Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From last summer, originally posted September 16, 2007, and originally titled “mm144: WIWICWLT #4.”

MUDGE’S Musings

Wow! I wish I could write like that!

We’ll keep this short. Almost choked on my lunch today while catching up with the best magazine on the planet, The Economist.

In an otherwise sober story about motorcycle gangs in England (who knew?) the following sentence appears:

… The victim, G[...], was a member of the Hells Angels, a biker gang that has a difficult relationship with the law (and with apostrophes)….

Wow! I wish I could write like that!

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

The changing face of military aviation

tenth in an occasional series

The series so far…

Two of our most useful military news links in our blogroll are Danger Room and Early Warning. After all, we’re at war.

Faithful reader of this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere© will recall that the subject of UAVs, Unmanned Air Vehicles or drones, is one of those topics that has consistently intrigued us. Look no further than the linklist above.

Robot aircraft of all sizes and scales hit the military commentariat several times on April 30, and reminded us of a related story (see no. 1a below) we had been waiting for the right opportunity to surface.

1. Future: Tiny

First, for all of the paranoid among us (and today, who isn’t?), comes truly the stuff of science fiction.

Army: Make Us a Mini-Drone Swarm (Updated)

By Noah Shachtman | April 30, 2008 | 6:53:00 PM

Usually, our dystopian nightmares of robot domination involve big, substantive machines – man-sized, or better. But many academics and military futurists believe the real power of ‘bots won’t be realized there swarms of tiny mechanical critters. (Think the spiders of Minority Report, instead of the Schwarzeneggers of Terminator.)…

“The idea is that a variety of crawling or flying mini-droids will be produced, able to go into situations where human troops might fear to tread – caves, bunkers, mountains, hostile urban areas etc. The robo-bug army would then spy out targets and intel for human commanders to act upon,” our pal Lew Page notes over at the Register.

The short entry contains fascinating links to related stories.

One just has to shudder.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Danger Room – Wired Blogs

1a. Future: Tiny, and they fly!

Apparently today’s subtext is insectoid.

Unmanned aircraft

The fly’s a spy

Nov 1st 2007 | From The Economist print edition

A new type of flying machine is watching you

Onera

JUST below a half-opened garage door a tiny device can be seen at the feet of someone lurking in the shadows. It looks like a blue dragonfly. Then its miniature wings begin to flap as it slips under the door and darts along the street. After rising through the air it stops to hover outside the window of a building several storeys high. There is an opening on the roof, and it slips inside. As it flits from room to room its video-camera “eye” transmits pictures to a screen on a remote-control unit strapped to the wrist of its clandestine operator.

The Onera shown in an artist’s conception above has a six-inch wingspan: a pretty large insect; a very tiny aircraft.

The smallest UAVS are the most intriguing because they will be able to fly in places where it was never thought aircraft could venture. Just how small might these machines be? The REMANTA bug has a total wingspan of less than 15cm (six inches). It flies by flapping its wings a bit like an insect. This means it needs less power than helicopter-type rotors and should be better able to withstand being blown off-course by wind, says Agnès Luc-Bouhali, a member of the project team.

Such a device can fly and be controlled remotely, but it could not yet conduct a mission like that portrayed in Onera’s video. “Today, that is a dream,” admits Ms Luc-Bouhali. But the team is working on it. Miniaturising power sources and sensors, and fitting REMANTA with systems to operate semi-autonomously in order to avoid obstacles such as walls are the main areas of future research and development.

The Economist‘s article is quite extensive, touching on safety issues (air traffic control for flying robots?) and privacy issues (how about a spy craft the size of a real fly?).

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Unmanned aircraft | The fly’s a spy | Economist.com

Spiders and dragonflies. Frightening, but strangely intriguing also. Yet another instance of science fiction rapidly becoming science fact.

2. Future: Immense

Another entry that day goes to the opposite extreme of the world of military robots.

Video: ‘Forever Drone’ Contest Heats Up

By Sharon Weinberger | April 30, 2008 | 2:58:00 PM

Which company will end up building a drone that can stay aloft for five years? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Aurora for the second phase of its ambitious Vulture program.

Lockheed’s artist’s rendition of their proposed “forever drone” appears at the top of today’s post. These are very large, solar powered aircraft that would be more directly positionable than today’s spy satellites,

The short entry is worth checking out to watch the two videos embedded there. One animates Vulture in a rather generalized way; the other is a promotional tool for Aurora, an interesting variant by BAE and its partners (BAE is the lead vendor behind our arachnid above), showing how such a vehicle would be launched in three sections, the better to maneuver through the thick atmosphere nearest the ground. The modular approach would permit a section to peel off for repair/replacement.

