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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."
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?
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.
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?