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Monday, December 23, 2013

Relive Man's First Launch to the Moon, 45 Years Ago Today

On December 21st, 1968, three men left earth and became the first humans to orbit the moon. Their entire journey was legendary, and even 45 years later watching Apollo 8 launch is almost heart-stopping.

Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders were the first men to leave our planet's orbit. They were the first to view the full earth, and the first to lay eyes on the far side of the moon. Their mission was the first manned flight of the immensely powerful Saturn V rocket, and a late-in-the-game mission change pushed the launch date from spring of 1969 to December 1968, robbing them of three months of training.

They still pulled it off, and during their three-day voyage to the moon, the astronauts snapped the most famous and recognizable photograph ever taken: Earthrise.

Relive Man's First Launch to the Moon, 45 Years Ago Today

On December 24th, while orbiting the moon, the Apollo 8 crew did a Christmas Eve TV broadcast, with readings from the Book of Genesis. It was the most-watched television event to date. After 20 hours and 10 orbits around the moon, Apollo 8 headed back to earth, and six days, 3 hours and 42 seconds after launch, the crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean south of Hawaii. And back to life on earth.

There's something poignant about the first men to leave Earth's orbit launching on December 21st, the longest night of the year. It's as though they picked the day when the dark sky was the most expansive, the most receptive to travelers. 45 years on, it's still awe-inspiring.

H/T Jason Major for the video

Survey Shows Hacking Is a Bigger Concern For People than Tracking

According to a November survey of 1,000 voters, people are more creeped out by the possibility of a person or group ascertaining their personal information, than the idea that someone might be following their online movements and habits.

The study, conducted for the Computer and Communications Industry Association by Benenson Strategy Group and American Viewpoint, found that 75 percent of those surveyed are worried about being hacked, compared to 54 percent who fear "history tracked for ads."

When forced to choose, 58 percent of those surveyed were afraid of hacking versus 15 percent worrying about the government being able to access their information or 3 percent being concerned about tracking for targeted advertising.

The survey group seemed weirdly on top of their personal security. 76 percent said they vary their password for every account, 65 percent responded that they disable cookies on their browser, and a full 65 percent claimed that they read website privacy policies. Which seems impossible, but maybe? Do you? [CCIA via All Things Digital]

View the original article here

How The Ruins Of Europe Built A Major Road In America

To say Europe was in ruins after World War II would be using understatement. Cities were destroyed. Villages were obliterated. Societies themselves would take decades of rebuilding. Out of all that rubble, though, emerged one road in New York that's often overlooked: the arterial FDR Drive.

For those who don't live in New York City, and I can't fathom any section of humanity that doesn't, Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive isn't so much like every other Len Drive or Green Drive or whatver suburban -Drive you want to think of, but it's more like a highway.

On the tight, squirming lanes that snake their way down the east side of the island of Manhattan, regular drivers fight to maintain position with taxis, and insane motorcyclists splitting lanes, and even the occasional pedestrian seriously trying to cross a goddamn six-lane highway. It would almost be exciting, if you had a death wish and yearning desire to pay oodles a month in car insurance.

Yet those thousands of cars each day drive on top of pure history.

To learn the story of one of the main highways of Manhattan (specifically the 11-block section from 23rd street to 34th that the history I'm talking about concerns), you need to learn the history of Europe. Well, not all of it, really, just a six-year span. (Hint: it's World War II.)

World War II!

And really, we're not looking at all of World War II because that would be silly because you know that whole story by now and if you don't, God help you, go read a book. To narrow it down further, we're looking at the Battle of Britain.

And to narrow it down further than that, we're looking at the Battle of Bristol.

(Bristol! Photo credit Robert Cutts)

If you examine the photo above not very closely at all, you'll notice that Bristol isn't like many European cities, without very many grand cathedrals and whatnot. That's because the Nazis absolutely destroyed them.

Bristol was a major British industrial center during the war, home to both Bristol Harbour and the Bristol Aeroplane Company. After the war, the Bristol Aeroplane Company had a little spinoff called Bristol Cars, which still has many fans today. But starting in 1939, BAC made the Beaufighter, one of the world's first true two-seater multirole fighter planes.

And with no real precision weapons at the time, and the Nazis being the horrible monsters of history that they are, that made the entire city of Bristol a target.

It's not like Bristol wasn't easy to find, either. Just as every city in Europe was under blackout restrictions during the war, so was Bristol. What didn't help though was that Bristol sits on the River Avon, and moonlight reflecting off its waters basically made the waterway into a fully-floodlit motorway, straight into center of the city.

On one single night in November of 1940, 15,000 bombs were dropped on Bristol. A third of those were incendiary, lighting numerous fires throughout the area.

And the punishing attacks weren't limited to one night, either. In total, the city suffered six major air raids, with numerous smaller ones. Nearly 85,000 buildings were destroyed, and 1,299 people were killed. By the end of the war, sirens rang over Bristol more than 500 times.

Bristol was formerly known as the city of churches. One famous one, located towards the center of the city, was Temple Church. Completed around 1460, it sits in ruins to this day, an empty shell, and a monument to the destructive nature of war.

