T Party

While I generally find The New York Times news coverage and editorial positions to be badly skewed to the left, the still carry wonderful feature stories. Such as this little gem describing some of the ways people customized their Model T automobiles. The Tin Lizzie turns 100 this year, so this is a fitting tribute to American ingenuity, both on the part of Henry Ford and of his customers.

No duty was too mundane or extreme for the wildly popular T, which became known by the nickname flivver. By jacking up the rear end and replacing one wheel with a pulley and leather drive belt, the Ford made a fine stationary power plant for milling grain or spinning the saw blade of a mobile lumber mill.

Even years after its heyday, the T continued as the Swiss Army knife of automobiles. In the 1930s, a group of New England ski enthusiasts created the first tow rope on the slopes of Woodstock, Vt. Their initial source of power was a well-worn Model T equipped with a Pullford tractor conversion, its huge steel drive wheels turing at just the right speed to reel skiers up the mountain.

Even when the original bodies and frames had rusted away, T owners would swap out the nearly unburstable Ford engines and drive axles to power boats, oil derricks, stationary pumps and other devices .

The car’s do-it-all utility sprang from a combination of stout basic design and widespread availability, said Robert Casey, curator of transportation at The Henry Ford museum and Greenfield Village, in Dearborn, Mich., and author of “The Model T: A Centennial History” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

There are some great pictures along with the article. Here's The Henry Ford Museum's pages on the Model T. This is the Model T Ford Club's website. And here is a short illustrated history of the Model T.

Labor Of Love

What results when 30 enthusiastic volunteers spend 18 years and some £3 million working in a shed in Britain?

A brand, spanking, new steam locomotive.

It's a project which makes no sense on paper  -  but it has created 90 tons of polished, gleaming, shining nostalgia. Above all, it means the world to the small team behind it.

Their aim? It's ambitious, to say the least. To build, by hand, the first new full-sized mainline steam express locomotive in Britain for half a century.

Since 1990, a team of around 30 enthusiasts, contractors, volunteers and staff  -  under the banner of the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust  -  have turned up every day to an old shed and happily milled and turned, cast, drilled, bored, welded and torqued mountains of gleaming brass, copper and nickel-silver steel to create a machine that belongs in another age.

In a few weeks, all being well, the boiler will be fired and their locomotive, christened Tornado, will turn its wheels for the first time.

The whole project is delightfully bonkers, so utterly British that just stepping through the doors of the workshop and getting a whiff of oil and acetylene, hot brass and stove enamel is enough to blow away the cynicism that comes from living in the 21st century.

It is completely mad to build a brand new, coal-burning steam engine today. Which is why I hope it works out for the builders! They are planning to run passenger trips with the new engine, possibly even running over to Europe via the Chunnel. More about the extremely eccentric project can be seen over at their website.

Mobile Infantry

The late Robert A. Heinlein's vision of powered armor is rapidly approaching reality. A company in Utah has an operational powered exoskeleton and a contract with the US military to develop it even further.

Rex Jameson, one of his test engineers, has been trying out Jacobsen's 150lb XOS exoskeleton, a mechanised suit that shadows his every motion to give him the kind of strength and endurance usually reserved for Marvel comics.

The real life version does not have a flame thrower, like the one in Iron Man. But, thanks to its mechanical muscles, it is strong and moves seamlessly to mirror Jameson's every motion.

To show off his superhuman endurance, Jameson can lift a bar loaded with 200lb for hundreds of times. "As far as software engineering goes, this job is about as good as it gets," he says.

"We get to write programs and we see them working on actual robots, that's very exciting. I've had a lot of software jobs before this. This one is definitely the most fun."

Jameson works at Sarcos, a robotics company that was recently purchased by the defence giant Raytheon. Although the military is most interested in using this mechanical shadow to boost the strength and endurance of soldiers, others are too, from firemen to the wheelchair-bound.

The basic idea is simple. As Jameson moves his hand a sensor in exoskeleton's handle detects a force and the computer - on the back of his suit - calculates how to move the exoskeleton to minimise the strain on his hand as a series of valves controls the flow of high-pressure hydraulic fluid that act like tendons to drive the joints.

