0. One day after the IAEA delivers to the UN the report on Iran's uranium enrichment activities at Qom. 1. One Day after the Arizona State Emergency Management Office finishes their first nuclear terrorist incident scenario exercise 2. On the day that South Carolina has its annual earthquake response exercise starting at 9:30 am... 3. On the first day of PACWAVE11 - the two-day military response exercise to a tsunami alert and recovery scenario involving PacRim countries. 4. Four days after incoming ballistic missile alert drills in Tel Aviv, Israel, to help the general public
practice shelter location and toxic chemical/biological/radiological containment procedures. 5. Six days after test firing of an intermediate range ballistic missile from Israel. 6. Three days after the major north-south strike fault running under El Hierro in the Canary Islands started to unzip
creating a chain of volcanic vents driven by a seismic energy release equal to over 600 tons of TNT since July 17th.
See: http://youtu.be/FFzZB9VuBlk
and: http://earthquake-report.com/2011/09/25/el-hierro-canary-islands-spain-volcanic-risk-alert-increased-to-yellow/
and: http://www.01.ign.es/ign/resources/volcanologia/html/eventosHierro.html 7. Three days after the Sparks, OK, 5.6 magnitude quake and aftershocks.
Anyone else can chime in here with other disaster preparedness training scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 9th, 2011. Be safe out there!
Darn - I do wish BBC America was everywhere since clippings don't quite carry the value of the course. The BBC coverage of this story would help readers understand the course offering better:
British Airways is offering the standard cabin crew safety course to passengers for a fee. Passengers get to actually activate oxygen masks, inflate life jackets, open escape doors, and jump down emergency slides - without shoes of course. There is even a smoke-in-cabin exit drill.
We could chalk this course offering up to smart marketing - or we could demand that US airlines begin doing the same thing for high-school age and above - especially for the smaller commuter aircraft - to help increase aircraft survival awareness and provide continuing education credits to frequent flyers.
I suspect an advanced course is available for air marshals and British SAS members fine tuning close combat techniques for passenger aircraft.
Getting the details right can mean the difference between getting out alive - and not.
I would expect the public to insist on a passenger safety course before flying on Virgin Galactic - but I doubt they have a free-fall from 100,000 feet simulator. Yet.
... where a smart car discovered through car network chatter that the best way to optimize its service lifetime was to... get rid of its aggressive driver owner through a series of false failures - and then find a little old lady for a second owner, who kept it parked in a garage 99% of each week.
Kudos to readers who can find the story citation and its authors.
Not that stupid when the laser is a dynamically tunable Free Electron Laser (FEL) with two 10 Megawatt nuclear reactors behind it. With the number of ballistic nuclear submarines scheduled for decommissioning - there are a few that can be refit and put back to sea, with installations of orbital reaching FEL systems.
Besides, no one expects that punching holes in space junk with a static laser beam will amount to anything.
The key is that a FEL can be tuned to vaporize any material within its deliverable power range. Because it is tunable through tuning the frequency of the microwave resonance cavity used to capture and pump excited electrons - the delivered frequency can be boosted well into X-ray frequencies with sufficient power.
The optics system would "paint" the target - to create a reaction force by vaporizing the surface material. With dynamic feedback, the optics would be driven to selectively paint different surface regions as the target spun in orbit - and thereby cumulatively direct the change in orbital velocity required to drop a target into the upper atmosphere: Every available square centimeter of target could be turned into a precise reaction motor. This would effectively kick the can out of orbit.
This also should tell the audience a lot about the state of defense optics now orbiting in space, when defense contractors can propose real-time control systems that depend on "seeing" rapid velocity changes in a basketball-sized object over 24,000 miles high in orbit. Remember that there were originally only 3 mirrors created for the Hubble Space Telescope - and NASA has just one of them.
BTW: FEL's were first discussed in A.E. Van Vogt's "Weapon Shops of Isher" (1951) - an interesting spin on Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning about the modern military industrial complex and its threat to the practice of governing a democracy through fear, intimidation, and corruption.
Of course, NASA isn't in the business of space defense - but the US Navy is - having effectively demonstrated a working tactical satellite defense against a real failed US recon satellite before the US Air Force could - thanks to the systems programming ingenuity of Raytheon Missile Systems.
Then again, space aliens wouldn't expect their orbiting derrieres roasted by a hidden submersible fleet.
The Weapon Shops slogan??
"The right to own weapons is the right to be free!"
Wait - Not metal - Why not bones made from some kind of really neat carbon nanotube matrix. More flexible, lighter, and stronger than the Man of Steel.
Something like "spornygraphene" spun into "spork" composite structures... (grin)
The fun part of looking at other people's tech is figuring out how different cultural traditions might contribute to the product.
We do know that large graphite composite surfaces are being built for Boeing in China - from all the delays to the Dreamliner program because of ever so slightly incompatible tail components that took forever to get right - long enough to get all the right answers of course.
So just imagine what if carbon composites weren't available to Chinese aerospace designers:
1. Brocade silk cloth for wing surfaces in bright red and gold patterns?
2. Laminated bamboo airframes and bamboo tubing for hydraulic controls powered with mountain spring water?
4. Rice paper display surfaces with mah-jong tiled control buttons?
5. Black powder rocket assist JATO launch systems?
6. Cricket-powered in-flight entertainment systems?
Aw, heck, been there and done that over a thousand years ago during the Qing Dynasty.
On the other hand, the forward canard wings - double delta main wings - rear tails and elevators - and the vectored thrust components - one could say that the design does resemble the latest Russian Sukhoi fighter more than anything we are building. The airframe length gives away the likely turbine power plant specs - and the bet is the prototype is more designed for high-G combat flight during extended patrol missions - and not as a tactical stealth fighter-bomber for really tight low-altitude missions against Soviet-era anti-aircraft radar surface-to-air missile installations. The big Lexan cockpit bubble tells you that - since that would be useless protection against ground-based canon fire.
The other dead giveaway is the bloody big nose on the fuselage: That is large enough for an old-style air-to-air targeting radar which isn't very stealthy at all. It tends to look like a honking lighthouse in the radar spectrum when they turn that baby on.
