This video of swarming Autonomous Quadrotors has made the rounds, I guess I’m just adding my bit to the noise, this isn’t that surprising but it seems to me just one more indication that the world is the cusp of great change. The article at Wired is short but has some other interesting links.
The picture below was part of this article about Space X’s intentions to develop a better launch abort system using the integrated rocket system on the Dragon Capsule.
The cool thing about this is that the old system was horribly wasteful and a danger in itself. This is the old and still standard way (from Wikipedia) a shot of the Apollo system under test, and that was just a larger version of what was on Mercury.
This is called a Tractor system, and it pulls the capsule off the booster in case of disaster. The rocket motor is attached to a shell which attaches to the base of the capsule protecting the capsule in case of rocket ignition. But for a successful, even survivable mission, now you have to discard the abort system during boost. And it’s an expensive and heavy piece of gear tossed in the sea. Even the Orion exploration vehicle, part of the SLS uses the same expensive and wasteful system.
Space X will make the rocket motors part of the Dragon, firing from the skirt area as you can kind of see in the picture at the top. This rocket motor will Push the capsule off the booster. It can also become part of the landing system, the intent is to make the Dragon a mixed mode lander, decelerating using rockets, heat shield, then parachute but finally landing under rocket power, this will allow for pin point landing in some reasonably remote and safe spot on land instead of at sea. In fact the Russians have used a rocket ‘cushion’ system for landing their capsules forever, but the Dragon will be a real landing system, not just a cushion.
Below the Draco Rocket under test, and here the article in Wired that does a good job of explaining what’s going on in the picture. There is also video at Wired so enjoy.
Draco Rocket Test
Work absorbed my time this week, one of those weeks where every hour was tagged and I almost forgot several calls even though my electronic adjuncts tried to keep me on path. I work with some really great people who I enjoy spending time discussing problems of society, America, industry and the world, we almost always solve most of the problems by the end of the meal.
But after solving the world’s problems verbally I just didn’t feel like blogging…and with the iPad and the WP app there is really no excuse for that. So I need to make another dedication to getting at least something, even its just “Mehe” or “Have some eye candy, now don’t bother me conscience’
Speaking of eye candy the series of solar eruptions have produced their usual stunning skyworks and since the cycle is 11 years, this is the first solar maximum in the age of digital photography so there are fabulous, fantastical pictures all over the web.
APOD Aurora Image
Such as this one, todays APOD eyecandy.
APOD Aurora Image
Or this one from the Jan 24th APOD.
Those were from two solar flares, the first a 3 the second a 2, there has been a near max one as well (above a 5 on the scale which is a log, scale so more than a thousand times stronger than the one that produced the image above.) Here is a bit more information. You’ll notice that it’s from Kent (England) which is because the English, and even more the Scots see a lot of this sort of thing, the British Isles are surprisingly far north (Hudson Bay Canada sort of North.) The Aurora is a polar effect due to the Earths powerful magnetic field (which prevents this sort of thing from sterilizing the planet) the magnetic field lines plunge into the body of the world north and south, allowing the energetic particles to interact with our atmosphere, creating plasmas, immense natural neon signs.
On the Strategy Page, I read another of their excellent pieces recently, oddly enough called Snipers Rule:
Currently, about ten percent of American infantry are trained and equipped as snipers. Commanders have found that filling the battlefield with two man (spotter and shooter) sniper teams not only provides more intelligence, but also a lot of precision firepower. Snipers are better at finding the enemy, and killing them with a minimum of noise and fuss. New rifle sights (both day and night types) have made all infantry capable of accurate, single shot, fire. With the emphasis on keeping civilian casualties down, and the tendency of the enemy to use civilians as human shields, lots of snipers, or infantrymen who can take an accurate shot at typical battle ranges (under 100 meters), are the best way to win without killing a lot of civilians.