Satellites stay in orbit (and not permanently, entropy causes orbits to gradually decay and give them a finite life, as we are sometimes reminded) usually without much intervention. After all, they are coasting, as it were, although I missed that day in high school Physics that explains why they stay up there as long as they do.

The thought of an aircraft, remotely piloted or not, with its solar fueled electric engines powering it, constantly adjusting to winds aloft and the direction of its solar power source, not to speak of flying over whatever target has been selected that day, and staying aloft in military readiness for five years, is astonishing. What machines of any kind today, much less aviation machines, much less military issue built by the lowest bidder (or so we’re assured) are capable of such sustained performance? The Aurora team may have the right idea with its modular approach.

But, wow!

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Danger Room – Wired Blogs

3. Today: Right sized, but the right thing to do?

The use of today’s arsenal (and make no mistake, they are in daily 24×7 use — consult the link table above) of UAVs and UCAVs (‘C’ for combat, as in, not just spying, but bombing and/or shooting) has a moral component, as William Arkin of the Washington Post reminds us.

Unmanned and Dangerous: The Future U.S. Military?

By William M. Arkin | April 30, 2008; 6:00 AM ET

The controversy over the availability of unmanned reconnaissance and strike drones in Iraq and Afghanistan has become one of those quintessential Washington dramas that plays while Rome burns. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates is pushing for more drones to support the troops, while the self-interested Air Force is resisting. The false solution, as I have written, is as simple as more equipment and more money.

Arkin points out that when we send Predators and Global Hawks to do our dirty work while we safely and comfortably sit in hangars in Nevada, we are both prosecuting a war as best we know how, as well as showing the world that we increasingly are unwilling to place at risk our own human capital to do so.

So overall, while drones may saves lives (ours and civilian’s) in the short term, and may be less expensive than other means and may even be a better means to destroy a given target, they carry a long-term risk: If our military future is to be a push button video-game style of warfare, others may see us as heartless automatons bombing the world. The desire to get back at us could increase; the desire to get at the root of the technological system perpetrating the war against them would be paramount.

It is useful to be reminded that the technological advances of remotely controlled military hardware that some of us are so dazzled by, have as their ultimate goal the maiming or outright destruction of a flesh and blood enemy.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Early Warning

This really is not a new issue. Robotic military equipment has been utilized by many countries for many years.

For what are the decidedly low-tech land mines that armies of every level of sophistication (first, second and third world) have so profligately scattered over the years but robotic military hardware?

These mines, produced cheaply and deployed in the millions, have randomly plagued civilian farmers and their children for years after whatever war sparked their use. If the activists on the subject are to be believed, nearly every day someone steps wrong, and someone gets blown up. And no, the U.S. hasn’t signed that convention banning land mine use, either. Ugly.

I suppose that what’s new with this new generation of robotic war materiel is the extreme selectivity to identify targets available with today’s sensors.

Does that make us better than the minelayers?

Maybe just better warriors. Since the end of World War II, morality and war have become ever more contradictory, so that may not be enough.

And the Bush administration has done much to grease that slippery slope.

Perhaps a new administration will take some time to consider the implications of our increasing use of robotics in war. Not to speak of war itself.

Can’t wait.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

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I consider myself technologically sophisticated. Made my living by writing really sophisticated code for; creating applications for; using; and lately teaching the advanced use of; electronic computational devices for nearly 40 years.

Started when the average of such computational devices filled large, refrigerated, raised-floor (to clear the boa constrictor cabling) floor to ceiling windowed but locked chambers.

Large box (think refrigerator sized) with colorful lighting containing the computer itself with its proud array of 64,000 bytes of hand-assembled magnetic core memory. Folks, that was 64KB.

Today’s home PCs are stunted if they have less than 512MB. I recently upgraded the memory in my own PC: bought 2GB (about 31,000 times larger than that 64KB magnetic core processor for which we wrote so cleverly, and compactly!) for about $100.

No keyboard was attached to the central processing unit. It was controlled at a basic level with knobs and buttons and a console typewriter based on the iconic (if you’re my age) IBM Selectric “golf-ball” typewriter; and on an operational level with punched cards from a separate device.

