Thought ya’ll might get a kick of the old sensawunda out of these “rapatronic” high-speed photos of nuclear bombs exploding:
The exposures were often as short as 10 nanoseconds, and each Rapatronic camera would take exactly one photograph.
A bank of four to ten or more such cameras were arranged at tests to record different moments of early fireball growth.
They provide technical information about the device’s disassembly.
Some really awesome images captured here. More on rapatronics here.
Like it or loathe it, there’s no escaping the fact that we live in a mediated world; even developing nations are becoming rapidly connected to two-way communications networks that are changing their perceptions and enabling new forms of interaction and collaboration – whether it be for good or evil. [image by randomduck]
The new world stage is digital; to be a player in the game, your pieces need to move in the mediasphere. Which is why John Robb sees the Pentagon’s insistence on sealing itself away from that mediasphere as a form of institutional suicide:
Bathed in a world view dominated by deprecated cold war logic/secrecy, it is in the process of trying to create an impervious bubble to shield itself from the very environment within which it is expected to fight. This can be seen in everything from a growing plethora of buildings that bar any and all communication devices to the blocking of Web sites that contain dangerous ideas.
[…]
So, in essence — by blocking access, hyping the threat posed by Chinese citizen hackers, and locking down facilities — the US military is self-inflicting grand strategic failure on itself. US servicemen are now being increasingly reduced to a level of isolation on par with an immunologically suppressed “bubble boy.”
Another approach is for the US military to learn to learn live in this media sphere. To leverage it and operate within it on a level that befits the trust and treasure we routinely imbue it with.
Avoiding it, by claiming it is too tough an environment for the US military to operate, is a path to complete obsolescence.
He’s got a point, there. After all, it’s not as if the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts haven’t demonstrated that fourth generation warfare is a struggle for more traditional Western war-machines… and the internet and mobile communications are far more ubiquitous and affordable now than they were five years ago.
Robb’s mention of Cold War thinking is very telling, too – I can’t be the only one who’s noticed the increasing prevalence of Red Menace news stories, predominantly focussing on China but taking in the former Soviet states as well. Geography is a dead scene; clinging to the old system of monolithic states as ideological opponents is a sort of wishful thinking that, at best, invites your own decline into irrelevance.
Regardless of your opinion about the Somalian pirate situation, if you’ve a jones for high-tech weaponry you’ll have been enjoying the brief flurry of military hardware reportage that emerged in the wake of the kidnapping rescue mission.
Wired has the low-down on how much more awesome the armed forces might be once DARPA has churned through a bit more R&D work:
Already, we’ve seen Navy SEAL shooters take out three pirates with three trigger-pulls — despite uneven seas and bobbing ships. Imagine how much easier the snipers’ jobs would have been, if they had rounds that could change course in mid-air, to account for crosswinds, air density, and moving targets. Darpa, the Defense Department’s way-out research arm, launched a $22 million effort in November to do just that. By countering these “fundamental limitation[s] of accuracy,” Darpa thinks it can dramatically improve American snipers’ range — and “provide a dramatic new capability to the U.S. military.”
Dramatic? Not the ideal choice of word, perhaps. Surely it would be more dramatic for the sniper to miss with every bullet but his last? But I digress – there’s more to come:
A companion project, Super-Resolution Vision System (SRVS), wouldn’t just make snipers more accurate. It would make them functionally invisible, as well. The system is trying to use “heat haze” — that shimmer you see on summer days, out in the distance — for helping snipers, instead of inhibiting them. In any given instant, the heated air acts as a series of lenses; you may be able to look right through them and see a magnified view of the scene beyond. The trick is to use digital technology to identify the “lucky regions” or “lucky frames” when a clear view appears and assemble them into a complete picture. SRVS researchers are aiming to do just that.
It’s always a relief to know that, even in the depths of a global economic slump, we’re still working hard at finding new and inventive ways to kill one another. [image by mateus27_24-25]
We interrupt our usually po-faced seriousness for a brief dose of vaguely topical cute… assuming your definition of cute extends to rodents.
You may have read and enjoyed Eliot Fintushel’s “UXO, Bomb Dog” when we published it here last year (and if not, you should, because it’s a great story), but you may not have been aware that even smaller animals can be trained to de-mine battlefields – like rats.
Trainers begin socialising the young rats to the sights, sounds, and textures of the world by walking them on wet grass, going for a ride in a lorry and interacting with humans.
Then the sniffer rats are taught to recognise the smell of metal land mine casings in return for a food reward.
Thirty sniffer rats are already being used in Mozambique, Africa, and have proved incredibly successful for the detection and removal of land mines.
The rodents are fitted to a leash before scrambling their way over a piece of ground, sniffing out any explosives.
A trained rat can clear 100 metres square in 30 minutes, equivalent to two days work for a manual de-miner.
I used to share a house with a guy who kept rats, and I can vouch for their intelligence… and their tenacity. Their ability to come when they’re called? Not so much. [via grinding.be; image by charlycoste]
In what won’t be the last instances of laser-related “friendly fire” three US soldiers in Iraq have been hospitalised, and one has been blinded in one eye, by a green dazzling laser:
Since November 2008, a single unit in Iraq “has experienced 12 green-laser incidents involving 14 soldiers and varying degrees of injury. Three soldiers required medical evacuation out of Iraq and one soldier is now blind in one eye,” writes Sgt. Crystal Reidy