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Life-Saving Baseballs
DeAshcroft writes "Researchers at the
Penn State Acoustics Lab have developed life-saving baseballs. As described in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, the team put microphones and wireless transmitters into baseballs, which they toss into piles of rubble to find the (noise-making) survivors. The advantage with baseballs is that they apparently don't have to stop work on the pile to listen for survivors. So, remember, if you're ever trapped in a collapsed building, the basball is your friend. The college paper has a story."
you're out
Such an elegant solution, using the 'cluster' configuration.
I suppose things like this could be used for ship-wreck/plane-wreck situations too, where some sort of mass of floating balls is released during structural damage or hull-breach to be grabbed by survivors for tracking purposes.
Maybe in Space this would be useful? Hull-breach in the dome, sections of which when destroyed by structural breaks, release thousands of tiny 'life-balls' which, when activated by a human, send out "SOS"...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Does MLB get a cut of the profits from the devices?
Would these baseballs, when tossed into debris, distract the search dogs?
Do these baseballs work in conjunction with MLB's spy satellite? If so, would a tinfoil hat prevent them from finding me?
Do these baseballs have RFID tags, and if so, shouldn't we protest their use?
Can they help me find my car keys?
If I whistle in the rubble, will the baseball beep so I can find it if _it_ gets lost?
What would happen if terrorists got ahold of these baseballs? Think of the children!
Can a swallow carry such a baseball by gripping it's "husk"? Perhaps by two swallows flying in tandem? African or European?
Can these baseballs be used with bats? If so, wooden or aluminium?
If they're networked together within a field of debris, would that mean you'd have a Beowulf cluster of them? Would that find people faster?
Do these run on BSD? If so, they're dead (along with Apple).
Do these use any GPL code? If so, GNU/Baseball!
Has the design of these been put out under any particular Open Sores License yet? If so, which one, if not, why not? If not now, when? If not me, who? What? Why? Where? When? Whatever.
Duuude, yer gettin' a baseball! (Sweeeeet.)
Go get it, Lycos! (arf! arf!) ((Good boy, Ubu.))
Can you tell how much soda I've already had today?
Good point. It should be easy enough to triangulate (well, since it's a three dimensional pile, I suppose you'd need *4* baseballs, so 'quadrangulate') the location of victims by simultaneously analyzing the relative volume of sounds picked up by the baseballs.
May I also suggest enclosing some of these baseballs in a tetrahedron framework (probably made of some non-conductive wire, i.e. not copper). This will mean that baseballs enclosed in this sort of framework that are tossed in at the top of a heap of rubble do not go all the way down, but stop on any relatively level surface that they encounter. Then you would have round baseballs near the bottom of the pile, and tetrahedral baseballs further up, thus enabling a better "3-D" acoustic view.
Also, why not use golf balls too? They are even smaller (so that they could go through smaller cracks) and are also resistant to damage from smashing into things.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
they are wireless microphones, theres nothing about the baseball that means anything. The article says they put one of the mics in a baseball and hit it with a bat to test shock resiliency.
This is not a signature.
Kinda like an airplanes black box?
Record structural stresses at key points, info that could be invaluable in analyzing the situation afterward.
You'd know exactly where they were placed in the constuction or retrofitting of the building, and perhaps could be even more useful than loose devices, providing they weren't damaged during the destruction of the building.
Are baseballs more advantageous than say, cricket balls, tennis balls, racket balls, or golf balls?
How so?
-Turkey
I wonder why they picked baseballs, as opposed to something smaller. If there's something een more indestructible than a baseball, it's a golfball. One of these would also be able to be put into a smaller space, and with a suitable plastic shell, could be made to glow in the dark so that somebody in a deep hole could actually find one!
Hell, why not both, depending on the situation?
Fox Sports has ordered a number of the mic'ed balls in order to promote its new "Sounds of the Game" portion of its MLB coverage. Hear the deafing sound of the bat cracking against a homerun ball, then listen to the fans fight over said ball.
One to toss in the pile and the other one to play catch with till the muffled scratching stops.
I gotcha.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
If you thought the 73rd Home Run ball was worth alot wait until one of these balls saves a life and see home much it goes for on e-bay!
I wonder why they used baseballs - yes they're more resistant than, let's say, tennis balls, and you don't want to crush the electronics inside.
But if the ball is supposed to locate people who are stuck inside a pile of debris, I guess the deeper the ball gets, the better; and baseballs don't bounce much. Imagine throwing a SuperBall(TM) and a baseball inside an irregularly shaped tunnel 1 feet wide - which ball will get the deeper inside the tunnel?
This seems like this has been done before. The article mentions that this research was done after 9/11. I have seen a few shows on discovery channel about avalanches and using transmitters to find people. What is the difference between those devices and this one done by Penn State?
From now on I have to carry a baseball as well as the towel with me?
...the problem of finding trapped survivors.
They're softer, bounce further, and lighter!
oh nanotechnology, when will you come and obsolete these crazy baseball type ideas!
this is not a sig.