Larger boxes (refrigerators again), each with two vertically mounted reels (supply and takeup) of magnetic tape storage (the latest innovation: vertical glass sliding doors provided access when the tape needed changing, and vacuum columns provided buffering to eliminate stress as the delicate tape was propelled across the magnetic read/write heads).

Squat boxes (think washing machines), containing the latest innovation in high density storage: rotating disk memory. Think of 12 14-inch diameter plates glued together around a metal cylinder (total weight of the disk pack, 30-40 lbs.) providing 20 coated surfaces on which magnetic heads on swing arms read and wrote data. Total capacity of each washing machine: 29 megabytes, for the time, an astonishing number.

And, various spinet and upright piano sized boxes: card readers and card punching and card sorting machines; and high speed continuous form printers.

We cavemen communicated with our dinosaurs using large stacks of 80-column punched cards, generated by ranks of noisily clacking keypunch operators (their machines, not the operators) reading from our handwritten coding forms.

IBM wouldn’t sell such machines; they rented them. I once saw an invoice for the modest sized machine I’ve described: $29,000/month, which works out to $348,000 annually, in 1970 dollars.

2008 equivalent of those 1970 dollars: $159,000/month, or almost $2,000,000/year, to RENT this machine that everyone’s home PC, even several years old, can run rings around.

The windows were for the CEO to show off where so much of his company’s treasure had been spent.

Charles E. Rot/Corbis via MSN Encarta

At the time I first learned this technology, when computers themselves had just recently graduated to solid state from vacuum tubes, to learn the principles of card input and continuous paper form output one actually was taught to program tabulation machines from the 1930s and 40s, which programming was performed via cables with old-fashioned telephone plugs at each end connecting various jacks on heavy, removable plugboards.

For the small IBM System/360 I used, it took mental dexterity, (writing in Assembly language, one slight level above the bits and bytes of the digital machine itself) to get useful work done in 64,000 bytes, less about 25,000 for the Disk Operating System; in those years, yr (justifiably) humble svt had such skulljuice to burn. Today’s developers, it has often been noted, think nothing of writing auxiliary applications (processing images for a graphics package, for example, rather than sending rockets to the moon) that are hundreds of megabytes of code in size. Memory is cheap.

Today, of course, all that computational power of 40 years ago, with additional undreamed of capabilities, can be found on millions of office desktops, on more millions of home desktops, at a tiny fraction of the cost. Personal example: between internal and external rotating memory, my excellent Sony desktop has just over a terabyte of storage, about 345 of 1970′s washing machines!

In fact, more power than in 1970′s refrigerated, raised-floor room filling boxes is today to be found in many purses and pockets, in the form of a several-ounce device known as a smart phone. You know, the Apple iPhone, RIM’s Blackberry, and the like.

Which lengthy prolog brings me to the point of today’s post.

Traveling to Southern California a couple of weeks ago, accompanied by the lovely and patient Mrs. MUDGE and The Economist, the best magazine on the planet, I encountered a piece of information that was dazzling and startling.

I’m an experienced, mature guy, if youthful in outlook: I’m not bedazzled often. I don’t startle easily.

Economist’s special section that week was on the mobile workforce, the people who have moved beyond telecommuting, who work wherever they find a Wi-Fi connection: Starbucks being a widely known such oasis. Indeed, Economist calls these workers, nomads.

Okay, I got that. And, while not a nomad myself (occasional worker from home, an earlier paradigm), I certainly understand the trend.

For example, I understand that a significant number, perhaps 25%, of IBM’s 375,000 global employees have no permanent office space in IBM buildings. They office at home, or at their customers’ facilities (this I do have personal knowledge of), and for those occasional visits to HQ, IBM provides “hotelling” space (chair, small desk for the laptop, power outlet). Imagine the real estate and utility savings.

And so, nomads. An intriguing series of stories, worth checking out. But the introductory section is where I encountered that factoid, parenthetical, actually, just casually dropped into the article.

MOBILITY

Nomads at last

Apr 10th 2008 | From The Economist print edition

Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places—and each other, says Andreas Kluth

… (Five of the ten bestselling novels in Japan last year were written on mobile phones.) …

Is this not dazzling and startling information? When I repeated it to my L.A.-residing career-technologist brother later that week, he’d heard that fact from someone else quoting The Economist the day before. We agreed that it was astounding, even to technically adept people of our generation.

Perhaps not to my children’s generation, however. I’ve written before about my LG en-V phone. I love its many features. However, please understand that it was purchased mainly as a defensive maneuver.

