Author: Dan Black

Dan Black lives in Gilbert, Arizona and works full-time as a Senior IT Project Manager. Dan is a retired Army NCO who served overseas during Operation Desert Shield, Storm and Calm. He is also a registered Arizona Firefighter I & II, EMT-B and Combat Lifesaver.

Space for Cardboard

I watched the Space X explosion today and was sad that so much money, time and effort had been put into the launch only to have it end in a giant fireball.  It got me to thinking, why is it so expensive to launch a rocket into space?  I’ve hypothesized in the past about the possibility of using a magnetic rail (love magnets and lasers :)) to help accelerate a ship into orbit, but my idea this time is on the actual ship construction itself.  Why does it have to be so expensive if it’s just send supplies and why the torture of creating a reusable rocket that so far has yet to land where it’s supposed to?

My idea is simple, however it’s not new.  Why not make something like the model rockets I used to play around with in grade school?  Okay stop laughing and consider it for a second.  Why couldn’t you build the main rocket structure from some super condensed cardboard (paper) type material.  I would imagine layers of paper wrapped thousands of times to create a very solid structure.  As for the rockets, why not make giant solid fuel rockets, again like the ones model rockets use?  Combine these two and you could build a simple, cheap, disposable supply rocket.  As a note, it would be very disposable because it would simply burn up on reentry.

Under Armor

I was watching the movie Lone Survivor the other day where the Seal team was stuck in a major firefight in Afghanistan on some god forsaken hill.  The part that struck me was the damage those guys took from bullet wounds and kept going.  Simply amazing.

But my thought this morning (love those waking up ideas) was why can’t we develop some sort of light weight material that is either completely bullet proof or slows the bullet down significantly?  Sure the former would be best but might not be entirely possible.  The material I had in mind would be some sort of composite with overlapping layers on a molecular level.  I mean imagine taking something as strong as say a spiders web and figuring out how to do the same thing but infinitely smaller and tighter.  The ultimate goal would be to create a material like spandex that is light-weight but almost impervious to bullets and shrapnel.

Typical manufacturing concepts wouldn’t work given the composition of this.  Instead I would imagine it would have to be poured into a mold of some sort.  To maximize comfort/functionality you would likely do a body scan of the recipient and then the mold would be an exact fit.

What if you could also generate power from the wearers body heat and then convert that into electricity?  This could conceivably power anything from a communication/navigation device to  some sort of body regulating medical device.

Mind Your Thoughts

I read something the other day that said we were almost at the point where people could control things by thinking of them.  For instance, you place a device on your head and it reads your brainwaves/electronic pulses and when you think “play music” it could translate that and actually tell a media device to play.

Now take that a step (more like jog) forward and why couldn’t we develop a device that can read someone’s thoughts from a distance?  At first this would likely be pictures or interpretations of pictures and sounds based on patterns the devices detect.  This would likely be accomplished with the use of some sort of directed laser (love lasers :) ).  Actually the first prototypes would probably need more than one laser triangulated on target.  Future versions would be able to do the same thing using some sort of spread spectrum thing based on cranial shape, size, etc. If you combined the laser aspect with say maybe inverse sound waves you might get a better resolution of picture/sound?

Imagine the implications this would have on human intelligence gathering (HUMINT) by a country’s intelligence apparatus.  Actually kind of scary if you think about it.  Maybe this is one of those things that shouldn’t be.

Then again what an amazing tool for law enforcement.  Instead of hooking a suspect up to a stupid lie detector machine (archaic and ancient) they could just sit them in a special room, ask them questions and see what the person remembers of the incident.  Not only could they ascertain someone’s guilt or innocence but they could also pull that one piece of critical information from a witness, say a license plate that the witness didn’t even remember seeing.

The worst part is once this is a reality, someone will ultimately figure out how to reverse the damned thing and push pictures, sound (false memories) out to people rather than collecting it. Bad thing.

 

Castle the Game

On the way to work I’ve been listening to the Audible version of a book by Michael Crichton called Timeline.  It’s about a bunch of archaeology nerds who travel back in time (over simplified for this post) and see the place where they are researching but as it was back in the 1400’s.  Of course this got me to thinking, wouldn’t it be amazing to have a first person game like DayZ or Rust but with castle building, siege engines, flaming arrows and the whole works.  I would want it to be very detailed with accurate depictions of actual building materials and good flight dynamics for projectile type weapons.  My clearest example of this in my mind would be having an opposing group of players outside my castle with fire arrows and having them land in my castle setting wooden structures on fire.  Imagine building a mammoth trebuchet to hurl giant boulders toward an enemy fortress and watching rocks and debris fly off into the air.  Or getting a group of your bandit cohorts together to man a battering ram to drive down the enemy gate.

Maybe as the  game progressed you could even have a whole health component that would react to a diseased animal being thrown into your midst and causing a minor plague of sorts.  On that note I think it would be important and maybe educational for players to only have medicines and healing techniques that were actually available during the time period.  (leeches? nice!)

Of course for me the castle building itself would be the most fun especially if you could build secret passages/tunnels, take advantage of features in nature (think draw bridge across a ravine) and actually have to mine the stone from a local quarry.

