Lifeboat Foundation

With the web of undersea cables lacing the continents together now, it’s hard to imagine that it wasn’t until 1956 that the first transatlantic telephone cable was laid. Sure, there were telegraph cables under the Atlantic starting as early as the late 1800s, but getting your voice across the ocean on copper was a long time coming. So what was the discerning 1930s gentleman of business to do when only a voice call would do? He’d have used a radiotelephone, probably at an outrageous expense, which as this video on the receiving end of the New York to London radio connection shows, was probably entirely justified.

The video details the shortwave radiotelephone system that linked New York and London in the 1930s. It starts with a brief but thorough explanation of ionospheric refraction, and how that atmospheric phenomenon makes it possible to communicate over vast distances. It also offers a great explanation on the problems inherent with radio connections, like multipath interference and the dependency on the solar cycle for usable skip. To overcome these issues, the Cooling Radio Station was built, and its construction is the main thrust of the video.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Transatlantic Radiotelephone System Of The 1930s” »

What do quantum computers have to do with smog-filled London streets, flying submarines, waistcoats, petticoats, Sherlock Holmesian mysteries, and brass goggles?

A whole lot, according to Nicole Yunger Halpern. Last week, the theoretical physicist joined Jacob Barandes, co-director of graduate studies for physics, to discuss her new book, “Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterday’s Tomorrow.” In it, Yunger Halpern dissects a new branch of science—quantum thermodynamics, or quantum steampunk as she calls it—by fusing steampunk fiction with nonfiction and Victorian-era thermodynamics (the heat and energy that gets steam engines pumping) with quantum physics. Yunger Halpern presents a whimsical lens through which readers can watch a “scientific revolution that’s happening in real time,” Barandes said, exploring mysteries even Holmes couldn’t hope to solve, such as why time flows in only one direction.

“This fusion of old and new creates a wonderful sense of nostalgia and adventure, romance and exploration,” Yunger Halpern said during a virtual Harvard Science Book Talk presented by the University’s Division of Science, Cabot Science Library, and Harvard Book Store. In steampunk, she continued, “fans dress up in costumes full of top hats and goggles and gears and gather at conventions. What they dream, I have the immense privilege of having the opportunity to live.”

Current DNA computation techniques are slow in generating chemical outputs in response to chemical inputs and rely heavily on fluorescence readouts. Here, the authors introduce a new paradigm for DNA computation where the chemical input is processed and transduced into a mechanical output in the form of macroscopic locomotion using dynamic DNA-based motors.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-Oox2w5sMcA

Provided an FAA environmental review wraps up by then.

The SpaceX boss provided a recent update on the long-anticipated first orbital launch for his Mars-bound Starship rocket.

A new theoretical paper has tackled the phenomenon of quantum decoherence.

A new theoretical paper has tackled the phenomenon of quantum decoherence, the process by which objects slip out of the quantum world and start behaving classically. The paper approaches this in a new way by applying an effect of general relativity to decoherence. The paper claims that gravity is the key to the disparity between the weird quantum world and the everyday, familiar world of human-sized objects in which we live.

Schrödinger’s cat is an example of a quantum system which might decohere due to time dilation — and myriad other interactions.

Tesla released production numbers for the first quarter after a record-setting close to 2021.

If you need any proof that it doesn’t take the most advanced chip manufacturing processes to create an exascale-class supercomputer, you need look no further than the Sunway “OceanLight” system housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China.

Some of the architectural details of the OceanLight supercomputer came to our attention as part of a paper published by Alibaba Group, Tsinghua University, DAMO Academy, Zhejiang Lab, and Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, which is running a pretrained machine learning model called BaGuaLu, across more than 37 million cores and 14.5 trillion parameters (presumably with FP32 single precision), and has the capability to scale to 174 trillion parameters (and approaching what is called “brain-scale” where the number of parameters starts approaching the number of synapses in the human brain). But, as it turns out, some of these architectural details were hinted at in the three of the six nominations for the Gordon Bell Prize last fall, which we covered here. To our chagrin and embarrassment, we did not dive into the details of the architecture at the time (we had not seen that they had been revealed), and the BaGuaLu paper gives us a chance to circle back.

Before this slew of papers were announced with details on the new Sunway many-core processor, we did take a stab at figuring out how the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (known as NRCPC) might build an exascale system, scaling up from the SW26010 processor used in the Sunway “TaihuLight” machine that took the world by storm back in June 2016. The 260-core SW26010 processor was etched by Chinese foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation using 28 nanometer processes – not exactly cutting edge. And the SW26010-Pro processor, etched using 14 nanometer processes, is not on an advanced node, but China is perfectly happy to burn a lot of coal to power and cool the OceanLight kicker system based on it. (Also known as the Sunway exascale system or the New Generation Sunway supercomputer.)

Architecture may make it possible to train one machine-learning model that performs all sorts of tasks.

Tl;dr: It’s obvious at this point that humanity isn’t going to solve the alignment problem, or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight. Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with with slightly more dignity.

Well, let’s be frank here. MIRI didn’t solve AGI alignment and at least knows that it didn’t. Paul Christiano’s incredibly complicated schemes have no chance of working in real life before DeepMind destroys the world. Chris Olah’s transparency work, at current rates of progress, will at best let somebody at DeepMind give a highly speculative warning about how the current set of enormous inscrutable tensors, inside a system that was recompiled three weeks ago and has now been training by gradient descent for 20 days, might possibly be planning to start trying to deceive its operators.

Management will then ask what they’re supposed to do about that.