The lovely QWERTY keyboard, pictured in the post linked to above, allows me to more easily communicate with MUDGElet number 3, who when communicating with me on his smart phone, a Blackberry Pearl, mainly texts. Got tired of texting with 8 keys.

So, I text him back that much more fluently with my en-V.

But, could I conceive of writing more than a Twitter message (a “Tweet?” –140 characters) on this device? Never in a million years. But,

… (Five of the ten bestselling novels in Japan last year were written on mobile phones.) …

Remarkable.

Lot’s more fascinating insights available, so click the link.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Nomads at last | Economist.com

I figure if I repeat it enough, I will start to believe it!

… (Five of the ten bestselling novels in Japan last year were written on mobile phones.) …

And, probably while standing for two hours commuting on the Tokyo subway.

Yesterday’s nomads knew how to wrangle camels, and where to find the next oasis in the chartless desert.

Today’s nomads know how to write novels on their smart phones.

Welcome to the 21st Century. As Jeffrey Harrow, that eminent futurist used to write: Don’t blink.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

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Found a video that I had seen, along with zillions of others, some time ago, but it gained fresh context when connected to a recent briefing in the best magazine on the planet, The Economist.

First the video, very compelling.

Sobering and enlightening work, by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, actually a 2007 revision and update of the original which has been around for a couple of years. It suggested to me the headline for today’s post, “Don’t look back: Something may be gaining on you,” from that unique African-American U.S. ballplayer, Satchel Paige.

The above video is specially intriguing when measured against current reality, in Economist’s “Report on technology in emerging economies.”

Technology in emerging economies

Of internet cafés and power cuts

Feb 7th 2008 | From The Economist print edition

Emerging economies are better at adopting new technologies than at putting them into widespread use

WITHIN a few months China will overtake America as the country with the world’s largest number of internet users. Even when you factor in China’s size and its astonishing rate of GDP growth, this will be a remarkable achievement for what remains a poor economy. For the past three years China has also been the world’s largest exporter of information and communications technology (ICT). It already has the same number of mobile-phone users (500m) as the whole of Europe.

Okay, some numbers that help make real Fisch and McLeod’s message, that the 20th Century was the “American” century, but shift is happening.

Not quite so fast, though.

Yet this picture of emerging-market technarcadia is belied by parallel accounts of misery and incompetence. Last year ants ate the hard drive of a photographer in Thailand. Last week internet usage from Cairo to Kolkata was disrupted after something—probably an earthquake—sliced through two undersea cables. Personal computers have spread slowly in most emerging economies: three-quarters of low-income countries have fewer than 15 PCs per 1,000 people—and many of those computers are gathering dust.

The lever of change is of course technology. And technology is propagating to the developing world at a whiplash pace.

The upshot is that technology is spreading to emerging markets faster than it has ever done anywhere. The World Bank looked at how much time elapsed between the invention of something and its widespread adoption (defined as when 80% of countries that use a technology first report it; see chart 1). For 19th-century technologies the gap was long: 120 years for trains and open-hearth steel furnaces, 100 years for the telephone. For aviation and radio, invented in the early 20th century, the lag was 60 years. But for the PC and CAT scans the gap was around 20 years and for mobile phones just 16. In most countries, most technologies are available in some degree.

But it turns out that technology adoption is not uniform by any means; there is more to building out infrastructure than erecting a cellular tower.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Technology in emerging economies | Of internet cafés and power cuts | Economist.com

The analysis reminds us that progress turns on “technical inheritance.” A lovely phrase that simply means that technological development builds on previous achievements.

Sometimes the paradigm can be fractured. I recall having discussions more than 30 years ago regarding progress in what we then called the “second world,” i.e., communist Eastern Europe and Latin America. Imagine all of the copper wire and the ferocious amount of time it’s going to take to telephonically connect all of those millions of deprived people.

The cellular telephone system totally leapfrogged the need for a copper based communications infrastructure to the last mile in the second and third world.

But.

But, batteries still need to be recharged, so electricity still must be reliably delivered to that last mile, at the very least. Oops. Copper wire needed for that.

Until some genius in Shanghai or Bengaluru figures out how to broadcast the power from the cell tower along with the signal.

Next Thursday, you think?

But, a fascinating video, and an equally grounding analysis.

Who else but yr (justifiably) humble svt would think to put them together?

Okay, probably a less than humble moment actually.