New sniper equipment has made a big difference. During the last decade the U.S. Army has issued several new sniper rifles. The M110 SASS (Semi-Automatic Sniper System) was delivered to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan four years ago. This weapon is not a big technological breakthrough. It is based on the older AR-10 rifle. The U.S. Navy had already been buying a similar weapon, the SR25 since the early 1990s. The SR25 was also known as the Mk11 Sniper Rifle System (SRS). These new semi-automatic sniper rifles are 7.62mm weapons based on the M-16 design elements. The basis for the M-16 was the AR-15, and a 7.62mm version of that weapon was called the AR-10. About half the parts in the SR25 are interchangeable with those in the M-16.
Read the whole thing if you are interested in modern warfare and the American way of war. One should put this in context of smart bombs and drone assassins, the fact is that it takes very few modern US warriors to take down a lot of bad guys, without the massive ‘collateral damage’ that our fires centric way of war used to mean (not that any of the others were better, we were just more worried about it.)
Realizing that this going to put me in the ‘gun nut’ category I always get a grin out of the fact tha the iconic US rifle of the Vietnam war and ever since, the M16, was designed in the stoner decade by a guy called Stoner. It’s also so interesting that the M16 had a horrid reputation and yet has remained the basis of our main fire arm ever since. In the early days they were prone to jam and some of the early units (If I remember correctly built by Mattel…yes THAT Mattel) were for crap, but with time, training it has shown itself to be the best compromise available for a long time.
And it’s that word compromise, that used to be an US an American strength. We and our tools were rarely the very best, at least for argument’s sake, but they almost always had good combinations of attributes available at the right price in the right amounts at the right time, they were compromises, we were good at making very good compromises. In some ways I fear for a country that has lost its ability to understand that perfection or pure solutions are impossible and that a good compromise is always a better solution anyway because it trades off many factors and allows many to say they had a part in it, even if they also say: “…jeeze why the XXXX team make THAT decision???”
Before I had chance in another war, the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away.
– Autobiography of Mark TwainChange is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.
– Roughing It
Strangely enough I have only read a little of Mark Twain’s work, I like reading about him and I like his humor and his philosophy but his classic novels don’t interest me. Not sure if it was Junior High, High School readings that did it to me or if I’m just not up for the experience.
I find the times in which he lived fascinating, in some ways we should be ashamed of ourselves for complaining about the rate of change today. The rate of change during the Victorian era, or the Twain era (which overlap a great deal,) was simply incredible. The biggest difference is that the impact was probably less personal than the changes today, but they were more physical. The Transition from horse carriage and canal to train, the telegraph, the steam ship, the spread of parliamentary gov’t and limited monarchy, the explosion of broadsheet papers and journalism, the beginnings of scientific medicine etc.
By the time Twain died the world he had been born into would be almost unrecognizable. The world you and I were born into are recognizably precursors to our life today. However the differences in mental attitude and knowledge etc, are many orders of magnitudes greater than the same types of changes that happened across Twain’s life.
The intellectual changes that lead to the Victorian/Twain era explosion, happened in the decades and years leading up to the years of greatest change. Is that what we are seeing now, the build up of an underpinning that will enable quantum leaps in the physical characteristics of our lives like those that occurred from ~1840-1900?
Just a thought …
A 660 foot wide comet flies through the Sun and survives by Andrew Malcolm – Investors.com.
So cool the video has to be seen to be believed that little rock was MOVING!!
This is a link to a NASA site with even more info. Neat stuff.
This fascinates me in all sorts of ways, reading their short history makes one see clearly how narrow is the viewpoint of many older nations. By the by from a layman’s viewpoint it certainly seems like the claim of sovereignty has some basis.
The history of Sealand is a story of a struggle for liberty. Sealand was founded on the principle that any group of people dissatisfied with the oppressive laws and restrictions of existing nation states may declare independence in any place not claimed to be under the jurisdiction of another sovereign entity. The location chosen was Roughs Tower, an island fortress created in World War II by Britain and subsequently abandoned to the jurisdiction of the High Seas. The independence of Sealand was upheld in a 1968 British court decision where the judge held that Roughs Tower stood in international waters and did not fall under the legal jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. This gave birth to Sealand’s national motto of E Mare Libertas, or “From the Sea, Freedom”.
165 MPH gusts in Scotland. The ‘mill was supposedly feathered and locked but something bad happened, nobody hurt fortunately.
This World and Others 
