What's inside the box, Pandora?

As you have probably seen splashed all over the internet, Microsoft announced its Xbox One today. Here's the video that went with it:

There is a good summary of all the features here. The stuff that stands out to me--at least in terms of trying to position a product to hit as much of the market as possible--is how gaming actually seems almost like a secondary function to all the multimedia stuff it's rigged for.

It doesn't just look a little bit like a Tivo box, it's meant to BE a Tivo box, more or less. Television, music, other streamed content, Web browsing and Skype are all part of the voice-controlled package. And, of course, you can play games, although there is a little controversy about how that will work and whether there will still be a market for used games.

I have an Xbox 360 (now eight years old, somehow), but I don't play a ton. To me, video games are entertainment in the same vein of television or movies... something to do in a spare moment but not something to do all day. Mrs. Blog, who doesn't enjoy many games you can't dance to, is much less of a fan.

But she is exactly who Microsoft is taking aim at. Not only is the box sleek and unobtrusive, it is arguably more of a multimedia reciever than a gaming console. And that's an easier purchase for a non-gamer to embrace. If you can make the case to someone that they need this because they can eliminate other devices and streamline content access, then you're in good shape to expand your consumer base. There is even talk of a subsidized system, where you pay a greatly reduced price for the gear, but pay a monthly fee for Live access (and presumably streamed content therein). That, too, feels at least psychologically like a cable bill and not a means of online gaming.

Anyway, the bottom line is that Microsoft, like Apple and Google, is trying to create a device ecosystem. Whether it works depends largely on how people like Mrs. Blog react. But it should be noted that the motion-sensing Kinect is geared toward dance games.

Calling the ball

A follow-up to my paean to our future automated overbeings: the X-47B has now almost landed on an aircraft carrier without a human pilot:

What you just saw was two simulated wave-offs--when an aircraft setting up for a landing is told to break off the approach and go around for another try--and then two "touch-and-go" landings. Those simulate what is called a "bolter," when an aircraft landing on a carrier misses all of the cables designed to catch its tailhook and bring it to a safe stop.

Yes, it's a beautiful day for flying and calm seas, but note that the X-47 nails the centerline. After watching this, an actual landing seems like just a baby step for robotkind.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

Quick aviation dork post. The X-47B, the world's first stealthy, carrier-borne, semi-autonomous drone will make its first catapult launch at sea today. The cat shot is a big deal, and also a first. To date, the only seaborne drones are small and don't operate from aircraft carriers like, say, an F-18.

The key difference between the types is, of course, the pilot. And that's why it's such an impressive milestone. The X-47's processor and software fly it off the catapult and, more important, land it on the carrier... a feat that is arguably the hardest in aviation.

See what I mean?

An airliner's autoland system is proven technology, but there are a lot fewer variables. For example, the runway is bigger... and it's not moving in three dimensions. To date, landing on a carrier deck is something only a highly trained pilot could pull off; instinct plays almost as big a role as processing all the information from instruments and eyes and translating it into control inputs.

And yet. Look at this:

And this:

Granted, these are occurring on dry, unmoving land. But what you see there is a plane launching from a catapult and landing using an arresting wire in a space the size of a carrier deck without a pilot at the controls... onboard or on the ground.

if Northrup-Grumman and the Navy pull this off at sea on Tuesday, it represents a huge leap forward. Or, depending on how you look at it, another step on the way to Skynet.

Out with a bang

Guess what? Now with a 3-D printer (and a nail), you can make yourself a working firearm!

I'll keep this brief. I love the technology behind this; it fascinates me that we can literally create just about anything we can draw in a CAD program. It opens up fantastically interesting horizons for manufacturing.

I also realize that given this kind of technology, someone was going to do this eventually.

But there's no utility--and plenty of what seem to me to be PAINFULLY obvious drawbacks--to not just creating a plastic gun, but disseminating the plans widely. Maybe it makes me a pathetic sheep, and I'll be first thrown on the truck to the government New World Order summer camps, but handing out plastic guns is not needed to prevent tyranny.

