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US coalition in first downing of Syrian army plane

U.S. warplane downs Syrian army jet in Raqqa province

I'm a little shocked it took this long.

http://www.snopes.com/breatharians/

http://www.babwnews.com/2017/06/crazy-couple-says-they-no-longer-need-to-eat/

Some predictions from "the father of deep learning", Jürgen Schmidhuber:

He predicts trillions of AI in the 2050s will mine and develop [asteroids].

He has a long list of “truths” that many disagree with.

1. Many think that intelligence is this awesome, infinitely complex thing. Juergen think it is just the product of a few principles that will be considered very simple in hindsight, so simple that even kids will be able to understand and build intelligent, continually learning, more and more general problem solvers.
Partial justification of this belief:
(a) there already exist blueprints of universal problem solvers developed in my lab, in the new millennium, which are theoretically optimal in some abstract sense although they consist of just a few formulas (http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/unilearn.html, http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html).

(b) The principles of our less universal, but still rather general, very practical, program-learning recurrent neural networks can also be described by just a few lines of pseudo-code, e.g., http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/rnn.html, http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/compressednetworksearch.html

2. General purpose quantum computation won’t work (Juergen’s prediction of 15 years ago is still standing). Related: The universe is deterministic, and the most efficient program that computes its entire history is short and fast, which means there is little room for true randomness, which is very expensive to compute. What looks random must be pseudorandom, like the decimal expansion of Pi, which is computable by a short program. Many physicists disagree, but Einstein was right: no dice. There is no physical evidence to the contrary http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/randomness.html. For example, Bell’s theorem does not contradict this. And any efficient search in program space for the solution to a sufficiently complex problem will create many deterministic universes like ours as a by-product. Think about this. More here http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html and here http://www.kurzweilai.net/in-the-beginning-was-the-code

[...] Juergen won’t be surprised if Moore’s Law holds for another century. If so, computers will approach the Bremermann limit of 10^51 ops/s per kg of matter in the mid 2100s

Femtocomputing, please.

Interesting Wikipedia talk page.

This is from last month but there's no newer article about AV1:

Google’s Royalty-Free Answer to HEVC: A Look at AV1 and the Future of Video Codecs

AOMedia Video 1:

AV1 can be used together with the audio format Opus in a future version of the WebM format for HTML5 web video and WebRTC.

What kind of features are you looking for in AV1 (other than the obvious: better compression efficiency than H.265/HEVC)?

Apple is adding HEVC support to its products.

In light of the horrible attack in Alexandria on MY BIRTHDAY, I've signed an executive order declaring next week National Liberal Violence Awareness Day. Eric Bolling on @FoxNews said something very smart:

How many innocent people have to die before we realize that words do matter? Crazy people act on the crazy things they hear from politicians and celebrities. Think before you utter those blind, hateful words next time, liberals, because there are crazy people out there taking your metaphors literally. https://t.co/nKWid37odD

Wear my favorite color, orange, and be aware of the hatred the liberals (and Dems) spew and the violence they do. #WearOrange

I talked with Malcolm Turnbull on the phone. With the Prime Minister, the disgusting Prime Minister, of Australia. Of all the phone calls I've been on, it was the worst call by far. Believe me, folks, it was a terrible phone call. That happened in March. He asked me to take in Australia's refugees. I said we'll do it, but we have to vet them. Refugees, for America, are a huge problem. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime. They're rapists. Even with extreme vetting, they're making big problems for America. And Australia doesn't want them either. So they made a deal, Australia made a deal, with Obama. Who came to America as a refugee. And let me tell you, folks, the deal they made is terrible for America. Totally one-sided. But I said I'd stick to the deal. Because promises are important. Even when I didn't make them. Very reluctantly, I'm sticking to the deal. But now Malcolm is making fun of me and it's very hurtful. My wife, Melania, and my son, Barron, heard about the way Malcolm made fun of me, how he mocked me, and they are very hurt by it. He's hurting my family. He should be ashamed of himself. He has no shame, but he should be ashamed.

Trump's Name Will Be Bleeped Out In The Next "Broad City" Season

Would I have seen this important news if I hadn't accidentally opened BuzzFeed? I'm not so sure.

Russia protests: Opposition leader Alexei Navalny sentenced

Russia protests: Kremlin critic Navalny jailed, hundreds arrested

Will Navalny make it into the Kremlin or get shot in the night?

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/ames/kepler/media-invited-to-nasa-s-kepler-and-k2-mission-science-conference

NASA invites members of the media to attend the fourth Kepler and K2 Science Conference to be held June 19-23. The weeklong science conference will take place at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

Probably a good time to look for exoplanet-related announcements.