Cop Car's Beat

Cross that off our bucket list

Never in 84.5 years have I been exposed to the inside of an ambulance or an emergency room (ER). Well, I could say that until this morning. I proved that I am too stupid to live*.

For the past two months, Hunky Husband had been anticipating the air show at McConnell AFB, up the road about seven miles from us. I tried to convince him that we were not "up to" doing the air show bit these days. Did I stick to my guns? Of course not! (I told you that I am too stupid to live.) HH kept talking about it and was convinced that, even if I didn't wish to accompany him, he would go by himself. (Mind you, that among the thousands of cars parked in open fields on the base, he had no hope of finding his car once he walked away from it.) Oh...see that? I can blame HH. Well...not really. I am supposed to be the caregiver. Had I been such a push-over with the girls....

I got a brilliant idea. Knowing that today's forecast was a high temperature in the low 90s and that tomorrow's high temperature was/is to be in the mid 80s, I told HH that we would go early this morning, before the heat set in, to do the static displays. We would return at noon, tomorrow, for the flight shows - scheduled to begin at 1pm with the Thunderbirds flying at 3pm. Oh, yes. Tomorrow is forecasted to be a bit cooler.

HH didn't sleep well last night, so I let him sleep in. (Add one more to my poor decisions.) We arrived at the AFB at about 10am. I made good note of where we were parked so that I would be able to find HH's car upon returning.

We walked over hill and dale (mostly succeeding in dodging gopher holes) to arrive at the inspection gate (think TSA screening) and flight line displays. We spent 30-40 minutes among the static displays. (HH refused drinks when I asked him, and I did no better. We had been told that there would be hydration stations scattered around, but we didn't see them. And we had been allowed to take in empty, plastic water bottles, but no liquids.) Some news coverage photos may be found here. I thought the crowd quite small, but we had arrived relatively early on the first day of a 2-day, 6-hour per day event and would not have seen the largest attendance.

We start our tour of the static displays with one of my favorite aircraft, the A-10 Thunderbolt (referred to, lovingly, as the Warthog) and my very favorite guy (referred to lovingly, as Sweetheart or Hunky Husband.) Taking photos was absolutely point-and-shoot as the bright sun prevented my seeing the view screen.

The next photo shows another golden oldie, a Northrop T-38 Talon trainer. HH chatted with the pilot - comparing flying in the T-38 to flying in a B-52. The T-38 is a really graceful aircraft used as a basic jet trainer. If I recall correctly, it was basically the same aircraft as the Northrop F-5A Freedom Fighter.

According to Northrop Grumman Aircraft, "Every T-38 Talon built by Northrop Grumman was delivered on time, at or below the contract price and with performance as promised. The final T-38 was delivered to the Air Force in 1972."

Next up is a Cessna O-2 Skymaster (lovingly called the "Oscar Deuce").

The next photo shows buildings on the far (western) side of the parallel runways that run, basically, north-and-south. The building indicated by the arrow is the hangar that houses the 184th Wing Air National Guard. HH spent many years as a "weekend warrior" in that building.

At the head of the line of large (heavy) aircraft was the redoubtable, Lockheed C-130 Hercules, one of the most useful craft in USAF, to me. It was one of the models that we analyzed (at Tyndall AFB), setting requirements for repair of bomb-damaged runways & taxiways. It has a short take-off roll and is rugged!

Next comes another aircraft that we worked with on the Rapid Runway Repair Program, The McDonnell Douglas KC-10 Extender. AFAIK the KC-10 is the largest tanker flown by the US military, although I don't recall how it compares in payload to the Boeing KC-33A that may still be flown by a mid-Eastern country.

All three of the tankers/partial tankers shown in the next photo are Boeing KC-46 Pegasus tankers. If you wonder why so many tankers were on display, consider the mission of the USAF components at McConnell AFB.

From McConnell AFB In-depth Overview:

Mission

The 22nd Air Refueling Wing is the host unit at McConnell AFB and part of the Air Mobility Command. The 22nd ARW is one of the Air Force's three core tanker wings. The Wing's fleet of KC-135 and KC-46 aircraft provides in-flight all-weather aerial refueling for U.S. and allied military aircraft, as well as airlift for global reach projection of troops, equipment and supplies worldwide. The Wing's 17 squadrons (16 at McConnell, one at Pease Air National Guard Base in New Hampshire) combine for a force of approximately 3,500 active duty military members.

