Groucho Marxism
Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics
Category: Technology
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Quantum computers are advanced computing systems that harness quantum mechanics—specifically superposition and entanglement—to solve complex problems beyond the reach of classical computers. Unlike classical computers that use binary bits (0 or 1), quantum computers use quantum bits (qubits), allowing them to process vast amounts of data simultaneously. Qubits can exist in multiple states at once,…
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The ‘Astute’ class is the latest class of nuclear-powered fleet submarines in service with the Royal Navy. The Astute program began in 1986 when the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) launched several studies to determine requirements for replacement of its existing submarines. These studies were conducted during the Cold War, when the Royal Navy maintained…
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A sport utility vehicle (SUV) is a car classification that combines elements of road-going passenger cars with features from off-road vehicles, such as raised ground clearance and four-wheel drive. These cars have grown massively in popularity in recent years. The rise in production and marketing of SUVs in the 2010s and 2020s by auto manufacturers…
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Last summer I entered a competition run by the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. The competition involved forecasting the incidence of Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted to humans via bites from ticks. The way the competition worked was that the Alan Turing Institute provided data on…
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A ‘magnetosphere’ is a region of space surrounding an astronomical object, such as a planet, in which charged particles are affected by that object’s magnetic field. A geomagnetic storm is a temporary disturbance of the Earth’s magnetosphere driven by interactions between it and magnetic field structures that originate from the Sun. In September 1859, the…
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In the last few years there has been a rapid adoption of artificial intelligence across all sectors of society. This has been driven largely by the development if so-called ‘generative AI’ technology. Generative AI is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, audio, software code, and other forms…
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The term ‘climate change’ refers to both global warming – the ongoing increase in global average temperature – and its wider effects on Earth’s climate system. It is generally accepted now that climate change is happening and that it is already having an impact on the environment. Many such impacts have been observed in the…
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In February this year, Keir Starmer set out plans to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, stating that this would be offset by cuts to aid spending. This was met with uproar by many on the left, and its not hard to see why. Figures from the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SPRI)…
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The Luddites were a group of workers in the cotton industry who lived in northern England (Nottinghamshire, Lancashire, and Yorkshire) in the early 19th century. They take their name from Ned Ludd, an apocryphal figure said to have smashed machines back in 1799, although he did not share the later Luddites’ motivations. In modern parlance,…
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The standard account of human history runs as follows. First, modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Then, for a long time nothing much happened, until about 11,000 years ago when somebody invented agriculture. After that, human civilization took off – and the rest, as they say, is history. There is a glaring…
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I just returned from a holiday in France, during which I visited three medium-sized cities (Rouen, Le Mans, and Tours). Something that struck me about these cities was how nice they seemed compared to cities in the UK. Now obviously this is biased sample as I specifically I went to these places because I knew…
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