RISC-V

RISC-V is an exciting new microprocessor ISA (instruction set architecture).  In the last 30 years several proprietary ISAs have tried to dislodge x86 as the defacto processor standard with varying degrees of success.  ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, PA-RISC, SPARC, Itanium to name a few.  ARM has come closest to dominating the embedded space, but seems to have stalled lately.  But these are all proprietary which has something to do with the acceptance as a standard for the lowest level computer language.  Who wants to depend on a language owned by somebody else ?

A few years ago OpenRISC entered the market, but it's ecosystem and architecture are limited, largely due to the limited resources of the authors.  Enter RISC-V.  This architecture is very clean, well designed, open, and originally out of Berkeley.  This architecture is tracking to do for microprocessor architectures, what Linux did for Unix Server Operating Systems.

This architecture is going to win because it:

• Has a very clean well designed extendable ISA
• Easily emulates on x86 (is little endian)
• Completely open royalty free, with mechanisms for proprietary extensions
• High performance free simulators already available
• Huge list of technology companies already endorsing this architecture
• Real silicon designs available today ready to be customized as desired.

Very cool.  This will open new frontiers in machine languages as well once it is not owned by some for profit company.

https://riscv.org/

Drones and facial recognition to address crime and terrorism

Drones have the potential to significantly impact crime and terrorism.

Computer vision and facial recognition is available now and is only getting better.

Crime

Imagine a fleet of bird size drones available to local police departments that can be dispatched immediately in response to an emergency call.  They can have suspect images uploaded in flight and programmed to find the suspect given his last known location.  Yikes.  I see no reason this can't be done now.  Why isn't it being done ?

Alternately the drone swarm could be dispatched to a location and just used for broad surveillance to gather information at a potential crime scene or high crime area.  Imagine a thousand different high resolution videos of a crime.  With that kind of data there should be little doubt about guilt or innocence.  

I can also imagine having facial recognition cameras at the entry to future grocery stores to spot known criminals potentially up to no good.  Nice.  If I owned a store I know I would like to know when shady characters entered my store so I could keep a closer eye on them.  

Facial recognition is now being added to home security cameras.  It seems just a matter of time until these are connected to crime databases such that home break-ins can accurately ID the offending person.  This should bring down crime rates, but criminals may also get smarter and start wearing masks.

Military

Similarly imagine the military having a swarm of a thousand drones to look for a terrorist after a recent sighting.  Facial recognition would prevent them from ever stepping outside.

So if you're a member of an old school hard religion that believes in chopping off the heads of anyone that says something you don't like it might be time to rethink your beliefs... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2la4pIyXOEQ

Sherp ATV

I used to dismiss Russia as a boring fading socialist experiment.  Maybe they knew how to make Vodka or something.  What else are you going to do when there is snow on the ground for 11 months out of the year ?

And then I saw a video of the Sherp ATV.  I'm sorry but that is the coolest ATV I have ever seen period.  And I thought Americans knew how to make ATVs.  I guess living in ice and snow makes you good at engineering vehicles that travel over anything including water.  Wow.  That is one beautiful machine.  Really, really, really impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sherp+atv

UFOs and Intelligent Alien Life

• UFOs
• I wish I could see a good UFO, but unfortunately have not.
• Why do all the videos have to be at a distance and blurry, bummer
• If there are any aliens reading this please contact me.  Especially if you own a UFO.  I would really like to go for a ride in a UFO.

• Are We Alone ?
• Some smart folks ask why we haven't detected other intelligent life in the universe.
• Given the exponential rate of growth of technology the logic goes that we should be able to aim a telescope at distant stars and see cool giant space cities or some such.
• Good question.  One of the bigger good questions of life in fact.
• The more we look without seeing anything artificial the more it seems we might be alone.
• Perhaps we have underestimated the odds of things aligning for advanced life.  Maybe we under estimated earth's geographic and other factors that led to the evolution and adaptive nature of man.  Maybe it isn't just 10 things that had to happen to get to this point, maybe it is 100.
• An alternate option is that intelligent life has existed before but destroyed itself.  Does it make sense to leave hundreds or thousands of children unattended in a nuclear reactor control room ?   Now imagine 1 billion children in a control room that could wipe out the human race.  That is what we are looking at in the very very near future in the domains of AI and nanotechnology.
• Another alternative is that as other intelligent species have evolved they moved into other 'domains' of existence that are harder for us to detect.  The transformation of human existence into something 'digital' is not that crazy anymore.  We are only a few years away from computers being smarter than humans.  A computer with the capacity to download the sum of every interesting bit of a human can't be that far behind.  And once we're fully digital it get's really crazy.  

Politics: Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians

• Democrats
• Get right
• The game is rigged.  
• Minimum wage is a poverty trap
• Company execs do not work 1,000,000 million times harder than their janitors but they get paid that 
• Get wrong
• Taking money from people (via taxes) with no regard for fairness or results only makes things worse
• 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions'

• Republicans
• Get right
• Policies based on physical world realities instead of wishful thinking
• Get wrong
• Capitalism without regard to society/ethics is evil
• How many people has tobacco killed ?
• Capitalism has creeps cold calling senior citizens trying to talk them out of their savings

• Libertarians

• Get right
• Elegant simple clean political philosophy
• Leans toward anarchy
• If you think Anarchy works a great example of that is Afghanistan.  Please go there and see how great it works.
• Get wrong
• Unfortunately it is too simple.  
• It does not deal with the reality of large groups of people, IE 'Political Power'.
• Similar to nuclear energy political power or the power of the mob needs to be understood and carefully managed.
• The truth is that political power (power of large group of people) is even more dangerous and complex and unpredictable than nuclear energy.
• As such the rules for managing it should be very robust and well designed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_forms_of_government