Throughput

[jay]

I'm sitting here late at night, for the eighth night in a row... the paper went off to Japan last night, tonight I'm catching up on entirely mundane air traffic management visuals.

One stark moment at this afternoon's air traffic technology planning meeting... a colleague from NASA-Dryden was discussing their incipient shift from classical pulse-code modulated telemetry to a network structure, and added that they'd used 802.11b. Out to an aircraft 20 miles distant. I was impressed, as we're lucky to get a quarter of that on the ground on Devon Island.

Then the Dryden guy said, "that's nothing... the Army has their training ground at Yuma completely saturated. They can fire tanks remotely from their desktops." Okay.... I imagine something like a real-life video game... wondering vaguely what defines "work-safe" in that context.

Then he added," and they've been putting it on ordnance, too, like shells. 802.11b packets can handle the Doppler shifting up to Mach 10." That gives new meaning to throughput... I'm sure that the details are classified, but I can't help wondering what they're doing with 2-way digital communication with unguided shells...

Comments

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

*sigh* The line between exploration and war gets too damn blurry for me. I'm glad I'm no longer working somewhere that's funded by DARPA.

Like another before me said: Go home. Rest. Be with your family. You need it.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

I would have had fewer qualms about dual-use technology development under the previous Administration... with the Bushies, I'm reluctant to do anything that contributes (however indirectly) to their ability to bully and threaten other countries. Mars-analog drilling projects are an area with no likely military applications...

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Good point... I'm not sure I'd bet on it, though :-(

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, what was studied at your former (DARPA-funded) workplace? I thought that you were at UCB... not a place that I'd typically associate with weapons research.

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

I was at UC (from 1988 through 2002). The DARPA funding was when I worked for Donald Glaser. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in the early 60's for inventing the bubble chamber. When I worked for him in the early 90's, he was doing research on Vision/Perception/The Brain, so you can see how that could possibly translate to something weapons-related. I don't recall at this point which specific project it was that was funded by DARPA. It wasn't a big one. The big one there was an NSF project, IIRC. Over the years, most of the projects I worked on were funded by NSF. But I also got paid in part by NIH, CTR (Council for Tobacco Research), DoE (Dept. of Education), NSIC (National Storage Industry Consortium), DoD, and several others. The funding will depend on exactly which dept. one works in. And even when I worked in Education (which one would think would be far from science and weapons), I was working for someone who did research on Science and Math instruction, so it was usually NSF. And the rest of the time I worked for science or computer science departments, so weapons research was never terribly far away.