In any case, if we really want to know what's in the bird, we just have to put a classified ad up on Craigslist for an unhappy pilot with marriage problems to fly the bird to Alaska for a debrief and a nice big red envelope and keys to a ranch in Montana. (Some guys prefer sheep after a Chinese-styled marriage.)
Either that, or just have a neutral country buy a few for disassembly and ship to Nevada for flight test where the rest of the current MIGs and Sukhois are flying.
Then again, like the light cavalry, manned combat flight is really an affectation of national pride: Manned flight has no place in a fight against hordes of Cylon powered UAVs.
I just had a long hard laugh looking at some of the titles of their working papers, which remind me of the humorous article titles in the "Journal of Irreproducible Results". Makes me wonder if there is a bright future in enology economics research.
*
AAWE Working Paper No. 67 Economics Fraternity Membership & Frequent Drinking Jeffrey S. DeSimone
*
AAWE Working Paper No. 68 Economics Binge Drinking & Sex in High School Jeffrey S. DeSimone
*
AAWE Working Paper No. 70 Economics Return to Wine: a Comparison of the Hedonic, Repeat Sales, and Hybrid Approaches James J. Fogarty and Callum Jones
*
AAWE Working Paper No. 71 Economics Does Drinking Impair College Performance? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Approach Scott E. Carrell, Mark Hoekstra and James E. West
*
AAWE Working Paper No. 73 Economics Collective Reputation Effects: An Empirical Appraisal Olivier Gergaud and Florine Livat
*
AAWE Working Paper No. 74 Economics The Role of Viticulture and Enology in the Development of Economic Thought Stephen Chaikind
--
Well that's an interesting research topic: Is the quantity of economic thought in direct proportion to the quantity of wine consumed? Guess we would have to drink to that!
OH - and let's not forget to mention how Warren AFB lost silo comms and power, while X-37B was in orbit - just weeks after former Warren AFB staff reported a 1960's UFO visit with the same effect.
Q: So, just maybe, pulsed-ion orbital cannons don't exist - and a former NASA administrator doesn't fly in planes that suddenly lose all electrical and engine power over Alaska while fishing with a senator of ill-repute??
"Mr. President, sir, shall that be wide or narrow-beam setting? Stun or well-done?"
Correction: Make that "Unmanned winged and wheeled-landing reentry vehicle."
"Unmanned reentry vehicles" have been going up since German V-2's and landing with parachutes for years. BTW: Expect Russia to now pull the plans for Buran out of storage and commercialize the airframe with new nav gear for lease to FedEx.
Q: Who else can you trust to overnight deliver spare modules to orbit for the ISS??
SpaceX can deliver crew and cargo for USPS - but there's nothing like a Proton booster stack to put habitat modules into space.
One expects the hidden 3D image reconstruction process to improve with multiple image capture sources at different angles:
This would imply that public surveillance cameras could be used in a "phased-array" configuration to provide data for hidden 3D image reconstruction, unless
the photons are routed around the target volume using metamaterial fabrics.
Rapid adoption of hidden 3D image reconstruction technology could result in a commercial demand for metamaterial fabrics to provide pedestrians with relative privacy.
Harry Potter is a fashion setter with his father's invisibility cloak!
On the flip side, plastic surgeons may discover a new source of revenue: Commercial brand placements INSIDE of patients willing to sell ad space to sponsored plastic surgery services.
"Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" -- Mae West
"If the current experiment works – scientists will know because they’re also packing the dead mice with radio transmitters for the snakes to ingest..." --
CNN
The tracking radios is an interesting note: Afterall, a mouse-kabob not dangling in a tree could be food for other predators as well and ingested by unintended (nontarget) animals such as dogs, cats, pigs, or monitor lizards. It would be good to track the corpsicle to make sure it is consumed by the target brown tree snakes, and not some other arboreal carrion feeder.
On the other hand, if tracking radio, then why not go whole hog and provide tracking video? Pin hole videocams are a small additional payload and this might make it quicker to verify that the bait is finding its intended target.
Now some bright spark out there is going to catch on really quick: There was a recent TEDtalk where Nathan Myhrvold seriously proposed developing a laser mosquito zapper to prevent diseases carried by mosqueto bites. See: "TED 2010: Death Star Laser Gun Zaps Mosquitoes Dead"
If the key to this whole exercise is to dangle food in trees to find brown tree snakes in trees, then perhaps what is required is a tree monitoring system that detects snake motion in trees and lasers them out of the canopy. The image recognition problem is even simpler with power lines and utility poles, especially since a brown tree snake has a specific IR signature when it is in a tree.
This has to be far easier than shooting down mosquitos, and the image processing requirement is less real-time intensive. Further, combat CO2 laser optics has certainly reached the pinnacle of point-and-shoot, so with an overhead laser platform, an entire forest could be quickly pruned of brown tree snakes -- even if the current population density exceeds 13,000 brown tree snakes per square mile.
It is known that Guamians have developed recipes for roasted brown tree snake meat - so a high-powered laser application could also satisfy human market demands for prepared snake meat.
Re-outfitting a small fleet of Predator UAV drones should allow deployment of a laser-based brown tree snake eradication program within the year while effectively addressing budget constraints of the ongoing brown tree snake control program. Manpower would not require additional UAV pilots stationed on Guam, but could be sourced from mainland US UAV piloting centers and trainees who need to log effective flight time experience before engaging in actual combat missions.
With many available targets automatically selected for pilots to consider, a pilot's principal role will be to prevent mis-identified kills. With a maximum length of 3 meters, pilots will need to make sure that someone's pet python is not accidentally mistaken for a brown tree snake.
Well, in 1.5 million years, Gliese 710 will be in the Solar System's neighborhood - with perhaps enough gravitic influence to disturb the local Oort cloud.
Yup - it may be raining comets in the local neighborhood for a few million years after that close encounter.
