The U.S. Army will buy up to 473 new “Bradley fighting vehicles,” but they’re so different from older variants that they probably shouldn’t be called “Bradleys” anymore.
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2018/06/27/army-makes-massive-bradley-buy-up-to-473-vehicles-to-prep-for-major-power-war.html
Upgrade details: https://breakingdefense.com/2016/10/rebuilding-the-m2-bradley/
A Pentagon OIG report says that old Soviet Mi-17 Hip helicopters are better-suited to service in Afghanistan the newer American UH-60s. In a saner world, this would put the brakes on our plans to sell UH-60s to them, but the DoD operates in a world of its own.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21558/pentagon-admits-afghanistans-new-black-hawks-cant-match-its-older-russian-choppers
At the White Sands Missile Range, there’s a facility where antiaircraft weapons are tested on helicopters, which are strung up on a long cable stretched between two mountaintops.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21834/theres-a-place-where-helicopters-fly-on-high-wires-and-get-pummeled-by-missiles
Weirdly, the Ukrainian military is buying RPG-7 rocket launchers that are made in America, even though Ukraine has its own factory for making them.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/05/21/national-guard-of-ukraine-purchases-american-made-rpgs/
The Sun never sets on the U.S. military empire.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321
It turns out the widely mocked 1950s “Duck and Cover” slogan and accompanying cartoons were actually sage advice. Nuclear war is survivable.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/11/would-you-know-what-to-do-during-a-nuclear-attack-218675
[North Korea said] “[The] imperialist yankees can sometimes be helpful.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Hong_Dan_incident
According to virtual wind tunnel simulations, the fighter craft from Star Wars have poor aerodynamics. Yes, it doesn’t matter when they’re flying through the vacuum of space, but what about all the times they’ve been shown flying in a planet’s atmosphere?
https://youtu.be/PilQTjw1Qis
I think nuclear missiles will be common space weapons. Newton’s Third Law would also make it hard to shoot projectile weapons since it would nudge your ship in the opposite direction. There would also probably be “effective speed limits” on how fast the space ship would travel, since burning up 51% of your fuel to charge headlong at the enemy will mean certain death for you if you are pointed towards the depths of space.
https://www.quora.com/What-would-a-realistic-space-battleship-look-like
Facebook has abandoned its project to use high-endurance flying drones to broadcast internet to poor parts of the world. However, Google’s counterpart, which uses high-altitude balloons, is still going strong.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44624702
Just think: In only about five years, there will be A.I.s that can debate politics with humans on Facebook, never tiring, never taking offense, and replying instantly to anything you write.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44531132
The criminal who just committed a mass shooting at a Maryland newspaper was hard to fingerprint at the police station and he refused to give his name, so the police took a photo of him and quickly identified him by uploading it to the Maryland Image Repository System (or MIRS), “which includes over ten million photos drawn from known offenders and the state’s entire driver’s license database.”
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/29/17518364/facial-recognition-police-identify-capital-gazette-shooter
Since it was announced that a DNA genealogy website had been used to catch the Golden State Killer in April, four other cold case murders have been solved using the same technique.
https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611548/a-dna-detective-has-used-genealogy-to-point-police-to-three-more-suspected/
Pigs that are genetically engineered for disease resistance have been created and might be destined for widescale use.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44388038
If you want an idea of how radically we could improve humans through genetic engineering, read articles like this and then consider that IQ is at least 50% genetic.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44668452
Richard Feynman was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, but as a child scored a mere 124 on an IQ test (smarter than average, but not genius-level). It’s possible that the disappointing score simply owed to the fact that there was too low a ceiling to the difficulty of the math questions.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-iqs-of-eminent.html
Between 2000 and 2015, pneumonia and meningitis vaccine drives in poor countries saved the lives of almost 1.5 million children under age 5.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-million-children-hib-pneumococcal-vaccines.html
The FDA just approved a cannabis-based drug to treat people with seizures.
https://apnews.com/16829deb1ce0489aa7e0bd1afa02eb73/Medical-milestone:-US-OKs-marijuana-based-drug-for-seizures
A new study suggests that 70,000 American women with breast cancer make needless use of chemotherapy. For them, chemo doesn’t improve survival rates more than using other treatments with milder side effects.
https://apnews.com/9f30770a3a3d42538cd3f14672cd6529/Many-breast-cancer-patients-can-skip-chemo,-big-study-finds
Gerontologists in Italy have found that the mortality rate hits 50% once a person turns 105, and stays at that level indefinitely, suggesting that the ultimate limit on human lifespan is unknown.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05582-3
In the distant future, there will be a single database with the genomes of quadrillions of different organisms, including DNA from all humans. If paired with something like a cloning lab, it could create any organism in the database from scratch. It reminds me of a combination of the “Universal Constructor” from the Deus Ex video game and the use of organic “blanks” in The 6th Day movie to rapidly make human clones.
