#nothing like ending a long day at a NASA visitor center with an hour long bloody nose

[the-yearning-astronaut]

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[josephhealan-blog]

Hello, my name is Joseph and I’m a rideshare driver

Like a scared, timid visitor to their first 12 step meeting, I stand here before you reader and declare in front of my higher power and the rest of you my inclusion in the growing population of drivers in the ride share era. I’m not embarrassed by my participation in this new modern phenomenon but you’ll see later in this initial post why I have framed it this way.

I don’t distinguish which company I drive for to protect them from any story I might share that could compromise their reputation. I have personally found them all to be mostly reputable and sometimes a challenge to work with. My journey is what it is and depends very little on which of the firms I am currently working for. I plan on encouraging questions but that’s one I will not answer.

Driving strangers, except for the time I picked up a former boss of mine, around my favorite city has been an amazing experience. If there is a color, gender, profession, age or any other type of human on the planet I’ve had at least one of them in my car. For 47 years I have lived in Atlanta or her suburbs and every shift I drive down a street I’ve never seen before and explore a neighborhood I’d never heard of.

What’s the blog for? Why the introduction that intones embarrassment or shame with this noble profession? I’ll get to that at the end of this inaugural post and I hope to take a deep dive into that very issue over time as well as share some of the odd ball characters and adventures I’ve been on with my riders. I’ve even had nights where I damn near feel like a superhero and plenty of rides I’d consider as some of my proudest performances as a human being.

As of the date of this post I have given 2,623 rides. There’s no count of actual butts in seats but that’s at least 3,000 men, women, children and a few dogs. We are required to carry service animals but a few good old fashioned pets have been along as well. To some that sounds like a lot but to veterans and the earliest drivers that started as soon as Uber came on the scene it’s a drop in the bucket. There are drivers out there now with over 30,000 rides and counting. I share my number not as a brag but as a reference point that I’ll update with future posts. I’ve learned a lot from those veterans at the airport lot, gas stations and the streets of Atlanta. We are everywhere. Pay attention if you never have the next time you stop for gas or visit a busy shopping center at the stickers in the front and back windows of cars.

Why the shame? The shame comes from many places. From society and otherwise wonderful people and from terrible human beings I’ve had the displeasure of driving in my car. I am a mid 40’s white male with a conservative haircut and I look like a typical dad or boss that would be cast on a tv sitcom. In a crowd of rideshare drivers I stand out a bit. I get second looks from riders in West End Atlanta that are not expecting me to show up and I get this question several times a shift, “what do you do for your real job?”. Real job. Driving strangers to new locations in one of our countries worst cities for traffic full of aggressive drivers is a job and one that requires focus, attention and customer service all while making sure you and your companions don’t die. I myself have been a victim of being embarrassed about my side gig, removing my window stickers while visiting someone or going on a job interview. I do not do that anymore.

My “real job” is in Finance and Accounting. I’ve been doing it for over 25 years and I’ll be doing it again as soon as I start a new contract assignment in a few weeks. I’m good at what I do and proud of my career and I’ve had the chance to work for and alongside many amazing people. But compared to my side gig, my “real job” is a piece of cake. Indoors all day, bathroom right there on demand, usually a fridge with food and coffee service. While I am on contract I sometimes drive 2 to 4 nights per week to help pay down bills and between assignments I drive long shifts up to 6 days per week. I can’t sit around at home and drive my wife crazy and I need the extra income to bridge assignments.

One night not long ago I picked up a young woman south of Atlanta in the wee hours of the morning and took her downtown to one of our large hotels. Conversation is not a given, I have a plan for a rider/driver etiquette post in the future, but this young lady was delightful and I appreciated her energy at the beginning of her day to help me get through the end of my day. As we pulled up I inquired about her job there in genuine curiosity, and based on her uniform with the hotel’s logo, I assumed it was a safe question. She very apologetically and quietly told me she was currently working in housekeeping but hoping for a better position soon. Not wanting to let the moment pass but not wanting to slow down her walk into work I said to her, “please don’t ever apologize to me or anyone else about having a hard job. You are up before dawn while others sleep and not only do you have a job with a great well known brand in the hotel industry, you also have ambition and a plan to expand and grow your career.” She smiled very gently, touched my shoulder and said “thanks man”. I’ll probably never see her again but I hope she’s doing well. I took my own advice and stopped apologizing for my job too.

Georgia State University is my alma mater and when school is in full swing the current students along with the other students in Atlanta area schools are heavy rideshare users. Students, from Clark, Spellman, Morehouse, State, Tech, Emory, Gwinnett and even as far north as Kennesaw have been some of my most interesting riders and have renewed my faith in the next generation with their amazing plans for their futures and the unbelievable things they are working on. I believe I’ve probably had a future scientist that will work for NASA and a doctor that will save a child’s life and a teacher that will pass that energy on to another generation of riders, but they’ll probably be in an auto piloted helicopter that will force me to find a new gig.

But not all students have been my favorite. At least one of them is one of my least favorite humans and I hope she will mature and have some life experience that will smooth out some of her sharper edges. It was an after work shift while I was on assignment so I was dressed like an accountant. I picked up two female GSU students for a fairly long ride from their dorm to a restaurant outside of the perimeter, 285 for any non-Atlantans that may one day stumble across this story. They weren’t particularly talkative at first but we started talking about their classes and their dinner plans. As they mentioned their career ambitions after school I shared that I had once in a previous millennia graduated from their school. One of the riders made one more unremarkable comment to close the loop on our polite small talk.

Her friend, however, was apparently unimpressed with me and said in a tone that might have been intended as a whisper but rang through the car like a church bell on a clear afternoon, “went to state and can’t even get a real job”. Her friend audibly gasped at the rudeness that had just been forced on hers and my ears and she reached up and touched my arm beside the seat. Her touch lasted a little too long but did very little to tone down the anger and disgust I was feeling. I had just left my six figure job to drive her to dinner and her absolute dismissal of my side gig of choice was so ignorant and short sighted that it shocked me. I hope she never knows some of the challenges and hurdles that my own choices and the random life changing tornadoes that happen no matter how well you plan that have landed me in a place where one job doesn’t quite make the ends meet. And even in great times I have found myself driving a few times a week to buy something special or extra or just to feel useful while my wife was busy and there weren’t any kids at home. My personal reasons for driving are of absolutely no consequence in relation to her comment and I gave the one and only rating of 1 star to a rider I’ve ever given that day. It means nothing to her and won’t keep her from getting rides in the future but it will keep her out of my car.

As a contract worker I am regularly interviewing for assignments and I am keenly aware of my online reputation. I toyed around with making this blog anonymous for the same reason that rude student was dissatisfied with my career path. But I decided to use my real name for two reasons. For one, if I come to your office for an interview I’ll be rocking my window stickers and I’ll probably be giving rides 5 minutes after I leave. And second, if you share the opinion of that rude student I don’t want to work with you. And I don’t have to. The good people of Atlanta that need a ride will carry me, just as I carry them, until I land a new gig and scale back my shifts.

Enough heavy stuff for now. With so many rides done I have funny stories, scary stories, gross stories and a few that might even be a little R rated. If anyone except my poor wife actually reads this blog, I hope you take away something positive and find it entertaining. If not then thank you tumblr for providing me a space to offload a lot of mental baggage in a way I might share with others one day.

Adios for now. See you in my rearview!

[thelibraryatgatsbys]

Here we have a story that I started recently.

I'm probably not going to finish it. It's called Sonic Boom, and I don't know why I started it, it never really made me happy to write.