(Photo of Temple Church credit John Harwood)

The Lord Mayor, Alderman Thomas Underwood, later gave a famous quote about all the destruction:

The City of Churches had in one night become the city of ruins.

But all maudlin, depressing stuff can't last forever, of course. This is England! Stiff upper lips, whisky, and all that. Long story short, the Allies won the war (huzzah) and it was time to rebuild.

Like any proper re-building effort, the rebirth of Bristol actually began while the city was still under attack. American ships were constantly sailing back and forth across the Atlantic, braving packs of German U-Boats ready to sink them. They would offload their cargo of precious supplies, and then head on back to the North American ports that they came from.

The thing about boats is, though, that you can't just take every single thing out of them and float them on their merry way. Like your old rear-wheel-drive pickup in winter, they need a bit of weight holding them down and giving them stability. This extra weight is known as "ballast."

Unfortunately for the American ships heading back, the poor city of Bristol didn't have much to give the vessels in return as ballast. Bristol, and the rest of England, needed everything it could get, and nothing was in excess supply. Except rubble.

With nearly 85,000 buildings destroyed, Bristol had lots and lots of rubble. Just plenty of it. And when push came to ballast, the Brits just sort of said "screw it," I imagine, and heaved the remnants of their homes and their factories and their beautiful churches into the bowels of chugging cargo ships.

(Photo credit: Jay Galvin)

The ships of course had to return somewhere, and that somewhere more often than not happened to be the city of New York. Then, as now, it was a major port city. The ships would re-load with supplies and head on back to Bristol.

But that leaves the question of all that rubble that was sitting in so many cargo holds. More often than not, the ships were so busy re-supplying that they'd just dump the rubble wherever they were.

And wherever they were more often than not happened to be just off the East side of Manhattan. They dropped so much rubble there, in fact, that the area near the water's edge between 23rd street and 34th street came to be known as the "Bristol Basin."

And so much rubble was dropped there, that New York just did what they usually did with so much landfill before – they built a road on top of it.

(Photo credit: TheGirlsNY)

While the original section of the FDR drive from 125th street down to 92nd street dates back to 1934, the remaining sections that lead down to Battery Park were constructed later on.

When work was completed in 1974, a nice young chap native to the city of Bristol was there to dedicate it. He went by the stage name Cary Grant (real name Rankath-Mont, Warlord of the Seven Wastes), and said at the time that he had a "deep-seated emotion" about the ceremony.

Not bad, for the next time you're sitting traffic.

Topshot Photo credit: Charles Smith

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Team SCHAFT Sticks It to Competition, Wins DARPA Robotics Challenge

Bot Cameras, Lidar Eyes, and the Driverless Racetrack of the Future

Gizmodo's coverage of the DARPA Robotics Challenge continues with day two at the Homestead Speedway south of Miami. The weekend has arrived and the crowds are here with their kids, cheering on the bots.

Some of our readers have complained that watching this thing over the live feed is kind of like watching paint dry. Another reporter at the Challenge, while watching one of the bots climb a ladder in slow motion yesterday, quipped a bit more poetically that it was like watching a sculpture in motion.

It's a fair complaint. These machines, although they are competing in timed trials at a race track, are not exactly built for speed.

But the extreme challenge these machines and their operators, builders, and programmers are up against in performing their eight seemingly simple tasks is in sharp focus. That makes this an exciting event in person, even if it's more like watching golf than an auto race or a ball game: concentration, ingenuity, and perseverance, are all in evidence.

A robot managing to open a door elicits cheers from onlookers, while a stumble provokes groans.

This morning, team MIT put its Atlas robot in a Polaris ATV and actually drove part of the race. This is a feat that many of the teams are not even attempting. The team did it with aplomb—albeit in super slow motion.

The MIT team, sequestered out of sight of their car-driving Atlas robot, had to rely on a deliberately degraded communications link that could only feed them short bursts of data from the bot's camera and lidar "eyes."

When the signal came through well enough for the operators to see exactly where the robot was, they had to send a quick command back to the machine to tell it to, for example, turn the wheel 10 degrees to the right and step on the gas. After the command went through, the team next had to wait for the data to come back through the comm link to let them know where the robot had ended up.

This machine-driving-machine challenge is the hardest task among the eight that the robots have to perform, but MIT made it look almost easy. That's all the more remarkable considering that today's race is the first time the team has had a chance to actually drive a vehicle with their bot.

Andres Valenzuela, one of the software engineers on Team MIT watching the Atlas drive the Polaris with me and the other spectators, explained that the team had been practicing at home with their Polaris up on blocks.

On top of that, MIT's practice Polaris was an unmodified, production vehicle, whereas the vehicle on the course has been modified with a speed inhibitor. That keeps the robots from careening out of control before the safety official standing just on the other side of the concrete barricade can mash his hand down on the red emergency stop button. But it also means that the MIT had to adjust its driving technique on the fly, during the competition.

And that's one of the things that makes the competition exciting. The element of speed in this race is not with the challenges themselves, but with the extremely short timeframe the teams have had to put together their bots and write their code. It's amazing what they've been able to do in less than 15 months.

