My Flying Car is almost here!

Australian creator, Chris Malloy, and his hover bike.

It is literally the seat and the 1,170cc 4-stroke boxer engine of a
BMW motorcycle welded to two massive 80kW rotor blades.
Put a clear Plexiglass dome on it, and I have my Jetson-like flying car!
[read the whole article here]

1st Step to Birth Right lotteries?

Perhaps my favorite book(s) of all.

IVF Lottery Raises Eyebrows in U.K.

By Kristina Fiore, Staff Writer, MedPage Today

Published: July 07, 2011
Starting next month, couples in the U.K. will be able to slightly raise their odds of having a baby -- by buying into an in-vitro fertilization lottery.

The country's gambling commission recently approved the lotto, run by a U.K. charity called To Hatch. A ticket price of $32 (£20) will hold the promise of about $40,000 (£25,000) in fertility treatments.

[read the entire article here]

Just a bit different from Larry Niven's Birth Right Lotteries, as mentioned in the Ringworld Trilogies.  According to the story in Ringworld, Puppeteers intervened (indirectly) with the birth control laws of Earth five generations previously. The right to reproduce was strictly limited: with some exceptions, everybody was entitled to reproduce exactly once. This did not result in a replacement rate of fertility, so the system also included a Birthright Lottery whereby any person could enter and win the chance to reproduce more often. The Puppeteers set this up specifically as a program of breeding human beings for luck. They believed luck to be a genetic (thus inheritable) psionic ability, and they regarded humans as unusually lucky to begin with. "Your species has been incredibly lucky. Your history reads like a series of hair-breadth escapes", Nessus (a Puppeteer) says to Louis (a Human).

This series is a great read, I suggest you put it on your 'must read' list.
 

I Love My Job

Today I had to modify Yaesu FT60R ham radios for Emergency Management. Now our first responders can transmit on Police, Fire, Marine & amateur bands. This makes inter-agency operations possible in an emergency situation.

I only had to remove this one smt resistor.

I used Kapton tape to protect the circuit board in case my hand slipped, that is the yellow bits in the photo.  NASA has been using Kapton tape since the Apollo missions because of its excellent thermal properties.

To get an idea of the size of the resistor, I photographed it against a metric ruler. The resistor is about 1.0 mm in length and 0.5 mm wide. It is so small I had to use a 10x magnifying lamp while wearing 4x magnifying glasses. This also shows the beauty of digital electronics. Converting an analog radio would be more time consuming, would have required replacing some parts, re-tuning some others & would have required expensive test equipment.

Did I mention, I love my job?   8^)
 

T-Hawk down!

Honeywell T-Hawk Micro Air Vehicle

TOKYO -A small 8.2 kilogram drone aircraft gathering data from heavily damaged areas of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant lost control Friday and landed on the roof of the No. 2 reactor building, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.
The vehicle, known as a T-Hawk, is about 50 centimeters in diameter and looks like a small jet pack. It is used primarily by the military for reconnaissance work in dangerous areas. It has been used at Fukushima Daiichi since mid-April to assist in damage assessment.
The company said there didn't appear to be any damage from the impact of the vehicle, with no fire or smoke observed following the accident. It wasn't known if the vehicle was damaged in any way.
By Mitsuru Obe Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES


So what is a T-Hawk? 
It looks like my kind of toy!! With all the new 3-axis accelerometers and microchips available this should be easy for a hobbyist to build. 

For more info about T-Hawks and their use look at some of these links:

T-Hawk data sheet

T-Hawk Sales Brochure

What the aircraft industry is saying:

Avionics - Aug 2010

Aviation Week & Space Technology - June 14/21 2010

Unmanned Vehicles - Oct/Nov 2009

These links and more info (& video too) can be found at Honeywell T-Hawk
 

Gamma ray flash still ongoing

This artist's image provided by the
University of Warwick  shows a
star being distorted by its close
passage  to a supermassive
black hole at the  center of a galaxy.

  A monster black hole devoured a Sun-like star, producing a long-lasting gamma ray flash.  The star was likely destroyed because it wandered too close to its galaxy’s central black hole, located in the constellation Draco 4 billion light years away.  Earth just happened to get in the way of this stream of gamma rays produced 4 billon years ago.  That 'flash' lasted for months and is still going on now. Gamma ray bursts usually flare up and end in a matter of seconds or milliseconds.