(also, since it's unedited, it has "elephants" in it to mark where I wanted to change something/wanted to summarize something and come back to go into detail later)

Elephant: make it so the aliens wanted to kind of keep their visit on the down low, so they could just come, have fun, and not arouse a government after them.

Soleil checked her compass again, making sure she was still headed due east. The valley outside of town was overgrown, filled with tumbled over, half rotted logs from the old building projects long since abandoned. It held a charm in the daylight, but it was just spooky at night, in the mist.

She had been to this place often, but in foggy conditions a compass never hurt anyone. She clambered up onto one of the logs, plotting her path up the steep incline, before beginning. Sometimes she had to jump from log to log, sometimes scramble up wet dirt and leaves, and sometimes edge along creaking branches until the top of the hill came into view.

It could almost be counted as a cliff, but not quite.

Sitting in the pine needles at the edge, she looked into the valley below her, where the usual Saturday crowd gathered around the big tree.

Every kid, 10 through 20 knew about this place. It was miraculous this place was safe for ten year olds, most teen hangouts weren't, but there was something about this place that kept people kind. People looked out for each other in here.

She trotted down the hill towards the huge oak tree with a campfire a few feet from the base, repositioning her backpack. The clearing was fenced with thick blackberry and pieces of discarded wood and plastic from town. A few picnic tables and benches littered the clearing, with two fire pits. The oak tree held half a dozen treehouses, two of which had roofs and could act like houses in a pinch.

She waved to one of the kids at the fire, who saved back.

"Hey, Sully!" The kid said.

"What's up Vinny?"

"Not much is up with me, but Ed needs to see you. He told me to tell you when I saw you."

She frowned. When Ed wanted you, there was normally something wrong.

"Well, I'll see you round, then, Vinny. Take care."

Vinny saluted, grinning.

Into the many tree houses, she climbed towards the one at the top, the most elaborate one, the common haunt of her good friend Edward, the scientist.

He kept track of it all. If there was something you needed to know, from cryptozoology to history to aesthetics to Mario Kart strategies, he knew it. And he had a good bit of it recorded in his diaries. What a weirdo. She loved him.

Inside, she found him staring intently out his telescope.

"What's up, Eddie?"

He looked up, nervous.

"Well, come see for yourself."

She shrugged, stealing around piles of books.

Looking in the telescope, she didn't immediately see something wrong but then it caught her eye. A bright green spot in the center of Orion's belt.

"What does it mean?" She asked?

"Well, it doesn't mean iminent doom, don't worry, but... I can't say I know exactly what it is."

"So like...."

"It's not an asteroid or something that's going to strike the earth. It's getting closer to us, but it's slowing down at a rate that if it hit Earth at all, it wouldn't hurt us."

"Well that's good. Do you have any theories?"

"Well, yeah, but it's kinda dumb."

She crossed her arms, raising an eyebrow.

"No it isn't. You figured this out before any of the nasa people did, your idea about what it is isn't dumb."

Ed rubbed the back of his neck.

"Well, it kinda seems like.. A ship."

"Like, aliens?"

"Yeah. I think that thing is aliens."

"That is so, so cool. You think they're coming here?"

"Well they're on a direct tragectory course for earth. Probably."

(ELEPHANT: this story is gonna be tough cuz it's the 'independant kids doing their own thing but with their parents' support 2000s era w/ whole computer labs and stuff outta bedrooms. Y'know, the stuff you never did cuz you were busy being feral in the woods. It'll take some effort to make this feel natural)

"Alright, so we might meet aliens in a while. How long till they get here?"

"This is the first night I've observed them, so I'll have to take some more calculations. But, given the rate of size increase based on tonight's observations alone, I'd say... Maybe a week."

Soleil smiled, pushing the hair out of her face.

"A week. Gonna maybe meet aliens in a week. That is so cool, Ed. You're so cool."

"Uhh, well, th-thank you! You're cool too!"

Two days later, Soleil got a call from Ed smack dab in the middle of telephone hour. She was on the phone with Darby, who was

discussing the dance from last week, the nerd con coming up, some new kittens, etc. She was expecting a call from Rin in a couple minutes, and was working on a mutual coding project over a chat

room on some server on her computer when the line in the dining room rang. Nobody ever called the dining room phone unless it was important, and nobody ever answered the dining room phone buy

her. Darby was wrapping up anyway, so she said a giggly goodbye and hung up, heading curiously to the dining room.

On the other end, Ed's voice was excited.

"We were right! We were right, it's allens!"

"Yo, that's amazing! How can you tell?"

"W-well, they talked to me."

She stared at the roof, dumbfounded.

"Well," He continued, "not to me specifically, but to the people of earth. And since I'm the only one listening, I heard jt! They said they came in peace."

"Pfft well I should hope so. Do they have a mission or something?"

"That's why I'm calling you. They wanna know stuff about earth.

They're landing to observe earth for a while. We're video calling tonight, and I wanted you to be there. Come to my house at 7:45, there'll be a few other kids there, but not many. Some trusted fellow

scientists. Will you come?"

"Oh yeahl I wouldn't miss it for the world. I'll wear some nice clothes."

"Thanks Sully, I can't wait to see you there."

The call ended, and she did a little happy dance. Aliens. Real aliens.

And a nerd party. She didn't know which one was better.

That evening, she walked through the suburb towards the DeLorean house in a light blue skirt with puffy sleeves and jeans with flowers emproidered on them.

A few of the nerds were standing out in the yard, with capri suns, discussing nerd things.

Ed opened the door when she knocked, ushering her in with a smile.

"Thanks again for coming, Sully, this is going to be great."

"You know it."

They hung out for about half an hour until 7:40 rolled around, when they and the assembly of kid scientists moved to Ed's room.

He turned on the TV, messing with the large computer and keyboard beside it, until the screen buzzed to life.

They waited in an eager silence for the clock to strike 7:45.

Suddenly, the fuzz on the screen cleared, showing the insides of a ship.

The aliens were adorable. They looked mammalian, and their body looked like a cross between a meercat and a swan, with a smart head sitting atop am elegantly curved neck. Their bodies long but compact, with two pairs of both arms and legs, with tufts of dull orange fur over the elbows, knees, knuckle, chest, ears, and a tuft on the tail. They had no nose other than two slits, and their eyes were big, red, trusting and inquisitive. (ELEPHANT: LOOK OVER THE DESCRIPTION OF THE ALIEI wasNS BETTER, MAYBE REWORK IT)

"Greetings, human, we meet face to face at last." The one facing them directly said, his voice like helium. He sounded as though he were very excited, but was trying to hide it to be professional.

"Greetings, my friend. My name is Edward DeLorian, and these are my friends/colleagues."

"I am Hilarion, and these are my classmates. We have been sent from our home planet for our first unchaperoned school trip, and we request permission to visit Earth."

"Are you sure Earth is the safest place to visit?"

"Indeed. Extensive tests on our world's show that there is nothing there capable of harming us."

Soleil muttered, "wow," under her breath, before Edward continued."

"I don't know if I can give you permission, I'm not in charge."

"Well it's your planet, right? According to our laws, any lawful citizen of the planet that has not committed major criminal activity and harbors no ill will against the chancellor may give an alien permission to land. Is that the way it is there?"

The humans muttered to each other, trying to decide how to answer. Finally, Soleil spoke.

"Since it's rare we get alien visitors, we don't have a real rule about how they should land. But the way you have described things leads me to believe it would be perfectly fine for you to land here. Is there an adult that you can contact and vouch for you if something does go wrong?"

