Basic Transportation
I’ve always thought that NASA’s manned rover concepts were a little too consciously “futuristic”, designed more with a sci-fi aesthetic in mind than simple rugged practicality.
Now this…this is my idea of a manned rover…
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DIY High-Altitude Photography
I’ve already got the camera – if only I had the time to do the rest.
Amazing pictures of Earth captured by one man, a balloon and his compact camera:
Space enthusiast Robert Harrison managed to send his home-made contraption 22 miles – or 116,160 feet – above the earth’s surface from his back garden.
He used GPS tracking technology similar to an in-car sat-nav to follow its progress – and an attached radio transmitter to find it when it parachutes back to earth.
The photos taken by his device were so spectacular that Nasa has been in touch to see how he achieved it.
Mr Harrison’s budget of £500 might also offer inspiration to the new UK Space Agency, which launches on April 1. Based in Swindon, with only one astronaut and a budget one 50th the size of Nasa’s, it will be looking for cut-price ways to reach for the sky.
Mr Harrison first got the idea to explore space after a failed attempt to take aerial pictures of his house using a remote control helicopter.
The pictures are pretty impressive. What’s really amazing about this, though, is that he didn’t get nailed by the aviation authorities for doing this. Or that the police didn’t arrest him under the 2004 Terrorist Act for “suspicious” or “antisocial” photography.
NASA Gives Opportunity Free Will
Okay, not really. But they are giving it the ability to autonomously select science targets based on general guidelines:
The new system, which NASA uploaded over the past few months, is called Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science, or AEGIS and it lets Opportunity’s computer examine images that the rover takes with its wide-angle navigation camera after a drive, and recognize rocks that meet specified criteria, such as rounded shape or light color. It can then center its narrower-angle panoramic camera on the chosen target and take multiple images through color filters, NASA stated.
AEGIS lets Opportunity look at rocks at stopping points along a single day’s drive or at the end of the day’s drive. This lets it identify and examine targets of interest that might otherwise be missed, NASA said.
NASA said the first images taken by the Mars rover choosing its own target show a rock about the size of a football, tan in color and layered in texture. It appears to be one of the rocks tossed outward onto the surface when an impact dug a nearby crater. Opportunity pointed its panoramic camera at this unnamed rock after analyzing a wider-angle photo taken by the rover’s navigation camera at the end of a drive on March 4. Opportunity decided that this particular rock, out of more than 50 in the navigation camera photo, best met the criteria that researchers had set for a target of interest: large and dark, NASA stated.
Cool. But while it increases the productivity of this and future rovers, it isn’t going to eliminate the utility of sending humans to explore – or their essential role in settlement which, by definition, is not something robots have the ability to do.
I’m curious as to where the developers at NASA plan to take this technology in the future. Will evolved versions allow for (for instance) faster-moving rovers capable of covering more ground instead of waiting for detailed instructions? How much serendipity or “curiosity” will be allowed in the programming – that is, how broad will the selection criteria be, how much autonomy will future rovers have to pursue their own selections, and will the process be recursive, allowing the rover to reevaluate and select new science targets based on unexpected discoveries at a previously-selected target? Imagine a fleet of small, fast, simple, mass-produced rovers with loose guidlines and broad autonomy, scattered over the surface of Mars and allowed to wander at will, subject to occasional nudges from controllers back on Earth towards features of interest.
“Non-Smoking, Please”
I guess someone must have missed the lesson of the Hindenburg: Giant hydrogen airships could herald a new era in luxury travel
Image: Seymourpowell/PA
Set aside the obvious problems with floating bags of hydrogen large enough to lift nearly 400 tons of payload over major cities, and their obvious appeal as terrorist targets, and the fact that obtaining that much hydrogen would not be as green as the creators imagine.
I want to know how they’re packaging this monster.