Now you could of course make it so one person could carry large loads (ox and cart?) but the true fun might come from forming an alliance with a whole group of people to build a much larger fortification/castle. You would even likely want to setup a simple form of government to rule your new kingdom of friends and knaves. :)

All in all I think this game would be a huge success and I could imagine the game would have great longevity just due to the vast number of great features that could be added over the course of many years.

If you “borrow” this idea please be a sport and at least give me a beta slot. :)

Update:  Well as luck would have it a company is working on just such a game and it has great potential.  Give it a look at http://lifeisfeudal.com/

 

 

 

Targeting and Engagement

Was listening to an audio book on the way to work the other day dealing with a fictional military battle and it got me to thinking.  In the book there is a great deal of vehicles (Tanks, Infantry Fighting Vehicles, Artillery, etc.) that are being attacked primarily by aircraft.  However a lot of the attacks rely on the attacking aircraft keeping eyes on the target.  So my thought was what if you could develop a laser type weapon that would somehow paint a target in such a way that it would leave a radiating patch on it that a weapon system could home in on.  By radiating patch, I mean, for instance, the top of a tank would get zapped by this laser type device (maybe even from space?) and that would leave a round area on the top of the tank that a weapon system could lock on to.  In my scenario the laser device “paints” the target once and then moves on to the next one, leaving behind this area that sort of glows or radiates.  Unlike current targeting system, the laser wouldn’t have to stay on the target for it to be illuminated.  I know that’s sort of rambling but I want to be clear on how I envision this working.  Maybe you could somehow project radioactive isotopes down a laser beam and have them splatter on a target?

Robo Doctor

I was thinking today about diagnosing a patient and how it would be cool for doctors to wear some sort of Google Glasses type device linked to a computer.  The headset could have a heads up display showing the vitals like heart rate, blood pressure, etc. Of course it would also monitor commands given by the doctor and show contraindications where appropriate.  For instance a doctor might order a certain drug be administered and the computer would compare that against medications the patient was taking.  Then if it found a problem it could vibrate and flash a warning on the screen.
Speaking of voice commands, the doctor could instantly call up symptoms of any disease and ask the computer to compare that to those of the patient.  All the while watching the results or progress on his heads up display.
Such a system could also theoretically show a surgeon the appropriate place for an incision.

Even better the system might pull up images from previous surgeries the patient had to compare any changes.
Of course this would be a dream come true for a Dentist.  The system automatically overlaying past images over real-time captures.  Take that a step further and imagine the patient smiling into a camera at home and having the computer recommend adjustments to braces or signing off that things look good. Remember images coming from across town from a remote camera would appear live in the same headset thing.
Now take it a step further and the headset camera could help a surgeon map out an area of cancerous material, superimposing over it in varying colors to indicate boundaries.

Liquid Healing

Watched a movie last night where a guy is stabbed and it got me to thinking, why couldn’t we create a substance that you could literally pour onto a puncture wound to not only seal it but do rudimentary repairs as well?  So the sealing part is simple enough, heck with enough superglue you could close just about any wound, but that’s not what I’m proposing.  Instead create a solution with an intelligent matrix that would seek out the disconnected tissue/organs and pull them back together.  Okay saying that sounds nuts but think about it for a second.  Everything in the body has a unique structure.  Kidneys are kidneys not just because of their shape but because of a certain structure on a molecular level.  Why couldn’t a compound be created that could flow into a wound and do simple repairs?

If nothing else how about something that would stop the flow of blood.  Now there’s a nice segue, maybe the short term answer isn’t to fix the damage but to simply stop the blood loss.  The substance in question could simply react with the blood and cause it to instantly coagulate.  Of course how do you stop it from simply coagulating ALL of the blood in your system?  What would make it stop right inside of the broken/damaged vessels?  Maybe the bodies own reaction to such damage could be the inhibitor.  The body tries to do essentially the same thing right?  Blood vessel is damaged so it moves to close it off if possible.  Our wonder sludge could simply trigger on that process and halt stoppage where and when the body directs it.  Of course the next request/requirement would be a substance or device that could quickly reverse the effects.  So a doctor for instance could simply move around the damaged area and undo the fix as needed, then repair that portion and move on to the next.

 

Not Cool, Not Hot, But Just Right

Why is it that home temperatures seem to be at odds with the surrounding weather and most of the time counter intuitively?  Example;  It’s a nice October day here in Arizona it’s about 80 degrees during the day which means the AC runs to keep my house at around 76.  No big deal, but then at night it starts cooling off dramatically and the outside temperature quickly plummets to around 60.  But not my house, instead it starts shedding all of the residual heat it built up from being baked by the sun all day and takes another 4 hours to normalize.

My point is this, why don’t homes have a system where they automatically detect the outside temperature and somehow vent the internal air and replace it with the outside air to bring the temperature either down or up as one desires?  To me this could be as simple as have air transfer points high and low on the structure for air transfer.

On a side but related note, if the ground remains an almost constant fixed temperature why couldn’t we simply sink metal rods deep into the ground and have them come up in the walls of the house?  Wouldn’t these rods at as a natural heating/cooling system of sorts?

Speaking of cooling, everyone knows things under shade are about 10-15 degrees cooler, so why not build giant tarp type shades over homes?  Wouldn’t this in effect cool them down naturally?  Sure it would look funny as heck but not once they got their first electric bill in summer and realized it saved them 20% or more.