"Indeed, we can contact any of our parents at any time."

"Excellent. I'll allow mr. Edward to continue discussing from here."

Ed mouthed "thank you" to Sully before continuing.

"A-ah yes, you'll need a place to land, right?"

"Yes. We'd like to meet you, so we request permission to land near your current location."

"Granted. There is a large abandoned field that should be big enough."

"Hmm, ok, we're locked onto your location now and... Alright, yes, I see the field you mean. That will work splendidly. At our current rate of acceleration, we will arrive in five earth days roughly."

"Ok, that sounds just fine. Is there anything we can assist you with?"

"At this moment, no. I must thank you, Edward and company, for being so helpful with this. We look forward to meeting you soon."

The scientists smiled and nodded, remaining professional until the call ended, when they all screamed in excitement.

A similar thing happened aboard the spaceship. As soon as the call ended, the fluffy creatures lept from their seats, buzzing around the room, making excited, happy chittering noises.

Hilarion and his littermate, Gi, danced around each other.

They were going to meet real live humans in five days.

"How was your day, sweetie?" Soleil's mom asked as she set a plate of mashed potatoes on the table.

Sully scooped up an eye raising amount of mashed potatoes, with a bit of chicken and steamed vegetables to go with it.

"It was good. Like I said yesterday, we talked to Aliens, and they're coming earth to learn stuff. As long as it's ok, the scientists and I are going to camp out behind the baseball park for the next four to five days so we can make sure we welcome them to earth. Is it ok if I do that?"

"Of course, kiddo, you pack a mean punch, I bet you'll be fine."

Her mother whirled, giving her father "the look."

Dad looked up from his book.

"What I mean she does."

" What your father means is yes, you may. As long as you are with other people that we've met and there's a phone somewhere around, you can stay out in the field."

"Aww, thanks mama! Hey, would you two like to come with us?"

Her mother looked at her, considering.

"Out in... The brush. For several days. To see... Aliens."

"Well, maybe you could just tag along with me the night they show up. That way you don't have to spend so much time outdoors."

Her mother nodded, looking at her father, who smiled and nodded as well.

"We'll be there, kiddo." Her dad said.

The next day, Soleil stood, hands in pockets, in front of a brownstone house in the city. She was in need of the services of the occupant's son. This was the Rodger household, where the ever mysterious Rabbit lived. Rabbit, who's read name was probably Chad but never told anyone, was a 17 year old working from home, in the possession of a truck, which Soleil hoped to aquire the services of.

It was always hot in the city, so she took her hands out of her pockets. She wore a neon yellow tank top with an elephant on it, and some cargo shorts, and was still too hot. She put up with a flannel around her waist, since it would be cold that evening. The summer light filtered in from between the buildings and trees, in a beautiful way that only summer could manage.

Inside, she heard someone stomping down the stairs, and the door opened.

And again, there was about no way his real name wasn't Chad. Baggy pants, orange t-shirt over a white long sleeved shirt, perfect, bleached blond hair, and the most amazing sunglasses ever. Something straight out of star trek.

"W'sah little dude?"

"Quite a bit, actually, but it's somewhat confidential. Are you still offering taxi services?"

"'course."

"How much would it be to privately taxi say, a dozen ner- erh, scientists to and from the suburb for four days?"

"'bout a hundred bucks, I guess. Them lil scientists planning a mad scientist con someplace?"

"That'd be fun. We should do that someday, but for now, until you're on board with the project, I can't spill a word."

Rabbit considered.

"Done. For a big project, I take 25% up front."

"Naturally."

She fished the money out of her flannel pocket, handing it over.

"Meet me in an hour at the DeLorean household. That's 1503 Duck Street."

"Sure thing, lil dude. The truck's got seating for 8, if we're trynna keep the law."

"Oh, certainly. "

On schedule, Rabbit turned up on the front steps an hour later, as the gaggle of 10-14 year olds with camping gear prepared to pile into the truck bed, which was converted into a miniature seating area that could hold 6 people with plenty of footspace. They decided to go six at a time, saving cab space for more camping gear.

Two trips, a long winded explanation of the project, and dozens of bad jokes later, Ed and one other scientist, a black haired girl named Daisy, were trying to make a fire at the chosen campground. The mobile lab was set up nicely behind them, and Soleil pulled a cooler out of the back of the truck, putting it beside the fire pit.

They were tucked in between a big oak tree and the tall net that kept stray baseballs in the ballpark next door, with town just barely visible. The grass in most of the field was tall and unkempt, but under the trees it was almost nonexistent.

Soleil watched them struggle with the fire for a couple of minutes, before offering assistance.

Rabbit walked over to the now burning fire, hands in pockets.

"So, dudes, you need any like... Adult supervision up in here? Cuz... I'm not busy, and this sounds super fun, so like. I. Could stay here if you want."

Soleil looked up, sly.

"How much?"

"Well I guess this time it can be free, I mean... Major scientist bivouacs can be exempt."

She glanced at Ed, who was smiling.

"Of course you can stay."

And so the group settled in for the night. Rabbit produced an electric guitar, realizing too late to save face that he couldn't use it without, well... *Electricity*.

(ELEPHANT: they agree on location and time, and then the humans recruit an older kid with a truck to drive them around and get stuff set up. Sully invites her parents, and they agree to come. Edward invites his parents, and they say they wish they could come, but there is s shallow spot in the fabric of reality and they need to be on guard against it. A scene where him and his dad have a small heart to heart about how his parents love him and respect his work, but need to work on other stuff. Good messages, y'know.

The night before the aliens arrive, the scientists, Sully, a few other kids, Sully's parents, and the truck boys, are in the field, and have a sleepover. The aliens *should* appear tomorrow night, but there's no perfect guarantee, so someone is guarding their little camp 24/7 for the next couple days.

But the aliens arrive right on schedule, at night on Saturday.

Last line is "what should we do first?")

[ruminativerabbi]

To Boldly Go

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched the video released by NASA last month of Perseverance         descending towards the surface of Mars and then gently landing on it. (Click here to watch. You won’t be sorry!) I don’t know much—or rather, anything—about the aerodynamics of space parachutes, but watching this spacecraft slow down from its initial descent speed of 1000 miles per hour and then gently plop down in the center of the thirty-mile-wide Jazero Crater is just riveting. The event itself was not unprecedented—an earlier visitor named Curiosity landed on the Martian surface in 2012, but it didn’t have any cameras aboard to record the landing. (It’s still there, by the way, completing today as I write its 3137th day on Mars.) Nor was Curiosity the first vehicle to set itself down on Mars—that would be the old Soviet Union’s Mars 3 probe that landed on Mars in 1971 but only managed to convey data to earth for 14.5 seconds before conking out. And there have been other attempts as well, most notably probably the Mars Exploration Rovers of 2003 and 2004.

What intrigues me the most, I suppose, is that the point of sending Perseverance to Mars is not to collect soil samples or to chart the geography of the planet, but specifically to attempt to answer the question of whether there was ever life on Mars. It’s widely understood that Mars once flowed with water. So the question—way simpler to ask, apparently, than to answer—is whether we can find the chemical signatures of fossilized microbial life that could have flourished when Mars was wet. Perseverance, a rover the size of your average car, also has along for the ride a little helicopter named Ingenuity to fly overhead and attempt to see what would not be visible from the ground. I’m completely into it! But I have to stop thinking of Perseverance and Ingenuity as the Martian versions of Star Wars’ C-3PO and R2-D2. (That would be silly. Or would it be?)