What is crucial is that, given a few points of contact - the feet and hands, in this case - the smart machine is able to interpret the intended movements of the person strapped into it and react accordingly, turning a nifty piece of robotics into a superhero suit. It has taken three prototypes to get the blend of speed, power and sensitivity just right.

They have a video of the exoskeleton at the link. It's fascinating and eerily like what Heinlein predicted back when he wrote Starship Troopers almost a half century ago now.

Too Tired To Play With The Dog?

Help is at hand.

Via the Daily Mail . 

“Phased-Plasma Rifle In The Forty Watt Range.”

It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead. (From The Terminator)

Dire warnings are circulating about the possibility of hunter-killer robots being unleashed, a la The Terminator movies. 

Robot soldiers that can decide who to attack will soon be roaming the world's battlefields if something isn't done about the global 'robot arms race'.

That is the stark warning from a leading robotics expert who spoke today of the dangers of allowing increasingly sophisticated robots to make decisions of life and death.

Professor Noel Sharkey, a robotics and artificial intelligent expert from the University of Sheffield, also warned that armed robots could soon become terrorists' weapon of choice.

"The trouble is that we can't really put the genie back in the bottle,” said Professor Starkey.

“Once the new weapons are out there, they will be fairly easy to copy. How long is it going to be before the terrorists get in on the act?"

Over 4,000 robots are currently deployed on the ground in Iraq and by October 2006 unmanned aircraft had flown 400,000 flight hours.

At the moment, humans can make the decision whether to attack or not but a recent policy shift in the U.S means that 'intelligent' autonomous attack robots will soon be given the power to decide who and when to kill.   

No, the genie will not go back into the bottle. They never do once they are out, no matter how many treaties are enacted. Even if governments signed onto treaties banning these things, terrorists would pay no attention to the laws any more than they do today.  There is also no way to stop a talented amateur or rogue expert from building one of these as a freelance project.

We've just got to get those ED-209's working properly here at the Crabitat.  

Gentlemen, We Can Rebuild Him…

…We have the technology. That comes from the old television show The Six Million Dollar Man, of course. But now, the real world has caught up with that television show that went off the air in 1978. Because they can, indeed, rebuild someone. At least the hands.

The cutting edge headquarters of a Scottish firm behind the world’s first commercially available bionic hand was officially opened today.

Government ministers toured Touch Bionic’s plant in Livingston and met the first recipient of the firm’s pioneering i-LIMB hand.

UK Minister of State for Competitiveness Stephen Timms, and Scotland Office Minister David Cairns, went on to officially open the plant.

More than 70 of the hands are now being used by amputees around the world after the product was launched last July.

About half of these are in the US although there are no plans at the moment to make the hand available on the NHS.

They have pictures of the hand in use. Here’s the Touch Bionics website. It is amazing when the real world catches up with science fiction, isn’t it?

Unintelligent Design

The New York Times has an interesting article on unintelligent design. No, this has nothing to do with the debate over creationism versus evolution, this is about lousy design in something really important: gadgets.

So the bad news is that despite two decades of lectures from Dr. (Donald) Norman on the virtue of “user-centered” design and the danger of a disease called “featuritis,” people will still be cursing at their gifts this Christmas.

And the worse news is that the gadgets of Christmas future will be even harder to command, because we and our machines are about to go through a rocky transition as the machines get smarter and take over more tasks. As Dr. Norman says in his new book, “The Design of Future Things,” what we’ll have here is a failure to communicate.

“It would be fine,” he told me, “if we had intelligent devices that would work well without any human intervention. My clothes dryer is a good example: it figures out when the clothes are dry and stops. But we are moving toward intelligent machines that still require human supervision and correction, and that is where the danger lies — machines that fight with us over how to do things.”

Can this relationship be saved? Until recently, Dr. Norman believed in the favorite tool of couples therapists: better dialogue. But he has concluded that dialogue isn’t the answer, because we’re too different from the machines.

You can’t explain to your car’s navigation system why you dislike its short, efficient route because the scenery is ugly. Your refrigerator may soon know exactly what food it contains, what you’ve already eaten today and what your calorie limit is, but it won’t be capable of an intelligent dialogue about your need for that piece of cheesecake.

