41–50 of 205 posts
My idea was to use the soles of the feet instead, since there are a lot of nerves there, enabling very high resolution information.
But ideas without execution are useless......
> The estimated damages caused by spatial disorientation cost the U.S. military an estimated $300 million every year, along with the lives of around 30 pilots. Can that be right? 30 pilots a year sounds really high.
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/military-aviation-mishaps-de... indicates that the U.S. have had 224 deaths and lost 186 aircraft over seven years, so roughly thirty airmen a year sounds about right. I suppose one could be pedantic about pilots rather than aircrew at large, since those 186 aircraft would have had one pilot each, but the larger point still stands. Someone probably just saw the 224 number and thought e…
Either way though, 224 deaths from accidents in 8ish years is way higher than I had expected. Hopefully with the withdrawal from Afghanistan we will see this number decline.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems very odd as by the time you start feeling the effects of an hallucinogen, your body has already absorbed them past the point of expelling them being effective.
Is that always the case? I suspect the hallucinogens that people have selected to intentionally trip on are a bit unusual (intentional dose sizes, presumably they are selected to get the person tripping in some particular timeframe, right? I'm obviously showing some ignorance on this topic).
Oddly, I gather rats cannot barf, which is why coumarin works as rat killer.
>> It can take pilots up to 30 seconds to reorient themselves, a long time while behind the stick of a jet aircraft. Their is an old chopper pilot saying: the faster the aircraft the slower the pilot. You think 30 seconds is a long time in a fighter jet at 30,000 feet? Try 30 seconds when trying to land helicopter on the deck of a pitching ship. A 747 flies at basically the same speed as a fighter (~mach 0.8), in man…
This makes me wonder. I get car-sick when I'm a passenger in a car. Sometimes it takes an hour. Sometimes 10 minutes. However, if I'm riding in a convertible with the top down... I haven't gotten car-sick yet. Is the wind "fixing" the problem with my brain?
In a non convertible, your vision senses betray what your balance sense perceives (motion instead of stillness) and the body decides it’s time to throw up whatever poisonous stuff made you
Good article. I can't help but wonder why way-finding / path-finding vibrational orienteering vests aren't a thing yet. You could vibratory signal a path in complete darkness, indicate obstacles and threats or directions to supply caches etc.
I read about a hobby project a while back that used vibrating motors to keep the wearer aware of magnetic north. It supposedly made quite a difference. Here's a project that could be the same thing. https://newatlas.com/north-paw-vibrating-ankle-compass-kit/2...
Add a couple of grams more for GPS, and you can have it click when your head points to where you parked your jeep or tent. To maintain battery life, you turn on the GPS only once every 5 minutes, and rely on the compass for real-time orientation.
(This might not be so useful for soldiers, because they have mostly long since wrecked their hearing. Maybe use barely perceptible electric shocks, for mil application.)
After a very short time, the clicks etc. fade from conscious perception, and you just know your directions at all times.
"In 1974, the future Dr. Rupert was skydiving naked while he was a student at the University of Illinois. He noticed that the rush of air on so much bare skin kept him oriented, even as he spun and twirled in midair." Where do you sign up for naked skydiving?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The market for people who need a non-visual device to help them detect obstacles, threats, or supply caches is too small to justify the expense (both per-unit and of development) of such devices.
Just list military applications of whatever you want developed. They are not concerned with how big of a market it might be. If can give their troops advantages, they are interested.
When those systems and their backups fail you're into like, "hide and wait for help" or even straight up sere training shit, because the entire thing that makes you a powerful force rather than just a guy with a gun is gone. Knowing which way is north is not gonna solve your problem at that point. Knowing "which way to the supply cache" might but if that piece of tech is still working probably so is your normal radio and gps.
Good article. I can't help but wonder why way-finding / path-finding vibrational orienteering vests aren't a thing yet. You could vibratory signal a path in complete darkness, indicate obstacles and threats or directions to supply caches etc.
The market for people who need a non-visual device to help them detect obstacles, threats, or supply caches is too small to justify the expense (both per-unit and of development) of such devices.
Soldiers have it even worse, carrying, literally, pounds of batteries, sometimes tens of. Anything that works without needing to produce power-burning, night-vision destroying light they have to look at, and weighing them down, is a huge benefit.
One of the surprises I got after being locally anesthetized for a surgery, was that I could no longer localize my arm in space without looking at it. Proprioception is heavily based on the flow of air against our skin and hair. Some flowmeters are based on that principle, using a tiny mechanical hair that vibrates as air flows over it, and I've always felt robotics should just dump a whole bunch of them on their movi…
feeling sensations on the skin doesn't tell you where the skin is...?