The windows at the lower apex suggest most if not all of the accommodations are there…which makes sense, since you want the mass on the bottom (think Weebles). But what about the hydrogen cells? Is an octahedron with concave sides really the best way to package large volumes of gas that want to assume a spherical shape? Oh sure, the thing could be fitted with conformal cells, but how structurally efficient would all of this be compared with other, less eye-appealing shapes?
On the other hand, I do like the rendering of tethered airships against the backdrop of Hong Kong – it makes me think of the floating cities from the Ringworld books.
[hat tip: JB]
Detroit – the New Trantor
Isn’t this what the remaining denizens of Trantor did after the collapse of the empire in the original “Foundation” trilogy?
[O]ne day about a year and a half ago, [investment manager John Hantz] had a revelation. “We need scarcity,” he thought to himself as he drove past block after unoccupied block. “We can’t create opportunities, but we can create scarcity.” And that, he says one afternoon in his living room between puffs on an expensive cigar, “is how I got onto this idea of the farm.”
Yes, a farm. A large-scale, for-profit agricultural enterprise, wholly contained within the city limits of Detroit. Hantz thinksfarming could do his city a lot of good: restore big chunks of tax-delinquent, resource-draining urban blight to pastoral productivity; provide decent jobs with benefits; supply local markets and restaurants with fresh produce; attract tourists from all over the world; and — most important of all — stimulate development around the edges as the local land market tilts from stultifying abundance to something more like scarcity and investors move in. Hantz is willing to commit $30 million to the project. He’ll start with a pilot program this spring involving up to 50 acres on Detroit’s east side. “Out of the gates,” he says, “it’ll be the largest urban farm in the world.”
The original article at CNN Money features a graphic that shows these urban farms won’t just be rows of crops, oh nosirree…they’ll be something special…something cutting edge…like a cross between an O’Neill colony and a baseball stadium:
To increase the odds that they will, Hantz plans on making his farms both visually stunning and technologically cutting edge. Where there are row crops, Hantz says, they’ll be neatly organized, planted in “dead-straight lines — they may even be in a design.” But the plan isn’t to make Detroit look like Iowa. “Don’t think a farm with tractors,” says Hantz. “That’s old.”
In fact, Hantz’s operation will bear little resemblance to a traditional farm. Mike Score, who recently left Michigan State’s agricultural extension program to join Hantz Farms as president, has written a business plan that calls for the deployment of the latest in farm technology, from compost-heated greenhouses to hydroponic (water only, no soil) and aeroponic (air only) growing systems designed to maximize productivity in cramped settings. [emphasis mine]
He’s really excited about apples. Hantz Farms will use a trellised system that’s compact, highly efficient, and tourist-friendly. It won’t be like apple picking in Massachusetts, and that’s the point. Score wants visitors to Hantz Farms to see that agriculture is not just something that takes place in the countryside. They will be able to “walk down the row pushing a baby stroller,” he promises.
Which all sounds pretty silly to me, an unnecessarily capital-intensive way to accomplish the stated goal of making the land productive through agriculture – and a ridiculous exercise in subsidy seeking, as Dan notes. But on the other hand, this is not unlike what will be needed for farms on the Moon and Mars, so even if it fails (as, being in Detroit, it is foredoomed to do), it may be a valuable learning experience for future space settlement efforts.
Christmas Comes Early, Part I
Part of the reason that posting on MarsBlog has been so lackluster over the past year is that my other project, People’s Press Collective, has been claiming nearly all of my time outside of work. Since I live about forty minutes from downtown Denver, and end up down there for events 2-3 nights a week, it’s been awfully hard to find the time (or motivation when time is available) to blog from my trusty deskbound desktop PC at home.
For that and other reasons, I finally invested in a new HP dm3 laptop yesterday. Or maybe it’s a netbook. I’m not really clear on the distinction, and this one seems to be in a gray zone in between, having a dual-core 64-bit processor and faster bus than an obvious netbook and a slightly larger size, but similarly missing the optical drive of a laptop and a typical laptop’s voracious appetite for battery power. Oh, and it has a slick magnesium case, which makes it look much more hardy than the toy-like netbooks (or medical-equipment-like white Apples, for that matter).
