“…a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it…a great body of machinery on a tripod stand”
Reality Dump 12.06.2010
With peak solar activity expected in 2013, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) are taking steps to raise awareness and help prepare for the solar battering:
“Earth and space are about to come into contact in a way that’s new to human history. To make preparations, authorities in Washington DC are holding a meeting: The Space Weather Enterprise Forum at the National Press Club on June 8th.
Richard Fisher, head of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, explains what it’s all about:
“The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we’re getting together to discuss.”“
“Individual Vehicles Self Assemble, Co-ordinate and Take Flight” – Into the Mind of the Swarm
Swarm intelligence has featured in science fiction since the 1930′s, with Olaf Stapleton’s Martian cells (able to communicate via radio waves) in The Last and First Men(1931). He re-visited the concept in his 1937 book ‘Star Maker‘. This is territory more recently explored by Stanislaw Lem with ‘The Invincible‘ (1964), and in Michael Crichton’s 2002 novel ‘Prey‘.
Circulating on the web this week are videos from the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control (Zurich), who’s Distributed Flight Array demonstrates just how credible the idea of an artificial, autonomous, swarm based, intelligence actually is:
“The individual vehicles of the Distributed Flight Array have fixed propellers that can lift them into the air, but the resulting flight is erratic and uncontrolled. Joined together, however, these relatively simple modules evolve into a sophisticated multi-propeller system capable of coordinated flight. The task of keeping the array in level flight is distributed across the network of vehicles. Vehicles exchange information and combine this information with their own sensor measurements to determine how much thrust is needed for the array to take-off and maintain level flight. If the array’s leveled flight is disturbed, each vehicle individually determines the amount of thrust required to correct for the disturbance based on its position in the array and the array’s motion.”
X-51A Breaks Scramjet Record
On May 26th the Boeing X-51A flew for over 200 seconds at a top speed of Mach 5. The supersonic combustion ramjet (SCRAMJET) technology that powers the X-51A ‘WaveRider’ could, it is thought, propell future ‘single stage to orbit’ (SSTO) vehicles into space, eliminating the need for multi-stage rockets.
Dr Bloodmoney
Variable 4: The Future of Generative Music
On-line in Dungeness, and making amazing noises.
“Variable 4 transforms weather patterns into a living musical composition with the same unpredictability as the elements themselves. Using meteorological sensors connected to a custom software environment developed by the artists, the wild weather conditions of the Kent coastland act as composer, navigating through a map of 24 specifically written movements. Every aspect of the piece, from broad harmonic progressions down to individual notes and timbres, is influenced by changes in the environment: wind speed, rainfall, solar radiation, humidity, tropospheric variance, temperature, and more.”