It's actually an amusing, yet disturbing, read. Dr. Norman is not at all optimistic that designers of many of these gadgets will figure this problem out in the short term. Norman has spent two decades or more trying to get designers and engineers to design the human-machine interface in a way that makes sense to the end-user. It is an uphill battle at best, a losing one at worst. Gadgets just keep coming out that appear to have extra "features" tacked on for no apparent reason whatsoever. Fundamentally, however, the problem is not really the machine as much as it is the human element, of course.

“Our frustrations with machines are not going to be solved with better machines,” Dr. Norman said. “Most of our technological difficulties come from the way we interact with our machines and with other people. The technology part of the problem is usually pretty simple. The people part is complicated.”

Or, as I like to say, the nut behind the wheel is loose.

Ramjet Helicopters

After I posted that old newsreel footage from 1957 earlier, I decided to look up ramjet-powered helicopters, seeing if there was any information out there. Not only is there information, there is a surprise: the Hiller company actually produced an operational ramjet helicopter designated the HOE-1 Hornet and the US military bought and operated a number of them. 

Hiller and a team consisting of Robert Wagner, chief engineer, Elbert Sargent, chief of propulsion, Harvey Holm, project engineer, and hanger supervisor Edward Bennett, began to develop a small, simple helicopter powered by ramjets that would be easy to fly and maintain, and ground-transportable. The design used no heavy components such as tail rotor assemblies, drive shafts, main rotor clutches, transmissions, or engine cooling blowers. In 1948, he started building the HJ-1 Hornet single-seat sport helicopter. The most difficult challenge was to engineer the ramjet engines. Virtually no one had attempted to put these devices to practical use, but they appeared to be far easier to incorporate into an aircraft than jet turbine engines. The ramjet consists of little more than fuel nozzles and an ignition device mounted inside a metal pipe internally shaped to help pressurize high-speed airflow. When air flows through the pipe with sufficient velocity, both pressure and temperature increase. Introduce fuel and ignite it and the ramjet becomes the simplest jet engine. Both the ramjet and the jet turbine engine produce thrust by generating hot gases but the ramjet has no moving parts and is considerably lighter and more reliable. Unlike the turbine, the ramjet must be accelerated to a comparatively high-speed before it can begin to operate. The ramjet also consumes much more fuel than the turbine engine.

Hiller experimented with a version of the ramjet engine called the pulse-jet but quickly discarded this approach in favor of the pure ramjet. During World War II, the German's used pulse-jet engines to power V-1 robot cruise missiles (see NASM collection). In 1949, Hiller introduced an improved ramjet engine that weighed only 5 kg (11 lb) and produced about 14 kg (31 lb) of thrust. He installed two of these motors on each blade tip of the HJ-1 main rotor. At maximum operational speed, the ramjets moved through the air at 207 m/sec (680 ft/sec) and the rotor turned at 550 rpm. The two ramjets produced a total of approximately 27 kg (59 lb.) of thrust, a miniscule amount but more than adequate to rotate the two engines and the small rotor. The rotor freewheeled and generated no torque so a tail rotor was not necessary. Hiller used a tiny 1 hp gasoline engine to turn the rotor fast enough (50 rpm) to generate the high-speed airflow required to start the ramjets. The ramjets were not at all particular about their fuel. They would operate satisfactorily on gasoline, kerosene, even fuel oil and the less-volatile fuels reduced the dangers of explosion and fire. A "flame-holder" inside each ramjet ignited the fuel and ensured re-ignition if the engine flamed out.

Hiller referred to the first single-seat HJ-1 as the utility model. It consisted of an open steel and aluminum tube frame left exposed to facilitate the tweaks and component adjustments that most prototypes frequently require. Although additional yaw control was theoretically unnecessary because the main rotor did not generate torque, in practice the fuselage wandered from side to side, particularly at low speeds and a rudder was installed to beef-up directional control. This design first flew in 1950. The next HJ-1 featured side-by-side seating for the pilot and a passenger inside a cozy cabin made of fiberglass. This marked one of the first applications of this new composite material in the aviation industry. Hiller used this aircraft to launch a marketing campaign for the ramjet helicopter and to fly certification tests for the Civil Aeronautics Authority.

There were still others developed and tested and the French produced one called the Djinn. I've never been all that big a helicopter buff, so all this was news to me. So there's today totally useless factoid and historical oddity.

Incidentally, given today's mania for political correctness, would the HOE-1 name be allowed? I'm betting not.

