DIY Sentry Gun

Kevin sent me this weapon of choice the other day:

The idea of this project was to create a fully-automated sentry gun, capable of picking out a human target and accurately tracking and shooting him or her in the heart. Really, the idea was to find a cool robotics project for the summer while I was working at an advertising agency, and I’d only ever seen sentry guns in movies (like Congo) and video games (Half-Life 1, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress Classic). I couldn’t find any record of anyone building one, even the military, although it seems likely I just didn’t look hard enough. It’s a pretty simple technology.

I think I can answer why there arn’t any of these systems in the real world. You just can’t trust a robot to not shoot you in the back. Thats a tough one to code around.

Sentry Gun

Sony’s PCM-D1 Digital Field Recorder

Looks cool, hope it sounds good too. I can see these being used by the pro bloggers as soon as they hit the market.

The PCM-D1 is a retro-looking field recorder that can capture audio at 96 KHz/24-bit quality on either the 4GB of built-in memory or any size MemoryStick Pro card. Since one microphone is totally amateur-hour, the Sony model sports two angled, high-sensitivity condenser mics along with a five-line LCD for displaying recording and playback info, and two analog level meters.

Sony’s PCM-D1 $2000 digital field recorder

Slow Light Laser

Slow light

Could this be the basis of quantum computers? Maybe…

Physicists in Australia have slowed a speeding laser pulse and captured it in a crystal, a feat that could be instrumental in creating quantum computers.
The scientists slowed the laser light pulse from 300,000 kilometers per second to just several hundred meters per second, allowing them to capture the pulse for about a second.

Wired News: This Laser Trick’s a Quantum Leap
(Thank you Special Agent Steve for this info)

Adaptive Optics Produces Ultrasharp Images Of Sunspot

Adaptive Optics

Greg sent this to me:

The Dunn has two high-order adaptive optics benches, the only telescope in the world with two systems, which enhances instrument setup and operations.
This image was built from a series of 80 images, each 1/100th of a second long (10 ms), taken over a period of 3 seconds by a high-resolution Dalsa 4M30 CCD camera in its first observing run after being added to the Dunn. Speckle imaging reconstruction then compiles the 80 images and greatly reduces residual seeing aberrations.

I wonder if any digital camera makers will ever offer adaptive optics on their products. It may not be practical to do the layering of images if your subject is moving, but it might be useful to chart out the lens flaws and build a digital filter to correct them in camera.

Adaptive Optics Produces Ultrasharp Images Of Sunspot