Having a navy composed of many, smaller ships is better than a navy composed of a few, big ships because the former can project power over a larger area, and the loss of any particular ship is not so bad.
https://www.navalgazing.net/So-You-Want-to-Build-a-Battleship-Design-Part-2
A scathing analysis of the WWII Imperial Japanese Navy.
https://www.navalgazing.net/Japanese-Battleships-in-World-War-II
Tying together two subjects I’ve repeatedly touched on, Russia has sold China advanced turbine engine components for its Type 055 destroyers in exchange for China agreeing to fix up Russia’s sole aircraft carrier. Recall that the Type 055 is one of China’s best ships and is only slightly inferior to U.S. ships of the same type, and Russia’s military floating dock accidentally sank in October.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/2179553/china-makes-turbine-blade-breakthrough-could-give-type-055
Australia’s former aircraft carrier–the Melbourne–was a cursed ship that probably found its most productive use after it was decommissioned, acquired by China under the guise of commercially scrapping it, and then reverse-engineered by their Navy.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/meet-australian-aircraft-carrier-jump-started-chinas-own-carrier-quest-38387
The U.S. Marines have built a scale-model replica of China’s J-20 stealth fighter.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6478933/US-Air-Force-reveals-owns-scale-replica-cutting-edge-Chinese-stealth-fighter.html
In stark contrast to the U.S., China hasn’t fought a real war since 1979, meaning the vast majority of its soldiers have zero combat experience. There are real advantages to having combat veterans in your military.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinese-military-has-one-weakness-it-cant-fix-no-combat-experience-38952
Slovakia has decided to replace its Soviet-era MiG-29s with U.S.-built F-16s, which moves NATO that much closer to logistical interoperability and reduces some of their members’ highly embarrassing dependence on Russia for military assistance.
https://www.janes.com/article/85204/slovakia-signs-for-f-16v-fighters
There’s a family of WWII enthusiasts in Belarus with my dream job: they raise tanks from swamps and bogs and restore them to working order.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180312-the-salvagers-who-raise-world-war-two-tanks-from-the-dead
Brazil just gave Uruguay 25, M41 Walker Bulldog tanks, which are 65 years old.
https://www.janes.com/article/85132/brazil-transfers-m41c-light-tanks-to-uruguayan-army
There are good reasons why no army uses double-barreled tanks, a staple of future military sci-fi: The extra barrel and its breech make the tank heavier and its turret wider in exchange for little benefit.
http://forum.worldoftanks.com/index.php?/topic/65875-double-barreled-tanks/
When will we have electric planes? Whenever we have at least tripled the energy density of today’s best batteries. Since energy density doubles roughly every 25 years, a tripling should happen in 38 years. At that point, medium-sized electric passenger planes with up to 125 passengers could profitably ply short- and medium-distance routes.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/when-will-electric-airliners-make-sense/
Porsche has made a 450 kW fast-charging station for electric cars. There’s no technical reason why a car’s batteries couldn’t be recharged in under 10 minutes, which would eliminate one of the few advantages of gas-powered cars.
https://newatlas.com/porsche-450-kw-fastcharge-prototype/57659/
Electric cars are more expensive than gas-powered cars because the former’s batteries are expensive. However, the costs are rapidly declining, and at the current rate, Bloomberg predicts electric cars should actually get CHEAPER than gas-powered equivalents by 2026. Crucially, this can be done without the discovery of some new type of battery with new chemistry–we’ll find ways to make existing lithium-ion batteries cheaper.
https://data.bloomberglp.com/bnef/sites/14/2017/07/BNEF-Lithium-ion-battery-costs-and-market.pdf
In California, the police pulled over a Tesla on autopilot mode after seeing the driver unconscious at the wheel. This sort of thing can only get more common.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-tesla-driver-asleep-20181202-story.html
In another extraordinary coup, SpaceX reused one of its rockets for the THIRD time, and launched a record-breaking payload of 64 satellites.
https://apnews.com/b5adaacf957f49efba481aef2ef55914
Virgin Galactic’s “SpaceShipTwo” did a successful test flight to a 51-mile altitude, which is considered the beginning of space.
https://apnews.com/659f385710cc46fdb381c5f6dfbb6573
Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders thinks a Mars mission is a terrible idea, and that NASA has done nothing but make mistakes and grow more bureaucratic over the last 50 years.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46364179
Secret military bases in Israel and Turkey were found by perusing publicly available satellite images for blurred-out areas. The photos came from a Russian-owned satellite, and apparently they have an agreement with Israel and Turkey, which has inadvertently backfired.
https://fas.org/blogs/security/2018/12/widespread-blurring-of-satellite-images-reveals-secret-facilities/
NASA’s IceSat 2 laser mapping satellite can determine the heights of ground features with +/- 2 cm accuracy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46532975
NVIDIA has developed a software program that can synthesize fully realistic photos of human faces belonging to no one.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mby4q8/these-people-were-created-by-nvidia-ai
A new machine learning program can quickly make highly realistic computer images based on uploaded photos of real-world objects.
https://techxplore.com/news/2018-12-artificial-intelligence-graphics.html
Once AIs grasp your skills, intelligence, and personality traits, they’ll be able to match you with jobs more optimally than you or a company’s human resources department could. As technological unemployment accelerates, it will be interesting to see what uses machines find for humans (e.g. doctors picking up roadside trash).