The base is Total Force, hosting the 931st Air Refueling Wing Air Force Reserve and the 184th Wing Air National Guard units.

There are two areas of concern in the next photo: 1) the small blue and gold biplane, a Stearman Kaydet ("The Kaydet, [a] two-seater biplane introduced by the Stearman Aircraft Division of Boeing in Wichita, Kan....") and 2) an array of large aircraft; left-to-right, the Boeing 747-400 Large Cargo Freighter Dreamlifter, an unidentified Boeing-made plane (I'm guessing a Boeing 777, commonly referred to as the Triple Seven), a McDonnell Douglas/Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, and two Boeing KC-135 Stratotankers.

Toward the end of our walk-around, I wanted to walk to the north end of the apron (adjacent to Runway 1R) to get a photo of the Boeing Dreamlifter that was on display. HH had been dragging, so I thought nothing of it when he sought shade under a C-17 wing, urging me to go get my photo and come back for him.

The next few photos show some of the previously listed large aircraft, the nearest being the McDonnell Douglas/Boeing C-17 Globemaster III. At this point in our tour, HH opted to shelter in the shade of the C-17's nose while I wandered on down the flightline to photograph the rest of the large aircraft.

The next photo shows a Boeing 747-400 Large Cargo Freighter Dreamlifter which uses McConnell AFB runways a few times most months. A behemoth, it accommodates the fuselage section of Boeing 787 aircraft. It is also used for other transport needs - at a high price, I'm sure.

Upon my return to the C-17, I found HH patiently waiting.

 

I was going to tell HH, "Let's go home." We had done our bit and it was getting too hot. The closer I approached HH the more it became apparent that he had a problem. He told me that he felt lightheaded, so I tried to help him sit on the concrete, but he was too wobbly and uncoordinated to do that, so I called in the two Emergency Medical Technicians who were just feet away with their bicycles. They helped him sit, then lay back.

The show was over for HH and me. I asked the EMTs (note one of the two who were standing with their bicycles quite near HH) to summon a golf cart to take us to HH's car so that I could drive him home - with a stop off at the Emergency Room (ER) that was just three miles on the way toward our home, as they insisted. It was too late for that. The EMTs started HH on a drip of saline solution and summoned an ambulance. In the hassle of getting HH taken care of, I myself passed out. [An EMT thought my heart had stopped, so gave me CPR, but I think he just could not find my pulse** - as has happened in my past 70 years, on occasion.] We ended up sharing a suite at a downtown Wichita hospital ER. We were not held long when our EKGs and blood workups turned out "reasonably normal". 

Dudette arranged for Wonderful GrandDaughter to be the first to greet us at the ER, even before Dudette arrived. (I had called Dudette during our transport phase. HH and I were in separate ambulances because neither ambulance would accommodate two stretchers. Our dear neighbor Adam, an EMT, accompanied HH on his journey.) WGD and Rachie found HH's car (amazingly astute women, eh?) and arrived at our home before we arrived via Dudette's car.

All is well that ends well. We are fine and thankful to the whole village of people who helped us when we were down and out.

__________________________________

*    I am told that making such mistakes does not let me resign from caregiving by ELAINE M. ESHBAUGH, PHD in You Are Going To Mess This Up.

** Back in 1983, I flew to Kansas City to be with my mother and dad when Mom was having double bypass surgery. At one point, in the recovery room, I summoned a nurse when Mom started struggling. During the nurse's ministrations, having feared that Mom was dying, I started going into shock. Telling Mom that I would be right back, I walked a short distance away where I sat on the floor and immediately lost consciousness. I came to with a physician holding either wrist, one saying to the other, "I'm not getting anything, are you?" They couldn't find my pulse and, knowing that my mother had previously had surgery to correct a congenital defect, thought that I might also have a defect. They gave me oxygen for a bit and I was fit enough to fly myself back to Wichita a few hours later.