Sigh.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

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Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?

[MUDGE is not especially a popular music fan in the conventional definition, but there are things that stick. Brass and woodwinds stick. And, after all, Chicago is home.]

In more and more parts of the world, time, specifically time zones, have become a political football.

The history of time zones has mostly to do with that engine of the industrial revolution, railroads.

Our Wikipedia link says that most major countries had adopted the classic system by 1929, but there are some exceptions, most notably India, which uses a half-hour deviation.

Turns out that it’s never been that cut and dried. There are even some areas with quarter-hour deviations. And some areas, Wikipedia reports, where three nations meet, encompassing three different time zones.

Lately, though, it’s really getting weird.

Caught this over breakfast the other day, in The Economist, the best magazine (about and) on the planet.

Stop all the clocks

Jan 24th 2008 | BUENOS AIRES | From The Economist print edition

On Patagonian time

NO FARTHER from the equator than are Los Angeles or Beirut, Buenos Aires is hardly known as a land of midnight sun. But at 10pm in the southern hemisphere summer, it is still not dark in Argentina’s capital. For this eerie illumination, porteños can thank Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the country’s new president. She decreed that the clocks should go forward by an hour on December 30th for eleven weeks in a desperate attempt to allay energy shortages.

Its geographical position suggests that most of Argentina should be four hours behind Greenwich Mean Time. But it has been only three hours behind for most of the period since 1969, when a military government made summer time last the whole year. Now it is just two hours behind, until mid-March.

I suppose it’s a reasonably lightweight way of exercising national sovereignty: local time in Freedonia is exactly what I say it is!

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Argentina | Stop all the clocks | Economist.com

Time has always been important to yr (justifiably) humble svt. Even as a kid, my mother tells me that she knew that, if I was supposed to be home by 6 o’clock, there I’d be.

I married a lovely person who feels exactly the same way – we’re never purposefully late, and it tears us up if we’re even a few minutes tardy.

I own more than 10 (very inexpensive) watches. And yes, each one tells a slightly different time.

A few posts ago I introduced one of my most useful links, to timeanddate.com. In my role as global web conferencing facilitator and instructor, I really need to know what the local time will be for the meeting or class I will conduct. If you click this link, and select the applet version, you’ll see the 25 cities I’ve chosen for my Personal World Clock.

But I’m not obsessed. Really.

However, it does make me upset when politicians play fast and loose with their local time, for no other reason than asserting their power to do so.

Ms Fernández is not alone in fiddling with time. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s populist president with whom she is friendly, decreed last month that his country’s clocks should go back by half an hour permanently. The change, aimed at ensuring children go to school in daylight, “affects even the biological functioning of the body,” said Mr Chávez. Maybe, but the result is that Caracas is now two and a half hours behind Mendoza, which is further west. It’s enough to make the condors drop out of the sky in confusion.

Wow, I Wish I Could Write Like That! And, wow, I wish these self-important presidents would stick to playing with their currency and nationalized oil producers, and leave time alone.

And, before I leave off, might as well share another clip with you, if you’d care to indulge.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

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Don’t spend much time reading Forbes any more. Guess I’ve given up the dream: to be a capitalist.

My dear grandmother gave me a gift subscription when I was 21 years old. Found it interesting and aspirational, then. The politics made little impression (and maybe in the early 70s were less obstreperous).

But, it was really business news I hungered for, rather than investment advice (I was investing in my domicile and groceries at the time). For advice on decisions made in my favorite field of battle, the business world, Business Week became my regular read, and has continued to be for more than 30 years.

Lately, I’ve (all but) graduated to The Economist (wait for it), the best magazine on the planet, and I’ll face a real conundrum when my BW print subscription expires in a few months; can I really afford both?

Can I afford not to read both regularly?

But this is about Forbes; every so often I glance into Forbes.com, and occasionally will find something I hadn’t encountered elsewhere.

So it was last week.

Diesel cars: back here to stay?

We’ve occasionally written about alternative energy for transportation:

• the wrong-headed corn ethanol boondoggle (here for example);
• hybrids (will you break even on your new Prius by the year 2023? truth in advertising – can’t find where I’ve done more than comment disparagingly about hybrid vehicles, but there’s an exhaustive analysis here);
• fuel cells (here – anyone spot the hydrogen pump at the corner station? Didn’t think so).

Forbes reminds us that there’s an existing, smart alternative, one that Europe embraced first, and still does: diesel engines for passenger vehicles.