They’re Watching You

The Miami-Dade police will join the Houston police department as the first two operators of a new high-tech aerial surveillance drone system. The tiny vehicle, called the Micro Air Vehicle or MAV is built by Honeywell it is not armed but it looks pretty amazing.

MIAMI — The Miami-Dade police department will begin experimenting with high-tech drones as law enforcement tools beginning next year.

Although the military has been using unmanned aircraft systems for years, this will be the first time they are used in law enforcement.

"We are aware it is a great responsibility. The FAA is looking at us to see if we can professionally manage this program," said Lt. Cliff Nelson of the police department's aviation unit.
 
The flying camera is called a Micro Air Vehicle made by Honeywell. The MAV is remote controlled, unarmed and unmanned and can soar over 10,000 feet.

They have a video of the weird looking device here. They are not quite down to the flying mechanical insect level yet but they're getting closer. (We have a fleet of these puppies surrounding the Crabitat, just to keep an eye on things.)

Attack Of The Robot Guitars

Gibson Guitars is releasing a new, robotic guitar that keeps itself in tune all by itself – even after a string change. It will also retune itself into six different preset non-standard tunings at the push of a button.

Help is at hand from what is described as the world's first robot guitar — an electric guitar that not only keeps itself in tune even after string changes but also allows players to access six non-standard tunings at the push of a button.

After 15 years of research, Gibson Guitar is launching a limited edition Les Paul Robot Guitar next month that has set players abuzz with both enthusiasm and scepticism.

"It will not make you a better guitar player but it will allow the average player to access some very sophisticated tunings," Gibson Guitar Chief Executive Henry Juszkiewicz told Reuters on Tuesday.

The six non-standard preset tunings were used on hits ranging from "Honky Tonk Women" by The Rolling Stones and Hendrix's "Voodoo Child" to Led Zeppelin's "Going to California" and Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game."

Gibson says the robot guitar is aimed at amateurs who have a hard time keeping their guitars in tune, as well as professionals who now use technicians during concerts to keep about 100 guitars tuned to different keys.

Next up: a guitar that simply plays itself, relieving budding artistes from having to actually learn how to play! No more of that mundane, repetitious 'practice.' No, sirree.

Seriously, I rather suspect that these will prove to be somewhat less than robust in actual use. I'm guessing that in 20 or 30 years (or less) none will still be functional, while my old, run of the mill Les Paul Standard will still be chugging along.

Time For A Niche Electric Car?

Interesting concept, although sales thus far are fairly dismal. A tiny, one-seater electric car with a 30-mile range that is actually pretty zippy (70+ mph). It would be a practical choice for many people who have short commutes and who normally do so all alone in a car designed to hold four or more passengers. It is the Myers Motors NmG - or No More Gas.

TALLMADGE, United States (AFP) - Tired of waiting for big auto to come up with a truly clean car, Dana Myers has developed a tiny solution to the carbon crisis.

Tucked into a corner of his family's factory, behind an industrial crane and giant transformers, sits a fleet of what look like three-wheeled technicolor shoehorns.

Unlike the hybrids currently on offer, his No More Gas runs entirely on electricity. And its engine is powerful enough to zip down the highway.

There is one rather large catch. It has a maximum battery range of just 30 miles (50 kilometres) and room for just the driver and some groceries in the trunk.

Which could be why he's only sold 35 of them.

Dozens of companies have tried, and failed, to switch consumers over to electric cars.

The most spectacular failure was GM's EV1, the subject of award-winning documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

Failures among smaller companies are also legendary, said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research.

"The sheer complexity is just overwhelming," Cole said, explaining that while safety regulations are a huge hurdle, the biggest problem is finding drivers willing to compromise on comfort and convenience just to go green.

"It's really tough to do."

The Myers Motors website has a lot of information on the car - and a thoroughly annoying auto-play video (hint - get rid of that and allow people to start it themselves guys.) The video will play whenever you go to the main page. Argh. That aside, the car is interesting and would actually work for a lot of average commuters. But it is going to be a tough sell. The car is almost more of a replacement for a motorcycle, as the annoying video points out, but it has a closed cab, good impact protection, heat and a place to plug in your MP3 player. It's a geek's dream! Reportedly, they are working on extending the range to about 100 miles. They come in some eye-popping colors, too.

