“Incoming! Self-guiding bullet could strike from a mile away”

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I have decidedly mixed feelings about this. Like any tool, it could be either good or evil depending on who wields it, but the amount of power it provides greatly amplifies both possible outcomes — and in another five or ten years, it will probably be available to anyone who’s willing to spend the money.

Obligatory science-fiction link: in Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat’s Revenge, the main character poses as a representative of an intergalactic weapons manufacturer to infiltrate the militant world of Cliaand:

I unlocked the case and flipped back the lid. The armament specialist glared down at the various components in their padded niches. I explained.

“My firm is the originator and sole manufacturer of the memory line of proximity fuses. No other line is as compact as ours, none as versatile.” I used tweezers to take a fuse from a holder. It was no larger than a pinhead. “This is the most minuscule, designed to be used in a weapon as small as a handgun. Firing activates the fuse which will then detonate the charge in the slug when it comes near a target or predetermined size. This other fuse is the most intelligent, designed for use in heavy weapons or missiles.” They all leaned forward eagerly when I held up the wafer of the Mem-IV and pointed out its singular merits.

“All solid-state construction, capable of resisting incredible pressures, thousands of G’s, massive shocks. It can be preset to detonate only when approaching a specific target, or can be programmed externally and electronically at any time up to the moment of firing. It contains discrimination circuits that will prevent explosion in the vicinity of friendly equipment. It is indeed unique.”

There was no talk of his wares guiding the explosive bullet/warhead/whatever, simply adding some intelligence to when, where, and whether it detonates, but I can foresee this real-world example adding such capabilities in the future as well.

“iPhone doc will detect cancer, diabetes – boffins”

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I never thought that I’d live to see a working Star Trek-esque medical tricorder, but it seems that I might… at least a poor-man’s version of one, that requires placing a sample on or in the device. Even better, the smartphones we’re toting around today might already have all the hardware needed, if I’m reading that right.

(Of course, I’ll believe it when I see it — too many of these pie-in-the-sky tech advances get mentioned once or twice, then vanish, never to be seen again. But it’s exciting to think that it might actually work.)

“National Popular Vote — Electoral college reform and direct election of the President of the United States”

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As my US readers may remember from their mandatory high-school civics class, presidential elections in the US are kind of odd. Presidents aren’t elected by the people. Instead, their elected through the Electoral College — the people’s votes tell the Electoral College what candidate the state votes for, and each state has a certain number of electoral college votes.

Thing is, each state (with apparently two exceptions) throws all of its Electoral College votes at the winner of the election in that state. In other words, even if 49.9% of the people in the state are for one candidate and 50.1% are for another, the state gives all of its Electoral College votes to the candidate with 50.1% of the support.

Because of that, candidates never pay much attention to states that are mostly Democrat or mostly Republican. They only concentrate on a handful of “swing states.”

It’s possible for a candidate to take the majority of the votes, but lose the election because due to the distribution of those votes, the Electoral College voted the other way. And not only possible, it has happened — at least three times, including in Bush vs. Gore in 2000.

Obviously this is a pretty poor way to run a democracy. It might have been necessary in the late 1700s, but we have computers and near-instant communications now, and the majority of people have favored changing to direct elections — where every vote in every state is counted equally — since at least 1967. And I’ve just today discovered that there has been a concerted legal push for just that for at least the last five years, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

Will it succeed? It already has half of the support it needs, and that keeps growing, so it seems that the question is when it’ll happen, not whether. It’ll be interesting to watch, at any rate.

“Star Trek tractor beam to save Earth from asteroid Armageddon”

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No, there’s no real Star Trek-style tractor beam (yet, anyway). What they’re discussing is parking a large spacecraft near such an asteroid and using its gravity to drag the asteroid onto a course that would miss the Earth. That assumes that we detect the threat early enough to launch such a craft, get it into position, and give it enough time to make sufficient difference to the course. Also, of course, that we have such a spacecraft ready when the threat appears, which so far as I know we don’t at present.

They’re also exploring other possibilities, including other ideas from science-fiction movies. 🙂

In any case, I’m happy to see that we’re taking steps to ensure that what happened to the dinosaurs won’t also happen to us. It’s a remote possibility, but even remote possibilities can happen regularly over a long enough period of time.

“Simple Heresy”

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Long ago I came to the conclusion that the best investment strategy is to invest only in things that you know very very well, and a close second is to invest in a market index fund. As I don’t want to take the time to study stocks and companies, a large part of my money is in the S&P 500 index.

Despite that, I still find it interesting to read about investing strategies and such, and this article drops a bombshell: it seems that sophisticated financial analyses don’t work as well as simply picking some stocks you think will do well and dividing your money evenly between them.

[…] The head of the firm’s investment department attended a recent lecture about the power of distributing money evenly among assets, given by psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development’s Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition in Berlin. Skeptical but intrigued, the insurance honcho returned home and reanalyzed his company’s investments from 1969 to 2009.

To his surprise, a 1/N portfolio would have made more money in that time than any of the complex strategies that his department had employed. Naïve diversification requires periodic reassessments of which stocks and other assets to include in a portfolio. Yet regardless of how the insurance official realigned the portfolio, 1/N came out ahead. […]

The KISS principle is alive and well. 🙂 I imagine that there are a number of fund managers and financial analysis software companies that wish the article had never been published. 😉

“Arsenic life does not exist after all”

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Remember that claim, about a year ago, that a scientist had discovered arsenic-based life forms right here on Earth? It seems that other scientists are having trouble reproducing that research. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the original scientist was wrong, but it puts the assertion in doubt.

If it does turn out to be wrong, it’s too bad, really. I was hoping that we’d found our first truly alien species (chemically speaking, at least) literally right in our back yard. Well, there’s always science fiction. 🙂

“US Supremes: GPS tracking requires warrant”

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Wow! Maybe the US won’t turn into a technology-driven police state, as all recent indications had pointed toward (and as I had cynically expected, as the “security” apparatus has more money, and thus influence, than ordinary citizens).

Between this and the SOPA uprising, my flagging hope for the US has been renewed.

“Facebook exposes hackers behind Koobface worm”

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The literary and film genre known as the Western covers a very short period of American history — 1850 to 1900 by the most commonly-accepted definition, but it’s more accurate to say from the end of the Civil War (1865) to maybe 1890, when our forefathers ran out of frontier — a small window of time, in a large but sparsely-populated area, where laws couldn’t be effectively enforced. The the lack of effective law enforcement, and thus the popularity of the area with those who wanted to avoid the law, are (along with the handgun) the elements that define the genre.

The Internet has been compared to “the wild west” many times, and for essentially the same reason: with very little effort, those who scoff at laws can put virtual bandannas over their faces and hold up any bank that opens a branch in their neck of the woods, or any honest folk that dare to venture into the area, and fade away into the badlands until the heat is off them.

But like the wild west, the Internet is becoming civilized. It’s getting easier to enforce the law, and the bad guys are finding those bandannas a lot harder to come by. If the same sort of timing holds, the next decade will see the end of the digital frontier, and Internet black-hats will fade away like those of yesteryear.

It will be the end of an era. and many will eventually look back on it with longing, but the Internet will also be a much safer place to travel through, and that can’t be a bad thing.

EDIT, same day: Another example.