So, with any luck, this should make posting a lot easier, and thus somewhat more frequent.
While I’ve had limited time thus far to play with it (that will come in the airport this week), I have tried out some video from the HD camcorder I picked up last month, and it is truly amazing. The desktop didn’t have enough memory to view native .MT2 files without a lot of choppiness (and since it was RDRAM, was not cost-effective to expand), but the little laptop was all set up and ready to go, with all the right codecs already installed for Media Player. If you haven’t played around with HD video, it’s incredible how much sharper and more “real” it is than what you may be used to from YouTube or online television watching. I still may need to get a new desktop at some point to process video, but for viewing it, I don’t think I could ask for much better.
Timelapse, the Hard Way
This guy clearly has a lot of media cards for his camera.
More at rossching.com. And details of how he did it can be found at Digital Photography School.
What surprises me (and perhaps it shouldn’t) is that it took roughly 15,000 still frames to generate the film. I bought a Nikon D80 two and a half years ago, and since have taken it on two trips abroad, on two trips to Moab, up eight Fourteeners, on at least five significant hikes, four trips to Michigan, one cross-country trip, four moonbat rallies, two tea parties, and numerous other events, and still have only taken just shy of 14,000 pictures with it (not including RAW/jpeg pairs).
One Good Use for ISS
Whatever else good eventually comes out of the ISS, demonstrating VASIMR — and then using it to routinely reboost the station — might just be its best sci/tech achievement.
[h/t: Instapundit]
Two Tales of Technological Evolution
Tale #1: A Visit to Borders
I visited Borders over the weekend to buy a gift certificate. The first thing I noticed when I entered the store (having not been to this particular location in perhaps six months) was the vast expanse of empty racks in the middle of the place where CDs used to be displayed. According to the counter clerk, they were in the process of phasing out most of their CD products — all but new releases — due to the rising popularity of iTunes and other internet-based digital music sources. “Nobody is buying CDs anymore,” she explained.
Apparently, nobody is buying books at Borders anymore, either. Something about the book racks also struck me as odd while I was standing in line, and as I was leaving I figured out what it was: the racks had been cut back to half their length. That is, the racks perpendicular to the walls used to be made up of two oak shelving units, but the units on the end had been removed. Now, they may plan to simply reshuffle their existing book inventory into the space vacated by CDs, but this particular change didn’t look recent – and why would they remove a good portion of the existing inventory from the floor, rather than waiting until the new area had been prepared?
Given the company’s financial situation, it may be that I was witnessing one small step in the slow demise of the Borders chain:
Borders (BGP) has struggled for several years as the No.2 operator of book store behind Barnes & Noble. When Border’s released its last set of earnings it said it would cut the number of Waldenbooks stores from about 300 to 50 or 60. With Border’s losses, that won’t be enough. The pressure from online book operations led by Amazon (AMZN) and new e-book readers is overwhelming Borders. In the fourth quarter of last year, sales at Border’s branded stores dropped 15.3%. For the full year 2008, Borders lost $157 million on revenue of $2.8 billion. Borders recently extended its $42.5 million senior secured term loan with Pershing Square Capital Management, moving the due date to April 1, 2010. That may be the day that Borders goes away. Border’s shares trade at $1.47, down from a 52-week high of $8.02.
Tale #2: A Visit to the Dentist
Two years ago, I was glad to finally have an excuse to get rid of my last unsightly amalgam filling. Unfortunately, there was some sort of material flaw in the porcelain crown that replaced it, and today I had it replaced gratis.
Only, they didn’t replace it with quite the same thing. Or in quite the same way.
Rather than the two-visit process I had to go through the last time, with those gag-inducing trays filled with molding putty and seemingly-endless custom fitting of the crown made from the resulting molds, I was in and out in about three hours, of which maybe ten minutes involved fitting and polishing. Best part: no molds.
