Tech Takes of the short variety

Curt Schilling - teaching us how to game the system

Technology stories that interested me - and might interest you
By Will Collette

Curt Schilling gets more of your money. As we celebrate screwing public workers, let us also celebrate the final payment of $1.58 million to former Red Sox pitcher Curt "bloody sock" Schilling's 38 Studios. This payment is the final installment on the $75 million "loan guarantee" Governor Don Carcieri arranged for Schilling.




Question: isn't a "loan guarantee" sort of like co-signing a loan? Why are we paying Schilling anything? Isn't the payment part supposed to happen only after his company's only product - a video game they haven't even released yet - tanks and he goes bankrupt? Or is it more efficient for us to pay now, rather than to wait?

Cube-shaped building is the URI nuke

NRC completes inspection of URI nuclear reactor. On October 25, a student intern at Rhode Island's only nuclear reaction, a 50-year old reactor at the URI Bay Campus in Narragansett, received an unintended dose of gamma radiation that management said was no worse than a chest x-ray. But it was serious enough that they had to report it to the NRC, and the NRC has conducted a special investigation at the facility. The NRC's report should be out soon. Taxpayer money funds this dangerous piece of junk. Fortunately, that funding has continued. Good thing it's not a public employee pension.

Some French REALLY hate traffic radar. The French really know how to protest. Here in America, there's a lot of vocal opposition to such things as red-light cameras. You can read the whining on the CCA website.In France, there are lots of anti-speeding radar installations that automatically issue tickets. But a resistance movement in France, the FNAR, "The Anti Radar National Front," has taken resistance up quite a few notches by actually blowing up these radar installations. Another one just went off recently on the motorway between Metz and Nancy. 

Beam me up, Francois. Speaking of the French, the CERN particle accelerator in the French countryside just outside Geneva ran another experiment aimed at determining whether subatomic particles can violate Einstein's Theory of Relativity and go faster than the speed of light. An earlier experiment created neutrino particles that appeared to do just that. In answer to critiques from peers, the CERN scientists repeated the experiment with new variables that addressed those criticisms and, voila, neutrino particles once again were clocked going faster than the speed of light. Obviously, we have no immediate practical application for this discovery - or are actually 100% it's for real - but imagine the possibilities.

Pentagon gives Santa its Christmas list. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, put out a list of project ideas it is interested in developing. Among them is a type of Star-Trek like "tricorder," a device to aid search and rescue of sensing the presence of life at a distance and through dense material. The Army has an idea for a "Hovering Tube Launch Micro-Munition" that combines the idea of a mortar shell and a drone. The Air Force wants a thing called “Discourse Analysis for Insights into Group Identity and Intent,” which is essentially a mind-reading system to figure out from a distance what a person or group is thinking. The Marine Corps wants an alternative to GPS because they figure that in a conflict, the Chinese will know how to jam today's GPS system.


Geordi, deploy the tractor beam! OK, more sci-fi staples may be closer to our technological reach. Science Magazine reports that four teams of physicists have independently come up with ways to make a tractor beam by manipulating ordinary light into a beam that can move objects. We are nowhere near the point where we can grab a Klingon shuttle craft and bring it into the cargo bay, but who know?

But how about this? While DARPA and the branches of the military are shopping for Star Wars technology, can somebody get the high-tech vacuum toilets on the USS George H.W. Bush to flush? The USS Bush (named for Bush the First, not G.W. of Iraq fame) cost taxpayers $6.2 billion to build. It just completed its first combat deployment and, throughout most of it, the toilets would not flush. Navy Times reported that sailors sometimes had to hunt around the ship for an hour to find a working "head." The brass naturally blames the sailors for flushing things down the toilet that they shouldn't. Why can't DARPA find a fix for this, I wonder? Hey, let's get Curt Schilling on the job!