An interesting article on Kummersdorf in Germany, site of some of Wernher von Braun‘s rocket experiments before WWII:
It is here that the German military initiated the world’s first large-scale rocket development programme in the first half of the 20th Century.
This programme led to the development of the infamous V-2 rocket, used by Germany against the allies during World War II.
More information about the Kummersdorf proving grounds can be found here.
Quite old, but still relevant, here is an exerpt from a brief comment by author Ken MacLeod on the “new enlightenment” and the divisive debate surrounding global warming and environmentalism:
In science fiction, the key challenge is thinking about questions of the future. Some of the tools we have for thinking are broken or blunted. The climate change issue is a good example.
It’s difficult for the informed lay person even to decide if there’s a problem or not. The difficulty lies not in the complexity of the science, but in the subversion of the institutions of science, communication and democracy.
The role of the interest groups involved, whether it’s the energy corporations or the environmental campaigners, has been to accuse the other side of doing what the other side accuses them of doing – namely, subversion.
MacLeod may not be a climatologist but he makes a good point about the basic nature of the argument.
The possibility of a digital dark age has been noted before, but I hadn’t realised the problem was this acute, according to Prof Jerome P. McDonough at the University of Illinois:
“Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date,” McDonough said.
Magnetic tape, which stores most of the world’s computer backups, can degrade within a decade. According to the National Archives Web site by the mid-1970s, only two machines could read the data from the 1960 U.S. Census: One was in Japan, the other in the Smithsonian Institution. Some of the data collected from NASA’s 1976 Viking landing on Mars is unreadable and lost forever.
It is a pity – and it highlights the importance of non-proprietary file types.
I imagine extracting data from obsolete formats will become a major industry in the future.
Kudos and congrats to the US military industrial complex for continuing to output such consistently high quality James-Bondworthy widgets and gizmos. The latest is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle from arms megacorp Raytheon that can be launched from a submarine without having to surface:
The new U-UAV is dubbed SOTHOC, for Submarine Over the Horizon Organic Capabilities. The launch system works by deploying a sealed can through the sub’s waste disposal lock. The can then sinks away safely to get clear of the boat. On reaching a preset depth it dumps weight to become positively buoyant and ascends to the surface. Once stable at the surface, it aligns itself into wind and launches a one-shot, disposable UAV.
Gawd bless America for supplying the rest of the worlds military hardware geeks with a consistent supply of goodness with no only minimal risk to our own person (unless you live in one of the Axis of Evil countries).
Peace out.
Obligatory shout-out to Pentagon boffins for their most recent bout of world-domineering mad-scientica. The Pentagon proposes to:
…develop a software/hardware suit that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject.
According to Prof Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University:
“What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.
We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.”
Like a PACK OF DOGS I SAY! Muahahahahahaaa!
You gotta laugh, right? 😉
[from New Scientist, via KurzweilAI.net][image from this New Scientist blog post]