One step closer ...

Bots, drones, guns and military, a match made in heaven, is now becoming reality in near realtime time frames. Enter the spectre of drones, packed with heat, intended to replace boots on the ground. Interesting without question yet one must pose the question, what if you have thousands of these bad boys to control? If so, AI and autonomous control by said AI would be a prerequisite, right?

Skynet anyone? Had to ask, right?

Have you ever looked at a drone and thought, “Yeah, that’s kind of neat, but I sure wish it came with some mounted firearms?” If so, you may be interested to hear about the TIKAD: a new drone that’s described by its Florida-based creators Duke Robotics as the “Future Soldier.”

Intended for military deployment, TIKAD is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed to replace boots on the ground in some of the toughest warzones on the planet. It weighs 110 pounds (50kg), can fly at an altitude of anywhere from 30 – 1,500 feet and — oh yes — did we mention that it can sport a plethora of semi automatic weapons, and a 40mm grenade launcher for good measure?

Push button war, one step closer ...

On the Beach

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — President Trump threatened on Tuesday to unleash “fire and fury” against North Korea if it endangers the United States as tensions with the isolated nuclear-armed state grow into perhaps the most serious foreign policy challenge yet in his young administration.

“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Mr. Trump told reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state and as I said they will be met with fire and fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

Reading this reminds yours truly of On the Beach, Nevil Shute's elegiac novella describing the end of the world, a work that gives one pause on how seemingly minor miscalculations among nuclear armed nations can have catastrophic consequences of truly horrific proportions.

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river . . .

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

T. S. Eliot

Read the novel, it will stay with you forever.

Infrastructure 101

Infrastructure 101, invest money to insure said country to operate as a viable entity vis a vis roads, buildings, mass transit etc, etc, etc, or perish, something not being done by the Trump Administration in any way, shape or fashion.

It’s basically the opposite of a major government infrastructure program.

Government spending on transportation and other public works is in decline as federal funding stagnates and state and local governments tighten their belts.

Such spending equaled 1.4 percent of the nation’s economic output in the second quarter of 2017, the lowest level on record, according to Census Bureau data.

In West Virginia, where President Trump on Thursday touted a vague $1 trillion infrastructure plan, public works spending has fallen for five straight years.

When the infrastructure of a country collapses, the country collapses. Ask the Romans about this or the Egyptians or the Greeks. History shows this to be true without question.

Last but not least, ask New Yorkers about their subway system circa 2017.

Any questions?

Heineken nails it.

Never have posted an ad until now. Heineken nails it and yes, it's good beer without question. :)

Like a finely tuned watch ...

No words needed.

Lord of the Flies

The Gordian Knot.

Bad hair day.

Working hard or hardly working.

Open Ended ...

BRT has talked often about AI as this is the one tech that's open ended with the real possibility of it getting out of control given just how powerful hardware has become along with the rise of the net, a potential feast for the asking for any enterprising AI that may be built by us unsuspecting rubes. With that being said, some rather disquieting events regarding said tech has come to pass as we speak.

Researches at Facebook shut down an artificial intelligence (AI) program after it created its own language, Digital Journal reports.

The system developed code words to make communication more efficient and researchers took it offline when they realized it was no longer using English.

The incident, after it was revealed in early July, puts in perspective Elon Musk’s warnings about AI.

“AI is the rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive,” Musk said at the meet of U.S. National Governors Association. “Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’ll be too late.”

Example 1

Arkin and his team learned by reviewing biological research results that squirrels gather acorns and store them in specific locations. The animal then patrols the hidden caches, routinely going back and forth to check on them. When another squirrel shows up, hoping to raid the hiding spots, the hoarding squirrel changes its behavior. Instead of checking on the true locations, it visits empty cache sites, trying to deceive the predator.

Arkin and his Ph.D. student Jaeeun Shim implemented the same strategy into a robotic model and demonstration. The deceptive behaviors worked. The deceiving robot lured the "predator" robot to the false locations, delaying the discovery of the protected resources.

Example 2

Dmitry Malioutov can’t say much about what he built.

As a research scientist at IBM, Malioutov spends part of his time building machine learning systems that solve difficult problems faced by IBM’s corporate clients. One such program was meant for a large insurance corporation. It was a challenging assignment, requiring a sophisticated algorithm. When it came time to describe the results to his client, though, there was a wrinkle. “We couldn’t explain the model to them because they didn’t have the training in machine learning.”

In fact, it may not have helped even if they were machine learning experts. That’s because the model was an artificial neural network, a program that takes in a given type of data—in this case, the insurance company’s customer records—and finds patterns in them. These networks have been in practical use for over half a century, but lately they’ve seen a resurgence, powering breakthroughs in everything from speech recognition and language translation to Go-playing robots and self-driving cars.

HIDDEN MEANINGS: In neural networks, data is passed from layer to layer, undergoing simple transformations at each step. Between the input and output layers are hidden layers, groups of nodes and connections that often bear no human-interpretable patterns or obvious connections to either input or output. “Deep” networks are those with many hidden layers. Michael Nielsen / NeuralNetworksandDeepLearning.com

As exciting as their performance gains have been, though, there’s a troubling fact about modern neural networks: Nobody knows quite how they work. And that means no one can predict when they might fail.

A graphic primer on AI

Something to think about don't you think?

Sam Shepard - We will miss you big time

A very cool guy without question. RIP Sam, we will miss you big time.

"I've always felt a great affinity with music. Writing seems to me to be a musical experience – rhythmically and in many other ways. But I don't think that that's so unusual. Most of the old guys had the same sense – Christopher Marlowe thought of himself as a musician. Just another musician killed at a bar."

Kinda says it all, doesn't it?

Peregrinations

Insects, in particular, are always on a journey to survive, whether it be to find food, to mate or find shelter, something this video shows in some detail. Enjoy.

Dragonflies & then some :)

Field Dragonfly

Forest Dragonfly

Hawkmoth Visitation

Queen Anne's Lace 

3D Printing becomes real

3D printing has promised to revolutionize manufacturing for years yet has failed to live up to that promise until now.

The production system is built for speed, to a degree that has never been seen before. Faster than machining, casting, forging or any other technique, each production printer can produce up to an incredible 500 cubic inches of complex parts per hour. That's 100 times quicker than a laser-based alternative, with zero tooling.

Indeed, it prints faster than those hybrid microwave furnaces can sinter. To reach the full production speed, you'll need up to four furnaces per printer.

The Production printers use a different process called Single Pass Jetting, explained in the video above.

Instead of bound metal rod cartridges like the Studio printer uses, the Production machines use powders, which are bonded together during printing by spray-jetted droplets of a binder solution. They use regular, low-cost, easily available MIM powders. That's another huge advantage over laser machines, which need expensive powders with very precise particle sizes. Material costs here will be up to 20 times lower.

This, combined with the lack of tooling and job setup costs, can bring 3D printed metal parts down cheap enough to compete with traditional manufacturing processes for the first time.

May you live in interesting times. - Chinese Proverb