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
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."
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
"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.
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
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."
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."
I'm equally attracted to and repelled about jumping out of an airplane. I don't even like being on the upper floors of tall buildings. But there is one line in your story that thrills me: "Then silence. Eery silence, as I floated to earth." Oh, how I'd like to experience that, floating above the earth.
And, Cop Car, that's quite a childhood you've got in your past...
Posted by: Ronni Bennett | April 27, 2005 at 06:24 AM
It isn't too late for you Ronni. When you can spare the bucks, you should go try one jump--even if you want to do it with a "buddy". Now, they hook you up to a jump instructor who just takes you out of the airplane with her/him. In fact, I would highly recommend the buddy system if you're only going once. That way, they will take you up to 10,000 feet, or so, if you want. It will give you more time to experience free fall (before the chute opens) and hanging under the canopy. If you make the jumps on a static line as a part of training, they will probably (as they did with me) only take you up to 2,000 feet for the jump. BTW: One pays for the airplane lift up according to how high they fly you.
One of the guys who worked for me at the LAP is a real jumper. He has hundreds of jumps and spends most weekends at it. He keeps a photo of a group jump (about 15 people forming a loose circle in the air) on his desk. He's also a pilot. At one point, he wanted to get into the Engineering Flight Test group--and they wanted him--but my boss counseled him that he would be layoff fodder if he were to change groups just then. That was just a couple of months before the LAP offered "early retirement" bonuses to cut the workforce (which my boss, and his boss--at ages 63 & 72, respectively--took) prior to layoffs that we all knew were coming. Jumper's decision to stay in Structural Integrity was a good one. He could probably get into Engineering Flight Test, today, if he wished. I'll have to ask him about that the next time I see him (scheduled for a luncheon in July).
As to my childhood--it was certainly varied, and at the same time, sheltered. My Elder Brother attended seven different schools in first grade, then stayed with our maternal grandparents the next year and skipped second grade so that he could be in third grade with his best friend. Part of the time that we were in Tulsa, the younger of Mom's two sisters (and, now, the only survivor among the siblings) lived with us. In Kansas City, at various times, that same sister, their brother and his family, or their mother lived with us--in a two-bedroom house of about 850 square feet (plus unfinished basement where all of our family, but me, slept). Dad was a saint, the way he put up with Mom's family.
Dad and Mom worked all sorts of jobs. While we were on the farm, they sold Raleigh products. At one time, Dad had an auto shop. In Tulsa, both of them and my aunt worked at Douglas Aircraft during the war (Dad built bombs, Mom worked on the A-26 as a deburrer, and Aunt worked in the cafeteria), and Dad drove our car (1938 Plymouth) as a taxi. Mom and her mother, after Grandpa died, went to Las Vegas where they worked in the kitchen of a hotel (Grandma cooked, Mom washed dishes). Then, in Tulsa, Mom drove a municipal bus.
In Kansas City, Dad worked as an electrician until he retired in 1974. Mom worked, variously, as a sales clerk for Katz Drugstores, a pharmacist's assistant at Manor Hospital, a clerk for the IRS, a file clerk in a bank....It was Mom's paycheck that financed my first two years of college (Elder brother's first two years were covered by a full scholarship--something that was unavailable to women at the school where we attended). In later years, after Dad died, when she protested at something I did/wanted to do for her, I always pointed out to Mom that it was/would be just a return on her investment.
Posted by: Cop Car | April 27, 2005 at 10:02 AM