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/business/economy/artificial-intelligence-hiring.html
Once AIs learn your preferences, they’ll be able to reliably recommend new foods you’ll enjoy, and maybe even make foods perfectly suited to your individual tastes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/12/gastrograph-flavor-goes-digital/577270/
Kevin Kelly termed that future phenomenon “the Satisfaction Paradox.”
https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-satsisfacti/
Some ancient Greek myths describe what we would today think of as robots.
“If you think about what any reproducing organism that is under natural selection will do,” Martinho-Turswell told me, “it is going to try to maximize the effect it can get from the minimum investment. That is how you win the evolutionary game.”
https://gizmodo.com/the-ancient-origins-of-automation-1830880224
Tokyo Disneyland is building a Beauty and the Beast attraction full of robots that look and move exactly like the animated characters. It’s surreal watching footage of these things.
https://youtu.be/bJtNxaTwgz0
A year ago, the AlphaZero AI taught itself chess with no human help, achieving a superhuman level of skill in 24 hours. Some questioned the legitimacy of the accomplishment, and those critiques have just been refuted by a detailed paper published in Science.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/science/chess-artificial-intelligence.html
Russia shows off its Potemkin Robot.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/12/high-tech-robot-at-russia-forum-turns-out-to-be-man-in-robot-suit
Kroger has unveiled an autonomous vehicle meant to delivery groceries to people living near one of their stores. Since it isn’t meant to carry humans, the vehicle is very small, light, and lacks safety features. As autonomous vehicles get more common, the diversity of vehicle shapes and sizes will grow, as they will be purpose-built for specific tasks. In a distant future where AIs run the planet and humans aren’t around, I think smaller volumes of physical “stuff” will move around the planet, and vehicles designed to transport human-sized beings will be a very small fraction of the global vehicle fleet.
https://techxplore.com/news/2018-12-grocery-delivery-humans-drivers-underway.html
The concept of a “space of possible minds” has recently come to fascinate me. The human mind is only one possible type of mind, and it thinks and perceives things in unique, but not objective ways. Other species, like bats, ants, and chimps, have very different internal states that could be appropriately called “alien.” Maybe in the future, we’ll have an enormous number of minds–human, animal, hybrid, artificial, blended organic/synthetic–all linked to the same Matrix (for lack of a better term), with each mind specialized for a different type of processing. As data entered the Matrix, it would be shunted to the type of mind best suited to process it. Some of the nodes might be human brains floating in jars, genetically tweaked to be enormous in size and hyperspecialized for specific types of thinking.
https://www.edge.org/conversation/murray_shanahan-the-space-of-possible-minds
An update to a link I posted some months ago: The NHS has decided to get rid of its ridiculous fax machines.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-46497526
There are now portable machines that can perform DNA fingerprinting in two hours, and the FBI plans to link them to the national criminal DNA database. I’m reminded of the scene from Gattaca where a group of detectives force a random group of people to submit to DNA ID tests in public.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2018/12/13/fbi-plans-rapid-dna-network-quick-database-checks-arrestees/
The full genomes of 100,000 people living in Britain have now been sequenced.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46456984
A U.K. study has found there are nine genes coding for red hair in humans. I don’t think red hair will ever disappear from the human genepool, as some have predicted.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-46522679
The first genetically engineered humans probably didn’t gain any beneficial traits. This really is a sad way to start, and I’m glad the geneticist who did this is being punished.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/11/28/after-such-knowledge
Making use of genetic engineering, advanced organ preservation techniques, and immunosuppresant drugs, scientists successfully transplanted pig hearts into baboons, which survived up to 180 days. Transplant experiments involving humans are next.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/baboons-survive-for-half-a-year-after-heart-transplants-from-pigs/
The tragic man who had volunteered for the first live human head transplant has wisely backed out.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/man-set-worlds-first-head-13748350
Scientists successfully grew hair follicles in vitro, surgically implanted them into mice, and the hair grew. A true cure for human baldness will exist by the end of this century. Eventually, we’ll be able to edit it out of the human genepool. Full heads of hair are attractive, completely shaved heads can also be attractive, but heads covered in visibly thinning or receded hair are universally seen as unattractive.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07579-y
Twelve people were hospitalized after getting infections from poorly regulated stem cell clinics in the U.S. Stem cell therapies have enormous long-term potential, but at present, the clinical field is dominated by quacks peddling unproven, expensive treatments to desperately ill people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/health/stem-cell-shots-bacteria-fda.html
“Human Genomics Inc.,” a company co-founded in 2013 by biotech luminary J. Craig Venter to apply genetic knowledge to find ways to slow human aging, has lost 80% of its stock value.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/genomics-startup-human-longevitys-valuation-falls-80-1544187724
China’s first pet cloning service has made a copy of one of the country’s best-known dogs, famous for starring in commercials. Dog cloning services have been available in the U.S. and South Korea for years.