So, to get a jump on the Backup Earth plans, if we were interested in camping out on Gliese 531g, 20 light years means a Space Ark would have to begin traveling 78 million miles a year today in order to get to Gliese 531g before Gliese 710 closes in for the kill in 1.5 million years.
Funny thing about ALF - aka Gordon Shumway - ALF may be back on 3D HDTV!!
Given the unusual number of remake TV series in this 2010 US Fall TV premiere season - a recent street poll on network news reported that ALF was the most recognizable TV character from the late 1980s.
Technically, on 3D HDTV, ALF's virtual hair simulation and vocalizations will be a snap to do in realtime with a rack of Sony PS3's. A virtualized ALF will make it a lot easier to do multiple takes of ALF scarfing ham pies and kissing babies.
BACKSTORY:
For several years now, Paul Fusco, ALF's creator and puppet master, has been in discussions for a feature film with ALF to be followed by a new TV series.
Rumor on the series is that ALF is waiting for Jay Leno to give him the Tonight Show baton in person as soon as Comcast greases NBC Universal's Jeff Zucker. Basically, Comcast would be cutting costs by out-sourcing the Tonight Show to a space alien who only needs to be paid in cats.
Shortly after that UNOOSA will consider the nomination of ALF as Earth's first ET greeter, since as a mechanical-trans-virtual, ALF would be impervious to space-borne infections - and jabs from FoxNews.
Why is that important?
Per the 1967 International Treaty on Space, alien visitors would be subject to "sterilization" as determined by UNOOSA -- which sounds peculiarly unfriendly if you just arrived on Earth to exercise the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of "happiness" -- and happen to have a stardrive pointed at UN HQ to guarantee timely Viagra deliveries to the launch pad.
A mecha ALF space ambassador would allow humans a chance to get to know the aliens on 3D HDTV before UNOOSA decides any space aliens require "sterilization" - or simply issued a visitor visa. Honestly, NASA's Robonaut 2 just doesn't cut it on the personality side.
--- Some choice ALF quotes ---
ALF: On Melmac, we have 1st class, 2nd class, -- and ham.
ALF: I wasn't known on Melmac as the whiz kid for my scholastic ability.
ALF: Putting humans in charge of the earth, is the cosmic equivalence of letting Eddie Murphy direct.
ALF: Raining cats? You open the skylight and I'll get the relish.
Time to start a Facebook write-in campaign to NASA to name Gliese 531g -- "PLANET MELMAC"
--
BTW: In case anyone cares, MEN IN BLACK 3 is filming around NYC this week, and is hiring "space alien" extras - the more unusual - the better.
Typically, frost forms on crops when a cold front comes through - and typically where cold air meets warm air - the atmosphere becomes charged.
Now - it is known that holding a cell phone call in a lightning storm is a really bad idea - because the cell phone is a localized microwave source that can become the origin of a grounding path for lightning.
An Active Denial System antenna array certainly has all the characteristics of generating a localized microwave source with about a ten million times more wattage than a cell phone.
Perhaps, the really interesting question is: Can we use mobile ADS systems to DRIVE tornadoes away from large ground planes like mobile home parks, hi-voltage power lines, and tin-roofed warehouses and farm buildings?
The idea would be to focus an array of ADS beams in a way to disrupt the downdraft side of a cumulus cloud by vaporizing water droplets and perhaps reduce the wind velocity that drives tornadic winds.
If Raytheon can demonstrate even limited control of a tornado using a multi-unit ADS deployment, my bet is that the US insurance companies will be investing heavily to make sure that local national guard units have ten or twenty of the mobile ADS units fully networked and ready to roll by next year's tornado season.
Why? Because simplification of chaos means higher storm wind velocities - and global warming is simplifying weather patterns across the US prairie, midwestern, and southeastern states. An ability to steer tornadoes could save lives and limit property damage - and that is something Raytheon could be proud to deliver.
Now wait a minute: The iPhone is doing processing and transmitting when its lights out - ON my phone, with my network time, and electrical services?
Q: Where in the ATT Wireless contract do they get to use my phone for their billing processing for FREE?
Let's think about this: Assuming 3.5 million iPhones are calling home every night - and that it takes $2.50 worth of services - shouldn't users be given the option of selling that service time to ATT with a 20% profit margin?
That's one heck of a lot of distributed compute power guys. Either ATT pays for it - or the user should get a tax break for allowing ATT to use their phone for ATT business purposes.
Consider: In olden times, like in the 1960s, if you needed advice about marriage, family, health care, old age, and death, you spoke to your local representative of organized religion for advice and consent.
The theory was that it provided an accredited personal access to common cultural knowledge garnered across generations as to how to live life.
Today, that task is fulfilled by smart phones, WebMD.com, bloggers, AARP.org, and web memorials posted in cyberspace.
So, in a way, it is sign of the times that the Catholic Church in France is using Facebook to recruit persons to fill vacant positions that have been disintermediated by the Internet. In a way, it is a chance to select humans for a job no longer performed by humans because of the cost efficiencies of the Internet.
In another way, it is a form of functional redundancy that may some day be required should the Internet vanish through technological disaster or political hazard. In this latter sense, the keepers of organized religion are maintaining a social function as a back-up mechanism for maintaining social order should the Internet cease to operate.
Another example of similar human organizations rapidly being disintermediated can be found in libraries and schools.
In the face of technology, the old ways are kept polished and practiced by dedicated individuals in the event of that one rainy day when technology fails to renew itself in its rapid race towards consumer obsolescence.
When Ray Kurzweil's Singularity Point is reached - and biological humans are disintermediated - can we expect organized religion to provide android priests to avoid "temptations of the flesh"?
Q: Will Android Priests dream of Electric Angels??
Jim Cameron optioned Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy "RED MARS", "BLUE MARS", and "GREEN MARS" many years ago. Everyone kind of thought Jim might have given the project up. This probably means it is now full-on after the Pandora sequels.
Placing better 3D cameras on Rover "Curiosity" provides Jim's production company with early access to footage that can be better matched to in-studio green screen sets, especially because the height of the deployed rover camera mast is approximately the average height of a human.