https://qz.com/1315829/the-dna-of-all-the-animals-on-earth-will-be-recorded-in-an-enormous-new-genetics-project/
The Straight Dope, one of the best sources of mythbusting and digestible anecdotes about the oddities of history and science, may be shutting down for good.
https://www.straightdope.com/a-note-from-cecil-adams-about-the-straight-dope/
Old photos that have turned black with age can be restored using an x-ray scanner. Someday, we’ll be able to use more advanced techniques to restore/upgrade old film footage and photos to perfect clarity. They’ll do highly accurate and natural-looking colorizations of black and white photos.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/new-technique-brings-secrets-out-of-old-daguerreotypes/
“If AI rationally allocates resources through big data analysis, and if robust feedback loops can supplant the imperfections of “the invisible hand” while fairly sharing the vast wealth it creates, a planned economy that actually works could at last be achievable.”
This same thought occurred to me a few years ago. Communists shouldn’t get too excited though, since the same AI-powered mass surveillance system would also keenly understand the abilities of each human and could track whether they put in an honest day’s work or not, which would in turn affect the AI’s decisions about how “fair shares” of the day’s wealth should be allocated.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/05/03/end-of-capitalism/
If you’re only counting animals that might have consciousness and can probably feel pain, daily births are in the billions per day. Since those species’ populations are mostly steady-state (neither growing nor declining overall), then the same number of deaths must happen each day. Many of those deaths are agonizing because they owe to untreated injuries, disease, or slaughter at the hands of unskilled humans. There’s a fringe coalition of transhumanists, altruists, and animal rights advocates who think it is humanity’s ultimate mission to use technology to end this cycle of suffering, possibly by capturing all wild animals and putting them in something like The Matrix. All humans would also go vegetarian or switch to lab-grown meats.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44412495
‘The Summit’s theoretical peak speed is 200 petaflops, or 200,000 teraflops. To put that in human terms, approximately 6.3 billion people would all have to make a calculation at the same time, every second, for an entire year, to match what Summit can do in just one second. ‘
That is probably not true. We don’t know how much computation the human brain does, but the best guesses converge on the “tens of petaflops” realm, plus or minus one order of magnitude. So what this milestone really means is that, for $400-600 million, we can now build a supercomputer with the same raw processing power as 1-10 human brains. That sounds pretty snicker-worthy until you remember the cost-performance of supercomputers improves by an order of magnitude every 5-7 years. So using a conservative extrapolation, a supercomputer with the same power as 1-10 human brains should cost single-digit millions of dollars by 2033, putting them within reach of midsized businesses and second-tier college Computer Science departments. Big entities like militaries, spy agencies and Google will collectively have tens or hundreds of thousands of them. If we haven’t built an artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 2040, it won’t be thanks to deficient or costly computer hardware. It will be because we don’t know how to properly arrange the hardware to support intelligent thought and because of a failure to develop the software of intelligence.
https://qz.com/1301510/the-us-has-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-again-the-200-petaflop-summit/
https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-the-cost-of-computing/
Mathematicians proved that the maximum number of moves needed to solve a Rubik’s Cube of any configuration is 26. A deep-learning machine with no knowledge of how the Cubes worked managed to teach itself how to solve them 100% of the time in 30 moves, on average.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611281/a-machine-has-figured-out-rubiks-cube-all-by-itself/
Streaming is the future of video games. Someday soon, no one will need a console device like a Playstation or Xbox or games saved on physical media discs to play their video games.
https://gizmodo.com/if-streaming-is-the-future-of-console-gaming-it-might-1827056790
The TCL television is 55″ and 4K, but it only costs $600. The tests showed it was only slightly worse than the equivalent $1,300 Samsung TV.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/08/this-tv-youve-never-heard-of-is-the-best-tv-deal-weve-ever-seen/
Assuming a constant 3% inflation rate, $1 million in the year 2120 will only be worth $50,000 in today’s money. Being a “millionaire” in the future will be meaningless, and the title will probably fall out of use. (Similarly, it wasn’t long ago that having a $100,000 income was a huge deal.) But given that central banks support price inflation because it’s a sneaky way of cutting wages without making human workers mad, will inflation stop once machines take over the economy?
https://www.officialdata.org/2018-dollars-in-2120?amount=50000&future_pct=0.03
Here’s an old episode of the Joe Rogan show where he debates a very skilled tech skeptic named “Bruce Damer” who pours a lot of cold water on his optimism. Start watching about halfway through.
https://youtu.be/SSf2bVpibmw
My idea for “solar Venetian blinds” was commercialized by a company called “SolarGaps” a few months before I wrote my blog entry. Dang it! An overlooked advantage of having an all-knowing AI is that it would warn you up front if your big idea had already been thought of by someone else. Humanity could use its energies much more efficiently without wasting time reinventing the wheel.
https://youtu.be/whrroUUWCYo
China’s effort to corner the global market in rare earth metals failed because they’re not actually that rare, and other countries have large deposits of them.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/17/17246444/rare-earth-metals-discovery-japan-china-monopoly