Urban warfare just became easier - thanks to Google

From the estimable Boston Dynamics via foreXiv.

You need to watch this video all the way through .. and be very afraid.

"Handle is a research robot that stands 6.5 ft tall, travels at 9 mph and jumps 4​ ​feet vertically. ​It uses electric power to operate both electric and hydraulic actuators, with a range of about 15 miles on one battery charge.

Handle uses many of the same dynamics, balance and mobile manipulation principles​ found in the quadruped and biped robots we build, but with only about 10 actuated joints, it is significantly less complex. Wheels are efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere: by combining wheels and legs Handle can have the best of both worlds."

I have a vision of a swarm of those things clearing ISIS territory, toting AKs or M16s.

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Incidentally, Google owns Boston Dynamics. This from The Guardian:

"Google’s parent company Alphabet is reportedly looking to offload Boston Dynamics, following tensions within the company about its subsidiary’s fit within the wider corporate culture.

"After a previous robotics video was posted to YouTube, Google communications staff sought to distance the company from the hardware, according to emails leaked to Bloomberg News, citing the feeling that such technology could be “terrifying”.

Please don't let me be the first to ask 'Handle' very politely, "Don't be evil"!

Christmas Links

Two million YouTubers can't be wrong .. Happy Holidays!

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Chinese is hard.

"At the end of three years of learning Chinese, I hadn't yet read a single complete novel. I found it just too hard, impossibly slow, and unrewarding. Newspapers, too, were still too daunting. I couldn't read an article without looking up about every tenth character, and it was not uncommon for me to scan the front page of the People's Daily and not be able to completely decipher a single headline."

Read David Moser's (University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies) scintillating essay, "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" - even for the Chinese themselves.

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Stairs. Such a long trudge forward to get any height .. but wait, Jess Riedel explains that 'alternating tread stairs allow for extremely steep stairs without making the tops of each step too short.'

Take a look at this diagram - the alternating tread stairs are in green - so what's going on?

Alternating tread stairs in green: get upstairs fast. But how does it work? 

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Also from Jess Riedel. Alex and I watched this all the way through. If you want to go to Mars you'd better have plenty of delta-v, so big engines. Designing those calls for state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics.

Great videos of their combustion chamber simulations and re-entry vehicle flows:- from SpaceX.

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As I write, Clare and Alex have just departed for Midnight Mass. Have a good Christmas.