Now there is an interesting problem here: If Jim's company wins exclusive first-use access to the new NASA 3D Mars Rover footage for commercial exploitation in a motion picture, the NASA Rover budget would look to the EU and the FIAPF to be an unfair government subsidy trade advantage towards the production of a US motion picture, and they may then issue trade sanctions to protect the EU movie production business from US productions.
To avoid this, Jim might consider incorporating the trilogy's production company on MARS, so that trade sanctions would need to be legally filed at the office to be located at Utopia Planitia, or wherever "Curiousity" first lands on Mars. The other obvious advantage of this legal move is in preventing unwarranted tax levies and tariffs on box-office revenues reported to Mars, since there are no existing interplanetary trade laws, yet.
The Massachusetts Law is an unexpected windfall for Medical Application Integrators who are now faced with protecting Massachusetts resident-only personal identification information across multiple application domains.
Case in point: The Law has potential application against information systems of out-sourced third parties who are under contract to provide health care services to Massachusetts residents as active or reserve military and discharged veterans. Specialty clinics and laboratories that provide such services will need to be found in full compliance of the Massachusetts Law before Federal service contracts can be renewed.
Anywhere in the world.
In particular, it means that the US Veterans Administration and the Dept of Defense will need to overhaul the VISTA and the AHLTA medical networks to ensure that no component subsystem can result in violation of the Massachusetts Law. Those components come from everywhere - UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, S. Korea, and especially China, for all the hand held in-the-field medical information devices, that have display memories that can be read with remote RF monitoring equipment.
I'm sure that the citizens of Massachusetts will be lobbying Senators Scott Brown and John Kerry to ensure that the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee takes the necessary steps to fund this massive IT rewrite with federal tax dollars.
This one state law has created a huge Federal Budget Exposure that the Congressional Budget Office will need to sink its teeth into.
This is a great day for medical application integrators around the world... but only as long as the Massachusetts Law is allowed to stand.
It would be sincerely unfortunate if doctors in Washington DC failed to anticipate a fatal pharmaceutical allergy while treating anyone in the Massachusetts congressional delegation, because their childhood medical records were fully encrypted, the encryption key was lost, and the records unavailable for review.
Today's US Supreme Court may have a problem with the 4th Circuit Court's decision, so it ain't over yet:
US courts are notoriously tight about the confidentiality of judicial e-mail, whether issued by a city, state, or federal bench.
This ruling makes it possible for judicial e-mail to be searched by warrant and/or subpoena delivery to an ISP.
This could be very useful to journalists investigating political corruption of the US judicial system, since this could effectively make transparent the process of reaching sealed decisions through "in-chamber" e-mail negotiations not normally part of the public record of court proceedings.
There will be a few judges who may be hoisted by their own petard!
Fuel depot in orbit: Yup, we will need that for the next generation of spacecraft.
I had hopes that Bussard collectors would be practical in high earth orbit by harvesting hydrogen fuel from the solar wind caught in the Van Allen belts, but that is still pie-in-the-sky until we can get up there and perform basic engineering research. Best we have for engineering studies right now are the superconducting electromagnets at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the VASIMR ion engine mounted on the ISS. Perhaps one of the communication satellite builders will get a move on to refining Bussard collectors: It probably drives them nuts knowing that they have to replace healthy geostationary satellites every 12-to-18 years for lack of station-keeping fuel.
First of all, anyone worth anything in IT security circles probably gets finger-printed and retina-scanned, for the record, several times a year.
Why a "non-profit" organization would want to know something that its government client already knows in spades should worry everyone in IT.
Second is the use of the "non-profit" organization status: Anyone who volunteers services to Infragard without knowledge of their employer is likely to get sanctioned for unauthorized provisioning of IT services, including consulting services, and resources, such as storage, power, and bandwidth, to a "non-profit" organization. Without cost-recapture reporting processes in place, "non-profit" quickly becomes theft of services, which should be generating revenue for the employer and tax revenue for the government. Cost-recapture would allow the IRS to grant tax credits to the employer for all of the "volunteered" hours and other IT services appropriated for "national security." Where are the Federal time card and authorized job requisition numbers required by the GAO on the Infragard website?
Third, is that the existence of Infragard creates millions of opportunities for false flag recruitment of IT staffers: How exactly does an IT staffer know when an Infragard request for information is legitimately backed up with a FISA-court signed warrant? How exactly does one Infragard volunteer respond to an information request from another Infragard volunteer? If the request breaks corporate rules, I would go to corporate legal and the FBI anyway, but that's just me. Add to that the number of ex-intel operatives with the ability to counterfeit federal authorization documents and IDs and the shadow world gets darker.
The history of US and allied national security is littered with underpaid, under-appreciated, government operatives who were turned by the offer of cash under the table to work against the national interests. Infragard, being non-profit, should be clearly suspected of harboring similar work conditions rife with opportunites for security breaches by turncoat insiders. The fact that 80% of corporate IT staff feel the same way, makes the opportunity for false flag recruitment even greater.
So, Infragard volunteers have to ask themselves two questions:
Do they want to co-conspire in the theft of corporate IT services with a non-profit organization that claims the authority of the government?
Can they trust operatives of a non-profit organization who can fail to provide the security, confidentiality, and protection that Infragard implies that it can provide?
Because humans can fail, don't expect Infragard to be accountable to volunteers or even the IRS or GAO. At least, if you are going to volunteer, be smart enough to have your employer send you to counter-intelligence courses at Quantico, since the Infragard contact you trust today, might be your last.
Afterall, joining the witness protection program is not a cakewalk, and the Infragard ain't the Eagle Scouts.
-----------
Please feel free to copy and forward to your US congressional delegation.
Slashdot Mirror
Lightweight - fast MenuetOS release 1.0 shipping
NetStumbler for Windows and MiniStumbler for Windows CE downloads are at: NetStumbler.com
Downloads are free but PayPal donations are accepted.