https://www.news18.com/news/world/two-of-a-kind-chinas-first-pet-cloning-service-duplicates-star-pooch-1976313.html
A German company has invented a way to safely identify the sexes of chickens while they’re still in their eggs. The eggs with males in them could be pulverized as early as the ninth day, when the chicks are still embryos with undeveloped nervous systems. Currently, the egg industry disposes of 4-6 billion hatched male chicks per year by drowning them or grinding them up in huge machines.
http://www.seleggt.com/supply-chain-of-shell-eggs/
“Domicology recognizes the cyclical nature of the built environment. Ultimately we’re imagining a world where no building has to be demolished. Structures will be designed with the idea that once they reach the end of their usefulness, they can be deconstructed with the valuable components repurposed or recycled.”
http://theconversation.com/domicology-a-new-way-to-fight-blight-before-buildings-are-even-constructed-82582
Machines keep getting better at predicting protein shapes based on their amino acid sequences. The new champ is Google’s Deepmind AI.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/12/03/the-latest-on-protein-folding
More proof that California’s decision to put out every wildfire–even if no humans or infrastructure are threatened–interferes with nature’s cycle and only increases the amount of dead, dry wood that will serve as fodder for mega-fires. Global warming doesn’t cause every problem.
https://apnews.com/f92cc1767c33459c9312d6fa408cdd50
And here’s more support for my prediction that house robots will reduce wildfire damage in the future.
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/24/678853717/how-houses-themselves-become-fuel-for-wildfires
80-90% of the scientists who have ever lived are alive now. The number of scientists has been growing exponentially since about WWII. And undoubtedly, access to information today is better than ever in human history.
https://futureoflife.org/2015/11/05/90-of-all-the-scientists-that-ever-lived-are-alive-today/
For the first time in human history, fewer than 1 billion people lack electricity.
https://qz.com/1509999/the-number-of-people-without-electricity-fell-below-1-billion-for-the-first-time-ever-in-2018/
China just built perhaps the world’s most advanced nuclear reactor. The design originated in Europe, but various problems have delayed the completion of any of the reactors on that continent. China started building its reactor after the Europeans and has finished years before they will.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/2178099/delayed-still-world-first-new-breed-nuclear-reactor-powers
There’s merit to the saying “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”–survivors of the Japanese atomic bombings who received lower doses of radiation actually lived longer than average and had reduced cancer rates.
https://genesenvironment.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41021-018-0114-3
Alien planets with large numbers of solar panels covering their surfaces would emit characteristic light signatures we could see with the right telescopes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/tracing-biosignatures-space-find-alien-life/578089/
Syrian government forces have reoccupied the northern city of Manbij for the first time in six years. At last, and for better or worse, the country’ civil war is ending.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-46701095
President Trump has announced U.S. troops will leave Syria. America never got permission from the Syrian government to enter in the first place.
https://www.janes.com/article/85396/us-s-syrian-withdrawal-likely-to-prompt-turkish-backed-operation-targeting-sdf-which-will-seek-pre-emptive-government-deal
General Douglass MacArthur had a truly crazy and dangerous plan for winning the Korean War. I can understand why President Truman fired him. I think MacArthur was an overrated commander who never adapted to the realities of the Postwar era.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/how-america-could-have-won-the-korean-war-not-north-korea-26307
Alan Watts postulated that, if you were a Godlike being with billions of years on your hands, you would eventually start doing mental exercises where you simulated what it would be like to live as a random human on Earth, with no knowledge of your divine nature. Eventually, you would simulate the person you are now.
https://steemit.com/christianity/@gbolson/alan-watt-s-perfect-description-of-simulation-theory-or-hell
Humans have a natural bias towards pessimism, attach more weight to bad news than to good news, and in surveys usually underestimate how much things have improved in the world, such as the growth of the global middle class.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-persistent-appeal-of-pessimism/