Tag: technology

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government transparency national politics & policies

Identified?

UFO, UAP, aliens, US government, secrets, technology

The current UFO story is not a Big Nothing, but neither is it a Big Something.

Tucker Carlson addressed it on the first episode (6:43 mark) of Tucker on Twitter, his new show solely broadcast on the social media giant’s platform.

“A former Air Force officer, who worked for years in military intelligence, came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. Government has physical evidence of crashed, non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft,” Tucker explained. “The Pentagon has spent decades studying these other-worldly remains in order to build more technologically-advanced weapons systems. OK. That’s what the former intel officer revealed, and it’s clear he was telling the truth.”

Tucker’s conclusion? “UFOs are actually real and so, apparently, is extraterrestrial life.”

He may have gone a bit overboard. As “skeptic” science writer Michael Shermer notes, there is no real evidence here — at least in The Debrief’s  June 5 story, upon which most of the journalism is based — just very familiar rumors. Nothing whistleblower David Charles Grusch says is new; hundreds of other alleged whistleblowers have been saying similar things for decades.

What’s different? This time one of these whistleblowers has sworn under oath and given testimony to Congress.

Which is not insignificant. Grusch’s testimony also, allegedly, points to where in the Deep State the secrets lay hiding.

While the story hardly proves “UFOs are actually real” and so “is extraterrestrial life,” it suggests that the Government’s contradictory past press releases on the subject may (just may) be provably identified as the lies they’ve long seemed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2

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defense & war general freedom international affairs

An Invisibility Cloak We Can Use

Chinese invisibility cloak

It’s not quite the magical invisibility cloak worn by Harry Potter. But it’s the next best thing.

Chinese students have created apparel that human eyes can see but that hides the wearer from security cameras and recognition software.

The InvisDefense coat looks ordinary. So it won’t by itself arouse the suspicion of other people on the street. But it is designed in such a way as to foil the kind of cameras that, for example, try to identify who is protesting Chinazi lockdown insanity.

During the day, the printed pattern of the InvisDefense coat blinds cameras. At night, the coat emits heat signals that disrupt infrared. It was invented by Chinese graduate students at Wuhan University under the guidance of computer science professor Wang Zheng. Their coat won first prize in an innovation contest sponsored by Huawei.

Wang observes that “many surveillance devices can detect human bodies. Cameras on the road have pedestrian detection functions. And smart cars can identify pedestrians, roads, and obstacles. Our InvisDefense allows the camera to capture you. But it cannot tell if you are human. . . .

“We use algorithms to design the least conspicuous patterns that can disable computer vision.”

And the coat costs only seventy bucks or so.

I’m not always a fan of the algorithms. In this case, shout Hooray for algorithms and for those who put them to such good use by inventing the InvisDefense coat. 

I hope these students sell about eight billion of them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with DALL-E2

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voluntary cooperation

The Day Cillian Took Control

chair, robotics

One of the things that made 2019 a decent year was the robotics team at Farmington High School in Minnesota.

A former student at the school, Tyler Jackson, contacted the team to ask if they could help his son, two-year-old Cillian, become more mobile. He had been born with a condition resembling cerebral palsy that makes it hard to move around.

The Jackson family couldn’t afford the kind of power wheelchair Cillian needed.

The Farmington kids were eager to help. They replaced the electrical innards of a Fisher Price riding toy, added a bicycle seat, and used a 3D printer to design a joystick and other components.

The team applied skills gained by building robots for competitions, and they also got technical help from the University of Delaware, which had a program for designing mobility devices for disabled kids.

A local broadcast story about the wheelchair shows Cillian in action.

He isn’t the only child who has benefitted from the team’s tech prowess.

Early in 2021, the Rogue Robotics team at Farmington posted an appeal on their Facebook page after learning that Fisher Price had “discontinued the Power Wheels model Wild Thing we convert into wheelchairs for little kids” who either don’t fit into standard powered wheelchairs or can’t afford them.

They asked that anyone who happens to have a Wild Thing model in good condition consider donating it.

This kind of innovation can now be rolled out — pun intended? — broadly, not so much as mass production but as home and community and fix-it shop projects, with 3D printing tech aiding in the revolution.