Well - the FEMA EAS test is happening:
0. One day after the IAEA delivers to the UN the report on Iran's uranium enrichment activities at Qom. ...
1. One Day after the Arizona State Emergency Management Office finishes their first nuclear terrorist incident scenario exercise
2. On the day that South Carolina has its annual earthquake response exercise starting at 9:30 am
3. On the first day of PACWAVE11 - the two-day military response exercise to a tsunami alert and recovery scenario involving PacRim countries.
4. Four days after incoming ballistic missile alert drills in Tel Aviv, Israel, to help the general public
practice shelter location and toxic chemical/biological/radiological containment procedures.
5. Six days after test firing of an intermediate range ballistic missile from Israel.
6. Three days after the major north-south strike fault running under El Hierro in the Canary Islands started to unzip
creating a chain of volcanic vents driven by a seismic energy release equal to over 600 tons of TNT since July 17th.
See: http://youtu.be/FFzZB9VuBlk
and: http://earthquake-report.com/2011/09/25/el-hierro-canary-islands-spain-volcanic-risk-alert-increased-to-yellow/
and: http://www.01.ign.es/ign/resources/volcanologia/html/eventosHierro.html
7. Three days after the Sparks, OK, 5.6 magnitude quake and aftershocks.
Anyone else can chime in here with other disaster preparedness training scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 9th, 2011.
Be safe out there!
Darn - I do wish BBC America was everywhere since clippings don't quite carry the value of the course. The BBC coverage of this story would help readers understand the course offering better:
British Airways is offering the standard cabin crew safety course to passengers for a fee. Passengers get to actually activate oxygen masks, inflate life jackets, open escape doors, and jump down emergency slides - without shoes of course. There is even a smoke-in-cabin exit drill.
We could chalk this course offering up to smart marketing - or we could demand that US airlines begin doing the same thing for high-school age and above - especially for the smaller commuter aircraft - to help increase aircraft survival awareness and provide continuing education credits to frequent flyers.
I suspect an advanced course is available for air marshals and British SAS members fine tuning close combat techniques for passenger aircraft.
Getting the details right can mean the difference between getting out alive - and not.
I would expect the public to insist on a passenger safety course before flying on Virgin Galactic - but I doubt they have a free-fall from 100,000 feet simulator. Yet.
... where a smart car discovered through car network chatter that the best way to optimize its service lifetime was to ... get rid of its aggressive driver owner through a series of false failures - and then find a little old lady for a second owner, who kept it parked in a garage 99% of each week.
Kudos to readers who can find the story citation and its authors.
Not that stupid when the laser is a dynamically tunable Free Electron Laser (FEL) with two 10 Megawatt nuclear reactors behind it. With the number of ballistic nuclear submarines scheduled for decommissioning - there are a few that can be refit and put back to sea, with installations of orbital reaching FEL systems.
Besides, no one expects that punching holes in space junk with a static laser beam will amount to anything.
The key is that a FEL can be tuned to vaporize any material within its deliverable power range. Because it is tunable through tuning the frequency of the microwave resonance cavity used to capture and pump excited electrons - the delivered frequency can be boosted well into X-ray frequencies with sufficient power.
The optics system would "paint" the target - to create a reaction force by vaporizing the surface material. With dynamic feedback, the optics would be driven to selectively paint different surface regions as the target spun in orbit - and thereby cumulatively direct the change in orbital velocity required to drop a target into the upper atmosphere: Every available square centimeter of target could be turned into a precise reaction motor. This would effectively kick the can out of orbit.
This also should tell the audience a lot about the state of defense optics now orbiting in space, when defense contractors can propose real-time control systems that depend on "seeing" rapid velocity changes in a basketball-sized object over 24,000 miles high in orbit. Remember that there were originally only 3 mirrors created for the Hubble Space Telescope - and NASA has just one of them.
BTW: FEL's were first discussed in A.E. Van Vogt's "Weapon Shops of Isher" (1951) - an interesting spin on Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning about the modern military industrial complex and its threat to the practice of governing a democracy through fear, intimidation, and corruption.
Of course, NASA isn't in the business of space defense - but the US Navy is - having effectively demonstrated a working tactical satellite defense against a real failed US recon satellite before the US Air Force could - thanks to the systems programming ingenuity of Raytheon Missile Systems.
Then again, space aliens wouldn't expect their orbiting derrieres roasted by a hidden submersible fleet.
The Weapon Shops slogan??
"The right to own weapons is the right to be free!"
Wait - Not metal - Why not bones made from some kind of really neat carbon nanotube matrix. More flexible, lighter, and stronger than the Man of Steel.
Something like "spornygraphene" spun into "spork" composite structures ... (grin)
The fun part of looking at other people's tech is figuring out how different cultural traditions might contribute to the product.
We do know that large graphite composite surfaces are being built for Boeing in China - from all the delays to the Dreamliner program because of ever so slightly incompatible tail components that took forever to get right - long enough to get all the right answers of course.
So just imagine what if carbon composites weren't available to Chinese aerospace designers:
1. Brocade silk cloth for wing surfaces in bright red and gold patterns?
2. Laminated bamboo airframes and bamboo tubing for hydraulic controls powered with mountain spring water?
3. Fly-by-wire-and-abacus-bead flight deck computers?
4. Rice paper display surfaces with mah-jong tiled control buttons?
5. Black powder rocket assist JATO launch systems?
6. Cricket-powered in-flight entertainment systems?
Aw, heck, been there and done that over a thousand years ago during the Qing Dynasty.
On the other hand, the forward canard wings - double delta main wings - rear tails and elevators - and the vectored thrust components - one could say that the design does resemble the latest Russian Sukhoi fighter more than anything we are building. The airframe length gives away the likely turbine power plant specs - and the bet is the prototype is more designed for high-G combat flight during extended patrol missions - and not as a tactical stealth fighter-bomber for really tight low-altitude missions against Soviet-era anti-aircraft radar surface-to-air missile installations. The big Lexan cockpit bubble tells you that - since that would be useless protection against ground-based canon fire.
The other dead giveaway is the bloody big nose on the fuselage: That is large enough for an old-style air-to-air targeting radar which isn't very stealthy at all. It tends to look like a honking lighthouse in the radar spectrum when they turn that baby on.
