One year ago today: July 9, 2013, Carol Kaye, my hero.
Five years ago today: July 9, 2009
Ten years ago today: July 5, 2004, the Mars brain.
MORNING
Among others, the topic of GPS came up during the club meeting y’day. Agt. M got a first class demonstration of what happens when you skip meetings. He knows, navigationally, he can never catch up now. Unless I stop and how likely is that? But hey, that’s a vast improvement over most people who have no real clue how far they’ve fallen behind. Absolutely no real clue, whatsoever.
The meeting topic was robot awareness of the surroundings. Face it, a robot that cannot sense where it is or reach out and touch something isn’t much more than a toy. The question was asked if I could program a robot to follow GPS. Yes, it has already been done and you could probably buy the kit. What I need most is practical experience and I’m about to go looking for it. That’s navigation, not GPS.
In case you do not know, the Chinese successfully tested a kinetic kill on one of their own obsolete weather satellites. In layman’s terms, they hit a satellite in space with a metal slug. This means that they can still obey the international ban on space explosives and still knock out the GPS satellites on which every American smart weapon depends. And sure as William Shatner that is the first thing they would target.
At that point, yes, for enough money, I could build a robot that could figure out where it is by looking at the sun. How much money is enough? Well, that would depend on a lot of things, wouldn’t it, now? Enough anyway that some long overdue changes would have to be made in the system. I can’t say which, but these are the ones who would have most to worry about: corporations, civil servants, illegal immigrants, politicians, welfare recipients, and the entire department of motor vehicles.
This was later found to be 7km east of Orchid Island, pop. 4000, the place where Taiwan dumps its nuclear waste, giving the island its nickname, "Toilet of Taiwan". I made that last part up. FYI, this location can be calculated only by knowing what time it is in Greenwich and looking it up. You do not need a sextant or anything but a clock and the tables. That is another nugget that is not stated clearly in any of the study material. In plain talk, it is the single point on the Earth where the Sun is directly overhead that that particular time.
NOON
More robots. Everywhere I look, robots. So I watched a few documentaries on what people fear most about these machines. It seems predictable along the same lines as what people once feared about computers. Some feared the computer would become more intelligent than they are. Or take away their jobs. That turned out to be true only for the dumbest and laziest of humans—and they had it coming. Fear of robots seems also based on culture and religion. There is a certain fatalistic acceptance of robots in the first world rising to a dread panic in the third world. Then again, over there, they’ve seen firsthand the militarization of the technology.
Those tracked robots with a sniper rifle in the turret are the single most hated item by terrorists. I can understand their dislike, since robots don’t necessarily die when you ambush them and shoot them in the back. Next most hated are the drones, but not the large Predator class, rather the small hand-launched models that can swarm around a battlefield. Myself, I believe the US should completely pull out of the third world and leave them to their own devices. I think that 1950s notion that peace is indivisible is an outdated theory clung to only by those who make their dollars from that belief.
There is a lot of talk about robots autonomously making the kill decision, like it is some huge hurdle. It isn’t, killing has be automated for a century. And even if a few robots kill by mistake, there would still be fewer friendly casualties than there are now from human error. There’s more lip service about robots reading human emotions on the battlefield and the need to interpret them. What nonsense. Anyone on the battlefield is friend or foe. Like they said in the 60s, kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out.
What everyone should be watching for now is the robotic alpha moment. Hmmm, oddly, I was going to link to a definition of that term only to find there aren’t any good definitions available. The alpha moment is that outwardly simple breakthrough that causes all the pieces of the big puzzle to fall into place. The entire world surges ahead because of it. The classic example is the Wright brothers. At that time, everyone except them knew it was impossible for humans to fly. But then came their alpha moment and 70 years later we were on the moon. I’ve already predicted the breakthrough will be in miniaturized weightless but enormous battery power, probably nano-based. Molecules generating electricity directly. And who’s to say it would not be discovered by two guys working in a shed?
ADDENDUM
I reworked all the example problems from the navigation textbook, coming up mostly with good answers, but still some suspiciously off by known amounts. The topic here, however, is that of land or sea navigation. When I started, I did not know that sea navigation techniques could not be used equally well on land. Nobody said anything. The height of the observation introduces errors for which correction charts are only available for the oceans. Not a peep from anywhere on this.
Dang, because I had planned to navigate on land. You know, mark on a map where I was each day, for posterity. I further did not know that it took more than one reading. Now, stupid me, I have to think my way out of this.
So what's a body to do? Well, I’m glad you asked. Whereas I was at first lost with all the angles and charts, the same cannot be said of my background with formulas and calculations. The concept I have is to mix the two. Co-mingle physics with geography, throw in a little arithmetic, and see what entails.
Following are the basics of my plan. Foremost is the concept of “DIP”, this is the apparent recession of the visible horizon at sea level due to the height to the observer’s eye. I saw the formula, and it makes perfect sense to me. DIP = .971 × √(Ht. in feet). The nautical charts stop at 155’, which is likely the maximum height of a sailor standing on the bridge of a supertanker.
Later today, I will, with pad and paper, do a thought experiment of moving vertically up in 100 foot increments, then diagrammatically watching what happens to an imaginary horizon. If it recedes at a constant (proportional) rate, I’m onto something. What I would then do is finance a club expedition to the beachfront. There, I would take a series of readings from where I stand at the waterline toward a tall PVC pipe 25 feet distant. Can you see my plan?*
Somewhere along the length of that pole, I will see the real horizon in the distance behind it. Agt. M marks it on the pole, communicating by cell phone. After a few readings, I will know on a very good average, the height on that pole where my personal eye height would see the horizon.
In a future event where the horizon was obscure, I could reverse this process. Plant that pole 25 feet away and that mark should indicate where the horizon would be, if I could see it. This will assume a lot, for instance, that the pole and I are on level ground, but this problem is surmountable. It may sound mikey-mouse, but formulaically, it has merit.
As usual, I am not saying I invented this method, I'm saying I have never seen or heard of it before and it was independently arrived at no thanks to existing sources. If it works, I will take it on the road for real testing and follow-up. I would only need some way of estimating my actual altitude, but there are instruments for that.
There, that’s enough thinking for today.
*[Author's note: in the end, it required a trip to the beach to complete this experiment. At thirty feet from my eye level on flat ground, the horizon appears to be 57-1/2 inches high. And just because I wanted to be alone, the beach was the most crowded day of the summer.
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