The Other Green Engine: Diesel?

Joann Muller, 01.17.08, 7:30 PM ET

Looking for a fuel-efficient alternative to your current gas-guzzler? How about a car that gets 30% better fuel economy, doesn’t require a giant battery in the trunk or have to be plugged into the wall, and can travel 600 miles between fill-ups?

Believe it or not, automakers may have a tough time selling those attributes to consumers later this year, when a new generation of diesel-powered vehicles arrives in dealerships. Images from the 1970s–of rattling engines and tailpipes spewing black soot–are hard to shake. And, thanks to superb marketing by Toyota (nyse: TM – news - people ), maker of the Prius hybrid, Americans are convinced hybrids are the only green choice available, despite some discussion of diesel cars’ potential. (See “Day of The Diesel.”)….

But a new generation of modern diesels is on its way to all 50 states, led by carmakers based in Europe, where half of all consumers prefer diesels.

One gets the impression that today’s diesel engined vehicles are considerably more refined (the clattery noise and that black smoke were turnoffs in the 80s).

And one can’t help notice that, in the bigger retailers, the diesel pump has made a reappearance. My nearby Citgo has one; if I could only stomach supporting Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s nationalized oil company that owns it…

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

The Other Green Engine: Diesel? – Forbes.com

Okay, diesel fuel is still a version (less refined, so in higher sales volume conceivably less expensive per gallon to purchase) of the petroleum that we’re desperate to get away from. And okay, Forbes being Forbes, it’s the BMW and Mercedes diesel models they’re apparently lusting for: capitalist tools, indeed.

But it makes some sense (can half of Europe be 100% wrong?). Certainly more sense than burning food.

Wacky, but maybe brilliant, electric car

Our other alternative energy for transportation story comes from aforementioned Business Week. A curious story about an Israel-born executive who gave up the race to succeed the CEO of SAP (only the third largest software company on the planet) to create a uniquely feasible business that might create a truly viable electric car.

It’s a lengthy story, full of fuzzy personality stuff, but the hard-edged concept wowed one of the geniuses of today’s automotive world, Carlos Ghosn of Renault-Nissan, so it’s worth the read.

The Electric Car Acid Test

Shai Agassi’s audacious effort to end the era of gas-powered autos

by Steve Hamm | Autos January 24, 2008, 5:00PM EST

Just over a year ago, on Dec. 31, 2006, Shai Agassi settled into a leather couch in the office of Ehud Olmert to meet with the Israeli Prime Minister. Agassi, then a top executive at German software giant SAP (SAP), had come to pitch the idea of his native Israel reducing its dependence on oil by replacing gas-powered cars with electric ones. Olmert liked the concept but laid down a steep challenge: He wanted Agassi to raise hundreds of millions in venture capital and get an auto industry CEO on board before he would pledge his support. “You go find the money and find a major automaker who will commit to this, and I’ll give you the policy backing you need,” Olmert said….

Agassi does bring a new perspective to the alternative fuel world. The trouble with traditional electric cars is that they can go only 50 or 100 miles and then they need to stop for hours to recharge their batteries. Hybrids overcome the mileage limitations, but only by burning gasoline. One of Agassi’s unconventional ideas is to separate the battery from the car. That will allow drivers to pull into a battery-swapping station, a car-wash-like contraption, and wait for 10 minutes while their spent batteries are lowered from the car and fully charged replacements are hoisted into place. Better Place will build the service stations, as well as hundreds of thousands of charging locations, similar to parking meters….

What got Ghosn excited was Israel’s willingness to slash import taxes for green vehicles and alter domestic sales taxes in ways that would make the economics of the plan work. “This is a unique situation,” says Ghosn. “It’s the first mass marketplace for electric cars under conditions that make sense for all the parties.” As a result of getting involved, the Nissan-Renault Alliance has made electric autos a top priority. Initially, the companies expect to produce electric cars for Israel and other countries by modifying existing models, but eventually they plan to introduce new models designed from the ground up to run on batteries developed by Nissan.

The Electric Car Acid Test

An absolutely remarkable story. Can this happen? Did I pick up the April 1st issue by mistake?

Okay, totally impractical in most parts of the world, but Israel could be considered this idea’s incubator.

And, as long as no petroleum or coal is burned to generate the electricity that charges the batteries, it would be a true environmental breakthrough.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

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The changing face of military aviation

seventh in an occasional series

The series so far…

Many of the above links refer wholly or in part to UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles. So one might imagine that MUDGE is somewhat taken with the concept, and one would be correct.