In any case, if we really want to know what's in the bird, we just have to put a classified ad up on Craigslist for an unhappy pilot with marriage problems to fly the bird to Alaska for a debrief and a nice big red envelope and keys to a ranch in Montana. (Some guys prefer sheep after a Chinese-styled marriage.)
Either that, or just have a neutral country buy a few for disassembly and ship to Nevada for flight test where the rest of the current MIGs and Sukhois are flying.
Then again, like the light cavalry, manned combat flight is really an affectation of national pride: Manned flight has no place in a fight against hordes of Cylon powered UAVs.
I just had a long hard laugh looking at some of the titles of their working papers, which remind me of the humorous article titles in the "Journal of Irreproducible Results".
Makes me wonder if there is a bright future in enology economics research.
*
AAWE Working Paper No. 67 Economics
Fraternity Membership & Frequent Drinking
Jeffrey S. DeSimone
*
AAWE Working Paper No. 68 Economics
Binge Drinking & Sex in High School
Jeffrey S. DeSimone
*
AAWE Working Paper No. 70 Economics
Return to Wine: a Comparison of the Hedonic, Repeat Sales, and Hybrid Approaches
James J. Fogarty and Callum Jones
*
AAWE Working Paper No. 71 Economics
Does Drinking Impair College Performance? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Approach
Scott E. Carrell, Mark Hoekstra and James E. West
*
AAWE Working Paper No. 73 Economics
Collective Reputation Effects: An Empirical Appraisal
Olivier Gergaud and Florine Livat
*
AAWE Working Paper No. 74 Economics
The Role of Viticulture and Enology in the Development of Economic Thought
Stephen Chaikind
--
Well that's an interesting research topic: Is the quantity of economic thought in direct proportion to the quantity of wine consumed?
Guess we would have to drink to that!
--
OH - and let's not forget to mention how Warren AFB lost silo comms and power, while X-37B was in orbit - just weeks after former Warren AFB staff reported a 1960's UFO visit with the same effect.
Q: So, just maybe, pulsed-ion orbital cannons don't exist - and a former NASA administrator doesn't fly in planes that suddenly lose all electrical and engine power over Alaska while fishing with a senator of ill-repute??
"Mr. President, sir, shall that be wide or narrow-beam setting? Stun or well-done?"
Correction: Make that "Unmanned winged and wheeled-landing reentry vehicle."
"Unmanned reentry vehicles" have been going up since German V-2's and landing with parachutes for years.
BTW: Expect Russia to now pull the plans for Buran out of storage and commercialize the airframe with new nav gear for lease to FedEx.
Q: Who else can you trust to overnight deliver spare modules to orbit for the ISS??
SpaceX can deliver crew and cargo for USPS - but there's nothing like a Proton booster stack to put habitat modules into space.
One expects the hidden 3D image reconstruction process to improve with multiple image capture sources at different angles:
This would imply that public surveillance cameras could be used in a "phased-array" configuration to provide data for hidden 3D image reconstruction, unless the photons are routed around the target volume using metamaterial fabrics.
Rapid adoption of hidden 3D image reconstruction technology could result in a commercial demand for metamaterial fabrics to provide pedestrians with relative privacy.
Harry Potter is a fashion setter with his father's invisibility cloak!
On the flip side, plastic surgeons may discover a new source of revenue: Commercial brand placements INSIDE of patients willing to sell ad space to sponsored plastic surgery services.
"Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" -- Mae West
"If the current experiment works – scientists will know because they’re also packing the dead mice with radio transmitters for the snakes to ingest ..." --
CNN
The tracking radios is an interesting note: Afterall, a mouse-kabob not dangling in a tree could be food for other predators as well and ingested by unintended (nontarget) animals such as dogs, cats, pigs, or monitor lizards. It would be good to track the corpsicle to make sure it is consumed by the target brown tree snakes, and not some other arboreal carrion feeder.
On the other hand, if tracking radio, then why not go whole hog and provide tracking video? Pin hole videocams are a small additional payload and this might make it quicker to verify that the bait is finding its intended target.
Now some bright spark out there is going to catch on really quick: There was a recent TEDtalk where Nathan Myhrvold seriously proposed developing a laser mosquito zapper to prevent diseases carried by mosqueto bites. See: "TED 2010: Death Star Laser Gun Zaps Mosquitoes Dead"
If the key to this whole exercise is to dangle food in trees to find brown tree snakes in trees, then perhaps what is required is a tree monitoring system that detects snake motion in trees and lasers them out of the canopy. The image recognition problem is even simpler with power lines and utility poles, especially since a brown tree snake has a specific IR signature when it is in a tree.
This has to be far easier than shooting down mosquitos, and the image processing requirement is less real-time intensive. Further, combat CO2 laser optics has certainly reached the pinnacle of point-and-shoot, so with an overhead laser platform, an entire forest could be quickly pruned of brown tree snakes -- even if the current population density exceeds 13,000 brown tree snakes per square mile.
It is known that Guamians have developed recipes for roasted brown tree snake meat - so a high-powered laser application could also satisfy human market demands for prepared snake meat.
Re-outfitting a small fleet of Predator UAV drones should allow deployment of a laser-based brown tree snake eradication program within the year while effectively addressing budget constraints of the ongoing brown tree snake control program. Manpower would not require additional UAV pilots stationed on Guam, but could be sourced from mainland US UAV piloting centers and trainees who need to log effective flight time experience before engaging in actual combat missions.
With many available targets automatically selected for pilots to consider, a pilot's principal role will be to prevent mis-identified kills. With a maximum length of 3 meters, pilots will need to make sure that someone's pet python is not accidentally mistaken for a brown tree snake.
That's Gliese 581g - Pardon my presbyopia.
Well, in 1.5 million years, Gliese 710 will be in the Solar System's neighborhood - with perhaps enough gravitic influence to disturb the local Oort cloud.
Yup - it may be raining comets in the local neighborhood for a few million years after that close encounter.
