heinleinblog

Live Science once again uses Heinlein as a reference in this article about theoretical robotic design.

Heinlein also pursued similar ideas a bit earlier in his 1940 novella Waldo, his story about, well, waldoes – he originated the concept as well as the term. A waldo is a remote manipulator that mimics human motion at larger and smaller scales. For example, waldoes that looked like mechanical hands that were six feet across could bend steel girders, as well as “tiny pixy hands, an inch across” used for miniature work. In his later work Time Enough for Love, he wrote about “ultramicrominiature waldoes” that could be used for gene surgery.

Roboticist Hans Moravec conceived of a more “fractal” version of this idea; a “bush robot” (also called a “Fractal branching ultra-dexterous robot”) that literally had manipulators on its manipulators on its manipulators… you get the idea.

Courtesy of this article about the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA):

One such DARPA effort – Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation – could transform today’s infantry “grunts” into high-tech supersoldiers similar to those imagined by Robert Heinlein’s 1959 science-fiction classic Starship Troopers. The $40 million program – already midway through its six-year run – is experimenting with power suits meant to increase by orders of magnitude the toughness and lethality of the average foot soldier.

DARPA’s plans call for the exoskeleton to be built around a “haptic interface,” a series of sensors distributed throughout the suit to read and amplify even the smallest of human muscle movements. According to the agency’s Web site, soldiers encased in this futuristic battle armor will be able to “handle more firepower, wear more ballistic protection, carry larger-caliber weapons and more ammunition, and carry supplies greater distances.” They might also be able to jump to extreme heights and even fly short distances. Peter Parker’s “spidey sense” is tingling just thinking about it.

The exoskeleton research has met with at least a few notable, if modest, successes. At the University of California (Berkeley) Human Engineering Laboratory, a team of researchers has built what might ultimately become the legs of tomorrow’s robo-warrior. According to the lab’s Web site, the “Lower Extremity Enhancer” gives its owner the “ability to carry weights on the order of 120 pounds over any sort of terrain for extended periods of time without undue effort.”

New Mars photos astound scientists

The white stuff is believed to be frozen water that remains throughout the Martian summer.

Here’s a Time article about an Italian village brimming with octogenarians that makes me think of the Howard Foundation.

But Agostino Vargiu, who serves up those same ingredients at his downtown restaurant, has another hypothesis. “The food and the air probably help,” Vargiu says. “But the point is that there’s very little intermarrying with outsiders here. In Orroli, we’re all practically relatives. It’s in the genes.” That same logic — and the same noted propensity for long life in nearby towns — prompted molecular biologist Luca Deiana to launch a sweeping genetic study of every 100-plus person across the entire island. “You look at a Sardinian phone book and you see there are relatively few last names,” says Deiana, a researcher at the University of Sassari in northwest Sardinia. The project — dubbed A Kent’Annos after an old Sardinian salute meaning, “May you live to be 100″ — confirmed that the island has the world’s highest documented percentage of people who have passed the century threshold. Of 1.6 million Sardinians, there are at least 220 who have reached 100, twice the typical ratio. Five of the world’s 40 oldest people live on the island, and until the January death of Antonio Todde at 112, Sardinia boasted the oldest of them all.

Hat tip to Kate from alt.fan.heinlein and member of The Heinlein Society.

The Institute, whose ideas on increasing the preciseness of language were incorporated into Robert A. Heinlein’s novels, has made news recently.

From the July 23, 2003, Dallas Business Journal:

Founded on the principal that the language of science is more precise — and less prone to misunderstanding and chaos — than everyday communication, the nonprofit has attracted as trustees, teachers and students the likes of Buckminster Fuller, a world-famous architect who conceived the geodesic dome; comedian and former talk show host Steve Allen; botanist David Fairchild, the son-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell; science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein; and Dave Garroway, an original host on NBC Today.

Wikipedia has an article about general semantics. Here are exerpts:

General Semantics is a school of thought founded by Alfred Korzybski in about 1933 in response to his observations that most people had difficulty defining human and social discussions and problems and could almost never predictably resolve them into elements that were responsive to successful intervention or correction.

In contrast, he noted that engineers could almost always successfully analyze a structural problem prospectively or a failure of structure retrospectively, and arrive at a solution which the engineers first of all could predict to work and secondly could observe to work. He found especially significant the fact that engineers had a language which helped them to do this, in mathematics. Mathematics has such properties that it appears to mimic its referents and thereby simulate or emulate the behavior of the observed physical universe with some precision. This gives physical scientists and engineers a valuable tool.

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These ideas, retold in more accessible form by Samuel Hayakawa’s Language In Thought And Action (1941), Stuart P. Chase’s The Tyranny of Words, and other secondary sources, achieved considerable initial success in the 1940s and early 1950s. During that period they entered the idiom of science fiction, notably through the works of A.E. van Vogt and Robert A. Heinlein. After 1955 they became popularly (and unfairly) associated with scientology but continued to exert considerable influence in psychology, anthropology and linguistics (notably, the development of Neuro-Linguistic Programming shows very obvious debts to General Semantics).

In Robert A. Heinlein’s classic tale, “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” billionaire D.D. Harriman resorted to planting diamonds on the moon’s surface to promote interest in commercial development of the moon. This article suggests a very good economic reason to return: Helium-3, the “perfect fuel source,” is as common as dirt on the lunar surface.

Battle Fatigues
by Wendy Marston
John Munroe spends his days thinking about how to avoid getting killed in the new millennium. He’s not paranoid–he’s doing his job. As warrior systems integration team leader at the Natick Soldier Center in Massachusetts, Munroe is developing a vision of what American soldiers will be wearing in combat a quarter century hence.

The U.S. Army is preparing to roll out uniforms that include video-display goggles and a chest-mounted mouse for weapons and radio controls. Munroe’s Future Warrior 2025 concept draws on much more far-out engineering. Night vision glasses correct for the distortion caused by the curvature of the visor. The helmet, called “headgear subsystem–information central,” links with the soldier’s suit and firearm so that the soldier need only look at a target and the voice-activated gun is locked on and ready to shoot. The suit itself is a bullet-resistant mesh of carbon nanotubes. It circulates hot or cold water to keep the wearer comfortable and contains embedded enzymes to neutralize biological or chemical weapons.

For now, Future Warrior 2025 is just a dream–or a nightmare. The necessary technology is years off, and the mockup at the Natick Soldier Center isn’t a working prototype–it’s a “conceptual simulation” to stimulate the imagination. So how does one decide what a conceptual simulation of tomorrow’s soldier should look like? “The black suit shows you he’s of the future,” Munroe explains.