But, this is not solely the byproduct of some feverish boyhood-hatched hobbyist daydreaming; this is mainstream, folks. The first link above referenced a fascinating story on UAVs at war that appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

Mentioned during the Wright Brothers post that it had been my intention to use Orville and Wilbur as the jumping off point (as it were) for a large scale story we’ve been accumulating regarding this intriguing development — remote controlled aircraft at war. But, that post took off in another direction (aiw), and we hangared the UAV for another day.

Then, casting around this evening for tonight’s topic (last night’s wrote itself — one gets spoiled), I finally arrived at the best magazine on the planet, The Economist whose print edition I confess that I’ve fallen a bit behind in reading.

And there, in their Technology quarterly, a couple of intriguing aircraft stories, including a well written (of course) analysis of the most common UAV, Predator.

Unmanned and dangerous

Dec 6th 2007 | From The Economist print edition

Aviation: Unmanned aerial vehicles are a vital tool of modern warfare. Once-harmless drones are now deadly attack aircraft. Where did the technology come from, and where is it going?

RNLA

DUSK falls over Baghdad and Kabul, and the Predators take their places in the skies overhead, ready for action. Western soldiers prefer to fight in the dark, when their night-vision gear gives them the advantage over insurgents. They know that with drone aircraft scanning the ground, with unblinking eyes able to see by day or night and radars that can see through cloud, they “own the night”.

For the Predators’ pilots, however, it is still bright daylight. Sitting in cramped metal containers in bases across America, they fly their machines by remote control from thousands of miles away, via satellite links. The video from the drones is gathered in a makeshift operations centre in the Nevada desert and distributed to leaders in the Pentagon and commanders on the ground. In the Predator operations centre, one screen monitors the weather around the Arabian Sea (Predators do not like rain or high winds), another shows the location of each aircraft on a map, and a third projects a mosaic of video images from each plane. One image shows a house under close observation in a palm grove in Iraq; another shows a road being scanned for hidden bombs. A laptop computer system known as Rover allows troops on the ground to watch the footage, and will soon let them mark out targets.

After a useful history of the development of UAVs that begins, of course, in Britain in the 1930s (much inventive military technology either originated or was perfected in England, including that oh-so-American entity the modern aircraft carrier, whose offset deck and steam catapults are English imports), we arrive at Israel in the 1980s.

Ultimately it was Israel, not America, that revived the use of drones in warfare. It had seen at first hand in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war the damage that modern air defences can cause. In the 1982 Lebanon war, the clever use of small Israeli-built UAVs (incorporating technology developed in America’s disappointing programmes) helped win a startling air campaign in which Syria’s anti-aircraft batteries in the Bekaa valley were destroyed and up to 100 Syrian jets shot down against no losses for Israel. In carefully choreographed moves, drones were used to spy on the Syrian defences, fool their radars and gather the electronic intelligence needed to destroy them.

Unlike America, which sought to operate large UAVs at long distances through hostile air space, Israel’s drones operated from its own defended territory, and real-time video was transmitted through short line-of-sight data links. Israeli UAV technology became all the rage in the Pentagon, especially after the American navy lost three aircraft over Lebanon in 1983. Predator is in fact derived from a design devised by a former Israel Aircraft Industries engineer.

Before providing you the link, need to share this wonderful diagram.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Unmanned and dangerous | Economist.com

As The Economist points out UAV technology is evolving rapidly beyond primitive (in technology terms) Predator, which is tricky to fly, greatly prefers good weather, and gulps down huge swaths of commercial satellite bandwidth.

Such aircraft as Reaper and Global Hawk are already flying, with improved size, payload, range and autonomy (Global Hawk famously flew non-stop US to Australia, and that’s just scratching the surface of its accomplishments — check this out!)

The Wright Brothers started flying kites; now pilots control their high flyers with invisible strings, or just with strings of program code. What an awesome circle this makes, in just over 100 years.

But, what are the flyguys going to do with all that surplus “right stuff” if callow 20 year olds in Nevada perched in front of consoles are doing all the flying and war-winning?

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Left-Handed Complement didn’t start as an education weblog, although we reserve the right to comment on any subject any time.

In retrospect, no special expectation for education topics was probably unrealistic on my part.

While under-credentialed, MUDGE has done more than his share of instruction in corporate environments over the past bunch of years, and indeed, earns a living doing a lot of training.