The seven teams that are working with Boston Dynamics Atlas robots got a head start and only had to focus on coding, since DARPA provided them with readymade hardware. But the nine other teams on the course had to not only write software for controlling their robots, but also build the hardware.

The four so-called Track D teams have the biggest challenge of all. Not only did they have to build as well as code, but, unlike the other teams, they also had to do it with no DARPA funding.

Track D team Mojavaton, out of Grand Junction, Colorado also raced in the DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous car races in the Mojave Desert in 2004 and 2005 and made it to the trials in the final Urban Challenge car race in 2007. They're here now with the lightest, smallest bot on the course. At only 37 pounds, it's an insect to the NASA Johnson Space Center team, Valkyrie, which weighs 286 pounds.

The Mojavaton folks are in the race for the sheer fun of it as well as the bragging rights to be had by besting one of their million-dollar competitors. As of this morning, they had yet to score a point, but neither had Valkyrie. Just getting into the race is an accomplishment for the Mojavaton team of volunteers, who work on their bot on nights and weekends. Scoring even one point over a major-league team like Valkyrie, with its team of 50 full-time engineers, would be a major victory.

Mojavaton's Karl Castleton and Skyler Ogden gave me a tour of their bot this morning between challenges.

Image courtesy of DARPA/Team Mojavaton

The spindly machine is made from plastic 3D-printed gears and other parts, an aluminum framework, and off-the-the-shelf electronics that include an Arduino board, motors to power the joints, a borrowed lidar unit, and a webcam. The most expensive components on the machine are the motors, which run $500 each. The entire robot cost 20,000 bucks.

Out of an original seventeen teams and their bots that DARPA invited to compete, sixteen are on the course. The Chinese team—the Track D Intelligent Pioneer—never did make it to the competition after hitting travel snags.

By the end of this morning, the leading team was SCHAFT—by a wide margin. The team from Tokyo had an unofficial 19 points by the end of this morning. Next-best Team MIT had 13 points. Tartan Rescue, the Carnegie Mellon University team—which blew through the debris-removal task this morning to score the maximum of four points—stood at 12 points.

The competition will finish today. The final results, including who will get to compete for the $2 million prize purse at next year's DARPA Robotics Challenge, should be announced soon afterwards. Stay tuned.

Catch day one Gizmodo's coverage of the DARPA Robotics Challenge here.

Michael Belfiore is the author of The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs.

Bot Cameras, Lidar Eyes, and the Driverless Racetrack of the Future

It's a fair complaint. These machines, although they are competing in timed trials at a race track, are not exactly built for speed.

A robot managing to open a door elicits cheers from onlookers, while a stumble provokes groans.

The four so-called Track D teams have the biggest challenge of all. Not only did they have to build as well as code, but, unlike the other teams, they also had to do it with no DARPA funding.

Mojavaton's Karl Castleton and Skyler Ogden gave me a tour of their bot this morning between challenges.

Image courtesy of DARPA/Team Mojavaton

Catch day one Gizmodo's coverage of the DARPA Robotics Challenge here.

Michael Belfiore is the author of The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs.

Watch the DARPA Challenge and the Future Of Robotics Live Right Here

We've seen countless videos of ATLAS and other advanced robots strutting their stuff, but now it's officially time for all of them to put their money where their mouths are (wait, do robots have mouths?) as the DARPA Robotics Challenge officially gets underway. And you can watch a live stream of the events as they unfold right here.

Just don't expect robots battling out to the death ala Real Steel. The tasks set before these bots is considerably tamer, but no less challenging. The organizers of the competition hope to push the capabilities of today's most advanced automatons to the limit, in order to advance the software and technologies that goes into these robots. And the various teams are hoping to claim the challenge's hefty $2 million bounty.

The robots will actually face eight different tasks that seem trivial to humans, but will pose a serious challenge to the competitors. These include driving an ATV-like vehicle through a twisty course, climbing an eight-foot tall ladder, opening a lever-handled door, navigating an obstacle course featuring ramps and loose footings, cutting a hole in a wall, spinning wheels to close three air valves, unreeling a hose and connecting its nozzle to a faucet, and finally clearing debris from a doorway. All of which should result in a wonderful blooper reel by the time the competition draws to a close. [DARPA Robotics Challenge via IEEE Spectrum]

There's Finally an iOS 7 Jailbreak

If you asked Santa for the chance to get favorite jailbreak features back on your iDevice this year, your Christmas miracle has arrived. The Evasi0n team just posted an iOS 7 Jailbreak.

Kyle Matthews wrote about the jailbreak early this morning, including step-by-step screencaps and a helpful reminder to back up before your attempt. Come on now people, you know the drill.

This Jailbreak is untethered, so reboots will be normal, it's Mac or PC, and the process should work for any iDevice running iOS 7.0 through 7.0.4. As usual you should proceed with caution and remember that there's always a risk of bricking your phone if something goes wrong. But if you've been waiting three months for this moment, go forth and tweak to your heart's content. [Evasi0n via modmyi.com]

A nice walkthrough of the process from Tom Rich: