Tech Talk

Yesterday I attended Crusher's "graduation" from DARPA. It's going to be leaving its creators at Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Engineering Center, and going into the army: specifically, to the Army's Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center. The ceremonies took place at Fort Bliss, a base outside El Paso, TX, that is essentially 1.12 million acres of desert.

But feast your eyes on some video of the "urban" part of the field trials.

I'm sitting on one of those corrugated steel containers you see in the background, and hoping the thing's batting eyelashes--lidar, in layman's terms-- understand the container and me as an obstacle.

I will write much more eloquently on the topic later, but I was and continued to be sleep deprived, thanks to a sequence of events in which Delta unplugged the airplane that was supposed to get me to my connecting flight in Atlanta; I missed said flight and couldn't take another until the following morning; Delta refused to give me my luggage but a cranky customer service lady gave me a voucher to spend the night at a serial killer's hideaway called the Comfort Inn Camp Creek.

More on Crusher later, and certainly more on the astonishing "first domino" in this chain of events. Could someone maybe post a comment explaining how an airplane can lose all power from being unplugged? Even my cell phone is more sophisticated than that.