This is not a joke created by zombie loving hipsters.
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I know it isn’t, because FOX News told me so.
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On the upside: with minor modifications, it could double as an alarm to let you know if your spouse is sleepwalking.
Have you encountered The Shadow Caddy before?
It’s essentially a robotic golf caddy that will happily carry your bag about as you play, tracking your movement through a little receiver you slip into your pocket before embarking.
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While it does strike me as a bit decadent, it excites me to see real-world applications for personal robots. What if this device was modified to become a guide for the blind?
If you were to create some sort of verbally-interactive GPS, you’d be well on your way to allowing the visually impaired greater freedom of movement – and the little beast looks well-built for hauling groceries.
Franz Reichelt, sometimes known as The Flying Tailor, was a man who didn’t know when to say quit.
Quotes are from the wikipedia.
Reichelt had become fixated on developing a suit for aviators that would convert into a parachute and allow them to survive a fall should they be forced to leave their aircraft.
Living in France, in the early 1900s, it was impossible to avoid the explosion of enthusiasm flight was undergoing, and Reichelt felt he had an important contribution to make.
He presented his design to the leading aeronautic organization, La Ligue Aérienne at the Aéro-Club de France, hoping that they would test it, but they rejected his designs on the grounds that the construction of the canopy was too weak, and they attempted to dissuade him from wasting his time on further development.
Which is a nice way of saying they told him to knock it off – of course, he wouldn’t listen. What was driving the man? Fame? The Romance of the Skies?
Money?
In 1911, Colonel Lalance wrote to the Aéro-Club de France, offering a prize of 10,000 francs for a safety parachute for aviators – double the prize he had offered the year before.
Whatever the case, he got back to work:
Eager to participate, Reichelt refined his design, reducing the weight while increasing the surface area […] Further tests proved no more successful than his earlier attempts: his dummies invariably fell heavily to earth.
– and there’s the problem: despite some initial success, Reichelt had never had a successful test. He even decided to take his failures on the road.
L’Ouest-Éclair reported that in 1911 he had then made a jump himself from a height of 8 to 10 metres (26 to 33 ft) at Joinville. The attempt failed but his fall was cushioned by a pile of straw, which helped him escape injury. Le Matin reported an attempt at Nogent from a height of 8 metres (26 ft) that resulted in a broken leg.
The tailor was convinced he had the problem licked – all he needed was more height.
Reichelt announced to the press in early February 1912 that he had finally received permission and would shortly conduct an experiment from the Eiffel Tower to prove the value of his invention.
The apparent assumption behind his test was that he was going to be using a dummy.
M. Hervieu, who was present to witness the demonstration, also attempted to dissuade him from making the jump. He was concerned that the parachute needed longer to fully open than the few seconds the drop from the first platform would allow, and he also presented other technical objections to which Reichelt could not provide a satisfactory response.
The end of the experiment wasn’t pleasant. If nothing else, Reichelt stands in history as a reminder to believe your own lying eyes, and, that if something in your thinking isn’t working, it may be you.
His parachute, which had seemed to be only half-open, folded around him almost immediately and he plummeted for a few seconds before crashing into the frozen soil at the foot of the tower. […] Le Figaro noted that his eyes were wide open, dilated with terror.
To my thinking, one of the saddest aspects of his tale – if you’ll note the picture at the start of this post – was that, despite his failings as an aeronaut, he seemed to be quite a talented tailor.
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Reader Jeff Pyrotek left me a comment on Facebook, admonishing me for my lack of info on Russian anti-tank dogs in the last post.
Frankly, it was because I’d never heard of them.
All quotes are from the wikipedia
They were intensively trained by the Soviet and Russian military forces between 1930 and 1996 and used in 1941–1942 against German tanks in World War II. Although the original dog training routine was to leave the bomb and retreat so that the bomb would be detonated by the timer, this routine failed and was replaced by an impact detonation procedure which killed the dog in the process.
How do you train a dog to destroy a tank?
First, you deny it dinner.
Dogs were trained by being kept hungry and their food was placed under tanks.
Unfortunately, a lack of nutrition was the least of the canines’ problems. Unlike the relatively lucky American mutts, these pooches were expendable.
Their deployment revealed some serious problems. In order to save fuel and ammunition, dogs had been trained on tanks which stood still and did not fire their guns. In the field, the dogs refused to dive under moving tanks. Some persistent dogs ran near the tanks, waiting for them to stop but were shot in the process. Gunfire from the tanks scared away many of the dogs.
[…]
Another serious training mistake was later revealed; the Soviets used their own diesel-engine tanks to train the dogs rather than German tanks which had gasoline engines. As the dogs relied on their acute sense of smell, the dogs sought out familiar Soviet tanks instead of strange-smelling German tanks.
Speaking of what you might do for your government, I meant to post up this little nugget regarding war dogs yesterday, but got side-tracked.
From the wikipedia:
1943–1945: The United States Marine Corps used dogs, donated by their American owners, in the Pacific theater to help take islands back from Japanese occupying forces. During this period the Doberman Pinscher became the official dog of the U.S.M.C.; however, all breeds of dogs were eligible to train to be “war dogs of the Pacific”.