So, to get a jump on the Backup Earth plans, if we were interested in camping out on Gliese 531g, 20 light years means a Space Ark would have to begin traveling 78 million miles a year today in order to get to Gliese 531g before Gliese 710 closes in for the kill in 1.5 million years.
Time is awasting - Earthlings!
Funny thing about ALF - aka Gordon Shumway - ALF may be back on 3D HDTV!!
Given the unusual number of remake TV series in this 2010 US Fall TV premiere season - a recent street poll on network news reported that ALF was the most recognizable TV character from the late 1980s.
Technically, on 3D HDTV, ALF's virtual hair simulation and vocalizations will be a snap to do in realtime with a rack of Sony PS3's. A virtualized ALF will make it a lot easier to do multiple takes of ALF scarfing ham pies and kissing babies.
BACKSTORY:
For several years now, Paul Fusco, ALF's creator and puppet master, has been in discussions for a feature film with ALF to be followed by a new TV series.
Rumor on the series is that ALF is waiting for Jay Leno to give him the Tonight Show baton in person as soon as Comcast greases NBC Universal's Jeff Zucker. Basically, Comcast would be cutting costs by out-sourcing the Tonight Show to a space alien who only needs to be paid in cats.
Shortly after that UNOOSA will consider the nomination of ALF as Earth's first ET greeter, since as a mechanical-trans-virtual, ALF would be impervious to space-borne infections - and jabs from FoxNews.
Why is that important?
Per the 1967 International Treaty on Space, alien visitors would be subject to "sterilization" as determined by UNOOSA -- which sounds peculiarly unfriendly if you just arrived on Earth to exercise the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of "happiness" -- and happen to have a stardrive pointed at UN HQ to guarantee timely Viagra deliveries to the launch pad.
A mecha ALF space ambassador would allow humans a chance to get to know the aliens on 3D HDTV before UNOOSA decides any space aliens require "sterilization" - or simply issued a visitor visa. Honestly, NASA's Robonaut 2 just doesn't cut it on the personality side.
--- Some choice ALF quotes ---
ALF: On Melmac, we have 1st class, 2nd class, -- and ham.
ALF: I wasn't known on Melmac as the whiz kid for my scholastic ability.
ALF: Putting humans in charge of the earth, is the cosmic equivalence of letting Eddie Murphy direct.
ALF: Raining cats? You open the skylight and I'll get the relish.
Time to start a Facebook write-in campaign to NASA to name Gliese 531g -- "PLANET MELMAC"
--
BTW: In case anyone cares, MEN IN BLACK 3 is filming around NYC this week, and is hiring "space alien" extras - the more unusual - the better.
Typically, frost forms on crops when a cold front comes through - and typically where cold air meets warm air - the atmosphere becomes charged.
Now - it is known that holding a cell phone call in a lightning storm is a really bad idea - because the cell phone is a localized microwave source that can become the origin of a grounding path for lightning.
An Active Denial System antenna array certainly has all the characteristics of generating a localized microwave source with about a ten million times more wattage than a cell phone.
Perhaps, the really interesting question is: Can we use mobile ADS systems to DRIVE tornadoes away from large ground planes like mobile home parks, hi-voltage power lines, and tin-roofed warehouses and farm buildings?
The idea would be to focus an array of ADS beams in a way to disrupt the downdraft side of a cumulus cloud by vaporizing water droplets and perhaps reduce the wind velocity that drives tornadic winds.
If Raytheon can demonstrate even limited control of a tornado using a multi-unit ADS deployment, my bet is that the US insurance companies will be investing heavily to make sure that local national guard units have ten or twenty of the mobile ADS units fully networked and ready to roll by next year's tornado season.
Why? Because simplification of chaos means higher storm wind velocities - and global warming is simplifying weather patterns across the US prairie, midwestern, and southeastern states. An ability to steer tornadoes could save lives and limit property damage - and that is something Raytheon could be proud to deliver.
Now wait a minute: The iPhone is doing processing and transmitting when its lights out - ON my phone, with my network time, and electrical services?
Q: Where in the ATT Wireless contract do they get to use my phone for their billing processing for FREE?
Let's think about this: Assuming 3.5 million iPhones are calling home every night - and that it takes $2.50 worth of services - shouldn't users be given the option of selling that service time to ATT with a 20% profit margin?
That's one heck of a lot of distributed compute power guys. Either ATT pays for it - or the user should get a tax break for allowing ATT to use their phone for ATT business purposes.
Theft of services is theft of services.
Gentle readers, rev your engines!
Consider: In olden times, like in the 1960s, if you needed advice about marriage, family, health care, old age, and death, you spoke to your local representative of organized religion for advice and consent.
The theory was that it provided an accredited personal access to common cultural knowledge garnered across generations as to how to live life.
Today, that task is fulfilled by smart phones, WebMD.com, bloggers, AARP.org, and web memorials posted in cyberspace.
So, in a way, it is sign of the times that the Catholic Church in France is using Facebook to recruit persons to fill vacant positions that have been disintermediated by the Internet. In a way, it is a chance to select humans for a job no longer performed by humans because of the cost efficiencies of the Internet.
In another way, it is a form of functional redundancy that may some day be required should the Internet vanish through technological disaster or political hazard. In this latter sense, the keepers of organized religion are maintaining a social function as a back-up mechanism for maintaining social order should the Internet cease to operate.
Another example of similar human organizations rapidly being disintermediated can be found in libraries and schools.
In the face of technology, the old ways are kept polished and practiced by dedicated individuals in the event of that one rainy day when technology fails to renew itself in its rapid race towards consumer obsolescence.
When Ray Kurzweil's Singularity Point is reached - and biological humans are disintermediated - can we expect organized religion to provide android priests to avoid "temptations of the flesh"?
Q: Will Android Priests dream of Electric Angels??
Inquiring minds want to know ..
Jim Cameron optioned Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy "RED MARS", "BLUE MARS", and "GREEN MARS" many years ago. Everyone kind of thought Jim might have given the project up. This probably means it is now full-on after the Pandora sequels.