Hunky Husband's Hitchhiker

Hunky Husband mowed our lawn, this morning, then took a nap before lunch. As I was cleaning up the kitchen after lunch, HH walked in - with a hitchhiker on his shoulder. It didn't wish to hold still for its portrait, but I was able to get several good photos of the hitchhiker, which I'm calling a Walnut Caterpillar. As we have several large, old walnut trees in our woods (and a few small ones in our yard), this is not an unusual find for us. How it hid on HH for such a long time is beyond my ken. HH had no idea of its presence until I picked the caterpillar off of his shoulder.

I had seen a Walnut Caterpillar Moth clinging to the doorframe of the door into the house from the garage, early this morning, but it didn't occur to me to take a photo of it - and it is no longer there. I'll substitute a photo that I found at Texas A&M: Extension Entomology.

ADDITION of 8/30/2022 7:00am - more on Walnut Caterpillar

I took the time to dig a little deeper online and found the following photo on Kansas State University Research & Extension. I like the photo even though it isn't sharply focused because it shows a grouping of Walnut Caterpillars that includes younger and older specimens.

North Carolina State University has the most comprehensive set of relevant photos. Not only has it posted individual photos of younger and older specimens, but also the next photo showing a pupa.

A good resource that I found was . That's a mouthful! It may be accessed at Moth Photographers Group. Finding the resource surprised me. The only thing I ever learned at Mississippi State University was in a hands-on course in laying up composite materials - at their Advanced Composites Institute. (I'm the "no moustache" person next to the tall guy in the back row. We students were a scroungy lot, but the instructors wore ties!)

ADDITION of 8/30/2022 10:12am - on Stu's Oak Processionary caterpillars

Stu's caterpillars are interesting critters. Unlike our Walnut Caterpillars that, at least around our place are not numerous enough to constitute a real threat (thus, I turned loose the caterpillar that had latched onto HH), parts of England and Europe are home to too many Oak Processionary Caterpillars. I found the following photo and paragraphs at Wildlife Insight. 

Oak Processionary caterpillars

on 22 MAY 2020

Oak Processionary Moth caterpillars create amazing patterns when resting in large numbers on the trunks of oak trees. They’re also fascinating to watch when on the move, walking head to tail in a long processional line, hence their name.

However, these caterpillers [sic] have a darker side. They are a growing threat to oak trees as well as a potential health risk in parts of south east of [sic] England.

These were sighted on a tree trunk by Emily Kirt while taking a walk in Kingston upon Thames, Greater London.

The origins of Processionary moths in London are thought to be from eggs imported on timber from the continent where they are a common pest. Small numbers of moths also arrive annually along the south coast as migrants from other European countries such as The Netherlands and France.

As with other invasive pest species from abroad such as The Gypsy Moth and Box Moth caterpillar they seem to be on the increase and spreading in parts of southern England.

Other caterpillars can be seen in the Moth caterpillar galleries and Butterfly caterpillar galleries . Other hairy caterpillars can be seen in the Hairy caterpillar gallery.

B-52s make noise

More than any other system in the world, the Boeing B-52 has provided meaningful work and recompense to Hunky Husband. To a lesser extent, it provided meaningful work and some recompense to me, my having spent a couple of years working on B-52s. The embedded video (nearly 10 minutes), below, was first seen by me at JUST AN EARTH-BOUND MISFIT, I - self-described as "...A "SUCKER" AND A "LOSER" WHO SERVED HER COUNTRY IN THE NAVY." It has been years since I've seen an operational B-52 in person, so this is a nostalgic trip for me. I think the last that I saw was on my way home from work one day - and I've been retired for over 18 years.

 

High Flight - Four United States Air Force (USAF) Boeing B-52H Stratofortress bombers, part of the 23rd Bomb Squadron nicknamed the 'Bomber Baron's', of the 5th Bomb Wing, normally based at Air Force Base Minot in North Dakota, USA, arrive at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, UK on 18th August 2022 for the third USAF 'Bomber Task Force' deployment of 2022 at RAF Fairford. This film shows the final 3 aircraft landing.

 

[Keeping it light, this morning...] I hasten to add that, as a former member of the Naval Reserve, I never knew of a B-52's landing on an aircraft carrier. Additionally, I did the loads on the B-52 landing gear in about 1974, including the wing tip protection wheels (it took a lot of vector rotations to get there), but did not include a carrier landing condition!

 

The following embedded video (nearly 21 minutes) of the same event - but including aircraft in addition to the B-52 - was found when I went to YouTube to embed the above video.

 

 

CobraEmergency - Cold War-era B-52H Stratofortress bombers of the US Air Force arrive in the UK to join NATO forces in Europe. Several passenger & cargo planes also assisted with the deployment. The bomber planes landed at RAF Fairford, a standby airfield for the US Air Forces in Europe. It's the only bomber base of It's [sic] kind in the continent and therefore key to the United States European Command area of military operation.

0:00 - Introduction

0:13 - Atlas Air Boeing 767

1:20 - Kalitta Air Boeing 747

4:35 - US Air Force Boeing C-17 Globemaster

5:45 - Ministry of Defence Police

6:20 - US Air Force Boeing B-52 Stratofortress x4

20:11 - Outroduction

Recorded: August 18th, 2022

Wandering far away

I have been exploring some of the websites with links included in my Typelist 4 FUN & ENLIGHTENMENT, mostly to assure that the links are still active. I found a short video from NASA to share.

From the Hubble page, I present the following:

On The Shoulders of a Giant

In 1675, famed physicist and mathematician, Isaac Newton, penned a letter to his contemporary and rival, polymath Robert Hooke. In that letter, Newton writes what would become one of his most famous remarks: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Over time, this simple statement has come to represent the process of science itself, each new discovery building upon previous work. The same is true for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and its observing partner, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has given humanity a unique perspective of the universe. From its vantage point above Earth’s light-distorting atmosphere, Hubble has provided us with clear, detailed views that reach farther out in space and further back in time than any of its predecessors. Hubble’s observations have charted the evolution of galaxies, stars, nebulae, comets, the outer planets, and their moons. Hubble’s discoveries have confirmed the existence of black holes in galaxy cores, measured the composition of exoplanet atmospheres, found the most distant galaxies to date, and verified the accelerating expansion of the universe – a 2011 Nobel Prize winning discovery in physics. Hubble’s findings have affected all aspects of astronomy, prompting further research and revisions to textbooks, but its observations have captured more than our scientific curiosity. Today we find Hubble’s iconic images on lunchboxes, coffee mugs, socks, neckties, and even moving vans. For more than 30 years, Hubble has spurred our imaginations, inspiring our desire to learn more. To do that, we need to see farther and deeper.

Note: The viewing experience of the following video is more satisfactory from the NASA page instead of viewing the embedded version, below or on YouTube. For some reason, I can't get away from double captioning in either of the latter versions.

NASA celebrates Roddenberry

Nine days ago, NASA celebrated what would have been Gene Roddenberry's 100th birthday. The following is stolen from the NASA posting. As I told Hunky Husband, one can certainly tell that the photo is from the 1970s by the leisure suits and bell bottoms.

Gene Roddenberry would have been 100 years old on Aug. 19, 2021, and we at NASA celebrate his legacy. As creator of the legendary Star Trek saga, Roddenberry's vision continues to resonate.

In the documentary “NASA on the Edge of Forever: Science in Space,” host NASA astronaut Victor Glover stated, “Science and Star Trek go hand-in-hand.” The film explores how for the past 55 years, Star Trek has influenced scientists, engineers, and even astronauts to reach beyond. While the International Space Station doesn’t speed through the galaxy like the Starship Enterprise, much of the research conducted aboard the orbiting facility is making the fiction of Star Trek come a little closer to reality. 

In this image, the then Dryden Flight Research Center (now Armstrong) hosted the Star Trek crew in 1976 for the rollout of space shuttle Enterprise. In front, from left: NASA Administrator James Fletcher, and the show's stars DeForest Kelley, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, Leonard Nimoy, show creator Gene Roddenberry, and Walter Koenig.

#Roddenberry100

Image Credit: NASA

Last Updated: Aug 19, 2021

Editor: Yvette Smith

 

 

Refueling by drone

It's been 34 years since I was mustered out of the US Navy Reserve; but, Hunky Husband makes sure I keep somewhat in touch with what's happening with the Navy by asking frequent Navy-related questions - usually about ships or boats, expecting anyone with any affiliation to know all about them. Of course, I was a part of NAVAIR.

HH had a special interest in the article from which the following excerpts were taking. The drone involved is from Boeing - his home-away-from-home for 35 years.

Fueling the Future: MQ-25 first to conduct unmanned aerial tanking

07 June 2021

From NAVAIR Public Affairs

​​​​​​​NAVAL AIR SYSTEMS COMMAND, PATUXENT RIVER, Md. - The MQ-25™ program successfully conducted the first ever aerial refueling operations between a manned receiver aircraft and unmanned tanker June 4 from MidAmerica Airport in Mascoutah, Illinois.

....

During the flight, the receiver Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet approached the Boeing-owned MQ-25 T1 test asset, conducted a formation evaluation, wake survey, drogue tracking and then plugged with the unmanned aircraft. T1 then successfully transferred fuel from its Aerial Refueling Store (ARS) to the F/A-18.

....

 

The US Navy posted a 30-second video on Twitter.

 

The photo, below, and a 2:05 minute video are posted on the Boeing Media Room webpage.

 

Data mining find of 5/10/1967

"[Hunky Husband] flew first flight of WFT on 004."

HH spent a lot of time in that aircraft - on the ground and in the air. That was a long time ago! Before you ask, I'll volunteer that I believe that "WFT" was Wichita Flight Test. We had moved back to the Wichita area from Seattle just a few weeks before the quoted entry was made. I'm not sure when the photo of 004 was taken (presumably by a Boeing or USAF employee), but I had written "69" on the back of it.

ADDITION of a few hours later

B-52 669 - photo dated February 1962

Below are two "color chips" as found in a Wikipedia article.

The photo, below, of HH (back, right) and the rest of the crew with which he flew flight tests in 1963 has previously been posted on this blog; but, it seems appropriate to repeat it with the photos of tail numbers 669 and 004.  The aircraft is 669. [There is a five-digit number stenciled onto the vertical stabilizer. The first two digits indicate the last two digits of the (Gregorian) year in which the aircraft was ordered while the last three digits indicate the last three digits of the aircraft's assigned serial number.] I posit that the photo was taken before a flight. Had it been taken after a flight, the guys would be looking bedraggled and sporting stubbles.  Those flights were not short!

Ingenuity’s rotors will make about 2,500 revolutions per minute because of Mars's thin atmosphere. (NASA/AFP/Getty Images)

Previous posting on the subject is at First flight of Ingenuity expected no earlier than April 11, 2021. The above photo and the excerpt, below, is from The Washington Post.

Ingenuity, which rocketed from Earth inside the belly of the space rover Perseverance on July 30, made it to Mars in February and spent just over a week getting ready for the spotlight. Perseverance, a $3 billion project to check for signs of life on Mars, is the main attraction. The robotic drone worth about $80 million is the follow-up act.

The aircraft went through the multiday process of descending from the rover, unfurling its solar panels and powering itself up to prepare for what was supposed to be its first launch on Sunday. However two days before the big event, its rotors failed.

“During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a ‘watchdog’ timer expiration,” according to NASA. The timer was designed to stop the operation if it detects issues.

The glitch occurred when the copter tried switching from preflight mode to flight mode. NASA said a software update is necessary to address the issue. The agency now has to develop, test and upload new software onto flight controllers. Then it has to reboot Ingenuity to move forward with its mission.

The software trouble postponed what is supposed to be only a brief flight. The plan was for Ingenuity to take off, hover for about 30 seconds, then safely land in place. It’s an easy accomplishment for drones on Earth, but a challenging feat on the Red Planet, currently more than 100 million miles away.

Mars’s atmosphere is thinner than Earth’s by a ratio of about 100, making liftoff more difficult. To compensate for this, Ingenuity’s rotors will make about 2,500 revolutions per minute (RPM). That’s far faster than a passenger helicopter on Earth.

 

Also, since Mars is so far away, joystick control isn’t an option. The entire operation has to happen autonomously. The chopper also contends with temperatures that can drop to minus 130-degrees Fahrenheit, pushing the tiny aircraft’s parts to their limits.

Still, NASA hopes the eventual liftoff will serve as the kickoff of five aerial demonstrations, each designed to be more challenging than the previous one, over about 30 days. Step one was to prove the craft can fly. Step five is to test how far it can go. The goal for Ingenuity is to expand how the space agency can investigate other planets.

ADDITION of 4/19/2021

From Space.Com

An image captured by the Ingenuity Mars helicopter shows the vehicle's shadow on the surface of the Red Planet. (Image credit: NASA TV)

BTW: On the morning news, we were told that Ingenuity is about the size of a tissue box. Physics.org further states:

The triumph was hailed as a Wright Brothers moment. The mini 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) copter named Ingenuity, in fact, carried a bit of wing fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer, which made similar history at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

and

More than six years in the making, Ingenuity is a barebones 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) tall, a spindly four-legged chopper. Its fuselage, containing all the batteries, heaters and sensors, is the size of a tissue box. The carbon-fiber, foam-filled rotors are the biggest pieces: Each pair stretches 4 feet (1.2 meters) tip to tip.

Congratulations to Ms Aung and the team!

From Wikipedia:

MiMi Aung is a Burmese American engineer and project manager at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is a lead engineer on the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity, the first extraterrestrial aircraft.

First flight of Ingenuity expected no earlier than April 11, 2021

APRIL 4, 2021

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter dropped on Mars' surface ahead of flight

ADDITION of 4/6/2021 - from NASA website

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is seen in a close-up taken by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard the Perseverance rover.

This image was taken on April 5, 2021, the 45th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

NASA is targeting no earlier than Sunday, April 11, for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s first attempt at powered, controlled flight on another planet. To mark a month of Ingenuity flights, the agency will host several events to bring people along for the ride.

A livestream confirming Ingenuity’s first flight is targeted to begin around 3:30 a.m. EDT Monday, April 12, on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website, and will livestream on multiple agency social media platforms, including the JPL YouTube and Facebook channels.

Ingenuity arrived at Mars’ Jezero Crater Feb. 18, attached to the belly of NASA’s Perseverance rover. The helicopter is a technology demonstration with a planned test flight duration of up to 31 days (30 Mars days, or sols). The rover will provide support during flight operations, taking images, collecting environmental data, and hosting the base station that enables the helicopter to communicate with mission controllers on Earth.

The flight date may shift as engineers work on the deployments, preflight checks, and vehicle positioning of both Perseverance and Ingenuity. Timing for events will be updated as needed, and the latest schedule will be available on the helicopter’s Watch Online webpage:

https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/#Watch-Online

More from News for Nerds - Digidog, Dragonfly drone, Bitcoin

The Digidog in the posting on News for Nerds, below, might have saved three police officers in Wichita KS a painful trip to the hospital last Saturday. An owner had called 9-1-1 to report apparent activity in a house that should have been vacant. Investigating, three officers were hailed by a shotgun blast - presumably accidently set off since there were no people in the house. Why three officers were within range of a single shotgun blast is beyond me; but, I'm not in law enforcement.

Boston Dynamics Is Selling its 70-Pound Robot Dog To Police Departments (yahoo.com) 114

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday February 28, 2021 @07:34PM from the woof dept.

The New York Times reports on what the city's police department calls Digidog, "a 70-pound robotic dog with a loping gait, cameras and lights affixed to its frame, and a two-way communication system that allows the officer maneuvering it remotely to see and hear what is happening." Police said the robot can see in the dark and assess how safe it is for officers to enter an apartment or building where there may be a threat. "The NYPD has been using robots since the 1970s to save lives in hostage situations & hazmat incidents," the department said on Twitter. "This model of robot is being tested to evaluate its capabilities against other models in use by our emergency service unit and bomb squad."

But the robot has skeptics. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, described Digidog on Twitter as a "robotic surveillance ground" drone.... Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, said empowering a robot to do police work could have implications for bias, mobile surveillance, hacking and privacy. There is also concern that the robot could be paired with other technology and be weaponized. "We do see a lot of police departments adopting powerful new surveillance and other technology without telling, let alone asking, the communities they serve," he said. "So openness and transparency is key...."