These dogs were accepted into service after being ‘volunteered’ by their human caretakers, or, if the movie Courage Of Lassie is to be believed, after being found stray.
A “basic training” period was initiated where dogs were trained to carry out certain fundamental commands such as sit, stay, come, etc… They were also accustomed to muzzles, gas masks, riding in military vehicles and to gunfire. – qmfound.com
After basic training, the dogs would specialize in a specific task, usually scout or guard duty, although occasionally in being messengers or mine-detectors.
The scout dog and his Quartermaster handler normally walked point on combat patrols, well in front of the infantry patrol. Scout dogs could often detect the presence of the enemy at distances up to 1,000 yards, long before men became aware of them. When a scout dog alerted to the enemy it would stiffen its body, raise its hackles, pricking his ears and holding its tail rigid. The presence of the dogs with patrols greatly lessened the danger of ambush and tended to boost the morale of the soldiers. – qmfound.com
Lessen the dangers of ambush, possibly, but not entirely negate them. I couldn’t find a casualty count for canine combatants during WWII, but I imagine being specifically used as the method of determining first contact would lead to quite a number of close encounters.
At the end of the war the Quartermaster Corps put into operation a plan for return of war dogs to their civilian owners. Dogs were sent to a reprocessing section for the purpose of rehabilitation for civilian life. Dogs were trained that every human was friendly and tested for such things as reaction to people riding around them on bicycles or placed in an area with a great amount of noise. Before return, each dog was given a final check by a veterinary officer. Shipment of the dog to the owner was made at government expense. Those dogs which the original owner did not desire were sold to the public by the Treasury Department with the assistance of Dogs for Defense. By early 1947 the return of all borrowed dogs was completed. – qmfound.com
Which almost seems like a more careful and tender-handed release process than most modern human soliders get these days.
Of the 549 dogs that returned from the war, only 4 could not be detrained and returned to civilian life.
Were these four dogs put down – or were they the start of a secret, elite K9 combat unit?
Distributed denial of service attacks are the current weapon of choice for internet combat.
You may have heard about MasterCard, etc., being taken down in recent weeks by pro-Wikileaks agitators, all via the use of virus-laden zombie computers – the same technique was used during the Russo-Georgian fighting in 2008, and in July 2009 Chinese and North Korean originating botnets attacked South Korean and American sites.
The reason I bring it up: I have a prediction.
It seems obvious that the next major conflict between modernized nations will include an escalation in these tactics, and at some point it’s going to be necessary to move beyond illegal rafts of infected DELLs.
In the same way that we were once asked to grow Victory gardens, or buy war bonds, at some point the government may ask you to install an app.
It may run as a screen saver, or it may simply sit in your computer’s taskbar – but in those quiet moments, when you’re not surfing ebay, or critiquing the photography of friends and family on Facebook, your computer will be marching with its brethren, readying packets of digital-blades with which to shiv foreign servers in the dark alleys of cyberspace.
This flu got me thinking about how much I actually knew regarding the Spanish Influenza of 1918. We’ve discussed before the fact that troop movements and the nature of modern warfare went a long way towards spreading the bug globally, but I was surprised to discover this little factoid:
Although the first cases were registered in the continental U.S. and the rest of Europe long before getting to Spain, the 1918 pandemic received its nickname “Spanish flu” because Spain, a neutral country in WWI, had no censorship of news regarding the disease and its consequences. – wikipedia
So – if this illness I’m recovering from ever goes global, we may be calling it The Wikileaks Flu?
Extreme measures were implemented to prevent further spread:
“In some communities, it was a criminal offence to shake hands. Gatherings of more than six people were banned.” – CBC
Keeping apart gatherings of six must have also been difficult given that the average American family size was 4.9 people; and, of course, that put the usual places of comfort – hospitals, theaters and churches – out of bounds.
From the Stanford website:
With one-quarter of the US and one-fifth of the world infected with the influenza, it was impossible to escape from the illness. Even President Woodrow Wilson suffered from the flu in early 1919 while negotiating the crucial treaty of Versailles to end the World War.
I’ll close this little random walk through plague-town with a children’s rhyme I came across on that same page:
I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.
Have you ever thought to yourself: “The thing I need most in life is a life-like representation of a new born, as if it were possessed by the dark powers of the seven maws of the hell lord Wik’stin’phlag?
Me either, but now you can purchase them from a Geocities-looking site called kryptkiddies.
Well, I’m ambulating a little more freely around the house now, largely carried on a cloud of high-powered medicine.
In theory this means that we’ll be able to post Friday’s episode tonight, but I’m not so sure about the FlashCast; my throat sounds like a suped-up Honda Civic drowning in a swamp.
Side note
One possible use for a bad case of the cold-sweats: get a long sheet of vinyl and, blam, you’re a DIY Slip ‘N Slide.
So, about last night:
Forget the Turing test; humanity isn’t going to accept any machine as sentient until it’s been convicted of a murder.