Like many people my age, I suppose, I grew up dreaming about the planets and about the possibility of human beings actually visiting them. Nor was I alone among my classmates at P.S. 196 to dream in that direction: space adventurism was just part of who we were back then. (I was eight years old when Alan Shepard became the first American in space, nine when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the planet.) I remember both those events clearly, but more than that I remember the specific way that neither felt like an end unto itself, but far more meaningfully as one more step forward on the great journey that would eventually bring us to Mars and beyond.

It may have been a generational thing. My parents, for example, did not dream of Mars. For them, in fact, the whole space thing was more of a contest than a science project and the specific point was not to do any specific thing at all, only to do it before the Russians got there and did it first.

But for me and my pals in fifth grade the whole space thing had nothing to do with beating the Soviets and everything to do with conquering new frontiers. Nor was this something we intuited on our own: when that disembodied voice opened every new episode of Star Trek (our favorite TV show, and by far) by referencing space as “the final frontier,” we all understood it to be saying almost clearly that our brave astronauts were merely the latter-day descendants of the brave settlers who risked everything to move west in their Conestoga wagons and establish an American presence in the western part of North America back in the nineteenth century. (That the parallel was not at all that exact—in that the crew of the Enterprise was not seeking out that “new life” and those “new civilizations” so that they could push them off their own soil and settle there themselves—did not dawn on me back then. Or at least as far as I can remember, it didn’t.)

I was on my way into twelfth grade when Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon and the sixteen-year-old me was still possessed of the same enthusiasm for our nation’s space program that the younger me felt so keenly. But I had evolved in other ways by then: I still dreamt of travel other planets, maybe eventually even to other solar systems, but an element of social justice had crept into my field of vision and part of the point of pursuing the exploration of space, my hip teenaged self thought, should be precisely to use each successive discovery as a way to combat the kind of parochialism and provincialism that allowed so many of our fellow earthlings—centuries after Copernicus—still to think of our home planet as the center of the universe.

By the 1970s, of course, no one would admit to actually thinking that. Everybody understood perfectly well that the planets were in orbit around the sun, that the solar system itself was part of a much larger galaxy that contained not some other stars, but about 400 billion of them. But although no normal person would have insisted that the sun and the stars travel around the earth, the world continued to behave as though that were the case, as though the earth were the center of all existence. The adolescent me saw in space exploration the ultimate way to combat that kind of self-serving provincialism…and, perhaps, in so doing to ween humanity away from the supposition that the universe exists to serve their needs.

By college, I had moved on in my space-fantasy-life to wonder more seriously about the search for extraterrestrial life and to wonder, given our endless interest in meeting the neighbors, if it could just possibly be the case that the neighbors were just as interested in meeting us as we were them. And if that were the case, then was it not just a matter of time before we actually would hear from them? And by “hear from them, “ I meant really hear from them, not via a momentary glimpse of a mysterious silver orb in the nighttime sky or an otherwise inexplicable blast of radio noise from somewhere out there in space—but in the specific way the residents of Hispaniola heard from Columbus on December 6, 1492, when he landed on their island—where Haiti and the Dominican Republic are today—and simultaneously changed the history of that island, this hemisphere, and the world utterly and forever in as long as it took him to step off his ship onto dry land. And yet those neighbors have never come a-calling. Or have they?

A few years ago, I wrote to you all about Oumuamua, a cigar-shaped reddish rock about 2600 feet long that scientists noticed one day hurtling through the cosmos. (To read what I had to say then, click here.) I left the matter unresolved, but had it drawn back to my attention just recently with the publication of Avi Loeb’s Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in January of this year. Loeb, a professor of science at Harvard and the chairman of its Department of Astronomy, has studied all the data and concluded that the most likely explanation for the existence of Oumuamua in the first place is that it is a kind of light sail, a spaceship that gets its energy from sunlight or starlight and that was either launched by some alien civilization in our direction or else set out in the cosmos as kind of in-place space buoy (in which case it would be more correct to say that it was we who ran into it). The book was reviewed both worshipfully and harshly—some of the reviews were respectful, while others were filled with the same kind of sarcasm born of ill ease and disbelief that once greeted the theories of Copernicus or Galileo. I read the book and enjoyed it, finding the argumentation plausible and the conclusions, if not fully convincing, then at least intriguing and challenging.

The chances are excellent that we will never find out if Professor Loeb was right or wrong about Oumuamua. It—Oumuamua itself—is long gone into interstellar space; we’ll debate it for a while, then let it fade into the background among other unproven theories relating to the distant neighbors we feel certain must exist but have, at least as yet, been unable to find any clear trace of. But I continue to feel certain that the neighbors are out there…and that they day will come when they come to call and we on earth finally have no choice but to seize just how tiny a piece of God’s great universe our little planet actually does constitute. Will that happen anytime soon? There’s no way to know…but if Professor Loeb is right about Oumuamua, the doorbell could ring now any time. It’s clear that Perseverance is not going to find Mars filled with little green Martians eager and able to establish diplomatic (and every other kind of) relations with their counterparts on Earth. But each step we take towards exploring the cosmos makes it that much more likely that we will attract the attention of extraterrestrial space watchers gazing at the heavens and waiting for signs of life on a planet other than their own.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

A massive, intense heat wave is settling over the continental US (Wired) A perfect storm of crises is forming across the United States. Above our heads, a “heat dome” of high pressure could blast 80 percent of the continental US with temperatures over 90 degrees for the next few weeks. This coming in a summer when the Covid-19 lockdown has trapped people indoors, many without air-conditioning—and mass unemployment may mean that residents with AC units can’t afford to run them. A heat dome “is really just sort of a colloquial term for a persistent and/or strong high-pressure system that occurs during the warm season, with the end result being a lot of heat,” says climate scientist Daniel Swain of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. That high-pressure air descends from above and gets compressed as it nears the ground. Think about how much more pressure you experience at sea level than at the top of a mountain—what you’re feeling is the weight of the atmosphere on your shoulders. As the air descends and gets compressed, it heats up. “So the same air that’s maybe 80 degrees a few thousand feet up, you bring that same air—without adding any extra energy to it—down to the surface in a high-pressure system and it could be 90, 95, 100 degrees,” says Swain. That heat can accumulate over days or weeks, turning the heat dome into a kind of self-perpetuating atmospheric cap over the landscape.

Comet streaking past Earth, providing spectacular show (AP) A newly discovered comet is streaking past Earth, providing a stunning nighttime show after buzzing the sun and expanding its tail. Comet Neowise—the brightest comet visible from the Northern Hemisphere in a quarter-century—swept within Mercury’s orbit a week ago. Its close proximity to the sun caused dust and gas to burn off its surface and create an even bigger debris tail. Now the comet is headed our way, with closest approach in two weeks. The comet will be visible across the Northern Hemisphere until mid-August, when it heads back toward the outer solar system. While it’s visible with the naked eye in dark skies with little or no light pollution, binoculars are needed to see the long tail, according to NASA.

As pandemic surges, older people alarm adult kids by living as they usually would (Washington Post) When the pandemic began, Darcy Scott worried most about her parents, who are in their 80s and among the most vulnerable to the coronavirus. To keep them safe, her brother drove them 27 hours from Kerrville, Tex., to Churchton, Md., where Scott and her husband were hunkered down. But after a couple of months, Texas started to open up and her parents wanted to go home. Scott’s brother drove them back, and since then, she has watched with growing dread as her parents have resumed many of their regular activities even as the infection rates there have climbed. “Mom went back to the gym, to aqua aerobics. Dad went out to pick up the recycling around town,” Scott said. “So there you go, we expended 11 weeks of our lives, and now our parents are wading around in a cesspool of germs.” The effects of covid-19 are most devastating for older people, with a 30 percent death rate among people over 85 in the United States who develop it. Many in that age group are sheltering in place and skipping social events in an effort to avoid the virus that causes the disease, and younger family members have often stayed away or gotten coronavirus tests before seeing them, to protect them. But others have taken a more relaxed attitude, engaging in behavior that fills their middle-aged children with terror, for both their parents’ health and their own. This can leave middle-aged people, many of whom may already be worried about their adult children going to protests or beach gatherings, feeling that they must also parent their parents.