A mobile device that can gather intelligence about a volatile situation remotely has "tremendous potential" to limit injuries and fatalities, said Keith Taylor, a former SWAT team sergeant at the police department who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "It's important to question police authority; however, this appears to be pretty straightforward," he said. "It is designed to help law enforcement get the information they need without having a deadly firefight, for instance."
The Times reports that Boston Dynamics has been selling the dog since June. It's also already being used by the Massachusetts State Police and the Honolulu Police Department, "while other police departments have called the company to learn more about the robot, which has a starting price of about $74,000 and may cost more with extra features," according to Michael Perry, vice president of business development at the company.

The Times points out that the robot dog is also being purchased by utility and energy companies as well as manufacturers and construction companies, which use it to get into dangerous spaces. "The robot has been used to inspect sites with hazardous material. Early in the pandemic, it was used by health care workers to communicate with potentially sick patients at hospital triage sites, Perry said."

 

The idea of going to Titan is intriguing if one is into really long-distance travel.

The Dream of Sending a Submarine Through the Methane Seas of Saturn's Moon Titan (nytimes.com) 50

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday February 28, 2021 @01:34PM from the above-the-sixth-planet dept.

"Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn's strange moon," says the New York Times, introducing a piece by cosmic affairs correspondent Dennis Overbye: What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturn's large, foggy moon Titan — plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun? Those are the visions that danced through my head recently...diverted to the farther reaches of the solar system by the news that Kraken Mare, an ocean of methane on Titan, had recently been gauged for depth and probably went at least 1,000 feet down. That is as deep as nuclear submarines will admit to going. The news rekindled my dreams of what I think would be the most romantic of space missions: a voyage on, and ultimately even under, the oceans of Titan...

NASA recently announced that it would launch a drone called Dragonfly to the Saturnian moon in 2026. Proposals have also circulated for an orbiter, a floating probe that could splash down in a lake, even a robotic submarine. "The Titan submarine is still going," said Dr. Valerio Poggiali, research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, in an email — although it is unlikely to happen before Titan's next summer, around 2047. By then, he said, there will be more ambient light and the submarine conceivably could communicate on a direct line to Earth with no need of an orbiting radio relay.

Titan is the weirdest place in the solar system, in some regards, and also the world most like our own. Like Earth, it has a thick atmosphere of mostly nitrogen (the only moon that has much of an atmosphere at all), and like Earth, it has weather, rain, rivers and seas. But on this world, when it rains, it rains gasoline. Hydrocarbon material drifts down like snow and is shaped into dunes by nitrogen winds. Rivers have carved canyons through mountains of frozen soot, and layers of ice float on subsurface oceans of ammonia. The prevailing surface temperature is minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. A chemical sludge that optimistic astronomers call "prebiotic" creeps along under an oppressive brown sky. Besides Earth, Titan is the only world in the universe that is known to harbor liquid on its surface — with everything that could imply.

 

 

The following item reports the same information that I heard on BBC World Service via KMUW Radio a day or two ago.

 

Vast Energy Use of Bitcoin Criticized (bbc.com) 300

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday February 28, 2021 @12:34PM from the yours-and-miners dept.

The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has calculated that Bitcoin's total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 terawatt hours (TWh) a year, with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours, reports the BBC: The UK's electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the CCAF's best guess for Bitcoin. And the electricity the Bitcoin miners use overwhelmingly comes from polluting sources. The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that about two-thirds of it is from fossil fuels....

We can track how much effort miners are making to create the currency. They are currently reckoned to be making 160 quintillion calculations every second — that's 160,000,000,000,000,000,000, in case you were wondering. And this vast computational effort is the cryptocurrency's Achilles heel, says Alex de Vries, the founder of the Digiconomist website and an expert on Bitcoin. All the millions of trillions of calculations it takes to keep the system running aren't really doing any useful work. "They're computations that serve no other purpose," says de Vries, "they're just immediately discarded again. Right now we're using a whole lot of energy to produce those calculations, but also the majority of that is sourced from fossil energy."

The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues. "If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [U.S.] Federal budget to spend on electricity."

"We'd have to double our global energy production," he says with a laugh. "For Bitcoin."
Ken Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former chief economist at the IMF, tells the BBC that Bitcoin exists almost solely as a vehicle for speculation, rather than as a stable store of value that can be easily exchanged.

When asked if the Bitcoin bubble is about to burst, he answers, "That's my guess." Then pauses and adds, "But I really couldn't tell you when."