Now that’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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individual achievement progress

The Power of Man’s Mind

brain reader, text, binary, analog

Can you communicate with your mind alone, without moving a muscle?

Setting aside fantasy and wishful thinking, my answer is, at least presumptively, “No.”

But the paralyzed man known as T5 was not alone when the sentences he imagined appeared on screen at a rate of 18 words per minute with an accuracy of about 94 percent.

He had the help of inventive scientists. And, by some definitions, I suppose T5 did move a muscle: his brain. 

Normally, though, we must also move other muscles to get what’s on our mind out into the world and communicate it to others.

After suffering a spinal cord injury in 2007, T5 became almost entirely paralyzed. Several years later, he enrolled in a clinical trial called BrainGate2 to research brain-computer interfaces.

Two small microchips were implanted in his brain.

Scientist Frank Willett of Stanford University and his colleagues asked T5 to imagine that he was writing individual letters and punctuation marks. They found that the patterns of neural activity they recorded were distinct for each letter, period, and comma.

Now all they had to do — a trifle! — is train an algorithm to predict, based on T5’s neural patterns, what letter or punctuation mark he was writing in his imagination.

It worked. Initial accuracy: 94 percent. With autocorrect that percentage went up to 99.

As yet, the technology is said to be too rudimentary to be practically applied. But the basic approach has been shown to be viable. The work also communicates the power of human ingenuity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

Deep State, Deeply Fake

deep fake, Donald Trump, Young Frankenstein,

Is there a good, presumptive reason to believe what the government tells us?

Not when it comes from the “intelligence” agencies.

One of the more breathtaking developments of recent years has been the transformation of Democratic Party politicians and activists from skeptics of alphabet soup intelligence agencies — CIA, NSA, FBI and many more — to becoming enthusiastic cheerleaders.

On the bright side, Republicans are drifting in the other direction, from their old-fashioned lockstep support of “intelligence agencies” to a new realism — the relentless Deep State “coup” attempts against the Trump Administration having proved . . . instructive.

While we might wish to think that, whew!, these agencies are comprised of loyal Americans, consider what Senator Chuck Schumer said earlier this year, almost approvingly: “You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

But more important than all this is the developing techniques the Deep State can marshal. I refer to Deepfake tech, where anything video can be faked, convincingly and completely. If not now, then very soon, technicians within the Deep State — and outside, too — will be able to videofake anything, from Trump cavorting with Moscow hookers to an Iranian “attack” to . . . UFO landings.

We shouldn’t have trusted intelligence agencies in the run-up to the Iraq conquest, now we have good reason to doubt anything and everything they tell us. 

Which means Congress should take very tight control of them, rein these agencies in — for Congress is indeed worried about deepfake tech.

How?

Well, de-classifying old secrets might be a good start. The last bit of the JFK assassination files? Maybe. UFOs? Maybe. But it’s what’s not on our radar that may be the most important.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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deep fake, Donald Trump, Young Frankenstein,

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free trade & free markets

We Need iPads

Every once in a while somebody explains that “we” don’t need this or that product, however great it may be and however great the demand for it. For example, a tech reviewer dubs Apple’s latest iPad models “largely unnecessary,” given last-year models almost as capable.

The charge of unnecessariness is surely false when we’re talking about customers who do want the most cutting-edge technology and can put it to good use. But it’s false in a broader perspective too — unless we suppose that all advances in human civilization beyond the level of the hut and the bearskin are “largely unnecessary” to human survival and well-being.

If technological progress is necessary, so are key aspects of how that progress happens, including the fact that it so often happens by “largely unnecessary” increments. Any given marginal advance in computer or PC tech may have been dispensable. But the same can’t be said of the process of cumulative improvement as a whole. Consider, for example, that some ninety percent of what we now do on our PCs would have been impossible to do with the 1980 PC. Our 2014 laptops could not have been crafted without myriad intermediate advances.

As striving human beings, our needs evolve as our means improve and enable us to pursue ends that we could not have pursued with less powerful means. Ergo, I welcome every little improvement we can get. And I can hardly wait for my 2025 iPad.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.