Daily Virus Death Toll Rises in Some States (NYT) The daily number of deaths from the coronavirus has risen recently in some of the nation’s most populous states, leaving behind grieving families and signaling a possible end to months of declining death totals nationally. The seven-day death average in the United States reached 608 on Thursday, up from 471 earlier in July, but still a fraction of the more than 2,200 deaths the country averaged each day in mid-April, when the situation in the Northeast was at its worst.

Majority of public favors giving civilians the power to sue police officers for misconduct (Pew Research Center) Two-thirds of Americans say civilians need to have the power to sue police officers to hold them accountable for misconduct and excessive use of force, even if that makes officers’ jobs more difficult. While declining shares give police forces positive marks for using force appropriately, treating racial groups equally and holding officers accountable, there is little support for cuts in spending on local policing.

U.S. dependence on China for rare earth elements (South China Morning Post) As US-China relations hit new lows, Washington is redoubling efforts to address a major Achilles’ heel: its dependence on Beijing for rare earth elements—essential materials in various hi-tech products from smartphones and electric car batteries to Javelin missiles and F-35 fighter aircraft. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) recently introduced a bill to spur US production of critical minerals, among the latest of several before Congress amid rising concern that China could leverage its dominance in economic and political negotiations. “It’s making people in Washington wake up and say this is not sustainable,” said Martijn Rasser, a fellow at the Centre for a New American Security. “If China really is willing to restrict exports, we’re in for a rough ride over the next few years.”

U.S. Will Impose Tariffs on French Goods in Response to Tech Tax (NYT) The Trump administration on Friday said it would impose new tariffs on $1.3 billion worth of French goods, including cosmetics, soap and handbags, in retaliation for a French tax that largely hits American technology companies, escalating a trade dispute that threatens to further damage the global economy. The 25 percent tariffs will be delayed 180 days and take effect in January 2021, a hiatus meant to give both countries time to resolve their differences over a digital tax that will hit American tech companies. France has adopted a 3 percent tax on the revenues some companies earn from providing goods and services to French users over the internet, even if they do not have large physical presences in France, a measure that will target Facebook, Google, Amazon and others whose businesses focus on digital advertising and e-commerce.

Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel blazes a bloody trail in rise to power (Washington Post) MEXICO CITY—Before they allegedly tried to assassinate this city’s police chief, the foot soldiers of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel already had left a bloody wake across the country. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel has killed judges, congressmen, dozens of police officers and thousands of civilians. Its fighters once shot down a military helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade. The cartel controls the movement of more than a third of all drugs consumed in the United States, U.S. officials say, and has expanded into Europe and Asia. And yet until last month, many here saw the rise of the cartel as an internal matter for the parties in an interminable drug war. Then the group sent three dozen men armed with military-grade weapons into one of the country’s most exclusive neighborhoods, authorities say, to kill the capital’s top security official. Omar García Harfuch was shot three times in the June 26 attack but survived. Three people were killed. Since then, several Mexican officials, including the governor of the western state of Jalisco, Enrique Alfaro Ramírez, and the head of the country’s human rights commission, Rosario Piedra Ibarra, have said that they received death threats from the cartel. For now, at least, it appears that Mexico has arrived at a moment of reckoning, as the country’s elite look more closely at the new, more brazenly violent face of the country’s criminal underworld.

In Latin America, the pandemic brings new poverty (NYT) Not long ago, Colombia—and Latin America more broadly—were in the middle of a history-making transformation: The scourge of inequality was shrinking like never before. Over the past 20 years, millions of families had marched out of poverty in one of the most unequal regions on earth. The gap between rich and poor in Latin America fell to its lowest point on record. Now, the pandemic is threatening to reverse those gains like nothing else in recent history, economists say, potentially upending politics and entire societies for years to come​. The engines of upward mobility are failing, choked off by an economic shutdown that began in March and fell hardest on the working poor and vulnerable members of the middle class.

UK PM to tell firms to order staff back to workplaces—Daily Mail (Reuters) British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will tell employers next week to start ordering staff back into their places of work, as long as it is safe to do so, in order to stem the coronavirus hit to the economy, the Daily Mail said. On Friday, Johnson said he thought it was time for people to start shifting away from working from home. “I want people to go back to work as carefully as possible,” he said in a question-and-answer session with members of the public. “It’s very important that people should be going back to work if they can, now. I think everybody’s taken the ‘stay at home if you can’ (advice). I think now we should say ‘go back to work if you can.’”

U.K. lifts travel restrictions for dozens of countries, but U.S. arrivals still require 14-day self isolation (Washington Post) The British government rolled back pandemic travel restrictions Friday on arrivals from 75 countries and British overseas territories—but visitors from the United States will still be asked to self-quarantine for 14 days. Under the new policy, first formulated last month, travelers entering Britain from dozens of countries, including former novel coronavirus hot spots, will no longer face a requirement to self-isolate. The lightened rules free up residents of Britain to travel to the countries in question, as they will not face a requirement to isolate upon return. Italy and Spain, once the epicenters of the pandemic in Europe, along with countries such as Japan and South Korea that pushed back their outbreaks early, are on the green list. But not all parts of the United Kingdom have adopted the exact same rules: Scotland will still require arrivals from Spain to self-quarantine for 14 days, while England, Wales and Northern Ireland will not.

Dozens of US Marines in Japan’s Okinawa get coronavirus (AP) Dozens of U.S. Marines at two bases on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa have been infected with the coronavirus in what is feared to be a massive outbreak, Okinawa’s governor said Saturday, demanding an adequate explanation from the U.S. military. Gov. Denny Tamaki said he could say only that a “few dozen” cases had been found recently because the U.S. military asked that the exact figure not be released. The outbreaks occurred at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, which is at the center of a relocation dispute, and Camp Hansen, Tamaki said. Local media, citing unnamed sources, said about 60 people had been infected.

Singapore ruling party holds on to supermajority, but with historic losses (Washington Post) After gambling on holding a vote in the midst of a pandemic and a recession, Singapore’s ruling party predictably won general elections—but with one of the smallest vote shares in the party’s history, and conceded a historic number of seats to the opposition. There was little doubt that the ruling People’s Action Party, which has been in power since 1959, would hold on to its supermajority. But its share of the popular vote fell to 61 percent, from 70 percent in 2015. The Workers’ Party, the main opposition, managed to wrangle more seats away from the ruling party, winning 10 out of 93 seats—the most ever held by opposition lawmakers. The results reflect a mounting challenge to the PAP’s dominance in the city-state and a growing desire for a plurality of voices in the legislature.

