January 28, 2009, 6:15 pm Some years ago, when my job involved intrusion detection and surveillance of very high value items, I recall a conversation with my boss who said we also needed a method of delivering just the right amount of force very precisely over a considerable distance. We couldn’t achieve that, for both technical and political reasons. Now, that may be changing.
From the Ares Blog on Aviation Week: the Israeli Air Force (IAF) demonstrated tight command and control and precision strikes during the recent fighting in the Gaza Strip.
After the initial air strikes took out their primary targets in the first four minutes, tactics switched to a hunter-killer operation. “Surveillance technologies allowed the monitoring, identification, tracking and targeting of an individual in a crowd. Sensor to shooter cycles were reduced to less than 60 seconds by networking information and choosing from air, ground and naval weapons to strike various kinds of targets.” During the fighting, the IDF posted surveillance video of Hamas fighters seemingly oblivious to being observed. UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) presumably played a key role. I’ll have more say about UAVs in another post.
Wired’s Danger Room blog reported that there are indications a small, precise, focused-lethality weapon was used in the Gaza fighting. Destruction in some cases was limited to just a car interior, or a single room in a building. It was speculated to be Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME).
Perhaps the fictional technology presented in the movie Runaway is getting closer to reality.
January 22, 2009, 4:17 pm Today Karen and I took a short hike (well, we did it twice because I forgot a flashlight) and found the final stage of the Witch Hunt cache. I liked this puzzle cache—I aspire to its level of craftsmanship, but fear it’s quite beyond me.
The first part of the puzzle is by far the most difficult. I was stymied by it for years (of course, it doesn’t take much of a puzzle to stymie me). Finally a hint by Lamneth at a caching event narrowed the options and I finally made the breakthrough. I didn’t rush out and find all the stages at once, but spread them out. This was also by necessity, since I wasn’t good at puzzle solving in the field. Still, after the first puzzle, the rest of the puzzles were fairly straightforward.
January 20, 2009, 9:20 pm  Dan and I went caching in Sunol Regional Park today. Our original target was the Maguire Peaks area, but there was a possibility of being the first to find a cache in the Little Yosemite area, so we hiked there first. Another cacher found it earlier in the morning. It was a very pleasant day (shirtsleeve temperatures) and the grass was starting to green up nicely.
 One of our goals was this peak—actually a string of three peaks—but this was the tallest one. It’s rocky around the top, and there are some small cliffs.
 From the top we had a good view of San Antonio Resevoir.
 We descended from the peak down the little cliffs. It took us a little hunting to find a spot we thought we could handle.
 This one looks a little more rugged, but was actually easier to get down. I was pretty tired when we finished. Our distance was around 7 miles and we did have a couple of steep sections, but I need to get in better shape.
 Here’s the track we followed.
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Consider this:“Let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in your brother’s way.” Romans 14:13 |
