the human immune system. This technology might end organ shortages, saving countless lives and sparing millions from suffering.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-surgeons-successfully-test-pig-kidney-transplant-human-patient-2021-10-19/
Here’s a relatively readable summary of what the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for (improved techniques for synthesizing molecules with specific chiralities).
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/organocatalysis-nobel
Facebook is training computers to recognize the tasks people are doing, in the hopes that the algorithms can someday be installed in augmented reality glasses.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58896551
Facebook has rebranded itself as “Meta,” to emphasize the company’s new focus on technologies and services beyond social media.
https://apnews.com/article/facebook-meta-mark-zuckerberg-technology-business-5ad543ab7780caae435935f0aca9fac6
Turboprops and piston plane engines look the same on the outside, but are completely different on the inside: A turboprop engine is actually a jet engine that spins an externally mounted propeller. A piston engine, on the other hand, is fundamentally the same thing as a car engine, though the components are usually laid out differently from their analogs in cars.
https://youtu.be/CTsBi6WOGWQ
1924 U.S. government report “Jet Propulsion for Airplanes”: ‘But to return from such speculations to the quantitative results of the computations, there does not appear to be, at present, any prospect whatever that jet propulsion of the sort here considered will ever be of practical value, even for military purposes.’
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19930091225/downloads/19930091225.pdf
The “Solar Power Satellite by means of Arbitrarily Large Phased Array” is a proposed satellite that could generate enough power to satisfy 1/3 of humanity’s total consumption.
https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/716070main_Mankins_2011_PhI_SPS_Alpha.pdf
A Russian crew just filmed the first movie in space.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58944660
China has put a new space station into orbit.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/16/1046742793/china-space-station-docking-astronauts
William Shatner became the oldest person to ever go into space.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58885555
NASA Chief Bill Nelson acknowledges that the USS Nimitz UFO sightings may have been alien spaceships.
https://twitter.com/UAP1949/status/1451803056421670913
South Korea builds nuclear power plants more cheaply than the U.S. or anyone else. There’s no reason why safe, advanced reactors can’t be built today at affordable cost.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106
Advocates of nuclear fusion power have a habit of deceptively expressing how efficient their experimental reactors are, making it look like they are much closer to the energy “break-even” point than they really are.
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nuclear-fusion-power.html
California’s banning of gas-powered lawn machines shows how badly we need to invent more energy-dense batteries.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-09/california-moves-toward-ban-on-gas-lawnmowers-and-leaf-blowers
Rising atmospheric CO2 levels have significantly boosted U.S. crop yields. Plants use CO2 to sustain their growth.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w29320
Genetically engineering cows to burp less could reduce their methane emissions by up to 50%.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/uk-researchers-study-genetic-link-to-methane-emissions-in-cattle-key-to-reducing-greenhouse-gases/
Genetically engineering a bacterium to fix atmospheric nitrogen into biomolecules, and then splicing the bacterium into crop cells, where they would become as ubiquitous as organelles like mitochondria and chloroplasts, would massively boost farm output and cut the need for nitrogen fertilizers.
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1331173&HistoricalAwards=false
Unsurprisingly, genetics strongly influence how much people benefit from exercise. There really are people who can get six-pack abs from just a little diet and exercise, and others who can’t get them no matter how hard they try.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249501
‘More generally, one can see top chefs producing recipes that are then scaled not just to restaurants but also to home robot preparation services. Meals would be produced by a subscription service (“We have 10,000 recipes from the greatest chefs on every continent.”). Restaurants would compete even more on ambience.’
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/the-new-top-chef.html
This paper estimates that a 1 kg, 1 liter in volume computer made of the most powerful computer chips allowed by the laws of physics would do 1051 operations per second and would have a memory capacity of 1031 bits. Even if those theoretical maxima of performance can’t be attained, and future computer engineers hit a “practical peak” that is several orders of magnitude lower than those figures, the resulting machine would be incomprehensibly powerful.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9908043.pdf
‘For the entire history of computing, our calculating machines have operated in a way that causes the intentional loss of some information (it’s destructively overwritten) in the process of performing computations. But for several decades now, we have known that it’s possible in principle to carry out any desired computation without losing information—that is, in such a way that the computation could always be reversed to recover its earlier state. This idea of reversible computing goes to the very heart of thermodynamics and information theory, and indeed it is the only possible way within the laws of physics that we might be able to keep improving the cost and energy efficiency of general-purpose computing far into the future.’
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on-making-it-reversible
In a recent study, 80% of people with type 2 diabetes were able to put their disorders into remission simply by losing weight. The higher obesity rate and the concomitantly higher rates of obesity-related illnesses like diabetes explain much of the reason why the U.S. spends more on healthcare than other rich countries and has worse public health metrics.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dme.14395
Obesity raises the risk of cancer in the digestive tract. Obesity is just bad and can’t be rationalized.
https://www.studyfinds.org/bmi-cancer-risk/
A new malaria vaccine has been approved by the WHO for use in Africa. It lowers the odds of infection by about 40% and is cheap to make.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58810551
The FDA has approved an e-cigarette as an aide for people who want to stop smoking regular cigarettes. It is the latest confirmation that vaping is less harmful to health than smoking.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/12/1045408023/fda-e-cigarettes
The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 hit 700,000. Had more people chosen to get one of the vaccines, the milestone would not have been reached until 2022.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-pandemics-public-health-80209c66802902e42adfbe075ff5272b
Bill Gates’ predictions from a year ago about the COVID-19 vaccine, problems scaling up its production, and hesitancy among conspiracy-minded people were completely right.
https://www.yahoo.com/now/bill-gates-thinks-ll-covid-110000085.html
It remains much more likely that COVID-19 originated naturally instead of leaking from a lab.
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/06/scicheck-the-facts-and-gaps-on-the-origin-of-the-coronavirus/
The NIH’s poor public messaging about its pre-COVID dealings with the Wuhan Institute of Virology is fueling conspiracy theories and empowering its opponents.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function
Two pills have been found to moderately reduce hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/molnupiravir-thor-s-hammer-delivers
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(21)00448-4/fulltext