Long-Planned and Bigger Than Thought: Strike on Iran’s Nuclear Program (NYT) As Iran’s center for advanced nuclear centrifuges lies in charred ruins after an explosion, apparently engineered by Israel, the long-simmering conflict between the United States and Tehran appears to be escalating into a potentially dangerous phase likely to play out during the American presidential election campaign. New satellite photographs over the stricken facility at Natanz show far more extensive damage than was clear last week. Two intelligence officials, updated with the damage assessment for the Natanz site recently compiled by the United States and Israel, said it could take the Iranians up to two years to return their nuclear program to the place it was just before the explosion. Another major explosion hit the country early Friday morning, lighting up the sky in a wealthy area of Tehran. It was still unexplained—but appeared to come from the direction of a missile base. If it proves to have been another attack, it will further shake the Iranians by demonstrating, yet again, that even their best-guarded nuclear and missile facilities have been infiltrated. Officials familiar with the explosion at Natanz compared its complexity to the sophisticated Stuxnet cyberattack on Iranian nuclear facilities a decade ago, which had been planned for more than a year. In the case of last week’s episode, the primary theory is that an explosive device was planted in the heavily-guarded facility, perhaps near a gas line. But some experts have also floated the possibility that a cyberattack was used to trigger the gas supply.

Virus cases up sharply in Africa, India (AP) South Africa’s confirmed coronavirus cases have doubled in just two weeks to a quarter-million, and India on Saturday saw its biggest daily spike as its infections passed 800,000. The surging cases are raising sharp concerns about unequal treatment in the pandemic, as the wealthy hoard medical equipment and use private hospitals and the poor crowd into overwhelmed public facilities. Globally more than 12.5 million people have been infected by the virus and over 560,000 have died, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

[biofunmy]

The Moon Sits for Its Portrait

Century after century, the moon adamantly refused to give up its secrets. The ancient Greeks and Romans generally considered it pristine, smooth and white, but did not have a good explanation for the dirty spots on its face that were visible to human eyes. Then, around 90 A.D., Plutarch wrote that those blemishes were the shadows of mountains and valleys and that the moon must be habitable.

By no means did everyone agree, but ignorance is seldom bliss. Faced with an unanswerable question, our species generally comes up with theories, guesses, myths and fantasies. Telescopes made viewing more precise, and photography did even better, but though no living creatures showed up, the notion that they might would not die. After World War II, one of several rumors was that the Germans had established a secret facility on the moon, and some even speculated that Hitler had faked his own death and lived out his days beneath the lunar surface.

A new exhibition, “Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a journey through an uncommon history, the history of representations of the moon across four centuries. This outsize and beautifully installed revelation of persistent astronomical searches is a trailblazing marriage of science and art — 300 images and objects (a telescope, a photograph used as a fire screen, two moon globes, Hasselblad cameras used by astronauts), plus film excerpts. The images shine a bright light on astronomers’ unstoppable pursuit of knowledge as well as on technological advances, artistic responses and fantasy, and also a generous serving of unabashed cuteness. The show amounts to a testament to the human drive to know and explore, and it quietly affirms the growing influence of visual representations of the moon from the invention of the telescope through the first manned moon landing 50 years ago.

Mia Fineman, the curator in the department of photographs at the Met, organized “Apollo’s Muse” with Beth Saunders, curator and head of special collections at the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and they wrote essays for its informative catalog. (Apollo, god of the sun, never had a muse; he was leader of the nine muses. NASA, of course, wasn’t going to the sun. The moon landing project might have been named after Diana, goddess of the moon.)

After 1608, when the telescope was invented, the moon seemed approachable. In 1609, Galileo drew its first closely observed portraits: maps of a portion of the surface. The English mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriot made telescopic observations a bit earlier than Galileo, but his were not published until later, and he could not explain the “strange spottedness” he saw. Galileo, expertly trained in perspective and art, realized that the “spottedness” was actually the shadows of mountains. His published drawings, two of which are included in the exhibition, represent the dawn of modern astronomy.

The 17th century brought to human vision both extremely distant and extremely tiny objects, as telescopes rapidly improved and the power of microscopes, invented at the end of the previous century, vastly increased. Accomplished artists collaborated to provide scientists and the public ever more detailed and delectable illustrations of information obtained au clair de la lune. Johannes Hevelius’s highly successful Selenography — a lunar atlas published in 1647 and named for Selene, the moon goddess in Greek mythology — is thought to be the first book entirely dedicated to the moon. Hevelius surrounded one lunar map with baroque flourishes: cherubs brandishing pronouncements, looking through telescopes or studiously drawing.

Astronomers drew what they saw; artists made the drawings better. But some images were of little use to astronomers without good scientific texts, and most were not widely seen by anyone but scientists. The French artist Claude Mellan’s 1635 engravings were not simply beautiful but also so accurate that they were not surpassed until two centuries later. In 1805, the British portraitist and amateur astronomer John Russell made a superb engraving of the moon titled “Lunar Planisphere, Flat Light,” showing the moon not as we see it but rather in flat, even light. It’s a choice that reflected Russell’s belief that an artist should “correct’’ nature in order to produce an ideal.

The idea that earth’s mysterious companion might be inhabited kept being broached by imaginative people, mistaken people and hoaxers.

The name of Sir John Herschel, a noted British astronomer, was slyly stolen in 1835 by The New York Sun for the sensational “great moon hoax,” which reported that Sir John had observed houses, roads and sophisticated cities on the lunar surface. The story was reprinted across Europe, and a wide international audience ecstatically bought both paper and hoax.

The invention of photography four years later meant that more accurate and believable imagery was about to take center stage. “Apollo’s Muse” has several of the earliest photographs of the moon, including John William Draper’s remarkable 1840 daguerreotype — exposure time: a half-hour. (Daguerreotypes required more light than the moon produced, hence the long exposure, during which the earth and moon both moved.) Draper’s photograph gives us a glimpse into a rare moment of double discovery, comparable to Galileo’s: a more precise understanding of the moon’s surface, and one obtained with an instrument able to see more accurately than the eye.

Until mid-19th century, photographs could be reproduced only with great difficulty, and photography by the light of the moon as the earth rotated was no mean feat, so for years the public saw less than visitors to the Met will.

The British astronomer James Nasmyth, despairing of photography’s power to capture the minutiae and three-dimensionality he saw through his scope, made detailed plaster casts. In 1874, his photographs of his artful stand-ins for the moon were published and lauded as the most “truthful” representations ever seen. So much for photography’s reputation for veracity.

In fact, photography did not simply run artistry out of town. As late as 1882, the French astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, working at the Harvard College Observatory, believed that photography had limitations that art did not. He published “The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings Manual,” illustrated with stunningly drawn prints of craters on the moon and an eclipse of the sun. His scientific drawings were published in a large portfolio and collected; public interest in science was growing.

New and more accurate information does not always move minds. (Consider the Flat Earth Society.) Technological and scientific advances never produced evidence of lunar inhabitants, but the moon was too fascinating to be held back by mere science.

Literary voyages to our constant companion existed long before Jules Verne’s influential “From the Earth to the Moon” (1865). Illustrations included humanoids and fanciful animals, but more charming was the first science fiction movie, Georges Méliès’s “Le Voyage Dans la Lune” (“A Trip to the Moon”), from 1902. A group of astronomers are shot off the earth by a cannon, land smack in one of the man-in-the-moon’s eyes, and barely escape hostile natives. A colorized excerpt (as well as clips from Fritz Lang’s “Woman in the Moon,” from 1931, and Irving Pichel’s “Destination Moon,” from 1950) plays in the exhibition.

By the early 20th century, the moon had become cuddly. Portrait studios acquired sturdy, smiling crescent moons (and at least one that was implacably grumpy). Nudes, lovers, friends, families and pranksters sat on the crescent curve to be immortalized on postcards.