The new process involved inserting a small scanning device into my mouth before and after the old crown was removed, to create 3D images of the perfectly-fitting existing crown and the cleared-out bonding surface along with the surrounding molars. Immediately after the second scan, a 3D image of the tooth as-it-was appeared on the screen next to my chair, the dentist made a few adjustments to add some material at certain adjustment points and then fired it off to a milling machine in the next room — just as if she were printing a document.
About fifteen minutes later, she returned with the new but uncured crown to make a few adjustments to the fit. After about five minutes of grinding and test-fitting, it was into the curing oven for about 40 minutes. Then it was bonded in, and after another five minutes of fitting, it was done and I headed back to work.
That’s a pretty neat bit of medical technology, I think.
This is the same dentist with whom I first experienced digital X-rays a number of years ago, and who (with improved resolution on the X-ray interface) determined at my last exam that I have extra roots on all of my teeth, and not just the molars…something the new technology is showing to be surprisingly common. Even better – she’s bringing in a 3D digital X-ray system soon, which should provide images at even higher resolution.
While I figured out the bricks-and-mortar bookstores’ days were numbered the first time I ordered something from Amazon back in 1996, the rapid evolution of medical technology is pretty surprising.
Xcel “Smart Meters” in Boulder: More Information for Better Consumer Choices?
Complete Colorado points to an article in the Daily Camera on Xcel’s efforts to install “smart grid” technology in (where else?) Boulder.
I definitely don’t like the idea of the power company (or envirokook do-gooders in the local government) having the authority to turn down my air conditioning or water heater whenever they find it “necessary”, but there are elements to the “smart grid” technology that I do find interesting, and possibly appealing.
Xcel has spent the last year installing more than 100 miles’ worth of fiber-optic cable in Boulder. That cable now carries vital information about the grid’s performance to Xcel. The company is also asking 10,000 volunteers to install “smart meters” in their homes that will allow them to get nearly real-time information about their electricity use.
The new grid technology could let customers give Xcel the authority to turn down the power to their air conditioners or other energy-hog appliances to help save power during peak-use periods. It could also let customers power-up their appliances when the data shows that more energy is being produced by alternative sources like solar and wind power…
Xcel will also soon be asking regulators for the right to charge consumers for electricity based on demand, rather than a flat price. If their efforts succeed, customers will be able to decide, for example, to turn on the dryer later at night, when electricity is cheaper. {emphasis mine}
That makes a lot of sense, in principle at least. (More info on the smart meters here.) If the new meters could actually provide realtime usage and pricing information via household display, it’s easy to see how one can save a few bucks simply by choosing to delay certain energy-hungry activities for a short while. And if the meters could show real-time price trends over several days or several weeks, consumers could establish new money-saving (and, yes, energy-conserving) habits based on this information.
Note that this sort of demand scheduling is not new – the company I worked for in college scheduled the startup of its heavy machinery for early in the morning, before the daily power demand picked up, in order to qualify for reduced rates from the power company. What’s new is the ability to plan such things on the fly, based on real-time information.
But of course, this being Boulder, someone has to drag class envy into it. Giving consumers more information on which to base voluntary money-saving choices isn’t good enough: poor consumers need to be given money to adopt the glamorous, expensive, and dubiously-effective green-preening luxuries energy technologies that the wascally wealthy can buy with their pocket change:
Boulder City Councilwoman Angelique Espinoza, one of those in the audience, said the energy-saving opportunities Floyd described sound exciting. But, she said, she wants to know what efforts will be made to help people without money buy their own solar panels, smart-meters, or plug-in hybrid vehicles.
“What it sounds like is that the person who has the most money to invest to control their consumption saves the most money,” she said. “But that’s not the person who needs to save the most money.”
Floyd said he doesn’t necessarily agree with that assessment. Much of the energy-saving technology is cheap, he said — and it makes sense to try to distribute it as widely as possibly.
“We want it to be equally beneficial, or even more beneficial, to people who are struggling to make ends meet,” he said.
That’s our Boulder.
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