The question is, is this the right time for the car to catch on? The cars are built in Ohio and have an MSRP of about $35,000.

Robo-Massage

Japanese engineers have developed what they hope will be a practical robot capable of giving facial massages.

The WAO-1 robot, which stands for Waseda Asahi Oral Rehabilitation Robot 1, is being developed initially for patients with jaw-related medical problems who require facial massages as part of their treatment, according to project leader Atsuo Takanishi.

The robot's arms are fitted with ceramic spheres the size of golf balls, and the spheres roll over the skin. The arms' movements are controlled by a complex set of algorithms designed to emulate massages, while six sensors at the base of the arms measure and adjust the pressure applied by the spheres, Takanishi said.

The technology has to be more refined than those in electric massage chairs because the facial bone structure is much more fragile than back or spine bones, he said.

Another research team member, Ken Nishimura, said the robot could be adjusted to give beauty and relaxation massages.

For some reason, the only thing that came to mind when I read this is Poltergeist. Or reasonable facsimile thereof.

The DragonSpies Are Coming!

Oh no! Run away! The Washington Post reports that people at anti-war rallies are reporting being bugged. Or rather, being watched by bugs. Or something.

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Others think they are, well, dragonflies — an ancient order of insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

There are some really fascinating examples of some of the various projects going on at a number of labs on micro flying robots. The article is worth a read just for that. Gadget freaks will get a kick out of some of them. The real problem with things like this is simple - power. The amount of energy they can carry in whatever form is limited and so, therefore, are their range and effectiveness. That is going to be, I suspect, the real limiting factor in really using things like this. There will be uses - the development efforts show that there is serious attention being paid the the potential usefulness of such devices. But we really want to assure our friends on the left that there is nothing to fear. You are not being watched. These are not the 'droids you are looking for.

(Sweetness and Light has a rather telling photo - not taken by bugcam - of Ms. Alarcon the "witness" to this event. Spree is also watching.)

So Cute You Just Want To Punch It

The Nissan Motors company has unveiled its newest concept car, the Pivo-2. It's just so cute and cuddly that you want to slap it.

(AP) Nissan's ball-shaped electric vehicle can squeeze into tight spots without backing up because its wheels turn 90 degrees and the cabin part of the car can rotate in a complete circle.

The Pivo 2, being shown at the Tokyo auto show later this month, is a three-seat ecological commuter car that's fully working but too expensive to go on commercial sale yet, according to Nissan Motor Co. officials.

In a demonstration Friday, the concept car rolled up next to a tiny parking space, turned its wheels at an angle, then scooted into the space without the back-and-forth jockeying that most cars would need.

The top part of the car - the name is inspired by the word "pivot" - swivels 360 degrees, independent of the wheels, so drivers can turn to face whichever direction they want.

Nissan designers added robotics functions to the Pivo 2, an upgrade of a car shown a couple of years ago, so that a bobbing mechanical head near the steering wheel speaks in a cute electronic voice to provide companionship.

Its the robo-buddy that makes me want to hit it, incidentally. Too cutesy. But there's video of the car parking (and the robo-buddy just asking for it) here. They also have some nice still pictures.

Robot Birds

Well, this is just creepy. Right after I got done with the last post about the increasing use of drones over the United States, I come across this article. It seems some Dutch engineering students have come up with a design for robotic birds that they plan to build to enter into a competition. Eventually, such robo-birds could be use for surveillance.

The team, from Delft and the Department of Experimental Zoology of Wageningen University in The Netherlands, based the design on recent findings on the common swift’s flight features, as detailed in an April issue of the journal Nature.

During its lifetime, a common swift can fly up to five times the distance to the moon and back, or more than 2 million miles (more than 3 million kilometers). The Nature study found the common swift is able to endure the distance by constantly morphing its wings in response to the prevailing flight conditions.

By folding its feathers over one another and sweeping them back and forth, the bird changes its wing shape and the surface area exposed to the elements. The feathery adjustments boost flight efficiency and maneuverability.

If it works as designed (it appears that no real prototype has been built yet) the first evolution of these things would be capable of about an hour's worth of time in the air. But the truly radical shape-changing wings mean the darn things will be highly maneuverable. In a few years time, you might have to start wondering if that bird watching you is a bird at all.