And the thing is, it's plastic. PLASTIC. Yes, that crazy material that doesn't show up on metal detectors. Congratulations, assassins: now you can not only sneak your firearm into a controlled space, but also melt down the evidence when you're done.

On the bright side, thriller writers now have another toy to play with as they create crime scenes.

*Dork note: I am mildly annoyed that they called this thing the Liberator, but kept showing clips of B-17s in their video. Those are Flying Fortresses. The B-24 was the Liberator.

The future (of the past) is now!

Space dorks like me often have a childhood filled with science fiction books. I pawed through a lot of pulp as a kid, including the stuff kids are supposed to read, like Tom Swift; the stuff kids of a different generation were supposed to read, like The Secret of the Marauder Satellite (dunno why that one stuck in my head, but hey, it did); and stuff that blew my mind, like Fahrenheit 451.

Almost everything I read was written before 1980. A lot of the "classic" stuff was from the '50s and '60s. And space travel, in that era, had a common mechanical element: rockets took off and landed tail first (check out what happens about 1:38 or so).

Of course, all that changed in the late '70s, when the Space Shuttle did its now-famous "take off like a rocket, land like an airplane" trick:

And basically from then on, you had spaceships that were either never meant to land at all, and thus could look more or less like a flying radiator…

In space, no one can hear you complain about aerodynamics.

… or like an aircraft of various permutations. Taking off vertically seemed optional, and landing vertically seemed, well, anachronistic.

Well, here we are in the 21st Century. The Space Shuttle is retired, we're hitting "interplanetary holes in one" with Mars rovers and private launch companies are perfecting new vehicles for getting stuff, and people, into Earth orbit and beyond. And what do we see as the latest round of innovation?

Why, a rocket landing tail-first, of course.

And so it was that the tales (and tails, ha, little space dork humor there) of my childhood have become reality. Not just because it looks neat, either: when landing on a planet with a thin atmosphere--like Mars--parachutes and wings become dramatically less effective ways of slowing an object down to non-splat impact speeds. And as computers, robotics and other technology have matured, we have gotten to the point where this can be routinely pulled off.

That's exciting. I just hope the arrival of science fiction past doesn't also include tentacled monsters and mind-control rays.

Be careful what you wish for

Just a quick post on what "news" seems to mean to many in the 21st Century.

In the wake of the Boston bombings, the story moved fast. So fast, in fact, that several outlets reported incorrect information. Today's latest screwup seems to be CNN reporting that someone had been arrested in connection with the bombing. That turned out not to be true. Ouch.

But what is driving all this incompetence?

It's not a lack of smarts or--I hope--a lack of training. It's the desire to be at the front of the pack in reporting a story in which every detail was being followed, posted, tweeted, retweeted and blogged. The adage is that as a journalist, your goal is to get the story first but your duty is to get it right. But the pressure to lead the digital herd has, apparently, flipped that on its head.

This is not an attack on digital journalism, by the way. The Internet is where the readers are, it's where most people consume their news, and it offers a remarkable spectrum of tools for presenting that news.

And speaking of tools, the wide and instant dissemination of information creates another opportunity... and problem. The opportunity is for crowdsourcing: investigators can easily reach millions of people instantly with information, and those people can instantly reach investigators. The odds that "someone saw something" are high; with the immediacy of the Internet, it is extremely likely that such information winds up in the hands of investigators.

The problem is that crowdsourcing an investigation can quickly and easily snowball into the digital version of vigilante justice. Sites like Reddit and 4Chan, which are essentially fast-moving message boards, have  spawned conversation threads in which users have sifted through the thousands of images from April 15 and "deduced" the identities of several "suspects." (I'm not going to link to the threads for obvious reasons.)

The guy in the green vest was seen near the site of the bombings. SUSPECT!

The quotes, if it's not clear, indicate skepticism. After this New Yorker piece about a guy of Arabic origin--wounded in the blast--who was tackled while running away, it's a little disheartening to see that no one seems to have learned a goddamn thing about jumping to conclusions.

