So, you remember a year or so back when a cruise ship repelled pirates using a new-fangled sound-based weapon? An entry today at the blog Danger Room features a report from someone who’s actually been hit with the Long-Range Acoustic Device, a.k.a. “sonic blaster,” as well as a a video of one in operation. There’s not much to see in the video, but you can hear what the weapon sounds like. Oddly enough (or perhaps not, given my geekly inclinations), the weapon reminds me of the distinctive sound made by the giant, radioactive ants in the classic “big-bug” movie Them!; who knows, maybe that is the sound effect being played through the blaster, which is essentially just a souped-up loudspeaker.

Danger Room also recently posted a witness account and video of another “less-lethal” weapon being demonstrated, a “pain ray” that makes you feel as if your skin is boiling. That can be found here.

I honestly don’t know how I feel about these weapons. I suppose it’s a good thing that we are developing options that don’t require genuinely injuring the target, but there’s something very discomforting about these things. Something creepy. Maybe I’m just having trouble getting used to the idea that the science fiction I grew up on is becoming everyday life…

Telstar Logistics, the blog that got me thinking about maglevs the other day, has posted an account of what it’s like to actually ride one, specifically the three-year-old Shanghai Maglev that connects the city to Pudong Airport:

…It was very shaky, despite the magnetic levitation. The train was going so fast that it is constantly bobbing horizontally as it seriously banks from side to side. The rolling/weaving makes it hard to walk around when it reaches top speed; indeed they don’t want you to even stand up then. The tracks parallel the highway so cars look like they are going backwards. The entire train rides lasts less than 8 minutes. On the way in to Shanghai it took us 1.5 hours to travel the same distance in a taxi late at night.

I’m surprised (and, truth be told, disappointed) that the ride is so rough. I would’ve thought that it would be smoother than an ordinary train because of the levitation effect, but then, I suppose at those kinds of speeds it would be difficult (if not impossible) to avoid some kind of buffeting and turbulence from the airflow. Perhaps this is an engineering thing that could be solved, as opposed to a limitation of maglev technology? Anyone?

Here’s a follow-up to the previous entry, a video that looks like it was originally a news clip. It details the Japanese effort, shows how the technology works, and includes lots of footage of the prototype train racing along its 18-kilometer test track. The clip is several years old, and a little pessimistic on the funding issue, but it’s neat stuff…

[Update: I’ve found another one, a compilation of home-video clips shot by curious tourists, several of them from ground level, right alongside the track, so you can really get a sense of the speed and relative quiet of this machine. It’s on the other side of the break…]

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Somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of the Bennion Archive, I’ve got a stack of old Science Digest magazines, a gift subscription my parents bought for me around 1982 or thereabouts. I keep meaning to have a look through them some mellow afternoon when I have nothing better to do, and I’ve even had thoughts of scanning the more interesting covers for my photo gallery, but naturally I never seem to find the time.

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When last we encountered Melvin Dummar, the Utah native who claims to have once given Howard Hughes a ride and that he’s owed a share of the Hughes fortune, his last-ditch lawsuit — which alleged that new-found evidence showed the original 1978 probate trial was tainted by false testimony — had been thrown out by the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake. I figured that would be the last we’d hear of old Mel until the time came for an obit.

Looks like I was wrong. Melvin has now filed a new lawsuit in Nevada, repeating the same claims as last year’s failed Utah suit. As I’ve said before, I’m inclined to believe Melvin’s story, both because it seems plausible based on what I know about Howard, and also because it’s just such a damn good story. Such an American story, really, the tall tale that has the ring of truth, of two self-made (or, in Melvin’s case, self-defeating) men who meet by chance in the wide open Western deserts.
I wish him luck with this new suit, although I remain pessimistic about his chances of actually getting anything…

The new Airbus A380 superjumbo jetliner arrived on American soil for the first time yesterday (two of them, actually, one in LA and one at New York’s JFK) amid much media hoopla. The plane has been somewhat controversial because of production delays and the current inability of most airports to accomodate the behemoth, but to my eye, it’s still a pretty impressive machine, if not exactly a pretty one. (Its two-deck design makes the fuselage look rather stocky, but I guess there wasn’t any other way to accomodate over 500 passengers without going to a radically different configuration.) I’m especially intrigued by the “tail cam,” a continuous video feed from the outside the plane that can be displayed on the individual seat-back monitors. When I flew to Germany a few years ago, I spent a good part of the journey mesmerized by a map feature that showed the plane’s progress across the Atlantic in real time, a la the “red-line transit montage” in each of the Indiana Jones movies; the A380 tail cam sounds like a nice companion to that.