By the time NASA came along, the moon was a pretty serious matter again. Before the launch of Apollo 11, on July 16, 1969, cameras were surveying the moon from unmanned Lunar Orbiters, looking for a landing site. (Spy satellites had already taken photographs, and in 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 took a picture of Earthrise two years before the astronaut William Anders took the more famous image.) Some of the photographs taken from 239,000 miles away were converted into three-dimensional moonscapes and carefully studied for a landing site, but Neil Armstrong eventually, and breathtakingly, used his eyes to find a safer landing spot than the one to which he had been directed.

The exhibition usefully supplies some Soviet propaganda photographs — the first dogs in space, the first woman in space — that were stoking popular support for their outstanding space achievements when the United States was still feverishly working to surpass them.

These proved to be forerunners to the hugely successful American public relations campaign that followed the first moon landing. Images of the Apollo 11 astronauts — Buzz Aldrin walking near the lunar module, for example, or standing by the American flag — still resonate 50 years later.

Critics initially dismissed the Apollo program as a “moondoggle.” After Apollo 11 landed, a few declared it a fake. But Americans generally saw it as an affirmation of national greatness after a decade of tragedy, upheaval and Cold War, and the whole world thrilled to this intimate encounter with the moon, which had been aloof since something like forever.

Perhaps nothing can live up to the moon landing. Less exciting is the artistic response in the last gallery of the show. In 1962, the NASA administrator James Webb and the artist James Dean founded the NASA Art Program. A NASA website suggests one reason: “An artist also could bring something that engineers and managers loathe to admit to: emotion.”

The program commissioned well-known artists including Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, all of whom made tiny drawings in 1969 for a small ceramic wafer that was attached to the Apollo 12 spacecraft and left on the moon. (It has become known as the Moon Museum.) Also left behind, in 1971, was Paul Van Hoeydonck’s small sculpture “Fallen Astronaut,” a replica of which is at the Met.

The space program’s impact on popular culture is represented by Harry Gordon’s “Rocket” dress (1968), which depicts an alarmingly phallic rocket exploding upward through the mannequin’s middle. Made of paper, the dress could be cut apart and displayed on a wall. And it makes clear how just about everything, including history, is grist for the commercial mill.

The American flag was planted on the moon in 1969, not to proclaim our satellite an American colony but to memorialize our achievement. A 1971 photograph by Stephen Shames of a message spray-painted on a brick wall in a vacant lot in Brooklyn says it all: “THE MOON BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE!!!”

The images collected here read like a love letter from all its ardent suitors.

Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography

Through Sept. 22 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.

Sahred From Source link Science

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[technato]

Video Friday: Security Robot as a Service, Robotic Mining, and Saved by a Drone

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

Photo: Mike Collett/Promus Ventures

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

Applied Collegiate Exoskeleton Competition – May 05, 2018 – University of Michigan, USA

NASA Robotic Mining Competition – May 14-18, 2018 – Kennedy Space Center, Fla., USA

ICRA 2018 – May 21-25, 2018 – Brisbane, Australia

Dynamic Walking Conference – May 21-24, 2018 – Pensacola, Fl., USA

RoboCup 2018 – June 18-22, 2018 – Montreal, Canada

RSS 2018 – June 26-30, 2018 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USA

Ubiquitous Robots 2018 – June 27-30, 2018 – Honolulu, Hawaii

MARSS 2018 – July 4-8, 2018 – Nagoya, Japan

AIM 2018 – July 9-12, 2018 – Auckland, New Zealand

ICARM 2018 – July 18-20, 2018 – Singapore

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Nothing is more secure than a workplace protected by prowling robots. Nothing.

But are the fish okay?

[ Cobalt ]

ElliQ, a social home robot for seniors, has been in the works for a while. It looks good in this video, but remember, all robots look good in videos like these.

[ ElliQ ]

Zuzana from Quanser wrote in to share this video of their new Autonomous Vehicles Research Studio:

We recently launched this complete open-architecture, multi-vehicle lab, with Intel Aero Compute-powered QDrones, QBot ground robots, OptiTrack camera system, and our QUARC real-time rapid control prototyping software for Simulink. We developed it to help researchers in the autonomous robotics space start their work faster. Rather than spending time on developing and integrating DIY drones, coding, or other low-level tasks, they can start testing their controllers and strategies indoors within hours.

[ Quanser ]

Thanks Zuzana!

Resources that future explorers could use to make rocket fuel, life support or building materials, are just below the surface of the Moon, Mars or other alien ground. Low-mass, high-performance and fully autonomous machines can bring these possibilities to the surface. Teams of college-level students from across the nation will put their excavator robots to the test during NASA’s 2018 Robotic Mining Competition. Catch the action May 16-18 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

[ NASA RMC ]

In an impendingly tiresome new world record, over 1,400 drones were airborne at the same time in China last weekend, making shapes and spelling words and stuff. The only reason we’re bothering to post about it is because something went wrong at the end, and drones started falling out of the sky:

It doesn’t look like anyone was hurt, but consider this a friendly reminder that drones of all shapes and sizes, carrying cameras or cargo or humans, can have bad days sometimes. And you don’t want to be under them (or in them) when they do.

[ ECNS ] via [ Gizmodo ]

Imagine a world… In which sending robots to Mars… Was made even more dramatic… Than you ever.

Thought.

Possible.

#lensflare 

[ Insight ]

It feels like I harp on this every single year, but I wish that competitions like VEX (and FIRST) would put some more emphasis on robot autonomy. They could do that, for example, by providing more points and time for the autonomous portion of each run, and de-emphasizing the human remote control aspect. Robotics is becoming a software problem more than a hardware problem, and to be successful in the field long term, understanding autonomy is arguably more important than being able to build a robot. Programming an autonomous robot can be challenging, but kids are smart. They can handle it.

[ VEX ]

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau manages to restrain himself from running over photographers with a robot:

The robot in question was created by Erin Kennedy, and it’s designed to be a super accessible way for people participate in environmental cleanup. Read more at the link below.

[ Robot Missions ]

To help get development on Misty gain momentum, Misty Robotics has been holding hackathons (robothons?) out in Colorado:

And here’s an example of how Misty does its own mapping:

[ Misty Robotics ]

In search and rescue operations, every minute counts. When two Polish tourists found themselves stranded on the side of a mountain in Northern Iceland, and the 112 emergency service was unable to locate them by GPS, the Dalvik Search & Rescue Team knew they could count on DJI Phantom 4 to save the helpless hikers.

[ DJI ]

Starship robots are now delivering food, drinks, parcels and other items on corporate and academic campuses around the world. This new service allows staff the freedom to choose how and where to spend their time during the day.

Starship’s initiative is the first large scale deployment of autonomous delivery services, supporting campuses by implementing robots to assist in work and school environments. The robots offer on-demand delivery anywhere on participating campuses via an app, offering employees the flexibility and convenience of having food delivery when and where they want, eliminating unwanted errands and waiting in line, or transporting items to and from other locations on campus.

[ Starship ]

The more data you have to train autonomous cars with, the better your results are going to be, especially in situations that you weren’t expecting. Oxford Robotics Institute took some vehicles to Iceland to gather some serious off-road data, while testing out some rugged new sensors at the same time.

[ Oxford Robotics Institute ]

Middle Size robot soccer is one of my favorite events to watch, and Tech United is among the best. Here are four matches from the recent Portugese Open:

[ Tech United ]

Rafael Hostettler is talking about the Roboy project with its new Roboy 2.0 and the agile hardware development organization behind the products.

[ Roboy ]

In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, Per interviews Andrew Graham from OC Robotics.