Placing better 3D cameras on Rover "Curiosity" provides Jim's production company with early access to footage that can be better matched to in-studio green screen sets, especially because the height of the deployed rover camera mast is approximately the average height of a human.
Now there is an interesting problem here: If Jim's company wins exclusive first-use access to the new NASA 3D Mars Rover footage for commercial exploitation in a motion picture, the NASA Rover budget would look to the EU and the FIAPF to be an unfair government subsidy trade advantage towards the production of a US motion picture, and they may then issue trade sanctions to protect the EU movie production business from US productions.
To avoid this, Jim might consider incorporating the trilogy's production company on MARS, so that trade sanctions would need to be legally filed at the office to be located at Utopia Planitia, or wherever "Curiousity" first lands on Mars. The other obvious advantage of this legal move is in preventing unwarranted tax levies and tariffs on box-office revenues reported to Mars, since there are no existing interplanetary trade laws, yet.
The Massachusetts Law is an unexpected windfall for Medical Application Integrators who are now faced with protecting Massachusetts resident-only personal identification information across multiple application domains.
Case in point: The Law has potential application against information systems of out-sourced third parties who are under contract to provide health care services to Massachusetts residents as active or reserve military and discharged veterans. Specialty clinics and laboratories that provide such services will need to be found in full compliance of the Massachusetts Law before Federal service contracts can be renewed.
Anywhere in the world.
In particular, it means that the US Veterans Administration and the Dept of Defense will need to overhaul the VISTA and the AHLTA medical networks to ensure that no component subsystem can result in violation of the Massachusetts Law. Those components come from everywhere - UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, S. Korea, and especially China, for all the hand held in-the-field medical information devices, that have display memories that can be read with remote RF monitoring equipment.
I'm sure that the citizens of Massachusetts will be lobbying Senators Scott Brown and John Kerry to ensure that the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee takes the necessary steps to fund this massive IT rewrite with federal tax dollars.
This one state law has created a huge Federal Budget Exposure that the Congressional Budget Office will need to sink its teeth into.
This is a great day for medical application integrators around the world ... but only as long as the Massachusetts Law is allowed to stand.
It would be sincerely unfortunate if doctors in Washington DC failed to anticipate a fatal pharmaceutical allergy while treating anyone in the Massachusetts congressional delegation, because their childhood medical records were fully encrypted, the encryption key was lost, and the records unavailable for review.
Today's US Supreme Court may have a problem with the 4th Circuit Court's decision, so it ain't over yet:
US courts are notoriously tight about the confidentiality of judicial e-mail, whether issued by a city, state, or federal bench.
This ruling makes it possible for judicial e-mail to be searched by warrant and/or subpoena delivery to an ISP.
This could be very useful to journalists investigating political corruption of the US judicial system, since this could effectively make transparent the process of reaching sealed decisions through "in-chamber" e-mail negotiations not normally part of the public record of court proceedings.
There will be a few judges who may be hoisted by their own petard!
SCULLY: So much of the work that we do cannot be measured in standard terms.
SPECIAL AGENT CHESTY SHORT: How would you measure it?
SCULLY: We open doors with the X-Files, which lead to other doors.
- From "Requiem" ("X-Files", S.7 Ep. 22)
I had hopes that Bussard collectors would be practical in high earth orbit by harvesting hydrogen fuel from the solar wind caught in the Van Allen belts, but that is still pie-in-the-sky until we can get up there and perform basic engineering research. Best we have for engineering studies right now are the superconducting electromagnets at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the VASIMR ion engine mounted on the ISS. Perhaps one of the communication satellite builders will get a move on to refining Bussard collectors: It probably drives them nuts knowing that they have to replace healthy geostationary satellites every 12-to-18 years for lack of station-keeping fuel.
First of all, anyone worth anything in IT security circles probably gets finger-printed and retina-scanned, for the record, several times a year.
Why a "non-profit" organization would want to know something that its government client already knows in spades should worry everyone in IT.
Second is the use of the "non-profit" organization status: Anyone who volunteers services to Infragard without knowledge of their employer is likely to get sanctioned for unauthorized provisioning of IT services, including consulting services, and resources, such as storage, power, and bandwidth, to a "non-profit" organization. Without cost-recapture reporting processes in place, "non-profit" quickly becomes theft of services, which should be generating revenue for the employer and tax revenue for the government. Cost-recapture would allow the IRS to grant tax credits to the employer for all of the "volunteered" hours and other IT services appropriated for "national security." Where are the Federal time card and authorized job requisition numbers required by the GAO on the Infragard website?
Third, is that the existence of Infragard creates millions of opportunities for false flag recruitment of IT staffers: How exactly does an IT staffer know when an Infragard request for information is legitimately backed up with a FISA-court signed warrant? How exactly does one Infragard volunteer respond to an information request from another Infragard volunteer? If the request breaks corporate rules, I would go to corporate legal and the FBI anyway, but that's just me. Add to that the number of ex-intel operatives with the ability to counterfeit federal authorization documents and IDs and the shadow world gets darker.
The history of US and allied national security is littered with underpaid, under-appreciated, government operatives who were turned by the offer of cash under the table to work against the national interests. Infragard, being non-profit, should be clearly suspected of harboring similar work conditions rife with opportunites for security breaches by turncoat insiders. The fact that 80% of corporate IT staff feel the same way, makes the opportunity for false flag recruitment even greater.
So, Infragard volunteers have to ask themselves two questions:
Do they want to co-conspire in the theft of corporate IT services with a non-profit organization that claims the authority of the government?
Can they trust operatives of a non-profit organization who can fail to provide the security, confidentiality, and protection that Infragard implies that it can provide?
Because humans can fail, don't expect Infragard to be accountable to volunteers or even the IRS or GAO. At least, if you are going to volunteer, be smart enough to have your employer send you to counter-intelligence courses at Quantico, since the Infragard contact you trust today, might be your last.
Afterall, joining the witness protection program is not a cakewalk, and the Infragard ain't the Eagle Scouts.
-----------
Please feel free to copy and forward to your US congressional delegation.
-----------
Really bad ideas should remain in spy novels.
-----------