"Arabic running guy" was tackled because he looked suspicious. Suspicious, in this case, basically meant "brown." So maybe we should be a little cautious about posting pictures of people online and linking them to a fatal bombing because they were, for instance, carrying backpacks at the Boston Marathon.

It's easy for anyone these days to post about hearing "chatter" (usually code for "I read it on Twitter") or identify a "suspect" based on nothing more than what the person was wearing or carrying.

Yeah, so many scare quotes. Sorry. But these days, it's scary to see what rushing into a story can do.

Missile interceptors and you

North Korea has continued popping crazy pills at an astounding rate. Their latest move, it seems, will be to fire (or test-fire, as in, not at an enemy target) a medium-range missile or two from its east coast. This has everyone a little nervous, because if even if the thing flies perfectly--and they don't always work out that way--it could very well fly over or land near Japan.

A brief look at what the DPRK is bringing to the table: The Musudan ballistic missile.

Pointy? Check. Fins? Check.

With a range of a little over 2,100 miles, it could concievably hit all of Japan, bits of Russia, a scattering of U.S. island bases and of course China. (A Co-Worker of the Blog suggested hitting China would be North Korea's ultimate "look at us, we're so crazy and unpredictable!" card.) It can theoretically carry a 1,600-pound warhead. I say theoretically because it has not been successfully tested.

Meanwhile, South Korea, the United States and Japan have brought their own pointy-finned toys to the table. In Japan, you have the MIM-104F Patriot PAC-3 deployed around Tokyo.

It's in a box, but yes--pointy and finned.

These are the latest iteration of the Patriot air defense missile made famous--or infamous--in the first Gulf War. These days, they are lighter, faster, stronger and have a tougher job than their predecessors. The early Patriots were designed to destroy their targets by exploding nearby and spraying it with high-velocity fragments. The idea is that this structural damage would rip the target, also traveling at high speed, straight to pieces.

But there is a better way: hitting it directly. Until relatively recently, the idea of hitting a missile directly with another missile was too difficult an engineering challenge to pull off reliably--thus the blast-fragmentation warhead. But the PAC-3 is in fact designed to hit its target directly. It does this by combining high-quality radar data from ground stations with a radar receiver in its own nose (now conveniently empty of a large warhead). When it hits its target, the kinetic energy of two objects, each moving about five times the speed of sound, is enough to completely obliterate the incoming missile... and thus prevent its warhead from following a ballistic path and hitting something on the ground. To make sure the job is done, the PAC-3 also carries a small explosive charge.

Meanwhile, in Korea and Guam, you have the latest in missile-blowing-up technology, the THAAD, whose unwieldy acronym stands for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. It looks a little something like this:

Yep. Another box.

The THAAD is designed to actually destroy an incoming ballistic missile at the edges of the Earth's atmosphere, essentially before it has time to begin falling toward its target. This is a fantastically tricky task, and the actual interceptor is studded with reaction control jets that make it look like a freaky alien spaceship:

And that weird-looking box smashes into the warhead, again using kinetic energy to blow the enemy missile up real good.

And finally, both the U.S. and Japan have ships loaded with RIM-161--the boringly named Standard Missiles--that can actually blast satellites out of orbit.

Pointy again!

As the link above illustrates, these missiles, in combination with the U.S. Navy's Aegis radar system, are designed to hit incoming warheads well away from the target. This includes ICBMs, which thankfully North Korea has none of, but also shorter-range ballistic missiles. And like the THAAD and PAC-3, they are designed to directly hit their targets.

The exact ranges and capabilities of these systems are played relatively close to the vest. The Patriot's ground-based radar has a range of 65 or so miles. The THAAD and RIM-161 are harder to pin down, but as their targets are essentially extra-atmospheric, we're talking hundreds of miles, most likely.

What does this all mean? Well, essentially, it means that barring multiple failures--not impossible, but unlikely--if North Korea shoots a missile... and it works... and it's headed anywhere remotely dangerous... it will probably be shot down by one of the above systems. But in the meantime, let's hope for a sure thing: if North Korea doesn't test its missile, no one will get hurt.