Andrew tells the story about starting OC Robotics as a way to ground his robotics development efforts in a customer need. He felt that making something useful gave a great direction to his projects. We also hear about some of the unique properties of snake arm robots: they can fit in any space that the tip of the robot can get through, they can operate in very tight locations as they are flexible all along and therefore do not sweep large areas to move, they are easy to seal up so that they don’t interact with the environment they operate in, and they are set up in two parts where the part exposed to the environment and to risk is the cheaper part. Andrew then shares some interesting insights from the many projects he has worked on, from fish processing and suit making to bomb disposal and servicing of nuclear power plants.

[ Robots in Depth ]

This week’s CMU RI Seminar comes from Vladlen Koltun, director of Intel’s Intelligent Systems Lab, on “Learning to Drive.” Robots learning to drive, we assume.

Why is our understanding of sensorimotor control behind our understanding of perception? I will talk about structural differences between perception and control, and how these differences can be mitigated to help advance sensorimotor control systems. Judicious use of simulation can play an important role and I will describe some simulation tools that we have built and deployed. Much of the talk will focus on autonomous driving as a compelling application domain for the study of coupled perception and control.

[ CMU RI Seminar ]

Video Friday: Security Robot as a Service, Robotic Mining, and Saved by a Drone syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com

[technato]

Video Friday: Security Robot as a Service, Robotic Mining, and Saved by a Drone

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

Photo: Mike Collett/Promus Ventures

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

Applied Collegiate Exoskeleton Competition – May 05, 2018 – University of Michigan, USA

NASA Robotic Mining Competition – May 14-18, 2018 – Kennedy Space Center, Fla., USA

ICRA 2018 – May 21-25, 2018 – Brisbane, Australia

Dynamic Walking Conference – May 21-24, 2018 – Pensacola, Fl., USA

RoboCup 2018 – June 18-22, 2018 – Montreal, Canada

RSS 2018 – June 26-30, 2018 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USA

Ubiquitous Robots 2018 – June 27-30, 2018 – Honolulu, Hawaii

MARSS 2018 – July 4-8, 2018 – Nagoya, Japan

AIM 2018 – July 9-12, 2018 – Auckland, New Zealand

ICARM 2018 – July 18-20, 2018 – Singapore

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Nothing is more secure than a workplace protected by prowling robots. Nothing.

But are the fish okay?

[ Cobalt ]

ElliQ, a social home robot for seniors, has been in the works for a while. It looks good in this video, but remember, all robots look good in videos like these.

[ ElliQ ]

Zuzana from Quanser wrote in to share this video of their new Autonomous Vehicles Research Studio:

We recently launched this complete open-architecture, multi-vehicle lab, with Intel Aero Compute-powered QDrones, QBot ground robots, OptiTrack camera system, and our QUARC real-time rapid control prototyping software for Simulink. We developed it to help researchers in the autonomous robotics space start their work faster. Rather than spending time on developing and integrating DIY drones, coding, or other low-level tasks, they can start testing their controllers and strategies indoors within hours.

[ Quanser ]

Thanks Zuzana!

Resources that future explorers could use to make rocket fuel, life support or building materials, are just below the surface of the Moon, Mars or other alien ground. Low-mass, high-performance and fully autonomous machines can bring these possibilities to the surface. Teams of college-level students from across the nation will put their excavator robots to the test during NASA’s 2018 Robotic Mining Competition. Catch the action May 16-18 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

[ NASA RMC ]

In an impendingly tiresome new world record, over 1,400 drones were airborne at the same time in China last weekend, making shapes and spelling words and stuff. The only reason we’re bothering to post about it is because something went wrong at the end, and drones started falling out of the sky:

It doesn’t look like anyone was hurt, but consider this a friendly reminder that drones of all shapes and sizes, carrying cameras or cargo or humans, can have bad days sometimes. And you don’t want to be under them (or in them) when they do.

[ ECNS ] via [ Gizmodo ]

Imagine a world… In which sending robots to Mars… Was made even more dramatic… Than you ever.

Thought.

Possible.

#lensflare 

[ Insight ]

It feels like I harp on this every single year, but I wish that competitions like VEX (and FIRST) would put some more emphasis on robot autonomy. They could do that, for example, by providing more points and time for the autonomous portion of each run, and de-emphasizing the human remote control aspect. Robotics is becoming a software problem more than a hardware problem, and to be successful in the field long term, understanding autonomy is arguably more important than being able to build a robot. Programming an autonomous robot can be challenging, but kids are smart. They can handle it.

[ VEX ]

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau manages to restrain himself from running over photographers with a robot:

The robot in question was created by Erin Kennedy, and it’s designed to be a super accessible way for people participate in environmental cleanup. Read more at the link below.

[ Robot Missions ]

To help get development on Misty gain momentum, Misty Robotics has been holding hackathons (robothons?) out in Colorado:

And here’s an example of how Misty does its own mapping:

[ Misty Robotics ]

In search and rescue operations, every minute counts. When two Polish tourists found themselves stranded on the side of a mountain in Northern Iceland, and the 112 emergency service was unable to locate them by GPS, the Dalvik Search & Rescue Team knew they could count on DJI Phantom 4 to save the helpless hikers.

[ DJI ]

Starship robots are now delivering food, drinks, parcels and other items on corporate and academic campuses around the world. This new service allows staff the freedom to choose how and where to spend their time during the day.

Starship’s initiative is the first large scale deployment of autonomous delivery services, supporting campuses by implementing robots to assist in work and school environments. The robots offer on-demand delivery anywhere on participating campuses via an app, offering employees the flexibility and convenience of having food delivery when and where they want, eliminating unwanted errands and waiting in line, or transporting items to and from other locations on campus.

[ Starship ]

The more data you have to train autonomous cars with, the better your results are going to be, especially in situations that you weren’t expecting. Oxford Robotics Institute took some vehicles to Iceland to gather some serious off-road data, while testing out some rugged new sensors at the same time.

[ Oxford Robotics Institute ]

Middle Size robot soccer is one of my favorite events to watch, and Tech United is among the best. Here are four matches from the recent Portugese Open:

[ Tech United ]

Rafael Hostettler is talking about the Roboy project with its new Roboy 2.0 and the agile hardware development organization behind the products.

[ Roboy ]

In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, Per interviews Andrew Graham from OC Robotics.

Andrew tells the story about starting OC Robotics as a way to ground his robotics development efforts in a customer need. He felt that making something useful gave a great direction to his projects. We also hear about some of the unique properties of snake arm robots: they can fit in any space that the tip of the robot can get through, they can operate in very tight locations as they are flexible all along and therefore do not sweep large areas to move, they are easy to seal up so that they don’t interact with the environment they operate in, and they are set up in two parts where the part exposed to the environment and to risk is the cheaper part. Andrew then shares some interesting insights from the many projects he has worked on, from fish processing and suit making to bomb disposal and servicing of nuclear power plants.

[ Robots in Depth ]

This week’s CMU RI Seminar comes from Vladlen Koltun, director of Intel’s Intelligent Systems Lab, on “Learning to Drive.” Robots learning to drive, we assume.

Why is our understanding of sensorimotor control behind our understanding of perception? I will talk about structural differences between perception and control, and how these differences can be mitigated to help advance sensorimotor control systems. Judicious use of simulation can play an important role and I will describe some simulation tools that we have built and deployed. Much of the talk will focus on autonomous driving as a compelling application domain for the study of coupled perception and control.

[ CMU RI Seminar ]

Video Friday: Security Robot as a Service, Robotic Mining, and Saved by a Drone syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com