For all the talk about the A380’s size, however — every article I’ve seen mentions that it’s bigger than a 747, which, for anyone who’s ever flown on one of those venerable birds, is a pretty impressive statistic — this new liner is still not quite the equal of Howard Hughes’ infamous Hercules H-4, a.k.a. the “Spruce Goose.” Consider the following nifty chart (which I gleefully swiped from Telstar Logistics):

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Just to end the day, here are a couple of things that made me say, “coooooo-uhllll,” like Bart Simpson when I saw them:

First, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan (who occasionally takes a break from politi-blogging for cooooo-uhlll stuff), it’s Jet-Man, a crazy Swede Swiss guy who likes to bail out of airplanes with a small, jet-powered wing attached to his back. Jet-Man’s website compares him to Batman, but this guy reminds me more of The Rocketeer.

If you’ll recall, in the Rocketeer movie starring Billy Campbell, Howard Hughes himself asks our hero, “What was it like strapping that thing to your back and flying like a bat out of hell?” Good old YouTube provides us with something of answer:

If flying like a bat out of hell doesn’t appeal to you, how about taking a ride on a futuristic superboat that’s powered by biodiesel and pierces through waves instead of riding up over the top of them? The boat is called Earthrace, and its crew is currently trying to circumnavigate the world in record-breaking time using only renewable fuels. It’s a cool cause (i.e., trying to draw attention to the possibilities of biodiesel) and a really wicked-looking machine, too (hi-res photo here). Not surprisingly, given my obsessions, it reminds me of Amidala’s personal chromemobile from Attack of the Clones. I’ll be following this one with great interest…

Today, the photoblogger Telstar Logistics shares with us pictures from his ride aboard the B-17 Nine o’ Nine, a 60-year-old bomber aircraft operated by the Collings Foundation out of Stow, Massachusetts. You may recall that I took a ride aboard another Collings aircraft, a B-24 called — at that time, anyway — the Dragon and His Tail, and I absolutely concur with Telstar’s assertion that one of these flights is worth every penny of the $400 charge. It’s an amazing thrill, and the closest thing to actual time travel I’ve ever experienced.

Telstar’s complete photo set is here; photos of my ride on the Dragon are here (just for comparison’s sake, of course!)

Further evidence that we’re now living in the future: a Canadian company called XYZ RGB (even the company’s name is futuristic!) has created what it calls the “next-generation movie poster”:

Using cutting-edge technologies, XYZ RGB can turn an eight-second video into a full-colour hologram and place it in a plastic film that can be posted in malls, pasted to billboards or even wrapped around a can of soup.

 

The energy needed to make it work? Only a source of light.

The effect is described as similar to those newspapers in the Harry Potter movies that show a looped film clip over and over.
To be honest, I find that I’m rather ambivalent about this development. I’m totally wowed by the concept and the technology, and given that I used to collect movie posters, I think this may be a great way to revive what has deteriorated into a sadly unimaginative art form. However, if this technology becomes commonplace and ends up on everything from giant billboards to soup cans, I fear that the novelty will fade very quickly and we’ll be left with just so much additional noise in an already-deafening environment. I’ve become very conscious in recent years of how many commercial messages we receive during the day and frankly I resent them. It would be nice to find a way to turn down the volume, and I’m not sure this is it. I imagine that “video posters” will be pretty damn distracting once we start seeing them out in the wild; I can’t wait for the first 30-car pile-up because someone was checking out that amazing new sign looming over the freeway.

Of course, these posters may never rise beyond the level of novelty. The production process currently takes too long for any kind of large-scale implementation — a couple of hours are required to produce a single poster — and the company may never manage to improve on that. But I suspect they will. And the year 2015 may look a lot more like Back to the Future II than we ever expected…

You can see a video of the Terminator 2 demo poster here (the 3-D effect is great, but the video doesn’t demonstrate the embedded film clip very well); I originally found this story here.