I guess this is cheaper, less polluting, and visually just as interesting as fireworks. Gandalf would approve.
drones can be used for fun things
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Tag Archives: drones
June 2022 in Review
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Mass shootings are often motivated by suicidally depressed people who decide to take others with them to the grave.
Most hopeful story: For us 80s children, Top Gun has not lost that loving feeling.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Taser drones? Seriously, this might have been my most interestingly random post last month. I’ll try to do better.
Taser drones
All the information is really in the name. Taser drone. They’re supposedly halting development of it for the time being, but some company somewhere will undoubtedly bring this to the market. Then all we have to do is give them facial recognition and autonomy, and we can just set and forget!
robotic fighter planes
Robotic fighter planes are here. I remember reading one article (which I can’t find at the moment) about a test where human pilots were unable to beat them in a simulation. The simulation is unimportant, because the robots were unconstrained and allowed to sacrifice themselves if that gave them the greatest chance of taking out the enemy fighter. And that is just what they did – play chicken with the human pilots, whose instinct was to try to preserve themselves and their expensive planes. Anyway, here is another article from Forbes about a “robotic wingman” called Skyborg. Beyond the apocalyptic name (Terminator bad guys meet Star Trek bad guys?), the article focuses on intricacies of Pentagon procurement. Suffice it to say, the companies involved (who probably issued a press release that led to this article) hope there will be lots of procurement.
UFOs
Fact: pilots and astronauts see weird, unexplained flying objects in the sky from time to time. The U.S. military has released some unclassified videos of real footage from real airplanes, it says because these same videos are already floating around on the web and people aren’t sure they are real. Of course, there are plenty of fake videos on the web, but now as long as you accept the U.S. military as a source of factual information, you can accept these as facts. And how many classified videos exist for each unclassified one?
I find these facts inconvenient. I don’t really want to take this seriously, but I feel like I have to at least give it some thought. These things aren’t necessarily aliens. They are simply what they are called – unidentified. But it seems clear that somebody is testing something. Or playing with something. Or intentionally messing with our minds. Who and why? Well, at least some serious people (see May 17, 2011 Fresh Air: “Area 51 ‘Uncensored’: Was It UFOs Or The USSR?”) have claimed that the Soviet Union used UFO rumors and possibly even actual UFO-like aircraft to sew confusion. So maybe some government or mad billionaire is testing a drone, either to sew confusion or just for fun.
If it is super-technologically advanced aliens playing with toys, with the technology to hide in plain site and the technology to crush us like bugs anytime they want, I guess we should just say thank you for not doing that so far.
drone stikes
Here’s some more evidence that drone strikes are not as surgical as we have been led to believe.
THE FREQUENCY WITH which “targeted killing” operations hit unnamed bystanders is among the more striking takeaways from the Haymaker slides. The documents show that during a five-month stretch of the campaign, nearly nine out of 10 people who died in airstrikes were not the Americans’ direct targets. By February 2013, Haymaker airstrikes had resulted in no more than 35 “jackpots,” a term used to signal the neutralization of a specific targeted individual, while more than 200 people were declared EKIA — “enemy killed in action.”
In the complex world of remote killing in remote locations, labeling the dead as “enemies” until proven otherwise is commonplace, said an intelligence community source with experience working on high-value targeting missions in Afghanistan, who provided the documents on the Haymaker campaign. The process often depends on assumptions or best guesses in provinces like Kunar or Nuristan, the source said, particularly if the dead include “military-age males,” or MAMs, in military parlance. “If there is no evidence that proves a person killed in a strike was either not a MAM, or was a MAM but not an unlawful enemy combatant, then there is no question,” he said. “They label them EKIA.” In the case of airstrikes in a campaign like Haymaker, the source added, missiles could be fired from a variety of aircraft. “But nine times out of 10 it’s a drone strike.”
drone waiters
Singapore is experimenting with drone waiters due to a supposed labor shortage in the service sector. I am all for cool new technologies, but in this particular case I can do without. I actually like the Australian system – you order, get a number or buzzer, and when your food is ready you pick it up at a window. It works just fine. I would save the technology for the ordering and paying part. That would really help with a business lunch, for example, where you are in a hurry and would like to order in advance, then not have to sit around waiting for the check. Combining a sit-down restaurant with online ordering also opens up a lot of possibilities for customizing your order and seeing what other people thought were a restaurant’s best dishes. It should also work well with delivery and mobile food trucks.