Under-credentialed. Highly successful. Go figure.

So it’s probably not an accident that education, especially as enhanced by technology, has been featured multiple times in this space over the past more than five months of its active existence.

For example, an entire brochure could be developed around our posts on the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

And the topic of education in general has not been ignored.

All this is prelude to the point of this post: The Economist, the best magazine on the planet, is sponsoring a debate this week on their website, www.economist.com/debate:

Technology and Education — This house believes that the introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.

Now, an Economist debate is not your League of Women Voters or CNN haphazardly posturing beauty contest.

Traditional Oxford-style debate

Oxford-style debate is most famously practised by the Oxford Union, the debating society of Oxford University. The Oxford Union’s invigorating debating chamber has yielded generations of British parliamentarians, lawyers, journalists and other accomplished advocates.

The Oxford style of debate is characterised by its formality and structure. Debates are hosted by a moderator and take place between two teams, the “proposition” and the “opposition”.

It began Monday October 15th (today for MUDGE as this is written, yesterday in the UK) with erudite opening statements from the highly credentialed proponent and his equally qualified opposition. Readers can register to vote (and change their vote as the debate progresses — how cool is that?) during the course of the eight days of the debate.

My instincts are that technology can only help education.

But, I’ve always believed this, where education (and almost any other field of human endeavor) is concerned.

After all, at heart, I am a technologist, fascinated even by the history of technology.

A personal story comes to mind, bubbling up after nearly 30 years.

It’s the late ’70s, and your future correspondent / education expert is, of course, under-credentialed but always creative (at least in his own mind).

His two (at the time) children are just beginning elementary school, and through the Parent Teachers Association, future-MUDGE is invited to a curriculum review session held for interested parents under the auspices of the school district administration.

This was (and is) a community that took (takes) immense pride in its efforts to provide high quality education to its students. How successful the effort is, is a matter of constant controversy, which seems, sorry to say for a community prideful of its integration record, to line up on racial boundaries.

Digression aside, this discussion is arithmetic and mathematics for the early grades. Remember it’s the late ’70s, portable calculators are coming down in price every moment, but still seem exotic, especially in a school environment.

I suggest, “How about issuing every child a calculator? This way, their understanding of higher order math problems won’t get hung up by concern over errors of simple arithmetic.”

The answer: Interesting idea. Of course we have no budget for calculators. It’s all we can do to make sure we have sufficient books for our students.

Here’s the gold-plated (for 1978) suggestion:

Talk to a text book publisher (and this is a town influential with publishers):

Suggest that they bind a calculator (they’re coming down in price every day!) into the arithmetic/mathematics text book.

This way, the district would be purchasing books, satisfying all statutory requirements, and our children could learn math without tripping over rote arithmetic.

Of course the over-credentialed functionaries never took the suggestion seriously. After all, what did future-MUDGE, a mere civilian, know about EDUCATION?

So one wonders what use is actually gotten out of computers in today’s thirty years on elementary school classrooms.

A curmudgeon might guess: not very much.

Read the Proposition in the Economist debate, and the statistics seem to favor that depressing observation.

Oddly, for MUDGE, I remain optimistic about the application of technology to education, and a fervent supporter of One Laptop Per Child.

Just the way the cellular telephone leapfrogged more than 100 years of ferociously expensive and painfully achieved infrastructure development to provide cheap and instant communications to even the remotest developing world village, so in the same paradigm shifting way can OLPC do the same for that village’s schoolhouse, and all this planet’s schoolhouses.

But, follow that debate this week in The Economist (and isn’t this a useful and most timely discussion for them to sponsor?). Go over to www.economist.com/debate and check it out.

You could even tell them MUDGE sent you (not that they’d ask, or care!).

And remember, as the giving season looms (the pumpkins are out, after all!), why not add OLPC’s “Give 1, Get 1” to your planning (orders to be taken Nov. 12–26); and as MUDGE recommends, just make that slight adjustment and you can call it “Give 1 (there), Give 1 (here).”

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Wow! I wish I could write like that!

We’ll keep this short. Almost choked on my lunch today while catching up with the best magazine on the planet, The Economist.

In an otherwise sober story about motorcycle gangs in England (who knew?) the following sentence appears:

… The victim, G[...], was a member of the Hells Angels, a biker gang that has a difficult relationship with the law (and with apostrophes)….

Wow! I wish I could write like that!

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE